#cw: ptsd

[lara-prism-light]

"The Accident"

[Content warning: panic attack, trauma and ptsd]

On Wattpad And Archive of Our Own 

For context, in this au, Clay stays(Floyd had left for his solo career and returned three years later on the day of the incident) and the day their grandmother is eaten he sees her being taken away, unable to do anything he blames himself for not being there at the time of the incident, believing he could have done something if he hadn't was so neglectful of his younger brother. Now as an adult he sees himself responsible for Branch's condition, and has constant nightmares about what happened.

[tsaomengde]

“The Mission”

A short story about love, time travel, healing, spaceplanes, and making the world a better place, even when no one will ever know.

---

After the TAG forces shot me out of my cockpit in low orbit, I floated there for about six hours.  Something – probably debris from my fighter – had hit me in the back, hard, and I couldn’t feel anything below my waist.  My suit’s maneuvering jets let me correct the initial nauseating spin I was thrown into, but they didn’t have sufficient thrust to get me out of my unstable, highly eccentric orbit.  

My suit told me I had about eight or nine trips around Titan before my periapsis wobbled low enough into the atmosphere that drag would bring me down below escape velocity.  At that point, gravity would catch up with me, I would fall, and I would crash into the surface and die.  The suit had an emergency beacon, but no built-in communications beyond that.  I was alone in the silent dark.

I sped around the moon at a little less than ten thousand kilometers per hour.  The view of Saturn, for the parts of the orbit where it wasn’t eclipsed by Titan, was gorgeous.  That was a small comfort, as my brain endlessly analyzed the ways I could go.  A bit of debris from the battle could kill me outright at these speeds, or it could puncture the suit on a glancing hit and it would be a toss-up whether I would die of suffocation or extreme cold.  My oxygen meter also claimed I had about three hours of air left, which meant I would probably be unconscious or dead by the time I actually hit the ground.  And, of course, there was the matter of my probably-broken spine.  I suspected I was bleeding internally from that.

Later, when I woke up in a hospital bed on the Agamemnon, they told me that the TAG brass had transmitted a formal surrender eighty-seven seconds after my fighter had exploded.  I was officially the last casualty of the Earth-Titan war.

They fitted me with prosthetics so I could still walk, but as the physical therapist with the cute dimples explained to me, there was some kind of incompatibility with my chromosomal something-or-other that meant I couldn’t use them at a hundred percent, which meant I didn’t qualify for combat.  My spine, which had indeed been broken, was too damaged to repair with conventional methods.  That left experimental regenerative genetic surgery, which was more expensive than the navy was willing to shell out for.

So, at thirty-one, after thirteen years in the navy, I got out with an honorable discharge, a pension that was decent enough but far from what it would take to fix my spine, a chromium heart for my injury, and enough PTSD to fuck me over for the rest of my life.

--- 

“I don’t care about my legs,” I said to Kate, the first time we ever met.  We picked a bar about halfway between us for our first meeting. She had a gin gimlet with cucumber simple syrup.  I had an old fashioned.  “They get me from point A to point B just fine.  I just miss flying.”

“Were you good at it?” she asked, blue eyes very wide.

“I certainly thought so. But then some TAG dipshit blew me out of my fighter above Titan and ended my career, so maybe I was less good than I thought.”

“You can’t fly for one of the intrasolar shipping companies?” she asked.  “Or transport?”

I gave her a patient smile. “Do you know what a pilot actually does aboard one of those big fusion torchships?”

“No, actually.”

“They point the nose where the destination is going to be, fire the engine for half the trip, then flip the ship around and fire the engine for the other half.  There’s nothing to that.  I miss flying.”

She nodded sympathetically. “I understand.”  I could tell she didn’t, not really, but that she wanted to.

I moved in with her a few months later.  Part of me wondered if it was a good idea, moving so fast, but I was two years from Titan and still waking up screaming in the middle of the night, convinced I was back in my suit, in the dark above the moon.  The greater part of me, the selfish part, was happy that someone was there to touch me, to talk to me, to root me back in myself and pull me back to earth from up there in the black.

In that sense, Kate could have been anyone.  I never thought of her as replaceable, but there was always a vague sense of guilt, of knowing that I was definitely getting more from the relationship than she was.  I voiced this to her once, and she told me I was being silly, and that she loved me, and that was all she needed.

So when she first approached me with her idea for the Mission, I like to think it was that part of me, the part that wanted to be more for her, that moved me to say yes to what was honestly an idiotic idea.  Not the part that missed flying.  Just selfless altruism and desire to help the woman I loved.

I like to think that a lot.

---

We cracked time travel about a decade after I was born.  Much to our collective disappointment as a species, it was not the fun kind of time travel that lets you go back in time and kill Hitler.  

Kate, as she told me once we were living together, was part of a DOD think tank tasked with finding some kind of use for the technology.  After a lot of experimentation, they came up with what Kate called the Four Rules.

1.      It’s time travel, not space travel.  If you want to meet Julius Caesar, you had best make sure you’re in Europe when you travel back.

2.      It only works by going back.  There is no forward travel because the future hasn’t happened yet. The only exception is returning to your point of origin.

3.      If you actually do meet Julius Caesar, it’s because your meeting him will not change history in any measurable way.  If you try to go back in time to change something significant, it simply doesn’t work.  The little box makes the noise, it uses up a lot of energy, and then nothing happens.

4.      The corollary rule to number three, then, is that when you travel back in time, whatever you do end up doing has already happened.

I asked Kate what this meant about determinism versus free will, and she primly replied that she was a theoretical physicist, not a philosopher.  The DOD was not known for employing philosophers and paying them the kind of money they were paying her.

---

The Mission’s personnel consisted of four people.  Myself, the heroic pilot.  Kate, the brains behind the time travel stuff and the one who came up with the Mission to begin with.  Leon, the aerospace engineer slash DOD contractor.  And Ash, the director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. We would go over to Ash’s place, have dinner, and conspire.

Over one such dinner – mac and cheese with broccoli, I remember it vividly for no adequate reason – we discussed the logistical difficulties involved.

“We can’t use anything from the last century,” Leon was saying around a mouthful of mac.  “All the guidance systems on those ships are keyed into the orbital satellite network.  There’s nothing like that at the target time.  We need a craft that can achieve orbit, rendezvous, and de-orbit in a single stage, without remote guidance.”

I nodded.  “That means we need a spaceplane.  Not just a fighter, but an actual spaceplane.”

Ash chewed over the problem as well as their food.  “There might be an SR-75 in decent enough shape we could appropriate from the displays at the museum.  The hardest part will be bribing the transport operators to take it to home base instead of, you know, a navy cache where highly dangerous military surplus equipment is supposed to go.”

I raised an eyebrow at them. “That’s going to be the hardest part? What about getting the parts to get it into decent working condition, or the fuel?”

Leon waved a hand dismissively.  “Do you know how many spare parts I have lying around at work?  How many millions of tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen are stored in poorly-guarded places that I have access to?”

“No.  I’m guessing the answer to both is ‘more than the general public would be comfortable knowing about.’”

“Exactly.”

I looked at Kate.  “Is the magic box going to be able to send a whole spaceplane back, kitty?”

She wrinkled her nose at me for using her pet name in front of our friends, but let it go for the moment. “The magic box can send anything back given enough juice.”

“Okay, but is the shitty little battery at home base going to be able to give it enough?”

“Probably.  If we strip everything nonessential out of the spaceplane, get the mass down as much as possible.  I need to know the exact mass of the plane, plus us, when it’s ready for travel.”  Kate shrugged.  “If it won’t be enough, we can always add to our list of capital offenses and steal a torchship, then use its fusion reactor for the power.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed.  “Last resort.”

---

“I don’t really understand why we’re doing this,” I told her one night, in the silence following her helping me out of another flashback.

She shifted a little in bed so she could look me in the eye.  “You said you were on board.”

“I am.  I’d do anything you asked, kitty, you know that. And obviously I’m excited to get to fly again.  But nothing we’re going to do is actually going to matter.  That’s one of the four rules, right?”

With a little shrug, she began running her fingers through my hair, which I’d stopped bothering to keep short after I was discharged years ago.  It was pretty long by now.  “It’ll matter to us, won’t it?  And to her?”

“I mean, sure, but the risk-reward ratio is way off.  You and Leon and Ash could all lose your jobs, we could get prosecuted by the Justice Department –”

“Vee, why did you sign up to be a pilot?”

I stopped.  “I mean, I always wanted to fly.”

“Yes, but what was the reason you put on your application?  And the reason you told me on our first date when we were still trying to look really good and put together for one another?”

That took me back, and I snorted gently.  “To make the world a better place.”

“Exactly.  Does there have to be a minimum threshold of goodness increase in order for an altruistic act to be worthwhile?”

I weighed that particular bit of moral utilitarianism in my mind before I committed to an answer.  “No.”

“So, that’s why we’re doing this.  To make the world a better place, even by the tiniest, slimmest margin.”

I gently snaked a hand out from under the comforter to lightly boop her on the nose.  “And the real reason, since we’re not on our first date and this isn’t an application you’re filling out?”

She stuck her tongue out at me.  “I know how much you want to fly again.  And I want to see my magic box used for something other than letting rich assholes reenact Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’ without any of the nuance or lessons learned.”

“Dinosaur leather shoes is not the outcome you probably had in mind,” I agreed.  The time-travel hunting industry generated billions for the government every year now.

We fell asleep that night, and the next morning, we took a magtrain to Vegas, and from there we went to home base.

---

Home base was an abandoned aircraft hangar in the middle of the Nevada desert.  Leon had said something about centuries-old top-secret aircraft testing, when we first conceived of the Mission, and lo and behold, there was a facility with room for a spaceplane.  We spent far too much money on the highest-capacity quantum battery civilians could buy, hooked it into the Vegas grid, and watched it take eight weeks to charge.

It had also cost far too much money to bribe the transport operators to bring the SR-75 here, but the deed was done and they hadn’t sold us out so far.  They probably assumed we were aviation junkies.  What domestic terrorists would bother stealing a hundred-year-old spaceplane when there were far cheaper and more effective ways to kill people, these days?

Kate, Leon, Ash, and I sat at a small table in a corner of the hangar, drinking coffee and going over the ascent profile.  Ash’s part was done, having delivered the goods, but they wanted to be here for everything, and I certainly respected that.  The spaceplane took up the majority of the hangar space, a sleek black dagger with barely a suggestion of wings to either side.  The underside was dominated by a pair of huge jet intakes, and the rear of the plane sported three engine nozzles, the center much larger than either of the ones flanking it.  A gracefully curved tail fin slightly forward of the engines completed the vessel’s profile.

“The plane looks like it’s in good condition,” Leon was saying.  “I’ve sourced the fuels we need.  The main problem is going to be the timing, not the equipment.”

“How so?” Kate asked.

I spoke up.  “The SR-75 should theoretically be able to hit escape velocity just on the air-breathing engine mode, but the target has an extremely elliptical orbit, and we’re launching much closer to the equator, so we’ll have to adjust our inclination, too.  That means either a lot of burns with the rocket fuel mode once we’re in vacuum, or a very steep climb to orbit.  That pronounced an angle of attack might affect the engines’ ability to get enough air to achieve escape velocity.”

Kate blinked.  “Still not seeing how that affects the timing.”

I pulled out my personal comm, laid it on the table, and put it in draw mode, so I could trace pictures on its screen with the tip of my finger.  I drew a little ball, the Earth, and traced a messy, elliptical orbit around it. I indicated the very top of the orbit, where the line peaked like a mountain summit.  “We have about a thirty-minute window to achieve rendezvous with the target.  We need to rendezvous at or near its apoapsis, here, where its orbital speed is lowest and matching relative velocity will be easiest.”

I loved Kate, but it was endlessly amusing to me how she could understand quantum and temporal physics and articulate mathematical concepts I could never grasp in a million years, yet still not understand basic orbital mechanics.  She gave me a blank look, then just said, “And that’s hard?”

“Yes.  It is very hard, kitty.  We are trying to hit a target the size of, roughly, a bullet train car, except the target is going twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour.  We need to come alongside it, match velocity with it, perform our docking maneuver, and then decouple.  And the parameters of the Mission mean that there is exactly one half-hour window we can do this in if we’re going to avoid violating rule three.”

“I think the best solution is going to be adding some external rocket fuel tanks,” Leon said.  “Not much, since we have to think about flight performance and transit mass for the magic box, but even a few hundred extra meters per second of delta-vee might make the difference in your ability to match orbits with the target.”

“Agreed.  Just make sure the Goddamn things aren’t going to come loose at Mach fuck-you.”

Leon grinned at me.  “I love your optimism, Vee.”

---

Unlike with most modern fighters, and indeed with even-older jet aircraft, the SR-75 did not have a fully enclosed cockpit.  The pilot sat in a big swiveling chair in front of the instrument panel, and the main cabin of the craft was accessible from there.  It was a spaceplane, and therefore supposed to be able to perform orbital docking maneuvers exactly like the one we were about to attempt, which necessitated the crew being able to actually get up and access the docking port without going fully extravehicular.

Kate sat behind me in a second chair that Leon bolted in there for her.  She had the magic box in her lap, hooked up by a pair of very fat and long yellow wires to the bulk of the quantum battery, which squatted heavily just slightly off-center in the SR-75’s main cabin.  (“Gotta keep that center of mass where it’s supposed to be,” Leon had said.)  She was doing something with the box’s controls, squinting at the small readout which displayed some kind of complicated waveform.

“I’ll initiate the breach when we get to fifteen thousand meters,” she told me.  “It wouldn’t do for anyone to actually see us at the target time, because then it just wouldn’t work, but I would rather not get shot down by our modern-day autonomous airspace defenses.”

“Sounds good,” I told her. “Hey.  Kate.”

“Yes, Vee?”

I craned my neck around as best I could while strapped into the pilot’s seat.  “I love you, kitty.”

Her cheeks darkened a little and she smiled.  “I love you too.”

I keyed in the ignition sequence and the SR-75 roared to life.  Leon and Ash, both standing a safe distance away outside the hangar so their eardrums didn’t rupture, started waving and giving us thumbs-ups.  I gave them a thumbs-up in return, projecting more confidence than I actually felt, and brought the throttle up just a little.

The spaceplane practically leapt out of the hangar.  Ruggedized, smart landing gear wheels hit the Nevada desert ground like it was perfectly maintained asphalt.  Within twenty seconds I pulled back on the yoke and the SR-75 was in the air, starting a steep climb.  I opened the throttle up the entire way and was slammed into my seat with the gee-force.

“JESUS CHRIST WE ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE!” Kate screamed.

I glanced over my shoulder at her.  “You okay, kitty?”

She was clutching at her chest, magic box forgotten, and for a long, terrible moment I thought she was having some kind of heart attack.  But then she nodded, looking pasty.  “I just got taken by surprise,” she shouted over the roar of the engines.  “Sorry!”

“Okay!”  I returned my attention to the instrument panel.  We were already moving at a good clip, and the altimeter was increasing fast enough that even the digital display was having trouble keeping up.  For a long, pure moment, I just relaxed into my seat, hands on the yoke, feeling the currents of air spiraling around the ship.  Now, more than ever before my prosthetics, it felt like an extension of myself.  I was flying again.

“We’re at fifteen thousand meters!” I told her.

Kate pressed a button on the magic box.  Everything blurred like someone just messed with the focus on a camera, except the camera was my brain.  When it re-focused, we were still in the plane, climbing toward space at an impressive clip, but all of the global positioning systems were dead.  There were no satellites to receive data from, not in this era.  However, we had accounted for this; the SR-75 had its own onboard suite of computers dedicated specifically to calculating orbital information.

It was at this point that things began to go wrong.  I felt a sharp tug on the yoke.  Swearing to myself, I corrected, keeping the plane on course, and keyed a status readout. The SR-75’s onboard systems insisted that nothing was wrong, but that the plane was experiencing significant and unexpected drag.

It hit me.  “Fuck me!” I snarled.  “Leon’s fucking external fuel tanks!  I told him they needed to be secure!”

“What’s going on?” Kate asked.

“One of the external fuel tanks Leon spit-soldered onto this Goddamn thing has come loose, and the drag is killing our velocity,” I told her.  “I need to get it off of us, now.”

My gaze was fixed on my instruments, so I couldn’t see the horror in her big blue eyes, but I could hear it loud and clear in her voice.  “How?”

“Shearing force.  Hold on, this is going to fucking suck.”

I stomped down on one of the SR-75’s rudder pedals with my right foot, the motion almost as smooth as it used to be even with the prosthetic, and spun the plane in a sharp, hard three-hundred-sixty-degree roll.  I nearly blacked out, and I know Kate did for a few seconds, since she didn’t go through flight training.  But there was a sudden, violent wrenching feeling that went through the yoke into my arms, and afterward the drag was gone.

“Did it work?” Kate asked blearily.

“Yup.  And apparently an external fuel canister from several hundred years in the future crashing in the Nevada desert doesn’t fuck up the timeline, since we’re here at all.”

“Are we still going to be able to make it?”

I eyeballed the delta-vee readouts on the navigation display.  The lost fuel tank didn’t exactly have a ton in it, and of course, the reduced mass of the ship now that it was gone meant the net loss was slightly ameliorated. But even so, the situation was grim.

“Well, yes and no,” I told her.

“That is never the answer anybody wants to hear, Vee.”

“I should, should, still be able to match velocity with the target and achieve rendezvous. But our margins are basically nil now. If I don’t do this perfectly, we’re going to miss completely.”

I felt her reach out and place a hand on my shoulder, give it a squeeze.  “You can do this, Vee.  I know you can.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” I told her, and was surprised to hear that it didn’t come out sarcastic.

The ascent became a delicate balance.  I was trying to hit escape velocity while still using the air-breathing mode of the engines, which was incredibly efficient compared to the rocket fuel.  But as I got higher, the engines needed to work harder to ram enough air in to function, which meant my thrust decreased.  Without the global positioning system to feed me flight info, I needed to do it all by feel and eyeballing the orbital information given to me by the onboard computers.

I trimmed a couple degrees off my angle of attack, trying to find the sweet spot between still gaining altitude and not starving the engines of air in the increasingly-barren stratosphere. The SR-75 shuddered, engines straining, and began to threaten me with a stall.  I swept my gaze across my instruments.  “Fuck,” I muttered, and switched the engines to rocket mode.

Instantly, we were slammed back into our seats again as our thrust suddenly increased dramatically. I glanced at our projected apoapsis, counted to three, then shut the engines down.

In the sudden silence in the absence of the engines’ roar, Kate asked, “Did we do it?”

“Yes and no.”

“Goddammit, Vee!”

I looked over my shoulder at her and gave her my most reassuring grin.  “Sorry, couldn’t help it.  The drag from the fuel tank breaking loose meant that we lost velocity, which meant we took longer to get to the speed we were needing, and the spin I had to put the plane through shifted our course a little bit.  Our inclination is about five degrees off of where it should be.”

“Okay.  What does all that mean?”

“We are going as fast as we need to be, but we’re not in the place we need to be going that fast.  I’m going to need to do correction burns at certain points in our ascent.  We can still make our rendezvous, but we won’t have the fuel to do a proper deceleration burn. I’m going to have to perform emergency aerobraking.”

“In English, Vee!”

“On our way back down I am going to use the atmosphere to slow us down the old-fashioned way.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Is this plane designed for that?”

“Probably.”  I shrugged.  “Assuming we don’t burn up, I’ll be able to switch the engines back to air-breathing at a certain altitude and land without the need for lithobraking.”

I could see her trace the Latin roots of litho and arrive at the gallows-humor definition of the word.  She went even paler than before.  “Certainly hope so.”

I let my grin fade as we continued to coast on our momentum, rising inexorably up through the mesosphere into the thermosphere, our speed gradually slowing as we crested toward the very top of our parabolic arc.  At key points, I reoriented the SR-75’s nose, now using chemical thrusters to maneuver the craft in the absence of air for the control surfaces to manipulate, and fired the engines in rocket mode, tweaking our orbital inclination until it matched that of the target.

The computers suggested to me, at that point, that we would be able to achieve equal relative velocity, and it would leave us with enough delta-vee to then de-orbit ourselves. We would not be stuck in orbit forever until we died.  I blinked hard, banishing the memory of Titan as it suddenly threatened to overwhelm me, and repeated the affirmations Kate taught me.  I am not there anymore.  I am here, now.  I am safe.

Safe was, of course, a relative term in the vacuum of space, going tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.  But Kate took my hand from behind and gave it a squeeze, and I was good again.

“We’re going to do a long burn once we’re within ten kilometers,” I told Kate.  “That’ll bring our relative velocity to zero.  From there we just point our nose at the target, fire the engines for half a second, get as close as we can until we’re either about to hit or miss, fire them again to bring ourselves back to zero relative velocity, and then we do that over and over until we’re close enough to dock.”

“I don’t need to know all the mechanics,” Kate replied, and I could see she was fighting to keep her teeth from chattering.  The environmental controls were working just fine, so it was fear she was dealing with, not cold.  “I just trust you, Vee.  Make it happen.”

I suited action to words. It took ten long, arduous minutes, and by the end of it we were very short on time to actually execute the retrieval, but I successfully brought the SR-75’s docking port, which sat on the dorsal surface of the spaceplane, in contact with the target’s own.

Not that they were remotely designed to be compatible, being hundreds of years apart in origin, but fortunately the SR-75 had the advantage of smart materials incorporated into its construction.  Its port sealed itself tight around the target’s, flashing a green light and hissing open to reveal the shiny metal surface of the target.

Kate was already out of her seat, plasma torch in hand, and the acrid smell of it hit my nostrils as she ignited it and started cutting through the ancient hull like butter.  It was joined less than a minute later by new smells: faint traces of iodine and ethanol, urine, feces, and a wet, animal musk.

And, of course, I heard barking.

“Got her!” Kate called to me.  “She’s in pretty rough shape, but she’s alive!”

“Strap back in, and get her secured too,” I told her.  “We’ve passed apoapsis and I need to fire the engines right now for the Oberth effect or we’re going to be stuck in orbit forever.”

I keyed in the command for the docking port to close on our end and release.  The leftover atmosphere inside the target puffed out of it in sudden decompression, pushing our two crafts apart, but not hard enough to seriously perturb either of our orbits.  That was the engines’ job, and I brought them to life as soon as we were clear.

They sputtered out as they burned the last of the rocket fuel.  I looked at our orbital readout.  “Ah, shit,” I muttered.  “This is going to be a bumpy ride.”

---

We all but rammed into the atmosphere with the entire length of the plane.  The yoke bucked in my hand and the instrumentation suggested to me that I was a fucking moron that had doomed us all, but with polite numbers instead of those exact words.  I kept an iron grip on the yoke, worked the rudders with both my leaden feet to keep us perpendicular to our approach vector so we would generate more drag and thus lose more speed, and prayed to every God I could think of.  Behind me, Kate’s teeth were audibly chattering, but she managed to avoid screaming again, and the dog was remarkably quiet.

The interior of the SR-75 got incredibly hot, naturally.  The instrument panel helpfully informed me that it was almost fifty-five degrees Celsius inside, and that was with the life-support system working as hard as it possibly could to cool it.  The one saving grace we had was that the spaceplane’s designers had anticipated the need for this kind of extreme aerobraking, and the skin of the craft was designed to tolerate it – in theory.  I sweated, and I panted, and I watched our velocity slowly decrease until we were no longer going to boomerang back up out of the atmosphere.

Then I pointed the plane’s nose down, let gravity take over, and switched the engines back into air-breathing mode.

They decided they did not want to start.

“Well, we’re fucked,” I laughed.

“This is a plane, right?” Kate asked through clenched teeth.  “Aerodynamic?  You can fly it without the engines, right?”

“Well, glide, yes. Fall slowly, yes.  Land… maybe.”

I let us half-glide, half-fall until we were back in the troposphere.  “Magic box time,” I told Kate.

Everything unfocused again, and when I was able to see once more, my global positioning displays were back online.  They told me that, if I did nothing, we were going to crash into the ocean just off the coast of Hokkaido.

I tried the engines again. Still nothing.  The reentry had fried them, as far as I could tell.

I started the plane’s nose trending up again, trying to bring us out of the dive and into a climb. The control surfaces bucked and the plane fought me.

“I’m sorry, Vee,” Kate said.

“Don’t start,” I told her. “We’re not dead yet.”

“I couldn’t go back and save you from what happened at Titan.  I thought, if I could save Laika, maybe –”

“I know exactly what you were thinking, kitty.”  I looked back at her, and the scared-looking mutt buckled into her lap.  “It’s okay.”

“I just – when I read about how she died, all alone, in that terrible little capsule –”

“I said don’t start, Kate. I said it’s okay and I meant it.”

She kept going like she hadn’t heard me.  “She was supposed to have enough food and oxygen for a week.  But the satellite was rushed, and the temperature control system failed.  So when she was –”

“FUCK me!” I shouted.

That finally got through to her.  “What?!”

“Temperature control.” I quickly hit a series of switches. “The jet intakes were superheated by our reentry.  When you switch the engines to rocket fuel mode, they have shutters at the front that close so you don’t get trace amounts of gaseous oxygen mixing with the liquid fuel. Those shutters are probably half-melted shut.”

“And?”

“There’s an emergency release that just drops them completely.”  I pressed the button, felt the SR-75 shudder as explosive bolts fired and it shed hundreds of pounds of metal.  “Okay. Now –”

I was cut off as the sudden force of the engines firing slammed me hard into my seat.  The plane began to corkscrew wildly as the engines put out differing amounts of thrust for the first few moments until the oxygen feeds equalized.  Clearly one of the intakes had had less of its shutters blown off than the other, and the plane had needed some time to adjust.

Kate coughed.  “The engines?  They’re working?  We’re not going to die?”

“Oh, we’re still going to die,” I told her.  “Eventually, of old age.  But probably not today.”

She smacked the back of my head.  “Jackass.”

---

The vet gave us a very suspicious stare as we paid our bill and accepted Laika’s carrier back from his nurse.  “I have never seen an animal in that kind of shape before,” he said.  “Malnourished, half-dead from heat exhaustion, matted shit in her fur, and primitive bio-monitoring equipment surgically grafted into parts of her. I assume you didn’t do this, since it would be colossally stupid to come into my office and ask me to fix her up if you did.”

Kate shakes her head. “No, it wasn’t us.  She’s a stray.  Found her while we were out on a trip.  We felt so bad for the poor thing that we brought her back with us.”

Somewhat mollified, the vet nodded.  “Well, make sure to give her the antibiotics for the rest of the week, and call me if there’s anything else she needs.”

We stepped outside, and I opened the carrier to let Laika out.  She staggered out, still a little loopy from the anesthesia, and I got her leash onto her without too much trouble.

“You know,” I said to Kate, “when we first shacked up, I said I didn’t want any pets.”

She grinned at me.  “For someone who was so against the idea, you went very far out of your way to get me one anyway.”

---

About six months after we brought Laika home, a very humorless man in a snazzy uniform, accompanied by many more humorless men in uniform with large guns, came and visited our house. The humorless man in charge sat and chatted with us for a while, and Laika sat in his lap and let him give her pets.

Nothing else ever came of the visit.

There is no neat bow to tie on this story, unfortunately.  I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night, though not quite as often. That probably has more to do with the passage of time and a lot of therapy than pulling a time-travel dog rescue, though.  The only point to any of it is that we spent a lot of taxpayer money (since Kate, Leon, and Ash are all paid by the government) and risked our lives to make the world a better place, even by the tiniest, slimmest possible margin.  

And perhaps having read about it will have made your world a little better too.

[void-ink-studios]

Nightmare's Rampage

Inspired by a comment left by @scumbkat, behold, a very very bad night for Scarab.

Not much left to say other than that, so enjoy!

TW: Implied/Referenced torture, Scarab has a major nightmare/PTSD response.

Word Count: 2,100

"Scarab..."

Scarab groaned. He was on the ground, he could feel cold tiles against his bruised and cracked shell. His limbs twitches painfully. Like they were... bent? Bent at wrong angles, twisted in some way.

"Scarab."

He tried to push himself up, but his arms and legs protested, pain shooting up and down his spine. His head throbbed.

"SCARAB!"

The beetle jumped, an undignified chirp falling out of his mouth. His wings twitched as he blinked his eyes open, trying to make sense of where he was, what was happening.

"Oh, good, you're awake."

A large shadow loomed over Scarab. The beetle could see the glint of those ridiculous sunglasses staring down at him.

"So. Have you learned your lesson?"

Lesson? What lesson was he meant to learn? His head was filled with wool, his thoughts sluggish and blurred. He couldn't speak, like something was sitting in his mouth.

"What...?" His voice sounded slurred. What had happened?

"Oh, Scrabs, buddy. Still? You still need to be taught?"

Taught what? What did he do?

"Wait..."

"Scrabs, buddy, you know I'd hate to do this to you." His sickly sweet voice dripped like poison over Scarab's head. "But you need to learn your lesson."

What lesson? Please, what lesson was he supposed to learn? Why did everything hurt? What was going on?

"Tell ya what. If you can tell me what you did wrong, we can be done for today. You can rest up, and get back out there. Just tell me what you did to deserve this."

Scarab wracked his brain. He tried to cling to memories, what happened before this? What did he do to make Orbo mad? What happened this time? Every time he thought he had it, the memory slipped through his fingers like water. He uselessly tried to summon words to his throat, but it was drier than a sand dune. His mouth and throat filled with gritty mud, drowning in silence.

"Really mate? Nothing? It's almost like you think you didn't do anything wrong. Pity. You know I don't want to do this, but you've left me no choice. You know, order from the Higher Ups and all that junk."

Scarab saw the shadow roll to his other side. He tried to turn, tried to crawl, tried to do anything except lie there, but it was as if he had his strings cut. He couldn't move his limbs, could barely twitch his fingers.

"Please..."

"You're begging? Not very becoming of an Auditor, Scrabs. Just keep quiet and try not to make it worse on yourself."

The shadow let out a loud whistle.

Scarab heard footsteps, heavy ones. They surrounded him, boxed him in from all sides.

"Let's see... we took your antenna last time, already an improvement... what should we take this time? Something that'll make sure the message really sets in."

Scarab felt like a scientific specimen. His limbs were occasionally poked and prodded, lifted to be dropped, almost a little too much weight pressed into his hands and joints. He held his breath. He was waiting for it. What "it" was, he didn't know. He just knew it was coming, whatever it was.

"Hmm... No, you need your arms, you'd be useless otherwise... Legs are probably necessary too... What about your extra arms? You really need four arms, mate?"

Scarab made a light pleading noise, his wings unconsciously flaring out, trying to carry him away, away from here, away from the shadow.

"Ahh. Now there's an idea. Thanks for the suggestion, bud."

No. No no no no...

"Hold his back open. Ugh, it's gross that that's even something I can say. Let's just get this done quick so I don't have to look at it anymore."

Rough hands gripped the seams of his elytra, forcing them open as wide as possible, painfully pulling on the joints in his shoulders. His wings twitched, still trying to fight through this foggy paralysis.

"No... No please no..."

"Hmm? Fellas, you hear something? Me neither. Come on, get on with it."

He felt a hand grab at one wing, sending stinging shivered up and down his back.

This wasn't happening, this couldn't be happening, he couldn't be losing his wings of all things... He'd already lost his antenna; he could be losing his wings too... His beautiful wings, the ones he preened over, the ones others admired... they'd never been touched by anything but his own hands, until now. Until now, when they're being pulled by strangers he couldn't even see.

He wept. He pleaded in the murmurs that he could force through the muck in his throat and lungs, his wings thrashed as they were tugged.

He tried to pull his mind elsewhere. But all he could recall is the words of older members of the mounds, telling him to be careful with his wings. That they're meant only to be touched by someone special.

In this moment, even his own mind betrayed him.

"Do it."

And Scarab's back was set alight.

And all that could bubble up through the mud was a broken scream.

------------------------------

Prismo didn't think much when Scarab said he was tired. While he himself never felt sleepy, he could imagine it'd be different for someone who lived their entire life as a 3 dimensional living thing. Maybe it was just out of habit.

So, Prismo gave him a soft peck on the cheek, jokingly wishing him a good night, and watched Scarab slink into the basement, probably to one of his burrows.

The Wishmaster had assumed he'd see Scarab again in a few hours, they'd work on their story, and maybe browse the tv wall for something interesting.

What he was not expecting was a horrid scream, followed by a loud bang to echo up from the depths of the Time Room.

It startled the heck out of both him and the wish maker he was currently talking to.

"Uhhh... Wish granted" he panicked, not even thinking about how to monkey paw this wish, before sending the mortal on their way and diving into the basement.

And he was met with a wreck.

It looked like something had bulldozed its way through the walls, smashing everything it could find until the Time Room was some winding cave network.

Okay, this was bad.

"Scarab? Lovebug, are you okay?"

He followed the trail of destruction, a creeping feeling of dread bubbling into his chest. Claw marks scraped into the walls, along with dents that implied something smashing its body into the wall over and over.

"Scarab!" He yelled for his partner, growing a bit desperate.

"AWAY! STAY AWAY!"

Prismo froze.

That was not a voice he was used to hearing. He'd been told what Nightmo sounds like, a sandpaper like guttural hiss. Now he knew what they were talking about. It sent shivers down his nonexistent spine.

"...Scarab?"

He heard movement down a smashed open tunnel, a scratching, growling sound. He peered into the cave, drawing in a sharp breath.

Scarab was not here right now. His Nightmare was glad to meet him though.

His small, elegant Lovebug was not bound by his logical view of self anymore. This shadow stretched gigantic, almost the same size as Prismo himself.

It reminded him of a black centipede or spider almost. His limbs were long and jagged, fingers fused into sharp looking, stabbing hooks. His eyes were filled with a bright purple, mandibles much bigger and sharp looking, mouth filled with dagger like fangs of the same bright purple.

"Oh Glob..."

Prismo was at a loss for what to do. He knew what Nightmo was like in this state...

Whatever Scarab was afraid of was... intense.

"Hey... Lovebug? It's me."

He decided to try and do what he usually did when Scarab panicked. Offer a hand.

The Nightmare hissed violently, shoving itself into the corner farthest away from the Wishmaster.

"STAY AWAY! WON'T LET YOU! WON'T LET YOU!"

Prismo's hand stopped a few feet from the Nightmare's body, still clearly in its sight.

"I won't touch you, Lovebug. If you want it, you can come to me, just like always."

"WON'T HURT! WON'T HURT ANYMORE! WON'T LET YOU!"

Prismo gulped, feeling his heart break. Ah. So that's what happened. Scarab finally saw the Nightmare's extended wings, trying to look as big and threatening as possible. Its poor, torn wings.

"I won't hurt you. Scarab knows I wouldn't. It's nice to meet you. I'm Prismo. You know me, don't you?"

"YOUR FAULT, ALL YOUR FAULT! HURT WAS YOUR FAULT!"

The words stung, but he knew they weren't meant. Scarab had told him, he doesn't blame Prismo for what happened.

But it seems the Nightmare didn't get the memo.

"Hey now... The one who hurt you can't anymore. Orbo can't touch you anymore. I wouldn't allow it. The Organizer wouldn't allow it. You know her, don't you?"

"SHE LEFT US! LEFT US TO ROT! LEFT TO BE TORN APART!"

"She didn't leave you, Lovebug, you know that. You know how much she cares for you. Come on, come back to me, Scarab."

The Nightmare growled and hissed lowly, not convinced. It looked at Prismo's outstretched hand like it would bite.

"WON'T BE FOOLED! WON'T BE HURT!"

"You won't be, Lovebug. Come on. It's time to settle down."

Prismo conjured a small flashlight, at the ready in case this thing lashed out.

"Orbo's not here. It's just you and me. No one can hurt you here."

"LIAR! WON'T BE HURT!"

"You won't be. I promise you, you won't be. I know you're frightened. You're trying to protect Scarab. You're doing such a good job. But I can take it from here. You did so well, you deserve to rest."

The Nightmare warbled, a hesitant hiss echoing in the cave. It eyes Prismo's hand again. It stretched out, extending a claw, hovering a few inches away.

"WON'T BE... Hurt..."

"You don't be. You come to me when you're ready, Lovebug."

"Lovebug..." it whispered.

The Nightmare shrank, its rough edges slightly smoothing out. It hissed warily as it touched Prismo's hand.

"There we go... You did such a good job, protecting him... I'll take it from here, and finish what you started."

The purplish-black spider-like nightmare hesitated before folding itself into a protective curl, still touching Prismo's hand, as it faded into blue.

The blue shadow held still for one second, then two, then finally looked up at the Wishmaster with wide, uncertain eyes. He looked around at the cave he had built out of the shattered walls of the Time Room.

"There we are... Hey Lovebug..."

And Scarab wept.

Not like how he normally cries. This was a rough, breathless, heaving sob, one that made Prismo immediately curl around his poor beetle.

"I-I-I... I-I'm sorry..."

"Shh... It's okay, Scarab. It was your first time handling your Nightmare aspect... The Time Room can be repaired, don't worry."

Scarab shoved his face into Prismo's side, muttering apologies through his tears, his shell shaking, rattling even. He didn't seem to know what to do with himself, unsure if he should cling to the Wishmaster, push him away, open his wings or keep them as tightly shut as possible.

"It's okay, baby. I'm right here. Let it out..."

Scarab shuddered, seemingly declining speaking for the time being. That was okay. Words didn't need to be said.

"Must've been some dream to pull you into your Nightmare aspect..."

"...I-I... I..."

"You don't have to talk. Don't force yourself to."

Scarab closed his mouth, his mandibles clicking nervously against each other.

Prismo decided to lean down and nuzzle. He did it exactly like how Scarab often did, nuzzling with the forehead on the side of the cheek. He planted his own little peck at the end.

"...Do you want to come up? Or would you rather stay down here for a bit longer?"

Scarab curled up tighter, right where he was. Guess that answered that question...

"Okay, Lovebug. We can stay right here. Just breathe."

The two stayed that way for a long time. No one word was exchanged between them. No words needed to be said.

Prismo just kept himself curled around Scarab, feeling his every breath and shiver. He softly, gently, pet the space between Scarab's wings. The beetle shivered and wept a little harder at the touch, but whined pitifully if Prismo tried to pull his hand away.

This wasn't a good night, and the Wishmaster knew that. But, he could at least be here to ride it out with his Lovebug.

He was needed.

And he were right where he needed to be.

[animetrashmuffin]

Working on a glow-up of this Almost Human comic I started almost 5 years ago to the day. I'm doing a rewatch because I've re-embraced physical media and I do have it on DVD. We'll see if I finish this time but I've got one page done and another laid out and partially inked...regardless it's fun to see how much I've improved in 5 years!

[lingeringmirth]

who do you work for?

Stranger Things | Steddie | Rating: T | Words: 100 | Angst, Transfeminine Steve Harrington, Hurt Stevie.

CW: PTSD, flashbacks.

Written for @whumpril day 2: sweat | Also here on AO3.

Stevie wakes up, shivering and panting and crying, her body covered in cold sweat.

“Who do you work for?”

She doesn’t know where she is. It’s dark. There’s someone there with her. She can hear them moving.

Blood rushes in her ears. She can’t breathe. The words come, familiar yet foreign. “Scoops… Scoops Ahoy.”

There’s words, instinctive and muffled.

She whimpers and scampers away, uncoordinated limbs tangling in the sweaty sheets and trapping her. She can’t… 

A hand reaches out from the darkness, through the abyss of her memories, the terror and pain.

“ --- evie? Stevie?”

Eddie.

She’s safe to break.

[iron-strangers]

What are your HCs about reader from Expanding Clan Mudhorn universe?

OMG my first ask!! Thank you for sending this, anon. Keep it coming, I love answering them

Anyways, this is how i picture reader a.k.a. Rid'ika from ECM

Rid'ika is Din's favorite nickname for his riduur, it literally means 'little wife' because everyone used to call her 'Alor's little wife' for a while after they got married.

Rid'ika then proceed to punch them all in the face.

Rid'ika has known Grogu since they both lived in the temple.

Rid'ika was raised in the Jedi Temple during the Clone Wars. She was a jedi healer padawan. Her master smuggled her out when order sixty-six happened, she was then found by Fenn Rau and adopted into his clan.

Rid'ika was trained by another jedi during the rebels era. Her second master knighted her with his dying word.

Rid'ika's beskar'gam color is red with black streak, for justice and honoring her parents, both Fenn'buir and her dead masters. The Mudhorn is painted in Din's silver color on her right pauldron, the left one has Jedi Order insigna painted in red.

Her lightsaber still has the original kyber she ran away with. It was blue then, but she touched the dark side once, resulting the kyber to changed into purple.

Rid'ika still has PTSD whenever she's surrounded by fire and she hasn't been to Coruscant again since she got away.

Rid'ika's ship is called The Defender, yes, so does her son. No, the ship actually came first.

Rid'ika is banned in thirteen (13) Inner Rim systems, including Alderaan (thankfully the planet exploded, so it's just 12 now)

Greef Karga sent Din a copy of Rid'ika's old bounty puck for his Space Christmas present.

Overall, Rid'ika is a menace and I hope you all love her too 🩷

[aplaceinthedark]

chapter eleven: JUST wouldn't STAY DOWN

Summary: Down in the Shenandoah Valley, there lay a court consisting of the Grim, the Drowned, the Witch and the Watcher.

CW: supernatural themes, mentions of vehicular accident, mentions of motorcycle accident, religious sacrifice, ptsd, large canines, bodily injury, body horror, graphic violence, religious trauma, blood, witchcraft

Every chapter will have a different cw section. This is Bad Omens rpf, so obviously I don't know all the little nuances of the members or their family members.

A/N: Some things are color-coded. If any of you are colorblind lemme know. 

I tried to relax the best way I knew how: playing with the cats. When that didn't work, I tried staying still on my bed, but the scent of Nick was still ingrained in my sheets.

“Lyds, why am I so useless?” I asked, less to the calico and more to myself.

My only response was the sound of cat paws hitting the wooden floor. Great, even they were abandoning me. I sat up, watching Lydia move towards the dresser that was still pulled away from the wall. The lock box still discarded near it—

But not empty.

I scooted off the bed and picked it up. In his haste to take out whatever had been it, Noah didn't scoop out some papers that had stuck to the bottom.

It looked like notes, like mine, but attached to it was a page from a book, or maybe a handbook:

"Beyond the conceptual or abstract, it is an existence born of darkness and light, manifesting in every corner of our world. This Divine Power cannot be wielded or controlled by humankind, but merely channeled through distinct means. The greatest way to channel Divine Power is to become a Vessel for the Truth.

To become a proper Vessel, one must be completely open to receive the Truth. To be open, one must be empty: all unnecessary thoughts and emotions must be cast aside in a process called Hollowing. Hollowing occurs at the end of one's journey to seek Truth.

Once the Hollowing is complete and one has become an Empty Vessel the Truth may then fill that void using the Ritual of Cleromancy. Those filled with the Truth are fully enlightened, a receptacle of knowledge and Divine Power. Imbuement is the greatest privilege for those who seek the Truth, as all who journey strive to reach this peak."

And then on the paper, written in a small, clipped handwriting:

"RITUAL OF CLEROMANCY = STAB SOMEONE IN THE GUT"

God, even back then Noah was a blunt bastard.

I shook the lockbox, thinking something else might've gotten stuck, and I was rewarded with something metallic and small dropping out of the box. It bounced, and Jerry scrambled to chase it, batting at it with his paws. I quickly retrieved it before he would try and chew on it.

It was a small ear spacer, almost the size of a stud. It had to be Nick's, from when he started to stretch his lobes.

That's when I heard noises from the other side of the house “Taylor?” I heard Folio call.

“Coming!” I scrambled up and out of my room. I ran to my living room where—

"What the fuckin' hell?” I shouted.

Folio’s hands and mouth were coated in blood, but Noah was almost drenched head to toe in it. He had shed his shirt and jacket, and this close I could make out the pattern of symbols tattooed from his collarbones to his hips. And despite his human appearance, the branch-like antlers were present.

“Like what you see?" Noah asked after popping his jaw, a sound like several twigs snapping accompanying the motion.

I was too grossed out to be angry at his comment. “What the fuck did you guys do to him?”

“Interrogated,” Folio said, grinning. God, his fangs were dripping blood still.

"When you said bloody, I didn't think this much—“

“There's a lot of blood in a human body,” Noah said, wiping his bloody mouth with the back of his hand, which didn't do much since that was covered in blood as well.

I swallowed. Surprisingly I didn't feel like throwing up. “Did you at least get something out of the guy?”

“Well, we definitely got his intes—“

Noah smacked Folio upside the head, earning a small growl. “No location, but Jolly's working on that. But we got the reason behind all this.”

“Between all the screaming," Folio added.

“They’re going to try and resurrect the old Watcher, so they can go back to the old ways. And since it’s not one of the Days of Power, they’re using a practitioner for the Ritual,” Noah said. “They were going to use Granny, but they took Nick when he showed up unexpectedly.”

My vision started spinning. The Ritual. “Cleromancy,” I muttered.

“How did you—“

“You left some stuff behind,” I said. My legs felt too heavy to move, so I couldn’t get the handbook page. “We have to find him. I can’t…”

I couldn’t lose Nick. Not after I’ve lost so much already.

“Is there a way we could speed up the locating process? Jolly only has maybe eight hours, and has fifty miles to cover,” Folio said.

“If you know another way, I’m all ears dude.”

My eyes fell on my coffee table while they conversed. Amongst the papers we had abandoned last night, the little red string stood out like a fresh wound.

"What if we get separated?"

"This helps with that as well. Unless you'd rather I hold your hand the entire way?"

I don’t know why I threaded the string through the ear spacer, nor why I tied the string around my wrist. I wasn’t a practitioner, nor a witch. Was it a good luck charm? A pathetic excuse to connect to Nick? It wasn’t even that great of a job, since I did it one-handed.

Except I felt a spark of… something.

It started as a warmth in my chest and head, where my near-healed head wound was. It moved to my hand, where the metal spacer heated up and felt like it would sear my skin. I hissed in surprise and pain, pulling the spacer away, but there was no mark on my skin.

“The fuck are you doing over there?”

I turned around at Noah’s voice. He looked annoyed but curious at what I was doing. When I turned though, the metal cooled down. I turned back, and the metal heated up again.

“I think I just unintentionally casted a location spell.”

“So when did you learn how to practice?” Noah asked.

“I didn't. It just… I don't know,” I said, sighing.

This trek through the woods was a lot faster, even though I kept tripping and falling, due to not having Nick keeping me upright. At one point Noah suggested Folio carry me on his back, even going so far as to call it a “furry piggyback ride” after we refused the first time. Needless to say, we refused again.

I couldn't feel angry at him. Just… pity, I guess. “You got serious anger issues then. Probably should see a therapist about that,” I stated.

Unfortunately, Folio ran on ahead to scout the area in front of us, with Noah acting as the middle man if we had to change directions because of the terrain. Which left me with the man who just this morning had me pinned to the wall by my neck.

“So how long?” I asked. Noah made an inquisitive grunting noise. “How long did you have feelings for him?”

Noah was silent for a while, almost making me think he wasn't going to dignify me with a response, until he finally spoke, “Not too long before shit went down, actually. We… bonded a little after we watched Folio get killed.”

“Bonded? Is that a euphemism for–”

“No, get your mind out of the gutter,” Noah snapped. “We kissed once, okay? After i lost my mom, I stayed over a lot. Nick wasn't into it, and I respected that. We stayed friends, and I got a girlfriend soon after.”

“Elin?”

“God, don't fucking remind me. That bitch deserved her fate,” Noah growled. The thought of what that fate probably was had me pushing through another several moments of tense silence.

“You didn't get over him, did you?” I asked quietly.

“I did, in fact. When I was in service to the original Watcher as the Towering Man,” Noah said with a bitter laugh. “Being over six feet tall was a curse in school, and the Watcher just loved to rub my face in it.

“I would wait for Nick to realize that I wasn't dead; that I was right outside in the woods behind his house. Nick used to search the woods after the search parties gave up, turns out. I thought he had just given up. So I left, and didn't see him until the next Summer Solstice.

“I guess seeing him with you… brought back old wounds. And I acted on them.”

Noah was about to respond when he suddenly crouched down, pushing me down with him. “You see that fire?” He hissed.

We crept up on the scene before us. It was… horrifying. That was the only way I could describe it, but even then, it felt inadequate. It looked exactly how I’d imagine a cult would look like: dark clearing, candles, an altar.

I could only count ten members. They all wore black cloaks, and black masks that mimicked a deer’s skull and antlers. They all stood in pairs, except one who stood before a tall effigy made of thick branches, twigs, vines and leaves. And tied that effigy, in some kind of terrifying mockery of the crucifixion, was Nick.

I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to middle the sound of my choked sob. From this distance, I couldn’t see if he was alive or not; just that he was covered in blood.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Wait for Jolly to lure them to the river. He's not far,” Noah said.

My stomach churned when I looked back at Nick. A part of me wanted to rush the cultists and get him down, but I knew with my disabled hip I wouldn't be able to take on ten people who may or may not have something to stab me with. At least one person had to if they were going to try to sacrifice Nick.

Just then, one of the cultists brought out a small drum, starting to tap out a rhythm that was simple but loud. I could compare it to what my heartbeat felt like.

The one that was closest to Nick, who stood out amongst the others because their mask’s antlers were blood-red instead of black like the others, held up a hand. “We will now drink from the Cup of Fate,” the leader called out.

“Come on, Jolly. Any second now,” Noah hissed from behind me.

“Our words uttered into the formless void.”

“Our words uttered…” the cultists parroted back.

“Reverberate through the space between space, between space.”

The rhythmic beating of the drum and the smell of smoke was almost hypnotizing. More so than the one time I heard Jolly’s guitar playing…

“We are heard by THAT WHICH WATCHES OVER US, so it may lift one heavy, eager eye in our direction.”

“You don’t think they have the drum to dispel Jolly’s song, do you?” I whispered to Noah.

“We are heard by those who shall always be nameless—“

“Fuckin’… shit!” Noah cursed.

“—whose incorporeal arms reach for us—“

“Alright, Folio, get in there.”

“—uniting us in unbodied observance, until we are heard no—“

The chant was cut off by the sound of a long howl. The drum stopped, and when the howl faded, I could hear the sound of a guitar and a clear voice singing:

“If God came down from His kingdom; He came down from His home, and we asked Him if He would take us back, He would surely tell us no.”

Noah had warned me of Jolly's songs, which was why I brought some small ear plugs that blocked out certain frequencies. It just so happened to block out any siren-esque frequencies as well.

What they didn't block out was the absolute chaos that came next.

They didn't block out the sounds of creaking wood and snapping branches behind me as Noah shifted into his other form. They didn't block out the sounds of Folio’s paws thundering through the forest, nor his snarls. They didn’t block out the screams as some people were ripped apart by Folio’s jaws. I had to block it all out myself.

I looked up as Noah’s deformed shadow fell over me. He looked down at me through a deer’s skull, which from this angle, I could see was melded to his face. His large, glowing white eyes pierced the darkness.

GET TO NICK.

I didn't need to be told twice.

As Noah loped towards the remaining cultists, I bolted towards Nick as fast as I was able to. I almost slammed face-first into the effigy when I skidded to a stop, but I caught myself by digging my fingers into the cracks between the sticks. The carnage behind me was still unfolding, even as I heard Noah unleash an unearthly shriek. Using a small pocket knife to cut Nick’s legs free, I soon had to climb the effigy to free his wrists.

That's when I heard a small noise come from him. I pressed a hand to his chest, feeling his heartbeat and his chest rise and fall. I almost collapsed in relief. “Nick? Nick, hold on. We're gonna get you out of here,” I sputtered, moving my hand to cup the side of his face. His eyes fluttered open at the touch. They looked drained of color in the dim light.

“Hey, you’re gonna be alright, okay? I’m gonna get you out of here,” I repeated, trying to keep him conscious. “I'm gonna cut this one rope, and I'll try to catch you, but we might take a fall–"

I had cut through the rope, finally freeing him, and Nick started to slide down. I managed to catch him, but I couldn't compensate for the near-dead weight in time. As my footing slipped, I tried to catch us by grabbing onto the effigy. The wood tore my hands up. I hissed in pain, but held on for dear life; more for his and less for mine.

My feet touched the ground, followed by Nick's. Luckily he was only half a foot taller than me, because otherwise this would've gotten awkward as I wrapped his arm around my shoulders.

I searched wildly for Noah. Thankfully, he was easy to spot. I got him!! I screamed out into the ether in his direction.

GO! RUN!

Just then, a dark force barreled into me, launching me and tearing Nick from my arms. As I landed on my bad hip, a visceral scream of pain tore up my throat. In my dazed state, I barely saw the same force kick me with what seemed to be supernatural strength, as I heard bones crack as I flew several feet away and landed on my back.

“You who are empty, I shall guide your step. Lo, though you envy, envy not. Lo, though you covet, covet not.”

Despite the agonizing pain in my side, I managed to turn myself over onto my stomach. Vision spinning, I was able to find Nick, who had managed to push himself up onto his elbows. I started to pull myself toward him.

“You who are empty, I shall see through your eyes. Lo, though you toil, toil only for me. Lo, though you suffer, suffer only for me.”

A strong hand grabbed the back of my skull, tearing some of my hair out from its bun and my scalp. The pain was dulled, thanks to the adrenaline. The voice that hissed in my ear was the same voice as the leader.

“You who are empty, I shall be with you and within you. You who are empty, you shall want no longer.”

He suddenly let me go, a wave of dizziness and fog overcoming me as I collapsed back to the ground, face smashing into the hard ground. I groaned into the pavement as the adrenaline faded, and my entire left side felt like it had been scorched. I couldn’t feel my legs.

I sucked in a deep breath, though it hurt my chest to do so, and shifted my head to where my cheek was pressed against the hot asphalt. Someone’s headlights illuminated the entire crash scene, but my eyes immediately fell upon a masculine body that was several feet away, blue-gray eyes fixed on me. Eyes that pleaded for me.

I forced my body to move, even if it was just my arms. I clawed at the blacktop, my weak strength barely getting me off the street, and I barely felt the twinge as my fingernails split and broke.

YOU CAN'T SAVE HIM.

Yes, yes I could. If my stupid body would just cooperate–

YOU ARE WEAK.

Why wasn't I moving?

YOU ARE EMPTY.

No. Not this again.

My brother was dying. Again.

And I was being forced to watch. Again.

Fuck, everything hurt.

Everything was hazy as well, like the whole day was spent underwater. Nicholas tried to think of the last thing he remembered clearly. Having sex with Taylor? That was practically so ingrained into his brain, he’d never forget about that in a million years. Noah being angry and yelling at him about Taylor having sex with Taylor? Yeah, that was pretty much ingrained into him as well. Driving to his grandmother's house, going through the front door, and then… That's where his memories took a nosedive.

He practically existed in a halfway state, up until now. Small flashes of consciousness here and there was all he had. He had tried to reach out to the Woods to try and gain some energy back, but he couldn’t, so whoever had him must've drugged him or bound his inner power. He felt like a battery whose insides were slowly leaking.

Except he could sense a little spark he couldn't quite reach.

It was like it only existed in the corner of Nicholas’ vision; whenever he would look directly at it, it would disappear. When he looked away, it would appear again. It felt familiar, the little golden light, like it was a friend—

Oh, that's what it was. The fact that they were still holding onto it was surprising to him. Maybe they did share the same feelings after all.

He had coaxed the little spark closer and closer, weaving his practice into suggestions that would lead them to him, until he could almost touch it. Except when was right in front of him, he couldn't. Why couldn't he take it? It was his, after all.

“--? Nick, hold on.”

With the sound of a familiar voice, Nicholas roused to a state of semi-consciousness, but that meant the spark vanished, leaving him in the dark once again. Except now he could feel. And everything hurt.

He felt his body let out a small noise of pain. “Hey, you're gonna be alright.” A warm hand touched his face, and he was so shocked at the feeling of something not painful that his eyes slowly opened. His vision took awhile to clear up while a slightly feminine voice kept speaking. Large brown eyes swam into view. Noah?

No, Taylor. “I'm gonna cut this one rope, and I'll try to catch you, but we might take a fall–”

He couldn't hear the rest because he was too focused on the feeling of gravity pulling him down. It quickly stopped, but not before someone let out a noise of pain. He then felt his feet touch solid ground, and Taylor took all of his weight onto themselves.

Except then he was flying again - no, falling. Everything hurt more when Nicholas felt his body connect with a hard surface, almost knocking him out again, but that darkness went away when an ear piercing shriek roused him more to consciousness.

Taylor. Taylor was hurt.

Nicholas pushed himself up and looked through the curtain of his tangled and bloody hair. He managed to see Taylor, saw their eyes connect with his, until a shadow descended over them. All he saw of their attacker was blood-red antlers, and his heart dropped.

He screamed in pain and terror and anger as he launched to his feet. He managed to land a swing despite being drunk on pain and blood loss. The figure, this new leader of the cult, stumbled backwards, and then a long, branch-like arm snagged him and threw him further away.

Nicholas fell to his knees next to Taylor. “Tay?” he shouted, rolling them over. “Taylor!” Their brown eyes were wide, unseeing, but he could feel their pulse beating frantically under his fingers. They would jerk and moan occasionally, like they were experiencing a nightmare. They were under some malediction.

“Maledictions are just what we call dark practice,” Granny had told Nicholas several years ago, when he was just starting to learn the practice. “These are mostly spells that are used to hurt people, like a curse or what ordinary people might call a hex.”

Nicholas looked up at the sound of a roar that used to haunt his nightmares.

Despite facing two paranormal entities, the cult leader was somehow still standing. It was almost like watching the fight between Noah and the Black Stag all those years ago. But that meant there was only one way to defeat the Stag, if he really was possessing the cult leader. Just like last time.

And to save Taylor from the Hollowing, he’d have to kill the Vessel the only way he could.

“That sounds intense,” Nicholas had replied that night with Granny. “Have you ever done a dark spell like this?”

“No,” Granny had replied, “they can steal something from the practitioner. You might not even feel it, but the malediction can take something from you. The darker the malediction, the bigger the sacrifice.”

Using what little of his inner power he had left, Nicholas scooped a handful of dirt and rubbed it between his palms. “Come denizens of the dark earth, banish the evil and let it be no more,” he muttered into his hands. He then ran and jumped onto the Vessel’s back, earning a surprised, unearthly shriek. He wrapped his hands around the man’s throat, digging his now-black fingers into the soft flesh.

YOU CANNOT KILL US.

“No, but we can stop you. And we’ll keep stopping you from coming back, again and again, until you finally give up,” Nicholas hissed into the Vessel’s ear.

WE WILL NEVER GIVE UP, FOR WE ARE THE VERY BEST AT WAITING.

“Then you can wait in Hell, motherfucker.”

Nicholas squeezed his fingers tighter around the Vessel's throat, speaking the spell he had learned those several years ago, despite being warned of the consequences. “May the righteous triumph over he who walks the untrue path. With this sacrifice, I bind your suffering. May you eternally wither.”

And under Nicholas’ fingers, the cult leader began to rot away, until nothing was left except the wet slap of skin and bone hitting the ground.

Nicholas looked up at Noah, who was shifting into his humanoid form. He could hear Folio limping towards them, and could hear Jolly’s song fading, meaning that they were all okay. All his family was safe.

He turned to look at Taylor, who was stirring to life. Nicholas let go of the cloak, breathing out a sigh of relief as the last scraps of his essence slipped away.

And everything went black.

Tysm for reading! Next chapter coming soon!

[whatdoyoumeanitsnotcanon]

Uhhhh heyyyy if it’s ok can I have some comfort headcanons of either Morgott, boc , Diallos or blaidd (or whoever you feel like writing I’m not picky) after they accidentally trigger there tarnisheds ptsd. It’s completely understandable if you don’t feel comfortable writing this btw.

Sure thing, anon. With requests like these, I don't get uncomfortable but I do like to take my time on them because of the sensitive nature of the topic. With that being said, I hope it's to your liking!

Comfortcanons - Elden Ring x Tarnished. (cw: PTSD)

Blaidd

Will internally beat himself up over it.

"I'm here, Tarnished, if ever you have need for me."

Turns out the best way to comfort his little Tarnished is to literally be their grounding object.

The Tarnished self soothes by touching Blaidd's fur.

It's a win-win, he supposes. The Tarnished calms down and he gets some gentle pets behind his ear. He makes a mental note of what triggers them and does his best to prevent it from happening again.

Boc

Is freaking out just as much. Oh, dear...

Does whatever he can to help alleviate the pain but it isn't working.

Finds out that all it took to calm the Tarnished was draping their travel blanket over their shoulders.

And later when the Tarnished rests (at his insistence), Boc notices that they wrap their blanket ever so tightly around them.

And so the next time the Tarnished visits, Boc gifts them with a handmade blanket that is doubly warm and comforting. It serves the Tarnished well.

Diallos

Oh shit. Shitshitshitshit—

Diallos is way out of his depth here. But the chap tries.

He enlists the help of the Jars to save the day.

"It's alright, coz, we got 'em!" Jar Bairn is such a sweetheart.

And so what do he and Diallos do? Well, Diallos sits Jar Bairn right in the Tarnished's lap. It works.

They break the tension by quipping that the little one is heavier than he looks. Jar Bairn plays offended and Diallos laughs nervously. They're back. Thank the heavens.

"Thank you," the Tarnished later says softly, vulnerably. "I... You're welcome..." Diallos replies sheepishly, cheeks pink with embarassment.

Morgott

Has experienced this all too well. He experienced it with his brother. He grew up watching his kind suffer in silence and loneliness. And even Morgott has his moments. He'll berate himself later but right now, his little Tarnished needs him.

And so he keeps his distance, far enough that the Tarnished has space but close enough that they know he's there.

Morgott gently talks them through it. The deep timbre of his voice radiates comfort and security. He reminds them that they're safe, they're safe with him, and that he won't let anything befall them.

It takes some time but they calm down. And almost immediately, Morgott finds his arms full of a sorrowful Tarnished. They embrace each other firmly.

"I'm sorry, I—" "Nay, it is I who has offended. Forgive me, Tarnished."

[clone-anon]

In the US the 4th of July is tomorrow and there will be so many fireworks. I have ptsd and hate fireworks. I always cry into a ball of blankets and try to hide. Can I get some love (maybe some cuddles) from any of the Coruscant Guard please?

I hope no one minds this jumping to the front of the request line as it seems time-sensitive. You are not alone in your reaction to fireworks, Anon. I wrote this with platonic cuddles with Hound and gn!reader, although could be potentially romantic / early relationship. Grizzer makes an appearance.

You'd dreaded it the entire day. Everyone was out celebrating, but you knew the annual fireworks display would be the cause of personal stress. This was a massive celebration and there was no way you could travel to any location that wouldn't have fireworks, not without leaving the planet. You spent part of the day with friends, including some of the Coruscant Guard. Your close friend worked for a senator and had started inviting them to group events. You enjoyed time eating and hanging out with them, and especially loved sitting with Hound as Grizzer convinced you to share your food. You tried to take your mind off of it, but when it came time for everyone to get ready for the fireworks display, you said your goodbyes.

Hound caught your hand as you were about to leave. "Everything okay?"

You tried to smile and nodded, but your eyes gave it away.

"Anything I can help with," Hound asked gently.

You shrugged. "I don't like fireworks."

He nodded slowly as the weight of those words offered a realization and he said, "Do you want company?"

You thought about it. You'd never asked anyone to support you during this, always quietly leaving and not wanting to bother anyone. Then, Grizzer came closer to you, almost like he was offering too.

"Okay," you replied.

Hound and Grizzer walked home with you. It was almost night and you knew they would start at any moment. You grabbed the biggest blanket you had and sat on the couch, Hound watching for any indication of what you might need, not sure how to ask and not wanting to seem like he was prying. The first burst hit the sky and your body shook, cowering under the blanket as tears came to your eyes. Hound sat next to you and held his arms open. You crawled into his lap and he held you. Grizzer laid down on the couch, offering support by leaning on both of you.

You noticed Hound had some tears in his eyes and his core seemed to shake when there was another boom.

"You don't like them either," you said.

He tried to smile. "Not particularly, no."

You moved the blanket so it was wrapped around all three of you and you huddled together for support. You stayed that way, both of you feeling better with someone who understood. Grizzer's calmness helped both of you and eventually, you all laid down in the couch in a cuddle pile, you laying on top of Hound and Grizzer laying along your legs, head resting on Hound's foot.

When a tear escaped your eye after a huge boom, you felt him gently wipe it away and whispered "It's okay." When he startled after a crackling burst, you gave him a squeeze to remind him he wasn't alone either. Most of the night was little exchanges of support and Hound telling you how he would usually rely on Grizzer in times like these.

"Now we both have Grizzer," he said, "and each other."

"Yes we do," you replied. "I'm glad you came."

After the fireworks were done and your bodies had some chance to settle a little, you fell asleep to the feeling of each other breathing a little easier.

[lara-prism-light]

Trolls Never Apart AU - "The Accident" Animatic [Content warning - panic...

[skyrim-forever]

the T in PTSD stand for Tortured by Vaermina because man are my nightmares terrible

[baring-my-fangs]

I'm new here, but I just wanted to share that a part of my nonhuman experience thus far is feeling my hackles and fur raise when I have flashbacks or feel threatened. I may bare my teeth and growl, as I've gone through past trauma. But please, don't give up on me. I may growl but I'm still a good dog.

[dreamlostdevourer]

A Very Helpful Angelic Hand

The newest angel girl at my small refuge?

She's a bit too driven.

A bit too purposeful.

Too impulsively helpful.

Now, I know that doesn't sound like a curse or a problem, but. A driven angelic doll can do the silliest things in the name of helping. And we like to try and iron out the misfires in that reflex.

Anyhow, she had just arrived, newly minted, her halo not even past it's first molt.

The usual whirlwind tour, some polite bowcurtsies, some pleasantries, a few shared looks of concern, nothing unusual.

She didn't even flinch when she met the demons and the void dolls, their polite smiles and her earnest ears made it easy for them to be friends.

And she was fine. It seemed like she was adjusting okay enough.

She had the usual stumbles, 'helping' us with cooking, smiling with oblivious destructive cheerfulness as her angelic flames charred the veggies. Or calling down the sky fires on a stain.

Just Angel Things, I guess.

We focused on those overreactions first, and she seemed to understand she wasn't in trouble or misbehaving, just that she was ill equipped.

Always smiling, always listening, sometimes even learning.

Really, it was more than we hoped for! It really seemed like we had gotten through to her, but. Yeah, always a but with my stories.

We awoke to the doors in our house slamming open, then shut. It's not that unusual, with our menagerie of- Well, dolls who were no longer wanted.

Anyways, after the third lap of door slamming, I lumbered out of bed and made my way to the noisy doors, in the kitchen.

And there she was, the new girl running about. She ran off before I could stop her.

A glass of water in each hand, all the clean glasses lined up on the counter...

Shit. Gotta teach her this lesson. I hate this lesson.

Relaxed my frown into a smile, and sat down, waiting for her return. It didn't take long, and was hard to miss, what with the doors slapping open and shut.

And our poor angel, disheveled, rambling, panicked, wings and halo sparking with savior impulses. It took a minute to decipher, but her adrenaline fueled rambling told the story.

She had seen a fire in the distance, and set out to help, she wanted to prove herself useful and good, after all. So she grabbed what she could, and flew out to fight the fire!

A noble impulse, but this was a genuine inferno, a four alarm fire, a goddamn high rise engulfed in a terrifying blaze. And our angel flew out there, two glasses of water clutched in her hand, just to throw them at the fire.

She was so proud.

Her hands were slightly burned, her face and clothing speckled with soot, the fringes of her wings were charred, and her halo shone brighter than ever.

As softly as I could, I took her hands in mine, and helped her to a stool, just to get her off her feet.

"I know you're trying to help dear, but, you don't have the right tools."

Her face twisted in disappointment, then fear, then anger, but she gripped my hands so tight, I could tell she wanted to scream protests. I don't blame her for being upset, she was just doing what she thought was best.

It took us a bit to calm her down, I had to get one of her new friends, a wizard doll, to help her break out of the panic spiral. But it worked, we got her to understand that she was endangering herself, and maybe others. There were better ways to respond to the fire, and we could teach her.

She choked back a sob, a dread panic in her eyes. I grabbed her shoulder firmly, trying to reassure.

"You're still good enough, starshine! I know you want to do good, to help no matter what-"

She slumped forward into me, and I caught her in an impromptu hug. Over my shoulder, the wizard doll droned out chimes.

"Dear Doll. Using the right tool for the job? That is our job." The angel girl simply rocked in my arms, but she listened as the wizard spoke more "I can teach you about fires. Controlling. Culling. Creating."

With uncanny casualness, a slender, dull rod manifested in the air, thrumming with unreality.

"And you must learn how to find the right tool."

And our angel? She started sobbing, thrashing, wailing. She said all sorts of nasty untruths about herself, about us, about the world.

So we sat with her.

It took another hour or so for her to calm down, but she seemed to understand now. I'm not looking forward to having to reinforce this, but it's better in the long term.

Someone taught her she was useless, a useless helper, and that she has to constantly be proving herself as useful, faithful, powerful, or loved.

And when it was too much for her new owner?

She got thrown away.

And someone has to save the dolls that were thrown away.

[distopea]

There are days where Mads suffers from a heavy dissociating state and doesn't even recall when he has woken up, if he has been eating or drinking, if he has moved somewhere. 

It can occur due to triggers surrounding him. Events, smells, a certain setting that bring back memories of war and the trauma he suffers from it. Usually, if something triggers his PTSD, for days Mads fights it through coping mechanisms, trying to muffle those waves of overly negative emotions, absolutely crumbling his mind because this is how he has been doing for years. But it happens that he lacks the mental strength to cope anymore, and his brain somehow shuts down to avoid facing his traumas. 

Mads can handle conversations, but he looks passive, absent. For anyone outside, they will perceive his automatism, his lack of implication in tasks, and his more distant attitude. It's quite dangerous for Mads to remain in that state of mind; it could lead him to hurt himself without noticing. 

[starkskypines]

sunrise at the altar of a dead god

it’s time for the religious metaphors galore codywan fic 

i got inspired by the bad batch episode “solitary clone” and one thing led to another and here we are

it’s also multichap so woooo we will be having fun for the next few weeks :)))))

>>>

Even now, Cody will still wake up with the gut-wrenching feeling that Obi-Wan betrayed him. Rex or one of the others has to remind him that it’s not what happened. That Cody betrayed Obi-Wan. That Obi-Wan never turned his back on Cody except for the moment he did when he trusted Cody to follow him into battle and protect him but instead Cody shot him off a cliff.

His mind is still not his own some days.

It’s what has led him to this. He can’t remain here anymore with his brothers. Not when he knows what he ordered them to do. Not when he has their blood on his hands. He can’t fight the Empire when he was one of its best soldiers. When he feels like he’s just a moment away from returning to their side because at least then he knows what to do. The orders are simple and he doesn’t have to wonder about who he is. 

He’s the villain and it’s so much simpler that way.

But he won’t go back.

He can’t betray his brothers more than he already has. And that leaves him lost.

He left his armor behind with Rex and the others. He’ll have no use for it on a desert planet. The sand is far too difficult to clean from the crevices in his armor and gods, does it get everywhere. It’s just irritating enough to be a fitting punishment for Cody.

He kept his boots though because they don’t let anything in, mud nor water, or sand. His pants are something Rex got for him. His cloak is stolen from Rex. His shirt is from Gregor. He has nothing of his own on his person. His blasters are Republic issue, his vibroblades Imperial issue.

Quite possibly his name is the only thing that is securely his own. His mind surely isn’t. That makes him dangerous.

Rex didn’t get it. Rex still saw the value in fighting for what was lost. He sees hope on the horizon. Cody sees only the loss. The wave that crashes over and over and makes standing pointless. There’s no up or down; there’s only loss.

read here

[aplaceinthedark]

chapter five: GETTING OUT is not ENOUGH

Summary: Down in the Shenandoah Valley, there lay a court consisting of the Grim, the Drowned, the Witch, and the Watcher.

CW: supernatural themes, ptsd, large canines, bodily injury, body horror, graphic violence, blood

Every chapter will have a different cw section. This is Bad Omens rpf, so obviously, I don't know all the little nuances of the members or their family members.

A/N: Some things are color-coded. If any of you are colorblind lemme know. 

I took in a slow, quiet breath, trying to will my hands to still as to not show the fear that was creeping up my spine one vertebrae at a time. “Was he found?” I asked, even though I had a feeling I already knew the answer. My voice shook no matter how hard I fought to contain it.

Steeling myself for her answer did nothing when it came. “No, dearie. It's been several years since he vanished into the woods. Even Nicholas has moved on.”

Probably because he knows the man is alive, I wanted to say. “But… if they never found a body… maybe he just moved away?”

Granny gave me a funny look. “Are you okay, dearie? You look like you've seen a ghost. “

I think I have. I handed her back the news article. “When does Nick come home again?”

I was done.

On my way back to my house - what used to be Noah’s house, I had learned - I tried calling Nick. When he didn’t answer, even though I knew he was with a client, I sent him a snap I had taken of the news article on Noah’s disappearance. Let him open it on his own time; I was going to get answers whether I had his help or not.

I wasn’t going to wait for Noah to come over; I was going to look for him.

I barely stopped in the house. I threw my bag onto the couch, not caring when the papers spilled out and made a mess. I then changed into some cargo pants and boots, and grabbed a water bottle and granola bars.

My eyes happened to land on an apple. Despite being angry, I grabbed one and put it on the plate outside. I looked up and waited, like it would summon the Watcher instantly - because I had no doubts in my mind that it was the Watcher I was making the offerings to.

But of course, the woods remained silent, or as silent as they could be at four in the afternoon. Then the offering would have to be for good luck, because I guess I was going to have to find Noah the old-fashioned way.

I looked up at the sky. I had maybe a couple of hours of true daylight, at least, but I wasn't going to let this stupid town's fairy tales spook me into what I could and could not do.

That's probably what Noah said before disappearing.

I groaned internally. I did not need to scare myself into abandoning this mission.

As I was about to take my first step into the woods, my phone rang. I flinched at the sound. Lighting up the screen was the picture of Nick flipping off my security camera that I had pulled from our test run. I hit ignore, but a few seconds later, he tried again. This time I just put my phone on silent.

No distractions. Time to go in.

And wouldn't you know it, nothing exploded as I took my first step into the woods. I let out a breath that I begrudgingly admitted to holding in. And then I walked in the direction that Noah had said his house - not my house - was in.

After a few minutes of walking, I realized Nick must've stopped calling, but when I checked my phone it said that I had lost service. That couldn’t be right; the house was just behind me—

No. No it wasn't. In fact, I couldn't even see my house anymore. Like I had walked for hours and not a few minutes. I didn’t even recognize the trees I had just passed.

Dread settled into my stomach, but I kept going, ignoring the rhyme that was repeating in my head; one that I had read in the library:

But if you venture far from home / If deep into the woods you roam / You’ll see what seems a moving tree / Coming toward you: that is He.

“Get a grip, Taylor,” I muttered to myself. I wasn't going to see the Watcher.

I wasn't going to get lost.

“Shit! Shit shit this shit—“ Nicholas cursed to himself as he repeatedly hit his steering wheel.

Taylor wasnt picking up their phone. He had been with a client when they initially called, and he hadn't looked at his phone until the shop was closed. And then he got the snap that made his blood freeze.

He hadn’t seen that article in years. He thought he had thrown it away, actually. Once Noah had come back, he hadn't needed the reminder of one of the darkest times of his life. Granny must’ve saved it, or had a copy of her own, or… whatever. That didn't matter.

Now here it was, biting him in the ass.

A part of him wanted to blame Noah. If he had just waited, and not “introduced himself” - Noah's words, not his, and definitely not Taylor's - he could've avoided this. But here he was, speeding back to New Hope a day early, trying to figure out how best to tell Taylor the truth.

Two hours later, he was jumping out of his car into Taylor's driveway. Their car was in the driveway, but none of the lights in the house were on. The automatic light came on when he stepped onto the porch; hopefully they could see he was there, surely. He then saw an apple was placed on the plate. They couldn't have gone to bed already, could they? It was only just past six.

He pounded on the front door, calling their name, but there was no answer. Nothing stirred past the window curtains. Against his better judgment, he tried the doorknob, and with a lurch of his stomach discovered it unlocked. He slowly opened the door, calling out again. Still nothing.

And with that, a horrible thought came to his head. What if they went into the woods?

Nicholas whipped around, staring into the treeline. That was the one rule he was fine with breaking; nothing out there scared him. Not until now. Especially now.

"NOAH!" he yelled out into the green.

Normally it took Noah a bit to appear, but with the fear in Nicholas' scream, he practically materialized out of the woods before the last echo of his name faded away. "What?" he asked, his angular brows creased in confusion.

Nicholas breathed out heavily. "We've got a big problem," he said, "and an even bigger hell to explain it."

I was irrevocably and utterly lost.

What I had thought was only fifteen minutes ago, I had given up and turned around, thinking I'd be back home before the sun sank way below the treeline. When I looked at my phone, I saw that those fifteen minutes had somehow become over an hour, and I was still nowhere near my home.

Worst of all, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being watched.

The sounds of my boots stepping on pine needles and rocks seemed deafening in my ears. My phone's flashlight barely seemed to penetrate the darkness, but it at least gave me the ability to see where my feet were stepping. It was practically all that my phone was good for, since I hadn't found a signal ever since I stepped foot in these stupid woods.

I cursed myself for the millionth time. Stupid woods, stupid Nick, stupid boots, stupid Noah even though I've only known him for half an hour and he might not even be Noah, if Noah's dead. Oh, and stupid me for thinking this was... well, I knew it wasn't a good idea, but–

Halfway through a step, I heard leaves crunch behind me, like I had finished my step but I hadn't. I froze, a sudden chill descending over me. I could feel the eyes watching me grow stronger. My heart was pounding so bad I thought that whatever was stalking me could hear it. It had to, because I could hear it coming closer. With my heart in my throat, I turned around.

As my eyes locked with what was coming towards me slowly, my body cut all communication. No matter how much my mind screamed at me to run, my legs wouldn't cooperate. I couldn't breathe.

The only way my mind could describe it was it had to be a wolf. It was still too large to be a regular wolf, but it was way too big to be a dog or coyote. It also looked too feral. Its body was thick with muscle, its broad body covered in a light fur that shined silver in the small light from my phone. When its eyes passed over me, I caught a glimpse of a mix of dirt brown and grass green. They looked almost... human.

And those eyes were focused on me.

My knees finally gave out, and I collapsed to the ground. The spell broken, I tried to scramble backwards and get up at the same time, but I just fell onto my back everytime. The creature was faster, and soon it was towering over me. I squeezed my eyes shut as it leaned close, snarling. I could feel it's hot breath wash over me. A whimper clawed its way out of my throat.

Please... I didn't survive that accident just to get mauled to death by this creature.

Suddenly, there was a loud roar from behind me, and I heard the sound of trees being snapped. Then something leapt into the air, colliding with the creature on top of me. The void of bitter cold it left in its wake when the creature's hot and sticky breath vanished made me scream. I opened my eyes just as I heard the loud sound of bigger bodies hitting the ground.

Bodies. Plural.

My mind reeled. The wolf-creature lay on its back several yards away, but it got up quickly and shook off the debris it had collected in its wake. And standing between us–

I almost collapsed again.

The new creature had its back to me, but that didn't stop my fears. If the wolf was big, then this creature absolutely towered over me. Its movements were quick, jerking, and its joints sounded like bark being peeled from a tree. It was humanoid in shape, its broad torso covered in whorls and symbols that made my brain hurt to look at. But my eyes were quickly drawn upwards, towards the thick, branch-like antlers protruding from beneath that thick mess of long hair.

The Watcher of the Woods.

It let out a roar that sounded like it could've been words, but it was in a way that I couldn't even think of understanding. It made my head hurt just hearing them. Judging by the sound that came from the other creature, it hurt it too. But then it began backing away.

The Watcher had commanded it to leave. And it understood.

After the wolf creature disappeared, its tail proverbially tucked between its legs, the Watcher turned and faced me. It was at that moment I turned and bolted, but didn't get very far when I heard a voice in my head.

WAIT.

I stopped, freezing at the familiar voice. It wasn’t full of the arrogance that I had heard, which nearly threw me off. I also didn’t expect to see a human hand come down on my shoulder and spin me around.

“Are you okay?” Noah asked. Gone was the Watcher, but he was shirtless, showing off every inch of his skin that, from his neck to his hips, shoulders to fingers, was covered in tattoos.

I backed away, Noah letting me go easily. “What… what are you?” I asked, fear soaking my every word.

“I… It’s better if we go back to your place. It’s not safe here—“

“No fucking shit! I just got attacked by some… wolf, and… and you were some… tree thing a-and… you’ve been missing for seven years—“

“Taylor—“

“No! I’m leaving, going back to my house, and going back to fucking sleep, because obviously I’m having a nightmare!” I yelled at him, turning away.

I felt his hand grab me again, and I swung. My just connected with his cheek, and with a loud curse that didn’t cover the sound of twigs snapping, he let me go. I then bolted.

Despite my feet probably bleeding with blisters, the adrenaline from the fight had them running as fast as I could go. I didn't even know which direction I was going, as long as it was away from him and his dog. I thought I could hear him behind me, but for all I knew, it was just my heart pounding in my ears. I just had to get away; get out of here—

My foot connected with something, pulling my leg out from underneath me. For a moment, I felt weightless as I soared to my downfall. It almost felt familiar. When my body connected with the cold, dark earth below, it almost felt like hitting pavement.

But I didn't stop there. I kept tumbling, skidding across the ground as I felt every rock embed into my skin. Until my head hit something hard, and I fell into dark oblivion.

Tysm for reading! Next chapter coming soon!