#throwing it into the deep end now

[ploo-toe]

The Crow and The Mourning Dove: CH 2

SCP-049 x SCP!Reader

Series tags/warnings(18+): fem!reader, slowburn, (eventual)smut, horror, gore/violence, death, unethical experiments, dark, mentions of past trauma, happy ending

Chapter Summary: “The Chem. Department has a new lavender sedative mix they want to test out, so we’re moving it to a separate testing chamber.  During that time, maintenance will come in for a routine inspection of all the locking mechanisms in 049’s cell.  You’re there to ensure everything runs smoothly.”

 ___________________________________________

Almost a month had gone by, and while 049’s insight had been helpful, progress with 9528 was slow.  The scp was wary; reluctant to let its guard down.  Though, on rare occasion, it would be comfortable enough to drop its facade, even if only for a brief moment.

While Y/n didn’t completely trust Dr.Leeward, she could recognize that he was somewhat of an oddity.  He deviated from the other foundation staff.  Where others were callous and barbaric,  he was softened.  He couldn’t deny his compassionate nature.  It’s why he didn’t push when she was unwilling to share certain details, encouraging her to answer only what she felt comfortable with.  Even if deep down, Y/n knew that he still only thought of her as a thing. Not a she, but an it.  Still, he was better than most.

“Ok, so we went over the things you like.  What about dislikes?  Anything that upsets or annoys you, possibly even things that you’re afraid of?”  Dr.Leeward sat across from her, encouraging her to go at her own pace. It was refreshing, his patience.

“...I’m not overly fond of fire.”  

“Fire?”  It was clearly an answer he wasn’t expecting.  A centuries old being, responsible for the slaughter of hundreds, if not thousands, afraid of fire?

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“May I ask why?”

While there were some things Y/n was willing to disclose, others were deemed far too personal.

“There was an incident in the past that led to a certain… avoir les pétoches… aversion.”  Y/n muttered under her breath, trying to find the words.  While she was fluent enough in the King’s English, she found its expressiveness quite limiting.

“I see…” Leeward spoke as he finished up his notes “Well I’ll leave it at that for today, and we’ll pick up again next week.  Is there anything you want to speak of before the end of the session?”

“No Doctor, that will be all.”

He nodded, gathering his things and exiting the cell.

Y/n remained at the table, simply staring ahead at nothing.  To the camera’s she appeared almost bored.  But for a brief moment, she was back there.  She could see the flames surrounding her, feel them eating away at her skin. She blinked it away as quickly as it had come.  She got up slowly, making her way over to her bed and getting as comfortable as it allowed.  Perhaps some rest would do her good.

Leeward made his way down the hall towards his office, nodding to a group of guards on his way, before The Director flagged him down.

“We’ve really got to stop meeting like this, Adam.”  Director Novak joked. Tell me about it. Leeward bit his tongue.  “I need you to assist in the movement of SCP-049 today.”  Movement?

“Why are we moving 049?”  He racked his brain, trying to think of whatever reason there might be for such a high clearance task.

“The Chem. Department has a new lavender sedative mix they want to test out, so we’re moving it to a separate testing chamber.  During that time, maintenance will come in for a routine inspection of all the locking mechanisms in 049’s cell.  You’re there to ensure everything runs smoothly.”  Novak’s cold stare bore holes into Leeward’s skull.  He wanted Leeward there to keep 049 docile.  Meeting the director's gaze, it was clear as day.  He knew the risks that came with moving 049, he just didn't care.  Leeward swallowed down the lump in his throat, knowing it was better not to question Novak’s judgment, and followed him to 049’s containment cell.  

Leeward went into the cell first, told by the director that he was to obtain 049’s full cooperation.

“Hello 049.”

“Doctor, I was unaware that we had any meetings today.”  049 stood cordially, halting its previous task of writing in its journal.

“No, we don’t, I’m here sent by the director to prepare you for testing.  He asked that I come in first to make sure you’re cooperative.”  Leeward spoke with thought out words, careful not to provoke the scp.

“Ah, yes.  I have my work as you have yours.  I am willing to see through your tests.”

He was relieved that 049 seemed to be in a good mood today. The last thing he wanted was for this to go poorly.

Leeward signaled for the guards to come in, stepping back as they attached its restraints.  Two held onto its chains, pulling it forward, while the remaining 4 had their rifles fixed on it.  They slowly began making their way out of the cell, leading it down the hall.  Director Novak stood stiffly, staring down 049 with a shark-like gaze.  The teams movements were slow and calculated. While the facility guards may have been lacking in certain social aspects, they knew the tactical precision necessary, and the weight any mistakes would carry.

They had just barely made it to the first turn before they heard it, down the hall behind them.

A gut wrenching scream bounced off the walls, laced with pure terror.  What the hell was that!?

049 halted, posture stiff and eyes wide.  

“...Y/n?”

[andi-o-geyser]

“cody only has under an hour of screen time in all of star wars” maybe to you he does. to me he's the main character

[squuote]

I know I’ve already made a post about the parable but I do wanna also say I adore how on first glance, it’s a generic office setting until you start actually observing it closely. but more specifically the way the white glow from the windows is meant to be like, sunlight shining into the building. but then when you finally pause to take a peak of the outside world, you’re only to be met with a seemingly never ending white void. idk perhaps I am focusing so much on such a small thing but it’s just. such a thing to process. the way everything is so normal when you don’t look into the small details.

[zymstarz]

yeah sure that's how i'll [re]come out

[aardvaark]

parker leverage is so real for having a conversation flowchart. how does small talk even work without rehearsed answers honestly

[fluentisonus]

me, not great with patterns beyond the basics, trying to make sense of some of this stuff

[starlooove]

My batfam gender sexuality hcs 🥰🥰🥰🥰:

Bruce: cishet he/him

Dick: cishet he/him

Jason: cishet he/him

Tim: cishet he/him

Steph: butch lesbian to ME! She/her but she’s trying out she/they and doesn’t know how to feel. Might fuck with neos but she’s not ready to take that step yet.

Cass: think early on in accepting that she’s a human being she’d psychoanalyze the fuck outta herself to see where she fits in and be super super super pressed about the entire thing to a detrimental point but as she progresses she’ll be fine. Lesbian, and she’s pretty sure she’s a girl most of the time sure 😄.

Duke: I think he knew he was not straight since he was young (moonlight opened his eyes and broke his heart) but he never really questioned his sexuality at all. The problem is that he doesn’t question it because the idea of gender roles (girls do this. Boys do that.) is so engrained in his mind that it’s not even something he thinks can be changed, if that makes sense? Anyways I don’t think he’s the type to get dysphoria he moreso experiences euphoria when exploring his gender identity. I think he would realize he has different views on his own gender when he sees other people expressing their own differently. Like genuinely he goes to school and sees another boy wearing lipstick and his brain blows up. As of this very moment he’s “exploring” but he’s actually a lil scared to genuinely confront himself about this and uses “there’s bigger problems in the world” to get out of it. End goal is non-binary but for now he’s at the veeeeeeery tail end of questioning.

Damian: I think at the moment Damian’s just not thinking about any of that but it’s in the opposite of duke; he knows he’s probably some kind of queer, both in sexuality and gender, but it’s just. Not top priority for him at the moment. I wanna bring up clothes rq bc, extra hc time, in MY mind Damian does express himself a lot through his clothing and getting to the manor made him a bit shy when it came to skirts and dresses. Seeing the way boys, and especially black and brown boys, who explore their femininity are treated, he just doesn’t mention it at all and the scenario never comes up. He gets more comfortable as time goes on though and later on gets bold enough to wear a dress to an event. He’s stonefaced but slightly regretting it till some younger kid sees him and is awe stricken, like stars in his eyes and asking if he can do that too. Damian feels better about it and resolves to wear whatever he wants more often. I don’t think he ever comes out in big big way (he’d tell the people closest to him but everyone else can just figure it out) but he genuinely doesn’t feel the need to label himself at all.

[quatregats]

I also just. Sorry not to make everything about The Other Blorbo. But if you look at my obsession with TE Lawrence you can see what I mean about how much more of a freak Hornblower could be

[felixvanhuss]

One of these days I'm gonna find that fucking hankcon fic I lost. Then I can stop losing my mind over it every few months

[boag]

I’m so depressed about everything rn . Being sick has ruined my sleep schedule again so I slept through most of the day and now I just feel so devastatingly alone for whatever reason . Brb watching Eraserhead

[flywolfwriting]

I was gonna make you wait until Tuesday for chapter 15 but I am thoroughly enjoying y'all's reactions to the teaser and I will be finishing the chapter within the next hour or so, and I am very tempted to post it tonight instead....

[daisychainsandbowties]

Amber Run - Amen

oh, is there a heaven?/ you’d know now you’ve been 

you know this show makes me crazy but one of the most interesting things it does is, simply, giving us Mary

this character who is bereaved from the very start, and we cannot possibly understand her grief. can’t even grasp at the edges of it.

& it’s so powerful because Shannon is a gaping wound ripped through the narrative, but we can’t see it. we can feel the blood dripping onto our backs, in our periphery. but we're stuck with this outline of her, a body ripped open not once, but twice. plundered for its treasure. only Mary goes and searches it for answers.

maybe out of habit, because it's where her answers have always been

and, with no body to keep her contained, Shannon is scattered everywhere.

in Beatrice, flinging herself at armed men in a kind of strained imitation of Shannon, because we learn bad habits too.

people sometimes say that Bea's whole 'trust your team' speech is ironic, coming from her, but i think she trusts her sisters. her issue in s1 is that she knows what she can trust them to do. she knows that Shannon would have wrapped her body around their bodies; that she would have carried any of them through fire.

she hates that and she resents it but, again, we learn bad habits most especially from the ones we love.

Lilith, who must at least be motivated somewhat by the thought of Shannon, perforated, brimming with blue light and telling her, with that sudden set of her jaw. that elusive steeliness to her voice, ‘you’re ready.’

Mary. i always think of her standing in Vincent’s office that night, and how incredibly kind she is to Ava. what we’ve seen her do before that - shoot a man in cold blood on a cliff, hold a knife against the tangle of veins in a wrist, telling a man how quickly it is possible to bleed out.

& then we see her in standing in the sunset at Cat's Cradle & she's something else. she's a container for all the grief we aren't ready to see.

Ava, who spends so much time running but can’t escape. 

something about how you can’t run from a ghost when the ghost is inside you. 

I can't help blaming you/ for leaving me here, what am I supposed to do?

thinking about how episode 1 takes its title from the Book of Psalms. episode 1, and the first thing we hear Mary say which is

'i need somewhere to put her down'

it always makes me think, oh Mary, you never will

this passage from psalms 23 & what it says about her,

Mary and the places we see her most often: on the docks, on the plateau where Ronda perches, on a bridge with Ava when Beatrice picks her up.

liminal spaces. between land and sea. between the earth and the sky. a bridge (between). what i think that says about where Mary is standing the whole time and where she ends up.

where she ends. 

standing between her sisters and the world that wants to eat them. 

[djarin]

the way i've just finally been able to tackle about 10 years worth of clutter in my room...

[steakout-05]

for months now i have had this little story idea bouncing around in my head for an AU of Jetpack Joyride where Barry is stuck inside a big expermental time loop conducted by Legitimate Research to create an army of randomly selected time-travelling soldiers. the idea is very much still rough and i dunno if and when i'll develop it into a bigger thing, but it's a pretty cool idea and it's a twist on the JJ game that i've never really seen much exploration on.

basically, it focuses on Barry, who is the sort of Patient Zero of an experimental concentrated time-fuckery technology LR is working on. every single day, at exactly the same time, Barry goes out to work his salesman job, discovers the jetpack, breaks into the laboratory, takes it for a joyride, eventually gets hit by an obstacle and dies. the next day, Barry goes out to work his salesman job, discovers the jetpack, breaks into the lab, takes it for a joyride and dies. and he does the same exact thing the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day... he's pretty much stuck in a loop of the exact same events happening repeatedly every single day, and he has absolutely no idea about it. that is, until there's a glitch in the system, and Barry progressively becomes a lot more suspicious and paranoid about the situation he's in. the rest of this post is gonna be REALLY spoilery (like i literally just explain big important chunks of the story for several paragraphs) if i ever make this into a full-fledged fanfic, so i'm gonna put it under a keep reading thingy. also it is... quite long and convoluted lol.

as the story goes on, it focuses more on the mental degredation of Barry as he starts uncovering all these weird clues, slowly trying to piece together what's going on and driving himself insane, because every time a reset occurs, his memory of the previous loop ever happening is completely wiped and everything he did that day goes all the way back to square one. since the malfunctioning of LR's technology though, Barry has been getting little nuggets of deja vu and half-remembered fragments of dying before a reset. this eventually becomes him repeating things to himself, little phrases and codes over and over and over in hopes that it will persist into the next reset. this eventually becomes symbols stuck up on the walls of his room and then progresses to entire rituals to help him remember and little behaviourisms like tics and stims to let him know he's in another loop. he becomes more and more panicked and unsettled, paranoid that someone - or something - is watching him closely. additionally, he keeps having disturbing dreams in the early hours of the morning before he gets up to go to work, ones that are symbolic and prophetic, as if they're trying to warn him about something. i've had concepts of him waking up on top of a pile of millions of mangled carcasses that all look exactly like Barry, and having on them them forcefully grab onto his leg and pull him down with the rest of them. it's kinda like the nightmare Woody has in Toy Story 2, but like, dead guys everywhere, lol.

the backstory of this whole thing is kinda insane. basically, Legitimate Research is a sketchy government funded facility that's doing secret time experiments to create the strongest beings for a purpose that's somewhat similar to Brains' Zomb Bomb plan from AOZ (i haven't fully decided yet). Barry is someone who has been randomly selected for their newest version of the concentrated time loop experiment, where patients will be put under looping tests to extract data about their strength, agility and performance and decide what they need to supplement them with in order to create the perfect soldier.

Barry was 22 years old when he was selected. he was actually a relatively normal local Fish N' Chips vendor living in New South Wales, but one day, when he recieved an exciting letter in the mail about a new ambitious job opportunity, he completely disappeared without a trace and seemed to have been entirely erased from the minds of everyone he had ever known. Barry had actually been kidnapped and ensnared into a mind-experiments facility of the laboratory, where they proceeded to wipe his mind, proof of his existence and his entire personhood up to this point, and replaced all of it with fake memories to fill in the gaps. he was then placed in stasis and to be injected with high doses of strength drugs as they crafted a new life for him behind the scenes. a new house, in a new state, all with new stories and memorabilia meant to be lived out by new person. now, he was Barry Steakfries in Queensland, a rough-around-the-edges guy with a passion for action movies and destruction. he was a revel with a thirst for chaos and freedom, but he just didn't have the means to achieve it yet. it was all according to plan.

a big part of the story i want to tell that involves him is that at some point, Barry tries to break free from the time loop by doing something different. this takes a lot of pre-planning, memory rituals and repeating details to himself, but after he wakes up from a reset and gets out of bed, he hesitates, choosing to go to a different place to sell his gramophones that day. he deliberately tries his best to avoid Legitimate Research's headquarters as much as he can, and while he doesn't completely remember why he's doing it, he has a deep gut feeling that he should stay away from them at all costs. so he does. and at first, it goes well. the day is different, his choices seem to actually matter and for once, the feeling of deja vu isn't tearing him apart... until a crazy freak accident happens that forces Barry to die and reset the time loop again, wiping away everything he had done that day. Legitimate Research is now forcefully trying to stop him from knowing what the hell is going on by forcing him to die with each now discovery he makes, and Barry has to figure out more and more creative solutions to averting their surveillance and trying to get the hell out of the loop.

Craig will also be involved with the story too!! i'm not exactly sure what exactly the events leading up to Barry discovering and meeting him would be, but it'd be kinda halfway-late-ish into the story where Barry manages to cut off LR's surveillance of him, breaks into the laboratory and searches through its archives for anything relating to time. during this raid, he accidentally discovers the true Patient Zero to this time experiment: a broken, decrepit shell of a man who has been hooked up to a set of wires and locked away deep into the laboratory, never meant to be discovered by anyone, only known simply as #000 'Craig'. Craig was the very first human they used to run an early prototype of these experiments, but through malfunctions in the threads of LR's technology, he ended up knowing too much and tried to break free from his time loop, which resulted in him being dragged out of reality and becoming completely detached from his own time, stopping his aging process completely and practically allowing him to exist forever and persistently through every reset unaffected. LR relocated him and considered him a catastrophic failure, locking him away in a cell deep in the bowels of the laboratory before destroying and erasing every archive of him ever having existed in any point in time. and now, the same thing is about to happen to Barry if he doesn't figure out a way to stop what's happening quickly. Barry, outisde of LR, is the only one who is aware of Craig's existence in this timeline. Barry makes a vow to make sure that he will never ever forget Craig, no matter what happens to him, no matter how many times his timeline gets reset, because he is the only other person on the whole world who truly understands what he's going through.

at the very end of the story, when Barry finally escapes the time loop and is about to enter into a new reality where none of this ever happened, he reaches out a hand to Craig and offers he come with him to live. Craig, however, rejects the offer, sadly confessing to Barry that because of his disconect from the threads of time progression itself, Craig must stay behind and be erased along with everything inside this one and let Barry live his life. Barry protests, insisting that his life wouldn't be complete without him and that they've already gone through so much together, but Craig assures him that this is the best for the both of them, and that Barry must leave him soon before the window to escape closes. Barry gives Craig once last goodbye, holding him close and basking in his presence for the final time. he closes his eyes, presses his head against Craig's and whispers "I promise I'll never forget you." before he slowly lets him go, not breaking their locked gaze on each other for even a second as he steps into the portal and ventures into an entirely new reality, never to return.

i want there to be an epilogue part where Barry starts his new life and goes looking for a place to stay, and he comes across the place where LR used to be, which is instead occupied with a big square fence plot and a sign that says "UNDER CONSTRUCTION: NEW RESTAURANT TO BE BUILT". Barry stares at it for a moment and reflects on everything that has happened. all the hellish experiments that were once held inside this very plot of land, all the trauma he went through to get to this point, Craig's sacrifice, everything has lead up to him standing here, in the right place, at the right time, to finally live the life he should've had to begin with. eventually, he turns away, continuing to walk down the street. he should go check that place out sometime.

(insert "what a fucked up dream for a baby to have" ending from 'then what' here)

[impossible-rat-babies]

ngl I do think my biggest gripe with myths of the realm in a narrative sense is having it be so late in 14’s life means you end up with a lot of unanswered questions that are just a result of how the content wasn’t created until later

[griffinsboyfriend]

Mk. I change my mind, Mandy is very annoying and would be an utter failure without MC and Ryder.