#and i end up dissociating the whole time. having a really bad time

[dickggansey]

i wish my best friend would understand that what helps them feel better doesn't necessarily helps me the same way. i wish they wouldn't keep pushing me to do things that aren't helpful for me. bc i know they just want to help me, i know they're being kind bc they care about me. but we just work differently, but i don't wanna dismiss their help :/

[our-inspire-verse]

Just keeps going round and round eh?

[heartpascal]

the world is brighter

▹— joel miller x platonic!f!reader

▹— summary: joel is trying to be someone he’s not.

▹— a/n: so this is meant to be the reluctant daughter fic…. and it didn’t turn out exactly the way i planned :( not sure that i like it at all honestly, but i wanna put smth out for y’all and this is 13K words that i cba to rewrite so… love you.

▹— warnings: references to suicide attempt, familial loss, previous good relationship with (assumed) biological dad, blood, so much blood, murder (you kill someone), fighting, i think you could class this as dissociation/blackouts but i’m not sure (pls tell me if it’s something different), fighting, canon-typical violence, angst — please tell me if there’s more, ive been trying to keep up to date but i’ve written this fic over so many days. be mindful, this one might be kinda heavy.

▹— tags: @auggiesolovey @just-kaylaa @evyiione @lemonlaides @fariylixie0915 @erensloveinterest @dazedshoon @faceache111 @randomhoex @canpillowscry @sleepygraves @pedropascalsrealgf @star-wars-lover @coolchick333 @soobsdior @ilybbg @rvjaa @oliest19xx @pedropepsi @sunflowersdrop @truthfuleeyours (if you’ve been tagged it’s because you requested to be on my general taglist! if you want your tag removed, drop me a message! <3)

masterlist

howl’s song associations!

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Living in Boston QZ hadn’t been your idea. No — you never would have chosen the so-called safety of the walls, which were only filled with bad people and worse authority, but you had been left with no other choice.

Pronounced an orphan on your way to the QZ, you didn’t know what else to do. With nobody to guide you or advise you, you had gone ahead with the original plan, walking the final twenty-something miles alone, in some sort of absent state.

The journey was a blur, and so was the arrival, you only really remember seeing the green flash of the cordyceps tester, reminding you of all you had lost. Every time you closed your eyes after that, the shade of green haunted you.

They had put you up in a FEDRA school, and so you began your training to become an officer. You hated it, hated the FEDRA organisation as a whole, and hated being in Boston when the person who had wanted to be there didn’t make it.

You tried not to make a habit of sneaking out after the first time, but you couldn’t help yourself. Most days, you were so exhausted from your nightly adventures through the QZ that you got everybody into doing more drills. Not many people were a big fan of you, but that was the way you preferred it.

You liked being alone, really. Enjoyed the silence that echoed through your room, the absence of other people letting you simmer in your own feelings. Your father had always reprimanded you for wallowing in your own self-pity, but he was no longer around to do such a thing. So, you wallowed.

Between climbing out of your bedroom window, jumping across rooftops to reach a particular apartment building with an actual view outside of the wall, you spent your time disconnected from the hellscape you lived in. Everything felt so far away, so out of touch, and the only moments you blinked back to reality, you were dripping in blood. Down your face, your hands, so much of it that you didn’t know where it started or ended. Or if it was your own.

Everything coming back into focus at once was dizzying enough, and sometimes that feeling was so closely related to blood loss that you had been sure somebody must’ve stabbed you, must’ve finally managed to get past your survival instincts, must’ve brought you to your end, at last.

But then you’d wake up, blood dried, no sign of the looming figure of death in front of you. There was only one occasion where the blood must’ve been mostly your own, and that was a broken nose. You pretended not to be disappointed, each and every time. Despite everything you had done to survive, everything you still do, there was a darker part of you that hated yourself for it. That blamed you.

It was one of those times yet again, where one moment you swore you were paying attention in your FEDRA classroom, and the next you blinked, eyes opening to the sight of bloodied hands in front of you.

It was everywhere, you would swear on it, underneath your fingernails, between each digit on your hand, even dripping down your wrist. It was warm and clung to your skin, even when you wiped your hands against the jeans on your legs. You blinked again, finally moving your eyes away from your sticky hands, and you gulped down a lump in your throat at the sight in front of you.

You recognised the man — a snarky guard at FEDRA, one who always had it out for you. You could see a slither of the face that always glared over at you underneath all of the red blood.

It didn’t take much realising to know that you wouldn’t get away with this thing, that this would be something that killed you. If they found out, if, then you were dead.

You needed to know, had to be sure, if this was going to be the final thing, your final action, if you had actually killed a FEDRA guard. But despite that, despite knowing that you didn’t have another option than to look if his chest was rising and falling, you couldn’t draw your eyes in the direction. Even when you tried, your chin fell to your chest, eyes back on the hands that were cradling one another in your lap, feeling far too heavy for your arms.

With the sharp way your breath was coming into your chest, you were starting to realise that your hearing hadn’t returned with your sight, and you jumped when the realisation brought it back, a rush of sound hitting you all at once.

The distant sound of gunfire, the whirring of a generator nearby, the sound of your own hyperventilating breaths, it all echoed too loudly, far too much going on for you to comprehend it all. So much so that you missed the footsteps heading your way, missed the sound of crunching stone as somebody else stepped foot on the rooftop.

A hand against your shoulder had you rearing around, fists drawn back and pushing forward until they hit the person, hard, and the hand was immediately withdrawn. You continued forward, eyes blinking closed in a flinch as the hand grabbed your wrists, holding tight until you stopped trying to pull them away.

“Jesus Christ— Tess, get on out here!” The voice belonging to the person holding on to you yelled out, about as loudly as he dared, and you bared your teeth with clenched fists at the woman who pulled herself up from the fire escape on the apartment building.

“Jesus,” She echoed, looking between you and the FEDRA agent with raised eyebrows, a slight grimace, marring her features. She looked over at the man who was grasping your wrists in a bruising grip with a questioning gaze. “What the fuck went on here?”

“Get your fucking hands off of me!” You spat out, tugging your arms, trying to get out of the man’s grip as you grit your teeth, your mind still reeling with everything that was going on.

He stared sternly at you, “You gonna calm down?” When you responded with a more than angered nod, he nodded, releasing your wrists and stepping away, leaning to look at the FEDRA guard still lay at your side. He kicked the guy in the side, and there was no hint of a reaction. “Dead.” He told the woman, Tess, with an odd look on his face.

“Well, shit, kid.” Tess sighed, hands on her hips as she looked at the situation before her. She shook her head with a tut, and approached to have a look at the guard herself. “What happened?”

You just continued baring your teeth, metaphorical hackles raised high, and Tess just responded with a blank look on her face, a dismissive purse to her lips as she moved her gaze over to the man.

He tilted his head, looking between you and the body, “Could’ve been anyone.” He suggested to Tess, rocking his head from side to side in something like deliberation. You stared hard at the two of them, confusion still buzzing through your head.

“Could’ve been.” She agreed.

They shared a look, communicating between only their eyes, and they had no reaction to the way your hands clenched, your head snapping between them. You didn’t know what had happened, couldn’t understand what was going on, and you had no idea who these people were. It really didn't provide any reassurance, and your eyebrows lowered over your eyes, a glare prominent on your features as Tess huffed.

“C’mon, kid.” The man said to you, offering a hand to help you up from the ground. When you stared at him, that glare on your face, he raised his eyebrows in annoyance. “It’s either you come with us, or you’re found here with him and hung. Your choice.” He told you, hand still offered out, and you grit your teeth as you took it, letting him pull you to your feet, and steady you when you stumbled, everything feeling a bit too real.

You focused on where you were going, rather than who was leading you there, as the two of them took you down the fire escape, hurrying you into an open window on the second flight down from the top. You didn’t take any notice of the bloody handprint Tess wiped away after you had managed to get yourself through the gap, instead looking for the doors.

“You can calm down, kid, we ain’t gonna hurt you.” Tess said, sounding snarky as she moved past you to their kitchen, where she helped herself to a glass of illegal alcohol. You raised your eyebrows, knowing that wasn’t a FEDRA-supplied bottle.

You huffed, watching the man look around the area before he shut the window, flicking the lock into place. “Can never be too careful.” You murmured in response.

“Ain’t that the truth.” Tess said, somewhat amused. “I mean if anybody here’s showed some aggression, that’d be you. Gonna tell us what went on up there?” She asked between careful sips from her glass, measured, or maybe, savouring sips.

At her question, your eyebrows furrowed once more, and you pulled your bloodied hands close to your chest, jaw clenched.

“No?” She asked, leaning forward with an expectant expression, and she opened her mouth to ask some more questions, say something else, but the man cut her off.

“Tess,” He warned, eyebrows raised, “Take it easy.” He glanced back to you, to the hands you held close to yourself, and frowned. With a nod of his head, clearly expecting you to follow, he headed down the hallway. You looked at Tess, hesitantly following the man as she nodded with an exasperated scoff.

He opened a door, revealing their bathroom, which had certainly seen better days. You wouldn’t exactly cheer for the bathrooms at FEDRA school, but jesus — at least it was better than what the general public got. “Head on in, clean yourself up. Don’t want anybody seein’ that on you.”

With some reluctance, you kept a hostile expression plastered on your face as you stepped into the bathroom, flicking on the tap in the sink and running your hands under it. Up until that point, you had remained ignorant to the way the blood clung to your skin, sticky and not quite cold, but now there was the opportunity to be rid of it, you became desperate.

The water helped, slightly, but not fast enough for your liking, resorting to the scraping of your dull nails against the drying blood, up until flakes of red started to melt away, colouring the water as it drained.

Their mirror was broken, and you couldn’t have been more glad. You were sure that if it had been there when you glanced up, if you had to look yourself in the face, you would be sick. You didn’t want to face the fact that all of this was real. You had just killed a FEDRA guard.

“Alright, that’s enough of that, now.” The man said, reaching into the sink and pulling your hands away from the stream of water when you ignored him. He shut the tap off, staring at you with that same strange expression, only glancing away to grab the towel that hung over the door. You took it, drying your hands hastily before you shoved it back towards him.

You were shoving past him before he could get another word out, barely even able to grab the towel as you passed it back. He blinked, a frown forming a deeper crease than usual between his brows.

“Listen, I—I really need to get back. Curfew is going to be over soon, I think.” You fumbled around the words, hurrying down the hallway you came from and spinning around in the room to try and reorient yourself. You finally saw the door you believed to be the exit, and headed towards it.

“Well, hold up,” Tess said, frowning and reaching out to you, stepping back with a slight scoff when you moved away from the reaching arms. “Daylight’s gonna break any second, you’d be better off waiting for curfew to be over with. And,” She added, tilting her head at you with a stern look, “You still haven’t told us what went on. We’re covering your ass, right now. If anything goes to shit it’ll be us keeping you safe. You realise that?”

You did realise something — and that was the kind of people you were dealing with. You’d heard from them, and not from the FEDRA teachers, but from other trainees, other students.

When the world went up in flames, FEDRA had been the first to seize onto power, and they held on to the pretence that they had never let go. But the world was still burning, and the people had begun rioting, and there was another opportunity for a power-grab. It was people like this who had taken that opportunity, who had made something of themselves in a world on fire.

You knew then that the way she had likely gotten that bottle of alcohol was through her own network. She was a manipulator, clearly, a blackmailer. She used the resources she had, and she definitely made the most of them. She wasn’t bluffing.

“So, what? I don’t tell you and you sell me out?” You ask, despite knowing the answer. Part of you wants to hear her say it, though, wants to hear the admission of being a bad person. Then again, maybe she was the good guy, you thought, after remembering the blurry image of that guard, lay still on the roof above where you stood.

Tess tilted her head, “Pretty much.”

“Well, fine. Be my guest. As much as I would love to comply with your blackmail, I couldn’t tell you. Don’t have a fucking clue what happened up there. I’d say try asking him, but…” You snarked in response, another bare of your teeth, another raising of your hackles. Tess was looking more frustrated by the moment, if the slight twitch of the skin of her brows said anything. She held herself together pretty well. If it weren’t for the stark difference between times like now and the times of blacked out memories, blurred images, you likely wouldn’t have even noticed. But it was like everything was so clear when you actually looked, and you noticed details that most people wouldn’t.

“Joel,” Tess sighed out, and even the cadence of her voice revealed the annoyance that was growing within her. “Help me out, here?” She asked, because despite every front that the man put up, he was still better with kids than she was. There was something about him, an authority, she wondered, that just made people fess up.

You looked over to the man, to Joel, to see his eyes looking at you with more recognition by the second, a pull to the frown on his lips that suggested he knew something that you didn’t. You weren’t a fan of the look.

He gritted his teeth at the whole situation, his chest aching with familiarity. Joel knew, probably better than anyone, that look in your eye. “I believe her,” Joel answered Tess, hesitantly, rolling his eyes when the two of you immediately looked at him with dumbfounded expressions. “Look, Tess is right. You’re better off sticking ‘round here ‘til curfew drops.” He told you then, his voice gruff as he leaned to look out of the window, seeing the light outside growing brighter each passing minute.

You huffed, but crossed your arms in defeat, shoulders slouching where you stood.

“But remember, you owe us.” Tess said scathingly, a crease running along her forehead before she turned away, heading down the hallway. She pretended that she didn’t hear the way you scoffed at her words.

You and Joel stood opposite each other, the room tense. He cleared his throat, uncrossing his arms so the two of you didn’t mirror each other quite so accurately, and he turned to grab his own glass of booze. “So, uh, you go to school? FEDRA?” He asked, talking over the sound of liquid being poured into his glass.

“Yeah.” You responded lamely, tapping a foot against the floorboards of their apartment, avoiding looking at the man.

“You know the guy, then?” He questioned, eyebrows raised as he turned back around to look at you.

The look you gave him was scathing, but you gritted your teeth and responded anyway, seeing no other choice. “I guess. Gives me— gave me a hard time for dumb things. Don’t know what happened last night, before you ask.” You said, correcting your words to the past tense, and your chest felt hauntingly empty, despite what you had done.

Joel shrugged at you, “Wasn’t goin’ to.” He responded, mouth set in a thin line before he took a long sip from his drink. “Get some rest, kid. Got an hour or so, yet.” He told you, seeing your exhaustion before you had even felt it, apparently.

You blinked at him, surprised. The idea was tempting, you could admit, but it didn’t feel like a good idea to go to sleep around two strangers. At any moment, they could have a change of heart. It was best to stay on guard, to be ready to run at a moment’s notice. That was the way you always played these type of things, and it worked out.

He drained his glass, shrugging at you when you didn’t move to head towards the sofa he had vaguely gestured at, and said, “Suit yourself.” Before he walked down the hallway, following Tess.

You waited there for more than a few minutes, so still, making sure you didn’t make a sound, waiting to hear when one of them would come back to keep an eye on you. You had never felt more confused when they didn’t.

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Ever since then, the world seemed to blur around you even more. And despite getting out in the hold at school after getting caught trying to sneak back in, it didn’t deter you, and they didn’t seem to suspect you of anything. You had heard the whispers about the dead FEDRA guard, though.

You tried not to listen.

Instead, you spent even more of your time sneaking out, but allowed that haze to fall over you with even less of a fight each time you went out. It was easier, that way, to let the world fall away and leave you with memories smudged in blood, that you certainly didn’t remember acquiring. Nothing in them was clear, and the cycle of waking up covered in blood didn’t stop.

More often than not, though, it was beginning to be your own blood. Apparently, your hazed self had become terrible at picking the battles you fought, and you’d blinked back to reality more than once when sparring at school, the jolt of pain when somebody caught an injury bringing you back faster than anything else had.

When you blinked back into reality this time, however, it was with warm blood dripping down your face, a hand gripping onto your head and keeping it upright when it began to fall to one side. You didn’t expect to see a familiar face, that was for sure.

“Joel?” You asked, incredulous, your voice slurred as you spoke through blood in your teeth.

“Well, she’s alive.” He said, not to you, barely even acknowledging your questioning tone as he glanced behind him to somebody you couldn’t see. Tess, presumably. “What have you gotten yourself into this time, kid?” He grumbled, voice gruff as he looked over your head for injuries, a grimace on his face at the amount of blood dripping down your temple.

His hand left your head a moment later, and you just about caught the weight of it before your chin could hit your chest, leaning back and settling the crown of your head against what felt like a brick wall.

A hand against your shoulder caught your attention when your eyes had been drifting closed, without you knowing they had even begun to do so, and you blinked them back open. “Jesus, how many times are we gonna have to save your ass?” Tess asked rhetorically, a grimace that matched Joel’s on her face as she looked at the state of you.

“‘M fine.” You grumbled, moving to try and push her hand away but only pulling your hand back with a hiss at the sudden throbbing pain that bloomed in your fingers.

Tess smiled sarcastically, “Yeah, sure you are. Those are broken, by the way.” She said, nodding down to the fingers on your hand which were bloodied and bruised, swollen and now so painful you had to grind your teeth together. Your knuckles were split, and you looked around, seeing no sign of a body, but you couldn’t help wondering what the other guy must look like.

You didn’t say anything else to her, just focusing on keeping your eyes open and attempting to remember whatever had happened to lead you to such a state. Nothing came up.

Even when Joel lifted your arm, hand gripping your wrist tightly as he pulled your elbow around his neck until he was holding most of your weight. He stumbled slightly when you did, and let out a gruff comment about you handling some of your own weight.

You did your best, but he ended up practically carrying you all the way back to their apartment, which was a couple of blocks. You vaguely wondered how they had even come across you, but figured you were in no place to ask questions.

“Remember what happened this time?” Tess asked, opening the door to their shared apartment so Joel could pull you through it, his arms straining to keep you upright. It was a much harder task when you were conscious but barely in control of your own limbs. He had thought about carrying you, but decided that was much too strange.

You shook your head, but realised she was facing away from you, and you hoped Joel hadn’t noticed your mistake. “Not a fucking clue.” You slurred out, tongue feeling heavy in your mouth as it tried to spell out the words.

Joel huffed out a breath through his nose as he set you down against their couch, his shoulders slouching as he finally relaxed his muscles, feeling a distant ache in his arm from being so tensed. He went down the hallway a second later, disappearing from your view.

“You are one lucky kid.” Tess drawled, the scene so familiar to the first time you met the two of them, as she held a glass of alcohol loosely in her hand. Distantly, you wondered if they had a glass every day, and if that meant they had shitloads of the stuff stored away somewhere, but decided you probably shouldn’t be thinking about it.

You scoffed, brows furrowed in aggravation despite the fact they had probably saved your lives. “Yeah, lucky. Sure.” You said, likely the clearest you had been able to speak since you’d woken up. Or become aware. You weren’t really sure which was more accurate.

Tess smiled, a sarcastic one that was full of humour and annoyance, “Oh, you don’t think so? Should we think about what could’ve happened if somebody else had found you there?” She asked, eyebrows raised, and you grit your teeth to stay silent.

You, better than anyone, knew what could’ve happened. You knew what people in this QZ — hell, in this world, — were capable of. So maybe you were lucky that Joel and Tess had found you, considering that they hadn’t ratted you in to FEDRA just yet, but you knew that the one thing this world would never generate is trust. They could be just as bad, or worse, as anyone else who might have discovered you there, bloody, injured, and completely unaware.

After all, you were at their apartment, with no idea why.

“She knows, Tess,” Joel grumbled, reappearing from the hallway and looking just as unhappy as ever. He sighed, drawn out and heavier than you had expected, and held up a wet cloth. “Come on, kid, get yourself cleaned up.” He handed it over to you, and ushered Tess to follow him back down the hallway, where they spoke in harshly whispered voices.

You wiped the side of your face, getting rid of the sticky blood that was coming from the side of your head. It was kind of difficult to do with no mirror, but you wiped as much of it off as you could get to before you stopped, breathing through the pain in your head, your fingers, the left side of your chest. You grimaced as you tried to wipe blood away from your split knuckles, your broken fingers. It hurt, and it was too real of a pain.

You paused when you heard Tess’s voice raise, “She’s going to get us caught, or killed, Joel!” She said, before her tone lowered once more, further discussion happening between them. You wondered what they could be talking about — they held no obligation to pick you up off of the streets. They didn’t owe you anything. As far as you were concerned, you didn’t owe them anything, either. Everything they had done was of their own volition, meaning you hadn’t forced them into anything.

For whatever reason, they felt the need to help you. You couldn’t pretend to understand it, but you did know that this couch was much more comfortable than the stones of whatever street you had been lay on were.

Joel came down the hall soon enough, a crease between his brows, and he grunted when he saw the poor job you had done of cleaning yourself up. “Get to the bathroom, kid. We’ll patch you up there.”

“Why?” You asked, before you could help yourself. They didn’t need to be doing this, so why were they? Tess was right, you were only a danger to whatever operation they had going on, so why?

“It’s either that or you carry on bleeding out on our couch.” Tess called out, rustling through something as soon as she emerged from the hallway, busying herself in drawers and cupboards.

You figured it’d be in your best interest to not bleed out on their couch.

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Weirdly, it was the fourth time you ran into Joel and Tess that everything seemed to fall into place. Except this time, it was you doing just that, running into them. Or more accurately, him.

You had hit against shoulders in your fast pace, sending various people tumbling backwards or stepping out of your path. Helpful for you, yes, but also helpful for the group chasing you. You tried not to look back, but the footsteps chasing you were growing louder and you had to know how close they were.

One look over your shoulder led to you colliding with somebody, and you cursed as it sent you spilling to the floor at their side. With a scathing glare on your face, your heart going a mile a minute, you looked up to see none other than Joel fucking Miller.

“You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me.” Joel murmured, eyes wide as he looked to where you had fallen after running into him. The alarm in your eyes made him move to face where you were looking, and there were three of Robert’s goons. He noticed, quickly, the knife that one of them was holding.

Without a second thought, he stepped between you and the group approaching, his hands clenching into fists as he grit his teeth. He wasn’t good at negotiating, at talking — that was more of Tess’s side of the deal. If it came to it, though, he could take on these fools. And he could play it off as if he was defending himself from the knife they were carrying, if need be.

They sputtered to a stop in front of him, a wary look exchanged between the two men, as the woman behind glared daggers at him. “Come on, Miller, move outta the way.” The man holding the knife said, tilting his head to one side as if that was going to make Joel listen to his directions.

Joel’s eyebrows set lower on his face as he looked back to you, with your wide eyes, and the way you scrambled up to stand just behind him. He huffed, a tired sigh leaving him, and turned back to the goons.

“Not happening.”

The three of them scoffed, incredulous, and the woman stepped forward with a sneer on her face. “What? You some kinda saviour now, Miller? Gonna start defending all the helpless little girls?” She said, voice venomous, but she stepped back when Joel went to move forward.

You, however, were not having that.

“Helpless?” You questioned, a scathing heat burning its way down your throat, “I’d like to see you go and ask your boss how helpless I am.”

Joel’s hand blocking your path stopped you from stepping towards the woman, your teeth bared at her, but you remained behind the man. You may not like listening to him, but he seemed to know what he was doing far more than you did.

“You bitch,” The final man said, no weapon held in his hand, but there was something dark about him that even Joel could see. Joel pushed against you, putting you further behind him as the man stepped forward. “When I—”

Joel’s eyes darkened considerably, and he knew from the expressions on the group’s faces that they had seen his face harden. “When you what?” He asked, looking down at the group before him, something violent in his words, as if daring the man to finish his sentence, to say something that Joel didn’t like, to give him the excuse.

“Can’t you just mind your own goddamn business, Miller?” The one with the knife asked, his lips drawn back in what was almost a snarl as he tried to catch a good look at you from around Joel’s shoulder.

“This is my goddamn business. Now run yourselves back to Robert before this gets out of hand.” Joel said, the threat in his words clear despite him having said nothing particularly violent. It was explicit in his tone, apparently. His gruff words were somewhat of a comfort to you, though, a slight relief that you could stop running, for now. You were also hoping that this meant your messed up shoulder would be your only injury of the day.

“Are you having a fucking laugh?” The woman asked, incredulous, as she stared at where Joel stood tall in front of you.

“Do I look like I’m laughing?” Joel asked, being met with nothing but deadly silence. You peeked around his arm to see the three of them looking like fools in front of him, their cocky, entitled attitudes falling apart under the weight of his words. The three of them shared a glance, gritted teeth and angered glares, and looked to Joel with a more than annoyed expression.

The man with no weapon caught sight of you looking around Joel, and pointed his hand at you, “Just you fucking wait.” He threatened, putting his hand down when Joel’s shoulders straightened, his legs moving to take a step towards the man, who quickly backed away alongside his two companions. They left without another word, throwing angry looks over their shoulders until they disappeared out of sight, at which point Joel turned to you.

“How is it that I always find myself savin’ your ass?” Joel asked, mostly to himself, as he looked at where you stood, a hand holding your other and close to your chest. He sighed, heavily, “You hurt?”

“I’ve been worse.” You admitted, though Joel knew better than anyone. He could see on your face that the swelling from around your black eye hadn’t long faded to almost normal, he could see the stitched cut along the back of your forearm, could see the way you winced as you attempted to shrug, give up halfway.

Joel nodded, studying you for a moment, his eyes drawn to the way your clothes had been ripped after your fall to the ground. He frowned. It was getting colder as the days went on, and he was already sceptical about the lack of layers you wore. He huffed out another sigh, a frown pinched between his eyebrows, and looked back down the street to ensure the goons hadn’t decided to come back. When the coast was clear, he turned back to you where you stood almost nervously, and he realised this was the first time he had seen you out during the day time. Every other time he had discovered you it had been the midst of the night.

“C’mon, let’s get back.” He murmured, keeping the mean look on his face in case anybody else came after you. For once, you didn’t say anything, just following along at Joel’s side, wincing every time you moved your arm.

“I remember what happened this time,” You offered, when the two of you finally reached Joel and Tess’s shared apartment, with you taking your seat on their couch with a half-repressed sigh. Your feet were aching, and your shoulder was killing, but at least you could rest here for a while.

Joel looked up from his rummaging at that, surprised by not only what you said, but the fact that you had said it at all. Each time, one of them prompted you for information, and you never remembered. Or you weren’t willing to share the small details you did recall. It was strange for you to offer such information to him. “Yeah?” He prompted absently, continuing to look through drawers after his slight pause.

“Yeah,” You answered as you raised an eyebrow at his actions, wondering what he could be searching for. Before you could lose your nerve, you continued, “Got into some stupid business with some guy called Robert, and then he tried to rip me off. I got kicked outta school trying to get what he needed, too.” You scoffed as you spoke, paying less attention to Joel’s reaction and focusing more on your annoyance at the whole situation. “I just… got angry, started hittin’ the guy. Then ran away, and they started chasing me.”

“What were you goin’ into business with him for?” Joel asked after you had finished, his eyebrows creased together. Robert had a way of getting to old world stuff, but everyone knew he was dodgy. Often times, it was double-sold, or broken. He was a scammer, and that was coming from Joel, who had upped prices to ridiculous amounts on the shit he and Tess smuggled in, per her order, of course.

You huffed, “I dunno, just wanted something. Doesn’t matter, anyway. He didn’t have it.”

“Well, you tell me what it is and I’ll see what I can do.” Joel offered, unsure as to why. He hated himself for doing this, for letting you in, for feeling some inexplicable reason to help you each time you were hurt. He couldn’t understand it. Perhaps, he could say you reminded him of someone who’s name he refused to speak, but that wasn’t right. You shared very few similarities with her, in fact, Joel would argue that you looked more like him. That lost look in your eyes, the blurred vision you saw through when he found you covered in blood, the memories lost to bloodshed… it was like looking in a mirror.

He felt some sort of responsibility towards you — as if helping you could heal his own wounds. Joel figured he should’ve known by now that something like that would never work.

Perhaps, he just wished that someone could’ve pulled him out of that state, when he was in it. He couldn’t say your reasons for being like this, hell, it could just be a product of the apocalyptic world you lived in, but he figured that one day, you’d grow to be like him. And god, he was hoping that you could avoid it. So if him helping you could do that, could steer your path away from seeing him in your reflection, he’d do it.

“I said it didn’t matter.” You responded, snappily. Clearly whatever you had been after was personal, held close to your chest. He couldn’t blame you for not wanting to reveal it.

Joel said nothing for a moment, but looked at you from where he stood across the room. “You got kicked outta school?” He asked, instead of pressing the subject. He saw a weight lift off of your shoulder at the change in topic.

“Yeah, got caught sneaking out too many times. Said I must have some place else to go, and that I’m old enough to know what the fuck I’m doing.” You said, rolling your eyes at the memory. You weren’t all too bothered about it. Learning about the world through a government’s perception wasn’t all that mind blowing, and you hated drills. You didn’t want to be a FEDRA soldier. So, in reality, it was quite the gift.

You had to think that way, too stubborn to remember how your father had always talked about you going to those kind of schools, about you getting an education that was more than him just pointing out words and teaching you basic math. He had never quite understood that you learned more from him than you would from anybody else.

Joel’s eyebrows pinched, a look that was almost concern shining through his eyes. “You’re just a kid.” He said, having no reaction to the way you glared at him.

“I can take care of myself.” You told him, firmly, trying your best not to think about how many times he and Tess had pulled you out of shit, likely saving your life. It didn’t matter. At the end of the day, all you had was yourself.

“Where are you staying?” He asked, eyebrows raised at you, as if he was proving his point by asking it, especially when you didn’t answer immediately. All orphans went to FEDRA school, until they were old enough to get sent to a position as a guard or they were kicked back out to the street. He knew you weren’t old enough to be put in that position just yet. After all, FEDRA didn’t allocate housing to people of your age.

You looked to your hand in your lap, picking at the blood still stuck underneath your nails. “Not important.”

“No?” Joel asked, just a hint away from mockingly. You furrowed your brows at him, a frown pulling at your lips in defence.

“No.” You answered.

∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘

You think now, that you would have never been in this situation if you hadn’t accepted Joel’s insistence that you stay with him and Tess. It had gotten to a point of normalcy, something so close to domestic that it had you sneaking out of their apartment, up the fire escape back to the roof where it all began to unravel, all those nights ago.

The stain of blood on the ground is still there, and you had been staring at it long enough that you were starting to miss where it began and ended. You still couldn’t pull the memories from that night from your skull, and you were starting to think they weren’t in there at all.

It had all led you to here, to where you sat, legs swinging over the edge of the air-conditioning unit on the roof of the building. Or at least, that’s what Joel told you these things were. You frowned at the memory.

You hated the way you had let all of this happen, had let yourself get closer to the people who seemed to always be there. They were more present in your life than any other figure, even before you moved in with them. It had seemed as if you only woke up from your haze when they pulled you out of it. You couldn’t begin to understand why, and honestly, you didn’t really want to.

All you knew was that this was exhausting. You had been present for the longest time you could remember since before your father had… well, since before everything changed. And it was all because there was a ball of anxiety in your chest, hammering loudly within the beat of your heart.

Maybe it was selfish, or foolish, maybe it was both, to feel so dejected over something that should be good. But it was all feeling too familial for your liking, and it was like a constant waiting game, constantly wondering when the other shoe would drop. There had to be some sort of catch, something would surely go wrong, because life with Joel and Tess was becoming too comfortable. You should’ve been happy for it. Perhaps any other kid your age would have been, but all you could think of was the time before Boston.

Images of a house, a father who cared about you, who bought you paints and brushes even when that would have been better spent on new boots for himself. You could remember the way the sole had been peeling away when you had last seen him, remember the way he had yelled at you, begged you to leave him behind.

Sure, you had listened, had walked away from him slumped against the wall of a decrepit convenience store, but you had never truly left him behind. All the times you had spent in Boston, in a subconscious state, there had been no more memories. Before Tess and Joel, the most vivid thing you could recall was your dad.

If you closed your eyes, shut out the image of the blood staining concrete, and focused hard enough, you could hear his laugh. Reluctant laughter was something you had often drawn out of him, because he found the only joy he had left in the world within you. But there was always that nagging worry, at the very back of his mind, reminding him that things weren’t okay.

Hell, the whole reason he had insisted upon leaving the house where you had spent most of your life was because he believed you would be safer in Boston, in a QZ rather than a small community with not enough firepower to cope with any hordes.

He’d been a firm man, with a furrow between his brows that you could now see in Joel’s face, and you hated it. Your dad had given up everything for you. Why were you seeing similarities between him and Joel?

“Come on, it’s time to get going!” Tess called to you, dragging you from where you were trying to conjure up an image of your dad that wasn’t his last moments. You huffed, pushing off of the air conditioning unit, and headed down the fire escape, taking your backpack from Tess where she held it out to you.

It hadn’t been your choice to go along with Joel and Tess, more of an order, given that they didn’t want to leave you alone at their apartment. They were running low on ration cards, not enough for you to survive alone, especially if anything went wrong. That was the whole purpose of their trip, they had told you, to get something they could trade for more cards. The two of them hadn’t explained to you the radio and music catalogue that sat in their apartment, but you had figured out that it must’ve been some sort of communication system. If you were going to go off of the way Joel’s head had snapped up when some song you didn’t recognise came on.

The three of you were setting off the next day, so it must’ve meant something to them.

Joel had said something about you being in for some kind of treat, assuring you that the trip would be worth it, despite the way you remained unconvinced. You didn't want to leave the QZ again, but part of you, that stupid childish part, was curious.

So you followed them.

You were quiet most of the trip, despite Joel trying to encourage conversation with you, a crease of concern to his face the more checked out you became.

In your own defence, you seemed to be on guard well enough when you retreated to that state where it wasn’t really you, and the whole trip was too familiar. If you didn’t focus hard enough on your surroundings, you would wake up and be with your father again, or you’d lack attention and hear that gunshot as you walked away.

It was easier this way. Safer.

You also didn’t expect for Joel or Tess to notice anything different, but then you were blinking back into reality some time later, though you couldn’t tell how much. Joel’s face was in front of your own, his eyebrows furrowed, expression angrier than you had seen it in a while.

Looking around the area, over Joel’s shoulder, you saw a burning building some ways behind him, and your eyebrows raised in surprise. “What happened there?” You asked, your throat sore as you said it, your chest aching, and you were more confused than anything else at the sensation.

“What were you thinking?” Joel seethed, seemingly becoming angrier at your question, and you tried not to pay the emotion any mind. You looked around again, squinting your eyes and catching sight of Tess stood before the building, her gun raised to the doorway as if expecting something to come out of the blaze. “Huh?” He questioned, drawing your attention back.

“What are you talking about?” You asked, getting more confused by the second. You looked down to where your fingers were apparently covered in soot, and slowly connected that with the burning building across the way. “Wait, did I—”

“You can’t check out like that! You’re gonna get yourself killed.” Joel said, and you felt his hand squeeze your shoulder far more gently than the way he was speaking. He seemed… frantic, almost. You frowned, because nobody had ever really noticed you blanking out before, or at least, nobody had ever said anything to you about it.

Your awareness came back to you fully then, and you could feel the heat from the fire even all the way over here, so you couldn’t imagine the heat Tess was feeling. With a huffed breath, you pulled yourself to your feet, shrugging Joel’s hand off when he tried to help you as you stumbled slightly. Your bag felt lighter than it had before, but at least you still had it.

Joel grumbled, his hard expression unchanging as he turned away from you to go and grab Tess, nodding at you to follow them as you hurried away from the burning building, blinking as you tried to remember what had happened.

∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘

Arriving at Bill and Frank’s compound was… overwhelming. Which was probably the biggest understatement ever.

Tess and Joel didn’t think it pertinent to tell you where you were headed before leaving Boston, and you weren’t all that well versed in where smugglers got their items to smuggle. You figured it would be some run down place, that was mostly untouched by the outbreak.

You didn’t expect this.

Initially, it reminded you of the small community you had lived in with your father, all that time ago. Though this place was guarded much better, with that electric fence that Joel warned you away from. The houses looked good, and there was one down the street, with a wide porch and old kids toys piled in the garden, which made your heart clench.

You wanted to retreat back into yourself, to hide in that haze, to let the blanket of emptiness cover you, but then Frank was emerging from the doorway of their house, his grip tight on a walking stick, but his smile was wide. He was tailed by Bill, whose hands hovered hesitantly as he followed Frank.

“Tess! Joel!” Frank called, and held his arms out for Tess when she approached, sharing a hug like they were family. You were pretty sure that they were just friends, had no connection before the outbreak. It was strange, really, to think of hugging someone that wasn’t a relation. Or perhaps it was the caring part of it that had your brows creased. “And who’s this?” He asked, smiling at you.

With a nod from Joel, you introduced yourself to the man, trying not to shrink into yourself at his cheerful demeanour, and the suspicious glances of Bill from beside him.

“Bill, it’s fine,” Frank sighed, a roll of his eyes as he turned to the man. “Go get started on dinner! We’re going to sit out here, while the weather is nice.”

Bill grumbled, eyes darting between the three of you and the man he loved, but he turned with a resigned sigh. Frank grinned, a fond look on his face.

Tess busied herself setting the table, ignoring the way Frank scolded her for doing his job, only shooting him an exasperated smile. After a moment, Frank realised there were only four chairs set around the small garden table.

“Oh, I think there’s another in my art room.” He said, as he looked between you and the four chairs.

Unable to help yourself, “You have an art room?” You asked, which was probably the most you had spoken for the past few days. You ignored the way Joel seemed to perk up at your words, a glance going between him and Tess.

Frank smiled. He seemed to do a lot of that. “You wanna have a look?” He asked kindly, nodding his head and starting towards the house.

“Go on.” Joel encouraged with his monotone murmur. You hesitantly followed Frank into the house.

You didn’t look around much, instead opting to focus on keeping close to the man in front of you. If you looked to closely, you think you might see similarities to the home you had with your dad, and after already shutting down once on this journey, you figured that Joel wouldn’t be too pleased if you did it again.

It was wracking your nerves, the closer you got to Frank’s art room. You wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, not even your father, had he been here, but you were scared. You had gotten so good at removing yourself from a multitude of situations, but the concept of art had you grounded in place no matter how much you might have wanted to fade back into your mind. You can remember nights spent staying up late, dipping brushes in colours that resembled the world around you almost too accurately. The gentle swipe of paint across paper, canvas, walls, wood — whatever your father could give you, at the time.

It was the best thing you had.

You realise, now, that you had been escaping from the world for your whole life. Only back then, it had been to nicer lands, beauty put down on different mediums so you could physically touch it, could know it was true, it was real. The only thing that had changed was your method of escaping, really. Where you had once clambered for colours and depictions of the world in a different light, you now escaped to the very depths of your mind, hidden deep under sadness and fear and loneliness. Somewhere that you couldn’t be disturbed, wouldn’t have to think about the world and what it had taken from you.

You’re scared of wanting that old method of escape back.

When you enter the art room, you know your fear is valid. You know that the longing you have for paints and pencils and whatever supplies your father could get his hands on was back, or perhaps it was just the longing for your father returning full force from where you had buried it. Whatever it might have been, it was overwhelming.

It made everything feel like it meant more. Like the careful brushes of meticulously selected colours on white canvases was personal to you.

Frank’s art was covering the entire room, a stack of empty canvases in one corner, dwarfed by the amount of wooden frames that had sketched or painted pictures stretched over them. It was bright in here, the colours seemingly glowing from the light that was shining through the large windows, looking out on parts of the garden.

“This one isn’t finished,” Frank said, his voice quiet, and you looked to where you had forgotten he was standing. He leant heavily on his walking stick, gesturing with his free hand toward a canvas stood upon an easel — the first easel you had seen. When your dad first encouraged your interest in art, he had told you all about what his time in art class at school had been like. He’d told you about the easels, the shitty school paints — which were heavenly compared to what yours had been like — and his own art teacher. But easels weren’t the most common thing, and so you had never used one.

The painting that stood upon the strange-looking three legged stand looked like the beginnings of Bill’s face, blue eyes surrounded by carefully mixed colours to bring about the contours of the man’s skin. It was much better than anything you had ever painted.

“Have you ever painted?” Frank asked, after a few moments of hesitation. He’d lived in the apocalyptic world, too, but he hadn’t grown up in it. The man had more awareness than you expected, given his presence in such a protected home, but you supposed that if he knew Tess and Joel, it made sense that he would be sensitive of the world’s horrors.

You looked at the paintbrushes set out to dry beside an open window, and quickly drew your gaze away. “Yeah,” You responded, voice uncharacteristically gentle. You cleared your throat, annoyed at your own involuntary vulnerability. “My dad used to get paints, before I got to Boston.”

If Frank noticed your choice of pronoun ‘I’ and not ‘we’, he didn’t comment on it. He let your words settle for a moment, and you realised this was probably the most open you had been, the most you had spoken of your life before Boston. It was almost… sad. You think your dad would’ve loved Bill and Frank’s home, and the knowledge that nobody else would ever be able to consider what he would like was a painful admission.

“Well, I’m sure you could take some back with you.” Frank offered, a gentle smile on his face. He seemed to know more than he let on, even when your words were limited and he didn’t know you, hadn’t even met you before today.

You tried to brush your discomfort away, tried to unwind the stiffness to your shoulders. “That’s okay.” You said, fiddling with a button on your jacket as you took one more glance around the room, an uncomfortable tightening in your throat. “We’d better get back.” You prompted, walking to the chair in front of the easel and picking it up, gesturing for Frank to lead the way back to the garden.

“You alright?” Joel asked quietly as you set the chair down by his side, taking a seat in it a moment after as Frank and Tess began chatting away.

“I’m fine.” You snapped.

∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘

It was on the way back from Bill and Frank’s that everything seemed to go wrong. For this portion of the journey, you made sure to cling on to every slither of awareness you had, digging your claws into consciousness and not letting go. You wouldn’t admit it, but the whole situation on the way there had shaken you.

You supposed it was different to the way blanking out in the QZ had been. After all, there was a certain amount of control in the QZ, much less of a wild factor than there was in the outside world. You could anticipate everything that you might come into contact with at the QZ, and each time, nothing was scary enough for you to even consider holding on to consciousness. Out in the real world, that was very different.

Despite travelling in it to the Quarantine Zone, there wasn’t a whole lot of that you could remember after the incident with your father. Everything was unpredictable, out here, and you were foolish to forget that. Especially after what it cost you the first time.

There may have been something else, though, something that had your fingers grasping onto reality so tightly you didn’t think you would ever let go. And that was the fact that it wasn’t just yourself that you were putting in danger, anymore, but Tess and Joel, too. And would you ever be able to forgive yourself if you came to awareness, just to see their blood on your hands? To find their bodies lay still? To be at fault once again for killing the only people left in the world that would see you safe? You could pretty confidently say no, you would never be able to forgive such a thing.

Even with your best attempts to cling on to your own awareness, it was clear that Joel and Tess didn’t quite trust your efforts. Given the fact that they refused to let you take a watch when night fell early, stopping to wait the darkness out just over halfway back to the Zone. Tess had already taken first watch, shaking Joel awake despite your offer to watch the area for him, so it was just you and Joel, Tess’s breaths long-since evened out.

“You can get some rest, y’know.” Joel said, his voice low to avoid waking Tess. You were well aware that she was a light sleeper, though you couldn’t blame her. It was the apocalypse, after all. Besides, it wasn’t like you were able to catch much sleep, too hyper focused on staying present to drift even into slumber, fearing you wouldn’t become conscious afterwards, fearing you would just wake.

“‘M fine, Joel.” You grumbled in response, eyes flitting around the rustling grass surrounding you, as if something was going to jump out at any moment.

Joel huffed, something between exasperation and vague amusement in it, and shook his head. “Sure, you are, kid.” He responded, adjusting his grip on the gun and resigning himself to the fact that you were going to stay up, no matter what he said. “Not gonna let anythin’ hurt you, you do know that, right?” He asked, after a long pause, and ignored the unpleasant way your face twisted.

“Why do you two help me? I don’t get it. Not done anything to help you, so why?” You questioned, instead of answering his question, too desperate to know to avoid the opening in the conversation. Joel sighed, a roll of his eyes, a deflection, as always.

“So impossible to believe that we could just be good people?” Joel replied, after your expectant silence lingered on uncomfortably. He shuffled, pausing when Tess moved, but only turned in her sleep.

You huffed, and Joel tried to ignore the way he was sure it sounded just like him. “Yes, it is impossible to believe that. You found me after I…” You paused, unsure how to go about admitting something you didn’t even remember. “After that FEDRA guard. Good people wouldn’t help me, after seeing that.”

“Been in your shoes, kid.” Joel said, at last, and you furrowed your brows at his answer. And the nickname he had taken to calling you. Joel didn’t exactly want to talk about it, both for the unpleasantness he had experienced and the worry that you’d retreat if he was honest. He could barely even explain the why to himself, so he had no idea how he could formulate it into words to tell you. “Not a good place to be, even worse if you’re alone.” He admitted, though he hadn’t been alone for as long as he could remember. There had always been Tommy, and after Tommy there was Sarah, and then his brother returned, but even then — he had Tess. But despite all that company, Joel knew exactly how it felt to be isolated, to be alone in your situation, to feel no other option than to retreat into yourself to get through the day.

He wouldn’t wish it upon anyone, let alone you.

You wanted to deny it, to tell Joel that you weren’t alone. That you already had a family you loved, that you already had a dad who cared about you, but what could you say? The truth was, he was gone.

“Get some sleep.” Joel said, dismissing the conversation before you could figure out anything to say. You just frowned at him, staring at him like his expression held all the answers, but as always, Joel revealed nothing. No reasoning, no answers, nothing. Finally, you turned away from him, resting your head against your backpack, eyes remaining open so you could keep an eye on the forest ahead of you for the last few hours of the night.

When the light finally a swept the last of the darkness away, the three of you set off again. Now, you were at the final stretch of your journey — so close to the QZ you could almost smell the pungent scent of fire and unrest. You never thought you’d be glad to see the decimated land around the Boston zone, but here you were, five steps ahead of Tess and Joel, who shared secret glances, communicating in a language you couldn’t understand.

They joined your side when you paused, waiting for them, just along the edge of where FEDRA usually patrolled. You looked to the two adults expectantly, not sure where you’d be entering the Zone, and figuring you must’ve been out of it if they had ever actually told you that part.

Now this, this was where it all went downhill.

“On your knees.” A voice from behind the three of you said, and you recognised the sound of a familiar FEDRA officer, from your time spent as a trainee. You just hoped he wouldn’t remember you. “I said, get on your knees!” He repeated, when the three of you had hesitated a moment too long, stepping forward and jabbing the end of his gun into the back of your knee. You grit your teeth as your knees buckled from the hit, dropping to the ground with your hands raised. You watched Joel and Tess follow when the guard moved towards them. Joel’s jaw was clenched.

“We’re just lookin’ to get to the QZ, man, that’s all.” Tess said, keeping her hands in the air and her head tilted as she tried to negotiate, as usual.

“Just a precaution, ma’am.” The guard responded, a snark to his voice. Despite what he said, when you first arrived to the QZ, there was no precautions this far out. In fact, it was only when you stalked towards the gate that guns were trained on you, your wrists bound until they got you through the main gate to test you.

He was patting down Tess, and you would’ve sworn you could hear Joel grinding his teeth together, clenching his jaw shut so tightly you wouldn’t have been surprised if it had broken. Meanwhile, you focused on trying to remember the name of the guard, trying to recall his temperament, whether he was easily swayed. You blinked your eyes shut, trying to see through the haze that clouded your memories as the guy moved on to Joel, but without seeing the guy’s face, it was too difficult.

“What kinda QZ has precautions this far out?” Joel grumbled as the guard moved along, checking the distance towards the gate with squinted eyes, and trying his best not to clench his fists as the guard moved towards you.

“You born yesterday, man? World’s fucked.” The guard answered, stepping away from you and moving to go around to see the front of the three of you. “Well, I never.” He chuckled, catching sight of your face as it fell, finally putting the voice to the face as you looked at him. “Don’t recall seeing your name on the exist list, trainee.” FEDRA had a bunch of awful guards, but this guy… Jerry, you were pretty fucking sure, was amongst the worst of them.

“Not a trainee, anymore.” You bit out in response, practically feeling the two adults beside you tensing up at the FEDRA guard’s recognition of you. “You even know my name, Jerry?” You asked, tilting your head upwards with your best reinvention of the careless expression that used to rile the man up so much.

He smiled, a grin full of rotten teeth and breath that stung your eyes as he leaned towards you. You resisted the urge to throw up over his shoes as he said your name, proving your hopeful taunt incorrect.

“Alright, now, no need for trouble.” Joel said placatingly, trying to keep the grimace off of his face in exchange for a more… reasonable expression. “We ain’t Infected, just a couple of folks tryin’ to be on their way.”

“Shut your mouth, and mind your business, fella.” Jerry spat towards Joel, before he looked back to you, a grin on that ugly face. “I’ve been trying to get the dirt to have you hung for months, now. Unauthorised exit? Well, that ought’a do it.” He said, morbid amusement dancing across his face. You just bared your teeth at him, a sarcastic expression donning your features.

“Careful, Jerry. You’re soundin’ awfully obsessed. Didn’t they out you for that, once already?” You asked, sarcastically, recalling the way he had been shamed outright by a higher up for getting on the trainee’s cases too much. FEDRA was strict already, so if he was getting publicly scolded for his obsessive behaviour, you figured it must’ve been bad.

You saw the way Joel was tensed up out of the corner of your eye, but didn’t dare turn to look at him, or even attempt to see how Tess was fairing.

It was when Jerry reared back, his rotten teeth bared, a sneer pulling at his features, that you saw Joel move. He’d noticed a second before you did, the way that the FEDRA guard was reaching for his smaller weapon, his handgun, barely getting it out of the holster before Joel was launching up and forwards, pushing Jerry and falling alongside him as they rolled down the slight slope to go towards the QZ gate.

“Joel!” Tess yelled out, a curse falling from her lips as she grabbed the stuff that Jerry had been attempting to confiscate before realising who you were. She dug through her bag, looking for her own gun, too risky to have it on her person this close to the QZ for this goddamn reason. You glanced between her searching frantically and the duo fighting slightly below you, before you caught a glint of metal in one of their hands. Did Joel have a knife? Did he have a knife, or was that Jerry’s? Was Jerry about to fucking stab Joel, who had tackled him to protect you?

You stumbled down the slight decline after the two of them, just as Jerry was catching the upper hand, something red trickling down his sleeve. You pulled the very gun he had tried to pull on you from its holster at his side, before he could even react to you having moved from where you were. He was slow, this guy, but that didn’t mean he was incapable. He was freakishly strong, and he bared bloody teeth at you as he moved to swing the blade in his hands down.

A crack interrupted his movements, blood dancing a crimson path down the side of his forehead.

Jerry’s body slumped backwards, falling away from where he had been about to fucking kill Joel Miller, all for what? His helmet made a dull thunk against the ground as it connected, and Joel was groaning, shoving the deadweight off of him with a bit of a struggle.

“The fuck were you thinking?” Tess asked, grasping onto Joel’s shoulders to help him up, only for him to hiss and pull away, and you vaguely saw Tess’s hand covered in a sticky sheen of blood that had leaked through the material of Joel’s jacket. “Jesus, Joel, you could’ve gotten yourself killed.” She scolded, pulling the jacket away and unbuttoning the top few buttons of his shirt to look at the wound. She dug through her bag to pull a few rags out of it, pressing the material against the fucking stab wound, and waiting for Joel’s steady hand to take over before she moved away. “Come on, we can’t wait around. If they’re patrolling this far out, something must’ve gone down, and I doubt anyone’s far enough to have not heard that.” She said, nodding pointedly towards the gun gripped tightly in your fingers.

At her reminder, you shivered, taking the knife from Jerry’s limp hand and replacing it with the gun. You wiped the blood — Joel’s blood — off of the blade onto the side of your jacket, before shoving it back in its place on Jerry’s vest, which you hadn’t even realised was there. You wondered if Joel knew, before he decided to attack him.

∘₊✧───── ───── ───── ─────✧₊∘

You blinked, and realised you were already back at the apartment you stayed in with Joel and Tess.

Joel was sat at the table, med kit set out open in front of him, with Tess being nowhere in sight. He barely spared you a glance as you stood up from the sofa you didn’t remember sitting on, your brows furrowed as you looked around the room, as if the answers—the memories—you wanted would be revealed.

“She went to trade what we managed to get from Bill and Frank’s.” Joel told you, not even looking in your direction as he focused on fixing himself up. He had the rag in his hand once again, wiping at the blood still trickling from his wound. You wondered if Tess didn’t tell you where she was going, or if Joel just knew you weren’t present if she did.

You didn’t even know what had sent you back to the depths of your mind, this time. Was it shooting Jerry? Killing somebody whilst actually being fully responsible for your actions? Was it his threats about getting you hung? Or was it that very wound that Joel was tending to right now? The fact that once again, somebody got hurt, and it was your fault?

“Can you hand me the, uh…” Joel trailed off, gesturing over towards the counter where amber liquid sat in a glass bottle. You went over and grabbed it, placing it down on the table in front of Joel far harsher than you realised you were going to. You hadn’t quite noticed the way anger, or something defensive at least, had settled in your chest, stirring that brimming pot of guilt until it was almost flowing over the edges. “Thanks.” Joel said gruffly, splashing some of the booze onto the rag and pressing it to his shoulder.

You stared at him, waiting for him to say something, to explain himself, but he made no move to do so.

“What is wrong with you?” You said, finally, your voice loud and echoing around the barely furnished room, like it had burst from your chest, like you had no choice in the matter.

“Got stabbed, in case you didn’t notice.” Joel quipped, which seemed even further out of character for him. You vaguely wondered if you had just lost your mind, if this was all some made up scenario playing out in your head.

“Why did you attack him? He didn’t attack you, I—I don’t understand!” You told him, gritting your teeth when Joel just continued tending to his wound, not acknowledging your questioning. Part of you wished Tess was here so she could dismiss you before you could continue, but she was clearly nowhere nearby, given that she hadn’t burst into the room to stop any conflict. “Joel, answer me.”

He finally looked up, shaking his head. “What do you want me to say, huh? Somebody’s gotta protect you! Lord knows you don’t do it yourself! Rilin’ that guard up— it was reckless. He could’ve killed you, kid, and what would I have done then?” Joel questioned, his voice louder than your own, a booming thing that had you wanting to retreat. You refused, pushing it down in favour of the confrontation that you’d been putting off for months, by now.

“I can take care of myself.” You answered, spitting the words out like there was a semblance of truth to them. “I’m not your goddamn kid, Joel, there are plenty of other strays you could help out if I had died.” You continued, throwing the nickname back in his face, watching the way he recoiled, something unfamiliar flashing in his eyes.

“Now, you listen—”

He tried to say, only to be interrupted by you continuing on. “No! You’re not my dad, Joel! I already had a dad, okay? I had a dad, and he’s dead, and that’s on me. I won’t go through that again. You gotta stop puttin’ your life on the line for me!”

“Kid…” Joel trailed, the confession not exactly surprising him, but he felt a twinge in his chest nonetheless. He had figured all of this was catalysed by some kind of loss, just going by his own experience with the matter, but he had never known for sure. You were closed off — another way you were just so similar to him, and you’d never spoken about any family.

You closed your eyes, tears brimming in the edges, slipping down your face, and you wiped them away with a rough swipe of your sleeve against your skin. “You don’t understand. It was my fault. If it weren’t for me, he’d—… Every day I’ve been here, I’ve just been wishing we could’ve swapped places, wishing that he was here instead of me, because I can’t do this without my dad. But—But he could’ve, without me.”

“When my Sarah died,” Joel started, gritting his teeth against the pain in his chest that just her name brought. “I gave up. I—I lost any will to live, I prayed that it wasn’t real, prayed for God to switch our places, to trade her life for mine. Tried to end it, and when that failed, I got numb. Got lost in my head, ended up fightin’ anybody I crossed paths with, usin’ any excuse to hurt people, even while I was with Tess. Barely even remember it,” Joel continued, a strained laugh falling from his lips, his hand held to his chest in hopes of soothing some of the ache that originated there. “Just remember wakin’ up, covered in—in blood, not knowing who the hell I hurt. So, when I saw you, not even present in your own goddamn head, I figured that wherever you came from, whatever family you might’ve had, they wouldn’t want you ending up like me.”

That pot of guilt in your chest felt like it would explode, even as you blinked back tears, only getting harder the longer Joel spoke, the more he told you. You had never taken him for a religious man, but you supposed you could relate to that, that desperation to just save your family’s life.

“I’ve got too much blood on my hands, kid,” Joel told you, the words going past the literal sense of his own blood, spilled across his palms from that wound that you had caused. It was deeper than that, it was something you related to, like he knew that sensation of fresh blood that plagued you, like it was dripping over your hands all the time. “You gotta wipe yours clean.”

Clearly, that wound on his shoulder wasn’t his only open one. It was there, gaping in his chest, weeping waves of guilt and suffering that hit you with such familiarity. My Sarah. You couldn’t help but think about your dad, couldn’t help wondering if this was how he’d feel, if your places had of swapped.

“He was my dad,” You said desperately, like it could explain everything, like the simple statement could convey everything you couldn’t put into other words. That’s not something you can replace, something you can change, something you can forget. You opened your mouth to continue, but all that happened was the tears stinging your eyes fell, and you turned your head to the side, hoping Joel wouldn’t see the way your lip was trembling.

Joel’s arms were warm when he wrapped them around you, blood still tacky on his shirt where it pressed to your jacket, but you barely noticed it. “She was my daughter.” He said in response, and suddenly it made sense.

If anything about your relationship with Joel was true, it was that you were mirror images. Reflections. Two sides of the same coin, two sides of the same story, one that told of grief and loss and pain that would never go away. His response was the answer you didn’t even realise you had been waiting for. He was my dad, and she was my daughter. Not replacements, not something to try and fill the gaps. The acknowledgment was everything you needed to wrap your arms around Joel, to squeeze his shirt between your fists and cry, to cry for the dad that you lost, for the daughter he lost, for everything the two of you would never have again.

You weren’t Joel’s daughter, and he wasn’t your dad.

That much was true, and you knew it, because you had each other. And maybe, come morning, you would still leave the apartment like you had been considering doing all along, or maybe you would stay. Maybe, you’d let yourself have this, this little family made up of torn apart pieces, of members too damaged to fit just right, of a dad who lost his daughter, and a daughter who lost her dad.

[callofdudes]

Don't go there.

Summary: When you and your friends take a summer trip out to the woods you are unaware of just what you've disturbed from it's slumber deep inside.

Cw: Serial Killer Simon, gore, blood, wounds, angst, death, childhood trauma. Mention of dissociation, abuse. Dark themes, animal death, Simon has a bit of a psychotic obsession over you in the end.

Word count: 6.8K+

A/N: Please don't let this flop, I spent way too much time staying up and writing this. So I do apologize for my dry-eye editing mistakes. I didn't want to super edit it all but I worked so hard on this. I was tempted to make the end kinky, but he just really, really likes chasing. Italics means a flashback/something in the past.

"How much longer until we get there??" You asked, looking out the window of the car, seeing the long road of trees. Stretching out for miles deep into the unknown where shadows lingered.

"Shouldn't be much longer." Your friend, Adam replied, checking the gas level in the truck.

You had stopped at a gas station nearly an hour ago. You had been going down this road for almost half an hour with nothing to see for miles.

Two of your other friends sat in the back, distracted by their boredom. You look in the rearview mirror, seeing them making out.

Crystal and Peter couldn't get off each other for five minutes... You had to be in the car with them. Why couldn't you have been with the others following in the car behind you?

You sigh softly in exhaustion, fixing your headphones again.

You all had taken up the opportunity for a summer job out at a camp for the extra money. Having just gotten out of school, you were looking for somewhere to start fresh, away from your parents' clings. And this felt right.

"Hey, looks like we've got something," Adam points out.

You look up, clicking off your phone to see the road split off. An old sign at the crossroads directs you down another road.

"That's the camp's name." You sit up, your whole body feeling relief that you are almost there.

"Thank goodness."

You looked at the backseat, leaning over to gently hit Peter. "Hey, stop it, there are others in the car you two."

"Sorry y/n."

Hah, you knew they weren't. At least you'd be at the camp soon...

🩸🔪💀🔪🩸

You arrived at the camp, pulling up on the road to the large cabins just across from a lake spanning out into the thick forest grove.

You got out, stretching your limbs. Hands high above your head, yawning and working your legs.

"Finally."

You grabbed your bags from the car, meeting up with your other two friends Phillip and Stacy, pulling up in the car behind you.

"Geez, I'd have to make that trip every summer." Phillip fixed his hat, slinging his duffle bag over his shoulder.

"Well, hopefully, the drive back won't be as painful." You playfully glared at Peter and Crystal, taking your bags up the walk to the cabin lodge.

The warm late afternoon sun came through the trees, the breeze blowing softly across the open land. Seeing some of the other campers and counsellors wandering about.

The main office was where you met up with the head counsellor. He smiled upon seeing you. "Y/n, glad you made it."

"Thanks, it was quite the trip."

"Well, we're glad to have you here. Sign your name, and we'll get you all the keys to your cabins."

You nod, write down your name on the paper, and then take the cabin key from him, "Thanks!"

He nods, setting up your friends as well.

Taking your bags, you head down to your cabin. You walk through the main grounds, across the road and over to the thick backwooded area. You paused, looking out into the woods.

The trees were growing and darkening as you looked in, hiding the other side from what lay there.

You shook it off, heading to the cabin and unlocking it. You were sharing your room with Adam, two beds set up and a window at the back of the cabin wall as well.

"Not bad..." You muttered.

As you and Adam start to unpack, you couldn't help but feel a little excited about spending the summer here. The camp was beautiful, with its lake and surrounded by lush forest. It was going to be the perfect escape from the stress of school and family drama.

As you were unpacking, you noticed that Adam had left the cabin without saying anything. You shrugged, thinking he had gone to explore as well.

After organizing your clothes and items in the drawers, you grab your sunglasses and head out to explore the camp. The sun was setting, casting a beautiful golden hue on the entire area. You walked towards the lake, admiring the serene beauty of the water.

As you sit on the dock, dipping your feet in the water, you feel off. Feeling that weird sense that someone was watching you.

You looked out across the lake, attempting to spot anyone, but the forest looked all the same. You were startled a little when you heard footsteps approaching. You look up to see Adam walking towards you, a mischievous glint in his eyes.

"Hey there," he says, sitting beside you on the dock. "Enjoying the view?"

You roll your eyes but can't help but laugh at his antics. "Yeah, it's beautiful."

"Well, I was talking with some others and we're setting up dinner for everyone, then it's swimsuit time~"

You scoffed, shoving him away. "We're to relax, not stick our pieces in random places."

"Oh, say you," He grinned, but you just shrugged him off.

"Meet you at the cabin then?"

You hummed in agreement, and Adam left you alone to join some of the others. You looked back out at the lake, sighing before getting up and following after him.

As you walk back towards the main grounds, you can't shake off the feeling of being watched. The shadows of the trees seemed to elongate and twist, as though they were reaching out to grab you. You shivered, feeling as though you were being watched by something lurking in the forest.

But you shook it off, reassuring yourself that it was just your imagination running wild in unfamiliar territory. You arrive at the campfire just as dinner is being served, the smell of grilled meat and vegetables making your mouth water. You grab a plate and sit down next to Philip, who was chatting animatedly with one of the other counsellors.

You laughed at the funny stories and jokes that were shared, feeling yourself relaxed for the first time in a long while.

But as the night wore on, the atmosphere changed. You noticed the people around you becoming louder, more intoxicated. The crude jokes turned into innuendos and the flirting became more aggressive.

Your typical night with a bunch of people barely older than the drinking age and taking it to their advantage to flirt with any young mind like themselves.

After dinner, you all head back to your cabins to change into your swimsuits. You grab your towel and head towards the lake, joining the others who are already swimming and playing around in the water. You dip your toes into the cool water and shiver slightly, but soon adjust to the temperature and join in the fun.

As you were swimming around, you suddenly felt someone grab your waist from behind. You gasp and turn around to see Adam, grinning cheekily at you. "Gotcha."

You continued to splash around in the water as the sunset. Across the dock, dark eyes stared into the stirring waters. Watching from behind the darkness of the tree line Peter and Crystal made out against one of the firm dock legs. Others laugh and touch too closely to not be called flirtatious.

Their laughter stung his ears. The sounds of shrill joy twisting his stomach in a way that made him angry. One more year where he'd have to do all the dirty work. Where these kids would have to learn.

He'd hear their screams and see the looks of horror on their faces. That's what he wanted.

He moved back into the shadows, slinking down the old house of a family doomed from the start...

🩸🔪💀🔪🩸

"Simon! Get your ass down here right now you little shit!!"

"Hang on." The young boy looked in the mirror, whining as he fiddled with his belt, desperately pulling it and looping it back through. Shaky hands working hard when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs.

His father angrily pushed through the bathroom door, grabbing his wrist. "I said get over here. You're going to make us late again and I don't want your excuses."

Simon wriggled, whining again as he was pulled down the stairs.

His older brother sat with his bags on the couch, chuckling. "Hah, look who got caught with his pants down again." He smirked.

"Shut up Tommy!" Simon retorted, his father yanking him forward and slapping him across the face.

"He's right. Now you shut your mouth."

Simon looked over at his mother who remained quiet as the boys' father led them to the door, getting them into the car.

"If I hear any shit from your counsellors' I'm going to be through with you. You understand me!?"

Simon looked out the window, watching the trees blur by in a mess of green as they drove. He saw his brother look over at him and smirk.

"Don't be a pussy, Simon. You're going to love it."

Simon shook his head and looked away, thinking about all the wonderful things he could be doing if his brother was the one going away to camp.

Simon couldn't help but feel the knot of worry in his stomach. He wasn't looking forward to the summer camp, but his father threatened him with more than was needed to scare the young guy.

"Simon. Simon! What the fuck are you whining about?" His brother punched his arm, and Simon looked over at him.

"Nothing."

"Don't try to lie to me. I can hear it in your fucking voice."

"I'm just nervous is all."

"Yeah, about that..." Tommy laughed, reaching into the glove compartment and pulling out a small tin. "I got you something to take the edge off."

Simon looked at him, eyes wide. "What the fuck is that?" He asked, Tommy, grinning and popping open the lid, a snake popping out and making Simon jump.

"Tommy, stop!!"

Tommy laughed, tucking the fake snake away.

🩸🔪💀🔪🩸

The stairs of the old house creaked. He took it to the bathroom where the mirror took in his frame, eyes showing out from behind the skull mask he wore. Something he'd taken on after his brother's death.

He bent down, opening the sink drawer doors and grabbing his set of knives and his hatchet. Tracing his gloved fingers over the sharp edge, a twist of evil excitement stirred inside him.

Another year of spilling blood. All for himself.

You were back at your cabin at the end of the night, slipping into a sweater as the chill of the summer air set through the interior.

"What's up, y/n?" Adam asked as he noticed you staring out the window for the hundredth time.

"I don't know, I just have this weird feeling like we're being watched." You turn from the window to face him.

Adam let out a chuckle. "Don't tell me you believe in all those ghost stories they tell around the campfire?"

"No, it's not that. It's just a feeling. Nothing more." You tried to brush it off, but you were unconvinced.

"Yeah, but it can be fun to believe you know? Peace of mind." He offered his hand, and you took it.

Adam pulled you outside, and the two of you walked to the cabins beside yours.

"Do you believe in ghosts or spirits?" You asked, feeling a little braver around him.

"Not really. I've seen some crazy shit and it's hard to believe there's more out there. But why not? I'll believe anything if it's from you."

"You're uncontrollable."

"I know." He grinned but then stopped in his tracks. "Wait, hold up. What was that?"

You stop, cocking your head to the side to listen. "I don't hear anything."

"Shh. Listen."

You sit there for a tense moment, scanning the dark tree line, fists clenching in your pockets.

You listened closer, and what you heard was a heavy thumping from one of the cabins. You both seemed to exhale softly upon realizing it wasn't anything to be scared of.

"Whatever, I'm going to the bathroom." You kept walking, heading down the path to the bathrooms. Heading inside and flicking on the small light, locking the door.

Adam smirked, hearing you as you left down the path. He's been trying to get into your pants for months. And yet you brushed him off every time. He partly hoped that this time around, the summer camp and the alcohol will loosen you, literally.

He waits around for you to be done, looking out down toward the dock and the cool waters. Hearing footsteps behind him, he chuckled. "That was quick." He turned, facing someone who definitely wasn't you.

His eyes widened, looking up at the imposing figure.

The mask bore holes into his skin, the darkness hiding the grotesque glint in his eyes.

"Woah man, easy." Adam backed up, but it did little to save him as the large man's hand clasped tightly around his throat, his hatchet slashing into his abdomen.

He had to die first.

Adam's eyes went wide. He attempted to scream, heels digging into the dirt as the blade retracted from his stomach and he was dragged across the open grounds. Blood splattered from the torn skin and clothes onto the rocks and dirt. Dragged back into the woods, trying to scream or scramble for anything to help him.

"Help!" His words were mumbled and barely made it out as he was dragged back into the darkness behind the cabins. Thrust into a tree, the knife sinking back into his flesh. Adam choked, blood spilling from his mouth as the knife carved up through him. Blood splattered into the dirt and leaves.

His eyes stared upward; his face twisted in fright as the man began to brutal him with the knife. The blade tore into his flesh, slicing open as the man took his time to toy with the young man.

Adam's struggles weakened by the minute. Until the knife dug into his throat, and life escaped his body.

He dropped Adam, flicking the blood from his knife and tucked it back into his vest.

The man turned back to the cabin, the sound of footsteps approaching.

Adam was left slumped on the ground, blood oozing from his wounds.

The man slipped back behind the cabin, his hand grasping the hilt of his knife as he listened intently for your return.

You were coming out of the bathrooms, heading back to your cabin when you noticed Adam wasn't around. "Adam?" You looked around, watching the darkness. When you heard nothing, you shrugged. He probably just headed back to the cabin then. So, with that you headed back, but when you returned, still no Adam.

"Alright then."

You left the cabin door unlocked, just in case he'd take a while to get back. Setting up your bed and crawling in, flicking out your lamp. You lay in the darkness, snuggling into the bed and closing your eyes.

You listened to the sounds of the cricket outside and the occasional small rustle of a critter along the wilderness edge. Your breathing slows, exhaling softly as you feel yourself slipping away into sleep.

Footsteps crunch against the pebbled ground. You aren't entirely sure how long you've been asleep when you feel your eyelids fluttering open again. Not moving when you hear the heavy footfalls coming up the side of the cabin. They come around the front of the cabin, stopping at the door.

Silence.

"Adam?" You finally whisper, shifting a little in your bed, squinting into the darkness.

Still silent.

You sat up slowly, looking out the window to see if the coast was clear. You couldn't see anything. You listened for a few moments more, and when you still didn't hear anything, you laid back down.

You watched the door, your heart picking up in pace slightly. The door handle of the cabin finally twists. Your heart leaps as the door opens with an ominous creak.

The steps follow into the cabin, and in the moonlight, you can clearly see that the figure is not Adam.

Your heart spasms in your chest. Your body goes into freeze mode. You try to keep your breathing low in the darkness. The figure shifts its weight slightly, and you feel a pair of eyes on you. Whatever or whoever it was said nothing.

Boots moving across the cabin floor. You close your eyes, feeling fear overtake you when the person reaches your bedside. The glint of the moonlight revealed the sharp hatchet, yet your eyes were closed. Unaware of just what danger you were in.

The figure leans over, warm breath fanning from the mask, leaning down near your cheek, the blade caressing over the skin of your shoulder. You can't stop your whimper, feeling another hot puff of air against your skin, the tip of the blade digging into your shoulder.

You flinch, gasping. The figure stops, the blade drawing away from your skin. Your eyes finally open, wide with fear.

The figure is looming over you, and you can't make out their features in the dark, but the knife glints in the moonlight.

"Please." You whimpered. "I won't tell anyone, I promise."

"Shhh..." The figure shushed, bringing the knife down slowly, trailing the cold metal across your exposed stomach.

Your bottom lip quivers, shying away, whimpering. "Please- Please I won't-" Your voice dies out with another small whimper as he toys with you. Your body is a nervous wreck.

The blade drags across your skin, slowly sinking into your flesh. Your body throbbing in pain, your eyes so wide that they sting.

You try to look down to see the blade, but the figure moves away, and your eyes follow the figure. You see the glint of the moonlight upon the blade as it comes into view. Your body is trembling violently, your skin stained with a light coating of sweat.

You're going to die. You're fully prepared for whatever is happening to end you.

"Oh, Crystal, come on!" You hear Peter's voice in the darkness. The thick silence pierced like shards of glass. Their breathing pauses, blade stilling against your skin.

"No! I told you not to look!" Crystal hollered back. You could hear her coming closer, walking down toward the docks probably.

The figure leans away from you. You feel your heart throbbing inside your chest. The blade leaves your skin, boots heavily walking back across the floorboards. You remain there, hearing the stride stop, eyes back on you. Then the door creaks shut, and the steps are moving away.

You exhale shakily, opening your eyes, half expecting him to still be there.

You thought he was going to kill you. And then it hit you. Crystal... He must have been going after one of them. You were about to rush out of bed on adrenaline, but the fear immediately had you lying back down. You couldn't move, pulling your blankets back up.

🩸🔪💀🔪🩸

It was morning when you got up, finding Adam not at the cabin. You were surprised. You thought he'd come back eventually, but it seems he'd disappeared. You tried to clear your head. Getting dressed and stepping outside to brush your teeth. You looked around, trying to see any signs of what had happened last night. But it seemed all was still. You spat into the dirt, shrugging on your camp sweater and headed over to the main cabin.

There you saw everyone, Peter sitting alone and looking a little bummed out. "Hey." You walked over, getting his attention. "Hey... sleep ok?"

"Yeah, you? Heard a scuffle last night."

Peter sighed, looking into his half-full cup of iced tea. "Found some old photos in a bag she brought with her... Her and her ex."

You cringed a little, but nodded, hearing him out.

"She stormed off and didn't come back last night."

"She did seem the type to be dramatic." You shrugged but gave him a side hug. "Look, it'll be alright. I'm sure she'll come back, and you can sort this out."

Breakfast was passed around and you slowly got to thinking about Crystal. She had no ride back unless she were to take Adam's car or Phil's truck... And where was Adam? Oh well... She was probably off brooding about how she would have to come back and apologize. She was always a tad dramatic for your type.

But the day shifted on, afternoon setting and you all headed to get changed into your swimsuits.

Grabbing your towel you headed outside to meet up with Phil who was chatting up one of the other male counsellors. He had that sly look in his eyes. You patted his arm, motioning him to go get it somewhere else and you headed for the dock.

Some others were already talking and breaking out the kayaks to take on the lake.

You once again sat down, dipping your toes into the water. You looked down into the water, noticing it seemed slightly darker than you remember. Playing it off to be the sunlight and you continued to gently swish your toes through.

One of the girls waved off as she pushed her kayak out into the lake. Rowing out a small bit enough that she comfortably floated along. Until her paddle hit something in the water, rippling up the lake.

You raised an eyebrow, looking down, noticing a chain tied to the leg of the dock. That hadn't been there the other day. The girl seemed to come to the same conclusion, pulling on the chain, something scraping along the bottom floor of the lake bed.

She grunted, pulling a little harder, one of the guys swimming out to steady the kayak.

You all watched as she pulled the chain up, struggling with it until finally. She screamed. You were startled, immediately pulling your feet out of the water. The girl dropped the chain and started desperately attempting to get out of the water and out of the kayak. There wasn't any mistaking her blonde hair, Crystal's body tied by the neck around the chain, her body gutted and hollowed so she'd sink.

You were horrified. Everyone was horrified. Peter and Phillip grab the chain and tug it, dragging her back to shore. They pulled her body onto the dock, seeing her lifeless eyes. The chain digging into her throat, stomach and chest completely hollowed out, her rib cage sticking up like fangs from her peeling, mutilated skin.

You backed up, hitting Phillip's arms. Covering your mouth as you saw what it was. Someone had murdered Crystal. And he was in your cabin last night. You hadn't imagined it.

Someone was hunting you...

"What do we do??" Phillip asked.

"We call the police!" Stacy cried.

"No! They'll shut us down. We'll be responsible."

"What if he comes after the rest of us?"

Your heart pounded a million miles an hour. What were you going to do!?

Some of the boys simply pushed her body back into the water. Vouching that they should just keep a lookout for anything that comes up. They wanted to make the rescue that it was probably just animals. Yeah, because animals were the ones to skillfully skin the organs and carve out around the sharp bone of her ribcage.

But no one could convince them otherwise, so you let it go. It still terrifies you, keeping an eye out as you walk the grounds. Every noise around you sounds like aggression.

🩸🔪💀🔪🩸

Dark eyes watched from the cabin door as Crystal stalked across the camp. Muttering angrily to herself, pulling her shirt fully on, and heading for the docks to get some fresh air. He watched her head down, footsteps following after her once she was far enough away.

The twisted sense of hunting prey filled his mind. Smelling the blood before it was spilt and the delicious scream he'd tear from her lungs.

She sat on the dock, huddled against the small sloshes of the lake against the dock legs. Staring out into the starry night. Footfalls make her brow wrinkle. "Peter, I told you to leave me alone."

He stared down at her, his hatchet glinting in the light, hand tightening on the blade in anticipation. He could almost get off to it. Grabbing her by the throat, hearing her gasp and choke, feet scraping against the wood of the dock. She tried to scream, grabbing his forearm, and looking up at him.

He stared down at her, eyes glimmering with excitement as he watched her thrash. A predator toying with its prey. She squirmed desperately, attempting to kick or bite her way out. Her nails dug into his forearm, drawing a light trickle of blood from his skin.

He frowned, gripping the hatchet and piercing it up through her back, the blade squelching through organs and blood, spilling across the dock and flicking into the cool water.

Her face was frozen in an endless scream, bloodletting out across the wood, falling limp after a moment.

He dropped her body, walked back up the dock and grabbed one of the boat chains from the grass. Unthreading it from the post, he came back over. He tied the chain around her throat, making sure it stayed.

The blade tore into her stomach and gutted her before picking up her organless body and throwing her into the lake. Blood seeps into the water like a bleeding-out animal. Like she'd just been mauled by a shark and was left as scraps.

Seeing blood flood and bubble along her flesh as she sank down to the bottom, the current moving her slightly, throat tugging on the chain that kept her secure to the dock.

He flicked out his blade, looking down at his forearm, wiping the blood from the scratches away. And he left silently.

🩸🔪💀🔪🩸

Simon stood at the edge of the tree line. His brother sneered from the porch, watching him investigate the noise that had rustled the bushes. He stood there, looking down at the small fox, blood splattered across the leaves, stomach torn open, caught in the barbed wire fence of the property and ultimately caught by whatever it had been running from.

Simon reached out to touch it but quickly pulled away and backed up. He walked back over to the porch, nose scrunching when he smelled the putrid smell of cigarette smoke from his brother.

"Go tell Dad, he'll want someone to pick the guts out of the fence." He sneers.

Simon kept his head down, heading inside where his father was muttering away angrily about his mother again, another bottle in his hand. Drinking it back while he went on and on over the phone.

Simon hesitantly went over to him, standing there patiently and waiting. His father noticed him and frowned angrily. "What do you want, boy!?"

Simon gulped, finding his voice. "There's a fox in the fence..."

"Is it dead?"

Simon nodded. "It's dead."

His father huffed, chugging back more alcohol. "Get the tools and go clean it then. You know what to do."

Simon felt his stomach twist painfully, digging under the sink in the kitchen to grab the gloves and cleaner, heading back outside onto the porch.

As he worked to remove the fox from the fence, Simon couldn't help but think about how much death he had been exposed to lately.

He finished cleaning the fence, but his mind was elsewhere.

As he buries the fox gently, Simon can't help but feel the weight of the world on his shoulders. He knows that there are cruel people out there who are capable of senseless violence, and it makes him angry. He wants to do something, to make a difference, but he doesn't know how.

As he walked back towards the house, he heard his father's voice. "You know, Simon, you can't be a sissy your whole life. You gotta learn to face things head-on. That's what real men do."

Simon felt his blood boil with anger. His father had no idea what he had gone through, the trauma he had endured. And yet, he was still expected to be a "man". He was only twelve by that point.

🩸🔪💀🔪🩸

You sat around the fire with a blanket over your shoulders. The warm afternoon was rather quiet as you all attempted to get over what you'd seen earlier. Why the hell were you sitting here instead of calling the cops? Someone was murdered and you just had to be stuck with the people worried about the camp's reputation.

The boys continued to work, trying to forget about the corpse in the lake and the ramifications that would come with it. The girls all sat in the cabin, trying to distract the younger campers from the grim day.

Phillips came over, handing you a flask of scotch. "Drink this. It'll help."

You took it from him, looking away. "Why'd she have to die?"

"I don't know."

"Where's Peter?"

"He's outside, making s'mores with the other kids."

You nodded, taking a sip of the liquor. It warmed you up and you sighed in relief.

Phillips sat down beside you, looking like his mind was miles away. "You seen that prick, Adam?"

You shake your head. "Nope. Disappeared last night hasn't come back." Saying it out loud really solidifies it for you and Phil. Looking at each other, simultaneously coming to one conclusion.

He was probably dead too...

"We need to get the fuck out of here. We can take his car, leave and go get help."

You agreed, nodding your head. "Yeah, yeah. We should leave now."

Phil wasn't gonna fight it. He may like to do his own thing but the idea of getting killed wasn't on his MO. Not this pretty boy face, no, no.

So, you packed back up, Phil convincing Stacy to go back with you. With your bags, you loaded into Phil's truck. Some of the counsellors seemed a little upset at the idea of you leaving so early. Or going to the cops at all.

But you weren't going to sit there and wait to be next.

Within another hour or so you were all packed up and getting in the truck. Phil pulled you out of the road, clicking his tongue as he turned the truck around.

You stared out the window, looking at the trees and the stretch of empty road as if they were watching back. Mocking you, laughing.

It was silent for a large portion of the drive, your foot tapping along the car.

"What of the others?" Stacy asked from the backseat. "Their fault for being stupid. Although that one counsellor was pretty cute..."

You remain quiet, watching the road as you drive. Tires picking up down the road. You looked down at your phone, distracting yourself with one of your games, Phil eventually filling the silence with the sound of the radio.

The thick tension in the air was palpable through the drive.

There was a thunk under the truck. You looked up, eyes widening as Phil brought the truck to a stop.

"What was that?" You looked out the side mirror but couldn't see anything.

"It's probably some dumb rocks." Phil takes off his seatbelt and opens the door. "Phil-" You reached out for him, and he shrugged it off. "I'm just gonna check it."

He left the door open, heading back around the truck, seeing something lying in the road. A clump of fur stuck on the tread of his tire, a fox in the road.

Phil approached it, looking around. "Geez... talk about dumb." He mutters, spitting into the dirt and scuffing his shoe. Looked like there wasn't any damage done to his truck though. That's what mattered.

He bent down to look at the fox again, hearing footsteps. Just as he looked up the sharp glint of a blade glared into his eyes. His heart lurched, backing up as the blade retracted, swinging again.

Phil gasped, continuing to dodge and trying to move, the large skull-masked figure intending to strike good with the hatchet.

You heard the scrape and thunk when the blade hit the side of the truck, seeing the large figure.

"Phil!" You cried, Stacy getting out of the car before you could stop her.

Your eyes widened, seeing the figure. He dwarfed both Stacy and Phil.

How did he get out here!?

The figure turns towards Stacy, raising the hatchet. She screams, but before he can strike, Phil tackles the figure from behind, knocking him down onto the ground.

You quickly get out of the car, running towards them. "Phil, are you okay?!"

"I'm alright, but we need to get out of here!" Phil grabs your arm, pulling you back to the truck.

The figure stands up, body looming in the dim light. You get a good look at him now. He was wearing a skull mask, with the rest of his face hidden in shadow. He was wearing a black jacket with a hood, and black gloves. You couldn't see anything else.

He starts coming towards you, but Phil quickly gets back into the truck, starting its engine. You all drive away quickly, leaving the figure behind.

You're breathing heavily, heart pounding as you look out the back window. The figure is standing in the same spot, watching as you drive away.

"We're getting the police..." You whisper, unable to take your eyes off the man as he gets smaller in the mirror.

"Agreed," Phil says, continuing down the open road.

Ghost lifts his mask, putting a lit cigarette between his scarred lips, exhaling smoke out into the open road. Turning back toward the camp. He'd gone too far anyway, back to his stomping grounds.

He takes another drag of smoke, dropping the cigarette and shoving his heel into it.

🩸🔪💀🔪🩸

Tommy smeared the dirt with his shoe, exhaling the last of the smoke from his lungs, spitting into the freshly shuffled dirt.

Simon watched him, holding the shotgun his father had shoved in his arms. "Tommy-"

"Shut it. You'll scare 'em off." He looks around, scanning the forest grounds, into the darker parts of the trees and across the bushes.

"They always run back to where they think they're safe." Tommy picks up a rock and throws it at the lake. Birds stir in the water, flicking and scattering, some rushing back toward the trees.

Simon gulps, raising the shotgun, and aiming upward at one of the birds. He shot, missing the thing by a mile.

Tommy scoffs, shaking his head. "You're not gonna hit anything like that, kid."

Simon lowers the gun, feeling embarrassed. He had never shot a gun before, let alone at a moving target. "Sorry, I-I didn't mean to-"

Simon can feel his cheeks flushing. He hates it when Tommy treats him like a little kid. But he knows better than to argue. Tommy's been doing this for years, and Simon's only been brought into this recently.

"What are we even doing out here?" Simon asks, shifting the gun in his hands.

Tommy turns to him, squinting in the sunlight. "We're hunting, Simon. Hunting for something that's been bothering the camp for too damn long."

🩸🔪💀🔪🩸

A couple days later you and the others returned. It was only you and Phil this time, along with a couple officers and a K9 unit. You'd been nervous about returning for the entire time up until finally going back.

Getting there you open the door, looking around. The camp was quiet, the trees still, bushes bristling as the breeze flowed steadily.

Some officers looked around, the K9 sniffing along the ground as you headed into the camp.

It was completely dead. Abandoned beer cans, a filled pool, and Kayaks still down at the beach unchained.

You latched onto Phil nervously as you followed the officers. Searching everywhere. The main office was empty, and cabins were abandoned. You gulped, the officers scratching their heads, but you knew it was too late. He had gotten to them.

"And what did you say he looked like again?"

"Tall- over six feet, skull mask, wore all black?"

The officer nodded, looking around. The K9's ears perked up, staring into the bushes. Barking into the darkness.

Your insides tensed up, watching the officer with the K9 move forward, others readying their guns in case.

You were shaking and your knees felt weak. the officer moved the K9 forward, waving it further in.

The K9 stopped, barking as it tugged on its leash. The officer stepped forward, pointing his gun into the woods.

The noise quieted, and the dog calmed down. The officer sighed, walking back over. "It's a deer. Want us to keep searching?"

You look around, sighing. "No, nobody's here. Nobody was here."

"Alright, well, we're going to be here for a while still. You can head back to town, we'll keep searching." The officer shrugged. You pocketed your hands, heading back to the car with Phil.

You get into the passenger seat; Phil leans forward and turns on the radio. You look in the rearview mirror and your body freezes. You look back, going cold in horror, a silent scream building in your throat. The hatchet reached up between the seats, grabbing Phil and choking him.

You attempt to tear the man off but he's too strong, blood slashing through Phil's throat as he angrily fights.

You finally manage to scream, getting the door open quickly getting out of the truck, your heart hammering in your chest. The figure turned towards you, his mask hiding any emotion he may have felt. You couldn't make out any details in the darkness, but you could tell that he was tall, muscular, and had a menacing aura about him.

Your feet carry you, thudding across the ground, the back door of the car opening and heavier footsteps following.

You try to call for help, bloody glove wrapping around your mouth, pulling you back, back pressed to the strong chest of a bloody killer.

You wanted to thrash but thought better, remaining still. His hand tightened over your mouth, leaning in so his warm breath fanned over your face. You whimpered, feeling weak, shaking as the edge of his weapon grazed your stomach. Tracing up your sternum, across your chest. Edge of the blade nipping your clothes.

You breathe in heavily through your nose, hands clasping on his forearm, wriggling around.

He enjoyed it. Seeing the pure fear in your eyes, watching you struggle and shake.

Your eyes water, looking into the bushes, knowing the officers were just right there...

He leaned closer to you, whispering into your ear, "Now, now." He was right up against your ear, breath hot and damp.

You try to kick him in the knee, but he's too strong. He grabs your leg, squeezing, bruising as he pulls it up, causing you to fall to your knees.

He moans in your ear, lips pulling into a smirk against the shell of your ear.

You gag, struggling, hearing the heavy thunk of his hatchet against the ground.

His hands were big enough to cover your face. One wrapped around your throat, the other on your mouth, thumb and fingers digging into the meat of your cheeks, squeezing.

Your hands scrambled against his arm, nails digging into his flesh as you desperately tried to claw him away.

There's barking and a sharp whine of the K9. You struggle, attempting to wriggle away as you hear the officers yelling. There's another loud bark, claws digging into the ground, the man letting you go.

You don't have a moment to think longer, taking off down the old road. The canine returns to Simon's side, a tussle of fur in her mouth, and he gives her the signal to wait. He smirks under the mask, watching you run as fast as you can. His stomach twisted in excitement. He couldn't wait to watch your blood spill…

He wants to watch the anguish before the pain. He wants to see your insides. Do they look as good as you do? He swings the blade wiping some of the blood off, running it along the white truck stopped along the road.

Tears fill your eyes, your heart pounding. Your legs shake as you run with everything you have in you. He could have just killed you, but you couldn’t give up. You had to get out. You had to run. You had to survive. This twisted game of cat and mouse, feeling the cats claws ready to sink into your tail and drag you back for a meal.

For now, you were prey, and he was predator.

(Please do let me know what you thought if you read this. I worked hard and haven't a true slasher fic before. I tried my best and want to give you guys more of this.)

[flowerbxuquet]

Shauna nsfw drabble bcuz i haven’t uploaded in a long time :3

WARNINGS: Nsfw (duh), brief mentions of violence, not really consensual at first??? feral shauna

A/N: ended up way longer than i expected.

Shauna’s so angry lately..no one can really blame her with the death of her baby and the death of Jackie. Shauna’s lost a lot in a couple months and it’s really been draining her.

You’re the only one who doesn’t look at her like she’s some feral animal though..you comfort her, you hug her and tell her that you don’t necessarily understand what she’s going through but you’re there.

Shauna adores you, you’re the one thing in the wilderness that makes her feel so warm other than the cold and feral version of her that craves to feast on flesh.

She’s so mad, she’s filled with anger and hatred — especially towards Lottie. The way the girl acts so calm and spiritual, ‘brainwashing’ the others into what Shauna believes is delusions.

Shauna throws the first punch at Lottie, she can feel the soreness and pain in her knuckles at how harsh the hit is. She’s ready to keep going until she feels a hand tug at her jacket.

Shauna whips around, looking ready to kill until her eyes fall on you. Sometimes when she looks at you all she can see is Jackie and that sight..calms her slightly.

“Shauna, don’t.” You beg, the last thing everyone needs is another dead body and Shauna looks like she was about to murder Lottie. Lottie looks like she’s ready to protest but before she can you’re dragging Shauna off her.

Because you’re the only one who can tame the feral beast in Shauna’s body.

…

You bring Shauna up to the attic - attending to the wounds on her bloodied knuckles with the limited supplies you all have.

“I don’t need you to protect me.” Shauna huffs, a bit irritated as the anger in her body just seems to build the more she can’t find a stress relief.

You sigh, looking up at Shauna with an almost disappointed gaze.

“I know, honestly I think I was protecting Lottie more than you. You looked ready to kill her.” You sigh and set the cloth you had back into the water bucket you used to disinfect Shauna’s hands.

Shauna rolls her eyes at your comment and looks down at her knuckles that you had patched up for her — the action makes her heart flutter a bit.

“I wouldn’t have actually killed her.” Shauna protests, “Just..I don’t know what I was thinking..”

You give her a sympathetic smile and walk over to sit beside her, draping an arm around her waist as you give her a hug. Shauna slightly stiffens before melting into the contact, her breathing getting heavier as she takes in your embrace.

You’re so warm, she can hear your heartbeat against hers, she feels absolutely feral and all she wants to do right now is devour you whole.

Shauna feels like she’s blacking out, nearly dissociated from her body and she doesn’t even realize that she’s smashing her lips against yours hungrily.

Your eyes widen and you stiffen up, gasping in surprise but Shauna takes that initiative to push her tongue into your mouth as she squeezes your waist to pull you into her lap.

You’re on top of Shauna now — eventually you melt into the kiss and are kissing her back just as hungrily. It’s been months since the both of you have had some real connection with another human being and you two are practically starving.

Shauna pulls back for a second, desire in her eyes as her lips are bruised from the rough kissing. “I need you so fucking bad right now,” Shauna growls, attaching her lips to your neck.

She grabs your hips and flips the two of you over, pressing you against the harsh wood flooring but you’re too lost in the sensation of Shauna’s lips on your neck to care.

“Shauna.” You mewl softly, laying your head back to give her more room to kiss and bite.

Shauna’s hungry and she eagerly tugs your shorts down, giving you no time to process as she slips her hand into your panties.

Your hips jolt in surprise as Shauna starts to rub harsh circles on your clit, she’s never really pleasured another woman before but she’s touched herself plenty of times to be familiar enough.

Your breathing gets heavier as Shauna’s fingers rub your bundle of nerves while her lips continue to suck and kiss on your neck.

“You’re so fucking sweet the way you always try to protect me.” Shauna pants as she starts to rock against your thigh, “All mine..no one else can touch you because you belong to me.”

Shauna growls, sloppily pushing two fingers into your cunt which causes you to cry out at the sudden stretch. You move up to cover your mouth since the girls are just downstairs but Shauna grasps at your wrists and slams them above your head onto the wood floor.

“Don’t you fucking dare.” Shauna moans, her hips snapping against your thigh, “Let them hear you, let them all hear how good i’m making you feel.”

Shauna’s nails are slightly digging into your wrists from the pleasure coursing through her body and she continues to roughly pump her fingers into your weeping pussy.

Your moans fill the room, unable to even hold them back as Shauna fingers you with an absolutely feral pace. That knot in your stomach is starting to get tighter and you writhe against Shauna while she pins you down.

“A-Aah! S—Shauna, please..i’m gonna cum..” You pant inbetween gasps, her fingers curl and rub against your walls without mercy.

Shauna grits her teeth together as her rocking against your thigh gets harsher, the way you announce your pleasure to her makes her clit throb and she can feel her orgasm approaching as well.

“Do it. Fucking cum all over my fingers.” Shauna spits at you with an aggressive tone, taking out all her anger with the harsh pounding of her fingers inside your wet pussy.

Your mouth falls agape and nearly your body rises up off the ground, shouting Shauna’s name with pleasure as you gush all over her fingers.

Shauna’s eyes squeeze shut while her mouth falls open, letting out harsh pants of breathe as she rides your thigh with reckless abandon.

Shauna doesn’t care that the girls downstairs can hear you crying out her name, it honestly just makes her body even hotter and her panties get even wetter. She wants everyone to know that she’s making you feel absolute bliss because you belong to her.

“Tell me you love me.” Shauna gasps out, her thighs squeezing against your leg as she rides you desperately, “Please.”

She needs to hear it, needs to hear that atleast someone does, that she’s not completely alone out here without Jackie.

“I love you, Shauna..” Your breathless voice comes out as your hands fall on her waist to stabilize her.

The coil inside Shauna’s stomach snaps and she lets out a loud cry as her orgasm wracks through her body, her thighs slightly twitching.

Shauna collapses against you, cuddling you close as she pants heavily to attempt to catch her breath that was stolen from the intense pleasure through her body.

You wrap your arms around her and kiss the side of her head, happy that Shauna got the stress relief she needs as she falls asleep with a small smile on her face for the first time in weeks.

[basil-does-arttt]

so we all know how Bury The Light as a theme song represents Vergil and subsequently his story and themes within DMC 5??

Well obviously that means Subhuman is the same for Dante. So i did some thinking (wow big surprise there shocking i know)

The TLDR of this is my conclusion that Dante is reckless and overconfident because of his half-devil nature and as a result disregards his life and safety. Also, that Dante has mixed feelings about his demon side.

Specifically what got me to this thought was the line we all know if you've listened to subhuman:

"You cannot kill me, i am subhuman."

And,

I mean come on, the message couldn't have been written any clearer here. Because he's part demon, because he's - as Dante puts it, assumably the writing of this song is from his POV much like i assume Bury the Light is from Vergil's POV - sub-human, he believes he cant die. That whatever is thrown at him, no matter what or how dangerous the situation is, he naively believes he will come out the other end unscathed.

And to be honest, he kinda has reason to believe that thus far. If being stabbed at least 5 times throughout your life and brushing each one off as if it were a mere scratch wasn't enough to convince him, defeating so many different great demonic beasts including Mundus himself definitely would. I mean, who wouldnt? Whatever hell throws at Dante, surely cant be any worse than the actual fucking demon king or his own brother post-DMC 5. In a sense, he believes he is immortal.

But that way of thinking is shallow, its naive and leaves him open to danger because it makes him cocky. He thinks he's untouchable, and that way of thinking could get him seriously hurt or worse if he isnt careful. (As we see in the beginning of DMC 5 actually. He thinks "eh, ive fought worse, how bad could this actually be?" That "Its only Vergil, and ive fought him before." Only to have his shit kicked in and end up in a coma for a month. Imagine if that happened with a different demon that wasn't so merciful as to keep him alive for all that time, who would've jumped at the opportunity to rip him to shreds in an instant.)

I also want to go into how the song reflects Dante's (poor) mental health and his thoughts on being a half-demon.

Its kinda hard to catch unless you really think about it but the song is clearly negative in tone when it comes to describing Dante's own devil form. "As i call upon the dark gift to erupt" is one line that sticks out to me and i think is the best example of this. I also believe from the song that Dante views his DT as a seperate entity from himself; "I feel the devil in me, we're coming right for you".

"Funny how the mind tries to sink me deeper, as the evil tries to turn me around." The evil could be in reference to other demons, yes, but it also could be referencing his own "demon"; "i must not forget that i have bled, from no respect to the demons in my head". Wether that line means he's gotten himself hurt because of his own recklessness or self-harm i cant tell, and i wont assume one or the other specifically.

Throughout the song too, the lines "i cannot erupt, i must control, i cannot erupt, i must explode" to me also seems like Dante struggles with control of his DT, and is scared of losing himself when triggered. The whole tone of the song seems like a rampage of sorts too, its very aggresive and almost violent. "Something save me, put me out of my destiny, and drop me safely in this hell"; yet at the same time as his fears toward his own DT, it feels natural to him, this kind of "bloodlust" he feels in his triggered form is something he doesnt want but he knows he cant keep from happening entirely, so as a result the most comfortable place for him is in danger. He can let loose and he doesnt have to worry when all he's killing is demons. One last thing, "i see right past me, the eyes are flashing" to me sounds like Dante becomes almost dissociated when triggered, he's not really present in his mind and body and is acting on pure instinct alone.

All in all, Subhuman (like i said earlier) at first just sounded like an epic battle theme for Dante, but when i really listen to it, it becomes much sadder. Of course all of this could just be me bullshitting so id love to hear other's takes on this.

i also wanna analyze Bury the Light too. So i might do that later.

[josnhoes]

Platonic!Yan batfam with young adult reader. Part 4

[Part 3]

Note: Reader is 18-22 years old. Gn reader

Content warning: being treated like a child, being looked down on, stalking, obsessions, soft yandere but still a yandere, reader has memory issues and it's ambiguous as to why, delusional batfam, batfam as a whole basically view you as a child younger then Damien despite you being older, reader is questioned by police, reader witnessed a crime, reader tried to be a hero, violence, blood, mentions of death, dissociation, abduction

Focus Dick (Nightwing)

------

Life moved on after the incident with Redhood. He'd left early that morning leaving a note saying, 'See you soon Sparky -RH'. You didn't care to think of what the note could mean. So you burried the strange sense of foreboding that clawed in your mind at the note. Maybe the Gotham paranoia had gotten to you?

Either way, things in the next few days were normal...as normal as Gotham could be. The bat clan had put most of the heavy rollers back in Arkham at a record speed. No one knew if it was just the rogues being sloppy, or the bats were feeling a tad extra feral. You remembered when you first learned about Batman and his underlings; the idea of the police having feral furry themed vigilantes was funny. You'd thought your new neighbor was joking. But no, it was true, and after your personal run-ins with Robin and Redhood, you could confidently claim the group was feral and would punch God..any God really... given the chance. Which was what Gotham needed to be blunt.

It was nice though that you got out of the heart of Gotham sometimes. So you'd taken a day off to go to Bludhaven. It wasn't better than Gotham, but it was a change of place. The fact that a comic store was having a closing door sale was totally *not* the reason. It was.. but you were hoping to get something cool for cheap! Nerd stuff was expensive, and as a nerd, you knew that well.

The quest for a trinket wasn't supposed to end with you being brought into the local police station for questioning. You weren't part of a crime no, but you were a witness, *the* witness. A mugging gone wrong. Honestly the details were fuzzy, yet at the same time, key parts you couldn't forget. The feeling of the woman's heart fading as you held pressure on the stab wound. The wheeze in her voice as she struggled to breathe and tell you her final words. The way your body trembled as the paramedics arrived and carted her away to a hospital. The sensation of blood on your hands and skin, and the smell...

"You okay?" The police officer's voice pulled you from the spiral of your thoughts.

"I'm sorry what?" You were in a haze, shock most likely.

"I asked if you would be okay answering a few more questions. Detective Grayson just got here and wants to ask a few."

"Oh sure yeah..." the voice, no your voice spoke, but it didn't feel like you.

Dick Grayson walked into the room the officers had put you in. You weren't in trouble. A nearby camera had seen it all go down, but you were a vital witness, one who was clearly not well after what you saw. Dick didn't blame you for your state either. He...he should have been there. When Bruce had called telling him you were in Bludhaven, he was ecstatic to think he could meet you. He'd been planning a nice little meet cute styled thing to bridge a gap from a stranger to you to being besties. He was your eldest brother, the one you'd be able to rely on most. You'd love everyone in the family but you'd come to him first for everything. He could so easily picture it. The two of you staying up late, watching films and you opening up to him and feeling safe in his company. The inside jokes you'd have together, you'd both be thicker than thieves.

So seeing you as you were now was a reminder of just how fragile you were. You were in shock a really bad case of it too. Your eyes were distant as you struggled to answer the basic questions. You were shaking. You still had the victim's blood on your shirt too. He should have been there. Any of them should have, but you were in *his* turf so it should have been him. He should have gotten there before you had to see it. You shouldn't have had to apply pressure to a wound like that.

Your voice was hollow, he'd seen videos of you. Hollow is never something he could have pictured you as. You had so much life to you. Yet here you were in this state because of *his* failures; as Nightwing, a detective, and a big brother. What if it had been you? You would have died on his watch in his turf. He couldn't handle that right now.

He got the answers he could from you, then easily guided you out. He told his fellow workers he was taking you home. No one questioned it, Dick was a good guy and not the type to let a traumatized witness go home alone.

You didn't question him as he ushered you to his car, or where he was taking you when you hadn't told him where you lived. He wasn't sure you could do that right now. He wasn't lying saying he was taking you home... it just wasn't the home you'd have expected if you were more here. The room in the manor wasn't perfect, but you'd be safe there.

He brought you inside, and the family members at home seethed at him. He couldn't blame them, this was his fault. Cass took you with help from Alfred to get you cleaned up and put you to bed. His heart broke seeing how you just went with everything. Like you were aware enough to function on a base level and orders, but mentally? You were gone. Pulled into yourself, protecting yourself from the trauma that he'd caused. He should have been there.

[citrusandcyanide]

Can't Lose You | L.G.

Part 2

Pairing: Lip Gallagher x f!Reader

an. Okay this part is a lot shorter than I expected just cause I think it was a good place to end the scene. I got more coming, but this had to stand on its own. I forgot to mention in the last part that I changed Lips college to UChicago instead of Chicago Polytechnic. Also Thank you for the kind messages and reblogs!!! They really motivate me to write and put out chapters quicker. Thank you for the love <3333

Synopsis. Lip doesn't want to go to college unlike his best friend who has her mind set on leaving Chicago and her feelings for Lip behind. Lip won't let her leave so easily.

words. 1.2k

Warnings. Drinking. angst, swearing. idk clutch your pearls.

Part 1 Part 3 (Final)

“Berkeley…” Lip said as he held the acceptance letter in his hand. “California.” 

“Cali-fucking-fornia,” You said with a grin, giggling a bit from the beers. You had gone through more than a few. You were tipping over the edge of tipsy. Lip was going at a much slower pace. You were laying down on his bed while he was sitting on the edge of it. His eyes kept scanning over the paper. His expression was bare. You were too gone to care what he was thinking. “I fucking did it. I’m fucking out of here. All that work, fuck… I was hoping it would do something but I didn’t think it would.I got in. to BERKELEY. THE UC BERKELEY.”

“I’m proud of you, kid,” Lip applauded, but his voice didn’t show any enthusiasm . You stood up to grab the letter from him. Only then did you notice his clenched jaw and dissociated expression. You stared at him until he looked over. He straightened his back and handed you the letter. “I’m sorry it’s just far.” 

“Yeah that’s the point: Far. Away. Not here,” You replied, rolling your eyes. You knew he would do this, but you thought he would at least try and pretend to be happy for you. This was all you had been wanting, a life outside of Chicago. But he couldn’t bring himself to entertain the idea for a moment. He wasn’t going to let you leave easy. 

“What about the, uh–what’s it called? The institute. ISA something,” Lip asked. You interrupted him briefly to correct him before he continued.  “That’s a perfectly good option.” 

“Why? I told you I don’t want to stay here,” You sighed and fixed your position on the bed so you were fully facing him. 

“Yeah but is it really that bad here? It’s not sunshine and rainbows but it’s fine. It’s not like Berkeley is gonna be any different,” He said, looking at you fully. There was something behind his eyes you couldn’t quite place. Like a part of him was offended you wanted to leave. You didn’t like it. 

“There isn’t anything left for me here.” The excitement left your voice. You stated it plainly. It was a fact. There wasn’t. Lip wasn’t yours. Lip had never been and never would be. You had no other attachment to Chicago than him. You waited long enough for something that wouldn’t happen. Lip scoffed. 

“We’re here. Our friendship, us,” Lip said, pain evident in his voice. He was taking it personally that you were ignoring the fact he was here. He didn’t realize he was exactly the reason you needed to leave. “Is it selfish of me to say that I don’t want you to leave me behind?”

“You have your own ticket out. You are personally capable of leaving on your own,” You quickly replied. It hurt you having to justify your reason for leaving to your best friend when he’s known how important it’s meant for you this whole time. He couldn’t be happy for you for a moment without thinking of what it meant for himself and his life. 

“I’m not going to fucking Boston,” He replied offended, shaking his head in disgust. 

“There’s nothing keeping you here. That’s your choice,” You argued back. You weren’t going to let him paint himself out to be the victim. He had equal the chance to leave Chicago behind and start something good for himself. You wanted that for him. You desperately wanted to see him succeed and find happiness outside of what your current life had to offer. He just couldnt see the same for you.

“You’re keeping me here. We– Us,” Lip turned fully to face you. His eyes pierced deep into yours. It didn’t sound like an excuse. He said it and you could tell he actually believed it. It was the first time in years that he was admitting that a part of him needs you in his life. He cared about having you with him. He cared that you grew up together. That you were his other half, but it was delusional to believe the two of you hadn’t been growing apart. And whatever this is was a plea to hold on to what was left. 

“Stop repeating that as if it was a thing. There hasn’t been an us in years,” Your voice was stern. 

“But there can be. Me at UChicago, you at SAIC. a few miles away from eachother,” Lip put a hand on your knee. “I haven’t been fair to you or your feelings and I know what I said before but not having you here is so much worse—” 

“Don’t bring my feelings into this.” You winced. You shut your eyes in an attempt to control your emotions. 

“It’s not just yours,” He argued. 

“Stop.” You kept your eyes closed. 

“They’re mine too.” You felt the bed move under you as he inched closer to where you were sitting. 

“Stop.” 

 “I love you–” You cut him off before he could finish. 

“Don’t say that. You don’t want me. I know how this will go,” You said opening your eyes. The alcohol had made you dizzy but your head was as clear as day. You’re heart was pulling you towards him and it made you angry. “ You’ll keep me here and play with someone else’s heart instead cause you think it’s kinder than to do it to me, but you are playing with my heart. All of this is hurting me. You’re hurting me.” 

“I don’t want to hurt you,” He reached his hand out towards you. You quickly pulled it away. 

“You can’t help it,” You spat back. Tears threatened to fall from your eyes as your rage began bubbling instead you. 

“You don’t know what you’re saying.” He shook his head and tried to reach for your hand again. You held your own close to your chest. Clenching your shirt over your pounding heart.

“You don’t love me.” With each of his words you felt your walls being chipped away. 

“I do,” His voice sounded like he was pleading. 

“You don’t want me.” You were convincing yourself, not Lip. He was your weakness. He always was.  

“Y/n, if you stay I’m yours.” 

The world stopped. As you looked at the boy in front of you, your walls broke. He won. Lip gets what he wants and he wants you to stay. To give up the dream you had been working so hard for and you were about to. He was offering you another dream.

“Let me be yours… please,” He pleaded, his voice barely above a whisper. Your hand fell into his. He gently pulled you forward to him, closer and closer until your noses touched. You closed your eyes. His lips touched yours. How could you ever say no to Lip Gallagher?

~~~~

an. poor Mandy lol

[frvnkcastles]

Hello love! I know you’re probably still in recovery, so feel free to table this request as long as you like (or permanently if it doesn’t vibe with you!) but it came to mind and I immediately thought of you.

I thought, maybe something happens to the reader as a consequence of Frank’s life. Maybe they’re kidnapped or tortured or otherwise hurt, and it’s really not that bad - Frank gets to you in time, and you’re not too terribly hurt. But it sets off the readers cPTSD, which they weren’t ready to share with Frank yet. And he thinks they’re haunted and traumatized by the event, and you don’t know how to tell him it’s not what he thinks. And Franks doing his whole guilt spiral but you can’t explain that it’s not his fault, that these cuts and bruises are nothing. That you’re not scared of those men. That it’s something else you’re scared of

WILL YOU STILL LOVE WHO I AM ➵ F. CASTLE

Summary: You’re kidnapped and Frank comes to your rescue, but the ordeal triggers your CPTSD and you just want to make Frank feel less guilty.

Warnings: Knives, guns, mild torture, childhood abuse, hurt/comfort

Word count: 1.8k

Author’s note: I hope I did your idea justice!! I don’t feel like this is my best work but it’s a very heavy topic to write about and I really wanted to be respectful and careful with it. Sending you lots of love <33 (Also, I’m realizing I am NOT good at ending fics lmaooo.)

It was supposed to be a fun night out with your girlfriends. And you could have sworn you hadn’t taken your eyes off of your glass, but somewhere between laughing at your friend and reapplying your lipgloss you must have lost focus and that was when they had struck. The dancefloor was full, anyway, so you shouldn’t have been surprised that no one paid attention to a stranger dragging you away, and yet, you wished so dearly that someone would have.

That, you figured, was how you ended up in that warehouse, tied to a chair with your head heavy and groggy, just like your eyelids. You couldn’t tell how long it had been, but you were tired and scared and all you wanted was to go home.

You came to when one of your captors roughly grabbed your chin and tilted your head up. ”Smile. It’s for your boyfriend”, the man grinned in satisfaction, and as he squished your face and snapped a photo of you, you squinted at the flash. It was over quickly but the burn on your jaw remained, and it made you groan as you tried to look around you and process your surroundings.

”What do you say we make you all pretty for when he arrives?” the man spoke up in front of you, and when you turned to look at him, you saw the gleaming knife in his hands. You inhaled sharply and your whole body tensed at the implications, but with your wrists and ankles tied, there was nowhere for you to go.

He traced the knife across your stomach, not enough to draw blood but enough to remind you he could. He then fisted the material of your dress in one hand and, with his other one, drove the blade through the fabric, creating wide tears over your chest and thighs. He laughed mockingly, and as he trailed the knife past your revealed chest, tears welled up in your eyes.

”You’re going to regret this”, you mustered, but the shakiness in your voice didn’t make a very convincing case. Still, the attempt was enough to piss him off, and before you could do or say anything else, he had cut you right across your collarbone.

”Don’t talk back to me”, he warned you, and despite the tears running down your face, you stared back at him defiantly.

”You’re pathetic”, you spat at him, and within seconds, he had swung his hand across your face, making the warehouse echo with the smack. You cried out, and in an instant, you were back in your childhood home — at the hands of your parents, slapped around like you weren’t worth anything else.

You supposed that dissociating from the situation was how you got through the next hour. You were far too busy stuck in a flashback to fully process the cuts you received at the hands of your captor, but you heard every word he whispered in your ear.

You’re worthless. You deserve this. No one’s coming to save you.

It was all too familiar to you. But you had survived then, and you were determined to survive now — you knew Frank was coming to your rescue. Even if you had barely started dating, he wouldn’t let an innocent person get killed by his enemies, and that was exactly why you had faith that it was only a matter of time.

And, indeed, eventually you heard gunshots from behind the heavy door closing you alone with the man. He flinched, and when you both heard Frank roar out his name, you knew it was time. He reacted by circling behind you and holding the knife to your throat, so tight you barely dared to breathe.

Then the door opened, and Frank looked absolutely feral as he pointed the gun at the man behind you. ”Let her go”, he demanded with his gravelly voice, and the man only laughed.

”You stupid—”, he began, but Frank didn’t waste more time — he pulled the trigger, and your captor dropped dead, the knife clattering against the floor as he did.

You exhaled heavily, and immediately, Frank was rushing to your side. ”I gotchu, sweetheart. ’M here now. I’mma take you home, okay?” he rasped, using his own knife to free you from your binds. Your body slumped forward and he caught you with ease, supporting you against his chest as he gathered your limbs and heaved you up into his arms.

”I got you”, he repeated in a quiet whisper, before carrying you out to his truck and taking you home.

Soon enough, you were seated on the edge of your bathtub with an ice pack against your bruising eye and Frank’s hand ghosting over your body to assess all the damage. In hindsight, it really wasn’t as bad as it could have been — minor, shallow cuts littered your skin but they didn’t even need stitches, and the drugs were wearing off. Frank still made sure to disinfect the cuts and apply band-aids where it was necessary, but for the most part, there was nothing to do about the physical aspect.

He helped you out of your torn dress and into one of his sweaters, and the whole time, you could tell how tense he was, like he was a ticking timebomb about to go off.

”You saved me”, you voiced your thoughts out loud, after not having said a word since he had found you. Your words got his eyes to meet yours, and you gave him a weak smile. ”You found me and I’m okay”, you added, and with a wry scoff, Frank looked down at your conjoined hands as you stood in the middle of your bedroom.

”You’re not okay”, he grunted, his voice dripping with guilt and blame, all of it directed at himself. ”I never shoulda let this happen”, he continued as he let go of your hands and started pulling off his skull-adorned vest, only now finding the time to take care of himself.

”It wasn’t your fault”, you argued with a frown, and with his back turned to you, Frank shrugged.

”Wouldn’t have happened to you if you weren’t involved with me”, he pointed out, and from the fragile tone, you felt like he was on the verge of tears. It made you sick to your stomach, and in a sick twist, you started to feel guilty, for causing him distress.

You weren’t used to someone looking after you, either. And his care-taking seemed to only emphasize the voice in your head that your parents had instilled in. You didn’t deserve it. You would have been better off dead.

Swallowing, you gave Frank’s back a caress before dropping your hand. ”Let’s just get some sleep, okay?” you proposed, ready to put this night behind you, and with a small nod, Frank agreed.

It was 4 AM when you jolted awake from a nightmare. You cried out as you flinched up, and reacting to the potential danger, Frank snapped out of his slumber, ready to attack. When he saw you sitting next to him, on the edge of hyperventilating, he ran a hand across his face and reached for your arm.

”Sweetheart”, he called for you, and startled out of your haze, you turned to look at him. You let your shoulders drop and with a sigh, you buried your face in your hands, all the while Frank climbed out of bed and began pacing back and forth in the room.

”This is my fault, shit, I never should have let you go. I never should have gotten you involved in the first place”, he rambled away, ”I fucked up, I did, and now you’re sufferin’ ’cause of me.”

Shaking your head, you tried to open your mouth and tell him. You wanted to. But a part of you was nervous. You hadn’t told him about all your trauma yet, hadn’t disclosed the effects your childhood still had on you, and you didn’t know how to get the ball rolling.

”Frank”, you croaked out, but he didn’t stop pacing. ”Frank, listen to me. It’s not your fault”, you insisted, and finally, he gave you a weary look, like he was catching you in a lie. But it wasn’t a lie — your nightmare hadn’t been about the man with the knife, it hadn’t been about the cuts or the bruises, it hadn’t been about any of it. It was like any other nightmare you had on a regular basis, and if anyone was to be blamed, it was your parents.

”Look… I didn’t want to tell you like this, but it’s not the first or the worst time I’ve been hurt”, you started, and finally, Frank paused and sat on the edge of the bed to be closer to you.

”Whaddya mean?” he wondered, curiosity and concern in his voice as he looked at you intently.

”My parents”, you shrugged with an unamused chuckle. ”I guess all of this is reminding me of the way they treated me. They put me down, physically and verbally, and no one’s ever looked after me the way you do”, you explained, and instantly, something shifted in Frank’s eyes.

”Shit”, he breathed out, ”baby, I’m sorry. You realize you deserve to be looked after, right?”

You licked your lips in thought. ”I don’t know”, you answered truthfully, and that was what got Frank to snap out of his guilt. He sat closer to you and took your hands in his, peppering your knuckles with kisses.

”I mean it. I’m real sorry no one’s shown you that before. But lemme tell you, I was going outta my mind tonight. I was wonderin’ if I’d ever see ya again. And that’s a feeling I never wanna deal with again. I want you in my life, and I fuckin’ wish it wasn’t so dangerous”, he ranted, and pursing your lips together in a faint smile, you nodded.

”It really wasn’t that bad. I’m okay. You came to get me”, you assured, before adding, ”and you’re worth it.”

Chuckling, Frank ducked his head before leaning in to kiss your forehead. ”You’re worth everythin’. I adore you, y’know? There ain’t a thing I wouldn’t do for you”, he emphasized, holding you close to him.

”Thank you for saying that. I might need some support for the next few days. I think I can manage it for the most part but after getting triggered things suck a little extra for a while”, you spoke shyly, worried that you were putting too much pressure on him, or revealing too much of yourself. This thing with him was still so fresh, and that was why you had avoided telling him about your past before — it was too much too soon. But now, you supposed, you both had baggage and it was just a part of who you were.

”Hey, you got it. Anything else you need right now?” Frank tilted his head at you, and quickly, you nodded.

”Yes. For you to stop blaming yourself and to get in bed with me”, you decided, and with a chuckle, Frank nodded.

”Aight. I’ll try my best. C’mere, sweetheart.” And with that, he wrapped you into his embrace and helped you fall back asleep, satisfied that you were still in one piece and home with him.

[baynetta]

i love running to you whenever i had concept ideas because i feel like i wouldn’t be good enough to write them, i hope you don’t mind!

but omg, im listening to exhale by sabrina carpenter and i just got an idea—what if spider!yn just like…reaches a breaking point? like between the super hero life, her family life, and college life…she’s just super exhausted with everything, yk? i highly recommend listening to the song, it’s amazing <3

and miguel is dealing with a whole bunch of shit with his own life and matters so he doesn’t really see how exhausted and how bad she’s hurting inside until she shows up to hq the next day super exhausted. he’s giving her the rundown on the next mission and she’s trying her best to listen, but she ends up passing out due to lack of sleep and severe stress and he starts FREAKING OUT. like it genuinely breaks his heart seeing her like that.

exhale (mini fic)

there’s somedays you’ll ask yourself what you even bother to show up. what you even doing what you’re doing if it’s always causing you so much pain and distress, i mean you suppose to love these things right?… waking up at 5 am having to indure the loud horns and noisy neighbors, the feeling of the heavy cold smog making hard to catch a breath in such crowded streets that only nyc can offer, find a way to fit in such packed wagons. all this effort just to get to uni and being forced to face the hard but honest truth, that maybe you’re just not good enough. not good enough even for your family, it’s been countless times that you’ve been showing up late for dinner, all bruised up, evading your mom every time she touched the subject of you wanting to drop out, your late night scapes, how you became just so apart from everybody. what’s more difficult is how you stopped taking care of yourself, completely dissociating for days asking you how or when your life got to this point. you constantly are wishing to make yourself feel something, pulled you out from this stoic state. just the right moment when you feel comfortable enough to take off this weight that you been carry on for months. the truth it’s that you love saving people, be the hero that every person can feel protected by, but who’s taking care of you.

for miguel it hasn’t be easy either. when he decided to isolate himself planing the next mission, he started to miss again that warm-cozy feeling to have a company when he most needs it. it i’ll often think about what you said to him, about your family pissing you off lately. he couldn’t even listen to the rest of it, he just kept thinking of how much he’ll give to even have one. he took it as kick directly in the guts, something that just got incrustaded in his mind. he felt how the memories started to attack again, but this time he couldn’t make it stop, make them go away. he usually will find ways to distract himself, making the best out of his slightly nerdy hobbies, keep repairing the avarite sistem, train with the spider team, your smile, god.. when was the last time he ever saw it. you two had became so apart from each other the last couple of months that he barely has sees you without the mask, if he’s not giving you structions, he’s asking you to pay more attention, to be better. he wished he didn’t throw those dagger words at you, but you almost got killed and if that ever happened that’s on him..and only him. he just can’t.allow that.

as miguel gather the team to try give them a rundown of the next mission you could see just by the way he was standing, he’s simply not in the mood. and you were late as per usual. as you make your way into the room you try so hard to pass unnoticed by him, but even if you were wearing a sack of potatoes as a suit, you’ll never be overlooked by him, he just can’t help himself, always looking out for you, he’ll always find himself staring at you intensively. but do to the lack of sleep, and dehydration (srsly when was the last time you drink a glass of water?) impairing your muscle coordination making you stumble around, making noise, not paying attention. “oye! if you’re not going to pay attention at least you can’t stop distracting everybody”–. he barked. and you knew it was directed at you. it surprised both of you honestly. he really didn’t meant to do it, but as i said the man was stressing out lately. he usually will set you aside from the group, and reprehend you personally. but not today. and miguel could feel the instant regret kickin in as he sees the annoyed looks from everybody, feeling his heart sink deep in his chest as he sees you getting all flustered, distinguishing some harsh words being throwed across the room “agh, again?” “why she even here”. you noticed obviously, it was no strange feeling being a burden everywhere else but now here.. it was just too much, the pressure in your head starting to bump, feeling drizzled, how slowly your cheeks start to burn tangling your whole face, your legs start to numb, you took your mask off trying hard to reach for air, you were suffocating as you try to make your way out of there.

miguel notice it and it felt like his body went on autopilot, he wasn’t thinking anymore, he got to get to you. he calls out your name several times, but it felt like echoing in the back or your head as you start loosing conscience of your own steps, so you trip and inmidiatly got cought by a fellow spider partner from the hq, you try to mumble some words but you can’t even get to a full sentence. the last thing you distinguish is an “are you okay?” and all pitch black.—to nothing. miguel for the other hand was panicking, he’s face was full on horror, as he’s making his way in the circle of people that gathered around your passed out body. he just throw them around —“EVERYBODY GET THE FUCK OUT!”—. he yelps tragically, everyone inmidiatly started to back out, they simply don’t want to deal with him in that state (yeah he’s scary protective) as he gets to you, he inmidiatly drops on his knees, he’s in shock how could this happen, how could he allow this to happen. he took you delicated frame by his hands, one caressing your back, and the other supporting your head. he looks around in desbilief, he wanted to hunt down every single one of those crows eyes staring you down, not doing anything. fuck it made him go violent. “i said..everybody..out..out”—.

it was quiet but sharp, it’s visible how his fangs started to peak out and his eyes are mixed rage but an inscrutable pain, the man was not playing anymore. as the room left empty and your pulse started to stabilize thanks to the aracnid sense, preventing your body to go on an physical trauma. you sense how little strings of hair peaked at your noise, making it tingle, as you’re eyes adjust at the sudden light assaulting your sensitive vision. as you breathe in you feel a light-weight on your chest that moves with you as your exhale the lodge air off your lungs. you peek down and see miguel’s head resting on it. “hey” you whisper. he looks up to you with his glossy puppy eyes, his thumbs now brushing your lips making a trace down to your chin. “i’m sorry mi morenita” god when was the last time he called you like that, “i was not there for you”—. he coos as he presses his front with yours. “i’m..i..missed this” that’s the only thing that you managed to say, and it was true, you missed his intimate contact, his gentle touch. but more importantly you missed feeling safe.

(pd: i hope is not too much i got inspired, and also this hits home particularly so it’s the first time a relate this much with a y/n 😭)

[bamboozledbird]

IGNITE: A Teen Wolf S1 AU // Chapter 1

Characters: Stiles Stilinski, Sheriff Stilinski, Original Female Character Pairing: eventual Stiles x OFC, but man are we talking slow burn Word Count: 4.9k Warnings: canon typical gore/violence, parental death, descriptions of burning, depictions of depression (apathy, dissociation, 'numb little bug' vibes) Tags: canon has been lovingly scrapped for parts, author loves lesbian poets and it shows, prolific overuse of the em dash, the slowest of burns i fear

Summary: Four years ago, Drea Dickinson's entire life fell apart. Her mom died, her best friend replaced her, and all she could do was watch listlessly while everything else burned down around her. All she wants is to forget and maybe get through her sophomore year without flunking chemistry and completely unraveling at the seams—a seemingly impossible task with the sudden appearance of ghosts from her mother's mysterious past and a hair-raising beast ripping people apart all over town. It would be easier to pretend if she hadn't accidentally entwined her life with the most interrogatory bastard in town. She could have gone her whole life without meeting Stiles Stilinski, and she would've been perfectly fine, but now she's stuck knowing that she's made her bed in the fragile, breakable bones of the boy with all the answers. Chapter Summary: After her annual interrogation with Sheriff Stilinski, Drea meets his son who turns out to be very handy with jumper cables, poetry recitation, and incoherent babbling.

A/N: This is an entirely selfish project. This rewrite has been so incredibly nostalgic, and I may or may not have cried a few times because the TW era was such a special time of my life. To be 17 again, sigh. I wrote a very bad version of this in 2014, and I cannot believe it has been 10 years!!! I'm almost 30! Impossible! The 10-year anniversary is entirely coincidental but still a wonderful, serendipitous happenstance. I'm re-watching the entire series with my little sister, who is coincidentally 17, and good god I just miss the TW, TVD era. Bring back the cheesy teen monster shows that give perpetual fall vibes PLEASE. You can also check me out on ao3 (dork_knight)!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire.

Before her mother’s death, Drea would have picked fire. Every single time. 

She never liked the cold; never really had to get used to it growing up in central California—but the crux of her argument, the twisted logic behind it all, was that most burn victims died from suffocation before they felt the flames. A small mercy, really, in the face of unspeakable tragedy. 

In the end, however, statistics were just numbers, her mother didn't die from smoke inhalation, and there was no mercy in burying a parent before you were old enough to have children of your own. Nothing ever ended poetically off the page. Death was just death, and it was always ugly. Someone should really tell that to Robert Frost, Drea mused, biting at a raw hangnail.

The medical examiner said the actual cause of death was pulmonary edema; at least, that was his best guess based on the state of the body. He didn’t say that she felt everything, her skin peeling back into her flesh, her flesh liquefying into fuel, her joints flexing into contorted pleas until the fire incinerated her last nerve ending. He didn’t have to; Drea connected those dots all on her own. She’d been twelve at the time, not an imbecile. 

“I’m sorry to drag you through this all again.”

Drea flitted her eyes away from the flickering lightbulb above Sheriff Stilinski’s head and met his gaze; it was nauseatingly sympathetic. Her responding shrug was a small, little thing—more like a twitch in practice, “Not your fault.” 

Her yearly visits to Sheriff Stilinski’s office were solely her father’s doing, even if no one wanted to admit it to her face. Most mayors would use their political power to get their child out of a police station, not into it, but perhaps Mayor Dickinson stopped being her dad somewhere between the funeral and now. 

“If you could start—”

“From the beginning,” Drea smoothed her thumb in small circles over the armrest of her chair, attentively tracing patterns into the polished wood, “I know.” This was, after all, the fourth anniversary of her first interrogation. She’d become somewhat of an expert at being a useless witness. Drea picked at her uneven cuticles before continuing, “Mom put me to bed around 10:00—which was kind of late for a school night, honestly, but she let me stay up to finish another chapter anyway.” The right corner of her mouth twitched for a brief moment, “Nancy Drew: Password to Larkspur Lane. I told her that forcing someone to go to sleep in the middle of a mystery was specifically forbidden in Geneva Protocol II.” Her mom had been far too indulgent of her lip on most occasions, but that night she didn’t smile at her snarky aside. She let her finish the chapter because she was too tired to argue; Drea could tell. At the time, she saw it as a victory. Now, it kept her up at night, the drooping lines of her mother’s mouth spilling over the pages of whatever book she was trying to read.

Drea bit down on her tongue when a stray splinter snagged against the soft pad of her thumb, “Dad was out of town, so it was just the two of us. Mom always put me to bed when Dad was gone; said it was the only way she could get to sleep. Had to make sure my window was locked.” She paused for a long moment: everything went dark after this. Her mother kissed the top of her head, murmured, ‘Love you,’ turned out the light, and then that was it. Drea woke up in the hospital, and her mom was dead. 

A bead of sweat dripped onto her top lip. The air in the Beacon Hills police station was, without fail, sticky with heat and body odor—and it wasn’t just the oppressive Californian sun. Even in the winter, a person could choke on the stifling warmth. Idly, she wondered if it was a matter of interrogatory tactics or budgetary constraints. 

“And then,” Sheriff Stilinski prompted gently, though they both knew how the story went from here. She had told it to him and a dozen other officials at least a hundred times in the last four years. 

Drea bit down on her thumbnail and winced when her teeth snagged on the tender nail bed, “And then nothing. I opened my eyes, and a nurse said that you found me on the front lawn.” 

“You don’t remember how you got outside?” 

Drea shook her head, staring past the Sheriff's shoulder. Large pieces of dust floated through the air, highlighted by the slivers of light trickling through the blinds. Suddenly, she had a newfound appreciation for the lack of fans in the room. 

Sheriff Stilinski cleared his throat and rubbed his hand over his jaw, “You don’t remember saying it was an angel?”

Blinking slowly, Drea looked at the grim line of the Sheriff’s mouth and gripped her knees tightly, digging her fingers into tawny skin until her wrist cracked, “I should, right? I was twelve. I should remember something—that’s what everyone thinks. That’s what my dad thinks.” Her eyelids fluttered to a tight close, and her voice went so quiet she could barely be heard over the hum of the copier outside the door, “He thinks it was me. That’s why he makes you question me every year.” She pulled the sleeves of her jacket over her fists and gnawed on the soft lining of her cheek, “He thinks you’ll finally figure out how I did it.” 

Drea was scared to open her eyes as the silence stretched between them. They’d danced around the subject before, hinted and twisted around the heart of it, but they’d never truly discussed how it looked from the outside. Sheriff Stilinski had been kind enough to give her a few different excuses over the years: trauma, head injury, oxygen deprivation, plain old grief—but whatever caused her temporary amnesia wasn’t so conveniently explained. In fact, currently, she still had no explanation at all. When she finally peeked through her lashes, clumped together with frustrated tears, Drea couldn’t quite figure out what expression the Sheriff was making. He leaned back in his desk chair and frowned, “I’m sure he doesn’t—”

“He does,” Drea cut him off. Her eyes went flinty, deep brown darkening to something far more ashen with the resolve of her anger. She never had any trouble reading her father’s face; the disgust was thinly-veiled between the flickers of fear. 

Sheriff Stilinksi leaned forward so that she had no choice but to look him in the eyes. They were kind—more tired than usual, but still kind. They always were. That was one thing Drea remembered from that day, waking up in the hospital to Sheriff Stilinski’s kind, watery blue eyes, just before the entire world fell apart. His voice was gentle, but firm, when he finally spoke, “I don’t.” 

Drea nodded numbly and pulled at a fraying string on the hem of her denim skirt until the thread snapped. 

“I mean it, kid. They couldn’t identify the source of the fire. They couldn’t even find an origin point; no twelve-year-old could pull that off.”

Drea chewed on her bottom lip, “Could anyone?”

Sheriff Stilinski’s brow furrowed, and his mouth screwed up into a crooked line, like he was chewing on his words and deciding if he should swallow them or spit them out. “I wish I had all the answers for you. I really do. Not knowing, it’s worse than any truth.”

Drea blinked up at him for a moment, once again taken aback by his raw sincerity, and swallowed hard. He wasn’t the one who was supposed to have the answers; he was the one who was supposed to ask the questions. There was one failure in his muggy office, and it wasn’t the Sheriff. “It’s okay,” she said quietly. “Not your fault.”

He looked like he wanted to argue the point, but whatever he wanted to say was interrupted by the sharp ringing of the phone on his desk. “I have to take this, but if you remember something, or if you just need to talk—”

“My dad spends a small fortune on a psychiatrist and a behavioral therapist for that,” Drea stood up quickly, shouldering her bag. She forced the corners of her mouth into a small smile, tight at the edges like a sheet that had been stretched too thin, “But thank you. For everything.” 

The Sheriff’s gaze darted to a framed photo on his desk. Drea had seen it before, on one of her many visits to his office. It was of a boy—his son, she assumed—he looked like he was around five or six at the time. He was grinning, wide enough to show off his missing incisors, and his fingers and wrist were stained cotton-candy blue from a melting popsicle. She must’ve been that happy once, right? In the beginning, everyone was unencumbered by the weight of imminent mortality. Maybe that’s what Sheriff Stilinski was thinking, too. He looked away from the photo and gave Drea a small smile, “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

Drea gave a half-hearted wave before wrapping her fingers around the strap of her backpack and walking to the parking lot. 

The sky was grim, a mocking reflection of expression on her face. The spite in her eyes hardened when big, fat raindrops splattered against the apples of her cheeks. For a moment, she just stood there, glaring at the rain and cursing the cosmos for their utterly unamusing sense of humor. A jeep pulled into the parking lot, and the squealing engine startled her back into reality. 

Unfortunately, the search for her car keys was a considerable endeavor. Typical. Drea stacked her textbooks and binders onto the hood of her sedan, haphazardly throwing her jacket on top of the pile to protect her painstakingly penned Kafka essay from the rain. By the time her fingertips brushed against the cool metal of her keys, her hair was damp and curling at the ends. 

The momentary relief was short-lived when she pressed the unlock button five times and the accompanying beep didn’t sound, not even once. For an absurdly long minute, all she could do was rest her forehead against the driver’s side window, breathing heavily until condensation gathered next to her mouth and the drizzle speckled dots onto the sleeves of her thin cotton shirt.

“If you’re trying to charge the battery through osmosis, it’d probably be more effective to smash your head against the hood.”

Drea jumped, and then flinched again when her keys clattered against the ground. She caught a glimpse of the phantom speaker in the side-view mirror; bizarrely, he looked just as surprised as she felt. She turned around, apprehensively—objects may be closer than they appear n’all—and tried to swallow her rapidly rising heart. 

“Sorry,” the boy pulled the hood of his sweatshirt down and had the decency to look contrite, “big mouth.” He rubbed a hand over his chapped lips. “It’s a real problem. It’s so big, actually, that my foot just slides right in there like…all the time,” he gestured animatedly with a flat hand, a quick sliding motion, like a fish through water.

Drea blinked at him, slowly, and bent down to reach for her keys, “Might wanna see someone about that. Sounds unsanitary.”

“Eh, it’s hardly the worst thing I’ve put in my mouth,” he said, eyes widening into horrified round circles the second he stopped talking. A faint flush creeped up his neck to his ears, and Drea’s heart dropped back into her chest. Slashers and ax murderers didn’t blush. Probably. She hadn’t ever met one, but it seemed like sound logic.

“Choking hazard,” Drea hummed, leaning back against her car. Her fingers traced a small dent in the door, the cause long forgotten, “It’s definitely still a choking hazard.”

The boy grinned before fixing his expression into something on the cusp of severity, “I’m about 95.7% sure that anything bigger than a fist is completely mouth-safe.” He held up his fist and nodded sharply, “Make that 98.3% sure.”

“98.3?” Drea’s brow arched.

“Maybe even 98.9.” 

The buzz of a lamp post hummed above their heads as they stared at each other with little smirks until the quiet made Drea sink her teeth into her bottom lip and big-mouth drum his fingers against his forearm. 

“So,” his sneakers squeaked against the slick asphalt as he shifted his weight, “you need a jump?”

Drea pursed her lips and ran her eyes over the front of her car, “I might give osmosis another shot. 30 seconds is hardly a fair trial.”

“Of course,” he hummed, “you gotta be fair.”

“We are in front of a police station.”

“Well,” he scratched his cheek, “it’s not a courthouse.”

“Technicality.” Drea was slightly horrified when she finally noticed that she was smiling. The sensation felt like it had escaped straight out of the uncanny valley and latched onto her face like a parasite in need of a host. It only took two weeks for muscles to atrophy; years must have completely decimated the fibers in her cheeks. “I guess I could use a jump. If your offer was an offer and not a hypothetical.” 

“Smart choice.” The boy rapped his knuckles against the hood of her car and said, “Steel’s probably pretty low on the permeability scale.”

“As opposed to a skull.”

He snorted and then nodded towards the large lump of books and papers covered by her freshly dampened jean jacket, “You should probably move your stuff. Y’know, ‘cause of the very un-permeable battery.”

“There’s that,” Drea sighed and started stuffing her things back into her backpack, shaking it violently until her notebook finally slid past her chemistry textbook, “and flunking English isn’t high on my list of things to do this weekend.”

His gaze flickered back and forth, rapidly cataloging every corner and crevice of her face. Drea tilted her head, brows pinched, and stared back at him with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. His eyes, she noticed, became a peculiar shade of brown in the yellow glow of the setting sun and the fluorescent light of the lamppost. More like honey, she realized, more like honey than irises. Something finally clicked behind them. "You,” he pointed aggressively, “you go to Beacon Hills.”

Drea pushed his finger away from her face with her own, “Safe bet, considering there’s exactly one option for the next 2,000 square miles.”

“You’re kind of a smartass, you know that,” he muttered as he struggled with the trunk of the jeep parked one space to her right until he finally wrenched it open with an almost guttural grunt.

Her lips parted briefly, and then she grinned drolly. It was refreshing, not being treated like some fragile little creature who would buckle in the knees—or possibly set something on fire—at the slightest confrontation. “Kind of?”

“Total.” He nodded decisively before sticking his head and torso into the depths of his trunk. “Completely, entirely, and wholly a smartass.” There were various clanging sounds until he re-emerged with a pair of jumper cables, “Never noticed that in class. You don’t really…say anything.”

Drea bit back the snark poised on the tip of her tongue. When people looked at her, the only thing they saw was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She was the daughter of the woman who burned to death on Cedar Street; Drea Dickinson’s mom died, and she was there. It seemed like that was all she would ever be in Beacon Hills. 

In the grand scheme of things, it was better to be no one. 

High school had been her chance to slip into social obscurity—more kids, more drama, less discussion of homicide by arson—so she took it, wholeheartedly. She kept to the corners of classrooms, away from extracurriculars, and her mouth resolutely shut. 

“I try to exclusively bring the smart and leave the ass at home,” Drea finally replied.

The boy’s eyes drifted downwards for a moment, and his voice did a funny, squeaky thing when he said, “I should give that a go sometime.”

“10/10 would recommend. No one bugs you—and teachers never throw erasers at your face.”

“So you do remember me,” he grinned a little and rolled up the sleeves of his sweatshirt before unlatching the jeep’s hood and propping it open.

Slanting her head, Drea watched his profile. There were moles scattered across his cheek and neck, and his angular jaw clenched as he struggled with the knotted cords in his willowy fingers. “Vaguely,” she said faintly. It was coming back to her in pieces. That was life after twelve for Drea Dickinson: bits and pieces. Everything was made up of the disquieting moments when she surfaced from the haze and into the present. It should’ve felt like a lungful of air, but it didn’t. It always felt like choking. 

He wiped his grease-smudged hand on his jeans and then extended it towards her, “Stiles.”

She took his hand, despite the strange formality, and shook it—mainly because of the black streaks staining his pants. “Drea.”

Stiles’s brow wrinkled, “I thought it was Andy.”

Drea hadn’t been Andy for what felt like a very long time. Four years, in fact. There were several reasons: her mom called her Andy, and she wanted to become someone else, anybody else—but ultimately the deciding factor was ‘Andy Arson.’ The nickname stuck around far longer than she thought it would. With a last name like Dickinson, Drea really thought the tweenager taunting would go in a different direction, but thirteen-year-olds had a knack for latching onto a person’s deepest-seated insecurities. Middle school, she mused, was a tragedy all on its own. 

“Nope. Just Drea.”

Stiles examined her face, and she saw that flicker in his eyes again: the light of recognition. “Well, Drea’s cool, y’know, in comparison.” His fingers twitched a few times when he connected the clamp to the coordinating battery terminal, and Drea’s eyes widened. She held her breath in her sternum until she registered that he hadn’t been electrocuted. He was just naturally tweaky, she concluded. It was either that, or he had jumped one-too-many engines in the last 24 hours…unless it was hidden option C, and he was actually tweaking. Unlikely, given he was on his way into a building teeming with cops, but far stranger things had happened in Beacon Hills. 

The longer she remained silent the more parts of his body started to move. Stile squeezed and unsqueezed the black clamp in his hand and drummed on the side of her car with his unoccupied fingers, “Like, Andy—no offense—doesn’t exactly strike fear or confidence in the heart. I mean, I wouldn’t trust Officer Andy to save my ass in a shoot-out, and I definitely wouldn’t trust Dr. Andy to cure my unknown, incredibly rare, incurable disease.” 

“No one could cure your incurable disease. That’s quite literally the entire definition of the word.”

“Sure,” Stiles connected the last clamp and glanced at her over his shoulder, almost checking himself in the chin with a large shrug, “but I’d buy that Dr. Drea could.”

Her mouth parted for a second, and then she closed it before she could say something impulsive. “That’s not even how it works; I’d be Dr. Dickinson.” 

Stiles winced, “Brutal.”

“Yeah,” Drea sighed and rubbed her palms over her arms until the goosebumps prickling her biceps receded into her skin.

Stiles looked back at her again, and his mouth wormed its way into a little frown. His head disappeared into his trunk, and after a moment a lumpy maroon mass hurtled towards her face. She caught it before it could smack into her nose, and she clutched at the soft material until she realized that the projectile missile was actually just a sweatshirt. 

Stiles was staring at her when she looked up from her hands. A small, unsure…something squirmed over his face, and she felt a little stupid, just standing there, hoodie limp in her arms. It happened a lot—more than it should after so many years. The invisible quicksand materialized in the strangest, most insignificant moments. Drea blinked, completely brainless, at simple questions, stared aimlessly into her closet until her second alarm startled her into snatching the first shirt her fingers came in contact with—clasped at a stranger’s hoodie until the rainwater pooled on her lashes dripped into her eyes.

Robotically, Drea thrust her arms through the sleeves and tugged it over her head, “Thanks.” The sweet scent of grass clung to the fabric, and there was something earthier underneath it, something like evergreen. She smiled slightly, combing her baby hairs behind her ears, “I almost forgive you for being a dick about my name.”

Stiles’s shoulders unwound as he scoffed, “At least people can say it without seizing.”

Drea looked at him and tilted her head, eyebrows crawling towards the bridge of her nose.

Stiles waved his hand in the air and extrapolated, “My full name is—just trust me. Dick jokes aren’t the worst thing in the world.”

“No,” Drea chewed on her lip, “they aren’t.”

There was a moment in middle school where she was tempted to plant the seed of something incredibly stupid and irresistibly raunchy, something like, ‘Andrea wants ‘Dickinsideher,’ because even that was better than a name with matricide as the punchline. But it didn’t take when Jared Cartwright soft-launched it in PE, so Drea seriously doubted it would ever catch-on from the target herself.

She cleared her throat, “But they are almost as bad as stye jokes.”

“Uh, absolutely not. Eyesores are nowhere near as gross as dick’n nu—” Stiles coughed, throat bobbing as he swallowed, before finishing his sentence with an audible question mark, “…phallic imagery.”

Drea pursed her lips, “Pus beats penis on the ick meter by at least 23 points.”

Stiles’s eyes glimmered in the fading light, “23?”

“Maybe even 24.”

Another bout of silence fell between them, but it wasn’t so restless this time—even after Stiles torpedoed his body through his passenger seat. He fought with his keys for a while until the correct one slid into the ignition. 

The jeep’s engine hummed pleasantly in the quiet as Drea let out a soft sigh, dropping her head back against her car window. The rain had stopped somewhere between trying to unlock her car and now, but she couldn’t quite recall when. The chill wasn’t so bad, she realized, without her foul mood casting a shadow over her head.

Stiles landed back on his feet and leaned against the jeep. Drea could feel his gaze on her again. A tickling sensation trailed down her spine as she fiddled with her keychain. It was old, a gift from her parents on some birthday she couldn’t remember. Paint had chipped off in most places after thoughtlessly throwing her keys every time she came home, but she could still make out the M and Y of the orange ‘Mystery Machine’ logo.

Stiles hummed for a moment and then said, “I’m Nobody. Who are you?”

Drea stared at him and waited for the punchline. It didn’t come. Instead, he shifted from one foot to the other and fumbled over each following syllable. “You know, like…Dickinson,” he waved his hands around, seemingly searching for some sort of cosmic relief. “I thought it would better than a dick joke, but upon some seriously belated reflection, I realize that you’re probably tired of corny assholes qu—”

“How dreary,” Drea interrupted, quietly but loud enough to be heard over the rumbling jeep, “to be Somebody.”

Stiles’s jaw snapped shut; it was his turn to blink at her stupidly. He smiled a little and ran his hand over his buzzed head, “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t know what she was agreeing with, only that she wholeheartedly did.

“I forgot that part.”

Drea clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and shook her head, “It’s the best line.”

“It might have something to do with my species landing somewhere between microscopic bacteria and radioactive cockroach on the high-school social food chain,” Stiles said dryly. His face remained impassive, like he was talking about something benign as the weather. 

Drea tilted her head a little and a timid smile unfurled over her face in time with the swell of familiarity blooming beneath her ribcage, “Then there’s a pair of us.”

His cheeks dimpled when he smiled back at her, “I do remember that one.”

“Well,” Drea slid her hands into her back pockets and shrugged, “it is the best part.”

Stiles squinted at her and then laughed.

Drea felt a bit like laughing too, so she swallowed thickly before she could choke on the impulse. She took a step backwards and curled her fingers around her keys in her back pocket, “I should probably try start my car…y’know, before you start reciting, ‘I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain.’”

He nodded, taking a step towards his jeep, “Solid plan. ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ would be next.”

Drea slid into her car and stared at the steering wheel, wrapping her fingers around 10 and 2 and silently calling upon every deity she’d ever heard of to end her suffering. Stiles seemed nice enough, but she seriously doubted her smalltalk capabilities were up-to ‘ride home’ standards. Perhaps, she should revisit her resounding dedication to atheism, she thought, as the engine sputtered in protest a few times and then came back to life. 

Stiles flashed two thumbs up through the window. The smile on his face was positively goofy, but his dismount from the jeep was somehow even goofier. He stumbled over his large feet a few times before regaining stability. Drea bit back a smile when he shot her another thumbs up, this time through the dash as he removed the jumper cables from her battery.

He wiped his hands off on his jeans again; at this point, she was convinced that they were beyond saving, but Stiles didn’t seem concerned. He tapped against her window before stepping around the open door, “You should probably let it run for a while. Take the scenic route home; enjoy all the Beacon Hills hotspots open past 8:00 pm on a weeknight. I personally recommend the Rite Aid or Walmart.”

Drea snorted, “Maybe I’ll swing by the Preserve. I hear the woods are especially beautiful in the foreboding darkness.”

“Don’t.” Serious was an odd look on Stiles’s face. Drea decided that she much preferred the goofy grin. “Don’t go anywhere near the Preserve. It’s officially cordoned off—totally locked down, quarantine-zone-central. Something about flesh-eating, parasitic plant life.”

“As completely real and unobtrusive as that sounds,” Drea drawled, “don’t worry about it. Literally every single person in town knows about the body they found in the woods.” It was bound to happen, small town and all—and ‘woman dies in deadly animal attack’ was the most interesting thing that had happened in Beacon Hills since the intersection got a Target two years ago. “I’ve seen every installment of Friday the 13th and The Blair Witch Project. If I’m going to be murdered, I refuse to also be humiliated by a cliché C.O.D.” 

The manic expression on his face softened to a relieved smile and then again to a little smirk, “So what’s a certified fresh murder, then? Not that I doubt the depths of human depravity, but I think society killed off originality a few centuries ago.”

Drea thought back to a house fire with no origin, accelerant, or discernible cause. Apparently, not. “You know what they say,” she sighed, “life finds a way.”

Stiles tilted his head, “And death.”

“And death,” Drea agreed, staring at a small chip in her windshield. The cracks had just begun to spiderweb out from the pit. 

Stiles looked like he wanted to say something, and he looked so much like the Sheriff with his face twisted around thoughtful contemplation that she couldn’t believe it had taken her this long to make the connection. The boy in the photo had grown up. How unfortunate for him. Stiles swallowed whatever it was that was lingering on his tongue and shut Drea’s door. He leaned his elbow against the window frame and cocked his hand in a stiff little wave, “See ya in English, Dickinson—both of you.”

“Awful,” Drea’s nose scrunched as she buckled her seatbelt, “terrible, dreadful. A solid 25 on the ick meter.”

Stiles grinned and held up his hands, “I’ll think of something better by Monday, promise.” 

Drea put her car in drive once Stiles was safely a few feet from the wheels and flicked her damp hair over her shoulder, “I dwell in Possibility.” What a scary place to be, she thought as she watched Stiles disappear in her rearview mirror. Possibility. Hope. Life. She was chronically good at surviving; cockroached her way out of every horrible thing life squashed her with. Lately, all she could do was cling to her heartbeat and the warmth of her skin, until she was barely more than roadkill. A walking carcass was a far cry from living, but Death would not stop for her, so she stopped looking for him. She kept treading water, took her pills, stopped existing—she was a lot like Schrödinger’s cat that way: too stubborn to live, too stubborn to die. She didn’t know what to do if someone unsealed the box and forced her to choose. That was the trouble with possibility; it required far too much uncertainty.

[girlatrocity]

i saw a post of yours talking about your himiko lore and i need to know what you think. btw i love the art of the folded picture with himiko ❤️

THANK YOU ♥️ I'm really proud of how that one turned out!!

Okay, I have no other outlet for this stuff so I'm gonna put literally everything here ty for being curious u will regret it ♥️

so here's her happy, happy family :D I wanted to give her two younger sisters bc I think of Himiko as the first born. The first sister (who I'm thinking of naming Mariko) is about 13 in the present timeline and the youngest (Chiyo?) is about 8.

Mariko is kinda supposed to be the perfect daughter (in comparison to Himiko). Her mom was already pregnant w her by the time Himiko got her quirk, which had the parents scared that they'd bring another "thing" like Himiko into the world. But once Mariko got her quirk and showed no signs of abnormality, they were 1. relieved and 2. very ready to have another child now that they knew Himiko was just a "fluke"

Okay so to talk about her parents a little, while they are both for sure terrible, I think the few good experiences she had w them were w her mom when she was very young.

The mom has A Lot of Issues. She had a very perfect picture in her head of what she wanted her family to be like and when she first had Himiko she was very happy and would dress her up and do her hair and stuff, but after she got her quirk, she felt a lot of guilt and shame and would subsequently avoid her daughter like the plague.

She would pay a lot of mind to make sure her children looked cute and neat and overtime it became very obvious that she didn't pay that same attention to Himiko at all anymore 😶

(btw, I think Himiko associates the hairstyle her mom would put on her as a toddler with being loved and free which is why she wears it after becoming a villain)

Both the parents are ALL about presentation. They don't care so much about having a nice family so much as looking like a nice family. (All of this ended up creating a whole idea in Himiko's head about appearances).

Mariko, the middle daughter, was very aware of why her parents dissociated from her sister because they never tried to hide the horror they felt towards their first born. Her parents were kind of hard on her to be a normal lovely daughter (not like Himiko). Mari resented Himiko for that a little but also never spoke to her either (partly bc she had been made to feel afraid of her). I imagine if they ever did have any meaningful interaction it probably ended terribly and soured their already estranged relationship.

Mariko actually holds a lot more resentment for Himiko after she becomes a villain bc this ended in the parents uprooting their lives, changing their names, arguing, and generally being much more awful. So, in her head, Himiko is responsible for everything bad that ever happened to her ( SHE'S 13 SHE'LL LEARN EVENTUALLY).

Now Chiyo, the youngest, was never really fully aware of the situation with Himiko. She just knew her parents and sister were very wary of Himiko for some reason? When she was a baby, Chiyo was probably especially distanced from Himiko as they thought she'd hurt her. Chiyo and Mariko probably have a normal sister relationship (Chiyo's annoying, Mari's nagging, they're good).

Once she got a little older though (and her parents became more busy with Mari) Himiko may have helped Chiyo w schoolwork or other things once in a while. So in Chiyo's head Himiko is her Weird but Kinda Nice Eldest Sister.

After everything went down, nobody ever bothered to explain it to Chiyo and refused to answer her many questions so the poor girl is probably currently very confused why they have new names and why her eldest sister vanished and why she's now a "monster" and a "villain". She was only five when it happened.

I imagine her family isn't on Himiko's mind as much as how they made her feel is. She was an alienated daughter and avoided sister and that's kinda what I use to explain some of her behavior in canon (being very clingy and touchy as well as taking on a little sister dynamic w the league as she never learned to be an older one) But she doesn't really think about how they're doing until probably late in canon.

Honestly, I think if she ever reunited with them it would just end up in a lot of blaming and belittling and self righteousness and also apathy 😓

I THINK THAT'S ALL THANK YOU IF YOU READ LITERALLY ANY OF THIS ♥️♥️♥️

[casually-slips-into-coma]

spoilers for iwtv s2e4

my thoughts after a rewatch:

i know claudia hates the baby loves window play but she ate up that little song

the lulu role really is so humiliating :(

louis’ expressions whenever he watches these plays always kills me lmao he hates theater kids

louis and armand talking over each other to daniel

armands theater notes lol

claudia no eyebrow big eyeliner look is kinda cunty ngl

im a fan of sam the irish vampire

making claudia be lulu all the time oooh armand i hate u so bad

almost threw up watching louis and armand give different answers to the companion question IN FRONT OF THE COVEN that shit was so embarrassing

i wouldve kms if i was armand

vamp catfight

armand stuck in this situationship dont worry king we’ve all been there😔

literally telling each other i love you and still having the what are we conversation

“do you notice how hot the room gets when you two talk about the secret” plsssss

louis only able to use the fire gift when hes angry👀👀 gee i wonder if thats gonna come back👀👀👀👀👀

louis going🤨🤨 to the schizophrenia question like it came out of nowhere

armands face while louis talked about dreamstat why not just shoot me in the head

loving these dutch angles whenever daniel dissociates and gets an armand memory

santiago looks so good in the gold suit? robe thing??

claudia santiago friendship is killing me santiago i know what u are

claudia killing the guy singing baby lu

i like that you can tell claudias french has gotten better. nice small detail

i love scenes of louis and claudia just talking about non vampire things

santiago mimicking louis was pretty cool

buffoon sighting!!!

whole dinner scene bangs

the guy saying theres smth “fragile” about armand in the photo louis took and louis saying “no he’s anything but” and then the guy saying “you’ve captured the soul he hides” 🤌🤌

louis would never survive a 4 hour art school critique

daniel telling a girl he’d only do her if she had a paper bag over her head??????

claudeline truthers how are we feeling

context for the eating paper clip in the trailer

romeo!!

armand is so down bad its sick

madeline tailoring a yellow dress for claudia😟😟

the whole claudeline interaction was great

amadeo☹️🔫

MARIUS KILL YOURSELF!!!!!!!

the way armand talks about marius

MARIUS KILL YOURSELF x2!!!!!!

“no one has painted me in 400 years” fuck

madeline period blood moment. theres so much here about femininity and maturing might make a separate post about this scene

armand pinning claudia against a wall armand i hate you so bad

we already know that armand is powerful but seeing him choke and manhandle santiago really solidified that i think

picked another one over me!!

delainey is ACTINGGGGG

louis not believing claudia about armand ooooh louis i hate you so bad

love makes you stupid clock it

louis still referring to claudia as his daughter in his head (thru dreamstat)

louis just actively talking to himself girl do that in your head

park bench moment <3

“wanker” i giggled sorry

that suit is his favorite on him :(

“im a little wet” and armand instantly pulling out an umbrella, armand lighting his cigarette, armand calling him maitre

louis calling him arun and armand calling him maitre and then louis throwing away the lighter this fucking scene is cinematic art

the other coven members calling santiago maitre

i kinda like that daniel can hear them arguing from another room. i feel like its a very human experience? really domestic? even given the circumstances

armands eyes were never brown!!!

san francisco flashback episode might kill me im not kidding

insane way to end the episode

ok this was much longer than i thought it would be but this episode has a lot in it. each episode gets better and better and this is definitely my favorite of the season so far.

i am LOVING louis and armands relationship and also both of their story arcs and characterizations. their dynamic is kind of the opposite of what i, and i think a lot of other people, expected but it still makes total sense and im enjoying it a lot

god i love this show

[horrorjunki3]

Can you do the sawyer brothers when their S/O falls to the ground and starts having a seizure? (Plz include Drayton because I'm a simp)

Sawyers reacting to they're S/O falling and having a Seizure

An: lmao don't worry im such a simp for Drayton -> choptops mentioned in all of these lmao sorry

Warnings: sad boys, seizures, mentions of war training -> dissociation and mental illness

Drayton Sawyer

Parental instics activated - he'll jump striaght into action while everyone's panicking -> at first he just things your fainting bc of the heat so hell catch you and lay you down ready to bark orders at his younger siblings until you start shaking then he freezes -> he doesn't really know what to do till he gets yelled intrustctions (curiosity of choptop)

He'll make sure you don't bite your tounge and keep your head in his lap until it's stopped -> his so worried the whole time

The whole house kinda go silent no one dares annoy Drayton whole his sweethearts hurtin'

Infact all the boys kinda stick close to you afterwards always ready to catch you and help ya -> pays to be they're "other parent" you've got a mino army of crazies to help at the touch of a button

Afterwards Drayton will lecture you and ask if this is common -> he'll ask what he should do and like this man's is taking notes!!

He'll make you food -> fully believes a hardy soup can sure anything!

Choptop Sawyer

"Fallin' for me sugar?"

At first he assumes you've just tripped until he doesn't hear your giggle to his flirting then his worried

Whips his head around and is striaght inro action -> again his training in the army kicks in he kinda shuts all his emotions off and just goes on autopilot -> he can't bear to think about what'll happen if this ends badly

He rolls you into the best position and makes sure you don't bite your tounge, hit or head or anything like that -> he'll stay until the sizeures settled then jump into giving you water and bandaging you up

It's crazy the shift in Chop when your hurt he goes from goofy, crazy hippie to stone cold in seconds ordering Nubbins and Drayton around -> his training really kicks in

He won't lecture you like his older brother but he'll wanna know if it's common and how to avoid it

He won't leave your side for the rest of The day -> keeps his arm around your waist for good measure so you don't fall and harm your head

Nubbins Sawyer

He doesn't pick up on you even falling at first -> his rambling about his Camera and pics of you but once he realises he panics -> drops everything and rushes to you

He knows enough to giuide your head inro his lap to stop from harming your head but his feverishly screaming for Chop -> ( as soon as Chop hears twin screaming he'll be there in seconds ♡ )

Chop will calmly tell Nubbins what to do and sit comforting him until you do -> once you've stopped he just pats your head and walks away

Poor Nubbbins is a stuttering worried mess, his got tears down his cheeks and can hardly even get words out "y-y-you sc-a-a-red m-m-me" :(

His like a dotting puppy for the rest of the day constantly running to chop to ask questions and following you around

"Is my camera bad? I can turn flash of sweet thin'" -> he doenst wanna trigger a seizure

Asks so many questions and is your lil shadow for the rest of the day - you wanna go shower? To bad his following - and besides how could he not follow ya? *click aggressively shakes picture*

He'll have you sit in his lap and pamper you he was so scared!

Bubba Sawyer

As soon as you drop a sea of panic squeals leaves them -> this'll cause a rush of footsteps and the boys bursting in!!

Chop again is the one that jumps into action he'll tell Bubba to put your head on his thighs and encoruage them to softly stroke your hair to calm down while he goes about helping ya' can't have his new sibling dying on him can he?

Bubba silently squeals and whimpers while there's orders being thrown around :(

Once you've come to he'll pull you into they're chest and just hold you

They'll make you chop and Drayton tell them what to do next time and will prepare for it!

Lots of cuddles and checking if your okay from them

They'll kiss you on the head and whimper while you tell them you okay -> he was so scared!!

[antiqua-lugar]

I think basically everything that can be said about that interview regarding Gale has been said but I did see some people be like “Well, but Gale is annoying and his stans are just woobifying him” and like. 

Like, okay. Gale is annoying. And Lae’zel is mean, Shadowheart is a bitch, Astarion is a cunt, Karlach is happy all the time all the time and Wyll is boringly well adjusted. That’s…the first impression you get of them in Act 1. That’s not even their full arc in Act 1, that’s literally the first few minutes you get with them! And then all of Act 1 is just undoing all of that.

In Gale’s specific case, being annoying isn’t even his main flaw. Like it gets brought up, I think because the writers wanted to make sure we would know this is a flaw he actually has in case you, like me, did not even notice you were supposed to be annoyed by him. But it’s not a serious issue or something it’s even remotely implied he has to work on. They still all end up liking each other and working together and flirting at each other. He’s a nerd that talks a lot and unless you end up in a jealousy convo no one really cares. His blissfully happy ending is to become a professor. His infodumping is so good the narrative lets him do it forever.

Gale being annoying (or being bothersome for eating your artifacts) is the player’s problem. You don’t have to like him, you don’t have to like anyone, but the narrative is not there to make a big deal out of it. Why should it? Everyone is flawed and then they get better. If you ignore Gale for being annoying or stake Astarion for being a vampire or forget to save Mizora condemning Wyll to the hells it’s a you problem, just like it’s a you problem if you push Shadowheart to embrace Shar and then Shadowheart is cold to you. 

Which is why the writers saying “Well, Gale is annoying so the fact that he sacrifices himself helps him redeem himself” is bonkers (just like rewriting Lae’zel lines to be more palatable is bonkers). Like it’s not just a bad take, it’s a “Gale was annoying so I ignored him the whole game so I don't know what his deal is” take. From the writers. Of the game.

And the rest applies to other weird instances of writing during the game. Like yeah, you can treat Gale horribly, you can treat everyone horribly. You can take advantage of Astarion, you can sell out Shadowheart, you can cheat on Wyll with Mizora and then tell him it’s his own fucking fault for not “pulling out”. But the game doesn’t try to imply that it’s funny that Astarion dissociates during sex. But it somehow is when Gale has to be persuaded into group sex, bolts and then the morning after he is like “Can we just never talk of this again”. And like Gale isn’t special in this regard, there is some stuff with Halsin, Wyll (no seriously what was that short) and even Raphael that is frankly appalling, but it really doesn’t help with the “we just never talked to Gale” vibe. Like if you romance Gale there is a line in the brothel where you can say that if you wanted boring sex you would have just had sex... with Gale. 

Gale “I read tons of erotic books and I have so many ideas. Let's do it in the Weave so we can try as many as possible” Dekarios. 

Also, nevermind all the serious implications, “He wasn’t ready for [his sacrifice] before but now he is” it’s like not even what happens. Like it’s not even what he says. I should not be reading an interview with the writers of a game and be like “did they just skip all of the dialogue”. 

(That interview was also very weird about Karlach but also I just feel like that interview was weird in general, like they just were in a rush and couldn’t really talk in depth about anything so it was vague lines for everyone, it's just that those about Gale particularly sucked).

[drifting-pieces-blog-blog]

Breaking down the comics: BEMIS. Part 2

READING THINGS SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO! 

Part one is here. Thanks Tumblr.  (please go read it)

Two issues left of this trash heap volume. Any time you think it can’t get worse you look at the next panel. 

NEXT ISSUE. We’re almost through this collection. This bread is not what I ordered. Send it back. 

ISSUE #192. 

(Spoilers: There are no sharks in this episode. For those of you waiting for the dolphins, that’s in vol 2)

Alright. In this issue. We open with Marc, Diatrice, and Frenchie sitting at the table having coffee. ANd Frenchie looks very dead and is in scrubs. 

I’MMA PAUSE FOR A SECOND. 

I will cover the Lemire run later. It’s inevitable and something I’m deeply looking forward to. 

The thing about the Lemire run is that it takes place at a time when ALL of Moon Knight’s original friends had left him. Gena, the kids, Crawley, Frenchie, Marlene… They had all been driven away. They were all in pain and either hated him, were disenchanted by him, or just pushed away. 

The Lemire run takes place with the Moon Knight system, Marc in particular, having a severe mental health crisis. 

DID is caused by extreme repeated trauma at a young age. It leads to dissociative episodes, and it is not uncommon for other issues to crop up (thanks trauma!). A lot of systems, if they have the health care, end up in and out of hospitals when they reach crisis points. 

In this run, a LOT of things happen that seem spectacular and fantastical and a lot of things that are grounded in reality. It’s hard to say if the whole thing happened or was really all just in Marc’s head. There is evidence for the latter. I’ll discuss that at a different time. But in this run, he witnesses his friends all leave him again. It’s a way for his mind to make sense of it and to let them go. To let go of the past and the pain associated with his friends departing him. In this world, Frenchie sacrificed himself to save them and died. 

So… Bemis is assuming that the audience took in the Lemire run at face value. He feels he has to explain away the events. He isn’t trusting the reader at all. In fact, he’s even going to try to explain it to the reader.  This is bad writing. This is just… Where is the editorial team? Why are they not explaining things to him? Did they even read his script? Or were they so desperate to feed off of the success of Lemire and get Moon Knight up and going again that they just shoved whatever they could at the fans and waited for the money? 

UNPAUSE. 

So this is why Frenchie is a zombie. He’s trying to explain away Frenchie’s ‘death’.

"Undead?" Frenchie asks Marc. 

"Well, no. Not really undead. Just dead. It's all I can visualize. Like when you seen an old person and think of them naked and then can't stop picturing it." 

"That's disturbing. But I'd be equally haunted if I had seen YOU get murdered in a waking nightmare of insane asylums and Egyptian Gods. You saw it. You felt it. It was real enough." 

(Also he has his legs.) 

There's one of those comic editorial notes in the corner: To find out what Marc's talking about, read the mind-bending Lemire/Smallwood Run! - ED

#^%#$$@ YOU ED. DO YOUR JOB AND ACTUALLY KEEP THE CONTINUITY AND EDIT THIS PILE OF-

deep breaths. deep breaths... We're going to get through this. 

So Zombie Frenchie talks to Marc about what Marc saw in the asylum. 

"Losing you was some kind of fantasy. You can chalk it up to me accepting my dissociative identity disorder, or me facing my demons...But I think I needed to see you die in order to make sense of your worth to me. That's not fair to you. You're my best friend." 

So close. He's SO close to getting the run. And I get the feeling it's spouting off what he was cliff noted about the run without either reading it himself or perhaps he did read it, didn't understand it, and someone had to explain it to him. 

It wasn't about him accepting his dissociative identity disorder or facing down his demons. It was so much more than that. 

At this point Frenchie pulls off his zombie look (literally) and is back to being a normal looking man. 

And we get what Bemis REALLY thinks is going on. 

"You think too much, Spector. You can picture whatever you want in that malfunctioning cranium of yours if it helps you make sense of the hand you've been dealt." 

"...Okay." 

"Now, Marc, are you actually hearing me, or are you still picturing some grotesque fantasy?" 

He’s just using things as an excuse to paint Marc with whatever mental illness he fancies at the time. Hallucinations are apparently now in the mix. What does Bemis actually think is mentally wrong with Marc? Did he do ANY research at all? Is he just pointing at the DSM randomly and picking out things that make the comic edgy or ‘funny’??

As Marc prepares to go, a brick smashes through their window. 

He climbs out the window, dramatic style, and finds Bushman and Truth and some other guys with guns waiting on the street below. 

Bushman has the landlord (a little old lady) at knife point. 

They tell Marc to meet them in the lobby or the old lady gets it. 

Oh look. Another jab at underlined villainous homosexuality. 

Just before Moon Knight can start trashing them all, and Bushman knows he would, Raoul tells him that Marlene is on the boat. 

Oh good. Khonshu's narration is back. I'd missed it. 

Honestly, any time Khonshu narrates it's just a lot of random metaphors, over explanation, or depictions on what's going on that aren't needed. 

He describes Marc being tied to a boat surrounded by his enemies with his fate unknown. ....as the comic shows him tied to a boat surrounded by his enemies with his fate unknown. 

Let the reader read the damn comic! 

Bushman goes against orders of the Sun King and decides to go toy with Marc. 

Never a good idea and everyone there knows it. 

He holds a knife to Marc's face. Well... Honestly, it’s in his style to do just this… Props for that I suppose. 

And Moon Knight makes his way around the top deck of the boat and takes out all the bad guys,circling back around to Bushman. 

"You don't scare me, Spector!" 

"I didn't want to have to do this to you again." 

And Marc cuts off two of Bushman's fingers then tosses them overboard. 

"You can replace those, but they'll never be yours again. And next time, I won't be satisfied with a piece of you. I'm not one of those super heroes who won't straight-up kill you, Bushman." 

It's fitting for what Moon Knight did from the 90s through early 2000s. As much as I disagree with it, it does fit for those times. 

He goes below deck and finds a bunch of sad looking people sitting around like refugees. 

Marc asks what's going on and he's told that they signed up for this. 

He talks to one of the kids who tells him they are going to an island to form a new city for only them. 

Back on deck, he finds Truth. 

"Unlike Raoul, I think I may have learned my lesson in trying to defeat you personally. Besides, I was tasked with your delivery to the Sun King. I just want to help you see what I see, Spector." 

For once, Truth is pretty reasonable. 

True uses his powers on Marc and it's just... 

"I have a vision every waking day. Lovers and dreamers piled waist-deep in the streets. I wade through piles of their slack, twisted bodies. Utterly powerless. Nauseated. It's my fear of this moment that motivates me, not the desire to save lives. The Fear that I've built my sanity on a lie. My hope for a better world is my most tragic form of dissociation." 

You know... I'm not even sure Bemis knows what dissociation really is at this point. 

Truth tells him that he's ready to face the Sun King now. 

They arrive on the island where the 'refugees' get off and go to make camp in the village that they found. 

OKAY. Okay. okay... here we go. 

So... I'm going to point out something here that someone probably should have mentioned to Bemis while editing this crap. 

The bad guy henchmen are all disabled people. People missing arms, legs, hands, eyes, on crutches, or fake legs and things. 

They follow around a man that looks like white Jesus that calls himself "Ra the God '' and "Sun King". They head to a place that Bushman called an "Undiscovered tribe of underdeveloped backwards people". They take over the island for themselves and he brings in other people to populate it....

He's literally colonizing it. 

The other bad guy is an overweight drug dealing black man with possible repressed homosexual desires for the good guy. The other bad guy is a large menacing tattooed white guy that makes people spout nonsense and calls it deep truth like characters in a Chuck Palahniuk novel! 

Is anyone else as fed up with this as I am? Am I reading too much into this? Is this really not as bad as I think it is? Because…this looks pretty bad. 

Moon Knight finds Sun King on the beach who welcomes him to "Isla Ra". 

"Soon this island will burgeon with those willing to light up this shadowy world. They're like us, Marc! The sickly, the fragile, the INSANE. Society's regrettable by-product, but to me...To us... They are everything!" 

He tells Moon Knight to relax. He knows that as long as Marlene is his prisoner, Marc won't do anything to risk her. 

"Take a catnap, Marc. We fight to the death tomorrow, but tonight we indulge in a ritual." 

"A ritual you probably just made up." 

"Ra feeds my mind what it needs to know." 

"You're going to drug me, aren't you?" 

"Sleep, Marc. Tonight we become enlightened." 

So... We see nightfall and Sun King and Marc sit before a camp fire. 

So of course we get an instant jab of homophobia. 

"Why did we have to do this half naked?" 

"Shhhh Let your mind unravel, Spector." 

"I don't do well with psychedelics, Sun King." 

"It was only tea." 

"It smelled like woodstock." 

I have a problem with this. Marc is telling him flat out that he doesn't do well with psychedelics. 

Studies have shown that certain drugs can actually trigger mental illnesses that are linked to chemical imbalances. Not to mention that if he happens to be on any drugs meant to help him, they could negate their effects, interact with them poorly, or make him very ill. 

We know Marc has been in and out of mental hospitals. We know he's been drugged before in these hospitals. Forcing him to take a psychoactive trip is not a cool thing to do for the dramatic storytelling. What’s going to happen is that we’re going to get a really trippy scene of them going into Marc’s ‘messed up’ mind and he’s going to learn things, find peace or some bullshit, and then be healed. 

This gives the wrong message that doing these potentially harmful drugs will fix all your problems! Especially if you have dissociative issues or other similar issues. 

ALSO. People with DID? Not all the alters respond the same way to inebriation. Some will get drunk if they look at a beer. Others can do a LOT of pot and not feel a thing. The brain is a fascinating and complex place. Marc could do psychedelics and Jake could just be having a nice time while Steven has the worst trip of his life. 

Sun King goes on. 

"We share what they label 'insanity'. That gives me a gateway into your beautiful, tortured mind. Let me in, Marc. Let US in." 

NOT ALL MENTAL ILLNESSES ARE THE SAME. ONE CRAZY DOES NOT ALL CRAZY MAKE. 

And Marc starts tripping. 

In Marc's mind, we find Marc, Jake, Steven, Khonshu, Sun King, and Ra. 

Ra calls Khonshu a "bad boy" and Khonshu calls Ra a "loathsome fascist." 

Marc tries to tell himself that this isn't real. Jake demands to know how Ra can be there if it's "all just made up by Marc's mind". 

"Steven is distressed and theorizes that "I think we've entered the world of metaphor, Jake. ANd it's scaring the hell out of me." 

Bemis must really dislike Steven Grant. He writes him as weak, cowardly, clingy, and narcissistic. Not a fan. 

So now, Ra takes hold of Khonshu and tells him to show him the truth. 

He spouts a lot of garbage here and it just... It's fanatical. It's... It's dangerous. 

What do I mean by that? He's talking about things like righteousness. About prophets and saviors and gives images of a world under idealistic circumstances where everyone gets along because he rules it. 

Marc snaps out of his trans by the fire to declare "No... Ra is....RIGHT?!" 

There was nothing right about that crap. It makes no sense. It’s just propaganda crap. There is no just and right and perfect in this vision. It’s a problem. A big problem. 

END ISSUE. 

One more to go. I can’t wait to put the Sun King behind us. 

After all? How much worse can it get? (spoilers so much worse. Sooooooo much worse). 

ISSUE # 193

I like how the past two covers have had NOTHING to do with the actual story inside. It’s like they are trying to make it look cooler and more dramatic than things are. 

Moon Knight in the jungle? I’d read that. Marc spent a lot of time in South America. Although, standing on his cape like that means he can't stand up without falling out of the tree. Just saying. 

Alright so... Marc went on a drug trp and came to the realization that Ra and Sun King were right for some reason? 

And this broke him and made him some passive weakling for some reason? 

We see him wake up the next day and being kicked around and dragged around because "the moon can't save me now." 

Then he's taken to a tent with some old lady outside knitting and she uses her flaming hot knitting needles to burn a sun into his back? 

Back with Frenchie and Diatrice, we see her praying to "Dear Mister Khonshu" and she asks that he not let "the bad men kill my daddy." 

She asks him to let Marc save her mom so they can be a family. 

Marc is pretty broken now and he's taken to see Marlene. 

He tells her that "this time is different"

"I know. He's different. I know because I'm actually scared." 

And Marc begs Marlene not to let Diatrice forget him because he's going to die. 

Why are they acting like Sun King is some super huge bad guy unlike any they have ever faced before? They have faced WORSE. 

He's fought ghosts. He's fought vampires. He's fought werewolves. He's faced aliens and apocalyptic events! 

Some hippy looking man with flames is NOTHING. 

HE'S FOUGHT SO MANY ANIMALS (I need to make a list). 

Marc is taken to a ring of fire and tossed inside to face the Sun King in a battle to the death. 

He tells Marc to fight like he means it or he'll hunt down his daughter and burn her to death. 

They fight and he takes a beating because suddenly Sun King knows how to fight? 

He sets fire to Marc more than a few times. 

Back in the head space, Jake tells Khonshu that they have to do something. 

I have real issue with the assessment here. 

Khonshu tells him: 

"Look around us. We're just faint firings of his synapses now. His defense against the darkness. As we have been since his childhood, and...Our connection is nearly severed. He is alone now, save for death itself." 

This is the belief that Marc is "the original" and that he created the others to deal with things and gave them all parts of himself. 

This is old thinking that people with DID were just shattered and broken bits of themselves that needed to be put back together. It's outdated. It's insulting. 

Why does everything Khonshu says just sound like absolute drivel? 

Like he was TRYING to be deep and just spouting off things that sounded metaphorical. It's just bad writing. He's clearly trying to copy Lemire. 

So he asks if Jake has ever believed in anything. 

And Jake remembers Diatrice. 

And they all take a moment to bask in the glow of their daughter’s memory. 

Then we get Steven’s version of what Khonshu said. 

Yeah. This is where that saying comes from. 

Somehow this gives them the ability to punch harder? 

And he starts beating on Sun King. 

He gets the Sun King to admit that he fears him now for some reason. 

And this makes everyone happy like some sort of 1980s movie.

And the Sun King can no longer use his fire. Because 

"I convinced you. Now Bow before me you horrible bastard." 

I'm not sure it works like that, Marc. But sure. You convinced him. 

And the Sun King bows down before him. 

"Thus ends the reign of the Sun King." 

And the people in the croud are cheering? Despite being there to support the Sun King and because they hate Moon Knight. 

Later we find Marlene bandaging up Marc's burns. 

The Truth stands by watching for the boat to return to get them off the island. 

"The man's cause is dead to me. Proven false by his impotence. I would undo any affiliation I had with him. I've found the facts of life to be more...Malleable than I realized. Maybe with some time in a room by myself...I might reassess my purpose." 

Yeah sure. A man is impotent because he lost a fight with another man and now no one believes in him. 

This is some fucked up masculine toxicity. 

Marc turns to address the other people on the island. 

"All of you just got stuck on a desert island because you let yourself get convinced of a bunch of crap by a completely mad super villain."

Uh huh. So the notion of him raising his own group of followers and warriors out of normal people. Cause that isn’t an issue. Obviously these people are easily swayed and maybe a bit fanatical. So telling them that you are now the new leader is not problematic at ALL. 

Also? That “I believe” in the back? 

We get a zoom in. I’m not going to show you the image. 

It’s Dr. Emmett! 

She's in her Moon Knight cloak thing (why would she bring that to the island with her if she was there following Sun King?). 

She's covered in burn scars and missing an eye. It's drawn to look like a rotten hole. 

Does no one believe in medical care here? Open eye holes are a problem. They run a risk of infection! Also they don't just stay open eye holes. The eyelids will collapse downward a bit. 

Anyways. She's back there going "I believe... I believe! Your doctor believes, Marc!" 

And the comic ends there. 

That was something alright. UGH. 

Give me a second to gather my thoughts up from this burning dump of ableism and poorly depicted mental health peppered with racism and anti-semitism. 

Volume one of Bemis is like a love letter to the kinds of people that think it’s fun and funny to show mentally ill people as dangerous, wild, unpredictable, and overall pathetic. 

The continuous use of language like ‘Insane’ and ‘Crazy’ is more than poor taste. It’s a constant reminder that we aren’t supposed to see Moon Knight as normal at all or even sympathies or identify with him. 

You see, there is a difference between “We have the power of crazy” and “You were the only superpower I ever had.” 

A big difference. 

In the former, it’s played up for laughs. Much like the old gags of seeing a man in a dress. It doesn’t age well but it persists. It persists because it still garners laughs. And the people that are still laughing are the people like Bemis. And he draws in more people who are like minded and he tells them it’s okay to keep laughing. 

The latter is a beautiful way to show that having DID was a powerful and wonderful way to be strong enough to survive when everything didn’t want you to. 

How did he get away with this? He is Bipolar. I’m not going to argue if he is or isn’t. I don’t know him and that’s his own personal history. I’m going to argue that being Bipolar does not give you the right to assume you understand ALL mental illnesses or that you can write for all of them. Or even lump crazy with crazy. 

Marvel is the sort to say “Ah yes, this person had a drink with a black person once so they should be able to write for Luke Cage.” Or “I took high school spanish so I can write for Miles Morales.” 

We can’t put up with this anymore. We can’t let them do this. We can’t let Marvel keep perpetuating things that hurt us. That hurt others. That keeps ripping the power away from those with so very little to begin with. 

So this is Vol 1 of Bemis. 

“But Drifting Pieces” you might say “How can it get worse than this? This was pretty bad.” 

My friend… You are in for a ride. 

PART THREE: HERE