#because eva was a symbol of what she was trying to push behind her

[jamessunderlandgf]

🖊 + ⚔🩸faustina🩸⚔

FAUSTINA was gifted her name by his holiness escribar. she was an orphan and didn’t have one, so he gave her the name faustina, which means “fortunate”— which. is ironic. because she certainly is not fortunate. he thought so as a sick joke, of course.

how fortunate for her to have been found and given purpose, praise the miracle, etc etc but she is NOT living laughing or loving cs she’s in a constant state of having to prove herself and not once has it worked in her favor. the single time that it does is when she’s DYING.

[dark-arts-and-crafts-universe]

A Dying Art (Chapter 13)

A Dying Art

Lorcan Verdigris is a time wizard, a misanthrope, and a single father to a household of magically-sentient furniture.

Lorcan Verdigris is not a necromancer. Anymore. But when the leader of the local necro coven comes to him with a request he really, really can’t refuse, past collides with present and he finds himself back in a world he’d tried to leave behind. Someone is trying to steal a powerful magical artifact, one whose destruction could unleash chaos upon the city. Or save it from an even greater danger. Or do nothing at all. Who knows. See, this is exactly why Lorcan stopped messing with the stuff.

Unfortunately, one way or another, Lorcan’s the one stuck dealing with it. He’d like to say this is a challenge that will take all his magic and his ingenuity to overcome, but let’s be real, stopping this threat will take something even more dire: actual effort. At least he’s getting paid this time…

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Chapter 13: Oh No

Word count: 3,577

Content warnings: no major content warnings

-

If Lorcan took the most circuitous route out of the mall, that was his own business. He was trying not to have a meltdown in the middle of the mall and a stranger saying hi would surely push him over the edge.

It was pathetic to think how fragile he felt at the moment. He wasn’t the victim here–Kyle was most likely going to die before Lorcan even left the mall, and it was his fault. If he hadn’t chosen to confront him now, if he’d realized Osiris might be listening in–Lorcan had been walking around with bloody hands all day. He guessed now it was symbolic, too.

And Jennifer Lynn…he knew there wasn’t much she could do to help him. Not much reason to, either. They weren’t friends or anything. There was really only so far acquaintanceship could take a person, wasn’t there?

He pulled out his phone and texted his mother, writing, “Are you sure I’m not a fuckup?” Because he wasn’t, not at all.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, until Vulk spoke up to ask, “Did we just get fired?”

It was a fair question. Would Osiris still be expecting Lorcan to deliver on the rest, after all of that?

The idea was tempting. This assignment had been nothing but misery from start to finish, a reminder of every way he’d failed in his own life. If he stopped his work without Osiris’s explicit say-so, though, and it turned out they still expected him to deliver–“Safer to assume not.”

“Okay, so…what next?” Also a good question. His necromancer suspects had picked at a lot of old wounds. Especially Gravelord, the only one he had yet to rule out. But the only reason they’d been suspects in the first place was they knew where Osiris lived. If the usurper had gotten that information from Kyle, it meant whoever it was didn’t.

Gravelord, the Marquis of Shadows wasn’t Lorcan’s perpetrator. Which meant everything he’d put himself through was for nothing. He had no leads. No hope of success.

He glanced at his hand. It was a clue, technically, but he couldn’t return-to-sender a curse he didn’t even know how he got. And if Belial, Eva, and Gravelord were innocent (well, ish), he had to have picked it up before his investigation.

So maybe something happened at the seer’s. A splinter of glass in his hand, a contagious element designed to hamper anyone who was getting anywhere close.

If it was, Kryptonia and her friends would be in trouble, too.

Lorcan’s shoulders sank. They had to have caught on how wrapped up he was in necromancer stuff by this point. He couldn’t just walk up and ask, especially if he’d managed to get them cursed twice.

But if the curse had carried itself through the fragments of Kryptonia’s rig, he thought, then there’d still be evidence. He started walking faster, something almost like a spring back in his step. “I have an idea,” he told Vulk.

-

“I’m just saying, it’s very on-the-nose that you’d rather dig through a dirty dumpster than talk to a person,” Vulk was telling him. “Grandma showed you tons of social skills you can lean back on here you know.”

His mouth quirked up in a smirk. “Don’t forget I’ve got your grandad’s skillset, too,” he replied, grabbing the handles he’d been taught to use. Like most of the city trash bins, this dumpster wouldn’t have been emptied since the Monday before he visited Luminous Fortunes. “It all evens out.”

He wasn’t exactly a climber, and it took a moment to get steady once he was in the dumpster. He almost didn’t notice the buzzing vibration of his phone in his hip pocket. He opened it up: his mother had finally replied.

“Are you okay?” her text asked him. “Do you need me to call?”

Family never let him down. Couldn’t family go too far sometimes, though? Lorcan’s mother never gave up on him, but he kept fucking things up. Fucking people over. After a while, it was obvious the problem was him. Lorcan shoved the phone back in his pockets and shook one of the trashbags to listen for glass sounds. Maybe a little too forcefully.

“Ahem, Lorcan,” Vulk said about five minutes in.

He lifted his head up above the lip of the bin. “What?”

Kryptonia the seer, standing in a propped-open side door leading into the neighboring building, waved her high-tech button glove at him. “I could have sworn you’re not a garbagewixen,” she said. “Want to explain why you’re rooting around my trash?”

“Um.” He thought about it. “I’ve got nothing.”

“Garbage inspection?” Vulk suggested.

“No,” she told them. “Get out of that dumpster, come inside. You’re lucky I’m free until two. Try not to stink up my chairs.”

Kryptonia’s shop didn’t look that much worse for wear from the fire. There was a new laser rig, obviously, one that wasn’t so cleverly camouflaged under the crystal ball, but otherwise the damage was pretty well masked. Her table suddenly had a tablecloth, and every power outlet Lorcan could see had an air freshener running to cover up the burnt under-smell. But otherwise, things seemed fine.

The seer fiddled with her remote glove to turn on the stereo. After a moment of consideration and a few more button pushes, a song started playing. It had a psychedelic vibe much like the last time, though this one had lyrics.

“Ooh, nice,” Vulk said, and tapped Lorcan’s arm. “Lorcan, get it?”

He didn’t, no. “You know I don’t know music.”

“There go my ideas for small talk,” Kryptonia said, sitting down. “But then, I don’t have that long before my next customer comes by. You could have picked a better time to stop in.”

“I wasn’t exactly planning for you to scry me out–”

“I heard you, actually,” she told him. “You’re not that stealthy. Look…Tuesday was a lot. Clo’d rather I not get involved any more than that. She says you were trying to scry the Crown Osiris’s--uh, crown. That not many other necromancers in this area use those anymore.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think I knew the risks when I got in, and whatever you’re wrapped up in probably puts you in more danger than me. Wasn’t even sure you were alive until I saw your familiar outside.”

“Hm,” Lorcan grunted. “Well, this is my own mess to deal with. You don’t like me. You don’t have to feel responsible for me, either.”

Kryptonia tilted her head. “When did I say I didn’t like you?” she asked.

“I mean, we just met.” He shifted slightly. Wasn’t it obvious? “Your friends don’t.”

“Clo doesn’t trust you, that’s a different thing. You’re making an effort, at least, more than I can say for some. And Lacie just thinks you’re cool.”

“She spent the whole time insulting me,” Lorcan said.

“Teasing you,” the seer corrected. “It’s how she shows camaraderie. And she likes that you poke her back.”

“She thinks necromancers are bad news.”

“You remembered that, huh?” Kryptonia waved a hand, and said, “Well, she does, but she also thinks it’s funny to freak Clo out. So after, she decided it’s neat actually that you’re friends with a necromantic mafia lord.”

And Lorcan had to defend himself there. “We’re not friends.”

“My bad. Acquaintances?”

Oh. That was even worse. He buried his face in his hands, muttering, “Fuck.”

“He doing alright?” he could hear Kryptonia asking Vulk softly.

“It’s a work in progress.”

Lorcan pulled his hands away, noting the way the red had smeared all over his face. Kryptonia had, too, by the sudden alarm on her face. “Oh, look, a change of subject,” he said weakly, waving his hand. “I think I might have picked up some kind of lingering curse when your crystal ball exploded. Maybe the laser rig had some kind of residual dark energy or something. That’s…that’s why the dumpster diving.”

The seer steepled her fingers. “I check all my stuff for magihazards before throwing it out. The curse got us through the light show, the actual materials were fine.”

Shit, he thought. Then when had…

“Sorry if that wasn’t the answer you were hoping for,” she continued. Then, bafflingly, “Do you have a therapist?”

Lorcan guessed the look on his face was answer enough.

Kryptonia sighed. “Right. Consider it? Because you clearly have a lot going on, and it’s above my pay grade.”

“I’m just having a bad week. Things are usually a lot better.”

“What’s a usual week like for you, then?” she asked.

A usual week? Well, Lorcan would maybe get an online order or two, pick up supplies and hole up in his workspace putting them together. Watch TV, talk to the kids, go to sleep. Nice. Safe. Predictable. “Nothing much.”

“So,” the seer said, “you’re fine as long as you’re doing literally nothing.”

“Yes. Wait. It sounds bad when you put it like that.”

“I’m sure your future therapist will say it nicer.” Wow, and here Lorcan thought her buddy was supposed to be the snarky one. “They might also wonder why your social life is such a touchy subject.”

Ugh. “It’s my social life, isn’t it? It’s everyone else who gets weird about it.” He sighed, ran a hand through his hair. “Look, people have…broached the subject of me being a little bit friendlier, when I do my work.”

“He means me,” Vulk explained, “I’m ‘people’.”

“And sure, I can be rough, but, I don’t know–everyone acts like I’m the bad guy for not wanting to be friends with the people I talk to. Even–” Lorcan cut himself off. “I try to do good. That should be more important, shouldn’t it? Saving lives, protecting people?” He wasn’t thinking about Kyle. “Just because I don’t open up while I do it, that doesn’t make me bad. Does it?”

“Right, so I just met you, time guy,” Kryptonia said. “I don’t know the balance of your soul. But I do get what you’re saying, a bit.” Lorcan looked up at her, and she shrugged. “I give people hints of the future for a living. I like to think it puts some good out into the world, but…people can be stubborn. They don’t listen. I wouldn’t be doing myself any favors if I acted like every client I’ve ever had was a friend. Or that whatever fates they bring on themselves are my fault.”

And that was exactly what Lorcan did. Or. Tried to do. Because, in the end, hadn’t he done a lot to try and reach people who just wouldn’t listen? Didn’t it hurt, even when he told himself he didn’t care?

Hadn’t Kryptonia invited him inside when she didn’t have to? He was someone stubborn, determined not to listen, and she kept talking to him anyway. Just as he realized that, the last notes of the song faded.

“Anyways,” she said, in the silence that fell, “that’s the stuff you should bring up to someone who can give you real advice. I have…not a lot of time before my next reading, so I’m gonna have to kick you out.” She stood from her seat, and nodded to Vulk. “See ya, retro lamp.”

“Bye. Thanks for the help.”

Lorcan let out another slow breath. “I can pay you for your time,” he told the seer. “Since I interrupted your break and all.”

“You really won’t let yourself understand this, huh?” she asked. From this angle, the look in her eyes was almost pitying.

“Sorry.” He meant it, too.

He was thinking about the conversation for the entire bus ride home. “I don’t want to be a bad person,” he told his son, and felt the lamp’s plug come to rest on his shoulder.

“I don’t think you are,” Vulk said. “You’re grumpy and you mope a lot. I wish you could have somebody besides just us. But you’re not bad.”

Vulcan was–he was lazy, and flighty, and of course he was family. By all accounts, hearing reassurance from him shouldn’t really mean much. But it did help. He was one of the people who knew Lorcan best, after all.

So maybe he could try a little harder to see some good in what he did. When he talked to people like Belial and hir crew, Eva, Gravelord–of course he’d end up seeing the bits of himself he hated most.

But Kryptonia had seen someone who needed help, even if he didn’t think he did. And she tried, the same way he tried to help Eva, and Gravelord. If what she said about her friend Lacie was true, he had plenty in common with her, too–sharp tongues, and an excitement to use them. Clo…okay Clo was kind of a cipher, he still didn’t know what was up with Clo.

But Lorcan had been seeing only the worst of himself lately, in the worst kind of people. Maybe he could try finding himself in people who were good, too.

When they finally got home, he pushed into the stairs of his apartment complex. There was another figure walking up, which Lorcan didn’t think much of at first. But then he noticed they’d exited on his floor. And had an envelope in their free hand.

“Hey!” he called up, hexes at the ready, running headlong up the remaining flights towards what might be another nasty fight. He shoved open the door. “You there–”

It was his landlord. Which. Shit.

“Ah, are you…looking for this month’s rent?” Lorcan asked.

The landlord frowned. “It was due yesterday.” Yep, fuck, it was. The envelope the man was holding, despite being splashed with a very menacing crimson stamp on the front, likely contained the much more mundane threat of a late notice. Lorcan got a lot of those, too.

“Right. Hang on, I’ve got most of it here.” He took Osiris’s payment out of the money clip. About a hundred short at this point, but he’d get paid the rest later, hopefully. He said as much to the man.

The landlord rolled his eyes, starting to turn away. “It’s tenants like you who keep me in the red,” he muttered.

Something about the phrasing froze Lorcan in place. “What did you say?” he asked.

His landlord gestured with the cash in his hand. “I can’t pay my bills if you don’t pay yours,” he said. “You like keeping the AC running? Having maintenance come by to fix your problems?”

“Whatever.” Lorcan walked off, deep in thought. Why hadn’t he seen it before? “Vulk, Kryptonia’s vision. She saw us ‘in red’--or ‘in the red’. Like debt.”

“We know we can’t pay our bills Lorcan, we don’t need a seer for that.”

“It’s not our debt, though. Osiris said their GameStop location has been going into debt because of all the extra shifts they’ve been working. That’s the red the vision meant. Why the GameStop?”

Vulk’s cord flicked out, and Lorcan braced himself for some comment about Nintendos or evil video game haters. But instead Vulk said, “The GameStop is the only part of the mall that isn’t dying. That and the Hot Topic.”

Holy shit, he was right.

“If your goal was to kill the mall completely, you’d need to weaken those two holdouts. And if you can force the GameStop’s manager to overspend on the store’s budget…That would mean the crown is just a distraction. The attacks on Osiris have been about the mall this whole time.” So much for the hope that Lorcan could turn this into a chance to take Osiris out of the equation. Their crown had never been in any actual danger.

He paused. “Who would care this much about the mall?”

“Oh no.”

“What’s ‘oh no’?” he asked his familiar sharply.

“Well, uh, Doug says the scene movement draws inspiration from a variety of other subcultures before it, like alt-rock, emocore...and um. Mall goths.”

Lorcan took a deep breath. “You’ve been trying to get me to hang out with mall goths?!”

“Technically, they are a derivative subculture!”

“That explains why they’ve been so goddamn sociable this whole time!” Lorcan had known it was suspicious. “You know what the lesson here is, Vulk? Friendship is a scam and will only hurt you.”

“That’s not the lesson.”

“They’re college-age kids who work at the mall. Would’ve been easy enough to find Kyle after work.”

“We just went over this with the future lady.”

“Share some makeup tips, my ass,” he muttered as he approached his door (probably a good thing he’d caught his landlord before the man saw the bloodstain). “I’d be easy prey alone in their home turf.”

He found his hard proof in the back of his closet. A tube of green eyeliner that, when he asked Vulk to do his sensing on it, positively reeked of dark magic.

Lorcan had been worried about the tattoo doodle, or the stamp from the concert. Maybe even Gravelord, the Marquis of Shadows’ spilled mojito. But before any of those had touched his skin, that scene kid had drawn a smiley face on his wrist in cursed eyeliner. He was right, again; you could hex someone with a smiley face.

And if he’d ever bothered to wear the stuff, it might have hit him hard enough to take him off the case completely. The curse was making him bleed from the hands. Lorcan didn’t want to imagine the stuff near his eyes.

“Ha!” he crowed to Doug. “Boring fashion sense saves the day once again.”

“Has he been like this the whole time?” Doug asked Vulk.

“Preeetty much.”

He ignored the jibe. He was busy remembering everything that had happened after that. The scene kids had–they’d gotten into line ahead of him. Paid with a bunch of change. Change the cashier had handed back to Lorcan.

The name jar. The concert door fee. Paying Gravelord’s tip. Fuck, Lorcan had passed the curse on to his own suspects and he hadn’t even known it.

It was a decent way to stir up more chaos, keep him focused on Osiris’s old crew and maybe even get him killed in the process. And a dangerously indiscriminate one. What if Lorcan had paid with a card, or spent that change anywhere else?

The eyeliner sat heavy in his hand. It had been too much to hope that whoever was after Osiris had good reasons at heart, hadn’t it? He’d given up on running into an altruist after what they did to Kyle, but a lesser evil, at least? This, though–these people weren’t even trying to make things better. Lorcan shuddered to think of the collateral damage if they got their way.

Speaking of, he took out the info sheet on Osiris’s ex-friends. “Hey Gravelord, I gave your bar some cursed coin sorry it was an accident but maybe you want to fix that.” It took forever with his shitty cell phone’s shit number pad, but he sent the text, then: “PS you blocked my burner but please do not call this number ever thanks.”

The next step was to alert Osiris. He could call them through Jennifer Lynn, but. That felt painful now. Besides, the GameStop might not have closed down, but if the goal was to get Osiris’s store in debt–they were already there. And the scene kids had tried to stop Lorcan when they spotted him in the mall, but not that hard.

If revealing Kyle would have hindered their plans, they’d have done more. But they’d cut him loose. By now they’d know Osiris had learned about his betrayal.

Which meant whatever their endgame, it had to be going down soon. Soon enough they might even be ready for Osiris themselves.

“Necromancy shit always starts at midnight,” he said, more for his own benefit than anyone else’s. “But then…Vulk, if these kids are planning some sort of mall necromancy, would closing time count as a liminal hour?”

“You’re asking me?”

He seemed surprised. Lorcan told him, “You’ve read the mall’s energy, and you actually like socializing.”

Vulk’s cord flicked around, but Lorcan could tell his kid was thinking hard this time. “Yeah. Closing time makes more sense.”

“Then we’ll aim for closing,” he said. “This is going to be a big fight. Stay close to me, alright?”

“Alright.” The lamp paused. “If we’re going near closing time anyways.” Uh oh. “Can I buy another pretzel?”

Lorcan looked out the window and sighed. If the best time for the ritual really was closing, he had a lot less to work with than he thought. If he left right now, no delays, he might be able to catch them before they started their whole plan. But it was a risk. They might already be setting up for the ritual and if so–he’d be walking into a firefight. On one side, however many scene kids, all complete unknowns regarding their magic and ability (and Lorcan hated unknowns). On the other, the Crown Osiris.

And he couldn’t go in without Vulk, either. Who knew what these people would be planning–he needed Vulk to get the lay of the land. But he couldn’t risk a fight like this without being sure his son would get out okay. Couldn’t risk being unprepared again.

“There’s one thing we need to do first.” He googled a spot he remembered from teen-hood and grabbed his collapsible shovel. “But if we get there in time… Yeah. I’ll buy you a pretzel.”

[piracytheorist]

Since the first thing that strikes me about re8, story-wise, is that it seems to be all over the place? Again, I’ve no idea how it ties to previous games but it feels like this parental/mother-child theme is just hanging there with no resolution at all? I mean yes, Ethan saved his daughter, presumably breaking some sort of abuse cycle, yay, congrats, but what about his wife/gf? Isn’t she supposed to be like the main protagonist of the story of a mother bereaved to the point of tyrannical madness

Or rather, this specific story is not the right choice for his character since there’s SO many ethical and philosophical issues and questions implied but never properly explored because of Ethan’s ‘fuck you, idc’ attitude (which is completely understandable in those circumstances but adds virtually nothing to the plot and arguably even ruins it a bit). Heisenberg could’ve been an excellent ally with fascinating grey morality (provided the writers wouldn’t push him to the point of absolute insanity and let freedom, not power-hunger be his main goal and motivation for rebellion).And again, aren’t the lords supposed to represent child development stages? In which case Ethan what? Kills the possibility of some evil version of Rose? Or his own chance to experience fatherhood throughout all of those stages? Either way, it seems a bit… weird to have a Parent destroy multiple people whose main relevance to the plot is that they’re children of an abusive antagonist in a storyline so extremely focused on parent/kid relationships.

I feel like the main theme of re8 is not just parenthood/motherhood, but the relationship itself of the parent to the child. There's a lot of mentions to "children being used". Miranda kidnapping people, experimenting on them and mutating them and then treating them like they're her kids; Miranda kidnapping and practically killing Rose; Dimitrescu making daughters out of reanimated corpses she experimented on; Heisenberg wanting to use Rose's powers, etc etc.

And it's important that Miranda is at the center of this. There's something very interesting she says to Ethan in her boss fight:

"Why do you interfere? Surely you have no need of Rose now, so close to death?"

And that's where her mistake was. Ethan wasn't doing all that because he needed Rose herself. He was doing it to save her, fully aware that he wasn't going to be a part of her life cause he knew he was dying. Miranda was way too dependent on her love for Eva - and like, I honestly get it that losing your child can devastate you (if anything my fear of that is one of the reasons I don't want to have kids) - so much that her life literally revolved around her child. Once Eva died, Miranda wanted to die. Once she found the Megamycete and discovered she maybe had a chance to bring Eva back, she dedicated her entire life and ruined multiple others to do just that. Her one and biggest need was to get Eva back. It wasn't a simple want or wish. It was a need. She'd get her child back, damn everyone else - including other people's children.

Miranda had no-one to blame directly; Eva had died from the influenza, it wasn't like she had any chance to change things. Ethan's case was different; he had people to blame, particularly, the one who kidnapped Rose and dismembered her, and her lackeys who kept said parts and fought him for trying to take them back.

So on one end, you have a parent who lost her child due to a tragedy, and ended up destroying other - innocent - lives in order to get her back. On the other, you have a parent who lost his child due to a crime, and ended up going after the criminals responsible in order to get the child back. Like, it wasn't even revenge, and it wasn't that he "needed" Rose in his life. He simply wanted to save her and ensure she'll be alright.

I fully agree it could have been Mia as the protagonist in re8, and that it was a wasted opportunity to simply fridge her and have her in the sidelines angsting over her husband. But whether it was Mia or Ethan as the protagonist, I feel like the theme that I explained above does offer a resolution, showing the opposites of Miranda and Ethan, and ending Miranda's tyrrany of her "need" to have her child back through Ethan's determination to ensure his child's safety and happiness - even if he doesn't get to be a part of any of that later on. Miranda showed obsession; Ethan showed dedication.

And this is how I see the abuse cycle breaking and the resolution is reached; an obsessed parent hurt a good parent's child to bring their own child back - the good parent's dedication stopped the former, allowing the former's tyrrany to end and their child to grow up safe.

Seeing as this is a horror game, I don't tend to focus on the morality issues (if I'm interpreting your second message correctly). Like, the developers are making a grant effort to put us in Ethan's shoes, first-person POV, plain character protagonist and all; our child got kidnapped and practically murdered, and we have the chance to bring her back. We'll absolutely raise hell to the people who are responsible for it and we will get our child back, fuck any moral dilemmas we might have. When someone is threatening your life, you have the ability to kill them to defend yourself. In the case of a caring parent, that ability may multiply by a lot when the threat is towards their child. And I feel that this is what the game explored in the end. Though the whole survival issue is taxing on Ethan, he doesn't give a damn about who he has to kill if it means saving his daughter - but again, it's only the responsible parties. We see how watching all the people at Luisa's house die affected him, and even before Elena died, he wanted to ensure her safety before he went searching for Rose; he is sympathetic and morally rational, but also capable of cold-blooded murder if someone is threatening his child. To a lesser extent, we saw that in re7 too. With his life on the line, he killed Jack (multiple times) and Marguerite, and at the end he recognized how they were actually victims of Eveline. But they were still actively trying to murder him so he wasn't given the chance to help them. With Zoe, he promised to send help, and he did, even wanting to talk to her once she'd been rescued by her uncle and Chris. The same applies to re8, but as I said, it's multiplied since it's his daughter who's in danger, and the end of re8 proves he cares for her safety more than his own.

Now, all that said, I think it's important to note how it's stil a Resident Evil game. I haven't actually played or watched any playthroughs of other games, but the basic concept in these games, from what I understand, is that the player shoots zombies; ex-human beings who have lost any human mentality and will just come for your throat if you don't kill them first. They're not humans anymore, they can't be reasoned or sympathized with. It's not really an issue of morality, ethics or philosophy. Your life, and the life of your child in the case of re8, are in danger. You don't give a shit. You just start shooting and hope for the best. Again, I don't know if the morality issue is explored in other RE games, but to be honest... Resident Evil doesn't sound like the kind of franchise that's thematically into going super deep into the morality of shooting zombies to save your life.

I have to admit I haven't thought of the Lords being representative of child development stages. I think they could be put as Moreau being a toddler, fully dependent on their parent - funnily enough, the Greek word for baby is "moro", pronounced almost exactly the way "Moreau" is pronounced in the game - Donna as a child, Heisenberg as a (rebellious?) teenager, and Dimitrescu as a late teen/young adult (if anything, Dimitrescu seems to behave like the eldest child of the bunch). But I'm not sure the connection that has to Ethan as a father, if anything because the bosses are fought in complete random order of age, if my analysis is correct. Like, I understand the symbolism behind the Lords' behaviours, maybe as you said they represent the obstacles Ethan had to overcome. In one single day and with his life on the line, instead of in the course of Rose's entire childhood and adolescence, but that's exactly why he hated being a protagonist of a horror game, lol.

Anyway, yeah. All in all, I don't think Resident Evil is a franchise where we should expect to sit down afterwards and ponder whether we were right to shoot the zombies that were trying to kill us. Again, I'm not the right person to ask this, since I don't know anything about other RE games, but that's the conclusion I'm making in a meta-thinking way.

[flclarchives]

Amusing Himself to Death, an Akadot.com interview with Kazuya Tsurumaki (director of FLCL and assistant director of Evangelion) from around December 2001. In the article, Tsurumaki explains a few things about Evangelion, his mentality behind FLCL as a whole, and the meaning of the name ‘FLCL’.

Full article text is under the cut, or read the article in its original form [here].

Kazuya Tsurumaki was a relatively little-known animator when Hideki Anno selected him to work as the assistant director on Neon Genesis Evangelion. For the TV series, which became a smash hit in Japan and one of the touchstones of the current surge of interest in anime in the US, Tsuramaki served as the main storyboard artist as well as assistant director, and when Studio Gainax began production on a trio of Evangelion films Tsurumaki got his first directorial assignment.

As he tells the story, Anno came to him after Eva and announced that he was out of ideas and that it was up to Tsurumaki to dream up the next project because, "you are next." Tsurumaki let his imagination run wild, but by the time he had written a script, Anno - despite his declaration that he had no stories left to tell - was already several steps ahead of Tsurumaki and in pre-production for his next series, Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo, leaving Tsurumaki a chance to have complete and unsupervised creative control of his own series FLCL.

FLCL, referred to as "Fooly Cooly" (or "Furikuri" by its American fans), is unlike any anime series to come before it. Wild, maniacally fast-paced physical comedy; exaggerated, exuberant animation alternately pushing towards surrealist- as when mecha exuviate from a bump on young Naota's head - and deconstructionist - as when the animation literally stops and the story is told by a camera bouncing across a page of black and white manga art panels; and obsessively, often irrelevantly, referential to obscure Tokyo-pop bands and anime insider trivia; FLCL was hyperkinetic and disorienting, yet mesmerizing, almost transgressive, and undeniably original. It inspired enthusiastic admiration for Tsurumaki as a creator, even amongst the perhaps 90% of the series' fans who were absolutely baffled by much of it. One is tempted to refer to it as announcing the arrival of full blown post-modernism in animation, or perhaps as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable of the anime industry.

When Tsurumaki visited Baltimore to speak to American fans at the recent Otokon Convention, predictably, many of the questions were along the lines of, "Hi, I really loved FLCL [or Evangelion], but could you please explain this part of it to me?"

Tsurumaki answered all questions genially with a self-deprecating and often mischievous sense of humor. For example:

Why does Haruko hit Naota over the head with her guitar?

Kazuya Tsurumaki: Naota is trying to be a normal adult and she belts him to make him rethink his decision.

Why does Evangelion end violently, and somewhat unhappily?

KT: People are accustomed to sweet, contrived, happy endings. We wanted to broaden the genre, and show people an ugly, unhappy ending.

Why is the character of Shinji portrayed as he is?

KT: Shinji was modeled on director Hideki Anno. Shinji was summoned by his father to ride a robot, Anno was summoned by Gainax to direct an animation. Working on Nadia [Nadia: Secret of the Blue Water, one of Anno and Tsurumaki's earlier projects] he wondered if he still wanted to work like this. He thought that working on Eva could help him to change.

Is there any particular reason why so many Gainax series feature very anxious, unhappy young male protagonists with no parents?

KT: Yes, the directors at Gainax are all basically weak, insecure, bitter, young men. So are many anime fans. Many Japanese families, including my own, have workaholic fathers whose kids never get to see them. That may influence the shows I create.

Could you explain the mecha bursting from Naota's head in FLCL?

KT: I use a giant robot being created from the brain to represent FLCL coming from my brain. The robot ravages the town around him, and the more intensely I worked on FLCL the more I destroyed the peaceful atmosphere of Gainax.

Why doesn't FLCL follow one story?

KT: In the third episode Ninamori was almost a main character, a kid who, like Naota, has to act like an adult.  After episode three her problem was solved so we wrote her out.  She has many fans in Japan and we got plenty of letters about that decision.  For FLCL I wanted to portray the entire history of Gainax, and each episode has symbols of what happened behind the scenes on each of Gainax's shows.   Episode one has many elements of Karekano; episode two, a lot of Evangelion references, etc.

Where does the title FLCL come from?

KT: I got the idea from a CD in a music magazine with the title Fooly-Cooly.  I like the idea of titles that are shortened long English words. Pokémon for "Pocket-Monsters" for instance, and an old J-pop band called Brilliant Green that was known as "Brilly-Grilly."

Is there any reason why the extra scenes added to Eva for the video release were cut in the first place?  Did you think the story would mean something different with them intact?

KT: The scenes that were added to Eva for its video release aren't that important.  We added them as an apology for taking so long to get the video out.  Maybe they'll help people understand things, because the episodes were done under tough deadlines the first time around.

Can you explain the symbolism of the cross in Evangelion?

KT: There are a lot of giant robot shows in Japan, and we did want our story to have a religious theme to help distinguish us.   Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious.  None of the staff who worked on Eva are Christians.  There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool.  If we had known the show would get distributed in the US and Europe we might have rethought that choice.

After the panel, Mr. Tsurumaki sat down to speak with Akadot.

Do you enjoy confusing people?

KT: I have a twisted sense of humor.  I'm an Omanu Jacku, a contrarian.  [Writer's note- Omanu Jacku is a folk character a bit like Puck, a mischief maker]

What do you see differently now that you're working as a director rather than only as a visual artist?

KT: As an animator I have only the art; as a director story is really big.  I still feel as an animator and I often have trouble putting the needs of the story first.

Did you intend from the start for FLCL to be as bizarre as it wound up?

KT: From the very start I wanted a different flavor.  To achieve this I had to re-train the animators to be as stylized as I wanted them to be because I wasn't drawing it.  I knew that not everyone would get it.  I deliberately selected very obscure J-pop culture and anime sub-culture jokes and references.  Because Eva was so somber I always intended to make FLCL outrageous and wacky.

Why the choice to break out of conventional animation and use manga pages? Was it at all a response to how many anime are using computers to achieve smoother and more realistic visuals?  Were you trying to go the opposite direction?

KT: I like manga, not only to read, but the visuals.  The pen drawings, the frame breakdowns and layouts . . . This is the first time I have used digital animation, and those bouncing manga shots wouldn't have been possible with cel animation.   Personally I'm not interested at all in using computers for realistic animation.  I'm impressed by it sometimes, but I'm interested in using computers to do what was once impossible, not to do smoother versions of what has already been done.  I want to be less realistic.

Has using digital animation techniques changed the way you work, or the way you feel about your work when you see it?  Does it still feel like it's yours if a computer did much of it?

KT: Before I got into digital animation I saw other shows that were using it and I felt that there was no feeling, it was empty.   As an animator, there's a sense of release when you draw a cel.  There's something there.  Working on FLCL, though, I learned that computers can do more, and, most of all, that they allow room for trial and error and revising, more freedom to experiment.  That is why I now feel that cel art cannot win against computers.  For actual animation everything is still drawn on paper.  That work hasn't changed.  It's the other stuff, the touchups, and coloring.  If we didn't use paper, maybe the feeling would change.

Earlier today you said that you were trying to broaden the genre by giving Eva a sad ending.  Does the sameness of much of today's anime bore you?

KT: First of all we didn't use a sad ending to annoy fans.  When they're upset, that really bothers us.  Personally, I think a happy ending is fine, but not if it is achieved too easily.  That's no good.

For all the fans that are confused at all, if you had to define in one sentence what FLCL is about, what would you say?

KT: FLCL is the story of boy meets girl.  For me it is also about how it's ok to feel stupid.  With Evangelion there was this feeling that you had better be smart to understand it, or even just to work on it. With FLCL I want to say that it's okay to feel stupid.

Even though it may be strange to us, do you have in your head a logic behind it?  Are you trying to portray a story that follows the logic of dreams, or is it supposed to make sense symbolically?

KT: I'd like you to think of FLCL as imagination being made physical and tangible, just as it is for me when I take whatever is in my head and draw it.

So what are you working on next?

KT: Right now Gainax has told me that they'll support anything I choose to create, but I'm having trouble coming up with any ideas.

Why is that?

KT: Releasing titles for market, I know I have to make something to please fans, but I'm not a mature enough person to accept that fact.  If I'm not amusing myself I can't do it.  I feel bad that fans have to put up with such behavior from me.  I apologize. 

[honey-dewey]

Somewhere That’s Green

Pairing: Jack ‘Whiskey’ Daniels/Reader

Word Count: 3,220

Warnings: None

Jack’s always known his girlfriend was big in musical theater. He’s heard her practice, listened to her sing, and driven her to the theater more than once. But this is his first show of hers, and boy is he in for a shock. Between the on-stage kissing and the death of his girlfriend’s character, Jack Daniels has never been so invested in musical theater. 

“And you’re sure you’re okay with missing work?” You asked, picking up your coat from Jack’s coat hook. “It’s a long show.” 

Jack smiled, grabbing your waist and pulling you close to him. “Darlin’ I wouldn’t miss this show for anything. I’ve been waiting two months to see this play.” 

You grinned, kissing him slowly, almost teasing. “Just promise not to murder my costars, okay?” 

“And just why would I be murdering your coworkers?” Jack asked, keeping his arm around your waist as he walked you out to the parking lot. 

Stepping into the parking lot and following the familiar trail to Jack’s car, you took a breath. “The show gets kinda dark. My character is abused by her sadistic boyfriend.”

“Oh.” You could hear Jack’s jaw tightening, hesitation filling your chest as you thought over inviting him to the show. Again. 

“Babe,” you said softly, trying to console him. “If you want, I can introduce you to my co-star Alex who plays the character. He’s a sweetheart, I promise. Wouldn’t hurt a fly and y’know how Stevie is my best friend? Well, Alex is like the cool big brother I never had. He’d never even think about touching me. And he knows I’m totally off limits. Stevie does too.” 

“Stevie’s the one who’s playing your nice fictional boyfriend?” Jack asked, opening the Bronco’s door and helping you up. 

You laughed. “Yes. Stevie is the one who gets to kiss me on stage and his character isn’t a huge dick. Alex is my first fictional boyfriend, and Stevie and I get together halfway through the show. He gets to kiss me.” 

Jack’s eyes darkened behind his sunglasses. “Does Alex kiss you?” 

Reaching across the center console, you took Jack’s hand. “No. Alex does not get to kiss me.” 

As Jack drove to the theater, you mulled over this decision. Since dating Jack, you’d done three musicals, but this one was your biggest and proudest role, as you’d finally managed to get the female lead in a musical after countless ensemble roles and smaller name characters. 

“And what’s the show called again?” Jack asked, squeezing your hand. 

You smiled, lifting his hand and pressing lazy kisses into his knuckles. “Little Shop of Horrors.” 

Jack hummed, his face scrunching as he thought. “Ain’t that that movie with the crazed talking plant?” 

“It was adapted from a musical,” you explained. “And then they redid the movie in the early 2000’s and put it back on Broadway.” 

“Ah.” Jack turned to look at you as you pulled up to a red light. “I’m sure you’ll kill it. You got the voice of an angel.” 

You smiled to yourself, the fate of your character entirely unknown to Jack. “I know I’ll kill it.” 

Upon reaching the theater, you hopped out of the Bronco, looking at Jack. “Wanna meet Alex and Stevie? I think Yvette and Eva are here too, and I know for a fact Amber’s been here for an hour, at least.”

Jack shrugged. “Why not. I’ll go park, you go get your friends.” 

You eagerly headed into the theater, practically jogging around as you looked for your costars. 

“Eva!” You shouted happily, hugging Eva and seeing Amber around the corner. “Is Yvette here?” 

“Nah,” Eva said, gesturing to the empty dressing room she shared with Yvette and Amber. “You know she always gets here at the last damn minute.” 

“And she’s somehow always ready to go first,” Stevie said behind you, causing you to laugh and spin around to hug him. “Heya Auds!” He used the nickname he’d given you based on your character, causing you to punch him lightly. 

“I want y’all to meet someone,” you said, walking towards the entrance, where you knew Jack was waiting. “Jack’s finally coming to see the show.” 

“Ooooo,” Amber said, coming out of the costume closet. “We finally get to meet the mystery man!” 

You waved them off, looking around for your final costar. “Where’s Alex? He didn’t call in tonight, did he?” 

“Of course not,” Eva scoffed, drawing her coat closer around her. “He doesn’t call in unless he’s like, bleeding out.” 

Laughing, you pushed open the door, seeing Jack leaning against the Bronco. “Jack!” 

Jack drew closer, smiling and looking at your friends. “Alright. Who’s who?” 

You introduced everyone, the chatter flowing easily until someone came up behind you, lifting you off your feet with a happy growl. “There’s my girl!” 

“Alex!” You squealed, squirming and laughing. “Alex you absolute fuck! Put me down before Jack murders you!” 

Alex put you down, grinning and holding out a hand to a very shocked Jack. “So you’re the mystery man our darling has been swooning over for the past three years. Nice to meet you.” 

Jack shook his hand. “Their darling?” He asked you as you stood by his side. 

“That’s what they always call the female lead,” you explained, tucking yourself under Jack’s arm. “Alex, Jack has promised not to kill you upon seeing the show, which is a damn relief because I don’t think we can do next year’s show without you.” 

“What’s next year's show?” Jack asked, looking at you. 

You shrugged. “I heard from the director that they were seriously considering School of Rock.” 

Alex whistled. “Auds, that’s been a rumor for years now. They aren’t gonna do it.” 

“Okay Dewey,” you said jokingly, reaching out to give Alex a light punch. “You wanna talk about people who were born to play certain roles? Alex is a spitting image of Broadway’s Dewey Finn,” you explained to Jack, who had gotten very lost very fast. “We’re all just waiting.” 

“Oh, so you wanna talk about that, huh?” Stevie said, raising an eyebrow. “I swear that voice of yours is identical to Audrey’s.” 

You flushed, checking your watch and looking up. “An hour,” you explained, extracting yourself from under Jack’s arm and heading back to the theater’s entrance. “I’ll see you after babe!” 

Jack grabbed your hand, kissing you deeply and nipping ever so slightly at your earlobe as he murmured a teasing “break a leg darling,” into your ear. 

“I like him,” Alex said, coming up behind you and smiling. “He’s good for you.” 

You rolled your eyes, grabbing Alex’s white jacket out of the costume closet and handing it to him. “Go get dressed, dork. We can talk about my boyfriend later.” 

Alex shrugged. “Just saying. You have my blessing.” 

“I don’t need your blessing!” You called after him, seeing him disappear into his dressing room. “And where’s Jake?” 

“Where he always is!” 

You sighed, heading to your own dressing room and sitting down, beginning the long yet calming process of caking your face in stage makeup. It took forever and made your face feel heavy, but the results were worth it. 

Eventually, by the half hour call, you were ready, having pretty much cemented your hair into beautifully picturesque curls and shimmied into the tight cheetah print dress that barely covered the tops of your thighs. Thank god you were able to wear tights. 

You tossed a fluffy cream colored faux fur cropped jacket overtop your dress and adjusted your black heels. With your makeup and your sufficiently warmed up voice, you were entirely ready for the night. 

Picking up a picture frame, you gave the glossy photo of Jack a kiss, slipping a worn out penny he’d given you when he’d first heard you did theater into your bra. It was a symbol of luck, and the magic would hopefully continue into tonight. 

“Knock knock,” Alex said, knocking on your doorframe. “How’s the princess?” 

“Good,” you said, raising your voice to get the perfect breathy innocence that was needed for the role. “How much time?” 

Alex checked his watch. “Ten. I think the girls are on stage already, and Jake’s having his fun on the beams. Are you sure you’re ready?” 

“Just nervous,” you mumbled, fiddling with the sleeve of your jacket. “I dunno what Jack’ll think.” 

“Does he know the ending?”

“No.” 

Alex whistled in a breath. “Damn. Ten bucks says he cries.” 

You scoffed, slipping past Alex and smiling, your heels clicking on the worn out flooring. “Twenty!” 

The opening of the show, as was the rest of it by now, was a familiar chaos to you. The fanfare that signaled the beginning spurred you and Alex to your places, tucked just outside of view but still able to see the show. 

The ensemble and the girls rushed past, filling the stage and giving life to the purposefully worn down set. You craned yourself neck, heart swelling when you saw Jack, his hat off, sitting in the front row. 

“Front row, fifth seat in, stage left,” you whispered to Alex, who nodded, spotting your boyfriend as well. 

Stevie joined you at that moment, grinning as Alex told him where Jack was sitting. “He got a good seat, huh?” He said with a wink, sliding past you to take his place on stage. 

As the second song started up, you adjusted yourself, tugging on your dress and asking Alex for help with your mic. 

“Break a leg,” he said, watching you rush behind the set to the section that was your fake apartment. 

At the cue, you opened the door, slipping out and beginning to sing. It was easy to lose yourself in the role now that everyone else was singing too. Stevie came out, singing his part as you sat weaved in and out of the ensemble members, climbing up a ladder to a fire escape on one of the building fronts. Leaning on the railing, you sang along with Stevie, spotting Jack beyond the stage lights and grinning as you finished out the song. 

The next four songs went smoothly. You left the stage after the next one, when Stevie got his first solo song. Standing next to Alex, you checked your phone. 

Jack: You’re amazing doll. Love the dress.

You smiled, slipping your phone back into your pocket. Stevie was, as usual, doing great on stage. Everything was running perfectly. 

While the songs you weren’t really in ran in the background, you helped prepare the other sets. The apartment set you were about to use was ready to go by the time your first big song was about to start, and you walked back out on stage, reciting lines you’d memorized months ago. As the set turned, revealing the inside of the apartment, you began to sing. 

The song was a nice one. Maybe a bit of strain on your voice as you pitched it upwards, but otherwise easy to sing. You poured a certain mournfulness into it, taking your jacket off and hanging it on the coat hook. 

Every so often, you’d see Jack out of the corner of your eye, grinning like a lovesick fool at you. When the stage rotated again, showing you leaning out the small balcony, singing about your character’s dreams for a brighter future, you watched Jack carefully. His eyes never left you, winking when he realized you were watching him. 

The song ended, the audience clapping as you slipped out, grabbing your coat on the way. 

One quick change and bit of makeup adjusting later, you were cycling through another song. Nerves began to bundle in your stomach as the introduction of Alex’s character drew closer. You always drew a few gasps when he roughed you up, but it never made you this nervous. 

Thankfully, it was a short scene, as the focus shifted to the introduction. His touch was always professional and careful, never actually harming you. You slipped off stage as his character began his song, settling down on a beat up old couch and loosening your shoes. You didn’t have to be on stage for a while, so you half listened to Alex and half focused on checking your phone. No texts from Jack. 

“Hey hon.” Alex flopped onto the couch next to you, shocking you a bit. “C’mon.” 

You quickly tighten your shoes, standing and taking Alex’s hand as he tugged you towards the stage for another small scene that you knew would make Jack’s jaw clench. 

The scene was, yet again, not harmful. You moved in perfect tandem with Alex so neither of you got hurt, stumbling a bit as you walked off stage after only two minutes. 

“You okay?” Alex asked, steadying you and checking your wrists where he’d grabbed you. 

“Yep.” 

“Everything good up in here?” He asked, knocking gently on your temple. 

You smiled. “Haven’t been this nervous about a show in, gosh I don’t even know.” 

“You’re doing amazing,” Alex promised, pulling you into a hug. “I’m sure he’d love it even if it all went to shit.” 

You nodded, tightly hugging Alex back. “Yeah. He would.” 

You two got ready for your final scene together, the one where he ‘hit’ you. The slap had been practiced until it was instinct, until it was a guarantee Alex’s hand would never even touch your face. 

Watching the stage and slowly moving behind the set pieces, you bopped a bit to the song, looking up and seeing Jake having the absolute time of his life above your head, singing for the plant. 

“Ready?” Alex asked, squeezing your hand. 

You nodded, hearing the cue and starting your nervous babbling conversation with a shouting Alex, stumbling through the door and smiling at Stevie. “Hey Seymour! I left my sweater here before.” 

Immediately, Alex followed you, still shouting. You couldn’t see Jack’s reaction when he called you a slut, or when he slapped you, your pitiful voice breaking as you and Alex headed off stage.

As soon as you were out of sight, Alex hugged you, murmuring the apology he always gave after that scene and heading off to act his death. 

It was a favorite scene of yours, and you watched as Alex ‘died,’ unable to leave the scene until the lights went dark and he hurried off, Stevie taking a bag of fake limbs and grinning to you as the lights rose and he headed back out. 

During intermission, you left the couch, allowing the girls to collapse into the frankly disgusting crease. Instead, you curled up in the oddest place that shouldn’t have been comfortable, the antique dentist’s chair from Alex’s scenes. 

Which was where he found you, settled into the leather and adjusting your makeup. You were humming along to some music playing out your phone, carefully wiping away your black eye and touching up your foundation. “Good job. You absolutely murdered it.” 

Alex smiled. “Thank you. Still nervous?”

“Nah.” You closed your makeup bag, spinning the chair lazily. “No more than usual now.” 

You two just hung out, as usual, until the signaling music began to play. You shook yourself out, standing and smiling. “Halfway there!” 

Alex laughed and took your place, grabbing a book. 

You were significantly more involved in the second act, breezing through the first few songs, feeling an uncomfortable tingle of guilt in your stomach as you and Stevie kissed during the second song. It was an emotional scene that was immediately followed up by a murder. Not your murder. You weren’t set to die until later. 

Of course, your next big scene was your death. You ran over the process in your head, just in case. Stevie would throw you into the giant plant puppet, and you’d slide past Jordan, who was the puppeteer inside, and out through a hole so you didn’t have to sit inside the cramped puppet. 

However, you had to die first in probably the most heart wrenching scene in the play. 

You walked out as Stevie walked in, alone on the stage aside from the plant. Sitting on the couch in your fake apartment, you began to sing, wandering over to the florist’s shop set and talking to Jake, who was still sitting above your head. 

And then it all went to shit. 

Jordan, inside the puppet, grabbed you with a vine, tugging you close as the song finished out, and you fake struggled as he pretended to eat you, the voice and the body working in perfect tandem as you got deep enough and struggled enough to open a buttoned up tear in your dress, smearing fake blood all over and making it truly seem like you’d been bitten, all without the audience knowing. 

Stevie pulled you out, revealing the wound to the audience. He carefully set you down, going through the musical motions as you poured everything you had left into your final few minutes on stage. Your voice broke, the gentleness fading slowly as you did your best to imitate someone who was dying, actually starting to cry with your last line. 

When the music swelled, Stevie wiped your tears and lifted you, slowly and gently placing you in the plant puppet and allowing Jordan to grab you and pull you in, helping you down and out the other side. Immediately, Alex helped you up, handing you a change of clothes and a pack of wet wipes. It was easy to remove the blood and toss the stained dress into the wash as soon as it was off. By the time the last plot important song was over, you were completely ready for the finale. 

You were unable to spot Jack as you and Alex walked out together, singing one final time for the night and taking your bows. It was a giant group number, everyone happy and very much not dead. Jake came down, singing and throwing an arm over you and over Stevie, dragging you two forward to take the first bow. 

Amidst the clapping and the people leaving and the actors heading off stage, you didn’t see Jack until he met you and Alex at the Bronco. 

He scooped you up, laughing and firmly kissing you. “Holy shit babe! You couldn’t’ve told me that would happen at the end?” 

You laughed, wiping tears off Jack’s face. “Alex! He’s crying!” 

“Well fuck.” Alex leaned against the car, smiling. “Guess I owe you.” 

Jack put you down, still holding you tight. “Y’all did good. I almost got up to smack you halfway through the show.” 

You rolled your eyes, squeezing Jack’s hand. “I’m exhausted.” 

“Alright,” Jack said, opening the Bronco’s door and helping you up. “Pleasure to meet you Alex.” 

“Same,” Alex said, stepping back. “You be good to our girl, you hear?” 

Jack snorted. “I will.” 

The drive home was quiet. Now that the adrenaline of the show was gone, you felt limp, every part of your body in pain. Jack, the ever sweet and loving boyfriend, carried you inside, setting you down on the bathroom counter and grabbing your makeup wipes for you. 

“Anything else?” He asked once you were done, cuddled up in your favorite pyjamas. 

“Well,” you hummed, getting down and heading over to the bed. “I seem to be missing my boyfriend. C’mere.” 

Jack, now eager, took his shirt off and crawled into the bed next to you, pulling you close. “You were amazing tonight, truly.” 

“Thank you,” you murmured, already falling asleep. 

“You’re welcome.” Jack shuffled so you’d be more comfortable, stroking softly up and down your back as you fell asleep properly, safe with the knowledge that Jack’s first musical theater experience had been a good one.

[thewatsonbeekeepers]

Chapter 3 – Death Cannot Stop True Love… [HLV 1/1]

… All it can do is delay it for a while. Whilst Westley’s hair in that film horribly resembles my lockdown hair, more happily the fantastic movie The Princess Bride continues to resemble Sherlock – there was a very popular meta on the links between the two for a while there that can be found here: X.

This chapter is going to run through EMP theory as it begins, covering mainly the second half of HLV. It’s important to note, however, that the first half of the episode provides a lot of clues about the way certain images function in the mind palace, which backs up EMP theory quite nicely – the last ideas that Sherlock has going around in his brain before he is shot inevitably swirl around in there whilst he’s unconscious and form an important part of the train of association.

I toyed with the entirety of HLV being in EMP, because parts of it are weird (think Magnussen pissing in Baker Street, or the fucky MP glasses), but I ultimately dismissed it, though I’m willing to be challenged on this. I dismissed it as being a part of Sherlock’s post-wedding drug abuse for a few reasons. The first is that we only see Sherlock wake up from his drug abuse, not go into it – EMP is something that’s going to be hard for viewers to swallow, and Mofftiss are actually quite good at dropping big hints and drawing attention to the important bits along the way. That’s really not the case in the crack den, which is well integrated into the plot and has no traces of Sherlock’s mind palace. The second is that, actually, the premise of HLV is far too integrated into the main plot of s3 to be entirely MP – the CAM stuff and Janine at John and Mary’s wedding could be Sherlock extrapolating, but it seems like a bizarre extrapolation to make given how much fuckier the s4 mysteries are (London aquarium, Culverton’s drugging, the entirety of TFP) - the only MP fuckiness we get in HLV really takes place after Mary shoots Sherlock, like the restaurant scene with CAM or the Appledore Vaults being his MP. Mary shooting Sherlock also has far too many throwbacks with Norbury and Eurus in s4 to be completely irrelevant. So, with that in mind – let's go.

To understand what’s going on in HLV, we’re going to need to understand the metafiction going on – and this is where a good knowledge of acd canon comes in. Most of HLV isn’t actually based on His Last Bow, but on Charles Augustus Milverton X. To give a brief synopsis (although I would thoroughly recommend this story, not least because it’s incredibly queer) Holmes is engaged by Lady Eva Brackwell (Lady Smallwood in our world) to stop Milverton (Magnussen) from showing her husband some indiscreet letters she wrote to a squire some years ago. Holmes realises he can’t get Milverton under the law, so gets engaged in disguise to Milverton’s housemaid (Janine) in order to break in and burgle him. Watson agrees to come too. When they break in, Milverton is talking to another woman (Mary) who shoots him in revenge for Milverton’s use of information causing her husband’s suicide. She escapes and Holmes and Watson burn all of Milverton’s letters, and then escape. They refuse to help Lestrade solve the murder.

All of this lines up pretty evenly with HLV until the moment when Sherlock is shot. Admittedly there are minor changes to the Smallwood plot line (who committed what indiscretion), but these are minor and seem to be to make the plot work in the modern day – nobody cares if someone has a working-class ex anymore. But we get huge canon divergence from the shooting scene onwards.

Sherlock believes that Mary is Smallwood because of her perfume. This is a rational enough assumption to make, but it’s not just based on perfume. We know that since Lady Smallwood has engaged Holmes, Lord Smallwood has committed suicide – so she fits the profile of the blackmailee from Charles Augustus Milverton perfectly. She fits the patterns that Sherlock expects to see in his deductions. Mary does not – our first point of canon divergence. It sets up a painful parallel between John and Mary and the couple from Charles Augustus Milverton; they never name the indiscretion that led the husband in acd canon to kill himself, and given the company that Doyle kept (Wilde, Douglases including Lord Francis Douglas, who was thought to have killed himself shortly after being ennobled – much like the unnamed nobleman - because of his sexuality) it seems reasonable to assume this silence is euphemistic. Let that mirror linger in your thoughts, because it’s important.

Mary is the housemaid who has broken in to shoot Magnuessen/Milverton – so far so good. Although Holmes was hidden in the original stories, he was still present and sympathetic; the logical canon-following route here is for Mary to kill Magnussen, and that’s exactly what Sherlock expects her to do – but she doesn’t. She shoots him instead, and Sherlock can’t understand this. As we’ll see, he spends the rest of HLV trying to justify this pattern-breaking to himself, and is finally unable to.

Once Sherlock has been shot, the Molly/Anderson/Jim/Mycroft section which sets up EMP is fairly self-explanatory – the only thing I want to dive into here to point out is that this is the first appearance of Jim in the EMP, as a kind of restrained beast, and his most pivotal line is the fear he represents: John Watson is definitely in danger. This sets up what he’s going to represent for the rest of the EMP sequence. Other people have delved into the rest of this section before, and extensively – I don’t have a huge amount to add. We know John is in danger from Magnussen, because that’s ostensibly why Mary was there, but she didn’t seem to care as much as the housemaid from the initial stories did. We also know from the original stories that Magnussen has the power to make John suicidal, but in this story he hasn’t yet – but because of this, Sherlock senses that the danger is much more than a loss of reputation. It’s heart-re-starting-ly important.

The next bit I want to jump into is Sherlock’s conversation with Janine in the hospital. A lot of people have argued that this is one of the only real moments following Mary shooting Sherlock, and that Janine fiddling with the taps is part of what induces Sherlock’s fucky mind palace wanderings. I don’t buy into that theory – the more I think about this scene, the less it makes sense as being real in the context of EMP theory. The first reason for this is, very simply, that it means Sherlock has woken up after the realisation that John is in danger. The driving idea behind EMP theory is that Sherlock has to spend s4 making that realisation and trying to wake up – having that actually happen at the very start of EMP, only to be aborted, is bizarre. Secondly, it completely negates the idea that Mary’s actions are possibly fatal, which is a theme that reverberates through s4 (and all the chapters of this meta) - if Janine fiddling with the taps is what pushes Sherlock back into his MP, then by rights Janine should appear in S4, instead of the preoccupation it has with Mary and shooting.

What, then, is going on here? Sherlock is told by MP!Jim that John is in danger – and then imagines he wakes up. In his MP, Janine appears, puts him in pain and puts him back under. She, then, is the reason he can’t wake up. Janine has been Sherlock’s beard, and it’s quite possible to read her as being a symbol of Sherlock’s repression, but I think that’s a simplification; discounting TAB, Janine doesn’t appear again, and even then it’s minimal, whereas s4 is literally built around the concept of repression. As I go into in a lot more detail in chapter 9 (X), which is about the use of drugs to mask our darkest secrets in TLD, it’s the drugs that represent Sherlock’s deepest repression, in this case the morphine that he uses to mask the pain. Having Janine be the one who is fucking with the taps simply makes the link clearer, particularly when we might not associate hospital drugs with the other kind of drugs that Sherlock normally takes to take the pain away – however, it’s clear that the drugs that anaesthesise his pain do the same job as Janine – hide his queerness. Janine turned vindictive causes him intense pain, and he needs to turn back to the drugs to slip back under. Bearding was always temporary in this show, at least for Sherlock; drug abuse is a consistent problem and becomes a running metaphor for Sherlock’s repression in the EMP.

Janine being a symbol here helps me to make sense of the couple of lines that didn’t make sense to me otherwise. If Janine were real, getting rid of the bees would be awful – she gets the future our boys want and she destroys it. But if she’s a symbol in Sherlock’s mind of that bearding, and a barrier to waking up and saving John, then her sitting there, pushing him back into a coma and tearing away the future he longs for – that makes a lot of sense, and is 100% more devastating. The other line that has never made sense to me is Janine telling Sherlock that he could have just been honest with her, that she knows what kind of man he is. This line doesn’t make sense unless she means a gay man. I would be really interested to know how else this can be construed. This line can make sense in the real world if we accept that Janine is working with Mary – which must be true anyway, because otherwise Mary can’t get to CAM – and also wants Sherlock to get involved in that situation, although God knows why – the Janine-is-Jim's-sister theory feels like it might work here, but I don’t think there’s enough evidence for me to unravel it. If Janine genuinely does open the door out of affection for Sherlock, regardless of her relationship with Mary (the two aren’t mutually exclusive), Janine knowing Sherlock is gay doesn’t make sense at all - but Sherlock’s mind turning that beard back on himself to mock him? Absolutely makes sense. Remember, this is the loathing that pushes him back into the deep coma – this scene is really pivotal.

Sherlock vanishing from the hospital bed, despite being nearly dead, is pretty much medically impossible, and is probably the first impossible thing that we see happen in EMP – but it should be a red flag that that’s where we are. It’s also nice and symbolic of his movement away from that surface level, a level which we see him return to briefly in the hospital scenes in TLD when he realises his place in John’s heart. Touching stuff.

We then move into Sherlock’s interrogation of Mary behind the facade of the houses. In case we missed the reference, Mofftiss actually have the phrase the empty house used, a reference to The Adventure of the Empty House X, the story on which TEH is meant to be based. It is telling, though, that very little of The Empty House features in TEH, other than that it is the moment when Sherlock comes back. Others have commented on the minor relevance of Moran to the story and hypothesised that Mary is the real Moran – I think that the facade scene presents that as a genuine possibility. I don’t want to overstate the similarities that The Empty House bears to HLV, but Mofftiss do draw attention to it – and there is something interesting about the criminal being revealed by Holmes only after the criminal thinks they’ve killed him. That bears a particular relevance to Mary – and links her to Moriarty as his potential second-in-command. The most important link, however, is that in The Empty House, Holmes tricks Moran into incriminating himself by creating a dummy Holmes for Moran to shoot at. It’s true that Mary doesn’t shoot at dummy Sherlock (John) here, but the dummy is set up to incriminate her, and she acknowledges that this is a basic trick, one she should have known before. The links of the empty house and the dummy, both made explicitly familiar in the dialogue, do a lot to link Mary’s character to acdcanon!Moran.

This, however, all takes place in Sherlock’s brain. In several scenes, we’ve had Sherlock engage with two concepts in his mind that he can’t know about; one is Sebastian Moran in The Empty House, which only takes place in ACD canon, but even if you think that link is tenuous, he’s also engaged with his canon future as a beekeeper in Sussex. And then, on top of this, there is the problem of Mary versus the housemaid from Charles Augustus Milverton. My suggestion is that these aren’t just jokes put in by Mofftiss to say look-we've-read-the-books – Sherlock's mind is actually using the bees from the original stories to negotiate his relationship with his sexuality, and The Empty House to try to understand Mary’s motives. This is confirmed on a grand scale by TAB – he goes back to ACD canon!Holmes to navigate the problems of his everyday life – so Sherlock is not just a modern Sherlock Holmes, he is on some level self-aware of his existence as a fictional character. As we’ll see going through, his awareness of the existing canon of stories is fascinating and tied up in his repression – how do we break out of canon character, and what has canon been hiding, are two questions which repeatedly come to the fore. Mary is the character who most consistently breaks these canon expectations – a lot of TAB is about this – and that’s something he really struggles to contend with, and is one of the reasons that the reality of canon!verse starts to break down in TAB – it's not sustainable, and it doesn’t tell the full story. These two moments early on in EMP show him negotiating his identity and his experiences in his mind in relation to what he knows about Sherlock Holmes – an early iteration of a theme that’s going to become much larger.

The first thing Sherlock does after being pushed under by Janine is go and interrogate who Mary is in his brain, whilst also working out her impact on John. Sherlock comes up with a pretty reasonable background for who she is in the Leinster Gardens scene, but this isn’t really what’s important – it's the The Empty House parallel which sees him subconsciously making the link to Moriarty. ACDcanon!Moran, unlike bbc!Moran, was the last assassin sent after Sherlock from Moriarty’s network – this means that the dismantling-Moriarty's-network plot from the start of TEH becomes more than a fill-in-the-blanks montage, it means that the show retains its key villain to the end – it structurally works, in a way that other plot-level ideas haven’t. [@ eurus holmes. anyway]

Something that’s interesting here, is that there is a real shift away from the implications of the dummy in acd canon. In acd canon, Moran attempts to murder Holmes, which is a way of catching him in the act and sending him to prison. This is about catching Mary in the act in a similar sense, but it’s about being caught by John. This is interesting, because it shows that Sherlock’s priorities have shifted from acd canon – or, more accurately, we’re seeing the priorities that weren’t reported in the Strand. The emotional impact on John is far more important than the legal ramifications – and this in itself is the shift which the creators have been pretty emphatic about taking from the original stories.

John often represents the heart in Sherlock’s MP – I haven’t quite worked out how to distinguish between heart!John and Sherlock’s imagined John yet, and am flying on instinct, which is definitely not sustainable! But it strikes me that a lot about HLV and TST is about understanding the impact of this shooting on John, and that therefore this needs to be John as Sherlock imagines him.

We’re still with Sherlock’s imagined John as we move into “the Watsons’ domestic” in 221B – but, as so many have pointed out, for a domestic between the Watsons, they feature very little as a couple! The core emotional dialogue is often said to come between John and Sherlock, but despite Martin Freeman’s excellent performance in this scene, that’s not strictly true either. The centre of this scene is Sherlock explaining John’s love for Mary. It’s not about the Watsons – it's about Sherlock understanding what’s going on, which fits into EMP theory exactly. I firmly believe that Sherlock begins his EMP trip believing that John loves Mary, and slowly unravels the threads to realise that it’s actually him John cares about, and this scene is testament to the first part – the deduction that he makes about John loving Mary is flawless, but despite explicitly referencing himself, he fails to see the obvious – hiding in plain sight - that such a deduction could equally be applied to himself. He’ll get there in the end (TLD), but right now, that’s what makes this scene so painful for me.

Turning Mary into a client is about moving into the rational part of Sherlock’s brain, trying not to let emotion cloud it, even though it’s incongruous and unworkable. We’ll see Sherlock’s brain and heart slowly integrate, finally uniting in TFP, but for now he thinks rationality is the way forward. This also helps us to set out a framework for what happens with Mary in the EMP – clients are deduced, worked out, they present problems - never forget Mary being framed as the abominable bride – and that’s what is happening here. She is the first problem of the extended mind palace to be solved.

But this scene is metafictional too, because it gets to the core nub of Mary – as John puts it, she wasn’t supposed to be like that. And, canonically, he’s right. If we follow acd!canon, Mary is not meant to be an assassin, but more importantly for HLV, she’s also supposed to save her husband. She’s meant to be all-out devoted shoot-Magnussen type – but instead she shoots Sherlock. When John says that, then, it’s not just a nod to an updated show – it’s a genuine problem that Sherlock has to contend with, because in neither acd!Mary scenario nor housemaid!Mary scenario is she obeying the framework of a woman who loves her husband. This failing marriage is not in the stories, it’s not supposed to happen, and things that come outside of established canon come outside of Sherlock’s pre-programmed mould – we can think of this as a way of thinking about our own childhood programming to be straight/cis/etc., but in a more self-conscious, literary way!

And then, Sherlock’s response: you chose her. That’s why she’s different, and this is actually a vital line. It suggests that the programmed canon that we know these boys follow, because they have to – that’s not what this show is about. Our characters are agents, and for the first time in history, their lives are dictated by free choice. John chose this Mary, not the Mary of canon – and Sherlock himself makes explicit the comparison between John choosing Mary and John choosing Sherlock. The heart of the story is the choices that can be made for the first time. How incredibly exciting.

The ambulance people coming into Baker Street (seemingly without the door being unlocked?) is, I think, the real world blending with the mind palace world here – although not paramedics, there are people currently trying to restart Sherlock’s heart, and this scene shows us that he’s trying hard inside his brain, he’s working with them – he really doesn’t want to die. The idea of the outside world taking on a physical form in his MP is not incredibly hard to believe – I really recommend watching s02e02 of Inside No. 9, written by Mark Gatiss’s League of Gentlemen co-stars Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, an episode which pulls this off marvellously, although with a big cn: for death. In this moment in Sherlock, we get the lovely lines

Sherlock She saved my life.

John She shot you.

Sherlock Eh – mixed messages, I grant you.

These lines are delivered so quickly between the two of them that it feels like Sherlock is talking to himself, like Mary isn’t even in the room. The way BC delivers ‘mixed messages’ – it’s as though there’s still a problem, bbc!Mary hasn’t been reconciled to good!Mary yet.

The next section on our whistle-stop tour is Christmas with Mummy and Daddy. Plenty of people have pointed out how Mummy and Daddy are very clear mirrors for our boys – you can see here X, or you can just look at this picture to be honest.

The Christmas scene doesn’t make sense in the timeline – there's a great timeline diagram here X that shows how much fuckier than any other episode HLV is (excluding TSoT and everything post s3), and that doesn’t even take into account all of the jumping between scenes that we see in the Christmas bit. Jumping from Leinster Gardens to Christmas to Baker Street and back several times is chronologically odd and doesn’t seem to serve a purpose, except to show that the rift between John and Mary has lasted for months – and even that didn’t need such a complex interweaving of flashbacks that is so at odds with the show. It’s also at odds with the plot – why on earth did Mummy and Daddy invite John for Christmas, if he’s no longer living with Sherlock, and even stranger, why did they invite Mary if John and Mary haven’t been on speaking terms for months? This isn’t the way human beings behave. There’s also an old adage in writing which says to never move a conversation to a new place – it’s a waste of time and space. Have the conversation here, or have it there. Don’t abort it for no reason – and that’s exactly what they do here. Mofftiss are pretty experienced, and I’m inclined to believe that they’ve done it for a reason.

So, in MP terms, why does Sherlock gravitate towards his family home instead of Baker Street as the location to unravel John’s relationship with Mary? Bearing in mind that this is a continuation of the interrogation of their relationship, it seems interesting that he chooses to juxtapose them to the only loving couple we see in this television programme. Like a lot of parallels in EMP, this is something that our dads choose to draw our attention to; Daddy says to Mary “you’re the sane one”, as though every happy relationship has a sane one and a mad genius. And they draw attention to it again – Mary points out that Sherlock brought them here to see a fine example of happily married life.

Except, of course, like so much of this interrogation of John and Mary’s relationship in HLV and onwards, this doesn’t quite ring true. Because, of course, there is no mad genius in the Watsons’ relationship, and in terms of sanity Mary is certainly not the sane one. It’s like Sherlock is trying to fit them into the domestic bliss mould, but they just won’t quite go there. The comparison won’t quite be made.

The conversation between Sherlock and Mycroft, who has been established as his brain in TSoT (I cannot find this meta! Where Mycroft is brain and John is heart! Can anyone help?), is pretty straightforward – the brain is interrogating Sherlock’s obsession with the Magnussen case and why he can’t just let it go, and the emotion we see here from Sherlock is more powerful than pretty much anything we get in real life. I actually think this scene is one of the most vulnerable moments he has in the show – and there’s no way that vulnerability would be to Mycroft in real life. There’s also, crucially, no reason why MI6 should actually want Sherlock dead this early. It’s another tell-tale sign that the surface plot doesn’t make sense – we should be looking deeper. Sherlock has just brought down a terrorist network – MI6 should love him. What Mycroft is actually putting forward is that already, way before Sherlock kills Magnussen, pretty much as soon as he enters EMP this is a two-way fork. He can choose to die at any point. But he doesn’t.

There’s something that I really don’t understand here, though, which I think is important – Sherlock drugging the family with the help of Wiggins. This motif of drugging is something which comes back time and again to represent Sherlock’s repression – but here he’s not drugged. Wiggins is also a symbol of repression, but again he’s completely sober. Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated – I don’t like loose ends, and I don’t believe that another use of drugs is insignificant!

Then we have a quick flashback to the canteen scene. A lot of EMP theory has drawn on the canteen scene, and how phenomenally dreamlike the entire situation is. There is no way this can take place in Speedy’s – in terms of the timeline, it can’t even take place in the hospital canteen! However, it seems to draw on a mental image of Speedy’s because of the visual similarities between them (referenced in this meta, although this meta makes the argument for the reality of the scene X). Magnussen doesn’t seem to even have a bruise, despite being battered by Mary’s gun. This scene cannot exist. Magnussen picking at Sherlock’s food has often been seen as a metaphor for Sherlock being sexually assaulted whilst comatose, which is something I buy into – the food=sex metaphor has been striking from the beginning, and it suits Magnussen’s power play. It’s also quite possible in this scene that Sherlock thinks that everything fucky is real, and the absolute fuckiness of this scene draws it out – this is the scene that foreshadows the realisation that Magnussen is working from his MP, and of course that’s a realisation that Sherlock needs to make himself. The scene opens with a moment of dislocation – is this the hospital canteen or not? – and is about Sherlock working out what’s happening to him.

What’s really striking is that John has brought his gun to Christmas lunch, however. Bear in mind John-being-suicidal is the realisation that Sherlock is going to come to in TLD, but it’s prefigured here. We haven’t seen John’s gun since ASiP, when it was used to indicate that he was suicidal. It’s suddenly come back, but Sherlock misses its significance – he expects John to have it, but he doesn’t focus on the significance of the gun itself. He’s still thinking in terms of Mary and Magnussen. What’s significant is that John throws him the coat, which has the gun weighing down in its pocket. This prefigures that scene in TLD -

Faith!Eurus, who is a mirror for John in TLD, is thrown the bag, and we see Sherlock weigh it and then realise there’s a gun in it – too late. A bag is the female equivalent of a coat (*cries about pockets*) and the throwing motif with the heavy gun inside it is a clear link between the two moments. Sherlock didn’t recognise the significance of the gun in the first one, possibly because he couldn’t process the situation without mirrors (more on the importance of Eurus as a series of heterosexual mirrors later). When he realises in TLD that he’s made a mistake, that there’s something he’s missed, the implication isn’t that he’s missed it in his analysis of Faith!Eurus, because in no sense of the word does Faith!Eurus exist. What it means is that he missed it in his first, cursory analysis of John. Not the heaviness, but exactly what it meant. The symbols of John’s suicidal ideation start to appear and threaten to break in right up until the end of TLD – this is arguably the first point we start to see them.

Hypothesis theory – that Sherlock is running simulations in his MP – is not something I hold with through all of EMP, but I do hold with it to the end of HLV. It’s something that we know Sherlock does in real life because of THoB, both in acd!canon and in bbc!canon – he stages something in order to prove it to himself. In this case, he’s not able to see the war between Mary and Magnussen play out, so he’s running it himself, and we’ve already seen him desperately trying to prove Mary’s innocence, and more than that her love for John. But this trip to Appledore will prove that impossible.

It’s possible that the Appledore Vaults being Magnussen’s MP is the first time that Sherlock recognises that this is a simulation, and that this isn’t real. He certainly looks incredibly distressed, although that could also be because of the immense danger he’s put John in. However, the vaults being a mind palace doesn’t make sense as surface plot, as so many have pointed out – we’ve literally seen the letters before. (I grant that Magnussen could be bluffing, but it seems odd to draw attention to the letters having a physical form nevertheless.) However, the fact that Magnussen’s MP is in vaults underground is really interesting – imagery to do with going deeper and deeper into Sherlock’s mind is pretty much always falling or sinking, as seen in both TAB and TST in particular. That idea of descending into one’s mind is prefigured very neatly here, and should get us thinking about height generally (I’ve talked about the reverse side of this in the previous chapter X). I also think, although am not an expert on sound, that we can hear a slight eerie dripping when Magnussen walks through the vaults, which ties thematically to the water that is linked to falling/sinking in the rest of the EMP.

Fast forward past the face-flicking, and Sherlock shoots Magnussen. This is the culmination of the metafictionality of the episode, and I think it’s really fantastic. The simulation that Sherlock has run to prove that Mary loves John has failed, because the only way to save John is to kill Magnussen and he’s the only one who can do it – so in short, Sherlock becomes the housemaid, not Mary. He takes on the role, and it breaks canon completely. He’s supposed to be above that, disinterested – but instead he becomes the woman who kills out of love for her husband. He is no longer filling the traditional role of Sherlock Holmes in the narrative. He has disproven the point he needed to make – and so, as brain!Mycroft seems to suggest, deeper waters still. The cut to little Louis Moffat screaming in the firing line instead of BC is another hint that this isn’t real – we might just about accept it here as showing Sherlock’s vulnerability, but given that the entirety of series 4 is about childhood trauma coming back up, the resurgence of a screaming child of Sherlock as he recognises his new place in the narrative is brutal. (Yes, Sherlock has a lot of gay trauma – we’ll find out more when we meet Eurus.)

Eurus, incidentally, comes up here – you know what happened to the other one. I want to home in, though, on Mycroft’s line about Sherlock, that there’s no prison that he could be incarcerated in. This is a bizarre comment, given the events of TFP – it could just be sloppy writing, sure. Or, again, these inconsistencies are pointing to something else, that Sherrinford isn’t a real place and that Sherlock’s death sentence is not a sentence, but self-imposed.

So much has been said, so eloquently, about the tarmac scene, that I don’t know that there’s much more that I can say. The importance of the plane as being Sherlock going to his death is really important as an image that will repeat later – again, see previous chapter X. I’ve also pointed out that there is no point at which Sherlock is told Moriarty is back, yet he seems to know it automatically – another suggestion that this is EMP, and there’s a lot more going on.

The final thing I want to focus on in this episode, though, is the east wind. The east wind is referenced in His Last Bow, which gets very little coverage generally in HLV. His Last Bow is (I believe) the final Holmes story, and the east wind that is coming refers to WW1 – Holmes tells Watson that there is an east wind coming and Watson thinks he means it’s cold, and Holmes laughs and jokes that Watson is a stalwart who will always be there. This is a touching moment to end the stories on, and might remind us of the It is always 1895 poem that will become so important in TAB. Except, this time, John accepts that there’s an east wind coming – he references it repeatedly, actually, as a threat, both here and in TFP. The east wind is the wind of change that comes through the changing years in acd!canon. This seems particularly important here – the social changes between 1895 and 2014 are vital for the next episode, highlighting the idea that the update of the show is a really central part to it. There’s no world war ahead of Holmes (please God @2020) so the wind of change must be referring to something else… I really couldn’t possibly comment as to why the change of time period might be so important!

This chapter has been a long one, but I hoped it help to set up EMP theory on firm foundations. We’ll move into TAB next – see you there!

[taehyungsgrowl]

Garden of Eden

A/N: Basically @wickedlangdon made me listen to East of Eden by Zella Day and it somehow turned into a scenario of shapeshifter Michael being the snake that tempted Eve (Eva) in the Garden on Eden. Canonically, it was satan, but hey - this is fan fiction. 

Also - this could technically be reader insert, but it’s basically Michael seducing Eve. 

Warnings: religion kink, vaginal sex, sex in nature, voyeurism, degradation (kinda), i use a few lines michael said in the show and i cant tell if its cheesy or not. 

Word Count: 2.4 k

Michael had watched them from a safe distance for days now. He’d seen these new creations be so pure - so innocent. But below the naive exterior of the two they were human. Humans that he was just aching to corrupt. 

He wanted to taint them. Michael wanted to smear himself all over God’s creations. Soon enough, he knew they’d be marked by him and his chaos. 

One of them captured his attention more than the other. The curves of her nude body were almost enough to have him beg for mercy. Her softness and chasteness had his mind racking for ways to ruin her. 

Michael shifted his form into that of a serpent - blending into the lush green plant life of The Garden. Watching and lurking on an unsuspecting Eve. His favorite time was when she bathed in river. Cool water making goosebumps raise on her skin, water droplets adorning her nude breasts, her hair slicked back and falling past her shoulders. 

Of course she had to be one of His creations. No one else could create something so delectably perfect. 

--

In order to get to the man, Adam - Michael knew he needed to start with Eve. Not because he believed her to be the weaker sex - on the contrary. He saw the power God envisioned for women. He could see the rawness of her feminine nature and knew  if he wanted something done right he’d have to go through Eve. 

Eve held the answer to Michael’s prayers. A world full of sin and carnal pleasure. He could achieve with the help of her. 

Testing his own patience, Michael awaited for the moment of Adam’s distraction to put forward his plan. He knew his window would be slim, but that just made the excitement in his stomach grow. 

Eve sat against a tree alone, humming a tune unknown to Michael. It was soft and made his ears ring in a way he was unfamiliar with. Her lips were glossed over with the traces of berries she swiped from the bushes. Seeing her suck on her blackberry stained fingertips made him realize the time was now. Her eyes were closed and her index finger was secured around her pout. If Michael did’t know any better, he’d think she were the one seducing him. 

Tempting him. 

Michael shed his skin - his snake skin, as he slithered along the bush. He felt each and every limb transform onto his body as he returned to his true form. Shaking freely from the prison of his other body he proceeded to walk towards the unsuspecting woman. Michael’s toes dug into the moist dirt, taking in the feeling of walking. 

He had crawled on this garden for too long. It was his time to run. 

--

“Eve..” Michael was surprised by the sound of his own voice. It had been too long since he had heard it spoken aloud. Low, smooth, and sinfully, silky. Her name dripped from his lips. 

The woman’s head snapped up at the unfamiliar voice. Tilting her head to one said she looked into the man’s eyes. It was all she could see, really. It was all she knew of Adam as well. Vague outlines with piercing eyes - only this strangers eyes weren’t Adams. 

These were a pair of well calculated eyes that held a depth of knowledge in them. Eve didn’t know how to explain is, but the way his eyes lingered on the rest of her form made her tingle in a way she’d never felt before. 

“Who are you?” her voice is even sweeter when it was directed at him. 

“My name is Michael.” he got closer to her. 

“Are you new here?” Eve was curious about this man. God never mentioned anyone else besides her and Adam - and she’d never seen him before. She’d remember this gaze too well if she had. 

“Not exactly,” he took a seat besides her and placed a hand on her thigh. “I was here before you and Adam.” he explained. 

“Why haven’t I seen you?” she questioned both his words and the feeling she felt on her skin by his touch. 

“I’m only seen when I want to be seen, but I dear, see everything.” his hand cupped the curve of her hip. “Would you like to see... everything?” a devious smile spread on his face. 

The confusion on Eve’s eyes only made Michael want to push her further - drive her to the edge with his temptations.”What do you mean?” her voice lowered with fear of the unknown. 

“Oh, Eve. Hasn’t God told you? There is so much to this world beyond what you see. As a matter of fact, I think if you saw it, you’d be powerful than God himself,” Michael shrugged, planting the seed in her mind. 

“What is it that I can’t see?” she frowned. She’d just met this man yet his words were providing her with a headache. 

“All it takes is one taste.” 

“A taste of what?” 

“There’s a reason God forbade you from tasting the fruit of that tree.” Michael gestured to the Tree of the Forbidden Fruit. “He doesn’t want you to be more powerful than him.” 

Michael could feel the confusion radiating from Eve. Her eyes sparkled with curiosity over the man. “Come with me,” he grabbed her hand in his and pulled flush against his body. He had her follow him to the tree. They both peered up at the dangling fruit. 

A symbol. 

A symbol of temptation and sin that Michael wanted to leave on Eve’s tongue. 

He picked the most perfect fruit off the tree, holding it up to his nose. “Delicious,” he inhaled deeply, his eyes scanning over her body once again. 

“Taste it.” he held up to her, the fruit grazing her lips. 

“I-- don’t know. I can’t..” her words denied his offer, but her mouth watered at the promise of the unknown. 

Michael shrugged and took a big bite of the fruit himself. The sweet nectar coated his lips. He made sure to swipe he freshly bitten fruit of his lips - leaving a trace of its sweetness. 

“Taste it from my lips.” 

Eve’s eyes glanced at his stained, wet lips; they were practically dripping in the fruits sweet delicacy. 

Michael leaned his face against hers, his lips brushed over hers, making her breath hitch in her throat. He chuckled quietly, his soft breath fanning her face, “No need to be afraid, Eve.” 

He pressed ghosted his lips over hers, making her eyes flutter shut. Letting instinct, human nature, take over - she kissed him. The sweetness of his lips awakening something in her. 

A kiss with the forbidden fruit wouldn’t be enough for her to see - Michael knew that. She needed to taste it. 

He pulled back from the brief gesture. Her fingertips were at her lips, attempting to make sense of the emotions she felt. Again, Michael brought the fruit to her lips. 

Eve nodded her head and bit into the fruit, locking eyes with Michael as she did. As the fruit went past her lips, things became different. She blinked, once, twice, three times, before her vision adjusted. 

Not only was she now accurately aware of Michael’s handsome face, but the rest of him as well. 

Long golden hair grazed his shoulders, he wore is neatly parted in the middle. She noticed a small braided strand tucked behind his ear. As her eyes dropped, she took him in. All of him. 

He had broad shoulders and narrow hips made of porcelain skin. There was another part of him that peaked her interest. His manhood, hanging proudly between his legs. 

Her heart was beating rapidly in her chest, her breathing quickened, and her head was spinning. Eve slumped back against the tree for a moment as Michael chuckled to himself. 

The harsh bark dug into her back - it was only then that she realized a sense of shame. Shame a guilt coursed through her. Shame for what she’d done and guilt over impure thoughts that clouded her thinking. She realized he could see her - entirely and without filter. Her arms crossed over chest in a meek attempt to hide her breasts from him. 

“Eve,” the way he sang her name made her heart drop to her stomach. He was making her feel like, truly, no man had before. 

“What’s happening?” her voice was weak, searching for a strand of hope. 

Michael grabbed her wrists and made her remove her arms from her chest, exposing herself to him once again. “No need to be so shy. This is who you really are. The blind has been removed from your eyes. Delve into your pleasures..” he dragged out the last letter of the word, making a longing ssss, sound linger in her ear. 

He pressed his hot body against hers. The heat from him felt unfamiliar, but she melted into him nonetheless. He cupped her face in his hand, crashing his lips on hers. He kissed her slowly. Each swipe of his tongue coaching her. He took his time, letting her carnal pleasure build. She kissed him back with little hesitation on her part. Her lips parted open as his tongue slipped inside her mouth. The faint taste of the fruit, that was now at their feet, lingered in both their mouths. 

Eve pulled back, trying to catch her breath. “Michael..” she was about to protest, Michael knew, but he stopped her with his index finger on her lips. 

“Shh,” he shook his head. “Did that feel good?” he dragged his nose along her jawline. 

“Yes,” she admitted without delay. 

His tongue licked a spot underneath her ear before kissing it, “If it feels this good, can it really be that bad?” he tempted her. His mouth moved from her neck down to her shoulder, nibbling on it playfully. The art of temptation lied within the balance. 

“Michael,” she whined. 

Michael could feel himself getting hard as he toyed with Eve. It had been less than ten minutes since she had eaten from the tree and she was now eating from Michael’s palm. She had just become unblinded and yet here she was... desperate for something she didn’t even know. All she could feel was the drenching ache between her legs.

Arousal.

His hand traveled down the valley of her breasts, past her navel, stopping only when the tips of his finger tips could brush against her pussy. 

“Do you want me to fuck you?” he whispered in her ear. He slowly let one of his fingers begin to play with her wet cunt. Collecting her wetness on his finger, he brought it up to his mouth, sucking it clean. “Sweetest fruit in the garden,” he smirked. 

“You’ve eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, Eve. You know what you want. Tell me.” he kissed her neck. She could feel his hardening member press against her thigh and she imagined what it must feel like to have him inside of her. Her face burned with excitement and shame. 

“Fuck me,” the words fell from her with ease. She spoke the truth; she wanted him to show her the pleasures she’d been missing on. 

Michael grabbed her leg and hoisted it around his waist, giving himself better access to her dripping center. He took his cock in his hand and aligned himself at her entrance. He rubbed the head of his cock, which dripped in his precum, over her swollen clit a few times. Each time he moved the tip up and down her folds, he threatened to enter her, but never gave her the full satisfaction. 

“Please, God..” she begged for him to fuck her. 

“That’s right,” he pressed her against the tree with his body, “I am your God now,” he growled at the same time he pushed himself inside her. 

As Eve was about to moan out in pleasure, he caught her lips with his, hushing her with a deep kiss. Her sounds were muffled by his mouth as he pushed all the way inside her tight cunt. Her warm, wet walls hugged him tightly. 

“Fuck,” Michael cursed into her mouth, “You’re exactly what I need. We’re gonna tear down this fucking tree.” he bit down on her soft neck. 

His hips thrusted into her is slow deep movements. Her ass felt raw against the bare bark of the tree. “Tell me how much you like being my little whore.” his fingers dug into her hips as he held her in place. 

“I broke the rules,” she gasped, tightening her walls down on him - milking his length. 

“No need for rules anymore; chaos has won,” he moaned into her ear. 

Eve felt herself boiling over. Every fiber of her body was on fire. Like a brewing pot about to boil over, she was about to cum. “Michael!” she rasped out, as the head of his cock rammed against her cervix, “Oh God,”

“That’s it,” he coaxed her, “Cum all over my cock. Taint me with your sin.” 

She whined and whimpered, hiding her face in the crook of his neck. She felt her stomach burn in pleasure. She began to move her hips along with his, chasing her release. 

“Just like that.” Michael unhooked her leg from his waist and pinned her to the tree; he began bucking himself into her over and over. 

“You’re going to take my seed,” he panted against her mouth, that hung open in soft moans,

She nodded her head, completely fucked out on his cock. 

Michael released his load into her pussy - staying inside after their release. He rested his forehead against hers, his arms on either side of her head, as he held her to The Tree. 

He grabbed her face again and kissed her. He was surprised when Eve grabbed the back of his head and pulled his harshly into her lips. She kissed him with such hunger - no other fruit could suffice now that she had tasted sin. 

--

Thank y’all for reading. I’ve been working on 2 other fics for WEEKS and can’t finish them, but somehow got this one finished super quick so if it is trash don’t drag me sdjkjfskslf 

Tagging: @langdonswhoreprobably @langdonsdemon @lvngdvns @divinelangdon @getdevils @xavierplympton @hecohansen31 @1-800-bitchcraft @lathraios @wroteclassicaly @avesatanormalpeoplescareme @venusxxlangdon​ @coollangdon @moonanonwriting @mantorokk @sammythankyou​ @michael-langdon-appreciation @lovelylangdonx  @ritualmichael​ @langdvnshepherd @leatherduncan @langdonsblood @rocketgirl2410 @coollangdon @satcnas @littledemondani @plsfuckmelangdon @duncvns @desertsunflower00 @fckinsupreme @maso-xchrist @saviorinsilk @langdonsgothgf @peachesandfern​ @angel-langdon​ @emmyrosee​ @bitchchatter​

*** I feel like I need to update my taglist (this is just some that I’ve tagged in the past. Feel free to LMK if you want to be added or removed!) ***

[sparkie96]

Being filled or Bukkake?

How about filled with a child and anger? Possible future project. VergilLeon/NeloLeon

(Summary: Good news: Leon and Sherry don’t immediately get picked up by the US Government post Raccoon City and shortly after their departure with Claire. 

Bad News: They’re taken by demons in disguise who work for Mundus...though it’s not totally bad because they’re “gifted” to Nelo Angelo. The demon knight takes pity on them because he is reminded of what had happened to his mother. When Nelo hears of what the two had endured, he respects them both and even grew to love Leon and care for Sherry as if she were his own pup.)

Rated M for off-screen sexy times, language, and gore. Canon Typical stuff. 

____________________________________________________________

Leon shifted uncomfortably, wearing the attire of this “realm” as that crazy creature looking thing put it. The supposed “King” of the “Underworld” and all that jazz. Leon found all of this to be insane and he was quietly wondering if he and Sherry had been taken by some angry failed Umbrella experiments. But these things did things that even “viruses” couldn’t do. At least...he didn’t think they could, he did see some crazy shit in Raccoon City. 

And then there was this Nelo Angelo guy who looked pretty normal underneath the helmet and armor, at least, as normal as one could look when they had gray skin, black veins and red orbs and snow white hair. At least he was human looking, and Leon had wondered if he had once been a prisoner like them. From the few times he had taken the Omega, Leon didn’t end up infected with anything and he smelled like a normal Alpha. 

Though, there was a hint of a scent that was a bit off, but not rancid like Mundus or the other whatever the fuck they were. Leon often wondered what Nelo had done to deserve the constant mocking and insults from Mundus. The Demon King often called Nelo “half-breed” or “abomination” along with mocking his mother’s death and his father’s dishonor. It had been after one particularly violent dinner that Nelo had Leon and Sherry eat in his quarters from then on, the knight eating with them, but never saying a word. 

Come to think of it, Leon had never heard the Alpha say much of anything, even during sex. It had been mostly growls and grunts then. The only time Leon had heard his voice was when the knight told them where everything was in his humble abode. And even then, it was mostly one word sentences in a quiet, almost strained voice. 

Leon laid on the bed with Sherry, the little girl reading a book she had procured from Nelo’s collection of books. She wore a simple blue night gown as she cuddled up to the Omega, both of them unable to sleep due to nightmares. Leon pulled at the clothes he wore, feeling a bit cold. He wore a simple white buttoned down shirt and soft black pants. He wasn’t sure if they were supposed to be sleep clothes or lounge wear here, but he wore them because they were the comfiest things he could find. Nelo hadn’t come home yet either from whatever he had been tasked to do. 

Sherry was a smart girl but she struggled a bit with the complex reading, asking Leon to help her with some words and what they meant. The story itself read much like a fairytale. This one told a tale of a human woman named Eva falling for a demon knight named Sparda. Leon listened and occasionally helped read, finding himself very invested in the story as well. Two people, or well, a demon and a human, who had fallen in love, so much so, the demon gave up his power and position to be with her, sealing off the Gates of Hell so their family could be safe. He had done some other things, but Leon had no idea what they were, but he assumed it was all very honorable. 

“Oh no, I read ahead by accident!” Sherry exclaimed suddenly, “I don’t know if I want to read anymore…” 

“Why?” Leon asked curiously, “What happens?” 

Sherry swallowed down a breath before pointing to the part she had read ahead to. Leon looked down at it, feeling a little disappointed, “Oh no...he disappears?” 

Sherry nodded, “Uh huh...what about Eva? And their sons?” 

Leon tried to maintain a bit of optimism, saying that they could keep reading and see if he maybe came back to be with them. Sherry nodded, hoping that he did because she would be very disappointed if he didn’t. 

“He doesn’t.” A voice by the door said. 

Leon and Sherry looked up, seeing Nelo standing there with his helmet under his arm, “Oh, sorry, we didn’t hear you.” Leon apologized, about to get up to help the elder out of his armor but Nelo held up a hand, telling Leon to lie back down, so that he could take care of his own armor.

“Oh…” Sherry deflated at the news, “He doesn’t?” 

“No.” Nelo replied with a shake of his head, setting the armor on it’s rack, standing before them in black slacks, “Sadly, he doesn’t…” 

“Spoiler Alert.” Leon sighed, about to close the book, but Sherry protested, “He doesn’t come back, Sherry Berry.” 

“But I want to know what happens to his family!” 

“No, you don’t.” Nelo said, “Trust me...especially since the story is based on a true story.” 

Leon and Sherry looked up at the man with twin looks that were a mix of confusion and shock. Nelo sat on the side of the end of the bed, gently taking the book from Leon’s hands, closing it and looking at the cover sadly. He ran his clawed hand over the symbol on the cover, giving it a longing look before setting it down on the bed next to him. 

He turned to Leon and Sherry, both still watching him curiously,  “Have you two eaten dinner yet?” He asked nonchalantly, changing the subject. 

Leon nodded, still in awe at the sound of the Alpha’s voice, “Yes, but I can prepare you dinner if you want, even though it’s late.” 

“No, thank you.” Nelo simply replied, “I shall make something for myself. You two try to get some sleep.” 

Leon and Sherry watched as the Alpha stood once more, taking the book with him. Waiting for the door to shut behind Nelo, Sherry looked up at Leon, asking him if he thought the story had been real. He merely shrugged, saying that it wasn’t entirely impossible to believe, considering all that they had seen and experienced. Sherry then asked what might have happened to the family, the little girl obviously looking a bit distressed. 

“...I’m not sure.” Leon replied, gently brushing gold locks out of her eyes, “...But we can make-up a happy ending for them.” 

Sherry smiled and nodded as Leon tried to recall where they had left off before making up the ending for the little family. One where the father came back and saved his wife and children from some bad demons. The little girl listened intently, seemingly a bit more at ease with their ending, blue eyes fluttering closed as she laid her head on his chest. After Leon had said that they lived happily ever after, and once Sherry had drifted off to sleep, the Omega carefully carried the little girl to her own room. After tucking her in, he gently kissed her forehead before quietly exiting her room. The door slowly closed behind him with a soft click. 

Leon looked from the intricately detailed door to the living room area where Nelo now sat. The tall being now sitting on the couch, watching the now lit fireplace before him. Leon decided to not go back to their shared room, deciding to sit with him instead. As he approached, he noticed the room didn’t smell of food, but Leon could faintly smell the scent of tea. Jasmine? Green Tea? Maybe a mix of both? 

As he sat beside the man, he could smell the flowery fragrance, seeing the porcelain teacup between his hands, “You’re having jasmine tea for dinner?” 

Nelo hummed, not turning his attention away from the burning embers in the fireplace, listening to the crackling sound, “I’m not hungry…” 

Leon gave him a sympathetic look, unable to read the expression on the Alpha’s features, “Are you okay?” 

Nelo stared ahead for a moment longer before slowly turning his head and looking at Leon, blood red orbs staring into his own, “Do I look okay to you?” 

The Omega studied his features, looking at the black veins that stood so prominent under the gray skin, running like inky rivers of black through bare fields of ash and smoke. The red eyes reminded Leon of blood, and suddenly the Omega found himself seeing flashes of teeth rip through flesh, the same blood red smeared across said teeth, rotten flesh and tattered clothes. He then saw flashes of the pools of blood and the spatters that splashed across the walls and windows of the RPD’s Waiting Room, staining and clashing against the blue of the wallpaper and the tiled floor. All he could hear were the growls and snarls of the hideous undead, the screeching and roaring of monsters. 

Leon turned his eyes away from Nelo, gasping as his breathing picked up. He clenched his eyes shut as he tried to regain his composure, pushing the traumatic memories to the back of his mind before he could suffer another panic attack. Nelo scoffed beside him, and Leon could see the man shake his head out of the corner of his eye.

“Thought so.” Nelo merely said, turning to stare at the fireplace again, sipping at his tea before settling the cup back on the saucer, “You can’t even look at me now...I haven’t been okay in a long time.” 

“No…” Leon whispered with shaken breaths, “It’s not...you, specifically.” 

Nelo raised a brow, looking back at the Omega. Leon looked at Nelo, trying to focus on the man’s eyes without losing it again. The Omega was definitely shaken up, but he pushed the fear back down, explaining that it wasn’t Nelo exactly. It was Leon’s own fucked up brain, his screwed up memories and even more terrifying nightmares. That’s why he and Sherry were still awake when the Alpha had returned. 

“We’re still not over what happened in Raccoon…” Leon admitted, swallowing the lump in his throat, “All that blood...all those monsters. Christ, even Sherry’s own father tried to kill her, for fuck’s sake. It’s like, who the fuck would do this? Why? Normal people like you and me turned into...these fucking things out of a horror movie...and for what? Some military contract? Money? Why?!” 

Nelo listened intently, haven’t not heard Leon’s tale before this. He had been curious when Mundus mentioned that Sherry and Leon were “Extraordinary Creatures”, saying that they had “earned the honor” of not being made food or breeding mules. Hence why they had been “gifted” to Nelo, but the Alpha himself often wondered what made them so special...until now. 

These monsters...were they demons? Or made into beastly creatures by demons? Sherry smelled tainted, not like any human he had ever encountered, but she never changed or acted strangely. Nelo didn’t sense danger when around her, so there was no way she was a demon. And Leon smelt like a normal human Omega...though, Leon’s scent now smells slightly off. Not like a heat...but there was something else. Something new. 

Leon went into the whole process of how he and Sherry had been found by Mundus’s men, who had been looking for something but had found Leon and Sherry instead. They had disguised themselves as normal looking humans, wearing military gear and Leon explained that he and Sherry thought they were the rescue team. He thought they were there looking to help any survivors. 

“And then there was this flash of light and then we were...here…” Leon noticed that Nelo was sniffing at his hair and then moving to smell around his face and neck, “Are you even listening? What are you doing?” 

“I heard you.” Nelo admitted, setting the teacup down on the coffee table in front of them before grabbing Leon by the leg and pulling, the Omega falling backward onto the couch cushions, “You smell off.” 

“What?” Leon asked in confusion, Nelo climbing on top of him, drawing a sound of protest as Nelo unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it open, “Hey!” 

“You weren't planted with anything, were you?” Nelo asked, hands settling on the Omega’s chest, glowing a dark blue as he continued to smell the younger, “Mundus didn’t stick anything inside of you or the girl?” 

Leon furrowed his brows up at the Alpha, “No. I wouldn’t even let him or his assholes near Sherry.” 

Nelo kept “frisking” the younger, his hand glowing as he scanned it over Leon’s form. Not only did the human smell weird, but the Alpha sensed a demonic energy inside of Leon, so he had been a bit paranoid that Mundus had done something to the human to spite him. His hand stopped at Leon’s stomach, or rather the area where his womb was, the glow turning from dark blue to a color Nelo hadn’t seen since…

...His palm was now glowing a bright baby blue color, and Nelo felt a sense of familiarity. A sense of peace…like when he was a child. He laid his head against the Omega’s womb, his hand touching Leon’s stomach. If Dante couldn’t succeed in defeating Mundus and falling to the demon king...then there was still hope inside of the Omega.

Leon looked down at the elder, noticing that there were tears in his eyes before the Alpha shut them, “Nelo?” 

Nelo looked up at him, lying in Leon’s lap, “You carry the last hope for your world should my brother fall to Mundus.” 

At the younger’s even more confused and shocked expression, Nelo explained that the story Leon and Sherry had read had indeed been a true story...a story about Nelo’s own family. He told Leon the full story, how his father, Sparda, had been the greatest warrior in all of the underworld. He was the most powerful demon knight who had led Mundus’s army and had been the demon’s right hand man. He helped Mundus win many battles in the underworld before Mundus looked to move on to the human world. 

But Sparda soon realized that what Mundus had been doing was wrong. He wanted to save humanity...so he did. He had defeated Mundus and sealed off the Gates of Hell across the world. He had done this for thousands of years, defeating any demons who threatened the Earth or threatened to open the Gates. He defended humanity and acted as their savior. 

“And then, in the twentieth century…” Nelo began, drifting off as he thought of his mother, feeling a wave of guilt wash over him.

“He met your mother, Eva.” Leon realized, recalling the story he and Sherry read, “And she gave birth to you and your brother...which twin are you?” 

Nelo called forth a sword with what little strength he had left, the once mighty katana looking quite worn and fragile.

“...Vergil…” Leon recalled, looking over the katana, remembering the description of the swords given to each twin, “That’s the…? Is that the one Mundus is looking for? Wouldn’t he have just read that book to find out what happened to it?” 

The demon knight shook his head, “The book came from a forbidden archive in a city in the human world. A city called Fortuna.” Nelo explained, “It’s also where they had been keeping my sword for safekeeping...until I found out what they had been trying to do with it.” 

“What were they doing with it?” Leon asked, “What does it do? Why is Mundus looking for it?” 

Nelo explained that the sword is imbued with demonic energy, it’s so powerful that it could cut through anything, it could even cut open gateways between realms and worlds. It had been one of the swords that sealed off one of the Gates in Fortuna. It had been forged by his father, and was as strong as the user wielding it. 

The Alpha gave it a sad look, “Unfortunately, due to my own callousness...I am no longer worthy of its power...and the Yamato is weak in my possession.” 

Nelo continued on, saying that he had opened one of the gates in order to procure his father’s power from Hell, nearly destroying the human world while he was at it. He hoped to make himself stronger...but in doing so he had failed and fell into the netherworld, encountering Mundus at the same time. Sadly, he had failed at that too, and now he was Mundus’s servant and knight. 

Leon looked at him in horror, “You...you did what?!” He asked, pulling himself out from under the Alpha, backpedalling to the otherside of the couch, “You’re one of the bad guys then?” 

“You don’t understand,” Nelo said, shaking his head, sitting back on his knees and looking up at the Omega, “I had to. I needed to become stronger...without strength…” 

“Bullshit!” Leon exclaimed, standing before the man and feeling a sense of betrayal, “People could have died!” 

“Humanity is weak.” Nelo insisted, “Not all of it, but a lot of humanity is weak. Frail, helpless, fragile. It can end in an instant. Humans give in to temptation, greed, anger...they kill one another for frivolous things and reasons, oblivious to the true evil that lies beneath them.” 

“Not all of us!” Leon hollered, pointing an accusatory finger at the Alpha, “Some of us have morals and give a shit about others. That’s the reason I joined the force! To serve and protect the people! Yeah, there’s a bunch of bad apples who want to fuck everyone over for their own selfish reasons, I’ve seen it first hand! I’ve fucking fought through it! But you know what? It’s up to us to stop those people! To be better than them! Not become them!” 

Leon was red in the face now, “And demons like your father saw that! He helped the humans! Despite the assholes, he helped humanity! He loved your mother and he loved you and your brother! And now you’re spitting in their faces!” 

The Omega was now pacing in front of the coffee table, anger radiating off of the younger in waves, reminding Nelo of an angry Lion in a cage, seconds from pouncing, “You don’t have to have all this power to be strong! That’s not strength! Strength comes from within! It’s the ability to get knocked down, get back up, dust yourself off and keep going! I didn’t inject myself with any of those fucking viruses to make myself “stronger”! I kept fighting and kept going! I had to for Claire and Sherry’s sake!” 

Now it was Nelo’s turn to be stunned silent, looking up at the human before him. As much as he wanted to strike the Omega down for speaking to him in such a manner, he found he didn’t have it in him. He couldn’t. On one hand, a part of him was angry, the demon inside wanting to know what right the human had to speak to him in such a manner. On the other hand, what little remained of his humanity respected Leon’s courage and outspoken nature, silently agreeing with him. 

He had never encountered a human that didn’t immediately kiss his ass or bow to him in fear. Or encourage his behavior because of his father’s name or in hopes of tasting the power he had or was trying to acquire… 

...he could see why Mundus hadn’t killed Leon. Mundus preyed on fear...but Leon didn’t seem like one who was easily scared. He obviously was never one to beg for his life either. Nelo stood, going toward the still ranting Omega whom he had only admired for his physical attributes and sweetness, but now also admired for his fire and strength. The Omega who was now carrying his child and would lead them down a path to a better life...a path he himself could no longer follow. 

He would get them and Sherry out of here. When he would inevitably be sent after his brother in the human world, he would leave them somewhere safe. Or he would find a way to get them to safety sooner. 

“...and I will be damned if I let you do anything to Sherry or...mmph!” Leon was cut-off by lips capturing his own for a searing kiss. 

A muffled protest left the Omega, pulling away for a moment, “Oh no you don’t! You’re not gonna change my mind...HEY!” Leon exclaimed, the Alpha lifting him up and carrying him over his shoulder, picking up the Yamato on the way to the bedroom, “HEY! PUT ME DOWN! WE ARE NOT DONE HERE!” 

“You are going to rest,” Nelo said, “And then tomorrow, you and I will discuss your means of escape. Your friend is still on her way to Europe to find her brother, yes?” 

Leon stopped struggling, looking at the back of the man’s head, “Claire? Yeah. Why? You better not…wait, escape?” 

“I’ll help her or her brother. Whomever I find first.” Nelo informed the Omega, bumping the bedroom door open with the toe of his boot, “And then I will make arrangements with them to guarantee yours, Sherry’s and the child within you’s safety. You’ll keep and hide the Yamato and carry our child in exchange for me helping you.” 

He set Leon down on the bed, blue eyes looking up in shock at Nelo, “Wait...there’s a baby inside of me?!” 

[kreactionsentertainment]

Starlight

Admin Eva: The image was created by the wonderful Admin Ninja~!

The Elder of Light sighed as another explosion shook the Elder Hall. Taking a deep breath, she sighed and stood from her throne. The remaining Elders gave her looks of pity and amusement. Her blinding white eyes drowned the room in annoyance as she demanded silence from those snickering at her misfortune. As soon as she took one step from the Place of Legends, another explosion rocked the building. Pristine white eyes, blazing with a white fire of fury, looked toward the destruction that covered the halls from wall to wall. How a child no older than ten could cause such damage was beyond the Elder of Light. These apprentices reminded her of Baekhyun’s apprentice days. It was difficult to manage such blinding energy with Baekhyun, Chanyeol, and Jongdae, let alone the new apprentices. The new apprentices developed the energy of 14 Baekhyun’s. Maybe she could have handled such energy when she was a Guardian, but now in her old age, she wanted nothing other than peace and quiet.

The once beautiful halls of the Elder Hall were tattered in disgusting black burns from small lightning bolts and beams of light. The once elegant symbols of Tempes and Aeria were hanging by a thread of fabric, the Elder of Light made the mental note to tell the Elder of Life about the disarray. He was very picky about how clean the Hall was, on second thought she’ll tell the Elder of Force. If informed about this destruction, the Elder of Life might just have a heart attack and leave them right away. The Elder of Light continued on her path to the Wing of Apprentices, she cursed under her breath when she arrived at the entrance. The once beautiful golden door was defiled with scribbles from those hideous earth creations! What were they called…. Markers! Those horrible Earth creations stained the golden stone door.

Her eyes glimmered dangerously as they twitched, out of all the Elders her temper wasn’t something to admire. Without wasting another moment, she pushed the door open with force and stormed into the room. A small girl continued her actions of using her abilities to commit more destruction for her crowd of admirers. Once the other apprentices saw the form of white fire behind their source of entertainment, they quickly rose to their feet and backed away with their eyes glued to the ground. The entertainer looked at her friends confusedly, suddenly she felt it. The atmosphere dropped to an unbearable temperature, the little girl slowly turned around with her eyes glued to the ground.

“Byun Jinhyun, Kim Soojin, follow me. Now.” The Elder of Light left no room for arguments or excuses. The two criminals followed the Elder of Light out of the Wing of Apprentices and only stopped when the pristine heels in front of them stopped moving.

“Enlighten me about what occurred in this hall,” The Elder of Light demanded as she turned to face the two tiny culprits.

“Ah, surely you must have a reason. There’s no need to be silent now. The entirety of Exo Planet must have heard the explosions caused by you two!” The Elder of Light growled.

“Elder, Soojin didn’t want to be a part of this. This is all my fault, please don’t be mad at her,” The girl in gold tried to defend her actions as her own, not wanting her friend to be the only one taking the blame. She was interrupted as the Elder of Light refused to let her speak by placing her hand above her hip.

“Soojin, I will be speaking to the Elder of Thunder. He will decide how long you will be grounded. Return to the Wing of Apprentices and wait for him there,” The girl in gold bowed respectfully and quickly returned to where she came.

“Jinhyun, I want to know what possessed you to destroy the silent beauty of this hall,” The Elder of Light’s voice boomed through the silent halls.

“Because it’s no fun here! We’re always working on our abilities, trying to train ourselves to become someone you can be proud of! We’re bored, what else are we supposed to do? We train and train and train until we’re too tired to try again. You say we’re training to become someone our fathers can be proud of, but we’ve never seen them! They don’t even care enough to come visit!” Jinhyun screamed at the Elder, shocking the older woman.

Since her arrival, Jinhyun has been nothing short of respectful. Despite her constant supply of energy, she has never shown such disrespect to another. The Elder of Light took in the younger’s anger and sighed softly. She was reminded of herself at that age. Her Elder of Light never agreed with her, nor did he pretend to tolerate her energy. She too had an altercation with her mentor’s father figure.

Unfortunately, she never had the chance to apologize. She hated the older man until there was no one left to hate. The Elder of Light learned a very difficult lesson when her Guardian explained there was no longer a reason for her to stay at the Elder Hall until her presence was called upon again. She never knew the Elders returned their energy to the Tree of Life when the Tree deemed their lives over. Now as she stood over Jinhyun, she was reminded of that lesson all over again.

The Elder of Light slowly matched the height of the little girl in front of her. The life of being a child of Light was one of the most difficult and cruel. Children of Light arrive blind, after a year of practicing their ability they are given the gift of sight. Like the gift of life, the gift of sight is taken away once the Child of Light becomes the next Elder of Light. Although she couldn’t see the tears falling from Jinhyun’s beautiful white eyes, the Elder of Light knew from the atmosphere surrounding them and the dull light of sadness surrounding Jinhyun’s silhouette.

“Jinhyun, I have not considered your feelings and for that, I am truly sorry. I hope you can find it in your heart, maybe not now, to forgive me for this injustice,” The Elder of Light spoke softly.

“I think it’s time for you to meet your Guardian, I think it’s time for you to leave this place until you are called upon these walls again,” Though the Elder of Light smiled softly, tears of her own fell from her unseeing eyes.

“But-“The Elder of Light closed her eyes and leaned into the small hand that pushed away her tears, “doesn’t that mean you’ll be going away? Like the Elder of Mind?” Jinhyun asked softly.

“Eventually I will need to answer the call from the Tree, however, you can’t get rid of me that easily,” The Elder of Light growled playfully as she tickled the little girl. Small squeals of joy created a smile on the Elder’s normally cold face.

“How about I call your Guardian home? I think it’s time the two of you meet,” The Elder of Light stood up and offered her hand to the little girl.

“I think that’s a great idea! What about the hall though, won’t Appa be upset with me?” Jinhyun asked softly as she carefully grabbed the Elder’s hand tightly.

“It’ll be our little secret,” The Elder smiled softly. The Elder walked into the Hall of Rituals and picked the little girl up to place her on her hip. Carefully taking off her necklace, she handed it to Jinhyun.

“Would you like to call the Guardian of Light?” The Elder asked with a small smile.

“Can I?!” Jinhyun squeaked excitedly as she reached out for the necklace.

“Of course, you can. Gently place it upon its pedestal and watch the magic happen,” The Elder of Light instructed. Jinhyun followed the instructions carefully, placed it on its pedestal. The room shattered into a shockwave of pristine, blinding white light. Because of their element being Light, Jinhyun watch as glimmering white snakes appeared from the tiles on the ground and slithered up the walls and pillars to the Tree of Life etched into the ceiling above them. The Tree of Life glistened in a sea of white raindrops that fell around the room. As soon as it began, it ended.

“It shouldn’t be long now-“The Elder of Light was cut off as the door into the Room of Rituals burst open.

“Eomma! I received your call, is everything alright?” Baekhyun entered the room in a panic as he looked at his mother figure for any injuries. His gaze stopped on the little apprentice in the Elder’s arms.

“I-Is this…?” Baekhyun asked the Elder of Light quietly. The Elder of Light smiled at the sound of hope dripping from her apprentice’s voice.

“Baekhyun meet Jinhyun, Jinhyun this is your Guardian Baekhyun,” She carefully put the apprentice on her feet. Jinhyun looked at the man in front of her, excitement and energy ran through her. She smiled happily when she saw the same excitement and energy running through her mentor’s eyes.

“Appa!” Jinhyun yelled out and rushed to the man in front of her, the man whose symbol matched hers.

“Hello, Starlight! It’s so nice to finally meet you! I’m going to protect you and love you with all my heart!” Baekhyun said happily as he hugged his apprentice tightly.

  The Elder of Light closed her eyes as she remembered the excitement of meeting Baekhyun for the first time.

“Chaeyeon, I believe it is time for you to meet your apprentice. Anticipate my call,” She waited day and night for the Elder of Light to call to her. One day, Exoplanet was bathed in a brilliant white light, her symbol shining in the sky above the great Tree of Light. Using the speed of light, she ran from Auris to the Elder Hall. Bursting through the door, completely out of breath, she looked around for her apprentice. A small boy, hair as black as night, stood out from the white lights surrounding him.

“Eomma~!” The small boy, energy bouncing off the wall ran to her. She fell to her knees, tears of happiness fell in waves from her eyes.

“Hello, Starlight!” She hugged the boy tightly in her arms as he cried shared her happiness. 

[nnegan13]

I love your writing so much!! Could you write something about ele going to visit edo in nyc?

hi!! thank you for the prompt it was literally a lifesaver you have no idea!!!! i was in a seriously bad block and i was tinkering with this idea and it helped me get out so thank you thank you!!!

ao3 link is here

fic is under the cut. i do have to warn you: tumblr hates me and the format always gets fucked up on mobile, so that’s thing one. thing two, it’s been eons since i’ve written in-canon so forgive me if this feels rusty!! but enjoy ily all and thanks again for the prompt

WEDNESDAY 27 NOVEMBER 15:12 ROCKEFELLER CENTER, NEW YORK CITY 

“Is there a reason,” she starts, staring up at the Rockefeller Christmas tree with her eyebrows furrowed. It’s only November, albeit late November, but November, still, and it’s already up. She doesn’t understand. “That it’s so big? I don’t get it.” 

“Capitalism, an American need to assert their dominance even in their own cities, the overbearing nature of corporate Christianity?” Edoardo suggests, coming up behind her and wrapping his arms around her shoulders, placing his chin atop her head and pulling her back into his chest. Eleonora tilts her head up to look at him as best she can from her position underneath his chin and he shifts as well so their eyes meet, if only barely. It makes her mouth twitch a little at a smile. “What?” 

“You’re feeling opinionated today.” 

“Spend four months around angry, liberal, college-aged Americans and you will, too,” he says, the corner of his mouth turning up. He presses a kiss to her upturned forehead before letting her tilt her head back down. “Do you still want to go ice skating?” 

“Maybe tomorrow? I’m still kind of wiped from my flight.” She doesn’t like asking him to postpone anything, they only have four days together, after all, and even if he’s coming home for Christmas in a few weeks, she still hates wasting any time she has with him. But, if she doesn’t find her way into a bed sometime soon, she might end up sprawled across the stairs of the Rockefeller Center, and that would not be a pretty sight. 

“Want to go take a little nap and then come back a do some shopping or get dinner?” He asks as she shifts around in his arms to face him. 

“Yes, I’d love that,” she agrees and kisses the content smile that grows on his face. Just as he starts opening his mouth, lets her get a taste of the hot chocolate they were drinking earlier, another idiotic reason for the Christmas tree pops into her mind. She pulls away, smiling a little as he pouts. “The need for men everywhere all the time to create phallic-centric symbols to inflate their own, tiny little egos?” 

For a moment, he furrows his brows, but then he purses his lips and gives her a look, a c’mon, really? look that has her holding back giggles. He knows she’s right. “Are you really thinking about the Rockefeller Christmas Tree while we’re kissing?” 

“I mean—” her tone is sly, she watches as he realizes what an opening he’s given her, and can’t help the satisfied grin that grows on her face, “—I probably wouldn’t be if—”

Against her mouth, he mutters, “Mm, don’t finish that sentence,” and she laughs.

— 

17:49 HOTEL, NEW YORK CITY 

When she wakes, it’s to find a very sleepy Edoardo still pressed against her—half on top of her, more like—and the sun set behind the curtains of their hotel room. Eleonora blinks, feeling more awake, now, than she did earlier, but still jet-lagged, and shifts her arm out from underneath Edoardo’s shoulder so she can play with his hair, slipping her fingers in between the curls and rubbing them between her fingertips. 

His face rests against the crook of her neck, nose pressed into her throat and jaw resting against her collarbones. His arm curls up underneath her, hand splayed against the back of her shoulder, and he’s wedged his bent knee between her legs. Her unoccupied hand drifts, tracing her fingertips across his bare shoulder before coming to the back of his neck, playing with the chain he’s always wearing. 

It’s got a little guitar charm on it, she knows, and it makes her smile. His mom gave it to him and he wears it to keep her close to him, Edoardo told her when she asked once. Eleonora hopes he’ll like the little addition she got him. 

He’s a heavy, warm weight pressed over her like a second blanket, but much more comforting than any blanket she’s ever owned. Having Edoardo away is hard, she knew it would be even for those few days they thought he would just be going to school in Milan, and him being in Ithica—on a completely different continent—sometimes makes it worse. 

Being with him again, she thinks as she turns to press her mouth against his forehead, is one of her favorite things. 

Something she’s done must’ve woken him up, though, because she feels his lips press into the hollow of her throat, feels his breathing change, and he shifts, rolling off her slightly to slip his other arm underneath her waist, hand drifting up her shirt to press warm against her spine. She arches her back just a little to make it easier, but then he rolls further onto his back and pulls her with him until their positions are flipped; Eleonora on top of him, now. 

Edoardo’s second hand slips under her shirt as her arms tighten around his shoulders reflexively and he takes the opportunity to pepper kiss after kiss against her neck. Eleonora smiles. “Good morning.” 

“Good evening, really,” he says, voice rumbling in his chest and against her skin, his mouth never far, and he presses a second kiss to the hollow of her throat. 

She bites her lip, goosebumps rising all over, as he continues lower and lower down her chest, between the folds of her button-up, making her skin heat and her heart beat a little faster. For a moment, she lets him tease his lips along her sternum, over the top of her breast, lets him elicit quiet noises from her mouth as he skims his teeth over her skin and traces his nails along her back, before drawing back as best she can, propping herself up against his chest. 

From beneath her, he smiles something lazy and pleased and sleepy that zings down her spine, blinking a little. “Have I told you yet that I’m really glad you came to visit me?” 

Trying to hide a smile, she purses her lips and pokes the tip of his nose. “Because now you have someone to make out with?” 

He scoffs, grinning a little as she shifts her fingers down to trace over his lips, and presses a kiss to her fingertips. Eyebrows raised, grin shifting into a teasing smirk, he says, “Exactly.” 

Eleonora shakes her head at him, her own brows inching up her forehead a little. “Mm, is that so?” 

Nodding, smirking just a little more as a small smile does break onto her face, he shifts them, pressing his back into the headboard and helping her climb into his lap. When she moves out from underneath the blanket, her decision to forgo pants as they slept becomes one she regrets, the cool air making her hiss. 

That is, until Edoardo pulls the blanket back around her waist, slips his hands up along her thighs until he can trace the edge of her underwear with his fingertips, and settles them there, warmth seeping from his palms into her skin. 

He’s probably colder, she decides, one hand resting on his bare stomach as the other cups his face, draws his mouth to hers. She kisses him once, twice, three times; chaste little things that make both of them smile, make his hands flex against her thighs, make her want just a little more. 

So she takes just a little more, lips parting against his as she licks into his mouth. 

A small gasp escapes her as one of his hands leaves her thigh to slip back underneath her shirt, splays against the small of her back, and pulls her closer to him. Smiling against his mouth, her hand drifts from his cheek back into his hair and when he groans as she tugs, it makes her smile again. 

“Ele,” he whispers against her lips, but doesn’t get much further than that. 

—

19:32 5TH AVENUE, NEW YORK CITY 

“Come look at this one.” Eleonora swipes open the curtain to the dressing room, giving Edoardo a little smile as he pushes off the wall he was leaning on and joins her in the little cubicle. 

After an hour or so, she finally managed to tamp down her own needs long enough to remind him that he didn’t bring her to New York City just to leave hickeys on her neck, her stomach, the back of her thighs—they could do that in Ithica, for fuck’s sake—and the pout he gave her from between her legs was almost enough to change her mind. 

If she told Eva—or any of the girls, for that matter—that she interrupted Edoardo as he was about to go down on her to go shopping of all things, she’d never hear the end of it, so she decides that that’s one thing from the trip they will not be hearing about. They won’t be hearing about the two other times he went down on her earlier, either, but that’s their loss for being so predictable. 

And her secret to think about when him being gone gets a little—difficult. 

This dress, however, she might tell the girls about. 

It’s a dark forest green, floor length, and gives her curves she’s only ever dreamed about. The straps are thin, the neckline daringly low for her personal tastes, and the back scooping. She’s slipped off her bra so it doesn’t look awkward, pulled half her hair back into a bun, and debated over and over in her head if she even wants Edoardo seeing her in this. To say her clothing choices were conservative—high necklines, tights under her shorts, always wearing something with sleeves—would not be untruthful, and to say Edoardo’s never seen her in something as revealing as this dress, long though it may be and naked he has seen her, would also not be a lie. 

It makes her nervous, in sum. 

He smiles, though, standing behind her shoulder so they can both study her in the mirror, and brushes her hair behind her ear, pressing a kiss to her cheek. He whispers, “You look beautiful,” and it makes her smile in turn. 

“Do you like it?” She asks, turning around to look at him, twisting her fingers into the soft material of his sweater. 

He nods, slipping his arm around her waist and pulling her into his side. “Yeah. Do you like it?” 

She considers, studying his face and pressing her lips together. Dresses have never been her favorite, neither have skirts, they remind her a little too much of being at her old school, doing things to catch her ex-boyfriend’s attention, the way his hands would wander too far, the different clubs they’d wind up at, that very last night together. Donating all her skirts and dresses during the clothing drive was probably too cathartic to be normal, but looking into her closet and not seeing a single thing she wore just because her ex liked it is something she really, really enjoys. 

This dress she thinks she could like.

When Eleonora pulled it off the rack, the color had caught her eye, drawn her in, made her go back on her personal promise to forgo anything that wasn’t a pair of pants and a shirt. The cut, the sudden expanse of skin, the attention it gives to the lines of her body are all things she’s avoided for one reason or another—is she thin enough, is she too thin, does this make her ex look her way, does this make the rumors at school true, will it make them worse—and this dress—though beautiful it does make her feel—brings her worries back to the forefront of her mind. 

Does she like the dress? 

“I’m not really sure,” she says, tilting her head to the side and watching the pensive expression form on his face. “I think it’s pretty and I feel pretty in it, but I don’t know if it’s something I would wear.” 

He nods, agreeing with her, and raises his eyebrows. “Could I bring you something I saw that I think you’ll like?” 

“Okay.” He could be walking her into a disaster or something wholly wonderful, and the little smile that quirks onto his lips when she agrees makes her glad she did so; disaster or not, seeing him happy is worth it. 

Once he kisses her and disappears out back into the store, Eleonora pulls the curtain shut again and studies her reflection. She hadn’t checked the price tag, maybe that would be more helpful with her decision…

Edoardo returns a few minutes later, looking very smug as she pulls the curtain open again and lets him into the dressing room. He’s got a few hangers in his hands and when she rifles through them, she realizes he’s brought her—

“A suit?” 

He shrugs, that smug grin not leaving his face. “It could be fun.” 

They end up getting the suit. 

— 

22:46 TERRACE, DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN 

In her coat pocket, a little box sits and she fumbles with it when she sticks her freezing hand inside. Edoardo’s disappeared back into the building to grab hot chocolate from the little stand he spotted inside on their way to the terrace, and Eleonora wanders over to the edge of the balcony, leaning against the concrete railing and staring out at the blinking lights of the city. New York, the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps. It’s beautiful, no questions there, but there’s something she misses about Rome, even if it’s only been a day since she left. 

But, for the time being, New York has Edoardo, which is something Rome can’t beat. 

He returns a few minutes later and pulls her close to him as they sip at their cups and chat quietly about Ithica, his classes, her classes, what she’s been doing with her friends, the radio episodes she wrote that she’s been sending him at his request, how Filippo is, how his friends are, and all the while her chest fills with the need to be near him, even though she already is. 

“What are you thinking about?” He asks, returning from throwing their empty cups away, wrapping his arms around her waist, and pulling her close again. 

Leaning up to press her forehead to his, she says, hoping her voice isn’t too shaky, “Home, you being here, things like that.” 

A soft kiss to her cheek. “I missed you everyday.” 

She looks at him, studies the deep brown of his eyes, the crinkles at the corners even with his somber tone. It’s nice to know he enjoys the bittersweetness of their situation like she does; sometimes when she lets herself think about it long enough, having him gone is a personal form of hell, but seeing him again is something heaven-sent. 

It feels like coming home. 

“I have something for you.” It’s whispered so low she thinks her words are captured in the wind, but he squeezes her waist and waits, silent, as she pulls the box from her pocket. She wiggles the lid off, staring at the little charm inside for a moment or two before looking up at him. “It’s for your necklace. I figured, while you were here—or, in Ithica, really—it might be nice to have a reminder, or something—” she swallows, “—of me.”

Lips parted, eyes wide, face open, he’s staring at the charm like it’s the most precious thing he’s ever seen, and turns his gaze to her. It doesn’t change. Her heart beats a little faster. “Ele, I am always thinking of you.” 

She laughs, thick with tears building up behind her eyes, and kisses him once. The plan had been to give the charm to him on her last day, but she couldn’t help herself, she needed him to know that she wants to be on his mind, even if it’s just for a moment here and there and even if it’s selfish of her. 

When she pulls back, Edoardo smiles at her, bright enough to light up all of Manhattan, and it only makes her want to kiss him again, tell him more of the feelings curled in her chest, let him know that she’s always thinking of him, too, but he speaks first. “Thank you, Ele, I—I’m glad I can keep you close when you’re not with me.” 

It feels like her smile might split her face in two. 

They maneuver around, pulling off gloves and holding the box and unclasping his necklace, and with careful fingers she slides the charm onto the chain. 

When she was looking for one, Eleonora tried to stick with charms of a similar style to the one already on his necklace, and she thinks she succeeded. It’s silver to match and rectangular as well, a raised silver flower, simple like a child’s drawing, with an emerald green background. It’s proportional to his mother’s charm and when he puts the necklace back on, her heart flutters a little. 

“It looks good,” she tells him in lieu of saying something that might have her crying again. 

“Yeah?” He draws her close, lips twitching into a smile. 

She leans up to kiss him again, revel in the fact that she can be near him. “Yeah.” 

— 

SUNDAY 1 DECEMBER 19:04 SAVA’S APARTMENT, ROME 

“Ele,” Eva calls from Eleonora’s bedroom. Eleonora finishes shoving her dirty laundry into the washing machine, trying to ignore the tired flutter of her eyes, the exhausted pounding of her head. It was a long flight back home, and not as enjoyable as the one to New York. After all, she left Edoardo this time and going home to her friends who she’s seen everyday for the past three months is not as exciting as flying to see her boyfriend who’s been living in another country. 

She gets to go to sleep soon, Filippo promised her he wouldn’t be too loud, and she’s looking forward to being back in her own bed. The fact that she’ll be sleeping alone? Not so much. 

The rest of the trip passed in a blur of sight-seeing and food-eating and souvenir-buying (mostly on Edoardo’s part) and long mornings spent in their bed doing things she already scolded him once for. If she couldn’t find it in herself to complain about the feel of his hands against her skin, his mouth finding its way to the places on her body he knows makes her louder than usual, how it feels to hook her legs around his hips, waist, shoulders, as much as she did that first day, well then that was Eleonora’s moral quandary to have. 

And the questions; even eight months into their relationship, Edoardo was still determined to become an expert on all things Eleonora Sava, and in turn she became an expert on him. 

It’s another of her favorite things. 

When he took her to the airport, he kissed her long and hard and slow before sending her off, winking as she went, and she had several texts waiting for her after she got through security, all questions about something new or something she’d said or something he remembered them talking about days previously, and the last was a picture she set as her wallpaper: a selfie of a distracted Edoardo, chain of his necklace held between his lips, her charm just off-center against his mouth, the yellow glow from the streetlights shining through his hair and casting a warm light against his skin. 

“Ele, I thought you said you only got the suit from that store?” 

“I did.” Eleonora frowns, padding her way from the kitchen into her room to see what Eva was talking about. The suit Eva’s hung up in her closet, but sitting in her suitcase in a see-through, plastic dress bag is the green dress she tried on. She smiles a little, pulling it out for Eva to see and lets her friend pull it from her hands to gush over better. 

19:07, message to Edo 💜Did you buy that dress and put it in my suitcase? 

It doesn’t take long for him to respond, her phone buzzing in her hand and his contact picture flooding her screen. She answers, trying to keep the smile from her voice. “Hey.” 

“Hi. Good flight?” He asks, voice scratchy and rough. It makes the hair on her arms raise, a shiver run down her spine, and she starts wandering out of the room. No need to give Eva anything to tease her about. 

“Did you just wake up?” 

“Maybe.” There’s rustling on the other line and Eleonora can imagine him laying in his bed, curtains drawn, one arm wrapped around his pillow, sheet pull haphazardly over his chest, the hickey she may or may not have left Saturday night bright red against his ribs. The thought makes her smile and she bites her lip. “Good flight?” 

“Yeah,” she says, leaning against the wall just outside her bedroom door. The slick sound of plastic running against fabric reaches her ears; Eva must’ve pulled the bag off the dress. She hopes her voice stays casual. “I got home a few minutes ago, found something extra in my suitcase, though.” 

“Mm, good.” He’s grinning now, she can tell. “I was worried I forgot to put it in or something when you hadn’t said anything.” 

“When did you get it?” She can’t remember being very far from him the entire trip, the longest she can think of is when he’d grab them hot chocolate or coffee or when one of them would slip off to the restroom. 

“When you were looking at the lipsticks and I was getting everything,” he says. “You seemed a little preoccupied so it was pretty easy to go back to the dressing room and grab it.” 

She blushes, remembering the several minutes she spent looking through that particular store’s lipstick selection. She didn’t need any new ones, but it’s always fun to look. And apparently a good time for boyfriends to buy dresses in secret. In her stomach, her worry begins to rise and she can’t find it in herself to beat it down. “Sneaky.” 

“I still think you should’ve gotten that red one.” 

“They were all red.” 

He chuckles and even over the phone it makes her chest warm. “You know, it was like a really dark red, but not purple-y. A really solid dark red.” 

“I already have one of those.” The fact that she knows exactly which one he’s talking about is a little concerning, but it’s the one she was testing on the back of her hand when he came back with her suit—and dress, apparently—tucked neatly in a bag, the one he liked the best even after she tested six or seven others. “And I think you need to work on expanding your vocabulary, or at least checking the labels on stuff.” 

“Can’t, my brain won’t compute anything besides economics and the principles of finance.” His voice sounds muffled, like he burrowed his face further into his pillow. 

“But it can plan to buy a dress for me in secret?” It’s itching under her skin to know why, to know if he bought it in the hopes that she’d wear it for him, because it’s cut a little more racy, because it shows so much skin, shows her figure, gives her a shape—

“You said you felt pretty in it,” he mumbles, a little hint of embarrassment coloring his tone. It’s only ever over the phone that she hears him become self-conscious and it always makes her smile. Now, it brings a sweet relief. “So I thought it’d be nice if you had it, even if you only ever wore it when you were alone.” 

For a moment, she says nothing, just listening to the gentle sound of his breathing on the other line and letting her stomach calm down. Biting her lip, she asks, “Edoardo Incanti, has anyone ever told you how nice of a guy you are?” 

“Only when they’re going to drag me.” 

Eleonora laughs loud enough that Eva pokes her head out into the hallway, an eyebrow raised, the hanger for the dress slung behind her neck and the dress itself, still hanging on the hanger, draped down her front. “What’s so funny?” 

Eleonora can’t stop laughing. 

If, once Eva leaves and she finishes unpacking her suitcase, Eleonora pulls on the dress, lays on her bed, and traces her finger along the edge of the red mark on her sternum that barely sticks out of the neckline, then that’s another secret she’ll keep to herself. 

[princeasimdiya12]

i got an idea: CU/NGE au. erica in shinji's spot, george as asuka, and harold as rei. oh and crackers is Pen Pen

Oh boy. Well I do think the idea is certainly interesting and I already have a few choices for the main cast. Although I need to take alot of artistic liberties regarding the tone since this series is DARK. Also, with all due respect, I’m gonna have to switch out the character roles you picked out for other ones if that’s cool.

With that I present Captain Underpants and the Nightmarishly Gregarious Escapades of Neon Genesis Evangelion

So to start, I actually want George and Harold to share the role of Shinji. Just like the start of the series, both of them lost their parents due to a horrific accident that occurred at NERV headquarters and how they were left at a boarding school by the director of NERV who could care less about them. The impact of their parental loss along with being abandoned was hard on the boys, but they always had each other for emotional support as they grew up. Together, they both pilot Unit CPN-UNDRPN5. The director of NERV wanted the mecha to look just like him but after the boys pilot the suit for the first time, they give him a dramatic makeover by giving him a cape and underwear. After their first successful takedown of Malakai the Turbo Toilet, the staff at NERV decide to roll with their Unit’s ridiculous appearance much to the director’s frustration. Despite their own issues with their abandonment, they decide to make the most of their situation in order to save the world. Plus all these battles against cartoony alien monsters gives them more inspiration when making comic books.

Next up, I actually envisioned Erica as Rei. Both of them are stoic, serious minded girls who prefer to keep their distance. While she may be friendly with the boys during leisurely hours, she has a hard time accepting them as friends. Mainly because she doesn’t see much value in making friends during the end of times. Before and even after the boys arrived, Erica is considered one of the top pilots as she has an incredible track record of defeating multiple angels on her own. Even after she sustains multiple injuries from fights that are considered too dangerous, she always turns out great the next day. She pilots Unit PLNGR-1NA which comes equipped with two giant plungers.

And the third/fourth member of the pilots is Melvin as Asuka. Both of them are hot-headed red heads who do not get along well with the main protagonists because of their contrasting ideals. He’s also an accomplished pilot who has used his technological skills to improve the fighting capabilities of his Unit MLVN-B0RG to endure much longer than the standard Unit. Despite his achievements, he’s still brushed off as a kid in the world of adults. What’s worse is that the adults tend to use his ideas and only give him an ounce of praise to pacify him and send him on his way. He feels frustration over how he rarely gets the praise and appreciation he deserves, especially for all he does for the organization.

Now for the adults.

As you can guess, Krupp would be the Gendo Ikari of this AU. They’re both horrible, selfish, arrogant leader figures who are all too willing to exploit children for their own nefarious purposes. Krupp was initially asked to care for George and Harold after their parents’ death which he was indirectly responsible for, but he didn’t want to be bothered by them so he had them sent to a boarding school. This has resulted in the boys developing a secret hatred for him. And while it would be too easy to make him into a complete monster just like Gendo, I would like to include some redeeming qualities. Like for instance, as the battles against the angels become more dangerous and mentally scarring, Krupp begins to second guess as to whether it’s a good idea to actually send kids to do the dirty work. At first he didn’t mind so much since to him a kid battling a giant monster in a robot suit is every child’s fantasy. But it becomes impossibly concerning when the kid ends up having a mental breakdown and all the adults stop to question whether any of this is a good idea. The Hedgehog’s Dilemma would also be explored here as Krupp starts to feel guilty over how the boys are getting emotionally distressed with each Angel battle and over what he did in the past. 

For the role of caregiver and senior officer, I chose Edith as Misato. Both of them are friendly, cheerful and slightly awkward young women who are assigned to watch after the boys. She makes alot of effort into helping the boys with their issues and providing emotional support during their times of stress. During work, she proves to be very competent as she organizes the main operations behind the NERV defenses as well as maintaining relationships with her organization and the outside world. And just like Misato, Edith was one of the few survivors of the Second Impact which left alot of psychological trauma after she was found. There were also alot of rumors that painted her as an alien in disguise as there’s no way any normal human would have survived the Impact. Also, she has a closer relationship with Krupp then Misato did with Gendo. He still cares about her and treats her with more compassion and gentleness compared to his coworkers. It’s also thanks to her influence that Krupp starts to take notice of the pilots who are making him successful to begin with.

For Ritsuko’s role, I wanted place Ms. Anthrope as the chief scientist of NERV. She works closely alongside Krupp and Melvin regarding the technological systems that maintain the Units. She’s also a close friend of Edith and is the only one who is able to understand her trauma after the Impact as well as the pressures she feels as a senior officer. She’s also aware of her growing relationship with Krupp and she feels a bit of jealousy; Anthrope has been working alongside Krupp since Day 1 and knows all about his issues and the dark secrets behind NERV. She can’t help but feel that she deserves to be recognized more for what she does behind the scenes. 

Then there’s Mr. Ree as Kaji, an old acquaintance of Edith who is also a double agent working both for NERV and the government in order to keep track of NERV’s dubious schemes. Much to Krupp’s relief, Ree isn’t interested in Edith romantically but he does care about her as a friend and pushes her to question whether her organization is as righteous as it makes itself out to be. He also serves as Melvin’s primary caregiver after his parents ‘went away’ on business.

Other minor characters include….

Professor Poopypants as Kozo Fuyutsuki. Krupp’s right hand man who helped organize NERV and helped create the Units aswell as study the nature of the Angels.

Ribble, Meaner and Fyde as the trio of First Lieutenants who often oversee the Unit vs Angel battles alongside Edith as they keep track of the Units when they obtain damage. 

Bo, Gooch and Dressy as Toji, Kensuke and Hikari respectively. Ordinary classmates of the boys who often stay on the sidelines and cheer for them.

Crackers as Pen Pen: The adorable bird like mascot.

And below the line will include spoilers for this AU as well as the one will be casted as Kaworu Nagisa. 

So for starters, Poopypants will turn out to be a “twist villain” in the endgame. His motivations of using the EVA Units and having the children fight with them was a way to experiment them in order to create perfect Units. He’s also been capturing and hording the remains of the Angels that were defeated in order to study their alien biology and unlock their powers in the hopes of using their power to improve his technology. He reveals this secret to Krupp and Anthrope knowing that neither of them will tell since they too are also involved NERV’s seedy actions so they’ll also be imprisoned for their crimes.

Next up, Erica comes from a series of clones. Having found the perfect human who’s body reacts perfectly to the Angel DNA, Poopypants decided to create an army of expendable clones to continue the Unit vs Angel battles regardless of the damage it was doing to the Erica pilots. Only Anthrope has been charged as the main supervisor for this side project but after seeing the recent Erica clone making meaningful bonds with the boys and growing as a person, she decides to pull the plug on the project to keep Erica safe. 

And finally, for the role of Kaworu Nagisa, I actually envision none other than Dav Pilkey for the role. As the mastermind behind the Angel attacks, Dav initially wanted to reconnect with Earth as for too long they’ve become disconnected and have subjected their world as being serious, oppressive, cruel and self-serving. The Angels, which all consist of wacky monsters of the weeks from the books and cartoon, were created to destroy the symbols of that corruption as well as connect with the children pilots in the hopes of reaching out to them. And it isn’t until he makes his presence known to George and Harold do they really understand what he was trying to do all along.

And that’s all I have so far for this AU. Thank you to those who actually read this whole thing. And if you have any comments or ideas for this AU, you’re more than welcome to share them by reblogging this post and adding your comments.

[noah-blues]

Hearts Awaken. Chapter I: Surprise

Warnings: Violent language. 

You didn't bother to go back to Browns' ranch until tonight. The lights inside the big house illuminated through the windows, indicating that the old man was drinking whiskey, with the whip in his hands, his stinking boots on top of the bear skin he had hunted last winter in the mountains and a macabre smile as he imagined the leather of the torture instrument hitting your exposed skin, adding one more scar to the collection you had on your back.

You took slow steps, like you carried coal instead of feet. You were exhausted, not only by what happened in the orchard and with the dogs, but by the widespread thought you dedicated to what the old man would do to you as soon as you arrived without apples or in time. Surely Eva had to do everything in the kitchen in your absence, cursing you between the teeth and making noise with her cane, as well as complaining about her back, of course. Needless to say, what Noa and Yumav had to endure, Brown certainly took it out on them when he didn't find you —you, his favorite toy.

You didn't want to get there, but you couldn't escape either. You'd die just trying or you'd be raped or abducted by another pale face the same as or worse than the old man. Your options were limited. You closed the fence, Brown's cattle moved at the noise, and the horses whinnied, it seemed that all the animals had agreed to give you a noisy welcome; one that the old man would not ignore.

You tried to sneak into the barn, knowing that Eva and the others would have locked the door to the small room where they were staying —it was something they always did so that the old man, being drunk, wouldn't come in— and even if you begged they wouldn't open. It was your fault for coming in so late. You closed the barn doors, it was dark and smelled like manure, the usual.

You gathered straw to remake your bed when in a quick and unknown movement your back was found against the wood of the barn. The dry noise confirmed the force with which you were pushed, drawing out a sore whimper as it was caught by the hand that covered your mouth. You immediately deduced that it was Brown, you foolishly thought he would be on his couch, drinking, but he was waiting for you. Now it would rain the blows, you would have to bite the inside of your cheeks not to shout so loud —if you shouted loudly, he hit you harder— and bear it.

But the whip didn't come, no one would open the fabric on your back or put you on the floor to hit you and insult you. That wait made you feel anxious, anguished, would it be another kind of torture?

“Shh” the sound, similar to that of a rattlesnake indicating its presence and danger, made you feel confused.

Little by little you opened your eyes, but it was dark and the tall figure in front of you mixed perfectly with the dark tone. You dared to swallow. You could taste the leather of his gloves over your lips and the renegade scent on it. All of him was a shadow that embraced you.

“Are you the dakota girl?”.

You nodded out of pure instinct, thinking of nothing but cooperation rather than inquiry because a stranger would ask for you or be curious.

“Don't shout” he said after you answered.

He separated his hand from your mouth and you were silent, as he ordered, looking at him, or trying to do so because you could not locate his face, you were only guided by his deep voice.

“Come with me” he command you again, opening the barn doors effortlessly, he was strong, that it would probably break your neck if you tried to escape.

He waited for you to come out, to keep an eye on you. You did it, walking slow. He pointed to the big house and they both went there. You climbed the porch, watched at your own pace, more confused than at first. Where were they all?

“Open, I found her”.

The man spoke and the door opened, making the usual squeal for lack of oil. A second figure was shown, dressed in black and hat. You didn't have time to get a good look at his face because the guy in the back pushed you and the other guy just stepped to one side. He told you to walk again, and you did it like this. On your way you saw the rest kneeling and with their hands behind their necks, heads down. There were more men, dressed in black, guarding them with guns in their hands. When they heard you, they watched you, their masks covering part of their faces, only showing you the depth of their eyes. That was enough for you, you knew they were sinners who were constantly accumulating misfortunes with every stray bullet.

You thought they would make you kneel and join the others, to be slaughtered, but the man who attacked you in the barn told you to go up to the second floor. They came to Brown's room, he was on the floor, breathing heavily and with blows to the head; for a brief moment you experienced rejoicing, but when you felt that great hand on one of your shoulders you stopped, you returned to your reality.

“Hyung, it's her”.

Two figures moved to see you. Faces uncovered and in black clothes. The pairs of eyes stuck in your figure and you felt dense, what would they want with you? If they had beaten Brown, taken the house, why didn't they just take the valuables?

“You” the other man, who compared to the one who was ordering you looked smaller (but still tall to you, only a little) called you “, come here”.

You didn't know how to react, you just stood there until the guy behind you pushed you; you walked to where you were called, to the edge of the old man's bed. There you discovered a third man, lying down, sweating and stirring. His face reflected pain and agony, his tightly closed eyelids indicated suffering.

You looked at who he called you, not understanding.

“Heal him” he ordered, and when you were near you appreciated his face; young, brown, with a strange cut that reminded you of those times when Brown sheared the boys, just for fun, making them cry because of the razor that savagely wounded their scalp.

You looked at the dying man again, cured him of what? You weren't a healer or a shaman, you didn't have that gift.

“I…” You denied “. I can't. I am not…”.

“The old man over there says yes”.

Someone hit Brown's ribs, making him cry.

“He said you are good with poisons” the strangely cut man glanced at the sick man, the blond man still with his eyes tightly clenched. “He was stung by a snake half a day ago”.

“The poison was already…” Surely the poison was already all over his body, veins, organs, you couldn't do anything, but the man interrupted your excuse and put the tip of the revolver on your temple. Cold contact with the gun made you tighten your lips.

“Do it” his voice did not seem intimidating to you at first, it was soft compared to his hostile and strange appearance, but the tone had changed, he sounded furious.

You looked at old Brown still on the floor, and the bandit close to him kicked him again.

“Just get the poison out of him, you fucking bitch” he shouted in pain.

You looked at the dying man and then at the one who was still pointing the gun at you.

“Where was he bitten?

“In the leg”.

You got closer, your hands straight to the indicated area. You removed the fabric from the pants and saw the bite. That pair of deep holes. You stroked them lightly with your fingertips, making the dying man wince. A metallic click near your temple, the other subject had not removed his revolver from you.

“Herbs”.

“What?”.

“I need herbs. To cure him” you started to recognize the affected stretches, this thanks to the swelling.

The men looked at each other, the one next to you spoke:

“What herbs?”.

“The old lady downstairs knows which ones”.

He gestured to the big guy who had taken you there, out of the room.

“What else do you need?”.

You moved his leg without the slightest care, causing the light-haired one to scream.

You didn't look at him or who he was pointing the gun at.

“Much, much faith” you replied.

“If the word is spoken, things exist. The word in men's mouths has powers. But when the wise man finds the right words and knows how to pronounce them with the right feeling, they heal. That is when the word ceases to be a word to be a prayer, and prayer ceases to be a prayer to be a cure…”.

The chief's words were hardly a murmur to you, a distant one, for you were lost in the warmth of the arms of your mother who sat near the fire, beside your grandmother and father. All were attentive to the chief's counsel, not because he was the chief, but because he was the wise man of the tribe. Not only did he heal the sick with prayers that the spirits whispered into their ears and he pronounced properly, he also revealed the hidden messages on earth, in heaven and in water, or when someone had dreams that he could not comprehend, he made them clear.

Your mother stirred you gently, she didn't want you to sleep in the middle of something so important. You even felt your father's look.

“If you don't pay attention, how can you go with me tomorrow to recognize the poisonous of the non-poisonous?”.

With regret you settled into your mother's lap, struggling against sleep to listen to the chief’s advice.

It wasn't the language of the pale face that your lips loosened, it was the language of your people. Your roots. You applied that odorous paste of herbs that Eva always stored in the affected area and you did not stop praying. They were a few words that you had learned from your people, you didn't know the rest due to the massacre of your tribe, with no one left to teach you the rest.

Many like you were uprooted from their tribes at a very early age, being sold to whites. The majority had to forget, obligatorily, the rituals, the lullabies, the symbols, the memories and everything that represented the tribe of each one to avoid being beaten, humiliated and even killed. You had not even been saved from it, for you did not even remember the name your mother had given you. Not hearing it had made you forget it, and you only reacted to the insults that the pale faces had made your name seem.

But you remembered the prayers, not complete, not all of them, but part of them. And you remembered how to get poison out.

You began to be hot, because you had not stopped putting herbs in the calf of the man nor in repeating the prayers, from beginning to end, ignoring the dryness of your mouth and trying to ignore, equally, the still cold contact of the weapon put in your head. The other man hadn't left your side all that time.

More men went in and out, to bring herbs, water for the dying, to pull out Brown's unconscious and throw him into the hallway; you heard noise below, fortunately not of weapons. You chewed the herbs to make pasta, squeezing the juice, and then repeated the prayers again, without grimacing at the bitter taste. When you saw the herbs turn dark, you changed them.

You didn't have visual access to the men, but after going through the shock of the moment, finding yourself surrounded by them and with that gun in your head, you remembered what happened in the morning. You didn't know the man who shot the dog was one of them, or if it was the one pointing at your head, or maybe it was another and your hunches were confused, but it was too coincidental. There were almost no bandits in these parts, Brown's ranch was little compared to the northernmost gold mines or the counties with banks, but that did not prevent the old man from having a shotgun at hand. And although the area was not safe either, those suspects on horseback only passed by, keeping their distance when the old man showed up on the porch with the shotgun loaded; Brown was not one of those who invited in those who could kill him.

But there are always first times.

“Man can store up riches, sins and tragedies, but never favors. Favors go beyond the physical, sometimes they are the difference between life and death. It's important to receive and give favors. It's a fundamental barter in the soul of our tribe. Never owe a favor”.

And even if you didn't want to save him, because he was a pale face, because they would surely kill you later, you wouldn't leave the world without a favor. You didn't want your soul to get stained.

“Knife” you asked.

The three men —for the moment— inside the room looked at you, suspiciously. Did you sense the thought that crossed their minds, an native with a knife near his dying and vulnerable companion? Of course those looks.

“I won't rip his scalp out” that wasn't tradition in your tribe. “I'll use it to draw the excess blood” you explained.

The one on the other side of the room looked at who you guessed was the boss —the one with the gun— waiting for his answer.

This one addressed you.

“If you make a move, I'll blow your head off”.

“If I wanted him to die, I would have let him die, even with your gun to my temple. The death of a pale face wouldn't keep me awake. I'm just returning one favor for another favor”.

You replied.

The eyes of both were connected and you did not know which reflex was found on the other side of those pupils, they were cloudy.

“Give her the knife” ordered the leader.

They gave you the knife and you watched the dying man.

“It'll hurt” and you cut it.

Brown's room was filled with screams.

Fortunately, they weren't yours.

You wiped your mouth and erased the traces of saliva mixed with blood and poison from your chin. You saw the blackish liquid in the bucket, that was the poison. You'd been sucking on it for over an hour, your jaw hurt as well as your neck.

The rooster crowed and the sun hit your face. You sighed as you threw the poison into the well you had made, burying it.

You weren't alone, they kept an eye on you. Just like the rest that were still inside the house, while old Brown was in the rocking chair, sore, beaten and tied up. When you finished burying the toxins, you went to the well to carry water. Since none of the bandits were willing to have everyone free around the house, now you were the one obeying their orders. You took out the bucket and walked into the house. It had been an exhausting night, for him, but especially for you.

You came to the bed where the blonde-haired man was, and to your surprise, he was awake. His eyes rested on your figure, then on your face, on your messy hair, on your hands coloured with greenish material and your dry lips. He formed a smile.

“Hello” he saluted.

You didn't answer, you just focused on pouring the water into the jug, waiting for more directions from the leader who was stretching and looking through the window.

“If you're already courting, Seonghwa, it means you can ride”.

“Come on, Hongjoong, don't be grumpy. I'm alive. Or so I think” he stopped talking to who you thought Hongjoong was to see you “is it true, isn't it? Am I alive?

You just nodded, cut your answers. You had to be more careful now that they didn't need you anymore.

This Seonghwa guy chuckled.

“It's lucky I took a shower yesterday, I didn't expect a nice woman to kiss my leg”.

You looked the other way, not knowing what to say. Did that man call you ‘nice’?

“Fever is not yet low” you concluded, and the blond man laughed again at your comment.

“Lucky Seonghwa has nice legs”.

Someone else came in, her hair similar to that ash mustang you saw. His fleshy lips formed a smile when he saw you.

“I'm sure if it had been San, or Mingi, she wouldn't have dared to bring her lips closer with the hyung gun in her head” he said.

You didn't react. How was you supposed to do that in the middle of a situation like that?

“Wooyoung, call San, pick up Seonghwa and help him get on the horse, we've already lost a lot of time”.

“Next time I'll try not to take so long to die” was Seonghwa's sarcastic comment.

“It would be a great favor on your part” Hongjoong replied.

The bandits, led by Hongjoong, had locked everyone in the barn, except you and Brown —who was still in the rocking chair with a huge pounding and bruises— who were on the porch, watching the bandits assemble their chair, or helping the newly revived Seonghwa get on his steed.

“San, get your fucking hand off my ass!”.

“You mean the opposite! You get your ass out of my hand!”.

“For Esther's breasts, stop fighting!”.

You bit your inner cheek, it was funny the behavior of those three —if you remember well they were Seonghwa, San and Wooyoung. After several attempts, complaints related to Seonghwa's ass, they finally managed to get him up.

San sighed as if he had done a tiresome job and looked at his leader.

“I will never touch his ass again”.

The others didn't immute at his words.

San wiped his hands over his pants and gave you a look. You diverted the eyes without knowing why, that man's gaze was… deep. When you returned your sight again, believing that this one surely entered in arranging his chair, you found the surprise that he looked at you playfully, to nod for himself and to snap the fingers, attracting the attention of all. Including your curiosity.

“Can we keep her? She already proved that she knows about poisons, having her would prevent me from hearing Mingi cry and inherit the crap he calls treasures to imaginary girlfriends”.

The petition sounded so out of place that even you opened your eyes in surprise. Although his tone seemed humorous, as if what he said most of the time was a joke, there was a seriousness anchored to his words. And because of the tired sigh of another of the boys, the one on the brown horse and you had seen an apple split in half without any problem, he scolded him

“Oh no, San. The last time it was a possum, which by the way you suffocated when you fell asleep, now do you want to adopt a girl? The answer is no”.

 “But she knows about poisons!”.

“And to kill” said Hongjoong.

“Of course, and we don't do that too” said San, putting his hands in his pockets, taking funny steps towards you.

You instantly regressed. Seeing your action, he stopped and only smiled at you from a distance. That confused you more.

“I like her eyes”.

“Hm?”.

“They are a mixture of hatred, resignation, courage and scarce peace; when mixed it results in a beautiful color”.

You heard one say, you watched the tallest two in the group.

That comment made you frown. What did he know about the color of your eyes?

You watched him unconsciously. And he only smiled at you, smiled at you in such a gentle manner that it gave you chills. How could a man smile like that after reading your eyes perfectly?

Of all of them, he probably made you more nervous.

A sharp blow got you out of your trance. You heard old Brown complain and watched him, again, on the floor. Hongjoong had cut his strings and looked at you.

Then he looked at San, who smiled in response.

“He won't get up from the ground for several days, San took it out on him”.

“I hate men who mistreat women” he commented.

Wooyoung snorted.

“Says the man who murdered his fiancée”.

“That was a very different case. She deserved it”.

“Aha”.

Hongjoong tried not to roll his eyes.

“But as soon as he does, he'll be the same old bastard again. And again all of you will begin your sad lives”.

Hoongjoong drew a knife, which he drew and extended toward you. Of course, you didn't take it.

“Or you can do your good deed and cut his throat, free all those people”.

“Aren't you going to kill us?”.

He raised an eyebrow.

“I'd have nothing to gain by killing all you, except to soil my new pants”.

You watched the knife, not knowing whether to take it or not. Would you be able to kill Brown? For many nights you dreamed of it, but when you saw it in the face, when he yelled at you, or just hit you, you hesitated to even do so. Killing a person wasn't like cutting a chicken's throat, and even if you did it every day, you still felt sorry for the animal; feeling sorry for the animals, that their death hurt you, still meant that a person's death would hurt more, even if it was old Brown.

Hongjoong put the knife away when he saw you weren't taking it. San released a sound of disappointment and the rest of the bandits decided to ride a horse, bringing the scene to a close.

Hongjoong walked down the stairs of the porch, his spurs tinkling, you watched his feet, the way he walked away. You heard the horses stirring restlessly, the metal of the reins… the sound of what might have been your only chance to avenge yourself.

“What are you doing there, stupid?! Come and help me!”.

You heard the old man screaming and insulting, you looked at him with disgust. You always avoided contact with him, he disgusted you. That's why you kept yourself as unattractive as possible, although in the eyes of a lustful man that didn't matter, but it had worked with Brown, that and the paprika —he is allergic to paprika — you sprinkled on your clothes.

You took a look at the outside of the corral, they were already leaving, and you stayed there, with everyone and with Brown, living that life. You squeezed your lips, wishing you could have taken that knife, but your fingers were so hard that you doubted you could even take the weapon.

Downstairs, Brown was still yelling at you and you were staring out at the sky. It was so blue, so beautiful.

In the midst of your self-absorption, where Brown's voice disappeared as well as the pull on your skirt, a distant echo of horse footsteps infiltrated your mind.

But it was his voice that brought you to reality.

“Hey, girl” he called you and you looked at his face. Hidden under that hat and the mask, you could hardly guess the movement of his lips, you recognized the horse: the ash mustang, and you could identify it, the one who saved you. He looked around the place and then at you “, you can choose to stay on this piece of land forgotten by the devil himself and stay frustrated every day your owner keeps breathing and didn't die with his saliva” he pointed to old Brown, who could barely see who was telling you all that. You saw him raise an eyebrow and continued “, or you can join us, be useful and join us until we consider you disposable or run away from us, without a bullet hitting you; whichever comes first. What do you say?";

For a moment you thought he was joking, but of all of them he was the one with the most serious face. You felt a little strange being called a girl as if he was much older, because of his appearance you deduced that he was younger than you. But his broad shoulders and that aura made up for the lack of years and made him a dangerous subject.

You looked at him, hesitating. He was still staring at you.

You looked down at old Brown, he had you by the ankle, looking at you with rage, as if he guessed your dark thoughts.

“Don't even think about it, bitch” he hissed furiously.

You looked back at the bandit.

“I'm coming” you replied.

Brown screamed in pain when you stomped on his hand. Unable to stand up or catch you, he could only see you riding the chair of that shameless man who, brazenly, took off his hat to say goodbye.

And you spit and looked at him with contempt.

The mustang whinnied. You looked at the sky, felt the wind in your face and inhaled the smell of leather.

The sky seemed more blue and the sunlight more welcoming.

Notes: So... its all, for today. Thanks for your comments and likes, you make me happy. Anyway, enjoy and welcome to the tragedy and angst!

See you soon!

[starboundfic]

Chapter 16

Silence

Chapter 15 - Interlude 1

Gonna say this upfront, this chapter’s a doozy, in terms of things that happen in it.

A huge thanks goes out to my beta for this, because I’d still be stuck on this without them. This chapter is something of a milestone for me, too, as it's one I've had planned out since I first started the fic back in ye olde days of '17.

PLEASE DO REREAD CHAPTER 15 IF YOU READ IT ONLY WITHIN THE FIRST THREE DAYS OF ME POSTING IT. YOU’LL BE EXTREMELY CONFUSED OTHERWISE.

“We’ll provide support from orbit,” Allura said over the comm. “And let you know if anything changes.”

“Thanks for that,” Stan replied, while Jordan focused on taking a few deep breaths. He thought Eva had seemed a bit distracted earlier, but now he knew why. Rick’s down there.

“So we know what to do, right?” Eva asked.

“Yeah,” Jordan replied. They’d spent almost an hour coming up with the plan, and while it was on the simpler end of the scale, he had a good feeling about it.

First, they’d all take out any fighters the base might have. Then, they’d all go on foot into the base—he and Koji would handle one half of the building, while Eva and Stan would look through the other, with all four of them freeing anyone and everyone on the way.

After that, it’d just be a matter of getting everyone to the castleship.

She’d also mentioned having seen two actual-Galra guards there, with a third named Lirax supposedly in charge of the place. Which meant looking before shooting.

Jordan knew that…well, that it was unavoidable whenever it came to Lions-against-battlecruiser, but he wasn’t too keen on the idea of actually taking anyone out himself. I’ll just…try to knock ‘em out if I see ‘em. Yeah, that’ll work.

Unlike the time on the Balmera, there was no fanfare to the four Lions launching, aside from a small reassuring purr from Blue. The sun was already up, so they had a clear view of the base itself—and they had a clear view of them in return, if how fast a swarm of fighters swarmed out of an opening in the cliff face below was anything to go on.

“Okay, so the building goes underground too,” Jordan noted.

“There has to be a map in the system,” Koji said. “I should be able to get in after a few minutes.” Rover was in the Green Lion with him—they didn’t have Shiro to get directly into any computers, so the drone was the next best bet.

The Red Lion moved first, a red-hued beam sweeping across in an arc and melting one-fourth of the fighter swarm in seconds. Jordan’s surprise at the speed of it didn’t keep him from having Blue freeze another portion, while the other two took care of the rest.

Then again, Rick was at stake here.

“Was that it?” Eva asked after a few minutes, suspicion tinging her voice, as the last of the smaller ships had been sent plunging toward the bottom of the canyon.

“I think so,” Jordan replied, looking at a side-screen—Blue running a scan wasn’t showing anything else. “Talk about bad security.”

“I don’t like this,” Stan muttered. “You sure they didn’t know you and Shiro were here?”

“I’m sure,” Eva replied, the Red Lion moving forward to blast down part of the wall surrounding the base, otherwise forming a nice landing area for the four Lions by the edge of the cliff.

There was no one and nothing on the outside of the base, and the front door couldn’t hold up against the explosive charges Coran had been very clear in explaining to Jordan in terms of how they worked. “That tower on the right side looks like it might have a control room,” Stan pointed out.

“Then we’ll take that side,” Jordan said. “There’s probably gonna be a lot of robots in here.” And then some. And speaking of robots, there was ten of them right behind the door, which all immediately started shooting, which meant three of them were ducking behind the wall again while Jordan shot back at them with his bayard.

They managed to bring the number down to four; the leftover sentries were steadily making their way toward them, once they’d found a gap in his shooting. Then he heard a loud bang, followed by the sentries falling back with holes burnt into them. A sideways look confirmed that yes, it was Stan’s bayard that did that. A shotgun? Huh.

Nice.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

They decided to split up after that, with Jordan taking the lead. Koji had no complaints about that, looking back over his shoulder every thirty seconds or so. Given the alarm droning on, they definitely weren’t here unnoticed.

There was a total of two patrols they ran into on the way, both consisting of three sentries, but they went down fast.

Something felt weird about that, but it could also just be that most of the sentries had been in the fighters. This wasn’t a very large base, either—and it was the only Galran establishment on the whole planet.

Green was assuring that it would go fine. And then they reached the control room, which had two Galrans in it, who both froze and turned when they heard the door.

So much for fine.

Jordan moved first—the alien might not have registered it until it was about to happen, with how fast he’d moved in and punched him in the face. The other moved then, rushing at him, though he stopped when he saw the blue bayard pointed at him, slowly putting his hands up with a nervous smile.

It was over faster than Koji expected it to be, and it didn’t go down like…well, like part of him was thinking it would, which he was glad for.

“We got the control room taken care of,” Jordan reported, glancing at the two now-tied-up (the next room over happened to be a storeroom with some rope in it) Galrans before adding “It wasn’t that hard, either.”

“Well, that’s one good thing,” Stan said. “This side of the building’s like a maze.”

“Just give me a minute or two,” Koji muttered, attaching a cable between his tablet and Rover. “Have you found him yet?”

“Not yet, no. We just—” There was a pause, with blaster fire being heard. “We just found some more sentries, though.”

“Do you guys need backup?” Jordan asked.

A minute dragged by, before “We got it. There’s…really not as many of these things around as I thought there would be, though.”

“It could be that you took out most of them with the fighters,” Allura suggested. “But that is strange. A prison base wouldn’t usually be so lightly-guarded.”

“How’re things looking from up there?” Jordan asked.

“The alarm you’re hearing now is only for the base, and you got there before anyone could send out a distress signal, so it should be all clear.”

“Great, that just makes it easier for us,” Eva said. “C’mon!”

“H-Hey, Eva! Wait up!”

Jordan let out an exasperated sigh, rolling his eyes a bit, running a hand down his face while looking upwards as if asking Why?

Koji bit down a smile—it was a little piece of normalcy in the midst of all of this.

He still handled the tech.

Jordan was still their gunner.

Stan was trying to be the voice of reason.

And Eva keeps running off and doing whatever she wanted to.

The translation program missed a few symbols, but an otherwise-still-legible map came up on the screen. “It looks like there’s three floors to the building, not counting the hangar,” he reported. “I’m sending the map to you now.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There was a stark difference between seeing the inside of the base and seeing it from ventilation grates.

For one, when they did find the cells, they were seen by some of the prisoners. Some of whom obviously recognized them, with all the gasps and whispers and staring.

“How are these things even supposed to open?” Stan muttered, glaring at one of the doors.

“There’s a code,” the alien inside whispered. Eva didn’t recognize her, and was pretty sure she wasn’t from Alwas. “I don’t know what it is, though.”

“Of course…” Stan paused, glare being directed to the corresponding keypad to the door, and his bayard flickered into form. “Gonna try something. You might want to stand back.”

The alien did as such, and one shot later, the keypad on the door was very broken, and the door slowly slid open.

If you can’t work with it, break it. A motto she lived by, so she approved of the action.

The alien inside came out hesitantly, wariness all over her features. She was humanoid, aside from having four pupilless blue eyes and gold-colored scales, long rabbit-like ears, a crest of white feathers on top of her head, and six-fingered clawed hands.

“Thank you,” she said finally, voice still quiet. “I was beginning to give up hope that we’d ever be free from here.”

“It’s nothing.” Eva said, not exactly paying attention. “There’s someone else like us here. Do you know where he is?”

The alien tilted her head to one side slightly, before replying “There is, yes. He’s not on this floor, though I think—”

Eva didn’t wait to hear the rest, instead turning on her heel to bolt toward the stairs, though she remained near enough for long enough to hear a startled curse come from Stan. Whoops.

She was halfway down the wide hallway that made up the first floor down when she heard a low “Just what is going on up there?” The volume by itself indicated that it was someone asking their neighbor, but it was the fact that she knew the voice that had her skidding to a halt.

“Rush?” she asked, happily surprised. There was a pause, before she heard a shuffling from one of the nearby cells, and then saw a glimmer through the space on the door.

“Is that Molly?” He sounded halfway between surprised, startled, and disbelieving, before laughing. “It is! How in Byrus’ name did you even get out here?”

“Long story,” she replied, smile just a tad wobbly, before glaring at the keypad, and then at her bayard—which she hadn’t realized she was holding until then. Okay seriously, how is this thing supposed to work? Red did something of a mental sigh, before pushing an idea that vaguely translating as imagining the arrow was there.

Well…it was something, at least. The object took its bow-shape seconds later, and she took a few steps back from the door. “I’m gonna try something,” she warned, before thinking back on how Prince Aikka used his bow. She felt a little silly in just pretending the arrow was there—but only for a second, because the next thing she knew, she felt a slight weight on her hand, in the form of a plasmatic red arrow. Huh.

Pulling it back took a little more effort than she thought it would, but there wasn’t much time between figuring that out and a broken console.

The door was practically thrown sideways, which didn’t match up with how nonchalantly Rush stepped out, stretching. “Ahh…it was pretty cramped in there, so it’s nice to be able to get out of it!”

Eva gave him a small chuckle but otherwise didn’t reply, her eyes wandering to the other doors. There were others from Alwas here too, and then some. So many racers...so many broken dreams and wishes. She felt a pang of sorrow, and her heart went out for them and their lost opportunities.

She may have wanted to win, and was more than willing to take them out to do it, but…it all got ripped away from them, and now they were impossibly-far from home to boot.

She almost didn’t notice that Stan had come after her as she was musing to herself, until she’d heard him saying “Think there’d be some sort of override switch up there?”

“Maybe?” Koji sounded dubious. “I’ll check. In the meantime—he should be at the end of the hall on the next floor down.”

“Jailbreak and a rescue mission rolled into one thing, eh?” Rush nodded. “I’ll get everyone else out. You two go find your friend. But just so you know, I think the warden’s down there.” His tone lowered toward the end. “I think he knew you were coming.”

“There it is,” Stan muttered, coinciding with a “Oh great,” from Jordan.

“I think we can handle one guy,” Eva said, turning toward the stairway.

The last floor was lit in the same purple as the other floors, moreso given the lack of skylights, but the first thing she heard was “So, the prestigious paladins finally grace me with their presence.” The source of the voice was at the end of the hall, with two sentries. “You’ve all caused a lot of trouble for me.”

“Have we?” Stan sounded partway between confused and disinterested. “I’m pretty sure we haven’t met.”

The Galran sputtered a bit angrily, while Eva stared hard at him for a few seconds. Then it hit her. “He was there when we left Alwas the first time,” she hissed. Stan glanced sideways at her, then at him again, simultaneously with Red providing a name—and the Galran lunging at them, while both sentries fired their blasters.

They both ducked out the way in time, with Eva focusing on the two robots. The first shot blew an arm clean off of one of them, and the second sent it down. The other robot went down on the first shot.

As for Lirax, he went down in maybe seven seconds after Stan hit him over the head with his bayard. Eva winced at the sound, though the low groan that followed indicated that the Galra was otherwise okay, if maybe unconscious.

“Well, that was sad,” Stan muttered, before asking “Koji, any luck with that override switch?”

“Uh, just one second…there!”

An alarm went off for three seconds before every door in the hallway slid open, and an even shorter pause before there was a veritable stampede of the now-former captives rushing to get out. Eva didn’t waste any time in going against the tide, ignoring Stan’s protest. “Rick? Rick, we’re…here?” She trailed off in a whisper at seeing the empty cell.

“He’s not in there?” Stan sounded confused.

“No, he’s—is there anywhere else in the building they might be?”

“There isn’t.” Koji’s words were clipped. “E-Eva, I think—I think Rick might’ve been part of the group that was moved out of this base before we got here. We missed them by ten minutes.”

“What?” she exclaimed, voice cracking slightly. “But that’s not—he was right here…”

There was a small, forced-sounding cough from somewhere behind her. “Eva, c’mon,” Stan said. “We better make sure everyone else gets out of here okay.”

She looked back at the empty cell for a few seconds longer, before sighing. “Okay…but do we know where he might be now?” she asked.

“I’ll check, but—”

She didn’t think much when she heard the footsteps behind her, first thinking it was just a prisoner who came back to see why they were still there.

She turned to direct whoever it was to follow the others; they were on a time limit, no matter how easy this was—and promptly felt her heart shoot up into her throat from sheer fear.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He hadn’t noticed the last remaining prisoner there, since they blended into the shadows. He was too preoccupied making sure there was no sentries coming to hurt and/or wrangle the released prisoners.

What Stan did notice was how fast Eva had gone blank-faced at seeing them. It was downright scary how all the emotion just slid off her expression. But only for a few seconds, because then something in her expression twitched—and then she lunged, swinging the bayard like it was a hammer instead of a bow.

The suddenness of it almost didn’t leave Stan enough time to react, moving to get between them. “Eva, what the hell are you doing that for?!” She didn’t answer, instead shooting an arrow off this time. The alien was able to get out of the way, thankfully. Whoever they were, their reflexes were insanely fast.

Completely matte-black save for a white mask-like face, Stan vaguely recognized them, so they had to be from Alwas. Creepy fellow, but who was Stan to judge? The outfit they were wearing though…it didn’t look like the one they were wearing while in the races. Stan shoved the thought to the back of his head as Eva got off another shot.

Creepy or not, it didn’t explain why Eva suddenly seemed hellbent on trying to kill them. He grabbed her by the arm, but all that got as a response was for her to shove him hard enough to make him stumble. “Stay out of my way!” she spat, the sheer hatred in her voice catching Stan off-guard. “I have to get rid of that thing!”

Well that’s never a good thing to hear.

The alien was making some arm movements as they dodged, and even Stan can recognize the universal signs for ‘Stop’ and…‘behind you?’

He didn’t even register what happened until a few seconds after it happened, only that he heard an abrupt choked sound from Eva, as well as something wet  that did not sound good—and then the Galra saying “And that’s why you don’t take your eyes off your opponent,” as the purple-colored, blood-streaked blade vanished.

To the side, the Phil (now he recognized him) went completely rigid, hands reaching out as if to catch Eva despite that fact she was trying to hurt him. Numb horror now radiating from Yellow snapping Stan out of it to go to do something.

His first instinct was to check on Eva, who’d dropped like a rock now, but he had to dive out of the way of a sideways sweep of the sword.

“What did I just say?” the Galran taunted, lunging again. “I was expecting you to be smarter, or at least have more fight in you than whatever that pathetic display was.” The swing coupled with the emphasized word was way too close for comfort, enough for him to notice a few strands of hair spiraling away.

Stan tried using his bayard—but all that got was an elbow to the face that sent him reeling. This guy was fast! Stan could hardly defend himself, let alone fight back. He was being overwhelmed and while the Phil had moved Eva away, he had the feeling this bastard wasn’t above going after them again.

They moved about the hallway, Stan trying keep himself between the Galra and Eva at all times while he tried to figure out how to get them away.

Eva was groaning in pain, he could hear it even over the clash of weapons. A swift turn that made the Galra trip a little let him see the Phil racer trying to put pressure on the heavily-bleeding wound.

Engine oil—a woman saluting goodbye—an explosion—

Stan gasped, stumbling in an attempt to stay standing as he was kneed in the diaphragm, but another hit, this time on the back, sent him sprawling on the floor, black spots flitting across his vision now. (What had that been?)

Dimly, he could hear worried voices over the comm, but it was all under the following “At least I’ll have you and the other two to deliver to Lord Zarkon. The brat’s better off dead anyways. Lord Zarkon was more than a little upset with her performance at Central Command.”

He was grabbed by the collar of his uniform and brought face level with the Galra scum preventing him and his team from leaving. The bastard that was the catalyst for them all being in this situation.

The one who hurt Eva.

“Consider it a mercy that she is dying by my hand. If anything, you’ll be thanking me—”

Stan didn’t remember what exactly happened after that. Or couldn’t, maybe. Just that some small part of him completely and utterly snapped right then.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“What’s going on down there?” Allura asked, voice tense. “Neither Stan or Eva are responding!”

“I have no idea but I’m going down there,” Jordan replied, tone icy, and Koji nodded stiltedly. What they both heard over the comms simply could not be good.

The fact that the impending-doom feeling he recognized from Sendak’s siege of the castleship had reappeared cemented that.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The first alien they’d freed had come downstairs to check on them, and had only looked for a second before rushing to a room at the end of the hall and coming back with an armful of bandages in hand.

Yellow was a distant, vague sense of something between hurry and slow the bleeding, to which Stan returned a semi-hysterical no kidding.

He couldn’t be entirely sure but he was pretty sure being impaled wasn’t good for one’s health, and Eva looked like she was halfway to being unconscious already, despite the alien’s urging to stay awake.

The amount of blood covering the floor definitely did not bode well.

He didn’t know what to do anymore at this point. Despite the Phil’s obviously-rising panic, despite the other aliens hurried whispers and glances at him to give direction, he didn’t know what to do.

The bandages were soaking through and Stan went to touch the wound and saw a small splotch of orange liquid splattered on his hands.

He was staring and—

SMACK.

Stan blinked in shock as his head was bent downward from the slap he received from the Phil, who was clearly at the end of his patience.

“The Lion—we need to go to the Red Lion,” He was able to blurt that out, and with quick nod the tall racer picked up Eva keeping her close to them as they quickly walked off.

(Eva was staying quiet; was that shock? Never mind the fact that she just looked confused by all of this.)

(He was pretty sure that wasn’t a good sign.)

The visible and audible shock/horror from the ex-prisoners was something half-lost in the haze, superseded by a blazing sort of fear that wasn’t, couldn’t be from the Yellow Lion.

The Byrusian went right to clearing a path for them, shouting for everyone else to clear a path to let them outside—and that was when the other two found them.

Jordan screamed something incomprehensible, running after the Phil, who was heading right for where Red was crouched with his ramp down already.

A touch on his shoulder made him jump, and he looked up to see Koji looking at him, face ashen with a look that was a clear-enough question in itself. The stare was returned, for a few drawn-out moments, and he thought he saw a morbid sort of recognition cross Koji’s face before he looked away.

Stan couldn’t remember what he did, but he was able to remember the sound.

And the should’ve-been-inconsequential detail that Galran blood was orange in color.

(It was a lot brighter than the red smeared over his wrists—)

He at least made it to the edge of the cliff the three Lions were on before being sick.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

She should have seen it coming. It had been too easy, all of them coming back together again, Shiro’s druid-wound notwithstanding. Allura had felt her blood freeze when Red himself had all but voicelessly screamed at her to have a pod ready for his Paladin.

Though she hadn’t seen why herself yet, she could tell by the Red Lion’s hollow relief that they’d nearly been too late.

Allura took a deep, shuddering breath, banishing those thoughts. What matters is that she’s alive. She’ll be alright.

Coran was working with a few of the more knowledgeable freed captives to work out just what they were going to do with all of them. They didn’t have nearly enough shuttles to send all of them home, after all—and a majority of them had no knowledge of anything outside of their own galaxy.

Of course, that was saying nothing about how much of a headache getting through the blockade on their galaxy would be.

If anything, it would likely be phoebs before they could even start going through, if the restrictions were still as tight as they had been ten-thousand decaphoebs ago.

Allura looked up slightly when she heard a small cough from behind her. “Some good news, princess,” Coran started. “The Pokitaran—Aihe? A cousin of hers has some connections that can help the ones whose homeworlds are behind the blockade get home. It would seem that there are some gaps in the system.” He chuckled faintly, humorlessly. Those same gaps were how this all began, no doubt. “We just have to bring them to a drop point not too far from here.”

She sighed. “That’s a relief.” As heartening as it was for the castle to have some life to it again, even with their new supplies, they wouldn’t have enough to support an extended population for more than two phoebs. Then she frowned. “Have you seen Stan or Koji anywhere?”

“Well…” Coran hesitated, before saying “Last I knew, Stan was still holed up in his room. I think Koji might’ve gone to check on him again.”

There was a lengthy pause. “Coran, would it be possible to shift the infirmary’s priority to Eva?”

“Well, yes, though it’d mean Shiro won’t be back up for another quintant…” Realization crossed his face then. “Ah, you have a point there. The main console should have the option in there.”

“Thank you. I’ll do that—and I know this is a lot to ask, but I think it’s been a while since any of our guests had a decent meal.”

Coran grinned, saluting. “Leave that to me, princess!”

Jordan was there, sitting on the floor and looking blankly at one of the two active pods, but that didn’t surprise Allura much; he’d been beside himself with worry last she’d seen him. He didn’t seem to notice her come into the room, either—not until she heard herself gasp with dismay at seeing Eva.

She had been left in the armor’s undersuit, only because there simply hadn’t been time, and while the fabric hid the injury itself from view, she could see the tear in it. The armored pieces were scattered loosely around the pod. She’d been painfully aware that their Red Paladin was young, but this just made it even more obvious.

She looked smaller in there, somehow, especially compared to Shiro, who was in the next one over.

Then Allura heard a quiet, dazed-sounding “When’s she gonna be up?” from Jordan.

“By tonight, likely after dinner,” she replied, forcing her gaze to turn to him. At seeing his startled expression, she added “I thought it might do us all some good to have her awake again sooner than later.”

The gaze was kept steady for a few long ticks, before he looked away, with a muttered “Thanks.” Allura felt the Blue Lion paying some mind to the exchange, mostly uncertain, but also thankful.

Now for the reason she was somewhat glad he was still here. “Have you seen Stan at all?”

“No.” Jordan tensed slightly, before quietly adding “I dunno what happened down there, but…whatever it is, he’s been holed up in his room for a few hours now. I think—I know Koji’s gone to check on him twice already, but…”

Aihe had explained some of their former situation as well, and it just so happened to tie into that of the Paladins’, in that the warden, Lirax, was not only formerly a commander, but had also been the one to raid Alwas in search of the Red Lion in the first place.

The Pokitaran’s use of past-tense, alongside the Yellow Lion’s uncertain brevity regarding the situation, had been enough of an explanation as to what had happened. But when Coran had gone back there to ensure no one had been left behind, he’d reported injuries not matching up with the form the yellow bayard took—a mixture of blunt and cutting.

And that just didn’t make any sense.

Allura felt a slight mental nudge from the Blue Lion, allowing her to notice the sideways questioning look Jordan was giving her now. “Mind if I join you for a while?” she asked.

“Not at all,” he replied, turning back to the pods while she sat down. Then he said “I think—I don’t think it really hit me until now. How dangerous this all is for us.” It was Allura’s turn to look sideways at him, while he went on “I mean, the closest me and M—Eva got to getting hurt was when we had to go up against the Crog during the race, but this…” He stopped, taking a deep breath. “We didn’t get actually hurt then. Or at all, during the whole thing.”

It was after briefly wondering what in the world a Crog was that Allura suddenly felt startled, a realization hitting her with the force of a charging klanmürl.

Jordan didn’t look much older than Eva.

She’d always overlooked it somehow—perhaps it was simply that he had some military training that made him seem older—but seeing him like this? So vulnerable and open? It was like a mask had been ripped off.

Allura looked down, unsure what to say in response to that. It never failed to hurt her heart seeing children forced into war.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Everything had started blurring together maybe an hour ago, but only because there had been so much to do, and it was only now that Koji found himself with some free time.

The first thing he’d done was stop by the infirmary, and he’d immediately had to force away the memory of seeing the injury. It was an ugly reminder that the situation they were in meant people were going to go out of their way in trying to kill them, and being a kid didn’t exclude Eva from it.

Jordan hadn’t moved from his spot, though Koji had sort of expected that. What he hadn’t expected was for there to be someone else in there. More specifically, the last person they raced on Alwas. “This is some impressive technology you have here,” he was saying. “I daresay it puts what they have on Alwas to shame.” The large alien was subdued in his admiration, though.

Koji, despite having never actually met him, felt that was not a normal state for him. It just felt...wrong, somehow, for him to be subdued and quiet, compared to the first impression they’d gotten of him during their team’s race against him.

“Yeah,” Jordan muttered, noticing Koji standing in the doorway after a moment and adding “There’s still another hour or two.”

Koji nodded, hesitating before asking “You don’t—know what happened down there, do you?”

The pilot, Rush if he remembered right, sighed. “I wasn’t there. You might have better luck trying to ask Spirit. He was still down there when it happened.”

“Okay…do you know where he is?”

“The last I saw, he was heading down one of halls away from where everyone is staying. I’m not familiar with this ship’s layout.”

“It’s alright. We’re still learning it too.” The guest wing they were using was right between the hangars for the Red and Green Lions. Green herself had been somewhat of a background presence since they came back to the ship, at least until now; she pushed the idea of checking Red’s hangar.

It was when he got there that the detail of Spirit being the Phil racer came up. On one hand, it meant he didn’t have to worry, since they were friendly to humans. On the other, it meant communication might be a problem. But he wouldn’t know until he tried.

He was maybe halfway to the Lion when he saw that one of Spirit’s hands was against one of Red’s paws, and that the metal under it seemed to be shimmering slightly. There was some surprised realization from Green, implying some sort of telepathy. Well, that…might make things easier.

(Koji tried not to stare at the blood staining Spirit’s clothes, and tried not to think that the Phil was not looking too friendly at the moment; his feathers were standing on end and rustling slightly, reminding Koji of a cornered bird.)

“Uh, excuse me?” he started, which had Spirit turn to look at him, the feathers smoothing out just a bit once he saw Koji. “If—if you don’t mind me asking, what happened back there in the base? Or—what happened to Eva?”

The most Koji had gotten out of Stan earlier, before he’d stopped answering anything he said, was that she’d sort of…freaked out, and attacked Spirit.

For a few moments, Spirit stared at him, before looking up at the Red Lion, and then slowly holding a hand out.

In retrospect, Koji really hadn’t been too sure how the explanation would work, given that his only example of telepathy was the Green Lion.

One second he was feeling something that could’ve maybe been described as a mental numbness, and then it was like he was both somewhere and someone else altogether. Specifically, like he was looking through Spirit’s own eyes.

The fear crossing Eva’s face before it became worryingly blank. Her ferocious attempts at attacking Spirit, and Stan trying to stop her.

Her only stopping as Lirax stabbed her through.

Spirit desperately trying to stop the bleeding. Sounds of fighting in the background.

Recognition, fear, and guilt saturated the memories so strongly that it almost had Koji being sick then, with Green then providing a thin barrier with a faint, worried growl.

“B-But—why would she do that?” he managed to ask. Another load of memories came after another hesitant pause, somehow worse than the last, even with Green stifling the emotions this time.

It started as rushing over a star-racing track, definitely on Earth somewhere, with a star-racer just ahead—blinking in reflex when a few drops of oil flashed by, having come from the star-racer—and then the pilot frantically waving at him to get away.

The feelings of genuine confusion morphing into fearful panic, before finally settling into sorrow and regret.

Koji flinched as he recognized the pilot, too. Hollow realization came over from Green, as a memory of his own was brought to the forefront of his mind: two preteens watching a TV screen at home with awe, with Miguel cursing as he fiddled with the connection. Awe turning to horror, and the live broadcast cutting to a technical difficulties screen.

Something colder settled in him, witnessing someone’s death up close and personal. It wasn’t like Haxus—he wasn’t able to keep back the shudder at that comparison—because that…that had been a fight. What happened at the end of it had been unintentional, yes, but still a fight.

This had been nothing more than a horrible coincidence. One that Spirit still felt raw over.

He remembered to stutter out a thanks, before backing away and starting back down the hallway, Spirit’s gaze feeling heavy on the back of his head.

Eva had mentioned before they’d left Arus that Don was her father, but none of them had thought then to bring up the question of who her mother was.

Now Koji was just wondering how in the world he hadn’t even started to think that the one pilot who shared the surname could’ve been her.

First, there was something else he had to do. Or at least attempt…again.

The door didn’t budge this time either, so he just opted for sitting down and leaning back against it. “Hey, Stan?” he started. “You don’t have to talk, but I need to talk to you. This—this is major. And suddenly a lot of things make sense now and I have no idea why we hadn't made this connection sooner—and I’m rambling.” Koji brought his head into his hands and sighed, taking a breath to try calming down. The emotions of today mixing with Spirit’s was making him feel ill.

“Eva Wei, Don Wei, Maya Wei—Stan, she’s Maya’s daughter.” Shaky breath and continue, and don’t forget to breathe. “That’s why she went nuts down there. I think she blames Spirit for her mom dying. I can see how too, from our perspective it looked like sabotage a-and it wasn’t! That scandal that came from that all boiling down to an engine leak.

“Eva—she must have spent all the time thinking that…” He trailed off when Green prickled, voicelessly imparting a thought of her own on it all.

(The amount of sense it would make was chilling.)

There was a ten-second silence before a strangled “Oh,” came from the other side of the door, which was what prompted Koji to find the willpower to keep going.

“And do you want to know the worst part? I think she might’ve been there when it happened, too.” What felt like a few minutes dragged by, before Koji sighed, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. He added with a little forced hope in his voice, “Eva should be up soon. And…and you can’t stay in there forever, either. It doesn’t work.”

There was a quiet shuffling sound, followed by the door opening. “I guess you’d know that, huh,” Stan muttered, voice quiet and rough-sounding. His eyes were slightly red and he overall looked disheveled, but given everything, Koji couldn’t blame him.

“Kind of,” he replied, standing up. “Look, I don’t—I don’t know what happened down there, but whatever it was…she’s gonna be okay. There’s still at least another hour, and we’re definitely going to reach the drop point for everyone else first. But—but she’ll be okay.”

We’ll be okay, he wanted to add, but the words didn’t come. Stan gave him a long look, before saying “At least that makes one of us,” and looking down again.

Koji almost hadn’t heard him with how quietly he’d said it, and carefully replied with “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“I should’ve paid more attention to Lirax.” For a moment, Stan looked like he was going to duck into his room again, but he didn’t. “If I hadn’t—”

“Hold on,” Koji interrupted, moving to put a hand on his shoulder. This was…familiar, in a way not entirely unwelcome. “I don’t—I don’t think there was anything you could’ve done to keep that from happening. If you’d done that, who knows what she would’ve done to Spirit?”

Stan froze for a few seconds, before sighing shakily. “As…as much as I hate calling that a good point…”

“Yeah,” Koji mumbled, before coming up with a subject-change. “C’mon—we should figure out where Coran put our tools from Alwas.”

“Good idea.” Stan paused, face darkening a fraction again, before saying “The orange needs to go too.”

What? “Okay, the purple’s a given , but why the—?”

“It needs to go.”

The intensity with which he’d said that made Koji flinch a little, and he nodded a few times. “Okay, okay. Complete re-painting. Maybe…red and blue?”

“Red and—” Stan stopped, blinking a few times, before smiling, alongside an amused ah-ha feeling from Green. “Yeah. I think that’d work.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Coran paused to crack his back a bit as he finished cleaning up what was left of the dishes. Many of their previous guests had been grateful for the food and had happily thanked him. It was nice to be thanked once in a while, made everything worth it. No gift, no favor, no debt repaid could ever measure up to a genuine thank-you.

Putting the last of the dishes away, he went to start on making dinner for his Princess and her Paladins. Today had been…exhausting, to put it mildly. Coran was sure everyone would be famished and need a hardy meal to get some of their stamina back and rest well for the cycle.

One would think that, after all these years of war, he would have grown immune to seeing his friends hurt, but it seems that every new grievous injury just makes his heart seize more.

It seemed they got younger every time.

Humming to himself he didn���t pay much mind to the footsteps entering the kitchen until he heard someone clearing their throat.

He paused, turning to see Koji and Stan (part of the lingering tenseness wore away at seeing the latter) their armor since exchanged for nightwear.

“Good evening to you lads, what bring you to my corner of the castle?” he greeted.

“Well, we were hoping you knew where you put some of the things you got from Alwas,” Koji explained. “Me and Stan were hoping to take a crack at the Arrow again tomorrow.”

Coran thought on that for a moment. “Most of the things from the first floor are on the floor, though the box of…paints, I think? Those should be next to the wooden box with the broken latch. We didn’t get much of a chance to organize it all very much.” Coran smiled sheepishly at the boys.

“…box?” Stan sounded confused.

“Oh yes, a strange little thing. Reminded me of Allura’s jewelry box, only it had no jewelry, just a photo.” Coran turned back to his tasks, deciding on some of the spices acquired from their brief stop on Alwas. He hoped they would enjoy dinner tonight. Tonight’s dinner would likely be some trial-and-error on his part, but they deserved something at least somewhat familiar.

Another recollection on the photo came to him, having him add, “Now, I might be wrong, but I think Eva’s in it.”

A beat of silence, before Stan asked “Is the photo still in there?”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The first thing she felt was cold. Not the winter-night type of cold, either—more like an all-encompassing cold that superseded everything else.

Then she heard a hissing sound, followed by her ears popping, and then the next thing she knew someone had caught her when she’d slumped forward. “E-Eva?” she heard Jordan ask tentatively.

“Jordan?” she mumbled, blinking a few times before backing out of the grip, stumbling a bit when she bumped into something. “What…what happened?”

Jordan stared at her, face slightly pale, before asking “You don’t remember?” instead of answering the question. Remember? Remember what?

Her head felt fuzzy, and her whole body was sore, like she’d slept for too long and still woke up sleepy. A chinking sound reached her ears and she looked down to pieces of her armor littering the floor around…one of the healing pods?

Then it came back like a slap to the head, at the same time as Red mentally tackling her.

The attempted rescue mission. Rick not being there. Spirit. And—

“Wh-Whoa, hey! They’re—they’re not here. We dropped them off on some outpost on…well, the outpost was named Astera. They’re all gonna get home. Maybe not soon, but eventually.”

Eva stared at him for a few seconds, before saying “Oh.” On one hand, she was relieved on a deeper level than she thought humanly possible. On the other…the guilt was something between uncalled-for and wholly-expected.

Spirit had nothing to do with her mother’s crash.

It had been an engine leak.

That something so small had been what had done in such a famous star-racer pilot was almost unbelievable. Almost too cruel to be true, and yet it was.

Eva numbly recognized the room’s layout once she started to come back to herself, made note of Shiro still being in a pod, and…and the second pod slipping back into its hatch in the floor, now that she wasn’t standing in it. Why had she been in it?

“Jordan, what—did something else happen?”

“I…uh…”

He didn’t get to answer, since Allura walked by then and saw her. “Oh, you’re awake!” she exclaimed, her shoulders slumping slightly in a way that enunciated the pure relief in her voice.

“Well, yeah, but what—”

Allura didn’t let her finish, coming forward to grab her by the arm and start leading her down the hall, saying “Come with me for a dobosh. There’s something I wanted to give you.”

“Okay,” she muttered, now directing a blatant feeling of confusion at Red.

The Lion’s presence went stilted, hovering between uncertainty and sheer relief, before suggesting that they go for a flight tomorrow and going distant, otherwise also not answering her question.

The hallway they ended up in wasn’t one Eva had been down before, ending with a bedroom that was definitely bigger than the ones she and the others had. It didn’t really occur to her that it was Allura’s until the princess opened a closet and started rifling through it, throwing various articles of clothing onto the bed while muttering “Now where did I put it?”

There was a vanity up against one wall, and the bed was definitely a lot bigger. The whole room was a weird shade of iridescent blue, and there was a mirror just like the one in Eva’s own room. That was as much as she got to look around before she heard a “Here it is!” from Allura; the princess was holding something sunset-hued in color with a gold trim, definitely clothing of some variety. “I wasn’t sure if you had anything like this in your closet, and I know this is too small for me now. Why don’t you try it on?”

“Um—okay but—what happened?” Allura froze, smile slowly vanishing. “I mean…why was I in there?” she asked, suddenly feeling uncertain.

“You were...injured rather severely,” was the response given. “You were in there for a few vargas. I don’t know what exactly happened, though.”

And that would explain why both Jordan and Red were acting the way they were. She took the piece of clothing—a nightgown by the look of it—before glancing at Allura again, who promptly turned around.

It was in working to get the top half of the undersuit off that Eva noticed the two parallel holes in it, one in the front and one in the back, but she didn’t think too much of it. Not until she saw the definitive cause for the holes.

She heard a sharp “Oh,” and didn’t realize that she’d been the one to say it until she heard Allura saying “Those are there to stay, unfortunately.” Her eyes were still averted, but she’d turned her head enough for Eva to see that she was biting her lip. “The pods can only do so much.”

It wasn’t even that big of a scar, being maybe an inch-and-a-half long, and she knew for a fact that she had one on her back too.

Looking at it made her feel nauseous.

How everyone was acting made way too much sense now.

Eva quickly put on the nightgown to hide the scar from herself if for a little while…and ended up getting tangled in the fabric in her haste, to the point where Allura had to help her remove it and put it back on.

The nightgown was a little too big, in that it was loose around her shoulders and went all the way to her ankles, but whatever it was made of was soft. “I-It’s—this is nice,” she managed to say, prompting Allura to look.

The princess looked solemn for a moment, before a genuine smile replaced it. “It does look nice,” she agreed, smiling gently. “Now, come on. I’m sure the others will be happy to see you.”

Jordan was in the dining hall with Coran, with the former poking at a plate of what was probably the last of the preserved fish and vegetables from Arus. Coran saw them first, with a greeting of “There you are, Number Five!” which had the added effect of making Jordan jump straight into standing, almost falling over with how fast he turned.

“Uh—Eva, you look—nice?” he stuttered out, face flushing slightly. There was a stifled chuckle from Allura, while Eva gave him a flat look.

Allura looked around, frowning slightly, before asking “Where are the other two?”

“Right here,” Koji replied, with both him and Stan coming from one of the other halls. Koji promptly stopped mid-step, stammering out “O-Oh, Eva! You’re—you’re up!” He took a few steps forward before stopping again, looking uncertain all of a sudden, before asking “H-How are you feeling?”

“A bit numb,” she replied, though the words came out more tonelessly than she wanted them to. Koji bit his lip, looking sideways for a second at Stan, who’d gone completely stiff.

He’d been there when it happened, and Eva looked at the floor when that memory came back up. Now that the shock of seeing the aftermath of it was starting to wear out, it was finally hitting her that she almost died back there.

“Guys, I—I’m sorry,” she mumbled, voice hitching slightly. “I just—if I hadn’t—”

“H-Hey,” Jordan stuttered slightly. “Eva, it’s not—it wasn’t your fault th-that…” He trailed off, alongside Eva hearing approaching footsteps.

Stan looked like he was going to say something before looking nothing short of uncertain, before glancing at something he was holding in his hand that looked like a photograph. “You should have this,” he said, holding it out to her face-down. She took it almost hesitantly, and turned it over.

Eva wasn’t sure how long she stared at the photo, just that it was long enough for her chest to start protesting with a lack-of-oxygen ache. It wasn’t the photo she’d held onto for so long, because that never left her room.

Couldn’t be, because this one had her mother in it. And there was only one other person who could possibly have had this in the first place. Which would mean…

He didn’t forget.

She heard voices, from both sides and from behind her, but nothing registered, not until she suddenly felt something warm around her, and it took her a few seconds to realize that someone was hugging her. When was the last time someone had done that…?

She may as well have physically felt something in her break then, because then it felt like she just couldn’t get herself to not cry at that point. It was all she could do to make sure she kept holding the photograph so that it wouldn’t be damaged now—and then she heard a voice from right over her head.

“I got you, d-don’t worry.” Stan, Stan was the one hugging her, and he sounded like he was crying too. “I’m sorry I couldn’t—I didn’t—do much before. Today…it’s not gonna happen again. Alright?”

Slowly she felt other arms wrap around her. “We’re here for you partner, you…you don’t have to hide anything anymore.” Jordan, he sounded like he was getting emotional now too.

And a third. “We’re here for each other now, like we should’ve been during the race. Like a team. We aren’t going anywhere.” Koji.

Slimmer hands covered the one she had over the photo.

“I know it’s hard to grieve, especially when you want everything to go back to how it used to be. But some things…some things, there’s no going back from. But that doesn’t mean our future is hopeless. We will make a better future. For all our families.” Allura.

A hand on her head, firm and gentle. “We may not have all wanted each other around in the beginning, but we’re learning the ropes. We will pull through, and we are not leaving anyone behind!” Coran.

Red was a solid mental presence through it all, and beyond him was nothing but sincerity from the three she was tied to now that were here—the fourth was there, beyond a haze, but she had no doubt that Shiro would be with them all the way through this too.

She finally knew the truth behind what had happened, and while she wasn’t ready to sort through that tangle of emotions just yet…she wasn’t alone this time.

It was all she could do to say “Thank you.”

[ngenewyear]

Gift for thehprevolution from aubergineinfatuation.

Sorry this is a little long!

Fic:

“Shinji-kun, you are the apple of my eye.”

“…”

“The light of my life, my only sunshine.”

“…?”

“If I were to compare you to something, a summer day might be too cliche, and our contemporary understanding of an angel not entirely accurate, but –”

“Kaworu-kun, what are you talking about?”

Shinji sets down the homework he’d been trying (and failing) to complete for the last twenty minutes. He often prefers to study in Kaworu’s room, half because Kaworu is there but half because pretty much everyone else isn’t, but it does occasionally carry the occupational hazard of Kaworu being like…this.

“Oh, you looked up.” Kaworu smiles pleasantly, completely undeterred by Shinji’s former unresponsiveness. “I was trying…. what is it that you Lilin call it? Oh, right. I was trying some flirting techniques.”

Shinji blushes in spite of himself, in spite of the fact that they are already dating so Kaworu has no reason to flirt (and Shinji has no reason to let it affect him so much either); opting for the easiest course of action, he can only ask “Why?”

“Actually,” Kaworu says, propping himself up on one elbow. It seems to be his favorite position. “There was a book I found, when I was at your house the other day.”

“A book?”

“Yes. It was called, The Five Steps to Woo Any Man. Apparently it belongs to Katsuragi-san, but she said I could borrow it.”

Shinji recalls, quite distinctly, the way Misato had surrounded herself with a tower of beer cans and refused to get into bed until 1am, when he and Asuka had dragged her. There was something about Kaji, something about Ritsuko, but Shinji has stopped paying attention at this point. All he knows is that, apparently, leaving Kaworu and Misato alone is probably not a good idea, not even for the five minutes he left to go get snacks.

He wonders, distantly, where she even got that book.

“The first chapter was on compliments,” Kaworu says, and suddenly the book has materialized in his hand and is being waved above his head. “I decided to try out the ones they had in here, but Shinji-kun, you deserve every –”

“Kaworu-kun, you do know what ‘woo’ means, right?”

“Of course I do.”

“You don’t need to…. woo me. We’re already…” Shinji has no idea what he’s embarrassed by, after all this time, but as always, saying it out loud feels strange. “You know. We’re a already dating.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t compliment you?”

“No, but –”

“I think I’ll continue studying this anyways. Lilin mating rituals are so strange, after all.” and Kaworu’s smile is uncharacteristically mischievous, making Shinji’s heart skip. In both the good and the ‘slightly scared of what’s coming next’ way.

An eternal fifty/fifty with Kaworu.

And so Shinji decides that it’s time to take matters into his own hands. Abandoning his homework to the floor, he pulls himself up to Kaworu’s bed and makes a grab for the book.

Predictably, Kaworu dodges him, deftly switching it from one hand to another and then disposing of it somewhere – Shinji can’t tell where because Kaworu also manages to grab him and pull him to his chest, locking him in a gentle yet simultaneously firm backhug.

“Nice try, Shinji-kun,” he says, in a way that suggests he’s not planning on letting go any time soon.

Shinji finds that he’s okay with that.

x-x-x

It is barely two days later but Shinji has already forgotten entirely about the book and all of its contents. He has forgotten because Kaworu has done nothing to remind him – at least until he comes home and there are flowers pushed into the mail slot and piled around the front door.

He pushes open the door and is greeted with bouquets, bunches of flowers tied with twine, vases overflowing with red and white and pink. Misato sits in the middle of it, looking bemused, while Asuka stands by the kitchen table, looking pissed. Penpen chews on a leaf.

When Shinji walks through the door, Misato gives him the look of a predator who has just landed on some juicy prey. The corners of her lips quirk up, and Shinji immediately backs away.

Of course, he’s too late.

“Shinji-kun~” she says, voice raising sweetly, and Shinji shivers. “Why is it that ever since this morning, I’ve been receiving flowers all addressed to you?”

“Yeah,” Asuka says, plucking a flower from a vase and staring at it in disgust. “I’d like to know, too. Are these all from Ayanami? I didn’t realize she was capable of having feelings.”

It’s at times like these Shinji is glad he never told either of them about his relationship. It’s not as though he has anything to hide, per se – but he figures he receives enough teasing (from Misato) and verbal abuse (from Asuka) on a daily basis that he can be forgiven for wanting some privacy regarding his personal affairs.

And, of course, if Asuka paid him any measure of attention in school she might have figured it out – because Kaworu is neither subtle nor willing to be – but thankfully she has adopted a strategy of acting like Shinji is a stranger whenever she encounters him in a public place, which she sticks to unwaveringly.

As for Misato, Kaworu is just Shinji’s friend. A friend with a total lack of personal space and a penchant to stare whoever he’s talking to directly in the eyes, but a friend nonetheless.

They’ll never have to know.

“It definitely wasn’t Rei,” Shinji says, because honestly the idea is laughable. He begins gathering the flowers in his arms, but to his dismay, there are even more on the kitchen counter, and far too many to carry overall. “I think I know who it may be, though.”

“Who?” Asuka demands, but Shinji is out the door before she can pursue him further and luckily, there are too many flowers blocking her way to catch up. All he can hear is Misato’s distant laughing (unaware that this is all entirely her fault, probably) and then nothing.

x-x-x

He finds Kaworu is the expected position: cradling a cat by the side of the road. As though he can instinctively sense him coming, he turns to face Shinji once he gets close, gently playing with the cat’s paw.

“Shinji-kun!” he says, nearly beaming. “I see you received the flowers.”

“I… did…” Shinji says, speaking around the bouquet that nearly blocks his face. “Kaworu-kun, why are there so many…?”

“Red roses symbolize love,” Kaworu says immediately. “White carnations, pure love. Purple lilac, first love. Jasmine, sensual love. Forget-me-nots – well, I’m sure you know. And white dittany is said to be an aphrodis–”

“Kaworu-kun!” Shinji shouts even though there’s no one else around, and nearly drops the flowers in his haste. “Were you reading that book again?”

“The second chapter was on gift-giving,” Kaworu says, setting the cat down. It winds around his ankles and purrs. “Apparently men prefer fashionable watches or neckties, but flowers were another option. I thought you might prefer them more.”

“They’re pretty, but… you must’ve bought the entire store!”

“I just wanted to communicate every possible meaning I could,” Kaworu laughs softly as though enjoying some personal joke. “It’s fascinating how you Lilin assign an entirely new language to the weeds that grow around you. I find it charming.”

“I don’t really get it myself, but…” the cat meows at him and Shinji pets it tentatively. “This is… the first time I’ve ever received flowers.”

“Did you enjoy it, then?”

It’s just the two of them, so it’s probably okay. Shinji nods, ever so slightly. “Yes….Thank you, Kaworu-kun.”

“I’m glad, then.” Kaworu smiles like the sun and Shinji’s looks away, lest he be drawn in by Kaworu’s annoyingly irresistible charm.

“All I’m saying is, don’t go crazy because of what some book says,” Shinji tells Kaworu, glancing at him sideways. “I have no idea what we’re going to do with all of those flowers, we might have to throw some away…”

“How about you return them to the earth?” Kaworu suggests as the two of them begin walking down the street. The stray kitten follows behind, mewing plaintively after them.

“I don’t know, the stems are already cut….” Shinji says, glancing behind them. The one kitten following them has multiplied into several, and Kaworu has practically a kitten army on his tail by the time they get to the end of the street. “You really attract them, huh?”

“They seem to like me, and I think they’re cute.” Kaworu says, scooping another cat into his arms. “They remind me of you, Shinji-kun.”

Shinji looks away, embarrassed mostly because as cheesy as Kaworu is, he’s also completely earnest, and he probably meant that when he said it. “I’d say that little white one looks more like you.”

“What do you say we adopt it, then?” Kaworu says, and Shinji knows he’s probably joking but reacts instantly anyways.

“I don’t think I’m ready to be a parent.”

Kaworu laughs at him as they walk in the setting sun.

x-x-x

Shinji has become pretty accustomed to not getting much time with Kaworu at school, despite the fact that they’re in the same class and even sit relatively near to each other. It’s not surprising; Kaworu, in the same vein as Rei, is intelligent, athletic, and handsome enough to warrant a significant amount of popularity, particularly from female members of the class, who don’t seem to mind his occasional misunderstanding of human behaviors.

Shinji, on the flip side, enjoyed his most significant amount of popularity when his status as an EVA pilot was discovered, and since then has faded back into the background. And he’s fine with just being with Toji and Kensuke; even if he’s jealous of the crowd of girls that habitually surrounds Kaworu during lunch and break times, he’s long since accepted the hierarchy at school.

So he’s more than a little surprised when during lunch Kaworu places a pair of chopsticks in his face and says, “Shinji-kun, say aaaah.”

“Kaworu-kun, what –” Shinji realizes a little too late that he shouldn’t have asked, because Kaworu takes the opportunity to shove the chopsticks into his mouth, their contents unknown.

On instinct, Shinji swallows, and then gags as the taste hits his tongue, at once cloyingly sweet and then overwhelmingly salty. Kaworu raises the chopsticks again – it looks like he’s trying to feed him some kind of omelet – but Shinji makes sure to push them away before making inquiries this time.

“Kaworu-kun, what are you doing?” Shinji asks – despairingly, because he thinks he knows the answer already.

“The book said, ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” Kaworu looks immensely pleased with himself as he holds up a bento Shinji had not noticed before, packed to the brim with brightly colored foods Shinji can’t quite identify. “So I made you this.”

At this point Shinji is keenly aware of the looks Toji and Kensuke are giving him, from two desks away. They had initially resented Kaworu for his incredible success with the girls of the class, until Shinji had convinced them he had no interest in things like that – and then they went on to bemoan that he was squandering his luck by going for someone “like Shinji”.

Kaworu, for his part, had cheerfully proclaimed that any friend of Shinji’s was a friend of his.

Now the two of them are staring at Shinji in a way that suggests that they won’t say anything at that point in time, but are planning on giving him an earful later. All he can do at this point is count his blessings that Asuka is across the room eating with the class rep and paying them no attention.

“I wasn’t sure what you would like, so I tried a little bit of everything,” Kaworu says, pointing at each part of the bento box in turn. “I don’t need to eat, so I’m not well-versed in these matters, but I tried everything myself and I think you’ll like it.”

“Thank you, Kaworu-kun, this is….” Shinji examines the bento. It’s true that it’s much more substantial than the bread he was planning on eating instead (Misato wasn’t really one for packed lunches) and, well, Kaworu is talented at basically everything else, so Shinji has no reason to doubt his cooking. That first bite was just a little strong – it’s probably fine.

Still, he errs on the side of caution and goes for the safest option – white rice.

“Wait, Shinji-kun,” Kaworu says, tapping his chopsticks on the table. “Let me feed it to you.”

“Wait, wait, why do we have to –?”

“That’s what the book said to do,” Kaworu says, like the answer is perfectly obvious. “And I quite like the idea, myself.”

“Kaworu-kun –”

“What are you guys doing?” and without warning, Asuka is standing over their desks, arms crossed. “Half the class is looking over here like there’s a dead body.”

Shinji is dismayed to realize that she’s right – excepting Rei, who is mercifully reading a book and paying them no attention like usual. The urge to run away is stronger than ever before.

“Nagisa, is this bento yours?” Asuka asks. She doesn’t like Kaworu, and makes it abundantly clear. Shinji thinks they have quite possibly the least compatible personalities ever, and while Kaworu has never said a word about it, he suspects the feeling may be mutual. “I know Shinji can’t cook like this.”

“Yes, I made it.” Kaworu says pleasantly, disregarding – or perhaps contributing to – the tension in the air. “Do you want some, Asuka-san? I won’t feed you, though.”

Asuka looks visibly scandalized, and Kensuke chokes on his drink in the background, though whether from surprise or laughter, Shinji’s not sure.

“Gross, I wouldn’t want you to!”

“All right then,” Kaworu says, and he brings the chopsticks back up to Shinji’s mouth. “All right, Shinji-kun –”

And at that moment, Shinji can see connections inside Asuka’s head beginning to form, synapses forming an intricate web to his doom. Before she can even finish the sentence, “Wait, were those flowers the other day –” he has Kaworu by one hand and the bento in the other and is out the door before either of them can blink.

They end up on the school roof and in fashion truly unique to him, Kaworu is completely unbothered by Shinji’s abrupt exit from the classroom. Instead, he just presses a hand against the fences surrounding the roof and remarks, “It’s lovely at this time of day, isn’t it?”

“Kaworu-kun…”

Kaworu turns to face him, the slight wind ruffling his hair slightly. No matter how disarming his smile is, Shinji is still in awe sometimes of how handsome Kaworu is – for lack of a better word, angelic.

“I’m happy you’re doing all of this for me, but…” Shinji sits down on one of the benches, placing the bento in his lap. “It’s just, you know, doing it in front of everybody…”

“Lilin are very concerned about privacy,” Kaworu remarks, settling down on the bench next to Shinji and leaning back on his palms. “Is that why you wanted to be up here alone?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, if you’d rather be more private, then I’ll do my best to be that way too. Because I want you to be happy, Shinji-kun.” and he’s so sincere it makes Shinji’s chest tighten a little – but in the good way. The way only Kaworu can do.

“With that said…” Kaworu picks up the chopsticks again. “There’s no one else here, so is it alright if we pick up where we left off?”

And as embarrassingly lovey-dovey as it is, Shinji would be a liar if he said this exact scenario hadn’t occurred to him at least once, in the form of distant fever dreams, probably, but nonetheless – and so he agrees.

And actually, it tastes pretty good. Of course, Kaworu couldn’t screw up plain rice, and it’s actually impressive how many little fruits and vegetables he managed to cut up into cute flower shapes. A couple onigiri, some bamboo shoots, a little bit of Hamburg steak – the only part that tastes odd is the rolled omelet, which Shinji chews and swallows with reservation.

“Kaworu, what’s in this?” he asks when he’s done. Moreover, what kitchen did you use and where did you get these ingredients – but Shinji keeps those to himself, for now.

Kaworu thinks for a moment before responding. “Tomatoes, mushrooms, ginger, lemon peels, some pumpkin, soy sauce –”

“Why?”

“The book said omelets benefited from variety.”

And before Kaworu can feed him another piece, Shinji leans over to kiss him. Partially to protect his stomach for later. But also because, well, being alone together has its benefits sometimes.

x-x-x

“Shinji-kun.” They’re staring outside the door of Kaworu’s room in NERV headquarters and Kaworu is looking uncharacteristically serious. “I gave some thought to what you told me yesterday.”

“What was that, again….?”

“You wanted to keep things more private between us.” and then suddenly Kaworu’s waving that damn book around again, like he always carries it in his back pocket or something. “So, the next chapter in here was about physical affection.”

Shinji suddenly feels all the heat in his body rush to his… face. Kaworu can’t mean – definitely not, after all, they’ve showered together and shared the same bed and it’s just been kissing and hand-holding, up to this point. Kaworu’s not even human, there’s no way he’d have an interest in that, probably just saying “the things you Lilin do for reproductive purposes are so strange” –

…but, so far, he’s followed the book’s instructions thoroughly, and maybe it’s time – it’s finally time – and Shinji doesn’t think he’d be opposed –

And as all of this goes through Shinji’s head, Kaworu takes his face in his hands and kisses his forehead, cheeks, and nose in turn. Then he takes his hands and kisses his palms, and then each of his fingers.

Shinji actually starts crying.

“I’m sorry, did you not like it?” Kaworu says, looking legitimately distressed. “I thought it might be more intimate –”

“No, it’s fine,” Shinji says, because he doesn’t know how to articulate that “no one has ever touched me that tenderly in so long and I don’t know how to react” without delving into personal problems that have been buried so long it would be unwise to uncover them. He wipes at his face determinedly. “It’s just… not what I was expecting.”

“You were disappointed?”

“More… surprised.”

Kaworu touches his cheek lightly. “I apologize. What should I do instead?”

“Well… if you would try it again, I might know what to expect this time.”

Much, much later, once they’ve returned to Kaworu’s room, Shinji decides that this is his favorite chapter of that book to date.

x-x-x

It’s been about a week, and Shinji is starting to get curious. The book which Kaworu had been following so religiously was titled The Five Steps to Woo Any Man. And yet only four steps have occurred, at least to his knowledge so far. With how enthusiastic Kaworu had been, he wonders why the sudden stop – and then chastises himself for even expecting anything when he’s done nothing to deserve it.

Still, it remains on the back of his mind until one day they’re all walking home from school, Toji arguing with Asuka and Asuka trying to argue with Rei, when Kaworu takes Shinji by the arm and pulls him back.

“There’s something I want to show you,” he says, cryptic as usual, and then starts walking in the opposite direction of home, going fast enough that by the time anyone could notice their absence, they’re already down the hill and several streets away.

They end up traversing a part of the city Shinji is not familiar with, and his curiosity only grows as they leave the more populated areas behind and begin wandering through abandoned and rundown buildings, surrounded by the wreckage and detritus of the old world.

Just when Shinji thinks Kaworu must be either lost or seriously misled, he stops them in front of the ruins of a church, identifiable by the blown-out stained glass and miraculously still-standing pews. Most remarkably, though, is the piano sitting in the middle of it all, somehow still unblemished and in perfect shape, despite its dilapidated surroundings.

“Here, sit down.” Kaworu says, and Shinji sits next to him on the piano bench, admiring the faint glow of the ivory keys in the low light, untouched even by dust. He runs one finger across the smooth surface.

“The very last chapter of the book was a difficult one,” Kaworu says, resting his hands on the keys but not playing a note. “All it said was, share what you love.”

“That was it?”

“Yes. But when I thought about it… well, I realized I didn’t know enough about Earth to really have anything I loved that much. Just you. But that doesn’t really work, right?”

“No, I guess not…”

“But then I remembered,” and Kaworu breaks into a radiant smile. “The Lilin’s best invention is music. So I thought that we could share that.”

Shinji’s breath catches in his throat, a bit, and he has no idea what to say. It’s a simple gesture but somehow there’s some gravity to it, some incredible significance to something so small. He realizes, deeply and probably with much delay, just how much Kaworu has been thinking of him all this time.

Like he understands what Shinji’s thinking, Kaworu doesn’t wait for a response, and instead places his hands on the keys and plays a few notes. Graceful and deliberate, this, like everything else, seems to come easily to Kaworu. Shinji recognizes it as Beethoven, but knows little else.

When the song finishes, all Shinji can say is, “That’s beautiful.” For some reason Kaworu’s playing makes him choked up, but in a good way. Always in the good way.

Kaworu glances at him sidelong like he wants to say something, but for once opts not to. Instead he takes Shinji’s hand and lays his fingers lightly on the keys.

“I thought we could play a song together,” he says, and taps out a few notes. This one Shinji recognizes – Ode to Joy.

The song Kaworu was singing when they first met.

“It’s relatively simple, even for beginners.” Kaworu says. “I can teach you the notes.”

“I’d like to learn, but….” impulsively,  Shinji rests his head against Kaworu’s shoulder. “Could you first do another song for me? I like to listen to you play.”

“Of course,” Kaworu says, and he places his hands down again. Shinji listens and thinks how ridiculous this all is – the book and the steps and everything. Kaworu never needed any of that. He had his heart from the beginning.

Above the sound of the piano, Shinji’s not sure if Kaworu will hear his whispered “I love you”. But he must have, because he smiles ever so slightly and begins to play another song.

[skamfairy]

What do you think is the (symbolic) meaning behind having all the mains on the same place, trying to support sana (s4's main) in the clip today? :) x

you know what I didn’t even think about it until you mentioned it, so thank you so much for bringing this up!

wow, it’s kinda nostalgic isn’t it? 

like think about it, Eva, Noora and Isak have all been in the position Sana is in now. Alone, inside their own head afraid of what’s to come next (same tbh)

and now here they are sharing this moment with her. Could they be a reminder for us to show us how much they have grown and the ‘evolution’ of the mains?

or maybe….

okay so Sana has served as an important character in each of their seasons. she helped each main move along in their story in a different way. 

for example with Eva

Sana gave Eva the push she needed to finally confront Ingrid as well as all the feelings she has been repressing and torturing herself with from the beginning of this season. If it wasn’t for Sana we might not have gotten the most emotional heart to heart in this entire season. We wouldn’t have gotten Eva to finally let out all of her feelings as well as realising who she is and what means the most to her. She wouldn’t have gotten the push she needed to gain closure with Ingrid if it wasn’t for sana…and then of course she wouldn’t have caught Iben and learnt about Snakesak…so yeah Sana pushed Eva’s season along when she needed it. 

then Noora

Of course Sana and noora had that massive beautiful clip where she told Noora that it’s impossible to expect people to think like you do, but it is possible to try and understand them, and for them to understand you. This convo of course encouraged Noora to try to connect with William and talk to him…pushing her in the direction of Nico where the next part of her story began. Again you could say Sana pushed her story along…leading her to the next chapter of her journey and growth. 

Now angel Isak Mikki doesn’t have favourites I love my children equally

oh my gosh I loved this clip. I don’t know if Sana knew or not but she gave Isak exactly everything he needed to hear right in this moment of his story. She reassured him that he still means the same to her as he always has and that maybe his mum would feel the same way. she gave him the courage and the love he needed to tell his mum about Even. She made him feel less scared about how she would react and calm in knowing that she still sees him the same way herself. ahhh oh my god if it wasn’t for Sana I don’t know if Isak would have gotten the guts to tell his mother about his sexuality and that was one of the most important parts of his story. His mother accepting him and loving him when he needed it the most (hell he had been needing it since we met him) ahhh it was everything. and Sana helped him reach to that point where he could reach out to his mother. So again, she pushed and impacted his story…in the best way. 

So now why were all the mains here in this clip? 

Maybe they were here to remind us just how much Sana has been there for them. How much she has impacted their lives and had such a strong hand in moving their journeys of growth and development along. Because now Sana is the one withdrawing herself from everyone and believing that none of them see her as someone they can connect with because she is too different. She is beginning to take herself out of their world…to push them away. But they are here trying to remind us (and her but she can’t see it rn) that god dammit she is a part of their world. She’s not just a part of it but because of her their worlds have changed and grown. She has been there for all of them. They need her and they love her and they respect her. 

but Sana feels like no one does. 

someone needs to tell her just how important she is and why she is needed so much in their world…because their worlds are her world.

They each had Sana to move their story along…but who does Sana have? maybe that’s what they are trying to show us by involving them all here. Who is her Sana? What happens when the friend who is always there for everyone, needs someone to be there for her and get her to talk and listen? 

lets find out ahhhh

[cherrybomb-witch]

Moo! || Self-Para || Summer, 1969|| When I Was Younger.

“Are you sure it will work?”

“Positive. I asked Catie about the draught. And I looked at her old school notes just in case”.

“Catie kept her school notes!? But she graduated like three years ago!”

“Catie keeps everything. Now shut up and keep pushing”.

It is a warm summer midnight, and the McKinnon Manor was in blissful slumber, except for the two blonde girls in their white nightgowns. That same evening, the McKinnon siblings had all extended mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor across the living room for a family slumber party with stories, and music and marshmallows roasted by the fireplace. It seemed like forever before everyone was asleep, but finally, the living room was silent save for the quiet sleeping breaths and occasional snores, and then Marlene had quietly slipped out of her bag and motioned to her sister Eva, her partner in tonight’s crime, to stand up and follow her.

They were small and slender-limbed, but after much struggle, they had managed to drag the inflatable mattress outside the living room, down the hallway and finally across the kitchen and through the back door. On the mattress, under the effects of a simple sleeping draught, their older brother Duncan slept like a baby, oblivious to the movement, or the girls’ whispering, or the numerous bumps they accidentally caused while dragging him all around the house.

“How did you even manage to prepare a sleeping draught?” Eva was at the feet end of the mattress, pushing it carefully down the small set of stairs that went from the kitchen door to the garden.

Marlene took her time answering, for she was struggling with the head end to hold it back and prevent the mattress from toppling down the stairs and risking to wake up her fifteen year old brother despite the potion she’d given him.

“I already told you, stupid. I looked at Catie’s old notes. It wasn’t hard to find the ingredients. Most of them grow in the woods. And the ones I couldn’t find, I stole from Mrs. Salsburgy’s garden in town” the older blonde replied once they had safely lowered their brother on the grass. Her cheeks were flushed with effort and her breath was labored.

“You broke into Mrs. Salsburgy’s garden!? Marlene!” Eva’s eyes were wide with impression at her sister’s audacity. The alluded simply shrugged her skinny white shoulders and pushed her long golden curls out of her face. She liked the old florist well enough, it was nothing personal. It just had to be done.

The two girls took a moment to catch their breaths while looking around. There was a big, round full moon on a cloudless sky, which favored their mission since the world around them was illuminated well enough by its silver haze. The garden was covered in moonlight and it looked enchanted. Marlene and Eva almost expected to see night fairies coming out and start dancing. But only some of their dogs showed up to glare at them curiously, but eventually decided that it was not worth staying awake for. 

“Well, c’mon then” Marlene spoke after some time, bending once more to grip the corners of her side of the mattress “We’ve got to get him all the way to the cows’ drinking trough”.

“Why are we doing this again?” Eva grumbled, rubbing her eyes. It was way past both of their bedtimes, but unlike Marlene, she was not as invaded by excitement and she really wanted to go back to sleep.

“Because” replied her sister, straining the word with exasperation “Duncan pushed me onto a puddle of cow dung the other day. I’m getting back at him and you have to help me”.

“But…”  Eva stifled a yawn and groaned “He’s too heavy! How are we even going to drag him all the way there? My arms hurt already. Also, the mattress will break with all the bumps and pebbles in the road”.

Marlene frowned thoughtfully. Her sister did have a point. She searched around for inspiration, trying to find a solution to their inconvenience. She refused to let a single obstacle prevent her from making Duncan pay for what he’d done. They had gotten so far already, especially after it took her days and several little accidents to eventually brew the sleeping draught despite her young age. She was a very capable little witch, after all. This could hardly frustrate her plans.

Her viridian eyes passed over a red cart that her younger siblings used to wheel each other around the house, and just like that, she was struck with a complex, yet surely effective thought.

“I have an idea. Come on!” she motioned to her sister and then darted towards the depot, careful not to make too much noise with her steps. Eva groaned, but eventually followed her older sister, wondering what on earth she had come up with now.

Later, the younger girl concluded that Marlene was either incredibly brilliant, or incredibly crazy. They took out the small pony cart and some harnesses and dragged it all the way to the garden. Eva slowly began to understand what was on her sister’s mind. They were going to get caught for sure, and then they would be in deep, deep trouble. But Marlene would have none of it. She run up to the stables, and returned with one of the Shetland ponies, Toffee, the most calm and easy to manage they had. Mar had seen her father harness the pony many times, and through some trials and errors, the two girls eventually managed to set up Toffee to the cart. Marlene took a step back with her hands on her hips, looking very smug and pleased with herself.

“Now all we have to do is get the mattress with Dun on it on the cart” she stated.

“But he’s still too heavy! We could barely drag him! How are we going to lift him!? Oh Mar, I am really tired. Can’t you just let it go!?” Eva begged, pouting miserably.

The other blonde shook her head, stubborn to the bone. She knew they could pull this off. They could not give up “No. Stop being such a crybaby, Eva” she hesitated, considering her options and then sighed with resignation “We need some help, we have no choice. Let’s go get Rowan and Christopher. I bet between the four of us, we can get this fatty on the cart once and for all”.

Ten minutes and a lot of insisting later, the two girls had managed to drag the twins outside with them. Ro and Chris were still groggy from sleep, but when they saw Duncan sprawled out on the garden, sleeping like a rock, and the cart with the pony peacefully grazing beside him, their eyes opened with disbelief and they glared at the girls.

“What are you doing!?” Rowan gasped, going from sleeping Dun to Marlene. It was quite clear she was the mastermind behind all of these.

Marlene raised her chin, her expression proud and solemn. In order to convince her siblings to help her, she would have to lift up their spirits and get them to stop thinking about going back to bed. She knelt to dip her finger in the wet earth and dramatically gave herself a line on each of her cheeks, like war paint.

“We are on a mission. Duncan thinks he can do whatever he pleases with us just because he is older. Well, we are going to teach him a lesson” she then proceeded to catch them up on her plan, speaking passionately, like a general delivering a speech before a really dangerous military action. At first, the three other children rolled their eyes and their sister’s quirkiness, but eventually they too became inflamed with the thrill of “danger” and “victory”, and soon enough, even Eva had painted stripes on her cheeks.

Infused with excitement, each of the siblings grabbed a corner of the mattress and synchronized, after much puffing and groaning and struggling and nearly dropping Duncan a couple of times, they’d pushed him on top of the cart and stood staring at their deed, quite impressed that they had actually succeeded. She would never admit it, of course, but even Marlene herself was surprised that it had actually worked. However, she was quick to step back into her leader role.

“Come on then, my valiant warriors! The night is young and our work is yet to be finished! To the fields I command thee!” she grabbed Toffee’s reins and began leading the pony out to the road that ran across the vast McKinnon estate, her siblings trailing at either side of her, occasionally glaring over their shoulders in fear that their mother might suddenly come out of the house, chasing after them and screaming like a banshee.

“What does ‘thee’ mean?” Rowan whispered to his twin quietly so the older girl would not hear.

Christopher shrugged and made a screwing gesture against his temple to symbolize their sister’s possible state of mind.

It took them twenty minutes to reach the field were the cows were grazing, and another fifteen to get to the trough, drag Duncan down from the cart and push him to the edge of the water. The cows raised their heads and stared at the children with large black eyes, but to them four children dragging their drugged brother on a cart while in their pijamas was of little concern for them.

“All right, now comes the last part of the plan” Marlene announced, hardly able to conceal her excitement. Her eyes were shiny and a mischievous grin was spread all over her face, showing her little white teeth “We need to push him into the water. The mattress will float. And when he wakes up in the morning, he’s gonna be in the middle of the trough, surrounded by water and cows. And that will teach him not to mess with me! Or any of us!” she hurried to add.

The look on Eva, Rowan and Christopher’s face was one of absolute shock.

“But…but Mar!” gasped Chris “Cows drink from there. And bath and…” the boy lowered his voice “And do their poo-poo!”

Marlene’s smile did nothing but grow “Exactly. See there, that heap of cow poop?” she pointed at a dark, flat mound on the grass near them. Half of it was squashed and there were marks of two hands on them “That’s the heap he pushed me on the other day. Well now, he’s going for a swim in his own medicine. C’mon, help me push him into the water”.

The children were all anxious about the scolding they would eventually have to face once this prank blew up. However, inside every McKinnon there was a little instinct that craved trouble, and in the end, none of them could deny that the whole situation was going to be extremely funny. They all teamed up to push Duncan into the drinking trough between muffled giggles and mocking whispers. After that, the four of them laced their arms around each other and contemplated the figure of the floating mattress in the middle of the water, with their older brother on it, cut against the moonlight. Marlene was right, this would definitely teach him just how dangerous a little girl’s mind could be if scorned.

Marlene could not remember the last time she had seen her parents so furious. She was grounded for months, not only for her prank on Duncan, but also for involving her younger siblings. 

But in the end, the only thing the ten year old girl truly regretted, was not having been present when Duncan fell head first into the water, and then slipped on the mud and collapsed on top of the very heap of dung he had pushed her to before. According to her father’s workers, he had screamed like a little girl.