#but because the eruption was so big the people on the island had warning signs for like a decade before it happened

[literallyjusttoa]

Left this abandoned in the drafts (which is a bit ironic) but it's a spin on this post, where instead of Apollo just being locked in some room on Olympus somewhere, he's bound to the ruins of an abandoned Ancient Greek city. Maybe somewhere near Delphi, maybe Troy, idk.

[letarasstuff]

Doesn't she love me anymore?

(A/N): This was requested by an anon, I hope you like it as much as I do!

Summary: Spencer's daughter starts to question why her mother left the small family early on

Warnings: Mentions/undertones of bullying, an absent parent and descreptions of the concequences for the child, So. Much. Angsty. Feelings.

Wordcount: 2.5k

✨Masterlist✨ _________________________________

“Daddy?” Spencer turns around from the frying pan to look at his daughter. Against common belief, he is quite the cook. But this only started when he became a father, after he realized a child won’t be able to live off of a diet consisting of coffee and anxiety, just like he did at the time. “Yes, Sweetheart?”

She looks down to the piece of paper on the kitchen counter in front of her. “Why did Mommy leave us?”

The spatula falls to the ground. It’s a question the father did not expect on a Tuesday morning before school. “It’s because of me, isn’t it? She saw me the first time and didn’t want me anymore. It’s my fault Mommy left us, left you, just like Linda said.” Tears begin to stream down her face.

“No no no”, her father is quick to turn off the heat and walks around the island to hug his daughter. “None of this is your fault. I don’t know what this Linda said, but it is not true. Your mother had her own reasons to stay out of our lives, but it has nothing to do with you.”

This doesn’t calm her down. “What are her reasons? Why did she leave us? Why did leave me?” Frantically she tries to keep her sobs down in order to speak. Spencer never has seen her this upset.

“Sweetheart, are you sure you are in the right state to talk about it now? Why don’t we calm down and get something for breakfast on our way to school and talk about it after I pick you up this afternoon?” He suggests, hoping the thought of a cup of hot chocolate from their favorite bakery would help her.

(Y/N) looks up at him with bloodshot and glassy eyes. Snot runs down from her nose. Spencer is quick to get her a tissue and make her blow into it, cringing internally about all those germs. “Do you promise to tell me more after school?” Big eyes look up at him and the father hurts. It hurts him, because there are so many things in her future that will break her and all that because of her mother. He can’t shield her from all of it, as much as he wants to he isn’t able. Because there always will be people, people like this Linda, who will make the girl conscious of her absent mother.

“I promise”, he tells her and holds his little finger out for her. (Y/N) smiles while linking hers with his, knowing her father will keep this promise just like any other of his. “Good, and now pack up we got a bakery to visit!” Quickly the girl grabs the piece of paper in front of her only to shove it into her backpack.

A little later she sits at her desk and looks at her teacher expectantly, just like her fellow classmates. “Ok children, today we won’t work further on our addition and subtraction worksheets-” The teacher’s sentence is cut short by the eruption of cheerful shouts. Just (Y/N) looks at the multiplication sheet in front of her.

The teacher is quick to quiet the class again. “Instead we will continue our work on the mother’s card you started doing yesterday. Linda was so kind to tell me that you don’t have the chance to finish them at home, because your moms are there. That is why you do it here and your worksheets at home.”

With a frown on her face (Y/N) pulls out the blank piece of paper that made her feel bad ever since her teacher handed it out to her yesterday. While everybody around her chatters happily with other classmates, she just stares at the paper. It is a reminder of something she doesn’t have, something she lacks and will never get: A real mother. A hug from her mother. Not even the motherly reassurance one gets after a nightmare. Nothing.

“Hey orphan. Ya realizing your mom doesn’t love you and that’s why she left you?” Linda, someone (Y/N) later learns to call a Mean Girl, struts up to the younger one’s desk. A sigh leaves her lips before answering. “You do know for an orphan I need to have neither a mommy nor a daddy. And I do for a fact have a dad, a loving one actually.”

A more light than hard slap on the back of her head makes the girl’s body jolt. “I don’t care, but I know that your mom hates you enough just after looking at you to know she doesn’t want anything to do with you.” After that Linda goes back to her table, leaving (Y/N) feeling more miserable than before.

Some starring on the paper later her teacher passes her table. “Is there something you want to talk about, Sweetheart? You seem very sad.” That is an obvious fact. Finally the girl is able to lift her gaze. “Miss Ramirez, I don’t know what to do.” This is probably the first time ever she said this sentence in school.

“Mother’s day is in a few days, Sweetie, and this is why we all make these cards. It’s a thank you to your mom and a way to show her how much you love her. You love your mom, don’t you?” The shake of her head shocks the teacher. Immediately an alarming signal rings through her head, because this is a red flag. “Why? Did she do something?”

“Miss Ramirez, I don’t have a mommy. She- she left Daddy and me.” Tears fill (Y/N)’s eyes. Her teacher is quick to hug and sush her. “Oh Sweetie, this is not a bad thing. I’m sure your mom loves you very much, even if she is not there with you. Do you wanna go out for a bit to calm down?” Meanwhile she connects the obvious signs of a single dad in her mind. Missed parent teacher conferences, unnecessary hovering over the child and the tendency to be categorized as a helicopter parent. Yes, Dr. Reid ticks all of those boxes.

It’s the second time of the day that an adult asked (Y/N) to calm down, and frankly it doesn’t really help with the situation at hand. “Can I do my homework outside? It’s too loud in here”, she asks between sniffles. Both of them know that the class’ volume is not the real reason for the request. “Of course, Sweetheart. If you need something, just come in and ask me. Alright?” (Y/N) nods and gets her multiplication sheet and a pencil before leaving the classroom.

At the end of the school day, Spencer is there to pick up his daughter. For days like these, where are no cases, Hotch gave him a free pass on (Y/N)’s very first day at school to leave the office earlier to be able to pick her up himself. As a father and someone who works the same high demanding job as him, he knows that little things like these are often the most important. And even if there were a case today, Spencer would have stayed back. He promised his daughter the truth and this is what he is going to tell her.

“Hey Dr. Reid. Do you have a moment?” Her teacher greets him at the classroom door. Concerned about his child’s wellbeing he nods and follows her back out of the room. “I gave the children the assignment of creating a card for their mothers, because mother’s day is rolling around. Today (Y/N) told me her mother left you, is that right?” This is the moment Spencer connects the dots. This is the kick off that made her question her mother’s motives about leaving all of the sudden.

The young doctor clears his throat. “Uhm yes, that is right. Actually, I’m going to talk to her about it right after school on her demand.” Miss Ramirez nods with an understanding nod. “Thank you for your honesty, Dr. Reid. I also want to warn you, in two days we will hold a celebration in honor of mother’s day with the kids’ mothers. You are invited as a father, because this is a special situation. But I also give (Y/N) a free pass for this event. It can be very traumatic for her.”

The dad thanks her, but his thoughts are somewhere else. He is mad. He is mad for his daughter, because she will always be the one with a “special situation”. The odd one, because yeah, it isn’t uncommon for fathers to leave (which isn’t anything less sad and traumatic), but an absent mother hits differently.

But Spencer is also hurt. Hurt, because for her young age, there is already the word “traumatic” thrown around. No, it isn’t enough that her dad works a job with the risk of him not coming home from a case again, or being the target of an enemy. No, she also has to go through the experience of missing a parent, never knowing how her life would be if it wasn’t for someone like her mother.

Even with Spencer trying to fill that role, there will be a time where (Y/N) will ask herself all of the “what ifs”. He can’t stop it from happening, and that is his biggest pain right there. Because he can’t shield her from her own thoughts. At the age of six she already is a bright, brilliant and talented mind. Now in a few years or maybe just months, she will start to think about her mother being the root of her pain, bad experiences and hurt. Her thoughts will lead to a downward spiral of how a person can do something like her mother, who acted like that with the knowledge of which consequences will follow. And Spencer can’t stop this from happening.

“Daddy!” A small thud comes from (Y/N) colliding with his leg. Just by the way she squeezes it he knows that she hasn’t had a good day at school. “Hey Baby. Do you want to go to the office for a bit? I think your Auntie Penelope told me something about a new science set she got for you. Or do you want to go straight home?” Spencer asks after lifting her into his arms. Immediately she hides her face into the crook of his neck. “Home”, she murmurs. Home it is then.

“Aaaaaand here comes the little missy’s hot chocolate!” The father says in a funny voice while carefully putting the cup into his daughter’s hands. She sits covered in a blanket on the sofa, looking expectantly at her father.

Spencer sighs at the lack of reaction. “Are you sure you want to hear it?” (Y/N) nods adamantly. “Ok, but I got to go a bit back for this story

“It was about eight years ago, I worked on a case with your Aunties and Uncles back then. I was the one who had to get the last round of coffee for the night at a small 24/7 diner. As I walked in I thought I died, because I was sure an angel stood right in front of me. Well not-” “Is that Mommy?!” (Y/N) cuts him off excitedly. Spencer smiles slightly. “You need to listen to the story!” The girl shifts in her seat. “Right, sorry.”

As I was saying: well in front, because she sat at the bar waiting for her order. I nervously ordered the coffees and had to begin three times, because I kept messing up, mesmerized by her sole atmosphere. As the waiter went to put the coffee pot on, the woman turned towards me and introduced herself. After that she asked me what I was doing late at night in a small town like that and we somehow forgot everything around us by just talking. After that we stayed in touch. Six months later we became a couple, she moved to DC in order for me to still be able to do my job here.

“Two years later your Mom got pregnant with you, and it was quite a surprise to us. But we felt ready at that time and so she moved in with me and we had you. The first few months were great, we couldn’t be happier. BUt then you continuously became ill. At first just a cold, then the pocks and so on. I think it was the third night in a row where you held us up all night. I took a year off from work to care for you with your Mom. I carried you through our apartment the whole night, giving you a bottle, singing, reading, doing anything.

“Then I saw her standing in the doorway. Even though there was baby vomit on her sweatpants and I had never seen her eye bags being this dark, she was the most beautiful woman to me. I approached her with a smile, but her frown only deepened. I thought it was because she worried about you and your health. Instead she told me she can’t do it. She can’t be a mother, that she wasn’t cut for this job.” Her exact words still resonate in Spencer’s ears to this day. He knows exactly what she said, word for word, and they never stopped to sting any less.

“So Mommy left us because I was too much trouble?” (Y/N)’s voice sounds even sadder than before. “No, it never was because of you. She knew exactly what it meant to have a child. Your mother knew what kind of work it takes and what the future brought. You have absolutely nothing to do with it. Some people are just not made to be parents and it’s better when they realize it themselves and leave the situation.”

(Y/N) nods, her mind running wild. All of that makes plenty of sense but at the same time not. “Sweetheart, that doesn’t change the fact that I love you and I will never leave you. You are my everything and I’m so happy to be a dad to such a wonderful little girl like you. I want you to remember that your Mom may not be here with us, but she still loves you. And I’m here for you, for anything you need, want or don’t want. Do you understand me?”

She nods again and curls up into her father’s lap. “Can we watch something?” She asks after a bit of silence, where both of them indulged their own thoughts. Quickly the TV turned on and some kids movie plays. The rest of the day the small family spends all the time cuddled on the couch, because at the moment they need to feel the other there with them.

The next two days Spencer calls (Y/N) in sick at school and himself at work, because together they fly to Vegas. Just because her own mother wasn’t ready for the job, doesn’t mean they can’t appreciate the work her grandmother did as a mother. That and you never know how much time you have left with the people who are dear to you.

Taglist:

All works:

@dindjarinsspouse @big-galaxy-chaos @jswessie187 @kneelforloki

Criminal Minds:

@averyhotchner @mggsprettygirl @herecomesthewriterwitch @ash19871962 @ellyhotchner

Spencer Reid x child!reader:

@ilovetaquitosmmmm

[tsarisfanfiction]

WIP #47

(Send me a number 1-60 [or a fandom/character I guess] for the corresponding wip) because I’m bored and brain-fried and have too many wips that’ll otherwise never see the light of day.

For @misssquidtracy who asked for “Number 47 - Thunderbirds (specifically da Gords)”.   Luckily, this happens to be a Gordon PoV wip, so it’s all Gordon!

It’s also a Scott!whump, because it’s me and I’m terrible and I have way too many of these lying around, so watch out for that.  There’s also a lot of this.  Nearly 6k words, so enjoy :D

Gordon hated it when his squid sense started to tingle for no discernible reason.  On a rescue, his squid sense was invaluable, warning him just in time that a building was about to topple, or that an aftershock was on its way.  Lives had been saved by his mysterious power – hardly a power, more an instinct honed by too many years of military precision combined with a predisposition for pranks whilst living in a house with three older brothers.  Alan joked about him being bitten by a squid, like that old superhero story about the guy and the spider.

It was easier to laugh it off than get into a debate with the astronaut about the biting habits – or lack thereof – of aquatic creatures his younger brother knew nothing more than the required basics about.

However, joking aside, Gordon’s sixth sense was particularly active, and while usually it was a life-saving boon, this time it was just a nuisance.  He was at home, safe and comfortable in the clean water of the pool. He’d opted for lazy backstrokes, taking his time to reach from one end of the pool to the other before executing a neat flip to repeat the stroke back the way he’d come.  None of his brothers were on missions, either.  John was as ever up in Thunderbird Five, but from the far end of the pool he could see the holographic form of his brother just visible in the den.  Alan was, last checked, also in the den – the two space mad brothers had decided to watch a documentary on, surprise, surprise, space, during what downtime they had – while Virgil had decided to do some maintenance on Thunderbird Two with Brains.

Scott was away on boring business, a stuffy CEO meeting that he couldn’t palm off onto the board of directors that were supposed to be handling that sort of thing for him, or even attend via hologram.  They had insisted on a personal touch – literally – and as it was, apparently, a big deal, that meant Scott had to ditch the blues, send one last longing look at Thunderbird One, and let Kayo escort him in Tracy One to the meeting place.

The meeting had been due to start about an hour ago, if Gordon was getting his timezone calculations correct.  Why Tracy Industries still had its headquarters in America, far too many hours behind Tracy Island, when there was a perfectly respectable landmass or two closer to home, he couldn’t quite fathom, but when he’d raised the point Scott and John had both fixed him with tired, don’t be an idiot looks, with just a hint of be glad you don’t have to deal with this nonsense to stop him from pestering further.

Kayo herself was who-knew-where, sneaking around in her sneaky Kayo way.  He’d seen Tracy One return several hours ago, Kayo’s taxi service duties over until Scott called for her.  Apparently, head of IR security did not equal anything in terms of Tracy Industries security, a fact that he knew grated on her.  Still, she and Lady Penelope had run multiple background checks on all the men and women that made up Scott’s official security, and were as assured as they could be with Kayo not amongst their number that he was in good hands.

So if his squid sense could stop tingling randomly, that’d be great, thanks.

It didn’t, and annoyance turned to dread when the emergency signal went off, summoning them all to the lounge.  A tingling squid sense, and an emergency?  Gordon had a really bad feeling about that.

He made it to the den in record time, more damp than not with a beautiful trail of drips across the carpet that Grandma was going to murder him for later, and still in nothing but his swimming trunks.  Alan made a face of disgust as he threw himself down onto the sofa next to him to face John.  The documentary that the two astronauts had been watching was paused on what his old school lessons told him was a supernova eruption.  The imagery of an explosion did nothing to help his jittery squid sense.

Virgil was last to join them, grease streaking up one sleeve and smearing onto the sofa he chose to sit on – at least he wasn’t the only one that would be facing the wrath of Grandma later.

“What have you got, John?” his eldest currently-home brother asked, looking far too laid back for Gordon’s liking.  Not that there was anything wrong with it – Virgil still was far from relaxed, alert and ready for the briefing before launching himself down the slide of death – but Gordon found himself tense in comparison.

“A plane’s gone down in America,” John told them.  “I intercepted a mayday call from the pilot; the GDF have already responded but it’s a bad one and they don’t have enough resources to get everyone out.   Gear up; I’ll give you the details on the way.”

One of those, huh? Gordon flew towards the fish tank that housed his launch tube, slapping his palm against the hidden sensor and feeling the familiar downwards rush towards the hangars, splitting off from the route to Four and instead making a beeline for Two.  He met Alan on the platform, his youngest brother jittering excitedly as always, just in time for Virgil to retract it, bringing them up into the cockpit.

Co-pilot was his chair, and the only person annoying enough to turf him out of it on ‘superiority’ grounds was Scott.  Even Kayo knew better than to steal his chair, so Alan settled happily enough into the navigation chair behind Virgil, pulling up the screens ready for John to transmit the data straight though.

“You alright?” Virgil asked him as the hangar door rolled down, revealing rows of palm trees ready to bow in homage to the green beast.

“My squid sense is going haywire,” he admitted, no point in lying.  Not on a mission.  He expected John to scoff – his second eldest brother always slightly more dismissive of it than the rest of them.  After all, there was no scientific explanation.  All joking about fish and gills aside, Gordon was one hundred percent human.  John didn’t scoff, and that made his squid sense reach an uncomfortable level.  In fact, John didn’t say anything at all, his hologram not paying them any attention at all as he fiddled with something invisible up on Five.

“Well, it’s a plane crash,” Alan pointed out, his voice somewhat subdued.  Virgil made a noise of agreement as Two’s engines roared to life behind them, punching them into the air.  She was no rocket, but Thunderbird Two could still produce a decent amount of Gs. Gordon wished that was it, but the tingle had started before John briefed them.

“Guys,” John finally said, once Two was cruising at full speed towards America.  “I’ve got hold of the flight details for the plane.  It wasn’t easy; turns out it was a top-secret flight even the GDF didn’t know about.”

“That sounds ominous,” Virgil observed.

“It gets worse.” John’s face was grim.  Really grim.  Bearer of terrible news grim.  “It was a private flight chartered for a top secret business meeting between the biggest aerospace companies in the world.  Four CEOs were on board, including-” his voice broke in a very un-John-like manner, and Gordon’s stomach dropped.

“Don’t say it,” Alan begged. In front of him, Virgil’s knuckles were white on the yoke, Thunderbird Two’s engines whining as they went just that little bit faster.

“Including Scott,” John finished, visibly pulling himself back together.  “In total there were thirty people on board, including the pilots. The reports from the GDF so far say that the rear of the plane is trashed but the cause isn’t yet clear. Two bodies have been recovered so far – neither of them Scott – but they can’t get into the main body of the plane. Scans suggest that approximately half of them survived the initial crash.  I’m picking up fourteen life signs; two of them in the cockpit area so they’re most likely the pilots.”

“Scott’s communicator?” Virgil asked as sea gave way to land beneath them, the American coast looking unfairly beautiful.

“I’m not getting a response,” John admitted.  “I’ll keep trying.”

“Anything from the telemetry?”  Alan was tapping away at the screen by his chair, clearly manipulating the data John was sending him.  Gordon envied him the distraction.

“It’s offline,” John sighed, rubbing his face tiredly.  “Seems like it was damaged in the crash.  EOS is attempting to reconnect but no luck so far.”

“Do you have any good news for us, Johnny?” Gordon asked hopefully.

“Colonel Casey is one of the GDF officers at the scene,” John offered, notably not rising to the bait. Well, Gordon supposed that was better than random officers, or worse, the ones that weren’t overly fond of International Rescue and didn’t fully co-operate.  “Kayo’s just launched in Thunderbird Shadow for the airport they took off from.  Lady Penelope is also on the way; she and Parker are already making enquiries to find out what happened.”

“They think sabotage?” Virgil asked.

“The CEOs of the four most powerful aerospace industries in the world were on that plane,” John pointed out.  “It’s suspicious, at least.”

“Do you think it’s the Hood?”  Gordon sent Alan a withering look.  Not everything was the Hood’s fault, even if it felt like it.

“I don’t know, Alan,” John said.  “Kayo thinks it isn’t his style.  He’d have been looking to get money from them, not kill them.”

“He killed Dad.”

Gordon flinched.  He wasn’t the only one.

“No-one said Scott’s dead,” Virgil said, voice steady even though Gordon couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked so tense.

“He’ll be okay, right?” Alan asked.  “I mean, it’s Scott.  If anyone can walk away from a plane crash, it’d be Scott, right?”

“Let’s hope,” John replied.

The co-ordinates John had programmed into Thunderbird Two’s navigation system flashed up, warning that they were on final approach.  Slowed to subsonic, they came to a hover alongside a GDF flier and got their first glimpse of the downed plane.  It wasn’t pretty.

The final third of the plane no longer resembled the tail of anything remotely flight-worthy.  Twisted and warped metal was crumpled and torn ragged. Men and women in GDF uniforms were hovering around the area, large lasers deployed to slice their way in. Gordon knew instantly that no-one who had been in that part of the plane could possibly have survived.

At the other end of the plane, the nose was also crumpled but not as far back as the cockpit windows. It looked as though whatever had downed the plane had occurred at the back, with the damage to the nose only made by the impact of the crash.  More GDF were swarming the cockpit windows, cutting their way in with infinite more care than their counterparts were cleaving the rear.

The area of most interest to them was the middle third.  While not the complete write-off of the rear, massive dents and warps in the metal warned of a serious crash.  Any survivors would be in that area, but the condition of said survivors was unknown. All of the emergency exits were untouched; from a distance, Gordon couldn’t tell if they were wedged shut by warped metal, or if there was another reason that none of them had been opened.

“International Rescue!” Colonel Casey flagged them down, guiding them towards a space just large enough for Thunderbird Two to land.  “You boys are a sight for sore eyes,” she greeted.  “The fuselage is too thick for our lasers to get through without endangering the survivors inside.  We’ve got the pilots under control, but we haven’t been able to make contact with any of the passengers.”

“F.A.B.,” Virgil answered her.  “We’ll get them out.  John said fourteen life signs?”

“Affirmative,” she said. “We have visual on both pilots. The other twelve are randomly positioned within the front half of the plane.”

“We’ll get them out,” Virgil assured her, and ended the call.  “Gordon, Alan, get as much cutting gear and first aid supplies as you can carry.”

“You didn’t mention Scott,” Gordon observed, and he sighed.

“No point worrying her. You two know we have to treat him the same as the rest?”

Alan frowned.

“But couldn’t he help us?”

“If he’s fit to help, then that’s one thing,” Virgil told them.  “But I don’t like that none of the doors are open.  Don’t get your hopes up; this is a nasty crash.”

“Come on,” Gordon muttered, grabbing Alan’s arm and tugging him towards the module.  “Faster we get in there, the faster we’ll find him.”

“I know that much!” Alan grumbled, yanking his arm back.  “I can walk by myself, Gordon!”  He stalked off ahead.  Gordon let him, hearing Virgil catch up with him from behind.

“You don’t think Scott’s okay,” he said, quietly.  It wasn’t a question.

“If he was, he’d have got word out somehow by now,” Virgil replied.  “Even if his communicator’s broken, there are GDF swarming the place. He’d only need to catch their attention through a window.”  He made a beeline straight for his exosuit, pulling on the heavy gear with the ease of practice and charging out of the lowering module door.  Gordon collected their last hand-held cutter and shouldered a medical pack before following alongside Alan, who was kitted out the same.

Virgil’s shoulder laser was powerful and made short work of the fuselage that the GDF had been too reluctant to touch.  A wrench with the claw arm and a thick wodge of metal slammed down on the ground in front of him.  The opening wasn’t huge, too small for Virgil with his suit to fit through comfortably, but it was the largest they’d been willing to risk with the unknown structural integrity of the fuselage.  Gordon slipped through first, hand laser in hand for any further obstacles, and let out a shaky breath.

“Woah,” he muttered, pulling his helmet on.  The air was murky, dust kicked up and swarming around from the warped metal. None of the seats were upright; sheered metal struts protruded from where they should have been, in a circle around what was once a table.  That had broken in two, the far end buried under the start of the truly warped area. “Hello?  International Rescue!”

Silence.

Alongside personal effects and broken pieces of aircraft, the floor was strewn with bodies.  Some were obviously dead, impaled by shrapnel made from the very plane that should have been protecting them.  One in particular was grotesque, a metal strut that had once supported a chair stuck straight through his chest from where he’d been thrown on top of it.  Gordon recognised him as part of Scott’s security detail and had to fight to hold back the bile.

Scott.  Where was Scott?

Despite Virgil’s words, he wasted a moment looking around the scene, but there was no sign of his eldest brother.  Unable to justify hunting for him before checking for signs of life in those immediately visible, he crouched down by the nearest person not obviously dead and checked their pulse.  It was weak but there.

“Woah!”  Alan mimicked his own reaction upon entering.  “What a mess.”

“Alan, I’ve got a survivor here!”  Gordon called him over immediately.  “Mind your step.”  His youngest brother picked his way over to him.  “Find a way to get him out.  I’ll look for more.”

“Have you found Scott yet?” he asked, kneeling down and opening his med kit.  Gordon shook his head.

“No sign.  I’ll let you know as soon as I do.”  Alan nodded, and Gordon continued his search.  It was a grim one.  He’d suspected as such when no-one had responded to his call, but even when he found a warm body, they were unconscious.  Virgil joined him, exosuit stripped off and replaced with more medical kits and a small group of GDF personnel courtesy of Colonel Casey. Between them, it was a far more manageable task to carefully remove the survivors from the wreckage.  Those pronounced as dead were left for the moment as John’s countdown of life signs inside the remains of the plane slowly ticked down.

All in all, they’d so far found eighteen of the twenty eight passengers, including the dead pulled from the ruined tail section.  Ten to go, two of which were still alive according to Thunderbird Five’s scans. One of the ten was Scott.  Gordon felt cruel when he found another breathing body and mentally cursed her for not being Scott.  It wasn’t her fault; she was lucky to be alive herself, torso contorted in a way he knew meant a broken back.  He should be relieved to find any survivors at all, not cursing them for not being the one he wanted to be alive.

He flagged her up to one of the closest medics and moved on.  It was almost too dark to see at the back of the plane, up against the crushed wreckage.  His toe snapped on something soft and he tripped.  Landing in a crouch, he turned around to face the obstruction.  A dead body.  He didn’t even need to check the young man’s pulse; the poor guy had been caught in the mangled metal and torn in half.  His face was twisted in pain and terror, blue eyes wide and glassy with death.  It wasn’t Scott, but Gordon knew he’d be seeing those eyes in his nightmares nonetheless.

Turning back around, he moved to stand before realising he was by part of the fallen table.  Various limbs had been protruding from beneath the large slab at intervals during Gordon’s search, but here there was a gap. A seat, wedged beneath it, had left part of the table at an angle.  It was too dark to see into it, so Gordon palmed a glowstick and snapped it, illuminating the area in an eerie green.  Immediately the silhouette of a body greeted his eyes.  Mindful of additional shrapnel, he reached in carefully, fumbling until he found their wrist.

Thump… thump…

Slow, but there.  At the same time, a GDF woman called in another survivor.  One more than expected.

“Virgil!” he called. “I’ve got someone under the table with a pulse.  Going to need some heavy lifting to get them out!”

“F.A.B.” his brother replied.  He raised the glowstick above his head with the hand not measuring the pulse and waved it around.  “I see you.” A moment later, Virgil and a trio of GDF officers appeared.  “How much of this are we going to need to shift?” he asked.  Gordon shrugged.

“I can’t see.  Got a silhouette but not much more.  Give me your torch.”  He dropped the glowstick and kept his hand open for Virgil’s gear. It landed in his hand and he carefully manoeuvred it down before turning it on.

A once sharp grey suit was covered in dust, but that wasn’t what caught Gordon’s breath in his throat. It was the dark brown hair, and the broken but unmistakable International Rescue communicator on his forearm, less than an inch from Gordon’s fingers on the slow pulse, that made him gasp.

“Gord-?”

“It’s Scott.”  He cut Virgil’s query off.  Behind him, the GDF murmured in surprise.

Virgil didn’t ask anything more.  Gordon stayed where he was, watching the limp form of his eldest brother with a lump in his throat as they moved around him.  His fingers didn’t budge from the pulse, a fear gripping him that if he stopped measuring it, it would stop altogether.  Orders barked and a concert of groans resulted in a large part of the broken table slab being cut up and lifted, letting what pitiful light had reached so far back into the cabin illuminate Scott’s body.

It wasn’t good.  Blood matted his hair, a mark of something striking him in the crash.  One leg was twisted almost completely around, a dislocated hip at best, and more blood stained his arm.

Virgil took charge, nudging Gordon out of the way.  He went willingly only because out of everyone in the world, he only trusted Virgil or Grandma to handle his brother in such a broken state.  He tapped his communicator.

“John, Alan?”

Both answered immediately, eager for news.  Inwardly he was glad not to be the bearer of tragic news, not sure he could have managed it.

“Found him; he’s alive.”

“How is he?” Alan demanded over John’s sigh of relief.  Gordon winced.

“Alive,” he repeated. “Virgil’s got him.  It’s too dark back here to tell past that.”  That was a bare faced lie; even as he spoke he could see Virgil attaching the medical scanner to him, still glowing glow stick highlighting the frown on his face.  Neither brother called him out on it.

“I’ll update the others,” John said instead.  “Keep looking for survivors; you’re on one more than our scans showed.  There might be more.”

“F.A.B.”  He ended the call.  “Virgil?”

“All in hand,” his older brother said shortly.  “Keep looking.”

“Yessir.”

Seven dead bodies later, all thirty crew and passengers were accounted for.  He exited the craft, removing his now filthy helmet, only to almost collide with Colonel Casey.

“You knew Scott was on board the flight,” she said without greeting.  Her face was displeased, and he figured he was the first Tracy she’d managed to collar.

“Of course we did,” he confirmed.  “But that didn’t change how we operated.”

“I can see that,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”  He glanced back at the corpse of the plane, where Virgil was still inside with Scott, carefully transferring him to a hoverstretcher, last Gordon had seen.

“Because it didn’t change anything,” he repeated.  “Excuse me, Colonel, but my job isn’t over yet.”

He didn’t wait to be dismissed, heading towards Thunderbird Two’s open module to prep it for Scott’s transport.  The GDF might be taking the other injured to hospitals, but there was only one craft their brother would be travelling in, and that was their own.  He wasn’t naïve; Scott’s injuries were bad, beyond anything Grandma and Virgil could handle at home.  John and Kayo were already working to locate a hospital both capable of treating him, and with enough security that he would be safe from ill-wishers during his recovery.

None of them were convinced this was a simple accident.  Not with so many high profile individuals on board.  The Hood aside, there were many people that stood to gain from the deaths of the four CEOs.  Lady Penelope was already digging into the employees from the other three companies who stood to benefit from the deaths.  Regretfully, the only CEO still with a pulse was Scott.  All four of them had been towards the back of the cabin, all bar Scott caught up in the twisted metal that was the final third of the plane.

Scott had been lucky, for all that he wasn’t out of the woods yet.  Gordon wasn’t a medical professional, but Virgil’s face told him that much.

“The medical carrier is ready to leave,” Colonel Casey told him.  He assumed she’d followed him to Thunderbird Two, although had at least refrained from entering uninvited.  “As soon as Scott is on board, they’ll be on their way.”

“They can leave now,” Gordon retorted.  “We’ll handle Scott.”

“I know you are concerned, but this crash is a GDF investigation,” she told him.  “All casualties fall under GDF jurisdiction.”

Gordon was shorter than her – the only one of his brothers bar the still-growing Alan with that distinction – but inside the module bay he could still look down at her.

“Scott is International Rescue jurisdiction,” he corrected her.  “And as the CEO of the family business, also Tracy jurisdiction.  He’ll be treated at a location approved by us, not the GDF, and if the GDF have an issue with that, they can take that up with our head of security.”

“And your other employees?” she challenged.  Gordon pushed away the memory of a man impaled by a seat strut.

“None of them survived.” He turned his back on her, readying the finishing touches.

“I’m sorry for your losses,” she said, and he heard her walk away.  He’d barely known them, the six men and women wearing Tracy Industries logos, but Scott had.  John, too, and Kayo had hand-picked the four members of security.

Alan appeared beside him, putting away what remained of the medical supplies he’d taken out earlier and locking the hand-held laser back where it belonged.

“Is he going to be okay?” he asked, and Gordon shrugged, putting an arm around his shoulders.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Do you think this was sabotage?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why would anyone do this?”

Gordon sighed.

“It might have just been an accident,” he reminded him, even if he doubted his own words.  Alan looked equally unconvinced.  “Come on, let’s get her ready to go.”

“F.A.B.,” Alan said quietly, and they headed out towards the loading platform, only to be brought up short at the sight of Virgil approaching them, hoverstretcher alongside. Immediately they got out of the way, letting their older brother brush past and secure the stretcher to the wall.

“Gordon, pilot,” he said. “John and Kayo found us a New Zealand hospital.  It’s a fair distance, but it’s secure.  Scott should hold on long enough to get there as long as you don’t dawdle.”

“F.A.B.”  Gordon wasn’t a fan of the implication that Scott might not, but had no choice but to trust Virgil as he jabbed the button to raise the platform.  Alan stayed behind – understandable, as he hadn’t seen yet seen their eldest brother – but Gordon didn’t say anything.  He could pilot Two solo.

There were many words that could be used to describe the speed they left the crash site and headed for the other side of the world at, but ‘dawdle’ was not one of them.  She was no rocket like One or Three, but Two was still one of the fastest planes in the world, and Gordon was determined to get as much speed out of her as he dared.  Virgil could take her faster, another Mach at least, but he wasn’t Virgil and didn’t trust himself to keep her flight smooth at top speed.  He just hoped it would be fast enough.

About halfway there, somewhere over the large expanse of water that Gordon would much rather be in than over, Virgil contacted him, a hologram flickering into life in his periphery.

“If I send Alan up, will you go faster?” he asked.  Gordon’s heart sank.

“Is he getting worse?” Please no, please not Scott.

“I’ve got him stable,” Virgil reassured him.  “But he’s still critical.  The sooner we get him to the hospital the happier I’ll be.”

“More speed coming up,” he confirmed, reaching for the throttle.  “Uh, yeah, send Alan up, would you?”  He could probably do with a co-pilot if he went any faster.

“Sure thing,” Virgil agreed. “He’s on his way.”

Sure enough, no sooner than his older brother ended the connection, the door opened and Alan stumbled through it, all but collapsing into the co-pilot’s chair.

“He hasn’t woken up,” the astronaut offered as he reached forwards to power up the co-pilot controls. As soon as the second set of lights lit up, Gordon accelerated the craft towards top speed.  “Virgil’s worried about the head injury.”

Gordon grit his teeth, remembering the red matted into the brown under the powerful beam of Virgil’s torch.

“Head injuries are tricky,” he agreed.  “But Virgil knows what he’s going, and John’s found a hospital that specialises in them.”

“I know,” Alan replied quietly.  “That’s what worries me.  They’re not telling us something.”

“The hazards of being the youngest,” Gordon groaned, unsurprised but as annoyed as Alan about it. Scott was their brother too, dammit. “So, what are they not telling us?”

“Have you seen the results of the scan?” Alan asked him.  Gordon shook his head.

“Nah, had to leave to look for other survivors once Virgil was dealing with him, and haven’t seen him since.”  Five seconds of hoverstretcher rushing past didn’t really count.  “What came up?”

“No idea,” Alan sulked. “Virgil’s been keeping it out of my sight all journey.  But I know John knows.”

Gordon growled and slammed the comm button.

“John, Virgil, I want the result of those scans,” he demanded.

“You’re piloting,” Virgil responded immediately.  “No reading while you’re controlling my ‘bird.”

“Then summarise for me,” he retorted.  “Starting with that head injury.”

“Just get us to the hospital,” Virgil ordered.

“Already doing that,” he ground out, hackles rising.  “Stop trying to keep us in the dark!  He’s our brother too!”  Thunderbird Two lurched under his grip before Alan hastily stabilised them.

“What are you doing up there?” Virgil demanded.  “Be careful!”

“Letting my imagination fill in the blanks,” he lied – he was, in fact, keeping his imagination carefully blank.

“Is it that bad?” Alan interrupted before Virgil could find a fresh retort.  “Is he dying?”

Silence filled the cabin, and Gordon’s temper flared.

“You said he was stable!” he yelled.  “Dammit, Virgil, don’t lie to me about that!”

“I said critical but stable,” Virgil corrected.  “He is stable, Gordo, but…”  He trailed off, and Gordon glanced over at Alan to see his own growing panic mirrored back at him in blue eyes.

“He’s comatose,” John said quietly.

“What?” Alan yelped. Gordon stiffened, hands threatening to crush the yoke in his hands before he forcibly relaxed them.

“You didn’t think I might like to know that?” he growled, flashes of hospitals and white coats and bodiless voices stirring in the back of his mind before he trampled them down ruthlessly.  Not now. Silence answered him.  Clearly both his conscious older brothers knew they were in the wrong, and that whatever nonsense they fed him about not wanting to distract him while he was piloting wouldn’t pacify him in the slightest.

Alan’s face had gone white, big blue eyes focused on him, and he knew his younger brother was remembering the last time he’d had a family member in a coma – him.  He forced a smile for his benefit, which had about as much of an effect as any pacifying words John or Virgil might have tried to use.

“Why?” Alan asked, voice shaking.  “Who would do that?”

“Kayo and Lady Penelope are looking into it,” John told them.  “Whatever happened, they’ll find out.  I’ve got EOS doing some digging of her own, too.”

“But… is Scott going to be okay?” Alan pleaded, looking back at Gordon, who was clearly the resident expert on comas.  He remembered the fight for consciousness, pleading voices turning to resigned ones as they talked about their day yet again.  He remembered wanting to respond so badly but being trapped by his own body.

The idea of Scott going through that filled him with dread – if he even did.  Comas were different for different people, he’d found out later, when he’d torn through everything he could get his hands on in a desperate attempt to understand what had happened to him.  He wouldn’t wish that on anyone, except maybe the Hood but then even only in his blackest moods.  Scott had done nothing to deserve that.

“He’s a fighter,” was all he could say.

The hospital staff were ready and waiting for them when they finally arrived, a two hour flight that had felt far longer.  No sooner had he touched down and opened the module than they were swarming, hurrying Scott inside with Virgil hot on their heels, presumably talking doctor-speak and filling in anything they hadn’t already been briefed about.

Gordon and Alan were left in Thunderbird Two’s cockpit, watching out of the windows as their elder brothers vanished into the maw of the hospital.

“Do we follow them?” Alan asked after a moment.  Gordon looked at the doors with no small amount of dread, and shook his head.

“They won’t be allowing visitors just yet,” he said.  “Virgil will have a fight to stay with him, and he’s our medic.  We’ll just get shoved in a waiting room with sympathetic looks and no news.”

At least, that was the stories he’d heard from his brothers, regarding his own accident. International Rescue might have more weight than merely the Tracy name had back then, but a patient was a patient.

“Come home,” John said, popping up from the dashboard and looking them both over.  He looked tired, too, and Gordon wondered how much worse it was for him, stuck up in space and fully reliant on holograms to see Scott. At least the rest of them had been able to see – and touch – him.  It didn’t take much for Gordon to recall the thump-thump of a faint pulse beneath his fingers as he clung to the sign that he hadn’t lost anyone else.

Not yet, a nasty voice whispered in the back of his mind.  He silenced it sharply.

“But-” Alan protested, clinging to the edges of his seat as though it was the hoverstretcher carrying Scott’s limp body.

“Come home and get cleaned up,” John said firmly, reminding Gordon that he’d spent several hours in a wrecked plane with dead bodies.  It was hidden slightly better on Alan’s uniform, but a glance at his own showed red drying into brown on his yellow baldric.  “By the time we get back there, they might have news for us.”

“We?” Gordon locked onto, and John crossed his arms.

“I’m not staying up here waiting for news to trickle in,” he snapped, and Gordon raised his hands in surrender.

“Never said you were, big bro,” he soothed.

“What about the investigation?” Alan asked, even as he started flicking switches and preparing the massive craft for lift off once more.

“I’ve got EOS on that,” John replied.  Following Alan’s lead, Gordon took control of the massive Thunderbird again, her VTOLs roaring as they peeled away from their landing spot back into the sky.  “I’ll let Virgil know where you are once he gets in contact.”

“F.A.B.,” Gordon acknowledged.

He pretended it didn’t hurt to turn their back on the hospital where Scott lay comatose, but even if it fooled his brothers (doubtful), he couldn’t fool himself.

...tbc..?

[s-creations]

Return the Flames - Chapter 1

All at Dead Bird Studios knew of Amos' (The Conductor's) ability. How the owl could suddenly erupt into flames if angered enough. When the studio first opened, Dominic (DJ Grooves) was told that Amos had his ability under control. Nothing to worry about. No possible loss of anything from an open flame.

A few years later however, and that control seems to have lessened to a dangerous degree.

It should have just been a simple, week long drive to fix the problem. It really should have been.

Dominic should have asked a lot more questions and should have been prepared for a twist ending.

_________________

Fandom: A Hat in Time Rating: General Audience Relationships/Pairings: The ConductorXDJ Grooves Warnings: Eventual depictions of violence, slow burn relationship, named characters, attempt of an accent, being hunted down, a race against time (sort of).

 It’s amazing how one outside source could influence an entire planet and change it’s view. Okay, maybe the ‘entire planet’ might be an exaggerated size. But, big key players were involved with the overall growth. So, it felt as if the world shifted when the time wielding child left to race among the stars once more.

 Mustache Girl, discovered to be named Mu when the dust settled, had seemingly disappeared. Her usual hideout had been cleared out. With no signs of her remaining there or found to be anywhere else on Mafia Island. There was a theory that Mu had hopped onto one of the many shipment boats and had left said island as soon as she could. If that was true, it would be nearly impossible to find her. No one could fully tell if this was a good or bad thing.

 The Mafia boss had officially retired when he couldn’t find a new body to use. Apparently the price      was    too high to pay for someone to give up their own. Losing that intimidating edge and just being gross, he announced his leave and traveled to the nearby mainland. There he found his new calling: being the store manager to a small fish market operation. Apparently, no one wanted to argue about prices against a goo of a human being that survived in a jar. Between the harsh words and rather disturbing appearance, people lost their argumentative spark quickly.

 The rest of the Mafia scrambled to figure out what to do with themselves. It took a lot of soul searching and late night conversations for a solution to be found. They reached the conclusion that they all worked better when they’re told what to do and decided to turn the island town into a high end luxury resort. Cooking Cat had taken the chief helm and taught a large team of Mafia members how to be proper cooks. It would be bad if a customer complained about food poisoning.

 Subcon Forest, while still downright terrifying and with Vanessa a heavy threat over the citizens, had seen the number of lost souls consumed by that place dropped. The Snatcher had apparently changed stance on determining which souls were meant to be taken. Namely those who were weighed down by a lot of sins. If asked, he would claim it was due to those being more filing when eaten. No one had the needed bravery to really question the twisted spirit’s reasoning. So, more living beings started leaving the woods. Confused, with their souls still in place, and all at the cost of a high-five.

 But the biggest change came from Dead Bird Studio. If one was interested in movies (which was a good majority of the planet) they knew of the rivalry that ran that place. Or      did     run that place. The Conductor and DJ Grooves announced, shortly after Hat Kid’s departure, that their feud was over. More or less. Everyone knew that years of animosity couldn’t be solved or swept under the rug, to be forgotten about overnight.

 So, it was an difficult uphill battle to learn what it meant to actually work together peacefully. Between Conductor’s anger and Grooves’ rather smug attitude, it was a hard progress. Both directors used a lot of late nights to find even ground. After a few months, they had reached a level of comradery that couldn’t really be qualified as ‘being friends’. Business partners was probably the best title.

 Which was still an achievement to marvel at, if Grooves was completely honest. But the worry of getting into a shouting match with Amos was now at the bottom of Dominic’s list.

 When the studio had been open for the first few months, they gained the title as the ‘studio with the hot headed director’. Dominic seeing first hand how deranged the other could become. The penguin could chalk it up to first time jitters. After all, opening up a business in the same building with someone you deemed as a rival was not the most calming experience. Add on top of that the tense world of film making and Grooves was surprised he didn’t eventually turn to biting off a few heads when things went wrong. But as Amos’ anger seemed to grow, Grooves began to worry that the director was going to have a heart attack from his numerous outbursts.

 What he was not expected was for the owl to suddenly have his ears erupt into      flames    . The only thing that pulled Dominic from his shocked state of mind when the sprinklers suddenly activated. All in attendance having to evacuate until the place was dried out.

 Unable to ask Amos directly (and already knowing the director wouldn’t have answered his questions anyway) Dominic had gone to the Express Owls for answers. He had been told that their director suddenly creating flames was something normal to see. Amos even had occasions where he would actually have smoke rising off of him. The penguin asked how this was even possible. As far as he knew, this was not a normal occurrence, and working with someone who could burst into flames at any time seemed a dangerous factor. Especially if it became a worry they’d lose the studio because of this. But Dominic was assured that Amos had his ability under control. That day was just a build up of bad moments that tore at the owl’s patient until it was just released.

 That didn’t mean Dominic didn’t start carrying around a small fire extinguisher whenever he had to be near Amos.

 Amos, on his part, was not a bird who opened up about anything. So, he never explained to anyone why he had this ability, with the Express Owls just accepting the idea their boss could handle himself. And, true to their word, Dominic didn’t see that many open flames coming from the angry owl. During their early years that was.

 Now, however, the worry had reached a new level of concern. Because Amos’ anger seemed to have suddenly grown. Even after the feud was put away. The control the other director had over the years seeming to have disappeared. Now the owl bursting into flames, full flames covering his body, when his mood was even. With another worry arising when he was around open flames and his anger made those grow dangerously. So much so, Dominic put his foot down on allowing open flame to be anywhere near the studio. Which annoyed Amos as now his movies lost a touch of authenticity. In turn causing the owl’s already short fuse to become shorter.

 It had become a dangerous, endless cycle. One that Dominic had to intervene before things got too out of hand. Something he was going to take care of today. Because he was afraid if he waited too long, they’d lose the studio they’d just started to work together in.

 Recording was done for the day and the studio practically empty as Dominic made his way to the Western-themed portion of the building. Asking a few lingering owls where their director was, he was directed towards Amos’ office. The partially closed door had light emitting from the cracks. Dominic gave his thanks before heading over. Raising his hand up to knock, the penguin paused hearing Amos’ daughter’s name.

 “Amelia...no, listen… Aye, ‘m aware. But you’re in no condition ta take me… I know, I know… No, flyin’ is too dangerous. Ya know know I hate those death machines and there’s no easy exit for me ta take in case of… In case I have an episode.”

  Dominic leaned against the wall, frowning. He probably shouldn’t be listening in.

 “There are no tracks that run there. Besides, the train will be in use. I can’t change that just ta better me. No- no, that’s not what I mean… People rely on the train… I don’t know who ta ask. I don’t know anyone who would want ta travel that far.”

 Amos laughed softly after a pause on his end. “Uh oh, someone sounds fussy… Aye, I'll keep ya up ta date as best I can… No, no, don’t ya fret about this. I’ll figure somethin’ out. Rest well Amelia, I’ll call tomorrow. ...Love ya too.”

 There was the clatter of something heavy hitting the table. Dominic could only assume it was the owl’s phone being dropped. Braving his chance, the penguin pushed the door open. He found Amos, bent over the writing table with a discarded cell phone next to him. The owl looked in complete shambles.

 Feathers were ruffled, randomly sticking out at odd ends. Some were even starting to turn gray. The familiar white button up had its sleeves rolled up over the elbows, the cross suspenders hanging limply from the black pants they were connected to. The similarly colored jacket was pooled at the Conductor’s feet.

 “If ya have somethin’ ta say, come in and get it out.”

 Amos’ growl broke Dominic’s stupor and the penguin closed the door behind him as he entered. “So-”

 “How much did ya hear.”

 “Enough that you know that you need to get somewhere with no reliable way to get there.” Dominic answered, pulling another chair towards the table.

 “Didn’t know ya were one for eavesdroppin’. Hopin’ ta find a usable script for yer movies?”

 “I’m going to ignore that last comment. I came to see if you were okay. Your ability is getting out of control and it’s becoming a concern. More than it’s been previously.”

 “‘M aware of that. That’s what I was tryin’ to fix.”

 “You need a ride to get there? To wherever this ‘fix’ is supposed to be.”

 “Great deductive skills.”

 Dominic let out a heavy sigh, tamping down the slowly rising anger within. “What I’m trying to say is that if you need a ride, I would like to offer my assistance.”

 Amos sat up at that, ears perked up. “...What?”

 “I will offer you a ride.”

 “Ya don’t even know where I’m goin’!”

 “It seems you’re desperate to get where you need to go. With your flares, it would be foolish for you to travel alone or in a confined place that you wouldn’t be able to leave when you needed.. So, let me help you.”

 “...Are we...alright enough with each other ta be stuck in a car? Together? For so long?”

 “How long is this journey?”

 “I need ta get ta Starlight Peak.”

 “I- That’s halfway across the planet!”

 “Ya can see why this is a bit of an issue fer me.”

 “Why do you need to get there?”

 The owl huffed, ruffling his feathers further. “I’ll explain, if ya promise you’ll take me, and ya don’t ask further questions.”

 “Those are pretty high demands.” Dominic crossed his arms.

 “This...is not somethin’ I want a lot of people to know about.”

 Dominic wasn’t ready for that answer. For as long as he’d known Amos, the owl has never been one to share any personal information. It took Dominic almost 8 years to learn he had a daughter and a few more months to know about his grandchildren. Which was really the only thing Dominic knew. Amos was short tempered but closed-lipped. Loud but private.

 So, seeing him here, quiet and withdrawn, ears folded and arms crossed…

 Dominic didn’t like it.

 “I will take you and I will not share with anyone what you’re about to tell me.”

 “And…”

 “And I will not ask further questions.”

 Taking that as an adequate answer, Amos sat up and faced Dominic properly. “I have this… ‘condition’ where I have this… I have fire burning in me.”

 “Ah...I wasn’t ready for that. Wait, like an actual fire?”

 “Aye, where did ya think my fire came from?”

 “To be honest, I’m not really sure. Now that I know however, it kind of makes sense.”

 “Well, that fire is burnin’ brighter everyday. More than what I can contain and control. There’s something at the peak that will help tamper that fire back down.”

 “Tamper the fire down? What does that-”

 “Ah, ya said ya wouldn’t ask questions!”

 “Alright! Alright…” Dominic raised his hands in defense as Amos glared him down. As the owl sat back down, Dominic felt himself relax. “It’ll take us at least a week to get there and back.”

 “Aye, ‘m aware.”

 “We’ll need to shut down the studio for that long.”

 “Ya worried about fallin’ behind on filming.”

 “You wish. I’m more worried about the paparazzi. If they get wind of this, they’ll have a field day wondering where we’re going.”

 Amos groaned, leaning back in his chair. “Peck, I forgot about that. Do ya think we could slip out without the peckin’ buzzards findin’ out?”

 “You’re joking, right? The first day we don’t open, they’ll be hunting us down. If not the day before we depart. Speaking of, when do we need to leave? I’m assuming the sooner the better.”

 “That would be ideal. But I do have a few things ta take care of before we do.”

 “How about the day after tomorrow?”

 Amos nodded to that suggestion. “Sounds like our best idea.”

 “Best get to packing then.”

 “Aye...and leave your peckin’ platform shoes here!”

 “You just don’t care for style.”

 “Do ya really want ta climb a mountain side in those shoes?”

 “...Fair point.”

[andrewhq]

Oh, would you still offer your embrace (if it's another place you'd find me in?)

tags: War AU, Pirate AU, Witcher AU, GTA V AU, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Travelling through universes and stuff

AO3 Mirror link

A man in his bunk takes out a picture in his pocket and stares at it. It’s the last picture he took of Thomas, his lover, before being drafted into the military and forced to serve his country. That’s where he is now, fighting for his country.

He took the picture on Christmas night the previous year, 1940. He was arriving late to the party and saw his lover at the window. He took the opportunity to snap a picture of him, then knocked on the window. When his lover looked at him with the warmest smile, and from the outside he mouthed:

“You look dreamy tonight.”

His lover laughed, although he couldn’t hear it, he still cherished every moment of it.

He has something written on the side of the picture:

“Things to love the list

Ø

Øone your eyes forever

Too too 2 many things”

He keeps the written part folded over so the other soldiers can't see when he looks at it every night with the light of a small candle.

They ask who the man in the picture is and "someone important to me who died" because that's easier to explain somehow.

When he comes back home, people keep telling him that his lover actually died, that there was a bombing in the port while he waited for someone whose name he never spoke of. People thought of the man as mad. Every single day waiting for this unknown person. There was no way he would've survived that.

The man never broke down as hard as he did at that moment, he even ran to where the bombing happened, screaming for Thomas in desperation. Even his lover’s father told him there was no use in searching for him any longer

The army man gave up that very night, he just couldn't take it anymore. He would be nothing without his love.

--

On an island, the time unknown, a boy stumbled upon a photo of a man on the ground, a really old looking picture, dated 1940 (he couldn’t remember what year was currently), with a man so beautiful, he almost lost his breath. There's a name on the back that signs the owner of the picture. "Jordan S. Maron."

"Weird." He thought out loud since his name matched the one from the back of the picture. There was something in him telling him to search for this man in the picture. And search he did. Far and wide, high and low, trying to at least find an answer to the whereabouts of this mysterious beautiful man.

A ship came to the island he was stuck on. Jordan didn’t even get a say, he was immediately captured by the pirates and forced to slave away on the ship. For a while, that was how his life was. Sweeping floors, cleaning shit, being pushed around, and yelled at constantly. It wasn’t a pleasant life. He would spend the days working and the nights just staring emptily at the picture of the man.

One night he almost lost the picture. The Captain caught him staring at it and ripped it out of his hands. Jordan never screamed so loud in his life. He couldn’t lose the picture.

He used his chains to choke out the Captain, taking his picture back when the Captain stopped breathing. A few pirates heard the commotion and came to see the scene, their Captain dead at the feet of the slave.

From that day on, Jordan became a Captain himself. The Captain of the ship that captured him and made him a slave. It was pirate law or something. He wasn’t the most ruthless pirate in the world, but his devotion to balance scared the rest of the pirates. There was no messing with the Captain if you messed with the balance.

For a while, the ship travelled aimlessly, Jordan refusing to tell his crew where they were going. The truth was that he didn’t know himself where he was going. Just that he needed to find the man in the picture.

He arrived on an island one day. He saw smoke coming from it and went to see what was happening. The forest was on fire, a volcano erupted. He saw someone on the shore, so he got down to the island to see if it could be a potential survivor.

His breath got caught in his throat as he saw the man in the picture laying on the beach of the island. He ran to him as fast as he could, falling to his knees to check his pulse, to check any signs of life. But he could feel nothing. Nothing at all. His purpose, his reason for living, was dead in his arms.

He put heavy rocks in both of their pockets and pouches, then picked up the man, and started heading into the waves and slowly sinking with them.

--

As he was riding on a horse, a piece of paper flew into a man’s face, making him stop in his tracks. It was a really detailed small painting of a man, man so beautiful, he almost lost his breath. There's a name on the back that signs the owner of the picture. "Jordan S. Maron."

"Weird." He thought out loud since his name matched the one from the back of the picture. There was something in him telling him to search for this man in the picture. So he did. Not like he had anything better to do. He was a Witcher, constantly on the run, not belonging to anywhere or anyone. So finding a man from a painting that had his name written on felt right.

He stopped at a tavern in a nearby town and showed off the painting to people. Most did not recognize the man at all. Jordan huffed. Well, this would be harder than he expected.

He traveled to a different kingdom eventually, showing off the picture at every stop.

Eventually, someone recognized him.

“He’s the Prince, Witcher. Better get rid of the picture before someone tells on you that you have some painting of him. It’s not gonna bide well for you.” A drunken man told him after he downed his fifth mead of the night.

Jordan was quiet as he put the painting back in his pouch.

“What is the Prince’s name?” He asked.

“You should know. It’s Thomas.”

Thomas, huh?

He left the tavern late in the night and went to the castle. He didn’t want to enter, he just wanted to see him, just to confirm that the Prince was really who he was looking for.

Before he could get close to the castle, a hooded figure ran into him.

“Whoa, I am so deeply sorry! I did not mean to bust into you like that!” The hooded figure said. The voice felt so familiar, yet he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

Jordan lifted his candle to see the man better. When he did, he saw that the hood fell off the man’s head. That was when he realized. That was Thomas . That was the man he was looking for.

“You’re… the prince? What are you doing out here so late?” Jordan asked.

“You’re a witcher, what are you doing near the castle?” The Prince immediately snarked back. Jordan couldn’t help but laugh.

Thomas crossed his arms together and puffed his chest. God, he was so adorable.

His thoughts were cut off when he heard shouts from nearby. When he went to warn the Prince, he saw a sword pushed through his chest and Jordan’s eyes went wide. Masked men stared right at the Witcher. He could see the one that had his sword in the Prince smirking at him as he pulled his sword out.

Jordan was raging. He chased after the masked men as far as he could but eventually lost them. He went back to where the Prince died and dropped to his knees. He wanted to cry, to scream, but did none of those.

When the guards came in, they accused Jordan of murdering the Prince. He didn’t even argue with them. He felt like he did anyway.

The Witcher was executed the following day for the murder of Prince Thomas of Cassell.

--

As he was running on the streets of Los Santos, a man tripped and stumbled upon a photo of a man on the ground, a really old looking picture, dated 1940, with a man so beautiful, he almost lost his breath. There's a name on the back that signs the owner of the picture. "Jordan S. Maron."

"Weird." He thought out loud since his name matched the one from the back of the picture. There was something in him telling him to search for this man in the picture. But right then he was busy running away. The police were after him after all. He pocketed the picture and took off once again.

He hid between the large brushes of a car wash and waited until the police passed, making sure no camera was following him (luckily for him, that car wash had only one CCTV near the front of its store and none at the car wash itself). From between the brushes, he managed to take off his mask, change his clothes, and put the cash into a backpack, different from the bag he was carrying.

“You motherfucker, you made it!” he heard a voice coming through his earpiece. Jordan couldn’t help but grin smugly. The voice belonged to Declan, one of his crewmates. “I mean it should’ve been obvious, cuz you’re the boss. Still in awe of it every time.”

Jordan shook his head as he looked for the bus station to find his way back to the HQ.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” Jordan said, even though it was that big of a deal. “We’ve been doing this for years, haven’t we?”

“You got a point, boss.” Declan agreed.

On the bus to the HQ, Jordan couldn’t stop staring at the picture. The man felt familiar, yet he had no idea who he was.

Weeks passed, Jordan didn’t forget about the picture, but he was a little too busy with his crew to be able to constantly search for a man who could probably be dead by now. He looked at the picture again as he sat on the rooftop of a building with his sniper rifle resting just barely over the edge. He sighed. Why was he so obsessed with finding this man?

Well, that could wait, he had a job to finish. He looked through the sniper rifle and tried to find his target. The sight of blue hair caught his attention. When he finally focused on the person, it was… the man in the picture. He held his breath as he watched him, happily chatting away with some people. He also spotted his target, chatting with the man. Through the bug planted in the room, he could hear their conversation. They mostly talked about business, selling and renting houses, the state of real estate, stuff that Jordan didn’t really care about. He then finally heard it.

Tom .

That was the man’s name. Tom. Thomas. That name felt so familiar. He tried to listen further, maybe he could hear his last name. When it sounded like the target was about to say his full name, Dec came through his earpiece and completely cut the audio from the room.

“What are you doing, Cap? You have a perfect shot!”

Jordan groaned. He lined up his shot again, moving it away from the man with blue hair, and focused it on the target. Then he shot. Straight in the head. Before the target even dropped down on the floor, Jordan picked up his grappling hook and shot it to the other building, sliding on the wire to the other side and breaking through the window. The rest of his crew also came in, guns out. More people came in, shots started being fired everywhere. Jordan went straight for the blue-haired man who looked scared and confused.

“Get out of here, Tom!” Jordan yelled and tried to push Tom away into the hallway.

But before he could do so, a member from the other crew shot Tom in the abdomen and he dropped down dead. Jordan had never screamed so loud in his life. He was stunned.

Before Jordan could do anything, he got shot in the chest and dropped down on the ground, his crewmates screaming after him. He didn’t survive, but maybe it was better that way.

Jordan gasped as he woke up, then a nurse immediately told him to calm down. It was one of the crew nurses. He didn’t die.

Before he blacked out again, he asked the nurse “Did he live too?”

He didn’t manage to hear the nurse’s answer as darkness took over once again.

After waking up a couple more times, undergoing some surgery, and weeks of healing passed, Jordan was finally allowed to leave the medical ward of their HQ.

He found Dec first.

“You look much better, boss.” Dec smiled at him.

“Yeah, I guess.” Jordan looked very lost, the memory of Tom being shot in the chest haunting his mind. “Do you know who had been leaving me flowers?”

“Oh, you don’t know?” Dec asked surprised. “Huh, you two didn’t manage to catch each other…”

Jordan narrowed his eyes in confusion. “Who?”

“Tom? The guy with blue hair you jumped in front of a bullet for?”

Tom was alive?! Jordan’s eyes went wide.

“Where is he?” Jordan grabbed Dec by the shoulders and shook him until he answered.

“Jeez, slow down man, he should be somewhere around HQ, I don’t know!”

Jordan immediately took off through the HQ. He needed to find Tom again. He needed to make sure he actually was alive and this wasn’t some sick joke.

“Where are you running, mate?” The British accent was unmistakable. “Aren’t you supposed to re-”

Before Tom could finish his sentence, Jordan went to hug him tightly.

“I’m so happy to see you again, Tom.” He couldn’t help the tears streaming down his face.

Again? , he caught himself saying. When did he meet this man again? As far as he knew this was the first time he’d seen him.

“I missed you too, dummy.” Tom said, a smile on his face, his voice sounding rough from trying to keep himself from crying as well.

Those words felt like warm honey being dripped on his heart. It hurt, even though he couldn’t quite remember. And Tom couldn’t remember either.

But maybe it was better if they never knew the tragedy of their love story.

[221bshrlocked]

For Heaven’s Sake

Pairing: Bucky X Vampire!Reader (and just to complicate it, A/B/O Dynamics)

Words: 7250

Warnings: Not really angsty but it might be for some people. Graphic mention of blood and violence. Smut. Smut involving blood.

Prompt: “Tell them I’m coming. And hell is coming with me.”

A/N: For @sherrybaby14 because she deserves the best and seems to be the one that managed to bring me back into writing so I thank you for that dear because I had no motivation whatsoever and you, thankfully and without intending to, forced me to write. Had I not found a good enough reason to dive back into this, that reason being celebrating your talent and your followers, I wouldn’t have bothered for months. For obvious reasons. So thank you and I do hope you enjoy this even if it is shit.

Ever since you were recruited by Natasha, it was constant growls and snarky moments between you and Bucky. Whether it was after the easiest of missions or just walking by, you’d hear the growl emanating from his chest until you passed by. And to be fair, you didn’t make it any better, constantly talking back whenever he said something remotely towards you. He didn’t like it. No Alpha could stand an Omega headbutting with him. And even though Bucky knew you weren’t a normal Omega, it still pissed him off when you blatantly disobeyed his orders. Nevermind the biology behind everything, he was clearly above you in the chain of command and you never made it easy for him. As much as Steve and Bruce tried to convince him that although it was in your Omega nature to be submissive, the predator in you won out most of the times. Vampires were the opposite of being yielding. Just as he couldn’t hold back the super soldier in him sometimes, you couldn’t keep the vampire in your blood at bay.  

Was it your fault? Maybe. Had he not been a dick and talked about you behind your back right after you met him, you would have given him a chance. It was fine up until you heard him tell Steve you’d be the last person he’d want to work with on any mission. The exact words were, “fucking Omega won’t control herself and compromise everything.” So you made it your life’s mission to piss him off, whether hissing back at him or baring your teeth as soon as he tried to go all Alpha on you. As much as you wanted to shy away and bare your neck to him, call him ‘Alpha’ and beg him to scent you, you never once broke. Well, you broke when you went into your room, fucking yourself to the thought of him taking you on every single piece of furniture in your place. But you wouldn’t tell him, you wouldn’t tell anyone. It’s not like he’d want anything with you as he so boldly said.

So when Steve broke the news that you’d be going on an operation with Bucky and you’d be stuck together for a day or two, you shut your eyes and tried to remain calm. Granted it wasn’t a long time but it was longer than any given time you’d spent with him. The two of you couldn’t even be in the same room for five minutes without engaging in a yelling match. For a split second, you swore you smelled something foreign coming in waves from Bucky but you paid it no mind. He, on the other hand, clenched his fist so hard it broke the chair arm he was holding on to.

“Fucking great.” Bucky muttered under his breath, refusing to look at you and pretending he was reading over the file. “Aww looks like the big Alpha is intimidated again!!” You mocked him and within seconds, he was pushing his chair back and strutting towards you. Steve couldn’t stop him in time and you only continued your teasing laugh when he grabbed your shirt and slammed you against the wall.

Bucky continued to growl and you smirked at knowing how much you got under his skin.

“Careful Omega, we haven’t even left yet.” His eyes searched your face for any sign of submission and when he found none, he only got angrier. Everyone could smell his pheromones flooding the room, and Steve tried to snap him out of it.

Too busy focusing on Bucky, no one picked up on the arousal seeping into your panties. You noticed too late, however, and you felt cheated by yourself when you realized Bucky could definitely smell the change in your scent. His actions faltered for a second, eyebrows furrowing in confusion because there was no way you were acting this way towards him. He let go in an instant and hated how composed you still were. You knew he knew, and he knew you knew he knew. And it only made him so fucking more pissed him that you still weren’t submitting to him. Any other Omega would beg for his forgiveness and let it go but not you. And when he realized his anger was due to wanting you to submit, his scent began to shift.

But he didn’t need you to know this, walking out of the room in a hurry and leaving everyone on edge.

“You gotta stop doing that. I can’t ask him to play nice if I know you can’t.” Steve warned and you felt a little guilty for what you said.

“Fine. Just tell me when I need to get ready.” You took the files and walked out, wanting to get to your room as quickly as possible. You pushed harshly on the elevator button, knowing you didn’t want anyone to catch onto your scent. It was already bad enough that Bucky did. You thought about what just happened on your way to your floor, trying to register the way he reacted to you. He definitely felt something, even before you spoke. The unfamiliar scent you took a whiff of had to be him.

As the elevator doors opened, you looked up and came face to face with Bucky. Neither of you moved until the door began to shut. Slamming his hand against one of them, he was about to walk in when his nose flared once more and there was no mistaking it this time. You were turned on by him. But he didn’t show that he knew, walking in and giving you enough space to walk out before stepping forward and pressing on his floor number. Before the doors shut, he looked up and saw a drop of blood rolling down your lips from how hard you were biting them.

This was going to be interesting.

Hours later, Bucky was waiting in the pilot seat until you finished talking to Steve. He tried his hardest to tune you out and not think of what happened. Most of all, he tried not to think of how he felt because as much as he hated to admit it, he wanted you. He wanted you because he knew you didn’t want him. Well, he thought you didn’t want him, seeing as you took every chance to get his blood boiling. The Alpha in him didn’t want to accept the fact that he loved seeing you as the perfect Omega for him: not submissive and almost unhinged. Almost.

Once you sat down next to him and checked everything he asked, you took off towards the destination.

Halfway there, you broke the silence.

“Are the islands connected by land or do we have to go by water?” You were reviewing the file again and Bucky couldn’t hold back the chuckle.

“What’re you afraid of water or something?” He turned to stare at you, only to find your eyes locked onto his neck. His smile dropped and he noticed the shift in the air again, looking ahead to not alert you of his awareness.

“N-no.”

“They’re connected by land. Forest to be exact. We’ll have the playground all to ourselves.” Bucky hadn’t meant for his comment to roll off the way it did and he knew you didn’t miss the innuendo.

The rest of the flight was spent in silence, the two of you trying to control yourselves and your scents from hitting the other because you couldn’t afford to compromise the mission. As you landed, Bucky asked you to take all of your stuff to the cabin while he mapped out the islands. You did so in silence, refusing to hit back with a snarky comment because something told you it would be his breaking point and the last thing you needed was to have an angry Alpha, an angry Bucky to be exact, having his way with you.

It wasn’t a bad idea to be honest but he might regret if anything happened and he seriously did not need more things to feel guilty about.

Bucky was done half an hour ago but he refused to budge. He kept thinking about you and he didn’t know if he could control himself as soon as you were alone in the cabin. Taking a deep breath, he walked out and headed towards the cabin. He checked the perimeter before walking through the front door, only to find you’ve placed everything on the kitchen table.

“Someone’s eager.” He said, approaching the table and unzipping his bag before mirroring your actions and placing everything on his side of the table.

“We move in two hours. Better prepare.” You quietly responded, making Bucky stare at you almost as if you grew a second head. He didn’t like this change. It was easier to control himself around you before when you were being a bitch to him but now that you were, dare he say, a little docile, it was harder for him to not push himself towards you.

You could feel his eyes on you and when you looked up, you saw his eyes locked onto your scent gland.

“Omega.”

In a split second, the two of you felt something shift in the cabin air. Bucky walked slowly around the table, eyes never leaving your neck even when you stepped back. You hit the counter behind you and didn’t know what to do. So you let your biology take over, finally looking away from him before turning your neck to the side and baring yourself to him.

Bucky’s entire body was suddenly flush to your own, hands caging you between him before he lowered his head and nudged your neck with his nose.

You couldn’t believe what was happening. Bucky was fucking scenting you and you were fine with it. More than fine to be honest. You whimpered when you felt his tongue peek out and lick your scent gland right before he nipped at it. Your hands remained at your side, holding onto the counter before you felt his own wrapping around your waist and bring you impossibly closer to him.

“Smell so good Omega. So fucking good.” Bucky growled right before he kissed your skin. Your voice broke and there was no mistaking the moan Bucky heard erupt from your throat.

But it was over as soon as it began. You wouldn’t do this. You couldn’t do this to him.

Not meaning to, you pushed him as aggressively as you could, fangs visible through your lips as you hissed at him. Bucky was surprised before he was angry. There it was again, your unwillingness to give in to him.

“Know your place Omega.” Bucky snarled at you and he tried everything to hold himself back. He didn’t know whether he wanted to punch you or fuck you. One of the two would do at this point.

“You need to back the fuck away from me Bucky or I swear to God I will not be responsible for what happens.” It was your turn to warn him, rubbing at your neck until you realized it wasn’t helping the situation. The harder your rubbed, the more your smell filled the room and Bucky was losing his patience. You were trying to erase his smell and he didn’t like it one bit.

“Mine.” He growled and your eyes shot up at his exclamation.

“No. Not yours. Not fucking anyone’s. You know why? Cause I can’t fucking bond, let alone mate, with anyone without killing them. So either you control your fucking dick or I’ll have no choice but to call Steve and tell him this mission is compromised.” You didn’t give him a chance to respond, collecting your shit before walking upstairs to your room.

Bucky snapped out of his haze and somehow calmed down. What did you mean you couldn’t mate with anyone without killing them? Not giving much thought to his actions, he took out his phone and typed the password into the system. As Friday pulled up your file, he quickly read through it.

And then he stopped breathing when he read more closely.

While subject is an Omega, her classification as a vampire prevents her from physically engaging with an Alpha for fear of unrestraint. Subject has never drank human blood and personal account suggests she might be incapable of controlling her urge for human blood during the mating/bonding process. Subject states her father has passed away due to mother’s instability during pregnancy. Caution is advised around subject, particularly during heats. No attachments recommended.

Bucky didn’t know how to react. It was fear he always smelled when you were around, not defiance. You were afraid of hurting him.

He shut his phone off and picked up his guns and knives, checking each one before walking to his room on the opposite end of the cabin and getting ready.

An hour later, you walked out of your room and went downstairs to wait for him. He emerged soon after, not acknowledging you until he collected everything and told you it was time to move. As you walked through the forest, Bucky tried to focus on everything else but your smell. He soon came to realize choosing to focus on your scent was what calmed him down.

You didn’t like this entire situation at all. You’d calmed down after your argument but then Natasha called and asked why Bucky accessed your file. You knew he might get in trouble for not asking for permission. Yes he had higher access but it didn’t mean he could do whatever he felt like at any given point. So you lied and told her you were trying to prove to him something about your abilities. She didn’t buy it of course but she said nothing.

You knew why he opened your file. You’d said too much and he got curious. And you weren’t sure if you were hurt because he read your file without asking or that he read your file and finally knew why you couldn’t humor the idea of the two of you together.

You stopped all of a sudden when you felt something was not right. Bucky halted and looked back when he saw you weren’t moving.

“What is it?” He whispered and you held out your hand for him to stop talking. Shutting your eyes, you followed the faint smell of gunpowder until you saw the sniper not two hundred feet away from you. You reacted instantly, throwing your knife as swiftly and precisely as you could. Bucky turned around and saw the man drop from the tree, running towards him to kick the gun away.

You knelt down and took your knife out of his throat, shutting your eyes to control your urges before standing.

You were about to say something when a shot sounded through the forest, eyes going wide when you saw Bucky falling backward. The man ran towards you, missing every shot he fired and swearing loudly when he noticed how fast you were jumping around. As he tried to load his gun, you came from behind him and jabbed the knife in his shoulder, twisting the knife before grabbing his throat and turning his neck towards you.

“Tell them I’m coming. And hell is coming with me.” Snatching the knife out, you picked him up with ease and threw him across the way, waiting until he was out of sight before running to Bucky.

“S-shit,” Bucky swore, pressing his hand on the wound and frantically looking around until you knelt in front of him.

“Let me see.” You tried to remain calm, removing his hands to see if the bullet exited or not. “Fuck okay Bucky stay with me.” Your eyes met his and saw how uncharacteristically calm he was. You tried to think of what you should do and the craziest idea came to you but you were afraid of Bucky’s response.

“Do you trust me?” You asked him quietly, amazed at how instant his response was. He nodded without hesitation and looked quizzically at you when he saw you take your necklace off.

“W- what is this?” He asked, looking at your shaking hands as they tried to open the small vile. “Bruce made this for worst case scenarios. Open your mouth.” When Bucky continued to stare at you, you huffed in annoyance and held his neck.

“Bucky please, open your mouth.” Something happened in that moment that neither of you anticipated and he listened to you, swallowing down the viscous material and groaning in pain when he felt something shifting in the pit of his stomach. You looked down and were surprised his body wasn’t reacting quicker.

“Shit okay I thought it wouldn’t take too long. Maybe if I-” The words died in your throat as soon as you heard more soldiers approaching. “Stay here, and don’t make a fucking sound. You understand?” Bucky snarled at your commanding tone, grabbing your wrist roughly and refusing to let go.

“Don’t fucking do it Y/N. Omega don’t-”

“My Alpha,” you caressed his cheek, thumb circling his cheek until his eyes meet yours, “you will stay here.” You knew the consequences that came with what you had just done to Bucky. You’d never attempted to hypnotize anyone on the team and Bucky would’ve been the last person on your list. He growled deeply when he caught onto what you did, a part of him hurt that you were doing this for him.

Leaving him between the bushes, you ran towards the facility, not wasting a second and killing every guard approaching you. You’d left Bucky with his weapons close enough that he could kill anyone coming his way.

In no time, you went through each man like a knife going through paper, rage taking over you from the thought of knowing Bucky was in danger. Not a half hour later, you’d collected the data required and were well on your way out when you sensed that something was not right. But you realized this too late, feeling an army of men coming through the lab door and standing with their guns aimed at you. So this was a trap after all.

“FIRE!” One man gave the command and the room was suddenly filled with gunpowder and smoke. A minute later, they ceased to fire, waiting to see what happened to you. Taking a deep breath, you looked up at each man, eyes turning an icy silver shade before you moved like a ghost between them. But before you could take down the opposite side, they were dropping to the floor like flies, the bullets coming through the window letting you know that Bucky was nearby.

You ran through the men, creating small knicks with your knife in their major arteries and watching them bleed out.

Then silence washed over the entire building.

You listened to make sure there wasn’t anyone else, walking the hallways slowly until you came outside and looked around to see where Bucky was. The zipping of a bag signaled his place and you looked at the roof of the opposite building in time to see him putting his weapons away.

“I’ll check the perimeter.” You turned your earpiece on and halted in your steps when you heard his semi-collected response.

“No, I’ll do it.” He whispered back and you looked up to see if he was kidding, only to find him gone from the roof.

“But Bucky you’re-”

“Don’t fucking test me right now Omega. Go back to the cabin and let them know we’re finished here.”

You could tell how angry he was, could smell his scent shadowing the premises and you didn’t dare disobey him now, not when you had done nothing but try to control him ever since you arrived. So you made your way back to the cabin, senses on alert in case he was nearby.

You made it to the cabin and called Steve, reporting everything to him and asking him to tell Bruce about what happened and if there was anything you should watch out for.

“Steve you have to understand, he was going to die. I wouldn’t have done either of those things unless I absolutely had to. I’m sorry.” You apologized again for what you did, not knowing how you were going to open that can of worms when Bucky returned.

“No Y/N I understand. I know you had good intentions. I just don’t know if Bucky will comprehend that. Bruce says he’d removed all your pheromones and chemical effects from your blood, apart from the healing factor of course. It shouldn’t affect Bucky in any negative way.”

“Is he sure? You do remember what I said about my blood. Don’t you?” You reluctantly asked again, knowing this conversation was as awkward for Steve as it was for you.

“Believe me Y/N, Bruce explained more than what I needed to know. Do you need me to come tonight? Maybe defuse the tension?” Steve knew he wouldn’t be of much help with his angry friend but he had to ask anyway. You were so invested in the conversation, you hadn’t paid attention to the door of the cabin opening and Bucky entering. He could hear you were on the phone and stayed behind to listen to your conversation.

“Thanks Steve, you’re a good friend. But I don’t think it’ll be a good idea if you came.”

“Whatever you say, see you tomorrow. And careful around him, he’s been acting strange lately.” Steve warned, and Bucky held back his emotions because what the fuck was Steve up to now? And why did he become so protective of you all of a sudden? Was there something between the two of you that he didn’t know about?

“Oh believe me I know. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.” You shut your phone off and throw it on the table, wiping your face before pushing off the counter to head to your room. You rounded around the corner, only to find Bucky standing there unmoving, hair hiding his facial expression and stance as dominant as ever.

You were about to speak when you thought against it, swallowing the lump in your throat as you backed against the wall. Bucky turned towards you when he saw what you did, sniffing the air to make sure he wasn’t reading any sign incorrectly.

With as much resolve as he could muster up, he let go of his things and took off his leather jacket, brushing his hair back and walking towards you as slowly as possible so as to not scare you. As soon as he was right in front of you, you stretched your neck as far back as you could, letting him know who was in control in that instance.

He leaned down and mirrored his previous actions from hours ago, nudging his nose against your skin roughly before pulling back and baring his neck to you. You were surprised to say the least, not knowing why he was doing this after he found out why this shouldn’t happen. When you refused to move, Bucky whined and looked down at you.

“Omega,” it was almost like a warning, the way your status rolled off his lips, and you didn’t know how to react. The predator in you wanted nothing more than to bite into his neck and show him who’s really in charge here, but for the first time since you were born, your biology won out.

As carefully as possible, you stood on your tiptoes and touched his own scent gland with your forehead, rubbing yourself on him and whimpering when he moaned against you. “Good girl, my sweet Omega…” Within seconds, Bucky was wrapping his arms around you, lifting you up until you wrapped your legs around his waist before slamming you against the wall.

“Mine, all mine...you hear that Y/N? You’re fucking mine. I won’t stop trying until I see my bite mark in that pretty little neck of yours.” Bucky didn’t wait for your response, plump lips attacking your own and growling into the kiss until he felt you wrap your arms around his neck. His hands were roaming everywhere at once, not quite getting enough of you. You moaned into the kiss, throwing all caution out the window and making him know just how much you enjoyed this. Enjoyed him.

He pulled away and gazed at you, and that’s when you sensed his scent was different. He was aroused, but he was angrier than turned on. Not caring how rough he was being with you, he pulled away and grabbed your wrist, pulling you behind him as he ascended the stairway to his room. You tried to not fight him, afraid he’d think you were challenging him, which you definitely did not want.

He pushed you inside and slammed the door shut. When he saw that you were about to move he growled at you. A full-on snarl that could be mistaken for a howl.

“Don’t you dare fucking move. I’m beyond furious and I can’t trust to control myself.”

“Yes Alpha.” You hadn’t meant for the words to come off as lewdly as they did but Bucky snapped his neck at you, eyes warning you before he stepped towards you.

“Now, I’m going to ask you some questions and know that I will smell your lies. Understand?” He pointed his finger at you and waited until you responded before turning away and sitting on a chair.

“Y-yes Alpha.” You stared towards the ground to make sure he knew he was still in control.

“Yesterday in the meeting room, you were turned on when I grabbed you?”

“Yes.”

“Was that the first time?”

You took a deep breath before whispering your reply. “No Alpha.” Bucky felt a sense of pride when you didn’t hide the fact that you’ve been attracted to him.

“So why do you always talk back? We could have solved this problem sooner.” He pointed around at the two of you and you couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Is something funny?”

“You want me to answer honestly?”

“I already gave you a warning Omega.” Bucky responded nonchalantly at your small outburst.

“Fucking Omega won’t control herself and compromise everything.” As soon as those words left your lips, Bucky’s facial expression fell, recognizing those words and suddenly feeling guilty. “You think I didn’t hear when you said that to Steve? Why else would I always try to challenge you? I needed to show you and, frankly everyone else, that my biology doesn’t define me. It was like a game after the first few times, but then I couldn’t help myself. Something shifted and I couldn’t help but wish to see you being the Alpha that you are and not the resolved Sergeant Barnes. It was the closest I could get to-” You stopped yourself before you said anything else, not wanting to show too much of yourself to him.

“You could’ve told me.” Bucky knew he shouldn’t have said that but he wasn’t about to give control over to you.

“You’ve read my file. You know I can’t...can’t mate. I’m not taking a chance with anyone, especially not you.” Silence fell between the two of you until Bucky spoke again.

“What was in the vile?”

“My blood. Or at least a modified version of it so it only has the desired effect.”

“And what was the desired effect?”

“Well, healing you. I- I thought that was obvious.” Your voice was laced with hurt and although Bucky didn’t mean for his question to cause that reaction, a part of him wanted to make sure you weren’t trying anything on him.

“And telling me to stay?”

“I couldn’t wait until you fully healed. More would’ve come and I wasn’t sure if I could take them all down. I knew the consequences but I didn’t want to take a chance with you.”

That was the second time you said this in the span of five minutes and it hurt Bucky how much you were trying to protect him because all he ever did was the opposite.

“And calling me your Alpha, was that just another trick to get me to stay?” You couldn’t take it anymore, knowing the tears would roll down your cheek any moment. He genuinely thought you were playing with him and the thought of that hurt more than a knife to the heart.

Without thinking much of it, you headed towards the door, only to be pulled back and deposited on the bed like a feather. Before you could react, Bucky was on top of you, hand holding your wrists above your head and mouth impossibly close to your throat.

“Didn’t I tell you to watch what you’re doing?” He whispered against your clavicle, licking and sucking on the skin until he felt you ease beneath him.

“God fucking damn it, you smell so sweet Omega, like lime and sea salt. Fuck! You have no idea what you do to me. Every single time you hissed and stood your ground, it got me so fucking hard...knowing you weren’t afraid to challenge me. It shouldn’t have made me hard but fuck it...don’t know how I held back all those times.”

“A-alpha.” You writhed under him and he continued to rub your scent gland until you felt like jello.

“I’ve wanted to fuck you for so long, bend you over have my way with you….knot you so hard you felt me inside you for days. The more you resisted the harder I got. My fucking Omega wanted me to chase her.” Bucky didn’t know what came over him, resting between your thighs and humping you like an Alpha on his first rut.

“B-bucky...Alpha please-”

“Careful with your words doll, ‘m not sure I can hold back.” He warned again, this time with a seriousness in his tone and you knew what he was trying to say.

“I- I’m afraid.” You didn’t know why you said those words but Bucky’s demeanor shifted for a second.

“Didn’t I tell you I trust you doll?” There was a hint of humor in his voice and part of you believed him. But the other part was afraid of how quick things would escalate. “All you gotta do is trust me too Omega. Trust me to protect you, pleasure you, fucking love you...that’s all you have to do.”

Neither of you moved for what felt like hours. Bucky thought you were going to deny him and began to shift away when he heard your pleas.

“Alpha please.” You bared your neck to him and he lost all inhibition, attacking your neck with violent kisses that had your arousal seeping through your panties like a river. With every pass of his tongue on your sensitive spot, you moaned and whimpered beneath him, the smell of his own arousal filling your nostril you swore you couldn’t get enough of it.

“Fucking hell...smell so good Omega, Y/N baby...you still with me?” He asked and you nodded with a hazed mind. But then he stood up and you whined from the loss of his warmth. You sighed with relief when you saw he was stripping and you followed his actions, immediately getting on your hands and knees and presenting to him.

“Fuck Omega, you’re so wet for me. Is this pretty pussy all wet for me?” He swiped your folds teasingly and your hips jolted from the cold feeling of his fingers against your hot core. “Alpha please...need your knot. Wanna feel your cum inside me. Please Alpha, please...can make you feel so good.” You couldn’t hold back any longer, whining and begging him to take you. Bucky almost came from hearing what you wanted him to do, pushing your legs wider before taking his cock in his hand and teasing your entrance with the head of his cock.

“Baby you’re so hot and ready for me aren’t you? Tell me Y/N, who does this pussy belong to?”

“You...oh my god only you Alpha, Bucky it’s for you. Please! Please fuck me...take what you want, fill me up with your cum Alpha I want it ple-” The pleas turned into a scream as soon as you felt Bucky thrust his cock past your wet folds and into your heat. You stopped breathing altogether, wanting to commit this to memory and feel every pass of his cock against your pussy.

“Fuck fuck mine. You’re mine Omega. This cunt was made for me baby shit you’re so tight. So fucking tight around me doll feel so good.” He pulled out and pushed back in harshly, the action making you almost fall flat on the bed. Bucky’s hands gripped your waist harder and you couldn’t wait until you saw the bruises tomorrow morning. He leaned down until you felt his sweaty chest against your back, continuing to fuck you mercilessly until you only remembered his name.

“Shit baby you’re too hot for me. So slick and hot for your Alpha aren’t ya baby girl?” You screamed his name when you felt one of his arms reach around and pass against your clit. The cool sensation was excruciating against your throbbing clit and you wanted him to stop but you somehow told him to continue.

“Baby I’m not gonna last...you still with me doll? Come on baby cum with me, cum on my cock…wanna felt your cunt milk me dry baby I’m so close...so fucking close for my Omega shit fuck shit shit-” He wrapped his arms around your chest and sat up, your back still sticking to his chest as his knot caught in your pussy and with a few last thrusts, you came hard around him, walls clenching so much that he couldn’t back and bit your shoulder, the action drawing a bit of blood and causing you to fall over the edge once more.

Your body felt like jello against him and had he not supported you, you would’ve fall flat on your face. As slowly as he could, Bucky made sure he wasn’t hurting you as he shifted on the bed, lying on his back with you on top of him. He continued to whisper the filthiest things in your ear, hands roaming your body and pinching and cupping your nipples until he felt your muscles spasm around him harshly.

“You alright?” He whispered and saw your smile widen with every caress of his fingers on your skin.

“Oh I’m more than alright.”

You spent the next half hour touching each other until he slipped out of you.

Turning you to your side, he kissed your forehead and kept you as close to him as possible.

“What do I smell like to you?”

“Dark rum and orchids.” You whispered against the hand on your lips, kissing and nipping on his wrist until he smiled.

But then he noticed you shifting around and thought something was up.

“Hey you okay?” He placed his hand on your neck and felt how warm you were. “Doll hey, are you okay? Were you shot with something?” Bucky began to worry but he calmed down as soon as he felt how relaxed you became when he placed his metal hand on your chest. You sighed with relief but soon enough, your agitation started to show again.

“Shit...doll when was your last heat?” Bucky smelled the shift in your scent long before you noticed what was happening.

“W-what?” You didn’t understand what he said for some odd reason, wanting to feel anything but the painful cramps starting to hit you.

“When was your last heat baby?” He wiped your hair away from your face and held himself back when he felt you scenting him.

“Y/N wait...d-doll,” you didn’t stop, couldn’t even if you tried, nose nudging him until you could only smell him everywhere. When he tried to push you away, you held onto him, rubbing your cheeks against his neck until he snapped at you.

“Shit...oh no B-bucky, you have to go...you have to, just go, stay outside, go to the quinjet. You can’t be here. I can’t...fuck, I can’t control myself during my heats. You have to go.”

“Baby I’m not going anywhere.” Bucky held your cheeks against him and kissed your forehead before running across the room to get you water.

“Drink Y/N...you’re gonna need it sweetheart.” You tried to push him away but couldn’t, the feeling of his skin on your own making you feel just a little better. Taking the bottle away, he grabbed his phone and called Steve.

“We won’t be coming for a couple of more days.” Bucky stated matter of factly and you whined when you knew what he meant. “What? Why, is everything okay?” Steve asked worriedly and Bucky couldn’t help but remember what he said a few hours ago.

“Y/N is going into heat earlier than she thought. I’ll call you later.”

“Shit, then maybe you should come today. We can try to-”

“You and I are going to have a serious talk when I come back Rogers.” Bucky didn’t wait for a response, throwing the phone away before giving you his undivided attention.

“Bucky please...I’m not sure t-this is a good idea.”

“My Omega remember. I ain’t leaving you by yourself during your heat doll. I’m gonna take real good care of you baby, give you my knot every fucking day till you beg me to stop. Fill you up with pups and fuck you till you can’t feel anything but my cum leaking down your thighs baby doll.” A fresh wave of arousal rolled down your pussy and Bucky growled, spreading your thighs embarrassingly wide just to see your wet cunt clenching harshly around nothing.

“I’ve wanted to taste this pretty little pussy for so fucking long doll you have no idea.” Stepping forwards, Bucky intertwined both of your hands with his before attacking your core, tongue fucking you and licking and nipping at your clit until you saw stars. Your back arched violently off of the mattress, hands shooting to his hair and pulling on it as he held your thighs open for better access. Bucky could feel you shaking and he looked up just in time to see your blissed expression.

Eyes shut and lips wide open. But what had done it for him was the way your fangs peeked out of your lips, almost as if they were affected by what he was doing.

As soon as he inserted two metal fingers past your folds, you came on his tongue, gushing out and sitting up until you couldn’t take it anymore. You begged him to stop but he didn’t want to, refusing to let one drop go to waste.

When he felt your legs grow hotter under his touch, he pulled away, smiling to himself before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. You fell back on the bed, feeling satisfied but not the way you wanted to be. Before you could beg him to take you again, Bucky was inching himself inside you once more, the two of you moaning in unison as he bottomed out.

“Alpha please...touch me.” You held onto his hands, whining when he chuckled and told you he was already touching you. But this was different from an hour ago, this was more than just the biology talking. This was you wanting to feel connected to someone and finally finding that person. With every thrust of his hips, you felt yourself flying on clouds, torn between moaning his name and telling him how perfect of an Alpha he was.

He felt his knot growing and slowly fucked you until you shuddered from feeling his metal fingers rubbing your clit.

“Mark me.”

Bucky ceased all motion, staring down at you because there was no way you had just said that to him.

“What?”

“Bucky, mark me. Make me yours. Want to be yours. I-” You stopped as soon as you realized you may have taken this too far. But then he was leaning down and swallowing your sobs, kissing down your neck and fucking you until he couldn’t move anymore.

“You sure baby?” He asked, afraid you’d take back what you said but knowing he had given you a chance to hold off on this.

“Alpha please.”

With one more swipe of his tongue on your scent gland, Bucky bit down until his teeth broke the skin, lapping up the blood and kissing the swollen mark. You screamed your climax against his shoulder, cunt clenching around him until you’d milked every last drop of his cum. He couldn’t hold back, continuing to lick the mark until you told him you were becoming too sensitive.

Slowly, Bucky rolled the two of you until you were on top. He gazed at you like a predator sizing up his prey, a smirk becoming visible before he told you he was ready. When he saw your hesitation, he jutted his hips a little, partially being playful while also warning you.

“I trust you doll, I’m ready. Make me yours Omega.” He bared his neck to you and waited until you mirrored his previous motions, gently digging your nose into his scent gland before carefully biting him. Bucky swore from the rush of endorphins that hit him, knowing this was more intense than any coupling because of the nature of your bite. You couldn’t help yourself, trying to remain calm as you drank his blood. You were hyper-aware of Bucky, of the way he twitched inside you, the way his fingers tapped and squeezed your waist, the way his breath fanned out against your shoulder as he sighed. His blood tasted like nothing you could have imagined, and you swore you could taste the dark rum and orchids. When you felt his body relaxing, you panicked, pulling back and making sure he was still awake.

“Oh my god Bucky...Bucky are you okay?” You tapped his cheeks lightly, sighing in relief when his eyes fluttered open and you saw pure ecstasy written on his features. “Fuck, that has to be the most intense feeling in the world. Was it the same for you as it was for me?”

You relaxed when you say he was okay. From the looks of it, he was way better than okay.

“I’m not sure. But I’ve never felt this way before. So, so-”

“Alive.” Bucky finished your thought, eyes never leaving the mark on your neck and you could tell he was proud of it too. “You smell like me.” He smiled when he saw the blush taking over your features. You leaned down and kissed him, apologizing for being incapable of holding back and drinking his blood.

“Don’t. Felt so fucking good.” He sleepily responded and you laughed at how absolutely burnt out he was.

“Get some rest doll, you and I are gonna need it for the next few days.” He pulled you down until you were laying on top him. You slept to the sound of his heartbeat and when he felt your steady breathing, he laid you beside him, arms wrapped protectively around you before giving in and shutting his eyes, a smile taking over his features when he saw his mark on your neck again.

[lolanickson-blog]

Japanese Earthquake

The March 9th 2011 earthquake that happened in Japan caused enormous tsunami waves that did harm to Japan and created immense problems. The effect of the catastrophe was felt all over the world. The debris of numerous buildings and other structure destroyed by big waves that were seen in many coastal areas of Japan were found even on the American coast. The catastrophe also initiated a nuclear accident at a power station in Japan. The echo of the tsunami can be heard even now. Great damage was brought to people and architecture, economy and ecology of Japanese cities, which is illustrated in the pictures of Naoya Hatakeyama.

Japan earthquake on March 11, 2011 known as Great East Japan earthquake caused huge local devastation. It was the most tremendous earthquake that happened in this country since the 1995 Kobe earthquake. It caused more than 6,710 deaths. It also caused many problems for children and their parents. Thus, international organization Save the Children estimated that more than one hundred thousand children were taken from their homes. Many children were separated from their parents because the earthquake happened during the school time. Over two hundred children were orphaned. Besides, the tsunami took the life of many people and became the deadliest one since the Hokkaido that occurred in 1993. It was the fourth largest earthquake in the history. The catastrophe resulted in more than $10 billion in damages. The earthquakes or other vibrations of the earth under the ocean caused tsunami waves moving at the pace of a lightening over 698 kilometers per hour. Waves 4 to 40 meters tall covered the Honshu’s coastline. They had a destroying effect on towns and villages. The flooded area spread up to ten kilometers. Tsunami waves also went across the Pacific. They caused damage and devastation in Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington. This natural disaster was the reason of more than 130,000 constructions being totally destroyed. Japan got used to coping with seismic dangers, but this scope of the catastrophe was too hard to handle for this country. Scientists estimated that the largest and quickest-moving tectonic plate is sinking at a rate of seven centimeters each year. It lies beneath some other tectonic plates. This process has been causing earthquakes and eruptions of volcanoes in the Pacific for millions of years. Three days before the earthquake, the earthquakes of magnitude 7.3 with two aftershocks hit eastern part of Honshu. Those aftershocks caused seventy-centimeter-high tsunami. It was hard to imagine that these could be the heralds of the big catastrophe. Scientists may control and follow geophysical signs at seismically active zones, but it is extremely hard to forecast a big one shortly before it happens. Nevertheless, it is essential for scientists to gather and analyze as much information as possible about the catastrophes of the past. Great East Japan earthquake caused a negative impact on economy of the country. First, the damage to roads, railways, ports and power plants seriously complicated economic situation of the country. The railway network was also ruined. It resulted in the breakdowns of railway connection. Second, the telecommunication and the Internet networks, television and mobile towers were completely destroyed; as a result, the interruption of communication happened. Besides, the sanitation system encountered extensive destruction since the concrete plates were raised, displaced and destroyed. Damage was observed either on the permanent way of the rails, or even the rail themselves which, in some cases, were intensely distorted. In the area south of Sedai city, the rails were carried by the tsunami wave for more than 100 m. Finally, even the piers constructed with the aim to defend the coast against enormous waves could not cope with the catastrophe, either due to poor, not reliable technology, or due to crash, resulting in destructive influence on island areas. In addition, severe mistakes were noticed after huge washouts in different types of regulation constructions. Great East Japan earthquake also caused harm to ecology of the country. Japan used to have fifty four nuclear reactors and seventeen power plants. They produced about 35 percent of the electricity. Therefore, the damage caused had a negative influence on the health of the residents. The Japanese Nuclear Safety Agency states that radiation rate in the areas nearby plants became more than 8 times higher than the normal level. People who lived within 11 km of the Fukushima Daini and 25 km of the Fukushima Daiichi power stations were evacuated. The total amount of people evacuated was more than one thousand. Scientists say that meltdown happened at the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi plant. As a result, radioactive material was released. The tremendous disaster was the reason of a white cloud of radioactive vapor rising above the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Many mechanical generators were demolished and three reactors exploded because of hydrogen gas. Even now, radioactive water was found flooding from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Residents with high radiation levels were taken to hospitals. Fortunately, a great number of people were saved due to the early warning. Residents of Tokyo got a warning before the Great East Japan earthquake hit this mega polis. Due to the earthquake early warning technology used in Japan, millions of people were in safety, and many deaths were precluded. They walked out of high-speed trains, metro, etc. People in Japan also got typed warnings of the earthquake and disaster alerts on their mobile phones. Since it is not possible to be ready for unforeseen catastrophes, early warning is crucial in countries with seismic activities. The exhibition I happened to attend showed the terrible effects of the catastrophe on Japan, its nature, architecture, and people. From the photos presented at the exhibition, it is obvious that the earthquake and tsunami had tremendous impact on Japan. Almost 3,000 people were deprived of running water. From the pictures, one can see that many buildings were totally destroyed. The number of buildings destroyed is impressive. Over fifty thousand buildings have been damaged, washed away or burnt. On the photos, one can see much debris. The impact of the catastrophe was devastating. More specifically, the buildings and other structures were completely swept by the rollers and items carried by the waves. They were crashed to the tiny parts of trash, which were collected in the flooded areas, or drifted to the ocean. Boards, trees, household items were lying everywhere. It seems that there were no buildings in a normal condition. Every building, tree, and plant in a short period of time turned to debris. The exhibition shows real scope of the catastrophe. It is hard to imagine that in the places illustrated on the photos there were roads, homes, schools, kindergartens, shopping malls, factories and other items of infrastructure. The catastrophe destroyed everything mercilessly. The pictures show how deep the tsunami encroached the country. Miyagi and Iwate have been totally flooded. The losses the flood caused are shown on the pictures. It also led to subsidence. From some pictures, one can judge that buildings were blasted rather than simply destroyed with infrastructure being completely ruined. The disaster triggered water outflow in the water tunnels. Bailing ceased because of waste of energy, but the transferring cable was not damaged and remained in a good condition. There are different technologies that reduce the influence of disasters on the infrastructure. It is interesting why there was no earthquake-resistant technology in Japan. The answer is very realistic — because of outrageously expensive cost of that equipment. Most machinery in Japan was made more than forty years ago. Great amount of tunnels have about fifty per cent of cables that are more than thirty years old. Many hatchways are over thirty years old. Too old equipment is easily damaged. Japan built significant transportation infrastructure and many highways since 1971. In 1963, there was build the first highway designed for fast traffic. Japan made more than seven thousand kilometers of expressway. More than one and a half million vehicles used it every year. Great amount of all these roads were damaged and totally destroyed. On the photos, the parts of roads are drifting in different ways. It is hard to imagine the scope of the tragedy. People’s efforts, money, time were spent in vain. Great infrastructure of the country that develops at an ever increasing pace was damaged. Japan was not defeated by the nature. It was hard to recover, but Japan succeeded. At first sight, it was impossible. However, it picked up its pace again in a few months after the catastrophe. Todd Pitman, the reporter and former Bangkok bureau chief, remembers those painful days after the catastrophe. He was on a helicopter taking aerial photos and collecting data material after tsunami. He saw enormous pillars of dark smoke from a destroyed town. A big ship was on the top of a house. There was no life at all. He could not resist thinking about thousands of people who were there when the unexpected catastrophe hit. Now, they were buried under debris. He just tried to focus on his duties. So, the March 9th 2011 earthquake in Japan was the tragedy of the global scale. Five years ago, an enormous earthquake effected Japan’s northeastern coast. It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded to hit Japan. The catastrophe caused enormous waves up to forty meters. It was the reason of thousands of deaths, significant material losses, and global ecology problems. The memory about this catastrophe will live forever in people’s hearts. Therefore, the exhibition of photos illustrating the disaster is a good chance to acquaint oneself with the scope of tragedy and reflect on its consequences.

The essay was written by the professional writer Lola Nickson, who works as an executive writer from papers land

[noisykate]

Azores to Falmouth - or nearly

The Azores are lovely, and deserve much more than the few days we gave them.  Another time, perhaps.

Horta is the main port of arrival, the marina full of boats which have had big adventures. The social atmosphere is very relaxed; everybody here has ‘been there, done it’ to a significant degree, and the normal tensions arising from watching new arrivals – do they know what they’re doing, can they handle their boat – simply don’t apply.  It is difficult to explain – the nearest I can get is that when you pull in to a service station on the M1, there are no learner drivers. It’s a bit like that. A bit.

It is truly wonderful to get back to sensibly priced groceries, decent bread and cheese, and restaurants which don’t hustle you out at 9pm and expect huge tips regardless of the food, because the staff don’t get paid.

The Azores are volcanic: the centre of this island (Faial) is a huge caldera, which we drove up to in our little hire car, with John and Sue, and Carl. We circumnavigated the island, stopping to walk around the area of the 1950’s eruption, which inundated the old lighthouse and a small whaling village on the western end. Stopping for a great lunch of mussels, which Carl thought he didn’t like – disguised with prodigious amounts of garlic, they were a huge hit. Surprisingly green and rural, the island is charming, cattle everywhere.  The architecture is Portuguese in style, but mitigated with a more subtle use of the highly patterned tiles we saw in the mainland.

We left Horta on Monday – 17th- after waiting for a predicted blow to pass through. It was a bit of a non-event in Horta, but we weren’t the only ones to play it cautious. Stopping at the fuel dock was a bit of a game, with three boats already in place, and a wind sufficient to pop fenders on the inside boat, a crippled French boat with a broken stay – and, it has to be said, rubbish fenders. Still, the weight of three other boats pressing him into the dock under the influence of 20 knots was a bit much. The marina seemed blithely unconcerned; this is clearly quite normal.

We are now 400 miles out, about 1/3 of the way to Falmouth. The weather has been all over the place, with some flat calm, some fog, and now some windy, rolly conditions, with winds gusting up to 30 knots, and seas up to 4m. The boat is behaving very well, the hydrovane (mechanical wind-driven steering system) coping with most of what gets thrown at it, although you have to be ready to take over for the squalls. Thankfully, these mostly lie in wait for Carl’s watch, to the extent that he is the only one who preps for his watch by putting full oilies on.

Sleep deprivation has taken its toll on tempers - mine particularly. Doing 4 hour shifts nominally gives each person two eight-hour periods off-watch, which should be plenty, but when the boat is rolling hard, it is difficult to get to sleep and then stay asleep long enough to clear the deficit. Fitting in communal eating times also cuts into it.

The food has generally worked out ok, if I say so myself. Homemade bread and cakes (all right, the cake was from just-add-an-egg packets) most days, and cooked-from-scratch dinners most days. The Omnia (stovetop oven) has been brilliant, as has the pressure cooker. The boat oven has hardly been used.

Overall, though, I am done with long passage-making. The magical milky-way star-lit nights with phosphoresce sparkling in the wake as we bob along in a gentle breeze are an absolute delight, but sleep deprivation, uncertainties over the weather, and the physical challenge of cooking and doing the normal stuff of life while being thrown about are the norm – glad I’ve done it, but don’t need to do it again.

Really, really looking forward to getting to Falmouth; family and friends, a long list of jobs, and the prospect of some paid work for both of us; me in acoustics, while Mike will be looking for something boat-related. Berthing master at a handy south-coast marina, with a free berth thrown in, would suit. Not holding our breath, but no chance if you don’t ask!

26 June 2019

We’ve turned towards A Coruna, in the face of persistent north-easterly winds, and the threat of a full gale in the Falmouth area a few days ahead. Now making slow but steady progress, hard on the wind. Winds 20-25 knots, occasionally up to 30, from just north of east.

We were getting advice to divert from Falmouth to either (a) a point south of Ireland, then east, or (b) head direct to Camaret (Brittany, near Brest). In the event, neither option was really tenable – (a) put us in the path of a still unknown quantity, which at times threatened to be quite nasty, and (b) simply did not work – we could not make a course which put us anywhere close. All thoroughly fed up, some more than others; Coruna was the nearest available and attainable land. Carl can fly to London from there, and we will regroup and sort ourselves out before continuing home. So very, very ready to be not on the boat for a while.

27 June 2019

Motoring the last few miles into Coruna. Boring. And a slightly anticlimactic end to our Atlantic odyssey. We expect to arrive in the very early morning, perhaps 4am, and will probably anchor until daylight.

28 June 2019

So we got here, eventually.  Marina Coruna, north-west Spain. Tintin got in first, and were anchored just outside the marina when we arrived at about 6am local time. No dramas, apart from the night of no sleep for Mike, as the 50-mile (=10-hour) band around this corner of Spain is very busy with large shipping, and the alarm kept tripping every few minutes, all night. No danger, plenty of warning, but little chance of proper sleep. I got off best, lying down at 11pm, getting up for a few short-lived non-events, then up properly at about 5am to help get in to the marina.

We crawled into the first appropriate berth, had breakfast, and bodged around, all very grumpy and sleep-deprived, until it was time to check in, which -as usual- took ages.

Carl and I set about sorting the inside of the boat; laundry, damp cushions and mattresses, grime everywhere.  Mike got back eventually, and bodged about some more, in a foul mood, before conceding that the problem was lack of sleep. Carl went off on his own to explore, his one-and-only chance to check out this part of Spain, and, with luck, pick up some of the special fids (rope-splicing tools) he had been coveting since Mike showed him ours.

Partly revived by about 3-hours on the saloon sofa, Mike and I had a beer and a light lunch in the marina bar, while the first of several loads of washing did its thing. We bumped into Carl, on his way back to the boat for his passport so he could check in to his flight – he looks pretty dreadful – almost as if he’d had no sleep.

We were delighted to find Barbara and Simon (Cartagena friends) in situ in the marina, and I was able to have a coffee and a catch-up of sorts, promising to make a better go of it sometime in the UK – their boat is destined for a mooring off West Mersea! They fly home tomorrow, having decided that the current (wrong for sailing north) weather is set to last for at least a week. We shall see.

And phoning home, of course – got hold of everybody to some degree or another, only to find that Rachel and David had planned a big surprise arrival party in Falmouth, which we have utterly harpooned by not going there at the appointed hour. So very disappointing, but deeply touched that they wanted to make the effort.

So – we’ve been stuck in the Bahamas, stuck in Puerto Rico, St Thomas, the Azores, and now Spain. So far, Spain is by far and away the most amenable.

1 July 2019

Weather here is cloudy, and it has been quite cold today, with blustery winds from the north. Still no sign of any change in the conditions which would allow us to head out.

Have wasted most of the day watching films on TV, disheartened after finding all my stored-away warm clothes damp and covered in mildew. Some may be revived by a wash, but some are clearly trashed. Nothing valuable, just really, really annoying.

We had a lovely evening with Jacquie and Kevin off Tintin last night; good food, good company, lively conversation.

Intensely frustrated to be here, and not back in the UK – things to do, people to see… spending time each day on weather sites, but still failing to find anything useful.

[mountrainiernps]

There’s a pullout on the west side of State Route 410, just a half mile south of the Sunrise Road junction that takes my breath away. Partly, because its a fantastic view looking up the White River valley to Goat Island Mountain, the Emmons and Winthrop Glaciers, and Mount Rainier. And partly because if you had been standing here looking up at Mount Rainier 15,000-22,000 years ago, you might have been under or along side a glacier.

During the Evans Creek Glaciation, the Emmons and several other glaciers were so big that they grew together down the White River valley and extended outside of today’s north park boundary. That was an amazing amount of ice on the move. Standing at this pullout, you can use your imagination to fill this valley almost all the way up with ice, covering the rocks in the riverbed, many of the trees on the hillsides. Then imagine all this ice being pulled by gravity down the valley, grinding all that rock underneath, pulverizing boulders into tiny pieces as fine as flour.

You can still see some of that pulverizing at work today. The glaciers still turn boulders into flour, glacier flour. Some say that’s how the White River got it’s name. Have you stopped at this pullout, or any other spot along the White River and admired the glacier’s handiwork? ~ams

Mount Rainier is an active volcano with the potential for future eruptions, but eruptions do not happen without warning. The USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO) carefully monitors Mount Rainier and other Cascade Range volcanoes. For weekly updates on volcanic activity go to https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp/updates.html (click on the "CVO" tab for Cascade Range volcano updates).

NPS/L. Lane Photo. (top) Pullout on west side of State Route 410 with view of Goat Island Mountain and Mount Rainier. People reading sign. October, 1978. NPS/Butts Photo. (middle) The White River amid riverbed rocks near White River Campground. June, 1974. NPS map. Close up of Mount Rainier National Park map with yellow arrow pointing to pull out along State Route 410.

[sepdet]

My visit to Mount St. Helens, August 22, 2017

Johnston Ridge Visitor Center | Mount St. Helens north face, runoff from snow cutting through 1980s pumice plain

Close-up: melting snow rising as steamclouds from the still-cooling lava dome of 2004-2008 eruption that’s partly filled 1980 crater

Blown-down trees on surrounding hills show direction of blast | Spirit Lake in distance (human figures on trail for scale) | More blowdown trees in background

 Blowdown tree, possibly flew 5 miles from Mount St. Helens, with “Indian paintbrush” flowers and pearly everylasting

Bees in fireweed | Bees in pearly everlasting 

Johnston Ridge Memorial to those who died

Let me tell you a story.

When I was a little girl, there was a beautiful mountain.

Mount St. Helens behind Spirit Lake: U.S. Army Core of Engineers, 1978

The explorer George Vancouver had named her after some British diplomat. But native peoples called her Louwala-Clough, “smoking mountain,” or Loowitlatkla, “Lady of Fire,” or just Loowit. 

(cont’d with more photos below)

Loowit taught people fire; she guarded the Bridge of the Gods. She had been an old woman, but the Great Spirit transformed her into a beautiful maiden for her good deeds. Then two brothers, Pahto and Wyeast, fought over her, throwing flaming rocks and laying waste to whole forests. At last the Great Spirit turned all three of them into the mountains westerners call Mount St. Helens, Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood.

Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest knew volcanoes were shapechangers. Geologists knew. But by 1980, most people living nearby were barely aware of the sleeping giants looming over them. They didn’t realize just how dramatically they could change.

Most Americans’ notion of a volcano was shaped by TV images of Kilauea spewing red-hot lava. Fluid when it first erupts, lava cools rapidly in open air, so that its leading edge creeps rather than runs. Even I can outwalk it. Like millions of tourists, I’ve safely watched Kilauea’s lava fountains and flows from a few miles away.

(Sorry, Hollywood. Lava is usually not that scary, unless you’re a house.) 

But stratovolcanoes like Krakatoa and Vesuvius are different. Their magma (lava before it erupts) is sticky and stiff. It piles into rugged peaks, clogs their pipes and caps old craters with heavy domes. Stratovolcanoes can sleep for centuries, sometimes thousands of years. When they erupt, they explode.

Large chunks of the old summit get blasted out, some pieces as big as houses. 

Frothy, gassy magma flies out as blobs of pumice: hole-pocked volcanic rock that isn’t very dense but can bury a town (see: Pompeii).

Powerful explosions pulverize magma into volcanic ash, which is actually tiny jagged grains of glass. Fine ash can fill lungs, scratch eyes, clog machinery, or fuse into a glass coating if sucked into a jet engine.

Water seeping into hot rocks may flash to steam. Steam explosions are dangerous because there’s no warning.

Glaciers and snow and rivers mix with ash to form mudflows the consistency of wet concrete, able to flow as fast as water. Geologists use the Indonesian name for them, lahars. Some lahars are boiling hot.

Scariest of all are pyroclastic flows, hurricane-force avalanches of superheated ash, pumice, boulders, semi-molten rock, and hot gasses (including sulfuric acid), about 1000°C (nearly 2000°F). They travel at speeds up to 700kph (450mph). They flow over ridges and hills, and can even cross water on a cushion of steam, as the islands closest to Krakatau learned the hard way. 

Here’s lahars (Japan has remote cameras to watch for them): 

Pyroclastic flow in Indonesia (truly terrifying):

That was what geologists were worried about, when Mount St. Helens stirred to life with a flurry of moderate earthquakes on March 19, 1980. 

Trouble is, geologists didn’t yet have many active stratovolcanoes under their belt. They could reconstruct what St. Helens was capable of from the remains of ancient eruptions, but what would she do this time? More importantly, when?

Drawing on experience from Kilauea, United States Geological Survey scientists planted instruments around St. Helens to monitor her vital signs. They measured thousands of moderate-sized earthquakes with seismometers. They installed tiltmeters on her flanks to monitor the groundswell as magma rose underneath. (With one bizarre exception, there was no movement.) They measured escaping gasses, since other volcanoes’ SO2 emissions spiked before erupting. (Hers didn’t). They scanned with infrared cameras, searching for major heat sources near the surface (not much). 

A week after the first earthquake swarm began, St. Helens cleared her throat and opened a small summit crater, belching steam and ash that dirtied her snow. Spirit Lake near her feet was evacuated, and local officials set up roadblocks around a no-entry zone.

Same view as my photos. Note “bulge” in front of original summit, 1 day before eruption. Harry Glicken, USGS. (Also notice 150-200 foot fir trees on slopes.)

Loowit was living up to her “smoking mountain” name. Local vendors made a brisk trade in t-shirts and souvenirs. But after a few weeks, media and public interest began to wane.

Weyerhaeuser logging, the main employer and property owner in the region, couldn’t let a few earthquakes get in the way of million-dollar profits, not when the logging season was so short. Nor was the state’s fishing and game department happy about the closure of popular lakes and recreation areas. Their main source of income was permits, and it was the start of the hunting and fishing season.

So Governor Dixy Lee Ray shrank the boundaries of the “Red Zone,” the mandatory evacuation area that USGS scientists had advised. She drew in the exclusion zone to just three miles from the summit on the northwest side, along the Weyerhaeuser property line. Hundreds of miles of logging roads now offered public access outside the roadblocks.

Geologists warned about pyroclastic flow and mudflow, but most people still imagined lava like Hawaii’s. Besides, the geologists couldn’t tell when or even if these things would happen. All they knew was that St. Helens had done it before. 

Except this time, she was doing something new:

“Bulge” from the side a few days before eruption, photo by Peter Lipman. 

That bulge distorting Forsythe Glacier was swelling 3-4 feet towards the north each day, an unheard-of ground movement. Geologists guessed it would come down in an avalanche/landslide that could reach as far as Spirit Lake. Dr. David Johnston was one of the most outspoken on the danger, communicating eloquently to state officials and news media.

But the earthquakes and ash explosions had died down. Residents of Spirit Lake kicked up a fuss, and were grudgingly given permission to retrieve belongings from their cabins on Saturday, May 17. They were planning to return Sunday.

At 8:31 Sunday morning, David Johnston was on duty at the monitoring post the USGS had established on Coldwater Ridge, five miles north of the mountain. (Above, photo of David from the day before, snapped by a colleague saying goodbye).

At 8:32, one more earthquake, not much bigger than those before, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It triggered the biggest landslide in human history (frames 1-4):

[Animation stitched together from still photos by Gary Rosenquist, 11 miles NE]

Ham radio operators heard David Johnston’s last words as he shouted a warning: Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!

Within minutes, Mount St. Helens was 1300 feet shorter, with a huge crater over a mile across cutting deeply into its north face. The landslide ran out seventeen miles.

Another view, AP, from The Atlantic’s St. Helens photo gallery.

That landslide had popped the cork. An explosion more powerful than an atom bomb blasted out: an absolutely colossal pyroclastic flow. Every living thing on and near the mountain was blown away or incinerated, topsoil scoured right down to bedrock. No one ever found a trace of Johnston’s trailer. Beyond the zone of total destruction, trees up to 10 feet across were blown down pointing away from the mountain for dozens of square miles. Beyond the blowdown zone, standing trees were stripped and scorched.

Lakes were dashed out of their basins and sloshed back in miniature tsunamis, dragging debris down with them. Spirit Lake’s bed was raised 100 feet by landslide fill. More pyroclastic surges followed, devastating over 200 square miles of forest. Charred branches, needles and cones fell on awestruck climbers on Mt Adams and Mt Hood, watching from 30 and 60 miles away.

That was how geologists learned that, every now and then, volcanoes don’t blow up. They blow sideways.

USGS photo of blowdown zone (see scientists at lower right for scale).

St. Helens did it all: lahars that flooded river valleys and bulldozed houses and bridges, ash fall, pumice fall, mudball fall, and more. Immense clouds of ash caused white-out (or rather, black-out) conditions, blanketing and shutting down most of Washington State for days. The Columbia River’s shipping channel had to be closed for dredging after its 40-foot depth was filled in to 17 feet. Intermittent eruptions continued for months.

Ash cloud reaches Ephrata airport, Washington. Mike Cash/AP.

In her press conference, Governor Dixy Lee Ray said that those killed in the eruption had deliberately bypassed roadblocks and violated the “Red Zone.” President Jimmy Carter took her at her word and repeated the claim. That’s the story I remember from The Big Blast, a Scholastic book about the eruption that came out later that year.

Eruption seen from Toledo, WA, taken by Rocky Kolberg

In fact, only four of the 57 victims were inside the “Red Zone”, and three had permission: USGS official David Johnston and two scientists staying at Spirit Lake for field research. The only person who had defied evacuation orders was an old codger, Harry Truman (no relation of the president), who refused to leave his lakeside lodge. Governor Ray had sent him a letter congratulating him on sticking to his principles.

Unsigned on the governor’s desk lay a proposal for a revised hazard map devised by sheriffs and geologists in consultation with Weyerhaeuser, moving the restricted zone’s boundaries back out by several miles.

Day after eruption; vast pumice plain still steaming with melting fragments of the mountain’s glacier embedded in debris. AP.

Mount St. Helens was made an official national monument. It’s become an enormous laboratory for geologists to study deposits left by a well-documented eruption, and for biologists to study how life recolonizes an area sterilized by a catastrophe. 

(My photo, Aug 22, 2017, Toppled stump embedded in slope; Johnston Ridge Visitor Center behind.)

 A visitor center was built on barren Coldwater Ridge, renamed Johnston Ridge. There, 37 years later, I stood listening to a ranger who wasn’t born in 1980, telling tourists about mountain goats and hummingbirds returning to the crater. I watched bees buzzing among a profusion of flowers, ground squirrels chasing each other in burrows under the stumps of dead giants, fir saplings growing where a 200-foot-tall mature forest once stood.

Sightseers posed for selfies in front of Loowit, still lovely even with her scars. They gazed out at the spectacular, alien landscape, softened now by greenery creeping back. It’s a miraculous transformation, considering the bleak moonscape of just a dozen or so years ago.

The visitor center doesn’t dwell on those who died. Far better to focus on creation than destruction.

(My photo, Aug 22, 2017. Flowers on Johnston Ridge)

But some stories you learn as a child stay with you. 

So while I spent three hours exploring a flower-tufted ridge below that massive, strangely beautiful mountain, I also paid my respects to 57 names carved in stone, many of whose stories I know. I brushed fingers against the name of  David A. Johnston. I looked out at that huge scooped-out crater on the mountainside and whispered, Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!

[kansascityhappenings]

Indonesia tsunami survivors remain jittery as deaths hit 429

SUMUR, Indonesia — Panicked residents, police and soldiers in this remote fishing village clobbered by a devastating weekend tsunami ran to higher ground Tuesday, shouting “Water is coming! Water is coming!” and reciting verses from the Quran as emergency messages were broadcast over mosque speakers.

It proved to be a false alarm, but a similar frenzy broke out in Tanjung Lesung, another tsunami-stricken area located hours away, as unsettled survivors of the disaster remained traumatized by a tragedy that killed more than 420 people and left thousands homeless.

Meanwhile, Christmas celebrations were replaced by somber prayers, as church leaders called on Christians across Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, to pray for tsunami victims.

Unlike other tsunamis that have hit disaster-prone Indonesia following large earthquakes, Saturday’s big waves blasted ashore at night without warning. The eruption of Anak Krakatau, or Child of Krakatoa, a volcano in the Sunda Strait, is believed to have created a landslide on the volcano’s slope, displacing a large volume of water that slammed into the islands of Java and Sumatra.

People in Sumur village, which has been slow to receive aid due to roads being cut off, remained stunned by how quickly the tsunami hit. The beach, located just a few kilometers from the tourist island of Umang near Java’s western tip, is popular for snorkeling and other water activities. The tsunami decimated the area, ripping houses from their foundations and bulldozing concrete buildings.

Scientists have said the tsunami’s waves were recorded in several places at about 1 meter (3.3 feet) high, but residents of Sumur insisted they towered more than 3 meters (10 feet) there. They said a soaring white wall of water roared toward them at high speeds, ripping trees out of the ground by their roots.

“There was no sign of a tsunami when we were at the beach. The sea didn’t recede,” said Tati Hayati, a housewife, who was enjoying a pleasant evening with 10 other people when the disaster hit. “It was calm and bright with the full moon.”

When she spotted high, fast-moving waves launching toward the shore, she ran to her car and managed to get inside. But she couldn’t outrun it. She said the car was struck by three waves, breaking out the back window and filling the vehicle with gushing water.

“We were locked inside. The car was swaying in the waves and we thought we would all die,” Hayati said. “We almost could not breathe and I almost gave up when I groped the key in the water and managed to open the door, and the water began to recede. We got out of the car and ran to safety.”

The disaster was compounded because it occurred over a busy holiday weekend before Christmas when many people had fled crowded cities such as Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, to relax at popular beach areas.

Pastor Markus Taekz said Tuesday that his Rahmat Pentecostal Church in the hard-hit area of Carita did not celebrate Christmas with joyous songs this year. Instead, only about 100 people showed up for the service, which usually brings in double that number. Many congregation members had already left the area for locations away from the disaster zone.

“This is an unusual situation because we have a very bad disaster that killed hundreds of our sisters and brothers in Banten,” Taekz said, referring to the province on Java island. “So our celebration is full of grief.”

The death toll climbed to 429 on Tuesday, with more than 1,400 people injured and at least 128 missing, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for Indonesia’s Disaster Mitigation Agency.

He said more than 16,000 people were displaced and that there was an urgent need for heavy equipment in the Sumur subdistrict near Ujung Kulon National Park to help get aid flowing and reach people who may be injured or trapped.

Military troops, government personnel and volunteers continued searching along debris-strewn beaches. Yellow, orange and black body bags were laid out where victims were found, and weeping relatives identified the dead. Many searched for missing loved ones at hospital morgues.

The lead singer of the Indonesian pop band Seventeen located the body of his dead wife after posting emotional posts on social media, vowing that he would not leave her. The group was performing at a beach hotel when the tsunami was captured on video smashing into their stage, killing several band members and crew.

Anak Krakatau is a volcanic island that formed in the early part of the 20th century near the site of the cataclysmic 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which killed more than 30,000 people and hurled so much ash that it turned day to night in the area and reduced global temperatures.

The head of Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency, Dwikorita Karnawati, said Saturday’s tsunami was likely caused by Anak Krakatau’s volcanic activity and so could not have been picked up by sensors, which monitor conventional earthquakes responsible for more than 90 percent of Indonesia’s tsunamis.

She said the tsunami was probably caused by the collapse of a big section of the volcano’s slope. Anak Krakatau has been erupting since June and did so again 24 minutes before the tsunami, according to the geophysics agency. Other scientists have said an underwater landslide may also have contributed to the disaster.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands and home to 260 million people, lies along the Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.

In September, thousands were believed killed by a quake and tsunami that hit Indonesia’s Sulawesi island. A quake on the island of Lombok killed 505 people in August.

Saturday’s disaster came ahead of the anniversary of the massive Asian tsunami that hit Dec. 26, 2004, after a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra island spawned huge waves. The giant wall of water killed some 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2018/12/25/indonesia-tsunami-survivors-remain-jittery-as-deaths-hit-429/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2018/12/26/indonesia-tsunami-survivors-remain-jittery-as-deaths-hit-429/

[marilynngmesalo]

‘WATER IS COMING!’: Indonesia tsunami survivors jittery as deaths hit 429

‘WATER IS COMING!’: Indonesia tsunami survivors jittery as deaths hit 429 ‘WATER IS COMING!’: Indonesia tsunami survivors jittery as deaths hit 429 https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

SUMUR, Indonesia — Panicked residents, police and soldiers in this remote fishing village clobbered by a devastating weekend tsunami ran to higher ground Tuesday, shouting “Water is coming! Water is coming!” and reciting verses from the Qur’an as emergency messages were broadcast over mosque speakers.

It proved to be a false alarm, but a similar frenzy broke out in Tanjung Lesung, another tsunami-stricken area located hours away, as unsettled survivors of the disaster remained traumatized by a tragedy that killed more than 420 people and left thousands homeless.

Meanwhile, Christmas celebrations were replaced by sombre prayers, as church leaders called on Christians across Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, to pray for tsunami victims.

Indonesia searches for tsunami victims

Unlike other tsunamis that have hit disaster-prone Indonesia following large earthquakes, Saturday’s big waves blasted ashore at night without warning. The eruption of Anak Krakatau, or Child of Krakatoa, a volcano in the Sunda Strait, is believed to have created a landslide on the volcano’s slope, displacing a large volume of water that slammed into the islands of Java and Sumatra.

People in Sumur village, which has been slow to receive aid due to roads being cut off, remained stunned by how quickly the tsunami hit. The beach, located just a few kilometres (miles) from the tourist island of Umang near Java’s western tip, is popular for snorkeling and other water activities. The tsunami decimated the area, ripping houses from their foundations and bulldozing concrete buildings.

Scientists have said the tsunami’s waves were recorded in several places at about 1 metre (3.3 feet) high, but residents of Sumur insisted they towered more than 3 metres (10 feet) there. They said a soaring white wall of water roared toward them at high speeds, ripping trees out of the ground by their roots.

“There was no sign of a tsunami when we were at the beach. The sea didn’t recede,” said Tati Hayati, a housewife, who was enjoying a pleasant evening with 10 other people when the disaster hit. “It was calm and bright with the full moon.”

When she spotted high, fast-moving waves launching toward the shore, she ran to her car and managed to get inside. But she couldn’t outrun it. She said the car was struck by three waves, breaking out the back window and filling the vehicle with gushing water.

“We were locked inside. The car was swaying in the waves and we thought we would all die,” Hayati said. “We almost could not breathe and I almost gave up when I groped the key in the water and managed to open the door, and the water began to recede. We got out of the car and ran to safety.”

The disaster was compounded because it occurred over a busy holiday weekend before Christmas when many people had fled crowded cities such as Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, to relax at popular beach areas.

Pastor Markus Taekz said Tuesday that his Rahmat Pentecostal Church in the hard-hit area of Carita did not celebrate Christmas with joyous songs this year. Instead, only about 100 people showed up for the service, which usually brings in double that number. Many congregation members had already left the area for locations away from the disaster zone.

“This is an unusual situation because we have a very bad disaster that killed hundreds of our sisters and brothers in Banten,” Taekz said, referring to the province on Java island. “So our celebration is full of grief.”

The death toll climbed to 429 on Tuesday, with more than 1,400 people injured and at least 128 missing, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for Indonesia’s Disaster Mitigation Agency.

He said more than 16,000 people were displaced and that there was an urgent need for heavy equipment in the Sumur subdistrict near Ujung Kulon National Park to help get aid flowing and reach people who may be injured or trapped.

Military troops, government personnel and volunteers continued searching along debris-strewn beaches. Yellow, orange and black body bags were laid out where victims were found, and weeping relatives identified the dead. Many searched for missing loved ones at hospital morgues.

The lead singer of the Indonesian pop band Seventeen located the body of his dead wife after posting emotional posts on social media, vowing that he would not leave her. The group was performing at a beach hotel when the tsunami was captured on video smashing into their stage, killing several band members and crew.

Anak Krakatau is a volcanic island that formed in the early part of the 20th century near the site of the cataclysmic 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which killed more than 30,000 people and hurled so much ash that it turned day to night in the area and reduced global temperatures.

The head of Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency, Dwikorita Karnawati, said Saturday’s tsunami was likely caused by Anak Krakatau’s volcanic activity and so could not have been picked up by sensors, which monitor conventional earthquakes responsible for more than 90 per cent of Indonesia’s tsunamis.

She said the tsunami was probably caused by the collapse of a big section of the volcano’s slope. Anak Krakatau has been erupting since June and did so again 24 minutes before the tsunami, according to the geophysics agency. Other scientists have said an underwater landslide may also have contributed to the disaster.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands and home to 260 million people, lies along the Ring of Fire, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.

In September, thousands were believed killed by a quake and tsunami that hit Indonesia’s Sulawesi island. A quake on the island of Lombok killed 505 people in August.

Saturday’s disaster came ahead of the anniversary of the massive Asian tsunami that hit Dec. 26, 2004, after a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra island spawned huge waves. The giant wall of water killed some 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia.

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  Click for update news Bangla news http://bit.ly/2BEyGjD world news

[mitchbattros]

Indonesia Tsunami Caused By Collapse Of Volcano, Experts Confirm

Saturday’s tsunami in Indonesia was caused by a chunk of the volcanic Anak Krakatau island slipping into the ocean, it was confirmed on Monday, as officials at the country’s natural disaster agency said it must develop a new tsunami early warning system.

At least 373 people were killed, hundreds injured and many buildings were heavily damaged when the tsunami struck, almost without warning, along the rim of the Sunda Strait, between Java and Sumatra islands. Anak Krakatau had been spewing ash and lava for months before a 64-hectare section of its south-west side collapsed, an Indonesian official said. “This caused an underwater landslide and eventually caused the tsunami,” Dwikorita Karnawati, the head of the meteorological agency, said. Images captured by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite showed that a large portion of the southern flank of the volcano had slid off into the ocean, scientists said. The fact the tsunami was triggered by a volcano rather than an earthquake meant no tsunami warning was triggered, scientists said. Coastal residents reported not seeing or feeling any warning signs before waves of up to three metres high surged in. Hundreds of military personnel and volunteers spent Monday scouring beaches strewn with debris in search of survivors. At least 1,459 people were injured and more than 600 homes, 60 shops and 420 vessels damaged when the tsunami struck. Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the chief spokesman for the Indonesian disaster agency, said the country had no early warning system for landslides or volcanic eruptions. “The current early warning system is for earthquake activity,” he wrote on Twitter. “Indonesia must build an early warning system for tsunamis that are generated by underwater landslides & volcanic eruptions … Landslides triggered the 1992 Maumere tsunami and the Palu 2018 tsunami.” He also said Indonesia’s tsunami buoy network had “not been operational since 2012”. “Vandalism, a limited budget, and technical damage mean there were no tsunami buoys at this time,” he said. “They need to be rebuilt to strengthen the Indonesian tsunami early warning system.” Sutopo said on Twitter: “Anak Krakatau has been erupting since June 2018 until now,” he said. “Yesterday’s eruption was not the biggest. The October-November 2018 period had a larger eruption.” The death toll is expected to rise as 128 people were still missing on Monday. At least 1,600 people have also been displaced.Dody Ruswandi, a senior official at the disaster agency, added that the rescue effort was likely to last a week. Sutopo warned locals to stay away from the coast. “People should not carry out activities on the beach and stay away from the coast for a while,” he told reporters. The University of Queensland volcanologist Teresa Ubide said Anak Krakatau had been erupting for the past few months, which was not unusual. “It seems like the volcano is active at the moment and it may happen again,” Ubide said. “The volcano is very close to the shoreline so … there wouldn’t be much time to warn because it’s close and the tsunamis can travel very fast,” she said. The lack of seismic activity that would accompany an earthquake was also significant, she said. Richard Teeuw of the University of Portsmouth said sonar surveys were needed to map the seafloor around the volcano, but that work usually took months. “The likelihood of further tsunamis in the Sunda Strait will remain high while Anak Krakatau volcano is going through its current active phase because that might trigger further submarine landslides,” he said. Kathy Mueller from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said aid workers were helping evacuate injured people, bring in clean water and tarpaulins and provide shelter. he said the group was preparing for the possibility of diseases breaking out in the tsunami zone, adding: “The situation, and the death toll, will remain fluid over the next days and even weeks.” The water washed away an outdoor stage where a local rock band, Seventeen, were performing, killing their bassist and manager. Other people who had been watching the band on the beach were missing. Azki Kurniawan, 16, said his first warning about the tsunami was when people burst into the lobby of the Patra Comfort Hotel shouting: “Sea water rising!” Kurniawan, who was undergoing vocational training with a group of 30 other students, said he was confused because he had not felt a big earthquake. He said he ran to the parking lot to try to reach his motorbike but discovered it was already flooded. “Suddenly, a one-metre wave hit me,” he said, his eyes red and swollen from crying. “I was thrown into the fence of a building about 30 metres from the beach and held onto the fence as strong as I could, trying to resist the water, which felt like it would drag me back into the sea. I cried in fear ... ‘This is a tsunami?’ I was afraid I would die.” Read the full article

[global-news-station]

CARITA: A tsunami killed at least 222 people and injured hundreds more on the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra following an underwater landslide believed to have been caused by the erupting Anak Krakatau volcano, officials said Sunday.

Hundreds of homes and other buildings were “heavily damaged” in the tsunami which struck along the rim of the Sunda Strait late on Saturday.

It was the latest in a series of tragedies that have struck Indonesia, a vast archipelago, this year. Successive earthquakes flattened parts of the tourist island of Lombok, and a double quake-and-tsunami killed thousands on Sulawesi island. Nearly 200 people died when a Lion Air passenger plane crashed into the Java Sea in October.

Authorities warned residents and tourists in coastal areas around the Sunda Strait to stay away from beaches and a high-tide warning remained in place through till December 25.

“Please do not be around the beaches around the Sunda Strait. Those who have evacuated, please do not return yet,” said Rahmat Triyono, an official at the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG).

TV footage showed roads blocked by debris from damaged houses, overturned cars and fallen trees.

On December 26 in 2004, an Indian Ocean tsunami triggered by an earthquake killed 226,000 people from 13 countries, including more than 120,000 in Indonesia. The eruption of Krakatau in 1883 killed more than 36,000 people in a series of tsunamis.

Endan Permana, head of the disaster mitigation agency in Pandeglang, told Metro TV police were providing assistance to victims in Tanjung Lesung in Banten province, a popular tourist getaway not far from the capital, Jakarta, as emergency workers had yet to arrive.

The western coast of the popular Banten province in Java was the worst-hit area so far, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the national disaster mitigation agency.

Rescue workers and ambulances were finding it difficult to reach affected areas because some roads were blocked by debris, said Ketut Sukerta, head of the disaster agency in South Lampung.

‘Washed away’

Around 250 employees of the state utility company PLN had gathered in Tanjung Lesung for an end-of-year celebration, company spokesman I Made Suprateka told Reuters. At least seven were killed and many suffered broken bones, he said.

Dramatic TV footage showed the seconds when waves hit a concert at the event and washed away the stage where local rock band Seventeen was performing. One band member was killeding and one remains missing.

“The water washed away the stage which was located very close to the sea,” the band said in a statement. “The water rose and dragged away everyone at the location. We have lost loved ones, including our bassist and manager…and others are missing.”

The disaster mitigation agency said it was still compiling information on the disaster and there was a “possibility that data on the victims and damage will increase”.

The tsunami was caused by “an undersea landslide resulting from volcanic activity on Anak Krakatau” and was exacerbated by abnormally high tide because of the full moon, disaster agency spokesman Nugroho said.

Ben van der Pluijm, an earthquake geologist and a professor in the University of Michigan, said the tsunami may have been caused by a “partial collapse” of Anak Krakatau.

Rock slide

“Instability of the slope of an active volcano can create a rock slide that moves a large volume of water, creating local tsunami waves that can be very powerful. This is like suddenly dropping a bag of sand in a tub filled with water,” he said.

Anak Krakatau, an active volcano which is located roughly halfway between Java and Sumatra and has been spewing ash and lava for months, erupted again just after 9 p.m. on Saturday and the tsunami struck at around 9.30 p.m., according to BMKG.

Anak Krakatau is the island that emerged from an area once occupied by Krakatau, which was completely destroyed in the 1883 disaster. It first appeared in 1927 and has been growing ever since.

Gegar Prasetya, co-founder of the Tsunami Research Center Indonesia, said that it’s possible for an eruption to trigger a landslide above ground or beneath the ocean, both capable of producing a tsunami.

“Actually, the tsunami was not really big, only one meter,” said Prasetya, who has closely studied Krakatau. “The problem is people always tend to build everything close to the shoreline.”

Coastal residents reported not seeing or feeling any warning signs, like receding water or an earthquake, before waves of up to two meters washed ashore, according to media.

Nugroho told Metro TV that tsunamis triggered by volcanic eruptions were “rare” and that the Sunda Strait tsunami had not resulted from an earthquake.

“There was no earthquake, and the Anak Krakatau eruption also wasn’t that big,” Nugroho told Metro TV, noting there were no “significant” seismic tremors to indicate a tsunami was coming.

The post Death toll from ‘volcano tsunami’ in Indonesia climbs to over 200 appeared first on ARYNEWS.

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Aggressive pigs becoming a nuisance at some state parks

A visit to Hawaii Island’s state parks provides a close encounter with nature — sometimes, a bit too close for comfort.

When two Hilo Medical Center employees, including its chief executive officer, visited Rainbow Falls in Wailuku River State Park on Wednesday morning prior to work, they found themselves scurrying back to their cars to avoid an aggressive feral pig.

“I go there every morning before I go to work,” said Michelle, a HMC technician who asked that her last name not be used. Michelle said when she arrived on Wednesday, her boss, Dan Brinkman, the East Hawaii region CEO of Hawaii Health Systems Corp., was there, as was a feral pig Michelle said had become too accustomed to being fed by people.

“The pig was going either for the garbage or for Dan,” she said. “I made noise to let Dan know and try to startle the pig, but the pig didn’t startle. So I got out of my car and was waving a piece of paper, trying to get it to go. And it just ran at me. And it did it three times, so I kept running back to my car.”

“It’s a scary thing,” Michelle added. “Usually when you try to shoo a pig away they’ll go, but this one did not. Just the opposite.”

Dean Takabayashi, Hawaii Island superintendent of the Department of Land and Natural Resources Division of State Parks said officials are aware of a feral pig problem at the Big Island’s state parks. Pig populations are established at Rainbow Falls, a popular tourist attraction in Hilo, as well as Wailoa River State Recreation Area in Hilo, Akaka Falls State Park in Honomu, and to a lesser degree, Manuka State Wayside in South Kona.

There are also feral pigs in Lava Tree State Monument, off Highway 132 near Pahoa — which remains closed to the public because of lava from this year’s Lower East Rift Zone eruption.

Takabayashi said the department has been working with its Division of Forestry and Wildlife, surrounding land owners and other agencies “to come up with solutions.”

“Although we have not had any reports of injury related to aggressive feral pigs in our parks, it would be most prudent to retreat from where the pigs are,” Takabayashi said. He said Rainbow Falls and Wailoa have signs warning the public to not feed the animals.

Michelle said she’s seen people feeding the pigs on her morning excursions to Rainbow Falls and, on one recent morning, saw a woman bitten by a pig she was feeding.

“She was petting it, and when she turned and looked away it bit her thigh,” she said. “I saw a guy just this week, maybe Monday, pull up his truck and just unload all of these avocados and all the baby pigs were right there and the mother pig. I’ve seen several people just feeding it. You can tell people are just saving up food to feed it.

“A co-worker said they saw several tourist families with young kids going towards the pig, trying to take pictures. They’re like, ‘Wow, a pig.’ And they’re going towards it. They don’t seem to realize it could be dangerous, especially when the pig has babies and they’re more aggressive.”

Brinkman said he thinks the pigs have become a problem, and added they present “a danger to the public when they become used to human sources of food and lose their fear of humans.”

“I lived in Colorado for a time and many precautions had to be taken with trash, provision for bear-proof containers, etc., in order to not encourage these animals to frequent parks and other urban spaces. When this mixing occurs, someone will get hurt,” Brinkman said.

“Feral pigs, especially sows with piglets and boars are dangerous and their bites and goring from tusks can cause substantial injuries and subsequent infections. Pigs in a group presents their own hazards. HMC regularly sees these injuries in our ER, most related to hunting, but some that are from unwanted encounters.”

Brinkman said he’s also noticed feral swine on a campus near the HMC’s extended care facility “and have asked DLNR, who owns the adjacent river property, to assist in eradicating or trapping them.”

Michelle said she called police, who referred her to the Hawaii Island Humane Society, which emailed her a list of hunters, but she didn’t consider that a satisfactory solution in a place with so much foot traffic. She said she’s considering halting her morning visits to Rainbow Falls, but added, “I don’t want to stop going there, because it makes me feel good.”

“It’s a beautiful place to go,” she said.

“I know there are pigs there, but when you’re feeding them, you’re encouraging them to come at people. And that’s my fear. That’s my peaceful spot in the morning. I have a few minutes to go before I go to work. I say a prayer and I look at the water. I’m going to have to have a stick to go there. I knew this would happen. This pig is not going to be afraid of people. I’m worried that tourists are going to be hurt, young children — and even myself.”

Takabayashi said DLNR is “always concerned about any safety issues in our parks.”

He said the public can call DLNR’s Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement hotline at 643-3567 or the DLNR Hilo district office at 961-9540.

Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com. from Hawaii News – Hawaii Tribune-Herald https://ift.tt/2Qd5nPz