#description of a corpse

[nat-space-obsessed]

For @kinglazrus !! Super excited abt this one! I love corpse aus so I just had to do this one.

AO3 Link

"There's a shallow grave in the woods. The only marker is a stone with the name "Danny" scratched into it. Judging by the fresh-turned soil, it hasn't been empty for long."

The call came in from a hiker early in the morning.

She'd been going on her daily hike when she decided to go on a route that was different from her normal route.

When she tripped over the rock, she should have known that there was something wrong. At first, she started to walk past, and continue on her hike.

It was on her way back that she really noticed the issue.

The rock she had tripped over had writing that she didn't notice the first time.

It was a simple engraving, probably done with another rock or a different sharp tool, definitely not professionally done.

There was one word.

A name.

'DANNY'

It was at that point that she realized that the dirt path seemed to be disturbed near the edges, as if someone had gone digging.

Oh god, someone had been digging .

As she looked at the disturbed dirt, she saw something odd. It was an odd color, looking as if it had been burned or melted, blackened.

It was a bone.

A charred, dirty, old bone, covered in a material that had melted and fused to it.

It was like one of those horror stories, of certain toys made from plastic materials melting onto skin if exposed to too much heat.

She called the police station the second she was in range of a cell tower.

All the operator at the call center heard was, "God, the bones , they're black, they're burned. There's bones in the woods ."

The CSI left the station immediately.

.

..

...

"She wasn't kidding, these bones were definitely burned, but they're weird. It's more reminiscent of electrical burns. What could output enough power to burn a body so thoroughly by electrocution?" The lead CSI said. She was wearing gloves and slowly unburying the body.

The more they uncovered, the more horrified they were.

"This is a kid," A member of the team said, "Either a kid or a small person. The size of the bones indicate that the owner of this body was under 5 ft. Maybe a small kid? What name did the stone say?"

"Danny, I think, it's a little hard to read, but that looks like the right name."

"Wait, wasn't there a kid that went missing a year ago from Amity named Danny?"

"Yeah, but I thought the parents were under suspicion, with that weird lab in their basement."

"Didn't the sister call it in?" The one handling the bones said.

The case they were talking about was the case of Daniel Fenton. He had gone missing four weeks before his freshman year, except he was only reported missing when his sister came back from a college summer camp. Two weeks after he supposedly went missing.

Because of this, nobody actually figured out when he went missing. The police had searched the entire Fenton home, which had uncovered the lab in the basement of the home.

The Fentons had a portal. An interdimensional portal to some place they called the Ghost Zone, and it had corresponded with sightings of weird, translucent, flying people that had been sighted in the city.

They had been taken into custody, but then later released due to a lack of evidence. His sister was still advocating for missing children, especially kids who weren't reported until long after they vanished.

"But this body is too decomposed for only a few months. Maybe the burns accelerated it?"

"I mean, if this is the Fenton kid-"

"Don't start being a conspiracy theorist now, Sean." The lead investigator said, shaking her head.

"You never know!"

.

..

...

The coroner's office was cold. The autopsy room was colder.

The body on the table was small, a kid, wearing a plastic material that had seemed to fuse with the bones it was covering.

The bones, God the bones. They were blackened, covered in a dark material, flesh that had been burnt to a blackened crisp.

The coroner looked at the body in front of him and sighed.

The only thing he could easily use for identification that wasn't fingerprints or DNA were dental records. Luckily, while the corpse was completely desecrated, the bones were somehow intact.

He was able to take a scan of the teeth and send them off to be compared with all local dentist offices within a 50 mile radius.

It was a few minutes later when he got the ping.

There's a match.

"Shit."

.

..

...

The Fentons were in their lab when they got a phone call.

"Hello, this is Jack Fenton of Fentonworks, how can I help you?" The burly man said into the receiver.

"Hello, Mr. Fenton. This is the Briggersdale Police Department, calling you to inform you that a few days ago, we found a body in the woods. This body has been identified as the body of your son, Daniel." The voice on the other end said to him.

"What?" Jack stood with the phone in hand in shock. Maddie chose that moment to walk into the room.

"Are you okay, Jack?"

Jack thanked the officer and hung up. "They... found a body."

"A body? Why did they contact you? Where was this?"

"The next town over. The body was identified. It was Danny's."

A sharp intake of breath could be heard from Maddie. "We need to call Jazz."

"She isn't speaking to us, she'd just ignore anything we have to say to her."

"She'll listen, it's about Danny."

.

..

...

Jazz Fenton had been having a good day. She had only one class that morning, her favorite introduction to developmental psychology course, and she had just finished speaking with her roommate about their date next weekend with their longtime girlfriend. She was happy for them. She was having a good time, reading one of her favorite books at her desk.

It was a good day, until she got the phone call.

It was from her parents.

She refused the call at first. This was the third time that week her parents had tried to contact her, and the third time she refused their call.

Usually they stopped trying to call her, and just left her a few texts after she refused their call, but this time was different.

She should have known something was wrong.

"What is it? I thought I told you guys to never contact me again." Jazz spoke before either of her parents could even get one word out.

"Jazz... They found it."

"What, what did they find?" Jazz stood up. She was really getting annoyed now, with them being all cryptic towards her.

"His body. Jazz, they found Danny's body."

Jazz's phone slipped out of her hands.

What?

They found his body. They found his body.

Oh god, he was actually dead.

Jazz knew after the first few days she realized her brother was missing that the chances of finding him again were slim to none, and after the first two weeks, she knew that she would probably sooner see a body bag than see her brother alive again.

But this? This made it real.

He was dead.

He was gone .

She was never going to see him again.

Oh god, this was real .

She stared in front of her. She stared at the wall.

Her knees gave out and she slumped to the ground.

She could feel her eyes well up with tears.

She could hear her roommate shouting her name and kneeling in front of her as she sobbed, crying and trying to say anything, but no words would come out of her mouth.

Oh god, she had to tell Sam and Tucker.

No way would her parents even know that he had them as his friends, and they were always the first people that she gave updates to, even before her parents. They deserved to know he was... dead. That they had found his body.

.

..

...

Sam and Tucker were hanging out at Tucker's house when Sam's phone rang.

She picked it up, recognizing the number as Jazz's.

Tucker watched as emotions crossed her face, beginning with worry, and ending in dread.

"Oh my god. Tucker. They found it."

“Shit.” He said.

“Shit.” She nodded in agreement.

[myfanfictionsideasarekillingme]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: MASH (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Henry Blake & Radar O'Reilly Characters: Radar O'Reilly, Henry Blake, Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce Additional Tags: Guilt, Nightmares, Burns, Blood, Brief Depictions of a Corpse, Henry is dead, whumpcember24, Whumocember24 day2, Whumpcember, Whumpcember2024 Series: Part 2 of My Whumpcember 2024 Summary:

Prompt: "This Is Your Fault"

One drunken sentence is enough to trigger Radars guilt.

[wordingg]

Dead To Me

Summary: Jason Todd attends the funeral of Bruce Wayne.

Whumptober Fill. Day Two. Prompt: "I'll call out your name but you won't call back." from Dead To Me by Melanie Martinez

It rained the day they buried Bruce Wayne in Gotham Cemetery. Because, of course it did. Even the sky mourned the death of Gotham's crown prince.

Jason showed up at the funeral even though he wasn't technically invited. He didn't legally exist, so he imagined that made it a little hard to add him to a guest list or send him an invitation. But, Babs had sent him the date and time, and it seemed sort of pointed, so he showed up.

Bruce wasn't really his father. But, there had been a time when Jason had really wanted him to be. He had enough years behind him by then that he could admit that to himself.

They had two years of something together, that's for sure. Bruce had been warm and welcoming back then, but he was also completely over his head with Jason. With distance, Jason could see all the ways they were a disaster waiting to happen.

Bruce had meant well, but he didn't understand Jason. He could read the DSM front to back and write a small novel about all the way that Jason's upbringing caused him to react the ways he did to certain stimuli. But, Bruce had no ability to put any of that knowledge into action. When Jason lashed out or went overboard, Bruce brought down the hammer of judgement down had, even if every psychology textbook he ever read probably told him that wasn't going to get him the results he wanted. In the end, he was human. He had no training regarding caring for traumatized children, and he hadn't learned anything from the mess that his relationship with Dick had devolved into.

Jason didn't understand Bruce any better than Bruce had understood him. Jason could put aside his distaste for Bruce's material wealth, because he felt like Bruce was doing something about the unfairness of it all with Batman. But, he didn't understand all the lines that Bruce drew around his vigilante activities. Why did they have to work inside the law if the law was wrong? Hell, why work with the police at all? They were vigilantes! They were already operating outside the law!

Bruce never really entertained Jason's arguments, maybe because he felt that Jason wasn't in a place to really listen to him. And, maybe he was right, but it just made Jason more sure that he was on to something or that he was being dismissed out of hand.

But all of that was years ago and far behind him by the time he stepped into the cathedral.

Dick, Tim and Damian stood at the front of the chapel while the priest read a heartfelt sermon about a man who didn't even really exist. Brucie Wayne, the farce, was who was really being mourned there that day.

Cassandra was Bruce's daughter by law too, but she was nowhere that Jason could see. Though, she could be anywhere in the cathedral and nobody would see her unless she wanted to be seen. Maybe she didn't want to come. Maybe she was asked not to, since she had never been a big part of Bruce's public image like the boys were.

No Alfred either. Maybe there would be a family memorial later. Maybe Jason would be invited to that. Somehow he doubted it, though.

Jason's biological father was a consummate disappointment and, if Jason was honest with himself, Bruce wasn't much better. But, there had been hope there once, unlike with Willis. They had good times together too. There had been camping trips in the mountain, supposedly for wilderness survival training, but containing too much fishing and roasting marshmallows for Jason to take that excuse seriously. They used to discuss books late into the night. That had been really special to Jason. No adult had ever wanted to hear his opinions about books before. No adult had even believed that Jason read the books he carried around since his mom died.

Bruce could listen to him talk about books for hours, but he was never there when he needed him. Missed phone calls, missed dinners, missed teacher conferences. As time went on and the new shine on Jason's adoption wore off, they piled up more and more.

By the end, he didn't bother to call anymore. Bruce never answered.

They were lining up to view the corpse. The boys went first, followed by the rest of the upper crust of Gotham's elite who had been invited to the funeral of the decade. There would be a public memorial tomorrow, where everyone was invited. Jason wondered how many people would come out. The weather was supposed to be just as nasty tomorrow, but the public loved a little shared misery.

Jason made sure he was at the back of the line, the very last person.

When Jason got to the front, his stomach clenched at the sight of the man who could have been his father laying in white silk. Bruce looked good. Jason had seen a lot of dead bodies, but they usually didn't look like this. His cheeks were full and smooth, the color good, his skin smooth and healthy looking. His thick dark hair was brushed back from his face, just touched with gray at the temples. His hands were clasped over his stomach. He looked like he was just taking a nap.

As long as you didn't look at the glue beading between his eyelashes.

Jason looked at the glue and couldn’t help but to see the milky, dull eyes that hid behind those closed lids. He looked at Bruce's mouth, smoothed out in death and lacking the furrows that perpetual frowning had given him in life. He thought about metal wire being punched through gums, about a thread run through the palette of the mouth and up through the nose. In the old days they would just tie a towel around the head to keep the mouth closed, but these days morticians had gotten creative when it came to keeping the mouth closed after death.

Pushing thoughts of embalming fluid away, Jason carefully placed the single dark red rose on the pile of flowers left by mourners on the casket.

He followed the line out of the cathedral past the boys. Dick and Tim were shaking hands with suitably somber faced wealthy Gothamites. Damian was staring intensely at the toes of his polished leather loafers, like they had insulted him personally.

When Jason got to them, Damian's head shot up, and he hissed with a low voice, "You should not be here!" It didn't escape Jason's notice that his eyes were rimmed in red and the sclera were bloodshot.

"Damian," Dick hissed back, sounding tired and waspish.

"He's right," Tim added in a voice so flat that it would have been an insult to computers to say it sounded computerized. "If someone gets a photo of him here talking to us, we'll have a hard time explaining it."

Jason only raised his eyebrows. He looked so different from his teenage self, he couldn't imagine anyone connecting the dots on that one.

"He shouldn't be here because he is a black spot on the Wayne family," Damian bit out with barely leashed rage.

Jason put his hands up. "I'm not here to cause problems. Just here to pay my respects. Feel free to forget I exist after this."

He turned to leave after saying his piece, shoving his hands into his pockets as he stepped out into the drizzling rain.

God, sometimes he hated the city. Was it too much to ask for a break in the rain for ten minutes?

Jason was pulling out the last of his Newport cigarettes and lighting up under the small overhang outside the church when Dick caught up with him.

He put his hand on Jason's elbow, which Jason gave a pointed look, but Dick didn't take the hint and remove his hand.

"Damian didn't mean that," he said in a low voice. Dick was keeping a weather eye on the mourners still milling around outside the cathedral, rubbing elbows and gossiping over the late Bruce Wayne and what would happen to the family in his wake. A few eyes drifted their way, but most people were eager to get to their cars and out of the rain.

"Yes, he did," Jason replied incredulously.

Dick grimaced and ran a frazzled hand through his hair, messing up the artfully tousled style he had going on. Jason wondered if Alfred had styled it for him.

"This has really shaken him. He's just lashing out at everyone right now. He'll regret saying that later," Dick said tiredly.

"Maybe real later," Jason muttered wryly. He sucked on his cigarette and savored the burn as the smoke hit his lungs. The nicotine settled into his nerves, like a soothing hand running down his back.

"I know things are tough right now, but we don't want you to disappear, okay?" Dick said, a desperate note to his voice.

Jason took a second to look at Dick, really looked at him. He had big bags under his eyes that even expensive top shelf concealer couldn't hide. His cheeks looked hollowed out, and his suit was impeccably tailored, but Jason could see how small his waist was, how thin he had gotten in just the last few days.

"I think you need this more than I do," Jason replied, shoving his cigarette at Dick, who fumbled to take it before it burnt him or dropped onto the wet concrete steps.

Jason took advantage of the distraction to step out into the rain. The cold drizzle felt good after the close quarters of all those high class people. The smell of expensive perfume and cologne had mingled with the scent of hot house flowers to make Jason feel lightheaded.

Dick didn't follow him, which Jason was glad for. Jason wasn't sure what he would do now, but whatever it was, Dick had a lot of bigger things to worry about than him. He'd been fine for a long time. He'd been waiting on Bruce's funeral for a long time.

Death was a lot more real to him than most vigilantes, with the one exception of Bruce himself, maybe. One last thing that they had shared between them. The certainty that death was just one wrong turn away.

The funeral was just a formality. Batman had been living on borrowed time for years.

[compasivos]

other people's descriptions of amber

vs. fitz's description of amber!

i know what you are fitz

[spicysourchimken]

Murder! Murder! Murder!

TRIGGER WARNING: discussions of death, murder, descriptions of corpses, gore and corpse desecration

(This Idea is loosely inspired by @/the-witchhunter's 'Ghost in the Morgue', please go check it out if you like this concept and have not yet read it)

[Other stuff in this AU: World Building]

Corpses au Danny, not just Corpse but Corpses. Every time Danny transforms he drops a new body, Danny honestly has lived with it long enough that it's funny at this point (and also. maybe made him a little weird about his own death and or deaths). This is not the same for Tim, who now has to deal with a potential serial killer.

Tim is looking into a string of strange and suspicious deaths that might point to the appearance of a new rogue, this results in him taking a visit to the morgue as Red Robin, only to meet a potential victim, Daniel Fenton the latest medical examiner for GCPD.

----

Tim was the one who had found the first body a week ago. He'd been on patrol when he'd spotted it propped up against a dumpster in an alley. It couldn't have been there longer than an hour, the blood was far too fresh.

Tim had planned to just check out the scene and call it in, but then he actually saw the body. It'd been eviscerated, torso ripped open organs spilling out and its hands had been frozen to the ground- hell the entire body seemed to be coated in a layer of frost.

Tim kept tabs on the investigation, if anything for simple curiosity. Then they'd found the second body. Body frozen to the ground, same victim profile- but the death had been completely different. Slashed throat, face mutilated.

Then there was another, and this time Tim wanted to see it in person. This was either a serial killer or the start of a new rogue, and for Tim to be able to tell he needed to see. He sent word to Gordon, if anything more of a warning. He was greeted by the medical examiner.

Greeted was a strong word.

The medical examiner was... strange. Tim had heard news of him starting work and as far as Tim was aware of he was clean, and an almost boring person. The medical examiner that Tim met was unnerving. Pale, staring almost through him and carried blase attitude to his work.

What was worse is that he reminded so much of a corpse, not just a corpse but the corpse.

Then it struck him.

Fenton could be a target. Fenton could be the focus of the killer's obsession.

He'd have to keep tabs on Fenton, too bad he might be the most reckless Gotham citizen in existence.

----

Gotham, admittedly hadn't been Danny's first pick after he finished medical school. Danny had always intended to become a medical examiner, dealing with your own corpses for years would do that do you. 'Finished' was the real problem, Danny had been doing well, great even but then he'd died. Twice. Real unfortunate really, hit and run and then poison, left him with a dry throat for weeks.

His own classmate apparently tried to kill him, which means it would be more than hard to actually finish medical school. That's fine, he had access to Tucker, an actual godsend who was able to make it look like he had all the proper qualifications... as long as you didn't look too hard.

Gotham was apparently pressed for a good medical examiner. All he needed to be was experienced.

Thankfully he had that in spades.

Things frankly only started going down hill last week. He'd made a habit of taking on requests between work, occultist avoided Gotham like the plague leaving him the only voice for the dead. Usually it was pretty easy gig, collect some momentos, help a few ghosts recognize they're dead. Until he'd had to deal with a Wraith.

It didn't go well. Danny was dead set on handling it as a human, appearing as Phantom could cause all matter of chaos. Danny had also not been informed that the claws of a wraith could pierce through human flesh so there's that. Danny was once again evicted from the mortal coil, dropping his own corpse and having to finish the fight off

Danny had planned to deal with his body after gaining his human form back and making sure that the thing could no longer return to the earthly plane. Turns out a bat got there first, turned the place into a crime scene. Just his luck he was beaten bloody enough to be unrecognizable.

His luck continued to go down hill when he was killed, not once, not twice but three times (this of course, wasn't accounting for the times he'd needed to go ghost). He'd gotten good at taking care of his bodies in Gotham at that point, or so he thought, until he was told he had not only a new body on his table and Red Robin waiting to be escorted to his morgue.

Now Danny has to juggle the growing chaos that it they spirits of Gotham while trying to make sure none of his bodies are identified, even if that means making a mess of Red Robin's investigations.

[cirrus-grey]

TMA 122:

Statement of uh, uh, Lorell St. John regarding, uh... zombies. Original statement given 1st February, 2015. Recording by Jonathan Sims. The Archivist.

TMA 53:

My biggest concern right now is whatever creature Mr. Heller encountered down there. It was 56 years ago, but if it’s still alive, I should be careful. What was it? A guardian of some sort? Or perhaps… perhaps… it too was once an Archivist.

TMAGP 26:

It was holding a tape recorder to Mr. Jarrod’s mouth, like it was trying to catch his dying words.

“Who are you?” I asked it.

“An Archivist,” it replied.

I know many people have already pointed out that [ERROR] could be the same kind of being that was under Alexandria, but this phrasing in particular is making me certain of it. A living, breathing, active Archivist like Jon is "the" - the one and only, the main focus of the Eye. The ones that linger after their Archives are forgotten - not alive, not dead, but somewhere in between - are just "an". One of many, still holding the title - still powerful - but far less human.

There are a ton of other parallels between the two that are making me so curious what our Alexandria guy got up to between - potentially - being released by Mr. Heller and finding its way to the Panopticon: basement Archive, the main building/library is burned down on top of it, it remains locked down there until some unsuspecting explorer unintentionally gives it the key... I wonder if there was an [ERROR] drifting around in the TMA world too, hunting people with a quill and parchment rather than a tape...

.

.

.

(Celia's phrasing is also very telling as to what she's been expecting to find.

TMAGP 26:

"No, I mean, something isn't right.… The External, the Archivist, it’s not acting how I would have expected..."

No, it's certainly not acting how the Archivist would. An Archivist, on the other hand...)

[windcarvedlyre]

I've been following @druidposting's DR2 playthrough on discord and we just had a really good discussion about DR's Closing Arguments. Specifically the way the murderer is depicted as grey and featureless, which until now I found a bit annoying.

In Danganronpa it's repeatedly the case that we don't have the full picture until the talking actually stops- which always goes beyond the end of the trial. We generally vote first and come to understand what the murderer's actual motive was, sometimes filling in important pieces of the timeline in the process, afterwards.

But none of that matters for the killing game because characters' emotions aren't directly relevant to who was the 'blackened'- the only thing that matters to Monokuma- so it comes out afterwards and does nothing to change their execution. It doesn't matter how sympathetic they are (basically everyone) or whether other people share responsibility for the situation (eg. Hanamura, Pekoyama, Momota) or whether they intended to murder at all (Nanami). They objectively pulled the trigger and nothing else matters. Nothing about them as a person matters.

The Closing Argument mechanic might illustrate that problem- literally. They're a dramatic, conclusive summary of the entire case... constructed before the vote even happens, before we know if we're actually right, and they're missing something really important:

The actual perpetrator.

We quite literally don't even begin to see the real person behind the crime, any real exploration of their mental state, anything besides the cold, hard facts of the murder that are necessary to convict them, until the comic finishes and the protagonist makes their final accusation- replacing the grey figure with their real appearance in a shot that's often intensely emotional.

And these comics lack crucial parts of the case's timeline and sometimes important parts of the very scenes they depict that we only find out about afterwards. And those are what we know; characters may die with some pieces of the truth and prevent us from ever learning them. These aren't objective depictions of the murder, they're the protagonist's subjective attempt to connect the facts they have. A join-the-dots portrait of someone with missing dots and no colour.

Even characters' expressions may not match how they truly feel, with the grey placeholder potentially looking way more confident and sinister than they were in reality. Pasting Falter's commentary here since they put it well.

For obvious reasons this could especially be a problem for characters that die before the trial- the ones we never get a post-vote testimony from. DR1 chapter 4 really highlighted that in the way Asahina's huge misinterpretation of Oogami's feelings took up a lot of the post-trial discussion, only for Monokuma to reveal Oogami's real suicide note and recontextualise everything.

It might really be a problem for how Komaeda's depicted in DR2 chapter 5. While he isn't greyed out, we get panel after panel where he's either level-headed or maniacally evil, and even the depictions of his self-torture and death don't humanise him:

But we know that his real feelings were more complicated than that. We have his actual corpse to compare the last page to.

He died afraid.

If we approach the comic as Hinata's mental image of him instead of reality, he died without anyone truly understanding him. He was alarming, very hard to relate to, actively fought against people doing so, ensured even the killer didn't watch him die, and the survivors couldn't begin to understand his motive until a chapter later. The Closing Argument reflects that.

Early in DR1 Togami calls out the rest of his class for judging others by their own standards. However, he, too, is doing this, maybe more so than many other characters; his inability to view other people through anything but the cold, brutal logic of the killing game bites him in the ass in chapter 4. In DR2 chapter 2 voting without a good understanding of Pekoyama's motive or Kuzuryuu's involvement nearly got everyone killed. Komaeda's a walking embodiment of the problems with flattening people into caricatures and not empathising with them, suffered from people doing that back to him, and his case- the Closing Argument for which turned everyone else into grey placeholders- was impossible to solve with objective facts. It was only survivable because the survivors cooperated and one person tried to analyse things the way he would.

The games have always been a critique of the justice system and Japanese society and push us to care about others as individuals, not reduce them to- and judge their right to exist by- something they've done or their net impact on society. There are always consequences when someone neglects to do that, and the above might be yet another way the games explore that theme.

[emandemms]

okay so i'm almost done with the iliad and i've got another addition to my "no one told me the iliad was a comedy??" list. also, for anyone wondering, i'm reading emily wilson's translation, which i highly recommend for anyone reading it for the first time!

parts one and two are linked below if you wanna check those out!!!

part one

part two

- idomeneus and meriones running into each other in the greek camp while everyone else is fighting. fully imagined them just standing there and pointing at each other like: "yo, dude, what are you doing here?"

- meriones, instead of going to his own tent, decides to take a spear from idomeneus and basically tells idomeneus "dude, my tent is so far, please don't make me go all the way out there and just let me borrow one of yours."

- idomeneus being totally chill with it, so long as they hurry the fuck up and no one sees them away from the battlefield because then people will think they're cowardly losers.

- patroclus.

- no further notes on this one, just patroclus. what a guy.

- agamemnon trying to convince the rest of the greeks to retreat in the middle of battle. AGAIN.

- and agamemnon keeps on doing this, throughout several books at this point, and it's actually kind of impressive. i guess he really just wants to leave troy because he's sick and tired of NOT winning all the time.

- odysseus having absolutely none of this and immediately putting agamemnon on blast. odysseus literally curses him and calls agamemnon pathetic and dishonorable. preach it, king.

- and agamemnon actually listens to odysseus and immediately goes "shit, you right, my bad."

- posideon and zeus beefing in book 15.

- specifically posideon basically saying that if zeus doesn't let the greeks win, he's never going to forgive zeus. peak sibling behavior.

- meriones and aeneas shit-talking each other in the middle of a very intense, very important battle.

- this is immediately followed by patroclus telling meriones to "stop yapping and throw hands".

- in retrospect, patroclus probably regrets saying that, given that throwing hands is what got his ass killed.

- patroclus throwing a massive rock at some trojan, effectively killing the poor guy, then proceeding to mock the way the trojan fell as he died. absolutely FOUL behavior and it made me giggle just a little bit.

- i should probably mention that this "poor guy" was cebriones, hector's current charioteer and half-brother. hector's proceeding crash out was completely understandable, when you think about it.

- odysseus reminding achilles of the importance of breakfast. eat your breakfast people!!!

- odysseus also telling achilles to "shut the hell up because i'm older and therefore wiser and i know what i'm talking about so zip it and let me speak".

[3-2-whump]

The Morgue

<prev next>

Dear Readers,

Yep. This is it. Eternal's last chapter (at least for now). Thank you for sticking around for so long, I appreciated each and every one of you for reading this story and interacting with it! And thank you beta readers @whumped-by-glitter and @generic-whumperz for reading draft after freaking draft of this story for months now; I look forward to collaborating with you in the future.

The ending is kind of open ended, and I acknowledge this may frustrate some people, but I promise I'm not gonna pull a Netflix and drop this series on a cliffhanger (looks passive-aggressively at Netflix). Whatever happens next is for tomorrow; today, without further ado, here is the conclusion to Eternal!

TW/CW: death of a major character, aftermath of death of a major character, gore /graphic descriptions of a corpse, blood, emotional angst (I think?), nonconsensual nudity, slave whump /transfer of ownership, defiant whumpee, creepy whumper

Khaled was more than a little concerned when he woke up the next morning and his master’s bedroom was still empty. He was downright worried that he had not heard even a word from him by midday. This is so unlike him, Khaled thought as he checked the spare phone for any text messages he might’ve missed in the night. No new messages. Where is he?

He went to his room and retrieved his hidden cellphone from the place he had hidden it. There was one new message from Julio, but Khaled quickly swiped past it to text the one other contact he had on this illicit device.

To: Nic-Nac Have you seen the Boss today? He didn’t come home last night.

The subtle click of the door unlocking made his heart jump into his throat. Khaled quickly hid the phone away, bolted into the living room, chucked off the blanket, and assumed a perfect kneeling positon by the entrance, back straight, chest out, palms down on thighs, just as he’d been trained. His heart sank as the door opened and a man who was definitely not his master entered the apartment.

“Throw a coat on and-” Underboss Luca dropped his gaze down at Khaled once he realized he was not at eye-level. “Oh, right,” he groaned, punctuating his comment with a dismissive eye roll. “Should’ve known you’d be on your knees.” Khaled’s cheeks flushed bright red. “Get up and put some clothes on, we need to go to the morgue and identify a body!”

The last part of that command jolted Khaled out of his conditioning as abruptly as a kick in the teeth. “Wait, what?!” he asked, straightening up from his kneeling position.

“Just get dressed and come with me!” Luca said. He fumbled around his pockets until he found a small key. “You know where the safe is; get your clothes, and let’s go,” he instructed, tossing it to Khaled.

The young man caught it and dashed to the safe in the master bedroom, unlocking it and sprinting with the pile of clothes in his arms to change in his own bedroom. As he quickly dressed, he had an unshakeable feeling of dread. Thomas not coming home at all last night, no communication this morning, Luca coming over, and now this trip to the morgue –it was all adding up. If his master was truly dead, then he had no idea if or when he would be back at the apartment.

Khaled saw the designated hiding space for his cash jar out of the corner of his eye. He yanked it out and emptied it onto the bed, quickly folding and stuffing the dollar bills into every pocket, fold, and crevice of his outfit he could manage. Lastly, he grabbed his forbidden cellphone from its hiding place and jammed it into his pants pocket as he sprinted out to meet his foreboding feeling head-on.

Luca filled him in on the details as they drove to the morgue. A little after six in the morning, a bloodied and mangled body had been found hanging upside down from a crane at the dockyard. The ID in the dead man’s coat pocket had identified him as Thomas J Costa, but his face was barely recognizable beneath the blood and gore. The forensic pathologist would need a positive ID on the dead man’s corpse before they could tell the coroner to issue the death certificate for Don Costa, hence the need for Luca and Khaled to come down to the morgue.

“You know, if it is Tommy-boy on that slab, all of his assets will immediately be transferred to my control,” Luca reminded him, snaking an arm around the young man in a feigned gesture of comfort as they walked to the entrance of the morgue. “All of them,” he whispered. Khaled bristled under the other man’s touch as Luca moved his hand downwards. He did not miss the hidden meaning of those words. He jumped a little as Luca experimentally groped his ass on the way through the entrance.

The forensic pathologist met the men, their androgynous face set into a grim expression. “Next of kin for Mr. Thomas J Costa?” they asked. Both men nodded. The pathologist waved at them to follow them. “I gotta warn you though, he’s not a pretty picture. I cleaned him up as best I could, but just be prepared.”

No forewarning could’ve prepared Khaled for what he saw when the sheet was lifted from the corpse on that autopsy table. He recognized the cold gray eyes that now stared unseeingly up at him, the telltale scar at the man’s left temple, and what remained of the skull and snake tattoo on the man’s left pec, but that was about it. The rest of his master’s body looked as if wild animals had gotten to it. His usual dirty-blond hair was stained a coppery red, matted in places with clotted blood. There were cuts, bruises, and even burns scattered around his face, disfiguring it into something near unrecognizable. A long, jagged cut ran from his jugular down to his sternum, deep crimson with coagulated blood that had long since stopped bubbling from its schism. Deep gashes of a knife punctured his upper body and torso. His privates were…gone… and his legs from upper thighs to ankles were littered in cuts and bruises. The soles of his feet looked as if they had been burned away. Merely looking at his feet made Khaled feel faint, so he let his eyes travel back to Thomas’ face. The man’s dull gray eyes stared up at him.

“Well, is this him?”

“Yes,” Luca answered solemnly. He quickly swiped a hand over his eyes and took a breath to compose himself before turning to Khaled.

No matter how much he wanted to, he could not tear his gaze from the man’s dead eyes. He gave a small nod, at a complete loss for words otherwise. The pathologist merely answered a quiet “okay” before draping the sheet back onto Don Costa’s mutilated body, shielding Khaled from those steel gray eyes forever.

It’s finally happened, he thought. Master is dead… Instead of hope, or sorrow, or anger, or even a sick sense of satisfaction from witnessing this karmic justice, Khaled searched within himself and found nothing. He felt nothing, and then he questioned what kind of person he was, to feel nothing.

“Khaled, hey, Khaled…” a faint voice called out to him through the fog of his mind. Khaled stayed rooted to the spot, unable to move as he stared down at the veiled corpse.

“Khaled, sweetie, it’s time to go.”

He’s dead now, which means…which means what? The feeling of Luca roughly pulling him away from the autopsy table and dragging him back the way they came answered his own question for him. All the while, Khaled took shelter in his thoughts, not even fighting back as he tried to process what he just saw and what it meant for him. The man who had fed me, clothed me, given me everything is dead, and now, what am I?

“Well, it looks like you’re mine now,” Luca announced, pulling on his leather gloves as they exited the morgue and stepped into the parking lot.

That snapped Khaled out of his mind quick. The man who had once openly said he would’ve taken him while he was still a minor flashed him a small, sad smile. “Of all the ways I could’ve gotten you, this is the last one I wanted,” he admitted. He raised a gloved hand to Khaled’s face, gently caressing his cheek with leather-clad fingers. “But maybe, together, we can help each other process our loss.”

No. Khaled shook his head. Luca’s soft caresses quickly hardened into a crushing grip on his face. He drew him in closer until their faces were mere inches apart. “You’re mine now, Khaled,” he growled, glaring into the young man’s eyes. “I never approved of the erratic, unpredictable way Tommy treated you, and I promised myself that when it was my turn, I would be better.” Khaled’s hands scratched at Luca’s arm, which only served to tighten the hand around his jaw. “But not if you’re going to fight me the entire time!” He drew Khaled in closer, too close for comfort, as he maintained that crushing grip on his face. “So, what’s it gonna be? You gonna be a good boy for Master, or are you gonna make me hurt you?”

Letting go of Khaled’s face to allow him to answer was the greatest mistake Luca would make. With a fierce desperation to die rather than be owned by someone far worse than Thomas, Khaled drew his head back and collided their skulls with a crushing force. Both men withdrew from each other, each groaning in pain as they held their heads, but Khaled recovered from the head-butt first, and used the ten-second head start to make a run for it out the parking lot.

“You bitch! Get back here, you stupid little slut!” and various threats of bodily harm were shouted at him as he ran. He kept running, even when he rounded the corner and an exposed piece of chain-link fence grazed his thigh, nipping the skin enough to draw blood. He kept running, even when he wasn’t sure which streets he was running down as he single-mindedly sprinted ahead, most definitely lost. He kept running, even as the tears blurred his vision and the cold air stung his throat and lungs, and every time he tried to blink back his tears all he saw were those cold, dead eyes staring up lifelessly back at him. He kept running.

Le Tag List: @kabie-whump @rainydaywhump @whumped-by-glitter @skittles-the-whumpee @generic-whumperz @bamber344 @there-will-always-be-blood @morning-star-whump @a-la-whump @watermelons-dont-grow-on-trees @defire

[kudossi]

a fallen star will be thy fate

The walk to the Moonpool is strange and otherworldly, as if he’d fallen into the past and the seers around him were nothing more than ghosts, specters of light and shadow with no secrets weighing heavily on their brows. Kestrelflight, barely older than Jayfeather, tries to strike up a facsimile of a conversation, but Jayfeather isn’t in the mood for petty platitudes or idle chit-chat. He keeps his head down and moves, slots his paws into the ancient footholds made by cats so old they were nothing but echoes.

Ahead of him, someone gasps.

It isn’t the gasp of a newly-named apprentice glimpsing the Moonpool for the first time.

It isn’t the gasp of a particularly spectacular night, where he's told that the stars are clear enough in the pool to lap up with delicate strokes of the tongue.

It isn’t the gasp of someone falling, of someone losing their footing, of someone bumping into someone else.

No, it’s a gasp of terror, and it roots Jayfeather to the ground.

“Ashfur,” Leafpool breathes, and Jayfeather knows her well enough to feel as fear spikes up her frozen legs, wrapping around her heart. The scent of blood in the air becomes heavy and cloying as the seers stir the still air, as they wreath around the pool like frightened ants, courses interrupted to the point of spiraling.

Someone is screeching. He thinks that it’s Flamepaw. The seers are talking over each other now, their words and emotions pounding into Jayfeather’s brain in a senseless cacophony.

Willowshine, curiously, is still, any emotion she might have been experiencing tamped-down and quiet. “He’s floating in the pool,” she comments. “It’s full of blood.”

Ashfur has been dead for a quarter-moon, and now he’s floating in the Clans’ most sacred place?

“He’s been missing for sun-cycles,” Jayfeather manages.

“He looks it,” Willowshine says blithely. “He’s bloated on the side facing the air. The flesh on his underside is all but gone. There’s bits of tissue at the sides of the pool. His eye looks like it’ll come out of the socket soon enough.”

“How are you so calm?”

Willowshine scoffs. It isn’t much like her. “How are you?” she asks.

“I can’t see him,” Jayfeather retorts. “I’m blind.”

His companion laughs as if he’d told a particularly funny joke. “When has that ever stopped you?”

[sallymew4]

stageplay shouteru is a whole other beast

fun little extras below cut vvv

look. they are holding hands

[skepticalpigeon]

Annoys me deeply when christian conservatives subtly try to influence women to define themselves by their role in the household. It's unsettling how upset they get when women refuse to see themselves as a piece of meat, given purpose only by what lives in or off of it.

[hodginspodgins]

guess what was at the cabin i was staying at but i didn’t notice until right before i left—

[completely-normal-girl]

Do the characters in Dark Souls etc. even understand how soapstones work? Like diegetically. Is there a lore reason the undead love Posting?

[flowersforthemachines]

Elektra by Jennifer Saint has been a wonderful companion book while I'm writing this one shot but I don't feel like violent descriptions of the battles of the Trojan War are helping with the sex scene I'm writing rn

[akolnoix]

gay sex wouldn't have fixed seishin and toshio's relationship but i think they should've given it a shot anyway