sisterspooky1013 · 11 months ago
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Gaslight, Chapter 48/48: Epilogue
Rated X | Read it here on AO3
May 29, 2001
Tonight we bring you an update on the conspiracy that continues to rock the States. Ten months after exposing the major players behind the now defunct Spurious Project, three men identified only as “The Lone Gunmen” were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with one of the three men being awarded the medal with distinction due to injuries sustained during an attempted assassination by Spurious operatives.  
As millions of Americans continue to line up to have microchips containing false memories of a global pandemic removed from their necks, the search continues for the individuals at the heart of the project: identified only as ‘subject 101-1’ and ‘subject 101-2.’ While their precise role in the project remains unclear, sources state that they should be considered victims. 
The Spurious Project is purported to be the largest and most well-orchestrated attempt to mislead the public in recorded history. Any Canadian citizen who visited the States between February and March of 2000, or who received a vaccination for the Manatua Virus, should see their doctor as soon as possible to be scanned for a microchip and have it removed if necessary. 
There’s a knock at the door, and Frenchie barks sharply as she skitters across the hardwood. Scully turns the TV off before hoisting herself out of her armchair, fruitlessly attempting to quiet Frenchie with verbal commands. Halfway to the door there’s another knock, and she calls out, “Just a minute!” as she shuffles the rest of the way, already out of breath. On the other side she finds a little boy with messy blonde hair and an RC car hanging from his fingertips, the remote tucked under his arm. 
“Can Zack play?” the boy asks without preamble. 
“Sure,” Scully huffs, then turns to shout down the hallway. “Bear! Micah’s here!”
A moment later Peter trudges down the hall, his own RC car in hand. Scully grabs him by the back of his shirt collar as he prepares to wordlessly walk out the door, and he stops and tips his face up to look at her. His body has softened in the intervening months, rounding out his face and padding his hips beneath his sweatpants. 
“Watch for the car please, okay? Daddy and Bunny will be back from the airport soon.”
Peter nods, and she takes his chin in her hand and kisses his forehead before sending him outside. She watches him walk shoulder-to-shoulder across the lawn beside Micah and tells herself that he’s a typical little boy. One who is fiercely independent because he subconsciously doesn’t expect the adults in his life to meet his needs. One who struggles to stop eating when he’s full because his body remembers a time when his next meal wasn’t guaranteed. One who hoards everything from Q-tips to granola bars in his room, just in case. But he fits right in with the kids in the neighborhood, and is excited to start kindergarten in the fall. Typical, considering all he’s been through, and she’s grateful for it. 
The oven timer beeps and she makes her way to the kitchen, the warm vanilla smell in the air making her mouth water. It’s just a boxed cake, nothing fancy, but she feels emotional as she sets it on top of the oven to cool and gets out supplies for decorating. 
Her life now would be completely unrecognizable to the person she was a year ago, a fact that both relieves and saddens her. As difficult as that time was, it wasn’t all bad. There were happy memories made, and there are people she still misses, as well as places. But the home they’ve made here is a permanent one, both for the sake of the children who have enough to contend with without another international move, and because the risk of returning to the States is simply not one they are willing to take. 
She hears the crunch of tires on gravel and her belly does a nervous little flip, which strikes her as silly. She can’t decide whether to meet them on the front porch, or in the driveway, or maybe just stay here in the kitchen. She’s still pondering this when the screen on the back door snaps and Abby walks in, eyeing Scully curiously as she examines the sweet-smelling cake.  
“Are you okay, Mommy?” Abby asks, and Scully forces herself to smile.
“Yeah, sweetpea, I’m just a little nervous,” she says, reaching out to run her hand through the child’s short-cropped hair, now devoid of blonde. Abby tenses reflexively at her touch, but Scully ignores it. “Did you have fun going to the airport with Daddy?” 
Abby nods, watching Scully’s face. She’s always watching her, measuring her mood and anticipating her reactions. The casual observer would deduce that they’re incredibly close, based on the way Abby never lets Scully out of her sight, but the truth is much more complicated than that. Abby can’t relax unless she knows that Scully is relaxed. She cannot feel safe in a place where Scully is present unless she has taken steps to prophylactically placate her. The outside world sees a little girl who dotes on her mother, but Scully sees a little girl who perceives her mother as a potential threat that she must constantly monitor. It gets better week over week, month over month, and Scully has faith that someday Abby won’t flinch when she reaches for her. 
“Oh my god.”
Scully turns away from Abby and towards the sound of her mother’s voice. She’s standing in the doorway of the kitchen, her hands held over her mouth and her eyes shining. 
“Mom,” Scully says, rushing towards her, tears already pooling in her eyes. 
They embrace awkwardly, both laughing, and just the smell of her mother’s skin, her laundry soap, her shampoo, makes Scully feel like a little girl again. She wishes she could crawl into Maggie’s lap and tell her how hard it’s been, and how much she’s needed her. 
“Look at you,” Maggie says, leaning away and laying a palm on the tight drum of Scully’s stomach. “You look beautiful.”
Scully laughs uncomfortably. “I feel like a whale,” she says. “Sorry I didn’t come to the airport. I can’t sit down for more than twenty minutes without my sciatica acting up.”
“It’s okay,” Maggie says, beaming as she looks between Scully’s belly and her face. “I’m just glad I was finally able to come see you.”
“How long are you staying, Maggie?” Mulder asks as he lumbers in with a bag in each hand as well as one under each arm. “I think you packed for the apocalypse.”
“Oh, half of that is gifts for the kids,” Maggie says, taking two of the bags. “I have a lot of missed spoiling to make up for.”
-
After dinner, Scully brings out the carefully decorated cake and sets it on the table. The mood shifts to something somber as she props up the only two photos they have of Cal against the cake stand: the one of the four of them that Maggie gave her that first day when she woke up in the hospital in Baltimore, as well as the ID Byers had created when they thought Cal would be traveling with them to Canada. She’d secreted them across the border in her luggage against Tom’s direction, unwilling to risk the children forgetting him completely, which she is now exceedingly grateful for. 
“Happy Birthday in Heaven, Daddy,” Abby says as Scully lights the lone candle. 
They sing a low-energy rendition of the birthday song, and the kids blow the candle out together. Their memories of Cal are hazy and don’t feel nearly as significant to them as they do to Scully, but she is steadfastly committed to ensuring that they never forget how much he loved them, all three of them, and that he is remembered for the good he did in this world. 
Scully does the dishes, smiling to herself as she listens to Maggie quiz the children on their lives in the next room. Despite losing their implanted memories of their grandmother, both Abby and Peter seem very comfortable with her, which is a relief. She hears Mulder’s feet on the linoleum before he steps up behind her, running his hands in wide circles over the sides of her belly. 
“Seems like everyone’s getting along,” he says, resting his chin on the crown of her head. 
She feels a flash of foolishness remembering how she cried to him the night before, terrified that the children would receive her mother as a stranger, or that celebrating Cal’s birthday would trigger one of Abby’s flashbacks, or a myriad of other things that would create tension and stress so close to the baby’s impending arrival. Pregnancy has made her feel like an imposter in her own body, betrayed by her unpredictable emotions, and Mulder has been exceedingly patient and supportive with both her and the kids as they adjust to their new circumstances. 
There are still holes in the patchwork of his memory, some pinpricks and some gaping. He’s himself, but a slightly less restless version than she knew before their lives were stolen from them and returned in increments. Still searching and endlessly curious, but not quite so tortured by the unanswerable questions as he once was. Still busy and preoccupied, but not to the degree that he can’t set his current fixation aside and be present with his new family. It’s difficult to say whether the change in him is due to how completely his life has been turned upside down in less than a year, or if maybe some of the memories he never recovered were the ones that haunted him the most. Regardless of the reason, she’s been pleasantly surprised by how easily he’s fallen into the roles of husband and father.  
He bends down a little, hooking his chin over her shoulder and slipping his hands under the water alongside hers. Scully smiles and glances toward the living room, then pushes her backside against him to the greatest degree that she’s able, given her belly and the obstruction of the countertop. 
“Are you trying to start something, Mrs. Manningham?” he asks playfully. 
Scully tilts her head to the side and Mulder kisses her neck. 
“At first I thought it was infatuation,” he sings quietly, brushing his lips across her skin. “But oooo it’s lasted so long. Now I find myself wanting to marry you and take you home.”
Scully closes her eyes and sways back and forth, feeling so happy it almost hurts. Then the tears come, as they are wont to do, running down her chin and leaving wet splotches on the gray cotton T-shirt stretched over her belly. Mulder doesn’t ask her what’s wrong or make a fuss over it, he just dries his hands and then her cheeks, then kisses her and tells her to go visit with her mom while he finishes in the kitchen. 
By the time the kitchen is cleaned up and the children are in bed, Scully is too exhausted to socialize any further, and she excuses herself to take a bath while Mulder and Maggie share a bottle of wine. In the tub, she wets a washcloth and lays it over her belly for warmth, more relaxed than she can remember feeling in quite some time. She hears her mother laugh from the living room and she smiles and closes her eyes. She must have started to drift, because her belly is suddenly cold and Mulder is crouched beside the tub, brushing his index finger down the bridge of her nose. 
“I thought we agreed to no sleeping in the bath,” he admonishes her lightly, the sour smell of wine on his breath. 
“I wasn’t sleeping,” she mumbles, sitting up and taking his hand as he helps her out of the tub. 
They both get ready for bed and he curls himself around her beneath the covers, one hand resting on her belly. 
“How do you feel?” he asks quietly. 
“Hmmm, tired,” she says on a yawn, hoping he takes the hint. 
“I mean emotionally. Having your mom here, Cal’s birthday. You holding up okay?”
With great effort she rolls to her back, her belly protruding towards the ceiling like a mountain summit. The baby squirms, jabbing her rib cage uncomfortably, and she grabs Mulder’s hand to lay it over the place where he might be able to feel movement. 
“I’m really good, actually,” she says. “It feels like…closure, maybe. Or something similar to that. Like we can finally start moving forward.”
Mulder nods, giving her three quick kisses before she rolls back to her side. She falls asleep quickly, no longer afraid that someone is about to break the door down and take away everything that matters. No longer feeling like her life is not her own. 
She dreams that dream again, the one with the green countertops and Mulder spinning her around in his kitchen. The one of a love so strong that neither man nor science could destroy it. The one that she simply wouldn’t forget, no matter how hard they tried to make her. 
Tagging @today-in-fic
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undeadunhingedchaos · 2 months ago
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... That said, I really believe most cats are their own flavor of crazy...
Hall of fame of the cats I've had the pleasure to know (chronological order) :
😼 Doodles : brown tabby, either a Maine Coon mix or a Norwegian Forest Cat. An absolute unit anyways. The Cat, The Myth, The Legend.
... My father took him for a ride on his bike. With a leather jacket stolen to an aviator teddy bear.
Doodles ate mice, learned to open doors, somehow teleported into my father's race car overnight, pissed nearly everywhere, fought other cats, slept in a barn with the neighbor's sheep, almost took a ride on the car's roof, rolled into dirt right after we washed him, became addicted to tuna, and flipped his bowl to eat kibble on the floor - but didn’t eat when I served him directly on the floor...
He also used to shit right next to the litterbox, then eject a pile of gravel over it. And went bat-shit crazy when fed olives...
Weirdly enough my father successfully trained him to come when called, give a paw, roll over and play dead.
... Latest news : before getting neutered, Doodles "fucked a plush centipede in the ass" as my mother so nicely said...
Cats are really weird animals....
😼 Féline : Smaller brown tabby, aptly named. Thieve. It's more of a criminal record than a biography in her case...
She stole :
_the steak off my father's plate
_ an entire chicken off the counter, then wedged herself under the bed with it, ate the entire chicken safe a leg, and only then did she got out of there...
_ my father's wallet. 5 min before he had to leave. Guess who got late - and scratched ?
_ my favorite toy. Also 5 min before departure. My father, having enough of these shenanigans, flipped his king-size bed to "fish" the damn cat out of there...
_ X-mas tree baubles....
_ So many hair ties.
Well, there's also vandalism in there :
_ Scratched every vertical surface available.
_ Repeatedly climbed up the christmas tree. My father resorted to put the tree on top of a pyramid of chairs on top of the table. Every. Night. The ensemble eventually collapsed under Féline's repeated assaults...
_ Last but not least, one day, while home alone, she tore apart the carpet right behind the front - and only - door, efficiently blocking the door, locking us outside. My father, who you might see now as a kind of brute, broke down the door of his own flat, tearing apart what was left of the carpet... And that's why the next carpet had a hole in the exact shape of the opening angle of the door...
The trick my father regretted teaching her : turning off the lights... Yeah, the thing with the laser pointer. She ended doing it anywhen.
The tragic end to her criminal career is that she ran away during our moving, never to be found...
😼 Desmo : Grey and white cat. Named after either the Greek god or a specific model of motorbike. Laziest cat ever.
... Was the unfortunate test subject of my first attempt at washing a cat.
Had a really stinky breath, prompting me to wonder why cats don't have "toothpaste treats"...
Got chased all around the flat by me, my father's best friend AND the RC car...
Was taught by Doodles how to drink in the tub, which drove my father crazy...
Ungratefully ignored the kibble track I laid for him across the apartment, preferring trying to eat the cereal I dropped...
Had a certain taste for my toys' hair...
I successfully took a picture of him by crawling under the coffee table and using a barbie doll as bait...
😼 Dieci : Black cat.🐈‍⬛ Void that lived a fairy tale. Definitely named after the Desmodieci model of bike...
Her story started as yellow eyes and plaintive meows in the blacked-out staircase. Then, as my father opened the door, secretly hoping she didn’t follow him, a small shadow rushed out of the darkness into the light of hope, straight into Desmo's bowl...
Did my father attract cats ? Absolutely.
Dieci was young and playful, and a bit of a thieve as well. Her targets of choice were pencils and all kinds of bobby pins and hair ties...
Her most notable act, besides her obvious ability to disappear over dark surfaces, was the day she stole our guest's comforter, which was, you'll never guess, a paint brush ...
We put the house upside down searching for it, until my father, once again, flipped the entire couch....
😼 Swiffer : black and white cat. Kitten, rather. Named like that 'cause she had a habit of squeezing herself behind furniture, only to come out gray...
Her habit might have to do with not wanting to deal with my then toddler brother...
Who tried to teach her to ride on the lego train.
Among other disatrous ideas...
Like many of her feline comrades, Swiffer absolutely wrecked the damn christmas tree...
Just like Féline, Swiffer ran away during our next moving....
Moral of the story : Don’t move with a cat ?
😼 Tanuki : Current cat. Brown tabby, may have a Maine Coon up his family tree. Might also be a bastard. In both senses of the term (he doesn’t look a single bit like the cat we were told was his dad).
Loveable asshole, quickly nicknamed : The Trap ; Piranha ; The Night's Claws ; Jaws....
List of his shenanigans : still going...
... Already fell twice in the damn swamp.
To be followed...
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mylifeisactuallyamess · 4 years ago
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Somewhere in the Dark, Your Light Finds Me
Modern!Poe Dameron x Female Reader/Modern!Ben Solo x Female Reader
Warnings: NSFW 18+, PTSD feelings and description, RC is having a hard time. Smuuuutt and fluff, lots of angst!
Word Count: 5,228
Finally you allowed yourself to sit down gently stroking his large wedge shaped head as tears slid down your cheeks. You pulled your hood up hoping no one would recognise and if they did, they’d leave you alone. You weren’t sure how long you sat there counting the gravel on the path as you tried to figure out what to do, you didn’t want Poe to move out, not really. But you wanted him to get help, he tried to go back to work but he panicked as soon as he saw a helicopter, his life’s work and everything he had worked towards was now useless to him. You knew he felt ashamed and weak, he was struggling and he had every right to be. But you were too. Trying to keep the house tidy, looking after Bee and going to work, running a shop all day long, you were exhausted. Someone said your name softly and you automatically looked up to see Ben standing there and he wasn’t alone. @daydreamsofren this is your chapter!
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Read Chapter 17 here on AO3.
Read from beginning here.
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wrc7pcdownload-blog · 7 years ago
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WRC 7
International Rafting Federation (IRF)
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Weighted Runs Created (wRC) is an improved version of Bill James' Runs Created (RC) statistic, which attempted to quantify a player's WRC 7 total offensive value and measure it by runs. In Runs Created, instead of looking at a player's line and listing out all the details (e.g. 23 2B, 15 HR, 55 BB, 110 K, 19 SB, 5 CS), the information is synthesized into one metric in order to say, Player X was worth 24 runs to his team last year.” While WRC 7 PC Download the idea was sound, James' formula has since been superseded by Tom Tango's wRC , which is based off Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA ). Oil - Teak or linseed oil is not recommended for Cedar outdoor furniture as the oil will tend to collect dust particles which will stick to the furniture. Also, oil will not keep the WRC from changing to the silver gray color. It will only slow down the WRC 7 natural aging process and repel water.
While the damage system works in game, it does not seem realistic or punishing enough in many situations. For example in one race, I damaged my gearbox had a coolant leak and cracked something else so my car regularly made a strange sound. Third and fourth gear seemed longer than usual to switch but I was able to finish the stage with the best time. My car was so damaged that with the 60 minutes allotted to do repairs I could only fix half of the issues. I still got a stage win on the next stage as well, but I still had to listen to the strange sound.
In order to park and league adjust wRC, it takes a few more steps, but it's nothing you can't do on your own with basic calculator or Excel spreadsheet. You may notice that there are shortcuts to arriving at some of the numbers below depending on what statistics you already have in front of you, but we've provided full details if you're looking for a very thorough breakdown.
Instructors who would like to request an In-class Workshop on one of the Writing Success topics (or on a topic that can be tailored to address the specific needs of their classes) should complete a Request for In-class Workshops” form, which can be found on our website under WRC Forms.
Despite how many drivers are in one team, constructors may only nominate two drivers to score points for the team as well as scoring for themselves. As only nominated drivers are counted while awarding points, competitors placed further down the final standings than tenth overall (if preceded by privateer drivers) can score them.
For 2017, more emphasis has been on organising a calendar with a mix of stage surfaces, so there's not a run of six consecutive rallies on gravel. We don't want to see that. We want variety. It's good to see WRC reacting to this to shake up the schedule a bit.
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Bell Endeavor Helmet - Women's
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