#double-basin fountain

[dollsonmain]

Oh wait, it’s not a flower basket, it’s a fountain basin and the back wall of the fountain is the fold-down table.

Weird thing to put on the back of a door....table....window.........thing.

Also funny that the center back is molded to LOOK like a big double door but is not a door at all.

@musicalmeowsandcandiedlemons​

[just-another-star-47]

Let's stroll over the grounds of Hogwarts...

Excerpt from my fic.

During the first hour, the new student helped the coachman look after the Thestrals, taking in the way he did so and explaining to her that the animals were allowed to roam the Hogwarts grounds freely for most of the year, as most students didn't notice them anyway.

Afterwards, she strolled across the forecourt, watching the play of water in the fountain, the four animals that also adorned the emblem on her chest spouting more water from their mouths into the lily-decorated basin. For a while she remained sitting by the fountain, which murmured a soothing melody at her back as she gazed up at the castle. The golden afternoon sun made the towers glow, the light blue sky wreathed the battlements with a cloth embroidered with white wool. Luscinia's gaze fell on the double doors through which the professor had disappeared and had not yet reappeared. Lined with two winged boars, they cast their attractive spell, which Luscinia soon succumbed to.

[scottelkartwork]

ARTWORK

Robert Gober

Double Sink, 1984

Chicago Institute of Art

Double Sink is exactly what it seems—a domestic basin with holes where the taps typically go. Gober's sink shows signs of being handmade and is missing the hardware and plumbing fixtures of a functional object. The discrete modifications to this now-functionless form suggest anthropomorphic associations: the dark holes resemble bodily orifices, and the softly curving corners and lip of the sink are likewise creaturely. An early example from the artist's sink series (1983-86), Double Sink draws from Gober's imagination as well as his memories and experiences of the first years of the AIDS epidemic. The object takes on an expressive role as a coded symbol of memory and loss, mystery and regret, humor and pathos.

What I connect with…

I was first drawn to the work as a modern take of Duchamp's Fountain, but after reading about the work, appreciated the exploration of identity through the lens of the AIDS epidemic.

[imfullofworms]

Excerpt #2: A Ballad for the Bloody Wolf

“Has there been a date set?” I asked Eula, the head-maid. I don’t think Eula had time for me given that I was so new to her well-established underlings. My Mother worked as the Reimstadts' cook for some years. My Grandmother before her as their wet-nurse. Even Grandfather remembered being stationed on the walls as a sentry. Drachenzahn had spent three generations worth of Wolfs by the time it came to me – an honour, by Father’s reckoning. I thought it to be a punishment. “Not today,” she replied sharply, cutting me with a look of disgust. Perhaps I should’ve known, or at least have known not to ask. “Shouldn’t you be fetching pails?” “Not today,” I replied and returned to my small, cracked mirror to finish braiding my hair. “No soup today. Chops.” I was always the last out of bed; not by design. Still, Eula made it her prime directive to wake me every morning, for her own sanity if nothing else. “I'll have to visit Berges to get them.” She huffed. “Well get a move on – lunchtime isn’t far off.” I flicked the completed braid aside and stood to brush down my dress and petticoat. “Will Johann be taking lunch in his study again?” Her eyes rolled almost by themselves, her thick brows hanging over them like a pair of lead-lined coffins. “Do as you’re told, girl, and don’t worry about things which don’t concern you.” She left immediately afterwards, leaving me to finish wrapping a scarf around my neck and tucking my doubled-up tights into my boots. Castle Drachenzahn was a maze to me, its long halls never-ending and its shadowed alcoves confusingly spread out. I’d walk down a corridor full-sure of where I was heading, only to be shaken by where I’d eventually end up. Several times I’d had to ask Hilde, another lowly maid like me, to set me straight – over which we managed to form a friendship of sorts. When I found my way to the courtyard (after two attempts), I saw Hilde at the marble fountain, poking at the thick layer of ice in its basin. “Morning,” she chirped briskly, fighting with her arms to stop them shaking. I huddled close, trying to steal what little warmth I could from her. “Morning, you. Any news?” She shook her shoulders loose and offered me a shrug. “Ursula’s dead, what else is there?” A stray laugh stabbed my throat. “A week already.” She turned slowly, an uneasy expression dawning on her soft face. “It’s not… is it?” “A week today,” I replied, poking at the same layer of ice. “As if nothing else of import has occurred since.” She chortled, but was keen to suppress it. “You’re brave, Elke Wolf.” My cheeks burned and not from the cold. “I never wished death-” “But you’re glad to never suffer her wrath again, no? Like the rest of us,” she nodded. “You weren’t the only one. Have you been to a part– no, you’ve only been here a month. At parties, the fancy ones… Well, no point saying it now.” “Hilde,” I pushed her lightly. “Go on, you’ve started now.” She eyed me from the side of her face and sighed. “I knew a maid, a new one like you. She spilled a single, single drop of wine…” “And?” With her hands cupped she brought them to her mouth. Steam then vented from betwixt her closed digits. “That was the last I ever saw of her.”

[yachtchartergal]

Catamaran Katrina Virgin Islands Yacht Charter Vacation

We wish we were there too! Our clients are having great fun aboard Catamaran KATRINA in the Virgin Islands!This beautiful 2018 Fountaine Pajot features an upper deck lounge that has sectional couch and sunbed area with 360 degree view. The forward deck has spacious lounge area with adjustable reclining seating, trampolines and sunning areas with an aft deck that offers lounge area plus alfresco dining area. The salon offers lounge area with coffee table plus flat screen TV with many movies and USB capabilities. For guest comfort, she has three spacious queen cabins, each with private ensuite bath with electric toilet, wash basin and separate shower stall and one double cabin. The master stateroom has desk space, separate toilet room, and a walk-in shower. All cabins have air conditioning, two fans, 110v outlets and dimmable recessed lighting. Paired with the all-star crew duo Ed and Erin, guests are sure to have the time of their lives!Catamaran Katrina Brochure: https://bit.ly/SailKatrina

Learn More About Crewed Yacht Charter Vacations: https://www.YachtCharters.Guru

[prometheusinitiative]

Map | Floor 3 | The Primordial Church

Back to Maps Floor 2: The Workplace

The Hallway

The elevator opens into a hotel hallway. The carpet is old, featuring an indistinct pattern that’s been darkened from age and wear. Walls are decorated with wood paneling, and doors mirror each other all the way down the hallway.

The doors themselves have peep holes, numbers, and knobs. They seem in almost every way to be normal motel doors, made of a dark wood. It’s almost funny to see such lowtech doors– there’s not a single NFC panel in sight.

You immediately understand that you should not, under any circumstances, open these doors.

But those of you who defy common sense will find that they’re all locked, anyways. The harder you try to open them, the louder you can hear the sounds of something on the other side trying to do the same.

The hall goes and goes and goes. And sometimes it curves. And sometimes it bends. And others it is short. But no matter how it presents itself to you, at the end of the hall is a set of double doors, like the kind you’d find for a hotel conference room.

The Chapel

These double doors open into a chapel. By the entrance is the Vestibule, an open space with a fountain which burbles dark water. A confessional booth sits to the left in ornate wood.

Up ahead is the Nave, where pews line the aisle on both sides and candles frame them from the edges of the room. Stained glass windows bring in cool and dark light from outside. They’re not an image of a cross, nor any holy mother or son. No, it’s the milky way set into the glass, tinting the light dark blue and purple in a way that seems to almost put the whole chapel underwater.

Shadows shift and twist on the ceiling in the way that it tends to when you see darkness on the backs of your eyelids. But should you shine a light up there, all you see is a painted mural– a swarm of angels spills out from a hole in the earth, attempting to reach a light in the sky. The ones at the bottom of the pile crawl on stomach, hands, and knees, and the ones near the top unfurl beautiful wings, pulling their fellows along with them.

An altar stands at the end of the room, covered in melted candles. Behind this is the choir loft, where a choir might stand to sing. If you find yourself standing there, you might imagine the ghost of a melody you've long forgotten come to mind.

To the right you can see two doors, plus a staircase entrance which seems to go up to the loft where an Organ sits.

The Confessional

The confessional is a two-compartment space, one partitioned away from the other. The side for a holy man sits with a door, and the side for the sinner simply uses a heavy curtain. Between the two is a latticed window, where you cannot see who sits on the other side– nor if anyone is even there at all.

But chances are, should you speak, something will listen. And maybe, something may even offer you words of solace. (message Juni in an RP or private channel to make a confession)

The Organ

Upstairs is the organ, which sits on a darkened balcony overlooking the rest of the church. If you play it, you can be faintly heard from every other part of the tower– and of course, it is deafening on the third floor itself. It’s a beautiful instrument, set into the wall and decorated with carvings of spiral shells, crustaceans, fish, and other sea life. The keys glimmer as if pearlescent.

Further up the same spiral staircase which leads to the organ is the bell tower.

The Bell Tower

Strange that if you should look out any window of the bell tower, you see Summit Basin outside. Looking down, you see the normal facade of the tower. But the dimensions of the inside don’t quite suit the dimensions of the outside.

At the center of the wood platform you stand on is the bell. It’s impressively large, and likely impressively loud, but the clapper is nowhere to be found.

The Nursery

The nursery is a playroom space, with faded plastic pens and toys that were once colorful. The floor is all foam that's seen some wear and tear, and a black board sits empty on the other end of the room.

Shelves are full of children's toys, including etch-a-sketch, plastic food sets, legos, train tracks, and more.

The School Room

A simple school room, with a blackboard and rows of desks. There are no doors or lights or windows in this room-- just featureless stone walls and stone floor...

[catsitespeed]

Ratatouille ride disney world

The attraction is just one of the many enhancements that Disney has made to celebrate its 50th anniversary this year. The centerpiece is a Ratatouille-inspired fountain, a three-basin structure in the center of the expansion with rates holding bottles and flutes of champagne with water shooting out toward the top of the basin. In total, the added area more than doubles the size of the existing French pavilion. The menu was crafted by celebrity chef Jerome Bocuse.

The expanded area that the attraction sits in includes a new eatery, La Creperie de Paris, both a quick-service and sit-down restaurant where guests can enjoy Parisian fare including both sweet and savory croissants and hard cider. each morning with additional slots available after 1 p.m., all through the Disney Parks app. The ride will employ the virtual queue system that Disney has made use of in recent years, most notably with Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance in the Disney Studios. Guests are swung through the attraction on a trackless ride system. Guests are shrunk down to rat-sized and get to experience the perspective of Remy scurrying around Chef Gusteau’s restaurant in Paris, with sights, sounds, and smells to accompany them on their journey. The attraction, a 4D ride experience located in a new, expanded section of France pavilion of the theme park, is a family-friendly ride that invites guests into the world of Remy, the main character from the 2007 Pixar animated movie Ratatouille. 1, Walt Disney World will officially welcome guests to its newest Epcot attraction, Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure. NOLA Weekend is the ultimate destination for New Orleans food, things to do, culture, and lifestyle.On Friday, Oct. You can get a chance to experience this ride and all the fun at Disney during the 50th anniversary celebration.įOX 8 launches a contest for a trip to the “Most Magical Place on Earth,” and you can enter to win here.Ĭreated in partnership with Walt Disney World Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure is part of Epcot park’s newly-expanded France pavilion inspired by the film. You really feel like you’re a rat running alongside chef Remy.” “One of my favorite things is how our ride engineering team was able to work on the vehicles and make those feel part of the overall 4-D experience,” said Sarah Ramos, Imagineering project manager. It will open in an expanded section of the park’s France pavilion and will open as part of the 50th anniversary celebration for Walt Disney World. The family-friendly attraction makes guests feel as if they shrink to the size of Chef Remy as they scurry through Gusteau’s restaurant.

1, 2021, at EPCOT at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. The grand opening for Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure is set for Oct. The engineering team says a special trackless ride system is part of the magic that makes each twist and turn feel real. It’s a front-row seat to all the sights, sounds and even smells, just like in the movie.

We were lucky enough to get a special preview of the ride before it opens to the public. Chef Remy stands atop the fountain wearing his classic French toque (hat) and holding a cooking spoon. A “Ratatouille”-inspired fountain features rats holding bottles and flutes of champagne as water shoots out of the bottles toward the top basin in the newly expanded France pavilion at EPCOT at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure is the newest attraction at Epcot park, and the ride brings the Disney Pixar film to life in an amazing 4-D experience. Walt Disney World unveils a brand new ride just in time for the park’s 50th anniversary celebration. Remy's Ratatouille Adventure is the newest attraction at Epcot park, opening in time for the park's 50th anniversary celebration.

[itskingfalcon]

'FUVWARA' - FOUNTAIN SET

Created for The Sims 4

Hello Everyone!!

I know right!!!, this game was missing some fountains! Well don't be disheartened, I present you with 'Fuvwara' a fountain set with 6 pieces which you can mix and match to create more combinations as you like.

Features:

Base Game Compatible.

All LODs.

Fountain Base with 99 Swatches!

Four Spouted Fountain Insert with 99 Swatches!

Birdbath Fountain with 99 Swatches!

Single Tier Basin Fountain Insert with 11 Swatches!

Garden Wall Mount Fountain with 99 Swatches!

Double Dome Jet Water Emitter with 3 Swatches!

Mix & Match! Use any fountain insert inside Fountain Base.

All Fountain Inserts snap inside Fountain Base.

All objects can be found in Fountains.

Average Poly Count on Fountain Pieces is around 5k on highest LOD Setting.

Special Thanks to @bakiegaming & @syboubou for their guidance and help in understanding Custom Tuning.

DOWNLOAD [Mod The Sims]

Support KingFalcon 😊

As always, happy to see you use my CC, so please don’t forget to tag me in your posts/videos so I could take a moment to look and appreciate your creation!

If you find any error in the set please do kindly message me 😊

Any feedback/suggestions are most welcome!

T.O.U. (Please respect my terms of usage)

😊 Re-colour of my CC is allowed 😊, but please do NOT include mesh. Instead link back to original mesh.

Please do NOT claim my cc as your own or put them behind a paywall.

Please do NOT modify my meshes or convert them for any other games.

Please contact me if you have any query with my T.O.U.

Thank you

Happy Simming!

itsKingFalcon

@maxismatchccworld @maxismatch4sims Thank you.

[sinkorswimvn]

200 Follower Sail-ebration!!!!

We can't express enough how excited we are for this project and we're thrilled that you guys are too!

We promised we'd keep you updated and our Art team have been working hard on deciding how we want to spend the summer. Let's set the scene and check out the vibes, shall we?

You've not had much luck when it comes to love, but an opportunity arises for you to sign up to a reality television show. An opportunity to find the love you've been missing. A summer of sun, sea and sexy singles is on the horizon.

But that summer isn't complete without a romantic atmosphere. From fountains and fruit trees to hidden places, the villa is the perfect spot for you to spend time with that special someone.

We hope you enjoy it and find what you're looking for!

[Image description: 

Image is of a moodboard-style picture and in the centre there is neon pink lettering that reads “villa concept.” The image contains a collage of eight photographs - four above the caption and four below. The first is of an arched, open doorway, taken in a corridor containing two old-fashioned chests on either side. The corridor leads to an outside courtyard, where there is a stone fountain, decorated with potted plants and hedges. 

The second photograph is taken outside, under the shade of some tree branches. In the foreground of the image, there is a planted up area filled with different bushes and flowers. Behind it, there is an old, run-down building with two archways. The one on the right leads down a path onto a darkened area and the one on the left is held up by four white pillars. Further on the left of that, there are two more pillars in front of a view of the ocean.

The image next to it is underneath a canopy, covered in greenery. In the background, there is a view of the ocean with white boats scattered around the area. In front of the view, there is a cream coloured sofa, decorated with patterned cushions. In front of the sofa, on beige tiled flooring there is a small rectangular coffee table. 

The fourth photo shows a similar concept. It is a brighter photo underneath a canopy of overgrown greenery. There is a sofad seating area, decorated with brightly coloured cushions, with a view of the sea in the background. The flooring is also tiled, with two tables in front of the seating. In the centre, there is a person sitting on the middle sofa, sideways, looking out at the view. She is wearing a brown and cream maxi dress and has dark brown hair, styled into a bob.

The first image on the second row is of an outdoor corridor. There is patterned tiling used as the flooring and there is a tree on the right and a hedge on the left. There is a beige archway in the centre with three visible pillars that have shadows cast on the ground. Under the archway, there is a person standing sideways, looking out to the sea in the background. They are wearing a white shirt and black jeans and they have short, dark hair. 

The next photo is of an outdoor kitchen/bar area, underneath a wooden canopy with leaves overgrowing under it. The bar itself is a curved shape and is made of stone. The surface is marble and decorated with a variety of plant pots. Five wooden stools are placed around it and in the background there is a grassed area and the sea can be seen in the distance. 

The third image on the second row is of an outdoor swimming pool area. In the foreground, the swimming pool can be seen and the water is dark turquoise in colour. On the left side, there is an outdoor chair decorated with white cushions. On the left and right side, there are stone steps leading up to different levels. On the second level, there is a black sofa with white cushions and a small table in front of it. Above the second level, on the left, there are more stone steps leading up into a garden area with many trees in the background. 

The final image is of a small room. In the centre, there is an old stone basin with water inside and there is a rectangle of light surrounding it on the floor, caused by the sunlight. There are two large open doors leading out to a balcony and outside there is grass and hedges. The wall decoration is made up of different paintings. The first has been made to look like the doorway of a house, with a rectangular shape and a triangle above it, built outwards from the wall. Inside the rectangle there is a purple double door that has been painted on, with a person in a white and green dress peeking their head out. Next to it, there is another painting of another person wearing a silver and purple satin dress, holding a guitar-like instrument. End ID.]

[remmushound]

Curse of the Clan Part 42! @selfindulgenz @scentedcandlecryptid

While Draxum and the rest of the clan discussed their options, April had to get away. Her heart was still pounding in her head and the medicine she took had yet to have any effects to relieve the pain and sickness. Cassandra and Sunita had patched her up well, cleansing and soothing the abrasions caused by the too-tight ropes that had held her. The pain in those spots had simmered to a soft ache, but seemed to agitate the rest of her normal pains.

She felt hot; too hot. She sought shelter in the bathroom the moment she was out from under the protective eye of the turtles. Chugging from the sink like it was the fountain of youth did little to quell the building head, so she took the thermometer from the medicine cabinet.

“103…” She whistled when the results came back, “That’s high…”

After a long moment of debate, April decided that a nap might do her good. She had been up too long and if she didn't get some sleep soon then her body would force her to. One moment she was mostly fine, opening the door so that she could leave the cool shelter of the bathroom. Then she was on her knees, keeled over and clutching her head as it exploded with violent fervor. She bit down on her lip to prevent a scream from escaping as her mind was drilled into by the relentless pressure.

Then she was running. Her legs were burning but she couldn’t stop. Another throb. Rain pounded against her skin. Another throb. A power was in her hands unlike any other, ripping through the fabric of time itself. Another throb. More pressure. More pain.

“April…”

April gasped and looked around. The throbbing ceased momentarily, but soon returned with a sharp vengeance.

“Karai…” That voice had been unmistakable. It was in Japanese, but April was so fluid in the language that she hardly registered the difference. “Where are you? Why can’t I see you?”

Was that April’s voice? That raspy, weak voice that came from her lips without the permission of her mind?

“You can…” Karai’s voice called again, “You just have to find me…”

April forced herself to her feet. Another throb. Her skin felt like it was on fire. Another throb. She made her way back into the bathroom, the cool tile practically calling out to her. Another throb. Running again. Her legs felt numb and useless as she pulled herself onto the sink to look in the mirror. What she found staring back at her was her reflection, like one would expect in a mirror. She didn't know why she stared at it for so long until, at once, what was so enrapturing about the double caught her full attention. The likeness had one flaw in it, one difference separating it from her true image and catching her attention in full.

Her eyes were green. Not faint either— practically glowing!

“Karai…” April breathed.

“Why are you upset?” The voice of Karai was slow and even.

April was furious. She tightened her grip on the shower basin until her hands were shaking as much as the rest of her.

“Karai, ever since you left me with your mark, I’ve been sick!” April snarled; the heat of her body escaped in her voice, her boiling temper releasing hot, scalding steam into her words. “I can hardly eat— hardly sleep! My chest is always burning!” April clung at the scar on her chest.

“You’re making yourself sick.” Was Karai’s gentle answer, “Why are you fighting me? Our memories—“

“Your memories. They aren’t mine!” April screamed; she didn't care if the others heard her. This was her first opportunity to talk to Karai and she had so much to say. “I don’t want them!”

���They’re just going to keep pounding if you don’t welcome them to pass.”

April fell from the sink. Her body hardly felt the impact. Another powerful throb; another overwhelming memory.

“I don’t like it…” She practically sobbed.The cold of the tile was welcoming and she didn't think she had strength enough to stand.

“I don’t like it either…” Karai’s voice followed her, “When you hurt, I hurt. My essence is in you. It will hurt, but until you welcome my memories, the evil in our world will continue to rage…”

April seized with a vision. An evil, horrible creature with tendril reaching over the land. Grabbing, ensnaring, crushing. Laughing. A name rang in her head— at least that’s what she could only assume it was. Krang. Bishop had mentioned that name to her. Was that this creature? This monstrous creature?

“Accept the memories, April O’neil…” Karai’s words soothed the burn of the evil vision— or was it a memory? “And share them with your brothers so that they may remember as well. Only then can you defeat the evil.”

April couldn't hold it back anymore. Karai had told her not to! And with the promise of this pressure, this pain, leaving her forever in peace… April let the memories overwhelm her.

April didn't recognize where she was. The world changed between blinks and she was in an open field. Long grass tickled at her feet and wind danced through her hair. Once her eyes had settled and accepted this new and sudden reality, she was able to make out more details of the space. It wasn’t just a field; it was a village! Most of the houses were dilapidated and broken, without a villager in sight to inhabit what must have once been beautiful houses. She walked over to the closest one, tracing her finger along the destroyed stone. It looked like it had been slashed by something— something big!

Then she saw Karai. She called out to the woman, but no answer came. The kunoichi didn't even seem to notice her.

“Of course…” April said, looking at the transparentness of her hands, “This is a memory…”

Her voice echoed in her head like a haunting melody. She looked back to Karai and found an additional four soldiers standing around her in a formation that was all to familiar to April. She looked down at her hamato symbol, the five dots surrounded by a circle of protection, and then back up to the soldiers that held the same pattern on their robes. One human woman and four kappa— four turtles!

Red, orange, blue, and purple skin, with darker hair of the same color around a water dish on their heads. Wrapped under their chin and over their water dish were bonnets with their designated colors, protecting the sensitive space from spilling any of their precious lifewater. They were small creatures, the tallest standing barely four feet, but still they all came together, forming around the green kunochi with weapons in hands. Weapons April recognized because her turtles had the same weapons! Or, at least they did before they were destroyed by Draxum’s goons. Sai, nunchaku, katana, and bo, all wielders ready to fight something that April didn't see until she looked up.

“Shredder…” April breathed. Of course it was Shredder…

One by one, the four kappa and the kunoichi ignited in ninja nimpo; April could feel the powers radiating from them as their once normal weapons took on the mystic properties as extensions of their owners. The kunochi led the charge with the kappa at her side, fighting against the power of the Ancient Shredder. Dash, dodge, strike. Powerful weapons igniting through the night, illuminating the dark in an endless rainbow of mystic potential. Through the night and into the day the conflict was fought, but to April it seemed like only minutes, maybe even seconds, passed. Then came a green rift forged by a green sword. Just like that, Karai and The Shredder were lost together, but the kappa remained.

April gasped in a cool breath. A cool breath that brought no pain to her. No burning, no pressure. Just a sweet, blissful breath, like one that came after a long needed stretch and yawn. The long sought relief washed over her, waves cooling on a burning day. April’s eyes shot open when the euphoria wore away.

“Wait— no!” April looked around, trying to find any hint of Karai. Some faint green glow in a reflection— some powerful flutter in her chest! “That can’t be it! Don’t I get to see what happens to them yokai?! Haven’t I earned that?!”

Karai’s laugh made April sigh; that meant the kunoichi was still there, hopefully somewhere April could see her. She kept looking around as Karai talked, trying to find any glimmer of green.

“April, you cannot see a memory that I wasn’t there to witness…”

April spotted a green reflection. Like a cat with a laser light, she dove to try and catch a glimpse of the ninja’s reflection. Karai’s image was gone just as quickly. April groaned at the near-victory.

“Then why’d you show it to me in the first place?” April huffed, leaning on her head on her hand.

“Now you know the first piece…” Another green shimmer, passing from the porcelain sink to the barely reflection in the tile. “You can unlock the rest.”

“Unlock the rest?” April’s face crinkled. She tried to pounce on the light again, but once more it was gone.

“Yes…” Karai’s voice was behind her now; when April turned, of course, there was nothing there. Still, she felt a hand on her shoulder, even as she stared through nothing. “The Shredder was trapped first so he could be destroyed later, and Krang must follow the same pattern…”

[theoldlord]

"Open the gates, it's a friend! Send for the Lady!" A guard from atop the gatehouse called out, and the mounted nobleman waiting below before the castle offered a grateful nod as he steered his charger towards parting gates. The visitor in question? Lord Araian Sunshield. A man of middling years, his face a mask of cordiality as he lifted the massive war hammer held in hand to gesture the small party of mounted men with him forwards. A black tabard worn over his breastplate, and a golden sun paired with crossed blades emblazoned upon his chest. Horseshoes struck upon now cobbled ground as they passed beneath the archway into Southwatch, the sound reverberating loudly off the castle walls and they soon filled the courtyard. Though it was dwarfed in size by castles such as those along the Gold Coast and elsewhere throughout the realm, Westfall's Southernmost holding was still impressive. It had weathered through the enemies of Stormwind since the Gnoll Wars, often times rebuilt and improved upon to prepare for the next enemy of the people of Stormwind's breadbasket. Stablehands rushed to greet them as they gathered around the fountain centered in the courtyard, barren of any water in its basin. An eager boy held his hands out for the war hammer Araian held as the lord moved to dismount. unfortunately the boy crumpled under its weight the moment Araian let go and the head struck the stones at their feet with a metallic 'thud!'. "Oof! Pardons, milord! How you swing it, it's too heavy!" The boy exclaimed, struggling to lift the weapon from the ground with little success. Fortunately, Araian was there to lend a hand and retrieve the weapon after his boots struck the ground. "It is as heavy as it needs be. The weight is a reminder to never swing it without due cause, for there is no stopping it once done so." His free hand ruffled the boy's hair before handing over the reigns of his charger along with a silver coin. "Thank you for looking after him for me." The young boys eyes lit up at the glinting bit of metal in his palm as bobbed his head a half-dozen times in gratitude. "Yes, milord! Thank ya! Never been this close to a paladin's horse before! My friends in Brushwind will never believe it!" Before long the boy and the rest of the stablehands had gathered their mounts to be watered and looked after. In the interim while awaiting the Lady of the castle, the paladin's stare swept over the interior of the castle. Many a metal note taken as each building surveyed. The fortress was in a better state than he'd thought it was, thank the Light. "Araian Sunshield!" A woman's shrill voice pierced his thoughts and he'd wheel about to face the Keep as those double-doors threw open. A short, elderly noblewoman at least thirty-years his senior, stormed down the steps and towards them. Araian was already moving towards her, fearful she'd fall. "Four weeks! Four weeks since I've written you and out of the blue you show up just like that! Just like that!" Araian's head was already bowed in deference to the elder noble, fighting the smile that threatened show and mark his doom. "Forgive me, my Lady. My delay was King's business." "I know. But I also knew you would come when you could." Tension if there ever was any vanished in an instant and Lady Dorenshire of Southwatch was all smiles as she threw herself at Araian's frame seeking a hug. "Thank the Light you've come. Everything is prepared of course as we discussed.." Her stare peeling itself away from his features and to look around the castle that had been her home for the better part of her adult life. "It is good to see you again, my Lady. I keep your husband and your son in my prayers always." Araian replied, his towering frame enveloping the smaller woman in as delicate a hug as his armor would allow, worried he might break the frail woman should he squeeze too tight. "Thank you, my friend. Were they still here we wouldn't be meeting under these circumstances, but I am glad to see you regardless. Come, come! You must all be thirsty riding under the sun all morning." Her hand stealing his free one before he could object and drag their party towards the keep.

[miss-spooky-eyes]

intersection (a belated OC Kiss Week fic) part II

In which the adventures of Teo and Dev, teenage dumbasses, continue. Part I here. 

Author Notes/What to Know:

This is a fic about the (near) kisses of my IA/Cipher Nine, Devinahl, and @sunsetofdoom's Smuggler Teo. I encourage absolutely anybody & everybody to read what she's written about Teo, which you can find the most important & glorious pieces of here, here and here.

'Karia Madeesh' is the alias used by the future Cipher Nine during her adolescence as a schoolgirl spy tasked with befriending the children of important Republic figures. I think that's all you need to know, but Dev's backstory fic Riddle goes into much more detail.

Warnings: Um ... nudity? Mentions of vomiting? Extreme teenage dumbness?

Part Two

New Baxeid, 3651 BBY/2 ATC

Teonine couldn’t believe he’d been stupid enough to end up here.

His feet pounded the ferracrete as he sprinted up the street, trying to keep to the shadows nearer the buildings and storefronts without tripping over the crates of recyclables left out to be picked up by New Baxeid municipal sanitation in the morning. He could hear shouts and more running feet behind him, but he didn’t dare turn and look back.

With the clarity that came to those who were about to be hunted down and arrested, if they didn’t die of twin heart attacks first, he focused on Karia’s back, the studs on her jacket flashing prismatically every time she passed through the pool of light under a streetlamp. In the almost two full terms since they’d met, her hair had gone from blood-orange to silver to magenta, and she’d started dressing nouveau-bashcore, but some things hadn’t changed at all; she still called him ‘little fish’, she was still determined to be his friend and Teonine still had no idea why.

He’d let her act like she was his friend, since it seemed so important to her. It wasn’t all bad; she might have a complex about her military parents, but when she wasn’t complaining about them and not-so-subtly expecting Teonine to reciprocate with his own tales of woe (as if he even knew where Colonel Lunulata was stationed these days), she was actually pretty good company. Which to Teonine meant that she could hold her booze, and was almost as good at being silent as he was.

Teonine liked her best like that, after lights out when she would sneak into his room and they would sit side by side on his windowsill, not touching except to pass the bottle back and forth.

That had been his plan for tonight: Drinking himself to sleep in silence with Karia beside him. Instead -

Teonine skidded round a corner so fast he almost collided with a bollard, the soles of his shoes squealing loudly on the ferracrete. A pair of flashlight beams ignited down the street ahead of them, and Karia swerved and yelled, ‘This way!’

Following her through the covered arcade to their right, sprinting past shopfronts shuttered for the night and chairs and tables piled outside closed cafes, Teonine tried to figure out what the fuck he’d been thinking. She’d caught him off guard, that was it, just when he thought he could trust her. All her seemingly desultory chatter, all her teasing and subtle prodding and little jibes about aquarium fish while they drank their way through his latest batch. Then, at the exact moment when he was at his warmest and weakest, she had produced the security pass nobody except senior teachers were supposed to have and said, So I heard there’s this party …

They burst out of the arcade into an intersection, one of the settlement’s busiest by day and fairly crowded on this particular night as well, because station security were already struggling with one knot of party-goers as another tore through and on down the street, patrol in hot pursuit.

Teonine and Karia slalomed frantically between the bodies and ducked into a side street, too busy trying to put distance between them and the chaos behind them to register its familiarity until they burst out into a sudden wide open space.

‘Oh, skrag,’ Karia panted.

They’d come out into the main square in the commercial district of New Baxeid. To their right, the governor’s mansion, which doubled as the courthouse and main municipal seat of business, squatted unimpressively along one entire side of the square; ahead of them, the fountain with its deep pool churned within its well lined with faux-marble. And the square itself, which would during daylight hours have been busy with people buying kaf from the kiosks or simply cutting across it, stretched away empty and shadowed to their left.

They had to keep going if they had any hope of getting back to the atmo-speeder they’d stolen from the school (‘borrowed, little fish, borrowed’), but there were flashlights across the square, and voices behind them, and Karia grabbed his arm and yanked him into the shadow of a nearby kiosk.

Teonine crouched down beside her; the kiosk was close enough to the building behind them that the pool of shadow was deep, but if the patrol behind them came right up the street … ‘Did they see us?’ he breathed.

Karia had her eyes narrowed, listening intently. ‘I don’t think so. But -’ She broke off, listening, then swore again. ‘It sounds like they’re going to patrol that street. We can’t go back that way.’

‘Well, we can’t go that way,’ Teonine hissed, nodding towards the wide street that led off the opposite side of the square. ‘So what the fuck are we going to do?’

Karia shrugged. ‘Got me.’ She caught his eye, and smiled wickedly. ‘Good party, though.’

Teonine wasn’t about to rise to that; they had been there for precisely twenty minutes, nineteen of which he had spent awkwardly standing around while Karia flirted with some guy who looked like a spice dealer. And almost certainly was a spice dealer, if the fact that the party had been heavily raided by station security was anything to go by. ‘I’m serious, what are we going to do?’

‘We could make out.’

‘What?’

‘They’re going to catch us, and we can at least have some fun until they do, since we’ll probably be sent to different schools after this.’

‘Will you be serious?’ Teonine hissed.

‘I am. We can’t go back the way we came, and if we try to go forward, we’ll be caught.’ She shrugged. ‘We’re boxed in, little fish. We lose.’

Teonine stared at her, hearts thudding with a new and entirely different kind of panic. ‘What happened to “I get my friends in trouble, but I always get them out of it”?’

In the dim glow from the streetlights, he thought she looked guilty for a second, but then her face hardened. ‘Yeah, well, you hate this school anyway, I’m getting you out of it. Problem solved.’

Teonine couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He hadn’t even wanted to sneak out of school tonight, and now she was telling him that she didn’t have a plan? That he was, essentially, on his own?

She glanced round the edge of the kiosk, then turned towards him. ‘Look, I didn’t want this to happen, OK? It won’t be that bad. You can blame it all on me and they probably won’t even expel you.’

Teonine gave a hollow laugh, his hands gripping on to the kiosk counter so tightly he thought his knuckles might snap.

‘So your mom finds out that you’re not always her good little boy.’ There was exasperation in Karia’s tone. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’

No, Teonine thought distantly. It was much, much worse than that.

And it could not happen.

The thought was like a bolt of white-hot adrenaline forking down his spine. It could not happen. It had to not happen. That was all there was to it.

Suddenly, he felt suffused with a new and icy clarity. ‘That patrol behind us. How far down the street are they?’

Karia eyed him curiously, then cautiously craned her neck to peer back behind them. ‘Um - forty feet, maybe?’

Teonine nodded, while his mind threw up parabolas, lines of sight, angles. ‘OK.’ He crawled to the other end of the kiosk, then reached back to hook an arm around Karia’s shoulders, urging her forward so that she was crouched at his side. ‘Can you tell how many patrols are over there?’

‘Teonine, what the fuck -’

‘Just listen,’ he cut her off. ‘And tell me. Please.’

She breathed a huffy little sigh, but he watched her eyes narrow, and after perhaps thirty seconds, she shook her head and said: ‘It’s definitely two patrols. But I can’t hear what they’re saying.’

‘That’s all I needed to know.’

Teonine peered around the edge of the kiosk, watching the bobbing beams of the flashlights carried by the security patrol, while in his mind's eye the map of New Baxeid's commercial heart unrolled. He knew these streets, he'd spent enough bored hours wandering them. The wide street that led off the square curved to the left after fifty feet or so, but Teonine had no intention of trying to go that way.

He watched as the patrol trudged back from the corner, down the street and back into the square; two members of the station’s security force, each carrying a flashlight, and it was easy to tell from their body language that nobody trying to escape the raid on the party had come this way yet. Teonine counted the seconds as the security patrol made their way from the corner, into the square and over to the fountain.

They paused for a second, idly playing the beams of their flashlights around, then turned and began making their way back up the street. Teonine grabbed Karia’s hand again. ‘Get ready,’ he hissed.

‘What are you doing?’ she whispered back.

‘Getting us out of this.’ As the patrol made it perhaps halfway up the street, Teonine broke cover, pulling Karia with him, running in a wide curve to make sure to stay out of sight of the guards stationed in the street behind them.

As the guards reached the corner, Teonine and Karia made it to the opposite side of the fountain. He pulled her down into the shadow of the waist-high lip of the basin, both of them crouching low enough to be hidden.

It wasn’t really a fountain, more a sort of hydraulic relic of the only attempt New Baxeid had ever made to pretend it was more than an administration centre for the mines scattered throughout the system. An over-ambitious governor had the regrettable idea of turning the settlement’s water supply into something decorative as well as utilitarian, and had designed the fountain himself; a basin only twenty feet square but a good thirty feet deep, to generate the requisite water pressure for the jets that leapt into the air. At least that was the plan; these days the jets were mainly broken, and the fountain was just an odd, slightly underwhelming water feature.

During the day, people sat or leaned on the wide faux-marble lip to drink their kaf or eat lunch; Teonine had spent more than a few hours there himself, blankly staring into the churning, constantly recycled water. It was about to pay off.

Slowly, he wriggled his feet out of his shoes, trying to conceal his movements so that Karia didn’t notice what he was doing; he was fairly sure she wasn’t going to like this plan, and he didn’t want to have to deal with any objections until it was a done deal. He counted off each second in his head, visualising the position of the patrol; now they would be entering the square - now they would be coming up to the fountain - they’d take a few seconds to sweep their flashlights around the square - now they would be turning back up the street -

His heart hammering, Teonine counted down to zero, then stood up, pulling Karia with him. A hasty glance told him that the patrol were indeed halfway back to the corner, but there was no more time to look; yanking off his sweatshirt and dropping it on the ground, he turned to Karia. ‘Take a deep breath.’

He saw her eyes flick to the water, then slam back to him as she inhaled sharply, mouth opening -  

There was no time. Teonine wrapped one arm around her waist, planted the other hand on the back of her head, clamped his mouth to hers and rolled backwards into the water.

With his senses heightened by adrenaline, the cold, clean shock of the water was like a surge of electricity through his veins. It was always a sensation he struggled to put into words, that moment when he felt his gills open and the burden of uprightness slip from his shoulders as easily as discarding a robe. With Karia held to him, there was no way they hadn’t made a splash as they entered the water and the patrol would be coming to look, but that was OK, he had a plan for that …

Teonine dived, kicking to propel them down towards the bottom of the basin. He’d expected this to be hard, maybe impossible, and nothing but desperation would have compelled him to try it. But even without being able to use his arms for anything other than keeping Karia held against him, it felt easy, even effortless, to let the circuit of the water propel them around the basin while he corkscrewed from one layer of the current to another.

After her first, reflexive struggle, Karia had stopped fighting; he felt her fingers digging into his shoulders as she let him take them deeper. As long as the water kept moving against his gills, the oxygen his well-adapted body took in would be enough for both of them, but not much more than enough; if she didn’t fight him, that would give them more time. He hoped.

He had to fight against the current that wanted to force them upwards as they neared the bottom of the basin, and the reason was obvious; the input pipe, half a metre across. Still, even where the bulk of the water was moving one way, there was water going the other, and Teonine barely had to try to find the path of least resistance. Two powerful kicks brought him to within reach of the mouth of the pipe; he let go of Karia’s waist, grasped the pipe with one hand and with a single sinuous heave managed to propel both of them inside just as flashlight beams dimly pierced the surface of the water above.

There was about a metre and a half of pipe before the fan that helped to force the water into the basin, and Teonine used his legs and one hand to wedge them in, keeping them still while the water pummeled them mercilessly. He craned his neck to see back out of the pipe. The flashlights were sweeping and spiralling through the water as the patrol searched for the source of the splash they would have heard, but there was no way they could see the two teenagers inside the mouth of the pipe, and confronted with an apparently empty basin, they would have to conclude that they’d made a mistake. Of course, Teonine’s sweatshirt and sneakers and Karia’s abandoned shoes would give the game away, but the patrol weren’t likely to spot them on the other side of the fountain. At least, not until Teonine and Karia were long gone.

He could feel Karia starting to make little convulsive movements against his chest as her body reacted to the slow depletion of oxygen, but Teonine held position, watching as the flashlight beams made one last circle through the basin before they blinked off.

He waited a little longer just in case the patrol decided to turn back, then relaxed his limbs and let the pressure propel them out of the mouth of the pipe. This time, he worked his way up, sliding elegantly between layers of the current as the circling water again carried them almost the whole way round the basin - right towards the output pipe near the surface of the water.

Ignoring Karia’s increasingly frantic struggles, Teonine jacknifed to plant both feet on the side of the basin, then pushed off, his body aimed unerringly at the mouth of the pipe.

They shot like an arrow through the pipe and into inky darkness. Even for Teo, there was no light to see with, but he could sense the walls around them constraining the water. New Baxeid’s underground reservoir.

He didn’t know whether Karia knew that there was no surface to come up to any more or whether she was just blindly panicking, but she was properly struggling now, kicking and writhing against him, her head trying to turn and break the seal of their mouths, fingers clawing at his shoulders, his face. But Teonine knew that if he let go of her now, she would drown, and he was surprised to find that he could hold her with no difficulty at all.

He wished he could tell her that he knew what he was doing, that they were almost through, but instead he concentrated on knifing through the dark water. He was shamefully conscious of a feeling of exhilaration, too, something that went deeper than just the basic biological thrill of being in the water; he’d always believed he was a weak swimmer, but it had been almost … easy. He kicked harder to send them through the water even faster, and was astounded to find that he could.

Karia had gone limp by the time Teonine saw the dim glow ahead, and he put on one last burst of speed, spiralling through another pipe with ease. The ceiling opened up above them, and he kicked up to the surface, finally releasing his iron grip on Karia’s head to let her take a gasp of air.

She sucked in an immense, relieved breath, choked and began to cough and splutter. Teonine steered her gently towards the metal ladder, not unlike the ones that the other kids used in the pool at school. In fact, apart from being underground, this chamber was not unlike a swimming pool, with metal walkways surrounding a decent-sized, uncovered tank. There were instruments mounted on the wall, and another ladder leading up to a heavy hatch in the ceiling.

He boosted the shaking, coughing Karia up the ladder until she collapsed face-first on the walkway, then climbed up himself. Teonine bent to check on Karia, but she shoved him away violently, and he stepped back to give her her space.

He couldn’t believe it. They’d done it. They’d got away. He’d done it.

‘You s-s-s-son of a b-b-b-bitch.’ Karia had finally stopped spitting up water, and she was levering herself up to her hands and knees, shaking violently. ‘You ab-ab-absolut-t-t-te f-f-f-fucking b-b-b-bastard. I’m g-g-going to k-k-kill you.’

Teonine instinctively opened his mouth to apologise and found himself saying instead: ‘You’re welcome.’

Karia pushed wet hair out of her eyes as she sat back on her haunches. ‘W-what did you s-s-say to me?’

‘I said you’re welcome.’ An unfamiliar warmth was spreading through Teonine’s veins. ‘You got us into trouble, I got us out of it.’

‘You n-nearly drowned me!’

‘You weren’t going to drown. You weren’t even close to drowning. Your body just made you think you were.’

She ignored him, pushing herself shakily to her feet; as Teonine reached forward to help her, she waved him off. ‘Don’t touch me! You nearly drowned me! And I’m not going to die on this miserable fucking rock for some s-s-’ She bit the word off, turned it into a gasp for breath, then a spluttering cough. ‘For some stupid kid.’

When she’d first got out of the water, she’d been shaking with rage, hissing and spitting like a furious cat dunked in a barrel. Now all of a sudden, she looked small, and frightened.

‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ he muttered, feeling a familiar reversion to guilt, but before he got through the sentence she had flared up again.

‘Oh, you didn’t? Well, that makes everything OK, doesn’t it? You drag me into the water, you nearly get us stuck in a pipe … Did you even know where that output pipe led? Did you even know there was somewhere with air down here?’

‘Yes,’ Teonine said. ‘I did. It’s the monitoring pool for the New Baxeid underground reservoir. We came on a field trip here two years ago.’

She glared at him, momentarily stymied, but made a quick recovery. ‘And what if they’d changed the layout in the past two years? Put in a gate or a filter? Did you even think about that?’

‘Did you even think about how we’d get back to school if something went wrong at your party?’ Teonine shot back. ‘Or did you just decide that since you didn’t care about getting kicked out, it was fine to ruin my life, as well?’

She blinked, looking taken aback; not by the accusation itself, but by the fact that it was Teonine who was the one levelling it.

Teonine felt the same way. After all, the voices of fifteen years of habit were telling him urgently that he should be asking for forgiveness, that he must be in the wrong for her to be angry with him. But louder than it all was the heady sensation pumping through his veins, telling him that he’d just done something he didn’t need to apologise for. Something daring. Something creative. Something pretty fucking cool.

‘And how are we supposed to get out of here?’ Karia demanded, making a recovery from her state of surprise at Teonine’s unaccustomed display of defiance. She waved a hand at the hatch in the ceiling. ‘What are we going to do, wait for the next time someone comes to monitor the chemical levels?’

‘Actually, the hatch is designated one of the vital entry points for the whole of New Baxeid in case of emergency,’ Teonine pointed out mildly. ‘Which means that the security pass you’re carrying should open it.’

She glared at him, fuming. ‘Fine.’ She strode over to the foot of the ladder. ‘But after you and I get back to school, we’re done. If you ever touch me again, I’ll kill you, Teonine Lunulata. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes.’

If anything, his mild agreement seemed to infuriate her more. ‘Is that it? Is that all you have to say to me? You don’t want to say anything else?’

Teonine considered the question. He knew what she wanted; he could see how little it would take to defuse the situation.

It was just that, for perhaps the first time in his life, he didn’t feel like apologising.

‘Not bad for a little fish?’ he suggested.

The look she gave him at that removed any doubt about whether or not he’d just lost his only sort-of friend, and that was bad. But as he climbed up the ladder behind her, Teonine had the distinct sense that he’d gained something much more important.

Nar Shaddaa, 3643 BBY/10 ATC

Club Ufora on a Saturday night was not where Teo wanted to be.

To be fair, he didn’t much want to be anywhere right now except Open Ocean, newly re-christened, newly his, running his hands over her controls and revelling in ownership. But off-planet jobs like the ones he craved needed crews, and they certainly needed fuel, and for that he needed credits.

It wasn’t like Teo didn’t have some credits, of course, more than enough to fuel Open Ocean in a pinch. But the thought of digging into his emergency fund made him feel like his skin was too tight. So did the thought of risking more than a little delicate fleecing at the sabacc tables, especially on Nar Shaddaa, where getting through a hand without vibroknives being pulled was a rarity even when nobody was cheating.

Teo had only just got his ship all to himself. He wasn’t going to put himself in a position to have her yanked out from under him.

So here he was, doing the kind of planet-bound petty crime he really wanted to leave behind. If it had been anyone other than Tommie who had proposed the job, Teo would have nixed it at the outset, but Tommie was cautious and smart and Teo had gone over all her data-gathering thoroughly.

All of that didn’t mean that he liked Club Ufora. It was just far enough from the Promenade that crews on leave could kid themselves they were seeing the ‘real’ Nar Shaddaa, but it was a tourist trap for all that, all coloured lights and slot machines that made happy noises. Even the vice was calculated to be inoffensive; the female dancers were little and buxom, the males muscle-bound and gleaming, and all of them covered in sequins and sparkles. It was bachelor-party sexuality and excess, nicely calibrated to empty the pockets of the spacers enjoying their night of R&R and send them back to their ships stinking of booze, covered in glitter and happily convinced they’d participated in something really wild.

Teo found it all unspeakably depressing.

He’d arrived at Ufora about ninety minutes ago, spent some time playing the slots, chatted up a couple of ‘Pub medics on leave from their ship at the bar, watched the dancers, all of it designed to make him appear like any other low-level Nar Shaddaa grifter on the hunt for a mark (an impression which would be subtly reinforced by his suit, which was flashily expensive enough to assert wealth, but poorly-tailored enough to remove any intimation of class). Now he was ready to get on with the job.

Teo strolled across the casino floor, weaving in between knots of patrons, towards the bank of elevators, each flanked by a pair of hulking bouncers. He nodded at the nearest, a human with tattoos crawling over his shaved scalp who was stuffed into the regulation bad suit, and held up a small triangular chit between two fingers.

The human grunted, taking the chit and slotting it into the top of his handheld scanner with the air of one who’d done this fifty times tonight already. The scanner lit up as the infrared beam ran over the surface of the chit, logging the ident of the dancer who’d given it to him (in theory, anyway; Teo had actually purloined it from a Rattataki spacer who was way too drunk to notice), then beeped twice, its light turning green. The bouncer pressed the scanner to the elevator’s control panel; there was another beep, and the doors pulled smoothly open. The bouncer stepped aside to allow Teo to enter. ‘Enjoy, sir.’

Teo winked and flipped another chit, credits this time, to the man as he stepped into the elevator.

The doors closed, and the elevator began to ascend without Teo having to press any buttons; it would deliver him directly to the suite where the dancer who he’d paid for a private performance would be waiting, a pretty common and relatively efficient system used in clubs and casinos across the galaxy to control patrons’ access to the dancers (and make sure that the dancers weren’t entertaining customers without the owners getting their cut, of course).

Teo counted off ten seconds, then squeezed the small cylinder in his pocket.

Before the elevator had fully shuddered to a halt, he was moving, reaching up to the security cam above his head even as it clicked and whirred in response to the pulse. It was a make and model he’d dealt with plenty of times before, and he knew just where to apply pressure to pop the casing. Swiftly, he disconnected the input and slid the micro-card Tommie had given him into the memory slot before reconnecting the input and holding down the necessary buttons to trigger a hard reset. Now when the cam turned back on, it would run the footage Tommie had mocked up of Teo exiting the elevator on his assigned floor and the empty elevator returning.

Teo wasted no time in moving to the control panel; the display, scrambled by the pulse, showed a garbled mixture of aurebesh characters and Huttese glyphs. For any graduate of Pantomathia (although technically, of course, Teo had not graduated), it was the work of moments to slave the elevator controls to the pocket datapad he palmed. Nor was it difficult to reinitialise the controls in a different mode. Now, instead of only going between the main casino floor and the entertainment suites, the elevator could be commanded to access any of Club Ufora’s levels.

Like, for example, the topmost levels out of bounds to anybody except the club’s owners and their guests.

Teo’s destination wasn’t the penthouse where the owner, a Twi’lek named Jep’temok, lived with his personal slaves, but the level two floors down on which Jep’temok’s eldest son and majordomo had his office and suites. Uat’jamok was off-planet right now, and had been for three months - some said he was in Hutt space trying to swing some kind of deal, although Teo had also heard a rumour he’d been snatched by the Imps. Wherever he was, he’d left behind a safe with a few hundred million credits his closest associates could access in a crisis. Small change for an aspiring Nar Shaddaa crimelord; precious, precious fuel for a starship captain. They were, essentially, robbing Uat’jamok’s petty cash box.

Teo didn’t like how many times he was having to use the word petty in relation to this particular job.

He told himself again that it was a stepping-stone to better and less planet-bound things, and set about the tricky part.

This was the bit that neither Teo’s formal nor informal educations had prepared him for. But Tommie had walked him through it several times, and then Teo had practiced it several hundred more times. The programme was hidden on his datapad under a skin mocked up to look like an innocuous gambling game. Teo opened it, input the code commands he’d memorised, then re-initialised the elevator and held his breath.

The elevator hummed smoothly into motion again; it would take eleven point three seconds to reach Uat’jamok’s floor, and Tommie’s programme should have run its course in no more than nine point nine. All Teo had to do was count down the seconds and then -

Ding.

Teo’s thumb stabbed down on the datapad.

It worked just like it was supposed to. The overload cascade that Tommie had set up took just milliseconds to kick in; the datapad crackled and jolted in his hand, sparks flew from the elevator’s control panel, and the lights snapped off, plunging the elevator into darkness.

Not a problem for a Nautolan, of course, and now every light, every terminal, every security system that wasn’t on its own separate circuit would be out on Uat’jamok’s floor. And that wasn’t even the clever part.

Now all Teo had to do was walk on to Uat’jamok’s floor, slice the safe in the reception room and be back in the elevator within the four-minute window that Tommie’s clever little programme had bought him - four minutes in which Club Ufora’s security mainframe, not to mention the additional monitoring programmes that Jep’temok had as a matter of course installed to spy on his son, would be blind to what happened up here.

The elevator doors had just begun to part when Teo had triggered the cascade. He slid his fingertips into the gap, pulled the doors apart in one fluid motion, and strolled out into the darkened, empty room, adjusting his tie.

At least, that’s what was supposed to happen.

What actually happened was that Teo confidently pulled the doors apart to reveal a fully-lit reception room and two people pointing blasters directly at his chest.

‘Hands up,’ said one of them, a stocky middle-aged woman with a crewcut and a livid red scar running down the side of her neck and disappearing beneath the collar of her jacket.

Teo obeyed slowly, the pleasant, slightly giddy hum of adrenaline in his veins replaced in an instant with frozen shock.

‘Out,’ said the other, a skinny, nondescript-looking man with a cheap-looking phobium earring in the shape of a Togruta-style stylised fang dangling from his right ear.

Teo’s higher brain was still offline, but his primitive survival centers were working just fine, and they dropped a simple message into his consciousness: If he stepped out of this elevator, he would die.

‘Wrong floor?’ he suggested weakly.

They ignored his attempt to engage them, not even bothering to snort away the feeble excuse. Instead, the man said again: ‘Out.’

Teo considered his options, which didn’t take long. Even if he could get a hand to the elevator controls before the pair unloaded blaster bolts into his chest, he’d shorted out the power in the thing and it would take long, agonising seconds for it to re-initialise. He wasn’t carrying a weapon, because the effort it would have taken to get round Club Ufora’s body-scanners wouldn’t have been worth it, not when the kind of trouble he could potentially get into if the job went wrong was anything that one blaster was going to get him out of. Even the little datapad had gone into his pocket once its part had been played, besides which it was now a flimsy, useless square of plastic and dead circuits; he couldn’t even use it to challenge one of them to a game of online pazaak.

Just as well, because this wasn’t his lucky night.

‘Last warning,’ the man said, eyes narrowing to cold slits.

Teo stepped out of the elevator.

Whatever was going on up here, it wasn’t the deserted floor it was supposed to be. Not only were there two people pointing blasters at him, he was sure there were more up here; he saw lights blinking on access panels, signals that the rooms which opened off the reception room were occupied.

And people weren’t the only thing where there should be none. Teo could see security cams at the edge of his vision, vibrating in that almost imperceptible way that said they were on and scanning - and although he didn’t dare turn his head for a proper look, these didn’t appear to be the same cheap functional models that surveilled the elevators, or the main casino floors. The power and environmental and security systems that all Tommie’s research had said were operating on this floor should have been shorted out by the overload he’d triggered.

The only explanation was that someone had taken over this particular floor and equipped it with its own set of self-contained systems, independent of the rest of the club. A black site, squatting quietly in the midst of one of Nar Shaddaa’s busiest, tackiest casinos.

And whoever they were, they weren’t gangsters. Oh, they were dressed like the euphemistically-termed ‘private security’ that were five for a credit on the Smugglers’ Moon. But their stances weren’t just textbook, they were identical. So were their gleaming weapons, and so were their cold, blank expressions.

Tommie hadn’t double-crossed him, and she hadn’t slipped up. She’d just sent Teo walking into something way, way above either of their pay grades.

The only reason Teo could think of that they hadn’t already shot him was that they wanted to know what the fuck he was doing there.

Teo could think of ten different stories just off the top of his head, but not one of them was going to save him, because if he’d come to this floor knowing that they were there then he was a threat and they were going to kill him. And if he’d done it without knowing they were there, he’d now found out, which meant he was a threat, which meant they were going to kill him.

He was going to be executed in a Nar Shaddaa club he wouldn’t be seen dead in. Tommie wasn’t going to know what had happened, only that he went in and didn’t come out. Nobody was ever going to know what happened to him, and Open Ocean would sit rusting in her hangar until the docking fees ran out and some spaceport bureaucrat reclaimed her and sold her at auction and Teo was never going to get the chance to stock her and crew her and fly her like she deserved.

This was what he got for thinking he was clever, being stupid enough to believe that he knew what he was doing, strutting through Nar Shaddaa casinos like he belonged, like he wasn’t alone and helpless and going to die.

Then a door towards the back of the reception area opened and a woman in a black dress walked through it. She was looking down at a datapad in her hands as she crossed the floor towards a door on the other side, but Teo saw her lift her eyes to take an instinctive survey of her surroundings. As she did, the light struck one of her implants and the shape struck a familiar chord deep in Teo’s memory.

He still might not have recognised her, but with the heightened awareness of those very much about to die, he registered the sudden flare of shock in her eyes as they passed over him and he knew he was looking at Karia Madeesh.

Teo might have cried out to her if she’d kept walking, but shock kept his tongue tied and then he saw her smoothly alter her course to head towards the little group by the elevator.

She was older, of course, and a little taller, and she was filling out the clingy dress she wore in a way that had nothing to do with the skinny teenager he remembered; her hair was ashen-blonde and rippled glossily past her shoulders and down her back; her makeup was the finest in Nar Shaddaa chic, all scarlet lips and iridescent colour on cheekbones and eyelids; and after that first flicker of recognition her face wore the same studied blankness as the two currently training their blasters on Teo. But all the same, it was her. Karia.

Teo half-opened his mouth, caught between conflicting impulses - should he call to her to help him? Warn her to keep away? - but as she walked towards them he saw her lift her hand to sweep a wave of pale hair back over her shoulder and, as her chin tilted, the tiniest, tiniest shake of her head, barely more than a tremble, but aimed at him.

He closed his mouth again as she stopped a few paces behind the two - guards? - and said, ‘Situation?’

Fuck, even her voice was different.

The two with their blasters trained on Teo were too well-trained to look away, but Teo saw both their heads lift slightly. ‘Contained,’ the woman responded.

Karia’s eyes flicked over Teo, cool, assessing, this time without the faintest hint of recognition. ‘Negligible,’ she said dismissively.

‘Still assessing,’ the short-haired woman disagreed, and this time Teo almost heard the bitten-off ‘sir’ at the end of the sentence.

Karia’s eyes narrowed, just a little, and Teo could see the girl who’d once pointed her finger at him and picked him out of a crowd as she said: ‘A moment, please.’

The short-haired woman glanced at her partner, then carefully retreated a pace or two as he shifted his position to cover Teo alone. The woman lowered her blaster, but kept it held ready in front of her, weight on her back foot and ready to spring, as she inclined her head to listen to Karia murmuring in her ear.

Teo couldn’t make out what Karia was saying, but the short-haired woman clearly disagreed with it; she was shaking her head, arguing back. Karia’s response was short and, despite the low tone in which she was speaking, had the unmistakable ring of finality to it.

The short-haired woman frowned, but did not reply.

Then for the second time in his life, Teo found himself rooted to the spot while Karia Madesh approached him with a calculating look in her eyes and a lipstick in her hand. Brushing aside the man with the earring and his still-levelled blaster, she stepped right up to Teo, looked him in the eye and began to apply a fresh coat of scarlet on her already-reddened lips.

Then she snapped the lipstick closed again, replaced it in whatever concealed pocket she’d removed it from, reached up to take Teo’s face in her hands in a no-nonsense fashion, tugged his head down and kissed him.

As methods of execution went, it had a lot to recommend it.

As kisses went, it had a certain cold-blooded brutality to it, but it got the job done. Teo went from being too startled to respond to kissing her back before he’d even begun to process what was happening. Her thumbs were stroking teasingly against his cheeks, her tongue was slipping into his mouth; the soft sensuality of it, with his hands still raised above his head as if bound and the blasters trained on him, was making his head swim with the rush of sensation. He was showing Karia Madeesh that he’d come a long way since that airlock.

Except …

Except he was also going to faint again.

Teo opened his eyes as Karia pulled away from him, or maybe he pulled away from her, because all at once the room was spinning alarmingly. He inhaled sharply, but all he could taste was the sudden thickness of her perfume. This couldn’t be happening to him again, he thought dizzily, but his heartbeat was throbbing in his temples like it used to when he was a scrawny teenager who never swam, and Karia was watching him with a look that meant trouble, and they had to get back to school or else they were going to get sucked out into space, and if the room kept tilting back like that he was going to fall off, and then -

*

‘Teo! Teo!’

‘Sorry,’ Teo mumbled. His mouth was full of dirt. ‘I’m up.’

‘Teo, come on! Wake up, man, come on!’

‘I’m up,’ Teo repeated louder. He opened his eyes, and discovered that the reason his mouth felt like it was full of dirt was because he was lying face down on an extremely dirty pavement.

His head felt like it was three times its usual size, there was something poking into his belly and someone kept prodding him with something sharp.

‘It hurts,’ he said, not sure whether he was talking about his head or his side.

There was another strained giggle that seemed very familiar. ‘Yeah, well, it’s going to hurt worse in a minute if you don’t get the fuck up.’

Teo pushed himself up on one elbow, squinting through the sickening lurch inside his skull as he moved to see - ‘Tommie?’

‘Yeah, it’s me, whatever. What the fuck happened, Teo?’

Teo scrubbed one hand across his eyes and looked around him. He was lying, or now half-sitting, in what looked like - and definitely smelled like - one of Nar Shaddaa’s patented dark alleyways, in the shadow of an immense dumpster. Big as it was, it still couldn’t contain the garbage that was spilling out of it and on to the ground - garbage that contained a lot of edible material, or material that had once been edible, at any rate. The lights from the street turned the alley merely shadowy, rather than pitch-black, and the flashing neon signs on the building opposite the mouth of the alleyway were reflected on the viscous surface of the … something … pooling on the floor, and faintly on the skin of the exposed arms of Tommie, who was crouching by his side, clutching a jacket and looking considerably more skittish than normal.

‘Karia,’ he mumbled.

‘What? What did you say?’ Tommie’s voice was verging on the hysterical.

Teo pushed himself up further, and made another unwelcome discovery: He was completely naked. ‘Nothing. I mean -’ He clutched one hand to his head as it throbbed again. ‘What happened?’

‘You’re asking me?’ Tommie’s tattoos were standing out vividly in the darkness, always a sign that she was on the verge of panic. ‘I was monitoring the cams remotely like we said, I saw you go into the elevator, picked up the power surge, everything on schedule - then you didn’t come out. I waited and I waited and then the next thing I know, you’re spamming my comm with calls but whenever I try to answer, nothing. So I tracked the signal and here you are, butt-naked in an alleyway like some rube who got Narsha Necked.’

‘I called you?’ Teo’s hand dropped to the thing that had been prodding into his belly. His commlink, the one he’d had in his pocket in Club Ufora. The tiny light was blinking on and off, over and over.

‘She set it to signal my last contact,’ he said slowly.

‘She? She who? Teo, what the fuck happened in there?’

Teo tried to get his thoughts up to speed. Karia - or whoever she was - she’d kissed him with a knockout drug on her lips, spread over a seal; Narsha Necking, they called it here, where hapless johns drugged, robbed and stripped naked by the prostitutes they’d thought they were picking up were a common sight in the alleys. Those people - whoever they were - had wanted to shoot him; they could have done it, too, because dead bodies were even more common in Nar Shaddaa’s alleyways than unconscious ones. But Karia had knocked him out instead, then made sure someone found him.

He wondered how fast she’d had to talk to get them to agree to leave him alive, to trust the knockout drug to sufficiently scramble his memories of the moments before he’d passed out. What she’d had to do to talk those two killers round.

Because they had been killers. Highly-trained, and therefore highly-paid, killers.

Killers operating a black site which would have taken a stack of credits the size of a senator’s bribe to set up.

And Karia was with them? No, he thought, remembering the way that she’d overruled the short-haired woman. Karia was in charge of them.

‘Teo? Hey? Hello?’ Tommie waved a hand in front of Teo’s face. ‘Are you with me? Care to start filling me in any time soon?’

Teo blinked. The disturbing train of thought he’d been following had left him with one thing: A sense of urgency much more pressing than his headache. He refocused on Tommie, grabbed for her arm to support him as he struggled to get to his feet. ‘Things went bad. We gotta go.’

‘Well, I didn’t think they went to plan,’ Tommie said with another one of her nervous giggles, trying to help haul Teo upright. ‘What happened?’

‘It was - I can’t explain.’ They hadn’t been gangsters, that was for sure, which only really left some galactic-level corporation like Czerka … or military intelligence. And the club was frequented by Republic spacers. ‘Something bad’s going on at Club Ufora. Something really bad. I walked right into it.’

‘And you walked out?’

‘Not exactly walked.’ Teo’s head swum as he finally managed to get to his feet, but he stayed upright, gripping tightly on to Tommie’s arm and shoulder. ‘Look, I got lucky, but this is serious.’

Her gold-flecked eyes darted up and down the alleyway. ‘How serious?’

‘Get-off-Nar-Shaddaa-tonight serious. I’ve got to get back to the ship.’

‘What about the credits?’

‘I’ll work something out.’ Fuelling Open Ocean would just about wipe out his savings; looked like he’d have to take that Ord Mantell run after all. ‘What about you? Can you get off-planet?’

Too late, he remembered Tommie’s chronic phobia of space travel as the Zabrak waved her hands. ‘No, no, I don’t do off-planet, remember? I don’t care how bad you say it is.’

‘Then go to ground. Go stay with someone, or - Just stay out of sight for a bit, OK? Don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself.’

‘You’re one to talk right now.’

Teo looked down; he’d almost forgotten he was completely naked. ‘Fair.’

‘Here.’ Tommie held out the jacket she’d taken off; fortunately she was almost as broad across the shoulders as Teo.

‘This is the best you can do?’

‘Well, I wasn’t exactly planning on - hey, what’s that?’ Tommie grabbed for his arm as Teo lifted it to shrug the jacket on. ‘Did - did someone draw on you? In blood?’

Teo craned his neck to see. There, just below his armpit, where it might be missed by a casual observer: Two curved lines, meeting at one end, diverging at the other, the dark red standing out on his skin.

‘It’s lipstick,’ he said distantly. He could almost hear Karia’s voice: We’re even now, little fish.

‘Someone drew a fish on you in lipstick? What the fuck does that mean?’ Tommie asked, peering at it.

It meant if I see you again, you die.

Teo dragged his fingers across the drawing, smearing until it looked like a bruise. ‘It means not to go poking around where you don’t belong. Come on. We’ve got to go.’

Odessen, 3630 BBY/23 ATC

Teo knew she was there the second that she walked in.

He raised his drink to his mouth and took a swallow to cover up any giveaway changes in his expression, leaning one elbow on the bar with a casualness he was far from feeling as he listened to Hylo’s story. His heartbeats picked up speed as he watched her over the Mirialan’s shoulder, sauntering through the cantina, pausing at the jukebox to scroll through songs. He should have known, if reliable rumour had her away on Dromund Kaas, that there would be every chance she’d actually be on Odessen.

But Visz had wanted a face-to-face meeting with him for months now, and Corso had been desperate to visit Odessen Base since they’d started making runs for the Alliance, and Teo had been running very short on excuses he hadn’t already offered them both. And when Corso had heard that his old slicer buddy Jettison had washed up on Odessen working for the Alliance and insisted on heading there as soon as they were free, Teo hadn’t known how to tell him no. Not without telling him a story that Teo himself didn’t quite understand, or believe, anyway.

Teo tried not to let his eyes stray to the booth where Corso was sitting with Jettison and Bowdaar and a couple of other old buddies; it was stupid, really, but he didn’t want to draw any attention to Corso, not with her in the room. On the face of it, there was no real reason why she should care that Teo was on Odessen, but Teo still remembered the ambiguous message of that fish scrawled in scarlet on his skin, and who knew how she would react to seeing him again?

‘- So the damn things actually seem to be interbreeding with the Shade Stalkers, which means they’ve started to develop this weird camouflage reflex and their scales have started to bend light so we can’t see them in the trees until they drop - Hey, Commander!’ Hylo broke off her story in mid-sentence as she glanced around. ‘Don’t often see you in here.’

She looked over her shoulder and smiled exactly as if she’d just noticed them. ‘Some of us work for a living, you know.’ It was surprising how jarring it was to hear that clipped Kaasian accent clothing the tones he remembered.

‘And here I thought you just lounged around in your quarters all day with handsome men bringing you bon-bons and kneeling at your feet,’ Hylo retorted.

‘I leave that sort of thing to my head logistics expert.’ She turned away from the jukebox and strolled over to them. Her hair was raven-black now, scraped tightly back into a polished bun; her makeup was discreet and cleverly applied enough to look almost like no makeup at all; she wore a form-fitting black speedsuit, trimmed in red, as if ready to flow smoothly into combat mode at a moment’s notice. It was all very familiar from the holos, but it was still a shock to see her, the woman he still somehow thought of as Karia, sauntering up to him. Even her walk was different now, relaxed yet alert, carrying a subtle suggestion of a predator on home turf. ‘Who you’ll notice I’m not surprised to find in the cantina.’

She softened the barb with a teasing half-smile, and Hylo grinned back. ‘Hey, someone’s got to sample the latest shipment of vuul-nut wine, make sure it’s fit for your troops.’ The Mirialan motioned the bar-droid for another glass and poured a measure.

‘I’ve always commended your attention to detail.’ She took the glass Hylo held out to her and sipped, then licked her lips and smiled. ‘Delicious.’

‘Courtesy of the captain here.’ Hylo gestured to Teo. ‘Commander, meet Teo Lunulata. He’s the one who’s been doing such good work for us on the Commenor and Ison Runs. Captain, this is - well, you know who she is.’

Teo tensed, not quite certain how to play this, but she held out her hand to him without a flicker of recognition. ‘Captain.’

He grasped her hand, following her lead with slight relief. ‘An honour, Commander.’

‘First time on Odessen?’ she asked politely.

‘That’s right.’ Teo resisted the urge to look over at Corso, who he knew would be wide-eyed and starstruck in his booth; he was going to catch it later for not introducing him.

‘I was just telling the captain here about some of the new wildlife out in the woods,’ Hylo said.

‘Oh yes, the released specimens.’ She added with seeming casualness, ‘Amazing what can survive in the wild.’

Just like that, Teo was fifteen again, knees hugged to his chest and the sour taste of home-brewed wine on the breath that was fogging up the plexiglass, obscuring the stars. ‘Amazing,’ he answered quietly.

A new song came on the jukebox, some imitation Ithorian ballad Teo vaguely remembered being popular a decade or so ago, and she tilted her head to one side as if listening. ‘I wonder …’ She held out her hand to him. ‘Would you like to dance, Captain?’

Ignoring Hylo’s startled look, and Corso’s wide eyes in his peripheral vision, Teo took her hand. ‘I’d like that, Commander.’

She tugged him gently over to what probably passed for the cantina’s dancefloor of an evening, but which for now was just an empty space in the middle of the floor near the jukebox. Teo was conscious that everybody in the place was staring at them, but she fitted herself against him with such quiet assurance that it was the easiest thing in the world to wrap one arm around her waist and hold her hand with the other.

They danced like that for a few moments in silence, and then she tilted her head back to look up at him and said, ‘So. You finally made it to Odessen.’

‘It’s quite a place.’

‘I can’t take credit for it, believe me.’ There was an edge of bitterness in her tone that made Teo look down at her, and she shook her head slightly and gave him a small smile as if to say that it wasn’t anything to do with him. ‘I saw your name on Hylo’s very first list of operators to contact, but I didn’t know if you’d ever come here.’

Teo debated how to answer that non-question. ‘I didn’t know if you’d feel comfortable with that.’ He didn’t add, Or how quickly you’d have me killed if you weren’t.

The former Cipher Nine raised her eyebrows. ‘What are you going to do, tell people I sometimes pretend to be someone I’m not?’

Teo couldn’t help but smile at the exaggeratedly scandalised tone she used. ‘I suppose that secret’s out.’

‘Still, people close to me tend to become targets.’ Her gaze was direct. ‘You don’t want anyone thinking you’re one of them.’

‘I’ll keep my distance.’

‘Good.’ She cast a sidelong glance back towards the bar. ‘Who’s the boy with the arms?’

Teo resisted the urge to roll his eyes; apparently, people were never going to stop referring to Corso as a boy despite the lines at the corner of his eyes that deepened when he smiled and the touches of grey creeping into his hair at the temples. ‘That’s Corso Riggs.’ She would never have asked if she didn’t already know, so he added: ‘My husband.’

She gave another look at Corso from underneath her eyelashes. ‘He looks too good for you.’

‘He is.’

She smiled a little at the absolute conviction in his tone. ‘And here I thought you only liked things that were bad for you.’

‘You weren’t bad for me. I mean, Karia wasn’t. I mean -’ Teo abandoned his attempt at precision. ‘I guess I still think of her as … real.’

‘She’s at least as real as I am. Maybe more.’ She looked a little rueful. ‘I think I’ve buried her, and then you walk in. I suppose it’s harder than it should be, to let go of the people you were when you were young.’

‘Worth making the effort, though.’

‘Maybe.’ She cocked her head on one side. ‘How are you going to explain this to your husband?’

‘How are you going to explain dancing with a random freighter captain in the middle of the day?’ Teo shot back.

‘I like a challenge.’ She settled herself a little closer to him as the ballad continued, seemingly oblivious of all the watching eyes. ‘Besides, it helps to do something unexpected every so often. Otherwise my people might stop thinking of me as deeply enigmatic, and that would never do.’

Teo had occasionally whiled away long, slow nights in the cockpit over the past few years by idly putting together everything he knew or guessed about the woman now in his arms. But it struck him then that he’d never really thought about how hard it must be, for someone whose entire existence was predicated on disappearing, to find herself wearing the most famous face in the galaxy.

She must have seen the change in his face, because she said with an air of slight resignation, ‘Go on, say it.’

‘What?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Standing at the bar, you were burning with something to say, so say it now. Ask your questions. You won’t get another chance.’

‘Well, I do have questions,’ Teo said slowly. ‘I can live without the answers, though. But there is one thing I wanted to say to Karia Madesh, if I ever saw her again.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Thank you.’

She smiled, looking away. ‘Couldn’t let you die because you got out of the wrong elevator.’

‘I didn’t mean Nar Shaddaa.’

Her eyes flew back to his face, but all she said was ‘Oh.’

‘She was the first friend I ever had.’ Teo hated how that sounded - like he was asking for, like he thought he deserved, sympathy - but this was the only time and place he was ever going to get the chance to try to say this. ‘She - the things she said - she helped me. Even if that wasn’t what she was trying to do.’

‘She wanted to,’ she said slowly. ‘She cared about you. Well, you pissed her off.’ Teo smiled at the way she said it, like those two things were synonymous. ‘You had everything, all around you, and you couldn’t see it. Everything she -’ She broke off, stared past him blankly for a moment and then gave a tiny shake of her head. ‘Anyway.’ She refocused on Teo and smiled up at him. ‘She’d have been glad to see you thriving … little fish.’

Teo groaned. ‘Please don’t let my crew hear you call me that.’

‘Oh, I’ll do better than that.’ She slid her hand around the back of his neck and leaned in closer to him. ‘How about I get you in trouble one last time? For old times’ sake?’

Teo considered. ‘But will you get me out of it?’

‘You’ll just have to take your chances.’

The kiss was long, and sweet, and almost torturously slow, neither of them wanting to be the first one to pull away. It had been a long time since Teo had kissed a woman, or anyone apart from Corso, and he had almost forgotten what it was like - the softness, the urge to drop his hands and pull her up onto her tiptoes and against him. The curious stares he could feel upon them, the knowledge of something illicit and never-to-be-repeated, even the fact that he knew Corso was watching, it all added up to something tormentingly delicious, until Teo’s head swam when he finally, reluctantly broke the kiss.

‘What do you know,’ he said absently, lost in staring down at her, ‘I stayed upright this time.’ He took a breath and then released it, long and slow. ‘So is that what I missed out on in the airlock?’

She smirked, gently disengaging his arm from around her waist as the song came to an end. ‘Trust me when I say that you have no idea what you missed out on in the airlock.’

‘You’re not going to walk me back to my friends?’ Teo objected as she stepped back. ‘That’s no way to treat a respectable boy.’

She spread her hands in a theatrical shrug. ‘Don’t you know by now I’m a bad girl?’

‘Maybe not as bad as all that,’ Teo said gently. Then he winked. ‘But they won’t hear it from me.’

She smiled and sketched a cross over her heart, then turned to walk away.

As she did so, Teo glimpsed the expression that she’d worn to look at him wiped from her face in an instant, the warmth and life gone in a second to be replaced with stone.

He had the feeling she’d wanted him to see that, just as she’d once left a message on his skin for him to find; her own protective colouration, a signal from one predator to another, or just another way of hiding in plain sight? He wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t want him to try to find out.

But if there was one thing he still owed Karia Madeesh, it was distance. So he went back over to the booth, to Corso and Bowdaar and the others, and told them to prepare the ship for departure.

It was time to be somewhere else.

[classicalmonuments]

Nymphaeum of Suwayda

Dionysias Soada (Suwayda), Syria

2nd century CE (?)

The Suweida aqueduct is the first regional-scale supply system to supply a monumental fountain. The latter, which has now disappeared, is known from the descriptions of several travelers and, in particular, from the plan and elevation established by W. J. Bankes in 1816 or 1818. According to these documents, it is a semi-circular arched niche-fountain, 6.14 m long and 3.12 m deep; its height 6.09 meters. The opening of the exedra represents almost two thirds of the total length of the facade. It is framed, like the ends of the facade, by projecting pilasters with Corinthian capitals. A double frieze entablature, on which part of the dedication appeared, runs the entire length of the facade. The interior is composed of a deep exedra pierced by three niches surmounted by molded arcades and separated by piers surmounted by Corinthian capitals. This space covered with a half-dome housed a basin whose overflow flowed into the basalt gutter seen in place by Mascle.

[prometheusinitiative]

Map | Ground Floor

Back to Maps Summit Basin Floor 1: Living Quarters

Lobby

Concrete floor, concrete walls, everything here is so much concrete and the lobby is no exception. At least potted plants crowd the reception desk and waiting areas, making everything feel a little livelier. You’ve got snake plants, rubber trees, corn plants, monsteras, chinese evergreens, peperomias… and on and on and on. Nobody would bat an eye if you stole one or three.

Locked cabinets sit behind the front desk, presumably for paperwork of some sort. Ithika also happens to sit at the front desk sometimes, and whenever they’re there the front doors are unlocked. (All it takes to get through the locked front door is your watch though!)

An unlimited vending machine for drinks and snacks sits between two mirrored couches and tables. Baskets on the tables hold old magazines– for houses, cars, clothes… oh! There’s several with personality quizzes and match making advice…

Courtyard

The space between the main tower and the surrounding facilities is open to the air, and part of the tower cuts away to make space for the courtyard. Sculpted pine trees, floral bushes, and soft grass grace the gently sunlit area. There’s even some swinging benches, a picnic table, and cultivated herbs like rosemary and thyme. Various walls of ivy are scattered about for a semblance of privacy.

A fountain with an austere modern aesthetic gently bubbles at the center of the courtyard. It's kind of pretentious, isn't it?

Lounge

Glass walls line the inner and outer areas of the lounge, providing a clear look from the courtyard to the surrounding lake. Along the inner wall runs two long bar counters, with stools interspersed. There’s plenty of tables and chairs here, notably four to a table, but nobody is here to stop you if you want to pull some tables together (or make the legendary monotable like the main character of a geometry math problem). A shelf at the north end of the room has napkins, cutlery, trash, and a bin for dirty dishes which conveniently takes care of itself.

Kitchen

The southern half of the lounge houses a kitchen– with counters, sink, giant double fridge, pantry shelves, an electric top stove, electric oven, and microwave, toaster, blender, an industrial sized coffee grinder and espresso machine… oh, and several nice tea sets. In the drawers and cabinets you can find just about anything one might use for cooking.

The contents of the fridge and pantry shelves change every few days, but generally you’ll find: rice, honey, any canned or jarred goods including jam, peanut butter, marinara, beans, chicken, tuna and peaches, dried pastas, bags of chips, a thousand kinds of pickles, cereals, powdered milk, flour, instant coffee, a jug of white vinegar, and alcohol.

In the corner sits a palette of enough Emergency Ration Bars to last 16 people 2 years, so, if you’re not a fan of cooking or feel like building a brick house, there’s that. One bar has enough calories to feed a person for 3 days. There's just the question as to whether or not you can chew it.

Notably, there’s a fire extinguisher mounted to the wall.

Mail Room

A wall of unused mailboxes dominates most of the mail room. The other things you take in when first stepping into the room are the simple tables at the center (ft. paper cutter, tape, rulers, and permanent markers), and the crowd of empty cardboard boxes of various sizes scattered at the fringes of the room.

In one corner also sits a behemoth of a copy machine, which you can connect to using your smart watch. Seems like you’re limited to ten pages or copies a day (lame. That’s not even enough to print a full set of copies for the whole group).

Lastly, there’s an enormous cork board labeled the Community Board that spans the eastern wall of the room. Pinned up on it right now are profiles of your cohort: Names, Pictures, and Cover Letters, in full view for everyone else. It’s a good opportunity to freshen up on your peers if you haven’t already introduced yourselves.

A door to the side leads you into the maintenance room.

Utilities

The door is locked tight, but the sign affixed to it clearly indicates that there’s hazards in here of the red, yellow, and blue kind (that’s fire, electrical, and water). This must be the utility room. You can hear the gentle hum-buzz of mechanics going on behind the door.

Laundry

Washing machines are clustered in the center of the room, and dryers line the back wall in two rows. It seems that all of these machines can be activated with your watch, and your watch will also keep timer reminders for you for active cycles. Said timer beeps once 10 minutes before your washing/drying cycle ends, and once the time runs out will obnoxiously repeat a pleasant song until you return to the unit.

In the corner is a counter space with a sink and cabinets, where you can find detergent, softener, and bleach.

A door to the side leads you into the maintenance room.

Maintenance

The first thing you notice is the unsightly backside of the elevator shaft that dominates this room. There’s a little access door to the shaft, and a few panels on the outside.

There are several panels on the wall for breakers and switches, and it looks like the building’s network wiring begins here as well. You can find some thermostats for each room on the first floor, though they won’t let you go below 60 nor above 80 and return to their default after a day.

Whatever cleaning supplies you might need can be found here– though, hopefully you won’t be making enough messes to warrant that, right? Brooms, mops, industrial mop buckets, extra trash bins, and a little medley of chemicals and sprays to suit. There’s even some janitor’s uniforms, gloves, and boots.

Elevator

The elevator seems to rest on the ground floor, and opens with a pleasant chime almost the moment you press the button. You come face to face with– yourself?

The elevator is all mirrors. There are three glassy walls of reflections lit in bright blue tinted light, and the multitudes of you’s stretch out into forever.

By the door where the buttons should be is another black NFC panel. It seems the floor selection is available on your watch.

You can cram 14 people in if you all pack in like sardines, but this elevator more comfortably carries around 5-6 at a time.

[phoenixmaiden-gaming]

Hollow Knight part 31

More exploring around but this time I remembered about the knight that was stuck in webs. I had forgot about him and had to look up to see if he would still be there and he was so I went to Deepnest then to a new place called The Hive.

I went to Deepnest and the rude knight guy was still stuck in webbing so I cut him down.

He was really rude after I cut him down, saying I could have cut him but I could have died by his hand if I had. He didn’t even say thank you. Rude. I should have left him there.

I headed to a the Mantis Village because there was a room that I hadn’t been before. It had been locked but now it was open after I beat the Mantis Lords. There was a few chests of money as well as a Mark of Pride charm.

Next I went to Fungal Wastes and to a room where I had to double jump up to and was now in a new place called Fungal Core.

I went through some routes downward and ended back up in Deepnest and got to the mask piece I had seen before. I also created a shot cut.

Next I noticed I already had 2 Pale Ore so I went to the City of Tears and to the Nailsmith and had my nail upgraded.

From there I headed down to the Ancient Basin and at the bottom I found a wheel tree and activated it.

Once I collected all the red orbs that were scattered around I activated the tree and it said “Kingdom above, Palace below, Servants’ path”

Now in the Ancient Basin, I was sliding down the wall when I went into this part and it was a fountain.

The fountain said that a true servant gives all to the Kingdom and asked if I wanted to give all of my money. I was afraid of losing it all but did it anyway.

Thankfully it only took 3,000 Geo and I got a vessel piece and now I have another vessel to hold soul.

From a guide and a complete map I had I went to this spot leading up to Kingdom’s Edge. There was a part of the wall that I had to blast and revealed a new area.

I was now in The Hive. It was so pretty here and the little bees were so cute!!

Down one corridor I found a bench trapped in honey so I had to hit it free so I could use it.

In a wide area I found a wheel tree and I activated it. I first took care of the enemies so I could go around with no trouble.

Once I got all the red orbs I activated the new tree and it said “Hardened tribe, Light familiar”.

I found a mask piece in another wide area, I had to have one of the big bees crash into the cracked portion of the wall so I could get it. I just need one more piece to get another mask.

The final area on the Hive was where the Queen Bee was in the background and I had to fight the Hive Knight. 

He was kind of hard and I died a few times because he was quick even if he was easy to hit. It took a while to beat.

Past the fight area I went over some spikes and to the dead end where I picked up a Hiveblood charm.

I left the Hive to the rode way to Kingdom’s Edge and found a portion of the floor that was breakable.

I was back in the Hive and I found a worm baby!!

I found a secret entrance that was going to the Royal Waterays and I found yet another worm baby.

Now in the Royal Waterways, I found yet another place where I could break a wall and I found yet another worm baby.

I went down an area in the Royal Waterways and was able to get to a different area. I found this trash digging thing and he said he would give me food if I paid him, so I gave him 94 Geo and I got a Rancid Egg. Great. Thanks.

So I read that Zote would appear at the Colosseum so I went back and he was there in the rest area locked in a cage. He was just as rude and condescending as usual.

I went through the Colosseum again for the Trial of the Warrior and the final boss was Zote. When the cage came out all the spectators gasped and when he broke free they laughed because he fell. It was hilarious.

This was the most ridiculous fight I ever had. He was really easy and would fall over his feet and swing his sword willy nilly. He didn’t even do any damage to me. So much for having a mighty “Life Ender” sword. It wasn’t even a real fight.

I then went back to the entrance and paid the fee for the next fight of Trial of the Conqueror since I’m supposed to get a Pale Ore as a reward.

But I’ll do that next time since I’m tired. I took a rest below and filled my soul in the hot spring and I’ll be ready. Until next time!

[sam-roulette]

Timsasha; angst; a lamp, a fountain, and a map?

(I am going to hurt you I am going to rip your heart out This is just a little TimSasha wedding story!! Hope you enjoy <3)

vows, brittle and old

“My hair looks fine, right?”

“I think the zipper here is getting caught…” 

“I can!!! Take those off your hands if you need help-” 

“Good Lord, Tim,” Jon said, exasperated, “you’re going to pass out at the altar.”

Tim’s hands fluttered uncertainly in the air in front of him for a moment before he brought them closer to his chest, sheepish. “Don’t think I could fall asleep if the Queen herself commanded it at this point,”

“What’s the Queen got to do with it?” Martin pondered, setting down the last box of tiny decorative lamps. “Seems like she’d have better things to worry about,”

“I don’t know, it just,” Tim gestured somewhat helplessly, “came to mind? You know, commands and orders and whatever are monarchial bull but maybe the shock of seeing some random royal away from a guillotine will do- something,”

“You’re spiraling,” Jon deadpanned.

Tim frowned, “I’m not spiraling.”

“He’s just nervous,” Martin patted Tim’s shoulder sympathetically, shooting a little look at Jon. Tim made a mental note to tell Sasha to double down on the “make sure Martin gets the bouquet” plan they’d been cooking up. “The man’s getting married! Cut him some slack!”

“I will do no such thing.” Jon said, “He’s still in the way,” But Tim could see that he was fighting down a smile. Jon was a lot easier to read than he thought he was, and honestly, if he’d really been as stoic as he tried to pretend to be, Tim might not have made him his best man. But it was plain to see that Jon was happy, and the feeling was infectious.

The lamps had been Sasha’s idea. She and Tim had wandered around the garden all those months ago in the precious first planning stages and found that there was nowhere to feasibly hang the fairy lights he’d thought about putting up for the reception. It’d been a bit of a disappointment, but Sasha came through as always; he wasn’t even sure where she’d managed to find so many little vintage-looking electrical lamps, but they were a marvel, settled on top of the dark tablecloths. 

Martin was doing a remarkable job of setting up, of course, but Tim just couldn’t find it in himself to sit still. 

“Are you absolutely sure you don’t need my help?” Tim asked instead, watching Martin continue to set up.

Martin sighed from where he’d been unloading the lamps, gesturing with a faux rustic-gold ornament. “No, Tim, we do not need help- and you shouldn’t be helping!” 

“All you need to do is go and look pretty,” Jon said, “Shouldn’t be hard for you,”

“Oh, Jon,” Tim mock-gasped, “you think I’m pretty,”

Jon rolled his eyes, “Pretty annoying, yes,” 

“But. Still pretty, right-?” 

“You look very pretty, now please go check on the altar,” Martin cut in quickly, a few notes of red dusting his cheeks after he realized how quickly he’d cut in. Tim grinned. He couldn’t help teasing Martin, when it was just so Easy with a capital E to get him rankled. “P-Please.” Martin added again, belatedly.

“Aye aye,” Tim said, giving a little salute, unable to keep his smile from widening. It was a little soothing, seeing that these two were the same as ever. Definitely helped with the jitters. 

“Ah- don’t forget the map,” Martin said, almost offhanded as he pressed the little square of folded paper into Tim’s hands.

“Yeah, yeah,” Tim said, “See you there!” 

Tim waved as he disappeared into the little hedge maze of greenery, hoping his cheeks would be alright after today. He still couldn’t stop smiling, God- and sure, it was just the best day of his life which was going to be shared with quite literally the best human being on earth for the rest of their natural-born lives. It was just this life-changing emotional event. But Tim could play it cool. Save all that energy for the hours of revelry or, better yet, the vows.

Even in the relative quiet of the garden, he couldn’t help it. Leaving the sounds of Jon and Martin’s good-natured bickering behind, Tim’s thoughts were just as loud as ever, and the only thing on his mind (always, always) was Sasha, Sasha, Sasha.

Sasha was walking down that aisle in a little less than an hour. God, Tim could feel his heart threatening to leap out of his chest at the thought- abort mission, life’s too damn perfect and happiness meters are so high the whole thing’s going nuclear. Tim was turning left at every hedge with his brain fluffing up like clouds and he, genuinely, didn’t know how anything could top this.

Tim was so in love that it physically ached. He was sure that was just the nerves- it’d felt like an eternity since he’d seen his Sasha at this point!- but the squeeze of his heart in his chest was so profound that for a moment, he needed to pause. Beside him, a wall of pink mandevilla vines towered up, smelling sweet and lovely in the June air.

Wait, Tim suddenly thought, Why do I have a map?

Tim slowed to a stop in front of the flowers, eyebrows furrowing. It’d seemed so normal in the moment that he hadn’t really thought about it, but it was odd that Martin had given him a map, right? Like, that was a weird thing to be given. The garden wasn’t really all that complicated to go through. He just had to…

Hm. He’d thought the venue owner said nothing would be in bloom until that evening.

… 

Tim shook his head, frowning to himself. Maybe this had been getting to him more than he’d thought- the nerves, the anticipation of seeing Sasha walk up the aisle, looking like he’d never seen her before… He wished he’d taken a little peek before when he’d had the chance, if only to assuage his nerves. Just the tiniest little peek, long after Sasha had laughed in that beautiful way of hers and kissed him on the lips and said to be patient. Maybe then he’d have room to remember the map. 

He unfolded the thing to see what he’d forgotten in the initial daze of premarital bliss. Made sense to, right about then, when he was pretty sure he was in a part of the garden that he hadn’t been in before. The last thing Tim needed was to be late for his own wedding- even if it’d be funny later on, Sasha would never let him live it down! 

Maybe that cheerful thought was why it took him a moment to recognize it to be a map of the Archives. 

… 

… Alrighty then!

Well, mix-ups happened to the best of people. Martin really had been doing a lot to make sure the reception was being set up, so it made sense that maybe he just mixed up the maps somehow. The garden map probably would have looked newer than this old thing anyway- something far different from the rough, rusty lines, looking like the hurried work of someone trying not to be caught…

Tim was just glad he almost certainly had time to make it to the altar. The garden wasn’t very big, even if he was standing by a wall of thoughtlessness, so he’d probably loop his way back around eventually. Gave him time to think, in the end. More time to rehearse his vows. 

The flowers by his side swayed lightly in the summer breeze as Tim stood, adjusting his cufflinks and thinking.

“Really Tim,” Jon muttered, even more exasperated than before. That was Tim’s fault, probably- wasn’t a good idea to be pissing off your best man. What was that old trivia fact he’d heard? Something about best men being there to act as bait in case of evil? That was a high enough price for Tim to forgive a little stalking following. 

“Sorry, sorry!” Tim said, smiling sheepishly. “I was just- y’know, thinking of the vows,” Which, of course, had to be perfect, because Sasha was going to be perfect and he just knew he couldn’t mess this up.

(Was it weird that maybe he was still trying to parse out whether Persephone or Proserpina would be a more thematic mention? Perhaps, but Greek versus Roman had such different vibes. Tim wasn’t sure about likening himself to Hades or Pluton. Maybe Janus was an option-)

He wasn’t moving because he was apprehensive. He wasn’t moving because he was in love. There was a difference.

Jon understood. Jon was watching him, after all.

“She’ll be walking in five minutes,” Jon hissed out, harried. 

“We better get on out there, right?” Tim asked, smiling.

The grip he suddenly had on Tim’s arm was a vice, filled with strength that Tim wouldn’t have expected from the scrawny stick of a man. He’d been so harried lately (about the wedding of course) that Tim was honestly surprised he apparently had the time to keep his strength up. 

The brush of pink flowers as they walked directly through the vines barely registered to Tim, who was just so happy that it was finally happening. Here and now, in the garden, surrounded by everyone they loved, he was going to marry the love of his life. (And underneath were others that they loved who couldn’t make it.) Why else was it so hard to breathe but for the anticipation?

The altar was neatly set up, dwarfed by the massive fountain at the garden’s center, rising so high into the air that it felt like something from a fairytale. Atop a stone pedestal sat a tall woman, holding in one hand a simple horn to her ear and in the other, a glassless mirror. The water flowed from the horn and from her fingertips around the mirror and from around her waist, gently sloping into the basin below with crystal clarity and pooling around her stone feet. It had been the feature that sold Tim on the place immediately.

The fountain woman had no face. Tim had tried, before, to find the angle that would let him take a peek at the “hand mirror” she held before herself, trying to find a way to see her face and complete the impression of the art piece, but he never could get a clear shot. 

For a moment, Tim toyed with the idea of asking Jon, who was fidgeting by his side and making a bit more of a fuss about the whole wedding, to help him see if the fountain’s face was inside the mirror. 

Then, he wasn’t thinking much of anything. Sasha was here. It was starting.

Tim held his breath as from the other end of the aisle, Martin gently held aside the curtain of willow vines and gestured the bride forward. Sasha stepped delicately through, raising her ivory skirt just enough to keep from tripping over the fabric before she smoothed it down. 

Tim’s heart stopped dead in his chest, and oh, she was radiant. Even with the pearly opaque veil covering her features, she was a vision, standing taller than he had ever seen her in a dress that swooped low on her brown shoulders and trailed out behind her. The sleeves were embroidered with flowers, reminding Tim of the summer clematis Jon had dragged him through, and her curls were pinned up in an elaborate coif dotted with pearls. 

Tim only wished that night would come sooner, so the sky could gaze at her and weep for jealousy- no amount of stars or galaxies could compare. Even through the gloves that slipped into Tim’s hands, Sasha’s hands were warm, and he could feel her smile. 

Tim loved her so terribly that it just might kill him.

“You’re beautiful,” Tim breathed, ignoring the preacher’s beginning statements.

Sasha huffed out a little laugh, voice so bright it bathed them in sunlight, “You haven’t even seen what’s under the veil,”

“I don’t need to,” Tim said, feeling happy tears prick at his eyes. He just barely avoided biting his lip, trying to suppress them. He at least wanted to start crying after they’d declared their undying love for each other. If he started now, he might not have been able to stop.

“I love you,” Sasha breathed.

Tim’s heart was beating for the love of it. “I love you too- always will,” With trembling fingers, Tim slowly lifted the veil so he could see her face. The fabric moved fluidly with the motion and, fully exposed to the light of day, Tim saw…

The most beautiful woman he had ever seen. 

She stood before him, full lips painted a soft petal pink and parted gently. Dark brown freckles dotted her tawny skin in constellations, all seeming to lead to the beauty mark under her left eye. And what big eyes they were, large and brown and gazing at him with such love that Tim felt faint. She was tall and picturesque, as though she’d stepped off the stone pedestal fully formed, a beacon for poets to celebrate and lovers to mourn for. 

Tim looked at her face and his heart sang, I know you, I know you, I know you.

Tim whispered, “You’re not Sasha.”

The woman looked at him in confusion, eyebrows furrowing. Those full lips took on a worried twist. “Tim…? That’s,” She smiled a bit, shaking her head, “Come on now- of course I am! Don’t tell me you forgot your beautiful bride already?”

This woman was beautiful. Possibly the most beautiful woman that Tim had ever seen and a dream come true put in a form able to stand in front of him. He looked at her and was overwhelmed with how much he wanted to take her face in his hands and hold it there, close to him. He asked, louder, “Who are you?” and his brain was spinning on its axis, falling out of orbit. 

Why isn’t she here?

What did she do to Sasha?

The woman’s smile was fading. “I’m… I’m Sasha. Tim, we- I’m really Sasha. Are you…?” She was reaching her hand out.

“Where is she?” Tim asked, taking a shaking step back. There were murmurs from the crowd of onlookers, but he couldn’t make out their faces like this, not out the corner of his eye. He might have been able to remember their faces if he or Sasha had any family left alive. “Where is she?” 

“I’m right here,” Sasha said, eyes widening. She was pretty- so damn pretty that it made Tim’s chest ache like he should know this like this is irrational or a trick or-

This was a trick. It had to be. 

Taking another shaky step back, Tim nearly tripped over himself as he looked out toward the crowd of onlookers, calling out, “Sasha! Sasha, this was- it was a funny joke. Come on, I know you- you wouldn’t just,” His throat caught on leave me. 

“Tim, please,” The imposter said, reaching a hand out to him, “This really isn’t funny. You know me!”

“No,” Tim said faintly, “No-” He turned back toward the crowd. Jon stood in the audience and watched as Tim started rushing away from the altar, “Sasha! Where are you, Sash? Come on, it’s- you’re here, right?!”

“I am! I’m right in front of you!” Sasha cried desperately, rushing after him and taking him by the shoulders. Her hands were so warm against his shoulders. The real Sasha was always cold. “Tim, please. Look at me.”

(Sometimes in more ways than one- was he really so surprised to have been left at the altar?)

(He wasn’t moving because he was in love. He wasn’t moving because he was in love.)

The woman asked him, “What do you see?”

Tim slowly turned to face her, searching. She looked at him so earnestly, so desperately that it made him want to believe. Could someone lying look so close to genuine tears? Could someone lying have that much power in her voice, the much fear?

Could Sasha have any of those things? The Sasha he knew?

(He knew the answer.)

“I don’t know,” Tim said. The woman recoiled as though it were a physical blow, her hands jerking away.

“But…” The woman whispered, voice high and reedy, “I thought I was unforgettable?”

There was something to that. Something familiar. Something-

The world winked out.

Tim awoke in darkness, tears streaming down his face that he didn’t understand. The face of the woman in the dream who claimed to be Sasha but wasn’t was already retreating into the black, disappearing before the first of the tears cluttering along her lower lashes could fall.

And as Tim looked up at the ceiling, more awake than he’d felt since Prentiss, he wondered what had brought this all on, bewildered and feeling even more bewildered when his chest still ached.

He had fallen out of love with Sasha James months ago.

For a moment, Tim peered up at his ceiling and waited for the remnants of tears to dry. For a moment he considered getting up and starting the day early, or at least finding something to eat. In the end, though, he didn’t want to deal with the thought of having to go to the institute later or dealing with Jon outside the window, watching. Always watching.

Tim rolled back over and closed his eyes. He could stand to stay in bed for a bit longer.