#this video nails me to the cross and makes me bleed out and die.

[mattzerella-sticks]

Come Home (ao3)

Jason Todd gets a message from Bruce. He's surprised to see it. Then, he's surprised by the message itself. Hearing Bruce's final message stirs something inside of him, urging him towards a place he's avoided ever since his and Bruce's falling out. So he gathers his things, and then... waits.

He can't leave yet. Jason doesn't know why. Bruce gave him a mission, just like old times. Except it's not, because he... Jason can't move. Can't even stand.

That's how Kyle finds him.

New York City, NY - 3:42 a.m.

           Jason heard the flick of a switch before he saw Kyle’s shadow in the doorway. He tensed in his seat but made no move of leaving. Not an inch since he finished packing, duffel lying at his feet. Waiting for Jason to drag it out the window he came through.

           It’ll wait a bit longer.

           “Jason,” Kyle asked, shuffling closer. He turns the light on in this room now, shadows retreating. Like a warm blanket being pulled away, leaving him defenseless. “Jason,” he repeats, peering down at him. Hair ruffled from sleep, wiping at drool with his wrist. “You finished with patrol?”

           He answers with a small hum, knuckles shifting against his lips.

           “Rough night?” Kyle yawns. “Why’re you still out here?”

           The words catch in his throat, scraping it hard enough he bleeds. Though the copper taste might be from how he bites his tongue. Afraid that if he eased his grip, it all might spout forth like a broken pipe, leaving a horrible stain. Once those thoughts are given form, there won’t be any avoiding them.

           Kyle crouched down when he wasn’t looking, dragging his thumb across Jason’s cheek scar. “Jay,” he whispers, “what is it? Why do you have your bag out?” Blinking, Jason notices his lover is more alert now. Staring at him with unnaturally green eyes, piercing like they were constructs from his ring.

           The usual finger is naked. Ring absent, as it should be. There’s no need for rings or guns, masks or helmets, here in their apartment. Together, they can exist as themselves. In this small, shared space, they are Kyle Rayner and Jason Todd. Green Lantern and Red Hood can have every inch of the world – the whole universe, even – save the apartment they call home.

           But the helmet still rests on his lap. Reflects the light from the overhead lamp, milky lenses staring up at him.

           “Kyle,” he chokes on the other man’s name. Then, nothing. His shoulders shudder, vision grows hazy. His lover’s face blurs, but it’s the only thing he can focus on. Closer, rapidly, until the darkness returns. He nuzzles at Kyle’s neck, arms slipped over his shoulders. Warmth treads the surface of his skin but cannot dive deeper. Iced out by the pervasive chill that spread since he answered his phone.

           “Jason,” Kyle says, “hey… I’m here… let it out, Jay…”

           The muttered encouragement breaks what little remained of his defenses. His tears flow free, unburdened, transporting him years into the past. As a kid, his sadness went unnoticed. Swallowed up by the hustle and bustle of Gotham, too busy for another misty-eyed, dirty kid on the street. Over time he learned how to hide that part of him, wound scabbed so heavily he might never cry again. But then someone saw him. Offered his shoulder like Kyle does now, soaking up Jason’s tears. Riding the wave alongside him.

           How Jason wishes he were that young again. When it was simple. Where all that happened between them was a far, twinkling dot in the sky named ‘yet to be’. So he can cry with him one last time.

           Kyle, for once, isn’t enough.

           “Hey,” he starts, as Jason’s sobs lessen, “d’you want to talk about it now?”

           He doesn’t. Might never be able to. And if Jason told him that, Kyle would understand. Kiss along his scar; suggest a nightcap even though he knows Jason will shoot the idea down. Only offering it as a poor attempt at changing the conversation.

           That’s why he loves him. That’s why Kyle deserves to know.

           Talking is hard. Luckily, someone can speak on his behalf. Jason pulls his phone out, blindly punching in the passcode. Then he hands it over, video already playing.

           Kyle watches Bruce. Jason watches Kyle.

           The video is white noise at this point, Jason having lost count of how much he hit the rewind button. Listening to Bruce’s voice like sitting on the other side of a window while a severe thunderstorm rages; safe from the pounding rain and deadly lightning. As it plays, and Kyle’s expressions mirror the same marks Jason believes he hit during his first few views, some of the rain slips through an open crack. A shiver races down his spine.

           Bruce stops talking. Kyle drops Jason’s phone, collapsing onto his knees, crushing Jason’s duffel. Face blank while he processes what Jason can’t quite wrap his head around yet. “Batman… Bruce Wayne is dead?”

           “Yeah…” Having someone else admit it made it easier. It breezes past his lips, “Bruce is dead.” A beat passes, Jason lifts his helmet. “Gotham’s gonna be hell, with Batman gone… defenseless.”

           Kyle’s hand hovers over his knee for a second, and then lands. Squeezes it until Jason breaks from the contest with the empty gaze of his helmet so he can look at a warmer, more loving one. “You’re going back then. To Gotham.”

           “You heard the video,” Jason shrugs, “Kinda have to.”

           “Jay…” Kyle huffs, rubbing tiny circles into Jason’s knee. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

           “I know.”

           “And yet you’re still going.” There’s no judgement weighing down Kyle’s statement, only concern. It’s a luxury that Jason revels in. “Do you want to go? Go back… there?”

           Oddly enough, Jason does. “He sent me a video,” he starts, shifting. Holds his helmet with one hand while the other crawls over Kyle’s. “After everything that went down, he… he sent me a video. I can’t begin to explain why …” Kyle flips his hand, fingers curling around Jason’s wrist. “But he did. Sometimes, in those really bad moments… I figured he wrote me off completely. Kicked out of the nest for… well, y’know. But this I… I can’t help feeling, by sending this, he was saying sorry. For it getting this bad. For not being there when I needed him. Not being around anymore to make it better. If I didn’t go back… let’s just say I’d regret it.” He sniffs, chuckling, “Besides, I’d be a hypocrite if I let the old man die and not leave at least fifty slugs in their corpse after harping on and on about Bruce letting the Joker live.”

           “Jay,” Kyle warns, fighting a smile. Losing with every twitch of his lips. “Fifty is a bit much, isn’t it?”

           “Forty-nine, then?”

           “You’re not funny.”

           “Yes, I am,” Jason says, scraping at Kyle’s wrist with blunt nails, “you love my jokes.”

           Kyle rolls his eyes. “I love you. Your sense of humor is one of the many crosses I bear for doing so.”

           “Yeah, well…” The levity flees as the weight of the situation reasserts itself, both their mouths thinning into serious lines. Jason tugs himself free of Kyle’s hold, clutching at his helmet with both hands again. “I have to go.”

           “For how long?” he asks.

           Jason frowns, “I… I’m not sure.”

           Nodding, Kyle stands. Towers over Jason, bangs hanging over his face. He pushes them out of the way, brushing them behind his ear. “You don’t have to leave right away, do you?”

           He thinks about it. Not for long. “I… guess I can wait until morning.”

           “…Thank you.”

           Jason follows Kyle, dropping Red Hood’s helmet on the duffel. Sheds his layers in a trail towards their room, falling into bed beside his lover. Kyle wraps his arms around him, kissing him. Maps out well-worn paths on more scars scattered over his body. He accepts the laved attention, soaking it up. Memorizes each caress for the lonely nights to come.

           There’s a whispered prayer mixed in with Kyle’s reverence. “Please Jay,” he says, “Come home to me.”

           Jason could say it a million times in a million different ways, none of which would make a believable promise. Instead he kisses Kyle. Kisses him until exhaustion overpowers them both, Jason falling asleep in Kyle’s arms.

           When Kyle awakes next, however, there’ll be no one there. No Jason, no bag on the living room floor, and no blood red helmet. By then, he’ll be on his way to Gotham and away from home.

           Coming back only when he’s ready to.

[mcatra]

Catra works at Burger King pt 3

catradora in ther modern party clothes!

AO3

pt1/2

Catra was currently studying in the library, trying to work her way through a math problem. 

Her place didn't have internet, so she usually alternated between the school wifi, the public library, and Burger King. Lonnie usually let her study in the break room when the libraries closed up. 

Her phone pings with a message, obviously from Adora. 

Catra picks up her phone and unlocks it, eyebrow raising when she sees the message. 

Adora: 

Wyd? 

Catra sighs. Of course that airheaded jock texted like a frat boy. As much as she wanted to leave her on read, a deal was a deal. 

Catra: 

Studying. 

Adora: 

So diligent! You're so cool, Catra :) 

Adora: 

I'm weightlifting right now! Gotta work off all those BK calories 💪

Great, maybe she will leave her alone to go do her workout. 

Adora: 

[image.attachment]

Catra almost drops her phone when she sees the photo Adora sent. It was a shot of her by the mirror, and she was flexing with a dumbbell. She was wearing a black crop top, which framed her abs perfectly.  What was she doing, getting flustered over what, a gym rat photo that looked like it belonged on a Tinder profile? After much gay panic and debate, Catra takes a photo of herself with her middle finger up to the camera. She taps ‘send’ angrily. 

Catra: 

[image.attachment] 🖕 She doesn't get a response for a few minutes, which was odd. Usually Adora typed back at the speed of lightning. 

Ping. 

Adora: 

wow Ur rlly hot  Catra looks at the text, slack jawed. What the hell? 

Adora: 

Oh my god I am so sorry. That was Glimmer, she took my phone. 

Catra could almost scream, but she was in a public library. She settles for furiously chewing her out, sharp nails flying over the keyboard. 

Catra: 

Plz make Ur excuses more believable. It's so unoriginal I can't even post this on r/OopsDidntMeanTo. 

Adora: 

I really didn't mean to 🥺

Adora: 

I mean 

Adora: 

Glimmer didn't mean to  God, Adora was so stupid. Yet here Catra was, blushing like a fool. When she doesn’t answer for a while, her phone starts pinging again with notifications. 

>Adora liked your photo

>Adora liked your status >Adora reacted to your comment >Adora liked your photo

It goes on for another 23 times and Catra scrolls through it, dumbfounded. Unblocking her was a mistake. 

---- 

As promised, Adora would visit her garage when her shifts were over bringing groceries. In exchange Catra would cook, as it seemed like Adora would burn water if she tried. 

It started off as a weekly thing, but in a true Adora-like fashion it ended up like this everyday. They would talk for hours, catching up on their lost years together. 

Adora talked about all sorts of things, like how hard it was adjusting to the soft beds at first and how she requested a hard one. She told her about the contents of the letters she would send to Catra that never went received. Catra just listened, gratified to hear that Adora missed her in their time apart even half as much as she did. 

They would sing the little songs they invented back when they were kids and make up whole new ones as they waited for the food. Adora even started learning how to cook after watching Catra, and she would barge in uninvited with new recipes. The food tasted better with company, and Adora took great pleasure in piling her seconds. 

Catra would show her the local dumpster and they would go scavenging for items they needed. She taught her how to repair the things they found using Youtube tutorials, and how to disinfect them. It was fun watching Adora try to haggle for prices at the market, or her face when she realized she had to use the outhouse to go to the bathroom at Catra’s. 

Days bleed into months, their easygoing friendship making Catra feel at peace for the first time in forever. 

Right now they were currently in their trial exam period, which functioned both as practice for their final exams and half of their final marks. They were sitting in the library, chatting about their future majors. 

Catra taps a pencil to her chin. ‘Let me guess, you want to do art. No, art history.’

‘Political science, actually! Did you know Eternia University has  the  number one ranked Political Science course in the entire country?' Adora says, flipping through the uni coursebook. 

'Wao, future leader of the free world huh? That's kinda hot.' Catra teases, while Adora swats her in embarrassment. 

'What about you?' 

'Double degree of Law and Social Work.' Catra replies. 'Cliche I know. But I just want to be in a position where I can sue the shit out of Shadow Weaver. The system is corrupt, and there's thousands of kids being abused.' 

'Wow, you're so cool Catra.' Adora says in awe. 'You're so smart, you'd definitely get in.' 

'Damn right.' She scoffs, crossing her arms. 

'You're gonna love Eternia. I went to their open day, the campus is gorgeous. Oh my gosh we could dorm together!' 

'Gross, who'd want to be  your  roommate?' 

'You  would.' 

'Ew, you're so full of yourself. Anyway get off me, I have work soon and I need to get changed.' 

'Ah yes, the cute Burger King apron. I never get tired of it.' 

They would always flirt back and forth like this, but nothing ever came out of it. 

With her friendship came the feelings that she had repressed long ago, unknotting and resurfacing like they had never gone at all. However she had no idea if Adora even liked her in that way, given how affectionate she was with Bow and Glimmer. She was popular with boys and girls alike, but she never dated anyone. Catra never dared to ask. 

Once Adora had fallen asleep in Catra's bed, and the brunette had woken up to the other girls arm around her and their feet tangled together. It reminded her of when they shared the bed as kids, but now they were grown up and this kind of thing didn't have an innocent meaning anymore. Having her there made her heart race and her palms sweaty.

She had wanted to kiss her then. She wanted to kiss her now. Catra wanted every single morning to end up like that. 

-- 

Adora:

Your birthday is soon! Did you want anything?

You  , Catra thinks, like a huge sap. 

Catra:

My sanity back. 

Adora: 

Oh my gosh, we could throw you a party at my place! You’re turning 18 right? We could go out drinking! Angella has this amazing vintage wine collection and I could make cocktails!  

Catra receives another wall of text, basically planning the entirety of this birthday party with Bow being the DJ and how Glimmer could make these buns that were to die for. Adora starts going through the entire party guest list until she has to cut in. 

Catra: 

lol calm down 

Adora: 

Does this mean Ur on board? 🎉

Catra: 

yes fine since you won't shut up about it 

Adora: 

AAAAAAAH YOU'RE THE BEST!!!!!!! ♥️♥️♥️♥️ U WILL NOT REGRET THIS 

DW I WILL PLAN EVERYTHING <3333 

💗💖💖😻

The excessive amount of heart emojis make Catra grin dumbly into her palm. 

She's glad they're not video chatting, or Adora would've already taken a screenshot. 

---

It’s the day of her 18th birthday, and she’s nearing the end of her shift. The best friend squad were waiting for her at their usual table so they could give her a ride. 

‘Hey Catra. Can I speak to you out back?’ Lonnie asks, gesturing outside. 

What the heck, did she do something wrong?  It’s been pretty peaceful as of late, and Catra tries to remember if she had done anything to Kyle recently. She nods, chucking her apron at the back as she tries not to notice Adora’s eyes following her. 

 Catra goes out to the back of the store, the night air nipping at her shoulders. Lonnie waits for her there, biting her lip.

‘What’s up? Don’t tell me you’re giving me a raise.’ Catra jokes. 

Lonnie looks conflicted, and she takes a big breath. 

‘I’m sorry but our store isn’t doing so well. I know you’re turning 18, and that means we can’t afford to keep you on anymore.’

‘What…?’ 

Catra felt numb, like she wasn’t really there in the back alley with Lonnie. It felt like an out of body experience. She could only stare at her, betrayed. 

Like Lonnie could read her mind, she tries to correct herself. ‘It wasn’t my decision, it was Octavia’s.’

Of course it was. Her regional manager was the reason she could never just swipe food while she was working. Octavia never liked her, she always reviewed the security cameras and told her off for goofing around. She must’ve known the door incident was on Catra’s shift, and what really happened despite Adora’s cover up. This ‘layoff’ was just an excuse to get rid of her from a financial standpoint. 

‘Thank you for all your hard work over these past 3 years. I know you’re going through a rough time, so we will of course give you a recommendation.’

Catra just nods. 

She returns to her shift, robotically going through the motions. Catra doesn’t even say anything sassy when Adora asks for a burger with no patty and no onions and no sauce, only cheese on bread.

The lack of a clever comeback to their gag routine has Adora concerned. ‘Are you okay?’ 

Of course she wasn’t. How could she be? She was going to have to vacate her garage space, not like she had anywhere to put her furniture in. What the hell was she going to do? 

‘I’m fine.’ She says, even though tears were threatening to burn a hole in the back of her eyelids. ‘Just...rough day.’ 

‘It’s your birthday! The party will cheer you up.’ Bow says brightly. ‘I have the sickest playlist of all time, you're gonna love it.' 

'My mum isn’t home so we have free reign over the entire house! Come on girl, let's get you changed!' Glimmer crows, too excited about the party to pick up on Catra's mood. 'Makeover time!!' 

The two of them force her into Glimmer's Mercedes, on their way to buy every alcohol imaginable from the bottle shop before they go to her house. 

The last thing Catra wanted to do was play dress up or even go to her party, but Adora had planned for so long for this. It would definitely ruin the entire night if she refused to go. 

Out of all the times they had hung out, she’s never been to Adora’s house. She leans her head against the window when they drive into the fancy part of town, by the lakeside with the multi-million dollar yachts parked in the water. 

That still doesn't prepare Catra for when security lets them in through the black gates to the biggest mansion she’s ever seen. There were fountains, perfectly manicured lawns, a tennis court, and was that  a helicopter pad?! 

It was incredible, she had only seen this kind of luxury in the movies. So Glimmer was rich , rich. No wonder she was put out that Adora had her 18th birthday at Burger King. 

Catra looks at Adora with a dumbfounded expression as the attendants let them in, and the blonde looks almost embarrassed when they have to get into an elevator to go to her room. 

Glimmer picks out a hybrid of clothes from her and Adora's closets. The walk-in wardrobe is huge, like a department store full of designer clothes, shoes, jewellery and bags. 

Her wardrobe alone is the size of Catra's home. The brunette suddenly understands why Adora cried upon seeing her concrete garage space. Looking at it, she wanted to cry too. 

Glimmer sets her down on her huge poster bed as she brings out a checkered crop top, ripped black garter shorts and an expensive looking black leather jacket with a gold trim. While Catra reluctantly gets changed, Glimmer picks out a pair of black strappy heeled boots and a hair straightener to battle the bush on Catra’s head. 

She sits still while Glimmer goes to work on her face, bringing out an entire Sephora’s worth of makeup. When Catra looks in the vanity mirror, she almost doesn’t recognize herself. Her eyes were framed with false eyelashes, a swooping cateye, smokey eyeshadow, sharp contour and her lips were now cherry red with bold lipstick. Glimmer applies the finishing touches with silver rings and clip on piercings. 

She hears Adora inhale with shock from the staircase in her bedroom. 

‘Catra you look incredible !’ She gasps. Adora was wearing this cute backless white dress tied with strings, short enough that it cropped above her knees. She was wearing sparkly wedges to go with it, and her hair was curled instead of her usual ponytail. Her delicate gold sword necklace frames her collarbones. 

Catra’s throat goes dry. ‘Uh- You too.’ 

 Glimmer smirks, satisfied with her work. She gets changed into her own outfit, a short purple tulle lace dress with a white fur trim and a cute Gucci clutch to accompany it. The pink haired girl spritzes them all with her various floral and sea spray scented perfumes before they head back downstairs.

‘Wow you guys look amazing!’ Scorpia marvels, and Adora’s friends voice their approval as well. 

‘Gosh this place is crazy.’ Scorpia whispers to Catra. ‘Did you see their pool? We should’ve just held the swimming carnival here!’ 

Catra opens her mouth to tell her how Lonnie had let her go, but Sea Hawk’s booming voice interrupts them. 

'I challenge you to the ultimate game of BEER PONG!' Sea Hawk announces, spinning the ball on his fingertips. 

Of course this gets everyone's competitive spirit going, and everyone gets into pairs. 

After a few drinks Catra has almost forgotten what she was worrying about earlier, too focused on the buzz. Her and Adora demolish the other teams by a landslide with their impeccable aim. 

Soon the attendants came out with dinner, and it was lavish with every food you could imagine. Lobster, kobe beef, hor d'oeuvres, beluga caviar, kale, and opulent ice cream were all among the plates of food on the table. They bring out a massive 3 tiered truffle cake, the words 'Happy Birthday' written with an oddly crude drawing of Catra. 

'You drew this?' She asks, and Adora nods happily. 'You worked so hard on mine, so.' Catra doesn’t have the heart to tell her that the cake was $7 and the drawing of her forehead was meant as an insult.  They sing the birthday song for her, and this time no one brings up the cake cutting tradition. 

 After dinner they sit outside in the garden around the bonfire Sea Hawk had made. He was drunkenly singing a loud shanty while Bow piled in the wood, fanning the flames. Frosta sips on a mocktail, the only one there who wasn’t old enough to drink yet. The fire flickers and dances, casting shadows around them. 

Catra downs a few more cocktails and jello shots as she waits for Mermista to light up some fireworks. Apparently it was illegal, but Mermista just waved her off, telling her that she’ll just pay the penalty fee as Catra’s birthday gift. Sea Hawk really did rub off on her. 

When she successfully sets them off they light up the sky in dazzling multicoloured sparks. Adora’s friends whoop with glee, taking photos and videos to commemorate the moment. 

Adora's side profile is lit up in the dark, and she looks impossibly beautiful among the backdrop of stars. Longing tears at her chest, Catra wants to hold her hand but her throat feels too tight and she can’t move. The truth was that she knew she had always had feelings for Adora, even back when they were just kids back in the foster home. But like a coward, she could never voice them for fear of Adora leaving her side. 

A loud neighing can be heard from the stables in response to the loud booming noises from the fireworks. 

'Swifty!' Adora says, standing up. The moment's breaks and Catra reels back her hand. 'Stay here, I'll be right back.' 

Her chance disappears, she couldn’t say it after all. She watches her go tend to her horse, feeling stupid. 

‘Yoohoo~, want a rematch?’ Sea Hawk calls out from the patio, pouring vodka into tiny glasses. 

‘Don’t mind if I do.’ Catra replies. She definitely didn’t know her alcohol tolerance levels yet, so it was the perfect time to take that to the test. 

Catra confidently does a whole line of shots, determined to drink herself into unconsciousness. Every time she sees a flash of Lonnie or Adora’s face in her mind, she takes another swig. Everyone is cheering her on, screaming the song ‘Shots’ over and over again, also all drunk out of their minds. Sea Hawk taps out at the 5th drink, and everyone screams at Catra’s flawless victory. Scorpia lifts her into the air to do a victory lap, cheering. 

Adora finally makes an appearance, alerted by the sound of Catra's shrieky laughter as Scorpia swings her around. 

‘Don’t worry, I can take it from here.’ Her school captain says pulling Catra away from her friend. Scorpia just shrugs and makes her way to the food table. ‘Catra, maybe you should slow down.’ Adora tells the giggling girl in her arms. 

‘Noo way.’ She slurs, she was enjoying the feeling too much, the alcohol burning through her body, making her feel lightheaded. The light up disco dancefloor starts to blur into a kaleidoscope of colours. 

‘You got some weed?’ Catra asks, seeing Perfuma light a bowl. The taller girl hands her an already rolled up one and Catra snatches it to take a long drag. The smoke hits her lungs and she starts coughing. 

‘Oi Perfuma, why did you bring drugs? Angella will kill me!' Adora gripes, trying to wrestle the blunt away from Catra. 

‘Aw don't be like that! I made some edibles for you guys to try.’ Perfuma says cheerfully, pointing to the pot brownies. 

‘See? Scorpia likes them.’ She gestures at the other girl, who seemed to be currently tripping out of her mind and eating everything on the table. 

Catra goes to reach for one, but Adora grabs her by the wrist to lead her back inside. 'Alright, you're done for the night. Everyone say bye!' 

‘Byee Catra!’

‘Happy birthday!!’

Adora grabs her by the waist to lead her to her bedroom, Catra wobbling after her in the heels Glimmer lent her. 

'Ugh Adoraaa, don't be such a party pooper. I'm fine.' She moans, leaning heavily on the other girl. 'Don't you have a shift tomorrow afternoon? I don't want you getting hungover or drug tested.' Adora chides, rummaging around the dark for the light switch. 

Catra snorts. 'Oh you don't have to worry about  that  anymore. Got laid off.' 

Adora looks at her in confusion, until realization dawns on her. 'Wait, is that why Lonnie took you outside?' 

'Say, I never got to give you  your  birthday gift.' Catra pushes her hair back, voice sultry as she flings off her jacket. She never pinned herself down as a horny drunk, but here they were. Catra shoves Adora onto the bed, straddling her. Her golden hair spills over the mattress, soft like spun silk. 

'You still want that kiss?' Catra whispers in Adora's now burning red ear. 'My knife touched the bottom.' 

Adora's face now resembled a fire truck, mouth gaping in shock.

'C-Catra, I…' 

Catra presses their lips together, silencing her. She knows she probably tastes like alcohol and weed right now, but she couldn't care less in the moment. Adora's mouth is still slack jawed from mortification, so she takes the opportunity for tongue. She frowns and moves down to her neck when Adora doesn’t return the kiss. 

'Catra, what are you doing-' 

Catra bites down on Adora's nape. The blonde underneath her lets out a soft gasp, arching her back. Her gold manicured nails dig into her shoulder. 

'Stop, you're not thinking straight-!' 

'Sure ain't.' Catra grins, licking a stripe down the base of her neck. Adora’s necklace chain jingles with the movement. There was now an impressive hickey there, blooming violet on her pale skin. She pauses to admire her handiwork. 

'This isn't you talking, you'll, you'll regret this in the morning.' Adora stutters. She's shivering, their hands now laced together, silver rings clanking. 

'I know. I don't care.' She replies, kissing her again. Adora's teeth nick her lip. The alcohol in her system makes her feel lightheaded, confident. No way would she have managed this sober. Adora tastes better than she does, sweet like blueberry soju. Catra's hands wander down further, pulling the strings to untie the back of her dress-

'Catra stop!'  Adora suddenly shouts, striking Catra across the cheek in a deafening  slap . 

Adora's eyes were blazing, almost teary in the dark. Her breathing was irregular, panting in and out. Catra stills, clutching her cheek. The look in her eyes sobered her immediately. 

Adora looks down at her palm, realizing what she just did. 'Sorry for hitting you!' She flounders. 'It's just that, you're only doing this because you’re drunk and upset, right?’

Catra just stares at her before climbing off. Cold realization settles as the fog in her brain clears. 'You're right. Forget it.' 

She sits on the edge of the bed, numbly watching Adora hurriedly trying to re-tie the back of her now wrinkled dress. Her lips are stained with Catra’s red lipstick. Adora catches her looking, and she quickly turns away to smooth down her hair with her fingers. 'You've had more than enough to drink tonight. I’ll get you some water to clear your head.’

She gets up to turn on the light switch, and Catra blinks in the harsh light from the chandeliers.  ‘Come on, let’s get you sobered up, okay?’ Adora leads her to the kitchen on the same floor, gingerly placing her friend on the slippery bar stool. 

The blonde goes to get the chilled jug of infused water from the fridge and pours it into a glass. Adora slides it across the island, and Catra reluctantly takes it. She sips at it, mint and lemon on her tongue. It tasted way better than her hose water. 

‘I’ll uh, pick out some groceries for you since we’re here and all.’ Adora says awkwardly into the silence, turning around to rummage through her pantry. 

Suddenly Catra is brought back to the whole reason why she was sitting here in this oversized mansion in the first place. Their friendship agreement. The one she had just violated. Catra had never felt more stupid to mistake Adora’s kindness and guilt for actual feelings. She felt like a charity case, waiting to collect food from the soup kitchen.

Of course Adora didn't like her back. She just saw her as someone needing to be saved. The product of survival guilt. Catra wanted to whack her head on the corner of her marbled countertop and not wake up. 

Adora takes out a green plastic bag, and starts filling it with everything and anything she can get. Cans, pasta, biscuits, fruits and vegetables. Actually this feeling was more like being one of those poor kids that white girls would pose next to for their Instagram after their trip to Africa.  Did Adora have fun, volunteering to slum it up in her place while she returned here? All she ever wanted her entire life was to be Adora’s equal. 

Scorpia and Sea Hawk's loud laughter and DJ music can be heard downstairs in the garden, beyond the tall golden trimmed windows. The class difference between them stretched like an unfathomable canyon. Living the classy bougie dream until the clock struck midnight and she was back in her run down garage. Except soon she won’t even have that anymore. Why did Adora have to bring her here? It was almost cruel. 

Catra's suddenly overcome with the urge to vomit. She nearly falls off the high chair in her rush to throw up the unholy cocktail of alcohol into the sink. Tears bead in her eyes from the sour taste as she continues to vomit out everything she ate that night. She can feel Adora by her side, patting her back reassuringly.

It was by far the worst birthday she has ever had. 

 --

The morning of, Catra woke up in Adora’s bed with a splitting headache. 

Unfortunately she was  not given the gift of amnesia, as she vividly remembered every last excruciating detail about last night. 

She spots Adora’s mop of blonde hair under a blanket on the floor, even though there were a billion other free spare rooms to sleep in. Adora was probably too afraid to share the same bed as her now.

Catra’s borrowed crop top digs uncomfortably into her skin, and she angrily flings it off her body. The shorts stick to her like a second skin, smelling of tequila. She grabs her old Burger King uniform and puts it on, though even this didn’t belong to her now. 

Adora shifts in her sleep, and Catra lightly steps over her to get to the door. The last thing she wanted was for Adora to wake up. 

As soon as she’s out, she runs out to the elevator and bangs frantically on the buttons until it sends her to the bottom floor. The lift opens with a  ding  and in her haste she almost crashes headfirst into Glimmer. 

‘Oh hey! Are you going to work?’ Glimmer greets. She was in her silk pajamas and slippers, holding a glass of orange juice. 

‘Uh. Yeah.’ Catra lies, trying her best to look natural. 

‘Some party last night huh? Lucky today is a Saturday.’ Glimmer says conversationally, unaware of Catra’s urge to throw her across the room. ‘Hey, what happened to your cheek?’

Catra clutches her face, it still strung from where Adora struck her. ‘Nothing.’

Glimmer raises an eyebrow. ‘Well anyway, did you wanna stick around for  breakfast? The cooks made pancakes, bacon, eggs, the whole deal.' She peeks behind Catra. 'Is Adora  still  not up yet?’ 

As much as Catra wanted to scream  get out of my way she schools her expression to her best customer service smile. ‘Nope she’s still sleeping it off. Anyway I’m gonna be late so I can’t stick around.’

‘Did you need a lift?’ Glimmer asks. It dawns on the brunette she couldn’t exactly run the entire way back home. ‘I’ll ask one of the drivers to take you back so you make it to your shift.’

Catra thanks her lucky stars that Glimmer was still too hungover to drive her. She wouldn’t have been able to dodge her questions if she had. 

‘Yes please.’ Catra says, giddy with relief. ‘Thank you.’ 

‘Ooh and before I forget, Adora told me last night to give you this.’ Glimmer says, grabbing the green bag of groceries off the counter. The shorter girl bundles it into Catra’s arms before she can object. 

‘Get home safe.’ She says, waving as the attendant leads her out the door. 

Catra looks down at the cans of food in her arms and doesn’t say anything.  

 ------

The days leading up to graduation were painful, to say the least. 

They more or less pretend the kiss didn't happen. Adora never brings it up, and neither does Catra. 

She would stare at the ceiling, wishing she had never gotten piss drunk at her birthday and kissed her. Adora was right, she did regret it. It was awful, the look on Adora's face when she slapped Catra replays in her mind and nightmares over and over again. It was mortifying. 

Adora still messages her every 3 days, and Catra still replies, though her words are empty and devoid of banter.  I'm worried about you,  she says.  I'm fine , Catra always responds. 

The brunette continues to humour her to keep the peace, only shutting down when her old job was mentioned. Catra doesn’t allow Adora back into her home again. 

Sometimes they study together, but she can't concentrate when Adora wears her glasses. Her heart hurts, so she cradles her cheek and tries not to remember. 

The hickey she had branded Adora's neck with had been covered with foundation until it faded away. None of her friends had teased her about it, so she clearly had not told a single soul what had happened. 

Catra bites at the scab on her lip from where Adora’s teeth nicked her until it bleeds. She wants to apologize, but the words stick on her tongue and she can't bring herself to talk about that night. 

Catra knew Adora was only here by her side to alleviate her guilt. Shame buries itself under her skin every time she's near her, like she was too embarrassed to even exist in the same space as Adora. She wants to disappear. 

Exams are hard, and without an internet connection after the library closes at 6pm made it difficult to study. In her heart she knew she wasn't going to come out on top. Her ranking had slipped, she wasn't even at second place anymore. Rent was due at the end of the month, and without her Burger King wage she knew she'll be kicked out sooner than later. 

Catra felt stressed and self destructive, and the only thing that kept her from falling off the edge completely was Scorpia. As much as she hated depending on others, she'd much rather her old coworker than Adora. 

Her classmates seemed to like this new, muted down version of Catra who didn't argue and just stayed quiet most of the time. Fighting back was too difficult when all she wanted to do was blend into the wallpaper. All they talked about was where they were going for vacation after graduation, and Catra certainly had nothing to contribute to that conversation.

She felt like crying, all the time. It was agony, wanting to burst out into tears randomly while she sat wasting away in the student council room. Despite herself, she missed Burger King, and she just kept getting ghosted or rejected in her other job applications. Sometimes when she really wanted to indulge herself, she'd go cry silently in the school toilet stall. 

Glimmer notices the change, and she catches her glaring. 'You don't seem as alive lately. Your eye bags are huge.' 

'S'fine.' Catra replies, hiding her hands so she doesn't see how they shake. Honestly Catra couldn't remember the last time she slept.

'Pfft, don't lie to me. Adora's worried about you. You're getting skinnier, and your eyes are always raw. All you do is stare into space.' 

Catra bites down on her nails. Of course she knew that. But she's gone through this before, and she'll do it again. 

'What happened between you two?’ 

‘None of your business.’ Catra replies, shuffling her way to the hall. 

--

 Their graduation ceremony starts off uneventfully. Every student’s parents except Catra’s sit proudly in the audience, eager to watch their kid graduate. One by one they receive their certificate and return to their seats. 

Adora and Catra stand side by side onstage, as Adora makes their final speech as School Captain. Through the blinding lights, she sees Angella waving proudly at her adoptive daughter in the crowd. 

Catra looks at Adora in the corner of her eye. She must look pathetic, lovesick and pining after someone she couldn’t have. 

‘It’s been such an honour serving the entire faculty and students of this school. I couldn’t have done it without my amazing Vice-Captain and all of my prefects. Now I’m proud to hand over my badge to the next School Captain, Frosta.’ 

They go through the rest of the ceremony like that, each member of the student council handing their badges to their successors. 

Soon their Principal comes up to the podium, tapping it once and clearing her throat. 

‘Announcing our honor student, and the winner of the scholarship to Eternia University…’ Castaspella says, turning over the sign card. 

‘None other than our school captain, Adora!’

Everyone starts clapping, and Adora walks across the stage to shake Castaspella's hand. 

Sounded about right. Catra never won against Adora in her entire life. She had already expected this outcome. Like a game of cat and mouse, going over and over for all eternity. 

Adora would excel with her elite education and secure a well paying job. Catra would struggle at the bottom indefinitely, never amounting to anything. She never would, if Adora was still there next to her. When the blonde re-entered her life, everything she had been working towards for years just collapsed. Her job, her home, her School Captain status, her chance at the scholarship, her sanity. 

She had to be wiped clean. A fresh start. 

The flower petals were falling, the streets decorated with a vibrant pink. The other students mill out of the crowd with their parents, chatting excitedly about what was next in their futures. She waits for Adora underneath a tree.  

'Congratulations.' Catra says, when she finally spots the other girl in the crowd. Adora pulls away from Angella’s embrace to meet her. 

'You deserve this so much more than I do.' Adora says, her voice pained like she didn't just win a full ride to her dream university. 'You should take it.'

'It's in your name, silly.' Catra replies, lightly tapping her with her rolled up certificate.

'Besides, I knew you'd get into Eternia, so I never applied.'

Adora blinks dumbly. '...What? Aren’t we going to the same university?’ 

She always was a bit slow on the uptake. ‘Only  you  decided that, stuupid. Say, it's about time we ended this right?' 

‘Catra, what are you...' 

'Our deal. You don't need to feel guilty anymore or bring me anything.' Catra says, her voice sounding like it didn't belong to her. She rummages in her bag, bringing out Adora's spare varsity jacket that she hadn’t returned. 'Here, take this. Thank you for all the help.' 

'What do you mean? You want to stop being friends?' Adora says in disbelief, taking the jacket.  

Catra nods. ‘I can’t continue with the arrangement. I hope you understand.’ 

‘I don’t! Was I the only one who thought we were friends, real ones?’ Adora asks.

‘...That’s right. I never saw you as a friend. You were just a meal ticket to me. Are you happy now?’ Catra snaps back. Shit, that wasn’t what she meant to say. She had planned to end this quickly and painlessly, on a high note.  Trust Adora to put up a fight. 

Something seems to click in Adora’s brain. ‘Is this about the night of the party?’

‘Figure that out yourself.’ Catra replies, turning to walk away. 

Adora grabs onto her arm. ‘Wait! If- if that’s what you want, I’ll give it! Just don't go!' 

This dumb blonde really was offering up her body, out of what? A sense of duty? How stupid. 

‘Is that right?’ Catra says, walking closer to her. Adora backs up until she is pinned to the tree. They’re face to face now. 

‘Can you really do this?’ Catra lifts Adora’s chin by a finger. 

Finally it seems to dawn on Adora exactly what Catra wanted. She swallows, biting her lip. 

There’s a flicker of hesitation, before Adora’s eyes squeeze shut defiantly. The blonde is shaking like a leaf, her breath coming out in panicked stutters from her pursed lips. 

Catra just stares at Adora’s scrunched up face impassively. Her scared reaction was the only confirmation she needed for closure. 

She flicks the other girl’s forehead, and her big blue eyes open in confusion. ‘Chill out, I’m not that evil to do it to someone so unwilling.’

 Adora blinks, clutching her forehead. ‘Catra?’

Suddenly Angella’s voice cuts through their conversation from the car park. ‘Adora dear, are you done chatting with your friend? We have reservations!'

‘Um, I…’ Her old school captain opens her mouth to say something, but Angella's started to lose her patience. 'Adora, how long are you going to stand there? Glimmer is already waiting for us at the restaurant!' 

Catra just smiles tiredly. ‘Take care, dummy.’ 

She watches Adora being dragged off unwillingly by her adoptive mother to the car. 

Catra lets out a sigh. Her phone pings with a message from Scorpia, and she knows it's time to go. 

---

 By the time Angella releases her from their graduation celebration, Adora can feel that it's already too late.

 Adora: 

Please, can we talk? Let me fix this

A pop up appears over the screen. 

Message Not Sent

This person isn't receiving messages at this time. 

Adora sends another message, but they all go undelivered. Catra had blocked her again. Panic spikes through her veins, and she quickly dons on a jacket and grabs her car keys. 

She sneaks out that night, down the familiar winding path through the bush that led to Catra's place. 

'Catra?' She rolls up the garage door, blinking in the darkness. When her eyes adjusted, she found Catra's old home completely emptied. 

All the furniture and items her friend had collected over the years, they were all gone. The little stove where they cooked, the old mattress where they talked late into the night, all vanished like they were never there. 

A single green plastic bag remained on the floor untouched, filled to the brim of food. 

     catra working at BK fanart: 

https://twitter.com/huetrooper/status/1265188930741080064

https://twitter.com/quackelroys/status/1271199987540668416?s=20

https://mcatra.tumblr.com/post/620493235561824256/your-catra-works-at-burger-king-fic-is-great-you

 pt1, pt 2

Catra was currently studying in the library, trying to work her way through a math problem. 

Her place didn't have internet, so she usually alternated between the school wifi, the public library, and Burger King. Lonnie usually let her study in the break room when the libraries closed up. 

Her phone pings with a message, obviously from Adora. 

Catra picks up her phone and unlocks it, eyebrow raising when she sees the message. 

Adora: 

Wyd? 

Catra sighs. Of course that airheaded jock texted like a frat boy. As much as she wanted to leave her on read, a deal was a deal. 

Catra: 

Studying. 

Adora: 

So diligent! You're so cool, Catra :) 

Adora: 

I'm weightlifting right now! Gotta work off all those BK calories 💪

Great, maybe she will leave her alone to go do her workout. 

Adora: 

[image.attachment]

Catra almost drops her phone when she sees the photo Adora sent. It was a shot of her by the mirror, and she was flexing with a dumbbell. She was wearing a black crop top, which framed her abs perfectly. 

What was she doing, getting flustered over what, a gym rat photo that looked like it belonged on a Tinder profile? 

After much gay panic and debate, Catra takes a photo of herself with her middle finger up to the camera. She taps ‘send’ angrily. 

Catra: 

[image.attachment] 🖕

She doesn't get a response for a few minutes, which was odd. Usually Adora typed back at the speed of lightning. 

Ping. 

Adora: 

wow Ur rlly hot 

Catra looks at the text, slack jawed. What the hell? 

Adora: 

Oh my god I am so sorry. That was Glimmer, she took my phone. 

Catra could almost scream, but she was in a public library. She settles for furiously chewing her out, sharp nails flying over the keyboard. 

Catra: 

Plz make Ur excuses more believable. It's so unoriginal I can't even post this on r/OopsDidntMeanTo. 

Adora: 

I really didn't mean to 🥺

Adora: 

I mean 

Adora: 

Glimmer didn't mean to 

God, Adora was so stupid. Yet here Catra was, blushing like a fool. When she doesn’t answer for a while, her phone starts pinging again with notifications. 

>Adora liked your photo

>Adora liked your status >Adora reacted to your comment >Adora liked your photo

It goes on for another 23 times and Catra scrolls through it, dumbfounded. Unblocking her was  a mistake. 

---- 

As promised, Adora would visit her garage when her shifts were over bringing groceries. In exchange Catra would cook, as it seemed like Adora would burn water if she tried. 

It started off as a weekly thing, but in a true Adora-like fashion it ended up like this everyday. They would talk for hours, catching up on their lost years together. 

Adora talked about all sorts of things, like how hard it was adjusting to the soft beds at first and how she requested a hard one. She told her about the contents of the letters she would send to Catra that never went received. Catra just listened, gratified to hear that Adora missed her in their time apart even half as much as she did. 

They would sing the little songs they invented back when they were kids and make up whole new ones as they waited for the food. Adora even started learning how to cook after watching Catra, and she would barge in uninvited with new recipes. The food tasted better with company, and Adora took great pleasure in piling her seconds. 

Catra would show her the local dumpster and they would go scavenging for items they needed. She taught her how to repair the things they found using Youtube tutorials, and how to disinfect them. It was fun watching Adora try to haggle for prices at the market, or her face when she realized she had to use the outhouse to go to the bathroom at Catra’s. 

Days bleed into months, their easygoing friendship making Catra feel at peace for the first time in forever. 

Right now they were currently in their trial exam period, which functioned both as practice for their final exams and half of their final marks. They were sitting in the library, chatting about their future majors. 

Catra taps a pencil to her chin. ‘Let me guess, you want to do art. No, art history.’

‘Political science, actually! Did you know Eternia University has the number one ranked Political Science course in the entire country?' Adora says, flipping through the uni coursebook. 

'Wao, future leader of the free world huh? That's kinda hot.' Catra teases, while Adora swats her in embarrassment. 

'What about you?' 

'Double degree of Law and Social Work.' Catra replies. 'Cliche I know. But I just want to be in a position where I can sue the shit out of Shadow Weaver. The system is corrupt, and there's thousands of kids being abused.' 

'Wow, you're so cool Catra.' Adora says in awe. 'You're so smart, you'd definitely get in.' 

'Damn right.' She scoffs, crossing her arms. 

'You're gonna love Eternia. I went to their open day, the campus is gorgeous. Oh my gosh we could dorm together!' 

'Gross, who'd want to be your roommate?' 

'You would.' 

'Ew, you're so full of yourself. Anyway get off me, I have work soon and I need to get changed.' 

'Ah yes, the cute Burger King apron. I never get tired of it.' 

They would always flirt back and forth like this, but nothing ever came out of it. 

With her friendship came the feelings that she had repressed long ago, unknotting and resurfacing like they had never gone at all. However she had no idea if Adora even liked her in that way, given how affectionate she was with Bow and Glimmer. She was popular with boys and girls alike, but she never dated anyone. Catra never dared to ask. 

Once Adora had fallen asleep in Catra's bed, and the brunette had woken up to the other girls arm around her and their feet tangled together. It reminded her of when they shared the bed as kids, but now they were grown up and this kind of thing didn't have an innocent meaning anymore. Having her there made her heart race and her palms sweaty.

She had wanted to kiss her then. She wanted to kiss her now. Catra wanted every single morning to end up like that. 

-- 

Adora:

Your birthday is soon! Did you want anything?

You, Catra thinks, like a huge sap. 

Catra:

My sanity back. 

Adora: 

Oh my gosh, we could throw you a party at my place! You’re turning 18 right? We could go out drinking! Angella has this amazing vintage wine collection and I could make cocktails!  

Catra receives another wall of text, basically planning the entirety of this birthday party with Bow being the DJ and how Glimmer could make these buns that were to die for. Adora starts going through the entire party guest list until she has to cut in. 

Catra: 

lol calm down 

Adora: 

Does this mean Ur on board? 🎉

Catra: 

yes fine since you won't shut up about it 

Adora: 

AAAAAAAH YOU'RE THE BEST!!!!!!! ♥️♥️♥️♥️ U WILL NOT REGRET THIS 

DW I WILL PLAN EVERYTHING <3333 

💗💖💖😻

The excessive amount of heart emojis make Catra grin dumbly into her palm. 

She's glad they're not video chatting, or Adora would've already taken a screenshot. 

---

It’s the day of her 18th birthday, and she’s nearing the end of her shift. The best friend squad were waiting for her at their usual table so they could give her a ride. 

‘Hey Catra. Can I speak to you out back?’ Lonnie asks, gesturing outside. 

What the heck, did she do something wrong? It’s been pretty peaceful as of late, and Catra tries to remember if she had done anything to Kyle recently. She nods, chucking her apron at the back as she tries not to notice Adora’s eyes following her. 

Catra goes out to the back of the store, the night air nipping at her shoulders. Lonnie waits for her there, biting her lip.

‘What’s up? Don’t tell me you’re giving me a raise.’ Catra jokes. 

Lonnie looks conflicted, and she takes a big breath. 

‘I’m sorry but our store isn’t doing so well. I know you’re turning 18, and that means we can’t afford to keep you on anymore.’

‘What…’ 

Catra felt numb, like she wasn’t really there in the back alley with Lonnie. It felt like an out of body experience. She could only stare at her, betrayed. 

Like Lonnie could read her mind, she tries to correct herself. ‘It wasn’t my decision, it was Octavia’s.’

Of course it was. Her regional manager was the reason she could never just swipe food while she was working. Octavia never liked her, she always reviewed the security cameras and told her off for goofing around. She must’ve known the door incident was on Catra’s shift, and what really happened despite Adora’s cover up. This ‘layoff’ was just an excuse to get rid of her from a financial standpoint. 

‘Thank you for all your hard work over these past 3 years. I know you’re going through a rough time, so we will of course give you a recommendation.’

Catra just nods. 

She returns to her shift, robotically going through the motions. Catra doesn’t even say anything sassy when Adora asks for a burger with no patty and no onions and no sauce, only cheese on bread.

The lack of a clever comeback to their gag routine has Adora concerned. ‘Are you okay?’ 

Of course she wasn’t. How could she be? She was going to have to vacate her garage space, not like she had anywhere to put her furniture in. What the hell was she going to do? 

‘I’m fine.’ She says, even though tears were threatening to burn a hole in the back of her eyelids. ‘Just...rough day.’ 

‘It’s your birthday! The party will cheer you up.’ Bow says brightly. ‘I have the sickest playlist of all time, you're gonna love it.' 

'My mum isn’t home so we have free reign over the entire house! Come on girl, let's get you changed!' Glimmer crows, too excited about the party to pick up on Catra's mood. 'Makeover time!!' 

The two of them force her into Glimmer's Mercedes, on their way to buy every alcohol imaginable from the bottle shop before they go to her house. 

The last thing Catra wanted to do was play dress up or even go to her party, but Adora had planned for so long for this. It would definitely ruin the entire night if she refused to go. 

Out of all the times they had hung out, she’s never been to Adora’s house. She leans her head against the window when they drive into the fancy part of town, by the lakeside with the multi-million dollar yachts parked in the water. 

That still doesn't prepare Catra for when security lets them in through the black gates to the biggest mansion she’s ever seen. There were fountains, perfectly manicured lawns, a tennis court, and was that a helicopter pad?! 

It was incredible, Catra could only walk in a daze with her jaw dropped on their polished marble floors. So Glimmer was rich, rich. No wonder she was put out that Adora had her 18th birthday at Burger King. 

Catra looks at Adora with a dumbfounded expression, and the blonde looks almost embarrassed when they have to get into an elevator to go to her room. 

Glimmer picks out a hybrid of clothes from her and Adora's closets. The walk-in wardrobe is huge, like a department store full of designer clothes, shoes, jewellery and bags. 

Her wardrobe alone is the size of Catra's home. The brunette suddenly understands why Adora cried upon seeing her concrete garage space. Looking at it, she wanted to cry too. 

Glimmer sets her down on her huge poster bed as she brings out a checkered crop top, ripped black garter shorts and an expensive looking black leather jacket with a gold trim. While Catra reluctantly gets changed, Glimmer picks out a pair of black strappy heeled boots and a hair straightener to battle the bush on Catra’s head. 

She sits still while Glimmer goes to work on her face, bringing out an entire Sephora’s worth of makeup. When Catra looks in the vanity mirror, she almost doesn’t recognize herself. Her eyes were framed with false eyelashes, a swooping cateye, smokey eyeshadow, sharp contour and her lips were now cherry red with bold lipstick. Glimmer applies the finishing touches with silver rings and clip on piercings. 

She hears Adora inhale with shock from the staircase in her bedroom. 

‘Catra you look incredible!’ She gasps. Adora was wearing this cute backless white dress tied with strings, short enough that it cropped above her knees. She was wearing sparkly wedges to go with it, and her hair was curled instead of her usual ponytail. Her delicate gold sword necklace frames her collarbones. 

Catra’s throat goes dry. ‘Uh- You too.’ 

Glimmer smirks, satisfied with her work. She gets changed into her own outfit, a short purple tulle lace dress with a white fur trim and a cute Gucci clutch to accompany it. The pink haired girl spritzes them all with her various floral and sea spray scented perfumes before they head back downstairs.

‘Wow you guys look amazing!’ Scorpia marvels, and Adora’s friends voice their approval as well.

‘Gosh this place is crazy.’ Scorpia whispers to Catra. ‘Did you see their pool? We should’ve just held the swimming carnival here!’ 

Catra opens her mouth to tell her how Lonnie had let her go, but Sea Hawk’s booming voice interrupts them. 

'I challenge you to the ultimate game of BEER PONG!' Sea Hawk announces, spinning the ball on his fingertips. 

Of course this gets everyone's competitive spirit going, and everyone gets into pairs. 

After a few drinks Catra has almost forgotten what she was worrying about earlier, too focused on the buzz. Her and Adora demolish the other teams by a landslide with their impeccable aim. 

Soon the attendants came out with dinner, and it was lavish with every food you could imagine. Lobster, kobe beef, hor d'oeuvres, beluga caviar, kale, and opulent ice cream were all among the plates of food on the table.

They bring out a massive 3 tiered truffle cake, the words 'Happy Birthday' written with an oddly crude drawing of Catra. 

'You drew this?' She asks, and Adora nods happily. 'You worked so hard on mine, so.' Catra doesn’t have the heart to tell her that the cake was $7 and the drawing of her forehead was meant as an insult. 

They sing the birthday song for her, and this time no one brings up the cake cutting tradition. 

After dinner they sit outside in the garden around the bonfire Sea Hawk had made. He was drunkenly singing a loud shanty while Bow piled in the wood, fanning the flames. Frosta sips on a mocktail, the only one there who wasn’t old enough to drink yet. The fire flickers and dances, casting shadows around them. 

Catra downs a few more cocktails and jello shots as she waits for Mermista to light up some fireworks. Apparently it was illegal, but Mermista just waved her off, telling her that she’ll just pay the penalty fee as Catra’s birthday gift. Sea Hawk really did rub off on her. 

When she successfully sets them off they light up the sky in dazzling multicoloured sparks. Adora’s friends whoop with glee, taking photos and videos to commemorate the moment. 

Adora's side profile is lit up in the dark, and she looks impossibly beautiful among the backdrop of stars. Longing tears at her chest, Catra wants to hold her hand but her throat feels too tight and she can’t move. The truth was that she knew she had always had feelings for Adora, even back when they were just kids back in the foster home. But like a coward, she could never voice them for fear of Adora leaving her side. 

A loud neighing can be heard from the stables in response to the loud booming noises from the fireworks. 

'Swifty!' Adora says, standing up. The moment's breaks and Catra reels back her hand. 'Stay here, I'll be right back.' 

Her chance disappears, she couldn’t say it after all. She watches her go tend to her horse, feeling stupid. 

‘Yoohoo~, want a rematch?’ Sea Hawk calls out from the patio, pouring vodka into tiny glasses. 

‘Don’t mind if I do.’ Catra replies. She definitely didn’t know her alcohol tolerance levels yet, so it was the perfect time to take that to the test. 

Catra confidently does a whole line of shots, determined to drink herself into unconsciousness. Every time she sees a flash of Lonnie or Adora’s face in her mind, she takes another swig. Everyone is cheering her on, screaming the song ‘Shots’ over and over again, also all drunk out of their minds. Sea Hawk taps out at the 5th drink, and everyone screams at Catra’s flawless victory. Scorpia lifts her into the air to do a victory lap, cheering. 

Adora finally makes an appearance, alerted by the sound of Catra's shrieky laughter as Scorpia swings her around. 

‘Don’t worry, I can take it from here.’ Her school captain says pulling Catra away from her friend. Scorpia just shrugs and makes her way to the food table.

‘Catra, maybe you should slow down.’ Adora tells the giggling girl in her arms. 

‘Noo way.’ She slurs, she was enjoying the feeling too much, the alcohol burning through her body, making her feel lightheaded. The light up disco dancefloor starts to blur into a kaleidoscope of colours. 

‘You got some weed?’ Catra asks, seeing Perfuma light a bowl. The taller girl hands her an already rolled up one and Catra snatches it to take a long drag. The smoke hits her lungs and she starts coughing. 

‘Oi Perfuma, why did you bring drugs? Angella will kill me!' Adora gripes, trying to wrestle the blunt away from Catra. 

‘Aw don't be like that! I made some edibles for you guys to try.’ Perfuma says cheerfully, pointing to the pot brownies. 

‘See? Scorpia likes them.’ She gestures at the other girl, who seemed to be currently tripping out of her mind and eating everything on the table. 

Catra goes to reach for one, but Adora grabs her by the wrist to lead her back inside. 'Alright, you're done for the night. Everyone say bye!' 

‘Byee Catra!’

‘Happy birthday!!’

Adora grabs her by the waist to lead her to her bedroom, Catra wobbling after her in the heels Glimmer lent her. 

'Ugh Adoraaa, don't be such a party pooper. I'm fine.' She moans, leaning heavily on the other girl. 'Don't you have a shift tomorrow afternoon? I don't want you getting hungover or drug tested.' Adora chides, rummaging around the dark for the light switch. 

Catra snorts. 'Oh you don't have to worry about that anymore. Got laid off.' 

Adora looks at her in confusion, until realization dawns on her. 'Wait, is that why Lonnie took you outside?' 

'Say, I never got to give you your birthday gift.' Catra pushes her hair back, voice sultry as she flings off her jacket. She never pinned herself down as a horny drunk, but here they were. Catra shoves Adora onto the bed, straddling her. Her golden hair spills over the mattress, soft like spun silk. 

'You still want that kiss?' Catra whispers in Adora's now burning red ear. 'My knife touched the bottom.' 

Adora's face now resembled a fire truck, mouth gaping in shock.

'C-Catra, I…' 

Catra presses their lips together, silencing her. She knows she probably tastes like alcohol and weed right now, but she couldn't care less in the moment. Adora's mouth is still slack jawed from mortification, so she takes the opportunity for tongue. She frowns and moves down to her neck when Adora doesn’t return the kiss. 

'Catra, what are you doing-' 

Catra bites down on Adora's nape. The blonde underneath her lets out a soft gasp, arching her back. Her gold manicured nails dig into her shoulder. 

'Stop, you're not thinking straight-!' 

'Sure ain't.' Catra grins, licking a stripe down the base of her neck. Adora’s necklace chain jingles with the movement. There was now an impressive hickey there, blooming violet on her pale skin. She pauses to admire her handiwork. 

'This isn't you talking, you'll, you'll regret this in the morning.' Adora stutters. She's shivering, their hands now laced together, silver rings clanking. 

 'I know. I don't care.' She replies, kissing her again. Adora's teeth nick her lip. The alcohol in her system makes her feel lightheaded, confident. No way would she have managed this sober. Adora tastes better than she does, sweet like blueberry soju. Catra's hands wander down further, pulling the strings to untie the back of her dress-

'Catra stop!' Adora suddenly shouts, striking Catra across the cheek in a deafening slap. 

Adora's eyes were blazing, almost teary in the dark. Her breathing was irregular, panting in and out. Catra stills, clutching her cheek. The look in her eyes sobered her immediately. 

Adora looks down at her palm, realizing what she just did. 'Sorry for hitting you!' She flounders. 'It's just that, you're only doing this because you’re drunk and upset, right?’

Catra just stares at her before climbing off. Cold realization settles as the fog in her brain clears. 'You're right. Forget it.' 

She sits on the edge of the bed, numbly watching Adora hurriedly trying to re-tie the back of her now wrinkled dress. Her lips are stained with Catra’s red lipstick. 

Adora catches her looking, and she quickly turns away to smooth down her hair with her fingers. 'You've had more than enough to drink tonight. I’ll get you some water to clear your head.’

She gets up to turn on the light switch, and Catra blinks in the harsh light from the chandeliers. 

‘Come on, let’s get you sobered up, okay?’ Adora leads her to the kitchen on the same floor, gingerly placing her friend on the slippery bar stool. 

The blonde goes to get the chilled jug of infused water from the fridge and pours it into a glass. Adora slides it across the island, and Catra reluctantly takes it. She sips at it, mint and lemon on her tongue. It tasted way better than her hose water. 

‘I’ll uh, pick out some groceries for you since we’re here and all.’ Adora says awkwardly into the silence, turning around to rummage through her pantry. 

Suddenly Catra is brought back to the whole reason why she was sitting here in this oversized mansion in the first place. Their friendship agreement. The one she had just violated. Catra had never felt more stupid to mistake Adora’s kindness and guilt for actual feelings. She felt like a charity case, waiting to collect food from the soup kitchen.

Of course Adora didn't like her back. She just saw her as someone needing to be saved. The product of survival guilt. Catra wanted to whack her head on the corner of her marbled countertop and not wake up. 

Adora takes out a green plastic bag, and starts filling it with everything and anything she can get. Cans, pasta, biscuits, fruits and vegetables. Actually this feeling was more like being one of those poor kids that white girls would pose next to for their Instagram after their trip to Africa. 

Did Adora have fun, volunteering to slum it up in her place while she returned here? All she ever wanted her entire life was to be Adora’s equal. 

Scorpia and Sea Hawk's loud laughter and DJ music can be heard downstairs in the garden, beyond the tall golden trimmed windows. The class difference between them stretched like an unfathomable canyon. Living the classy bougie dream until the clock struck midnight and she was back in her run down garage. Except soon she won’t even have that anymore. Why did Adora have to bring her here? It was almost cruel. 

Catra's suddenly overcome with the urge to vomit. She nearly falls off the high chair in her rush to throw up the unholy cocktail of alcohol into the sink. Tears bead in her eyes from the sour taste as she continues to vomit out everything she ate that night. She can feel Adora by her side, patting her back reassuringly.

It was by far the worst birthday she has ever had. 

--

The morning of, Catra woke up in Adora’s bed with a splitting headache. 

Unfortunately she was not given the gift of amnesia, as she vividly remembered every last excruciating detail about last night. 

She spots Adora’s mop of blonde hair under a blanket on the floor, even though there were a billion other free spare rooms to sleep in. Adora was probably too afraid to share the same bed as her now.

Catra’s borrowed crop top digs uncomfortably into her skin, and she angrily flings it off her body. The shorts stick to her like a second skin, smelling of tequila. She grabs her old Burger King uniform and puts it on, though even this didn’t belong to her now. 

Adora shifts in her sleep, and Catra lightly steps over her to get to the door. The last thing she wanted was for Adora to wake up. 

As soon as she’s out, she runs out to the elevator and bangs frantically on the buttons until it sends her to the bottom floor. The lift opens with a ding and in her haste she almost crashes headfirst into Glimmer. 

‘Oh hey! Are you going to work?’ Glimmer greets. She was in her silk pajamas and slippers, holding a glass of orange juice. 

‘Uh. Yeah.’ Catra lies, trying her best to look natural. 

‘Some party last night huh? Lucky today is a Saturday.’ Glimmer says conversationally, unaware of Catra’s urge to throw her across the room. ‘Hey, what happened to your cheek?’

Catra clutches her face, it still strung from where Adora struck her. ‘Nothing.’

Glimmer raises an eyebrow. ‘Well anyway, did you wanna stick around for  breakfast? The cooks made pancakes, bacon, eggs, the whole deal.' She peeks behind Catra. 'Is Adora still not up yet?’ 

As much as Catra wanted to scream get out of my way she schools her expression to her best customer service smile. ‘Nope she’s still sleeping it off. Anyway I’m gonna be late so I can’t stick around.’

‘Did you need a lift?’ Glimmer asks. It dawns on the brunette she couldn’t exactly run the entire way back home. ‘I’ll ask one of the drivers to take you back so you make it to your shift.’

Catra thanks her lucky stars that Glimmer was still too hungover to drive her. She wouldn’t have been able to dodge her questions if she had. 

‘Yes please.’ Catra says, giddy with relief. ‘Thank you.’ 

‘Ooh and before I forget, Adora told me last night to give you this.’ Glimmer says, grabbing the green bag of groceries off the counter. The shorter girl bundles it into Catra’s arms before she can object. 

‘Get home safe.’ She says, waving as the attendant leads her out the door. 

Catra looks down at the cans of food in her arms and doesn’t say anything.  

------

The days leading up to graduation were painful, to say the least. 

They more or less pretend the kiss didn't happen. Adora never brings it up, and neither does Catra. 

She would stare at the ceiling, wishing she had never gotten piss drunk at her birthday and kissed her. Adora was right, she did regret it. It was awful, the look on Adora's face when she slapped Catra replays in her mind and nightmares over and over again. It was mortifying. 

Adora still messages her every 3 days, and Catra still replies, though her words are empty and devoid of banter. I'm worried about you, she says. I'm fine, Catra always responds. 

The brunette continues to humour her to keep the peace, only shutting down when her old job was mentioned. Catra doesn’t allow Adora back into her home again. 

Sometimes they study together, but she can't concentrate when Adora wears her glasses. Her heart hurts, so she cradles her cheek and tries not to remember. 

The hickey she had branded Adora's neck with had been covered with foundation until it faded away. None of her friends had teased her about it, so she clearly had not told a single soul what had happened. 

Catra bites at the scab on her lip from where Adora’s teeth nicked her until it bleeds. She wants to apologize, but the words stick on her tongue and she can't bring herself to talk about that night. 

Catra knew Adora was only here by her side to alleviate her guilt. Shame buries itself under her skin every time she's near her, like she was too embarrassed to even exist in the same space as Adora. She wants to disappear. 

Exams are hard, and without an internet connection after the library closes at 6pm made it difficult to study. She tries to use the Mcdonald's wifi but soon just ordering a water cup wasn't enough for the workers to let her stay. It was a fruitless effort anyway, in her heart she knew she wasn't going to come out on top. Her ranking had slipped, she wasn't even at second place anymore. Rent was due at the end of the month, and without her Burger King wage she knew she'll be kicked out sooner than later. 

Catra felt stressed and self destructive, and the only thing that kept her from falling off the edge completely was Scorpia. As much as she hated depending on others, she'd much rather her old coworker than Adora. 

Her classmates seemed to like this new, muted down version of Catra who didn't argue and just stayed quiet most of the time. Fighting back was too difficult when all she wanted to do was blend into the wallpaper. All they talked about was where they were going for vacation after graduation, and Catra certainly had nothing to contribute to that conversation.

She felt like crying, all the time. It was agony, wanting to burst out into tears randomly while she sat wasting away in the student council room. Despite herself, she missed Burger King, and she just kept getting ghosted or rejected in her other job applications. Sometimes when she really wanted to indulge herself, she'd go cry silently in the school toilet stall. 

Glimmer notices the change, and she catches her glaring. 'You don't seem as alive lately. Your eye bags are huge.' 

'S'fine.' Catra replies, hiding her hands so she doesn't see how they shake. Honestly Catra couldn't remember the last time she slept.

'Pfft, don't lie to me. Adora's worried about you. You're getting skinnier, and your eyes are always raw. All you do is stare into space.' 

Catra bites down on her nails. Of course she knew that. But she's gone through this before, and she'll do it again. 

'What happened between you two?’ 

‘None of your business.’ Catra replies, shuffling her way to the hall. 

--

Their graduation ceremony starts off uneventfully. Every student’s parents except Catra’s sit proudly in the audience, eager to watch their kid graduate. One by one they receive their certificate and return to their seats. 

Adora and Catra stand side by side onstage, as Adora makes their final speech as School Captain. Through the blinding lights, she sees Angella waving proudly at her adoptive daughter in the crowd. 

Catra looks at Adora in the corner of her eye. She must look pathetic, lovesick and pining after someone she couldn’t have. 

‘It’s been such an honour serving the entire faculty and students of this school. I couldn’t have done it without my amazing Vice-Captain and all of my prefects.

Now I’m proud to hand over my badge to the next School Captain, Frosta.’ 

They go through the rest of the ceremony like that, each member of the student council handing their badges to their successors. 

Soon their Principal comes up to the podium, tapping it once and clearing her throat. 

‘Announcing our honor student, and the winner of the scholarship to Eternia University…’ Castaspella says, turning over the sign card. 

‘None other than our school captain, Adora!’

Everyone starts clapping, and Adora walks across the stage to shake Castaspella's hand. 

Sounded about right. Catra never won against Adora in her entire life. She had already expected this outcome. Like a game of cat and mouse, going over and over for all eternity. 

Adora would excel with her elite education and secure a well paying job. Catra would struggle at the bottom indefinitely, never amounting to anything. She never would, if Adora was still there next to her. When the blonde re-entered her life, everything she had been working towards for years just collapsed. Her job, her home, her School Captain status, her chance at the scholarship, her sanity. 

She had to be wiped clean. A fresh start. 

The flower petals were falling, the streets decorated with a vibrant pink. The other students mill out of the crowd with their parents, chatting excitedly about what was next in their futures. She waits for Adora underneath a tree.  

'Congratulations.' Catra says, when she finally spots the other girl in the crowd. Adora pulls away from Angella’s embrace to meet her. 

'You deserve this so much more than I do.' Adora says, her voice pained like she didn't just win a full ride to her dream university. 'You should take it.'

'It's in your name, silly.' Catra replies, lightly tapping her with her rolled up certificate.

'Besides, I knew you'd get into Eternia, so I never applied.'

Adora blinks dumbly. '...What? Aren’t we going to the same university?’ 

She always was a bit slow on the uptake. ‘Only you decided that, stuupid. Say, it's about time we ended this right?' 

‘Catra, what are you...' 

'Our deal. You don't need to feel guilty anymore or bring me anything.' Catra says, her voice sounding like it didn't belong to her. She rummages in her bag, bringing out Adora's spare varsity jacket that she hadn’t returned. 'Here, take this. Thank you for all the help.' 

'What do you mean? You want to stop being friends?' Adora says in disbelief, taking the jacket.  

Catra nods. ‘I can’t continue with the arrangement. I hope you understand.’ 

‘I don’t! Was I the only one who thought we were friends, real ones?’ Adora asks.

‘...That’s right. I never saw you as a friend. You were just a meal ticket to me. Are you happy now?’ Catra snaps back. Shit, that wasn’t what she meant to say. She had planned to end this quickly and painlessly, on a high note. Trust Adora to put up a fight. 

Something seems to click in Adora’s brain. ‘Is this about the night of the party?’

‘Figure that out yourself.’ Catra replies, turning to walk away. 

Adora grabs onto her arm. ‘Wait! If- if that’s what you want, I’ll give it! Just don't go!' 

This dumb blonde really was offering up her body, out of what? A sense of duty? How stupid. 

‘Is that right?’ Catra says, walking closer to her. Adora backs up until she is pinned to the tree. They’re face to face now. 

‘Can you really do this?’ Catra lifts Adora’s chin by a finger. 

Finally it seems to dawn on Adora exactly what Catra wanted. She swallows, biting her lip. 

There’s a flicker of hesitation, before Adora’s eyes squeeze shut defiantly. The blonde is shaking like a leaf, her breath coming out in panicked stutters from her pursed lips. 

Catra just stares at Adora’s scrunched up face impassively. Her scared reaction was the only confirmation she needed for closure. 

She flicks the other girl’s forehead, and her big blue eyes open in confusion.

‘Chill out, I’m not that evil to do it to someone so unwilling.’

Adora blinks, clutching her forehead. ‘Catra?’

Suddenly Angella’s voice cuts through their conversation from the car park. ‘Adora dear, are you done chatting with your friend? We have reservations!'

‘Um, I…’ Her old school captain opens her mouth to say something, but Angella's started to lose her patience. 'Adora, how long are you going to stand there? Glimmer is already waiting for us at the restaurant!' 

Catra just smiles tiredly. ‘Take care, dummy.’ 

She watches Adora being dragged off unwillingly by her adoptive mother to the car. 

Catra lets out a sigh. Her phone pings with a message from Scorpia, and she knows it's time to go. 

---

By the time Angella releases her from their graduation celebration, Adora can feel that it's already too late.

Adora: 

Please, can we talk? Let me fix this

A pop up appears over the screen. 

Message Not Sent

This person isn't receiving messages at this time. 

Adora sends another message, but they all go undelivered. Catra had blocked her again. Panic spikes through her veins, and she quickly dons on a jacket and grabs her car keys. 

She sneaks out that night, down the familiar winding path through the bush that led to Catra's place. 

'Catra?' She rolls up the garage door, blinking in the darkness. When her eyes adjusted, she found Catra's old home completely emptied. 

All the furniture and items her friend had collected over the years, they were all gone. The little stove where they cooked, the old mattress where they talked late into the night, all vanished like they were never there. 

A single green plastic bag remained on the floor untouched, filled to the brim of food. 

[jojo-reader-hell]

imagine being Jotaro's twin, and you wake up one morning. You look in the bathroom mirror, only to realize you have fangs, claws, & slit pupils. You scream for Jotaro, who is groggy from the lack of sleep. He glares at you, "wait that's it? For fuck's sake, i thought it was a spider or something." Then he yells for your dear mother. "It's y/n, they're finally going through their transformation." Holly squeals before rushing over to you. (It turns out the Joestar family is a werewolf clan!)

I loved this idea so much that I kinda got carried away writing for it! I definitely would like to turn this into a two parter, so keep an eye out for the AO3 link! Until then, hope you enjoy!

Werewolf!Joestars and Werewolf!Reader

...

“WAAAAAAAAAAAH!! BUBBA! BUBBA!”

Big brother instincts activated, Jotaro slammed the door to his room wide open, nearly putting a hole in the wall and causing the door to dangle haphazardly off its hinges. His footfall was heavy, bounding through the hallway and nearly knocking down the decorative plants. In the back of his mind, whatever wasn’t preoccupied with getting to you was worrying about his mother’s nagging about the second door he would have to break to find you. But door be damned, he had to get to you. You never screamed this loud unless something was terribly wrong...

He skidded to a halt in front of the open bathroom, thankful for once in his life that you had the nasty habit of leaving it open, and saw you curled into a ball on the floor. Jotaro wasted no time in dragging you up to sit on your knees and asking where it hurt, only to stop dead in his tracks when he got a good look at you.

“B-Bubba!” You whined, an unmistakable edge to it as you clutched your face. “I’m ugly!”

“You’ve always been ugly.” The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them, and you only cried harder and more violently, a little blood dribbling out of your mouth where extra canines had been growing over your normal set.

“What’s happening to me?!” You wailed. “Everything hurts, my mouth is bleeding, my hands are furry, there’s a fuzzy thing on my butt and when I tried to pull it off I scratched myself with my nails-...”

“Good God, just shut your yap already!” Jotaro snapped. “You’re alright, stand up by yourself!”

“Jotaro! What’s wrong?! What’s happened??”

The pattering of your mother’s slippers echoed throughout the hallway, she nearly slid on the wood floors when she came to an abrupt halt, watching in horror as Jotaro yanked you up violently by the arm and tried to get you to stop screaming and wailing. Evidently it wasn’t working, because the louder he barked orders at you to shut up the harder you cried, yelping every time he yanked you the wrong way.

“Fuckhead over here is going through the change!” He answered back, as though you’d merely gotten a zit. Jotaro was dangling you by your arm painfully, and you tried clawing at him to make him put you down.

Nothing bullied him into letting go until a dark look crossed your mother’s face.

“Let go Jojo.”

She used a voice you never heard before, and even more shocking was the fact that Jojo finally listened for once instead of bullying her and calling her horrible names. He immediately dropped you into her care, feigning disinterest like a scolded pet.

“Oh, my baby!” She cooed, a huge smile coming over her face as she took over trying to get you to stand on your own. “It’s going to be all ok now, sweet baby. Nothings wrong, and you’re not ugly. You’re growing up!”

“H-hwat???” You blubbered, acting like a child as your mother mopped up your face with her apron, not caring that your bloody mouth was staining the white fabric.

“Look baby! Look how pretty your fur is, oh... how cute, I hope you have the same pattern as your grandpa. Even your little tail... we need to get you all nice and brushed.”

“But I... I don’t understand!” You couldn’t wrap your head around it, your mother was more concerned with gushing over you and reassuring you about how cute you were, and all you could do was babble questions until your brother put it bluntly for you:

“You’re turning into a wolf stupid.”

“Jojo, we need to be encouraging.”

Your mother’s voice had a certain conviction to it, another mystery wrapped in an enigma as she glanced disapprovingly at her son. She began to tell you all about the changes that would take place over the next few months, asking if you remembered those puberty videos they showed you in school when you were eleven, and you did, quite vividly if you were being honest. Every month during the full moon you’d just go through the motions of transforming, until your body got used to it and the process became as natural to you as breathing. She assuaged your fears: no you weren’t going to become a bloodthirsty animal. No you weren’t a danger to your family. No you weren’t going to suddenly find other wolves attractive or any other silly fear you had. All it was she said was an extra step in growing up you had to take, kind of like puberty 2.0. Well, it was sort of like that for the Joestars anyway, going back as far as your great great grandfather’s parents, the mythological monster part coming from his mother Mary who was one of the last of the werewolves. The lineage was diluted, hence the pain at the beginning that was inevitable, because in order to be with her beloved for all eternity she had to bite him to turn him, thus every Joestar since had to experience a rather horrific baptism by blood when they came of age. It could have been avoided if the lineage had been kept human free, and you would have been born a fluffy puppy instead of a baby, but then where would we be if we couldn’t choose the ones we loved your mother reasoned.

“The only tricky little detail is keeping the secret of our immortality. Usually when we’ve felt enough is enough here among humans, we just pop off into the woods and enjoy our nice long life with our loved ones. You’ll even age differently, your face will stay wrinkle free, and the only difference is your hair will turn grey!”

“Wait a minute... you mean we can’t die and we just leave society to live in the woods?”

“Uh huh!”

“Like, the actual woods around our house?”

“Of course baby. Everyone lives in the woods, who do you think you hear howling every now and again when the moon is full? If you’d like, you can spend your moon time with your Grandpa and Granny, or Papa Jonathan and Momma Erina will be there to take care of you too!”

The way your mother put it, it was like being a werewolf was as simple as going on a fucking family vacation every month.

When the pain came back you didn’t care to even acknowledge the insanity of your mother’s nonchalance. All you knew was that it felt as though somebody was taking you by the arms and legs trying to yank them out of the sockets.

“It hurts...” you cried, “Can I please have something for the pain?”

“No honey... Now that it’s taking over, we can’t give you any anti inflammatories for the pain, it’s too dangerous. We have to be very careful with certain foods too, no chocolates or onions, no coffee, no more cooked bones, no nuts, no avocado. You’ll have to be very careful with your diet from now on, those things can make you very sick. But I have an idea, maybe it will help if you shift completely and we get some food in you.”

“How do I do that?”

“Just relax, don’t tense up because of the pain, it just has to happen. Breathing helps as well, if you want, mommy can shift with you and I’ll show you how to breathe.”

She shooed Jotaro out of the bathroom, giving him some sort of a nonverbal signal that made him snap to attention, for obvious reasons she explained that it would be best to do it in private. You could hear Jotaro on the phone with someone, informing them of your latest development with the Joestar gene and instructing them to bring lots of something, whatever it was you didn’t catch it because your mother closed the door behind her. She helped you change and folded your clothes painstakingly, holding your hands in hers as she instructed you to keep your eyes trained on hers.

“In and out sweetheart.” She told you, inhaling through the nose and exhaling out through the mouth. “In... and out...”

She made a soft sound with her pursed lips, and you mimicked her even though your body was in excruciating pain. Eventually you could actually feel the smoothness of the transition, once the tension left your body you noticed the pain had disappeared and your bones just simply shifted out of place and wherever they needed to go. When you finally came to, you noticed that the world was a whole hell of a lot bigger, a fact that made you completely terrified. Your whole body was seized by shaking and it only made your fear worse, but when you looked at the mass of cream colored fur in front of you, you actually voiced your fear with a loud yelp.

“Baby, shhh, it’s mama.”

A large wet nose pressed against your soft cheeks, a large warm wet tongue lathed at your face, so familiar... you felt like you remembered something like this, maybe when you were a baby, a memory of you cold and wriggling against the same warm cream colored fur surfaced and soothed you somewhat. When you finally looked up, you immediately recognized the warm green eyes staring lovingly back at you.

“Mama...” your voice was startling, almost high pitched. When you looked down at yourself, you noticed little beany paws where your feet and hands should have been, completely covered head to toe in fuzz the color of your hair.

Making yourself go cross eyed revealed a soft muzzle and little black nose, but it hurt to focus too much and you had to stop, turning to the side and noticing a soft rotund puppy body where your own used to be. You were still the same size, but when compared to the adult body of your mother, you felt incredibly small. She was gigantic, rear end pressing against the door as she struggled to stoop in the bathroom, a huge bushy tail nearly the size of your body thumping against the sink and displacing a couple of toothbrushes.

“It’s okay baby. There’s a lot of changes happening, and when you’re born into it you’re luckier than if you’d been bitten like your Granny Suzie or your great Granny Lisa Lisa. Everything is gradual, and you’re not going to burn so much energy. It’s so much easier going through this, you will be smaller than the rest of us for a while until you’re out of high school, but that’s ok. It’s just like growing up all over again, except this goes much faster, isn’t that exciting?”

You couldn’t help the whine that escaped as she mouthed your neck and picked you up. Being dangled from this height didn’t exactly help you when you were already a fearful person to begin with, and it certainly didn’t help that your mother was now the size of the mega fauna they had at the museums. But it was all a matter of perspective. You’d never seen a wolf this close before, only from far away at the zoo on rare occasions, and certainly not from the perspective of being small enough that her mouth almost dwarfed your body, her hot breath steaming on your pelt as she scratched at the closed door with a large paw.

When it opened, Jotaro was there, looking far too annoyed at the fact that you made such a fuss about your changes. He raised an eyebrow as your mother tried to wriggle out of the narrow door frame into the hall with you still in her mouth, and even more shocking was the fact that after she’d placed you delicately on her oversized bed to snuggle with you, you saw Jotaro just close his eyes and lose himself into his own impossibly large wolf form, not caring that his clothes ripped. He laid his head next to you, nosing you as your mother’s bushy tail encircled you protectively, and she began to clean you in a similar manner to a cat cleaning a kitten. Was it the same for canids? Probably. You’d never owned a dog before and suddenly you were very aware of why this was. Especially the way your brother acted, he was a grumpy asshole as a person, you could only imagine what he was like as a monster.

Curiosity compelled you to look around the room, everything so different from a wolfy perspective. Your perception of colors was vastly different, as was the way you perceived the room itself. Often you’d find yourself staring at things that seemed to mystify the primal part of your brain. You were compelled to gnaw at the tassels on your mother’s bedspread, but her gentle nip on your ear discouraged you. Things you knew to be red and green were nearly invisible, fading to grey or an interesting shade of yellow that you didn’t think could exist. Her dresser table interested you the most, as you could see your little ears in the reflection. Lifting your head up a little bit more however, that was a different story as the human reasoning part of your brain suddenly seemed to shut down.

“MAMA!” Your voice was a shrill scream!

You stood on your hind legs and began screaming, hackles raised and your poor little tail between your legs. The sounds you made were so loud and scared that it made your brother flinch.

“MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA MAMA! THERES A MONSTER ON THE DRESSER! THERES A MONSTER ON THE DRESSER! MAMA HELP ME THERES A MONSTER ON THE DRESSER!”

...

“Oh that’s adorable Jonathan! Where’d you find that?”

“It was mine when I was a pup!” Jonathan Joestar said, a look of pride on his face as Suzie examined the tiny blue collar with a brass bell he had in his hands. “My mother got it for me because I had a tendency to wander, this way Holly can use it on the little one. Jotaro was too big for it, but I figure it’s just the size for my little bundle of joy!”

“I figured it would be best to just bring meat, and lots of it considering how ravenous of an appetite Jotaro had when he turned.” Joseph Joestar insisted, he and his wife carrying two large fresh kills apiece.

“We can’t feed the baby that!” Jonathan’s wife Erina looked scandalized, holding far too many sweaters that looked similar to the ones pet owners got for their spoiled dogs. “We’re just going to get the little one dirty, and then Holly’s going to have to clean up the mess later on after we make sure the little one is asleep.”

“Once we get the little one fed, then we can give out presents, matter of fact it was very smart of Joseph to bring so much. Whatever the little one doesn’t eat, Holly and Jotaro can have.” reasoned Jonathan’s son, a hulking creature named George who was every bit the spitting image of his father, and the only one of the bunch comfortable enough in the open to remain in wolf form. “Better to be full of food than stressing about the new changes on an empty stomach. Especially if the two of them had to waste energy and shift from the sound of Jotaro’s phone call. It wouldn’t hurt to be fully shifted when we see them either. After all, Holly is the alpha, it would be helpful for her to be surrounded by familiar faces instead of a bunch of humans.”

They all agreed, stopping short of the little cabin in the woods where Holly lived with her two children, helping each other to change out of clothes and stashing them in strategic places on the porch before transforming into creatures so large some of them had to hang back, unable to fit on the small space of the porch. Jonathan took the lead, a smile on his canine face as he politely scratched at the door.

“Jojo!” He barked, tail thumping wildly against the wall as he scratched the door again. “Jojo it’s us! Please let us in!”

He was interrupted by the shrill sound of a puppy’s yelping, the door flying open only for the mega wolf to be nearly bowled over by a very frightened young werewolf being chased by an alpha female.

“HELP! HELP! MONSTER!” You cried, taking off into the woods as your mother chased at your heels.

“Baby! Baby please come back! It was only your reflection! There’s no monster in the house!” Your mother barked after you.

“MONSTER!”

A very irritated and nearly naked Jotaro appeared at the door much to everyone’s shock, scratching his rear through the leftover shreds of his pants.

“Good grief, at least you brought me something to eat...”

There wasn’t even time to scold him for taking a large portion of the kill, he simply took it and went back indoors, dragging it off into a corner to gorge while Jonathan tried to help your mother chase you down.

[thatweirdtranny]

"You should've said that yesterday" for Supercorp.

so i know this prompt was sent to me so SO long ago and i’m very sorry it took me so long to do it, but i’ve been itching to play around with the idea of an AU where lena tells the world kara is supergirl at the pulitzer ceremony and a couple mosts making their way around my dashboard about it sort of inspired this angsty mess

enjoy!

prompt: “you should’ve said that yesterday”

“You should���ve known it would end this way.”

Lena’s voice is cold as she says it, as she dashes away Kara’s last hope that maybe, maybe it was all just the actions of someone deeply hurt unable to control her darker impulses. An impulse to hurt back, to be as ruthless as she thought the betrayal deserved. A spur of the moment decision that, once revisited, would be recognized for what it is.

Crossing a line.

Maybe, maybe Lena didn’t mean to burn it all down, Kara had reasoned as she dashed through the crowd, now going wild around her. She left Alex behind, scarcely hearing her sister’s calls for her or her harsh shouts at the crowd to back off as she called in the DEO to secure the area, to escort away everyone now clamoring towards Kara to bark out questions and snap pictures, the entire frothing mass of journalists who’d just been let in on the scoop of the century.

Kara Danvers is Supergirl, and now Kara Danvers is running away.

Away from the crowd, away from the flashing lights and cacophony of sound, away to somewhere she can breathe and figure out what the hell just happened.

She came out to Lena, and then Lena outed her to the world in a televised speech.

Maybe she didn’t mean it, maybe her world wasn’t crumbling around her, Kara had told herself between stuttered breaths as she stumbled out onto the roof of the building. But Lena had followed Kara out onto the rooftop after her Pulitzer speech, had walked to the ledge Kara sat at as she struggled to process the evening’s events, waiting for Kara to turn and look her in the eye before she bit out the words.

“You should’ve known it would end this way.”

And there it slips away, Kara’s last grasp at the chance this isn’t what it looks like. That Lena isn’t currently looking at her with all the venom she can muster and not a hint of regret on her face.

“Why?” Kara is surprised to find herself speaking, doesn’t feel like she’s remotely capable of anything right now. She’s been watching DEO agents escort the crowd of journalists out of the building entrance below her for several minutes and her phone hasn’t stopped buzzing in that time. She knows that by the time she gets home the news will be nothing but this -- big blazing letters on every channel proclaiming her secret to the world -- but… Rao. Can she even go home? Her apartment could be getting flocked right this very moment.

“Why should you have known?” Lena sneers.

“Why would you do this?” Kara says, voice hollow. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“I’ve revealed to the world who you truly are: a liar.”

And Rao, it shouldn’t make her laugh. The situation definitely doesn’t call for it by any means, but all the same she finds it bubbling up within her. It’s not happy, it’s an unsettling laughter that drags on through the silence and it feels a lot like she’s giving voice to her undoing.

“How the fuck do you think aliens make it through the day? We lie,” Kara bites out between peels of giggles. Maybe she’s lost it, but the way Lena’s eyes widen a little at her curse just sends her back into her laughing fit. Lena can out her to the world but is shocked to hear the word fuck come out of her mouth.

It takes another minute for Kara to collect herself, during which Lena doesn’t say a word. Perhaps she’s unnerved at Kara’s strange reaction, perhaps she’s curious to see where Kara’s taking this, but nonetheless she remains silent until Kara speaks.

“You think there’s a single alien out there who doesn’t lie every fucking day to the world about what they are? It’s how we live, Lena! Lying to you was a mistake, the biggest mistake of my life because I hurt my best friend. But Rao, lying to the world was about surviving on this planet, and you burned every protection I had for myself and the people I love to the ground. So I’m asking again, do you really understand what exactly you’ve done?”

A pause, then, “Do you understand that everyone I care about is a target now? Do you understand that, Lena? Did you even think about that?”

And this is what finally makes Lena break her stony cold expression. Her jaw drops open slightly, like she’s on the edge of saying something, but Kara doesn’t get a chance to hear it. She’s honed in on another sound, the signal of one of her watches coming from a direction she knows is Midvale.

In an instant she’s gone, leaving behind only a gust of wind and a gaping Lena in her wake.

*********

Kara feels hollow.

Comforting words from Alex and a chorus of “She’ll be okay” and “Eliza will be back on her feet in no time” from her friends do nothing for her. Not when she can’t even visit Eliza in the hospital without bringing swarms of people wherever she goes, reporters throwing invasive questions, passerby gawking and bringing attention to the people she’s already put in enough danger.

Alex had wiped a few stray tears from behind Kara’s glasses -- Why is she even bothering to wear them anyway? -- and told her in her strong and steady big-sister voice, “The craze will die down eventually. We can figure this out, Kara, I promise. Let’s just take it one day at a time, okay?” to which Kara had given an unconvincing nod before taking off.

But now, Kara finds herself with nowhere to go. The DEO sectioned off her apartment after discovering it was broken into during the night. CatCo is a no-go too. The discovery that Lena had sent incriminating videos of her using her powers as Kara Danvers just felt like another nail in her coffin, and in the hours since then it’s become more and more clear that this isn’t a storm she can simply wait out.

And so, with nowhere to go, she finds herself sitting cross-legged on the ledge of a roof, the roof of what should be her favorite building but now just makes her stomach twist, and waits for her presence to become noticed as she knows it will. She doesn’t wait long before she hears heals clicking against the cement, noting how the sound still quickens her heart and brings warmth despite how very wrong things have gone between them.

“I like what you’ve done to the roof. The solar panels and rooftop aeroponics greenhouse system is a nice touch,” Kara says as the clicking comes to a stop just behind her, a sad smile crossing her lips.

Lena’s heartbeat is different today, quicker and with a stutter that Kara’s come to associate with nerves from the Luthor. But when she hovers in midair and turns, lighting down in front of her favorite person, Lena’s face is remarkably similar to their last encounter: unyielding, stony, not unlike the expression Lena turns out for rude businessmen who talk down to her because she’s a young woman at the top of her fields.

It’s the sight of Lena looking at her like she’s worse than a stranger that has the words tumbling out of Kara’s mouth.

“I really went and made a mess of things, didn’t I?”

If Lena’s surprised at this, she doesn’t show it, but it’s all Kara’s thought about since their last encounter. She’s angry, furious even, at Lena for what she’s done, of course. But Kara knows, with absolute shame, that it all comes back to her. Years were spent living a double life to her best friend, deceiving her, putting her in danger all the while, and she understands perfectly well why Lena lashed out the way she did upon discovering the betrayal.

“How long did you know?” Kara asks, and she can’t mask the exhaustion that seeps into her voice. The last twenty-four hours have exhausted her beyond recognition, but she needs to know how long Lena had been sitting with the information of her identity. “You had videos of me going back months, it’s pretty clear you didn’t find out when I told you yesterday.”

“Weeks,” Lena says, almost curtly, and Kara fights a wince at the short tone. “It felt fitting, using the same video files Lex used to show me the truth to show the rest of the world.”

“He told you?” Kara asks. Lena’s icy indifference hardens into a kind of wrathful glare. Kara doesn’t back down, only sighs. “I just want to understand. If this is it, if it’s really over between us, I need the full picture of why it all burned down.”

“You say that like we were in love,” Lena retorts, and Rao that almost makes Kara laugh.

“Weren’t we?” Kara murmurs, waiting as Lena’s mask slips for just a moment.

In that moment, the anguish washes over her face like a tidal wave before the brunette quickly and carefully knits her expression back into one of stony indifference, and Kara has her answer.

“Look, I know I’m not always great at social cues, but I knew what we had. Knew what it was turning into, and I’m sorry I screwed it all up with my lies. I can’t fix it, and I don’t intend to diminish your pain by asking you to just get past it, and maybe nothing is salvageable anyway.” Kara’s voice wavers near the end, and she finds herself slipping the glasses from her face and hooking them over her shirt pocket so she can more easily wipe away her tears. She doesn’t bother to put them back on, there’s no point now. “But why couldn’t your revenge just be on me? Why do other people have to suffer because I screwed up?”

Lena’s eyes hone in on Kara’s movements, the removal of her glasses. She watches her like Kara really is a stranger, and Kara didn’t think it would burn as much as it does. It takes Lena a moment to respond to Kara’s question.

“What are you talking about?”

“Eliza was attacked last night. I barely managed to get to her in time.” Anger bleeds into Kara’s voice as she says it, but she can’t help it. Every safeguard protecting her loved ones is gone, and as much as she understands Lena’s side to it, she can’t help the part of her that’s burning with fury at it all. Lena opens her mouth as if to speak, but Kara cuts her off. “She’s okay, mostly. A few bumps and bruises, a grade three concussion, but nothing she won’t heal from.”

“I… that’s not what I wanted.”

“You think I don’t know that? I know you, Lena. I know you never want anyone to get hurt, I know you probably assumed I’d be fine because I’m practically indestructible, but the people around me aren’t!” Kara is yelling now, crying and yelling and damn it, it’s all so wrong. “Everyone I love is a target now, and that damn well includes you!”

“Oh, don’t go pretending I wasn’t a target before!” Lena’s voice has risen to a yell too. “I’m a Luthor, I already have assassins after me every few months. And my working relationship with Supergirl has never been a secret.”

“You think a working relationship with Supergirl is the same as what the world now assumes we are?” Kara throws back. “All my coworkers have seen us on lunch dates. They’ve seen you showing up to invite me to galas. They’ve read every tooth-rotting article I’ve ever written about you. I have super hearing Lena, I know they make jokes about us, the crushes we obviously have on one another. Half of them assume we’re already dating! And with your speech last night, coming off like a lover’s quarrel or something, well… you do the math! These people are journalists, Lena, at a paper that’s become all about gossip. What do you think they’ve been writing about for the last day? Have you even checked? Because I have, and it’s not just me dominating the papers right now. It’s you and me.”

“I… we’re not together…”

“That doesn’t matter. Not to the people writing these articles, not to my very super-powered enemies who now know exactly who to use to hurt me most. Rao, Lena, what would I even do if they… if they hurt you to get to me?”

“You…” Kara doesn’t think she imagines the way Lena’s eyes soften momentarily, but it doesn’t last long. “No, you don’t get to go pretending we were… that we were anything more than another lie.”

“Well, I’m not going to convince you of the contrary at this point I guess, and after spending the day thinking of all the places I can’t go instead of being able to spend it with Eliza in the hospital -- you know, because being near her puts her in worse danger now -- I’m not feeling up to trying right now,” Kara says, every bit the girl of steele with how hard her voice becomes. “Whatever, what’s done is done. You want us to be in the past? Fine, but I still need to give you this.”

“And what is this exactly?” Lena says, taking the watch offered to her with trepidation.

“Open it, there’s a button you can press that’ll send out a signal I can hear and I’ll come straight away. If you ever need me, all you have to do is call.”

“I don’t understand.” Lena appears genuinely taken aback at what she’s being offered. It’s a place in Kara’s life, a level of care and protection she hadn’t expected after everything. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I need you safe, Lena. I thought that much was clear.”

And with that, Kara moves to leave, having nothing else to say. She’s about to take off again, maybe spend the night in the DEO until she can figure where she’s going to live now that a loft in the city is no longer feasible, before Lena’s shout stops her.

“Wait! I’m sorry for putting your friends and family in danger. I can have each of their homes equipped with the highest security systems there are, same as mine.”

A pause, then, quieter, “I’ll help you protect them, Kara.”

Kara turns back, all sad smiles and regret. She hasn’t made a move to put her glasses back on, and she doesn’t intend to. There’s no point.

“You should’ve said that yesterday,” Kara says. “But thanks.”

[lilacandladybugs]

What’s your current relationship with god? I’m very curious lmao

I’m sorry if this sounds incomprehensible and rambly and disjointed or pretentious. I care a lot more about this than almost anything else in the world and I wish I could do a better job of explaining myself. But I feel like why I believe in God or what my relationship with him is like is like trying to explain who I am. And I’m just the accumulation of everything I’ve ever experienced or that I think and I feel like it’s really important that I communicate it correctly so here is my attempt.

Here’s a video that’s really good that I think will give some good background information. If you don’t want to read all of this, the video is probably enough to explain.

TLDR: This isn’t the way things are supposed to be. Death isn’t supposed to happen, it isn’t a part of the natural order of things. God loved us so much he died to fix it, and rose again to defeat death. God loves me and I love him, and I’ve never found peace or fulfillment like that in anything else.

I hope this makes sense anon let me know if you have any questions or if I misinterpreted your question. 

TW suicide // grief // abuse // rape mention (not v bad or graphic or anything)

Long version:

I think I've always thought that there's something naturally (for lack of a better word) poetic about existing. Not really meaning that it's good, but kind of that everything feels really purposeful it seems to flow together like an old epic. Everything seems intensely meaningful to me.

I've always thought that life was tragic. That death is a fracture in the way things are, like we live in the ancient ruins of a long lost civilization.

And I've always thought that life seems like an incomprehensibly wonderful gift, because how can there be tragedy if there isn't anything worth losing? But somehow it seems like peace is the basic way things are, that normalcy isn't normal at all but like this status quo of goodness which makes bad things happening not only heart breaking but surprising.

Reconciling all of those ideas is really confusing.

I'm a strong proponent of thinking analytically about what you believe since the answer we choose to the question of whether or not God exists is like quite literally something we bet our lives on. We bet our life that God exists or that he doesn't, that things have meaning anchored in an external source or that they don't. 

So while I grew up a Christian I've never felt really dead in it. I want to be uncomfortable. I want to be stubborn in asking questions and I don't have a problem with questioning authorities on why they believe what they believe—especially if they really confidently assert it. I want to be able to know things and understand them.

My junior year of high school three of my closest childhood friends died, and several others almost died. I remember sitting up at like two am listening to twenty one pilots self titled album just like seething and exhausted asking lord why would you abandon me like that?

Some other really horrible things happened to people that I cared about, I felt abandoned and rejected by Christians just for being broken, some of them caused it or contributed to the trauma and abuse. How could people who claimed the name of God do that?

My debate partner's best friend killed himself the same year that my friends died, and he became an atheist and I stayed a Christian. We fought about it a lot. I really seriously considered becoming an atheist.

The thing that I couldn't accept was the lack of eternality. 

Really ironically I think I stayed a Christian for the same reason that my friend became an atheist. We were both asking why all of the living world is crying out in anguish. We both wanted to die. We both were angry. We both were horrified.

My friend thought that the question of “where is God?” was harder to answer than “why is there meaning to death?”

I'm a Christian because I'm horrified. He's an atheist for the same reason.

If you don’t feel like reading it, here’s the TLDR: there is no reason for someone to do something or not do something if God isn’t there to tell them to. There isn’t a moral grounding for law.

Arthur Leff was an atheist law professor at Yale in the eighties, and he wrote about the moral grounding for laws in his essay, Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law. The question he was asking was what can we do to ground morality? What can we do to prove objectively that there are things one ought to do and things one ought not do?

I am unwilling to accept that. There is something evil about abuse, neglect, rape, torture. There is something about these things that violates human rights, human dignity. There's something about them that goes against objective moral law.

But without God there is no moral law. So I wouldn't be able to say, "you should never rape someone, because rape is wrong." And everything that I had experienced flew in the face of that.

Dr. Leff wrote this about that question;

“All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us "good," and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us, could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things now stand, everything is up for grabs.

Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up to and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot-and General Custer too-have earned salvation.

Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil.

[All together now:] Sez who?

God help us.”

In the end, it comes down to this; Do I believe that the complexity of the universe is because there was someone intelligent actively involved in its design, do I believe that information, reason, logic, emotion, and morality exist and are reliable because they have grounding in God’s identity? Do I believe that God is who he says he is?

And I guess the answer to those questions was yes.

I saw God. He was there in the stillness - in the sunrise and sunset and at 2 am after I couldn't cry anymore. I felt him. And I know part of his goodness that I wish I never had to know. I felt like I was lying breathless bleeding out in a gutter watching the stars. Almost like a pause - just a moment in time where I was hurt enough, still enough to hear his voice.

One of the most important things I learned is that life is not hopeless.  If life is a story, then the last chapter of the book has already been written. This is the premise of the song It is Well with My Soul by Horatio G. Spafford.

“When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll;

Whatever my lot, God has taught me to say,

It is well, it is well, with my soul.

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought

My sin, not in part but the whole,

Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, o my soul” 

The powers of evil and darkness can take away my friends, my sanity, my family, and even my life, but God has already saved me, and I can find peace in spite of my circumstances. Three of my friends died, but God has already conquered death. I feel powerless, but God is powerful. I feel abandoned, but God loves me so much that he died a horrible torturous death for me. Living in light of that is peace. 

Whenever I felt like I couldn’t keep going there would be something to stop me. I heard his voice in music, and in my friends that held me when I cried, and in morning glories on my morning walk. I kept lists of all of the times this happened, every time that someone encouraged me to keep going, every time that someone would quote a Bible verse when I was crying out for God to answer me, every time that the world paused. Everything asked me the same question, do you think it means nothing? Do you think that there is a direction that we’re going? Are we coming from nothing and going toward nowhere?

I had friends who heard him too. He was so gentle to us. I wasn’t able to go to church, I wasn’t able to listen to worship music but the LGBTQ+ community took care of me, they were isolated from church as well. There was enough for me in that God promised he would take care of me, and he did. He died for me. He talked to my trans friend and said, “listen, your parents have rejected you and said you’ll never be your son, but I am a good father. I love you. Be my son instead.”

God mourned with me. He saw everything and he was angry. I was able to breathe because I knew that in the end there will be justice for abuse victims, because God said that he is the holder of justice, and vengeance will be his.

When one of my friends was hospitalized I stood outside during the beginning of a thunderstorm and watched the clouds and the sky darken and lightning flash across the sky.

Even the wind and the sea obey him. He asked me if I trust him. 

I guess my answer was yes.

In spite of everything that I went through, I was more thoroughly convinced that I ever was before that things matter. I was convinced that abuse is evil. I was convinced that death is an abomination. I was convinced that these laws of morality are woven into the fabric of the universe. I was convinced that God died to save us from that reality. I was convinced he loved me.

I still am

[in-the-whisper]

I’m sorry if this sounds incomprehensible and rambly and disjointed or pretentious. I care a lot more about this than almost anything else in the world and I wish I could do a better job of explaining myself. But I feel like why I believe in God or what my relationship with him is like is like trying to explain who I am. And I’m just the accumulation of everything I’ve ever experienced or that I think and I feel like it’s really important that I communicate it correctly so here is my attempt.

Here’s a video that’s really good that I think will give some good background information. If you don’t want to read all of this, the video is probably enough to explain.

TLDR: This isn’t the way things are supposed to be. Death isn’t supposed to happen, it isn’t a part of the natural order of things. God loved us so much he died to fix it, and rose again to defeat death. God loves me and I love him, and I’ve never found peace or fulfillment like that in anything else.

I hope this makes sense anon let me know if you have any questions or if I misinterpreted your question.

TW suicide // grief // abuse // rape mention (not v bad or graphic or anything)

Long version:

I think I've always thought that there's something naturally (for lack of a better word) poetic about existing. Not really meaning that it's good, but kind of that everything feels really purposeful it seems to flow together like an old epic. Everything seems intensely meaningful to me.

I've always thought that life was tragic. That death is a fracture in the way things are, like we live in the ancient ruins of a long lost civilization.

And I've always thought that life seems like an incomprehensibly wonderful gift, because how can there be tragedy if there isn't anything worth losing? But somehow it seems like peace is the basic way things are, that normalcy isn't normal at all but like this status quo of goodness which makes bad things happening not only heart breaking but surprising.

Reconciling all of those ideas is really confusing.

I'm a strong proponent of thinking analytically about what you believe since the answer we choose to the question of whether or not God exists is like quite literally something we bet our lives on. We bet our life that God exists or that he doesn't, that things have meaning anchored in an external source or that they don't.

So while I grew up a Christian I've never felt really dead in it. I want to be uncomfortable. I want to be stubborn in asking questions and I don't have a problem with questioning authorities on why they believe what they believe—especially if they really confidently assert it. I want to be able to know things and understand them.

My junior year of high school three of my closest childhood friends died, and several others almost died. I remember sitting up at like two am listening to twenty one pilots self titled album just like seething and exhausted asking lord why would you abandon me like that?

Some other really horrible things happened to people that I cared about, I felt abandoned and rejected by Christians just for being broken, some of them caused it or contributed to the trauma and abuse. How could people who claimed the name of God do that?

My debate partner's best friend killed himself the same year that my friends died, and he became an atheist and I stayed a Christian. We fought about it a lot. I really seriously considered becoming an atheist.

The thing that I couldn't accept was the lack of eternality.

Really ironically I think I stayed a Christian for the same reason that my friend became an atheist. We were both asking why all of the living world is crying out in anguish. We both wanted to die. We both were angry. We both were horrified.

My friend thought that the question of “where is God?” was harder to answer than “why is there meaning to death?”

I'm a Christian because I'm horrified. He's an atheist for the same reason.

If you don’t feel like reading it, here’s the TLDR: there is no reason for someone to do something or not do something if God isn’t there to tell them to. There isn’t a moral grounding for law.

Arthur Leff was an atheist law professor at Yale in the eighties, and he wrote about the moral grounding for laws in his essay, Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law. The question he was asking was what can we do to ground morality? What can we do to prove objectively that there are things one ought to do and things one ought not do?

I am unwilling to accept that. There is something evil about abuse, neglect, rape, torture. There is something about these things that violates human rights, human dignity. There's something about them that goes against objective moral law.

But without God there is no moral law. So I wouldn't be able to say, "you should never rape someone, because rape is wrong." And everything that I had experienced flew in the face of that.

Dr. Leff wrote this about that question;

“All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us "good," and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us, could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things now stand, everything is up for grabs.

Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up to and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot-and General Custer too-have earned salvation.

Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil.

[All together now:] Sez who?

God help us.”

In the end, it comes down to this; Do I believe that the complexity of the universe is because there was someone intelligent actively involved in its design, do I believe that information, reason, logic, emotion, and morality exist and are reliable because they have grounding in God’s identity? Do I believe that God is who he says he is?

And I guess the answer to those questions was yes.

I saw God. He was there in the stillness - in the sunrise and sunset and at 2 am after I couldn't cry anymore. I felt him. And I know part of his goodness that I wish I never had to know. I felt like I was lying breathless bleeding out in a gutter watching the stars. Almost like a pause - just a moment in time where I was hurt enough, still enough to hear his voice.

One of the most important things I learned is that life is not hopeless.  If life is a story, then the last chapter of the book has already been written. This is the premise of the song It is Well with My Soul by Horatio G. Spafford.

“When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll;

Whatever my lot, God has taught me to say,

It is well, it is well, with my soul.

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought

My sin, not in part but the whole,

Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, o my soul”

The powers of evil and darkness can take away my friends, my sanity, my family, and even my life, but God has already saved me, and I can find peace in spite of my circumstances. Three of my friends died, but God has already conquered death. I feel powerless, but God is powerful. I feel abandoned, but God loves me so much that he died a horrible torturous death for me. Living in light of that is peace.

Whenever I felt like I couldn’t keep going there would be something to stop me. I heard his voice in music, and in my friends that held me when I cried, and in morning glories on my morning walk. I kept lists of all of the times this happened, every time that someone encouraged me to keep going, every time that someone would quote a Bible verse when I was crying out for God to answer me, every time that the world paused. Everything asked me the same question, do you think it means nothing? Do you think that there is a direction that we’re going? Are we coming from nothing and going toward nowhere?

I had friends who heard him too. He was so gentle to us. I wasn’t able to go to church, I wasn’t able to listen to worship music but the LGBTQ+ community took care of me, they were isolated from church as well. There was enough for me in that God promised he would take care of me, and he did. He died for me. He talked to my trans friend and said, “listen, your parents have rejected you and said you’ll never be your son, but I am a good father. I love you. Be my son instead.”

God mourned with me. He saw everything and he was angry. I was able to breathe because I knew that in the end there will be justice for abuse victims, because God said that he is the holder of justice, and vengeance will be his.

When one of my friends was hospitalized I stood outside during the beginning of a thunderstorm and watched the clouds and the sky darken and lightning flash across the sky.

Even the wind and the sea obey him. He asked me if I trust him.

I guess my answer was yes.

In spite of everything that I went through, I was more thoroughly convinced that I ever was before that things matter. I was convinced that abuse is evil. I was convinced that death is an abomination. I was convinced that these laws of morality are woven into the fabric of the universe. I was convinced that God died to save us from that reality. I was convinced he loved me.

I still am

[silentglassbreak]

For the prompts #5? with Harringrove :)

Hello and thank you for the prompt!

We’re going post S3 here. All the angst. All the sad. And I damn near cried while writing it. 💔

5. “He was all I had. He was everything. And he’s gone.”

Letter

All he could feel was other people’s hands. He wasn’t sure whose they were, but he knew they were pulling on him as hard as they could. His sleeve, his shoulders, the back of his uniform shirt. He was fighting against them, not hearing any of the shouting going on, begging him to stop. He couldn’t see anything but Billy. Laying there, bleeding, choking, looking at Max. His face was illuminated in what was left of the neon lights inside of Starcourt, a thick black ooze dripping from his lips.

“Billy!” He shoved at whoever was trying to hold him. “Let me fucking go!”

The hands were gone, his body now plunging forward down the stopped escalator, straight to the golden boy, so tarnished, dying. His legs were working overtime, trudging through some kind of bloody, fleshy sludge that had formed on the floor. He didn’t know where the pool of swampy blood had come from, or where everyone else had gone. Everything had dissolved to black, the neon lights gone, the body of the Mindflayer vanished, and it was just Billy standing there, the sludge threatening to swallow him up. It was lapping at his knees, rising up toward his waist.

Steve threw his arms out. “Billy! Come here!” Billy just stood, tears streaming down his cheeks. Blackened blood staining his white muscle shirt but his face was clean now. As clean as it always was when he was with Steve. Fresh shave, mustache trimmed, hair perfectly coiffed.

“I’m so sorry, Steve.” The liquid was rising still, now reaching both their chests. Steve was stroking through it, trying to swim, but he was stuck, like a piece of sliced fruit in cherry Jell-O.

“Billy! Please!” He was screaming, reaching for the boy only a few feet in front of him, just out of reach.

“I’ve got to go.” Steve’s eyes widened in horror as blood began spilling from Billy’s mouth, his eyes, ears. He was being swallowed, just like Steve. He was dying. They were both going to die right here, just like this…

“Steve!” His eyes shot open, chest heaving and body trembling. “Steve, wake up!”

Robin’s voice was shrill, swiping him from his dream, his nightmare. His body sat up, sweat pooling at the base of his skull. He snapped his head over to look at her. Robin’s hair was askew, eyes tired, but alert. Her hand was still gripping his shoulder. He surveyed the room in haste, attempting to ground himself to his surroundings.

Steve was in their apartment, in his bedroom, in his own bed. Robin was with him. The bedside lamp was on. His body shrugged heavily, head falling in his hands.

“What the fuck.” His words were only breaths. “I’m sorry, Robs.” Her fingers loosened on his skin, becoming something more comforting. He cracked an eye open at her.

“Hey,” Her lips quirked up in the smallest, most tired smile she had. “it’s okay. That’s why I’m here.” He groaned and flopped himself back down onto the pillows. She stared down at him.

“It’s not. You should be able to sleep in your own room once in a while.” She leaned down on her arm, resting the side of her head in the palm of her right hand.

“I will. Once the nightmares stop.” He rolled away from her, feeling his eyes stinging.

“I don’t think they’re going to.” She let her left arm fall over his side, pulling at him to roll back over.

“Look at me, Dingus.” He reluctantly obeyed, not even fighting the tears. “They will.” She insisted. “You just need time.”

Steve let out a choked snort, trying to laugh, but sobbing instead. “Time?” He buried his face in the pillow. “It’s been eight months. And they haven’t let up, not even a little.” He was curling in on himself as he began to tremble.

“It’s going to take longer. A lot longer.” It was quiet for a beat, his pillow dampening with each passing second. She let him cry a while, before laying her head back down on the dry pillow.

“I miss him so much, Robin.” She bit her lip, and he almost saw a glint of moisture in her eyes.

“I know you do, Harrington.” His eyes scanned the wall behind her head, his mind going somewhere else entirely. His memories slipping in.

“You know, he used to smack his lips when he was chewing popcorn.” He didn’t look at her, the thought filling him with a feeling that was equal parts fondness and loneliness. He chuckled lightly. “It used to drive me absolutely crazy.”

She smirked a moment before carding her hand through his hair. She let him stay lost, knowing this was some of the only reprieve he had. It was only a short time before he was looking back at her, eyes so big and brown, so innocent and so hurt.

“He was all I had.” His words were wet, coming out as a string of slurs. “He was everything.” His body shook violently, and Robin wrapped her arms around him, tucking his head in close to her. She smoothed circles on the skin of his back.

“And he’s gone…” Steve laid there with Robin for hours, never saying another word. He didn’t make it back to sleep that night. Robin got up at six for her opening shift at Family Video, leaving Steve in a ball on the bed. He would get up soon after, like he always did. He would smile like he always did. And he would hurt, more than he ever had, like he always would.

*

Steve’s elbows were sitting on the countertop, his face buried in a magazine that truly had nothing interesting in it. He heard the bell above the door jingle, and his eyes lifted. He saw the flash of red hair come in the glass door, and a smile played at his lips.

“Hey, Max.” Skateboard under arm, she made her way to the counter with a smile.

“Hey Steve!” She lifted the stack of tapes in her other hand onto the counter. “Just returning these.” He lifted an eyebrow at her.

“Did you rewind them?” She rolled her blue eyes, smile falling to an annoyed shrug.

“Yes.” The demeanor reminded him so much of her brother. Something in Steve’s chest pulled.

He began marking them off in the binder kept under the desk, making idle conversation.

“How’s the Party?” She set her skateboard down and folded her arms over the top of the counter, resting her chin on her hands.

“They’re okay. Planning a trip to go see El and Will next weekend.” Steve snuck a glance at her.

“You’re not going?” She just shrugged her shoulders in response. He took the answer for what it was, and mimicked her stance, slumped over in front of her.

“We can hang out when they go if you want.” Her eyes sparked a little.

“Yeah?” He stood up, grinning wide.

“Oh yeah. Pizza, movies, me and you. What’s better?” She thought for a second.

“Beer?” He pointed a finger down at her.

“Don’t push it, shitbird.” They both laughed for a second, giggles dissolving rather quickly. Her eyes looked up at him, a sadness he knew all too well brewing behind them. Her expression washed out, a spaced out stare replaced it. The nickname trudged up both good and painful memories.

“Neil made me clean out the last boxes in his room last night.” Steve’s eyes snapped to the countertop, a lump forming in his throat. “Asshole didn’t even cry.”

He reached his hand out to place over hers, Max’s face turning away from him. She was tough as nails, just like Billy. She didn’t cry in public. Before Starcourt, he wasn’t sure she cried at all.

“That actually reminds me…” She pulled her hand away from Steve’s, reaching into her hoodie pocket and pulling out a small stack of folded up papers. “I found these in his stuff. Thought maybe you’d want them.”

Most of the papers were crumpled, as if they were once balled up and discarded. Max began backing away from him, skateboard now back under arm, and gave a small wave.

“I’ll call you later to plan for the weekend. Bye, Steve!” He returned a wave, a little dumbfounded and feet frozen to the ground. His hands shook, the papers rustling.

“Robin!” His voice shouted out; sharp and anxious. When he didn’t get a response, his head started whipping around frantically. “Robs!”

He could hear her feet stomping in the back room before the door opened. “What, Steven? I am rewinding in here.” His expression must have said enough that he didn’t need to speak, because she paced over to him, concern padding her face. “What is it?”

Steve’s eyes were wide. She looked down at the paper in his hands. His words were shaky. “Can you cover for me?” She just nodded, exasperated.

“Of course, yeah.” He didn’t wait for her to ask what was going on before sprinting to the office, pushing the door open that read Employees Only.

Back pressed against the wall, he began unfolding the paper, seeing that some of them looked like they had been spilled on, crinkled and slightly torn at the edges. The first page had words scrawled in random places, some on lines, some written in corners. Steve read them all carefully.

‘Dear Harrington, I wrote this for a reason. I need to tell you something.’ The last word was crossed out heavily and the word ‘stupid’ was written beside it. ‘Bitch’ was scratched into the upper right corner. A little doodle of a baseball bat on it; a baseball bat with nails. Steve stared at the letters a long time, before flipping to the next page.

The paper had definitely been wet at some point, the ink where the blue lines used to be blotted out. ‘Dear Pretty Boy, I think you’re pretty. Obviously. That is why I call you that. Obviously. And I’m writing this because...I don’t fucking know why and I’m an idiot.’ That was all that was written there.

The next page had an even shorter message. ‘Dear Princess, I think you’re hot. And I like banging you. A lot. And I’d like to continue doing that for a long ass time’ and that was it.

When Steve flipped to the last page, he noticed the difference. It was smooth, unlike the others. No blemishes on the page, no words scratched out. From the very top line to nearly the bottom, words were written in clean, crisp cursive. The top right corner was dated. June 15th.

‘Dear Steve, I’ve been trying to write this for hours. Turns out, I’m not as good with words as I thought. Guess you’ll just have to deal with that. I wanted to let you know something, and I don’t really know how to say it out loud, so I’m probably going to slip this in your shoe or something when you’re not looking. We’ll see. Anyway, look, you know I like you. And we’ve been fucking around for like 3 ½ weeks now I think, and that’s not a long time. I know. But I’ve liked you for longer. So don’t think I’m crazy for saying what I’m about to say. And don’t you fucking tease me for this cause I’ll still beat your ass, you know that. I’m trying to be honest here. And I’m kind of scared. Because you’re kind of really fucking important, okay? You’re kind of, everything. Everything I’ve got. And I don’t fucking know man. I guess I just really fucking care and I guess I really fucking love you. I really hope this doesn’t freak you out. Just punch me if it does, it’s cool. -B.H.’

Steve’s back slid down the wall, salty tears free-flowing down his face. He figured that something like this would have broken him, but he was actually smiling. His grin spread ear to ear, because it was Billy. He could feel Billy, hear the words being spoken in his voice, see him sitting on his bed trying his damndest to write this letter. He felt him there, with him as he read it. And something inside Steve, ever so lightly, stitched together.

He was still shattered, still teetering on the knife’s edge of normalcy and devastation, but in that moment, he was with Billy.

The door cracked open slowly, the hinges squeaking awfully. He lifted his eyes to see Robin poke her head in cautiously.

“Steve?” When she saw his face, she opened the door more. “You okay?” Steve smiled genuinely for the first time in eight whole months, a soft chuckle coming out.

“No, not at all.” He shook his head and wiped at his face. “But I think I will be.”

[blookmallow]

and now we return to outlast 2, where- 

THINGS KEEP GETTING SO, SO MUCH WORSE

(i have... a LOT im trying to process about this whole section sorry for upcoming text walls. really nasty #blood / #gore in here as well though) (i didnt realize i was This far behind on liveblogs lmao i drafted this. a while ago and didnt get back to it until now) 

---

so i fell off the bridge (shock. horror. who could have predicted this) and right into the scalled village

what.............happened to you 

fuCKING GO D

so it turns out “the scalled” are... some kind of leper colony banned from the town and left to fester and rot out here alone 

most of them are just lying around suffering and dying, i dont know what the fuck happened to them, there’s some mention of like. wildly untreated syphilis/potentially other stds they’re being told is their curse for the sins they’ve committed but does.... syphilis do that to you. it might actually be leprosy i dont know i dont want to research this. all i can think about is when i watched jesus christ superstar in high school and the leper colony song where they’re all crowding around jesus all trying to touch him REALLY freaked me out for a while

i mean its like. probably a combination of disease left horrifically untreated and massively infected given the absolutely appalling conditions these people are living in (everything’s run down and full of blood and shit and who knows what else), starvation, who knows what they’re even finding to eat out here so that’s probably causing even more disease but still jesus christ

at first it just made me really sad, sure these people came from temple gate too so they were. fucked up cultists to begin with but a lot of this is like... result of longterm emotional and mental abuse and manipulation, some of these people might not have started out as depraved evil murderers, and like. nobody deserves to live like this. except knoth lmao throw him down here, but

so i thought maybe it would turn out that you realize they’re human too, they’re just in a fucking LOT of pain and maybe you can’t do anything to help them (i dont think there’s any hope for anyone down here at this point) but maybe they’d turn out to be on my side and do something to help me fight back against the leader who abandoned them, “the most absolutely fucked up looking people are actually the most human” kind of thing but uh. that is not how things went. at all, 

ill get into How Fucking Bad this got in a second lmao but like

most of them dont really do anything to you other than bleed on you and beg you for help, some people lash out but thats like, understandable given the horrifying state they’re in, but

as it turns out, being the “scalled messiah” is a VERY bad thing, they went from occasionally lashing out at me to outright tracking me down to murder me to death which, like, honestly kind of disappointing

bc one of the things i liked the most about the first outlast was how many of the prisoners were clearly just victims too, some of them (lookin at you, naked twin guys,) were just evil and murderous but some of them were just very very mentally unwell (exacerbated by horrible living conditions and the fact that the people who were supposed to be protecting them and helping them recover were actively, intentionally working to make their symptoms worse) and couldn’t really be blamed for acting violently toward you, but

then sometimes there’s people who warn you about dangers ahead, people sitting in corners hiding and scared and wont hurt you unless you give them a reason to think you might be a threat, people just trying to stay alive, people who need help 

but that’s. not the case here, and there’s definitely a particular kind of horror in “absolutely no one in this hell town can be trusted, nobody will help me, everyone here wants to hurt me and every time i think ive made any kind of progress it gets so much worse” (except that ONe guy who tried to protect me. im still sad about him) but. i dont know i feel like there’s a missed opportunity here. im not sure if im supposed to feel like the scalled deserve to be like this because of the kind of people they were before, but i dont. i feel like the “what the fucking shit HAPPENED to these people” horror is heightened by the realization that they’re people, and just kinda using them as attack zombies is. missing something, somehow. i dont know, i cant figure out how to word what i want to say here 

i mean its absolutely fucking horrifying, i was scared out of my mind going through all this, and i still gotta give props to a video game experience that left me legitimately feeling like i needed to go take a shower and crawl under a blanket for a while 

i guess ultimately with outlast im coming here to be scared shitless more than anything else and boy did they ever fucking deliver

ok im gonna stop bc i will keep talking in circles about this forever if i dont, moving on

WHAT EVEN ARE THESE GUYS, APART FROM COMPLETELY TERRIBLE

im guessing theres some kind of... inbreeding birth defect situation going on here but i cant even process what im looking at 

that and its hard to look at them at all considering the only times i see them im getting murdered to death. my panicked screenshots hoping to get a better look later did not help 

PRETTY SURE THEY JUST MADE HIM DRINK THEIR BLOOD, 

how the fuck has my dude not thrown up like 90 times already. im glad he hasnt bc im bad emetophobia but outlast 1 did it so im honestly surprised that hasnt happened unless ive just forgotten it in the blur of nightmares im going through here 

OH

THAT’S... NOT GOOD

THAT IS REALLY, REALLY NOT GOOD

FUCK SHIT MOTHERFUCKING FUCK

i gotta say im impressed with how FAR they GO with this one, i have no idea how much game i have left but considering this isnt even the ending i am HORRIFIED to see what the fuck is gonna happen next 

i mean outlast 1 has you getting your fucking fingers sliced off and whistleblower has. That Scene (even though like. it stops before waylon actually gets cut its REALLY CLOSE)  

this whole time i kept thinking something would happen and they’d get interrupted, I’d escape somehow, they aren’t really going to have the player character get literally fucking crucified from your own perspective,

but then the nails go in 

and you’ve got one hand literally nailed to a cross

and then they start the other one 

and i was like, WOW FUCK, THEY ACTUALLY DID IT, BUT NOW HE’LL ESCAPE... SOMEHOW.... RIGHT ??? 

but they lift it up 

and you’re hanging there 

and for a second i legitimately thought it was gonna end there for him, i thought he was actually just going to die there and the game would continue with lynn or something (which, to be fair, would be a pretty cool twist, but i dont WANT blake to just die here like this) 

ANYWAY!! FUCKING GOD, THAT SURE HAPPENED 

but against all odds HE SOMEHOW DIDNT FUCKING DIE, and managed to find the strength to rIP HIS HANDS OUT OF THE NAILS AND FALL DOWN

i cannot fucking IMAGINE what that would feel like. i dont want to imagine it but i sure the fuck am now 

i dont know if its possible to like. die from bleeding out in this scene if you dont find the bandages fast enough but it sure felt like i was going to 

fucking hell i can practically feel it in my real hands i HATE THIS i HATe it

god. fuck. im gonna be thinking about this scene for the rest of my life i didnt think anything would ever be worse than the finger slicing scene in outlast 1 but this. i think this wins

wHAT THE FUCK IS THAT!?!??? THERES SOMETHING CHASING ME IN THE SCHOOL FLASHBACKS NOW IM NOT EVEN SAFE HERE ANYMORE

WHAT *IS* THAT??!??

w OA h

i still have no IDEA whats going on with these flashbacks either, clearly his classmate hung herself and he feels subconsciously responsible for it because he didn’t do anything to stop her (though it doesn’t sound like he Could have done anything, and. they were kids), there’s definitely some buried trauma he never dealt with thats resurfacing now but

i still dont think its just a manifestation of trauma, because like. the recordings are still coming out as fucked up static, if he was just having really intense hallucinations there wouldn’t be any record on the camera, it would just be him filming nothing and talking to himself through a panic attack, it wouldn’t be getting consistently corrupted ONLY during the flashbacks so what the fuck is happening 

COLA

DRINK IT

i m losing it its the cola machines from the first game i diD NOT EXPECT THESE TO BE HERE 

what the fuck is christian salad 

you didn’t think i would see this, outlast devs, you thought you could hide this on the menu board and i wouldnt notice. i did notice and i demand answers

NO!!!! THAT IS THE OPPOSITE OF OKAY THIS IS THE LEAST OKAY I HAVE EVER BEEN IN MY LIFE 

WELL!!!!! OKAY!!!! ALRIGHT!!!! NOW THAT I’VE BEEN LITERALLY FUCKING CRUCIFIED, FELL DOWN A HILL AND STRAIGHT INTO A FENCE OF BARBED WIRE, GOT DRAGGED OUT HERE AND BURIED ALIVE, CRAWLED MY WAY OUT OF MY OWN GRAVE AND NOW HAVE HOARDS OF DISEASED ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE CULTISTS SEARCHING FOR ME SO THEY CAN DEVOUR MY FLESH, LET’S GET GOING, SHALL WE 

THIS IS FINE!!! EVERYTHING IS FINE I CANT SEE SHIT AND THERES NOTHING BUT TREES AND BARBED WIRE EVERYWHERE AND NO INDICATIONS WHATSOEVER OF WHERE I NEED TO GO BUT IT’S F IN E IM DOING GREAT 

[roomalthoughts]

03.09.2019: trouble

Would you bleed for me? Lick it off my lips like you needed me? Would you sit me on a couch? With your fingers in my mouth? You look so cool when you're reading me

Let's cause a little trouble Oh, you make me feel so weak I bet you kiss your knuckles Right before they touch my cheek

But I've got my mind, made up this time 'Cause there's a menace in my bed Can you see his silhouette? Can you see his silhouette? Can you see his silhouette?

And I've got my mind, made up this time Go on and light a cigarette, set a fire in my head Set a fire in my head, tonight

Would you lie for me? Cross your sorry heart and hope to die for me? Would you pin me to a wall? Would you beg or would you crawl? Stick a needle in your hungry eyes for me?

Let's cause a little trouble Oh, you make me feel so weak I bet you kiss your knuckles Right before they touch my cheek

But I've got my mind, made up this time 'Cause there's a menace in my bed Can you see his silhouette? Can you see his silhouette? Can you see his silhouette?

And I've got my mind, made up this time Go on and light a cigarette, set a fire in my head Set a fire in my head, tonight

Don't forget me, don't forget me I wouldn't leave you if you'd let me Hmm, when you met me when you met me You told me you were gonna get me

Don't forget me don't forget me I wouldn't leave you if you'd

And I've got my mind, made up this time 'Cause there's a menace in my bed Can you see his silhouette? Can you see his silhouette? Can you see his silhouette?

And I've got my mind, made up this time Go on and light a cigarette, set a fire in my head Set a fire in my head tonight, tonight, tonight Set a fire in my head tonight

- Trouble // Halsey 

Okay, I will admit that Halsey is like my biggest girl crush ever. Well it’s a tie between Halsey and Hayley Williams (I’m bisexual, I just don’t like to be flamboyant about it). I have loved Halsey since the first time I heard her back in 2015, right when she was getting popular. Ever since I heard her single, Is There Somewhere from her EP album “Room 93″. I love her voice, her personality, pretty much everything about her...I think she is just an amazing soul. Halsey is a proud bisexual icon and has been incredibly open about her personal struggle (she has Body Dysmorphic Disorder along with Bipolar Disorder). I have tried to sing in her vocal range, but since my voice is naturally deep (for a girl) I sound like the horrible version of Lorde (I LOVE Lorde, but if I had better control on my vocal range and not let it go nuts, I could almost nail her voice range...but I don’t have good lungs, haha). I blame Halsey for my love to sing out loud when I’m alone in the car. 

Halsey is known for writing and composing songs that talk about her relationships and how they have shaped her to become who she is. Along with writing heartbroken songs, she also writes about her mental disorders (Hold Me Down from her album “Bandlands” is a perfect example) She has gotten her heart broken plenty of times before and when she writes songs about being hurt, it helps others relate to the pain. She has a way of making her fans feel like they are not alone in their daily battle. Halsey gently reminds her fans, “hey, it’s okay, everything will be okay.” I love her sarcasm and how she makes light of an uncomfortable situation. 

This song hits home for me and for a few of my friends that have been in toxic relationships. My friends and I know how it feels when the significant other spits out hurtful words and it cuts deep in our hearts. We all had someone who would spit out hateful words to us and make us feel worthless. Thankfully, we learned what not to look for and just keep moving on. 

Here’s the video for Trouble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2aTxmwRiJQ

Here is a poem inspired by this song: 

come on, tell me what’s going through your head 

you tell me that i’m not the only one in your bed 

you lick your lips while you lie straight to my face 

come on, tell me another lie, tell me that you love me 

tell me what’s on your mind, i know that i’m not the only one 

you keep saying that i’m going insane but can’t you see 

i’m losing my sanity because of you 

you say that you love me and that there is no other woman in your bed 

can i stay for the night? 

kiss your knuckles before it touches my cheek 

so i can wipe off the tears on my cheeks and not let those words get to me 

or to my head

come on, tell me what’s going through your head 

you tell me that i’m not the only one in your bed 

you lick your lips while you lie straight to my face 

come on, tell me another lie, tell me that you love me 

entertain me, tell me that you love me, that you love me 

light up a cigarette so you won’t pay attention to me 

or to the words that come out of my mouth 

you know i can read you very well, you just don’t care 

kiss your knuckles and let them hit my cheek 

just like how you lie to me when you used to kiss me 

come on, tell me another lie

[abrokenvessel]

By His stripes we are healed

“He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on Him, and by His wounds we are healed.” - Isaiah 53:5

When we see a cross of Jesus Christ we are always reminded by God’s Grace. We are reminded that He saved us to pay for our sins and debts and those are facts, but sometimes we forget the depth of its (crucifixion) meaning that we don’t value much the symbol of the cross because we don’t have the knowledge of how exactly He suffered.

Last last last night I was browsing to find some Christian movie to watch (on n site). I didn’t find anything that i haven't watched yet so I ended up watching Cdrama. 5mins  of watching I felt uncomfortable because my mind kept on thinking I should watch something that’s related to Him. So i then decided to browse to watch some testimonies but then i saw a video titled “Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion- Medical point of view” (will leave the link after) which caught my attention because It’s been ages since I last watched it and also because it is medical related.

The video was so in detailed that it made my heart wrecked In pieces. I couldn’t imagine what He experienced. It’s 2 am and I was crying and I just can’t catch my breath thinking about how terribly that was, how much pain He endured and how good He is. In between sobs and catching of breaths I was asking Him why, and saying no a thousand times. I just literally can’t put into words because there is no one really like Him.

And I wonder what more could it take for you to accept Him? How much difficulty and cries you want to have or to experience just to accept Him?

The video explained these

Before the crucifixion:

Hemathidrosis- where a person excludes blood from their sweat glands

Scourging- horrible torture, scourge is done only for slave and traitor (and Jesus is not), the victim is completely naked, stripped, wrists are tied to a post, with his back exposed, whipped from the back of his arms down to shoulders, and back across his bare buttocks down to his legs all the way down to his heels. Scourging is intended for public humiliation and embarrassment.

Historical accounts Traditional scourging- 2 roman legionarri (the largest military unit of the Roman army) consisted of 39 lashes, their whip is 18 inches long that had 9 leather thongs

The 9 leather thongs were 67ft long, at the end of it was some iron balls.

The iron balls would produce severe contusions, and the leather thongs and sheep bones would cut into the skin and subcutaneous tissues as the Roman soldiers repeatedly struck the victim's back with full weight.

The lacerations would then tear into the underlying skeletal muscles, resulting in trembling ribbons of blood flesh as the flogging proceeded. Circulatory shock is usually precipitated by pain and blood loss.

1 swing of the whip total of 9 laceration could be conflicted on the victim. 1 wound could take up to 180 stitches to close. 180 multiply to 39 = about 2 thousand stitches to close.

Those were the physical trauma that was inflicted to Jesus. Just from the scourging

Crown of thorns- 1/2 -2 inches long. They slapped the thorn on the head to thrive the thorn into the skull. Those thorn were laid upon Jesus head hard enough to penetrate the outer table or outer bone of the skull.

Reminder: Before His crucifixion His face was beaten. His eyes were swollen, his nose was bleeding his body oozed with blood. Scourging had literally ripped his back down to his legs.

The cross- weight of 125-150 pounds, The bars were a rough, unfinished piece of wood with splinters, spikes, and rough spots throughout.

To maximize the shame and suffering they would tie the cross bar to the victim and have it carry through the city from his condemnation to his execution. To add to the ultimate humiliation the victim have to carry the cross naked.

Nail wounds- Romans perfected the art of pain and suffering. The Romans found that if they drove the spike right through the middle of a man's wrist, they would avoid hitting the arteries or veins, preventing the victim from bleeding to death.

In Hebrew hand is inclusively from the fingertips to about the wristwatch crosses your wrist. The muscle in your palm is not strong enough to carry your body weight, according to medical experts. The transverse carpal ligament in the wrist  is strong enough to support the body weight.  They would drive the nail right through the biggest nerve in the hand called the median nerve. When the median nerve is transected it gives pain, tingling, and numbness in the hand and arm that causes the fingers to claw. And so the Romans could drive spikes to a mans hand without losing one drop of blood while maximizing the amount of pain and suffering that a man can endure.

The Romans did a similar thing with their feet. They determined where they could drive a spike through both of a man's feet without causing blood loss that would kill the victim.

Hanging on the cross-Because the diaphragm pushes air into the lungs as it sinks into the abdomen, someone hanging on the cross had no trouble getting air into their lungs. Breathing out was the tough part for those nailed on the cross. To exhale, a crucifixion victim would have to lift their wrists up against the spikes and press their feet up against the spikes.

Take note that Jesus was naked on the cross, in front of the whole city and his back with fresh wounds from scourging.

That ripped, lacerated, and torn back was dragged and scraped against the splinters and hard knobs protruding from the cross every time he took a breath.

He had to lift up his arms and push up with his knees every time he breathed out, every time he said a word.

That’s why Jesus’ words from the cross were  precious. Because when he talked, he only talked as he breath out. Every word Jesus spoke on the cross was spoken as he was pulling up against the nails and dragging his back across the cross

Crucifixion- the victim actually crucified for or up to six days. Imagine a man hanging on the cross outside the gates of a city with the birds pecking at his eyes and roosting on his head.

It was not intended to kill anybody it was only intended to make a human suffer as much as he can afflicted upon before killing him by breaking his legs

Cause of death- Jesus didn’t die from crucifracture. Crucifracture is what they would do when they simply grew tried of watching this agony and suffering. They would take a spear and swing it like a ball bat and hit the victim in the shins to break his shin bones. They’d break the tibula and the fibula bone. They'd have to hit the legs for five to ten minutes before they could ultimately shatter the shin bones—breaking your shin bones takes a lot of force. The victim could no longer lift up to breathe since his shin bone was broken. That’s how the two thieves died but Jesus was dead already.

Why didn’t they break Jesus’ legs? if you go back to the psalms 34 it says “not a bone of his body was broken” the reason why Jesus nose and jaw and cheekbones should have been broken but couldn’t have been in the time of scourging

John 19 the roman centurion broke the legs of the two thieves, but when they went to Jesus, Jesus the bible says he was already dead. When the soldier thrust the spear into the Lord’s side, Jesus had already been dead for thirty or 45 min. The spear wound did not take the life of the Lord Jesus; he was already dead when they thrust the spear into his side.

So what took Jesus’ life? No man did, no roman centurion, no cross took Jesus’ life. He was able to do something we’ve never seen another human being can do.

Jesus laid down his life. When it was finished and with a loud voice he gave up the ghost. He didn’t just gave his life, BUT he suffered physically stress, pain, got wounded severely, humiliated, and got mocked to something that He DIDN’T do.

The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.” John 10:17-18

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." John 16:33

I want to remind you that He saved all the sinners. “ALL” meaning even the ones who hurt Him, laughed at Him, mocked Him, and even the people who chose Him to be crucified. Be reminded that He also said sorry to His Father in behalf of those people.

Luke 23:34: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Jesus Christ saved you already. He didn’t do it because of the good things you do. It is because of His mercy and His love for you. It is a free gift that it is only up to you if you will accept it.

Ephesians 2:8

For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;

Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion - medical point of view- https://youtu.be/0B3kgiLxybY

[a-queer-seminarian]

I was happy to be part of this year's LPTS More Light (LGBT+) chapel service -- here's the reflection I gave on Mark 8:27-36! Our overall theme was letting go of the world’s views and embracing God’s views.

The sound quality of this video is horrendous -- not through any fault of the one who recorded it but because 1) my phone is old and 2) a horrific buzz always pervades the chapel and I tried to dampen it at the expense of further sound quality.

There is a special look of revulsion that people save for particularly unsavory, offensive things: the slug stepped on with a bare foot, the man convicted of astoundingly brutal crimes, the person who dares to be queer in public.

I have heard the same story, too many times, from too many transgender friends – whether it happens in a public bathroom, in the street, in church, at work

the look is the same: disgust.

Revolting, that’s what we are. We are breaking the rules, are flaunting…something, I’m not sure what, in public, and that makes us disgusting. Less than human.

I wonder if Jesus ever got that kind of look.

Probably not for the gender thing. Choosing to squeeze Their divinity into a human body, Jesus was assigned male at birth, and probably that was never questioned by anyone. He likely started growing facial hair in his teens. Probably wore “men’s” clothing.

But at the same time, he did break many rules of gender in his society – men were supposed to settle down, take a woman, have children who could pass on their name. As far as we know, Jesus did none of that – instead he left his human father’s profession behind and traipsed around the region saying dangerous things with twelve other men and a faithful train of women who were not related to him. Disgusting!

“Who do people say that I am?” Jesus asks his closest friends here in Mark, and so we discover that he was talked about, that people debated his identity, about who or what he was – probably without bothering to ask him about it.

and then, “…Who do you say that I am?” he asks those same friends. I’ve been in similar conversations. I know the whispers, and I know that vulnerability, that flicker of anxiety when you dare to ask people whose opinion matters intensely to you how they see you. Will they get it right? Do they really know you?

Peter responds, “the Messiah.” And we think that’s good, right? That he got it right….right?

Maybe he got the title right. But based on his reaction to Jesus’s next statement, he clearly had no real idea what being the Messiah meant to Jesus.

Jesus foretells suffering and death, so Peter takes Jesus aside and tries to set him straight. “This is what Messiah means, Jesus. So what you think is part of your future, your identity, can’t be right.” In a way, he’s saying, “I know you better than you know you.”

With priests, with friends, with people who claimed to know something of biology, I’ve had  similar talks about my identity – “What you think about your gender can’t be right. I know how gender works, what God or science has planned for your gender, and it’s not what you think. I know you better than you know you.”

Jesus’s response to Peter’s lack of understanding is to gather a crowd and explain what it means to follow him: We must deny ourselves. We must take up our cross.

But he doesn’t explain just what that means, to deny ourselves, to take up a cross. I know what the world has told me it means – what they say it means for LGBT people in particular.

The world tells me these things — my gender, my love— are just my cross to bear – and to bury, that I need to suffer because somehow these things are sins, that’s right – my love, love! the pair of wings God fixed on my shoulders to help me fly to Them is actually a heavy weight, a sin, a sickness –

but God knows I have seen far too many of my people nail themselves to that cross, bleed out as you watched

to think for a moment that God is the one who placed that cross on our shoulders.

That’s not how crosses work! The Cross of Jesus, the one he urges us to take up, was fashioned by worldly hands, not Christ’s.

After all, his yoke is easy, his burden light.

The cross is a consequence of following Jesus, yes, but not something delighted in by him— to follow Jesus means to deny ourselves a certain safety, the easy life lived when we go along with the status quo, when we don’t challenge authority as Jesus did. When we take up our cross and become visible signs against oppression the world stops tolerating our existence. When we dare to follow Jesus – it’s the world that throws the cross over our backs.

God does not bid us suffer for suffering’s sake the way humans do when they tell us to stuff ourselves into boxes we were never made to fit, to bury our way of loving and relating to other people and bear a cross of shame and fear of hell on our shoulders every day, every minute, of our lives.

When we do this, when we accept what they say about our sexuality, our gender, it’s not ourselves we’re denying – it’s God’s call, God’s vision of us.

I can attest to this as one who tried it – who tried to carry my queerness like a burden and resisted when the Spirit tugged it from my shoulders and unrolled it at my feet to behold the beautiful vision, the gift, that it is.

I can attest to this as one who finally denied myself by redefining myself, not in the paradigm of the world with its rigid binaries and its distrust of difference but according to the call of the Spirit, the Spirit of abundant life, of overflowing love, of broken-down boundaries, of diversity!

When I followed that call, I did take up the cross— rejection followed just as it followed Christ, and grief at the pains of my siblings struggling beside me. I did take up the cross – not for suffering’s sake, and not for my own sake, but to share its load with every person this world tries to crucify.

…In Jesus, divinity kissed humanness and the two became one, and while I don’t claim my story is anything like that, like God’s,

I will declare that there is something queer in the identity of Jesus,

something that resonates in a unique way with queer people, with transgender people especially, and with all who are shoved to the margins by this world, whose God-given identities are crushed and not allowed to flower.

…So, will you take up this cross with me? It is not easy to stand up to the world in this way. You will die to the world in one way or another. But friends, truly, as Jesus says, what does it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your life?

We who follow Jesus must indeed take up the cross – so that the burden becomes a little lighter on our siblings’ shoulders. So that the world will see that we are ready to die to it, to be rejected and persecuted if that’s what it takes to help carry all its oppressed people into the vision of abundant life, of wholeness, painted by Christ with his life, his cross, his resurrection.

[tarantula-hawk-wasp]

Bat Paladin Chapter 4

voltron / batfam /dc comics crossover.

Chapter 1 link Chapter 2 chapter 3 link  Shiro is Bruce Wayne’s adopted son and part of the batfam AU  created by me (I was the anon) and @tchailla

word count : 6.2k (its a big boi)

A/N

Well it has been a Long Ass Time folks. All i can say is that pretty much every excuse in the book applies, a busy senior year of high school, writers block, doubts, changing fandoms, busy summer, busy college, etc. But, starting in Nov. I've been going to a 4 day a week writing group and that's really helping me dedicate time to this so I really think the next chapter will be only in a month or smth. That's about as much as I can promise. I will never let it go this long again.

The hand they gave him was so intimate a weapon.  

A sword, though a close-quarters weapon that made him watch the light fade from his opponents’ eyes and left him splattered with blood, was at least impersonal.  It was a detachable item that had transferred only vibrations up his arm and across his shoulder. He could at least physically cast off that brutal role of warrior at the end of every fight.

The arm was personal.  Cutting through flesh, even with the hand alit, had a horrible sensation.  There was a microsecond of resistance, before, like crushing a grape, the flesh gave and was sheared like paper.  He could smell meat charring, feel the pulse of body systems, taste the rancid breath of last exhales.  

The arm felt like an extension of himself in so many ways, but it was impossible to forget it was artificial.  The Galra technology was extremely advanced, it had a smoother and greater range of motion than the joints on a real hand would, but the sensations were subtly different.  It had temperature and pressure and texture sensors that were more than adequate. But flesh has a give to it.  Even the most taut musculature has squishy skin over it and feels organic.  The arm was solid and hard metal, there was no molding slightly to a surface, it either touched or it didn’t.  Texture was another jarring change.  Instead of the grooves of a fingerprint and the pad of a finger feeling out a surface, it was a staccato vibration of metal finger clipping a surface.  

The reality of what the Galra had done to him settled in again with each fight.  And with it came the reality of the life he was living.

Sometimes he considered just letting himself die.  It would be absurdly easy to let himself lose a fight.  Battling to a win was strenuous and unpleasant. If he so wished, he could just pick an opponent and weapon trajectory that would kill him so swiftly after he thudded to the sandy floor that he would not even have to hear the roar of the crowd.  

But each time faced with that choice he did not pursue it.   Each time he clung with desperate claws to life.

During a fight, his flesh arm had been cut - a messy snag of talons shearing out a groove of bicep.  The pain was a dangerous distraction and Shiro had danced backwards, staggering away to gain distance and a moment’s respite.  

He needed space and time to think.  

Shiro sprinted across the sand and leaned against a pillar with his back to the focus of the action. Judging by the crowd and the grunts and wet slurps combined with suddens rips, the alien was occupied goring a fallen gladiator, another red tally in Shiro’s ledger of failure.  

And he was at a crossroads. This wound could kill him. The bleeding was heavy and not slowing, and this fight was far from over.  It was not the worst injury he had sustained, but usually the bloodiest gashes came in the desperate close attacks that ended a match and returned him to the callous care of the medical facilities.  He needed something immediate to survive the rest of this fight.  

A horrid idea struck him and he stared at his foreign, bloodstained palm.  

He used the hand to shoddily cauterize the injury, the pain enough that the addition of searing and the stench of charred flesh did not outweigh the benefit of stopped blood flow.  Using the Galra hand to save his life left a foul taste in his mouth.

But he did it regardless.

He told himself he was living for Earth, to warn them.   For Solaan, whose eyes softened the few chances they had to meet gazes and would send reassuring nods in his direction.  For the weaker prisoners, the untested, untried who had never held a weapon before and were sent into the arena to be slaughtered as blood fodder to rile up the crowd before the real fights.  

He was not living for himself.

****

Despite being in a family and lifestyle of vigilantes, Shiro did not have a consistent codename. He’d tried out Nightjar, and had stuck with Starling for years, but none had truly clicked.  His siblings ended up calling him variations of spaceman and space themed jokes.  Nothing had become a second identity the way Batman was for Bruce or Oracle was for Barbara.  

Until now. The whispers of “Champion” had spread after those early fights, echoing from cells in the corridors and jeered by opponents, and now it was notorious.  

He had always understood the theoreticals behind creating a separate persona for vigilantism, but never before had he truly understood the inherent power in a dual identity.  It was equal parts blessing and curse.

It helped in the arena, because it was not space cadet Shiro fighting, it was not brother or son Shiro fighting, it was not pilot Shiro,  it was The Champion.  And as The Champion he could be brutal, he could spill blood, he could growl in pain and rage and then slink back to his cell and weep as Shiro.  

However there were times when he felt the liberation of his role as The Champion could be too consuming.  It made it easier to use tactics with the intent to kill.

His technique had changed as he rose in the ranks, his opponents more and more often other vicious victors and now rarely helpless blood-fodder.  And so he was employing lessons taught to him less by Bruce or Diana or Dinah, but more by Solaan.  

His crash-course in alien anatomy had been shallow because of the sheer variety he might face.   Solaan had instead drilled into him the strategy of going for the neck.  They had explained that nearly all species have some form of head or brain encasement and targeting its attachment to the body is a safe bet for conquering any unknown alien.  

Shiro had received this advice early in his days as a gladiator, but had not the stomach to implement it for many weeks.  

And now, with his Galra hand that split keratin plates like butter, he could attack with deadly force.  

He couldn’t help but keep up a count of the outcomes of his fights.  Both the deaths he did not prevent, and the ones he caused.  And as the blood spilled and numbers grew he could little help but notice that he was far beyond the realm of most criminals.  

There were people serving life sentences who had snuffed far fewer flames than he, - cells in Arkham filled by those who had never used their own hand to end a life, - mug-shots of faces who had never felt the spray of blood from a torn jugular.  He was on par with the monsters.

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

Shiro sat up from the microscope he had been looking into.  Bruce had asked him to compare the weave and wear of two pieces of cloth from crime scenes and he needed to sit back and think about it.  

Shiro could hear grunts from the out-of-site training floor where Cass and Jason were sparring and the rattle of Dick’s gymnastic equipment.  

Tim and Steph were monopolizing an empty table with a sprawl of homework.

It was a good day in the cave.  Shiro smiled as the thought came accompanied with new inspiration for examining fiber fraying and hunched back over, adjusting a lense.

“Hey English Question.  Need an example of extended allusion or metaphor in something I read this semester.”  Stephanie broke the silence.  Shiro felt satisfied pride that she was comfortable to ask.  When she had first switched to Gotham Academy on a Wayne Scholarship, she had pushed herself, determined not to let Bruce down and certain that meant independency.  Actually, Bruce encouraged teamwork and consultation in the family.  

A perk of most of them going through the same school, one with tenure and established curriculum meant that the chances of someone having previously done an assignment was high.  

Shiro looked up from his microscope again.  

“ Old Man and the Sea .  Santiago is Jesus.  He gets hand injuries,  he makes ‘a noise similar to that of a man having nails driven through his hands’.  At the end, he collapses on his bed and he’s lying with his hands out like a cross.”  Shiro remembered doing that same outline.  

“Thanks Captain Kirk” Steph called.  Shiro groaned, anticipating the oncoming chorus.

“Actually, since he’s a pilot isn’t he more Sulu?”  Dick commented helpfully, dropping down from his set of parallel bars and walking over, wiping sweat from his brow onto his faded Gotham Knights shirt.

Tim snorted.  “He strikes me as more Travis Mayweather.”  

Shiro smiled around the cave fondly.  His eyes catching with Stephanie’s gaze.  She was grinning at him, smile shining beneath a plain domino mask. Batman was the only one in the cave in full regalia -  the rest just wore dominoes.  Bruce didn’t want to risk a bare-face showing up in the background of a video call.

Stephanie faltered and in her place was Haggar, a feral smirk stretching her features.  She was there just long enough for Shiro to register and then it was back to Steph, rolling her eyes and shoving Tim with her shoulder.  

Shiro slowly pushed his chair back from the table, the screech of the base on the floor ringing louder than the rest of the sounds of the cave.  He felt something cold and heavy settle in his core.  He stood up, the banter continuing with Jason and Cass entering the main area, hair equally mussed and matching towels over their necks.  

Shiro walked over to Haggar-Stephanie.  She was flickering more frequently now.  He looked around again. No one else seemed to be noticing this.  

“Is Scarecrow in Arkham?” He asked cautiously.  For once he prayed this was fear toxin.  He needed to know now though, before he took action.

He only had experienced the effects once, in his youth, when the Batmobile had rolled into the cave where he was waiting, after watching an intense and dramatic showdown between Scarecrow and Batman and Robin and Nightwing that had culminated unsatisfactorily in Scarecrow’s escape.  

He had been overwrought and ran to the returned trio, and embraced them in turn, clinging and unknowingly inhaling residual Fear Toxin.  

Everyone had been exhausted and Shiro already upset enough that the preliminary signs went unnoted and he, and everyone else, had gone to bed.  

They were woken later by him screaming, eyes open but unseeing, awake in a nightmare.  Bruce had administered the antidote and stayed with him for the rest of the night.  

That raw, unbridled terror at things that had seemed real was not something he wanted to re-experience, nor did he want to act on unfounded and strange visions.  If this was a hallucination he did not want to hurt his family.  

“He is.  And his rehabilitation reports are showing progress.”  Bruce answered from the Batcomputer.  He was still facing Oracle.  Good.  Shiro didn’t want him watching.  

Haggar was there long enough to let out a laugh and then it was back to Stephanie, smiling up at him. She looked trusting. He lit his arm up.

Shiro put his glowing Galra appendage through his little sister’s heart and it hurt in a way no weapon could.  

Stephanie burst into a puff of mist with a brightness that momentarily disoriented Shiro from his stricken state.  

The others were continuing with their conversation, ignoring the absence of Stephanie.  

Now Dick was the one flickering to a shorter, white haired frame and then back to himself.  Shiro strode towards him on steadier legs than he thought he ought to have.  

“Do you want a sweaty hug, sweat-ie?”  Dick said, laughing with arms spread, showing the mottled dark patches on his shirt.  It flashed to Haggar with spread robes.  

“Please no. Don’t do this.”  Shiro muttered,  and chopped Dick in half.  He too burst out of existence.  

Shiro swiveled around, watching each of the rest of the family,  dreading any of the options of who could be next.  

Jason sputtered-his eyes glowing yellow.  He had a shit-eating grin.  “Actually I think you're more Wesley.”  

He was still laughing when Shiro dispersed him.  It was perhaps worse that they did not react, merely acting as if everything was normal until they disappeared.  Shiro was the only one shaking, the only one wracked with guilty choked sobs.  

Shiro was in the middle of the triangle of Tim, Cass, and Bruce.  A bolt of gratitude struck him that Alfred wasn’t present in this hellscape.

Cass, with her typical understated delivery, placed a hand on his chest.  

“R2-D2.” She said decisively.  He smiled.  Even as another sister turned to Haggar and the hand resting on his pectoral gained sharp nails and dug into his flesh painfully.  

After he did away with Cass, Tim was next.  Shiro went through the motions quickly and with as little thought as possible.  It pained him how practiced this was already becoming.  

And then Bruce.  Destroying even an image of Bruce would only drive home more solidly how far he had deviated from the principles his adoptive father had instilled in him.

Bruce was smiling at him - the little curve of his closed lips that could slip past the seriousness of the batcave and the cowl.

Shiro stared at his own eyes reflected in the lenses of the mask and hated himself.  The face looking back could not be his own now, because the rip across his nose was missing and those eyes did not burn with the haunted exhaustion he ached with.  

Shiro searched Bruce’s visage for an apology he did not deserve and with the destruction of Batman, the Batcave melted into darkness.  

****

There was a heavy anticipation of pain and gore, a speculation of whether this would be a fight uphill against a savage opponent or a fight of restraint against some helpless victim.  

He often forced himself to push past his lack of desire to watch the match before his - the inability to help a weak competitor despite being only meters away was intensely disheartening - but frequently he knew he was to fight the victor of a match and that strategically he must bring himself witness whatever bloodbath played out.  

He was focusing on the hissing, bipedal bird-esque alien that was had an iridescent covering that was intermediary scales and feathers that ended in wickedly sharp points.  It had used a serrated beak to rip the still-twitching circulatory system from the screaming form of its last opponent.  Shiro hoped it would be defeated by whatever poor creature faced it before him, getting close enough to put his hand through the feather-scales would be difficult and he was not sure how thick they were, -If he would have to hack away to create an opening to even injure.  The likelihood of him ending a fight of that kind anything close to unscathed was scant.

The figure that was shoved out onto the sand next was not some defenseless waif, nor was it some brawler.  It was the six limbed hulking form of Solaan.  

Shiro watched, wide-eyed, his parched eyes drinking in the sight of the friend he had been treated to only infrequent glimpses of in months.  They looked little changed, fur perhaps a hint duller and thinner and something in their face held a deep weariness.

They rolled both sets of shoulders, limbering up their joints and sending ripples rustling through their purplish fur.  

They stepped into the central area of the arena and evaluated the bird-like opponent with a calm resignation.  Shiro knew Solaan’s methodology in trying to create an initial strategy.  

With a sudden burst of motion the bird-alien darted and jabbed for Solaan’s thigh,  Solaan pivoted, planting their lower arms and used their body as a lever to deliver a bucking kick that sent the alien staggering feet away.

The attack and dodge continued. Solaan was the bulkier and slower of the two, and they relied on their endurance and powerful blows to retaliate against the vicious speed.  The bird was in constant motion, dodging and leaping like a ricocheting shuttlecock in a volley.

The fight came to a head with a graphic collision between the beak of the bird-alien and the broad palm of Solaan’s upper right hand.  

Shiro’s gasp was matched by the crowd and the wet puncturing sound of the action.  Everything froze for part of a moment and then Solaan flexed and raised the injured arm, heaving their opponent up, the beak still driven completely through their flesh.  

The alien thrashed as its feet left the ground, and with its spindly taloned legs flashing and goring deep gouges across Solaan’s chest and thighs.  

Shiro flinched with each strike.  He was pressed as close to the force field as he dared, watching desperately.  

Solaan stayed stoic and clamped a hand around one leg, the other foot’s talons scored first that wrist, and then they ripped into the other arm that came to seize the free leg.  Solaan gripped the legs and with their remaining unoccupied hand, reached for the neck of the bird.  

The beady eye of the alien widened and then its neck oscillated with a writhing yank, it pulled free its beak and drove it pointedly into one of Solaan’s eyes.

They bellowed, this injury finally snapping their control.  Solaan’s limbs jerked spasmodically and with a lurch, their arms jolted in opposite directions and tore the legs off the bird-like alien.  

Solaan, brownish coat now patchy with blood, had managed to end the fight in better condition than their hemorrhaging opponent.

The wave of relief that Shiro felt at their survival was quickly followed by a tsunami of dread.  

He was to fight the victor of the match he had just witnessed.  He was going to have to face Solaan.

He was churning with scenarios.  Would Solaan and he fake some sham of a fight that ended with a mutual loss?  Or would he sacrifice himself for Solaan or the other way around?  He doubted that Solaan would engage him in true combat like a bonafide opponent.  Could Solaan even survive long enough to put on a show satisfactory to the merciless voyeurs?

His gate was opened and his feet felt so heavy in the sand.  The matching dull thuds of his heart and his steps carried him across the floor.  The stadium was roaring with the fervor his appearance always provoked, but that was all a negligible rush in Shiro’s ears.  The only sound he heard was the rasp of Solaan’s labored breaths.  

Solaan tried to plant their arms and heave themself up to standing, but their limbs trembled with strain and nearly gave out with the attempt.  So they stayed kneeling.  

Shiro stood before Solaan, feeling odd and awful being the taller one.  He reached out a gentle hand and trailed his fingertips tenderly over the soaking of blood.  Solaan’s blood was morbidly beautiful.  It disgusted and pained Shiro for what it was -  the life of his friend pulsing out over his fingers - but it was fascinatingly different from most hemoglobin-based bloods.  Solaan’s blood was a teal blue and shimmered with a golden metallic sheen.  And it was painted over both of them.  

Solaan shifted their weight and freed a hand from holding themself up and covered Shiro’s.  Somehow, through the likely-crippling pain of their bleeding eye, through the damage to their body, through their fear, they managed to soften their gaze and smile at Shiro.  

It was Shiro whose breath shuddered in a sob as if he were the one nearly gutted.  Solaan slid Shiro’s prosthetic hand down to cup their chin and throat, and Shiro felt the rumble of their speech resonate up it.  

“It is good to see you.  And to see that you have not lost yourself to let the fight become easier.”

Shiro was momentarily taken aback, he expected an immediate addressal of the matter of the fight at hand.

“I… No, of course not.” He paused.  There were so many things he suddenly needed to say.  They were not living a situation with allowances for regrets or ignoring opportunities.  “I didn’t want to let you down.”  

Solaan met his honesty with equal gravity.  “You could not have let me down.”  

“I’ve tried to do as you said, to save people by getting them sent off and to only kill the-” His rush of words was interrupted.  

“I know.  I know and you have done well.”  Solaan’s smile, still battling against the tightness of a grimace of pain, grew a little.  Now they were interrupted.  

The crowd had not been content to sit idle as they caught up.  The baying for blood grew in fervor and suddenly Shiro noticed a Galra with a handheld control panel standing at one of the arena’s entrances and staring at him.  The second Shiro made eye-contact with him, the Galra’s countenance turned smug and he manipulated something.  

Shiro staggered, a shout leaving him, as his body was wracked with electric pain.  It was not a lengthy sensation, he was left gasping after only a moment and a cold and clear voice ordered him to “Fight!”.  

He tried to muster himself, staring at Solaan, but found he could only refuse.  

He was shocked again, this time leaving him crouched in the sand with a hand planted to support himself.  Now it was Solaan giving orders.

“Shiro, you have to do something.  They’ll do that until you pass out or die and then I’ll face whomever comes after you.”  

“What would you have me do?”  Shiro didn’t like either option.  

“You have to kill me.”

“NO!” That got Shiro up off the sand and back to his previous position before Solaan.  

“I will not survive these wounds much longer.  If not you, then the next competitor will kill me.  And I would rather it was you than something brutal.”  Solaan was so serious. Shiro was running his options through his mind and did not like any of them.  He had no desire to see Solaan torn apart by someone else, but to kill them himself was a nightmarish prospect.  

He placed his prosthetic hand to their throat, and they met his gaze with a composed readiness.  Shiro lit his hand and found himself frozen in incapacity.  

This was the scenario he was tortured with, this was his terror, putting his hand through a loved one.  He had performed this act countless times in hallucinations to dozens of people, but he knew this was real.  This was not Haggar pulling the strings this was his own volition.  

The glow of his hand turned off and he dropped it limply.  

“I can’t.  Solaan I’m sorry but I can’t.”  His voice sounded breathy and whiny to his own ears.  

“I understand.  I should not have asked.” Solaan did not sound accusative.  Shiro felt even lower with that.  Solaan had trusted him to do one basic thing he had done so many times before, he had killed so many except the one person who had actually wanted him to do it.  

Inspiration struck him, because he could not just abandon Solaan to the blade of another.  He had a third option.

He stood tall and stared around the crowd, garnering their attention and his own voice declaring an ultimatum with his own alit hand held to his throat.  Either Solaan was taken to a work colony or he, the titular Champion, would never fight again.  

It took a staredown of conviction and sheer stubbornness cultivated out of the Wayne household, but it apparently worked.  

Solaan was removed from the arena with breath still in their chest.  And Shiro was left with nothing of them but hopes and doubts.

For all he knew, all his supposed leverage of popularity was a sham and worthless and he was merely condemning Solaan to a future death behind shut doors.  There was no guarantee, he had no rights and no real say on what they did.  

But he had been an incapable coward when faced with the surer solution.

Were these benevolent acts of violence against people he loved his curse?  How many times must he use the sharp side of a sword to save?  And was it really more merciful than death?  His knowledge of the work colonies was limited and fragmentary, combinations of hopeful imaginings, Galra propaganda, and threats from guards.  

They might be simply worked to death, a slow and painful dragged out process.  Or they could be kept alive and tortured in worse ways in colonies far from any regulatory supervision of the mainstream Empire.  

The injuries he inflicted may just be the first in an endless onslaught of suffering.  

*********

Shiro had little chance to see other prisoners outside of gladiator matches or passing by others surrounded by an equal number of sentry robots in the corridors.  He was kept in a solitary cell, he was fed in that cell, and after his fights he was now often the only survivor being healed in the medical facilities.  Or he was being taken to Haggar’s chamber of horrors or some other lab for experimentation.  There was little socialization, and with Solaan gone, there was no one to seek out if he had been allowed in a crowd.  

But anomalies in any surety could crop up, and Shiro was being escorted after an exhausting match, bruised and stumbling and desperate for the horizontal surface in his cell that was at least mostly safe to collapse on, when the screeching blare of an alarm went filled the corridor.  Shiro had pieced together an observation of the severity scale of various Galra alarms and this one was blaring with importance.  He had little else to do with his downtime.  When he was too exhausted to exercise he could only listen to the ambient noise - the hydraulics of doors, the ringing clip of sentry steps, the occasional scream.  

His escorts this time were a mix of flesh and metal.  The two Galra guards exchanged glances over his head, looking through him as a ragged prisoner, a non-entity, and both shrugged and frowned.  Rapidly, they growled orders to the two robots and those sprinted down the corridor, presumably towards the commotion.  

Suddenly Shiro was grabbed around the bicep and hauled bodily around a corner and stopped in front of a closed cell door. It was a larger cell, like the one he had shared with Solaan and others in those early weeks.  

The guard not holding him partially off the floor slapped her hand against the door control and as soon as it opened he was rudely tossed in.  He stumbled as the door shut behind him and heard a muttered “That counts as temporarily securing any in-transit prisoners right?” between the guards.  

His eyes adjusted to the darkened light and he was met with five sets of eyes.  Three were species he had seen or fought before, two were tall vermiform beings that swayed hypnotically and twined around each other in an embrace. It would have been almost cute but for the fear in their eyes.  

In fact, all of the beings in the room were ones he would have immediately decided to try to get sent to the labor colony if he faced them on the sand.  

He turned to the most calm looking person in the room, a slender but humanoid being with brightly colored segments of color, and raised his hands in a peaceful, beseeching gesture.  He was desperate to assure his harmlessness to all present as swiftly as possible.  

He had little chance.  

There was a movement behind him - he had not attentively tracked the motion of every person in the room and let one get behind him.  He fought down his combat instincts, determined to show his friendly intent, to show that he was just another helpless prisoner trapped in this situation and thus akin to them, and was wholly unprepared for the sudden punching pain to the back of his lower left rib cage.  

He gasped and dropped to his knees, breathing suddenly laborious, and groped behind himself, the motion of his shoulders pulling and twisting the painful flesh.   He felt a rough edged piece of hard material, plastic or bone, it was difficult to say, that was wrapped in a layered strip of frayed and greasy fabric.  

He left the weapon in his flesh, it was keeping at least some of the blood on this inside and he did not feel like contorting and cauterizing himself when he knew there was at least some chance the guards would return and take him to a proper facility with a far less painful repair tactic.  

The other inhabitants of the cell, even the bold one who had stabbed him, were keeping their distance now, huddled against the walls.  He little blamed them.  They likely thought him some wounded animal, burning to lash out at anything that dared come close.  

And he felt little better than that.  

It was an agonizing wait after that.  Shiro lying on the ground in a twisted pose that relieved the most pain from his injury and focusing on breathing.  In the back of his mind there was a countdown going, there was only so long he dared wait for guards to return before he lost too much blood.  Before that threshold he would have to take matters into his own hands and close the wound.  But until then he would wait.  

The guards, only the female the same as before, returned before he had to take measures of self preservation and collected him off the floor with a scoff of disgust. He was healed by the apathetic infirmary and with little ceremony returned to his cell for his usual solitary rumination.

He had been shanked.  In prison.  The absurdity of this being the prison cliche he got to experience, despite being in deep space, was not lost on him.  He tried to focus on that near-amusement, trying to think about how much Jason would laugh at that, at the face Dick would have made, at how Keith would have scoffed.  His brain kept slipping down the alternative train of thought.  

This was painful evidence that he was no hero.  He was seen as something to be feared and put down by a makeshift weapon by a prisoner his instinct was to save.  He was not viewed as a savior or a Champion of these common folk.  He was seen as the enemy, - the one to be struck down, - to be feared.  

It rankled and rotted in his heart.  Was this how superheroes whose populace disliked them felt?  Or worse, was this how villians saw themselves?  A hero working against the actual wishes of the people for some grander scheme that he thought he understood?  

He had been shanked and it felt like a betrayal to all of the efforts he thought he had been making on behalf of the weaker.  

********

The arena was becoming a preferable destination.  This was not an opinion Shiro had ever anticipated harboring, but as his escort of uncaring Galra robot drones turned more and more often to the right instead of the left at the crossroads of the main corridor and led him away from the arena and towards either a scientist or Haggar’s workroom, he found himself wishing for the crowds and sand.

At least when he was fighting he had some facsimile of control.  He may not be there by choice and his opponents were never of his own selection, but he picked which moment to lunge, where to strike, how to move and feel.  It was the only time he felt truly alive and present in the moment.

Time in his lilac-lit cell droned in the monotony of echoed robotic footsteps clanking past in a clockwork rhythm broken only by the delivery of food.  But in the arena it was a series of heartbeats pulsing fast and roaring with his blood and the crowd.  

And there he picked which blows to give and take. And the pain, for there was often pain, was natural - in that it came from injury and was localized at a source rather than from some inflicted cruelty.  

When he was strapped to a table, or forced into a tank of fluid, or scanned or prodded, he had no control.  When they alit every nerve in his body at once, or worked through them systematically, the pain was the kind that writhed under his skin and churned his gut.  A seemingly endless discomfort made worse by the callous interest of the scientists.  

Time with Haggar was foul beyond that.  When she was not using her powers to wrack his body with agony, she invaded his mind with distorted visions of his loved ones that grew more disturbing and detailed with each session.  

Sometimes they were memories, nights in the Batcave with his siblings, or gatherings with the Justice League, or cadets he had grown up with in the Garrison, other times they were new creations.  Being pitted against Solaan, or Bruce, or Dick, or Jason, or Keith or someone, in the arena and forced to fight desperately to the death.  

The fights against Bruce were the worst.  

Haggar’s Batman grew more and more lifelike and now vocalized scorn and disappointment just as often as it did gruff affection.  

Lingering doubts about his actions were dragged into the light in the most painful way.  

It was one thing to think on the darkest of nights about the way he was betraying nearly every doctrine his adoptive father had ever instilled a belief in. - But to hear him say it.  To look into Bruce’s eyes, for now Batman was just as often a maskless Bruce Wayne in training clothes, and see disapproval, to see the disappointment, to see the resignation to failure, cut Shiro to the quick.  

For Shiro was not breaking the “no killing” rule in some questionable accident. Irregardless of the utter lack of pleasure he took in killing, he deliberately went for lethal blows and no circumstantial justification he offered in pleading gasps from beseeching lips could undo the intent behind each bloody victory.  

*******

It was not that escape had never occurred to Shiro, but rather that it had been a pipedream of impracticality.  Even if he made it out of his cell or out of his bonds, he would still have to make it through a maze of patrolled corridors, and even if he made it that far, he was in space, which created an even greater complication of transportation.

But he was a scion of Batman, so despite his misgivings he was prepared to leap at any opportunity. And Ulaz was offering a chance that accounted for many of the potential problems Shiro had been most daunted by.  He had mapped every corridor he had had the privilege of being forced down, and kept a mental count of steps and shift changes. He could handle navigating the corridors and there was a spacecraft waiting at the end.  

The plan as soon as he was out of Galra range was to contact the Green Lantern Corps and through them one of the Earth Lanterns and the Justice League and his father.  He was mentally prepared for complications in this, without Galra translation technology he was likely going to be reduced to pointing at something green and at a ring or his finger and hoping the Corps had widespread awareness in that area.  

Instead, to his shock, he was met with familiar constellations and passing by planets he was intimately familiar with.  He was in the Solar System.  The Galra were in the Solar System.  Relief was warring with panic in him.  On the one hand, he could directly land on Earth, but on the other the Galra would see one of their own hijacked ships landing there.  

He would have to hope he created enough of a warning for the Watchtower and other interplanetary defenses to prepare.  

Some part of him was even hopeful that he would be hailed by the Watchtower or met halfway by J’onn or Superman.  

Instead, he was greeted with nothing.  He had little capacity to dwell on that rather concerning fact.  His descent and landing were dangerous and difficult enough that it took much of his piloting expertise to make it survivable.  He had spent a lot of time in simulators learning how to crash ships in ways that kept the cabin intact, but this was an unfamiliar ship and simulations could never quite capture the desperation of how badly he wanted to live.

He was rather proud of himself for landing not only on the same continent as the Garrison, but in the same desert as the headquarters.  It would be hard for either the League or military to miss the smoke and flames of a crashing spaceship, he knew he would not be left waiting long.  He smiled at the sandstone filling the viewport and gave into the unconsciousness his throbbing temple begged for.

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

A/N So that's the end of Shiro's imprisonment. Ik this is a lot of build up without actual Batfam interaction, but the way I want to tell this story is going through how Shiro's outlook on the canon story would be different with a Batfam background. SO we've got next chapter which is like Bruce and Batfam hearing about shit on earth, then a chapter of Shiro with the Voltron squad and honestly like the actual Shiro and DC characters present interactions will happen in a few chapters but the like pacing of this fic is more rushed at the start because I want the exposition to build up to the like last 5 chapters which will be slower paced.

Honestly I had about 4 different voltron fic ideas, and bc i know myself and that I would only have the dedication to do one long fic, I combined them so like Solaan was created for a different story and I really liked them and they fill in some plot holes so.

ALso! Duke Thomas! introduced next chapter!

[recommendedlisten]

The battle wounds of a DIY music blogger are directly reflected in the eye strain due to excessive screen time that such a human is subjected to, and this week, this writer is definitely seeing stars. This isn’t just because Solange and Carly Rae Jepsen are once again turning their sights toward global domination, or the fact that highly anticipated releases from folktale aliens Big Thief, blushing dreamweaver Hatchie, or hardcore angels Fury made great first impressions with their newly-announced albums. There was also scene heroes Emily Reo, Kitty and Potty Mouth doing things on their own terms, too, all the while up and comers BRUTUS and Jackie Mendoza continued to impress with intriguing new dimensions in their respective sounds. In short, this week’s music was very extra, and there’s still a heavy order left to discuss.

Here’s the best of the rest from the week of February 24th, 2019…

American Football feat. Elizabeth Powell - “Every Wave to Ever Rise” [Polyvinyl Records]

On March 22nd, American Football will release their third self-titled effort, and remarkably so, despite the long stretch between their 1999 genre-molding classic and the now, the Midwestern emo pioneers have evolved with the times rather than just rummaging through nostalgia in their sound. A major factor in that on this outing has been the inclusion of guest vocals beyond Mike Knsella’s own hum, as we recently heard third wave emo icon Hayley Williams of Paramore serenade the growing pains on “Uncomfortably Numb”. The LP’s latest preview “Every Wave to Ever Rise” is further proof of both, as it features Land of Talk’s Elizabeth Powell joining the quartet for a gorgeous listen of ghostly arpeggios that sparkles at the surface like refracted water, as Powell’s soft presence co-mingle a faint spell in layered langued. “Truth or dare / Love is the cross you bear / J'ai mal au cœur, c'est la faute de l'amour,” she sings in its chorus. American Football have also tacked on west coast dates to their North American tour, bringing along emotive next-gens Illumanati Hotties, Tomberlin, and Pure Bathing Culture with them.

Control Top - “Chain Reaction” [Get Better Records]

It’s not very common for a band to have announced an album and its first single well into a year in advance of when it actually becomes slated on the release calendar, but that’s what Philly punks Control Top managed to do when they set “Type A”, off their forthcoming debut full-length Covert Contracts, into the wild last March. Despite the passing of time since, the trio -- comprised of frontperson and bassist Ali Carter, drummer Alex Lichtenauer of HIRS / Get Better Records’ and Bleeding Rainbows guitarist Al Creedon -- remain fiercely awake and confrontational on the LP’s second preview “Chain Reaction”. As Carter tells Stereogum, “The song takes place in the middle of an argument... Vitriol is flying and emotions are running high. With our culture’s growing appetite for anger and conflict, a petty disagreement can easily escalate into a full-out shouting match.” Knife-like guitar riffs daggering over even sharper angles are the vehicle for her choice words as thumping rhythm mimics the non-stop adrenaline drip that ensures emotions remain high and heated. “I'm looking for an open door / But all I see is a broken mirror I can't take it anymore / I wish I could disappear / What start,” Carter shouts, hurling herself at the edge of a point of no return. The album, by the way, officially arrives on April 5th, and they’ll be supporting Laura Jane Grace & The Devouring Mothers on the road this spring.

Covert Contracts by CONTROL TOP

Deafheaven - “Black Brick” [ANTI-]

It would seem that for every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction in Deafheaven’s catalog. Last year, the band released the listmaker Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, a listen that you could arguably consider their most accessible work to date in the way they focused on elements of slowcore, shoegaze, and even some gothic balladry thanks to an assist from Chelsea Wolfe, but make no mistake about it -- Deafheaven can be depended upon delivering a reminder that they’re still a metal band despite what the purists hate on them with whenever they push the genre’s corners out a little further into the experimental unknown. “Black Brick”, a new one-off single, is a sharp-toothed epic doing just that by ferociously pulverizing itself up through a scorched earth as George Clarke’s black metal howls damn us all to their intense hellscape. The listen will come in use beginning next week when the band heads out on a co-headlining tour with fellow metal outliers Baroness and avant outfit Zeal & Ardor.

Ex Hex - “Rainbow Shiner” [Merge Records]

Mary Timony’s Ex Hex is another one of the many artists with new music out on March 22nd, as the glammed out indie rock trio led by the former Helium frontwoman will break their five year stretch of silence since 2014′s debut Rip very loudly with the release of its sophomore follow-up It’s Real. So far, we’ve heard Timony, bassist Betsey Wright and drummer Laura Harris spin us through an intergalactic romance and toughened us up with a pep talk with their power-pop licks, but with the album’s latest advance listen “Rainbow Shiner”, the trio go full-on Detroit Rock City with a hair metal twist in their glittering of arena-sized riffs that’s got a big swagger to it. Cheap faux leather, studded vests, tatted arms, and chipped nail polish white-knuckling a vintage muscle car with the windows down may come to mind when taking this one in, which is to say, it’s smashes through the stereo with an effortless, dangerous cool.

Nothing - “Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping” [Relapse Records]

Shoegazing shape-shifters Nothing outdid themselves once again with one of last year’s best heavy albums in their third studio effort Dance On the Blacktop. Over the years, however, the Philly punk band has amassed an impressive string of covers released in the interim between albums, showcasing a malleable side to their sound in applying textures of loud echoes in the dark to listens you may not originally deem adjacent to Nothing’s own sonic vortex. If you ever wanted to have them all in one place, then you’re in luck, as Nothing’s takes on Concrete Blonde, Low, New Order, Ride, and their latest, a feedback-drenched interpretation of Grouper’s “Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping”, will appear on Spirit Of The Stairs – B-Sides & Rarities, due out on March 6th. The compilation includes those listens alongside B-sides, demos, and live versions of songs that stretch the full span of their catalog, making for an essential listen for anyone who considers them a completist. Like many, Nothing heads into SXSW as they tour throughout the entire spring, with one leg featuring CANDY and Tony Molina, and another co-headlining with Basement, supported by Gouge Away and Teenage Wrist.

PUP - “Free At Last” [Little Dipper / Rise Records]

Stefan Babcock is upping his Debbie Downer game for PUP’s upcoming third studio effort Morbid Stuff. Now that he’s made it perfectly clear to the “Kids” that life is meaningless (but it’s what you make out of it), he’s piling on the self-loathing and destructive habits with the album’s second preview “Free At Last”. The listen is characteristically wild and reckless in axe-edged riffs and beefed up drum crashes that topple charging versus into big chorus sing-a-long -- in this case, the deprecating, “Just ’cause you’re sad again, it doesn’t make you special at all...” -- that lifts Babcock’s gloomy sneer of reality into a comforting rallying cry of a punk anthem. Preceding its debut, the band released the lyrics and a basic chord chart to its fans asking them to record the song without hearing it, and those results are now the now the basis of its music video. Charly Bliss’ Eva Hendricks and celebrity stan Finn Wolfhard make guest appearances throughout the altered edit final instructional as well.

Show Me the Body - “Madonna Rocket” [Loma Vista]

Art-minded hardcore trio Show Me the Body have signed on with major indie Loma Vista for the release of their forthcoming Chris Coady-produced sophomore effort Dog Whistle, due out on March 29th. A slicker side of the studio as well as a cohesiveness in the trio’s carnage has already been defined through the crunchy static of the album’s lead single “Camp Orchestre” and again resurfaces through the collision of fast moving walls of ‘80s-era British post-punk and NYC hardcore of its second preview “Madonna Rocket”. It’s a dash that barely makes the three-minute mark over wiry guitars, relentless drumming and frontman Julian Cashwan Pratt snarling over the sea-sawing teetering that intensifies as the listen wears on. “When I meet someone that’s good, I want to die with them / Dead friends / I still want to say goodbye to them / Aside from me, aside from them / All I have is family / I will die with them” his words thrash into bodies. That he finds in the track’s accompanying visuals, a dual shot performance clip recorded at the band’s Corpus DIY spaces in LA and New York City.

War On Women - “The Ash Is Not the End” [Bridge Nine Records]

The great feminist punk band War On Women were also among one of the creators of last year’s best heavy-hitting albums with their sophomore effort Capture the Flag, an album built around unabashed socio-political anthems and a controlled grip around melodic hardcore aggression. Their screams for activism and change in a current climate that could stand to be burned to the ground by their plight continues on “The Ash Is Not the End”, the Baltimore quintet’s contribution to Adult Swim’s Singles series. What’s most noticeable about this listen, as opposed to the gritty firestorms of earlier, is how a greater degree in pop heroics akin to Paramore’s rockier moments in turn pronounce Shawna Potter’s time’s up declaration. “It’s all just a matter of time,” she spears through crisp cut riffage. You’ll be able to catch War On Women all over the world this spring and summer, including dates opening for Jawbreaker’s east coast tour.

[astralworld-blog1]

Donald Marshall (Sun. November 11, 2012) - They went very retarded last night... do not trust Thien Nguyen/Tila Tequila. I think they're using me to round up people for fema camps... the world is run by dead consciousness people on chip and drones... and people scared of them... dead consciousness people are just as idiotic as drones and go with the evil... last night was very bad, It just keeps getting worse, I cannot mail most people, some have been sending me messages and I try to respond and it says unable to post comment, unable to post comment everytime... others can't see my page. They said they want to get Yeshua and the army of light, break the prophecy and get power... cosmic power... also said they want to have me die and come back dead clone and lead them like that, an evil dead clone puppet for them. Thien is a hardcore crystal meth addict, this is why she doesn't ave the Lamborghini and lives a simple life now, she sold everything for crack and meth... she threatened me last night to go along, and I refused and stuck her fingernails in my face while in restraints, saying that if I told about it I would recieve more of the same. they cut me all up and had a crowd of old fat people come out when I was debilitated then they held me up in the air like crowd surfing at a concert and tossed me up bleeding and set my clone body to spinning tossed up and down up and down blood flinging all around, then some rabbi in the crowd started yelling "BLOOD OF YESHUAAAA BLOOD OF YESHUAAAAA BLOOD OF YESHUAAAA!!!" and that seemed to send them into a frenzy and each time I would come down people tried to grab my skin and tear it off giggling going cross eyed and repeating what he said... women tearing nails through my skin... then lowered me to the ground gently and all converged like a football pile up and tore me apart and everything went black... Zionists as strange as it sounds are allies with the Nazi's... and the nazi's have been droning jewish people for a long time and becoming them by putting dead consciousnesses on chip and putting them in their heads... it is bad... Elizabeth and the pope are down with them, seems they all want to escape death by recording themselves on chip and becoming dead retards, dead consciousness chip heads are stupid and a mockery of they're former selves... seems everyone is down with nazi ideals now... russia china everyone... all scared to die so they use the headchips... it's worse than I thought, and I already thought it was bad... guy yelled it idiotic too, like a priest would in church, was so bs dramatic BLOOD OF YESHUAaAaAaA BLOOD OF YESHUAaAaAa was absolutely retarded... then new body and theyre scratching up my chest with fingernails and thumb knives... I'm goin to hell I guess to be tortured for eternity by retarded undead people and drones and Vrill... think theyre gonna sacrifice me for the planetary alignment... they said they were... Tila is down with them... she is trying to round up people for fema,.. she will recieve benefits like Steven will for the more people she gets. She probably hasn't been Thien/Tila since her aneurysm there are drones and deadheads on my friends list,... some of them act helpful... They may replace me... you will know if its me or not from what I say.... the idiots were like washing themselves in my clones blood slowly,... buncha fat ugly losers... and acting like it felt good... like a porn star having a sexy shower on film, but these were ugly old fat losers... it was quite a scene.... it's ugly old people that have NO chance of ever getting laid, so they keep the fear going on everyone... deadheads come back gay child molester, like drones are, and caveman like cannibalistic, and they go overboard with it to keep kids scared into never saying no... nazi's have a few city bases underground,... deep underground where usually the pressure would be too great for human habitation, but using technology theyve regulated the pressure and temperature... they have bases on the sea floor too and saucers can go underwater.. hope you guys understand that I'm goin through a real bad time relating this to everyone,... they get me bad everytime I sleep now and I'm very sick, heads jammin and hearts messed bad... I'm glad to though, feels good to do good, having a clear conscience feels good. and I hate the Illuminati/NWO more than anyone on Earth. simply my duty really.... feels awesome :) hearts done for anyway,... nothing to lose, I'm looking at undying hell anyway, least this way possibly I can prevent myself goin to lizard hell... and save our species from annihilation... the Vrill hate humans bad. Blah lol dead men can't enjoy rewards.... long as I'm remembered well. I will be wanting a statue though :P frickin big one. cool pose, with a stomped vrill lizard under my foot lol ..... lots against me though. pope n monarchies and entire 4th reich. Pope is a very evil man... was Hitlers favorite ass boy,.. he is pope as a reward for faithful service... he likes his gold... likes lotsa evil stuff... everyone thats human thats down with them are promised to be spared, and will live in luxury bunkers deep underground... stocked with food for 100 years... and cloning tubes to "make" friends. only the figureheads will be spared though and the rest will just be processed too... I made that boondox abadon song about it... over a year ago before I started mailing..

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvcSa2oy5Xg Boondox - Abaddon]

its about being processed into dumb's for vrill to do whatever to... at 2:45 Elizabeth included a line in it with her own clones voice... its the command phrase to self destroy a dumb if there is trouble. she says "drop the motherfuc$ing base" . I dont know what the plans are for afterwards. Listen to every word of that song... its all about the subject. they let me make the lyrics including stuff because they were supremely confident... and arrogant. Vrill like this song a lot. everyone there is hoping I can alert the world and save them from Vrill... but drones are trying to mess me up... they havent deleted my facebook account but theyre doing everything but... and making me verI'm not even very computer literate, I just installed games on computer before. I'm not very organized either... I'm sorry about that but theyre trying to drive me insane with clone torture I think and I'm starting to feel wierd. I'll maintain sanity to see it through though.....so sick so I can barely look at the screen to text... atleast everyone reading this will know... they must think there is a chance of my success,... because theyve been making me run around there under mind control mk and other stuff making me do retarded stuff on video,... saying if the world stops them, rises up against them they will show this "highlight reel" to the world and take me down with them.