#I'll not tag Martin but I will tag it as

[mogoce-nocoj]

thanks jokeroutsubs for bringing this early version of vkv to my attention because bojan and kris starting to sing the last chorus together without kris falling back into his falsetto is just. 🫠

[saragrosie]

As promised, incredibly stupid s4-5 drawings

[bandtrees]

[CW: EYE STRAIN/MILD FLASHING]

i have done what many people in my life have wanted me to do for years (started listening to the magnus archives) and to nobody's surprise i am enjoying it. i am partway through season 2 (just finished ep56, which inspired this vid ofc) so have a pmv i've been chipping away at since sunday, about my favorite disaster paranoiac john 🤲

i've always really really wanted to get into videomaking again, like pmvs and what have you, and everyone around me has been subject to so much griping about how i don't think i have it in me. and then i tried it. and turns out i do! follow your dreams people. draw that man in distress

[scrollonso]

First Kiss (Birthday 1)

A strollonso AU where 18 year old rookie Lance Stroll falls helplessly in love with the notoriously mean world champion. (3.9k words, angst, alcohol, internalized homophobia, religious talk, teary eyed lance, unprotected sex, aftercare) [@v3lnys @biancathecool] {I love this chapter sm}

last part - masterlist - next part

Lance knew it was going to be weird, seeing Fernando the day after he stole his first kiss. It had been all that was on his mind for the past 24 hours.

Even while his mind was racing with the memories of the Spaniards lips on his he walked into the venue as if everything was normal. People were already filling the room, he wasn't expecting such a large party considering his birthday had already passed but when he considered the Spaniards success this season it made sense

People were distracted, everyone seemingly knowing everyone. Fernando excused himself from the conversation he was partaking in to welcome the Canadian.

"Lancito, I'm glad you came" He smiled at him, as if everything was normal, as if he hadn't had his hands on the others waist as their lips tangled together the day before.

"Hi- yeah, uh, I wouldn't miss it" Lance almost hit himself for being so obviously anxious, he felt the urge to talk about it, he needed to talk about it and Fernando was the only one he could speak to about it, he'd been too ashamed to even admit he had kissed the man to anyone.

"Let's get you a drink, eh? Loosen you up a bit" Fernando grabbed Lances hand, their fingers naturally locking together as if they were molded to fit perfectly together.

It wasn't the first time their hands had been together this way, considering how close they were the day before there was no reason for Lance to be so flustered by the small touch but he was. He almost tripped over his feet as he walked because he was so busy with his eyes glued at their hands, Fernandos skin seemed to glow in the lighting of the room, he wasn't dressed up, most people weren't, but he still looked gorgeous, the contrast of his light shirt and tanned skin was almost breathtaking, Lance would admire the Spaniards beauty forever if he could.

"What would you like, mi sol?" Fernando asked, turning to face Lance, the Canadians eyes quick to meet the older mans

"Uhm, I'm fine with anything" He pursed his lips slightly, eyes not leaving the Spaniards face as he continued admiring him, the way the waves of his hair fell perfectly, his brown eyes seeming to glow in the dim light of the room, the way the entire room seemed to fall silent as he was captivated by Fernando

He nodded, turning to the bartender to order for the younger man and himself.

Fernando was busy, of course he was, it was his party. Lance didn't feel welcome without Fernando by his side, sure, Nico was there, he liked Nico enough, but Nico didn't make him feel how Fernando did. Didn't make his heart flutter, didn't make him lick his lips any time he thought of him, didn't make him consider sinning in the ways Fernando did.

"You good?' Nico asked, a slightly watered down drink in his hand, too distracted speaking to anyone who passed to drink.

"Great" Lance flashed a smile and nod, downing the rest of his drink, trying to ignore the disgusting taste it left in his mouth.

Lance's eyes fell on Fernando, seeing how he laughed and how close he was to the women he was conversating with, he was annoyed, not sober enough to fight back the nasty look on his face.

Fernando turned his head, locking eyes with Lance and staying that way for a minute, the Canadian could've swore he saw the older man wink before going back to his conversation, his face changing from upset to confused, why would Fernando be winking at him when he's surrounded by beauitful women and has been all night?

Fernando was painfully obviously straight, he frequently had girls all over him but Lance never saw Fernando go to them first, never saw his eyes flicker from their eyes to their lips, never saw his hands grabbing their waist and pushing them against a wall, he felt insane for even thinking that maybe he was different to Fernando, it was a crazy thought, a sinful thought.

The night seemed to speed by for Fernando, as it got later and later people began to excuse themselves to return home.

Lance hadn't noticed as the new day began, having drank way too much to register how time works

"Lancito" A voice called, he looked up from his glass right away

"Nando!" He smiled, automatically wrapping his arms tightly around the spaniard

"Hello, mi sol" Fernando smiled, wrapping an arm around Lance while he used the other to pay for the youngers tab and push the glass away from his seat "Are you tired, Lancito?" He asked, earning a quiet no from the boy "Well, I think it's time to leave anyway"

Fernando hummed as he stood up, a familliar arm around Lances waist as he guided him outside, through the parking lot, and into the passenger side seat of his car. Nico had left earlier so this was the only way to get Lance home

"What's your room number, Lancito?" He spoke softly, brushing the hair from the boys face as he awaited a response

"I-" hiccup "I dunno"

Fernando smiled slightly, nodding and buckling the boy up before heading to their hotel, figuring having a drunk Lance in his bed again wouldn't be too hard.

Fernando opened his hotel door, a hand still resting on Lances waist as he guided the boy to a chair by his bed

"Sit, mi sol, let me get you some water"

Lance nodded, sitting down and rubbing his eyes, his brain slowly registering his surroundings and his body realizing how late it was

"Here, Lancito, drink" Fernando held out a glass, watching carefully as Lance took it and drank

Fernando sat on his bed as Lance began to sober up, he could feel the canadians eyes on him, watching every time he moved slightly. He eventually made eyecontact with the boy, he could tell there was something he wanted to say

"What is it?" Fernando asked, sitting up to take a good look at the Canadian

"I think i'm in love with you" He blurted out, eyes widening as he realized what he had just confessed "I don't- I didn't- uhm, I don't know why, I don't even know if I like boys, I don't know if I like you or I admire you- I-" He trailed off, Fernando's eyes on him as he waited for the boy to finish "I'm terrified"

"You are in love with me?" He echoed

"Fuck" Lance muttered, standing up, and running his fingers anxiously through his hair "I'm sorry- I shouldn't have said that." He breathed out, licking his lips as he avoided Fernandos gaze

"Lancito" He stood up as well, quick to go over to Lance and place his hand softly on the boys upper arm, encouraging the taller man to look at him "Is okay, what are you sorry for?"

"I can't love you, Nando- It's-" He furrowed his brows, not sure why the older man didn't just understand, Lance hardly understood, Fernando was older than him why did he have to explain this "It's wrong, It's a sin, If I continue to act on this, Nando, I-"

"Hey" He spoke softly, everything about the man was comforting to Lance "What makes you think that, Lancito? Is nothing wrong with this, you loving me is not a sin, is just life"

"It is, Nando, I know- I know you don't have faith, you don't believe, you don't have to but-" He stumbled over his words, tears threatening to escape with every blink "I do, Fernando. I believe, If God says that this is a sin, Fernando, I can't live with myself if I do this willingly."

"What exactly is this, to you?" Fernando asked, pleading for the boy to give him a straight answer "What are we, what am I to you? How do you feel about me, mi sol?"

"Nando, You know how I-"

"Tell me."

"Fuck, Fernando, I don't-" He looked away from the man, lip quivering as he broke down, hands rushing to cover his face as the tears began to fall

"Ay, mi sol" He breathed, quick to pull the boy into his arms, one hand trailing through his uncut hair, the other taking a familiar position on his waist

"I-" He felt like he couldn't breathe, hands grabbing onto Fernandos shirt as he cried into the mans chest, he felt weak.

"Te quiero mucho, Lancito" Fernando whispered into the boys ear, lips brushing against his skin as he continued "Please, mi sol, please let me. Let me love you. Let me worship you. I have no God, let me devote myself to you. Let me show you how deeply I adore you, por favor."

Lance couldn't speak, all he could do was melt into the Spaniards touch as he sat down on the corner of the bed with the boy, keeping him close as he patiently awaited a response, even if it was no, even if he was disgusted, he needed something.

"If I was a girl-" He started, breaking the silence of the silence to choke out the words, not wanting to believe them himself "If I was a girl, loving you wouldn't be a sin."

Fernando felt like he just got punched in the gut hearing that, his eyes meeting Lances who's were filled with tears broke his heart "Mi sol.." He breathed out, unsure what to say, he understood how Lance felt, he was well aware of Lance's religious family and what exactly that meant but hearing it from Lance hurt

"I want to, Nando, I really want to." His voice cracked, eyebrows practically knitted together as he tried to blink back tears

"You can, please, mi sol, is nothing wrong with this, with us, with loving eachother." The Spaniard tried to convince the boy, praying it'd be easy, he wasn't sure how much longer he could stand to see his Lancito so hurt because of him.

"But-" He started, unsure what he was going to say in protest

"No, I know i am right, is just me and you here, no?" Fernando asked, earning a nod from the younger man "Your God will forgive, anyone who truly loves you will be okay with this, am okay with this, is okay."

It made sense in Lance's head, Fernando always made sense in his head, he trusted him with everything. Both of them fell silent, doing nothing but looking at eachother, Lance couldn't shake the feeling that this was wrong but if they weren't meant to be this close then they wouldn't be.

"Can I kiss you?" The older man spoke again, seeming hesitant to even suggest it now, without even thinking Lance connected their lips, how his god felt about this meant nothing when Fernandos lips on his was all his heart desired.

The Spaniard was quick to move his hands to Lance's waist, pulling him closer as they kissed, the younger man sinking into his grip, following his lead.

Fernando opened his mouth slightly, teeth grabbing onto the Canadians lip as a way to pull them closer, they could never be close enough.

Lance gasped, Fernandos teeth digging in slightly deeper after he heard the response he got out of the boy, his light pants between each kiss like music to the Spaniards ears.

The older man moved Lance slightly, lowering the two of them onto his bed, having himself positioned perfectly on top of him before he pulled away

"Nando" Lance started, lust filled eyes staring up at his Fernando, the room was lit just enough that it looked like the boys eyes were sparkling, Fernando absolutely adored his eyes.

"Is this okay?" Fernando asked, moving his gaze away from Lance's face to grab the hem of the taller mans shirt. Lance followed his hands, he wanted to, he trusted Fernando, of course he did, but he couldn't help but be scared.

"I don't know how-" He practically whispered, breaking the eye contact between the two of them "I've never done this before"

"Let me take care of you." He spoke softly, making Lance's heart flutter, Lance knew he was safe, Fernando would never do anything bad to Lance and everyone had slowly came to realize that

"Okay" Lance nodded, looking back up to Fernando "Yeah, Yeah this is okay"

"Sit up, mi sol" He instructed, taking off Lance's shirt once he did, he could tell the boy was nervous, even after sobering up it made sense for him to be. "I'll be gentle with you" Fernando promised, planting soft kisses on the corner of Lance's mouth as he laid him back down, slowly moving his lips lower

Lance closed his eyes, moving his hands to cover his face as Fernando bit his neck softly, gasping at the pleasant feeling.

"So pretty" Fernando spoke against the younger mans skin, hand moving to his jaw to expose more of his skin, lips traveling up Lance's jawline and leaving kisses behind his ear

"Nando, please" Lance begged, voice shaking

"Please what, mi sol?" Fernando sat up, looking at Lance for direction

"Touch me, please, Nando, do something" He whined, reaching to grab Fernandos hand, he wasn't even sure how he wanted the older man to touch him he just knew he needed something, anything.

"Okay, Lancito, I will" He whispered, placing a light peck on the boys lips and interlocking their fingers before moving his other hand down to the Canadians belt, taking it off for him "You are sure? You want this?" Fernando asked again, not wanting to take advantage of the boy considering how much he drank and how he'd just opened up to him.

"Please, I need it, Nando please." As Lance spoke he got more and more desperate, Fernando feeling as the taller man brought up his hips in desperation, body begging to feel any type of friction

He nodded, finally going to give the boy want he wanted. He lifted Lance on his own this time, sliding his dress pants down and off, shoes already disgarded somewhere in the room.

After placing his pants at the foot of the bed he brought his attention back to Lance, squeezing his hand slightly as he brushed his thumb over the boys bulge, seeing his head arch back slightly, body still aching for more and who was Fernando to deny his sun of anything?

He moved his and Lance's hand closer to his mouth, kissing his knuckles softly before letting him go, using both hands to take off the younger mans briefs, not realizing he was leaving him fully exposed while Fernando still had every inch of his body covered

"Nando" Lance protested, reaching for the mans shirt, desperate to take something of his off as he laid down, his body on display for him.

"I know, is okay, Lancito" The Spaniard spoke, planting a kiss on the boys forehead before undressing himself, turning slightly in order to place his clothes on the floor, Lance sat up again, eyes examining his body since this was the first time he was seeing all of him, his gaze landed on the samurai tattoo decorating his neck and upper back, he wasn't sure why but the sight of Fernandos inked skin alone was enough to make his cock throb, a quiet whimper escaping his lips

He felt intimidated as the older man turned back to face him, finding himself leaning onto the bed before the shorter man even spoke

The Spaniard smiled, finding his way on top of Lance once again, a hand placed on Lance's thigh as he spoke "You're so good for me, Lancito"

The words didn't seem like much but to Lance they were life changing, he whined at the praise, moving his hips slightly in efforts to recieve any kind of friction, he needed Fernando to hurry up.

"So desperate, mi sol, I've barely even touched you" He cooed, finally moving his focus to the boys body, eyes landing on the tattoo placed on his upper ribs. He brought his hand up the boys waist, thumb brushing over the hebrew lettering before moving onto his core, littering soft kisses down the boys stomach until he reached the base of his cock, Lance already squirming under him "So pretty, you are so perfect, Lancito"

With each praise that came out of Fernandos lips it only left Lance more desperate, needing more, he was beginning to get impatient until he felt a hand brush over his member, applying light pressure that alone could've made Lance come undone on the spot

"Nando" He whined, moving his hand to grab onto the older mans wrist, bringing it back to where Lance needed it most

"Can not have you finish too soon, mi princesa" He explained, the use of a new nickname leaving Lance's skin even more flushed than it had already become, he loved every nickname the Spaniard gave him but something about being his always made him feel special.

"Please, I just need you to touch me, Nando" He begged, Fernandos lips curling slightly as he listened to the boy

"Okay, okay" He nodded, sitting down on the bed besides Lance as he instructed the boy to reposition himself, getting on his hands and knees with little hesitation.

He brought his hand up to the boys waist, squeezing his hips slightly as he leaned over to the bedside table, grabbing a bottle of lube he'd been given as a gag gift, now he was more than greatful for whoever decided to make the joke.

He opened the bottle and got some on his hand, thumb brushing the boys hip softly "Am going to start, okay?"

Lance nodded quickly, he needed him to start, he needed anything, anything Fernando gave him he'd take

Fernando inserted a finger, careful at first because he was well aware this is Lance's first time doing anything like this, the boy shuddered under him, eyes closing at the cold feeling of Fernando's single digit inside of him

"More, Nando, please" He spoke, gasping as Fernando did what he asked. He could feel his fingers opening him, getting him ready, it was a new feeling but Lance adored it, his brain foggy as the reality of the situation hit him. Fernando was good with his fingers, reaching places and getting reactions out of Lance that the younger boy didn't know was possible.

"Sound so pretty for me, Lancito" Fernando's voice made Lance feel different, he still spoke the same but the combination of the praise and the feeling of his fingers deep inside of him caused a pit to form in his stomach, cock twitching slightly every time he moved

"Fuck, Nando, Please, Please I need more" Fernando nodded at the boys words, leaning forward to plant a kiss on his neck before adding a third and final finger, stretching Lance just enough so the Spaniard could fit inside without causing the boy too much pain.

Fernando turned Lance around, taking off his own briefs before pulling the Canadian onto his lap, watching as he moved to hide is face in the crook of his neck.

The older man moved back, leaning against the headboard as he lifted Lance by his hips to line himself up with his hole, whispering praises as he finally put the tip in, Lance gasping as his body sunk onto Fernandos cock, eyes squeezing shut against Fernandos skin as he felt himself getting filled up

He didn't move at first, waiting for Lance to get used to the feeling of him. When the Canadian started grinding slightly, looking for friction once again, he knew it was time to start moving

"Let me do the work" Fernando whispered, kissing the back of Lance's ear as his hands settled back on his hips "I'll take care of you, princesa"

With that he began to move, Lance's arms draped over the mans shoulders, his hands finding their way to the mans back and digging into his tattoo slightly as he felt Fernandos length moving inside of him, whining into his skin with every thrust

Lance could barely bring himself to think about anything but Fernandos cock, if this was so wrong why was it making him feel so good?

Lance and Fernando were close, practically every inch of their skin that coud be touching was touching, Lance's cock trapped between both of their torsos, dripping with precum as Fernando found his prostate, adoring how Lance practically meweld every time the older man made contact with it.

"Nando, Nando I'm-" His voice was shaky, barely able to form words as his head spun, feeling euphoric because of how the Spaniard was using his cock

"Cum, Lancito, cum for me" He instructed, continuing at the same pace inside of him as he felt his orgasm building, the feeling of Lance beginning to clench around him pushing him closer and closer.

He leaned Lance back slightly, wanting to watch as he came for him, not regreting his choice as he saw the way the boy shook softly in his arms, his cum covering both of their torsos and finally pushing Fernando over the edge.

Lance's breathing was heavy, he was quick to melt into Fernandos touch as he rode out both of their highs, something so intimate about the position they were in

"You did so good, princesa, so, so good for me." Fernando raved, cupping the boys face with his hands to cover him in soft kisses

Lance hummed, a soft smile on his face as he felt Fernandos lips on his face, ending with a loving kiss on his lips, this was perfect.

"Let's clean up" Fernando spoke again, hand brushing through Lance's hair as he stood up, Lance whining at the empty feeling he was left with "We can sleep after" Lance liked the sound of them both sleeping, he liked the sound of both of them together, it felt almost unreal as he gazed up at Fernando, nothing but admiration in his eyes as he appreciated the man in front of him

"Come on" Fernando laughed, moving to help Lance up as they made their way to the bathroom, grabbing both of them a towel and running a bath for him and the boy.

As they got out Fernando wrapped a towel around hinself, moving to dry of Lance's hair before wrapping him up as well

"I can dry my own hair, Nando"

"I can dry your hair too" They both smiled, they hadn't been able to stop smiling since they'd gotten to the bathroom and when Fernando pulled Lance to lay on top of him after they got dressed they still had grins on their faces

"Thank you, Nando" He heard Lance whisper, laying his head on the Spaniards chest

"You're welcome, Lancito" He hummed, moving his hand to stroke Lance's hair once more, admiring the boy that was slowly falling asleep on him, his boy.

Nothing else mattered in this moment, he didn't care about anything else besides the person breathing quietly in his arms. Lance was right, Fernando didn't have faith in a religion, in a god, in a book. He had faith in Lance. The man he'd spend the rest of his life worshipping and devoting himself to as if he was a god if he'd only let him.

[hypocrisy-incarnate]

once again thinking about podcast men with the most british names i've ever fucking heard

[caus34concern]

why would he say that...

[hotdrinks]

[ID: I black and white ink style drawing of Tim and Martin from the Magnus archives. Tim is a stocky man with dark hair and a thick mustache. Martin is a short, fat man with light hair and glasses. They are both in vaguely Victorian-era white button-up shirts and suspenders. They are both disheveled. Tim has Martin by the shoulders, and their faces are close together, like they are about to kiss. End ID.]

Spicy Victorian (ish) era Martim for @saintbleeding and ALSO FOR ME

[ghostieblr]

<- Part 2 | Untitled

When he decides enough is enough, he also realizes he has no clue how to fix this. Research has always been Stiles' forte, and Derek is, admittedly, not the best with the internet.

But he does have a penchant for reading.

Determined, he makes his way towards the vault below the high school, with a quick detour to Wendy's to get something to eat. There, he goes through the drive-through, and valiantly ignores the fact that Stiles' blue jeep is sitting in the parking lot, and that he can hear him flirting with the waitress. Instead, he quickly vanishes under the cover of the night, and finds himself near the high school in minutes.

Demons aren't common. They don't appear out of nowhere, they're summoned — in this case by a bunch of kids, supposedly — that much he knows. But the summoning ritual itself, what it is and how it's done, and why, is a mystery to him. Someone in this town has been dabbling in things they shouldn't have, and now he — Stiles — is paying the price.

The books in the vault are old and dusty, as well as disorganized. It takes him a while to pick up three books on demons, and he decides he'll start with these and come back tomorrow for more.

Once back at the loft, he tries his best to not look anywhere that would remind him of Stiles as he eats in record seconds and starts on his research. Except, there's Stiles' red hoodie on the back of one of the dining chairs; his copy of Percy Jackson on Derek's bedside table; his favorite flavor of chips on top of the kitchen counters.

He reads. He reads and reads, and barely anything talks about the aftereffects of a deal with a demon. All three books warn of the consequences, but don't elaborate. It's half information to him, but it's still half more than he had before reading them, so he sighs and lays his head against the couch, trying to think what he should do next.

What Will Stiles Do Next?

The morning has dawned, sunlight splashing across his face as he sits sprawled on his couch, and he is no closer to a solution than he was last night. Perhaps he could start with investigating the summoners — He did get the scent of the kids there in that clearing, but finding them with just that isn't going to be easy. But it's a start, and hell if he isn't going to do everything in his power to fix Stiles.

Except does Stiles actually need fixing? Sure, he's turned vicious towards Derek, but he sounded like himself when Derek heard him flirting with that waitress. Carefree and genuine, with his dorky jokes and cascading laughter.

He'll investigate for the sake of his own heart, but if it turns out this is better for Stiles', then he'll leave it be. Rest this case. He's used to the cruelty of the universe, so what's one more time? What's another loved one lost to the hands of fate?

Sighing, he makes his way towards his bed — where Stiles was only hours ago — and manages to fall asleep after some of turning and tossing.

It's only been a meager few hours when there's a loud pounding against the door, and he slips out of bed, in his sleeped-in henley and jeans, to a harried looking Lydia Martin.

She smells of panic, and she looks so too, but in a sort of way that's still impeccable. If a stranger looked at her, they'd think she's alright; it's because he knows her that he knows that something is wrong.

"What's wrong?" He asks her as she brisks past into his home, and she doesn't move to say anything until her purse has been put on the coffee table. Except, her eyes catch on the books he'd brought from the vault, and her mouth snaps shut in shock for a moment.

"You read those?" She asks instead of answering him.

"Yes."

"They're in Archaic Latin," she says, like she didn't think he'll ever have a cause to know them. The surprise of it tilts into anger as she continues, "You know what's wrong! How long have you known? What did Stiles do this time, Derek?"

He feels his insides go cold. "This is about Stiles."

"Yes! And you know what's going on with him. We need to fix it."

She says it matter-of-fact. Of course Derek would help when it comes to Stiles, wouldn't he?

"Why didn't you go to Scott?" He can smell multiple people on her, like she'd been out in a mall or something, and yet the most prominent smell remains. Of course it's Stiles' scent; Now that he's woken up enough for his senses to work properly, he can conclude that she met him recently. It's what, around twelve at the moment? He glances at the clock to confirm — it's been three hours since he went to sleep. "He'll be better equipped to handle this."

Lydia's eye twitches at the statement, like it's fucking stupid. "You have to be kidding me right now," she hisses. "Scott might be an Alpha, but he is no way Stiles'. Never has been. He has no clue how to take care of his pack, and definitely none about solving problems like the one we currently have, without Stiles whispering solutions in his ear. Which would be difficult at the moment, considering Stiles is the problem we currently have."

"If he can't help, why do you think I can?" He can't help anyone.

Lydia takes a few menacing steps forward, her heels clicking like bullets. She's tiny, but her presence is huge, and it takes him a conscious effort to not move backwards. "You," her voice is crisp, clear, crystal fucking steel, "are the only one who can."

He looks at her, the determination and the concern. She's Stiles' friend, and she has a right to protect him. It takes him by surprise that she's come to him to protect Stiles, because who is he but the reason of Stiles' ruin? But she's also smart, and he'll follow her; the two of them have a common cause, after all, even if his stems from feelings he can't quite shake, and hers has grown from a mutual foundation of respect and genius that remains unmatched to anything Derek has ever seen before.

He asks, "What's the plan?" And, "What happened?"

Lydia's laugh is without any humor. "He was flirting," she says it with bewilderment, like it is unfathomable. "He was flirting with the cashier, the guy at the gas station, the damn librarian! And me."

The outburst breaks him as much as it perplexes him. "Lydia, he's a healthy 21 year old man."

Lydia doesn't seem to appreciate his honesty, and this time when she marches forward, he does take a step back. "Boys!" Her snarl is almost like a wolf's, a sound of frustration coming deep from her bones. "You are all so — Derek Hale, something is very, very wrong," she stops for a breath, and here, he intervenes.

"He is free from his shackles," he tells her. He's been thinking, in the little time he's been awake, and since he'd put the books down and not quite managed to sleep yet, that what had been missing in his interaction with Stiles since the deal was warmth. Affection.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, doesn't it? With the heat there, he'd always disregarded it as part of his illusions; demoted the looks of longing and care towards a box labeled "unworthy" in his brain. And now that warmth has been sucked out with the teeth of a literal demon, and all he's felt since then has been the cold reality. That perhaps Stiles had felt the same for him as he does for Stiles, but it's all gone now, taken.

He misses Stiles from before, but had he really deserved the devotion? Of having been worthy to be included in the most precious things that the demon took from Stiles?

Lydia's voice snaps him out of his thoughts. "Derek, what happened?" When he doesn't answer, head down, she repeats forcefully, "What the hell happened on that perimeter run?"

He looks up, and all he sees is a concerned friend. Perhaps the demon took more than just the warmth for Derek — maybe it burned away the roots of care itself.

"I'll tell you, after you tell me what happened exactly."

Lydia swears, says, "Talking with you is like going in fucking circles," and then, "He's vicious."

"I'm not for everybody," it's his turn to chuckle without humor, and then his to be startled into silence when he gets the reply:

"No, but you are for Stiles." She takes a moment to read his expression, hardly hidden behind a mask at the moment. "Christ, men are dumb. Derek Hale, Stiles has been in love with you for ages, and whatever happened to him yesterday has taken away a primal part of him. Whatever happened, it has changed him, to the point that the person who wouldn't even look towards another person, no matter how much his type, or how hot, has started to flirt with everything that moves and keeps commenting that he'll sleep with me even if it's stupid. That he's so over this town and its hold on him. And that there's nothing tying him to this town, nothing."

"He has his dad here."

"And he has us, his pack. You know, he told me last week he's planning on joining the BHPD while he earns another Bachelor's online after his current one?"

Derek's lips part in surprise. "He's planning to stay. Or he was."

"Exactly my point. So, how many times more do I have to ask —"

"He made a deal with a demon."

Lydia's breaths come out sharper at his admission. She moves back, gives them both space. Paces the floor of his loft, click-click-click.

He gives in, admits further, "During the perimeter run, we came across an abandoned clearing. From the smell of it some high school kids had been staying there, but something had happened there. There were all these things for a ritual, and when Stiles tried to investigate, a demon appeared. We tried asking it where are the kids, but it won't give a clear cut answer to us, and then it asked Stiles to give his most precious thing to him as a trade. I tried to protect him but I never do anything right, do I?"

"This is not the time for your self-loathing, schedule that later."

Always so cynically to-the-point. Derek scoffs, continues, "He did it, he agreed, and then came here. He couldn't stay upright and fell face-first on my bed, didn't wake up for a couple of hours, and when he did he was... vicious. Cruel. Cold."

Lydia picks up the book on the top, the last one he was reading. She motions for him to continue, and he takes a deep breath.

She's already told him Stiles loves him. Maybe that is true in the ways he wants it to be, or it isn't, but in Lydia's mind his delusions are true. And anyways, what is vulnerability in the name of saving Stiles?

"At first I figured it was just me. That whatever he had sacrificed only skewed his feelings for me, but now... I don't think so."

"So what are you thinking now?" She points to the book, now open to the middle, her face somewhere between plain and panicked. Closer to the Lydia he's used to. "This says the demons are like the Fae, they twist their words to benefit themselves. According to me, the most precious thing he has in this world are his feelings for you."

Derek makes a noise of disagreement. "Not me. His dad is the most — " Lydia looks at him sharply.

"Not the time for you to hate yourself," she repeats, "You are. Another possibility could be his affection."

He gets it. He's been thinking this, rather than her ludicrous idea of — of. "The demon took away his unending care for the people in his life."

Her eyes flick between the pages open in front of her and him. "Or both." She says at length. "We need to find those meddlesome kids."

"You sound like every villain in Scooby Doo," he says, and it strikes him as odd, that in the middle of all this, he's not thinking why did I say it? Instead he's stuck on Stiles would appreciate the joke.

"And you fucking wonder why you would be the person he cares for most," Lydia mutters under her breath, piling up all three books in her hand. "Come on, we need to get to work. I want to finish this today. What did the demon tell you?"

She's by the door before he takes a step towards the direction of it.

"Nothing."

"Nothing? Didn't it make a fucking deal with Stiles?"

"It also promised none other of his kind would come to our town," he says, and smiles sardonically as they both descend the stairs. "Which means that thing is still here and will probably only tell things to Stiles."

"He's the one it made a deal with," she agrees, and pulls out her keys from her purse. Derek takes a seat on the passenger seat without any protests, but he dreads what Lydia says next. "So we need him."

He'd deduced that much.

"He's under its influence," she says, but it sounds more like a reminder than a statement. As if she's trying to reassure the both of them.

"Where would he be now?" Normally, Derek would be aware of it, because Stiles texts him these things. It's a question he hasn't had to ask in a long time in regards to Stiles.

"Hopefully, still at the mall where I left him without a ride." He gives her a look as she turns on the engine and pulls out of the parking lot of his building. "What? I couldn't stand him."

"And you both had some shopping plans."

"It was not a fun experience," she states. "Not how it usually is."

"Alright." He takes a pause, and decides if he really wants to say what he's going to next or not. He goes along with it, because really, what's the harm? And at least he'll get to tell it to Stiles later — hopefully. So he says, "Let's solve this mystery," and imagines Stiles' raucous laughter instead of Lydia's side-glare at it.

[gerrydelano]

SKINDEEP

Rating: M Words: 13.3k Characters: Jon Sims, Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood, Danny Stoker, Sasha James, Melanie King, Caroline Brodie, Callum Brodie, Gerry Keay (in memorium)

Relationships: Gerry/Tim, Martin/Danny, Sasha & Tim, Melanie & Caroline Brodie, Danny & Tim

Synopsis: Alternate ending for Pharos by Right (inspired by this anon) where Tim doesn't manage to stop Danny from swinging the hammer while Gerry read the incantation to start the Change — i.e., Gerry is killed to save the world, and then the world goes quiet.

(Actual ending of PBR will commence after posting this because I needed to get it out of my system. Got possessed.)

To those unfamiliar, PBR is my massive Archivist!Gerry series, and this requires the context of most of it, but especially my most recent chapter. If this intrigues you at all, there's 430k more words where this came from!

CWs: Character death; Head trauma; Severe injury; Grief; An intense breakdown ft. drowning imagery; Mention of drug use

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

Jon opens his eyes to the sound of screaming, burning, and a loud ringing in his ears. He coughs against the ash in his mouth, halting in his attempt to roll onto his side as his ribs clip a hard object underneath him. He must have been thrown backwards into something when the—

When the bombs went off. The bombs went off. It’s must be over.

But the screaming. Oh, the screaming, it’s louder than the ringing and the burning and the voice that he can almost hear saying shhh, it’s alright, I’m right here! Oh, G-d, somebody help! The voice calls his name. His name is Jon. His name is his name again.

Stiffly, he rises to his elbow and coughs again, his chest sore and his legs weak and oh, G-d, his leg— there’s a gash in his leg, a large one, and he can feel the blood running down into his sock.

His name is called again, and he’s almost afraid to rub soot into his remaining eye even on the off chance that he might clear it and find the source of the sounds, the screaming, the voice. Bleary, he stumbles forward onto his less-injured leg, peering around in the smoke for a shape he might recognize.

There is a shape, tall and upright, but it’s silent. A spire in the fog. Not the source of his name.

He keeps looking. He keeps listening. He crawls.

“Jon, where are you! Judith? Tim! I need help, somebody help me!”

Martin? That’s Martin’s voice, high and desperate and rough with smoke, too, there’s smoke everywhere, they need to get out of here. They need to leave, before the police arrive, before the structure collapses, before—

The screaming has transitioned into bawling, deeply pained cries for help, and only when he finally sees Martin’s shape hunkered over a spasmodic, outstretched body does it click. Danny is hurt. He was hurt in the explosion, and Martin needs help with him. Jon drags himself over to Danny’s other side and reaches out for his arm to find his sleeve wet with blood, but not torn. Danny screams again at the contact of his hand, startling Jon into letting go.

“How—” Jon coughs again. “Where is he hurt, what—”

“I-I don’t— Everywhere!” Martin panics, his hands on Danny’s chest like he’s about to start compressions. He doesn’t, of course, because Danny is horrifically alive, and there is blood seeping through his ringmaster’s jacket like the fabric has just been lain upon a dark puddle.

Jon reaches out for his hem to lift it, earning a smack from Danny’s frantic, bloody hand. He persists. He gasps.

The open wound is a perfect split down the middle of his stomach, disappearing at his groin, and most certainly extending up his chest into a V. He’d heard about the autopsy seams. He could never have imagined they would split open again.

Quickly, Jon lowers the shirt again and presses down on the wound, earning another guttural sound of agony. Martin is weeping but trying not to let it slow him down, trying to pin Danny’s arm to his side with his knees. Jon tries to do the same, but then who will get his legs? They surely go down his legs, too.

“Tim?” he hears himself croak out. “Tim, where are you?”

No answer. He could assume the worst, but he remembers that tall shape and turns around. It’s still there, standing a distance away in utter stillness, like another wax statue that hasn’t been taken down in the blast or a troupe member that refused to be exterminated, but Jon knows that sound. The sound of phantom water.

“Tim!” he shouts. “Tim, come over here and help your brother!”

No answer.

Jon turns around again and waves a hand through the smoke. There is daylight shining through a busted out window, casting beams onto the filthy, ruined floor. Tim is hovering a few yards away, staring down at the ground and soaked to the bone as water pours from the top of his head all the way down his body. He doesn’t look injured — why would he? He’s still clenching his fist around what Jon can only assume is the detonator.

“Tim!” he shouts again. “Tim, we need you to— oh.”

At Tim’s feet, there is a dark pool. It creeps slowly across the floor towards Jon’s own extended shoe, glinting red in the dusty daylight. Jon traces the seeping to its source, and meets Gerry’s open eyes.

“Oh, no… No, no, no.”

The blood is pouring fast from his head, spreading out from under the mess of his hair. His mouth is parted almost in surprise, frozen around an unspoken word, like he’s been interrupted from a dream.

This has to be a dream.

“Jon, could you please focus!”

Jon realizes he’s let go of Danny entirely. Jon stutters back around, stutters his next half-words. Nothing comes of his violent nausea. He almost wishes it would. Maybe it would wake him up.

“I— Martin, Gerry is—”

“I know!” Martin snipes, and then takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I know. I know, and I can’t think about that right now, not when— Danny is still alive, please, help me keep him that way!”

“We need… We need an ambulance, we need… Where’s my phone…?”

Jon pats at himself, feeling the tack of bloody handprints on his clothes as he goes. When he finds his phone, he finds the screen cracked, but it still works when he presses his sticky thumb to the sensor. His free hand moves back to Danny’s arm, squeezing his bicep hard.

“Y-Yes, hello? We’re at the House of Wax. Yes, that one, in— in Great Yarmouth. There’s been— There’s been an explosion, people are hurt, we need… please, send an ambulance. Send two. Send all of them! I don’t care, please, just— please, help.”

Jon doesn’t realize he’s started to cry until he’s bowed forward enough over Danny that the next time his arm flails, it clips him on the face. He recoils and nearly drops his phone, barely catching it to put it back into his pocket before he secures his hands around Danny’s arm again and holds tight. He dreads turning his head again, but he has to.

“Tim,” he says more carefully this time. “Tim, you need to move. You need to do something.”

No answer.

“Either help us, o-or go find Judith, or the Hunters, or see if any of the troupe are still alive.”

No answer.

“Anything, Tim! Can you hear me?”

No answer.

“He can’t hear you,” Martin sniffs. “I don’t— I don’t think he can hear anything.”

The water in his ears may be too much. He may be frozen in his avatar state, consumed by repulsive satiation. He may be lost, too.

When Danny’s screaming dies down into whimpers, his thrashing into mere twitches, Jon finds himself just as worried as Martin. He lets Martin take up the mantle of trying to keep his attention — Danny? Angel, can you hear me? Stay with me, stay awake! I can’t lose you here, not like this! — because what could Jon possibly say? What could he offer to either of the Stoker brothers now?

A clattering sounds from afar. Jon snaps his head up to look for the source of it, spying Judith stumbling over a pile of rubble to reach them. She’s covered in soot, clutching her arm and limping. When she reaches their pocket of the room, her eyes go to Gerry first.

“Oh, G-d.”

Jon swallows hard. “Where are the other Hunters?”

“Dead. Think they fragged each other.”

Her voice is dreamy and distant. She crosses over to Tim, and bends down to pick something up off the floor. Gerry’s walking stick, forgotten in between the two scenes. She doesn’t wipe the blood off of the handle, inspecting the head of the hammer in the light for something Jon can’t see. He watches her study Tim like a marble statue in a museum, until his eyes drop once again to meet Gerry’s.

This has got to be a dream.

“What happened to him?” Judith asks of Danny.

“I— I don’t know,” Martin struggles. “I think a lot of his old wounds opened up, but I don’t know how, I don’t see why they— Jon, how long until the ambulance gets here?”

Jon blinks. “I didn’t ask.”

Martin doesn’t chastise him, instead nodding with a tearful sound. He’s come to lean his forearm across Danny’s collarbones, his other bent to cover as much of the vertical line down his chest as he can. Like he’s holding together some little paper art project, waiting for the glue to dry. His wrist is angled strangely, and for the first time, Jon notices his gritting teeth. He’s hurt, too, and he’s fighting through it.

“I’ll go wave them down,” Judith says, starting to step over the growing lake of Gerry’s blood. A thin branch of it is close to touching the edge of Danny’s.

“What’s our plan?”

“Plan?” Jon almost mocks. “What can— What can we even do now?”

“You were all about contingency plans before,” she says dryly. “You didn’t plan for something like this?”

“Well, obviously not, Judith! Of course I didn’t think—”

Didn’t think… what? That only some of them might die? That the rest of them would have to live with it? Of course he didn’t plan for that.

“I say… let it get sectioned.” She shakes her head at the scene. “Let it all get put away.”

“How do we do that?”

“Tell them that something unbelievable happened, that they got caught in the crossfire, that you don’t know what happened to them because something was happening to you, too. Isn’t that the truth?”

It sounds too easy. “Won’t we be detained anyway until they decide we’re not lying?”

“We all need a hospital. I have a feeling we’ll be fine, when they see the rest of the scene. The choir’s dead, too.” Judith turns to Tim once more. “…I’ll put this in my car before they get here.”

She leaves with the help of the walking staff, calm and direct, and Jon doesn’t think he has it in him to be a Hunter, after all.

Tim pays her no mind, still staring stone still at Gerry’s body. He’d landed on his back, mostly, one leg tipped to the side and his hand delicately curled in the puddle. The other is resting serenely on his hip, almost like he’d been posed that way. One of his eyes is severely bloodshot, grey shining up through the darkness of it like a coin. The longer Jon looks at him, the clearer the sunlight is through the window. It’s a beautiful day outside. It’s the middle of summer. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

“How did— How did this happen?”

“There was an explosion, Jon,” Martin mutters.

“No, I know, but— but the rest of us… We’re fine, we’re… Why him?”

“I don’t have an answer for you. I didn’t see what happened.” Martin lifts an arm for a split second to wipe his nose, leaving a smudge of red on his face. He stares down at Danny’s face, paler than fear has ever left it, one-track minded as ever. It’s not as if Jon can blame him. What else in this room is worth worrying about now? It’s all over. They were just in time, and they were too late.

Jon forgets until the sound of sirens. He spins around to face Tim again, to tell him that he needs to control his leaking before someone sees, but the only evidence that Tim was ever standing there in the first place is a small disturbance in the blood where it has been thinned and expanded with water.

Firefighters first, police, and then the paramedics with their stretchers and their questions and their back away, let us take over. Martin tries his best to explain the extent of Danny’s wounds, launching into the true lie that Judith encouraged without rehearsal.

“We were just walking around, and something weird started happening, there— there was music, and dancing? But it was terrible dancing, not bad to look at but bad to be a part of, we couldn’t stop, there are— there are more people lost in here somewhere, I just know it, but I don’t know where they are. There was—” A sob. “There were people without skin.”

Danny can pass very well as a mere victim of whatever supernatural nonsense had taken place, certainly. His wounds are too severe and his clothes too close to pristine over them to make any sense to the ordinary eye.

Jon is asked about Gerry.

“I—” His throat stops up with a cry. “I didn’t see. I think… I think the blast must have… I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Should he mention the Magnus Institute? Will that hurry up the Section Eight process? He doesn’t know what to do. When a paramedic asks to see his leg, he’s powerless to do anything but obey, limping out of the building with the help of a firefighter.

Martin isn’t permitted into Danny’s ambulance, the paramedics too frantic to stabilize him. Jon catches one of them noting the texture and colour of his blood in confusion, in distress, and looks down at his hands to find them more maroon than crimson in the sunlight. He sways.

While he’s being bandaged on the back of an ambulance, a stretcher carrying a body bag is rolled by and loaded into another. He watches as a series of dark, wet spots form on the ground leading up to the step into the back before the doors close.

Good. Someone should stay with him until the end. Jon only knows Jewish funerals, the strict customs that being sectioned might not care to honour. Perhaps Gerry wouldn’t care one way or another if someone were to guard his body, but he still shouldn’t be alone.

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

They bring him straight to the morgue.

Tim follows behind the man with the stretcher in silence, in absence, and cares nothing for the mess his footsteps leave behind. When the swinging door shuts in his face, he steps right through it. He watches the man handle his lover with ambivalence, with some anxiety, and waits as long as it takes for him to leave. He is going to be alone with Gerry if it kills someone else.

When there’s no one left in the room, he releases his grip on disappearance and watches the perfect stillness of the black bag. He doesn’t feel that old sense of being observed anymore. It’s his turn to stare.

He reaches for the zipper.

Pulling it down takes an eternity, his hands numb with hate. When he’s peeled back the sides to free Gerry’s face, to let his body breathe, he takes in the sight without so much as a shaken gasp. Gerry’s eyes are still open, the one damaged with the impact to his skull, the other clear as day, but catching no light. Not anymore.

Tim reaches out to shut them with his fingertips. To wipe a speck of blood from his forehead. To stroke dust from his cheek.

Gerry’s head lolls with the touch, no control left to be had. The fluorescent lights cast a shine on the blood-matted depression in his skull.

Tim’s eyes catch on the purple bruise on the side of her neck, nestled sweetly just above her collar. His fingertips drift down to touch it, to beg for a pulse. He remembers why he never bothered with prayer.

Gerry never bothered with it, either. What would he want to happen next? It’s up to Tim now. One decision he never wanted to make for her.

Tim remains by his side until the morgue doors open again, at which point he makes eye contact with a startled hospital employee. Water pours from his head and shoulders to spread across the tile floor at his feet, his hand still resting on Gerry’s lifeless breastbone. The worker doesn’t scream, staring back and breathing hard, until Tim forces two words past the outpouring of water from his mouth.

“Get— out.”

Now, they scramble to run, and he turns back to his love for one last, long glance. The next time someone interrupts him, he’ll have to leave. He can’t keep Gerry like this forever. It wouldn’t be fair.

He needs to be out in the waiting room as family when someone finally comes looking for some. He needs to be composed. He needs to be human. To handle this like a husband.

Tim reaches for Gerry’s chin to straighten his head again. Dignity.

Gently, he reaches his hands behind her neck to feel for the clasp of her collar first, and then the chain that holds her padlock. He can get the rest of his jewelry and his jacket back when they strip him for cremation. No one else should get to touch these. Not for anything.

Gerry would choose cremation. He wouldn’t want to be locked in a pine box, slow to decompose. He wouldn’t choose to leave remnants for desecration should someone feel like fucking with the Archivist just a little more. He feared the sink even more than he feared burning. He wouldn’t choose to be Buried.

That doesn’t mean it sits right with Tim. For there to be nothing left of her, just like that. Like she was never here.

He knows what Gerry wanted. He knows exactly what happened.

Tim tucks the collar and padlock into his pocket, no regard for the blood on them, and looks down at Gerry’s bloodless, peaceful face. Carefully, he bends down to place his lips over hers one last time, as if he had a final breath to give her. All he’s ever had was a kiss. He’s still colder than she is.

He zips the bag shut, but lingers just that moment longer.

When the doors open again — the same worker, this time with reinforcements and a right there, see! — Tim lets himself be seen before he revokes the privilege, disappearing with all that he can take with him. He walks past them as any live man ordinarily would, sure to brush shoulders with the one that he knows now will never forget his face. The shudder makes him stronger, and he needs it. There is nothing else left in him.

He walks back into the world in an empty hallway, and keeps going until he finds Jon and Martin in the waiting room. Jon shoots upright when he sees him, stumbling on his new injury. Tim takes a seat beside him. Jon’s questions are a blur of sound and disinterest, until a long silence passes and Tim hears him say:

“I don’t understand.”

“It was the bomb, Jon,” Martin tries. “Something must have hit him when it went off.”

“No,” Tim says, his voice foreign in his throat and his own ears. They need the truth. “It was Danny.”

Martin recoils with a curled lip, disgusted by the notion. “No, that’s not true. You don’t know that.”

“I do know,” Tim refutes. “They had an arrangement.”

“An arrange— what?” Jon shakes his head. “You can’t be serious.”

“You knew about this?” Martin demands. “You knew and you just—?”

“Choose your next words very carefully, Martin.”

Martin shuts his mouth. Jon’s better leg bounces with tension. He breaks the next silence with a question that Tim wishes he couldn’t hear.

“What do we tell the others? When, h-how?”

Tim stares at the floor. “In person, when we get back. I’ll do it.”

“We have no idea how long we’re going to be here,” Martin tells him. “Danny’s in bad shape. He might be stuck here for a long time.”

“If you want to stay with him, you should. I won’t.”

Martin almost looks offended, hurt, before he reins himself back in with a cleared throat. “They won’t let me see him yet.”

“It takes a long time to suture the entire body,” Jon contributes. “Those wounds went down to the muscle.”

Tim would wince if he could. Martin does, leaning forward to scrub at his face with the one hand not in a sling. He’s washed the blood off of his hands, but his clothes are still soaked in it. Jon’s are, too. Tim doesn’t feel the need to tell them that their bags are in the trunk of the car they drove here. They’ll change when they remember.

“It feels wrong to be so calm,” Jon says suddenly. “I feel like I should be throwing the biggest conniption of my life.”

“That’d be a pretty big conniption,” Martin mutters.

“It would be, yes. But I can’t seem to… access it.” His brow creases, as if in confusion. “This still doesn’t feel real.”

“It’s real,” Tim says simply. “Gerry’s dead.”

Jon’s face scrunches up in refusal as he turns away to lean into his hand. Martin stares at the floor at Tim’s feet for a while before he speaks up.

“I’m sorry, Tim.”

Tim has nothing else to say.

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

Martin bolts out of his chair when Danny stirs, fingertips to the edge of his bed.

“Danny?” he asks, tentative. “Danny, can you hear me? It’s Martin, I’m right here.”

Danny whines in protest. His arm shifts barely a centimeter before he seizes up with pain again, eyes flying open as he gasps. Martin freezes; he learned from the sore spot on his cheek. Don’t get too close.

“Look at me, over here. That’s right, right over here. See? It’s only me.”

At first, Danny says nothing. His eyes are bleary with the frankly lethal amount of sedatives they’d given him after the last time he’d lashed out at an orderly when she tried to change his bandages, his mouth slack and weak. His chest heaves with shallow breaths, but he looks at Martin and keeps his eyes locked on him. Martin will take that.

He sits back down in his chair, pulling out the magazine he’d gotten from the waiting room. It’s hard to turn the pages one-handed, his left arm still in the sling. “I was just reading this trashy thing here, but none of the gossip is all that good.”

Not that he expects a response or anything. He just wants Danny to get used to the sound of his voice again, to his presence in the room. Eventually, it feels stupid to make this kind of small talk, though. He tosses the magazine down at the very foot of the bed and leans forward on his knees.

“Can I… get you anything? Water?”

Danny licks his lips, but says nothing. Martin can hear his breath trembling.

“Okay… when you change your mind, you let me know. The doctor said we might try to sit you up a little bit today, if you’re up for it? Just a little bit, not too far. Only until you’ve had enough. I… I think it’s a good idea to try.”

It’s difficult to look Danny in the eye when he’s still so drugged out, so silent. Martin regrets looking away, though, because then all he can see are his heavily bandaged limbs. The padded cuffs around his wrists.

“I wish I could just take these off of you, but… but you hit an orderly, so—” Martin lets out a curt breath. “It’s for your own protection, too. So you don’t rip your stitches. It’s been a few days, though, and you’re doing a little better, so maybe they can start weaning you off the morphine, a-and if you’re more alert, you won’t get so scared anymore when somebody comes by to help.”

“Tim.”

Danny’s voice is wrecked from screaming, reduced to a small, thin whisper. Martin looks down at his laced hands. “Tim isn’t here.”

He takes a long moment to form a second word, licking his dry lips again. “Where?”

“He’s— Jon is… teaching him how to sit shiva.” If Martin could lower his head any more, he would. “They’re about halfway through.”

Danny’s eyes glaze over as they drift up to the ceiling. Martin gives him a moment; that might have been a confusing thing to say while he’s still only partially in his head. It was devoid of context, it was a stupid way to answer that question, dammit, he’s going to need to start over.

“What, um… What do you remember?”

There is another stretch of quiet while Danny seems to think. The sound of hospital machines chews on Martin’s bones. In the end, Danny only comes up with one murmured, deadened word.

“Crack.”

Martin’s stomach solidifies into a brick inside him. He fights the way his leg wants to shake, running his hands over his thighs and pressing down hard. “You remember that?”

Danny nods minutely. “The dancer… thanked me.”

“…But you didn’t do it for her,” Martin suggests. “You did it for Pharos. Right?”

“Right.”

An empty little echo, barely an exhale. Danny’s eyes slip shut, finally, and in the bright light from the window, Martin can see the faintest glint of a tear stuck in the corner of just one. It doesn’t dislodge to fall when he looks up again, clinging instead to his lashes. Martin aches for him in a way that perhaps no one else has it in them to ache.

“I won’t… claim to know what sort of ‘arrangement’ you and Pharos had, or why, but… I know you. I know you wouldn’t have done it without an honest reason.”

“Honest,” Danny huffs.

“I know you,” Martin says again. “I know you’d never—”

“Stop. Stop it.” Danny shifts and shock-stops again, a pained sound caught in his throat. He keeps his eyes screwed shut tight. “Please, don’t. Just stop. Stop.”

“Okay,” Martin murmurs. “Okay, I’m sorry.”

He sits in helplessness as Danny fights the pain of trying to turn away and hide, as he struggles against the wave of grief and regret that Martin can see written plain across his face. Tears build up in Martin’s throat, too; he’s only cried in private since that day, too set on being strong for Danny. No one else could stay in Great Yarmouth just to wait around for Danny to wake up or become a more cooperative patient or explain himself. Tim couldn’t stay in the city that rushed to burn Gerry’s bones.

To be so absent from the mourning process back in London makes Martin feel like a terrible friend. He can’t cite feeling less than close to Gerry as a reason for it; of course his death makes Martin want to curl up into a hole and stay there, but there’s— there’s another factor in the situation, and if no one else can stomach it, then he will. Why stop now?

“Can I hold your hand?”

Danny makes a disagreeable noise. Martin accepts the rejection as gracefully as he can, sitting back in his chair to diminish the temptation to reach out anyway.

“Maybe I could get you that water—?”

“Leave,” Danny spits out on the tail ends of a sharp breath. “Just… please, go. Go home.”

“Well, no, I won’t be doing that much. I can leave the room for a while, I’ll go down to the waiting room again, but… No, Danny, there’s no way I’m just leaving you here. It’s a three hour drive, and you’re in no shape to be by yourself. You need someone to bring you home when you’re ready.”

It must hurt like hell to cry. Martin can see the tendons in Danny’s neck standing out with how harshly he’s turned his head away, his body jolting painfully as he tries to keep himself quiet. How could anyone possibly be expected to hold all this in? Martin isn’t judging him. He wants to cry, too.

“I love you,” he says, even knowing it might even make things worse. Just on the off chance that it doesn’t. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

He stands up without waiting for a response, grabbing up the magazine from the foot of the bed. The waiting room is a better place to check his texts.

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

Every desk in the bullpen filled, but an empty Head Archivist’s office. Sasha glances towards it every now and again, still half-expecting it to creak open and to see Gerry yawning in the doorway. They haven’t erased the nap counter from the white board. They haven’t been touching the calendar, the last blue dot left behind on the day before they all left for Great Yarmouth. It’ll simply gather dust, she suspects, because what function does it serve now? No more estrogen. No more joy.

There is no joy left in Tim. It’s been wrung out of him in a way that Sasha has never seen before. Never in his wildest depressions or losses has he ever looked this grim. His eyes sink into shadows when he turns his head the right way in the light. The wet spots on his shirt could almost be mistaken for sweat if he didn’t radiate such a coldness that sitting across from him makes her want to tighten her cardigan around herself. She hasn’t seen him smile since their meeting in the safehouse, when the corners of his mouth turned up in a halfhearted attempt at saying I’ll see you soon before she hugged him goodbye the second time.

She joined in on Jon’s attempted shiva. They all had, except for Martin. Jon explained the rules; only some of the restrictions, as Gerry was not a Jew, but he said that for the time being, they were to see themselves as Gerry’s immediate family. Who else would mourn him properly? It not being his custom hardly mattered in this case; it was something where he would otherwise have nothing. According to Jon, shiva was meant to contain the grieving process into something manageable. To allow for the full depth of it to sink its teeth in, to truly sit in it, and then when the time came, face the world again with renewed strength. It was the only way he knew how to grieve, and so it was all he could do to share it.

Tim had followed the rules in silence. Sasha watched him from her low cushion and waited for an opportunity to touch him, to console him, but he never gave her one. On the morning of the seventh day, Jon took it upon himself to say play the visitor and recited a blessing in front of Tim, bidding G-d to comfort him among all the mourners in Jerusalem, and reached to help him up off the floor. “Arise,” he’d said, and Tim had.

It just wasn’t Tim’s custom, either. It’s been a week since they returned to work, and he’s still a stone gargoyle in his desk chair, empty of light and effort. Jon told her that for spouses, the mourning period will be considerably intense for at least a year.

A year. Two years. Three years, four. Eventually, the years without Gerry will outnumber the ones they had with him, and Tim will feel it like no one else. Sasha looks at him, and she feels moths crawling underneath her clothes, trapped there in her own grief.

Sasha has lost enough sisters. This one is especially cruel.

“So…” Martin begins, breaking the long silence. “What exactly are we going to… do now? Here, I mean, at the Institute.”

“The same thing we’ve been doing, I presume.” Jon sets a pile of papers off to the side. “The Unknowing was only one ritual of many potential rituals. I think it’s only natural that we should keep trying to stop as many as we can.”

“But—” Martin bites his tongue for a moment. “I mean… sure. But something has to happen next, right? I mean, Elias—”

“Elias is mine.”

Tim’s voice doesn’t even sound like his voice anymore. Sasha shifts in her seat.

They’ve talked about this already. Judith went back into the rubble to find Begging the King and bring it to her father, who studied page 77 with a thoughtful face. There was only so much he could speculate about the incantation, but the long string of words at the end made him surmise that it was an attempt to bring forth all of Smirke’s Fourteen at once, and that the results could have been catastrophic. None of them knew how far Gerry must have read, or if he’d even been reading it at all by the time Danny swung the hammer, and so it’s difficult to say that the sacrifice was worth it.

But it looks like they wiped the chessboard entirely. Elias can’t come back to the Institute and reinstate himself as Head, he can’t ‘promote’ anyone to the Archivist position and start over whatever the hell he’d been doing with Gerry the whole time, he can’t show his face while it’s still Faraday’s. Whatever game he was playing, he’s lost.

Sasha doesn’t know if she’s allowed to feel triumphant or if she should just settle for being afraid of the retaliation that could creep up on them should he switch bodies again, or send something after them, or pull another gun. She wants to believe he won’t risk it; not with Tim still around to want revenge. She’s willing to bet he’s more afraid of Tim than he ever was before.

“…Okay, but, after that.” Martin’s skepticism is hesitant, but reasonable. “I just feel—”

“Lost,” Jon suggests, sounding far away.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Sasha repeats, too. Tim has the right idea, in his almost-vow-of-silence. There’s not a whole lot else to say.

Another length of quiet sweeps through the Archives. Sasha can’t bring herself to touch her laptop, or get up for a box of folders. She can’t imagine recording statements onto her phone. She can’t imagine moving, paralyzed into her chair by the crawling sensation at the small of her back, the bend of her knees, in her sleeves.

“Hellooo?”

Sasha, Jon and Martin all jump in their seats as Divshah elbows her way into the Archives. She’s carrying a tray of coffee cups with both hands. Dread drops into Sasha’s stomach like a cement block.

“Oh, um—” Jon swallows. “H-Hello, Divshah.”

“Hi!” she chirps. “I haven’t seen you guys in a while, so I thought I’d bring something by! Scoot, scoot!”

She hops over to the bullpen and sets the tray down in front of Sasha and Tim. Sasha numbly accepts the biscotti as Divshah passes it to her, watching the cups as she distributes them by memory until there’s only one left in the very middle. Divshah takes it into her hands and straightens up to look around the room with a smile.

“Where’s Gerry?” She gasps gently. “Is he asleep?”

Sasha looks up at Tim to find him entirely unmoved. There is a droplet forming at his hairline. One glance at Jon and Martin tells her that she’s going to have to get up from her chair after all, because this conversation can’t happen in here.

“Um… Divshah, come with me really quick.”

Confused, Divshah places the last cup down on Sasha’s desk. “What’s going on?”

Sasha doesn’t respond just yet, shaking out her clothes a bit as she stands. If she doesn’t look down and around for the moths, they may just fade away.

Divshah follows her to Basira’s old room down the hall, her cheerful smile traded for something more apprehensive. Sasha shuts the door and sighs, catching her own face in both hands for a moment before she bites the bullet.

“You don’t have to bring cocoa for Gerry anymore,” she begins.

Divshah wilts. “Oh, no! Does he not work here anymore?”

“No, he doesn’t. Because, um.” Sasha swallows roughly. “Because— he died, Divshah. About two weeks ago.”

For a moment, Divshah just stares at her. She’s not like them, though, and she’s quick to blink. “What?”

“There was an accident. He… took a bad blow to the head. It happened really fast. There was nothing anyone could do.”

Instant are the tears. Divshah covers her mouth with both hands, shaking her head. “No, that’s— How could that happen? That’s not right, I don’t— He couldn’t—”

“I know,” Sasha interrupts, her own throat stopping up again. “I know, come here.”

Divshah slips into her arms like a river, clinging tight to the back of her cardigan. If there are moths around, she doesn’t seem to notice them, or care. Why would she? She’s been touched by the Corruption, too, and nothing seems to faze her. This is the first time Sasha has seen her look anything less than simply happy to be alive.

It takes a while for her to stop crying, pulling back to sniff so hard it must hurt. “How’s Tim doing?”

“Not well,” Sasha admits. “He’s really not himself right now.”

“Oh, I can’t imagine,” Divshah says nauseously. “I’m so— I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to make it worse with the— with the cocoa, I just wanted to—”

“I know, sweetheart. You didn’t do anything wrong.” Sasha pets her hair; her dark roots have grown out past her ears, the bleach-fried ends freshly lopped off. “Just… He needs some space. They all do, they were all there for it.”

“Oh, G-d.” Divshah hides her face again, letting out another round of tears. “That’s— That’s awful.”

“Yeah, from what I gather, it… it was.”

She could be more comforting, probably. She could be better. Or she could be honest, and cry a little bit, too. Divshah hugs her one more time, and Sasha plucks off her glasses to bend and bury her face in her shoulder. She hasn’t done this with Tim yet. She doesn’t know how much longer she can take it.

“I’ll, um… I’ll go.” Divshah wipes her face, stepping away and towards the door. “Enjoy your biscotti.”

Sasha steps out after her, watching as she pauses in front of the Archives doors and looks in through the window with a tearful face before she carries on towards the stairs at a brisk walk. Good that she didn’t go back in. She has some tact after all.

That was mean to think. Sasha taps her own cheek in reprimand, to shock the tears back inside, before she goes back into the Archives with a straight face. Tim is still sitting with his back to the door, the cocoa still sitting in front of him. Jon meets her eyes with concern, arms wrapped tight around his stomach. His kurta today is pink.

“She’s gone,” Sasha tells them, sitting down.

“What did you tell her?” Martin asks.

“What else? I told her the truth.” Sasha stares down at the cocoa cooling in front of her. “She didn’t take it very well. Cried a lot.”

Jon and Martin both nod, but only Jon voices his opinion. “Good. Someone ought to. S-Someone other than us, I mean. Anyone, really.” And then he gasps. “Oh, G-d, someone has to tell Tazia.”

Sasha winces. “You do it. I can’t. Not after Divshah just now, I— I can’t.”

He pulls out his phone to scroll through his messages for the large group chat they’d made back in Venice. The only way that anyone would even have her number. The only other person that Sasha can think of that knew Gerry, really knew him, and will care that he’s gone.

Tim moves, suddenly, to take the cocoa from the desk and swipe it into the bin.

The remainder of the day moves like molasses. The moment the clock strikes 5:00, Sasha stands up and requests that Tim follow her. He rises and does, and the drive home is silent. He waits on the doorstep for her to find her key and use it, perhaps consciously stopping himself from walking straight through. Without another word, he retreats to his bedroom and shuts the door.

Sasha doesn’t know what to do with the rest of her evening. She spends most of it on the couch, texting Melanie. Danny got home yesterday, having left the hospital against medical advice, and is largely immobile in bed. He still won’t speak much, either, apparently. Sasha can’t wrap her mind around the fact that she currently lives in a world where the Stoker boys — of all people — have gone speechless.

It’s half past midnight when she hears the crash. It jolts her out of bed and into the hallway, towards Tim’s room, before an even scarier noise halts her worried footsteps entirely. A garbled wail, like a scream underwater, interspersed with loud, hacking sobs. She looks down at her feet; there’s water seeping out from under his door. When she knocks, the only response is another item shattering — the bedside lamp? A picture frame? Sasha reaches for the doorknob to find it locked.

“Tim?” she calls out against the door. “Tim, can you hear me?”

The drowning noises don’t stop for her. Every image her mind conjures up of what he might look like right now only serves to split her heart further apart. She almost doesn’t want to see, but it feels like she needs to know. She needs to know in order to fix it. She needs to be able to hold him, to shush him, to simply be with him until the pain eases. She needs him to want her to.

“Tim,” she repeats, pleading. “Open the door, let me help you.”

“No!” comes the shout, hysterical. It’s barely intelligible as a word through the slosh of water that must have spewed from his mouth alongside it. “Go— away!”

Fine, then. If he wants her to do this the hard way, then she will. Sasha leaves the hall to dig through her room for the new lock-picking kit Melanie got her for her most recent birthday. The lock on his door is simple and plain like all the others in the house’s interior, so it barely resists when she fits the tool inside it. The phantom water is cold under her bare feet as she stands in the growing puddle, until the lock pops open and she ventures inside.

The floor is almost entirely flooded, and there’s a large wet spot on the center of the bed. She was right, the bedside lamp had been thrown to the ground, pieces of glass scattered in the water. She can’t see yet what else had been broken in the dark, but she can see Tim’s shape in the moonlight through the window, curled up between his side table and the edge of his mattress on the floor. He grasps at his chest like he’s suffocating all over again, water cascading down his body at an almost threatening speed. It’s a wonder there’s any room for him to cry through the outpouring.

There is no splashing sound when she walks through the flood to reach him, the water only as real as they believe it to be. Sasha chooses to believe he could breathe through it if he wanted to. That he will, eventually, when this has run its course. It’s been such a long time coming.

She sits down on the floor under the window, her dressing gown skimming the top of the puddle. Tim jolts like he’s in the tank again, his head banging against the side table, and Sasha lets herself wince because he’s not even looking at her. He can’t yet. He’s not ready.

So, she waits. She watches as it all comes rushing out of him at once, until he’s reduced to trickles and trembling and softer cries that finally sound more like weeping than a waterfall. He leans against the mattress and she finally sees what he’s been clutching in his fist; Gerry’s padlock on its chain.

There’s still nothing to say.

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

Melanie zips up her backpack with a sigh. “Martin, come on! You’re coming with me!”

“No the hell I’m not.”

“You have to! I’m down an assistant, and you know Callum. You went to his birthday party this year!”

Martin slams his mug down on the counter hard enough that she sees some of his tea splash out of it. “I’m not going to be a part of this video, Melanie. I don’t know how many times I have to say it.”

Melanie crosses her arms. “You’re really not even going to give me a statement for it, either? You don’t have anything to say about our dead friend?”

He whirls around with a vengeance. “What do you want me to talk about, Melanie! The time I stole his keys and went behind his back and got Leitner all NotThem’d, so he compelled me and made it really clear that he’d never trust me? Or the time I nearly strangled him to death and proved him right? Or maybe for something lighter, how about the time we went to a flesh witch’s house and he hacked up his tonsils in front of me, that was a blast!”

“Okay, I get it!” Melanie cuts him off. “Fuck you.”

“Just— go do your thing, and don’t bring this up around me ever again.”

With a scowl, she turns around to snatch up her bag and storm out of the house. She hates this Martin. He’s worse than punctuation-user Martin, because now he uses punctuation all the time and he’s mean in person. Even when he had that bullet inside of him, he wasn’t quite so cutting.

She knows it’s because of Danny leaving, but it’s been three bloody months. He should be starting to level out again. He should be starting to— well, to get over it would be unrealistic to expect of him. How are any of them supposed to get over any of this?

Maybe she’s faring better because she’s the one Danny said goodbye to. The only one, because she was the only one he could trust not to beg him to stay. She’s the one who gets pulse check texts now and then, and sometimes the name of whatever continent he’s made it to. When he said he was in South America last weekend, she almost called him a liar.

Melanie doesn’t want to be angry at Martin, but it’s hard when he’s angry at her. For harboring something that he’s been deprived of. For persisting in the face of the paralysis that’s taken over the entire Archives, still, to this day. For being almost relieved by it, because Danny’s absence gave her enough space to breathe to decide on her next, long overdue project. One that he could never have helped her with.

It starts snowing halfway through her bus ride, speckling against the windows to dissolve into droplets. Melanie watches them trickle away, going over the intro to her video in her head again and again and again.

This is a video I’ve wanted to make for a long time, but it’s also one I never wanted to have to make at all. I’m going to start this by asking for some basic courtesy, because while I know this is the internet and I’m broadcasting from a channel about supernatural crap that a lot of skeptics like to make fun of, I’m going to be telling you about that close friend of mine that passed and I will not tolerate disrespect towards his memory. There will be times where I can only give so much proof, because some of the events I’m going to outline are from a long time ago, and yeah, have to do with supernatural crap that didn’t exactly leave behind a lot of clues. Long time viewers will know that the real stuff can’t always be captured digitally, and I want to finally tell you who opened my eyes and changed my entire career path with that knowledge: his name was Gerard Keay.

It was hard to deliver the lines into the camera when she first started recording. Took way too many takes, and she’s still not sure about the script. She might have to rewrite it a third time, maybe a fourth before this is over. This is going to be a big project. It’s going to be all the more difficult without Danny’s help.

One thing that makes it easier are the number of witnesses willing to appear on camera and speak on it.

Divshah wanted to tell her story the very day that Melanie asked her if she would, eager to tell the world the truth about how Gerry saved her from an abusive relationship without even knowing her name, and how he was never unkind to her, or dismissive of her disposition. She knows she’s a lot to handle, but Gerry never put out the idea that she was too much. He was accepting, and friendly, and he always put something in the tip jar.

Melanie sent Timothy Hodge an email. She plans to put a screenshot of his reply in the video, too, with his permission; he wants to put Jane Prentiss behind him, but he will admit with no hesitation that the only reason he’s alive today is because of Gerry. Gerry noticed, Gerry saw the signs, and Gerry personally saw to it that he was brought to a hospital. Gerry did that.

Next on her list is Caroline Brodie.

The snow is sticking to the grass a little bit as she walks up to the door and knocks. Caroline answers quickly, expecting her at this time. She ushers her inside and to the living room, where she sits on the couch to wring her hands in anxious hesitation.

“Thank you for doing this,” Melanie says after she’s taken out her camera and tripod. “I know it’s… out of the blue, after all this time.”

“No one could have predicted that this would have happened.”

“Still, it’s been… what, a little over a year? Since—”

Since Basira took the umbra from Callum. Since Gerry scared him to save him. Since the worst time of this family’s lives finally came to a tentative end.

Caroline nods. “Just about, yes. It feels like so much longer ago, but… also like it was only yesterday. Do you ever get that feeling?”

“All the time.”

Melanie offers a small smile, and then turns on her camera. Caroline shifts to sit up straighter, presentable, nervous.

“So, you’re making this video as… a memorial?”

“Sort of. But also… there’s a lot of people out there who have some really wrong beliefs about who he was. And people who did know him only got him in passing, he was like some… mythic figure, even to me at first. So, now that he’s not here to have his privacy invaded more, I figured it’s finally time to shed some light on the situation and kind of… clear his name.”

Tim had granted his assent, though not in so many words. He knew she wouldn’t be exploitative about it, but the real root of his reason was clear: everything is pointless now, so it didn’t matter what she did. Jon and Sasha had already given a few accounts each, full of stories and love. They’ll surely think of more to add as time continues to pass, in the absence of any contribution from Tim. Melanie won’t press him the way she pressed Martin earlier. It’s different.

Caroline wraps her mind around it, and doesn’t pry about what his name needs clearing from. “What is it you want me to say?”

“Just… the truth of your experience, I suppose? This video is about Gerry, about the person he really was, everything he did to help people… So, whatever you remember about him, I’d really like to hear it.”

Caroline nods again, clearing her throat. Melanie gives her a thumbs up when the camera starts recording, gesturing for Caroline to look at her while she speaks. It takes a long moment and a deep breath, but she does.

“I didn’t know Gerry very well. I only met him a few times, and the most prominent of those memories was the scariest moment of my life. Even scarier than losing my child was watching him— tied to a chair, and afraid. It worked, is the thing; the scary thing worked. I-I couldn’t even begin to recount it for you, what the process of… freeing him, was like, but it saved his life. It gave me my baby back.

“And just before the scary part began, I remember Gerry… sitting in front of him, just talking to him. He showed him a scar that I can still see in my mind if I think back on it — a big, black handprint on his leg — and told him that he wasn’t alone in what he was going through. That letting people notice that he’s hurt and letting them help him was the only way to heal. I remember him pulling his rucksack into his lap and showing him all these little trinkets he’d gotten from people over time, and one of them was—” She laughs wetly. “One of them was from Callum. They’d met before on a bus one day, and my son flicked a paper ninja star at him. Something I might’ve scolded him for had I been there, but then… maybe Gerry wouldn’t have flung it back. Maybe they wouldn’t have had their fun, and my son would have one less fond memory of a kind stranger who paid attention to him. Gerry kept that ninja star pinned to his bag that whole time, because he must have been short on fond memories, too. I didn’t know him well, but I know that’s the kind of person he was. The fond sort.

“And Callum listened to him. He has friends, now. Good friends who come over and stay the night sometimes, and lightbulbs don’t break in our house anymore. He’s happy. He’s healthy. He’s safe. And we’re closer than ever, we’re in a good place. That whole time was… very dark for us, so dark, and if you’re asking me about Gerry… I’d say he did his best to shine just a little bit of light on the future he wanted for my son. No one made him do that, no one made him care. He just… did. And I wish I had taken the chance to thank him for that.”

After a hesitant hand motion from Caroline, Melanie shuts off the camera and dabs at the corner of her eye. She hadn’t been there for Callum’s rescue, or his second saving, but she’d heard the stories of their respective horrors. She didn’t know about the sentimental part of it, but she believes it. She knows it.

“Thank you, Caroline,” Melanie says again, and she’s taken off guard by the swelling of pain in her throat that comes with the words. She turns her face away to roll her eyes up to the ceiling, bouncing a hand on her leg. She’s not supposed to cry, not here.

Caroline gets up and rushes back with a box of tissues, handing the whole thing to her. Melanie laughs, and accepts it, letting herself let just a bit of it out before she forces it all back inside. Another mumbled thanks, and an equally quiet you’re welcome.

“Are you done already?”

Melanie jumps, snapping her head back around to see Callum standing at the foot of the stairs. His hair is in need of a trim, his shirt baggy around his arms and hanging low past his waist. He stares at her sullenly, one hand on the banister as he sways with the clear desire to enter the room.

“I don’t know,” Caroline says to him, and turns to Melanie. “Are we?”

“I, um— I think that’s just about all I needed, yes. We can watch it over and you can tell me if you want to do another take, but I think… I always think interviews are best kept organic, you know? We never recall things the same way twice, and we can’t… replicate the same emotion.”

Caroline agrees, looking down at her folded hands before she glances back up at her son. “Were you listening?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you want to come and talk with us?”

He gives Melanie a wary look before he slumps over to the couch to sit beside his mother. He doesn’t react much when she runs a hand through his hair and rubs his back once, his eyes tracing the camera and Melanie’s belongings.

“Why can’t I do one, too?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Caroline says. “We’d be telling the same story, wouldn’t we? I don’t want your face on any more… computers, or televisions, or any of that.”

“But he died.” He says it so plainly. “Shouldn’t I say something?”

“What would you say that she didn’t say already?” Melanie prompts.

He looks at the camera again. “Turn that on.”

“Why?”

“Because if I have to say it twice, I’ll get it wrong.”

Melanie looks at Caroline for permission. Caroline hesitates a moment longer, petting Callum’s hair again.

“Are you sure, honey?”

He nods. “A lot of people… have died, for me. And maybe he didn’t die for me, but he died, and I knew him. I want to do this.”

Caroline’s eyes well up again, and after another beat, she relents. She scoots over to the other side of the couch to let Callum take her seat in front of the camera, and Melanie starts to fiddle with her equipment again. Before she hits record, Callum asks her a difficult question.

“When’s Danny coming back?”

Melanie swallows. “I don’t know yet, kiddo. But I’m still in touch with him, so when I know, you’ll know.”

“Okay.”

She readjusts in her seat and angles the camera a little lower to focus on his face, and starts recording.

“Whenever you’re ready, go ahead.”

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

He listens to the rumble of the train around him in place of any sort of music, no headphones on his person since he left. Self-deprivation, perhaps, but that was almost the point. Instead he’s filled his life with the sounds of the world around him, voices to mimic and borrow, the machinery of travel and distance. No nice little daydream to get lost in. He hasn’t earned that.

His bag is light on his lap. He’d only brought enough with him that he could carry on his person at all times, replacing things when he needed to the same way he’d swindled his way onto planes, boats, trains like this one, when he wanted to take his time instead of traveling through mirrors. Excuse me, that’s my seat. Oh, you already punched my ticket. The same way he’d grifted their way to Greece the first time he left home with Martin and—

Home. What a lost notion.

It’d be a lie to say he didn’t still daydream. His dreams are different now; no longer limited to the Circus the second time, no longer Watched by that haunting pair of silver eyes. They’re broader again, now with new hammersplat sounds and Tim is there, turning away from him. Sometimes they’re not about anything at all, ordinary dreams that he didn’t realize he could still have. Ones that leave him emptier than the ones that wake him up with chills or a shout, because he hasn’t earned those, either.

But some mornings, he would wake up in a motel without arms around him and sincerely wonder where they went. Had Martin gotten up to get them coffee? Was he showering, or off finding a vending machine? Will he be back soon?

The illusion never lasted very long. It was always a source of stinging while the rest of him stayed numb and distant, removed from the experiences he could be having in Zimbabwe and Costa Maya and Sydney if this were a vacation. If this were anything but a chance to think. Mostly, he wandered.

He’s finished, now.

The train comes to a screeching halt, and he rises with his bag to exit. His legs have had eleven months to heal, nearly ten of them spent walking, and still they ache with each step. He doesn’t need a taxi for the rest of the way, or a bus. He’ll bide his time now that there’s so little of it left.

It’s the first of July. The crickets are loud in patches of grass when he reaches the start of the lawns, and the sun warms the back of his neck. He doesn’t count the minutes on a watch, or pull his phone from his pocket. He wouldn’t search for a mirror to jump through even if he thought he could land right inside the house. He still doesn’t even know if he’ll be welcome there.

Try as he might to stay numb, his stomach twirls up into tighter and tighter knots the closer he gets to the street. The more his legs ache for him to stop and rest, just for a little bit more time. The more he wants to turn around and go back to somewhere, anywhere, that no one could ever have the chance to know him.

He can’t, though. It’s been long enough. He can’t let the world creep into August; hah. August. The worst time of Tim’s life, and death. He must have replaced the losses in his heart by now. Danny keeps coming back, against all odds. Gerry never will.

Danny stops walking to breathe against the memory, the knowledge. The shame that builds and builds heavier and heavier with every day that passes, no matter how long he’s taken to deconstruct it. Maybe that was another one of Gerry’s gifts; all that Weight. Reva told him all about the sink. Whenever they were out instead of him, that’s where he would be, without fail. That was his home in their head.

So maybe that’s Danny’s punishment, too. Every morning, he is lowered back into that tank, and he thrashes all day until someone has their twisted idea of mercy and pulls him out to let him sleep, only to start all over again tomorrow. He never drowns like Tim did. His fault, too.

It doesn’t feel like punishment enough.

He leaps away from a speeding car before it has the chance to honk at him for drifting into the road. Adrenaline tingles in his limbs, his lungs, just the barest little taste of something alive. He looks ahead at the street signs and knows he has to keep going, he has to turn left, and to do that, he needs to forget how to feel again. Just until he gets onto the doorstep.

When he does reach it, he stands there for a while. He hasn’t earned the right to knock on the door and say hello, certainly not to smile and wish for one back. But he’ll be standing here all day if he doesn’t, and he can’t waste any more time. It feels like taking, but he does it.

Melanie answers the door. Her face falls in an instant, her eyes wide and skipping over his body as if in search of wounds or changes or evidence that he’s only a mirage. He lets her process his presence in silence until she finally finds it in her to speak.

“Holy shit.”

“Hi.”

“Hi!” She laughs, backing up to usher him inside. “You didn’t tell me you were coming home.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s— Well, I won’t say anything is fine, but I’m just… really glad to see you. You haven’t been texting.”

“Sorry.”

She makes a piteous face, pausing on her way to the kitchen. He knows she’s going to offer him tea in the mug with the holographic telly on it and he’ll accept it to be gracious, not because he thinks it’s fair. For a moment, they hover in place at a distance from each other, equally at a loss for words, or affection, or mending.

“Um…” she recovers, pointing towards the hallway. “I’m… going to go get Mar—”

Again, she pauses, this time in a cold startle. Danny turns his head to face the music; Martin is already standing in the mouth of the hallway, staring at the pathetic scene with the flattest expression Danny has ever seen on him. Danny keeps his own face just as empty, careful not to betray the depth of how that expression makes him feel. It wouldn’t be fair. He has no right to beg.

“…Ah.” Melanie clears her throat. “You know what? I’m gonna— I’m actually going to head to the store, we don’t have… milk. I’m going to go get some milk.”

“Sure, Melanie.” Martin doesn’t bother to look at her. “Go get some milk.”

His voice is different. Not in tone, but in quality. His hair is different; shorter, in an unfamiliar stage of hopefully-growing back out. It was only a matter of time before Martin cut his hair. Danny remembers stopping him the first time he held scissors down to the scalp, convincing him it wouldn’t be worth it to cut it out of anger. He’s been angry, and Danny wasn’t here to stop him.

Of course he’s been angry. That is something Danny deserves.

As Melanie grabs her keys and leaves the house, Danny turns his body to face Martin fully, his bag still on his shoulder — he can’t set it down yet, he can’t make himself at home. He braces himself for the tirade, the accusation, the hatred. All things he’s earned.

Martin takes a step forward. Danny doesn’t realize he’s taken a step back until the look on Martin’s face is more hurt than hollow. This conversation will be held across the room.

“Happy Birthday,” Danny tries.

“What were you thinking?” Martin says instead of ‘thanks.’ “You disappeared.”

“I’m sorry.”

“How could you do that to me?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop— saying you’re sorry, and tell me what was running through your head!”

“I couldn’t be here, Martin!” The confession leaps forth without another hesitation, prompted forward by Martin’s demand. “I couldn’t just— exist here, waiting for Tim to be able to look at me again! I couldn’t just wait around for him to feel obligated enough to forgive me, and you know my being here would have put that pressure on him. I couldn’t— I couldn’t think here!”

“So you went to Tanzania?”

“Yes! Yes, I did, and I went just about everywhere else, too, and did almost every drug known to man, and I didn’t have a lick of fun because I was running! You have to know Elias is probably after me, too, after I fucked up his plans. I couldn’t stay anywhere for more than a few days, I had to just keep moving, I barely— I barely processed any of what I was seeing, I just needed to think.”

“About what?”

“About why I did it!” The bag slips from his shoulder, and he hardly notices the sound of it hitting the ground past the blood in his ears. “You said in the hospital that I did it for Pharos and I agreed with you, but was I just agreeing because you said it? Or did I do it because I knew it’d be the best thing for Nikola?”

“You wouldn’t have—”

“But what if I did!” He can’t fight the smile as it pulls at his mouth. “What if I did, Martin?”

Martin stops arguing. Danny battles to neutralize his face again, and fails. The best he can do is continue to explain himself.

“I had to figure it out on my own, I couldn’t just— let your belief in me influence how I remembered things.”

“No one really— remembers the whole Unknowing, I mean. It was the Unknowing. You can’t try and force yourself to recall every single detail of an event like that, the whole point was to confuse us.”

Danny scoffs. “Don’t you think I know that? I soaked in that for years before you people dragged me out of it by the hair. I learned to navigate it, I learned to cause it, and you think I wouldn’t have been able to coast on that during the ritual? You think it’s that impossible that I could have just slipped back into my old role? Seriously, Martin? You still love me enough to lie to yourself like that?”

You still love me at all? Danny can’t take the words back. Martin crosses his arms, leaning against the wall to look down at the floor.

“And what conclusion did you come to?”

“A different one every day.”

He sees the minute shake of Martin’s head, the disbelieving desire to scoff as he turns his eyes back up to the ceiling. “So, what you’re saying is that this was pointless. You didn’t come back with some big epiphany, you didn’t have your come to Jesus moment in Cambodia, it was all just— a waste of time.”

“No,” Danny says firmly. “I still couldn’t just be here. I need you to understand that.”

“What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just tell me.”

“Because you would have tried to stop me, or asked to come with me, and I wouldn’t have been able to say no to you! I needed to be alone, Martin.”

“Since when has ‘alone’ gotten anyone anywhere good? You said before you did every drug known to man, h-how is that a good thing? How did that help you?”

“It helped me forget sometimes.” Danny curls and unfurls his fists. “You don’t know how hard it was to look any of you in the eye before I left. Any of you, even you.”

“I never blamed you for—”

“Maybe you should have. Maybe I wanted you to! Maybe I needed someone to blame me, because it can’t just be me blaming myself! I can’t trust myself, you know that.”

“But if no one blames you, then isn’t that a signal that it wasn’t your fault?”

“I swung the hammer, Martin! I did that. And I still don’t know for certain if I did it for Pharos or not, so no, it’s not a signal that it isn’t my fault. It just tells me that no one takes my actions seriously, even when they’re catastrophic.”

“You saved the world, technically.”

“Don’t.”

“You did, though,” Martin insists. “Adelard said that incantation could have been the end of everything—”

Danny shakes his head. “We have no idea how accurate that is.”

“And we’ll never know! Because it’s over, and because Pharos saw it coming. He trusted you.”

“And what about Gerry, then, huh? What about the one all of you actually miss? The one I took away from Tim without a second of hesitation because Pharos decided that the collateral would be worth it?”

“That sounds like a Pharos problem. And it sure sounds like you put a lot more thought into what Pharos was asking of you than you were probably thinking of Nikola in the moment.”

“G-d, you’re not even listening!” Danny can’t control his gestures, arms frenetic and jerking to grab for his own head. “Martin, I murdered the love of my brother’s life! I killed him, he’s dead because of me! No amount of justification is going to change the result! I don’t care about the incantation, I don’t care about the end of the world, I care about the world I have to live in now! I always have, that’s all that matters to me! There needs to be a consequence for what I did!”

“Is that another reason why you left without so much as a note?” Martin asks. “Inviting some kind of consequence?”

“Maybe it is! Now, are you going to deliver one or are you just going to— forgive me?”

For a long time, the adrenaline of raising his voice had kept the tears at bay. He doesn’t know precisely when they started to burn in his throat, but all at once, the notion of forgiveness creates such a deep longing in him that he can’t help the way it jumps out. He can’t retract the way it sounded; like a lie, like bait, like pleading. Danny does his best not to drop his head, muscling through as his eyes water, looking Martin in the face as if he stands a chance of challenging him. He feels like the frenzied bull in the arena, while Martin stands calm and resolute in the distance, daring him to come closer.

It’s Martin who steps forward again. Danny backs up one more step, instinct over impulse, but there’s only so far he can go before his back hits the wall. Martin is slow in his approach, reaching out with his hands first to show that they’re empty, they’re open, they’re safe. Danny is powerless to him, then, when Martin pulls him down into his arms.

“I’m going to forgive you, Danny.”

Danny sobs into his shoulder. “Why?”

“I don’t— I don’t like being angry, it makes me mean. Just ask Melanie, I’ve— I’ve been awful to her this whole time. I don’t see the point in holding a grudge against you for… for what happened to Gerry, or for you leaving to sort out your thoughts. I can’t punish you any more than you’ve punished yourself. I refuse to even try.”

“Why?”

Martin cradles the back of his head as he shakes. “It wouldn’t do any good. Not like… actually trying to fix things might.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“You’re home. That’s a start.” Martin kisses the spot behind his ear. “And don’t get me wrong, I’d love to keep you all to myself as long as I can, but Melanie’s going to be back with that milk we don’t need, and… I think the person you really need to talk to is Tim.”

For a while, the most Danny can do is weep. He hasn’t cried much since he left, if at all — hell if he remembers anymore. The wall behind him and Martin’s sturdy frame in front are the only things keeping his legs from giving out underneath him, the Weight still there and still suffocating and still too oppressive to dig himself out from. He lets Martin hold him until it makes more sense to let him lead him to the couch, and then time distorts until he’s lying with his head in Martin’s lap, breathing slower.

He hasn’t earned this, but he’s selfish. He needs it.

They decide to text Sasha, not Tim, just to make sure he’s home, and leave it at that. Danny takes a shower before anything else and changes into a fresh set of clothes from his dresser, still full of his things. He looks at himself in the mirror and wills it not to crack. The scar on his forehead. The scar on his lip. His identity in seams. He can’t face his collarbones, or his wrists.

Martin offers to go with him, and he finds the strength to say no. The most he can give is leaving his bag in the house, a promise to come back. Today, he thinks he keeps his promises.

Tim’s house is too far to walk to, so he takes the bus as close as it’ll bring him. He hopes that Sasha doesn’t answer the door, too tired for another round of what happened with Melanie and Martin. He wonders if he’s earned the right to want this to be direct. To the point. Not painless, but bearable. He can bear quite a lot before it breaks him. He could take any comeuppance Tim has to offer as long as it isn’t forgiveness, too.

It won’t be. It couldn’t be. Not this time.

With hands unfeeling, he knocks. He listens for the heaviness of the footsteps that approach the door, for a moment forgetting if Tim’s are still audible at all. When he doesn’t hear anything, he figures that no, they aren’t, and why would they be? Tim is more of a ghost than ever. Danny doesn’t know how to prepare himself for what he’ll see when the door opens.

Tim is dry, at least. His hair is down, no longer or shorter since the last time Danny saw him. They’re the same, in that regard; Danny’s hair still hasn’t grown a centimeter since he first encountered the troupe. Tim can’t cut his for anything now because there’s every chance it’ll never grow back.

His eyes are vacant, empty black holes in his head. Frightening to passersby, no doubt, but to Danny, it’s something else. Something words can’t describe, so he doesn’t try.

“Hey,” he starts, because Tim doesn’t say it first.

For a long moment, Tim doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t move to let Danny into the house, or step onto the porch to join him. Simply stands in the doorway like a statue, studying him for change the way that Melanie and Martin had. Studying his eyes for traces of… what, guilt? Shame? He’ll find it in abundance.

“I just came by to tell you… I’m done running, now.”

The calm question comes up from inside a deep well. “Where were you?”

“Um… around.” Danny looks down at Tim’s shirt and shrugs. “All over.”

Tim hums, and still he doesn’t move. “Have fun?”

“Not especially.”

“Alright.”

Danny thought he could handle the comeuppance. “I just didn’t… think it’d be right to tell you over the phone.”

“When you left, or when you got back?”

“Either.” Danny tucks his hand behind his hip to fidget in private. “…Tim, I’m sor—”

Tim holds up a hand.

“What’s done is done.”

“Which part of it?”

“All of it. You can’t take it back. I don’t want you to try just to be disappointed that I can’t forgive you yet.”

“I don’t want you to forgive me yet,” Danny admits. “…Or at all, if you really can’t. I know Pharos said that I’m the only one you might be able to—”

“Might.”

“Exactly. And I left because… I didn’t want you to feel obligated to honour that just because he said it. I left so you could have some time to yourself, without me… pressuring you to move on.”

“You left for yourself.”

“That, too. I needed time, I thought… I thought we could both use the time. I didn’t expect to walk back into welcoming arms.”

Tim doesn’t need to say good for the sentiment to come across. He’s silent for another long while, unmoving in the doorway. A barricade between the outside world and his private space, so empty now with his loss.

“What’s done is done,” Tim repeats. “And I don’t forgive you yet. But… you’re back now. Which means we can start to try and get there someday.”

Danny’s throat closes up. “You don’t have to.”

“I know. And you didn’t have to come back, but you did.” Finally, Tim’s eyes shift to look over Danny’s shoulder at the street. “You did the one thing I couldn’t do for him.”

“I’m sorry,” Danny rushes out before Tim can stop him again. “If I could go back—”

“You can’t. He wouldn’t even want you to. What’s done is done.”

Danny drops his head. “What’s done is done.”

“Yeah.” Tim turns his eyes back to Danny’s face, his stare so deadened that Danny can feel the blood on his hands. “We can talk about this some other time.”

“Okay.”

There is a beat of quiet before the door is shut in front of him. Danny swallows the rejection and forces his eyes to stay dry, forces himself to turn around and step off the porch and head for the bus stop. One step at a time, one speculation after another; when will some other time be? What will tomorrow look like?

There’s so much left to say.

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

[sparky-is-spiders]

There's something trans about being eye-aligned I think. The desire to be perceived. The desire NOT to be perceived. The feeling of being an outside observer. The fear of being Seen. Of wanting to know and understand so desperately but maybe also fearing what you'll find. Knowledge that changes you.

[ehlnofay]

Travelling with Martin the second time is more an ordeal than it was the first.

There’s the Blades tagging along with them, now, with their elaborate plans and zealous concern; every time any one of them takes a step they rattle like tin cans, so loudly that if any of the cult is trying to track them down it’s a wonder they’re not all gutted already. Then there’s all the extra bits the Blades insist on – like tents, which Pax is by no means opposed to but slows them down ridiculously, always needing to be set up at night and taken down first thing in the morning, or the horses, which speed them up but Pax resents, all the same. (They always need breaks to rest or eat or what have you, and riding for too long sets them aching to hell, their legs and hips and stomach all quavering with exertion. Pax rides the same horse they found halfway through their first journey with Martin, and she is getting more familiar than she ever wanted to be with its little snorts and stomping gestures. Martin keeps patting it on the nose whenever they’re down on the ground again. Martin rides the paint horse, too – it’s two to a steed, plus bags, which Pax knows would be enough to snap their spines like dried-out twigs but of course the Blades have spelled saddles. Feathered, Martin says, like Pax has any idea what that means.) They all spend as much of the day riding as they can without the horses withering away and dropping dead, unable to divert at all from the roads without riding face-first into a tree branch, the Blades getting all serious and severe at any passing glimpse of another traveller, or the edge of a town, or a suspicious-looking boulder. It’s fucking exhausting. Maybe if they’d dressed Martin in something less impractically fancy, and left their glittering armour behind, they wouldn’t all be so conspicuous. Pax is the only one here with any sense.

In Blackwood, the trees don’t sprawl so low down; you can ride horses well off the road as long as you’re careful of the muck. For the first leg of the first trip with Martin, they didn’t have horses at all – they both just walked, past razed fields and empty buildings, the span of land around Kvatch near entirely abandoned, scrounging what they could and sleeping wherever they wanted. They couldn’t proper restock on supplies until they hit Skingrad – certainly didn’t have tents or armour that reflects every whisper of starlight so bright it blazes, and they were fine. It all feels unnecessary. And annoying. This close to the end, all the little extra things to pay attention to make Pax want to jump out of his skin.

Because they are close to the end. They’re in the denouement, now.

The Blades set up a watch routine, too – everyone crawls into their superfluous tents and leave one person up to keep an eye out, until they wake the next person for their turn, and so forth. Pax hasn’t done watch shifts like this since he left Blackwood. (It doesn’t really work, when you’re alone. Besides, he wakes easy, and he goes to sleep quick. Martin’s bad at it, so swapping watch back and forth when they were together just would have left him confused or lethargic the next day. Not worth the bother.) Pax gets watch shifts, most nights, set in the dark hours just before the sun rises; Martin, though he asks, doesn’t get any. Pax usually wakes him up, instead of whoever else she’s supposed to. It isn’t like he has anything he needs to be especially well-rested for – just sitting on a horse in an enchanted double saddle, same as the rest of them, his too-long hair getting in his face, careful arms loops around Pax’s middle. He won’t even take a turn to direct the bloody thing, because he still hasn’t learned how – the fact that he’s never managed to fall off is a damned miracle, honestly.

So she wakes him up, if the Blades won’t – and she doesn’t usually go back to sleep, right after, because there doesn’t seem all that much point. They both stay up, around whatever burnt-down firepit was constructed in the night, the small tents arrayed around them; the leaves of the trees rustle, flickered through by some small animal, owl or bat or squirrel living in a hollow. Crickets chirp, loud and endless.  It would probably be peaceful, if it could be, but Pax is keyed up, taut as a bowstring ready to snap, and he can’t really remember how to feel peaceful anymore. They’re getting ever-closer to the capital and the temple and the end of this whole strange, terrifying thing, and he wants it over and done with instead of lurking in this strange in-between space. They’ve all done so much to fix this and none of it will feel like any kind of accomplishment until the fires are lit and the Gates closed and sealed beyond reopening. It’s almost, almost, almost done – but it’s not the end yet, and in the quiet night all there is to do is waiting, and Pax, antsy, irritable, is very, very bad at waiting.

Martin’s better at it. Which isn’t to say he’s not nervous – he’s all nerves, even more than normal, which is really saying something – but he’s patient, and doesn’t complain, even though Pax knows he wants it over just as much as they do. Probably more. (Definitely more.) He just sits, in the dark and the dew, all quiet and watchful in just his undershirt and warm wool trousers, and even those are fancy, all fine-sewn and slippery as water to the touch. They wear oddly on him. He keeps the Amulet tucked under his clothes, cold metal setting against bare skin, and the red gleam beneath his shirt makes it look, at certain angles, like his heart is glowing.

The fire is well out; no owls call. Pax lies, in their own much less swish sleeping-things, in the dirt and grass, all of it wet so thoroughly with dew that it soaks the back of their tunic. Through the silhouettes of leaves and branches, they can just make out the lustre of the stars.

The old Emperor talked an awful lot about stars, when Pax met him; she wonders, vaguely, what he’d make of these ones.

There’s a shifting, up nearer the firepit; and, “Pax?” Martin whispers, sound half-swallowed by the still, drifting night. “Are you awake?”

“It’s sopping wet,” Pax replies. He props himself up on his elbow and turns his head; Martin’s got a lantern lit, and it’s just enough to make out his face by. “Even I’ve got my limits.”

Martin exhales; Pax knows he’s smiling because they can see the dim white gleam of his teeth. It’s not too cold a night – they’ve travelled far enough from Bruma to be clear of its sodden snow and ice and winds – but it’s not warm, and the wet fabric plastered to their back is chill enough to make them shiver. The stars, up above, shine cold and clear.

“I was wondering,” Martin says, voice still hushed; his eyes flicker up to the snatches of sky between the tree branches, too. “What will you do, when all this is done?”

It’s a perfectly reasonable question; Pax realises, quite abruptly, that doesn’t have an answer. She sits up, shuffles awkwardly over the dewy grass. “I don’t know,” she says slowly; she shrugs. “Go back to the roads, I s’pose. Get some venturing work. Join a guild, maybe, if I get bored.”

(They haven’t thought about it; they’ve been busy. A part of them – quite a large part, if they’re being honest – kind of wishes the Crisis would never end, one way or the other. Wishes it would keep on in this sort of suspended state forever. But it won’t, and it can’t, and it would be ridiculous to say as much. Just – they’ve never done anything this exciting, before. And they don’t really know anything that could measure up, once it’s done.)

(Pax has never really been one to plan for the future. Back in Blackwood, he didn’t have to; he knew he’d just run with the same crew he always had, and he learned only from them. Learned letters and archery and what dregs of mage-craft he had any aptitude for – learned to scamp on the roads and crack locks reasonably well. And then he left, and became a hero, and that’s a good occupation in itself, but it’s not going to last forever. He’s not sure what his other options are – he could try to work square, but he doesn’t think it would last. He’s not one suited to an apprenticeship, or an honest job, or much of anything, really. The only thing he really knows is this.)

In the lanternlight, the shadows are so stark that Martin’s face looks creased with ink. “Oh? What guild? Fighters? Thieves?”

“Thieves’ Guild wouldn’t take me,” Pax tells him loftily; they wriggle a bit closer, goose-pimples rising on their shins. “They don’t like independent operators, and I’ve been one since I was born.”

Martin clucks his tongue. “You can’t say things like that around me, Pax. I’ll have to have you arrested.”

“Like you could,” Pax tells him, grinning, and leans over about as far as she can reach to elbow him. She has to lever herself back up, afterwards. The watery-pale stars are winking at her.

Martin is looking up at them again. “There’s always work for a hero, I’m sure,” he says, and waves a hand. “You’ll have endless people to save and feats of derring-do to perform. Perhaps you could write an autobiography.”

“Ha.” Martin’s received their letters, sent on longer stretches away from Cloud Ruler; he’s read their writing, their chicken-scratch hand and the less than delicate way they pick their words. Pax is fine enough as a communicator; they get to the point quickly and clearly. But metaphor and flowery prose is rather beyond them. And they’ve seen the speech Martin gave in Bruma, the endless editing of his drafts, debate over this word or that. “You know you’re the better writer of the two of us, Martin Priest. Reckon you should pen our book.”

Martin tips his head further back. “I wasn’t even there for most of the interesting parts,” he points out, “and I’m sure to be far too busy, besides.” His eyes are closed. Pax shunts themself another bit across the grass.

“Oh, I’m sure you can take a half-hour every evening to scribble out a few paragraphs in your four-poster bed and your kingliest pyjamas,” he says, unsympathetic, and flicks him in the shoulder. “With a silk canopy, and duckling-down blankets, and a pen nib of solid gold.”

“All right, all right.” Martin opens his eyes; they look grey, in the dim light, the orange lanternlight flickering off their whites. He reaches out an arm, and Pax rolls his eyes but shuffles damply into it all the same. “I suppose I have no choice.”

His arm, settled around their shoulders, is heavy-warm. Pax leans their shoulder into his ribs, under his armpit. This close, they can see the faint gleam of the Amulet through his undershirt. Quiet, they ask, “Still nervous?”

Without missing a beat, Martin replies, “Excruciatingly.”

He’s always nervous. But on this, Pax can’t even really make fun of him for it – if someone told her that she was the heir to the whole Empire, and tried to thrust her into court to take it all over, she’d tell them to eat shit. If the fate of the world depended on it, though, that wouldn’t really be an option anymore. And Martin’s too nice, most of the time, to tell anyone to eat shit. And Martin’s too nervous not to take every bit of it so painfully seriously. Not just the world-ending bit, but all the etiquette and legalese, too. Jauffre gave him some books to read to try to acquaint himself with it all; none of them seemed to help much.

“You’ll be fine,” Pax says, and leans their head on his shoulder, the post of their earring jabbing into the skin behind their ear. They gesture out at the silhouetted tents. “You’ve got all this lot, and the Elder Council – they’ll help you out. If they won’t let you take a piss by yourself they’ll definitely be there to assist with the stuff that’s actually important.” Martin exhales; it’s almost a laugh. The earring is beginning to hurt quite badly, so Pax lifts their head. “Besides, you’re trying. You want to get it all right. That’s more than some would do.”

“Thank you, Pax,” Martin says, and then they’re both quiet.

The stars above look watery-dim. The silhouettes of trees have slightly more dimension. Martin is pressing his palm, fingers splayed, to the smooth-cut bump of the Amulet under his shirt. Pax is still shivering, a bit – lying her whole back down in the dew was a bad idea. Now she’ll have to wear her one other tunic and hope this one dries out in time not to wet everything else in the bags.

“I hope,” Martin says, voice silver-soft in the dark, “that when you’re out roaming, shocking everyone with your valour and intrepidity, you’ll come to visit a great deal. You won’t have the excuse of being out saving the world anymore.”

Pax leans her shoulder harder into his ribs. “Only if you’re not boring when I’m there,” she replies. “You won’t have the excuse of saving the world either.”

“No,” Martin says. “I’ll be running it instead.”

Already, the stars are beginning to snuff themselves out, like candle-lights; in half an hour or so, the sky will start to lighten properly. The Blades will all wake, springing up like little clockwork puppets, and the tents will be packed up, and the horses saddled – they’re tied on slack ropes to trees down the other end of the clearing, and now, if Pax squints, he can just make them out – and then the day will begin, the timer trickling down.

Pax wets his lips. “Three more days,” he says. “Thereabouts.”

Then they’ll reach the city.

Martin breathes out, slow. “Then I’ll really be Martin Septim.”

The Amulet glows under his shirt, royal-red, rising and dimming like a heartbeat. If Pax hadn’t been arrested, that day – by chance, for one of the few robberies they actually didn’t commit – then they wouldn’t have been taken to the gaol, dribbling blood all over the floors, antagonising the guards trying to mark them down in the records, and they wouldn’t have ended up in that dust-coated cell with the shitty neighbour across the way, and the old Emperor would never have glanced at them twice, and the door never would have opened, and they wouldn’t be here.

Pax is not one for gratitude, generally, but they have never been so thankful to be falsely imprisoned in their life.

“My census name’s Camilla Patesco,” he says.

He’s looking at the first watery dregs of dawn in the sky, not at Martin’s face; but he can hear the smile in his voice when he replies, “I won’t tell anyone.”

[mobius-m-mobius]

MARTIN FREEMAN and JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS as EVERETT ROSS and CONTESSA VALENTINA ALLEGRA de FONTAINE in Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever (2022)

[shmorp-mcdurgen]

Figured i'd start actually. slowly reintroducing the new monster au turned oc project by first posting the new character names!

Mark -> Markus Adrianne Addams (Mark/Chris) Cesar -> Martin Garcia Sarah -> Amber Addams (Ace) Thatcher -> Jackson Hyde (Jack) Ruth -> Mabel Palmer Dave -> Barney Holmes Evelin -> Olivia Davis (Liv) Jonah -> Aaron Jones (AJ)

Another thing I wanted to introduce, this universe from now on will be referred to as Whispers of Willows!

[corruptedcontainer]

Horrors have to wait for their turn, now is the time for a tea break

[the-magpie-archives]

MAG 1 - 'Angler Fish' - Jon's professional aggression.

It's highly notable that in his introduction to his first recording Jon is angry, stuck up, and incredibly defensive. In almost every sentence he exclaims his hatred, disappointment, and disapproval of something or someone. This level of aggression, presented under the guise of genuine academic concern is not in line with real aggression, but much more closely aligned to fear.

Jonathan Sims is scared. He's totally not qualified for the job he's landed himself in, he's creating an access mode into the archives for many future researchers, and he's got absolutely no idea how he found himself in this situation. He's backed into a corner and lashing out feels safer than settling down, but there aren't many ways to lash out and simultaneously keep your job.

Being snarky with Martin; hating the tape recorders; complaining about Gertrudes standard of work; it's all irrelevant when it comes down to it. The whole introduction pretty much sets us up for his failure, it's not so much an introduction as it is a premature excuse for future mistakes.

It's all so enamoured with that clunky, embarrassing, flushed feeling at the start of a new job where its all going wrong and you're totally sure you're gonna be sacked. He's already been unable to record statements to his computer, entirely quashing his plans for a digital archive, and there's already tension among his staff, probably making him feel like a totally inadequate boss!

What a way to start a job: inadequate, insecure, and totally aware of the reality of the supernatural horrors you try so hard to ignore.

[michelle-jacksons-art-blog]

Hi hello have this somewhat old Jonmartin kids concept ideas while I try not to die