#they will warp every other character in the books to turn them into a prop for Sansa when the Hound is literally right there

[fromtheseventhhell]

I know it's because they hate SanSan, but the fact that Stansas desperately want other characters to be attack dogs for Sansa yet ignore the Hound is hilarious

[miekasa]

six thirty

+ pairing: armin arlert x (fem) reader

+ genres and warnings: college au, enemies to lovers… kinda… in a very nerdy academic rivalry kind of way, me being a comedian you’re welcome, fluff, smut/nsfw content

+ word count: 5.6k… pls say sike

+ notes: shout out to ryn​​ for listening to me during our very many rambling sessions and also for extorting me into posting this. consider it a late birthday present for my favorite menace </2

+ side notes: no i am not a part of armin nation and i never want to be, nor do i wish speak of this again.

Armin Arlert is the perfect student. Prompt and well prepared during lecture; smart and insightful during office hours; the apple of any teacher’s eye. Unfortunately for him, so are you.

If you asked Armin, you were a little too clever for your own good, and liked to make it very well known that you believe you’re the smartest person in any room you walk into. That may be true, but it doesn’t mean that he has to sit there and worship your superiority complex. 

If someone asked you, you’d say that Armin was a know it all, and a manipulative little piece of shit. Again, not a completely false statement, but perhaps a slightly biased character analysis.

Neither of you are wrong. It’s why you’re both the bane of each other’s existence.  

There’s a noticeable grimace on your face, chin in your palm, elbows resting atop your desk, as you turn your head to where, sure enough, Armin is seated where he always is: first row, right side, directly in front of the podium, like perfect little teacher’s pet he wants to be. He doesn’t have any books to unpack like everybody else because a shiny, blue iPad is propped up on his desk in place of all of that. He’s robably looking through his pre-written list of showboaty questions to ask during lecture. Like he’s a cut above everyone else.  

Maybe some of the other morons in this course, but not you, that’s for damn sure. You bet that if you broke his thousand dollar tablet he wouldn’t think he’s such hot shit anymore. Maybe that would knock him down a couple of pegs.

“Look at him sitting there with his stupid blue eyes, and his stupid Bieber haircut, and his stupid, shiny blonde hair, and his stupid fucking glasses. I bet they’re not even real and he just wears them to—”

“Did you just call his hair shiny?”

You snap your head to your left, “What—no, of course not. I said shoddy, he’s probably a bottle blonde. Maybe all the chemicals from the hair dye seeps into his head and warps his sense of reality.”

“I’m pretty sure you said shiny.”

“Shut up, Annie.”

She raises an eyebrow at you, “You got something against blondes? Because your track record would beg to differ.”

“Once. We kissed once, and it was truth or dare, and we were both sloshed.”

“You still chose me,” she reminds you, pulling her notebook out of her backpack.

You huff, ignoring her words and turning your head back to Armin, this time finding him twirling his stupid fucking expensive Apple Pencil between his fingers like it’s nothing. You can feel your eye begin to twitch.

Perhaps he can, too—or maybe he can just feel your eyes boring holes into him—because he turns in your direction and ceases his pen twirling the moment you make eye-contact. More students filter in, walking past your line of vision, but each time they move, you and Armin meet gazes again; neither one of you daring to look away, a palpable tension between you.

His eyes might be icy blue, but you can see the rose pink tint underneath his skin, even from the distance; a familiar blush that spreads across his nose and cheeks. You exhale with a silent laugh, breaking your eye contact before he grows completely red, just in time for Dr. Zöe to start the lecture.

Everybody thinks that Armin’s so brilliant, so smart, so untouchable. You know that his only genius is that he’s fooling everyone into thinking that he’s the kind, humble, little nerd boy who wouldn’t harm a fly, when that’s far from the truth.

Armin is mean. He’s competitive and possessive and snarky and sly. He’s the definition of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but you’re pretty sure the only person in the world who might believe that is Eren. Though, you’ve heard some of the insults Armin throws Eren’s way, and they’re not exactly soft. Granted, that’s a factor in any friendship, and most of his jabs are coated with a layer of intellect the brunette likely doesn’t understand, but that doesn’t make Armin any less sarcastic. It just means Eren’s too dumb to know what’s going on.

Poor kid. Maybe it’s for the best.

That’s all to say that Armin is nothing but a big talker—not even; a smooth-talker, is more like it. He comes across as perfect, all good and sweet and soft, because that’s what he lets people see. Nobody else looks through to the sharp tongue and ragged edges, because they’re too busy cooing over innocent blue-eyed baby in front of them.

But you know that Armin, the one he doesn’t want other people to see: the one that’s so good, he’s bad; so sweet that he’s sick; so nice that it’s cruel. And you know just how much pressure to apply to make his façade crack.

And you intend on doing so.

“I don’t know which formula to use—hey, are you two eye fucking again? Cut it out, I’m trying not to fail over here,” Eren exclaims, poking Armin’s shoulder with his pen.

The jab averts the blonde’s attention back to his friend, eyes wide as he blinks himself back to reality. He curses under his breath when he feels a familiar warmth creeping across his cheeks. Few things piss Armin off like the way he gets red in the face after thinking about you, or even just looking at you, for too long. Whether it’s red out of pure annoyance, or another feeling he tries to push down, it’s irritating, and above all, embarrassing.

He spares one more glance over his shoulder, to where you and Annie are sat a few tables away in the library. You’ve looked away by now, focusing back on your notes, but Armin swears he can still see that irritating smirk on your face from this angle.

He rolls his tongue along the inside of his cheek. He should be able to keep it together around you by now, but he can’t, and it bothers him. You bother him.

“We weren’t eye fucking,” he refutes, turning his back to you completely, “She’s such a little know it all sometimes, s’annoying.”

Eren raises an eyebrow. He knows that you and Armin don’t get along, but he doesn’t understand why. Armin knows almost all your friends, and you definitely know all of his—Eren would even go as far as to say that you and him are pretty close friends—so it’s not a matter of not spending time together. You’re also the two smartest people Eren knows. In theory you should have more than enough to talk about together, but every time you’re in the same room, you hardly acknowledge each other outside of surface level commentary, or glances that border on staring.

Thankfully, the bickering remains in the classroom for the most part. Eren’s seen you and Armin go at, and he’ll be the first to admit that it’s beyond intimidating. Though, a little part of him finds it oddly entertaining, and he can’t help but to be impressed. All the more reason for you two to start playing on the same team. 

Eren thinks the two of you should get to the root of the issue already. Which, if you asked him, has very little to do with your rivaled academic genius, and a lot to do with your lack of it concerning your feelings for each other.

“She’s not that bad,” Eren vouches for you, “I think you two might get along if you ever spoke outside of trying to one-up each other in class.”

“I’m not trying to one-up anybody,” Armin rolls his eyes, a nasty habit he’s picked up as of late, “And if you stopped and used your brain for a moment, then maybe you could solve the problem.”

“I did use my brain!” Eren’s lips fall into an offended pout, “But none of this makes any sense to me! I fucking hate math, you know that.”

Armin sighs, feeling sympathetic for Eren as he slumps into himself defeatedly. He knows that Eren isn’t dumb, but math in any capacity is certainly not his strong suit. He also knows that he shouldn’t give Eren all the answers, but sometimes he needs a little push to get him there. A little bit of added guidance and motivation to keep him going. It’s either that, or he has to trick Eren into doing the work himself, but clearly that method wasn’t working out today.

“You already solved for the activation energy, now you’re supposed to use the Arrhenius equation in the expanded form.”

Eren’s lips fall into a small o-shape, as his eyes scramble across his paper again. “But—how do you—”

“There’s two measurements given for temperature.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah! Okay, right, but then—”

“You have to convert it to Kelvin first or it won’t work. It’s given to you in Celsius.”

Eren furrows his eyebrows together, and then it finally clicks for him. He mutters to himself as he puts his pencil to paper to begin to work through the problem, “How do I convert—”

“Add 273.15 to it. Make sure you put the bigger one first in the equation, or else you’ll get a negative error.”

“You didn’t even do it,” Eren huffs, angrily punching numbers into his calculator, “How do you know it’s right?”

“Because I took this class already,” Armin reminds him, sparing a brief glance over his shoulder, “Isn’t that why I’m tutoring you?”

Eren coughs over his embarrassed blush, “Oh, yeah, right.”

It’s quiet between them as Eren makes a final attempt at solving the equation, carefully and proudly circling his answer when he’s finished. He looks to Armin with bright eyes, and is content when the blonde gives him a reassuring nod, confirming that his answer is correct.

“Well that was a bitch to work through,” Eren sighs, stretching his arms behind his head with a slight yawn, “Chemistry is nothing but glorified math. It’s barely a science.”

Armin shrugs, but he doesn’t disagree. He isn’t the biggest fan of chemistry, unlike somebody else he knows. “Why’d you take chem if you knew it would have so much math?”

It’s Eren’s turn to shrug, slumping back in his chair and running a hand through his hair, “I gotta take all the pre-med requirements… just in case.”

“You wanna go to med school? Since when?”

Eren averts his eyes from his friend, a telltale sign of his bashfulness coming over him. It doesn’t happen often, but Armin knows it’s sincere when it does.

“Dunno. I’m not sure of it, just wanna keep my options open, you know?” Eren replies casually, “Doctors help make a difference and all that, and surgery looks kind of cool. Besides, if my bastard father could do it, how hard could it really be?”  

A gentle smile grows on Armin’s lips, “You can do it. If you really want to, I know you can.”  

Eren’s head snaps up, eyes wide and filled with affirmation and adoration. He relaxes his expression quickly after, but the pink hues are still present, “Thanks, Min.”

From his position he catches eye of another head of familiar blonde hair over Armin’s shoulder, and beside it, your own hair. There’s a flash of a moment when your eyes meet Eren’s, and you offer him a small wave before turning back to Annie to resume doing your homework. Eren barely gets the chance to wave back, but a dopey smile sits on his features at your kind gesture. It fades when he looks back to Armin, once again pondering the animosity between you two.

You and Armin aren’t all that different, you just need to get to know each other better. Actually, Eren thinks that you might make a good couple if you both stopped overthinking it.

“So, what’s the deal with you and (_____)?” Eren asks, bending his right knee to wrap his arm around his leg and rest his chin on top of it, “You act like she kicked your cat.”

“What?” Armin questions, flustered, “What—no, she wouldn’t touch Soup.” 

Eren quirks an eyebrow at that. “I still can’t believe you named your cat Soup.”

“It’s technically a nickname.”

“A nickname for what?”

“…For Miso Soup.”

Eren blinks. “Okay, if she didn’t mess with Soup, then what’s the issue? You scared of her or something?”

“Why would I be scared of her?” Armin asks, tone incredulous; then softer, more subdued, like a kid who doesn’t want to admit they’re wrong, “’M not scared of her.”

“You stare at her like you are—well, you look kind of angry, but also scared. Like, when you see those balloon things outside of car washes. You hate them, but you can’t look away from them—”

“I am not scared of those!”

“You are, and it’s okay,” Eren waves away his friend’s denial, “Oh, I get it—is this one of those things where she makes you nervous, so you respond with anger and sarcasm instead of thinking through your feelings?”

“You’ve been going to therapy for one month, relax.”

“Maybe you two should go to friend therapy and work this out,” Eren bites back, “It probably doesn’t help that she’s always with Annie. They both look like they would murder someone with no remorse. I admit, it is kind of scary… but it’s kind of hot, too.”

Armin spares him an unamused glare. Eren crosses his arms in defense, “What? I’m not wrong. It’s sexy in a scary kind of way, maybe that’s why you’re always eye fucking. I don’t blame you, she’s hot. I would let her and Annie axe-murder me without regret.”

“Eren?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up and do problem six, I don’t have all day.”

Eren huffs, but flips the page to the next problem, grumbling under his breath as he attempts the, “It’s not as sexy when you’re mean, you know.”

Armin hits him silent.

Tuesdays are Armin’s favorite days because he only has one class. Sure, it’s three hours long, but it’s much more bearable than his usual eight-hour day.

It’s also the one class he shares with you. Which is why he’s always mentally exhausted by the end of it, but physically, he feels like he could punch a wall; all his pent up anger and frustration is channeled into his body and he’s desperate for an outlet for it. It’s a feeling he hates to love.

Annie seems to have cut class today seeing as she’s not next to you; and it’s almost as if it’s emboldened you to mess with him even more than usual.

He bites his tongue as Dr. Zöe enthusiastically uses your latest point as a segue into the final topic of the evening. He made that same point ten minutes ago. You just worded it differently—admittedly, more concisely, but somehow with a little more nuance, than when he had hesitantly proposed it—and, yeah, maybe you made it sound more convincing, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t come up with it first. If his stupid, fancy stylus didn’t cost upwards of $200 he might have snapped it in half.

You’re definitely the better conversationalist, that much he can admit. Words have never been his forte and he hates the way you can talk circles around him, and that there’s so little he can say to make you stop.

He wishes you would just shut up. In fact, he’d like to shut you up himself.

Thankfully, class ends sooner rather than later. Armin finds himself briefly talking with Dr. Zöe afterwards, most other students having taken the opportunity to leave early for the night. To nobody’s surprise, you’re not one of them, having stuck around to talk to the professor, too.

“The two of you should consider lab research this summer,” Dr. Zöe suggests ardently, walking between the two of you as you exit the lecture hall, “I could really use two students like you!”

Armin chuckles at his boisterous professor. He’s known about the research opportunities at their lab for quite some time now, and he knows that you have, too. “I don’t know that lab work is really my strong suit.”

The three of you come to stop at the hallway intersection, the professor now standing across from you and him. You give them a polite smile, “And I’m not sure that collaboration is mine.”

Armin spares a glance just in time to see you flash one of your own in his direction. Dr. Zöe’s eyes flicker between the two students rapidly, a slight squint to their eyelids.

They aren’t quite sure why their two brightest students seem to despise each other. They wish you two would just get along already, so that they don’t have to spend the summer training half-witted chemical engineering majors how to use basic lab equipment; and instead, conduct some actual research.

“Well, I hope the both of you reconsider,” they smile, “I’ll see you during office hours, I presume?”

You two nod in sync, sending the doctor off with happy smile, just long enough until you see that they’ve turned the corner further down the hall

“Had fun stealing my point earlier?” Armin questions, looking your way as you still wave mindlessly, eye-twitching at your polite façade.

“I would call it improvement,” you tell him, not bothering to turn in his direction; still and smiling waving like the professor can see or hear you, “You should stick to showing, rather than saying. You never were good with your words.”

Armin kisses his teeth together. He’ll give you what you want, if that’s how you want it.

In a fit of irritation, he grabs your moving hand by the wrist, and pulls you down the opposite hallway, not caring for your dramatic wailing behind him.

“Hey, Einstein, the exit is the other way, do you have any idea where we’re going?”

“Ever heard of observational learning? Maybe if you shut up for a second, you would figure it out,” he snaps, pulling you further.

There’s a door on the left that Armin knows is unlocked, and he’s quick to open it and pull you inside. Before you have the chance to glance around, he has you pushed up against the wall, jaw forced up and forward.

He could scoff at the small hitch in your breath at his actions, clearly a little too satisfied with being manhandled; but instead, he takes the opportunity to press your lips together. Armin quite likes the feeling of your lips on his; warm and soft and far too welcoming; a rare moment of silence.

“Someone could hear us.”

Or not so silent.

“Then be quiet,” he snarls.

Armin feels your fingers weave themselves into his hair, scraping along his undercut in sync with his lips trailing down your jaw. A groan falls from his when he feels you tug at the ends of the strands, just hard enough to force his face back to eye level with yours.

“You’re the one with the big mouth.”

“You’re so smart, huh. Always got something to say,” Armin lets out a low chuckle, deft fingers running down your sides to squeeze at your waist, “You can be really fuckin’ annoying, you know that.”

You mirror half of his ministrations, letting your right hand trail down his chest barely brushing over the very visible bulge in his jeans, before hooking your index finger under the belt loop, effectively pulling him closer to you.

The smile on your face is dirty, but you’re not laughing like he was, “Do something about it then.”

His blue eyes grow cloudy as he takes a good look at you; slowly rakes over your features, from that stupid, snarky look in your eyes, to your kiss-bruised lips, down to your chest, and back up again. Armin finds himself copying your smirk for all the wrong reasons. But it’s your own fault; you always did like to push him one step over the edge.

“Fine.”

Despite your twisted grin there’s a look in your eyes that’s eager; willing; ready for the taking. That same look you have when you talk over him in class; when you pretend to ignore him around your mutual friends; when you want him to fuck you stupid.

Armin uses his right hand to cup your jaw again, closing the distance between your mouths with a less than gentle kiss. He feels your groans reverberating through his body, waves of heat accompanying them and going straight to his erection. Your arch your back into the kiss, but he forces you backwards, left hand flat against your tummy.

Following suit, he pushes himself against your body, pressing his knee between your legs; the thin fabric of your stockings doing little to prevent your thighs from rubbing against him.

He swipes his tongue over the seam of your lips, earning a frenzied whine when glides his tongue across yours, and teasingly licks at the roof of your mouth. Your tongue is lithe against his, but somehow just as deceptive and sly as always, and Armin would be a fool to deny that he loved it.

There’s a spark flickering in his stomach when you push your center harshly against his; and it’s only ignited further when he feels you bite his bottom lip. A guttural growl escapes him, his right hand moving to your throat with practiced ease, pushing the back of your head into the wall.

He pauses for a moment, drinks in your wide eyes and desperate visage, “You are the single most frustrating person I’ve ever met in my entire life.”

And he couldn’t get enough of it if he tried. He couldn’t get enough of you.

You must see through his words, into the grainy expression of adoration in his eyes, because he can see it filtering into yours, pupils dilating with both want and care.

“Aw, baby, I love you, too,” you pout, leaning forward as best to can to peck him on the lips, “Now, shut me up and fuck me. It’s exhausting being this pretty and smart-mouthed, you know.”

Armin dips his head into your neck, squeezes against the column of your throat with warning until he hears a gasp escape from your lips. He presses gentle kisses into your skin, in stark contrast to the increasing pressure from his fingers, waiting for one last request, and then, finally—“Please.”

He smiles, loosens his grip for a moment, just long enough to hear your pretty panting, before slotting his lips against yours again. Your moans are lewd and sloppy and breathless between kisses, and it makes his dick twitch in his pants. You really are so fucking loud. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

He uses his free hand to push your skirt up, and subsequently dip past the weak barrier of your tights and underwear. The slightest flicker of his fingers against your center has you choking out a moan, and Armin is forced to press his right thumb harder against your neck.

“Quiet,” he reminds you, “You asked nicely, so I’ll give you what you want. No need to be loud about it.”

He watches you nod with short and restricted movements, a sadistic kind of power washing over him at your eager compliance. He uses his middle finger to rub slow, careful circles around your clit; the feeling of your wet cunt against his fingers, coupled with your wanton moaning only spurs on the throbbing in his pants.

“Armin,” you whine, impatiently; but he expected that of you, “Don’t tease.”

His eyes flash to yours briefly, pressing his lips to yours again to swallow your shuddered moans. He dips his tongue into your mouth at the same time he does his middle finger into your cunt. An obscene moan echoing through the classroom, as Armin feels your body arching into his again; feels your fingers frantically flying to his hair, searching for purchase to anchor yourself on.

He pulls away in time to add another digit and watch you groan underneath him. He pushes both his fingers in to the knuckle, carefully curling them upwards to elicit the prettiest sound out of you. He has to admit, it’s probably his favorite thing to hear come out of your mouth.

He keeps a steady pace, pumping his fingers in and out of your pussy with perfect friction, teetering between letting you moan his name and choking you silent. Your hands are frantic in his hair, grasping and pulling and so, so, desperate, Armin can’t help but to finger fuck you harder.

“You want one more?” he questions, but his voice is taunting, words ghosted over your lips just out of reach for you to kiss.

He can feel your leg trembling against his, see you pupils shaking along with your shaking head. Armin stops to smile; he thought you might do that. He could probably make you cry right now if he wanted to. Maybe later.

“Want you to fuck me,” your words short and ragged, eyebrows raised when he uses his thumb to press lightly against your clit, “Armin, please.”

The blonde shakes his head, “You’re dumber than you look if you think I’m gonna fuck you in a classroom, baby, so if you want to cum now, you better tell me.”

You have the audacity to pout of all things, “You’re mean.”

Armin lets out a breathless laugh. “You like it,” he leans forward to peck you sweetly, “So, what’ll it be?”

“Fine, but I want head later, too,” you tell him, words becoming less firm when Armin teases his ring finger against your slit, “Please.”

Armin hums in compliance, leaning forward to kiss you again, this time with more tact, and he chases your whines when he finally pushes a third finger inside of you.

“Look at you,” he croons breaking your kiss and forcing your head back again, “You take it so well.”

“Ah—fuck, there, Armin—there,” you cry, wet heat squeezing around his fingers in intermittent spasms.

Armin watches your chest heave with desperate breaths, air stuttering to pass from your lips to your lungs with his hand around your neck. He can feel your walls constricting around his fingers, feel your body shaking underneath him when he increases his pace. He curls his fingers again, just right, just until he hears you sing a strained call of his name. And when he feels your nails scraping down the nape of his neck, and the slight weight of your body convulsing, Armin knows you’re done for.

He’s nice enough to fuck you through your orgasm, shallow thrusts of his fingers bringing you to and down from your high as he watches you pant for him. He presses small kisses against your throat, up, up, up, until he’s kissing you, and carefully pulling his fingers out.

He removes his hand from your neck, and slides it down your waist to offer you support. He’s not prepared for your sudden pull on his neck, forcing him into a kiss that conveys your content; he’s quick to raise his left hand, palm meeting the wall to hold himself up against your sporadic actions, chuckling lightly into your kiss. You were always so reckless and happy after an orgasm.

You kiss him like you have him wrapped your finger despite being the one pleading moments ago. You do, so he supposes it’s not unwarranted; and he welcomes your flirtatious kisses despite the annoying blush they always bring forth.

And sure enough, he can feel his face on fire when you pull away. Armin scoffs internally at himself; he really should be able to keep it together around you by now. But when you kiss him like that, you kind of make it hard to think straight.

“You’re so good when you’re not… pretending to be good,” you hum, a blissful, hazy look on your features as you wrap your arms around his neck.

Armin shakes his head with a chortle of disbelief; leans forward to kiss you again, “’M not pretending. I am good.”

“Yeah, you’re such a good little saint that arguing with your girlfriend turns you on,” you taunt him, “It’s okay, Armin, you can admit it.”

He groans, out of shallow annoyance this time, and it makes you giggle. “Why are you acting like you’re not complicit in this?”

“Oh, no, no, no,” you refute with an exaggerated roll of your eyes, “You get turned on by hearing me talk about biochemistry. I like it when you tell me to shut up about it. We are not the same.”

“Yeah, because you look hot doing it,” he tells you, “Speaking of which, Eren called you hot today, so I kind of need you to slip a neurotoxin in his Gatorade.”

“Aw, Eren thinks I’m hot? Tell him I think he’s hot, too,” you bat your eyelashes at him, but Armin only offers you an unimpressed glare in return.

“I think he might be onto us, actually,” Armin notes, affectionately bumping his nose against yours.

“If he’s onto us, then it’s because you’re the one giving it away, not me.”

“Oh, because you could never do anything wrong, right?”

“Right,” you flash him an overconfident smile before reaching up to kiss to the tip of his nose, “See you’re so smart, baby.”

Armin shakes his head again in disbelief. You’re a handful, he can see that much.

“Come on,” he prompts, “We should go, I still have to finish my lab write up, and I know you haven’t started your paper.”

Armin tries to motion you forward, but is stopped when he feels your hand combing through his hair, and sees the genuine spark of concern in your eyes. “The one for your elective? I thought you said you were going to finish it on Monday.”

“I was,” Armin admits, “But then I didn’t.”

“You want me to help you with it?” you offer kindly, pushing his bangs back and letting your hands fall down the sides of his face, palms resting against his ears.

He nods gently, turning his head to press a kiss into your left palm, before wrapping his hand around your wrist, “I can help you outline your paper.”

You nod in return, and Armin spares one more kiss, before pulling your hand away to lace your fingers together.

Thankfully, nobody’s around to catch you exiting the classroom, or see you holding hands as you make your way out of the building and towards the bus stop. This was Armin’s favorite part of any Tuesday; the one time he could hold your hand on campus without the fear of getting caught by your friends.

He reasons that you guys should probably tell them soon, though, especially if Eren might have an idea of what’s going on. You were bound to get caught sooner rather than later. That, or Eren and Sasha would start meddling.

“If you think Eren knows, then Mikasa definitely knows,” you note, swinging your intertwined hands as you walk through the parking lot as a shortcut.

“Maybe if you actually remembered to hide Soup’s toys, there would be less evidence for her to piece together.”

“Yeah, well, maybe if you didn’t forget when your midterms are, I wouldn’t have to emergency cat sit the hour before Mikasa comes around, and there wouldn’t be any toys to hide in the first place.”

“I’m bad with dates, you know that!” Armin pouts, “I don’t say anything when you forget about ten page papers until four hours before they’re due.”

“You’re saying something right now, actually.”

“That’s not what I—you know, you’re so—”

Armin’s quiet when he feels your lips pressed against his cheekily, “Annoying. I know. You like it. You’re not very good at staying mad for very long.”

Armin’s tempted to roll his eyes yet again—he really needs to quit it, or at the very least, get your own temper under control before it’s irreversible and completely rubbed off on him—but takes the opportunity to kiss your forehead, instead.

“You’re lucky you’re cute.”

Your eyes twinkle under his affections. “And that you love me?”

He nods, “And that I love you.”

“And that you’re gonna fuck me before you make me write my paper when we get home, right?”

Armin chuckles and presses another kiss to your forehead, “We’ll see about that one.”

Hange huffs as they make their way through the parking. They always forget their keys in their office, and always, inconveniently park half-way across the campus. In their defense, this parking lot is free, and the one closest to the Medical Sciences building is not. So, really, capitalism is the one to blame for their frequent late night car lot strolls.

They hear two familiar voices bickering just as they’re about to step into their car, and are more than surprised to see their two favorite students walking together. Walking together and holding hands. Wait—you and Armin are walking together and holding hands?

Hange blinks for a moment, drowning out the sounds of the conversation after they see you two kiss. Their jaw practically falls to the asphalt and they might not blink for a full two minutes as they process what they just saw.

Their trance is broken when it finally, finally clicks together, and Hange has to try their hardest to contain their squeals before sitting in the driver’s seat, an overly forceful slam to the car door following. They waste no time fumbling with the pockets of their lab coat to fish out their phone, and make a call to their favorite math professor.

“Levi, I told you Arlert and (_____) had to know each other outside of class! I think they might be dating! You know what this means, right? I can have them both in the same lab without worrying they might start a chemical fire, and I won’t have to hire two brick heads this summer!”

Levi has never hung up a call more quickly in his life.

[ms-march]

Old Hollywood AU- The Lucky One

Here is the first chapter/one shot of this AU that is a collab and crossover that @tolstoyamericanrevolution and I have been working on it since November! Please keep an open mind to character interpretation because this is AU territory and a lot of a character who isn't necessarily the focus of the AU can be warped for plot and time accuracy purposes over character accuracy! So let's get to it and happy last day of TURN WEEK 2021!!!!

Global media was in a buzz, Today was the Hollywood equivalent of a royal wedding. With all the bells and whistles belonging to the West Coast set. New & old money all united around the superficialities of silver screens and unions and dubious desert deals. All neatly swallowed down with a glass of wedding champagne- the same brand as Buckingham palace yet here it looked slightly gaudy, American.

The media was here to adore, this was a decade before your Grace Kelly’s and other exports could wear centuries-old crowns.

Here it was harsh, fiscal, temporary, silver over platinum yet it was royal, majestic, lovely- every bit worth the soundbite.

This was the American monarchy, all a blend of the finest breeds and worst mongrels.

Dressed up in such a lovely, splendid crowd that Philadelphia, New York, Houston, Los Angeles & Chicago would all be running titles.

“Adoring Crowds rewarded at last! The Marriage of America’s Sweetheart”

“Hollywood Royalty! Adrienne Fairfax & John Laurens tie the Knot”

“ Media Heiress & Tobacco Heir; Los Angeles’s Marriage of The Decade”

Those picking up the papers would all sigh the same thing; how lovely.

The crowd was lovely.

At least, she was sure it was. Adrienne Fairfax had not yet been seen by a single member of the crowd, anxiously sitting before a vanity in a wedding gown three times her size, wringing satin gloved hands until the gloves began to crease. Her hands shook with the same fear that was responsible for the turning of her stomach as she removed them.

Today was her wedding day and it was exactly as she had always dreamed. Every detail was perfect and precisely to her liking.

Every detail was impressive.

Every detail would impress them.

The crowd was lovely.

The crowd had cheered for her, applauding her on the engagement just as they did when she was on the movie screen. Adrienne had been just as shocked as them to hear of her engagement. She would certainly remember being proposed to at the ripe age of seventeen. She certainly would have remembered if the man who did so was twenty-three years old, making him five years her senior.

The crowd had buzzed with conversation, just as they did now, outside of the open windows that were meant to cool her down. The cool breeze in the mountains this time of year should have corrected the heat filling her face and chest as it billowed through the open windows of the room, carrying the sounds of society in with it.

Her wedding was exactly as she had always dreamed.

It was in the mountains, away from the pollution of the billboard lights and American mile cars. She could see the stars from here, the real ones, in the sky. Not the ones in the velvet curtains in the ballroom, or the ones on the tule that coated the tablecloth in the grand dining room of the house she had barely spent a night in since she was a very young girl. Not the ones taking their seats in a church to watch Adrienne make the most irreversibly horrible decision of her life.

The crowd was lovely.

She was sure it was, and she was grateful for them. Their own chatter drowned out the echoes of old ghosts that still haunted this house’s halls. Adrienne’s eyes fluttered down to the picture frame propped up on the vanity in her childhood bedroom. She had been watching it like the smiling couple in the photo would decide to leave their seats on the terrace and walk away.

It was impressive.

The woman had light-colored hair, and the man’s was some odd form of grey in the yellowing black and white photo. She wore the most beautiful gown of pearly ivory layers and lace, the very same gloves Adrienne had just pulled from her own clammy hands graced the woman’s hands, the tiara atop her head in the photo matching the one atop the pile of blonde curls that she had just arranged in the vanity mirror.

It was just as she had imagined it.

Adrienne had found her mother’s wedding planning book years ago, and she fell in love with it the moment she first laid her eyes upon the beautiful fair-haired woman, leaning happily into the man in a finely tailored tuxedo and a wide smile in his eyes with an odd grey color to his hair.

Adrienne had not stepped foot over the threshold of this impressive Georgian English Manor style house since the last time she was dressed head to toe in black.

Adrienne had not crossed the threshold since the day of their funeral when she crossed from the foyer to the stairs down the drive with her belongings in tow.

She had gone home with a family friend that her parents had entrusted with her care and upbringing. The Washingtons were more superficial people than her parents had been. Not to say that they consumed more, that much was about the same. Rather, they were more concerned about success than they ever were with her. Growing up with the Washingtons, Adrienne had so many nannies, nurses, and governesses she often forgot their names. Not that it was important really, none of them integrated with her more than they absolutely had to.

Martha Washington had been insistent that she was to be the only maternal figure to the young heiress. Which would have been perfectly alright if she did not despise Adrienne’s own mother so deeply, making her maternal affection very few and far between.

Today is her wedding day.

It was Martha that had opened the door without a word, simply raising her brow, impatient with the blonde girl before the vanity. Adrienne managed one last look in the mirror before rising from the small chair she had sat on, donning her gloves over the clamminess of her sweaty hands, and breathed.

She breathed carefully as Martha pulled the veil to cover her face.

In and out.

In and out and suddenly she could pretend she was not being made to act as a witness as George signed over all she was to gain upon her 18th birthday to a man named John Laurens. He had shown up to sign the papers himself, a courtesy to George, she was sure. He was to be her husband, or so she had been told.

He had not even looked at her.

He did not greet her when he came through the door, only George. He did not converse with her, only George. She could have gotten up, smacked him, and walked out of the room and he would still not have noticed her.

He was to be her husband and she had not met him but once before. She knew who he was, vaguely. He worked at the studio as an actor. He was the son of an influential South Carolina politician who had a family fortune in the tobacco trade. But she had only met John Laurens once before her wedding day was set for the day of her 18th birthday and not a single day later. A week after watching her life be signed away into his hands he had paid her a visit.

Another courtesy to George, she was sure.

He had arrived with no specific plan, and walked through the gardens with her, talking now to her for almost an hour straight. She had even tried placing both tea and whiskey before him to shut his ramblings, both attempts failing miserably as he continued on about himself. He visited for almost two hours and had not asked her a single thing about herself.

He was to be her husband and he did not know a thing about her.

They met four other times during the short engagement, most of which were public niceties, another courtesy to George. There was not a single newspaper, magazine, or television hour that did not wish to have some kind of word with her on the topic of her wedding. None of them dared to advise her, she had been out planning the very best in the country since her earliest teenage years. A popular anecdote she had heard more in the past few months than she had anything else in the rest of her life went as following:

The Pope had come to visit the re-elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House but found the most pleasant time in the company of the most eligible girl in America, all the way on the West Coast.

The crowd was lovely.

That is what George had told her with a peck of a kiss to her cheek before he took his seat. She would walk herself down the aisle.

The harp and violins played as the grand doors to the ballroom opened on her, exposing her to the crowd and their whispers. The ceremony looked stunning. It was just as she had imagined it when she was little.

She only now began to wish that she had imagined the man at the end of the aisle so that there might be at least something she could find fault with.

There were familiar faces among the crowd that she passed on her long and slow walk to the man at the other end of the grand room. The clicking echo of her heels on the floor being the only thing keeping her trembling legs on course, but even worse was searching as discreetly as possible for those familiar faces. Anything to not have to face the harsh reality of who— no, of what— waited for her at the end of the crowd.

Among the crowd, her eyes locked with another blonde-haired man and she begged herself not to look desperate. He saw her looking too, but he managed far more composure than Adrienne did. Of course he did.

He must be thrilled.

Adrienne had the thought before she could stop herself. John Andre was another executive at the studio alongside George. Before her engagement, there had been pressures from all around for the two of them to marry. It would be a fitting trade, they justified, the daughter of an executive to the wife of an executive. It was a natural transition.

Perhaps that is why he had not spoken out about her engagement and marriage being written into her contract. He stood there, pretending he was not looking at her in his black tailored tuxedo, hair done in the most fashionable way with a small wave curl to it. He pretended that she was not on a death march.

He pretended far better than her.

He had his vices, that much she knew, but he was respectful. He spoke with her, not just to her. She knew him. She knew him and even though she had never found him more than physically attractive she found herself wishing it was him at the end of the aisle, and not for the first time since her engagement.

Today was her wedding day.

In a few minutes, she won’t be engaged anymore.

In a few minutes, she would be married.

In a few minutes, she would be married to a man that did not know a single thing about her.

She would be married to a man in less than a few minutes, and suddenly Adrienne understood all those runaway brides, leaving their fiance’s at the altar. Her heart pounded, hammering in her chest as she composed herself with a warm indifference. She had been doing so well. Then she saw him.

John Andre was an executive at the studio with George. There was pressure from all around for them to get married.

It was a fair trade.

He remained silent for his own sake. One cannot be forced to marry a woman who already belongs to a husband of her own.

She would be married and he would remain a bachelor till the end of his days, just as he wanted, receiving pity for her engagement everywhere he looked, exempting him from the very idea of marriage. Exempting him from being held accountable for his vices.

He must be thrilled, signing her life away to a man who doesn’t know a single thing about her for his own peace of mind.

It was a fair trade.

He had played the game and played it well.

He had won. And it was fair.

This will all be over soon, and she could find solstice in the stars over the sleepy Manor estate, talking to a ghost from the lawn as if he never left her. He had never left her, calling her to look up and scour the sky for stars whenever she felt lonely.

He had called her “my star.”

She was his star, and soon it would all be over. She could disappear into the night and be with the stars, chatting with ghosts from a happier past.

It will all be over soon.

She was looking through the crowd for familiar faces.

She was doing so well. And then she saw him, in the doorway she had just come from, a man in a finely tailored tuxedo and a wide smile in his eyes with an odd grey color to his hair. “It will all be over soon.”

And she heard him from the other end of the aisle, loud and clear, as if he were right beside her, as he should be.

Executive’s daughter married,

Media magnet meets Southern industry

John Andre: Hollywood’s Most Wanted Bachelor Remains Unwed

It was easy to feel remorseful, heroically guilty when you had nothing at stake.

No real risk to gamble.

It was the prisoner that escaped the hanging and looked sympathetically to the damned, fingers crossed behind their back. That was John Andre on this fine nuptial day.

If it had been him standing at the end of the aisle, where another John stood, he would be less prone to sympathy and instead resentment. Resentment of having his wings clipped and arranged around him, in exchange for a slip of a girl whom he felt no connection with.

By no connection, he meant romantic or intimate or lustful- none of the trilogy of connections worth considering matrimony.

Instead, he felt an observer's connection, a connection of pity, of sympathy- lightly powdered amusement and a genuine kindness that came from recognizing another piece on the chessboard of the older generation.

You could have as much power or success as you wanted in this city, as an executive you would assume John had made it to the top, and yet you would always be a puppet on someone else’s string.

Ask any man and it would be a woman, a mafia deal, a boss, an older competitor, or simply the moths that floated around the sparkles of fame ready to consume you if you stepped out of line.

[blankdblank]

Hobbit Soulmate Pt 35

Two more weeks of daily stops to the same banquet hall, that once split in half Adrien and his film stage cast around metal chairs forming the set of the fake play the first directions came about. Off to the other half they kept him too distracted while you worked with the choreographer on your own routine involving falling down on purpose. A lot less acrobatic than some had expected but no less adorable to you with thoughts of how it would look at the final go around. And while they broke you got to work on the second stage routine you would have, more graceful with large feathers for the entourage to the top hat and cane donning man.

Evening calls to both Richard and Lee up in Canada seemingly on vastly different schedules came between extra juggling lessons with Emma. Though soon enough you were back smiling for the security guard at the airport who let you past excited to see your next postcard of a film showing off the worth of all your travels around the world. Smoothing your fingers through your curls absently while rereading one of your favorite books adjusting to the slightly shorter length once you’d had it trimmed again. The flight had become a common blip to just get to the next stop along the way. When you would get to your between home however it would be a quick drop of the bag to head to the car waiting for you to take you to set alongside Lee.

Out in the hall once you’d hurried from the taxi up to your floor Lee outside his doorway stood off of the wall smiling and closing the distance. “Hey, welcome back,” nice and warm he hugged you tightly saying, “Rich left earlier I think, his car’s gone.”

“Ya, has to get to the empty northern set. Have fun up here? He said you’ve been making friends.” You asked in his pull back guiding him to your door as he took hold of your duffel bag.

“Just been meeting the other extras, they’re a bit curious on you. Understandably.” His eyes looking you over, “Sleep on the plane?”

“Nope, too cold, you sleep well?” Unlocking the door to step inside turning on the light guiding him inside.

“Inflatable mattress is a bit rickety.”

“How have you not bought a bed yet?”

“I don’t want to buy a bed, then I’d have to get rid of the bed. Will and my sister want the lounges at least for when they move out and we can split the moving costs.”

Down the hall you went stopping in the living room at the cabinet with a grin, “He fixed it up,” you said making Lee smirk watching you open the doors and peek inside.

“Saw him outside in the cold sanding away weeks back. Been keeping busy, even bought some shelves looks like.”

“Yes, he does love breaking out his hammer.” Making Lee chuckle going with you to the bedroom where you found a box of candies and a note from Richard that he would have dinner ready for you when you got back. A quick settle of your bag in the closet and you left your satchel beside that when he glanced at his watch again clearly having been waiting himself to climb in the car with you to get started. “Sorry I’ve left you to carry the weight.”

That had him chuckle walking with you back down to the lobby, “No problem, kind of like the mystery, even Tracy has been thriving in it. Though it will be fun to see you so relentlessly confrontational.”

“Thank you, get to be an odd duck.”

You caught his eye and he wet his lips at the door saying, “I saw him at a jewelry store you know.”

“I did not hear that,” you said exiting the door making him smirk again.

“He’s going to propose, or buy you something very very shiny.”

“Why do you do this?” you said locking the door behind you.

Leaning in however he pressed a sweet kiss to your cheek humming in the sling of his arm behind your back, ���Gets cold, we need a distraction.” Making you roll your eyes while he settled closer to your side glad to have you back with him. “He is perfectly miserable you know, when he’s not on set, only got him to lunch once.”

“Oh I know, we’re just determined to mope when apart apparently, and everyone I work with seems to say I rattle endlessly on about Rich too.”

“Oh I doubt that, more like you don’t share much and when you do it sticks out. They want you to be over the moon happy, you brood off to the sides from what I know about you on set.”

“Well I’ve never been one to be the center of attention at a party.”

“Odd choice of employment for the lot of us wallflowers.” He hummed shifting his hand to fix your collar after fixing his own jacket shut again.

.

Changed and seated in a trio of people helping to straighten your hair you read through the script for the first scenes to be filmed today. Curious stares lingered around the room of actors readying to film the start of the first four episodes set through winter months. A few bouts of chatting with the others and some of the mystery seemed to drop away with people wondering how convincing the bubbly vibes you gave off could be warped into the cynical and rude young woman to head this cast. Though from a glimpse of your note taking on the edge of your script the also left handed father wondered how your right handed grip on the pencil had been known by those casting when he had been told that you were left handed, the one child of his hired three that was a leftie like him.

Once the camera was rolling that doubt dropped as you switched hands showing you were ambidextrous, a trait at least comforting himself that your characters could hold that bond. A bond that between takes you got to deepening sharing more about yourselves that Lee jumped in on stealing every chance he got to be close to you. Always trying to wrap around your side or back propping his chin on top of your head proving that like Tracy had mentioned there was a history there, one that was confusing as clearly Lee wasn’t the name of your boyfriend and he wasn’t the guy you had been photographed cuddling up to at your premiers.

.

“Richy Rich,” you said entering your apartment just filled with the scents of the dinner he was fixing up. From the archway of the kitchen the grinning giant frame came to scoop you up in a warm hug with lips melting against yours.

Tenderly he kept his forehead to yours smiling as he hummed, “I made meatloaf,” relaxing his arms more around your back as your fingers smoothed up into his hair. “I take it Lee’s in the hall.”

That made you giggle, “Changing his shirt, got something on it.” He nodded and you giggled, “If he’s wearing green then he was lying to buy us some time. I hear you’ve been brooding between shifts.”

“It’s cold, I’ve been missing my cuddling partner. Did you notice the cabinet?”

You nodded and smiled, “You did an amazing job. Doors open and everything.”

Settling you down he stole another kiss along with your hand guiding you to the living room to show off the cabinet and polaroids of what he had found sharing the story about the family he’d tracked down creeping your grin out more, “And you tracked the family down over these?” Lifting the pile of pictures conveniently free of the geode box and rings, “Really?”

Sheepishly in a try not to spill the beans he eased his hands into his pockets saying, “Music boxes and those pens are expensive, and the receipts had a name. Wouldn’t be right to keep them without looking into who owned them. Made a cute story.”

“Very cute,” you giggled out then glanced to the door at the knock.

“Open, Lee.” He called out smiling at you, “Told him before it was open, he insists.”

The door opened and creeping in Lee poked his head in and you said, “No one’s going to eat you. You changed your pants too.”

You teased making him smirk and lift his slipper covered foot, “And took off my boots. Socks were cold too. Brought some cake.” Lifting the cake he brought from his fridge.

Richard smiled saying, “Thank you, I’ll set the table, let you breathe.”

Lee retorted, “I am breathing,” turning to follow Richard’s path to the kitchen as you sat to undo your boots to change your own socks. You nodded up at him and he repeated, “I am breathing.”

.

Days had the three of you mingling your schedules to have lunches and dinners together between distractions from the sleepy section of town you had settled in. On the set still things only seemed to get a bit mixed up for you, between playing someone so opposite and even having so much friction between you and Lee on screen with his place right next to you between the takes and scenes. “He really isn’t over you, yet is he?” Tracy had muttered a week in and all you could do was sigh at another take pulling you apart while you were to film the big reveal scene for their pretend relationship he clearly had hoped to be with you instead.

Richard was your rock though when he kept these rocky days a bit smoother, even if it seemed he was plotting something. Each stolen glance away and subtle flinch or tuck of a sweatshirt in one of the cubbies he never seemed to move in the closet had that jewelry shop trip mentioned by Lee circling in your brain. No matter how many times his shifts had kept him away for part of the day or even some of the night you didn’t dip to start digging for what he might be hiding and simply pretended that you didn’t know or notice he was up to something.

Valentines circled in your mind and was always a possibility just a few weeks off, a date he made sure to note, even with a card or folded paper flower or heart. Either way he was miserable with secrets and would cave eventually. And in the evenings in together that same fluid friendship came out with a tv and the splurged purchase of a dvd and vhs player helped to add to group movie nights where Richard got to show off his morning off wine purchases to share more of his interest in it with the pair of you.

.

Confusing didn’t come close, and where wine led to joking and a lean in with a teasing smile apparently led to a kiss, not with your boyfriend. Right between the pair of men you had eaten with you shared a communal grumble at the phone call announcing it was morning. Off your back Lee eased with hand smoothing down your side, the motion opening your eyes to spot Richard’s hand from your shoulder to pat the nightstand for his phone he grumbled and set down seeing it wasn’t ringing. “Not mine,” he rumbled moving his hand to smooth across your back again drawing you closer with his forehead tapping to yours.

Behind you Lee found his pants and said, “Not mine,” sighing as he reached out tugging your pants closer from your pocket he brought your ringing phone, “Yours Jaqi.”

Richard sighed again and while your mind still settled to the fact that you and Richard were naked out of instinct you rolled onto your side with hand raised to accept the phone you read the name and sighed reading Jennifer Garner’s number you grumbled and answered, “Hey Jen,”

A sniffle later and while Lee, also clearly naked settled out beside you, she sobbed out, “I’m leaving Scott.” Smoothing a hand over your face she said, “I’ve called a lawyer and I just have to get out of here. How is Canada?”

“It’s cold, tons of snow coming,”

She sniffled again and said through clearly packing a bag, “Good, I could use some snow. I’ll let you know where I settle in,”

“Ya, I can have you for lunch when you get here.” She traded good days and you hung up settling your phone on top of your belly as the duo cuddled closer to you. “Jen’s coming to town, getting divorced.”

To that Richard rumbled, “No, no bad mood,” planting a kiss on your neck followed by another on your lips in the start of a trail down your torso. Smirking drowsily on your side Lee leaned in glad to have another chance to kiss you again. The night before obviously fueled by the wine at the mention that you had brought the kit of toys from New York hoping to give them back to him not needing them anymore clearly in case he might find someone to be in a relationship with. The morning was clearly going to be awkward and a second call from a friend back in New York had you in a sweater fetching a drink while the guys pulled on their underwear and sweats.

Now was when the awkward set in for the guys, or Lee at least. From the edge of the bed Richard glanced to Lee at his second glance his way making Richard say, “Oh stop, I think we’re a touch past bashful glances, don’t you?”

Lee looked him over asking, “We kissed. Touched-. Have you, have you had threesomes before?”

“No,” Richard sighed out smoothing his hand through his hair, “But I’ve had partners who’ve suggested it before, never got there though.”

Lee asked with brows furrowing, “Partners, not girlfriends?”

“I’ve dated men before,” That had Lee’s brows arch upwards, “Though it was always frivolous. A lot of charismatic people in musical theater. Focused on more scratching their itches to keep them content when it came to sex that I just never felt. Never even really bonded with anyone before, never truly loved anyone before. Sex was never truly gratifying at all preferring a more domestic side to relationships, but now I’m with Jaqi that’s all changed. And it’s absolutely fantastic that when I met her she felt the same way about relationships, though she’s never showed an interest in women before it’s more than comforting to have someone who is the same as me.”

Lee, “So, you think Jaqi’s gay too?” He wet his lips, “I mean, she likes us, well she loves you, no question,”

Richard cut him off by chuckling at his try to correct his wording, “Haven’t found a label for anything concerning Jaqi yet, good luck with that one,” making Lee smirk and nod, “I do hope you’ll help keep her from moping while I have to head to Europe.”

Lee’s hands fixed around his shirt on his lap, “I always try to keep her from moping, not counting with that Jordan debacle.” Wetting his lips again he asked, “How long till you come back?”

“I won’t, unfortunately, when filming is through here for you both she’s sending the furniture to her place in New York while I’m working in England. She’s got some free time there through the Daredevil premier till she heads to England.”

Lee asked after wetting his lips again, “You don’t like me, do you?” That made Richard smirk again, “Because you’re supposed to be proposing to her.” Right off Richard’s brow ticked up, “I saw you walk out of that jewelry shop, when are you proposing?”

“I am still working on that.”

Lee whispered, “But you have a ring?”

“I have one, my brother’s helping me come up with a plan. Easier back in England.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

“Keep her from moping, least you could do for your girlfriend. I smell breakfast, come get some food.” He said standing up to head to the kitchen. Once there he grinned easing his hand across your belly to peer over your shoulder pressing a kiss to your free cheek as the other was holding your phone. “I’ve got it, Love,” he murmured into your ear guiding you away from the oven to take over cooking smirking as he caught your turn in time for Lee to come into the kitchen.

Passing you Lee leaned in to kiss your cheek too and got to helping with the food, not too long after you hung up and turned to set the table for the three of you. “What are you two up to later?” Lee asked looking you both over taking a bite of his food.

“I have to read through tomorrow’s script still, that reservation episode is still driving me up the wall,” gaining a smirk from Lee, “And you won’t help either antagonizing me the whole time.”

Richard hummed, “What are you up to?” lifting his mug for a sip.

Lee, “Just the go-kart race track with the guys. You can come too if you like?” He looked to you as you lowered your fork lifting a finger while you chewed, “Right, Jen is coming down.”

“Maybe next time. Plenty of time to shame the guys on the track yet.”

Lee post smirk wet his lips and drew in a breath, “I can eat at mine tonight,”

Richard smirked saying, “No need for that. If she’s wanting time with Jaqi we can help to keep Jen’s mind off her soon to be ex.”

Swallowing your mouthful you said, “I don’t even know why she called me other than I’m out here away from everyone else.”

The guys both said, “You’re her friend.”

Richard continued, “If I was going through that I’d want you to be with me. Even the other Jen calls on her rough days,”

Lee, “And Naomi let you in on her plan. Said she was torn between the roles. Has she called since you got the role?”

“Well, they still haven’t gone public yet, and she said she’d be off to email only on her new project thanks to shoddy reception.”

Richard, “Should be some interesting fireworks then.”

The conversation veered around to other things that could be done through the week noticed from trips around town. And once cleaned up at the time Lee said, “Better get a shower in before the guys get here, you two have fun,” his move in wasn’t missed and right on the lips he claimed a sweet kiss and smiled in his pull back.

“No kiss for me?” Richard teased.

With a shake of his head Lee chuckled to himself and at Richard’s step over they traded pecks on the cheek and Lee said, “Have fun you giant teddy bear.” Turning for the door to let himself out through another lingering smile your way.

Behind the closed door Richard smiled easing closer to you in the shift of your eyes to him. Straight to your hips his hands settled and smoothed upwards in his lean in to begin a trail of his lips down your neck, “While we’re alone, let me give you a rubdown and draw us up a bath my Love.”

Smirk melting across your lips your hands eased up around his shoulders in the firm smooth of hands up your sides onto your back, “I love you, you know that.”

Lowly he chuckled against your neck tightening his arms to lift you up and carry you to the bedroom to lay you out. Kneeling above you again he hummed continuing the kisses along your neck with hands working against your back firmly unable to move at the thighs holding him in place in this loving embrace. To your forehead his moved with a tap of noses at the sudden sniffle from your seeing the pants Lee had left on the end of the bed in fetching your phone. “I love you, it’s me and you always. Lee’s always been there, it’s always been us three. Not sure if he’ll be wanting another three way tumble, but it’s always gonna be you and me, no matter who he flits off to.”

Anxiously you wet your lips and you asked, “You think he’ll want to again, us three?”

“I think it had a lot to do with the wine, we did pop the third before the teasing started. Honestly I don’t know what he wants or would want, I know he still loves you and he’s comfortable sleeping with you after you were his first, hard to shut you off, I was miserable without you. For now, until I have to go and get naked for someone else I’d like to keep cuddled up with you while I can.” Stealing another kiss to your lips he hummed, “So no tears about last night.”

Weakly you said, “I didn’t plan-,”

“I know, and I doubt he did. He’s been picking up hints from your dad no doubt and has been asking about our future plans. He knows it’s you and me always. I know I hurt you when I slept with Tiffany, and there is no chance I would ever think you would do anything like that, and I will never hint otherwise. We chose together the three of us, I know your past and his feelings and I’m not threatened by that to dare to say anything hurtful about it. Please don’t be scared this does nothing to damage us at all.” Sweetly in a partial pout he asked, “Now can I flip you over and rub your back?” Up you lifted and stole a kiss of your own letting your legs loose granting your chuckling Mate to start the rubdown starting the afternoon of cuddling post bath to a show on tv.

“I love you, so much more than oceans can fight.” You murmured clinging closer to his side stretched out on the couch widening his already bright smile from the kiss you planted on his neck and burrow of your head there gripping at his shirt in a try to bring him closer to you.

“Oceans don’t stand a chance, my formidable Love,” he hummed back adjusting the blanket and his arms more across your back feeling you drifting off to sleep. Keeping you there until a convenient stretch from you a while later let him climb up out of your hold to hurry to the bath to relieve his bursting bladder. Jen Garner had arrived and asked to have lunch the next day hoping for a long nights rest and meal alone to deflate granting the three of you to blend back into another tame supper and night apart once your sheets were dried and the bed made again.

.

Quiet out of the bath while you remained asleep, now on the bed, Richard crept. Walking in the path of light lit by the lowly glowing aquarium lamp with tiny floating fish inside giving off bubble sounds on the shelves along the wall as a sort of nightlight used thanks to the trains of big rigs that woke you up in their path behind the building from the warehouse a while down the road in your first week there. He never got an answer for what nightmare they set off to have you jolt out of bed near to screaming halfway already to tears. Something he hoped was coincidental or drawn from a horror film of some sort. All the same while that usual train of big rigs came through sounding off he smiled to the sight of those unruly curls sprawled about halfway into your face nestled into the pillow supporting it and arms above your head matching the awkward sprawl of your legs. Impatient to sleep to bask in the time to cuddle even when unconscious with him now turned over when he slipped out of bed.

Sheets half strewn and wrinkled beyond repair until he would come back righting them to draw close to your side again. Somehow the notion was back on his mind, your wedding night, just that first night where you were secured together having vowed to be bound to one another forever. Deep back in the closet even in the dark he found the hiding place for the rings he had made up and once that cold metal touched his palm from your ring he slipped his ring right on his ring finger smiling to himself in the dark. Slowly he crept closer with yours in hand and to the bed he went hovering over you finding the right finger that after a few hushed huffs of hot air inside the ring to not jolt you awake.

Rather easily it slid over your lowest knuckle inching his smile painfully wider at the perfect fit, that smile dropped however at your brows scrunching up and body tucking to roll over onto your side stirring an urge to tell you to stop or turn back. Instantly his hands were over his mouth in his wide eyed stare in your settling back into the bed. Right up under the pillow your left arm curled and he caught his opening, around the bed up to the headboard he crept resting his hand on the wood frame to reach out lifting the edge of the pillow slow and steady. Sideways around your fingers his hovered to rest on the metal, down to your face from the ring his eyes darted and leaning in he pressed his lips to your cheek stirring a shift in your body aiding in the subtle tug of the ring. Back into his palm it was tucked and in a step back he let out a breath turning to head back and hide the rings away again smile back noting that the fit was just perfect.

“Richy,” lowly you whined to the sound of the engines cranking up again in the shift of gears hastening his rush to tuck the rings back in their place and turn to be back.

“Right here,” he said from the closet luring a disapproving slumbering huff in response hurrying him along to silence any shadow hidden pout sure to follow. “Right here,” he hummed again sliding back into bed drawing your shifting self to his chest again tangling with you to his favorite position halfway across your body granting tons of sleepy kisses to your cheek and nose to help you stir.

 *

Halfway sprawled over Lee woke for his waking trip to the toilet groaning, barely able to make it there before his body dropped to the floor. “Agh,” he groaned wincing at the excruciating pain radiating from his right side upwards. To his knees he managed with tears threatening to pool into his eyes from the pain to the far wall of his bedroom where he managed to drop to his side whispering, “Jaqi-,” curling a fist he took a pained swing failing to catch his breath.

On the other side of the wall softly you grumbled in your sleep at the thump spoiling your late morning off in bed. Into your neck Richard huffed only to grumble himself at the second thump. “Lee have-,”

Two more thumps came quickly opening the Brit’s eyes making him lift his head as you turned yours with hearts quickening at the trio of thumps coming next and a muffled sound of what could be a groan. Together up you popped and hurried to pull on clothes and slippers, the last thing you grabbed was your key ring including the spare to his apartment he’d given you upon moving in for a spare to yours and out you shot. Straight to his door you went with Richard locking yours behind you to race inside his after you, “Lee?” You panted out answered by a pained groan.

“I can’t-,” he groaned out setting his head on the floor with eyes shut hearing you entering his bedroom.

“Lee,” you said on the way over to drop at his side looking him over as Richard stopped in the doorway inspecting the scene himself. “Is it your head, or stomach?”

“I stood up, and,” he panted again, “Just, this pain up my side.”

“Right side?” You asked and he nodded. “Okay,” you said easing his shirt up, “I’m gonna press on your side, it’s gonna hurt.” He groaned but clenched his eyes at Richard’s move closer to watch you press into his right side, the press made him groan but clenching into a ball he groaned loader at your hand releasing.

“Why did you do that?” gritting his teeth the pain now had tears in his eyes.

“That’s the appendix.”

“I’m gonna get you up, Lee, Jaqi you can get the car.” You nodded accepting the keys from him as Richard tucked Lee in his arms and lifted him bridal style only luring another groan, “I know it hurts but over the shoulder will be worse.” Around the room you grabbed his phone, wallet and keys leading the way out and locking up to the lot where you brought the car over opening the door from inside for Lee to be eased and buckled into the seat. Locking eyes with Richard panting for air through the pain he groaned again and Richard said, “Just sit tight, hospital in no time.” From the front to back seat he moved closing the doors behind him to buckle in as you turned the wheel starting the drive as Lee tired to relax back against the seat with eyes closed.

“Just another block,” you said at the final light seeing the hospital in sight, “Then they’ll get you fixed up.”

“My,” he panted out and inhaled to pant out, “my mom,”

“I’ll call them when we get you booked in.”

Richard said, “My brother had his appendix out when we were kids it’s quite a simple surgery and you weren’t half as bad as he was, painted half our bedroom by the time we found out it wasn’t a stomach bug.”

You nodded as Lee looked your way, “Three of my cousins’ kids have had them and two of my cousins, even my uncles have scars from theirs when dad was raising them. I’ve even looked into it, small cut and some clamps and then cut and singe off the tube thingy going to the appendix and it’s done, feel so much better after.”

Lee, “Have you had the surgery?”

“No, but I have had my tonsils out,” you said glancing to the halfway smirking Lee, “I know it’s not the same, but it kinda is, you can live without both of them.”

Lee panted out, “What I get,” making you look at him again from the road then back again, “pretending to sleep with Tracy.”

“Oh I highly doubt that is what did it,” Richard hummed helping to keep Lee upright in the final turns. Parked in the closest spot at the emergency room you both got out with Richard unbuckling Lee he eased his arms around again, “Almost there big guy.” You shut the car and shivered in the rush across the crosswalk.

The sight of the tall person being carried in had a gurney brought over and as Lee stretched out you said, “His appendix. I don’t think he’s been sick. Found him on the floor.” Sharing his blood type and a bad reaction to a medication he was given as a kid to help him pass something he swallowed making a couple nurses smirk at the irrelevant medication but glad all the same to have been informed of the reaction all the same.

Lee’s hand gripped yours and he said, “Jaqi-,” as the doctor from the ER called for an operating room to be prepped and nurses to bring over the prepping IV.

“Cut, clamp, cut, singe, stitch, done. We’re right here,” he drew in another breath letting you go at your peck on his cheek, letting the staff take over at Richard’s confirming pat on his shoulder through the confirming press the Doctor gave to his side.

Holding the clipboard you sat with Lee’s wallet filling in everything you could with Richard beside you stroking your back and walked over taking the papers for you and the nurse there said they had wheeled Lee back. “Thank you,” he said and turned to go back and bring you into his side pressing a kiss to your forehead. “Just took him back, his parents answer yet?”

“No,” you said still holding Lee’s phone, “Will’s on a trip and they’re out in Oklahoma with his sister. I said he’ll be fine.”

“He will be, you gonna call work? Let them know?”

That had your head turn to see the flashes from outside of the two photographers who had been camped out at your place since Jen had come to town hoping to catch her dropping by as her hotel had stricter surgery. “They’re not up for a few hours at least. Still dark out. I’ll call in the morning.”

Not even ten minutes into the first magazine Richard had brought over the phone began to ring and answering the call you said, “Mr Pace, ya hey, Lee’s still in surgery but he seemed to be early on in symptoms. The doctor didn’t seem bothered by anything.”

“Well,” he cleared his throat, “That sounds good, um, we can’t exactly fly out,” he said clearly having just woken up to check on his sick mom they’d flown out to help with the family home.

“Oh no I get that. We’re here I just wanted you guys to know. I’ll keep you posted and have Lee call you later.”

“Thank you Jaqi, really. Couldn’t have happened at a worse time when at least his mom couldn’t fly out.” A voice calling out had him saying, “Um,”

“That’s ok, I got him here, you take care of Gran Pace few days and he should be up and ready to go.”

“We’ll talk later, thank you Jaqi.” He hung up and you smoothed a hand over your forehead stealing another glance at the growing number of flashes through the opening doors as another patient arrived until a ring from your own cell phone drew your focus.

Your dad’s number was on the screen and you answered, “Dad?”

“Pumpkin, whose hurt? My friend up there said you’re on the news you’re at the hospital?”

“Lee’s appendix is giving him trouble,” that had him exhale in relief, “Ya, Rich carried him in and they’ve got him on the table now.” You wet your lips, “It’s on the news and they didn’t say who was sick?”

“They just saw you with a guy carrying another guy to the hospital. He alright?”

“Scared,” you said, “But shouldn’t be long now and I think work should be fine giving him a few days easy work. Sorry we worried you.”

“No, worry me, any time. Both you kids up there we need to worry from time to time. You ok?”

“Good, he was just on the floor when we found him. You ok? They didn’t wake you up?”

“Up to the sheep here in a bit, not too early, Pumpkin. All good here. Looks like the biggest birthing year yet coming up, they’re glad to have me around again for some more heavy lifting. But I’m never more than a flight away, don’t want to use up all your minutes, but call me if you need to talk ok? I love you.”

“Love you, Daddy, I will, hug the sheep for me.” Earning a chuckle from him before the call ended.

Pt 36

Hobbit – Soulmate - @evyiione​​, @deepestfirefun, @rhaenaatargaryen, @anastasialovers

X all Rich. A - @abiwim​, @deepestfirefun​, @thestorybookmistress

X Lee P - @tigereyesf​

All –

@himoverflowers​, @theincaprincess​​, @aspiringtranslator​​, @thegreyberet​​, @patanghill17​​, @jesgisborne​​, @curvestrology​​, @alishlieb​​, @jogregor​​, @armitageadoration​​, @fizzyxcustard​​, @lilith15000​​, @marvels-ghost​​, @catthefearless​​, @imjusthereforthereads​​, @c-s-stars​​, @otakumultimuse-hiddlewhore​​, @mariannetora​​, @shes-a-killer-kween​, @ggbbhehe4455

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

Lena, Paragon of Humanity (a Supercorp alt. Crisis story), Part 1 of 2

[Warning for blood, violence, assault & battery, character death (temporary, but not resolved in this installment)]

---

Appearing on the Waverider and being declared the Paragon of Humanity is a shock for Lena in and of itself. If she had her preference, she'd be back on the Legion ship helping the so-called superfriends than be here among strangers facing an insurmountable challenge. 

But that shock wanes when-- with a sharp twist of the knife still lodged between them-- Kara volunteers even more information. "There's something you should know--" "Hey, sis." Ever the slave to his congenital need for dramatic flair, Lex thwarts Kara's voluntary truth for a second time by strolling into the too-bright room, hands tucked in his pockets with a shit-eating grin. "Miss me?"

Lena's blood runs cold as she stares, stunned, at the apparition of her brother. She's allowed a single heartbeat to wonder if the verse-warp scrambled her brains. There's no precedent that she knows of for reality jumping on the scale she'd just used-- sudden onset schizophrenia isn't beyond the realm of possibility. 

But Kara's jaw tightens irritably at his entrance, a confirmation that she sees the apparition as well, and her deep loathing for the ghost walking among them. "The Monitor revived him," Supergirl tells her, an explanation that explains nothing. "I don't know why but--" "I killed him, Kara," Lena whispers. "I swear to god I shot him in the chest I watched him bleed out--" "Never been more proud of you, ace," Lex supplies, with a grin that would almost be genuine if not for razors edge lurking beneath it. "It's rare that anything surprises me, but you did. Brava." Kara grips Lena by the hands and tugs her into the corridor, out of Lex's line of sight. As soon as his spell is broken, Lena's capable of conscious thought again, and she pulls away with a muttered curse, this time not meant for the hero. "What the fuck is he doing here," Lena demands, anger overwhelming her shock. She clings to it for dear life, because she's afraid of what will be left if it fades. Nothing, is what she fears. "What the fuck, what the FUCK," she mutters all the way down the corridor to the lab she'd first arrived in. "What the fuck, Kara!" "I know," Kara says quietly, having followed her pace for pace. "I almost killed him myself, but the Monitor says--" "Lex Luthor is still of use," the Monitor delivers himself, appearing in a flare of white light. "Fuck you," Lena snarls at the stranger, too angry and too shattered to be daunted by the display of extranormal abilities. Seven billion people on Earth-38 about to die, and you chose HIM?! A literal monster?!" "His resurrection was necessary--" "Anything he can do, I can do better. If you have me, you don't need him." But the Monitor is not swayed. "Neither of you alone can undo what has been done. If you are to return the universe to its rightful form, you must set aside the bygones--" "Bygones?" Lena exclaims. She shakes her head. "No. In fact, set aside this: your 'paragon of humanity' refuses to stand in the same room as him, let alone work with him. Either he goes, or I go." In the end, it's Kara who smoothes things over. She gestures for the Monitor to let her have a shot, and he disappears to give them a moment of privacy. Lena braces herself heavily against the console with both hands, trembling with more than just fury. When Kara finally gets a glimpse of her face, it's heavy with despair. "All those people," Lena whispers. "All those people, and he's the one who cheats death." "I know it's not fair..." "We don't know if James made it to a ship," Lena says abruptly. Her eyes close against sudden tears. "Boarding was such chaos, there's no passenger manifest for any of the ships that made it through. No one knows if he made it." Kara's heart lurches, but she remains calm. Strong. She places a warm hand on Lena's shoulder, and to her surprise, Lena doesn't pull away. "If what the Monitor says is true... if you can bring the universe back-- don't you think it'll be worth it? You're his sister..." Lena doesn't respond right away, and when she does her voice shakes for a whole other reason. "All my life, I was an orphan. But I wasn't. I was Kara Danver's best friend," she mutters, half under her breath. "But I'm not. Then I was the woman who murdered her own brother. But now I'm not even that anymore." Lena shrugs. "If I'm none of those anymore...what else am I?" But Kara doesn't say that. She curls a hand around Lena's wrist, silently willing to look at her. "You're Lena Luthor," she tells her friend, offering a small but genuine smile. "And you're still all of those things. For better or for worse. And you're still my best friend. That never changed, Lena." Lena shakes her head against the claim, but her fingers grip Kara's tighter. With a soft huff, she straightens to face the challenge at hand. "Right. I still killed my brother in cold blood," she says, her voice sharpening into a new edge, "and that's not a thing Lex Luthor forgets. Has your Monitor considered the fact that he'll return the favor the first chance he gets? His still of use Lex Luthor will murder his paragon of humanity?" Kara wraps Lena in a firm hug, one that Lena finds herself returning after a moment of silent hesitation. She's still angry, her chest still hurts with the ache of Kara's lies, but their world was just destroyed, and Lena's identity feels like it's following on Earth-38's heels, and the warm circle of Kara's arms feel like the only thing keeping her atoms together. "I won't let that happen," Kara vows. "I promise." However intimate their moment of reunion, it's still the end of the world, and at the end of the world heroes and paragons have greater duties than promises to each other. While Lena works with Lex in the lab, Kara and the remaining paragons fulfill their own roles. It pulls Kara away from her watch dog duties, pitting her against the anti-monitor while Lena finds a way to restore the multi-verse. The solution is relatively simple. They have the Book of Destiny, but not someone guaranteed to survive the encounter with their sanity intact. Of course, Lena has someone who can. Hope. Lena and Lex restore the AI saved on the thumbdrive, and then divide & conquer to alter Hope's programming while generating a means to let her interface with the Book of Destiny. Lena suspects that the ordeal will fry Hope completely (along with every other electrical component in the lab, if not the entire ship) but Hope is ready and willing. It is what she was created to do. Working with Lex while being completely devoid of any softness towards him is a new experience for Lena. Her wariness gives her new independence, and allows her to interact with him on equal footing. Their banter is familiar, but sharp, and her new ease with herself gives Lena a new sort of comfort. It feels almost... normal. When Hope is ready and Lena pushes the button, she and Lex are alone on the ship. The others have taken a jump ship to face the anti-monitor directly, and honestly, Lena believes it's their best chance for survival, considering that even if their plan works, the energy wave from the Book of Energy could tear the ship apart. The surge of energy rocks through the ship. Sparks fly, the lights go dark, and it's a long moment before Lena can believe they're still alive. "Gideon?" It takes a long while, but Gideon comes back online with a garbled voice but some external sensory capability. "All matter-based realities have been restored." Elation bubbles up inside Lena, and she turns to Lex with a broad grin that shines with triumph. "It worked! We did--" She turns into her brother's fist as he shoves it deep into her abdomen. The blow knocks the breath from her, and Lena's ears ring as she slowly comes to the realization that Lex hasn't punched her. Fists clutching at his lapels, Lena turns her gaze down between them, where his hand curls around the bloody hilt of the knife protruding from between her ribs. She gasps, staggering, only to be steadied by her brother's gentle grip. "You did it, ace," he delivers. His voice is devoid of emotion-- of rage, of pride, of hate. His tone is perfectly congenial, and it chills Lena to the bone. "I knew you would. And now that you've served your purpose--" With a vicious tug, Lex pulls the knife from her flesh. A grunt pulls from Lena's throat, only to be strangled once more when Lex plunges it back in. "No one will miss you." When Lena sags, Lex props her up, tipping her chin up so their eyes meet. She stares into his fathomless gaze as it regards her with disdain. "The Paragon of Humanity," he sneers, but then softens with rationality. "I suppose it's fitting. You certainly embody all that it is to be human. Fallible. Weak. Governed by emotion." Each point is punctuated with another thrust. Each one drives more of the breath from Lena's chest, until she has nothing in her but an empty hollow. "You are alone, Lena," Lex murmurs in her ear, holding her close. "And more than that, you are mortal." With a final twist of the knife, Lex rips the blade free and tosses it aside. It clatters into the shadows, far beyond her reach. He releases Lena as well. A small shove sends Lena staggering against the console, but her efforts to catch herself are immediately thwarted by hands that grip her head and slam it against the pedestal. Lena hits the ground blindly, her sight stolen by the darkness and ebbing consciousness. Lex's foot slams into her belly. Once. Twice. And then there's utter stillness, broken only by Lena's own grunting gasps for air. "I congratulate your tenacity, Lena. Watching you pulling that trigger-- it was the most Luthor I'd ever seen in you." Lex crouches beside her, stroking the side of her head. Lena doesn't even have the strength to flinch from his touch. "When I negotiated your survival in exchange for availing my services to the Monitor, I won't pretend that it wasn't because I needed your intellect. You are truly brilliant. The efficiency of your mind, your intuitive leaps of logic-- you've come a long way from the little girl I taught to play chess." Lena blinks against the throbbing of her skull, dislodging the tears that have gathered on her lashes. They drip across the bridge of her nose, and fall soundlessly to the floor. Her brother's fingers brush the hair from her temple, smearing blood across her skin. After a moment, his hand tightens cruelly. Her mind has disconnected from from her body-- Lena imagines she can see herself as Gideon must: a pathetic, pile of flesh and bone bleeding out under the heel of a monster. But then her imagined gaze catches on the dark shadow encircling her own wrist: a watch. The beacon. She watches her fingers reach blindly for the watch face, and then blinks back into her body just in time to see her brother offer one last kindness. "In the spirit of that efficiency," he delivers smoothly, "know that I would never condemn to you outlive your purpose." Just as the tip of her finger brushes the sigil on her watch, Lex picks her head up with both hands and slams it against the floor. There's no pain. No fear. There's absolutely nothing. --- Kara returns to the Waverider with victory in her throat. Their communications with the ship have been disrupted, but they can see that it's still intact, and when they dock, the newly awakened hope inside expects to find Lena on the far side of the door. What they find instead is a dark and empty ship, utterly silent save for the ear-splitting alarm only Kara can hear. "Lena." Her heart pounds thunderously, pulsing against her vision as she strains to look through the bulkheads that stand between the docking bays and the lab. The energy wave has disrupted something in the make up of the metal hull-- Kara can't see through it. She starts to run, panic overtaking her as she realizes that the only heart she can hear beating over the beacon's shriek is her own. The lab's door won't open-- sabotaged by Lex on his way out. Kara punches through it with her entire body, and the metal tears like aluminum foil under the impact. Inside she finds silence, blood, and Lena. Kara knows before her hands make contact that she's too late. Lena's too pale, too silent, and when Kara scoops Lena's upper body into her lap, her friend's body feels empty. "No," Kara's vocie shakes. "No, no, no, Lena, please..." A flash of light pierces the darkness, and the Monitor appears, his features grim and impassable. Kara glares up at him through her tears, her anger reaching for its only available target. "She told you this would happen..." she croaks. "SHE TOLD YOU!" A blast of heat vision crackles ineffectively against his breastplate. The rest of the crew fills in around him, and murmurs of dismay cloud the air around them, shocked at the violence visited on one of their own on the cusp of victory. "She told you," Kara echoes, hugging Lena close to her chest, "and you still insisted on keeping her killer here. Because his use outweighed the threat he posed." "Lena Luthor's loss is tragic," the Monitor intones, bending to one knee to meet Kara's gaze. "But she fulfilled her purpose, as did her brother." "Yeah, but it's her brother who gets to keep breathing?" Kate demands, catching Kara's anger and fueling it with her own. "Where's the justice in that?" "Lena dealt the first blow," comes the flat reply. "I am not responsible for the actions between mortals--" Kate grabs him by the cowl and hauls him up, away from Kara. Away from Lena. Scowling, she shakes her head. "This time you are! YOU brought him back, YOU insisted on keeping him alive! Lex may have been the one to murder her, but Lena's blood is on your hands too." "Kate," Kara breathes, her chest quaking with the effort to keep her wits about her. "The book... bring me the book." An electric surge of hope surges in Kate's chest, and she releases the Monitor to sweep towards the interface, where the book lies under a neat of sensors and wires. Just as she reaches for it, it dematerializes like so much ether. "What the fuck--" She whirls to face the Monitor, who draws himself unapologetically to his full height. "The Book of Destiny cannot erase the sins of the mortal world. It's power is too dangerous--" Kara coughs a laugh, her cheeks streaming with tears. "Lena used that book to save the universe. ALL the universes. She of all people--" "I am sorry for your loss," the Monitor cuts in. "But my task is now complete. It is time for me and the book to remove ourselves from the timeline, before reality is forever altered." "No, wait--!!" He disappears without another word, leaving Kate to tackle nothing but air, and Kara reaching for a hope just out of reach. They stare at the vacated space he'd just inhabited, and not for the first time wonder if they'd been helping a good guy after all. It certainly doesn't seem like it, when the engineer of their salvation lays dead in her hero's arms. Kara's features fall, a mask of stunned and empty disbelief. For long minutes no moves. No one speaks. Finally, Kara numbly reaches for the watch on Lena's wrist. Her fingers brush cold skin on their way to the el mayarah still pulsing with a faint glow. With a single press, the sound in Kara's ears cut out, silencing the beacon for the last time.

[novantinuum]

Bi the Way...

Fandom: Steven Universe

Rating: Teen

Words: 2.8K~

Pairings: Steven/Connie

Summary: Connie has a question, and also something to say.

Or: the one where Connie comes out as bisexual :D Set post Steven Universe: The Movie.

You can find the AO3 link in the reblogs! (I have to omit it from the original post these days to ensure this will show up in the tags.) If you enjoyed this, I’d greatly appreciate your support through reblogs here, or kudos on AO3 as well.

---

Bi the Way...

Outside the familiar coziness of Steven’s bedroom, the late autumn rain pours steadily, the choppy waters of the Atlantic crashing onto shore with a ferociousness Connie hasn’t seen for a number of months. Historically, Beach City has been blessed to be host to consistently good weather. But even the most consistently stable meteorological systems aren’t immune to the odd unexpected shake-up. It’s a necessity to clear the air with a great thunderous clap, sometimes. It relieves pressure that’s built up long term amongst the clouds. It leaves the atmosphere noticeably cleaner, the dirt below sparkling with that fresh scent that comes about after torrents of cool rain.

On this particular afternoon, she’s found that this is a lesson that holds just as true for people as it does the weather.

It begins with a stray comment, as things often do.

They’re watching TV, the two of them, tangled together on his bed. About once a week they’ll try to have one of these cuddle sessions, just some time alone together to relax and enjoy each other’s company in private. Working alongside a myriad of Gems to aid in the restructuring of an entire society can be excruciatingly stressful at points, and so can rigorous AP classes and the eye-rolling drudgery of high school drama. There’s no placing a hierarchy on these things for them, no matter their outward difficulty or importance, they’re all just... the challenges in life they have to win. And on occasion, they’re the challenges they need a quiet break from. Both of them are no stranger to throwing themselves at a problem and working endlessly towards a solution until they hit rock bottom and crash, but over the years they’ve started to recognize this tendency for the bad habit it is. It’s okay to take 'me' time, Connie’s constantly reminding Steven (and herself) whenever she catches him about to stubbornly sneak away to the galaxy warp with clear stress lines rimming his eyes. And without fail he’ll groan halfheartedly, knowing he’s been caught red-handed, and retire to his room to relax with a book or a board game or a few rounds of Lonely Blade: Resurgence instead.

Today’s workaholic distraction is a marathon of old Under the Knife episodes. It’s been a while since they’ve binged through this show, and when Steven brought it up and she started to feel super nostalgic about it, in a flash their entertainment for the afternoon was selected.

“Gosh, I honestly forgot how good this is,” he says in the middle of an episode, nudging her arm with his elbow. “The satirical nonsense, the passion, the drama? Eh?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty pulpy,” she giggles, nudging him right back. Then, directed at the unhearing characters on screen: “Ughh, Marigold, come on, just go out with him already! We all know you like him!”

“I can’t believe they kept this a slow burn for five entire seasons,” he comments, pursing his lips. “They’re literally perfect for each other!”

Connie throws her arms down against the mattress, palms stretched wide open. “I know, right?? Adrien’s like, a total dreamboat of a man.”

“Yeah, he is pretty cute,” Steven says, an unmistakable blush coloring his face and ears.

Connie pauses upon hearing this, gazing at her boyfriend thoughtfully with a soft smile as he continues to watch this old episode with the same level of investment he exhibited upon its first airing. He props his chin in the cradle of his hands, which of course only further exaggerates the curve of his chubby cheeks. His eyes are blown wide with youthful endeavor, the TV’s glow glinting against his irises in a myriad of continuously shifting colors. He is pretty cute, she thinks, his own adorably smitten words echoing through her mind. And then that blush...

There’s a question she’s had for quite a while but has never asked. Something she’s suspected of him, but had no concrete proof of. The reason? Even if they’re best friends, and now— boyfriend and girlfriend on top of that— the idea of asking him something like this just felt too... what’s the word... invasive. Not that there’s anything wrong with discussing this sort of stuff, no, no, of course not! That’s definitely not what she means. But talking about something as important as this, she just knows it would turn into an in-depth conversation, as most worldly topics tend to do with Steven Universe, and it’s only inevitable this conversation would eventually turn back on her. On why she cared to ask in the first place. And that answer was... well, straightforward, but something she’s not sure she’s ready to broadcast. As if she’s taken command of but a single fragment of Garnet’s future vision, in her restless mind she’s already mapped out what feels like every possible response he could have to her. Most of them are no more than anxiety laced fabrications, things he would never ever dare think of with his upbringing, but believe her when she says she’s been burdened with considering every possible outcome in great, excruciating length.

Now that she knows for sure there’s a strong chance he’s the same way, however... that narrows down these possibilities significantly.

Connie threads her fingers together, gathering the courage.

Come on, you. It’s just Steven. No script, no planning, just... say it!

She opens her mouth to speak before her anxiety laden mind can beg to differ.

“By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask- do you like girls and guys?”

Steven glances away from the television set to meet her curiosity head on. “Oh, you mean like, romantically?”

Running in automatic, she nods in confirmation. Here she goes. The answer to both her spoken question, and the question of which river of possibility this conversation will careen down.

He grins, scratching at the side of his neck. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I guess I do! But I think I could like anyone, really. Guys, gals, none of the above. Doesn’t matter to me. That’s... okay, yes?”

“Silly, of course it’s okay! You don’t need my permission to like who you like. I just asked because I-“ Her heart pounds as she pauses briefly, focusing on the nervous jitters, but not in fear. Not anymore. Instead, that soft fluttering in her heart is nothing less than sheer exhilaration. She parts her lips once more, bravely speaking her inner truth into reality for the first time in her life. “I’m like that too. I... I’m bisexual.”

Her boyfriend’s whole expression lights up so bright she may as well be looking at a newborn star.

“Oh, really? That’s awesome!” he says, throwing an arm around her shoulder to side hug her. (Knowing him, his keen empathetic ability likely led him to sense the internal battle she waltzed through just to state this out loud.)

The forgotten soap opera continues to play in the background as Connie gives a bashful laugh.

“Hehe, glad you think so. You’re actually, um... the first person I’ve ever said that out loud to,” she says, blushing.

Steven looks as if he’s about to say something in response, but then he pauses— fades into a silence that’s deliberate and measured— as he gazes back at her. Drinks in the moment. Wonders how he could be so lucky to hold her trust like this, or how— heck, he could be thinking anything, she has no idea! Unlike him she can only catch small glimpses into how he feels, the truth woven like gossamer threads through his words and actions, but in this one hallowed moment she doesn’t need to guess. The spark of affection dancing within his dark eyes is soft, perhaps softer than he’s ever looked at her before.

More than anything, Connie feels seen. Years back, long before sword training and Gem missions, long before that fateful day she discovered the beautiful temple (it looked like it could very well be a Hindu goddess, and that cultural connection alone made this slice of beach instantly familiar) hidden on the other side of the hill and decided to park herself there with a book, she’d grown used to feeling invisible. Before she bravely chose to step into this world of magic, it’s as if she forgot that she even had a choice to stand out, to openly shine as the unique, extraordinary individual she is. Admittedly, she still struggles with that to this day. But whenever she’s with him, with her Steven? It’s as if her universe explodes into a kaleidoscope of dizzying color where everything is so, so beloved and worthwhile. She’s worthwhile.

She can only hope being with her makes him feel the same way.

“I know it’s silly after everything we’ve been though,” she continues in time, still having a few things on her mind she suddenly has an exhilarating need to set free, “but I always kinda worried that people... would belittle me for it, I guess. Especially my parents. That like, there’s some upper limit to the number of unusual things about my life they’ll accept.”

“It’s not that unusual, though,” Steven says with a shrug. “I mean, Ruby and Sapphire are legally married. Sure, the Gems aren’t exactly women, but they do present that way. And then Pearl was in love with Mom, of course. Oh, and Amethyst once told me, and I quote, that ‘like a whip, I swing in every direction.’”

Connie snorts at this, and even he can’t help but laugh.

“Let’s see, what else...” he muses, peering at the ceiling thoughtfully as he continues to list the queer individuals he knows of. “Jenny, Buck, and Sour Cream are all dating each other. Mr. Smiley finally reconnected for real with his old comedy partner, and they’re dating. And my dad may not be seeing anyone but he’s always been openly pansexual.”

“Well, it’s not usual in my family,” she says glumly, nestling her chin into his bed’s comforter as the terrifying possibility of rejection hits her harder than expected. Her glance roams. On the television screen, the episode they were watching had paused automatically, a message asking if they’re still there popping up. Clearly it’s been a while since anyone’s handled the remote. She blinks past tears, shame settling at the pit of her stomach for even daring to cry them when others have gone through so much worse, and you’re lucky, what do you even have to feel lost about, and suddenly she begins to feels shameful just for feeling shame, and what cyclical, bittersweet irony is that, and what’s wrong with her, why can’t she stop obsessing over distant possibilities that likely have zero chances of coming to pass, why can’t she—

Steven breaks through her downward spiral with a gentle hand on her shoulder, rubbing away the physical evidence of her stress. She melts into his touch, forever smitten by this kind of casual intimacy they get to experience together here, alone. It’s innocent, still merely the wandering hands of two teenagers barely beginning to break the boundaries between close friendship and romance, but when words fail she’s discovered that touch can be a language of its own. And right here, right now, she knows he’s talking her down from the mountain of anxiety she’s marooned herself on. He’s leapt effortlessly into the stormy sky and cradled her in his arms, ready to float back to Earth’s surface together.

Outside, the rain continues to slap in rhythmic sheets against the deck. She shivers. Maybe it’s in reaction to the gloomy weather beyond the sliding glass door, maybe it’s despite it. She has no idea.

Steven scoots forward on his belly a bit, and rolls to his side so they can talk face to face without turning their heads. During this, his shirt rides up— ever so slightly— ambient light catching on the lower facets of his gem. The reassurance found in that beautiful, familiar smile of his is dizzying. “Well, at least no matter what happens with your family, you have more than one, huh?“ he says.

“Yeah,” she breathes shakily, eyes glistening with emotion at the metaphorical hand he’s extending with that statement.

Hopefully it’ll never have to come to that, though.

“I do think my parents will be fine with it, if I ever do tell them,” she continues, dabbing the dampness from her eyes. “Especially my mom. She works with queer patients all the time at the hospital, so she’s pretty used to stuff like that. I just... get anxious sometimes.”

“Yeah, I get that. It’s tough dealing with identity stuff.”

She hums, mind immediately harking to the years he spent doubting his own personhood. Seeking any kind of physical connection she can get, she nuzzles her cheek against his forearm, which he’s currently leaning on. They lay there like that in comfortable silence for a good while. Steven, laying on his side, one hand lazily trailing through her wavy hair, and her, curled up close to his heartbeat, hugging his free arm.

“Hey, while we’re on the topic, can I ask you something?” he asks eventually.

She nods. “Anything.”

“How’d you distinguish bi from pan, when you were figuring all this out? I know they’re pretty similar, and my dad tried to explain it a while ago when I asked, but I still don’t exactly get the nuances.”

Connie shifts to sit up, pursing her lips as she considers her words here. She’s done a lot of research into queer identity in her time, checking out books from the school library and looking up stuff online on incognito mode, but there’s probably still a ton of holes in her knowledge. “Hmm, okay... so I’m no sole authority on any of this of course, but to the best of my knowledge bi means you’re attracted to two or more genders, and pan means you’re attracted to people, but like... their gender isn’t really a factor in the way you experience that at all? I‘m pretty sure? There seems to be a lot of overlap. From what I’ve read people just sorta pick whatever feels the best to them.”

“Huh, that makes sense,” Steven says. “So picking labels is kinda like fusion, then! Whenever I fuse, we decide our own name, and it’s sorta... based on a feeling, y’know?”

“Yeah! And like, with Stevonnie... Even though Amethyst kinda inspired the name, they still had to figure out who they were as a person on their own.”

“Exactly! And then, even if two fusions are made of the same gem types, they could still have different names because they’re different people, and that’s what they choose. Anyways, that’s just what this reminded me of,” he says, glancing up at her with a bashful smile. “Honestly... I don’t actually know how I identify.”

The corner of her lips edge upwards. “That’s fine,” she reassures him with a pat, “it took me a while to sort through all this stuff.”

“I really wanna figure it out, have a word for it, but nothing’s clicked yet. For a while I thought I was pansexual like my dad, but that didn’t quite... feel right. Like—“ he too shifts to sit up, folding his feet under his legs as he continues to speak— “I love getting to kiss you, but no offense, I don’t... know if I'll ever want to have- to do anything more than that, y’know?”

She snickers at his inability to simply say the word sex. He’s seventeen now, he knows full well what that is, yet still his faux innocence on the matter remains. It’s one of his charms.

“None taken. Love and attraction is a bizarre, complicated world.”

“You can say that again.”

“Bogus.”

“Whack,” he agrees with a playful grin. Reaching for the remote, he presses play a few times to wake up their streaming site. The episode starts up right where it left off, and they continue to watch together, the air somehow feeling sweeter after her much needed release of emotion.

The satirical medical drama quickly fades into the background, though, as Steven’s hand curls around hers.

“Hey,” he says quietly, blushing. “Even if I don’t know everything about labels yet, I do know one thing for sure.”

She raises a curious brow. “What?”

“I know I love you.”

And before she can open her mouth to respond in kind, he’s kissing her cheek, swooping in like a bandit just like she did for the first time all those months ago, and her heart swells with affection for this boy. He leaves her with one kiss, then two. At the exact moment she turns her head to reciprocate— to sneak a gentle kiss to his cheek right back— he turns as well and she ends up meeting him at the lips. It’s but a quick peck, but she's almost floating. The two of them stifle a laugh as they gaze at each other, their noses almost brushing together.

“Hey, it stopped raining,” he comments then, grinning against her cheek.

She drapes her arms around his shoulders, and hugs him close. Her eyes trail to the glass sliding door. The clouds outside are still thick, but after releasing their load they’re visibly lighter now.

“Yeah,” she breathes, feeling her muscles finally relax as she sinks into her best friend’s embrace. “Yeah, I guess it finally has.”

[lisatelramor]

Truth and Lies

I’ve wanted to write something for FF15 since I started playing the game and reading fic, but hadn’t had any ideas my brain latched onto. So here, finally, is something it deigned to write. @vulcansdarkest, hope you enjoy <3 (It’s not detective!Ignis, but it is Ignis-centric ^_^ ) To everyone in quarantine or living their lives, hope you can keep safe! 

***

“I’m bored,” Noctis groaned, flat on his back in the tent. It was raining outside as it had been all evening. Ordinarily, this would mean a round of King’s Knight, but their phones were on the last dregs of battery life after days of hiking in the wilderness. Their second-best option would have been a card game, but a mishap during one of Noctis’s fishing marathons had taken away that option.

“Read a book,” Gladio said, tossing one of his paperbacks at Noctis’s head.

“Ow! Not all of us are into whatever historical epic-romantic whatever you’re reading at the moment,” Noctis grumbled tossing the book into the Armiger.

Ignis was about to suggest Noctis help go over their inventory and funds if he had such a dire need to keep himself engaged when Prompto sat bolt upright with a wide grin.

“Ooh, I got an idea!” He pulled something out of the Armiger and set it on the tent floor with a soft thump. “Ta-dah! We could play a drinking game!”

“Prompto,” Ignis said looking over the bottle of high proof vodka he’d pulled out. “Where did you get the funds for that?”

“Psh, I didn’t raid our budget, Iggy,” Prompto said with a wave of his hand. “I sold off some bits and bobs I collected a while back. Sometimes you can find neat stuff near all those fishing spots. I figured it might be nice to relax and have a drink once in a while.”

“I’m not sure we can really afford a night of drunken revelry,” Ignis said, though it was tempting. They’d been working hard lately, pulling hunt after hunt to gather up a better buffer of money. And when they weren’t doing that, they were looking for any hint of a royal tomb around them. It was wearing them ragged even when they weren’t roughing it camping for over a week straight.

“Please?” Prompto asked with the puppy eyes that were far more effective on all of them than they would ever admit to Prompto lest he abuse them. “It doesn’t have to be drunk-drunk, just like, a few shots?”

Gladio examined the bottle. “Vodka’s crap, but you got a less shitty brand so, sure, sign me up. Noct?”

“Sounds better than staring at the tent ceiling,” Noctis said.

Outnumbered three to one, Ignis sighed. “Very well, but we’re not drinking straight vodka.” He had a can or two of fruit juice in the Armiger to water it down with.

“Yes!” Prompto did a little seated dance. “Ok, what’re we playing? Never have I ever? Buzz? Most likely?”

“Dude do you just have a list of drinking games you want to play?” Noctis asked.

“Uh, maybe if you’d have come to one of the parties in school you’d recognize them.”

“Yeah, that was never going to happen back then and you know it.”

Prompto pouted and Ignis and Gladio exchanged an amused look. Ignis pulled out juice and a carafe and started mixing the alcohol. “Well it’s not like we can do the games with other props,” Prompto said after a moment. “No cards. No cups and balls for beer pong. Not drunk enough for the games like Thump.”

“I can’t even remotely imagine what any of those games are with names like that,” Noctis said with a yawn. “Hey Ignis, what game do you think?”

“Well, considering there’s only four of us and we don’t have props, games like never have I ever are probably the better choice. Although given how many shared experiences we have here…” Everyone grimaced. Between growing up together in the citadel to running around all of Lucis on this trip, Prompto would likely get them all drunk very fast on the sheer principle that he had more unique personal experiences that the rest of them lacked. But a game that involved talking was more or less a given. “How about… two truths and a lie?”

“Not truth or dare?” Prompto asked.

Ignis gave him a look. “With everyone’s competitive streak and magic to fuel drunken shenanigans, I think not introducing the possibility of wild dares is the best option.”

“Ok, yeah, fair enough.”

Ignis still remembered a memorable occasion where Noctis got stuck on a roof when he was still new to warping thanks to one of Gladio’s dares. They were not going that route. “Besides, two truths and a lie will be a good test to see how well we actually know each other.”

Prompto sighed. “Dude, you guys all grew up together. Kinda rigged.”

“And yet we have very little knowledge of your life,” Ignis countered. “So if any of us has an advantage, it’s Noctis for knowing all of us.”

“Ooh, good point. Guess it works in the name of bonding.” Prompto grinned. “Gonna know you guys better than I know myself at the end of this trip.”

“Quite.” This hadn’t been what any of them expected when they left but leave it to Prompto to find a glimmer of brightness in the mess. “Here’s how we’ll play: we each have a cup, no more than two helpings of the drink to work with, and will take turns telling various facts and lies while the next person in the circle guesses which was the truth or lie. If they guess wrong, they take a drink, if they guess right, the person whose turn it was takes a drink. When you run out of alcohol, you’re out of the game. Does this seem fair?”

“Geeze, Iggy, that’s a lot of rules for a drinking game,” Prompto says. “But sure, sounds great, gimme the booze!”

Ignis rolled his eyes and handed around glasses of vodka mixture.

Gladio sniffed it. “Smells more like juice than vodka.”

“The point is not to have a debilitating hangover tomorrow,” Ignis said drily.

“Ok, but those two are lightweights and I have an iron liver.”

Ignis rolled his eyes again and added a shot to Gladio’s cup. “Is that satisfactory?”

Gladio grinned. “Yeah, that’s a bit more like it. Now who goes first?”

“Specs,” Noctis said, sniffing his own cup with a wrinkle of his nose. “Since you chose the game.”

“Very well.” Ignis sat in their loose circle. Two truths and a lie… “I speak six languages, I stabbed a man when I was five, and I can do a backflip in heels.” He looked pointedly to his left at Prompto.

“Damn, starting things out on hard mode,” Prompto said with a grimace. “Uh… The flip in heels is the lie?”

Ignis smirked.

“Aw man.” Prompto took a drink. He at least didn’t seem to dislike the taste. “Wait, you can do a flip in high heels?” A beat. “You’ve worn high heels?”

Ignis kept smirking.

“Iggy!” Prompto groaned. “What was the lie?”

“He only speaks three languages,” Gladio said. “He can read six. I don’t remember you stabbing anyone when you were five though.”

“It was an accident learning how to use daggers.” Ignis’s lips tilted into a real smile. “I never said I stabbed someone purposefully.”

“None of you are surprised by the heels?” Prompto asked.

Noctis and Gladio exchange a look. “A bet,” they said in unison. “Though only Ignis would take it as a challenge to master movement in high heels in general,” Noctis added.

“One never knows if that skill might be useful,” Ignis said. He wasn’t exactly going to admit that he’d liked how they’d accentuated his legs.

“The more ya know,” Prompto said. “Okay. My turn! Uh, lesse…” He tapped his cup absently. “My first kiss was with Jessia from eighth grade, I love cucumbers, and I have a whole USB filled with nothing but dog pictures.”

Noctis pointed at Prompto. “The first kiss is the lie.”

“Bzzzt,” Prompto said.

“What? You’d have told me if you’d had your first kiss!”

“Dude, I had it before we were friends. Also, like, it went horribly and she never talked to me again so I don’t really bring it up much.”

“Wait, so either you don’t have a USB of dog photos—which you totally do—or you secretly hate cucumbers? I thought you liked vegetables.”

“I eat healthy cuz it’s healthy not cuz I like all of it,” Prompto said. “You should try it.”

“Pass.”

Ignis made a mental note to avoid giving Prompto anything with cucumber in the future. “Drink up, Noct,” Ignis said when Noctis kept giving Prompto a look like he’d just destroyed one of the pillars of his understanding.

Noctis rolled his eyes and took a swig. “Whatever. Ok, Gladio. My favorite character in King’s Knight is Toby, I once pet a cat that had ten toes on each paw, and I caught a two-headed fish one time.”

Gladio raised an eyebrow. “That’s not even hard. You’d have talked our ears off if you caught a two-headed fish.”

“Eh, fair enough.” Noctis took another swallow of his drink.

“You just want to get drunk, don’t you?” Gladio said, amused. “My turn. I can bench a hundred and twenty kilos, on one of my camping trips I hiked forty kilometers in one day, and I once ate eight cup noodles in one sitting.”

Ignis hummed, turning the numbers over in his head.

“You know,” Prompto said, “I honestly would believe all of those actually happened. You’re not normal.”

Gladio snorted. “Thanks for the backhanded compliment.”

“You’re welcome.”

“The hiking one is a lie,” Ignis said after a moment. “I know your average bench press numbers and I remember you trying to prove something stupid with how many cup noodles you could eat in one sitting—and definitely remember you throwing them back up.”

“Worth it.”

“So the hiking distance has to be the lie.”

“You would logic it out,” Gladio said, snickering. “Yeah, you win.” He took a drink. “Your turn again Iggy.”

“Wait wait wait,” Prompto said. “I’m not going to have to guess Ignis every time am I? He’s like, way too good at deadpan for that.”

“Hmm, you have a point,” Ignis said. “Noctis and I can swap positions this next round and then you can swap with Gladio and by alternating like that we can keep things fair.”

“You’re making this way too complicated,” Noctis said, but he obligingly swapped places in the circle with Ignis.

“It makes things more interesting,” Ignis countered with a sharp grin. He had every intention of playing this game to win—by which he meant he intended to stay as sober as possible while watching his friends fall into drunken antics.

“Whatever, just get on with it,” Noctis said with a sigh.

Ignis glanced at Gladio. Gladio was privy to far more of Ignis’s private life than perhaps anyone in part because while he couldn’t always talk to Noctis—because friend or not, there were still the occasional professional boundary lines—Gladio was someone who shared a responsibility in caring for Noct and as such someone who could commiserate over some of the worse aspects of their prince’s personality. Still, he didn’t know everything about Ignis’s life. “My favorite knives are a gift from my uncle, I’ve always loved the taste of Ebony…” He pretended to put an extra second of thought into this, like he was hesitating over a lie. “One of my earliest memories is of reading a book.”

He could see Gladio labeling the knife fact as truth; Ignis hadn’t been subtle about his preferred weapon choice in combat and the topic had come up before. But Ignis was also banking on Gladio’s association of Ignis and Ebony; he’d been drinking some form of coffee since his early teenage years, and for as long as he and Gladio had any significant interaction.

“As hilarious as the idea of baby-Iggy reading is, I’m calling that out as a lie,” he said after a moment.

Ignis smiled triumphantly. “While not my earliest memory, I was reading full sentences by the age of three, so yes, it is one of my earliest memories. I actually detested Ebony the first time I tasted it and poured the can down the drain. It was only the lure of caffeine that ever got me to pick up another can.”

“No kidding.” Gladio didn’t look the least upset by guessing wrong, but he was probably happy enough to be ingesting some alcohol. “Sometimes I think you pretty much run on the stuff like the Regalia does gasoline.”

Ignis snorted. “It’s not an inaccurate assumption.” Thank goodness for caffeine for his overworked, frequently sleep deprived body.

Gladio took a larger-than-necessary swallow from his cup. “Right. So. I ran away from home when I was six, I tried to give Iris away when she was first born because she kept crying, and I can’t float when I swim.”

Noctis frowned. “I’m pretty sure everyone can float. That’s swimming 101.”

“Take a drink because I can’t.” Gladio grinned, then grimaced. “It’s actually a downside to muscle. It’s dense as hell and sinks more than my lung capacity can make me float. I can swim just fine, but it’s kind of hell trying to tread water for long.”

“Huh. You learn something every day,” Noctis said taking a drink.

“Did you really try to give Iris away?” Prompto asked. “Because I can’t see it.”

“No. I mean I was tempted because she was the worst, colicky baby ever but I was old enough that I wasn’t that impulsive.” Gladio picked at the edge of his cup. “Now if I was a couple years younger at the time…”

“I remember hearing your dad complaining to my dad,” Noctis said. “She was only quiet when she was asleep and even then that was almost never the first month.”

“Yeah, I feel so lucky she grew out of that.”

“Noctis’s turn!” Prompto chirped. “Go easy on me, buddy.”

“You wish,” Noctis said, sticking his tongue out at him. “Okay. I’ve killed every plant I’ve tried to grow, I broke three priceless vases as a kid and told no one, and I set Iggy’s first boyfriend on fire once.”

“Noctis Lucis Caelum!” Ignis said, scandalized and more than a little annoyed. “That was you?!” Ignis had been dumped very soon after that incident.

“That guy was a jerk,” Noctis said.

“I could have dumped him myself instead of the indignity of it being the other way around!”

“Uh,” said Prompto. “I’m guessing that’s not the lie.”

Ignis huffed, and Noctis waited.

“Plants are the lie?” Prompto said tentatively trying to steer things back toward the game.

“Nope. Actually it was Gladio that set the guy on fire.”

“Way to throw a man under a bus, Noct,” Gladio grumbled. He held up his hands when Ignis turned his glare on him. “Hey, he’s right. The guy was a dick.”

“Gladiolus!”

Gladio leaned a bit away from Ignis, a sheepish grin on his face. “I mean, no one got permanently injured.”

“Which of you ran off my next boyfriend, then?” Ignis demanded. Neither of them met his eyes.

“Uh,” Prompto said again into the tense silence. “So… Iggy, you like dudes?”

And Ignis had the horrifying realization that Prompto didn’t know.

“Oh shit,” Noctis said. “Uh, sorry Specs…”

“It’s fine,” Ignis said, hoping that it actually was fine and this revelation hadn’t just made their current close-quarters living arrangements strained. He’d forgotten for a moment, too comfortable with Noctis and Gladio being in the know, that not all of his friends actually had the knowledge that he was more interested in men than women.

“No, hey!” Prompto waved his hands frantically. “It’s cool, I’m fine with it, shit, I wasn’t trying to make things weird!”

“Prompto…” Ignis took a breath. “If this is—”

“My turn next,” Prompto blurted over him and Ignis frowned, trying to cut in only to have Prompto keep talking over him. “I’ve only kissed girls,” he said, which stung a bit considering what was just revealed, “I’m bi,” oh, “and I’ve never, uh, never had a crush on anyone here,” Prompto finished, his confidence draining into nerves. There was a faint blush on his face.

“Prompto,” Ignis said softly, “you didn’t have to do that.”

“What, continue the game?” he said with a forced smile. “Uh yeah I did, we still have booze so…” His gaze pleaded for Ignis to play along.

And Ignis couldn’t refuse considering his friend had chosen to out himself just to make Ignis feel less uncomfortable. “I take it the last one wasn’t a lie,” he said gently.

“You got me there.” Prompto took a large swallow of his drink. His cheeks were pink and he couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

“Shit,” Noctis mumbled. “…I wasn’t trying to make this real, I just wanted to tease Ignis.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Full disclosure, you’re not the only one who’s had a crush on someone here, Prom.”

Prompto’s jaw dropped. “Wait, is Gladio the only one here that’s straight?”

Gladio snorted. “I mean I’m mostly straight,” Gladio said. “But if we were playing a game of never-have-I-ever, the only one of us who wouldn’t drink to having a crush on Ignis is Ignis.”

Ignis went bright red.

“There was more than one reason we didn’t think your boyfriends were good enough,” Gladio said with a snort of laughter.

“…Did either of you approve of any of them?”

“Uh, the one Glaive was okay but…”

Noctis finished for him, “You weren’t into him half as much as he was into you.”

Ignis pinched the bridge of his nose. He was going to have to reevaluate so many previous interactions with a new perspective.

“Wait, Prompto, is that why you keep taking ass shots of Gladio?” Noctis asked.

Prompto sputtered. “I do not take ass shots! Of anyone!”

Gladio laughed. “Uh, hate to break it to you but you kind of do. Don’t worry, I don’t mind.”

“You take ass pics of Gladio, Ignis whenever he’s doing acrobatics, and usually half of what you take of me is mid-warp.”

“That’s just because you’re always warping, Noct,” Prompto said, settling into an embarrassed pout. “And Iggy’s usually doing backflips or setting something on fire like a boss so…” His shoulders hunched. “Also Gladio’s always rushing in so of course I get pictures from behind in battle.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Noctis said with a shit eating grin.

“Well,” Ignis said, feeling vaguely uncomfortable and ready to finish the game, “I think we’ve learned enough about each other for one night.”

“No, no,” Gladio said. “Prompto’s right. We still have booze. Also you and Noct haven’t interacted yet and I haven’t traded lies with Prompto.” He swished his cup around. “Besides, we’re still bored. Scared you’ll get embarrassed more?” he teased.

Ignis rolled his eyes. “Not at all.” It was just that if things continued along the current lines of affairs things could get complicated in ways that their trip didn’t allow for. From the way Gladio gave him a teasing eyebrow wiggle, he was thinking along the same lines without considering the fallout. He sighed. Ignis was not going to let things run in even more flirtatious directions thank you very much. “Noct.” Coming up with something for Noctis was about as hard as Gladio. On the one hand, Noctis could be unobservant. On the other, when he did use his powers of observation, they were uncannily accurate and stuck in his memory. “I choose to keep my accent,” he said after a moment of thought, “I had tutors before I was chosen to train to be your chamberlain, and I hated cooking when I first started learning.”

Noctis frowned. “I could see you keeping the accent because you like it and it reminds you of home. I know nothing of your life before you came to the Citadel more or less, and knowing you you’re probably banking on that. So, weird as it is to think of you hating cooking, I’m calling the second one a lie.”

Ignis smiled ruefully. It figured that he’d apply logic to it. “You’re correct.” He took a swallow of his drink and was pleased at its flavor, the alcohol a faint aftertaste on his tongue.

“If you didn’t like cooking, why’d you stick with it?” Prompto asked.

“Because it’s a useful skill,” Ignis said. “Knowing it is an important life skill as well as useful for caring for others; it was non-negotiable to learn. It just took a bit of a learning curve to get good enough at it that it wasn’t troublesome. Once I started looking at it as a puzzle made of ingredients it was a lot more enjoyable.”

“You know, you’re allowed to like or dislike something based on other things than usefulness,” Noctis said with a slight edge to his voice like he was somewhere along the lines of sad and exasperated.

Ignis, of course, knew that. But when growing up with a large job to fill, there had never been much room for non-useful things. Even his hobbies were chosen to be practical. “I can also enjoy things that also happen to be practical,” he pointed out. He liked languages. And while he couldn’t say he liked cleaning, it gave him a sense of satisfaction. Cooking was similar. These days it was one part puzzle, one part challenge, and the satisfaction of an end result. Baking on the other hand… “I do enjoy baking though.”

“Oh?” Noctis said.

Ignis smiled. He’d started because he’d hoped to make Noctis smile. And every time Noct ate one of his desserts and looked a bit happier, it had made Ignis happy. “I’d have to to make the same dessert over and over with slight changes for years.”

“Wow, that almost sounds like you’re accusing me of something,” Noctis joked.

“Accuse? Never,” Ignis said, grinning back. “I am surprised you never got sick of me trying though.”

“They were good,” Noctis said. “Even the worst of the failures. And they were…”

“They were?”

Noctis looked faintly embarrassed. “They were part of how you showed you cared so… it meant a lot.”

More than the cleaning and cooking or giving condensed reports ever did if Noctis’s embarrassment meant anything.

“And this is getting weirdly emotional,” Gladio cut in. “I know Noct drank a bit, but you only took a sip.”

Ignis rolled his eyes. “It’s reminiscing and nostalgia, Gladio.”

“Uh huh. Sure.” Gladio gave him a look that had Ignis blushing slight enough that hopefully no one would notice. “Anyway, Noct, either you go or I’m going next.”

“Fine.” Noctis drummed his fingers for a moment. “I like traveling and helping people out. I don’t like how crowded we are. I sometimes wish that things could always be this simple.”

Ignis had the strong desire to give Noctis a hug, like he’d done when they were children. There was vulnerability and defensiveness warring under his attempted nonchalance and if they still had the sort of uncomplicated relationship that children had, he’d already have Noctis in an embrace. But they were adults and Noct might accept side hugs and slaps on the shoulder from Prompto and Gladio, there had been a wall of propriety between him and Ignis for a while. A wall that he should really start to take down. Propriety was pointless when there wasn’t anyone left who would care.

“The second one is a lie,” Ignis said softly.

Noctis smiled, lopsided. “Yeah.” He took a drink.

“Aw, we like crowding you too,” Prompto said, nudging Noctis with an elbow. “I mean, sometimes a little privacy would be nice, but honestly you can’t feel lonely like this and that’s been good.”

Left to their own devices they weren’t the sorts to spend every waking moment with another person, but they had been spending more or less that for months now. Ignis, if asked before their trip started, would have thought that they’d have gotten on their last nerve at some point or another, but they hadn’t. There was quiet, introspective time on car rides, or brief moments at havens to break away from the group and have a private moment, but surprisingly they hadn’t needed more than that so far. It was almost nice if Ignis didn’t think about the circumstances. And for Noctis who had never really had enough time to spend with friends with his busy life… Well, Ignis, having a busy life of his own, could more than understand why the lifestyle they’d been living appealed.

“We can’t forget our purpose though,” Gladio pointed out.

“Dude,” Prompto said, “I don’t think any of us could no matter how many fetch quests people send us on.”

“I’m just saying,” Gladio grumbled.

“And I’m just saying that tonight’s time to not think about the things that are always looming over us,” Prompto said, pushing back more than he normally would. “Please? Like we’re all strung out, that’s why we gotta relax and recharge sometimes or we’ll just burn out.”

Gladio rubbed a hand down his face and took a drink even though it wasn’t part of the game. “Yeah.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Noctis added in a quiet voice. “I promise.”

“We’re really missing the point to this game,” Prompto said with a sigh. “Getting too real, guys. On that note, Gladio—Two truths and a lie. I’ve always wanted a pet, I bought my first camera with allowance money, and I am naturally a morning person.”

Gladio took a second to switch gears but when he did he relaxed in a very deliberate looking manner. “Well considering how you go on about chocobos, I wouldn’t be surprised if you always wanted one as a pet. And how you’re friends with Sleeping Beauty over there, it’s a mystery because you don’t need coffee in the morning like Ignis and you don’t sleep in like Noct. So, how’d you actually get your first camera?”

“I bought it with money from a part time job,” Prompto said after taking a drink. “Technically I had a phone camera before, but I was kind of frustrated at the limitations and after taking a photography class… Yeah, I was hooked.” He smiled. “So I saved up and bought this beauty,” Prompto said patting his camera. “It’s not like high end, but with multiple lenses and filters and a hella good zoom, it’s a pretty dang good first camera, you know?”

“I commend your work ethic,” Ignis said, though Prompto’s work ethic had always been good, even if he and Noctis were enablers in indulging in their gaming interests at the expense of other tasks at times. Prompto had gotten decent grades his whole life, and worked from no prior combat knowledge to full-fledged Crownsguard, pulling his own weight on this trip purely because he cared for Noctis. It wasn’t really surprising that he’d seen the goal of a nice camera and put the effort into getting it.

“Thanks, Iggy,” Prompto said with a pleased grin.

“Now if only Noct had a bit more of that,” Gladio joked.

“Of all of us, I think Prompto and I have the best work-life balance,” Noctis shot back.

“Besides,” Ignis added, “Noctis is hardworking. Unfortunately he just has a tendency to drop less pressing tasks in favor of immediate ones.”

“Is this about not sewing the button back on my shirt? Because I’m going to sew the button back on my shirt.”

“I’ve actually been impressed by how much help you’ve been with tasks like dishes and laundry,” Ignis said, a bit mean to do, but it was a sore point between them. Then again, Noctis was more likely to drop what he was doing and help than Gladio. Prompto was fine if given directions at least. Goodness knew Ignis couldn’t run every minutia of their lives no matter how much he wanted to.

Noctis groaned. “You’re never going to let high school go are you?”

Ignis smiled. “If it was only high school, I would.”

“He’s got you there, dude,” Prompto said. “You’re kind of a trash master when you get distracted.”

Distracted being anything from work, to a gaming binge, to one of Noctis’s occasional depressive episodes. Ignis was sympathetic to the latter and exasperated by the former.

“It’s Gladio’s turn,” Noctis said pointedly turning the conversation away from himself.

“Fine,” he sighed. “I am a dog person, I kill houseplants no matter how I try to keep them alive, and I kind of wish I’d gone to college.”

Prompto squinted at him. “This is the sort of thing I was worried about playing this. I have no idea which of those is a lie.”

“Guess,” Gladio said unhelpfully.

“Plants?” Prompto asked more than stated.

“Bzzt. I’m not a dog person. They’re cute and all but they’re high maintenance compared to cats.”

“Harsh, dogs are great,” Prompto said taking a drink. “They’re loyal and hard working. Don’t get me wrong, cats are adorable, but they’d abandon you for a sardine.”

“Lies and slander,” Noctis said.

“Dude, they’re super picky and you fall for their begging every time.”

“You feed every dog that looks your direction,” Noctis countered.

“Uh, no, we’ve seen like three dogs and one of those is Dave’s. You’re the one busting out super expensive cat food. Anyway, we can all agree chocobos are best.”

Noctis laughed. “I think it’s just you there.”

“Nah, chocobos are more useful and better fighters than either of them,” Gladio said, “so they win in my book too.”

“Why didn’t you attend university?” Ignis asked.

“You think I’d have had the time? I don’t know how you did it, honestly. I had my plate full learning everything I needed to protect Noct.”

Ignis could see a small, guilty twitch from Noctis. Ignis’s own university years had been…hmm, eventful. And the largest reason for his caffeine addiction. “Out of curiosity, what would you have studied?”

Gladio shrugged. “I dunno. I like history, and some of the stuff I’ve talked with Sania about’s pretty cool.”

“Oh yeah, you are friends with her aren’t you?” Prompto said. “Are frogs really that exciting?”

“Okay, the frogs are just one of the things she studies,” Gladio said. “Her greater research is on wildlife in general and you’d know that if you listened to what she said when we help her that she’s been looking into the change in daylight and the increase in scourge infected wildlife—”

“Holy shit have you been hiding a nerdy side this whole time?” Prompto said with the expression of a man who’d just witnessed something life changing. “Gladio, are you a science nerd under all that muscle?”

Gladio frowned. “Could you not say it like that? Also, I haven’t been hiding anything. I already know a lot about physiology from training, and nature is a thing I clearly enjoy as you guys love to complain about how I like camping. At least one of the books I’ve read on this trip was Sania’s research.”

“Well shit, man.” Prompto downed the rest of his drink. “The more you know. I think we all learned something today.” He blinked. “I should not have drank that all at once.”

Noctis laughed. “So we’re all on board to just drink now, huh?” He took a pointed swallow of his drink. “Might as well.”

“Really?” Ignis sighed.

“Eh, let ‘em,” Gladio said, taking a drink from his own cup. “As you guys keep saying, we’re trying to relax. Besides we were getting nowhere fast with the game.”

“That’s the point,” Ignis said. “To not get drunk.”

“They can’t get that drunk,” Gladio pointed out. “You made sure of it.”

Ignis pursed his lips, but Noctis and Prompto were elbowing each other and laughing and no one was going to end up so inebriated they were hung over the next day. It was almost like back in Insomnia…

Gladio slung an arm around him. “Don’t think too hard.”

“I am trying not to but…” They hadn’t really given themselves any proper time to grieve had they? One moment they were watching Insomnia burn and the next they were throwing themselves into seeking out royal arms and helping random strangers and going on hunts with barely any time to breathe because if they relaxed too much it might all fall apart. Ignis was used to setting how he felt aside, and so were the rest of them, but that didn’t necessarily make it healthy. Noctis and Prompto could laugh like this, so they would be okay. But sometimes Ignis wondered if he would be. That if he ever stopped he’d pull himself back together again.

“Drink if you think it’ll help,” Gladio said softly under the shriek of Noctis engaging Prompto to an impromptu tickling fight. “If you think it’ll be worse, leave it. Be in the moment, not the past.”

“I know that,” Ignis said. “I have been.” But the game had been about the past. On automatic, he saved the alcohol from getting spilled all over the tent floor as the tickle fight got wilder. Gladio gave his shoulder a squeeze.

“How about we team up against them, hmm?” Gladio offered.

Ignis pushed the mess of feelings back to deal with another day and managed a smile that almost reached his usual standards. “Would that be fair?”

“Anything’s fair in a tickling fight,” Gladio said. “Noct or Prompto first?”

“Noctis; Prompto is easier to subdue.”

“I’ll get his arms.”

“And I’ll handle his feet.”

Noctis and Prompto jumped when they entered the fight and Noctis yelped as Gladio caught him and Ignis exploited his weak points until he was gasping. Prompto laughed at his misfortune. At least until Ignis and Gladio shared a glance and turned to him, leaving Noctis to recover.

Later, much later, after more alcohol and Gladio ultimately emerging the victor of the tickle fight—he was only ticklish on his neck and that was hard to reach even when he wasn’t guarding it—they collapsed into a comfortable pile of bodies, curled up around each other, propriety and personal space be damned. They needed this, Ignis thought hazily on the edge of sleep. The laughter. The contact. The reassurance that they were still friends and close even after—or perhaps because of—everything that had happened.

“I haven’t done something like this in ages,” Gladio said, breaking the silence. “Not since… Hell, I don’t know. When I was a teenager?”

“Same,” Noctis said.

“Do our elbow fights over racing games not count?” Prompto asked. “Because we did that less than a year ago.”

“Yeah, but that’s… different,” Noctis muttered. “For one, Ignis joined in this time.” He lifted himself on one elbow long enough to fake-scowl in Ignis’s direction. “You’re brutal, by the way.”

Ignis laughed and had to stifle it on the nearest surface, which happened to be Noct’s thigh. When the laughter ran out though, he felt a bit drained, happy and sad at the same time. “I don’t think I’ve let go quite this much before.”

“Eighteenth birthday?” Gladio countered.

“Mm, but not everyone here was present for that.” And it hadn’t ended in a cuddle-pile on the ground. This was much better and would hopefully have less hangover-induced nausea the next morning.

“Well we’re all here now,” Noctis said, and like that was all that needed to be said, they went quiet, just the soft sounds of breathing and the occasional shift of limbs as they got comfortable.

Ignis ended up with Prompto’s head on his stomach and his own in Noctis’s lap. Gladio was both Noctis’s pillow and a heat source in how he managed to curl around Noctis and half of Prompto in the process. They were all going to wake up with limbs asleep and cricks in their necks, but for the moment it was all terribly comfortable.

Ignis drifted, letting the familiar sounds of his friends existing lure him toward sleep.

He was almost there when Prompto shifted against his chest.

“Ignis?” Prompto whispered, easily heard above the whistle-y start of Gladio’s snores and Noctis’s softer breathing.

“Mm?” When Prompto was silent, Ignis let a hand curl against his back, reassuring.

Prompto breathed out, relaxing minutely. “Do you think we’ll do this again someday?”

Ignis hummed. They didn’t have much downtime, though playing games happened when they did, but he knew that wasn’t what Prompto meant. They’d all shared parts of themselves tonight and boundaries had been crossed in other ways too, or they wouldn’t be curled up like this. But would it last beyond the morning?

Altissia loomed in their future and Ignis, for all that he would be glad to reach the city safely, equally dreaded it. It was one more step along some pre-destined path Noctis had laid out for him that only seemed to grow more burdensome the more Ignis let himself dissect what little he knew about Noct’s fate.

No, Ignis didn’t think that they would do this again. Not with this level of uncomplicated friendship, with their burdens as easily set aside. Those burdens only grew as days trickled by.

But he knew that wasn’t what Prompto needed to hear though, so for the moment he pulled on comforting hopes instead of his more realistic fears.

“We will,” he said, making himself sound sure.

“Promise?” Prompto asked.

He was so young, all of them were, but Ignis felt it in this fragile moment. All the more so because Prompto didn’t come from a life where things were predetermined. He’d forged his own path here, and perhaps that made him the most driven out of all of them. But because of that, he didn’t hold the same assurances. He didn’t see that he’d forged his own bonds here or that they were just as strong—if not more—as anything Ignis or Gladio shared with Noctis. Or with each other truly.

They were all friends and more than by this point. Comrades. A family of a sort, the last that each other had.

Ignis wanted to protect that with all his heart.

“I promise,” he said gently.

“Double promise,” Noctis slurred, patting randomly in Prompto’s direction. “Now go t’sleep.”

Prompto stifled a giggle. “Back at you, dude.” Noctis, apparently, fell truly asleep at that. Or perhaps he was already asleep and in one of his odd, in-between lucid moments.

“You’re one of us,” Ignis murmured, “and we’re going to stick together.”

“I’m holding you to that,” Prompto said, getting comfortable again.

As Ignis relaxed again, letting sleep pull him under, his last thought was how lucky they were to still have so much in each other.

[hocats-blog]

7 Lord of the Rings Fan Theories to Rule Them All

As you probably remember, Gollum wasn't always Gollum. For a time he was Smeagol, a Hobbit quickly corrupted by the power of the One Ring. It was his "precious" that afforded him an extraordinarily long life, and warped him into the scrappy half-naked mangoblin that becomes the bane of Frodo and Sam. Though he's been Gollum far longer than he was Smeagol, at times there seems to be a war of identities going on within the sad creature. We assume that the centuries he's spent under the ring's influence has created this rift within the character, but that might not be the case at all. One intriguing fan theory claims that Gollum is actually a personality inside the ring, an entity that can possess anyone. The identity isn't unique to Smeagol, meaning that if someone like Aragorn held it long enough, he'd turn into a pasty diaper-wearing wretch just the same as you would. Think about those we know who have held the ring for an extended period of time. Right off the bat, there's Bilbo Baggins. He seemed relatively chill about the ring and managed to hold onto it for years without going nanners, but we definitely saw some cracks forming in his psyche when Gandalf came to town. Bilbo was less than thrilled about having his "precious" taken away. That, right there -- Bilbo unconsciously "gollum'd." That's the "Gollum personality" breaking through, its infection spreading within Bilbo. The possession gets a bit more overt later on during a conversation with Frodo, at which point Bilbo's face makes a hellish transformation. Looks a lot like Gollum, doesn't it? Bilbo doesn't just call the ring his "precious" just because he heard Gollum say that -- that's actually Gollum talking through Bilbo. For more proof, we have to look no further than Isildur. Remember Isildur is the one who lopped Sauron's fingers off and took the ring? Isildur is also the same shitbrick who, given the chance, didn't toss the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Instead, he wore it around his neck, which is more or less the Middle-earth equivalent of treating a nuclear warhead like a piece of bling. The corrosive power eventually killed Isildur, but not before he wrote about the ring in a series of creepy journals. Gandalf discovered these writings, and found one particularly disturbing passage. Could it really be a coincidence that a dude who lived thousands of years before Smeagol would used the same word to describe the One Ring? Probably not. It seems a lot more likely that Gollum is a personality inside the ring that infects its host and possesses them to protect the ring and do Sauron's bidding. If Isildur's hubris hadn't ended him, it may well have been his wispy form that Bilbo came across on his initial adventure in The Hobbit. Now, the name "Gollum" is merely the name given to Smeagol after his neighors kept seeing him hacking up a lung every day, so it's probably not the actual title of the deity inside the ring. But the name "Gollum" has significance, in that it's pretty close to "golem," the mythological creature which is made of inanimate materials, but given life from an outside force. It's a compelling theory not because it dramatically changes the story, but because it gives you a new perspective on what the ringbearers must have been going through. That, and it's fun imagining a crazed Viggo Mortensen wearing a diaper.

This is a stupid idea. No one's going to actually come out and say that J.R.R. Tolkien created Albus Dumbledore and the world of Harry Potter. But it's a testament to the strength of fan theories that some beautiful bastard could come up with a convincing explanation that links Hogwarts and Middle-earth. It all relies on the fact that there are five Istari -- better known as "wizards" to people who have seen the sun in the last two weeks -- in the realm of this fiction. You probably already know three of them: Gandalf the Grey, Saruman the White and Radagast "That Forest Hippie Who Refuses to Clean the Birdshit Out of His Beard" the Brown. The missing pieces of this magical grandpa pie are the two "Blue Wizards," which Tolkien glossed over briefly but never really followed up on. Last we heard, they were sent into Mordor to quell the threat of Sauron. They weren't seen again, but there's also no explicit mention of their deaths. The two blue wizards could be anyone, which is why it's entirely possible that they are in fact Albus Dumbledore and his nemesis/boytoy Gellen Grindelwald. All it would take is a temporal or multidimensional mishap, and they'd be in the modern world of muggles. How they got to Earth from Middle-earth isn't as important as the thematical connections. Dumbledore says that "It is important to fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then can evil be kept at bay, though never quite eradicated." Meaning that he wasn't going to give up once Sauron was down for the count. Though Grindelwald fell to the "dark side" like Saruman before him, Dumbledore kept up the fight and was eventually upgraded from "Dumbledore the Blue" to "Dumbledore the White." It fits, especially because in Latin, "Albus" literally translates to "white." It makes sense that Dumbledore took the job at Hogwarts, as that was the place he could best mount his defense of the world. Once there, he builds an army of wizards to do just that. And yet, he still remembers where he came from, which explains why there's a portrait of Gandalf the Grey hanging in Dumbledore's office. Dumbledore had already assembled his wizard defense force, so he passed off into the undying lands in the most fantastical way possible. The entire theory sheds new light on Dumbledore's words: "Ah, music. A magic far beyond all we do here!" As it so happens, the world of Middle-earth was created via song by the Illuvatar. Did J.K. Rowling write Dumbledore with Tolkien's lost wizards in mind? It's not impossible, but it's probably unlikely. It doesn't matter, because veracity isn't the point of this fan theory. The real strength of this tangled yarn is just how creative it is in weaving two disparate but similar fictions together. These two worlds don't exist anyway, so why can't they they exist in the same place?

Though it's not featured in a big way in the films, the books go into a little more detail about the death of Frodo's parents. Drogo and Primula Baggins drowning during a freak boating accident is tragic, but storywise, it gives Frodo less of a reason to be tied down to the Shire. But one fan theory suggests there's a darker undercurrent to this story, that Frodo's parents were in fact murdered. The culprit: Gollum. We all know that creepazoid is capable of murder. It's arguably the first thing Smeagol ever did as Gollum. After the events of the Hobbit, Gollum set about finding the his precious stolen ring. Problem was, Gollum really only had two things to go on when it came to finding the ring: "Baggins" and "Shire." It's not out of the question that he might come across the Brandywine River on his quest, and he would certainly kill any Bagginses he found there. The theory is propped up by the questionable circumstances of the deaths. There seems to be a question among the Hobbits as to just how Frodo's parents passed. Whatever the case, both Drogo and Primula were pretty experienced boaters, so it's more than a little surprising that they would just fall in the water and die. No, it makes more sense that an angry Gollum murdered them straight out, giving up on his mission once he found nothing on their person. The only real damper on this theory is Gandalf, who claims that Gollum never made it to the Brandywine. That would seem to put an end to this theory, but put yourself in Gandalf's old man shoes for a minute. You're talking to Frodo, the guy who is going to lug the world's most dangerous weapon across a continent, and he's pretty fragile as it is. Now imagine if Gandalf decided to tell Frodo that the same guy who guides him through Mordor is the one that deprived him of his parents -- he'd undoubtedly lose himself to rage at some point, and as a result succumb to the power of the ring itself. If Gandalf hadn't pulled off an Obi-Wan-tier lie, our story would be over before it began. To be fair, at least that one ending is preferable to like seventy.

This almost feels like cheating. This "fan theory" is so perfect, fits so well into the mythos of the series that it's basically canon. But that's exactly the reason it can't be ignored. Just after the Fellowship is formed, the angelic Lady Galadriel offers each member of the group a special gift. Legolas got a rad new bow, Pippin and Merry each received sweet daggers, and Boromir was bestowed with a tacky gold belt that did not go with his bracers. The most interesting gift was that given to Gimli, the dwarf. While most others just took what was handed to them, Galadriel actually asked Gimli what he wanted from the elves. After a bit of stammering, Gimli gave in and requested his greatest desire. Others were naturally curious about this mystery gift. Asking for (and actually GETTING) a strand of Galadriel's hair might sound creepy, but it's really a huge deal. To explain why, we have to rewind a few thousand years. Several millennia before the War of the Ring, there was this shitbird named Feanor. Now, Feanor is a grade-A dickweed, but even he can see how lovely Galadriel is. As the legend has it, Feanor too asked for a single strand of Galadriel's hair, but he was denied. Twice more Feanor made the same request, and twice more he was shut down. Dude wasn't worthy of Galadriel's crusty toenail clippings, much less her luscious locks. Flash forward to the Fellowship, and Gimli's wish for a strand of Galadriel's flawless hair is granted threefold. Though Gimli is likely oblivious to the significance of the gesture, Legolas' smile tells us he understands. Up to this point, dwarves and elves had an uneasy relationship, like co-workers that hate each other but stay cool because they have to be in close proximity every day. But Galadriel saw the innate goodness in Gimli, and rewarded him thrice over. You can almost hear Feanor grumbling "It still only counts as one."

[culturevulture73]

What have they done to Star Wars?! Why. Destroy the original characters to prop up a villain, destroy the new characters to prop up a villain, destroy the series for what? A topless scene of kylo? A scene where leia slaps poe? A scene where luke milks a titty monster? A scene where finn’s recovery is played for lols? I wish the sequels never happened.

Hi Anon,

I wish I knew why. I still cannot fathom why they’ve done what they did to the OT gang and now to the new characters. Why the whole movie is warped around Kylo - the whole trilogy. Why they destroyed Luke. Why they broke up Han and Leia and cavalierly, gleefully trash them in the books. Why they never reunited Luke, Han and Leia and just treated them like they were bit players in a third string sitcom. 

Why they took the character who stood for hope, for fighting back, for optimism, love and faith, and turned him into a grumpy cynic - I guess because they so cavalierly killed the other grumpy cynic? Why not bring Han to Luke and let him knock some sense back into the Jedi and then they go help Leia? Wouldn’t that have been a damn fantastic Episode 8? Can you imagine, the fleet facing the First Order and here comes the Falcon, with Han and Chewie flying and Rey and Luke in the guns? An Episode 8 where Finn can start turning the stormtroopers in rebellion? Where Leia is an actual military leader and not slapping her subordinates on the bridge? 

Instead we get nihilism and outright crazy, so much that fans don’t want to see episode 9 - because what the hell would you want to come back? If Rey, Finn and Poe are smart, they’ll run for the hills. Because what have they got to look forward to? All they have to do is look at Luke, Han and Leia and see their horrible ends.

Luke, Han and Leia, the unshakeable trio, ripped up, torn apart, and every one of them died separated from the others. Luke really died absolutely alone. It makes me heartsick.

Sorry, I’m with you!

Thanks, Anon

[my-dear-hammy]

Falling Through Time: Book 2

Masterpost

Jamilton Series Masterpost

Basking in Firelight

Part Forty

Forgotten Dreams and Nightmares

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Warnings: Drinking, bit of self harm, anger issues, depression,

----

Jefferson woke to an empty bed and the ghost feeling of warm arms wrapped around him. Then they were gone. He sat up and rubbed his face. This was going to be a long day. Every now and then he had strange dreams of him looking for something. Looking and looking but never finding. Sometimes Hamilton was there, reaching out to him, but then there'd be a door. Jefferson didn't know what to think. He was just tired. He had so many nightmares lately and none of them made any sense to him. They were warped and hazy and didn't feel quite right but then again, nightmares tended to be like that anyway.

Well, except the bloody ones that always seemed to be in the greatest of detail.

Breakfast consisted of coffee, which was out of character for him, he always had a full meal to start off the day. Today he just couldn't bring himself to cook so coffee it was. His violin still was where it remained on the couch. It wasn't the one from Monticello, no, this one was just one he'd gotten when he was young. His mother saw him staring at it in a store and bought it for him. The first time he touched it he sawed off the most beautiful melody. His mother was hysterical, calling him a prodigy. But now Jefferson knew that it wasn't because he was a prodigy but because he'd already learned to play in a past life.

He wanted to throw it in the fire.

He didn't have a fire at the moment so he just ignored it, for now, he'd throw it in the closet or something later. His phone pinged, alerting him that he'd received a text. From Madison it seemed, letting him know that Hamilton had already published the first essay they were to be helping him with. Jefferson didn't think Hamilton wanted his help anymore after last night, but the pile of papers that he brought were still on the counter so Jefferson looked through the proposal. It was outlined in great detail exactly what they'd be doing. Twenty-five essays divided evenly among the three men. Well, how that supposed to work? Twenty-five wasn't divisible by three. Hamilton must expect someone to slack off, probably Jefferson.

Yeah right, people forgot that Jefferson was always a writer. He wrote all the time, preferred it to public speaking and just about any other form of communication. As if he'd fall behind. It almost felt like a challenge. Jefferson wasn't going to let Hamilton outwrite him.

Madison said Hamilton wrote the first one already, that meant it was Jefferson's turn. He grabbed the coffee maker and after a moment of thought, grabbed a bottle of wine, and went to his office where he pulled up Hamilton's publication and read it over. Jefferson immediately saw exactly how to pick it apart.

But that's not what he was doing, his job was to write a follow essay addressing the points Hamilton didn't cover and support what Hamilton was saying. That's when Jefferson saw Hamilton had signed it under a pseudonym. Oh hell no. Hell no. He wasn't writing under a pseudonym. He whipped out his phone and called Hamilton.

"What do you want Thomas?" Hamilton asked groggily, Jefferson must've woken him up.

"*I never did in my life, either by myself or by any other, have a sentence of mine inserted in a newspaper without putting my name to it; and I believe I never shall.* And that means I'm not writing these essays under a stupid pseudonym."

He heard Hamilton groan in frustration. Hamilton was famous for his pseudonyms, he wrote under them all the time. Jefferson never did. On rare occasion, he requested his name to be left unknown, but never a pseudonym. "Why not?"

"I've always felt like if I can't put my name on it, then I don't truly believe it."

Hamilton sighed, "Fine, I don't care, put your name on it, just make sure to title it the same and group them together." Then he hung up. Hamilton must've been too tired to argue.

Jefferson went back to work. It was so weird picking apart Hamilton's writing so he could add support to it with his own, bringing up different points and cases that would make the Constitution look even better instead of picking Hamilton's work apart so he could tear it to shreds and disprove every claim.

After going through his work and making sure it was perfect, he published it right along Hamilton's. Then he texted Madison.

"Published mine, you're up."

"What?! We decided to do this like six hours ago! How have you and Hamilton already written and published your essays? Fine, I'll take a look."

A few minutes later, Jefferson got a follow-up text, "Seriously? You know what this is going to turn into? You and Hamilton trying to out-write each other, that's what."

Jefferson chuckled. Madison was gifted with a pen, he didn't to worry about him keeping up. Well, that's not necessarily true, his health tended to interfere with his writing pace a bit.

***

Madison took his time with his essay, so it left plenty of time for the people to read and pick through Jefferson's and Hamilton's with a fine tooth comb. What was really funny was the fact there were some mentions of bringing Publius and T. J. into this. That's where the people were used to seeing the debates from different sides come from, they trusted their writings, at least the writings of the side they supported. Little did they know the both of them were writing this.

Jefferson paused. How did he know that? How did he know that he always picked apart Hamilton's writing? How did he know that Hamilton was Publius? Hamilton never told him about that, he just said that Hamilton and he had been in a pamphlet war. Why did he remember that and nothing else?

Jefferson pulled at his hair. This was so frustrating! He couldn't remember half his life because Hamilton was always involved somehow, but he could remember some stupid detail that was Hamilton's pseudonym? How was that fair?

Jefferson sighed in defeat, at least it was something. He went back to reading responses and starting formulating an outline for how he would respond depending on Hamilton's next publication.

***

It didn't take long for the people to catch on to their publication schedule. Madison would take a week and then they'd get two more the next day. It was obvious there were three authors and the cries for Publius' and T. J.'s appearance grew louder with each essay. Some people began to speculate that Thomas Jefferson was, in fact, T. J. The initials matched but no one could be absolutely positive without a confession. Most of the people were too busy writing their own responses to really pay attention to T.J. and Thomas Jefferson. How they didn't piece together who Hamilton was a mystery to Jefferson. He could spot Hamilton's writing a mile away just from the unique style he had.

There were lots of complaints about the new form of government, especially since not everyone had supported the war and the destruction of the old one. Those were the people they fought most with.

The funny part was that all three of them, without the other's knowing it, found a quill, a bottle of ink, and some parchment and proceeded to write hard copies of each essay, just as they each had done for the Constitution. Call them old-fashioned.

This went on for weeks on end. It's harder to convince a nation to ratify a new government than one might think. Especially one so divided. Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison already knew since they'd done it before. Madison was actually wondering if John Jay was somewhere in the world, walking along in blissful ignorance to his past life or if he remembered as well. Was he even alive?

***

Hamilton stood on Jefferson's doorstep with a bunch of papers in hand. He couldn't bring himself to knock. But he had to. Hamilton needed to collaborate with Jefferson on the next publications. He usually did it over the phone or by email, but a week ago his laptop finally gave up on life after years of limping along. He'd been writing his essays on his phone ever since. Until his dropped it in water yesterday, try as he might to save it, it was lost forever. Now he had no way to communicate except by mail or in person and walking over to Jefferson's was faster than the mail system so there he was, hand poised to knock.

He let his hand fall against the door and rapped on it a few times. No response. After a couple more tries he tested the doorknob. It was open. Okay, odd. Jefferson never left his door unlocked anymore. They were both too paranoid. They always locked the doors and they always carried some sort of weapon. Hamilton pushed the door open slowly, the hinges creaking like an old, cheesy horror movie, and peered inside. Nothing seemed to be amiss. No broken furniture or bloodstains, still, it was suspicious.

Hamilton reached for his knife. Better safe than sorry. He crept through the house, not wanting to call out Jefferson's name in case there was, in fact, someone else in the house. There were only two places Hamilton could think of where Jefferson wouldn't hear Hamilton knocking. One would be his bedroom because he was sleeping, and the other was his office because he'd be lost in his work. The bedroom was upstairs so Hamilton went to check the office first.

He swung open the door.

There sat Jefferson. At his desk. Asleep. His arm was propped up on the desk, supporting his head. His mouth hung ever so slightly open and his thick-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, slightly askew from his hand resting on them. Hamilton nearly died, it was so cute. The glasses in themselves were nearly too much for Hamilton to handle, he's hardly ever seen Jefferson wearing his glasses and every time it ended with Hamilton kissing him. But this was a whole other level of adorable.

Hamilton stole Jefferson's phone, unlocked it easily seeing as Jefferson never changed the password after he'd lost his memory, took a picture, sent it to his email, and then deleted the picture off Jefferson's phone. Hamilton could get the picture later when he had an electronic device to do so with. Hamilton returned Jefferson's phone and debated on how to wake him up. Hamilton debated screaming or shouting or slamming a door, but Jefferson had PTSD and that would probably set him off, Hamilton knew better than anyone how that felt. So he settled for gently shaking him awake with soft murmurs like he used to do all the times until he didn't anymore.

Jefferson protested weakly by mumbling, "Alexander, no, I've got another hour before I have to make breakfast for you." Hamilton froze. Did he- could he possibly-Only one way to find out. Hamilton gently shook him again. "Alexander, I'm not giving you a morning kiss until it's actually time to get up."

Hamilton immediately backed away and accidentally backed into a table, knocking a picture frame to the floor, which shattered on impact. Jefferson jolted awake, hitting his knee on the desk. "Fuck! That hurt!" He looked over at Hamilton, "Hamilton? What're you doing here? Why are you in my office?"

Hamilton rushed forward and grabbed Jefferson's face, holding it between his two hands. Jefferson tried to recoil, but Hamilton already caught him and his grip too tight. "What were you dreaming off?" he demanded.

"What're you doing? Let go of me!"

"Thomas, tell me, what were you dreaming of?"

"Relinquish me!" Jefferson grabbed Hamilton's wrists to pry them off but Hamilton just dug his fingers into Jefferson's hair so it'd be next to impossible.

"I will if you tell me what you were dreaming! Quickly, before you forget! It's important!"

Jefferson looked into Hamilton's eyes, thinking of his dream. "I was dreaming of-" Jefferson was thinking hard, trying to remember exactly what he'd been dreaming about.

"Remember," Hamilton commanded.

"Get your hands out of my hair and I might be able to think straight," Jefferson snapped, this time successfully freeing himself of Hamilton's hands. Hamilton let go and backed away.

Jefferson stood from his chair and leaned against a wall, arms crossing over his chest defensively. "Well? What were you dreaming?" Hamilton pushed.

Jefferson screwed his eyes shut. "There was grass...and trees...lots of trees. I was walking out of Monticello, there was someone leading me somewhere. It was still dark outside...Then they dragged me by the hand around a corner...and I saw something...I saw a...I saw a horse. It was a horse. Two horses. There were two... Then I grabbed the person, shoved them up against a wall and-" Jefferson's eyes snapped open and pushed himself off the wall, his face flushing red, his gaze fixed on Hamilton. "It was you," Jefferson stated. "It was you that I pinned against the wall." His face flushed even more.

Hamilton knew Jefferson remembered exactly what he did to Hamilton against that wall too. He wasn't sure if he wanted to laugh, cry, or throw up, so he settled for stunned silence. Jefferson's gaze raked down Hamilton's body and back up again, no doubt remembering how Hamilton felt against him. Hamilton felt his face flush as well.

"Well," Hamilton broke the silence, "I came to go over the essays with you, but we can, ah, do it some other time." Hamilton made for the door.

"Don't be ridiculous, Hamilton. You're here now, let's get it over with."

Great. A nice, awkward chat about the Constitution that neither of them is actually thinking about and instead have their thoughts turned toward that dream. "Fine."

Hamilton returned to the desk and dropped his stack of papers in front of Jefferson who picked it up, ran his hands over it and looked at Hamilton. "This is parchment and written by a quill," he stated it as a fact.

"Umm, yeah. I prefer them."

"Me too." Jefferson set the papers down and they both took a seat. "I actually wanted to talk to you about revealing Publius and T. J, not that mine was ever a secret, but if I confirm mine, it'll pretty much give away yours. I texted you but you wouldn't reply."

"Yeah, I dropped my phone in some water. Kinda why I'm here right now."

"How'd you get in any way?"

"You left your door unlocked."

"No, I didn't." They both stared at each other. Someone was in the house. "No, wait, I ordered pizza and forgot to lock it again because my hands were full."

"Oh, okay. Wait, you ordered pizza? You never order pizza. You make your own pizza." That's when Hamilton noticed the coffee pot and the bottles of wine on Jefferson's desk. "How long had this been going on?" Hamilton asked.

"What?"

"This," Hamilton gestured to the desk.

"Oh. I dunno. Since we started the essays?"

"Who are you?" Hamilton asked.

"Can we just discuss the Publius thing?"

"No." Hamilton got up and walked around the desk so he was standing over Jefferson. "This isn't you. None of it is. You don't drink often and definitely not excessively."

Jefferson stood as well so he was towering over Hamilton. Hamilton's eyes were fiery and defiant as he stared up at him, daring Jefferson to push back, to fight, to argue, almost begging for it. "So what? Weren't you saying I'm not Thomas Jefferson anymore?"

"That doesn't mean your morals changed! Your core principles!" Hamilton half shouted. "What is this? What is this really? What's going on really?"

"Nothing," Jefferson lied. "Look, can we please just settle the pseudonyms?"

"Not until you tell me what's wrong with you." Hamilton crossed his arms.

"Fine, then I'm going to bed," Jefferson said, brushing past Hamilton and walking out of the office, "Lock the door behind you when you leave," he called over his shoulder.

Hamilton looked at the empty wine bottles on the desk. At least it wasn't whiskey like that night. His heart bled for what had become of Jefferson, Hamilton still loved him. The memory of him. His Jefferson, not this ghost of one. He didn't know who this Jefferson was.

Hamilton left without another word. If Jefferson wanted to fuck up his life, then fine, Hamilton wasn't going to stop him.

Jefferson heard the door close as Hamilton left. He stood alone in his room. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like shit. Dark bags under his eyes, clothes a mess, slumped posture. Jefferson stepped up closer to the mirror. "You want to know what's wrong?" he asked his reflection, "I can't remember half of my fucking life! I can't remember people that were apparently all that mattered to me! I can't remember my friends! I can't remember everything I stood for! All I can remember is the feeling of pain and misery! I can feel this big hole in my chest and I can't do anything about it!" His fist slammed into the glass, shattering it and cutting open his hand. "I'm drowning. I can't breathe. I'm drowning and no one can help me. I can't scream. I can't yell. Because if I do then, then I'm broken and if there's one thing I can remember, it's that I can't break because then they win. They win if I break."

Blood dripped down Jefferson's hand and soaked into the carpet as he stared at the broken pieces of glass on the floor. He didn't care. Jefferson laid down across on his bed sideways, his long legs sticking out into the air, his face buried in the soft blankets. He wished Hamilton stayed. Wished he stayed so Jefferson could bicker with him and distract himself from everything else in his life. He could keep together as long as Hamilton was around.

Who was he? Who was Thomas Jefferson?

He was a broken man.

----

[fireandgloryrpg]

Congratulations Daniel and welcome! We’re so happy to accept your application to play Aldéric “Eric” Alexander Martin with the faceclaim of Dante Scott in Fire & Glory RPG! We can’t wait to begin roleplaying with you so please remember to look over our checklist!

Out of Character Information:

Name: Daniel

Pronouns: he/him

Age: 18, but my birthday is tomorrow (January 31) and I’ll be 19!!

Timezone: EST

Activity: I hope to be online a little every day! I’m a college student, so some days it’ll just be too much work, but I really want to stay active and will do my best to make time for an rp I care about. Hopefully a little bit every day!

Anything Else?: I’ve missed y’all so much and I still haven’t read the books.

Original Character Application:

Name: Aldéric “Eric” Alexander Martin

Age and Birthday: 18, January 2nd 2000

Faceclaim: Dante Scott first choice, Cameron Boyce second choice

Heritage: Son of Eris

ABILITIES:

Because of Eris’ connection to war, most children of Eris have violent powers. Eric, the son of a conman and the goddess of chaos, has powers more focused on non-violent confusion.

Like most demigods, Eric has ADHD and is dyslexic.

Eric has a passive ability of increased confusion, making those around him sooner believe something he says over other information. This ability is weak and is only truly effective if Eric is trying.

Like some other children of Eris, Eric is able to make a group chaotic, or to cause infighting. This is usually in the form of harsh words in his case than of actual fist-to-face fighting. This is a good defense and increases the ability to escape if need be. Only works on 2 or more people (no existential crises)

Eric only has one physical, fighting ability called a “storm of strife.” Everything within this usually small cloud will change, warp, or break. The size and the power depends on the energy put into it. The effect on humans/demigods has been a change of clothes, hair-color, and once a tattoo but nothing too devastating.

Affiliation: Eric is a Greek demigod and the son of a conman. It’s not in his best interest to be a part of any groups, and he was kicked out of the Fifth Cohort. Eric is now a former Fifth Cohort member and former citizen of Rome, an illegal Greek alien.

Headcanons:

Eric never liked the violent side of his mother’s lineage. He’s always been more a person of peace. In his life, though it has always been chaotic, he has always tried to center himself with sun salutations in the morning and moon salutations in the evening. His attempts to be centered have always failed, but something about doing them always make him feel a bit better.

Despite his attempts to surpass his lineage and not be chaotic, Eric has always been pretty chaotic. Always climbing out of his crib when he was little, tying his dad’s shoes together, breaking into the cookie jar for breakfast, small things like that when he was little. He’s a bit of a kleptomaniac, but he’s been careful to not let himself get into too much trouble.

Biography:

Aldéric Alexander Martin was left given to a very hungover Trevor Lorcan Wilson on January 2nd, 2000. Trevor was a conman, and Trevor was the sixth name he’d had in his life. He had little concept for responsibility, and when his son was given to him he was sleeping in the bed of a wealth man’s wife in their New York apartment. Trevor was busy stealing her husbands documents when the baby on the doorstep began to cry. Thus began Aldéric’s first impression of life: in the arms of a man running buck-ass-nude from the scene of a crime.

Life didn’t change much after that. Aldéric got new names, Ryan Kelly George Jim Geoffrey etc., and so did Trevor. Eric’s dad never did stop conning people, because now he had someone to provide for. Aldéric never had his own address to call home, but he always had somewhere to rest his head for the night. They went from New York to New Haven to Paris to LA to Vancouver to Singapore to London to Berlin, and then they did it all over again.

His dad was his best friend. Sometimes, most of the time, his only friend. They stuck together, Trevor teaching Aldéric everything he knew and Aldéric using his “charm” to get them out of sticky situations. It was perfect.

One day when he was 16, Aldéric woke up to the sound of his dad crying in the other room of their “rented” penthouse. Trevor, after a little prodding, confessed that he was tired and wanted to go home. Aldéric realized he didn’t know where home was for his father. After hours of talking about the life Trevor had given up, the two stole a car and sped off to Toronto.

Aldéric and Trevor were at his parents house in Toronto for 7 minutes and 43 seconds before his father, Aldéric’s grandfather, kicked them out because his son was a ‘dirty criminal’ he didn’t want to be associated with.

The two then went to (broke into) Trevor’s old high school. They got an entire day in Toronto before Trevor Wilson, whose real name was Leslie Harry Martin, was arrested. When the sirens started wailing, Aldéric’s father turned to him and told him where he could find a home - a camp far away from here. His mother would want him to go to her. Harry told his son to run and go find Eris.

Para Sample:

The front door banged behind them, punctuating the family reunion with a rather alarming note. Eric slowly reached in his pocket and pulled out two of the nearly twenty cookies he’d managed to sneak from his grandmother’s freshly made batch. He handed one to his dad and took a bit of his own.

“D’you know he was gonna boot us like that?” he said, mouth still full of cookie as he was shoving in another.

“Nope,” his dad replied, the popping ‘p’ spewing crumbs on the sidewalk.

They started walking away from his grandparents house in silence for a while, quietly passing cookies between them and thinking about the strange interaction they’d just had with the only family they had. They got maybe a block before Aldéric smirked and looked over at his dad. “So… Your name is Leslie?”

His dad laughed, the bellowing thing Aldéric had always loved hearing growing up, and turned to him with the same teasing smirk and shine in his eyes. “Well your name is Aldéric!”

“That’s your fault!”

The two broke into fits of giggles as they kept walking away from the people who rejected them, not needing anyone but each other as usual. His dad wrapped an arm around his son and tousled his hair lovingly. Eric always felt like it was the two of them against the word, and today was no different. He wasn’t stupid, he knew his grandfather was going to call the police on his father in order to save his own hyde. This was his last few hours with his dad. He knew that, but together they still felt unstoppable.

The turned a corner and his dad laughed and stopped walking. “Hey, kid, how’d you like to see the inside of a real high school?” he said. Aldéric looked up and saw his dad’s eyes trained on a large brick building with hideous blue ascents. It looked a right mess, and his dad looked damn fond of it.

It didn’t take a lot of effort to break in since his dad knew that the back service entrance door was usually propped. The two wandered the halls and his dad relived the glory days while Aldéric held onto every word. His dad didn’t seem to be very different in high school. Same free spirit, same trickster ways. The difference was he had someplace to go home to. He had an affection for this place that Aldéric had only gotten glimpses of as they moved away from city to city.

The pair walked by a display case of prom courts and Aldéric stopped and stared. The people in the black and white photographs seemed kind of happy. They at least seemed like they were trying to be happy. He found the picture of his dad’s year and spotted a horrible mullet on the far left. “Pft - dad is that you?” His dad grinned and nodded. Aldéric pointed to the girl on his arm. “Is that mom?”

He knew it was a risky question. His dad never talked about her. Every time she came up, his dad got a far off look in his eye like he was trying to remember a dream. His dad smiled and shook his head. “No. Your mom, she was much prettier than Georgia Moody. I, uh,” he rubbed the back of his neck in a shy, reserved type of way that was uncharacteristic for the charmer, “she was -”

The pair spun around as they heard a heavy door slam hallways away and many boot-clad feet start to rush to where they were. Aldéric’s father turned to him and held both of his shoulders, looking him deep in the eye with a panic and certainty that didn’t mix well. “Listen to me. There’s a place in America you can go. It’s a camp or some shit, far west. Your mom, she has people there that can help you. Now you’ve gotta get out of here, okay? Run and don’t ever look back do you hear me? And don’t you dare stay in one place for more than a day until you get to that camp.” Aldéric stared at him in stunned silence and even when his father’s hands went off his shoulders, he didn’t move. He stood there stuttering, confused and feeling truly alone for the first time in his life. His dad spun around and opened a fire exit near them, sending the alarms blaring. “Go, Aldéric! Now!”

[ayankun]

the second hand unwinds

Fandom: The Flash Type: Drama with a side of angst and a dash of humor Characters: Eobard Thawne/Barry Allen, also featuring Sara Lance, Ray Palmer, Nate Heywood, Martin Stein, Cisco Ramon, H.R. Wells, Harrison Wells, and Barry Allen :| (and Jefferson “Jax” Jackson) Warnings: Super spoilers for past and current seasons, as usual; canon-typical violence, canon-typical spurious pseudo-science, canon-atypical sexualities Word Count: 17562 Tag: This is just one of those stories that leads with an unexpected twist, ends in the way everyone saw coming, and leaves its beginning unwritten.  In that order.

Note: I have to say that this feels less like a sequel to the ostentatiously titled Barry Allen and Eobard Thawne Walk into a Bar (or, He'll Have the Temporal Mobius Strip, on the Rocks) than Temporal Mobius Strip feels like a preface to this  If you have a few minutes, I'd recommend checking that out before starting this one.  But I'm not your real dad so do as you like.  Also all poetry reproduced in this work belongs to Maya Angelou, as credited.

the second hand unwinds

WE THIEVES OF TIME

Your skin like dawn

Mine like musk

One paints the beginning

of a certain end.

The other, the end of a

sure beginning.

Passing Time - Maya Angelou

PART I.a

Canyon City, Yukon Territory - 1902 - Winter

It's cold.  Cold enough almost to stop a speedster in his tracks.  Even so, it's not the sub-zero conditions that stall Eobard's pace.  The natural contrarian in him refuses to rush this, preferring to take the long way round to meet fate -- a fate, at long last, of his own choosing.

Ever since he dropped out of the time stream into this frozen frontier wilderness, a perverse sense of pleasure has been crackling across his nerve endings, every inch of him a livewire.  It's not unlike the high-octane punch of the speed force firing through his veins.  Not better than, not by a long shot, but it's intoxicating and heady and powerful all the same.

For the first time in a long, long time, Eobard Thawne has no idea what's about to happen.  For the first time in his entire life, perhaps, he is acting on a decision he has made for himself, without the guiding hand of destiny pointing the way.  Can he be faulted for wanting to savor such a precious novelty?

He turns inland from the whitewater rapids of Miles Canyon and follows the trail south through a copse of thin, bare aspens, which stretch skeletal towards a slate gray sky.  They stand solemn and still like pallbearers to the hollowed-out carcass of the gutted township ahead, all sunken roofs and gaping windows, the wind whistling a funeral dirge through the bones of this ghost town.

The implacable forward motion of the industrial revolution will overrun countless frontier towns such as this before all is said and done.  The arrival of the railroad signed Canyon City's death warrant, siphoning the life force out of what had otherwise been a bustling settlement and diverting human history a tad north to what will become the Yukon's capital (and only city), leaving this one to wither right off the map.  

Eobard's not one to judge; as a seasoned time traveler, he's learned to remain objective about events that take place centuries before his own timeline begins.  Besides, the town, abandoned, and the climate, extremely unforgiving, provide a lonesome environment suited exactly to their needs.

His heart absolutely and completely does not jump into his throat when he crunches down onto the frost-crusted main street and sees the warm lamplight streaming out from the windows of the former Canyon City Hotel farther on up the road.

Eobard keeps his boots moving forward through the snow at an even pace, using all his self-control to do so, relishing the final few minutes of uncertainty and freedom before he opens that door and discovers what Barry Allen -- and not fate, for a change -- has in store for him.

(Also, he's fairly certain these borrowed period clothes would be reduced to smoldering scraps if he attempted to run flat out to the door.  The dawning 20th century does not have the technology; they cannot rebuild them.

For a brief, insane second, he imagines Barry's reaction to a naked Eobard Thawne gracing his doorstep.  He's lucky he has the subzero temperatures to blame for his ruddy cheeks.)

Taking a moment more under the wind-shredded hotel awning to revel in the luxury of second first impressions, cocooned in a winter silence only disturbed by the murmur of the White Horse rapids and an icy gale slicing overhead, Eobard calmly wraps his hand around the rusted door latch and lets himself into the hotel.

A welcome warmth greets him as he quickly slides into the small front room and closes the door firmly behind him.  From the look of it, the hotel's lobby had also served as a saloon, complete with a short counter running down the length of the left-hand wall and a pair of rustic plank booths set into the wall opposite.  Presumably, these booths had sported table tops in the saloon's heyday, but these have been roughly torn out by scavengers most likely, and the warped stock shelves behind the bar are dusty and bare.

He doesn't see Barry at first.  But there are snow-damp boots by the door, and a painfully anachronistic S.T.A.R. Labs branded space heater humming away atop the counter's peeling lacquer.

In the back right corner, beside a door that leads deeper into the hotel, there's a much more period-appropriate fire crackling inside the sooty black belly of a cast iron parlor stove.  In the space between the stove and the farthest booth, a bonafide grizzly bear skin rug hugs the floorboards, and sprawled out on this monstrosity, cuddled up in a CCPD hoodie and using his balled up parka as a pillow, is the one and only Barry Allen.

Barry's got a thin paperback held aloft, but this sinks to his chest when Eobard spots him.  Neither man says a word, and Eobard's excuse is the way his throat has closed up at the sight of idol-rival-frenemy tipping his head back to peer across the room with firelight in his eyes.  By everything that is holy, he was not ready for this.

"Eobard," Barry says, and the name rolls almost too casually from his lips in a way that is painfully perfect, "You're late."

He says it like it's his favorite joke, like it means more than it does.  Those upside-down eyes squeeze to joyous crevasses deep and dark with fathomless humor.  The room feels suddenly far too warm.

Eobard responds to this with the harsh sound of him clearing his throat, and follows that up with the self-conscious business of divesting himself of top hat and gloves and fur-lined overcoat and the like.

"The train from White Horse was delayed due to difficult weather conditions and the rail company almost postponed the return trip until next week.  You're lucky I'm here at all."  He detects a note of petulant defensiveness in his own voice that he's not proud of, but he chalks it up to the combative nature of their relationship to date.  He leans into the curve and presses the offensive.  "Of course, I could have just run straight here, if only preserving the sanctity of the timeline didn't happen to be chief among my concerns."

Eobard side-eyes the space heater's sunburst logo hard to make his point, but Barry just laughs.

"It's not like I can't clean up after myself," Barry retorts, waving the paperback as if it were a suitable piece of evidence to support his argument.  "Last thing I want is a time wraith showing up to crash the party."

Meddling with the timeline is fraught with such sobering and unpleasant considerations, and Eobard's flickering hope about the immediate future gutters at the prospect.  He licks his dry lips and watches the dust pile up as he sweeps a finger down the bar top's pitted surface.

"What are you reading?" he changes the subject, his voice low.

Something of a cagey look supplants Barry's easy grin.  He rolls fluidly upwards into a seated position, shifting around on the grizzly skin to face Eobard the right way up for the first time.  His thumb never leaves the crook of yellowed pages, like he's loath to lose his place.  The hood of his sweatshirt falls to his shoulders and he paws a bit at his cowlicks with his free hand before leaning back to prop himself up with his fingers tangled deep in the thick fur.

"Seeing as you know so much about me from the history books, I might have taken the liberty of some future-reconnaissance of my own."

Eobard's lips twitch.  "I'm flattered," he says wryly but meaning it all the same.  "And the sordid details you uncovered lead you to a little light reading?"

Barry squints, that crooked sunbeam smile breaking across his face like the dawn.  "You made the front page once by publishing a white paper outlining how the Aristotelian concept of poetic diction could be applied to quantum theory."

"And you believe everything you read in newspapers?" Eobard asks, adjusting the high, starchy collar of his gentleman's costume.  His ascot seems to be suffocating him all of a sudden.  "You of all people, I suppose you would."

"They even printed the white paper itself as a special addition," Barry continues, brow going stern with mock gravitas, "Riveting stuff.  Your propositions were very compelling."

Eobard sighs, ducking his head and flourishing a hand in equally affected acceptance of the complement.  "The product of sheer boredom and rebellious teenage spirit.  Ms. Cotsis' Advanced English class was not nearly as challenging as she believed.  I hope you didn't waste your time on any more of my erstwhile endeavors."

His eyes are sharp on the small motions Barry is making as a clear preamble to inviting him to a seat on the bear skin.  As the parka-pillow is shoved aside, Barry tilts the cover of the book towards Eobard, his handy bookmark still firmly wedged between the pages.

"Just a second-hand poetry book my mom picked up at a thrift store once," he explains, "I was afraid of looking uncultured next to a bonafide student of literature such as yourself, Professor."

There's now an Eobard-shaped vacancy on the rug in front of the fire and Eobard knows how to capitalize on an opportunity when he sees one.

With a mix of suave confidence and endorphin-rich recklessness, the same kind of tantalizing what-if electricity thrumming through him as he had experienced on the cold lonely walk into town, Eobard drops himself to Barry's side and indulges in his wildest dreams.

"As if anything could ever make me think less of you, Barry Allen," he all but purrs, laying a hand on Barry's narrow chin in a way that would have been impossible in any prior context.  When Eobard kisses him, it feels exactly as though all the time in the universe is at his command, infinite possibility distilled down into this singular golden moment.

The subarctic wind shrieks over the splintered roofs and the fire sputters from the draft down the stove pipe.  Eobard almost misses the quiet, helpless noise Barry makes in the back of his throat.

Instantly the gilt tarnishes over and Eobard goes as cold as the abandoned winter wasteland and his heart seems to stop beating in his chest.

One of the benefits of super-speed is the extended time frame a speedster has to think and react to the relatively sluggish goings-on occurring around them in real time.  That's why even though it's probably only a span of seconds, to Eobard it feels like an eternal nightmare; how horrifyingly slowly he seems to detach himself from Barry, how chilling it is to spend a lifetime staring at Barry's blank, neutral expression.

His heart hasn't stopped at all, it's just slowed to a comic ice age crawl, the bone-shaking pound of it reverberating in his ears only once an eon.  A billion galaxies are born in flame and wink out in the frozen, silent void in the time it takes him to fully consider the depth of his mistake.

"Eobard," Barry says, and time resumes with all the finesse of a smoking locomotive barreling down a mountain pass.

Barry hasn't moved a muscle since Eobard invited himself into his personal space, but now a cloudy concern has settled on his face, though perhaps that's an improvement over the utter non-reaction he'd had to Eobard's advance.

"I obviously misread the situation," Eobard says tightly, "I'm only meta-human, after all."  He shifts to get his feet under him -- and look at him, farcical in spats and waistcoat, some kind of gentleman clown all dressed up and ready for his pie in the face -- but Barry's quick hand on his arm stays him from running straight out of this century.

"No, it's my bad," Barry insists, his hand dropping back to the bear skin when Eobard's knee-jerk grasp on the Speed Force diminishes, "It's been a while since I had to explain to anybody, and I didn't want to assume that it was something I needed to state up front."

His one eye scrunches up into an apologetic grin and he palms the back of his neck in that endearing (infuriating) way of his.  "One of the things you probably didn't learn about me from the history books is that I'm asexual?"

Eobard Thawne, celebrated genius and criminal mastermind, blinks at Barry like a dullard.  "Ah."

"Yeah," Barry nods.  "Surprise."

A thin smile plays on Eobard's lips as he tries to tuck this new information into the matrix of Things He Knows About The Flash.  "So you're comfortable meeting me in a romantic fire-lit greeting card of a setting, but you're not comfortable with me kissing you."

Barry's hand falls Freudianly to his mouth and Eobard finds enough common decency within him to tear his eyes away.  "Well.  It's not that it makes me uncomfortable -- I can see where we are, and you didn't misread anything -- I just don't have the natural instincts to respond to that kind of … thing ... the way someone else might."

For a moment Eobard doesn't have a response to this revelation.  Then something slightly caustic rises and drips bitterly from his tongue.  "So it doesn't count as cheating on Mrs. West-Allen if there's no sex, is that it?"

He naturally expects Barry to take the defensive or to be riled into meeting this confrontation head-on, and they share an unnaturally long second observing the glint of firelight off his wedding band, but the surprises don't stop coming as Barry relaxes with a carefree laugh.

"Dude," he says, side-eyeing Eobard with gentle disapproval, "isn't polyamory a thing in the twenty-second century?"

Eobard closes his eyes and runs his teeth over his bottom lip, staving off the lingering panic and disappointment in exchange for acceptance of this sudden swerve off the tracks.  He tries to anchor himself with perspective; this is what he wanted, wasn't it?  To experience the novelty of the unexpected?

"I suppose I should have expected as much from a Millennial," he finishes his thought aloud.  "The Flash: polyamorous asexual."

Eobard cracks an eye open and catches Barry shaking his head with a relieved smile.  "For real though, don't you have these things in your time?"

Eobard shrugs, uncoiling his restless legs towards the fire and leaning back on both his hands.  Settling in.  "The concepts, sure.  Your era's incessant need for labels, I'm happy to report, went the way of the dodo a while back."

"Huh," Barry rejoins, considering.  He matches Eobard's sprawl, although his right hand is still faithfully entwined with that beautifully archaic paperback that won't be printed for another hundred years.

"So we're good though, right?"  Barry's question isn't even half-formed before Eobard starts nodding his head slowly, definitively.

"My previously imparted sentiment remains intact," he says, ignoring the little flip his heart gives.  Funny how the admission, stripped of its red-blooded ulterior motive of the moment, now makes him feel vulnerable, like he's a little kid again, peering up at his hero from the cool and vast expanse of his shadow.

Only this hero isn't some unreachable myth anymore -- this is the one and only Barry Allen, alive and warm and real and boldly scooting closer so that they sit shoulder to shoulder the way equals might.  The way lovers (or, at the very least, frenemies with open-for-discussion benefits) might.

Eobard clears his throat and grabs onto the here and now with both hands.  "The way I see it, Barry Allen, we have a fire, we have a beast of a rug, and we have all the time in the world.  I think you're going to have to start reading me poetry before I embarrass myself again."

Barry's eyes twinkle with a special kind of light.  Beyond the walls of their hideaway, the wind blows relentlessly through the frozen canyons, and the river tumbles headlong over the rapids, but time itself crystallizes, silent and glacial, on behalf of two speedsters and however many moments they can together conspire to steal.

PART I.b

Canyon City, Yukon Territory - 1903 - Summer

With the Waverider nestled within the safety of the deserted alpine foothills, the intrepid away team picked their way cautiously down the weedy main street of the ghost town, peering into dark broken windows and ignoring the wind's ominous whispers rustling through the aspens guarding the trail behind them.

"This is the right time and place, boys," Sara said, looking up from the blipping chronograph to squint through the pale northern sunlight at the sagging skeletons of the ruins.  It was hard to tell what they might be hiding under all the moss and rot.

A sudden banging clatter drew her suspicious attention over to one of the larger buildings, but it was just Ray heaving a fallen weather-bleached sign up against the side of what was now identified as the town's hotel-slash-saloon.

"Are we sure?"  Ray was squinting as well, stepping back and brushing off his hands.  "Seems a little rustic for Thawne's tastes."

Stein sniffed, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to ward off the rising dust.  "You'll remember, Raymond, that Eobard Thawne was -- or is, I unfortunately must say -- a man of many hidden facets.  For all we know, he might have found such a setting, er … quaint."

"He must have been one hell of a chameleon," Nate interjected, idly testing the latch of the hotel door.  The whole thing broke off in his hand.  "If he was able to keep his cover as Harrison Wells for as long as he did, what with a half dozen geniuses watching his every move from over his shoulder."

"You have a knack for making compliments difficult to accept, Dr. Heywood," Stein murmured to himself behind his handkerchief.  Nate didn't hear him, too busy off-loading the rusted door latch into a clump of wild flowers pushing sunnily up through the boards of the sidewalk.

Ray came around the side of the hotel, shrugging like a defensive toddler.  "They don't put out PSAs about how to spot the tell-tale signs of a time-traveling body-snatching mad scientist or anything, you know."

Sara cocked an eye at the chronograph and then gave the dusty road another once-over.  Nothing to be seen hiding in the shadows -- so far.

"Settle down, kids.  Let's just find whatever it is Future-Cisco sent us here to find so we can get back to tracking our version of Thawne before he gets his hands on the Spear."  She stepped lightly up to the boardwalk between Ray and Nate, while Stein shuffled after her as though wary of straying too far from the group.

"Ray, Martin, you're looking for anything that strikes you as something that Thawne could have left behind.  Nate, you're looking for anything that doesn't fit the time period.  Future-Cisco said there were twenty-second century energy signatures coming from this location, so it's probably tech, but we won't know for sure until we find it."  She glanced over her shoulder.  "Nice work, He-Man.  You plan on deconstructing the whole place?"  

This last piece was said in response to Nate's discovery of the hotel door's equally dilapidated hinges.  He grunted as he set the newly liberated door off to one side.

"Ladies first," he said as if he hadn't just ripped the door bodily from the frame.

"Question," Ray piped up, ducking through the doorway after Sara as she disappeared into the dingy remains of the hotel, "How do we know Future-Cisco is right?  Or even that he's telling the truth, for that matter?  What if we're walking into a trap?"

Sara spun on him in the dusty darkness -- most of the room's light came from the cracks in the roof -- jabbing the center of his broad chest with the chronograph.  "You really think now is a good time to be having these questions, Ray?"

He rubbed at the spot where she poked him, frowning.  "Well, yeah, I guess.  No one else had  brought it up yet."

Sara held back a sigh.  "Just assume, at all times, that you're walking into a trap, and then you won't have to wonder about it, okay?"  She flicked a finger around the room.  "Now spread out and help me look for whatever it is Thawne left here."  

Ray's frown melted into something of a pout, and he raised a stiff hand in a small salute of acknowledgement.  Sara turned to move deeper into the dim space, partially to let the guys filter in behind, but mostly to hide her fond smile.

The light from the street dimmed as Nate and then Stein, the latter still breathing through his hanky, passed through the gaping entryway.  Ray turned and edged back behind the bar, looking dutifully under shelves for the boogeyman's hidden treasure.

"My question is," Nate said, crossing the length of the room towards Sara, "if Thawne was erased from reality -- his current existence notwithstanding -- then how was he able to leave anything behind at all?  Shouldn't it never have happened in this timeline?"

Sara stepped back into the corner as he leaned past her to try his luck with the inner door.  It didn't disintegrate at his touch this time and he poked his head into the far room for a moment.  

"Well we're talking about the Thawne that originally traveled back in time and altered the course of history to begin with," Ray was saying when Nate ducked back into the main room, "Thawne-prime, as it were.  All of the things he did or had happen to him before that juncture would remain intact in that original timeline.  Or am I wrong, Dr. Stein?"

He leaned over the dusty countertop, scratching his head.  The uncertain wood shifted under his weight.

Stein cleared his throat, tentatively dropping the handkerchief an inch or two.  "Yes, I believe you're on the right track, Raymond.  Cisco and I discussed the matter briefly some time ago and we came to the loose conclusion that there must exist a sort of temporal graft that occurs when objects -- or people, in practice -- move between time periods."

Sara, crouched beside the rat-eaten bearskin rug, shook her head at the three slackers and continued the search for the twenty-second century item.  It wasn't under the rug.  No, of course not, that'd be too easy.

"How do you mean, 'graft'?" Nate asked, stepping back to the end of the bar and crossing his arms.

Stein wet his lips in preparation of the symposium he was about to give.  "Think of the timeline as a trunk, of a tree, with every infinite variation of the timeline as its branches.  To keep it simple, let's look at a tree with only two such branches forking from the trunk.  Imagine that a person -- in this case Eobard Thawne -- experiences time as movement along one of the branches.  As a speedster, he then doubles back to a point along the trunk, makes his way to the fork and travels up the second branch, as we know, for fifteen years.  Even though he originated in the first branch, he has now 'grafted' himself onto the second.  Remove the second branch from the tree and you excise Eobard Thawne from that section of the timeline -- but the removal of that section alone does not invalidate the path he traveled along the trunk, which is a constant and immutable past for both timelines."

Ray nodded as he followed along.  "So it's like this point in 1903 is somewhere on the trunk, and the timeline we're protecting from aberrations is actually the one he created in the year 2000, which includes the trunk, and even though Eobard Thawne will never be born in the 22nd century in this timeline, we can still find evidence of the one who was born in that timeline….right?"

"Something like that," Stein agreed.

Nate sucked on his lip, considering.  "Sounds like one of the side effects of staying too long in an alternate or altered timeline is having time catch up to you.  Like, the way we see changes in time start to set if an aberration hasn't been corrected quickly enough.  Otherwise why would the death of Thawne's ancestor in this timeline have any effect on him if that other timeline still exists separately from ours?"

"Quite," Stein agreed, a touch more reluctantly.  "As I said, this theory was the product of a brief discussion.  A very brief discussion, really.  More of a casual chat, now that I think of it."

Ray leaned his elbow on the countertop and the wood groaned a warning note.  "Taking what Barry said about his months in the Flashpoint timeline into account, it makes sense.  His memories from this timeline were being overwritten by the ones that belonged to the him that should have experienced natural time between 2000 and 2016.  That does make sense, right?"

"Or how memories of having a daughter can oust memories of not having one, once the change has been made and time has set," Stein added quietly.

"Sure, sure," Nate said, drawing attention off that sore subject, "The era Thawne ended up grafting into, the early twenty-first century, he had no existing self to merge with.  He must have fused into the timeline of his future self, while still retaining his individuality."

Ray tipped his head to the side, his brow knit in amicable consideration.  "It's a working theory, at least."

"Hate to interrupt the egghead convention," Sara called, rising fluidly from her crouch.  She stepped around the crumbling saloon furniture to Nate's side, clapping a thin rectangular object to his chest and her dusty ashy hand to his back.  "Found this lodged behind the stove, something tells me it didn't belong there."

Nate briefly tried to eye over his shoulder at the cosmetic damage done to his shirt, but the pressing mystery of the object in his arms very quickly commandeered his attention.  It was, the geek squad were surprised to see, the unassuming and familiar shape of a worn paperback book.

"They had books in 1903," Ray said, craning dangerously over the rickety countertop to get a better look at the thing.  His statement sounded suspiciously like a question.

"While it's true that the paperback book dates back to the early 1800s," Nate said thoughtfully, "this one was published in 1994.  Also, there's an inscription:  'Henry, you are the verse in my heart, happy anniversary - Nora.'  Dated 2004."

He held up the book to show them the title page.  A small white envelope slipped from between pages yellowed and warped with exposure to the elements, and fell to the floor with a small clatter.

Ray instantly reared back from his slouch, the foundations of the bar cracking under the force of his recoil.  "Is that the trap?!"

"Could be," Sara replied, cavalier.  She grinned up at Nate.  "Why d'you think I palmed it off on the iron man?"

"I see how it is," Nate grumbled, steeling up his arm to the elbow and stooping to retrieve the fallen item.  "I thought you brought me along for my wealth of experience as a time detective, but really I'm just here to do all your heavy lifting."

"Literally!" Ray chimed in, his self-appreciative chuckle a little on the nervous side as he warily ogled what was most certainly a trap.

Said trap, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a plain white envelope, the unsealed flap tucked in along one of the narrow ends.  "That's weird," Nate mused, turning it over in his metallic hand, "It's addressed to Barry."

The crew exchanged concerned looks.  "That would seem to weigh in on the side of trap, wouldn't you think?"  Stein proposed.  If he edged a little closer to the bright gap of the doorway, nobody blamed him.

"Wait a minute," Ray said, "Are we one hundred percent sure that Thawne left this?  Wasn't Nora Barry's mom's name?"

"Nora and Henry Allen," Stein said thoughtfully, "Why yes, yes those were their names.  May I see the book, Nathaniel?"

Nate passed the book over the counter to Ray, who leaned the remaining distance to pass the book obligingly to Stein.  Then Nate thumbed open the envelope and dropped its contents into his palm.  The futuristic round data chip plinked into his hand, metal on metal.

Sara passed the chronograph over the chip, and the device pinged a series of assertive tones.  "Unless Mrs. Allen had a secret supplier of twenty-second century tech, my money's still on Thawne."

"So, what does this mean?" Ray asked the room.  "Barry -- Barry-Prime from the timeline where his mom lived -- brings the book back in time to here, and Thawne-Prime brings this tech back in time and ... leaves it in the book for Barry to find?"

Sara narrowed her eyes, sweeping her considering gaze between Stein's book and Nate's chip.  "Yeah, I'm not seeing the angle here, either."

"One man's aberration is another man's book of poems," Stein said absently, flicking through the pages.

Nate cleared his throat, an obvious attention-grabber.  When he proceeded to say nothing at all, Sara humored him with a short, "Yes, Nate?"

"Well," he started, slowly, uncommonly shy or characteristically dramatic, "I have to admit I've seen this sort of thing before."

Ray and Sara exchanged a quick look.  She crossed her arms, squaring her stance.  "Out with it."

"You know the way I found you guys in 1942, right?  I collected data on the past and noticed the inconsistencies -- inconsistencies exactly like finding a book out in the middle of nowhere, a hundred years before it's been published.  Some of those inconsistencies led me to the Legends; but the rest of them, well, let's just say they painted a very specific picture of two time-travelers meeting up in various out of the way places.  Places and times where they wouldn't draw attention to themselves."

"Two time-travelers, you mean two speedsters."  

"Guess so."

"Barry- and Thawne-Prime."

"Looks like."

"And you didn't feel like sharing this information because…?"  Sara flipped a hand outward in an irritated shrug.

Again Nate hemmed and hawed, stubbing the toe of his boot into a warped knot in one of the floor boards.  "Ok, well I wasn't sure, until just now, that the evidence pointed to the Flash and the Reverse-Flash.  And anyway, I always assumed these things were left by a man and a woman, on account of said evidence only ever showing up in these secret ... love nests."

Sara snorted.  "Some love nest."

Nate waved her off.  "Sure, it's nothing but a derelict ghost town now, but that book wasn't left here yesterday.  Picture it, I don't know, six months ago, the dead of winter, a remote little hideaway where they won't be disturbed.  There's a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace, for crying out loud.  It's not hard to imagine that a little poetry would go a long way in that scenario."

"Are you saying that the Flash and the Reverse-Flash...."  Ray trailed off, groping visibly for a phrase he was comfortable using in public, not finding it, and eventually settling on the all but unintelligible pantomime of tapping the tips of his two pointer fingers together.

Sara's eyes narrowed to a bright, considering gleam, her leer one of quiet astonishment as she beheld the miracle that was Dr. Raymond Palmer, actual adult.

"I'm not saying anything, but it all makes sense now that I've met Thawne in person.  You can't tell me you haven't seen those leather pants of his," Nate intoned, ducking his chin to look knowingly up at Ray.  He swung this look around on Sara to get her confirmation.  "Sara, back me up on this."

Sara's leer deepened, even as she wagged a finger at him.  "Normally I wouldn't condone your use of stereotypes, but I feel you on this one.  Our boy rocks his leather and doesn't care who knows it."

As this strand of conversation spun on, Stein looked more and more like he was going to be sick.  Finally he snapped the book shut as if continued exposure to it might reveal something too risque for his sensibilities, and rounded on the other three with a stuffy flap of his handkerchief.

"Please let me remind you that this is Eobard Thawne we're talking about, none other than the Reverse-Flash and founder of the so-called Legion of Doom -- a man who has ruined countless innocent lives and will continue to do so unless we stop him from getting the Spear of Destiny.  Forgive me if I don't feel like gossiping about his romantic inclinations while reality itself hangs in the balance."  He balled up his handkerchief and returned it roughly to his pocket as if to make a point.

The others cast sheepish looks at one another.  Sara tucked the chronograph into a back pocket and held out a hand to take the envelope and chip back from Nate.  He powered down and handed it over without a word.

"Martin's right," Sara said, securing the chip in a jacket pocket.  "Whatever happened in the other timeline, all that's out of our hands.  Let's get back to the Waverider so we can deliver this to Future-Cisco and then get back to stopping our Thawne from messing up our timestream."

IN MEDIA RES

PART II.a

Central City, Missouri - 2024 - SPRING

So this is what the collapse of reality itself looks like.

He can feel it in the periphery of his senses, this supernatural gravitational force that softly yet insistently tugs at his bones to join it in infinite oblivion.  Running back towards it, back to 2024 at Barry's urgent summons, it had loomed ahead of him like a cold dark spot in the Speed Force, foreboding with all the the grim surety of a brick wall and cut brakes.  He hasn't even seen it yet but he doesn't particularly feel the need to; he's well aware of the old adage about staring into the abyss.  He's afraid he'll recognize himself in the void.

It hangs up there over his head like a guillotine blade, silent, impossible, unforgiving:  Eobard Thawne's long overdue date with destiny.  

The pinprick singularity, a rapidly unraveling rip in the fabric of space-time, is up there, too.

The midnight sky he can see as he dashes through ground zero, downtown Central City, is a vicious blood red.  No stars, no moon, just the blood of a thousand trillion lifetimes being syphoned out of the past-present-future and funneling into the bottomless nothingness like so much dirty water circling the drain.

For some reason, Eobard can't stop laughing.

That is, until Barry banks up the side of a pedestrian overpass to circle back around and punch him in the face at mach speeds.

(In a dim, semi-rational corner of his brain, he realizes how this will look to the history books.  The Reverse-Flash chasing the city's very own Scarlet Speedster until something gives and the two hated rivals come to blows.  He can see the headline now -- but maybe that's because it's a headline he's had seared into his memory for the last thirty-five years.)

"You do have quite the fondness for a dramatic gesture," he drawls through his bloodied smile once he's extracted himself from the overturned tanker truck which had so kindly broken his fall.  "It's one of the things I've always loved about you."

Barry stalks forward and shoves a hand down to help him up.  Eobard readily takes him up on the offer, clasping Barry's arm in his own and flowing to his feet to stand toe to toe and eye to eye with the Flash.  He won't have many chances to get this close again.  He's out of time.  They're out of time.

"This is not a joke, Eobard," Barry growls.  He tries to pull his arm away but Eobard just comes with it, silent, intent, smiling blood.  Barry has to tear out of his grip, leaving them both reeling.

"What about this is funny to you?"  Oh no, Barry's mad.  He's got lightning in his eyes.  Bits of the city are crumbling around them, distorted into nothingness as the periphery of the singularity's event horizon laps outwards in rolling waves.  Like footprints washed away in the surf.  Like they never even existed.

The humor drops off Eobard's face in a heartbeat.  The blood is rushing in his ears and he swears he can hear the nothing-nowhen drone of the void calling to him, a voice that wicks under his skin like oil, urging him up and up into the gentle cradling arms of perdition.

"Funny?  I can't think of anything about this that's funny."  He can't even hear himself.  He doesn't know if he's whispering or if he's shouting.  There's lightning in Barry's eyes and his world is falling down around him and there's a speck of pure non-existence growing in the sky that wants to invite him home.  If he can't laugh about it, he's not sure what he could do to relieve the suffocating pressure of the situation.

Barry's lightning arcs from his eyes into the air around him as he flickers forward a step to grab a fistful of Eobard's suit front.  He rocks him, attempting to shake Eobard out of his nihilistic trance.  "I get it, you're angry.  You think I'm not?  I'm leaving everything behind -- Iris, my family, the city, my entire life.  Iris," he repeats, his head and shoulders drooping.  The fist on Eobard's suit clenches tight.  "I didn't say goodbye."

Eobard wraps a hand around Barry's wrist, clinging to this lifeline while it lasts.  He should shove Barry off, should face fate with dignity and tell him that he's right, tell him that what the universe is asking of them is righteous.  Noble, even.  He should lie and tell Barry that whatever happens, they didn't have a choice.  That their sacrifice will mean something -- everything, even -- to those left to carry on in their wake.

Righteous?  Noble?  No, he's Eobard Thawne.  He's the Reverse-Flash.  If this is actually the promised end to life as he knows it, then he's going to claw every last shred of Barry Allen out of this existence until all that remains is a hollowed-out husk -- that's all a life without Barry Allen has ever been, or could ever hope to be.

The rumble of existential chaos spins down to a muted background whine as he holds on to Barry.  This time, when he speaks, it feels as though his words travel through rarified air, crystal clear and sharp as daggers.

"We don't have to go through with it," he whispers.  It's a useless, selfish plea.  He can't imagine a world where the Flash forsakes his heroic duties, but Eobard's never held himself to such limitations.  He can freely give voice to blasphemous thoughts.  Still, he doesn't want to see Barry's inevitable look of betrayal, so he pulls the Flash close and breathes words of cosmic treason into his ear.

"There's nothing keeping us from staying right here," he's saying, and he suddenly feels a crazed conviction in the errant thought.  A punch-drunk fervor to damn the world a million times over in exchange for a few more moments with Barry.  "Just the two of us.  Nobody will know once it's all over."

Crushed tight against him, Barry shudders.  Eobard wonders -- horrified -- if Barry could possibly consider taking him up on the offer.

It takes an unnaturally long moment to realize that Barry's shaking his head against his shoulder.  Then, before he can react, Barry's shoving violently out of the cage of Eobard's arms.  Electricity still dances along the long lithe line of him, but his stormy eyes are dulled now by impotent remorse and fury.  Eobard suspects he mirrors the emotion, dutifully playing his assigned role as Barry's foil until the very end.

The full weight of this unfolding moment lays squarely on Eobard's shoulders.  He looks up, craning his head back slowly as though the action costs him more than he's willing to give.  Finally, achingly, he acknowledges the infinite pitmark in the blood-red sky that winks down on him like a inverse star.

"I've been such a fool," Eobard admits to the End of All Things, "thinking I could make deals with destiny."

He tears his eyes away from the singularity and drops his gaze to Barry.  His Barry.  "I should have known I would never be able to pay this debt, when it came time to settle."

"Thawne," Barry warns, and it's exactly the right move in all the wrong ways.  "Do what you have to do."

Eobard rolls his neck, almost a drunken, unhinged maneuver.  In answer, whether he's aware of it or not, Barry starts shifting his weight from one foot to the other.  Eobard thinks it's like being thrown into a long-forgotten dream.  He knows, as he has always known, exactly how this ends.

"Maybe I will," Eobard tells him, his eyes sharp and his smile wicked.  "Maybe I won't.  Maybe thinking you could trust me all these years was your greatest mistake, Barry Allen."

Too quick for the average observer to catch, the Flash and the Reverse-Flash fly for each other's throats.

This is probably right, Eobard thinks.  This is probably poetic.  Ending this in violence, same as it began all those years from now.  As it still must begin so many years ago.

This old dance is nostalgic, nothing like the show fights they'd endeavored to stage whenever Eobard came to town, a playful attempt to keep the wool over the eyes of history.  The steps are familiar and bittersweet, each bloodthirsty blow a reminder to each of what it was like to live back-to-front with his rival, trembling in the other's shadow until the day the tables turned and their roles reversed.  Only this time they're both meeting at the peak of their ability, with unfathomable reservoirs of skill and endurance, and both with everything left to lose.

Eobard feels each passing second slip away from him forever as he forces himself on the Flash in the only way he's ever felt entitled to, with fists and lightning and an unspoken understanding that he fills a niche in Barry's life that no one else in all of the multiverse ever could.  His old tired anger at his scripted destiny flares up hotter and hotter as he confirms with a leaden certainty that the reverse has also always been true.

He'd always known this day would come.  Only, he had naively envisioned his part in doomsday as limited to walking Barry to the door and waving him off with a tear in his eye.  (And somehow this whole time he thought that scenario would be simple, easy?  That he could just walk away from Barry Allen?)  How hilariously mistaken he's been to think that fate would ever release him from its grand production.  The role might have changed, but the script remains the same.

Be Barry Allen's undertaker, the multiverse keeps insisting, be the tool of the Flash's final and complete destruction.

A world without the Flash -- unimaginable.  Incomprehensible.  He'd rather no world at all.

Hadn't he always wanted the choice?  Wasn't his deepest desire to choose the course of his own destiny?  To believe, even for a second, that Eobard Thawne lived for himself?

Silently, the singularity whispers the kind of sweet nothings that reverberate through the darkest chambers of his heart.  It would be so easy to refuse his marching orders, to play the mutineer for the first and last time, and choose to let the eternal and infinite swallow him up.  The alternative --

Eobard realizes he's stopped running.  Under the all-seeing eye of absolute undoing, he's got the Flash hoisted by the throat against the plate glass window of an evacuated Jitters.  The brick wall on either side, the lamp post on the corner, the boxed shrubberies in the corner of his vision are all wavering in and out of existence, tenuous as a candle about to burn itself out.  It won't be long now.

Barry looks down on him with unreadable eyes.  He reaches -- not to pry Eobard off, not to claw for his release -- a gloved hand coming to rest tenderly on the exposed skin of Eobard's cheek below the cowl.

"Please," Barry gasps, "Eobard, please."

Eobard curses everyone and everything he's ever known, but none more fiercely than Barry Allen.  He sets Barry back on his feet, every fiber of him livid as he submits unwillingly to this angelic avatar of virtue.  He never had a choice.  Not with Barry Allen.

And now his time has run out.

"See if you can keep up, Flash," he sneers, wild and heartsick and furious beyond reason.  He doesn't wait to see if Barry's fit to follow as he tears his own hole in space and time with the sole purpose of murdering the mother of the man he loves, the result of which will be his personally authoring an infinite number of destinies; excluding, of course, his own.

PART II.b

Central City, Missouri - 2024 - SPRING

"Hit it, H.R."

Cisco rolled his shoulders, shaking out his arms and legs, the segmented lenses of his shades lighting up in preparation of the temporal shift.

H.R., stationed at the back of the breach room at one of the consoles, winked at an un-cowled Barry, who stood observing with his arms crossed at the bottom of the steps.  "I'm hitting it.  If you know what I mean."

Barry obliged him with a wan smile and a brief lift of his eyebrows.  Cisco froze and then looked stiffly over shoulder, his eyes hidden from view but the line of his mouth more than adequately expressing his irritation.  "H.R., mi amado, I'm about to vibe across timelines in a way that's going to tear a hole in the multiverse -- and that's only if we're lucky.  A little focus, please?"

"Of course, of course," H.R. said, ducking his head apologetically.  "I am also hitting the switch.  I'm hitting the switch now."  He waved his drumstick with a imperious flourish.  "Once more, into the breach!"

"Thank y--ou," Cisco started to say.  Before he could finish voicing the thought, reality warped itself around him and he scrabbled to wring the correct chronographic coordinates from the totem he held.  He sank in a stomach-turning freefall of infinite potentiality until the psychic line he cast out into the cosmic roil caught something solid and pulled tight.

With an effect like an elastic band stretched to its limits and then being violently released, Cisco snapped out of the temporal corridor back into real fluid time.  Back into S.T.A.R. Labs, too, the homey Cortex by the look of it, although the Team Flash he found there was the bizarro kind of familiar.

Dr. Wells threw a handful of papers over his head and swore fluently at Cisco's unannounced arrival.  Barry took his appearing out of thin air with a modicum of grace, although he had his cowl back on in a flash.  They stared at him from behind the Cortex's main computer bay.

"Thanks but no thanks, H.R.," Cisco grumbled to himself.  He slid the shades off his face, trying to appear as non-threatening as possible off the tail end of that entrance.

"Mr. Ramon?" this Barry asked, recognizing the face at least, tentative relief coloring his surprise.  

Dr. Wells had a hand to his forehead, sharp eyes behind his glasses darting all over Cisco's vibing gear, probing for answers without deigning to ask the questions.  "My first guess would be that Ramon Industries is breaking new ground in teleportation technology."

Barry -- or, more appropriately, the Flash -- wheeled on Dr. Wells, "What, for real?"

Dr. Wells didn't hear the question.  "But something tells me our visitor has nothing to do with Ramon Industries."  His steely blue eyes hadn't flickered off Cisco for even a second.

Cisco smiled, a little tightly.  "Sharp as ever, Dr. Wells.  Let me get this out of the way because I have a lot of crazy stuff to explain and not a lot of time to do it -- I know that you're Barry Allen, because in my timeline Barry Allen aka the Flash is my best friend.  And also, yeah, I'm Cisco Ramon from another timeline.  A divergent timeline that I need your help to create."

Upon hearing this last bit, Dr. Wells removed his studious gaze from Cisco and turned it on the Flash.  Something unspoken passed between them, and Barry carefully pushed his cowl off his face.

"This is about the singularity, then," Barry guessed, visible tension gathering in his shoulders as he crossed his arms.

Cisco sighed in relief.  "Okay, so you've been tracking the singularity.  Great, but, you know, also not great.  Just leaves me less to explain."

"You still have plenty to explain, Mr. Ramon," Dr. Wells said shortly.  He sifted some of the disarrayed papers on the desk and waved a handful at Cisco with deliberate meaning.  "By what means could you possibly have been able to detect a singularity from an alternate timeline, and why, for instance, does it fall to us to create said timeline?"

Raising his hands -- one holding his shades and the other the totem he'd used to vibe this timeline -- Cisco was about to answer to the best of his ability when Barry pointed and snapped, "That book, where did you get it?"

All eyes went to the unassuming and fairly decrepit paperback.  Cisco's brow furrowed.  "Is that the question you want me to answer first?"

Dr. Wells looked quietly over at Barry, as if waiting for his confirmation.  After a moment Barry dropped his arm and shook his head once.

"Proceed as you wish, Mr. Ramon," Dr. Wells allowed.  He kept his watchful eye on Barry for a heartbeat longer, only directing his attention back to Cisco when he began to speak.

"It's like this," Cisco started, tucking a stem of his shades behind his jacket collar, "in the year 2000, Eobard Thawne aka the Reverse-Flash, murdered Nora Allen."

Barry barked an overly loud scoff.  "Never happened.  Never gonna happen."

"I hear you on that, I really do, Barry, and I'm sorry.  You have no idea how sorry I am to have to lay this on you."  Cisco's tone rode a line between sympathetic and persuasive, moving increasingly towards the latter as he went on.  "But for the sake of reality itself -- both our realities -- it has to happen.  You and the Reverse-Flash have a huge street fight tonight.  It ends with him going back in time to kill you, but you stop him, so he kills your mother instead.  This is fact in the timeline I'm from."

"Eobard would never--" Barry cut himself off, biting back the rest of the thought.  He looked to Dr. Wells for assistance.  "That's crazy, right?"

Dr. Wells' voice was low, somber.  "Hear the man out, Barry.  We know the cause of the singularity is a temporal paradox; this Mr. Ramon may very well be presenting us with the resolution we have heretofore been unable to identify."

Cisco looked around the Cortex and spotted the glass diagram board.  "Some things never change," he muttered.  Addressing Dr. Wells, he pointed to it.  "Do you mind if I…?"

Dr. Wells waved a hand.  "Be my guest."

Barry had an agitated hand worrying his jaw, and Dr. Wells put a calming hand on his shoulder as they watched Cisco squeak a cap off one of the pens and sketched a horizontal line that stretched from one end of the board to the other.

"You know the theory of temporal grafting, right?"  Cisco looked over his shoulder to see Dr. Wells' small nod.  "Okay.  So we know that if you travel in time and spend a significant duration in another era, then you eventually merge with the you that already existed in that timeline.  If this graft doesn't take, then you experience the multiverse's immune system response, which manifests as time quakes and time wraiths and so on."

He exemplified the act of traveling back in time and altering it by drawing a loop that lifted off the right-hand side of the line, connecting it to a point at the far left and continuing through in a slant that forked down and away from the trunk line

"Antibodies that reject and attack the grafted individual," Dr. Wells agreed.  "You've had some luck avoiding those, haven't you, Barry?"

Barry just ground his teeth and threw a hand angrily at Cisco.  "So the singularity is the next level defense response from the multiverse.  Now you're trying to tell me that screwing up the timeline -- killing my mom -- is going to make it go away?"

Cisco dipped his head placatingly, his hands held up to bid them to wait a moment longer.  "That's where it gets tricky, I understand.  But creating a timeline where your mom is killed when you're a little kid isn't screwing anything up.  It has to happen.  It has happened.  I couldn't be here if it didn't.  But I'm here, aren't I?"

Barry balled his fists on his hips, shaking his head with a barely concealed sound of disdain.  He half turned away, unready and unwilling to believe any of this.

"If you'll allow me to make a supposition," Dr. Wells said, letting Barry step out of the conversation for the time being, "if this singularity we've detected is the collapse of all realities due to a temporal paradox, then your belief is the murder of Nora Allen in 2000 by Eobard Thawne from this timeline's future will close the open loop, averting the paradox.  Now, granting that, how did you conclude that the relevant parties originated in this particular timeline?"

"Ah, that," Cisco started, "It's all very timey-wimey, if I'm being honest."

Barry shot him a dirty look at his use of less than scientific language, but Cisco quickly continued.  "It has to do with the flat timeline theory, which I was getting to," he explained.

Dr. Wells winced, a faint deepening of his crow's feet.  "I'm afraid you'll have to enlighten me, Mr. Ramon."

"Okay, so if you think of each separate timeline as a strict linear progression of cause and effect," Cisco gestured with the pen along the length of the trunk and then again along the branching line, "then you run into some wild scenarios in the case that these discrete cause-effect strings start forming closed loops between timelines."

He pointed to the fork off the main line.  "This is Eobard Thawne from your future traveling to both our pasts and directly creating this divergent timeline.  Now this is today--" he drew a vertical line that cut down through both the trunk and the branch, "--April 24th, 2024."

On each of the points where the vertical line intersected the other two, he scribbled a messy dot.

"And this is the singularity.  One in your timeline, one in mine."

"Very artistic, Mr. Ramon," Dr. Wells interjected, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Cisco took it in stride.  "So now if we look at the cause-effect structure of the alpha timeline and the divergent beta timeline, we can say that this conversation we're having right now is Event A, Eobard Thawne in the year 2000 is Event B, and the singularity in my timeline is Event C."  He wrote the letters in the appropriate places before capping the pen.  

"To answer your question, getting from C to A involved a little time excavation to dig up this book, which had Thawne's temporal fingerprints all over it, and a little of my own personal mojo to trace its origin back to your timeline.  But that's all academic.  Now get ready for this."

Cisco held the pen against the board, along the vertical line between that ran between A and C, and carefully swung the bottom of the glass up so that the pen rested on the flat surface with only its bright red cap visible.

"In the flat timeline theory," he said, tracing the bottom frame of the board that faced the room, "this is your timeline.  A view of time-space where the only thing that matters is the linear cause-effect structure; any self-contained loops are compressed into 1-D."  

Cisco motioned to the pen's red cap.  "And this is your singularity.  Our singularity, I should say.  Just one, located at the point where the consolidated timeline reaches lethal levels of quantum flux due to the unclosed loop."  

"The result of the unstable paradox," Dr. Wells hummed appreciatively.  "Each one of these events cause the next, A causing B, and B causing C, and C causing A.  If any of these links break, the whole chain breaks."

"And you get a temporal paradox with a side of reality-dissolving singularity," Cisco finished with a shrug.

"And you brought the singularity from your timeline, didn't you?"  Dr. Wells' eyes flashed with serene accusation behind his glasses, his hands folded carefully under his chin.  "You ruptured time-space just by coming here."

"I had to," Cisco said simply.  "The singularity in your timeline is a point of fact.  They'll call it the Crisis.  It has happened, and it will always happen and it's happening right now."

Dr. Wells only nodded, crunching the numbers and finding them sound.  "And the only way to keep both our realities from collapsing like a house of cards is for Eobard Thawne to run back to the year 2000 and murder Nora Allen.  If he's not already on his way, you can bring him here, can't you, Barry?"

Barry dropped a startled look on Dr. Wells, who met it evenly.  "Why are you talking about this like it's a done deal?  Don't we need to, you know, verify this claim?"

Cisco stepped towards him, a hand outstretched to placate, to plead.  "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry that I dropped this on you out of the blue, but you don't have a lot of time.  As we speak, both our timelines are in a state of elevated quantum flux that will continue to wreck space-time until the loop is closed.  It's going to be bad.  The city's going to take a hit.  You're going to need to call for backup, because on top of evacuating the city, you're going to have your hands full with Thawne."

Dr. Wells arched one eyebrow.  "You're right about that, Mr. Ramon.  I'll send a blast out to the JLA to let them know what we're in for."

Barry's eyes went to the ceiling, and he chewed his lip while shaking his head in tiny motions as he remained unconvinced.  

"I have a feeling the Green Arrow, Hawkgirl, and the Atom are free," Cisco suggested helpfully.  "But again, I hate to sound like a broken record, you need to act fast.  We all have until midnight tonight, then it's game over, man."

"I just -- I need a second."  Barry threw a dark look in Cisco's direction, not even seeing him, and stalked from the room.

Dr. Wells, already tapping away at the screens in front of him, glanced up at Cisco and then back down at his work.  "Forgive him.  He knows what he has to do, and he'll do it.  You'll agree that this is an upsetting turn of events for him."

Cisco chewed the inside of his cheek, digging a flashdrive from his pocket.  He wagged it in his fingertips for a second, then reached over the back of the console desk to drop it near Dr. Wells' keyboard.

"It gets worse," Cisco told him, his voice flat.  "Barry -- the Flash -- doesn't come back from this.  Not to your timeline, anyway."

Dr. Wells met his solemn gaze, slowly straightening up from the desk and crossing his arms over his chest.  "I'm sure you're aware that you are asking a lot of us, Mr. Ramon."

Cisco broke the stare first, dropping his eyes, guilty.  He motioned to the flashdrive.  "There's more information on that.  Everything about the Crisis we could transfer from Thawne's twenty-second century copy of Gideon."

"Evidence that the Thawne with whom we're familiar did indeed wind up in your timeline," Dr. Wells mused.  He put a hand over the flashdrive, slipping it off the desk and into his pocket.  "I'll make sure Barry sees it.  It won't make it any easier for him, but it may speed things along."

"Thank you, Dr. Wells.  This won't … mean anything to you, but I've always wanted to thank you in person."  Cisco shrugged, self-conscious, and a crooked smile wound its way across his face.  He lifted a hand over the back of the desk, offering it to Dr. Wells.

Dr. Wells' sharp blue eyes fixed on it for a long second.  Then he raised his own hand and firmly accepted Cisco's handshake.  "Goodbye, Mr. Ramon."

Cisco nodded, letting go of Dr. Wells' hand and the alpha timeline with the same motion.  The bright lights of the Cortex swirled away into the chaotic always-everywhere of the time stream, and then Cisco was staggering back into the cavern of the breach room.

"Cisco, how was it, did you make it?"  This was Barry, his best friend, reaching out with a steadying hand on his shoulder.

Blinking hard at the transition, Cisco allowed himself to be lead a few steps towards the console platform.  His bearings returned after a handful of moments, and he very nearly leapt away from Barry and up the steps, careening around the railing to crash into the computers there.

"Alpha Barry wasn't too thrilled by the news," he said, glancing down at Barry with something like apology in his eyes, "But Dr. Wells was pretty certain that they'd be able to grab Thawne and prevent the singularity."

"That's great -- Cisco, you did it," Barry clapped his hands to the back of his head, relieved and impressed.

Cisco kept working away at the computer, focus glued to the information scrolling down the screens.  "Checking on the state of our singularity now.  But yeah.  I think we did it."

H.R., slouching over the other console, scratched his temple with the end of his drumstick.  "You met Dr. Wells, then."

"Yep."

"The real Dr. Harrison Wells from this Earth."

"A version of Earth-1 Harrison Wells, yes."

"I bet he isn't as much as a silver fox as me," H.R. supposed, frowning.

Cisco's hands froze in midair over the keyboard, and he cocked his head, as if considering.  "Don't be too sure of that, he had this kind of sweater-vest headmaster vibe that was working for him.  You know, not too soft, not too stern."

H.R. stepped away from his console, squaring his shoulders like a man about to face a firing squad.

"I could -- I could wear a sweater-vest."

Barry hid his grin behind his hand, and Cisco didn't even look up.  "Uh-huh.  You look like you stole your entire wardrobe from a hipster indie band roadie that's half your age.  Yahtzee, baby, quantum flux has reached negligible levels; not getting any readings on the singularity.  It's almost like it never happened, which, in a sense, it didn't."

Cisco dropped his head back with a wild shout that reverberated around the breach room.  "I can't believe that actually worked.  I need an aspirin and a handle of tequila."

"You did good, Cisco," Barry applauded.  He started to come up the steps but he paused with his hand on the rail.  A heartbeat, and then, behind him, the familiar blue whirlpool of causality swirled open over the breach pad.  

"I had to go and jinx it, didn't I," Cisco groaned.

Barry turned back towards the breach, holding up a cautioning hand.  "I think --" he said, haltingly, "I'm coming."

H.R.'s jaw dropped.  He furiously stabbed his drumstick towards Barry and glared across at Cisco.  "How come he gets to make rude jokes and I don't?"

His question was ignored.  Out from the wormhole came the Flash, weary and worn.  His suit was ripped and bloodied, smelling faintly of diesel and smoke.  His feet hit the floor and he stumbled, nearly going over if it weren't for Barry's quick blink forward to catch him.

"Hey, easy," Barry said, helping the Flash right himself.  "You did it, we got you."

The Flash looked at Barry, staring through him.  Then recognition visibly set in, and he pushed Barry off roughly.  "I didn't do anything," he spat.  "He did.  He really killed her."

"Yeah, yeah he did," Barry said, glancing back to Cisco and H.R. for backup.  They stared down at the two Barrys from the platform, stock still, utterly out of their depth.  Barry turned back to the Flash, his hands up to settle, to soothe.  "And I've had to live with that every day for the last twenty-four years.  But it's okay.  Really, it's okay.  He only did what he had to do."

The Flash waved off Barry's consoling reach, turning to pace around the empty space in front of the breach pad.  His hands went to his face, and the other three pretended not to see him wipe away his tears.  After a minute of this, the Flash turned searching eyes on the room, stopping at last on Cisco.

"Mr. Ramon--"

Two voices answered him:  "Yes?"  Cisco shot H.R. a dirty look.

"Please, call me Cisco.  Mr. Ramon is my husband."  He made a dismissive gesture towards the man in question.

"We don't hyphenate on my Earth," H.R. told the Flash, as if any explanation had been asked for or needed.

Cisco snapped his fingers several times to get H.R.'s attention.  "Sweetheart, how about you let the grown-ups talk now, alright?"

This trivial exchange washed on over the Flash, completely unheeded.  "Cisco," he said earnestly, stalking past Barry and up to the console platform, "The Reverse-Flash -- Eobard Thawne -- what happened to him, is he here?"

It was Cisco's turn to look to Barry for guidance.  At Barry's small helpless shrug, Cisco spread his hands and offered the Flash a reassuring smile.  "No worries there, my friend.  We took care of him ages ago."

A thunderstorm of emotion passed over the Flash's face.  "What do you mean?" he asked, his voice low and cold.

Again Cisco looked to Barry, a trifle started this time around.  "We … it's complicated because we didn't know who we were dealing with until it was too late.  But to make a long story short, we fought him, and we won."

Barry shuffled forward and put a foot on the bottom step, looking up at his alternate timeline doppelganger.  "He lost his speed in the Crisis so he built the particle accelerator and created me, the Flash, just so I could open a wormhole and send him back to the future."

The Flash ducked his head down and to the side, putting Barry in his peripheral vision without really looking at him.  "And you stopped him from going back?"

Barry rolled his shoulders, defensive and a little proud.  "He gave me a choice, he wanted me to choose between saving my mother or stopping him.  Obviously I had to stop him."

A heavy silence filled the breach room as the Flash processed this information.  "He's dead?"  A flat monotone question.

Cisco sucked both his lips in and let them go with a pop.  "Functionally, yes.  If you want to get specific, due to temporal grafting we were able to erase Eobard Thawne from this timeline entirely."

The Flash startled everyone present by attempting to put his fist through the console's steel desktop.  The force of it knocked the book, Cisco's alpha timeline totem, to the floor.  In the shocked silence that followed, the Flash calmly bent and retrieved it, thumbing the yellowed pages with infinite tenderness.

"I took his speed," the Flash said after a moment.  He didn't look up from the book he held.  "Most of it.  The second she died, the exact instant the divergent timeline was created, I felt myself start to merge with that version of me.  I didn't know if I would stay connected to the Speed Force long enough to make it out.  I took his speed, thinking he'd find another way back."

While Cisco and Barry exchanged another volley of nonverbal communicaes, H.R. raised his hand.  "Forgive me for interrupting, but I think I must be missing something.  I never met the guy, but I always understood that the Reverse-Flash was nasty business.  I'm H.R., by the way.  Originally Earth-19 Harrison Wells, although don't be alarmed if you don't see the resemblance.  Facial transmogrification and all that."

H.R. extended his hand to the Flash, who just looked at it dully without moving.

"You were wrong about him."  The Flash slowly lifted his eyes to look at H.R., Cisco, and finally Barry in turn.  "He played his part in the Crisis because I asked him to, and in return for saving the multiverse, he gets erased from it?"

In the uneasy silence that followed, only one man was brave enough to speak.

"I lobbied hard to call it the 'Alpha-Beta-Crisis' because then it spells A-B-C," H.R. said brightly.  "Nifty, right?  Like that alphabet soup you have here, gosh I love that soup; on my Earth all we had was Roman numeral soup -- can you say booooring."

Cisco shook his head, eyes locked on the floor.  "H.R., love of my life, shut your mouth before I divorce you again," he warned quietly.

H.R. just chuckled nervously.  "You're joking -- he's just joking.  What a jokester, my Francesco.  Really keen on his jokes, this one.  Always with the jokes!"

"Keep flappin' that trap and we'll see if I'm joking, won't we?"  When Cisco looked up at him, there was fire in his eyes.

H.R. paled.  He twiddled his drumstick and edged towards the exit.  "Why don't I just go grab us a couple of coffees?  You still a decaf man, A.B.A?  The first A stands for--"

"H.R.!"

In the wake of the echoes of Cisco's outburst dying down around them in the cavernous stillness of the breach room, H.R. effected his escape.  "Right, I'll let you unpack that one on your own time.  H.R. out."

Barry stirred, making to follow him.  "Nate was right," he said, bitterly, enigmatically, to Cisco as he passed the Flash on the way to the door.  "Nate was right all along."

Cisco was left alone with the grieving Flash, who stood there holding that book like a ghost of a man.  He cleared his throat.  "Look.  I don't know who Eobard Thawne was before he got here, other than what he told us about his rivalry with you.  But while he was here, lying to us every day, he did a lot of terrible things.  Hurt a lot of people.  I'm sorry if we got it wrong, but he didn't leave us a choice."

Very, very slowly, Barry lifted his head.

"Didn't he?"

A Last love,

proper in conclusion,

should snip the wings

forbidding further flight.

But I, now,

reft of that confusion,

am lifted up

and speeding toward the light.

Recovery - Maya Angelou

MAN OUT OF TIME

PART III.b

Central City, Missouri - 2015 - SPRING

Harrison Wells leaned back in his chair, slid his glasses back off his face, and became Eobard Thawne.

"While we're on the subject of confessions," he told the blank glassy lens of the holo-recorder, "I'll admit that sometimes I've wondered if you were ever real."

Eobard chewed over the admission, irritable, shifting in his chair like he might stand up and turn the recorder off.  He looked down at the glasses in his hands, and when he looked up, there was something rueful twisting in his lips, some dark humor glinting in his borrowed eyes.  He leaned forward, towards the lens.

"There was one--" here he stopped for a barking laugh, little more than a scoff, one elbow on the table and Wells' glasses dangling from his fingers, "--one truly chilling moment I remember, just a few years back, just after construction of the pipeline had broken ground.  The days -- and most, if not all, of the nights -- were bleeding together with the crush of meetings and inspections and deadlines and what have you; in the thick of it one would think that the place was operating on snap decisions and caffeine alone.  It wasn't, obviously.  A decade of carefully laid plans were being executed by the most proficient workforce money could buy, but I remember it felt like the whole thing could come spinning off the axle at any moment."

Eobard's grin threatened to bend towards nostalgic.  Catching it in time, he narrowed his eyes and tipped the scales of his expression in favor of bitter and away from sweet.

"Well.  One of these endlessly late nights I'm walking through the corridors, alone, and because there's a brief turnover of the crews working below, for a moment everything's silent.  A real, haunting silence.  Now me, I hardly notice.  I've got a hundred and one issues rumbling in my head, you know, the sort of overwhelming minutia that keeps the average industrialist up at night.  Nothing new there, to be honest," he shrugs, "But here I am, Dr. Harrison Wells, completely lost in the business of setting up S.T.A.R Labs, and that's when it hits me."

Eobard settled evenly on his elbows, shoulders hunched, staring down at the plastic frames he held.  Positioning these in view of the lens, he shook his head.  His voice, when he continued, held an anger that ran quiet and deep like the ocean.

"In that moment, I am Dr. Harrison Wells.  I am the inspired mind responsible for all this -- for everything S.T.A.R Labs could and will be, I, Dr. Harrison Wells, will be recognized and held responsible.  I hadn't noticed when it had become such a natural and effortless feeling to be wearing this man's name and to be standing in his place, forging his legacy.  So natural, in fact, that I had to stop and seriously consider the possibility that Eobard Thawne didn't exist."

He set the glasses on the table with infinite care, looking as though all he wanted in the world was to smash them into splinters with his fists.

Eobard looked back up, staring dead at the lens, and tersely wet his lips.  "And if he didn't exist, what guarantee did I have of your being real?"

He exhaled, another scornful almost-laugh, devoid of anything approaching humor.  He stared into the lens for a long stretch, unblinking.  Then he clicked his tongue and sat back in his chair again.

"Having come to the conclusion that none of this would mean a damn thing if you weren't out there, I soldiered on.  Every day since our last … meeting, I have done, as you so rightly insisted, what I had to do.  Every day spent working towards …."  Here Eobard shook his head with his fingers pressed to his lips, musing for a thought that either wouldn't come or he couldn't voice.  

He left that sentence unfinished, moving his hand up to scrub his forehead and eyes.  Resetting his train of thought.

"I am a man out of time, Barry," he told the middle distance to the left of the recorder, somewhere off to his right.  "In every delicate and calculated nuance of the phrase.  I am out of time."

Eobard swung his head back around to fix the lens with a half-manic grin, his shoulders twitching with jumpy shrug that was echoed in the lift of his brows.  

"'So what?' I suppose.  I was never deluded enough to believe this story had a happy ending.  Not any story that involves you and me.  Not ours."

He shook his head, the mania hardening into a grim sobriety.  "Our narrative is built on spite and is written in blood and there can be no plausible ending where both you and I find the salvation promised to all good and faithful servants.  There is no clockwork deus ex machina waiting to swoop down from the wings and deliver us from our tragedy.  That's not the kind of story we are, and I've accepted that.  I've known from the start that there was no looking you in the eye when all was said and done.  I wouldn't be recording this if I didn't know, for a fact, that this is the only chance I have to…."

Eobard grimaced, a thinning of the lips and a deepening of the crow's feet at the sides of his eyes.  Maybe Harrison Wells was a man who could apologize.  This man was not Harrison Wells.

"Maybe I got ahead of myself.  Clearly, if you're watching this, then I managed to get myself killed."  He paused to let this sink in, an ironic smile directed at the lens.  "I can't be too upset about it, because if you're watching this, then I also managed to close the last loop in making this message available to you.  Playing Russian Roulette against the multiverse is a thrilling prospect, I assure you."  He winked while saying this.

"In any case, since this is a message from a dead man, I want to ask you not to blame these people for what they've done.  In this reality it's not too egotistical to say that each one of them is a masterpiece sculpted by yours truly, so in the end, if they were able to outwit me and orchestrate my death, then the appropriate response should be pride.  Forgive them, if you can.  And as for this timeline's Barry Allen, I wonder if you can forgive me."

Eobard spoke these last words directly to the lens, and as they faded from his lips he dropped his gaze as if to study the lab table a while.  At last he sighed and lifted his head to address the the invisible future recipient of the message.

"Barry Allen."  He said the name like a prayer, resonant with awe and holy fervor.  "Words alone cannot express the width and depth of the many varied sentiments I carry for you.  I face my destiny with the assumption that my actions have been eloquent enough."

His gaze went soft, turned inward, focused on something he couldn't share with the lens.  The flicker of a real smile danced across his face, there and gone in a heartbeat, easy to miss.  "See you around, Flash.  When the time is right, I'll be there."  

Eobard Thawne leaned forward and switched the recording off.

The events that unfolded before the end went more or less according to plan.

First, the truth about Harrison Wells was uncovered (exhumed might be a better word, given the circumstances), exposing Eobard as the charlatan he had been since the inception of this timeline.  He was ready for this.  He had more than a few trump cards hidden up his sleeve.  Fifteen years of preparation and a genius intellect weren't so easily bested.

"Then face me now!" an impotent Barry shouted, just a voice in his ear, all bark and no bite.

"Oh," Eobard breathed, "We will face each other again, I promise you.  Soon.  Very, very soon."  Whether he addressed a ghost or a what-if or a never-was, or even the wounded Barry Allen to whom he currently spoke, he couldn't be certain.

Second, Eobard collected his insurance, stealing Eddie Thawne away until the final key to restoring the particle accelerator could be completed.  It didn't surprise him that Team Flash took their sweet time mounting a rescue for this relative (that's a pun) waste of space, but then again they were preoccupied with monkeying around and booking rogue international flights.

"I'm impressed you went to such great lengths to keep those people from harm.  Ever the hero, huh, Barry?"  The sentiment came out far less sarcastic than the situation required.

Barry didn't notice.  He stood there with his shoulders squared and his brow set, full indignant tantrum mode.  "You've hurt enough people."

"I know, you see me as the villain.  But Barry, if you were to look back -- look back carefully -- at everything I've done, every wheel I have set in motion, you would realize I have only done what I had to do.  Nothing more.  Nothing less."  Only what another Barry Allen, from another time and place, had asked him to do.  Not that he expected this Barry Allen to ever understand.

Then he was outgunned by a trio of kids who looked like they'd be more comfortable at a Halloween party than on a battlefield, and thrown into a dungeon of his own creation.  The proverbial key, he presumed, was thrown away.  It stung, the indignity of his capture, but imprisonment wasn't all bad; his request for Big Belly Burgers was respected for some reason, and even if he didn't have much room to stretch his legs, he'd had plenty of time as Harrison Wells to get used to that restless tingle.

Furthermore, Eobard had resumed his position of power, effortlessly continuing the manipulation of his team from the safety of his cell.  Caitlin Snow, Cisco Ramon.  Joe West.  Barry Allen.  Children unable to take care of themselves, craving his direction, his attention, even as they despised and distrusted him.  He was more than willing to cater to their bad habits.

Barry, of course, came to him armed with a lifetime of thorny questions, the answers to which would only drive the barbs deeper.  Eobard didn't mind watching his would-be-once-was rival buckle under the words Eobard had ready for him.  This, too, was all part of the plan.

"Why were we enemies?"

"It doesn't matter.  It doesn't matter -- anymore." Eobard spun some villainous lies, suited to the part.  The myth of the Flash-Reverse-Flash feud, as dictated by fate, had always been destined to outlive them both.  "I'm giving you a chance to undo all the evil I've done."

Then there was Joe, coming to reprise his performance of Bad Cop slash Overly Protective Father, having no idea that Eobard had already been subjected to a very similar lecture in another lifetime, albeit under a wholly different context.

"There are people you care about.  Isn't there."  The phrasing of the question was a formality, rhetorical almost, an answer unnecessary to confirm what Joe already knew.  Eobard wouldn't lie to him at this juncture anyway.  "In the future I mean.  I don't think you'd be this eager, go as far as you have, to get back to your time unless there were people there that you held dear.  As dear as I hold Barry, and Iris."

"I do."  Eobard wouldn't lie, but he felt free to omit.  This Joe, with his finely honed detective instincts, had hit the nail square on the head, although he could never have guessed the exact nature of Eobard's relationship with his daughter and son-in-law in that other life.  Probably for the best not to mention it now.

And Cisco.  Oh, Cisco, Cisco, Cisco.  

Cisco came, with anger and betrayal eating gaping holes in his own defenses, walls built against the boogeyman too cheaply and too late, just to confirm for Eobard that the future was as yet on the right track.  A to B to C to A, blood begetting blood and violence begetting violence, the Vicious Cycle in its purest form.

"Don't be afraid, Cisco.  A great and …. honorable… destiny awaits you now.  I only hope that as you're living your great adventure, that you remember who gave you that life, and that it was given out of love."

Soon he had them wrapped around his finger, working like the well oiled machine he had built them to be, propelling his plans headlong into their final stages.  There was a wormhole to create and a time sphere to construct.  There were choices to make, and Barry made them, as only Barry knew how -- with blistering spontaneity and a staggering minimum of forethought that made Eobard want to scream.

And that was as far as Eobard's plans took him, in this series of events.  A lifetime of work, fifteen years in the making, crumbled into dust because favorite son Barry Allen willed it to be so.  It was like Eobard had bet his entire fortune on black, and the House -- that two-faced siren called Destiny -- had spun the wheel and laughed when it landed on red.

In the end, there would be no grand homecoming for Eobard Thawne.  (Bummer.)

Finally, a stray coincidence beyond all reckoning, like the trivial and all-important flap of a butterfly's wing, and, incidentally, part of no one's plan whatsoever:  a choice made, unasked, by a nobody named Eddie Thawne.

Well.  That's how this iteration of cause-and-effect played out, anyway.  But you'd embarrass yourself in underestimating Eobard Thawne if you believed for a second that his plan ended along with him.

Beloved,

In what other lives or lands

Have I known your lips

Your Hands

Your Laughter brave

Irreverent.

Those sweet excesses that

I do adore.

What surety is there

That we will meet again,

On other worlds some

Future time undated.

I defy my body's haste.

Without the promise

Of one more sweet encounter

I will not deign to die.

Refusal - Maya Angelou

PART III.a

Central City, Missouri - 2025 - Winter

It's cold.

Cold enough to stop a speedster in his tracks?  The man jingling keys out of the pocket of his genuine leather overcoat wouldn't know.  He's not the right guy to ask.  Not anymore.

It's cold enough to make him impatient, at the very least.  He fumbles the key into the padlock on the second try, the frozen metal sticking, and the padlock arm springs open with a click.  He reclaims the key and hooks the open arm of the padlock on one of the links of the security gate that keeps the hoodlums from smashing the plate glass windows.  Pulling the loose end of the chain from the frame set into the wall, he checks his footing for ice before heaving the gate to one side with the shredding screech of metal on concrete.

Keys in hand again, he unlocks the door handle and the deadbolt above it.  He looks over his shoulder before depressing the latch and letting himself in -- the twilit street is grayscale with muddy asphalt and smog-stained piles of snow lumped up around the streetlights.  The frost-crusted sidewalks are empty and the motor traffic rumbles down roads more attractive than this one.

Maybe he suffers from a touch of paranoia, always watching his back for unseen agents spying from the shadows.  Then again, maybe he wants to be followed; maybe he's waiting for someone to catch up.

You could ask him which one it is, but he won't answer.  Nobody appears out of the evening gloom, anyhow, and he pushes his way on inside.  The door closes.  The neon signs in the windows sputter to life.  They depict the colorful logos of major beer brands, mostly.  Front and center, though, in a curving script that glows a vivid red, is the word "Joe's."

Inside the bar, the man occupies himself with the minutiae that comes with opening up shop.  He may not be the fastest man alive, but he gets through all this in time.  He is methodical and diligent, and a place like this affords him precious few distractions.

Whether it should be considered lucky or not, he isn't bothered by a single customer for most of the night.

He's finished organizing the display bottles behind the bar by relative opaqueness and is about to re-order them by label size when the annoying little bell over the door jingles brightly.  It's probably one of his greatest regrets, sticking with the period (contemporary, he reminds himself) theme for the bar.  But something had warned him that it wouldn't do any good to negotiate with fate; it certainly hadn't gone his way last time he had tried.

He turns towards the counter with a bottle of what happens to be a single malt whiskey in his hand, and his heart clambers up into his throat to see a blood-red windbreaker thrown carelessly over the bar.

The face it belongs to, though, leaves much to be desired.  Sandy-haired, round in the cheeks, a little soft when it comes to the chin.  Just some guy.  Just some guy with eyes that glow with a secret he obviously wants to share.

The cost of owning a bar would be the drunks, wouldn't it, he reminds himself.

The guy's voice matches the face, plain, unexciting, nothing to write home about.  "Been out of town a while," he says, like it's the funniest joke in the world.  "Last time I was here this was a coffee shop or something."

"Jitters, sure," he nods, setting the whiskey down on the lower counter on his side of the bar, "Place closed up after the Crisis, been empty ever since.  Landlady says she doesn't know whatever happened to the previous owners.  Leased it for a song."

"Lotta people went missing after the Crisis."  Red-windbreaker guy says.  His mouth does this half-hearted shrug which manages to be both infuriating and charming.  He gives the empty interior of the bar a lazy once-over.  "Business hasn't picked up, yet, huh?  How long you been open?"

The answer is a laugh, a single "Ha."  To better explain this answer, he adds, "All told, about three hours.  You're my first customer, in fact."

The guy's eyebrows raise slowly, an out of place look of disappointment glancing from his wide eyes.  "For real?  This is your grand opening?  It's supposed to be a party."

"The last time I arranged for a grand unveiling, the whole thing blew up in my face."  He wonders how long it'll take him to shake this incessant need to couch trivial statements in private riddles.  Maybe it's just a part of him now, like so many things from that other lifetime are.  "Tell you what.  How about my first customer's first round is half off, is that more in the spirit of things?"

"I'll drink to that," the guy smiles.  He's got a sunburst smile that looks like it comes easy.  "To Joe's."

"To Joe's.  What are you having?"  He inclines his head slightly.  "I'll beg your pardon for not asking sooner -- it's my first day on the job, you see."

The guy magnanimously shrugs it off, and then, in a move that's flat-out audacious, winks.  "I'll take a shot of that whiskey you were fondling when I came in."

A shot glass is procured and the whiskey is uncapped without a word.  His hand steady, he pours the guy his discounted drink.  He sets it in front of his customer, but the guy just grins that foolhardy grin at him and ups the ante.

"Now I'm going to be all self-conscious, sitting at the bar by myself.  Bad form to drink alone, after all.  Let me buy you a drink," the guy says, cheerful, "You know, since we're catering to the spirit of things?  To celebrate your un-grand opening and all."

"I think you had one too many sales pitches in there," he says in response, dry as ice.  Still, it isn't like he can get drunk on the job.  "But a sale's a sale."

A second shot glass procured and filled, he raises his glass towards his customer, who mirrors the gesture.  "To Joe's," they say, one as bright as the other is dark, and then together they drink.

"Don't take this the wrong way," the guy says, slamming his glass back onto the counter and wincing around the burn in his throat, "but you don't exactly look like a Joe."  He leans a round cheek against his fist, his eyes watery from the sting of the alcohol.  Not a man well-versed in his liquor, this one.

In the other corner, fifteen years of business lunches and industry meet-and-greets and charitable cocktail galas have forged him into a veritable master in the art of drinking.  His shot glass meets the counter with a demure click of glass on wood.  "That would probably be because I'm not a Joe.  Though some people have told me I bear a passing resemblance to one Harrison Wells."

The guy squints, coy.  "I don't see it."

"It's something about the eyes," he offers, deadpan.  "The other guy wears glasses.  The smug old bastard thinks they make him look smarter than he is."

The other guy snorts and says under his breath, "I'm going to tell him you said that."  Raising his voice to directly address his not-Joe bartender, he asks, "If not Joe, then…?"

He crosses his arms, chewing on the question briefly.  "Haven't decided yet," he replies, just as brief, still deadpan.  There's a hard line burrowed in his brow.

"Ok, well," the guy laughs, flopping his hand to the countertop and leaning forward curiously, "Why call it Joe's, then?"

His eyes narrow a fraction, surveying this nosy Chatty Kathy with a hint of something that might soon become annoyance.  "I thought it was the bartender who was supposed to listen to boring life stories," he drawls, his voice gravel.  The other guy just waves a hand flippantly to indicate that he's not bothered by this role reversal, so he grabs the shot glasses and turns towards the small sink basin set under the far end of the counter.  

"I knew a Joe once," he explains, running the glasses under the tap.  "Long time ago.  Owed the guy a drink and unfortunately had trouble getting around to delivering on that promise."

From the other end of the bar comes a set of words that hit him the wrong way.  "That's a recurring problem for you."

"What--" he turns, slowly.  He slides the green-checked dish towel from his shoulder automatically, drying his hands by rote.  His mind is elsewhere, churning,  "--would you know about that?"

He walks mechanically back to stand across the counter from his one and only customer, glaring into this sunny round face and not seeing it at all.  "Who are you?"

The guy obligingly proffers his hand over the bar.  "Call me Bart."

He reaches forward to accept the handshake against his better judgement.  It's like he's suddenly been knocked underwater and he's not certain which way it is to the surface, the light wavy and the sound distorted and the unyielding pressure squeezing in on all sides.

The second their hands meet, Eobard feels like a drowned man who has had his life breathed back into his lungs.  Like a man on his deathbed who has been told it's all been a mistake and he's fine, he can go home now.  Hell, he feels like goddamn Sleeping Beauty herself, roused from her eternal sleep by true love's kiss.

The Speed Force arcs into him -- floods into him -- sparking along his dusty nerve endings and eddying into long-dry reservoirs.  The heat of it is astounding, raw electricity charging through this human conduit at an impossible amperage, and the experience of taking it in all at once is almost as terrifying as that first lightning strike had been all those years from now.

It probably only takes a few scant seconds, jumping his dead battery like this, but when Eobard snaps back into his surroundings with a gasp, it feels like he's been gone a lifetime.  (In the grand scheme of things, he's not wrong.)

"I'm sorry," he says, light-headed, shaking, holding onto this familiar-unfamiliar hand for dear life, "What did you say your name was."

"Bart," Barry says, that stupid beautiful grin plastered ear to ear on his stupid fake face, "Bart Allen.  I've got family in town, you may know them."

"I may -- ha, your family," Eobard mutters incoherently.  He's still holding Barry's hand and when he notices this he very nearly throws it out of his grasp.  He can feel the lightning in his eyes and he's afraid what he might do with all this newfound power.

"Barry Allen," he growls, planting both hands firmly on the counter top.  "You're late."

Barry puts his head back and laughs.

"And where on earth did you acquire that face?" Eobard roars over the laughter, "I thought being stuck with this pruney mug until the end of time was as bad as it gets, but then you come waltzing in here looking like that.  You're never happy unless you're proving me wrong, aren't you?"

"Oh that, I've got a -- hold on a second," Barry says, flicking a mirthful tear from the corner of his eye.  He rummages through the pockets of his windbreaker for a moment, ultimately retrieving a brass stylus of some sort.  "A gift from a little place called Earth-19, to answer your question."

Barry activates the stylus, casting a flash of blue light onto his round face.  There's a flicker of visual tearing, which, in three dimensions, is hard on the eyes -- but then there he is, the one and only Barry Allen.  He looks about ten years older than he should be, but that would be due to Eobard's memory being topped off with fresh memories of the wrong Barry Allen.

"Smoke and mirrors, then," Eobard nods.  "Lucky you've got options."

Barry shrugs.  "Light refraction technology, actually.  I know the face will take some getting used to, but the newspaper says the CCPD's CSI director's been missing since the crisis, and, as far as anybody knows, the Flash has vanished for good.  Bart Allen won't raise too many questions if he's moved back to town to be closer to his bereaved family in these troubled times."

"I knew a guy who believed everything he read in the newspaper," Eobard says, tossing Barry his top-shelf side-eye.

"It's a bias, I'll admit to that," Barry grins.

Eobard drops his attention to the spotless counter top below the bar, running the dishrag over it in a ploy to appear unconcerned.  "And how is Iris?  I shudder to think you came straight here without stopping home first."

Barry shifts and rustles with his jacket again, and Eobard glances up to see him tugging a thin rectangular object from another of his pockets.  The weather-stained book goes onto the bar top between them, and they both ignore it after that.

"She's good, Iris is fine," Barry tells him, a series of bobbing nods accenting his words.  "Happy I'm not dead, or not trapped in an alternate timeline, at least."

Barry stops himself, ducking his head with an embarrassed huff.  He squints back up at Eobard, a hand anxiously smoothing down the already-smooth hair on the back of his head.  "Which reminds me I owe you an apology for both of those things happening to you."

Eobard laughs, a single silent exhale that rocks his upper body with its force.  His eyelids flutter closed for a heartbeat and he's shaking his head without intending to move at all.  "You don't owe me a goddamn thing, Barry Allen.  You saw him there, didn't you?  I told him he could save her, even knowing the multiverse wouldn't allow him to.  He ran all the way back there just to listen to her die."

That narrow chin wobbles while Barry's jaw works, and Eobard knows the effect won't be at all the same on the droll soft face he's chosen to wear for the rest of his life.  "You only did what you had to do.  I won't be your judge.  You know I can't."

Eyes narrowed still, Eobard tosses his head to indicate the battered relic on the bar.  "You watched it, then?"

"Nah," Barry says.

It's not at all the answer Eobard was expecting, so it doesn't quite take the first time.  "No?"

Barry spreads his hands.  "I have a good enough guess what it says.  But as far as I'm concerned, whatever's on that disc is the last message of a dead man.  Wouldn't be right to watch it while the man's still alive."

"You're too smart for your own good, you know that."  It's not even a question.  A hesitant smile is threatening to break out over Eobard's face and he wonders if, in fighting it, he doesn't just end up looking twice as undignified.  "Here I thought I'd leave you a trail of breadcrumbs to follow -- that is, if you so chose.  Looks like I couldn't stop you from showing up on my doorstep even if I tried."

Barry leans his angular cheek against his fist again, looking up at Eobard with a hint of dreaminess in his partially lidded eyes.  "I don't know what you're talking about breadcrumbs for.  You left the hugest 'this way to Eobard' sign possible.  When I saw Cisco had this book, and when he'd gotten it from, I knew instantly you'd found a way back here."  

Eobard rolls one shoulder.  "Like I said, I told him he could save her.  I gave him that choice."

"Counting on that one-in-infinity chance that the timeline created as a result of his choice would be the one to take you home."  Barry shakes his head.  "Those are some odds to play against.  If it were me, I wouldn't take 'em."

Eobard leans forward onto the bar.  "An infinite number of Eobards were destined not to make it out of there," he says, the familiar existential ache settling over him, "The only risk was in being one of them."

"But you're you," Barry says, voice low, eyes bright.  "Behind that face -- which I don't mind at all, I have to say -- you're still you.  And here you are."

"Here we are," Eobard agrees.  He's not sure what there is left to say.  

Barry taps the warped cover of his mother's book with a thoughtful fingertip.  "All that stuff they found that we have to leave behind -- we've got our work cut out for us, don't we?  If you've got the holo-recording on you, we can run back home and get my copy of this," he drums his fingers on the book, "out of the den.  I know Iris would be thrilled to see you."

He's suddenly bashful, unable to lift his eyes from where they rest on the book cover.  Their work's cut out for them indeed.  They both have some battle scars that will need to mend before everything's back to the way it was before fate took them down two very different paths.

Eobard licks his lips.  He reaches out and puts his hand on Barry's, on top of the book.  He waits until Barry looks up.  

"I intend to take you up on your offer at some point, so don't take this the wrong way:  there's no rush.  Now that I've got my speed back -- by the way I'm not angry with you for taking it and I'll have to find some really creative and probably filthy way of thanking you properly for returning it -- I'll close these last loops when I get to them.  If I've learned anything from this life of mine, it's that everything happens in its own time.  Whether you want it to or not."

Barry just nods, silent.  Eobard slips his hand off and bends to pull two more shot glasses from the shelf below the counter.  Barry watches him pour the whiskey, and flicks his eyes up to Eobard when one of the full glasses is placed in front of him.

"Besides," Eobard says, lifting his glass.  "You can't just casually mention an 'Earth-19' and leave it at that.  I've been away for fifteen years, remember, I believe we have some catching up to do."

The corner of Barry's mouth screws up into a chewed-on smile.  He takes his glass in his thin fingers and lifts it in kind.  "It's a long story, you sure you've got the time?"

Eobard's smile flashes brighter than lightning.  "Barry Allen, who do you think I am?  I've got all the time in the world."

in the infinite multiverse theory, this happens at least once

Checking the corridor was clear before he entered, Nate slipped into the study, loot in hand.

"Gideon, open a log for me, will ya?  I've got to record the details of this alpha timeline artifact before we ship it off to Cisco."  He squeezed himself behind the curved desk in the center of the room, setting the small worn paperback reverently on the table top between a carved stone bowl and the little magnetic globe.

"Certainly, Dr. Heywood," Gideon's ephemeral voice replied.  "Will this be an addition to your series of speculations on the possible events that lead these artifacts to be strewn about the timeline?"

"You got it, Gideon," Nate told the room, his focus already scoping in towards the book and the mystery it contained.

"Very well.  You may begin recording at any time."

Nate pulled the thin white envelope from its place nestled between the pages, and settled back in his chair, running a thumb over the inked letters.  He cleared his throat.

"Canyon City, Yukon Territory.  Nineteen-oh-two.  Winter."

Here he paused, abruptly leaning forward over the desk to peer out through the door and into what he could see of the corridor beyond.  All clear.  He sat back again and resumed his "log."

"It's cold.  Cold enough to stop a speedster in his tracks…."

Elsewhere on the Waverider, Jax put his hand on the bulkhead and poked his head into the kitchen.  Empty.  "Yo Gideon."

"Yes, Mr. Jackson?"

"You seen Nate anywhere?  We're gonna hit up 1943 Chicago for the invention of the deep dish, wanna see if he's in."

There was a pause before Gideon answered.  "Dr. Heywood is currently in the study recording a log of the artifact the team recovered from 1903.  I can notify him of your plans, if you wish."

Jax crossed his arms, leaning back against the bulkhead in the kitchen doorway.  "A log, huh?  More of his sappy time traveler fanfiction?"

There was an even longer pause.  Long enough to cause concern about Gideon's continued operation.  But her voice eventually echoed down an answer.  "Yes."

"That's cool," Jax shrugged.  "Don't bother him on account of me.  Just let me know when he's done, alright?  I'm dying to see what happens next.

[retro-gamers-stuff]

Last time on ember(magnified by 2 months)

So last time i made one of these we were headed to arak nor as different characters. I will focus on my groups story because the dm split the group. So trogreth survived cause the lugan and half orc were no longer with us(lugans player was though). We camped out after the selah battle and then first thing the next day set back on the path until another minotaur caravan train came by which we stood on the side of the road and hailed for them to stop explaining that we meant them no harm and were headed to arak nor and needed a ride. They let us on and i switched to a different new character cause i didn't like the direction trogreth was taking as my character(failing at almost everything). So i was zak du'urden(yes i fucking know) a dual scimitar wielding human ranger(no drow in ember, and in my defense the books describe drizzt as a rogue until halfway through sojourn and i was at the beginning), meanwhile the other guy who played a lugan was an elkan(deer person) ranger. We reached arak nor and the other three switched back to kol, kylea, and hando, and tthe dm made benedict recruit the elkan, zak, and a joke lugan npc that was high and drunk to the group. Not long after battle broke out and we found ourselves against dark colored silith that we couldn't identify as it was night, until one spit lava at us. They wielded magic chuthkas and tore my ass up, but i lived and the lugan sliced one in half. After the fight a giant dragon showed up and we had to use the cube. The dragon did get one hit before we killed it and that was 4 points of weak damage to me, turns out the cube also makes dragons frail. Every silith close by fled as we were now using the cube fully. Two more dragons resisted though and we fought them, they did eventually submit to us as the cube is strong. We had barely any time to rest as the silith had finished their machine and the ogo pogo was waking up. We rush to the beach and see the ice on the lake breaking, a giant monstrosity almost emerged wjen suddenly a flash of light and we wake up on the beach hurting in the early hours of day. Everything looked like the aftermath of the biggest battle in existence. We made our way to benedict, passing a dead minotaur and silith propped back to back one still clutching a rock, and he told us of an explosion at the lake and didn't know where quickmoon(cause he WAS with us), the ogo pogo, or the cube(cause it was gone) were at so we assumed we won with a few strange side effects and helped heal the wounded and gather bodies. At the stroke of midnight we awoke back on the beach, back hurting, and once again morning. Read those last few sentences 2 more times and that was our session for a bit except in the third repeat hando found when he did a spirit walk everything was geometry and we had a barrier of chaos around the town. After that we tried to breach the barrier with a cone of law only to make the geometry show up to our eyes, next we brought benedict to the beach to show him and he shimmered when we hit the barrier so we surrounded him with a barrier of law and he screamed and died as geometry. We then looked for a temple of law to no avail but we found a temple of mordain, the god of chaos, insanity, and magic(he also made the cube). Inside was a crazy guy that the more he talked the more i knew him for the man himself..mordain. we wasted most of our time talking to him so we time warped. As we returned this time we grabbed the rock from the two bodies on a hunch and when we encountered mordain he told us we broke a toy prompting kol to lift the rock and say "can you fix it?" And he did, he fixed the cube and tossed it to us but only kol and hando caught it(kylea was absent for that session) teleporting them out of the cube and leaving me and the elkan trapped so i rotated in tye. I was absent for the next session and when i came back we were in another town(finally on last sundays session in this story) after having won, and kol going off to find himself again, the cube was gone, and we left with minotaurs who almost got annihilated by trolls on the trip, and kylea left. Now we have a human thief played by kols player and an elkan priest played by kyleas, also kim is back. We fought direwolves as soon as we entered town and i had kim skin two so i can have a cloak made in the future, and an archon healed us. We then had food and drink at a tavern when a man asked us to go on an escort trip with him to deliver supplies. We agreed and hando had the archon beam him to khord to give cava friend the cinebral, vork stepped in. We left on our new mission and were attacked by elkan bandits that we killed quickly after the thief backstabbed two and i used the horn of blasting to stun them and got one hit on one of them. Our group now is an elkan priest, a human thief(i'll remember their character names later), tye, kim, and vork.

[the-gongoozler]

Current WIP projects that, because I have ADD and can’t prioritize for shit, will most likely never be finished:

A TV show about people that mostly went to the same high school at the same time and are now (through a series of random events) teaching at that same high school years later. It’s based on the teachers in my life/teachers I know and the fact that a lot of teachers seem to have never left high school in the first place. Uses two sets of characters in a This Is Us sort of half-flashback and half-current times way so that you can see that the trope-y characters (cheerleader, jock, nerd, art kid, rich boy) all turn into fully fleshed people. Meant to show that high school doesn’t last forever and that when people are assholes in high school, there’s usually something more going on (because they are teenagers and it’s hard to express intensely real feelings in a constructive way). 

An original book about witches in which I have to create an entire system of magic. Because of a curse that goes back to the Putnam family in the Salem witch trials, boys can’t pass on their magic (trans girls can! Would be explained as “that one time uncle Thomas’s kids had magic and we were like ?? until she came out as a she”). This makes Twin X bitter against his sisters and when that combines with the death of the boy he fell in love with (while a teenager in the closet (hopefully a more progressive and explicit version of Dumbledore, really)), he is convinced to become a necromancer (because that’s both the most absolutely rare version of magic (2-3 in history) and he can bring back his 1 true love, plus he already is a medium and can speak to ghosts). This leads him to secretly being a “borrower” (stealing magic from other living things through ritual sacrifice), which warps his humanity until he thinks that using his oldest sister’s daughter would be a good idea (he hasn’t bonded with her & she shows a lot of power at a young age) to get the power necessary for successful necromancy. Ends up failing because his twin sister defeats his attempt to kill the niece. The actual story is from the niece’s POV when she’s 18-20-ish and the evil uncle is setting up to attack her again (because 1. his family has ancient magic, 2. borrowing works much better through close blood relation). He eventually gets enough power through a sacrifice made by his evil partner (a woman who was in love with him despite the fact he is 100% gay (if he hadn’t been warped by borrowing, he wouldn’t have lead her on)) and the spirits that are speaking to him from the “other side” convince him that if he raises Thomas Putnam, Thomas can raise the boyfriend. Then Thomas possesses him (HE TRICKED EVIL-UNCLE, Oh no!) and becomes the real villain! Ahhhhh! What will they do? The story is supposed to pull from a lot of cultures, that way it’s not just european/latin-based but it also doesn’t imply that Native American/Latin American cultures are actually magic or backwards or something racist.

A dark comedy/romance play about two serial killers that have taken on their victim’s identities to hide from the law but end up having to deal with two incredibly annoying hotel guests the entire time. Basically, a young couple is murdered by 1 girl and 1 guy. They are an infamous serial killer pairing that is terrorizing the West Coast. They dispose of the bodies and because they look sorta like the couple, they take their identities to avoid the heat. They end up going on the (crappy) honeymoon of this dead couple and are coincidentally rooming next to a VERY annoying couple that happen to know the dead woman’s mother/grandmother through something old and white and because of this feel some random attachment to the newly weds. Annoying Lady saw that the Newly Wed Couple were going to the hotel and moved their rooms right next to each other to have an adjoining door, scheduled them for activities, etc. This leads to Serial killer B (the guy) having to convince Serial Killer A (the girl) to not murder the Annoying Couple in every other scene while also getting marriage advice from Annoying Husband on how to keep their marriage healthy. The serial killers end up falling in love (think “fake relationship” trope) and in the end are almost caught, but because of the Karen-ness of Annoying Wife, they get away in the nick of time!

A long powerpoint project that is an aggregate of all of my analyses and opinions on Gilmore Girls (as well as other shows, but mostly Gilmore Girls). This includes Character progression, plot points, writing choices, the use of recurring themes/props/color expressions, wardrobe choices and foreshadowing, the way things should have gone, etc.

Feel free to add your own projects that will probably never get finished! It’s fun to come up with ideas and plan them, but when you have Executive Functioning Issues it can be hard to focus on one project or another because you want to do them all at once (when you even have the energy to do something) and that doesn’t mean you aren’t creative...