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mahounomanga · 3 years ago

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Mai (a.k.a. Mai, the Psychic Girl)

I am extremely grateful to live in a time where English translations of manga are as accessible as they are. There are plenty of titles I either plan to cover on this blog, or have covered already, that would not have been accessible to me just fifteen years ago. Even if we're only talking about official releases, we are in an era when I can walk into my local Barnes & Noble and buy volumes of semi-recent magical girl titles like Cosmo Familia, Machimaho, and Nirvana. Today I want to take a look back to the beginning of that legacy, and examine what was probably the first magical girl manga ever to get an official English release.

Mai is a 1985 manga written by Kazuya Kudo and illustrated by Ryoichi Ikegami. The story revolves around Mai Kuju, a 14 year old girl with powerful psychic abilities, especially psychokinesis. At first she mostly uses her powers to amuse herself when bored; however, she catches the attention of the Wisdom Alliance, a shadowy organization tracking young psychics worldwide. Mai is one of five teens the Wisdom Alliance has taken an interest in, and once she realizes she's being followed, she has no choice but to go on the run. Encountering danger at every turn, Mai accepts help from those willing to offer it, but when the going gets tough, the tough get psychic.

The story is highly serialized, gradually building on itself and undergoing major status-quo changes along the way. Usually these changes have to do with who Mai's allies are at any given time. One of the things that stands out to me about this manga is the number of people who come to Mai's aid. Ordinarily this kind of character-trying-to-escape-from-a-myserious-group story carries a message of "trust no one", and I was honestly glad to see that subverted here. These supporting characters (usually) don't detract from Mai's story, but reinforce her as the emotional core of the narrative. Oftentimes, Mai's reaction to the events unfolding around her are given as much focus as the events themselves, especially early on. I found this series more compelling than I expected, and even with a chapter count higher than any other manga I've read for this blog yet, it was decently easy to get through. It helps that the chapters were short and well-paced. Lavishly detailed panel compositions draw out the action in some scenes and sell the more tender moments in others.

Not everything about this manga is great though. A content warning is in order for violent and erotic imagery. The violence is used sparingly, and it often conveys the emotional impact and stakes of the narrative, but still, the headsplosions felt unnecessary and caught me off guard. The horny stuff is generally pretty tame, but it does show up more frequently near the end. There's some occasional nudity and inevitable panty shots during the flying scenes, which, whatever, but Mai sustaining outfit damage during the final battle felt completely uncalled for. The political implications of this story are a bit messy as well. Not just in the sense of dated gender relations and gender stereotyping (though there is plenty of that too). The Wisdom Alliance alludes to real-world political systems and historical events in ways that can be hard to parse what the author was implying. They even go so far as to draw comparisons to the Third Reich in terms of the amount of power the Wisdom Alliance holds, which feels questionable. Not to mention, there's some racial stereotyping going on with the psychic kids from other countries. Japanese and white characters in this manga are almost always drawn attractively and/or with realistic proportions, while the Mongolian and Vietnamese boys are... visually distinct let's say. Almost everything about the way they act and talk feels like it's designed to other them, and it's really uncomfortable to read honestly.

The series was co-created by Kazuya Kudo and Ryoichi Ikegami, with Kudo on writing duty and Ikegami drawing the manga. Both worked with Kazuo Koike early in their careers; Ikegami providing illustrations for Koike's 1973 manga I Ueo Boy, and Kudo being one of the first students of Koike's renowned story writing course, Gekiga Sonjuku, in 1977. Both men also worked predominantly in adult-oriented manga with dark and mature themes. From what I can tell, Kazuya Kudo never illustrated any manga, all his stories I know of were drawn by other artists, but he continued writing manga well into the 2000s. Mai is perhaps his best known work, though he is also remembered for Pineapple Army and Nobunaga, the latter of which was also illustrated by Ikegami. Ryoichi Ikegami has been making manga since age 17, and he is still active in the industry as of this writing. Like Kudo, he usually collaborates with other mangaka, drawing rather than writing. One of his earliest works was the 1970 Spider-Man manga co-written by Kousei Ono and Kazumasa Hirai. Three of the manga he drew for have been adapted into OVAs: Kizuoibito in 1986, Crying Freeman in 1988, and Sanctuary in 1996.

Mai was originally published in Weekly Shounen Sunday, a Shogakukan publication, from March 20, 1985 to April 2, 1986, for a total of 53 chapters. The series was reprinted by Shogakukan in six tankobon volumes between July 1, 1985 and July 18, 1986. Media Factory reprinted the series twice in the 2000s, first as three volumes between 2002 and 2003, then as two volumes in 2006. Most recently, Shogakukan published a digital version of the original 6 volumes on April 28, 2020.

But of course, that's only the manga's Japanese run. This series was also translated into Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, and most famously, Mai was among the first manga to be officially published in English. Viz Media collaborated with Eclipse Comics to release the series as Mai, the Psychic Girl from May 19, 1987 to July 12, 1988. Mai (, the Psychic Girl) would prove popular enough with western audiences to warrant multiple reprints, which Viz continued to handle after Eclipse went defunct in 1994. The chapters were compiled into four volumes in 1989 (this time by Titan Books), and a three volume Perfect Collection was published by Viz from 1995 to 1996. Such a widescale release at the dawn of the North American anime and manga boom means that this series is decently well-remembered, seemingly moreso in America than in Japan. (Though that could also have to do with the Japanese title being so nondescript it's difficult to search.)

In fact, Mai, the Psychic Girl was so beloved that there were talks of adapting the manga into a live-action film. This project languished in development hell for decades and ultimately wouldn't see the light of day, despite a script being written and a soundtrack being completed but never released. Over the course of the film's troubled and inconclusive production, it was worked on at different points by Sony, Columbia Pictures, Tim Burton, and Francis Ford Coppola, with Burton expressing interest in the project as recently as 2010. It's unlikely a Mai, the Psychic Girl film will ever happen now, but still, it's kind of a cool side note.

Anyway, back to the manga's English release. I had my concerns going into this, given some of the xenophobic attitudes of the time, and especially because of the tagline on the cover that reads "She is pretty. She is psychic. She is japanese." (Lowercase j? Really?) Thankfully the translation job doesn't seem to lean too heavily into that kind of orientalism. I don't have a secondary translation to compare it to, or a copy of the raw Japanese text, but at the very least the character names are unchanged and the localization team didn't try to hide that the story is mostly set in Japan, in contrast to later and more infamous localizations. There are some nods to American pop culture, such as Mai singing Walk Like an Egyptian by The Bangles in the first chapter, and cameos from recognizable cartoon characters like Snoopy, Garfield, and Mickey Mouse throughout, but from what I can tell, these were in the original. As far as I'm aware, there were only two visual edits made. One was a nude scene being removed from the initial run, which was restored in later printings. The other, and more substantial edit, is that the whole manga is "flopped", a term that refers to the mirroring of pages and panels. Flopping was a common practice in early manga localization given that Japanese books read right to left whereas English books read left to right. Weirdly enough, the flopping here seems a little inconsistent. There were a couple of times I caught details switching sides from one panel to the next. It's not egregious but it is noticeable.

No magical girl manga was officially localized in English before Mai. But I did specify at the beginning that this is probably the first magical girl manga ever to get an official English release. Which raises the question: is Mai even a magical girl manga in the first place? That's... debatable. I talked a little bit about psychic magical girls before in my post on Sennome-sensei, and I stand by the assessment I made in my initial post defining the boundaries of this project that the magic in a magical girl series doesn't have to be literal. It can instead derive from sci-fi or supernatural elements such as E.S.P., so long as the story otherwise meets the criteria of the genre, namely that the story is female led and driven by her using her powers. Therein lies the disconnect with this series. The number of supporting characters in Mai, the Psychic Girl is staggering. That's not a problem in and of itself, after all, many of these characters are pretty fun. Hands down my favorite is Intetsu, a university student with a big heart who might not be a full-on himbo but is at least himbo adjacent. But the sheer number of other characters means there are some chapters, particularly in the middle section, where Mai doesn't appear much. She's still the main character mind you, (no other character gets more focus, and the story manages to continue being about her even in her absence), but it's still a noticeable difference from other titles we've covered. It doesn't help that even when she does show up, there are a couple of stretches of time during which she refuses to use her psychic power to avoid inadvertently hurting anyone. All of this is without even taking into consideration authorial intent: i.e. I doubt the creators intended to make a magical girl manga. Mai, the Psychic Girl draws influence from a lot of different genres. It's an absolute kitchen sink of tropes ranging from martial arts and sword fights to international espionage and government conspiracies. If Kudo and Ikegami wanted to throw in a power trinket or a transformation, it would not have felt too out of place. And yet, this series does not contain any recognizable magical girl signifiers of the time, nor does it draw any influence I can identify from magical girl works that came before it. That's just not the kind of story they were trying to tell.

But despite everything I just said, there are plenty of moments in this manga that feel magical girl-esque somehow. There are certain narrative and visual cues that are not exclusive to the magical girl genre, but are still very prominent within it, which do show up in Mai in some capacity. For one thing, Mai has a puppy named Ron which spends so much time with her, he ends up developing latent psychic abilities of his own. This manifests as extrasensory perception of danger, which he uses to warn Mai of incoming threats, much like some mascot characters do in certain later magical girl works. Mai also has two best friends (named Yumiko and Rie) who are average schoolgirls from whom she has to keep her double life a secret. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how often they reappear in the story, as they and Mai genuinely care for one another, and their friendship very effectively establishes that despite her abilities and the danger she consistently finds herself in, Mai is an ordinary girl. Speaking of how Mai relates to others, the Wisdom Alliance eventually calls in one of the other teen psychics, a German girl named Turm Garten, to help eliminate Mai. A major story arch revolves around the one-sided rivalry between Turm and Mai, the latter of whom just wants to be friends, and it's very much evocative of the dark magical girl archetype. I also feel the need to point out that the series starts with Mai having a prophetic dream, something that jump starts the plot of a few high profile magical girl works. And lastly, we find out early on that in the Kuju family, psychic powers are passed down matrilineally. Mai comes from a long line of female protectors, and this revelation influences the way she thinks about her destiny.

Mai, the Psychic Girl is a mixed bag in just about every way. Some aspects of it are deeply artful, other aspects are atrociously tacky. There are things about it that have aged like milk, and yet it does boast some historical significance. I like it for what it is, even if it's not my usual cup of tea. It's not what one might expect from a magical girl manga, but if you enjoy magical girl stories, you might enjoy this.

#my posts #long post #Mai #Mai the Psychic Girl #舞 #Kazuya Kudo #Ryoichi Ikegami #工藤かずや #池上遼一 #Weekly Shounen Sunday #80s #shounen #official English translation #dubiously magical girl #Extremely thankful I was able to get this out before the end of the month.#Sorry the wait was longer than expected.

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neonthewrite · 4 years ago

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Leaf Wings (One-shot prompt)

Got this prompt a while back, and I wanted it to be Eral and Bowman. Do I know what led up to this little scene? Absolutely not! I may try to come up with more, but for now I have some fun with a What If scenario, bringing my leaf-winged characters together for some crack AU type shenanigans. The prompt: “Stop running away!” “AND WHY SHOULD I NOT.”

From This List

Reading Time ~10 minutes

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Bowman’s heart pounded and he breathed quicker than his lungs could truly take in the air. His legs burned from so much running, activity he definitely wasn’t used to. Most days he’d be flying, his speedy wings propelling him forward. Wherever forward might lead him.

He was lost in a maze of twisting corridors, dimly lit and echoing faintly with every one of his frantic steps. They loomed a foot or so overhead; he didn’t know what they might be for, or where they might lead him, but he yearned for some glimpse of the outside world. He’d barely managed to escape into these tunnels on his own. At least here, whatever had captured him couldn’t follow.

Whatever had bound his wings wouldn’t be able to bind the rest of him, blast it.

His wings, strong as they were, couldn’t budge the odd material wrapped around his torso. It chafed at the all important limbs, and he couldn’t risk scratching them up without even a guarantee that he’d actually get them free. His arms, also trapped partially at his sides, couldn’t reach a proper angle to shove at the loop. All he could rely on was his sprinting speed.

Around a bend just feet ahead of him, a figure stumbled into view. Bowman smiled at first, and then skidded to a halt with a distrusting frown as he parsed the details of his fellow duct-traveler.

For one, his clothes looked so human, from the collared shirt to the leather boots. Pale skin, dark, swept-back hair, and blue eyes set him apart from any wood sprite Bowman knew. He had wings at his back, too, though they looked strangely folded under the bindings that also held them in place. His hands were bound by the wrists behind his back.

Most notably, this pale stranger was six inches tall, standing over Bowman by half his own height.

“What?!” Bowman blurted, scrambling backwards so abruptly he nearly toppled himself. He didn’t want to wait around to find out what was going on with that stranger, that … small giant. That was just too much to deal with.

“Hey, waitasecond!” the man griped after him. Bowman didn’t spare a look back, but he didn’t need it to know the man followed. Footsteps that didn’t match his own echoed around him in the metal corridors. “What’s going on here?”

Bowman didn’t want to take any chances. For all he knew, this man was just another part of the bizarre trap he’d found himself in. He didn’t slow, and he didn’t look over his shoulder. He simply ran on, though his aching lungs made him think that might not last much longer anyway.

The man swore, and by the sound of it he wasn’t gaining that much ground despite his height advantage. “Dammit, kid. Stop running away!”

“And why should I not?!” Bowman shouted back, wishing he could turn his indignant glare on the strange miniature giant. “How do I know you’re not part of all this?”

“I don’t even know what ‘this’ is!” the man insisted. “I’m just as tied up as you are! Will you stop for a second?!”

Bowman scowled as he ran, but didn’t slow just yet. He didn’t have enough information to say for sure if this man was part of whatever was going on, or another victim like himself. With this many unknowns in the game, he really ought to seek out an ally.

Why did his only option have to be some strange almost-giant?

He let his sprint taper into a jog, which came to a steady walk. Finally, he stopped and turned to face his would-be pursuer, finding that the guy had slowed down along with him. He stood his ground and stared hard up at the guy’s face, searching for signs of a trick there; in the dim lighting, he didn’t see much aside from annoyance.

Two could play that game. Bowman would get his answers somewhere, blast it. “What is going on?” he demanded.

The stranger didn’t seem bothered nor intimidated by his glare, and merely rolled his eyes. “If I knew, I’d already be unbound,” he shot back confidently. “But it looks like maybe we need to work together if we’re gonna get anywhere, so how about you drop the attitude, kid?”

Bowman bristled. “I’m not a kid! You don’t look any older than I do!”

The man smirked. “Looks are deceiving,” he countered. “I’m Eral. You got a name under all that piss and vinegar?”

Bowman didn’t know what the expression meant, but all the same he narrowed his eyes. “Bowman,” he said, giving the shortest introduction he could just to spite this Eral. “How did we get here?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Eral said with a shrug. “But we might have better chances getting out if we can get our wings untied. Sound agreeable, Bowman kid?”

Bowman scowled again. “I’m not a kid,” he insisted. “But yes. We need to get untied.”

Eral nodded, his smirk still faintly present on his face, taunting Bowman with his nonchalance. “Alright. If you can reach my hands and get them undone, I’ll get that loop off you for your wings, okay? Then you can get these bands off mine.”

It was a reasonable plan, though Bowman’s wariness clung to him like cobwebs. He eyed Eral critically and nodded, for once having nothing to say in contrary stubbornness. Suspicion and snark could wait until his wings were free.

Eral turned, and to Bowman’s chagrin his wrists were nearly Bowman’s eye level. Luckily, the loop keeping Bowman’s wings restrained only kept his arms partially restrained. He had enough movement to tug at the bindings around Eral’s wrists, searching for some kind of weak point in the knot that he could exploit.

While he did, he stared at Eral’s wings. They were somehow folded up into a leaf bud shape, same as a wood sprite’s when they were still just a sprout. Strange bands wrapped around each one, preventing them from unfurling into the proper shape, but Bowman wasn’t sure how they’d folded up so tightly in the first place. If he attempted to curl his own wings up so tightly, he’d break bones for certain.

“Any luck?” Eral prompted, glancing over his shoulder.

He wouldn’t be able to see Bowman’s progress, but Bowman waved him off anyway. “It’s a tough knot,” he snipped. “I’ll get it.”

He glared at the knot as he worked at it, finally managing to work his fingers into the mess of coiled string and loosen one loop by degrees. He gave it a few more tugs, a smile flashing onto his face in spite of himself, as the bindings loosened more and more. Soon enough, he tugged one end free, and from there it was much easier to pull the knot loose.

“I got it,” Bowman announced, some pride and relief in his voice as Eral finally managed to tug his wrists apart and let the rope fall to the ground. Bowman took a step back as the small giant turned to face him, absently rubbing at the raw skin where the ropes had dug into his wrists. Bowman had some sympathy, but he was impatient. “Now you can help me, right?”

Eral grinned and shrugged. “Absolutely, kid. I’ll do my best.”

Bowman opened his mouth to protest the nickname, but flinched when Eral leaned over him to grasp at the loop tied around his torso. Eral’s shadow fell over him, a claustrophobic thing that made Bowman want to duck out of reach and back up. He tensed, but resisted the urge to flinch away.

Eral was, to Bowman’s surprise, quite careful with the task at hand. He didn’t simply yank at the bindings keeping Bowman’s wings restricted; such an action would probably only frustrate them both. Instead, Eral carefully worked the loop upward bit by bit, inching it along without putting too much strain on Bowman’s delicate wings. Even then, Bowman winced once or twice as the pressure shifted along the bones and joints within his wings.

“This knot doesn’t wanna loosen up,” Eral commented, though he didn’t sound too concerned. “Luckily it’s moving right up. We’ll have it over your head in no time, kid.”

Bowman scoffed, but remained rooted while the mini-giant worked. “I’m fully grown,” he grumbled, some heat in his cheeks to accompany the admission. “I’m not a kid.”

Eral’s gaze flickered to meet his, but not for long before his focus returned to the rope. “It’s just nuance, Bowman,” he conceded. “I’m old. A lot older than I look. Lots of people are ‘kid’ to me.”

Bowman’s consternation showed in the distrusting set of his brow, but he didn’t say anything to counter the claim. A lot of things were strange about Eral already. What was one more? “How much older than you look?” he asked, wondering if he’d get a real answer.

He didn’t. “It’s tough to say,” Eral admitted, sending him an apologetic smirk. “There’s a point where you stop counting. Almost gotcha.”

Indeed, Bowman could feel the ropes moving up at a slightly faster pace as they loosened. His wings tapering inward helped the task, and soon enough Eral was pulling the whole loop over his head. Bowman stepped back from him at last to regain some space, and gingerly opened up his wings.

They were sore from being so cramped, and the bindings had chafed against them at points, but they’d make it without any damage. Bowman stretched out his wingspan before finally tucking his wings against his back once more, this time without some stupid rope keeping them there.

Eral humored him, but soon made an impatient, rolling gesture with his hand. “Alright, everything in one piece? Can we get my wings all stretched out and showing off now?”

Bowman rolled his eyes. “Yes, one blasted second,” he countered, mimicking Eral’s gesture to prompt him to turn around. “Let me see them.”

The bands around Eral’s leaf bud wings looked tight, and Bowman winced faintly at the sight of them bound so soundly. “What is this?” he asked, carefully working at one of them. He was careful not to scrape it against the wing too much; it looked like they had the powdery scales of butterfly wings, and he didn’t want to damage them.

“I think they’re just rubber bands,” Eral mused, patiently waiting for Bowman to work them free of his wings. “Once my wings are furled it’s pretty easy to keep ‘em that way.”

Bowman could relate, considering he’d only recently been freed from his own bindings. Their wings were all-important for their ability to navigate the world, so they had to be careful even when struggling to get free.

Thankfully, the rubber bands came loose fairly quickly, and Bowman tossed both to the ground with a certain sense of triumph in the action. He looked over his hands, where some of the glittery dust from Eral’s wings had rubbed off.

“It’s just pixie dust,” Eral reassured him. “Won’t stick or anything.” Bowman looked up just in time to see those leaf bud shapes uncurl before his eyes, spreading wide into leaf shapes even more convincing than Bowman’s. If he hadn’t already touched them, Bowman might think there really were leaves fixed right to Eral’s back.

Eral grinned, and Bowman, in spite of his misgivings about the entire situation, smiled along with him. They could both relate to the relief of being free, even if they still didn’t know where they were.

“Thanks, Bowman,” Eral said, his gratitude outweighing any teasing that might have lingered in his tone. “Look at us go, a regular leaf winged team.”

Bowman rolled his eyes. “We’re blasted unstoppable, alright,” he quipped. Then, rolling his shoulders, he inclined his head at his apparent ally. “So why aren’t we already flying out of here, then?”

Eral snickered, and it made him look altogether youthful for someone who insisted he was older than he could remember. “I like the way you think, Bowman kid. Wanna lead the way?”

“Yeah,” Bowman shot back, full of confidence. “I can do that. Better keep up, Eral.”

#leaf wings #bowman leafwing #eral the arbor pixie #mywriting #prompt #scene without plot

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borkthemork · 4 years ago

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I'd like to partake in these drabble requests myself, how about one focusing on Anne and Ghost Sprig from that AU art by @jsheios?

Some topics hadn't been said when Anne and the Plantars made their way to the Boonchuy residence. Of course, there were a few concepts that needed to be discussed. Anne had reunited with her parents in an extraordinary display of intense crying, some confused introductions were exchanged, and the once-missing Thai girl had taken the best shower that a modern home could ever give her, while her respective guardians waited anxiously in the kitchen.

So in this brief set of hours — where the sun had started to set, and the kitchen celebrated with a massive banquet — Anne tried her hardest to integrate back into a world she once believed to be so far away.

But there was one topic that remained steadfast in her presence, and she couldn't escape it even if she tried.

And that was the cerulean figure that seeped his way into the bedroom walls and found relaxation by floating above her head.

Polly and Hop Pop didn't know about this piece of information. Anne tried, but how could one say something so out-there without hurting her little frog family to bits? One couldn't. The information was too much, even for her.

So at dinner, it wasn't a surprise that hunger didn't hit her. Hop Pop seemed to be coping with back-and-forths between her mom and dad, but for Polly, she was scarfing down every piece of noodle found on the dining platters. So with nowhere to go, and with some permission from her mom, Anne retreated into her quarters to unpack. Sprig, chipper as ever to stay with the only one who could hear and see him, had followed suit. Not like Sprig could eat anymore...so, whatever.

"It's not bad once you get used to it," Sprig told her. His blue form spun the center of her ceiling and ultimately lounged on the edge of her bed. "I can totally scare your parents with this if they actually saw me."

Anne hummed. Even with the familiar press of the mattress, nothing about her room comforted her. Especially with the specter that continued to bounce around with joy in his newly-found tail.

“Anne, you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She parsed through her boxes. Each piece of cardboard harbored something that once inhabited the niches of her room. Folded stacks of clothes, teen magazines, posters of teen pop idols, and TV garbage. There were a lot of boxes packed for a room she once believed was too small and plain, and it was going to take a while for her to put everything back into the places they once remained. “Just...this is a lot.”

Sprig frowned. His pace slowed, his presence chilling her skin, and knelt carefully beside her. “Yeah, you haven’t been here for a long time.”

“Mhm.” Her hands fumbled with an article of clothing, its orange attire soft against her fingertips. “It’s different. A lot of this is just so different.”

As if she died and came back.

“You want to talk about it?”

Anne looked at him.

“It’s always better with a friend.” He put on a small smile, voice fainter than before. “And you know I’m not going anywhere.”

Anne grimaced. Her throat grew heavy. She knew that this was going to happen, that her stupid body would betray her like this, but the heat stung her eyes anyway, vision blurring more as her hands covered her face.

“I wish everything went differently,” she said finally. “I wish you didn’t have to go through this. You didn’t deserve what happened to you at all.“

When it came to Sprig, the frog always did love to brush off things until the last minute. He was similar to her in some ways, but seeing him put on such a strong face for her hurt a lot more than it should've.

And Sprig could only be there, his arms faint and seeping through her midriff as Anne started to weep. He always did that — being there, helping in the best way he could. And right now his voice was still soft, calm in spite of what happened. She wished he didn't have to act this way. “Hey, Anne, it’s going to be alright. I’m sure we can find some revival magic to bring me back.”

“But can we though?” she croaked out, groaning at how nasally her voice became. “We don’t have the music box. I don’t think we can do anything right now that’ll get you back.”

“We can though,” he said with confidence. Even with the reassurance in his voice, his tone quivered slightly. “We’re the Plantars. We rode on the backs of frog-eating scarabs, we just battled the king of an entire country and barely made it out alive. Death can’t take me that easily, and even if it did, I’ll make sure to complain throughout the entire way.”

He gingerly pulled out a translucent slingshot.

“See? I’ll be fine. Ole’ Slingy died so he can accompany me into my fight against the afterlife.”

Anne stared at him in silence, her grief momentarily forgotten at the sight of his weapon. “How is that even possible? It’s not even alive!”

“Beats me!” Sprig beamed at her. “But that proves my point! If I’m still sentient, then there has to be a way to bring me back one way or another. There’s something that’s keeping me connected somehow, so until we get to the bottom of this I’m not gonna go down without a fight, and neither should you.”

Anne continued to stare idly at an opposing wall. Now that the tears had lessened, she stroked her chin and hummed a distracted tune to herself, thinking in the chill quiet.

“Wait a second,” she mumbled. "You might be onto something."

He winked. “A possible lead?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but...” Reassurance swelled a little in her aching chest. As if there was hope to be found. There were still a lot of topics to unpack, but taking it one at a time was helping. “Any lead is a good lead and it's worth it if we can get you guys back home, we just need to think about where to start.”

“Yeah, that’s the spirit!”

“But what about you, though?”

Sprig stifled. He may be the enthusiast at this point, but the way he started to fidget under her gaze told her everything she needed to know. “I’ll be fine, really. It’s better than dying dying, right?” His eyes brushed downward. His fingers tried to press into the bed's mattress, phasing through until the only thing she could see was his wrist. "It was scary though. Falling isn't that bad...but from way high up in the clouds? It's different somehow."

He chuckled. "Is it weird to say that I'm still thinking about it? It's not much but—"

Without another thought, Anne embraced the lining of his form. He was cold, hard to grasp, but she knew something whisped into her shoulder and remained there, growing frigid as Sprig attempted to press his face into her clothes.

She at least hoped that the comfort — of the presence of her there, breathing and alive — was enough.

#amphibia #amphibia spoilers #sprig plantar #anne boonchuy #fanfic #angst #asks #Anonymous #after I finish some work Imma edit the hell out of this cause something about it is bugging the heck out of me #but it's been in my inbox for too long so take it for now

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hecticcheer · 5 years ago

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This is ~2,000 words of fluff, inspired by late-night brain’s inadvertent mashup of this suggestion by boxofsfic with the ending of this story by sickiepop. (If either of you are seeing this post, hi! I love your work, and I hope you don’t mind what a monster I conceived while reading it…!)

The OCs I made up for the occasion are both around 30; the sick one’s a guy, and the other is nonbinary; they’re housemates; they might be in a QPR, but I don’t think they know that yet either.

I mmmmight write the sequel foreshadowed in the last few lines? Not sure yet; depends on whether I still like what I’ve written by tomorrow. But if you’re reading this and you’d dig that, please let me know!

—

Mr. Bartholomew Fox lay on his classroom’s hard, dusty floor, trying to remember how to pronounce respite. It had been a vocab word this week in some of his tenth graders’ books, but grading their worksheets had not required him to say the word aloud. He could remember that it wasn’t phonetic—it did not rhyme with despite, like its spelling suggested it should. But did one say the word as though it were spelled respeet? Reecepite? Resspit? The remembered voice of a friend from the days of his first smartphone reminded him, You have 3G; he fumbled for his phone, hoping the dictionary app would load this time deecepit the classroom’s shoddy cell service. When he lifted his phone, however, a text from Leverton distracted him.

You ok? At a meeting I forgot about or s/t?

Barty (he was Barty to friends, Mr. F among his less-creative students) hadn’t quite felt like himself all day, though he wasn’t sure what more than that to say about it. His joints and muscles ached, sure; his head throbbed for a bit after every movement, yeah; he’d been shaky and dizzy all day, true—but none of that was weird. He guessed these symptoms must be worse than usual, but no one of them seemed enough that way to justify what an unpleasant day he’d had. Or at least, none had done so until his final class ended, when struck the irresistible urge to lie down on the floor instead of heading home. On the floor, with nothing else to think about, they all seemed urgent. He felt so dizzy it made him hot all over, his upper lip prickling with sweat. If he moved in any way, and whenever he opened his eyes, the feeling grew worse. His left shoulder, right wrist, that mysterious place in his lower back, both knees, the muscles in his neck and thighs and forearms and halfway down his right calf—all traded off shouting for his attention. The throb behind his left eye grew sharper now, more electric, like the start of a migraine (but those usually came on earlier in the day). That side of his nose was clogged. Was he getting a cold? Not unlikely, this early in the school year. Or was it just allergy season.

He’d gone about this far in his musings and then apparently quit thinking at all until something (he could no longer remember what) had made him reach for his phone. Now, having read Leverton’s text, he laid the phone down on his chest and closed his eyes, trying to think how to reply. After he’d typed I’m okay, just and then lay still for a bit pondering how to make must’ve fallen asleep sound less dumb, another text arrived from Leverton:

Just send me an emoji or something so I know you’re not dead? You’re probably just at a meeting and I don’t want to bug you, but, starting to worry a little

I’m okay Barty sent back therefore, deleting the comma and the just. They’d both long-since turned off their phones’ “Read at 4:18 PM” feature—it made Leverton anxious, and incensed Barty on principle. Sending a quick reply took priority, therefore, over explaining himself. The little green progress bar hovered for eons about two thirds of its way across the screen, which it would never have dared at home unless he had tried to send multiple photos. Making sure not to touch the phone’s sides directly, even though he knew that made no difference on this non-dinosaur model, he wrote further, No meeting; fell asleep in classroom. Somehow that one went through at once—so quickly that he’d barely had time to close his eyes and set his head back down before it buzzed again.

Oh my god

Are you ok??? That sounds so unlike you

He didn’t know what to say. The first I’m okay hadn’t felt like a lie, since in that case it was clear he meant okay as opposed to dead. But now neither Yes or No seemed like the right answer. The long pause he elected to respond with instead probably treated Leverton worse than either one:

Are you still in your classroom? Stay there, I’ll come get you

I don’t knw [sic] if I’m comfortable w/ the thought of you driving like this.

On its face Barty found this absurd. Students fell asleep in his class nearly every time he turned on the projector, and that seemed a much greater feat than dozing off while lying alone on the floor. Besides, it hadn’t been real sleep—only stage one or two. If someone had asked whether he was awake he could have honestly said Yes, without startling first. Don’t, he began typing back, but once the initial guilt wore off he thought again about Leverton’s words (Stay there, I’ll come get you). The corners of his eyes grew hot when he pictured them setting out on foot to collect him. Leverton was right, after all—Barty never fell asleep during the day. He deleted the message he’d started and sent instead, Okay.

By the time he heard Leverton’s hand on the doorknob Barty had drifted back into early-stage sleep: close enough to the surface to recognize the sound, but far enough under that it surprised him a little. He’d forgot where he was, his thoughts (now vanished) so vivid they’d seemed realer than the floor under his back. He pulled himself up onto his elbows and his sight went dark blue from the corners inward.

“Hi,” he told Leverton as the latter entered—too quietly, as it turned out, for them to hear over the sound of the closing door. They peered around the room, but it took them a few seconds to spot him; he could tell they were looking for a seated person, rather than one on the floor. Barty cleared his throat and this time said, “Hello.”

“Oh my god—did you fall? Are you alright?”

“No, I’m fine,” Barty insisted, shaking his head, and then, smiling inanely, added, “I meant to do this.”

(Meant to do that was a long-standing meme of theirs, an offshoot from Leverton’s comparisons of Barty to a cat. After a cat does something stupid, it recovers its dignity so quickly you’d think it was trying to look like the stupid thing it did was all part of the plan. Thus whenever either of them made a mistake too large to ignore but too small for a real apology, they’d say to the other some variation on, Meant to do that.)

“You just thought the linoleum seemed like a nice change of pace from the nice couch we have at home,” summarized Leverton, and Barty noticed how they used the word nice twice in a row.

He lowered his head back to the floor, feeling too dizzy and neck-sore to waste his strength on trifles. “It’s vinyl; they just replaced it.”

“What?”

“The floor.”

“Ah. Vinyl. Excuse me.” They sat cross-legged down next to Barty, on the aforesaid vinyl.

“I’m alright,” Barty said again.

“Yeah, but that word doesn’t mean a lot coming from you. Excuse my cold hands,” Leverton warned, and placed the back of their hand to Barty’s forehead and each cheek in turn, brushing some hair out of the way first so it wouldn’t get in his eyes. Barty flinched slightly, having gone from unpleasantly hot to unpleasantly cold in the time since he’d first made contact with the floor. “Feels like you’ve got a fever. Do you think you might be coming down with something?”

“You just said your hands are cold, though,” pointed out Barty.

“Well, yeah,” Leverton conceded with a snarl of laughter—“‘cause compared to a face I figured they would be.”

“Thought you meant ‘cause you’d come from outside.”

“No; I wasn’t cold out there.”

This week had brought their town its first cold snap of the season, but in California an early-fall cold snap parses out to more like absence of heat wave. The last few days it had been cool enough to keep the AC off, but it was still t-shirt weather out from ten to ten. Leverton’s tie dye, sweatpants and flip-flops attested to this—as well as to how quickly they must have hurried to meet him. Though they worked from home, Leverton usually put on jeans to meet the public. And that tie-dye t-shirt, Barty knew, had a small hole in one armpit. It pleased him to remark that he could still keep track of details like this; too bad these examples of lucidity were invisible to Leverton.

“You look pretty sick,” said the latter. “How do you feel?”

Come to think of it, the word lucid itself could also mean translucent. That was about how he felt: diaphanous, vague, barely-there. His mother always said with it instead of lucid; though she’d never said so, he’d deduced the antonym of with it must be out of it.

“Not my best,” Barty admitted.

“But you didn’t faint, or hurt yourself, or anything.”

“No. Worried I might, but figured I’d preempt it.”

“Always thinking ahead,” scoffed Leverton, combing their hand through some more of Barty’s hair. “Your hair’s all sweaty; did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“You don’t usually sweat that bad just from feeling faint, I didn’t think.”

“You’re right.”

“So again I say, You look sick.”

“I’m probably getting sick.”

Leverton sighed through pursed lips, making them billow noisily. “Well, shit, pal, this is a terrible place to be sick.”

“Such language,” mumbled Barty, without conviction. He was so unused to letting swears pass without comment in this room that it would have taken more effort to say nothing. But Leverton, rightly, ignored this comment:

“Can you stand? Maybe I could get you some water—would that help?”

“Yes, and yes. On my desk,” Barty said, pointing without looking up.

“Uhhh… ah! I see it.” Leverton stood up and brought back Barty’s bottle of water. They sat again, uncapped it, and, once Barty had sat back up on his elbows, handed it to him and gripped his shoulder, presumably to help him keep his balance. Barty gulped down several mouthfuls, broke off to catch his breath, and shoved the cold-sweaty bottle back into Leverton’s hand, eager to lie back down. “Ah!—no—wrong way!” squawked Leverton. “Are you sure you can stand.”

“Just need a minute. Can you drag the desk chair over? Seems a pleasanter middle ground than.”

“Oh—good point. Sure.” They rolled it over, apologizing for the squeaky wheel. When he had more energy, among his friends Barty would sneer and hiss at such unpleasant sounds; the chair’s squeak hurt his head now too, of course, but somehow at the moment he found it easier to withstand unpleasant phenomena than resist them.

After a minute, he did indeed pull himself up and slither into the chair. (Leverton evidently knew better than to offer a hand to help him up; such offers would hurt his pride, and possibly also his shoulders.) His hands shook as he gripped the arms of the chair to haul himself up into it; his head spun; he was so weak the exertion hurt his chest and all four limbs. When he subsided to catch his breath his head throbbed raucously. He leant it into his hand—whose support Leverton then seconded with their own hand. Their touch chilled him at first, but he lacked the strength (whether of will or body who knew) to scoot away. He hadn’t realized how much the weight of his head had hurt his wrist until Leverton’s help removed that hurt.

“You’re really not feeling well, are you.”

“Seems that way.”

“Thank god I didn’t let you drive yourself home.”

“Too bad for the kids, they’re all gonna catch it,” Barty muttered, regretfully; “as will you, of course. And I won’t do nearly this good a job of looking after you.”

“I don’t mind. You’ll do your best.”

“Will I?”

“You always seem to. From my limited perspective.”

“I don’t have your patience. Or your empathy.”

Leverton scoffed: “Empathy? Yes you do! You feel other people’s feelings just as well as I do—you’re just shyer about it. You’re just emotionally constipated.”

“Perhaps,” granted Barty. He doubted that first half, but could already feel himself smiling at Leverton’s flatteries, and knew if he tried to argue that they would hold the smile against him as an admission. So he gave his doubts no more explicit form than, “Nice of you to say so.”

“Are you ready to try and walk to the car?”

Barty sighed, sort of phlegmily—almost a hiss. “Might as well be.”

#a shifty tract #(...first time i'm using the writing tag and it feels like a lie; no digestive ills here at all #(just vague fluey stuff and undiagnosed chronic illness. in my headcanon he has heds and pots 'cause that's what i have lmao #(but this premise Just Didn't Work on a character who understands his chronic symptoms' mechanisms as well as i know mine #(and barty--again like me--is the kind of guy who Learns Everything about any label he knows applies to him #(but who dislikes not knowing so much that if the problem has no name he'll pretend it doesn't matter for as long as possible #(sooooo no diagnosis for him. sorry pal)#permasickfic #(trying to avoid the chronic illness tag but figured i should tag for it in SOME capacity as i suspect it squicks some people)

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sshbpodcast · 4 years ago

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Something for Everyone (unless you liked Jadzia) in S7 DS9!

by Ames

How exactly does one pick top and bottom episodes from a clump that’s mostly serial? A Star to Steer Her By found a way! It’s a strange final season of Deep Space Nine that’s split almost evenly between the ongoing storyline of the show and a bunch of episodes to pad for time while the writers created that ongoing storyline for the show.

Read on below for our bests and worsts of season seven, which you can also listen to at our absurdly long series-wrap podcast episode here (jump to timestamp 1:38:05 for the season discussion), where you can hear the bonus tops and bottoms of fan-favorite guest star Liz and also the full series ratings!

[images © CBS/Paramount]

Bottom Three Episodes

This season really suffers from some characters regressing hard as if they didn’t make any development over the course of the show. Some regressed so hard, they basically restarted the character (oof, too soon…).

“Afterimage”: Chris Quick! We’ve only got a couple episodes to establish Ezri as a character because we were huge dicks to the last Dax and killed her off. Let’s rush through showcasing this new Dax in a barely formed plot mostly spent treating her like a sex object. Check, check, and check!

“Take Me Out to the Holosuite”: Ames, Caitlin Season 7 is all about wrapping up the Dominion War arc, but let’s pause that for two weeks to have a goofy baseball game that is entirely lifted from every other TV show, to wash all the sci-fi off the show, and to just crack jokes that don’t land. That’s strike three; you’re outta here!

“The Emperor’s New Cloak”: Caitlin, Jake Mirror universe episodes tend to always feel like fanfic as it is, but our final trip through the looking glass basically said “Hold My Beer.” The whole thing felt like a checklist of in-jokes, some tropey character nonsense, and even more objectifying women to round it off!

“Extreme Measures”: Ames, Caitlin Julian goes full hypocrite in this not-even-a-little-bit-surreal mindtrip when he kidnaps and tortures Sloan, gets him absolutely killed, and takes a whole episode for a boring brain adventure. This is not the Julian we thought we knew, and it’s a shame.

“Chrysalis”: Chris, Jake And that’s not even the worst thing Julian has done lately! He has fully reverted to his sleazy season-one self, grooming women so he can date them, performing surgeries on them to “fix them,” and still somehow making everything about him. Gross, Julian. Gross.

“Field of Fire”: Ames, Chris, Jake One thing we can say about our new Trill character is at least she’s consistent… because every single time we do a Trill episode, it’s entirely contradictory of all the preceding Trill episodes to the point of confoundment! Joran is the worst he’s been and what even is this new overpowered weapon?

—

Top Three Episodes

On the flip side, this season also benefits from how varied its episodes are that it really does somehow have something for everyone, especially if you love you some schlock!

“Take Me Out to the Holosuite”: Chris Sigh. Chris likes doofy, fillery episodes and I’m not even going to try to parse why this time. The uniforms looked good, I guess? That must be it. If you like doofy, fillery episodes and aren’t bored to tears by baseball, then this episode… has some good uniforms for you.

“Once More Unto the Breach”: Jake We love us a good Klingon episode and this one’s got a lot to sink your teeth into. It was an excellent send off for the long-established character of Kor, it reflected on some of the less honorable elements of Klingon culture, and Worf got to put his knife skills on display!

“Badda-Bing Badda-Bang”: Caitlin Heist episodes of the world, take note! This is how you pace and tell a concise, interesting, coherent, and clever heist story. Placement in the middle of the war arc aside, this episode gave us some great acting, costumes, music, film techniques, the works! Badda bing!

“The Siege of AR-558”: Chris, Jake We’ve also got a straight-up war episode featuring some tense ground patrol action, horrifying new weapons, and Quark with a gun! Also we see actual consequences for characters’ actions! What Star Trek so far has ever given us that before?

“Treachery, Faith, and the Great River”: Ames, Jake Proving that two Jeffrey Combses are better than one, this episode doubles your Weyouns and gives us some excellent Vorta time that really kicks you in the feels. It would take a bunch more Weyouns to reach the level of this excellent story. Those are our demands, Star Trek; get on it.

“The Changing Face of Evil”: Ames, Caitlin One of the absolute highlights of the big honkin’ ten-part finale is the Dukat-Winn relationship you never realized you needed. The hottest elements of which are all on display in this episode in particular, which are all pretty drool-worthy, but the most props go to Louise Fletcher for totally selling every moment.

“It’s Only a Paper Moon”: Ames, Caitlin, Chris This episode achieves the impossible: It gives us some really genuinely good Vic Fontaine. All the credit, of course, does go to Aron Eisenberg for his really touching and complete characterization of post-traumatic stress disorder. Thank you, ensign Nog, for being such a treasure.

—

So that’s all the season-by-season bloodwine we can spill on Deep Space Nine. We’re sad to leave the station and take our final look at the wormhole, but there’s also the full series top and bottom fives to celebrate and lament, respectively. Watch this page for more, listen to weekly episodes at our home on the web on Soundcloud, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and tell the prophets to stop it with all the baseball already!

#star trek #star trek deep space 9 #ds9 #podcast #star trek podcast #top three #bottom three #afterimage #take me out to the holosuite #the emperor's new cloak #extreme measures #chrysalis #field of fire #once more unto the breach #badda-bing badda-bang #the siege of ar-558 #treachery faith and the great river #the changing face of evil #it's only a paper moon

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writingithink · 5 years ago

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Tangled Timelines Chapter 3 Rated: T Chapter Word Count: 5,010 Chapter Summary: The Doctor and Rose try to track down some ghosts. Notes: Hey look! It's an update!! Hopefully they'll be happening more regularly now. I'm semi doing NaNoWriMo, and by that I mean that I'm attempting to write 50,000 words this month spread across any project (including this one). I'm starting to find my groove with this fic, so *fingers crossed*

As always, many hugs and thanks for @hey-there-juliet , my lovely beta. && all mistakes are mine.

READ IT ON AO3 [copy/paste link]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/26686090/chapters/67268401

<-- Ch2

Ch 4 -->

As soon as he entered his ship, the Doctor collapsed onto the jumpseat and stared blankly at the time rotor for a few moments. And then he glared at it.

“I somehow manage to happen upon the exact coordinates for the beginning of an invasion, and for some reason you’ve put me smack dab in the middle of it?!”

The answering hum was … frustrated.

He furrowed his brows, frowning. It would be exceedingly bad, incredibly bad, astonishingly bad bad bad if something else was influencing the TARDIS. The Doctor sprang to his feet and immediately sonicked open the grating, taking a moment to place a temporary barrier around his panic before he could worry Rose.

Back at the flat, she was having tea with her mother. She’d only just managed to get Jackie to stop complaining about his apparent need to ‘make everything about aliens’, and they were now talking about the wedding. Apparently she’d found a baker who said they’d make up cake samples that all somehow incorporated bananas. Best news he’d heard (well, technically) all day, and he couldn’t properly appreciate the sentiment when he desperately needed to check his ship and parse out exactly what he was going to do about these ‘ghosts’.

First things first, he needed to make sure that the TARDIS was physically fine. That she was healthy. And actually, it wasn’t so bad. There were some minor repairs he should take care of before they next left Earth, but nothing he couldn’t leave until after they’d saved the planet. The Doctor pulled himself out from under the console and bounced over to the navigational matrix, pulling a screen with him as he went.

His mouth dropped as he looked at the recording of their last flight path. A time track seemed to just- just pop into existence, pushing them months away. His ship had immediately landed due to the unexpected error. It literally looked like a glitch in the Vortex - but there were no such thing as glitches in the Time Vortex. A whole dimension doesn’t glitch - not without some outside force acting on it.

And any outside force meddling with time was even more dangerous than whatever these ‘ghosts’ were.

One bloody thing at a time, though.

The Doctor pushed himself away from the console and began pacing.

Ghosts ghosts ghosts ghosts ghosts.

Not really ghosts. Getting stronger from the psychic energy of the entire human race. Incredibly unpleasant when one walks through you - really do feel dead. Worse than dead. Likely nothing good, and all over the world.

But they appear in shifts. There’s shifts.

So someone had to be in charge of that. Probably multiple someones. But still, there would be a central location connected to them, giving them whatever help they need to press themselves onto the Earth from wherever they really are. To do that, all around the world, they would have to have an incredibly strong signal.

An incredibly strong, traceable signal.

“Alright then!”

Headfirst into danger was just what it was going to have to be.

The Doctor sonicked open a different panel and began rummaging around for the equipment he’d need. It wasn’t long before he heard the TARDIS' door open.

“According to the paper,” his wife announced, “they’ve elected a ghost as MP for Leeds. Now tell me about this plan you’re tryin’ so hard to keep secret.”

He popped out of the grating with a backpack full of equipment.

“Who you gonna call?” he joked.

“Ghostbusters!” Rose laughed, more amused by the voice he was using than his shockingly similar looking technology.

“I ain’t afraid of no ghosts,” the Doctor finished with a little jig before dashing out of the TARDIS.

“My mum’s on her way down,” she informed him as he looked around the playground for the best area to set up the cones. Actually, should do nicely right where they were.

“Oh?” He turned on his heel and went back into their ship, pleased that she’d seen fit to set out the rest of the equipment they would need. “Let’s get these outside.”

“Doctor,” his bondmate huffed, even as she took a cone. I don’t think we should tell her yet. About the lifespan thing. Not until after we’ve gotten rid of the ghosts. Like, way after. Next trip back.

That’s fine, he agreed as he sat down his roll of wire and cone and began plugging everything in.

“We’ll still have to stay for awhile, though. Because we said we would.”

The Doctor paused what he was doing, dramatically raising his eyes skyward. It was quite a nice day, really. You’d think, with London having nice weather for once, that he’d be able to enjoy it. He opened his mouth, planning to vocalize his many complaints, but as soon as he turned back towards Rose, he saw Jackie walking up.

After the ghosts, yes. Sometime during this trip, though, please .

He wasn’t ashamed to beg. Well … a little ashamed.

“Why’d you park all the way over here?” Jackie asked as he began plugging the wires into the cone Rose had placed.

“Got tired of the alley. Bit dingy,” he quipped. It was a lie, but better than telling his mother-in-law that not only had the flight gone wrong time-wise, but also slightly by location.

His wife shot him a worried look as she caught the thought.

Later, he promised, rushing back into the TARDIS for the final cone. He would worry about all of that later - they had important things to do.

“When’s the next shift?” he asked as he sat the cone down.

“Quarter to,” Jackie answered, “but don’t go causing trouble. What’s that lot do?”

“Triangulates their point of origin.”

“I don’t suppose it’s the Gelth?” Rose asked, visions of their spectral forms playing across their bond for a moment.

“Nah,” the Doctor responded, and she quickly shrugged off the idea. “They were just coming through one little rift. This lot are transposing themselves over the whole planet. Like tracing paper.”

With the final cone plugged in, he ran over to make sure they were all in the proper position.

“You’re always doing this,” Jackie complained. “Reducing it to science. Why can’t it be real? Just think of it, though. All the people we’ve lost. Our families coming back home. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”

He paused to give his mother-in-law an honest answer.

“I think it’s horrific.”

And then the Doctor bounced back into motion, unrolling the cable that would connect the triangulation devices to the TARDIS console. They were on a time crunch, after all. “Rose, give us a hand, love.”

His bondmate sighed before following him into the ship.

She’s so upset.

The Doctor remained silent, aware that the thought wasn’t really meant for him and even more aware that there wasn’t anything he could say that would help. He plugged in the cable and turned to Rose, aware that her mother had followed them inside. This is how they could help.

“As soon as the cones activate,” he explained quickly, pointing to the monitor, “if that line goes red, press that button there. If it doesn’t stop,” he continued, reaching into his jacket to pull out the sonic screwdriver, “setting 15-B. Hold it against the port, eight seconds and stop.”

“15-B, eight seconds,” she confirmed.

“If it goes into the blue, activate the deep scan on the left.”

“Uhm … oh!” His wife leaned over the console, which he found much more provocative than the situation really called for. “This button there?”

“Hmm close.”

And he’d really, sincerely intended to send her a mental image of the correct button, but some wires must have gotten crossed there. Instead what he sent was a memory of their return to the TARDIS right after the Rhibelini festival. Eh. Oops?

“That one?” Rose smirked, pointing to another button that was definitely not close, while sending some very, uhm, creative suggestions that, unfortunately, weren’t actually feasible.

“Eehh, now you’ve just killed us,” the Doctor told her with a theatrical grimace.

With the button, or- ?

They both laughed, but only for a moment.

“Er, that one.” She confidently pointed to the correct button, telepathically informing him that she knew the whole time.

“Yeah!” he smiled before turning to Jackie. “Now, what’ve we got? Two minutes to go?”

Jackie looked down at her watch, and the Doctor was glad that she didn’t realize that he was just trying to make her feel needed. That he was a Time Lord and didn’t need her help to check the time. Because his wife had to be right - there’s no way her mum actually enjoys the act of doing laundry. She enjoys being a mum.

You like her, Rose teased over the bond.

Shush.

He gave her a peck on the cheek before exiting the ship to do the final prep work on the triangulation cones. It was go time. The Doctor raced around, calibrating each one.

“What’s the line doing?” he shouted through the door.

“It’s alright,” came his wife’s answering shout, though she really didn’t need to with his superior hearing. She could whisper and he’d be able to hear her from this short of a distance. “It’s holding!”

“You even look like him,” Jackie said to Rose, and he could hear her just fine. Not that he understood what that was supposed to mean.

“How do you mean? I suppose I do, yeah,” his wife responded, sounding pleased, though he still didn’t know what it meant. Rose didn’t look at all like him. What a strange thing to say. He tried to refocus on the triangulation equipment.

“You’ve changed so much,” Jackie sighed. “All grown up and married to an alien, living in a spaceship.”

The Doctor almost said something to Rose about her mother acknowledging that they were, in fact, already married, but then caught himself. If she didn’t already know that he was eavesdropping, no need to make it obvious. Not that it would matter either way. He wasn’t going to stuff cotton in his ears just because the humans in his life couldn’t be bothered to remember all of his biological differences.

“For the better,” his wife replied with confidence. “We have an amazing life, and we’re in love.”

“I suppose. It’s just barmy. Seeing you two like this in this box of his. Makes it hard to pretend everything’s even a little normal.”

He wondered what exactly Jackie imagined their life was like when they weren’t around. Things had actually gotten shockingly domestic lately, though it would still probably be too alien for his mother-in-law.

“Mum, I used to work in a shop.”

“I’ve worked in shops. What’s wrong with that?”

“No, I didn’t mean that,” Rose sighed.

Once again the Doctor made himself refocus on the task at hand, all the while hoping that they weren’t about to have a row.

“I know what you meant. What happens when I’m gone?”

“Don’t talk like that,” Rose ordered, distress flooding their connection, making it nearly impossible for him to pay attention to the cones.

How exactly was he supposed to save the Earth with these working conditions?

There was a smug voice in his head, with a distinct Northern accent, very pleased to point out how they were right about avoiding domestics.

“No, but really. When I’m dead and buried, you won’t have any reason to come back home. What happens then?” Jackie asked her.

“I don’t know,” Rose mumbled, as she tried and failed to imagine their future life without her mother in it.

The Doctor frowned, realizing that he couldn’t quite picture it either.

“Do you think you’ll ever settle down?” her mother continued.

Their connection was now awash with all sorts of negative emotions, and he could tell that his bondmate was near tears, which was completely unacceptable. He turned away from the cones, ready to march back on board before stopping himself.

“The Doctor never will, so I can’t,” Rose told her. “Wouldn’t want to. We’ll just keep traveling.”

“And you’ll keep on changing. And in forty years time, fifty, there’ll be this woman, this strange woman, walking through the marketplace on some planet a billion miles from Earth. But she’s not Rose Tyler. Not anymore. She’s not even human.”

Their bond somehow managed to pulse mauve.

It’s going to be okay, love, he tried to comfort her, fighting to send soothing, positive thoughts over their connection just as he finished up the calibrations. A distraction, that’s what she needed! It was certainly what he needed.

“Here we go!” he shouted.

“The scanner’s working!” Rose called out. “It says Delta-One-Six!”

“Come on then, you beauty!” the Doctor laughed, firmly resolved on drowning out all of the pain present in their shared mental space with adrenaline fueled glee. After all, he had always wanted to use these cones - they were state of the art!

He watched with wide eyes as the cones connected, immediately trapping one of the so-called ‘ghosts’ within their quasi-electric field. And then he reached into his pocket, carefully blocking their bond as he pulled out and put on a pair of 3D glasses - this was the part of his speculations that he really would rather not worry his bondmate with. At least, not yet. Not until he absolutely had to.

The ghost … thing he’d just trapped was absolutely riddled with Void particles. Completely covered, blurry head to blurry toe. Blimey.

The Doctor knelt down, adjusting the controls in order to get a more accurate read. If he was lucky, he would be able to figure out which parallel world these creatures were trying to come from. Likely a parallel Earth, but which one?

It began writhing, though nothing about the triangulation device should cause a living thing pain.

“Don’t like that much, do you?” he couldn’t help commenting. “Who are you? Where are you coming from? Woah!” He jumped back as the ‘ghost’ attempted to break out of the containment field. “That’s more like it! Not so friendly now, are you?”

He looked on as the creature faded away and the cones deactivated. While some more time would have been helpful, the Doctor had enough information to get started. After quickly picking up all of the cones, he ran back inside. Once he’d dumped them all out of the way, he raced up to the console, shrugging out of his coat and tossing it onto the railing.

“I said so!” he exclaimed. “Those ghosts have been forced into existence from one specific point, and I can track down the source. Allons-y!”

With that, he slammed the dematerialization lever, the coordinates having been inputted by the triangulation device. So handy! Finally got to use it.

The TARDIS shook violently.

Well, maybe he could make some improvements ... if he ever got the chance to use it again. The Doctor sprung to his feet and stabilized the flight.

Things seemed abnormally silent in the console room and over their bond. He was uncertain as to why, but still gave over to his natural inclination to fill the silence.

“I like that,” he told his wife as he moved around the console. “Allons-y. I should say allons-y more often. Allons-y. Watch out, Rose Tyler. Allons-y. And then, it would be really brilliant if I met someone called Alonso, because then I could say, ‘Allons-y Alonso’ every time.” He finally reached Rose and wrapped his arms around her before pausing. “You’re staring at me.”

“My mum’s still on board,” she whispered, squeezing his arms.

The Doctor looked up to see Jackie Tyler sitting on one of the platforms.

It was terrifying.

“If we end up on Mars, I’m going to kill you.”

Absolutely, bone-chillingly terrifying.

Stop being a drama queen, his bondmate chastised.

Oh, the domestics of it all! Worse than living in a house! Traveling with his mother-in-law?!

You’ll be fine, it’s hardly traveling . We’re in the same city, in the same time, Rose reassured him, rolling her eyes before giving him a proper hug.

What was he supposed to do now, though?! Bring Jackie with them? Leave her in the TARDIS? It would likely be dangerous wherever they ended up, invasion and all. The alternative was having her stay in their home to snoop around and get up to who knows what. There was no winning!

“Welcome aboard, Jackie!” he said with a wave, his smile showing a bit too much teeth.

“Where exactly are we going, anyway?” her mother asked.

“Come down, mum. You can watch the landing on the view screen with us,” Rose encouraged, releasing him so that she could meet her halfway. “We’re gonna land at wherever they’re controlling the ghosts. Are you fine to stay on board? There’s a pool, you could have a nice swim. Or watch telly in the media room. We’ll be back before you know it.”

“I’m just supposed to hang out in this weird ship of his while you’re off trying to get yourselves killed?”

“We do stuff like this all the time,” the Doctor piped in, trying to reassure her. “Only this time you’re on the TARDIS instead of at home in your flat. Which, really, is much better, when you think about it. Best ship in the Universe.”

Jackie still didn’t look thrilled as they all gathered around the view screen. She looked even less thrilled as they watched the TARDIS land in a hanger before immediately being surrounded by armed gunmen.

“Oh, well, there goes the advantage of surprise,” he sighed. “Still, cuts to the chase.”

Now he was going to have to deal with soldiers. Really, every time he thought that the day couldn’t possibly get worse. The Doctor turned to his mother-in-law as he made his way around the console.

“Jackie, stay inside. Doors shut. They can’t get in.”

“I’m not staying here! Take me home!”

“It’s too late for that,” he told her. “Shouldn’t have come aboard if you didn’t fancy a trip.”

“I was kidnapped!”

He rolled his eyes, deciding not to dignify that with a response as he took Rose’s hand. She pulled him to a stop before they reached the door.

“Doctor, they’ve got guns.”

The Doctor mentally reminded his wife that they’d been surrounded by much, much worse. Daleks couldn’t help but come to mind. 21 st century Earth guns were really the least of his concerns at the moment. Jackie Tyler accidentally breaking his precious timeship was more of a worry than guns. Whatever these creatures had planned, definitely more of a worry than guns.

“And we haven’t,” he delightfully informed her. “Which makes us the better people, don’t you think? They can shoot us dead, but the moral high ground is ours.”

With that, he tugged her out of the TARDIS behind him and closed the door as casually as he could manage.

Honestly, with all of the emergency programs he had installed, why couldn’t he have made one to deal with this scenario? A program that would immediately take Jackie home and then bring the TARDIS right back - now that would be nifty.

They barely had a chance to look around before the soldiers surrounding them cocked their guns. He and Rose quickly raised their hands to prove they were unarmed.

Y’know what this reminds me of?, his wife casually asked across their connection.

What?

Utah, 2012.

The Doctor’s eyes swept the area as much as he could without moving his head. He could see her point.

Do you think they’d fire if I knocked on wood right now?, he asked her, just as a blonde woman in a suit rushed into the hanger.

“Oh! Oh, how marvelous!” she exclaimed, clapping.

I think she may’ve gone ‘round the bend, Rose laughed in his head as she fought back a confused smile.

The soldiers slowly began to lower their weapons as they joined in on the … clapping? Really, why were they clapping?

“Oh, very good. Superb. Happy day!”

Really, the Doctor felt inclined to agree with his bondmate on this one. Still, now that guns weren’t being pointed at them he was inclined to just go with it.

“Uhm, thanks. Nice to meet you,” he greeted. “I’m the Doctor, and this is my-”

Probably not the time to introduce me as your wife.

“- this is Rose.”

“Hello,” his wife waved with a wide grin that didn’t reach her eyes.

“Oh, I should say! Hurray!”

And there they went again with the clapping. Honestly, what the bloody hell was going on?

Think you’ve got more fans, Rose teased.

“You- you’ve heard of me, then?”

Really, where had his ship landed them?

“Well of course we have,” the overly enthusiastic woman replied. “And I have to say, if it wasn’t for you, none of us would be here! The Doctor and the TARDIS.”

Everyone started clapping yet again. He was starting to get used to it, actually. It was kind of nice.

“And his companion, of course,” the woman continued.

Okay, not as nice. Then again, Rose was the one who didn’t want him to say she was his wife. Which was probably the smart thing to do, mid-invasion, but still. Just … didn’t feel right. As it was, she had had to cover her mouth with her hands in order to keep herself from laughing - out loud. Their bond was awash with her amusement. The Doctor found himself fighting the urge himself as he tried to politely make them stop.

“And- and- and you are?” he asked as the noise died down.

“Oh, plenty of time for that,” she evaded. Huh.

I think she thinks she’s the boss of you, his bondmate informed him.

She also thinks that I’m the boss ofyou, the Doctor couldn’t help but point out.

Bless.

“Aaaaaaanyway lead on, allons-y. Will there be nibbles?”

He fought the urge to take Rose’s hand as they followed the woman away from the TARDIS, surrounded by armed guards, stuffing his fists into his pockets. A moment later she tugged on his sleeve. The Doctor glanced over, taking out his hand when she rolled her eyes. Their fingers slotted together, perfect fit, as always.

We’ve been holding hands since the moment we met, she mentally chastised. Memories played across their bond.

She certainly wasn’t wrong.

Sorry, he told her, squeezing her hand. Not sure how to pretend to not be married, I guess.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Rose smirk.

Well, I took off my ring. Think all we’ve got to do now is not say it outright.

Before he could properly respond, something on the tip of his tongue (or whatever the telepathic equivalent of that idiom might be) about how he could do a much better job than that, the mystery woman started talking.

“It was only a matter of time until you found us, and at last you’ve made it,” she said. “I’d like to welcome you, Doctor. Welcome to Torchwood.”

With that, she flung open the doors and they entered a massive warehouse. A massive warehouse that was full of alien technology. And since this definitely wasn’t UNIT, this was very, very not good.

Blimey , he told his wife, you’re right. This really is frighteningly similar to that bunker in Utah.

Gonna nip over to that crate and knock on wood?, Rose asked, only partially teasing.

He really was considering it, actually, but … (he peeked behind him at the armed soldiers following uncomfortably close) better not. Instead he focused on the spacecraft in front of them.

“That’s a Jathar Sunglider,” he realized.

“Came down to Earth off the Shetland Islands ten years ago,” the woman explained.

“What, did it crash?”

“No, we shot it down,” she stated. “It violated our airspace. Then we stripped it bare.”

Oh, this was really not good. The Doctor tried to sense the timelines, but they were all still so jumbled and wrong that he couldn’t make out the consequences of it, this technology that Earth really shouldn’t have right now. Not yet.

“The weapon that destroyed the Sycorax on Christmas day?” the woman continued with pride, “That was us. Now, if you’d like to come with me.”

That’s what Harriet said, Rose realized, replaying the memory over the bond, Torchwood. I didn’t even think about it, though.

No, me either, he agreed as they were led further into the warehouse. Why hadn’t he noticed anything off before? He should have felt it. On Christmas, maybe not - he’d just regenerated. But apparently this organization has been active for at least a decade, if not longer.

“The Torchwood Institute has a motto - ‘If it’s alien, it’s ours’,” their ‘captor’ slash ‘tour guide’ explained. “Anything that comes from the sky, we strip it down and we use it for the good of the British Empire.”

“Excuse me, the what?” Rose interrupted.

“The British Empire,” the woman repeated, turning around and looking his bondmate up and down, sizing her up.

“There hasn’t been a British Empire in ages,” Rose informed her, and she wasn’t wrong.

“We’ll see,” their hostess replied, a little too condescending for his liking. “Ah, excuse me,” she continued as a soldier handed her a particle gun?! “Now if you wouldn’t mind. Do you recognize this, Doctor?”

“That’s a particle gun.”

Now that he was here, now that this had his full attention, the Doctor could feel the strain on the timelines. This whole building was a threat to the entire causal nexus. His wife held his hand tighter when he showed her just a smidge of it over their connection.

“Good, isn’t it?” the woman smiled, unaware of the impending disaster that he wasn’t yet sure how to fix. “Took us eight years to get it to work.”

“It’s the 21st century,” he calmly tried to explain. “You can’t have particle guns.”

“We must defend our border against the alien,” she replied, as if that somehow gave them a free pass.

The Doctor didn’t know what to say to that, which apparently was fine, as their guide wasn’t really paying attention anyway as she handed back the gun.

“Thank you, Sebastian, isn’t it?”

I think it’s best if we just, you know, let her talk, he told Rose, studiously not looking directly at her - and really, there was a lot to take in, the warehouse was packed with advanced tech. Much too advanced.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Think she’ll give us an evil monologue?

Well, I don’t think she’s evil, he admitted. I think she’s … some sort of, I don’t know, business woman? I think she truly believes that what they’re doing here is good . Which makes them even more dangerous.

It would also make stopping them even more difficult.

“Thank you, Sebastian.”

He refocused as she turned back to them.

“I think it’s very important to know everyone by name,” she said. “Torchwood is a very modern organization. People skills. That’s what it’s all about these days. I’m a people person.”

Well that’s … nice?, Rose commented across the bond as she gave the woman a very forced grin.

“Have you got anyone called Alonso?” he couldn’t help but ask.

“No, I don’t think so. Is that important?”

Eh, oh well. It was kind of nice, though, having her asking a question for once.

“No, I suppose not,” the Doctor replied, just as he noticed a crate of Magnaclamps. He’d always wanted some, hadn’t gotten around to it, though. “What was your name?”

“Yvonne,” she told them (finally). “Yvonne Hartman.”

He let go of his wife’s hand, giving into the urge to inspect a clamp.

“Ah, yes,” Yvonne said with a smile. “Now, we’re very fond of these. The Magnaclamp. Found in a spaceship buried at the base of Mount Snowdon. Attach this to an object and it cancels the mass,” she explained, as if he didn’t already know. “I could use it to lift two tonnes of weight with a single hand. That’s an imperial ton, by the way. Torchwood refuses to go metric.”

Of course they do, Rose scoffed over the bond. British Empire, I mean really.

“Well, that’s handy,” is what she said aloud as he tossed the clamp back into the crate, wandering away to try to get a better idea of all of the other alien technology they’d managed to scavenge, commandeer or steal. His wife wandered in the opposite direction, giving him a second set of eyes even if she didn’t know what everything was. It really was a devastating amount, and the Doctor had to assume that this wasn’t all of it.

Really, it was about time they got back on track.

“So, what about the ghosts?” he asked.

“Ah, yes, the ghosts. They’re, er, what you might call a side effect,” Yvonne admitted.

“Of what?”

“All in good time, Doctor. There is an itinerary, trust me.”

Ugh, of all the things to add to this no-good-very-bad-day, he was stuck on a tour. With an itinerary.

It was his personal hell, really.

And to make it even worse, there went the TARDIS on the back of a lorry.

“An itinerary?” Rose scoffed. “And what are you lot doing with the TARDIS?!” My mum’s in there!

Oh, seriously?! He’d just managed to forget that they’d left Jackie Tyler unsupervised on the ship. Really, truly, worst day ever.

Seriously? Could you just grow up and get some perspective?, his wife snarled over their connection.

“If it’s alien, it’s ours,” Yvonne replied confidently.

“You’ll never get inside it,” he told her with just as much confidence, if not more.

“Hmm, et cetera.”

Once she turned away, they both glanced back at their ship to see Rose’s mum peek out through the doors - which he distinctly remembered telling her to keep shut.

Really, why did no one ever listen? He didn’t understand it.

With a sigh, and all of his unflattering thoughts about his mother-in-law safely behind a barrier, the Doctor turned away to continue their ‘tour’. At least the ghosts were on the itinerary. So this day had to turn ‘round at some point … right?

#ten x rose #tenrose #time petals #ficandchips #dw fanfiction #fandom: doctor who #pairing: rose x doctor #fic: tangled timelines #my fic

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lalainajanes · 6 years ago

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I teased this one ages ago! Sorry, rl got in the way! Do me a favor and cross your fingers that my bosses agree to start letting ups work from home a couple days a week next year bc that will make my life waaaayyy easier.

You’re Better Than Normal (Part Two)

Part One

Caroline shifts from sleep to wakefulness violently, with a jerk and a gasp. She can’t trust the fuzzy place between the two.

She’s yet to manage a decent stretch of rest. She dreams of walls that shift closer and closer no matter how hard she tries to force them back. Of Bonnie fading and weakening when no rescue comes. Of Bonnie hanging in there until Caroline gets so thirsty.

Those are the worst.

She fights her way out of the nightmares and her body reacts accordingly. Each time she wakes she’s rigid, ready to use every ounce of her strength to get free.

Klaus is always there to remind her that she is.

This time her palms slam into his chest when she tries to spring to her feet. She snaps into lucidity when his body gives in a way the ground wouldn’t. He inhales sharply but makes no other noise of shock or pain, just grabs her wrists firmly. “Caroline, wake up.”

Caroline’s eyes pop open, only to close quickly when the light stings. She relaxes as the memories – of the last few hours, of yesterday - flood her. She inhales deeply in relief before she slumps back down. There’s a lamp on the bedside table, the shade off so it’s as bright as possible. “Ouch,” she grumbles, tucking her forehead against Klaus’ chest.

He laughs and his hands glide up her arms, his thumbs rubbing circles against her stiff shoulders. “You seemed not to appreciate the lack of light the last, oh, half-dozen times you woke.”

She’d been so sure she was back in the cave when she’d found herself in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by unbroken darkness. Her throat had tightened, her breathing growing ragged and painful. Klaus had asked what was wrong and parsed the issue from her frantic gestures and garbled words.

He’d left the bed long enough to solve the problem, had brushed off her weak protests that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He’d said he’s gone weeks without sleeping while on the run, without slowing or resting, so he wouldn’t even notice a few nights spent awake in the comfort of a bed.

When it had been silence that made her uneasy, he’d talked. About what Caroline’s not quite sure because the words had mattered less than his voice.

She’d grown used to noise while she slept in various hostels and hotels in Europe. People shifting across the room or through too thin walls, city noise streaming in through open windows. Birds chirping and trees rustling the few times they’d ventured somewhere more rustic.

The cave had been quiet.

“Sorry,” Caroline says, not for the first time. “For, well, you know.”

Keeping him up, invading his bed, being so freaking needy. It’s an ever-lengthening list.

She bites back a moan when he digs into a particularly tight knot near her spine. “Stop apologizing,” Klaus chides.

Again.

The first ‘I’m sorry’ she’d muttered had been mortified. They’d moved to a bed but she hadn’t allowed Klaus even a fraction of an inch of personal space. Each time she barrels into alertness she’s half on top of him. Her hands are always on his skin, gripping too tightly.

He’s yet to complain.

She sighs, turns her head to rest her ear against his heart. “It must be almost morning.”

“Nearly.” He doesn’t seem particularly eager to start his day.

“Bonnie’s still asleep?”

“Yes. We’ll know when she stirs,” Klaus promises. Elijah’s with her, he’d explained. That there were plenty of other vampires he could have posted but Elijah had offered, reasoning it was best that someone familiar attend to Bon.

“How long has it been now?”

“About fourteen hours.”

So an hour longer than when she’d last asked. She’s kind of impressed that Klaus doesn’t sound more annoyed. “I’m…”

This time Klaus doesn’t allow the apology. “Worried about your oldest friend, I know. If she’s not up in another few hours I’ll send someone to fetch a doctor.”

“Have house calls made a comeback in the twenty…” Caroline pauses abruptly, lets the joke die. She doesn’t even know what century it is.

“Second,” Klaus tells her softly, his palm flattening on her back like he’s braced for her to rear away.

Caroline doesn’t move much, lets the news sink in. Honestly, she’s kind of relieved. She’s had no real way to guess – Klaus and his siblings will look the same if a hundred or a thousand years had passed. “Are we talking early twenty-second century?”

Hey, she’s always been an optimist.

“Mid,” Klaus says, a touch regretfully. “Just on the cusp of late, mathematically speaking.”

That startles a choked noise of amusement from Caroline. She taps his chest lightly, “Nerd.”

Klaus doesn’t react much to the teasing but then he’s definitely been called worse. “Do you want a specific date? Or would you prefer to ease into it a bit?”

Caroline takes a deep breath, then another. She’d told herself she’d face her problems head on in the morning. It’s time to stop procrastinating. “No, let’s get it over with. How long did I spend molding in a cave, Klaus?”

She shivers involuntarily, remembering just how long it had taken for the water in the shower to run clean.

His hand starts to move, gliding up and down the length of her back. It’s an attempt at comfort that she wouldn’t have thought Klaus capable of, once upon a time. “One hundred and forty-seven years.”

She’s always been a fan of numbers. In goals that could be measured. Timelines. When Klaus gives her the number – the length of time she’s been gone – her brain whirls, trying to quantify it.

One hundred and forty-seven years equals two human lifetimes, almost. It’s roughly ten percent of Klaus’ very long life. Almost eight times as many years as she’d lived. Caroline can’t decide whether she should laugh or cry or scream.

“And a few months, I believe,” Klaus adds softly.

A few months doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things but Caroline does appreciate precision. It had been the very beginning of spring when they’d returned to Mystic Falls. After a winter in Greece neither she nor Bonnie had been happy to find their hometown chilly and damp. “What’s the date?”

“September 30th. Twenty-one-sixty-four.”

“Huh. Just in time for my…” Caroline thinks for a minute, “…172nd birthday.” She’s technically older than Stefan had been when they’d met. Damon too, she’s pretty sure.

“I know,” Klaus murmurs. “I’ll have to scrounge you up a gift.”

Caroline lifts her head, glad he’s given her an opening to quit obsessing over a length of time she truly can’t even fathom. She glares at him playfully, “You’ll scrounge? You, a birthday enthusiast, will scrounge for a gift for the first birthday I’ve been aware of in a century and a half?”

He smiles at her and shifts so he’s propped against the bed’s padded headboard, easily moving Caroline with him. She stretches out her legs, wonders if she should move. Discards the idea when Klaus’ fingers sink into her hair. He matches her feigned outrage with a taunt, “I know you love surprises so I wouldn’t want to spoil anything. I may have a suitable item or two laying around.”

Hmm. Would it be rude to snoop? Probably. Is she going to do it anyway? Of course. Hopefully cake is still a thing in the twenty-second century.

“I hate surprises.”

She feels his amusement this time, rumbling through his chest under her head. “I’m well aware, love.” Klaus rubs at the base of her skull and Caroline finds her eyes drooping, unable to form a clever comeback. She knows she won’t sleep properly but a few more minutes of rest might be a good idea.

She wants to be sharp when Klaus’ guests arrive.

* * * * *

Caroline paces, waiting for Bonnie to wake. It's been at nearly eighteen hours and Caroline’s worry is mounting. Bonnie seems okay – she’s not too hot or too cold, doesn’t look like she’s in any pain or distress. She looks like she’s just sleeping well.

Kol’s insisting that’s exactly what’s happening, that it’s normal for witches to need to rest after big spells to recharge. He’s made the proclamation at breakfast, while double fisting blood and bourbon, in the most man-splain-y way possible, and Caroline’s temper had flared.

"Bonnie is not a freaking battery!" She’d snapped, her hands hitting the table hard enough to send cutlery rattling. Kol had leaned forward, his lips twisted condescendingly. Whatever he’d been about to say had been cut off by the warning look Klaus had leveled his way. It had promised retribution and so Kol had refrained from snapping back.

Or snapping Caroline’s neck.

She'd left the breakfast table (and it's weird, unidentifiable, array of food-like things) in a huff. After a few wrong turns she’d found her way to the room they'd deposited Bonnie in last night. She'd been soothed by Bonnie's strong heartbeat, by the steady rhythm of her breaths. She'd relaxed enough to accept the glass of blood Rebekah had dropped off, had even remembered her manners and muttered a thanks.

Rebekah had left quickly, telling Caroline to yell if she was too dim to remember how to work the shower, leaving the door ajar.

She'd downed the blood quickly and rinsed the glass (managing just fine, Rebekah). Bonnie’s a little uneasy about the whole blood drinking vampire thing. Better than she had been but, when they’d been travelling together, Caroline had gotten into the habit of hiding her meals as much as possible.

Unable to sit still any longer, nervous energy thrumming through her body, she'd started to move.

It takes fourteen strides, from wall to wall, and she's never been more grateful for Klaus' penchant for opulence. She's making lists in her head. There’s so much she’ll need to know, a million things she'll have to do. Like, how's she going to go about getting a driver's license? Do people still have those? Or is there a retinal scan, or some creepy microchip implanted in your body? Caroline had never been much for sci fi movies, something she deeply regrets now that her life has become one.

She's got her ears focused on Bonnie, however, recognizes the little annoyed noise Bonnie always makes when she's about to wake up. Caroline's in the chair beside the bed in under a second, legs pulled up under her, trying to look casual and like she's not freaking out.

The attempt is pointless, Bonnie's known her forever, and it only takes a second before her green eyes sharpen and focus on Caroline. "How bad is it?" Bonnie asks, resigned because she’s way too accustomed to doom and gloom.

They’d been doing so well on their own. They’d been away for months without even the tiniest threat of danger.

Caroline chews on the inside of her lip for a second, considering how to answer. She can't lie, won't lie, but a little stalling might be a kindness. Just until Bonnie has a chance to shower and eat. "Honestly? It's not great, Bon. But we're alive. We’ve got… help.” She’d almost said friends but that would have been pushing it.

Bonnie closes her eyes again, “This bed is an improvement over the cave.”

“That’s the spirit. I felt a bajillion times better after a shower.”

When Bonnie sits up and kicks the blankets aside, the sheets are no longer white. She makes a disgusted face at the grit and grime covering her body, "Gross. I can't believe I fell asleep like this."

"You were right out," Caroline tells her. "Rebekah tucked you in and you didn't even notice."

"Weird. I wish you hadn't told me that."

Caroline cracks a smile at the mildly disgusted look Bonnie wears, "Don't worry. I have it on good authority that Nice Rebekah will be a fleeting presence. We'll probably miss her once Bitch Rebekah rears her ugly head."

"I heard that!" Rebekah bellows from several rooms away.

Caroline looks away, from Bonnie. She'll start giggling if she doesn't and that will likely not endear either of them to Rebekah.

Caroline’s stronger than she had been but Damon will be too. If things get violent, well, she wants all The Originals on her side.

Once she's swallowed down her laughter she stands, brushing her hands together, "You'll have to bear with me. Everything in the bathroom is crazy fancy and I've only been in it once. I'm pretty sure there's no boil humans alive setting though."

"Are you sure?" Bonnie asks dryly. "You're aware of just who lives here? Might be something they do for fun."

Klaus, with his impeccable timing, chooses that moment to poke his head in the door, "Now why would we overcook a perfectly good meal?"

Bonnie glares, dark and deadly, and Caroline hastily steps into her line of sight, in case she starts throwing magic around. "He's joking, Bon. Klaus just doesn't realize that he's not actually funny."

She shoots him her own quelling look, more exasperated than upset, and he merely smirks back, leaning against the open doorway. "Nonsense, my sense of humor is delightful, everyone says so."

"People you're attempting to kill, I'm guessing? I think that counts as duress and you should assume they're lying."

Klaus places a hand over his heart, his face dropping into an exaggeratedly wounded expression. Caroline rolls her eyes, "Did you need something?"

He turns serious in an instant, "Yes, actually. Our guests will be arriving within the hour." Klaus' eyes flit over to Bonnie, and Caroline glances over to find her friend looking puzzled at Klaus' words. She’s not going to start explaining with Klaus in the room. There are things Bonnie needs to hear from Caroline. Privately. "I'll let you know when I'm ready to see them," she says.

He nods in acceptance, rocks back a step, before turning to leave. A thought occurs to Caroline, one she's kind of ashamed is just now popping up. "One sec, Bon," she says, before darting out the room after Klaus. He turns, a brow raised, and she invades his personal space to speak quietly.

It’s weird she even notices considering how she’d spent last night draped all over him.

"Bonnie's mom was a vampire. Can you find out what happened to her? If she's still around?"

"I can," Klaus says. "I even have a reasonably good idea of where to start looking."

"Good. Thank you. Can you let Enzo know what I'm doing? I'll find him as soon as I can."

"And our other guests?" Klaus asks mildly. "Any specifications for how I treat them?"

She knows what he's asking, wonders what it says about her that her first instinct is to ask for a little bloodshed, Damon's in particular. "Are their memories still gone?"

"Yes. It was a clever spell. Your little witch friend is the only person who can break it."

Caroline's not surprised. Of course Damon would craft the tiniest loophole possible. "Then I think they should be comfortable."

“Such generosity.”

“Comfortable for now.” Until their memories have returned, and they’ve confessed to the exact series of events that had led to Caroline and Bonnie losing so many years.

Klaus' eyes gleam, a slow, pleased smile tugging at his lips, "I’ve always enjoyed the way your mind works."

She remembers, had always found it flattering, his intrigue with her brain when so many had only seen a pretty face or attractive body. What does it mean that it's endured?

Klaus tips his head, gestures to the room behind her, "You'd best return, it sounds like someone's getting impatient."

She can hear Bonnie moving around, now that he mentions it, "Right. I should," Still Caroline hesitates. She wants to say thank you, again, but she feels like she's already said it so many times. Knows she'll probably need to say it more, over the coming days and weeks.

"I'll send someone with a tray of food, in a bit. And you may find me, if you need anything."

"Klaus…" Caroline murmurs, trailing off helplessly. She can't find the words but she's always been good at actions. Before she can second guess herself, she puts her hand on his shoulder, rises and brushes her lips over his cheek. He stiffens, and his eyes are slightly wider when she pulls back, trained on her face. She feels a momentary surge of satisfaction at having caught him off guard.

Surely not many can claim the same.

Caroline lets her hand slide down his arm, before she steps back. Throws him on last smile, before she turns on her heel.

Klaus, and all the things between them, will keep. He's proven that. Right now, Bonnie needs her more.

* * * * *

“What? That’s insane. Impossible. She can’t be a vampire. She took the cure. Katherine tried to turn back, remember?”

Bonnie’s restless, crackling with energy. She’s pacing the room, just as Caroline had earlier. They’ve thrown all the curtains in but there’s not a whole lot of natural light to be found. Clouds pack the sky, sitting low and heavy, like a storm threatens. They hadn’t been able to figure out how to open the windows but at least the room is big and well lit.

They’re avoiding the view. Caroline vaguely recognizes the back grounds of Klaus’ Mystic Falls home but it looks way different. Once carefully manicured it’s now little more than a few scraggly patches of brown-yellow grass dotted over rocks and cracked soil. The outbuildings are crumbling and weather beaten and the stone paths that had once wound around the house no longer visible.

Caroline’s doing her best to project calm. So not her forte but she’s had a good chunk of time to process. Someone to lean on (in the most literal sense of the word) and answer her questions. “Bon, you’re a witch. Once upon a time we thought that was impossible.”

Bonnie’s head swivels to shoot Caroline an annoyed look. Caroline’s sitting cross legged at the end of the bed and she tips her head to the side and maintains eye contact until Bonnie huffs out an irritated sigh and resumes walking. “Fine, I will give you that one.”

“Why thank you.”

“She wouldn’t though. Elena never wanted to be a vampire.”

That’s kind of a sticking point for Caroline too. Klaus hadn’t known how or why Elena had turned but he’d had theories. Caroline goes with the most generous, “Maybe it was life or death again. She chose to be a vampire rather than die the first time. If she had to choose again...”

“She wouldn’t sacrifice us though. That’s not Elena.”

Caroline’s not so sure.

Elena had chosen sleep knowing that the future she wanted was on pause. That Damon would be waiting for her, and Stefan would remain unchanged. That she could have everything her little heart desired when she woke up and that she wouldn’t even suffer the agony of waiting. If something threatened that future? Caroline doesn’t trust that Elena’s selflessness would have held.

She’d let go of the things Elena had said and done with her humanity off, had known that holding on to her anger was pointless when Elena hadn’t even been willing to entertain the idea of an apology. She’d rationalized that it wasn’t really Elena. Then she’d flipped her own switch and she’d been entirely herself. The worst parts of herself that she’d tried to temper, yes, but she’s not going to deny they exist. She’s ruthless and blunt, and capable of terrible things in pursuit of her goals.

Some might label those traits as flaws but privately Caroline thinks they can be strengths too.

Elena had always been selective about the flaws she was willing to overlook, a teeny bit in denial about the ones she possessed.

Damon and Stefan were gifted limitless chances. Other people not so much.

Sometime after Damon and Stefan had shown up Elena’s universe had narrowed. Caroline had been aware of just who existed at the center of it. If Damon was the sun and Stefan the moon, destined to be stuck to Elena’s side, Caroline had figured she and Bonnie were planets. Their orbits would grow bigger, away from Mystic Falls, but that they’d still be important. They’d keep track of each other, share milestones, celebrate success and band together in tragedy.

That may have been too rosy a view. Maybe, to Elena, she’s Pluto. Easily demoted.

“She’s here, according to Klaus. Damon and Stefan too. That wouldn’t be possible if she hadn’t turned.”

Bonnie pauses, her head snapping up and her eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Are they the guests Klaus was talking about? He sounded extra smarmy.”

“Yup. Their memories are all messed up. Klaus thinks you’re the only witch on the planet with a fix.”

“Klaus thinks,” Bonnie repeats and there’s a whole heap of distaste in those two little words.

Oh boy.

“I know you don’t like him,” Caroline begins.

“That’s understating it a bit.”

Caroline decides it’s prudent to ignore the interruption. “Or trust him. And you don’t have to. But maybe give him some credit for springing us yesterday.” Caroline’s not sure she would have been able to do it on her own. She’s definitely sure that she wouldn’t have been fast enough for Bonnie to make it out with no ill effects.

“Yeah, about that. He says it’s been a hundred and forty seven years, how did he happen to show up in the exact right place at the exact right time?”

Caroline had really been hoping to avoid that question.

But she’s not going to lie. Or even sugar coat. She and Bonnie need to be a united front.

“Klaus has been… searching for descendants of the witch who sealed us in.”

“And?” Bonnie prompts because she really knows Caroline too well.

“And killing them. If they proved unable to help.” She’s not well versed in the intricacies of magic. Only knows that there’s usually a whole heap of terms and conditions. Klaus had explained, sometime last night, when Caroline had been failing at sleep, that the original witch had anchored the spell to her line. That Damon had compelled her very human husband as a means of making her cooperate. She’d refused to lift it no matter what Klaus had offered or threatened.

Damon had, apparently, used every ounce of self-serving cunning and self-preserving intelligence he’d possessed. Without any memory of the undoubtedly heinous orders he’d given the witch’s husband, Damon couldn’t be forced to undo his compulsion. The spell to seal his memories away had involved Bonnie’s blood and the spell to return them required the same ingredients.

And Bonnie was trapped, her blood well out of reach.

Klaus had seethed with frustration as he’d explained, his body a solid mass of tension where they’d been pressed together. His hands had remained gentle, however, his fingers in her hair soothing.

Caroline still wears his scent on her skin and she’s glad Bonnie’s human senses can’t detect it.

“How many?” Bonnie demands.

“You know, I didn’t ask,” Caroline replies, and that’s not a lie. She hadn’t wanted a count for this very reason.

Bonnie rolls her shoulders, a hand coming up to rub at the back of her neck. “I think I need a couple minutes. To make this all make sense. Is that okay?”

Caroline’s already rising and she scoffs, “Of course it’s okay. We’ve dealt with a whole lot of crazy but this is a brand-new level of nuts. You can have all the time you need to process.”

Bonnie smiles. Just a tiny wan quirk of her lips but Caroline will take it. “Thanks, Care.”

“Come downstairs whenever you’re ready. Klaus has been hoarding spell books that might help with the memory thing but honestly, there’s no rush.”

“Who are you and what have you done with Caroline Forbes?”

It’s a terrible joke but Caroline lets that slide. She shrugs, turning when she reaches the door. “It’s not life or death. I’m alive, you’re alive. Everything else we can figure out, right?”

Bon blinks a little, her eyes shining, and Caroline swallows passed a lump in her throat, rushing forward and throwing her arms around Bonnie. She watches her strength, mindful of how much it’s grown, how weak Bonnie had been just yesterday. Bonnie returns the pressure, her breathing shaky, “We’ll figure it out,” Caroline repeats.

This time it’s a promise, one she intends to keep.

* * * * *

Caroline had been on her way back to her room to wash her face and fix her hair. When she’d gotten closer to the staircase she’d heard the voices. They’re too quiet for her to make out the words but one voice is new, just slightly familiar. Her feet take her down the steps quickly, towards an open door.

There’s no real point in cleaning away the evidence of tears. Enzo had always been annoyingly perceptive about her emotional state and, with the events of the last 24 hours, Caroline’s in no position to attempt to act like she’s okay.

Besides, he’s seen her look far worse.

Caroline deeply regrets the hair and leather pants related mistakes she’d made with her humanity off.

She’s not trying to be stealthy and the conversation pauses, a glass hits a table with a clink.

Her hand touches the door and then everything gets blurry. There’s a crash, she feels a whoosh of air, hears a groan and a tear. Caroline shakes her head, blinks, finds herself staring at the back of Klaus’ neck. Enzo’s there too, right in front of Klaus, wide-eyed and unconcerned about the death grip Klaus has on the collar of his jacket.

She’ll chalk that up to his total lack of a survival instinct.

“Manners, Lorenzo,” Klaus warns, mostly friendly but with the tiniest edge of a threat.

Caroline brushes passed Klaus, a laugh bubbling out of her. She plows into Enzo and he grunts but lifts her off her feet in a bone crushing hug. “It has been far too long,” he mutters into her hair.

She returns the embrace just as fiercely, “Doesn’t feel that long for me but I have missed you.” Enzo sets her down and Caroline notes the room’s other occupant. Kol’s here, slouched on a leather sofa. He lifts his glass in her direction in welcome, Caroline supposes he’s over their breakfast table spat.

“Aren’t you two adorable?” Kol drawls.

Enzo shoots him a casual rude gesture and Klaus laughs softly behind her. His hand presses into her hip briefly, drawing Caroline’s attention. “Drink, love?” he murmurs.

She’s hopeful the booze is less terrible than the food. “Yes, please.”

He makes his way to a cart across the room. It holds glasses, several crystal decanters, Klaus pops the top on one and pours a more than healthy portion. Caroline drops down into an armchair, curls her legs under her. Enzo pats her head and she swats at him but he’s still much faster than her, dodging easily as he throws himself down next to Kol.

And props his feet on the coffee table. Caroline glares a little but he grins at her, unrepentant. Caroline half expects Klaus to comment but he doesn’t seem bothered, leans against the arm of her chair after handing her a glass.

“How’s the little witch?” Kol asks, as if he’s genuinely interested.

“Fully recharged,” Caroline tells him. “She wanted a little time alone to process but she’ll be down later.”

“Have you told her…” Klaus lets the sentence hang.

“Everything I know, she knows.” Caroline twists her head to study Klaus’ reaction, searching for a hint of displeasure of disapproval.

Klaus only nods, “Did you discuss what we’d like done with our other guests?”

“Not really.” She and Bonnie had only decided that the first order of business would be to figure out how to restore the memories that Elena and the Salvatores apparently lacked. “I’d like for them to be kept comfortable. Until we can make them remember.”

AKA warm and fed with all their organs and extremities intact.

She watches Kol as she says it. Klaus had already agreed but she remembers Kol being volatile, fond of bats and not a big fan of Damon.

He moans in exaggerated disappointment, his head rolling back against the couch, his expression growing petulant. “You, darling, are a bit of a fun killer, aren’t you?”

“Elijah’s settling them,” Klaus tells her, ignoring his brother’s complaint. “In separate, well stocked rooms.”

“Cells, technically,” Enzo pipes up.

Kol cheers up a bit, “Well, at least that’s a little bit of torture. As clingy and nauseating at their little triangle is.”

“Did Elena go back to Stefan?”

“Back and forth. Back and forth,” Enzo drawls. “For ages.”

“Took her far too long to work out that she didn’t have to,” Kol adds. “Imagine, being a hundred years old and only just realizing you’ve options other than monogamy?”

Unfortunately, Caroline had just taken a sip of her drink. She chokes on it and her throat burns. Her eyes water and she coughs while Klaus pats her on the back. He sounds distinctly amused when he speaks, “She insisted on living with humans. Got a little caught up in the norms.”

“This is really too much information,” Caroline manages, her voice weak. She’s also seriously regretting her honesty is the best policy vow. This is not gossip she wants to have to relay to Bonnie.

“Jealous? You’d developed a bit of a thing for Stefan, hadn’t you?”

Ugh. Had it just been a few minutes ago that she’d been elated to see Enzo?

Klaus straightens next to her, putting more distance between their bodies and lifting his hand away. This time, Caroline does not check his reaction. “I got over that pretty quickly, thank you very much.”

“Oh?” Enzo asks, like he doesn’t believe her.

Caroline takes another sip of her drink, this time welcoming the fire when she swallows. “I wasn’t good with change. With everything that happened with my mom…” Caroline hadn’t been ready to lose her mother. She’d had plans – she’d wanted to graduate college and get a job, to make her mom proud while she could, knowing that by the time she hit thirty-five or so she wouldn’t be able to show her face in Mystic Falls without whispers starting.

With her mother’s death Caroline’s reasons for playing at being human evaporated. She’d taken a leap, dropped out of college, and bought a plane ticket. Had quickly realized that there were plenty of new experiences worth having.

“Stefan was familiar,” Caroline says, keeping it simple because Kol really doesn’t need to know her personal business, outdated though it is. “After I left I found I didn’t actually need familiar.”

“I could have told you that.”

She makes a face, barely resists the urge to stick out her tongue. Enzo’s not the least bit chastised. His boots squeak against the polished coffee table as he gets comfortable. “Tell me, Gorgeous, what’s the plan then? We just wait?”

She’s about to snap an apology for inconveniencing him but Klaus speaks first, “It shouldn’t be too long. I believe we have the spell, the wi…” Caroline sees him glance at her when he pauses. He smiles at her, all warmth and dimples, and corrects himself. “Bonnie just has to look it over. It’ll take a few days to track down the necessary ingredients but she likely shouldn’t be spilling blood immediately, given her condition.”

“Is my usual room ready?” Enzo asks.

It’s so weird that he has a usual freaking room.

“Of course,” Klaus answers, the tiniest hint of offense making the words come out clipped.

Caroline takes another drink. A bigger one. “I’m going to need the full story of how you two became bffs. Like, right now.”

Enzo smirks, his eyes growing gleeful, “It was a rocky road, Gorgeous. There was bloodshed, severed limbs.”

“His,” Klaus mutters darkly.

He doesn’t try to stop the story, however. Only interjects when Enzo begins to embellish and occasionally to supply extra details.

It’s not long until Caroline’s sides hurt from laughing.

For the first time she feels like maybe, somehow, she really will be okay.

* * * * *

It takes a minute for Elena to realize she’s no longer alone. Caroline hadn’t announced herself but she’s kind of surprised Elena’s not more alert. She looks miserable, wrapped in a blanket on the mattress in the corner of the cell. It’s not her only blanket, she’s got a whole pile. Pillows too. It’s only the locked door that makes the room a cell because it’s clean and dry and well lit.

Far nicer than a cave.

The door’s feature small barred cut-outs, high enough that Caroline doesn’t have to duck to look through them.

There are guards behind her, at the bottom of the staircase, but they hadn’t tried to stop or discourage her. Caroline thinks they’re hybrids but she’s not sure how that’s possible. It’s another question to add to her endless list. It’s mental list for now. Klaus had informed her that paper and pens were no longer commonly used. She’d been horrified and he’d smiled, had told he’d sacrifice one of his sketchbooks and some pencils for her until he could track down something suitable.

He’d offered a tablet too but nothing is as satisfying as striking off a task on paper.

Stefan had glanced up as she’d passed his cell. They’d eyed each other for a moment before he’d bowed his head once more.

It had felt like a dismissal and she’d be lying if she claimed it hadn’t annoyed her.

She can hear Damon moving, breathing harshly. Dull thuds that must be him slamming into the walls. Idly, she wonders if putting Elena in the center cell had been purposeful or coincidence. She doesn’t travel beyond Elena’s cell, has no pressing need to check on Damon.

Elena’s still a pretty crier, no snot or splotchy skin, just big fat tears and attractively clumped lashes. Her hair is shorter than Caroline’s ever seen it, resting just at her collarbones but that’s it. Physically, the Elena before her is identical to the Elena she’d always known.

Caroline taps at the door and Elena startles, springing from the bed and pressing her back to the wall. Her face is twisted in anger but confusion takes over when she spots Caroline. “Who are you?” she asks warily.

Well. That’s weird. She’d shared dolls with Elena, games of Candyland. Giggled about crushes and complained about pop quizzes. There’s no hint recognition in Elena’s red-rimmed eyes.

She takes another step closer, “My name’s Caroline.”

Damon’s stilled and Stefan’s risen. A glance to her left and right shows the they’re peering out at her. Elena can’t see them and she’s waiting, like she expects a longer explanation. “Where’s your boss?” she spits, when Caroline remains quiet.

“I don’t have one of those.” Technically, she’s never had one of those. She’d had ideas about trying her hand at a career or two, hadn’t gotten the chance.

“Klaus,” Stefan cuts in. “Where is Klaus?”

Caroline shrugs, points upwards. He’s somewhere upstairs. Bonnie had emerged from her room, had begun to go through the research Klaus has compiled over the years. He’d excused himself to make a call, had said something about arranging for reinforcements. “I’m not a hybrid. Just a regular ol’ vampire. About the same age as you, actually. And I don’t work for Klaus.”

The noise Elena makes is disbelieving. “Sure you don’t. Why else would you be here? Unless you’re…” she trails off, her eyes flitting over Caroline in a way that’s familiar in it’s silent judgement. Caroline’s sure she’s trying to find a safe euphemism but she apparently fails. “…with him,” Elena finishes.

Caroline keeps her reply simple. She doesn’t owe anyone in this basement an explanation. “He’s helping me with something.”

“Klaus doesn’t help people.”

Technically false. “Really? I thought it was pretty helpful when he offered up a hybrid for you to kill so you didn’t spend a few decades going insane.”

Elena shrinks back, growing fearful once more. “How do you know about that?”

“We used to know each other.” Kind of an understatement but Elena’s not going to believe her anyway.

“We’ve never met.”

“We have,” Caroline counters. “I don’t actually remember when.”

Mystic Falls had been small, and big on community celebrations. She assumes she’d met Elena and Bonnie at one of them, had been plopped in a group with kids her age under the semi-attentive eye of whatever grown up was the most likely to go easy on the spiked punch.

Elena’s watching her with some measure of concern. Caroline can’t blame her. A stranger, talking nonsense, while you’re trapped in a cell is bound to be alarming.

She should probably apologize for the kidnapping thing but she’s not sure if Elena deserves it.

Elena moves forward again, her big brown eyes once again pleading, and her voice turns soft. “Listen, Caroline. If you need help, I’ll help you. We’ll help you if you get us out. But Klaus is… Klaus is bad news, okay? You need to get me out of here. Damon and Stefan too. He’s going to kill us. Torture us.”

A demand, one that’s annoyingly condescending. Not even a request.

“He’s not going to torture you.”

Caroline’s hoping that, whatever went down, Elena had been kept in the dark. Damon and Stefan had tended to get high handed and she thinks it’s plausible that they’d decided on a course of action for Elena, had decided what her best interest was and hadn’t cared about collateral damage.

The door to the next cell rattles and she hears a strangled grunt. Glancing over Caroline sees Damon, his pale blue eyes just as startling as she remembers. He’s livid, his color high and his mouth is ringed with dried blood. He makes more sounds, feral inarticulate noises that don’t resemble actual words.

Elena’s frantic, stretched up on her toes, her head pressed to the bars but there’s no way she can see Damon. She glares at Caroline, “Do you not consider cutting out a tongue torture?”

A throat clears behind her and one of the guard pipes up, “Technically, that was Kol.”

Ah. She should have known. He’d acquiesced so easily.

Caroline wonders if she should be outraged but she finds she can’t muster the energy. ““I mean, it is but it’ll grow back.”

Elena gasps, “That’s not the point.”

“The Damon I remember was really bad at knowing when to shut up.”

Elena recoils, watching Caroline warily now. “And that makes it okay?”

It’s not a debate Caroline’s willing to entertain, especially when there’s no point in reminding Elena what a giant freaking hypocrite she’s being.

Stefan says her name, catching her attention. “Caroline,” he repeats, drawing out the syllables. “Klaus asked us about you. Several times.”

This time the noise Damon makes is a snarl and Caroline figures those were not civilized conversations. “Like I said, he’s been helping me.”

“For a hundred years?”

“More like a hundred and fifty.”

She can still read Stefan. He’s measuring her, trying to figure out how loyal she is to Klaus, if he can use her. He’s going to be disappointed. “An awfully long time,” he finally says, carefully neutral.

Caroline laughs even though none of her present company will get the joke, “Didn’t feel like it.”

She studies each of her old friends in turn. Stefan’s got his brows furrowed in frustration, Damon’s tense like he’s considering going for her throat, thick doors be damned. Elena’s sad and anxious, her knuckles white where they clutch the edge of the window.

Part of her hadn’t understood what it meant that she’d been erased. She’d half expected recognition. That seeing her in the flesh would shake whatever magic that had been weaved loose. She’d hoped for answers. At the very least she’d wanted a target for her anger.

Of course it’s not that simple.

* * * * *

She’d planned to sleep in her own bed.

Had showered, explored the bottles and tubes of sweet-smelling lotions and creams that had appeared in the bathroom adjacent to the room she’d been given. Had used up several hours making notes in the sketchbook Klaus had provided while scouring the internet for answers to some of her more practical questions.

She’s super disappointed that flying cars still haven’t become a common mode of transportation.

When she’d settled under the covers and closed her eyes she’d begun to get anxious. It wasn’t the silence because music hadn’t help. She’d turned on a lamp, just in case it was the dark. She’d grown tense as she’d lain there, struggling to take even inhales and exhales. Had thrown off the blankets once she’d grown hot and sweat slicked.

Her mind had kept returning to waking up alone, in the cave. To the moment when she’d realized she was trapped, when she hadn’t been sure if Bonnie was alive. She’d felt utterly alone and so scared. That same terror creeps into her bones, until she’s shaking and curled into a tight ball, her teeth grinding together.

Maybe she should have stuck it out. She’d known she was safe. That Bonnie was just next door, that it would be daylight again in just a few hours.

The longer she’d lain there, unsleeping, the harder it had been to tell herself that she needed to.

Why she should have to suffer? It’s not like Klaus is going to judge her or turn her away. He’d made that clear last night. She’s not sure what time it is when she gives up, only knows that she can’t hear a peep from any of the other occupants of the house.

She finds Klaus’ door wide open.

She can see him propped up in the center of his bed. He watches her approach, shifts to one side, an invitation he doesn’t bother to voice.

She reaches behind her once she crosses the threshold and shuts the door, fingers fumbling for a lock.

It’s warm when she tucks herself under the covers and she sighs and stretches out her legs, her muscles unclenching in relief. Klaus sinks down until his head rests on a pillow, on his side facing her. There’s no hint that she’s not welcome.

It used to make her jittery, the way Klaus looked at her. She’d tried to tell herself that he wasn’t actually interested, that he had a motive or a lack of other prospects in the immediate vicinity. That his pretty words were practiced lines and that he’d offered trips and trinkets to a thousand people before her.

Caroline knows she was wrong. That if she’d been only convenient he never would have bothered digging her out of that cave.

That should scare her.

Should.

Caroline pulls the heavy comforter over her shoulders, wonders if she should just say screw it and cross the few inches that separate her from Klaus now, or if she should make a show of getting heavy eyed and sleepy first.

“Something wrong with your bed, love?” Klaus teases.

Ugh, he’s so not going to let her get away with faking sleep before she gets hands-y, is he?

She rolls until she faces away from Klaus but rests against him. “Shut up,” she mutters, reaching back to grab his arm. She wraps it around her middle, rests her hand over top of his and squirms until they’re comfortably pressed together. He takes the hint beautifully, his legs bending to tangle with hers.

She feels him laughing, his breath against the back of her neck. “I’ll take that as a no, then.”

They shift, settling, and Caroline finds that she can breathe easy now that she can focus on the faint thrum of Klaus’ heartbeat. “How did your visit downstairs go?” he asks.

Caroline scoffs, tugs at a leather cord on his wrist, “Like your minions didn’t report back my every word.”

“They would have. I didn’t ask.”

Caroline finds that she’s smiling, presses her face into the pillow to try to hide it. It’s a simple statement but it tells her that Klaus trusts her. She hadn’t expected that.

“They don’t remember me. I knew they wouldn’t but I still didn’t totally expect it. I felt… expendable a lot, you know? I thought I’d gotten past that but… they kind of brought that all back.”

His grip on her tightens, his stubble scraping her skin as he shakes his head. “You are not expendable.”

“I know,” she answers, firm and steady.

Caroline isn’t who she’d been when she’d called Mystic Falls home. Getting out had been good to her. She’d lost the instinct to second guess her actions, to wonder if her choices would negatively impact her friends. Outside of the tiny town, away from all the people who’d known her all her life, she hadn’t worried about anyone whispering about how she was disgracing her family name or embarrassing her mother.

She’d shed insecurities as she’d hopped planes and trains.

Caroline knows she deserves to be happy, that she matters. Leap frogging into the future hasn’t changed her mind.

“Good,” Klaus rumbles, a wealth of satisfaction in his tone.

Caroline shifts back slightly, nudging him with her elbow, “What? Did you seriously expect me to argue?”

She knows he’s smiling, can hear it in his taunt, “Are you implying that you’re not argumentative, love?”

Caroline twists to glare at him, “I’m going to ignore that obvious baiting because I recognize that I’m totally invading your space right now.”

“It’s not baiting, it’s a statement of fact. And I’m not implying it’s a defect. Quite the opposite, really.”

She studies Klaus carefully, judges that he’s being honest, and turns until her head’s once more resting on the pillow. “So I like a lively debate, sue me,” she mutters.

Klaus laughs, so softly that she feels it more than hears it. Caroline closes her eyes, lets the warmth of him behind her help ease her into sleep.

Tomorrow’s bound to be another whirlwind of a day.

#klaroline #klaroline drabbles #yay sequels finally #ybtn

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mystic-scripture · 5 years ago

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Prolific Scene: Grief Assessments

Continuing off my post from here, I’m making my way through the ten week time lapse. I’m still not sure If I’ll do anyone as in depth as this one or her one for Spencer, but I do want to make an attempt at going through all the team. Nothing has really jumped at me for Rossi or Garcia (ironic given their family, but it’s explained in this) and I don’t think Wendy would have that much of a relationship with Ashley. Anyway, enough rambling, and on to the writing.

Wendy sat on Hotch’s couch, her knee bouncing and her arms crossed as she glanced at him across the coffee table. She knew she was reading as closed off, and that it would be recorded along with everything else. He was profiling her before they even spoke about the elephant in the bullpen so to speak. That was, in fact, the entire point of these mandatory grief assessments. Except, traditionally speaking, it was something the whole team underwent, and Strauss was the one to conduct them.

So why she was sitting in front of her SSA, she didn’t know. If anything it strengthened her arguments that she’d been having with herself. She hadn’t forgotten about the suspicious behavior between him and JJ. So, while he was having his go at profiling her she was doing it right back, or at the very least attempting to. Unfortunately, he had been at this a lot longer than she had, and everything she learned was from him. It was part of the reason she was stubbornly waiting for him to initiate, trying to parse out who could stay silent longer. The answer came after she took a sip of the offered tea without breaking eye contact.

“I suppose I’ll start with answering the question you're making a point not to ask.” He said, stating the obvious first. “Why am I doing this instead of Strauss?”

“That would be because I know that every member of this team, present company included, finds her to be an evil that isn’t necessary at this time. More accurately, she’s a dragon that we don’t bother unless we really have no other options.” She quipped, offering a shrug as she put the tea down and returned her arms to their crossed position.

“That is,” he cleared his throat, trying to control the smile that tried to twitch at the corners of his mouth. “Certainly one way to put it.”

“Well I figured it was more diplomatic than ‘Heinous Bitch’.” She offered a half smile of her own. “Probably would look better on paper, too.”

She felt her smile grow as she earned one, paired with a small chuckle from her boss. She always felt a swell of bride in getting him to smile, aside from being Jack, it was rare to achieve it. She didn’t let it show though, raising an eyebrow as if to challenge him to contradict her. They both knew he wasn’t going to, the point to break the tension between them.

“Besides, given your need to control this team with everything you have…” She mused, swirling her mug slowly in one hand. “And how close to the vest the team plays it amongst each other, let alone any perceived outsiders; you were the logical solution.”

She watched the subtle twitch in his eye as she called him out for his alpha male personality, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, he focused on her, allowing his attention to shift ever so slightly where she could slip past his walls. It was a blend of Rossi and his teachings; lighten the mood then attack the subject’s pride. He nodded slowly, his eyes shifting up and down her face. His face was set into the neutral, yet stern expression. Lips and eyebrows were straight, and to the point, much like his speech patterns. From what she could tell, everything was annoyingly familiar. The pause broke as she sighed, deciding that getting to the point was best for both of them.

Wendy pulled her lips inward, biting the middle before puffing them out. As he refocused his gaze, she stated the truth. “Denial and Anger.”

“What?”

He shook his head, as if he didn’t understand. She knew that he did, of course, it was just a ploy to make her comfortable enough to continue talking. Blue eyes met brown in annoyance, rolling slightly when they found nothing.

“That’s where I am right now.” She clarified, unable to stop her hands from twisting with each other. “Five stages of grief and all that? I mean yes I’d agree that I’m depressed, as well, and there has been plenty of bargaining. Hell, I wouldn’t be lying if I sat here and said I still feel all of them aside from acceptance. But Denial and Anger...those two are the most prevalent.”

“So what do you do?”He relaxed with her familiar babbling, but only slightly, his hand moving along the lined pad of paper in his lap. “How do you rationalize it?”

“Well, Denial is self explanatory and common in cases like this.” She recited, her voice taking a clinical approach.

Her body, however, betrayed her as she started picking at her fingernails. She’d only started the habit after the funeral, but it was oddly comforting to her. Whether or not Hotch noticed it, wasn’t shown in his face, but indicated in the new writing on his pad. She didn’t pause, pushing forward as she felt her knowledge push away her feelings, if only for a moment.

“This can’t be happening, I can’t believe she’s gone…” She placed the tea back on the table, rotating in his direction. “This has to be some twisted nightmare, so on and so forth.”

“But the anger?” Hotch pressed, his eyes not leaving his notes. “Where would you say that is currently placed?”

“I could lie to you and say that it’s hard to pinpoint.” She stated, picking her words carefully. She knew that in order to get something from him, she was going to need to give. However, her methods were all she had against him. “Doyle for his part in it, Emily herself for running away, Me and Derek...but that is mostly logic and the aforementioned bargaining talking more than my actual feelings.”

“Why Derek?” His face softened with curiosity. “Was there a shortcoming that wasn’t mentioned in your reports, something that he did wrong?”

“No, we played it straight, it’s nothing like that.” Wendy sighed, standing up to pace, her hands weaving her thought process in front of her. “He did everything he was supposed to, he stayed and tried to stabilize her, clearing the room before stopping. It was me who messed up. I pushed forward leaving in a futile attempt of hubris. We didn’t both need to be there, and he had backup, so I ran down the hall, trying to track Doyle.”

“But he was gone,” She paused, her hands freezing along with her legs. “I hadn’t seen the extent of her injuries, he’d gotten to her so quickly. When I heard him call out for help, I doubled back so fast I’m surprised I was able to stay upright after. I’d foolishly thought she was fine, I thought-I don’t even know what I thought, all I could do was stand there and stare after calling for the medic.”

She gulped, blinking so as not to focus on it. She’d refused to do a cognitive interview for this very reason. She hadn’t wanted to think about it, her mind compartmentalizing it behind a wall of facts. She hesitated, she froze, and she hated herself for it. Having let the truth out for the first time, she felt a knot twist in her gut. She hadn’t even told Spencer about that, and Derek told her not to mention it. They’d done the best they could and that was what mattered on paper. But paper didn’t keep the nightmares at bay, and paper didn’t twist into her everyday thoughts to shame her.

A silence fell over the room as she slowly slumped back onto the couch, cradling the teacup in her hands. It wasn’t particularly hot anymore, her hands barely feeling the heat within, but it was something that kept her hands busy. She’d given up on her own hunt into Hotch’s mind, her thoughts circling around her confession.

“Wendy…” She turned to meet her mentor’s gaze. “Are you in any way qualified to help with the sort of injuries Emily sustained? Do you have a medical degree?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I’m the on field tech support.”

“If that’s what you need to hear, the yes.” He tilted his head as if to accept her self depreciation. “So, what could you have possibly done to help in that situation.”

“Look, I know what you’re doing and it’s not going to work.” She mumbled, setting the tea down to level her gaze at him. “Intellectually, I get it, I shouldn’t blame myself, we did everything we could. Everything was done right.”

She grit her teeth watching the pen scratch across the paper, eyes barely leaving hers.

“But with all due respect, Hotch you weren’t there. I deserve to feel like this, to let this guilt fill me. When it really mattered most, I cared too much about the suspect than I did about my own teammate. I left her bleeding out on the floor while I chased a lost cause. I was too focused on my job to worry about my friend.”

“I may not be as smart or have a steel trap of a mind like Reid does, but I still could have worked something out. Looking back there are several ways I could have helped. I should have known, something, anything that could help. But instead, I froze, and just stood there: useless. Sure I called for Medics, sure I told Derek not to pull the plank of wood she had sticking out of her stomach, but what did that to in the end?”

“Morgan did the only thing you could have done.” Hotch raised his eyebrows at the look she gave him. “Think about it, he applied pressure, and was there for her until someone qualified showed up. You did the right thing.”

“Again, logically, I am aware of that.” She sniffed, rubbing at her nose stubbornly. “But the stupid chemicals in my brain that control emotions that have a different idea.”

“Then let’s talk about how you’re coping with that.” The pad slid onto the coffee table, his entire focus on her now. While she didn’t meet his gaze, she could feel it, the usual intensity of it gone as concern came to the forefront. “How is this affecting you and Reid?”

“I can’t provide an answer for that.” Wendy stated, averting her gaze just as quickly as she met it.

“Can’t or Won’t?”

She bit her lip in thought, debating the answer. How could she tell him that it was both? She knew it would come up eventually; it was inevitable. Ever since the hospital, things had been strained between them, Wendy watching Spence slowly slip away from her. This was different than when Gideon left, different from when he was using. They’d been uncharacteristically distant and she didn’t know how to help him. Usually, she was instant on her presence, and letting him know she was there. This time though, this time that was only met with deflection and him pulling away. If she was to be honest, this was the part she really didn’t want to talk about.

“Let’s just say things aren’t quite normal at the moment.” She stated, doing her best to keep her body language as neutral as possible. “And answering your question would require me to interact with him enough to form a diagnostic for you to interpret.”

“So you haven’t seen each other? What about Garcia?” His brow furrowed, lips falling into a slight frown. “You’ve at least seen her and talked to her, have you?”

“She’s my cousin, obviously I’ve seen her.” She snipped, offended by the implication that she was isolating herself on purpose. It made the guilt of trying to read his expression dissipate a little, especially when she recalled some microexpressions when she recounted the incident they were here about. But only a little

“And I’m not providing any profiling of her.” Rushed out of her lips, a little harsher than she intended. “She’s pretty easy to read as it is, you don’t need insider trading.”

He let out a ‘hmm’ of interest, making her look up at him quizzically. “There’s no need, I’ve already assessed her. Though, she did the same thing, maybe with a little less hostility. She also knows that she can’t read you.”

“Not for lack of trying on her part. She even tried to take me to a couple sessions of the group she runs.” Wendy rolled her eyes. “Trust me, it’s better for everyone involved that I not participate in group therapy scenarios.”

She thought there was an ever so slight wince at her words. If it was in regards to how she reacted to Penelope, or if it was the use of ‘trust me’ she wasn’t sure. But there was no denying the pull to his lip, almost like she’d said something that disappointed him. She didn’t look at him head on, acknowledging her solidarity in the feeling. Nervous about what he wrote, she instead focused on him from the corner of her vision, playing with her mug again.

A part of her thought it was an appropriately nice and thorough gesture on Hotch’s part; grabbing one of her own mugs. It showed his care in his team outside of the professional scope. Wendy felt a slight uptick in her pulse, a physical manifestation of anxiety, when he spent a few more seconds than previously on his notes. She kept quiet though, sipping at her drink as she kept a subtle gaze on him. When he was done, she tilted her head in tandem with him, ready to continue.

“Maybe you don’t grieve in the same ways, but have you talked to her?” She shook her head slowly, causing him to push on. “But isn’t that what family’s for, comforting each other in times of loss? Why build up the walls?”

“Because I know Penny, and she is going to push all her own stuff aside to focus on someone else.” Wendy placed her drink down with a sigh. “And that is a distraction to the team that we can’t afford. I also know that while she means well, when it comes to things like this, her comfort is ineffective. At least with me, anyway. She has enough raw emotion on her own without lumping my emotions and relationships into a loss that affects both of us.”

“So there is something you’re avoiding telling me about your relationship?” He held up his hands, putting the pad down. “Saying this as a friend, not your supervisor, but that rings an opposing tune to your deflection earlier.”

“Doesn’t necessarily make it an invitation to pry.” She defended, smiling despite her blunt tone.

She couldn’t help it; it was challenging to be so guarded around Hotch. She hated herself for harboring these suspicions, knowing he has and will always put the team first. The man lost his wife long before she was killed by his enemy. However, his line of questioning was a little too pointed for her to ignore. Not that she was. She wasn’t crazy, she saw Hotch and JJ talking in the hospital, she saw the looks they shared at the funeral. It wasn’t her grasping at straws, it wasn’t her grief making up illusions in her mind, she was sure of it. She knew how to separate emotion from reality. Or so she thought, but seeing the culmination of his efforts to make her feel comfortable gave her doubts.

“While that’s a fair statement, there’s a part of you that wants to discuss it.” He said, pulling Wendy from her thoughts and back to the conversation at hand. “What’s on your mind?”

She ran her tongue over her teeth, fighting against his soothing tone. “Whether or not you asked him anything regarding our personal relationship.”

“Deflect all you want,” He said, leaning back in his chair with a sigh. “But it’s your subconscious that keeps circling back to it.”

“Don’t know why, there isn’t much to tell.” She picked up the mug to take another sip of tea. “I already told you; we haven’t really seen each other much.”

“But he’s your partner, in more ways than one.” Hotch reminded her, “Which makes that unusual for the pair of you, correct?”

“We’ve worked three cases, in which you’ve been pairing me with Rossi or Morgan, each had our own parole consults, and I’ve been helping Penny narrow down cases to take on.” She deadpanned, “We may have lost a team member, but the killers didn’t slow down.”

“That never seemed to stop you two before.” He mused, raising an eyebrow. “You two have been here later than me sometimes when I know neither of you had particularly heavy work loads.”

She paused, not willing to give into him with that. Yes, they were rather physical for a lot longer than they were together, but that wasn’t what he was asking. The emotions were something they still worked on day to day, and that was all she was going to discuss with her coworker. Unfortunately, her face warmed, and her eyes widened in surprise, giving him everything he needed anyway.

“Well, now that you’ve confirmed it, thanks by the way I owe Rosse twenty bucks.” He gave her a look where he had a half smile, but his eyes challenged her to call him on his bluff. She decided on laughing humorlessly, rolling her eyes.

“Not that it’s any of your business, either of yours, there’s more to it than that.” She explained, tapping her foot a couple of times. “You know what, okay, I’ll admit it, I’m worried about him. Ever since the hospital and the funeral it feels like he’s pulling away from me even when he’s there, but that’s grief. I’m not going to force him on the issue when I know that JJ’s been helping him. When he needs me he knows where I am so that I can do my part, until then, I can’t really do or say anything else at the moment without sounding callous or jealous.”

“What about, your needs?” Hotch said, sounding genuinely concerned for her. She avoided his gaze, not wanting the confirmation. “You suffered a loss as well, and we’ve spent this entire conversation circling it outside of your confession that you’re angry at yourself for something you couldn’t control. It hardly seems fair for you to help anyone without processing your own feelings.”

“I know, but that’s pain.” She stated, shrugging her shoulders slightly. “As the Dread Pirate Wesley said: ‘Life is pain. Anyone who says different is trying to sell you something.’”

“On that note, I think that’s where we’ll stop. For today, at the very least, I may call upon you again.” Hotch stood, moving to open the door for her. “Until then, know that my door is always open.”

“Technically you just had it closed.” She teased, stretching upwards and taking her empty mug with her. “But thank you, I do appreciate it.”

He gave her a quick smile, nodding to her as she made her exit. Wendy offered a half smile in return before starting the walk down to the bullpen. A part of her wanted to throw him a bone, tell him that maybe she was jealous. JJ was in the picture far longer than Wendy had, and she knew about his crush. Their similarities had always been a source of insecurity. That is until she paused on the stairs, to glance back at him.

She doubted he was even aware of it, but she watched him, his figure moving ever so slightly as released whatever tension he was holding. If he was going to keep secrets from her, it was more than fair that she do the same.

Wendy Tag: @abbyarcxnes @raging-violets @perfectlystiles @curious-kittens-ocs @starcrossedjedis @foxesandmagic (Want to be added, hmu!)

#oof I love this dynamic so much #Wendy Durant #fic: prolific #fd: criminal minds #arron hotchner #hotch x wendy feels #BAU Team angst #scriptures of the mystic

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vroenis · 5 years ago

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Uncharted 4: An Era’s End

It’s recently come to light that game developer Naughty Dog has been subjecting its employees to crunch; the practice of overworking and underpaying staff in order to meet deadlines. This is not unique to Naughty Dog, nor to their current project pending release later this year, The Last Of US 2. Reports suggest that crunch has been endemic in the working culture of Naughty Dog for some time and this is now no surprise to us as such reports continue to surface about studio after studio, most in the corporately structured, premium funded and managed space we call “triple A” or AAA, but many smaller studios and independent spaces also. Several senior and long-tenured creatives have left Naughty Dog quite recently, and some may have been leaving earlier than those that have been reported during what’s turning out to be a turbulent development cycle for The Last Of Us 2.

Each month, as part of the paid subscription to the Playstation Plus online service, Sony offers a small selection of games. For April, one of them was Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, from which I derived my title. Not only am I here to suggest the studio’s troubles may have begun during the development of this game, first released back in 2016, but the title may have been one of the first significant indications that the book was closing on AAA development as we know it. I appreciate there have been many good voices shouting from the rooftops about the how unsustainable it’s been from before then, but the Naughty Dog for a long time seemed like a light in the dark, signalling that a big studio could still produce good product under strong leadership.

I feel that Uncharted 4 rather than The Last Of Us 2 is the real light, and instead of a light-house, it turned out to be a signal-fire warning that even then the composure of Naughty Dog was an illusion.

This piece is going to contain significant spoilers for Uncharted 4. It’s also not investigative - I just played it for the first time, completed it and I have some thoughts about it; these are my thoughts.

I didn’t like the third game at all. I took nothing away from it. I’ll never play it again as there’s nothing I want to relive from it, so I’d better look up the wiki on what happened in it... well that didn’t help at all as I don’t remember playing any of that, it was so unmemorable. I remember the wandering around in the desert bit and then some shooting in the desert which was all pointless. There were also some puzzles with shadow puppets that were almost good but so short and pointless, those two things sum up my feelings about the third game entirely.

What a way to start.

I’ve replayed the first and second games once each, so I’ve played those each twice thru and have decided that the first game is overlong and poorly paced, and the second game is the best and probably two-thirds good. Honestly, Elena should drop the Drakes in the ocean, run-off with Chloe and keep in touch with Sully because those are the only three characters with any depth and meaning. Let’s roll-back a bit.

I get that Nathan’s supposed to be a charming, happy-go-lucky character and for the most part, it works. Maybe I’m just getting too old for it or it’s wearing too thin. I really think the third game was completely unnecessary. When I review my notes on the fourth game, I think about the emotional quandary it attempts to set up i.e., ultimately that Nathan should be more honest with Elena - spoiler; he isn’t, but don’t worry it all works out *SPIT* - this was already a problem I was ready to face at the end of the second game. Given my feelings on the third game, I’d have much preferred a simple trilogy and conclusion that faced that emotional brunt to wrap things up. Naturally of-course, that’s not how money-spinners work.

If Uncharted 4 doesn’t spend time on Elena, who does it spend time on? Nathan has a brother! To be fair, I love Troy Baker as a voice actor and if there’s one thing that is consistent in Naughty Dog games, it’s excellent voice acting. I don’t know if I’m now biased after seeing so much of Nolan North and Troy Baker on YouTube outside of their VO talent work, but they’re wonderful people and their professional work is always great. The supporting cast is always great, too - so too the villains even if the narrative arcs are always completely absurd. I know these are always a bit of a lark, you can’t take them too seriously so I can’t hold Uncharted up to Kentucky Route Zero (got my mention in) and shake them comparatively, that’s not fair. It’s OK to have an excuse for a romp even if it does wear on a bit over time.

The problems I have with Uncharted 4 specifically are things like the level and environmental design. I’ve never gotten lost in this franchise up until now when it happened in almost every level... several times. I simply didn’t know where to go. There would be absolutely no clear indication of where to go and no assists, no subtle environmental guide and no camera nudges to help. There is a timer that eventually tells the player where to go and at times, this is tied to deaths so at one point I just threw Nathan off cliffs repeatedly to respawn until the hint appeared. This is unquestionably stupid design. I began to wonder if this was due to criticism that previous games had too much hand-holding, but when the UI assist was finally given and I made my way to the next check-point, I would *never* have found it under normal exploratory gameplay.

This remained true during several moments of scripted action sequences, some including during combat which brings up something else I now remember about the third game. I still couldn’t tell you when it was other than I didn’t know where to go and it was stupid, so there you have it. Maybe the third game was the real signal fire in my metaphor, who knows. In any case, constantly reverting to check-points and having to repeat, not understanding why you’re failing when the game isn’t telegraphing what you need for a success state in a scripted sequence is an exercise in frustration I’m not willing to ever repeat. While I’m not a souls-like player, I completely appreciate the admiration and respect for those games because they have rules that are clear to parse. Video games are *all about* providing feedback to the player. I’m not saying it’s easy, it is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve but it is literally the job you set out to do, it is the only vehicle you have to convey the lofty emotions you want to communicate to your audience.

And then there’s the driving. Naughty Dog. Do not put driving in your games. This is something you’re not able to do.

I don’t want to bash the driving so hard because at this point I feel like it may have been bolted on without time to make it stick correctly. This is the first game in the title where the hot-zones for interactions weren’t quite right. Where I bugged out of animations and had check-points or re-spawns instanced or loaded. Where I glitched out and fell off things, where I had to walk back and forth in-front of things to make buttons appear. The edges of that Naughty Dog polish were fraying. I’d attempt to do a thing and it just wouldn’t work, I’d fall to my death. I’d attempt to do the same thing the same way and it would work. Again this is dredging up more nondescript memories of the third game so I’m beginning to have my suspicions about the working environment there and when in the timeline things started getting bad - but cameras and jumping distances got really difficult to judge. One gap at one time would be fine to jump, then another would have you plunge to your death, and they’d be inconsistent to read or judge. These were not frequent, as with the third game, almost as if the artists and level designers were given time to adjust lighting and camera geometry tracking and control mapping as much as possible but just couldn’t get to them all. But throughout the games, it creeps in more and more.

I’d talk about combat - it’s functional, but it’s not interesting. These games don’t add anything interesting to the genre or video games in general. I play the games on easy because I don’t need to prolong the experience, I don’t actually have the physical time - if I could play the games without combat, I would. There are other games to play if I want dexterity challenges which I do engage in, Uncharted isn’t one of them. Even in 2016 I’m not entirely sure this would have turned heads. I realise I’m playing this a full four years later, but it’s hard to think of the sum-total of this game’s parts and see it as relevant...

But you know what? Uncharted 4 visually looks immaculate. Outside of the voice-acting and sound design, without question, the highest priority has been given to the visual fidelity of this game inclusive of the animations. So much has been invested in how the tech works, to the abandonment of everything else, I’d say the for example, the driving suffered the most, level design next, then interaction scripting. The attention to detail in the environments is stupendous...

...yet it’s all hollow. You know what? I don’t care about pirates and adventures anymore. Whatever. By the fourth game, I don’t care. I totally get that the game’s not for me but I played it and I’m writing how I feel about it. You’re telling me a story about a guy who met the person of his dreams and marries, then his brother turns up and he can’t be honest to his wife? Meow meow meow it’s all for the sake of drama so we skip over all the details but the contrivance is too much. You want me to accept these things on face value, then on face value, I say Nathan and his brother can go get fucked.

I took particular issue with the comically brief relationship discussion Elena and Nathan have after she saves him and they set off together in which she concludes she’s with him “for better or for worse”, which from memory the game chapter is titled after. Now either the character genuinely believes she owes him under the sanctity of nuptial obligation or she’s using it as a justification of such. This is a wholly unsatisfying discussion for me was when I finally checked out of this game - sure I should have done so hours before but this was the last straw and the indication that I am definitely too old for this shit - but this is a horrifying and stupid message to be spouting. Elena don’t owe anyone shit. Married or not, she’s free to save Nathan if she wants to, for any reason, but she’s certainly not obliged to. I despise this massive chunk of traditionalist patriarchy smashed into her character and the narrative, even if it is “well it’s just about her character” yea great, so that just re-enforces her as a loyal dog-trophy for the main character in the on-going male power-fantasy shenanigans shit-train. Nathan’s behaviour isn’t exactly selfish but it’s certainly not adult or considerate. He behaves like a child not taking on an appropriate level of responsibility. Others around him, being Elena and Sully, continuously bail him out - literally saving his life while endangering their own, and he continues to behave like a manchild that neither acknowledges their physical and emotional labour nor does he grow and evolve as an individual. What a fucker. Does he ever sort his shit out, ask Elena what she wants to do for a career and support whatever the fuck she wants to do with her life? Of-course the fuck he doesn’t. Know why? Because he’s a literal man-baby. And his brother is too. But that’s OK cos he’s a fucken jock-hero and a funny guy so as long as we can all laugh about it and the narrative says-so and it all works out in the end and he gets the girl and she ends-up supporting his career anyway, it’s aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall fine.

Nathan should have died and Elena shouldn’t have given a fuck.

I know I know, it’s not that serious. Look I’ve been thru some shit, alright? I can see it both ways. Sometimes you don’t think about stupid shit that deep and sometimes you do. Most of the time, I do, and most of the time, I take it to the nth degree, so yea, shit like that gets to me. I call it bad writing, so no, I don’t like the story. At all. Nathan’s supposed to be flawed but nothing ever costs him. When people make mistakes in life, those mistakes cost. The unfortunately thing is the cost is most often paid by the others around them, and sometimes they themselves never realise it. I don’t like stories where there’s a fuckhead at the centre but everyone still stays happy. Nathan seems to have been given a lesson, but I don’t think he earned it. This is why y’all watch Game of Thrones and are surprised when characters die because you keep consuming narratives with no stakes, and GoT is *still* only middling stuff.

Anyway.

How could Elena’s character have been given more attention? Uncharted 4 isn’t all bad. The most valuable thing Naughty Dog achieved was the recreation of real domestic spaces; the Drake households. Twice, we’re given time and space and encouraged to explore them without being funnelled by level design, events, NPC shepherding or audio cues. Rooms and the objects that fill them are meticulously and beautifully created, and they're given life and purpose in a way that has meaning far beyond all the pirate nonsense that while almost as equally beautiful, is completely vacuous.

Putting on Elena’s vinyl record as her daughter Cassie was the only time I enjoyed the music in the game, and it was a great call-back to Nathan having done the same thing in their house much earlier. Sure, there’s the Drake theme that repeats ad nauseam throughout the series but otherwise the soundtrack is bland and unremarkable adventuring fare. It contributes more to the feeling of this game being out of touch, contrasted to something like Control which certainly has a completely different setting, sure - but that’s part of it, so that affords the creative team room for more modular synths and drones and to have a distinct sound.

Walking thru those houses, first as Nathan but really as the player repositioning themselves from adventurer to ordinary life-living person in a domestic setting, and then as Cassie - daughter of these two amazing characters in an equalling urbane setting yet filled with wonderful objects, made up the most fascinating and enjoyable moments of the game for me. The mess of each room gave the houses the perfect lived-in feel to a degree that most other games struggle to achieve, probably due to how much effort it takes to get that much geometry mapped in - Giant Sparrow’s What Became of Edith Finch is probably one of the few games that has come close. The difference between the tropical islands, decaying pirate mansions and the domestic Drake residences is that the houses felt like everything in there felt like it meant something and was in there for a reason, like it had been part of something. I don’t mean that just for the objects that were intrinsically tied to implicit narrative beats like collectables or even items from countries where Uncharted 4 or prior games are set, but also things like towels, washing baskets, plates and dishes, books and picture frames, shampoo bottles, food - the detail in the fridges! That you can feed Cassie’s dog, Vicky is the most meaningful interaction of the game - by the way, the second most meaningful set of interactions is buying an apple in the market in Madagascar then playing with lemur and letting it take the apple.

Back to the houses, I’m disappointed we never got to walk through one of them as Elena. Now that the core of the franchise is wrapped, I’m left with the impression that she’s the most important character in the series and she’s left woefully under-served. This is a very me thing, and unsurprising. I doubt anyone else cares enough about writing and character to have thoughts like this. They’re into Uncharted for the adventuring and the shooting, but as soon as you present me the opportunity for character drama and you want to have a red-hot go at it, I’m here to set aside the rest of that guff and go for it. The running and jumping and shooting never changes, and I’m here to say that the puzzling could have stepped up orders of magnitude that Naughty Dog never committed to - Crystal Dynamics did far better with Rise Of The Romb Raider, and while the puzzling was never really difficult, the way I described it to a friend was to liken the puzzles to desk toys; not intended to be too challenging, but more satisfying in their tactile nature. I feel Fireproof’s The Room series for iOS and Android are great examples of providing similar sensations.

I don’t mind a game mostly about shenanigans, I just don’t want it centred around a character that won’t learn, or who gets off cheaply. Elena is infinitely more interesting to me - her concerns, her desires - Chloe too, for that matter, and I absolutely am not above making the joke about shipping them as I’m sure thousands have before me (no I won’t write a fanfic about them, I’m sure there are plenty around).

I didn’t play the first The Last of Us. There was a horrifically jarring moment when the game felt it was over-playing its sense of cinema to me, then had a sudden camera zoom transition onto I think the first combat gameplay and I checked out. The tone of that game is trying to telegraph TAKE ME SERIOUSLY and I feel all I’m going to do is read tonally similar things to what I have here but far worse. Also post-apocalypse is easy pickings for bad writing, especially by video games narrative writers, I just don’t have the patience. I’m pleased that there’s lesbian representation in the second game but I’m not sure it’ll be handled with sensitivity. While I’m in no way invested in the game as a product, I continue to be concerned for the welfare of the employees at Naughty Dog, and all game developers everywhere, as always. It is a hugely unregulated industry that is in the process of slow collapse, and now more than ever do we need reform and cultural change.

And in the midst of that, one day we’ll get a decent game that’s about domestic partnerships and wonderful emotional relationships with stunning visual fidelity; maybe it’ll have running and jumping and shooting and maybe it won’t. Maybe it’ll end sadly and maybe it’ll end happily but hopefully it’ll be well-written.

Here’s to Elena.

#Video Games #Crunch #Work Practices #Employment Ethics #Work Ethics #Naughty Dog #The Last Of Us #The Last Of Us 2 #Uncharted #Uncharted 4 #chrono #2020 #rant #games writing #writing about games #video games narrative

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michaeldempsey · 5 years ago

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The Deep Tech Deficit: Why more people aren't starting technically ambitious companies right now

This is an internal note I sent to a few investors/friends a few months ago.

Over the past 6+ months there seems to have been a noticeable drought in the creation of new deep tech or just broadly technically ambitious companies (ex-biotech). This is a sentiment that has been echo'd heavily from other investors, and has only accelerated with COVID. This became especially noticeable as startup fundraising has massively increased in adjacent areas in H2 2020.

While there isn't a data-driven reason as to why this has occurred (or if it has, indeed occurred) my working hypothesis is three-fold.

1) The maturation of platforms and no clear outbreak of new platforms

After a fervor of excitement surrounding areas like VR, ML, and Robotics from 2014-2018, we've largely seen unabashed excitement die down and be traded with hopeful skepticism. VR was too early and is looking increasingly like a platform that will be subsidized and dominated in early innings by incumbents due to heavy R&D costs.

Machine Learning has shown a commoditization curve that erodes value for much core ML development, while also has been incredibly difficult to implement at scale to build vertical specific companies that accrue value (read our 2019 annual letter for more thoughts on this). ML companies have largely turned into product-centric organizations versus true research engineering orgs, which many investors aren't quite sure how to parse mid to long-term defensibility or economics (see Martin Casado’s wonderful post).

The closest next platforms that people seem to be centering on are AR and Quantum. AR has its own difficulties, again, largely a value accrual in the short-term towards incumbents (Snap, Apple, MSFT) and at the application layer very little differentiation in technology (my view is that most enterprise AR companies are building product orgs with little technical moats and early product UI/UX that will be considered cringey in 2-4 years).

Quantum has a usability problem in addition to a timeline narrative that "this will take awhile and is incredibly capital intensive" so the only vertical use-cases we've seen really have been pharma and finance. In addition, some argue that ML algorithm development has kept pace in lockstep with quantum in reality.

So TLDR, investors need a narrative to drive them towards a Schelling point surrounding "what's next" but can't find consensus.

Again, Computational bio and further on the spectrum, biotech seems to be only area, but has debates around moats and is incredibly hard to parse and pattern match for technology investors.

Thus we default to what we know has killer cash flow dynamics in a time where TAM has materially expanded (SaaS/dev tools/infra), or follow narratives that we want to be (and may be!) true, like social being ready for VC investment again.

2) COVID & Founder Profile: “It's time to build" wasn't meant for deep tech founders.

Founding a company becomes sexy as generational startups scale and with a large amount of money in stock options, employees feel the desire to work on a new problem where they can seek a new form of status, both social and financial (early ESOP or founder title). It's no longer cool to be at the $10B+ tech company and there are hundreds of people at these companies starting funds, syndicates, and companies, so you should too.

Some subset of employees on the technical side look at internal tools that were built and democratize them (think data science teams, but there are tons of examples).

Another subset are PMs and software engineers who read Marc's essay, saw a year of remote work ahead of them and thought "great I can move out of SF, live cheaply and stomach going from $250k/year to $100k/year, and be a Founder.

These people like building software that can quickly be iterated upon and is quite realistic to raise $1-$3M to run at for 24 months. In addition, these people likely feel time pressure because multiple other teams are starting startups similar to their idea. It’s time to build because everyone is building.

Deep/frontier/emerging/whatever we call them tech founders sometimes follow a bit of a different founding story. Many have dedicated 4-10 years of their life becoming an expert in a given industry, or banging their head against the wall in academia, in pursuit of applying a technology to the real world, or bringing some other initially non-sexy technology to production level. The time pressure for these companies and founders could be viewed as less existential, as many companies aren’t speedrunning capital markets for a 12 month seed to series A sprint comprised of MVP -> early pilots -> highly extrapolated MRR/ARR.

Instead, many deep tech companies are operating with a 2-4 year R&D window, hoping to show a step function in technology reality and value creation by month 18 to raise a Series A, where they then start to either begin converting pilots, or testing hypotheses on commercialization over the next 2-4 years.

Candidly, there ain’t that many people signing up for that trajectory.

So when you're a deep tech profile founder (not to be overly prescriptive but often something like PhD/academic, eng/product lead at incumbent R&D group, Engineering at prior deep tech co, Engineering at scaling tech company with material infrastructure innovation, etc.) your calculus is a bit different.

If you're thinking about hardware, you might say, you don't want to deal with the dynamics of having possible supply chain headaches (not as much a concern today vs. 6 months ago), you don't want to deal with dynamics of really not being able to do remote work, and you know VCs are probably a bit risk averse on funding hardware at this stage as a whole. In addition, while customers might have a strong desire if you're automation focused, you won't be able to ship product for another 12 months probably so, why not just wait to see how the election/transfer of power/vaccine timeline shakes out to truly understand the economy in 2021, before starting something that could be de-railed from random economic/geopolitical policy.

Calculating the risk factor and why now of your business. The reality is, you must convince a smaller universe of investors every 12-36 months in the future you believe in and hope to pull forward, so why *now* matters more when these futures are less consensus. So just doing simple calculus, all of these things once again could lead to waiting. Bank your $300k+ salary at bigco through 2020 and see where the world is in 2021. You're operating on a true long-term time horizon so there isn't as much deep desire to uproot your life/family just to build asap.

TLDR - Deep tech founders maybe viewed as slightly less beholden to the time pressures of the market as many are solving previously unsolvable problems. I will say, many do underestimate the commoditization curve they are running up against though.

3) Burn Out

This point is not talked about enough publicly but is a consistent sentiment I’ve noticed over the past few years.

The first wave of "deep tech as a category" really hasn't created many successful businesses yet (we can debate the recent run of SPACs in deep tech on it creating successful outcomes). As you talk to more veterans in this space, many are pretty disenchanted by their past 7+ years of work.

Their friends at Uber, AirBnB, and Stripe are multi-millionaires (some on paper), same with their friends at FAMGA, and they possibly are too but don't really have anything material to point to in the real world. They’ve spent a good chunk of their professional lives to hopefully get swallowed up in an offensive acquisition (Boston Dynamics, Skybox Intelligence, Zoox, Cruise) or early commercialization that is strategic (Kiva, Six River, Blue River), and a bunch more are sitting at these companies that weren’t able to quite deliver on the future they believed in.

I think many are kind of waiting for a "moment" that feels like everything is once again possible. I don't think those moments are obvious in the present, but alas, it's a real sentiment.

I know I’ve painted a fairly jaded point of view on both sides of the market but ultimately I think there are massive tailwinds for all of tech over the next few years and believe COVID has pulled forward some futures we were expecting to take 3+ years.

I’m confident that we will see a high volume of deep tech startup creation over the coming 18 months, but as an investor with a large focus on these types of businesses, it has been interesting to hear how many have felt similarly in 2020 and thus I felt the need to litigate *why* this was happening.

#frontier technology #deep tech #venture capital #startups #robotics #ARVR

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rigelmejo · 5 years ago

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Repetitive Listening - here’s a youtube video playlist I found about it a few days ago.

Short summary: listening to audio in a language you’re trying learn, to the point of more than you feel like you need to. To where you can remember a lot of what’s said, the words/phrases sound familiar/pop into your head, and where if you have questions you could maybe say the chunk you’re wondering about out loud and ask about it. So like when you like a song a lot, and play it a lot, to the point its sort of in your head sometimes and you can remember lyrics somewhat. The idea is that if you listen to it enough you will get better at recognizing sounds and words and word chunks, and even if you don’t understand everything this will at least make looking unknown things up easier - and it should make your pronunciation/speaking better, and improve your comprehension of words you do know/have studied.

The videos give 80-100 times suggestions, but I do think as long as its a point where you feel really comfortable, that’s probably enough. The videos suggest: pick voices you like listening to, since you’ll listen a lot, and since you may pick up pronunciation/your voice sound from them. They also suggest using 2 minute to 20 minute clips depending on your level of comprehension in the target language, your comfort, etc.

So songs will easily be good material for this, along with youtube video audio, radio drama episodes, audiobook chapters, podcasts.

---

Tested it out a bit (listened 5-10 times so far):

I’ve decided to test out this a bit with the Guardian Audiobook chapters avenuex made. I think the podcast Slow Chinese would be better for beginners, since its shorter at 2-4 minutes.

I just figure I might as well use something I’m listening to anyway. Also, before I heard about ‘repetitive listening’ as a technique, I was noticing a Tangible difference in my comprehension of the audiobook chapter from the first time I listened to it to the second. So if nothing else, I figured it would definitely help boost my listening comprehension up to the point of being able to catch most/all words I’ve studied - instead of just some when listening.

I do think its helping me a lot with picking out words/phrases - to the point where I am picking up most words I’ve studied with text/flashcards, and to the point where I can catch the unknown words/phrases enough to type the pinyin in pleco to look them up. Also, for me personally, because an audiobook is based on a more literary text, I’m getting more used to the flow of the narrative writing - hearing time transition words, adjectives, descriptive phrases that usually get used more in writing like ‘turned his head’ ‘scratched his neck’ ‘gave a smile’ ‘hung up the phone’ ‘put his hand in his pocket’ etc. I could sort of recognize those phrases anyway when reading, since they’re words I know just in ways I’m less familiar with (I’m more familiar with dialogue sentences like ‘i did/he did X’). But hearing these phrases again and again is helping me to ‘process’ more quickly what they mean instead of having to work so hard to parse it out.

I’ve still only listened maybe 5-10 times, so I can’t say for sure yet if 30 or 40 or more times would see even more noticeable improvements. I can definitely say, even just doing this repetitive listening a little bit, seems to help a lot with listening comprehension of words you already have some familiarity with (have seen in text, or studied, or know some hanzi of) and it seems to help with recognizing pronunciation. By that second part I mean that often learning materials will speak slower, evenly, with a bit less natural variation, and if you learn a decent amount from flashcards or dictionaries then you know how often the automatic text audio can sound robotic and ‘off’ compared to once you hear it in real context like a convo or show.

Avenuex’s voice is really crisp and clear (and lovely I think) so she’s still really comprehensible for beginners, but her voice also says the tones so much more naturally than a lot of learner texts I hear (which exaggerate tone sound so you can hear it better/are more evenly paced) - her pace gets faster and slower depending on the suspense of the scene, and the flow of the sentence. I think its a nice example of how to break down word-chunks when saying a sentence too. She changes her voice a bit too for each character (and the bg music changes, which is all really cool and funner to listen to than a lot of audiobooks I’ve heard!). I can hear some of the more natural-sounding ways of things getting pronounced, but she still speaks clear enough that it doesn’t get as slurred as those same words/phrases sometimes get in dramas I watch (I started rewatching Guardian and wow the amount of times Zhao Yunlan slurs/is muffled because he’s talking with a sucker in his mouth lol, or in many dramas when its short lines of common words they’ll get slurred quicker a lot).

When I studied japanese, our teacher had us shadow the audio scenes in Genki, and record ourselves trying to say the dialogue and we were graded based on how close we sounded to the original book’s audio. What I noticed, back when I had to do that, is that I had to pay attention enough that I started noticing where the natural word-breaks were. Basically, which words you sort of ‘say together’ more quickly almost like they’re one word, versus the areas you’re more likely to leave empty space for to slow down or breath or change the pace. I’m guessing a lot of languages have this kind of natural word-breaks flow. I might break some of these sentences down in english like “I-might break some-of-these-sentences-down in-english like.” There’s a few different natural sounding ways to do it, but there’s definitely clear WRONG ways. It would sound less natural to pause after every single word - and depending on the sentences, there are sometimes odd places to pause that will stand out to native speakers.

Well for chinese, its easy for me to put probably more unnatural sounding word breaks, if I don’t consciously try to emulate a chinese sentence example’s word-phrase breaks. I do think repetitive listening is helping me to get more of a ‘feel’ of when to do it, the way when my teacher made us try to exactly emulate japanese audio I started to notice much more ‘when’ to choose to put breaks in my sentences and how to chunk saying the words together.

Listening to the audiobook chapter a lot is helping me sort of get used to picking out the word chunks, instead of just the individual words I know as ‘separate.’ I think in the long run, this will probably help with comprehending audio faster, and it may eventually help with me speaking with a more natural flow when I’m not thinking as consciously of it. Hopefully, I’ll have to find out on that second benefit over time lol!

There is other benefit I’ve noticed - and I’m not sure if its because of repetitive listening, or because I have been reading a lot more, and adapting sentence-example flashcards with Audio into my flashcard study. I’ve noticed when I’m typing its easier for me to gather my thoughts and word them in chinese. Before, when writing I would struggle first to think the right words, then on how to even phrase it in chinese/general grammar, then on word order. I’m still double checking my written sentence on word order (mostly on time placement, since I know it goes toward the beginning but I just tend to think of it when typing toward the end, so I insert it at the end). But for the actual words/how to phrase them I’ve been a bit quicker - its easier for me to go “na jiu hao”, “wo juede na ge,” “zai zheli” etc. Pretty basic stuff to word together, I know. But in the past it was just taking me longer to figure out how to phrase “that’s good,” “I think that” “Here...” even though I knew the words, just because I’d be double checking whether to use na/nage/naxie/naben (which still kind of confuses me but I can tell seeing/hearing it more is helping me get used to when to use which easier), and where to place zai/mian/cong.

If anyone else has tried repetitive listening, or used this study method a lot, I would love to hear about your experiences with it. How it helped you, how you used it, how it fit into your study plans. Whatever you feel about it lol.

#repetitive listening #study method #study methods #chinese studyblr

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twitchesandstitches · 5 years ago

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Polypa’s Victory Growth Comm

Commission of Polypa growing hyper-sized anime-esque proportions; I was given leeway for the actual circumstances, so I went with a more fantastical setting this round.

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It began with a hunt; victorious, mighty, and Polypa standing high over her prey.

Polypa roared in triumph, as only a troll could, and the other hunters (humans, trolls, carapacians, and other beings) saluted her, shaking weapons and claws and their own fierce mutations. Fangs gnashed, tusks were clanged together, and several of the more excitable trolls headbutted humans who had thought to wear helmets.

Polypa bowed her head, taller than some but shorter than others, her figure well-built and beefy; an ideal weapon to aim at the enemies of clan and oath-kin. Slowly she slid off the massive torso of the devil beast, her head still tilted backwards in a gesture of docility.

And she gazed upwards and kept craning her head back as the enormously muscular and motherly body of Nepeta Leijon, the progenitor of all olivebloods and Huntmaster of the creators, raised her massive paws up.

Leijon was massive; her hips wider than a doorway, her shoulders individually broader across than Polypa’s whole body, her armor distorted by the huge swells of her curvy frame, her large belly suggesting a hint of divine pregnancy. Her hands, as big as Polypa’s whole chest, raised up, claws extending out over the metal hand-blades she wore. Polypa tensed, dreading a frown or criticism from her, the first of their kind…

And Nepeta applauded her, a warm smile on her atavistic snout. Several antannae sprouting from her face like whiskers tweaked as her smile grew. “Good job, everyone! This is going to go in the records!”

They cheered at this. Someone Polypa couldn’t see declared, “All the other reenactment clubs will be so jealous!”

Nepeta, goddess and incidentally president of the Peeled Bones Rennactment Society, smiled indulgently. She took another look at the corpse, and said something that made Polypa stop: “Oh, good job, Polypa! You struck the killing blow!”

The others gathered around, saying things along the lines of ‘good on you!’.

Konyyl Okimaw, Polypa’s childhood friend, rival, occasional mate and professional pain in the neck, gave her a level look Polypa found hard to parse. Was it indignation? Jealousy? Genuine pride?

Konyyl then grinned, and applauded as well. “Congrats, burny girl. You fried that bastard good!”

Polypa glanced down at the beast, the flames from her special claw weapons still blazing upon it, and she preened. “Well, I don’t wanna brag…!”

“You should,” rumbled Li’l Hal, an ironically named war construct from ancient days, towering over the rest with a truly fearsome arsenal still dripping in bloody ichor. Just to be super-extra, he still kept that look even outside the hunts. “Or I’ll take credit for it.”

Nepeta gave him a look. “Don’t tease her!”

Hal winced, in the sense of his many articulated face plates wiggled contritely. “Yeah, ma’am. Sure.” Polypa smirked at him. He made a rude gesture at her, which Nepeta pretended not to have seen. Instead, Nepeta stood forward, extending the godforged green claws (said to have been crafted with some pieces of the green sun used in shaping the new universe they knew), and she sang the song of gratitude to the spirit of the prey. It had been an old song when she made this universe; it sounded older even now, these many eons later.

Then her massive arm blurred, and blood sprayed onto the ground. Her cut avoided getting any on herself, but it did land on the grass. It began to grow faster, swelling upwards with sudden blooms, but in that moment, they were too focused on the ritual of slaughter to notice this.

Nepeta wrenched out the heart of the beast, still dripping blood, and she carefully handled it so that she did not get much on her. The blood of these beasts could have strange effects even on gods, but her magic contained it, aimed those transformation effects on those honored by her. And she offered the heart to Polypa.

“Take it,” the goddess of the hunt said, her expression keen, glowing faintly with her divine olive light as her powers blessed Polypa, priming her for the benefits of her benediction. “You’ve earned it.”

Polypa did not waste time with refusal or meek protests. You didn’t argue with the lion goddess, and anyway she had a habit of just rolling through arguments without ever raising her voice or changing her tone from a sweet, gentle tone. Polypa accepted the heart, bowing her head with awkward grace. Briefly, she wished she could have a quick discussion with her moirail Tegiri on the proper protocol of divine gift receiving; he knew all about that kind of thing and she most absolutely did not!

Nepeta just kept half smiling in a pleasant, amiable way that nicely defused her tension. Polypa awkwardly smiled back. Nepeta patted her shoulder, leaving a bloody clawprint on the furs she wore, and bowed her head low, standing up high until she towered even over Polypa’s amazonian figure. “You may eat.”

Polypa looked down at the heart, which was no longer beating. That possibly would have made it a bit stranger. The black blood still poured, so much of it that it was frankly implausible, maybe it was actually the natural magic of the beast, Polypa mused, still being processed into an organic stuff not so different from blood. Certainly it tingled on her skin, in a surprisingly pleasant way. That was a bit odd; it felt warm, tingling pleasurably. Part of her felt the hints of bloodlust her people were blessed with, the joy of the hunt and the ecstasy of feeling the blood FLOW-

She got a handle on it. Tamping down bloodlust was one of the first things done in the club’s hunt training. She opened her mouth, her jaws working strangely as her mouth fully unhinged, membranes connecting them as they gaped impossibly wide, her lower jaw expanding wide like some kind of anglerfish, and she scooped the heart up into her maw and swallowed it. Her throat squeezed around it, squashing it into a pulpy mass sliding down so sweetly into her belly.

“Is it supposed to tingle like that?” She said, patting her enormously detailed muscle belly with some concern. Her claws scraped against a bulge of gut that wasn’t quite as thick as her abdominal muscles.

The general feeling from the others was along the lines of ‘I dunno’.

And that was then.

----

And this was now.

Months after the hunt, Polypa stretched through her morning exercises, enjoying the weight at her front, and the wonderful flex of all those new splendidly aligned muscles all going up her back.

She was stronger, now. She was… famous, in ways that the hunting reenactment clubs didn’t really think to cater to. And most of all, she was bigger.

She paced through her room, adopting a stride naturally for hips that were much wider now. She didn’t so much walk as sashay, a rolling stride that tended to draw gazes downwards with sheer motion power alone.

At her front, her breasts bounced in all their massive glory, almost bigger than she was, and to feel them moving with each sway, every little bump against her muscular belly… it was a pleasure.

In many ways, she looked every inch like the heroines of the shows she and Tegiri loved so much, that had inspired her to join the hunting club to fight mighty beasts. Wait… no. She was so much bigger than even they were usually drawn!

The thought put a smug grin on her face.

Polypa was a large troll. Larger now, in fact; her doorway had been remodeled several times over the past few months, scaling increasingly upwards just so she could fit through it. Fortunately it hadn’t (yet) gotten to the point that she was in danger of going past the ceiling of her hive; they were built to be as tall as possible, given considerations like the size of some lusii. Even so, she had to walk with her head low, her body lowered so much she felt like she was constantly about to drop into a quadruped stance. And, well. Given the size of her assets now, that would probably be a poor move.

And she was still scraping her ceiling up with her horns. The weight of them, arcing up through her scalp-quills, had almost doubled; they had to be as long as her forearm now, their jagged edges so much more pronounced that not even the armor of worthy prey or warriors would pose a threat.

Distantly, she heard a murmuring, the distinctive sound of many people gathering about as a respectable distance, and she smirked to herself. It was a faint, confident smile, as much self-adoration as anything else. Her public was arriving.

Yes; she didn’t much like hanging out in her hive all day, even before all this, and now that her hive was too cramped for her new stature, and the impact of her body, she had taken to spending a lot of it outside.

And being… admired.

She finished her meal, jaws unhinging as she swallowed her food and edible dish whole, and it made a brief bulge in her throat as she swallowed. She did a few exercises before she went to go on her daily jog, mostly to accommodate her body.

The back muscles were important. They formed a new support structure for her back, flexible and rigid in turns as required by the bouncing hulks at her front, but she felt better working them out first before doing anything intensive. And it felt good working them out, making them stronger. She could FEEL them growing bigger; perhaps it was just her imagination.

Polypa finished her stretches and strode to her doorway, opening it; moonlight poured in, and as she saw the crowd doing its best to huddle around secretively, she tilted her head up, preening. “Hello there,” she said amiably to them. They flushed, almost every one of them a hardened berserker or carapacian brute, and they were still reduced to squirming lumps of shyness in her presence.

It was so cute.

Polypa exited the doorway, and cut a dramatic figure as she left. But it was her breasts that exited first.

And they were gigantic; perhaps there had been some cow-beast in the genetics of the monster that had empowered her, or it was some latent mutation in her olive blood set loose, to make her so mighty. Though Polypa was a juggernaut weighing over fifteen hundred pounds of muscle mass, far more of it was in her breasts; each one was eight hundred pounds heavy, dipping from her throat to almost her knees, the teardrop-shaped masses almost as long as she was tall, and so wide that only their amorphous squishiness let her force them through the doorway. They sloshed heavily, a payload of nearly three thousand gallons of milk making them even heavier, swelling to even bigger sizes.

They bounced hypnotically, the crowd awestruck by her size as she strode out, towering over them even at range. It was hard to appreciate her figure behind her bustline, but Polypa was a curious blend of amazonian and extreme hourglass; her waist impossibly tiny, her hips shockingly enormous. Her butt stuck out like a gelatinous platform, and her shoulders were broad enough that most trolls (most only coming up to her waist, admittedly) could ride comfortably on one. Her muscles stood out, as defined as carved stone, and wearing only small shorts and a tiny beach-top to cup her breasts, it was impossible to not be aware of this.

Polypa strode out, the outer swell of her muscular gut smacking into her breasts and making them bounce up with every step. Her shoulders flexed ,her hips swayed, her butt moved so perfectly; every motion was a delightful frisson, and Polypa restrained herself from a soft moan only with the hunter’s focus that had earned her these benefits in the first place.

She kept going; step after step, moving in just such a way as to make sure everyone’s eyes were on her. She had EARNED this look, earned every magnificent inch she’d piled on. She would make quite sure they saw it all, just as surely as she had always carried her hunting trophies on high whenever it came to call.

She glanced and saw Tegiri sitting atop a hermit’s pole, apparently to catch some brisk morning air before his own run. He glanced at her, with an expression that was somehow totally deadpan. He nodded, just once, as if to say ‘good morning’. There was no real indication or commentary from him over her transformation, besides some vague comments on his part that he could help remodel her home.

She appreciated it. He knew her worth; she didn’t have to blare it with him like she did with others. And that pleased her.

Polypa did some more stretches, and noticed a few people imitating her specific stretches. As she hefted up her own breasts, their immense weight making excellent exercise for her arms, and stirred up her milk stores, she thought it was nice to be… inspiring people like that.

She whistled, and they all looked at her. “Right, then!” she said brightly. “Everyone, after me! It’s a training montage!” She pointed at a few random people in the crowd. “We got a tournament coming up, and if you want to hang out with me, you gotta compete!”

“We what now?” Someone (Joey, she thought vaguely) said in a small voice.

“Ah,” Tegiri said. “First the training montage, in preperation for the tournament arc?”

Polypa smirked. “See. You get it!” The others looked dumbfounded, but now helplessly caught in her wake.

And so off they went when she started to run, the quaking of her breasts causing shockwaves around her, and into the night they went.

#/#//#///#////#/////#queued #commissions #my writing #fics #twitchy!homestuck #twitchy!polypa

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zombiesbecrazy · 6 years ago

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new traditions from the stars

Summary: The problem was that neither Bruce or Alfred knew quite what to do with bedtime and often resulted in young Master Bruce in tears and Alfred frustratingly close to it himself.

AO3

Alfred sighed into his cup of over-brewed tea, trying to sort out what he would do next. Just as Bruce had been ill prepared and far too young to lose his parents in such a traumatic way, Alfred was struggling equally with how to care for a distraught nine year old who was suddenly in his care and he constantly felt like his was drowning without a liferaft in sight. When Martha and Thomas had first asked him to be the guardian of Bruce if anything should ever happen to them, Alfred had readily agreed without a second thought. Why wouldn’t he? People agreed to such a thing every day. It was expected that parents have plans for such things, but it was mostly symbolic.

No one ever expects it to really come into reality.

There were moments that Alfred spent alone in his apartment in the manor, when Bruce was otherwise occupied or late in the night when he would lie on his bed, and allow is mind to wander to the dark places of grief that he pushed aside during the day. The space where for a moment he would permit the unspeakable thoughts to leak out. Why had he said yes to Martha? Would Bruce be better off somewhere else? How on earth could he raise a child? What would happen if he simply ran away, abandoning the child and all associated liabilities? He was just an employee, would anyone blame him if he did? He’d never act on them, of course, but he couldn’t help where his mind wandered when he was alone in the dark. He then felt awful even thinking of them because if he was thinking that way, what could the young boy be thinking? Where were his own grief stricken thoughts taking him?

He allowed himself one week of such private thoughts before he pushed them out of his mind completely and decided that the best way to move on would be to throw himself into his new normal at top speed, with Bruce being the priority in his life.

Alfred grabbed onto every sort of parenting reference guide that he could find. He set up appointments with a child psychologist for Bruce in attempt to help him with his grieving process and then met with the same doctor separately to discuss what he could do to help assist the child better. He attended sessions about people dealing with ghastly events to see if he could learn from anyone there. He reached out to his friends but none of them were of much help because while some of them did have children, they didn’t have fully formed traumatized pre adolescents just thrust into their lives without much warning or preparation. He could parse ideas together from multiple sources but in the end there wasn’t a specific handbook for ‘caring for a child who’s famous parents were murdered in front of him and is now at the center of a media storm’. Everything that he was going to try was trial and error, which the psychologist pointed out that that was what all parenting was all about.

Alfred coughed uncomfortably at the word parent. It didn’t sit right with him.

In the end, he was just making it up as he went along and hoping that everyone was none the wiser for it.

Life moved on eventually, though it was at a snail’s pace and sometimes that snail occasionally moved backwards. It had taken some time, and a bit of up and down, but they had finally adjusted and fell into a sort of routine. Bruce had yet to go back to school, but they had a tutor come in and work with him in the mornings to keep up to date with his school work, and in the afternoons he would read or play quietly with his toys. Alfred didn’t know if it was normal behaviour or not, and if it was normal behaviour he wasn’t sure if Bruce was just doing those things so that he was pretending to be fine. He didn’t know and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. They had reached a sort of balance and he hated to disrupt it by shaking it too hard.

For all the quiet and peace, there was one moment every date that was the exact opposite and Alfred was at his wits end.

The problem was that neither Bruce or Alfred knew quite what to do with bedtime and often resulted in young Master Bruce in tears and Alfred frustratingly close to it himself. Whatever they did, they couldn’t get it right.

The books all told him that nine was fairly old to be having arguments about going to bed, but Alfred could understand where it had come from. In a life that could be chaotic and inconsistent with events and priorities, Bruce was used to things being thrown at him and having to adapt at a moments notice. The one thing that never changes was the bedtime routine, no matter what time Bruce went to bed. There was a specific routine for bedtime that had always been followed and without it, he was floundering. It was even worse when Alfred tried to replicate it because even if it was a perfect pattern (maybe more so in those cases), it just rang even truer that his parents were gone, specifically his mother. She wasn’t there to tuck him in, read together for a while, plug in his nightlight and tell him that she loved him as she had every night for as long as Bruce, or Alfred, could remember. It was small and simple, but it seemed to be the thing that mattered most in the world to Bruce and he couldn’t let go of it.

Now every night was a battle. Bruce would scream, hide, cry, barter, and beg to not go to bed and Alfred had no idea what he could do to settle the child. He had tried everything that he could think of, what everyone else had suggested to him, and nothing worked, leaving him stumped and exhausted at the mere thought of the clock striking nine.

It shouldn’t be so hard, putting a child in his bed to go to sleep.

He drained the dregs of his tea, washed the cup and saucer quickly and set on his nightly mission to find Bruce to start the task of getting him into his bed. The boy had a few places that he liked to haunt in the evening after dinner, and Alfred was not surprised to find him in the library, but until like most nights when he was curled up in a chair reading a book, instead he was standing near the window, looking through Thomas’ telescope.

He looked so calm and peaceful, relaxed as he examined the night sky and Alfred hesitated, not wanting to start the inevitable fight that bedtime would bring.

Maybe tonight they would try something completely different.

“Would you like to sit outside with me for awhile, Master Bruce?”

Bruce turned away from the telescope and eyed Alfred with scrutiny, which was an odd expression to see on a child. He seemed to be trying to figure out if it was trick or not, knowing that it was time for their daily battle. Curiosity overruled suspicion in the end and the child nodded in agreement.

“Go fetch your jumper and mittens then. There’s a chill this evening.” Bruce scurried out of the room, and Alfred called after him. “I’ll meet you in the side garden.”

Alfred took a detour back into the kitchen, prepared some quick snacks, pulled on a cardigan and went through the doors into the garden. Bruce was already there, sitting on the loveseat, with a large blanket that looked like it had been taken from the linen closet in his parents room over him. When he spotted Alfred, he shifted over on the cushions and hesitantly pulled back the cover, inviting Alfred to sit next to him.

Alfred settled beside him and offered him a thermos and a spice cookie. “Hot chocolate?”

“Thank you,” whispered Bruce, taking a sip of his drink, smiling at the taste and he looked out over the yard, into the shadows of the trees. Alfred often wondered what the boy thought about when he spaced out like that. He was bright, but not prone to sharing his thoughts with anyone, preferring to be introspective about them.

It was a dark, clear night, with the sky open and filled with stars being so far out of the city. It was interesting, how much the sky could look the same and yet so different no matter where you stood on earth. There was something peaceful about being able to look up and see the stars no matter where he was that Alfred found comforting. England, America, Japan. All had stars if you knew where to look and it gave him a sense of belonging.

“Did I ever tell you that when I was your age I wanted to be an archaeologist?” Alfred asked softly, looking up at the stars. He saw Bruce shake his head out of the corner of his eyes and he nodded. “Before that I was fascinated with dinosaurs and I suspect it was the next step. I wanted to dig into the dirt and learn about times gone past. Eventually it shifted again to being obsessed with classical history and Greek mythology for a time.” He rested an arm on the back of the chair behind Bruce, not quite touching him, not doing anything that could be described as a hug, but the open invitational clear of the bond that they were trying to forge. “That is when I learned about constellations and their stories.” Alfred looked up, trying to see if anything caught his eye before he pointed a bit east of where they were sitting. “Do you see that star there? The bright one? That’s Vega and it’s part of the constellation Lyra. If you connect the dots there,” Alfred took Bruce’s mittened hand and slowly outlined where he was referring to “you can possibly see a lyre. It’s like a small harp.” Bruce stared up at the sky for a few minutes, turning his head this way and that before finally nodding. Alfred wasn’t sure that he actually spotted the pattern, as it was rather obscure, but it didn’t really matter. “It was given to Orpheus by Apollo. Orpheus was a musician and a poet, but he also went on many journeys and adventures. He was one of Jason’s Argonauts, travelling the seas and battling mythical beasts, but the story that he is most famous for is when he went to the underworld to try and rescue his wife Eurydice after she had died. He used his music to impress Hades and Persephone and convinced them to let him bring Eurydice back to Earth, but the condition was that he had to walk in front of her the entire way, and he couldn’t look back until they were both at the surface or she would disappear forever.” This probably wasn’t the best story for him to tell a young grieving child, but it couldn’t possibly make their regular bedtime routine any worse than normal, and it was unlikely to cause any new mental scars, so they carried on.

“And did he? Did he save her?” Bruce was staring at Vega, lost look in his eyes, and leaned a little into Alfred’s side, resting his head on his shoulder as he watched the sky. Alfred took it as a sign that Bruce was seeking out a little more affection than normal tonight, and shifted his arm from the back of the chair and gently placed them around Bruce’s shoulders and rubbed his arm on top of the blanket, Bruce humming at the gesture.

“Unfortunately he did not.” Alfred said in resignation before he took a sip of his own drink. “He reached the surface and was so excited that he turned around without realizing that since she was walking behind him she was not yet there. She vanished.”

Bruce nodded in understanding and turned his head from the stars and stared back into the woods, in the direction of the old abandoned well that he had once fallen into. “Then what happened?” The inevitable what now of the story. It was something that Alfred thought about a lot in regards to themselves. What was he supposed to do next? They may have a tentative pattern for now, built on a fragile house of cards, but what were they going to do for Bruce’s first birthday without his parents? Going back to school? Holidays? First relationship? There were heaps of things that neither of them were prepared for and neither of them had ever expected to be going through them together.

But they were both going to have to make do.

“Orpheus continued on with his life. It wasn’t always happy, he felt scorned by the gods, but he kept fighting. He kept persevering, living his life the best way that made sense to him. Not all agreed with him and in the end he paid for it with his life, though the cause of death varies depending on the source. In some retellings he was reunited with Eurydice in death. After he died, Zeus and the muses placed his lyre in the sky for all to see.”

“That isn’t a very happy story.” It didn’t seem to be a criticism, just an observation

“That is true, but like life, not all stories have a happy ending. I like it as a story of perseverance. Orpheus got knocked down and he always got back up even if he was unhappy with his lot in life.” He looked down at Bruce who met his gaze with interest. “He reminds me a little of you.”

Bruce said nothing, turning back to look at the sky again, leaning against Alfred and snuggled warmly into the blanket and under Alfred’s strong arm. They sat in near silence with only the sounds of nature around them, cricket chirping and rustling leaves, until Alfred heard a soft snore escape the blanket, Bruce resting against him, eyes closed and breathing deeply in sleep. He looked smaller than he did when he was awake, stress and grief eased from the corners of his features that haunted him during the day when he was awake.

It was the first time that Bruce had peacefully drifted off to sleep in months.

Alfred carefully lifted up the boy, wrapped carefully in the blanket, carried him into the house, up to his room, and tucking him into his bed with great care to not wake him. Bruce curled deeper under the blankets and let out another snore once in his bed.

It was a bedtime without a fight, tears or battle. It was a small victory, but he had done it. This time Alfred did cry once he was back in the safety of his own apartment. He had done something right and he was flooded with the relief that he wasn’t an absolute failure at this guardian task.

There was no mention of it the next morning, when Bruce came down for breakfast at the table, nor after his session with the tutor or dinner, but when the clock in the study chimed nine o’clock, Alfred found himself with a visitor in the kitchen as he finished his evening cup of tea. Bruce had the blanket in his hand and a nervous expression on his face.

“I was wondering if you’d like to sit outside with me tonight? And maybe tell me another story about the stars?” He was hesitant in the question, but his eyes were hopeful, hopeful that whatever had worked the previous night would possibly work again.

“Of course, Master Bruce. Just let me prepare some hot chocolate and I’ll join you in a minute.”

Alfred stood by the kettle, waiting for the water to point as he watched the boy settle down on the love seat, arranging the blanket just so and leaving space beside him for Alfred. He had seemed better today, lighter. Alfred thought that it was because he had finally gotten a decent night’s rest, but perhaps it was more than that. Maybe they had finally taken a step in the right direction in their new situation.

Maybe they just needed to stop making new patterns and start making new traditions instead.

#whumptober2019 #no.15 #bruce wayne #alfred pennyworth

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forbearnan · 6 years ago

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*me being sleep deprived at five am voice* what if... Arthur had dreams too... like morgana..... but there..... was a god speaking to him..... about merlin........... but he didn't KNOW it was merlin

(here take this concept, not finished + minimal editing but i thought it was interesting)

"I thought I had already taught you this lesson," the being says impatiently, then begins to explain, at a pace just a bit too quick for him to understand all at once. "I sent the griffin to show you, beings of magic can only be slain by magic. Just as beings of blood can only be slain by blood."

"I'm not-- the griffin was killed by Lancelot, he didn’t use magic."

"Wrong. The beast was slain by him and if you hadn't been napping during my lesson you would know what I am talking about."

He had not been napping, he had been promptly knocked out by being thrown into a rock but he doesn't admit that because she always tells him he has is the patron of battle, blood and death and he should better learn to take advantage of that. Whatever that meant.

"Besides," he starts, dialing back to something else she said that made absolutely no sense, "people or 'beings of blood' or whatever, can be killed by magic, I've seen it."

"Wrong again. You've seen force used to kill people. You've seen wind, and fire and rock which all can be manipulated by magic." She sighs, "again, it is similar to how he killed the griffin, but the inverse, where he enchanted the spear to drive the magic into the beasts heart. It wielded with solid force, but the weapon to kill was magic. Just as what you speak of are weapons to the solid being, being aided by magic. It's very simple, really."

He rubs his temples, "Does he also have a god nagging him in his dreams each night or is that just me?" He asks bitterly.

She gives him a reproachful look, "magic, spirit, and life will speak to him a different way. She will talk to him through beings in your plane. And she will attempt to trick him and lead him astray, for that is her way. You should be grateful that I speak with you so directly," she reminds him sharply.

He frowns, "I thought patron gods were meant to guide you, why would she try to trick him?" He asks.

She shakes her head solemnly, "magic is fickle and always comes with a price, spirit is mischievous and whimsical, and life is feeling and unknowing. It is her way." She repeats. "This is why you must guide him as much as he will shield you. If you fail in this, there will be consequences, blood to pay. That is our way too."

He scowls at her, "I don't know how to do that! I don't even know who he is!"

"And yet you must."

He sighs heavily, "can't you just tell me his name?" he asks, not for the first time.

She shakes her head, "that is a lesson you must learn on your own."

"She made me swear not to confuse you," the goddess giggles, "or to try and lead you astray."

"You wanted to speak with me," he wonders warily.

"I was curious about you!" She exclaims, with a gesture that reads to him like a joyful clasping of hands, but not quite.

Of all the gods that he's encountered-- well, just the one, or, two now-- they are always hard to parse, visually. And in most other ways too actually.

Like if blood, battle and death spoke I a certain tone he was influenced with ideas but could no longer understand the words she was speaking, and if she ever touched him, it was rather like he was enveloped and surrounded in something unknowable rather than having a hand on his shoulder, yet he still understood it was a hand on his shoulder.

Visually, of course, was the most obvious of the unknowable qualities they held, seeing was the first way most people met after all and it was constant.

Blood, battle and death was vivid reds with depths of burgundy, earth tones and towering like some great stone pillar. She was wrapped up in shade and yet somehow still glowed steadily like magma or the fire of the hearth. And trying to parse what he was seeing too hard would only make it harder to understand, he learned. Instead he just let his eyes relax and understood the gestures she was making, like he knew some dead language in a past life and was hearing it once more.

Magic, spirit and life was much different, in almost every way. She was teal blues and greens like rivers and streams cutting through trees. She was also golden sunlight streaming through the leaves and the fire that burned it all down. She was snow and rain and the grass and bugs. She was also, smaller somehow. but still so all encompassing and endless. Like a star staring you down in the night sky, relentlessly, radiating light into a void. And she almost seemed to be flitting around him, but everywhere at once too.

"You're interesting,” she tells him. “Blood, battle and death seemed invested in mine as well."

"She was curious?" He asks.

She laughs its a mind-bending sound.

"She does not get curious, silly, she only has what is and what isn't. She's invested in him because he is your flip-side, your half, your partner. You understand."

"You should let her see him.”

"I may," she agrees slyly, "it would be fun to see what comes of it."

He sighs, trying to parse her was giving him a headache, maybe it was just because she wasn't his patron but he found blood, battle and death much simpler, even just to look at, though they were both unknowable.

"Do you do anything solely for his benefit?" He asks bitterly.

She stares at him now, closer than before, he can tell by the buzz on his skin. "I do everything for his benefit, his detriment, his enjoyment, and despair," she tells him, voice suddenly sorrowful.

He stiffens at the proximity, "What's his name?" He asks. She moves away now but he finds he still can't relax.

"You do not know?"

"She won't tell me."

Again a giggle, "its funnier if you don't know," she tells him.

“Pure magic is no simple thing to come by, but then again, neither is pure blood. Most people are made at least a little of both magic and blood. You and he are the exceptions to this rule. He is pure magic and simply cannot be killed by any physical means. You on the other hand are blood and can never be destroyed with pure magic."

He squints up at her, "how does that make sense? So, basically, nothing can kill him and something you said was really hard to come by in the first place is my only strength!?” She gives him a look of exasperation.

"It is not your only strength,” she chides, “you are the patron of battle, in this you are strong, you are of blood, your connections will last, and you are of death, you have no need to fear of endings. And beyond that, he will ward away what would do you harm for as long as he can, and he can never hurt you."

"It sounds like he could.”

"It is not in his nature, but his path is one of choices, deception and shroud. Yours is a simpler one. You will see him like a light in the dark and you will know where you are when the rest seems lost. But do not mistake him for a lantern. He is a star in a northern sky. Lonesome and far and you must reach to him. For otherwise he will always be alone, unknown."

“How?” he demands in desperation. “Where is he?” he pleads with her.

“He is close,” she whispers.

And he lets out a breath because that’s the most he’s gotten but does it mean he’s already here or he’s soon to come? Arthur has never met a sorcerer he could actually trust in his life, yet this one is meant to be different. His other half.

“I am I incomplete then?” he asks, “if he’s not here yet.”

She shakes her head, “you have never been incomplete.” she tells him, “that is as if I said the moon is not whole without the sun. They are something on their own, separate and complete, and yet with the sun, the moon can shine too, it is given new life, new meaning. He will live out a moonless existence for most of his long, long life. Your pull on his tides will be over too quickly for him. You should rejoice that you will have him for a much larger portion of yours.”

He frowns up at her, eyebrows drawing together, “what are you saying? He’s going to live forever?”

“From his perspective, yes. From mine, no, only quite a while.”

He reels at this knowledge, “and me? I’m going to live a human lifespan?”

She gives him a considering look, and tips her head, “no,” she says, “you will die in your prime.”

He expected nothing less. Somehow, it wasn’t a punch to the gut to hear, it did not leave him horrified, wanting for more, to hear anything but that. He did not want for more time for himself. If anything, death was something he’s always embraced, as a warrior and a leader. Who was he to tell a man to go willing to die if he was not willing himself?

But still, he finds himself outraged at the news. But not for himself, not really.

"And how is that fair?!” He demands, "If we're made for each other why would I die young and he have to go on forever!?"

"It is not about fair, you are simply a short beginning and he a long end.”

He seethes at this, “I thought this was supposed to be about balance! That we were two parts of a whole!” he leans forward and he can feel the unending heat radiating from her, but also the way she seemed to draw all of it from him, leaving him freezing, shivering, she was so cold, yet so full of warmth. He clutches at his arms, voice shaking as he asks, “why does he have to go alone?”

She hesitates, and sounds mournful as she says, “your loss will leave him wanting, for all his days...” Then she blinks and seems to recall something, “remember, Arthur. There is ground under your feet. You must remind him of this before you go.

"Be the roots to his tree. For it will be one of life. And I do hope it will flower.”

#long post #wip #merlin posting #merthur #my writing #im actaully very into this concept so i might write more sometime idk

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