#you had to be willfully avoiding information up to this point

[myfootyrthroat]

"Hmm, we in the modern pro-Palestinian movement may have dropped the ball on Syria."

Yeah, no shit. A lot of y'all seemed perfectly happy to watch war crimes against Palestinian refugees as long as it was Assad doing it.

[madsworld15]

You Can't Start a Fire Without a Spark Chapter 5: Brian (Part 2)

Here is the next snippet of my current WIP chapter of my Author/Artist AU. I am just going with what I could learn with a simple Google search in terms of the medical stuff. Anything else is whatever I wanted it to be. (Whether it makes sense or not) As always I want to thank my Discord pals for always encouraging me. Especially @winderlylandchime, who talked me through a couple of things for this section. Enjoy!

The next day, Brian was still struggling to keep things down. However, Dr. Stevenson informed him that now that they knew he had a major infection because he had caught the flu, they’d be able to treat it. According to his doctor, he’d be feeling back to normal in no time.

Brian picked at his blanket as his thoughts scoffed at Dr. Stevenson. What the fuck did he know? I haven’t felt “normal” in a long ass fucking time.

He knew that soon the nurse would come in for some blood. Dr. Stevenson wanted an accurate white blood cell count to formulate the next steps. But he already knew that things were bad. For one, his cough hadn’t gotten any better, and two, he felt worse than he probably should for someone at the tail end of chemo.

His chest scan last night had been exhausting and left Brian feeling claustrophobic, which was a new thing cancer had created in him. Dr. Stevenson said he’d go over those results during the game plan this afternoon.

He turned his head when the door opened. He expected to see the latest nurse, but instead, it was Lindsay. She was wearing a mask, hugging herself with her arms, and seemed extremely hesitant. Even without saying a word, Brian’s unease about how he had caught the flu was confirmed. Justin’s show.

“Hey, Peter?” Lindsay used her nickname for him. A dead giveaway to her guilt.

Brian broke his eye contact with her and stared out the window, which only showed the concrete of the building next door — the parking garage.

“Will you just look at me?” Lindsay begged.

Brian sighed. “You lied to me. You knew how much I restricted my contact with the outside world to avoid getting sick. And you lied.”

“Bri, I swear I didn’t lie. I told you Gus had a fever.” Lindsay turned on her innocent WASP act that Brian despised.

Anger flared up in Brian before he could control it.

“You left out the part where it was because he had the flu! The flu could KILL me, Lindsay! You know that. Then, despite what you knew, you pushed, and you pushed for me to attend Justin’s show. You knew that eventually, I’d be so annoyed I’d agree.”

“Which further proves my point that you’re in no state to handle Gus right now.” Lindsay’s concerned parent routine did nothing more than anger Brian further.

“Fuck you, Wendy! How dare you put the blame on a child. He is 8 years old. You knew better, and yet you withheld information just so you could manipulate me to do what you wanted.”

“That is not what happened, and you know it! Just because you feel shitty about breaking your no-contact rule for him doesn’t give you the right to dump it all on me!” Lindsay spat out just as the nurse walked in.

She looked from Brian to Lindsay, saw the tension, and started to back away. “I’ll come back later.”

“No, stay. She was just leaving.” Brian glared at Lindsay.

“Bri…” Lindsay reached out to try and change his mind.

“Go.” Brian was so mad he could spit fire. He’d known Lindsay’s manipulative ways for years. In fact, he’d learned how to perfectly balance everything so that she wouldn’t be a thorn in his side. But she’d never willfully put his health in danger before.

The nurse slowly approached his bed. Brian forced a smile in her direction. He put out his arm for her to draw blood through his IV injection point.

“I’m sorry. She’s…” Brian really didn’t know how to finish what he was saying.

“Don’t worry. As a nurse, I see many lovers quarrels. You aren’t the first, and you won’t be the last.” She smiled at him and gave his arm a warm pat. Brian let it slide.

Now that the fire had left him, Brian felt the exhaustion creeping back in.

“She’s not. I mean. I’m gay. She’s got a wife. We share a son.” Brian leaned back and closed his eyes.

“Well, I’ve seen plenty of families fight too.” Her voice was warm and reminded him of Debbie. Brian missed the red-headed woman.

“Now, you just rest and let the antibiotics work.” She reached out and gently squeezed his shoulder.

The last thought Brian had as he fell asleep once more was, I should call Deb.

—

A few hours later, the same nurse gently woke Brian up. She looked apologetic, but the minute his vision came into focus, Brian knew it was time to discuss the next steps.

“What’s up, Doc?” Brian attempted levity, but his anxiety still came through.

Dr. Stevenson tried to keep a neutral face, but Brian could tell there was some bad news coming. His doctor pulled up a chair to be on his level. Fuck. Never a good sign. Brian held his breath, waiting for the death sentence to come.

“Brian, based on your blood work and scans, your chances of remission have gone significantly down. It’s not impossible, but we are now looking at something closer to 40%.” Dr. Stevenson paused to see if Brian had any input. Brian just stared at the ceiling. His heart was pounding in his chest and ears.

“We’ll do another round of chemo, but this time, I suggest you remain admitted for the first few weeks to a month. Just to ensure you are completely healed from the infections caused by your run-in with the flu.”

Those weren’t the worst things Dr. Stevenson could’ve said, but it still didn’t ease Brian’s fears. His mind turned to Gus, who was still learning his way in the world and loved spending time with his dad. And of Linds and Mel, Mikey and Ben, Ted and Blake, and Emmett. And of Debbie, the mother he had always deserved. And finally, he thought of the skittish blond man who had captured his attention so quickly. Brian wasn’t ready to say goodbye to any of them, but a weight in his stomach told him he most likely would.

“Brian?” Dr. Stevenson pulled him out of his thoughts. Brian sighed, trying to hold back the few tears welling up in his eyes.

“Sounds good.” It was all he could manage at the moment. His mind was still an endless loop of video memories of his life.

Dr. Stevenson sighed and then stood up, aware that Brian wasn’t in a headspace to talk right now.

“Hey, Doc. What happened to my bag and my phone?” Brian turned his head as the doctor paused at the door and looked back.

“I’ll have Nurse Amy locate them for you.” And then he was gone.

Brian was alone once more, which he both loved and hated. As soon as Nurse Amy returned with his requested items in hand he pulled up his contacts in his phone. His finger hovered over Michael for a few moments, but then he scrolled back up to Debbie and pressed connect.

As the phone rang, Nurse Amy shuffled around his room, recording vitals and straightening some things up. Then, she placed a plate at his bedside, which contained some toast. She silently instructed him to eat. Brian sighed and then took a bit to get her to go away. And she did.

“Brian! It’s been far too long. How you feeling, honey?” Debbie’s exuberant voice finally picked up the call.

“Hey, ma. I’m in the hospital, actually. I caught the flu. Long story. I just wanted to hear your voice.” Brian smiled softly and leaned back against his pillows.

“Are you eating? You need to keep your strength up, baby.” Debbie’s voice wobbled over the line, and Brian knew she was seconds away from getting too emotional. “Can you have visitors? I’ll bring you some chicken soup.”

“Yeah, ma. I can have visitors. But only til 6.” Brian closed his eyes, willing his nausea to abate, and let the one bite of toast stay down.

“I just got off at the diner. I will come right over.” Debbie’s voice was back to normal and sounded like the Mama Bear he’d always secretly loved.

The thought of Justin came to the surface once more. “Hey, Deb. Have you seen Justin lately? The one you call Sunshine?”

“Brian.” Debbie gave an exasperated sigh. “He came in this morning for a muffin. He was extremely skittish like I haven’t seen him in years.”

She paused for a moment, “A few weeks ago, he told me that he’d started seeing his mom again. Told me that you’d encouraged him. I don’t care what anyone else says or what you manage to convince yourself. You are good for him. And I am willing to bet he’s good for you too.”

Brian gently sighed. He knew Justin had been freaked out by his vomiting and bleeding the other day. Fuck. Brian had never wanted to hurt the young artist. Ever since they started spending time together he saw how small Justin’s world was. He didn’t trust people, and yet he let Brian in. Now, Brian would be lucky if he ever saw Justin again.

“I just hope Jen gives Justin the book,” Brian muttered to himself, forgetting he was still on the phone.

“What’s that?” Debbie asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Brian muttered, realizing his mistake. “I’ll see you soon.”

They hung up, and Brian looked at the toast again. It was not what he had on his list of appealing food right now. If he was being completely honest, he was actually craving the soup that Debbie promised she would bring. If it was from the diner even better. He glanced at his bag in the chair next to his bed and considered getting some work done on his next novel, but exhaustion started to creep back in, and Brian let it.

The next time he was awake, Brian found Debbie sitting in the chair next to his bed, holding his hand while she watched some classic romance film on TV with the volume muted. She was wearing the required mask and had a bottle of Purell in her other hand. He sniffled and shifted to alert her that he was awake. Her eyes lit up when they fell on his.

“Oh, baby. You look so thin. Eat!” She fretted over him and shoved the still-warm soup into his hands.

Just then, Nurse Amy came in. She glanced at Brian and smiled. “Just take it slow. Your body is still trying to fight off the flu and an infection.”

Brian nodded and gently sipped a tiny bit of the chicken broth. He wasn’t sure if his stomach could handle chicken or noodles just yet. Debbie watched him without blinking. Brian paused his eating to reprimand her.

“Deb.” He attempted to get her attention. When the older woman looked up, he smiled, “Tell me all the Liberty Avenue news.”

“Well, they closed The Adonis and The Baths. Ted is doing great as the CFO of that company who stuck their neck out for him. Mikey and Ben are planning a big trip to Wyoming with Hunter and J.R. during Spring Break.” Deb smiled at him.

Nurse Amy looked sideways at the pair. Brian chuckled weakly. “Come on, Amy. I already told you I’m gay. Hearing about gay happenings shouldn’t be that shocking.”

Then he turned to Deb. “I’m glad they finally closed down those infested, disgusting establishments.” Her responding twinkle in her eye told him that she knew better, that Brian was actually sad to see places he frequented in his youth close up shop.

“As for Mikey and the professor, I’m glad they have the ability to travel. I know Ben loves it a lot. Plus, J.R. deserves to get out of Pittsburgh every once in a while.” Brian sighed, putting the soup off to the side after eating a few bites.

“You know, Emmett told me to give you love. He said, ‘I briefly saw him at that Gallery Show I catered a few days ago. But he didn’t stick around.’” Debbie gave Brian a discerning look. “That’s how you got sick, isn’t it?”

Brian bit his lip and stared at his hands for a moment. He knew he would never be able to get a lie past Debbie, but he also didn’t want her to pile onto the guilt he already felt.

“It was Justin’s biggest show, and I wasn’t going to go. I was just going to tell Linds I wanted to buy a painting of his. But Lindsay wouldn’t let up. She kept going on and on about how it would mean so much to him if I was there.” Brian took a deep breath, “So, despite my better judgment, I went. Not realizing that Gus had been sick with the flu within 24 hours of Lindsay hugging me. She failed to mention that in one of our many chats leading up to the show.”

“I wish you wouldn’t let her push you around and use Gus as both a weapon and a motivator.” Debbie patted Brian’s arm.

Her comment surprised him a bit. Debbie was always a strong advocate for a child’s right to feel a mother’s love. In fact, many times over the years, she sided with Lindsay over Brian in issues with Gus.

He looked at her confused, so she clarified. “I have always defended her, but the way she has dangled him in front of you like a pawn in her game has really come out in the last few years. Especially after you got sick the first time and changed your whole life perspective. She became jealous of Gus’ adoration for you.”

They both fell silent for a few more moments. Brian felt his frustration with the whole Lindsay situation bubble up once more. He wasn’t even looking at Debbie. Instead, his eyes were looking at the TV, but his mind was elsewhere. The exhaustion was taking hold of his body once more, but he forced himself to stay awake since Debbie was here.

“Brian, baby. I know there’s something else bothering you.” Debbie’s hand reached up and cradled his head, the way he figured a good mother would do to her child when they were sick. Not that Joan ever did.

Instead of speaking, Brian shook his head and scooted his body back down on the bed so that he was in a comfortable position to fall asleep once more.

“Mm tired.” He mumbled as his eyes fluttered shut again.

“You rest, baby. I’ll be right here as long as I can.” Debbie responded softly.

[ultrvmonogamy]

i agree that phrase may be too much of a generalization, some people can just be angry weird and bitter and make up things. especially on tumblr because most people on here have NO fucking lives. but from what i've seen it's been mostly true. on the other hand I have also gotten insane anon hate out of pure jealousy, so it's not impossible that some freak would be lying about you. i'll wait until i see some proof (if there is any.)

i'm sry that u've had to deal w insane anon hate too.

i dunno who has lives or not, but i do know that some of the ppl targeting me are willfully concocting an increasingly wide array of claims abt me and are acting out of pure malice. some others, i'm sure, are just towing the line and possibly think they're doing smth positive for the community. to my mind, the former is absolutely criminal (like waste of oxygen human being level), and the latter is at best ignorantly irresponsible.

i understand that many ppl feel that it's socially responsible to "take the accusations seriously" by further propagating them, but in my estimation to do so without even a single shred of evidence, let alone a preponderance of it is fully negligent. if what ur spreading is not true, then i believe ur complicit in the behavior u purport to condemn. i believe that to spread false claims is not only injurious to the person being slandered/libeled, but also is belittling to ppl who have truly been victimized, and further still makes it more difficult to believe similar claims in general, which ofc include true claims.

wrt your mention of jealousy, i do think that played in at some point in all this bullshit snowballing, but as far as i'm aware it is not at the root. i don't know for certain, but best as i can work it out i've concluded that a certain woman put herself in a position where she either 1) had to admit to her best friend that she'd made a hobby of doing something shameful, deceptive, dangerous to herself and others, and generally gross, or 2) avoid accountability in some way, which as happened was to present a bullshit version of reality that explained away the small part of it she'd inadvertently revealed to her friend.

that's partly conjecture (albeit informed conjecture), but it's the best i can make sense of it all based on what i know, and i think that given the circumstances the most obvious and convenient path for her was to claim that i had done the thing that she had actually done. for all i know someone who reads this on my blog is more aware of the motivations than i am, but what i do know is that i absolutely did not do the thing that i was originally told abt, and i absolutely have not done any of the numerous other things i've since seen myself accused of.

anyway, it started out w some calculated distortions that were reality adjacent but from there seems to have grown into some hellscape version of the telephone game, and at this point it seems to have picked up, like, a sociopathic clown parade throwing their clown grenades at me while circling me on their clown unicycles.

i realize this is still quite vague and abstract, and for several reasons i will likely continue to keep it that way unless faced w an absolute necessity to give concrete details.

fwiw i can tell you that the few ppl who i've shared concrete details with and who have seen some actual evidence all continue be mutuals who reblog from me and converse w me at least semi regularly, and this includes women for whatever that's worth as well. no one that i've shown evidence has blocked or unfollowed me.

obviously i can't verify that without disclosing them, and at this point i wouldn't even be willing to do that if they asked me to, bc this has become a total shitshow n the last thing i wanna do is put good ppl in harms way. if any of y'all are reading this tho and have trusted friends that you'd feel it'd be first and foremost safe but also worthwhile to vouch for me to, i'm def not gonna argue against that.

after the twisted vigilantism and malevolent buffoonery i've seen in the past couple of days, i'm far less inclined to share even vindicating details on a public forum, but if anyone who's got a well-established relationship of trust w me feels the need to know or see some things, feel free to reach out. assuming we've actually got that level of trust, my one contingency is that i'm not comfortable doing via any platform other than signal. it's not gonna happen tonight tho, bc i'm just fried at this point.

oh, but that only pertains to the thing that started all this last april or thereabouts. i've seen so much off the wall spurious shit thrown at me by now and, u know, my ability to prove things don't exist is heavily curtailed by the laws of reality.

anyway, i'm getting to a (probably far healthier) point where ppl can believe wtv the fuck they want abt me as far as i'm concerned. also tbh a bunch of ppl who have condemned me strike me as total hypocrites based on some of the ppl they happily reblog and shower w attention, so like those kinds of ppl can think what they want all the way to they're own self-destruction and make more space for the rest of us.

[serpentstole]

Can I ask what's wrong with Michael W Ford's books? I never read them but I've seen often people recommending them, so I'm curious. Thank you and have a nice day.

Thanks for the question! Sorry if this gets a little long, TL;DR is at the bottom but I've broken down some more specific examples in point form.

I'll preface this by saying that if people get something worthwhile from Michael W Ford's books, that's their business and I'm happy for them. However, there's a few things about his writing and him as a person that I don't really love and struggle to get behind. Most of the specific textual examples I give are from the Bible of the Adversary specifically, as it's one of his more famous books and the only one I personally have had the mental fortitude to page through so far.

- I'm immediately leery of anyone who's often described as a "visionary" or "luminary" on websites selling or listing their books, especially when I've gotten the feeling that it's just that his books are accessible and plentiful. Even among fans of authors like E. A. "Become A Living God" Koetting, the general opinion seems to be that his books lack a lot of consistency and are a bit poorly written. Can confirm for the Bible of the Adversary, at least. There's some parts of that thing that could have used a once-over by an editor.

- I try very hard not to use what happened to the Greater Church of Lucifer/GCoL against him. Another member of the community that I do still (loosely, infrequently) interact with was also involved, and while I sincerely wish they'd both more deeply researched the man they were signing up to run a very public and scrutinized church with, I think his turning into a scam artist who publicly converted to Christianity was enough punishment there. Likewise, I'm a bit uncomfortable with his past involvement with the Order of Nine Angels/ONA/O9A given the fact that they're a pack of murder advocating nazis, but apparently he left when he discovered that fact, so I try to give him the benefit of the doubt that he truly did distance himself from them immediately upon learning of their beliefs, as I don't know when these things became more widely known. However, both of these fumbles alongside how he presents himself and his books just don't sit well with me, as the most generous interpretation is that he was twice-misled in some pretty dangerous and harmful ways by those that are damaging to the public perception of Luciferianism, but still likes to be some figurehead of the Luciferian community. People make mistakes, and people can be misled, and people can learn from past experiences, but his track record is a bit upsetting for a supposed authority.

- His work includes pieces and ideas from occultists or practices that I tend to avoid in my own practice and study, such as Thelema and Crowley's writing as a whole, inspiration taken from the Temple of Set/Setian magic, Qlipoth (because it wouldn't be a Luciferian grimoire without pilfered Jewish mysticism), and forms of Gnosticism that embrace the idea of God as an evil demiurge (which i explained my discomfort with in my previous post). I'm also not a huge fan of his "all magic comes from within" approach (and find it hard to reconcile with his frequent use of Luciferian deities/spirits and demons), nor that he'll talk about Cain's role in "Luciferian grimoires" without actually naming any... though given how similar a piece of Lilith themed artwork he's done looks to Andrew Chumbley's illustration, I assume he means the sort of books the Cultus Sabbati was writing. I wish I still had the Ford version saved or could remember which of his books it's from, the side by side comparison is painful but without it I risk looking like I'm making things up.

- Heavy, heavy use of Lilith, which I don't love for reasons I outlined before. She mostly seems to appear whenever spooky lustful sex magick is being discussed, which is great, that's great.

- He also uses the Wiccan wheel of the year sprinkled in among his more Luciferian focused holy days, which is just really funny to me. Why are we celebrating Beltane, Michael? Why are we celebrating Imbolg? (Page 69)

- He likes to use a lot of "black magic" and "vampyre magic" stuff which tends to feel very sensationalized and over the top to me. I've seen discussions of vampiric magic I found very interesting, but so far his hasn't been one of them.

- He sometimes seems to conflate Lucifer with Samael which I really truly dislike, though it's admittedly not the most baffling or out of left field take I've seen.

- Ford at times seems to either willfully misrepresent or misunderstand information he's passing along. For example, in the Bible of the Adversary he says that Cain's name comes from "...root ‘Kanah’ which means to possess. This by itself presents the antinomian nature of his essence, while instead of sacrificing his most bountiful items to the Lord, he kept them for himself." As I understand it, discussion surrounding Cain's name possibly coming from the Hebrew word קנה (kana) lean more into it being the word for to get or to obtain, referencing Eve's declaration after his conception that she'd gotten a man from the Lord. I'm all for alternate interpretations, but it feels like needless edgy-fying to fit the narrative he's trying to present. (Quote from Page 58)

- He'll say some absolutely bonkers shit like "Abel in some Luciferian Lore is considered a lower pre-form of Cain, thus the sacrifice was not literal" with zero citations or references. Like sir what the fuck does that mean, what Lore, please give us the lore please. (Footnote, Page 59)

- His interpretation of the Watchers and the Book of Enoch is so insultingly bad that I won't even relay it here, but if I see one more person claim that an angel, demon, or spirit they want to distance from Christianity or Judaism is actually a Babylonian god I'm going to go feral.

- As I've hinted at above, it feels like he'll just cherry pick and regurgitate for no real purpose. A few spirits from other texts like the Lesser Key and the Grimoire Verum get mentioned for... mostly the set of names, it seems like, he just kind of lists them out of context.

TL;DR, Michael W Ford feels (to me at least) like someone who has picked out the more appealing and edgy occult trivia and magic he could find from a wide range of sources, recontextualized the parts that didn't appeal to him until they fit his aesthetic and purposes, and presented them as a workable entry point to the Luciferian religion and its potential magical systems that is all flash no substance... and then could barely polish the flash. I don't like that he's many people's first exposure to the concept of theistic Luciferianism, and I don't like how authoritatively he presents his jumbled works as what the religion is truly about when it's so broad a label. Again, if there is something that someone finds useful within his books I am very happy for them, but I have struggled to find anything I could point to that make them worth the read... even for me to investigate further keep critiquing.

I honestly do not know why so people recommend them, unless it's just that they're easy to buy, reasonably inexpensive, and specifically have the Luciferian label on them. If that's truly the case, those people are being lazy and uncritical in a way that doesn't speak well to their apparent Luciferian ideals.

[errorpeachy]

☾ Will He? ☽ 《Bakugo and Izuku X Reader》

Song: Will he - Joji

Angst?... Angst.

TW: Mentions of cheating.

Things had been difficult.

You stared at the boxes that littered your room floor, absentmindedly fiddling with the promise ring you wore on your left ring finger. You could probably sell it- it looked like it was worth a lot. It didn’t mean much to you now anyways. Sighing, you flopped back onto your unmade bed, goosebumps rising as you felt cold air waft through the AC vents in the ceiling.

It had been a long night. You moved everything out of what was once you and Bakugo’s apartment, purposely doing so while he was on patrol. It hurt a lot- you had been together with the blonde for a total of 5 years, living with him for three. In all honesty, you thought that you two were bound to get married at some point, as did all of your friends. You seemed to be the only one who could compliment his temper, even though it had calmed down throughout the years. Apparently, you were wrong.

It had gone on for two months. For two months, you excused his behavior. You excused his late night visits to the bar, thinking it was just hero work getting to him. When he came home late, you excused that too. You wrote off his immediate showers as him just being smelly from work. And when you walked over to hug him and he pushed you away, you let it go. You refused to think about why he smelled like perfume that wasn’t yours, and remained willfully ignorant. Of course, you knew deep down something was wrong. He no longer gave you the soft smiles he used to when you got excited over something. He held you when you slept, but you didn’t hear a word from him in the morning. No good mornings, no kisses, not even a grumble about how you’re too hot and you need to get off of him, nothing. The concern was eating you from the inside out, and you needed to know what was wrong.

And soon, you did.

“Hello! Thank you for calling Ground Zero’s hero agency, how may I help you?”

“Hello, it’s me.” You muttered softly, tapping your fingers against the granite counter of your kitchen. “Oh! Y/N! how are you?” The receptionist said cheerfully. You sighed, pushing your hair out of your face. “Not well. Listen, don’t go telling Katsuki I called, but I need to know something. Was he supposed to be off yesterday?” You asked, hand gripping the phone tightly. She paused for a second, and you could hear the clicking of her keyboard as she looked up his work schedule.

“Yes, it shows that he was off yesterday and never clocked in.”

You bit your lip, drawing blood on accident. “He wasn’t home yesterday until late.” You said quietly. She paused, before letting out a sigh. “Listen, I know it’s not right for me to keep this from you, but if you tell Mr. Bakugo that I gave you this information, I’ll get fired. So listen, he recently took on this new pro-hero that just debuted. Her name is Akemi. That is all I can tell you.” She said, before hanging up. You stood up straight before dialing the one person you knew could help.

“Hey, Izuku?”

Staring at his drink, Izuku remained concentrated before sighing. “Well, I don’t want to worry you, but those all sound like signs of cheating.” He said, causing you to choke on your food. When you had called Izuku and asked him to meet up at your favorite restaurant for lunch and some helpful advice, this wasn’t exactly what you expected.

“Cheat? Katsuki? Never.” You said, purposely avoiding the look Izuku gave you as you stuffed your mouth with more food. He sighed, running a hand through his green locks. “Look, I’ve known Kacchan for a very long time. I don’t ever think he’d cheat on you- at least, I don’t want to think about it. He was very focused on his hero career and becoming number one in high school, so the fact he managed to find space in his heart was a shock in and of itself. However-“ he stated, holding up a finger, “Kacchan is a very fast-paced, goal driven person, and because of the stuff that made him who he was growing up, I also know he’s very destructive when it comes to relationships. I mean, he bullied me throughout my life and even told you that you had to keep up with him if you wanted to be with him.” He said, taking a sip of his drink. You looked down at your hands, before sighing. “I know- but I just don’t understand why he’d do that. I mean, he’s too focused on his work, you know?” You said. Izuku shrugged. “Maybe he feels dissatisfied. It’s nothing to do with you, but maybe he feels like something’s missing and is trying to use other people to fill that gap.” He said. You leaned back, looking at him. “Well, then what do I do?” You asked

Izuku smiled. “I’m glad you asked, cause I wrote it down.”

The plan was simple. You were to go to the bar Bakugo visited and wait. If this Akemi girl showed up and they did anything, you were supposed to snap a picture and go home. When Izuku first suggested it, you looked at him like he was insane.

“So I’m supposed to stalk him like a crazy person?!” You shouted, watching as he sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck. “I mean, yeah.” He said, before yelping as you snatched his journal from him and hit him over the head.

“OW! Hey- cut that out!” He said, grabbing it from you, “I’m being serious! If you go, you’ll get the evidence you need. And if he doesn’t do anything, then you’ll be at ease.” He said, rubbing his head. You paused to think, sitting back in your chair. “Fine. I’ll do it.” You said, watching as Izuku gave you a determined smile.

That was how you ended up in this mess. You sat at a table far off in a corner, watching as Bakugo checked his watch. He’d been sitting alone for about thirty minutes now. Starting to relax, you got on social media before hearing the door to the bar open. You looked up, and felt goosebumps on your skin as you watched the person walk in.

The person in question was Akemi, who had walked over and sat down next to Bakugo. Your boyfriend. You watched as they started to talk, hands balling up into fists as you watched her giggle and touch his arm. “This bitch.” You muttered, feeling anger and sadness bubble up in your chest. What gave him the idea that it was okay to do this? You were never one to get upset about your significant others having certain friends, but this was just absurd. You watched them flirt and steal glances, becoming more and more upset. What was wrong with him? Why was he doing this?

Then they kissed.

You swore you could hear your heart shatter as their lips molded together. You felt tears hit your clothes as you started to cry. Snapping a picture, you quickly paid and got out of there as soon as possible. You didn’t want to see anymore.

You hastily made your way to your car, wiping your face as you dialed Izuku’s number. “Y/N?” “You were right, Izu. He’s cheating on me.” You said, sniffling as you got in and drove home. You could hear him move to grab his journal. “Okay, you can come stay with me until you find a new apartment. For now, go home and pack a bag. Wait there and confront him, then leave. When he’s on patrol I’ll have Mina and the others help you move out.” He said, writing things down. You nodded quietly, trying to swallow the knot in your throat as you walked into your apartment and began to pack your bags.

It was 2:45 AM when Bakugo got home. You had cried everything out at this point, and your eyes were now fixated on the TV. You tensed up as he walked in.

“Where were you.” You asked coldly, eyes not leaving the tv. He didn’t spare you a glance. “I was with Kirishima and the others.” He lied. You grit your teeth together. “You’re lying. I called Denki not long ago.” You said. It was true. You had called the whole bakusquad begging them to help you move, because you wouldn’t be able to do it by yourself before he got home from work tomorrow.

“He wasn’t there.” He said, setting his bag down. “Why are you so pissy? Did I do something?” He asked, finally looking at you. You inhaled, grabbing your phone.

“Who’s Akemi.”

He paused, watching as you turned to wait for his answer. Instantly, he got defensive. “She’s a coworker. I go to the bar with her sometimes after work.” He said. You nodded, before standing up. “Do you kiss her sometimes too?” You asked, causing him to glare at you. “What the fuck? No, I don’t.” He sneered, crossing his arms. “Do you think I’m cheating or something?” “I don’t think, I know you are Katsuki.” You muttered, pulling up the picture and showing him. He immediately reached for your phone. “Where the hell did you get that?!” He asked, trying to grab it out of your hands. You wrestled with him before tossing it out of reach. “Why does it matter? You’re fucking cheating on me Katsuki!” You shouted back at him. He shook his head. “She kissed me. I didn’t fucking like it Y/N, I pushed her off.” He said, causing you to get angrier. “You’re a fucking liar! I watched you kiss her back Katsuki!” You said. He growled. “You stalked me like a psychopath?!” “Yeah, and apparently I had to because you can’t even stay faithful!” You yelled, before grabbing your phone and making your way to your bags.

Bakugo followed you, watching as you slung them over your shoulders and grabbed your keys. “What the hell are you doing?” He asked. You turned to look at him.

“I’m leaving, Katsuki. Don’t bother contacting me.”

You arrived at Izuku’s door with tear stains on your face and bags full of your clothes. He rushed you inside, taking your bags as he sat you on the couch. “I ordered takeout. I got your favorite.” He said, handing you the box and breaking your chopsticks for you. You thanked him quietly before blinking.

“You remember my favorite takeout?” “Yeah! I thought you’d like it after what happened. I got ice cream too.” He said, blushing a little. You smiled softly. “I... thank you Izuku.” You muttered before turning on the TV and opening your box. He nodded, taking your bags to his spare bedroom. You sniffled, hearing your phone start to ring. Groaning, you set your food aside and grabbed it.

Boom boy💞

-where are you

You scoffed. Ironic of him to ask.

-None of your concern. Stop texting me.

-Y/N I’m sorry, please just come home and talk to me.

-No. I’ll be blocking you now.

You blocked all his social media accounts and his number before setting your phone aside, going back to eating your food. After a while, Izuku emerged holding two spoons and a pint of ice cream.

“Hey, are you alright?”

“Do I look alright? Hand me the ice cream.” You said, causing him to laugh and give you a spoon, popping the top open. You dug in, confiding in him as you ate the frozen treat.

“I just can’t believe he’d do something like this! Five years down the drain...” you muttered, sighing as you grabbed his remote. He nodded quietly, patting your head. “I know, I’m disappointed in him... but you’ll be alright. It sucks right now, but somebody will treat you better one day.” He said, smiling gently at you. Feeling your face heat up, you looked away. What was wrong with you?

“Hey Izu? I’m gonna go to bed.” You said, standing up abruptly and putting the spoon in the sink. He blinked before nodding. “Alright. Goodni-“ “Yeah, Goodnight!” You rushed, shutting the door to the guest bedroom and slumping down onto the floor.

What the hell are you gonna do now?

[aboveallarescuer]

No question, I just wanted to let you know that you & your metas/posts are so so SOO appreciate 🎉😊 you are such a blessing to the Dany fandom.🍾

Your metas are always so thoughtful & insightful, and the frequency with which you publish them, is astonishing & almost a tad scary. 😅

Anyway bless you 🤗💕

And not to mention how you always manages to remain polite, level-headed and respectful in discussions, whenever addressing a real person or talking about a character, yet unwavering & straight to the point. Very admirable 👏🏻 [ I envy you for that😬]

Thank you for sending these messages <333 I have a few mutuals who write much faster than I do, but I appreciate the compliment anyway lol. Especially the second one, because yesterday I was kind of sad thinking about how I probably helped to split the Dany fandom for being so vocal, particularly after that big fight last year...

I don't want to make it seem that the people I disagree with (the "neutrals", as I call them) never make interesting points or are "bad" people (I don't know them in real life and I don't think fandom is activism at all) or necessarily resent/hate Dany because none of these things would be true... So follow whoever you want and never feel like you're "betraying" your group because you don't owe anything to anyone here.

At the same time, though, I do get frustrated when I see that a lot of the "neutrals" mischaracterize Dany as arrogant and/or ruthless and/or hot-headed and/or obsessed with prophecies and/or susceptible to flattery and/or someone who doesn't think ahead and/or anything that actually defines Cersei and/or Stannis (both of whom are foils to Dany). I do get frustrated when I see them acting as if fighting for the Iron Throne is worse than fighting to retake Winterfell. That book!Dany is actually humble, modest, self-reflective, hard on herself, not susceptible to flattery and unwilling to use violence are all things that, to me, should be accepted as obvious facts just as much as Catelyn being driven by her loyalty to her family, Tyrion and Sam being intellectually driven, Davos and Brienne being good people, etc. And when I questioned them about these things, I was accused of dogmatism and intolerance at best and harassment, bullying, doxxing and stalking at worst. That crossed a line for me. And it makes no sense because they say that they're book only fans, but they're clearly still being influenced by the show's portrayal of Dany. I don't know about you, but I change my opinions when I'm presented with information I may have overlooked. That is why I always tend to bring up textual evidence (which most of them don't care to do). But what it seems to me is that the "neutrals" willfully ignore the evidence that Dany stans (and Arya stans too, because we've had similar issues over the years) provide instead of adjusting their views accordingly. Their attitude seems a lot more like mob mentality to me than what I do, imo. And considering how a lot of the people who made/agreed with the false accusations about me were also involved in this disgusting attack against the RL shippers, I can't help but look askance at them and their requests that people accept their takes (which are already the commonly accepted ones) and be nice to each other (because that seems more like telling us to keep quiet because they don't want to feel uncomfortable by having their views challenged, especially since they themselves often start fandom wank and are pretty nasty). So I avoid engaging with their content nowadays because of all these factors and I express my anger sometimes. But I also want to make it clear that it's a personal choice and anyone can follow whoever they want. I don't think it makes you "less" of a Dany fan (though that doesn't prevent you from judging her based on higher standards either because feelings don't always align with logical arguments).

Sorry for using these asks to get some things off my chest, I was feeling kind of guilty after I saw a post about how someone's appreciation for ASOIAF was ruined by their fandom experience (which is supposed to be fun). I hope people can see where I'm coming from. If what I say makes you dislike me, it's totally fine. But I won't stop defending Dany and presenting textual evidence when/if I have the time and energy to accurately characterize her because the double standards against her in this fandom are endless, go way beyond Jonsa hate and the claims that she's being set up to become a villain/Mad Queen and become really evident when you have a comprehensive knowledge of book!Dany's characterization and judge her actions based on the moral standards of her society.

[halfwaythereroyalwrites]

Trust in Me (FO!Poe Dameron x F!Reader Part 1)

Pairing: First Order!Poe Dameron x F!Reader

Warnings: Cursing. Capture. Bleeding. Age gap but all parties are of legal age.

Word count: 2.8K+ 

A/N: I can’t actually say much until the end, so have fun!

Part 2 + Masterlist

_____________________________________________

 Sleep eluded you again. Everyone else had long gone to return to their respective barracks and quarters. Even General Organa had turned in the towel, gently urging you to do the same which you kindly declined. You couldn’t bring yourself to rest after returning back to base. Paper cups littered your cluttered desk — some empty, some half-filled with forgotten caf gone cold. The sharp brightness of the screens and holograms were amplifying the dull throbbing at your temples, further reddening the whites of your eyes. Scribbled plans and maps marked with crimson x’s and scratches lined the edges of your desk. The mess of maps mingled with several pucks featuring holograms of lower-rank associates, but one hologram — rightfully placed in the middle of your desk —  stood out to you. Taunted you. Haunted you. Driven you to the point of fucking insanity.

    First Order General Poe Dameron.

    Since that dreaded meeting, his face had permanently etched itself into your mind. The first thing you think of in the morning. The last thing you fall asleep to at night. The mysterious man had settled in the shadows, carefully avoiding attention, while he ran one of the biggest military forces the galaxy had ever seen. General Organa had entrusted you with the daunting task of tracking the man’s movements…for a good reason. Based on your last interaction with the infamous general, he would serve to be a great asset to The Resistance.

    Lines of letters and cyphers had slowly morphed into an illegible jumble. You squeezed your eyes shut and pinched the bridge of your nose, willing the painful throbbing to go away. You leaned back against your chair; loud, satisfying cracks rang throughout the empty center. You continued to do small stretches in your chair to alleviate the stiffness that had settled into your joints. You paused, looking at your disaster of a workspace and listening to the humming of the monitors. Taking a deep breath, you got up from your seat and picked up all the cups that sat on your desk. You tossed the cups into a nearby bin, cleaned up your workspace, and walked out of command center. The air around you grew cooler as you stepped outside, relaxing the tension held in your shoulders. A wave of relief came over your mind when you had stepped into the darkness of the night, the soft light of the base adding to the mellow atmosphere your mind desperately needed. For a moment, you could almost forget there was a galactic war being fought. Or that a certain general has invaded every thought that had crossed your mind since you met.

    Your meeting with General Dameron had been…unorthodox…to say the least. There were several verified reports that a mole was in the First Order. Planning to defect soon after a year or so of secretly delivering information. They had sent names of lower-ranking associates in the First Order. The very associates whose holograms you have currently scattered on your desk. They had also sent locations and times of several battle ships that were successfully taken out by The Resistance fleet. After several thorough verification checks, General Organa personally sent you to meet with them to check their status and gather any additional intel. She gave you three pieces of information: a time, a location, and the phrase, “The sun is rather hot today, don’t you think?”

You flew by yourself to the designated planet and town, deeming it safe enough to be alone. You were told the mole would meet you at the marketplace which was strategically placed right outside the landing bay. “They’ll know who you are,” General Organa instructed. The marketplace was a perfect portrait of vibrant liveliness. Merchants calling out. The buzz of multiple people talking all at once and over each other. The sweet smell of food traveling through the air. Children were running around, playing, laughing — without a care in the galaxy. It was not long after you had stepped into the marketplace when merchants started calling for you to purchase their items.

“You there, young lady! How about a taste of the finest fruits in this system?!”

“Miss, I’ve never seen a beauty such as yourself! Come and do me the honor of trying on jewels that only you would be worthy of wearing!”

“Nuna legs! Get your deep fried nuna legs here!”

 You were absentmindedly perusing the marketplace, doing exactly as you were told. You often scanned the crowd for any signs of suspicious activity, but after an hour or so, you were starting to grow hungry. You made your way to the fruit stand, eyeing a couple particularly ripe jogans. After paying the merchant for one jogan, you heard the distinct sound of modulated voices.

“Everyone, show their identification now!”

Stormtroopers. Their party split up to search civilians, threatening those who could not produce their identification fast enough. One man stood in the middle, shielded by the soldiers that circled around him. You squinted your eyes at the figure clad in gray. He was slowly strolling through, scanning the crowd, seemingly oblivious to the upset his troopers were causing. Your eyes widened in realization at the infamous figure: General Poe Dameron. The man responsible for some of the most strategically successful invasions of the First Order. Although his face was known, very little was actually reported about the man’s history. While those in the First Order were quick to claim glory, General Dameron was infamous for maintaining a wall of silence. There were no reports of his origin. No reports of his time before the First Order. No reports of how he even got involved with them. Nothing. The man was a ghost. Until now.

You attempted to weave your way to the edge of the marketplace, trying to create an escape plan back to your ship. A keen stormtrooper halted you and grabbed you by the arm, demanding identification.

“Hey! Let go of me! Let go of me!” you pushed back against the soldier’s chest, but their grip only tightened. Stormtroopers stood at the ready, blasters pointed at you, ready to strike at their General’s orders. To your surprise, General Dameron ordered his troopers to stand down. With a subtle nod as a command, the stormtrooper cuffed your wrists together behind your back and placed a bag over your head. You were dragged, kicking and screaming, to an undisclosed location where you were kept in a dimly lit room, cuffed to an apparatus that kept your body upright, hands at your side, and ankles firmly against the metal surface. Your wrists were red and raw from struggling against the cuffs. Throat hoarse and parched from your loud pleas for help which everyone in the marketplace willfully ignored. There was only the faint sound of people talking in the distance. No unique distinctions anywhere in the room. Only one way out. Your head knocked back against the metal apparatus. There was no escaping this place.

Two stormtroopers and some captain entered the room, breaking the halfhearted lull your mind had gone into. The captain wasted no time interrogating you. Asking question after question, demanding to know your identity and affiliation.

“Are you Resistance?” You kept your head down, refusing to look these people in the eye. You felt the captain grab your jaw and forcefully tilted your head to meet his eyes. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” They yelled. You flinched at the spit that had flown out of their mouth from the sheer force of their voice. “Are you Resistance?!” You stayed silent.

Unfortunately, you found out the captain’s temper was quite short. After you met his repeated questions with silence, the captain struck your face. Hard. The slap had surprised you. You had not fully recovered before your face was knocked to the other side, harder and sharper. You felt something wet dripping down your cheek, mingling with the sweat beading on your face. The deep stinging brought tears to the backs of your eyes. You squeezed your eyes, careful not to contort your face too much and worsen the painful throbbing at your cheeks. The sound of the slaps were followed with a tense silence before one of the stormtrooper’s modulated voice broke through.

“Um…Captain…General Dameron gave specific instructions not to hurt her.”

“Shut up!” the captain hissed. “That coward won’t even come down here to do the dirty work himself.” Just then, the doors hissed open to reveal Dameron’s stoic face. He held his hands behind his back. His proud stance reflective of his high military rank. He slowly stepped into the room, the heavy thud of his boots increasing the tension in the air. You openly stared at him with furrowed brows and disdain clear on your face. He briefly took in your appearance, sweat dripping down both sides of your face. Your cheek was split open and dripping blood. Chest heaving up and down from the surprise strikes. General Dameron turned to the captain who stood at attention, avoiding the higher-ranking officials’ gaze.

“You were saying, Captain?” Dameron’s voice was lower than you’d expected. Careful. Calm. Calculated.

“Nothing, General.” the captain replied, still avoiding Dameron’s gaze.

“I believe I gave specific orders for her not to be harmed.” Dameron glanced at the two troopers who remained unmoving against the wall. His expression remained stoic, unchanged, as if this whole situation bored him. His steely gaze made its way back to the captain who stuttered out a response.

“She…uh..sh-she wasn’t complying, Sir…General… I th-thought…”

“That’s enough. Everyone. Out.” The curt command sent the captain and the two soldiers scurrying out. The doors hissed closed, and Dameron looked at your form. You stared at him, jaw clenched, determination evident. His measured steps made their way toward you, the light shining above you illuminating his face, his chiseled features becoming more prominent. You couldn’t help but to look at him in hidden awe. Most military men kept their faces clean of any facial hair, but this man did not. His beard was trimmed yet…bushy. Strands of gray peppered throughout revealed his older age. This coupled with his stern, expressionless demeanor added to the ominous aura he carried with him. The closer he got to you, the more you pressed your body against the hard surface you were cuffed against, trying to create some distance between the two of you. He studied your face, and in return, you did the same with him.

The space between his brows were furrowed. His forehead and temples had faint lines from where they undoubtedly often creased. His high cheekbones being hit by the light cast a shadow on the rest of his face. Although hidden by his beard, the outline of his jaw still stood out. He was…traditionally…handsome, you admitted begrudgingly. Your trance was broken when something softly touched your split-open cheek. Your head instinctively jerked away at the offending intrusion. He comforted you in return.

“Ssshhhh, it’s ok. It’s ok. I won’t hurt you.”

“That’s rich coming from the very reason I’m chained, General Dameron,” you scoffed. He paused at your response.

“So you know who I am?”

“The soldier said your name. Plus, it doesn’t take a genius to know who you are and what you’ve done.” you gritted through clenched teeth, lacing venom into your words. He merely blinked at you before continuing to clean up your cheek.

“Couldn’t have them getting suspicious.” Dameron muttered, dabbing at the blood with a black handkerchief.

“What the hell are you on about?” you growled at him, flexing against your restraints.

“It was too dangerous to meet you alone.” He caressed the side of your face. You yanked your head away from the warmth of his hand. He sighed and pocketed his handkerchief but made no movements to distance himself, staying mere inches away from you. “I’m sorry you were hurt, but this was the only way.”

“Only way to…what?” He can’t be. No, there was absolutely no way he was…

“The sun is rather hot today, don’t you think?” Dameron whispered.

“Bullshit,” you spat.

“Then, clever girl, how did I know where you would be? How did I know you were Resistance?”

“How do I know you’re not lying?” He considered your question. One-by-one, he started listing off names. The names of the lower-rank associates that were given to The Resistance in an effort to prove his validity. He also listed the battleships that had been attacked by The Resistance based on the tips he apparently gave. Despite the accurate information he gave you, you remained doubtful. “I still don’t believe you. I am chained up at Maker-knows-where with a First Order general. You have given me no reason to trust you.”

He sighed. “I can’t leave with you now. There’s still some loose ends that need tying. When I can leave, I will send you a time and a location. This is encrypted. It can’t be tracked.” You felt something placed in your jacket. He took one last look at you. Studying your face. He reached out and tilted your chin with his gloved fingers, locking his warm eyes with yours. “You know, my dear,…it’d be a shame…if the power went out in the next ten minutes. Your cuffs would be released, and you would be able to walk out this door. To your left, there would be an empty hallway that would be temporarily unguarded, giving you the perfect chance to escape. The marketplace is northeast of here.” He leaned in closer.

“It really would be a shame.”

His fingers traced the split skin on your cheek before clasping his hands behind his back. Dameron turned around and marched toward the doors. He paused before the doors opened. “I hope to see you again very soon.” You remained frozen, processing all the information he had given you. Your daze was broken by the room being flooded with darkness. The cuffs clinked open, and you unceremoniously fell to the ground with a thud. You quickly scrambled up, took a deep breath, and decided…you don’t really have much of a choice but to trust what he said. Either you stay here and possibly be tortured or killed or you try and escape during this very opportune time. You cautiously walked through the doors, looking left and right for any sign of the First Order. The hallways were deserted. You scuffled to the left and quickly searched for any door leading outside. After turning various unmarked hallways, you finally found a door that was unfortunately locked. Your blaster was taken from you therefore shooting your way out was not an option. You looked around for anything to break the keypad. On the right ceiling corner, you found a camera pointed in your direction. You stood frozen again, thinking your luck had run out. Then, the door opened, letting you out. You ran out to the marketplace, blending in with the bustle of locals shopping. When you deemed the coast clear, you  headed back to your ship. You flew to a nearby planet to lay low for a day or two to make sure you weren’t being tracked. You can never be too careful, especially when dealing with the First Order. After making sure there was no one on your trail, you returned home to the base on D’Qar.

You reported everything to General Organa: the mole’s identity, his plans on defecting, and his help in your escape. She immediately assigned you to track the General’s whereabouts, making sure The Resistance knew his every move. The task had proved to be daunting, for the man rarely made his presence known until it was too late. This was a smart move on his part. Deeply infuriating for you, but smart for him. This is why you sat here presently, exhausted from following the handsome general’s every move with little to no information. Chilled air and the quiet surroundings were doing wonders for your tightly-wound body. Fatigue was finally settling in. You looked down at your hand. You were clutching what General Dameron had placed into your pocket. A comlink and a scribbled note that read:

“Soon. -P”

You closed your eyes and took a few deep breaths. You got up from your position and was headed to your quarters for much needed sleep when a familiar high beep started coming from your hand. The comlink. First beep. Is he planning to defect now? Second beep. How could you be sure that it was actually him calling? Third beep. What if he could track you with this call? Fourth beep. You took a deep breath before answering the call.

“Hello?”

A familiar smooth voice answered.

“Taris, lower city in two days. I’ll call you with more information when the time comes.” Your breath hitched at the sound of his voice. “I’ll see you soon, clever girl.”

_____________________________________________

Part 2 + Masterlist

A/N: I hope you enjoyed it! I wanted to explore what would happen if Poe started out in the First Order. Let me know if you have any comments or want to be added to any of my taglists (General, Kilig Series, Trust in Me Series, or specific fandoms)!

Taglist: @multifandomlife22​ @peppermintvanillaa​

[consumedkings-archive]

WITCHING HOUR, a john seed/deputy fic.

chapter five: dark vibrations

word count: 11.4k

rating: m for now, rating will change in later chapters as things develop, tags will be updated accordingly.

warnings: body horror, hallucinations (?), mentions of self-harm, mentions of suicide. spooky scary activities ensue. elliot has an increasingly difficult time keeping a grasp on reality. we knew this was gonna happen, though!

notes: howdy! i hope y’all enjoy this. sometimes i go weeks without updating and sometimes i wait like, 4 days before manically writing an entire chapter. you know how it be like that sometimes. i was feeling a bit more inspired and felt like i finally hit a groove on where this story was going, which i think definitely helped, and i hope you all enjoy it!

thank you, as always, to everyone who reads, likes/comments, even if you just come into my dms with two nice words or write something nice in your tags; it really does make my whole night to see even one person enjoying anything i’ve made. <3

Cold morning light filtered in through the window, drenched in wedding-silk grays thanks to the wintery cloud-cover. Everything in the room looked to be placed with absolute intent and care; polished, porcelain-white decor in elaborate geometrics, gold accents, a king-sized bed with impeccably pressed sheets. Truthfully, John had thought for certain he’d come back into the house to be informed by Elliot’s statuesque mother that, in fact, she had rescinded her offer to let him stay and actually, he would need to depart immediately, lest the authorities be called.

He was glad that it hadn’t come to that, of course, because it would’ve been such a shame to have to dampen Scarlet’s opinion of her own daughter so quickly into their meeting.

Dropping his small bag of belongings—the manila folder packed full of information, including his own scribbled notes; the burner phone; a few quickly-packed clothes that had been meticulously cycled to avoid the most long-term wear—John paused as the heat in the house kicked on with a delicate whirr.

Everything in Scarlet Honeysett’s home seemed to be precisely the shape and color that she liked, with not a single thing out of place; and yet, as the heat kicked on, he was certain that he could hear the sound of sharp, hushed voices downstairs, a little ripple in the woman’s perfect, arcadian home scene.

It was good. It felt good, to be here. To have gotten the upper hand. So much of the past weeks he’d spent with Elliot had felt like he was slowly, violently spiraling out of control, but this? She was here, and she had to play by his rules for once, and—

And he’d wanted just one more second alone, with her. To watch the way her eyes flickered over his face, to drink in the way her chin tilted up in defiance but not unlike the way she used to do it when she was waiting for him to kiss her, the same lovely high-color in her spreading along her cheekbones and the same little spark in her gaze. Whether it was anger or allure was neither here nor there, anymore; with Elliot, they were interchangeable, a stepping stone one way or another, just the way it had always been with them.

Because John liked her anger. He liked her wrath. He wanted to put his hands on it, his mouth on it, break it into pieces and wring it out of her and put it back and do it all over again, while she said his name, his name, and not anyone else’s. God, she’d been so fucking close—so close, and he couldn have just had her if he really wanted to, grabbed a fistful of her hair and kissed her when the sting of her slap was still fresh on his face. She liked when he did that; kissed her, like he was starved for her. Because he was starved for her, and then she could knot her fingers into his shirt or dig her nails into his skin or whatever it was she wanted to make him desperate.

The sound of excited barking downstairs broke him out of his thoughts. John blinked, taking one last swift look-over of the immaculate room his mother-in-law had decided to put him up in before he nudged his bag beneath the bed and stepped out into the hallway.

To say old money would be almost an understatement. Surely, this house had to have some kind of historical significance; it was several stories, with one of those grand staircases that was wide going up, hit a landing, and then split to either side of the house. As he made his way down, he caught sight of the flicker of Scarlet’s silk robe in the kitchen; music drifted out of it, the same kind of hazy, older music that Elliot had turned on in her mother’s house back in Hope County.

“Stop moving,” Elliot was saying to Boomer, strapping him into a little reflective vest that sat on him like a saddle blanket. For a second, she didn’t notice his presence—or willfully ignored it; he couldn’t say for sure one way or another—and instead focused on the Heeler, rubbing his ears and kissing the bridge of his nose. A tiny little smile ticked the corners of her mouth, and he thought he heard her say, so handsome, best boy, yes you are.

Boomer’s attention snapped to John, now at the foot of the stairs. He let out one sharp, accusatory bark (could dogs sound accusatory, John wondered, or was that just Elliot getting to him?), and what little of his hackles were visible from out under the vest spiked up instantly.

“Good to see you too, beastie,” John greeted him, trying to ignore the way the hound’s low-pitched, reverberating growls made his skin crawl. Flashes of Boomer’s numerous and vicious takedowns of not only Eden’s Gate members but at least one member of the Family that had the misfortune of having chained the dog up darted across his memory, like a flipping through a photo album.

“Don’t talk to him,” Elliot snipped, cupping Boomer’s ears protectively. “I don’t need him getting the idea we’re friendly.”

John rolled his eyes. “More than friendly, I’d say.” His eyes darted over her, drinking in once against the shock of her appearance—red hair, so fucking red that every time he looked at her it was almost like staring at a stranger until he took in the rest, the freckles smattering her nose and the flush in her cheeks, cupid’s-bow lips that were glossed. Had he ever seen Elliot with more than river-soaked mascara on before?

The woman shot him a look, dry and unamused, coming to a stand. He asked, “Going for a walk?”

“Trying to,” she replied tartly, “but someone is evil enough that Boomer doesn’t trust them.”

“We’re pals,” John offered pleasantly. “Me and the beast. You know, were, anyway. He probably just needs to spend a little time with me.”

“Speaking from personal experience, more time makes you less palatable.”

“Let me come on the walk with you,” he tried again, letting her little barbs and jabs roll right off of him, water skating off of his feathers. At this point, he really quite enjoyed her venom; it was familiar. “I’m sure we’ve got plenty to catch up on.”

Elliot eyed him warily, eyes giving him a scathing once-over—eerily reminiscent of her mother’s own disdainful look, and now he thought, ah, yeah, that is where she gets it from, then—as her mouth twisted around whatever it was she wanted to say but wouldn’t let herself. Something too vicious for Scarlet to overhear, perhaps. The threats she’d made in the past had been wildly colorful, but each second that Ell spent considering her words more carefully rather than saying whatever it was she felt with her eyes darting to the kitchen was another second that John became more aware of how little Scarlet actually knew.

“Fine,” Elliot said at last, her eyes narrowing. “I suppose that we do. Mama, we’re leavin’.”

The little quirk of an accent at the end of her sentence made him swallow back a laugh. He’d barely heard that Georgia accent back in Hope County, but maybe spending time with her mother had reinspired it.

“Alright,” Scarlet said, drying her hands on a towel as she stood in the doorway. Her eyes glanced between them, inquisitive for a moment, before she said, “Be quick. Doctor’s appointment in an hour and a half.”

John tilted his head. “Oh? Baby check-in?”

“Can’t imagine what else it would be, Mr. Seed,” Scarlet idled. “Are you familiar with the process of pregnancy?”

“Not beyond the knowledge of a man, I’m afraid.”

“Well, allow me to educate you,” the blonde said, her voice light. “When a woman is carrying a baby, she has to make frequent visits to the doctor, to ensure that all is well. Can’t have anything going wrong with the baby, you know.”

John steadied the intake of breath so that it did not sound so abrupt. He would have done a double-take and thought perhaps she was just overbearing, and not attempting to insult him, were Elliot not smiling. Certainly, only her mother’s attempted insult of him could elicit such an expression out of her.

“Then my arrival was fortunately timed,” he announced. “I look forward to it.”

“And you’ll be sorely disappointed,” Elliot cut in, her humor fading. “You won’t be coming.”

Ah, yes. That’s why I don’t love her attitude. “That’s absurd,” he replied, incredulous. “It’s nearly six weeks, and I haven’t seen a single ultrasound of our baby.”

He was careful, this time, to keep it to our baby. He’d seen the way Elliot’s expression tightened when he’d said my baby, even though that’s what came so naturally to him now, being that they were hardly on the same team—but he’d seen it, that look in her eye, the way she’d squared her shoulders like she’d suddenly been ready to go at him.

Only one thing to do with a rabid dog, Jacob had said, not two days before they found Elliot drenched in another man’s blood in the woods.

John half-expected Scarlet to jump in, to say that it was the father’s right to be there; she was more traditional than Elliot, if her comment about wedlock or her insistence of him staying were anything to go by, but when he turned his gaze to her, the older woman’s expression was devoid of any sympathy. Typical of Honeysett women, he was coming to find.

“If she doesn’t want you there, then you won’t be there. I won’t have my daughter stressed out,” Scarlet told him. “Stress is bad for the baby. Surely that falls within the realm of what a man knows about babies, Mr. Seed?”

He pressed his mouth into a thin line. “Surely.”

“Good. Hour and a half, my beloved, do not be late.”

That a woman had become so capable of tacking the softness of my beloved onto something that verged on a threat was nearly beyond John—would have been, certainly, were he not accustomed to Isolde’s particular brand of venom that was not so unlike Scarlet Honeysett’s.

“I won’t,” Elliot promised. “Can you call the handyman? My TV’s been acting up lately. Turning on static and whatnot.”

“Fine,” Scarlet replied, waving her hand. “I’ll have them come out this afternoon.”

Elliot turned on her heel and opened the front door out into the frigid morning, letting Boomer dart out ahead of her and not waiting for him in the least. He fell into step beside her easily, shrugging into his coat halfway out the door as it clicked shut behind him; she trudged through the snow, passing the garbage can and opening the gate that led out into what had once been pastureland and towards the woods.

It was the same fence that she’d been standing at, early that morning, face lax and serene. If the return to the fence bothered her at all, it didn’t show on her face any more than her irritation at having him there.

“Your mother’s quite...” John’s voice trailed off. “Tall.”

“Mm.”

“Statuesque, even.”

“Mmhm.”

“I get the feeling she doesn’t like me that much.”

“Yes,” Elliot acquiesced, her tone dripping with something close to venomous amusement, “I’ve never seen her take so poorly to someone so quickly before.”

“I suppose I should be flattered.”

“You would be.”

A fourth of the way into the snowy pasture and Boomer was far ahead of them, leaping like a little speckled gazelle in drifts of snow. It was easy to forget that the dog had been ready to rip him to shreds just a little under an hour ago (and once more, more recently). Still, as they trudged through a path that it seemed Elliot had worn through a few times before, John let out a little puff of breath and glanced over at her.

For just one second, she wasn’t spitting any venom at him, but rather seemed to favor the act of pretending like he wasn’t there, which was a bit worse than having her fix her fury on him. Her gaze was focused forward, following Boomer’s little lines in the snow. Attention at all was one thing, but acting as though he didn’t exist?

John said, “So, Burke just got his autopsy reports back and dropped you off right here at home, huh?”

Elliot’s face had already gone pink from the cold, right on her nose and spreading through her cheeks. At his words, a new flush of color rose, a shade more vicious than the last, and her gaze slid to him. If looks could kill, he thought, that dreamy little spike of delight at her eyes on him going straight to his head. Look at you, my little Wrath. You’ve got the good girl mask on, but I know what your true face is.

He’d seen it. Kissed her when the blood was still in her mouth. Let her feed the monster inside of her when she told him to beg, when she dug her nails into his skin, when her breath hitched in her chest from the pressure of his knife blade against her sternum—not in pain, necessarily, but delight at that pain.

The scar had to still be there, of course. The reminder of its existence, swathed in the heavy winter fabrics she wore now, made his fingers itch. If he could just get his hands on her—get his mouth on her, if she would just stop being so obtuse—but he didn’t think he’d be so fond of her if she wasn’t.

“The same way the government probably drove you and your siblings back to the compound and dropped you off,” she replied at last, her voice tight, “isn’t that right?”

John flashed his teeth at her in a grin. “Very astute, hellcat.”

Her expression tightened at the moniker. She sucked her teeth, fixing her eyes forward again, shifting back into the strategy of being withholding of her attention rather than entertain him.

“Oh, come on,” he said, swinging around in front of her and stopping her single-minded journey across the pastureland. “You can’t say you didn’t miss me even a little bit, Ell.”

“I told you,” she replied tartly, “not to call me that.”

“Because it reminds you of what it was like when we’re together,” he agreed.

An exasperated noise came out of her. “Did you forget that I lied to you?”

“At the end, sure,” John said, eyes flickering over her face. “But I don’t think you’re so good a liar you could lie about all of the times you said please, or the way that you said my name, or—and I think you’ll recall I’ve insisted on this bit from the beginning—the undeniable connection that we’ve had since we met.”

“You are a fucking lunatic,” Elliot snapped, her face flushing red. “And don’t fucking talk about me like I’m—like I wasn’t there, I know what I—” She sucked in a sharp breath; lower, and more threatening, “I’m aware of what I said. Of what I did.”

“And you’re going to tell me that it was all fake?” he prompted, unwilling to let go of this little thread. Gripping, sliding through his fingers, but he wouldn’t be so quick to let it escape him now that he didn’t have to think about her mother pitching in an unwanted opinion. “That you lied the whole time and you don’t feel anything for me, that—”

“Of course it wasn’t fake,” she bit out. Her voice had gone venomous, sharp, unbridled in its timbre. “I’m not a fucking psychopath, John, I can’t fake loving someone like you can.”

John opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it. He hadn’t been expecting that. Sure, there was a part of him that was sure Elliot had her doubts about his intentions, otherwise she wouldn’t have fucked off to the middle of nowhere (nor turned them in), but—still?

“You think I—” He paused again, blinking. “You’re not that stupid.”

Her eyes narrowed. Everything about her stiffened, quite suddenly, like maybe she was bracing to take another swing at him. “You are fucking begging for a punch to the face.”

“I mean,” John began quickly, waving his hands a little, “that you surely don’t think that whole time I was just—”

Elliot made a disgusted sound and brushed past him, letting out a high whistle; the sound immediately drew a flurry of activity as a flock of birds when bursting from the treeline, followed closely behind by Boomer’s gray-and-black speckled form. John fell back into step with her, huffing out a breath of air. He was going to table that discussion for later—she was clearly still upset, still a little sore and tender from their departure, and that was fine. There were a lot of things at play concerning his wife’s mood, including but not limited to being pregnant.

So she did, he thought, glancing at her through the corner of his eyes. Love me. Back then, and maybe now, still.

“How have you been sleeping?” is what he said instead, when the moment had spread between them long enough for him to think that he was safe to speak again with incurring her wrath once more. Her lips pressed into a thin line.

“Fine,” she replied, her voice tight.

“Yeah?” he asked, keeping his tone conversational. Elliot blinked once, slow, clearly trying to temper herself. “I just remember what a restless sleeper you were, back home.”

He wanted to say, I saw you at three AM, twice, staring out your window and then walking out into the snow barefoot. I saw you sleepwalking, I know you aren’t sleeping well.

He wanted to say that, and he couldn’t, because if Elliot knew he’d been tailing her for a while she’d go berserk—pull the plug, self-destruct, take whatever loss she had to in order to fucking end him.

“I’m sleeping fine,” the redhead reiterated. For a second, she looked like she wanted to say something; her eyes flickered uneasily, like something was bothering her and she hadn’t been able to say it to anyone but maybe she wanted to, and maybe she could say it to him, but something in the treeline drew her attention away. They were about ten yards away, now, the low breeze skimming pine needles against each other as Boomer barked conversationally at the birds that had so rudely taken flight.

Elliot’s molars clicked, grinding together. Her lashes fluttered, and she sucked in a sharp little breath through her nose.

“Elliot?” John glanced at the trees, but that was all he saw—tall, dark pines, bunching together erratically through years of growth spurts and inevitable fellings. He turned his gaze back to his wife, gaze inquisitive. “What?”

“Don’t you—?” She stopped herself, and sucked in another sharp breath, and now John felt the concern spike sharp and hot in him, because when he reached up she didn’t even seem to register his movement; Elliot, the same woman who had snatched his wrist and threatened to snap it in half for having the audacity to ‘sneak up on her’ when he’d been in the middle of talking to her, completely transfixed on something that he couldn’t see.

“Elliot.” He tried something firmer this time, his hand coming up to sweep the strands of her hair away from her shoulder and neck. The gesture finally startled her out of wherever it was she had gone, yanked her back to reality.

Her shoulder bunched up to her jaw in an effort to deter his hand, swatting at him absently with her hand. “Don’t touch me.”

“Are you going to tell me where you were just now?” John asked, tilting his head inquisitively.

“I was here. Just thought I saw something in the trees,” she replied tightly, turning away from the treeline and clearing her throat. “Just birds.”

Just birds, she said, even though the birds had already taken off and the forest was otherwise still and serene. Behind her, Boomer whined before beginning to follow her back towards the house. Elliot moved with a newfound purpose, one that she had been distinctly lacking before.

His mouth pressed into a thin line. John turned his attention back to the trees, searching for anything—any tangle of branches of play of shadows that might read sinister or threatening.

Only the trees and their shadowy pines. He thought about that night he’d fished Elliot out of the Family’s grip, when she’d been so fucking drugged up to her gills that she’d balked at the sight of the treeline on their way out. I don’t think I can, she’d said then, her voice pitching high with the anxious vibrations of panic. John, I don’t think I can—

“John,” Elliot snapped from ahead of him, “are you coming, or are you just gonna stand there all fucking afternoon?”

He thought about the way Ase had grabbed her hand, blood and viscera coating Elliot like she’d become a tried-and-true Scream Queen. If he searched long enough, if he sat in the memory long enough—did Ase’s mouth open? Had she said something to Elliot? What had she said?

“John,” came the grinding demand, again, less patient than before. “As much as I would love to leave you to freeze to death for insinuating I’m stupid, mama would hate to have to deal with a corpse on her property and I’d never hear the end of it.”

“I missed our banter,” he replied, though the jest did not quite land the same way that it would have were he not so deep in his own thoughts. By the time he’d started walking in her direction, his back to the forest, something uneasy had settled just under his skin; the feeling of being watched, eyes on the back of his neck, anticipation prickling along like his spine.

The house loomed, polished and pristine, on the horizon; as they picked their way across the snowy field, Elliot puffing out breaths occasionally from the labor of it all, John tried to shake that pervasive feeling of dread that had settled over him.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Weyfield was just Weyfield, a small town not unlike Hope County, and maybe he was just jumpy from the way the Family had conducted their business, and maybe it was the same for Elliot, who had certainly been put through a different experience than he—but regardless:

The sooner they got out, the better.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Shouldn’t have agreed to let him drive me here.

“Have you been getting enough sleep?”

It was stupid. Stupid, I should have put my foot down, told him to fucking stay at the house and wait for me to come back.

“Elliot?”

She blinked, vision fuzzing and refocusing around the sterile white of the doctor’s office. Her abdomen was sticky, and the ultrasound machine had been turned off along with her shirt tugged back down. Like usual, Dr. Harding did not say anything about the gossamer-webbing of scars, but did pause upon first seeing them, as though she hadn’t seen them times before.

“Sorry?” Elliot said, the apology quirking up at the end in question. She sat up from the bed, the paper crinkling beneath her as she moved.

“I asked,” Harding reiterated, “have you been getting enough sleep?”

Elliot knew the answer. She felt the exhaustion souring in her mouth already, the way something spoiled when it went too long without attention. A sickness. She should say that she hadn’t been sleeping well at all, that she’d begun sleepwalking, that

(seeing things, I’m seeing things when I close my eyes and when I look in the dark treeline, I see faces, heads, people I don’t know but they feel familiar and their faces drop down in between the branches of trees on invisible silk threads and their terrible dark mouths open but they can’t scream)

she’d been feeling out of sorts, as of late. That seemed like a nice way to put it.

The dark images that had fluttered between the trees on her walk earlier that morning with John felt as real as any memory—and that wasn’t to say that her memories always felt real, because they didn’t. But the validity of this morning’s waking nightmare of floating heads drifting between tree-trunks, swinging loosely while John asked her how she’d been sleeping.

“Fine,” Elliot said after a moment, feeling a fresh wave of nausea come over her. “I think, um, maybe the stress about the baby is keeping me up at night.”

Harding regarded her for a moment. The severe sharpness of her dark hair pinned back did nothing to soften her expression—though the woman was hard-pressed to be cheerful, she, at the very least, never sugar-coated anything. “Have you been trying those breathing exercises before bed? And spending time at the stables, as I suggested?”

“I have,” she replied, which wasn’t entirely untrue—she was doing at least one of those things. “It’s just been a lot of—stress, is all. I’m sure it’ll get better once the holidays are over.”

“That can definitely help,” the woman agreed, nodding her head and typing a few loose notes into the computer. “If you find that you aren’t getting enough sleep—enough,” she continued, pointedly, “restful sleep, you let me know and we can figure out some next steps.”

Elliot nodded, coming to a stand; the sudden movement had her head rushing, and she for a second she thought again of the floating heads, swaying with the breeze through the pine boughs.

“I’ve been sleep-walking,” she blurted out impulsively, her doctor’s gaze turning quizzically towards her. “I mean—um, just twice.”

“Do you have a history of it?”

“No,” Elliot began, “but I’ve always been a restless sleeper.”

“It’s not uncommon for sleepwalking to increase with pregnancy, Miss Honeysett,” the doctor replied, her voice even-keel. “It sounds like you’re under quite a bit of pressure, as well. I would suggest trying something mild—an over-the-counter sleep aid would be fine. Unisom is a typical one. Try half of one first, and see how it makes you feel.”

“Okay,” she murmured, sliding her coat back on. Something that was less heavy-duty than the pills her mother had left for her might be good. “Are there any—symptoms? To sleeping pills?”

The doctor adjusted the glasses on her nose, regarding her for a long moment. “Some adverse side-effects, on occasion. Usually with stronger, prescription sleep aids, you could have worsening anxiety and depression, day-time drowsiness. That kind of thing.”

So, no hallucinations, then. No sleepwalking, no lost time, no...

“Are you having other symptoms?” Harding asked.

You’ll think I’m crazy, Elliot thought, you’ll think I’m fucking nuts if I tell you about my dream with the television, and Joey’s body, and walking out nearly to the treeline in my sleep clothes. You’ll think I’m fucking nuts and I’ll have to be committed.

So Elliot said, “No, just curious,” and Dr. Harding hummed as she scribbled the name of the sleep aid onto a sticky note for Elliot to take out with her.

“You have a healthy baby, Miss Honeysett. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?” The brunette gestured for Elliot to head out the door, walking with her back up the hallway that led to the front lobby once again. “Next appointment we can find out the gender, if you’d like.”

“Oh,” Elliot said, surprised. Was it that soon already? Had it already been that long of being—like this? With child? She swallowed, pleasant little flutters in her chest. It was the first time that she’d felt something other than dread concerning the baby. Well, first time, sans John’s annoying little assertion about his claim. Why had that bothered her so much?

“You can decide to keep it a surprise,” Dr. Harding added, sound a little amused. “Think about it, and in the meantime, get some rest. Half a pill to start, remember.”

“Will do, thank you.”

She waded through the small collection of people in the lobby and out onto the street. Something strange was humming inside of her—it was sad, she realized, with a little spike of panic. She felt mournful. So fast, and so soon, she would figure out the baby’s gender, and suddenly the baby would be all the more real and she’d have to start thinking about names, she couldn’t have a baby without a name, and how was she supposed to pick a name? How was she supposed to decide something a real human being was going to be saddled with, forever?

Was the baby a Seed? Or a Honeysett?

Which one was she?

“What’re you doing, just standing out here? You’ll freeze.” John’s voice broke her out of her thoughts, shaking her back to reality again. He must have seen her standing there, glassy-eyed in the middle of the sidewalk, from where he’d been waiting—perhaps, if she was lucky, even suffering over the fact that he hadn’t been allowed into the doctor’s appointment—and come out. He’d kicked up a big enough fuss about not getting to come in that she’d said, fine, you can fucking drive me there, but that’s it, and true to his word John hadn’t pressed the matter any further than that.

Even though he wanted to. She could tell he wanted to, the second they had parked on the main street. She could tell he wanted to say, so, maybe I do come in, hm? What do you say to that? But he hadn’t. And that was...something.

Fuck, she needed to stay focused; she couldn’t keep letting her mind wander like that. Twice in less than an hour?

“I was just—thinking,” Elliot replied, feeling exhausted already. John’s brows furrowed at the center of his forehead, and she sighed. “Stop looking at me like that.”

He arched a dark brow loftily. “Like what?”

“Like you fucking care,” she snapped.

“Contrary to what you might believe concerning my feelings for you,” John quipped, his voice tart, “I do have every reason to be invested in the well-being of our baby.”

She thought to reiterate again that the baby was, in fact, hers, and not any part his, as she was doing all the work and John had done nothing to endear himself as an acceptable father-figure, but she was too tired. Something about the doctor’s office and the way she’d had to dodge the truth of how she’d been feeling left her empty, scooped out her insides like she was a Jack-O’-Lantern and left her floating, aimless.

“Ell,” he began. His voice had pitched lower, now, and his hand reached up; she saw it move in the corner of her vision and something inside her said, yes yes yes, this is what we want, we remember you, we know you. He twisted a loose curl around his finger, letting it smooth out against her shoulder, the corner of his mouth ticking upward when she absently batted his hand away. “Tell me about the appointment. Did everything go well?”

“The baby is fine,” she told him, and then sighed. “I mean—healthy. The baby is healthy. The doctor wants me to pick up an over-the-counter sleep aid, so we’ll need to stop at the store on the way home.”

“I thought you were sleeping fine?” John prompted. He sounded sly. His was a gotcha tone, the way he got when he thought he’d walked a particularly fine circle through the holes in what she chose to tell him or not. Elliot’s expression flattened. She ignored the way that he was looking at her—hungryhungryhungry, always greedy and never, never content with what he had—and fixed her eyes on the passing traffic behind him.

She said, “Just when you’re being somewhat tolerable, you have to go and ruin it.”

“If it’s intolerable for me to point out when you’re withholding information from me about your health,” he demurred, “then I’d prefer intolerable.”

“I cannot believe that I have to say this to you,” Elliot bit out, the sudden spike of irritation flaring hot and violence in her chest, “but I don’t fucking owe you anything. I don’t owe you the truth, or an explanation, and quite frankly, the fact that I allowed you to even chauffeur me to this fucking appointment is a sign that I’m being incredibly generous with you—far more generous than what you deserve.”

John’s teeth flashed in a grin. Before, back in Hope County, the venom had bothered him—he’d hated it, frowned and fought back with a little poison of his own, despised that he had to work so hard to get to the nitty-gritty underneath. But he had once, and perhaps now that he had known her, it only thrilled him.

How frustrating.

“Everything I did,” he said, lowering his voice as he closed some of the small distance between them now, “whether you believe me or not, was for us—”

“Ugh.”

“—and I might have gotten a little heated,” John continued, and this time when he reached up again Elliot’s mouth twisted into a grimace and she tilted her face away, don’t say it don’t say it don’t you fucking say it fuck you fuck you fuck you, “back at the ranch, but I meant it when I said that I l—”

“Honeysett!”

It was Via. Her greeting immediately cut off John’s words, effectively driving a wedge between their metaphorical—and physical—closeness. Snapped her out of the magic of his cologne and his voice and his hand coming up to her shoulder with its grounding weight.

“Missed you at the barn today,” the blonde chirped, cheery as she approached, hands tucked into her fluffy parka pockets. Her eyes flickered over to John, inquisitive. “Friend?”

And then Via turned her eyes back to Elliot, waiting expectantly. It struck her quite suddenly that Sylvia was checking—that despite the kindness and warmth in her voice, she was giving Elliot the opportunity to escape, to wave a red flag and ask for help. She said friend?, and what she meant was, is this man bothering you?, and it made a fuzzy warmth spread right through Elliot’s chest, uncomfortable in the softness is inspired in her.

“Hey, Via, this is...” How best to proceed? How to explain, this man is the father of my baby—which, by the way, I’m pregnant—and also technically we are legally married, oh and also he’s supposed to be in Federal custody right now but he isn’t, somehow, but it’s fine, we’re all good? “...my...John.”

Sylvia eyed her for a moment, sticking out a gloved hand. “Howdy, Elliot’s John. I’m Sylvia.”

John was clearly trying not to have the biggest shit-eating grin on his face as he shook Via’s hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Sylvia,” he replied pleasantly, once again reminding Elliot that the man was a tried-and-true practiced liar and could slip a perfect face on at any time. The knowledge was almost enticing, to know that she’d seen him without the masquerade, more than once.

It made, in hindsight, reflecting back on that moment he’d come unraveled at the ranch—No way, baby, I’m fucking it for you—have a different light. She had done that to him.

Good.

“Y’all busy?” Sylvia asked, blissfully not prying any further for an elaboration on what the nature of their relationship was. “I was just about to meet Wyatt at the Wild Rose. It ain’t trivia night, but they do have a live band playing tonight that’s supposed to be good.”

“Oh,” Elliot said faintly, “I don’t think—”

“That sounds excellent!” John interrupted. “I’ve barely seen anything of Weyfield. What do you say, Elliot?”

I say you can eat shit, she thought, but Sylvia was watching her closely—trying to make sure everything was okay, she supposed, considering Elliot had said nothing of John since they’d become friends. She took in a little breath and looked at the blonde, giving a small smile.

“No harm in a little time out of the house,” she agreed after a moment. “I’m starving, anyway.”

She wasn’t hungry in the least. The sticky note with the doctor’s suggested sleep aid was crumple in her pocket, and a little sweaty from the way she’d been clutching it, but somehow the idea of returning back to the house only seemed to fill her with more dread.

The tv, buzzing static, dull and thrumming in the back of her head, in the roots of her molars. HAVE YOU BEEN HAVING STRANGE DREAMS? And the heads, twisting and turning in the breeze, their silk-spun puppet threads invisible, their mouths swinging open as they try to scream.

HAVE YOU BEEN HAVING STRANGE DREAMS?

“Well, can’t have you starvin’,” Sylvia said amusedly, looping her arm through Elliot’s own and beginning to walk. “You’re not keeping my girl well-fed, Mister John?”

“Trying my hardest,” John replied, his gaze sly, “but she can be a bit ornery.”

“Hm, that does sound like her. Where are you visitin’ from, anyway?”

As they chattered, over her, John on one side and Sylvia on the other, Elliot got the distinct impression that her friend was quietly, politely fishing for information without putting Elliot under the stress of it.

HAVE YOU

Snow underfoot. The forest breathing, expanding, swelling because it holds some great, dark beast just waiting for her to get close enough.

BEEN HAVING

(Itwaitsforyouitwaitsforusallanditwillhaveyou)

STRANGE

“Careful,” John cautioned, reaching for the door with all of the gentlemanly nature of a man not possessed by the devil to hunt her down across states, “it’s slick.”

He opened the door into the Wild Rose, the sweep of warm air rushing over her a pleasant shock to her system that managed to draw her back to reality. Sylvia nudged her inside, effectively planting herself between Elliot and John as they moved single-file into the crowded bar.

She was tired, and having nightmares, and once she finally got some sleep she would feel a lot better about everything. All she needed was some sleep. And in the meantime, try to enjoy her time with her friends as best she could.

Get some sleep. Feel better in the morning. Burke’s old mantra popped up in her head, running through the worn grooves that were a sad, bittersweet sort of comfort to her now; the second you think you can’t anymore, you keep going anyway. Dig, dig, dig, until her fingers were dirt-packed and bloody, as deep as she fucking needed to go to keep moving, because it wasn’t just about her anymore.

Get some sleep.

Feel better in the morning.

Sylvia had drifted out from their little formation to make her way to the booth they had recently staked out as their own, where Wyatt already sat waiting and waving for them. John planted his hands on her shoulders, squeezing and lowering his mouth to her ear. “What do you want to drink?”

“You’re acting awfully domestic for someone who should be in Federal custody,” Elliot replied lowly, looking at him over her shoulder just in time to see him flash a smile that was all teeth.

“C’mon, hellcat,” and he all but purred the words at her, making her skin prickle in a type of anticipation that wasn’t purely dread. Traitorous, treacherous body. “You can at least play at liking me while your friends are around.”

“Iced tea.” She shrugged, disembarking his hands from her shoulders. “No lemon. A lot of ice. Think you can swing it without, I don’t know, lying halfway to Hell on your way there, Slick?”

“Anything,” he replied, pitching his voice even lower amidst the din of the bar, “for my lovely wife.”

Elliot’s head snapped around, ready to grab a fistful of his shirt and remind him to watch his fucking mouth, but he’d already started his journey to meander through the crowd and reach the bar on his little fetch quest.

Fucker, she thought, even when her stomach twisted with something other than vicious disdain. John had only been here for a day and was already too comfortable taking liberties; she’d have to make sure that got nipped in the bud before he got any funny ideas about his own personal redemption arc.

It would have been nice, to just be able to turn off any and all feelings whenever she wanted. But she couldn’t, and that meant she’d have to do the next best thing:

Get John the fuck away from her.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Eden’s Gate did not make a good first impression. Eden’s Gate did not even make a good second or third impression; in fact, Isolde had come to the conclusion that Joseph’s little compound was incapable of making any impression that didn’t fill the observer with a sense of despair. Every time she stepped out of the little building Jacob had set her up in, she was overwhelmed with disgust—eyes followed her, but none of them held anything beyond a dull spark of interest, nearly smothered by what seemed to have been a full-body beat down by the other cult.

The other cult, she constantly had to remind herself, because that’s what Eden’s Gate was. A cult.

A few miserable days at the hands of Montana’s coldest winter by record had her in a foul mood. The snowfall seemed inevitable, like it wouldn't ever stop, and the amount of times there had been paths shoveled between buildings—all leading to the chapel—were equally endless. Isolde couldn’t imagine coming to fucking Montana for fun, let alone for work, and yet she was somehow here for the latter and not the former. Distinctly, painfully lacking in fun.

It didn’t help that Joseph was insufferable. It didn’t help that every time he fixed his eyes on her, she felt an uncomfortable heat dripping down her spine like some kind of molten IV, like they hadn’t left on the worst of terms. Like she hadn’t told him to get the fuck out of her loft, like she hadn’t thrown an engagement ring on the floor like it was poison.

That was a time of her life that she had the distinct desire to not revisit, not even once, and yet in his presence—she found it nearly impossible to ignore. Joseph seemed to take a special, muted pleasure in making her hackles raise, and at least that hadn’t changed about him.

“Sol!”

Jacob called to her from halfway down the compound’s yard, a truck idling beside him. She stopped her trek back to her little hovel and looked at him, arms crossing over her chest.

“You wanna get out for a little?” He inclined his head toward the truck. “I’ve got some errands to run.”

“What kind of errands do the Collapse dictate?” she asked.

“The important variety.”

“Hm.”

She didn’t elaborate on that any further, and Jacob waited only one heartbeat before he reached for the driver’s side door and opened it, slowly.

“Going once—”

“I am not a child, Jacob.”

“—going twice—”

Fuck, did she want to get out.

“Fine,” Isolde snapped, “but bring that truck here. I’m not hiking through a snowdrift to get to you.”

Jacob, sounding quite pleased with himself, replied, “I thought you weren’t a child?”

He seemed moved enough by the dramatic eyeroll to oblige her, and if he found it annoying, it didn’t show; enough so, at least, that Isolde was able to clamber into the passenger side of the truck once he pulled it around, tapping the snow off of her shoes before pulling herself in.

“Thank you,” she huffed, shutting the door and rubbing her fingers to circulate the blood again. “This weather’s a bit abnormal, don’t you think?”

“Not anything out of the ordinary for this time of year, no,” Jacob replied. He nudged the windshield wipers on, plowing a thin layer of snow that had already begun to accumulate off of the window before starting to pull out of the compound. “I think you’re just not suited to the snow.”

“Could have told you that myself,” Isolde snipped. “I’m a hot-blooded creature.”

Jacob made a noise, something like an mm, a place between agreement without incriminating himself by agreeing too fervently or elaborately. She glanced over at him through the corners of her eyes as they turned onto the highway. In the comfortable silence that elapsed between them, Isolde settled back against the seat of the truck and tried to appreciate being out from the stifling dread of the compound.

It did seem to her that Joseph was markedly different than he had been, before. In the few instances in the last couple of days where he hadn’t been picking a fight with her, it almost felt normal—but of course, he was doing it in his own way, this pot-stirring, this instigating. With politeness. With kindness. By remaining completely unrattled by anything she said to him, every, any critique, so self-assured in his righteousness that not even reason could make him look twice at the state of his congregation.

Then, he had always been that way. Righteous. Assured. She had found it appealing, once—she liked a man with confidence—but now she found it—

Equal parts frustrating and attractive. Objectively, of course. Not anything that she felt herself.

“Trying to account for the bodies of the Family against the ones we know we saw before,” Jacob explained, when she had been quiet long enough to let him sort out his thoughts. “Seems like they started killing themselves, in pairs, once the two leaders were done with. I sent out a couple of scouts and they radio’d back some locations, but they’ve gone quiet for a while.”

“Dedication,” Isolde murmured, digging the nail of her thumb into her lower lip. “How dreadful.”

“The dedication, or the act?”

“Both. Imagine being so bound to something or someone.”

Jacob’s mouth twisted in a wry smile, and he brought the truck to a crawl. Two bodies, swallowed by snow nearly up to their waists, sat propped against the cliff face. He fished a pad of paper and a near-worn out pencil out of the center console of the truck and held them out to her.

“Mark it down, Sol.” When she blinked at him, he continued, “What, you thought you were gonna get out and not help me?”

“Well, I was hoping.”

She sighed, taking the pad and pencil—a glorified secretary is what I am, she thought bitterly—and marked two tally marks down. From where the car was stopped, she could see that the arms of the corpses came together, and though it was buried in snow, she had to think that beneath the white frost their hands were intertwined.

They went like that for a while; Jacob would drive to a spot, have her mark down the amount of bodies, and then go on. By the time they had reached Fall’s End, Isolde had counted nearly twenty dead bodies. As they rolled into the far end of town, Isolde realized very quickly that most of the buildings were blackened, and when she rolled down her window, the stale scent of charcoal still sat in the air.

“What happened here?” she asked, grimacing and scrunching up her nose.

“Dunno,” Jacob replied tightly. “Someone with an agenda.”

Isolde’s gaze snapped to him, to try and wring any information out of his expression, but true to his nature Jacob remained completely unreadable. It wasn’t until they had gotten to what appeared to have once been a bar and tallied up the bodies there that Jacob threw the truck into park.

“What in the fuck?” he muttered, eyes fixed forward. When Sol followed his gaze, she realized that it was fixed on someone—someone running towards them, frantically, nearly falling over themselves in the snow.

“Is that one of yours?” she asked. “Jacob?”

“Shh.”

He had busied himself fishing around in the back seat, and as he did Isolde squinted, trying to get a better look at what was going on. The man running definitely had to be Eden’s Gate—he had the big red emblem on his shirt, but he wasn’t wearing any coat, and—

And there were others.

“Jacob,” Isolde said, “there are more.”

“What?”

“Bodies,” she managed out, “there are more bodies.”

The snow wasn’t so deep on the roads that she couldn’t see the width of a body, and she did—see it, that is, tousled dark locks reflecting wet and sticky in the overcast, late-afternoon light. The man running was waving his arms and yelling for help, and then he fell over one of the bodies, fell to his hands and knees over the body of someone else, and made a sound kind of like anguish.

Jacob finally managed to pull out what he’d been looking for—a pair of binoculars—and immediately lifted them to his face.

“Shit,” he said. “Fuck, they’re ours.”

“All of them?” Isolde demanded. “They’re all—”

“Yes,” he bit out, opening the driver’s door and grabbing the rifle from the back seat. “They’re all ours. Isolde, stay in—”

Jacob’s words were cut off by the violent crack of a gunshot. For a split second, Isolde saw nothing; in the space between heartbeats, sluggish from panic, she saw the arterial spray coming from the back of the running man’s body before he hit the ground, screaming.

He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dead, he was still crawling, dragging himself through the snow, leaving a smear of red behind him, and that’s when Isolde saw them.

Jacob had stopped moving as well. The person at the far end of the main road leading through Fall’s End had yet to shoulder their weapon. From here, Isolde could see that she was tall—short-cropped, blonde hair, swathed in dark clothes, but beyond that the features were near impossible to make out.

“Close the door,” Isolde hissed, not moving, her instincts screaming to duck but the fear that sudden movement would draw attention prevailing. “Jacob, close the fucking door.”

The eerily satisfying click-click of what could only be the bolt-action rifle in the hunter’s hands clattered around in her head. The rifle was returned to their shoulders, brought up level, and then fired again.

Out of pure instinct, Isolde flinched—but once again, the bullet was aimed not at them, but at the man already crawling in the snow. The sound of the gunshot, and the subsequent bullet-on-bone impact, was enough to make her stomach churn; now, at least, the man lay slumped in the snow, one of the many bodies that seemed to have been the unfortunate pull-and-fire clay birds for the stranger.

“Who,” Isolde whispered furiously, as Jacob carefully put the truck into drive without letting it move forward at all first, “Jacob, who the fuck is that?”

The redhead’s expression was unforgivingly tight, pulling taut with it the scars and mottling of his skin visible outside of his beard. He wasn’t looking at her, but rather kept his eyes fixed forward, as he closed the driver’s side door.

“Fifteen men,” he ground out between his teeth, “that’s fifteen fucking men I sent out here to figure out the body count.”

The stranger finally lowered their rifle, apparently satisfied with their work. This far away, it was hard to tell, but Isolde got the distinct impression that they were being watched, looked at now, where before the attention had been elsewhere.

And then it was confirmed, because the stranger lifted one gloved hand and pressed her index and middle fingers right against the hollows of her jaw. A snakebite. A cut right to the carotid. A message.

Jacob cranked the wheel, the tires shrieking in protest against the snow as he pulled between buildings in a sudden rush of acceleration. The stranger was quickly cut out, stifled by the side of the used-to-be-bar, leaving them out of direct range of a sniper rifle. Not that her companion seemed that pleased about it, anyway.

“Fuck,” he bit out, seething as he tried to navigate the narrow space in the clumsy Eden’s Gate truck. “Fuck, did you count how many bodies were on the ground?”

“Hm, no!” Isolde snapped viciously. “I was a bit too busy trying to make sure they were going to shoot us!”

Jacob gritted out another string of swears between his teeth, turning the truck until he could take what looked to be a back alley in the opposite direction of their little hunter. He checked the rearview mirror frequently; his expression was set in a deep frown, and he only looked at her once before continuing his regular scanning of the road behind them.

“Well, aren’t you going to turn around?” she demanded.

“For what?” Jacob replied flatly. “I’ve got a hunting rifle, not my HTI.”

“I don’t know what that means, and I don’t care,” Isolde bit out.

“It means, the chances of me getting shot before I get a shot on them are significantly lower,” he told her, his knuckles whitening along the steering wheel, “and as confident as I am that I could kill them before they killed me, I’m not confident they wouldn’t take a shot at you first.”

Isolde’s stomach rolled. It wasn’t the violence that bothered her—it wasn’t the death, or the guns, or even the blood—but the message itself. The Stranger had been hunting the Eden’s Gate men and women for sport. For fun. To pass the time, while they waited. But what for? What could they be waiting for?

She stayed quiet, listening to Jacob radio back to the compound quick, short orders that flew right over her head. She couldn’t stop thinking about it—the gesture. The stranger. Who were they? The remainder of the other cult, perhaps? What were they waiting for?

You’re next, that two-fingered, snake-bite-right-to-the-carotid gesture had said.

You’re next, and I’m coming for you.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Sylvia did not seem that impressed with John Seed, and Elliot could not blame her.

John was exceptionally charming. So charming, in fact, that he and Wyatt seemed to get along smashingly. It was almost frustrating, how quick the blonde took to John—but then, Wyatt did strike as the type of man who got along with everybody until they gave him a reason to think otherwise. After all, he’d been kind to her, and she was...

Needless to say, Sylvia was a harder sell, which was nice. Reassuring. It made Elliot feel more grounded, to see Sylvia politely smile at John’s chatter—she’d nearly forgotten how much he liked to talk—but then decidedly turn to Elliot to ask her about something or dive into a different conversation. It was pointed, and if the way John watched them interact was any indication, the message of it was not lost on him.

By the time the evening had drawn to a close, for her and John at least, the brunette had departed to go warm-up the Jeep and left her standing by the doorway, keeping warm, with Sylvia.

“You sure you’re doin’ okay?” the blonde asked after a moment, propped up against the wall in the tiny little doorway that led out to the main street. “You look tired. Stressed out. I was worried when we didn’t hear from you this morning, about comin’ to the barn.”

Elliot felt a little pang of guilt digging in, just there below her sternum. “I’m okay,” she promised. “I’m sorry I didn’t call, I—had a doctor’s appointment this morning that I completely forgot about until my mama reminded me, and John showed up this morning too, so it’s just been...”

“A crazy day,” Via agreed, her nose crinkling cutely in amusement. “He’s a funny fella, that John of yours.”

Oh, if only you knew. “I think so, too.”

“What is he?” she asked, conversationally. “Maybe a—car salesman?”

Her friend’s playful jab was enough to elicit a laugh, billowing out of her and catching even herself by surprise. But then, she shouldn’t have been shocked to find that Sylvia had gotten a quick read on John. Given the way she’d quickly diverted from the attention on Elliot’s scar and carried on, she thought maybe Via was more perceptive than she liked to let on.

“Lawyer,” Ell replied, and Via winced comically.

“Ouch.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I mean—Elli,” Via intoned playfully, “he might as well be sellin’ you snake oil when he’s a lawyer.”

Elliot sighed ruefully, glancing out the window to see John clambering out of the front of the jeep. Snake oil seemed a light judgment for him, all things considered.

“Hey, Via,” she began, swallowing a little, “if I tell you something, you’ve gotta promise you won’t say anything?”

Via regarded her curiously, head tilted. “Okay, sure, Freckles. What’s up?”

She shifted on her feet. “John and I are actually, um—” Elliot paused, swallowing thickly. She didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to, because saying it out loud—her, and not John—made it real. Gave it legs. Forced her to face what had happened and what she couldn’t change yet.

“You don’t have to,” Via told her gently. “I could tell there was somethin’—you know, out of sorts. You don’t get a slick-talkin’ lawyer grinnin’ like the cat what ate the canary if he hasn’t done somethin’ to piss a woman off.”

Elliot shook her head. “We’re actually, uh,” she tried again, pulling at a loose thread on her shirt, “m—married.”

Saying the word out loud didn’t feel as wretched as she thought it would, which was almost three times as concerning. She felt, instead, more dread waiting for Sylvia’s reaction—waiting to see what her one friend had to say or think about that.

The woman’s face screwed up comedically. “Oh, Freckles,” she said, her tone teasing. “Say it ain’t so.”

“I’m not kidding!” Elliot felt a nervous little laugh bubble out of her. “I mean—what, Via? You clearly have an opinion on him.”

“I don’t know the man from Jack walkin’ down the street,” Sylvia demurred. “I just think...well, I just think you’re a real peach, you know? And you didn’t seem too pleased to have this John walkin’ around, and I take that kind of thing seriously.”

Sighing, Elliot scuffed her shoe against the ground, watching John pick his way through the crowd back down the street.

“We left on—bad terms, sort of,” she explained. “He showed up to make amends.”

“Do you want to make amends?”

The question caught her off-guard. It was an obvious one—obvious in that, it should have been one of the first things anyone asked her regarding John, even John himself, and yet: no one had. Not a single person had asked her if she wanted to suffer through making amends with the man who had lied to her, violated her trust, and still somehow managed to be the one person she didn’t have to fear seeing the worst, ugliest parts of her.

“I don’t know,” Elliot said after a moment, clearing her throat. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“Then I will reserve judgment,” Sylvia replied firmly, “so you can make a decision on your own.”

The door to the street opened, bringing with it not only a waft of chilly wind, but John himself and the scent of his viciously-expensive cologne. It took every ounce of Elliot’s self-control not to burst into laughter at the absurdity of it—John Seed, charisma-extraordinaire, somehow managing to make poor first impressions both on her mother and her friend.

“Car’s all warmed up,” John announced, rubbing his hands together. He glanced between the two women, the corner of his mouth ticking upward. “What’s so funny, hm?”

“Nothing,” Elliot replied. “Just talking about you.”

This piqued his interest. He said, “Good things, I hope,” and she could see it on his face—the painful reminder of the way John had craved Joseph’s approval, the way he’d lit up like a nuclear mushroom cloud the second Joseph deigned to say anything remotely kind to him.

“Jury’s still out,” Sylvia said lightly, and then flashed a pretty smile and clapped him on the shoulder. “But don’t worry bud! We’ll get you there eventually.”

John tried very hard to feign polite laughter, but the uneasiness bled through readily—and it was a little satisfying, to see John squirm, to see him out of his element, no longer surrounded by a constant chorus of Yes hitting his dopamine centers nonstop. No wonder the man had a conniption anytime someone dared to dislike him.

“Better get this lady home, she looks like she’s about to fall asleep standing,” Sylvia announced, reaching and giving Elliot a gentle hug. “Night, Freckles.”

“Goodnight.”

John and Sylvia bid each other a pleasant goodbye as Elliot stepped out onto the street, careful to avoid icier parts of the concrete as she made her way to the car. Her brain felt fuzzy—a lot of socializing, a lot of time spent trying not to let John get to her. It had been long enough since she’d had to hold her walls up for so long that she felt exhausted from doing it, even for this long.

Maybe that was his strategy. Wear her down, then swoop in, just like last time.

“Did you have fun?” John asked, and she realized that she was at the car, having climbed into the passenger seat already. He closed the driver’s side door, settling in before carefully beginning to back out of the parking spot.

“I mean, having you loom over my shoulder the entire night was a little odd.”

He made an affronted sound. “I was not looming.”

“You were,” Elliot told him, “a little.” She paused, feeling the exhaustion pulling at the edges of her vision, begging for her to close her eyes—but she couldn’t. Not in the car, not with John driving. If she did, he might just keep driving and not turn back around. “It’s funny—”

“My quote-unquote looming?”

“How much different you are,” she finished, “when you’re not around Joseph.”

John was clearly trying very hard not to look like he was stiffening at her words. Gotcha, she thought, with a little pinprick of pride. Yeah, I didn’t forget. I didn’t forget how much you hated it when I brought him up.

“I don’t know what you mean,” John replied, keeping his voice light. “I’m exactly the way I’ve always been.”

“You haven’t tried to drown me a single time.”

“That time was a miscommunication,” he insisted. “I wasn’t trying to drown you. Just—coerce you. And besides, that’s behind us now. I know you, Elliot Honeysett, intimately, which means such forms of brute persuasion aren’t required.” He paused. “It’s much better when you indulge me willingly, anyway.”

Elliot’s nose crinkled. “You sound fucking nuts when you say that. ‘That one time I thought about drowning you was just a miscommunication’. No wonder Sylvia doesn’t like you.”

“So she told you? That she doesn’t like me?”

He paused for a moment, his gaze flickering over to her, and when he saw the very subtle upturn of her mouth he exhaled out of his nose.

“You’re fucking with me.”

“Not necessarily. But if I was—it would be the least you deserve.”

He was different, out from the insane pressure of the cult, out from under Joseph’s thumb. It was like, given room to breathe, he was suddenly relearning what it was like to make his own decision—to exist outside of Joseph. Back in Hope County, John had been fervent in his belief that he owed Joseph everything. Maybe the distance had done him some good.

Don’t, something inside of her insisted viciously, as she turned her attention out to the side of the road where the headlights illuminated snowdrift after snowdrift. Don’t get soft on him. That’s how he got you last time, you know. Don’t let it happen again.

But if he wanted to press the issue about Sylvia—or about her comment concerning Joseph—John seemed to exercise a remarkable amount of self-control and instead focused on driving. In the quiet, without him chattering on about doing things for them or how much he missed our banter, it was almost...Comfortable.

“Finding out the gender,” Elliot said after a moment, the exhaustion now settling like a deep chill in her bones. “Of the baby, I mean. At the next appointment.”

The brunette shifted in his seat. In an attempt at nonchalance, he said, “Oh, yeah?”

What am I doing? she thought. He plays nice for one night. He’s good at that. Short-term goodness.

“I’m nervous,” she added after a moment. “About finding out.”

“Not excited?” John tilted his head.

“No,” she admitted. “Nervous.”

Ahead of them, she saw the dark blur of a figure. A frown tugged at the corners of her mouth. John was saying something—something about how he’d read a number of books and it was normal to feel nervous, or some other kind of psycho babble—but she shifted forward in her seat, eyes straining to see.

“Slow down,” she said, “I think there’s a dog...?”

“What?” John asked. “Where? I don’t see anything.”

“Just up ahead. Have you not been paying attention to the road?”

He made an indignant sound—“I am the best driver between the two of us, you know,”—but before Elliot could think up a response, the dark, furred creature slowed down ahead of them, stopped in the middle of the road, and turned its head.

The headlights caught it immediately. It was a dog, four-legged and large and shaggy black fur, but when it turned its head, it was a man’s face, the mouth slung open and the gently-rounded teeth of a human’s mouth blaring white in the headlights. Something dark and slick oozed between the teeth, in that split second, she watched the dog-human-creature push off from the ground and stand on its two hind legs.

She screamed, and John swerved, and immediately threw the car into park and slammed his hand on the hazard lights button.

It was dread, pure dread and fear, sending a pulse of adrenaline straight to her brain. Bent over at the waist, Elliot closed her eyes tight, trying to will the image out of her head, out from behind her irises. John had quickly unbuckled and reached over, his hands doing the same to hers.

“Elliot,” he said urgently, fingers pushing the hair back from her face. “Ell, take a breath, come on—sit up, you have to take a breath—”

“Is—is it gone?” she asked, but the words came out closer to a wail, the fear spiking viciously in the timbre of her voice. Please, God, what the fuck, please let it be gone. God, oh fuck, what the fuck what the fuck— “The—the—”

“There’s nothing—?” John stopped. Elliot frantically scrabbled at the high neck of her parka, fingers shaking and clumsy. “Ell—”

“Can’t breathe,” she managed out. “Too hot, can’t—”

The brunette reached over the console and stilled her hands. She was still bent at the waist, but he made do, pulling the zipper of the parka down until she could pull her arms from it; once it had been deposited in the back seat, his hand went to the back of her neck.

She sat up slowly, her eyes immediately making a frantic search of the road. There was nothing. Only quiet snowfall.

“Where—” She paused, swallowing thickly. “Where did it go?”

“Ell,” John murmured, “there wasn’t anything in the road.”

“What do you mean?” she moaned. “I saw it, the—I saw the—”

“You saw...?” he prompted. His thumb swept across the back of her neck, coaxing.

“The dog,” she insisted. “It was a dog, but it had—it’s face was—it was a man’s face, and it f-fucking—it fucking stood up, John!”

He was watching her carefully, his gaze searching her face for a long moment. He cleared his throat. “I didn’t see anything,” he told her. “Just that you—you just screamed, so I pulled over.”

“I’m not crazy,” Elliot bit out, her voice wobbling.

“I know,” John replied plainly. “Maybe it was just—you know. The snow. In front of the headlights.” And then: “Have you really been getting enough sleep, Ell?”

She felt her lip tremble, the desire to cry almost overwhelming. She couldn’t stand it—couldn’t stand John being tender to her, worrying about her, questioning the validity of her saying that she had been sleeping fine because he could see that she couldn’t. He was wretched and wicked and it needed to stay that way.

“Please take me home,” she said finally, re-buckling and rolling the window down to let the cold air on her face. “Please just take me home.”

John waited for a few heartbeats before he turned the hazard lights off and put the Jeep in drive.

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he told her after a moment, glancing at her a few times. “I mean it, Ell.”

“Fuck you,” she replied, exhausted and feeling furiously wound up. “Just take me home.”

Get some sleep.

Feel better in the morning.

[sargeantwoof]

Lean Back And Breathe

In a school full of geniuses Peter expected to keep his secret?

Yeah, right.

Luckily for him, those who know aren't that interested in exposing that tidbit of information.

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

Peter shuffled to the side, dragging his face buried in his arms across his desk, missing the looks the team shot him. MJ cleared her throat, her face impassive aside from the minor tightening of her eyes.

"Well," she said, "The Yalta Conference was held when? And it was about what?"

Peter slid to the side again, his head getting dangerously close to the edge, knocking pens and papers from the desk. The muted thuds startled him, his head shooting up as he looked around panicked. His eyes caught on Ned first and then MJ, his body softening as he realized where he was.

"Peter?" Betty said quietly, causing Peter's face to swing to hers, his eyes blinking owlishly. When he realized where he was, in the middle of Decathlon practice, his face turned bright red and he groaned, dropping his head into his hands. "Peter," Betty continued. "Are you okay?"

He waved his hands at her, not bothering to lift his head. Above him, Ned and MJ exchanged a look, the glance not missed by anyone else in the practice. The silence lasted another beat before Ned cleared his throat, blushing lightly as the rest of the team swung to look at him.

"Peter- he's, he's fine," Ned said, his voice growing stronger with each word. "He- uhh, he had to get- help his aunt late last night."

"Right," Cindy said, her brow arched. "That's why he's always tired." 

Peter groaned again, lifting his head up, tired annoyance etched across his face. "Why do you guys care so much?" He rubbed his eyes, unaware of the sweet picture he was portraying. In the back of the room, Flash snorted, covering his mouth at the glare MJ shot him. Peter yawned, dropping his hand. "I just- I had a lot of stuff to do for Mr. Stark and Aunt May."

"Oh, I'm sure you did," Flash muttered, keeping his gaze focused above Peter's head to avoided MJ's worsening glare.

Peter scrunched up his nose, blinking at them again, as if he had just realized where he was. "What time is it?" He asked, frowning. He glanced down at his watch, freezing for a moment before swearing and scrambling for his stuff. "Shit!" He cried. "I gotta go, Mr. Stark-" he shoved a pencil in his mouth, shoving his chair back, the two muffling the rest of the sentence. "Gottagobye!" He ran for the door, never looking back.

MJ sighed, dropping her head into her hands. "Well," Abe said brightly. "It really is never dull in practice is it."

"Are we continuing?" Charles asked, glancing around. "Even though Flash is his alternate he really doesn't offer much."

"Hey!"

"No," MJ said, sliding her notebooks in bag. She stood, Ned rising across from her. "We will reconvene tomorrow. 3 pm sharp." She offered the group a blank stare and a nod before she turned to go. "Later losers."

"Yeah, bye!" Ned called cheerfully as they left the room.  

There was a moment of silence after they left. One beat, two beat, before the rest of the team drew closer together.

"So," Betty said, raising her eyebrows at them. "They really think they're fooling us all don't they?"

Abe snorted, Charles rolling his eyes. "Uh huh," Cindy answered, her tone vaguely fond. "Parker thinks he's slick."

"I still think you guys are wrong," Flash said, scooching closer to them. He ignored Sally's scoff and lowered his voice, leaning in even closer. "There's no way that it's true."

Abe rolled his eyes, irritation flashing across his face. "Peter has to be."

"No-"

"DC?" Sally said, interrupting. "C'mon Flash he has to be."

"No," Flash repeated, the word sour in his mouth. "Because if he is, why hasn't he decked me yet?"

Betty huffed, . "It's Peter, Flash. It's like you've forgotten that you, and most of us," she gestured around the group. "Grew up with him." She shook her head, eyeing him with disbelief. "He cried when one of us stepped on a beetle in 2nd grade, obviously he's not going to punch you."

"But-"

"He's protecting people," Charles cut in. "You were gonna say, 'but now he's out there punching people' - and yeah," Charles admitted. "He is." He looked over at Flash, taking in the tense lines of his body. "But the difference is that those people deserve it."

"I called him Penis."

"You still call him Penis," Sally said, a wry twist to her mouth. "I think at this point we all assume it's more of a weird fond nickname than an actual issue."

"But-"

"But nothing," Cindy said, slapping a hand down on the table. "We all know Peter is Spiderman."

A clap echoed from the doorway, the six of them tensing and spinning to look. MJ stood there, backlight by the harsh hallway lights of Midtown. "God," she said, raising an eyebrow. "It took you idiots long enough."

***

Tony Stark: I may have bugged your classroom.         4:23 PM

Peter Parker: mr stark???       4:25 PM

Tony Stark: c'mon Pete, like you didn't have my number before.       4:25 PM

Peter Parker: i didn't realize u'd know mine??        4:26 PM

Tony Stark: You thought that I'd not know your number - that I'd know you were the spiderling but not know your        4:27 PM  number?

Peter Parker: … in hindsight that feels dumb        4:28 PM   wait, y'd u bug my class? Tony Stark: why wouldn't I?        4:29 PM

Peter Parker: basic privacy laws???        4:29 PM

Tony Stark: those don't apply to me. I'm Tony Stark.        4:30 PM

Peter Parker: I think they still do        4:30 PM

Tony Stark: whatever, not the point        4:30 PM The point is that I bugged your classroom and your fellow nerds know Peter Parker: know what?        4:31 PM     wait, mr stark??   they know what??        4:34 PM    mr. stark?? ***

Peter scrambled from the car, his face flushing when Happy sighed behind him. He had told Mr. Stark that he was more than capable of swinging to him after school but the idea had been vetoed every time. He shut the door behind him, mindful of slamming it. The last time he had forgotten about his strength he had crumpled the car door. Mr. Stark had thought it was hilarious but Happy had been more than a little upset.

"Bye Happy!" He called over his shoulder, slinging his bag over his arm and scurrying in through the doors Friday was holding open for him.

"Good afternoon Peter," Friday said, her voice a familiar tone in his ears. "Boss is waiting for you in the lab - would you like me to take you there?"

"Yes, please!" Peter said, glancing down at his phone. Around him the elevator hummed, the doors clicking shut behind him as it began to rise. He frowned at the sight of Mr. Starks texts, still open on his screen. He sighed, shoving his phone back in his pocket, resigned to having to ask Mr. Stark what he meant in person.

The doors opened, a tiny woosh of sound, the hallway empty in front of him. Peter glanced through the windows as he walked towards Mr. Starks labs door, taking in the scattered tools and bits of machinery strewn across the tables inside. He pushed through, the sudden noise almost overwhelming him.

"-And you need to stop!" Tony said, staring at Dum-E, a fond look on his face. He shook the wrench in his hand at the bot, ignoring the way the he drooped in response. "If you go towards the fire extinguisher one more time-" Friday cut the music, startling him into turning around. "Fri- Kid!" He said, grinning at him. "Just in time!"

"Just in time for what Mr. Stark?" Peter asked warily, sliding his bag off his shoulder and setting it on the table closest to the door.

Tony blinked at him, the gleeful expression dipping for a moment. "Are we not re-calibrating the webs today?" He rubbed his forehead, smearing oil over his eyebrow. "I thought we were?"

"We are," Peter said, biting his lip to keep from laughing. "I was just - nevermind." He cut himself off, instead wandering closer to Tony. "Friday can you bring up the schematics from the last time I was here?"

"Of course Peter," Friday answered, the outlines unfolding in front of him in a haze of blue.

"Thanks Fri," Peter said, his eyes catching on a mistake he hadn't noticed before. He fiddled with it for a moment before glancing up and catching Mr. Stark smiling at him. He flushed, yanking his hand back from the schematics. "What?" He said, self-consciously.

"Nothing, Pete," Tony said, his face fond and open. "Just proud of you."

Peter blinked at him, blushing an even deeper red, his mouth dropping open. "Me- me?"

Tony snorted, rolling his eyes. "Who else would I be talking to here?"

"Friday?" Peter squeaked.

"Incorrect," Friday said, her voice as fond as she could get. "Boss is proud of you Peter."

Peter looked down, the action doing nothing to hide the shy smile on his face. "Thanks, Mr. Stark."

"Of course kid."

Peter fell silent, reaching back towards the schematics, his hands much slower than they had been. He worked for another moment before realizing that he had never asked Mr. Stark his question. "Mr. Stark?" Peter said, getting a nod in response, though he didn't look up from what he was working on. "What did you mean earlier?"

"Earlier?" Tony said, highlighting a section of code to be revisited, willfully ignoring the fact that the entire section was basically neon yellow. "Like when I said I was proud of you?"

"No-" Peter said, a tiny smile on his face. "Like with the texts?"

"Oh," Tony said, looking up. "Your nerd friends figured out your Spiderman."

Peter frowned. "MJ and Ned already knew that Mr. Stark."

"No," Tony said, raising an eyebrow. "The other ones who are on your team." Peter's face drained of color. Tony stood, setting down the tablet and striding over to him. "Did you really not know kid?" Peter shook his head, completely mute. Tony sighed, slinging an arm around him. "If it helps, it sounds like they've known for a while."

"What?" Peter said, his face shocked and voice strangled. "Since when?"

Tony bit back a smile at the obliviousness of Peter. "Since DC?" He said, the smile coming out full force when Peter groaned and dropped his head into his hands.

"God," Peter said, his voice slightly muffled. "They must think I think they're idiots."

***

"MJ, heyyyyyy," Betty said, her face slightly panicked. "How long- how long were you standing there?"

"Long enough," MJ answered, her face impassive. Ned appeared over her shoulder, his expression equally unreadable. They slipped inside the room, MJ locking it behind her. The six in the center of the room swallowed hard, fear flickering through their eyes. Though they knew that Peter would've never laid a finger on them, MJ was a complete anomaly.

"We were just-," Flash began.

"Shut up Flash," MJ said, her voice betraying nothing. She slung herself over a chair, turning it so she was bracing her arms on the back of it. Beside her, Ned followed, snagging another chair and sitting in it, his face completely serious. "Here's how this is going to go," MJ said. "We're going to have ourselves a little discussion."

Ned leaned forward, staring each of them down. "No one is going to tell anyone about this discussion." They nodded, Ned leaning back once he was satisfied. He glanced at MJ, gesturing for her to go ahead.

"If Peter Parker was Spiderman," MJ began. "Then he would have quite a reason for being Mr. Starks intern." She glanced at Flash, taking in his rapidly paling face and didn't fight the coil of satisfaction that settled in her stomach. "And,  he would have a well-deserved reason for missing so much practice." She smiled at them with more teeth than needed. "Isn't that just so interesting?"

"He sure would always be tired," Ned said, his voice low. "Would be hurt far more than most." He glanced around the room again, taking in Betty's pained face, Abe's pressed lips, Charles' tightening grip on his water bottle. He blinked rapidly, his face suddenly pained. "Of course, this is all speculation."

"Of course," MJ echoed. "However," she leaned in close to the group, the others leaning in almost unconsciously as well. "If word were to get out that this rumor was spiraling, well," she exchanged a look with Ned. "Someone would have to go down for it, wouldn't they?"

For a moment no one moved, the room falling even quieter, as if the school itself had heard MJ's warning and was committing it to memory. In front of her, Sally shifted, everyone's gazes snapping to her. She blushed, almost lowering her gaze from MJ's but soldiered on.

"No one here would do that," she said, her voice quiet but firm, her conviction backed by the rapid nods of everyone around her. "And we're the only ones who ever even thought-" she cut herself off, her voice quieting. "You don't need to worry."

MJ sighed after beat. "I like you guys," she said, smirking a little bit at Flash's shocked face. "Yes, even you Eugene. But," she said, her face dropping back into impassivity. "This is Peter's life we're talking about." Beside her, Ned coughed suddenly, his eyes wide.

"Uh," Ned said, his eyes on a familiar figure on the window. "I think we're about to get some company."

***

"Activating," Friday said, in response to Peter's query about the listening devices. "Broadcast begins in 3, 2, -"

"Shut up, Flash," MJ's voice came through, Peter's brow furrowing. "Here's how this is going to go. We're going to have ourselves a little discussion."

"Is this old?" Peter asked Mr. Stark, frowning.

He shook his head, his face placid. "This is all live, kiddo."

Ned's voice began. "No one is going to tell anyone about this discussion." There was a beat and then MJ started speaking again.

"If Peter Parker was Spiderman - then he would have quite a reason for being Mr. Starks intern." Peter groaned suddenly, gesturing for Friday to stop the device.

"I have to go," Peter said, glancing at Mr. Stark who was smiling at him.

"Keep your stuff here," he said, reaching over and ruffling his hair. "You and your partners can come back after. I know Pep wants to meet them."

Peter flashed him a smile, pushing his chair back and heading to the bathroom off to the side to go change. "Can you ask if Aunt May can come?"

Tony spluttered. "Your hot aunt can always come," he said, ignoring Peter's familiar Mr. Stark!

He strode out of the bathroom, fixing a glare on Tony before it melted off his face. "Can- can you send Happy to pick us up?"

Tony held up his phone. "Already texted him kid." He raised an eyebrow at him. "Got a change of clothes?"

Peter nodded. "Ned made me stash one in my locker."

Tony stood up, tugging Peter into a hug. "See you in a few hours kiddo."

Peter pulled back, smiling up at him. "Thanks, Mr. Stark," he said, his smile shy. "Love you."

"Love you too, Petey," Tony said, swallowing down a lump in his throat. "Friday can take you up to the top so you can swing from there."

Peter grinned, turning to go. "MJ's gonna wanna have words with you," he called cheerfully over his shoulder. "She doesn't like being bugged." The door shut behind him, Tony watching as he slid his mask on, bouncing up and down in place as the elevator doors opened. He turned, waving at Tony before Friday shut the elevator, bringing him up to the balcony.

Tony smiled, shaking his head. "Friday," he said, the AI already bringing the audio from the device back up. "Keep playing and continue to record. I want to hear these threats."

***

"What?" Sally said, before the window slid open and Spiderman tumbled through.

"Oh shit," Flash whispered, his face dropping. "We're about to die."

Spiderman stood in silence for a moment, the whites of his eyes narrowed at Ned and MJ. In front of them, the others were mostly frozen, their hands tangling together in their sudden nerves as if that would protect them from a pissed off superhero.

"Goddammit," Spiderman said, reaching up and yanking his mask off, the brown eyes of Peter meeting MJ's. "I told you not to threaten anyone."

"I knew it," Cindy muttered, her face splitting into a massive grin. She yanked her hands back, knocking her fist gently against Flash's shoulder. "Ha! You're the idiot now." Flash groaned, his eyes never leaving Peter who flashed Cindy a smile before going back to stare at MJ.

Surprising everyone but the three of them, MJ cracked first. "Protection?" She offered, her mouth twisted. "Cause you wouldn't do it yourself?"

"I wouldn't do it myself because I thought it was just rumors," Peter stressed. "If I had known that Cindy had figured it out, I would've done something."

MJ shrugged, her elbow knocking into Ned's. "We were trying to help." Ned shot her a betrayed look and she shrugged again. "It was a group plan Leeds."

Peter shifted his gaze to Ned, ignoring the fact that the others were enthralled in their discussion. Ned sighed. "You do too much sometimes," he admitted. "We wanted to take something off your plate."

Peter sighed, looking impossibly fond all of a sudden. "Just a little warning next time?"

"To be fair," Betty said slowly, looking between the three of them. "It was very spur of the moment I think."

"Oh," Peter said, blinking. "Just don't do it again?" He offered, grinning when MJ shrugged and Ned nodded.

"How did you know?" Abe said, wonder in his tone. He flushed lightly at the looks he got. "That this was happening?" He clarified.

"Wait, yeah," Sally said, her brow furrowed. "Do you know when people figure it out? Who you are?"

Peter laughed, snagging a chair and sitting in it, neatly sliding into the group. "No," he said, the corners of his eyes crinkling up. "Nothing like that." He glanced around the room, nothing sticking out to him. "Mr. Stark bugged the room."

"What?" Flash said, his voice strangled.

"That's illegal," Charles said, though his voice was light.

Peter's mask crackled to life, Mr. Stark's voice suddenly coming out of it. "And I'm Tony Stark, what of it?"

The room froze, Peter rolling his eyes at his mentors ego. "Mr. Stark," he said, ignoring the looks everyone but Ned and MJ gave him. "Please stop bugging my classrooms."

The mask was silent for a beat before his voice came through again. "We'll talk about this at dinner," he said, evading the plea. "MJ, Ned, you're coming with him, right?"

"Mr. Stark!" Peter said, fond irritation in his voice. "You know I haven't asked them yet, please, please stop interrupting this."

"Fine," Tony sighed. "I'll leave you to it." The mask crackled once more and when silent.

"Er," Peter said, glancing up at them. "Sorry about him."

Abe grinned at him. "This is the best day of my life," he said. "You've proven me right and I got to hear Tony Stark harass you?" Peter grinned back, grateful that someone was pleased with the turn of events. Abe shook his head. "It's an honor Spiderman."

"Oh geez," Peter said, flushing. "You don't - please-"

"I have questions," Cindy announced cutting him off.

Peter nodded but turned to Ned. "Can you-"

Ned cut him off. "I'll grab the change of clothes." He turned, leaving the room, exchanging a fond look with MJ as he left.

Peter smiled after him, turning back to Cindy. "Sorry about that- your questions?"

"Yeah, how are you Spiderman?"

"Do you produce those webs?"

"When did you become Spiderman?"

"What do you do with Mr. Stark?"

"Have you met the Avengers?"

"Okay!" MJ snapped, her glare silencing them all. "Peter can-"

"MJ," Peter said quietly, reaching out and squeezing her hand, the rest of them watching avidly. "It's okay." She glared at him for another beat before squeezing his hand back. "Right," Peter said, turning back to Cindy. "One at a time?"

Cindy smiled at him, her normally open face even more delighted than usual. "How are you Spiderman?"

"I got bitten by a spider," Peter said, rubbing his thumb over MJ's knuckles. "It was, uhhh, biologically altered and so it altered me."

"What the fuck?" Sally and Charles said in tandem, blinking at each other and then back at Peter.

He shrugged. "It was an Oscorp spider," he said, as though that made it make sense. "It died after it bit me."

Flash snapped his fingers, pointing at him, things clicking into place. "You- you were sick for like a week after," he said, ignoring the look MJ shot him. Peter nodded, smiling tentatively at him. Flash flushed, dropping his eyes and falling silent.

"So," Abe said, breaking the slightly awkward silence. "Those webs- do they come out of you?"

Peter snorted, glancing over at the door and dropping MJ's hand. "It's Ned," he said, nodding to it right before the knock sounded. MJ rolled her eyes but stood to get it as Peter ignored the slightly shocked looks he was getting. "No," he answered, turning back to Abe. "I made the webs myself, and Mr. Stark helped me improve both them and the web shooters." Abe wiggled his eyebrows at him and Peter huffed. "You are not going to get to wear them."

"Damn," Abe muttered, a grin on his face. "I really thought I had you."

Behind Peter, MJ let Ned slide through, relocking the door. Ned tossed the clothes to him, nodding at the teachers closet. "Best place for you," he said, grimacing. "Someone on twitter posted that Spiderman was out swinging so people are frantically looking for you - phones are everywhere, even in the hallway."

"Fuck," Peter said, dragging his hand over his face. "I really thought I could be stealthy this time." Ned poked him, urging him up and towards the closet. Peter sighed but complied, trying to change as fast as he could.

MJ snorted, leaning close to Ned. "He definitely needs to listen to Natasha more," she said in an undertone.

"Hey!" Peter said, popping his head out of the closet, yanking the sweater over his head as he reached behind him, tapping the suit as it folded up. "Not cool, MJ!"

"You heard that?" Betty asked, her face twisting. "I barely could and I'm right here."

"Oh, yeah," Peter said, slipping the suit into Ned's bag and reseating himself, scooching closer to him, his hand snaking out and gripping his. "I've got like super hearing and strength."

"Like how-"

"Stronger than Captain America," Peter admitted, frowning when Flash shrunk in on himself. He glanced at Ned and MJ, only to see the both of them shaking their heads at him. He arched an eyebrow, sighing when all they did was shrug back at him. "Anyways," he said, turning back to them. "I actually do have to be somewhere now," he said, sighing. "I wasn't even supposed to be here, I had stuff to do with Mr. Stark in the lab today."

"That's okay, Peter!" Sally said, cutting off everyone else. "We can definitely text you questions later, right?"

"Sure?" Peter said, before frowning again. "Though I think I'm gonna have to ask Mr. Stark if it's okay - secret identity and all that." His face suddenly got serious, all the humor leaving his eyes. "I really really really need this to stay on the dl," he said, biting his lip. "I will do all I can to answer your questions and stuff but I can't have this getting out."

"Of course," Cindy answered, the rest of them following. "We've kept a secret all this time, we can keep doing it."

Peter smiled at her, the relief clear in his eyes. "Great!" He said, standing up from his seat and tugging Ned up with him. "And like, not a threat, but if Mr. Stark finds out someone leaked it-" he shrugged, his face not nearly as amused as it had been. "He takes that shit seriously."

"Got it," Charles said, shooting a look at Ned's backpack, where the mask lay. "We won't piss off Mr. Stark."

"Awesome," Peter said, grinning at them. "I'm gonna go," he said, gesturing to the door and holding his hand out for MJ to take, which she did with a sigh. "See you guys tomorrow!"

MJ unlocked the door, the three of them exiting, Peter's excited chatter carrying through the hallways for a moment before they rounded the corner and the sound muted before disappearing entirely.

"Oh fuck," Flash said, his face pale. "I'm going to die."

"Well," Sally said, her eyes alight. "I think that went really well." She exchanged a look with Cindy and Betty, the three rising together. "We're gonna go chat about this in a classroom that isn't bugged," she said. "My place?"

"Sure," Cindy said, Betty nodding in agreement. The three gathered their stuff, leaving as quickly as they could without outright running down the hall.

"Fuck," Flash repeated, staring at nothing. "I used to bully Spiderman."

Charles began laughing, Abe grinning at Flash. 'Well," Abe said, his voice bright. "At least it's a 'used to'."

Flash sighed, burying his face into his arms. "My life is a fucking nightmare. God." He sighed again once more before muttering. "Fuck!"

[land-of-classpects-and-analysis]

Mage of Doom

There is a beginning to everything, as well as an end. A never-ending loop that completes its cycle well over a million times each and every day, just as someone else’s loop begins. Each and every one of us had an extremely slim chance of being able to experience this loop, and yet here we are. While we will one day finish our cycles and return to the Earth, the ocean, the air and the flames, no one ever knows for certain when that time may come. Everything within our lives ends, that much is certain. Whether it be our favorite TV show reaching its finale, closing a book that brought so many moments of laughter, anxiety, and crying, a relationship that seemed so promising at first only to slowly wilt away with time, all things have a beginning and an end. Even this blog will have its end someday, as there are only so many Classpects to examine and analyze. Until then, though, let’s try not to think of what the future may hold, as the future is something yet to be determined. All that matters is that of the present moment - something none of us can ever escape. Let’s stay in the present so that the last moments of Oculus October are not filled with stress or worry, but rather of reflection and meditation as to what this month has brought us. Without further ado, this is the analysis of the final Mage: the Mage of Doom.

Death, tragedy, and suffering is happening all around us at every single second of every single day. Do you ever think about that? How, even if you are having a moment of peace and contentment, there have been countless moments of horrific pain, grief, and sorrow happening throughout the world around you? Not even the big headline stories of a tragic incident, or a global pandemic sweeping across the world, but all of the smaller, more individual cases of people screaming in pain, crying out in agony, begging for a moment of bliss, or even breathing in and out their final breath? Do you ever think about that? The Mage of Doom is one who doesn’t think about such things. Why this is could range from them simply not caring enough to think about the bigger world outside of their own life - their own bubble - or maybe it’s that they’ve never truly experienced a moment of gut-wrenching sorrow. Perhaps they have become numb to all of the horrors they see and pay witness to in their everyday life, and so decide to pay no mind to it. While the Mage of Doom may have friends, they are often friends that reflect upon the jagged shards that is the Mage of Doom’s personality. Even the people who are friends with the Mage of Doom may not entirely be sure why they find themselves drawn to the Mage. Maybe it’s because they’re just as quick to wallow in misery and lash out with anger towards others, they find someone so perfectly opposite to them yet almost exactly the same to them, or maybe they are also someone plagued by the sense of ever-looming dread and doom, as well as very aware of the suffering and death that riddles this world.

The Mage of Doom is quite the peculiar person to try and pin down for one solid type of personality, if only because they are known to be quick to change how they act and how they present themself. They are masters of hiding how they are really feeling from the world around them, though not to the same extent as Knights are known to do. No, these facades are often brought on because the Mage does not wish to seem weak or vulnerable to the world around them. They may not be fully aware of the true force of their Aspect, but they know and have seen enough to realize that being weak, letting people walk all over you, is what gets you hurt in this world. If there is one thing the Mage of Doom will try to avoid as best they can, it will be allowing their own bubble - their own sanctuary amidst the fire that cloaks the world - to be popped and tainted by their Aspect. Little does the Mage know that while they may feel as though their bubble is unbreakable - unpoppable - it is only because their Aspect has not revealed the true width of its power. When their Aspect realizes it is time for the Mage to experience their Aspect Awakening, there will be nothing that will be strong enough to protect the Mage from one of the most devastating of all.

As many as there are disasters and instances of suffering in this world, there are just as many ways in which the Mage first experiences their Aspect. Ranging from losing the place they called home in one way or another, experiencing the death of someone they loved and held dearly, to even having a near death experience themself, the possibilities are endless. After all, suffering is something that is often argued to be an objective thing, but that is so rarely the case. Fate holds no bias in her heart. If she were to hold any, it would be to the people who question her, try to look down upon or discard her, brushing her off as a force that does not truly matter. The Mage of Doom is someone who would most certainly fit this description, and so whatever suffering may happen to them is simply because Fate saw it best that they learn not only is Fate the one who looks down upon their world, but that she could just as easily crush it within her fist. This great moment of true suffering for the Mage is one where they will come to realize that not only is there misfortune and pain all around them, but that they are not immune to Fate and her punishments. While this will no doubt terrify the Mage in the beginning - or perhaps only lead them to live a life of more anger and bitterness - it will be through their journey that they will learn what their Aspect truly stands for. They will learn that while there may be Doom all around them, it does not always have to be something filled with gloom and misery. Ironically, the Doom Aspect can be something of beauty and wonder, as those bound to it are often known to be wise beyond their years and truly empathetic souls.

How will the Mage of Doom, in their present emotions of anger, pain, terror, and so many more, be able to learn this information? How can someone so willfully ignorant and uncaring to the suffering around become a person of patience, empathy, and wisdom? As always, there are the traditional two paths presented to all Classes, but there are most definitely a few other unique and special options the more creative souls may realize - no pun intended. However, for the final time in Oculus October, let’s begin with the Mages of Doom who seek out knowledge and understanding through their Aspect. Let’s be honest, there is no comfy or happy way to go about this journey, no matter how creative the Mage tries to be with their journey. Doom is all about suffering, taking on the pain of others so that they may live happier lives, and providing the company that misery deeply enjoys having. To relinquish one’s self to their Aspect so that they may gain knowledge through it is one of the most noble acts the Mage of Doom could commit, as it means they will have to experience, first-hand, all the ups and downs that their Aspect has to offer. This group of Mages are most definitely the ones who grew more anger in their hearts rather than fear for their Aspect.

They are the ones to climb atop a radio tower and scream at a raging, thundering storm to strike them down. They are the ones who will be the first to start a bar fight or a riot, and will just as easily be the shield those weaker than them need. They will throw themself at any hint of Doom they can, because the knowledge they gain is that of personal experience and growth.  With every scar they collect, every bullet they bite, every brush and encounter with death, all the Mage of Doom gains is a better understanding of not only the world around them and how it truly works, but they also come to understand themself and their place in the universe even more. Through Doom, they will gain the knowledge needed to truly approach, battle, and tame their Aspect. These are the Mages of Doom who may have the greater promise to be far more empathetic than the other group, if only because they have truly thrown themself at every instance of Doom there could be. By the end of it, they may still look upon Fate and laugh or sneer, and perhaps they will become confident enough to try and challenge her to give them her worst.

A fine line in which these Mages walk, though, is that of simply being in the right place and the right time in order to gain more knowledge through Doom or them always being the ones to inflict or incite Doom wherever they find themself to be. The answer to this is that it does truly depend on the Mage of Doom and who they are as a person. There are most definitely the Mages of Doom who will simply, accidentally or otherwise, always find themself to be in situations and scenarios where there is plenty of suffering for them to experience and gain knowledge through. It is through these moments of turmoil and struggle, though, that will learn and know more than they ever could before. As mentioned before, though, this is no traditional, external knowledge - at least not primarily. No, these Mages of Doom will primarily have an internal knowledge awakening, as they learn to be more sympathetic and kind to everyone. A stranger may cuss out and berate the Mage of Doom, but as long as they have followed the path of discovering and seeking out knowledge through experiencing Doom, then they will most likely not become as bothered by this encounter as they may once have. This is most entirely because they will think about why someone would come to a point of verbally attacking a complete stranger, rather than assuming the stranger is cruel because they wish to be cruel.

This perfectly leads to the other Mages of Doom who seek out knowledge through Doom, and it is these Mages of Doom some may deem to be, rather bluntly, morally reprehensible. That is to say that these are the ones who provoke and agitate many people around them, trying to bring about the Doom they wish to experience so that they may be more knowledgeable. However, it would be false to say that is all there is to these specific Mages. Unfortunately, they also seek out this knowledge through inflicting these feelings of Doom onto anyone else around them. Whether it is by simply becoming someone so toxic and damaging, yet entrapping and alluring to those around them, or by simply targeting a person and bringing an immense amount of suffering, pain, and grief to their target, their prey, these Mages of Doom hold no qualms or have any moral dilemmas when it comes to being the one who brings Doom to others, if only so that they will not have to experience it. They took their anger and their fear and dropped it on top of other people, all so that they may gain their own knowledge: the knowledge of what makes people squirm - what makes them weak, frail, defective. Most importantly, it gives them the knowledge of how they can make other people hurt and suffer, as well. It is these Mages of Doom who made their own path, and it is one made of broken glass and thorny roses and vines.

The Mages who choose the path of seeking out knowledge through their Aspect are plentiful and come in many shapes, sizes, and motives, but let’s not give them all the run-time this show has to offer. After all, there is one more entire group left to put under scrutiny: the Mages who sought after knowledge of Doom itself. These are the Mages of Doom who experienced fear far more than they experienced anger in their Aspect Awakening. Not only experiencing their own bubble of paradise so tragically, and perhaps even horrifically, being popped, but also realizing that they can no longer live in such a blissful ignorance to the world around them. At least, not if they truly wish to survive in the reality they now find themself within. Having been now made aware that, not only are they not exempt from suffering, but that all they have heard over the years of all the tragedies, the disasters, all the brutalities and pain happening to those they love and they don’t know is, unfortunately, true. However, this is not enough knowledge or awareness for the Mage of Doom to settle for. They are someone who is more than willing to come forth and admit that they messed up, as well as swearing themself to search for all instances of Doom - to learn the signs, the flags, the warnings, if only to keep not only themself safe, but keep everyone else safe, as well.

These journeys for the Mage of Doom are far more akin to that of a redemption arc - as they begin their story choosing to ignore and dismiss everyone’s problems, until they are brought to the throne of justice that is Fate, wherein she reveals to them that they are no different than anyone else. No matter their class, their identity, their privileges, no one is ever truly exempt from suffering. It is through the fear that they are given the chance to truly reflect on who they are as a person, and whether they wish to continue living in fear of what Fate has planned next for them or if they would rather try to find a way to defend themself. Of course, there will most definitely be the Mages who pick the former option, if only because they have a sliver of hope that they may get to somehow recreate their bubble of false safety and continue living in ignorance. It’s scary to have to face the truth, especially when that truth pertains to having to realize that the world is not as beautiful as it appeared through rose colored glasses. As for the ones who do decide to go down their path of discovery - swallowing down any pride and/or prejudice they may have had left - they are the Mages of Doom that will grow more towards becoming wiser and kinder.

Starting out small, they will try to look for Doom in territory that they are familiar with, primarily within their own friend group and perhaps even family. Before their Aspect Awakening, they may not have cared or even really bothered to show any real support or care to their loved ones, but Fate can sometimes change even the most stubborn of souls. In the beginning, they may be a little clumsy in how they go about finding out knowledge of Doom - perhaps even to the extent of being downright rude and insensitive, asking, or even demanding their best friend to tell them all of their woes, traumas, and struggles in life. This could most definitely earn the Mage some more suffering of their own, whether it is in the form of physical, mental, or social struggling. Asking the wrong question at the wrong time, thus earning them a smack to the mouth, hearing of some piece of trauma so deeply upsetting that it leaves the Mage horribly shaken for many hours or even days, or becoming so desperate to become the supportive friend that they instead become an unbearing force and person to be around, causing some friends to become weirded out and leave the Mage. It won’t be an easy journey for the Mage of Doom, especially because they will have to eventually tread out into unknown waters, wherein they will subject themself to learning and researching more instances of suffering and cruelty in the world.

Over time, though, they will become someone who learns how to properly reach out to those in need. While they may not be a healer like that of a Life-bound, they are one of the few Doom-bound who would be the most trustworthy individuals to go to in order to vent about a rough day, or confide in a piece of trauma you may have gone through. It is through seeking out this knowledge of Doom that these Mages of Doom will also learn to become extremely non-judgemental to those around them, even if someone has done something exceptionally terrible. Not only that, but they have great promise in becoming a great advocate for many different things, whether it be advocacy for something as simple as individualistic self care, or the overthrowing of a corrupt government and policy that has always brought on more harm than good. They are someone who will not only have knowledge of Doom, but will be able to try and avoid it as often and as best they can in their day to day life. Do not mistake this as the Mage of Doom becoming naive or having convinced themself that they are now capable of avoiding Doom altogether - oh, no, not one bit. The Mage of Doom is well aware that suffering will forever be part of their life now that they have become aware of it, and it is with this knowledge that brings them the most ultimate suffering. They are aware they can’t help everyone, much to their dismay, but that is why they will always try to find those experiencing the most suffering and simply try to be there for those people. They may not be as empathetic as the other group, but they will be damned if they are not viewed as kind and caring - especially in comparison to who they once were.

The Mage of Doom is one who began their journey in a life of false safety and blissful ignorance. While ignorance may be a blissful thing for those privileged enough to obtain it, it is inevitable that one day Fate will take notice of their lack of suffering and selfishness. It may feel as though they are splashed awake with ice cold water, rather than that of a gentle kiss, and depending on the Mage this will either send them down a path of heated anger and vengeance, or scrambling for a trail that will help for them to realize that it is not only them who suffers, but that there are those who most certainly have had it far worse than they could ever have imagined. While some of them may finish their journey far more empathetic and patient or acquire more wisdom and kindness, there is no doubt that the Mage of Doom will most certainly not be the same person that they were when their journey finally comes to a close. In a way, it could be argued that during their journey, the Mage went through many stages of inner, personal death in many ways and many forms. Whichever way you interpret is most likely not far off for at least one of the many, many Mages of Doom out there in the world.

During their journey, the Mage of Doom would not only learn to overcome their anger or their fear, but also learn how to change and mold it into something that can be helpful to themself and their allies. For those who sought out knowledge through Doom and the anger it caused, they would come to realize that life is a finite thing. It doesn’t last forever, much like everything else in the known universe, but that does mean they should be living in fear and despair over their limited time. Rather, they are someone who will go out and try to live everyday as though it were their last, if only because, for all they or anyone else knows, it could very well be their last. They’ve taken the anger their Aspect Awakening brought them and changed it to become a driving force to try and see the better side of things - even if everything is crumbling to the ground and falling apart before their eyes. For the more morally dubious Mages of Doom within this group, they are the ones who truly believe that the more destruction and despair there is, the better and more fun the entirety of life becomes. Through this knowledge, though, the Mage of Doom will also learn how truly unique not only they themself are, but also how unique everyone around them is. While so many people suffer everyday, it is how that misery confronts us that truly makes us unique. Despite this, though, these Mages of Doom are still the ones to show the most kindness and empathy towards those around them, especially if they come to the Mage with a problem of their own.

As for those who wished to chase after knowledge of Doom, they are the ones who overcome the fear that they are left to suffer alone, or that it is only them to be riddled with so much misfortune. While they may have a rough start in trying to present themself as someone trying their best to care and support others, it is through all the countless arguments, lost relationships, and healed wounds that they will eventually grow to be a kinder and more loving soul. Not only will they become far more aware that they are not alone in their suffering, but rather that almost everyone in the world has their own struggles, trials, and tribulations that they must face every single day. It is through this journey that they will learn to be kinder to those around them, for they were given the gift of ignorance when they were born, and it was only by Fate’s hand that they were awakened to the true horrors happening in the world around them. They will also gain great wisdom in how to approach these issues, learning plentiful tips on how to present themself, approach their own and other people’s issues, and when to also simply accept when one is defeated. They are the Mages who will grow to be more humble in their suffering - prioritizing and trying their best to assure everyone else that the problems they, the people, face deserve more attention and resolution than those who do not even know what true suffering is. If no one else will do anything to support those in need, then these Mages of Doom will be more than happy to sit down with these people. If the other party is so willing, then they will just as happily listen to all the problems the person has weighing down on them, as well.

In regards to powers, there are many ways in which the Mages of Doom may use these knowledgeable capabilities. Whether it is achieving knowledge of or through their Aspect, chances are their overall role in the group will be like that of a guide. Not just any guide, though. They will be the guide who will be more aware of all the possible mistakes and Doomed Timelines to come of them, and so it will be their job to try and steer them and their group away from such dangers. For the Mages who sought knowledge through their Aspect, they will indeed be able to acquire this knowledge of immediate threats or approaching threats, but it will often have to come at a price - oftentimes involving that similar to a sacrifice, specifically a sacrifice of a personal thing connected to the Mage themself. Meanwhile, the Mages who merely sought knowledge of Doom will be far more capable and have a generally easy time to act as this guide. They will be able to focus on one decision - one situation, person, or object - and be able to see all of the mistakes that could come forth of mishandling such a thing. Another thing is that they will simply be able to focus their mind if they wish to try and find or sense any threats to them and/or the group. This could come quite in handy with a battle, but they should most definitely not be seen as the ultimate guide for the group. The reason for this is because, unfortunately, they will never be able to see the good options, only the bad. Due to this, some people may only ever see the Mage of Doom as a negative and pessimistic force who only ever looks towards the bad things. For some of the Mages of Doom, this is rarely the case, while for others, this is indeed extremely true for them and their fatalistic attitudes towards existence.

At the end of the day, though, what they truly strive towards is being someone that can be that one friend you can trust with your problems. Even after all they have been through, they may not be the advice or the healing friend, but they are the one who knows and understands that sometimes you simply need a body to hold onto and hug, or to simply sit in somber silence with. They may have great wisdom, or extremely deep empathy, but it is something that has come with a great, personal price to the Mage of Doom. While there may be some who do regret going on their adventure - perhaps because they had extremely different expectations of what would come of it - there are still plenty of others who will happily take on the role of keeping misery company if only to gain a better understanding of who they are or to make sure someone’s struggles are heard and understood. Not every Mage of Doom will be sunshine and rainbows when it comes to their existence, and there are most certainly some Mages who would rather keep what they learned to themself rather than share it with everyone else, if only because the turmoil that will come from it bring them a twisted sense of glee and satisfaction. Whether they are a Mage of Doom who tries their best to remain positive, even in the face of certain terror and perhaps even death, or they are one who believes that all there is to life is suffering and pain before the sweet release of death, there is one thing for certain amongst all of them. They are aware that everything will come to an end eventually, and there will be many moments of suffering along the way. That does not matter to them, though. What matters is how we choose to live out the moments we have to their fullest, and to not take what we have for granted while it’s still there, because you never know which moment will be your last. This is what the Mage of Doom believes in and holds close to their heart.

[k7l4d4]

Midnight Striga: Fairy Tail/Owl House Cross Fic Episode 6 Part 1

Hello, and once again, welcome back to Midnight Striga!! Everybody Clap Your Hands!!

“And now… to test it!” Eda cried, feeding a smidge of magic into the Lacrima sitting before her. In a burst of flames, she was sent flying into the wall, a pained groan clawing its way out of her throat. A crazed grin crossed her face. “Fire! Nice! That’s 163 down, 474 to go!” She cheered, hastily scribbling the results down on a piece of paper detailing the Lacrimas in her store. Carelessly tossing the Lacrima into the appropriate pile, she started sifting through her pile, hoping to find something interesting. “I’ve already managed to identify at least 13 specific types, wonder how many more I got?” She muttered to herself. She reached for her bottle of Appleblood for a swig, only to swipe at empty air. Glancing up, she met Luz’s unimpressed gaze, holding her Appleblood just out of reach. “You mind giving that back?” She asked, annoyed at the interruption.

Luz scowled. “Yeah, no. You’ve had way too much of this stuff.” She stated, a pointed look aimed at the kitchen, where at least 10 bottles lay emptied inside. Spotting the list of recorded Lacrimas and types, Luz’s eyes widened in shock. “Holy HELL Eda! When did you sleep!?”

Eda opened her mouth, paused, and awkwardly scratched her cheek. “I don’t have to answer that.” She finally said, evasively glancing to the sides.

Sighing, Luz plopped herself down from across the older Witch. “Eda, I get that you’re hurting. But trust me, running from this is just going to hurt you.” She looked up, naked grief burning in her gaze. “Believe me, I’ve been there.”

Eda gave a bitter snort. “Oh really? You’ve been betrayed by your family, cursed by someone you trusted, respected even!, and left to rot by society? Well color me surprised.” Eda sarcastically remarked, spite apparent in her tone. Her bitterness briefly fell away, however, when a thought came to her. “And weren’t you supposed to be watching Hooty and King while King was practicing?”

Luz huffed. “Pfft! They’ll be fine!”

King panted, dropping to his knees, the crude spear clutched in his paws trembling. He glanced up at his foe, scowling in anger. Hooty loomed over him, his long, wiry body coiled around multiple boulders he had suspended in the air; boulders that King now knew from PAINFUL experience could be willfully hurled like a slingshot. Forcing himself to his feet, King pointed his weapon at Hooty, screaming, “IS THAT ALL YOU GOT? YOU REJECT WORM TURKEY!!!!” With a savage battle cry, the two demons leapt back into the fray, bloodlust burning in their eyes.

“Yeah, they’ll totally be fine.” Luz repeated, blissfully unaware of the carnage going on out in the clearing she had left the two to practice in.

“I’m surprised you aren’t a mess yourself, Miss ‘My Sister Was a Hostage For My Cooperation Who I Thought Was Dead But May Actually Be Alive.’” Eda snidely stated, earning her a frosty glare from her roommate.

Luz sighed, seriously wishing they weren’t having this conversation right now. “I,” She began, pointing to herself. “Am Compartmentalizing at the moment. Does the information that my sister may be alive hurt me? Oh, absolutely. But I’m aware enough of my limits not to do something stupid, and am planning on putting the screws to Oroboros anyway. Forcing myself to panic and scramble won’t help me, and it won’t help her, if the info turns out to be true.” She finished, pain filling her eyes. Her gaze sharpened, pushing through the hurt. “But what’s important right NOW… is the fact that you avoided going to sleep, and are drinking this early in the morning while running magic experiments!” She glanced over the spread of Lacrimas, bewildered. “What were you even doing with all these anyway?” She asked.

Eda shrugged, lifting the Lacrima she’d most recently selected upwards for Luz to see. “Testing these to see what they can do.” She blithely stated, moving to do just that. Luz’s eyes shot open in panic. With a yelp, she whipped the Lacrima out of Eda’s hands. “Hey! What was that for!?” Eda demanded, holding her lightly stinging fingers.

Sighing in relief at the in-tact shard of magic in her hands, Luz carefully set it in what she gathered was the sorted pile. “That,” She said, pointing to the Lacrima. “Is an Explosion Lacrima. If you had tested that, it would’ve blown you to pieces, and considering its proximity to the other Lacrimas, would’ve taken the house and most of the clearing with it.” She stated, somehow managing to keep her panic out of her voice, even as Eda paled at the implications of what had almost occurred. Luz turned an accusing stare towards Eda. “This is what I mean! If you wanted to know about what these Lacrima were, you could’ve just asked me! But instead you snuck down here and proceeded to haphazardly test them without any kind of safety precautions!! I mean, I get your all about independence and inherent limitlessness of magic and all, but that was reckless, even for you. What. Is. The Problem?” Luz demanded, eyes hard.

Eda’s gaze fell to the table, her nails gouging into the wood. “I trusted her.” She whispered. “For all that we didn’t get along anymore, for all that she worked for Bonehead and I hated him and her attempts to bring me in, I still trusted her. And she’s part of the reason I’m such a pariah, the reason I can’t even live in town! She took my trust… and she stomped on it.” Tears fell to the wood, a look of desolation and pain stretched across her face. She turned to Luz, a look of hopelessness scrawled across her face. “How do I even deal with that!?”

Luz looked on levelly. She understood, she honestly did. While she herself may not have felt the particular emotions Eda was dealing with, she was incredibly familiar with the loss, confusion, and hurt that came from internal conflict. “Well, the first thing you gotta do is ask yourself this: do you still love your sister?”

Eda reeled back, appalled. “What kind of question is that!? She’s my sister! Of course I still love her!” She exclaimed, gesturing wildly.

“But she betrayed you and has been lying to you for years.” Luz evenly pointed out.

Eda snorted. “Yeah kid, I’m aware of that. I haven’t forgiven her for it, I probably never will!” She said, throwing up her arms in emphasis, before she continued, her voice softening. “But she’s still my sister. She’s still the girl who looked out for me as a kid, even if she has been acting like a pompous windbag for years. Am I hurting? Yes. But I know she is too. I don’t need to hold it any further against her than that. I just want my family to stop hurting over it all.”

“Well, my best advice for you is to get some rest and deal with this one day at a time.” Luz said gently. “It may not seem like much, but getting proper rest should do wonders for helping you process this and figure out how to go forward.” She shrugged. “It did with me at least.”

Eda gave Luz a misty smirk. “Since when are you the adult here?” She jokingly questioned, hands folding over her chest. As she felt a familiar sensation brush against her arm, she froze. Ignoring Luz’s inquiring look, Eda roughly pushed up her sleeve, the both of them turning pale at the sight of feathers popping up along her arms. “Crap!” With a shout, Eda rushed for her cupboards, hastily throwing them open, Luz following her lead with the cabinets and drawers. There wasn’t a single potion left in the house. Eda buried her face in her hands. “I can’t believe I forgot to stock up!”

“Well, do you have somewhere you can get more!?” Luz frantically questioned. Eda shot her a look that screamed ‘duh, are you serious?’ Luz sheepishly cringed. “Okay, yeah, you probably do.”

Eda nodded tersely. “Yeah.” With a gesture, she called her staff to her, Owlbert briefly cuddling up against her cheek before solidifying into wood. “Let’s get going before I go full Owl Beast in here.”

Luz gave a sharp jerk of her head, aimed in the direction of where King and Hooty were practicing. “Do you think they’ll be okay?”

Eda gave a mostly nonchalant snort. “Those two? They’ll be fine. Hooty’s more than strong enough to look after himself, and this place, and King isn’t a helpless little fuzzball anymore.” She stated, giving Luz a proud grin, one she happily returned. With that settled, the two leapt onto the staff, taking off into the air.

As they landed in town, Luz instantly took notice of the whispers. Everyone was huddled around, shooting one another furtive looks. Uneasiness rippled through the city, clinging to every group they passed. Luz was painfully aware of the stares she got, the fear and suspicion. She fought the urge to pull in and hunker against the voices, the accusations she just knew were building. A hand on her shoulder caused her to shoot her gaze up, Eda’s awkwardly comforting face filling her vision.

“Hey, just ignore them, okay? They don’t know you.” She said soothingly, rubbing Luz’s shoulder. “I’ve had to deal with it myself plenty of times. We kicked a hornet’s nest the other day, and now people are waiting for it to sting. They’ll be on edge, you might even get a few of the angrier idiots trying to yell at you, but they’ll come around. Eventually.”

Luz gave her a shaky grin, appreciative of the support. “Thanks Eda. It means a lot.” Eda gave her a jerky nod. As they wandered deeper into the city, they brushed by a group of school-age kids, including Amity and that girl who’d been burned that first day at Hexside. The group paused, turning to look at them, uncertain whispers kicking up. Luz was honestly surprised at how little it bothered her.

As they came to a fairly innocuous looking storefront, Eda began roughly pounding on what Luz assumed was the service counter. “Open up Morton! I’ve got an emergency, and I need potions, stat!” She shouted, her fist echoing loudly against the wood.

Thumps and shouts could be heard coming from the other side, before the shutters opened, a sickly seeming Witch poking through. “Oh, sorry Eda. I was up testing poisons last night and I haven’t been feeling too well. You said you’ve got a potion emergency?”

While Luz desperately wanted to comment on him testing Poisons on himself, she was rapidly growing accustomed to the lack of care to personal safety the Isles seemed to possess in regards to its Citizens. Still, Eda seemed to trust this guy, so she wouldn’t say anything. Eda nodded sharply, pulling out a sack of snails. “Yeah. I’ve got the usual payment, so make it snappy.” She barked, roughly sliding her payment across the counter.

Morton sucked in a hissing breath, a look of regret filling his face. Eda and Luz’s own faces dropped at what they expected to come. “I’m sorry, but I’m out of Curse-Suppressant Potions at the moment. Well, I’m nearly out, I should say.” He softly admitted.

Eda slammed her hands against the counter. “Then give me what you’ve got! I don’t even care if you take the entire payment, I need potions now!!” She said frantically, a feverish look burning in her eyes.

Solemnly, Morton pulled out a single potion, the bottle visibly only half full. At Eda’s crestfallen expression, Morton shook his head. “I’m sorry, but that’s all I have left.” He remorsefully confessed. Biting his lip, he slid the potion over, along with the payment, drawing a surprised look from the two. At Eda’s look of shock, he glanced up, a surprising amount of steel in his eyes. “It wasn’t right what your sister did, and it wasn’t right for the Emperor’s Coven to lie about what happened. A lot of people are in your corner at the moment, Eda, and I’m one of them.” He gave a firm nod, pushing the potion closer.

Eda gave a faint smile, gratefully pocketing the Potion and her purse. “Thanks Mort, you’ve always been a good one.” Her grin turned cheeky. “When your not doing something stupid like testing poisons on yourself, that is.” She and Morton shared a laugh, Morton’s sounding embarrassed but unhurt.

Morton’s gaze turned to Luz, his eyes widening. “Oh! You’re that human girl!” He exclaimed. “Wait here!” He ducked down, rummaging sounds audible as he looked through his stocks. Popping back up, he slid two bottles over. “Here, a one-time only gift, on the house. A specialty poison that obstructs magic, and a pain-relief potion I made on the sly.” He gave her a cheerful wink. “I heard what you said about that group, and what they did to your family. If you’re with Eda, then you’re a good person, as far as I’m concerned.” He folded his arms, growing stern. “But don’t expect any more charity. I do have a business to run, okay?”

Eda barked out a laugh. “HA! Don’t worry Mort, we’ll be fine. But, I’m sorry to say,” She held up the bottle. “This will barely hold me over for half a day, if that.” She and Luz exchanged worried glances.

Morton gave a rueful nod. “Yeah, that’ll probably be bad.” He scratched his chin, before snapping his fingers. “I think I might know someone who can help you!” His expression shifted into one of worried thought. “But it’ll be pretty dangerous.”

Eda raised an eyebrow, before her eyes widened in realization. “Oh no, don’t tell me-”

“Yup.” Morton replied, looking grave. “The Night Market. Specifically, a guy called Grimm Hammer. He probably has what you need.”

Eda cursed. “I hate the Night Market.” She growled, giving her thanks as she led herself and Luz away from Morton’s shop. “That place is seriously scummy, even for me.”

Luz raised an eyebrow. “Hmm, let me guess, Black Market? Illegal goods and services that would bring the law down like a hammer on ripe fruit?” She guessed, clarifying at Eda’s confusion at the term she used.

Eda snorted. “Exactly.” As the two strolled along, deep in thought about their next move, a finger slowly reached out from a nearby shadow, grasping for Eda’s arm. Luz shrieked at the sight.

[maghrabiyya]

A friend posted this and said it was OK to share the text but no attribution, so these words are not mine.

"READ EVERY SINGLE WORD:

—If you are livestreaming a protest, and you are recording yourself, or taking selfies, instead of documenting information: you are not an ally. You are a tourist.

—Cover your face. Cover your hair. Cover your tattoos. Wouldn’t want to have any surfaces exposed that could get coronavirus.

—Protect your identity. Obscure your face. There are bad actors on the internet that would love to identify you and track you down for participating in a peaceful protest. Want to feel paranoid? Read about the mysterious deaths of identified Ferguson protestors years later. If you are in the privileged majority, this might be your first time realizing that there are violent people out there who want to hunt you down and harm you for existing. Imagine how POC feel.

—Unless your phone is inside a faraday cage, or you have removed the battery, it can be tracked. Yes, even in airplane mode.

—Assume all information transmitted from your phone is being intercepted by the police at the protest. Including your livestream. Oakland once had one of the largest inventories of Stingray devices (communciations intercept towers) in the US. They used them extensively against Occupy.

—Friendly reminder, your license plate is being scanned and tracked most places you drive.

—Disable your fingerprint or facescan unlock. While it is theoretically true that a search warrant is required to search your phone, it is also theoretically illegal for the police to murder an unarmed and nonviolent citizen. Use a six digit or more passcode.

—Backups to the cloud. Things tend to get broken at protests.

—Do not publicly display your teargas neutralizing spray, or peperspray neutralizing spray. You might be targeted. Keep it discrete and ready for use.

—Document any people showing up in Hawaiian shirts. Document anyone suspected of being undercover cops. Document agent provocateurs. Document bad actors showing up just to destroy property.

—If you have an Iphone, learn how to use your emergency sos. You can set your Emergency SOS to notify your family you might be being arrested or kidnapped (if it is safe for you to activate this feature). You can also disable the call 911 feature in Emergency SOS. Activating this feature also locks your phone against anything but a passcode unlock. If your phone is also encrypted, it is very hard for someone to illegally break into your phone.

—Write your emergency contact on your body in sharpie, somewhere both out of view and where it will not sweat off. Or memorize it. You will not have access to your cellphone if you are arrested (whether wrongfully or not).

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. Hot hands gloves, or Nomex flight gloves, can be used to pick up hot objects on the ground, if you need to throw a teargas grenade away from you.

—Highpowered lasers, not usually the pocket kind, can destroy the sensors on cameras. Be careful with your cameras out there.

—If your goggles have vents, they are vulnerable to teargas and pepperspray.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. A set of allen keys can sometimes unlock crowd control gates.

—Remember that Neonazis have driven cars into peaceful protests in the past. There is finally a use for all those lyft/lime/uber bikes and scooters. Bring them to the protest and use them to as roadblocks if necessary to prevent cars from driving into protestors or chasing them.

—Umbrellas can be useful in preventing bad actors from hitting you with some projectiles during an otherwise peaceful protest. They also help protect identity.

—If you are a white ally: listen. Don’t make the protests about you. There are already literal Nazis doing that.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. It has already been noted on multiple organizing boards for white supremacist groups that a protest they’ve whipped into a riot is the perfect place to murder someone with impunity, and even kidnap people. Read up on how to escape from zipties. Bring medical shears or small snips to cut them.

—If you are arrested, identify yourself. Have your ID. Do your best to show the officer that you are peaceful and not resisting arrest. Say nothing else at all without a lawyer present, unless it is to request your phone call. Assume anything said, including on phone call, is being documented and could be aggressively used against you. Innocent people can still go to jail.

—Be careful, all kinds of bad actors can use a peaceful protest as an excuse for violence. Assume you might get shot with a rubber bullet/sandbag. Wear protective gear so you can protest in peace. Being misidentified as a violent/illegal protestor by an officer could also mean being hit by a baton, which could break your bones. Protests can quickly turn chaotic, and often the official response to a peaceful protest can be indiscriminate in who gets injured. Don’t forget that photo of a 12 year old that was peppersprayed for being at a protest.

—Recognize that there are complex factors at play. Not everyone at the protest has the same agenda. Some are not peaceful. The Attorney General of the US noted yesterday that outside provacateurs are infiltrating peaceful protests to accelerate outside agendas unrelated to protesting in solidarity with Black Lives Matter/George Floyd/Police Brutality. The Mayor of Minneapolis noted many* violent protestors arrested were from out of state, and some had ties to white supremacist groups. Not all protestors are looters. Not all looters are protesting anything.

—If you are a white ally that acknowledges your privilege and wants to use that to support the protestors, go to the front of the protest. If you can tolerate having your identity known and you can be a peaceful human shield, do it. Just don’t steal the scene. Let the other POC speak. Leave your megaphone and microphone with someone else while you shield them.

—If you are a white ally in your comfortable home, stop deleting anyone that disagrees with you. Stop feeding the divisive algorithms that have helped shape this discourse into a hateful thing. Right now, you can be putting in the work talking to people and helping them understand that “All Lives Matter” is a way to avoid talking about Black Lives Matter. Don’t be combative. Listen. Ask Questions. Talk. Your POC friends don’t need to spend all their time educating—a huge part of our role as white allies is helping our other white circles understand and grow.

—Yes, all lives do matter. The problem is that some are treated like they matter less. And they are disproportionately affected by police violence in the United States. When you shout “All Lives Matter” in response to “Black Lives Matter,” all that is happening is you are silencing people trying to speak up about disproportionate treatment and unequal rights. If you are sharing that favtoid about how many white versus black lives are taken by police, without adjusting for population, you are ignorant of statistics and being willfully manipulative at worst. Do you really believe that all lives are treated and regarded equally?

—Silence is how this grew. Colorblindness is how this grew. Ignoring this is privilege. The status quo is broken. Racism is alive and well. Silence is violence.

—Your political affiliation does not matter in proving you aren’t racist. Living in a diverse and liberal area does not matter. Knowing a POC in your personal life proves nothing. Quoting one convenient MLK quote does not matter. Only being actively anti-racist matters.

—Human lives will always be worth more than property. Stop changing the subject. There will be an appropriate time to rebuild.

—Violence at a protest does not invalidate the point of the protest, even one intended to he peaceful. Focusing on violence is just a way to ignore the meaning of the protest. Stop changing the subject.

If you want to share this, copy and paste it without attribution. This is not about any one person. Not even George Floyd. It is a chain in which George Floyd is the one of the latest links. Like Alton Sterling. Like Sandra Bland. Like Michael Brown. Like Freddie Gray. The list is staggering. And every single one of those names on the list was a person who could still be with us today."

[hadleyforte]

dating your friend's crush

That’s a very general question, but @kendallandersen is very loveable so it’s very easy to imagine happening. So I guess I’ll indulge you guys and go into a couple of scenarios here! 

Anyway! My two closest friends are @claudine--frollo and @hadieathanasius and you may have noticed we actually have fairly similar tastes! And when they’re fairly superficial crushes that’s actually totally okay. We could all talk about how cute @carterlabouff is and squeal about it whenever he pays attention to us, but at the end of the day, no one’s heart is in it too deep and there would be no hurt feelings if Carter, say, went on casual dates with Hadie and then went on to date Claudine with a bit more intent after that, because we all thought he was cute but none of us were in that deep at the time of these separate events occurring.

In a hypothetical world where I perhaps had a friend who had had deeper feelings for my boyfriend at some point in time, thought, I never would have felt comfortable entering into a relationship knowing those feelings were actively still present. In fact, I probably would have avoided getting to know their crush too well on a one-on-one basis, and then once circumstances made it so that I ended up getting to know them anyway, I would have actively tried to convince myself I didn’t like him, even though, as previously mentioned, he’s very loveable and I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone who spends any sort of significant amount of time around him that he’s just... really the most wonderful human, and he’s hard not to love. Like very very much, I mean. Yeah! But anyway, in that world, imagine that your friend didn’t really talk about her crush anymore and maybe was always swearing off love anyway, and seemed to have made every effort to get over feelings because they were scary and complicated... and then suddenly they were going on dates with someone else, when dating was something they’d never attempted or been comfortable with before! 

You’d probably imagine that whatever they had going on with that person superseded any past crush you may have known about, and may have felt like that and the lack of mentions of feelings for someone else even though they noticed that you’d formed a new bond with that someone else that was growing quite strong and that would have been a perfect time to jump in and be like ‘by the way you know I still like him, right? Just in case your heart wanted to do something silly like fall for him, maybe now’s a good time to hit the brakes on that?” and... this is such a run-on sentence, I’m so sorry. Is this even making sense anymore? I hope you’re still following! If not, feel free to send me follow up questions for me to clarify further. 

Anyway, the moral of the story is that in this VERY HYPOTHETICAL SITUATION... it seemed safe to assume that any friend I might have that might have had feelings for Kendall had moved past those romantic feelings and was starting a sort of relationship with someone else. But you should never assume anything, there’s a reason that there’s that adage about ‘assuming making an a$$ out of you and me!” And so using deductive reasoning to conclude that it was ‘okay’ to give in to developing feelings of my own was perhaps -- okay, was definitely -- a mistake on my part, but by the time my hypothetical definitely not real friend who certainly doesn’t exist told me that those feelings perhaps weren’t as in the past as I’d assumed, I was in far too deep to, you know, end a relationship that made me the happiest I’d ever been. 

Especially because Kendall’s a person and not property, you know? It’s not like you can just... break up with someone and tell them to date your friend because you feel guilty that you’re dating him instead! They’d been friends for years and years without anything happening and I mean, I would have understood if he didn’t want to be with me anymore and wanted to explore that other option, even if it would have made me sad, because I care about them both so so much and want them to be happy! But I mean... this way, two and a half people are happy, and if I had broken up with him when I figured out the truth, then they still wouldn’t be together and three people would be sad instead of one person being half sad and half happy while two are happy so... um, math? 

This was a very long HYPOTHETICAL scenario and than you to those of you who stuck with it to the end! If you didn’t want to read it all, though, just know that I would never ever do that to a friend on purpose and perhaps I might have been willfully ignorant about it to an extent because of just how very happy being around Kendall made me, but hurting somebody else would never be my intention and I did try to shelve what I was feeling for a while, I really did! I promise! 

Also sorry to Carter La Bouff who may or may not have known any of this hypothetical information, I’m sorry if it ends up hurting your feelings that a girl you’re dating IN AN IMAGINARY SCENARIO ONLY might have actually liked someone else more than you when you started taking her out on hypothetical dates! But also I’m the only one of my friends you never liked and I get insecure a lot more easily than people might realize, so perhaps this is really just us being even? Yes? No? I don’t know, sorry! That’s a very petty thing to put out into the universe, let’s just pretend I never said it.

Ask my character "How do you feel about ______?"

[thejilyship]

I’m just gonna jump right in: 

Breonna Taylor. Nothing substantial has happened to rectify this situation yet. Not that anything can actually rectify what happened, but the officers, as of the time I’m writing this at 10pm on june 4th, have not faced any consequences. 

Justice for Breonna Petition This petition only takes about fifteen seconds to sign, and if you follow through to step three, you can use the ‘one click’ sign feature on the sight to sign a host of other petitions. Petitions don’t always work of course, but many of the petitions for George Floyd were ‘victorious’ so they don’t accomplish nothing. Letting people know that millions of people are for or against something can be powerful

Fight for Breonna This is another petition demanding specific policy changes and for the charges against Kenneth to be dropped you can also go to the website directly to read about her story and find numbers you can call and people you can email about all of this HERE

There are still people out there that don’t know Breonna’s story. Share it. Force people to listen to what happened to her. 

Her birthday is tomorrow. Cate Young put together a list of things that you can do to help HERE. One of the things that they are asking of people, is to send kind words to the family as they commemorate her birthday without her. 

HERE is an article that was written yesterday that goes over what has and has not happened, it also talks about David McAtee. Educating yourselves is invaluable. If you don’t know what’s going on, then you’re being willfully ignorant. I know this is a lot to take in, I know it’s hard to stomach, but we have to pay attention and we have to do something about it so that it stops happening. 

HERE is an article detailing David McAtee’s story. The cops are claiming that he shot first, but there is no body cam footage for some reason and they have not released who shot and killed him. The chief has been fired, only after it became public that the cameras were not turned on (tho the mayor fired him so it’s possible that he didn’t know about the cameras until after it became public knowledge.) 

Petition for David McAtee Again, no one has been identified as his killer. The body cams were turned off, and they were responding to a break of curfew, so the fact that they showed up so heavily armed and threw pepper balls (it’s like a paintball full of pepper spray from what I understand) to disperse the group of people who were eating on the street corner in front of David’s restaurant. 

go to the BLACKLIVESMATTER website. They have more information and resources than I could list here. 

and the most uncomfortable bullet point... have those super hard conversations with your parents and your siblings and your friends. Show them the videos that the protesters are posting that show what is being done to them when they are being peaceful. You’re not going to change everyone’s mind, and even if you’re changing people’s mind, you won’t change it all the way with one conversation. This needs to be an on going thing. 

I had a conversation with both of my parents today and didn’t walk away from it feeling completely dejected, so it’s possible! Even if it doesn’t seem like it. We talked about the protest that took place in the town we used to live in. How it was small and mainly white because black people still say that they avoid the town if at all possible. We talked about George Floyde and Breonna Taylor. We said their names and talked about why the protesters were so angry, and it felt productive. It felt like a (albeit small) step in the right direction. I listened as much as I spoke, I didn’t jump down anyone’s throat, because it’s my job as an ally to try and change people’s minds, especially the people who black voices don’t normally reach. If you get angry and defensive, people stop listening to you. 

As an ally, it’s your job to have those conversations, with people you know. I know the impulse is to unfriend them, but don’t do that. If you do, then their echo chamber becomes that less diverse and they have fewer people to challenge the way they see the world. If you really hate the shit they post, just unfollow them, but don’t unfriend them.

Of course donate what you can. There are so many wonderful people doing so many wonderful things, and they need money to do these things. Protesters are being detained, they need bail. Medics are offering their services for free at protests, they need supplies. The families of those murdered need your support too. The blm site has links to everything in their ‘donate’ tab. 

Also, Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother, is running for office in Miami! Support her campaign if you can! 

Alright, I know that there was probably a lot that I didn’t say, I might want to say more later, but this is where I’m going to leave things tonight. 

Be kind when you can, take care of yourself and your friends and do whatever you can to help. There is progress already being made! All of this is making a difference! Keep it up! 

[eldritchsurveys]

984.

1. When was the last time someone saw you naked? >> That’s a good question. Sparrow sees me in various states of undress sometimes, but I don’t remember the last time I was fully naked long enough to be seen by anyone. The only time I’m nude is when I’m in the shower or putting on moisturiser directly after said shower (which I do in my room).

2. If you could bring someone back from the dead and spend an hour with them, who would it be and what would you do/say? >> I don’t want to do this. I wouldn’t want to do that to the person, either, like... that sounds traumatic as fuck. (Now, if it were an Inworld type of situation, that’d be way different.)

3. What is the greatest loss you’ve endured? >> Various aspects of myself, I guess. But maybe they’re not truly lost. I have no way of knowing right now.

4. How would you describe your current mood? >> Neutral. I am rarely in an actual mood of any sort when I get this question, obviously -- I tend to only do surveys when I’m in this state, because it’s hard to focus on survey questions (or anything, really) if I’m actively having an emotion.

5. When was the last time you did something you were embarrassed by? >> I don’t remember.

6. What was the last thing you lied about? >> I don’t know, lying isn’t something I normally do -- unless lying by omission counts, because I don’t say literally everything that I’m thinking or tell everyone literally everything about a situation. Or whatever.

7. Where is your favorite place to have sex? >> Inworld.

8. What is your earliest memory? >> I have a vague impression of being on the floor of a dog breeder’s house? When we got my childhood dog Roxie, I guess.

9. Do you ever drink or get high alone? >> I often drink alone just because I’m in the house alone during the times when I’m most likely to drink. I like to just vibe, and not have to worry about “putting on my human suit” or whatever. Sometimes I like to be weird and dreamy or dance-y and vibrant when I’m intoxicated and I like to have space to do that.

10. What type of a drunk are you? >> I don’t know, I haven’t been drunk in a long time. I think at this point in my life I’m probably just a sleepy, cranky drunk. Which is partly why I don’t drink nearly enough to get there, lol.

11. What song (or a few songs, whatever) means a lot to you and why? >> Death is the Road to Awe means a lot to me because The Fountain as a whole means a lot to me and the music is a big part of that whole yarn-ball of meaningfulness. It’s something I really can’t explain. The feelings I have about the movie and the song are on the “this is actually kind of painful in its intensity” level of emotional connection.

12. When was the last time you revealed your feelings for someone? Were they accepted or rejected? >> I don’t remember. Revealing my feelings isn’t a common activity here in Mordredland, as I’m sure is obvious, and I rarely have any remarkable (or share-able) feelings about people anyway.

13. What was the reason behind your last visit to the hospital? >> I think the last time I was in a hospital was when Sparrow’s sister had her child.

14. How do you tend to deal with a breakup? >> ---

15. What is the “worst” drug you’ve done? Are there any you will never try, or any you want to try? >> I don’t classify drugs this way, so I don’t know how to answer this question. The drug I know I will never try is crack, and a drug I am interested in trying is shrooms.

16. What is something you’ve done that you truly regret? >> ---

17. What does it mean to you to be a good person? Do you feel you are a good person? >> I am uninterested in the “good person” designation. I just want to be valuable to and loved by a few people, maybe. That’d be nice.

18. What is your philosophy on life/how do you generally choose to live or conduct yourself? >> I don’t think I have an overall life philosophy, because that seems terribly impractical at best. Life is so complex. Maybe that’s a philosophy -- rejoice in and value the complexity of life. *shrug* 

19. Do you view animals as being just as important as people? Why or why not? >> Hmm. I think a living thing should be allowed to live out its life and not be abused or willfully subjected to conditions that disrupt its quality of life. That’s really it, though.

20. When was the last time you were up all night and why? >> I don’t remember the last time that happened.

21. What is the worst thing you’ve done to yourself? What is the worst thing someone else has done to you? >> I don’t know what the worst thing I’ve done to myself is, but one not-great thing I’ve done to myself is become a chronic self-injurer. One not-great thing someone else has done to me is, well, I don’t know, physically abuse me repeatedly?

22. What is the most personal thing you’re willing to reveal? >> I’m not sure.

23. What made you stop talking to the last person you cut out of your life? >> The fact that he emotionally abused me, probably. That’ll do it.

24. Is there a situation or person you haven’t been able to get over/forgive? >> There are a lot of things I haven’t “gotten over” because their traumatic nature changed the way I am as a person and now I have to deal with that. I don’t really see a point in forgiveness, personally -- what I do see a point is forgiving myself and treating myself better than I’ve been treated.

25. Who was the last person to yell at you? Did you yell back? >> I don’t remember.

26. Where did your last injury come from? >> I don’t know! I just have this random gouge on my finger, like someone just took a small sample of my skin.

27. What are some kinks or turn-ons you have, if any? >> Trying to describe the things I like is hard because 1) it’s often dependent on context and 2) it’s more... specific kinds of things happening in specific kinds of situations and I don’t want to like, have to lay out a whole scenario, lol.

28. What are you like during arguments? >> I have an insanely heightened physical response to conflict, for some reason (I say “for some reason” like I’m not literally post-traumatic, but I don’t know what exactly contributed to this particular symptom) -- crazy heartbeat, flushed skin, shaking, the whole nine. So I guess I’d say I go full monkey-brain during arguments and I tend to do/say whatever will get me the fuck out of the situation because I cannot process anything but “I’m in danger and these people are dangerous and did I mention DANGER”. I’ve been working on trying to express myself rationally during perceived-conflict or actual-conflict situations, but it’s a long process and mostly I just try to avoid getting into the position to begin with.

29. What is the worst thing you have said to another person? >> *shrug* Who knows.

30. Where do you like to be kissed? >> Everywhere, when a person I’m available to in that way is doing it. (So, Inworlders.)

31. What is more difficult for you, looking into someones eyes when you are telling someone how you feel, or looking into someones eyes when they are telling you how they feel? >> I don’t look into people’s eyes, period. It’s the practice of eye contact itself that is inconceivably difficult for me.

32. Think of the last time you were REALLY angry. WHY were you angry? Do you still feel the same way? >> I really don’t remember the last time I was legitimately furious (and not just using bluster to suppress a more vulnerable feeling).

33. You are on a flight from Honolulu to Chicago non-stop. There is a fire in the back of the plane. You have enough time to make ONE phone call. Who do you call? What do you tell them? >> Why was I in Honolulu, though...? I need more context for this situation that I cannot imagine myself in.

34. You are at the doctor’s office and he has just informed you that you have approximately one month to live. Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die? What do you do with your remaining days? Would you be afraid? >> Well, obviously I tell my spouse, and then I guess... some people I hang out with online? I don’t know what I would do with my remaining days because I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in that situation and how it would change my priorities. And, of fucking course I’d be afraid.

35. You can have one of the following two things. Which do you choose? Why? Usually when someone says that, a list of two things would follow. <--

36. You are walking down the street on your way to work. There is a dog drowning in the canal on the side of the street. Your boss has told you if you are late even once more, you are fired. Do you take the time to save the dogs life? Why or Why not? >> I don’t work, so that’s the first problem with this question. In a general sense, though, I would probably risk a consequence of that caliber in order to try to save a life if I can. (I don’t know about this specific situation, though, because I can’t swim...)

37. Would you rather be hurt by the one you trust the most or the one you love the most? >> It’s people that I trust and love (those are the same thing, sorry, I don’t get how they can be separate *shrug*) that would have the best chance of hurting me, because of the emotional attachment...

38. Your best friend confesses that he/she has feelings for you more than just friendship. He/she is falling in love with you. What do you (or did you) do/say? >> ---

39. Think of the last person who you know that died. You have the chance to give them 1 hour of life back, but you have to give up one year of yours. Do you do it? Why or Why not? >> No, man, we went through this already in an earlier question. No matter how you present the circumstances, I’m not bringing anyone back from the dead, period.

40. Are you the kind of friend that you would want to have as a friend? >> Well, I don’t know???

41. Does love = sex? >> Inworld, it does, because that’s just how it works for Us.

42.Your boss tells your coworker that they have to let them go because of work shortage, and they are the newest employee. You have been there much longer. Your coworker has a family to support and no other means of income. Do you go to your boss and offer to leave the company? Why or Why not? >> ---

43.When was the last time you told someone HONESTLY how you felt regardless of how difficult it was for you to say? Who was it? What did you have to tell the person? >> I haven’t done that in a long time, idk.

44. What would be (or what was) harder for you to tell a member of the opposite sex, you love them or that you do not love them back? >> I think the “I don’t love you back” conversation would be way harder, lmao. People get really upset about that sort of thing.

45. What do you think would be the hardest thing for you to give up? Why would it be hard to lose? >> *shrug*?? 

46. Excluding romantic love, when was the last time you told someone you loved them. Who were they to you? >> ---

47. If there was one moment and one time in the last month what would you change and why? >> No.

48.Imagine it is a dark night, you are alone, it is raining outside, you hear someone walking around outside your window. WHO do you wish was there with you? >> My apartment is on the third floor... my biggest concern would be “how the fuck is this person walking on air???” I don’t know why I’d want anyone in particular with me -- why, so we can both be killed by this apparent superhuman? lmao.

49. Would you give a homeless person CPR if they were dying? Why or Why not? >> If I felt confident in my ability to perform CPR, I might. I think it’s mostly the fear that I’m going to do it wrong and... idk, kill the person quicker? that would prevent me from doing it. It does sound vaguely irrational when I write it out like that, but hey.

50.You are holding onto your grandmother’s hand and the hand of a newborn that you do not know as they hang over the edge of a cliff. You have to let one go to save the other. Who do you let fall to their death? What was your rationale for making the decision? >> ---

51. Are you old fashioned? >> No.

52. When was the last time you were nice to someone and did NOT expect anything in return for it? >> I’m not “nice to” people. I just treat people with basic respect and consideration, and of course I expect that in return...

53.Which would you choose, true love with a guarantee of a broken heart, or never loved at all? Why? >> ---

54.If you could do anything or wish anything, what would it be? >> ---

55. What was the last thing you ate? >> A few toasted vanilla Smashmallows.

56. What kind of guys are you usually attracted to? >> ---

57. What’s the stupidest thing that’s happened to you that ended a friendship? >> I don’t think any of the things that ended my friendships were stupid. It just sucked.

58. What’s the longest amount of time you’ve had sex for? >> Inworld, probably... an hour and a half, maybe 2 hours? Outworld, I don’t remember or care.

59. What reality shows do you watch? >> I don’t think I watch any. I’m trying to think if anything I’ve watched on purpose qualifies as “reality” and I... don’t think so? Untold Stores of the ER is basically just dramatisations of allegedly-real stories, so maybe that’s the closest thing to reality tv that I watch? Man, I do love that show. Oh, wait, those cooking shows! Those are reality TV, right? Okay, yeah, I watch stuff like that.

60. Post a video of yourself here: >> No.

61. Where do you work? >> ---

62. Have you ever gone up to a car thinking it was yours and tried to get in it? >> ---

63. Where do you buy most of your clothes? >> I don’t have a designated place where I buy most of my clothes. I shop for clothes so infrequently that it’s really just “wherever has the specific item that I want”.

64. If you were very intelligent and had the capability to have any profession, what would you like to be? Getting tired of the unrealistic hypotheticals. <-- My constant mood with surveys.

65. What’s your most irrational fear? >> ---

66. How many radio stations do you listen to? >> Zero.

67. What kind of music do they have? >> ---

68. Would you rather go to Greece or Hawaii? >> Oh, but I would go to either...

69. Musicals: Yay or Nay? >> Yay :)

70. What are the next concerts you’ll be going to? >> Ha! Hilarious.

71. What was the last conversation you had with your best friend about? >> ---

72. Are you one of those people that LOVE to hug others? >> Inworld I will spend all day cuddling if I can. Outworld, I legitimately cannot remember the last time I initiated a hug with someone. It’s been years.

[vateacancameos]

I Won't Let You Let Me Down So Easily

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Fandom: The Locked Tomb Trilogy Pairing: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus Tags: Canon Compliant, Post-Canon, Post-Gideon the Ninth, Post-Harrow the Ninth, Pre-Slash, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, they're working on the lovers part, POV Gideon Nav, Gideon watches Harrow Word Count: 1804 Part 2 of the Watching series (read Part 1 here)

For all of her short years of life, Gideon Nav has never wanted anything more than to ignore the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House. To pretend she doesn’t exist. Unfortunately for Gideon—and the entirety of the Ninth—Harrowhark Nonagesimus has made that impossible from day one. She’s always there, one step away from Gideon, not looking at her, but making her own presence known, making sure she’s seen. That shrill, commanding tone is there from the moment she says her first word. Bones follow her every command, and she’s a tiny tyrant in black and wearing a painted mask. Where she is, skeletons follow, and Gideon is left behind, bloodied and beaten on the floor.

She never asked for this. She’s never wanted to be the bane of everyone’s existence. In fact, she tries her hardest to get away, time and time and time and time again. But Harrow demands an audience, and with most of the House being blinded from old age, Gideon is the one forced to watch. So she watches. Mostly, she watches her back, but over time, she watches just to see. What she’s looking for, she’s not sure.

She’s never wanted this, so why does a part of her now ask for it?

*** 

 (read the rest under the cut)

***

Somehow Gideon isn’t surprised that even in the afterlife, she’s forced to watch Harrow. The Dark Mistress of Drearburh is a necromancer after all. If Gideon couldn’t get away from her during any of her eighty-seven escape attempts in life, it’s doubtful a little something like lacking a body would stop Harrow from forcing her to stay.

The really annoying part is that this time, Gideon actually does want to watch, but she’s got less a front-row seat and more like she’s using binoculars turned backwards so the thing she’s looking at is tiny and the lenses are smudged and she’s got cotton stuffed in her ears. She’s grateful for that when Ianthe tries her hand (haha, hand) at flirting with Harrow—she’s never felt such intense second-hand embarrassment in her life—but seeing what’s happening on The Mithraeum would be rather helpful right now.

Especially considering she isn’t allowed to do her job (protecting) thanks to one pointy-faced emo chick performing an at-home lobotomy with only a sociopathic princess to watch over her. Oh yeah, pre-surgery, Gideon could watch everything just fine. Why is it always that she’s forced to watch when she doesn’t want to, and she can’t watch when she does want to? She’s more than a little ticked by that.

No one ever asks her what she wants.

***

You know what’s really fucking annoying? Dying for your best frenemy so she can become the thing she’s wanted to become since she was four, then getting not only walled up in a tiny corner of Prissy McBitchFace’s brain, not only forced to see how awkward God is during tea time, not only stuck watching Harrow fumble her training and social interaction, but ALSO, unable to make her fucking necromancer work out or learn one single thing about a sword.

IT’S A FUCKING POMMEL, HARROWHARK. You can learn all the bones of the body by age two and a half, but you can’t learn the very few parts of a fucking sword? Sigh.

She’s being willfully ignorant on purpose. Gideon knows it.

***

You know what’s really fucking sad? Watching Harrowhark unable to function. Not just in her usual disconnected with reality and living in her special world where she’s the queen and everyone bows to her way. No, Harrow is … not Harrow. She’s barely human now (not that she was ever particularly human, more like a pointy, annoying bat), she’s paranoid (granted, someone is trying to kill her on the daily), she’s not sleeping, there are more wards in her tiny room than in all of the Ninth House, and she’s trying to … make soup?

It’s embarrassing to watch, and once again, Gideon is grateful her view is fuzzy and distant. Except that since she only gets a far-off snapshot of events a few times a day, she has lots of time to think and contemplate. And the more she thinks about it, the worse she feels. It’s sad, Harrow’s life is. And not in a oh she’s such a dork, how sad way, but more in a way that hurts Gideon’s heart, if Gideon had a heart still, which she guesses she doesn’t, not properly.

But still, she aches for Harrow. She wants to do her job, to be the big bad protector, but someone decided to be a selfish jerk and not let Gideon do the one thing she literally died to do.

Some people suck.

***

Swear to John (who’d’ve thought God’s name would be John), Gideon is really fucking tired of watching. At least when she was forced to watch Harrow in the past(life), she had a sword in her hands and a cocky smile on her face. Oh, what she’d give to go back to being able to watch and do, rather than watch and … watch, but not really watch, because time moves funny for her and it sounds like everyone is talking under water and faces are distorted (oh, no, wait, Ianthe’s face is always like that, nm).

She needs to be able to do again. She needs to force her dumb necromancer to get some sleep and then some exercise and then some brain surgery, in that order (what? squats are important). And then maybe learn the parts of the sword. SERIOUSLY, HARROW, HOW HARD IS POMMEL?

She wishes she had Harrow’s dumb army of constructs to fight. Even without a body, she has excess energy to get rid of and– HOLY SHIT. A CONSTRUCT JUST BURST OUT OF THE SKINNY/BUFF LYCTOR’S abdomen.

Okay, Harrow. You win this round.

***

Sleep does not help Harrowhark’s mood. She’s less of a zombie, sure, but she’s still a bit bananas. Watching her cut off Ianthe’s arm is pretty great, though (less great is watching her climb on top of Princess Bitch to do it). And the sex thing with God and two of the saints is … well, the jury is still out on that one. She actually got quite an eyeful of that scene. Perhaps all the wine allowed Gideon more freedom to move about in her necro’s brain.

None of that shocks her like watching Harrow save the lyctor whose been out to kill her for months. Gideon would definitely save him if she were in Harrow’s shoes (except she’d never be in those shoes because, one, they’re too small for her, and two, SHE KNOWS HOW TO USE A FUCKING SWORD). But even after everything that happened at Canaan House, and all that she’s seen of the disaster that is Harrow’s current life, watching Harrow save the man she’s absolutely bloody terrified of is … staggering.

Gideon’s not sure what to do with this information. Harrow with a normal human conscious is not something she thought she’d ever see. It’s not the Harrow she knew for seventeen years. It’s not the girl she fought tooth and nail with almost all of her life. It’s not the tiny mad genius who broke into the Tomb just to say she could. It’s not the tyrant who puppeteered her dead parents’ bodies for seven years for a power trip. It’s not the necromancer who longed for nothing more than to become a lyctor, even at every other person around hers expense.

It’s not the bone magician who performed possibly deadly surgery on her own brain rather than share soul space with the woman who died for her.

And if Harrow’s actions now say she’s not those things, then what else doesn’t Gideon know about her?

***

For once, Gideon is the watchee instead of the watcher.

Leave it to Sextus to be the one to see her.

***

Gideon takes it all back. She’d rather spend a myriad watching helplessly and foggily as her necromancer bumbles through life because she refuses to accept help in becoming a real lyctor. She’d love to go back to watching her make soup and avoid kisses with Tridentarius The Lesser and grimace at tea and cut her hair every three days and fuck up Gideon’s beloved two-hander by covering it in bone glue.

Because the alternative, of Harrow just up and leaving her body, which has just come to pass, is untenable. It’s wrong. Not just Gideon’s eyes and her WTF expression on Harrow’s face, but also the pure lack of Harrow in the room. For such a tiny little witch, she takes up a lot of space. She always has. It’s why Gideon had watched her their whole lives. Harrow would enter a room, and her presence would draw Gideon like a paperclip to a magnet. It was hateful, but it was comfortable, a known entity.

But Harrow being gone is so wrong.

Luckily, there are plenty of bug-human-acid-monster things that hold her attention for a time. That, and trying to figure out how to work Harrow’s limp noodle arms so that she can use a sword that weighs about the same as she currently does. As Gideon hacks and kicks and watches Harrow’s extremities regrow (trippy), she avoids thinking about why Harrow has left her. She fights Princess Peach and avoids thinking. She bickers (and maybe falls just a tiny bit in love) with Ianthe Tridentarius and avoids thinking. She listens to confessions twenty years in coming and avoids thinking. She finds her (very fucked up) family and avoids thinking. She (maybe?) befriends the lyctor who tried for nine months to kill her necromancer (except its actually not the lyctor anymore and she’s definitely going to have to learn more about that at some point when she’s no longer fighting for her [lyctor’s] life) and avoids thinking.

She’s going to have to think again at some point, but she’ll avoid it as long as she’s able.

***

When Gideon finally escapes and gets somewhere safe, she has time to watch again, and she hates it. She watches Harrow’s face in the mirror. She wills her necromancer to come back. She begs Harrow to come back. She paints the best skull she’s ever painted on Harrow’s face. She puts on the rust-black robes. She stares at the mirror and tries to find Harrow in the frown lines and pointy chin. But she’s not there, and it looks wrong. Gideon screams and punches the mirror. The broken flesh repairs instantly. She hates that. She needs the pain the last.

She has always associated pain with Harrow. The physical pain of their fights. The emotional pain of being unloved. If the pain is no longer there, does that mean Harrow is gone for good?

Gideon Nav’s eyes sting, and she watches the paint melt off Harrow’s face.