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#but the grip this facecam has on me..... :
yutaslaugh · 8 months
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my favourite yuta facecam! ↳ requested by @soonhoonsol
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digital-matchmake · 11 months
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I’ve seen your AU and I just thought that the digital gang were basically the stick figures from Alan Becker if you heard of him, so I thought someone namely Jax playing some games like Minecraft and the rest just got hooked on it.
Oh geez you've reminded me of this fanfic I made a while ago for shits and giggles but now here have at thee!
(Admittedly I know the stick figures from Alan Becker and watched some of the vs minecraft of them but I never really gotten into it but yeah it's basically that except the characters can get out in the physical world and can only access devices the reader has access on)
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Finally sunday, where you are finally free from your responsibilities for a bit just so you can play games on your computer and for today, your friends are online for a bit so you decided to invite to your minecraft server for a while to just hang out for a bit.
"Ok where should we put our base?" You question onto your mic as you fix your headset a bit, though your question was met with two chuckle from your friends.
"Bruh chill we just started, we haven't even gathered wood yet" One of your friends laugh as the three of you begin to collect wood
"Also when are you going to change your avatar from steve?"
"Idk, probably when I have the time and motivation to create my avatar" You casually answer, leaning back on your seat as you continue to collect wood, it's times like these that you like, just hanging out peacefully with your friends and just having a peac-
*Jax has joined the server*
"Huh? Who the fuck is Jax?"
"I don't know, shit did you guys invite your friend here?"
"Hell nah, I don't know anyone named Jax, (Y/n) do you?"
This is one of those days you are glad you do not have a facecam on, because your face says that you fully know who the hell this is.
"SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT" You interally panic as you try and quickly come up with a response "I uh, I don't know them, did someone managed to leak the server IP?"
Whilst your friends are responding, you look around in minecraft to see him, his avatar basically the same as he is, complete with that shit eating grin as you mute yourself on discord and began to talk to the monitor directly.
"Jax I swear to christ, get out of the server!"
"Aww don't be like that sweetcheeks, I just wanted to see what the fuss is about in this game"
Ohhh his snarky comment combined with his usual nicknamings made you grip your controller as you try to not think about just trying to reach into your monitor and yank him, You can't do that anyway without literally breaking your monitor.
*Ragatha has joined the server*
"Oh shit" You hear Jax say before.
*Jax has left the server*
*Ragatha has left the server*
Oh thank the lord, at least someone saved just in time before your friends began to ask more question as you unmute.
"Sorry I had to check something but it seems all is good now, Now where were we?"
And your game continued without any issues, as you and your friends continue to play, you can ever so slightly hear Ragatha telling Jax off in your living room but it's too muffled for you to understand but now atleast that rabbit man is getting put in his place... again.
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After a while you and your friends wrap up and bid one another farewell as they went offline to which you had call in the digital gang into your monitor, since Jax is curious about the game, you might as well introduce it to them as you start create a new world as they watch in your monitor as you hover your mouse over the name.
"Oh Oh! Let me name it!" Jax says as he reached over to the server name and begin to type 'Hell-' to which you just backspaced it all before he can even finish "Hey!"
"I am not gonna let you name anything, anyone else have a suggestion?"
Andd that was your mistake as they begin to fight over what name it will be, with only Gangle, Ragatha and Pomni not joining in the fight as they talk to one another of ideas, welp this is gonna take a while before you even play the damn game as you stood up from your seat, you are gonna need a drink and maybe a snack for this.
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ladyrawthorm · 6 months
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I’m back!
Hi guys! How’s it going? I owe you a bit of an explanation. I’ve been AWOL for a couple of weeks for a few reasons, some I will explain and some I can’t explain.
As you all know, I’ve been in a funk for a while now. I’ve been dealing with it somewhat successfully. Trying to figure out what it is and how to overcome it. I think I have it figured out, it’s not something I can talk about sadly but, I can talk about how I am dealing with it. Once I figured out what was going on, everything sort of fell like dominoes. The solution at the time was really difficult and not something that can happen quickly. So because I wasn’t really making any progress with my solution I started to feel bad about everything and mean literally everything.
Some of you may know, some of you may not, I usually get up at 5am to go to the gym just for a bit of exercise and to get out of the house (I’m told it’s a good thing to touch grass but I’m not 100% convinced XD). When I couldn’t find a solution to the funk I started feeling really about everything I was doing. What is the point in going to the gym? I’m tired all the time, I have to go to bed at 2030, I never seem to loose any weight. I hate the way I look in the mirror. Am I a good wife to Rawthorm? Is he happy? And it all goes downhill from there. I just didn’t feel like streaming and I was wallowing. I am coming out the other side though. Surprisingly Horizon Forbidden West did help a little. Horizon Zero Dawn is one of my all time favourite games and I had so much fun sharing that playthrough with you that I couldn’t wait to play Horizon Forbidden West and playing it 2 days in a row did just enough to start me off in the right direction. I’ll get there, It’s hard to explain when I can only tell you half a story.
Maybe one day I will be able to tell all but for now, just know, that I am getting better and I don’t think there are going to be any more missing streams without me at least telling you guys beforehand. Speaking of streams, I’ve got some good updates coming.
Lets start with my computer. As you guys know, I’ve slowly been updating my computer for a little while now. All I have left is to update my graphics card and graphics card cooling solution. So here are my new specs and a photo update!
Case :NZXT H9 flow
CPU: Intel Core i9-13900K
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER
Mobo: NZXT N7 Z790
Ram: Corsair Domintor DDR5 64GB (4x16GB)
Hard Drives:-
-Samsung MZ1L23T8HBLA 3.5TB
-Samsung SSD 950 EVO 500GB
-Samsung SSD 950 EVO 250GB
Monitors:-
-BENQ G2420HDBL x2
-LG UltraGear 27GN88A
CPU Cooler: Kraken elite 360 RGB
Mouse: Logitech G502 X (White)
Keyboard: Logitech G213 Prodigy
Webcams:-
-Elgato Facecam Pro
-Microsoft LifeCam
Headphones/Mic: Astro A40 with mix amp
Elgato Stream Deck Mk2. (White)
Elgato Stream Deck + (White & Pink)
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I’m excited. Hopefully it wont take long to save up. Once I have a new GPU then I will be top spec for a few months. On another note, my H510i PC case is now for sale so that gets me a little money towards a GPU 😊
We had a Thursday stream last week with the release of Horizon Forbidden West and so far it has not disappointed. I’m still getting to grips with a few of the new mechanics but it’s going well. As you can see from my Sunday selfie I was so excited for the game I put on battle paint just for the occasion. As much as I would love to it’s not going to happen for every stream but I felt the occasion warranted a little something extra.
Todays stream of Rainbow Six Siege was awesome. Thanks to everyone who dropped by and played some games with me. It was fantastic. I was carried in every single game and I did not deserve any of the wins I got.
My Horizon Zero Dawn playthrough is still going up on YouTube every Wednesday and I have started streaming on YouTube as well! So every Friday I will be live on YouTube playing Horizon Forbidden West so I wont have to edit any the videos for them to go up there! Win Win :D
I am off from my day job all week next week, so if you guys want to play any games or you see my playing anything on discord, come and hang out with me, lets play some games!
Have a wonderful week next week, Make good choices and I will see you next week!
Lady Rawthorm
xxx
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pacificwaternymph · 2 years
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so ive been reading your kid xornoth stuff and i really like it! and i saw that you had a s2 au with the witch shelby and i thought, ‘what if s2 shelby is s1 shelbys reincarnation, and xornoth also gets reincarnated?’ idk how they meet but kid xornoth, in my head, might become sort of an apprentice to witch shelby.
anyways heres to hoping this ask makes sense i woke up at 7am and its now 2am lol have a good day!
Aw, thank you!
I really like that idea, especially since Sausage has been pushing the reincarnation plotline, it's pretty plausible.
In this scenario, I imagine it going something like this:
Shelby finds a kid wandering around in the Evermoore. He's lost and confused and scared, his clothes are torn up, and he's covered in mud and dirt and infected cuts and scrapes. They look like they haven't eaten in days.
Shelby takes him back to her witch hut, of which he is suspicious and a bit scared. They say that them and their brother don't have good experiences with witches, but she reassures them that she isn't going to hurt them. He doesn't fully believe her, but he's desperate enough to follow her anyway.
She cleans the kid up and treats his injuries, asking how long he was in there. They respond that they don't know, but it had to have at least been a couple of days. His memory is all messed up, he can't remember a single thing about the time he spent in the fog.
She asks them what their name is, and they tell her it's Xornoth. She asks if he has any family she can contact, to which he replies yes, he has a twin brother. Shelby starts picking up ingredients to do a cauldron call (basically like a facecam call but through a cauldron) and asks what their brother's name is. She nearly drops the bottle she was holding when he says his name is Scott.
She checks to reaffirm that they're thinking of the same Scott, before calling him. He’s kind of confused why she called him, but the second she mentions Xornoth… he goes still. She asks if he’s okay, which he ignores and says he’ll be right there, and hangs up.
Of course, Shelby’s a little concerned and more than a little confused, but she reassures Xornoth that their brother is on his way and should be here soon.
He seems relieved, saying he’s glad Scott made it out, which confuses her even more because Scott hasn’t been to the Evermoore in at least a week, and he’s certainly never mentioned getting lost in it. She’s about to ask them what they mean, when there’s a loud thump from outside, and suddenly the doorbell starts ringing over and over.
Shelby opens it and lets Scott in. He’s severely distressed, and grips Shelby by the forearms, asking desperately where is he? Where’s Xornoth? She leads him upstairs, where Xornoth is sitting on her bed, and when the two see one another, they freeze.
Xornoth asks what happened to Scott.
“What happened to me!? What happened to YOU!?”
Yeah. So turns out, Xornoth and Scott are twins. Or- they were. Xornoth swore they were only in the Evermoore for a few days. But Scott’s twin had been missing for ten years.
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a-jynx · 3 years
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Dream; - usually really aware when you guys plan date nights! Even with his busy schedule, he’s on top of remembering important nights - he doesn’t want you to feel neglected or forgotten :’) - however he can get forgetful when he’s playing with Sap and George, or streaming, but when he does oh, he feels devastated and will definitely become clingy
[Short imagine]
12:30 PM - he’d forgotten. You sighed, closing your phone and slouching into the couch, listening to your boyfriend’s laughs echo throughout your shared home; Sapnap’s screams filtering through as well.
Frowning, you turned on the living room TV and turned on Netflix, deciding that a movie would take away from the small sting in your gut. You knew he hadn’t meant to get sucked up into his work, and this one time of a few that he’d forgotten, but that doesn’t stop the sadness twisting in your gut. Turning on the Twilight series, and obviously horrible but entertaining favorite [team Jacob anyone?] before grabbing your warmed-up Panda Express and engrossing yourself into the world of vampires and werewolves.
2:45 AM
Dream groaned as his screen flashed a dull red, congratulating George and Sap about their win from their Minecraft Manhunt; 2 hunters. Glancing at the time, he rubbed at his face and clicked out of everything, ending his video. Stretching he leaned back and glanced towards the bed, expecting you to already be cuddled up and passed out, but the comfy queen was empty…
Furrowing his brows, he scooted his chair back and left his room, moving downstairs as Sap came out of his room, still grinning.
“Hey man, nice hunt, though I’m surprised you made it go for so long,” Sap groaned as he joined Dream on the stairwell making the dirty blonde frown.
“What’re you talking about? Manhunts always go for a couple of hours?” Dream snorted as Sap frowned, only to sigh and pat his friend on the shoulder.
“Dude… You had date night tonight..?”
Dream’s eyes widened as he rushed further downstairs, turning into the living room and frowning at the sight. You curled up into the corner, an empty container on the coffee table and the credits rolling of The Twilight Saga; new moon. Squatting down next to you, he gently cradled your cheek as you hummed in sleep, cracking open your eyes as you broke into a smile, your eyes settling on your frowning boyfriend.
“Hiya handsome,”
“Hi, baby… Fuck, I’m so sorry I forgot,” Dream leaned into you, pressing soft kisses to your cheeks, nose, chin, lips - anywhere his lips could reach as you chuckled, raising your hand and threading it through his hair. “I just got so lost in the video, but that’s no excuse I promise I’ll make it up to you-”
“Dream, babe it’s okay, this is like… The first time you’ve forgotten, just don’t make it a full-time thing, yeah?” You laughed as Dream dove into you, circling your waist with his arms and picking you up, causing you to yell out.
“Clay!”
“We’re going to bed, and I’m not letting you go until I see fit,” Dream stated, carrying you upstairs as you glanced to Sapnap, waving to him before you and your still disappointed boyfriend disappeared into his room.
Sapnap - he’s definitely more forgetful than Dream, but he tries okay? - a lot more clingy when he realizes what he did, definitely becomes more of a hopeless romantic
[Short imagine]
“Shouldn’t you be gone by now?” You turned away from the fridge, seeing Dream entering from the living room as you shrugged, closing it with a sigh.
“Yeah, we should’ve left half an hour ago but he joined Karl’s stream… Again.” You mumbled the last bit as Dream frowned, leaning against the cabinets as you messed with the strings of your boyfriends’ basketball shorts.
“Aren’t you gonna say something?”
“Honestly? Probably not, I mean we’ve already had a talk about if he forgets-” you paused when a sudden crash came from upstairs, causing you and Dream to turn towards the stairs as Sap came barreling down. You blinked as he stood in front of you, wrapping his arms around your waist and tucking his face into the crook of your neck, making you giggle.
“Hi, bubs,”
“I’msorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimhorribleicantbelieveiforgotimsosososorry-” Sap mumbled into your skin, as you reached up, ruffling his hair as he pressed kisses along your neck, going along your shoulder before trailing back up and pressing his lips against your chin before settling back between your shoulder and throat.
Dream snickered from next to you guys as he dug into the fridge, digging out some pizza from lunch as Sap looked up and glared at his friend. “So, what reminded you?” The dirty blonde hummed, getting ready for his dinner as your brunette boyfriend scoffed.
“I obviously reminded myself! I’m not that-” he paused as a chime came from his shorts’ pocket causing him to cringe. Furrowing your brows, you reached in and tugged out his phone, breaking into a smile as you realized it was an alarm.
‘ Date Night Idiot!’ had been going off for an hour, you assuming Sap had snoozed it, not realizing why his alarm was going off.
“Dumb.. Okay! I had to set a few reminders,” Sap mumbled, pressing more kisses to your warmed skin, trying to hide away from his embarrassment. You closed his phone and slipped it back into his pocket before grabbing his hand and tugging him upstairs with you, his head hung low as you went into his room, besides a small light from his screen. You jumped onto his bed, opening your arms as Sap shot you a small grin and dove into you, cuddling into your chest and pressing more kisses to your free skin, his hand sneaking up your shirt just resting against your skin, rubbing his thumb across your navel while smiling into your kiss.
“I know I’m extremely forgetful when it comes to romantic stuff, but please always know that I love you even if I have a shitty way of showing it,” he mumbled against your lips, moving his hand from your stomach to your face, holding your cheek as you stared at each other. Sure, you could be upset at him, you could ignore him, maybe argue… But why miss out on warm cuddles and make-up kisses?
Karl - he’s the one who usually makes the dates up! He always tries to make sure his streams and recording don’t overlap the days you agreed on - but who says you always remember?
[Short imagine]
It was the long-awaited shock & facecam stream! You had promised to follow in your friend’s - George, Sap, and Dream’s - steps in a shock stream and even threw in a facecam if your followers had gotten one of your posts to hit one million likes, and your fans did not disappoint! Your tweet promising this stream had hit two million likes, 10,506 retweets, and continuous replies. So, here you were, setting up for your stream when Karl walked in…
“Sweetness..? What’re you, uh, what’re you doing..?” He nervously giggled as he stood beside you, his hands nervously tugging on your hoodie as you turned towards him, frowning.
“I’m getting ready for the shock stream? Remember? I planned this a couple months ago and we agreed on today?” You blinked at your boyfriend. You both had talked about this stream since you arranged the day - why is it suddenly a problem?
“Oh, well, remember we agreed that today - tonight - was going to be date night? We were gonna watch some of the new season of Survivor?” Karl hummed as you blinked, turning fully towards him with your eyes wide as you glanced towards your starting soon screen. You could feel your heart plummet into your stomach - you had done the one thing you and Karl agreed to never do, yet here you were..
“Baby, oh my god, I’m- holy shit, I’m so sorry,” you murmured, rubbing your face as Karl shot you a small grin, scooting closer and musing your hair as you leaned into his touch, cradling your own face with dread coursing through you.
“Bubs, it’s okay, I know you’ve been planning this, and I should’ve thought ahead-”
“No!” You burst, gripping his wrist and pressing light kisses to it before groaning against his skin. “No, it’s not okay, we always try and plan for us to have date nights between our busy schedules and it’s such an asshole thing for me to not double-check that it was-” Karl leaned down, quieting you with pressing his lips to yours. You melted into it as he turned your chair to face him more, causing him to grip your hands tightly in his before pulling away.
“It’s okay because I want you to go through with this stream! You’ve been excited about it and I know the guys are wanting to join, besides-” he paused, pressing butterfly-like kisses to your hands as you grinned at your boyfriend.
“Date night can be any night for us,”
“So, what I’m hearing is you love me more than Survivor?” You giggled as Karl furrowed his brows and scoffed, dropping your hands dramatically before pulling his gaming chair next to yours as you began to set up your facecams’ final touches.
“I love you, like a lot, but know your boundaries, Bubs,” Karl scoffed as you rolled your eyes, leaning over and pressing a quick kiss to his cheek and clicking through your screens before popping up on your stream with a ‘Hey guys!’
~~~
helloooo~ long time no writing and im so sorry about that - life has gotten a little crazy and I sort of lost motivation to write a lot again. i hope these headcanons and my future idea for some can hold you over until I have some sort of - lack of better word - motivation :'D
until tomorrow, i hope you have a beautiful day ~ J
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angy-mouse · 3 years
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BESTIE IM HERE AND I HAVE MCYT WHO WOULD LOVE BBW!!
First off Awesamdude! Like please he adore you and kiss you everywhere. Loves to see you be confident and will buy you sets of lingerie to see you wear. Gets full of hard thinking of you riding him.
Second Punz, like mans adores ass and tits but when his s/o has chub he just fuckinf looses it. Loves feeling all over you.
And of course sapnap mans would worship every bit of you. 
This took 3 days and its 2500 words... I have no regrets *^* fluff first, then smut under the cut
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Awesamdude strikes me as the kind of guy who says he loves all kinds of women, and he actually does. He’d never let you feel self-conscious just because of how clear he makes it that he loves your body. When you hug him he probably holds your hips as you pull away, giving them a squeeze as he just looks at you with a smile because you’re just so gorgeous. He's the kind of guy who makes you feel just as beautiful in a modest dress or something that shows every roll. He'd give you that cute little smile, take your hand and twirl you so he could get the full view, and give you a kiss on the forehead and tell you, "You look stunning, darling. Are you ready to go?"
Of course, just because he thinks you look beautiful in everything doesn't mean he doesn't prefer certain clothes over others. When you’re going out I think he’d wanna put you in a dress. He just seems like the kind of guy to love seeing his girl in dresses. A flowy sundress (with pockets bc he’s a feminist) when you’re going somewhere casual, but on the special occasions when you go out to a formal restaunt he’d buy you a tight fitting dress that showed off your figure. On the (now rare) occasion that you put on the dress and don’t like how it makes your fat look, he’d gently coax you out of the bathroom to come show him. “Oh, what’s not to like, baby?” He’d take your hands in his and put them on his shoulders to make you stop hiding behind them. “God, you look gorgeous.” He’d grip your waist and pull you into his chest, kissing your cheek before trailing his lips along your jaw. “If you really don’t like it I’m sure we can find you something else to wear, but you’ll still wear this just for me sometime, right?”
As for my emotional support chads-
I feel like Punz loves bbw. He’s the type to see a big girl across the club and instantly go “that bitch gonna be mine… at least for tonight”. He wouldn’t shy away from your fat- look me in the eye and tell me this man wouldn’t give you tummy or booty rubs when you cuddle. That’s right, you can’t. Because you’re absolutely right: Punz is the assiest ass man to ever ass (did that make sense? No, but I’m vibing so shut up) but he also watches anime and if there’s one thing I know about motherfuckers who watch anime (coming from a motherfucker who watches anime) it’s that they fucking love tiddies.
If you’re dating Punz then 1: mans is smacking your ass whenever you’re in reach. Especially if you decide to be sweet and refill his water bottle while he’s streaming. He doesn’t care if he’s got facecam, hand cam, all of the above- he’s smacking that ass. He’d get a good whack in as soon as you entered his peripheral, then grab your ass and pull you closer until you gave in and leaned down to give him a kiss. “Thank you, baby girl,” he’d hum as you traded his bottle for a full one. “Isn’t she so sweet chat? Fuckin’ wifey shit.” And 2: if he walks in on you laying on your back he’s faceplanting into your tiddies. If you’re laying on your front he’s faceplanting on your ass. Only way to stop him is to tell him seriously that you don’t like it but let’s be real you wouldn’t do that. Whether he’s on your tits or ass he’d mindlessly play with the fat, grabbing a handful and kneading, give a rough pat to make it jiggle against his face and make himself giggle- honestly more fat in Punz’s mind is just more to play with.
Sapnap is probably a bbw appreciator. He might not be as much of a fanatic as Punz, but he’s definitely crushed on a few big girls. I think he’s the kind of guy to not care much about someone’s body beyond ‘yeah I can acknowledge that they’re attractive’ until he starts crushing because we all know when you get a strong crush suddenly everything that motherfucker does is hot. Suddenly he’s watching you adjust your shorts after they ride up due to chub rub, he’s grinning like an idiot because you found something cute in your size and you’re just so happy about it, he’s seeing clothes and thinking about how good they’d look on you. He’d probably admit he likes you on pure accident, maybe you’re hyping yourself up after one too many people were cruel to you about your weight. And he’s watching you pace his room (because of course you had to get your best friend in on this) going between ‘fuck all of them I’m a bad bitch you can’t kill me’ and ‘is it really that difficult to find someone who likes big girls’ and he’s tired from staying up all night playing with George and Dream so he just mutters, “so just date me, then… I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
Once you start dating he discovers the joy of ‘girlfriend wearing your clothes’ and can’t get over it. Maybe you avoid it, telling him you don’t think they’ll fit, but he looks so excited to see you in them, so you try. Some hoodies and shirts actually fit pretty well, but some are a little tight around your chest and stomach. The first time you felt embarrassed and tried to sneak out of the bathroom to grab a bigger one, but he was waiting for you. He let out a strained breath and you were afraid he was trying to not be mean. “Fuck, darlin’, you look so pretty in my clothes,” he’d breathe out, settling his hands on your hips and pulling you closer. He’d pull you into bed to cuddle, spooning you and loving the feeling of your plush body against him. His hands would constantly be all over you whenever your around- on your thigh when you sit next to him, cupping your tit when you’re spooning, rubbing your hip when you’re laying with your head on his chest, giving you tummy and back rubs when you don’t feel good- he just wants to touch.
Sam always wanted you on his lap. You tried to resist at first, all too conscious of your weight, but he’d pout until he managed to pull you to sit on his thighs, pressing a kiss behind your ear with a smile. “See, darling, I’m fine. Now come on, settle down so we can watch the movie.” And soon it became a habit to settle on your boyfriend’s lap whenever he was on the couch. Of course, often he couldn’t seem to keep his hands under control and he’d find himself reaching under your skirt to rub and knead at your thigh. He seemed to always find himself losing interest in the movie, much more concerned with trailing sweet kisses down your neck and slipping his fingers into your panties.
“My sweet baby,” he cooed as he made you come on his fingers again. You moaned, hand trying clumsily to get him off through his sweatpants through your own pleasure. He gently tsked, crooking his fingers and grinning when your hand faltered against him. “Let me focus on you, darling,” he persuaded, lifting your skirt up around your waist to watch his fingers work. He groaned as he saw the familiar black lace and set to work taking your outer clothes off. “You’re wearing the set I bought you, baby?”
You nodded, pressing a kiss to his jaw. “Wanted to look pretty for you,” you murmured as you helped him tug your dress off. He groaned as you exposed the full set to him, lace accentuating your gorgeous body, and turned yourself to straddle him, grinding against his hard on in his sweats.
“You look gorgeous,” he gushed. His hands roamed your body like he couldn’t believe you were letting him see- let alone touch you. “I want you to ride me, baby,” he whispered reverently, grabbing your ass and pulling you to sit directly on his cock so he could latch his mouth onto the skin above your breast.
You moaned, scrambling to pull his cock out. “Please,” you whimpered, pumping him in your hand as he marked up your chest. He pulled your panties to the side and let you sink down on him, throwing his head back as he was wrapped in your tight heat.
“Fuck, baby,” he panted, eyes flying as he watched you bounce on his cock, every part of your body calling his gaze. It was everything he’d ever wanted- seeing his goddess-like girlfriend use him for your own pleasure and take what you wanted from him, wearing what he picked out for you. His hands gripped your ass as he thrust his hips to meet yours, swallowing your moans with a sloppy kiss. “God, you’re so perfect.”
Punz nearly didn’t make it through the front door the first time he brought you home. He growled into your mouth as he pressed you against the hallway wall, your hands pushed under his unbuttoned shirt feeling him up while his found the zipper on your tight dress. You helped him get the dress off with just a hint of shyness that immediately vanished as he groaned and groped your ass with one hand and your tit with the other, grinding his body against yours. “So fucking sexy, bunny,” he groaned, bucking sharply against you and grinning when it pulled a sharp moan from your lips. “Mmm, come here, baby girl.” He picked you up by the backs of your thighs and wrapped your legs around his waist, grinning against your neck as you shreiked in surprise and latched onto his shoulders.
“I gotcha, bunny,” he promised, pulling you off the wall with a deep kiss and carrying you off to the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed with you on his lap, leaving one hand kneading your ass while the other slid up to thread through your hair. He purred against your lips as you grinded down on him, his hips coming up to meet yours. “Fuck, baby,” he groaned, giving a sharp pull on your hair so he could mark up the underside of your jaw and grinning at your moans- he loved every reaction he pulled from you. He needed more.
“Wanna eat you out,” he growled, helping you push his shirt off his shoulders. “You gonna sit on my face, bunny? Let me drown in your sweet pussy? You panted out a hundred breathy ‘yes's- he’d made it clear earlier, when he made you beg him to finger you while he drove, that he needed verbal consent. You climbed off his lap so he could lay back and as soon as he was settled he was tugging you over by the hips. You kneeled over his head, glancing down at him to double-check that he was okay with this.
He had a dopey smile on his lips as he looked up at your gorgeous body. When he caught your eye he grinned wider, sticking his tongue out and lifting his eyebrows invitingly. You giggled at him but it turned into a moan as he pulled you to his mouth, eagerly lapping at your folds and curling his tongue around your clit. You let out a breathy moan, trying to stop yourself from grinding against his mouth but as soon as you made the slightest movement his strong hands on your hips were pulling you to do it again. He growled against you as he ravenously ate you out, one hand holding your thigh like an anchor and the other guiding your hips- save for when he gave a swift smack on your ass.
He moaned almost as loud as you did as you came on his tongue, making positively obscene noises as he slurped up every last drop. “Good fucking bunny,” he cooed, using your shaky legs to his advantage and firmly holding you down on his mouth. “Can you do it again for me? I’m not done eating yet.”
Sapnap was just so touchy. You never had to question what he thought about your body because his actions told you clearly- but he still made sure to tell you.
“So- haaa- look so pretty, darlin’,” he panted, holding his hair out of his face so he didn’t miss a single second as you sucked him off. “Fuck, so fucking good to me.” You gave a pleased hum at the praise, pulling off his cock to nuzzle against his inner thigh. He leaned closer and cupped your cheeks to pull you up to meet him, covering your face in soft kisses. He pulled you up to sit sideways on his leg, distractedly pushing his fingers into your panties as your hand returned to his cock. He pulled away from your lips just enough to give a needy whine, hot breath fanning over your face. “Fuck, sugar. So fucking pretty- gorgeous, baby.”
You pressed forward, swallowing his praise as you rocked your hips, grinding your clit against his palm as he fucked you open on his fingers. He groaned into your mouth as your hand pumped his cock, stomach tensing as he resisted bucking into your hand- he had no right, he told himself. He should be happy that such a gorgeous, perfect person wanted to pleasure him in the first place- he should be grateful for anything you wanted to give him.
On that note he gently brushed off your hand so he could focus, pumping his fingers inside of you while he searched for your g-spot. He smiled against your lips as you started whimpering, one hand latching onto his shoulder and the other onto his wrist to ground yourself as he worked you closer to your orgasm. “Let me make you come, sugar,” he coaxed, nose brushing yours as he refused to pull away. He had pure adoration in his eyes as your hips jerked against his hand. “Just wanna make you feel good, baby.”
You buried your face in his neck to muffle your moans as you came all over his thick fingers and he carried you through it, cooing how wonderful you were and how pretty you looked when you came until you were pushing his hand away. He laid you down on your back on the bed, covering your face with sweet kisses as you came down from your high then moving down your body. He gently helped you out of your bra and panties then lay down between your legs, resting his head on your chest as he waited for you to come down.
When your hand came up to cup his cheek he looked up at you with a grin, propping himself up and kissing you softly as one hand drifted down to line himself up. “Gonna make you come one more time, darlin’,”
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genius11rare · 3 years
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AH ChitChat Notes 3 22 21
Chitchat 32221 with Jeremy , michael and matt ft disembodied voices of lindsay and maybe kaden , gus in chat and joins
Jeremy: Kaden spoke up because of donuts earlier… Michael: Jacks time is over now… but he will be on stream later. Jeremy: oh yeah schedule. Slight last minute changes doing Fall Guys first cuz S4 came out… me michael  lindsay and matt did a letsplay in it earlier today … gus will be doing fall guys this stream (eyyy)... oh yeah and i wanna impersonate what jack does. Matt: do it. Jeremy: and if you're watching on the site we can see your chat like FatHippoHippo wrote BET in all capitals … yeah i just wanted to get into the spirit and be like “what would jack do, what would he think is funny” and that was it. Lindsay: alsoone of those WWJD bracelets from the 90s What Would Jack Do… (matt: ive repurposed them) Jeremy: so how are you doing? Lindsay: good weekend i guess , just telling Matt we watched Big Hero 6 yesterday (Jeremy: aw hell yell) still an awesome movie , kids loved it. Jeremy: where they scared of - idk if he has a name the kabuki villain… *looking it up* apparently its Yokai… guess they never really say it cuz that's generic. Lindsay: that's VERY generic. Michael: IVE GOT TO TAKE THIS CALL *facecam becomes void* Jeremy: ok spoiler alert for Big Hero 6 but just looking at the wiki… it makes an audacious claim. It says “professor robert calahan OR ALSO BETTER KNOW as his villain name Yokai”... is it? Lindsay: well its based on a comic right so i guess canonically he has a name…. But to answer your question No they werent scared … anyway something we noticed upon rewatching is that 2 characters before a MAJOR event happens to the fistbump… but DON'T do the explosion… like oooohhh foreshadowing. Michael: not really foreshadowing if they keep doing it throughout the movie , if anything its foreshadowing that like… hell… whats the robots name - baymax learning it… not really foreshadowing the building explodes (gen notes MAJOR EVENT) … what blew my mind was that movie has a post credits scene. Jeremy: oh yeah was it like with the dudes father. Michael: Fred yeah! Remember remarking upon them entering the house theres a portrait of the dad and i just went “his dads just Stan Lee… just a portrait of him” Post credits scene and guys talking to painting and - wasn't paying attention but he like hits his head on it and the wall opens up to show a superhero room with paraphernalia everywhere and Stan Lee walks in like “son we got a lot to talk about” Jeremy: Chat asking about if i watched the wrestling PayPerView… remember how i updated you last that the guy died in the ring after being set on fire (Michael: lemme guess hes a zombie now) - yep exactly last night a hand reached up and grabbed someones leg , he came out of the smoke with a melted messed up mask so yeah…. Hes a furry (i think?) zombie clown Michael: hey wait a minute let me read the chat , someone named Gus said “whoa no idea there was a post credit scene”  “what is a fastfood restaurant combo wish would open” Lindsay: Miss my KenTaco Hutt… Michael: idk im usually just in the mood for SOMETHING , not looking to combine , only time is when i want a certain food and they don't have the same sides i want other places have . like Sonic is amazing for sides , apps and drinks… don't care for entrees , but if i could get Sonic sides at McDonalds or Taco bell or something.. Jeremy: guess in the same vein id combine Dairy Queen with a lot of places (Matt: i was about to say) to get a BLIZZARD with whatever. Matt: that's how it usually goes anyway , you get the food , you drive by the Dairy Queen and get a desert - you don't get the food at Dairy Queen cuz why - just why Lindsay: i mean theres icecream but there isnt really fastfood places for other deserts… like theres not really a Cake or Cupcake place (Matt: not yet *tilts head at camera like “you know what i want”* ) there IS the cupcake ATM Matt: alright checking the google… Michael: Matts checking the driving distance. Jeremy: another questions whil matts looking up cakes (Matt: oh i already have it) nevermind then. Conware asks “what is your fave controller for console and whats fave controller you own” Jeremy: Idk really… i know for a while everyones was the Elite 2 Michael: yeah just most comfortable. Matt: well that's like a specialty type… if its a stock one then the switch pro controller is pretty good. Michael: i mean i also have this 8Bit do SNES bluetooth controller thing , love it Lindsay: i love the nintendo switch controller grip… makes it feel like it curves comfy around your palms Jeremy: the XBOX sea of thieves one is great (Matt: i was about to say…) got a glow in the dark skull in the middle , RT is like a gold tooth , is partly see through Matt: and it comes with some exclusive stuff for Sea of Thieves Lindsay: yeah like Motion Sickness. Matt: i got one that's just a donut. Lindsay: gave me an idea… you know how theres Pez Dispensers (matt: heard of them) yeah and how you don't really even use them right you just eat the candy and play with the thing  ( *matt nods approvingly* yeah about right) what if we invent a controller where every once in a while it opens up to give a snack. (Matt: yeah like everytime you get an achievement, Jeremy: yeah i did good! Just go up to the controller and eat it) “You Are Good Boy” Matt: be funnier if it just throws at you “everyone have a fave seasons and followup do you like seasons where you grew up or where you are now?” Jeremy: i mean springs probably my fave its easy to be outside , not boiling hot nor snow everywhere… great time to camp and fish , falls cool with changing colors… texas is like “do you want REALLY hot or hot?”  Michael: i do really like Fall on the East Coast but its like - yeah i miss it and its nice to be there when it happens where its light jacket weather. I used to wear sweatshirts all the time - i don't bother with long sleeves in texas cuz i know im taking it off within 30 min…  never knew about the Water Cup thing until i lived in texas where restaurants just HAVE water cups… blew my mind its free  - because people will drop dead . noticed they just have this seperate stack of clear cups which is i guess like “i BETTER not see any soda in that cup THAT'S  A WATER CUP!”. I don't like it when its 105 degrees but i do like being able to just wear Tshirts most of the year and not dealing with snow Lindsay: i like Fall the most cuz like its blend of i guess i embrace the basic bitch stereo types of fall , want my pumpkin spice latee but ALSO i know halloween is coming and ive said before how THAT'S like my religious holiday so like… i come alive. Matt: probably fall , maybe winter. I don't go out much but fall is like the right amount of cool but not TOO cool. Jeremy: over the weekend me and kat went to a town called rockfort (i think?) which is like right on the ocean , the weather was a little cold for it , like 50 maybe and the sea breeze made it chillier… im not really a beach person just more water. You say beach and you think  like Boogie Boarding Bros (Michael: whoooaah boogie. Lindsay: beach volleyball) yeah .. id reather be on a rocky shore than a sandy beach. Michael: youd rather be like a mermaid sitting on the rocks *jeremy laughs loud* is that what you're saying Jeremy: yeah Matt: attracting sailors to their DOOM Lindsay: i gotta send you a link but theres this one TikTokker i guess that i watch that talks about that an eastern european beach she went to and was like “i cant wait to go on my beach outting yeah!” and she gets there its rocky , really windy , noones there and goes “ooh its really cold” Matt: depends the kind of beach to me… for me East Coast beaches SUCK *jeremy nods yep* its water you cant see anything in its terrible Lindsay: that's also texas beaches , all brown. Matt: its just one of those things where you get in the water and your like “ok… at anymoment i could be attacked by everything around me”  Michael: well that can happen on land too matt (Gen Notes WELCOHME TA JOISEY!!!) (paraphrasing jeremy here) Jeremy: theres this guy who flys a drone out over beaches into the ocean , and he released the footage… apparently due to there being a lot less people now theres just Great White Sharks that go relatively close to beaches now… there are times where hes filming people playing and like 10 ft away is a fucking shark ya know just swimming. And cuz they're really far away hed be like “id see it , film it , then go to a lifeguard and show it like “oh btw…” “ Michael: so you know 2 hours ago someone may have been eaten. MattL he should put a speaker on the drone to like announce the sharks like HEY! DEATH OUT THERE!. Lindsay: “whats that Dronie? Theres a shark in the water?!?” Jeremy: and it was funny seeing that behavior where everyonce and a while a shark would be swimming then someone would do something near it not seeing the shark and the shark just goes “fuck dat” and swims away MattL god dude…. So close to death *gus joins* Lindsay: oh you're the guy who was like Texas beaches have Tar Gus: oh yeah i grew up in texas and i thought all beaches were like that just “oh you don't sit on the tar”
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sam-lives-story · 6 years
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#SamLives - Chapter 11
“Presenting Tonight’s Cast of Characters”
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Also find the latest chapters of this story on [Archive Of Our Own]
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Jack hadn’t been lying when he’d said that he and Mark were planning on doing some collabs. In the few days that followed the initial video, they recorded a good nine or ten videos worth of content each, most of it consisting of two-player games. (Being able to record one session for two channels had its perks.) Jack still hadn’t gotten over his wariness of technology in that time. He had to steel his nerves before starting every session, had to take a breath before hitting ‘record’. He found himself frequently checking his facecam on the monitor to make sure nobody was in the background, and every flicker, every stutter, every lag in whatever game he was playing made his hands tense and his breath hitch.
Today was no different. After spending a good five minutes mentally convincing himself that his computer mouse wasn’t about to come to life and strangle him, he and Mark dove head-first into a new game of “Sea of Thieves”. It was just the two of them this time, with no time to schedule a play time with Bob or Wade or Ethan. At the moment, Jack was trying to fend off skeletal attackers while his friend dug up the buried treasure.
“Shit! Fuck! Fuckin’ bastards!” He took another swipe at the nearest skeleton, cutting it down. Another attacker was quick to take its place. “Hah! That’ll teach ye not to mess wit’ ol’ Jackaboy.”
He pulled out a blunderbuss and took two shots straight through the newcomer’s chest.
“DIE BITCHES! How’s that chest comin’, Markerino?”
Mark, who Jack now realized had been oddly quiet the past few minutes, let out only a distracted hum in response. Jack turned his avatar to look at Mark’s rather voluptuous character, only to find him standing still over the half-buried treasure chest. Jack chuckled, a little bewildered.
“Mark? Th’ fuck are you doin’?” he took a shot at another skeleton. “Are ye just waiting for it to unbury itself or–”
Thwack!
The familiar-yet-unexpected sound made Jack jump, his heart pounding in his chest as he whipped his head around to stare at Mark. The other YouTuber had turned his seat away from the desk, Nerf gun in hand, aiming at the closed door with narrowed, focussed eyes.
What the fucking–
Jack swallowed thickly and took a slow breath, his panic ebbing away to make room for amused irritation. He swiped a small crocheted Sam from his desk and chucked it at the side of Mark’s head.
“Hey! What–?!”
“Don’t fuckin’ scare me like that, shithead!” Jack shoved Mark’s shoulder playfully. “What th’ hell was that for?”
“Target practice.”
Mark’s grin was cheeky and a little mocking.
Jack blinked at him, slowly, fixing him with a look that clearly said ‘Are you fucking kidding me right now?’ He snatched the Nerf gun from Mark’s hand with a barely-restrained chuckle and brandished it in the other’s face. Mark took a swipe at it, pouting and trying to take back his toy.
“Hey!”
It turned into a game of Keep Away, with Jack holding the Nerf gun high above his head and Mark practically falling out of his chair and climbing over Jack in his attempt to reach it.
“I’ll use you fer target practice if you don’t–”
“Jack! Give that back, you asshole!"
“–get your head back in the game!” Jack suddenly whipped the Nerf gun back at Mark, who fumbled to catch it. “I’m dyin’ here!”
Mark clutched the gun tightly to his chest and retreated to the safety of his seat, pouting and hugging the toy as though Jack might attempt to steal it from him again. He stuck his tongue out childishly before turning back to his screen - and he stifled a laugh.
“Uh…” He carefully set his precious plastic weapon on the desk, out of Jack’s reach. “Not to alarm you, but I think we’re already dead.”
Jack’s focus snapped to his own screen, and sure enough, both he and Mark were now standing on the deck of a ghost ship, waiting their turn to return to the land of the living. He threw his hands in the air and flopped backwards in his chair.
“Fuckin’ DAMMIT all!” He sank in his seat with a groan, Mark’s deep giggles permeating the air around them both. “I blame you entirely for that.”
“Yeah...heh...yeah, that’s...that’s on me. Sorry, man…” Mark still hadn’t stopped giggling, his mood far too bright to be dimmed by a death in the game.
“I’m makin’ sure everyone knows it’s your fault,” Jack bemoaned from his slouched position. “I’m gonna make you buy me a fancy-ass tombstone, an’ put one o’ those shitty rhyming couplets on it…”
He held his hands out in front of him, pretending to frame the words.
“Here lies Jack Just blame his friend Whose Nerf gun brought Their bitter end.”
Mark’s only response was a slow golf clap while he pretended to be tearing up.
“Beautiful,” he told Jack, voice laced with false emotion. “Absolutely beautiful. You should’ve become a poet instead of a YouTuber. Clearly you were meant for greater things than video game commentary.”
Jack almost fell out of his chair in his attempt to chuck another Sam plush at Mark’s head.
“D’you think that cop really believed that nothing was wrong?” Jack asked Mark with a mutter later that evening.
Mark had already sent out the day’s raw videos from both him and Jack to Robin and Kathryn for editing, though only after doing a little bit of content cutting before passing them along. There were certain things that had to be cut out from their recordings that really, really didn’t need to be shared with anyone beyond their immediate group. Not yet.
“The guy from the other day?” Mark asked, looking up from his phone. “I dunno. I mean I don’t think he believed all the anonymous tips, anyway. He was trying not to crack a smile the whole time he was explaining stuff to us.”
Apparently, some of Jack’s fans had taken Anti’s appearance on the stream at face value. They had believed (rightfully so) that it was real, and when Jack went silent on all forms of social media for more than twenty-four hours after it had happened, people had started to panic. While nobody knew for sure where Jack lived, the local police station in Brighton had gotten call after call after call from concerned teens and young adults who all claimed that a YouTuber named Sean McLoughlin had almost been killed on a livestream. If it hadn’t been for the sheer number of phone calls and the video proof that looked almost too real to have been edited, Jack was sure the police would have ignored it.
But two days ago - three days after the stream itself - a police officer had come knocking on the apartment door asking if a Sean McLoughlin or a Jacksepticeye lived there.
After explaining - through stifled grinning and amused chuckles - that a lot of fans thought he had been hurt, Mark and Jack had tried to awkwardly laugh it off and explain that, no, it was just a video, and nobody had actually gotten hurt.
(Jack was wearing makeup on his neck again for recording, thank god, otherwise the bruises might have brought on some unwanted questions. As it was...)
“I dunno man.” Jack sighed deeply and scrubbed his hands over his face, sinking back on the couch. “I swear he kept lookin’ at my neck. I’m sure he watched the video for th’ sake of the calls. Probably checkin’ to see if I really got strangled.”
“Ah, quit worrying. I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Mark scrolled through Twitter again, reading a few more tweets before, “...and we’re sure we don’t want to get the police involved?”
Jack leveled him with a blank stare.
“Do you honestly think the police are gonna know how to deal wit’ a computer virus of a demon that came to life from my YouTube channel? I mean WE barely know what we’re doing and we’re fully invested in the lore of it all!”
Mark stifled a laugh.
“Okay, yeah good point,” he admitted. He shook his head, eyes falling back to his phone gain. “Fully invested in the lore...god, we sound like we’re trying to solve Five Nights At Freddy’s conspiracies. That’s how complicated this whole mess has become. Frankly, if anyone overheard what we were talking about in the cafe that first day I showed up, they’d probably think–”
Jack jolted upright in his seat, eyes wide and expression one of stunned realization.
“Holy shit.” He grabbed Mark’s arm and shook him a little, his movements suddenly intense and a brilliant grin splitting his face in two. “Holy shit!”
“Holy shit what?” Mark gripped his phone a little tighter so it wouldn’t go flying out of his hands from Jack’s enthusiasm.
“Mark, you’re a fuckin’ genius!”
“Well - I mean, yeah, I thought we established that, but what the hell did I say?!”
Mark was rightfully very bewildered by his friend’s sudden change of mood. He gave Jack a quick once-over with his eyebrows raised, wondering if he should be concerned.
“Five Nights at Freddy’s!” Jack exclaimed. He looked far too excited and far too proud of himself for his own good.
“...Five Nights at–”
“Dude! Don’t you get it?” Jack leapt up off the couch, pacing, and Sam - who had been dozing in Jack’s hoodie pocket - poked his ‘face’ out with a sleepy blink, wondering what all the commotion was about. “This whole thing is too fuckin’ complicated right now, right? We don’t know what exactly Anti is, or how to stop him from comin’ back. He’s solid but he’s not. He’s made of glitches but - who the hell even knows what that means.”
“Okay…?” Mark just watched the Irishman pace the room, his phone long forgotten in his lap. “Where are you going with this?”
“Anti doesn’t make sense!” Jack was grinning like an idiot. He stopped in his tracks to turn and face Mark. “We know why he’s here but that only gets us so far! We need somebody who’s used to picking apart ridiculous bullshit to find the real answers, somebody who already kinda knows what’s going on.”
“Jack, you’ve lost me,” Mark said flatly. “Who are you talking about, Robin? Amy?”
“No!” Jack was talking with his hands, talking with his entire body, like he couldn’t contain all the energy that had built up inside him. “Five Nights at Freddy’s. Crazy timeline. Bullshit lore. There’s only one person I know who was able to tear that shit to pieces and make sense out of it.”
And then it hit Mark like a load of bricks, and he was on his feet too, his exclamation coming out as a loud and incredulous question in the same moment that Jack was busting out the same words.
“MatPat?!”
“MatPat!”
“Waitwaitwait, hold on–” Mark was trying to sort out his thoughts, pinching the bridge of his nose while he watched Jack rush around in a frantic search for his cell phone. Mark didn’t have it right now and Jack couldn’t quite remember where it had ended up. “What the hell do you mean Matt already knows what’s going on?”
“Well, okay, he doesn’t know about Anti,” Jack admitted, his ass in the air while he leaned over the armchair in the corner to see if his phone was plugged in back there. “He knows about Sam though.”
“He knows about Sam?!” Mark’s jaw dropped.
At this point, Sam had abandoned Jack’s pocket to hover a few steps behind the Irishman, watching him with quiet curiosity. At Mark’s question, Sam let out a happy little squeak and nodded, twirling through the air a little.
“Did you tell him before you told me?” Before Jack could even answer, Mark had continued: “But he posted a video like two weeks ago about how Sam couldn’t possibly exist!”
“Well, duh, he posted that because he knows about Sam,” Jack rolled his eyes and shoved away from the armchair, detouring to the kitchen. He spoke up to be heard across the apartment. “He was tryin’ to throw people off. And I didn’t tell him about Sam.” Jack returned to the living room, cell phone in hand and a sheepish smile on his face. “He...er...kinda found out on his own.”
“How?”
“Tacos and Rachel Ray.”
Mark didn’t know how to respond to that.
“I have no idea how to respond to that.”
“Look…” Jack huffed and came back over to Mark, sitting on the edge of the coffee table while his friend sank slowly back onto the couch. Sam settled onto his shoulder and nuzzled up against Jack’s cheek with a quiet purr. “Sam was sick, so I brought him with me for the taco-making contest. Matt was on my team. He bumped into me, I tripped, Sam almost fell out of my hood, and Matt saw him.”
“And he didn’t freak out?”
Jack’s lips twitched into a wry smile and he looked up from his phone.
“Oh, he freaked out, but not until later.”
“Let me get this straight.” Mark watched Jack carefully as he spoke. Jack nodded and went back to shakily tapping out a message to Matt. “Just so we’re both on the same page. Sam exists, clearly. Anti exists. You, me, Robin, and Matt know about Sam. You, me, and maybe Robin know about Anti.”
“And Matt too now, sort of.”
“And Matt,” Mark agreed. “And Amy too, come to think of it. Is there anybody else who knows anything else, just in case we need to recruit people for a battle of the digital age?”
“Nope, nobody else. Don’t think so anyway,” Jack shook his head. He paused and looked thoughtful, setting his phone aside (looking relieved to get the thing out of his hands) and tapping his chin. “...though I probably should bring up that Anti mentioned being late for a date or something last time? What was the name...something...something Warfstache…?”Mark looked like he might explode
“WHAT?!”
“Oh my god!” Jack cackled, doubling over with laughter and trying not to slip off the edge of the coffee table he was sitting on. “Oh my fucking god your face! That was PRICELESS! You fuckin’ - Haha! - f-fuckin’ believed–” He could barely breathe he was laughing so hard, his laughter sounding a little wheezy.
Mark groaned and flopped backward across the couch, a low, pained chuckled escaping him.
”Oh, you absolutely piece of shit. Fuck you.”
“Y-Yeah, I - heh - I probably...haha...deserve that one…” Jack was grinning, wiping tears from his eyes.
Sam had bounced over to Mark to make sure he was okay and was now nestled on the American’s chest, Tim’s curious little eyes watching from the arm of the couch not even a foot away. The little box tumbled forward and landed right next to Mark’s head, patting his cheek softly in what Jack assumed was a comforting motion. Another low, rumbling laugh bubbled up from Mark’s chest.
“But no, to answer your question,” Jack continued once he could breathe again. “I think that’s everyone.”
“Good. Great. Excellent.”
Mark was absolutely done. Just...done.
“Ah, lighten up, Markimoo,” Jack snickered. “Consider it payback fer that Nerf scare.”
“Considering that you were implying that Warfstache is alive too, and that he and your evil twin are getting it on–”
“Hey! I only said they went on a date!”
“–I’d say we’re far from even right now.”
“Oh, fuck off! That’s totally even!”
“And what if I tricked you into thinking your Dr. Schneep guy was alive and I caught him flirting with Dr. Iplier?”
“Oh, dude, no,” Jack groaned, laughing through it. “Nooo...I mean, yeah, Henrik totally would. He’d flirt with anything that moved. But hell no.”
“See my point?”
The living room was pleasantly quiet for a long moment, save for the little questioning squeaks Sam was making from his position on Mark’s chest. Then Mark heard the buzzing clatter of plastic against the coffee table. Jack’s phone was ringing, but on silent. Mark cracked open one eye to glance at Jack, who suddenly looked a lot more tense than he had a moment before.
“...you good, Jack?” he murmured, watching the other YouTuber. Jack nodded stiffly, looking a little pale. “Is it MatPat? He calling back already?”
Jack swallowed thickly.
“Nah. It’s...just Robin.”
“Answer it,” Mark encouraged him evenly. “Go ahead. We’re all in the room with you, it’ll be fine.”
Jack nodded, the motion a little jerky, and he reached over to press the ‘Answer’ button. He quickly put it on speaker and withdrew his hand as though he’d been burned. The phone stayed sitting on the table.
“Jack?”
“Hey Robin,” Jack murmured.
Mark could see the way Jack started fidgeting the moment he heard Robin’s voice, saw his fingers tugging at the edges of his hoodie and saw the way his knee started bouncing rapidly. Like he had too much nervous energy, like it was trying to get out however it could.
“Hey! I just wanted to...you know. Check in,” Robin continued, a half-smile in his voice. “I got the videos from Mark. Why didn’t you tell me he was planning on visiting the UK?”
“That’s his fault,” Jack muttered, and a small smile made its way onto his face. “He didn’t fuckin’ tell me he was stoppin’ by until he was on my doorstep. So blame him.”
“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.” Robin’s words were a touch humorous for a moment. “Anyway...how’s everything going? How’s Sam?”
“Sam’s great!” Jack’s grin became more genuine, and he giggled when Sam bounced over to sit beside the phone. He was wiggling on the spot in excitement. “He and Tim are gettin’ along famously. He’s been so damn happy, Robin, I wish you could see ‘em together.”
“You can thank me later,” Mark chimed in with a smirk.
“Is that Mark?” Robin asked. “Am I on speaker?”
“Oh! Yeah, you are. Sorry. Shoulda said.” Jack chuckled softly.
“No, it’s fine!” Robin laughed a little too. “Hey Mark!”
“Hey Robin!”
“How are you doing though, Jack?” Robin’s tone had turned concerned, more strained than before. “And what the hell is going on with the whole Antisepticeye thing? I mean - I saw the stream. That–” A sigh crackled through the speaker. “I know for a fact I didn’t edit that, and it looked…Jack, it looked way too real. What the hell was that? Are you okay?”
Jack stiffened. He could feel Mark’s eyes on him, his look a knowing one. It had been five whole days since they had talked at the cafe, and while Jack had texted Robin back and forth a few times since then (in very brief interludes, as there were still moments Jack couldn’t even look at his own TV for fear of Anti jumping out of the dimmed pixels, let alone carry his phone in his pocket all day), not once had Jack brought up the livestream. Any time Robin asked about it Jack evaded his questions and changed the subject, or didn’t respond at all. He had been half-ghosting his friend and he knew it.
“Eh…” Jack cleared his throat and shrugged, though Robin couldn’t see it. “I’m fine.” He answered only half of the question. “A little worn out, but Mark an’ I have been really goin’ hard, knockin’ out tons of videos now so we can get some free time to hang out later…”
“Seán.”
And there it was, the gentle scolding that reminded Jack too much of his older brothers. Robin usually pulled that one out when Jack was working himself too hard or he hadn’t sent Robin his finished recordings yet. How Robin managed to make Jack feel like a misbehaving child every time he used it was a mystery to him...but it worked. Every damn time. Jack sighed and let out a quiet groan.
“I’ll tell you soon, I promise,” he whimpered. “I promise I will, it’s - it’s just - I can’t–” He dragged a hand through his hair, and his gaze landed on Mark. The other YouTuber had sat up in the past few minutes and was leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his expression a searching one. He quirked an eyebrow at the Irishman.
“One second, Robin,” he said softly, reaching over to tap the ‘mute’ button on Jack’s phone. He watched his friend for a long moment before speaking. “Jack...I’m not gonna push you to talk to him, but - oh my god, man. It’s almost been a whole week . The longer you wait, the more likely it’ll be for him to figure it out on his own. Or, worse, he’ll be hurt that you’re still keeping things from him. He already told you yesterday, people have been sending him tons of tweets and tumblr messages asking about you. Didn’t he tell you that some people wanted to know if you’re dead or not?”
Jack nodded stiffly, wincing.
“I told you I’d help you tell him the truth.” Mark smiled reassuringly. “I meant that, okay? And - hell, I can get Amy on the line, and we can have a big ol’ Sleepover Party Egos Theory Skype Call.”
Jack snorted out a nervous laugh, shaking his head in amusement. Sleepover…
“Only you would see it as a “sleepover” opportunity, Mark.”
“What can I say?” Mark grinned cheekily and winked. “I’m a fully-fledged man-child.” His grin faded back to a soft, understanding smile and he tried to catch Jack’s eye. “Waddaya say? You up for it?”
“...I eh…” Jack stared at his hands, his fingers fiddling with the hem of his sweatshirt while he thought.
Was he ready to talk about what had happened yet? Would Robin even believe him? Would he freak out, or take it all in stride like he had with Sam? Jack didn’t want to cause a panic and he didn’t want to make this a bigger deal than it already was. He didn’t want to push into painful and uncomfortable territory but...it seemed a little unavoidable at this point. He had known that, eventually, he would have no choice but to tell Robin - but he’d been trying to delay the inevitable. He’d been hoping beyond hope that this whole thing would blow over as though it had never happened and he wouldn’t have to even think about the livestream or its implications or Anti’s “haunting” his videos ever again.
But Mark was right. The longer he waited, the worse it could get.
Jack sighed heavily. His hand was shaking when he reached for his phone, but he still pressed the ‘mute’ button to let Robin hear them again.
“Hey Robin,” he mumbled, to let her know he was back. “You there?”
“Still here, Jack.” The usual friendly patience was in his voice, colored with a touch of concern for his friend
It helped Jack with what he knew he had to do next.
“I...eh. D’you mind waitin’ a few minutes?” he asked, wringing his hands in his lap. “Mark’s gonna get Amy on a Skype call wit’ us, an’ we can all talk face-to-face, and I’ll...I’ll fill you in on what’s been, er, happenin’ in my part of the world.”
“Really?” Robin asked, sounding brighter. “You’re actually going to tell me this time?”
“I - yeah. Yeah, I am.” Jack took a breath. His nervousness was clear with every word that left his mouth. “I’ll tell you everything.”
“Wait!”
Mark’s outburst made Jack jump and his head shot up.
“What–”
“My smoothie! I totally forgot my smoothie!”
Jack stared, and he heard Robin snickering on the other end of the call.
“Your smoothie,” he repeated, his lips twitching into some semblance of a smile. “You mean the one from after dinner? From, like, two hours ago?”
“Yes, from after dinner!” Mark rocketed off the couch, skirting the coffee table and grabbing his rental car keys as he went to the door. “It’s still in the car. This is super serious.”
“Super serious?” Jack repeated. He watched Tim bounce off the couch and hop curiously around the room in pursuit of Mark, doing his best to keep up. “More serious than Serious Shit?”
“YES! MORE SERIOUS THAN THAT!” Mark, who almost stepped on Tim in his haste to get to the door, let out a rather undignified squeak and immediately crouched to the ground beside the tiny box. “Oh, I'm so sorry! Are you okay? Did I hurt you? C’mere, my little biscuit, let’s get you off the floor. I would neeeever want you to get hurt, I would neeeever step on you…”
“Oh my god, Mark, you’re such a mom.”
“What? It’s not like you’re not the same way with Sam!”
At this, Jack chucked a pillow from the couch across the room, hitting Mark in the legs to avoid hitting Tim.
“Go get your fuckin’ smoothie!”
“Fine! I will!”
Mark flipped him off and pretended to storm out of the apartment, putting Tim on his shoulder and “slamming” the door shut (only to stop it at the last second to close it with a quiet click.) Jack shook his head with a smile. Only Mark.
“Hey...Jack?”
“Hm?” Jack returned his attention to his phone, still sitting beside him on the coffee table. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to ask...you tried to tell me before. Anti is real, right?”
“Yeah…” His answer was a tense one, his hands coming up to fiddle with the strings of his hoodie.
“Did…” Robin’s voice trailed off, and there was static in the speaker, like he had taken a breath. “So...did he really hurt you? On the stream.”
Jack swallowed thickly. He was suddenly very aware of the sore bruises on his throat, and he felt rather than saw Sam land lightly on his shoulder.
“What...eh…” He cleared his throat, and Sam nuzzled up against his jaw, little waves of reassurance and worry filtering into the back of his mind. “...w-what makes ye ask that?”
“I told you I was getting messages and asks,” Robin told him. He could hear footsteps in the background, movement. Like he was pacing. “And I turned them off for now, because Mark said I should wait until you told me what was going on. Which I can respect. But...some of the messages – people are really worried about you, Jack. And I am too. I couldn’t help it. I kept going back to watch the end of the stream, and – damn. That entire thing - it was so intense. It...it looked like Anti was trying to…I mean, when he was...” Robin trailed off.
Jack closed his eyes, his jaw clenching tightly. Oh. Hands shaking, Jack picked his phone up off the coffee table and took the call off speaker, holding the mobile to his ear and getting to his feet.
“When he was holdin’ me up against the...eh...th’ wall?” he asked hoarsely. His movements were stiff, his footing a little unsteady as he crossed the room to pick up the pillow he’d thrown at Mark. He squeezed the edge of it tightly in his hand, lingering there by the door.
“...yeah.” Robin took another deep breath on the other end of the line, and when he spoke again his voice was low and hoarse. Concerned. “He – Jack, he was hurting you. Actually hurting you, not just - play-fighting, or acting for the camera. Wasn’t he?”
Jack’s chest felt tight, his throat constricting from both the memory and his own emotions. He took a shaking breath and dropped the pillow into the armchair closest to him, his free hand coming up to rest against his opposite shoulder. By Sam. Sam’s tail trailed down and brushed against his fingers, helping to soothe some of the uneasiness that had begun to build inside him.
“N-No, that...that was. Um.” Real. It was real. He blinked rapidly and his grip tightened on his phone. “Yeah. It...he left bruises.”
Robin swore quietly on the other end of the line.
“Jack–”
But whatever Robin had been about to say, Jack never found out, because the call was suddenly filled with static and audio distortion, Robin’s words lost in a mass of broken sound that had Jack freezing where he stood.
“...Robin?” he whispered, eyes widening. “Robin...listen...I need to go. Okay? I can’t...I can’t hear you, but I th-think–”
The call dropped before Jack even hit the end button, the cell phone slipping from his hand and tumbling to the floor with a quiet thump against the carpet.
There was a static in the air, a crackle, an energy to it that made the hair on the back of Jack's neck stand on end. His breath hitched. The hand that still lingered near his shoulder tensed, and he could feel Sam curl closer to his neck.
"I'm not the only one feelin' that, yeah?" Jack breathed, his eyes darting around his apartment and landing on nothing. He took an involuntary step back toward the door.
"Nuh-uh. I feel it too..." Sam's worried voice floated across the back of his mind. Jack nodded. Alright. So he wasn't crazy.
A lamp across the room sparked and popped, the bulb blowing out suddenly, and even as small of an occurrence as that was it made Jack jump. The room was plunged into darkness. Wide blue eyes latched onto the deadened lamp. "W-What the hell is going on...?" His voice sounded strained, even to his own ears.
But the question he asked was one he was almost certain he knew the answer to. This static, this...tension. Electricity. He knew this feeling. It was one he was far too familiar with, one that he had experienced before.
Anti.
The room had felt much the same as this when Anti had appeared during his stream last time, when he had pinned Jack to the wall by his throat and toyed with him in front of an audience, had left him scared and shaking in a way he never expected he'd have to feel in his life. Until then he hadn't been sure if Anti was real. But now? Now there was no denying it. So the feeling in the air, the tension, the spark? It flooded him with a very real and tangible fear that wasn't without reason.
"Ďid̎ ÿo̊u m̰i͋šs̶ m̰ē?"
A voice, so close, a cold breath against his ear. Jack cried out and flung himself away from the sound, knees hitting carpet as he hurried away from his own front door now, scrambled across the living room with desperate movements, one hand clamped over Sam so he wouldn’t lose him. There, by the door, his smile just as sharp and as wicked as Jack remembered, was the glitch himself. His image crackled and distorted for a moment - Jack could see the pixels separating as he stood there - and a moment later he had flickered forward, appearing a few steps closer.
Shit...shit, shit, shit...he had half a mind to scream, to call for Mark, but at this point Mark had probably already made it down to his car and wouldn't hear anything. All he could hope for now was that he could stall long enough for his friend to make it back inside. Two on one were better odds in this situation.
"I̥ d̠on̪'t e͊v͐enͥ g̴ét a h̒e͊llo̖, J̠åc̮k̾a͈b͗ö́y?"
“Go away!”
Jack’s eyes widened and he went stiff, panic doubling. Sam had wriggled free from his spot on Jack’s shoulder and he was hovering in mid-air between the two men in the room, planting himself boldly before Anti as though he was planning on defending Jack himself.
“Sam, don’t–”
“Leave him alone, you meanie!” Sam sounded so brave, so determined, so…so angry for such a small little being. “You hurt Jack, and you made him sad, and - and–” Sam wriggled in the air and tried to make himself look intimidating. “–and I’m not gonna let you hurt him again!”
Contrary to what Jack was sure Sam had wanted, Anti didn’t look scared at all. In fact, he smiled...a gleeful smile that had Jack dreading whatever was about to happen.
“W̠e͆ll, a̒re̮n't y͞oṳ a̸ b̸ra̢v̜e lĭt͉tle t̹oa̤s̈t̤èr̔?” Anti crooned, his head tilting far to the side in a way that was eerily non-human. He held out a hand, palm-up, and the air above it distorted and warped impossibly. A worn, dark jewelry box appeared there in a flurry of pixels, its lid popped open to reveal the empty space within. “Sȯr̬r̗y t̸o b̓ur̢s̈ţ ŷou̬r͊ b᷆u̫b᷇b̍l͑ě, S̕a̺m̮my̳, b̝u᷈t...yo̔u'rē no̸t̹ ne͑e̓d̐ed f̔o͍r̈ toñḯgh̠t̡'s ća̧s̱t̎ o̱f͗ c̟har̐a͐ct̊e͓r̊s͊.”
Quicker than Jack could react, Anti glitched, vanished, and reappeared inches from Sam with the jewelry box held out before him. With one swooping motion, Anti had flicked Sam into the box, snapped the lid shut, locked it with a key and tossed the box over his shoulder to land neatly on the armchair in the corner.
“NO!” Jack sprang forward without thinking, arm outstretched as though to reach the box–
“D̹ǐd̵ I̽ s͌a̝y y̪o͚u͘ c̡o̾u͎l̦d͗ m̐o͋v̫e͕?”
Before Jack could register the giggling words, he found himself tripping head-over-heels, colliding soundly with the front of the cabinet his television rested on. A jolt of pain pulsed through his shoulder and he cried out, biting his lip, biting his tongue. Desperate fingers clutched at his aching shoulder and he gritted his teeth.
“What the fuck do you want?!” he bit out, panting and tense as he watched Anti slowly stalk toward him across the room. “You here to...to k-kill me? Hurt me? S...Strangle me again?”
“Wh͔a̠ţ d᷁ō ÿ́o̊u̖ t͔ak̓e m̉e̥ f̓or̓, a᷇ s᷀a͂di͉s͟t͊?” Anti scoffed incredulously.
Jack blinked at him, a sassy retort on his lips before he could stop himself.
“What, you - ngh - aren’t one? Could’ve f-fooled me...”
“I'̗m̺ m̛or̬e̍ ǫf a m̭a͒s᷅ochi͙s̜t̕,̘ r͖ea̪l͟l̓y,͏” Anti shrugged. Jack was surprised that Anti had even bothered to answer the question at all. “Bu͂t̢ bo͑t͐h̬ a᷊r̛e͞ p̭r̂ett͒y̎ a͘c̬c᷅u͑ra̻t̎e̍.”
Great. Good to know. Wonderful.
“N̚o̫, i͓t̋'s no͙t̘h̺i̝n᷆g s͕o̻ s͑i̔m͕pl̖e̍ as a̖l̥l̆ t᷁h̄a̓t,” Anti smirked, waving the thought away with one hand.
The air around his palm distorted and glitched, and a shining blade appeared in his hand on the way down.
Oh, fuck.
Anti was a few steps away now, and Jack scrambled backward across the floor, trying to get as much distance between himself and the glitch as possible...but he was cornered, pinned between the side of the TV cabinet and the wall, blocked in with no way out. It was starting to become a struggle to keep his breathing steady, his heart hammering away a tarantella against his ribs, his throat coarse and tight from tension.
The burst bulb from earlier had thrown the room into near-darkness, but what moonlight was coming through the living room window reflected off the sharpened blade in Anti’s hand, the light bouncing off into Jack’s eyes as the glitch knelt in front of him - close, too close - his eyes beginning to swirl with an inky blackness that Jack never wanted to see this close again.
Jack kept his eyes fixed on the blade, wide as saucers, and his breath hitched when he saw it inching closer and closer to his face. The touch of cool metal against his cheek made him tense and he clenched his jaw with a gulp. It wasn’t sharp. It wasn’t painful. Anti was dragging the flat side of the knife along his jawline, and Jack could hear the sound of its edge scraping against the coarse facial hair there.
“No̫…” Anti shook his head, and the sharp grin widened wickedly, appearing to split his face in two. “No, I ẖa͗v̶e m̪ůch...͛mùch᷆ b᷆i͈g͗g᷄er p̓lan̶s᷉ foͥr᷆ yõu͕, Jaͅc̻k.” 
Mark was humming to himself as he made his way down to the rental car, the keys jingling in his hand. Tim sat perched on his shoulder, one tiny hand clutching the collar of Mark’s shirt, and he was trying to hum along to whatever song Mark had stuck in his head right now
It wasn’t his fault Katy Perry’s music was so catchy.
By the time he unlocked and opened the driver’s side door, he was well into the chorus, mumbling the words in an undertone to himself and for Tim’s entertainment.
“California girls, we're undeniable! Fine, fresh, fierce, we got it on lock~” Tim was giggling, and the sound brought a warm smile to Mark’s face. He shifted into the driver’s seat so he could reach his smoothie easier, but not before belting out the next few lyrics at the top of his lungs.
“West coast represent, now put your hands up!”
He did so, dancing in his seat, grinning and playing it up for his little biscuit’s benefit.
“Ooh, oh, ooh! Ooh…”
Something flickered in the corner of his eye, something red...or was it blue?...and he trailed off, a crease forming in his brow. Tim was still giggling softly. Had he been seeing things? With a soft chuckle, he reached over and plucked his half-finished smoothie from the cupholder, still somewhat chilled from the cool weather of the evening.
Yeah, it was probably nothing. The whole Antisepticeye thing had been keeping him on edge since he’d arrived here in England. He pushed himself out of his seat and shut the door behind him. But when he turned to head back inside, something in the reflection in the car’s window caught his attention.
Mark dropped his smoothie.
A quiet thumping rose up across the living room, a rattling that caught Jack’s attention as well as Anti’s.
Sam. Sam was trying to get out.
Anti looked away from his victim for a moment, only for a moment, some space coming between Jack’s cheek and the metal of Anti’s blade.
A moment was all he needed.
Jack lashed out with a fist and a knee, landing a punch square across the glitch’s face and driving a knee up into his gut. Anti tumbled away from him, distorting and flickering, a static-fused snarl of pain and annoyance bubbling up from his prone form. Jack shoved himself to his feet, leaping over Anti and heading for the front door. He had to get out, had to leave, had to get Sam and go–
“I d͓O̬n͈’Ṭ t̉H͠iN̼ḱ sͅO͊!”
Static, feedback, a crackle in the air, and Anti was in front of him again, seething with fury, blocking his exit. Jack was running on pure adrenaline now, veering left and heading down the hall toward the bedrooms. The bathroom. Recording room. Anything.
“y̜O̰u̯’̒R̡e̿ N̈o̽T͔ g̓O̩i᷈N̸g̽ Ản̉Y͋w̳H̤e̦R̸ë́!̉”
There he was again, cutting him off, keeping him trapped in the same room. Shit...fuck…
Mark. Mark was downstairs. He just - he needed to stall, to wait it out until Mark came back with his stupid smoothie. He could make it that long.
Jack did a one-eighty and darted back down the hallway, the rug slipping beneath his feet and making him stumble. He caught himself on the wall and kept going, kept dodging. He could do this. Distract him. Hold him off. Something. Anything.
Green.
...green?
Something green, in the corner of his eye. Green and orange.
Jack risked turning his head, risked a glance, and he caught sight of the Nerf gun - Chase’s Nerf gun - sitting on the kitchen table. Mark had been playing with the damned thing for days, and for the first time since it had resurfaced Jack was unendingly grateful that Mark had found it again. He made a detour through the kitchen, snatching it up and shoving the ziplock of foam discs into his hoodie pocket.
Disc. Pull back. Load. Click. Wait for it. Be ready.
Jack circled his way back into the living room, Anti’s laughter echoing through the apartment, and he dove behind the coffee table with his plastic weaponed primed. He was ready.
He was terrified.
Jack would be an idiot if he pretended that this entire situation wasn’t scaring him within an inch of his life. He knew - he was trying not to think - that he could die at any second tonight, and that the pixelated parasite hunting him down in his own apartment was far too strong of an opponent for him to handle, with or without Sam. With Mark, maybe he had a chance, but even those odds were slim. If he didn’t die tonight, or if he didn’t at least get stabbed, he was going to drink until morning then invite every single one of his friends over to England to have the party of a fucking lifetime.
“O͗h͢,᷄ Jȁa͚a̕a̓a̻c̈́k̘~” Anti’s distorted, chilling voice echoed through the room and sent a shiver down Jack’s spine. “W͘h̅e͔re a᷇r̰e̶ y̑ou͏ hid͛ǐnͅg̤?”
Jack caught sight of a flickering black sneaker from his hiding spot and he popped up from behind the coffee table, firing the Nerf gun at the center of Anti’s chest.
Anti barely flinched as the foam disc bounced off of him with a spark of electricity. He blinked - dark, void-like eyes - and stared down at the harmless green projectile on the floor.
“A̛ n᷄er̼f͈ d̑i͞sč? Ȓe͏a̧ll̐y̕, Ja͙c͂k̇?᷀”
Jack shrugged. He pretended that he wasn’t sweating buckets and shaking like a leaf behind the Nerf gun in his hands.
“N-Not like I’ve got anythin’ else.”
“H̆o̲w͘ v᷁e̛ry “C̰h̦a͘s̟e B̜r̵o̦d͔y” o͈f̹ y̬öu͍.”
Somehow the mention of another Ego’s name on Anti’s lips made Jack tense up. It was surreal. It was strange. They were all fake - all of them fictional - yet Anti had somehow become so much more. The concept of the living incarnation of his once-fictional character mentioning another of his still-fictional characters so casually like that...it was unsettling, to say the least. Jack squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed. He just needed to hold out a little longer, just a little while longer, until Mark came back from the car. Keep talking. Keep going...
“W-Well...well…it’s t-technically his gun...s-so…”
Jack opened his eyes.
Anti wasn’t there.
“I̚ kn̴ơw̼ w̖h̖a̽ẗ y᷆o̠u᷄’͍r͖e do̕i͖n̖g̉.”
The chilling voice seemed to come from all sides at once, and Jack could make out flickers of pixels and static in the dark shadows of the room. He fumbled with the ziplock in his pocket, pulling out a foam disc to load his Nerf gun again.
“Oh?” Jack asked, his voice coming out higher than he’d intended. “Do…” He cleared his throat. “...do you now?”
“M᷅a̪r̿k̀i̟pl̻i̘e͛r᷀ i̵sn̄’t͡ c̊o͇m̕i͝n̩g͚ to͆ s̲a͙v᷀e͎ yo̫u̥.”
Jack’s blood ran cold.
“What–”
“H᷁e’̘s̎...ă li͢t̺t͖l̷e᷄ ţie͓d᷄ u̯p̉ a̳t̀ th̪e͡ m̘oͥmȩn͇ẗ́.” Anti’s distorted giggle echoed and circled in the empty air, causing goosebumps to sprout up along Jack’s arms. His breath hitched, eyes flying wildly around the room, trying to spot any sign of his doppleganger. “Y᷇o᷅u̥ wer͖e̸ṇ’t̃ p̼l̯a̿yi̟n͘g̉ fa̯ir̤, Ja̒c̉k̩a̫b᷉o͎y…” The next words came front right over his shoulder, whispered into his ear like a dirty secret. “...s̥o̾ Į le͍veͅlèd͎ t̏h̬e͕ p̭l̎ay᷊i̹n͑g̵ fi̥el͔d͙.͝ Ġot̥ ą c̋er̒t̛a͙i͇n da̢r͍k a̭cq̑ŭa̖in͊t̮a̠n̸ce̬ of̿ m̪i̎ne t͖õ ẖęl̍p̖ m̓e̺ o̢u̟t a̲ li̫t͕t᷈l̪e.”
Mark was scared to blink, staring at his own reflection in the car’s window with his jaw clenched, a vein pulsing in his neck. A figure stood just behind his shoulder, his body outlined in a familiar red and blue, looking so familiar yet so foreign at the same time. By the time his smoothie hit the concrete and burst open, splattering the ground, only fractions of a second had passed...but it felt like an eternity. He blinked.
Dark was gone.
“Mark?” Tim’s voice cropped up beside his ear, confused and a little worried.
“...hold on to me, okay?” Mark murmured, and he brought a hand up to try and shield his familiar from whatever might happen. Whoever might happen.
“I’m not here for him, you know.”
The voice, deep and echoing and so like his own but different, startled him into turning around. He hadn’t been in the reflection, but he hadn’t actually left. His name left Mark’s lips in a strained whisper.
“Darkiplier.”
“Face-to-face, at long last,” Dark nodded. He smirked, folding his hands behind his back. “And like I said...I’m only here for you. This is all coming from your mind, Mark.”
“Mark? What’re you lookin’ at?”
Tim. He sounded so innocent and confused, so worried about Mark, and what Dark was saying suddenly registered in Mark’s mind.
“Tim can’t see you, can he?”
“Tim doesn’t have to see me,” Dark corrected, raising an eyebrow in clear impatience. “I don’t want him to see me, therefore he can’t. But you…” His head tilted to the side and he made his neck pop, his shell cracking and separating for a moment. Then he leaned forward, intrigued. “...you, I can never quite hide from. Not completely. Why is that?”
“I...don’t know,” Mark shook his head, confused. Lost. Dark was here, and he was very real, and he was talking to Mark as though none of this was odd. “Maybe...uh....maybe because I made you?”
“Y̙̭o͏̖͔͙͓̼u d͇͈̭i͎̤͉ḍ̼̠̭̟̯͡n̡͕͎̙̜’̠̹̫̦͙͡t ̝ma̟k̼͎͝e̗̗̱͈̬ͅ m̰̥ḛ.”
There was an echoing fury boiling under the words, and the air around Dark seemed to darken considerably in the moment. Mark took an involuntary step back towards his car.
“I - what?”
“You didn’t make me.” Dark’s anaglyphic image was separating, tearing itself apart, and one of his echoing reflections seemed to scream silently into the cold night air. All the while, his core image remained stern and unyielding, showing barely any emotion at all. “You destroyed me - destroyed us. You stole his body. You condemned her to hell. You drove him to insanity. You ruined their lives.”
It clicked, then, what Dark was talking about. This was exactly what Mark had been scared of, worried about, when he was talking to Jack in that cafe. This was why he was regretting the creation of “Who Killed Markiplier”...or more accurately, he was regretting the addition of the character of Mark. The Mark who was an actor. The Mark who was an asshole. The fictional Mark who ruined everything and destroyed so many people…
...Dark was under the impression that Actor Mark and YouTube Mark were one and the same.
Mark blinked, and suddenly Dark was so much closer than he had been before. The darkness that had been enveloping the demon was surrounding Mark too now, and it was absolutely suffocating.
“...but, I suppose I should be thanking you,” Dark continued, a smirk finding its way onto his face. He tilted his head to the side, regarding Mark thoughtfully. “In a way, you...are the reason I exist. Your damnation of your friends led to my creation. A part of me is furious...but a part of me is more than grateful. You set the darkness free, Mark.”
Mark’s heart was pounding, rapid, in his chest and he could feel a minute panic slowly flooding his very soul. He gulped and shook his head, one hand still holding Tim close - Tim, who had fallen strangely silent, though Mark didn’t stop to question it.
Dark wasn’t here to hurt him. Dark didn’t resort to physical violence unless he had to, Mark had written him that way. While Anti went straight for the knife, Dark resorted to other means of making his point and making his mark.
This was all in his mind. Dark wasn’t physically here.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “You...I’ve been seeing you, for months, but this is the first time you’ve actually spoken to me. What changed?”
Dark’s gaze trailed off to the side, toward the apartment, before settling back on Mark.
“A friend asked for a favor.” He quirked an eyebrow. “I merely agreed.”
A cry of pain broke the odd non-silence of the evening, a cry of pain that sounded all too familiar and was coming from the apartment Mark had been trying to return to. His eyes widened.
A friend asked for a favor.
A friend of Dark’s. Anti.
“Jack!”
Mark shoved away from the car and ran through Dark’s mirage of a body, the blue and red dispersing into wisps of dark smoke. Mark only made it halfway to the stairs.
“Clever boy. But you can’t leave. Not yet.”
Dark’s voice echoed in his mind, sending a blinding pain through his skull that brought him to his knees with a shout. He clutched at his head, fingers tangling in his hair and digging into his scalp. He felt rather than saw Tim tumble off of his shoulder, falling the few feet to the ground, making Mark wince in sympathy. There wasn’t enough strength in him to free himself from the mental onslaught, let alone help his tiny friend.
But he needed to. He needed to get Dark out of his head, needed to help Jack. If Dark was out here, then Anti must be in there, and he’d already seen what Anti had done to Jack the last time he had shown up. It wasn’t pretty. Mark didn’t fancy seeing a reenactment.
Get out...get out!
“Why would I? I have a job to do, Mark. You better than anyone should know that I never put in a half effort.”
Images began to surface in his mind, horrible images, memories that had never happened...memories of his friends, his real friends, getting hurt…
Please don’t. They don’t deserve this.
“Neither did Damien. Neither did Celine. Neither did William.”
“That...w-wasn’t me!” he protested, finally finding his voice, the words hoarse and weak. “You’ve got it - ngh - wrong! I’m - y-yeah, I’m Mark, but I’m n-not that Mark! I–”
“Oh, quit with your pitiful lies,” Dark sneered. “Celine is already angry enough with you as it is.”
“No, listen! I made up that version of Mark the same way I created you and Wilford and Abe – I’m just a writer, okay?!”
“Give up, Mark. Nobody can hear you. Let’s see how long you last before you begin pleading for forgiveness. I have all night…”
Hold on, Jack. I’m coming. Hold on–
Jack shuddered and shot to his feet, almost tripping over the coffee table in his haste to get away from Anti, who cackled in amusement from where he’d appeared directly over Jack’s shoulder. Jack rounded on the glitch and aimed the Nerf gun at his chest, not even caring that it was basically harmless.
“What did you do?!” he demanded, his concern for his friend overtaking his fear for his own life. “Is Dark gonna kill him?”
“D̙o͕n͑’̚t b͐e͟ s͋i̧lly!” Anti smirked and rolled his eyes, playing with his knife out of sheer boredom, tossing it between his hands and flipping it in the air. It was clear he was skilled with his weapon on choice, throwing it around with ease like one would a half-filled water bottle. “O᷄l’ D̜a̩rki͈e̚ do̶ẹs̨n̈́’ť ju͊st̽ ķill̔ p̠eo᷈p̰l͌e̞. O᷀r͋ hē w͈on̎’̞t k̇i͏ll̫ Ma̻r᷊kipl̮i̧er͕, an̋y̑w̩a͕y̒.”
The knife soared a good foot or two in the air before tumbling downward, making Jack tense even as he watched Anti catch it cleanly by the handle.
“Fa͐r a͓š I̩ c̠a᷊n̅ t͂ell͚ he̟’̤s̄ p͞r̃et᷇ty̚ p̝i᷅s̱s͚e͔d͐ a̤t᷆ ṱh͔e̓ g̹uy̗. Be̘en̒ t͑oy̕īn͗’͈ w̶it’ hi̛m᷆ f̦o͐r̬ m̽o᷆nt̾h̟s̞,̈ o̊ř so̊ h͍i᷉s̝ r̓oboͅt́ s̽a᷁ẏs͍.”
Robot? Jack’s brow furrowed in confusion. Dark had robots now?
“N̛a̡h᷾, Da͖r̓k̺’s͗ n̠o͊t̻ g̦onnå k̬i͗l͙ḽ Mar̃k̝. P͑ŕe̽t̩ṯyͅ s̒u̕r̾e ḣe᷇’d̈ r̯a̱the̗r dr̹i͖v̓ę h͂i͔m̃ t̰o̐ i͢n᷀s̷a͛nityͅ ḅefo᷾r̞e͓ tͅh͙a̓t ĥap̆p̝e̾ns.”
Jack swallowed thickly. Drive him to insanity? Could Dark do that? He was brought back to the conversation he and Mark had had almost a week ago, in the cafe. The first morning Mark had shown up.
“Dark’s more subtle,” Mark had said. “He works behind the scenes. He doesn’t deal with face-to-face conflict as much. He mostly sticks to the shadows. I mean, I gave him his backstory, I should know this…honestly, it makes me wonder if ‘Who Killed Markiplier’ wasn’t a horrible, horrible idea.”
Mark had been worried, beyond worried, about the concept of Dark actually making his move. Jack had noticed it that day but hadn’t bothered to ask about it. He was beginning to think that, perhaps, he should have pushed a little more.
“Bu̼t y̾o̲u̱ h᷁aͅve̕n̰’t̰ goṯ th᷁a͗t͓ to w᷁o͢r͊ry̽ ab̻o̱u̺t̍, Ja͖cͅka᷁b͐o̱y!” Anti was grinning again, and Jack would swear that his doppleganger’s teeth were sharp, pointed. Deadly. “A͟ft̸ëṙ t᷁o᷁n̎ig̙h̸t, you̅ w᷄o̓nͅ’̥t͂ b͐e̡ w̢OR̵r̈Yi͇N̞g a᷊BoUt a᷅N̡ÿ́T͒h̛i͙N᷇g͋.”
Anti’s distorted shadow grew around him, engulfing his side of the room in a glitching, pulsating, corrupted darkness, and from its depths shot out a dozen or so venom-green cords of light. At Anti’s command, they darted forward and curled tightly around Jack’s wrists, his ankles, his knees and elbows, his chest - his throat. Not tight enough to strangle, but with his bruises still healing, it was more than tight enough to hurt.
Jack gasped sharply and gritted his teeth, snarling and tugging against the green strings, fighting for his freedom. He had to get out. He had to save Sam, had to help Mark. But there was something...odd about the strings. With each tug against his restraints, Jack felt a little more of the fight leaving him, his will to rebel slowly draining away. His head was pounding, his throat was sore, and his shoulder was throbbing with pain...so...so wouldn’t it…
...wouldn’t it be easier to just give in?
The Nerf gun fell from his hands, tumbling to the floor with a clatter of plastic and a muffled thump against the carpet.
“No͊w be̺ a̦ go͟õd̏ li᷅t̏t᷁l͋e᷊ pup̝p͟ét, an̂d̯ ğo᷊ t̥õ s͕le̗e̥ṗ.”
Yeah...yeah, sleep sounded so wonderful right now. Jack slowly let his eyes drifted shut.
Click.
“You let ‘im go right this fucking second, or I blow your fuckin’ brains out, bro.”
[A/N] - Woot! It's done! ^^ And ending on a cliffhanger too? Shocking! :0c
This chapter actually took a lot longer to finish than I originally intended. For some reason I was really struggling to get going on it, but once I started into the ambush, it really started rolling. Believe it or not, this chapter is about twice the length of all the others. While most other chapters finish off at around ten pages in Google Docs, this one? This one hit a solid twenty. Absolute insanity.
Anyway! Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it, and comments and critiques are always appreciated! Ta!
Also find the latest chapters of this story on [Archive Of Our Own]
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pixie-mage · 6 years
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#SamLives - Pt.11
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Also find the latest chapters of this story on [Archive Of Our Own]
[This story has been edited and reposted on the official #SamLives Tumblr. The new post of Chapter 11 can be found here.]
(There is a big difference between the phone calls in this version and the updated version of Chapter 11. This version features Signe; the updated version features Robin.)
Jack hadn’t been lying when he’d said that he and Mark were planning on doing some collabs. In the few days that followed the initial video, they recorded a good nine or ten videos worth of content each, most of it consisting of two-player games. (Being able to record one session for two channels had its perks.) Jack still hadn’t gotten over his wariness of technology in that time. He had to steel his nerves before starting every session, had to take a breath before hitting ‘record’. He found himself frequently checking his facecam on the monitor to make sure nobody was in the background, and every flicker, every stutter, every lag in whatever game he was playing made his hands tense and his breath hitch.
Today was no different. After spending a good five minutes mentally convincing himself that his computer mouse wasn’t about to come to life and strangle him, he and Mark dove head-first into a new game of “Sea of Thieves”. It was just the two of them this time, with no time to schedule a play time with Bob or Wade or Ethan. At the moment, Jack was trying to fend off skeletal attackers while his friend dug up the buried treasure.
“Shit! Fuck! Fuckin’ bastards!” He took another swipe at the nearest skeleton, cutting it down. Another attacker was quick to take its place. “Hah! That’ll teach ye not to mess wit’ ol’ Jackaboy.”
He pulled out a blunderbuss and took two shots straight through the newcomer’s chest.
“DIE BITCHES! How’s that chest comin’, Markerino?”
Mark, who Jack now realized had been oddly quiet the past few minutes, let out only a distracted hum in response. Jack turned his avatar to look at Mark’s rather voluptuous character, only to find him standing still over the half-buried treasure chest. Jack chuckled, a little bewildered.
“Mark? Th’ fuck are you doin’?” he took a shot at another skeleton. “Are ye just waiting for it to unbury itself or–”
Thwack!
The familiar-yet-unexpected sound made Jack jump, his heart pounding in his chest as he whipped his head around to stare at Mark. The other YouTuber had turned his seat away from the desk, NERF gun in hand, aiming at the closed door with narrowed, focussed eyes.
What the fucking–
Jack swallowed thickly and took a slow breath, his panic ebbing away to make room for amused irritation. He swiped a small crocheted Sam from his desk and chucked it at the side of Mark’s head.
“Hey! What–?!”
“Don’t fuckin’ scare me like that, shithead!” Jack shoved Mark’s shoulder playfully. “What th’ hell was that for?”
“Target practice.”
Mark’s grin was cheeky and a little mocking.
Jack blinked at him, slowly, fixing him with a look that clearly said ‘Are you fucking kidding me right now?’ He snatched the NERF gun from Mark’s hand with a barely-restrained chuckle and brandished it in the other’s face. Mark took a swipe at it, pouting and trying to take back his toy.
“Hey!”
It turned into a game of Keep Away, with Jack holding the NERF gun high above his head and Mark practically falling out of his chair and climbing over Jack in his attempt to reach it.
“I’ll use you fer target practice if you don’t–”
“Jack! Give that back, you asshole!"
“–get your head back in the game!” Jack suddenly whipped the NERF gun back at Mark, who fumbled to catch it. “I’m dyin’ here!”
Mark clutched the gun tightly to his chest and retreated to the safety of his seat, pouting and hugging the toy as though Jack might attempt to steal it from him again. He stuck his tongue out childishly before turning back to his screen - and he stifled a laugh.
“Uh…” He carefully set his precious plastic weapon on the desk, out of Jack’s reach. “Not to alarm you, but I think we’re already dead.”
Jack’s focus snapped to his own screen, and sure enough, both he and Mark were now standing on the deck of a ghost ship, waiting their turn to return to the land of the living. He threw his hands in the air and flopped backwards in his chair.
“Fuckin’ DAMMIT all!” He sank in his seat with a groan, Mark’s deep giggles permeating the air around them both. “I blame you entirely for that.”
“Yeah...heh...yeah, that’s...that’s on me. Sorry, man…” Mark still hadn’t stopped giggling, his mood far too bright to be dimmed by a death in the game.
“I’m makin’ sure everyone knows it’s your fault,” Jack bemoaned from his slouched position. “I’m gonna make you buy me a fancy-ass tombstone, an’ put one o’ those shitty rhyming couplets on it…”
He held his hands out in front of him, pretending to frame the words.
“Here lies Jack Just blame his friend Whose NERF dart brought Their bitter end.”
Mark’s only response was a slow golf clap while he pretended to be tearing up.
“Beautiful,” he told Jack, voice laced with false emotion. “Absolutely beautiful. You should’ve become a poet instead of a YouTuber. Clearly you were meant for greater things than video game commentary.”
Jack almost fell out of his chair in his attempt to chuck another Sam plush at Mark’s head.
“D’you think that cop really believed that nothing was wrong?” Jack asked Mark with a mutter later that evening.
Mark had already sent the day’s raw videos from both him and Jack to Robin, and Robin was planning on doing a little bit of content cutting before passing them along to Kathryn. There were certain things that had to be cut out from their recordings that really, really didn’t need to be shared with anyone beyond their immediate group. Not yet.
“The guy from the other day?” Mark asked, looking up from his phone. “I dunno. I mean I don’t think he believed all the anonymous tips, anyway. He was trying not to crack a smile the whole time he was explaining stuff to us.”
Apparently, some of Jack’s fans had taken Anti’s appearance on the stream at face value. They had believed (rightfully so) that it was real, and when Jack went silent on all forms of social media for more than twenty-four hours after it had happened, people had started to panic. While nobody knew for sure where Jack and Signe lived, the local police station in Brighton had gotten call after call after call from concerned teens and young adults who all claimed that a YouTuber named Sean McLoughlin had almost been killed on a livestream. If it hadn’t been for the sheer number of phone calls and the video proof that looked almost too real to have been edited, Jack was sure the police would have ignored it.
But two days ago - three days after the stream itself - a police officer had come knocking on the apartment door asking if a Sean McLoughlin or a Jacksepticeye lived there.
After explaining - through stifled grinning and amused chuckles - that a lot of fans thought he had been hurt, Mark and Jack had tried to awkwardly laugh it off and explain that, no, it was just a video, and nobody had actually gotten hurt.
(Jack was wearing makeup on his neck again for recording, thank god, otherwise the bruises might have brought on some unwanted questions. As it was...)
“I dunno man.” Jack sighed deeply and scrubbed his hands over his face, sinking back on the couch. “I swear he kept lookin’ at my neck. I’m sure he watched the video for th’ sake of the calls. Probably checkin’ to see if I really got strangled.”
“Ah, quit worrying. I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Mark scrolled through Twitter again, reading a few more tweets before, “...and we’re sure we don’t want to get the police involved?”
Jack leveled him with a blank stare.
“Do you honestly think the police are gonna know how to deal wit’ a computer virus of a demon that came to life from my YouTube channel? I mean WE barely know what we’re doing and we’re fully invested in the lore of it all!”
Mark stifled a laugh.
“Okay, yeah good point,” he admitted. He shook his head, eyes falling back to his phone gain. “Fully invested in the lore...god, we sound like we’re trying to solve Five Nights At Freddy’s conspiracies. That’s how complicated this whole mess has become. Frankly, if anyone overheard what we were talking about in the cafe that first day I showed up, they’d probably think–”
Jack jolted upright in his seat, eyes wide and expression one of stunned realization.
“Holy shit.” He grabbed Mark’s arm and shook him a little, his movements suddenly intense and a brilliant grin splitting his face in two. “Holy shit!”
“Holy shit what?” Mark gripped his phone a little tighter so it wouldn’t go flying out of his hands from Jack’s enthusiasm.
“Mark, you’re a fuckin’ genius!”
“Well - I mean, yeah, I thought we established that, but what the hell did I say?!”
Mark was rightfully very bewildered by his friend’s sudden change of mood. He gave Jack a quick once-over with his eyebrows raised, wondering if he should be concerned.
“Five Nights at Freddy’s!” Jack exclaimed. He looked far too excited and far too proud of himself for his own good.
“...Five Nights at–”
“Dude! Don’t you get it?” Jack leapt up off the couch, pacing, and Sam - who had been dozing in Jack’s hoodie pocket - poked his ‘face’ out with a sleepy blink, wondering what all the commotion was about. “This whole thing is too fuckin’ complicated right now, right? We don’t know what exactly Anti is, or how to stop him from comin’ back. He’s solid but he’s not. He’s made of glitches but - who the hell even knows what that means.”
“Okay…?” Mark just watched the Irishman pace the room, his phone long forgotten in his lap. “Where are you going with this?”
“Anti doesn’t make sense!” Jack was grinning like an idiot. He stopped in his tracks to turn and face Mark. “We know why he’s here but that only gets us so far! We need somebody who’s used to picking apart ridiculous bullshit to find the real answers, somebody who already kinda knows what’s going on.”
“Jack, you’ve lost me,” Mark said flatly. “Who are you talking about, Signe? Amy?”
“No!” Jack was talking with his hands, talking with his entire body, like he couldn’t contain all the energy that had built up inside him. “Five Nights at Freddy’s. Crazy timeline. Bullshit lore. There’s only one person I know who was able to tear that shit to pieces and make sense out of it.”
And then it hit Mark like a load of bricks, and he was on his feet too, his exclamation coming out as a loud and incredulous question in the same moment that Jack was busting out the same words.
“MatPat?!”
“MatPat!”
“Waitwaitwait, hold on–” Mark was trying to sort out his thoughts, pinching the bridge of his nose while he watched Jack rush around in a frantic search for his cell phone. Mark didn’t have it right now and Jack couldn’t quite remember where it had ended up. “What the hell do you mean Matt already knows what’s going on?”
“Well, okay, he doesn’t know about Anti,” Jack admitted, his ass in the air while he leaned over the armchair in the corner to see if his phone was plugged in back there. “He knows about Sam though.”
“He knows about Sam?!” Mark’s jaw dropped.
At this point, Sam had abandoned Jack’s pocket to hover a few steps behind the Irishman, watching him with quiet curiosity. At Mark’s question, Sam let out a happy little squeak and nodded, twirling through the air a little.
“Did you tell him before you told me?” Before Jack could even answer, Mark had continued: “But he posted a video like two weeks ago about how Sam couldn’t possibly exist!”
“Well, duh, he posted that because he knows about Sam,” Jack rolled his eyes and shoved away from the armchair, detouring to the kitchen. He spoke up to be heard across the apartment. “He was tryin’ to throw people off. And I didn’t tell him about Sam.” Jack returned to the living room, cell phone in hand and a sheepish smile on his face. “He...er...kinda found out on his own.”
“How?”
“Tacos and Rachel Ray.”
Mark didn’t know how to respond to that.
“I have no idea how to respond to that.”
“Look…” Jack huffed and came back over to Mark, sitting on the edge of the coffee table while his friend sank slowly back onto the couch. Sam settled onto his shoulder and nuzzled up against Jack’s cheek with a quiet purr. “Sam was sick, so I brought him with me for the taco-making contest. Matt was on my team. He bumped into me, I tripped, Sam almost fell out of my hood, and Matt saw him.”
“And he didn’t freak out?”
Jack’s lips twitched into a wry smile and he looked up from his phone.
“Oh, he freaked out, but not until later.”
“Let me get this straight.” Mark watched Jack carefully as he spoke. Jack nodded and went back to shakily tapping out a message to Matt. “Just so we’re both on the same page. Sam exists, clearly. Anti exists. You, me, Signe, Robin, and Matt know about Sam. You, me, and Robin know about Anti.”
“And Signe, sort of.”
“And Signe,” Mark agreed. “And Amy too, come to think of it. Is there anybody else who knows anything else, just in case we need to recruit people for a battle of the digital age?”
“Nope, nobody else,” Jack shook his head. He paused and looked thoughtful, setting his phone aside (looking relieved to get the thing out of his hands) and tapping his chin. “...though I probably should bring up that Anti mentioned being late for a date or something last time? What was the name...something...something Warfstache…?”
Mark looked like he might explode
“WHAT?!”
“Oh my god!” Jack cackled, doubling over with laughter and trying not to slip off the edge of the coffee table he was sitting on. “Oh my fucking god your face! That was PRICELESS! You fuckin’ - Haha! - f-fuckin’ believed–” He could barely breathe he was laughing so hard, his laughter sounding a little wheezy.
Mark groaned and flopped backward across the couch, a low, pained chuckled escaping him.
”Oh, you absolutely piece of shit. Fuck you.”
“Y-Yeah, I - heh - I probably...haha...deserve that one…” Jack was grinning, wiping tears from his eyes.
Sam had bounced over to Mark to make sure he was okay and was now nestled on the American’s chest, Tim’s curious little eyes watching from the arm of the couch not even a foot away. The little box tumbled forward and landed right next to Mark’s head, patting his cheek softly in what Jack assumed was a comforting motion. Another low, rumbling laugh bubbled up from Mark’s chest.
“But no, to answer your question,” Jack continued once he could breathe again. “I think that’s everyone.”
“Good. Great. Excellent.”
Mark was absolutely done. Just...done.
“Ah, lighten up, Markimoo,” Jack snickered. “Consider it payback fer that NERF scare.”
“Considering that you were implying that Warfstache is alive too, and that he and your evil twin are getting it on–”
“Hey! I only said they went on a date!”
“–I’d say we’re far from even right now.”
“Oh, fuck off! That’s totally even!”
“And what if I tricked you into thinking your Dr. Schneep guy was alive and I caught him flirting with Dr. Iplier?”
“Oh, dude, no,” Jack groaned, laughing through it. “Nooo...I mean, yeah, Henrik totally would. He’d flirt with anything that moved. But hell no.”
“See my point?”
The living room was silent for a long moment, save for the little questioning squeaks Sam was making from his position on Mark’s chest. Then Mark heard the buzzing clatter of plastic against the coffee table. Jack’s phone was ringing, but on silent. Mark cracked open one eye to glance at Jack, who suddenly looked a lot more tense than he had a moment before.
“...you good, Jack?” he murmured, watching the other YouTuber. Jack nodded stiffly, looking a little pale. “Is it MatPat? He calling back already?”
Jack swallowed thickly.
“It’s...Signe.”
“Answer it,” Mark encouraged him evenly. “Go ahead. We’re all in the room with you, it’ll be fine.”
Jack nodded, the motion a little jerky, and he reached over to press the ‘Answer’ button. He quickly put it on speaker and withdrew his hand as though he’d been burned. The phone stayed sitting on the table.
“Sean?”
“Hey Signe,” Jack murmured.
Mark could see some of the tension melt out of the Irishman’s shoulders when he heard her voice, saw the way his lips quirked into a smile at the corners and the way his eyes softened in the moment.
“Hi! I just wanted to check in,” Signe continued, a smile in her voice. “How’s everything going? How’s Sam?”
“Sam’s great!” Jack’s grin became more genuine, and he giggled when Sam bounced over to sit beside the phone. He was wiggling on the spot in excitement. “He and Tim are gettin’ along famously. He’s been so damn happy, Wiish, I can’t wait for you to see ‘em together.”
“You can thank me later,” Mark chimed in with a smirk.
“Is that Mark?” Signe asked. “Am I on speaker?”
“Oh! Yeah, you are. Sorry. Shoulda said.” Jack chuckled softly.
“No, it’s fine!” Signe giggled, the sound melodic even through a phone speaker. “Hi Mark!”
“Hi Signe!”
“How are you doing though, Sean?” Signe’s tone had turned concerned, softer than before. “You still haven’t told me what’s going on with the whole Antisepticeye thing.”
Jack stiffened. He could feel Mark’s eyes on him, his look a knowing one. It had been five whole days since he’d talked to Signe at the cafe, and while they had texted back and forth every day since (in very brief interludes, as there were still moments Jack couldn’t even look at his own TV for fear of Anti jumping out of the dimmed pixels, let alone carry his phone in his pocket all day), not once had Jack brought up the livestream. Any time she asked about it he evaded her questions and promised to explain soon and made her promise to please don’t watch the livestream, I’ll tell you when you get home, please wait until then. So far, Signe had done as he’d asked, but he could tell she was growing concerned.
“Eh…” Jack cleared his throat and shrugged, though she couldn’t see it. “I’m fine. A little worn out, but Mark an’ I have been really goin’ hard, knockin’ out tons of videos now so we can get some free time to hang out later…”
“Sean.”
And there it was, the gentle scolding of her Mama Signe voice. How she managed to make Jack feel like a misbehaving child every time she used it was a mystery to him...but it worked. Every damn time. He sighed and let out a quiet groan.
“I’ll tell you soon, I promise,” he whimpered. “I promise I will, it’s - it’s just - I can’t–” He dragged a hand through his hair, and his gaze landed on Mark. The other YouTuber had sat up in the past few minutes and was leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his expression a searching one. He quirked an eyebrow at the Irishman.
“One second, Wiishu,” he said softly, reaching over to tap the ‘mute’ button on Jack’s phone. He watched his friend for a long moment before speaking. “Jack...I’m not gonna push you to tell her, but - oh my god, man. It’s almost been a whole week. The longer you wait, the more likely it’ll be for her to figure it out on her own. She already told you yesterday, people have been sending her tons of tweets and tumblr messages asking about you. Didn’t she ask you why they wanted know if you’re dead or not?”
Jack nodded stiffly, wincing.
“I told you I’d help you tell her the truth.” Mark smiled reassuringly. “I meant that, okay? And - hell, I can get Amy on the line, and we can have a big ol’ Double Date Egos Theory Skype Call.”
Jack snorted out a nervous laugh, shaking his head in amusement. Double date…
“Only you would see it as a date opportunity, Mark.”
“What can I say?” Mark grinned cheekily and winked. “I’m a hopeless romantic.” His grin faded back to a soft, understanding smile and he tried to catch Jack’s eye. “Waddaya say? You up for it?”
“...I eh…” Jack stared at his hands, his fingers fiddling with the hem of his sweatshirt while he thought.
Was he ready to tell Signe yet? Would she even believe him? Would she freak out, or take it all in stride? He didn’t want to worry her and didn’t want to put her in danger. He had known that, once she was home, he would have no choice but to tell her - so that had been his plan. To tell her when she got home, and let her enjoy her time with her family free of any of Jack’s current stresses. Once she was back in Brighton they could clear the air and talk about how to move forward.
But Mark was right too. The longer he waited, the worse it could get.
Jack sighed heavily. His hand was shaking when he reached for his phone, but he still pressed the ‘mute’ button to let Signe hear them again.
“Hey Wiish,” he mumbled, to let her know he was back. “You there?”
“Still here, Sean.” The usual sweet lilt was in her voice, her tone smiling and her words kind.
It helped Jack with what he knew he had to do next.
“I...eh. D’you mind waitin’ a few minutes?” he asked, wringing his hands in his lap. “Mark’s gonna get Amy on a Skype call wit’ us, an’ we can all talk face-to-face, and I’ll...I’ll fill you in on what’s been, er, happenin’ in my part of the world.”
“Really?” Signe asked, sounding surprised. “You’re actually going to tell me this time?”
“I - yeah. Yeah, I am.” Jack took a breath. His nervousness was clear with every word that left his mouth. “I’ll tell you everything.”
“Wait!”
Mark’s outburst made Jack jump and his head shot up.
“What–”
“My smoothie! I totally forgot my smoothie!”
Jack stared, and he heard Signe giggling on the other end of the call.
“Your smoothie,” he repeated, his lips twitching into some semblance of a smile. “You mean the one from after dinner? From, like, two hours ago?”
“Yes, from after dinner!” Mark rocketed off the couch, skirting the coffee table and grabbing his rental car keys as he went to the door. “It’s still in the car. This is super serious.”
“Super serious?” Jack repeated. He watched Tim bounce off the couch and hop curiously around the room in pursuit of Mark, doing his best to keep up. “More serious than Serious Shit?”
“YES! MORE SERIOUS THAN THAT!” Mark, who almost stepped on Tim in his haste to get to the door, let out a rather undignified squeak and immediately crouched to the ground beside the tiny box. “Oh, I'm so sorry! Are you okay? Did I hurt you? C’mere, my little biscuit, let’s get you off the floor. I would neeeever want you to get hurt, I would neeeever step on you…”
“Oh my god, Mark, you’re such a mom.”
“What? It’s not like you’re not the same way with Sam!”
At this, Jack chucked a pillow from the couch across the room, hitting Mark in the legs to avoid hitting Tim.
“Go get your fuckin’ smoothie!”
“Fine! I will!”
Mark flipped him off and pretended to storm out of the apartment, putting Tim on his shoulder and “slamming” the door shut (only to stop it at the last second to close it with a quiet click.) Jack shook his head with a smile. Only Mark.
“Hey...Sean?”
“Hm?” Jack returned his attention to his phone, still sitting beside him on the coffee table. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to ask...you said Anti is real, right?”
“Yeah…” His answer was a tense one, his hands coming up to fiddle with the strings of his hoodie.
“Did…” Signe’s voice trailed off, and there was static in the speaker, like she had taken a breath. “Did he hurt you, on the stream?”
Jack swallowed thickly. He was suddenly very aware of the sore bruises on his throat, and he felt rather than saw Sam land lightly on his shoulder.
“What...eh…” He cleared his throat, and Sam nuzzled up against his jaw, little waves of reassurance and worry filtering into the back of his mind. “...w-what makes ye ask that?”
“I told you I was getting messages and asks,” she told him. He could hear footsteps in the background, movement. Like she was pacing. “And I turned them off for now, because I was going to wait until you told me what was going on. And I know you’re going to! But...I’ve been tagged in a few things too. I saw some gifs of you and Anti–”
Jack closed his eyes, his jaw clenching tightly. Oh. Hands shaking, Jack picked his phone up off the coffee table and took the call off speaker, holding the mobile to his ear and getting to his feet.
“Holdin’ me up against the...eh...th’ wall?” he asked hoarsely. His movements were stiff, his footing a little unsteady as he crossed the room to pick up the pillow he’d thrown at Mark. He squeezed the edge of it tightly in his hand, lingering there by the door.
“...yeah.” Signe took another deep breath on the other end of the line, and when she spoke again her voice was shaking. “He – Sean, he was hurting you. That...th-that was real, wasn’t it? It wasn’t Robin’s editing?”
Jack’s chest felt tight, his throat constricting from both the memory and his own emotions. He took a shaking breath and dropped the pillow into the armchair closest to him, his free hand coming up to rest against his opposite shoulder. By Sam. Sam’s tail trailed down and brushed against his fingers, helping to soothe some of the uneasiness that had begun to build inside him.
“N-No, that...that was. Um.” Real. It was real. He blinked rapidly and his grip tightened on his phone. “It really happened.”
Signe gasped sharply from the other end of the line.
“Oh, god, Sean–”
But whatever Signe had been about to say, Jack never found out, because the call was suddenly filled with static and audio distortion, Signe’s words lost in a mass of broken sound that had Jack freezing where he stood.
“...Signe?” he whispered, eyes widening. “Signe...Wiish...I need to go. Okay? I can’t...I can’t hear you, but I th-think–”
The call dropped before Jack even hit the end button, the cell phone slipping from his hand and tumbling to the floor with a quiet thump against the carpet.
There was a static in the air, a crackle, an energy to it that made the hair on the back of Jack's neck stand on end. His breath hitched. The hand that still lingered near his shoulder tensed, and he could feel Sam curl closer to his neck.
"I'm not the only one feelin' that, yeah?" Jack breathed, his eyes darting around his apartment and landing on nothing. He took an involuntary step back toward the door.
"Nuh-uh. I feel it too..." Sam's worried voice floated across the back of his mind. Jack nodded. Alright. So he wasn't crazy.
A lamp across the room sparked and popped, the bulb blowing out suddenly, and even as small of an occurrence as that was it made Jack jump. The room was plunged into darkness. Wide blue eyes latched onto the deadened lamp. "W-What the hell is going on...?" His voice sounded strained, even to his own ears.
But the question he asked was one he was almost certain he knew the answer to. This static, this...tension. Electricity. He knew this feeling. It was one he was far too familiar with, one that he had experienced before.
Anti.
The room had felt much the same as this when Anti had appeared during his stream last time, when he had pinned Jack to the wall by his throat and toyed with him in front of an audience, had left him scared and shaking in a way he never expected he'd have to feel in his life. Until then he hadn't been sure if Anti was real. But now? Now there was no denying it. So the feeling in the air, the tension, the spark? It flooded him with a very real and tangible fear that wasn't without reason.
"Ďid̎ ÿo̊u m̰i͋šs̶ m̰ē?"
A voice, so close, a cold breath against his ear. Jack cried out and flung himself away from the sound, knees hitting carpet as he hurried away from his own front door now, scrambled across the living room with desperate movements, one hand clamped over Sam so he wouldn’t lose him. There, by the door, his smile just as sharp and as wicked as Jack remembered, was the glitch himself. His image crackled and distorted for a moment - Jack could see the pixels separating as he stood there - and a moment later he had flickered forward, appearing a few steps closer.
Shit...shit, shit, shit...he had half a mind to scream, to call for Mark, but at this point Mark had probably already made it down to his car and wouldn't hear anything. All he could hope for now was that he could stall long enough for his friend to make it back inside. Two on one were better odds in this situation.
"I̥ d̠on̪'t e͊v͐enͥ g̴ét a h̒e͊llo̖, J̠åc̮k̾a͈b͗ö́y?"
“Go away!”
Jack’s eyes widened and he went stiff, panic doubling. Sam had wriggled free from his spot on Jack’s shoulder and he was hovering in mid-air between the two men in the room, planting himself boldly before Anti as though he was planning on defending Jack himself.
“Sam, don’t–”
“Leave him alone, you meanie!” Sam sounded so brave, so determined, so…so angry for such a small little being. “You hurt Jack, and you made him sad, and - and–” Sam wriggled in the air and tried to make himself look intimidating. “–and I’m not gonna let you hurt him again!”
Contrary to what Jack was sure Sam had wanted, Anti didn’t look scared at all. In fact, he smiled...a gleeful smile that had Jack dreading whatever was about to happen.
“W̠e͆ll, a̒re̮n't y͞oṳ a̸ b̸ra̢v̜e lĭt͉tle t̹oa̤s̈t̤èr̔?” Anti crooned, his head tilting far to the side in a way that was eerily non-human. He held out a hand, palm-up, and the air above it distorted and warped impossibly. A worn, dark jewelry box appeared there in a flurry of pixels, its lid popped open to reveal the empty space within. “Sȯr̬r̗y t̸o b̓ur̢s̈ţ ŷou̬r͊ b᷆u̫b᷇b̍l͑ě, S̕a̺m̮my̳, b̝u᷈t...yo̔u'rē no̸t̹ ne͑e̓d̐ed f̔o͍r̈ toñḯgh̠t̡'s ća̧s̱t̎ o̱f͗ c̟har̐a͐ct̊e͓r̊s͊.”
Quicker than Jack could react, Anti glitched, vanished, and reappeared inches from Sam with the jewelry box held out before him. With one swooping motion, Anti had flicked Sam into the box, snapped the lid shut, locked it with a key and tossed the box over his shoulder to land neatly on the armchair in the corner.
“NO!” Jack sprang forward without thinking, arm outstretched as though to reach the box–
“D̹ǐd̵ I̽ s͌a̝y y̪o͚u͘ c̡o̾u͎l̦d͗ m̐o͋v̫e͕?”
Before Jack could register the giggling words, he found himself tripping head-over-heels, colliding soundly with the front of the cabinet his television rested on. A jolt of pain pulsed through his shoulder and he cried out, biting his lip, biting his tongue. Desperate fingers clutched at his aching shoulder and he gritted his teeth.
“What the fuck do you want?!” he bit out, panting and tense as he watched Anti slowly stalk toward him across the room. “You here to...to k-kill me? Hurt me? S...Strangle me again?”
“Wh͔a̠ţ d᷁ō ÿ́o̊u̖ t͔ak̓e m̉e̥ f̓or̓, a᷇ s᷀a͂di͉s͟t͊?” Anti scoffed incredulously.
Jack blinked at him, a sassy retort on his lips before he could stop himself.
“What, you - ngh - aren’t one? Could’ve f-fooled me...”
“I'̗m̺ m̛or̬e̍ ǫf a m̭a͒s᷅ochi͙s̜t̕,̘ r͖ea̪l͟l̓y,͏” Anti shrugged. Jack was surprised that Anti had even bothered to answer the question at all. “Bu͂t̢ bo͑t͐h̬ a᷊r̛e͞ p̭r̂ett͒y̎ a͘c̬c᷅u͑ra̻t̎e̍.”
Great. Good to know. Wonderful.
“N̚o̫, i͓t̋'s no͙t̘h̺i̝n᷆g s͕o̻ s͑i̔m͕pl̖e̍ as a̖l̥l̆ t᷁h̄a̓t,” Anti smirked, waving the thought away with one hand.
The air around his palm distorted and glitched, and a shining blade appeared in his hand on the way down.
Oh, fuck.
Anti was a few steps away now, and Jack scrambled backward across the floor, trying to get as much distance between himself and the glitch as possible...but he was cornered, pinned between the side of the TV cabinet and the wall, blocked in with no way out. It was starting to become a struggle to keep his breathing steady, his heart hammering away a tarantella against his ribs, his throat coarse and tight from tension.
The burst bulb from earlier had thrown the room into near-darkness, but what moonlight was coming through the living room window reflected off the sharpened blade in Anti’s hand, the light bouncing off into Jack’s eyes as the glitch knelt in front of him - close, too close - his eyes beginning to swirl with an inky blackness that Jack never wanted to see this close again.
Jack kept his eyes fixed on the blade, wide as saucers, and his breath hitched when he saw it inching closer and closer to his face. The touch of cool metal against his cheek made him tense and he clenched his jaw with a gulp. It wasn’t sharp. It wasn’t painful. Anti was dragging the flat side of the knife along his jawline, and Jack could hear the sound of its edge scraping against the coarse facial hair there.
“No̫…” Anti shook his head, and the sharp grin widened wickedly, appearing to split his face in two. “No, I ẖa͗v̶e m̪ůch...͛mùch᷆ b᷆i͈g͗g᷄er p̓lan̶s᷉ foͥr᷆ yõu͕, Jaͅc̻k.”
Mark was humming to himself as he made his way down to the rental car, the keys jingling in his hand. Tim sat perched on his shoulder, one tiny hand clutching the collar of Mark’s shirt, and he was trying to hum along to whatever song Mark had stuck in his head right now.
It wasn’t his fault Katy Perry’s music was so catchy.
By the time he unlocked and opened the driver’s side door, he was well into the chorus, mumbling the words in an undertone to himself and for Tim’s entertainment.
“California girls, we're undeniable! Fine, fresh, fierce, we got it on lock~” Tim was giggling, and the sound brought a warm smile to Mark’s face. He shifted into the driver’s seat so he could reach his smoothie easier, but not before belting out the next few lyrics at the top of his lungs.
“West coast represent, now put your hands up!”
He did so, dancing in his seat, grinning and playing it up for his little biscuit’s benefit.
“Ooh, oh, ooh! Ooh…”
Something flickered in the corner of his eye, something red...or was it blue?...and he trailed off, a crease forming in his brow. Tim was still giggling softly. Had he been seeing things? With a soft chuckle, he reached over and plucked his half-finished smoothie from the cupholder, still somewhat chilled from the cool weather of the evening.
Yeah, it was probably nothing. The whole Antisepticeye thing had been keeping him on edge since he’d arrived here in England. He pushed himself out of his seat and shut the door behind him. But when he turned to head back inside, something in the reflection in the car’s window caught his attention.
Mark dropped his smoothie.
A quiet thumping rose up across the living room, a rattling that caught Jack’s attention as well as Anti’s.
Sam. Sam was trying to get out.
Anti looked away from his victim for a moment, only for a moment, some space coming between Jack’s cheek and the metal of Anti’s blade.
A moment was all he needed.
Jack lashed out with a fist and a knee, landing a punch square across the glitch’s face and driving a knee up into his gut. Anti tumbled away from him, distorting and flickering, a static-fused snarl of pain and annoyance bubbling up from his prone form. Jack shoved himself to his feet, leaping over Anti and heading for the front door. He had to get out, had to leave, had to get Sam and go–
“I d͓O̬n͈’Ṭ t̉H͠iN̼ḱ sͅO͊!”
Static, feedback, a crackle in the air, and Anti was in front of him again, seething with fury, blocking his exit. Jack was running on pure adrenaline now, veering left and heading down the hall toward the bedrooms. The bathroom. Recording room. Anything.
“y̜O̰u̯’̒R̡e̿ N̈o̽T͔ g̓O̩i᷈N̸g̽ Ản̉Y͋w̳H̤e̦R̸ë́!̉”
There he was again, cutting him off, keeping him trapped in the same room. Shit...fuck…
Mark. Mark was downstairs. He just - he needed to stall, to wait it out until Mark came back with his stupid smoothie. He could make it that long.
Jack did a one-eighty and darted back down the hallway, the rug slipping beneath his feet and making him stumble. He caught himself on the wall and kept going, kept dodging. He could do this. Distract him. Hold him off. Something. Anything.
Green.
...green?
Something green, in the corner of his eye. Green and orange.
Jack risked turning his head, risked a glance, and he caught sight of the NERF gun - Chase’s NERF gun - sitting on the kitchen table. Mark had been playing with the damned thing for days, and for the first time since it had resurfaced Jack was unendingly grateful that Mark had found it again. He made a detour through the kitchen, snatching it up and shoving the ziplock of foam discs into his hoodie pocket.
Disc. Pull back. Load. Click. Wait for it. Be ready.
Jack circled his way back into the living room, Anti’s laughter echoing through the apartment, and he dove behind the coffee table with his plastic weaponed primed. He was ready.
He was terrified.
Jack would be an idiot if he pretended that this entire situation wasn’t scaring him within an inch of his life. He knew - he was trying not to think - that he could die at any second tonight, and that the pixelated parasite hunting him down in his own apartment was far too strong of an opponent for him to handle, with or without Sam. With Mark, maybe he had a chance, but even those odds were slim. If he didn’t die tonight, or if he didn’t at least get stabbed, he was going to drink until morning then invite every single one of his friends over to England to have the party of a fucking lifetime.
“O͗h͢,᷄ Jȁa͚a̕a̓a̻c̈́k̘~” Anti’s distorted, chilling voice echoed through the room and sent a shiver down Jack’s spine. “W͘h̅e͔re a᷇r̰e̶ y̑ou͏ hid͛ǐnͅg̤?”
Jack caught sight of a flickering black sneaker from his hiding spot and he popped up from behind the coffee table, firing the NERF gun at the center of Anti’s chest.
Anti barely flinched as the foam disc bounced off of him with a spark of electricity. He blinked - dark, void-like eyes - and stared down at the harmless green projectile on the floor.
“A̛ n᷄er̼f͈ d̑i͞sč? Ȓe͏a̧ll̐y̕, Ja͙c͂k̇?᷀”
Jack shrugged. He pretended that he wasn’t sweating buckets and shaking like a leaf behind the nerf gun in his hands.
“N-Not like I’ve got anythin’ else.”
“H̆o̲w͘ v᷁e̛ry “C̰h̦a͘s̟e B̜r̵o̦d͔y” o͈f̹ y̬öu͍.”
Somehow the mention of another Ego’s name on Anti’s lips made Jack tense up. It was surreal. It was strange. They were all fake - all of them fictional - yet Anti had somehow become so much more. The concept of the living incarnation of his once-fictional character mentioning another of his still-fictional characters so casually like that...it was unsettling, to say the least. Jack squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed. He just needed to hold out a little longer, just a little while longer, until Mark came back from the car. Keep talking. Keep going...
“W-Well...well…it’s t-technically his gun...s-so…”
Jack opened his eyes.
Anti wasn’t there.
“I̚ kn̴ơw̼ w̖h̖a̽ẗ y᷆o̠u᷄’͍r͖e do̕i͖n̖g̉.”
The chilling voice seemed to come from all sides at once, and Jack could make out flickers of pixels and static in the dark shadows of the room. He fumbled with the ziplock in his pocket, pulling out a foam disc to load his NERF gun again.
“Oh?” Jack asked, his voice coming out higher than he’d intended. “Do…” He cleared his throat. “...do you now?”
“M᷅a̪r̿k̀i̟pl̻i̘e͛r᷀ i̵sn̄’t͡ c̊o͇m̕i͝n̩g͚ to͆ s̲a͙v᷀e͎ yo̫u̥.”
Jack’s blood ran cold.
“What–”
“H᷁e’̘s̎...ă li͢t̺t͖l̷e᷄ ţie͓d᷄ u̯p̉ a̳t̀ th̪e͡ m̘oͥmȩn͇ẗ́.” Anti’s distorted giggle echoed and circled in the empty air, causing goosebumps to sprout up along Jack’s arms. His breath hitched, eyes flying wildly around the room, trying to spot any sign of his doppleganger. “Y᷇o᷅u̥ wer͖e̸ṇ’t̃ p̼l̯a̿yi̟n͘g̉ fa̯ir̤, Ja̒c̉k̩a̫b᷉o͎y…” The next words came front right over his shoulder, whispered into his ear like a dirty secret. “...s̥o̾ Į le͍veͅlèd͎ t̏h̬e͕ p̭l̎ay᷊i̹n͑g̵ fi̥el͔d͙.͝ Ġot̥ ą c̋er̒t̛a͙i͇n da̢r͍k a̭cq̑ŭa̖in͊t̮a̠n̸ce̬ of̿ m̪i̎ne t͖õ ẖęl̍p̖ m̓e̺ o̢u̟t a̲ li̫t͕t᷈l̪e.”
Mark was scared to blink, staring at his own reflection in the car’s window with his jaw clenched, a vein pulsing in his neck. A figure stood just behind his shoulder, his body outlined in a familiar red and blue, looking so familiar yet so foreign at the same time. By the time his smoothie hit the concrete and burst open, splattering the ground, only fractions of a second had passed...but it felt like an eternity. He blinked.
Dark was gone.
“Mark?” Tim’s voice cropped up beside his ear, confused and a little worried.
“...hold on to me, okay?” Mark murmured, and he brought a hand up to try and shield his familiar from whatever might happen. Whoever might happen.
“I’m not here for him, you know.”
The voice, deep and echoing and so like his own but different, startled him into turning around. He hadn’t been in the reflection, but he hadn’t actually left. His name left Mark’s lips in a strained whisper.
“Darkiplier.”
“Face-to-face, at long last,” Dark nodded. He smirked, folding his hands behind his back. “And like I said...I’m only here for you. This is all coming from your mind, Mark.”
“Mark? What’re you lookin’ at?”
Tim. He sounded so innocent and confused, so worried about Mark, and what Dark was saying suddenly registered in Mark’s mind.
“Tim can’t see you, can he?”
“Tim doesn’t have to see me,” Dark corrected, raising an eyebrow in clear impatience. “I don’t want him to see me, therefore he can’t. But you…” His head tilted to the side and he made his neck pop, his shell cracking and separating for a moment. Then he leaned forward, intrigued. “...you, I can never quite hide from. Not completely. Why is that?”
“I...don’t know,” Mark shook his head, confused. Lost. Dark was here, and he was very real, and he was talking to Mark as though none of this was odd. “Maybe...uh....maybe because I made you?”
“Y̙̭o͏̖͔͙͓̼u d͇͈̭i͎̤͉ḍ̼̠̭̟̯͡n̡͕͎��̜’̠̹̫̦͙͡t ��ma̟k̼͎͝e̗̗̱͈̬ͅ m̰̥ḛ.”
There was an echoing fury boiling under the words, and the air around Dark seemed to darken considerably in the moment. Mark took an involuntary step back towards his car.
“I - what?”
“You didn’t make me.” Dark’s anaglyphic image was separating, tearing itself apart, and one of his echoing reflections seemed to scream silently into the cold night air. All the while, his core image remained stern and unyielding, showing barely any emotion at all. “You destroyed me - destroyed us. You stole his body. You condemned her to hell. You drove him to insanity. You ruined their lives.”
It clicked, then, what Dark was talking about. This was exactly what Mark had been scared of, worried about, when he was talking to Jack in that cafe. This was why he was regretting the creation of “Who Killed Markiplier”...or more accurately, he was regretting the addition of the character of Mark. The Mark who was an actor. The Mark who was an asshole. The fictional Mark who ruined everything and destroyed so many people…
...Dark was under the impression that Actor Mark and YouTube Mark were one and the same.
Mark blinked, and suddenly Dark was so much closer than he had been before. The darkness that had been enveloping the demon was surrounding Mark too now, and it was absolutely suffocating.
“...but, I suppose I should be thanking you,” Dark continued, a smirk finding its way onto his face. He tilted his head to the side, regarding Mark thoughtfully. “In a way, you...are the reason I exist. Your damnation of your friends led to my creation. A part of me is furious...but a part of me is more than grateful. You set the darkness free, Mark.”
Mark’s heart was pounding, rapid, in his chest and he could feel a minute panic slowly flooding his very soul. He gulped and shook his head, one hand still holding Tim close - Tim, who had fallen strangely silent, though Mark didn’t stop to question it.
Dark wasn’t here to hurt him. Dark didn’t resort to physical violence unless he had to, Mark had written him that way. While Anti went straight for the knife, Dark resorted to other means of making his point and making his mark.
This was all in his mind. Dark wasn’t physically here.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “You...I’ve been seeing you, for months, but this is the first time you’ve actually spoken to me. What changed?”
Dark’s gaze trailed off to the side, toward the apartment, before settling back on Mark.
“A friend asked for a favor.” He quirked an eyebrow. “I merely agreed.”
A cry of pain broke the odd non-silence of the evening, a cry of pain that sounded all too familiar and was coming from the apartment Mark had been trying to return to. His eyes widened.
A friend asked for a favor.
A friend of Dark’s. Anti.
“Jack!”
Mark shoved away from the car and ran through Dark’s mirage of a body, the blue and red dispersing into wisps of dark smoke. Mark only made it halfway to the stairs.
“Clever boy. But you can’t leave. Not yet.”
Dark’s voice echoed in his mind, sending a blinding pain through his skull that brought him to his knees with a shout. He clutched at his head, fingers tangling in his hair and digging into his scalp. He felt rather than saw Tim tumble off of his shoulder, falling the few feet to the ground, making Mark wince in sympathy. There wasn’t enough strength in him to free himself from the mental onslaught, let alone help his tiny friend.
But he needed to. He needed to get Dark out of his head, needed to help Jack. If Dark was out here, then Anti must be in there, and he’d already seen what Anti had done to Jack the last time he had shown up. It wasn’t pretty. Mark didn’t fancy seeing a reenactment.
Get out...get out!
“Why would I? I have a job to do, Mark. You better than anyone should know that I never put in a half effort.”
Images began to surface in his mind, horrible images, memories that had never happened...memories of his friends, his real friends, getting hurt…
Please don’t. They don’t deserve this.
“Neither did Damien. Neither did Celine. Neither did William.”
“That...w-wasn’t me!” he protested, finally finding his voice, the words hoarse and weak. “You’ve got it - ngh - wrong! I’m - y-yeah, I’m Mark, but I’m n-not that Mark! I–”
“Oh, quit with your pitiful lies,” Dark sneered. “Celine is already angry enough with you as it is.”
“No, listen! I made up that version of Mark the same way I created you and Wilford and Abe – I’m just a writer, okay?!”
“Give up, Mark. Nobody can hear you. Let’s see how long you last before you begin pleading for forgiveness. I have all night…”
Hold on, Jack. I’m coming. Hold on–
~  ~  ~  ~  ~
Jack shuddered and shot to his feet, almost tripping over the coffee table in his haste to get away from Anti, who cackled in amusement from where he’d appeared directly over Jack’s shoulder. Jack rounded on the glitch and aimed his NERF gun at the glitch’s chest, not even caring that it was basically harmless.
“What did you do?!” he demanded, his concern for his friend overtaking his fear for his own life. “Is Dark gonna kill him?”
“D̙o͕n͑’̚t b͐e͟ s͋i̧lly!” Anti smirked and rolled his eyes, playing with his knife out of sheer boredom, tossing it between his hands and flipping it in the air. It was clear he was skilled with his weapon on choice, throwing it around with ease like one would a half-filled water bottle. “O᷄l’ D̜a̩rki͈e̚ do̶ẹs̨n̈́’ť ju͊st̽ ķill̔ p̠eo᷈p̰l͌e̞. O᷀r͋ hē w͈on̎’̞t k̇i͏ll̫ Ma̻r᷊kipl̮i̧er͕, an̋y̑w̩a͕y̒.”
The knife soared a good foot or two in the air before tumbling downward, making Jack tense even as he watched Anti catch it cleanly by the handle.
“Fa͐r a͓š I̩ c̠a᷊n̅ t͂ell͚ he̟’̤s̄ p͞r̃et᷇ty̚ p̝i᷅s̱s͚e͔d͐ a̤t᷆ ṱh͔e̓ g̹uy̗. Be̘en̒ t͑oy̕īn͗’͈ w̶it’ hi̛m᷆ f̦o͐r̬ m̽o᷆nt̾h̟s̞,̈ o̊ř so̊ h͍i᷉s̝ r̓oboͅt́ s̽a᷁ẏs͍.”
Robot? Jack’s brow furrowed in confusion. Dark had robots now?
“N̛a̡h᷾, Da͖r̓k̺’s͗ n̠o͊t̻ g̦onnå k̬i͗l͙ḽ Mar̃k̝. P͑ŕe̽t̩ṯyͅ s̒u̕r̾e ḣe᷇’d̈ r̯a̱the̗r dr̹i͖v̓ę h͂i͔m̃ t̰o̐ i͢n᷀s̷a͛nityͅ ḅefo᷾r̞e͓ tͅh͙a̓t ĥap̆p̝e̾ns.”
Jack swallowed thickly. Drive him to insanity? Could Dark so that? He was brought back to the conversation he and Mark had had almost a week ago, in the cafe. The first morning Mark had shown up.
“Dark’s more subtle,” Mark had said. “He works behind the scenes. He doesn’t deal with face-to-face conflict as much. He mostly sticks to the shadows. I mean, I gave him his backstory, I should know this…honestly, it makes me wonder if ‘Who Killed Markiplier’ wasn’t a horrible, horrible idea.”
Mark had been worried, beyond worried, about the concept of Dark actually making his move. Jack had noticed it that day but hadn’t bothered to ask about it. He was beginning to think that, perhaps, he should have pushed a little more.
“Bu̼t y̾o̲u̱ h᷁aͅve̕n̰’t̰ goṯ th᷁a͗t͓ to w᷁o͢r͊ry̽ ab̻o̱u̺t̍, Ja͖cͅka᷁b͐o̱y!” Anti was grinning again, and Jack would swear that his doppleganger’s teeth were sharp, pointed. Deadly. “A͟ft̸ëṙ t᷁o᷁n̎ig̙h̸t, you̅ w᷄o̓nͅ’̥t͂ b͐e̡ w̢OR̵r̈Yi͇N̞g a᷊BoUt a᷅N̡ÿ́T͒h̛i͙N᷇g͋.”
Anti’s distorted shadow grew around him, engulfing his side of the room in a glitching, pulsating, corrupted darkness, and from its depths shot out a dozen or so venom-green cords of light. At Anti’s command, they darted forward and curled tightly around Jack’s wrists, his ankles, his knees and elbows, his chest - his throat. Not tight enough to strangle, but with his bruises still healing, it was more than tight enough to hurt.
Jack gasped sharply and gritted his teeth, snarling and tugging against the green strings, fighting for his freedom. He had to get out. He had to save Sam, had to help Mark. But there was something...odd about the strings. With each tug against his restraints, Jack felt a little more of the fight leaving him, his will to rebel slowly draining away. His head was pounding, his throat was sore, and his shoulder was throbbing with pain...so...so wouldn’t it…
...wouldn’t it be easier to just give in?
The NERF gun fell from his hands, tumbling to the floor with a clatter of plastic and a muffled thump against the carpet.
“No͊w be̺ a̦ go͟õd̏ li᷅t̏t᷁l͋e᷊ pup̝p͟ét, an̂d̯ ğo᷊ t̥õ s͕le̗e̥ṗ.”
Yeah...yeah, sleep sounded so wonderful right now. Jack slowly let his eyes drifted shut.
Click.
“You let ‘im go right this fucking second, or I blow your fuckin’ brains out, bro.”
[A/N] - Woot! It's done! ^^ And ending on a cliffhanger too? Shocking! :0c
This chapter actually took a lot longer to finish than I originally intended. For some reason I was really struggling to get going on it, but once I started into the ambush, it really started rolling. Believe it or not, this chapter is about twice the length of all the others. While most other chapters finish off at around ten pages in Google Docs, this one? This one hit a solid twenty. Absolute insanity.
Anyway! Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it, and comments and critiques are always appreciated! Ta!
Also find the latest chapters of this story on [Archive Of Our Own]
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astressedwriter · 6 years
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FaZe Tfue
Summary:
The FaZe guys learn very quickly, that no matter how much it seems like turner and y/n hate each other, it’s quite the opposite.
After months of anticipation, the faze guys all moved into their new houses. There are a bunch of them in the old clout house, and then the pro team house. The pro team house consists of Faze Cloak, Faze Tfue, Faze Jaomock, Faze Tennp0 and their substitute player, Faze Y/n.
“Jesus, Y/N. How many hoodies do you have?” Cloak grunted as he helped Y/N carry in the third box filled to the brim with hoodies.
“Too many!” Turner called from behind them, Y/N whipped around to glare at him, which caused Cloak to nearly run into her.
“You can never have too many hoodies, Turner,” Y/N stated darkly, with a threatening undertone. Turner held his hands up in mock surrender, a smirk playing at his lips. Y/N gives him one last dirty look before continuing her trek up to her room. Turner shook his head, watching her climb the stairs.
Tennp0 and Jaomock shared a look, as they walked past Turner.
“What?” Turner asked, crossing his arms.
Tennp0 shrugged innocently, “Nothing.”
Banks was leaning against a wall, his entire posture screaming that he was bored out of his mind. Tennp0’s head was resting against the table he was seated at, also bored. Possibly a bit less so. Jaomock sat on the couch, scrolling through his phone, trying his best to ignore what was going on in the kitchen. Cloak stood in the doorway of the kitchen with his arms crossed, an ticked off scowl gracing his features.
For the past half an hour, Turner and Y/N had been screaming at each other. By this point, everyone had forgotten what the argument was about, even the two arguing.
“God!” Y/N threw her hands in the air, “You are such an asshole!”
Turner didn’t even flinch, he crossed his arms and glared at her, “Right back at you sweetheart!”
Y/N opened her mouth to retort, but before she could, Cloak stepped in, saying loudly, “Okay! That’s enough!”
Y/n and Turner begrudgingly gave in, making everyone else in the house breath a sigh of relief.
Banks made his way up to Cloak, who was in the middle of sigh, as he watch Y/N and Turner continue to shoot each other dirty looks across the kitchen.
“They really hate each other, huh?” He asked, Cloak looked at him in surprise,
“What? No!”
Banks stared at Cloak in complete and utter confusion,
“The hell you mean?”
“You’ll see.” The smirk playing at Cloak’s lips reassured Ricky that what was coming was good, which relieved Banks, he didn’t need to people who couldn’t stand each other living together.
All they wanted was to do a FaZe Cast. They didn’t want to witness yet another one of Turner and Y/N’s screaming matches. It honestly amazed them all that the pair could scream at each for this long consecutively.
“Go to hell, Turner!” Y/N ran a hand through her hair frustratedly. Turner glared at her, his hands handing at his side.
“See you there.” He shot back, Y/N shook her head, before turning around and walking out of the room.
Cloak closed his eyes in exasperation, before opening them again and glaring at Turner.
“What?!” He asked defensively, crossing his arms.
“Go talk to her!” Cloak gestured to the door that Y/N exited through wildly. Turner went to complain, but decided against it when Cloak shot him a warning look.
He uncrossed his arms and sighed through his nose, before leaving through the same door Y/N did.
“Are you sure they don’t hate each other?” Banks asks once again. Cloak shakes his head,
“100%.”
“I’m pretty sure they do, man,” Lucas commented, the others nodded in agreement.
“Okayyyy,” Cloak responded disbelievingly, he knew the pair of you better than that.
Y/N was leaning against a wall in the backyard, she gripped her juul loosely. Her eyes were closed and her head was tilted up, towards the sky.
“You still have that thing?” Turner’s voice breaks through her silence. Y/N sighs, before raising the juul to her lips, and breathing in deeply. By this time, Turner was standing right in front of Y/N, she opened her eyes and made eye contact.
“Yep,” She said, popping the p. She tilted her head up, studying Turner’s face. “I thought Cloak made you through it away.” Turner responded, ignoring Y/N staring. Y/N laughed,
“As much as I love Dennis, he never has and never will tell me what to do.”
“You should get rid of it. That shits bad for you.” Turner said, stepping closer to Y/N. Y/N raised her eyebrows and took another hit, and exhaled all of the smoke, causing it to hit Turner in the face.
Turner leaned closer to Y/N, where his lips were grazing her ear lobe,
“Don’t test me.” The tone of Turner’s voice shot a shiver down Y/N spin.
“Or what?” Y/N challenged, her voice quiet, Turner’s closeness flustering her slightly. Turner wasted no time in roughly colliding their lips. His actions caused Y/N to gasp, giving Turner access to her mouth. One of Turner’s hands were placed firmly next to Y/N’s head on the wall, while the other rested on her hip.
Y/N threw her hands around his neck and pulled him impossibly closer.
Y/N stood in front of her facecam, at her streaming setup. She had a faraway look in her eyes, that were tinted red. She was wearing an oversized grey hoodie and black leggings. Y/n started her stream, she stayed silent, staring into the distance as the stream began pulling her viewers, including her friends in the house.
“I never thought anything like this would happen to me.” Y/n’s voice was quiet, her eyes started to water, “You always hear about things like this and you think that it will never happen to you. But it did.” Y/N wiped the tears away that had began streaming down her face. She took a deep, shuddering breath.
“My childhood best friend was murdered last night.” Y/n’s tears came faster now, and she didn’t bother to wipe them away. This one sentence was all it took for her friends watching in the house, to take off towards her room.
“I’m going to be taking a break from streaming for a while. I hope you guys understand.” Y/n quickly ended her stream, as a sob escaped her mouth.
The door to her room flew open, and Cloak, Tennp0, Jaomock, and Alexia came running in. Alexia got to her first, and wrapped her in a hug. She pressed Y/N’s head to her chest and ran her fingers through y/n’s hair.
“Shhhh. I’ve got you.” Alexia continued mummering words of comfort to y/n as cloak whipped his phone out and dialed the familiar number.
“Turner?” Cloak asked, his voice panicked slightly.
“Cloak? What’s wrong?” Turner’s worried voice replied.
“It’s y/n. She needs you.”
“I’m on my way.” Dial tone.
Cloak made his way over to his girlfriend and his best friend. He took Y/N’s hand in his own, offering his silent comfort.
Y/n couldn’t breathe. She didn’t know if it was the pain or if it was the panic attack. Broken sobs escaped her mouth, and in between, desperate attempts to get some air back in her lungs. Y/N was desperate, her vision was going black and in hurt. Everything just hurt so much.
A few seconds later, Turner arrived on scene. He was sure he could feel his heart break at the sight of Y/n sobbing into Alexia’s chest, barely able to stand. He rushed over to her, and she immediately collapsed into his arms. Turner slowly lowered Y/n and himself to the floor. He was quietly shushing her, and mummering words that no one could make out. He laid her head in his lap, that’s when he noticed it.
“Y/n baby, you have to breathe.” Turner brushed the hair out of her face, “Hey, look at me. Breathe.”
Y/n gasped, the air she so desperately craved finally making its way into her lungs.
“Jao, will you go get her some water?” Cloak says, watching Turner calm Y/n down. Jaomock nodded and left the room without a word.
Y/n and Turner didn’t move for three hours, and most of it was y/n crying. When she wasn’t crying, she was telling Turner stories about her best friend. It seemed to calm her down.     
After all the crying and talking, Y/n was exhausted, and she fell asleep with her head still on Turner’s lap. When he noticed she was asleep, he gently picked her up into a fireman's carry and carried her over to her bed. Turner laid her down gently, and turned to walk out of the room, when a quiet voice stopped him.
“Stay.”
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yumenosakiacademy · 2 years
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since its the day after the 1 yr anni can i interest u in 3rd L!fe, aka the fuckign minedcraft short series tht gripped me by the throat for like a few months ^_^ it’s good it rly is i pwomise 🥺 like, the way things unfold n alliances come 2gethr n a war breaks out n the end i just aaaa. it’s rly goofy but also rly angsty n it’s not even! like! scripted like the ds/mp stuff it’s not tht kind of angst. it’s the angst out of things tht naturally happen n the bonds tht’ve been formed n stuff it’s jus Good ok. it Is. the series has multiple povs but the recommended 1s r scott, gri4n or scar, n m4rtyn (be warned tho he uses a facecam. u could watch r3ndog instead 4 the r3nchanting pov but ren is very... high energy n not 4 every1) but not all of those hav 2 b watched 2 enjoy the series! the more povs u watch the more u learn abt the different factions n sides n stuff tho.
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