#I drew this directly after playing marble nest

[themostartisticbread]

no one lives forever

[livvywrites]

Forgotten

a story i wrote a while ago as a writing exercise. I found it in the drafts of my computer. I hope you enjoy!

—

Cersei couldn’t tell you what made her go into the castle. It was dilapidated, like most of the buildings before the Fall. Towers had crumbled into themselves; wood rot had set into the door and drawbridge. Fauna had slowly grown its way into every crack and crevice, widening them as it did so. The glass had been shattered; the statues broken: and valuables stripped away from the inside.

There was no reason for this place to have any appeal.

But Cersei was a wanderer. An adventurer, who had donned the armor of the knights of old, painstakingly kept and restored by the blacksmith’s in the new cities. She had left her city—the one on whose doorstep she had been orphaned, the woman clutching her succumbing to the cold of winter, leaving only a squalling babe who slept by the fire of the inn and did chores about the place. She learned swordfighting from the guards; learned how to hunt and shoot from the hunters; could cook and clean and sew thanks to the innkeeper. The smith had given her the armor on her 17th birthday, after the many years she had spent pining after it… and that had been that.

So while she had no reason to go into the castle… she also had no reason not to go into the old castle.

Curiosity demanded she enter, see where the rulers had lived before the miners awakened the horror sleeping below. There would be little left, she knew that… but she had to see.

The air within was musty and dry. There weren’t nearly as many creatures inside as she would have thought; only birds who made nests in the rafters and the occasional bug colony. No predators. No abominations.

Just sunlight streaming in from broken windows and plants who stretched across the floor.

Paintings hung on the walls—or, rather, frames that had once contained paintings. Each one was made of brass; the wooden ones broken on the floor, or rotted away by time and insects. Chewed up rugs, frayed at the ends and covered in dirt and debris covered the marble floor, and furniture was in varying states of repair.

The whole place was strangely still, in a way the world outside wasn’t. Out there, things were always moving. Plants. Animals. Monsters. In here…

The deeper she got, the less life she saw.

Cersei wandered, looking in room after room, disturbing as little as possible. She felt like an outsider. An intruder. Like she very much didn’t belong here.

But she didn’t feel unwelcome. (Of course, nor did she feel accepted. Just a strange, tentative silence, as if neither of them could decide what she was.)

Then she found the bedroom.

It was… remarkably intact. Holey curtains fluttered in the breeze. A canopy bed, still remarkably intact, dominated the room. The dresser still retained its varnish, the mirror clouded with dust. Paintings were aged and cracked, but you could still tell what they were—except for one, directly in the path of the sun. It was so faded and peeling you couldn’t see anything at all.

But the thing that drew Cersei’s attention—the thing that commanded her to enter the room, something she had only done when it was the only alternative—was the grand piano.

Glass and debris crunched under her boots as she walked, slowly, over to it. She laid her fingers on the keys, yellowed with age.

She pressed—expecting no sound at all.

Instead, the piano sang.

Still in tune.

She found herself smiling.

She used her foot to push out the bench, and settled herself before it; back straight and shoulders back, fingers on the keys like she had known how to play all her life.

She knew no songs but the ones sung in taverns—and none of them were played on the piano. Yet still, she found herself playing. The song was haunting. Familiar. Like a word on the tip of her tongue that wouldn’t make the journey to her brain.

She let her eyes fall shut.

There was a weight on her head, a gentle pressure on her forehead and all around. Someone’s fingers were clasped in her own. A skirt swished around her legs as she moved, in patterns long-familiar and long-forgotten. A hand was solid against her waist, and she could make out the softest whispers underneath the strands of the music.

The song ended, and Cersei’s eyes opened at the final note.

She’s surprised to feel liquid on her face; her vision blurring.

She doesn’t know why she’s crying. She doesn’t know why she has a fierce ache in her chest, a tightness to her gut.

The castle walls close in around her, and she feels like a decision has been made. The weight in the air, the stillness that haunts this place has changed. There is a new taste to the air—a taste she doesn’t yet understand… but as she stands, she knows she wants to.

She touches her brow with two fingers, right where the thickest part of the weight had been. She drew a circle with her fingers—and sees a jewel of the deepest purple.

She turns to face the room again, her back to the window.

Cersei couldn’t tell you why she entered the castle, but only because she didn’t know.

There were answers, somewhere. She just had to find them.

[tryingthisfangirlthing]

Love, I’ve Missed You In A Million Different Ways (How Is It We Keep On Writing Tragedies Together?) 3/14-ish

So this is part 3 of my @bering-and-wells-exchange gift for @dapperdorian. This section kept kicking my behind, and I wasn’t happy with it, and I wasn’t happy with it but I had a plan to follow. Then last Friday this idea bowled me over out of left field, and exploded, and, well. It’s not soft longing, more like love-hate if-things-were-different repressed wanting.

And warning for implied major character death.

3. She Would Have Given Everything

“I never want to meet you like this again,” Myka bit out, as she grabbed Helena's hand and jumped them both to the posh downtown lobby.

“Well, don't.” Helena lifted one shoulder. “But I'm not going to aside while this plague wrecks —”

“If you want to help, go back to your lab. You are not Batman! Or — Batwoman, or whoever. One of these days you're going to get yourself killed!” And her concern was very real. “And we need you.”

“That fictional, pouty, playboy Gary Stu? I should hope not!” Helena arched her eyebrows at Myka, and shook her head in disbelief. “Quite frankly, I’m offended that comparison even occurred to you.”

“Helena, you’re not super,” Myka hissed at her. “And you have —”

A loud crash rang out above them. Amanda lost the queen, Steve relayed.

On it. “Get out of here, and stay out,” Myka grit out, and jumped back to the 10th floor to search.

Higher than 10. Lower than 15. Closer to 15 than 10, judging by the volume of the ruckus. Coming higher, the screech of metal giving way under demonic claws. Elevator shaft. To confirm, she jumped several floors below, inside the shaft.

The breathless cold split second of everywhere and nowhere. Steeling herself against the rushing freefall, the crack of instinctual panic. Up, look up.

A forked tail, lashing out, snagged her hair. That was too close. Closing her eyes, she jumped again, without those strands.

Solid ground beneath her feet, no large, otherworldly presence. Definitely in the elevator, and climbing, Steve. Then she fell onto all fours, shaky and ungainly.

“Don't you dare talk to me about risking my life, when they need you just as much.” A fierce murmur in her ear, and a vial was pressed against her hand. “Drink.”

Myka opened her eyes just in time to see the swarm zipping up the avenue, Helena flinging a grenade through the doors into the middle of it. Flame burst through the cloud of insects, licking at wings and silencing snapping mandibles. The drones are here. First wave is dealt with, but I'm sure more are coming.

Copy. She could hear the frown in Steve's thoughts. We need to get these civilians out of here.

Shit. Why here? It wasn't a food source for them (like the nuclear power plant just outside of town) or on the dessert menu (the slaughterhouse just across the county line) or even a good nesting spot (no large, open yet enclosed spaces).

Better here than almost anywhere else.

Office complex on a Saturday afternoon… You have a point.

Helena gave you something. Take it.

You connected her, too? A miserable foreboding rose in Myka's throat. But that was Pete's forte, not hers.

Safer for everyone, was all Steve offered in return.

Myka uncorked the vial and drank. It didn't happen all at once, but her heartbeat slowed, a new energy crackling through her veins.

“What was that stuff?” She called across the lobby, as she straightened, rising, testing her knees.

“Just something I cooked up.” Helena didn't spare her a glance, alternating between eyeing the street outside and a flashing gadget on the marble floor by her feet.

“Yeah, I got that much.” She rolled her shoulders, checking for any aches.

“Well, I don't have the time to explain the various biochemical process involved,” Helena snapped.

“I was pre-med, you know. Before —” She couldn't find the words for — this madness. “Before.”

“I didn't know,” Helena said, softly, and Myka glanced at her to find that this was the thing that got her attention. A kind of sorrow flickered in her dark eyes, and Myka almost wondered if she was thinking, for the first time, about how her screw-up had affected everyone else.

“I was going to switch over to pre-law, though.” She brushed it off. Something wasn't quite right, that last jump... “Just didn't know how to tell my dad. You kind of saved me the trouble.” Because the last thing she needed was pity from Helena fucking Wells.

Helena nodded, slowly, her gaze wandering back to the now-beeping device at her feet. “I was a writer, before.”

“I know. Writer, inventor, physicist, all-around polymath.” Something in Myka's back clicked into place, and all her atoms lined up again — sans that shorn-off hair, she reminded herself, running the flat of her hand over the ragged curls. If she tried to reassemble more matter than was there…

You good to go?

“You did?” There shouldn't be that much surprise in Helena's voice, for someone once heralded as “the next Jules Verne or Anne McCaffrey.”

Yep. Where?

They were all huddled in a storage closet on the 7th floor, eight weekend workaholics, one with a kid. Steve was shielding them all from the creature’s senses for now, but the effort it was taking him slipped over their connection as well.

She jumped.

Her eidetic memory served her unspeakably well, in that she could look at a roomful of people and know exactly how to reassemble them. “Hold hands, please,” as she reached for Steve to one side of her and the nearest civilian on the other. “No disabilities or chronic conditions?”

“Asthma,” one person in the back piped up.

“All right, noted. Shouldn't be a problem.” Where to?

Mall on King and McAllister. It was a good three blocks away, but definitely out of any potential lines of fire. Myka drew on all of her focus, making sure she could feel every one of them, and jumped.

A tug, a weight on her core, as she pulled them all through spacetime. Head throbbing as she stumbled onto the sidewalk, relief flooding her as they all came through all right.

Steve tightened his grip, wrapping his other arm around her to keep her from falling.

“You all right?” It was almost startling to her his voice in her ear, after so often hearing it only in her head.

“I will be,” she muttered.

“Get back to Helena. She'll look after you while you rest up.”

“Where the hell are Amanda and Pete?” Why couldn't one of them babysit me?

Amanda and Pete are doing their damn best to contain that queen.

Fine.

So she sucked in a breath and, for the third time in what felt like as many minutes, she jumped back to that damn lobby.

— Nearly jumped straight into Helena, careened as she shifted her destination at the last moment, Helena's startled “oh!” loud in her ear. Helena's arms wrapped around her, as she came to rest back in reality again.

“We've really got to stop meeting like this.” Low, teasing, warm breath feathering over her ear.

Myka let herself sag forward. “Screw you,” she muttered.

“You're quite welcome to, some other time.”

I just learned way more about you two than I ever wanted to know.

Butt out, Steve! And she could practically feel the same sentiment emanating from Helena, though she couldn't hear her directly.

Kinda hard right now, sorry.

Helena guided her over to a red leather armchair, Myka dragging her feet one after another. At least she shouldn't be crucial to operations now, unless they needed a scout, or bait, or a distraction, or a split-second save. Again.

Myka bent over, resting her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, hair falling in her face. Tried not to feel awkward about how sweaty and gross she was making this nice chair.

She heard Helena make some kind of round of the space, muttering to herself, occasionally British-cursing at some gadget or another. Myka focused on breathing and getting her presence of mind back together. “Do you have another of those pick-me-ups?”

“I wouldn't recommend downing two in a row. Just as a precaution.”

“Okay.” She lifted her head, to watch as Helena watched the exterior. A laptop balanced on the narrow reception desk, floor plan of the building on display, surrounded by sporadically flashing indicators of, something, and now Helena paid this more attention than the view through the glass doors. A flash-bang off too their left, building lights flicking off and on again.

“Don’t tell me it wrecked the wiring somewhere.” God, she was getting fucking tired. Both right now, and of everything.

“That was me. Experimental chain-lightning —” she caught Myka's look — “Basically a super-sized swarm taser. Or, attempt at one.” And she frowned at the screen.

“Great. You can knock them out. Now just jump this entire freakshow back off of our plane of existence already.”

“Yes, thank you, I’ve been working on that for the past six months already.” Annoyance crackled through her voice.

“Stopping every time there's even the faintest hint of an attack to go play Batman with us. Or really more Lois Lane.” Myka knew only the vaguest of comic book premises from Pete. “Or whoever the mad scientist is. Harley Quinn, maybe?”

“That is low.” Helena's voice shuddered.

“I Encountered Aliens From Another Dimension,” Claims Sci-Fi Author; The Secret Crackpot Side of Physics’ Once-Rising Star; Local Mother Institutionalized, Daughter Left In Uncle's Care; the headlines flashed across her memory, and she hung her head again. “You're right. I'm sorry.”

Helena hummed vaguely. It wasn't quite acceptance, but Myka would take it.

“Hopper, 10 o'clock.” Myka winced inwardly as its spines shattered window after window on its zigzag path through downtown, thirty feet above ground.

“Yes, I'm aware. How about you do your job and let me do mine?”

“Sorry,” Myka muttered. “Just trying to be helpful.”

“Well, you're not.”

“Besides, I wouldn't exactly call this your job.”

Can you cool it with the negative energies? Really making things difficult right now.

Myka braced herself against the loud crash upstairs, the way the entire building shivered with the massive impact. Then a loud kreee! and the creature fell to the ground outside, writhing on its back, screaming as it melted from its eight feet down.

“What — did you coat the building in something? Or has someone nearby recently discovered the power of carapace-melting acid shields?”

A wicker café chair across the side street burst into flames, and Helena swore.

“Is that going to melt through the cement?” It would be kind of impressive, if this stuff did manage that trick. It almost looked like it might, as the hopper's screams died down to a low gurgle.

“It shouldn't. It should only react with their exoskeletons but —”

“It is.” The last of the creature utterly dissolved, the acidic puddle was now carving itself its own little pondspace, sinking into the middle of the intersection.

A loud sigh. “That's what field tests are for.”

“Really? In the middle of the city?” Myka stood, outrage eating away at her. “You are utterly insane.”

Helena glared at her, and for a split second, Myka was glad those piercing eyes weren't super. “Oh, I'm sorry. Was I supposed to try to lure one out into the middle of bloody nowhere, and try to contain it, just to douse it in deadly acid, and hear from you, ‘Oh, how could you, Helena? Doing something so dangerous on your own! You're too important and we need you working to fix this reality tear you ripped open! Think about others for once!’” Her mimic was mocking, annoyingly accurate for this familiar argument.

Stop it! Fight later!

If Helena heard Steve, she gave no sign. “Myka Bering, my entire life right now is dedicated to mitigating the damage I've caused the best I know how, and I don't need to hear that sort of shite from you!”

She was trembling; they both were. In her peripheral, something burst into flames; a window shattered, smoking shrapnel landing on the entryway carpet.

Myka kicked at it, and found herself swaying on her feet. “You set up a minefield?”

“A perimeter, yes. For the moment.”

“How did you lug all this stuff here on short notice?” She hadn't helped, she knew. She rested her head in her hands again.

(“You're lucky,” she'd told Pete once. “Your powers don't leave you feeling like three-day-old roadkill afterwards.”

“Yeah,” he'd returned, “but I do spend like a billion dollars on tacos now. Besides, your powers are way cooler. I'm just a regular guy who can lift a bunch of stuff.”

Myka had surrendered to eating sugar, in frankly pathetic quantities, to combat the roadkill feeling the day after. But that wasn't something she'd tell anyone, not even her best friend.)

“I didn't.” As nonchalant as you please.

Myka looked up, narrowed her eyes. “What does that mean?”

“It means, I didn't do it on short notice.” Helena glanced at her, assessingly. “It means I set up what I hoped would be a lure for the queen here. And once she's gone, the rest should shut down.”

“And you didn't think to tell us?” Myka was striding across the room, reaching out to — to strangle her, probably.

She told me, Steve interjected, and Myka stilled. The queen showed up sooner than anyone expected.

Pete might as well have punched her in the gut. We're supposed to be a team, Steve.

“Because we all know how much faith you have in my work.” Helena's momentary smile was saccharine, sardonic.

She sucked in a breath, mind reeling like the colors of a kaleidoscope. “I think you're brilliant,” slipped out. “You've got no common sense, but you're a genius. You're, what, five years older than me? And you've found a whole other universe. Like something out of one of your books.” Helena was staring at her, lips parted, that melting gaze soft and shocked. “You're just so stupid, and — and selfish sometimes!”

Incoming! Myka!

She didn't think, just grabbed Helena and jumped.

But she didn't have some destination in mind, not even some instinctive concept of safe harbor. And now Helena was here with her, floating in this strange stillness that was everywhere and nowhere. I'm sorry, she tried to say, but there was no way to hear.

Like being thrown under a waterfall, she had no idea which way was up, air, reality. Stupid stupid, she'd been so tired, she hadn't thought — and wasn't that what she always accused Helena of? The thing she feared most in herself, the not thinking, the reason for rules... So stupid.

She tried to picture the lobby they'd left, tried to reach for any anchor.

There, that stupid blinking laptop, she could almost see it, and the ceiling plaster raining down, the claws and slobbering mandibles and gigantic five-eyed frilled head.

She pushed Helena away, through, pushed her to stumble onto that ragged red lobby carpet, and then Myka met the monster's claws.

It thrashed, resisted, but Myka yanked it with her, and then everything went black.