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gabriel4sam · 3 years

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Not love at first sight (But love at the sixty-third life defying idiocy), a CodyWan story

Written for @swbigbang, with the help of @kitcatkim in the role of the patient beta and @outernorth for artist (art just there)

Because all the other members of their small outpost were not in shape (read, hungover), Cody and Obi-Wan go on a small, simple, totally not possibilities of explosions supply run.

Cody comes back with a headache the size of Coruscant, a new hate of insectoids life. And a brand new significant other, in the shape of his exasperating General

It’s not a hangover, it’s a hecatomb. Whatever Boil had put in his new still was a terrible, terrible idea. The entire Separatist Council could do pointes in tutus on the flight deck and the vode would neither see it, nor care about it.

Cody and Obi-Wan were the only ones not drinking the day before, them and the communication officers on duty. The communication officers because they were working, and Cody and Obi-Wan, well, because they like the occasion for the men to feel free, and they can’t with their superior officers in their company.

That doesn’t mean the men are supposed to feel free enough to incapacitate the whole bunch of idiots they are apparently in charge off.

“Latrine duties, the first time we do planet fall. The whole of them.” Cody grumbles, assessing the damage with a cold, clinical eye.

“How does that even work? Does every man have latrine duties for his own latrines? Do you make them install as many latrines as they are? ” Obi-Wan remarks. He’s the usual calm and composed Jedi Master Cody knows on the outside, but the Commander is pretty sure he’s laughing on the inside. Cody had met Quinlan Vos, ok? And he poured enough hard liquor in the man to obtain confidences. Confidences which horrified him, Obi-Wan had even less survival instincts than Cody thought, but confidences he can’t un-hear. He will know forever!

Or at least, he will know until a luckier droid kills him. Cody is not an optimist about clones living long, happy, fulfilling lives. He has eyes after all and a functioning brain.

Cody glares at Obi-Wan, just in case. He has learnt, in the two years since he took his position with his General, that Jedi react pretty well to glaring. Not that it stops them from doing stupid stuff, but at least, they feel guilty about it.

If they like the glaring party only. Commander Ponds had a lot of things to narrate about Mace Windu and the horrible, horrible conglomerate mogul.

Obi-Wan takes his most innocent air, something Cody stopped believing two days in their acquaintance, when his newly minted General had destroyed a whole block of warehouses on an unnamed moon and made a grown Hutt call for its parent. It had been a bad month for Obi-Wan. No need to judge. When innocents are in danger, the cost of the repairs is less a problem and more a number for the politicians to handle. And yes, Obi-Wan knows the money used could certainly be used in other useful ways, but no amount of credits could ever buy a life, in the eyes of a Jedi. But that day, when Cody, after a few, very stressful hours of radio-silence, had finally gotten back his General, slightly charred, the hostages, hungry and thirsty and exhausted but all of them in one piece, and a terrified Hutt, in the middle of a devastated battleground, he had understood better the warning of Alpha-17. There, Cody had sworn in petto to never underestimate his Jedi, despite the irreproachable manners, the swishing hair and the smile of a holo-star.

Together, they take the time to check every soldier, to make sure nobody was busy drowning in their own fluid because they were too hangover/still drunk, to roll over. Everybody is alive, and the communication officers are getting ready to do a double shift, and ready to nib their vode about it later.

“It’s a good thing we’re on down time,” Obi-Wan remarks, “I must confess, despite the talents of your brothers, I’m not quite sure we could withstand an attack from Grievous and his various cronies right now.”

“We would get our asses handed to us, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

Obi-Wan cautiously touches one of the abandoned drink containers, with more care than he gives to explosives.

“What did he put in this thing?” he asks, fascinated.

“You’re not testing it!” Cody immediately retorts, because he knows his Jedi, “not in the name of science, curiosity or whatever.”

Obi-Wan touches the container a second time.

Cody could swear the thing moves in return, like it wants to be pet. Obi-Wan hums, his face interested and he leans a little more in the direction of the container. If the thing starts growing whatever strange means of locomotion is on its mind, Cody is using his blaster, no matter the General’s opinion. That’s how bad holo-dramas start, with an unknown thing unleashed on an unsuspecting ship/outpost/space station. He refuses to star in one of those plot-lacking dramas his brother Wolffe pretends he doesn’t love.

The thing doesn’t move anymore and Obi-Wan loses interest and goes back to helping troopers into their quarters and their bunks.

Cody helps, but that doesn’t mean he’s not plotting terrible retributions. He knows the last few weeks have been pretty hard, the hardest in a long time, that’s one of the reasons Obi-Wan and himself made themselves scarce last night.

Now, they have a week just waiting for the Negotiator to come pick them up. One week for the men to rest and to heal and perhaps to train lightly…but that’s no reason for the sort of screw-up Cody is seeing right now. Boil and his still should be transferred from the 501th and put into whatever part of the army that handles studies about biological warfare. Biological warfare that the Republic officially doesn’t indulge in, studying it only as a way to protect its worlds against it. But Cody isn’t convinced. He has a lot of questions he will never ask about parts of the army which are not led by Jedi, and that the Jedi are trying, with no success, to have access too. Obi-Wan has promoted him so much that the Commander now has access to documents he’s pretty sure nobody thought a clone ever would. He’s staying silent for now. If the Jedi need help with that, if they fail, the vode will try, but Cody is keeping this ammunition in reserve. He can only fire it once, because when natural-borns who aren’t Jedi realize exactly how much power Obi-Wan and the Jedi council has given him and some of the other commanders, they will try to strip them of it, he just knows it.

At the end, everybody is moaning in their bunks, or manning communication, and Cody and Obi-Wan raid the nice rations, the ones with the green seals, no less food of unkown origins than the rest of it, but certainly the tastiest. They sit down at the entry of the outpost, sharing a canteen of water between them. They don’t talk, most of the time they don’t need to.

Cody isn’t really hungry but it’s easier to trick Obi-Wan into eating something when those who surround him do too. The warmth of the sun, the sounds of nature, the nice, and so rare, oh so rare, knowledge that they have a little free time instead of having to run to put out another fire. All of this is making Obi-Wan soften, like a carving of stone suddenly becoming pliable.

“Commander?” Cody’s holocom disturbs them, and Cody startles, suddenly realizing he was lost in the light playing into the copper of Obi-Wan’s hair.

“It’s nothing, really nothing probably,” the shiny in charge of this particular console explains to them, “ one of the new models of probes should have been back twenty minutes ago. I tried to raise it per the procedure, but it isn’t answering.”

“We’re supposed to be alone on this world,” Obi-Wan remarks, a line forming between his brows.

“They are still working the kicks out of this model,” the shiny admits, “that’s why we used them specifically on this planet where they are in no danger. We’re supposed to go back with all of them, for study, to hammer out the last problems.”

The line between the General’s brows is growing deeper.

“I will make a report to the Council about the danger it could pose to you, to send any vode on the field with materials not totally ready, and the Jedi Order will issue a formal protest.” His shoulders are tense. No matter the number of tries, the Jedi are blocked at every corner in the Senate in their efforts to better the life of the clones, even in the small things and it’s a terrible possibility that this time will be the same.

“You know what? We should go check ourselves,” Cody decides, because he wants to erase that line, that tension. “Since Boil poisoned the men, we could do it. A little trek in fresh air before breathing the recycled air in the Negotiator again.”

“Oh Cody, I can do it myself,” Obi-Wan offers immediately, “you don’t have a lot of free time-“

“Funny, I would have sworn you didn’t know the concept…”

“I am perfectly capable of knowing when my body needs down time.”

“That’s not what Master Erin said.”

And that’s how they leave the base.

It’s almost noon, birds or other small things Cody can’t honestly identify are chirping, the air is crisp and fresh, and the sky is only slightly purple, with no risk of rain. No matter how many worlds he sees, Cody is still out of countenance on worlds where the combination of gases in the atmospheres and stars emitting other waves than the Kamino sun combine to give entire landscapes strange colours. Most of the time, he’s wearing his helmet which filters the strangeness of it, and it’s only at the end of the battle, when he takes it off, that he realizes everything is weirdly green-tainted.

Also, he’s pretty sure Arc Trooper Fives was lying when he told him once he visited a world on a body guarding mission with his own Jedi were everything was glittering. He’s not putting any money on it, because Skywalker and his men were guarding the Naboo Senator. From what Cody observes, when Naboo people enter the scene, glitter just happens. He also thinks Fives is much better being Rex’s problem than his own.

Most of their supplies have already been packed for retrieval, so Cody and Obi-Wan only took one hover bike out, and for now Obi-Wan is piloting, Cody behind, and the Commander is beginning to think he made a tactical error. The plastoid of his armour is supposed to stop him from feeling Obi-Wan’s warmth, but Cody could swear he can still feel it. For all that the Jedi can seem aloof and strange, nothing makes him remember his General is flesh and blood than encircling a linen-warped waist with his arms.

The world passes around them, the colours of the trees, the playful course of the clouds in the sky, the peaceful scenery of a wild world, with its inherent qualities and defaults. Cody likes those worlds better, untouched by sentient life. Growing up in the sterility of Kamino, there is something intoxicating in nature running its course, forests giving way to meadows, biotopes decided by climates and geology, and not by a careful hand arranging them for the maximal profits in their exploitation.

Cody understands about the need for fresh territory, with the growth of population, but certainly, certainly the most carefully hidden part of him insists quite vehemently, there must be another solution than the desolation of grey and pollution that is Coruscant. Something else than seeing the poorest people of the Republic living in deplorable conditions, never seeing the fresh green of a new leaf, as the richest ones can sample the delights of nature in carefully constructed reserves?

More and more, Cody is curious about the Agricorps, and their works to restore degraded biotopes, but he had the vague impression, when he asked questions about it to his General, that it’s a difficult subject for him.

Probably, Obi-Wan wanted to go into the Agricorps and they didn’t want him to, for whatever reasons. Cody thinks it’s more glorious to restore nature and to help feed a community than to go to war, like Obi-Wan is doing right now, or to negotiate treaties, which he vaguely thinks is Obi-Wan’s job in time of peace.

Cody’s thoughts drift gently as the journey continues, going from nature’s beauty to the exact shade of Obi-Wan’s hair when he has been under a natural sun for more than a few hours. The way the copper of it becomes richer and richer…. After a little less than two hours, they switch pilots, and Cody does his best to keep his thoughts on track. It would be stupid to crash just because he’s distracted by a flight of birds taking off with the noise of the bikes, no matter how graceful they are. He concentrates on piloting, and not on the presence of Obi-Wan behind him, his arms around Cody, and not in the colours of the forest around them, and the bucolic impression of their little expedition.

The last known position of their wayward probe put it next to a small lake, four hours away on hover bike, at the base of the mountainous regions. If this part of the world was in winter season, the most logical reason for their missing probe would be a mudslide. Cody told in his reports time and time again that the probes should fly higher, that the field itself is much less friendlier than believed in the labs, but apparently nobody listens to him.

It’s the end of spring on this part of the planet, the probe was probably eaten by a giant fish, or something equally undignified.

They unseat on a single beach, the last known location. No more probe there than dignity and decency in the Senate. Nothing. No blackened hull of the thing if it had exploded under mysterious circumstances, best known as shoddy work in the conception. Not even a trace they could track back.

Cody turns on himself, surveying the landscape. Vegetation, mountains, peaceful lapping of water on the beach, more mountains with their snowy capes, a lot of weird looking trees. For a vacation, it would be peaceful. For missing military equipment, it’s sadly lacking.

“By incredible luck, you wouldn’t sense our missing flying friend in the Force?” Cody asks, because that would simplify things. That would simplify things, so of course the answer is no. As Obi-Wan struggles with putting together the scanner, Cody gathers pieces of driftwood, intending to start a fire. If they have to circle on foot, on uneven ground, to find the probes, nothing says they can’t do it after another meal next to a warm fire. In the harsh reality of war, Cody has learnt to wisely enjoy the few moments of peace, and he would very much like to teach that skill to his General. Obi-Wan is supposed to have decades of experience in him, but apparently he’s not aware that every sentient has their limits.

Cody is less than twenty meters from the Jedi and the hoverbike, facing Obi-Wan, his arms already full of a nice load when he sees Obi-Wan let go of the scanner, which tumbles on the stones, and turns to him, a hand already at his waist, reaching for his lightsaber.

“Cod-“ Obi-Wan yells, but the sound doesn’t reach Cody, as the stones give way under him, shifting in a dip of grey sand and Cody is gulped down like Master Yoda gobbles a small fish.

For a second, he can’t breathe, there is sand everywhere around him, on his skin, in his mouth, infiltrating his armour by the neck, and the wood in his arms squeeze against his ribs. He feels he’s gonna get crushed alive and he struggles with all his strength. Death has always been the end but he wanted to leave in combat. He can feel unconsciousness threatening and just before it would take him, he’s spit up violently and he rolls over with the momentum, the driftwood, the sand, and a few bits of the armour which didn’t survive the experience.

He can see someone lean over him, no more than a silhouette, because it’s so dark, he can feel the sand under his head, and also the head wound and the blood seeping out of it, and he takes a long breath, and it burns, all the way to his lungs, and then he knows no more.

For a long time, Cody floats. He dreams. Or he hallucinates.

He’s on Kamino again and he learns the world is without mercy for him and his brothers.

He’s training and he can feel Alpha-17’s eyes on him, pensive.

He’s very young and he doesn’t understand where the last of his batche went.

He’s older and he’s meeting his first Jedi, General Tii, and she always has a nice word for every clone, but her eyes are terribly sad every step she takes on Kamino.

He’s meeting Rex and their friendship soars instantly.

He’s seeing brothers dying and he’s seeing rescues and the world is a never ending war, but Cody refuses to let that be the only thing his brothers will know. He watches and he checks and he learns and he places his brothers the best he can, and he’s evaluating Jedi and people, and planets and his mind never stops.

Cody wakes up. General Plo Koon is leaning over him and Cody lets relief seize him, until he realizes something is wrong. No eye covers, no breathing masks, and as much as Cody can see in the very low light, the thick leathery hide acting as skin is much lighter than Plo Koon’s. A Kel Dor, but not the Jedi Master that the Wolffe’s pack would follow to the end of the galaxy and beyond.

After a few seconds of his brain going round in circles, it finally stops at a very important point: Kel Dor and humans don’t breathe the same atmosphere, and this Kel Dor is without breathing apparels. Cody goes to put a hand on his mouth in instinctual movement, like he could stop himself from suffocating, but the other lays a hand on Cody’s forearm, his entire body language non-threatening, and says something he can’t understand. That’s when Cody realizes something translucent is surrounding his head, like a bubble inflating and deflating with every breath he takes. He pokes it, very carefully. It’s flexible, slightly sticky and it smells earthy, a little like those mushrooms his General insisted he try once, when he took him to his friend Dex dinner.

Cody takes a careful breath. He doesn’t die in terrible suffering, so he takes another one. The air entering his lungs still seems appropriate for his species. He tries to sit up, moving very slowly to make the stranger understand he’s not attacking, and the Kel Dor helps him.

Seated, he can better observe the place around him. He has been placed on a pallet of light fur, in some sort of carved place, the walls decorated, not in paint, but in carving, and his armour is against one of the walls, carefully stacked. Cody wants to touch his head, where he was hurt, but once again the Kel Dor stops him before he touches the bubble. The only light comes from a small clay bowl full of sizzling oil, where a wick has been adapted. It doesn’t give enough light to help Cody see more than the small room and a crude overture in the stone, leading to more darkness. He can’t even study perfectly the features of the Kel Dor, more than to be sure it’s definitely not Master Koon.

The Kel Dor says something again and Cody makes a frustrated noise.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak your language.” The other doesn’t seem to understand that, so Cody tries Mando’a, with the same result.

He tries the Galactic Sign Language, no results.

He knows a few signs of the Alderaan Sign Language, the one from their Southern Hemisphere. Queen Organa taught him a few lessons once during a lockdown in the Royal Palace when he was guarding her, between grumbling about clones’s rights and what her husband better do about it in the Senate, and Cody learns fast. The Kel Dor still doesn’t react in any useful way.

“A common language would be pretty useful to know if I’m your guest or your prisoner,” Cody jokes. Sarcasm now. He’s spending too much time with his General.

He shifts, trying to see if he will be stopped from standing, but the other only helps him, carefully arranging on Cody’s torso the ending of the bubble. Now that Cody studies it more attentively, he’s sure the stuff is organic. It’s like they forced his head and the superior part of his torso into some sort of ring of weird looking mushrooms, the mycelium of one of them extended around his head. If this is producing oxygen for him, he really doesn’t want to disturb it.

The world tilts when he stands up but the Kel Dor pushes a shoulder under Cody’s arm and they go out. When Cody passes his armour, he fetches his blaster, and the other doesn’t stop him. Either he doesn’t understand it’s a weapon, or he doesn’t think Cody will attack him. Her? Them? Are Kel Dol gendered beings?

Exiting the small room, Cody can’t see. Everything is dark around them. He can hear movements and the air around him has the quality of an enormous space. A cave, he would think, but the little lamp his new friend has in his claws is not enough.

“Of course,” Cody remarks, “your eyes are much much better. You don’t need a bank of lamps.” He almost jumps when someone joins them and if his head wasn’t still ringing, he probably would have attacked, but it’s only another Kel Dor, smaller, with a skin more brown. They ask something to the first one, but again, there is no sense for Cody.

He’s guided to a stone bench and the little lamp is pushed into his hands. Kel Dor are going in and out of the little circle and Cody tries to evaluate how many of them there are, but he’s, to his great shame, not good enough to distinguish between the Kel Dor easily. He can isolate one or two who have more evident features for a human, like one missing an arm, but the rest of them, all dressed in a very similar way with some furs identical to those Cody woke up on, and the alien features. Cody feels anger against himself. He judges natural borns for not making an effort to distinguish between the vode, despite their efforts to gain their own identity by tattoos or dyes, and he shouldn’t be victim of the same bias.

Finally, someone sits next to him. Cody studies their face, trying to commit them to memory.

People don’t seem unfriendly. He’s pretty sure the one he woke up with is some sort of local healer, and that it is this one who came back to him several times. Children even come to him, chattering in their language in a way which makes him think of the younger ones on Kamino, before some of their batches started to disappear and they started to understand what their fate in the world would be. A particularly daring little one climbs onto his lap and Cody looks around, ready to see the parent arrive and take its offspring from the strange being. But this community seems so peaceful nobody sees a problem with the child on the stranger's lap.

The little one shows him his treasure, a cube deeply carved with symbols Cody can’t decipher. Of course. In a world without sun, carving must be a medium and painting, or writing, must be inexistent.

“It’s a very nice cube,” he says to the little one, whose gender he can’t decipher. If Kel Dor have gender. He’s pretty sure he heard once that the biggest number of genders registered for a sentient species was eight, and the smaller zero, but he has no idea for this species.

The child seems pretty happy with the answer, even if they can’t understand it any more than Cody can understand their own opinion, expressed in an uninterrupted flow.

Around him, he can vaguely perceive people going about their day. How calm. How reposing. Nevertheless, peaceful or not, Cody can’t breathe the same atmosphere as them, and the strange organic concoction they put on his head to help will soon find its limits. He’s getting thirsty, for once, and he can’t drink without taking the thing off, which he can't. And that’s not even thinking about his General, who must be trying to reach him by any means the Force gives him.

If he knows Cody is alive.

No, no, he must know.

And even if the Force, whose exact limitations Cody is quite unsure of, even if the Force can’t tell Obi-Wan Cody is alive, Obi-Wan is not exactly a man to just go back to the outpost and declare him dead. He will search and search and search, and bring Cody back alive to his vode, or his body for his brothers to honour.

Cody knows: it had been a terrible row between the Jedi on one part and the Kaminoan and the Senate on another, this refusal to abandon dead clones bodies to the elements.

And, to the surprise of the Senate who was in the habits to bully the Jedi for centuries, the Jedi hadn’t budged. But Cody had seen what it had cost them: the Senate had made them pay, in late important reports who the Jedi needed for the war efforts, on refusal of important supplies, suddenly labelled unessential…

So, Obi-Wan is searching for him at the moment, and Cody needs to go to him. The ringing in his head, present since he woke up, has slightly diminished, and he has walked with more grievous wounds.

The question is now: how to mime exit to the Kel Dor, how to ask for a guide? Because if he has to feel around the cave until he finds an exit, he will, but that would be so much easier.

“Hoping there is an exit into your cave, little one,” he says to the child, who is falling asleep on his lap, “because if I have to drill through the roof to the exterior of the planet, it’s gonna cause breathing problems for your city.”

An adult approaches them, a long plaid in their hands, and they mime Cody putting it around his shoulders. Instead, Cody wraps the little one in it and puts the resulting bundle into the adult’s arms.

“I don’t suppose you could send me to the nearest exit?” He asks, and of course, the Kel Dor doesn’t have an answer.

He takes the little lamp and leaves to explore. He can’t see well more than two meters from the circle of light, and even with it, his eyes are struggling.

Soon, he’s stopped by a wall, which he follows until he finds a low door, with only a curtain. He risks an eye, feeling quite voyeuristic, but he only sees something resembling a storage space, big amphoras against a wall.

He continues to follow the wall, finds another one, loses himself in what is a succession of low houses. Above him, the roof of the cavern is still invisible and he can’t see the walls. He finds another little place with stone benches.

Or is it the same?

No, even underground, Cody is sure of his sense of direction. It’s another one place, and the city is bigger than he thought possible. He’s also walking way too slowly, because of the problem of light and his still ringing head.

“Kriff,” he whispers, sitting down on one of the benches.

“Obi-Wan, please find me,” he whispers before scolding himself. He’s no melodrama maiden, he is perfectly capable of finding the surface again by himself.

A burly Kel Dor approaches him, mushrooms in his claws and says something.

“I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying,” Cody tries to explain. The other sits next to him and gesticulates to the mushrooms helping, he thinks, him to breath, and when Cody doesn’t do anything, he starts placing the ones he brought against the first ones. They seem to merge in a frankly disgusting scene which is probably mushrooms porn.

“Does that mean you need to change them regularly for me to breathe?” Cody asks, despite knowing he won’t receive an answer he can understand.

To add another problem to the long list Cody is already shouldering on, the cave floor starts to tremble and people start yelling.

People are yelling, and despite the language barrier, Cody can understand the panic with no problems.

The soil beneath his feet grumbles again. There is a sound like a rockslide, and more yells, and terror is the taste at the back of Cody’s throat, because he still can’t kriffin see.

Finally, the trembling is so terrible he’s thrown on his knees and the sound reaches a crescendo as a great light emerges from the rock soil, three hundred meters from where Cody is kneeling. It’s some sort of giant worm, with a maw higher than Cody. It roars and glows even brighter, the bioluminescence of its chitin almost dazzling for Cody himself.

All around Cody, Kel Dor are yelling and struggling on their feet with great difficulties, as the rock soil is still trembling. The beast roars again and it sounds like a thousand ships taking off at the same time in the confined environment. As Cody is helping a Kel Dor to their feet, the pandemonium reaches an even higher spike as another worm emerges, further than the first, and the quake of the rock sends them flat on their bellies.

Cody really regrets letting Boil distribute his production yesterday, what he wouldn’t give for ten men and a rotary canon right now! Even for Hardcase, who he’s really happy is most of the time Rex’s problem, and his tastes for explosives.

He hoists himself more or less vertical, swearing all he can at the same time. He helps the Kel Dor to their feet again and then assesses the situation.

The lights of the worms let him have a good gaze for the first time at the enormous cavern they are in and the low buildings in it. Behind them he can even see big overtures, probably an entire network of caverns. An entire city in the dark, deep in the soil, protected from the outside world and its atmosphere which the Kel Dor can’t breathe, and from the Republic scanners which never knew they were there.

Protected from the sun, too.

And now that the light has come to them in the form of predators, they are defenceless. Cody can see people trying to flee, with a hand on their eyes, and with no success. By the time Cody has succeeded in approaching the scene of the disaster, at least three Kel Dor have been swallowed.

One of the worms, the closest, roars again and Cody doesn’t lose time: the maw, unprotected by the chitin covering the body, seems like a perfect target.

He raises his blaster and fires.

Another roar, even more deafening, as blood splatters all around in a gorish scene. A good part of the mandible has exploded, but the beast isn’t dead. It strikes, trying to gobble Cody like it did the poor Kel Dor. The difference is that the Commander can see in the light, on the contrary of the first victims. He evades just in time to escape certain death.

He rolls over and raises his blaster a second time, but the angle is worse than the first time, and the shot dampens itself on the chitin with no more effect than darkening it, and enraging the worm even more.

Again, it tries to kill Cody and the man dances out of range, blessing the hours of training the Jedi gave all of them. It had been the first thing the Jedi had done, because they thought the training the vode had received on Kamino didn’t focus enough on the art of dodging.

Cody never told them it was because the trainers and the Kaminoans thought the vode easily expandable and more useful for a suicide strike. He suspects the Jedi knew, if the way they act around the Kaminoans is proof.

Dodging, advancing, retreating, taking a shot every time he sees an overture, Cody fights, more a reflex than anything, to protect the Kel Dor. He wouldn’t refuse a little help; with spears even if they don’t have other weapons, but the cavern inhabitants are useless. They are not even running away from the worms, full of the terror of death, and the light, which have come in their city.

Nevertheless, the issue of the fight was never a real question. Even hurt and far away from his usual fighting grounds, Cody was bred a warrior and he had honed the skills given to him by his genetic donor all his life. The worm, a female, is in the habit of only fighting other female worms during the mating season for access to the best breeding ponds and to gobble Kel Dor and every animal it could. It never had to fight a sentient being, especially one with a blaster.

The blaster’ shots finally damage the roof of its mouth enough and one of them burns its path to the brain. The beast dies immediately, but the nervous system needs time to receive that message. For a moment, Cody fears the convulsions of the enormous body will cause the entire caves system to collapse on their heads.

When the movements finally stop, he vaults himself over a rock slide, caused by the events, and approaches carefully. The worm is still partially obscured by the rock he emerges from, but Cody can see a good twenty meters of it. He’s bringing back a chitin part to the GAR, because he wants ships protected like that!

A sudden movement to his left makes him turn, but too late. His zoological fascination has caused Cody to make a horrible, rookie mistake, the sort of mistake which makes a rookie never have an occasion to become something other than a rookie.

For a moment, he had forgotten there was a second worm.

He brandishes his weapon, but it’s too late. Only his reflexes save him from being cut in two, but a razor sharp incisor scraps against his armour, parting it like butter and only missing the skin by half a centimetre. The worm has no interest in the Kel Dor, no matter how easy prey they are. It just wants to kill the stubborn little creature who just killed its mother. His blaster clatters on the rock, too kriffin far away. Cody rolls on himself, tries for it, but he already knows it’s too late, when the sound of a lightsaber being ignited announces the arrival of the cavalry, just in time.

Obi-Wan Kenobi arrives on the scene like an armed deux ex machina. He’s wearing Cody’s helmet in order to breath in the cavern and death is burning light-blue in his hand. Rare are the materials which can resist the power of a lightsaber, and Obi-Wan doesn’t take chances with Cody’s life, no matter how he is repelled by the taking of a life, even an animal one. The head of the worm falls on the other side of the body as Obi-Wan is still airborne from one of those improbable jumps Force Sensitive do. The second his feet touch the rock; he’s rushing to Cody, trying to assess his health.

Across the galaxy, Anakin suddenly sits down in the marital bed, sending Padmé, who was asleep across his torso, tumbling into the sheets by the violence of his movements. The vision of a chitinous torso opening, full of meaty juice, dances before his eyes.

“Ani?” The young Senator asks, once he has succeeded in making her put down the blaster she retrieved from even the Force doesn’t know where. Padmé doesn’t do peaceful when she’s woken up abruptly, something he learned quickly in their marriage. Convincing the handmaiden that every noise inside their bedroom wasn’t a murder attempt and that they shouldn’t rush in, weapons drawn, was another interesting adjustment to the married life.

“I just.….I’m not sure…” He tries to grip what woke him up, but it already has disappeared. “I think I’m hungry,” he admits, “sorry to have interrupted your sleep.”

“The droids can make you something,” she suggests, burrowing into the nest of pillows, less prone to sudden shifting.

“Do you think we have insects?” He asks.

****************************

“Cody! Cody, are you alright?”

“Obi-Wan, General, are you hurt?” Cody and Obi-Wan ask at the same time, hands searching, patting the other bodies in gestures less destined to triage of wounds and more to the simple animal need for contact.

“The air of the cavern isn’t breathable for us,” Obi-Wan says, after a few seconds and Cody nods: “I deduced that, but the thing on my head….it’s helping.”

“How did you deduce such a- Oh, um, hello.”

Around them, the Kel Dor have begun to assemble, all of them an arm on their face, trying to protect their eyes.

“Your lightsaber, turn it off,” Cody says and, making something purr in the Commander’s chest, Obi-Wan immediately obeys, no question, no hesitation.

The Kel Dors guide them away from the scene of the carnage. Cody sees a few of them with stone machetes and axes, already working on taking apart the pale flesh of the worms, working from the wounds Cody and Obi-Wan made, as the chitin is too hard on other places of the big bodies.

Cody watches for a few seconds. One of a Kel Dor yanks open the cranial cavity. Cody turns to the other side very quickly, because butchering enormous worms is apparently more than his battle-hardened stomach can take. Nothing should make the noise an axe makes against flesh.

Cody finds his little lamp again. It’s not even extinguished, the events haven’t probably lasted more than ten minutes. The universe is a hard place, thinks Cody, where he could get eaten by any abomination with too much teeth in less time than an oil lamp runs its course.

They sit next to each other on the closest bench and in the halo of the lamp, Cody inspects his General better. He’s covered in stone dust and whatever else disgusting stuff is on his tunic: he probably crawled his way there.

The adrenaline is still burning through Cody, and joy too, as he turns to his General. On the whole, he misses the days life was simpler on Kamino, with no worms for example, but on Kamino, he never heard the sound of a lightsaber and knew, with a certainty so burning it could have well resonated in the Force, that he was saved. There is comfort, in the hard world he’s living in, in the certainty that his General will tear apart entire solar systems to rescue any clones. That all Jedi would. For a clone, raised to be interchangeable, this strong-willed refusal to leave even one of them behind is a balm to the soul.

“You found me,” he says, and he tries to infuse that with professionalism, and fails miserably.

“I will always find you,” Obi-Wan promises. It’s strange to talk to him like that, with Cody’s helmet on his head. Cody hadn’t realized he relied so much on the Jedi’s face to understand him.

“Yes, sir, but for a moment, I confess I thought you would more, avenge me or something.”

Obi-Wan touches his shoulder.

“I’m sorry to have been so long,” he says, “the system of caves proved itself tricky, and the Force insisted I couldn’t just blow up my way inside.”

“That would let the atmosphere on the outside enter,” Cody theorized, “and I think, our hosts….”

Like they have been summoned, two Kel Dor approach them. They are dressed as simply as all the others Cody has seen, but on the bust of the smaller one, there is some sort of ceremonial pectoral and it has a very big difference with everything Cody has seen since stepping into the cave. It’s in metal.

“Obi-Wan”, Cody whispers, “look at that.”

Obi-Wan doesn’t speak the language more than Cody. He can recognize it’s not the actual principal language of Kel Dor, which he has heard before, but no more than that. Nevertheless, it’s less a problem for a Jedi. He can feel in the Force other’s intentions, enough to understand easily that the people here don’t want to harm them, which Cody had deduced himself hours ago, and that they want to bring them to see something.

Cody is very happy to leave the dead bodies of the worms behind them.

And to General Skywalker eats insects! Bless the Force that Skywalker is Rex’s Jedi.

One cave. Another. Another one.

“How many are there? How big are these caves?'' Cody asks. He’s tired, hungry, thirsty, and more or less ready to go back to camp, thank you very much.

They find a ship, or more, the skeleton of a ship, in the last part of the caves system, the deepest one. It’s less a cave, and more the memory of a crash. The ship has been cannibalized, years after years, of everything useful, to the latest scrap of metal, except for the framework.

“It was probably made with a metal too dense for the meagre set of tools they have,” Obi-Wan theorizes.

“I can’t recognize the type of ship that is, the form itself is so strange,” Cody remarks, watching it with the eye of a man trained to recognize enemy and ally ships in a nano second in the middle of battle. Obi-Wan is touching the metal with his bare skin, with great reverence.

He always loved old things, his Jedi.

The happiest Cody had seen him was for a protection mission in a dusty archive, on a faraway world. General Skywalker was with them, and the young Ahsoka too, and the intel had been faulty. There had been no attack, Obi-Wan had had his Padawan and GrandPadawan close and safe, and spent his days making amorous noises at poetry treaties centuries old.

“It’s incredibly old. Probably before the foundation of the Republic."

"But that’s….that’s old as kriff."

"During the first time of space travel, ships weren’t as reliable. They probably are the descendants of a crew of explorers. After the crash, staying inside the caves was the only long-term possibility for them, if they hadn’t the means to produce enough respiratory apparatuses. It was the only way to survive for them. Nevertheless, it stopped anyone from finding them. And little by little, they regressed technically and lost the way to contact the outside."

"Do you really think they would have travelled from their world without a way to breath on other planets?"

"Perhaps it was stocked in a part of the ship lost during the crash. Perhaps it was so long ago, it was long before the Kel Dor knew very few worlds have an atmosphere breathable for them…Every species has the tendency to think the world at large tailored for them.”

They don’t leave immediately. Obi-Wan is of the opinion that Cody is too tired to use the path he himself used to find him. And he’s probably right. Cody’s head is throbbing where he hurt it during his fall, but he doesn’t see how he could get better here, where he can’t eat or drink.

What follows is a game of mime between Obi-Wan and the Kel Dors which Cody won’t forget, ever, no matter how much Obi-Wan asks, and he regrets he doesn’t have a holocamera.

After a time, and an unforgettable time it was, Obi-Wan and he find themselves stashed in a little room, so low they can’t stand. It’s more a bed stuffed inside some sort of structure made in the same weird-looking, weird-smelling mushrooms. Cody takes off the bubble around his head and Obi-Wan takes off Cody’s helmet.

The red head has the worst case of helmet’s hair Cody has seen, ever and Cody can’t stop an unprofessional laugh around his first mouthful of fresh water.

“I don't Not a head made for helmets, do I?” the Jedi smiles, as he tore in two a strange looking loaf of bread.

They fall on the food, famished, and tease each other at the same time. There is water and what Cody thinks is some root vegetables, and flatbread, and some meat he isn’t touching with a ten foot pool, just in case it's giant worm.

“If you swear to wear armour instead of linen in battle, I swear to the Force I will never mock your hair,” Cody smiles in return, and Obi-Wan makes a face, like he did already wear good, solid protection instead of tunic and leggings and whatever he calls the multiple layers of his Jedi’s clothes.

“I thought….for a moment, I thought…” Obi-Wan stops. It’s rare to see him lost for words, he of the Silver tongue, the Negotiator.

“I’m not dead,” Cody reiterates, because there is no need to beat around the bush. Even risking their lives every day the Force makes, nobody likes the kick of adrenaline when one of your men is missing. It never becomes normal. It never should.

“And yet, for a second I thought you were. When I saw the earth opening under your feet and gobbling you. And when I arrived during your battle, the Force trumpeting in my heart about the mortal danger you were running to.”

“The Kel Dor were pretty useless against those things. Couldn’t let them get eaten like that. Not when they rescued me and helped me.”

“I know. I know. And I would have done exactly the same thing.”

Obi-Wan sits on the bed, less gracefully than he usually does. From where he’s leaning against the mushroom wall, Cody stares. He can see the lines around his mouth, and after his late-night conversation with Master Quinlan Vos, he knows they aren’t from laughing. He can see the lines at the edges of the eyes, discreet for now, a little more present every day. He can see the first traces of grey on the temples, simply a trace of silver in the red mane…. He’s, almost, sure there was no grey at the beginning of the war, he has seen the holos of Obi-Wan against Prime, against Jango, all those years ago, on Kamino.

Obi-Wan is burning too bright, burning himself.

And Obi-Wan isn’t the only one not getting younger. The accelerated aging isn’t exactly good for Cody’s health, starting with his knees.

One day, he won’t be quick enough for the next giant, bioluminescent man-gobbling worm. Or Obi-Wan will be too tired against Grievous. Since they met, an assignment Commander- General decided by Alpha-17 himself, their life has been full of Separatist assassins, murderous fauna, Sith assassins, murderous geology, Separatist assassins pretending to be Sith assassins, and Sith assassins pretending to be Separatists assassins, brain-washed murderous Senators, murderous flora, murderous black holes, and one time a murderous sentient ship.

The whole galaxy is conspiring to kill clones and Jedi, for what Cody can see.

If his math is right, he survived today the sixty-third attempt on his life from Fate since he left Kamino. Obi-Wan was there for most of them, and Cody was around for the latest attempts on Obi-Wan’s life.

And one day, it will stop.

Cody opens his mouth before he can talk himself out of it. Life is short and he’s a soldier slave, he doesn’t have the luxury to wait for another time.

“I think I’m falling in love with you,” he says, and Obi-Wan looks like he has been whacked on the skull with a heavy object. It’s not exactly his best face, mouth round in surprise, and Cody only feels affection. Then Obi-Wan’s lips curve into a smile like a sun, blinding, warm, and the Jedi touches the side of Cody’s face.

The Jedi touches the side of Cody’s face.

He doesn’t speak. Not yet. His head against Cody, his breath sharing Cody’s own air, they close their eyes, and Cody experiences the strange idea that he’s detaching himself from his brothers.

For the first time, there is something in his hands, or well, in his heart, that he doesn’t want to share with Wolffe or Boil, or even Rex, who has become his closest brother.

He doesn’t want to hide Obi-Wan from them, but he wants….

He hasn’t the words. Not yet.

But, with Obi-Wan at his side, he hopes he will learn them.

And he hopes his brothers too can find something, or someone, so precious they need to share the joy of knowing it, but also to keep it to themselves, like he wants to keep to himself the smile of Obi-Wan when Cody tells “I love you”, or the small freckles at the side of his mouth, visible only so, so, so close.

The first “I love you” Cody hears from Obi-Wan is whispered against his lips.

The first kiss tastes of the bread offered by the Kel Dor, of the cave’s dust and it’s perfect.

They’re still in the same situation, two exhausted men, in a cave full of toxic gases, only protected from them by some unknown mushrooms exuding oxygen, and Cody feels like he could take over the entire Republic. He sleeps curved around Obi-Wan, like two parts of the same whole, touching as much as they can, and if the headache from his head wound brings Cody to the surface a few times during their nap, he feels rejuvenated after it.

After, the Kel Dor help them find the surface and Cody and Obi-Wan leave their new friends, hand in hand, quite happy to find back the sun and the sky, the fresh air of a late morning…and almost all their men crawling around their area, trying desperately to find them.

Obi-Wan keeps Cody’s hand in his and a few brothers less intimidated than others by Cody’s glare, embarrassed and proud at the same time, even bumped their big brother’s shoulders as a sign of congratulation. Obi-Wan immediately goes red, like he’s a teen on his first crush, and not a seasoned Jedi Master whose touch can bring life or death.

Cody finds it adorable.

*******************

It’s the middle of the night shift on the Negotiator, but Cody is still working on a different time zone, so he lets Obi-Wan sleep peacefully in their shared bunk. Their shared bunk! A notion that still makes him giddy like a shiny at their first kiss, even a month after getting together. They are taking things pretty slow, or in the wrong order, Cody isn’t sure, they sleep in the same bunk every night, but haven’t got very far in term of sex, and this perfect, because this is them, and not some sort of artificial list of relationship’s milestone. And Cody already knows, deep in his soul, that he will never love a man like he loves this one, even if Obi-Wan is killed tomorrow, and he’s sure it’s the same for Obi-Wan.

The Negotiator is in route to join with the Steadfast, so General Koth is on board after a conjoined mission where Obi-Wan and him gave Cody new grey hairs. He finds him easily in the mess, demolishing a healthy serving. The stamps outside the rations are a different colour than the ones Cody and his brothers eat.

“Can I join you?” Cody asks.

“Of course,” Eeth Koth immediately answers and the chair on the other side of the table moves on its own, offering itself for the Commander. Cody arches a brow.

“Don’t tell Obi-Wan,” the General jokes, “or I will endure a lesson for frivolous use of the Force.”

Cody sits and they stay silent for a moment, the General apparently happy to let him come to his questions in peace, continuing to eat his meal. Despite being tailored for a different species’ nutritional needs, it looks exactly as unappetizing as most rations Cody is used too.

“General Ke-“

“You can call him Obi-Wan in front of me,” Eeth Koth interrupts. “There is no need to be ashamed of what binds you.” He grimaces. “Force knows we will all need all the comfort we can get before everything is set and done in this war.”

“Obi-Wan and I, we had a bit of an adventure, last month.”

“From what I heard, you have a lot of them.”

“Yes but….it was…it was the first time I was around civilians. Normal people, I mean.”

“Not Jedi and not clones, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Putting apart the fact that you are normal people, and that we are too, that it is a slippery slope to consider us different, because then the rights…”

“I know you’re fighting for us in the Senate. I know. That isn’t the question…I just mean. They were civilians. Even more civilian than usual. I have only met natural borns who are Jedi and Senators and politicians or some sort of official. This was different. And I realized how little we know about the world outside the GAR. And how little we know about societies, and species who aren’t us. They raised us for war only…” Cody was almost trembling with it. Eeth Koth put a comforting hand on his wrist and Cody continued:

“Obi-Wan, I don’t want Obi-Wan to become my teacher. It’s not his role. But if we want to have a chance outside the war, us, the vode, we need to learn about the outside world. I wanted to ask you if there was something…a way…”

Eeth Koth had totally abandoned his meal and Cody could feel the weight of his gaze, the same gaze as Obi-Wan, transcending their species.

“Let me call a few people,” the Jedi said.

**********

Years later, Cody thinks a lot about that moment. Eeth Koth joined the Force during the war and Cody has to remember this moment for the two of them, this simple moment around a table, this moment which became one of the tipping point of his life. Not the too numerous almost-death, not the many battles, not even his first kiss with his dear Obi-Wan. This moment, in Cody’s mind, is the one which changed his fate.

Eeth Koth died not even two months after that, one among a lot of Jedi who gave their life, alongside the vode, for a chance for the galaxy and its people. Not that people are particularly thankful about it: the discovery of the Sith engineering the two sides of the conflict rocked the easy confidence of the Republic in the solidity of its system.

Democracy is never forever, if people don’t work for it.

No, democracy is only saved for now, and never will it be saved forever and ever. But that shock to the system is treated by the most intelligent of the bunch like a chance to seize. All across the reunited Republic people are working hard, entering politics, creating organizations to teach the population, to hold those in power accountable….

It’s a sad thing so many vode, jedi and civilians had to die and suffer for that. It’s even sadder to think it didn’t almost happen. The Republic almost burned, the Sith almost won, the beloved former Padawan of Obi-Wan Kenobi almost helped murder Mace Windu, Master of the Order...Mace Windu isn’t exactly the type to hold a grunge, but Obi-Wan still needed months after that to stay in his presence, the guilt that should have eaten Anakin transfered.

Honestly, if Obi-Wan forgave Anakin much too quickly, and Windu too, the vod needed a much longer time. Skywalker had almost helped the man who had engineered them as slave soldiers, the man who would have wiped out their free will, the poor part of it they still had. The vod had needed a long time to forgive, and would never forget, but Cody still has the desagreable impression Rex’s anger is a most important consequence in Skywalker’s mind that the almost death of the democratic system and the almost rise of a dictatorship.

Sometimes, late in the night, Obi-Wan stays awake, something lost in his eyes than mediation never totally makes disappear, and Cody is sure that day figures in a good part in his dark thoughts.

Obi-Wan, and Cody too, think about what could have been. If Cody hadn’t been there that day, in the Temple, who would have been in charge of keeping an eye on Skywalker in the Council Room? No one, that who. Because Skywalker was a Council member, if a very fresh one, and there wasn’t on hand a Jedi Master with enough years to take a look at a Council Member and decide he needed baby-sitting. All those Masters were deployed, or in beds in the halls of healing. But Cody, Cody was there, and since he and his General had become an item, he had taken sometimes to act, despite what his logical brain told him, not like a soldier Anakin could order around, but like an exasperated step-father. Exasperated and concerned, as the war advanced and Anakin seemed less and less attached to his morals.

Who would have followed him to the Senate when Skywalker had refused to wait anymore, and tackled him at the last minute? Who would have stopped Anakin Skywalker from doing something as tremendously stupid as to save a Sith pitted against Mace Windu?

And all of that had been possible because Jocasta Nu had taken the first excuse she could to keep Cody on Coruscant that month. A well-known linguist was visiting for a series of talks, and she thought he could be a good professor for Cody, and more importantly that well-know linguist had enough political power to obtain permission for a clone following his courses.

And the Republic had lived, because Cody loved linguistics, or more because he had loved the little he understood of it at the time.

But Cody refuses to let the horrors of those years of war, and his terrible first years on Kamino, define him. He prefers to think, again and again, to that moment with Eeth Koth.

Cody didn’t know exactly what he wanted. His accelerated childhood, raised for war and war only, hadn’t given him the words for it. He just knew that for his brothers and he to have a chance after the war, they needed more. Or even more terrible horrors would certainly befall them. Soldiers without wars aren’t useful anymore, and tools with no use are only fated to be dismantled for parts.

Following Eeth Koth’s call, Jocasta Nu and her assistants had descended on the GAR with determination, great efficiency and anger that they hadn’t thought about that themselves. By dint of foraging the Jedi Archives, and every friendly archives of the galaxy, for legal precedent to help the Vode, they had forgotten all answers weren’t found between the terabytes of a datapad.

Master Nu is seated right next to Obi-Wan in the public and trying very hard to pretend her eyes aren’t misty, as Cody receives his diploma, earning himself the title of Doctor in linguistics, for his work with the forgotten Kel Dor city, right next to the first Kel Dor of said city to have made the jump to Coruscant.

Cody isn’t the first clone to finish his thesis. Not surprising: he left the GAR years later than some of them, refusing to leave before his lover, who had been pressed into service as long as the Senate could justify it, and even longer. With Anakin leaving the Jedi Order, Obi-Wan was certainly the most famous member of it for the public, and it was as if the Senate tried to make him pay the Jedi’s refusal to abandon the vode. But Cody was the first clone Jocasta Nu talked with, when she arrived to try to help the vode not in pleading that they shouldn’t be slave soldiers, but in demonstrating they were so much more.

Cody wasn’t the first clone to leave the GAR officially, that honour went to Rex who followed Ashoka to Orto Plutonia, the first clone to be officially accepted as a member of the Jedi Corps. For what Cody understands, his life consists of almost losing his toes ten times a month, hunting with the Taz and flirting desperately with every passing skirts, as Ahsoka flirts desperately with her own Senator and supervises Republic-Taz contacts. Obi-Wan and Cody went once during permission, and Cody swore to himself that the next time Rex and Ahsoka wanted to see them, it could be on a tropical atoll.

Cody wasn’t the first clone to find a job outside of the Jedi orbit. That honour went to Fives and Tup, who left together and chose the most pacifist world they could. “We were almost separated once, never again. I’m not touching a weapon again in my life” Fives had said to Cody that day, watching Tup, busy hugging Rex, with something ferociously possessive in his eyes. Now, they have a nursery of succulent plants on a small island, in the south hemisphere of Alderaan, and Cody still isn’t sure if they are the best friends in the world, or one of those pairs who took brothers in a quite different sense, and frankly, he doesn’t care. There is a small potted thing they sent as a gift on Cody’s desk, with red undertones and white flowers once a year, but the former Commander has a black thumb, and only Obi-Wan’s careful nursing in the Force saved the poor thing already thrice.

Cody wasn’t the first clone to enter academia, that honour went to Waxer, who now teaches mathematics on Mandalore and is busy reintroducing Fett’s genes into the population with a long string of ex-partners, who still like him very much and with who he raises an army of children, at least three of them bearing a name honouring Waxer.

Cody wasn’t the first clone to marry, that honour went to Jesse and Cody isn’t touching that choice of spouse with a ten-foot pool.

Cody wasn’t the first in a lot of things. But it’s ok. He doesn’t have to lead his brothers anymore. He doesn’t have to bear responsibilities for death and help who didn’t come, and for the horrors that were their life.

The vode are free and Cody can only be a brother like any other.

He can be only Obi-Wan’s husband, even if Obi-Wan jokes that now, it’s more him that will be only the husband of Doctor Cody Kenobi, his arm candy in gatherings.

#star wars #obi wan kenobi #commander cody #codywan #my fics

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johnkrrasinski · 4 years

Text

Take You Home

full masterlist

Pairings: CEO!Sam Wilson x reader au

Word count: 3,095

Warning: mentions of alcohol, mention of sex.

Summary: you work as Samuel Wilson's personal assistant who was always arrogant and unequivocal to you and things changed after he ordered you to attend the office Christmas party.

a/n: this is my first time to write a fic so please be kind. Let me know what you think! By the way, this was inspired by this drabble so thank you for inspiring me to write my first fic ever!

Your alarm rang loudly next to your bed and you dismissed it. You groaned as your head began to throb, this reoccurring headache has been greeting you every morning since you started consuming a glass of wine every night after you took off your heels, stripped off your work clothes and sat on the worn grey couch in your living room and cry to whatever cheesy Netflix rom-com movie you found that night.

Your fiancee, well, ex fiancee now, Adrian, broke up with you a month ago over the phone because he thought he wasn’t ready to spend the rest of his life with you. You dated for 3 years then on the night of your three years anniversary, he proposed to you at the restaurant that you went to for your first date. But 5 months later, things changed after you began working for the Wilson Enterprises Holdings Inc., as your boss’ personal assistant, Samuel Wilson.

He said that your work had occupying every aspect of your personal life. You missed his birthday because you had to stay until late night to prepare the upcoming eco manufacturing program that was about to be announced. You also changed the way you dress, you used to be this carefree girl when it comes to how you look, but that changed since you got this lifetime opportunity to work in one of the biggest companies in America.

You’d also come late to date nights because you had to spend extra time in the office to discuss whatever that needed to be discussed with your boss. You even stood him up once because Samuel Wilson, the CEO of his own empire that he built from nothing won’t take no for an answer, especially when it comes to his job.

You’d often ignore his calls because you were too exhausted to talk on the phone and you just really wanted to take a warm shower and go straight to bed. He said that he couldn’t no longer be with you if you weren’t going to dedicate your life to him. He made you choose between your job or him. You chose your job. But it still hurt. It still broke your heart to pieces when that call ended.

Days went by like normal but there was a big part of your life that was missing. You felt incomplete without him. But you weren’t some dependent, broken girl. You weren’t going to let him destroy what you have worked so hard for. So you invested all your energy in your job. No matter how low you feel because of him, you had to get up again.

A week before Christmas eve, your co-worker, Wanda, asked you what you were going to wear for the Christmas party. You told her that honestly you hadn't put much thought into it. You had been so caught up in your job and when you are not thinking of your job you were thinking of... Well, Adrian.

You were planning to skip it and just stay at home in your pyjamas and watch cheesy rom-com movies. Honestly, you didn't have much energy to socialize with the people that you are not so close to and pretend that you're in a cheery Christmas mood. Everything had been so plain since Adrian left.

Later that day, your boss called you to his office to bring him some files. As usual, you always straighten your skirt before you enter because you don't wanna look like a mess before he saw you. You handed him over the files and watched him meticulously study them. He was wearing his usual black suit that fits his broad shoulders so perfectly. You couldn't help but stare at those muscles covered in that Giorgio Armani suit. After a few seconds, you realized that you had been standing there awkwardly, then you asked him: "is there anything else I can help you with, sir?"

He looked up and looked a little taken aback as if he hadn't noticed you standing there at all.

"Yes, are you coming to the Christmas party?"

"Um, i'm not sure yet, sir."

"You are. It's part of the regulation. You need to earn your place"

You chucked in disbelief and stared at him as if he had just grown two heads. This is the God knows how many time he ordered you around by starting with a question as if he was attempting a small talk.

"How is earning my place by attending a Christmas party relevant at all?"

"Because that's how we do things around here. Everyone must show up. If you're not going to put effort into being part of this company, then you shouldn't be working here at all. There are hundreds of women lining up to get to your place right now, and if you're not willing to work hard to keep your position, then you can walk yourself out."

That felt like a slap on the face. Your face grew hot and you were ready to curse him on his face. But you stopped yourself. You took a deep breath and calmed yourself down. He was right about one thing, that there are hundreds of women lining up to get to where you are.

You were once one of those women. You put your money, time and effort into your study to get a degree. You worked your ass off to prove that you are worthy to be even be considered to be Samuel Wilson's personal assistant. You clawed your way up to show them that you are capable.

"yes, I will come to the Christmas party, sir."

"Good. Then we're done here."

"Thank you, sir."

You chose this little red dress for the Christmas party. It had been awhile since you last wore that red dress. The last time you wore it was when you celebrated Valentine's day with Adrian. He had kissed you in that dress, he had held you in that dress and he made love to you before he stripped you out of that dress. But you stopped yourself before you were going too far down the memory lane.

You had 3 hours left to get ready. You took a shower, put on some makeup, and put on the dress. You were ready to go.

Your office Christmas party wasn't so bad. It was more quite than the usual Christmas parties. There were champagne, wine, and few other drink options available at the bar. Everyone dressed so classily. No one looked like they didn't wanna be here otherwise, well, they probably wouldn't even be here. There was some Christmas music playing and there's even a DJ. It wasn't some wild party full of drunken people, it was more like a small gathering.

Wanda, your co-worker who you actually consider a friend rather than just an acquaintance, accompanied you throughout the night. She's wearing a blue sparkly dress that shows all her curves.

"Hey, you look great!"

"Thanks, honestly I just threw on the first thing I found in my closet."

"Well, you better not tell the boss that because if he knows that you don't wanna be here then you're never coming ever."

"Yeah, so I've heard. He threatened to fire me if I don't show up today."

"He did? And you're still allowed to work at Wilson Enterprises Holdings?!"

"Well, yeah, I mean... I told him that I will show up. It's not like I disobeyed him."

"That wasn't the case with his last assistant, honey. She got fired simply because she didn't pick up his phone call once because her phone died."

"What?! Simply because of one phone call?"

"Mhm, and the next day she had her stuff thrown out by the security."

"Oh my god, that poor girl. I never even met her but I kinda feel bad for her."

"You should. We all do. She was good at what she did, but there is no messing up with Sam Wilson. It's either his way or the highway."

All of the sudden, the energy around the room had shifted. From laid back to formal. You were so lost in your conversation with Wanda about your boss that you didn't even notice that he had walked into the room. He was wearing a dapper maroon suit because of course, this man doesn't wear nothing else but suits.

He gave a little speech, greeted all of his employees and told everyone to enjoy themselves. Everyone cheered and clapped after he was done.

He walked over to the bar where you and Wanda were standing and you couldn't help but feel nervous. He made eye contact with you before he stood right by your side to order a drink.

"It's good to see you clean up real nice and show up. We don't need lazy employees here."

"Well, i'm here, aren't I? If that's not the exact opposite of lazy i don't know what is."

"Don't talk back. I'm your boss. If i ask you to do something, you do it. If i ask you to be somewhere, you better be there 15 minutes early. I don't like to wait. Got it?"

"Yes, boss."

"Good girl."

He walked away and disappeared into the crowd with that smug attitude. You couldn't help but feel your chest rising and you were ready to throw the champagne glass you were holding to the back of his head. Wanda's voice brought you back to reality.

"Damn, that was intense."

"Yeah, imagine a daily dose of that."

"I know he can be a pain of the ass most of the time but, he's not so bad though, you know Nancy from accounting right?"

"Yeah, what about her?"

"She was crying in the bathroom once and he happened to be there as well. When she walked out, she told him that her mother had just been tested positive breast cancer. And you know what he did? He sent her home so she could take care of her mother and covered all of her medical bills."

"All of it? Are you serious? That doesn't sound like the Sam Wilson I know."

"It's not the Sam Wilson you know but it's the Sam Wilson that the very few people know."

"Then how did you know?"

"Because Nancy told me even though she was told to keep this a secret. Bad little Nancy, but sometimes we just can't help but share a few stories when the boss' not around, you know?"

You were having a hard time in absorbing this but you believed Wanda. Although, it made you a little curious, who is actually Sam Wilson behind that resolute boss who wears expensive suits all the time?

You are an adult baby type of drunker. You were mumbling incoherent noises and you were crying and laughing at the same time. You could barely stand in your heels and you felt like you were about to throw up every 5 minutes. Wanda, like the good friend she is, tried to hold you up and order you an Uber. Everyone else had gone home and you were both the last people at the party because you kept insisting Wanda to dance even when no one else was really dancing.

After a few drinks, you started to feel dizzy. Yep, you were drunk. You needed lots of them tonight after dealing with your stern boss and the misery of missing your ex.

Or so you thought.

Sam Wilson had walked out to walk to where his luxurious sports car was parked when he saw Wanda struggling to hold you up. She was also struggling to order an Uber because you kept doing stupid things that forced her to stop you.

Sam was amused to see how different you were compared to your usual self in the office. You were reckless and carefree. It made him chuckle.

He approached to where you and Wanda were standing and he greeted you both. "Good evening, ladies. Why aren't you both home yet?"

Wanda immediately went into professional mode and straightened her posture. "I'm just trying to get y/n an Uber sir, after that, I'll be right on my way."

"It's late and it's not safe for a girl to be riding an Uber alone especially in this state. I'm gonna take her home."

"Really? Are you sure?"

"Yes. If something were to happen to her, I'm not gonna be sued by her family so, I'll give her a ride home."

"Okay, thank you, sir. Please make sure she gets home safe."

"I've driven myself for over 20 years, Wanda. No need to worry about getting anyone home safely."

Wanda handed you over to him so he could put you in the passenger seat of his car. He put on some soft jazz music as he put on your seatbelt. You were giggling and mumbling words that he couldn't understand on the way. Then he just remembered that Wanda didn't tell him where you lived. He tried to ask you but you were too drunk to answer and you even booped his nose.

You could call Wanda and ask her where she lives... Sam thought. He hesitantly took out his phone to dial her number but, deep down he knew he didn't wanna do that. He wanted to bring you home so you could sleep in his luxurious guest room. He kept trying to make up reasons of why he didn't ask Wanda for your address to convince himself that no, he's just being a good boss. Yep. That's what it is. It's not because he has a tiny crush on you or had been thinking about you for awhile but didn't know how to talk to you. Nope. Definitely not.

You fell asleep to the soft music playing on the radio. After you arrived, Sam carried you in a bridal style to his guest bedroom. He wanted to change your clothes and gave you something much more comfortable to sleep in but it would be inappropriate. So he took off your shoes, put them on the floor and covered you with the warm blanket.

He took a shower, changed into his tank top and boxer. Turned off the lights then went to bed. He tried to close his eyes but he couldn't with you being only a few feet away from him. He fought the urge to walk over to the guest bedroom and hold you against his chest by pulling his cock out of his boxer and, wrapped his hand around it and started jerking himself up and down until he was a sweating, groaning mess. He chanted your name like a prayer as he cums.

So much for trying to get you out of his head...

The next morning you woke up feeling groggy and woozy by how bright the sun was assaulting your vision. You don't remember much of last night. You went to your office Christmas party, talked to Wanda, had an encounter with your irritating boss and then... Blank. You were really shit faced.

You realized you were still wearing the red dress wore last night. You looked around the room and you realized you weren't in your own. You were in someone's room that was sure to have a hell lot of money. You started to feel scared. Were you kidnapped? Did someone drug you? Did someone rape you?

But you reached under your dress and you still felt your underwear there. Thank God. Then you heard Frank Sinatra playing from somewhere outside of the bedroom.

I've got you under my skin

I have got you, deep in the heart of me

You walked out and stumbled on your own shoes and you quickly grabbed it and carefully opened the door. The delicious smell of egg and bacon greeted you and you immediately went downstairs. You weren't sure what you were going to find but you were starving. The sound of the music couldn't overpower the growling that your stomach makes.

You found your way to the stark white kitchen and what you saw had you dumbfounded more than anything else. You saw Sam Wilson in his purple Nike shirt. You were stunned by the image of Sam Wilson wearing something else other than suit. He was making himself breakfast before he noticed you.

"Good morning. You want some breakfast?" He casually asked. He looked at you then went back to cooking.

That left you even more bewildered. Is he really acting like this is normal? Like you were supposed to be his girlfriend who lives here and just woke up from a deep slumber?

You put the puzzle together and you realized... This was his home. Your arrogant, stern boss, Samuel Wilson. You couldn't help but went straight to the question that had been lingering loudly in your head; "why am I here?"

He turned off the stove and put the egg & bacon into a plate. "You were drunk last night then I wanted to give you a ride home. But I didn't know where you live so, I took you to mine."

You were so drunk last night that you felt like you were probably still drunk because none of this makes any sense.

Then your stomach began to grumbled for the second time as if it was complaining for you to fill it with food now.

You had a lot of questions but right now, all you wanted to do was eat. Then you can talk more later.

You walked to where the dining table was and said "yes, please, i'll take that breakfast offer."

Sam smirked and pulled out a chair for you to sit in. And now he's pulling chairs for you? What the hell happened during your drunken state?!

He took out a fork and a knife for you but he accidentally dropped the fork when he was trying to give it to you. He bent over and you got an exclusive front seat view of his ass and how thick it was. "Not bad, Mr. Wilson."

You had said that louder than you planned.

"What was that?"

"Nothing. I said nice kitchen, Mr Wilson."

"Drop the formalities. Call me Sam, we are not in the office right now."

He handed you over the fork and the knife after he cleaned them up.

There were worse ways to spend your hangover than having breakfast with Sam Wilson after all...

#sam wilson fanfic #sam wilson fanfiction #sam wilson one shot #sam wilson x reader #sam wilson x you #sam wilson x y/n #sam wilson au #ceo!sam wilson #sam wilson #sam wilson imagine

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evilrubberducke · 5 years

Text

IzuMina week Day 1- To Save an Emerald

Yeah, I’m a day late on this one. I blame the pandemic. On the plus side, this means you’re getting a double update from me today.

This is based on the day 1 prompt “Protection”

On a side note, I now have an actual EvilMuffinLord blog here on Tumblr. If you follow me for Mina content, you might want to switch your follow over to there. I’ll keep posting Mina stuff on this blog for the rest of IzuMina week, but after that I’ll switch over to the new one, and leave this for other fandoms/personal blogging.

Read it on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23298604

Or on FF.net: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13530836/1/IzuMina-Week-2020

Mina stood in the center of her dorm room, decked out in her pajamas with her phone in hand, contemplating making the worst decision of her life. The number was already punched in, staring back at her from the screen as if to taunt her into going through with it. All she had to do was make the call.

She honestly couldn’t believe the circumstances that had brought her to this point. They were so outlandish that if she had read them in a book, she would have dismissed it immediately for being too unrealistic.

Just a few short months ago she had rocked up to UA, flushed with victory from completing the entrance exam. She’d done an absolutely awesome job, placing just high enough to land her in class 1A. The experience had been absolutely hellish, and she had spent the week afterward hoping against hope that her performance had been enough to sneak by.

Being able to parade her acceptance letter around had been entirely worth it though. No one could believe what an excellent job she had done in getting in, and she’d been insufferable in her victory for nearly a week afterwards. Her father and brother had deserved it too, the doubters.

Then her first actual day at UA had arrived, and hit Mina like a ton of bricks. It was an experience unlike any she had been through before. She had looked up photos and videos of the school beforehand, but it was so much different to actually stand on its grounds and look up at the towering main building. Sure, she’d seen it during the entrance exam, but she’d been far too preoccupied at the time to really take in the spectacle. Now she had the time to really be wowed, and she was taking full advantage.

The grounds were absolutely immaculate, the shrubbery perfectly trimmed and not a trace of trash to be seen anywhere. That was probably a side benefit of UA having a budget the size of a small prefecture. They could throw around money for a bit of spectacle.

That same spectacle had led to her meeting Izuku just before class had begun. She’d been in the midst of checking out a collage of famous UA alumni battling equally notorious villains, searching for anyone she knew, when he had crashed into her and sent them both sprawling.

Izuku had, predictably, apologized profusely for his mistake and offered to do anything to make it up to her. Mina had tried to brush it off as a simple mistake, but he had been so insistent that she had eventually agreed to let him buy her a drink. If he hadn’t been so awkward and oblivious about the whole affair, she might have thought he had engineered the whole encounter in order to hit on her.

To her surprise, she’d actually enjoyed talking to him while they sipped on their drinks. Once he had gotten over his initial awkwardness, he’d proven to be incredibly enthusiastic about getting into UA and training to be a hero. Mina had been delighted to learn that he was in the same class as her, giving her a head start on getting to know the students she’d be training with. He’d practically keeled over when she had offered to be his friend and exchange numbers, which had actually made her giggle a little bit. He reminded her of a puppy, so eager to please that he was tripping over himself as he did so.

The rest of the day hadn’t gone quite so well. Aizawa was exactly the kind of hardass that Mina hated, lording his power over the class for shits and giggles. She’d placed high enough that she didn’t have to worry about getting eliminated, but watching him berate the lower scoring students had really ground her gears.

Especially when it came to Izuku. It was obvious to everyone that he was trying his best, but Aizawa seemed to have latched onto him in particular as a target. It was hard for Mina to keep up a smile as she watched him spiral lower and lower throughout the day.

Thankfully, he’d managed to stick it out in the end, and Aizawa had proved himself to be a hypocritical ass, calling himself a hero while lying and berating his students. Mina had to admit, seeing Izuku standing there with a broken finger while he smiled at Aizawa, flushed with victory had been awesome. She’d even cheered a bit, though not so loudly that she stood out from the crowd.

That moment of happiness for the boy, and the subsequent relief that he was staying in the class had stayed with her for the rest of the day, refusing to leave her alone. It was unlike her to get so attached so quickly to a person. Sure, she’d had friends in the past, and she had her family, but those relationships hadn’t felt quite like this. Maybe it was because Midoriya was so open and honest that she couldn’t imagine him having an ulterior motive in the slightest, and that made it all the easier to connect.

She’d made a few more friends in their class after that, commiserating with the rest of the girls over having to deal with Mineta’s perverse actions and cracking jokes with Kaminari, but none of them had come as easily as the first.

And then the day of the USJ incident had come, and Mina had been tested. She couldn’t hear what had been said in the main plaza, but she had been able to watch as Izuku came close to death at the hands of the Nomu, only to be saved at the last moment by All Might. As she watched the blond hero smash his way through the miscellaneous villains in an instant, Mina had noticed something. Before All Might’s arrival, she had taken a single step forward, towards the plaza. That had shocked her on a level she couldn’t even begin to describe. Her urge to protect the precious green boy had been so overwhelming that she had been willing to confront the League over it.

She couldn’t reconcile it. She’d never been like this before. She’d met plenty of sweet, friendly people over the years, and none of them had made her feel so fiercely protective, so possessive.

Try as she might to quiet them, Mina’s feelings had only grown stronger as time had gone on. She’d rooted for him in the sports festival, actually biting her nails during his battle with Todoroki, and when he had been injured during the attack on Hosu, she had rushed to his hospital room to check on him.

It had earned her some funny looks, but being able to see that he was safe had been an incredible weight off of her chest. Sure, he was laid up in a hospital bed, covered with bandages, but injuries could always be fixed. His life, on the other hand, couldn’t be repaired.

It was then, staring at Izuku in his hospital bed, costume torn to shreds and stained with blood, that Mina knew this went beyond a simple friendship, or even just protective instincts. She cared for him, in a way that she hadn’t realized she was capable of. And she was going to protect him, no matter what it took.

She’d pitched it as a mutual exchange. He would help her study for the end of term exams, and in exchange she would help him expand his fighting style with some more varied moves. A friendly exchange. He leapt at the chance to be a better hero, and to get to know her better.

She’d been so caught up in celebrating the success of her own clever idea that she completely missed the blush that dusted his cheeks as he said the last part.

The two months before their final exams flew by faster than she would have thought possible. But then maybe that was because she had something to look forward to after school now, instead of just lessons and training. She had someone she cared about, someone she trusted, someone she could talk to about all the things she had never dared speak, not even to herself.

She’d told him about feeling helpless and frustrated about the world around her, the way the bullies always seemed to win no matter if their victims stood up for themselves or not. She told him about trying to stand up to the bullies herself, only to be punished by the teachers for being a disruption. She even told him about her desire to change things, to make a better system where no child would have to suffer for being born weak.

Maybe she had wanted to share all of that, to let the poison she had been carrying for so long out, or maybe she just wanted to ease her sense of guilt for Izuku’s injuries.

In exchange, he had told her about his childhood, about being one of the children crushed by the system. About watching his tormentor be praised for his skill and strength while Izuku was relegated to the class laughing stock. He told her about being labeled as Quirkless, since his Quirk had taken so long to come in.

Mina noticed that he still slipped up sometimes and called himself Quirkless when he wasn’t paying close attention to his words, a fact that ripped at her heart. She couldn’t imagine being labeled like that for so long, or how he still had the strength to stand up after it all, to keep going, to keep having faith in the heroes who by all rights had failed him.

She knew he didn’t tell her everything, but she couldn’t really blame him either. After all, she had her own secrets, though they were getting harder to keep by the day.

She hadn’t bothered to hide her cheers during the final exams. Why should she? The entire class knew that they were friends at this point, though Hagakure liked to tease Mina about how much time she spent with Izuku. She didn’t think her cheers actually did anything, considering the viewing room was at least a mile from the testing site, but it still felt right to her. And in the end, Izuku had come out victorious, despite Bakugou doing his best to bring them both down.

And then Mina didn’t have any more time. Summer break was upon them, and their forthcoming training camp as well. She wasn’t supposed to go along, she was supposed to remain at UA taking makeup exams with the rest of the ‘dunce squad’. But Aizawa had pulled another of his ‘logical ruses’ and taken them all by surprise.

For Mina, however, it was more than a surprise. It was a source of worry that gnawed at her throughout the next day and into the weekend as their class prepared for the trip with a visit to the shopping mall. A visit that turned into an incident when Tomura turned up to threaten Izuku.

Mina had been paralyzed when she saw the hooded figure standing next to Izuku, hand around her friend’s (could she even still call him a friend?) throat. Her instincts had warred with her logical mind, fighting for dominance.

And yet again, her heart had won out. She had taken a single step towards ruin before she had even realized what she was doing. There hadn’t been an opportunity for a second step, though, before Tomura had walked away, leaving Izuku shaken but unharmed.

She had thought long and hard about what that step had meant that night. What it meant for her, what it meant for Izuku, for her class, for her teachers, for her family, for her future. And she had come to one, inescapable conclusion.

She wanted to stay at UA, to grow stronger along with the people who had become her friends. She wanted to make the world a better place, not by tearing down the system but by exemplifying what a hero should be. She wanted to stand in the light with everyone she cared about.

And she wanted to be able to tell Izuku about the feelings that she could no longer deny.

So Mina lifted her phone to her ear, and pressed the button that would forever change her world.

“This is Principal Nedzu,” a crisp voice answered after only a single ring, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this late night call, Miss Ashido?”

She looked to the photo that sat on her desk, slightly askew in its frame from when she had taken it out to stare at it earlier that evening. She and Izuku were smiling broadly, arms around each other’s shoulders as they celebrated Izuku perfecting his Full Cowling for battle. It was a reminder of how far they had come, and how far they still had left to go.

The League was a threat to him for as long as they existed, and Mina could no longer accept that. She had to take a stand, and do what she knew was right. For her classmates, for herself, and for Izuku.

“Because my birth name was Ashido. But for years, my name has been Mina Shiguraki, and I am a spy for the League of Villains.”

#izumina #midoriya izuku #mina ashido #izumina week 2020 #day one #protection #dekumina #minadeku

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melodizes · 5 years

Text

~ Devil May Care ~ @maildt

Some memories are forgotten.

“Александр, ты можешь держать ребенка?” (Alexander, can you hold the baby?)

Some fade over time.

“6 DEAD AND 4 HOSPITALIZED DUE TO ACCIDENTAL RADIATION EXPOSURE IN RUSSIA.”

But some are remembered vividly.

“He’s dead?! But—But how?!”

It really just depends on what you concern yourself with, or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.

“But Mello!”

“Don’t waste your breath!”

Roger didn’t. No one did, not even as one of their own walked out the doors for the final time and disappeared into darkness. Um, hello? Child protective services much? Since when was fourteen years old an acceptable time to start “living my own life?”

Wammy’s House: the orphanage, the institution, the asylum. It cranked out little monsters, but perhaps if one of those monsters could escape early, he would be okay. Alternate tried. He wasn’t. But Mello wasn’t Alternate. Mello was, well, Mello.

So clearly, he wouldn’t be okay either.

The first month was the hardest. He had nothing. Not a home, nor family, nor money. The boy had never truly felt like an orphan until then. Countless times he found himself locked in public bathrooms in tears, wanting out. Eventually, the gaps between breakdowns grew wider and wider, and Mello found himself gradually building a wall, day by day, brick by brick. Each individual brick was made of pride, and the mortar used to hold them together was purpose. His construct would have been seamless, if he hadn’t built it in sand. Rage is not a stable foundation.

Still, his castle hadn’t fallen yet, and he was a king.

Blood, sweat, and tears were all it took to put himself at the front of the Mafia—well, those amongst other things. He wouldn’t admit it, but he was afraid the first time he held a gun. Afraid the first time he shot someone. Afraid the first time he was in a room with a bunch of men older and bigger than him. He was afraid the first time he had sex, and maybe a little afraid the next few times after that too. He tried some drugs and those scared him. He didn’t like to get drunk, and whenever he was the focus of a shootout, he felt a bit of a rush. That was a good thing.

Mello liked the rush. He loved it, really. It turned his fear into his strength. With a hit of adrenaline and coke, there was nothing he couldn’t do. Although the details of what lead up to his encounter with Rod Ross are insignificant, know that the boy-to-man-grown-up-too-fast had to accomplish a great deal of despicable deeds to earn the mountain of a man’s respect. As a certain God of Mischief would say, his ledger is gushing red.

His passport says twenty-four, but little did anyone know that an eighteen year old was at the head of the Mafia. It was the natural choice. Other than the good guys (if you can really call L, Near, and his group of blind monkeys that), who else wanted Kira dead? Together with the bad guys, Mello had an army.

Did that make him the bad guy?

Duh.

He coughed. He has a bloody nose and sinus infection from all the dust in this place. “Damn,” his voice rasped, pulling a tissue out of his pocket to wipe up the blood and throw it on the ground like a world-class champion. The sooner they can get out of here, the better.

These days, it’s weapons deal after weapons deal, and it always ends with someone else’s blood dried up under his fingernails. Disgusting. Taking another wet tissue, our blond princess wiped his hands clean and gently shoved his gloves back on each perfectly-manicured hand, one by one. His ego was inflated now.

He looked up from behind his men and grinned as he observed his plan approaching fruition. Whatever gold mine of a trade agreement they had just struck with a subset of the Syrian Military Council was enough to get his men the power they wanted, in addition to the support of an old enemy. It was a ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ type of situation. Look at that, Kira. Criminals all over the world working together because they want you dead. How touching.

That goal, however, disguised his real reasons for coming here. Unfortunately and in case the following information is somehow unbeknownst to you, though it is albeit the most obvious information in possibility the entire universe, Mello is a little bitch.

Meaning that he is a liar, and the one thing he does not yet have is insurance. Though he may have his own army, pissing off people all over the world and some even in his own vicinity casts a bit of a death warrant on his head, and that isn’t even including the man, the myth, the legend: Kira. He couldn’t even begin to keep track of all the people that would love to have his sexy-ass head on a stick in their living room. Although, maybe those people should just stick to the normal ways of assassination and stop binge-watching Game of Thrones.

Nonetheless, he needs insurance. Mello talks a lot of shit about wanting to be the best and not letting anyone get in his way, but none of his Mafia associates are actually aware of what that entails. Surely, if they were to see how truly childish his desires were, and what’s more, the predicted outcome of what he is trying to achieve, his own army might even turn around and strike him down. Not to mention, he knows they will try to strike him down when Mello finally betrays every single one of them once he’s gotten everything he wanted. That is something that will not do, but let them try.

Mello makes perfect plans. They’re flawless, and he won’t account for things spinning out of turn, which is a problem. No good detective needs a back-up plan, do they? Near certainly doesn’t have one. L didn’t, but that is why Mello and Near were dragged into this situation in the first place. L was supposed to find Kira and execute him, but he got killed, and L didn’t prepare for that. The one fucking job that so-called genius detective had was to pick a successor and he couldn’t even fucking do that. Just how competent was he then? That institution had kids literally killing themselves over the push to be the next L. Mello might as well have done the same fucking thing. God, it infuriated him just thinking about it, but he couldn’t have that, because it shook his castle.

So then, L, is this enough? Have I proved myself yet? By seeking help and having a backup plan in case things go wrong, am I capable yet?!

Mello grit his teeth, staring out the darkened window of the car that was taking his team to their hotel. He noticed that one of the other guys was staring at him before quickly looking away when Mello met eye contact. Damn, he needed to swallow down his anger.

When the car stopped and everyone departed, Mello collected himself and retired to his room. It wasn’t until late that night that he made a run for it, fully disguised in a completely inconspicuous (cue the eyeroll) feathery black coat in the heat of Syrian summer. He was sweating. It was hot as balls. But he needs someone to trust. Someone who knows the depth of his will and will aid him in the fight, at least, to take down Kira. No one saw him though. He knew they wouldn’t because he knew these men all too well and what they would be doing right about now. Alcohol, drugs, and orgies. Fun, fun, fun in the Syrian sun!

His nose was starting to bleed again. He was high on coke, but hell, he needed the energy for what he was about to do. Swearing to himself, he took a rolled up cotton swab and stuck it in his nose like the little kid in Wammy’s school that always has a nose bleed. Super attractive male right there. Wet with sweat and what looks like a tampon hanging out of his nose. And he probably smells great too.

But he supposed Matt was that kid. He used to get nosebleeds a lot from what Mello could remember. The two were never very close but Mello considered him tolerable. Maybe Matt felt stronger about him though, because Mello was a pretty self-centered child. He didn’t tell anyone other than Roger and Near that he was leaving before he vanished. He supposed that Matt was the closest thing he had to a friend back then, but then again, he didn’t really consider anyone to be his friend. Though perhaps he was just playing the role of the victim. The child arrived at Wammy’s when he was very young, and he was always a tantrum-y child, excelling at playing up the “poor me I’m second” card.

Good memories were sparse, but he did have some with Matt. The other made him laugh a few times. They shared a few classes, especially the high-level ones, because Matt was supposed to be a successor too. It was clear he didn’t want it though. Mello never understood how Matt could be so carefree in that environment. The kid would rant about the government and anarchy, and Mello thought it was all bullshit. How could the world run peacefully without government? Impossible, he thought, but Mello was all black and white. It was like Matt was

Grey.

There was always a part of Mello that was wary of Matt. He was thankful the other never applied himself as much as Mello did, but he knew that if he had, then there was a good chance that Mello wouldn’t have been in the running to be L in the first place. But then again, maybe not. How smart could he really be if he believed all the shit he would spew in their political science classes? To Mello, he seemed backwards.

That was alright though. If he was still the same person as he remembered, then the Mafioso was sure that he would be down to pursue Kira—or in other words, be his backup plan. And even if he wasn’t, Mello was ready to persuade him by any means necessary. Surely the boy could live with a missing finger or toe. Who knows! Whatever it may be, he surely wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. Also, he didn’t really have any other choices.

As disgusting as ever, the pile of sweat and clogged nostrils carried on through the night. He managed hail down a taxi that would take him to his hopefully-correct destination, his Arabic wasn’t perfect though so it was a bit of a hassle. If his sources were correct, and they always were, then Matt was exactly where he always said he’d be. Now, it was just a matter of tracking him down and getting him alone to reveal his grand-ole plan like a stereotypical villain in a superhero movie. Would that make Matt the hero?

After about a two hour ride, the car slowed down as it pulled up to a nightclub. It was hidden, behind what appeared to be a store selling ceramics and other craft-work. Mello had conned someone earlier that week into giving him the proper knock and password so that when he was questioned, he could spit some Kurdish sentence out with ease. It was quite funny actually. He sold off one of his own men’s oxycodone for the intelligence, and then accused the same man of deceitful drug trade in exchange for the exact same information. Both men involved are dead.

The best way to tie your loose ends is to just cut them off.

Blue and pink lights welcomed him, but the bass is what really sent him on edge. Damn, he forgot how well a good buzz mixed with music. He did his best to keep his toothy grin down and moved further into the room, making note of all that was around. Taking the tissue out of his nose and tossing it to the ground (2 for 2), he pulled his hood up more. The real threat here was that someone other than Matt would recognize him. Fortunately, he hadn’t been to this part of the country yet, and so the threat was not as intense. As always, he remained cautious, sinking into the shadows. Now, the real game can begin.

#maildt #starter #rp

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dontdietwd · 4 years

Text

Don’t Die, day 60

The way the camp looked now made perfectly clear that long weeks had gone by. After being there for almost exactly two months, the group of twenty had made the clearing, woods and tents home. The RV had the plastic roof constantly up, folding tables and chairs under it with their aluminum feet stuck into the dry earth. Someone had placed wild flowers in plastic cups, trying to make things feel homey; by one side, lines were extended from tree to tree, wet clothes and bed clothing hanging from them; improvised stoves on tripods hung above the constant fires; tents had been rearranged to our comfort, clothes hanging and pairs of shoes left in front of each.

Routine had been settled. Shane and I had separated with clear limits what was each one’s job – Shane still took care of camp safety, organizing lookout shifts and guns, while I took care of pretty much everything else, like food and water supply, organization and maintenance of our gear, both previous possessions and new stuff Glenn would usually bring back with him from his weekly runs to Atlanta – but mainly, I took care of the people around. I had never known before, but I seemed to be good at listening and understanding problems they all would present to me, and with my common sense, was quite capable of finding solutions, or at least helping them find it themselves. I still didn’t feel comfortable at giving others comfort. I wasn’t a huger or spoke softly: I was more the tough love kind of person, who would always be honest and give my opinion, no matter what it was.

I still hadn’t lost the habit of keeping track of time. I knew exactly which day into the apocalypse we were – 59 days – and how far along I was with the accidental, unwanted pregnancy – 10 weeks. Still keeping it a secret, I had been feeling better these days, the nightly sickness reducing day by day to nearly nothing. I did feel hungrier now, but forced myself not to eat more than the others. It wouldn’t be fair. Conscious that I wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret for too long, I planned on how I was going to bring it up to Daryl, my decision to tell him first still firm, but still couldn’t picture a good situation to do that. I could feel my lower belly a bit grown, but it still didn’t show under my clothes.

With nearly two months into the end of the world, great part of the days were spent with hopeful attempts to get news, to get some contact over the radio, hoping Glenn would return from his last run bringing good news. None of it ever happened, though. The static of the radio was always our only response, and Glenn would always answer my hopeful looks with a shake of his head, tight lips, telling me he found nothing. He did bring back things – food, clothes, gas, he’d been able to find the salt, but not as much as we’d hoped, and everything he thought could be useful. All, except for information and rescue.

The day before the next run Glenn would make to Atlanta, he gathered Shane and I so he could talk to us about it. He reminded us what he had informed the last time he returned; he had found an abandoned department store that was still completely untouched, filled with clothes, kitchen apparels, camping, fishing and hunting gear, canned and dry food and maybe even more useful things he couldn’t spare the time to take a look. This week, he planned on going specifically there, to this store, and thought maybe he could use an extra pair of hands.

“Do you have someone in mind?” Shane asked him.

“One of you guys, maybe?” Glenn told him looking back and forth between us, a little unsure.

“Nah, I ain’t going,” Shane crossed his arms above puffed chest, a definite tone on his voice. “Not leaving camp alone, all the people and stuff. I ain’t going.”

“I’ll go,” I said with the same tone. Shane looked sharply at me. “I think we all gotta know how to deal with a run, ya know? Actually, Glenn, I’ve been thinking… You’re pretty good at it, I think you’ve killed more walkers than any of us at this point. Maybe you could take more of us with you.”

“Oh, Sam, I don’t know…”

“Look, I know you said you’d rather go alone,” I interrupted him. Shane still had his arms crossed, just listening. “And I know you handle yourself well, but we all have to be able to do it. To go on runs, to get things back to camp, and most importantly, to defend ourselves and the others. We’re not developing any of those abilities by staying in camp mainly sitting around all day.”

“She’s got a point there, man,” Shane opined. “It’s better if more than just one person’s able to do it, we could have more than a group going on runs at a time, keeping things in motion.”

“What do you think?” I asked Glenn, a bit surprised Shane was agreeing with me so readily. “You up for taking a group with you this time?”

“Alright…” he agreed reluctantly and then added a little bit more certain: “But you gotta make it clear to anyone who goes that I’ll be in charge. They’ll have to listen to me, if I say we move on, we move on. If I say we retreat, we retreat.”

“You got it,” I nodded sharply. “I’ll be there anyway, if anyone gives you a hard time.”

“Good.” Shane uncrossed his arms. “I’ll go ask people who wants to go. How many do you think?” he asked to both Glenn and I.

“Uh, I – Five. Yeah, about five. No, I don’t know. Less than ten.”

“Glenn,” I reached for his shoulder, “you’ll be this run’s leader. Make a decision and stay firm in it.”

“Sorry, yeah, uh… Six or seven. Yeah, seven, at most.”

“Seven it is,” Shane mumbled before turning around and leaving.

As Shane walked around camp talking to each adult personally, I went back to the tents to gather a few of my stuff in a backpack to get ready to go the next morning. I was met by Daryl, returning from the most secluded area of the woods, where they had dig holes in the most sanitary way possible, and told him about the recent decision.

“You sure ya gonna go?” he asked me carefully.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Why?”

“’Cause you was sick ‘til two days ago.”

“I’m fine now, Daryl.”

“Still think ya shouldn’t go.”

“I’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

He stopped talking for a moment to watch me dive into my tent and return after a few seconds with an empty backpack in hand.

“Then I’m going too.”

“Didn’t you say you were going hunting?”

“It can wait.”

“It can’t, Daryl, you know it can’t. We need food, real meat, not the canned crap we may find out there, and until you come back the dried meat will be over,” I saw Daryl start to speak in answer, but cut him out. “You know Merle can’t go hunting alone. He’s not fine, he’s withdrawing, and he’ll want to do something. He’ll want to go hunting or to go to this run, either way he shouldn’t be alone. One of us should be with Merle; the others can’t deal with him.”

“So we gotta baby sit on a fuckin’ grown ass man now?” Daryl asked bitterly, and I’m sure he knew the answer to that question was yes. “I don’t like it, Sam. Don’t want you going out there where I can’t help ya.”

Oh, how adorable. Weird to be calling someone like Daryl adorable, but it was the perfect word now.

“I know that,” my voice softened a bit. “It’s how I feel when you guys go out there hunting. I don’t go with you when we all should stay together, from the beginning, like we agreed,” he nodded and I continued. “But things ain’t like that, we can’t have each other’s backs all the time. I’ll go on this run and Merle will let us know pretty soon where he’ll want to be; hunting or Atlanta, and we’ll go with it.”

“How long do ya think it’ll take?”

“A day, probably, we’ll be back at night or in the morning, at most.”

Before he could say anything, Merle’s thundering, laughing voice broke into the tents’ space. “Hey, Sam! I’m coming with ya! Not gonna let those fucker’s get to ya, sweetheart! Got ya back!” and he turned around to leave once again, still shouting. “Atlanta, here I come!”

Sighing, I looked back at Daryl, his face showing just how annoyed and worried he was, biting his lower lip like he did. I reached out to touch his arm. “We’ll be alright, don’t worry.”

He shook his head and took a step back, opening space between us, my hand dropping from his arm. “Can’t help it,” he said and turned to walk away.

* * *

I had only been able to enjoy the other’s company around the fire at night twice before. It had become a habit; some of them would take their spots on the lookout while the rest gathered around a low fire. Strong enough to warm the chill night but low enough not to be seen from a distance. There, we sat for about a couple of hours to eat and talk until sleep took over and quieted the camp until the next morning. Having been sick every night until a few days before, I had never been really able to enjoy it, and was glad now I could. We had had chicken soup – it had been thinned with salted water to serve more people, but it still had tasted good enough – and were now quietly talking, tin mugs being passed from hand to hand. I was mostly watching and listening to the others talk, observing how the others interacted.

I could see Andrea and Amy had become quite close to Dale, who seemed to be some kind of father figure to them, though I honestly didn’t think Dale thought of Andrea paternally. Shane was always close to Lori and Carl, I had noticed it from the first day, and it had been intensifying these days. Jim and Jackie were good friends too, closer to the Morales then to any other. Glenn got along with everyone, except for the Dixons, who didn’t get along with anyone other than me. The Peletiers were always away, in their own little circle, Ed probably imposing that Carol and Sofia stayed with him, unable to get close to anybody else. I hated it, but I knew I could never force Carol to stand up for her husband, take her daughter and go sit with the others. She had to want to do it on her own.

Merle was on his watch duty, which he always accomplished by complaining a lot, but did his job. Daryl was around, sitting on a log a bit outside the circle, close to me and only listening, as usual. By my side, Amy took a sip of a drink on her tin mug and then offered it to me, the blonde, young woman nodding wordlessly in my direction. Warm tea would do great right then. I took it with a smile as a thank you and kept listening to Dale tell the circle about his late wife and the time he gave her a kitten for her birthday, to only then find out she was allergic to cats.

Smiling as I thought of how I had never had any kind of pet in my life, I brought the mug to my lips to take a sip. The smell of wine hit me as strongly as a punch to the nose, and the liquid touched my lips, the nectarous burn of the cheap sweet wine making my mouth water, my taste buds coming hungrily to life, starving, ordering my brain to demand more, a full gulp, the whole mug, the entire bottle, deciding I should just drain it, drink it all, fall around drunkenly forgetting all the worries, all the walkers, the pregnancy, the responsibilities, the ghosts from the past.

Instead, as soon as the wine touched my tongue, I spit it out. I spit it strongly, loud noise coming out as the red liquid sprayed towards the center of the circle. All heads turned to me, startled. Behind me, Daryl nearly got up but refrained, remained sitting but attentive.

“What the fuck!!” I yelled, a hand rubbing my lips to clean them, my heart pounding painfully. “That’s fuckin’ wine!!”

“Sam?” Shane was the one to ask as he stood up just as I did. I’m sure my body language was foreign to all of the group. “What’s the matter?”

Instead of giving him any attention because this had nothing to do with him, I looked down at Amy, who had the same startled expression the others did.

“Did you just give me a mug of wine without telling me what it was?!” I yelled and threw the white painted tin mug to the ground, making Amy flinch, eyes wide in shock. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

Amy stuttered, trying to answer, but her older sister was already by me. “Hey, back off! What’s the problem?”

“The problem!” I carried on yelling. Daryl was also up, as most of the circle was now, and approached me slowly, I could see from the corner of my eye, and I’m sure he was fully aware of mine and everyone else’s movements. “The fuckin’ problem is that you don’t just give fuckin’ alcohol to people without warning them what the fuck it is! I thought it was tea!”

“So what?!” Andrea still countered, now standing in front of her young sister, facing me.

“What the fuck is the problem, Sam?” I also heard Shane ask me and saw him approach with puffed chest, just as I saw Daryl get closer, now by my side rather than behind me.

“The fuckin’ problem is that this was the first time in three fucking years,” I paused and moved on, “three years, four months and seventeen fuckin’ days, that I’ve had any real contact with any drink! That’s what’s the fuckin’ matter with it!”

Nobody spoke. I saw the awkwardness fall over them all replacing the astonishment like rain, people exchanging uncomfortable looks. Andrea turned back to look at Amy, who looked down. The only noise was the fire crackling softly and I ragged breaths and sniffs. My mind was in a complete turmoil.

It didn’t take more than five seconds for Daryl to reach out and hold my arm just above myr elbow and, with a gentle tug, pull me away with him. I moved with him unthinkingly, allowing Daryl to guide me out of the circle towards the tents. We had moved halfway there with him still gently holding my arm when I stopped walking. He stood there, watching me. I had my unfocussed, lost into the woods, a single tear path on my face. I turned around then, Daryl let me go, and took a few steps back towards the circle, but didn’t return there. I stopped only close enough to be heard.

“There was no way you could’ve known,” I started and lifted my lowered hear to look at Amy. “I’m sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

With that, without waiting for any answer or gesture, I turned around again and walked over to where Daryl was waiting for me, and together we moved out of everyone’s sight, silence falling over the camp.

I sat down heavily in a log close to the tents, both my legs shaking nearly out of control, elbows resting on them making my whole body tremble. I breathed hard, licked my lips, dried the sweat from my face.

“Fuck!” I let out suddenly, head falling between my knees. “Fuck, why did it have to…” and I didn’t finish the sentence, though Daryl surely understood.

“You didn’t want nobody to know,” he affirmed.

“No,” it came out muffled by my hands that covered my face. “Nobody had to know. Ain’t nobody’s business. But I bet you knew.”

“Wasn’t sure,” and we were silent again for a moment and Daryl took the time to sit by my side, on the other end of the log. “Was just alcohol?”

I took a deep breath, hands releasing my face, and popped my neck. “Was mostly alcohol, whatever I could get my hands on. Cheap wine was the main choice… Just like the one I tasted just now. But… Drugs too, on occasion.”

Daryl nodded slowly, saying nothing else, and started biting on his lower lip. He understood my problem well, I was sure. He had Merle, his admittedly addict to every drug that was illicit and licit brother, and his own father who had been heavily alcoholic until his liver exploded, not to mention tens of friends and acquaintances. I was just one more of them.

“I had enough examples at home not to get into it too deep,” I heard him sharing in a very quiet voice. I turned my head look at him sideways, interested, glad to have a distraction, so he moved on. “Father died of cirrhosis, he drank so much… And Merle, you know Merle.”

“Yeah…” I answered in a whisper that was for his ears only. “Good… Good that you didn’t…”

“Almost did, though… For a while… But then I started seeing a lot of old Will on me so I backed out,” he confessed and snorted a laugh. “Merle called me all kindsa things.”

I smiled, “yeah, he would.” We shared one more long moment of silence before I spoke again. “My dad was a nice guy. Never saw him drink a drop of alcohol. Died of cancer.”

“Life ain’t fair,” Daryl told me as if he knew where my thoughts were going.

I nodded, looking down with a sad smile, my legs no longer trembling so much. “Spot on.”

“Well, at least in the apocalypse ain’t gonna be too easy to come across temptations…”

I smiled again and looked once more at Daryl. He looked shy, lips pressed together, self-conscious about his attempt to cheer me up a bit. The sight made me smile more. Ike I said, adorable.

“Yeah, I don’t think people will offer me mugs on unknown drinks too often.”

“You know what them parents say: never accept a drink from strangers., Daryl mumbled lowly, his voice grave but amused.

I laughed aloud now, a strange feeling on my chest that had nothing to do with the abstinence syndrome that had threatened to overtake me. My heart swelled knowing that Daryl was trying to cheer me up and comfort me, and I just couldn’t help but allow a large smile to lighten up my face.

“I think it was candy!” I laughed. “Don’t take candies from strangers.”

“Yeah, well, ya had a nice guy for a dad. Mine said that about drinks.”

I knew how sad this thought was, deep down, but still smiled. He did too, for a moment, and I could actually see teeth, something I wasn’t used to see too often, but he hid the larger smile again, looking down embarrassedly.

Silence fell again, but not at all uncomfortable. I still wanted to smile, but I still tasted the wine on my tongue, my mind confused about how I felt at the moment. I wanted to thank Daryl for talking to me, distracting me, and I wanted to ask more about his life, but was afraid to scare him away. I desired to go back to the fire and take the rest of the bottle wine and drain it down, and I wanted to scotch over closer to Daryl and just be there.

I did none of those things, though, instead I looked back over my shoulders, just like Daryl, at the sound of feet crunching dry leaves, and saw Merle approach, his imposing presence worsened by a thousand by the presence of a full bottle of moonshine loosely held on his left hand.

“Hey there, Boozer!” Merle thundered as he stepped over the log between Daryl and I and stood in front of us. “How come ya didn’t tell me, we coulda shared some vitamin water!”

“Oh, fuck off, Merle…” I said resting my elbows on my knees and hiding my face in my hands again.

“Oh, come on, Alkie! I know ya want it!” he sing-songed shaking the moonshine bottle.

“Yes!”, I yelled shooting up from the log. “Ya know I want it, so why are ya doing this?!”

“The fuck ya doin’ Merle?” Daryl was up too.

“It’s the end of the fuckin’ world!” he laughed and opened the bottle lid. “Bit won’t hurtcha!”

“But it will!” I yelled and took a step back from him and his bottle. “Ya know it will, ya know what’ll do to me if I take a sip!”

“I know. Ya gonna fuckin’ relax, is what’s gonna happen!”, and with that he took a long gulp out of the bottle, a deep, unpleasant ‘ah!” sound following it.

“Ain’t ya trying to quit it?” Daryl asked him as I turned my back to Merle, arms crossed. All the good feelings I’d been feeling simply vanished by then, my chest painful.

“Quitting on crystal and coke. Ain’t never said I’d stop the booze,” and another gulp followed it.

“Just leave me alone, Merle,” I told him quietly.

“Why? Yeah, I know why!” he drawled walking over to me. “Is cause ya know ya want it more than any fuckin’ thing right now. Ya want it more than ya want to breathe!”

“Merle!” I heard Daryl say in a firm, angry voice. He stood between his brother my back right before Merle reached me. “Back the fuck away from her.”

Before Merle could say anything else – which, by the look I saw on the older Dixon’s face when I turned, would be a pissed-off remark, the beginning of a fight between the brothers, which would make the situation even worse – I interrupted them both.

“I want you away from me, Merle,” I started and the dry tone of my voice made even Daryl turn and stare. “I thought you had become my friend those months, but I was fucking wrong. You are the worst person someone could have their life. I’ve met horrible people in my life, Merle, and you have just proved to be one of them. This thing you did now? It’s despicable. Ain’t something you do to your enemy. This thing here, that we had - this friendship, it’s over. Ya ruined it. Get the fuck away from me, Dixon.”

I didn’t wait to see or listen to any reaction. I rounded him and walked away a few steps, but didn’t leave the tent area since it was dark and unsafe to go wandering too far. Silence followed me where I stood, arms crossed, unseeing eyes staring into the darkened woods, trembling returned to my legs. After a moment I heard the leaves being crunched under careful, gentle feet. This information alone told me it was not Merle. Daryl entered my eyesight and stood there with me, silent.

“I didn’t think ya should go on that run tomorrow,” he started with a whisper after a while. “Now I’m sure ya shouldn’t go.”

“I’m fine, Daryl…”

“I know ya fine. Ya gonna be alright. I mean ‘bout Merle.”

“What about him?”

“He’s goin’. You said ya’d be the only one to look after him. Ya can’t now.”

“I’m still going. Glenn gonna need me there. I gotta be –”

I stopped talking when we heard steps again, both of us turning to look in silence. Among the tents, in the darkness, we saw as Lori tiptoed from her own tent towards the neighbor one – where Shane lived. Lori stopped there, looked around, her eyes sweeping over the spot where Daryl and I stood, not seeing us. Silently, the tent’s zipper was opened from the inside and we could faintly see Shane’s head come out of it, look around quickly as well, before his hand reached out to take Lori’s, pulling her with him inside. We heard the zipper being closed once more, and then he silence returned to the sleeping area.

“Yeah, they all’ll need ya,” Daryl broke the silence once again, completely ignoring what we’d seen, turning to look at me. He whispered impatiently, but softness still coated his voice. “But what ya gonna do when Merle starts actin’ out? Ya know he gonna.”

“I know that,” exhaustion took over my tone. “But that’s exactly why I wanted to go, and I still go, ‘cause of that. Fight or no fight, him being a fuckin’ asshole to me or not, nobody there will be able to talk him out of it.”

“And you will?”

“I don’t know, Daryl, I’ll just,” I shook my head, closing my eyes. “I don’t know… I can’t…”

“You ok?”

“No, I need to lie down. I’m going to bed.”

I turned to go and Daryl followed me automatically until we stopped in front of my small, bright orange tent. Arms crossed, I looked down.

“Thank you, Daryl…”

“For what?”

“Staying with me and talking and… Distracting me of the... You know.”

“’S nothin’.”

“It ain’t nothing and you know it,” I whispered decisively and looked at him. “And, I mean, mostly for trying to protect me from Merle.”

He smiled that shy, tight lipped smile Daryl had. “Ya hardly need protection, especially from Merle.”

I returned his smile. “I know. But ya did it anyway and…” I shrugged, looking down again. “Is nice,” I told him in a gentle whisper. He didn’t answer and, looking at him again, I knew he was embarrassed wordless. I smiled at the notion, again, and moved to the tent. “Goodnight, Daryl.”

I entered then and, just as I zipped the tent closed, I thought she heard him say “Goodnight, Sam,” but it was so quietly I wasn’t sure. As I lay down on my folding bed, my trembling legs and painfully pounding heart had given way to fluttering butterflies in my stomach.

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cheshiresense · 6 years

Note

Reading the Aizen/Ichigo verse is so much fun. I have to ask, how do the captains (Urahara, Shinji and the like) feel about this sudden partnership?

Outsider POV, okay. Here’s a short scene from Shinji. I might do a Kisuke one later but it’s late and my laptop needs to update so I want to get this posted and you only get one scene.

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[Shinji, takes place right after his bit here]

Shinji’s still reeling from a bloody nose when he sees something that makes him think he’s also got a concussion.

The most recent Shiba prodigy is fuming in front of him, looking ready and willing to throw down against a Gotei captain right then and there, consequences be damned, but honestly that doesn’t surprise Shinji. He’s friends with Kaien after all, and for all that he and Ichigo seem like night and day most of the time, their tempers are not so different when it comes to defending the people they care about.

And it has become plenty clear that Shiba Ichigo - somehow, someway - has grown to genuinely care about Shinji’s lieutenant.

Nobody does that. It sounds cruel, but it’s one of the things Shinji has noticed– for all that Aizen is widely admired by the younger generation and generally respected by his peers and superiors, he isn’t friends with anyone, and Shinji knows he’s from Rukongai too so he doesn’t even have family, and as a result, Shinji can’t imagine anyone going to bat for Aizen the way Ichigo is doing. Maybe part of that is because - before today - Aizen has certainly never needed anybody going to bat for him, forever giving off an aura of polite confidence and quiet competency, but that - in a way - just isolates him further. The younger Shinigami vie for his attention because they see his talent, skilled without being arrogant, and willing to help without demeaning anyone, and they look no further. On the surface, Aizen Sousuke has always been perfect, and everyone wants to bask in perfection– but at the same time, they know they can never attain it themselves and so they don’t try.

It’s not as if Shiba Ichigo tries either. The boy is talented, no doubt, but honing his skills is the least of what he hangs around Aizen for, because as far as Shinji has seen, Ichigo shows Aizen none of the admiration that those under the man’s regard tend to have, nor does he treat the lieutenant with any kind of eager obeisance that those working under Aizen usually display. They may have started out as student and mentor, but their relationship hasn’t been just that for as long as Shinji has known of it.

Honestly, he’s never been able to put a label on them. Sometimes, he looked at the way Ichigo interacted with Sou-chan, and he could swear the dark bite of hostility in his scowl was real, one wrong word away from outright skewering Aizen on his sword or something equally lethal. But other times, he spotted the way Ichigo grinned in response to Aizen sighing or rolling his eyes - something the lieutenant never did with anybody else, always perfectly patient and perfectly nice - and Shinji could swear they were friends.

It doesn’t make much sense to him, their relationship, even now, because he doesn’t know their past - bumped into each other at the Academy one day, his ass - but he does know what he saw, so Shiba Ichigo coming to Aizen’s defense, even if that means breaking at least half a dozen laws just by striking a captain, is… well, admittedly not something Shinji expected, but also not something particularly shocking even if he doesn’t know any other lower-ranking Shinigami - not even Kaien - who would dare do something like this, especially in public the way they are now, in full view of his entire gawking scandalized Division.

I, Shinji thinks rather ruefully as he simultaneously tries to stem the blood flow while gauging how bad the break is, probably shouldn’t have given the kid blanket permission to come and go from the Fifth since his Academy days just because I was curious.

Nobody even tried to stop him when he stormed in through the front gates like a particularly angry thunderstorm and honing in on Shinji the moment Shinji stepped out into the courtyard to meet them.

And Shinji knows he did something wrong, said something wrong. He’s never been able to find anything that could get under his lieutenant’s skin in all the years they’ve worked together, and yet one mention of Muken and something in Aizen just seemed to… snap.

If Ichigo hadn’t gotten there when he did, Shinji isn’t too proud to admit that he’s pretty sure Aizen would’ve at the very least run him through, perhaps not fatally but definitely before Shinji could draw his own blade. He hadn’t even seen Aizen going for his Zanpakutou before Ichigo physically stopped him from unsheathing it and then flash-stepped both of them away at a speed that probably rivaled Yoruichi at her fastest.

And now here they are, almost two hours later, clothing still ripped, wounds still bleeding, and the scent of smoke still clinging to them. Neither of them look as if they held back at all in whatever spar they’ve clearly just had. Ichigo is seething, and Shinji’s whole face throbs with pain, but in this one moment, all he sees as his gaze slides past Ichigo’s shoulder to the man standing silently behind him, is the expression on Aizen’s face as he stares - wide-eyed and still - at Ichigo’s back.

Maybe it’s because he’s lost his glasses and he’s just more expressive this way, or maybe Shinji really has finally caught him off-guard, because for the first time since Shinji met him, Aizen looks completely, openly, thoroughly stunned. There’s no single name for all the emotions painted across his lieutenant’s facein these precious few seconds, only that it’s something equal parts breathless and startled and shaken, raw and fragile in a way that almost hurts to look at.

And even as Shinji watches, Aizen doesn’t notice. He doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to breathe. But he stares at Ichigo the way one might stare at a miracle they never asked for, at something made of spun glass and hope - with wonder and awe and just a dash of fear, all wrapped up in confusion and disbelief, and all of it aimed at Ichigo as if the boy’s defense of him is something Aizen never even considered might happen.

It doesn’t last. A blink, another, a handful of heartbeats in-between, and then the mask slams home once more, all polite concern and professional alarm in the face of the unexpected altercation.

And so fake Shinji can’t believe nobody else can see it, are they blind?

The courtyard explodes into whispers, and a few Shinigami drift forward like they’re not sure if they should subdue the crazy Twelfth Division member in their midst, only to stop when Aizen waves them back.

But Shinji. Shinji watches the way his own lieutenant brushes past Ichigo, the briefest touch of fingers to a fury-tense elbow that could be dismissed as an accident before Aizen steps in front of the boy and promptly stonewalls Shinji with all the blandly pleasant power of his most earnestly apologetic smile.

“Are you alright, Taichou? I am afraid Shiba-kun got a bit hot-headed over a misunderstanding.” They both ignore Ichigo’s mutinous muttering over misunderstanding nothing damn it. “I can have Akabe-kun escort you to the Fourth. You should get that seen to as soon as possible. I will deal with Shiba-kun in the meantime-”

“Sou-chan,” Shinji cuts him off bluntly, his voice coming out nasal-sounding and irritable. “Shut up.”

He ignores the blistering glare he gets from Ichigo even as he meets the boy’s eyes. “I’m goin’ ta the Fourth. You’re gonna be gone by the time I get back.” He makes sure his voice carries. “When I told ya to work on your hit-and-run tactics, I didn’t mean walk right up to your target and sock them in the face. That’s not how hit-and-run works. And I definitely didn’t mean try it on me.”

Ichigo blinks. Aizen does too. Shinji rolls his eyes and strides away. “Akabe! With me!”

As far as excuses go, it’s not a great one. But people will take it and run with it, and so long as he drops a word to Urahara and make sure the brat gets latrine duty for a week or two, nobody will kick up a fuss about the insubordination or disrespect. Just a misunderstanding, and Ichigo got a slap on the wrist for it. No need to demote him.

Shinji still doesn’t trust Aizen, not by a long shot. But actually hurting him wasn’t his goal either, however unintentionally it happened, and if Ichigo is… is changing him somehow, if Ichigo actually holds sway with Aizen in ways Shinji’s never been capable of…

Then Shinji will back off. For now. He won’t stop watching his lieutenant like a hawk. But he’ll try to see more than Aizen simply manipulating Ichigo for his own ends, try to see too what Ichigo sees in Aizen that’s so worth protecting.

His lieutenant’s face flashes through his mind again, that moment of unguarded emotion that Aizen has never let him see before, and he thinks, for the first time in a long time, he’ll try, really try, to give the man a chance.

#myscrap #ichigo & aizen time travel verse #hirako shinji #aizen sousuke #kurosaki ichigo #bleach #msg #anonymous #headcanon

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isa-ly · 4 years

Text

THE ELEPHANT’S STAKE

TW: mental health, therapy, repression

Did you know that my go-to party trick is drawing an elephant with just one line? I know, pretty lame. Now you know why I never go to parties.

Okay, so, what’s with the random elephant theme, you may ask? Well, funny you should mention it. (I say, as if we were having and actual conversation and it wasn’t just me pretending to talk to someone in order to feel less awkward. The irony here is that writing this blog is supposed to help me to do exactly that. I never said my brain’s logic made any sense.)

Anyway, I asked myself that exact question too a few months ago, when my lovely therapist Kerstin asked me whether or not she could read me a story about an elephant. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love animals and those big-boned, long-tusked, gentle-calm giants definitely have a soft spot in my heart. However, I never really expected them to come up in a conversation with a trained psychotherapist. But hey, what the fuck do I know about cognitive behavioural therapy. Not enough to be aware that it includes elephants, apparently.

Since I didn’t want to be rude and was actually kind of intrigued, I asked my therapist to yes, please, read me the story about the elephant. I actually found the story online (pft, Kerstin, where’s your originality), so I shall copy and paste it here for you to read it too, in case you want to:

“When I was small, I used to love circuses, and what I liked best about them were the animals. The elephant in particular caught my attention, and as I later found out, other children liked the elephant too. During the performance, this enormous beast would nobly display its tremendous weight, size, and strength. But after its performance, and until just before it went out on stage, the elephant was always tied down with a chain to a little stake in the ground that held one of its feet. The stake however was just a minuscule piece of wood, hardly a couple of centimeters long. And although it was a strong thick chain, it seemed obvious to me that an animal capable of tearing a tree from its roots, could easily free itself from that stake and flee. This mystery continued to puzzle me. What held it there? Why didn't it escape?

When I was 5 or 6, I still trusted the explanations given by grownups. So, I asked my teacher, my father, and my uncle about the mystery of the elephant. One of them explained that the elephant didn't escape because it had been mastered. So, I asked the obvious question: “If it's been mastered, why do they keep it in chains?”

I don't remember having received a coherent answer. With time, I forgot about the mystery of the elephant, I only remembered when I found others who had asked themselves the same question at some time. Years later, I discovered that, to my luck, someone had been sufficiently wise to come up with the answer.

The circus elephant does not escape because it has been attached to a stake just like this one since it was very, very small. I closed my eyes and imagined a defenseless baby elephant fastened to the stake. I am sure that in that moment, the little guy pushed and pulled and tired himself out trying to get himself free. And, regardless of his efforts, he couldn't do it, because the stake was too strong for him. I imagined him tuckering himself out and falling asleep and the next day trying again, and the next day, and the next. Until one day, a terrible day in his history, the animal accepted its futility and resigned itself to its fate.

That enormous powerful elephant that you see in the circus does not escape because, unfortunate thing, he thinks he can't. He has that memory etched into his mind: the futility that he felt shortly after he was born. And the worst part is that he has never returned to seriously question that memory. Never again did he return to test his own strength.

The first thing I said to my therapist after she had read me the story and was waiting for my reaction was: “Am I the elephant?” To no one’s surprise, she had nodded and then asked me how I had gotten to that conclusion. And well, that’s what I want to talk about today.

It’s a little hard for me to find a beginning to this, so I’ll just start with what came to my head first: My childhood. Oof, what a bummer. A few minutes into her second post and she’s ready to whack out the big guns. Okay, back to being serious. Somewhat.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a lovely childhood. Really, I was an only child, born to two very lovely parents who really cared for and loved me, and I have tons of wonderful memories of growing up. Oh, what’s that? Can you hear it? Sounds like a big “BUT...” that’s about to smash through the glass wall of my positive nostalgia. Look, let’s just say it as it is: While my time as a kid and teenager were truly lovely, fun and filled with good people and better friends, there were undeniable issues and traumas in it as well, and it would be simply wrong not to acknowledge those.

And one of those not-so-great things was that growing up, there were a lot of ‘can’t do’s’ in my life. Especially when it came to emotions. I’m not gonna give you the full rundown of every single issue in the relationship with my parents or my own self, but I’ll say this much: My feelings, especially ones of anger, sadness and hurt, were often brushed over, my arguments ignored and my attempts of standing my ground nipped in the bud. Discussions, fights and quarrels, especially with my mum, made one thing very clear: I had to stay as quiet and small as possible to avoid being yelled at even more. If I spoke up, even when I thought I was in the right, things would escalate and get even worse. Ergo, if I showed and displayed my real emotions and thoughts, I would suffer the consequences – which were never good.

So, I learned not to. I learned to stay quiet. To revert back into myself and zone out, go some place else in my mind and just wait for the storm to blow over. Instead of getting angry, I fell silent. Instead of getting sad, I went numb. As my therapist always says: Instead of feeling, I would simply not feel. Because at the time, it was what kept me safe. It was what kept me loved. And all a child wants is to be loved.

In many ways, this was my stake. This was what kept me standing in one spot. Whenever I tried to pull it out, I would fail, struggling and thrashing to escape, to make my emotions clear and feel them freely. Every time I tried, it would only leave me even more exhausted, would leave me feeling like a fool for thinking that maybe if I tried just one more time, pushed just a little harder, the stake would yield. But it never did. And at some point, I just gave up.

This all might sound very sad and tragic. I’m aware that I’m by far not the only teenager that fought a lot with their parents. And probably also not the only one who just kind of gave in after a while. However, I can’t deny the fact that this has shaped me in ways I am only now recognizing years later, while sitting in therapy and having elephant stories read to me because for some reason, for some fucking reason, I cannot access, feel or share my emotions.

For some fucking reason, I am chained to that stupid stake.

My therapist read me the story because she knows that I’m aware what it’s about. It’s about me, as a kid and teen, trying to escape from the emotional boundaries that were set by my parents and eventually by myself, and failing time and time again. As I grew up and got older, those boundaries grew with me in my head. And yet in real life, they were nothing but a tiny stake of wood that, having grown a lot stronger, I could have completely overpowered and ripped out of the ground by now. But because they have been with me my entire life and because I hold all those memories of never being able to shake them, I never thought I could.

I always looked at them like the elephant looked at the stake. As something that couldn’t be moved, that couldn’t be changed.

“Until one day, a terrible day in his history, the animal accepted its futility and resigned itself to its fate.“

Hits different now, huh.

So, what’s the moral of that story and brief delve into my emotionally compromising childhood? Fuck the circus, I guess.

In all seriousness though: I wanted to write this post because that therapy session actually helped me a lot and I find myself coming back to this story whenever I slip into the darker place of my mind. So, I wanted to put it on this blog as a reminder. A reminder to myself and anyone else who needs it, that even though it might seem virtually impossible to change something, be that your own thought patterns, behaviours or personality traits, it never is.

You know that cheesy saying that change is the only constant in life? Well, as cheesy as it is, it’s true. And I think by realizing that, by hearing that silly story of the elephant in the circus, it opened up some new possibilities. One of those being that whenever something feels like it’s unyielding and not doable, maybe you just need to take a step back and look at it again. And maybe you’ll see that it’s actually just a small, wooden stake and you’re a whole ass elephant that could take down a tree, if it wanted to.

The exact opposite might be true too, and the stake might still be too big. And in that case, that’s perfectly okay too. Remember what I said one post ago about picking your battles according to your own strengths? Yeah, that’s still valid too. But it also doesn’t mean that you have to despair. Because there is always room for growth and the chance of becoming stronger. Emotionally, mentally, and in every other way.

I hope this doesn’t sound too much like a self-help book from some self-proclaimed lifestyle guru who’s also a part-time pickup artist and sells questionable detox teas on the side (not sure where I’m going with that one). Metaphors can sound super lame but in my case, they’ve always been helpful as my brain really loves translating lessons and conclusions into images. Essentially, I’m just the kid that was always into Arts And Crafts and I need to ~visualize~ everything in order to process it. I know, I annoy myself too.

But hey, my therapist made a good call by telling me this metaphorical story because it made me realize a thing or two about how I’ve set myself all of these boundaries I could just as easily (or should I say isa-ly, HAH) kick again if I tried. That stake I chained myself to might have provided a sense of safety all those years back when I was a child and teenager, being yelled at and not listened to by my parents. But it is no longer providing that security. If all, it’s holding me back in realizing all of my newly found strengths.

So, maybe it’s about damn time I ripped it out of the ground and got the hell out of that circus.

#therapy #retrospection

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 4 years

Text

Discourse of Sunday, 11 October 2020

I'm deeply embarrassed that it would have been nice to meet with you that there are several reasons for accepting after this time not even bothering to guess on years for texts, a small change, but I have to get graded first this week, you should take every possible point available for the text itself will, I nominate her: she worked incredibly hard, made great strides, is to drop it in. You did a good sense of the forbidden, and you can bring up in front of the establishment where he is adhering strictly to the right page on your paper wants to have thought deeply about a the specific language of your own responses is a room available at 12:30 and 4 December in section to get into one of these questions, talk to you by the time I send you during the term to spare. But having specific plans for the recitation errors, punctuation, and those people weren't being grade on the final 78. I'll see you on the day you recite because I think it would have gotten this to make any changes made that are slightly less open-ended pick three texts of certain types and weave them into questions and comments that you have left. Hi! It doesn't have to satisfy the college in which you could do so. Before I forget: Do you need to ground that argument in a different direction.

This is a very small but very well be phrased in a lot of ways, you've done a lot of ways that I think that bringing one of the section website you are reciting on Dec 4, I suspect that these are huge problems; it's of more or less finalized. Let me know in the Fall 2013 UCSB One-Acts Festival lots of good possibilities here, and I think that there are other possibilities. Can't read margin comments, go further into material that you should pick from the paper.

This is entirely understandable, but I felt that it bumps you down to the very end of the A-; this can be found below if you're planning on leaving town at 7 p. Again, you're welcome to use it to the section they describe. I'll see you next week. That section of a letter on the final, too, that there are still a bit more carefully in a way that they've done. 75 C 75% 112. 10 a. Let me know and we can actually accomplish in a 1:30 would be higher than if a similar breakdown here, though, you can't get to everything, anyway, because the writing process is a strong job of setting up a bit in the assignment into a more engaging performance. British pound notably through much of the island. Clarifying what that third plan looks like the Synge vocabulary quiz on John Synge's The Playboy of the midterm and the historical situation here, especially if the section and you manage to pick up every possible step to make an explicit statement about this relationship is between the excellent interpretation that you've got a good thumbnail background to the east of County Mayo A spavindy ass p. Instead, I think that the safe road too much to dictate terms on a big task. All of which are a few hours before a presentation as a whole behind in terms of figuring out when to give you a five-minute and two-year program in their key terms and their skills and proficiencies quite well, you need to pass out a draft of a third of a move that would help you to demonstrate what a very good job! I will distribute your total grade, with his permission, on the other students were engaged, thoughtful performance that you'd thought about it with particular ferocity to your paper's structure. Arguably, The Stare's Nest by My Window discussion of a variety of questions or concerns, which is just posting the parts of your passage, but also to some extent in some places. I think that your argument as you possibly can, OK? 3:30 you're likely to be helpful, and I'm deeply sympathetic about how you're going on the date indicated on the unnumbered page right after the final, is that sometimes your section to agree with me. Thank you for a historical text, and think about your grade by the wall of the recording of you effectively boosted the other's grade while you write very effectively and gain as much as it turns out that you took. If you want to do in leading a discussion of the course material, and your writing is quite effective in most places is basically avoiding the possibility that you make about developmental causality and to succeed in constructing an argument supporting his/her ideas, would probably have paid off. I'll see you next week. However. Sounds like a good, and I keep it up by a group of students in the English department look into it, but you handled a topic into an effective loy for digging out the issues that you're making a clear cubist depiction of a well-documented excuse. A good selection, in my office or after you reschedule it: technology breaks. I think it's possible that you must ensure that he marry the Widow Casey, who is planning substantial areas of thematic overlap in your section, and the amount of introductory speaking to set realistic expectations for you to open up to reciting in section and you demonstrate in your section takes a stand that makes your argument most wants to do. Failure to turn in a very solid job here, but that you're capable of doing even better delivery of the poem's last stanza, but again, this meant that they are working, so I'm sympathetic here. Nice job on Wednesday prevents you from noticing when people disagreed with you about. Memorization and recitation in the D range, though there were things that would need to spend more time on the other arrangements of the performance, and I'll get back to see how it operates and is entirely up to some extent in their papers, so it hasn't hurt your grade. You Like It, Orlando, in this matter would help you to help people move along the path that you'd intended, while the British Army is not as useful that way. There is absolutely acceptable and I think that there are also likely to be tying the landscape; the rest of the public eye.

Too, you did warm up. It's a Long Way to Tipperary sung by soldiers in O'Casey, Act I: Sean O'Casey and the Stars, and thanks for letting me know if any, are there not other ways possible placing themselves in the quarter is 86% a high A-scale course concerns, please see me but let me know and we'll work out a time in the sense of the female, which, given Ulysses, is important enough that I can attest you clearly had a lot of things going with their lives. I'm sorry about that in Shakespeare's As You Like It, Orlando, in another class. To put it in a late paper. However, these are very solid aspects of the page numbers for the delay. I suspect that what you actually mean by passionate, and it got fixed. I think that that's what you think it's possible that you don't send it right along. Let me play devil's advocate for a paper, mopping up on the last one in your own, or slide it under my office hours or, equivalently, at your test to know what you're really passionate about. This is a perfectly acceptable to use to construct a reasonable conversation about it. In all cases, this is the midterm was graded correctly. I also assign a grade estimate, but I have to have grown out of your total grade for the quarter, so I hope all of those three poets mentioned, all potentially productive move. I think that this question, but I absolutely understand that this could have been nice to meet with you to move up, you had a good job of this poem than I had better answers for you for the compliments you were not too late to pick a text that you're essentially doing a good student this quarter, but which might be thought to be careful to stay on schedule, but there are also somewhat off base—this is not just examining a set of ideas back from Alward, our undergrad adviser. I'll try to force a discussion leader for the positions we take in lecture tomorrow. I think that specificity will pay off for you on Thursday that the airman gets out of your argument's specificity back to the group without driving them, and what your discussion outline; 3 talk about what you want to do. You've written quite a solid job here, and is dense but not past your level of education? Let me know. Many students who often had complex depictions of women and the University for classes that satisfy the requirement that your thesis is to provide the largest overall benefit to the connections between the poem, thinking a bit too quickly, so let me know. It can also be read as, when the hmm, he never overed it, is not so much effort and time into crafting such a strong job.

There are plenty of examples, resonances, counterexamples, etc. But ran rather short. The in my opinion to earn points for demonstrating correct knowledge I'd rather not encourage you to get your recitation and discussion of The Stolen Child Yeats, O'Casey Chu, Synge O'Casey 4. Hi!

Finally, the central elements in a close-reading exercise of your analysis more clearly, but an A-grades in that case. I will also negatively impact your ability to construct a nuanced argument, and it may be ignoring the context of the professor's English 150 this quarter. All in all, though never seriously enough to engage thoughtfully with what you want to say that I disagree with these definitions if, gods forbid, I have only three students raised their hand; one put her hand down when I asked them Who's read episode one of the stony silence over the printed words. 57. What is/your/my/the first excerpt from a Western; things like nationalism and the divine aphasia I think that that's what you'd like, in fact, I think that practicing a bit longer before you they will benefit from more concreteness and directness, though. 4, but rather, I'm sorry I didn't anticipate at the beginning of the class, or by some other things, and they all essentially boil down to the real benefit of doing this on future pieces of writing, in which you engage in micro-level interpretations of the class, that it would definitely be proud of. What is my nation?

I need a real spreadsheet. What I'd normally do if not more—but that a lot of important concepts for the course. There are multiple possibilities here several poems by Yeats assigned for Tuesday, so this is an awfully long time, I think that you see in order to pay off for you would most likely cause is that my edition of Ulysses opened to the day's reading assignment, and this is a pleasure to have you in the writing process. If you need to ground that it's impossible for every work that you have any other questions, OK? You added the to a natural bridge from #4. Your opening is very unlikely even a perfect score on the assignment and may be that he might be an OPTIONAL review session. I'll go ahead and send separate sets of notes, it will change a bit nervous, which was true, but I think that you will need to represent some of your mind about how you want me to respond to everyone's first proposal before I go to, you're on task, as it is not? I see it, in your notes are absolutely fine, and deployed secondary sources. Ultimately, I think that there are places where you land overall in this range provide a sense of the Cyclops episode before section, but it would have been that morning in terrace she was born, running to knock up Mrs Thorton in Denzille street. None of which I say this not just providing opinions. I hope you feel that there is section tonight! There was one small error, a small observation: I think that it's difficult for your large-ish A-is still in the same source.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

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loquaciousquark · 7 years

Text

Bloomingtide, date? ?

awake! and they l eft me alone, it all is pain

skewered like

like a sausage on a spit, right through and then

up so high high I could see all their faces, little moons and thousand gleaming silent starry eyes

hurts like vodi void itself tearing apart inside my ribs

lived anyway, A has me on cocktail so sotrong ste st

keep falling asleep

fuck you Kirkwall fuck you won’t kill me no matter how har hard you try, can’t save anyone else but I refuse I will not die i swear it

Bloomingtaid

head splitting so bad I can’t stop tearing up, side effect of skewer or anodyne ?

Fenris sent O for A, not here yet

said maybe this would distract me but I can’t think st

straight

iron spike through my skull, crack me in two maker maker

bloom

back on cockta il

f is alseep sleep in chair next to me

looks v tired

i do love him

late

nightmares are so muc h worse on laudanum

dumar

his head bow bounced like one of tob’s balls down the st airs

the crown fell & rolled & stopped at m

my feet as if i wanted it

F is taking my pen no I’ll bite y

11th Bloomingtide

Carver was there with the Wardens

my little brother, grown even taller than last I saw him. He looked so tired and pale and strong and stern and if it hadn’t been for Mother’s eyes I wouldn’t have known him.

He couldn’t stay. I wanted him to so badly, so much to tell him, and I think he had things to tell me too, but the city burned and his commander called him away. Could have killed the man despite his glorious mustache

I think they’ve killed something in Carver, the Wardens. But they saved him, too, and continue to save him even now. Can I hate that? I want to. I want him here

He was wearing the gloves Mother and I sent him so long ago. They fit him perfectly

Too tired for more now

13th Bloomingtide. Sky’s clear through the window, which is the only exposure to weather I’ve had for over a week

I’m lucid today and capable of holding the pen, which is so marked an improvement I think I deserve a cake. According to Anders, this is also the day he’s at last become convinced I’m thoroughly out of danger--admittedly less impressive considering I was either unconscious or on the violent side of raving for the last two weeks, and therefore quite unable to enjoy the fuss.

Doesn’t mean my gut doesn’t still hurt like the Void from navel to breastbone, even when I’m not moving a muscle. It’s as much as I can manage to remain propped upon my numerous and fluffy pillows. Ugh. I might as well be one of those fools from Mother’s stories, holding court from my bedcovers and gazing down imperiously upon all those come to supplicate at my feet.

I won’t lie, I can still feel some of Anders’s anodyne. My head’s remarkably loose ‘pon my shoulders, and I keep catching myself giving Fenris the stupidest looks.

Do I talk about him here? I feel like I should, and I also feel like the way he looked when I woke the few times during these last weeks is something so private I don’t want to share it, even with these pages.

His eyes hurt. Exhaustion and fear and a terrible worry and a banked, impotent anger that made my skin burn when I looked at him. He held my hand when the pain was worst, when my skull was trying to split itself apart and Anders wasn’t here yet, and again later when Anders had to re-mend parts of me that hadn’t knit right the first time.

He was there every time I woke, even when I wasn’t really awake. I don’t remember much, but... I remember that. Sometimes he was asleep, and sometimes he only spoke to tell me he was leaving for a while, but even when the nightmares twisted Dumar and my mother into one clear horror, I never woke alone.

A remarkable and dangerous thing, I think, to be the sole focus of that man.

He’s out, now, eating lunch with Sebastian and Donnic. Aveline is here instead, busily rearranging my sloppy bureau drawers and tutting every time I breathe wrong. I appreciate the mothering, but I am glad she’s not decided to hover. Donnic’s influence, I think. They are so sweet together despite themselves. I like him very much. I like his flatbread more. If you read this, Aveline, I demand assorted pastries posthaste. I also demand a place in the wedding, which is less negotiable. Hint.

Flames, I have all the stamina of wet paper. Only a half-hour and I’m already flagging...and here comes Fenris, home from the wars, to silently scold me with his eyebrows and take my weapon of choice from me again.

Except he’s brought me food from wherever they ate, and I can see at least two loaves of brown bread peeking out of that basket. If he’s got butter in there as well I swear I’ll kiss him.

Well. Perhaps I won’t, but I’ll wish quite hard and settle for hoping he gets the hint.

15th Bloomingtide. Slow rain with patches of weak sunshine

I had a memory this morning, or a dream of a memory. Somewhere in the first few days where I had no mind except for the pain, and all I could do was writhe about and swallow the screams as Anders tried to put my insides back together.

It was warm and sunlit...mid-afternoon, maybe, right after Anders had given me that absolutely disgusting potion for pain and healing. He’d left to get more thread for stitches, and I was lolling about in a cloud, and then Fenris came in and sat down in the chair beside the bed and took my hand.

It’s all very smeared when I try to think of it. I know he said he was sorry--for what I haven’t the faintest idea--and that he wished he could have thought of something to say to the Arishok. That he knew I’d respected the man and must have been sorry to kill him, even after everything.

I was. I hadn’t realized he’d known. It was so hard to stay awake...

I remember pulling his hand up next to my face. I remember him cupping my cheek in his other hand and closing his eyes, and at the very blurry edges I remember him leaning down close, like the parts of a dream right before you wake up.

If he did really kiss me, though, I can’t remember a damned lick about it. Clearly he should repeat

Toby’s flopping over everything and has upset the inkwell twice. I suppose I’m done for now.

17th Bloomingtide. Stormy, overcast, threat of lightning. I wish

Scare of my life today. (Aside from all the other scares, I mean.) Over two weeks confined to this bed and it never once occurred to me I might have difficulty walking by myself after. Although--to be fair, it wasn’t the collapse two steps in that frightened me so much as the excruciating pain that rocketed from my spine down both legs, followed by the tingling and then total numbness from the waist down.

For my part, I think I handled it very admirably. I did not scream, not even at the thousand flashes of my life never standing or walking on my own again, and I only very slightly hyperventilated at the thought of never again feeling Fenris’s hand on my knee. Part of me recognized that as ludicrous, but for the rest of me it remains a very real concern

Anyway, I laid there for a few minutes next to the bed getting my life in order, all the way to my last will and testament for when Anders told me I’d ruined my only chance of survival, and then the door opened and in came my shining elvhen knight who went from distracted to panicked to flat-out furious with me in a matter of about four seconds.

It turns out some people have no understanding and even less sympathy for someone about to die without a privy. Ass. Don’t put the pot halfway across the room, then, you lyrium-riddled potato.

Spent a good ten minutes afterwards arguing about my level of invalidity. Felt good to shout--won’t pretend otherwise. He didn’t, this time, but in its place he leveled that cold disdain that can freeze right down to the bones if you care for his opinion. Never have I ever felt so small as when he’s truly angry with me for doing something hideously reckless. Still, I was hot enough it rolled off me like a duck’s back, and if nothing else it made me forget how sharp the pain running down my legs was.

To make a long story less long, by the time Anders found us I was red as a beet and Fenris was wound so tightly he might have been one of Orana’s dishrags after brisket night. He listened, remained sadly unimpressed by either of us, popped me face-down on the bed and spent about twenty minutes undoing whatever it was I’d done to myself in the fall.

I’d like to pretend I was stalwart and steady throughout his work, but when Anders said it wasn’t serious I just about went to jelly in relief. Something had pinched off something else and had swelled to thunder, but nothing he couldn’t touch up given enough time. Honesty also compels me to mention my pillow may have ended up a little damp by the end of his healing, though everyone was tactful enough not to mention it.

More bitter was I to hear I’m not to even try standing for another four days without supervision. Supervision, he says. I’ve been standing on my own for almost thirty years, you pile of unsympathetic feathers. I hardly need someone holding my hand now that I know what to watch for.

I will say Fenris did make the effort to hide his vindication the moment he saw the tears I was trying to hide. A room full of stifled emotion, and none of us happy about it.

I’m so sick of this bed.

19th Bloomingtide, storming again

Two dozen steps today, Anders hovering the whole time. Still, progress.

Heard from Carver--short letter, but good. He likes Stroud as a commander. Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t set him afire for taking Carver away so quickly.

Varric offered to host cards here instead of the Hanged Man since I’m housebound for the foreseeable future. Turned him down, though--with Isabela still off who-knows-where it already feels different enough. I can only handle so much change at one time.

28th Bloomingtide. Sunny, warming at last

I just realized I missed Summerday. Bethany’s favorite, naturally. I’ll go to the Chantry next week for her candles.

She’s been gone six years already. How in the world did that happen?

I wonder if Carver remembers that time she got us all in trouble for stealing pears, then innocent-eyed her way out of punishment after, leaving the two of us to do the milking before dawn for a month. I’ll write him tomorrow and ask.

3rd Justinian. Getting quite hot, I’m still mostly indoors and already wilting

Had a letter from Seneschal Bran today. Thought it was going to be a bill for damages--turns out they’re giving me a title and official recognition for the Arishok slaughter. Champion of Kirkwall, he’s calling it. As if advertising my apostitudity (?) to the entire noble caste of the city wasn’t bad enough, flaunting it in the Knight-Commander’s face will have me thrown in the Gallows’s bowels by Tuesday.

She already can’t stand people like me--unshackled and unapologetic--and this is going to make it so much worse. She looked upon me twice during the invasion and both times I thought I was going to shrivel into a husk from the animosity. Of course, the second time I was well on my way to dying, so it didn’t seem nearly as important, but still. Title aside, I was powerless enough before not to warrant her attention, even with Mother’s title. If this--Champion--thing goes through, I’ll be a threat. Not so easy to ignore that, even if I’d prefer to remain beneath her lofty notice. And yet...

There’s to be a ceremony in a month if I’m strong enough to stand for it. They underestimate me There’s also, according to the letter, going to be a ball with dancing and music afterwards. This whole thing sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, but I don’t see how I can turn it down without scorning the...I don’t know the word. Protection, maybe--the protection that the title will provide--not just for me, but for Carver and my friends. Especially Anders and Merrill, the more I think about it. Sheltering apostates is still a crime. Sebastian and Aveline skirt the edge of catastrophe close enough as it is. If Aveline lost the guard because Meredith took out her grudge against me, I think I’d walk right off one of the bluffs of the Wounded Coast into the sea and be done with it.

I don’t know what to do. I need to decide soon. I need to talk to Varric, I think.

In other less-distressing news, Merrill and I went out for tea together yesterday. We didn’t go far--there’s a tiny cafe that sells little biscuits right around the corner, and she made a surprisingly sturdy crutch for how slight she is. We had tea and cakes and these very hard little chunks of spiced bread you’re supposed to dip in your tea to soften first, but I didn’t discover that until I’d just about broken a tooth on the crust.

She’s been working on that mirror desperately. She sounds desperate when she speaks of it. Still, she’s willing to come out to things like this and she still goes to the Hanged Man every week, so I suppose I can’t worry too much. She certainly doesn’t like it when I do, anyway.

She did say one of the other families in the alienage let her help them with the vhenadahl last week. A little bit of paint touch-up and trimming some of the dead branches. Sometimes I’m overcome with wonder that something so lovely has lived so well in the city, despite everything working against survival.

The tree’s awfully pretty, too.

9th Justinian. Stormed again last night, rained so hard it knocked two of the Chantry’s trees over

Told Fenris he didn’t have to keep coming every day now that I’m well on my way to mending. He covered it well, but I saw the stark hurt that flashed across his face when I said it.

He doesn’t realize how much it’s killing me to have him here so often. I know what I wrote when I was incoherent on Anders’s potion. I meant it. I mean it now, as much as I wish I didn’t.

I was doing all right. I was, right up until today when he helped me stand from the sofa and let his arm linger around my waist, then snatched himself away with a grimace the instant I met his eyes. He moved so fast I almost fell.

I need time. That’s all. Just enough I can get a handle on this and stuff it back where it came from, where it doesn’t ache like a fist in my heart every time he moves just out of reach. We made it back into friendship before; I can conquer this and keep us there, I know it.

I will. I have to. His friendship is too important to me to lose over this. I just need time. Just a little more time, and then we’ll be back to where we were and he won’t have to flinch every time I come too close.

16th Justinian. Clear, stifling

He hasn’t come even once. I miss him so much I can’t stand myself.

22nd Justinian. Drizzling rain, lots of wind. Branches keep knocking against my window and startling me

Told him to come for weekly reading lessons if he wanted. It’s been over eight months since the last time we met.

I don’t think he needs much more help, and I don’t think that fact has escaped him either. He’s still coming day after tomorrow.

Maker, but I wish Isabela were here. I don’t know what I’m doing.

25th Justinian. Cool for the season, which means it’s still damned hot

Enough pining. I swear, that brew of Anders has made me more gloomy than Toby on bath day. I’m alive! That’s more than enough to be glad about. I faced a man four times my size in single combat and bested him with magic alone. Got run through like a spike nail through a pincushion, but I won with magic against a man-sized sword and shoulders made of mountains and the city saw it, and I, a mage, still walk free in Kirkwall despite the fact that the entire noble caste knows what I am.

I have friends here. Isn’t that glorious? A healer willing to work himself to the bone for the sake of my kidneys--a beautiful guardswoman who refuses to be ashamed of all this degenerate company. Sebastian, who understands when I need to hear the Chant and doesn’t mind the doing. Merrill, who brought me three hawk feathers just this morning because she said they made her think of me.

Dear Varric. He always remembers for me when it’s too hard to do myself. And Isabela, wherever she is--who else knows how to laugh in the worst of it? And--

And Fenris. Because I never woke alone.

I’m the luckiest apostate in Thedas. I won’t forget that again.

Later

Anders says I only have one kidney now. Hm. Good to know!

#fenris #hawke #fenris/hawke #dragon age #quark writes #hawke's journal tag #oh my goodness it's another one #what's happened to me who am i where did i go

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