#being the ones that are simultaneously 'doomed from the start' and 'could have gone differently at any point'?

[mebis-reblogs]

The Wyrm could've chosen any pile of rocks and holes to make his kingdom

Yet his arrival and death was a self fulfilling prophecy

The moths could have ignored him, or the wyrm could have rejected them

Yet they weren't so loyal to their mother

And it is on a wyrm's nature to accept bugs into its thrall

He could've stopped expanding his kingdom at any point, yet the betrayal that doomed it was also the one to birth it

[ghostlygiant]

A short first meeting (really first seeing) for borrower!Haruhi and Hikaru.

1,410 words

Maybe considered accidental fear-play? Haruhi is definitely scared. Trigger warning just in case.

There are Three universal rules known by all borrowers. First, never borrow more than you need-not only is it a quick way to get noticed, it also slows you down when making an escape. Second, never let a human bean see you-the ones that speak that rule with the most passion in their voices have seen some truly horrible sights. Sights most borrowers hope to never see. Last, if you have broken rule Two never, ever, freeze up. First and foremost you must escape the situation-through any means necessary-then you can worry about moving into a new home and starting over.

It was a Thursday morning when Haruhi simultaneously broke all three rules.

She felt stupid-mostly because she wasn’t stupid. She knew better than to try and take a whole half of a dinner roll. But it was so fluffy, fresh baked that morning by one of the beans that wore the black and white outfits, and she was starving.

For the past three days the beans had been hosting some kind of gathering. What seemed like Hundreds of unfamiliar beans flooded the home that her home was inside. It was impossible for her to leave the cover of her home.

Even in the night hours it seemed that a bean was around every corner. Because of rule One Haruhi didn’t have any real backup supply of food. She’d always gone out during the hours she knew the beans would be busy, or sleeping, and only took enough food to last for the day.

Only a few hours after all the visiting beans left she ran out of her home and waited for the kitchen to empty of the black and white clad beans that were in charge of the food. She should’ve waited until night-another day of hunger was better than being caught-but at the time her body was controlled by her stomach instead of her brain. All she could think of was filling herself with food, and the roll smelled so delicious.

Now she stood frozen in place, eyes locked with the bean named Hikaru. No matter how hard she willed her feet they would not move. For the moment, neither did Hikaru.

Haruhi could hear the faint ticking of the clock, somewhere above her. Counting down to her doom. She wondered what was going through the bean’s mind. Was he thinking of different ways to torment her?

When she was small she had heard stories, terrible stories about borrowers who were caught in closed fists and never seen again, from one of her papa’s friends. A traveler who passed by from time to time. She was tough then-safe in her childhood home from the monsters of stories-but now she couldn’t stop picturing everything that might’ve happened to those stolen borrowers. Everything that might be happening to her soon.

Hikaru took a step towards her, mouth dropping open, and she finally found herself able to move. She had to move, before he closed the distance between them. She refused to be the next horror story told to young borrowers.

She threw the roll to the floor and dashed towards the spices lined up on the counter. She could use them as a barrier between her and the bean-however flimsy they may be compared to his massive size-until she could force her brain to remember the escape route she’d practiced so many times.

Behind the spices she couldn’t see the bean anymore, which was almost more terrifying than locking eyes with him. At least then she knew where he was and what he was doing. Now she only had the sounds coming from his direction, which were nearly drowned out by the thumping of her heart in her ears. Faint shuffling of feet and panicked mumbling.

Please she begged silently to any entity that might’ve been listening just let me make it out of this alive

She reached the edge of the counter just as the bean started shuffling the spices behind her. Her blood ran cold when the thought of him seeing her. It seemed to freeze up her heart and she was worried she might get stuck in place again, luckily her feet didn’t stop moving.

Unluckily, she was past the edge now. She felt her frozen heart drop to the pit of her stomach. Too terrified to even scream, her body went into auto pilot. She didn’t know when, but at some point she had pulled out her hook and stabbed it into the wall. Her hands burned when she grabbed onto the thread, skin peeling away from her palms and she slid too quickly, but she successfully slowed her descent.

As quickly as she could, she propelled to the ground, taking bigger leaps than she normally would’ve. Desperate times called for a few more risks-and her hands were already torn up anyway. They burned with every drop but she couldn’t let them slow her down.

She didn’t glance up-didn’t look for the bean. She could still hear the rattling of spice bottles on the counter. With any luck he wouldn't notice she was no longer behind them until she made it back to her home.

She reached the ground and pulled on the thread. The hook didn’t budge. Haruhi didn’t have a moment to waste on trying again, or even to mourn the loss of the hook her father gave her, she had already been seen. She left it without a second thought. He would forgive her for leaving it, given the circumstances.

“Hey” she heard the bean’s voice behind her as she ran towards the slit in the baseboards that served as the entrance to her home “stop running”

She vaguely heard the order, but of course paid it no mind. She was so close. Even with his giant legs the bean wouldn’t be able to catch her before she slipped inside. Once there she was sure she would be safe-at least for a moment. Long enough to get her emergency pack and start her escape. On to a new home.

“Come back” the bean called again and she heard the thumping of his feet. They rattled the ground slightly as he moved towards her.

A pause in the thumping almost made her stop, something strange was happening behind her. But she didn’t allow herself to look back.

Just as she slipped into the hole the floor shook beneath her, she felt wind push against her back, and felt the very tips of the beans fingers rustle her short hair. A squeak of surprise escaped her throat and she jumped forward. Safe.

Haruhi glanced back with widened eyes and saw the bean’s giant eyes staring back at her through the hole. He was on his stomach, laying on the ground. She knew instantly that if she had stopped to look at him he would’ve caught her. Probably crushed her. The bean has leapt from his previous place, towards her goal in an attempt to catch her.

She walked backwards, further into safety, but kept her eyes locked on his. Her whole body trembled.

“Come back” the bean sounded almost pleading when he spoke “where are you going?”

She slipped into the darkness. And once she had to turn a corner she stopped looking back. Her heart still thumped in her ears and throat, it felt like her eyes were throbbing in tune with it. Her brain raced as she recalled the events and mentally kicked herself for being stupid. Just because she wanted to gorge herself on bread.

I won’t make that mistake again she thought to herself as she gathered little scraps of things she might need.

She had no idea how far she would have to travel to find a new home. The only food she had was a small piece of stale cracker that was her absolute emergency last resort food. It had already been three days since she last ate.

No use pouting about it. It was too late to do anything else. She would have to brave the outside with what she had and nothing more. But at least she could wait until night. The bean can’t get her here-not quickly anyway. She might as well double check her materials and try to make some semblance of a plan.

I should’ve taken a bite at least she mourned the loss of the roll-the cursed thing had ruined her life, nearly ended it, and she didn’t even get a bite.

[mymommykinkismywholepersonality]

Sub! Yandere punishing his love

<Please take note I've never had interest in writing I just had this idea so I apologize if it sucks 😔😂>

Warning!!! Rape! And reader beats the yandere! Please don't read if those subjects make you uncomfortable <3

You could do whatever you wanted to him.

Yell at him.

Call him names.

Slap him, choke him, ʙᴇᴀᴛ ʜɪᴍ until his skin had changed from a neutral tan to blue and purple. He would take it like a good boy should. I mean he knew the adjustment was hard on you and its not like he would delude himself into thinking he was worthy of you. Maybe that's why it ended up this way, because you seemed untouchable to him. But he needed you, so so ꜱᴏ ᴍᴜᴄʜ . He couldn't bare being without you.

"Y/n-"

"Don't call me that you waste of space" you growled, interrupting his plea.

"Right, Mistress. You can't keep doing this, I know you don't want to be here but I promise I can be a good servant! I can take care of you and please you, let me prove it!"

Getting on his knees he kissed the ground where you had stood not a moment before, never making eye contact per your instructions.

"I don't want you, I don't need you, and I sure as hell know a psychotic shit like you could never please me! I'll escape and when I do, you'll finally get your wish of being handcuffed but it won't be by me!"

Enunciating every word by grabbing his leash and yanking on it hoping it'd choke him out. But you didn't bother this time, knowing the crazy man before you adored any markings caused by you. The room was silent, even if it was underground with walls of concrete usually your captor would be crying by this time. You'd attempted to escape before and you had almost achieved your goal this time, it struck paralyzing fear into him. He didn't want to but he knew he had to come up with a consequence for you. Something to discourage you from running away.

You watched with uneasiness as his brown eyes squinted in concentration. Even though he had never laid a hand on you before, other than abducting you and dragging you back into captivity, you didn't trust him, obviously. Maybe he'd finally snapped and would kill you, the thought made your heart fill with a twisted hope of freedom. Without a word he crawled to the door and left you without his usual lecture so you lied on your bed and screamed into your pillow wishing the nightmare would end. Little did you know, it was just the beginning.

A few hours after he didn't bring you dinner, thinking he was trying to punish you, you fell asleep. To escape from your unfortunate predicament or to gain strength for your next escape strategy you didn't know. But when you woke up, you noticed the time on the clock was far earlier than when your internal alarm would usually wake you. You tried to sit up to see what had woken you up, well you knew what but you wanted to know why, only to find your hands chained to the bed by heavily padded cuffs. Anger coursed through your body until you realized your legs were chained and spread as well. That anger turned into fear at what he might be planning. In the beginning he usually kept your arms shackled in some form or another but never your legs.

"Oh Mistress! You're awake!" Snapping your head in the direction of his voice your face flushed with embarrassment then paled from the sight before you. He was just standing there. Cock in hand as he secured a ring around the base, preventing it from getting any harder than it already was. You felt like there was a boulder on top of you. Then pure rage took over.

"Don't you dare even think about putting that disgusting thing inside me!" You screamed at him, only to be met with a laugh infuriating and confusing you more.

"I would never do such a thing Mistress! Not unless you commanded me to of course. I know you may be mad right now but I'm gonna prove myself ok? I'm gonna make you feel so good, I'll be useful to you I swear! So just relax. Let me please you the way you deserve."

Sliding on the end of the bed your heart sped up when he brought out a knife.

"W-what are you doing?!" Instead of answering you he simply put his fingers to his lips in a shushing motion, carefully cutting off your pants. When you realized what he was going for you started shaking wildly in a desperate attempt to free yourself.

"No! Stop! You can't!" Your cries fell on deaf ears as he focused on removing your underwear without cutting you in the process.

His moment of triumph was your moment of doom. Without wasting any time he brought his face in between your legs. Experimentally he pushed his tongue in between your folds, vibrating your core with a moan. He knew the only satisfaction he should be getting was from bringing you pleasure but he found it impossible not to enjoy himself. On one hand he knew he was disobeying you and the guilt was eating at him, but you tasted better than anything he could recall! And he needed to show you he was capable. With that in mind he pointed his tongue to go further inside you and inhaled your scent.

You were making many different noises, some gasps for air, pleas for him to stop, until he angled his face just right. When his nose rubbed on a small bead at the top of your pussy, the noise you made was undeniably angelic to him. Knowing the treasure he'd found he brought his mouth up as he gave a gentle suck to the pearl.

"N-not there! Please!" at this point your fear had overcome your anger. You had screwed your eyes shut until you felt his warm mouth leave your clit, finding him crawling up to you. As he hovered over you, your anger returned but you couldn't stop the frustrated tears.

"You're so beautiful when you cry."

He stated lovingly, leaning down he starts to lick the tears off your cheeks, muttering something about not letting them got waste.

"Please stop, you've proven yourself, you're useful whatever! You don't have to let me go please just stop." You struggled to hold eye contact, his gaze being so intense.

"I'm sorry Mistress, I love you so much" you felt a moment of relief as he peppered your face with gentle kisses until he started to speak in between them "But I won't stop. Not until I make you cum."

More sobs racked through your body meanwhile he positioned his face near your heat again. This time he was relentless, licking and sucking on your most sensitive nerve, simultaneously scissoring you open with his slender fingers. You jolted when he found your g-spot, giving him all the instructions he needed. Eventually after what felt like years to you but seconds to him, your thighs spasmed. Quickly he replaced his fingers with an open mouth, tongue lolled out expectantly for your orgasm. He gently rubbed your clit until your legs had stopped shaking.

"S-stop! You said you'd stop! I did it! I came!" Babbling out your exhausted protests you could barely hear his response, still nestled in your opening.

"Can't waste! Gotta clean it all up, gonna clean Mistress up!"

Another ten minutes passed until he felt confident none of your pleasure juice had gone to waste he finally pulled away. Soon he unlocked you and braced himself, expecting you to hit him but to his dismay you just curled yourself in the corner of the bed.

"I'll replace your clothing Mistress, I'll even let you pick them out! Whatever you like is yours." He said kneeling at your side, smiling as though he'd won the lottery and hadn't just defiled you.

It took a good moment before you could speak and even then it wasn't audible to him who was barely a foot away.

"What Mistress?" he asked, eager to follow your command once again.

Without warning you began screaming at him, "Get out! Get out! Get out!" You started swinging at his face and when he fell back you tried to get off the bed to continue your attack but failed miserably still being sore. Only then did his expression change from lust to worry. Quickly he dove to your side and tried to help you up only for you to push him with all your might away.

"Mistress don't strain yourself, let me help!"

Struggling onto the bed you continued to shout at him until he started to leave. Hand on the knob, he turned to look at you but you were already boring holes into his head.

"I left dinner on your desk, please make sure to eat Mistress."

And with that he was gone, but you knew he'd be back. Eventually you regained the strength back into your legs and walked over to the desk littered with crayons. You quickly bunched up the note he always left on your meals and discarded it. Sitting, contemplating whether or not you should eat, when your stomach decided to speak up for you. You'd missed lunch due to your "break out" but at the same time you knew how genuinely distressed he'd get when you refused to eat. After mulling it over, you decided to listen to your body. After all, you were the only one you could rely on. Opening up the container you found your favorite meal. As you ate you wondered if this was his sick form of apologizing but it didn't matter. You couldn't give up.

<I don't know if this is good so feel free to leave a comment or whatever! 😬💞>

[robininthelabyrinth]

Spilled Pearls

- Chapter 3 - ao3 -

The closing ceremony of the discussion conference was dignified and serene, as appropriate for an event hosted by the Lan sect, and after it was done everyone milled around to chat a little more before starting to break off into groups to leave.

The leaders of the Great Sects naturally gathered together.

They were an unusual mix. Wen Ruohan was the eldest by an entire generation, technically hailing from the generation of Lan Qiren’s grandfather even if his extraordinary cultivation made him seem as young as Lan Qiren’s brother; after him there was Lan Qiren’s father and the Jiang sect leader, Jiang Menglin, who themselves were a generation above their younger counterparts from the Nie and Jin clans – Jin Guangshan especially, having only inherited his position in the past year.

Lan Qiren’s brother stood beside them, speaking with them with his head held high. Their father planned to slowly transition sect leadership to him over the next half-decade so that he himself might be allowed to retire from the mundane world to focus on cultivation, as Lan An ultimately did. In accordance with that plan, he had allowed him to take the lead on hosting certain small events at the discussion conference, like the night-hunting.

Lan Qiren was there, too.

He was lurking as far to the back of the platform as he could get, trying simultaneously to perfectly reflect his sect’s expectations for proper behavior while also doing his utmost to remain beneath anyone’s notice – Lao Nie had caught his gaze at one point and winked, a friendly older man’s indulgence of a junior, but that was in large part unavoidable given the man’s gregarious personality – and enjoying the rare moment in which he could see his father at something other than a distance.

He usually only saw his father when he was brought before him to report on his achievements, typically once a month. When he was younger, he had been accompanied by one of his teachers, who would report on him while Lan Qiren anxiously examined his father’s face for signs of approval; now that he was older, he went by himself, dipping into a deep salute as he recited anything of interest, and sometimes if he really exerted himself his father would reward him with a word of praise.

Lan Qiren was only allowed to stand with the rest of them on the basis of a technicality – his father hadn’t officially transferred power to his eldest son and wouldn’t for a while yet, so he had brought along both of them on the transparent excuse that they could provide company for Jin Guangshan and Lao Nie as members of the same generation. It was very much a technicality in Lan Qiren’s case, given his much younger age; he fell on the very tail end of their generation on account of the circumstances of his belated birth.

Lan Qiren’s birth was very late to allow him to be considered a peer to those a decade or more older than him, in fact, but that was the way of things.

He was a child of duty, rather than pleasure.

His parents had been very much in love, as was the Lan sect’s way, and together they had had two sons and a daughter within six years, each one of them deeply beloved. But perhaps their joy had been too complete, because the heavens had not permitted it to last: they lost their younger son and daughter both – one to an unexpected illness, the other to an accident. Their eldest, Lan Qiren’s brother, was still there, but it would have been irresponsible to have only a single heir to a Great Sect. Accordingly, under great pressure from the sect elders, they had sought to have another child, only to fail time and time again, enduring countless miscarriages and stillbirths alike.

There had even been some debate as to whether such a situation permitted the sect leader to take on a concubine, regardless of custom or even his own wishes. Desperate to prevent such a result, Lan Qiren’s mother had inadvisedly taken certain drugs to encourage conception and at last Lan Qiren had been successfully born in a slow and bloody labor that had sapped his mother’s already poor health. She had died a few years later, suffering a recurrence of the infection left behind from his birth. Lan Qiren had been too young to really remember her, but he knew that his brother had blamed him for her loss ever since.

He sometimes wondered if his father did, too.

Of course, unlike his brother, his father had never said as much. As the Lan sect leader, he was graceful and refined, educated and reserved, a venerable and venerated cultivator; it was widely agreed that he would never have planned to retire so early if it hadn’t been for losing his true love all those years ago. Perhaps he might even have been another Wen Ruohan, seemingly ageless, striving for immortality – at any rate, he would never be so petty as to mistreat a person due to the circumstances beyond their control. It was something he had heard that his father had said from one of the other Lan sect juniors, and at any rate it was in the rules, and Lan Qiren believed in the rules.

Besides, it wasn’t a surprise that Lan Qiren would be an afterthought in comparison to his brother, the already famous Qingheng-jun, who his father treasured like a pearl cupped in his palm. His brother was the much-anticipated first child of his father’s happy youth, the reminder of good days gone by, a child who had survived the misfortunes that had taken his siblings, and Lan Qiren’s brother repaid his father’s adoration with strength, intelligence, and endless potential. He was a cultivation maniac, yet good at managing the other juniors; he was cold and aloof, elegant, yet capable of being personable and even charming when needed. He was one of the shining stars of his generation, already a powerful cultivator and a respected gentleman even though he’d only just passed twenty-one. Even the name which he was commonly called, Qingheng-jun, was a rarity, a personal title unusual in this peaceful day and age.

Lan Qiren, in contrast, was slow and clumsy, with only average cultivation skills and positively dire social skills. While his teachers praised his strong academic skills and musical talent, the Lan sect followed first and foremost the orthodox path of swordsmanship; once his weakness in that area had been discovered, many of his sect elders lost interest in him as anything other than the inferior back-up plan that he was.

Undoubtedly that was why, when Wen Ruohan turned to Lan Qiren’s father and said, “Your son is a credit to you,” everyone assumed he was talking about Qingheng-jun.

“Sect Leader Wen does him too much honor,” their father said, clearly pleased despite his deprecating words. After all, Wen Ruohan, Sect Leader Wen, was well known to be extraordinarily sparing with his praise for any who didn’t share his bloodline or surname. “My unworthy son is still young and foolish. His eyes are always fixed upon cultivation, never straying – he doesn’t even spare time for girls, despite his advancing years!”

The other sect leaders were smiling, and Lao Nie already opening his mouth to say something teasing, when Wen Ruohan said, “I meant your other son.”

Lan Qiren wasn’t prepared at all for all the sect leaders to turn to look at him.

He shrunk back.

“Qiren?” his father said, almost as if he were checking to confirm that that was the right name, a trace of doubt in his voice even as Lan Qiren’s brother’s face went white with humiliation. “I didn’t realize you’d had a chance to hear him play.”

“Regrettably I have not yet had that pleasure,” Wen Ruohan said, a slightly strange expression on his face. “We merely exchanged some charming conversation, that’s all. Is that his most notable skill?”

“His accomplishments as a musical cultivator are sufficient to rank him among the adults of his already talented sect,” Lao Nie volunteered when there was a brief pause, and Lan Qiren’s father was quick to smile and nod along. “You missed out, Sect Leader Wen.”

“Perhaps another time,” Wen Ruohan said, his return smile still strange and almost subtly displeased, though Lan Qiren would hardly trust himself to know for sure.

At that point, Jiang Menglin spoke up, changing the subject, and most everyone joined in, all of them evidently relieved – not least of all Lan Qiren himself, who had started wondering if there was some way he could become invisible or else fall into a deep chasm that might conveniently open up beneath his feet.

Nothing more was said on the subject until the ceremony was done and the last of their guests departed, when Lan Qiren’s brother tracked him down and hissed, “What did you do?”

“Nothing!” Lan Qiren cried out. “We only talked!”

“You mean you talked at him the way you always do – ”

Their father cleared his throat, having come up behind them, and they both turned at once and dropped into deep salutes.

“Do not think about it too much,” he said, voice distant as the cold wind on a winter night. “Sect Leader Wen sometimes likes to make trouble for the sake of making trouble, especially if he thinks he has found a weakness. You will need to be on your guard against that when you are sect leader.”

He was talking to Lan Qiren’s brother, of course. Lan Qiren could count, and had, the number of times his father addressed him directly in a given year, but it was only reasonable – he wasn’t the heir, doomed to take on the burden of leadership, and so there was much less his father needed to say to him.

“Yes, Father,” his brother said. “I’ll remember.”

“Do not trouble your younger brother over nonsense.”

Lan Qiren felt his brother’s angry gaze like a flame against his skin, even if it wasn’t anywhere as weighty as Wen Ruohan’s. He did not understand what he had done wrong, whether to Wen Ruohan to decide to make trouble using his name or to his brother now that had made him angry, but that wasn’t so much different from the usual.

“Very well, Father,” his brother said. “I won’t.”

[nightingaelic]

NV companions reactions to taking the courier’s place in OWB

"Here and now got its ups and downs, but... focusing on the past, like it was any better? That's just Old World Blues." -Blind Diode Jefferson

Arcade Gannon: Being whisked off to a pre-war scientific research haven and adopted by a group of five floating brains in jars was actually a dream Arcade had once, but he was pretty sure it didn't involve losing his own brain along the way. Conversation with the Think Tank would leave him amused at first, but increasingly more horrified as he learned the secrets of Big MT and realized just how much chaos they could create if they weren't busy playing in their Mojave sandbox. The most intriguing part of Big MT for Arcade would, of course, be the Sink. The Biological research station, the light switches, the Sink Central Intelligence Unit and all the others would fascinate him, and he would do his best to figure out their components and try to replicate them in New Vegas for the Followers of the Apocalypse to use. This leads to more than a few circular conversations with Doctor Klein and, once he meets him, Doctor Mobius. I think Mobius' side of the story would leave Arcade depressed about the state of Big MT and the various things roaming its landscape that used to be people. His argument with his own brain, on the other hand, would be worthy of any pre-war sitcom. Though sorely tempted to destroy the Think Tank for good and prevent their wild experimentation ever escaping the crater, I think Arcade would weight the potential good their technology could do much more heavily and convince Doctor Klein to partner with him as a new head researcher.

Craig Boone: Given Boone's hatred for the Legion and their enslavement practices, the Think Tank would seal their doom as soon as they stripped him of his brain and his ability to fight back. And once he found Little Yangtze and its total pacification collars? Oh, it's on. I don't think Boone would be sly about his anger either, but given the Think Tank's flippant attitude toward their lobotomites, they probably wouldn't pick up on just how furious he was until it was too late. There are two things Boone would form attachments to while sneaking around Big MT: Roxie, the ever-loyal cyberdog with a heart of gold, and the Stealth Suit Mk II, which compliments Boone's combat style with minimal commentary. While I don't think Boone would have any strong feelings either way toward Doctor Mobius, I don't think he would kill him unless he had to. Mobius would probably be tickled by his stoic countenance, and would attempt to shower him in Mentats as a way of loosening up. Boone's brain would be a bit like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, reveling in its own sadness for once because Boone always shoved those feelings out of sight and out of mind. Their main argument would be over a compromise to confront that deep sorrow once reunited. When the Think Tank is dead, Boone zaps Roxie and himself back to Nipton, then smashes the Big Mountain Transportalponder! on the nearest rock.

Lily Bowen: I think we could class Lily's reaction to being kidnapped and experimented upon by the Think Tank as utter confusion. She would still be as benevolent as ever, trying her best to soothe the over-inflated egos of the various doctors as they debated what to do with this creature that had thoroughly stumped the Auto-Doc upon recovery, but I think she would start looking for the exit as soon as they suggested a full dissection. Lily's experience in Big MT would be very different from the other companions after that, with the Think Tank sending wave after wave of lobotomites and night stalkers after her in an attempt to regain their new test subject, and Lily beating each attack back with her trusty vertibird blade and the growing pile of new gadgets she accumulated with every location visited. I think Doctor Mobius would watch this play out with interest, and would send a few packs of robo-scorpions to herd her toward the radar fence, then surreptitiously lower the barrier long enough for her to stumble outside. The story of her time in "the Big Empty" would become a fireside hit in Jacobstown, but few would believe that she had actually found the place where all cazadores and night stalkers come from.

Raul Alfonso Tejada: Raul is already missing a few body parts, so what's one more? The old ghoul would be somewhat exasperated at finding himself in another situation of imprisonment and being forced to do work for others, but at least it's not as boring as Black Mountain. Big MT, on the other hand, is a heck of a lot more deadly than the State of Utobitha, but all Raul can do is roll his eyes every time he spots another band of lobotomites chasing him down or robo-scorpions crawling over the horizon. Like Boone, Raul grows fond of Roxie, though his favorite acquisition from Big MT's tech piles would definitely be the proton axe: He just likes the way it looks and feels when he's swinging it around. Confronting Doctor Mobius would come when the old ghoul is reaching the end of his patience with the Think Tank, though he would spare the mad scientist some time to listen to his sad story and ponder the fate of Big MT. I think Raul would be the one most in tune with his disembodied brain, and they would greet each other as old friends that share a rocky history, but have accepted each other's flaws. As for the Think Tank, Raul would leave the decision of what to do with them up to Doctor Mobius: After all, they're not his mess to clean up.

Rose of Sharon Cassidy: Oh boy. Cass is no one's errand girl, but she's also rather fond of her brain, pickled in liquor though it may be. She would blaze a deadly trail through Big MT, marked by the wrecked bodies of robo-scorpions and Y-17 trauma override harnesses (a personal scourge for the former caravan owner, maybe her teams wouldn't have been killed if she'd just had some goddamned walking suits to do the job) and the never-ending stream of curse words floating on the crater's breeze. The lobotomites would quickly learn to stay out of her way, and every new acquisition for the Think Tank would be tossed unceremoniously on the floor of the sanctum with a clatter. Doctor Dala loves the caravaner, but the others all hate her, and Cass can't help but find the feeling mutual. Doctor Mobius would not be able to sway her from high-tailing it out of Big MT as soon as possible, and like Raul, she would not see the Think Tank's containment as her responsibility. Her brain, on the other hand, would berate her for her internalized guilt and bully her into doing the right thing - which, in her case, is eliminating the Think Tank's threat once and for all.

Veronica Santangelo: The main challenge for the doctors of the Think Tank upon capturing Veronica would be prying her away from their sanctum long enough to set her on the path to retrieving tech for them. Like Arcade, Veronica would be fascinated by the Sink and everything in it, but she would be equally fascinated with the scientists themselves and their varied personalities. She would prod Doctor Klein for details about his work, decode Doctor 8's speech patterns, and roll her tongue around in her mouth for Doctor Dala's recording equipment. Getting her brain back would take a backseat to just wandering Big MT, taking in the crazy inventions from a world long gone and wondering which ones she could bring home to Elder McNamara to show him how remaining set in his ways has put the Brotherhood of Steel on a path to irrelevance. This desire would stay her hand after meeting Doctor Mobius, and would lead her to convince the Think Tank to abandon their escape attempts and return to testing silly hypotheses. Her most important discovery would be the clues left behind by Father Elijah, well on his way to becoming a mad scientist himself, and Christine, hot on his trail for the Brotherhood of Steel. All in all, the experience would leave Veronica hungry for more adventure and send her sprinting toward the Sierra Madre and an uncertain fate.

ED-E: As a robot, the Think Tank would be disappointed with the little intruder and would likely argue about whether to toss it in the scrap pile. Doctor 0 would be absolutely disgusted by the intrusion of Robert House's technology into Big MT, but Doctor Dala would become attached to the eyebot and adopt it, cooing about the elegance of its design while simultaneously bemoaning its lack of biorhythms. ED-E, confused, would humor her for a while before striking out to explore the crater and its many wonders. After its first run-in with lobotomites, the eyebot would flee in fear, straight past the X-42 giant robo-scorpion and into the clutches of Doctor Mobius. The self-proclaimed villain would take pity on the robot and release it outside the radar fence with an escort of robo-scorpions to take home.

Rex: Cyberdogs are a well-known quantity at Big MT, so the new arrival from outside the radar fence is immediately handed over to Doctor Borous for his X-8 project. With a fresh new brain, some grease on his joints, and a competent pack addition named Roxie, Rex is ready to take on any obstacle courses in the X-8 research center. Once the two cyberdogs grow bored of tearing through night stalkers and avoiding Gabe, they make their escape and lope off into the Mojave to have a litter of Boston terrifiers together.

[alexwritesfiction]

hear my heartbeat? (just focus on that)

words: 2370

genre: fluff, angst, mlm friendship

tw: a bit very sad hmm

a/n: i love this idk why. i really shouldnt be writing so much angst holy hell. please read it!

—

in which michael can't sleep because if nightmares and ashton helps him.

—

Michael hated sleeping. He couldn’t even think about it. Just the thought of closing his eyes sent shivers down his spine. He used to love sleep. Heck, that was all he did back when he could. But things change, especially for him they did. He started to play in a band. With his best friends, no less. And he couldn’t have been more elated.

He needed to sleep, he craved to. Every night he’d lay down, terrified but with a bit of hope that maybe, just maybe he’ll sleep. Maybe, he won’t wake up in the middle of the thrashing and sobbing.

All he could do was hope, and he was running out of it at an alarming rate. For the past couple of shows he’d looked horrendous, as if his eyes had been painted red. He didn’t recognize himself in the mirror anymore. Didn’t feel like himself anymore.

He kept feeling worse and worse every day. It only doubled whenever he was struck with the realization that he should be happy that he even made something out of his career.

Lord, if Ashton could hear him right now, he would’ve no doubt broken down. And Michael couldn’t afford that. He needed Ashton to stay strong the way he was. He lived vicariously off him.

He thought Ashton didn’t know. But then again, he was the band dad after all. It was his job to protect his family. Where the band is, home is.

Today they were going to be playing a show in Copenhagen. The venue they were staying at only had two rooms, which means they’d have to share one each.

Sure, they’d shared rooms before, even beds, all four of them. But, this time, it was different. This time, Michael was different.

This scared him further. If he didn’t sleep alone, they’d know. He couldn’t bear the thought of having a nightmare while one of his bandmates was sleeping beside him. He could picture the disappointment on their faces. They’d hate him for not being okay. He was supposed to be fine. Michael had always been the chill, happy go lucky guy. The soft one, but strong. Oh, how untrue it was.

He may have been fine from the outside, but he just about was erupting like a volcano inside. And the lava ruined him every day. It was like he was the sun: bright from the outside, but just a big ball of black in the inside.

“C’mon Mike, we got to go,” Calum’s voice bounced off his door and he knocked. Michael currently sat in his stage clothes, trying to calm himself down as he curled into a ball. There was some shuffling outside the door, and then it burst open.

He looked up to see Ashton barging in with a wild look on his face. His face fell as he saw Michael curled up. But Michael, ever the tension diffusing machine, stood up faster than light and flashed a bright smile at him.

“Let’s freaking rock the stage tonight!” Michael grinning, hopefully throwing Ashton off track. He couldn’t let him know. But he could see it in Ashton’s eyes that he did. The look was gone as fast as it came, Ashton returning a soft smile.

Michael smiled gratefully, walking out the door, only to be held back by his arm as Ashton pulled him back and crushed him into a hug.

Michael inhaled sharply. He felt safe in his arms. He could breathe a bit better, even though it might just be a casual hug. His arms tightened against Ashton and then slowly tried to pull away. He knew that if he stayed like this any longer, he’d cry. And tears were weak. They weren’t manly. Especially not just before a show.

“It’s okay to not be okay, you know,” Ashton whispered in Michael’s ears, his voice cracking a bit at the end. Michael trembled, recognizing the words he’d said to his band whenenver one of them had felt bad. Michael took it upon himself to cheer them up. If only he could do that to himself.

“Ashton,” Michael said. Because what else was there to say, really. Nothing made sense in Michael’s mind. Other than Ashton.

“Boys, we really do gotta go!” Luke yelled from somewhere.

The hug just ended like that. Ashton held Michael to an arm’s length, scanning his face for any sign of weakness. He knew Michael was sad, but one thing he didn’t know that Michael had one of the best poker faces. And right now, the most heart-breaking thing was that he wanted to die, but his smile said that he couldn’t be happier.

Ashton, finally satisfied, nodded at Michael, signalling at him to go on stage. Michael heaved a sigh of relief. He just merely got out of that one, he thought. If he gets paired with Ashton to sleep on the bed, he would be doomed. He could feel it.

But he couldn’t risk messing up on stage. So, he stood and thought of how rainbows were magical and how kittens could make his heart melt. And when he finally felt ready to go, he did. And he rocked it.

---

He’d messed up. Bad. One of the best shows and it was his fault it messed up. He ran down the stage and to the backstage, ripping the guitar off his chest. Hot tears streamed down his face as he fell near the washrooms. Sobs wracked his body. His bandmates came after him, yelling his name.

“Michael, it’s okay",” the hushed him, standing tall over him, and peering down with pity in their eys. Michael hated pity. He didn’t need pity. He needed to just let it out.

Next thing he knows, he’s being lifted and engulfed into a hug by his best friends. This only made him cry harder. He should’ve stopped, should’ve calmed down. But he just couldn’t. The emotions kept erupting, the lava kept erupting and Michael wasn’t in control of his poker face anymore.

He heard Ashton say that he’d be rooming with Michael tonight, and he was so caught up in just breaking down that he was powerless.

“Let’s go” Ashton stated, and Michael barely nodded, wiping his endless tears with his long sleeves. One could have said he looked adorable even while crying, and Michael would have laughed at them. Right now, he could just imagine Ashton giving him a lecture on how to get better or think positive. But that's never helped. Still, he was determined to not let Ashton down. He was the one person to have cared for Michael even in the darkest times, when Luke and Calum and Ashton rose to shine and Michael was overlooked.

They reached a door, and a man, possibly a bodyguard opened it up, eyeing Michael up and down like he couldn’t believe someone could be so wrecked. he had disgust in his eyes, and Ashton noticed it too.

“You’re fired. Go home” Ashton said in his taking-no-shit voice. The man spluttered before rapidly nodding his head and looking at Michael one last time before walking away.

“Stupid freaking humans,” Ashton muttered, and Michael couldn't have agreed more. He giggled in between his crying, and it sounded like a frog wailing due to his croaky throat.

And then they both were laughing uncontrollably at the atrocity of it all. Michael didn’t know how much more he could cry, so he started laughing, and Ashton joined in until they were in peals of laughter, just laying on the bed,

Ashton laid back down, head on the pillow, Michael using Ashton's stomach as a pillow, and it didn’t feel awkward. Not one bit.

They calmed down after a few minutes, the hazy tension returing. Michael braced himself as he heard Ashton take a deep breath. His stomach bloated beneath Michael and he chuckled.

“You can't sleep, can you, Michael?” Ashton asked, his voice reflecting that he already knew the answer. Michael just chose not to answer that question. Ashton already knew, there was no point in saying anything. Except one.

“Go on, tell me how I should get better,”

Michael hadn’t meant for the words to come out so bitter and he sat up straight as hurt flashed in Ashton's eyes. But he recovered quick. He knew Michael hadn’t meant those words.

“I- I'm sorry – I didn’t – I didn’t mean that-” Michael struggled to explain, his hands flailing in different direction, once again on the verge of crying.

“Hey, hey, calm down. Shh. It's all right, Michael.” Ashton sat up and rested Michaels hand to his sides.

“I know you,” he breathed, and with that, Michael confirmed his suspicions. He was shaken for a second. He did not know why. Why was he so affected? He already suspected Ashton knew.

Michael’s mind was a hurricane, and it was spinning faster and faster. He couldn’t think of what to say to Ashton, how to handle this situation. That got to him, his ability to diffuse tension suddenly not acting.

“I can't sleep, Ash,” he said brokenly. Ashton locked eyes with him like he wanted to tear down the mask in his eyes and pull Michael out of whatever hole he falling into before it was too late. Michael already thought it was too late, but Ashton believed it never was. He hoped it was true.

It all comes down to hope, Michael thought, everything always comes down to hope. He hated that word now, with every fibre of his being.

He wasn’t aware that tears had started falling again, he just stared like a pale dead body at Ashton.

“I don’t hate you, you know,” Ashton said suddenly, surprising Michael with his words. He didn’t believe Ashton. How could he not hate someone so…sad?

Michael truly was a contradiction of himself. He could believe Ashton had his back and that he hated him simultaneously. That’s how he worked.

“I love you, Michael,” Ashton whispered into the dead silence of the room. His hands reached out to Michael’s cheeks, wiping away the drops that showed his weakness. Michael couldn’t hold himself in, he flung his weight onto Ashton, almost attacking him. They both fell back onto the pillows and Michael held onto Ashton for dear life.

Ashton sighed, softly rubbing Michael’s back until his tears dried and he could pass out from exhaustion. But Michael couldn’t bring himself to close his eyes, not when he’d cried so much.

Ashton had closed his eyes when Michael shifted his face from his stomach to look up at him. Ashton hummed in acknowledgement as if to say that he’s still there. Just…there. For him. And weirdly, that was all Michael needed to feel confident in telling him what he was about to.

“Hey, Ash?” he poked Ashton’s cheek repeatedly. Ashton didn’t respond, mocking him for being cute.

“Ash, Ash, Ash,” he kept chanting, finally cracking the curly haired boy up and making him pop one eye open. The tension that had been there had been dissipated as soon as cheeks were poked.

Michael had a soft smile on his face as he gazed up at Ashton. He blinked a few times, realizing they hadn’t even had the time to change their clothes. He still felt comfortable. Nothing other than Ashton could make him feel that way right now.

“Yeah?” Ashton murmured, raking his hands through Michael’s hair, which oddly felt like heaven.

“I can’t sleep,” he repeated his sentence from earlier, making Ashton confused. Why would he say that again?

“You already said-” he started, Michael cutting him off almost instantly.

“I have nightmares.” He stated. He felt Ashton inhale sharply at this. Ashton could never have imagined the extent of his acute insomnia. His hands stilled in Michael’s hair.

“God, Michael,” he stammered, “when were you gonna tell us?” Ashton asked, quietly as if the prospect of Michael keeping it to himself had hurt him. And it had, but he couldn’t focus on himself right now. this was about Michael, and he would be damned if he didn’t help him.

“Probably never,” Michael said truthfully, still lying on Ashton’s stomach. He grabbed Ashton’s hands from his hair and held them preciously between his own.

“There’s so many things I want to say to you right now, Mike. I just don’t know if I should say them now.” Ashton explained, and Michael understood perfectly. He’d known that feeling all too well.

“So, don’t,” Michael chuckled.

“Come here,” Ashton said in a voice that left no questions. Michael crawled up and lay his head on Ashton’s chest. He could feel a steady thumping beneath him and sighed and he put a hand over Ashton’s waist, cuddling up.

“Hear my heartbeat? Just focus on that.” Ashton said after a few seconds. And he did. He paid attention to ever heartbeat, the feeling calming him down. He felt like the volcano had erupted and now it was just calm, like a boulder had been lifted off his chest. He knew it would last, but he couldn’t bring himself to get away from Ashton. He believed then that Ashton was the one he could go to without hesitation.

Michael smiled, his eyes unconsciously fluttering close. Ashton peered down after a few minutes when he heard small snores. And he saw the best sight he could’ve seen, as Michael slept cuddled up to him. Slept because he felt safe. In his arms.

Ashton couldn’t quite believe his eyes, and he had to do a double take before finally letting a grin spread on his face. He adjusted the pair of them so that they held hands, Michael on his chest with his other arm on Ashton’s waist, and Ashton’s hand resting on Michael’s head. He fell asleep too, in a while, the thought of Michael still on his mind.

If someone had seen them now, they’d have seen a couple. Two boyfriends sleeping. But it went far deeper than that. They were best friends. Brothers, more accurately. And neither of them could care enough as to what anyone thought they were.

Because that’s what they were, in the simplest words.

Michael and Ashton.

read it full on ao3 here :)

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[languageek]

Tips I’ve Learned from Relearning my Second First Language

This is really important, to me, and maybe to you, too. 

But first, here’s some background info on me and bilingualism in general:

I grew up speaking Japanese and English and started speaking them as a baby at the same time (simultaneous bilingual). Some of you may have learned one after the other (sequential bilingual). 

I grew up speaking Japanese because my grandma mostly raised me, and she’s Japanese. So through her, I learned Japanese. This is my heritage language. Another example, a common heritage language in California (USA) is Spanish, and I have friends who grew up speaking Vietnamese and Tagalog. 

By definition (for ease, through Wikipedia), a heritage language is is a minority language (either immigrant or indigenous) learnt by its speakers at home as children, but never fully developed because of insufficient input from the social environment. 

People who speak a heritage language range in their skillset: some speakers are more fluent than others, and some can only understand. Some may know how to read and write, but many don’t. Everyone is different. 

The past couple months, at 25 years old, I decided I wanted to start trying to learn Japanese again. Before starting to study it more actively, I could understand Japanese pretty easily, minimal ability to speak, read, and write (hiragana was the easiest, followed by katakana and some kanji). When I was younger, I attended Japanese school on Saturdays, which is where I learned to read and write. 

I had tried many many many times before to learn Japanese again, but I failed every time. 

Here are some things I wish I would have realized earlier:

 1. You can’t rely on passive skills to study if you want to improve your active skills 

Passive skills: Listening comprehension, reading Active skills: Speaking, writing 

Active skills focus on the production of language. For the longest time I wasn’t improving these skills because I thought that I could improve them by listening to more things in Japanese: TV shows, songs, YouTube videos, listening to my family speak. 

But why would that work if I’ve been listening to my grandma speak to me in Japanese for 25 years of my life and I didn’t gain any active skills from that? 

In order to gain improve your active skills, you have to practice by using your active skills. 

I know, if you don’t speak a heritage language and are reading this, you might think DUH! I learned Portuguese and the only way to get good at speaking it is to speak it. I don’t think I realized this was the case with my Japanese because I already had an “in.” But this still applies. I had to speak and write more in order to be able to, well, speak and write more. 

2. You have to try 

You grew up speaking another language. It’s a special gift. But if you’re lacking in certain skills, you still have to work to try and strengthen those skills. 

A couple years ago, I went back to study at my Japanese school as an adult because I thought it would help. It kind of did, but not really... 

I TRICKED MYSELF into thinking I understood all the material because I could understand everything the teacher was saying, when in reality I wasn’t able to retain the kanji or the syntactic structures I was learning. 

By tricking myself into THINKING I knew things, I sabotaged my own learning experience. 

You have to try, and you have to really want to learn it because already knowing parts of the language have the potential to hold you back. 

3. Use what gave you the language to your advantage

Don’t “use” them, but you know what I mean. 

For the longest time (childhood into recent adulthood), I was too embarrassed to use Japanese with my mom and grandma. I would only routinely use a select amount of phrases that I felt comfortable using, even if my grandma was speaking to me in Japanese. 

My mom would always say “You have the best resources around you, practice your Japanese while you can.” 

And while sometimes what parents say can be annoying, my mom was right. 

But it took a HUGE change in my life to realize this and take action. 

When I was 23, my grandma went back to live in Japan. It was an emotional and difficult time for me because I was so used to having her around. While she was living with my family, we learned to communicate in a mix of Japanese-English, and I expressed my gratitude for her by doing housework for her, or buying her things at the grocery store or brought her desserts after going out to eat with friends. 

But her moving across the world meant that I couldn’t do these things anymore. A couple days before her departure, I decided that I would try and write her a letter in Japanese and slip it in her backpack for when she arrived in Japan. 

Let me tell you, I had THE MOST difficult time writing that letter. I couldn’t express how much appreciated her because my Japanese sucked. And I hated that I couldn’t tell her that in her own language. 

So after she moved to Japan, I started to write her letters--*practicing those active skills though!!! 

By being able to write letters with my grandma, not only was I practicing my Japanese, but I was creating a relationship with my grandma that I had never had before. I knew that I would regret it if I didn’t talk to her more before she’s gone. Which is sad, but it’s reality. 

And let me tell you. I’ve improved a lot. 

I can think in Japanese now. It may not be perfect, but I know how to structure my sentences. Words are coming more easily to my brain now. I can communicate with my grandma. 

4. It’s never too late

I considered late high school/early college the prime of my language learning career. I got myself to a decent level of Spanish, I learned Portuguese, I took classes in Mandarin and French. 

But for some reason, I thought my Japanese was always DOOMED because it was just way. too. hard. for. me. to. learn. 

Japanese is hard. But it’s not impossible. 

I realized that at 25. It’s never too late to learn a language, but it’s also never too late to try and relearn a language you were familiar with before. 

Just take it one step at a time. 

I always thought Japanese was overwhelming because I KNEW how difficult it was. I thought about everything--kanji, onyomi and kunyomi, all the sentence structures and everything all at once. This freaked me out and made me think I could never learn it. 

But if you learn it little by little, it’s not as overwhelming. 

# 

That’s pretty much all the major points of things I wish I realized earlier when it came to studying Japanese. 

Language is something I’ve been interested in for a long time in terms of academics, so Japanese is naturally, important to me as a language. For other heritage language speakers, it might be more of the food that’s important, or cultural aspects, or other parts of their heritage that is important. 

Everyone is different. 

But this was for you, heritage language speaker, if you needed a little push. 

[officialsporkintheroad]

Oooh Gin n Tonic for the soulmate ficlet!

(Author’s Note: OKAY so this one got away from me--it’s almost 3k words. It’s a little darker/sadder than I thought it would be--I started off with Power Couple vibes, and then it became canon compliant, so obvi that didn’t quite happen. Ginny’s still a bad bitch tho. Thanks for the prompt and I hope you like <3)

SEND ME A HARRY POTTER RARE-PAIR FOR SOULMATE AU FICLET

TW: brief & mild self-harm, depression, off-screen attempted murder, minor character death

**********

Here’s the thing.

By the time Ginevra Weasley is born, there are six other Weasley children already. It’s hard enough to distinguish yourself when you’re poor, when your family name is synonymous with Blood Traitors in some circles and Pity in others, when everything you own is second-hand and handed-down and usedbrokendirty. It’s even harder knowing half her siblings will make a name for themselves before she’s even out of nappies.

Bill is the most talented. Charlie, the most fearless. Percy is the smartest. The twins are funny and inventive to a degree that’s nearly unbeatable. Even Ron is the best at chess, the best at strategy.

What’s left for me, she wonders.

But when she’s old enough to understand soulmarks, old enough to read them, she realizes that magic herself has marked her as different. Nobody in her family two sets of words the way she does.

 ********** 

Here’s the thing.

Tom Riddle is born to nothing but the name falling from his dying mother’s lips, but even in a sea of orphans, he is extraordinary. First, because he is a pretty child. Then because is so very bright. And later—though not much later, because as noted, he is extraordinary—because of his magic.

And because, unlike the other children at Wool’s, there is a string of words winding around his wrist in narrow script that read, “I wish someone would see me instead of my family.”

Soulmarks. That’s what Professor Dumbledore calls them when he visits, when he explains magic and Hogwarts and the words his soulmate will one day say to him.

“Someone made just for me,” Tom mutters under his breath, enchanted by the idea. Someone who will understand him wholly and completely, who will be his entirely—

“Well,” Dumbledore says, and he has a strange, cold look in his steely eyes. “Not all soulmates work out.”

Tom gets the impression Dumbledore might not like him very much, and that’s before the man sets his wardrobe on fire.

Still, before Dumbledore leaves, Tom asks one more question.

“Sir. Do people only have one soulmate?”

Dumbledore pauses, assesses Tom. “Almost always.”

Tom nods quietly and lets the old man leave.

(There’s a second set of words in a more elegant script above Tom’s left hip that read, “It’s always you, isn’t it?” Another sign that he’s more than the wizards around him—two soulmarks instead of the usual one—but Tom doesn’t tell anyone about them. Not yet.)

 ********** 

When Ginny meets Harry Potter—for only a split second just outside platform 9 ¾ —she hopes it will be him. Probably lots of people hope Harry Potter will speak their words; he’s a hero and he has the prettiest green eyes and the nicest smile. He doesn’t speak to her then, and she’s too shy to say anything, and that means there’s still a chance.

Still a chance when Harry Potter comes to visit the next summer.

But of course, then he waves and says a cheery, “Hello!”

Ginny freezes, turns and all but runs back up the stairs. Neither of her marks is a simple, “Hello.”

For the next few days, weeks, she wallows a bit in her disappointment. Harry Potter is not her soulmate.

The excitement of Hogwarts dulls the hurt of her doomed crush, though, right up until she puts on the sorting hat and it says, “Another Weasley.”

And in the Gryffindor girls’ dorms late that night, having unpacked and found a strange, blank diary that she doesn’t remember buying, Ginny writes down the thought that’s been plaguing her practically from the moment she was born.

“I wish someone would see me instead of my family.”

She doesn’t expect the book to write back.

“I see you.”

She stares at the words, the pretty, delicate script, for only a moment, and then she’s running to the bathroom, wrenching her nightgown down off her shoulder because even though she’s looked every day since she learned to read, she has to be sure.

“Those are my words,” she whispers to herself, vaguely aware she’s nearly hyperventilating. She all but runs back to the book—her soulmate is a book?—and writes more.

“I’m Ginevra Weasley, though I go by Ginny. Who are you?”

 ********** 

When Tom Riddle is 16 and overconfident and proud and desperate to prove himself, he opens the Chamber of Secrets and inadvertently kills Myrtle Warren.

Waste not, want not, he thinks. The girl’s death might have been a bit of an accident—he’d planned to kill someone, if not her specifically, and perhaps not right now—but that won’t matter for the ritual he has planned.

When he makes his first horcrux, he feels as though he’s being split apart. The agony is blinding, burning. But eventually it fades and he hauls himself up, dusts himself off, and sneaks back into the Slytherin dormitories.

It’s only the next morning that he realizes the soulmark on his wrist is gone. Not burned off. Not faded to gray the way they do when your soulmate has died. It’s as if it never existed.

(The one on his hip remains unchanged.)

Ultimately, he decides, it’s of little consequence. Soulmates are a childish fancy that had appealed to him when he was an orphan nobody. Now, Lord Voldemort is on the horizon—a grander image for himself that will elevate him beyond the paltry frivolities of mortal men.

He doesn’t linger on this loss, or what it might mean for his soul.

********** 

Ginny wakes up on the floor of the Chamber of Secrets, soaked to the bone in filthy water, Harry Potter bleeding profusely beside her. The diary—Tom—is on the floor, a huge hole gaping on the front cover.

He tried to kill me, Ginny realizes, a sick feeling in her stomach. Tom had possessed her for months, had made her kill chickens and set the basilisk on muggleborns, had dragged her down to the Chamber so he could suck the life out of her. And now he’s dead.

At first, there’s nothing but the relief of surviving, tinged with bitterness and a vile, betrayed feeling in her gut. The idea of telling anyone that her soulmate was Tom—was Voldemort, as it turns out—makes her throw up. And then, of course, it occurs to her that no one has to know.

It would be better if no one knew.

She keeps that tidbit to herself, even with the anger and the grief. Everyone attributes her moods to the fact that she nearly died, but eventually they stop worrying so much. Eventually they leave her alone.

The mark on her shoulder—“I see you.”—once black, now has faded to a pale gray. So light it’s nearly invisible to anyone else.

The other mark is fine.

********** 

Ginny throws herself into her life with the energy of a person who knows what it means to die. Where she was quiet and shy before—always overwhelmed and overshadowed by her siblings—she’s now loud and bright and fearless. If Tom has taught her anything, it’s that nobody else is going to come along and make her great. That’s something she’s going to have to do for herself.

So she tries. She makes friends with Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom. She studies hard, makes sure she answers questions in class. She goes to the tri-wizard ball her third year with a nice boy named Michael Corner who is not her soulmate. She dances and she has fun and he doesn’t try to kill her, so it’s a win.

She thinks she might finally be getting the hang of things.

Of course, that’s when Voldemort resurrects himself.

Harry lands in the stadium, sobbing and clinging to Cedric Diggory’s body, and suddenly the sick feeling from the Chamber is back.

 **********

Cedric Diggory was Harry Potter’s soulmate.

Ginny learns this late at night at Grimmauld Place because dreams of the Chamber and Tom are keeping her awake and when she goes to make a cup of tea, she finds Harry at the table, staring blankly in the dark.

The clock reads 2 a.m.

“I barely got to know him, and he’s gone,” Harry says, voice ragged from crying. “And it’s my fault—”

“It’s Tom’s fault,” Ginny snaps. Not her Tom, really, but they’re the same enough. Both murderers and jackasses as far as she’s concerned.

Harry looks up at her, wide green eyes, and she realizes that no one else has told him he’s not to blame. Not for Voldemort coming back, or for Cedric dying. She wonders if anyone else even knows that they were soulmates.

Maybe that’s what prompts her to tell him.

“Tom was mine.” The words taste like ash, scrape up her throat and leave her feeling raw. “The diary. He was my soulmate.”

She shows him the grayed-out words on her shoulder.

“Fuck,” Harry chokes out eventually. “That’s…”

There really aren’t words for this.

“It’s all fucked,” she agrees.

Her tea is scalding and soothing and not nearly enough. But she’s been here for months; she knows where Sirius has been hiding the good stuff from her mom. She reaches into the false bottom of the china cabinet, pulls out a bottle of Ogdens, and pours a shot into her tea.

Harry raises a brow, but she just shrugs.

“I think we’ve earned it, don’t you?”

He takes the shot she pours for him, and there’s a silent promise that they won’t talk about this. Not with anyone else.

**********

She shouldn’t have come here.

That’s what she thinks, standing in the Department of Mysteries, in the Hall of Prophecies. One moment, they’re looking for Sirius, and then Lucius fucking Malfoy is there, and Bellatrix Lestrange, and a handful of other Death Eaters, and Ginny knows they’ve stumbled into a trap they’re not getting out of unscathed.

Harry was holding the prophecy, but sometime between him taunting Malfoy and when they all send out a simultaneous stupefy, she feels him slide it into her pocket. It takes less than a second for her to understand. They’ll think Harry has it, and even when it inevitably comes out that he doesn’t, Ron and Hermione will be the next obvious choices. Ginny is unexpected; Ginny can keep it safe.

They scatter, each one of them running in a different direction. Ginny’s dodging spells left and right, tossing hexes over her shoulder. She’s always had a fair amount of power, but the DA has honed her skills in a way they never were before. She lands more hits than she expects, hears the belligerent cursing of the man behind her when a well-placed diffindo makes him stumble. She can’t look back and see the damage herself—that would be stupid and she can’t afford to give up her meager lead—but she tosses a reducto and listens as the walls collapse.

She has three seconds to be proud of herself before it all goes to shit.

Somehow they all end up back in the same room—a strange one with a pale, shimmering archway standing in the middle—and then they’re surrounded: Death Eaters on all sides.

Voldemort himself strides forward from the darkness. He’s tall and pale and snake-like, but those movements, that grace, are all Tom.

The room is too cool and dark and for a moment, she’s back in the Chamber, she’s fading, she’s dying, she’s staring up at Tom’s face, twisted into a mocking, cruel smile that she’ll never forget as long as she lives.

“Harry Potter,” Voldemort says, breaking her out of her memory. “And I see you’ve brought your useless friends.”

There’s a split second of nothing, and then Harry’s clutching at his scar, screaming. Ginny is distantly aware of Ron helping to catch him, but she won’t be distracted now. She keeps her wand level, steady, and aimed at Voldemort.

That’s why she sees when his gaze shifts to her: red and piercing and horrid.

“Don’t be stupid, girl. Give it here,” he says, words half-hissed, and he holds out his hand for the prophecy.

She stares at him. Stares, and then laughs. It’s something manic and bitter and this is not the time, but she can’t help it. Fuck.

Because those are her other words, the ones etched across her ribcage.

(When she was younger—before the Chamber incident—she’d never liked these words as well as the other set. Her soulmate was calling her stupid, for one thing, and seemed demanding to boot. After Tom and the basilisk and nearly dying, she’d looked at these words with the last shred of hope she had left. She’d hoped, first impressions aside, that maybe this person would be the one to love her. Maybe this person she’d be allowed to keep.)

What a fucking joke.

“It’s always you, isn’t it?” she spits and has the joy of watching Lord Voldemort freeze on the spot.

She has managed to strike him speechless. It’s almost enough of an advantage.

But in the end—Ginny is starting to think some things are inevitable—Voldemort and his Death Eaters rally, the Order of the Phoenix shows up to save the day, the prophecy shatters, Sirius dies.

********** 

Back in the safety of Hogwarts, of the Hospital Wing, Ginny puts her fist through a mirror.

Then she takes one of the shards to the words on her ribcage, tries to scrape them off.

Madam Pomfrey has to stop her, has to restrain her to the bed while she heals the bleeding wound.

The mark stays. It’s magic, her soulmark; it goes deeper than the skin.

*********** 

Voldemort sits in his study in Malfoy Manor.

The prophecy is destroyed. Harry Potter has escaped. The Minister, idiot that he is, won’t be able to deny Voldemort’s presence now that he’s seen him firsthand.

It has been a shite evening, in short.

Then there is the matter of his soulmate. Ginevra Weasley.

“It’s always you, isn’t it?”

Even his new body, freshly formed out of the cauldron, had borne those words. The ones that, no matter how many horcruxes he’d made, had stayed firmly printed above his hip. Years ago, he’d thought they would disappear when he made the ring, then the cup, the locket. He’d wondered why he lost those first words but not the second set.

Now, of course, it all makes sense.

Well. He’s still not quite sure why magic has deemed some scrawny, red-haired chit deserving of Lord Voldemort.

Draco Malfoy is a well of information. Largely useless information, granted, but information all the same.

She’s a quidditch player, apparently, and—according to Draco—nearly as good a seeker as Potter. She’s got a mean bat-bogey hex and a short temper, but on the whole, she’s a year below Malfoy, so he doesn’t know much.

“Oh, but—” and here the boy pauses, pales, and swallows nervously “—she was…uh…the one who nearly died. In…in the Chamber of Secrets.”

Draco looks like he’s worried Voldemort will curse him for that, but really he’d gotten all—okay, most—of his frustration over that spectacular disaster over with when he’d first heard Lucius had given away his fucking diary.

But he didn’t know Ginevra was the one his horcrux had almost killed.

My horcrux that took my first soulmark, he thinks, and something in the back of his brain clicks.

“It’s always you, isn’t it?” she had said. Always. Because they’d met before.

She was both his marks.

********** 

“I had—have—a second mark,” she tells Harry, because he obviously knows something is up. They’re sitting together up at the astronomy tower. It’s one of those nights where the dreams creep in and she wishes she had the memory of Gryffindor’s sword in her hands. She wishes she’d been the one to kill Tom all those years ago. Wishes she could kill Voldemort now.

But that, apparently, is Harry’s job.

Despite the fact that she’s pretty sure he’s already guessed the truth, and despite the fact that she knows he won’t judge her for it—he didn’t judge her for Tom, he won’t judge her now—she can’t stand to say it aloud.

She shows him the words on her side instead.

Don’t be stupid, girl. Give it here.

“I…I tried to get rid of them,” she whispers into the night when the silence stretches too long. “Why is it him?”

Harry wraps her in a hug that’s just shy of smothering.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m sorry, Ginny. I’m so fucking sorry.”

**********

Dumbledore is dead. It’s only a matter of time before the ministry falls. Lord Voldemort is more powerful now than he’s ever been.

He can’t stop looking at his soulmark.

It is ridiculous, he tries to tell himself. Lord Voldemort has no use for a soulmate, no want for one either. And certainly not one that’s a mudblood-loving bint fighting for the enemy.

He should kill her and be done with it. It’s not as though he can just leave her be.

But.

But for all that Voldemort has remade himself into something near-godly, there is still an orphan boy somewhere inside of him that used to steal the things he coveted, that used to collect what little treasures could be found in Wool’s and keep them close.

Once, he saw his soulmarks and thought, There is someone made to be mine.

And that?

That’s a temptation he cannot quite pass up.

[sparksflamesembersashes]

Random musings on 10.18 Find Me

Other Carylers have spoken about the episode and their interpretations of it and what it means for Caryl and their future and I've been sharing those and don't have that much to add to what’s already been discussed. Others have written well thought out and detailed analyses and interpretations and said it way better than I ever could. Most of them have been writing about Caryl forever and I started less than a year ago. I do want to speak to some technical stuff and a few other things, since I never do know when to shut up. Spoilers for 10.18 below the cut.

Brief talk on techie stuff... Wow, the cinematography in the plus six are really taking it up a notch. 10.18 has some of the most gorgeous images in the history of the show. The colors, the framing, and Caryl; separated by a stretch of water that's a literal stand-in for the divide between them, in an episode stuffed with signs and symbols and parallels. "Find Me" has some of the most visually breathtaking shots in the history of TWD... and do you know why? Because the plus six were filmed on digital cameras, for the first time in the history of a show that has always been shot on 16 millimeter film. Turns out, the digital process not only has fewer "touch points" (thanks for nothing, COVID) but it's also cheaper, faster, and easier on the environment.

TWD almost switched to digital for Season 2, and while AK claims now that they can still give it that classic TWD look, in a 2019 interview posted on comicbook.com, she said they were committed to shooting on film to preserve it's look and feel (confirming that film and digital are noticeably not created equal, an opinion/truth they are apparently backing off of, now). If the new episodes look different, its because they are. I am torn between which style I prefer. The grainy, Kodak-y type images of TWD as shot on film are increasingly rare on any screen, simultaneously nostalgic and beautiful and born of toxicity. The gallons of chemicals used in developing standard film are not environmentally friendly and probably need to go the way of the dinosaur. 

Digital is wonderful in its own ways, so minute in its details, and can easily capture images and light conditions otherwise incredibly difficult to duplicate on actual film... But digital doesn't look the same, it doesn't feel the same, in the way that CD's and vinyl records don't sound the same. Purists curl their lip at the new and improved version of the medium, but the truth is,most people don't notice the differences.

TWD has always used the sun and the moon to their best visual advantage and both the celestial backdrops show up in "Find Me." The sun filtering through the trees onto Daryl or in his general direction has made repeat appearances in S10. Is this a metaphor for his finally finding his enlightenment? (Or is it nothing deeper than AMC uses the light to make everything look as cool as possible?) 

10.18 shows us more of Daryl's soul (in a single episode) than we've seen before. His character goes through all sorts of colors, screaming in the rainstorm, grimacing as puppy Dog licks his face, meeting and spending time with this strange, lonely, gruff, almost mirror reflection of himself, someone who is grieving and angry and alone. Fighting with Carol! A real fight, but an honest and not altogether unhealthy one. You gotta work through to acceptance and let go of the past before you can look forward to a future, and these two have enough trauma issues between them to fill a psychiatric journal. They’ve a long, arduous road ahead of them, but they WILL reach their destination. Together.

Daryl throwing the fish at Leah's door and Leah throwing the fish at Daryl are my favorite moments in the episode. I laughed out loud. I did not get the impression that they only encountered each other once every several months, I took it that the time jumps measured the progression of their relationship, i.e. that it took that long for them to warm up to each other. When Daryl did go to stay at Leah's, it was literally out of necessity, as he was getting frost bitten in the woods and probably would have lost at least a digit or two had he remained in his camp.

For the first time, I didn't really enjoy the Caryl banter? (Please don't hurt me.) There was a sadness, a tension, and a sense of loss there I just couldn't shake. Carol was trying to run away from the horrors of the Whisperer's aftermath, and Daryl knew it, and he was annoyed by it. Carol's attempts at lightheartedness seemed forced. I feel like Daryl is a man with a whole lot on his mind at this point, and that Carol is a woman who is habitually trying not to think about the real stuff if she can avoid it. She jokes and banters but she's almost too cheerful... or maybe it just seems that way because Daryl's so grim. Not grim as in we're-all-facing-our-end-of-days-doom grim, but not in a laughing mood where Carol's concerned. He thinks she's running again, and seeing Leah's cabin reminds him that Leah probably ran from him, too. He lost both his brothers, Rick and Merle. Daryl has abandonment issues and an overdeveloped sense of responsibility going back as far as we know. He loses people and can't find them again, no matter how much he searches. 

Revisiting Leah's cabin, the devastation of Alexandria, and everything that's been building up over, about, and because of Carol has pressurized within Daryl till he finally takes a shot, and who can blame him? But he also shows his development and maturity by trying to express his disappointment with controlled words of frustration (compared to camp- or barn-rage Daryl in S2), telling Carol exactly what it is she does that's widening the chasm between them. 

Carol to Daryl early in the episode "I don't want to lose you because you can't figure out when to stop," and Daryl to Carol "That's on you. 'Cause you don't know when to stop.") Daryl doesn't know when to stop searching for his lost brother and blaming himself for things, Carol didn't know when to stop her revenge-fueled pursuit of Alpha. Daryl also tells Carol "That's all that matters. You being right." (after she says she was right to go after and destroy Alpha to avenge her son.) At the end of the ep., Carol says it again: "I was right" (this time about their luck having run out), then she goes to fix the door. 

So now Caryl know and have established what gets each other's goat. That could be a good thing, but tptb will undoubtedly attempt to convince us its a bad thing,, ya think? Neither of the characters knowing when to stop and their mutual annoyance over the fact could be something the show runners milk for a while.

Î wanted to know whether Daryl went back to the cabin after leaving his note, to see whether Leah had returned to it, or not. I want to know what Carol did with the note. Did she take it with her, or did she put it back? They never showed us. Daryl seemed anxious and tense about her finding it, and I did not miss the symbolism of Carol being the woman who eventually finds the note Daryl left behind years ago: "I belong with you. Find me." I mean, how perfect is that? 

Contrary to spoilery bullshit stinking up the Twittersphere, Carol did not seem exactly “upset” at finding the note, though clearly she was sad. She knew exactly what the note was, so Daryl must’ve told her about it, that he left it. Maybe he didn't tell her exactly what it said or everything about Leah, but my impression was that she realized what it was and where they were, and it was all yesterday's news to her. Seeing the note seemed to make her sad for Daryl because she knows Daryl can't handle losing people, and that he punishes himself for failing to help or save people by pushing everybody away and isolating. 

Leah didn't so much choose to be there in the cabin as she ran for her life from a dangerous situation and the cabin was just the place where she and her bitten son ended up.

So many yawning gaps in the Leah storyline. How often did they see each other? Did Daryl move in with her toward the end of their relationship? I felt like he did after the time she found him freezing in the woods, but that he'd leave for days to go look for Rick, or hunt, or who tf knows. Maybe he'd leave to see or meet Carol. Carol knew about Leah, but when? Before, or after it was happening? Why is that important? I just want to know when he told her.  Really hoping they didn’t leave things purposely vague so they can fill in the gaps to screw with us later. 

Timing is everything. Like, how much time passed between Leah telling Daryl to choose, and the time Carol told Daryl she couldn't keep visiting? Or did he leave Leah's cabin and return to it that same day? Which would imply Leah abandoned Daryl practically the instant he walked out the door following her ultimatum. It seems like Daryl was gone a while, it was dark when Leah told him to choose, and daylight in the scene with Carol at his camp and when he was walking in the woods. It could have been days. That makes a difference. Leah was obviously not Daryl's first choice, no matter that he ran back to her in the end.

The fact that Carol knew about Daryl's relationship with Leah is a crafty move on the show runner's part because we can't really be pissed at Daryl if Carol knew about it the whole time and was cool with it.... but we all know now that Daryl didn't tell her everything. 

No one is talking about how Leah obviously abandoned Dog, she left him shut in the damn cabin for who knows how long after she left. And she DID leave. The cabin looked abandoned when Daryl left the note. He obviously went searching for her with Dog, but for how long? 

Not to say there was nothing between them, but I never felt for an instant that Leah had Daryl's heart, or that he ever offered it up to her in the first place, but I am also 100% sure that’s because I’m ride-or-die for Caryl and can’t bear to entertain the thought. No matter what else they were, Daryl and Leah are isolated, damaged, traumatized people who wanted someone to hold on to. Someone to try and forget with. It's not like there were a lot of other people around to choose from.

So did Leah just leave Dog behind because the memories associated with him were too painful? (i.e. he was born on the day Leah's son died) Or did she feel that Daryl needed the companionship and gambled that Daryl would drop by soon and take him in? It really bothers me that she just split and left the dog locked in the cabin like that. 

Grateful they didn't show us anything extra of Daryl seeming to genuinely give a shit, tbh. (Throwing a fish at someone's door, having sex with them, sleeping in their bed or eating their cooking doesn't necessarily constitute giving a shit in this world, just saying.) That was both refreshing (cuz u know, Caryl is endgame), and kind of tragic. I felt like Daryl was rather emotionally detached the entire time, but that Leah was maybe falling in love with him. Not in a good way, but in a possessive, demanding, all-or-nothing type of way. 

How very very clever of AMC to leave us with all these ambiguities. So much room for interpretation, so many gaps to never be filled in. Bastards. On the bright side, all these holes in the story and missing material provide endless new opportunities for fanfic writers like me who can't break free of the bonds of canon. So, yay, I guess?

I am sad to give up the virgin Daryl trope, I was beginning to think that one was ours in canon to keep, but you know, it is what it is. It was a good, long run while it lasted, and I'm grateful we got to write inexperienced Daryl fics while we could still entertain the fantasy that Daryl was actually inexperienced. So, R.I.P. virgin Daryl. I'm not as upset about his getting laid as I thought I'd be (although it was incredibly underhanded, AMC, to pull this shit so very late in the game, there better be a good reason for it). 

All the Leah thing means to me right now is that our man has probably picked up some skills during his time with her, and Carol's gonna be the ultimate beneficiary. Plus, Daryl's evolved over the years from throwing a fish at a woman's door to delivering her dinner on a tray with a flower, so...progress was made, even if he didn't start out with the woman we wish he had. (News Flash: The love of his life was unavailable and actually married to another man at the time, so there's that.) 

There are a staggering number of Caryllels in this episode. Someone once said here that Kang loves her symbolism and they weren't wrong. No matter what's to come, we can be confident about where this road ends. At this point in TWD, to not eventually give us Caryl canon would be the absolute greatest trolling of a fandom in the history of trolling fandoms, and besides, we're getting a spin-off.

Another thing, the fact that Rick and Leah both basically disappeared on him shines a bright light on Daryl's determination to stick to Carol like glue in 10A and B. He was terrified that she was going to disappear on him, too.

What happened to the Caryl fandom following the spoilers wasn't worth it. How many times have we freaked out over spoilers? You think we'd learn. And you KNOW we are valued because AMC went so very far out of their way to provide the vaguest-ever depiction of a sexual encounter for Daryl. Remember the Eugene spying scene with Abe and Rosita, guys? Shane and Lori screwing on the ground in the woods? They could really have tortured us, and they chose to be kind.

I'm looking forward to "Diverged." Honestly, I could give a shit about most of the other characters, but they'll have to make do for us over the next couple of weeks. Just about the time 10.18's been dissected and interpreted to death, Caryl will reappear on our screens and mess with our hearts and minds some more. I can't wait.

Thank you for coming to my rant, and Caryl on! 

[hellowkatey]

angstpril day 12: dying words

Summary: Qui-Gon lives after the duel at Naboo, but the Force isn’t happy about it. Fate had already predetermined this was to be his final hours, and now he lives on borrowed time. The Force beckons, and Qui-Gon is rushing to tie up his loose ends before he fulfills his fate.

part 1 | part 2 | read on AO3

warnings: major character death (surprise surprise)

Unfinished Business (part 3)

It should be easier to come to terms with death when you know the very moment you will die. It's a cruel thing to know the moment you will cease to live.

It should be comforting to know it will be painless. Timely. As quick as the time it takes to breathe, but after the exhale there will be no inhale that follows.

Dying should be the easy part of all of this because there is no death, only the Force. It's a phrase Qui-Gon has muttered to himself many times in his years of being a Jedi, and yet... he sits on his funeral pyre and realizes he isn't ready and certainly isn't comforted.

Qui-Gon knows he was meant to die in that duel. He knows he was meant to take his last breath in the arms of his padawan, and the galaxy was meant to move onward. But the galaxy was also doomed to darkness, and if the Force let him see the suffering, he rationalized that it was asking him to stop it.

The Force denies that as its motive. Apparently, he misread the situation. Qui-Gon always thought the past was meant to flash before your eyes in the final moments before death, but apparently, it is the future you leave behind. Maybe for some who worry about missing who their loved ones will turn out to be, it's a positive. A last happy note before becoming one with the Force.

For Qui-Gon, it felt like a slap to the face. Everything he had worked for, everything the Force had led him to, was just going to end in darkness? It couldn't be right. Not with Anakin being the Chosen One. Not with the Jedi at the height of their strength, and the Force the embodiment of light. No. Qui-Gon was always taught that the future is not set in stone. Fates change as frequently as stars die across the galaxy; the future is as unknown as where the next star will be born. This is a future he cannot allow to prosper.

Looking around, he can feel things are already different.

Anakin stands at the foot of his pyre outfitted in youngling robes and a freshly buzzed haircut. His eyes are big and brimmed with tears, but there's a soft smile on his face as Qui-Gon locks eyes with him. The Chosen One has a long way to go, but his progress has already been impressive. Qui-Gon managed to convince the council to send out representatives to Outer Rim to finally investigate the issue of slavery. They've operated under the safe thumb of the Republic for far too long. Jedi are meant to step out of their zones of comfort. When he has completed his youngling training he will likely become Obi-Wan's padawan. Though they haven't yet made their partnership formal, Qui-Gon is pleased to see a faint thread of a bond already forming between the two of them.

They are two beacons of light in the Force, seemingly meant to be intertwined. While the thought of such a pairing is daunting to Qui-Gon with what he saw, he sees the divergence from his vision. Anakin's undertones of anger and insecurity have diminished greatly. Obi-Wan's signature is not laced with pain and tragedy. Whatever he has done here, whether it is a permanent or temporary detour from the future, he has at least done his duty. As a Jedi, it is all he can ask for.

It's time.

Qui-Gon raises his eyes, taking in the room of what feels like half the Jedi Temple. His gaze falls upon Obi-Wan. The new knight stands with his cloak pulled tight around him and shields pulled tighter. Behind him stands the imposing presence of his own master. It's been a few years since he's seen him. His hair has gone completely gray now, and his face has begun to show his age. Dooku still has that unreadable neutrality that used to drive Qui-Gon mad, but he can at least feel their dormant bond buzz slightly with feelings of serenity.

"Padawan," Qui-Gon says, and Obi-Wan approaches with his usual obedience. Now closer, the Jedi Master can see the anxiety behind his eyes and feel the racing of his mind. "The time has come."

"Are you... sure, Master?" The break in his voice is enough for Qui-Gon to question it himself. But the feeling is undeniable. For the first time in his life, the Living Force has fallen silent. He can feel the faint signatures of his fellow Jedi around him, but he has lost the connection to the energy that flows through them all. Instead, he feels the Cosmic Force creeping out of his periphery. It builds-- the same intensity, if not greater, than the Force he has come to know through his life. The last chapter of his life has already closed, and now he must submit to the next one.

"Obi-Wan, I want you to know..." he starts aloud, but shifts to the bond that flows between them-- the last piece of the Living Force he has a grasp of. 'I am so very proud of you. Your strength, your talent in the Force, and your unbreakable will have continued to impress me these last twelve years.'

Obi-Wan stares at him. Silent tears run down his cheek. 'It has been because of your teachings, Master.'

'Some perhaps,' he replies. Obi-Wan smiles. 'but there is so much more that I couldn't have taught you. Qualities that are inherent and cannot be taught. You serve a very important purpose in this galaxy, my padawan. Let the Force guide you to it.'

The exertion makes him lightheaded, and he pulls out of their bond as carefully as he can. Obi-Wan's face falls as Qui-Gon takes care to lock up his side. Bleeding bonds are a painful experience, and though there is no way this will be comfortable with his former padawan, he can try and make it a little easier. He looks back to Anakin now and reaches out his hand.

"Come, Anakin."

The boy walks to him with half the confidence he displayed when he ran into them on Tatooine. He stands on the other side of the pyre, staring at him with uncertainty.

"Do you have to go?"

"Yes, Ani, I do."

"But you're fine now. Your injury--"

"My injury has healed, yes, but my spirit hasn't." Anakin chews on his lip. Qui-Gon does wish he had more time to explain but he will trust Obi-Wan to do that for now. "One day you will understand, young one. But for now, just know the Force has decided it is my time, and I am a servant of the Force. I am leaving because it is my fate."

"Fate," Anakin mutters, wiping away a tear with his sleeve.

"I will always be with you, Ani. In the Force."

The boy jumps forward suddenly, wrapping his small arms around his neck. He hugs the boy back, all the words he just said suddenly feeling as though he lied through his teeth. The realization is striking, and he looks to Obi-Wan who is staring at him with solemnity.

I don't want to go.

But the moment he realizes this is the moment the Force decides his time has officially run out. Qui-Gon gasps slightly, and time feels as though it is slowing.

Anakin is pulled away from him, carried off with tears dripping off his chin by one of the council members. At some point, he was laid down, softly and carefully, and peering over him is Obi-Wan who takes care to brush all the loose hairs out of his face and smooth it down. Mace Windu stands on the other side, his eyes shut and hand resting supportively on Qui-Gon's wrist. Even Dooku has taken a place beside his grand-padawan, an arm on his shoulder, which is a comfort he doesn't often extend.

Though he isn't ready, and the room feels like the air has been sucked out of it, Qui-Gon does appreciate that this will be his final moment. Surrounded by everyone he loves and cherishes. Soon, he will join all the others he loves who can't be here in life, but are waiting for him in death.

He can feel his Life Force waning into nothing. In his final moments, he looks at his padawan who is desperately holding back his mourning.

"Here and now," he says, a mantra he so often repeated. And upon the last bit of his Life Force leaving, he is overtaken by the Cosmic, and the room full of people around him fades into a bright white.

The strange part about dying is that somehow everything he learned about it was right and completely wrong.

The transition from life to the afterlife was quick, yes, but painless would not be the word he would use to describe it. With the Living Force vacuumed out, his bonds are suffocated and torn from his consciousness. If he had a body and the ability to cry out he would-- yet the face he can feel such agony without a body is a mystery on its own. One by one, he feels his connection to that room of people sever. One by one, he is reminded that he is dead. Truly dead. Not in some sort of twilight, not a dream.

Yes, maybe they were right that death is not the end, it is the return to the Force, but right now he feels like an unwelcome guest. He is simultaneously drifting through nowhere and somehow everywhere in the galaxy. He has no sight, but he can feel and therefore he can see in the strange way that the Force allows him a different kind of insight.

When the last connection is torn, he truly feels as though he has been untethered and dropped into the middle of an ocean. He is trying to float, trying to keep his head up, but the forces that surround him are pushing him down. Qui-Gon grabs aimlessly until he feels a familiarity. A rope he's pulled before. So he does.

The future flashes before him again. If his previous pain wasn't enough, this is an entirely different one. The same agony. The same pit of despair. Light battles against light, except one side is horrifically tainted by an insidious dark hold. He feels the cold of darkness, the loneliness of involuntary solitude, and when he drops that link to the future as though it's burning him, he yells out into the void in despair.

"No! I was meant to prevent all of this! I lived so I could stop the darkness."

Qui-Gon has little experience with the Cosmic Force, so it surprises him when it replies.

The nature of fate is not yours to change.

"But the future... the future is not linear. It is not set in stone. Every choice... every action can change--"

You have changed the destinies of your loved ones, but their fates are solidified.

He's stupefied, his horror causing crazed desperation within him, and he flails away as though his spirit has any authority here. "I must go back! I must tell them what I know, prevent darkness from--"

You cannot return to that world. You cannot stop the darkness. This is the fate of the galaxy.

"Why?" He yells bitterly. "I-I- made sure Obi-Wan was prepared. I set Anakin on a better path, with more support."

There was a time when the Force would surround him and feel like a warm hug. It was his constant companion, his best friend. But now it wraps around him and he just feels like he is trapped. This is his end? His thanks for years of service to the Force? None of it ever mattered?

You cannot stop the darkness, the Force repeats. This is the fate of the galaxy.

[dgcatanisiri]

I’ll stand by this and die on this hill.

Whatever merits The Last Jedi has - and before you start debating me, I’m not saying it doesn’t have them, just that this outweighs them - it fails as a part of the ongoing narrative. It may be a fine standalone film, but as movie two of the Sequel Trilogy, movie eight of the Skywalker Saga, it fails to connect itself to the rest of the story, existing more in isolation than in concert. Rian Johnson’s Star Wars is VERY different from JJ Abrams’ Star Wars, a clash that makes it all too clear that Rise of Skywalker - and the Sequel Trilogy in general - was doomed to fail from the moment it was decided NOT to maintain the same writer across it.

It shifts gears, taking moments that were played for drama in the previous film (or films) and playing them for laughs. 

It drops plot paths, with Rian Johnson explicitly saying that he didn’t use the Knights of Ren because they “didn’t fit” the story he was telling. Or the fact that, if the movie is taking place shortly after TFA, then where is ANY mention of Starkiller, the massive superweapon and installation that the Resistance just blew up?

It demotes Finn, the character who was the lead male of the last film, to a “comedic” c-plot that ends up going in a cul-de-sac, one that even the film’s defenders have said could have been cut and nothing be lost. And, in particular, this is noticeable because the plot of TFA moved BECAUSE of Finn - without Finn, Poe doesn’t escape, Rey doesn’t get off Jakku, the Resistance doesn’t go to Starkiller and destroy it. TFA hinged on Finn. TLJ treats him like a vestigial limb it can’t sever.

(No, really, based on what TFA establishes, FINN is the counterbalance to Kylo Ren - Kylo is a scion of a powerful line of Force users, Finn didn’t even have a NAME until TFA began, Kylo is the face of the First Order, Finn was a faceless stormtrooper, which is why the moment he first takes off his helmet means so much, Kylo was raised by heroes of the Republic and turned to the First Order, Finn was raised by the First Order and turns his back on it... The thematic parallels between them are ALL FUCKING OVER TFA! But TLJ wants him to go away, and there’s no chance for him to rebuild that plot momentum in Rise of Skywalker.)

Also on the level of connection to the previous film... Why the HELL is a coma patient stuffed in a storage closet, rather than the medbay with doctors monitoring him? And he’s then repeatedly tazed by Rose, which is again played for laughs. Finn’s injuries are played as a joke.

With Finn’s demotion, it elevates Kylo Ren, the villain, an explicit parallel to neo-natsees (because the Empire ALWAYS had its roots in natsee imagery, and the First Order is explicitly drawing on those, just like neo-natsees), into the lead male position. 

Rey ends up reduced to his prize - over the course of TFA, her interactions with him were, in order, him rendering her unconscious and kidnapping her, torturing her, killing her mentor (his own father), and grievously wounding Finn, the first person in her life who came back for her, which was part of her driving characterization in the previous film. Her motivations are reduced to proving to Luke that she won’t be like Kylo Ren, and then trying to get someone she has no motivation to genuinely care about to redeem himself.

That “redemption,” I say again, is being offered by her after, again, she was kidnapped and tortured by him, she watched him kill Han Solo, who she saw as a paternal figure herself, and he put Finn, someone she’d already come to care for and who was the first person in her life to come back for her, in a coma. What motivation is there for her to TRY to redeem him? And if you want to say “Force Bond,” then that means that something is forged between her and Kylo, without her consent, that makes her care for him, actively manipulating her mind, and this just... happens.

The whole “Rey’s parents” thing is also a problem because it is ignoring HER reaction - it’s all about subverting the audience’s expectations, without caring about how she as a character responds. She never needed her parents to be a Kenobi, a Jinn, a Skywalker, whoever. They didn’t need to be somebody to the audience, they just were people she needed. Even the idea that they were drunks... They were the drunks who gave birth to her, who left her behind, and she wanted just to know why. 

And why should anyone even believe that Kylo Ren would know that they’re just nobodies when it’s been like three days since they even met - none of his informants could have chased down any leads to the point of determining this in that time, if he even WAS looking for them. So by the same measure of “how does he know this?” is the question of “why should she believe him?”

It does not explain Luke’s change of character in near enough detail - this is a character who refused to kill DARTH VADER, his father, a man he barely knew, only really knowing him as the great boogeyman of the Empire, and yet I’m supposed to believe that he would actively attempt a premeditated murder of his own nephew, who he would have known all of said nephew’s life, for what he MIGHT do? There NEEDED more of points B and C to connect points A and D here.

Also on the subject of Luke, in the last movie, it was explicit - Luke had vanished and left a map behind. Why would you leave a map to a place you intend to run away to and be forgotten and die? 

This movie, indeed, SHRANK the galaxy far, far away to ludicrous levels - the Resistance is in the fringes of the New Republic, yet Canto Bight, a major casino resort hub of war profiteering, is a casual jump away? Also, if the Resistance fleet couldn’t jump there, how can a small ship like Finn and Rose’s do that? Doesn’t the fleet need every vehicle and every drop of fuel? Rey’s gone after Luke, to a planet forgotten by the rest of the galaxy, her training pretty clearly taking place over days, at least, if not more. And yet simultaneously, the ticking clock of the Resistance’s fuel running out happens, and she still manages to arrive in the midst of their escape? This timeline is a goddam mess.

Rian Johnson explicitly said that he wanted Holdo to be flirtatious with Poe. And told the costume designer NOT to dress her in the uniform befitting an admiral. Right there, you lose me on Holdo being in the right during the mutiny - we have an existential threat to the Resistance, and she’s dressed like she’s going for drinks with Senators and apparently supposed to be flirting with Poe. 

And I’m giving this its own bullet point - they actively changed the language of the film to try and frame her as more in the right. She was redubbed after the fact to have different dialogue and tone with Poe, while leaving his side of the conversation alone, seemingly to portray him more as a hotheaded maverick when what we’re seeing is him responding to the existential threat they are facing. I HAVE to address this, because they changed what the characters are reacting to after the fact to push a narrative of Poe being wrong, when he WAS acting in the Resistance’s best interests throughout.

Because his demotion is crap - the Original Trilogy showed the X-Wings and similar snubfighters having independent hyperdrive, there was no reason to keep the fleet there for the sake of recovering them based on the text of the film and the established technology of the setting. Leia could have jumped the fleet and let them rendezvous later. Keeping the fleet there? That was her blunder, not Poe’s. 

Meanwhile the dreadnaught? That was a MAJOR target - It had over 200,000 First Order troops. For a group on the fringe, LIKE THE FIRST ORDER WAS IN TFA, that’s a major loss of personnel and material. And that slow-moving target of the dreadnaught was the kind of target those bombers should have been designed for. And if they were really so valuable that they were all lost against the dreadnaught and it was a major blow to the Resistance, those bombers should have been scrapped for parts long before. So, based on what the First Order was originally established as in TFA, Poe did the right thing. His problem is that TLJ CHANGED what the First Order was.

And, again, with the existential threat of the First Order on their tails, Poe, one of the Resistance’s best pilots AND the guy who blew up Starkiller, should have been on the list of people who deserved to be in the know of the plan - if you’re worried about traitors (which Holdo never actually SAYS), he’s pretty clearly not working for them. So she’s holding over the fact that he lost people on a mission against him, which... I’m sorry, but what the fuck with that, EVERY fighter pilot mission we have seen in the films has led to losses.

And when he does find out the plan - the plan that he asks her, three times, in private, in public, and at gunpoint, to even just tell him EXISTS, not even the details of - he’s completely accepting of it. So the whole conflict exists because she doesn’t talk to anyone about it.

Because, before anyone brings up “she has no responsibility to tell an underling her ideas,” she may not, but there was a chance, right before the mutiny went through, for her to defuse the situation entirely, since, as we see, once he knows the plan, he’s willing to go along with it. And it’s not like Poe was acting alone - there were others in the mutiny, including Connix, who we’d seen in charge of the evacuation, which gives the impression she has at least some position of authority. And she wasn’t filled in on Holdo’s plan either. 

Holdo’s flaw is assuming that, because she is the named authority - explicitly the last link in the chain of command - that all the people under her command should just fall in line. But the Resistance was, like the First Order, reverted into the Rebellion for this movie - in TFA, it was not a military service but a volunteer militia of people who were acting in service specifically of one person, Leia Organa. Not Holdo. So when the whole damn organization formed to follow one person, and that one person is taken out of commission, it NEEDS someone willing to extend trust to take charge. Poe was doing that by wanting to hear her out. Holdo was failing to do that by not even bothering.

Yoda’s appearance is undeserved - this is the same Jedi who, if he’d had his way, would have refused Luke’s training in Empire Strikes Back because he was “too old,” even though that was always the plan, to train the Skywalker child, and, as shown by the prequels, was the embodiment of the Jedi Order’s hubris back in the days of the Old Republic. If anyone deserved to have that moment with Luke, it was Anakin, because Anakin was the embodiment of where the Jedi teachings and values had failed - when your prophesized “Chosen One” ends up being at odds with almost all your expectations of the “model” Jedi, the Force is probably trying to tell you something. But no, Yoda’s the fan favorite, so Yoda appears and undermines his own message of “failure, the greatest teacher is.” Yoda’s failures had as much to do with the fall of the Jedi as anyone else’s, and when he had the chance to learn from it, he was going to pass it up.

By the end of the film, both the Resistance and the First Order are devastated. Kylo Ren is Supreme Leader of a handful of vessels with no real power base, while the Resistance fits semi-comfortably in Han Solo’s old beat up weed van. Meanwhile the New Republic is still in shambles. No one WON. All they got from victory was survival. By this point, they’re BOTH defeated, so... Where even was the story going to GO from here?

Also... That focus on the child slaves on Canto Bight at the end? Yeah, fine enough moment on its own, but... We already HAD child slaves established in this trilogy. Because Finn was taken as a child and conscripted, along with all the other stormtroopers of the First Order. So why didn’t THAT get any attention? Indeed, his infiltration of the First Order is no more than show, existing for like five minutes, rather than... y’know, trying to set up a stormtrooper rebellion, something that, by virtue of his character, should have been a running theme through the trilogy. Yet, see again, “Finn is a vestigial limb the movie can’t cut off” - we know from the DVD, he had A LOT of scenes cut and rewritten, at his character’s expense, after, again, being the leading man of the previous movie.

If this film had been a standalone film, like Rogue One or Solo, one of the Star Wars Stories films, rather than a main series film, I’d say it was a good Star Wars movie. But... As part two of a trilogy, part eight of a saga, it fails to connect to the rest of the story, and that, more than anything, is why Rise of Skywalker was what it was. If you didn’t care for Rise of Skywalker, look at what TLJ left for it in terms of connective narrative tissue, and where the story could go from there.

It might be a good film, but it was NOT a good Star Wars film. And I’m judging it as one.

[nrth-wind-a]

Hidden, designer au skraelroc but Bellroc is the one to iniate

Kiss Meme // No Longer Accepting // Well... This was supposed to be between 100-500 words but it... is not. I hope you still enjoy nonetheless! // Thank you for this very compelling ask! It was extremely fun to write! --

Coffee. It was only coffee. He could do… coffee. Sitting together, pointedly across from each other, with a cup to place between them was a degree of separation that Skrael could handle.

Sweetening the deal was that it was entirely professional. There was no reason to cross into the territory that they had an unshakeable habit of crossing into, the way they clashed words as fencers did blades.

It was supposed to be easy. A simple discussion of particular business matters, and then they’d be on their separate paths again.

Bellroc slid into the chair across from Skrael, looking, unfortunately, incredible.

He frowned, “I’m fairly certain that I requested you be subtle.”

Bellroc’s grin was positively vicious, “Then you should have taken your own advice.”

Skrael rolled his eyes. “You are in bright red.”

“And a vision, I’m sure.” They smirked. “But we have business to attend to, Skrael. Focus.”

It was only coffee… it was only coffee…

Skrael took a deep breath, bit down on what he’d wanted to say, and did indeed focus up. He reached into his backpack for a manilla folder that felt more like he’d been carrying certain doom on his back, than what its contents really were.

With a gentle push, the thing sat between them, and it felt stark; a fresh morning pot of coffee, the blazing tail of roman candle firework.

“That’s them, then?” Bellroc hummed, staring at the folder.

It was odd how inconspicuous it looked; how utterly unremarkable it was in impression.

“The drafts, at least.” He said, taking a careful sip of coffee, to hide the twitch at his lips that threatened an anticipatory smile.

Merlin be damned, he felt that these designs were good. They were unfinished, but… well. There was a reason he was passing them on to Bellroc, now, wasn’t there?

It happened as Bellroc accepted the folder and began to put it into their own bag.

Skrael caught someone staring.

Now, someone staring wasn’t necessarily an issue in and of itself—even if their faces weren’t recognized, the two of them looked good, and he knew it; he knew people on the street knew it. They weren’t exactly wading through interested strangers, but they certainly could turn a few heads on occasion.

No, it was the notable lack of embarrassment when they were caught. The glint in their eyes that felt like a bird of prey’s. The pen being juggled between two fingers. These were all enough to raise suspicion.

The truly damning piece, however, was the portable recorder attached to their hip.

Skrael’s next movements were carefully calculated.

He slid his eyes casually out the window, acting as if his accidental eye contact with the journalist had hardly fazed him; the last thing they needed was the reporter realizing they’d been smoked out.

Because Skrael was also fairly certain—by the look on the person’s face—that they were still trying to parse out if they really were sitting in the same café as two nationally-recognized designers, or if the pair of them were lookalikes. Which meant that he needed—

“Do not turn around.” He said softly, over his coffee cup. “If you do, we’ll be caught by the press. No offense, but you rather have a… recognizable look.” He said, tapping his finger to his temple to indicate their sunglasses.

They scowled, “As if you don’t, Mrs. Elizabeth Bennet?”

He blinked. …They had an unfairly good point.

After a moment’s deliberation, he sighed, tucked his hands under the table, and slipped off his gloves, immediately feeling underdressed.

Bellroc’s face was woven in surprise. Their eyes lingered a little too long on Skrael’s fingers—long, bony, almost ethereal—before they snapped themselves from their stupor and reached to do the same with their glasses.

Skrael held up a hand—still hating how exposed something so simple as not wearing gloves could make him feel— to stop them. “No. You need those to see, and we need two pairs of eyes on lookout.”

They were taken aback a second time, which gave them no small amount of irritation, that Skrael could do that to them so easily. They mumbled, “How did you know that?”

Skrael’s answer was disarmingly honest, given that he was too distracted to consider lying, “You’ve always hated contacts.” He said casually, eyes trained on the journalist, who was staring at their phone, likely looking for anything that could prove their hunch about the designers to be true.

“We have to hurry.” Skrael continued. “We’re close to being recognized.”

Bellroc looked as if they were considering something, but evidently chose not to share, as they stood sharply, causing Skrael to do the same.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the reporter noticed their active departure, and, while they were trying to be subtle, they did begin to pack up as well.

Skrael grimaced, tucking his hair underneath his coat to obscure its length, “The jig might be up…”

Bellroc paused, then, and the fire in their eyes made Skrael do the same.

“Do you trust me?” They asked suddenly.

Skrael blinked. He glanced to the reporter—still packing up—and then back to Bellroc. “Wh- In what context?”

They huffed, “Skrael, we don’t have time to get into the technicalities; do you trust me?”

Skrael paused for only one moment longer. “…I trust that you have an idea that will get us out of this without ending up on the front-page news.”

It wasn’t the answer they’d expected—a resounding ‘no’ would have been the most predictable—but it was –

“Good enough.” They said, voice low, nearing a growl, as they took his hand—oh…—and dragged him outside.

The reporter was not far behind, and Bellroc knew they had to sell this.

There was one thing that the pair of them were most known for, in junction with the other, according to the public. Their absolute and utter distaste for the other was not obscured, and in fact, encouraged, even; it made staying away from the other easier.

So, if they were to prove that they were supposedly not themselves…

Thank god the alley’s empty, they thought, as they tugged Skrael into it, and, with little warning, pressed him up against the wall of the coffee shop they’d just exited from.

Skrael hated to admit that he caught onto their line of thinking nearly as soon as his back met brick. It was rare when it happened, but even now, that he could—in the important moments—practically read their mind, gave him a painful twinge that came from memory of the past.

Lucky for him, his mind was evacuated as soon as Bellroc’s face was the only thing he could see. They gave him one last chance to say no.

They breathed a quiet, “May I?” and Skrael’s eyes nearly slipped closed from that alone. The tone in their voice, the way they were crowding his space, and the way he didn’t even have it in him to mind—

He didn’t take it.

“Yes…”

Bellrocs’ lips were soft, and the pressure was simultaneously too much and not nearly enough. They’d opted, perhaps thinking themself merciful, for a gentle, sweet thing. Skrael appreciated the gesture, but they needed to properly deter anyone from trying to disturb them. He reached up with both hands, sliding them up the sides of Bellroc’s face to slip their glasses off. He could feel their hesitation, rather than see it, by the way the kiss stuttered.

They started to pull back, but Skrael wrapped his arms around their neck, glasses still in one hand, and he mumbled against their lips, “Not enough. Too easy to interrupt.”

They did manage to lean back enough to shoot him a skeptical look, but he grinned, reached down, placed their glasses in the inside pocket of their coat—one hand still pointedly holding the back of their neck—and said, “Don’t you trust me?”

He was challenging them.

…Hm. Fine.

They didn’t give him time to prepare, then, as they gripped his hips and leaned back in, and oh the cropped shirt had turned out to be a very bad idea, Skrael thought, as he could feel their thumbs almost absentmindedly rubbing the exposing skin there.

He suppressed a shiver and moved to press closer to them, trapping their bottom lip between his own. As much as he was trying not to enjoy this—it was purely professional, he insisted—he couldn’t help but wonder why they’d never done this before. If it was this…

Footsteps approached the alley, paused for half a second.

He turned his head so that the reporter would only be greeted by the back of his—a move to ensure that Bellroc’s lack of sunglasses was visible and that no distinct facial features could be made out—and reached to cling to Bellroc’s coat with both of his hands.

The footfalls sounded almost like running.

Good, Skrael thought. Maybe they’d think twice about following strangers—even famous ones—again.

But, now that the reporter was gone, the fact that Bellroc hadn’t yet pulled away was now—… it felt different.

He regretted it even as he did it, but he sighed against their mouth and ended the kiss.

Their breaths wove together. “I think…” Skrael grinned, “I think they’re gone.”

Bellroc’s eyes held a look that Skrael had never seen before. “Yes…”

A horribly awkward silence settled in the minimal distance between them, calling their attention to just that. Skrael noticed, then, and quickly let go of Bellroc, stepping back— only to be greeted with brick. Right.

Bellroc looked flushed as they, too, stepped away, royally embarrassed. “Ah… Thank you—” they flinched at their words, “For humoring me, I mean. No one would ever…” they trailed off.

“Suspect that we’d be caught kissing in an alleyway?”

Bellroc looked almost sheepish. “…yes.”

Skrael tilted his head, looking them over.

…And, ah, he couldn’t resist. He hiked his backpack onto one shoulder, and began to exit the alley, tossing his words out as he left, “That’s alright. It was fun.”

By the time they unfroze, Skrael was long gone, leaving behind only a tingle on their lips, and a manilla folder in their bag, which promised that they’d be seeing him again.

[peepingtoad]

OKAY SO. 

It’s not that often that I talk about what I really think about Jiraiya, and I guess I mean more how I feel about him, since I always try to write my ‘deeper’ headcanons/metas from a more... idk, trying not to get too emotional about it point of view. Basically it’s because I know how controversial he is, and I pretty much ritually avoid a lot of takes because I don’t want to get irritated about something that really doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme, because we’re all entitled to our opinions and I largely get my say through the act of writing and developing him how I see fit.

Which is enough for me, mostly, but for the purpose of reinforcing/building upon how I see my muse’s plight, working through some of my Sannin-feels and also to dip my toes into why I find blindly judgemental/single-faceted takes of him, his priorities and the Sannin’s bond so exasperating, I kinda feel like rambling my thoughts (feelings) anyway! 

Politely sticks this stream-of-consciousness mess under a cut.

So sometimes I do think about the fact that Jiraiya kinda, lmao, forgot about Everything Else in the world because of Orochimaru and his (frankly) obsession with him/them. And the fact that a ridiculously significant portion of bad shit that happened is down to his actions/inaction. And the fact that he really did go and leave the likes of Naruto (and maybe to a degree Kakashi, although there’s zero actual evidence he didn’t get involved given the strong indications of a great rapport in the canon), just because he was so hellbent on pursuing Orochimaru, who was not even shown to be affectionate towards him at the best of times. When I think about it in terms of Jiraiya being gone and the main reason we’re given for it, things suck for a number of people, and quite largely because of potentially unrequited/horribly communicated/obsessive JiraOro pursuits, in essence :’)

(And for all it’s still quite the rarepair, Jiraiya does express on accounts that he was destroyed when Oro left. I mean... this is the guy who rarely acknowledges his sadness so... It’s not my bias at all I sware)

Of course JiraTsu is very real in my eyes too, albeit a very different kinda tragic, as is OroTsu. And the messy poly ship? Ohohoho, even better, but... yeah. Tsunade does at least go her own way for a long time, as messed up as that is in itself, for reasons including the fact she seems to pointedly not heal or move on from her grief. And given the absolute debacle that was her and Jiraiya reuniting... and both her and Oro even discussing a possibility of sacrificing him... and just, them in general for that whole arc :’))) yeah. They are without a doubt messy and troubled, but even despite how fraught things become I genuinely think all the furtive expressions and the undercurrents of longing and the evasion of their past exhibits a history much deeper and full of lost love compared to many other team dynamics we get (otherwise the Three Way Divorce wouldn’t have been quite so horrible on them, would it? That and they’d probably have split up after Team Hiruzen was no more, if they really hated each other/just tolerated each other out of familiarity like I sometimes see speculated).

But yeah, back to our main man. Jiraiya’s intense (and frankly very Scorpio of him) love for our first series Big Bad kinda did ruin him and what he was setting out to do in some ways, to the degree that the actual story of Naruto wouldn’t be very much without him in terms of drama. I mean, he always loved a good story, right? So art imitates life, and innit just pathetic poetic.

And in so many ways it is incredibly tragic and pitiable that he’s Just Like That. Idealistic and warping everything terrible, no matter how bad, into adventure in his mind! As growth! As pain that makes you TOUGH and makes you a stronger man! As something to be pushed aside while you just keep on truckin’! Whatever anyone you love throws at you, it’s Totally Fine!

After so long narrating through his personal lens, I’ve come to realise he truly is so convinced that everything bad that happens, is sort of just... something he has to deal with and feel big and guilty and feelsy for while spinning it in ways that enable him to keep going. He just loads it on himself and sorta holds it. The fact he’s so sad and filled with sickly pining grief that he has to try and exorcise it with impulsive bouts of decadence? Fine. And it’s not abnormal at all, how he approaches things with such broad scope and just kinda... thoughtlessly wrecking-balls his way through everything he thinks is a great idea at the time. He experiences the fallout of these things and simultaneously feels the entire ravages of it acutely while compartmentalising it ever so neatly away. The crazy thing, too, is that he’s exceptionally convincing at making everything he does and how he handles things seem so grand and noble and romantic and tragic... but in a humorously self-deprecating and still ultimately very hopeful way, to the degree that I as a mun get caught up in his relentless optimism and forget he actually is a sad and heartbroken guy wrapped up in all this grandiosity.

Sometimes I do step back and look and I just think yeah, fuck, he really is a total disaster! He’s a walking disaster and he’s been so damaging to himself and others in so many ways, all because of acting on emotions and impulses without really thinking about the impact! He really did kinda give up on those who needed him and for what? A love that will never love him or prioritise him back? 

A wonderfully tragic theme that I do love with him, don’t get me wrong.

But then at the same time, there’s always more nuance to be had than just ‘he is a disaster and made bad choices, as tragic and romantic as it is, he was actually just selfish and kinda sucked in the end, pathetically whipped by his friends and unable to let go of what they had’. There’s more nuance to be had than reducing him to a purely romantically-inclined character, who just snubs everyone else for a doomed love... because in the end, I think a huge part of JiraOro’s demise in particular was that Oro felt immensely snubbed by Jiraiya when he stayed in Ame, when his loyalty to Konoha (as a place and people, not necessarily a system) and of course loyalty to his own ideals was prioritised over Oro.

To an extent, I feel like Tsunade could have been a similar case, were she not preoccupied with already having lost so much, and besides I really do think she and Jiraiya were quite firmly in best friend zone at that point. With Tsunade not being able to get comfortable around Jiraiya or to pursue any underlying affection for him because of the dumbass way he always behaved (understandably of her tbh), probably until she got with Dan, by which point I reckon Jiraiya started to really come through by showing how he valued her for her, where we see by them having each other’s backs so closely in the second war. Not to mention him generally respecting that his feelings for her have no place by the time he gets her back to Konoha.

In terms of that first split in Ame, Jiraiya, I feel, simply didn’t think him leaving was going to be a big deal, because the three were always fiercely headstrong people who had their own shit going on (simultaneously independent while also being, perhaps not to their knowledge, So Very Codependent). Not only that, but his overly affectionate ways and incessant jolliness were probably considered such a joke that he was basically like ‘they’ll be fine without me’. I certainly don’t think he felt needed by them, which I don’t think is their fault or a point of angst and ‘waaah poor blameless Jiraiya’, because quite honestly, the strain on their relationship was something I fully believe even he didn’t realise he needed out of at the time. His one-track mind was just on ‘save kids, teach kids, this is right, must seize opportunity to be the change I was told I’d be, not continue with this godforsaken war’

Selfish? Maybe. Well-intentioned? Certainly. Intended to hurt anyone or imply he stopped caring? No.

In essence, when it comes to why in the end Jiraiya seemed to be so horrendously bad at being around at the worst of times, at being responsible, whatever else (and I’m not even going to go into scenes intended to be comedic because, they are comedic)... I’ve got to look at it from more than just one view. It’s easy to say ‘he’s ridiculous and terrible because he pretty much flaked on what was important based on his whims/a doomed love/his dick’ (which I have seen said lmao) but there are so many other things at play here.

So I’m thinking, while he was shirking duties (godfatherly mainly)... did he actually consider that his most important duty? Was it anyone’s place to tell him it was? Minato didn’t, as I recall, and when he sacrificed himself he specifically left it to the Third because he (presumably) respected what his teacher was about and knew he wasn’t for staying put. Did Jiraiya not consider his primary duty to be to the prophecy, and in a more general sense fixing the big wrongs and trying to foil big dangers to his home? Were these things not pretty much what he existed for (as much as his faith wavered and went off the rails at times)? Was that not the main source of any real purpose he ever had, being a kid who showed practically no ambition before? Did he not pretty much redesign himself as being ‘from Mt. Myōboku’ rather than Konoha after two devastating wars, and thus is it not understandable for him not to focus solely on Konoha—not outright destroying it, still ultimately loyal to his home and not about to let anyone destroy it, but seeing that the world is in fact so much bigger than just his little town? Is that really something that’s so bad and wrong of him, in a story where the main cast’s country has a pretty fucking nasty system and is established to do so very early on? Is he not pretty revolutionary in his own brand of not blindly serving, but not going on a destroy-it-all frenzy either?

Also, was he not the only one who actually bothered to investigate Akatsuki and the forces that would see Naruto dead, in time? For all he did help bring Akatsuki into existence in ways, it was inevitable from before he even met the orphans that they were going to be groomed/moulded into what they became, regardless of whether Jiraiya came onto the scene. Jiraiya leaving them was just a different kind of suffering to what they were inevitably going to suffer anyway, and hell, with his influence at least there was a time where they might’ve stood a chance of going totally against Madara/Obito’s path, especially while Yahiko was still around. Jiraiya didn’t know that the whole thing with the Ame orphans was, by a design out of his control, doomed to end horribly. So while he felt personally responsible not knowing this, and it’s taken as a given that he was... actually, was he, when there was a master manipulator at play? Was it wrong to want to give some kids a chance?

With regards to all those things I see people say he should have stayed and fixed, that he should have been there, he should have done x y z... Is it not the responsibility of everyone not satisfied with their lot to step up to the plate and make where they live better? Jiraiya wasn’t the only adult. Tsunade, and I absolutely love her, does seem overwhelmingly to be absolved of leaving Konoha because... ??? Kicker is that she too is related to Naruto, of course. 

So... was she not also needed for the very material ways she could’ve helped at numerous points? Was she not also placing her grief and lost love before everything else? Are some reasons inherently more ok than others to ditch? As Kakashi’s generation grew up, was it not also then up to them to decide whether they’d change the status quo? Were Minato’s own generation, presumably his own peer group, not complicit in Naruto’s ostracisation? We got a slight taste of rebellion with Asuma, Hiruzen’s own son, but the fact is many Konoha-nin were overwhelmingly complacent with how things were. And yet never get demonised at all for it. Because it’s Jiraiya’s fault for... not staying and giving it all up to be a guardian who could well be depressed and unfit to raise a child... or just being a flaky as hell one that’s never there anyway because he has shit to do? (and in doing the former would let too many things go unchecked by a completely tuned-out Hokage, not gathering all that spicy useful intel, y’know... essentially he wouldn’t have ended up largely doing his job along with the personal shit in between).

Basically when I see claims saying that Jiraiya as an individual should have done pretty much everything better, and somehow been there for everyone that needed him at any given time, and that (mostly Naruto’s) suffering was a failing on Just His part because of his selfish whims... I feel like the point of his tragedy is absolutely missed. That tragedy being that barrelling through things alone is definitely a failing and harmful in numerous ways, as we see with Itachi shouldering everything alone too, and we see them both miss out on Naruto and Sasuke as a result... but at the same time, is just settling down and leaving everything else to chance not also a huge failing, when there are so many other circumstances and enemies acting against you, when you do have the power to change tides, and when so many other people refuse to or can’t seize their own agency? Jiraiya does put his faith in a lot of people too, and a lot of people fail. Don’t fail him, but in a general sense many, like Minato, fail to make the change they wanted to. That’s life in this world, it’s tragic, and after losing a lot of loved ones yeah, he retreats and goes at it alone. 

But how can he win? How does he do what’s right, other than by chasing what he thinks he can do to actually help the world, which happens to be bigger and not centred on individuals, even those he cares about?

(and remember, nobody knows Naruto is special-reincarnation-prophecy-boi, which is why I tend not to blame-game any characters for him being treated like so many orphans were because... while it’s not morally right or nice at all, it’s tone deaf to how the world is, to the fact all characters having different degrees of knowledge and priorities, and it’s insensitive of the fact most the characters had their own struggles and were just doing their best with a bad lot gdi). 

Hell though, Jiraiya even does put Oro, his big obsessive wild goose chase that whisks him away into selfish pining hopelessly devoted land, on the back burner at points. Maybe not in a lasting way, particularly by the last databook where he’s inspired anew by Naruto, but he does prioritise other shit on numerous occasions. And there’s a lot of shit to try and prioritise.

What I’m trying to say is, Jiraiya can’t solely be held responsible for people. Sure, he’s a character whose decisions were pivotal to events, but what of every other character in the story? Why are they not held to the same crazy high standard of doing and protecting and preventing and somehow doing everything ‘right’ that would have also meant him fitting neatly into the Konoha mould? Would other characters really have been that much better in the position of The Big Guide/Martyr/Tragic Hero/Force For Change character? And also is having a tragic Chaotic Good bastard of a hero not a sign of a damn good and interesting character, that at the very least tried where so many others didn’t? Would Naruto not have been a boring as hell story, whose main protag didn’t really have much conflict to make him compelling, without Jiraiya (among others) being a mess with the best intentions? Without so many other characters having failed him, for him to overcome it and still be able to love and inspire change (albeit through sometimes-clumsy talk-no-jutsu)? Was I missing the point of the story?

............. Hmm!

No longer sure where else I’m going with this now, so.... here, I guess, ends my ode to why character hate (especially that reduces them to One Thing) is dumb, why demonising truly well-meaning characters doesn’t feel particularly woke to me in a cast full of flawed characters and horrible circumstance, and why I’ll defend this poor bastard with far too damn much hinging on him to the end I guess :’)

TL;DR HE’S A DUMBASS AND HE TRIED, OKAY?!

[spell-cleaver]

(Luke Palpatine AU) There were soft voices coming from Luke's bedroom. Vader knew that his son hated him, that he despised him, but he couldn't help himself. He lurked closer, peering in through the half open door, and what he saw bright simultaneous joy and sadness to his heart. Luke was sitting on his bed, talking to Nova, and he was actually smiling.

Previous parts on the masterpost here!

There were soft voices coming from Luke's bedroom. Vader knew that his son hated him, that he despised him, but he couldn't help himself. He lurked closer, peering in through the half open door, and what he saw bright simultaneous joy and sadness to his heart. Luke was sitting on his bed, talking to Nova, and he was actually smiling.

Vader paused as he lifted his hand to knock, to draw attention to himself. It was still so rare for him to see Luke smile that he wanted to soak in the moment even if it wasn't meant for him, and all of a sudden he was hit with a surge of gratitude for Sabé. Sabé, who'd brought Luke happiness even in the depths of his miserable life, and had taught Vader's son love and goodness and light when all Vader had done was try to beat it out of him.

Vader didn't want to interrupt this. Not at all.

Exploring Palpatine's precious vaults, tearing through Sith holocron after Sith holocron, had... not been a pleasant experience. He hadn't wanted to report everything to Luke anyway, despite his promise, but now...

He couldn't destroy this moment of peace. Luke deserved this, and Vader deserved to stay away.

So he turned, heart clenching...

"Vader?" Luke asked, looking up. He froze. "Are you finished in the vaults?"

Vader paused, let breath fill his lungs three times, before he said, "There was far too much in there to be certain that I have finished, but I believe I have found most of what can conceivably be found."

"Are you here to report, then?" Luke asked, sitting up against his pillow. Sabé smiled at him, then more tentatively at Vader, from the armchair she'd pulled up next to the bed. "What did you find? What are your theories?"

Vader paused again. "I can report now if you so wish it, Majesty."

Luke nodded. He was in a much better mood than he was earlier, it seemed; the japor snippet sat snug about his collarbone. Vader's heart soared and shattered at the sight of it. "If you're ready?"

Vader let his respirator breathe again, and suddenly he felt odd, standing and towering over Luke and Sabé while they were seated. He used the Force to pull another one of Luke's armchairs over to next to the bed and seated himself, ignoring the way the chair creaked underneath him. Maybe it would collapse. Maybe it would make Luke laugh again.

"I... am ready," he said. He could feel Sabé's gaze on him.

"Then what did you find?"

Vader winced. "It seems that Palpatine put... a great deal of energy into researching this, little angel. There are all sorts of texts and holocrons which discuss this very ritual, and there are few decisive, accepted opinions of ancient Sith scholars. I believe a great deal of what Palpatine's plan was based on was merely his own theories." And his foresight, which was far more of a problem—it was famously accurate. But Vader didn't want to scare Luke.

Too late. Luke was scared, though he could tell he was doing his best to stay strong. "And what few decisive, accepted decisions did you find?"

"The body cannot hold two souls," Vader said simply. "Any sentient species researched was incapable of holding—"

"Researched?" Luke paled the moment he started thinking about what, exactly, that would entail.

"Yes." Vader stiffened as Sabé shot him a look. This was why he hadn't wanted this... "The human body, in this case, cannot hold more than one soul, and more specifically the soul it was naturally born with—natural attachments between body and soul—"

"You mean the act of living."

"...yes. But it is harder for the invading soul to seize control and settle into the body than for the original soul to fend them off, especially if the original being is Force-sensitive. So it is considered necessary for the invader to be far more powerful than the original, in order to be assured of success when faced with resistance."

Despite the morbid subject, that last part was said with hope. Luke was powerful—so, so powerful. If the worst came to the worst, Luke could...

"I'm doomed," Luke said. "There's no way I'll be able to resist my father."

Vader stared.

The boy shifted awkwardly. "He is all powerful."

"Luke..." Vader broke himself off. "You are far more powerful than Palpatine."

His son stared at him.

"What?"

"That is why he wants you as his vessel in the first place, I believe," Vader said, shaking his head—well, helmet. "Your connection to the Force is unparalleled, undoubtable. If it came down to it, you could resist him."

Luke looked at his fingers, entwined in his lap. "How?"

"Little was documented in the holocrons about how one resists or battles for dominance of the body, but I suspect it would be a similar skill to shielding, or resisting invasions of your mind—"

"Which I can't do. I can't keep you out. I could never keep him out."

"Because he kept you that way," Vader insisted. "Untrained, easy to overcome. But this is something we can change—"

"No."

Vader blinked. "What?"

"I trust you not to kill me," Luke said. His hands shook as he said it, and the words cut Vader to the core. "I trust that you don't want to hurt me. But you have hurt me, Lord Vader, and I refuse to train with you. I will never train with you again."

And as he said that, Vader thought he might have heard a death knell.

"Even if it may be the difference between life and oblivion?" he asked. "Even if it may be the only thing that allows you to keep control of your body?"

Luke kept his gaze steady. "Even then," he uttered, and the pieces of Vader's heart were crushed to dust.

He deserved this, he thought to himself.

He should've expected this.

If he lost his son, he knew, it would be all his fault.

"...very well," he acquiesced. "Then we shall do our best to simply keep him away from you."

Sabé was giving him a look. A fierce, furious look, and he knew exactly what she was thinking, but no. He could not. He could not.

...even if it was to save Luke's life?

He stood abruptly. "That is all for today, Majesty," he said to Luke. "I... will inform you if I learn anything else."

"Thank you, Lord Vader," Luke said, as Vader turned to leave the room.

His happy mood from earlier was completely gone.

Send me the first sentence of a scene from this fic and I’ll continue it!

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[tsarinastorm]

Dreams Were Thunder-Adam Sackler/Reader-Chapter 1

This is my first fic, let me know what you think. No smut now, but there will smut in later chapters. I’ve outlined this storyline, but I also have some other fics that I’m working on simultaneously. 

Words: 2,500

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You were finally moving to New York from your small town in the middle of nowhere. You had saved enough from your book sales to afford a place in the city. You had won a MegaMillions jackpot when you were still twenty-six and living in your parents’ house. You had given most of it to your family, paid off your student loans, and invested the rest. The winnings had allowed you to focus on your true passion: writing. You had since written several novels and a few other works. Now, you just had to find an actual place to live, other than your married friend’s couch or random hotel, and preferably a roommate to help you adjust to the city. You had settled on the neighborhood of Williamsburg and found a building you liked, but the roommate search seemed doomed from the start.

Half of the roommate options seemed likely to commit a crime, while you just did not mesh well with the others for one reason or another. Your friend Elijah, who you met accidentally at a writing soiree, suggested his ex-girlfriend to be your roommate as she was moving back to the city and was a writer as well. It sounded perfect: someone in your profession, not criminal, or otherwise intolerable. Well, you assumed she wasn’t intolerable. That was the catch: you hadn’t met her yet. And she had a kid, which you thought you could deal with if the two of you got along.

You agreed to meet her at a coffee shop in Williamsburg in January, near the building you wanted to live in. You arrived early, a habit from your previous 9 to 5 career. You were wearing a long gray coat with black cropped sweater, black skinny jeans and over-the knee boots. You had just sat down at a table near a window with your first cup of black coffee and scone when a short, mousey-haired woman carrying a cute baby made her way to your table.  She spoke as she moved forward,

“Are you Y/N?”

“I am. You’re Hannah Horvath?” you respond with raised eyebrows. She sits down across from you, as her baby boy watches you with curious eyes, “Unfortunately, that’s me. I’m sure you were hoping for someone more glamorous.”

You’re surprised that she would assume anything since you just met. Maybe it was the way you dressed, you always enjoyed fashion and tried to look on trend. “Oh no, you’re fine. What’s his name?”  You say as you look at the baby.

“This is Grover. He’s six months old. He is actually the best baby, he goes to bed at a decent time and hardly ever cries. Except he cried when he was really young. Turns out we had a problem with latching. But that’s not a problem anymore, don’t worry.”

“I’m sure he is the best baby around. He’s adorable. Elijah tells me that you’re a writer too?”

“Still aspiring at this point. I’ve been teaching since I found out I was pregnant with him. Better money, better insurance. Though now I got a job as an editor, and have flexibility. What do you write?”

“I’ve written three cotemporary novels and a few short stories. My second novel was chosen by a popular book club and has done well. But it’s always hard for writers, unless you happen to be Stephen King.”

               You and Hannah had hit off, and agreed to be roommates. She was a bit narcissistic and over-dramatic but you thought the two of you would get along as roommates. You had met her friends, Marnie and Shoshanna, and liked them so far. But her other friend, Jessa was more elusive as she had gone on another adventure.

               A few months had passed since you had moved into your new place. You had hardly been there as you had to do promotional work on your third book. It was now April, and the weather was finally warming up. The two of you were walking through a park with Grover in the stroller when a tall, dark haired man approached you. He had unusual, yet handsome features, and he was built like a house. You were suddenly glad that you had on a cute outfit of a tank top, white shorts, sneakers and a windbreaker. The man joined Hannah and Grover saying, “Oh hi, kid, and hi little kid,” then as he looked at you, “Hi, person I don’t know.”

“Adam, this is Y/N, my new roommate. Y/N, this is my ex-boyfriend, Adam.”

You reach out to shake his hand saying, “nice to meet you” as you thought what a strange relationship to have with your ex. But nothing with their relationship was normal, at least that’s what you gathered from her, Marnie and Elijah. You were expecting him to look like some weirdo, not almost charming. Hannah had told you recently that she and Adam had hooked up when she came back to the city, then had decided that there wasn’t any spark left. She had also said that he offered to always be there for Grover when she needed him.

“So how do you afford Williamsburg? Are you another rich daddy’s girl?”

Your face is turning red. Now you see what Elijah and Marnie were talking about. Who the hell says that kind of thing to someone they just met? You hate when people assume things about you anyway, but that comment was really hurtful to you, especially when you grew up in poverty. “No, I actually lived most of my life below poverty level so I am not another rich daddy’s girl. Never assume you know anything about me again.” You walk away as Adam’s jaw drops, and you sit on a bench to wait for Hannah to join you.

4 Months Later.

Hannah had talked you into having an “End of Summer Party” at your apartment. This would be the first party you’d have since moving in. You had agreed with her because she was leaving soon for the semester and apparently she was the using the party as a way to tell her friends. She would still be paying rent and she got free housing where she was going, so you couldn’t complain. It also gave you a chance to dress up and become more better-acquainted with the friend group. You pull down the edge of your baby blue slip dress and toss on a pair of strappy heels, while you grab a bottle of champagne and head towards the foyer.

Marnie, Shoshanna, and Elijah came into the apartment in a cluster. Then there was Ray (who owns the coffee place) you add in your head, who trailed behind the trio. Elijah immediately goes to hug you saying, “Y/N, you look amazing tonight! Who are you trying to impress? Seriously, you look hot.” “

“Just you. I like to dress up,” you respond while hugging him back. You offer him a glass of champagne and as you step back to pour a glass, you lock eyes with Adam who’s just walked through the door. You can’t help but grimace when you remember your last conversation with Adam. Elijah notices, “So I guess that look means that you’ve met Adam. He is very different and according to Hannah, kinky. Do you know he even made a movie about it?”

“Excuse me,” you say as you hand Elijah his drink and begin moving further into your apartment. You see Adam heading towards you, and you try to retreat onto the terrace. You make it out there, where you’re distracted by the view and don’t notice him come up beside you. His voice startles you, “hey Y/N. I want to apologize for what I said when we first met. It was rude and I had no business saying it,” you look at him which must put him on edge because his voice changes pitch, “FUCK—I’m so socially awkward.”

“It’s okay. Really, let’s put it behind us.” You say, before being cut off by him, “You know, I had it pretty rough growing up too. So I get it, and I really don’t know why I even said that. I guess I can’t help but get nervous around a pretty girl.” You’re stunned and you’re certain that you must be blushing, but before you come up with a way to respond, you notice that he’s walked away.

The party drags on, the guests are shocked by Hannah’s announcement. However, the shock wears off, and you start to feel lonely even in a room full of people. You go back to your room, sit down on your bed with a glass of wine, and scroll through your phone. You see updates from your friends and family back home, you never realized how much you’d miss them. Before you know it, you start to tear up at the feeling of homesickness that wrenches through your gut. Then you hear light knock on your door as a head of black hair comes in.

“Are you alright? What’s wrong?” He says as he comes up and sit beside you. You wipe your tears away and feel embarrassed that he saw you crying. He must think you’re emotional wreck. His hands reach out like they’re going to embrace you in a hug then he pulls back to place a hand on your shoulder and he gives you a comforting pat.

“I just started feeling homesick for no apparent reason. I promise I’m not some kind of train wreck. At least not all the time.” You try to smile.

“Well, I’d rather stay here than be all around them. This is a nice setup in here. I’ve been around them for years and still don’t fit in. I don’t really find any of them tolerable, except you. Maybe.”

“Uh thanks. Do you want a glass? I have both red and white wine around. Or I can get you something else.” You shake your glass as you go to stand up. He gently pulls you back and shakes his head.

“I don’t drink at all. I’m an alcoholic, I’ve been in AA since I was seventeen.” He says as he looks down. You put a hand on his shoulder this time as you say, “Adam, if I had known I wouldn’t have even offered. You’ve been sober for all that time? That’s really great for you, sobriety is an achievement. I’m proud of you.” His face lights up into a smile, then suddenly it’s gone.

“Sorry to tell you how fucked up my life is so soon. I normally wait until the third or fourth meeting until I start sharing emotional trauma. Seriously, I never open up to people like that. You’re very easy to talk to.”

You smile and you sit back down on your bed. Why is it that you start to feel butterflies in your stomach? It must be the wine and other drinks you’d had earlier.

“Well I’ll take that compliment. You don’t need to feel bad about it, everyone is fucked up in some way.  I had an eating disorder for years so I understand. Not that it’s the same as alcoholism, but you know what I mean.”

“Yeah I know what you mean. How are you doing with that?”

“It’s a struggle every day. Some days are better than others.”

“You should probably head back out there, it’s your party.”

“No, it’s really Hannah’s party. And I think I’d rather stay here.”

               Hours must have passed. You and Adam had talked about everything. You talked about your backgrounds, he talked about being raised by his sister, his going through multiple career choices for years. Then you talked about his acting gigs and your writing, including his time in Major Barbara on Broadway. His most recent gig being Woyzeck at The Brick. That had set the conversation down the literary path.

“Tell me what it’s like to play a character who is going mad? Is it easier, freeing, or challenging?” You say in an excited pitch. He looks slightly embarrassed then he gets up and starts pacing.

“All three actually. I guess I’m kind of crazy too. I look back at my past relationships and I’m definitely crazy.”

“I think we’re all crazy when it comes to love, and if what Hannah told me is true, then you might be actually be crazy for good reason. Based on her stories, her life is more dramatic than a reality show.”

 He starts looking through the books on your bookshelf by your bed. You have a large, full bookcase that sits in the living room. But the books in your room are some of your favorites.

“You know, 1984 is better than Animal Farm.” He says as he picks up a book.

“Well I really like Animal Farm but I haven’t read 1984 so I can’t comment on it.”

“I have it. I’ll bring it over for you to borrow, you should read it. It’s a classic,” He says as he stares intensely at another cover on the shelf, “Though I’ve never read Jane Eyre. You like it?”

“Yes, it’s one of my favorites. I love all of the Bronte sisters. They’re some of my biggest writing inspirations.  I’ll let you borrow it, if you promise to bring it back.” You remove the book from the shelf. You suddenly notice how close the two of you are. You’re close enough that you can appreciate every one of his freckles, and you can’t help but take note of his plush-looking lips. It feels like there is an electric current between you as his hand brushes yours when he takes the book. You lock eyes and you think he might kiss you, then the spell is suddenly broken as Hannah walks into the room.

“There you guys are! I had thought everyone had left, but of course Adam is still around! I can never get rid of him.  And Y/N you just disappeared, I was worried that you got sick or something.”

Adam steps away from you and heads toward the door, “We were just talking. Not everyone is a social butterfly like you…Bye!”

Adam is out of your apartment in record time. Hannah watches you and raises her eyebrows at you. You don’t know what to say so you just shrug your shoulders. Hannah tells you good night and goes to check on Grover. You try to go to sleep, but you can’t stop thinking of Adam’s freckles and his lips. You think you’d like to trace all of his freckles and see if his lips were really as soft as they looked.  You know you shouldn’t feel that way about your roommate’s ex-boyfriend because that could be a nightmare, but you ease your conscious by remembering that there’s no harm in thoughts so long as they don’t lead to actions.

[daisylincs]

Staticquake 71, 61, 70

71 = Twenty-Four Hours To Live, 61 = Love Confession and 70 = Locked In A Room. 

Thank you, anon, these prompts go so well together!I decided to take them in a sci-fi-y, almost dystopian kind of direction, because, firstly, well why not, and secondly, I'm quite interested (a little nervous, I'll admit, but excited) to try something a bit more out of my usual style (though I promise it still has a happy ending.) Hope you like it! 

The world where Daisy and Lincoln live is almost exactly like ours, except for the teensy little fact that it's run by Hydra. (Yes, you read that right.) 

Now, Hydra has always been kind of obsessed with powered people. Unfortunately, they also really really don't understand them.

So anyone who they even SUSPECT might have powers is taken to the Room of Doom and locked up for twenty-four hours. The idea is, if they have powers, they'll escape. If not, well, that's too bad. (Guys, this is Hydra. No-one ever said they were nice.) 

Enter Daisy and Lincoln, two childhood best friends who are honestly just trying to survive in this crazy world. They've both got fairly steady jobs, him in a hospital and her with a programming company. 

Neither of them think they have powers. But apparently Hydra thinks differently. 

"This is crazy," Lincoln says, walking around the room in small, incredulous circles. "This is crazy. How can they think we have powers?" 

Daisy rests her head against the white wall behind her and closes her eyes. White. Why is everything white in here? (Except for the giant red countdown on the wall, of course.) 

"I don't know," she says truthfully. 

"Because we don't," he says, eyes flicking around the room as though hoping someone would come in and tell them, oh, it's all been a terrible mistake, they can come out now. 

"I know that," Daisy says, opening her eyes to glare around the room. "I mean, it's totally ridiculous, right? How can we, Daisy Johnson and Lincoln Campbell, have powers?" 

"Exactly!" he exclaims. Turning to the little fish-eye camera in the corner, he says, "you hear that, Hydra?" 

She shakes her head. "This is such a mess." 

He snorts quietly. "You can say that again." 

After a moment of tense silence, he asks, "We're going to get out of this, right?" and she hates that cornered look in his eye, hates how he turns to her for reassurance when she doesn't have any to give. They always protect each other, and now, well… now, they can't. 

"I don't think so," she says softly. 

It's not like her to be so morose about things. She's always cheerful, and hopeful, and encouraging. A beacon of bright hope, just like her name. 

This time, though - well, she wishes she had hope to give him. But she's always hated lies, ever since her asshole ex-boyfriend Grant, and she won't lie to her best friend. 

He closes his eyes, and she can see the last hint of denial leave him as his shoulders slump. 

But then he straightens up, opens his eyes, and looks squarely at her. "If we've only got twenty-four hours left to live, we better make them worth it." 

Daisy's exhausted - bloody Hydra wouldn't even let her rest after a day of work, oh nooo it was straight to the Doom Room. But now she tilts her head and grins up at him. "Sounds good to me." 

He crosses the room to sit next to her, knocking her shoulder lightly with his. "D'you remember when we first met?" 

"How could I forget?" she returns playfully. "You walked into the girls' bathroom with a bag of popcorn, of all things." 

"In my defence, I was six years old," he says, raising his hands. 

She snorts. "Yeah, I was six, too, and I never went into the boys' bathroom with popcorn." 

"Whatever," he says, but he's grinning. "We became friends anyway, didn't we? Well, right after you finished chasing me out brandishing a hand-towel." 

She rolls her eyes at him, but she's smiling, too. This idea of his, spending their last moments reliving their best ones? She'd never tell him, but it's a good one. 

"Do you remember," she asks instead, "that time we went to China?" 

"How could I forget?" he echoes her, dryly. "As I recall, you first of all got us both banned from ever going near any elephants again, second of all nearly got us both killed with acupuncture needles, and third of all put me off chow mein forever." 

"Hey, that was a brilliant prank!" she defends. "Jemma's face, oh my God." 

"Okay, it was pretty brilliant," he admits. "But also really, really gross. I can never hear the words chow mein again without shuddering, thanks to you." 

He's grinning at her, and she's grinning back, and for a moment if feels normal. Nice. Like they're just two friends out chatting, the way they've done a thousand times before. 

Then she sees the big red countdown out of the corner of her eye, and that wonderful daydream shatters. 

She tilts her head to look at him. His face has gone serious, too, and he's frowning as he tilts his head to look at her. 

"Do you think we might actually have powers?" he asks, and out of everything she'd been expecting, that was pretty much bottom on the list. 

"Well," she says hesitantly. "A day ago, I would've said no. But now we're here." She gestures around them at the white room and the big red countdown - 22:34.

"Jemma's theory," she says slowly, mulling it over, "is that powers are tricky. How can you use them if you don't know you have them?" 

"Hydra thinks they can scare us into discovering them," Lincoln says, resting his head against the wall. She hums low in her throat, agreeing. 

"Let's not give them the satisfaction," he says suddenly, turning to face her. "I'd rather die down here with you than be one of their powered slaves."

Daisy has to smile. That's simultaneously one of the most morbid things she's ever heard, but also one of the most romantic. 

She reaches for his hand, lacing their fingers and tipping her head to smile up at him. "Me too."

His gaze drops to their hands, and he swallows. "Daisy," he says, hesitantly, "there's something I need to tell you." 

She rolls her eyes, but there's only affection behind it. "I already know," she tells him, squeezing his hand. 

He blinks up at her, surprised. "You do?" 

"I mean, you're not exactly subtle," she says dryly. "Every time Grant came over, you glared at him so hard I thought his head would explode." 

"In my defence, he turned out to be a total asshole," he says, raising their joined hands and dropping them into his lap. 

She shakes her head at his dramatics, but she can't argue that. "You know I like you too, right?" she asks instead. 

His gaze softens. "I hoped," he says. 

Daisy shifts so she's facing him more fully. "I was being a bit cautious because of, you know, Grant," she admits. And because she can't help it, she mutters "lying snake" under her breath. 

"Anyway," she says, directing her attention back to the situation at hand. (At hand. Ha. She glances down at their laced fingers, rolling her eyes at herself. Terrible pun.)

She takes a quick, bolstering breath, because this next part is serious. "The point is, I was being very cautious. Too cautious. And I'm sorry for that." 

"Why are you sorry?" he asks, genuinely confused. "It only makes sense that you'd need time." 

"Yeah, but not that much," she counters. "If I had gotten my act together sooner, we could have had time." She doesn't mean to, but she finds herself gesturing sharply at the red countdown. 22:19.

"Oh, no, don't you dare blame yourself for this," he says firmly, cupping her chin in his hand and making her look at him when she tries to duck her gaze away. "I know you, Daisy. I know you always blame yourself for everything that goes wrong. Well, since we're going to die today, I'm going to tell you the complete truth: it's ridiculous. You're the best person I know, Daisy. I mean that - you're amazing." 

She leans forward and kisses him. (In her defence, that was a really nice speech. In her defence #2, he's really attractive. And in her defence #3, they're going to die soon, so why the hell not? If she has to die, she might as well go out doing something she enjoys.) 

Only, it doesn't happen quite like that. (No, the kiss part goes just fine, don't worry. It's when they start trying to do more that the hiccups start.) 

When he pulls her onto his lap, she goes eagerly - but on the way, the floor gives a little shudder. 

They share a look - that's odd - then unanimously decide that right now, who cares, kissing is way more important. 

Then a few minutes later, when her hands slip under his shirt, the lights in the room flicker on and off. 

Okay, that's definitely a little weird. Daisy shifts, squinting up at the ceiling. Surely their time hasn't run out yet? 

She checks the opposite wall - no, they still have over twenty hours left. 

Then what…? 

He presses a kiss against the soft skin just below her ear to distract her, and Daisy finds herself biting back a happy grin. They might be about to die, but she's giddy on smiles and kisses, and she's just glad they have this time to do whatever the hell they want. (Also, if they make some low-level Hydra techie blush at his screen in mortification all night, well that's a bonus, too.) 

This time when the floor gives a shake, she knows it's a happy one. She also knows it came from her. 

"Lincoln," she says, putting her hand on his cheek and giving him a kind of breathless grin. "I did that." 

"Kissed me?" he asks, eyebrows flying up. "Well, yeah, I'd hope so." 

She rolls her eyes and slaps his shoulder. "No, you idiot," she says. "Well, I mean, yes, I did that, too, but that's not what I meant." At his confused look, she explains, "the floor. That was me." 

His eyes widen as he gets it. "Wait… you think you…" 

Mindful of the camera, she leans forward and kisses him again, but it's quick, distracted. "Don't say it," she warns. "We need to figure this out without Hydra realising what we're up to." 

Lincoln nods, and closes his eyes like he's concentrating. A moment later, the lights flicker on and off. 

Daisy can't help her incredulous little laugh. "Who knew," she marvels. She reaches for his hand, lacing their fingers, and a few sparks tickle their way up her arm. 

"Hydra was right," he says, flipping their hands over to trace her knuckles. Tiny sparks follow his fingertips over her skin - it feels so weird. 

She looks down at their hands for a second. "No," she says decisively. 

He blinks. "Uh, what…?" 

"Hydra wasn't right," she says firmly. "Their room - this whole doom setup -" she gestures around them with their joined hands "- is not what got us here."

She looks up at him and smiles. "We did," she says simply. 

"Hydra didn't discover our powers," she explains, feeling a low tingle of excitement start in her belly. "We did that. Not Hydra - us. You and me, together."

"And," she says, feeling her excitement spill over into something almost tangible as she pulls him to his feet, "Together, we can get out of here." 

His eyes are shining, caught up in her excitement. "You're right," he says, "you're right!" 

"First things first," she says, nodding at the camera. 

It takes him a moment, but he gets it. Closing his eyes, he holds our one hand and concentrates. 

The little camera explodes in a shower of sparks. 

Daisy stretches up on her toes to give him a quick kiss in congratulations - and if she's honest, part of her still can't believe this. 

She pushes that part down - this is real, and it's her turn now. She turns to the door and listens, harder than she's ever listened before. 

And… she can hear it. It's like a little buzz in her head. 

And with a quick tug, she pulls it out. 

The door crashes open. 

"Let's go!" she says, grabbing Lincoln's hand. Together, they sprint through the empty, creepily white hallways of the Hydra base. 

Predictably, there's a whole squad of guards waiting for them at the exit. 

But Daisy has had enough of Hydra for one day. First they pull her out of her job, without even letting her shower, then they stick her in their Room of Doom, and now they want to stop her from escaping with her new boyfriend? Page not bloody well found. 

And to make things worse, they didn’t even have time to finish kissing, for God’s sake. Yeah, Daisy’s really mad. 

Lincoln is obviously having the same kind of thoughts. And in the kind of perfect sync two people can only have after years of being best friends, they simultaneously blast the Hydra guards away from the exit. 

Those poor Hydra guards. They never stood a chance against the devastating shockwave-lightning bolt combination that was fired their way by two very pissed off ex-prisoners. 

And as for Daisy and Lincoln… 

"Hey, Daisy?" he asks her later that night, when they've found a place to crash and, er, sleep. 

"Mmm?" she hums, lying contentedly against him. 

"Fancy taking down a government?" he asks, as one does. 

She chuckles against his shoulder. "You know what, let's do it." 

And they do. Spectacularly. 

The End. 

(P. S. - when they're quite finished ridding the world of evil dictatorships, they find themselves a little cottage in Perthshire with the loveliest neighbours. Their little Liam and Fitz and Jemma's little Felicity grow up as the best of friends. 

And if they want to follow in their parents' footsteps one day… well, Daisy and Lincoln couldn't be prouder.

Now it's the end.)