#warning: contains phosphorus

[phosphorus-warning]

its so fucked up that marvel rivals.

i just found the “flopazine” (one-use floppy disk digital magazine download) paper wrapping case design for my ‘starburn’ logo debut from 3/4 years ago. yay for more DTDverse tech!

the back cover teasing a video game UI reimagining project i was gonna do for marvel nemesis — as a hero shooter (+ sequel to the original FDNB poem? apparently??)

it was one of the two in-universe games i was using to tease DTD’s game demo launch (also never happened): a game both rep and coney play excessively; despite the imperfects roster being hastily redesigned variations of their own team after GA’s post-DTD publicity crisis (nitrabunny/solara, cobra/wink, rep/hazmat, etc.)

was kind of a tongue-in-cheek ref in honor of the original game inspiring so much of DTD very unconsciously until i suddenly saw it

but now a HERO SHOOTER called MARVEL NEMESIS isn’t a cool retro throwback concept it’s a parody of the game that exists … which is fine!! cus that’s sooo funny tbh, but i dont see rep playing horndog royale marvel rivals

[summerdaze-imprint]

postcard from civilian life

[asura-demon]

symptoms of un-death in a young adult:

unkempt uniform due to chronic tardiness

twisted sense of humor, property vandalizing (“YES! i am killing myself. L👀K”)

find more information here.

[gaza-giving-tree]

Imagine walking for miles beneath a merciless sun, each step a battle against exhaustion. The empty water containers in your hands feel heavier with every faltering step, but you press on through rubble-strewn streets, driven by the desperate need to find clean water for your family.

Your vision blurs, dark spots dancing at the edges, and your heart pounds with the effort to stay upright. The heat is suffocating, your limbs tremble with fatigue, but you force yourself forward, refusing to give in. Then, without warning, your strength gives out. Your legs buckle, and you collapse onto the burning earth, dust rising around you as darkness claims your senses.

Images: Ahmed Aldani, a chronically ill teenager from Gaza, is trying to raise money to evacuate and receive medical treatment abroad.

@ahmedaldanigg

@ahmedaldani333

Story written by @rumiandroses

For most in Gaza, each day is a battle for survival—but for fifteen year old Ahmed Aldani, who is chronically ill, the struggle is far more severe. His body is being pushed to its limits by the relentless strain of hunger, pain, and exhaustion. He needs urgent medical care and a chance to escape the nightmare that has become his everyday life.

Image: Ahmed recently reached out to us with an update on his condition.

Every task, no matter how small, has become a struggle for survival. Just a few weeks ago, Ahmed collapsed while walking 3 kilometers (almost 2 miles) to fill water—his body having difficulty sustaining the effort, in desperate need of medical care that, without financial help, is out of reach for Ahmed and his family.

Born amidst conflict, Ahmed has spent all fifteen years of his life enduring the effects of war. The development of his teeth and hair were negatively impacted by toxic gas his mother inhaled during a phosphorus attack while pregnant with him in 2008. The recommended treatment—dental implants—is far beyond his family’s means, with each tooth costing around $1,000. But without treatment, the pain and exhaustion will only worsen.

Images: The development of Ahmed's hair and teeth were impacted by white phosphorus that his mother accidentally inhaled after an occupation attack near the family home in 2008.

Ahmed’s family has been displaced more than seven times in the past ten months, their savings drained just to stay alive. They now live in the southern part of Gaza, jobless and with no access to proper medical care.

This GoFundMe is a lifeline, both for Ahmed’s survival and for his family’s chance to escape Gaza and access the medical treatment he so desperately needs. The goal is to raise $50,000 to cover travel expenses, medical care, and a chance for Ahmed to finally rest, heal, and grow up without pain overshadowing every moment.

Ahmed needs your help—now more than ever. Even the smallest donation can help bring him closer to the care he needs to reclaim his health and his future.

You can donate to Ahmed's GoFundMe campaign [HERE].

Ahmed's campaign has been vetted by @gazavetters, and is (#198) on their list of verified campaigns.

[fading-event-608]

Recently the syndicate of chemists in Lebanon has issued a statement warning people to not go near the blast sites due to alleged use of depleted uranium by Israel. (link - you need to scroll till the statement in Arabic). The screenshot of their statement on twitter was shared here on Tumblr and I’ve seen multiple people expressing scepticism regarding the source. Some people linked an article (link) from anti-Hezbollah 'democratic' newspaper 'L’Orient Today' to ‘fact-check’ - because of course they can’t read Arabic and are discontent with a twitter link.

This is my short summary of the article: they confirm that Israel has used Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons, not only in Lebanon but also in Gaza in June of this year and between October and December of last year. They establish a history of the use of Depleted Uranium, and include examples of its use in Iran in 2003. Israel doesn't directly talk about their use of DU, but neither are they hiding it - because there is no law that forbids the use of these bombs by Israel, there is no treaty regulating the use of DU weapons. There were several resolutions calling for a moratorium on the use of DU weapons in the UN and EU Parliament, the latest of which was in 2022, but these have failed to stop their use (those who have used them also includes both Russia and Ukraine). The article ends with an ominous addition that the Israeli army has been found guilty multiple times of using white phosphorus, which IS prohibited against civilians or civilian property under international law. (You probably can already tell that their defense is that they do not use it against civilians)

There is another article that was published in early September this year - LINK - I highly encourage you to read this one yourself, as it is quite short, especially when considering the amount of information it contains. As this one is more easily accessible, I won’t summarize it - please take it in yourself. I will say, however, that this article’s author, one Dr. Busby, worked with colleagues to conduct several investigations into the use of uranium-based weapons in both Lebanon and Gaza. In 2006, Dr. Busby asked his colleague to collect multiple samples from a crater left by what was suspected to be Depleted Uranium weapons. Samples from an ambulance air filter were also taken. Dr. Busby and company found not only the  presence of depleted uranium but also of Enriched Uranium. Here’s the paper: link.

Enriched Uranium. In 2006.

By 2024, all of the laboratories that Dr. Busby had used to Conduct the investigation have closed their doors either to him or in general. Busby’s letters to the UN, as well as papers detailing evidence of the use of enriched and depleted uranium are either dismissed or ignored, rendering it unlikely that there will ever be the “official” source for these claims that certain people now see fit to demand. And even if the UN did accept those letters and did push for ban of those weapons - would Israel comply? Genocide is ‘illegal’ under international law, and Israel still faces the case in ICJ, but what will that ICJ do if they rule that Israel is guilty? What would UN do if they accept evidence of Israel using uranium-based weapons? Scold them and write a fine?

The aspect of the deployment of nuclear weapons considered the most horrific is - and has always been - the fallout. The idea that all nuclear weapons would leave evidence - again, fallout - behind was born into the cultural consciousness through various cold war era PSAs, as well as other media inspired by these horrors, potential and otherwise. The weapons Israel is using here do not create fallout, however. But do not mistake them as harmless - they are still highly carcinogenic. They cause birth defects, as well as various other illnesses - mysterious illnesses, or at least mysterious until doctors attempting to treat them register that their patients have been exposed to enriched uranium, after which point the mystery goes away. 

In a sense, the horrors advertised by cold war PSAs and films like Doctor Strangelove, the promise of some explosive end brought about by some fool in the US pushing the wrong button - these serve to draw a veil over the continued use of nuclear weapons that have been ongoing since this technology was first harnessed for violence. This is a severe danger to the people of Gaza, and we can’t ignore it simply because we have developed in our minds too much faith in the loosest understandings of nuclear warfare.

I think many of you are familiar with a boiling frog story. The story goes that if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will try to climb out. But if you put it in warm water and very slowly heat it, it will be so accustomed to the temperature it will eventually be boiled alive. It’s not very authentic, of course - in reality the frog will try to jump out as soon as it deems the water temperature uncomfortable. Just like you would try to get out of the bathtub as soon as it gets too hot for you or try to warm yourself up when you spend too much time outside in winter. 

But some of it still rings true. At what point will the UN, or ICJ, or some other white savior wannabe decide that Israel has done too much? What is that ‘too-much’ point that makes them try to protest, and what would that protest be?

As in case with Tumblr, it seems that the boiling point, in fact, has already passed and people grew accustomed to deaths of Palestinians. There are thousands of posts about the situation in Gaza, and the whole Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria… They get a lot of attention by both zionists and Palestine supporters. There are also hundreds of Gazans that came to Tumblr in hopes to escape the genocide by asking people to cover evacuation and survival costs. Do they get the same attention? Barely. Arguably zionists are more invested in interacting with those posts - they mass report them and harass Palestinians. And even if the fundraiser post gets a lot of attention, it does not necessarily translate into a lot of donations - people just assume that someone else will donate instead of them.

You can’t stop Israel all by yourself. You can’t convince the UN or try to progress the ICJ case by yourself. You can, however, do small acts that will contribute to Palestinian resistance. Go protest, go boycott, and please, please, please, go donate to Palestinian fundraisers.

Falastin’s family are under constant threat in Gaza. She’s been fundraising to save them since late June, and yet they’ve only recently gotten to just over 5% of their total goal - a little short of $10,000 USD. They’re still in Gaza, and still in need of funds for survival. The longer they are trapped there, the more they need - not just for food and water, but also for medicine, shelter, and clothes. Each time they’re displaced, due to inadequate time to pack, they lose more supplies, and their needs increase. Give what you can so that they can survive this, and please share their fundraiser as much as you’re able regardless of whether you can donate, just in case someone you know might be able to help. Not just here on Tumblr, on other social media, talk to your friends, coworkers, family, in group chats and in discord servers.

Please keep in mind conversion rates before donating:

10$ = 103 SEK

25$ = 260 SEK

50$ = 519 SEK

100$ = 1,038 SEK

[bitterrfruit]

houndtooth [20]

[masterlist]

ghost x f! reader. 10.2k words cw: sexual assault. heavy violence. heavy gore. 18+ mdni

the jaws close.

The shrapnel of your blood-thinning scream strikes Ghost through the head with the force of a bullet. 

It lodges in his brain, festering and swelling until a tumour forms around it, and it’s the only thing he can hear — not an echo, but a broken record, repeating and repeating until his vision turns red and the tendons of his hands nearly snap in the strain of his grip. 

His eyes are wide with it as he turns the corner and wrenches the trigger of his rifle, lighting up the dark room with a strobe of yellow fire and shooting down two Konni soldiers in a fusillade of bullets. Even persisting in firing at their lead-riddled corpses once they collapse to the floor beneath them. Stupid, because he’s onto his second-last magazine, but he isn’t lending much thought to practical concerns. 

He feels a writhing in his stomach, bubbling like cyanide, dissolving him from the inside out. 

He failed you. 

He lied to you. 

You told him from the fucking start. You knew what would happen. 

He didn’t believe you, and now you’re trapped with the very psychopath he promised you’d never have to see again. The fucking animal. At liberty to get his claws in you, his teeth in you, unmuzzled by an audience or the threat of retribution. 

The veins in his temples thump hard when he pictures it, as he yells a command at his Sergeant to breach the room on his right. Sees the smug grin pulling in the pig’s paper-cut lips. Hears his frothy laughter among the shrieks you cry out in the hope Ghost can hear them and come to your aid like he promised he would. 

Fills him with magmatic rage, viscous and molten in his blood, that makes his heart thud like a sledgehammer against his sternum. Makes his jaw grind to the point of ache, as he stomps his full weight into the head of the terrorist he had just gunned down. Just to see his skull pop. Wanted to feel bone and flesh crushing beneath the sole of his boot, imagining it as belonging to the man ensnaring you. 

Six men have been killed in the trap he fell for. 

Half of Delta team and two of his own. Their blood amalgamates with that of the enemy combatants he has killed, staining his clothes, dripping from the end of his gun, sticky on his cheeks. 

“LT!” The Sergeant yells through a door on his right. “In ‘ere!” 

“What?” Ghost roars, busy sweeping the bend in the hallway ahead. 

“Just — you need to see this.”

Ghost growls in frustration as he turns to storm towards him. “Stop fucking around, Johnny, we need to get the fuck out of here! ” 

There isn’t enough time to waste investigating what little bullshit might be littered around the dead-end factory, with the exfil helicopters a few clicks out, and your fragile life on the line. 

“Look,” Soap barks urgently, standing in a cavernous storage room, where fluorescent bars hang on chains from the ceiling, tall rolling doors along one wall. Johnny shines the torch of his rifle on to a stacked palette, wrapped in packing film, concern etched in his pinching eyes. “Y’were right.” 

“What is it,” Ghost grunts, coming to a hasty stop beside him, where Johnny tears away a layer of the plastic. Beneath sit four steel drums, lacquered in glossy navy enamel.  

Johnny points imperatively at the label on one of the containers. A big yellow sticker, bedizened in a skull and crossbones, all of the warnings in Russian — danger, highly toxic, corrosive. 

“Fuck’s sake, Soap, what am I looking at?” 

“Phosphorus trichloride,” he blurts, “a shit-tonne of it.” 

“And? English!” Ghost roars, impatience boiling within him so vigorously he can feel the steam rising up his throat. 

“We were fuckin’ right the first time!” Johnny shouts, jutting a furious pointer finger at the drums. “They were making nerve agents. Our early intel was right. We’ve been following fuckin’ bait they tossed to throw us off the scent.” 

If it were possible for Ghost to get any more furious, any more despondent, he might have broken his gun in half. Helps that the Sergeant is consistently cleverer than he gives him credit for — must have paid keen attention in his CBRN defence courses, such that he remembered even a precursor chemical to the production of nerve agents. 

Certainty is a powerful weapon, though — and there isn’t a second left to waste pissing into the wind. He pulls his sat phone out of a pocket on his tacvest and dials up the Captain. 

Picks up on the second ring — luckily — he was about to crush the plastic phone in his grip. 

“Lieutenant — what’s the story.” 

“There are no missiles,” Ghost barks, immediately, before the Captain is able to finish his dry greeting. “It’s fuckin’ nerve agents. Not missiles.” 

“What? That doesn’t make any sense. If they’ve been taken somewhere else, we need to—” 

“Listen, Makarov fuckin’ baited us. It was a trap, a lie!”

“Have you checked—”

“Captain, are you fucking hearing me?” Ghost bellows, “there are. No. Missiles!” 

There’s a pause of only a second, long enough to make a capillary burst in his sclera, before the Captain speaks again. 

“Zakhaev’s bloody widow, eh?” He seethes, “I told you not to trust that lying bitch.” 

The tendons of his neck crack in the strain of his fury. “Jesus — this isn’t her fault. Makarov gave her false intel so that we’d look in the wrong place.” 

“So that you’d look in the wrong place. You followed your cock right into a trap. Fuck’s sake, of all people, I never thought you’d fall for—” 

“We’re here because you believed the Americans’ intel, not because of her!” Ghost thunders, so ragged with rage that a mist of blood might have sprayed out with his broken voice. “You sent us hunting for missiles that never fucking existed — she is the one that figured that out, and now she’s being fucking tortured for it!” 

“Careful, Lieutenant—”

“Pull your fucking head out of your ass, Captain. Makarov never left Kastovia, he’s at Zakhaev’s estate. They’ve got a launch code with hundreds of locations. They’ll already have a network of bombs just waiting for the push of a button, ready to go, no thanks to the fucking months we spent chasing our god-damned tails!” 

There’s another venomous pause as the Captain must be in thought — rubbing his jowls, no doubt, white-knuckled and exasperated. If he were standing in front of Ghost in that moment he would have been met with a fist to the gut. 

“Fucking hell,” he croaks. “Alright, okay. Fine. Nerve agents, then — how are they dispersing them? When? Have you got that far?” 

“Today, Captain. They’re setting them off today.” 

“How do you know?”

“Mia,” Ghost grits. “Mia found the drive containing the code.” 

“And you believe her?” The Captain spits incredulously, “Sergeant Garrick and I are on route to Russia on her word — the same word that drove you into an ambush — and you still believe her?” 

“Yes, Captain, I fucking believe her,” he rages. “I’m taking my team and what’s left of Delta back to the estate. I suggest you turn around, because there’ll be an army waiting for you when you land. Only telling you that because I like Gaz alive.”

Price’s sigh cuts through the line like a ripsaw. 

“Alright, Simon,” he grumbles. “Garrick and I will circle back. Get the drive, if it exists — that’s the priority. Not Makarov, not the UNs, and not Zakhaev’s fucking wife. Understood?” 

The phone screen cracks in his grasp. “Copy.”

There’s a point where terror loses its meaning. 

Dulls to a blunt edge like an overused blade. Doesn’t cut as clean, doesn’t draw blood as quickly, but hacks away at flesh all the same. 

Still drives you to kick, to scream, to buck and twist like a wrangled cat, to claw and bay and cry until your throat goes splinter-dry and it hurts to inhale; even if your senses are fraught to the point of fog, blurriness where your vision had been clear, a ringing in your ears that deadens your hearing.  

It only makes him chuckle, like a dry joke, as he holds a stony arm around your neck, pit of his elbow pressing into your throat. Hauls you down the corridor of your mansion like dead game, towards an open door you’ve never seen before — tucked under the stairs, panelled in the same wainscotting as the rest of the wall. Hidden in plain sight for as long as you had lived there. 

“Stay up here, both of you,” he demands, in Russian, to the armed soldiers that followed closely behind him, there to catch you in the unlikely circumstance of your escape. 

It fills your belly with dread. 

Briney. Corrosive. No audience to spectate him, that might question or criticise him, that he might feel the need to appease. 

He wants you alone with him. 

He has wanted that from the day you met him, plain as the murky death in the pits of his eyes. In the yellowing where his teeth meet his gums when he grins. In the ownership forboded by his touch. 

The certainty of this inevitable outcome, seeded in his mind from the moment your husband had reclaimed the seat of power that would otherwise have fallen to him. 

How better to avenge such an injustice than to steal everything he once owned? The throne, the money, the estates, the credit for their terrorist plot — and last of all, you. 

You can hear it in his breathing, ragged and approving. Feel it in how he presses his nose into your hair as he drags you down a flight of exposed concrete steps, breathing in your fear like perfume. Fragrance bespoke for him. The raw musk of dread and corporeal anticipation of the agony he is yet to inflict on you. 

You don’t bother begging. Your pleas turn to blood at the back of your throat. Wasted breath, because to hear you pray for mercy would only please him. 

The crying is instinctive, though. Screams that rip from your chest and rend your diaphragm, sobs that you choke and gulp on and that drool from your mouth. There’s no swallowing that, no matter how hard you try to maintain some dignity, how hard you attempt to compose yourself in an effort to avoid arousing him. 

Because you know that it does. 

You know every tear that drips from your chin and lands on his forearm pulls vindictive blood into the cock you can feel against your spine. Every scream makes his smile wider. Every splutter makes his grip tighter. 

Beyond purely sexual sadism, because you can smell his spite in the vapour of his breath. Rancour as putrid and sanguinary as raw meat. Hatred that has been stewing and rankling in the noxious pits of him for so long that it leaks from his skin and smears against yours. 

He wants to hurt you because he loathes you almost as much as he loathed your husband. He delights in conquering you because you’re the trophy he has stolen from the only person that has ever been more powerful than himself. 

He relishes in your screaming because to him it sings like victory. 

“Here we are,” he croons, as he pulls you into a cement cave — a plainly square room, walls of raw concrete, with a lightbulb behind a cage bolted to the ceiling. 

Nothing in here but a metal door in the corner, that ventures to somewhere unknown — and a small terminal fixed to the same wall, with a display the size of a postcard. A keyboard juts out from beneath it, atop a steel cabinet, where thick rope of corded multi-coloured wires creeps out and along the floor. Your eyes follow them to where they travel up to the top of the wall, through a small square hole and into the space behind it. 

“Haven’t been down here before, eh?” He asks richly, entrapping you at the base of the stairs, with his cheek against yours. 

You only whimper, refusing to ingratiate yourself with words, even if indulging him might help you. 

“Keeping secrets was one thing Vic was good at, I’ll give him that,” he says smugly. “You were even better, though, weren’t you?” 

You swallow the bile that pushes up your gullet as he nudges you in the direction of the terminal. 

“Loyal girl,” he says into your skin. “Never told him about you and I, did you? Kept our secret from him until the day he died.” 

He describes it like an affair, like you cuckolded your husband because you wanted to, like you had a choice in the matter. 

“You must have known this is where you were headed. Straight back to me.” 

You know he isn’t stupid enough to think that. He’s only mocking you. Tormenting you for something he knows you could not prevent. 

“Mustn’t have told your Englishmen, either,” he drawls. “I’m sure they wouldn’t have sent you here if they had known how you spread your legs for me. If they had known who you are truly loyal to.” 

You choke on a sob, as he shifts his suffocating arm from your throat, and both of his hands land on your shoulders. Fingers burrow into the tender meat just to make you squeak. 

“It disappointed me that you did them favours so willingly, I admit,” he grumbles, into the hair at the crown of your head. “But, that’s why I let you send them to Mialstor. I knew you’d share that secret, at least.” 

A single hand releases you, and he reaches around you — with the same USB drive you had discovered earlier pinched between his fingers, you watch as he plunges it into the plug at the base of the keyboard, and the little screen lights up. A black window, command prompt, with lines of white text at the top;

> 𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚘  𝚍𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚍𝚎𝚝𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍

> 𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚘  𝚏𝚒𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚜𝚏𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚎𝚍 

> 𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚘  𝚍𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚌𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚍

> патриот@𝚕𝚘𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚑𝚘𝚜𝚝: ~$ _

You feel your beating heart in your teeth, and his lips on the shell of your ear. 

“But not our secret, eh, girl?” You feel him smile, his cold teeth on the thin layer of red skin over the cartilage. “Are you embarrassed? Or did you just want to avoid upsetting me?”

You cry, wrenching your eyes shut, and you taste your tears on your tongue. 

“Hm?” He pesters, tightening his fingers around your trapezius. “Answer me.” 

Every organ in your body resents the words you form with your tongue, but they spill from your mouth, because you do not want to know what he’ll do if you fail to obey a direct demand. 

“I was embarrassed,” you sob, refusing to answer him in Russian, the frail syllables barely eking out of your throat. Chose the option you hope might even slightly bruise his ego. 

But he only chuckles, synthetic sympathy in his breath. 

“Oh, Mia,” he coos, his second hand sliding away from you, “no need to be embarrassed. You have far worse things to be embarrassed about.” 

Your wet eyes follow as his restraining hand joins the other on the keyboard, arms enveloping you, the gritty skin of his clean-shaven jaw chafing against your ear. 

He types a short line of command into the terminal; 

> патриот@𝚕𝚘𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚑𝚘𝚜𝚝: ~$   𝟷𝟷𝟶𝟷.𝚜𝚑 &

“Like fucking the man that murdered your husband,” he remarks, amusement in his tone. “Are you embarrassed about that?” 

You whimper, and he laughs. 

How could he know that? It makes you sick to think — had he planted listening devices throughout the whole house? Cameras you couldn’t see, or never thought to look for? 

Had they been there since the funeral? Or ever since Victor bought the mansion for you, more than five years ago? 

Your sight goes hazy at the thought that he had been observing you the entire time. At the thought that you never had a secret, never had a moment of privacy, never had a break from ravenous eyes — not once, not even in what you thought was your only place of respite. 

That he had watched you shower, watched you masturbate, watched you fuck your husband, watched you scheme with the spec op that executed him, and watched you fuck that same man on the kitchen counter. Watched you bathe with him, touch him tenderly, sit on his cock in the bathwater. Watched you cry in remorse for it. Watched him cradle you. Watched you open yourself innocently to what you thought was a moment belonging to only two people; Simon and yourself. 

But it was never just the two of you. It was never only you. 

You’ve been a source of entertainment, of stolen pleasure, of inhumane gratification for every waking moment of your life. Raped by eyes you didn’t even know were defiling you. Followed unremittingly by sniffing dogs at every bend. 

“Are you?” 

“No,” you croak, because it’s true. 

He lets out a chuff of laughter. 

“Good,” he muses, “I’m glad, Mia. Because it just as likely could have been me. Shame he beat me to it!” 

“What do you mean,” you whine, as his clammy palm slides down your arm, taking your hand in his, pinching you by the pointer finger. 

You are past the point of being able or willing to resist him. Hopelessness sits heavy in your abdomen like a new organ, black and meaty. The venom of futility beats through you in place of your blood, it makes your skin turn grey, and your tongue chalk-dry. 

You watch vacantly as he pushes the tip of your finger into the enter key. As a line pops up beneath the one he typed. 

> 𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚘  𝚛𝚞𝚗𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐

“Victor was supposed to die here,” he explains gleefully, keeping your hand dead still, and your finger pressed deep into the key he had forced you to press. 

You feel a weight in you that is unexplainable, elusive, incomprehensible. A black hole where your guts should be. Something Eldritchian, like gravity, that makes your head feel heavy and nebulous, and your feet sink into the floor. 

“Don’t move your finger,” he instructs, stern and unforgiving. He means it. 

“I don’t understand,” you cry, obeying as he releases your hand, and he pinches a thin green wire that pokes out from the side of the keyboard. 

“I designed this all for him, you see—” he says, gliding his fingers down the wire, to where it enters the steel cabinet beneath the terminal. “He wanted to be the one to set everything in motion, fucking egotist that he was.”

He twists the small metal handle to open the door, and it squeals as it reveals its contents — you can’t quite see until he gives you room to look downward. 

You’re not sure what you’re looking at, at first. Blocks of ivory clay, wrapped in plastic, webbed with wires and kept together with straps of black tape. 

It dawns on you, though, as your eyes trail back up the little green wire, to where it connects to the keyboard, right beside the enter key. 

You let out a whine like a kicked puppy. “Is it — is it going to explode?” 

“Only if you lift your finger,” he hums, the pride of victory so concentrated in his voice that you can taste the salt of it in his breath. 

You would cry more keenly if you weren’t suddenly petrified of moving — because you understand, now, that you are as good as a warm corpse. A dead man’s switch he had orchestrated for your husband to trigger. He couldn’t run the code himself, having designed it to kill whoever did. 

No, he just used the same body he has never had any qualms about using, only this time for an additional purpose. 

He has made you his weapon as much as his toy. 

“What is it d-doing,” you sob, but you can guess the answer. 

“You read the script, didn’t you?” He asks, hot breath seeping through the hair at the back of your head, as one of his hands settles on the side of your thigh. His palm is cold and sticky as it slides up to your hip. It makes your skin bristle and your heart drop. 

“I didn’t — I didn’t know what it meant,” you moan, tongue slippery and stuttering on every syllable. 

“You’re a clever girl, Mia,” he lauds deeply. “What do you think it’s doing?” 

The repulsive softness of his touch makes you shudder, cold abhorrence dribbling down your spine — because he doesn’t need to be aggressive, nor forceful, nor violent, now that he has you where he wants you. Because he knows that you will not and cannot attempt to fight him off. Because he can fuck with your head, like he has always been predisposed to — putting the onus on you to refuse him, knowing that you wouldn’t. Then whose fault is it but your own? 

This time, even crueller; he can handle you how he pleases, because he knows you want to live. 

“Are there—” you ask in a whimper. “Are there bombs at the coordinates?”

His other hand fixes to your opposite hip, the hem of your long t-shirt draping over his wrists. He’ll have realised by now that you’re not wearing any underwear, because you are still wearing what you slept in. You can hear it in his breathing, it turns frayed as his hard fingertips brush your bare hips.

“Close,” he chuckles, head sinking to your neck. 

You break out in sobs, hoarse and shattered, arm quivering where you can’t rest your weight into the chest-height keyboard, nor drop it to relax the slowly aching muscles. 

You can hardly utter the words that stammer between your teeth. “Are p-people dying?” 

“Guess.” 

“Yes,” you whisper. 

He smiles. “See?” He murmurs. “You’ve always known.” 

The cement floor feels warm under the soles of your feet, and you wonder if the maws of hell are about to open up beneath you and swallow you whole. You hope it does, and you hope it digests you slowly. Hope it eats away at your sin and failures with brimstone and stomach acid, layer by layer, until there’s nothing left of you but the seeds of what once could have been a whole person. Seeds that might have germinated but were never planted, never nurtured. Wasted in the barren soil of a whore like you. 

Your eyes cleave to the blinking underscore on the command prompt — running, it says, and it doesn’t change — and you think for a moment you might be able to hear the cries of death over the horizon. The brontide of murder by the thousands, every second. One for every breath you take. 

You’re met only with beating silence, and the ragged breathing of the beast behind you. 

“If I take my finger off, w-will it stop?” 

You quietly hope that he might have overestimated your selfishness. Might have orchestrated some ploy that would force you to decide between your life or the lives of thousands of innocent people. Might tell you that releasing the key would put a stop to the suffering, both yours and theirs. 

But you know he is smarter than that. 

“No, girl,” he says dryly. “There’s no stopping it now. It’s already been done.” 

You choke on a cry as he lifts your t-shirt to your waist, and you hear him chortle under his breath. 

Seems he has staked his life on your desire to survive. Confident you won’t release the key and kill the both of you, because you want to live. Because you think you have somebody coming to save you. Because you think your life matters enough to preserve. 

He nudges your legs apart with his knee, and your finger feels light on the key. 

The air in the belly of the NH90 is resinous and heavy. Scarce. Hard to breathe and even harder to keep in his chest. 

The weight of death and failure hangs thick in it, a smog, one that keeps the remaining soldiers penitently and bitterly silent. Seething, mourning the men they lost; whose bodies they had to abandon, left to bloat and rot in the ambush they were caught in like mice in an unmonitored trap. 

There’s a rage shared, though. Swelling and shuddering in the steel bowel of the helicopter, as he and his men listen to the incoming reports from Laswell, and all they can do is sit and wait for the bird to approach its destination. 

“…Istanbul, Hamburg — fuck. Zurich. Dublin. Two in Paris, so far,” her voice is weak, grim, compulsively relaying every attack as if it might fuel their hunger to stop it. “We’ve sent out an emergency alert to instruct civilians to stay indoors. Until you find that drive, that’s all we can do.” 

“How frequent, Laswell,” Johnny grumbles into his headset. 

“Roughly — one every thirty seconds.” 

The Sergeant presses his fingertips into his eyes, head bowed, all but keeled over in his seat. Mumbles fuckin’ hell mournfully under his breath. Weighed down by that heroic grief, the poignant lamentation of his failure to save the lives he had set out to, the collapse of three years worth of efforts to prevent this very outcome. 

“They’ve targeted business districts, street corners, office buildings. Public transport. Subways.” 

Ghost checks his watch; just after half-past nine in the morning. One or two hours behind in the more western regions of Europe. Peak commuting hours in central cities. 

Failure . It rumbles deep in Ghost’s ears as he stares into the dark clouds through the small window across from him. 

It putrefies. It festers. Fury that turns black and sticky, thick in his veins — but not slow moving. It beats through him hard, and fast, it makes his vessels distend and his skin burn. Pellets of acidic sweat form on his skin and do little to cool him. His hands are rigid. Searing. Tendons taut and close to snapping. Knuckles white-hot.

His eyes are red with it. Wide and bloodshot and twitching in the corners. Jaw grinding so ferociously into his skull his molars threaten to shatter under the pressure. 

He can hear you, indistinctly, somewhere in the hollows between his ear canals and the back of his throat. 

Not only your indelible scream, the one ringing in his ears louder than his tinnitus — but your voice. The gentle terror in your throat every time you warned him of exactly this. 

You know what will happen. 

Riddles him with guilt that manifests as crude oil. Incendiary fuel for the rage that thunders within him, that needs only a single spark to ignite. But he contains it, for now. Chews on it like tobacco, lets the inebriant anger seep through his gums and bleed into his brain where it simmers behind his forehead. 

His Captain told him that you aren’t his priority.

But you are. 

Now, he knows it, as certain as gravity — there is no denying it anymore, no dancing around the inexorable fact, that you have been from the start. 

You were his priority when he stole you. His priority when he interrogated you. His priority when he dragged you back to your estate. His priority when he let you loose among the mongrels. 

He just hadn’t accepted it yet.

He had repudiated it with every fibre of his being, every synapse of his brain. Didn’t let himself make the calls he knew, deep in his gut, were the right calls to make — the call to spare you, the call to exonerate you, the call to send you home unharmed. 

You are stuck where you are because he was too much of a coward to confront his own humanity.

He won’t abide his cowardice anymore. Any residual shame for his concern for you has sloughed from him like irradiated skin, been trampled beneath the rugged soles of his boots, shot to pieces the moment he heard your broken scream over the radio signal. 

The ETA from the pilot crackles through his headset; “Five minutes out. Get ready to drop.” 

He shoves the magazine he had been flipping between his knuckles into his rifle and it clicks as he seats it. Tugs back the charging handle to chamber a fresh round. Taps the spare clips he had preemptively stuffed into the pockets of his tacvest, the backup that the helo had brought along with it. A blessing, because he does not plan on being frugal with his bullets. 

Igneous anticipation surges through him like a current, as he pushes himself to stand, gripping the handles on the ceiling of the aircraft to maintain his balance. Rolls open the sliding door early and peers out into the stormy sky — beneath the helicopter he sees the rampart of cedar hedges that encircle your summer estate, and he’s so close he can smell you. 

Soon your mansion comes into view, and he hopes you can hear the blades of his helicopter thundering across the sky. He hopes the walls of the building shake with it. He hopes Makarov can fucking feel it in the air, the fate so soon to befall him once he is caught between Ghost’s teeth. 

The Sergeant comes to stand beside him, clutching the ceiling and leaning out into the air to glare down at their destination. 

“Reckon Makarov is still in there?” Johnny asks through gritted teeth, acrimony thick in his voice. 

Ghost responds with a stiff nod. “He’ll be taking his fuckin’ time.” 

“Plenty of time to catch him, then.” 

Whatever tell he failed to conceal seems to alert Soap to the machinations of his mind, and the Sergeant lands a firm pat on his shoulder. 

“She’s a tough girl,” he assures him. “Don’t lose your head, eh?” 

Ghost bites on nothing, and a ragged breath rips from his lungs. “Too late.” 

It’s a fast few minutes before the helicopter begins its descent behind the treeline, far enough from the mansion that they’ve avoided fire from the woefully unprepared mercenaries that litter the estate. 

Ghost turns to address the men in the bird with him, and those that had been sent as reinforcement — the Captain had finally pulled his fucking head in, once the proof was drilled unremittingly into his ear, and he could suddenly justify returning to the estate with significant forces in tow. The next two aircrafts are not far behind. 

So as he roars his orders into his headset, he addresses all of them. 

“Right, the lot of you — we’re cleaning fucking house. Not a Konni soul left breathing. I want the fucking floor wiped with them! Copy?”  

Follows the uproar of yes sirs and copies as the rest of the soldiers up and ready themselves, rearing and ripe with a hunger to avenge the men they have already lost and the lives still being taken every minute. Exactly the furore he needs from them — he needs them driven, and vigilant, and angry, so that he can focus on his own objective. 

You. 

He leans out of the open door, unblinking in the gale of the blades, glaring down into the waving sea of grass beneath him. Just about close enough to jump out without breaking his legs on landing. 

“Alright!” Comes the inciting yell from the pilot, “move! Move! Move!”

Ghost had leapt to the ground at the first syllable. 

He sprints with the fury of a hunting wolf, legs pumping with adrenaline and tumescent rage, and his boots singe the grass underfoot. His massive assault rifle is light in his grip, an extension of his hands, raised and ready, itching to unload on a hair-trigger. 

He shoots down the first Konni soldier he sees through the trees before he had consciously acknowledged his presence there. The ear-splitting cracks of his gunfire reverberate through the steppe, likely alerting everyone in the vicinity to his incursion, if the helicopter hadn’t already.

Good. 

He wants you to hear him coming for you. He wants those that entrap you scared and scrambling. 

Stalks like an android. A terminator. Unrelenting and indomitable. Fires cannonades of red-hot bullets at every combatant that crosses his sights — precise, deadly, unhesitant. Splitting skulls with five-five-six calibre. Trampling over their corpses as he bulldozes towards the back door to your estate. 

His vision narrows to an aperture. Turns black at the edges. Pulsing. Bloodthirsty. The sight that’s left is clear and sharp — a reticule, crosshairs bright red, infrared vision hunting for the heatmap of one creature. 

Moves like he did when he first invaded your manor, back in the arctic mountains of your husband’s motherland. Just as hungry. Just as targeted. Killing every man in his sight without thought or vacillation — it happens instinctively, on autopilot, pre-programmed to clear targets as if they were still made of paper. His rage then was near as blinding, but rooted in an entirely different source.

His primary objective remains unchanged. 

Finding you. 

He fires a few rounds into the lofty glass of your sliding back door, and it shatters into shards of snow, sprinkling over his back as he storms in unhampered. 

“Mia!” He roars into the hollow of your mansion, hoping only that you’ll hear him, that you’ll know he’s coming for you — he expects no response, but he is still fraught not to hear one. 

Two soldiers in the sitting room. He shoots one through the forehead, but the other slips behind the stone pillar of the fireplace, out of sight. 

No matter, Ghost advances without reluctance. The man looks surprised to see him when he appears beside him, likely having expected some ducking-for-cover shootout — doesn’t have long to regret it, though, before Ghost fires three rounds through his neck, and his carmine blood sprays in a mist over the cobbled stone behind him. 

A chorus of gunfire wracks through the villa from every direction — up the stairs, through the corridor, out the front of the house. Stormed from every angle, now that the reinforcements had shown up, and his manpower matches that of the vermin that infest every corner of the property.

Their extinction is inevitable. 

Now, he can focus on what he came here for. 

He knows, wherever you are, that you can’t respond to him. So he calls for your captor instead. 

“Makarov!” He bellows, steaming through the kitchen, dining room, lounge — “I fucking know you’re in here, you piece of shit.” 

Continues up the stairs, shoots down another Konni that crosses his path.

“Wanna know what I’m gonna do when I fucking find you?” 

Sweeps the second floor — your bedroom, your cunt husband’s office, the ensuite he can still smell you in. Leaves bloody boot prints in the plush carpet and the sulphur of gunpowder in the stagnant air.

“Might start with your tongue, you disgusting cunt. Gonna cut it out and make you fucking swallow it.”  

The hatred starts to ulcerate within him when he doesn’t find you. Can’t even hear you. Feels the blisters of fury distending in every organ, threatening to burst, and he’s apoplectic with it. 

“Where the fuck are you!”

He thunders down the stairs, still inexplicably certain you’re somewhere, somewhere in the bowels of the palace. Not sure what it is that fortifies his confidence — magnetoreception, perhaps, sensing you nearby like your presence disrupts a radio signal. Maybe the lingering fragrance of your perfume and your sweat that dances in the air, leading him toward you like a string through a maze. 

But as there’s a fluke pause in the chaotic din of gunfire — in that fraction of a second— 

He hears you. 

What he thinks is you, anyway. 

A cry that cuts through the ephemeral silence like a knife, the pitch of your voice just high enough to pass through walls, through foundations, as he tracks it to the wall beneath the floating staircase. 

He notices immediately the gap in the edges of the panelling. 

Doesn’t waste a heartbeat looking for how to open it, whatever convoluted mechanism there might be in place to keep it locked — he steps back, hurling his boot into the centre of the panel with an explosive thud , and the echo behind it sounds hollow. 

He kicks it again, and again, and again, until a split forms in the lacquered wood — unceasing, even as he begins to feel splints in his shin — his boot slams into the panel unrelentingly until it erupts through the crater he deepened with every blow. His hands do the rest, tearing at the splintering wood like it’s made of cardboard, until the fissure is large enough for him to reach through and feel for a handle on the other side. 

He finds it quickly. Pulls it down and opens the door. It creaks as it swings. 

So encumbered by wrath that it weighs him down, his boots thud loudly with every step down the concrete stairs. Huffing like a bull. Steaming. 

Hears the pig before he sees him. 

“Unfortunate timing, Riley.” 

Met with the back of him, sinewy fucking ghoul — panting as though short of breath, clad in a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Only as his hand lowers does Ghost catch a glimpse of the Pernach pistol wrenched in his grip — he wipes the long barrel on the leg of his trousers, and in the dim white light of the bulb in the ceiling, Ghost sees a smear of wetness left behind in the fabric. 

The thought that crosses his mind is so putrid it makes his stomach rend itself in revulsion, and all he can do is hope that his assumption is erroneous. 

“Interrupted the fun part.” 

Ghost keeps the mouth of his rifle high, aligned with the back of his head. The only thing preventing him from pulling the trigger is his indecision on how slowly he wants him to die — and, more crucially, the risk that you are right behind him; that close-range bullets would tear straight through him and embed in you. 

And he’s endlessly thankful he curbed the impulse, because he hears your whimper eke out from obscurity. 

“Simon—” 

You’re alive. 

Relief as dizzying as liquor rushes through him in a torrent, a flash flood of napalm, and the embers of his worry reignite into an inferno of inveterate hatred, and his eyes glow red. 

Makarov turns his head over his shoulder as he shifts, just slightly — and  there, he sees you, hunched over but upright, between your anathema and the wall. Shaking. Knees locked but close to buckling. 

There’s nothing else he needs to see. No greater confirmation. 

The stifled fury sweltering within him tumefies to the point that the pressure threatens to crack his skull. He all but shudders with it, as he flips his rifle in his grip so that he holds it by the barrel like a baseball bat. 

The fucking egomaniac must have expected time to monologue, turning to aim his glistening gun at Ghost far too late — hardly has time to blink before Ghost swings the butt of his rifle into his armed hand, weapons colliding with a crack and the deafening eruption of a too-slow bullet fired as a last resort. The pistol is catapulted from Makarov’s grip, clacking loudly as it slams into the cement wall and bounces off the floor. 

Makarov snarls like a rabid cur, cursing through teeth; “Cукин сын.” Son of a bitch.

Greasy spite of besmears itself across his face. Eyes like beads in his gaunt skull. His belt is undone. Zipper down. 

Ghost carelessly tosses his rifle aside, and it skids across the concrete into the corner of the room. 

He was never going to proffer the pig the mercy of a bullet. 

There was only ever one means of execution befitting him. 

Frothing at the jaws as he abruptly thunders toward him, and despite the futile throw of a retaliatory fist, Ghost swiftly has him by the throat. Growls like a bear as he tackles him to the floor, in a furious blur, as the Russian contorts to pull an out-the-front switchblade from his sock. 

Only notices when the blade slices through his cheek, sharp as a scalpel, steel knicking the bone — but nothing at this point can hurt him. Everything in him, every nerve, every muscle, every cell — so focussed, so honed in on his victim that anything else is so utterly insignificant it disperses into smoke. 

The knife is gone before Makarov can muster a second attempt, riven from his grip and tossed to oblivion, and before he can swallow a breath, Ghost hurls his iron-hard knuckles square into the centre of his face, shattering his nose with a crunch , and the back of his head ricochets off the cement underneath with a teeth-chattering crack that makes the room go silent. 

The pig blinks, still breathing — so Ghost throws another, so violent that his nose caves in, and the blood splatters over the taut skin of his fist. 

Not enough. He throws another. Beats a crater into his forehead. Skull splits along the crest like ceramic wrapped together by skin. 

He throws another. Wrapping splits in the fissure and the blood spills like milk. 

Only sees red. Teeth bared. Eyes glass over.

Throws another, carmine fountain splashes out from the impact—

—another, eyeballs birthed from between purple eyelids, burst like blisters— 

—another, jaw breaks at the hinges from the rest of his skull—

—another, tongue severed and jutting out through shattered teeth—

—another, grey parasite of gelatinous brain spills out onto the concrete—

—another, and thuds turn to squelches.

—another, a fracture in his own knuckle. 

—another, his vision blurs. 

…another, and his fist is hitting concrete. 

Another. There’s nothing left. 

“S-Simon—”

Your weak voice cuts through the red fog like a beacon.  

His humanity gradually returns to him when he hears it. Comes back with a gulping breath, as he glares down at the body he bestrides. At the caldera of flesh and bone where his victim’s head used to be. 

Chest hounding, jaw loose, he can taste the iron of blood in his teeth. It drips from his beaten knuckles, speckles the cement like spilt paint. It sprays up his forearm like a glove. It glitters across his cheeks like freckles. 

You speak, again, and he finally breaks the surface. 

“Simon, what do I do?” 

He pushes himself to stand with a grunt, breathless, and attempts to wipe the blood spattered on his face with the back of his hand — smears the red leaking from his own wound in so doing, he forgot it was there. 

Turns to you, where you still stand facing the wall, and he grimaces — are you chained to it? 

“He m-made me—” You stammer out in broken sobs, and he grits his teeth as he girds himself to hear whatever horrific crime you were made victim to. “He made me press it. I c-can’t stop it — Simon, how do I make it stop?” 

His brows knot in worried confusion as he rushes towards you, fighting the urge to immediately take you by the arm and haul you into an embrace; such an act would be for his own comfort more than yours. 

But as though sensing his approach, you shriek—

“Don’t touch me!” 

He stops behind you, but your agitation simmers quickly. 

“You c-can’t — I can’t move,” you whine, shattered. “You can’t t-touch me.” 

“Mia…” He mumbles, finally registering what you’re looking at as he moves beside you — eyes pinned to a terminal interface, finger pressed into a keyboard below it. 

“It’s still going,” you weep. “It’s k-killing them… I can’t stop it. I’m killing them and I c-can’t stop it.” 

The tunnel vision that had focused solely on you widens just enough for him to absorb what you are talking about. The terminal, the keyboard — and as he looks at it, the drive. Jutting out of the plug at the base. 

The mission returns to him like a kick to the teeth. Laswell’s voice in his ear. Reminding him of every chemical bomb triggered, every thirty seconds, for the last forty minutes. 

His eyes catch the wire snaking out from under the key you press. Where it enters the open cabinet beneath the keyboard. Can see past your knees the blocks of C4 stacked from base to top, wired up tidily by experienced fingers. 

The realisation douses him like cold water. 

“What do I do,” you cry, as he reaches a careful arm around you. 

You flinch, and the guilt for startling you falls heavy in his stomach, but he can’t back away. Not now that he understands the predicament you’re caught in. 

Settles a thick finger next to yours, pressing into the enter key beneath it. 

“I need you to move your finger,” he murmurs gently.

You shake your head vigorously, desperately, shaking like a leaf but inadvertently leaning some of your weight against him. “I can’t.” 

There isn’t a choice. He coils an arm around your waist, gripping tight, and he feels you deflate as he lifts you upward. 

“ No, nonono, no…” you wail, but you don’t fight him; he twists you, reeling you away from the keyboard, until your finger is free and your hand drops to your side. 

You collapse into him once you’re no longer holding the dead man’s trigger — head rocks against his shoulder, weary hands clutching onto his forearm as though you’d plummet off a cliff if you let go. 

“I’m sorry,” you lament, voice frail and so fraught with grief it hurts him just to hear it. “I’m sorry — I let him — it’s my fault. I pressed it — I…” 

To hear you apologise makes his ribs close in. That you could ever be sorry for anything, that you could shoulder even an ounce of guilt — an injustice he cannot abide, and he presses his lips into your hair. 

“It’s not your fault, sweetheart,” he urges. “None of this is your fault. Hear me? It’s mine.” 

You sob, and he wants nothing more than to wrap both of his arms around you; to embrace you in earnest, to apologise unremittingly into your skin so that even the blood that pumps under it believes him when he says it. It’s not your fault. 

But he can’t. Your life is more important. “Now I need you to step back.” 

He lets go of you as you manage to stand on your own feet, balancing you with a hand on your back when you stumble, but you do as you are told — stepping back slowly, trembling, not yet willing to run. 

“Get out of the basement,” he orders firmly.

“No,” you refuse, shaking your head, still within arms reach — you gasp when the back of your heel collides with the corpse on the floor, and your head swivels to look down at it. 

He sees you gawk at it. Lips parting in horror. Eyes bulging with it. Can barely muster a sound. “...Simon…”

“Look at me,” he insists, and sweet girl, you do. Rheumy-eyed and quivering. “Mia — go upstairs.” 

“I’m not going anywhere,” you whimper, swallowing a breath. “Not without you.”

His chest tightens up, and it’s quickly clear to him you won’t leave unless compelled to — brave girl, your lack of self-preservation makes his teeth scrape together. 

He needs you out of the room before he attempts to interrupt the script. He can enter the command without lifting his finger from the enter key — but he needs to release it in order to press it. 

With his free hand, he speaks into his radio. “Johnny — how copy.” 

“Solid, LT,” he returns immediately. “Fucken’ bloodbath out here.” 

“I found the terminal. Entry under the stairs. Get here. Now.” 

Not even a minute before he hears the heavy boots, bounding down the stairs, but the Sergeant screeches to a halt when met by the carnage on the floor. 

“Jes— Jesus fucking Christ , Simon.” 

Not often the boy uses his Lieutenants name; says it meekly, like it’s a greater sin than using the Lord’s name in vain.

“Is that…” 

“Makarov,” Ghost spits his name out. 

“Where’s the girl?” He asks sombrely, as though already anticipating bad news — the state of Makarov’s carcass likely evidence. Ghost only gives him a nod in your direction, and he turns his head over his shoulder; you shrivel up when the Sergeant looks at you. 

“Listen to me,” Ghost barks, and Soap marches over hastily, ever obedient. “I need you to take her.” 

“Now?” Johnny balks. 

“Now.” 

“What about the terminal?” 

Ghost huffs through his teeth. “I’ve got it,” he grits. “Now get her on a fucking helo.” 

“No — no,” you suddenly yelp, inching closer to him, as if he might be the one to protect you from the Sergeant he has ordered to take you. “I said I’m not going anywhere.” 

His eyes wrench shut. Bites out a pained sigh. “Mia — go with him. Please.”

“No!” You yell, fragile voice breaking in the strain, “I’m staying, I’m not letting you disappear again—”

“Soap,” he grunts rigidly. 

“Copy.” 

Needn’t restate the order. The Sergeant understands well enough, and he marches toward you unrepentantly. 

That ever-present guilt burns in his throat as he watches you cower away from him, shaking your head and gulping on sobs — but Johnny scoops you up like you weigh nothing, an arm firmly buckled around your waist, back riveted to his side. He wastes no time, stepping over the corpse on the floor and carrying you towards the stairs. 

“Put me down!” You squeal — bucking, kicking, you even try to get an elbow in — “I’m not going! No! Simon! Simon!” 

His eyes are warm. He cannot listen to it. Agonising as a ruptured eardrum to hear you cry for him — right there, where he could answer you — but he is cruelly unable to. 

“Johnny — you get her that fucking passport if it’s the last thing you do,” he roars. “You hear me?” 

“You got it, LT.” 

The man carting you up the stairs is far stronger than the one who dragged you down them, and no amount of kicking or twisting or scratching loosens his grip. 

All you can do is cry, and scream, and pray that Simon changes his mind, and comes bounding up the stairs, having performed a miracle — that he frees you from the restraint of his subordinate, that he promises never to leave you alone again, that he gets on the helicopter with you. 

But you are carted down the hallway, toes dipping in the blood that puddles on the slate, and he does not come. 

"Put me down you son of a bitch!” You wail, voice shredded to husks and squeaks after the labour of interminable screaming. “Simon!” 

The Scotsman — Johnny — is steadfast. Unshakeable. Any moment you feel like you might come close to slithering out of his grip, he readjusts, reorients, subdues. 

“I’m only following orders, hen,” he grumbles, and you can hear the unease in his voice, coating his throat. Perturbed, perhaps. Guilty. “Not trying to hurt ye.” 

You are not afraid of him. There is nowhere worse he could take you than where you have already been, and you trust Simon not to have left you in the arms of somebody that could hurt you. 

No, there’s something else that terrifies you. 

That Simon will die at your hand, along with the thousands of others you have already killed. 

Your fault, because you sent him to that factory, where there was never anything to be found. Your fault, because you let Vladimir command you like a puppet, too frightened to pull back on his strings. Your fault, because you let Simon ever think you could be useful for anything but your inbuilt purpose. 

“I f-fucking hate you!” you sob, though once you utter it you’re not sure who the sentiment is for. Yourself, maybe. Johnny. Vladimir. Everyone you have ever met. 

“Ah know,” he says stiffly, giving you a pat where his arm coils around your back. “But he wants you alive.” 

He moves quickly despite your wriggling, keeping you as low as he can without letting your feet touch the floor — gunfire rings out in the distance, cracks that echo from within the house and outside. 

Soon he has you over his shoulder, just to free a hand, and you hear him talking to somebody over the radio. 

“Gaz, Gaz!” He belts, “how copy?”

You can’t hear whoever responds, assuming the conversation is being had within the man’s helmet. 

“You near the birds? Reckon you could start one up for me?” 

“Got the princess. Lieutenant wants her out of here. Yeah — she’s not happy about it.” 

“Does it sound like I give a fuck what the Captain said?” 

“Good man. Be there in two. Out.” 

He lets out a sharp and beleaguered breath, lowering you from his shoulder, where he must have assumed you might have been uncomfortable — or, less charitably, worried you’d slip out of his grip. 

Shards of glass crunch under his boots as he carries you through the shattered back door, out into the hammering rain, where the gunshots are close enough to make you cower into his chest as if he might shield you from them. 

“Almost there, hen—”

Boom. 

Assurance punctuated by deafening thunder that quakes the ground beneath him. Shatters all remaining glass on the first floor. Twinkles as the slivers fall to the patio behind you. 

Your diaphragm seizes. Heart stops dead. Hearing goes dull. Tongue goes dry. Eyes go gauzy. 

There’s a beat where you all but lose consciousness. Disappear within yourself like you’ve fallen down a well. 

You resurface when your escort begins to run. 

“NO!” 

You shriek viciously enough to make your vocal cords bleed, entire body contorting and writhing until you finally break free from him, and you land in the grass with a thud. 

He fails to grab you in time, you scurry in the mud, fingers clawing at handfuls of grass until you’re able to scramble to your feet — you break into a full sprint, bounding like a hare, sucking the wet air so deep into your lungs it makes you dizzy. 

“Mia!” Johnny roars after you, quick in his chase, but you endure. 

You run bare-footed over the shards, utterly ignorant to how many slivers might get embedded in your soles — the interior of the house is cloudy with dust and smoke, creaking and crumbling, moaning in dispute of its destruction. 

“Simon!” You wail, scrambling down the hallway, towards the staircase — even more glass carpeting the floor where the balustrade had been blown to smithers, and rained down on the slate underneath it. 

Charcoal-black smoke billows out from the open door to the basement, entirely obfuscating, beating and waving like a creature in itself. 

You venture into it unhampered. 

“S—” a shout bitten off by a cough as you leap down the stairs, “Simon! Please—”

You choke on your plea as you trip over something heavy at full speed, toppling into the smokey abyss and landing on sticky concrete. 

You cry, it hurts, every part of you — your eyes burn, and your lungs singe with every breath, and your knee stings — but you hastily turn to feel for what you had tripped over, and your hands find warm fabric. 

Simon. He made it to the stairs. Find his neck and you feel him breathing — hardly, he wheezes with every pitiful inhale. 

And his skin feels wet. Gritty. Peeling. 

“No, nononono,” you wail, clambering up and over him, attempting to situate yourself while utterly blind. 

You feel desperately for his shoulders, scooping your hands through his underarms until you have him hooked by your elbows. 

“Please, Simon—” You beg, coughing, spluttering, as you engage every fibre of muscle in your body to lift him from the stairs. 

“Mia — are you in there?” Johnny calls from the basement door, voice dampened by the density of the smoke. 

“He’s alive!” You try to roar, voice abraded to near-mute, and you’re not sure if the Scotsman could even hear you. 

You heave , pulling Simon’s enormous body up a single step with all of your might — dizzyingly heavy, and yet somehow lighter than you would have expected. You cry in your strain as you pull him again, stepping backward onto the next step up, hauling him agonising inch by agonising inch. 

Only as the smoke begins to settle, and you make it up another stair, do you see the blood. Coating you like paint. 

The side of his head is singed where it wasn’t covered by his helmet. Thick fabric of his uniform shredded by the explosion, exposing the blackened skin within, where it blisters and peels to reveal the yellow fascia beneath it. 

Your eyes land, then, on the strands of crimson flesh where his shin used to be. 

“Oh, god,” you wretch, cough, and turn your head to spill tar-black vomit onto the cement wall beside you. “Fuck — S-Simon…” 

You feel a hand on your arm, then, and it grabs you, picking you up and dragging you out of the smoke. 

“No!” You sob, “no — please, he’s alive, you have to—”

Johnny plants you in front of him, firm hands on either side of your shoulders, and he glares into you with such piercing eyes you have no choice but to meet them. 

“We’ll get him help, okay?” He pledges, firm, unyielding. “But he’ll never forgive either of us if you die here today, understood?” 

You wheeze, lungs glutted with smoke and charcoal, tears so wet on your cheeks that your skin itches, and you’re not able to form a single word. 

“C’mon, hen,” he says gently, scooping an arm under your knees and hoisting you deftly off the ground, carrying you tightly to his chest. “Let’s get you out of here.”

There’s no fight left in you. No wrath, no terror, no spite. Only a hollow pit in the core of you, sucking anything else into its void, and leaving you bitterly empty. 

Johnny totes you back out into the pounding rain, and you feel it rinsing the coal and blood from your calloused skin as he sprints across the expansive lawn.

You hear the beating of the helicopter gradually grow louder as he gets closer to the treeline. 

“They stopped!” 

An unfamiliar shout over the roaring aircraft, but you don’t turn to look. You keep your stinging eyes held shut so that you can feel the grit of the smoke wearing down their film. 

“Cannae hear ye, Gaz!” Johnny yells back, voice vibrating right through you. 

“The bombs! They’ve fuckin’ stopped!” 

You realise then that what you had thought was a shout, was a cheer. 

“Hear that, hen?” Johnny says pridefully, lowering his head closer to yours so that you can hear him. “He did it.” 

You have no words to utter, but you feel your heart twist up behind your sternum. 

He did it. 

Soon the helicopter’s engine is deafening, and Johnny unfurls you, raising you up by hands under your arms and sitting you down in the open door of the aircraft. Another hand encircles you, then, to prevent your limp body from falling back out. 

“Jesus—” blurts the man beside you — the Sergeant. Gaz, you suppose. “She okay?” 

“No,” Johnny barks, giving him a pat on the knee. “Y’take care of ‘er, yeah?” 

“Course,” Gaz confirms solemnly, with a rigid nod. 

The Scotsman addresses you, then. 

“You enjoy that new life of yours, eh?” He says loudly, an indeterminate expression of certainty tight in his features. “You’ve earned it.” 

With a nod, he’s away, unslinging his rifle from his back and barreling back off into battle. You watch vacantly as he disappears behind the oak trees. 

The man in the helicopter with you gives you a nudge to get your attention — doesn’t grab you, or pull you, just waits patiently for you to turn your head and acknowledge him. 

“Mia,” he says, as gently as he can while still audible over the helicopter blades. You finally turn to look at him. “C’mere, let’s buckle you in.”

He looks at you sincerely, sick worry in the back of his eyes, reflecting the dim light of the grey sky. You nod weakly, and he helps you stand, leading you to a seat and holding you as you slump into it. He tightens the straps over your chest, buckling them and giving them a jostle to make sure they’re secure. 

He fixes a pair of earmuffs over your head, adjusting them over your ears, and you’re suddenly swimming in a deep and thumping silence. Puts a pair on himself. 

“There we go,” he says into his microphone, and you can hear his voice clearly. He leans into the cockpit and taps the pilot on the shoulder. “Cleared hot.” 

With that, the helicopter begins its ascent. Wobbling on its way up, as the Sergeant settles into the seat opposite you.

“Where are you going to take me now,” you ask dejectedly, hardly a squeak, voice excoriated beyond repair. 

You expect him to say something vague, something obscurely menacing. To the compound. To an airbase. To a camp down south. 

He gives you a weak smile. 

“Home,” he says. 

[fanged-fanfics]

I was wondering if I could request a small fic pt 2. of Creature Commandos Weasel x child turned weasel reader?

Where the team is all meeting for the first time and their reaction to Weasel and little weasel✨

I just think it would be super cute like reader is just like “oh friends!!🥰” But the others are just like “what is thatttt💀”

☆ "You Have... a Kid?!-" — Weasel & Child!Reader ☆

Genre: Platonic/Familial || they/them pronouns for reader || Warning for mild swearing

A/N: To everyone who's been asking for a sequel fic for a while; I deeply apologize for not doing it sooner T_T best way I can explain is it's complicated. Here's the part one for those who need it

──────.𖥔 ݁ ˖˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗.𖥔 ݁ ˖ ──────

In the cell containing various mutant life, one member was notably missing. There wasn't any of the usual distant sounds of gagging, snarling, or even the maiming of the sixth pillow in a day. What there was instead was the sound of an attempted Jenga game clattering across the floor, a man of bronze metal having thrown it to the side. The black and green scientist before him groaned, rubbing his eyes sockets "That's the third game, G.I." "G.I. Robot had eliminated the nazis" the robot claimed simply, sitting back in his seat. "Right, right. Nina, you deal with him" Dr. Phosphorus said, getting up from the table

Nina began re-stacking the blocks, asking aloud, "Has anyone seen Weasel? He's been gone a while". "Good," Bride spoke up from her corner of the room "Means he isn't in here shittin' on all our stuff". "He's with his lawyer" Dr. Phosphorus answered as Nina sat to continue the next Jenga round. "Usually those visits only take about an hour. It's been closer to three" Nina frowned, moving the top block and placing it to the side

Just then, approaching voices were heard from outside. The lock on the door began to rattle. "There's your answer" Bride said. But when the door swung open, what came in instead was something that looked a lot like Weasel, except... smaller? Much smaller. Uncoordinated, wide eyes, fuzzy form, a spitting image. "The hell-" Phosphorus began, leaning over to see it better "Don't tell me that thing found a lady Weasel". "Nothing like that," Elizabeth Bates began, stepping into the doorframe "This.. is your new cellmate"

"What is it" Bride asked, looking at the small furry creature with displeased curiosity. The creature skittered in on all fours, hands uncoordinated and flailing a bit as they did so. They went over to G.I. first, sniffing at his arm. The robot squinted, attempting to run a scan, but they ran off too fast. They bounded over to Nina, who reached down a hand to pet them a bit as Elizabeth continued. "A patient at the site of John Doe's case was found. The DNA traced back to his saliva, and I requested to have them housed together"

"So he spit on a kid and now it's our problem? Great" Phosphorus said. "The results showed a similar genetic pattern to lycanthropy," Elizabeth responded "It's not making it easy on his case, but there is a connection between the two of them". The child scampered along, bounding up to Bride excitedly. Her steely gaze made them freeze, and they slowly backed up, instead heading straight for Dr. Phosphorus

"I wouldn't do that, kid-" Phosphorus said, trying to step back. The kid kept running over, eager to greet the radioactive man. Before their little snout could make contact, they were suddenly lifted off the ground. Weasel was back in the room, and he gave a big sigh of relief. He was able to lift the kid by their scruff before they could be hurt. He squinted at Phosphorus, growling as he turned away. "Don't give me that shit, I was making sure it wouldn't bite me" Phosphorus grumbled

"Poor thing," Nina said softly, watching Weasel carry them to his little corner. He plopped down, placing down the kid, who proceeded to roll around and curl up in his arms. "So this has to stay with us now? You expect us to take care of two of that thing?" Bride asked, pointing to Weasel. "I know, I know, but this is the only way I could get them somewhere safe. They were just going to experiment on them otherwise" Elizabeth answered.

G.I. focused on the game between him and Nina, while Nina herself kept sympathetically glancing at the new kid. Being a child, labeled as a monster... it hit much too close to home. "I think we can take care of them. It seems like Weasel's doing better with them around" she said hopefully. The kid was currently curled up right at Weasel's side, who was cradling them close and sniffing them to make sure they were okay. He gave a little murmur, tucking their head under his chin as he closed his eyes

"I'm not cleaning up after that thing" Phosphorus said. "There's nothing more I can do" Elizabeth reinstated firmly "So you might as well get comfortable with them". With that, she stepped out of the room, and the door was shut once more. Phosphorus glanced to Bride, who scoffed "This is such bullshit". "Come on, Bride, they're just a kid" Nina said "The least we can do is take it easy on them". Bride huffed, rolling her eyes, but she stifled any further comments

"Friend Nina," G.I. robot called. Nina turned back, removing another block so the mechanical soldier could take his turn. Her gaze kept occasionally flicking back to the little one Weasel was protecting. He was much calmer than his usual glassy-eyed snarling, it was... almost sweet. She took a deep breath, deciding to focus on the game for now. She made a mental note to check on both of them later on. For now, at least, they seemed happy

[chadillacboseman]

Regrets

Summary: This was never supposed to happen. Simon did everything in his power to keep you safe. He failed. Reader is gender neutral!

Warnings: Torture, bodily injury.

A/N: Holy shit I actually wrote something for Ghost. I don't particularly care for him myself, but I know others do. So, have a little treat I guess.

--

A fist connects with your cheek, and you feel a hot, coppery taste spring into your mouth. Again, your vision swims, hazy, on the brink of unconsciousness.

Oh, how you wish it would take you. How you wish you could slip into sweet nothingness and let the pain subside for a moment.

Instead, fingers thread into your hair and yank, hard, lifting your face to the gaze of your assailant. The man has dark eyes, narrowed over a black balaclava. He barely speaks your language, and you don't speak his at all.

He's been at this for what feels like hours- but maybe it's only been minutes.

Simon always taught you to never count the time.

"I can do this all day," the man spits the words at you, dripping with vitriol and a thick accent you still can't place.

You don't have what he wants. Truthfully.

Simon never told you anything that could put you at risk. He kept you at arm's length, like a collectible on some high up, dust-covered shelf.

"I don't. Know. Anything," you hiss. Blood patters from your lips as you speak, falling in thick rivulets onto your t-shirt.

Another blow.

This time, it sends the chair you're tied to toppling to the floor. With your arms subdued, you can't break the fall; instead, your face connects with the cold pavement with a sickening whack.

The darkness tries so hard to claim you.

The soldier's boot connects with your ribs and you're torn from the brink of it, wheezing as you feel at least one of your ribs give way with a dull crack that reverberates through your body.

A hand tangles in your hair once more and you're hauled upright, too broken and exhausted to even cry out at the pain.

Another man in a balaclava approaches your interrogator and places a hand on his shoulder. Words are exchanged that you don't understand.

The two of them depart together, leaving you alone in the room. Perhaps they had decided that you were no good to them dead.

You wonder what Simon is doing.

Is he panicking? Is he as calm and collected as always?

Has he decided that this is just an acceptable loss- something that comes with the territory?

You let your head loll back, ignoring the way the pain throbs to life in your temples at the motion. A single, dangling bulb above you burns into your eyes until you see sparks in your vision and have to close them.

You're no soldier. You're not built for this. That you've survived this long surprises even you. But you're at your limit now, and you know it.

You know that Simon is going to blame himself. This might be enough to push him over the edge.

You wish you could tell him you forgive him. That you knew the risks when you chose him, and you would never go back and change it.

The door on the opposite side of the room creaks open and the two men return, this time with a metal cart on wheels.

Your heart takes residence in your throat as you glimpse the blowtorch that rests atop it.

"You know what this is?" Your interrogator holds up a small container, but you can't read the label in the dim light, "White phosphorus."

The glint in his eye tells you that this is bad.

He opens the container and collects what looks like a white paste onto his gloved finger. As he moves toward you, you instinctively recoil, trying desperately to get away, your bindings still holding form.

The interrogator drags a line of the substance down your forearm, about 6 inches in length. It gives off a pungent odor that makes your eyes water as the man gestures for the blowtorch.

The white hot flame ignites and you struggle at your bindings once more, jerking violently in the chair as it moves closer to your arm.

The flame connects with the paste and in an instant it ignites, sizzling to life like a firework.

The pain is almost instant.

It's like nothing you've ever felt before - it makes you shriek until your throat is raw. It feels as if every nerve in your arm is being rended to pieces by a heated claw.

Nausea sets in alongside the pain, threatening to make you relive your breakfast. The two battle until finally pain emerges triumphant and your vision goes black.

--

Simon's boot connects with the door, sending it flying inward as the flimsy frame shatters with the force of his kick.

Soap, Gaz, and Price filter in alongside him, making quick work of the two men in the room.

"Fuck!" Simon's eyes fall on you, slumped in the chair, a tendril of acrid smoke still curling into the air from your arm.

"Go, we'll clear the rest!" Price gestures to you as the three of them make their way out the door.

Your name barely escapes Simon's lips, falling dead in the quiet room. You don't move.

There's so much blood.

He repeats your name again, louder this time as he crosses the room to you. He kneels beside you, feeling the tightness of panic growing in his chest when you don't respond.

Shakily, he feels for a pulse on your wrist. Feels a wave of relief wash over him when he detects it, thready and weak, but there.

"I'm so sorry," he murmurs as his knife makes quick work of the bindings. His words feel like a bandaid placed on a gunshot wound.

How could you ever forgive him for this?

"Simon?" You croak his name out through blood covered lips and he jerks his head up, eyes wild as they find yours.

Seeing your face makes another pang of guilt rip through him- dried blood is caked to your skin and hair, and deep purple bruises have made you almost unrecognizable.

The pain in your arm nearly makes you black out again, but you don't. Holding onto the thread of consciousness to make sure that this is real.

Simon scoops you into his arms gently, but you still whimper in pain as your broken body is lifted from the chair.

He presses his masked forehead to yours, taking a moment to inhale shakily, "This never should have fuckin' happened, I-"

He's interrupted by the arrival of Price, who shuffles over to examine you.

"Shit. It's bad, Simon-"

"I know."

Price brings his radio receiver to his mouth and calls for Nik as you once again flit on the verge of unconsciousness, Simon's masked face swimming in and out of focus.

It takes you once more.

--

The darkness is ever-present, pressing on you like a weighted blanket. Through it, you can hear an incessant beeping, and the muffled sounds of voice you don't recognize.

Your whole body feels heavy, and yet you seem to be floating.

You try so hard to wake up, to open your eyes, to move your hands- anything.

Then a voice you recognize pierces through the darkness- a thick Scottish accent floating somewhere around you.

"Go home, LT. You look like hell," Soap sounds like he's speaking from the end of a tunnel.

"No," Simon's deep voice is closer, less distorted

"They'll call you if there's a change. You sittin' here for days on end won't make a difference."

"Fuck off."

A sigh of exasperation and then footsteps fade into the blackness.

There's a long silence, punctuated by that fucking beeping. You feel a new weight, a hand on yours, rough and calloused, offering a gentle squeeze.

"I don't know if you can hear me," Simon's voice is still close, not quite clear, but there. Reassuring in its familiarity, "I need you to wake up. Please."

You try so hard for him. You really do.

You try to squeeze his fingers, focusing all of your effort into the muscles in your hands.

It doesn't work.

The darkness is too strong, too pressing. The effort you expend trying just drags you back down as if into a deep, black ocean.

Even the beeping fades away.

There's no sense of time wherever you are. Has it been hours? Days?

Weeks?

Simon's voice comes and goes, as does his grip on your hand. Sometimes, other voices come, too.

Gaz. Price. A sweet woman who changes the bandages on your arm and asks Simon if he needs anything.

He always says no.

As time wears on, Simon talks more- he tells you what's happening back home, and lists the people who have asked about you. He describes the flowers that adorn your hospital room, coming from as far as Las Almas with love from Rudy and Alejandro.

He tells you about the guilt he feels for not coming sooner. For letting this happen at all. Promises turn into begging, pleading for you to wake up.

He tells you he cleaned the house to prepare for when you come home. The thought of that makes you feel warm, almost seems to push the darkness away for a moment.

Your hand twitches in his.

"Did you just-" Simon searches your face, looking for a sign that you're awake. He hadn't imagined it, had he?

"Can you hear me?" He is squeezing your hand now, his other hand on your face, "C'mon, do that again. I know you can. I know you're in there."

You want to tell him how hard you're trying.

God, are you trying.

"I felt movement, Johnny," Simon's hand never leaves yours, but his voice moves away from you.

"LT...you need to get some sleep. In your own bed," Soap sounds worried, "It's been a week."

Ah. There it is.

Simon doesn't answer him, and eventually you hear footsteps fade away. The beeping remains.

You're determined now. It takes what feels like hours, concentrating, focusing- willing your body to just fucking cooperate.

Come on. Wake up. WAKE UP!

Your eyes flutter open and you're met with a dimly-lit room. Machines to one side of you flicker and beep. Your vision is still blurry, your eyes no doubt weak from their extended vacation.

It's still hard to move- your muscles seem to have forgotten how to cooperate. You manage to glance to your left to find Simon slumped over in a chair, snoring softly, his face half covered by a black surgical mask.

"Simon?" Your voice sounds so foreign to your own ears.

He jerks awake and his eyes first look to the door, then to you.

For a moment, he doesn't move. Scared that this might be a dream. A rug pull brought on by his exhausted subconscious.

When he's sure you won't disappear when he blinks, he grabs your hand, one of the few familiar feelings you recognize.

Words don't come to either of you, but he rests his forehead against yours and just breathes.

"How long have you been here?" You manage to ask; your mouth struggles with the words, but he still understands them.

"Never left."

[stardahlia]

Unicron In Fleshy Form Pt3.2

Summary: Human shares a few war crimes and history facts, only one sided. For now.

Warning/tags: Racism(Specism?). SFW?. War crimes and disturbing historical facts mentioned(Plus a present one). Mention of possible torture. Read at your own discretion.

Characters: Tfp Megatron. Human.

Pronouns: It, its. Human. @1stsana I believe you wanted to be alerted for this post? Sorry if I got the @ wrong, I'm still learning :'D.

3… 2.. 1. GO! _____________________

Megatron could scoff, hell he almost did scoff at the absurdity coming from the fleshy pest. He should crush it for having the audacity to cut him off, if only he wasn’t planning on using it as a hostage. But, maybe he could let Starscream toy with it? …. No, he’d most likely screw something up, leading to the organic’s escape. “Hey, are you even listening, Pointy?” The voice of the annoying creature grated at his patience, almost at the same level Starscream liked to reach. Unfortunately, it noticed his attention returning to it, and continued. “Like I was saying, White Phosphorus, nasty thing but also quite cool when it isn’t being used on people. Did you know it’s still being used today? Even though it’s a war crime? Anyways, moving on, do you guys avoid attacking or killing medics? Cuz it’s a war crime here to do that to an unarmed medic.”

“I do not care for your laws, crimes or primitive tactics, and I suggest yo-” “Primitive?? I’ll have you know that we’ve developed bombs that leave behind imprints, or shadows, of the people that were vaporized!” Megatron would’ve slammed his fist down by the container the fleshbag was in if it weren’t for what it had said. His curiosity was piqued, for the moment. He could let it go on if it meant potentially learning valuable information. “And I don’t think that’s even in the top ten most disturbing things we’ve done!”

_____________________

And CUT!

Human’s dancing on a fine line here, practically teasing death. I won’t share what I believe to be the worst of the worst history stuffs, I’ll leave that dialog for the void between posts.

[nightlyrequiem]

Be Still My Heart

Chapter 2- Analyze, Adapt, Overcome

Masterlist AO3 Next Previous

New Chapter Every Saturday

You're the best in the meth industry but a new product suddenly pops up. You and your boss, Valeria, must figure out who is making it so you can take back the market. All the while tension is building between the two of you.

A/N: This is one is a bit short and a little uneventful, but I promise you it gets good. I'm very excited to get to the later chapters.

Tags/Warnings: Illegal Substances, Boss Employee Relationship, Angst, Some Hurt/Comfort, Violence, Manipulation, Suggestive Themes, Smut (But Only in CH19.), Dual POV

 Even after a few weeks, you can't get that meth out of your mind. You lightly swish your hips to the beat of the song playing in your earbuds. Your gloved hands carefully pour the liquidated Red Phosphorus into an Erlenmeyer flask. Even through the gas mask you can still pick up wafts of the garlicy smell of the chemical. You'll have to talk to Valeria about getting a new a gas mask. Destroying your lungs is not one of your goals in life. While you work on this batch your mind strays to the meth Valeria brought you. The Enginuity of its creation is both impressive and irritating. You're a little upset that you didn't think to use morphine. Although that isn't entirely your fault. Getting unlicensed morphine here is like pulling teeth. That's why Las Almas's choice of drug isn't heroin.

You inaccurately hum along to the song while you measure the proper amount of Sulfuric Acid to add to the Red Phosphorus. You're very precise with your cooking. Too little and it won't be as potent, too much and you'll blow it up. You learned that one the hard way. Someone abruptly taps you on the shoulder and you yelp in surprise, almost dropping the Sulfuric Acid. You set it down on the steel counter and turn to look at the intruder. Corra's light brown eye's stare back at you, shining with amusement.

"Valeria wants to see you in her office." She informs you. Her eyes dart to the equipment behind you.

"Alright, tell her I'll be right there I just need to finish up." You reply. Corra leaves and you turn back around to swiftly finish up this batch.

Once done, you leave it in the big metal container to let the liquid product ferment into the iconic methamphetamine crystals. You make your way out of the lab after properly disrobing out of your PPE and neatly stuffing it back into the locker. On your way towards Valeria's office, you're ignored by the others. You see two of her worker's snorting something off of a table. You assume it's your product. You'll have to tell Valeria about that. Like you'll need to tell her about the gas mask. Come to think of it, you're also severely low on Ephedrine.

You open the door to her office and walk in. Giving Deigo a flat look, one he returns. Valeria gives you a much more friendly look and invites you to sit down.

"I want to discuss this new meth going around." She says. Leaning back and bringing a lit cigarette to her lips. 

"I think it's coming from one of those little gangs that have been popping up." Diego remarks. Furrowing his brows. Recently the Cartel has been dealing with new gangs that think they have what it takes to compete. After Valeria was arrested, multiple people began vying for the metaphorical crown. Her incarceration created a power vacuum, as Valeria would put it.

You shake your head at Deigo's claim, refuting it quickly.

"No, I don't think it's even being produced in Las Almas, let alone Mexico." You object. Both Deigo and Valeria look at you.

"Why do you say that?" Asks Valeria. You look at the wall. It's painted some muted red colour. It makes the room feel smaller. 

"Because," You say, staring at the wall. "morphine is such a hassle to obtain, if someone was stealing it, we'd know. And if there were a group big enough to pay hush money to hospitals, we'd know about them too."

Valeria nods in agreement.

"She's right." Valeria murmurs. Deigo rubs a hand over his knee, smoothing over the denim of his pants.

"There is that growing nuisance in Pajaro Azul." He grumbles. Pajaro Azul, Las Almas's sister city. You went there once and hated it. It even has it's own bigwig cartel. You'd never tell anyone, but they scare you a little bit. The men look ten times meaner and the man who runs it is crazy. You prefer the traditional small-town cartel in Las Almas. Even if their reach and influence is anything but.

"Let them deal with it." You say, furrowing your brows. "If the meth is coming from there then I doubt the Pajaro Azul Cartel will let that slide for much longer."

Valeria stubs out her smoke and stretches. Deigo fixes you with a look of annoyance.

"They've let them get this far." He grunts. "They're a bunch of pussies. We need to take care of it ourselves." 

You look to Valeria for backup but she's looking at Deigo. Regarding him with careful consideration.

"I'll think about it." She says. "I don't want to tread on their toes though. A war is the last thing we need right now." Her gaze darkens. Just a year ago, Valeria was caught by Los Vaqueros, aided by foreign military. The whole town was ravished by one of the groups going rogue and both she and the town are still recovering.

It's thanks to you, in your humble opinion, that the cartel is healing so fast. Your meth is making them great money. Well, it was. Until that other stuff just appeared out of thin air. The thought brings a jealous scowl to your face.

"How did that new batch do?" You ask. Looking at Valeria intently. You worry the inside of your cheek. Valeria glances at Diego. Nodding at him. He takes the cue and stands up, brushing off his pants and lumbering out of the room, shutting the heavy wooden door behind him. The office feels much lighter without his intrusive presence. "It didn't sell." She says.

You frown at her. "What?"

"Most of our usual customers weren't buying." Valeria explains. "The other stuff is cheaper and better."

The statement is a wrecking ball to your pride. Cheaper and better? You frown deeply at the news.

"Well..." You start, picking at a loose thread on the sleave of your shirt. "I'll have to come up with a new recipe." Something more addictive than the Super Meth. Which will be hard without morphine. Valeria stares at you as you go quiet, retreating into the dark folds of your brain. Meth causes intense sugar cravings. Which is one of the main reasons meth users have bad teeth. That and the Acetone in it reacts badly to saliva, drying it up which makes keeping bad bacteria at bay much harder, causing cavities and rot.

You brighten. That's it, sugar.

"I need sugar." You tell her. Looking up at her with renowned determination. Valeria blinks but nods.

"Okay." She agrees. "How much?"

"Three pounds should be enough." You say, then pause. Something in your mind is wiggling for attention but the harder you try to think about it, the less clear it becomes. You needed to do something. You shrug it off. If it were important, you would have remembered.

Valeria dismisses you and you head back down to the lab. You sit at your little desk and begin to start planning out the proper ratios of your ingredients. Excitement wells up inside of you. Nothing is better than a good challenge. You spend hours carefully crafting a new recipe. A few orange crystals of the meth sit on your desk for motivation.

[girlactionfigure]

🇮🇱 LEBANON ACTIVITY - Monday night - events from Israel  

ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

( VIDEO - Phosphorus bombs fired into southern Lebanon just across the border from Israel.  These bombs burn wide areas. )

❗️Sky News  Arabic reports that the IDF is calling on the residents of villages in southern Lebanon close to the border to evacuate.  The IDF informs the remaining residents of South Lebanon (the nearby villages) to immediately leave the area and move north.

❗️IDF SPOX.. many reports and rumors of IDF activity on the Lebanese border.  For security: do not report forces activity and only accept info from official channels.

♦️BEIRUT - EVAC WARNING.. An IDF spokesman in Arabic calls on the residents of 3 building centers in the Da'aheh district in Beirut to evacuate their buildings immediately.

♦️IDF ATTACK WAVE - Baalbek.. northern Lebanon, Hezbollah area.

♦️COUNTER-TERROR OPS - TULKARM.. explosions reported, firefights, wounded terrorists.

♦️RED ON RED - TUBAS.. PA forces opened fire on a vehicle containing terrorists in the Tubas area, reports of casualties inside the vehicle.

🔹Al-Mayadeen:  Hezbollah will probably allow the Israeli army to advance a few kilometers inside Lebanon, push them in and ambush them just like in 2006.

▪️IRAQ - EXPLOSION REPORTED IN BAGHDAD.. not an attack, a fuel tanker blew after a car accident.

▪️GPS JAMMING.. reported in Tel Aviv area.  Location apps such as Waze or ordering apps that depend on location may not work.  For Red Alert apps, set your location instead of “where you are”.

[phosphorus-warning]

oh lil bunny, how we’ve come so far

[eccentrcks]

“Tank” Dempsey x Reader ; drabble (NSFW)

Warnings : slight angst, NSFW, contains adult themes, sexual themes ; fingering, unprotected sex (wrap it before you tap it ya’ll), heavy sexual tension, overstimulation, dirty talking, cursing, comfort(ish) sex.

You often found yourself in a state of having existential crisis throughout this… adventure. Whatever you call this multiverse time traveling nonsense. Blanking out every now and then whenever the five of you weren’t killing zombies or solving puzzles. You hated the feeling … pessimistic. Before all of this, it was the complete opposite. Sickeningly optimistic about the future— your future especially. Looking back at it just made you cringed.

Ignorance was a luxury you came to realize a bit late. Unfortunately, you weren’t bound to have that lifetime of blissful of ignorance.

Now that you were involved in this multiverse of madness. You’re often internally anxious or zoned out. The only time you weren’t in that state was whenever you’re busied with these four men.

It wasn’t long before the two of you… became aware of each other’s fondness for one and another. It started off with the discrete longing glances, hand lingering there, he’d make a certain comment, or the marine would just treat you a whole lot better than the rest of the crew.

And the corporal was always the first to snap you out of your dissociations. “Hey there.” He’d mumble and and grasped onto your hand to give it a reassuring squeeze. Those blue eyes of his piercing into yours. “I need you to be focused right now and give us a hand. Think you can do that for me?” The marine asked before running off and making sure you were behind him.

His voice and brief touches had always gave you a fuzzy feeling. It’s not that you didn’t liked it or anything negative. You… somewhat enjoyed it. At least something other than this emptiness within. The marine has his ways of bringing you back to reality without having to shout at or shake some senses into you.

He was a napalm and you were the white phosphorus. Both volatile and self-destructive out here in your own different ways. No… he was the lightening strikes while you were the tsunami. Whatever your mind was scrambling to compare the two of you, it was completely haywire whenever he wasn’t nearby.

During your experience at Der Riese… the two of you got caught in a heated fickle that was quite compromising. Quite unintentional when the sudden sexual tension arose between the two of you.

It was so brief, that you hated when the moment barely lasted long, and that could’ve led to something… sensational. As his lips were stuck into yours while he had you pinned against the wall at Teleporter A. His gloved hand had somewhat slipped into your pants while he kept trialing his hot mouth on your neck, but then once Richtofen’s voice was heard from the distance.

The marine quickly separated himself from you and gave you the briefest apologetic look as he scurried off while you just stood there in disbelief on what just happened and your appearance disarrayed a bit. Flustered. Disappointed. If only you knew he was feeling the same way when he left the area…

And now Der Eisendrache… an opportunity was there for both sides and the two of you had taken it. You were just trying to return the favour of comforting him after Dempsey had to kill his Ultimis self for those times he kept you on both feet, but it didn’t matter who was the instigator. It just… happened. Luckily for you it was a big castle and you found him alone in his thoughts. The words of comfort slowly shifted to something physical.

A part of you was willingly to be the body for him to get off from, although another part of yourself knows you needed to feel something— no, him. He doesn’t make you feel completely anhedonic like your surroundings does with the occurrences that happens. In fact, it’s like he makes you feel more alive in the inside…

“C’mon baby, I know you can take this.” The Corporal breathlessly says encouragingly with a grunt after that. It wasn’t even half an hour that passed and he already had you overstimulated with his words, touches, and frictions. Leaving you incredibly breathless and aching physically for more.

Dempsey’s breathy groans and firm grip with his gloved hands on your hips with his rocking against yours from behind. His length and girth filled your warm tight walls in a perfect velocity. Basically stretching out your pulsing entrance with his throbbing member. Your hands were tightly holding on the side edges of a desk while he fucks you into oblivion.

Removing his glove with his teeth as he carelessly set it aside nearby on the floor before rubbing onto your clit vigorously while pounding into you. This could’ve made you mewled in pleasure, but his other hand reached to stuff his two fingers into your mouth, muffling your sweet sounds with those two fingers on top of your tongue.

“You know I don’t want others to hear me fucking your brains out, baby.” He mumbled near your ear and kissed your jawline before going back to what he was doing to you.

The wet sounds of skin slapping against each other alongside the sounds he made has just made you… weak. Your trembling posture and muffled sounds seemed to motivate Dempsey more as he went in, harder and deeper than before. His bare finger rubbed at your swollen clit more.

You unintentionally bit onto his fingers because of that, but he didn’t seemed to mind at all. In fact, it just made him more relentless with his pace.

“I’m gonna keep fucking you like this until your insides are overfilled from the brim,” He grunted and gave your backside a squeeze with one hand before smacking it softly. “You’d like that, would you? You dirty girl.” The marine kept muttering filth until you were clenching erratically onto his throbbing member. Your juices coating all over onto his pulsating cock. And he didn’t bother stopping at all for a short break.

This only ignited the attraction you have for this marine more. It makes you wanna take you more however he like.

“F-Fastnrgh!” Your pleads muffled against his fingers pathetically and in your way to a third peak. It feels so good that you don’t want this to stop. You were practically drunk with dopamine and serotonin at this point.

As Dempsey slowed his thrusts once he spurted his warm substance into you. Painting your inner walls with his semen. He entirely stilled and breathed heavily with sweat dropping from his brow while you groaned softly.

Then Dempsey switched you onto another position by laying your back on the desk after the messily scattered the items off of it for a deeper penetration. “Fuck.” He cursed under his breath and kept both hands onto your hips before continuing thrusting into you without giving you a minute. He just kept going until he was finished, which the marine won’t be done with you anytime soon.

“Goddamn,” Dempsey grunted your name with heavy breaths and his fingers dug into your skin while they squirmed. “You’re taking me so well, aren’t you?” He coos and licked his thumb before rubbing your sore clit with it which resulted a small gasp and moan slipping from your lips.

You can hear the squelching sounds of your bodily fluids altogether as he slammed into you. It’s like he’d gone autopilot. You shut your eyes and bit your tongue as he pounds into you senselessly with his hands spreading your thighs apart more.

Dempsey grunted and grunted while ramming his hips against yours until a choking gasp escaped his lips once more hot fluids spurted into you. It leaked out of you while he sloppily moved in and out. Your insides were strained from tightening, although you couldn’t find yourself to complain.

Then he slowly pulled out of you with his load practically pouring out of you. It left you with the feeling of emptiness, which of course was soothed by the numerous loads of warmth he instilled in you.

Dempsey grabbed your chin and pulled you in for a kiss, as you gladly reciprocated to him, before parting from you with a sharp inhale and rubbed your thighs soothingly.

He sighed and looked down at his stiff member before looking back at you with a sly smirk onto his handsome features. “Say… you interested in taking this more on a bed this time, doll?” That definitely piqued your interest when he asked you that.

Divider by @saradika.

[the-bibrarian]

“In the face of detailed and urgent warnings of catastrophic conditions for civilians in Gaza, an Israeli agency said there was “currently no humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.” The statement from COGAT, an Israeli defense ministry agency that manages administrative aspects of the occupation, said that the agency was monitoring the supply of water, food, fuel and energy in Gaza and asserted that “the situation is far from crisis.” The assertion stands in sharp contrast to reports from the United Nations, international aid organizations, accounts from within Gaza and photographs and video documenting dire shortages.”

(– Emma Bubola for the NYT)

It’s just war crimes upon war crimes upon crimes against humanity.

[tieflingkisser]

Israeli army pours accelerant on firefighters battling wildfire in Lebanon

An official in Lebanon's civil defense told The New Arab that Israelis sprayed an accelerant on a wildfire as firefighters fought to extinguish the blaze.

Israeli forces sprayed accelerant on a wildfire in Dheira, south Lebanon as members of the Lebanese civil defence fought to extinguish it on Saturday, a civil defence official told The New Arab. Videos of the blaze published by Lebanese outlet megaphone showed firefighters bracing themselves as a substance was sprayed from a hose from the Israeli side of the border wall, causing the fire to increase in size. "The fire was started by Israeli white phosphorus. It happened as the firefighters had just about contained the fire, the Israelis put some sort of accelerant on top of it," Abdullah Derdghaya, station chief of the Tyre district civil defence, told TNA. Derdghaya added that on Monday night, Israel launched shells at firefighters as they combated a wildfire caused by white phosphorus in the border town of Marwahein. "We had to leave because they were shelling around us to try to warn us off. We told UNIFIL that we were there and the Lebanese army was with us – but they don't respect our presence," Derdghaya said. The incident occurred as cross-border clashes between Hezbollah and Israel sparked massive blazes in both north Israel and southern Lebanon. Israeli media said over 2,500 acres had been burned by wildfires caused by Hezbollah rockets over the weekend. In Lebanon, Israeli use of white phosphorus has caused more than 134 forest fires over the last eight months.

[keep reading]

[mossyfella]

reminder that white phosphorus and depleted uranium are linked to a substantial uptick of birth defects. unclear if israel is using depleted uranium rounds but i have seen claims that they have in the past. i’ll add more sources as i find them but here are some to start with

(x)

(x) (contains parents and doctors accounts from Fallujah)

(x) (twitter account from a staff member of a Fallujah hospital, documenting the birth defects they encounter. warning for photos of still birth/aborted fetuses and very extreme birth defects. if you can stomach it it’s worth a look)