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osferth · 4 months

Text

confessing

request: She is the sister of Uhtred and she’s a total badass in combat. Maybe that Uhtred sees how Osferth looks at her and when he says something about that he gets all flustered.

pairing : osferth x reader

@unleashthelion im so sorry its been so long 😭 u might not even be into tlk etc anymore but take this anyway

You were only a baby when Bebbanburg was usurped by your uncle Aelfric upon the death of his brother and its heir, Uhtred, captured by the Danes. As a result, you grew up in the fortress never knowing your brother, only anecdotes from Aelfric and your mother Glenna - the former dismissive, the latter loving and wistful.

Glenna was your one saving grace during your time at Bebbanburg. Having been married to Earl Uhtred after his second wife passed away following Uhtred’s birth, she became his stepmother and loved him as her own. She spoke often of the days following your own birth with fondness in her eyes, describing how Uhtred was a permanent presence by your side - how he had loved his little sister more than anything.

It was Glenna that inspired your desire to meet Uhtred again, but for years you never got the chance.

For your safety, she never once voiced her anger and disapproval over Aelfric’s usurpation until you were together in private. He was never fond of you to begin with, and you learned early on that had you been born a boy, you would not have been allowed to live for very long.

She was the only true protection you had, and when she sadly succumbed to illness you knew, even at the age of eleven, that until you found Uhtred you were totally alone.

The year following Glenna’s death, you accompanied Aelfric, his priest Aidan, and his army of 200 men to Eoferwic, to meet with King Guthred and march on Dunholm. The infamous brothers Sigefrid and Erik were also there, but that hardly registered. After being told rather gleefully by Aelfric that Uhtred was dead, you were in little mood to do anything except passively go along with everything… until the Northmen inexplicably revealed that your brother was still alive.

You successfully hid your joy while Aelfric raged and planned to leave upon the advice of Gisela, Guthred’s sister. With little love or need for you to begin with, your uncle left you in Gisela’s care, perhaps hoping that some misfortune would befall you and rid him of his unwanted niece.

Recognising your neglect at Aelfric’s hands, Gisela led you from the meeting and promised to keep you safe. The two of you escaped Eoferwic together and found sanctuary in a nunnery, where you spent the next three years in relative peace. Understanding your desperation for any information about your brother, she revealed her knowledge of him and described everything - how he had grown up and found a family alongside Danes, his appearance, his personality, his love for her, and the words he spoke of his beloved sisters: blood and adopted alike.

When the nuns could protect you no longer and your uncle’s priests arrived to forcefully marry Gisela to him, you feared losing the only constant you had found in your life - until you were joined by four more people.

At once, your eyes locked on the man that angrily strode forward. Though he had grown tall and his hair now long like a Dane’s, you knew that this was your brother.

Too stunned to speak, you could only watch as Uhtred ordered the abbot to release Gisela’s hand. Although he did, he refused to stop repeating the fact that she was married to Aelfric despite Uhtred persistently telling him to stop - which resulted in him killing the man, and it surprised you less than you thought it would. Glenna had always told you what an impulsive boy he had been, after all.

After reuniting with the man she loved, Gisela beckoned you over, and it was only then that your presence was even recognised.

“Who is she?” asked Uhtred as you stood before him.

“Your sister,” Gisela replied, beaming at you. “Y/N.”

“Hello,” you mumbled shyly, unsure of what else to say.

Uhtred stared at you for a moment, his eyes wide. “You are certain?”

“Your uncle left her in my care three years ago, just after you were taken.”

You could see the tears swimming in your brother’s eyes before he swept you up in an almost bone-crushing hug.

“I missed you, ástin mín,” he whispered. “I wish I had been there to see you grow.”

You were crying too, but your tears were those of joy. “Mother told me all about you. All I wanted was to find you, but I never thought I could.”

“You are here now,” he said, “and I promise I will never lose you again.”

Uhtred was a man that kept his word. He brought you to live with him and Gisela in Coccham, where you stayed as a family. You had always hated feeling so powerless, and so you requested your brother to train you as a warrior - you had only been foolish enough to ask this of Aelfric once, but you knew Uhtred was nothing like him.

He agreed at once, jumping at the chance to bond with you at the same time as improving your ability with a sword.

Under the tutelage of your brother and his friends, you quickly grew into an adept fighter. As the years passed, you became a worthy opponent in sparring matches, your skill nearly as refined as those who had taught you.

Despite the upward turn your life had taken, there were things you still wanted. As much as you loved Uhtred and his friends, you needed someone your own age - a companion you could spend your downtime with.

Just as you were on the cusp of becoming a woman, your wish appeared to be granted when Osferth entered your brother’s service. Although Uhtred was sceptical of his potential, you couldn’t care less - Osferth was the same age as you and would surely improve with time, just as you had.

His gentle manner and soft-spoken words were such a vast difference from the brusqueness you were used to that you instantly took a liking to him. He was always careful to address you as ‘Lady’ until you insisted he used your name instead - which was a slow change, given that he would often accidentally revert back to the term of respect. As much as you jokingly scolded him for it, you never truly minded - he was so sweet that you could never be annoyed with him for long.

You trained alongside Osferth and saw him through Beamfleot, the first taste of battle either of you had ever had. It was equal parts terrifying and exhilarating, and it brought the two of you closer than ever.

Although battle, maturity, and time spent with Uhtred’s friends had greatly improved Osferth’s confidence, there was only one prospect that rendered him as nervous and shy as the day he had first asked to join Uhtred.

You.

Although the two of you were close friends, he had long wanted something more. His heart had yearned for you since the day he first laid eyes on you, and every day after that. He loved everything about you - your laughter, how you fought, the way your hand slotted perfectly in his, the cheeky grin that often graced your features… he could go on.

He wished you knew the truth, but he could never bring himself to admit it and risk ruining the friendship you had.

One afternoon, you were sparring with Sihtric while Osferth sat close by with Uhtred.

He watched you parry a blow with a deftness that made it look ridiculously easy, and smiled fondly. You were incredible in combat, and he both adored and envied you for it.

His gaze was solely on you which, unfortunately for him, was soon noticed by your brother.

“Enjoying the view?” Uhtred teased, nudging him a little.

Flushing, Osferth quickly averted his eyes. “I don’t know what you mean, Lord,” he mumbled.

“You have all the subtlety of a nun in a brothel, Osferth.”

“Lord!”

Uhtred snorted. “Well, your affection for my sister has hardly gone unnoticed.”

Osferth’s head shot up at once. “She knows?”

“I meant amongst the men. As far as I know, Y/N has no idea.”

“Oh.”

An amused Uhtred watched his shoulders visibly sag. “I’ve never seen someone look so disappointed and relieved all at once.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Osferth sighed, his gaze returning to the sparring match before him. You had just managed to knock Sihtric to the ground, laughing as you helped him back up.

“You could try talking to her,” Uhtred suggested, a wicked gleam in his eye.

Osferth looked at him sideways. “I am not you, Lord.”

Your brother hummed. “No, you are not.”

When he said nothing more, Osferth rolled his eyes. “Well, I’m going inside-”

“No, you are not.”

Huffing, he sat back down. “Why, Lord?”

“You will talk to her,” Uhtred decided. “You’ve been yearning long enough.”

Osferth frowned. “And what if it goes wrong, or- or what if she doesn’t like me? I can’t ruin our friendship, Lord. It’s not something I want to lose.”

“You have a choice, Baby Monk. Either you take a risk and maybe get somewhere, or you can remain silent and get nowhere at all.”

Before Osferth could respond to that, you and Sihtric approached the two of them.

“Did you see me knock Sihtric on his arse?” you snickered, leaning on your sword slightly.

Uhtred smiled. “I did, ástin mín.”

You looked across to Osferth, but his gaze remained fixed on the ground for some reason.

“Do you two want to come to the alehouse with me?” you suggested, hoping Osferth would respond, but your brother spoke up first.

“I think I’ll miss it today,” he said. “I’m going home to my wife.”

“And I’m going to mine,” Sihtric added, but you already knew that.

“S’pose it’ll just be us, then,” you smiled at Osferth, “unless you’ve also got a wife that I don’t know about.”

Finally, he looked up at you and returned your smile. “Lucky for you, I haven’t.”

The alehouse was bustling when you arrived, but you managed to wangle a small spot in the back corner, half-hidden by a wooden beam. It was cosy enough, and neither of you minded one bit.

As you sipped on your ale, you quietly observed the man before you. Every time your eyes dropped to your mug, Osferth’s gaze would find itself back on you - although he was trying to be subtle, you noticed, and it amused you to no end.

“You’re awfully quiet, Y/N. Is something bothering you?”

Osferth received a grin in reply, one that made his heart flutter in his chest.

“Not at all. I was just waiting for you to say something. I’ve realised I talk far too much, see, so I thought you might like a turn first.”

“You don’t talk too much,” he said at once, his expression hardening. “I don’t mind. Why, has anyone told you that you do?”

“No,” you assured him. “Just some introspection, I s’pose.”

His features softened at that. “Perhaps you should do a little more of that, then,” he smiled, “if that’s your conclusion.”

“Perhaps,” you chuckled.

After a moment, he took a rather large swig of his drink. “You fought really well today,” he said, his gaze meeting yours. For the first time, you felt you saw something else in his eyes, something beyond his usual fondness for you, but you could not be certain.

“Thank you,” you replied, beaming at him. “You… did see me knock Sihtric on his arse, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did,” he answered, “and I thoroughly enjoyed it, too.”

Both of you laughed then, only breaking eye contact to take another well-needed sip of your drink. Your heart was starting to beat uncomfortably quickly, and you suddenly felt the need for a little extra confidence just by sitting across from him.

“You and Uhtred seemed deep in discussion about something,” you pointed out. “Was it something important?”

Osferth exhaled before answering. “It was - it is. It’s really important.”

“Care to share?”

He frowned into his cup before finally answering, refusing to meet your gaze once again. “I like you.”

You raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’d hope so.”

Despite whatever he was seemingly wrestling with, his eyes momentarily shot up to give you an exasperated look. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Sorry. Go on?”

“What I meant was…”

He trailed off for a moment.

“Yes?”

“Y/N,” he groaned. “Give me a second.”

You grinned. “Alright. Sorry.”

Although you were being as patient as you could, the time he spent poring over his drink was beginning to feel like an eternity. Above all else, you did share Uhtred's blood... and your brother wasn't exactly famous for either his tact or his patience.

"D'you have feelings for me or something?"

His head shot up at this but, despite what you had expected, he didn't deny it. Instead-

"Yes. I do."

And for once, it was your turn to be silent. You felt incapable of saying or doing anything except staring at him.

The silence that descended upon the two of you stretched on for an uncomfortably long time as you processed the news with wide eyes. Osferth was beginning to fidget uncomfortably, his eyes fixed on his mug of ale - this silence could not bode well for him, surely-

“So do I.”

At once, his head shot up again, and if this moment was not so serious, you might have laughed at the comically shocked expression on his face. His eyes were wide and his lips parted, as though he truly had not expected such an answer from you.

“For you, I mean,” you added stupidly. “Not - not me, obviously.”

Why on earth would you say that?

Osferth stared at you for a moment, an unreadable look in his eyes, before he started laughing. Soon, you joined in, the two of you in fits of giggles, perhaps brought on by happiness or sheer relief that your feelings were mutual.

When they eventually subsided, you regarded him with pure fondness… though there was a gleam in your eye, too. At once, he picked up on it and raised an eyebrow.

“What?” he questioned, his lips quirking up into a smile.

You grinned at him, reaching across the table to take his hand. You didn’t miss the faint dusting of pink on his cheeks when you did so.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Laughing, he obliged at once and stood up to walk home with you. And for once, neither of you let go of the other.

#the last kingdom #osferth #request #osferth x reader #its been so fucking long #this has been sat in my drafts for probably a year or two so im really sorry #never was my strong suit #anyway enjoy tehe x

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rileyslibrary · 11 months

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can you maybe do something where like, things simon does when he realizes he’s falling for you? :,)

Let me start by saying that I see Simon as someone more accustomed to others falling for him than the other way around. Like, he is the one who tends to be pursued rather than being the pursuer, if you know what I mean? I don’t know why but I feel he doesn’t have to put too much effort into wooing someone (and he probably knows that). A tall, beefy dude with a rugged appearance and that voice of his? The guy has it easy.

Now, what if he’s the one who falls for someone first? Aha! Well, He doesn’t even realise he has feelings for you, but they manifest in other ways, mainly through actions.

Ghost, as your lieutenant, for example, starts assigning you to low-risk missions or insists on accompanying you to ensure you’re safe.

In a more personal context, Simon offers to pick you up from your home so you don’t have to walk or take public transportation. He might even escort you to your car at night to protect you.

He tells you jokes he thinks you’d enjoy. He absolutely loves it when you laugh; he feels defeated when you roll your eyes and even a bit salty when you already know the joke (or fail to “get” it.)

He pays close attention to the details. He remembers your favourite food, how you like your coffee/tea, and your pet’s name. No, he won’t cook for you (yet), but he’s taking mental notes, studying you.

However, he’s not aware of what he’s doing exactly (or why he’s doing it, for that matter). It’s not until the rest of the team notices and insinuates that there’s something more between you two that he comes face to face with his emotions. Emotions he’s not ready to accept yet.

He rejects the idea that he has developed feelings for you and hopes that by suppressing ignoring them, they’ll fade away. But, as my boy Freud once said, “unexpressed emotions never die; they are buried alive and come forth later in uglier ways.”

He begins distancing himself from you. He rebuilds the walls you once torn down and returns to treating you just like everyone else. He had people he loved before, and it’s only brought him pain. His past experiences have left deep scars, and he’s determined not to go through that again. He’s not just doing it just for himself, though; he also wants to protect you from him and the pain.

Him. Pain. What’s the difference?

You, on the other hand, pick up on his behaviour but don’t confront him about it. “You know how the lieutenant is,” they once told you. “Sometimes he’s all jokes, other times he’s just business.” Maybe, you think, he needs his space. So you begin mirroring his actions, pulling away and giving what he seemingly wants.

But he secretly doesn’t want you to do that. Contrary to what he hoped to achieve by distancing himself from you and, therefore, from his feelings for you, he falls even harder.

Once cocky and arrogant, now he’s insecure. He starts projecting his fears onto you, feeling that you’re the one pulling away, even though you’re merely respecting his unspoken need for space.

So he confronts you. He wants an explanation for the change in your demeanour. And you? Well, you tell him the truth; you thought he needed some space. Right?

Who knows. Maybe you were just respectful. Perhaps you were giving him a taste of his own medicine.

It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he gets it now. Running away from his feelings or those he cares about doesn’t work, just like ignoring his emotions won’t make them disappear. On the contrary, they directly affect both him and you.

Of course, he doesn’t admit it. No, he wouldn’t be caught dead doing that.

Yet, he decides to (re)open up to you, this time gradually, bit by bit, at his own pace. Just for a chance that this calculated, ruthless operator that many perceive him to be can finally transform into a genuinely emotionally invested human being for the first time.

#i won’t tag this cause i don’t know what it is exactly #but i like it #so there you go #thank you for the ask nonny :) xx #the librarian answers

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niko-sasaki-dbd · 4 months

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Can we just stop for a second and think about Charles attending his own funeral?

I can’t stop picturing him—still not used to being dead—playing a sickening version of hide and seek, just him and his fears. He’s still a kid, hidden in a dark corner, watching his mother’s tears shed over a casket that will shortly be buried six feet under. Rotting.

He is the uninvited guest, observing her from the shadows. He doesn’t find a trace of the silent tears in her eyes—the ones he had seen a thousand times before—but there’s desperation instead. A violent tremble shakes her shoulders, her sobs are stealing the air from her lungs. There’s pain running down her cheeks, the sort of torturing agony that can only be driven by guilt, and loss, and grief.

He sees people around, unknown voices trying to calm her down. He sees blurred faces, question marks, beating hearts but blind eyes. They don’t know anything about her, and they will never know anything about him.

He wants to get closer, but he doesn’t know how. He wants to never see her again. He wants to scream; he wants to tell her that he would have never chosen to leave her if he had been granted the choice. He wants her to look at him; he wants her to hold him as she’s holding onto that inert wooden box.

But she never will.

Just one more time, he looks at her intently.

“It’s gonna be okay, sweetheart.”

Just one more time, he takes one step closer.

“I promise…”

Just one more—

“I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr. Rowland.”

It's cold again. He retreats to the shadows and looks ahead. There's no one, not a single person, who shows less kindness than his own father.

He stays three steps away from his mother, with a hardened expression that never changes. They may think he's stoic, but Charles knows better; he is looking at him—at the lifeless body that once was him—with so much contained rage. It looks like home, the unwelcoming preamble to another beating, and Charles believes he is selfish for feeling relieved, for finding solace in his own death.

There is no one around to judge him for it, yet he still worries so much; he's safe, but somehow, he's still crying on the floor inside his mind, and the bruises keep blooming, and the pain feels so real.

"Charles?"

How can he explain that he wants to be alive, but he doesn't want his life back? It's just a plight he would rather avoid because he fears that if he keeps thinking about it, the water would come back, and this time, he wouldn't be able to find a way out. He would be trapped forever, fighting senselessly against the freezing cold, suffocating within the walls of his own nightmare.

Alone.

"Are you alright?"

He doesn't want to stay and haunt this place; he doesn't want to be remembered like this. He would rather pray for his mother to let him go, and for the violence to let go of her.

"Would you prefer me to wait for you outside?"

He doesn't want to feel fragile, he doesn't want to be useless, he doesn't want to be angry. He would rather bury his own aching body along with all his losses, but he would remember his father's eyes, just in case.

For now, he needs to put himself together because there's someone looking for him—hide and seek, but it's not scary anymore—maybe he will have to leave his hideout soon, but is it losing when you want to be found?

"No,"

Cold colors seem warmer when the light comes in.

Don't leave me.

"I'll go with you."

#this was supposed to be short #charles rowland #charles dead boy detectives #edwin paine #edwin payne #chedwin #paineland #payneland #painland #dead boy detectives #dead boy detective netflix #dead boy detective agency #dead boy detectives agency #the dead boy detectives #dbda #dbda fanfic #dc universe #dcu

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toffeecoco1 · 5 months

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A concept:

SQH is forced to reveal the system and/or his status as a transmigrator, due to a truth serum or whatever other convenient plot device. I HIGHLY doubt MBJ would just pass this knowledge on to LBH, especially if LBH didn’t ask—and how on earth would he think to ask??

So instead, I think at least part of it happens with LBH around. He watches SQH have a meltdown over being revealed, spewing nonsense about writing a book and then waking up inside it. He doesn’t even need to catch the entire mess, only fragments of it—enough to understand that it’s possible to jump from one world to the next, to end up in a world you already know.

And he starts wondering. Thinking about someone else he knows who has always known too much and brushed it off by claiming he read it in some book or another that Binghe can’t confirm exists. And though SQH appears to have found himself in this world as a child, who’s to say that’s the only possibility? His shizun’s personality changed suddenly and drastically, and he has no memories of his shizun having such startlingly extensive knowledge before that event.

What happens then depends on when this takes place: if it’s post-canon, he probably corners SQH to ask, and is smug about threatening him, then cradles the knowledge he receives close to his chest. Whether he brings this to his shizun is hard to tell, but he’d definitely carry himself with a light, happy air. Knowing that his shizun has always been kind to him and always loved him is simply euphoric. SQQ might notice him acting different and ask him about it, which might lead to a conversation—where SQQ is terrified at first, but relieved and simply relaxed by the end. He truly doesn’t mind being Shen Qingqiu and living what is technically a lie, but it’s… lovely to let his guard down a little around his husband, even if by this point “Shen Qingqiu” is no longer a mask he has to hide behind.

(Being post-canon is also fun because binghe can think back to the mausoleum and go “wow. maybe this should have been obvious.”)

Alternatively, I LOVE the idea that this happens earlier, during the 5 years where SQQ is dead. Rather than excitement and giddiness at solving a puzzle and figuring out more about his beloved, Binghe feels only grief and a slow horror as the pieces fall into place.

Maybe he still doesn’t know why his shizun pushed him into the abyss, but if none of the abuse he suffered was actually at his hands, if shizun truly was only ever kind to him… at the least he can begin to understand why his shizun might have sacrificed himself for him.

When he corners SQH this time, it’s with real anger, laced with fear and regret. SQH’s panicked answers give him enough information to piece together that SQQ likely didn’t have a choice in pushing him into the abyss.

So he wallows. His beloved never once tried to hurt him, was always kind to him and protected him. Likely knew he would escape the abyss alive. And he repaid that with threats and coercion, and drove his shizun to his death.

Years later, when he is in a dream and suddenly realises that his shizun is real, he doesn’t slowly smirk and begin to plot. He instead falls to his knees, gripping tightly to his shizun’s clothing and sobbing—much to SQQ’s confusion. But, still slightly numb with the whiplash of being kissed clumsily without warning and then suddenly cried on by a man he’s convinced is going to kill him, all SQQ can do is gently pat his disciple’s head.

#bingqiu #svsss #shen qingqiu #luo binghe #scum villain’s self saving system #shang qinghua #i was reading tossawary’s “if it can be destroyed”#and had the thought that. hm.#what if lbh saw something like this.#what if sqq’s system reveal was actually airplane’s system reveal #i think i meant to make sqh and moshang more relevant here oops #they’re having their own little relationship crisis on the side. binghe’s not going to interfere with that mess #writing

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starshipsofstarlord · 8 months

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Cuddle Bunny

summary - all you can do is reflect on the past as you sit by a tired and bedridden daryl, hellbent on not leaving his side. It seems he doesn’t want you to leave either, as you are the only person that sees him for who he is, in every light (1.3k)

warnings - daryl getting shot, mentions of violence, parental abuse (mental and physical) and death, slight angst, fluff, cuddly daryl, sophia being missing

daryl dixon + norman reedus works main masterlist

You had never experienced the fear that was currently combusting your entire being - Andrea had shot Daryl in the head. Sure, it was ‘just a scrape’, however you were furious, and ovulating a circus of panic within your veins.

Hershel was allowing the archer to rest, insisting that it was necessary in order to regain his strength, despite the veterinarian being displeased with him borrowing one of his horses without permission.

And you sat beside him, watching over him on a chair that you had pulled from the corner of the room. He seemed exhausted, and with a shaky hand, you reached across his forehead and brushed his hair out of his face.

He was beautiful, and you wished that he would acknowledge it more, rather than feeling insecure within the ranks of your group, always being made to feel by the others that he wasn’t good enough - that he was just like his brother.

To them, as his frugal search for the lost little girl had made such as Shane think further, he was a tragic liability, that was reckless, risking their uphold of temporary residency on the farmland. But he was the only one willing to venture out into the wild where the dead walked to find Sophia, having to believe deep down that despite being out there by her lonesome that she had to be alive.

Daryl had made it his mission, using himself as a pawn in the process, taking an arrow in the side and a bullet across the outside layering of skin at his temple all to strive on, and undermine the cruel evil that the world had evolved into.

You envied his loyal pursuit, neither of you owed these people anything, but nevertheless he found a role in which he could be responsible for, other than being the hand that kept them fed. The two of you were more like outsiders to the tight knit group, they all had varying opinions of you both, assuming the events in your pasts considering your closeness with Merle prior to him disappearing from the rooftop, abandoning his right hand on his untimely escape.

They knew nothing of importance when it concerned you and Daryl, you weren’t the proudest when it came to your past, but you weren’t ashamed either. There was nothing that they could perceive that was undoubtedly true, you remembered everything, both the good and bad that you had gone through before the world had gone to shit.

But none of it was as terrifying as seeing Daryl bedridden with stitches in his head, whilst you were trapped in a reality where everything wanted to kill you. If you could go back and just live in the memories that you had with him, you would, without a second thought. You and he were far away from any threats that would separate you in life, concocted in a mundane and happily bland routine.

You had a little house, on the outskirts of a rocky and small town in Georgia, and it wasn’t perfect but it was the roof that you and Daryl called your home. And all you needed to get by was each other, and whilst thing seemed perfect you still hadn’t got by without judgement. Merle and Daryl’s father was an obsolete rival to your relationship, he resented that his son had found happiness, brewing with cryptic resentment at the fact he had no physical control over his life.

But the mental aspect still remained, he was scorned within his brain from the impact that William Dixon had plagued into every scar that he invisibly wore, and you could see it on his face within the very moment he winced as he readjusted his head against the pillow beneath. Pain, it ran through his nerves, decaying him as though it was just another walker that Andrea had unloaded her misaimed shell towards.

She deserved your rationalised anger imploded upon her, and she’d be a sitting duck for the meanwhile, Daryl’s health was far more important than your yet to be unleashed rage. If you allowed all hell to be let loose, then you would never stop seeing the vivid colour of red, and there was no time to waste on yet to be salvaged conflict just yet, she could wait for the vengeance that she had earned to suffer from. Tending to the emotional instability that Daryl was floundering in was upmost priority, and that was one thing that hadn’t changed from before the constantly spreading apocalypse.

“Why ya starin’ at me, it’s gettin’ creepy?” His gravelly, smoke worn voice enquired, his eyes fluttered drowsily in your direction, the tight corners of his mouth uplifting at the sight of you. You felt exhausted as well, overwhelmed with emotions of despair and from the lack of much needed sleep due to your addictive worry.

“You say somethin’ similar every time you wake up.” You glowed as you spoke to the man that you loved, the raging sun illuminating your silhouette through the drawn curtains, brightening the focus in which Daryl had of you. Reaching across, you braced your adoring palm against the cusp of his cheek, brushing your thumb across his supple skin, relishing in the very touch of his flesh. Something so simple felt so intimate with him, everything did. After existing in a life felt as though it had no meaning, Daryl was the only constant, and the purpose for which you remained. And nothing had changed, and you knew that it wouldn’t for as long as you lived.

“Usually yer in the sleeping’ bag next ter me, a bed ain’t gonna make a difference.” He quirked his brow, wincing and allowing himself to be vulnerable as it stretched the tautness of his wound. His face creased in momentary pain, and you felt unbelievably lucky that the bullet wasn’t a millimetre to the right, as there was a chance that he wouldn’t be here, attempting to seduce you in an innocent and lustre fashion.

“Is that you inviting me to lay beside you Mr Dixon?” You corresponded with his portrayal of your early routine, unable to remember a morning to which he wasn’t a part of. He was a staple, a permanency that rendered you into a bathing of peace, and you both felt desired when sharing any type of company. Daryl meaninglessly rolled his oceanic eyes, tugging at your hand that was upon him to pull you closer, and beside him.

And his efforts became successful as you needed no convincing, and you rested atop of the mattress that was indeed much more comfortable than the makeshift bed, however your head in fact ended up laying on his chest, listening to his calm and steady heartbeat. “This is better than the meds the farmer gave me.” His words enforced you to laugh into his chest, addicted to the cheesy platter of jokes that he would share with you, and you alone.

Nobody saw this side of him, he was himself. And the world had turned into a massacring mess, the brutality shattering every ounce of soul that a person had. But you and Daryl never changed, you were adjoined to surviving the trauma that had tainted you both from birth, and nothing would change with the infected having the thirst to rip you apart.

“Well,” you dragged your word out, looking up at his face which was filled with adoration and surprisingly comfortability, “at least there’s no limit on the dosage you can take.” You leaned up, pressing your lips that had become chapped from the staring hue in the sky that was beating down on you in the passing daytimes upon his own. His arms tugged around the circumference of your waist, pulling you closer, him having the intention of using his time to rest to lay with you within his very grip.

#daryl dixon x reader #daryl dixon imagine #daryl dixon smut #daryl dixon oneshot #daryl dixon x y/n #daryl dixon x you #daryl dixon fanfiction #daryl dixon x female reader #daryl dixon fluff #norman reedus x reader #norman reedus imagine

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todomitoukei · 3 months

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Why do you believe Toya won't die? He's basically a burnt corpse that can no longer move and barely talk. Horikoshi's writing could be changed to emphasize how the family can now fully move on from Toya and Endeavor and it was a Greek Tragedy on Endeavor's end while hopeful for Shoto.

This is not a Greek tragedy, it's a Japanese shounen manga that focuses on kids becoming heroes.

"He's basically a burnt corpse" isn't it just lovely then that a fantasy story about people who have varying superpowers could so easily fix that?

I'm sorry you guys have never read stories where people look like they are beyond saving or actually dead, only to come back just fine because the author said so.

The only tragic part is the fandom being so dead set on the villains dying somehow being a satisfying conclusion rather than the tragic part of this only being that such a conclusion would be poor writing.

The themes of the story have been uplifting, focusing on the fact that people can get better in the right environment and if given a second chance.

"The family can now fully move on from Touya" and that is shown where? I see nothing but people being hopeful for a future where they can talk to him after ten years of being separated from him. The family does not want to move on from him. They want to talk to him, want to come see him. They had ten years to move on from him and couldn't, so suggesting that finding out that instead of dying before, he had been alive and physically and mentally suffering this entire time, is somehow the magic ingredient that was missing from their ability to move on is beyond me.

It is also unclear to me how it would be "hopeful" for Shouto to know he was able to prolong someone's life by a few weeks and have that person find closure before death like that somehow is the mark of a successful hero. He wants a relationship with his brother - wants to get to know him, have soba with him, hang out with him. That has been his goal since being a kid and wouldn't it be nice if he could get that?

Touya has been surviving a lot and as said before, if Horikoshi had wanted him dead, he could have done so at the end of the war instead of keeping him alive so that his dad can tell him he's retiring.

If you want to worry and tell yourself Touya and the rest of the lov are dying, I won't stop you but this idea is simply not supported by the story and with only 4 more chapters left, some of you should maybe just wait it out silently instead of spreading fear and holding on to this tragic mindset the same way Touya has been holding on to life.

#That's all I'm gonna say on that #I'm not interested in these depressing takes #Ask #Dabi

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two-crows-in-a-trenchcoat · 1 month

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my thoughts on certain characters being the 'minister'

Peter Lukas - I think it's unlikely bc no jonah to make a wager with to get him off the boat so he's probably still at sea buutt if it was him think it would funny bc he'd definitely have 'disappeared' Collin just to not deal with him

Simon Fairchild - he wouldn't give a shit like we saw him with the extinction stuff he'd just not care about what the OIAR is doing at all and I think that would be funny

Annabelle Cane - that would be verryy plot relevant and also probably the same annabelle Cane from tma bc she said she'd either go with the fears or die and so far as I can remember they said there was no sign of her I would love a return of annabel mainly just bc I love her

Sasha James - more likely to be the new IT person but also I desperately just want sasha to be alive and well I also think she'd be very good at her job we knew she would have made a good archivist but an actual one rather than eldritch horror one so maybe she's a librarian somewhere completely separate

Tim Stoker - I strongly believe he wouldn't take it seriously and would flirt with every one and make jokes about the computers looking worse for wears until he hears about collin and just makes jokes about collin

Danny Stoker - would be funny but would also mean Tim is not linked to the supernatural at all bc he only got involved after Danny's death so if Danny's fine so is Tim and I need Tim to be ok also I think it would be a fun link without them just having the same cast as tma

Elias Buchard (the real one) - would imply gwen is a nepo baby which would be really funny to see them interact also wonder how jonah would feel about it also he was a stoner so I don't think he'd be good at his job and this would be very funny

Jurgen leitner - he's probably dead but I think this would be fun and we don't know if he even had his library in this world but if he did and then became the minister of the oiar that's a bad way to hide and I think he'd die pretty quickly

Daisy Tonner - she would penalise them for everything she'd be so strict on them and probably aggressive I also think its unlikely to be her she'd hate the bureaucracy and would probably empathise with collins solution to their problems

someone new - the fandom reaction would be funny as fuck like we've spent all this time theorising and guessing and then it's no one we've ever heard of before I just think it would be a funny way to throw off everyone

sorry this so long lmao

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howlsofbloodhounds · 4 months

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You know, I was thinking about the ways that the Multiverse as whole might further contribute to Killer’s (specifically Stage 2) already preexisting dehumanization, demonization and objectification treatment he’s already received from Nightmare and Chara.

Being viewed and treated as something like a pet, or an asset, or a weapon. Something distinctly other from most people.

His SOUL is rather unique. The most likely people to have that shape and color is more than likely a variation of himself. He’s full of enough DT to be able to Reset, he seems able to understand the Humans in various timelines and universes in a way most can’t.

He can keep going beyond all reason and damage, his SOUL and codes are all deformed beyond recognition, he has knowledge he shouldn’t be able to know, physical strength he shouldn’t be able to have combined with his own experience, mindset, and skills that were all presumably required during..whatever made him what he is now, and he can be controlled simply through his SOUL.

And on that matter, what even *is* he? He’s not a monster. Not human. Not human AND monster. If he’s neither, then what is he then?

If Killer can’t give a satisfactory answer, people will either come to their own conclusions or seek to find out themselves.

The mad scientists types are definitely ones he’ll have to keep an eye out for, probably even rely on Nightmare’s fickle protection because no one would likely come looking for him should he disappear one day to be locked up in a lab for study. They’d be glad knowing he isn’t out there to be turned on them.

There might even be people out there determined to get rid of him and those like him, with strange SOULS or being soulless, because they’re seen as a threat or dangerous or just out of pure fear.

Imagine the sense of uncanny valley the rest of the Bad Sanses must experience by looking at him, let alone interacting with him. He is not a normal, stable functioning person and it shows. And yet he’s pretending to be.

Something is always..off about him. His eyes are too dead and empty to be something truly alive. His face never makes the right expression to match with his tone.

Any emotion that might show in his tone or face or body language is dismissed because..he can’t actually feel. He’s just pretending, to trick, to manipulate, surely.

And it makes it easy for most to either avoid him, completely ignore him as if he isn’t there, or be completely indifferent to any harm that comes to him or any opinions he has because..he isn’t like them. He doesn’t even seem alive or real most times..like he’s a shell to be filled.

Especially if he’s so easy to manipulate and control into doing absolutely horrid things through a simple SOUL keeping him complacent. Or at least that’s what the rest of the Multiverse has observed.

There’d be many chomping at the bit to claim and possess Nightmare’s living weapon as their own and use him for whatever goals and benefits they have in mind.

There’d probably be such casual dehumanizing, objectifying talk about or to him that most won’t even realize they’re doing it. But there are so many “justifications” people could use to treat him like that.

Maybe Nightmare uses this possibility to further keep ST2 loyal & with him. He offers protection, the rest of the Multiverse would love nothing more than to kill, experiment on, or use him.

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corazondebeskar-reads · 7 months

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live to rise - chapter four

live to rise series

four: where the light won't find you

series masterlist | prev chapter | next chapter

gladiator!Din Djarin x f!reader

word count: 4.3k

summary: After the Mandalorian is removed from your barrack and you are given a new assignment, you see him fight for the first time.

chapter warnings: graphic descriptions of violence, canon-typical violence, genre-typical violence, rape/non-con (NOT involving reader or Din but they are witness to it), implied physical abuse, near-death encounter, mando fic tropes galore

Please heed the series and chapter warnings.

also on ao3

dividers by @saradika-graphics

Reassigned. Not terminated. Reassigned. Your hand rests on your heaving chest as you try to settle from the surprise of it all.

The Mandalorian’s been sponsored.

You hadn’t thought it possible; his price was supposedly astronomical. This person must be obscenely rich.

And then your heart drops further. This is why you shouldn’t have gotten so close. Yes, you’d rather have him leave your barracks alive than dead, but you can’t help the wave of sorrow that crests. You had enjoyed his company immensely, even dismissing the feelings you weren’t acknowledging.

It’s not like you didn’t treat each parting as potentially permanent anyway, but sometimes, with your long-term residents, you got a little too comfortable.

You pack up the bedding hastily and head toward Cresh. You know he won’t still be there, you tell yourself, you’re just going to get the cell turned over as soon as possible.

It hurts a little to find it empty, anyway.

Cresh goes through three more C-5s before you hear about the Mandalorian again.

“How did you deal with him?” Hali asks you one night after the attendants have shared the day’s news.

“With who?” you ask, even though there’s no one else she could mean.

“That Mandalorian. He was so gruff and rude. I’m the fifth attendant he’s rejected, and it’s making everyone on edge. Like there’s something wrong with us .”

You shrug it off. “He’s just guarded. He probably doesn’t want someone in his space.”

“Yeah, well,” she grumbles. “It’s not like we want to be in his space.”

“Has anyone explained that to him?”

“I tried to,” she says. “But it’s like he wouldn’t even listen to me.”

Cold clarity finds you with your lips parted and eyes wide. You can’t tell her. But your stomach sinks. The design of those cells puts him at the back of the chamber. If they’re being quiet, from fear or otherwise, he can’t hear them.

They come for you the next day. Two guards. The fear when they beckon you is almost enough to bring you to your knees.

The only reason you don’t panic completely is because they don’t bind you. They just march you between them to the upper levels.

When you reach the lounge, they shove you through the door, and you stumble a little.

“This is the girl, as requested, Madame, but we really can’t spare her from her duties,” says one of the commanders. You don’t know his name; the officers never come downstairs.

“If she’s the only attendant he’ll accept, you don’t have a choice. Or am I paying these frankly extortionary caretaking fees for nothing?”

You stiffen, all nerves sparking on high alert.

The commander stammers a little, losing his composure when he realizes credits are on the line.

“I can handle both, Commander, I swear," you say, immediately wishing you hadn't.

The Mandalorian's sponsor turns slowly, a thin eyebrow arched. You figure you’re already in for it for speaking out of turn, so you clench your jaw and meet her eyes.

She’s petite, but there’s an undeniable aura of danger pouring from her. Her dark eyes are cold, and her plum lips narrowed. Her clothing is intricate and expensive in the way of the truly wealthy—it’s not dripping with jewels or gold; it’s quality fabric tailored immaculately, with delicate embroidery creating striking and flattering designs. She does wear jewelry, but it’s subtle and almost assuredly custom.

“Why you?” she says.

“I don’t know,” you admit. “I was his barrack caretaker.”

She hums and blatantly looks you up and down, circling you like a nexu. You keep your head up and force yourself not to follow her with your eyes. To let her prowl and remain uncowed.

It’s unbecoming of a servant, you know. But you want her to know you can handle him, that you won’t be intimated and manipulated by the infamous Mandalorian.

When she comes back around, she has a pleased, sharp grin. Turning to the commander, she crosses her arms.

“Make it happen, or I’ll withdraw my sponsorship.”

“Yes, Madame,” he says.

You don’t want to leave the barracks. Not Cresh and not the servant’s quarters. It doesn’t really hit you until you hug Eli and realize you’ll barely see him anymore.

“Shut up,” he grumbles when you say as much. “You’re going to come by and report, right?”

You nod, sniffling into his tunic. “I will.”

He puts his hands on your shoulders. “This is a good thing. You’ll have better… everything. And you said you trust him, right?”

“I think so,” you say.

“C’mon, I’ll walk with you,” he says.

You shove his shoulder. “You just want to see what it’s like inside.”

“Well, duh,” he shoves you back.

He only gets to peek in, of course. But he still plays it up to get a smile from you. “This is kriffing wizard,” he teases. “You get your own fresher? Practically Canto Bight.”

But you’re not really seeing it through the same lens. Because your new quarters are in the Mandalorian’s cell. There’s a barred gate between you, but your cot is still behind the solid durasteel door, same as his.

Eli sees the fear on your face. “It’s okay,” he murmurs. “It’s not locked for you. Your badge will always open it.”

He sets your bag down on the small cot and hugs you again. “You know where to find me.”

“I will,” you say. You don’t catch the look he gives Mando over your shoulder.

You sit down on the cot when Eli leaves, more unmoored here than you’ve been in years. You let it sit, ugly and misshapen in your chest, before steeling your focus.

“Do you have everything you need?” you say.

“I think so,” he says.

“Okay,” you say, and silence resettles. It’s strange to feel so uncertain around him again. “I’ll go retrieve your dinner.”

“Do you eat here as well?” he asks.

“If you wish,” you say. Your hands are folded together and wrapped up in the top apron layer of your skirts.

“I don’t want to disrupt your routine,” he says.

“I’m here to attend to you,” you remind him, feeling a little frustrated by all the things unsaid.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s—it’s nothing,” you say and sigh. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

He’s almost relieved when you only bring one tray. Everything about this has been chaotic and messy. But it’s a sacrifice that has to be made.

You retrieve his tray when you return from dining with the others, but this time, you come back to him after. The lights are out, and you think he might be asleep already, so you duck into the fresher from your side of the bars and wash up for the night.

You settle onto your cot, almost grateful that it’s not any more comfortable than your old one. It’s strange, without the shuffling and snoring of your peers.

And then it starts. A horribly unmistakable sound from the cell next door. You hope you’re wrong. You pray you’re wrong.

You’re not.

You sit up, fingers digging into your knees, and eyes on the ground.

You can’t see into the cells around you, but you can certainly hear your neighboring attendant’s screams and cries.

They’re begging and pleading, but no one will help them. It’s the champion’s right. The attendants must serve every request unless it goes against arena rules.

Very few things do.

It’s not that you’re afraid of the Mandalorian. It’s more like you’re just afraid. But he’s done nothing to lose your trust, so you try not to flinch when he comes near the bars between his cell and your chamber.

While you manage not to, you do flinch each time the noises intensify or change. The sound of skin against skin is constant, but some are more obviously violent, emphasized by the nauseating responses.

“Hey,” he says. “Come here.”

You’re trembling a little, but you tense and try to hold steady as you stand and approach him. The gate is not locked. It only locks when you access the main door, so that you may come and go without releasing him.

If you’re inside? All he has to do is push.

But he doesn’t. “Don’t listen,” he says. “Cover your ears if you have to.”

“I’m fine,” you say.

He doesn’t quite catch it, but he can wager a solid guess from your expression. He sighs. “You can look at me, you know,” he says. “You’ll see me eventually.”

“I might be able to avoid it,” you say.

“I appreciate it,” he says. “But this is all going to be easier if you don’t have to be trying so hard.”

“It’s okay. I don’t want to take anything from you.”

“I’m asking you to. I don’t want the first time you see my face to be in the arena.”

You bite your lip. It makes sense. “You’re sure?”

“I am.”

And you can’t really argue. Not because you’re supposed to do what he says but because you get it. He’s right; you will see him in the arena. But he can control how it happens this way. It doesn’t have to be another thing they just take.

So you look.

Your eyes scan his face like they always do when you see one of your fighters for the first time. Searing it in so you can find it later in the pigments.

You won’t paint him, though. Not like this.

He holds steady eye contact. You feel like he’s waiting for a reaction, but nothing comes. He’s beautiful, but that’s not yours to say.

“I’m sorry,” you say instead.

“Thank you.” He pauses. “Worked, though, didn’t it?”

You blink at him for a moment.

The smallest shadow of a crooked smile flickers but doesn’t ignite. “Distracted you.”

The hall is quiet. You hadn’t realized, but the horrors next door had wound down. Stars, you hope they’re okay. Sleeping or tending their wounds. Not… well. Not forcibly silenced.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, drawing your eyes back to him. His fingers wrap around a bar near yours. Not touching, but inviting.

“Okay.” You’re not really sure what else to say. You’ve heard it before. Some mean it, some don’t. You think he’s genuine, that he’s safe, but that caution is like a little burn that never heals, leaving you to flinch away.

Your fingers twitch, and he thinks you’re about to touch his.

But you wince when the main door of the neighboring cell opens. His eyes bear a plea he won’t voice, but you only hesitate for a moment before pressing your badge to the scanner. His gate clicks and the door whooshes open.

They’re already ducking into the medbay when you catch up, so you stick your hand in front of the sensor to force the doors back open.

It’s the girl whose name you couldn’t remember on the Mandalorian’s first night. Sessa. She startles and whirls around when she hears you, hand pressed to her chest.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you," you say quietly.

She looks at you for a moment, something hauntingly empty in her eyes before she seems to recognize you. She covers her face with her hands.

“Please,” you whisper. “Is there anything I can do?”

“I—” her voice breaks, and you step closer, offering an embrace she folds into.

You don’t say anything. What could you? That you’re sorry? She knows. That it’ll be okay? It won’t. It’s horrible, she doesn’t deserve it, it’s inhumane, but none of those things will help her. She knows.

She doesn’t even really cry. It aches, but the tears don’t come, just the soft prickle of numbness. She’ll survive this, you think. She shouldn’t have to, but she will.

When the time for softness has faded, you let her pull back, and she lets you assess her. She sits on the counter with an ice pack to her cheek and drinks the tea you press into her hand. Her nose wrinkles at the bitter taste, but the tincture within is worth it. A reassurance. Nothing will come of this that she can’t bear.

When she leaves, she hugs you again, and you stay behind in the dark room, leaning against the counter with your arms folded over your chest.

It wasn’t a secret, what happened here. It didn’t always; a lot of the fighters are honorable people. But sometimes… sometimes this life warps the psyche beyond repair. Sometimes, desperate people do desperate things. Become something terrible to survive.

You just hadn’t been witness to the cruelty before.

When you go back, Mando is still awake. Waiting, you think.

“Is she—” he hesitates. He doesn’t want to ask if she’s okay, because the answer is no. It’s not really what he’s asking, anyway.

You nod, lips pursed tight. She’ll live, your silence says. And it’ll have to be enough.

It’s strange. Waking in his cell but rising to follow your old habits anyway. He gets served first, and then you take breakfast down to Cresh as if nothing has changed. Except you can’t linger, you can’t chat and learn of them as you used to. You have to return to the Mandalorian.

It’s strange for the both of you. Your time is usually spent busy or with the other servants. His time is usually spent alone. He doesn’t have a fight that first day and so you are forced to learn to navigate one another.

The gate between you remains closed.

He does push-ups while you fold laundry, executes a series of jumps that cycle between laying on the floor and springing to his feet that exhaust you just to see from the corner of your eye while you clean, and balances on his hands—one and both—while you flip through the agenda on your datapad and try not to be caught impressed.

It’s quiet, this life, with neither of you inclined to interrupt the other. You let him know when you phase in and out to attend to your duties and his needs. Otherwise, you don’t really speak until nightfall.

“I’m sorry,” he says in the safety of the dark. “I didn’t know it would create more of a burden for you. I just… couldn’t trust anyone else.”

“It’s not a burden, just a change. I understand,” you say softly.

He sighs, an edge of frustration biting. “I disrupted your routine.”

You snort. “So?”

“I separated you from your friends.”

You sigh. “Will it make you feel better if I pretend to be mad?”

“Why aren’t you?”

You sit up on your cot. “Nothing about this life is fair, and it’s all temporary. Everyone leaves, one way or another. Everything shifts. This is just another phase of my time here, and there’s no point in being upset about it.”

He lets it sit for a minute. “How long have you been here?”

“Three years. I have just under two left.”

The weight of the time is not lost on him, and you can see the hint of a grim smile. “You haven’t let it break you.”

You return the smile. “Not yet.”

He reclines against the wall, legs sprawled and dangling over the side of his bed. “For what it’s worth, I truly am sorry. It was a selfish thing for me to ask of you.”

“I’m glad you’re not alone.” You mean it. It may have disrupted what you knew before, but getting moved here did the same for him. And it took away his opportunity to talk to others. “I’m glad you trust me with this.”

He sighs, bittersweet. “Me too.”

Something shifts, then, that you’re grateful for. The guilt and awkwardness dissipate and leave behind that budding comradery you had started to forge together. A sense of peace.

It’s one of the better nights of sleep you’ve had in a long time.

You’ve never been in the stands before, let alone in the box. Though it’s exposed to the open sun, the vents wash it in cool air, unlike the curved benches where the crowds jeer and hiss.

No, up here in the sponsor box, surrounded by the important and the rich, you’re considered fortunate. The Mandalorian’s sponsor is late, but you’re in place. While he waits for battle, your services shift to her.

“You’re still here,” the Madame says as she approaches her seat.

You stand to the side, stiff and silent, until she draws near. “Yes, Madame.”

She gives you an appraising once-over. “Good.” Her voice is as sharp as her eyes, and she settles to watch.

You don’t really know the protocol here. Your days serving in the lounge were passed silently, circling the room with a loaded tray. Here, you’re meant to cater to her alone.

She doesn’t speak to you, though. Doesn’t acknowledge you. She lounges, coiled and elegant, like a tree viper.

You don’t want to watch the fights. You don’t. But you know, now, that you must. You owe it to the barrack caretakers; you can’t leave this responsibility to the other attendants alone. You all bear the burden together.

When the first fight ends in a double loss, both fighters fatally wounded, you know you’re not strong enough for this. The nausea rises until all you smell is blood, a phantom sense as the sand turns red beneath each pair’s feet. You’re shaking and all you can think is how glad you are not to have to hold a tray of glasses.

And then it’s time.

The Madame sits up, focused, and you know. Teeth dig into the soft flesh of your cheek to hold your breath steady and shallow. Quiet as possible, as if you need to strain to hear what’s playing out in front of you.

And you think, he should not be caged, for he is power and beauty and ferociousness. You can see why his people followed him to death. He is death.

His opponent lands exactly one strike, and you almost think the Mandalorian allowed it. Like he was gauging the strength and will. He prowls, teeth bloodied and bared, a snarl natural in the set of his lips. You think it’s laid in beskar steel, a scar you can’t smooth out into the soft curve of a smile.

No, that’s been stolen from him, too.

He asks his opponent’s name, and you think he’s carving it into his ribcage, so each time he breathes, it impresses upon his lungs.

When he moves, it’s calculated. Like the arena is a map he’s plotting, each strike or dodge choreographed and steadfast. There are no weapons today, just fists, and though his opponent has the advantage of razor-sharp teeth, they never even come close to slicing him open.

And then it’s over. The Mandalorian’s broad hands dwarf the other fighter’s jaw as he secures his grip and snaps. The body falls limp and the Mandalorian sneers at the crowd before he looks up.

There’s no way he can see you, but it feels like it. It feels like he sees you there, and doesn’t find what he was afraid of.

He’s not in the room when you get back down, and you pre-set his towels and clean clothes, so you won’t need to go hunting them down if he wants to shower. It’s still mid-afternoon, and you’re buzzing with the leftover cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol when he comes back.

Neither of you speaks at first as he goes into his half of the cell and cracks his knuckles, sighing deeply once the main doors are shut.

“Are you okay?” he says.

You’re surprised until you realize you shouldn’t be. He knows how weak you are. “Yeah,” you say.

“Are you afraid of me now?” he says quietly, not looking at you.

Oh. You get up and come closer to the gate. “No. I’m not.”

He meets your eyes and must find the truth in them, nodding grimly. “So what did you think?”

“Why do they have you fight with a shirt on?”

His eyes widen. “What?”

“Well, it’s just, they usually—um.”

“What?”

“They usually make the more attractive fighters wear as little as possible. You know. To appeal to the crowds.”

Huh. He thought it was a choice made by the few he’d seen showing skin. And then he can’t help it. You won’t look him in the eye, and he can’t resist. “You think I’m one of the more attractive fighters?” he teases.

Your cheeks burn, and you look very seriously at the ground. “I—I mean like, um, objectively—“

He spares you. “It’s because of my tattoos. They don’t want me out there covered in Mandalorian symbology.”

“Oh,” you say, imagination kicking off. “Can I—I’m sorry, that’s so inappropriate of me. I just… like… art.” It sounds so stupid and crude, but you mean it.

“I’ll show you when I’m clean,” he says with a shrug.

He always seems to understand. It’s a comfort you’ve never known before.

When he gets out of the fresher, though, you realize you have severely overestimated yourself. Because your first thought when he steps into his room is fuck. He’s big. You know he’s big. And broad. But without a shirt on? Stars. And he’s still a little wet, his crumpled curls dripping down his shoulders.

You have got to get yourself under control. You’re pretty sure you’ve already been busted, though, because he’s suddenly looking at you, something a little dark in the lines of his face, and you feel flayed under his disapproval.

Your brain reboots in time to recover, though, as you really do take in the way his skin is bathed in black ink. A lot of it is abstract, sharp angles and curving arcs intertwining with constellations and letters in a language you don’t recognize. Some of it almost looks like smears of paint, the ink laid across his body in a manner so akin to brushstrokes that the craftsmanship is breathtaking.

But there are a few pieces that differ, ones that stand out against the intricate patterns. You realize you’ve stepped up to the gate once he does the same.

“These are incredible,” you say. “How long did this take?” You nod at the swirl of ink on his bicep that wouldn’t look out of place in your own work.

“A very long time,” he says.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. What was your first one?”

He turns around, and you’re struck by the mythosaur skull that takes up most of his back. It’s almost shimmering.

“The ink…” you start.

He turns back around. “It’s imbued with beskar.”

Your jaw drops. “It’s what?”

“It’s—I’m going to be honest, I don’t fully understand the process. But we use a small amount of molten beskar in the ink for certain tattoos. These have it, too.” He indicates the two on his front that had stood out from the rest.

“Do you mind if I ask what they are? Why they’re the ones that use beskar?”

“No,” he says casually. “They’re things that I should never be without, parts of my armor that can never be fully taken. This,” he taps the diamond-esque design on his chest, “is a beskar’ta. Every Mandalorian has one. It’s the heart.”

You’re staring, unashamed, as he indicates the other glimmering mark on his shoulder.

“This is a mudhorn, the symbol of my clan. Someday, my son will have the same one. He’s too young. Or, well. He’s…” he pauses like he can’t decide if he wants to get into this. “He’s not ready yet.”

“So… so you always have it with you. Your armor. The beskar.”

“Yes. Not everyone gets them, but many do.”

“That’s beautiful.” You’re a little speechless. Not just from the beauty of the art but the sheer idea. “That’s…”

“You can see why Gideon doesn’t want them to be seen.”

“Yeah,” you say, a small scoff slipping out. “No kidding.”

You step back, and he tugs on his shirt, ruffling his still-damp hair like nothing world-shattering has happened. And yet, the room seems to have tilted and knocked you to the side, the shift undeniable.

You don’t realize why until you remember the look on his face when he caught you staring the first time. It wasn’t discomfort. It was hunger.

It’s not a tension, exactly, that settles between you. It’s more like an acknowledgment. Something is going to change. It’s just a matter of when. And it lingers in the air for weeks.

It happens, like almost all things here, in the wake of fear.

You return to the cell before him, having fled the box as soon as his narrowest victory was called. Not that it gave you much of a head start, but you had time to grab a medpack and fresh clothes before they brought him in.

He never uses the arena freshers anymore, not even just to wash away the sticky, fresh blood. No, he’s still quite coated in it when the door snicks shut behind him, his face gaunt and haunted.

You think, at first, that he was afraid to die.

Who moves first is irrelevant. Your only focal point in the galaxy is the way he feels pressed right against you, fingers digging into your soft flesh like he’s trying to pull you into his ribcage as you embrace.

You’re not being much gentler, clinging on as you shake with unshed tears.

He lets go of your waist to clutch your face in his bloody hands. “Promise me you won’t watch.”

“What?” you say, rearing your head back to look at his furrowed brows and pouted lips.

“Don’t watch. When it happens. I don’t want you to have to see.”

Oh. “Stop,” you whisper, but he’s shaking his head.

“It’s all I could think about. Look away, and don’t find out what they do with my body. Promise me, kar’talyc.”

All that comes out is a sob when you try to argue.

His hand cups the back of your head, and he pulls you against his still-soaked chest.

Once you’ve settled a little, he pulls back but leaves his hands on your shoulders. “Promise.”

“Mando—“

“Din.”

You blink at him for a moment. “What?”

“My name is Din.”

next chapter

*Din calls her kar'talyc, which basically means "bleeding heart" (from kar'ta, meaning "heart," and talyc, meaning "bloody.") He's been calling her that in his head since the last chapter.

*tattooed Din and his mythosaur were inspired by this art by @xxlumos

*title from "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears, but I listened to the Lorde version while writing this and highly recommend it for the vibes. The original is quite a different mood lol.

#din djarin x reader #the mandalorian x reader #mando x reader #din djarin x you #the mandalorian x you #mando x you #din djarin x f!reader #the mandalorian x f!reader #the mandalorian fic #gladiator!din djarin #fic: live to rise

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mara-xx217 · 6 months

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Fear and hunger, like I don't mind monster (? If crow or guard or poket cat) and all but what about Pav from Termina??? :3. ;33

With Pav x reader if you don't mind, like I hope you don't mind me blabbing and all but I imagine Pav got curious and got the attention from reader but they(or she I don't mind) didn't notice and all , Pav be like Mine and he thought after the festival am gonna make them mine or something like that lmao

I've been thinking about him for a while and I've been liking him more and more. So here's some headcanons for him and a fem!reader as the Festival takes place!

Warnings for general Pav toxic-ness and shitty behavior

Day One - Day Two

Pav isn't sure why you have caught his eye. Maybe you remind him of someone from his past, from the village that the Kaiser had raised so long ago. Maybe you were just cute to him, maybe you looked like a particularly easy target to him-

He's got some serious shit to do. He can't be flirting with every dame that he crosses... though it's not like there are many left in Prehevil, or at least those that aren't hideously deformed or raving mad.

Fuck it. He's a dead man and he knows it. Might as well have fun while he still can.

Pav is the most obnoxious courter and he fucking knows it. What better way to get a lady's attention other than to be the loudest, most flamboyant man on the battlefield?

He's kind of vile... Leering at you, catcalling you, whistling like the wolf he is. You didn't know what you were hearing at first, so you pretended as though you couldn't hear him at all. For all you know, it was one of the mad villagers losing their minds.

Being ignored isn't in Pav's style, so he will directly confront you and anyone else that might be in your presence and Gods forbid if there's a lad with you, because he will be squaring up for a fight.

Get used to being called 'his good girl', because that's exactly what he'll call you. Over and over again. Maybe it makes you blush a little... Or maybe your face is red from annoyance and anger. All of it is good for Pav.

"You're so pretty when you are furious with me, radiant one~"

He will threaten you with his gun, regardless of the fact that he has little intention to kill you. It's an extension of his person, as a solider, as a survivor...

Becomes unbelievably frustrated with the fact that you do not engage him like Abella or Marina does. No shouting, no 'fuck you's', no attention given to him whatsoever. What, do you think you're too good for him?!

Maybe you're right-

He can't stick around for long... He'd like to chase your skirt all damn day but he can't. There's... unfinished business he needs to attend to. He can't afford to fuck it up, even for a pretty little woman such as yourself...

Day Two - Day Three

He... failed...?

Waking up on the train, Pav is... disappointed that he is still alive. The shame of failure burns worse than the wound across his chest. He's nearly forgotten you, your face, your nice, nice ass in your pretty little skirt...

He's... surprised that you were on the train with him.

Pav isn't the cocky bastard that you met earlier in the Festival anymore. He's subdued. Quiet, almost... thoughtful. He avoids your gaze and has an expression equivalent to that of a kicked dog.

"How... do you feel?"

"..."

He rolled over and went back to sleep. Daan might have been the one to initially doctor his wounds but you were the one that continued to keep him alive.

Why? Well...

Pav was rather pathetic in your eyes. He was compensating for something, though what you weren't exactly sure of. He was dangerous and worse he was obnoxious.

But he was still human, and learning that he had attempted to assassinate the Kaiser had shifted the feeling of disgust that you had towards him into something more akin to pity.

Pav won't talk to you much. He's a wounded beast and you and him both know that he's due to die at any moment.

But it doesn't really stop you from making the last hours he has left at least bearable... More so than any of his time in the damn Bremen army has ever been.

@prettycutebunny, @infinitewhore, @kennbb, @slutwithadegree, @dead-bxxxtch-walking, @space-arsonist, @pink-soft-shadow, @sinlessdesire, @hoemine, @memoryofheather, @horny-3

#fear & hunger termina #fear and hunger termina #termina #fear & hunger x reader #pav #fear & hunger pav #termina pav #fem reader #ask response

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cyanogoth · 2 years

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A nonexistent human being. Or is he? (character analysis of Johan Liebert)

A few months ago I’ve read a book which was recommended by one of the Monster’s fans, - “The Divided Self” by Ronald David Laing. He suggested Laing’s work to everyone who’s confused about Johan’s mindset and motivations, just as I’m sure a lot of us were… It was a GREAT recommendation, so insightful that I wanted to share my thoughts and the interpretation I developed.

Any blockquote in this post is from “The Divided Self”, there will be too many to sign each of them, so just keep that in mind :)

It’s going to be a painfully long read, but hopefully a rewarding one too.

PART 1: DEFINITION OF ONTOLOGICAL INSECURITY, TRUE AND FALSE SELF

Firstly we need to get familiar with a few concepts from Laing’s work which will be important for understanding the rest of the essay. His book describes schizoids and schizophrenics, exploring the mechanisms behind their illness. But it is important to understand that he, although a psychiatrist, acknowledged mental illness primarily as an existential/philosophical problem rather than a purely medical one. He saw more value in understanding the patient's experience of the world rather than endlessly examining and manipulating their body.

The first term we will need is ontological insecurity. Let's compare how Laing describes someone who is confident in his own reality - and someone who is not.

The individual, then, may experience his own being as real, alive, whole; as differentiated from the rest of the world in ordinary circumstances so clearly that his identity and autonomy are never in question; as a continuum in time; as having an inner consistency, substantiality, genuineness, and worth; as spatially coextensive with the body; and, usually, as having begun in or around birth and liable to extinction with death. He thus has a firm core of ontological security.

<...>

The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question. <… > He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

If a position of primary ontological security has been reached, the ordinary circumstances of life do not afford a perpetual threat to one's own existence. If such a basis for living has not been reached, the ordinary circumstances of everyday life constitute a continual and deadly threat.

For an individual who’s unsure of his own existence, life becomes a constant struggle to preserve his self. All efforts are made to avoid engulfment, implosion, petrification. Fear of being absorbed is essentially fear of being understood, caught up, seen, loved, "grasped".

To be understood correctly is to be engulfed, to be enclosed, swallowed up, drowned, eaten up, smothered, stifled in or by another person's supposed all-embracing comprehension. It is lonely and painful to be always misunderstood, but there is at least from this point of view a measure of safety in isolation.

The way to deal with this fear is to take one’s true self out of the real world, completely out of reach of other people. A true self withdraws into the depths of the inner world, its connection with an individual’s body is interrupted. That which interacts with the "outside" world and controls actions, movements, words, facial expressions is the false self. A carefully falsified image designed to deflect the gaze of others.

…[he] never allows himself to 'be himself in the presence of anyone else. He avoids social anxiety by never really being with others. He never quite says what he means or means what he says. The part he plays is always not quite himself. He takes care to laugh when he thinks a joke is not funny, and look bored when he is amused. <…> No one, therefore, really knows him, or understands him. He can be himself in safety only in isolation, albeit with a sense of emptiness and unreality. With others, he plays an elaborate game of pretense and equivocation. His social self is felt to be false and futile. - Laing describing his patient

However, another fear, of petrification, or objectification, clashes with the previous one. Fear of being absorbed makes one flee from the gaze of others, but by hiding from it, an individual ceases to be perceived by anyone, which once again puts their substantiality into question. An individual is very much afraid of being perceived by others as an object, as something inanimate, as a machine, as an “it” without subjectivity. It’s as if any potential observer is Medusa, who can instantly turn an individual to stone with a mere gaze. This fear pushes a person to "existential suicide" - he pretends to be "dead", giving up his own autonomy before someone else can deaden him and treat him as an inanimate object. Also, as a way of protecting himself, an individual might turn everyone around him into stone too - because a phantom, hallucination, or an object couldn’t harm him, only real human beings are capable of such.

Fear of implosion is the same as fear of absorbing the real experience of life. An individual is empty, he is a vacuum - but this vacuum he begins to think of as himself. Any substantial relationship with the world and people threatens to "tear" him, so he avoids it, too.

Now let’s clarify what is false self, how it relates to the true one and the world.

If the individual delegates all transactions between himself and the other to a system within his being which is not 'him', then the world is experienced as unreal, and all that belongs to this system is felt to be false, futile, and meaningless.

Here’s an illustration from “The Divided Self” to better visualize what is meant here.

The reality of the world and of the self are mutually potentiated by the direct relationship between self and other. In Figure 2, there is a vicious circle.

the person who does not act in reality and only acts in phantasy becomes himself unreal.

The true self resides in an imaginary, devoid world of phantoms. It becomes unembodied, not represented in the real world. The real world, in return, loses its vitality in the eyes of a schizoid, viewed now as filled with objects.

The false self is a mask, a performance, an imaginary identity with little or nothing to do with the true self of the individual. Laing describes cases in which the false self starts to emerge in childhood and such children are described by their parents as remarkably obedient, compliant, undemanding. They conform perfectly to the expectations of the family and the environment. They begin to mockingly imitate what is desired of them. This is not necessarily an absurdly "good" image; it can also be absurdly evil, if that is what the world wishes the individual to be.

The point of having a false self is to not let any part of the true one slip to the real world, where an individual has no power over what will be done to it. To give something about him away is to rely on others mercy, and it’s a risk a schizoid can't afford.

in reality, in 'the objective element', nothing of 'him' shall exist, and no footprints or fingerprints of the 'self shall have been left.

Now to the interesting part - how all of that correlates to Johan.

PART 2: ROOTS OF JOHAN’S ONTOLOGICAL INSECURITY

Firstly, of course, dressing up as a sister. He probably could sense already that it’s done for a reason, not for the fun of it. The family led “a quiet life”, which is probably difficult to do with two kids. So, my suggestion: the twins grew up with the feeling that they have to hide from some sort of danger and avoid attention. But, Anna didn’t have to hide her real appearance, unlike Johan, for whom pretending to be someone else became an important part of remaining safe.

Did he conceal as someone else, or was he only an imposter for the real human that for sure is present in the world?

Because everyone, besides mother and sister, only knew the sister, the girl, the daughter. She was definitely real. Was he really ever there?

Even the mother couldn’t tell them apart. He became an illusory twin.

The moment their mother hesitated could only solidify Johan’s intrusive thoughts. She had someone in mind, could it be that she hesitated because at that exact moment couldn’t tell where the kid she’d given up?

Did he only stand a chance to live, physically and existentially, only if he concealed as someone else? Because if people could see him for what he truly was, he would not be saved.

My guess is that Johan's perception of himself was so distorted that he no longer thought of himself as the real thing; that the true self worth protecting wasn’t inside of him, it was his sister, and he was fake in his entirety. He was a mere pretender who had to ward off danger from the true self. Johan's saying "I am you, and you are me" and referring to Anna as "my other self" indirectly confirms my assumption - he began to see himself and his sister as an integrated system, where he is nothing more than a facade and his sister is the living, real, substantial, human one.

The mother's hesitance in choosing between the two children added fuel to Johan's already flimsy sense of his own substantiality. What if she was not choosing between the twins, but simply could not at that moment figure out which one was which? Keeping a particular child in mind, she just couldn't tell who was really the kid she was thinking of and who was posing as such? Where is the real child and where is the false one?

The feeling of insecurity, the loneliness, the pain of their mother's abandonment, the sympathy for this sister, and the enormous guilt that the real one of them two had fallen into clutches of monsters. The twins' whole life consisted of constant attempts of intruders to destroy their lives and identities.

The days after Anna’s return prior to being found on Czech-German border mark Johan’s existential death.

Something in him collapsed in that interval of time. When his mother was choosing between them, he was still a normal child (or, at least, nothing described in manga showed us his abnormality) - afraid of being abandoned by his mother, of being handed over to be torn apart by sinister strangers whose intentions were unknown, but from whom he’d been running for as long as he could remember. All these feelings died in him. When and how exactly, we don't know, but a completely different Johan crosses the Czech-German border - detached, horrifyingly tranquil, indifferent to death. In a sense, he no longer has anything to fear, the short chain of events has been so devastating that he unknowingly committed existential suicide. Even if it’s death that’s awaiting them, no one will be able to put their hands on them, no one will be able to twist their souls and minds.

Laing’s patients often described their inner world as a wasteland, devoid of any sign of life. There are quotes from his book in which Laing talks about his patient and cites his words:

The self becomes desiccated and dead. In his dream world James experienced himself as even more alone in a desolate world than in his waking existence, for example:

“.. . I was standing in the middle of a barren landscape. It was absolutely flat. There was no life in sight. The grass was hardly growing. My feet were stuck in mud… ”

“. .. . I was in a lonely place of rocks and sand. I had fled there from something; now I was trying to get back to somewhere but didn't know which way to go… “

Reminds us of something, doesn’t it?

And it’s a precise reflection of Johan's world, the real Johan, where his self ended up imprisoned. However, he was a little luckier than the other schizoids - there was room for one more person in his world.

Mentally, Johan never made it out of that wasteland, only his body was saved. He calls this landscape a scenery of the Doomsday, not only because his body was close to death in that very space, but because it so strongly resembled Johan's inner landscape. It was the last place his soul has seen.

PART 3: KINDERHEIM 511 AND THE LIEBERTS

One’s true self, residing in a world of phantoms, ceases to engage with the real world through the individual's body. What is this body occupied with meanwhile?

Instead of being the core of his true self, the body is felt as the core of a false self, which a detached, disembodied, 'inner', 'true' self looks on at with tenderness, amusement, or hatred as the case may be. <…> The unembodied self, as onlooker at all the body does, engages in nothing directly.

This offers an answer as to why Kinderheim didn’t have the same destructive impact on Johan as it had on other children. His true self was already out of reach, it couldn’t be obtained no matter what they did to him externally.

They could get nothing from him. "They could only beat me up but they could not do me any real harm." That is, any damage to his body could not really hurt him.

In a sad way, the experiments on Johan's psyche were not successful, for he himself, quite unknowingly, subjected himself to all the horrors to which the Kinderheim warders were about to subject him.

You cannot kill what is dead, drain what’s empty, objectify what’s inanimate. That's why they didn't make it.

But Johan, of course, is the result they strived for but couldn’t achieve: a human so terrified and defenseless that is pushed to abandon his sensitivity in order to survive.

Thus, to forgo one's autonomy becomes the means of secretly safeguarding it; to play possum, to feign death, becomes a means of preserving one's aliveness. To turn oneself into a stone becomes a way of not being turned into a stone by someone else.

It seems to me that Johan was ready to settle down and stop running after escaping Kinderheim 511. But he left the orphanage with a critically dangerous revelation - sometimes it’s either you, or everyone else; his actions clearly show that he won’t hesitate to obliterate everything and everyone if it ensures safety. I just don’t think he expected to find himself in a similar position so soon, when he was adopted by Lieberts.

The thing about him is that he played along, he became what the world wanted him to become, yet it wasn’t enough to finally be left alone. The man they ran away from showed up at their doorstep and Johan lost his temper. Nothing helped the twins to escape monsters - living under different names, with different caregivers, in different places, together, separated- NOTHING was ever enough.

Maybe it was around the time his plan to be the last one standing was formed. Wiping out every sparkle of life from the world was the last attempt to gain safety.

Johan doesn’t care much about dying because his existential death has already happened, he already feels a lot more dead and frozen than alive. He already convinced himself that there’s nothing true about him, and out of two of them his sister is the true self. It doesn’t matter if he dies, he was never there from the start. But even after the gunshot he hopes to live through his sister.

Everything that comes after that wretched rainy night is an attempt to secure himself and his sister from the world that was on their tail for as long as they lived. He is ready to be separated from her and let her live under a different name if that’s how the monster finally loses track of her; he’s ready to enter the underworld, to take control of the German economy, to kill people.

It seems to me, because of the confinement of his true self in the realm of insubstantiality, he became unable to perceive people from the real world as alive and autonomous, that’s the sad reason why he could kill so easily. What he saw around were ghosts, objects that were mimicking human beings, not actual humans.

But there were exceptions.

Only Anna and Tenma are shown together with Johan in the wasteland of his inner world, where his true self dwells - them being there with him is a way of telling us, readers, that only these two truly know Johan. And therefore, only they can be spared.

I just want to emphasize: for Johan, “destroying the world” and “be the last one standing” wasn’t something he did for fun, or just because he could. It’s the last endeavor of a tortured child convinced in hostility of all living things to find peace.

PART 4: THE TALE OF THE NAMELESS MONSTER

The self is, however, charged with hatred in its envy of the rich, vivid, abundant life which is always elsewhere; always there, never here. The self, as we said, is empty and dry. One might call it an oral self in so far as it is empty and longs to be and dreads being filled up. But its orality is such that it can never be satiated by any amount of drinking, feeding, eating, chewing, swallowing. It is unable to incorporate anything. It remains a bottomless pit; a gaping maw that can never be filled up.

In the tale of the nameless monster, Johan can be both the monster and the boy who has been possessed by a foreign entity. That depends on how you interpret it.

This tale could be an allegory for what is happening to the twins, which are represented as nameless monsters. Johan could not remain himself, all the time hiding under different "faces'', changing names and identities. However, he couldn’t stay in any of them for long. His nature was bursting out, destroying these masks and whatever and whoever was around in the process. Nina on the other hand, even knowing her past, accepted the truth. Accepted her mother's choice and hardships she had to endure. She no longer tries to appear to be someone else, having chosen to move on with her life.

A second interpretation: Johan-the-Prince and our Johan are both weakened boys on a brink of death. For each of them, letting the Monster in, something scary, unnatural to humans, was a way to survive. So our Johan suppressed his sensitivity and susceptibility by pretending to be a not-quite-human, until traces and even references to his humanity have all but disappeared.

I don't think the fairytale manipulated Johan as a child, messing up his consciousness. What’s truly sinister about this picture book is that it foretold his fate.

As an adult, he picks up this book and sees himself in both the monster, who could not bear the present self and took on another's form, and the boy, who in an attempt to survive has ceased to be human, has destroyed everything around him. All that remains is solitude.

Imageries of the prince and the monster merge into one, and in one thing they are similar - in a fear of losing their lives, they lied primarily to themselves, and that lie destroyed the being of each of them. Neither monster nor prince really saved what they were protecting so desperately.

In addition, the book itself was an object from Johan's distant childhood, now almost forgotten, and served also as a reminder of the times when he was an ordinary, normal child.

Johan was wearing masks all the time, but the greatest of all his deceptions was not to live under the names “Johan Liebert”, “Franz Heinau”, “Erich Springer”, or any other for that matter. The most atrocious lie was to wear a mask of the nameless monster, even convincing himrself that this is who he is, that the emptiness and void is all there is to him. Wearing the guise of the nameless monster for years he had almost lost every memory of being human, and the book in his hands was a painful, violent reminder of his cowardly self-deception, his abandoned humanity, his forgotten self.

PART 5: I AM NOT YOU, AND YOU ARE NOT ME

From the moment the book falls into his hands, Johan probably realizes that his worldview is very much distorted. One of his fundamental beliefs about himself has been undermined, so debunking the rest of his illusions becomes a priority.

He remembers orchestrating the massacre at Kinderheim, but his belief that he was always capable of such things is shaken. He suspects that in his lost memories he will find the answer to the question he didn’t even think of asking. If he wasn’t born a monster, how did he become one?

We are not allowed to listen to the entire contents of the tape from Kinderheim 511. Only his attachment to Anna becomes apparent from it; but maybe he proceeds to talk about the Red Rose Mansion next. During interrogation he could recall his sister's words, which he heard again and again after her return. Her story was told in the first person POV: “I saw <....> I heard <…> I was <...> I ran <...>”. On recording he could repeat verbatim the words of his sister, and then, as an adult listening to it, misunderstand the meaning of those words. After all, he heard himself saying “I was taken <...>, I saw people die <...> , I ran away…” And only on the basis of this would he latch on to the story about the Red Rose Mansion as an explanation for what he had become.

Johan then decides to destroy the place. Although he clearly doesn’t recognize it, it doesn’t ring the bell yet.

Johan at that moment still considers himself a single set of personalities with his sister, and believes that in his mother's eyes they looked the same.

I can only assume that he told Čapek that Nina would kill him because he mistakenly thought that Nina held the same opinion about their connection as he did. If he's willing to kill for her, she'll do the same. Of course, he was wrong: he saw himself as an extension, a shadow of his sister, taking her joy and pain as his own; Nina, as much as she loved her brother, did not see herself and him as one, and clearly drew boundaries between her being and Johan's.

The capacity to experience oneself as autonomous means that one has really come to realize that one is a separate person from everyone else. No matter how deeply I am committed in joy or suffering to someone else, he is not me, and I am not him.

The assumption of being taken away by Bonaparta and being cast aside by his mother was one of the last crutches guarding him from the horrifying truth - he was the one who turned himself into a monster.

He cries when he hears Nina's story. Realizing that they’re not one, and she has never perceived Johan in this way. She is not his true self, and he is not his sister's false self. He sees more and more clearly the outlines of the true self within him, and he does not like the picture emerging before him at all.

All the “saving” he was doing turned out to be a sham that didn’t bring any of the twins the expected result. He experienced the guilt of denying himself existence and grew so enraged that he decided to kill himself. He now saw his true self - destructive, without a good reason. And realized it had to be eradicated, along with the man, the Monster, who made him that way - Franz Bonaparta.

PART 6: RUHENHEIM

The final stage of Johan's collapse, the massacre at Ruhenheim.

When he gets to Bonaparta's old house and finds numerous sketches of him and his sister as children he understands that Bonaparta was not “a monster outside of him”.

He refers to him as such when meeting Čapek, implying that Franz is to blame for him becoming a murderer. Upon seeing these sketches he recognized that Bonaparta's intentions had changed greatly over the years, and both Anna and himself were able to escape their fate because of his suddenly awakened sympathy. Not that this excuses Bonaparta, he was the one who designed the experiment after all. But these sketches were a confirmation of his kind intentions towards the twins, whatever they may have been at the outset.

It turns out that when Bonaparta came to visit the Lieberts, he was no longer a threat to Johan and Anna. Johan now knew that the night he shot the Lieberts had indeed stumbled and made a fatal mistake which tore him apart from Anna and plunged him deeper into the abyss of despair.

The event that finally convinced him of the animosity of the world and the lack of a safe corner anywhere in it was a figment of his mind which was led by fear.

This discovery was the final straw for Johan. Any image he had of himself collapsed for good.

The ending of "Monster" is Johan's realization of the fact that he undoubtedly Is. He exists, he is real, and he is him. And he was among the people who denied him the right to live; he was incapable of standing up for himself and recognizing his right to life, as his sister managed to do. He was so eager to erase any traces of himself from the world that didn’t notice the huge trail of blood dragging behind him, that was solid evidence of his existence, the only thing he had left.

He didn’t need to do horrible things that only left him and Nina traumatised. That left him all alone, miserable, separated from her.

He tried so hard to evade the evil people that he killed his Self before anyone had a chance to lay a hand on it.

When he set out to be nothing, his guilt was not only that he had no right to do all the things that an ordinary person can do, but that he had not the courage to do these things over and against and despite his conscience which sought to tell him that everything he did or could do in this life among other people was wrong. His guilt was in endorsing by his own decision this feeling that he had no right to life, and in denying himself access to the possibilities of this life.

After everything he learned about his past, Johan can’t forgive himself. For throwing himself into oblivion, for locking himself in the darkness. For making himself a monster that he was not born to be, that he had a chance not to become.

He was just as capable and deserving of normal life and real, deep connection with others as any other human being. He just convinced himself that he wasn’t one, and nobody dared to contradict him.

There is a desire in him to preserve not only himself from being consumed, but also those he cares about from himself. He thinks of his love as disastrous - because of it, Anna lost her brother and adoptive parents. Tenma, who saved him, was forced to be on the run for several years after becoming a murder suspect.

If there is anything the schizoid individual is likely to believe in, it is his own destructiveness. He is unable to believe that he can fill his own emptiness without reducing what is there to nothing. He regards his own love and that of others as being as destructive as hatred. To be loved threatens his self; but his love is equally dangerous to anyone else. His isolation is not entirely for his own self's sake. It is also out of concern for others. <…>

…what the schizoid individual feels daily. He says, 'It would not be fair to anyone I might love, to love him.' <…> He descends into a vortex of non-being in order to avoid being, but also to preserve being from himself.

He wishes to die now more than ever - a real death, this time. Not just existential, but total. The true end, as he called it.

Appearing in front of Bonaparta and Tenma, he doesn't aim at Franz, because he no longer blames Bonaparta for what he has become.

Johan said the only thing everyone is equal in is death, and what was behind his words: he says to Tenma that not everyone is worthy of saving, of being loved and forgiven, and Tenma should've finally realized this after meeting him and really knowing him. Because he's a monster, and being cheerful, having hope and light in their life is something that others can have, but he can’t; he's completely out of this human world and the only thing he has in common with everyone else is that they are mortal and so is he.

But even in his death he is mistaken. Once again believing he has no right to exist, he hopes to laugh at the world one last time, and die at the hands of the man who once saved him. After all, he certainly wouldn't have done it, knowing what Johan would grow up to be.

Isn’t that right, Dr. Tenma?…

Nina forgave him and the man who saved his life long time ago doesn’t regret his choice anymore and commits to it. The only people dear to him have recognized his right to live, whatever he may be.

Alas, how this affected him, we don’t know, and all we’re left with is speculation.

As a sentimental person, I want to believe that it meant something to Johan.

But what I really don't doubt is that Johan by the end is a completely different character to the one he used to be. Broken, disarmed, miserable. But it’s finally truly him.

"I think I must have figured out how the show ended. The Magnificent Steiner, he probably, became human again."

PART 7: THE FINAL ESCAPE

A mother plays a huge role in the development of her children's ontological insecurity - sometimes by being outright dismissive, sometimes by simply enjoying the child's undemanding and calm nature.

Here's what you can read about the mother’s impact in “The Divided Self”, those are Laing's reflections and descriptions of several of his patients.

... we suggest that a necessary component in the development of the self is the experience of oneself as a person under the loving eye of the mother.

His own feeling about his birth was that neither his father nor his mother had wanted him and, indeed, that they had never forgiven him for being born. <…> He was treated as though he wasn't there.' For his part, not only did he feel awkward and obvious, he felt guilty simply at 'being in the world in the first place'. His mother had, it seems, eyes only for herself. She was blind to him. He was not seen.

She had a great deal to say about her mother. She was smothering her, she would not let her live, and she had never wanted her.

Johan’s mother's choice was the first one in the long list of his miseries, it also triggered his ontological insecurity. And how could it not arise when the mother herself abandoned one of her children?

However, Johan was unaware that his mother had thought up names for the two of them, even before he and Nina were born. It turns out that the arrival of the second child was not an unpleasant surprise to her, she was looking forward to having them both.

She had always acknowledged the existence of both her children, and in her eyes they certainly weren’t a one big entity divided by chance into two bodies, one of which was never meant to be there.

But Johan looks truly disturbed after listening to Tenma. And this new revelation could also be another beginning to despair.

There is a door that must not be opened. What lays behind it: a paradise, or another monster?

Tenma, by telling him that the mother had given names to both of them, might have brought Johan down to a new hell. Where the mother recognised the reality of both her children and yet seriously chose which of them to keep.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life, but since it’s fiction we’re talking about, I think we should pay attention to the fact that Johan wakes up only after hearing Tenma’s words. There is a symbolic meaning of him being stuck between life and death for so long.

It’s like he was resisting to be alive again, refusing to stay awake, choosing to be in a coma rather than walk this Earth again. But yet he didn’t die - a part of Johan was holding onto life despite all the horrors it brought to him.

In his last waking moments, he was miserable after discovering all the truth about himself. He really wanted to die, he thought it was the only thing he was deserving of; but Tenma didn’t shot him, his sister forgave him - and it wasn’t the outcome he expected at all. It started an inner conflict he didn’t have the time to resolve.

Johan as well could see the memory of mother’s choice in a different light. By opening up to Tenma he admitted it as a serious enough cause for him to abandon his humanity, as he really was living in a world full of threats. Hiding and pretending came natural to a child that didn’t know any better. And his mother, however hurtful her choice was and how wrong was the very fact of it, loved both of her children, Johan knows that for sure now. Maybe, he could finally forgive himself for becoming a monster. There was no one left to blame for the way he had turned out, no one to take revenge on - even himself.

(I know it can be confusing, so I’ll clarify, just in case - by “forgiving himself” i don't mean he simply dismissed the damage he did to others. He could only forgive the one he, with his own hands, inflicted upon himself, finally realizing, he had no other choice in his circumstances.)

He had a chance to accept that he had the right to exist all along, from the very beginning.

Finally, I want to get into the last excerpt from Laing's book. These are his patient's words from their conversation.

I could only be good if you saw it in me. It was only when I looked at myself through your eyes that I could see anything good. Otherwise, I only saw myself as a starving, annoying brat whom everyone hated and I hated myself for being that way. I wanted to tear out my stomach for being so hungry.

<…> Everyone should be able to look back in their memory and be sure he had a mother who loved him, all of him; even his piss and shit. He should be sure his mother loved him just for being himself; not for what he could do. Otherwise he feels he has no right to exist. He feels he should never have been born. No matter what happens to this person in life, no matter how much he gets hurt, he can always look back to this and feel that he is lovable. He can love himself and he cannot be broken. If he can't fall back on this, he can be broken. You can only be broken if you're already in pieces. As long as my baby-self has never been loved then I was in pieces. By loving me as a baby, you made me whole.

<…> It was terribly hard for me to stop being a schizophrenic. I knew I didn't want to be a Smith (patient’s family name), because then I was nothing but old Professor Smith's granddaughter. I couldn't be sure that I could feel as though I were your child, and I wasn't sure of myself. The only thing I was sure of was being a 'catatonic, paranoid and schizophrenic'. I had seen that written on my chart. That at least had substance and gave me an identity and personality. [What led you to change?] When I was sure that you would let me feel like your child and that you would care for me lovingly. If you could like the real me, then I could too. I could allow myself just to be me and didn't need a title.

I walked back to see the hospital recently, and for a moment I could lose myself in the feeling of the past. In there I could be left alone. The world was going by outside, but I had a whole world inside me. Nobody could get at it and disturb it. For a moment I felt a tremendous longing to be back. It has been so safe and quiet. But then I realized that I can have love and fun in the real world and I started to hate the hospital. I hated the four walls and the feeling of being locked in. I hated the memory of never being really satisfied by my fantasies.

The above passage resembles Johan in many ways: the hunger he felt for real life, the doubt of being loved by mother, the bond which he developed with Tenma…. The last has to be special for Johan: the doctor didn’t simply let him off the hook in the end, he actively chose to save his life.

And just as Laing's patient laments how difficult it was for her to give up the label of "crazy, schizophrenic” because it was the only description she felt could be applied to her, Johan couldn’t part with the mask of the nameless monster for the longest time. It was, after all, the only constant in his life. And now he knows that "nameless" part isn’t really true. Or maybe it doesn't matter anymore. He is just him.

It’s up for a debate whether Johan chose life or death in the end. There’s evidence for both and this ambiguity is sure intentional on the author’s part.

I just want to believe it was a newfound hope that got Johan out of the hospital bed.

#johan liebert #monster anime #naoki urasawa's monster #anime analysis #monster anime analysis #nina fortner #kenzo tenma #naoki urusawa #monster meta

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see-arcane · 9 months

Text

Was Frankenstein Not the Monster? PILOT

A fire of too many colors swallows a manor in the countryside and descends into a pit.

An occult detective's prying leads to revelations far more volatile than the mere aftermath of a nightmare.

Men and monsters circle at the edge of a legend that should have died in the cold almost 100 years ago.

And in the dark beyond that edge, strange Creatures watch and work and wait.

…Such is the stage set for a new piece under the working title of Was Frankenstein Not the Monster? I make no promises—certainly none the size of Barking Harker—but at the moment, this project has been eating up much of the time I’ve spent while juggling the publication of The Vampyres. As it stands, I think I might be making another book.

If you’re interested, the preview is below the cut, but also available here and through a link in my website, here.

Was Frankenstein Not the Monster?

C.R. Kane

Every muscle palpitates, every nerve goes tense—then the body rises from the ground, not slowly, limb by limb, but thrown straight up from the earth all at once. He did not yet look alive, but like someone who was now dying. Still pale and stiff, he stands dumbstruck at being thrust back into the world. But no sound comes from his closed mouth; his voice and tongue are only allowed to answer.

—Scene of a necromantic conjuring by Erichtho, as depicted in Lucan’s Pharsalia.

“I see by your eagerness and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be; listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon the subject. I will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery.”

—Victor Frankenstein, as penned by Capt. Robert Walton, edited and distributed by M. Wulstan, in the epistolatory document referred to alternately as The Legend of Frankenstein, ‘The Walton Letters,’ or, ‘Lament of the Modern Prometheus.’

THE MODERN PROMETHEUS! THE MANMADE WRETCH!

WHO IS THE MONSTER?

THE HORROR, THE HUBRIS, THE HAVOC!

ALL COME TO ELECTRIFYING LIFE IN…

THE NIGHTMARE OF DR. FRANKENSTEIN!

Based on the lauded literary terror penned by the late Robert Walton and brought to public light by M. Wulfstan, The Legend of Frankenstein.

The Apollo Crest Opera House presents the most harrowing take on the mad doctor and his marvel of creation to date.

Featuring up-to-date theatrical effects and the most stunning visuals ever seen on the stage, this is a show to whiten the locks and deliver endless shocks.

Come to GASP, to WEEP, to SWOON, and above all, ladies and gentlemen, to PONDER the century-old query beneath the fear in this tale of a creature crafted from the dead and the proud madman who dragged it into the world!

When the passerby corrects you, claiming the scientist is Frankenstein rather than the monster, remember to ask in turn:

WAS FRANKENSTEIN NOT THE MONSTER?

The Inferno of Erichtho

While Dyson’s was one of many heads turned by the events surrounding the housefire of Dr. Richard Geber, he was one of few interested parties who arranged a stay in Surrey’s countryside to ogle the site in person. The other who rode with him was, stunningly, Ambrose, one of his oldest friends and the staunchest recluse he had ever known. Dyson had suggested they try to wheedle Cotgrave, Phillips, and Salisbury all together for a full holiday, if only half in jest.

But where eager Cotgrave was anchored by familial obligations, Phillips and Salisbury were merely hesitant in matters of the uncanny. In truth, the latter pair had positively gawped at him. Their eyes asked wordlessly if the stamp of inhuman horror had magically been blotted out of his memory or if he’d simply abandoned sense altogether. Dyson laughed at the looks, especially Salisbury’s. He of the straight-lined life and the wincing insistence that Dyson keep all answers to himself when it came to the mystery of Dr. Black and the query of Q, only to come slinking curiously back with questions upon seeing Dyson’s haggard mien post-discovery.

As if reading the memory in him, Salisbury’s face flamed and turned away while Dyson continued, “My friends, I would no sooner part with the haunting of those experiences than a writer of penny horrors would relinquish the muse of his nightmares. Ambrose here will rightly call it perverse with you—he is the adept where I am the amateur—but he knows the worth of retaining the proofs of what he calls ‘sin’ and we politely deem merely the ‘weird’ or the ‘supernatural.’ Cotgrave, dear fellow, you at least have an open mind on the subject. If we can manage it, would you appreciate a souvenir of the strange ash for your desk?”

“Cotgrave,” Phillips had cut in with an aridity to dry the ocean, “has not been put into contact with anything more harrowing than some poor child’s grotesque diary. He and I,” he’d nodded to Salisbury who was muffling himself with the wineglass, “had the dubious fortune to play witness to the far end of your direct jabbing at the unknown, neither of which bore anything but blighted fruit. The sight of that miserable treasure hunter’s golden relic was more than enough for me. Salisbury, for his trouble, had enough poisonous proof poured in his ear as thirdhand storytelling to make him rightly uneasy, followed by wondering whether you had been struck by some ailment after prying too far.” He’d turned fully to Salisbury. “Has Dyson ever breathed a word of what it was that shocked that new white up his temple after chasing the scrap of a cipher and Dr. Black’s work?”

It was Dyson’s turn to look away. He had not told Salisbury about Travers’ shop. Certainly not about the opal and what it held. Nor would he ever. He knew even the most sublime prose would fail to do the spectacle or its horror justice. Salisbury would suffer for it, as most of his friends would, and so he burned his tongue with holding the story in. For the most part.

He’d broken enough to recite the event to Ambrose in tragically plain terms. Ambrose had nodded, recorded his statement in one of many journals kept for the purpose of notes and scrapbooking, and shelved it away with the rest of the flotsam that clogged the bookcases which stood in for his walls. The recluse gave his oath not to breathe a word of the case’s final act to another.

“At least not until you are too dead to speak on your own behalf,” Ambrose had added. Dyson found the terms satisfactory.

Yet the fact of his having an encounter so disturbing he’d not even shared it with his most sober of friends still managed to work against his invitation to the strange scene in Surrey. Even Cotgrave shook his head.

“No need of the ash, my friend. I will settle for a description of whatever you dredge up in those hills.” Dyson noted the sickish pallor that washed over him as he pronounced the last word. Phillips shifted uncomfortably in his own seat. Salisbury ran out of wine to nurse and set his glass aside.

“I will be curious of whatever account you bring back,” came his intonation, “if only to know whether you are treading on more tangible toes than some unseen wraith’s.” Salisbury had canted his gaze sharply at Dyson. “No, you have not told me what it was you did upon following the trail of breadcrumbs I mistakenly revealed to you. But I would be a fool not to assume you went and did something unwise regarding the business of those strangers in the note. Q and friends and whoever else. They are real people. Just as Dr. Steven Black was. Just as Phillips and the whole of London recalls the late Sir Thomas Vivian being quite real, and more immediately dangerous than any bogeyman lurking beyond our respective brushes with the so-called supernatural.”

“Sinful,” Ambrose corrected over the rim of his own glass.

“Indeed,” Salisbury sighed. Dyson did feel a trifle apologetic toward the man. He seemed to have aged a decade since he’d stepped back into his life. “But be they supernatural or sinful or just plain mad, human monsters are the more prolific villain of the world, and far easier to cross paths with. Dr. Richard Geber was a man of considerable notoriety with, I would wager, any number of watchful vultures in the branches of the family tree and as many serpents playing patron to his less savory works at the roots.” He’d leaned in, regarding Dyson and Ambrose in the same plea. “Do your sightseeing if you must, but be wary of what prying you do whilst playing occult detectives. A man seeing a nuisance is far more likely to take action against it than any monster.”

Dyson sadly lost his opportunity to assure Salisbury and the rest of his planned caution, as Salisbury had used the word ‘occult’ and set off a fresh avalanche from Ambrose. Talk plunged into proper distinctions of the extraordinary and the eerie, somehow managing to trip into a round of storytelling that marched through the suicide epidemic of certain well-off young men who he theorized had each encountered the same unearthly stimulus whose knowledge could not be lived with, around to an ugly room in a rented country house with a habit of seeding a mirrored insanity in wives and daughters who spent too long in the sight of its irregular damask walls, and all the way to the facts in the case of the pseudonymous M. Valdemar, that mesmeric scandal that might not have been half so sensationalized as cynics might declare…

Salisbury had put his head in his hands while Dyson, Cotgrave, and Phillips settled in for the monologue, feeding the orator only what flints of dialogue were needed to roll him further on. Were he onstage, Ambrose would have deserved a lozenge, a bouquet, and ten minutes’ applause.

That was then.

In the now, Dyson and Ambrose sat in their car, preemptively swaddled against the first drifting motes of snow. November seemed only to have warmth enough left with which to give Geber’s estate its theatrical sendoff with its roiling thunderheads and dancing lightning. With that performance done, the sky handed its reins off to winter’s sedate styling. The train drew itself along under a ceiling of gauze and into the broad country whose rumpled hills and evergreen treetops were already hiding themselves in caps of cold white. Not that such seasonal flurries would have been any more help to the roasted manor than the downpour of the incendiary night had been.

Dyson riffled out the sections of newsprint he had brought along for the trip.

Headlines bellowed across the earliest of them:

STORM-STRUCK IN SURREY!

SPARKS FLY OVER GEBER’S BLAZE!

BLINDING FIRE DEVOURS MANOR OVERNIGHT!

And so forth.

The sum of these pieces was a remarkable series of witness reports from the staff who’d escaped the building before they could burn with it. Miraculously, every member of staff had made it out with barely a scorch mark between them. Even the horses, hens, and hounds of the estate were unscathed. It was only Dr. Geber and, the staff declared, a number of colleagues who had remained inside. Corroboration from the nearest towns confirmed that Geber was indeed housing several ‘learned gentlemen’ under his expansive roof for the purpose of some private experiment being undertaken in his home laboratory.

All that saved the staff from especially sharp scrutiny was the likewise-confirmed evidence of just where that laboratory was located.

“Geber had it all built underground,” claimed more than one servant. “He up and abandoned the one he kept at the top of the house half a decade back. Had a whole little nest of catacombs hollowed out lower than the cellar, moved in all sorts of equipment and chemicals and such. We saw it all go through the big double doors he had set in the back of the house. Figured him and his fellows would come up by that way or the little stairwell indoors. Whoever wasn’t eaten up by the blast, at least.”

The blast which had not come from the heavens by way of the frantic lightning that night, but from right under the floorboards. One poor girl, Elsa Godwin, had gone down to fetch a jar of preserves and been the first to hear a series of what sounded like detonations rattling up from the ground. A distant crackle, a hair-prickling hum, a string of boom-boom-boom, all muffled by earth and concrete. That, and men screaming. There was barely time to hear as much before she also got to play first witness to the memorable fire; a blaze that begun at once to eat holes through the floor and western wall of the cellar.

“I thought I was dreaming at first,” to quote Miss Godwin. “It all felt too impossible to be happening while I was awake. The fire only made it seem less real. Real fire isn’t supposed to work that way, you see? Real fire, it meets a solid wall of dirt or rock and that’s as far as it goes. Singes it, maybe, but it can’t just go burning through everything like it’s a paper dollhouse. But that was just what it did. While it was eating its way up the stairs to the doctors’ laboratory, it punched on through to the cellar. And even that I may have accepted as real enough, but for the look of it.”

The look of that fire was described by her, by her coworkers, by those who rode up to gawk in person or make a feeble attempt at playing fire brigade, and even by a number of technical witnesses who could see the glimmer of it from their far-off windows, all in varying states of poetry or dumbstruck curtness.

The fire had not been orange.

The fire had been black. And white. And yellow. And red. All of these at once, every flame throwing its improbable light as if it fell through some nebulous crystal. Its palette might have been more enchanting if it weren’t for the fact that it was, as Miss Godwin and many more would claim, a fantastically voracious thing. So much so that Miss Godwin had scarcely made it back up the steps to shout the alarm before tongues of fire were poking up through the floor.

It truly was a miracle that everyone aboveground had fled in time. The second miracle had come from the fact that, even lightning-struck as the roof was, it remained mercifully solid while the multihued fire ate up the lower floors. So solid that Fate kindly used it as the hand to snuff the monstrous blaze. The walls turned out to be so quickly enfeebled by their change to ash that they could no longer support the heavy slants and shingles. So the roof had crushed the creeping flames under its lid, dousing the fire with sheer speed, weight, and luck. It was as unlikely a thing as a man crushing a viper’s head flat with his fist before it could bite.

Another bittersweet bout of good fortune came from the positioning of the laboratory itself. Whatever state the subterranean workings had been in post-explosion, they apparently made for an efficient ashpit. When the roof slammed down, it compacted everything below directly into the waiting pocket of hollowed earth. What could have been a conflagration was tucked tidily away almost as soon as the proverbial match was struck. Though it had doubtlessly come at the cause and cost of the very men who had sparked the fire with some experiment gone awry.

“Some manner of chemical flame, a catastrophic bungling of electrical tinkering, or both,” professed numerous experts hunted down in their own labs and campuses. Dyson imagined they were perhaps a bit put out that Geber had done them the simultaneous mercy and unspoken insult of not inviting them to join whatever it was he and his colleagues had been dabbling with. An experiment of such secrecy and apparent potency that the man had not only tunneled out a buried laboratory for it, not only erected new stone walls and double-locked iron gates around his home, not only scoured fields across the scientific spectrum to people its undertaking—for chemists, engineers, technologists, surgeons, and sundry in-betweens were numbered among the missing and/or immolated dead—but even hired on a number of ‘attendants’ that the surviving staff recalled as having staggering guardsman physiques.

All this to keep the experiment hermetically sealed and shielded.

All this, only for a number of ears at the nearest pubs and markets to catch wind of the thing’s name anyway: Project Erichtho.

A secret experiment named for the necromancing witch of legend could only be yet another spur to the public imagination, turning a noteworthy housefire into a potential hellish horror story. Requisite headlines included:

FRANKENSTEIN’S ACOLYTE, ERICHTHO’S ECHO—DR. GEBER’S UNHOLY HEROES!

PROJECT ERICHTHO’S PARANORMAL PYRE!

SORDID SECRETS AND A DOCTOR’S DEADLY DESIGN: THE KINDLING FOR THE INFERNO OF ERICHTHO?

“It could be he’s gone on to join his heroes in a sordid afterlife,” some would say in tones that alternately scorned or cooed. “Faustus and Frankenstein may have a place waiting for him in a deeper inferno. It’s the sort of thing one gets from prying too far into Nature’s business, after all.”

So on and so on. Dyson had clipped everything of interest and strung the whole thing into a sort of haphazard file in contrast to Ambrose’s tidier pasting. Ambrose was even polite enough to feign renewed interest in the piecemeal newsprint despite the information being doubtlessly memorized already.

“Not memorized,” Ambrose said over a headline declaring Geber had conjured the Devil in his cellar. He opened his coat as if displaying illicit wares, flashing the holster where he kept a waiting notepad and pen. His was an especially tailored overcoat with a number of buttoned and hidden pockets for all his necessities. One might think he hardly needed his luggage but for a change of clothes. “My cheats are simply copied out and kept close like a good pupil’s before an exam.” He patted the lapel back in place. “I am not a man made to leave his cave often, Dyson. Therefore I must wrap myself as much in my mobile cave as I can.”

“Would that not make it your shell?”

“I suppose it would. It is a difficult thing for a snail or tortoise to be robbed of his home. Unless the thief is some errant bird after the homeowner, of course. But for all that I have my faiths and proofs in the uncanny, your Salisbury was right. Men are the most common threat to a man. They rob one of goods and life at a moment’s notice far more than any aberration.”

“Ah, that begs a question I’ve meant to ask.” Dyson waved his helping of papers as a baton. “You know the reality of seemingly unreal things. What you call your sinful, wrong, not-meant-to-be sort of phenomena and entities. Were you to find yourself cornered in the proverbial dark alley with an ordinary mortal cutthroat at one end and an unearthly bogeyman at the other, which villain would you risk?”

Ambrose offered a sliver of a smile and turned his attention back to the snow flitting by the window. He passed his helping of newsprint back blindly.

“You have only listened to my rambles with half an ear,” he said. “It’s true that what you would dub the supernatural I would call sinful, but I have yet to declare such things innately villainous. Otherworldly, yes. Eldritch is a decent term. Unwelcome too, at least in what we deem sane and right by the laws of Nature or our manmade structures. Or, to satisfy the macabre itch, yes, I would deem the whole breadth of it horrific. And yet, for all that we have assembled a fair collection of events that ended in death or worse as a result of crossing bizarre influences—indeed, enough to condemn many in, say, the demoniac terms of evil—the fact remains that even a living horror is not guaranteed to be villainous. To that end, let us look at your scenario. If I knew for a fact the ordinary man at one end of my alley intended absolutely to kill me, knife ready for my throat whether or not I handed over my money, whereas the horror at the other end was a complete enigma? I would simply have no choice but to remain still.”

Dyson lost himself to a laugh and crowed, “That is no answer! The scenario was a choice. Who do you risk pushing past? The common murderer or the uncommon enigma?”

“The threat,” Ambrose pronounced carefully, “of a horror is in the uncertainty of what it is and what such a thing is capable of. The cutthroat means to kill me, yes. But the horror? It may mean to end me as well, but in a far more hideous way. In fact, it may intend to inflict something far more unthinkable than the mercy of mere execution, such that the cutthroat would be a blessing of euthanasia by comparison.”

“Ah,” Dyson jabbed his paper baton again, “so you would take the cutthroat for the certainty of him.”

“No. I would remain still.”

“Ambrose—,”

But Ambrose held up his hand.

“I would remain still until one or the other proved himself the lesser evil. For the horror at the other end of the alley may have no ill design whatsoever. Being frightening does not immediately qualify the monster in question as a villain. After all, how many legendary monsters of old have we revealed as mere animals? How many unfortunate souls are there in the world, born with off-putting ailments or disfigured by circumstance, who possess the purest of Good Samaritan character? By the same measure, how many are there with the faces of Venus and Adonis who scatter only petty cruelties in their wake? Even creatures as humble as the common spider will terrorize some of the hardiest men as much or more than their wives. Yet the spider is there to help, tidying flying pests from the home just as the pretty housecat unsheathes her teeth and claws only to bloody her keeper’s hand.

“In short, a horror will horrify, naturally. A horror is capable of far worse things than any human effort. But a horror is not inherently a villain. I am happy to keep things in the hypothetical until I am faced with the awful choice in person, but should I choose to wait, to remain still and force one or the other to make his move, I am certain the motives of the inhuman party would be made clear. It would strike, or retreat, or…”

“Or what?”

“Or it would do as the first horrors of Creation did and be as an angel. Fallen or otherwise.” The topic clipped there as the station came into view.

Fighting the frost and the numb-faced arrival at their rented lodgings sponged up the rest of the day’s energy between the two of them. A hasty dusk and a heavy supper knocked both men back in their chairs and soon the ruddy comforts of the inn dragged them down into an early night.

Ambrose, Dyson was unsurprised to see, had turned into an insomniac so far from his preferred den. He was at the window puffing at the little ember in the clay bowl and staring out at the dark when Dyson finally surrendered to his bed midnight. Come morning, Dyson found he remained at his perch, puffing still.

“I did sleep,” Ambrose assured before the other could speak. “On and off. My dry eyes played traitor and made me lose watch for a few hours at a time.”

Dyson stilled in the effort of lacing his boots. He saw that the faint pouches that had been under his friend’s eyes last night had only deepened. The ashtray set on the windowsill was full.

“Geber’s housefire notwithstanding, I can’t imagine there’s anything worth spying on in these parts. Especially not on a moonless night.”

“It wasn’t moonless,” Ambrose said as he rubbed crust from either eye. His head gradually creaked away from the window to face Dyson. “I saw it come out in cracked clouds here and there. It helped somewhat, but I could still make out a little of the show either way.”

“What show was that?”

“I’m not certain. Some kind of domestic dispute? It involved either a very mad or a very sad individual on a rooftop.”

“What?”

“He got down alright. A giant came to gather him up and bring him indoors.”

“…How much did you have to drink after I went to bed?”

“Not a drop. The whole of it took place with that little house out toward the east there. You see?” Dyson followed where Ambrose pointed. There were numerous petite houses sprinkled along the crest of a far cluster of hills. He was about to point out the issue when his gaze caught on one that stood out from its siblings. Ambrose defined it at the same time, “It has its fresh cap of snow all ruined by their footprints. The man’s little pinpricks and the giant’s awl marks, so to speak. It happened that as I was woolgathering, a yellow light came on in the upper window. The shape of a man blotted it for a moment before the window swung open and the fellow climbed out.

“It wasn’t a pleasant sight even at a distance. He didn’t move like any climber I ever saw. More like,” Ambrose made a face, “I don’t know. An animal? An insect? Something like that. Whatever he was, he made it up there. So I assumed by how the darkness erased him when he skittered up. The first crack in the clouds helped me here, for it dropped a yellow beam on the house and showed the man standing on the very top of the roof. This he did while wearing no more than a pair of trousers and a coat that hung on him like drapes. A lone stick figure balanced on the ridge. Then a moment later, the giant came.”

“Not bounding over the hills, I take it?”

“No. He blocked the entirety of the lit window before he contorted himself out and climbed up after the man. His motion was a far more fluid thing, if likewise strange in how he placed his limbs. Were my eyes a little poorer, I might have mistaken him for some massive panther scaling a mountainside. But he was human enough seen from my seat. Just outlandish in his size and proportions. A hulking figure, yet corded and angled in a way you seldom see with men we might take for a contemporary Goliath.”

“I see. And what happened when he reached David?”

“The moon ducked out of sight for the first moment. It took a minute before it peeked through again to offer a silhouette of the meeting. Man and giant were facing each other with the giant seeming the most animated of the two. He gesticulated first with frantic violence, then as if he were beckoning the man like a stray from a gutter, and ultimately coaxed his frailer counterpart to extend a twig of an arm. The giant clamped onto it and seemed prepared to yank the man from his perch. But the man pointed with his free hand at the moon. This made the giant pause. The boulder of a head turned up. They stared together at the great ivory ball. But sense eventually overruled wonder and the giant maneuvered them both back in the window. The curtains were drawn. I figured that was the end of it.”

Dyson had by now fully dressed and packed for the day. He paused to raise a brow.

“Was it not?”

“No. Some while later, a light glowed in a lower window. David and Goliath walked outside. At least I assume it was David with Goliath. The spindly figure was erased in a massive clot of coats and blankets, it seemed, and so almost passed for a full-bodied individual. The giant shadowed him and forced a cup on him that I imagined must be steaming as it rose and fell from the man’s face. The moon was polite enough to show itself a few more times through the filmier clouds. Even the stars made some appearances. By dawn much of the clouds had broken up so that they skimmed across a half-clean sky. I saw the Morning Star hover in the horizon. The man pointed to this or the molten sunrise. The giant nodded and looked with him, patient as anything. Then David was herded back inside and I saw no more.”

Dyson hummed at all this and eyed the little house again. It really was a fair space away.

“Are you certain you saw a man and a giant? At this distance could it not have been some fevered child and his father?”

“If I were using my eyes alone, I might concede the possibility. Except.” Dyson watched him dig in his coat and produce a collapsed spyglass. “I have brought the full accoutrement of the hermit along, my friend. Its details were few, but far crisper than our sight alone.” A specter of mingled thrill and discomfort twitched along his lips. The former won just enough to pin the mouth up at one corner. “Though I wonder if that was a mistake.”

“Afraid they spied your spying? The threadbare David sounds like a stargazer. Perhaps he swung his lens around to find you in the dark.” Dyson spoke only to rib him. Instead he seemed to strike Ambrose like a lead weight. A greyish tinge passed in and out of his face as his gaze flicked back to the window. “Come now, there was no light on in here. Even if the pair had an astronomer’s lens between them, they’d never know you’d spotted their nocturnal theatre.”

“They had no lens at all,” Ambrose said. His lips still held in the unhappy upward curl. “Yet they did turn to look at this window. David first. Then Goliath. I cannot say whether they saw me, but…” Ambrose rolled the spyglass in his hand before replacing it in its pocket. “I saw a hint of their faces. Just the eyes. I may have imagined it. Some illusion of moonlight or sunrise. But the illusion was very crisp.”

“The illusion being what?”

“They were yellow, Dyson,” he almost chuckled. “Like the stare of animals caught in firelight. Bright as the lamps. And they did not turn from their staring in this direction until after I set the spyglass down.” Ambrose looked up at him. The whites of the man’s own eyes had gone rose-pink. “We’ve not yet set foot on Geber’s ash pile and already I have something for my notes.”

“Perhaps,” Dyson nodded carefully. “Perhaps you do. Or else a late night played on your conscience and sharpened your subjects into things that could chide you at a distance for spying. I have no such conscience on that subject and so might have missed their flashing eyes. Still, it is something for the diary. But only after breakfast.”

Dead, Buried

Breakfast came, breakfast went. Ambrose’s state barely loosened from its troubled knot. By the time they set out to poke around the week-old ruin under a dusting of snow, Dyson noted only a half-return to the man’s usual ease. He thought to remind him of the unhappy adventure involving the cruelly departed Agnes Black, to commiserate over the difference between the aftermath of the strange compared to meeting eyes with it, but swallowed it all down. Such talk would only rip up the scab, not plaster it.

In this mood, they took their way to the housefire’s wreckage with thin conversation. It only thickened again as the coach let them out at the site’s gates. They had been locked over again by the authorities and yesterday’s powder had made the surprisingly tidy mound and its rooftop cap into an anonymous lump of debris. Hardly worth the trip. But the sight of the ruin was only a fraction of their purpose there.

Dyson instructed the coachman to return in an hour to the same spot to retrieve them. The coachman eyed the two warily. He’d no doubt seen more than his fair helping of journalists and policemen in the past seven days than any soul ought to deal with. But pay was pay and he seemed content to reappear in roughly an hour’s time, sirs, give or take another customer’s route. Dyson and Ambrose waited until the horse-drawn speck was almost out of sight before they began their march around the the high stone wall that passed for the ex-manor’s fence. Their breath trailed after them in white streams.

“He really had the place made up like a fortress, didn’t he?” Dyson observed. “Look here. Even the ornaments along the top are like spires. No one could go hopping in or out without undoing the seams of his skin in the attempt.”

“Project Erichtho was a thing to covet as much as conjure.” Ambrose dug again in his coat, this time bringing out his notepad. He thumbed to one close-scribbled page. “Do you know, this manor was his for less than a decade? He took the place seven years ago and left behind a far more metropolitan estate. A handsome spot, but not half so private or titanic as this.” Ambrose knocked his knuckles against the stonework.

Dyson knocked his shoulder in turn, “I see you go a-haunting places other than your home while our backs are turned. You are a fraud of a recluse.”

“On special occasions, yes.”

“And the timeline of Geber’s road to the freakish blaze meets your standards.”

“Very much so. You see, he had his career in the city, for all its lauded highs and scandalous lows. And his one trip out of that area was also his first and last trip out of the country. I was told he took a holiday up to Switzerland.”

“Told by who?”

“Former staff. All the ones in the manor were local hands. The original workers say he returned home from his holiday with a wild new passion—,” Ambrose paused to catch Dyson’s eye, “—and a souvenir. One that they never saw removed from its massive box. The nearest guess anyone could make was that it must be one of those majestic Swiss clocks or perhaps some statue bought on a whim. None would it put it past him to purchase a likeness of his spiritual muse, or maybe a rendering of the latter’s infamous creation. But no one ever saw the contents in person. He had this thing moved into his upstairs laboratory, locked the door, and neither butler nor maid was permitted to set foot in the room for the rest of the year.”

“Mysterious enough,” Dyson agreed while shaking a snow clump off his boot. “Though I can hardly picture Switzerland as possessing any equivalent to Pandora’s Box.”

“Nor could the staff. But they never did wring an answer from Geber. No more than they ever confirmed what all his latest experiments were in that locked room. Whatever they were, the staff thought there must have been some noise to muffle. Geber started playing his phonograph whenever he set foot inside, letting the opera warble over whatever din went on in his work.” Ambrose tucked the notepad away and tugged at his glove. “When it came time for his sudden exodus to the far-off manor, the movers discovered the box was nailed shut again, offering no one even a parting peek at the treasure.”

“And what is the import of this crate, exactly?” Dyson asked, even as he guessed. It was hard to avoid, keeping his steps aligned with Ambrose’s as they circled to the rear of the estate. The trees loomed with their snowy crowns sawing against the blue-white sky. They were close to where the acreage sloped into woodlands.

“None of the new staff mentioned its arrival or its being toted down with the rest of Project Erichtho’s flotsam. In fairness, the interviewed parties likely had far more on their minds than the exact nature of their employer’s bric-a-brac. Especially when the project appears to have begun in earnest four years ago.”

“But,” Dyson intercepted, “the staff in the city dwelling remembered his fixation with the thing seven years prior. And if the manor’s fresher workers could remember that his other scientific oddments were loaded underground, surely they’d recall him fussing about the box.”

“Such is my guess,” nodded Ambrose. He stopped them both short as the exact back end of the stone wall came into view. “Geber likely would’ve clung like a shadow to the movers whether they brought it by the inner stairs or through the back entry. Yet there was no mention of it in their accounts. Almost as if he couldn’t bear to have more eyes upon it than absolutely necessary. And, naturally, there is the issue no other paper or ponderer has mentioned regarding the novelty of a subterranean workplace.” Here, at last, Ambrose began to grin. “One that even the miner or a digger of catacombs needn’t bother themselves over.”

“Because the men in the mines and catacombs don’t have to work within a hermetic seal,” Dyson concluded, beaming back. “They have a way constantly open to the air. The staff claim that the entryways into the laboratory were always shut and guarded by a boredly vigilant set of guards. A tricky area to provide ventilation for with no opening. Unless there was a third threshold somewhere that Geber neglected to mention to the house staff. Say,” he waved a glove at the waiting woods, “hidden in some convenient cover of wilderness.”

“It’s where I would hide a second backdoor in his position,” Ambrose agreed as he ogled the rear of the stone wall and the adjacent trees. “If the back of the manor was here,” he marched with measured steps to the back gate, likewise locked, and regarded the ashes beyond the iron, “then the broader outdoor entrance was likely slotted there with it. A tunnel connected to the underground work area would not be situated far off. So…” He turned and traced an invisible line from the ashes to the woods and away to the west. “A straight route from here on is likely to bear fruit.”

“Would it not be simpler to circle around?” Dyson asked this of the waiting trees as much as his friend. “If Geber’s precious crate was also moved in by this hidden corridor, surely it would be someplace near the edge of this tangled patch. It’s no narrow copse, but I’d rather amble around it rather than risk the trudge inside.”

“Normally I would agree. However.” Ambrose stomped purposefully along the slope, leaving clear tracks as he went. “If we want better odds against our own amateur detective work being spied on, we must take advantage of what little cover we can. Salisbury would tell you so.”

“Salisbury would be down with a skull-cracking headache over the prospect from any angle,” Dyson countered. But they went through the woods just the same. The snow had come in lightly through the coniferous canopy and it traded their softer snow-plush tracks for a brittle thudding along frozen earth. A quarter of an hour’s search and a number of brambles later they came upon a clearing cluttered with large stones. Dyson felt Ambrose bristle at his side. Not from the cold.

He had read the precious and painful little green book Ambrose regarded as one of his truest treasures. The book that contained the child-ramblings of a lost girl, of strange white figures, of stones carved and twisting with ancient unholy influence. Mercifully, the mystique was soon spoiled.

The clearing had let in a little more of the snow through the gap in the canopy and when the powder was brushed aside it revealed nothing but moss and bird droppings on every rock. Another glance showed a number of stunted logs also strewn about. A makeshift sitting area. Ambrose took a spot on one of the logs and set to picking burrs from his trousers. Dyson thought he looked a little ruddier for having seen the rocks were plain.

“Well, convenience dictates that a secret entrance would be around here.” He pointed to what would be a few minutes’ walk to where the open light of a meadow waited. “Any closer to the edge and it wouldn’t be hidden at all.”

“True, true,” Ambrose nodded, removing his hat to shake off the frost and pine needles. “But even if we were on top of the thing, there’d be the second trouble of spotting it while it’s disguised. There was likely one or more guards on duty. On the off-chance that some wanderer came by they’d need to have some way to mask the opening.”

Dyson thought as much too and had been scrutinizing the ground. He’d found a good stick to claw up the dirt with. So far, no convenient trapdoor presented itself. As he prodded, he caught himself mulling over the hypothetical guards themselves. Surely they couldn’t have been caught in the blaze. Even if they’d been struck by a heroic urge, there wouldn’t have been time to rush to the manor and attempt a rescue. Yet he recalled no interview with any such person in the aftermath of the pyre, only those domestic staff who minded the house itself. So where had they gone?

The answer was hidden under a rock.

Specifically, the largest of the rocks in the clearing. Dyson’s stick came to a stop in its shadow as the branch suddenly dipped an inch into the ground where he’d dragged it. The snowfall masked it, but not well enough.

“Ambrose.” He patted the broad rock. “This stone isn’t supposed to be here.”

“What?”

“Look here.” He dragged his stick back and forth over the hidden groove beneath the powder. “It was moved out of place.”

Dyson and Ambrose eyed this only a moment before taking position on the stone’s opposite side. Together, after many a shove and as many curses, the rock budged. Not all at once, but in bursts. Between lurches they agreed that it had to have been put in place by far stouter strongmen than themselves. Their thoughts broke away at the same time when their next push dropped a leg from each of them down into the earth. There was much floundering and flopping aside to save themselves from slipping entirely into the hollow. When they’d recovered themselves, they peered down into the new opening. A wisp of daylight revealed hints of the interior. Shards of wood. The angles of a short staircase. And there, laying at the foot of the steps—

“Oh,” Dyson breathed. “Oh, God.”

“I fear He isn’t involved here,” Ambrose murmured back.

They lurched the stone the rest of the way, moving with caution until the entire hole was revealed. A square of earth had been cut away for the tunnel’s mouth. A set of heavy mangled hinges showed where a crude but sturdy door had been bolted into place. The door itself was the source of the wood shards, the largest of them showing they’d had a covering of dirt, leaves, twigs, and pebbles all pasted on to mask it. To judge by the frame, the door was meant to be pulled up rather than pushed in. As the stone was flat on the bottom, it could only be surmised that someone had smashed the timber in rather than bother with the lock.

Perhaps that was why the guards had died. They hadn’t been quick enough to offer a key.

Two men of powerful build were left crumpled at the bottom of the steps like ragdolls. One had his head wrenched entirely around on his shoulders. The other had his head crushed in like an eggshell. Whoever had done the work, they’d also seen fit to strip the broken-necked man of all but his underclothes, even down to his shoes. The man with the pulped skull had lost only a coat.

“I believe this is where our investigative ghost story hits a snag,” Dyson said, if only because someone needed to speak. The words did little to settle the chill now twining up his back. “We need to have the police up here.”

“We will,” Ambrose said, digging in his coat. Out came his matches. “But first.” He struck a light. “Recall that we are not here in search of ghosts. Ghosts are vapor. Their only weight is given to them by the storytelling.” He flicked the match into the tunnel so that it soared over the corpses. Dyson followed its glow with wide eyes. “Whereas the party responsible here exists with or without fireside theatre.” Dyson was already inclined to believe him. The sight revealed by the match merely forged faith into knowledge.

On the night of the fire there had been a positive torrent to go with the thunder and lightning. Once the guards and door were brutalized out of commission and left broken on the tunnel steps, a river of mud had dribbled in after the intruder. In the carpet of now-dried muck were smeared remnants of footprints. Most were colossal and led two ways, going forward and back. Whoever had made them was large enough to dwarf the dead men. A second set of footprints tramped back with these first massive soles, the barefoot steps looking far closer to human dimensions.

Beyond these smeared prints and just out of reach of the match’s light was the outline of a wide cart.

“Spare another?” Ambrose passed Dyson the matches. Dyson descended and made a rush to the cart. A match struck and showed the contents was discarded linen tarps all mottled with stains dark as rust. In the very center of the rumpled sheets, pointing to him, was a single rotten human finger.

The match went out.

Dyson raced back up to the daylit earth and rattled off the find to Ambrose.

“It does line up. An experiment named after Erichtho could hardly earn the title without doing something unwholesome with corpses.” Ambrose inclined his head at the tunnel. “It’s certainly not the kind of material Geber would want the house staff spying on its way down to the lab.”

“I wonder about that.” Dyson righted himself and squinted up at the sun behind a veil of new clouds. “Who’s to say that the finger was already rotten when it lost its owner? Surely the towns would have something in the news about graverobbers pillaging their cemeteries for convenient goods.”

“True.” The word was small. Dyson looked to Ambrose as the man paused in jotting something in his notes. His gaze was suddenly very far, hooked on some unknown point in the trees. “Quite true. After all,” he slowly closed the notepad and tucked it away with gloves that trembled, “it’s only worthy of newsprint if the dead go missing. The living disappear every day.” Dyson watch his throat work strangely behind his scarf. His breath came in very brisk puffs. “Such is hardly worth a blink these days. What’s the time, Dyson?” Dyson checked his watch. They’d eaten up most of an hour and he said so. “Then we’d best head down to meet our coach. Now.”

“Should we replace the stone? What if some animal gets in and—,”

Ambrose seized his shoulder. His head still hadn’t turned away from the trees. His voice came out so low there was almost no breath to whiten.

“Dyson. Now. Quick, but—but do not run.” His Adam’s apple seemed about to leap up through his mouth. “Now.” Dyson tried to follow Ambrose’s line of sight, but his friend was already dragging him like an errant sheep. Rather than take their original route, Ambrose shepherded them towards the nearest edge of the woodlands, out to the open snow.

“What happened to discretion?” Dyson asked in his own low pitch. Ambrose shook his head without fully taking his gaze away from the abruptly-fascinating patch of trees.

“We’ll be bringing authorities around here anyway. It hardly matters. Go. Just go. Once we get out in the open, we should—,” Behind them, a heavy branch snapped. To Dyson’s ears it sounded loud as breaking bone. Ambrose’s clutching hand became a vise. “Run.”

They did.

The gloom behind them snapped and rustled in a straight line after their heels. More, the ground itself twitched with the bounding of some unthinkable weight. Dyson thought ludicrously of bears or lions somehow migrating their way to this mild crumb of Surrey’s landscape. Yet he heard no animal snarl. Only the unimpeded breaking of the trees’ quiet as something titanic loped after its quarries.

Ambrose and Dyson broke out into the open meadow after a minute that felt like half an hour. They raced across the slope and around toward the fenced-in ruin of the manor at a frantic pace. Relief barely flickered in them as they saw the coach trotting up to the front gates. Their own tread was too wild to register if their pursuer was still galloping after them, but Dyson now felt the presence of eyes on him as surely as he’d feel the trundling of beetles along his neck.

The dead men flashed in his mind. Twisted and mashed and tossed in a pit. There was plenty of room to spare down there. New tenants welcome. And the coachman was so far, so far—

He stepped on one of his own bootlaces and went sprawling. When he moved to catch himself on his hands, his palm landed on something slicker than the snow, fumbling him so that he landed with elbow and cheek in the frost. It really was a pitiful layer of powder, he noted as his arm and face throbbed against the stiff ground. Ambrose skidded to a halt with him, almost falling as he scrambled on the frost. He might have shouted Dyson’s name. Dyson couldn’t be sure as he was peeling up the thing his hand had slid with. A leatherbound book with its cover lacquered in congealed mud.

“Dyson,” he heard Ambrose puff again. His breath was labored, but no longer a shout. “Dyson, can you stand?” Dyson looked up to see Ambrose’s attention was split between him and the trees. Nothing else was behind them. Dyson fixed his laces and regained his feet without releasing the book. “I think we can go at an easier pace now.”

“Yes. Possibly.”

Their new gait was not a sprint, but still a fair way ahead of anything leisurely. The driver looked at them oddly as they jogged over, at least until they gave him pay and directions for a trip to the nearest police station. Then his caterpillar brows shot up.

“Come across some trouble up there?”

“The human trouble has been and gone,” Dyson told him. “But they may want hunting rifles at hand for whatever creatures are roaming around in there.” The driver snorted at that.

“What creatures are those? Worst we’ve got in these parts are the damned foxes and a few snakes. Biggest thing I’ve seen was a buck that ran around last year. Had antlers two men wide.”

“It was no deer,” Ambrose assured him even as he craned his head again to face the trees. Dyson saw him fondling the part of his coat that held the spyglass. “In any case, it is a matter that would be helped by having a marksman ready.” The driver got no more from them as Dyson and Ambrose bundled themselves inside the coach. Ambrose hastily fumbled out the spyglass and watched the woods through his window until the treetops were out of sight.

“Not a deer, you say,” Dyson spoke as much to his mud-crusted souvenir as to the back of Ambrose’s head. “What then? I had no time to catch a glimpse.” Ambrose let out a breath as he collapsed the spyglass, fidgeting with the cylinder rather than tucking it away.

“Speaking frankly, I didn’t either. All I could spot in the gloom was the flash of bright eyes.” His throat twitched. “A gleam of yellow.” Dyson paused in his picking at the shell of hardened mud.

“Last night’s Goliath?”

“I don’t know. I cannot say with certainty whether the eyes belonged to a human shape or a creature on its haunches. Only that it was still as a statue in the gloom back there. Staring at us.” Ambrose shivered either from memory or cold and tucked the spyglass away in favor of his notes. He sketched rather than wrote. Scrawled across a clean page was the impression of two huge coins floating in a scribbled ink-shadow. The eyes featured pupils of a distinctly non-human make. “I am no artist, but this is roughly the look I caught watching us. They turned in the dark when we started for the trees’ edge. Then the eyes came forward.” He clapped the notes shut. “I found I was far more eager to be out of reach than to wait and see the eyes’ owner.” Ambrose gave him a tired smile. “I feel I’m halfway to a hypocrite after this. True, there was no alley and no waiting cutthroat, but I did run from the unknown when it came running.”

“Nonsense,” Dyson huffed. “Those eyes no doubt belonged to some exotic beast that escaped its pen in a zoo or some fool’s private menagerie. Nice open country like this is just the place you’ll find people with deep coffers and shallow sense hoarding pretty predators as though they were collecting pedigree hounds and cats. You wait, we’ll see something in the papers about somebody’s missing leopard or tiger prowling around the hills. Now, if that beast had cleared its throat in the dark and shouted at us in plain English to get out of its woods, there might be grounds to point and go a-ha! But as it had nothing to say and neither of us was polite enough to stand still and get mauled, the matter remains unsettled. Say, have you got a handkerchief you don’t mind ruining?”

Ambrose handed him one, his face finally regaining some tint as he puzzled over Dyson’s prize.

“It would be an opportune thing to be in a ghost story,” he sighed while Dyson scraped at the mud. “If we are, that will turn out to be a conveniently abandoned diary illustrating every move Geber made leading up to the fire, replete with his devilish experiments and all the lost spirits it conjured up. At the very least it will contain the chemical formula that led to such a unique blaze.”

Dyson scoured away most of the muck and frowned.

“Not a diary. Not even a tome of unholy scripture.”

“No?”

Dyson held the book up for him to see. Ambrose frowned back at him.

“No.”

The book was a leatherbound copy of The Legend of Frankenstein. What had been a luxurious volume had apparently been mangled by elements, animals, or else someone with a distinct loathing of the tale. Dyson had wondered at the lightness of the book and found that much of the pages were either shredded or torn out entirely. The inner cover alone had been spared attack, though it still boasted a minor bit of vandalism within:

There are not words enough to voice proper gratitude to the Muse, the Master, the Miracle. For lifetimes to come, even the finest poets of the world shall struggle to meet the task. Here and now, the most that can be said is thank you. Thank you for all that you have done, all that you are, all that is yet to come. A toast to the teachings of Prometheus, to Prima Materia, to the Magnum Opus realized!

—R.G.

Below this, a single line:

Mortui vivos docent.

“The dead teach the living. Interesting choice of postscript.”

“That isn’t all of it.” Ambrose took back the handkerchief and chipped further at a smear of muck still gripping the cover. It crumbled away to show words that had been stained into the board with a different pen. Almost carved.

Prometheus had nothing to teach. He stole the lightning for Man’s fire. The only worthwhile lesson of his myth was taught by the Eagle.

Erichtho might have had teachings to spare. The gods were wise enough to harken to her and know to quail. Yet mortal men care only for the dead’s secrets and the boons they might grant. These you will have. May the knowledge serve you as well as it has me.

No initial or signature was jotted with it, though some rough symbol was gouged below. A thing that curved and went straight at once, vaguely serpentine and somehow unpleasant in both its shape and the depth of its coarse engraving. As though the artist had been both incapable of finesse and insistent on carving the image regardless. Dyson and Ambrose each had a good squint at it and decided it was something related to a caduceus, the sign of medicine.

“The alchemic variant seems just as likely, if we’re to chase Geber’s words to their logical end,” Ambrose said in a tone that heartened as much as frustrated Dyson to hear. It meant the man’s nerves were settling, but also that his mind was now wandering down avenues several leagues away from the present, no doubt combing an internal library of references. Dyson flattered himself to know that he too had some scraps of intel to turn over. He recognized the Magnum Opus as referring to a ‘Great Work’ just as prima materia was a term for a sort of primal matter from which life and the universe was meant to be concocted. But no more than that. He’d need to dust off some old books or wait for Ambrose’s own ramble before he could scrounge up any deeper details.

As it turned out, Ambrose had sealed himself up in his head for the moment.

A moment which lasted long enough to get within talking distance of the police. They described the tunnel and what was in it. There was scarcely time to stretch their legs before they were riding along with the uniformed men, each thankfully armed. Sunset was almost racing them to the horizon by the time they trudged back to the clearing with lanterns in hand. Both men froze upon discovering it. When asked why:

“We didn’t leave it like this,” Dyson heard himself croak.

“How so?”

“The stone. We left it pushed aside when we left. The tunnel was still uncovered.”

Now the boulder was planted right back where it had been.

A hasty examination was made for tell-tale shoe prints, to little avail. New snow was fluttering down and filling things in with an accomplice’s speed. Giving it up, the group of them carefully shouldered the rock aside. Their caution’s reward was a column of acrid smoke that wafted up and plugged every unfortunate nose in reach. The last embers of a fire were dying down inside the tunnel.

The two corpses were roasted. The cart was a cinder. The tunnel’s floor had been glazed with oil and set alight until the whole bottom of the chute was a long black stream at least halfway to the underground entry point of the manor. Investigation to that farthest end revealed a pair of melted metal doors with burst windows. Beyond them there was only packed-in ash.

Dyson made no more mention of his hypothetical escaped animal.

Ambrose was not only silent about the Goliath seen from the window, but went so far as to draw his curtains before bed.

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