#cross my heart and hope to die // i’ll see you with your laughter lines {re: anakin solo}

[hopetwin]

He learned something there that the rest of us don't know, something that could have made all the difference, if only he'd had time to figure it out. If there is such a thing as destiny, I think that was Anakin's. He has always been different. Special.

Jaina Solo, The New Jedi Order: Dark Journey 

[sharkselfies]

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast Transcript - Episode 4

Our journey comes to an end with the transcript for episode 4 of The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast, where Dave Kajganich, Soo Hugh, Dan Simmons, and Adam Nagaitis discuss the last two episodes of the series. Once again, Adam steals the show with his revelations about Mr. Hickey, but we also hear about everyone’s favorite death scenes, the fight to let Mr. Blanky say fuck, the many changes the writers made to the ending that differed from the novel, and the importance of trusting your audience’s intelligence.

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast - Episode 4

[The Terror opening theme music]

Dave Kajganich: Welcome to the fourth and final installment of The Minds Behind AMC’s The Terror as we discuss our final two episodes of the show! I’m Dave Kajganich, creator and co-showrunner of the series, here with the honorable Dan Simmons, creator of the novel The Terror on which the series is based. Also with us is Soo Hugh, executive producer and co-showrunner of the show, and Adam Nagaitis, who plays a man who plays a man called Cornelius Hickey. Welcome back!

Adam Nagaitis: Hi!

Dan Simmons: Hi Dave. 

DK: So we launch into our final episodes. Now we are in an episode where the show begins to bend time. We cover a lot of ground in episode nine, a lot of distance, we say goodbye to quite a lot of characters, and we start to really bend the tone and the shape of the narrative towards the kind of horrible collision that’s coming between Crozier and Hickey and our Tuunbaq.

Soo Hugh: So in nine we say goodbye to so many of our characters. I mean Dave and I cried so--

[laughter]

SH: The amount of tears that he and I shed editing this show, especially with nine and ten. For you guys, Adam and Dan, which were the deaths--well, what did you think of the deaths?

DS: What’s your favorite death? 

[laughter]

SH: Yeah, what was your favorite death? 

AN: My favorite was probably, the one that really moved me was Fitzjames, it’s such a fantastic story, his character’s so interesting, that transition, discovering, you know, admitting who you are, and the firework at the Tuunbaq being his feat of courage, and then to end up, to embrace death, and to do it in such a beautiful way. And then the line of “there will be poems” that Mr. Bridgens says. 

[show audio]

[sad, eerie music]

Bridgens (through tears): It was an honor serving you, sir. You’re a good man. There will be poems.

AN: It’s a beautiful death, it’s probably the best you can ask for, in that situation, you’re with a friend. Yeah, it’s quite sad. Of course you gotta love Blanky’s death as well, that’s, I’m cheating, now, yeah, but Blanky’s death is the greatest line to go out on, surely.

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq growling, shales crunching underfoot]

Blanky: What in the name of god took you so fuckin’ long? 

[Tuunbaq snorts, Blanky laughs maniacally] 

DK: We weren’t entirely sure whether AMC was going to permit us to use that word, a curse word, because on AMC you’re not meant to. Luckily for us, there are a number of AMC shows that have a precedent of using that word and we argued successfully that, you know, could you ask for a better show, a better scene than a Victorian disaster show to use the F-word, and they finally allowed us to use it, and we’re really grateful.

SH: I think just visually Bridgens’ death was so beautiful, and that pull out. And what was interesting was in our research found, we discovered, there was a corpse they discovered who had rolled over and was found sleeping on a set of papers, and in the show Bridgens takes Peglar’s diary when he chooses to die out there in the cold alone comforted with his memories, we see him roll over, and so that’s just our nod to history. Now it turns out we don't know whether or not it was actually Peglar’s diary, it could have been Armitage’s--

DK: No, I think we know it’s Peglar’s journal, but we don’t know whether the man lying on top of it was Armitage or Bridgens.

SH: Then there’s Goodsir’s death. Oh my God, Goodsir! I can’t believe Hickey! Adam! Goodsir!

AN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. He had it comin’!  

[laughter]

AN: I forgot that death, I forgot all of those deaths, actually, what a--so beautifully acted. I mean, unbelievable. It was perfect. The pure clean images of the coral, and the shell, oh I loved it, and the end, I think it’s an orchid, I just loved it, I absolutely--it’s something that I don’t like talking about, that death, it’s really horrible. 

[show audio]

[the rising music from the scene of Goodsir’s death]

DS: They were all very moving in their own way, saying goodbye to each of the characters, surprisingly powerful, you know, some of ‘em were not major characters, but everything connected for me watching your version. When--earlier, when Fitzjames is out with Crozier alone, and Fitzjames sort of acknowledges that he’s a fake, that he’s just been faking this heroism, you know, the admiralty thought they sent a hero, they sent Fitzjames, he was the man of the moment, but he hadn’t done that much, so he had the courage to say that, and Crozier immediately had the compassion to point out, “No, you’re here, now, and you’re doing fine,” that’s not the dialect but that’s the essence of his message. So all through these scenes with the different characters, I found compassion again. [It] was the way Crozier touched men who were close to the end, the tone of his voice, you know, it wasn’t mawkish, he wouldn’t like being at all sentimental, but it was so supportive. It was like Goodsir helping the poor boy at the beginning of the show, telling him how death could be good, how you see light, you cross over. The kid died in terror; some of these people did. But most of ‘em, they’re like--Fitzjames, when he’s, you know, when he finally has to be carried in the sledge, and he has a sense of humor at the end, he can laugh at himself, somewhat, ‘cause he tells Crozier that that the bullet that went through his arm into his chest, that area is now so gangrene--er, rotten, you know, the bullet is finally going to kill him. Haha. 

[polite awkward laughter]

DK: Well you pointed out a line from the first episode, where Fitzjames is talking to Franklin and he says, “Sometimes I think you love your men more than God loves them,” and Franklin's response is “For all your sakes, let’s hope you’re wrong,” and we brought that line back in a different way in episode nine, which is where the survivors of the Terror Camp attack are about to leave, and they know Hickey’s out there somewhere, and Fitzjames’s impulse is to hide or destroy all of their extra supplies so that Hickey’s group can’t benefit from them, and Crozier has the opposite instinct, which is because he knows some people in Hickey’s group probably made that decision because they were afraid that the alternative was worse to stay with Crozier and so many people, that he wants to offer them the resources in case they can use them and in case they wanna make a different decision in the days ahead.

[show audio] 

Fitzjames: And the supplies we cannot carry? If Hickey’s band are waiting us out to loot the camp?

Crozier: Some of the men with them made their choice out of fear, I’ll not take away any chance they have to survive. We may meet them yet again, and if we do, I want them to make a different choice. Leave our supplies in a tidy pile, as an offering. I want the men with Hickey to know that’s how we meant it. 

[shales crunching underfoot]

Fitzjames: More than God loves them...

DK: Lines like that are a real test, I mean, you struggle with them in the editing room. Did we earn that line? Is it important that an audience remembers that as an index point that line has now been sort of superficially applied to one man, but more sincerely applied to another man, and, you know, that goes back to sort of a close reading of the book, Dan, just sort of scouring through your dialogue trying to figure out how does a master, if I can refer to you that way, approach this idea of a relationship with an audience? And we learned an enormous amount from your book about restraint and indirection, and credit, giving the audience credit. And I will say this, the series is different enough from your novel that I would encourage everyone who has seen the television show but not read your book to seek it out, because they will have just as rewarding--even more so, possibly!--a time of learning about this history through the lens of horror than they did watching the show. So I think they complement one another. I hope they do, and I hope people will seek out both. 

DS: That’s kind of you, Dave. My wife keeps track of the tie-in version of the book, and it’s selling very well, so some people are gonna get that. 

SH: There is this fantastic scene that is in your book, that we had neither money nor time to shoot, but it’s where they discover leads, and they take the boats out going around, and they realize they’re just going around in a circle. We didn’t have the time to shoot that and we re-jiggered our narrative so that the leads ended up being a ploy on one of Hickey’s secret mutineers. Nine is a very quiet episode, and in some ways when you, in television shows--did you miss a set piece, in nine? Did anyone miss having a bigger narrative punch?

DS: Well, I'll answer, then let Adam answer, but for me, who had that boat scene and really liked it a lot, I didn’t miss my stuff too much, because what happened was when the young man, a boy actually, who’s secretly under Hickey’s control tells Crozier and the others he sees open water, and they rush to the rocky beach to see it, and of course that was a lie and a ploy to get them there so Hickey can seize them, but my heart just flew, that, “Open water! Ohh boy!” You know? How would men have felt if they’d heard that, in reality, what was their reaction? ‘Cause the open water could conceivably be their savior, they could get other places, not just cross over and start marching through middle Canada, but they could go anywhere on open water, and to see it all locked in with ice was just stunning to me, it was such a disappointment. So no, I don’t miss my part of it very much.

AN: I never thought of it as something that suggests a quiet narrative like you described it, Soo, to me it sort of links--I see nine and ten as one episode, really. It’s this slow build, the creation of that relationship that these two--the antithesis between these two camps, and between the tactics employed... I just think that the way you guys wrote it and put it together is flawless, I just think it’s so beautifully weighted, between, you know, the deaths that to me they don’t seem to just sort of monotonously pile up, they’re all just so beautifully handled and acted. And the whole time you have this tension building, slowly, slowly, that, you know, that it’s gonna come to a head. I didn’t feel when I watched it that it ever lacked punch. It had such clarity and such patience that made it really beautiful.

DS: And I don’t know if we can say the C-word on podcasts… cannibalism? 

[laughter]

DK: Yes, that one we can. 

SH: Yes.

DS: Oh, ok. You know there was a--if Hickey hadn’t already divided the troop into his people, the anointed, and then Crozier’s group, it would have happened anyway because of the cannibalism. And when you think about it, think of that rugby team or soccer team or whatever that crashed in the Andes. They went back into society. They were cannibals, they admitted it, they got a book deal. And so, presumably, even in England, these people would have been forgiven, or they would have kept it secret like some do. So cannibalism, what it did in this show, I think, divides the people. I didn’t see, until he was forced to imbibe in cannibalism, I didn't see Crozier even considering it. And so that fascinates me, just how far people will go to survive. 

[show audio]

[tense music, tent canvas flapping in the wind]

EC: I’ll give you some advice. Don’t indulge your morals over your practicals. Not now. Don’t you also wanna live? 

SH: Dave, we talked a lot about this, is when you’re in that moment, you’re not Dave Kajganich and I’m not Soo Hugh, in that moment, choosing whether or not we decide to eat someone. Something else will take over, whether it is the Goodsir in us or whether it is the Hickey in us, in that moment. I think that’s why when we shot that scene, you know, after Gibson is cut up, Adam, remember when we shot the reaction shots from each one of you eating your first bite of human flesh meat, and we took so much footage, we shot so much. We shot, you know, closes, mediums, just because Dave and I, you know, at that point, we were very confident of how to shoot everything, that was probably the moment when we were like ugh.

DK: Well we wanted to know how little we could get away with, and what we found, of course, which is typical for the show, the performances were so terrific, that we didn’t need very much. And I remember on the mix stage, the first mix that they did of the show, of that episode, I mean, there was quite a lot of chewing.

[laughter]

And so when I said, no no no, let’s pull all of that out, and use the most minute changes in expression, because all of you at that table were so well in character, that even the slightest muscle movement on your face communicated everything we needed you to. And we were obviously very interested in not overplaying that scene, knowing that audiences had been waiting for it, wondering how, in what kind of taste we would show it, you know, how we would modulate it, and you know a rule throughout the show was to try to present everything with its most practical face, including this. And so, you know, hopefully when that lands for people it will be both satisfying in the sense that they will understand how these characters made that decision but it won’t feel that we have over-articulated it, somehow. 

DS: I’m not religious, but I’m obsessed with religion, and in your story, the way you structured it, you have, in a sense, we’ve already talked, or at least I have, about how Hickey seems to be evolving towards Messiahdom, I think he near the end he thinks he is the Messiah, but it’s Goodsir who provides The Last Supper. How much more powerful a story of Christ is there, than, you know, “Take, eat,” and it’s yourself? And it’s fascinating to me that the man who dedicated his life to helping people and curing people and being empathic at their ending, his last act is to kill as many of Hickey’s people as possible. And, you know, so there’s--that’s where the trial was, it wasn’t when Hickey was gonna be hanged, it was inside Dr. Goodsir when he decided that “These people need to end and I will do it.” 

SH: So should we talk about the big scene at the end--well, it’s not the end, it’s the Tuunbaq sequence in 1.10? 

DK: To set it up, Adam, you know, Hickey--we’ll keep calling him Hickey even though we’ve established he isn’t--you get an important piece of information in episode nine where Tozer, Sergeant Tozer, relays to you a piece of information that he hasn’t shared with anyone, that he watched Collins be killed and he watched Collins’s soul be pulled out of his body. And, you know, for Hickey, suddenly a lot of things make sense. What happened to Private Heather, who was alive for many episodes but no longer sort of present in his body, I mean you even have a scene where you poke his brain hoping to get some kind of reaction out of him, and you take that piece of information and you suddenly realize you’re not longer in a kind of survival story, you’re in kind of a spiritual story, you’re in kind of a mythological story, suddenly. Can you talk about how you decided to play that so it was sort of clear to an audience what that opportunity was? Because we did not devote a lot of dialogue to it, it was going to have to be something an audience felt as much as was described to them. 

AN: I can only describe the way that it--the process--the mind of it, that, you know, you see Hickey has a plan, up until that point, he’s started--the way that I thought about it was that, you know, once he starts to hear things, he starts to have this space of this area, creates this space in his mind and he understands the things that have come before him and his curiosity leads him to, you know--one element in him is still practically engaged in survival, and outmaneuvering the captain, and heading south, and coming up with a plan and, you know, a story as to what happened, but then there are other elements of, you know, consuming human flesh, that there might be an answer there, it might be an enlightening experience. And if it’s not in that, is it something else? And he finds the hill, and he understands when he sees that hill, that he hears something, and then he’s not quite clear on what it is, what’s drawing him, and what’s talking to him, and what he’s feeling, but he’s becoming one with this realm, and, you know, he starts to, once he discovers the supernatural element--not that he hasn’t already established that there is one, but the fact that it’s such a specific--he’s been developing his knowledge of the summoning song that Lady Silence sings to become a Shaman, you know, the rules of this particular realm, this empire. And he’s been gathering this information as we go along, all the way through the series he’s been taking pieces of information, and he pockets it and learns and keeps it for later.

[show audio]

[mysterious music]

Hickey: Tuunbaq… a spirit that dresses as an animal, and yet we shot it with a cannon and drew blood. How do you reconcile that?

Crozier: I can’t. There’s much about this voyage I can’t reconcile. 

Hickey: What mythology is this creature at the center of?

Crozier: About the creature I have no answers, Mr. Hickey. We were not meant to know of it. 

AN: And when he gets this key piece of the puzzle, that the Tuunbaq is taking souls, and that... there’s a hierarchy of what the Tuunbaq wants to eat. You know, a captain, and important people, he realizes that he really is the center of this universe. I suppose the way that I adjusted it was that everybody else became irrelevant. Completely irrelevant. I no longer needed to worry about manipulation, control, fear. Everything was gonna sing for me, everything was gonna work as if I had magic hands, and my voice just dictated what the universe would do.

[show audio]

[mysterious music continued]

Hickey: I didn’t have anywhere near an equal on this expedition. But you. I wanted to thank you for that. On the eve of what is quite an important day. 

AN: Every single conversation was an annoyance because it was getting in the way of me listening to the universe, this world, this empire, this realm that was now speaking to me. And I was talking to the Tuunbaq, you know, from this distance, and we had this dance going, and everything that happened was just getting in my way. It was all gonna work itself out because I’ve been chosen to ascend, to reach this ascension, to, you know, ride the Tuunbaq into my new empire, to take my new throne, and I was finally gonna be given the answers to these questions that I’d been asking.

[show audio]

[rushing wind, men singing weakly in the background, creaking]

Hickey (shouting): Bugger Nelson! Bugger Jesus! Bugger Joseph and Mary! Bugger the Archbishop of Canterbury! None ever wanted nothing from me! 

SH: When you offer the Tuunbaq the tongue, and there’s that pause, what’s gonna happen, and he bites your arm off instead, and that look on your face of just, you know, “You too have failed me.”

DS: Et tu?

[laughter] 

“Et tu, Tuunbaq?”

[laughter]

AN: “Et tu, Tuunbaq,” that’s a great T-shirt. But that scene, I drifted, but that scene in particular, is a slight difference to what his plan was, which was to climb the hill, sacrifice the men, sacrifice the tongue, and to become one with the Tuunbaq and to take my place on the throne in this new realm. And to find the answers and maybe, you know, climb through to a different realm, or who knows what. This empire was now my empire, which was the culmination of all of Hickey through his entire life has been leading to this point, and he’s quietened himself enough to hear it, and then suddenly he gets sick, because somebody poisons him. And so it’s a slightly different feeling, as he’s climbing the hill, and it’s a different--something else is happening inside him. He’s still perfectly capable of executing his plan, he gets carried away in that scene, and then by the time the Tuunbaq appears, he kind of focuses again, and becomes very excited. It’s a relationship with the Tuunbaq, it’s a dance, that everything is for him and the Tuunbaq. Everyone else is irrelevant. 

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq snuffling, boat chain clanking]

[the Tuunbaq roars, sound of chomping flesh, then the screeching sound of the soul being eaten]

SH: And what he gets so wrong about the Tuunbaq, and I think what a lot of the Western characters in our show get wrong about the Tuunbaq, is that the Tuunbaq is not a deity, the Tuunbaq doesn’t ask to be a god, right? All it is is just this arbiter of what is good or what is not good for the land, you know, there’s no sense of the Tuunbaq wanting to be the ultimate creative force here, and I think that’s where Hickey was wrong, right?

AN: I think he sees it as a supernatural creature, and again, because everything comes through him, and the universe revolves around him, that it’s a challenge for him, it’s a question for him, and he deals a lot in questions as opposed to answers, and what his position is in the universe, and by the time he meets this creature that eats souls--and the creature’s sick, and it’s because he hasn’t united with it yet! It’s because of me that it’s sick, it hasn’t, I haven’t been in contact with it, and we haven’t united ourselves and taken over this empire, and he doesn’t see it for what it is. SH: And when you guys see the Tuunbaq’s death in the very end of that sequence, how did you guys feel?

DS: Speaking for the novelist here, I was surprised; and then I got through the surprise and thought yeah. And then I immediately wondered how Lady Silence would have to pay for this death, ‘cause you’d already shown me that she’s in charge of protecting the Tuunbaq, so it was controlling it in some way, and she wasn’t really up to the task, so I liked that in going, when Crozier’s with the Inuit band, learning that she’s been punished and sent out by herself. But the Tuunbaq’s death itself just seemed right at that time. 

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq’s death scene--growling noises, boat chain clinking, Crozier struggling] 

AN: It was a horrible thing to watch, as a viewer, it was so sad, and it spoke to me of this sort of contemporary sort of--to me it was sort of a global warming issue, not to bring it ‘round, but it was sort of like, that’s it, they’ve killed it. 

SH: No, absolutely, yeah! 

AN: They’ve killed it, they’ve killed the Tuunbaq and we’re actually rejoicing at Crozier’s survival. But really, the man deserves death, with the creature that creates balance to this culture should be alive. And we have this upside down world that we are celebrating, which is so, you know, intelligent of you guys to create, and it’s difficult to take, but that creature is gone, and so balance is gone, and here we are. 

DK: The very specific and subtle thing that we put in the show that probably no will decode it ‘til they hear this podcast, but was important to us as a structural element, was Sir John dies, when he’s killed down the fire hole in episode three, he has some flashes of subjective kinds of hallucinations, I suppose, or visions, I don’t know what you would call them. But one of them is of open water, it’s just a vista of the future of the Arctic, that there are going to be these, you know, that there’s going to be a huge melt, and there’s going to be all this open water. And for the final shot we tried to match, as much as we could, the angle, so that all of that frozen water that Crozier is sitting on at that seal hole would maybe possibly evoke that memory, to speak to what you’re saying, Adam, which is that this whole thing is a kind of, from the Netsilik’s point of view, it’s a huge tragedy in which these Europeans are the terrors, in a way. And not to be too reductive about it, but, you know, we wanted the season to have that kind of change of polarity, which is one reason why we couldn’t quite use the sort of the ending of the book, as much as we loved it, Dan, it felt like a lot of things that would feel--that would pull the point of view of the season across that line too much and too late. We wanted to try to modulate it a little bit so that every episode felt like you were giving some room in your point of view for Lady Silence’s perspective, or the Inuit’s perspective, and that that change would sort of happen so slowly you might not even notice that it was happening at all, which is one reason why we made that decision. 

DS: You gave every character I saw room to have his or her own apotheosis, which is a big theme with you guys, I meant, the arcs end and people becoming someone else. Crozier grows into his leadership, I think, beautifully. Maybe he deserved punishment, but I found Crozier and his empathy, as Fitzjames is dying in the boat, it’s Crozier that touches him and lets him know, you know, through physical contact, that he’s not alone. And giving them room is unusual. I just find there’s so many unusual elements to what you three have created, that, I have to warn you, I think it deserves a lot of intelligent attention.

DK: Well I hope we can volley a lot of those right back to the book, Dan. Well we should take some time at the end to--given that after the sequence, this really becomes almost a kind of silent film to deliver the ending to Crozier’s arc--to really sing the praises of Jared Harris in this show, I mean, what he did with this role is remarkable. So, Dan, I would love to know what you thought of Jared Harris’s Francis Crozier? 

DS: After watching the ten episodes of him and all those, and watching what he did with it, I just wanted him to adopt me. 

[laughter]

SH: He would love that! 

DS: But it certainly--leading is the operative word, isn’t it? He just, he didn’t give 100 or 1000 percent, he gave more than that to the character. He became Crozier for me. I’m the one who had to dream up the man, and see what he looked like, and write about him for about 1100 pages, 700 finally in type, and so I had my Crozier, he was pretty solid. But now Jared Harris is Crozier. There’s no doubt in my mind.

DK: The ending of the season is quite different from the ending of the book, Dan, how did you feel watching the ending of the show, and, in all candor, do you feel that it was satisfying? Do you feel that it was at least a good companion piece for the ending of the book? 

DS: Well I’m glad I didn't video record my reaction the first time I saw the different ending, because speaking for two million readers I stood up and shouted, “What's wrong with my ending!”

[laughter]

“Is it chopped liver?” And I realized it would be. I realized that I don’t think you could have taken my ending and made it a sensible finale visually in the way it went. So I tracked--the whole episodes, the last two episodes, were enlightenment to me, because I’m just a viewer now, I’m watching something I didn’t create, these are not my ideas, so I sat back and enjoyed it, as horrible as they were. So when I watch your ending, the only thing I was bothered by was I’m sentimental. And the real Crozier, I believe, and certainly the fictional Crozier that we’ve all created, was so lonely, he was so alone in life, I think he was less alone than Crozier was, and, you know, rejected by Franklin’s niece several times from marriage, a life where he really felt rejection, probably more than Hickey did, and at the end I wanted him to be with someone. So as much as I liked your ending and I really thought it was proper and appropriate for the series, I woulda put a person next to him as he’s fishing out there in, you know, in his Inuit outfit at night waiting by a seal--he’s not fishing, he’s waiting by a seal breathing hole to kill it. So if I’d seen a glimpse of two of them, you wouldn’t even need to see their faces, you know, the sentimental side of me woulda been happy.

SH: But we leave that ambiguous in the ending, in terms of he’s not with Lady Silence, she, you know, had to pay the bill in some ways for the loss of the Tuunbaq and her destiny is to venture forth alone, and in some ways her storyline is the most tragic of all the characters in our show because, I mean, the price she paid is so harsh. But in terms of the last shot, which Dave and I just knew from pretty early on that was gonna be our last shot, and it felt right. We don’t know much about Crozier’s biography, you know? For all we know that child could be his, it may not. We actually didn’t want to fill in too much of the coloring book at that point. It’s up to the audience to describe whether or not that last shot is--it’s interesting ‘cause we had this big argument, lovely argument in the color suite, the grading suite, of how we grade that last shot. Whether we grade it bright and sunny to be optimistic, or we grade it with a lot of contrast and stamp down a lot of the light to make it seem that, you know, there’s a sense--a harshness, to this reality. And in some ways we split the middle, so the audience can decide whether or not the life Crozier has at the end is one of punishment, reckoning, or whether or not he will move on and have something different.

DK: And I think something in that final shot that certainly we couldn’t have planned, that tipped things in a warmer direction was the child that plays that boy in the shot, who’s meant to be sleeping against Crozier as he’s waiting at the seal hole, really fell asleep because he was wrapped up in fur, and Jared’s a very welcoming person, and he fell asleep. And in the middle of that shot he twitches in his sleep, like children do. And I think that if you catch that it’s quite undeniably a warm moment. You don’t know whether that’s Crozier’s son, whether that’s just a friend’s son, someone he’s taking care of, but you do get a sense that there is a community and that it’s a warm one, even though that life will be difficult and he will occupy no position of leadership in that world, he will be--you know, he’s missing a hand at that point, it’s going to be a rough rough road ahead of him, but we decided to sort of be as ambiguous as we could but for that child who twitches in his sleep, which we just loved that, that that’s a part of that final shot of the show.

DS: Now you’ve made me wanna go back watch that scene about ten times. I think you did at the ending essentially what you chose to do throughout the series, which is to trust in the intelligence and the sensibilities of the audience. So in that sense I like it a lot, but I admire it too. It just, I’m just sentimental, I just want Crozier finally to find somebody.

[show audio]

[”The Gates of Paradise” by Robert Fripp, which is the music from that aforementioned final scene of Crozier and the little boy asleep at the seal hole, plays] 

SH: And with episode ten, the story of the Franklin Expedition on AMC is completed. And Dave, you’ve been working on this project now for ten or twelve years, I’ve been on it for two and a half years, Adam you’ve been on this journey for a long time, Dan you’ve probably been--how long has it been for you?

DS: Oh, since about 1994!

SH: Yeah, wow. I mean, what is it about this story that means it’s hard to let go? Even now I feel like there’s a grieving process that I feel like I have.

DS: I know why it’s hard to let go. You created real people, you did something that is incredibly rare I think, for any media, movies, series, anything. They’re real people, and when they suffer the viewer suffers with them. When they try to fight back and survive, that’s the viewer’s impression, and we’re sorry to see each one of them go, including Hickey. So, I think there’s a success in what you set out to do. 

SH: We’re just so thrilled that, you know, you gave us the trust to do your book but also that you love it! We were so nervous that you would hate this adaptation!

[laughter]

DK: Well and now what’s amazing is we all get to sort of take a seat in the theater of real history playing out again, now that they’ve discovered the ships. You know, we’ve been told by Parks Canada and by people we’ve met who are actively on the archeological expeditions now, dives to the ships, that there is a chance that they will find a ship’s log, and that all of the questions that have come up and perplexed us and preoccupied us and fascinated us in the researching of both the writing of the novel and the creating of the television show, that those questions may have answers soon. And so now we are all now back in that position of being riveted by this actual history. And what a treat it will be to have a conversation in a year when we have learned hopefully much more about what actually happened on this expedition. 

[“The Gates of Paradise” begins playing again softly in the background]

DS: If I were on the expedition ship and found the log, the diaries, everything, I would hide them.

[laughter]

DK: Agreed.

AN: Yep, absolutely. 

DS: I mean we’ve all done a lot of work here, who cares about reality? 

[laughter]

DK: Well thank you, Adam, thank you Dan, for joining us, Soo and I have had a fantastic time having this extended conversation that hopefully is interesting to people who have watched and appreciated the show. So thank you for the opportunity to do it, it’s been fantastic to talk to you both, and onwards we go, into the future!

SH: Onwards ho!

DS: Onward.

AN: Onward. Thank you so much guys, it’s been a pleasure.

DK: Thank you, and thank you for everyone who’ve watched the show and thank you for everyone who’ve read the novel, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback!

[“The Gates of Paradise” fades out]

[evabellasworld]

Storm of the Republic

Chapter 29

AO3 Link | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29

——————————————————————————————

Summary:  When Tup murdered General Tiplar during a battle, Anakin Skywalker and Captain Rex dispatched Ahsoka, Fives, and Yara to solve the mystery that was plaguing the Clone Army. Meanwhile, Senator Padme Amidala contacted Commander Fox, Commander Tori, Riyo Chuchi, and Dipper to help her continue investigating the death of Palpatine, suspecting that Dooku was behind the evil plot. But when Dooku send an ISB agent to stop them, the team had to race against time to search for the truth, which could alter the course of the galaxy.

————————————————————————————

Putting on her surgical mask, Dr. Urakchaevy took a deep breath as she glanced at the surgical tube, before shifting her focus towards Tup. With his head covered in plastic foil and his eyes shut, the doctor slid him inside the machine and looked at the panels. “We’re now beginning level 1 brain scan,” she announced to Fives, who was the only one in the room. “This will only take a short while.”

As Fives gave a nod of approval, the machine scanned his brain for 30 minutes. The ARC Trooper tapped his foot on the floor as the doctor focused on his brain condition. From what she had gathered so far, his brain scan was blue, showing that he was slipping towards his deathbed.

This is not good , her teeth chattered. Somehow, I couldn’t find any lumps in his brain, and yet, Tup is unconscious. How is this possible?

“Is everything alright, Doc?” Fives wondered, noticing her hands trembling on the panels.

Dr. Urakchaevy nodded, pressing her lips. “I’ll have to raise the brain scan to level 2. There’s nothing I could find on the surface of his brain.”

“Alright, Doc, you can raise it up to level two,” he gave a thumbs up. “I hope he’s alright.”

Let’s hope he does, she let out a sigh, as she performed another brain scan on Tup, hoping to dig deeper. Another half an hour has passed, and Dr. Urakchaevy felt her sweat dripping from her forehead, despite the air-conditioning in the room.

Considering Tup was the first clone she had treated, she wasn’t knowledgeable in their biology. The only thing she knows about clone troopers was the fact that they fought for the Republic, even though it had been crumbled by the Empire. She doesn’t see the point of the conflict, but Dr. Urakchaevy has to perform her duty to save her patients.

As the machine beeped, the doctor checked on her panel with a gleam painted on her lips, only for her shoulders to slump towards the results. Is this machine broken or what? Do I need to re-scan just to make sure I find something inside Tup?

“Did you find anything, Doc?” his voice turned agitated. “Please tell me you found something, Doc.”

Dr. Urakchaevy remained silent as she stared at the surgical pod, wondering if she could raise the level of the machine. She knows the risk, and she’s not sure whether she would like the result. The worst-case scenario she could think of was the side effects of the radiation, which was nausea, fever, and vomiting. But it was the only way if she wanted a fast result.

“It’s still the same result as the first scan, unfortunately,” she reported, turning towards him. “I’m afraid I have no choice but to perform a Level 5 atomic scan.”

“What’s wrong with that?” asked Fives, raising his eyebrows. “Is it dangerous?”

“It’s full of radiation and Tup might experience side effects, but it’s the only way I could find a lump inside his brain, though the chances are rather small. Are you okay with that, Fives?”

Fives tilted his head upwards as he pondered for a moment. I can’t just refuse his surgery and let him die. I’ll never forgive myself if I made the wrong decision.

“If the Level 5 atomic scan means saving my brother, then you need to do it,” he told her. “I came here to save Tup, and I’m gonna bring him back to base, safe and sound, so do what you have to, Doc. Go with the Level 5 atomic scan if you must.”

Dr. Urakchaevy gave him a small smile. “You’re a caring brother, Fives. Now go wait outside with your sister, Yara. I’m sure Thonda is done patching her up by now.”

“Will Tup be okay, Doc?” his voice quivered. “I don’t want to lose him, really.”

“He’ll be alright,” assured Dr. Urakchaevy, holding his hand. “I promise you. He’ll walk out of this room and act as if nothing had happened to him. He’ll drink with you and Yara and go back to his usual self.”

“In case he doesn’t make it, can I say my last words to him?”

“Fives, Tup will be fine,” she said, opening the door for him. “Besides, this will only take a few minutes, so don’t worry. I have faith in your younger brother.”

Without saying a word, Fives stepped out of the surgical room and held his breath when he found Yara sitting all by herself, munching a plate full of chocolate chip cookies. Cracking a smile, he tiptoed towards her and slapped his arms on her shoulders, making her choke on her food.

“Bitch, I told you not to sneak up to me like that,” she cussed with her mouth full, kicking his shin. “I could have died of a heart attack, you know.”

“Well, it was funny,” he burst into laughter, as he sat beside her and wrapped his arms around her shoulder. “You could have seen the look on your face. It was so ugly.”

“Shut up, Fives. At least I’m more good-looking than you.”

“Says who? Everyone knows I’m the most handsome man among the Grand Army of the Republic.”

Yara sticks her tongue out in disgust. “Yuck, you’re ugly as fuck.”

“No, you’re ugly.”

“No, you’re ugly.”

“Fuck you, Fives,” Yara shoved his shoulders, her other hand gripping on the plate of cookies. “I hate you so much.”

“Well, fuck you too, Yara,” Fives imitated her voice, as he snatched away her cookies from her grasp. “Also, you ate too much of these. Save some for me, will you?”

She crossed her arms, her lips pouting. “Give me back my cookies, dickhead. They’re mine.”

He shook his head, stuffing one in his mouth. “Hey, sharing is caring, okay? Besides, it’s been a while since I had authentic food, anyway.”

“Tell me about it. I miss drinking margaritas from 79’s. It was the best drink I could ever have, you know. I wonder what’s their secret?”

“Maybe they made it with love,” Fives jokes, leaning on his seat. “Also, the music was glorious at the club. I always enjoyed the songs that the DJ played on the dance floor, especially the song Groovy. That was my all-time favourite song.”

“But somehow, someone always bested you on the dance floor,” Yara snarked. “And that someone is sitting right next to you. Guess who it is?”

He rolled his eyes. “Very funny, Yara. I beat you one time and you were sulking the next day.”

“Yeah, exactly. You only beat me one time, Fives. The rest of the time we spent at 79’s, I always held a record on the dance floor, aside from Lisa, of course.”

“God, I miss those days. Everything was simple back then. Now, it feels like we’re stressing our future like a bunch of old men waiting for death.”

“I know, Fives. I miss the days when the only reason I cried was because I failed the simulation. Now, I cry because everyone we know was killed in front of us, and we don’t even know whether we’re next in line.”

“And I miss the day where the only reason we’re happy was because we passed the simulation. Now, I can only be happy because I lived to fight another day, though I wished I could join the rest of our fallen siblings instead.”

Yara hummed to herself. “I know, Fives. Honestly, when this war is over, I just want to walk away from all of this. I want to settle down somewhere and find someone to love, like Commander Fox. He and Riyo are so happy together and I want to be like them.”

“So, you’re looking for someone like those male leads from your favourite rom-com?” smiled Fives. “And how many kids are you planning to have?”

“First of all, I want a guy who is kind and sweet and secondly, I want at least four kids, doesn’t matter what gender they are.”

“Four kids? Well, that’s a lot, to be honest.” “I want to shower all my love on my kids and accept them for who they are, no matter what,” Yara expressed her hopes and dreams. “And I also want them to have a better life than I did. Since I fought in a war, I want my kids to live a peaceful life, without worrying about a single thing.”

“Sounds like a pleasant life,” Fives said, placing an empty plate beside him. “Honestly, I would like to have that kind of life, too. If only I could find someone like that.”

Before Yara could say something, Dr. Urakchaevy walked out of the surgical room with tears of shame in her eyes. Fives stood up from his seat, waiting for her to speak. “So, did the surgery went well?”

She bobbed her head with hesitation, her fingers fidgeting. “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

“We would like to hear the good news,” Fives replied with his brows furrowed.

“Okay then, the good news is that the surgery went well, and we found a tumour inside his brain,” she informed him, showing the evidence she extracted. “I’m not sure what kind of tumour it is, but I can do my research on it.”

“That’s great to hear, Doc,” Yara beamed. “But then, what’s the bad news?”

“Tup didn’t make it,” Dr. Urakchaevy broke the news to them. “I’m so sorry, guys. I did everything I could to save him, but somehow, his heart rate stopped.”

Fives’ face contorted as he dropped to his knees, frozen. Yara could not utter a single word from her mouth as tears flowed on her cheeks, hugging her knees.

How are we going to face Rex after this?

[undercooked-ravioloni]

Ooh, may I request the proxies walking in on S/O and another pasta having a rap battle in the living room (and S/O is totally killing it)? Bonus points if they're rapping to Epic Rap Battles of History. Thank you~!

i listened to erb for the first time and honestly, this request was lots of fun, even though i might have gotten a bit sidetracked

pure crackhead energy - i sincerely hope you enjoy it

+ ticci toby 

+ if he ever did walk in on his s/o having a rap battle with someone, he’d be a bit upset that they went ahead and did it without him

+ but that all melts away when the theatrics start

+ haha thats funny because that would never happen

+ BEN and toby are most likely to organize these re-enactments so it’s bold of you to assume toby wouldn’t already be there to do one with you

+ that’s how you find yourself in a surprisingly elaborate costume, next to toby, in a similar attire, who is fixing on a blond wig 

+ across from you stand clockwork, as clyde, and a jane who ended up in the role of bonnie against her own will - nat’s tipping her hat, grinning, while jane twirls a toy pistol in her hands

+ you fix the small tiara on his head and that’s when the shows start

+ BEN drops the beat and clockwork steps in front of her jane

+ “i’ll handle this darlin’, i’m known to fire off some bars”

+ the two gals are surprisingly good and their accents are on point

+ but you and toby have been practicing too

+ you have to bite back a laugh as you face him and start your verse “my love, your face is beauty to behold, i will protect thine honour”

+ all the sass the brunet has comes out as he raps to juliet’s lines

+ jane and clockwork watch you prancing around behind him, trying to keep their shocked expressions from crumbling into a fit of laughter

+ nat then points a finger at him

+ “hey partner, you better put a muzzle on your missus” she growls playfully as you hold your juliet close protectively

+ jane pulls out the toy pistol and pretends to shoot at toby

+ you never knew his voice could go so high

+ “then i shall kill myself, on my stomach i shall lie,” you weep as you dramatically pull out a waterbottle and gobble it down

+ “oops nevermind! my flesh was merely grazed!” your boyfriend happily announces. “where’s romeo? oh nOMEO there’s poison on your face!”

+ he takes a knife, sticks it under his armpits so to make it seem as if it was planted in his heart and collapses onto the floor again

+ the show is unable to go on as “clyde” bursts into loud laughter at toby’s fake-spasming on the floor

[romeo and juliet vs bonnie and clyde]

+ hoodie

+ the beat was what caught his attention

+ he walks into the living room just as you “step right in”, dressed in a black turtleneck and jeans

+ then he watches as toby borderline twerks behind you as you diss jeff who is supposedly bill gates [with a shabby wig]

+ he lost a bet okay ?

+ cue money being rained on everyone by toby while jeff tries to rap the aids donation part

+ then you get slapped with an iphone

+ but that doesn’t throw you off your game, not even slightly

+ hoodie has no idea what’s happening but he goes along with it

+ under his mask, he’s smirking, amused

+ he thinks the peak of crackhead energy is when you’re picked up by toby and carried away, acting out your ascent to heaven

+ he is wrong

+ jeff really gets into the next bit, spitting out the verse with incredible aggressiveness

+ “fine, you wanna be like that? dIE THEN”

+ just as hoodie expects the little show to end

+ the lights dim

+ BEN floats over to the center, his arms full stretched out

+ his voice is distorted as he looks at jeff, eyes glowing red, a condescending smirk on his face

+ “i’m sorry bill, i’m afraid i can’t let you do that”

[steve jobs vs bill gates]

+ masky

+ masky immediately backs out of the room and closes the door

+ but then toby comes through the door, pushing him in

+ so your boyfriend just crosses his arms and watches as you put on an itchy-looking beard and as BEN steps out dressed like that kid from pokemon

+ the blond boy starts, throwing a pokeball at your feet

+ masky: ???

+ he is about to leave again when you jump in

+ “you’re so ineffective, you couldn’t even turn 11″ you retort in a gruff voice

+ masky chokes back on a laugh as the elf looks at you, overdramatically shocked

+ BEN’s comeback has more intensity in it as he floats up, circling around you

+ you look unfazed and your boyfriend has to admit, he’s getting quite the kick out of this

+ he thinks the lines are so clever

+ “i am dar-winning”, “TB and scarlet fever, gotta catch em all!”, “it was hard losing my daughters and their brother, as hard as the wood that oak gave your mother”

+ he’s doubled over, shoulders shaking as he holds onto a chair to keep his balance

+ you see him wipe away a tear as you finished

+ he’ll never let you live it down though. except teasing for years to come

[ash ketchum vs charles darwin]

[skrltwtch]

Unwell

Prompt: Person A is taking care of a very sick person B. They eventually end up cuddling because A wanted to comfort B and keep them warm, despite B’s objections that they might be contagious and don’t want to get A sick. Then B throws up on A. B apologises profusely. A insists that it’s okay and works on getting them both cleaned up. (Source)

Word count: 1,286 words

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

‘You look like death,’ said George, pouring a glass of water.

‘I feel like it,’ I said. As if I needed convincing, a sharp pain sliced through my stomach, followed by watery rumbling. ‘At what point do I get my beneficiaries together and read them my will?’

He chuckled. ‘It’s only the stomach flu, Y/N. You’ll live.’

I took the glass of water from his outstretched hand and partook of its contents in slow, measured sips. ‘That sounds like what someone who’d stand to gain the most from an untimely death would say.’

‘That,’ he said, sitting down beside me, ‘doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Neither does this.’ I coughed. ‘It’s obviously not your cooking.’ I detected the reddening of his cheeks through bleary eyes. ‘So it has to be Bon Nomad, where we go all the time and never had any issues. Until now. Maybe.’ I added to the water in the toilet bowl.

He dabbed the corner of my mouth with a tissue. ‘Firstly, I’m flattered. Secondly, I could drop them a note. They have to know if their food’s making people sick.’

‘Get us a voucher, too, for our troubles.’

‘You’d want to go back?’

‘No, thank you.’ I mustered the strength to flash him a grin. The compulsion for an expulsion of a fresh surge of sick made quick work of my light mood. Every heave chafed the back of my throat.

George was quick to refill my glass of water. ‘Thank you,’ I said, taking it from him. Suddenly, I was made very aware of my lips’ craggy texture. Was it bad that I’d wondered whether I could stand to stomach lip balm? His hand on my cheek snapped me out of my reverie — fever-induced, possibly, if the difference in temperatures between us was anything to go by. ‘This sucks. And I’m taking up so much of your time. I’m sure you have better things to do than play nurse.’

He pursed his lips. ‘No … not really.’

His laughter that came after was contagious. This moment of joy was short-lived: the spasms that rocked my body soon became those of white-hot agony. A new round of vomit made a hasty, loud — very loud — exit. Fortunately, I was only expelling through one end. And … nope, I’d started to cry, too, from the pain and absolute rankness of what I’d been spewing. George moved closer and wrapped us both in an embrace.

‘I don’t think this is a good idea,’ I said.

He leaned his head on the back of my shoulder. ‘You’re warm.’ His tone, and the subsequent line of kisses he made along my shoulder, made it clear our situation wasn’t up for negotiation. I hadn’t the wherewithal to resist him anyway. It was easier to revel in the immense comfort his touch, his nearness, provided. His warmth was more than welcome against mine, preternatural and harsh. He’d hum some of our favourite songs in my ear and gently massage my abdomen. Though I knew full well it was for my own good, I’d hate it so much whenever he pulled away to flush the toilet, or top up my water or supply of tissues.

I didn’t know how long we stayed like this. Eventually, I felt less like I was about to keel over any moment soon, and I was 80% certain that the noises my stomach was making were from hunger, not symphonies from one of the circles of hell.

‘George? I think I’m a little better,’ I said. I led his hand over my stomach and applied pressure. Nothing. Not even the whisper of a gurgle. A while ago, doing what I did would’ve prompted my best impression of a soda fountain with only one option.

‘You want to get up?’

‘Yes, please. I don’t want to have my face so close to the toilet anymore. And I’m hungry.’

‘That’s good. I think.’ He got up. I raised my arms at him, an unspoken appeal for him to lift me up. I had to have lost at least two kilos of water after all this, and he’d been working out. (He’d thought I wouldn’t notice. Please.) It was doable. But imagine my surprise when he scooped me up from the floor and carried me bridal-style. I quickly placed my arms around his neck for support.

‘I’ve been working out,’ said George, grinning. God, he looked so proud of himself. I was, too, really.

‘I know.’ I pecked him on the cheek.

Then I had to go and ruin everything: I lurched forward — and I barfed. I barfed all over myself and him. Punctuating this twist to what’d been an enchanting story about enduring love and devotion was me burping up an enormous bubble that tasted lightly acidic … and then bursting into tears. He hadn’t dropped me to the ground in disgust. Ooh, damn him and his uncanny ability to remain calm in circumstances that called for anything but levelheadedness. The embarrassment welling up inside of me launched into a presentation on George’s fitting casting as Schofield in 1917. They were kindred spirits, it contended, because they displayed immense fortitude in the face of adversity. Ah, I countered, but a sick girlfriend couldn’t compare to the hells of World War I.

‘I’m so sorry, babe,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for being a wet, snotty, puke-y mess.’

‘It’s okay,’ he said, setting me down on the edge of the bed. ‘You need a shower anyway.’

He smirked to show he meant no ill will by that. I wouldn’t have disagreed with him. I was sticky with sweat and vomit. I’d spent most of my day steaming my face with toilet plumes. I wasn’t even sure what time it was now. I couldn’t even consult my internal clock for an estimation. I was tired. I was gross. I was hungry. I felt I was in more dire need of a hug than a shower, honestly, but I didn’t want to contaminate George further. I couldn’t bear it if he succumbed to this damn bug, too.

George re-emerged in my line of sight with a handful of paper towels. He wiped my mouth, and then he cleaned chunks off our clothes. His touch was so gentle. For the first time today, I wanted to die not because of this stupid sickness. The feeling persisted when he took off his shirt in one fluid motion. How’d he think I wouldn’t notice he’d started working out?

‘Arms,’ he said. ‘Come on now.’

I complied with his request. He took my top off for me. The breeze, mild as it was, was welcome against my skin.

‘I’ll be right back.’ Off he went again, this time with our soiled shirts in tow. I wasn’t ashamed to acknowledge that I’d mewled and pouted like a child when we parted ways. I could hear running water from the kitchen. How did I get so lucky … To show that I was still capable of autonomy, I undressed myself; I’d made sure to stand up first to prevent an unfortunate accident involving my now bare bottom. I was about to head in to the bathroom when he reappeared, and with a mildly sullen face, like, Why didn’t you wait for me?

‘I can shower by myself,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think we should really get naked together at this time … not after what happened … I’m so sorry,’ I added in a small voice.

He chuckled. ‘It’s okay! Really.’ He came closer and kissed me on the lips. ‘See, I’m not mad. Cross my heart and hope to die.’

I returned the favour: his taste was a welcome break. ‘You might just regret that.’

[scribeofmorpheus]

Mark of the Wolf Part 14

Catch Up Here!

Pairing: Derek Hale x Reader (Lastname: Markolf)

Words: 5k

Warnings: Some gory body horror bits -imo. Violence, another cold open, angst? Butchered Swedish.

A/N: It’s funny, looking back at my series plot outline, I never thought this was the direction I was going to go with this confrontation but... The pen writes what it wants.

Leave a like or reblog if you enjoyed this chapter! It helps ☺

~

Derek and Peter sat in the front of the car –Peter at the wheel driving at a more dangerous speed than Derek did. Markus sat beside you.

The others had taken other cars.

The car was cold. The air-con turned all the way up for some reason. It seemed you were the only one with goosebumps that refused to smooth over since you were the only one rubbing at your skin. In search of a warmer cardigan, you reached beside you to grab your duffle bag, but then you remembered you didn't have it. It was with Scott.

Damn!

You should have dressed warmer.

A dial tone sounded from Derek's phone. This was the third time he'd tried the same number. His brow was scrunched in annoyance as he tapped re-dial for the fourth time.

Your head was pressed to the cold glass of the window, the trees whooshing past to form one collective reel of green and brown as your nails dug into the bandage wrapped around your palm. An itch you couldn’t get at annoying your newly formed cut.

"She's not going to answer," Peter said, eyes focused on the road. "Besides, our plan isn't contingent on her being a key player."

"We need the back-up in case things go south," Derek said. "She's the only one powerful enough to take one of those hunters head-on if we need a quick exit."

"I cannot wait to say 'I told you so' when this inevitably blows up in your face," Peter snorted.

"If that happens we'll all be screwed to high hell," Derek said bleakly. “Which means, you’ll be going down with me, smart-ass.”

Peter rubbed his nose, a redness forming just above his lip. He exhaled loudly.

Once the ringing stopped, an unclear voice sounded out through Derek’s phone's speakers. He placed the phone to his ear.

"I need to cash in a favour," his tone was indifferent.

There was a beat of silence, thick and disturbing.

Peter shuffled awkwardly, stretching against the uncomfortable seat material and forward slanted head rest.

"She's not gonna show," Peter sing-songed.

You laced your fingers around your pendant, wringing it about from left to right like a pendulum. A spot on your chest marked by sage oil.

Derek hummed before cutting the phone, it sounded contemplative rather than disappointed. He turned to Peter, "I guess we're just going to have to hope everything goes as planned then."

 The car was parked on the edge of the treeline to the woods.

Peter groaned, looking down at his expensive shoes and the damp soil outside, "These were new shoes."

"I'll buy you a new pair if we live through this and you stop complaining," Derek clapped back as his heavy boots stomped into the mud, splatters of wet soil spraying on his dark jeans.

You and Markus disembarked and for once you were glad you weren't wearing your tennis trainers.

"On the plus side, if we all die, at least it’ll be in style," Markus noted dryly.

Peter shrugged and you rolled your eyes.

"Alright, split up?" Markus asked.

Derek nodded, "Yeah, since we know the lay of the land better, Peter and I will take one of you and we'll work going inward."

"If this place is so important, why hasn't anyone ever mapped out its location?" You asked, hands stuffed in your jeans to keep your body heat close as a cold breeze swept through.

"We tried. The Nematon has a tendency to hide itself," Derek told you.

"Oh..." you said, pretending to understand.

Peter looked around for a minute before speaking over his shoulder, "I'll take tall, dark and broody with me."

Both Markus and Derek pointed at themselves in confusion.

Peter rolled his eyes before pointing at your brother, "The other tall, dark and broody."

You lifted a finger to protest but before a full sound left your throat, Peter had already disappeared into the dark forest with Markus in tow.

You cursed under your breath and from the cheeky smirk Derek wore, you knew you hadn't sworn low enough.

"Come on," Derek's head nudged towards the dense forest. Hands in his back pockets.

"Perfect," you said sarcastically.

You and Derek walked in silence, your hands running up and down your bumpy flesh to burn the cold away.

The woods held an eeriness to them that made the air feel like burning sulphur despite the cold. Fog rolling outward like a dense smoke cloud the farther from the road you got.

You stepped in a mud patch and slid forward. Derek's quick hands caught you and kept you steady.

"You okay?" he looked you in the eye.

You blinked away and cleared your throat, "Yeah, t-thanks."

"You feel cold," he shrugged off his jacket. "Here."

"N-no, I- I'm fine, really," you refused his offer, but Derek ignored your words, draping his jacket around you. It was sweet of him.

"Relax. It won't eat you. It's just a jacket," he smirked.

You nodded while pressing your lips together.

"So… come here often?" you asked as Derek marched forward with long strides -you practically had to jog to keep up.

"To the woods?" he chuckled. "Yeah, this place is a riot," he added dryly.

You scrunched your face and Derek’s arms flexed as he folded them together.

"Actually I grew up close to these woods," there was a sadness to his voice.

You were intrigued, chin rising higher to get a better look at his face, "What's your family like?"

"Dead. Mostly," he noted casually.

Your eyes went wide.

Derek shuffled, feeling that maybe he sounded a bit more serious than normal. He ground his teeth before laughing humourlessly and tried again, this time lighter: "We used to be like your family, actually. Large, overwhelming, very unapologetically different."

"Thanks, I guess…?" you swatted at some fireflies.

Derek shifted his eyes blue and the bugs scattered from predatory fear. He relaxed back to normal and added, "It's a compliment, trust me."

You smiled before asking, "What happened?"

He answered almost immediately, like it as a rehearsed line or one he’d thought about many times, "The girl I was dating turned out to be a hunter… a homicidal one at that."

"Boy, those just follow you everywhere," you jabbed.

He craned a brow your way, "Goes with the territory."

He held your gaze for a moment too long and heat flushed through you, your lips tingling from the memory of his tender yet rough kiss. Your cast your eyes down at your feet.

When you looked back up you noticed Derek rubbed his nose discreetly.

You were compelled to ask him out of curiosity, "You and Peter have been doing that all night. Everything alright?" you pointed to his nose with a red nib.

"You can't smell it?" he was surprised, his eyes fixed on your pendant.

"Is it the sage?"

He hummed in response.

"Sorry," you said with a glib tone, feeling bad for causing everyone so much discomfort.

He cocked a half-smile, "Don't apologise. That is the only reason we're still alive-" he pointed at your pendant. "I can survive a little irritation. Immortal hunters? Not so much."

You stopped for a bit. Mind remembering something that made you laugh dryly. Derek turned to you.

"What?" he asked.

"N-nothing," you held his jacket as your body shook with laughter. "It's just ironic isn't it? The first time I met you, I dug a bullet out of your chest. You were the one in need of saving then. Now look at how everything turned out. I'm the proverbial damsel in distress and it pisses me off!"

It was Derek's turn to laugh, hot air permeating through the cold night in foggy breaths.

"You find that funny?" your jaw squared as you planted your feet and crossed your arms.

"I think it's funny you think you're a damsel," he smiled wider. "Not many damsels I know of have no qualms with cauterising a man's wound using the tip of an arrow and a zippo.  And you can damn well be certain they aren’t eagerly offering themselves up as bait. Not once mind you, but twice." He held up two fingers.

"Then I guess I'm an idiot," you remarked flatly.

"Aren't we all?"

Derek placed a hand on your shoulder. Your body reacted as you’d come to expect, with a shiver running up your spine and a flush rising up from your neck to greet your cheeks.

He uttered in a manner reserved for those more than friends -soft and intimate, "Take it from someone who lost their lycanthropy once, claws and teeth and speed doesn't make you powerful. Resolve does. And you've got that in spades."

You gulped, the warm feeling creeping into your chest again. It was strange seeing him so… open. This version of Derek was different from the one you first saw bleeding out on your metal slab.

Derek didn't move. His hand sending ripples of electricity through you from the contact. It didn't help matters that his jacket smelled of his scent and was wrapped around you like you were a couple in an 80's movie.

It all should have felt overbearing, too demanding, but for some reason, it felt the complete opposite. It felt like just enough.

You took a step forward and Derek stayed locked in place. He was determined to keep his promise. If anything were to happen between you two, under the stars and the pregnant silver moon, it would be only by your say so. You held all the cards and from the tantalisingly tempting way your lips tingled, you knew instinctively what your next play would be.

Your brain shouted for you to step away, to keep things from getting complicated, to not risk your heart again, but your lips parted of their own volition and soon you were speaking in a heady tone, "Derek… I…"

His jaw tensed, though it was much subtler. His eyes on the verge of turning blue. An odd aquamarine settled over his irises instead. He was trying his damndest to stay in control. It was then that you noticed how tightly he balled his other fist. The air filled with more trails of fog from his and your breaths. They kept climbing in frequency.

"I…" your feet trembled and then a howl pierced through the sound of crickets, startling you from your daze.

Derek inhaled and let his arm drop free from your shoulder, he brought it to his own and started working the muscle there as if it were sore.

"Peter's calling. Think he's found it. Come on," he shrugged as he walked in broad strokes towards the origin of the howl.

You cursed again and followed after, thankful for the cold air for the first time since the night began. It drained the colour away from your face.

"What took you guys?" Markus asked as he hopped off one foot onto the other in repeated motions.

"They were probably in-dis-posed," Peter wiggled his eyebrows as he strained the syllables of that last word, a devilish smirk pulling his face up.

Derek shook his head and you bit your inner cheek, ignoring the suggestive look Peter had shot your way.

A stone’s throw away was an old stump in the middle of the clearing. The Nematon.

"That's the Nematon?" you asked, a little disappointed.

"Not much to look at, but trust me, that thing is teeming with supernatural energy," Peter said.

Markus squatted close to the tree, placing his hand on its flat surface. His eyes flashed to red and back, nails shifting into claws then back to nails.

"They're right, this is it." He confirmed.

"This thing is barely higher than my knee. Without branches, what are we going to fashion stakes out of?" you raised your hand at the short stump.

Derek and Peter glanced at each other, each thinking the same thing.

In unison, they said: "The root cellar."

The root cellar was dark. The smell of earth was rich here. An old stain of a bloody handprint had turned a coppery orange colour on one of the root tendrils snaking into the ground. A five-fold-knot carved into another. The air was freezing, like the temperature decreased exponentially, forcing your teeth to chatter. A sickening feeling tugging at your gut as your organs protested in every way possible.

"Something bad happened here," you spoke in a hushed whisper.

Derek was stiff, eyes turning glassy as they stared daggers at the five-fold-knot. The atmosphere around him shifted. All of a sudden he was his usual brooding and detached self.

"That is an understatement," Peter replied.

Markus took in the air, coughing slightly. He and Peter scratched at their noses in almost perfect synchronicity. Not Derek though. He stayed painfully still.

"What happened here?" Markus rose his eyebrows.

Peter's mouth opened then closed, a furrow on his face.

"Let's just get what we came for and wait for the call," Derek grumbled out, claws extending instantly as he slashed at a sturdy section of root and pulled it free.

Peter ran a hand through his hair, "You heard the man."

***

You paced about the sparsely furnished loft space that belonged to Derek. There was yellow police tape discarded next to the entrance. A large window with no curtains provided most of the light in the open-plan apartment.

Derek tossed his phone on the counter, a sigh leaving his lips. "That was Scott. It worked. Now it's our turn."

"Do you think they'll make it out okay?" your voice was shaky, worry keeping you on edge.

"We can't worry about that now," Derek walked over and stretched out his hand expectantly.

You swallowed hard, a ball forming in your throat as you tried to unclasp your necklace with shaky fingers.

Derek squeezed your fingers, "Let me."

You spun around, focused on counting the number of bricks on the wall whilst he removed your necklace. His thumb brushed the back of your neck lightly and then he walked away to stash the necklace in a sealed ziplock bag, tossing it in a drawer for extra measure.

"And now?" you said after you had counted all the bricks on that stretch of wall.

"We hope Scott and Liam can take a few hits and stop any stragglers from coming our way while we..." Peter kicked his feet up and lounged on a leather couch, "Wait."

You stared down at the yellow tape, sorely aware of how tense the room was.

You did the one thing you hated doing in such instances, you made with small talk, "So… you still wanted for murder?"

Markus's head snapped up from his phone, nose no longer red. His attention was drawn towards Derek who was leaning against the kitchen island -his nose also no longer red.

"Alleged murder," he held up one hand to reassure your brother. "And, yeah, in four counties actually."

"Have you thought about what you're going to do if we survive this? I mean… you can't live on the run forever, can you?" you pressed your palms together tightly using your knees to keep from anxiously bouncing on your feet as you sat on the opposite couch to Peter’s.

"If we survive, that'll be just one of the many things I'll have to cross off my to-do list," he retorted.

Markus squinted before sitting up straight, hands clapping together once, "That's why you look so familiar. You were on the news some months ago. Manhunt in--"

"Shh!" Peter shot up quickly.

"I hear it too," Derek said hurriedly as he vaulted over the counter and pulled you behind him, stake in hand.

Right then, an arrow pierced through his large window and shattered the glass. The sharp point dug into the wooden floorboard a few inches to the left of where you'd been standing.

Here we go again.

"Okay boys," Peter cracked his neck before extending his fangs. "Once more with feeling!"

All three of them were all glowing eyes, long claws and wolfish snarls. You raced behind the kitchen island and ducked behind it for cover but no new arrows whistled through the air.

Just then, Astrid barrelled in in through the window, her nose raised high as she sniffed at the air, fangs extended. Her claws were longer than all the men's and her eyes glowed a deeper blue than Derek's or Peter's. Come to think of it, Markus was the only one in the room with red eyes.

Astrid clicked her tongue several times, one long-clawed finger swaying from the left to right, "I knew something was afoul when you weren't with the True Alpha and his rageful beta.” She turned to stare daggers at you, “Alyster will be pleased I found you and after I kill all three of your wolves, I'll deliver you to him." Her accent was heavy, Scandinavian. You realised this was the first time you'd heard her speak English.

“It is your time now,” Astrid pointed at you, a grin on her face.

Peter laughed.

Astrid’s eyes twitched, "What is so funny?" she demanded.

"The fact you thought it would be that easy," he replied like he knew the punchline to a joke she didn’t.

Astrid took a step closer, her claws slicing through the air. Peter leaned back with perfect timing.

"Now!" Derek growled.

Theo burst out of a hiding spot holding a jar of black ash and chucked a whole fist full of it at a broken circle on the floor. An impregnable ring forming around them while the other men in the room tried to hold the rabid Astrid down. You dashed back to the drawer Derek had stashed your necklace in and quickly clipped it back on.

"Mountain ash!" Astrid screamed in anger.

Like a volatile typhoon, Astrid took on all three men, her long claws slashing deep and wide. Blood soaked through torn clothes and your ears were deafened by the piercing howls and deep growls that vibrated off larynxes. Markus lifted his stake when he got an opening, but Derek held his hand at bay.

"No!" Derek stated bluntly.

Markus stared in confusion, not about to let one of the people that'd nearly killed his sister survive.

Peter took the brunt of Astrid's attacks while Derek and Markus were forced in a stand-off.

"Get out of my way!" Your brother shouted, twisting his arm free from Derek's hold

"We need her alive!" Derek shouted back, replacing his hold with his other hand. “For now.”

"Can we argue about this later?" Peter spoke through bloody teeth.

"Rahhh!" Astrid shouted as she lodged her claws into Peter's side, a scream ringing out.

You gasped, taking a step forward.

Derek got distracted by the sound for a fraction of a second, but it was all it took for Astrid to sink her claws into his back and lift him up over her head.

"Derek!" you screamed as you rushed forward, body impaired by the force field of blue light that flooded your vision when you collided with the mountain ash barrier.

Derek spat out a splotch of coppery scented blood as she threw him onto the ground, hard. The sound of his jaw breaking made the floorboards shake. Markus wasted no time and imbedded his stake in her spine. Astrid screeched, dark veins rising up to become visible around her neck and temple.

"Omöjligt..." she whispered as she collapsed onto the ground. Her eyes still open and her chest still moving. He hadn't killed her, but Markus had successfully immobilised her.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck. No!" Peter panicked over Derek's bloody and sliced form. His wounds healing, albeit not fast enough. "What the hell were you thinking?" he glared at Markus with bared fangs.

Markus answered matter-of-factly, "Protecting my pack."

You whimpered when you saw black oozing from Derek's wounds.

That wasn't good.

"If he dies…" Peter whispered low and sinister. Then he snapped up at you and Theo when Derek grunted weakly, "Break the seal damn it!"

Theo broke the circle with the dragging of his heel and a wave of blue energy rippled out. Faster than you’d ever seen him move before, Peter carried Derek to his couch.

Upon seeing the blood and smelling the copper, your veterinary skills kicking in. You ran to Derek's side and steeled your nerves before slicing the knife across his shirt and exposing his chest. Peter slumped down next to you, eyes serious.

"Help me tie her up," Theo asked for Markus's assistance as he hoisted Astrid onto a chair, binding her hands in rope.

The black veins had spread and her skin was beginning to wrinkle and prune. The tips of her fingers discolouring to a dark purple as one of her nails slipped off from the crown with no opposition.

"Eugh!" Theo grimaced in disgust as he held back a gag. "Uh, man! I th- think she's- she's starting to decompose. Rapidly."

Markus blocked his nose as a new stench wafted through the air.

You could smell it too. It was so strong it made your eyes nearly water.

"Whatever magic keeps her alive, the root from the Nematon must be sapping her dry. You were right," Markus assessed.

"Whatever you needed her alive for, you better do it quick," Theo urged as his cheeks filled with air from a repressed gag.

"Fools…" Astrid spat, a tooth slowly dislodging from her blackening gums. "We can't die!”

"Yeah, well you aren't looking very alive either," Theo coughed out from behind his palm, trying to keep from breathing in her ghastly scent.

Astrid carried on, “One always takes our place. We’re divine soldiers. A champion must always exist as long as the First Coming still lives."

“The First Coming? You mean the plague?” Markus pumped her for information.

Astrid huffed. She smelled like a gangrene infested wound, septic and infected, “The First Coming isn’t a sickness. She is a woman of unparalled power. Only her own magic can imprisson her. Only the blood of the tainted will keep her at bay. When there are none of the ex alia left she will bring about the end of the world. ”

You ignored Astrid’s discomforting words and felt all over across Derek's back, running over the imperfect triskelion. Padded fingers forced black ichor to cascade out from circular holes torn through flesh. Derek's eyelashes fluttered in pain and all you saw were the whites of his eyes. He was too quiet. Too slack. It was unbearable to see him like this, but you had to focus.

You wouldn't let what happened to Alex happen again.

Not to Derek.

"Peter, get me a sharper knife and some alcohol!" You ordered while examining the claw marks more closely. "Markus get me better light. Theo check to see if any of Astrid's claws broke off her fingers."

Displeased, Theo tried to look over Astrid's fingers as carefully as he could, his face sneered in disgust as he held back more gags. When he tried to lift a finger up gently the interphalangeal joint came right off, skin and flesh peeling away freely.

"Eugh! Gross! They keep sliding off like… like fucking butter, I can't- It's too-" He retched dropping Astrid’s severed finger bit like he just lost at a game of hot potato.

Markus scrambled to collect every lamp he could find and place it closer to you while Peter arrived with the whole cutlery tray ripped out of the drawer. Peter unscrewed the cap off the bottle of scotch and held it out for you.

You took a swig and then another and then poured some over Derek's scraped back. Derek shuddered, but no sound came out of his mouth.

Unresponsive to pain, he was going into shock.

You pulled out a butter knife, doused it in alcohol and started digging around Derek's first cut, barking at Theo with authority, "You're just gonna have to deal with it, Theo! Just keep checking!"

Peter picked up the bottle of scotch and took a few swigs himself.

Astrid started laughing, her voice growing hoarse with each chorus, one of her teeth fell out and Theo winced, dodging the discarded enamel.

"Wait, you're right!" Theo shouted when he looked over her other hand. "One of her claws is broken in half! Among other things…"

"That's why he isn't healing," you bit down, resigning yourself to breathe only through your nostrils as you concentrated hard on your task. "I just have to get it out in tim- Shit!" You wiped sweat away with a blood-stained hand.

"What? What is it?" Peter leaned closer.

"I think it punctured his heart..." you stammered, more tears welling in your eyes. You chased them away with a loud clearing of your throat.

Peter dropped the scotch bottle, the glass shattering and spilling amber liquid everywhere. Then, leaving you with no time to react, he lunged at your brother and the two struggled against one another.

"Stop, stop, stop, stop it! You two can fight it out if he… dies. But not while he's still breathing!" Your shout echoed in the loft.

They all stilled, even Astrid. You returned your attention back to Derek.

You had cleaned Derek's wounds as best you could, but Astrid's claw had pierced too deep into his heart. You were afraid you'd simply send Derek off to a far quicker death if you pulled it out. Maybe that would be a mercy, considering his state now.

Derek's body was burning way past the normal temperatures of any human fever. Almost like he was fighting off an infection. His skin was damp and his wounds not yet healed –that scared you. You compressed his larger cuts with the rags of his shirt, but there wasn't much else to do but wait.

Wait and watch him die.

You sniffled several times, trying to keep from progressing to full-on crying. Your heart heavy and your stomach twisting on itself.

"Theo, go to Scott, you can do more for him there. Take Markus with you. He isn't wanted here," Peter said without looking up from his nephew's dying form.

Markus took a step forward, "If you think I'm leaving my sister alone with yo--"

"Go with him," you said softly, not looking up from the blood-soaked rag. "I'll be fine."

Astrid was getting worse too. Her skin had turned leathery now, as though she was mummifying. Her eyes dulled in colour as cataracts formed over her filmy eyeballs. She couldn't see even though her eyes were wide open.

Peter picked himself off the floor and grabbed Derek's stake off the ground.

"What are you going to do with that?" you asked with no emotion. You knew exactly what he was going to do, you just didn't want to go forward with something unsaid.

"I'm going to save my nephew," he said through gritted teeth and he moved over to kneel next to Astrid. "Tell me how to save him!" he barked in her ear. From the way she didn’t react, you guessed her eardrums were the next to go in her decay cycle.

Her head craned too far back, popping sounds emanating from her sagging neck, "You're too late. Kill me. Don't kill me. It doesn't matter. It's up to him now,” one of her fingers pointed at Derek before falling clean off.

Peter growled before stabbing one of Astrid's bony legs under her now baggy armour.

She wheezed in pain.

Peter tilted his head to the side, twisting the stake in her tough, meatless leg, "Tell. Me. How!"

Astrid's jaw pulled wide as she tried to hold back a scream, a rip forming at the corner of her mouth.

"Peter stop!" You stood and pulled the stake out of her leg. "We aren't monsters."

His eyes flashed blue and he backed you away from him with a frightening snarl, canines chomping at the air close to your face, "That's where you're wrong. I am a monster!"

In lightning-quick movements, Peter pushed the stake into Astrid's heart and her whole body began to shrivel.

Between straggled breaths from burst air sacs, Astrid raised her head towards the light of the full moon, a melancholic smile crossing her dehydrated face. With what little life she had left, she whispered words not meant for anyone in this room, "I det här livet och nästa. Jag kommer se dig igen. Min kärlek..."

Then her head went limp, falling to her deflated chest as the ropes slipped off her body. Astrid was no more and in her place was a pathetic mummified corpse steadily turning to dust. Then she was nothing.

Suddenly, and violently, the weather changed. The wind grew tumultuous, a horrifically sharp scream carried with it. In the distant, lighting struck down in unnatural and frequent bursts of light. Somewhere in the dark clouds, a tornado began to swirl.

You and Peter ignored the chaos happening right outside the window. The two of you were locked in your own personal pandemoniums.

"Pull out the claw," Peter said darkly, having made up his mind.

"It's too close to his heart. If I-"

Peter's nose almost touched your own. His clawed fingers wrapping around your neck to pull you close, "His condition is only getting worse. Pull out the claw. If he's going to die, it's going to be quick. Put him out of his misery."

You shoved Peter away, but you knew, deep down, it would be the humane thing to do. And now you knew you had definitely gone insane if you were agreeing with Peter Hale.

“You just had to make me say I told you so,” he said bitterly, a tear streaming down his face. “Just like your mother.”

You knelt next to Derek, trembling fingers grazing his paling flesh. As you wrapped your hands around the tweezers gripping the claw, you whispered in his ear, "You said it took someone of tremendous resolve to go through what I've been through and have survived. I also believe it takes someone of great resolve to go through what you go through every day and still have the courage to wake up every morning. I admire that about you. I believe you still have some fight left, Derek… and I need you to survive this… because… because I have a question to ask you."

With a solemn teardrop, you pulled the claw out of his heart and crumbled to the floor, palms pressed together as you and Peter held your breaths.  

An otherworldly green glimmer shone from inside Derek's open wound.

Finale!>>

Tags: @melissavercos  @theflash-trash @mynamesalreadytaken @island-end @chipster-21 @helloscorpious  @marvelismyfantasy @anonymousfanfics-blog @homra-the-red-clan @derangedangel @phonegalhelp @bowtiesandwhiskers @soldierwinterthe @alina-barnes  @luckythepizzadog4444 @tlytxia @drunklili @iamabeautifulperson18 @zenawa @squadkyoya @cassandraevans @moli1497 @wanderlust-travler @143amberrose @humbledarkness @rockyrocket15 @4llmywr1tings @smolbeanfive @500daysofbecky

Permatags:@gruffle1 @thechickvic @notawarriorjustyet @savethehoneeybees 

[writersmacchiato]

Real | Joe Toye x Reader

A/N: this is angst, but there is fluff sprinkled throughout :)

um hi i wtChed the breaking point again and I almost cried like five times I have a lot of feelings about it

_____

Joe Toye.

Just the mention of his name made you want to slap, kiss him, and scream all at the same time.

It started in Toccoa.

Training as a field nurse, you had little time to think about anything else. You had to work twice as hard as the men just to be considered capable, but when you were transferred to Easy company it was a blessing in disguise. Sobel was awful, his feelings of superiority masked his insecurities that he took out on the men. To you especially was he harsh, screaming in your face while you never bat an eye. The men grew to respect you on that alone.

Joe Toye came to you on a quiet evening after another vigorous climb up Currahee. His hand is scratched up, bleeding at the knuckles. You don’t ask why and he doesn’t offer an explanation, a gruff “thanks” after you clean him up before he stalks away.

This becomes a re-occurrence, over and over, Toye coming to you with minor injuries insisting that you had to look at them. Another one of the nurses tells you that he came in earlier but you were gone, so he left untreated. It warms your heart.

One day he comes in with those knuckles that always seem to be covered in blood.

“It’s not mine.” He assures you, as if that will give you comfort.

“Well, I’d hate to see the other guy.”

He smirks, “he’s okay. Just knocked him on his ass.”

You shake your head, pursing your lips. Grabbing a cloth with ice in it, you gently place it over his hands, holding his palm against yours. If you had glanced up you would’ve seen his cheeks flushing cheek.

“He said some shit about you, so I put him in his place.” Joe says as he’s grabbing his jacket.

“You don’t have to do that for me.”

“Can’t have nobody messin’ with my favorite nurse, can I?”

Before you can formulate a response, he’s already out of the room, leaving you with warm cheeks and a racing heart.

After that night, he comes by more often just to see you. The injuries are not as frequent now and he just talks to you. Usually asking questions and listening to you talk, eyes focused on you entirely. Sometimes he just sits in the room, wanting your comfortable silence.

You come to realize that Joe Toye is many things and you might be falling in love with him.

Joe Toye kisses you the night before you’re shipped out to Europe.

The guys are having one last night in the states, drinking till they pass out. Laughter spills out of the bar, the lights casting shadows on your face. You had been in there with them, but slipped out shortly.

“Hey.”

Joe comes out to stand next to you, folding his arms as he looks up at the sky.

“Europe, huh?” You break the silence, toying with your dog tags to hide the nerves you felt.

“Never been before.”

“Me either.”

“Joe—“

“Hey, sweetheart.”

His voice is gruff, well gruffer than usual, as he drags out a puff of his cigarette.

“You’re my best girl, you know that?”

Scratch that, Joe Toye makes you fall for him with a smug look and a soft kiss that has you pulling him in for more. It tumbles out of control, his hands gripped firmly on your hips with every intention of wandering further. The grip you have on his hair has to be painful, especially when you tug on it, but it has him groaning and bucking his hips against yours.

Joe Toye stays away after that and you want to kill him for taking something like that away from you and treating it so poorly.

You go off on him, startling an elderly couple and you profusely apologize. They hurry away, glancing back at you with worried expressions, praying for your sanity most likely. Joe has an amused glint in his eyes when you whirl around, quickly dropping at the infuriated look on your face.

“You’re a real asshole, Joe Toye.” You spit out the words, feeling the coursing hot anger sweep through your veins and winding its ugly head back venomously.

He narrows his eyes, but remains silent. Arms crossed, muscles bulging out against the simple short sleeve he wears. You hate that even now your anger is cooling, leaving nothing but hurt and embarrassment in its wake.

“If this was all just some fucked up game to you, why didn’t you just say so?” Tears prickle at yours eyes and with a huff, you turn away refusing to let him see you cry.

He hurt you, and yet you still loved him.

Gravel crunched underneath his shoes as he stands behind you, hand grabbing for your hand to pull you close to him. His arms settle around your waist, nose burying in your hair.

“It was never a game, sweetheart.”

That goddamn nickname.

“I love you and that scares me.”

“Why?” You whisper, eyes falling shut.

With his hands cupping your cheeks, he mutters four words that break your heart while building it up at the same time.

“I could lose you.”

Those words echo in your mind; a constant reminder that you had to stay alive, keep going, surviving for him — because you’d be damned before you ever broke his heart. Through the battles, gunfire, bombs, sharpened, the blood, oh god the blood, those three words keep you sane.

“I love you.”

As you stitch up a solider’s wound, locking eyes with Doc and knowing that resources are running low.

“I love you.”

When a solider, so many, too many, die under your hands.

“I love you.”

The gunfire is loud, deafening, you can’t hear anything, only Joe’s repeated ‘I love you’ over and over until the coast is clear and you’re running back out there at the cry of ‘medic!’.

Everything; every moment, every wound, every breath, chips away at you until you’re struggling to even lift yourself up. His arms hold you, then in those moments, shielding you the best he can and offering temporary protection.

He grounds you.

The earth is shaking, literally shaking, as you cower in a foxhole. It’s like fireworks, so morbidly beautiful, and yet it’s taking out so many men, the knowledge squeezes your heart so tight you’re sure that it’ll give it out, until you remember ‘I love you’ and the world stills.

The cries for medic are faint and too far away, drifting off as another explosion rocks the ground. But, you hear it. Always. Him, always, his voice calling out for you.

The trail of blood is striking against the stark white snow, it leads to Joe Toye. With half his leg blown off. Bill Guarnere lays besides him, own leg in no better condition.

Joe meets your eyes and all you see is the pain and terror, it kills you. Hands fumble with gauze and bandage, Doc comes to a stumbling stop next to you. His hands are quicker than yours, wrapping up Joe’s stump and slowing the blood flow.

Joe is pleading, “I gotta get up.”, over and over, voice broken over his cries.

“Y/N, I gotta get up.” He pleads, hand latching onto your sleeve. “I gotta...”

“I love you.” can’t fix this.

Captain Winters pulls you off the line immediately after hearing the report from Lipton and seeing your state.

It tore you up seeing Joe like that. And, it wasn’t even just him. It was everything. The wounded and the dead count was too high. Bastogne was breaking the last bit of resolve you had and without Joe there to steady you, it was only a matter of time before you crumbled.

They refuse to let you see him. You scream, cry, and almost punch before Doc is pulling you away.

“Gotta give em’ time.”

Gene waits with you, for as long as he can, holding your hand in his. No words are passed as you both process the events from the bombings. His hand gives yours one last squeeze before he stands up.

“Thank you, Gene.”

He twists his mouth and nods, before walking away.

Two whole days pass before they let you into the room where Joe Toye is. Bill Guarnere is in the bed next to him, they’re arguing about something when you walk up. Bill sees you first, face lighting up.

“Bout’ time we saw a pretty face around here, ain’t it Joe?” He teases.

“Shut up.” He scoffs, but a smile is playing at his lips.

It was the typical banter between them, nothing changing. Only where the blanket dipped down on his right leg, the emptiness behind his eyes.

“How are you doin’, Joe?” You sit on the edge of his bed, grabbing his hand.

“I’ll give you some privacy...” Bill mutters, fluffing his pillow and blocking his peripheral with it to where he can’t see you.

“Just peachy.” He huffs, looking past you.

There are so many things you want to say, lip trembling as the reality of the situation crashed over you. A sob escapes you and Joe quickly has his arms wrapped you tightly.

“I’m sorry—“ you whisper, “I can’t.”

He tenses beneath you, pulling away.

“I almost lost you, Joe. I just can’t lose you.”

Joe Toye goes home to the states before you do.

He writes you letters and you respond when you can, but it’s sporadic correspondence.

The war drags on, many soldiers lost as victories are fought for viciously, your hope of it ending diminishing with each day. You expect to die, but then just as you’re tipping over the edge into the darkness you hear it.

“I love you.”

And, you keep on fighting.

When the war ends, you almost don’t believe it, but all you can think about is Joe Toye. His mailing address is hundreds of miles away from your hometown, but you buy a ticket anyway.

Joe Toye is sitting on his front porch when you arrive at his house.

The sun is setting, casting a warm glow on his face. His eyes drink in the sight of you; you’re different now, but so is he. The war took something from both of you.

“Hey, sweetheart.” The words are rasped, forced out, as he tries and fails not to cry.

It breaks the trance that had locked over you, rushing up the steps to hug him. You collapse onto him, hands grasping for any part of him that you can. He’s alive, he’s okay, you’re alive, you’re okay. This is real, it’s real,

This is real.

It becomes a mantra that you repeat to yourself every night and every morning as he lays next to you in bed, arm over your waist. His kisses are soft, desperate, bruising, it’s real.

He whispers the words to you when the world is collapsing around you, it’s real, you’re home with him — safe.

When tears gather in your eyes as your child paddles around the room unsteadily, a shake in his voice.

“This is real.”

_____

@kneesocksapollo @croatianbagudna @gottapenny

[belphegor1982]

New story! A little Don Camillo one-shot, set (roughly) between 1951 and 1957, my first foray into canon time for these guys. Hope you like!

Summary: Both Don Camillo and Peppone have a bone to pick with a trumpet player. Music has charms to soothe the savage beast, but what about the priest and the mayor? (on FFnet/on AO3)

THE TRUMPET OF CONTENTION

In the Lowlands, music, like a few other subjects, is something to be treated seriously.

Giuseppe Verdi is, of course, rightfully revered, and his name and works are one of the very few things that can make everyone – be they Red, Green, White, or Black – reach an agreement. It’s not even a matter of having culture or education: people pulled out of school as kids still know their Nabucco from their Trovatore. Folks will come by the music gene through blood, and you’ll find entire families passing down names like Radamès, Ofelia, Ernani, or Desdemona.

The Pedrettis were such a family. Iago Pedretti had a good voice for bel canto, his son Corrado played the bass drum, and when his daughter Leonora started to show interest for the trumpet, the little girl quite naturally found a place in the town band. She was singularly gifted, and before she was twelve years old, she could be found playing among the more experienced musicians on days of important events, wearing proudly her own bright white shirt and a cap that looked a little too big for her head.

The Pedrettis were so proud that, every time the band played, the whole family – grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts, uncles and cousins – went out en masse, all wearing their Sunday best, to see Leonora and her trumpet. They turned up for everything: town festivals, religious processions, political events, and so on and so forth. When Peppone was first re-elected as mayor, the band followed him and his staff on foot from the Communist headquarters to the town hall; as they crossed the main square, only a dozen metres from the church doors, the Pedrettis were first in line to applaud, even though every single one of them was a staunch anti-Communist and the band played Bandiera Rossa and L’internationale.

Don Camillo had watched the proceedings from the rectory door with his arms crossed, jaws clamped on his half-cigar, glowering at the blatant provocation. Afterwards, he went to the Pedrettis and protested to the paterfamilias.

“How can you let that little girl play for the Communists? Festivals and processions are fine, but not this Bolshevik propaganda!”

Pedretti was unperturbed.

“Reverend, musical talent is apolitical. As long as my little girl plays well, she can play whatever she likes within the limits of the law.”

Don Camillo bit his lip and left it at that. The day after he went to see Peppone in his workshop.

“Listen,” he said with a stormy glare, “the band aren’t half bad even though half of them are lunatics who still think Stalin is a decent person for some reason; they can parade in front of the church playing their nonsense as much as they like if they don’t mind having their bottoms kicked from here to Moscow if I catch them. But that little Leonora Pedretti is an innocent and I won’t let you recruit children for your Party.”

Peppone looked up from the motor he was working on and met Don Camillo’s eyes with a scowl of his own.

“I’m not recruiting anyone from the band. That kid is good with a trumpet, that’s it. Nobody’s making her wave a red flag around.”

“You’re right. She just plays the red flag song. Next time I’ll need music I’ll just hire the band from Molinetto. I hear they only play for funerals and processions.”

Peppone exploded. “Even you wouldn’t dare to do something so vile as that!” he shouted. “Just because you’re miffed I got re-elected –”

“Why on Earth this town picked you again knowing what you’re capable of is beyond me,” said Don Camillo huffily – especially as himself had, in what he considered a moment of weakness, voted for Peppone. “But no, your election in itself has nothing to do with it. The problem is that you and your henchmen are making a thirteen year old lass play music that could get her excommunicated, with her none the wiser!”

“If the Pope wants to set the Spanish Inquisition on people for playing music, that’s your problem, not mine! And I’m not the conductor, that’s old Gianelli’s job!”

“It’s the official town band! As the mayor and the boss of the region’s Communists, I’d say it’s your problem!”

They were nose to nose, sleeves rolled up, glaring daggers, and God only knows what would have happened if the sound of a lone trumpet, soon followed by a few other instruments, hadn’t reached them at that very moment.

It was rehearsal time for the town band and all windows were wide open to the cool evening air. Both men recognised the solemn tones of “Un dì, felice, eterea” from Il Trovatore. It worked surprisingly well, even without voices.

“Verdi will always be Verdi,” remarked Peppone quietly after a while.

“Yes he will,” said Don Camillo who had a lump in his throat.

They exchanged sheepish glances, feeling rather ridiculous now that the heat had died down. Then Don Camillo remembered exactly what had got him so worked up; but he shook his head.

“Look,” he said, “hear me out. We both know that the child has talent and Gianelli will soon be out of his depth because he only knows the basics of trumpet playing. She’ll need to study music seriously, in the city.”

Peppone nodded gravely. “I agree. Problem is, I know the Pedrettis. They’re poor as church mice. They couldn’t pay for music school even if they worked every second of every day for a hundred years.”

They stared at each other while the music drifted in on the breeze. Peppone put down the wrench he had been clutching and scratched the back of his head.

“I can have a whip-round around town,” he said eventually. “The Pedrettis aren’t very popular with my lads, but this is about making sure that a child of the people gets a decent education and a future. And we’ve all heard her play Verdi. Imagine what she’ll be capable of with a proper teacher!”

“I’ll convince the landowners to chip in,” said Don Camillo. “It won’t be easy, but I’ll wager they’ll listen to their parish priest. Besides, I can just point out the fact that she’d no longer have to play that garbage of yours.”

Peppone clenched his fists. But he breathed deeply and held out his hand.

“All right. Let’s see if the two highest authorities in the village can’t make this work,” he grumbled.

In the distance, the band struck up another song, faster and more spirited. Don Camillo shook Peppone’s hand heartily and walked away with a beaming smile while Peppone went back to his motor, humming along absently as he worked.

So it was that the town band lost a trumpet player, and little Leonora Pedretti went to the city to study music. An older cousin put her up; she paid for room and board by doing small odd jobs and delivering packages, and worked hard on both music theory and practice.

Leonora was not the first local child the village had helped on the way to higher spheres; it was rare, but not unheard of. The entire town contributed to the school fees: tenant farmers who barely had ten lire to rub together, die-hard Communist workers who called the Pedrettis ‘reactionaries’ and all kinds of unpleasant things, and even the rich farmers who found it easier to part with one of their limbs rather than money.

Such is the power of music. Politics often work their way through people’s heads; music always works through their hearts.

Years passed, bringing hot summers, hard winters, and one disastrous flood when heavy rains made the great river break its banks; people mostly waited till their houses were clean and dry before tearing each other apart over politics again. Elections came and went along with the years, and Peppone was re-elected mayor once more.

Through all that, the town folk cherished one of the real apolitical constants: the knowledge that their little trumpet player in training was doing a good job. The cousin she lived with wrote regular letters to her parents with news and the progress she made, until one day Leonora sent her own letters, because she had found a place she could live in by herself.

The few people who had the occasion to go to the city and hear her play all came back with reassuring words: the girl was good. Seeing her in the brass section in such deep concentration that she sometimes went cross-eyed justified all expenses and sacrifices. Her trumpet blended in perfectly with the rest of the orchestra, not a single note out of tune, which is the thankless fate of musicians without solos: to be essential, but easily overlooked threads in the big tapestry of orchestral music.

And then one day, as they combed through Leonora’s newest letter, Pedretti and his wife found a word that made them peer at the paper as though with a microscope. A word that was incongruous, fantastic, and truly and utterly foreign.

Jazz.

Their little girl wrote about learning to play jazz music.

The word was far from unfamiliar, of course. People listened to the radio, which often enough did feature music not composed by the classical masters. But in these parts, where land had history written in the blood of generations of farmers who lived and died on it not so differently than their parents had, and where the great river stretched out in the sun and in the mists, carrying hundreds of years of dreams, tears, and laughter with its mud and its pebbles, novelty and any of its potential contribution had to be weighed and studied before being allowed to become familiar.

Jazz was considered music, of course, but not ‘serious’ music. It was good enough for city people or foreigners – in other words, people who lived further along the country road – but not hard-working people who rose with the sun to feed the pigs, tilled the earth, or worked dairies, and then went to bed with their bones aching more every night.

The Pedrettis kept the letter and didn’t breathe a word to anyone, but soon enough, the word got out and ran throughout the village and its seven frazioni like an overexcited puppy. Unfortunately for the Pedrettis, it turned out that a lot of people had a lot to say on the subject, and much of what they had to say concerned young Leonora and the supposed lack of moral fibre in her upbringing. Nobody could agree on which would have been worse: the fact that a good, decent country girl, whom they’d known since she was little and who had received a proper Christian education had abandoned Verdi for the sirens of foreign music – or if that same girl had dyed her hair and gone around wearing make-up and short skirts.

Those whose opinion on the matter ranged from asking how bad it all could be anyway and not caring one bit what a person did as long as they were happy were sadly few and quickly drowned in the mass of gossip.

Chatter grew and grew until Leonora came back to her parents’ for a few days of holiday.

She had grown from a skinny child into a long, sprightly girl who walked with calm certainty and didn’t talk much. Her hair was intact, a little longer than it had been, and she wore no make-up at all. The folks who were still unsure about which of jazz or make-up was worse quickly made up their minds and decided on the former.

Leonora mostly stayed at the family farm for the first couple of days and to all intents and purposes remained blessedly unaware that she and her trumpet were all the village could talk about these days.

Since it was one of the few subjects which transcended politics, the more vehement critics soon referred to their own moral authority: the reactionaries and the little old ladies complained to Don Camillo, the Communists to Peppone in his capacity as the section’s secretary, and the others to Giuseppe Bottazzi in his capacity as mayor – which meant Peppone pulled a double shift. He was mightily annoyed about it all.

On one hand, it irritated him to no end that imperialist America had ruined yet another honest Italian girl, luring her with its newfangled ways and flashy… what exactly he hadn’t figured out yet, but knew he would have to if asked. And he couldn’t swallow the fact that a musician, after studying and playing masters like Verdi or Puccini – but mostly Verdi – could just move on to something so different as simply as that. It felt like a betrayal.

On the other, he had always had an argumentative streak, and seeing all those people finding fault in one girl bothered him a little. Leonora Pedretti wasn’t a political adversary and she hadn’t chosen to shoulder any kind of authority at all: she was only a trumpet player. And not even the kind to want to play Giovinezza or La Marcia Reale, either.

It was all very complicated, and Peppone didn’t like complicated.

In the end, he shoved his hat on his head one morning and went out to town.

It was market day on a fair, bright morning, and people flooded the main square. Peppone pushed through the crowd and the stands to get to the church parvis, where Don Camillo was sitting on his usual bench near the rectory door, reading a newspaper and smoking a half-cigar.

“Listen here,” he said, planting his fists on his hips, “what have you been telling your church biddies about that Pedretti girl?”

Don Camillo raised his head, looking curious.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s been no end of whiners and complainers knocking on the People’s House and the town hall lately telling me I should do something about that blasted affair. The Communists I can handle, but some of the others were your crowd and I’ve had it up to here.”

“Comrade, you’ve chosen to run for mayor and somehow you got elected,” said Don Camillo, going back to his newspaper. “It’s only natural that people will look to you to sort things out, God help them.”

Peppone was beginning to see red.

“When the girl was in the town band, she played the people’s music and you couldn’t stomach it. Now she’s not in the town band anymore and she’s playing American propaganda garbage! How do you like that?”

Don Camillo folded up his newspaper and rose to his feet.

“And what’s it got to do with me?” he asked in a dangerous voice.

“You’re the one always defending ruddy America like it’s a bastion of decency against the big scary Reds,” shouted Peppone, “and meanwhile the same America turns our girls’ heads and corrupts them until they forsake Verdi for some so-called music nobody can understand unless they speak English!”

“Reds never scare me, big or little!” bellowed Don Camillo, and he gripped Peppone by the lapels of his jacket.

Peppone grabbed him by the front of his cassock and roared, “I’ll see about that!”

Blood boiled, the pressure was off the charts, and blows would probably have started raining any second from two pairs of hands as big as shovels, when a loud, discordant noise sounded all around the square.

It was a noise like a duck getting stomped on, and it was just absurd enough to make both men freeze.

The market stand owners and the people around them had left their shopping to watch something potentially more interesting, namely a brawl between the mayor and the priest; but they all froze, too, and turned to the point of origin of that awful sound.

Young Leonora Pedretti was standing in the middle of the square wearing her Sunday dress and a defiant scowl on her face. In her right hand was her trumpet.

She breathed deeply, raised the mouthpiece to her lips, and began to play.

Later on, when people could reflect on it calmly, they realised things were missing, like a clarinet, a piano, some percussions, and maybe a double bass. But it was of little importance.

Music rose out of that little trumpet, a melancholic melody, like someone determined to keep hope alive through tears. The music – thin, bordering on reedy – trembled and tensed but always landed on its feet. It was a sound that tore a piece of your heart while telling you you were allowed to cry over it. Then Leonora segued into another song, more cheerful, cheeky even, with little high notes that sounded like winks, if winks could be turned into sound. It wasn’t mocking, however, but rather invited you to share a joke. The number was short, and soon gave way to a third song.

This time the trumpet was gentle and warm, the notes ample and clear, and the melody flew into the blue sky to the great river shining under the sun. And the people on the square heard, in the silence between breaths and in the quiver that punctuated the notes, the voices of men, women and children not so different than they were, who played and sang about hope, freedom, loss, joy, grief, their faith in God and their own great river that flowed majestically to the sea, carrying hundreds of years of blood, tears, and dreams not so different than their own.

Leonora held the last note and slowly lowered the trumpet, her face crimson from neck to hairline. She cast a last long look at the square full of people and walked away without a word. Everything she meant to say had been said.

Peppone and Don Camillo had loosened their grip on each other during the impromptu concert without quite knowing when or how. They both kept staring at the spot Leonora had been half a minute after she left.

“…Well,” said Don Camillo eventually in a voice that shook ever so slightly, “that wasn’t Verdi.”

“No, it wasn’t.” Peppone ran a hand across his eyes and fumbled for his handkerchief.

They looked at each other, opened their mouths to add something, but both realised at the same time that they, too, had said everything they meant to say.

They both took off their hats to each other. Don Camillo returned to his bench, still looking dazed, while Peppone went back home the long way, along the road on the main dyke, where he could see his great river and watch the sun wink on the muddy waters.

After that memorable market day, when Don Camillo received a complaint about girls who were no better than they should be and played music they should not, he threw out his arms and said, “I don’t know if it’s the Devil’s music. All I know is what I heard, and what I heard was so beautiful that I don’t believe God would leave it to the Devil.” And the crucified Christ on the main altar smiled, because he was right.

When the same people went to Peppone, he crashed his enormous fist on his desk and shouted, “The next wretch who says anything against that bloody trumpet goes through the window and learns to fly. Do I make myself clear?”

“Daddy,” his youngest boy asked him that very evening as his father went to give him his good night kiss, “what did that lady play the other day, exactly?”

Peppone vaguely sensed that the question had some importance; he thought long and hard before answering in a tone of finality, “She played the trumpet, and she played it well.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

And, as it turned out, he was quite right.

THE END

Thank goodness for music. The world would be so much darker, colder, and poorer without it!

Translations/Notes:

Red, Green, White, and Black: respectively Communists, Republicans (anti-monarchist, anti-clerical, and anti-fascist party, which was still left of the political centre at the time), Christian Democrats, and Fascists.

Radamès is from Aida; Ernani is from the eponymous opera; Desdemona and Iago are from Otello; Corrado is from Il Corsaro; Leonora is from Il Trovatore and La forza del destino; Ofelia stands out, being from a lesser-known opera (based on Hamlet) and not from Verdi.

Don Camillo voting for Peppone in his first re-run as mayor is a reference to one of the short stories, "Ancora il fantasma del cappello verde" (the ghost with the green hat again). The "ghost" is Peppone, who sneaked into the church in the middle of the night to pray for re-election and inadvertently left his hat behind. At the very end of the campaign, when it looks like he's going to lose, he makes an honest speech, straight from the heart, in which he asks his citizens to treat the election as a verdict on how good a job he did… and wins by a landslide. Don Camillo later admits to the crucified Christ on the main altar that seeing Peppone like this, sad and lonely, moved him so much he voted for him – and he's confused and furious about it.

I must admit fumbled with the chronology a little bit. Peppone's first re-election was in summer 1951, and the terrible flood from the Po river (some of it depicted in the second Don Camillo film with actual news footage) happened in both the real world and the "Little World" a few months later, in November.

Giovinezza (Youth) was the official hymn of the Italian Fascist Party, regime, and army up until 1943; the Marcia Reale (Royal March) was the official hymn of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1946. Both were usually played with the other, and both were forbidden after World War 2.

(If you liked, please consider leaving a comment so I know I’m not just shouting in the desert - not that I mind, but it gets lonely without someone to share it with!)

[midoridragonuus]

sanguinem sacrificium: wine

< previous | compendium | next >

- x -

Dinner had been relatively quiet; an oddity in the two's relationship. The absence of laughter and faux anger continued to expand each time Gabriel opened his mouth to speak. He'd been dying to ask just what was wrong, and what he could do to fix it, but his brand of repair was poor timing and backhanded insults - something the woman across from him would hardly appreciate under the circumstances - so he stayed still as a statue to not disturb whatever weighed heavy on his date’s mind.

Each time he tried to break the weighty silence, he was met with the woman staring into her dinner. It pained him, sitting in front of a beautifully prepared fettuccine and not be able to touch it, but he'd rather associate food with joy than the vicious awkwardness that hovered over them. Rather than ruin one of his favorite pastimes by provoking the woman, he figured it'd be better to sit in painful silence.

If it were anyone else, he would have made up an excuse to dine and dash. It'd be so easy to rip the napkin from his lap, toss it near the candelabra, and lie through a smile that so and so had called and he really needed to go. But his heart played a different tune. He really did enjoy her company, even if she refused to be open with her feelings more than once in a blue moon. Really, she was the personification of a  hesitant clam showing its pearl to the rare onlooker. It was those rare glimpses that kept him going - and so he suffered silently at the impromptu table with his best 'I'm trying' face.

Each tick of the clock gave him another reason to leave. The monotonous sound sent an uncomfortable shiver through his being. He hated this. Every minute - he hated having to be reserved, quiet, and stuck in a silent vacuum. If it continued any longer, he might just leap from his chair and put on a show, no matter the consequences.

A deep exhale brought Gabriel out of his funk, allowing the man to shift attention from his uneaten dinner to the woman sitting his opposite.

Still refusing to meet his gaze, she instead frowned into the pasta.

"I don't like him."

The man lifted an eyebrow, smile slowly spreading across his face. It was unusual to get so much satisfaction from a single sentence, but he was thrilled that she'd finally said something to get the ball rolling.

"That's odd, Elliecakes. You don't not like anybody."

Her head shot up defensively, glare painting a much harsher reality on the younger face. "I can not like anyone I want to."

"C'mon," he prodded. "All I do around here is be a nuisance and slander the other employees any chance I get. Gotta get ahead, you know?"

Without waiting for an answer to the question, he quickly added, "And all you do is defend them. What makes this guy any different?"

Ellie's frown deepened. "You know I can't talk about that."

"Can't and won't are two very different things." His eyes drifted downwards, ready to play instigator.

Eyes narrowed in the candlelight, making them twice as bitter as they would have been under the fluorescent glow of the office.

Stirring his noodles, which had tempered under the muted cold war, Gabriel shoved a full fork into his mouth. The more obnoxious, the better. "Oh well. Guess he won't get that welcome basket."

Every soft syllable led to a spray of alfredo. And despite the onslaught of flavors, the most fruitful was the look of sheer anger on Ellie's face.

The woman's silverware clattered to the plate. "Listen, you ass."

He winked. "My ears are always open for you. So are my arms, and legs too if you wanna get freaky."

Groaning, she leaned back. Delicate hands ran down her face in exhaustion. She knew she'd been played. Provocation was precisely the manner of Gabriel's dickery. And she'd been so out of it, she fell hook, line, and sinker without any hint of struggle.

"Don't beat yourself up. Everyone has a bad day." His chair managed to round the table as he scooted closer. "Besides, it's not every day that I can pull one over on you. Not to mention, humility is a good look."

"Then you should paint yourself with it." She shoved him away gently.

"Mn," he nodded in agreement, now staking out the woman's dinner as his lay forgotten.

"Really, though. He's... different."

Snatching her fork, he began to slowly wind the noodles into a more manageable state. "We're all different, babe."

"No, like..." She sighed again, unable to articulate exactly why the newcomer bothered her so much. "I don't like him because there's nothing to like?"

Gabriel clutched at his shirt, aghast. "Ellie! How can you say that about someone you don't know? He might donate his income to orphans and nurse cats or something!"

Ignoring his melodrama, she continued. "It's not that I don't want to like him, it's just that... I'm privy to a lot of information."

"Oh?"

"Confidential information," she replied, preemptively shutting down his question before it went further. "And that's the problem. There's very few things at Schwartz Industries that I don't know when it comes to employee files. Most information is unobstructed when Schwartz hands me the files. Of course, there's some stuff that's redacted on almost all of them, but they're such small portions. I think the largest ones are Schwartz, Werites, and... Saya? I get the first two, and... I didn't really ask about Saya's. She was here before I was... So I never really thought about it."

Gabriel nodded as she brushed the bangs from her face.

"But... even on those, I could read some information. But his... Ugh. Don't... Don't tell anyone, alright?"

Gasping, the man pulled away from their closeness. "Ellie! Spilling company secrets by sleeping with the enemy?"

A kick of the chair accompanied another shove. "Knock that off. I'm not sleeping with you, and it's not really... It doesn't violate any protocol that I know of."

"Uh-huh. Well, I cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye. Can't and won't tell a soul after that, right, Elliepop?"

Finally resting on both hands, propped up on the table, the woman gave him a troubled look. "The only part of his file I can read is his name. I can't see his age, place of birth, blood type, division, or anything. Everything is blacked out. No other employee has that level of censorship."

"That's... not right." Gabriel sat upwards, laughter falling from his face. His shoulders sat rigid, demeanor shifting in a matter of seconds.

Ellie shook her head. "No, it's not, and-"

The sound of someone clearing their throat pulled the attention of the couple to the door.

"Am I interrupting something?"

Another stood in the doorway, arms crossed as if waiting for an answer was no more than an inconvenience to him. Even under gold-rimmed frames, the sheer lack of empathy for his interruption was apparent.

The woman craned her head to the door, eyes wide. She sat frozen, staring into the face of the newcomer with doe like eyes.

Noting her lack of response, Gabriel quickly took her hands into his. "Yes. Absolutely. Now get lost."

The man stepped further in the room, surveying the atmosphere with a disinterested gaze. "Can't, sorry. It's an emergency. Schwartz demanded we go over a few more interesting items."

Upon hearing her boss's name, the woman snapped to attention. "What? Why didn't she call me?"

As she turned to dig through her purse, the stranger simply shrugged. "I don't know. But it's urgent."

"I doubt it's that urgent," Gabriel spat, holding his date's purse open so she could continue looking with both hands.

Tugging her phone free, she motioned for Gabriel to put down the purse. Despite not facing her, as his eyes never left the strange man, he obliged and set it on the floor.

The man at the door smiled, allowing the glasses to slip down his nose. "You know, I don't really care what you think. I was sent to collect the child, not her dog."

Roused by the other's comeback, Gabriel stood and quickly approached the man. Though he was a head shorter, the anger drawn into his features was more pronounced than it had been in ages. He poked a finger towards the other's chest. "I want you to listen, and listen good, friendo. I don't give a shit what you call me. I've been called every name in the book, and then some. But you need to start re-thinking how you address my Ellie. She's not some child. She's a stunning woman who runs as Head of Divisions for the entire company. You show her respect, or you're going to learn a host of new things in your time here, and I volunteer to be the teacher."

Looking down at the riled man, Carlos swatted the accusatory finger away. "I still don't care."

A burning rage coursed through Gabriel's body. Every nerve sparked to life and roasted in an unyielding fire. It was ridiculous, and he knew it was ridiculous. There's no reason for this man to hit every one of his annoyances, but here he was. Everything bothered him, from his monotonous voice to his smarmy attitude, to even his chinos. Like a switch in the brain, everything turned at once, and Gabriel was a soldier again.

A fist went flying towards the taller man, aiming to knock the ego from the man's liquid voice.

"Gabriel, no! Wait!"

His fist resounded with a dull thud, finding a cradle in Carlos' palm.

Leaving his punch where it lay dead, Gabriel turned over his shoulder to look at the woman at the table. A mixture of confusion and hesitation covered Ellie's face. "It's... it's fine. I did get something from Schwartz after all? I guess my phone was on silent or something. I just... I don't remember doing it, but the proper orders are here. I.... Please don't be angry I have to dip out, okay? I'll talk to you later...?"

Not wanting to add to her conflicting emotions, the man shook his head gently. Yeah, no, Elliecakes. It's fine. It's fine. Don't worry about it. I'm okay, okay?"

She could tell his answer wasn't genuine, but she appreciated the gesture regardless. Grabbing her phone, she shoved it back into the bag and quickly ripped the napkin from her lap. Shuffling to the doorway where the men still stood engaged in action, she placed a quick kiss to Gabriel's cheek.

His hands faltered, finally removing himself from Carlos' grasp before backing away in a slight stupor. As the two disappeared into the dimming hall, he returned to the failed dinner.

He wanted to tell himself that it was Ellie's voice that stopped him just enough that the fist didn't connect. He wanted to explain the lack of violence on his renewed conscious or poor judgment of distance, but none of it was true. The only truth was that Carlos had the reflexes and sheer strength to stop his punch, and that frightened him to his core.

[nightmareonfilmstreet]

5 Horror Authors (Not Named King) To Scare Away Your Winter Blues

New Post has been published on https://nofspodcast.com/5-horror-authors-not-named-king-scare-away-winter-blues/

5 Horror Authors (Not Named King) To Scare Away Your Winter Blues

Quick, name one of your favorite horror authors.

I’ll Wait…

Did you say Stephen King?

You did. I’m pretty good at knowing stuff. In fact, 104% of you answered with some variation of Stephen King. I, like many members of the horror community, got my start in the genre through the Master of Horror himself. To fans and non-fans alike, he is synonymous with the term “horror author”. Other authors may be more poetic, others may be more prolific, but none have meant as much to horror fans as King. The film and television adaptations of his works account for many of our first nightmares. Because of this, we all owe him our gratitude.

Nothing will ever take away our love and admiration for The King. The problem that I have with his books, if I had to pick one, is that there isn’t an infinite supply of them. Horror fans all over the world have rows and rows of his books on their home library shelves, many times displaying multiple editions of the same book. So where does someone turn when they have read and re-read everything in King’s canon? I’m glad you asked! Here are five horror authors that will expand your horizons and keep your bedroom lights on throughout these long winter months.

  Paul Tremblay

Book You Have To Read: A Head Full of Ghosts

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for best horror novel of 2015, A Head Full of Ghosts tells the story of a family going through tough financial times as told through the eyes of an eight year old girl named Merry. Your father has lost his job and has turned to the church for solace. Your mom is breaking under the weight of being the sole breadwinner for the family. They fight and argue constantly, and just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, your sister starts to act… very peculiar.

What is a family to do when faced with a mountain of bills and a possibly possessed daughter? They do what is only natural in today’s world and turn to a reality TV producer. To stay afloat, they sign on the dotted line and invite the world in to see their struggle unfold. Is the troubled sister Marjorie really possessed, or is she merely pretending for the camera, as she claims? Isn’t that exactly what a demon would want you to think? This fantastic novel is fast paced and hard to put down. Marjorie’s behavior made me slam the book shut and yell “NOPE” more than a few times, and the ending is absolutely perfect.

  Grady Hendrix

Book You Have To Read: My Best Friend’s Exorcism

Abby is a poor high school girl surrounded by wealth. The year is 1988 and she is attending a prestigious school on scholarship. Luckily for her, she has Gretchen, her beautiful best friend to serve as a bridge into the world of the rich and powerful. One night, Abby and her friends decide to drop LSD and see what happens. Most of the night is filled with boredom, until Gretchen goes missing into the woods, that is. Gretchen returns a few hours later, naked and unaware of where she is. She claims that nothing happened to her in those dark woods, but her behavior begins to tell a different story. Abby must find a way to save her best friend from the monster living inside of her before she is lost forever.

Hendrix is the best at dancing that fine line between comedy and horror. You can go from laughter to cold sweats in the span of a single paragraph. His books are a master-class in marketing and product design, but it’s anything but a gimmick. Packed into this novel is humor, terror and nostalgia for the days when being someone’s best friend actually meant something.

  Nick Cutter

Book You Have To Read: The Deep

The human race is in being decimated by a terrible plague known as the ‘Gets. It causes its victims to forget things on a progressively severe slope. Innocent things are the first to go, like forgetting where you parked your car or your dog’s name. Unfortunately, it escalates quickly from there, until you forget how to breathe or how to circulate your own blood. There is no cure and little hope for survival, until a substance is found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench that behaves like a universal healer. A state of the art lab is built at the bottom of the world and a few brave scientists descend to try to cultivate this substance and create a cure for the ‘Gets. What they find in the darkness, however, is an evil far greater than the world has ever seen.

Canadian author Craig Davidson has released four novels writing as Nick Cutter, and it was difficult to select which title to include in this list. All are amazing in their own way, but none of them scared me quite like The Deep. It reads like a cross between John Carpenter’s The Thing and Sphere, combining paranoia and body horror to create a dread that you can taste in the back of your throat.

  Adam Nevill

Book You Have to Read: Last Days

  I have already written about Adam Nevill and even had the chance to ask him a few questions about his novel The Ritual. I’ve admitted many times that Nevill is my favorite horror author, and The Ritual was the first book of his that I read. Although that book has since been adapted into a film starring Rafe Spall, I believe that the book of his that every horror fan should read is Last Days. It follows a guerrilla filmmaker named Kyle as he makes a documentary about the Temple of the Last Days, a cult that was rumored to be involved in the occult and was at the center of a massacre in the mid seventies. Kyle decides to tell the story of the cult and its leader by going to the locations where it once thrived and by interviewing the surviving members. During filming, the members of cult begin to die in horrific ways, and something seems to be coming for Kyle and his crew-mate.

Many cults throughout history have tried to peek through the veil and into the world of the dead. What would happen if one of them actually succeeded, only instead of taking a peek, they managed to create a door? A former member of said cult hires a documentary crew to try to find out if the door can be closed, but what happens when these “old friends” start to come through? I won’t spoil it for you, just know that you will be sleeping with the lights on after this one.

  John Langan

Book You Have To Read: The Fisherman

Winner of the 2016 Bram Stoker Award, John Langan’s The Fisherman is probably the most beautiful novel on this list. It follows a widower named Abe who has found peace on the banks of a river with a reel in hand. He becomes obsessed with the hobby, and invites along a coworker who just lost his whole family in a horrific car crash. They become fishing buddies and start to work their way through their grief in their own ways. That is, until they hear about a new stretch of fishing ground not found on any map called Dutchman’s Creek. While on their way there, there hear a story about the creek that is too good to be true. Could the rushing waters of Dutchman’s Creek possibly bring back the things that they have lost? Or is it just another fisherman’s tale?

With a unique story structure and truly beautiful prose, this tale will take you places you never thought imaginable. A combination of gargantuan monster story and folklore, The Fisherman is all about losing the things we love, and what we would do to get them back. This novel is a great bridge for those who don’t normally read horror fiction, for its scares are hidden between the perfect storytelling and heart wrenching descriptions of grief. The scares are there, though, and when they come at you they are beyond the scale of human understanding.

We all owe our fandom to The King, but these five horror authors are the heirs to the throne. Do yourself a favor and go to your favorite bookstore and pick up a few of these titles. You, and your local power company, will thank me. Hit us up on Twitter or in our Facebook Group and join the discussion. Who are your favorite horror authors right now? If you have read one of these titles, what did you think? I look forward to hearing from you and getting some new recommendations for myself.

[hopetwin]

tag drop ii

and i found love where it wasn’t supposed to be // right in front of me {re: caydren trecoll} im going to want you until the stars evaporate {re: poe dameron} we are warriors // following in our parents footsteps until the battle is done {re: poe dameron} there’s magic in our bones // a north star in our soul {re: jacen solo} cross my heart and hope to die // i’ll see you with your laughter lines {re: anakin solo} all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put us back together again {re: jacen & jaina & anakin} there’s a hole in my soul // i can’t fill it {re: ben solo} justice and vengeance aren’t the same thing // to me they are {re: kylo ren} dont worry mother // your daughter is a warrior {re: leia organa solo} they are valkyries / the battlefield is their domain {re: rey} taught me the courage of stars before you left {re: mara jade skywalker} everything could stay the same or we could change it all {re: finn} we took what the world threw at us and survived {re: ben skywalker} the pieces we shattered into can’t fit back together {re: darth caedus} a daughter’s greatest hero is her father {re: han solo} i’ve always wanted to know how a lightsaber works {re: luke skywalker} do not go gentle into the good night // rage rage against the dying light {re: resistance} you burn with the brightest flame // and the world’s gonna know your name {eu/legends verse} i knock the ice from my bones // try not to feel the cold {pre-tfa} there is a reason i’m still standing {tfa verse} name a hero that was happy // you can’t {tlj verse} i’ve been cold // i’ve been merciless {sith verse} we are the wild // we are the reckless youth {praexum verse} i have bars over my soul and something’s keeping me trapped {possession au} blood red lips and poison painted nails {vampire au}

[hopetwin]

tag drop pt2

and i found love where it wasn’t supposed to be // right in front of me {re: caydren trecoll} im going to want you until the stars evaporate {re: poe dameron} we are warriors // following in our parents footsteps until the battle is done {re: poe dameron} there’s magic in our bones // a north star in our soul {re: jacen solo} cross my heart and hope to die // i’ll see you with your laughter lines {re: anakin solo} all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put us back together again {re: jacen & jaina & anakin} there’s a hole in my soul // i can’t fill it {re: ben solo} justice and vengeance aren’t the same thing // to me they are {re: kylo ren} dont worry mother // your daughter is a warrior {re: leia organa solo} they are valkyries / the battlefield is their domain {re: rey} taught me the courage of stars before you left {re: mara jade skywalker} everything could stay the same or we could change it all {re: finn} we took what the world threw at us and survived {re: ben skywalker} the pieces we shattered into can’t fit back together {re: darth caedus} a daughter’s greatest hero is her father {re: han solo} i’ve always wanted to know how a lightsaber works {re: luke skywalker} do not go gentle into the good night // rage rage against the dying light {re: resistance} you burn with the brightest flame // and the world’s gonna know your name {eu/legends verse} i knock the ice from my bones // try not to feel the cold {pre-tfa} there is a reason i’m still standing {tfa verse} name a hero that was happy // you can’t {tlj verse} i’ve been cold // i’ve been merciless {sith verse} we are the wild // we are the reckless youth {praexum verse} i have bars over my soul and something’s keeping me trapped {possession au}  blood red lips and poison painted nails {vampire au}

[hopetwin]

;; quick tag drop because tumblr hates me p1

and i found love where it wasn’t supposed to be // right in front of me {re: caydren trecoll} im going to want you until the stars evaporate {re: poe dameron} we are warriors // following in our parents footsteps until the battle is done {re: poe dameron} there’s magic in our bones // a north star in our soul {re: jacen solo} cross my heart and hope to die // i’ll see you with your laughter lines {re: anakin solo} all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put us back together again {re: jacen & jaina & anakin} there’s a hole in my soul // i can’t fill it {re: ben solo} justice and vengeance aren’t the same thing // to me they are {re: kylo ren} dont worry mother // your daughter is a warrior {re: leia organa solo} they are valkyries / the battlefield is their domain {re: rey} taught me the courage of stars before you left {re: mara jade skywalker} everything could stay the same or we could change it all {re: finn} we took what the world threw at us and survived {re: ben skywalker} the pieces we shattered into can’t fit back together {re: darth caedus} a daughter’s greatest hero is her father {re: han solo} i’ve always wanted to know how a lightsaber works {re: luke skywalker} do not go gentle into the good night // rage rage against the dying light {re: resistance} you burn with the brightest flame // and the world’s gonna know your name {eu/legends verse} i knock the ice from my bones // try not to feel the cold {pre-tfa} there is a reason i’m still standing {tfa verse} name a hero that was happy // you can’t {tlj verse} i’ve been cold // i’ve been merciless {sith verse} we are the wild // we are the reckless youth {praexum verse} i have bars over my soul and something’s keeping me trapped {possession au}

[hopetwin]

;; and part 2

and i found love where it wasn’t supposed to be // right in front of me {re: caydren trecoll} im going to want you until the stars evaporate {re: poe dameron} we are warriors // following in our parents footsteps until the battle is done {re: poe dameron} there’s magic in our bones // a north star in our soul {re: jacen solo} cross my heart and hope to die // i’ll see you with your laughter lines {re: anakin solo} all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put us back together again {re: jacen & jaina & anakin} there’s a hole in my soul // i can’t fill it {re: ben solo} justice and vengeance aren’t the same thing // to me they are {re: kylo ren} dont worry mother // your daughter is a warrior {re: leia organa solo} they are valkyries / the battlefield is their domain {re: rey} taught me the courage of stars before you left {re: mara jade skywalker} everything could stay the same or we could change it all {re: finn} we took what the world threw at us and survived {re: ben skywalker} the pieces we shattered into can’t fit back together {re: darth caedus} a daughter’s greatest hero is her father {re: han solo} i’ve always wanted to know how a lightsaber works {re: luke skywalker} do not go gentle into the good night // rage rage against the dying light {re: resistance} you burn with the brightest flame // and the world’s gonna know your name {eu/legends verse} i knock the ice from my bones // try not to feel the cold {pre-tfa} there is a reason i’m still standing {tfa verse} name a hero that was happy // you can’t {tlj verse} i’ve been cold // i’ve been merciless {sith verse} we are the wild // we are the reckless youth {praexum verse} i have bars over my soul and something’s keeping me trapped {possession au}

[hopetwin]

New Tags Part One

Name A Hero That Was Happy // You Can’t {TLJ Verse}

There Is A Reason I’m Still Standing {TFA Verse}

You burn with the brightest flame // And the world's gonna know your name {EU/Legends Verse}

We Are The Wild // We Are The Reckless Youth {Praexum Verse}

We Are Infinite As The Universe We Hold Inside {Teen Verse} 

I Think There’s A Fault In My Code // These Voices Won’t Leave Me Alone {Sith Verse}

There’s Magic In Our Bones // A North Star In Our Soul {Re: Jacen Solo}

His Heart Was Born Out Of Fire {Anakin Solo}

Cross My Heart And Hope To Die // I’ll See You With Your Laughter Lines {Re: Anakin Solo}

All The King’s Horse Men and All The King’s Men Couldn’t Put Us Back Together Again {Re: Jacen & Jaina & Anakin}

There’s A Hole In My Soul // I Can’t Fill It {Re: Ben Solo}

All This Bad Blood Here // Won’t You Let It Dry {Kylo Ren}

Justice And Vengeance Aren’t The Same // To Me They Are {Re: Kylo Ren}

Mother Is The Name of God On The Lips of All Children {Leia Organa Solo}

Don’t Worry Mother // Your Daughter Is A Warrior {Re: Leia Organa Solo}

I Never Dreamed I Would Meet Somebody Like You {Re: Jagged Fel}

I was born in a thunderstorm // I grew up overnight {Ch. Study}

[nightmareonfilmstreet]

5 Horror Authors (Not Named King) To Scare Away Your Winter Blues

New Post has been published on https://nofspodcast.com/5-horror-authors-not-named-king-scare-away-winter-blues/

5 Horror Authors (Not Named King) To Scare Away Your Winter Blues

Quick, name one of your favorite horror authors.

I’ll Wait…

Did you say Stephen King?

You did. I’m pretty good at knowing stuff. In fact, 104% of you answered with some variation of Stephen King. I, like many members of the horror community, got my start in the genre through the Master of Horror himself. To fans and non-fans alike, he is synonymous with the term “horror author”. Other authors may be more poetic, others may be more prolific, but none have meant as much to horror fans as King. The film and television adaptations of his works account for many of our first nightmares. Because of this, we all owe him our gratitude.

Nothing will ever take away our love and admiration for The King. The problem that I have with his books, if I had to pick one, is that there isn’t an infinite supply of them. Horror fans all over the world have rows and rows of his books on their home library shelves, many times displaying multiple editions of the same book. So where does someone turn when they have read and re-read everything in King’s canon? I’m glad you asked! Here are five horror authors that will expand your horizons and keep your bedroom lights on throughout these long winter months.

  Paul Tremblay

Book You Have To Read: A Head Full of Ghosts

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for best horror novel of 2015, A Head Full of Ghosts tells the story of a family going through tough financial times as told through the eyes of an eight year old girl named Merry. Your father has lost his job and has turned to the church for solace. Your mom is breaking under the weight of being the sole breadwinner for the family. They fight and argue constantly, and just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, your sister starts to act… very peculiar.

What is a family to do when faced with a mountain of bills and a possibly possessed daughter? They do what is only natural in today’s world and turn to a reality TV producer. To stay afloat, they sign on the dotted line and invite the world in to see their struggle unfold. Is the troubled sister Marjorie really possessed, or is she merely pretending for the camera, as she claims? Isn’t that exactly what a demon would want you to think? This fantastic novel is fast paced and hard to put down. Marjorie’s behavior made me slam the book shut and yell “NOPE” more than a few times, and the ending is absolutely perfect.

  Grady Hendrix

Book You Have To Read: My Best Friend’s Exorcism

Abby is a poor high school girl surrounded by wealth. The year is 1988 and she is attending a prestigious school on scholarship. Luckily for her, she has Gretchen, her beautiful best friend to serve as a bridge into the world of the rich and powerful. One night, Abby and her friends decide to drop LSD and see what happens. Most of the night is filled with boredom, until Gretchen goes missing into the woods, that is. Gretchen returns a few hours later, naked and unaware of where she is. She claims that nothing happened to her in those dark woods, but her behavior begins to tell a different story. Abby must find a way to save her best friend from the monster living inside of her before she is lost forever.

Hendrix is the best at dancing that fine line between comedy and horror. You can go from laughter to cold sweats in the span of a single paragraph. His books are a master-class in marketing and product design, but it’s anything but a gimmick. Packed into this novel is humor, terror and nostalgia for the days when being someone’s best friend actually meant something.

  Nick Cutter

Book You Have To Read: The Deep

The human race is in being decimated by a terrible plague known as the ‘Gets. It causes its victims to forget things on a progressively severe slope. Innocent things are the first to go, like forgetting where you parked your car or your dog’s name. Unfortunately, it escalates quickly from there, until you forget how to breathe or how to circulate your own blood. There is no cure and little hope for survival, until a substance is found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench that behaves like a universal healer. A state of the art lab is built at the bottom of the world and a few brave scientists descend to try to cultivate this substance and create a cure for the ‘Gets. What they find in the darkness, however, is an evil far greater than the world has ever seen.

Canadian author Craig Davidson has released four novels writing as Nick Cutter, and it was difficult to select which title to include in this list. All are amazing in their own way, but none of them scared me quite like The Deep. It reads like a cross between John Carpenter’s The Thing and Sphere, combining paranoia and body horror to create a dread that you can taste in the back of your throat.

  Adam Nevill

Book You Have to Read: Last Days

  I have already written about Adam Nevill and even had the chance to ask him a few questions about his novel The Ritual. I’ve admitted many times that Nevill is my favorite horror author, and The Ritual was the first book of his that I read. Although that book has since been adapted into a film starring Rafe Spall, I believe that the book of his that every horror fan should read is Last Days. It follows a guerrilla filmmaker named Kyle as he makes a documentary about the Temple of the Last Days, a cult that was rumored to be involved in the occult and was at the center of a massacre in the mid seventies. Kyle decides to tell the story of the cult and its leader by going to the locations where it once thrived and by interviewing the surviving members. During filming, the members of cult begin to die in horrific ways, and something seems to be coming for Kyle and his crew-mate.

Many cults throughout history have tried to peek through the veil and into the world of the dead. What would happen if one of them actually succeeded, only instead of taking a peek, they managed to create a door? A former member of said cult hires a documentary crew to try to find out if the door can be closed, but what happens when these “old friends” start to come through? I won’t spoil it for you, just know that you will be sleeping with the lights on after this one.

  John Langan

Book You Have To Read: The Fisherman

Winner of the 2016 Bram Stoker Award, John Langan’s The Fisherman is probably the most beautiful novel on this list. It follows a widower named Abe who has found peace on the banks of a river with a reel in hand. He becomes obsessed with the hobby, and invites along a coworker who just lost his whole family in a horrific car crash. They become fishing buddies and start to work their way through their grief in their own ways. That is, until they hear about a new stretch of fishing ground not found on any map called Dutchman’s Creek. While on their way there, there hear a story about the creek that is too good to be true. Could the rushing waters of Dutchman’s Creek possibly bring back the things that they have lost? Or is it just another fisherman’s tale?

With a unique story structure and truly beautiful prose, this tale will take you places you never thought imaginable. A combination of gargantuan monster story and folklore, The Fisherman is all about losing the things we love, and what we would do to get them back. This novel is a great bridge for those who don’t normally read horror fiction, for its scares are hidden between the perfect storytelling and heart wrenching descriptions of grief. The scares are there, though, and when they come at you they are beyond the scale of human understanding.

We all owe our fandom to The King, but these five horror authors are the heirs to the throne. Do yourself a favor and go to your favorite bookstore and pick up a few of these titles. You, and your local power company, will thank me. Hit us up on Twitter or in our Facebook Group and join the discussion. Who are your favorite horror authors right now? If you have read one of these titles, what did you think? I look forward to hearing from you and getting some new recommendations for myself.