#and playing around with the idea of side-quests and whatnot

[soft-serve-soymilk]

I ALSO LOVE DRUGGING MY TEENAGE HEAD CHILDREN !!!!1!!1 ✨🎉🎊💯✨🎉🥳

[bitchimasnake-sss]

i love reading your fics, they always give me 🦋🦋🦋 i love them so much, so, i want to make a request a angst-comfort where zoro and reader are dating but they got into a fight (*cough* zoro got jealous and starts to question reader's loyalty *cough*) but it ends happily because I don't want cry. n e way, continue writing stories, you write them so well... 😚

im so glad you like my work!! and thankyouu so much for sending in the request, let's get to itt <3

moss and towel ft. roronoa zoro!

set-up: in which, you and zoro have been dating for six months. but after one fight night and growing distances, he finds himself questioning everything you've built together.

warnings: (poor attempts at writing) angst, zoro acts like an idiot, profanities. yeah, that's about it.

the winds were cruel tonight and even crueler were you. atleast there was some comfort in the cold gusts, some reason in the way they played against the swordsman's skin and left behind selfish goosebumps. atleast, he could attempt to understand it with nami's weather charts or whatnot.

but you. how could he attempt to understand you?

his eyebrows bunched as he stared up, fixing his gaze against the twinkling points. groaning, he put his hand over his eyes. maybe in a way, sure, it was his fault. he was never good with words or those fancy poems or haikus. he was never the one to resort to affection. but how was he supposed to fix this?

the first mate of the ship rested a fraction of his bodyweight against the wooden railing of the crow's nest. the wind tousled his unkempt hair and running a hand through his moss-green locks, he vaguely tried to remember how long it had been since nami dragged him into the bathroom and gave him a haircut again.

probably too long. he concluded with a sigh as the soft tresses caressed the mid-point of the back of his neck.

he was supposed to meet his girlfriend here. that's what had been decided. just you, him and the infinitely infinite night sky. the swordsman had even decided to talk about his feelings 'neath the dark abyss of the sky (even if he hated the mere idea of that).

but it had been 30 minutes and there were no signs of you anywhere.

life had been hectic for the both of you lately, whether it was because of the constant run-ins with the marines, zoro having to accompany luffy to side-quests or some other shit the sea sprouted every once in a while. either ways, it meant that you and him saw less and less of each-other as each day passed him by.

resigning himself to a tired sigh, zoro decided to climb downwards. you were not gonna come, that much was sure.

as his heavy feet planted against the wooden floor, he took a second to collect his thoughts. he started walking the stairs to go under the deck, to the common space where most of the crew lounged at the end of the day. descending, he thought of all possible explainations. maybe you had been caught by someone else and forced to listen to one of their anecdotes, maybe nami had asked you to help with the log pose calculations of the last island, or maybe chopper wanted you to help him grind some fresh medicine.

maybe-

he stepped inside the common place with heavy footsteps and a heavier heart and immediately saw you. you, ever so beautiful with you soft smiles and your lame jokes. you with your flowing hair and unruly habits. you, that was currently laughing along to something that shit-cook was talking about.

he must have caught your gaze cause you immediately looked away from sanji and to your boyfriend, giving him a soft smile. but he left the room without returning that gesture and you found yourself on your feet, walking after him and confused.

you trailed after him, calling his name out sweetly till you reached his room and he shut the door before you could get in.

"hey!" you laughed playfully, twisting the handle with ease and stepping inside. you closed the door behind you and tucked your arms around your chest, sporting a lively pout.

but he seemed to have to reaction to your antics, instead, deciding to carefully lay his three swords on the bed behind him as if he was courting the swords and not you.

"what's up with you?" you raised an eyebrow at him, amused by the way the man sat at the edge of the bed with an annoyed huff. when he said nothing, you pressed again, this time a bit more direct, "why are you grumbling now?"

he's been like this for the past few days and now that he refused to elaborate, you found your patience slipping off of you like a thin overcoat, leaving you behind in your ugly, impatient skin.

today had been hard, like any other day. and for some reason or the other, instead of inviting you into his arms, this man had swore to make your life even more difficult.

"zorooo," groaning, you asked again, "can you stop being so dramatic?"

his head snapped up, eyes finding yours with wicked ease. his jaw was clenched tight, face red as if he was burning up, "i am being dramatic? me?"

"yeah? you're being so fucking weird." you sighed, "why?"

"i dunno, go ask that fucking cook maybe?" he grumbled.

if the exasperation on your face wasn't obvious until now, after that comment, it was surely on full display.

"what?" you hissed, "what is up with you and all these weird accusations?"

"as i said, i dunno. ask that fuckin' waiter instead, why don't you? i'm sure he'd have some answers lined up."

"why are you dragging sanji into this?"

"why are you defending him?" he stood up, his face mirroring your exasperation tenfold. he crossed his arms similarly to yours and the muscles shifted impatiently under his shirt.

you threw you hands upwards, "im not defending him! i am aski—"

"—yes you are defending him, don't even."

you were tired.

god knew you every inch of your muscles were alight with exhaustion, your head was pounding and if he wanted to fight you, you wouldn't even have it in you to fight back. these past few days had been enough on their own. so, you sighed, taking on a resigned tone, "i am so tired, zoro. can't we do it another day?"

"yeah, right." he grumbled again, his eyebrows bunching together in a characteristic manner, "everything needs to be pushed back with you, right?"

"what is that supposed to mean?" you were sure smoke was rising from the top of your head and your pupils were comically blown out, "i was tired and wanted to take some time off, so, i had sat down. and sanji found me to make some ideal chit-chat. god forbid i be tired for once-"

"i was waiting at the crow's nest for the past 30 minutes, where were you?"

"huh—" fuck. your eyes widened as the terrible realization set in. almost on instinct, your fingers reached out to touch him so as to makeup for the terrible deed you had committed. but your boyfriend pulled himself back, dodging your careful grasp before rasping out, "don't."

"zoro, i'm sorry! really, i genuinely cannot believe i forgot—"

"so, you forgot me over that fucking cook?"

"no!" you repeated, slower, "no, of course not. i was just tired and—"

"—and you decided to go off with him instead?" he scoffed, "i thought we were dating and yet, i think we've barely had any time to just spend together. every time it's someone or the other you have to rely on, not me."

"zoro..." you started carefully but he cut off you off, "don't zoro me. it's either nami or sanji or luffy or someone or the other. i wouldn't be surprised if you're fucking blondie behind my back too."

you stared at him, shocked. the wretched feeling gnawed at your insides till you looked at him in pure, utter disgust. the corners of your eyes burned up and you spat out, "don't fucking talk to me."

and you left the room, slamming the door shut behind you.

zoro stared at the place you were standing at and then slowly dragged his eyes at the door that you had slammed shut.

fuck.

⋆⭒˚｡⋆🪐⋆⭒˚｡⋆

well into the night, when he finally had swallowed his pride and mentally beat himself enough, he walked out of his room.

his steps were slow, stride careful so to not panic the mostly sleeping crew. searching through the washroom and the kitchen, the supply closet and chopper's tiny, stashed-away office, he failed to find you. then, he stepped out onto the deck and in a clean sweep, found you at the port side. the wind blew ideally though your hair and you stood with your arms on the railing.

the swordsman silently walked up to you, choosing to stand beside you without saying much. and if he had hoped for you to start the conversation, he was in for a long, long night.

"hey" he finally started off.

"i think i told you to not talk to me."

your feet shifted and you balanced your bodyweight away from him and he pursed his lips. standing in silence, the sounds of waves crashing against the ship painted you both in a uncomfortable hues.

he tried again, "i- i am sorry, really."

"don't care, didn't ask."

roronoa zoro bit the inside of his cheek, savoring the taste of foul rejection in his mouth over and over. but he had never been the one to go out without a fight. hell, he was the king of hell.

"but i am sorry." he repeated and his calloused fingers inched closer to yours, a poor attempt to ghost his skimming touches over your hand. but you were quicker and you pulled your hands back to yourself and wrapped them around yourself.

he slowly withdrew his hand and his head hung low, "how long are you gonna be mad at me?"

"i don't know? probably till i want to."

"babe—"

"—don't babe me."

"i am sorry—"

"—to fuCKING HELL WITH YOUR SORRY!" your cool demeanor washed off and you bore daggers into his paper-like skin as you stared him down. your breath was laboured and you were sure your yells must have woken someone, if not the entire crew.

he stayed silent, ready to face the consequences of his actions. and although venom was a resident on your tongue, looking at his guilt-struck face, you were reduced to nothing but a dumbfounded, little girl.

whatever you had planned, whatever you had thought you'd call him, whatever accusations you had thrown you'd throw at him dissolved at the tip of your tongue. and instead, an ugly feeling stirred under your skin. the feeling sunk heavy in your chest and your stomach and your head and heart and every other crevice of you. bile crawled up your scratchy throat and the same waterworks made home on your lash line.

when you spoke, you were sure your voice sounded more like a desperate plea than a demand for apology.

"why? why did you say that? that was low."

he looked down at his feet, his fingers twiddling against the sword hilt of his wado ichimonji in an attempt to self-soothe, "i know it was wrong. i was just so angry."

"and that makes it okay for you to question my loyalty?" you sniffed, feeling the watery weight cascade down your cheeks.

"no!" he looked up, alarmed, "no! ofcourse it doesn't. i never was— i was just—" he paused, wincing, "—i was jealous of him."

"sanji?!"

he continued, agonized, "yes, the damn cook. and everyone else, i guess. you seemed to have time for everyone but me."

"zoro, why didn't you just say it out loud to me?" you whispered softly. inching closer to him, you rested your palm against his warm cheek. his growing stubble lightly tickled your skin. you hummed softly when he closed his eyes and leaned into your touch, pressing an easy kiss to your fingers. "because i- i just couldn't bring myself to. i'm sorry, i should have talked to you rather than being a prick, really."

"i am sorry too. i know we haven't spent any time for the past two weeks or so. i was so busy within myself that i didn't reach out to you." your fingers played gently against the scars on his face from years of training, "these past few days have been hard—"

"—they've been hell."

you laughed despite yourself, "yeah, i guess they've been hell."

his eyes swayed against yours in a guilt-ridden dance, "forgive me?"

you paused a beat, "do you trust me?"

his answer came more easily than breathing did, "more than i trust myself."

you hummed, "sure?"

and he just nodded. as moments passed you both by, he finally quipped up, "so, am i forgiven?"

"well..." you pondered for a second, "technically, i did fuck up too. so, yeah, you're forgiven." you glared at him, "just never say that kinda shit again."

he smiled and when he spoke, he offered a kind explaination, "i didn't actually mean you were fucking the cook. i just- just kinda said it."

"eh," you waved off his comment, "i don't wanna fuck blondes, anyways. to be honest, not really my type."

"huh?!" his eyes widened in play-pretend, "so his hair colour is holding you back?"

"i mean i'm more into idiots who grow slowly on me. like moss does on a wet towel."

roronoa zoro— bounty hunter, pirate, first mate to a terrifying crew, kind of hell, demon, whatever— looked appalled. "are you comparing me to moss?"

"i am comparing how you grew on me to the lowest form of moss that even grows on the stupidest surfaces."

"don't call yourself stupid, now."

you huffed and turned around, walking towards the stairways that led to the rooms, "i am gonna stop talking to you again!"

he laughed, taking in easy strides to walk after you, "just kidding. i promise. your moss, ever and forever more."

he met your pace, wrapping his arm around your shoulders. you gave him a wayward grin, "good."

he gave you one right back, "great."

"i'm tired."

"me too."

as you both disappeared back into your room, hand in hand, you made a comment about how much his hair grew and he responded with "like moss grows on a wet towel?". next morning you found yourself waking up to the swordsman's heavy snores and heavier body against you.

stupid moss-head.

a/n: i think i like how this turned out lol. hope it's okay @rkiveinmarvel and as always, thank you to anyone else who reads this <3

[nolongerapileofashprobably]

Still playing through ToTK and I get a *BoTW* fic idea because of course I do; I'd repurpose it for ToTK but it doesn't quite fit, yet nonetheless I gotta share it before it leaves me (still gonna try to write it though) --

So, it's always bugged me a little bit that Link would go out of his way to do Korok puzzles and extra shrines and whatnot when they all take a fair amount of time and Zelda's whittling herself down in the castle, and Link generally isn't one to mess around while her wellfare is endangered.

BUT I present another theory; that the first time Link decided to pass one up as not worth the time, he felt that little ember of Zelda in the back of his mind wilt a little bit, and realized that she actively looked forward to each and every one of them. After a century of monotony, her mind is starved for stimulation, and fuck if Korok puzzles aren't the kind of brain teaser she would actually kill for (or, as the case goes, sacrifice another week or two cumulatively for).

And bonus points if he starts soliciting her commentary for some of the harder ones.

(Idk I think it's the fact that I'm reading BoTW fic while I push through the end of ToTK so I don't spoil myself but this came to me and I'm like, 'Ah, this resolves so much ludonarrative dissonance for me.' Thought you might appreciate the idea haha)

Yo. Yes.

I do appreciate this idea oh my god

I always wondered like “okay so link canonically did all of the shrine quests and side quests… so like… Zelda had to wait? Through all those quests? Ig homie did it all bc he knew he had to help and get as strong as possible so he knew he wouldn’t lose again”

And just adding that Zelda DOES have a connection to link through the spirit realm… and that she WOULD definitely get a kick out of the puzzles link goes through… oh I am so here for this idea

[lupunsus]

i want to write fluff. i (you people) need to remember the good sides of this au (non-existent) because yanderes can be nice (questionable)

Anyway, amputated mouse reader with Al-Haitham and Kaveh bc i finished the story quest, and they're literally fucking each other every other day istg

based on genshin hybrid au idea by @cinnamonest

while writing this, it was pure fluff... but my demons whispered in my ear, so there's nsfw in it. im sorry, but my resolve is weak against poly relationship with Kaveh and Al-Haitham.

warning: masturbation, the hybrid is actually the pervert in this one, a bit of angst bc hybrid thinks they aren't good enough to be sandwiched between two hot men despite being loved lots but they want their pp even though they know nothing about having sex with a human

Kaveh is too kind, really.

If it wasn't for him, you wouldn't have had such a warm and loving home that cared deeply for you. Having the part of your leg below the knee taken away by bad people with awful traps was sad, but Kaveh and his partner, Al-Haitham, made sure to make you forget about that problem!

Of course, sometimes they argued about things relating to you.

"You claim to be so smart, but what's smart about giving them a pegleg?!" Kaveh glared at Al-Haitham while holding you in his arm. The other held out the object, dropping it in front of the gray-haired man. It was cute to see you hobble around at first. But then you fell over, and tears started to form in your eyes. You were so adorable!! But also, you should never be in pain while under the care of Kaveh and Al-Haitham!! You were fine, just a small bruise, but being the overreacting person he is, Kaveh had to make a big deal out of it.

To others, it would seem like he was making the situation sound worse than it is, but Al-Haitham is just like him. He's just a quiet worrier.

"I suppose I should readjust some things. If I were to buy some parts–"

"Peglegs are unnecessary when we can just carry [Name] around!"

"But then they'd have to crawl around the house if we aren't home."

"We'll put soft rugs down!!"

It's a good thing Dori resides in Sumeru. Her nose can smell potential customers all the way to the desert, but the biggest spenders are always Akademiya students. So when it comes to needing supplies for hybrids, Dori's the one to go to!

But that's a lot of soft rugs. What are you raising? A baby? It's okay. Dori won't ask, just hand over the mora. Thank you~

If anyone were to see Al-Haitham and Kaveh while they lugged a load of rugs to their place, they'd assume Kaveh was getting help with a new project. Nobody knows about the lucky little mouse waiting inside, as the rugs are for them. "Thank you masters! [Name] likes a lot!!" The texture was indeed fluffy and soft. One could wrap themselves up and sleep inside of one. That's how cozy it felt.

It's a shame that the pegleg would sit in storage to collect dust. Maybe one day it'll have its use.

Days when Kaveh is out and Al-Haitham is home are the best days. Why? The two of you do absolutely nothing. You make yourself comfy on top of him and take a nice long nap. Sometimes Al-Haitham will read to you, teaching you some words and whatnot. His voice is nice, however, so most of the time, he looks down to see you drooling all over his chest while deep in slumber. It's the main reason why he stopped wearing shirts during those times. Too much of a hassle to wash them. Kaveh doesn't complain, even doing the same.

Both of their chests make for good pillows, and their skin is always so warm. You definitely start drooling more when you're sleeping on them.

Kaveh is fun to be around, too!

He's made some toys for you to play with, but he doesn't mention how Al-Haitham helped. You didn't ask, so technically, he isn't lying to you. Do you know those cat wheels? Kind of big, enough for a human, maybe if they were to crouch down. Anyway, Kaveh made that for you! A nice little wheel to run to your little heart's content. It's super cute seeing you use it, especially when you get tired.

You just lay there in a puddle of exhaustion, and he takes the opportunity to scratch and nuzzle his face in your tummy. If you're ticklish, you try to push him off, but you're too tired to do so. Kaveh rewards you with treats and stuff to chew on, so it balances itself out. Plus, his belly rubs feel good.

Honestly, living with them makes you forget that you're missing half of your leg.

Almost.

You're a bit clumsy, especially when both of them are busy. During those times, they tend to leave a lot of things laying about. Books, well mainly stacks of books, but there's also occasionally some other stuff. And with how often Kaveh and Al-Haitham redecorate the place, things that are usually in a position you're used to are inevitably moved, and objects put in hard to reach places.

So when you trip or hurt yourself because of it, it's hard not to let a few tears fall. Would it be easier if you had two healthy legs? Of course, it'd be easier to balance yourself with two legs instead of one and a half. These negative thoughts start to spiral until you think about how useless you are to your masters.

All hybrids in shelters know that their purpose is to serve and please their masters. You weren't a stranger to the knowledge, even hearing of how if the hybrid is good, they'll be treated the same and even receive assistance during their... spring season.

But you're damaged goods! Unused, but still damaged! You require more care than the average hybrid, needing special attention and accommodations because of your small size. Neither of the men touched you in that way. Instead, they gave you space and sometimes left the house.

You could smell their scents on each other.

Why were you even here if they had each other to pleasure? You were grateful to even have such a nice home, but what were you to them? A pet? Or worse... an experiment? You've heard stories of fellow rodents being used for tests and experiments. They weren't harmed, but they weren't as loved as other hybrids in homes.

Ah, maybe you were a charity case.

A poor little mouse with half a leg missing. Nobody would want them as caring for them is so expensive, and you'd need to rearrange furniture and make the entire place practically baby proof. Perhaps you were a child to them. But you're definitely past that age! And what will happen to you if they do manage to conceive one? It's unheard-of for a male hybrid to get pregnant, but there are rare cases of it happening. Some can happen with the intervention of researchers, but only psychopaths (Dottore) would experiment with that.

Well, whatever. You're exhausted after overthinking and making yourself insecure and depressed.

The two men you loved with your entire being said they would be out late, but were they just having fun without you? Ah, you already told yourself to stop assuming things and thinking negatively, but it was hard. You wanted to be with them, too! Even during those times... There was only one thing that could help clear away these negative thoughts.

That's right. Stealing.

Borrowing would be a better word. You always put their clothes back! ...With the dirty clothes. Kaveh would be confused, not recalling wearing some of them, but blamed it on the alcohol. Al-Haitham made Kaveh do laundry, so he never spoke about it. He did express his impatience at how Kaveh takes forever to wash clothes, but that was it. They wouldn't think that their precious little mouse was to blame for the misunderstanding and confusion.

You'll never know it, but they think you're incapable of doing anything without them. Of course, you get exercise from your wheel, but they still feed, bathe, and clothe you (you're mainly naked unless they have guests over) with their own hands. The only things you should be doing without them are running on the wheel and chewing on your toys.

Going back to your session of "borrowing," it was usually something you did during the day when they were out, but since they're out late, you figured stealing more clothes of theirs again wouldn't get you caught. If they were doing what you thought they were doing, the two of them would get back home when the sun started rising.

So, you had plenty of time to make a nest in your hidden corner and masturbate while being surrounded by their scent.

It was really well hidden! Plus, you still had some clothes from earlier today, so the nest would just be cozier, and the smell of them would be even stronger. There really was nothing better than burying your face in their clothes while getting yourself off. It only helped to fuel your dirty desires.

Would they take you at the same time? You were confident that you stretched yourself to take both of them (you are definitely not), even using 3 fingers instead of 2! Surely, they'll both fit. But would they take turns instead? Impossible. They bicker so often that you think one of them will get impatient. And then there comes with that thing humans do. Kissing? You've only ever received forehead kisses from Kaveh, but you wanted more than that. Both men thought they were secret in kissing each other, and even if they weren't, they explained it as a way to share energy even if they both were out of breath afterward.

That was what you wanted. You wanted to give all your energy to them. To be drained until there was nothing left to give, even if they were insistent and shared with you their energy just so they could take it back.

"M-Masters...!" It was a relief that you came before your arm became weak. For some reason, you could only bring yourself to cum twice before your wrist felt numb. Maybe you needed to exercise more, you didn't know. You were still sensitive, so you opted to grind against their clothes to reach another high.

On any other day, you'd feel horrible for getting the clothes of your Masters dirty with your essence (or, as you like to call it, your love for them), but you were upset for always being left out! And they'd always tease you too. Going around the house topless. You have to hold back from pouncing on them and rubbing your nipples against theirs. You've done it before when sleeping on Al-Haitham's chest, but that time was an accident. It felt really good, though...

And the material of their clothes rubbing against them now felt incredible, but you really wanted to feel their hands and bodies against them. To have them pinched and squeezed even though no milk would come out. You heard hybrids can lactate if their nipples are squeezed and sucked periodically, so maybe if you play with them every day, you can give them a nice surprise.

Milk is delicious, after all!

Bringing yourself to the edge for the sixth time, you collasped onto the nest, exhausted from grinding against clothes. At most, you could only last three rounds, but this is an improvement! Humans generally go for seven rounds, so you are really close! But you're so tired... do humans really do it so many times? Their stamina sure is amazing.

You had time before your masters came back, so a nap wouldn't hurt. Plus, you were very hidden in this corner! Even if you overslept, they wouldn't be able to find you. You even threw a blanket over pillows on the couch just in case :) You've seen Kaveh do it, so it'll definitely trick them into thinking you're asleep.

It truly is unfortunate that you think you could outsmart two Akademiya graduates.

Al-Haitham is used to Kaveh's tricks, so he immediately knows you're hiding. You haven't figured out how to unlock the door, and there's even another few locks that you can't reach even if you manage to figure it out. Windows are too complicated to unlock for you, too. It's while he's narrowing down possibilities that Kaveh is calling out for you, thinking you were playing hide and seek, but fell asleep while waiting for them.

Kaveh thinks it's adorable and fun to look for the obvious tail sticking out from behind something. It isn't until Al-Haitham notices some of their clothes sticking out from underneath a table in the corner that he knows where you are and what you've been doing. How could he not? You practically begged them and threw a fit just to keep the table in its spot. It wasn't really hidden, but nobody would notice if someone or something were under it.

Calling over his partner, they looked to see you slumbering on top of their clothes, using their shirts as blankets. It would've been a cutely innocent sight if not for the fact you hadn't cleaned yourself up. "They've used more clothes than usual, but their heat is 3 weeks away.." Al-Haitham gently rubbed the inside of your thigh, causing your body to shift. Kaveh moved some of the shirts aside to see your reddened nipples perked up. He wanted to pinch them, but he settled on flicking one, smiling when you mumbled incoherently and squirmed a bit in your sleep. "Maybe they missed us~ We were out longer this time."

"Because someone can't play cards."

"I'd like to see you beat Cyno in less than 7 rounds!"

Realizing his mistake, both men looked towards you as you shifted. "Masters...." Nuzzling your face into their clothes, you let out a content sigh as their comforting smell seemed to be stronger than usual as if they were beside you.

"My skill is not provoking him. You'd have lost in 4 rounds if you had drank alcohol." This time, Kaveh chose to glare at Al-Haitham. The reason he didn't drink tonight was so that he'd be sober enough to remember being welcomed home by someone much cuter and nicer than the Acting Grand Scribe. But seeing you curled up in a nest of their clothes is definitely better.

Al-Haitham only sighed at the sight. "They took the pants I was going to wear tomorrow this time. I'll have to start hiding clothes I need."

"Wait, you knew they were the reason our clothes ended up in the laundry so often?" Al-Haitham only gave Kaveh a look that screamed, "Was it not obvious?" before rearranging the clothes to cover your entire body so you wouldn't get cold. If you weren't peacefully sleeping right in front of them, Kaveh would have yelled some very mean things at Al-Haitham. But that could wait for another day.

After all, they've left their cute little mouse waiting too long.

[docholligay]

Holligay Tries Things That Aren't Running: Kettlebell AMPD

The answer is a very obvious, 'Because people like it that way' but I swear to god, working out in groups is just choreography, and, why?

I walk into Kettlebell AMPD after a full week of doing strength classes, and I'm not too proud to tell you: I am beat to shit. I literally put dinner on the table and ran out in my Extremely Noble Quest to win an overpriced and unnecessary kitchen item, after having ran in the morning, and the idea of lifting a weight is not thrilling to me.

But, the only way to get a sticker is to do this class, and I've picked it specifically because it's only 45 minutes, and not an hour, and I am lazy.

The teacher's name is Lacy*. I am worried that she will think I'm a lazy shit, because I have every intention of picking up a 10 pound kettlebell and being a lazy shit. Echoes of Boot Camp haunt my mind. She'll see me for sure.

Then she struggles to tell the teenage boys playing hoops that open gym is over, and I offer to do it.

I grab my ten pound kettlebell. She ain't saying shit.

A kettlebell is essentially a flat-bottomed bowling ball with a handle. I've been in enough classes involving weight to have a rough idea of what is going to go on here, but what I could not have imagined is that the squats and bicup curls and whatnot would be set to the beats of That's What I Call Music: Doc is in and around High School.

I want you to imagine trying to get a serious workout in while you're listening to Fall Out Boy and The All American Rejects. You're doing squats in time the Good Charlotte. Am I the dad rock?? I ask myself. I never listened to this stuff really, but there is nothing like the popular music of your generation being used to inspire a bunch of greying women in t-shirts to make you realize that the greying woman is you, DocDoc.

All of which would have been fine until some other unspeakable mid00s hit came on, and she displayed a motion of making a wide swing with the kettlebell, trading it over at the top of her head, squatting down and passing it to the other hand, again, through her legs.

Like most people just this side of 40, I have a handful of infirmities, my only saving grace being that they were caused by something other than being old: Being an idiot.

When I was about 19, I fell through the floor of an abandoned farmhouse, from the second floor to the first, and have a handful of issues to show for it. A few light scars that most people never notice unless I point them out, a knee that gives me trouble occasionally, an elbow with a weak ligament that gets overtaxed easily, but most interestingly, a hand that drops something if I grip it wrong.

I assume this is some kind of nerve injury, as it's the same hand that loses feeling in two of the fingertips if it gets cold, but I don't know as I've never had the money and inclination to chase down an injury for which the diagnosis will be: Hell of a thing! But what it means is I often have to be thoughtful about the way I lift something with that hand, especially something heavy. I have done it so long that people never notice I do it, and honestly it's generally easy to avoid.

Swinging a kettlebell around my legs and through the air to the beat is PRIME TIME for me to be grabbing something incorrectly and sailing it off into Kelsey's head. I stand there for a moment like an idiot, unsure of what to do. Then i just go grab a 5 pound kettlebell and .5% ass it.

I would say I got nothing out of the class, but in fairness I didn't really give it anything to reinvest, it's not like I was actually trying. I don't think I would do it again though, it was weightlifting without any actual oomph. I would go to that class every week and never get any stronger.

We finished with a stretching session to Jimmy Eat World's song about a dead person.

*Or, as with these (reviews? Thoughts? Pointless asides?) a close enough approximation of her name.

[hyog-blog]

Under the Microscope

This is such a neatly made little historical drama, based on an actual case from the Ming dynasty, that you could absolutely binge-watch it in a day or two (just 14 eps). What starts as a simple math problem, a discrepancy in numbers between the actual field measurements and what is written in the registry reports, later blooms into a huge case of corruption on different levels of the government system in 8 different counties along with tax evasion, murders, false witnesses, and whatnot.

Chinese bureaucratic system of that period seems like a real nightmare, even more so, when someone is trying to investigate a case (and, in many ways, things really haven't changed that much in modern times). The story revolves around Shuai Jia Mo, a math genius who lacks social skills and is probably mildly autistic. His parents die in a fire under mysterious circumstances. All he's left with are a few memories and the number 3530, which turns out to be the exact number of taxes his whole county is paying out of thin air. No one knows where the tax came from and why people have to pay it, so he starts the investigation with the help of his friend. Naturally, all the powers involved try to silence them as soon as possible.

I really had no idea a show about ancient Chinese taxes could be so captivating - mostly thanks to a well-written plot and superb acting, as well as interesting, shrewd, and excessively scheming characters. I guess this is a story more about human nature, that's why it's so relatable today, and the quest for justice, because for each bad and greedy person out there in the world, there is one with a pure heart and soul who wants to do good. And sometimes, that person could actually win (well, at least in a cdrama :)

We see quite a few charismatic faces here. Wang Yang (Teng Zijing in JOL) seems to be very compatible with Zhang Ruoyun. Here he starts as an antagonist, Cheng Renqing, a lawyer who defends anyone who pays him more (in this case, the bad guys). For a good half of the show, he's just an increasingly annoying lil' shit with a broad smile and a sharp tongue, but then things change, we get to know his story, and he turns to our boy's side eventually. Wu Gang (Chen PingPing from Joy of Life) is a welcome treat no matter what role he takes. He's so good at playing skin-crawling bad guys, it's just remarkable. I also fell in love with Feng Biyu, a feisty lady-owner of a meat shop, who can beat the hell out of quite a few bullies who go after her little bro and the ML.

Needless to say, Zhang Ruoyun's performance was top-notch. I can't imagine how hard it is to depict such a character - but I totally believed him! Both his math genius side and the slightly autistic side. It actually leads to some pretty funny scenes because of how straightforward he is, not understanding the intricacies of human behavior (and the lies and the games between people).

I was not-really-surprised to hear Liu Yuning's voice at the ending OST of the series (the guy is literally everywhere:) but ah, he's just such a good singer and the song really got me hooked from the first notes. I also want to say that style-wise the show is quite beautifully made, too. It's a true-to-life historical depiction of the Ming period, but the shots, the light, the colors - everything was just very pretty!

The show is a kind of detective case story about tax evasion, but the characters make it very alive and entertaining to watch. There's some drama sprinkled with a bit of comedy, some math, 0,1% romance, but everything comes together so nicely that you really don't have any complaints in the end. The show is exactly what it promises to be, not overlapping with other genres. I, personally, was in the mood for it and it's definitely a 10/10 for me.

P.S. also, there's a cat)))

[karizard-ao3]

i'm re-reading Anamnesis on ao3 after that finale because i needed to be comforted by the fact that no matter what universe they find themselves in, Mikasa and Eren always find each other. After reading it the first time, I kinda viewed all your other EM fics as being in the same verse??? like they're just eren and mikasa and at any moment they can be pulled into the Anamnesis universe by Hange or smt. Have you ever thought of developping on the other eremika couples that we met briefly in Anamnesis? Like Merkasa and Meren, the office couple or the couple that was about to give birth?

You know, I hadn't considered branching out with Meremika because I was kind of just being silly with them (I mean, what are those names???), but I do sometimes think about Plague Eremika. I think whatever I came up with for them might be too derivative, though. I feel like most stories featuring a plague end up being kind of similar with world building and mitigation efforts and whatnot, just like how most zombie apocalypse stories are pretty similar.

Sorry, going off on a side quest there.

So, as for the other couples, in my head the ones who were camping were actually the version from my staff Christmas party one shot and a reader asked if pregnant Eremika was... Neighbors au Eremika? I think? I tried finding the comment but it's not on the chapter they appeared in, so I'm at a loss on where to look. I'm pretty sure it was neighbors Eremika because I liked their idea a lot and I currently think neighbors em are a great fit for that.

But yes! I'm glad you viewed it that way because that's how I viewed Anamnesis in relation to my other fics! I had played around with trying to introduce clueless teens Eremika and some of the others, too, but having EM run into their alternate selves ended up being less of a narrative factor than I'd anticipated going in. I had originally thought maybe it would be more episodic in nature and Eremika would learn very special lessons each time they met one of their former selves but as I worked out the plot more I realized that the alternate universes were going to play a different role than I'd anticipated and the story was going to be more about Mikasa's trauma than whacky alternate universe hijinks.

Sorry, started rambling again. I do also sometimes think about visiting the office couple in the hospital and letting everyone see that Eren pulls through all right and Mikasa is there at the hospital with him almost every day until he's allowed to go home.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Huh well, if you didn’t hear the news earlier from YouTube or twitter or whatnot. E3 once again is cancelled, mainly this time around due to well, not enough companies being there, Ubisoft was the latest to pull out last,that’s what I heard about? Ten cent and sega, Bandai Namco, and of course the mighty first three, Nintendo, Sony, and Xbox. More and more it is probably right to assume that E3 is dying while things like summergamefest and what not or the game awards or PAX or Gamescom. I think this may be the time where a shift is happening in the space, both in sense of games that people will pay for, and the way conventions similar to E3 may come to exist. It kind honestly surprised me when that four years ago yesterday apparently, is when Geoff Keighly, the host for summer game fest and the game awards, left hosting E3 to have and help create those two things, which kinda boggles my mind that someone saw the writing on the wall that long ago, pre-Covid? That’s kinda scary to imagine in my mind.

On the other side of the coin we have indie games slowly rising and clawing their way forth, more to the limelight, more to the front lines of gaming, pulling themselves up and bring themselves forth, figuring themselves out how to stand out from the crowd. And with the latest thing, bringing new ideas to the light or taking old ideas and introducing a new twist to it or shining it up to more modern standards, bringing in ideas in while most triple AAA company works are either too focused on the graphics, or too focused on making the moolah from their game continually, no matter if it was free to play or not, and with the new “inflation” based grow in cost, base games are going to be costing 70 dollars in America, 70 dollars! That’s may be a small amount overrall but it’s still a very noticeable and big number to buy games for! So while triple AAA studios are asking us to move on to this next big price jump, we have indie games, like, antonblast, or the current famous pizza tower (despite its issues of what the creator has said and has of course apologized for their past actions, but still it’s popular), Celeste, hypercharge, so many goddamn boomer shooters, selaco, hellslinger, wizordum, dusk, beyond sunset, ultra kill, deadlink, exophobia, and so many other options like patch quest for a rouge-lite where you can use a lasso to attach to a monster and then once “capturing” it, you ride it, or the rougelike and animal crossing combo that is cult of the lamb, where not only are you fighting demons, the highly addictive vampire survivors game, where you can become the bullet hell. And on steam, there is so many options of portal mods that have gained steam support to pay for the suckers like the painting initiative or portal:reloaded or if you want something portal-like with its own unique idea, entropy centre with is talking rewind gun and it’s talking main protagonist or what’s being currently made like ARTIFICIAL, which is a half-life and portal inspired puzzle game and it’s looking so interesting and neat. DEEP ROCK GALACTIC, With all it’s rock and stoning glory with destroying bugs ok hoxxes, and drinking many fantasy beverages made by a nice little robot to chill after a nice hard working day in the caves. Roboquest with its first person shooter rougelike goodness that is on Xbox gamepass and stuff. So many good possibilities is coming in the future and I look forward to the change that indies are gifting us

[eunoiaflow3r]

when worlds collide - h.p. x gn!avenger!reader

a/n: bahahahahaha no one reads harry x reader lmaoo you don’t have to tell me - i know. but still, i thought this was a cute idea and i went with it. hope you enjoy :)

not edited.

also: timelines don’t match up bc i don’t want to do the math so harry is like 20 - 21 and your like 19 - 20 in 2020. Civil War and everything on didn’t happen. Fred didn’t die.

gn = gender neutral

warning(s): “language!” - captain america.

word count: 3.1k

request(ed): no.

summary: stephen sends y/n to a strange new place with...wizards?

————————————-&—————————————

Never doubt Stephen Strange. That's something that pretty much everyone has accepted. Never second guess the wizard man. Usually you'd agree. Usually you'd just let the man babble about whatever he needed to and then go about your day.

Not now.

The fuckery.

Now you were here (wherever here was) after some flashes of orange and a "be careful." Did he even do the spell right? Is this really where you were supposed to be?

It was dark, and dirty and you just wanted to go home and not talk to anyone so you turned yourself invisible.

You were born with your powers - you think. You were adopted so you wouldn't know where your powers came from. All you know is that one day your parents couldn't find you, even though you were right there. Instead of thinking you were some kind of alien and throwing you out to labs, they helped you control it the best you could.

It was difficult at first, all things considered, but you got through. You discovered you had another power as well. Force fields. Those came in handy during the battles. (You helped where you could), and Tony Stark took you in afterwards as his own. He helped you create your suit, and your name, and discover more about your powers, he was basically a dad to you.

Your parents were a little hesitant letting you join the Avengers, but once they realized this is what you were meant to do, and you had people just like you protecting you, they couldn't keep you from that. They just couldn't.

So here you were, invisible, in some dark and creepy alley. There were doors either side of you, so you got out of the way considering they could open and smack you in the face at any given moment. You heard loud voices and laughing and cheering from both ends of the alley so you walked towards the one in front of you.

The voices were so loud and echoey that you really couldn't focus on anything else. Maybe that's why you didn't hear a boy behind you trip and fall into you from behind.

"I'm so sorry." he said helping you up.

You turned around to help him, he got awfully dirty, and searched for his glasses that fell off his face.

Once standing, he took out a stick, waved it over him, and all of a sudden the dirt and gravel was gone.

"How did you do that?" You were no stranger to magic, but this was something you've never seen before. And why would he do it in front of you? For all he knew, you were an unknowing human.

"What?" He asked eyebrows furrowed together, accent strong.

"With the stick."

He chuckled shoving the stick back in his cloak.

"The stick." He smiled and looked you up and down. "It's a wand. You must not be from around here."

"Yeah, what tipped you off?" You noticed the lightning bolt scar on his head. You wondered how he got it.

"The accent, the clothes, the inability to recognize a simple wand, the ability to be here, not recognizing me, and wait - where is your cloak?"

"Cloak?"

"You were just invisible a moment earlier but I don't see your cloak anywhere."

"I don't have one. I can make myself invisible without a piece of fabric or your fancy stick." You say sarcastically. Were you flirting?

"Handy." He grins. "The name's Harry Potter."

He holds his hand out for you to shake. "Y/N L/N."

He asks you if you want to talk somewhere besides a dark dirty alley. You agreed. It took some convincing though to let him use his stick to clean the clothes you had on, but to change your outfit to something less, standout-ish.

When you felt the witch hat on your head you immediately snatched it off your head and glared at him.

He just laughed.

Once out of the alley, you breathed in the now clean air, and was mesmerized. People were bustling in and out of small shops, animals were flying and chirping around their owners, children were running around with their friends and siblings, and people were waving sticks, or wands, just like Harry used.

"C'mon, this way." He smiled at your awestruck face. It reminded him of when he first arrived with Hagrid all those years ago.

He brought you inside a coffee shop, and sat you at a booth near the window knowing you'd probably want to still look outside at the new scenes.

After ordering, and a few moments of silence as you looked around, you decided to ask some questions.

"Where am I?"

"We're in Diagon Alley. It's like an outside mall."

"I mean like, planet? I guess?"

"Earth."

"Earth?"

"Well, more specifically London. Diagon Alley."

"London?! I'm in London?!"

"You've never been? To Earth? Or London?"

You rolled your eyes silently cursing Strange. "I'm from Earth. The United States, actually. I just wish he'd put me on a fucking plane or something instead of making it seem like I was going to Mars."

"He?" Harry was very curious.

You looked into his green eyes, your mind wandering. The guy in front of you was very attractive. His dark hair complimented his eyes, and his glasses made him even more attractive.

"You guys are wizards right?"

"Really? What gave you that impression?" He asks sarcastically. "The sticks, the pointy hats, or the big bowl with green liquid sitting outside?”

You rolled your eyes. "Very funny. It's not my fault you live into the stereotype of brewing potions in your cauldrons -"

"Oh well I can only assume you're one of those Avengers from the States, yeah?" He grins. "You guys are all over the news."

"Yes, sure -"

"And don't one of you wear capes and another shoot lasers or lightning or whatnot? Sounds very stereotypical to me."

You laugh as the waitress brings over your drinks and muffins. You thank her. "No, well yes, that's Strange and Thor, but that's besides the point -"

"Well of course it's strange." He grins and winks and you over his mug. He was purposely annoying you and found great joy in it.

"Anyway," you sigh getting back to the point. "Do you guys have a Wizard here, like a powerful, trusting, all-knowing kind of guy?"

His eyes dropped slowly and his smile dimmed for a moment before slowly widening once again.

"Had. His name was Dumbledore."

"Our guy is Stephen Strange. Or Dr. Strange. He sent me here, and I'm not sure why."

"Hmmm." He hums setting down his mug. "Are the states in danger? Were you sent here on a secret quest that would put you through tough trials that would risk your life but would ultimately save everyone you've ever loved so you just have to do it?"

You were in a silent shock. "Uhm. No, not that I'm aware of, no."

"Well then perhaps your Wizard Strange is playing matchmaker."

"Matchmaker?"

"Well you were sent here weren't you?" You nod. "Arrived outside the exact place where I was and I just happened to bump into you? Sounds like a set-up to me."

"Or a coincidence."

"I'd like to think it was fate that I bump into the most attractive person I've ever seen and they don't know who I am and won't judge me 'cause of my past." He took a bite of his muffin.

"Should I be worried?"

"I guess you'll have to figure that out yourself." He winks.

You decide to eat your muffin as well. It was a comfortable silence until you looked out of the window and noticed a guy crouching down behind a cauldron...with a camera.

"Harry?"

"Hm?"

"Why is there a man outside taking pictures of you?"

His eyes widened. "Oh shit." He whispered. "Here." He took out a baseball cap and put it over your head, hiding your face from the camera.

He gets out of his seat quickly pulling you along with him to the back of the shop but before you could say anything he had his wand pulled out.

Next thing you saw was a couch and living room.

"Wow." You panted. "What a way to bring a girl home."

"I apologise Y/N, I block them out so much I forget they're even there and now they've seen you, and have a story and -"

"Wait, wait, wait, are you wanted for murder or something?"

Harry walks over to his bookshelf and pulls out a rather large book. After opening up on the table, he waved his wand over it and beckons you over to read it.

'Boy who lived.'

'Golden boy defeats Voldemort'

'winner of Triwizard tournament'

And there was so much more… 'Harry Potter' in bold just strewn across the pages. His whole life story.

Your eyes widen at everything. "So both and neither. War hero. How come I've never heard of you? Or any of this?"

He smiles at the pages fondly, running his fingers across the letters and reminiscing on his times at Hogwarts.

"Unlike you Avengers, we like to keep our business private and quiet. We don't like prying eyes."

You scoff. "Not our fault we have alien invasions every year."

Harry agreed and for the rest of the night you sat on his couch talking and sometimes arguing, over every little thing. It felt like you two had known each other forever.

You're not sure when, but you fell asleep there and woke with your head on his chest and his arm wrapped around your waist. You're not sure how the two of you ended up this way, and you realized you were practically strangers, but you didn't want to move. You just wanted to tangle your fingers through his dark hair.

But you didn't. Instead you stared at his closed eyes, and focused on his long, dark, eyelashes that fluttered a little from time to time. You thought about how you could get used to this. Waking up with his arm wrapped around you.

You told him last night that if he was actually a serial killer, and wanted to kill you that you had a whole team of people who would rip him limb from limb. He had no doubts and looked actually scared of your threat.

You thought about what it'd be like to live here among people like you.

Stomach grumbling, you decided to get up and see if he had anything you could make for him. It's the least you could do. His face turned when you left his arms, but you quickly pulled the blanket over him so he would be able to sleep a little longer.

You found his bathroom, and washed your face. In your backpack was a toothbrush and some toothpaste so you brushed your teeth, fixed your hair, and got dressed.

By the time you got out of the bathroom, you noticed Harry was still sleeping so you went into the kitchen and tried to find anything remotely close to breakfast foods. By the look of his inventory, you could tell he was very good at cooking but hadn’t been to the store in a while. He did have some eggs and toast though so you decided to make that.

In the middle of it, you got a phone call from Strange.

“Strange?”

“Harry Potter.” he says.

“What?” you were so confused as to how Stephen knew ANYTHING.

“You’re in his place, we've been tracking you.”

“So I guess we should probably have a talk about privacy? I don’t know, it just seems like something we should discuss you know? Cause usually people can respect that - especially people who just DUMP you here in the first place -“

“Calm down that’s what the mission was. While you were sleeping, we searched the place with a camera we put on you and he’s not who we thought he was. You completed the mission L/N. Great job.”

“Is he a danger?”

“Not necessarily. Just making sure your fine is all.”

“What -?”

He hung up.

Why wouldn’t Strange tell you his intentions? Why would he let you stay here if he thought Harry might have been a bad guy? Why would he risk that?

Right as you hung up Harry Potter walked into the kitchen with his lenses in between his shirt - he was cleaning his glasses.

His dark hair hung over his eyes but his eyebrows were raised.

“You made breakfast?”

“It was the least I could do. I didn’t mean to fall asleep but thank you for letting me stay.”

He smiled and put his glasses back on. In doing so his gray shirt lifted and you could see his abs. You turned away a blushed.

“It was no big deal. Thank you for making breakfast, love. You didn’t have to.”

You didn’t say anything and instead placed both of your finished plates on the dining room table. He followed you and sat down immediately digging in.

“These are the best eggs i’ve ever eaten Y/N thank you.”

You smiled in response but then frowned remembering your conversation with Strange. You should probably tell Harry.

“So,” you cleared your throat. “You were wrong.”

He gave you a look that meant “about?”

“Dr. Strange - the wizard I work with - he likes to check out potential threats and make sure that ya’know - the earth stays safe and everything. Je can kind of see the future and its propabilities. He did the same thing with Thor and his brother Loki.”

“Okay, go on.”

You cringed. “And so he called me and told me that he sent me here so he could see you? I don’t know I guess he saw you as a threat and wanted to make sure you weren’t.”

You looked at Harry but his face was clear of any and every emotion. He just continued to eat his eggs. It was silent.

You ate a bit at your eggs too until he spoke up which made you look up.

“I can’t say I’m very surprised honestly. With everything you guys manage to fuck up there I’d wanna know if someone else was about to create shit problems too.”

You sighed with relief. He wasn’t mad.

“I’m sorry really Harry, I didn’t even know.”

“No yeah it’s fine. I get it. I still think he sent you specifically for a reason though. There’s just no way we aren’t soul mates or something.”

“Oh shut up Potter.”

He smiled. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Gee your head must hurt.”

He squints at you jokingly. “You should let me take you out. I can show you around today. Y’know, so you can see what wizards are like.”

“Is this a date?”

His face flushes red and he looks down at his plate. “Yeah, yeah it’s a date.”

And a date it was.

“What the fuck is wrong with you Harry! Again?!” You practically screamed. Harry called it aparation but you call it hell. You let it go the first time but damn. He barely even warned you, just took your hand, held it tight, pulled you close, and waved his wand.

It was teleportation. Something you’ve never ever done before.

“Fucking hell Potter I’m going to murder you.”

“And Strange was worried about your safety? This is like your 4th time threatening to end my life and besides, it wasn’t even that bad.”

You rolled your eyes.

Throughout the day Harry showed you all sorts of things you’d never ever seen before. This consisted of every flavor jelly beans (and by every flavor they really meant every flavor), a chocolate frog, and never ending bubble gum. And that was just on the candy side.

He took you inside this joke shop ran by two of his friends from his old school he called hogwarts. They were twins that went by the names of Fred and George. The only twins you had ever met was Wanda and Pietro but telling the story of Pietro’s death seemed to sour Harry’s mood but excite the twins. The fact that he sacrificed himself for a little boy made him a hero in their eyes. They begged you to tell them more stories.

By the end of the day you went back to Harry’s place and you were exhausted. You can’t believe all that you’ve seen and eaten. How was this stuff even possible? How was it all hidden? You were amazed.

Harry was glad to see you had a good day and glad that he had met you. When you got back, he told you that you could stay another night...and perhaps in the bed instead of the couch. He hadn’t meant it in a dirty way but that didn’t stop you from laughing until tears came out of your eyes. He was so awkward at times. Once he had to ask if it was okay to take your hand while you were in the street and it was so cute how he couldn’t really find the words even for something as simple as hand holding.

“Harry?”

“Hm?”

You both were laying in his bed facing the other.

“I had a lot of fun today. I feel like i’ve known you forever.”

He grinned from ear to ear and was glad that you couldn’t see him. He would have been beyond embarrassed if you’d seen how unmistakably happy that made him.

“I had fun with you Y/N. You’re great company.”

You were silent for a moment.

And another.

“Harry?”

“Yes?”

“Can I kiss you?”

You were scared of his response and your heart was practically beating out of your chest. What if he was just being friendly? What if he just wanted to be friends? You would have made a huge fool of yourself. You were going to turn away embarrassed until his hand came up to your face and slipped onto your cheek. He was so warm. His lips pressed against yours for a moment and then he pulled away.

After a moment he reconnected and moved his lips against yours slowly. Your hand went to the back of his neck and toyed with his hair. He groaned into your mouth. You smiled and scooted even closer to him. All you could hear was the sound of your breathing and kissing. You didn’t want to pull away but you had to.

“Harry.” you said practically breathless.

“Yeah.” he was breathless too.

“I want to show you my world. You should come see New York.”

“Yeah? You wanna show me those alien invasions and robot attacks?”

You laughed and snuggled into Harry. He wrapped his arm around you and kissed your neck.

“Mhmm.”

“I’d love to see it.”

Tags:

@romance-geek @gooseyhouse

[duelofthefatesmp3]

i DO actually wanna know how youd make kotor 3 !!!!!

this ask has been sitting on my inbox for so long on PURPOSE! i wanted some time to re read the revan book + watch some swtor gameplays so i could give a concrete answer about why the book and swtor arent satisfactory and what i would do instead (im not like. a storytelling god so i this is just my PERSONAL idea). under the cut!

to begin with, what's wrong with revan the book and swtor, mai?

i am very fond of swtor i think it was such a nice idea to have an "open" world game set in star wars old republic time. but ultimately, it was not a good conclusion to revan and meetra's storyline! now, i don't really know what happened in the development of the third kotor game (if there ever was a plan for one) but it's clear they dropped the ball on that and decided to start a whole different project. i don't think we can blame disney for that one, because it was announced on 2008, launched in 2011, and disney had just bought star wars that year. so who knows.

the thing is that it's painfully evident that a bunch of the story that was gonna be in the third game, ended up in the book + misc parts of swtor. much of the book feels like a gameplay.

now, it was clear when the book was planned that they wanted to keep revan's story open so when the game came out, they could have a cool Revan storyline so he could make a cool villain appearence and draw in some of that kotor nostalgia. which ehhhhhh. uh. i don't really think did any favors for revan's character. he didn't have a satisfactory arc (I'm not saying "a happy ending" because good arcs aren't always happy) but at least some closure?

revan went through many big events in his life. we didnt need to keep his ass in stasis for his fun villain moments 300 years later. we already had what we wanted from him: jedi turned sith turned jedi again to defeat a terrible threat. that was it we could have let it there and it would have been cool! but then they decided to drag and drag his story just to leave him right where he was before. he just suffered a little more in the in-between.

you could say he finally redeemed himself of all of his crimes this way, but wasn't that the whole purpose of the first kotor game (and would have been the purpose of the 3rd?)

swtor does not centre revan in his own narrative. he's a side character for the player to experience. and look, i get it, we've had a different protag on each game, why not have another one in this one. well, because the protagonist has no personal relationship with revan. meetra was one of his closest friends, and fought with him. there is a connection that can be exploited. but the swtor protagonist is just some guy 300 years in the future who happens to stumble into revan and his life. not even his descendants get to fully interact with revan.

also, there is the fact that revan is not the centre of the game itself, only of a particular storyline. and it's weird, because swtor could have happened without revan's involvement.

ms. meetra surik, ms. bastila shan, women of the world I'm sorry

so it's no news that star wars is misogynistic as fuck right. cause it is.

so you decide to make your gender neutral protagonist a guy. then you decide to make your other gender neutral protagonist a woman. cool. now let's guess who gets underdeveloped, turned into a plot device without reason, and promptly fridged in the most unceremoniously fashion just to fullfil some manpain moments. which one do you think got that treatment.

i know the revan book is supposed to be about revan, but why make meetra go through a whole arc just to undermine her character and turn her into the faithful servant of the guy? she leaves everything behind for him, sacrifices herself for him, hell not even dead is she not serving the guy. and she was the second game’s protagonist! she beat up a bunch of powerful people and now she’s just meh, there? she had so many interesting ways to interact with revan (meeting kreia, revan’s first master, encountering another force consuming entity, etc.)

meetra went through a whole arc about dealing with the guilt of doing something horrible and having the consequences of it cut her from the force. we see her broken, then slowly come back to the world and reconnect herself with the force, then stop running and face the consequences of her role in the war. thats such a cool character with tons of potential! and nothing happened!

then we got bastila who is. a whole deal. so you make her go through a “promising jedi who defeated revan, to questioning reluctant companion, to fell into the dark side, to was redeemed thanks to her bond to revan, who helped her come back because he’d been through the same experience” arc, and then you decide to push her to the side to have a baby?? which is... its clear that the writer didnt know what to do with her (or with the other characters outside of canderous) so hey, lets get her to marry revan and have a baby.

my ideal kotor 3

to preface, im not a game developer, so some of my choices could be stunted by what a kotor rpg can do lol. of course, it would follow the same mechanics and have the same format as the first two, because consistency!

the fun way to start the game, would be from scourge’s perspective. we get to play as a sith! i’d even say you get to change scourge’s name and gender and looks (i know sith have different looks)

in scourge’s storyline, we get from his arrival to normound kaas, to his talks with nissyris, to his missions working for her. in some of these, we can make scourge lean into the dark or the light side! fun! plus we get some exposition with dialogue options. it all continues untill we get to nissirys story about the emperor. we get a fucked up cutscene of his childhood and then BOOM when its over, we see revan waking up from a nightmare and their pov starts.

ok, as for revan’s story, since we’d have to pick it up from where kotor ended, i’d have a little cutscene of revan back into the ebon hawk, with bastila, and them telling the crew to take them to courascant. then cut to a council meeting where revan and bastila get scolded in private, then rewarded by the republic. i would also like to see some revan mournink malak’s death mayhaps. since he was their childhood friend and all.

i would 100% scrape the marriage and two years passed part. as the book said, the council had no use for revan aside from the legend(tm), so why would they stay in courascant. revan was very alienated from the jedi at that point, despite being back in the “light side”

then like, to revan asking around for meetra and other jedi from the mandalorian wars, we can cash in that atris cameo, then revan starts to have these visions about the sith emperor, and maybe we could get a playable dream sequence about revan’s fight with mandalore the ultimate (I KNOW I WOULD LIKE TO SEE IT.) and we get the whole exposition to mandalore telling revan that the sith are behind it all. i believe we should get a bunch of these flashback/dream sequences of revan’s past doing shit. cut to revan burying the mask in a planet, then back to the present. we see a bunch of mission and juhani scenes trying to reach him, but he keeps pushing them away. revan and bastila meet canderous, travel to the ice planet, meet clan ordo (god i love clan ordo) you get the whole quest, you decide weather to spare veela or not, maybe you get a cheeky mandalorian companion (force sensitive mando oh?) and leave canderous behind.

we can visit like, a couple more planets searching for clues maybe, etc. then when reaching nathema, you are forced to go alone as revan, get to explore nathema a bit (raiding ancient location yay) nathema as a location can be so fun because you can have it weaken you hp bar and also you cant use the force (which, in game is pretty cool)

then we get to scourge and nyssiris arriving to the planet, they fight but since theres two of them and revan doesn’t have the force, they beat the shit out of them, and while running away, they get in a fight with bastila and the companions in the ebon hawk (ebon hawk shooting game my hated). bastila manages to get a glimpse of revan’s thoughts before they take them away. but the ebon is so ruined it takes bastila, t3 and the mandalorian a while to fix it, and they get stuck into the unknown regions for a while. the ebon hawk is left in an outer rim planet with t3 fixing it, bastila and the mandalorian run back to the jedi council, only to get caught in the middle of the jedi civil war. we can have bastila choosing to hide in courascant and trying to make sense of what she saw, reading texts about the sith empire, trying to plot a course to where they took revan (more atris! but shes pissed at her now)

cutscene to meetra’s pov, leaving malachor v behind, getting calls from everyone at the hawk (atton my beloved) but just as she’s leaving she gets a force message from revan, calling for her to find him and sending visions of normound kaas. then, through her force bond with visas, she tells her not to go because they’re gay and in love and whatnot.

then boom, she gets intercepted by bastila’s ship, with the mandalore and the other mandalorian (yes i do love having a bunch of mandos on board) and they go on their way to find revan.

now i want there to be an underlying message of “we can’t take our friends with us because we have to do this ALONE we’re powerful JEDI we don’t need our FRIENDS.” meetra gets asked if she wants to bring any friends and she’s like “no. we have to do this alone.” along the game you get constantly contacted by other game characters, you get the chance to talk to them or ignore them.

so, we get back to nathema, and meetra has a whole “holy shit this is just like darth nihilus but ten times worse. but i beat darth nihilus. i can do this!” then she finds peace in this place without the force, we get a whole speech about how the odds arent against them, they find a way to normound kaas, and get going.

in normound kaas i thought about them getting a whole mission about how to infiltrate the citadel, only to get helped by scourge. he joins the party, we get a little flashback of all the years he spent trying to make revan remember and they storm the citadel. we get to fight the dark council members, fun! then we get to free revan and the game switches povs. bastila hands the mask to revan and he has a cool “yes im revan im pretty cool” then a nice heartfelt yet rushed reunion with everyone.

then have a small CONVERSATION WITH MEETRA where she talks about the sith triumvirate she defeated and revan is impressed with her and is like “we are the last hope of the jedi, we’ve learned to walk between light and dark, we’ve done horrors but we can still make things right, our experience has made us more powerful etc.

then they fight the imperial guard, ALL OF THEM, meetra revan and scourge make it into the throne room, they all fight the emperor. meetra shows the emperor that she has seen the void, she has cut herself from the force, and she’s not afraid of him, revan supports her, talks about redemption and hope  and NOW.

NOW. how the alternate endings could go:

if you decide to take scourge through the light side, he manages to form a forcebond with meetra and revan since they’ve both teached something about the duality of the force, they get 100% stronger, but its still not enough. UNTIL. a bunch of ships (jedi and mandalorian, even non republic ships) arrive to dormound kaas, the gangs from each game storm the room and together they make the emperor and his guard a bunch of punching bags. they beat him! (unknow to them, this was a backup body because the emperor can do weird shit like that, and has only debilitated his plan, but he’ll come back dont worry). then they fly back to the republic, to tell the chancellor about the sith threat, and preparations for the war begin. meetra and revan get to live happily ever after for a while, then they die away from the jedi or the sith (waaah im thinking about them helping canderous rebuild the mandalorians, and them doing it since they killed so many mandos in the war)

BECAUSE IN THE END KOTOR IS ABOUT LEARNING TO PROCESS TRAUMA AND RECOGNIZE YOUR MISTAKES AND LIVE WITH THE GUILT WHILST TRYING TO FIX THE MISTAKES YOU MADE ALONG THE WAY. AND ALSO TO HEAL FROM TRAUMA YOU NEED A SUPPORT SYSTEM SO EVEN THOUGH IT MAKES SENSE TO YOU YOU SHOULDNT PUSH PEOPLE WHO LOVE YOU AWAY. AND THINGS AREN’T BLACK AND WHITE ITS COMPLICATED SO YOU DONT END UP BACK ON SQUARE ONE YOURE A CHANGED PERSON.

or

if you decide to dark side scourge further, he betrays revan and meetra, they all die, and the emperor unleashes his angry lightning or whatever on everyone + a bunch of visions of all the enemies of past mocking them, and their loved ones suffering. and since you’ve had that “im not calling my friends bullshit” no one comes, you die there, and the emperor is only stalled for a few years. swtor ensues. scourge becomes the emperor’s hand.

now you could of course bring revan and meetra up in swtor, but maybe only as force ghost guides, or have some of the other characters of the game have relevance (visas tries to heal the miraluka planet 2021)

WELL THAT WAS A LOT OF WORDS. HOPE THIS IS SATISFYING ENOUGH

[nevertherose]

One Hundred Seconds to Midnight: Chapters 1-8

"All Roman wanted to do was take Logan on a Doctor Who LARP within the Imagination.

But with Thomas's Sides at their figurative breaking point after the disastrous wedding, the Imagination may just have a few ideas of her own..."

Hello, Tumblr fanders, it has been a while since I've poked around in here...mostly because, I've been writing another story!

Do you like Sanders Sides? Do you like Doctor Who? Do you like the idea of the Sides playing Doctor Who characters? If so, this story was written especially for you.

I found that the process of cross-posting Mahogany and Teakwood across three platforms, one chapter at a time, involved a lot of me spending too many hours squinting at html code. Not especially fun. This time around, I've only been posting on AO3 and Wattpad.

But I wanted it to exist here as well.

So! Today I'm going to post the first half (in two posts, because apparently Tumblr has a post size limit, who knew?), all the chapters that are up so far. Then, when the whole story is up on the other platforms, I'll post the other half.

Of course, you could head to either AO3 or Wattpad, if you want to read as the chapters go up.

But if you're like me, and like to read stories in nice, big, juicy chunks...here you go:

One Hundred Seconds to Midnight

Chapter 1- The Eleventh Hour

“Who are you?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m still cooking.”

Midnight.

The witching hour.

Or was that 3AM? Roman wondered. No, that’s the devil’s hour…damn it, Virgil! You had to get them all mixed up!

It was nearly midnight on the Imagination’s border.

Moonlight, pearlescent and brighter than it could ever shine in the real world, streamed feather-light through the tall windows on Roman’s side of the Dream Palace. It made patterns of light and shadow over the black marble floors, made nighttime caricatures of the white ivory statues that lined the corridor.

Roman’s heeled boots echoed in the silence; Logan’s dress shoes, in comparison, were whisper-quiet.

Logan himself had been uncharacteristically quiet since they entered this place, Roman noted, glancing back. Normally by now the logical Side would have asked a million questions, made a million plans, or be several bullet points into a lecture about palace construction or the history of measurement units or some other nerdy, obscure subject.

And Roman would either pretend to be annoyed, or would interject witty counterpoints to make Logan stop and bluster and…

But not tonight.

Maybe he’s nervous about being here, Roman told himself, smoothing a hand over his red sash. He’s only pointed out a million times that Logic and the Imagination are anathema to one another. Maybe I should have planned something else…

Or maybe he’s just annoyed at you for dragging him out of bed in the literal middle of the night, a more insidious inner voice whispered. When you know he likes to keep a consistent sleep schedule.

Roman pressed his lips together, lifted his chin…he might be a mere facet of a single personality, but he was also a Prince, and Princes do not listen to inner demons. However, he also looked back for the dozenth time to make sure Logan was actually still following.

That was the only reason Roman kept looking back.

It had nothing to do with the way the translucent moonlight caught the other Side’s dark, immaculately kept hair, or glinted off his glasses.

In the real world, of course, and whenever they manifested near their Source, the Sides all had precisely the same face and body as Thomas. But deep inside the mind, where physical appearance was an illusion anyway, the Sides exercised much more control.

Thomas remained their base template, but each Side also tended to portray himself with features that Thomas associated with their core function. Like Patton’s fluffy curls and childlike freckles, or Virgil’s anxious, ever-changing eyeshadow, or Remus’s abominable comic-book villain mustache.

Like Deceit’s…no, Janus’s very real scales.

Damn that snake. Why did I have think of him now?

Hopefully the lying bananaconda had better things to do than pop up and spoil things tonight. Because tonight, Roman was finally fulfilling a longtime promise to Logan, and taking him on a grand adventure.

The thought made his heart flutter in anticipation, and he looked back again.

Logan within the mindscape was leaner than Thomas, an inch or two taller, and his neatly trimmed hair and intelligent eyes were almost black in the low light. His face was narrow and intense, the nose more aquiline, and he had a habit of standing straighter than any of the rest of them.

(A habit which constantly showed off his trim waist and chest muscles…not that Roman paid any attention to that…)

Roman, by contrast, was a bit shorter, but his shoulders were broad and he was more muscular, due to all the questing and sword fighting he did here in the Imagination. He wore his hair in longish disarray that paired devastatingly with his clean, square jawline; hair that could be turned loose and wild on quests, or pulled neatly back as befitted royalty. His hands were strong; with long, artistic fingers, as skilled at wielding pens and paintbrushes as they were at wielding swords.

He liked to think he was handsome.

He was also painfully aware of how little it mattered when a certain someone…ehem…never seemed to notice.

“Roman, I confess to still being a bit lost as to the purpose of this journey,” Logan said at last, breaking the high-ceilinged silence. “You said you were taking us on a…’lark’? If so, why are we wandering around the Dream Palace?”

“LARP,” Roman corrected, flashing him a smile. “L-A-R-P. It stands for live action role play, Specs.”

Logan’s nose wrinkled at the words “role play”, and Roman’s stomach lurched. He hates it, he hates the very idea of it, you haven’t even started yet and you’ve already failed…

“Oh, don’t make the scrunchy face!” he added, a bit louder than necessary, and waved a hand. “At least wait until you’ve seen it.”

Roman had only been planning this for weeks.

“You know, when you promised to take me on one of your ‘adventures’,” Logan said, making finger quotes. “I was not expecting to be roused from bed in the middle of the night.”

“That’s because this isn’t your average adventure.” Roman gestured around them. “I constructed a special dreamscape to get all the details right, and we can only use the Dream Palace when Thomas is asleep.” He turned and dared a wink. “Only the best for you, my detail-oriented friend.”

Logan adjusted his glasses.

“Let it be known that I am indulging your antics right now because you have, on occasion, had some good ideas. You will, in turn, have to indulge my skepticism.”

“I have no idea what you just said, but I’m gonna pretend it was a compliment,” Roman said with a wink, which Logan rolled his eyes at.

“Ah ha, here we are!”

Roman stopped at a set of iconic blue doors, nearly vibrating in excitement as he waited for Logan to recognize them.

The nerd did not disappoint.

“Roman…” Logan murmured, stepping forward to touch the white PULL TO OPEN sign. “They look just like the doors to the TARDIS. The attention to detail is exquisite. But why?”

“Because I’m taking you on a Doctor Who LARP!” Roman exclaimed, flapping his hands. “All we have to do is step through, and the Imagination will make us Doctor and companion, and whisk us away through all of time and space!”

Logan’s face was a mixture of confusion and curiosity. “Again…why?”

“Because it will be fun?” Roman bit his lip, looking at his toes. “I…I know you aren’t into swords and sorcery and dragon-witches and whatnot. I wanted this to be something you might actually enjoy.”

Logan’s brow furrowed, as it often did when he tried to process something that didn’t fit neatly into his graphed, notated, logical worldview.

Usually, it was an emotion.

“But won’t us enacting such an intense scenario at this time of night negatively affect Thomas’s sleep?” Logan asked.

“That’s the genius of adventuring in the Dream Palace,” Roman explained. “You can do hyperreal, immersive stuff, and if Thomas does happen to remember anything, he’ll just think he had a weird dream. The worst that could happen is he might post about it on Twitter.”

“Hmm. I can see you’ve thought this through. I am…flattered that you went to all the trouble,” Logan said in a quiet voice.

Roman had to bite back an ecstatic giggle.

Not…not because of the way his nerves skittered below his skin when his gaze caught Logan’s black eyes and soft expression. No, Roman was merely…excited! That someone like Logan appreciated his hard work!

It wasn’t like he was trying to impress anyone, like some middle school boy with, you know, a crush or whatever. For the last, well…two years.

…and then some.

Ugh. There was little point in denying his feelings; he’d only accidentally summon Janus and his oily smirk, and if that happened, Roman would most certainly die of embarrassment and that was not a lie, thank you very much.

The truth was, ever since Thomas had placed that jar of Crofters into Logan’s hands and inspired him to sing…not just rap, or begrudgingly harmonize, but actually sing…Roman had fallen, and fallen hard.

How could he not?

Logan’s words and ideas had always challenged him, pushed him to be smarter, sharper, better, just to keep up. Logan was the grounding anchor to his sails, the clarity to his excess. It used to infuriate Roman, the way he and Logan always came at problems from opposite sides and fought, sometimes bitterly, over the best way to meet in the middle.

But now?

Now Roman relished the way they traded words in a good fight, like blades in the hands of expert swordsmen. Logan, despite his dislike for anything fanciful, was a natural wordsmith…and Roman was a great lover of poetry. Even better, it seemed like Logan was also starting to enjoy their verbal sparring matches…

And then these last few months had happened.

The Decision, and Deceit, and the way that snake had let Remus out of the shadows to wreck havoc, and then the disastrous wedding itself…and Roman knew that Logan, through all of it, had been feeling pushed aside.

Goodness knew the logical Side hadn’t deserved to be shoved to the back of a courtroom, or relegated to a pixel-y shadow of himself before being removed from the discussion entirely. Worse, in both of those scenarios, Roman had either done nothing…or actively made things worse.

Roman knew he was guilty of letting his mouth run wild in his zeal to solve Thomas’s dilemmas…or in desperately hiding his true feelings. He knew his nicknames often came with barbs, his insults sometimes hit too close to home, that he often ignored or dismissed Logan’s cool, much-needed perspective.

He knew he needed to be better.

I’ll make it up to him tonight, Roman told himself as he laid a hand on the rough wooden blue doors and glanced back at Logan. The logical Side nodded, giving Roman a tiny burst of confidence.

He’ll get to play his favorite character and be his best nerdy self. This is going to be great!

Roman took a breath, and shoved open the TARDIS doors.

Chapter 2- Human Nature

“It’s all becoming clear now. The Doctor is doing the things you’d like to be doing.”

The blaring of a dozen sirens burst in Logan’s ears.

He was yanked across the threshold, Roman’s hand practically a vice around his wrist. Logan inhaled the sharp scent of metal and warm electronics, and a million figurative lights went off in his brain.

Being the physical incarnation of Logic, this wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar sensation.

The TARDIS shuddered…wait, TARDIS? We’re actually on the TARDIS?…under impact. Lights flashed; reds and greens over an ambiance of steely blue-gray, and Logan knew exactly what to do.

He shook free of Roman’s grip and strode to the center console…console, how do I know this is a console?…flipping several switches and turning the green dial to precisely 3.56 degrees to offset the radiation sheer from the M-class star they’d just spun past.

Because naturally they happened to be careening through an asteroid field.

The time rotor rose and dipped, Gallifreyan symbols whirling overhead; Logan adjusted shields and dodged rocks, striding confidently from station to station. He guided his TARDIS around the last large asteroid, one that easily could have smashed his beloved ship to bits, and then they were clear.

The TARDIS chimed reassuringly under his hands, relieved to be in empty space again.

Roman screamed.

The sound echoed off the metallic walls, causing Logan to whip around and nearly lose his balance.

“What happened?” he said sharply, leaving the console. The creative Side stood near the railing, staring down at himself in obvious dismay. “What’s wrong?”

“Look at me, Logan!” Roman said shrilly and gesturing at his body. “Just look!”

Logan examined his fellow Side. There were no obvious injuries he could see, no blood, no bruising, nothing that would merit a scream. There was just Roman, unfairly handsome as always.

(He still wasn’t sure how Roman managed that feat when they all literally, at least some of the time, had the same face.)

“I…don’t see a problem?” Logan asked slowly.

“I meant, look at what I’m wearing, Calculator Watch,” Roman snarled, and turned to yell nonsensically at the ceiling. “Am I a joke to you? When I said I wanted to be a companion, this is not what I meant!”

Logan focused on Roman’s clothing, which had shifted rather drastically since passing through those doors. His normal princely attire was replaced by a denim cutoff skirt, overalls, pink leggings, and a tight pink blouse that clung to his muscular chest and arms...

“I look ridiculous, don’t I?” Roman murmured, scuffing a combat boot against the metal grated floor. The motion drew Logan’s gaze again to the way the cutoffs hugged his hips and wow, that skirt was really short, wasn’t it?

And those tights, the way they accentuated Roman’s legs...

Logan frowned, his face feeling unusually warm. Why did he keep noticing these things? Of course Roman was more fit than the rest of them.

Perhaps it was simply that Logan didn’t usually see the evidence of it so…plainly.

Stop, Logan told himself sharply. You might be gay and allosexual, but that is no excuse to be disrespectful.

He cleared his throat.

“If I may, Roman?” he said, approaching, and made a closer examination of Roman’s outfit.

“I gather from your earlier ranting that you instructed the Imagination to cast you as one of the Doctor’s companions for the duration of this scenario?”

“Well, yeah,” Roman admitted, “but I was thinking someone like Jamie McCrimmon, or Rory Williams, or maybe even Jack Harkness!”

“You know there is some debate over whether Jack Harkness would be considered a proper ‘companion’, as he was never full time on the TARDIS,” Logan argued absently, still eying Roman’s ensemble.

It was attractive but also familiar; he just couldn’t quite place it…

“Neither was Clara Oswald at first, but nobody had a problem handing her that label from the start!” Roman folded his arms and Logan had to look away because wow, short sleeves and arms…

“Just because she was a girl and the writers obviously intended for her to be a love interest—”

“A girl, of course!” Logan snapped his fingers. “Roman, you are a companion. Specifically, you are Rose Tyler.”

“What?” Roman frowned, smoothing the overalls across his middle. “I…Hmm. You might actually be right.”

“Of course I am right.”

The creative Side scoffed at that, but continued to frown.

“I think it’s a good choice,” Logan added. “Rose is arguably one of the most beloved companions in new Who; bold, kind, and intelligent in her own way. She was pivotal to the Ninth, Tenth, and arguably the War Doctor’s character arcs.”

He laid a hand on Roman’s shoulder. (To convey reassurance, of course. Not because he suddenly wanted to touch…)

“Hers are not the worst shoes you could be given to fill,” Logan said, “idiomatically speaking.”

“Only you would drop a word like ‘idiomatically’ in everyday conversation,” Roman grumbled, but some of the spark returned to his caramel eyes.

“But look at you!” Roman said in a brighter voice, gesturing. “All proper and Doctor-ish. At least the Imagination let you keep your tie, or, whatever that thing is around your neck.”

Logan glanced down at himself for the first time.

His sensible polo and jeans had become a clean-cut black suit, with a warm grey waistcoat, a crisp white undershirt, and a silver pocket watch. A navy cravat was knotted around his throat.

His knee-length suit jacket was also black, with a striking cerulean lining.

He retrieved a slender, metallic something from the jacket’s inner pocket: of course, the Doctor’s signature sonic screwdriver. Specifically, the Tenth Doctor’s screwdriver.

Logan chuckled, remembering all the times he’d ranted to Roman about how impractical and flashy Eleven’s screwdriver became, and don’t even get him started on Twelve’s, it was practically a lightsaber…

“Interesting,” he murmured, stretching his arms to turn in a slow circle, letting the jacket flare. “Fashionably, I appear to be a cross between the Eighth and Twelfth Doctors, which I appreciate, as they are the two most sensible dressers of the bunch. And by the way, Roman, this is a called a cravat, not a tie…”

He’d lifted hands to his neck but the words died on his tongue.

Roman had summoned a mirror and was, quite literally, checking himself out. He swayed his hips, tilted one toward and then away from the mirror, pouted, did a tongue smile, and…and Logan realized he had been watching for more than a socially acceptable length of time.

He swallowed hard and cleared his throat again. But he was saved from having to speak by a loud crackling at the center console.

Both Sides rushed over, Logan seizing the TV screen and pulling it down. Gray static skittered over the polished surface. He flipped two switches and turned a dial, trying to zero in on the signal.

“I meant to ask earlier…how do you know what to do?” Roman asked, tilting his head. “You were piloting before I think you even realized we were on a TARDIS in the first place.”

Logan froze in the middle of winding one of the cranks.

“I…I really do not know.” In fact, the more he thought about it, the less sense any of the controls made. “Now that you’ve drawn my attention to it, you are correct: rationally, I should not know the function of any of these…gizmos.” He gestured at the crank he’d been winding.

“Yet somehow my hands just…know.”

Roman leaned casually onto the console.

“When I built this LARP, I gave the Imagination quite a bit of leeway in how it wanted to construct our characters,” he said. “I’m thinking it took things a step further than costume changes, like making me the companion it thinks I most resemble instead of the companion I wanted to be.”

Roman bit his lip as though troubled, then clearly shook himself out of it.

“And it must have imparted some of the Doctor’s knowledge upon me.” Logan added, not sure how he felt about the Imagination having such a direct influence over his mind. He supposed if it didn’t get too invasive, and was confined to this one night, he could deal with it.

It had proven useful so far, after all.

Roman shot Logan a fierce grin.

“Indeed! So engage that big Doctor brain and let’s see who’s trying to call us. Allons-y, adventure awaits!”

“You know ‘allons-y’ is my line, right?” Logan said dryly.

He had to use his screwdriver on the screen before the picture came clear. The stream of static acquired the cadence of a voice…and then a disturbingly familiar face stared back at his own, looking equally shocked.

Roman, for the second time since entering the TARDIS, let out a bloodcurdling scream.

Chapter 3- The Witch’s Familiar

“If you’re going to take my stick, do me the courtesy of actually killing me. Teamwork is all about respect.”

Janus had just settled into his favorite chair with a mug of chamomile tea and a political science book when he was yanked…rather rudely, he might add…onto the deck of a spaceship.

He sighed, and dismissed his drink.

When one lived in the same mindspace as the literal embodiment of chaos, one unfortunately learned to expect such interruptions.

“REMUS!” he roared, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Did I not specifically ask to be LEFT ALONE tonight?”

Silence.

Deeply annoyed now, Janus took a moment to look around himself. This was not a normal spaceship; no windows, for one, and it was laid out in levels around a translucent column at the very center. His mismatched eyes followed the center rotor up and down, his mind almost placing it…

Something clumsily rose up from the deck with a clatter, causing Janus to summon his crook with a yell.

Only…the object that dropped into his hand wasn’t smooth wood, but a slender metal instrument just barely longer than his hand. A…sonic screwdriver? What the actual heck?

Well. It was what he had.

“Get back!” He pointed the instrument at the…figure…who still slowly climbed to its feet. It was an android or robot of some sort; humanoid, and the same kind of weirdly familiar as the ship.

“Janus?” the robot said, tilting its head.

Janus froze, all the scales standing up on his body. That was…that was Patton’s voice. Flat, mechanical, but unmistakable.

After all, Patton was the only Side who consistently called Janus by name.

“Patton?” Janus whispered.

“Oh, that was so weird-feeling! Thank goodness I’m not all by myself,” Robot-Patton said, putting a hand over his…well, where his heart should have been…in obvious relief. “But why are we both suddenly on the TARDIS?”

Janus drew in a sharp breath.

Of course, he should have recognized the stupid time rotor immediately. He’d never admit it to any of them, but he was as much of a Doctor Who nerd as Logan or Roman, sometimes going so far as to spy on them when they argued over episodes together.

To learn their arguing styles, of course.

Not because he had any desire to join those discussions.

And now, looking at Patton with a sinking feeling in his stomach, Janus deduced exactly what he was: a Mondasian Cyberman. They were older and cruder in design than the reboot versions…no wonder he hadn’t put a finger on it right away.

That wasn’t really the issue.

“REMUS!” Janus shouted again, more angrily this time. Bad enough his pleasant evening of solitude had been interrupted by…whatever this was. But putting the sweetest, most emotional Side into a canonically unemotional shell, a robot?

That was cruel. That was insulting.

It was too far, even for Remus.

“Janus, is everything okay?” Patton asked, coming closer. Janus shivered at the sound of that warm voice coming from a blank metallic face with empty eyes.

“Do you…feel all right?” Janus said in a hesitant voice.

“I’m a little chilly, but otherwise I’m in ship shape!” the other quipped, giggling. “Get it? Cause we’re on a ship?”

Is it…is it possible that he doesn’t know?

“Hilarious,” Janus deadpanned, but inside his thoughts spun.

He sensed they were in a dream construct within the Imagination, which meant this had to be Remus’s doing. Remus, who reveled in gore, despair, disturbing imagery, angst, and who was in charge of Thomas’s nightmares.

Remus could…and would, given the chance…recreate the experience of being a Cyberman down to the Last. Grim. Detail.

Maybe he hadn’t meant to ensnare Patton specifically to fill this role…Remus didn’t generally pull other Sides in for nightmares, come to think of it…but meanwhile, Janus didn’t want to find out what this might do to Patton’s head.

Worse, it was becoming clear that Patton was somehow oblivious to the state of his own body; he’d used his metallic hands to clutch at his metallic chest and found nothing wrong with either. He couldn’t hear the electronic rasp in his own voice, or the heavy clanging of his steps on the grated floor.

Should Janus say something?

Would Patton believe him if he did?

Ever since Thomas’s near mental breakdown after the disastrous wedding, Patton and Janus had orbited around each other in a state of tenuous truce. They talked now, sometimes, and those talks didn’t always end in arguments. Patton began to leave space for him by Thomas’s blinds when he was called up, and he…and by extension Thomas…occasionally actually sought his input.

But Janus, well.

Janus was still a liar.

The others still called him Deceit, either by accident (Logan) or out of spite (Virgil). Then there was Roman, who invented a colorful, wounding ego-jab for him every day, and Remus, whose fond nicknames tended to double as sex jokes.

Having no other real allies in the mindscape, Janus really, really didn’t want to screw up his tenuous alliance with Patton. Why sabotage his figurative “seat at the table” over one of Remus’s stupid nightmares?

Patton would assume Janus was slipping back into his old ways, lying just because he could, and Janus would never be able to prove otherwise. And later Patton would make that sour, pinched face he always made when he was disappointed, the one that made Janus want to crawl into a hole…

So.

Best to keep his observations close to the chest, for now.

“Do you have any idea what we’re doing here?” Janus asked, striding to the center console. True to dream logic, the controls made no sense and simultaneously made perfect sense.

Patton shrugged; a strange, clanky motion of his shoulders.

Janus sighed. “Although Remus has dragged me into dreams before, even he generally understands the concept of consent.” He casually flapped a hand. “And he always leaves you ‘light sides’ alone.”

“Honestly, this doesn’t feel like a nightmare to me,” Patton said, nearly making Janus choke. The Cyberman clanked over to stand by the console.

“It’s too clean,” Patton added. “Roman let me glimpse Remus’s side of the Imagination once, not long after he showed himself to Thomas, and it was…”

Patton trailed off.

“Fragmented? Chaotic? Disturbing?” Janus supplied.

“Sure, we’ll go with that,” Patton said quietly. “This,” he waved a hand around, “feels more like Roman’s work.”

“I suppose you would know.” Janus ran a thoughtful thumb over his face, tracing the ridge that ran from the corner of his mouth to his ear.

“And I would almost have to agree,” he added slowly. “If this was a nightmare, surely something ghastly would have happened by now. But my being pulled into one of Roman’s creations makes even less sense. He literally cannot stand me.”

“Maybe this is one of those dreams Thomas has sometimes after binge watching a show?” Patton suggested. “When there’s enough material in short term memory that the twins don’t get much input? Did Thomas binge a season of Doctor Who yesterday or something?”

And to think the others still view you as stupid, or slow-witted.

Janus bit back a smile.

“It’s a good theory, Patton, but no,” he said. “Thomas hasn’t really binged on much of anything lately.”

Patton ducked his head.

“You don’t…you don’t have to rub it in, you know,” he said lowly, the metallic rasp grating on Janus’s ears. “You and Logan have both made it pretty clear that I’ve been too strict with Thomas’s time.”

Janus fought to keep his expression neutral, but his stomach twisted.

Damn it.

Leave it to Patton to find guilt where none was meant. Even if Janus claimed he hadn’t meant it like that, Patton would probably not believe him.

Patton tilted his metal head as he examined Janus’s face.

“Did you know you have a mustache now? And a little goatee?”

“I have a what?” Janus felt at his face and groaned, his gloved fingers tugging at hair that most certainly did not belong on his face; with the scales, it probably looked hideous.

His entire outfit had altered in subtle ways, he realized. His usual plum tunic and trousers were now a brown suit and waistcoat ensemble, crossed with yellow pinstripes, with a black collared undershirt. A brown, knee-length suit jacket replaced his caplet, with subtle gold trimming. His yellow gloves were unchanged, thank goodness, and his hat…?

His hands flew up to his head and found something perched over his hair, sitting at an angle. Janus yanked down a screen at the console and stared. His beloved bowler had shrunk into a tiny, flat, rakish thing with a wide brim, festooned with a cluster of yellow rosebuds and black beads.

“What on earth, Remus?” he grumbled, turning his head from side to side. Well, if he had to be honest, pinstripes and a hatinator weren’t a terrible look.

“Well, if we’re on a TARDIS, I guess you’re supposed to be the Doctor,” Patton pointed out. “Which would make me your companion.”

Janus stroked his goatee and examined their surroundings in more detail. But am I a Doctor? he wondered. And if so, which one?

And whose TARDIS is this?

Because while it was clear they were on a TARDIS…what other class of spaceship had a time rotor?…he wasn’t almost certain this was not the TARDIS.

Every corner of the Doctor’s ship, no matter which face it belonged to, tended to overflow with bright, shiny, eclectic whimsy. By contrast, this one was plain, stark, with exposed metal beams and sharp angles.

Too dark, too full of shadows.

An awful suspicion rose up in his mind.

He crossed to one of the bookshelves, ignoring Patton’s soft inquiry, and his jaw clenched. There was the Necronomicon, shelved between the Liber Inducens in Evangelium Aeternum and The Black Scrolls of Rassilon, Book of Vile and its Black Appendix, The Ambuehl Lores and the Insidium of Astrolabus.

Janus finally looked at the sonic device he’d been holding all this time; seeing now that it wasn’t a screwdriver at all, and thanked every god he knew that he hadn’t tried to use it on Patton earlier.

It was a sonic laser.

Once again, even in a stupid, nonsensical dream, Janus had been cast as the villain.

His fist had collided with the bookshelf before he even realized he was moving, books falling to the floor. He punched it again, and again, until a cool rigid hand closed around his wrist and yanked him back.

“Janus, Janus, stop!” Patton yelled in his ear.

Janus wrenched his arm away and stalked back to the console, running gloved fingers over his scales, pushing them up and smoothing them down. The familiar sensation grounded him.

“You were right, Patton,” he threw over his shoulder. “This is definitely one of Roman’s dreams, and he definitely fucking hates me.”

Patton’s heavy footsteps clattered behind him.

“Language. And how do you know that,” he asked. “…Doctor?”

Janus whirled, lips curled in a snarl.

“I am not the Doctor, Patton, and we are not on the TARDIS.” He spread his arms to encompass them both, gesturing to the dimly lit spaceship. “Look around. Look at me!”

He turned, slowly, and eyed his mustached visage in the dark view screen.

“Clearly, I am the Master.”

Chapter 4- Nightmare in Silver

“You think he knows what he’s doing?”

“I’m not sure I’d go that far.”

Patton rested his arms against the console and sighed.

Once again, someone I care about is upset, and I don’t know what to do. I guess I should be used to it by now.

It didn’t help that it was so cold in this TARDIS. He folded his arms around his middle, which felt strange and heavy, to combat the chill that seemed to have settled deep in his bones.

Janus stalked past again, grumbling to himself.

“Of course the Prince would pull me into one of his little ‘adventures’ without my consent. He probably needed an antagonist. And naturally the slippery snake would have been the first person to come to mind!”

Patton opened his mouth…though he had no idea what he was going to say…but Janus drowned him out.

“Come on, Roman!” he shouted, throwing his yellow-clad hands up. “You’ve had your fun. Yes, I’m evil, I’m the villain, I’m the bad guy, blah blah. Let’s have our epic confrontation or whatever nonsense you have planned, as I would very much like to get back to my reading sometime tonight.”

Silence.

Patton didn’t know what Janus was expecting.

“Look, maybe we should just play along for now?” Patton said aloud, wincing when Janus turned his murderous expression on him. The deceptive Side had such deep, cutting golden eyes, the human one so much darker than the other…cynical eyes that were, ironically, almost impossible to lie to.

They’d see straight through it.

“It takes a liar to know a liar.”

The glare quickly softened, though, which in Patton’s opinion said a lot about how far Janus had come.

“And how do you propossse we ‘play along’?” Janus said, hissing his s’s in frustration.

“Well, we’ve kinda decided this is Roman’s dream, right? And since we’re in his part of the Imagination, we know he won’t let anything bad happen to us…”

Patton trailed off at Janus’s pained expression, reminded of just how badly Janus and Roman’s last encounter had gone.

“What are you, a middle school librarian?”

“Thank god you don’t have a mustache.”

And I just stood there and did nothing…no, I can’t dwell on that right now. Patton shook himself out of the memory.

It was surprisingly easy; even his emotions felt a little heavy and muted. He supposed he wasn’t used to being in a dreamscape; unlike Roman, who played in them all the time.

I know Roman, Patton reasoned. He might hold a grudge for a while, but he wouldn’t actually be out to hurt Janus.

Right?

“So, if we’re on a time ship, on some kind of adventure leading up to a confrontation like you said, the first thing we’d have to do is figure out where we need to go,” Patton finished, shrugging.

Janus pursed his lips…which looked downright weird with a mustache and goatee, almost making Patton giggle…and began pushing buttons on the console.

“You are definitely incorrect, Patton,” he said, pulling up another screen and flipping a few switches. “If I have been cast as the villain in this ridiculous charade, that means Roman is likely prancing around as the Doctor right now, on the proper TARDIS. Which, as the Doctor’s nemesis, I should be able to contact…ha!”

The screen burst into static.

“Doctor, oh Doctor, do you read me?” Janus crooned, and if Patton hadn’t known just how angry he was in that moment…well, he would have never known.

Janus had tucked it away entirely, in half a second's time.

That’s the scary thing about him, Patton realized uneasily. He’s smart, nearly as smart as Logan. Smart enough to run circles around me, that’s for sure. And he’s easily as good an actor as Roman.

Those attributes, combined with his naturally manipulative nature, made it difficult to trust him.

Patton was trying.

He’d been trying since the wedding, and well, since everything else that had happened. (Patton still cringed when Thomas encountered even a picture of a frog.) He’d done a lot of thinking and growing that day (in more ways than one!), and he’d come to a disturbing, but inevitable conclusion.

Janus wasn’t evil.

He never had been.

Just like Virgil had never been evil. Mean, sure; and sarcastic, and spiteful…but at his core, Virgil had wanted what was best for Thomas.

They all did.

And then there was the uncomfortable corollary to that: Patton, despite his best efforts, despite his core Purpose…Patton wasn’t entirely and automatically good.

Two weeks ago, Janus had proven beyond a doubt that Thomas needed him…ruthlessly, cuttingly, but no one could say he hadn’t made his point. It had been Patton who’d inadvertently pushed Thomas to the brink of a breakdown, and Janus who had to pull them all back.

Despite Patton’s unease, and the little voice in his head telling him that Deceit couldn’t be trusted, could never truly be trusted because it was in his nature to deceive…Patton remembered how they’d pushed Virgil so hard he decided to duck out, and how much of a tragedy that could have been if they hadn’t all intervened to bring him back.

With a pang of guilt, he pictured Thomas lying on the floor, crushed under the metaphorical weight of everything Patton needed him to do to keep from being a bad person…

He would not make those mistakes again.

If Virgil could learn to work with them instead of against them, so could Janus. If Patton could learn to recognize when his own Purpose did more harm than good, so could Janus.

Patton had to believe that.

He’d made too many mistakes lately to believe otherwise.

The screen in Janus’s hands cleared to reveal…

“What? Logan??” Janus exclaimed, as a scream echoed somewhere in the background.

“D—Janus?” Logan countered, then looked over his shoulder. “Roman, for the love of Archimedes, will you stop shrieking? I cannot hear.”

The screaming cut off and Roman’s fuming face squished into the frame with Logan.

“Deceit! I should have known you would show up to ruin this!” he managed to shout before Logan shoved him away.

“Ruin…I’m sorry, what?” Janus glanced at Patton, looking honestly confused. “Is he roleplaying right now? We assumed this scenario was Roman’s creation.”

Onscreen, Logan placed his whole hand against Roman’s mouth to prevent him from interrupting.

“It is. But to my understanding, it was only supposed to involve myself and Roman, and…wait. You said ’we’.” Logan peered around. “Who else is with you?”

Patton started to wave, but his view was blocked by Janus bending close to the screen to whisper something. Suspicion flared in Patton’s stomach; old, familiar, but after the talk he’d just given himself, he purposefully pushed it down.

I won’t assume he’s being shifty unless he actually gives me a reason to.

Lifting his chin, he crept forward until he was next to Janus’s shoulder.

“Hey, Logan,” he said brightly, waving.

“Ah…hello, Patton,” Logan squeaked after a moment, his eyes still wide.

“Wait, Patton’s there? With the snake?” Roman’s voice yelled from the background, and then there was Roman’s face again.

“Patton?” Roman said, narrowing his eyes. “But why are you—?”

Both faces disappeared for a moment as Logan yanked Roman out of frame. Patton thought he heard a rapid, hushed conversation. He glanced at Janus, who only shrugged, looking at puzzled as Patton felt.

Roman’s face reappeared, solemn and deeply annoyed.

“Patton,” he said, and hesitated. “D—Janus. You two…well, you’re not supposed to be here.”

“Very reassuring,” Janus quipped.

“This was only supposed to be a two-person adventure: Doctor plus companion. I have no idea why the Imagination brought you both in as well; I certainly didn’t tell it to.”

“Aw, that’s okay, kiddo,” Patton started gently. “It’s not your fault—”

“Oh, sweetie.” Janus folded his arms. “I’m sorry, but that’s bull. Putting me in the Master’s shoes? Are we seriously going to pretend the Side who unashamedly hates me had nothing to do with that?”

“I didn’t!” Roman argued, his voice going high. “You really think I wanted you here, in any capacity?”

“Deceit…er, Janus, you are being unnecessarily antagonistic, and as such, unhelpful,” Logan cut in with his low, reassuring voice. “But Roman, it might behoove us to consider the role of subconscious influence. You may not have intended to pull the others in, and yet here they are.”

Roman looked at Logan, aghast, and Patton almost flinched at the raw hurt in his caramel eyes. The creative Side backed out of frame.

“So you’re on his side, too,” his voice said quietly. “Is that how it is?”

“I am not on anyone’s side,” Logan argued, raising his hands. “We are all currently in this situation together, and as such—”

Whatever he’d been about to say was cut off by another garbled transmission, taking over the screen and blocking out Logan’s face with crackly, purple static. A gray, snarling face flashed out of the haze, making Patton shriek in surprise and even Janus took a step back.

Then it was gone, dissolving back to static…and the sound of someone laughing filled the connection.

“Hellooooo, nurse,” a familiar sing-song voice crooned. “Did you miss me?”

Chapter 5- The Long Game

“You can’t just read the guide book, you’ve got to throw yourself in. Eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get charged double and end up kissing complete strangers. Or is that just me?”

Logan sighed.

He knew that voice; they all did. Even Thomas, unfortunately.

“Remus,” Roman hissed.

The mustached Side filled the screen, grinning madly. “Boo!”

“Get out of my scenario,” Roman said, his eyes flashing. “If you know what’s good for you.”

“Your scenario?” Remus echoed, faux-outrage in his expression. “Yours? The Dream Palace is my domain, too, brother, whether you like it or not.” He leaned closer, letting his nostrils and a single radioactive green eye fill the screen. “Did you really think you could keep me out?”

Roman made a sound of disgust deep in his throat.

“Am I to assume, then, that you are responsible for bringing in the other Sides?” Logan asked, careful to keep his voice even. Remus thrived on getting a rise out of people.

“Of course he is!” Roman snapped, throwing up his hands. “He loves to ruin things, especially my things.”

“Now why would having the others here ruin anything, brother?” Remus asked in a sickly sweet voice, propping his head on his hand. “Unless you intended for this nighttime romp between you and Logan to be private?”

Roman sputtered and glanced at Logan, red-faced, as Remus giggled.

“It was meant to be so, yes,” Logan supplied, unsure why Remus would find that funny…or why Roman would find it embarrassing.

“As amusing as this all is—” Janus’s crooning voice cut through the speaker.

“Great. You’re still here, snake?” Roman snarked, his arms folded around himself.

“We’re all listening, kiddo,” Patton’s metallic voice said.

Roman’s lips always curl into a pout when he is angry, Logan thought, eyeing him without turning his head, and he gets a little wrinkle between his eyebrows. Why…why am I noticing such things all of a sudden?

Maybe it was the stress, or the unfamiliar environment.

Or maybe it was the Rose Tyler outfit.

That skirt ought to be illegal.

Logan deliberately focused on the screen, his cheeks warm.

“So this is kinda new,” Patton went on, “all of us actually talking—”

“If Remus is responsible,” Janus cut in again, “then perhaps he would be so kind as to explain the objective of this late night group therapy session?”

Despite the biting sarcasm, Logan did appreciate Janus’s insistence that they get to the point, even if it did mean talking over Patton…

Speaking of, why would Remus have paired Patton with Janus?

Surely he should have grouped Patton with Logan and Roman, and put Virgil with Janus? Or…maybe not, given how Virgil hisses if Janus so much as enters the same room.

Ugh. Interpersonal drama. Logan was thoroughly sick of trying to keep track of who carried a grudge against whom, especially when it seemed to change from day to day.

And on top of that, why would Remus make Patton a Cyberman? None of these decisions make any sense…

“Right?” Roman agreed softly next to him, and Logan realized he’d said that last bit out loud.

“If anything, I should have been the unfeeling killer robot,” Logan murmured.

“You don’t give yourself enough credit, Specs.” Roman shot him a strange look, both warm and troubled. “And frankly I don’t give a stinky rat’s ass about my stinky rat brother’s sick thought process. What I want to know is why Deceit doesn’t want us to mention it around Patton?”

Logan, who was still mentally stuck on rodents and donkeys…Roman’s metaphors were always something else…shook his head slightly.

“There’s no logical way Patton is unaware of his condition,” Logan pointed out. “So I can only guess he wishes to protect Patton’s feelings on the matter, by not allowing us to talk about it in front of him.” He shrugged when Roman’s frown deepened. “Those two have been getting along much better these last few weeks.”

“I think you’re giving the snake too much credit,” Roman muttered. “Even after he impersonated you, Logan? C’mon. It has to be something else.”

Logan bit back a sigh.

He doesn’t understand, he thought guiltily. Because he doesn’t know what really happened…

#

“This is unacceptable, Deceit,” Logan snapped, flinging the crook away from his body. “I was in the middle of a discussion—”

“He won’t listen to you,” Deceit had said, and there was no sarcasm or snark in his voice.

“Patton asked for my opinion!”

“And he dismissed you from the conversation the moment that opinion went against his preconceived notions!” Deceit snapped back.

Silence.

Logan could hear the others still talking, out in the real world…without him…as the misty dregs of subconscious curled around their feet.

“You tricked him.” Logan folded his arms. “He was scared and off balance and you gave him an out.”

“I didn’t make him take it!”

Deceit sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Logan. You know he is wrong on this. You know what this is doing to Thomas. His unquestioning, black-and-white, juvenile morality; it’s not working anymore. Thomas needs to grow up, and Patton is not letting him.”

Logan bit his lip.

“Logan.” Deceit moved closer, dismissing his crook into mist and setting both gloved hands on Logan’s shoulders. Logan stiffened.

“Logic. Please. I am…no good at this.” Deceit dropped his head, his hat obscuring his eyes. “I operate through deceit because that is the only way I can make them acknowledge me.”

“They don’t acknowledge you because you operate through deceit,” Logan pointed out.

“A perfect catch 22.” Deceit let out a bitter laugh. “But a snake cannot change its scales and I don’t…I have tried everything I know. I cannot fix this from the shadows. I am out of ideas.”

A strange thought entered Logan’s mind.

“You care. You care what happens to Thomas.”

Deceit looked up, his mismatched eyes glittering with stinging intensity. “I am the literal representation of selfishness. Why the hell else would I go to all this trouble if I didn’t care?”

“Well…” Logan trailed off, troubled.

He’d let the others get to him, he realized in that moment. He’d let Roman get to him, with his talk of evil and Dark Sides and how they were always trying to tempt Thomas off the right path.

But…they were all part of Thomas, even the so-called “dark sides”.

Of course they wanted what was best for him…well, what Remus wanted at any given moment was debatable…even if they didn’t always go about it in the healthiest of ways.

Deceit had laughed then, high pitched and bitter.

“Really? Really? Even you think so low of me?”

“You are manipulating me right now.” Logan frowned. “You are using my concern for Thomas to make me trust you.”

“Yes! I am!” Deceit got in his face, fangs flashing. “I am a manipulative bastard because that is the lens through which my Source perceives me. But that doesn’t matter because you, Logic; you see through me, always have. And you know perfectly well that logically, any objection you have to my personality or my methods does not change the fact that I. Am. Right.”

He punctuated each word with a poke to Logan’s chest.

“Deceit—” Logan started.

“Janus.”

“What?”

Deceit sighed. “My name. My…real name. It’s Janus.”

Logan blinked. He knew the mythology, of course: Janus, keeper of doorways and thresholds, looking simultaneously to the past and future. Two faces. Seeing things from every angle.

Self-preservation.

“It suits you,” Logan said quietly.

Tension bled out of Janus’s shoulders, a stiffness Logan hadn’t even realized was there until it was gone.

“Thank you.”

“Why am I here…Janus?” Logan asked, glancing away. “What do you need from me?”

Janus looked at him intently.

“Let me speak to them as you.”

Logan raised an eyebrow, and Janus sighed, waving a hand.

“I know, I know, more deceit, more lies, but—”

“No, it’s…” Logan pressed his lips together. “You already pointed it out. They don’t listen to me, either.”

The bitter twist that accompanied those words was becoming an all too familiar sensation in Logan’s chest.

Janus snorted.

“Oh, they do. Eventually. They heeded your advice on how to deal with Remus.”

Logan shrugged uncomfortably.

“Look,” Janus added, “honest people know how to tell the truth, but liars…” he smirked, not especially nicely. “We know how to wield the truth to accomplish an end. I can pull Thomas and the others out of this rut, but they have to be receptive to my tugging on the reins.”

Logan pursed his lips.

“You won’t fool them. If you recall, you tried to impersonate me once already and barely lasted two minutes.”

“I didn’t have your blessing.”

Janus fixed Logan with his intense mismatched eyes again, and held out a hand.

Logan stared at it, torn.

This was Deceit, the master liar: Thomas’s entire capacity for deception condensed into a single, snake-faced Side. How could Logan possibly trust him to not make things worse, after all the falsehoods, the impersonations, how he’d manipulated them all in one way or another to get his way?

But…as much as Logan, personally, didn’t understand why that callback had been so important to Thomas…he could not dismiss the fallout Thomas had suffered as a result of missing it. The decision to attend the wedding had turned out to be a bad one.

Patton had been wrong to insist upon it over Janus’s objections, and over Roman’s.

Those were just the facts.

Janus sighed.

“I’ll unmask myself when an opportunity arises, if that would help,” he offered, and to Logan’s shock, slowly tugged off a glove. “I won’t…I won’t let it go on as long as it did with Patton.”

He offered his now bare hand to Logan again.

Out in the real world, Logan could hear Patton’s increasingly desperate and ridiculous responses to Thomas’s and Roman’s questions, and winced. Janus did the same.

“Please,” was all he said.

Logan sighed…it really couldn’t get any worse, could it?…and shook Janus’s hand.

#

In his TARDIS, Logan let out the sigh he was holding back.

He might have personal, concrete evidence that Janus wasn’t evil, but he also knew Janus had wounded Roman, badly, that day. The creative Side was simply not currently capable of viewing any situation involving Janus with any sort of objectivity.

Passionate, sensitive people like Roman tended to have an unfortunate habit of hanging onto grudges.

As Logic, Logan needed to remember that.

“Oh, all right,” Remus said, his voice crackling over the connection. “Since you’re all here—”

“Actually, Remus, we’re not all here,” Patton’s voice pointed out. “You all know perfectly well who we’re missing; we’ve done this before.”

Logan’s eyes widened. “‘Where is Anxiety?’” he quoted.

“You mean Tickle Me Emo isn’t with one of you?” Remus asked, looking delighted. “Oh dear, oh dear. Is he lost?”

“I mean, TARDISes are huge,” Roman pointed out. “He could be somewhere on one of our ships.” His voice dropped again. “I’ll bet Deceit stashed him away, because we all know how he hates Virgil.”

“Excuse you,” Janus’s voice interrupted, annoyed. “It is Virgil who hates me, not the other way around.”

“Let’s both scan our ships,” Logan suggested, hoping to head off an argument. Honestly, if Roman and Janus didn’t stop picking fights with one another, he was going to lose his marbles.

The scans pulled up nothing.

“Oh well,” Remus said with a shrug. “Guess the emo gets to miss out.”

Janus grumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “lucky”.

“All right, here’s what’s going to happen.” Remus leaned close to the screen. “I’ve crash landed on a lovely snowbound planet that’s crawling with psychotic tin cans who like to roll around yelling ‘exterminate’.”

“Daleks? A snowbound planet, so not Skarro, but where else…” Logan narrowed his eyes.

“He’s on the Dalek asylum,” Roman said lowly. “That was one of the episodes I had in mind when I plotted this adventure.”

“Very good, brother.” Remus clapped his hands. “And up there in orbit is a ship full of people who’d really like to blow up the whole planet. Oh, woe is me, whatever shall I—”

“Save it,” Roman snapped. “You’d probably enjoy getting blown up.”

“Hmm, true.” Remus’s green eyes sharpened. “Think of the mess! Little bits of intestines floating through space, long pink ropey—”

“Or?” Logan interjected, before Remus gave Patton nightmares.

“Or you have to come rescue me!” Remus’s teeth flashed as he grinned. “Because otherwise it’s nighty-night for me and all the other aliens in the asylum.”

There was a beat of silence.

“As terrible as that sounds,” Janus drawled, sounding anything but worried, “given that none of this is real, and at least one of us would very much rather not be here at all…why exactly should your plight concern us?”

Logan secretly agreed, but felt his stomach clench when he glanced at Roman’s troubled face. None of this was real…right? Would something concretely bad happen to Remus if the planet he inhabited was blown up?

Surely not.

This was only a dream. Perhaps, then, Roman was merely upset that his twin had usurped his adventure for the night?

“Also.” Remus buffed his fingernails. “You should know that the Imagination will only release us if we complete the objective. In other words,” and he sneered, purple-shadowed eyes glittering, “we’re all stuck in this scenario until we’re all reunited.”

Remus giggled as Logan exchanged a shocked look with Roman.

“I don’t believe you. This was my dream,” Roman said darkly. “And I’ve just about had enough of all this!”

He stepped back and snapped his fingers with a flourish. Frowning, he did it again, and again, his face growing paler with each try.

“Roman, what—” Logan started.

“I can’t end it,” Roman whispered, still snapping. “He’s right. He’s…he’s sealed off the dream’s boundaries somehow. Remus!”

This he roared at the screen.

“Keeping Thomas trapped in a dream state is going too far, Remus!” he yelled. “I don’t care what kind of demented game you want to play with us, but we don’t bring Thomas into it.”

“Oh, you think I created an unbreakable dreamscape?” Remus snapped. “You let the Imagination have too much reign, my dear brother, and now neither of us have the power to end the dream ourselves. I estimate we have about ten hours before Thomas wakes up.”

For a moment, all Logan could hear was the soft whoosh of the time rotor, and Roman’s shallow, angry breathing at his shoulder.

“So I suggest you all pilot your ships to these coordinates,” Remus added, and a series of numbers and strange symbols flashed up on one of the smaller console screens. “And get started.”

The main screen blipped, and Remus’s face was replaced by an expressionless Cyberman and a snake-faced Side who looked extremely pale under his scales.

“Well,” Logan stated. “This is a problem.”

Chapter 6- Asylum of the Daleks

“You’re going to fire me at a planet? That’s your plan? I get fired at a planet and expected to fix it?”

“In fairness, that is slightly your M.O.”

“Don’t be fair to the Daleks when they’re firing me at a planet.”

The familiar wheeze of the TARDIS materializing filled Roman’s ears as he waited by the doors. Logan joined him a moment later.

“Ready?” he asked, smoothing a hand over his cravat.

He looks good as the Doctor, Roman thought, eying the slimming black and navy, the graceful arc that hand made as it adjusted a pair of glasses…

He shook himself out of his distraction. “Let’s do this, nerd.”

Logan opened the doors and the two stepped out…not onto the asylum, but onto a spaceship. Shiny copper terraces lined the vast walls in curving rows, leading the eye up to a domed ceiling with a clear view of black, star-studded space. Like a huge amphitheater, or stadium. Even Roman had to admit, the Imagination had really outdone itself on the realism.

Of course, given that the ship was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of Daleks calling for violence…realism wasn’t exactly comforting at the moment.

“Surprise, surprise, I don’t see my stupid brother,” Roman commented over the dull roar of the crowd.

“No. But I recognize where we are.” Logan waved a hand. “You were right about Remus’s location; this ship is from the episode ‘Asylum of the Daleks’, in Season 7. If we are following the basic plotline, Remus is likely somewhere down on the planet below, and we will be sent to him in due course. However…I am curious as to why all the other aliens are here.”

Roman looked around again, seeing that Logan was right. Daleks formed the majority of the crowd, but he also spotted Zygons, Sontarans, Silurians, other Cybermen, Ice Warriors…and quite a few aliens from older seasons he couldn’t remember the names of.

(Logan probably could.)

A second TARDIS materialized near their familiar blue box: plain, gray; a squat column of a ship. Janus emerged first, a silver instrument gripped in one gloved hand, followed by an old-school Cyberman…Patton. Roman frowned. Seeing that metal…being…and having to remember it was actually his friend was going to be difficult now that there wasn’t a screen separating them.

“Nice work, Roman,” Janus said, sidling up next to him and faux-clapping his hands. “A ship full of aliens who want us dead; always an excellent starting point for an adventure.”

“This is how the episode starts, Mr. Oh-I’m-Such-an-Expert-in-Doctor-Who,” Roman retorted. “Accuracy is important.”

“But this isn’t accurate,” Logan pointed out. “There should only be Daleks here.”

Roman folded his arms, stung.

Damn Logan and his damned need to be right all the time.

“I…well, I didn’t model this adventure after just one particular episode,” Roman admitted. “I wanted it to be a challenge, and it wouldn’t be if Logan and I already knew the ending. So no, I can’t exactly explain why all the other aliens are here, okay?”

Logan sighed.

“I was not criticizing you, Roman,” he said in a gentler voice. “As this has apparently become as much Remus’s and the Imagination’s handiwork as it is yours, it would be unreasonable to expect you to know what comes next.”

“THE DOCTOR AND THE MASTER WILL APPROACH THE SUPREME DALEK,” a grating robotic voice boomed across the ship, making them all whip around. A large white Dalek with an antenna on its shell loomed on a raised stage near the center of the amphitheater.

“They were expecting me, too?” Janus raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”

The lights on the Dalek’s head flashed as it spoke again.

“THE DOCTOR AND THE MASTER WILL APPROACH WITH THEIR COMPANIONS.”

The four Sides exchanged a glance, and weaved through the assembled Daleks to the raised stage. The White Supreme Dalek was not the only occupant; it was flanked by an Ice Warrior, an Emojibot (which made Patton giggle), and…

“Look, a Janus,” Roman chortled, nudging the snake-faced Side in the ribs and pointing out the two-faced alien.

“You are all nerds and my logo is a two-headed snake,” Janus complained, rolling his eyes. “I literally do not know how all of you missed that obvious clue to my name.”

“DOCTOR,” the White Dalek said as they climbed the dais. “MASTER. WHAT DO YOU KNOW OF THE DALEK ASYLUM?”

“I’m just impressed my rat-faced brother wasn’t lying about his location,” Roman grumbled, and sputtered when Logan placed a hand over his mouth.

“According to legend,” Logan said, “you have a dumping ground, a planet where you lock up all the Daleks that go wrong.”

“The battle-scarred, the insane. The ones even you can’t control,” Janus clarified. His voice dropped to a hiss. “No wonder they ssstuck Remus there.”

Roman covered his mouth to keep from snorting.

The snake would not make him laugh.

“CORRECT.” The Dalek pushed a button and a hole opened in the middle of the floor. A snow-covered planet lay below them, pristine from this high up.

“Ooh, that’s,” Patton started, and let out a metallic gulp. “That’s quite a drop. Do we, ah, have to go down the same way? Cause I remember that part, and—”

“How many Daleks are down there?” Logan asked.

“A COUNT HAS NOT BEEN MADE,” the white Dalek said.

“Millions, certainly,” a new voice chimed in. The tall, robed, dark-skinned Janus stepped forward, their front face addressing them. “But they will not be your only concern. The population of the planet consists of more than just Daleks.”

Roman exchanged a suspicious glance with Logan. This wasn’t in the episode. This is new.

“What do you mean?” Janus, their Janus, asked.

The alien Janus turned to a nearby monitor, pulling up some information. The backward-facing face continued to address them.

“Some time ago, the Daleks began noticing a curious phenomenon,” they said. “Random people, from all different races and species, started turning up on various planets in this quadrant of space, including the asylum. No ships, no technology, and no knowledge of how they’d gotten there. At first the imprisoned Daleks on the asylum simply killed them off as they appeared—”

Patton visibly winced, even with his metal body, and Logan’s eyes grew flinty.

“—but the new arrivals eventually became too many to exterminate,” the alien Janus went on, unconcerned. “By now we suspect the planet has a population of over a billion, far too many for its automated systems to handle.”

They turned their forward face to the four again.

“THE ASYLUM IS COMPROMISED,” the Dalek Supreme proclaimed. “IT MUST BE CLEANSED.”

“Hang on, you’re still going to blow the whole planet up?” Roman protested. “A billion people?”

“To be fair, that is what they did in the original episode,” Logan pointed out quietly.

“But that was just Daleks!”

Janus rolled his eyes. “Ah, so genocide is fine when it’s only the evil aliens getting blown up?”

“You know, somehow I’m not surprised to hear you defending the bad guys!” Roman snapped.

“That is enough!” Patton snapped in his robotic voice, stepping between them and raising both his hands. Laser pistols popped out of both of them, making both Roman and Janus step back in alarm.

After a tense moment, Patton lowered his arms again; the guns clicked and vanished into their casings.

“Uh, sorry kiddos, I don’t know what came over me,” he said in a sheepish, more Patton-y voice. “Can we please not fight? It…it kinda makes me feel weird and jittery when you do.”

Roman stared at Patton’s blank Cyberman face and armored Cyberman body and swallowed, hard.

Their Patton would never deliberately aim a gun at anyone, let alone his family. But Cybermen were created to eliminate…or rather, delete…anyone who got in their way.

Did Patton even realize what he’d almost done?

What would happen, if and when he was forced to confront the reality of his body in this realm? What if he didn’t figure it out until he accidentally did something terrible? It wouldn’t be real, of course, but to Patton…that wouldn’t matter.

If his Cyberman programming forced or tricked him into hurting someone, the guilt of it would devastate him.

All I wanted to do was take Logan on an adventure, Roman thought bitterly. A fun little dream adventure where he could play one of his heroes. Was that too much to ask, Imagination?

He folded his arms and glared around the Dalek ship, anywhere but at his fellow Sides.

Whatever the hell this has turned into, I want no part of it anymore.

“In order for us to destroy the planet, we will need you to disable the planet’s forcefield—” The alien Janus started, but Logan held up a finger.

“Excuse you,” he said sharply. “We have not agreed to do anything, least of all help you murder a billion people whose only crime is to have accidentally turned up in your prison. Have you even attempted to solve that mystery?"

"And why do you care what happens down there?" Roman added, sneering. "If the insane Daleks are armed—”

“DALEKS ARE ALWAYS ARMED,” the white Dalek proclaimed.

“—then why can’t they defend themselves?” Logan finished, shooting Roman a questioning glance.

Roman huffed, and looked away.

“At first they did,” the Janus explained. “But as I said, the automated systems cannot keep up with the influx. Wars are being fought over food and other resources as we speak. A starliner crashed on the surface mere days ago, and—”

“Ah,” Logan said slowly. “You’re afraid, with all the shifting alliances and new activity, that the mad Daleks will escape in the confusion.”

“We do not know who or what is behind the influx,” the Janus said. “But eventually, they will start coming with ships, or they will build them on the surface, or reach out to those who could attempt a rescue.”

“‘If sssomeone can get in, everything can get out’,” their Janus quoted darkly.

The other Janus nodded. “Even the Daleks agree, their mad brethren cannot be allowed to escape. We, of this assembly—”

They waved to the assembled crowd of aliens, who observed in eerie silence.

“—have decided that one planet must be sacrificed for the greater good of the universe.”

Roman slowly and deliberately drew his sword (which the Imagination had kindly left as part of his outfit). It rasped as it emerged, the sound hair-raising in the sudden lull.

Instantly every Dalek gunstick and alien weapon on the ship was primed and pointed at the four Sides.

“And if we refuse?” Roman said evenly.

“THE DOCTOR AND THE MASTER WILL COOPERATE,” the Supreme Dalek warned, its lights flashing balefully.

“COOPERATE! COOPERATE!” the cry was echoed by the other Daleks, filling the ship with a cacophony of robot voices.

The alien Janus shrugged, spreading their hands.

“You don’t really have a choice. If you want to live, that is.”

“Is that so.”

Roman tensed and sprang at the white Dalek, not giving himself time to think. He dodged a blast from its gunstick and leaped, bringing his sword down hard. This being the Imagination, the katana cut through the Dalek’s metal armor like butter, and it clattered to the deck in two pieces.

There was a shocked silence…but no retaliation.

“Well?” Roman shouted, spreading his arms and turning in a slow circle. “This is me, not cooperating. What are you waiting for? Are you really going to shoot us?”

If they all died on this spaceship…the worst that would happen is they’d be kicked from the Imagination, and that was what they wanted, anyway.

“Roman,” Logan warned quietly, pointing.

Roman looked.

The white Dalek’s shell was…laughing?

“Oh, Roman,” Remus’s crackly voice emerged from the fallen Dalek’s casing. “Roman, Roman, Roman. My poor brave brother who thinks he can solve all his problems with steel and bravado. Did you really think it would be that easy?”

Each word bit like sandpaper against Roman’s ears.

He growled, and stalked to the Dalek’s top half, snatching it up and quickly locating a tiny speaker.

“C’mon, Remus. End this stupid charade,” he said quietly, holding the casing to his face so he could speak quietly. “You’ve had your fun at my expense. Go back to your pile of severed limbs and gloat if you must, but end this. For Patton’s sake, if nothing else.”

“I’ve already told you, it’s out of my hands,” Remus responded; typically, annoyingly casual. “If you want to end the game, you have to come down here and find me.”

Roman exhaled, resting his head against the cold, bumpy metal for a moment. His eyes burned, but he was Prince; he wouldn’t cry, not here.

“Why must you make everything difficult?”

“Roman, in all seriousness,” Remus’s voice dropped. “I didn’t know you were taking Logan on a date tonight—”

“It’s not a date,” Roman hissed, glancing at the other Sides…one in particular.

“The Imagination brought me into this without asking, just like it pulled the others in,” Remus went on. “I am aware of what has to happen, but I did not cause this.”

“You’re lying,” Roman said tonelessly.

Remus’s whiny voice grew hard.

“I don’t lie, and you despise that about me. You hide so much shit from yourself that it baffles you when I refuse to do the same.”

“Look,” Remus added when Roman didn’t respond. “The Imagination is clearly trying to get our attention. Sure, it usually goes through one of us first, but it doesn’t have to. When it comes down to it, Thomas’s mind answers only to Thomas. ”

“How are you so sure?” Roman frowned.

Was Remus seriously suggesting the Imagination they both oversaw had gone rogue somehow?

“Because I don’t curate my side as meticulously as you do, brother.” Remus chuckled. “I listen. I let the Imagination do as she pleases, free from all those pesky ethics and morals and other boring boxes you always force her into, so that our sweet Thomas doesn’t fear the contents of his own head.”

“You expect me to believe that you know what’s going on because,” Roman let every ounce of disdain seep into his voice, “the Imagination talks to you, and not me…because you don’t make her behave?”

“You should try letting her loose sometimes,” Remus drawled, “or you’ll end up with a cane up your butt like Nerdy Wolverine over there.”

“Don’t call him that,” Roman spat.

“What you so-called ‘light sides’ always get wrong,” Remus went on, “is that the juicy stuff, the gruesome and grim, the ‘bad’ thoughts that filter up from the subconscious; they can’t all be locked away and ignored.” His voice dropped ominously. “Repression can be very bad indeed, you know.”

Roman’s reasonable nature knew that his brother, despite his infuriating attitude, was actually making some good points. Thomas had been dealing with a lot lately; the tension in the mindspace felt like a ticking clock, counting down to the next disaster.

But at that moment, Roman had no desire to humor his twin.

All he wanted to do was lock himself into his own room in the Dream Palace and spend the rest of the night writing sad poetry about love, or listing his mistakes to himself until he fell asleep.

“I just wanted to show Logan a good time,” he said aloud.

“And oh dear, apparently you couldn’t even manage that correctly,” Remus said, implacably. “So maybe you should use this opportunity to get your head out of your poopy ass, and reevaluate yourself.”

Roman slammed the Dalek shell against the floor.

It cracked upon impact, the wiring inside sparking and finally flickering down to darkness. He ran his hands through his hair, reminded, once again, why he hated talking to his brother.

Like looking in a funhouse mirror…

“Roman…” Patton sidled up behind him, laying a cold hand on his back. Roman shoved the metal arm away and stalked back to the others.

“Let’s just get this done,” he said in a low voice.

“You will need these,” the alien Janus said, pushing a button on a nearby console. A translucent vertical tube rose from a gap in the floor, holding three bulky black bracelets.

“Ah yes, I remember this,” Logan said, striding forward and taking a bracelet.

“They will prevent—” the Janus started.

“The nano cloud from converting us into Dalek puppets, yes?” Logan interrupted, snapping the bracelet onto his wrist and handing another to Roman.

The nerd is getting into this, Roman thought as he put it on. I guess that’s something.

“The cloud is only active in certain areas of the asylum,” the Janus warned them again. “And those change as different factions seize control of different areas and weaponize them.”

Patton hesitantly raised a hand.

“Um, Mx. Alien, I can’t help but notice that there are only three bracelets, and four of us?”

Logan frowned. “But Patton, why would you—?”

“I’m sure it’s because I’m part snake, Patton,” Janus interrupted smoothly, swooping in to grab the last bracelet and snapping it onto Patton’s arm.

Roman exchanged an alarmed look with Logan; that was the last bit of confirmation he needed. Patton really was unaware that he was a Cyberman.

But why on earth would Janus go to such lengths to keep him in the dark about it? Even leaving aside the fact that Patton was a walking weapon; being a machine, he didn’t need protection from the nano cloud at all.

Whereas Janus…probably did.

But when Roman opened his mouth, Janus shot him a look full of daggers and promises of pain, and shook his head. Roman rolled his eyes and mentally washed his hands of the situation.

Typical Deceit. Protecting his lies.

At least Patton would be twice-protected. If the snake wanted to risk his life for a lie, let him.

“The gravity beam will convey you close to the crashed starliner,” the alien Janus said, and then there were Dalek blasters being shoved into their backs, propelling them toward the hole in the floor.

“Oi,” Roman protested, “get your freaky little eggbeater appendages away from me, you AAAAHHHH!”

There was a push, and they were falling.

Chapter 7- Oxygen

“Look at this. Classic design. Pressure seals. Hinges. None of that ‘shuk shuk’ nonsense.”

“Space doors are supposed to go shuk shuk.”

“Are you gonna be like this all day?”

Janus was done.

He sat up with a groan, brushing snow from his jacket and vest, making sure his hat and gloves were still in place. Everything ached. Bad enough he never wanted to be part this stupid dream game in the first place; now he was probably going to literally turn into a Dalek.

All because the Imagination is being a dick and Patton doesn’t know he’s a killer robot.

Wind gusted around him, making Janus glad that the Master, like the Doctor, usually preferred long sleeves and a coat. He stood, turning in a slow circle as he took in the lay of the land. Nothing but snow and rocks; true to the episode, still.

The gravity beam had split into four as it hurled them at the planet, but Janus was reasonably sure at least one of the others had landed nearby.

He hoped it was Patton.

Not because he was concerned or anything. It was just that either of the others would be absolutely insufferable company, that’s all.

“Janus!” a metallic voice called, and Janus breathed a sigh of relief.

Patton’s Cyberman body clattered awkwardly down a nearby snowbank, sliding the last few feet to land in a heap.

“It is all kinds of chilly down here.” Patton stood, and waved rather nonsensically. “Hullo there, Janus, so ice to see you.”

Janus rolled his eyes. (He would deny to his dying day that the corner of his mouth twitched at the ridiculous pun.)

“If this scenario is consistent with its source material,” he said, gesturing to the closest ridge, “there should be an escape pod from that crashed ship nearby. Come on.”

He set off across the snow, Patton following in his wake.

“Say, what do snowmen call their offspring?”

Janus exhaled carefully. Hoo, boy, maybe Logan wouldn’t have been so bad…

“I haven’t the faintest.”

“Chill-dren!” Patton chortled at Janus’s grimace. “What did one snowman say to another?”

“St. Genesius spare me,” Janus grumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose. “What, pray tell, did one snowman say to another?”

“‘Do you smell carrots?’”

Janus quickly covered his mouth.

“You smiled,” Patton crooned.

“I most certainly did not.”

“Okay, okay, one more.” Patton scurried ahead and turned around, so that he was walking backwards. “Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?” Janus said flatly.

“Snow.” Patton hooked his thumbs into the metal rim at waist, like one might on a pair of pants. Janus swallowed and looked away.

“Snow who?”

“Snow laughing matter, Janus, I don’t know why you’re smiling.”

Janus snorted before he could hide it, and cleared his throat.

“I am not smiling, how dare you.”

“That’s twice now!” Patton cackled, the sound coming out all distorted. “Admit it.”

“I refuse,” Janus said, drawing himself up. “You won’t make a liar out of….”

Liar.

He felt the joke fall flat and cringed. Even though Patton’s metal face couldn’t react, those metal shoulders visibly stiffened.

Too soon.

Liar.

Too much history between them.

Besides, you are a liar, his mind whispered. Lies of omission are still lies, Deceit, and you’re doing that right now.

Janus gritted his teeth. They topped a ridge; the expected escaped pod lay half-buried near another ridge, across a flat stretch of snow. The two Sides glanced at each other and continued their journey in silence.

Patton seemed disinclined to continue his little pun war.

Janus badly wanted to say he hadn’t minded the punning, but truthfully, keeping silent was easier. Patton’s baffling ignorance over the state of his own “flesh” was starting to wear on Janus’s conscience. He knew the longer he kept it secret, the worse the fallout would be when Patton finally learned the truth.

The urge to come clean was an unfamiliar one for him, and extremely uncomfortable.

Ironic, the master liar, conflicted about maintaining a lie.

The old him would have laughed, but…the old him hadn’t heard the sincerity in Patton’s voice, when he’d spoken Janus’s true name aloud for the first time. The old him had assumed Thomas would reject him forever…because of Patton.

And then, with Janus still smarting from the sting of Roman’s mockery, Patton had said his name.

Patton had trusted him to take care of Thomas in his stead, when the moral Side knew he had failed at it. The memory still made all Janus’s scales tingle and his heart beat a little sideways.

The new him…this him…couldn’t find it in his small, shriveled, but very much present heart to risk pushing Patton away.

They reached the pod.

Muffled shouts and something that sounded like blaster fire filtered up from inside, making them exchange another glance.

Janus set a hand on the ice-crusted latch.

“Remember, we’ll have to fight our way through a bunch of dead Dalek puppets,” he reminded Patton.

“That’s a lot of noise for just a few puppets,” Patton said softly. “That canonically shouldn’t even be awake yet.”

“I know, and that is strange,” Janus agreed. “Maybe someone got here before us. But we won’t know exactly what to expect until we get down there.”

Patton sighed, a cloud of frost puffing out of his small, rectangular mouth.

Janus pushed the latch, popped his head in, and was met with a scene of utter chaos.

About six or seven human-Dalek puppets, with stalks sticking out of their heads and blasters sticking out of their hands, were locked in a fire fight with a horde of robotic humanoids that looked like they came from the Fourth Doctor’s era, if Janus remembered correctly. Round, bulky shoulders and faces that looked like metal sunbursts.

Both puppets and robots were using the seats as cover, blaster fire zinging back and forth and exploding against the walls in little showers of sparks. Janus and Patton would be directly in the blast zone when they jumped down, a little closer to the robot side.

“Well, someone definitely got here before us,” Janus muttered.

He withdrew his head and studied Patton. Honestly, with his metal body he’d be in far less danger, and those guns in his arms would actually be useful in this situation…but telling Patton he was a walking weapon, now, would definitely not go over well.

“The hatch down into the asylum should be in the cockpit of this thing,” he informed Patton. “There’s a lot of blaster fire, though, so—”

“—don’t get cold feet and hesitate?” Patton finished.

Something in Janus’s heart twisted…something he didn’t dare examine too closely.

“Say, Patton,” he said softly, looking away.

“Yes?”

“What did the hat say to the scarf?”

Patton turned his black Cyberman eyes on Janus.

“What?”

“‘You hang around, and I’ll go a-head’.” Janus let a smirk curl his lips.

Patton was silent for a moment, but then he began to giggle, covering his mouth.

Janus pulled out his sonic laser.

He dropped into the pod with a swing of his legs, catching one of the robots in its metal chest. It fell with a screech, careening into another of its kind, but by then Janus had gained his feet and ducked behind a seat. Patton clattered down behind, with less grace and far more noise…and a random Tivolian tumbled in directly after him.

Patton caught the rodent-faced alien with a startled shout, immediately dropping them again when they screamed and struggled. Janus blinked; where the hell did they come from?

The Tivolian tumbled across the pod’s floor, only making it a few feet before getting cut down with blaster bolts. Janus saw Patton cry out, and caught the Side before he could leap out and draw more hostile fire.

“It’s too late!” he shouted over the noise.

“I should have hung on!” Patton, if he’d had a proper face, would probably be in tears. He hated death. “I don’t know why they were so scared of me!”

Janus could answer that…

“I’m more curious about where they came from,” he said instead, frowning. “They surely weren’t up on the surface with us. It’s like they just teleported in, but Tivolians don’t teleport. They don’t have the technology—”

A blaster bolt exploded across the top of the seat they were hiding behind, showering them in sparks and forcing them both to duck.

“Janus!” Patton snapped. “We need to get out of here!”

“Right.” Janus brandished his sonic. “We’ll just have to run for it.”

He leaped out, activating his weapon, and discovered that a sonic laser had a very satisfying range and kickback. Forget the Doctor’s screwdriver, he thought, blasting a Dalek puppet aside and ducking another gun blast. I wonder if the Imagination will let me keep this…

A cold, dead hand seized the collar of his jacket, yanking him back.

Then there was a yell, a clatter, and Janus turned in time to see Patton blast a puppet with a fire extinguisher. The moral Side chuckled at Janus’s shocked expression.

“I’ve seen this episode too, you know,” he pointed out.

Janus huffed.

The two dodged and fought their way to the cockpit; Janus used his laser to seal the door behind them. For a moment they simply stood there, catching their breath.

(Well, Janus caught his. Did Patton even breathe, in that form?)

“Unauthorized personnel may not enter the cockpit.” Remus’s high-pitched voice came over the speaker system. “Unless it’s an actual pit full of cocks, in which case, where’s my invitation?”

Janus was going to need something a lot stronger than tea, once they finally got out of this mess.

“Remus, for god’s sake,” he grumbled.

“God has nothing to do with my cock, but if that’s how you want to roll…” One of the cockpit screens flickered to life, and there was Remus in all his ruffly, sparkly, mustached glory. Clara’s warm, messy cove spread out behind him, reds and yellows clashing horribly with the green of his sash.

Janus moved so that his chest and shoulders blocked the screen, to prevent Remus from catching sight of Patton. If Remus saw Patton as a Cyberman, Janus would never be able to convince him to keep his mouth shut.

“All right then, where do we find you?” Janus said. “And where did the others land? Not to mention our dear missing ball of anxiety.” He leaned forward, putting on his trademark smirk. “Come on, Re. You must know. One Other to another, you can tell me.”

“Aww, Jan Jan,” Remus crooned, also leaning forward. “You care.”

“I most certainly do not!” Janus sputtered, and cleared his throat. “Patton was worried about Virgil, that’s all.”

“I was?” Patton asked from the other side of the space. “I mean, of course I am, but—”

“But surely you can at least tell us why this scenario isn’t playing out quite like the episode it comes from,” Janus interjected smoothly. He didn’t want Remus to notice the metallic quality of Patton’s voice.

“Sorry to disappoint, but I’ve already told you everything that I know.” Remus shrugged. “Roman really did give the Imagination too much freedom.”

Janus frowned.

“Then how do you know the scenario will end when we find you?”

“I actually don’t! Isn’t it great?” Remus crowed, clapping his hands. “I love stories where anything could happen. We could all get vaporized, or have our flesh eaten by—”

“Remus, focus.” Janus pitched the bridge of his nose. “So, given what we know of this particular episode, you’re assuming that our main tasks are to come get you, and to drop the forcefield on the planet so the Daleks can blow it up.”

“That’s the idea, Double Dee!”

Behind him, Janus heard Patton make a weird, choked noise, and grimaced.

“By the way, Roman and Logan are already inside the asylum.” Remus grinned, the whites of his eyes flashing. “So if you want to catch up, you’d better scute those scaly asscheeks along. Check the floor for a breach; that will be your way out. A breach, ha! Like a butth—”

Janus pointed his laser and fired on the screen, cutting the transmission and sending sparks flying all over the cockpit. An awkward silence fell in which he turned to face Patton, who of course wore no visible expression.

This, and all the reasons for it, annoyed him further.

“I swear if you ask one question about scutes or scales,” he warned, holding up a finger.

“I wasn’t…going to.” Patton held up his hands. “Logan kind of taught us how to tune out the more, er, naughty things Remus says. But I am wondering,” he added hesitantly. “Are you…feeling okay?”

“Fabulous. Peachy,” Janus said flatly, kneeling to feel around on the floor. “Fantastic, allons-y, geronimo, what have you.”

“It’s just, you seem a little angry,” Patton went on. “And you remember, that’s, that’s the first step in being converted. Maybe you should wear the bracelet for a while? We can trade on and off…”

Patton’s fingers went to his wrist, but Janus stopped him with a gloved hand on top.

Tell him, an inner voice whispered. Tell him now, before this gets any more awkward.

“That’s sweet of you, but no, I’m merely frustrated,” Janus admitted. “I would very much like to get out of here, so I can return to the pleasant evening I was having before all thisss.”

He gestured irritatedly around them.

Patton joined him on the floor and together they found a person-sized hole, with a rope ladder hanging down.

“Hey, Janus,” Patton murmured, as they were about to start the long climb down. “Can I ask you something?”

“Why do I have a feeling you’re going to ask no matter what I say?” Janus said wryly.

“Do you remember when that puppet attacked you in the main part of the ship, and I fought it off with the fire extinguisher?” Patton ducked his head.

Janus raised an eyebrow.

“They hesitated, when they saw me.” Patton’s unnaturally black eyes met Janus’s. “That’s why I had time to grab the extinguisher.”

Janus swallowed, his heart starting to pound.

“Well, I’m sure they aren’t used to anyone fighting back—”

“No, they hesitated like…like I scared them or something,” Patton pressed. “It was weird, Janus. Please. If there’s something you need to tell me…you know you can.”

Janus’s mouth compressed into a flat line and he looked away, bitterness welling up inside him.

“Can I, Patton?” he asked softly, holding up a gloved hand. A yellow indictment of everything he was. “Can I really?”

Patton sighed, long and deep.

“Touché.”

Chapter 8- Extremis

“Something’s coming. And I’m blind. How can I see them when I’m lost in the dark?”

Logan awoke to someone shaking him.

He opened his eyes to an expanse of blurry blobs and color splotches, and Roman’s sharp, frantic face very close to his. His eyes have amber flecks, his brain noted inanely. But why is he clear when nothing else is…?

Roman threw his head back and exhaled in obvious relief when Logan groaned, blinking rapidly to clear his vision.

“Singing chimeras, Specs, I was starting to worry.”

Logan sat up and touched his bare face. Ah, there’s the problem.

“Where are my glasses?”

Roman was quiet.

Logan leaned closer to the other Side, squinting. Bad eyesight was such an annoyance. If only Thomas’s developing brain hadn’t decided early on that “smart and logical” also meant “stereotypically nerdy”, and pigeonholed his own sense of Logic into actually requiring corrective eyewear.

“Roman?” Logan tried again.

“Um. About that.”

Roman bit his lip, and handed over a smashed set of frames. Logan’s stomach sank as he examined them; the lenses were shattered beyond repair.

“I found them next to you like that, when I woke up,” Roman explained. “I’ve been trying to summon another pair, but for some reason the Imagination won’t let me!”

Logan pushed down a growing sense of dread, that he’d have to navigate the rest of this adventure half-blind.

“My glasses getting broken is obviously not your fault. We did fall down a rather deep hole,” he pointed out. “But what do you mean, the Imagination isn’t letting you?”

“I mean it’s not letting me!” Roman threw up his hands. “I could summon things on the TARDIS just fine, but now…” He sighed. “I am Creativity, right?”

Logan tilted his head and frowned.

“Is that…Roman, that is a nonsensical question. Of course you are.”

“So summoning a tiny object in my own dream scenario should be easy.” Roman hung his head.

“How long have you been trying?”

“Twenty minutes, maybe?” Roman shrugged, still not looking at him. “All that time, and yet still I fail.”

Logan resisted the urge to point out that twenty minutes should be long enough to realize a thing might be outside of one’s control, and to start brainstorming other options.

Stubborn fool.

“Maybe it’s just as well we picked the wedding over the callback,” Roman added darkly, an uncharacteristic glower twisting his face. “When Thomas’s Creativity apparently can’t even control his own dreams.”

Oh…this isn’t about glasses at all, is it? Logan swallowed around an achy sensation in his chest; the one he always got when something was wrong and Roman made that face and he just…needed to fix it.

Native English speakers have a passive vocabulary of around forty thousand words, he thought, frustrated. So why, in situations like this, am I constantly struggling to find the right thing to say?

The resigned set to Roman’s jaw prompted Logan to try.

“Your inability to summon things may not be your doing,” Logan said, laying a hand on Roman’s knee. “Perhaps the Imagination is attempting to impose a sense of realism on this adventure.”

“Realism,” Roman echoed flatly. “In Doctor Who.”

Logan huffed. “You must admit, summoning objects out of thin air does defy even time-traveling alien logic.”

Roman’s face twitched in the tiniest of smiles. “So why did it work before, Teach?”

“Maybe it only worked on the TARDIS because the ship already defies every known rule of physics.” Logan shrugged. “I admit I cannot possibly intuit the inner workings of the Imagination; I can only theorize from what I have observed thus far.”

Roman chuckled softly to himself, and bumped Logan’s shoulder.

“Aww, Nerd, I’m touched. You’re trying to logic me into feeling better.”

“Is it…working?” Logan asked.

“Kind of?” An unreadable expression flitted over Roman’s face. “At least one of us is still grounded in reality.”

“Where else could one possibly be grounded?”

Roman laughed outright at this.

“Oh, Logan. Never change, okay?”

He stood up, and pulled Logan to his feet as well.

“Where are we?” Logan asked, squinting.

He could tell they were in some large, open space; all blacks and browns and dull grays. Blurry domes of copper were scattered amongst what could be bits of fallen scaffolding or machinery.

Logan was also hyperaware of Roman’s warm arm pressed against his, and his own hand clasped tightly within the Prince’s larger grip. With everything else blurry, physical sensations were all the more distracting.

“Don’t panic, okay?” Roman started.

Logan scoffed.

“You are fortunate that I am not Virgil,” he commented wryly. “Because starting a sentence like that would almost certainly have caused him to panic.”

“Well, it’s just, do you remember that scene in the Dalek asylum episode where Rory wakes up in the hanger full of dead Daleks who turn out to be not actually dead?” Roman said in a rush. “Because…yeah.”

Oh. Logan swallowed.

“So, I am guessing that those copper domes are actually Daleks?” he said softly.

Roman snorted.

“Copper domes? Jeesh, your eyesight sucks.”

“I am aware,” Logan said flatly. “Which means you will have to guide us out. If I remember correctly, as long as we are quiet and don’t kick any pipes on the ground, we won’t wake them up.”

Roman let go of Logan’s hand… and replaced it with an arm wrapped around his waist. Logan only held back a squeak because it would have been extremely undignified.

“Hey, relax, I got you, Specs.” Roman’s breath ghosted over Logan’s ear. The Prince’s shorter stature allowed him to fit snugly against Logan’s side; if Roman turned his head, he could comfortably tuck his face into the crook of Logan’s neck.

Not…not that Logan imagined him doing any such thing.

Roman drew his sword with a metallic rasp, prompting Logan to pull out his screwdriver, and they set off across the floor.

It was a strange, vulnerable sensation, Logan thought, being this close to another, being forced to rely on him for direction…or maybe it was just that Roman’s Rose Tyler outfit left so much more skin on display than his usual royal attire…

To be fair, Roman’s bare arms and short skirt and leggings were the only non-blurry things in Logan’s line of sight at the moment.

“You know, I am not sure how much good a sword will do against a Dalek now,” Logan said dryly (to distract himself). “Since it would seem that the Imagination is now attempting to be realistic.”

“It’ll be a lot more useful than a screwdriver,” Roman retorted. “Honestly, the War Doctor had a point. The later seasons really do start to treat the sonic like a weapon, and it looks ridiculous. There’s an oily-looking puddle to your left.”

They dodged around it.

“The sonic screwdriver is an ingenious, multipurpose tool,” Logan argued. “Fitting for a character who is, at heart, a pacifist. In the right hands, it most certainly could serve as a weapon. For example one could scramble a Cyberman’s circuits, short out fuses, or calculate the precise amount of blunt force needed to take down an enemy.” Logan waved the hand with the screwdriver around them. “All things that a sword could not accomplish.”

“Sure,” Roman drawled, leading them around one of the still, silent Daleks, “but you don’t point a sonic at an oncoming Dalek and expect to survive. Even the Doctor had more sense than to try that. At least a sword could cut off its blaster arm.”

“We don’t know how strong Dalek amor is down here,” Logan pointed out. “You could end up breaking your sword and then where would we be?”

“Better off than we’d be while you assembled a cabinet at them!”

Logan’s foot collided with a metallic something that made an awful CLANG and went skittering across the floor. Roman pulled them up short, his face going pale.

All around them, round blue lights began to flicker on, one by one.

“I kicked the pipe, didn’t I?” Logan said, his heart starting to pound.

“You kicked the pipe,” Roman confirmed in a sick voice.

“EGGS…!” a crackly Dalek voice next to them stuttered, making them jump. “EG-EG-EG-EGGS…!” Its twin lights flashed erratically as it spoke.

“Roman,” Logan started.

“‘Eggs, you may laugh and that’s great…’” Roman sang in a wavering voice. “‘Your smiles are what make my day’…”

The Dalek rolled toward them creakily. “EEEEEGGS!”

Logan’s breathing sped up. Another Dalek rolled in from the other side, causing him to stumble. All around them, mechanical creaks and groans and a chorus of digitized voices rose up…

“EG…EG-EGGS…TERM…”

“Roman, I believe we need to run.” Logan could see the Dalek almost clearly now, its eyestalk glowing, its gunstick rising up.

“…IN…ATE…”

Blurry, flashing lights closed in.

“‘My self-worth’s fragile like an egg,’” Roman sang. The hand gripping Logan’s middle tightened painfully. “‘When it breaks it’s tough to put together again…’”

“EX…TERM…IN…ATE!”

“Roman!” Logan shouted. “Get us out of here!”

“EXTERMINATE!”

A blaster bolt warbled past and exploded over their heads.

Roman shuddered and seemed to snap out of it, seizing Logan’s arm and pulling him so hard he nearly fell. Logan staggered, hanging onto Roman’s hand for dear life as they ran, and ran, and blaster bolts burst at their feet and shattered around them.

“This way, boys and boys,” Remus’s voice sing-singed across the room. Roman yanked them hard in that direction.

“REMUS!” Roman shouted as they ran, and Logan was impressed he had the breath for it. “Remus, you better open that door like you’re supposed to or we are DEAD!”

“Oh, keep your pants on, brother,” Remus snarked, sounding a little closer. “Although maybe Logan would prefer that you didn’t—”

Whatever else he said wasn’t audible over a hanger full of jabbering Daleks and firing blasters.

They reached a wall and Roman shoved Logan down.

“Straight ahead, crawl. Go, go, go!” he said, turning and brandishing his sword.

Bless that Prince and his stupid, stupid bravery.

Logan went, nearly tripping over his coat as he crawled under the barely lifted hatch door. Once he was past the threshold Roman flung himself under and through, knocking into Logan and sending them both sliding across the floor.

There was a hiss and a heavy thud that Logan hoped was the door shutting behind them, and finally, blessed silence. They both leaned against the wall for a moment, catching their breath.

Roman thunked his head back.

“Jesus Christ Superstar,” he muttered.

“Your welcome.”

Remus’s voice crackled through the hallway. Roman growled and sat up straighter, looking around as if his brother would magically appear.

“I did just save your lives,” Remus added. From the direction of the sound, Logan guessed he was talking through a speaker somewhere on the far wall.

“Yeah, and I’m still gonna whip your butt when this is all over,” Roman groused.

“Oooh, do I get to choose the instrument?”

Roman sputtered, but Logan grabbed his arm before he could yell back.

“You know he just likes to get under your skin,” he murmured, and raised his voice. “Thank you for opening the door, Remus. We are grateful for your help.”

There was a silence on the other end, with a quality that Logan would have described as shocked.

“Well. You two lovebirds better move along,” Remus drawled finally, shrill as ever. “Before the Silurian army shows up.”

“Excuse me, the WHAT?” Logan exclaimed.

No answer.

“Remus!” Roman clambered to his feet and helped Logan up.

Nothing.

Except now that Logan was listening for it, he definitely heard approaching footsteps and murmuring, heavily-accented voices. And they were getting closer.

“That dick,” Roman grumbled through gritted teeth.

“To be fair, I think he is trying to help,” Logan pointed out. “In his own way.”

“Don’t be fair to my brother when he’s just led us out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

“We are neither in a pan nor on fire, Roman; I have never understood that saying—”

The lights dimmed and flashed an eerie purple; Roman silenced him with a hand over his mouth. There was a voice…not Remus’s, not alien, not like anything Logan had ever heard. It chanted something, over and over again, before fading out.

The lights flared back to normal.

Logan waited, counting Roman’s shallow breaths against his neck.

Nothing.

“What was that?” he asked softly.

“Beats the hell out of me,” Roman responded. “But I guess that’s our cue to go. Stay close, Mr. Magoo.”

Logan grumbled, but allowed Roman to recapture his hand and lead them in the opposite direction of the approaching footsteps…which had resumed the moment the purple light vanished.

Next time Roman asked him to come on an adventure, he was bringing a spare set of glasses.

[onyxiana-is-obsessed]

Late Night Trip | Shoto Todoroki x Reader

AN: So, I got this idea from a photo a friend had sent a picture of Todoroki in this BNHA discord server I'm in! I was in Walmart and the idea just hit me. So I wrote it this. It's my attempt at fluff! I hope y'all like it! Length: 1.7k words Pronouns used: She/her

Summary: You're hungry late at night! So you and your husband take a trip to the store!

Full name: (f/n) Todoroki Quirk: (y/q) Age: 24 Hero Name: ((h/n)/none)

(f/n) turned her body on the large bed letting her arms and legs drape over her husband, who chuckled a little. Her leg tightened around his waist, while her arm laid across his chest, her hand poking his cheek.

"Todoroni," She mumbled adorably, giving him her puppy dog eyes.

"Yes, love?"

"I'm hungry." She said, inching closer so her face was close to his. He placed his phone by his side and turned to her.

"Would you like me to make you something?" She fell in thought for a moment, before her (e/c) eyes looked up at him and she shook her head.

"Let's go shopping!" She cheered, throwing her arms up into the air. He groaned and pulled her into him, burying his face in her shoulder.

"All the way to the store?"

"That's where the groceries are, Sho." (f/n) giggled at his laziness. She wrapped her arms around him, breathing in his scent, feeling all her stress and worries practically melt away.

"Yeah, but it's so far."

"Come on! It'll be fun!" She said, sitting up and straddling his waist. "I'll buy you whatever you want!" Shoto laughed, the back of his hand covering his mouth.

"I know what you're doing, (n/n), and it's not working." He assured, letting his hand fall above his head. (f/n) bent down, placing her hands on his chest and her chin on top of her hands. She tried to give him her best innocent, puppy dog eyes, knowing full well it would sway him into agreeing with her.

"I'll buy you soba~," (f/n) said with a hopeful smile. Just that little look and the tone of her voice made Shoto automatically agree with her. Gosh, it was so difficult to say no to that cute face of hers.

"(f/n)..." Shoto whined and his hands moved to rest on her thighs. "That's cheating!"

"It'll be fun!" (f/n) countered. "Oh! We can buy pocky and play the pocky game!" He rolled his mismatched eyes at her enthusiasm- her cute enthusiasm that just made him want to melt into a puddle.

"But you can kiss me whenever you want."

"Ok, but like... there's a treat involved." Shoto's eyes widened and he placed a hand on his chest, pretending to be offended. He even added a little gasp.

"I thought my kisses were the treat." (f/n)'s eyes widened and she frantically shook her head.

"N-no! I didn't m-mean it like that! I swear! I was... just..." (f/n) trailed off when she saw her husband start laughing, which prompted her to sit up, cross her arms, and pout. "You're teasing me, aren't you?"

"Are you the most adorable wife on the planet?"

"Sho!"

"I can't help it," He laughed, then smiled up at her. "I'm sorry, love." She leaned forward, pressing a short kiss on his lips.

"I'll bite your lip off, I swear."

"Oh, I'm so scared." He taunted playfully. She sat up, holding her hands up. "No, no, no please!" Shoto pretended to be scared and immediately held his hands up in surrender. "Have mercy, my love!"

"Go on! What were you saying?" (f/n) threatened, pretending to glare at him. He reached out and gently took her wrists and looked up at her.

"I surrender." She smirked, holding her head up high.

"I demand a kiss as a sign of surrender."

"Come here," She shook her head.

"Nope. You come up here." He shook his head and pulled her wrists, making her fall forward. He caught her shoulders and gently pressed a kiss to her lips. When they pulled away, she glared at him.

"Cheater."

"Well, now you know how it feels." He teased, making her grumble.

"Yeah, yeah. Whatever, IcyHot."

"Come on, let's get changed. It's late anyway so we shouldn't waste too much time." Shoto said looking at his phone, it was currently 12:38 am and (f/n) wanted snacks from the store. Nothing surprising, honestly.

(f/n) rolled off of him and let him sit up properly. The two quickly got changed and gathered their necessities.

"Wanna drive?" Shoto asked, holding the car keys up as he walked to the front door with (f/n).

"Sure!" The two got into their car putting on their seat belts and (f/n) started the car up. "What store? Wanna go to my favorite? The far one?!"

"Why would we do that?" Shoto asked, looking at her.

"Why not?!"

"Because it's midnight... and we should be asleep."

"Or, hear me out. We could drive to that one store that has (fav snack)."

"That's like 40 minutes away." Shoto said, a little shocked she was willing to drive that far for (fav snack).

"It's not that far," (f/n) said, placing her hands on the steering wheel.

"Not that far- that's almost two hours of driving! For a bag of (candy/chips)!" He argued but he could see it didn't really phase her.

"We don't have work tomorrow."

"Baby," He frowned. "What happened to wanting to sleep early?" (f/n) giggled nervously and looked away then back at him.

"Start tomorrow?" He sighed in defeat which made her squeal in delight as she quickly pulled out of the driveway. Shoto chuckled, shaking his head. Yep, this was one of the many reasons he married this nutcase. Late night trips to a faraway store for her favorite snack.

"Play something! Something fun!" (f/n) said, keeping her eyes on the road. Shoto nodded, connecting his phone to the car and playing her playlist, which contained all her favorite songs.

As they drove on the highway, (f/n) sang and "danced" to all the songs, singing most of them since she knew every lyric by heart. Shoto just watched with adoration, sometimes lip-syncing some words with her.

The 40-minute drive flew by and before they knew it, they were at (f/n)'s favorite store. She excitedly got out of the car, running into the store.

"You forgot... to lock... the car," Shoto muttered as she disappeared through the doors. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and walked towards the entrance, jumping a little when the car lock behind him. "Good lord." He chuckled.

Shoto had finally found (f/n) in one the isles and his eyes widened when he noticed the already full basket in her hands.

"Hey, babe! What about this?" She held up a pack of gummy worms. He took the basket from her, looking at her with wonder.

"You were in here for maybe 40 seconds. How is this thing full already?" She smiled, waving his question off.

"Pick baby."

"I don't like gummy worms." She shrugged, putting it back before turning on her heel and walking away from him. Shoto quickly followed behind her, grabbing another basket, since she'd already filled up the first one. (f/n) grabbed different types of juices and snacks, nonchalantly throwing them into the basket her husband held.

"You should've grabbed a cart," He informed, holding up both of the overflowing baskets. "Why didn't you?"

"Eh, the baskets were closer!"

"I'll go get one." He said, placing the basket next to (f/n), while walking to the front. (f/n) continued on her quest for more snacks, gathering a bunch of candies, chocolates, chips, and whatnot in her arms. "I can't leave you alone for ten seconds." He said, making her turn around, one of the bags of chips falling to the floor. "Ten seconds, baby. Ten whole seconds, all you had to do was stand here. You still managed to get stuff." (f/n) only giggled, throwing her stash into the cart.

"You love me."

"To the moon and back, but you astound me with your abilities, (f/n). You truly do." She winked at him as she picked up one of the baskets and spilled the contents of it into the cart.

"(Fav flavor drink/1) or (fav flavor drink/2)?" (f/n) asked, holding up the two separate drinks.

"Whichever you want, love," Shoto answered, before looking at his phone. It was 2:17 am and (f/n) was still packed with energy. This came with its own list of pros and cons. Sure, she had an easier time staying up so night shifts for her were easy. But then again, she couldn't sleep early and would wake up later in the day, which was a bad habit. This little trip of theirs was a pro and a con. Sure, he loved spending time with her and it was kinda fun to drive this far. But then again, it was late and they should've been asleep. After a few more moments of watching (f/n) debate between the two drinks, Shoto spoke up. "Just get them both."

"Oh! Great idea!" She giggled, before dropping the drinks into the cart, which made Shoto reach down and adjust them so they wouldn't crush the other snacks. A few minutes of walking through all the isles, they'd decided they had enough stuff. "Let's go!" (f/n) said, running ahead while Shoto followed behind.

The cashier was just as surprised as Shoto as she slid every snack and drink across the register to scan the items. Shoto paid and they both walked out to the parking lot and threw all of their delicious snacks into the trunk before getting into the car.

"At least we won't be coming back for a while," Shoto commented, pulling his seatbelt down.

"Who said that?" His mismatched eyes shot to hers.

"Because we bought so much stuff." (f/n) giggled.

"Bold of you to assume it won't all be gone by the end of the weak."

"NO!" He yelled, his eyes widening. "Don't do that, you'll get sick!" (f/n)'s giggles turned into laughter as he went on about how dangerous it was to eat all of the junk food they'd bought.

"Relax, baby!" She yelled, between her fits of giggles. "I was kidding, of course, I'm not going to eat it all in a week." (f/n) drove them back home, which was, of course, filled with singing and lots of giggles.

**

(f/n) jumped on the bed after changing into some comfortable clothes, spilling all the candy and snacks onto her bed. Shoto stretched before sliding under the covers next to her.

"You seem like you're planning to stay up. Eating all this junk food before bed isn't healthy either."

"But, babe." (f/n) whined, turning to her husband and pouting.

"It's 3 am." He said, grabbing the remote.

"Come on! It'll be fun." There was a moment of silence as Shoto debated on whether or not he wanted to actually stay up all night. When his eyes met his wife's... he couldn't deny her.

"You're a bad influence, you know that?" She squealed in delight, wrapping her arms around him in a tight hug. Her lips pressed against his cheek quickly.

"I love you, Shoto!" She giggled, her (e/c) meeting his.

"I love you too, (f/n)." He replied, leaning down and pressing his lips against hers. "To the moon and back."

[victorluvsalice]

AU Thursday: Fallout of Darkness Does Far Harbor

Hey, I did a post for Nuka-World (under the old “Tell Me Where To Find Shelter”) name, and I’m up to the point in Jon of Many A True Nerd’s Survival Playthrough where he’s doing Far Harbor (I’m watching it when I work out), so I figured I could share a few ideas:

-->As stated in the Nuka-World post, I’m picturing the trip to the Island and Far Harbor to be a post-game adventure, with the Institute already defeated and whatnot. This would be a Victor, Alice, Nick, and -- after they meet him and become friendly -- Old Longfellow adventure, and I don’t picture them coming back to the mainland until they’re done.

-->I think Victor would immediately feel protective of Kasumi the tinkerer, and they’d end up bonding over their love of fixing things and modding items.

-->Similarly, he’d get along well with the Mariner, not only getting her the needed supplies but actively helping to reinforce the Hull and bouncing some of his ideas off her. The Mariner would be pleasantly surprised by this mainlander’s enthusiasm for her project! (Alice of course would help out too, but this is mainly a Victor project.)

-->DiMA: Do you think you could be a synth?

Victor: I wondered for a bit after learning about the Gen-3s, but my awesome vampire girlfriend used Auspex on me and told me I’m not.

DiMA: . . .

Alice: Yes, you look slightly different to me with that than normal humans. On the plus side I’m pretty sure this confirms synths have souls?

DiMA: . . .ANYWAY

-->Once the need to infiltrate the Children of Atom comes up, Victor goes and drinks from the spring to do their special rite, following the Mother and getting thoroughly creeped out in the process. . .and then, once he finally comes out of it, he finds that something, uh, happened to him beyond the spooky quest. Something a bit -- fishy.

Something like he’s suddenly got gills now.

Otherwise known as “I’m not taking any ranks of Aquaboy until then because it amuses me to picture Victor somehow mutating from a combination of stress, radiation, and proximity to another eldritch abomination and him freaking out about it.” XD

-->Oh, yes, there are more eldritch abominations in play! Because I’ve had a vague thought about the Mother of the Fog and the Children of Atom. One that ties back into everyone’s favorite World of Darkness.

Namely, I’m thinking the Mother is a Gaia pushed completely over the edge by the Great War two centuries ago -- and the Children of Atom technically a werewolf tribe. The members immune to radiation are either latent Garou or Kinfolk, with Tektus being very willing to explode into his Crinos wolfman warform to top off his sermons.

Alice, as you can imagine, is not happy about this. Any time she spends around the Children of Atom is the worst time of her life as she waits for them to start hunting her down. (Fortunately, they’re more obsessed with spreading the Fog than sniffing out vampires, but given what the Fog does, it’s kind of a lateral move in the end.)

-->The gang is going to try to get a relatively peaceful end out of this whole mess -- I’m thinking they can stop Far Harbor and Acadia from going to war, simply because Victor is a helpful sort and will get on everyone’s good sides in both camps, but I’m not sure how they’re going to handle the Nucleus. One thing’s for sure -- DiMA’s kill-and-replace plan ain’t gonna work here!

-->Oh, and by the way -- you know that quest in the hotel, where you’re investigating a murder among a bunch of rich-and-famous robobrains? Yeah, Victor takes on that quest -- even pulls out the Silver Shroud outfit to play “proper” detective (Nick: Do you take that thing EVERYWHERE just to annoy me?! Victor: Not JUST to annoy you). But almost the minute he gets to the hotel, this happens:

Seemingly random woman robobrain: Victor?

Nick and Alice: [heads swiveling toward Victor] ?

Victor, dumbfounded: Mother?

Nick and Alice: [heads swiveling back to the robobrain] ?!?

Yuuuup, William and Nell are in that vault, as robobrains. They were vacationing on the island when the bombs dropped, and Nell got them in there by impersonating another couple. I’m actually considering making her the murderer, with her motive being the victim was close to finding out the truth. Naturally Victor has a lot of feelings about all this, most of them “why the fuck were my parents allowed to survive when Victoria and Emily weren’t?”

-->Victor: [as they leave the Island] All in favor of never, ever leaving the Commonwealth again?

Alice and Nick: [raise hands]

[gleam-and-darken]

Zelda AU #2: The Triplets

The sketch is rough at best, but Zelda is supposed to look like she does pre-calamity, Tetra looks like the girl from the BotW 2 trailer (because it is her, I might explain that later if anyone’s interested), and Sheik has his design from Smash Ultimate. This is really just my take on the twins AU which was originally created by someone else (rockingthegraveyard, I believe).

https://triforce-princess.tumblr.com/post/627266504652668928/this-is-awesome-your-brain-is-so-good

Anyways, I was thinking of what this might actually look like as a fleshed-out story, and I decided that Zelda’s twin could be named Tetra. And then I thought, “hey, we can’t leave Sheik out!” And so here we are. Basically, thanks to her siblings, Zelda is able to stop the calamity and (almost) everyone lives happily ever after. I don’t actually plan on writing this into a formal story so this is a long post where I just dump a lot of my ideas concerning the trio. I will not be writing this into a story, because I’ve never played BotW and I fear I would get everything wrong, but you’re welcome to! If someone ends up writing something based on this, I’d love to know so I can read it. I also have lots more ideas about this, so if you want more content (aside from this ridiculously long post), just ask!

Zelda is technically the oldest, although it hardly matters since they’re triplets. Thanks to this, she is arbitrarily the one who had all of the responsibilities heaped upon her. She’s pretty similar to how she appears in BotW, except Link isn’t even a potential love interest for her. He’s just her knight whom she’s gradually grown close to - as a friend.

Tetra is the middle child, and by far the most troublesome. She is outgoing, adventurous, brash, and basically everything you don’t want in a princess. King Rhoam tried to raise her to be proper, constantly reminding her that it was the hero’s (Link’s) duty to be the courageous one, not the princess. This often resulted in her running away and threatening to join the gerudo. She and Revali got along like a house on fire, often bonding over how overrated Link is. She absolutely hates Link, because to her, he represents not her failures, but the failures of her country and family. Why can’t a princess with no triforce be the hero as well? She makes no attempt to hide her distaste for him, although she might have changed her perspective a little if she realized that Link actually greatly admired her. It’s too bad that he was too scared of her to tell her himself. Speaking of being too scared to admit things, the one thing Tetra can’t bring herself to say aloud is that she has a huge crush on Princess Mipha.

Sheik is the little brother, known as the quiet one. Unlike his eldest sister, he knows how to fight, but hates doing so. He would much rather prefer to be exploring the lonely areas of the wild, or researching ancient tech with Zelda. He’s trans, and while his sisters support him and his father respects that, King Rhoam also saw that as an excuse to ignore him. After all, the legends never told of princes doing anything noteworthy. Thus, the king, and by extension almost everyone in Hyrule, more or less forgot about their quiet prince. The champions knew about him and were varying degrees of nice to him, especially Lady Urbosa, which was more than almost everyone he met could say. He didn’t mind it too much, and didn’t even realize that it was wrong until after his father was dead.

Link had a varied relationship with the triplets. Originally, both Zelda and Tetra despised him, because he reminded them of everything wrong in Hyrule - Zelda’s own self doubt, and Tetra’s failed attempts to become her own hero. Since his two sisters were always talking about how much they hated having this royal knight follow Zelda around, Sheik grew to dislike him as well, despite having never met in person. However, there was a time in the castle when Tetra practically kidnapped Zelda and whisked her away to an unknown location in Hyrule, sending everything into chaos. Sheik was pretty sure that they were both in on it and were simply trying to prove how well they could manage without Link, but they hadn’t informed him of their plan before they left, so he really had no idea. What he did know was that they left Link behind, and now the royal knight was panicking because he thought the king would blame him for letting his daughters vanish, and feared he’d be at the very least jailed.

Link, to his surprise, was not punished - the king was too busy cursing his own tomboyish daughter - but was sent to go find them alongside a team of Hyrulean soldiers. Not wanting to look useless, Sheik joined the quest. In their travels, Sheik discovered that Link was actually a lot like himself, just in completely different circumstances (and much more reckless, unfortunately), and the knight found that the prince was one of the few people who didn’t meet him with impossibly high expectations, for which he was thankful. They became fast friends, although since they both said an average of ten words a week combined, their friendship often looked more like them being present in the same room.

Much later, after both princesses had returned to the castle (“of our own accord,” Tetra had reminded everyone within earshot), the king doubled down on Zelda discovering her powers. She and her knight were rarely seen around the castle, always visiting springs and whatnot, while Zelda’s siblings were left at the castle doing... basically nothing. They were both training constantly for a battle that they were beginning to believe would never come.

Their seventeenth birthday started like any other day. They were at the castle while Zelda and her knight were off at another spring to pray, along with the champions. Then all hell broke loose. (Literally.) Something monstrous decided to rear its ugly head from under Hyrule Castle, and it took over the guardians to boot. Of course, both Tetra and Sheik became extremely concerned for their older sister, since she probably couldn’t fight a bokoblin, much less corrupted ancient technology. This, combined with the fact that the castle was probably the worst place to be right then, prompted the two to bolt into the field and find their sister. They had to fight guardians the entire way, and Sheik recieved a nasty injury, but kept denying how bad it really was.

Despite the storm, she wasn’t that hard to find, thanks to that explosion of what they guessed was her divine magic that had finally decided to say hello. They found her as opposed to the sheikah, but arrived on the scene a bit to late for the hero. He wasn’t dead (or was he?), or at the very least he could be saved/brought back, but he was clearly not about to help them fight. (Still, Sheik absolutely lost his mind when he saw the state Link was in, to the shock of his sisters. Neither of them knew he was close friends with the knight.)

Zelda quickly explained her plan to her siblings, where she would return the sword to the forest and face Ganon herself, to which Tetra said “hell no.” The Master Sword was right there! Hyrule needs saving, and the princess found herself to be a perfectly competent hero. The sword could be fixed. Somehow.

This part is where I’m a little on the fence about what happens. The sword’s health and power does seem to be tied to Link’s, as evidence by how it heals with him over 100 years and can only shoot sword beams when he’s at full health (I think), but since Tetra actually was worthy of wielding the sword, Fi could have been restored when she accepted the blade. Alternatively, Tetra and Sheik could have been the sages of earth and wind without realizing it, and we’re able to restore the sword on the fly. You get to decide how the sword repaired itself.

So now Tetra has roped herself into fighting Ganon with the Master Sword, Zelda by her side, while Sheik is losing his mind over what is basically the corpse of his closest friend. It’s at this time that Zelda realizes just how injured her brother is. She knows that he can’t fight the calamity like that, so she tasks him with taking Link to the Shrine of Resurrection, like Fi said. Initially, he refuses, but he soon decides that it’s all he can do and agrees.

The triplets go their separate ways. Somehow, the sisters are able to get to the castle very quickly, and start to challenge the Calamity. Zelda uses her new sealing powers to force him into a mortal form, while Tetra beats him up with her new weapon of choice. Ganon originally shrugs them off, more or less, but as they start to win he activates Panic Mode and summons all of his blights back to the sanctum to fight the sisters. Luckily, the blights were snatched right out of their battles with the champions, who were beaten and shaken but still alive.

However, thanks to his new allies, Ganon starts to win. Just when the princesses think they’re about to die, the divine beasts - which are under the control of the champions after the blights left - strike, finishing off the Calamity. Naturally Ganon has a few tricks up his sleeve and transforms into Dark Beast Ganon, moving to Hyrule Field. By Hylia’s (late) divine grace, Tetra and Zelda are teleported to the field as well, alongside Sheik, surprisingly. He’d just set Link up in the shrine before getting pulled here. Zelda is able to summon the Bow of Light, which becomes his weapon.

Together, the three of them are able to take out the dark beast. Zelda creates weak points, while Tetra and Sheik shoot them with Master Sword beams and light arrows, respectively. (Maybe Tetra DID die, but her health was restored by a fairy, or she’s at full health for some other reason.) So now Ganon is dead. Castle town is in shambles, and multiple people are dead, including the king. But don’t worry - Urbosa quickly makes herself the new parental figure of the triplets.

Hyrule is rebuilt. The people celebrate the defeat of the calamity, and the guardians are restored to their former abilities. Tetra becomes the new Champion of Hyrule Castle, wielding the Master Sword and the Sheikah Slate. For an extra happy ending, maybe she and Mipha formally become a couple. Sheik pioneers work on improving ancient and modern technology, showing a special interest in ways to reverse aging. After many years, Queen Zelda’s son, Daphnes Link Hyrule, becomes the ruler after her reign ends.

And so, the people of Hyrule live happily ever after.

... and 100 years later, Link wakes up.

[lokeanrampant]

A bit of rambling...

Maybe it’s the Lit Major in me, but I periodically look at the media I consume - music, television (though right now, that’s literally unplugged), books, social media, games - and look at how it impacts the world around it.   The very best of our literature, regardless of medium, makes us think, makes us talk.  Sometimes it is beautiful.  Sometimes, it is damned uncomfortable.  And it needs to be both.  That truth should resonate deeply inside us, all of us.   Our media should tackle the social, religious, political, etc., issues of today in a way that encourages people to think about the ideas abstractly and then, hopefully, apply that thought to reality.  Because all of it is a reflection of our world.  

You’ll see I often use the tags #truth in media and #truth in gaming.  If I don’t have a #truth in fiction, I should.  Generally speaking, you see this most prominently in science fiction, but it’s just as easy to see in fantasy - magic is just sufficiently evolved science and vice versa, after all.  You definitely see it regarding to the early years of Star Trek TOS.  So much of that series was a deliberate retelling of the current world around it - it was showing viewers so many of the things that were happening, just through a different lens - a diffuse lens that allowed people a viewpoint removed from their own.  It took the immediacy and the knee-jerk reaction from the situation and presented it in a way to let people look and think and respond.  The situations were the same - identical in scope of the event itself, but the players, the presentation, that’s what differed.  Science fiction broadens minds.  Or at least, we hope it does.  

Dystopian literature, on the other hand, is created as a warning of what happens when society as a whole disregards the warnings of the world at large.  It shows what happens when extremism comes into play and how that works.  The goal here is to say, if we don’t change our views or actions, if we continue down this path, this is what awaits us.  And we can see it happening all around us.  We see the paths becoming more and more clear as novels we considered dystopian nightmare are becoming far too eerily accurate.  

So what does this tell us?  Everything we create is both a reflection of what we are and a desire of what we want.  Every reaction we have to these things is honest.  We have untold numbers of novels and movies that show fear of advanced technology and how it can root us in place - we’re so interconnected with tech that we lose how to connect with humanity or surveillance is everywhere and there is no escape or it will consume us to the point that we are nothing but a slave to it.  And there is validity in all of that.  Sure, some of those stories are extreme views (depending on what you’re reading/viewing), but our reactions show us so much about how the potential of that actually happening impacts us.  

All our stories are the same...there are no new stories, just new ways to tell them.  And our history continues to repeat itself as well.  We tell tales of heroes and villains.  We tell tales of epic quests and of the smallest actions having the greatest repercussions.  If literature can inspire you to greatness, it can inspire you to darkness as well.  It’s why propaganda is so insidious.  It’s why advertising and lobbying are billion-dollar industries.  Sell it, sell the story, sell the perspective, sell the lie, sell the truth.  

Communication - written and verbal - has been used since the dawn of humanity to influence.  We do it all the time.  What we consume consumes us, changes us, reveals us.  Are we good people?  Are we only good in certain circumstances?  Are we okay with X action in Y circumstance, but not in Z circumstance?  When is X action okay?  When is murder not murder, but self-defense?  When is imprisonment just and when is it not?  When is it okay to withhold medications and healthcare?  The list is endless.  And it’s terrifying.  

And when you see those warning signs, when you see the parallels and you fear the direction in which everything is headed?  How can you not say no more?   So yes, you better believe when I see it reflected in literature and people saying, hey, those are good things, I’m going to be pissed.  Cause that’s an honest reaction to a very real situation presented just this side of reality.  It takes very little for just-this-side-of-reality to sidestep into our reality.  We once believed so many of our novels and movies and whatnot would never come to pass.  We were too smart for that, too moral, too good.  We saw the inherent danger and we could avoid it.  

Except we’re already living so many of them.  How can I not be afraid when people look at a situation and say, “Hey, that’s fine!” when that situation is a direct parallel to something in my life?  I have every right to fear for myself and my loved ones.  

And I do.