#from a while ago. forcing myself to post something without fussing with it anymore. just chuck that image out there

[c-kiddo]

beau is now butch and she/they/he. i willed it so. world peace . standing ovation.

[thebiscuiteternal]

“Paper Scraps”

Post-Canon, Angst, Hurt/Comfort...ish?, Reconciliation, Discussion of Suicidal Ideation, Ghosts, Implied Sangyu, Mo Xuanyu Gets To Be Mourned, Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang Are Going Through It

Series Link on Ao3

__________

"To what do I owe the surprise visit?'' Nie Huaisang asks, and his voice is so devoid of emotion that Wei Wuxian has to bite back a shudder, suddenly very much aware that he is treading in completely new and potentially dangerous territory.

Nie-xiong is as dead as his beloved elder brother, and the Headshaker was nothing more than a mask. All that's left now is Nie-zongzhu, whom he knows nothing about and threatened the last time they actually spoke to each other in person.

Still, he sucks up his nerve and plasters on one of his usual careless smiles. "We need to talk, you and I. Just you and I."

"Wei Ying-"

He holds up a hand to cut off Lan Zhan's protest. "How about it?"

"And what, exactly, do you think there is for us to discuss, Wei-xiansheng? Have I not been behaving well enough for your liking?"

Ouch.

"Okay, I deserved that," Wei Wuxian says as he waves off his defensive husband and friend a second time, suddenly wishing he'd just snuck out and come alone.

Then again, that probably wouldn't have gone well either, judging by the wary looks he keeps getting from the handful of Nie disciples who linger defensively near their sect leader.

Okay... okay. No more trying to joke around. He takes a deep breath and lets it out, then straightens his back. "I'm here about Mo Xuanyu."

Nie Huaisang’s face betrays nothing, but the fan in his hand snaps shut with enough force that it's audible throughout the room. “Everyone, please escort our other two guests to the main gardens so that we may speak privately.”

“Zongzhu-” one massive bear of a man starts to protest.

At the same time Lan Zhan moves in front of Wei Wuxian to growl “We are not going anywhere,” and the tension in the room ratchets sharply to hair-on-end levels as the situation threatens to turn into a standoff.

Wei Wuxian pinches the bridge of his nose to stave off a building headache, then reaches out in an attempt to tug his husband back. “Lan Zhan. I’m the one who requested a one-on-one meeting, remember? Literally just now?”

“He cannot be truste-”

“Wei-gongzi, he might-”

“Enough,” Nie Huaisang snaps, the unexpected whip-crack of his voice making them all, a few disciples included, jump. “Let me remind all three of you that you came here and none of you are required to stay. In fact, today would be much improved if you didn’t.”

“Lan Zhan.” Wei Wuxian hisses.

Lan Zhan doesn’t budge, hand still tight on the hilt of Bichen. “If you harm Wei Ying-”

“Yes, yes, you and the Ghost General will cut me open and hang me with my own entrails just to start with,” Nie Huaisang replies irritably, giving a dismissive wave of the closed fan. “I’m well aware.”

Judging by the startled and utterly appalled looks that cross Lan Zhan and Wen Ning’s faces, that had decidedly not been on the list of options of what they might potentially do. But the descriptive suggestion does work to knock them off guard, and Wei Wuxian bites his tongue hard to keep his expression neutral as the two of them are herded out without any more fuss after Nie Huaisang makes a short gesture to his disciples. “You did that on purpose.”

Nie Huaisang turns without responding to the jibe at all and walks off towards another door.

Ouch again.

He trots after the other man and falls into step beside him as they enter a hallway that’s clearly not for public use. Part of him wants to ask where they’re going, if just to break the uncomfortable silence, but he keeps his mouth shut.

They finally stop at a door that, when Nie Huaisang slides it open, leads to a tiny garden so deep in the sect's keep that the back wall of it is cut into the mountain itself.

And in that little carved out cave, shielded from wind and rain and snow, sits a funeral tablet on a table shrine.

Wei Wuxian involuntarily sucks a sharp breath through his teeth at the sight of it, his hand coming up to clutch at his chest. Guilt wells up hot and stinging and bitter in his stomach, then higher into his throat. Dizzy, he sways on his feet and is only vaguely aware of the hands that catch him.

Once his resurrection had been revealed, everyone simply accepted him as “Wei Wuxian”, not “Wei-Wuxian-In-Mo-Xuanyu’s-Body”, seemingly having just... forgotten that the face he has now once belonged to someone else. He had grown so settled into this body that until the dreams had begun, he had barely given Mo Xuanyu a second thought.

But right at this moment, staring at the name carved into that tablet, held up by the one person left who had remembered- had loved the original owner of this body enough to memorialize him, he has never felt more like an invader in it.

His vision, gone fuzzy from the sickening torrent of emotion, slowly begins to come back into focus and, for just a moment, he is staring through Mo Xuanyu’s eyes into the worried expression of Nie-xiong before the lingering memory clears to the more neutral face of Nie-zongzhu.

He is on the ground, his head in the man’s lap, and the sudden urge to cry hits him hard. “Do you hate me?” he asks without meaning to, voice coming out plaintive and half-strangled by his effort to hold back the tears.

“You were the one who decided there was nothing left between us worth salvaging.”

“I did. And it was stupid. But that’s not what I mean, and you know it. Do you hate me for having this face?”

There is a pause, then a quiet sigh. “No, I don’t.”

“Why?”

“If it wasn’t you, it would be someone else. Or something else. Yu-er was…”

Nie Huaisang turns his head away, expression softening into a complicated mix sadness and pain, and Wei Wuxian finds himself thinking that while ‘his’ Nie-xiong might be dead, Mo Xuanyu’s Nie-xiong might still exist somewhere deep under the protective layers of Nie-zongzhu.

He swallows hard, then makes himself sit up and looks again at the tablet and its small offerings.

“Determined,” he says quietly, finishing the sentence. A tiny wet laugh bubbles out of his throat. “I thought… I really did believe that you had forced him into it,” he continues, and in the edge of his vision, he sees Nie Huaisang flinch at the accusation. “But no. No. He... really was determined to see it out to the end.”

“How do you-”

“Ah.” He scratches his cheek, then scoots to face the other man. “That’s actually the reason I needed to talk to you. I’ve been seeing- fuck, dreaming his memories, I guess… though they were more like nightmares, considering what was in them-”

“Wait,” Nie Huaisang says, holding up a hand. “When did this start?”

“Mmh. Just a little over ten months ago, I think? Or maybe closer to eleven. The first one was of your visit right after his mother died.”

Nie Huaisang goes slightly pale at that, though whether it’s from the admission of the length of time or the contents of the memory, Wei Wuxian can’t tell.

He gets an answer when Nie Huaisang gets up and rushes to the table, returning with something carefully cradled in his hands.

It’s a spirit pouch.

His hands are shaking as he holds them out to accept the tiny burden, and he’s vaguely aware that he’s gaping like a fish. “Huaisang…” he chokes out when he finally manages to find his voice again, but that’s as far as he gets.

“I… have studied a lot of ways of finding and contacting the dead,” Nie Huaisang says, and Wei Wuxian nods along numbly because that makes a ridiculous amount of sense, given the circumstances. “I know what the ritual notes said, but seeing that there was still something left of Da-ge after everything that had been done to him…”

He reaches out and touches the pouch and Wei Wuxian finds himself thinking of a gentle hand ruffling his (but not his) hair.

“I’m just sorry it took me two years to get up the nerve to go looking.”

But you went, Wei Wuxian thinks. You went.

He’d never even considered it. It had never crossed his mind at all.

“Eleven months ago, right?” he asks, voice still a little squeaky.

“Mm-hmm. I should have written to you about this long before now, but it seemed like every time I’d prepared myself to send the letter, something would happen that would remind me that… well.”

That we’re not friends anymore.

That you want nothing to do with me.

Wei Wuxian closes his eyes and rests his hands in his lap, still holding the pouch as if it’s made of porcelain instead of cloth. “I probably wouldn’t have read it,” he confesses quietly. “Or I would have, but I wouldn’t have believed you. I would have thought it was a ruse, a setup-” A tiny, wounded laugh escapes his mouth and he tilts his head back to stare up at the sky. “Maybe that’s why I started having the dreams. His way of telling me I’m an idiot.”

“A little drastic on his part if it was.”

“Can’t say it wasn’t necessary.” The pouch gives a jangling, discordant little hum when he pets it, the fracturing of the soul within vastly different from what he’d felt from Xiao Xingchen. The pieces feel smaller and fewer, yet heavier. “Oh,” he murmurs when he realizes why.

“Oh?”

“The array was designed to consume the resentment of the caster based on negative memories of the person or persons they wanted to curse. That’s why the memories of you and the flashes of his mother were so vivid when the rest of them weren’t. That’s why you were able to find these pieces. He really did see you two as the only bright spots in his life, so those memories were spared.”

Nie Huaisang makes a choked noise in the back of his throat, and when Wei Wuxian turns his head, the other man is looking away in a clear attempt to hide his expression. “He was wrong.”

“A year ago, I would have agreed,” Wei Wuxian mumbles. “After everything he showed me, though… I don’t think he was. I get it.”

He takes a deep breath. He has never talked about this, not with Lan Zhan, not with Wen Ning, and certainly not with Jiang Cheng, even if they are taking tentative baby steps towards being less awkward around each other. He’s not sure he should be talking about it with Nie Huaisang either, but-

“I know what it’s like, just wanting everything to end. Deciding the whole world can go to hell. Maybe I didn’t intend for the backlash from breaking the seal to kill me, but I sure didn’t fucking care what it would do to me one way or another. Nothing and nobody could have saved me by that point. You couldn’t have saved him even if you’d dragged him home with you like Lan Zhan wanted to do to me.”

“Wei Wuxian-”

He ignores the little flutter in his chest that they’ve at least moved back to an address that feels less precarious than the icy ‘Wei-xiansheng’. “Let me finish, okay?”

“Okay.”

“So... So... Ah, fuck,” he mutters, gently shifting the pouch so he can scratch the back of his neck, trying to catch the lost trail of thought. “You know… I never questioned the clothing I woke up in when I was resurrected. As brutal and nasty as the Mo family were and as disgusting as that little shack was, it should have come off as weird that I was wearing such nice robes.”

There is a quiet sniffle, and Wei Wuxian pretends not to see Nie Huaisang wipe wet eyes with the edge of a sleeve as he continues talking. “He appreciated those. Appreciated that you tried to take care of him.”

He raises the pouch to eye level, and it gives another little crackly hum. “And clearly he still appreciates your efforts, considering his method of dragging me here to make me apologize for thinking the worst of your relationship. So, I’m sorry for that.”

Nie Huaisang gives a watery little chuckle and swipes at his eyes again. “Accepted. Is he… Is he alright? I only know how to contact souls, I don’t know anything about tending to them.”

“Honestly… I’m not sure what can be done,” Wei Wuxian admits as he begins another examination. “There’s really so little of him left, I don’t know what will happen if a purification ritual is attempted. He seems to be more stable as he is than Xiao Xingchen was, but there’s no guarantee he’ll stay like that. Still, I owe it to him to find some way to help him out, so I’ll do what I can.”

“If it would be easier for you to take him back to the Cloud Recesses for study, then… then you should,” Nie Huaisang says, and Wei Wuxian is a little bit impressed that he was able to make the offer despite how much it must have hurt.

“I think he’d be much happier staying here,” he says, then tentatively adds, “But that would mean visits, plural, and while I’m definitely going to have a very long talk with them about all this, I doubt I’ll be able to come without either Lan Zhan or Wen Ning… probably both at first.”

Nie Huaisang rubs his temples with his fingertips, his expression cycling through a complicated series of emotions too quickly for Wei Wuxian to follow, then he sighs. “We’ll figure something out,” he says as he reaches out and takes back the pouch.

Wei Wuxian can’t help smiling at the tender way he cradles it against his chest as he gets up to approach the funeral tablet and put it back in place. “Yeah. We’ll figure something out.”

[cozy-the-overlord]

Severed

Sequel to Attached

Summary: When the Council sends Sydaya to retrieve the tesseract, she's forced to confront an old friend she thought she'd never see again.

Word Count: 5,130

Pairing: Loki x OFC

A/N: I've been wanting to write a sequel to Attached for a long time now-- almost since I first posted it-- but I had been holding off because I didn't think anyone would be interested in such a sequel. Attached isn't exactly one of my more popular fics, and I felt like my time would be better spent finishing projects I knew people wanted to read. But nearly a year later, I decided to just go for it, and I'm really glad I did because this was some of the most fun I've had writing a story for a long time. I guess I'll consider it an early birthday present to myself lmao. 

Thanks for reading!

Warnings: None, I think? It’s basically the first Avengers movie, but with a Jedi running around on the helicarrier lol.

Tags: @lucywrites02 @gaitwae @whatafuckingdumbass @the-emo-asgardian @imnotrevealingmyname

If you want to be tagged, feel free to send an ask/message :)

Read it on Ao3!

The starfighter set down against the helicarrier with a jolt, just barely within the white lines the control tower had directed her between. Sydaya winced. She had never been particularly good at landings. Given the circumstances, she supposed it could have been much worse, but still, she found herself pressing the lantern charm on her necklace against between her fingers.

Just breathe. It’s all going to be okay. Just breathe.

A team of SHEILD marshallers was already rushing forward to strap her ship down as she climbed out of the cockpit. Even with everything going on, Sydaya fought the urge to laugh. Shortly after her assignment, her old master had given her a quick briefing on Terran culture and technology, with strict instructions to not allow her judgement to show.

“The Terrans may be a bit … behind the times,” he said hesitantly. “But they are a very proud people. Be careful not to offend them. This situation is delicate enough already.”

And so Sydaya bit her lip, even though the idea of a carrier with an outdoor hanger but without gravity locks seemed like something out of a history data-tape.

A man was awaiting her at the entrance, wearing the same navy-blue jumpsuit and neutral expression as every other SHIELD agent she’d come across—although, he did do a visible double take as she approached.

“Sydaya Clepar?” he asked, frowning at his tablet.

Sydaya forced a smile. “Yes, sir.” She managed to hold her expression even as he turned back to her, peering at her as if she were a chicken claiming to be a swan.

“You’re the one the Jedi Council sent?” he asked again.

The muscles in her face were beginning to hurt. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Can you take me to Director Fury, please?”

After another suspicion-laced glare, the agent finally seemed to concede. “This way.”

Sydaya heaved a quiet sigh of relief.

It wasn’t really his fault, she told herself as she followed him through the hallways of the helicarrier. When people were told to expect a Jedi, their minds went to wizened old men with scraggly beards and wrinkled cheeks hidden under the hoods of their robes. Who could blame them for being confused when they got a skinny little snip of a girl instead? Sydaya knew she was young, and it didn’t help that she had always been short for her age. Any normal person would wonder at her qualifications. Honestly, Sydaya herself had been wondering at her qualifications for this mission, although her age had little to do with it.

The bridge was bustling with movement—people hurrying from one place to the next, shouting coordinates and orders and all sorts of things as their thoughts raced through their tasks. It was chaos, but it was a familiar chaos—almost reminiscent of life on a Jedi cruiser. Sydaya felt herself relax a bit.

See? Just get through this quickly, and everything will be back to normal.

“Commander Clepar?”

Sydaya turned to find herself facing a shorter, middle-aged man with a receding hairline, the only person around to be wearing a suit instead of jumpsuit. He gave her an enthusiastic smile.

“Are you Director Fury?” she asked, even though she was fairly certain she knew the answer. Based on what she had heard of the director of SHIELD, he didn’t strike her as a smiley type.

“No.” He extended his hand, and after an awkward moment Sydaya realized he expected her to take it. When she did, he gave it a firm shake. “I’m Coulson. Agent Phil Coulson. Fury asked me to get you up to date.” He grinned. “I’ve never met a Jedi knight before.”

Sydaya swallowed. Right. She was a knight now. She still couldn’t get used to that. Everything had happened so fast—her trials had been completed in a whirlwind two months, her ceremony shoehorned in right before she was dispatched to Ryloth to aid Republic troops against the Separatist blockade. She still found herself reaching for the clump of hair where her padawan braid had once hung.

But that was irrelevant now. Sydaya cleared her throat.

“Can you explain the situation to me?” she asked, summoning her most professional, Jedi-knight voice. “I’m afraid I wasn’t told very much.”

“Well, we haven’t located the tesseract yet, but it should be easy enough to track down,” he assured her. “It emits a very recognizable gamma signature—we’ve got our best man working on it right now. Bruce Banner, have you heard of him?”

She shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”

“Well, he knows what he’s doing. He’ll find it soon enough. But we do have the Asgardian in custody.”

“Yes.” Her mouth suddenly felt quite dry. “Yes, I was informed of that.”

She had thought she must have been dreaming when Master Windu had pulled up the hologram of Loki Odinson marching through the streets of Terra, wearing the same golden helmet he had once mockingly plopped on her head after they snuck away to the gardens from a particularly tedious meeting.

You should try wearing it into battle sometime. It suits you.

Sydaya had swatted at him and called him a name—something playful and stupid, something she couldn’t quite remember anymore. She had been trying to forget the events leading up to last year—she didn’t want to forget, but it hurt to remember, and it was useless to cause herself pain over something that she couldn’t change. There is no emotion, there is peace. It was a lie, but it was such a pretty lie, and it was easier to repeat over and over again in her head than to admit that all she really wanted was one last chance to see the only person she had ever wanted to hold.

Perhaps she should have been careful what she wished for.

Her mission was not about Loki. Really, it had very little to do with him. The Council was concerned with what he possessed—infinity stones were nothing to be trifled with. They hadn’t been happy with the Terran organization SHEILD housing the tesseract to begin with, and the events of the past few days had only proved their concerns. Sydaya was to work with SHEILD to recover the gem and to return it to the Jedi Temple on Coruscant at all costs. Only then would both it and the galaxy be secure.

Sydaya barely heard these orders. She could only watch the looping hologram, watch the emaciated ghost of the boy she had thought was lost forever.

She told them that she couldn’t accept this assignment. As the Council was surely aware of, she was too personally involved—she wasn’t sure she could trust herself to remain emotionally detached from the situation. In all honesty, she had been shocked that they had attempted to give it to her in the first place.

That’s when Master Windu told her that she didn’t have a choice.

“In order to send a Jedi into the Nine Realms, we require the Asgardian royal family’s consent,” he said. “You are the only Jedi to whom they would allow passage.”

Sydaya was stunned. “Me?” she whispered. “Why?”

“They didn’t say.” Even through the hologram, she could feel the way Master Windu was studying her face. “But I trust you will treat this mission with the solemnity and maturity that we would expect from a knight.”

The message was clear. Get ahold of yourself.

Sydaya swallowed. Without realizing it, she clutched at the lantern charm around her neck. The roughness of the broken glass scratched against her fingers like sandpaper.

Just so you don’t forget me, what with all the attractive princes you run into.

“I will, Masters,” she said. “You have my word.”

On the helicarrier, she tucked the necklace underneath her robes. She probably shouldn’t have been wearing it at all—somehow, she felt that wearing a gift from the criminal she would soon be interrogating wasn’t treating the mission with the “solemnity and maturity” Master Windu expected—but she couldn’t bring herself to take it off.

Agent Coulson was still talking. “There was a bit of a fuss, but for the most part, he surrendered willingly,” he continued. “The cell where we’re holding him is incredibly secure—you know, it was originally designed for—”

“Sydaya!”

The booming voice surprised her, even though it shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. Sydaya turned to see the familiar titan of a man making his way towards her across the bridge. She bowed. “Prince Thor.”

The Asgardian took her hand in his and pressed a light kiss to her knuckles. “It is good to see you, my lady. Congratulations on your knighthood.”

Sydaya frowned. “How did you know about that?” She hadn’t been in contact with Thor or any of his family since Loki’s funeral over a year ago.

“My mother told me.” It was a subtle confirmation that Queen Frigga had been keeping tabs on her Jedi career, just as her master had predicted. Sydaya tried to swallow the awful feeling rising in her stomach. Thor continued. “How have you been fairing?”

She inhaled. “About the same. And you?”

He sighed. It was strange— while she had been staying on Asgard, Thor’s defining characteristic had always been his childishness. He saw everything as a conquest refusing to look at a situation from any perspective other than his own and throwing a fit when the rest of the world wouldn’t bend to his desires. And yet here he was, only a year later, looking decades older and oceans more somber.

“It is difficult,” he finally said. “I wish to be overjoyed that he is alive, and of course I am, but …” He shook his head. “He’s not the brother I remember.”

Sydaya’s breath caught in her throat. This was beginning to sound like what her old master had told her before she left, the warning he had left her with …

Her eyes burned, and she blinked, quick to push the memory far away from her thoughts. She couldn’t revisit that conversation. Not now.

“Has he said anything about the tesseract?” she asked. “Or why he’s interested in it?” It was a question that she had yet to hear anyone ask, but that had been nonetheless floating through her head ever since she had walked out of her briefing. Why? The Loki she knew cared little for rulership and had no interest in domination. What happened to him in the last year? Why had he suddenly become so power hungry?

But Thor only shook his head. “Nothing at all. He has said nothing but that which to taunt us. I fear he is completely beyond reason.”

Sydaya gulped. This was the part she had been dreading. “Perhaps I should talk to him then. Maybe he’d be more willing to talk with—” With a friend? But that’s not what you are anymore, are you? She bit her tongue, her mouth flooding with the metallic taste of blood. “With someone more removed from the situation.”

“I can arrange that,” Agent Coulson offered. “Just give me a sec.” As he went off to speak with another agent at a computer, Thor turned back to her with a concerned frown.

“He’s not the same, my lady” he cautioned. “I doubt speaking with him will help anything.”

Sydaya shrugged, hoping the prince couldn’t see how tense her shoulders had become. “I’ve faced worse,” she said with false levity. “Besides, I have orders. I’ll be alright.”

Down the hall, Coulson waved her over. “This way.”

…

The cell in which they were holding Loki was … different. It was, at its base, a large, glass cylinder suspended over an air chute by four mechanical fixtures—a safety net, as Coulson referred to it.

“If he touches the glass with any kind of force, the whole thing drops,” he explained eagerly. “So you don’t have to worry about him trying anything.”

Sydaya swallowed. “I wasn’t.”

Her heart was thudding as she made her way down the hallway, so loud she was certain everyone on the whole damn ship could hear it.

There is no emotion, there is peace.

She wondered if there would ever be a day where the code rang true in her mind.

The figure in the cell was lounging on the bench, head back, eyes closed, black hair slicked into spiky curls cascading over his shoulders. He laughed as she approached. The sound was hard and cold, and yet so familiar it hurt.

“Come back for more already? Or do you—” Loki’s voice cut out abruptly when he turned to face her. For a moment, Sydaya forgot how to breath.

Because it was Loki. Living, breathing, solid Loki. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but with all the warnings, all the somberly whispered words describing some unrecognizable madman, it seemed impossible that it would be Loki, her Loki, awaiting her in that cage.

That’s not to say he looked well. He had aged since she saw him last—there was a hollowness to his cheeks, a tension to his shoulders that hadn’t been there before. When he stood, his movement was stilted, rigid, lacking every bit of the easy fluidity she had always associated with him. The fire that once blazed behind his eyes seemed to have been dulled to weary coals.

And there was something else too, something that only became apparent once the jolt of seeing him again had faded. The two of them were alone in this airshaft prison and yet, through the Force, Sydaya could feel a third being—something cold and rotting, wafting in and out the cell and clinging to Loki’s form like a leech. The hairs on her arms stood straight up. Sydaya had never before been in the presence of the dark side of the Force, but she knew enough to recognize it in an instant. She recoiled without thinking.

On the other side of the glass, Loki seemed shocked into silence. He stared at her as if she were an apparition returned from the dead, approaching like some half-starved predator as his eyes remained locked on hers.

“No,” he finally whispered. It felt almost like a growl. “No, this is a trick. The Council wouldn’t send you. You’re too involved.”

Sydaya tried to swallow the cyclone of emotion bubbling at her throat, but her mouth felt too dry.

“They didn’t want to,” she managed at last, voice flat. “Your parents wouldn’t allow anyone else.”

“My parents.” Loki turned away, looking out through the wall at something that seemed to appear only in his mind’s eye. He exhaled a humorless laugh. “So is this their attempt at pacification?” he asked. “Are they scrounging up all of my old acquaintances in hopes that one might be able to reason with the madman?”

“Loki—”

“In all honesty, I’m surprised you even accepted the invitation, Padawan,” he said, his tone taking on a much more purposeful edge as he began pacing the length of his cell. “Seeing as our last conversation seemed too much for you to handle.”

His words hit her like a slap to the face. Her own echoed through her mind.

I can’t do this.

It must have showed in her expression because his leering grin only widened.

“How shall it be, Padawan?” he asked, crowding against the glass. “How long before you run from me again? I do hope your code allows you to stay for the grand finale this time—you missed the whole show before, and I must say it was quite the thrilling experience—”

“Loki stop.” To her surprise, he did. It was taking everything in her to hold herself steady. Sydaya pressed her fingernails into the palms of her hands. He wasn’t being fair and he knew he wasn’t being fair, which cut even deeper. That last time they spoke, in the gardens of Asgard … didn’t he realize how many nights she had lain awake, replaying that conversation back in her mind over and over again until she could hardly see straight? Didn’t he know how the words she didn’t say that day now haunted her every waking moment? Or did he only want to torture her more?

That awful, malevolent presence seemed to be pulsing around them, flexing with every dagger he spat at her, beaming every time they landed. She inhaled. This isn’t himself. You know he’s not himself. Pull yourself together.

“I’m here for the tesseract,” she said, tone so devoid of emotion that even Master Windu would have been impressed.

Loki laughed again, even more dryly than before. “Of course you are.” He returned to his pacing. “Well, as I’m sure your Midgardian stooges would be overjoyed to tell you, I don’t have it. I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Loki raised his eyebrows as if scandalized. “Are you saying you wish to search me, Padawan?” Smirking, he stretched his arms out, as if expecting an embrace. “By all means, go ahead, although I imagine it would be a difficult situation to explain to your masters—”

“Who’s making you do this?” she interjected. Her words had an immediate effect. Loki’s smile dropped. All at once, the room went cold. It was only for a moment, but the façade he had been holding around himself ever since she had walked in cracked, and for a split second she could feel it, overwhelming all her senses— his sheer, unmitigated fear.

He was terrified.

It broke her heart.

Sydaya pressed her hand to the glass, even as he turned away from her.

“I know you, Loki,” she whispered to his back. “You never wanted to be king—you told me so yourself, remember? I know this interest in the tesseract isn’t yours.” She waited, but he said nothing. The Force twisted around them again, but this time she almost heard something too, dark, growling words not meant for her ears.

“Who’s here?” she asked sharply. “Who’s listening right now? Who’s making you do this, Loki?”

“Stop!” He whipped around, chest heaving, eyes wild. “You don’t know anything,” he snapped. “Not about me. Not even in the slightest.”

Sydaya leaned against the glass, wishing she could hold him, soothe him. “Then tell me.”

He sank back against the bench. For a moment, it seemed nothing else existed—just Loki staring at the floor, and Sydaya staring at him. He laughed softly, shaking his head even as he pressed his hands to his temple.

When he looked up, there were tears pooling in his eyes. “You really shouldn’t have come, ‘Daya.”

She didn’t have the chance to respond before the explosion rocked the entire helicarrier.

…

When her old master had popped into her quarters before she left for Terra, Sydaya had known he had something more important on his mind than explaining how Terrans used metal bullets in their firearms and greeted each other by shaking hands. She had listened and nodded to everything he had to say as she sat hunched in her desk chair, chewing through the inside of her cheek as she waited for him to reach his point. She didn’t need the Force to tell her that it wasn’t good.

It had taken him a while to work up to it. But finally, he inhaled, fixing her with a serious glare from where he sat on her bed.

“‘Daya,” he said. “I want to make sure that you understand what’s at stake here. The tesseract—all the infinity stones— they contain a power that no one in this galaxy can ever truly harness. Alone, they’re volatile and dangerous. In the wrong hands, they have the capacity for mass destruction.”

Sydaya had frowned. She knew this, of course—every youngling knew about the infinity stones. “Why are you telling me this?”

He hesitated. “I know Loki was your friend. But you have to realize that that’s gone. He has the tesseract, and it’s clear he’s got his mind set on devastation. You must not allow that to happen.”

“I understand—”

“Do you?” her master asked. “Because you’re being sent in alone—no backup, no reinforcements, no one but yourself to rely on. And there may be a point where you’ll have to make a difficult decision.” He paused. “Sydaya, you must secure the tesseract. At any cost.”

It took a moment for the full meaning of his words to sink in. When they did, Sydaya felt as if she was going to be sick.

“It won’t come to that,” she whispered. It couldn’t. “I’m sure of it.”

He didn’t say anything for a bit, eyeing her with something in between apprehension and pity. “You know why Asgard demanded only you on this mission, don’t you?” he finally asked. “Frigga realizes this as well as I do. She knows that any Jedi sent to Terra poses a risk to her son. She chose the one knight she believes won’t be able to do what’s necessary to defuse the situation.” He stood to leave, holding her in the severity of his gaze. “Millions of lives are at stake, ‘Daya. Don’t let your emotions get the better of you.”

His words rang through her mind even louder than the blaring alarms as she rushed through the hallways of the helicarrier. They were under attack—that much was abundantly clear. She gripped her the hilt of her lightsaber, ready to ignite it at a moment’s notice, but she seemed to be alone in the corridor. Still, she could sense the attack unfolding elsewhere on the ship, felt the bloodshed even as another explosion rattled the ground beneath her feet. A woman’s garbled voice pierced the air from a speaker on the ceiling.

“Perimeter breach—hostiles in SHIELD gear—”

Sydaya kept running, searching frantically for a ladder or a staircase or some other way to reach the outdoor hanger. For that had to be the key—how else would hostiles have been able to infiltrate a ship flying over 40,000 feet above the planet’s crust? They had to have a smaller ship of their own, one they were able to land on the helicarrier without issue due to the nature of an open hanger and the lack of gravity locks.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

She had to get to the hanger. It was the only way they could have entered the ship, and thus the only way they could exit alive. Cut off their escape route, and they would be trapped.

The intercom crackled with more voices, most of them too distorted to make out. She caught only one name before the entire system cut out.

Loki.

She shouldn’t have left him. Releasing him was surely the assailants’ target—knowing Loki, he probably planned the whole damn thing himself. Leaving his side had been a mistake, and she knew it, but instinct had taken over in the moment and she had rushed off to find out what was happening.

It didn’t matter. As long as she got to the hanger in time, it didn’t matter.

Sydaya had just made it to a ladder when the second engine cut out. She was barely able to register the lack of the familiar hum when the whole carrier began tipping forward.

“Shit!”

She managed to scramble up the shaft before she went careening down the hallway, but the ship was losing altitude, and fast.

The hanger. Now.

Grunting, Sydaya pulled herself up the rungs. I’m not dying on this farce of a mission. Not today.

The door at the top of the passage was locked. She only tried pushing at it once before reaching for the lightsaber at her waist.

The door flew from its hinges, metal glowing orange with heat as it clattered down the front of the carrier. She pulled herself through the opening and nearly went flying after it—the wind smacked her like a sucker punch, beating her so hard that it felt as if her head would be ripped from her shoulders. She clung to the hilt until her knuckles turned white, focusing on the soothing beam of energy pulsing through the Force from the crystal within as she fought to find her balance atop the failing fortress.

There is no death, there is the Force.

She pushed on. Loki was near—she could feel him, feel the anxious chaos convulsing through his mind as he hurried forward. He was almost at his ship …

Sydaya found him around the corner of the watchtower. He spun around almost as soon she did, eyes crazed as they met hers. He yelled something she couldn’t hear over the roar of the wind in her ears.

The SHIELD-attired accomplices flanking him fired at her, but she dodged their bullets without issue. She grasped the Force around her and flung towards them in one giant push, hoping to knock them off their feet.

It almost worked. The fake SHIELD agents tumbled backwards, but Loki used his scepter to brace himself, maintaining his balance. It was only then that Sydaya noticed the crimson liquid staining the tip.

Blood. He’d killed someone.

The realization turned her insides to ice.

Loki threw a blast of blue energy at her from the scepter. Sydaya almost didn’t duck in time—she could feel the heat singe the tips of her hair as she rolled under it. He hissed and lunged forward, almost bringing the scepter down on her head, but she blocked with her lightsaber and pushed him back. His Force-infused gold hissed as it collided with her blade, but it didn’t break. Their weapons locked together as they pressed against each other.

“Loki—” she choked. It shouldn’t be like this. It shouldn’t have to be like this. “Loki, it’s not too late—”

He sneered, ashen skin stretching too thin across his face. “Yes it is.”

He ripped himself from her, whipping around to shoot another blast at her in close range. She caught it with the Force, straining to hold it still in the air before her.

She had done this before, on the battlefield, stopping blaster charges in midair and throwing them back at her unexpecting assailant. It was a trick she had picked up from her master, back when the war had just begun, when she had first been assigned his padawan. At this point, it was practically second nature.

All she needed was to push.

Loki seemed to be frozen. He stared at her wide-eyed, searching her very soul as he waited for what happened next.

Sydaya’s wrist was shaking.

You must secure the tesseract. At any cost.

She hadn’t lied when she told her master she understood. If Loki were to escape here, he’d continue on his errand to deliver up the tesseract to whatever dark force held him in its grasp. He wasn’t her friend anymore. He was a threat to the galaxy at large.

But when she looked at him, she saw only the boy under the ash tree in the gardens of Asgard, laughing as he tried to talk her through creating her first illusion.

Frigga was right.

The blast hit Sydaya right in the gut. Her vision went white, the pain that exploded across her torso so sharply overwhelming that she didn’t even notice when she hit the floor.

Her lungs were on fire.

Loki was standing over her. When he had made his way over to her, she wasn’t sure, but there he was, looking down at her as she choked out bloodstained gasps on the hanger floor. The scepter in his fist glowed brilliant blue.

Sydaya whimpered.

Finish it. It’s over, just finish it.

But he didn’t move in for the kill. He just stood there, stock still, staring down at her with an expression that she couldn’t quite read.

Sydaya didn’t understand until he knelt beside her to reach for the little green lantern that dangled from her neck. His fingers shook as he cupped it in his hand, mesmerized. For a moment, it seemed he was about to rip the chain from her neck. The thought made her eyes swim with tears.

Please don’t take it, Loki. It’s all I have left, please don’t take it.

But he didn’t. He set the charm down against her collarbone painfully slow, as if he was afraid to break it. When he turned back towards her, his lip was trembling, his eyes glossy.

His fingers brushed her cheek, cupping her face with such restraint that it seemed he was afraid to break her too. His hand was cold. It felt nice against the fever burning under her skin.

Sleep.

The voice was Loki’s, but it didn’t come from his lips. It floated through her mind, soft and soothing and impossible to ignore.

Sleep.

Her eyes drifted close, the fire in her veins slowly washing away as the world faded to blackness.

…

Sydaya woke up surrounded by white.

She was in a bed, hidden by a curtain. Voices rang through her ears in a steady hum as footsteps shuffled back and forth around her. The scent of antiseptic stung her nostrils.

A hospital ward.

She sat up with a groan. Her limbs ached, and everything felt far too heavy. Her torso was wrapped in bandages. Sydaya frowned. Certainly not uninjured, but a far cry from the mess of blood and shredded skin that had been plastered across the hanger floor.

How was she alive?

She jumped when the curtain rasped across its pole. A woman dressed in blue scrubs ducked through, smiling when her gaze landed on Sydaya.

“Commander Clepar. Good to see you’re awake.” She glanced at her clipboard. “You got some minor burns and a conk in the head, but nothing too serious. Pretty lucky, all things considered. You should be able to leave in a little bit.”

Nothing too serious.

Without thinking, Sydaya reached for the charm around her neck, rubbing the uneven texture across the pad of her thumb. There was no way what happened on the deck was nothing too serious. Not unless …

Her voice was dry and rough when she spoke. “Where’s Loki?”

The doctor sighed. “We don’t know, sir. I believe they’re trying to track him now.” She continued on about burn treatments and discharging, but Sydaya didn’t hear her. She rolled the lantern between her fingers again.

Loki had healed her. He must have. There was no other explanation.

She tried reaching out through the Force, but it was useless. He had long since left, and she hadn’t the energy right now to go searching for him.

But he was out there.

Somewhere, her Loki was still out there.

And somehow, she was going to bring him back.

[kerfufflewatch]

quick HC about their feelings on marriage that turned into a 1700-word fic, whoops whoops

--

“Somethin’ wrong, sugar? Went a bit quiet on me there.”

Hanzo blinks, and his eyes burn as the ceiling swims back into focus. He glances down at McCree, draped over him with his chin propped on Hanzo's chest, then out the window. The sun had still been setting, its golden rays still sneaking through the blinds of their dorm to dapple across their sheets and skin, when they had first settled into bed in the pleasant exhaustion of post-orgasmic glow; now, it is simply dark.

Hanzo affects a smile as he looks back to McCree. "It is nothing," he says, but McCree's worried frown only deepens.

"You sure?" McCree presses gently, and Hanzo is helpless to do anything but sigh and fall back against the pillows.  Damn McCree for his perceptiveness--nothing fools him anymore.

"It is something Genji said to me earlier," he admits to the ceiling, unable to meet McCree's gaze.

"Yeah? What'd he say?"

"He . . . asked when we planned to get married."

It had been an offhand comment made earlier that day--a joke more than anything else. They had been discussing the mission that McCree himself was out on, as well as half of the rest of the team, over cups of tea in the dining hall. Hanzo doesn't quite recall how the conversation had transitioned from the mission to McCree to Hanzo's relationship with him, but nonetheless something had prompted Genji to tease, "So when are the two of you just going to get married and get it over with?"

The question had caused Hanzo to sputter on a mouthful of tea, making Genji laugh. After wiping his mouth on his sleeve, Hanzo had replied, "We have no plans to do any such thing."

"No?" Genji had tilted his head a little, looking both thoughtful and thoroughly amused. "I admit I don't know how either of you feel about it, but it seems like something that should have come up."

"It has not," Hanzo said shortly.

Genji shrugged exaggeratedly and the conversation moved on, but the idea had stuck in Hanzo's head. True, he and McCree had been together now for some time--just over two years--and it made sense to wonder if they would ever take that step. But the thought of it alone had made fear curdle in his gut, and he had left his cup of tea unfinished. Once the announcement came over the comms that the Orca was arriving with the team, Hanzo had forgotten it entirely in favor of meeting McCree at the hangar (and wrestling him into bed for the first time in two weeks), and he wished that had been the end of it. The memory only came back as they lay together now, and Hanzo would happily have never said a word if not for McCree's damned perceptiveness.

McCree sits up slowly, sliding off of Hanzo to prop himself up on his arms at Hanzo's side. "Don't think we ever talked about that before," he says slowly.

"No. I told him as much."

McCree's brow furrows, and he clears his throat. "But it's still buggin' you," he says slowly. "Maybe it's . . . somethin' we should talk about?"

Hanzo sighs deeply. He does not want to have this conversation at all. Everything about their relationship may be unconventional in some way, but McCree still has the more romantic heart of the two of them, still has better ideas of how these things should go,  and Hanzo is certain his answer will ruin everything.

"Hanzo?" McCree prompts. "What—"

"I do not want to get married," Hanzo says.

There is a pause. "No?" McCree asks. Hanzo waits for him to say anything else that might betray more emotion than the single syllable, but when nothing else is forthcoming, he swallows and turns his head away on the pillow.

"In my family, marriage was a tool," he explains. "Most marriages were for convenience, or power. Those that were not were few and far between. I in particular, as the future head of the family, was expected to marry whoever would provide the best relations. Eligible women from other families were offered to me, and I suspect I to them, as though we were meant to choose our favorite toy and hope we tolerated each other. My feelings on the matter, or even whether I cared for any of them at all, were not important."

Hanzo hunches his shoulders, as though it will protect him from McCree's disappointment. "I have never been that fond of the concept overall, regardless. Perhaps because of my upbringing, the assumption I would never have a truly loving relationship. But I cannot shake that association, that feeling that marriage is nothing more than an inescapable contract done for the benefit of others, even if I know better now. I do not think that will ever change."

The bed dips as McCree shifts. Hanzo grips handfuls of the blanket in tight fists. "Can I say somethin'?" McCree asks.

With great reluctance, Hanzo turns his head to look at McCree. "I don't think I wanna get married, either," McCree says.

Hanzo blinks. The tightness in his chest loosens so abruptly that he feels lightheaded. "You don't?"

McCree shakes his heads. His mouth twists with an uncertain frown. "I did, once upon a time," he says. "When I was younger, when stuff was . . . well, nothing was all that stable in Blackwatch, but that was probably the closest I was gonna get. Wasn't even sure I'd live to see my thirties, though, let alone long enough to have anyone. After that, well . . . I've signed enough contracts that have fucked me over, lost a few other folks, that the idea of gettin' married proper just makes me nervous. Too much shit to deal with if it all goes south."

He shrugs, but the motion is forced. Hanzo turns fully to face him and takes his hand on the bed between them. McCree gives a weak smile as he threads their fingers together. "And all that's assumin' we even got it all cleaned up to do it legally," he continues. "But even if we didn't do the papers and all, I never really wanted to make a big fuss about spendin' my life with someone if I could just do it. Especially if it might not be all that long."

The relief that Hanzo first felt evaporates, replaced by a sour feeling of dread in his stomach as a new thought occurs to him. By the look on McCree's face, he has thought the same.

"Then where does that leave us?" Hanzo asks softly.

McCree blows out a breath. "Dunno," he says. "Guess that does sort of leave us without the usual end goal, doesn't it." He worries the inside of his cheek as he thinks, while the weight of their realization hangs heavy in the air between them.

Eventually, McCree says, "But, here's the thing. Does it really matter?"

"Does it not?" Hanzo counters. "If neither of us wants to marry when that is normally the end of a relationship, does it not matter? I would have thought you, more than I, would want this."

"Does it have to be the goal? It's not like anything else in our lives is normal. If neither us wants it but we're still happy, ain't that enough?"

"I am happy," Hanzo says emphatically. "I just fear that this means . . ." He trails off, unable to voice the words aloud, but the meaning is clear enough.

McCree shifts his grip on Hanzo's hand and brings it to his lips, pressing a dry kiss to the knuckles as he thinks. "I don't know what I want in the future," he says softly. "It was only pretty recently that I even started thinkin' there might be a future for me, let alone one with someone else. I'm so used to movin' around, doin' something new every day, not banking on anything stickin' around. I don't know how long we'll be in Overwatch. I don't know if I wanna stay here until I can't do it anymore, or move out to a little house in the middle of nowhere, or go back to takin' bounties, or what."

He meets Hanzo's gaze, his eyes wide with sincerity. "What I do know, though," he concludes, "is that whatever I end up doin', I want you there with me." He offers a tiny smile, which Hanzo returns with a wobbly one of his own, the emotions clamoring in his throat making him nervous to speak. "However we do it, I know I wanna spend my life with you, as long as you'll have me."

Hanzo's throat tightens and his eyes begin to burn traitorously. He swallows past it all, refusing to let himself be overwhelmed. "I want that as well," he says thickly. McCree's smile breaks into a grin, triggering a swell of confidence in Hanzo as he continues, "Likewise, I was never able to envision a future for myself. Sometimes, it still feels like wishful thinking to imagine there is anything after today. But I cannot see myself without you, and if there is a future to be had, I want it to be with you. Even if it is not by the route we are expected to take."

Hanzo feels better when he sees McCree's smile wobble, too. "That sounds like a plan to me," McCree replies, the casual response belied by the tears that he rapidly blinks away.

Hanzo chases that answer with a hard kiss--graceless, barely more than a press of lips and teeth and soon broken by matching bouts of joyful laughter. McCree pulls Hanzo into a tight embrace and Hanzo goes willingly, muffling the last of his laughter in the hollow of McCree's throat. He sighs and melts into boneless contentment as McCree's hand comes up to stroke through his hair.

"I love you," he murmurs against warm skin. He only hesitates a fraction of a second before he does, and it occurs to him just how strange that is when not long ago, he could barely admit to himself that he had feelings for McCree at all.

McCree's hold tightens as he buries his face in Hanzo's hair. "Love you too, sugar," he breathes. "We're gonna do just fine."

As they settle in for sleep, it's on the tip of Hanzo's tongue to point out that it's still early, and they never got around to eating dinner. However, wrapped up as he is, warm and heavy, in awe of the potential futures that lay before them, Hanzo decides they can wait just a little longer.

[hispeculiartreasure]

All We’ve Got is Time - Chapter Seven | B.B.

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Female Reader

AU: If They’d Survived/Post-War/Window Washer!Bucky Barnes

Rating: Teen

Word count: 4,783

Chapter 7/24

Warnings: Strong language, bit of family tension

AN: Thank you for being so patient with the arrival of this chapter! The extra week gave me the time I needed to muddle through some research-heavy chapters so I can hopefully keep the ball rolling with my scheduling. This chapter was a big one for me since it involved weaving canon and my original thoughts in regards to Bucky’s family. Once I realized Bucky’s museum display in CA:TWS listed him as the eldest of four, I couldn’t stop this specific family dynamic from coming out. Sidenote, the use of Rebecca was inspired by the comics, I promise I am not that vain, haha. Hope you enjoy this week 💕

Chapter Six

‘All We’ve Got is Time’ Masterlist

Ice cold water finally dislodges the last vestiges of sleep from Bucky’s eyes. Patting his face with a hand towel, he avoids looking himself in the eye as he checks the mirror for any patches of hair he may have missed while shaving.

He’s been awake for several hours but had finally dragged himself to the bathroom once the sun had risen. Being a weekend the house should be quiet for another hour or so before he had to put his “family face” on. But the moment the bathroom door creaked open the scent of Canadian bacon wafting from the kitchen proves him wrong.

For a moment he dons a tight-lipped smile until he sees his mother’s familiar form in front of the stove. His shoulders instantly drop, his mouth moving into a genuine curl. She’s humming along to the small radio on the counter, an old Standard that takes Bucky back to moments just like this when he was two decades younger. Mother and son were often the first to rise on Saturdays, leaving a rare pocket of time to be shared just between them.

Winnifred Barnes had hardly changed since those days - besides the gray streaking her otherwise dark hair and a few extra lines around her eyes. Although years of raising four headstrong children and worrying about both a husband and son in battle - albeit different wars - would do that to anyone. She was the most gracious person he knew, forever keeping their door open to anyone who needed some love and a home-cooked meal.

He takes his place to the counter on her left, grabbing a freshly washed peach from a pile of them and bringing it to the cutting board.

“Good morning, James,” she warbles as she slides a pan into the oven.

“Morning, Ma.”

“Did you sleep okay, dear?”

He lifts a shoulder up and down in a small shrug before he grabs a knife to begin slicing. “About as well as usual. Ya know, it takes a real master to sneak through the house without me knowing.”

“Where do you think you got your covert skills? Your father is about as subtle as a gun.”

Bucky snickers. “You’ve got me there.” He slides the cut peach onto a platter before moving on to the next.

“You came in late last night. I trust you got your new friend home at a respectable hour?” she asks coyly between flips of her spatula.

“Ma-” he starts, a blush creeping up his neck.

“No explanation needed, you’re a grown man, but-”

“Don’t worry, you raised a gentleman. Escorted her to her door after dinner. Didn’t feel like taking the subway so I walked home.”

“I never thought otherwise. Oop, you missed some shaving cream.” Winnifred brings the corner of her apron up to swipe at Bucky’s ear before resting a palm to his cheek. “I’m enjoying seeing this handsome face of yours without all that facial hair. And seeing you smiling more often has been a treat as well. I trust this friend is the reason for both?”

“Maybe.” Bucky clears his throat as he grabs another peach. “I like her a lot,” he admits quietly.

“Had a feeling when you asked where I bought my flowers for the table you had to be at least a little taken with her.”

“She loved them, by the way. Thanks for your help.”

“Anytime, darling. I’m assuming you’ll see her again soon?” Kind eyes twinkle with a hint of hope.

“This afternoon, actually.” He gestures to a small carton of fruit. “Want me to slice the raspberries after these?”

“If you don’t mind. Then maybe get the coffee started?” she checks the grilling meat one last time before moving it to a plate, new cuts slipping into the pan moments later.

“Yes ma’am.”

They work side-by-side in silence for a while, humming tunes and bumping elbows every so often. These moments of peace were hard to come by in the house, but they both savored Saturday mornings cooking in tandem.

“If your father gets up, grab the paper and take a seat. Don’t want him getting onto you again. I can manage the meal by myself.”

“If he wants to say something about me doing ‘women’s work’ then he can. I don’t care. Someone had to help you with three other kids while he was in his study smoking cigars.”

“James,” his mother reprimands tenderly. “Despite his flaws, your father is a good man who has always made sure his family’s needs were met. Especially when you weren’t around. Oh!” she spins toward the oven. “My brioche!” Carefully she coaxes the pan of bread out of the oven and onto a cooling rack.

Bucky plates the last of the raspberries before moving to the coffee maker. “Well at least I’m around to contribute now. Being able to help with the bills and all.”

“We don’t really need your money, you realize that, right?”

“Whaddya mean? You said it was helpful.”

With one hand on her hip and the other resting on the counter, she turns to her son. “And it is, don’t get me wrong. But we are very comfortable. If you have an opportunity to be out and on your own, then I think you should take it. It’d be good for you. I think distance would be good for the relationship between you and your father as well.” Bucky hides his scowl behind a cough. “Besides, your youngest sister will be out soon, while Rebecca is looking into an apartment. . . we’ll need to downsize anyway. Promise me you won’t stay here for us?” A touch to his shoulder forces him to meet her eyes.

“Okay, I promise.”

A new, yet very familiar, voice enters the conversation. “What’re you promising this time, Buck?”

Bucky flashes a grin at his sister over his shoulder, “That you’ll pay our parents back for that vase you broke the summer of ‘29.”

If looks could kill Rebecca Barnes would have been a master assassin. She gives him a pinch to the arm before opening the refrigerator to bring out a bottle of milk. “I seem to remember you being left in charge that day, being the eldest and all.”

“Then you remember the absolute chaos of me trying to boss around three younger sisters.”

“Still, you were responsible for the household. A mistake Ma constantly repeated.” Becca smirks, hazel eyes shimmering with mirth.

Bucky would never admit outright that he had a favorite sibling. Having only two years’ distance in age was bound to draw them together as they grew older. Had it sparked many fights through their adolescence? Absolutely. But it was amazing what high school miseries could draw a brother and sister together. They’d spent last night on the back porch, Bucky telling her all about you over some booze he’d smuggled into the house. Becca was one of the few who didn’t treat him like a wounded animal after he’d gotten home from the war. They were able to slip back into their normal routine like they’d never missed a beat. She worried about him, but made sure to voice her concerns rather than watch him with a critical eye.

“C’mon, you have a big girl job now, you can afford to replace it.”

“Kids, that was over 15 years ago. Let it be.”

Becca mutters, “Jesus, we’re getting old.”

“Rebecca Louise!” Winnifred chortles in horror. “Watch your mouth.”

“Sorry,” she apologizes quickly, sharing an amused glance with her brother as he hands her a mug of coffee.

Another set of heels approaching the kitchen signals the next Barnes woman’s appearance.

“Good morning, Evie,” Bucky greets his youngest sister cheerily.

“It’s Evelyn, Bucky.” She fusses with the buttons on her dress before squinting in her brother’s direction. There was no questioning that she’d grown into a beautiful and intelligent young lady during his absence. The signature Barnes dark hair combined with creamy pale skin and bright blue eyes made for an arresting presence that commanded the attention of each room she walked into. Every time he looks at her he can’t help but see the 14-year-old he hugged goodbye before he left for England.

“I can’t call you Evie anymore? Why not?”

“It’s the name of a little girl, I’m almost done with high school now.”

“You’re still my kid sister,” he slid a cup of coffee her way as she sat down at the kitchen table.

“I’m not a kid anymore, Bucky.”

“So you’d be fine if I said you had to start calling me James now?”

Evelyn arches a brow. “If that’s what you wanted, yes.”

An elbow in the ribs from Becca interrupts his next statement before a knock on the front door sounds. “Come in!” all four of them shout toward the door.

“It’s me!” echoes the voice of the only Barnes child not currently living in their childhood home. Rose waddles into the kitchen, a hand resting on her protruding stomach. “Good morning, everyone.”

Each of them mutters their own greeting, ending with Winnifred kissing Rose’s cheek and rubbing her belly. “And good morning to my precious first grandbaby too.”

“Ma, you’ve got a good few months before you get to meet them.”

“It wouldn’t hurt for them to get used to the sound of their grandma’s voice, would it?” Rose giggles as she sits in her usual seat at the table.

“How ya feeling?” Bucky asks.

“Alright, I think. I can already tell this summer heat is going to be unbearable. Not looking forward to only getting bigger from here on out.”

With a warm smile and commiserating nod, Bucky brings the pot of coffee and platter of fruit to the middle of the dinette as Becca sets the table with plates and utensils. “Looks like the Barnes girls are all dressed up and rarin’ to go. What’s going on today?”

“Shopping trip! We need to find Evelyn a new dress for her graduation in a few weeks,” Rose gushes - unsurprising coming from the shopper of the family.

“Especially since Robert will be there,” Becca teases over the edge of her coffee cup. The three older women in the room titter mischievously while Evelyn blushes.

Bucky’s brow furrows as he grabs the plate of bacon from his mother before returning to his seat next to Becca. “Robert’s this boy you’ve been talking about, right?”

Evelyn rolls her eyes in his direction. “My boyfriend, yes.”

“Possible future husband too!” Rose squeals, even after receiving a gentle kick under the table.

The hair on the back of Bucky’s neck stands up. “Wait, what?”

Immediately Evelyn sits ramrod-straight, the clench in her jaw screaming defiance. “We’ve been dating almost a year, it’s not like he’s a stranger.”

“Yes, he had a very long talk with your father after dinner last week,” Winnifred confirms as she slices the loaf of bread into even pieces.

Bucky can’t completely choke down his scoff. “You’re just kids, way too young to be thinking about getting married.”

“You didn’t kick up a fuss when Rose was getting married right out of high school,” Evelyn takes the fruit from Becca before scooping a few pieces onto her own plate.

“For one, I was in the middle of Italy when Rose got hitched. And that’s because John was about to be shipped off to join me. S’different.” Bucky piles more bacon onto his plate than necessary, needing to keep his hands busy for fear that he might start wagging a finger at his baby sister.

“It’s totally normal for people to be marrying younger now. The war made us all feel like time’s running short. Who knows what can happen tomorrow. Why take the risk of not being together?”

Just as Winnifred shed her apron to join them at the table, George Barnes enters the room, presence tall and arresting. Everyone pauses to say their ‘good mornings’, receiving a nod and low grunt in return. Winnifred places a steaming mug in his hand before kissing his temple. He smiles small before unfolding the newspaper his wife had left by his plate. Once his glasses are in place he may as well be in another world. They all know better than to engage him in conversation before his first cup of joe.

“Ma, are you tryin’ to tell me you’d be okay with Evelyn getting married soon?”

“James, it’s not up to me. If Evelyn feels ready, we all have to respect that,” ever the peacemaker of the family, Winnifred takes her place at the opposite end of the table from her husband.

“How is he going to support you? Does he have any idea what kind of work he wants to go into? Are you prepared to look for a job if his isn’t enough for rent? ”

“Easy, Buck,” Becca says under her breath.

“Well, that’s not your problem to worry about, is it Bucky?” If Evelyn was attempting to hide the disdain in her voice, she was doing a terrible job. The patriarch of the family thunks his mug against the table before reaching for the pot to refill it.

“Dad, you have to admit that Evie getting hitched is a bad idea,” Bucky appeals to his father.

“Evelyn,” she grits out, cheeks pink.

“The way I see it, it’s one less mouth for me to feed. And as long as the boy has a good head on his shoulders and good intentions, I don’t see the harm.”

The youngest Barnes hums in satisfaction, serving Bucky with a wholly smug smile.

“You can’t be serious.” Bucky ignores another poke to the ribs from Becca.

“Well, James, by the time I was your age I was married with three children. By all accounts you’re the one who’s behind schedule with no prospects in sight.”

Bucky’s fist tightens around his fork. A kick to his ankle draws his attention to Becca, who subtly shakes her head; clearly trying to say, “Please not right now. It’s been a good morning.”

He huffs out a breath, thankful that his father’s eyes are still trained on the paper. “You may be surprised to know I’m not completely hopeless.”

Rose leans in and says slyly, “Now what does that mean?”

“Yes, James, what does that mean.” Bucky’s father has set the paper down, reading glasses dangling from his fingers.

Why did I open my fuckin’ mouth. “I, uh-I have been on a handful of dates with a girl.”

“Ooooh, the secret comes out,” Evelyn teases, overjoyed at the chance to turn the tables on Bucky.

Rose claps, “That’s great news! Who is she? Do we know her? Is it that friend of Becca’s I always wanted you to date?”

Becca’s side-eye confirms he’s already painted himself into a corner. His mother stays blessedly quiet, keeping her promise not to discuss you with his father.

Don’t panic. Give ‘em broad details, they don’t need to know everything. “She just moved to the city. I met her at work about a month ago. We got to know each other, had our first date last week.”

“What’s she like?” Rose questions around a mouthful of brioche.

“She’s sweet. Always had time to smile at me when we bumped into each other. But she’s also got a mind of her own.”

His father drains his mug again before setting Bucky with a hard gaze. “She’s not a working girl, is she?”

Bucky can feel Becca tense next to him, gaze staying fixed to her plate. “What if she is?” Bucky starts, outrage for both Becca and you on the tip of his tongue when Winnifred clears her throat.

There’s a warning in her gaze that does not translate to her sweet tone. “You should invite her over for dinner one Sunday night. I’d love to meet her.” The girls chime in their agreement, all three of them eager to see who finally caught their brother’s eye for the first time in years. “Speaking of Sunday dinner, will John be home in time to make it, Rose?”

Bucky took the shift in focus as an opportunity to take a breather while Rose prattles on about her husband’s government job and how his schedule was always changing. Thankfully the rest of the meal passes uneventfully, the girls gathering up the dishes to be washed promptly.

While the kitchen bustles to life, Bucky slips from the table to tie on his shoes before his father can make an attempt at conversation. He grabs a rusty toolbox from the floor next to the coat rack before popping back in to tell his family goodbye.

“Where you going?” Evelyn asks, a little too nosey for his taste.

“Steve’s.” Bucky gestures to case in his hand, “Gonna take his toolbox back.”

“Thank goodness,” Winnifred groans. “Hold on, let me pack him some biscuits and that strawberry jam he likes.” Obediently, Bucky waits as his precious mother tied up a handful of baked goods and a small jar of jam in a napkin.

“Bye, Ma,” he kisses her cheek. “Don’t hold dinner for me, I’ve got plans.”

“Going out with Steve and Peggy again?” Becca chimes in.

Becca knew full-well what his plans were. “No, I uh, have another date.”

Rose’s eyes grow as wide as the plate she’s washing. “With the same girl?”

Halfway out the front door Bucky hollers, “Uh-huh. You gals have fun shopping!”

“But Bucky-!” He hears as he firmly draws the door closed. He huffs out a sigh with a hand tugging at his hair before he starts on the familiar walk to Steve’s.

He berates himself for letting his father get under his skin enough that he let out the sweet secret of you. The last thing he wanted was his family nosing around his dating life before he was even sure of what this new relationship was.

It was too late now. He’d opened the door and an entire damn circus was charging through.

Letting his thoughts drift to happier things, Bucky reflects on last night’s date. You had looked exquisite in a maroon dress, lipstick the perfect matching shade. He’d picked out a simple diner for supper where you both admitted you felt much more comfortable. He kept his promise to share about his time serving in the military. Granted, he stuck to the most simple version, sparing you of the gritty details of blood, carnage, and capture.

You had been more merciful than he deserved. You read his cues well, changing the subject when he started getting emotional. Empathetic, kind - truly listening rather than waiting for your turn to talk. All he had to endure was a little teasing about Captain America being his closest friend. Even then, you were gentle. He’d walked you to your doorstep, lingering too long - trying to get his nerve up for a kiss. Disappointed in himself he settled for a peck to your cheek and hastily walked away, later commiserating with his sister over his jitters.

Before he knew it, Bucky was knocking on Steve’s door.

“‘Bout time you showed up,” Steve complains without a hint of malice as he opens the door of his apartment.

Bucky stands opposite of the blond, thoroughly unamused. “You’re the one who left your damn toolbox in our kitchen last week before up-and-disappearing for work. Well, you gonna stand there and let me freeze?”

“It’s almost May.”

“It’s the principle of the thing.”

Steve swings the door wide, waving Bucky in. “Thanks for bringing it back.”

“Ma’s been complaining about it being in the way for days, needed to get it out of the house.” Bucky sets the toolbox down in the living room next to a dilapidated dresser that was in desperate need of repairs.

“Sorry about that. How’s everything at home?”

“Alright. The girls are gearing up for Evelyn’s graduation. Dad is. . .Dad. By the way, Ma sent some biscuits for you.”

Steve smiles, peeking into the napkin before setting it down in the kitchen. “Strawberry jam, my favorite of hers.”

“Yeah, I’d say she knows you pretty well, ya moron.” Bucky grumbles, wiping a hand down his face. Steve notices he’s a little sluggish today, his walk more of a shuffle, the dark circles beneath his eyes more pronounced.

Steve knows he should mind his business.

But then again.

“Still sleeping on the couch?” Bucky nods. “Those cushions were uncomfortable when we were kids, I can’t imagine they’re better pushing 30.” Steve kneels by the box, rummaging to find the tools he needs.

“30 is almost a year away, I don’t wanna hear it.” Bucky takes up residence in an armchair close to where Steve begins to work.

Bucky likes Steve’s apartment. Forever army neat, Steve’s surroundings were kept meticulously tidy. The furniture was simple, utilitarian. He had what he needed and nothing more. The most ostentatious part of his home was the west wall of the living room that was completely taken up by bookcases. Floor to ceiling, left to right was all books. S framed wedding portrait of his parents hung next to the clock on the opposite wall, along with a snapshot of the Howlies and a photo of Steve and Bucky from their high school days. The home was in a good spot of Brooklyn, reminiscent of where they’d grown up; except much larger than what Steve had been accustomed to. Why he’d gotten a two-bedroom was beyond Bucky - Steve wasn’t exactly known for lavish spending. The SSR must pay Captain America well. If Bucky looked hard enough he could see hints of Peggy’s presence. The pillows on the couch, the tablecloth on the dining table, a rug set in the living room.

“The spare bedroom is still open, ya know. If the couch is killing your back.”

“I can’t afford rent right now.” Bucky pinches to bridge of his nose.

“You know that’s not a problem.”

“It’s a problem for me.”

“Stubborn ass,” Steve mutters under his breath.

Bucky only feels smug. “Says the pot.” He watches Steve wrestle a drawer out of the dresser before asking, “Where’d this thing come from, anyway?”

Steve exhales heavily. “Peggy saw it on a curb and thought it would go perfectly in my guest bedroom without considering why it was on the curb in the first place.”

“Why didn’t you tell her that? Why not her apartment?”

“I’ve gotta pick my battles.”

Bucky arches a brow. “Even when that lands you with a fucked up piece of furniture you’ve gotta fix?”

“Especially then,” Steve groans as he tugs another drawer free. The next time words are spoken is when Steve’s got his head in the interior of the dresser trying to discern why the drawers continued to jam. “You shaved.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “You’re the fourth person to say that to me.”

With a shake of his head Steve emerges to grab a piece of sandpaper from the box. “Just different. Been a while. Can you give me a hand? Hold it still while I try to sand off this edge.”

He steadies the piece while Steve aggressively sandpapers one of the tracks. Resentfully Bucky mutters, “It hasn’t been that long.”

Steve pauses to look up at his friend. “Yeah it has.” Bucky grunts. “Don’t harumph me. You know I’m right.”

Quiet falls again as Steve works on, occasionally asking for Bucky’s help or thoughts.

This time Bucky breaks the silence. “I’ve been looking at other jobs. Trying to figure out what I wanna do when my GI benefits come through.”

“Oh yeah? What’re you thinking?” Steve’s moved the dresser to its side to address a crooked leg that set the whole thing off-balance. Bucky’s on the floor as well, back against the armchair waiting for further instructions.

“Maybe working on cars? Someone mentioned it to me and I think I might like it.”

“Huh, never heard you talk about that before.”

“It’s a new idea. One that has potential. Won’t be in an office, get to keep my hands busy. Be learnin’ something new.”

“Sounds almost perfect for you.”

“Could be. We’ll see. I’m gonna keep looking into it but it feels good to have some kind of direction to aim toward.”

Steve glances at Bucky with a glint in his eye. “You’re awfully chipper.” A beat. “Have anything to do with the girl?” Bucky says nothing. “Thought so. You gonna make me ask or are you going to volunteer?”

“I feel like you just asked.”

“Well you weren’t volunteering.”

Bucky leans forward, vaguely motioning to the bottom of the dresser. “I think this thing needs some more support, what if you added an extra beam here?”

“The date was that bad, huh?”

The misplaced sympathy finally forces the truth out of Bucky. “No. It was that good.”

Steve stills. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. We’ve actually been out a couple more times.”

Steve’s eyebrows fly up his forehead. “‘A couple times’? That date was a week ago and you’ve seen her again - several times - since?”

“Jesus, it’s not like I eloped, calm down.” Bucky can’t help prickling the tiniest bit.

“No, no, I. . .” he shuts his mouth, head bobbing. “That’s great, Buck. When’re you seeing her again?”

“In a few hours. She’s. . . the one who suggested cars. Gonna show me what she knows at a friend’s garage.”

“Where’d she learn about cars?”

Bucky can’t contain his smile. “Worked for Chevy during the war. Seems to know her stuff.”

“A mechanic? Sure could’ve used her when you stalled our jeep in Saarbrücken.”

“That was Morita and you know it. He’s always trying to fix things that aren’t broken. Speaking of idiots, thanks for telling DumDum about my date.”

“I--I, uh, what’re you talking about?”

“Don’t act dim, he called ahead at the restaurant and got us a special table.” Steve stutters several times in a futile effort to deny the accusation. “I thought better of you, flappin’ your lips like Old Ms. Johnson at the grocers.”

“I just-”

“What if that made her think I was some uppity snob?”

“Did it?”

“. . . no.”

“So no damage was done.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is?”

“Just-” Bucky groans in frustration. “No one else needs to know unless it’s more than a date. Okay? I don’t want people thinking I’m chasing skirts and not taking life seriously.”

“I get it. I’m sorry. I’ll keep it to myself until you want people to know.”

“Thank you.” The small moment of tension dissolves and eases back into their familiar rhythm. Steve secures the leg correctly and the two of them set the dresser on its feet. Bucky hesitates then mentions quietly, “I did have a small. . . episode. . . that night. She didn’t treat me like I was nuts.”

“You okay?” Steve nonchalantly wipes dust and dirt from the surface but Bucky can feel the concern he’s trying to hide.

“It was a short one. But she got me out of there and let me be quiet for a sec before trying to distract me. Almost felt like she knew what I needed. Even my folks don’t know how to handle me when I get like that.”

“Seems to be someone worth hanging onto.” Steve slides the drawers back into the dresser one by one, running smooth on their tracks.

Responding with a hum Bucky crosses his arms. Again, he sees you stand up from the dinner table, eyes soft with kindness. He remembers how the click of your heels on the sidewalk gave him something steady to focus on while trying to dig himself out of bad memories.

“So when do I get to meet her?” Steve is all tease, looking to get a rise out of his friend. The last thing he expects is Bucky’s one word response:

“Soon.”

Bucky ignores Steve’s incredulous look. “Fuck, I thought you were going to say no. Didn’t think you were there yet.” He grabs one end of the dresser, nodding to the other end. “Help me move this?”

Huffing, Bucky complies, the pair lifting the piece together. “Why are you so fuckin’ worked up about this?”

Steve raises an eyebrow as he walks backwards down the hallway. “Because the last time I met someone you dated I was 5’6 and 110 pounds soaking wet.”

“We were both very different people then.”

“No shit, ace.”

They set the dresser down in the spare room opposite of the bed, making the space a little less sparse, slightly more homey.

Bucky sighs, looking down at his hands. “She’s a good one, Steve.”

“That’s not surprising. She’d have to be if you wanna keep her around.” Hands on his hips in satisfaction, Steve eyes the dresser. “Peggy’ll insist on meeting her too.”

“Yeah, pal, that’s what I’m worried about.”

Chapter Eight

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[knowyourincantations]

Minding One’s Limits - Cho/Ginny

For Sapphic September 2019 Day 6: “Take us home.”  from @rockmarina​‘s prompt list.

G-rated | 1,548 words | EWE, Post-Hogwarts, Established Relationship, Disabled Character, Light Angst, Fluff

(AO3 | My other Sapphic September 2019 works: AO3 | Tumblr)

Minding One’s Limits

As much as Cho had been enjoying the morning, when they ducked out of the newly opened Quidditch museum to sit down for a cuppa in a nearby cafe, she almost collapsed into a chair with relief.

While Ginny went up to the counter to order for them, she let herself hunch over and grimace through the pain. The museum was larger than either of them had anticipated, and they hadn’t made it through even half of it before it was time for a rest and morning tea.

The day had started out so well, more energy than she’d felt in a while, and her pain levels delightfully low, perhaps from sheer excitement alone.

But now she felt as though a building had crumbled down on top of her.

“I got us some scones with cream and jam,” Ginny said as she neared the table again, sliding into the seat opposite Cho’s and depositing her bag over the back of her chair. “And I ordered Earl Grey for a change. They have rose petals in theirs, I thought that would be nice to try. Sound alright?”

Cho fought the weight dragging her down to sit up a little straighter and smile at her.

“Sounds lovely,” she said.

“I’m glad we went a bit further,” Ginny said, peering around the cafe. It was muggle, and only a few tables were occupied. All the places close to the museum had been packed, and the mere sight of them and the sound pouring out of them had made Cho cringe. “A week after opening and the museum is still being flooded.”

“I suppose lots of other people thought waiting a bit would be a good idea too,” Cho said, shifting in her chair to try and ease the pain in her legs.

“I still can’t believe that first exhibit,” Ginny breathed, gesturing wildly. “It hardly counts as Quidditch but the similarities are there. It predates the information in all the books on Quidditch history I’ve read. They really weren’t bluffing in their ads in the Daily Prophet, they really do have newly uncovered history found nowhere else.”

Cho nodded, drinking in Ginny’s excitement. It made her fatigue feel stronger to see her gesture so exuberantly, but she loved to see her so excited.

“I could have done without the taxidermic snidget display though,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “They could have constructed replicas. Even transfigured something, like they did for the active displays.”

The practice of using a living creature as the snitch was a dark stain on the sport’s history as far as she was concerned. And she was still trying to forget the materials used for the early Quaffles.

“I agree,” Ginny said, scrunching up her face as well. “But I suppose they’ve been sitting around in cupboards for so long they may as well be used. At least they included information about the conservation efforts going on. I didn’t realise they were still endangered.”

Cho shifted in her chair again and Ginny’s focus sharpened on her. It was on the tip of Cho’s tongue to say she was fine, but Ginny was already reaching for her bag.

“Sorry,” she muttered, digging through it. “We should have popped out for a break an hour ago. I shouldn't have let myself lose track of time.”

Under her breath, she whispered a notice-me-not charm, and then passed a pain potion over to Cho. She was always so quick to blame herself, and Cho couldn’t stand it.

“I lost track of time myself,” Cho said firmly, taking the potion and downing it. The merest fraction of her pain eased a few moments later, and her stomach sank. She’d have to switch potions again soon. “I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks.”

Ginny took the vial from her and slipped it back into her bag, then reached across the table and took her hand.

“We don’t have to see everything at once. Don’t push yourself too hard,” she said gently.

Old frustration wormed its way to the surface until Cho felt tears pricking behind her eyes. She shook her head and forced it back down. It wasn’t the time to dwell on how the things that had once been so easy were now so hard.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m really enjoying myself.”

It didn’t look like Ginny was buying it, but their scones and tea were brought over a moment later and she let the subject drop.

While they ate and sipped their tea, which really was lovely, Ginny kept her distracted by talking about the exhibits they’d seen. She got particularly fired up about the historic fight for the inclusion of women into the sport at all, and then the one for the end of gender segregation in teams.

Cho listened and participated less and less. By the time they finished the pot of tea, Ginny reached for her hand again.

“Time to go home?” she asked.

“No,” Cho said quickly, only realising she’d slumped when she had to fight to pick herself up.

“We really can come back another day,” Ginny said, looking concerned. “There’s so much to see, it’s better to draw it out really, otherwise it’s like an information overload.”

It made sense, but they were already so close.

“Just a bit longer?” Cho asked.

Ginny pursed her lips but nodded. She waited patiently while Cho struggled out of her chair, joints grown stiff after sitting still for so long after being on her feet for too long before sitting down. She even kept her mouth shut as Cho’s first steps were more like hobbling along than walking.

They were halfway back to the museum when the pain grew too much. Cho turned into an alley and leaned against the wall.

Ginny sighed and took her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.

“I know this is a lot about your own expectations for yourself, but in case you’re worried, I’ve had a thoroughly lovely morning, and don’t mind at all if we go home now,” she said.

Cho closed her eyes in a grimace against shooting pains in her ankles and calves. She inhaled sharply and held her breath for a few moments.

When she exhaled, she sagged against the wall in defeat.

“Alright,” she said, squeezing Ginny’s hand in return. “Take us home.”

Ginny gently pulled her close and glanced around. Where the alley opened to the street, a few people passed by. As soon as the way was clear, Ginny Apparated them away.

When they landed in their bedroom, frustration welled up in Cho again, but she let Ginny ease her onto the bed without a fuss.

“I’ll make a hot water bottle for your ankles,” Ginny said, skimming a hand down Cho’s leg to rest on her left ankle for a moment.

Cho closed her eyes and grimaced. “I can do it myself.”

Ginny sighed and leaned over her to meet her eye. Cho looked away. She was getting too defensive, she knew. It wasn’t about Ginny, and she was lucky that Ginny knew that and didn’t get too frustrated with her.

“It’s been a long morning,” Ginny said softly. “Give yourself some credit. We saw several exhibits, and that was after waiting in line to get in. We’ll go again another day.”

“Fine,” Cho muttered. She couldn’t argue Ginny’s point, it was the longest she’d been on her feet in a long time. She should be proud of that and not let herself get wound up. It wasn’t like it was new anymore. “Can you grab the book I was reading off the arm of the sofa since you’re going that way?”

Ginny nodded and ducked down to kiss her quickly. When she left the room, Cho sagged into the bed and groaned. She let herself have a few moments before struggling up and tugging off her shoes.

It hurt to spread out her toes, but she did, rubbing at her feet and then her ankles. She may as well have not taken any pain potion at all, and made a note to look into another alternative.

When Ginny returned, she had propped herself upright against the headboard, sagging against the pillows and far more tired than she had been before they’d Apparated away. Ginny set a hot water bottle over her ankles and handed her the book.

Instead of wandering off to do something else, she clambered into the other side of the bed with a pile of information booklets they’d picked up at the museum.

Cho sat stiffly for a moment, then leaned against her side. With a soft sigh, Ginny turned and kissed the side of her head then snuggled down deeper against the pillows.

“I really am enjoying today,” Ginny said softly.

Cho stared at the open pages of her book and tried to think back to before the pain and fatigue had set in. She really had lost track of time herself, looking at exhibits and finding herself distracted enough to ignore the warning signs of reaching her limit.

“Me too,” she replied, more to herself than Ginny. It was important she didn’t forget the good parts of each day.

“I’m glad,” Ginny whispered, like it was a secret, before kissing the side of her head again.

End.

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[unicorn-sprinkles-101]

I'm an autistic, mentally ill young adult who very desperately needs to find a new place to live.

I can't exactly recount what happened during most of my childhood but I have to say that my parents have drastically spiraled out of control since then. 

My mother had never really been a big impact on my life other than being my primary guardian and taking me from place to place. Other than that, she has little to no emotional connection to me and especially not now. I don't really "hate" anyone listed here, I just don't care for my family anymore and don't want anything to do with any of them.

My mother is completely unable to work, relying mostly on disability since I was a baby due to an ongoing condition. My father refuses to get a better job to support my mother and I, often leaving us with around $5-$10 at a for gas money (often with tons of quarters) or to take with me when it is absolutely required.

Now that I've turned 18, things have gotten much harder when it comes to me being used for financial gain. I do admit that alot of that money was used towards me in some way or another while I was growing up, but not anymore.

While my father is unable to let go of grandmother's old house (which has gone to shambles), one of my mother's friends has lives under us in the basement after being rendered homeless, which can make akward when describing family troubles.

She started living with us a while ago after her trailer finally caved in after we packed water jugs back and forth to her location for several years.

Ever since she moved here, she's developed an overbearing attachment to her "animals". It got so bad she refused time and time again to put her very ill 16-year-old dog to sleep, rendering them unable to walk, see, eat or hear for months on end. The breaking point was when they bled out all over the kitchen (which we knew would happen eventually), which was traumatic for us and highly unnecessary for the dog to go through considering how miserable they were when they came here.

She has made tons very rude and hurtful comments to me about how I'm such an "abuser" when I told her dogs (she has 3) to go away or get off the couch in front of her. She often claims that I'm abusive towards my guinea pigs, saying that I don't "take care of [my] animals".

This friend of my mother has also made comments ranging from my weight to my behavior and called me names ranging from "brat" to the more recent "trashy white girl" while my mother rolls her eyes and tells me it was all just a joke.

She's physically done things towards me such as shoving me out of the way, crushing me on the bed, and almost hauling a foot tall scratching post towards my direction after I refused to get her a broom the second she demanded it (I ended up getting it for her anyway.

However, physical altercations between me and my mom's friend are very rare and this type of behavior is often seen as the norm in my area, so unless it's something that left bruises or sexual assault, it isn't really that big of a deal compared to the other stuff I face on a daily basis.

It only got worse after I graduated from highschool. It got so bad that it became worse than all of the countless harassment I faced throughout my highschool education combined.

I was forced to give up over 3/4s of my $700 worth of graduation money to my mother in order to pay off bills, food, and other neccessities. While I ended up snagging some small gifts for myself (apx. $120) before it was all sucked up, I know I'll probably never be able to get paid back that amount of money from either one of them and I feel extremely cheated as a result.

While I was legitimately excited to see them grow as people in a good home, my sister's kids have drastically changed for the worse ever since they've been shoved in a tiny old trailer and moved back to the classic small town community full of people with money (maybe extracurriculars will keep them busy).

The youngest of them (8), who is often dumped here on a daily basis, has disrespected us in a variety of ways including: eating at the computer after my mom's friend made a rule not to, not picking up after themselves when they did so (often leaving uneaten food out), and using every other dollar my mom had to go get candy and drinks from the Dollar Store (they stole my leftover change in front of me and lied about it, but that was a one-time occurrence).

The back room often smells like trash because my mother puts off going to the dump until the very last minute.

Nobody can keep up with the animals, use a flyswatter on the cat to keep it from climbing everything and having to lock it up so it wouldn't take the food straight off our plates while we were eating.

While two of the dogs from my mom's friend stay downstairs in the basement, the third one stays up here and refuses to go downstairs.

The dog is well-behaved (aside from agressive barking) but while it doesn't pee anywhere in the house (as far as we know), it appears to leave, traces of leftover urine on pillows, blankets, and the furniture (or at least the odor, although I felt small wet spots on the couch before) which could spread germs, not good for someone with a few open sores.

None of them use leashes, so when this dog bursts out the door it takes off up the street aggressively barking at everyone and everything, with little to no repercussions from either adult. The overly intense noise from this small dog has gotten way out of hand, making me a nervous wreck.

These two stress factors combined with everything else makes it impossible to keep the house clean by nearly any means (I'm doing my best just to sweep off the porch).

I'm grateful that my mom's friend took one last shot at trying to clean up the bedroom, but there's no point in trying to keep anything kept up when all it does is get destroyed.

Moving to my own place means I won't have to look after anyone else but me and my pets (guinea pigs). However, I don't have anyone to support me in my endeavors.

As my parents often failed to attend my physical and emotional needs, I became highly unstimulated and constantly stressed as a result. This has lead to severe bouts of depression and executive dysfunction, which has caused my mom's friend's harassment to get even worse.

Not only did they fail to properly take care of my needs all throughout highschool, we've never been able to afford ANY sort of renovations to the house during our residence here (about 8 years), aside from basic roofing which was performed by a small Hispanic business instead of a professional company. 

The only two instances of DIY fix-ups I can remember during my 8 years here are replacing the shattered windows with plexiglass (which happened years ago) and recently restoring some of the rotten floorboards under the washer that were caked in mold.

The simple act of taking a shower has now become one of my worst dreaded nightmares and unless I move to a safe environment then I won't ever be able to properly take care of myself like I dream of doing someday.

Even though it'll take top surgery to make me feel comfortable taking showers again, moving to an inspected apartment means I  have one less worry about falling through the basement and the rancid smell of burnt urine that sometimes reeks from the basement.

I never went outside much, aside from sitting on the corner of the porch since the rest of it was turned green by air conditioning water and the walkway was flooded by overgrown plants (even they've been given more respect than I have).

I often vented through various social platforms but I decided that enough is enough: I needed to grow as a person and stop shoving all my problems on others.

It was then I knew I had to find a way to escape. Unfortunately, in order to move out I needed at least a little bit of stable funding, which I'm very, very far from.

My sensory issues make it hard to gain interests in whatever food was cooked (ex. spaghetti, dumplings), and I didn't have the desire to eat expired canned greens from the food bank, which have since been covered in roach poo. They're pretty much everywhere you go.

Even the cleanest of countertops could be seen crawling with a few roaches. They reside deep within the microwave along with fried maggots from ages ago.

They have also made their way into the refrigerator, making it difficult to scour what little there is without feeling grossed out. It's getting harder day by day to tell the difference between of the smallest of bugs and pepper. Since we we can't afford a closed-top hamper, our dirty clothes are often covered in roaches trying to find a place to hide, making it difficult to gather the strength to wash them like I should.

They've also taken over my computer, rendering my unable to even touch it for months.

No amount of bombing, traps, or pesticides will clear them either. They were there to begin with, and they always come back.

There's even been an increase in other types of bugs, most notably fly's and gnats.

The Crock-Pot would often fill up with mold  every other week because me and my mother didn't like chowing down on her friend's grand "homestyle cooking" every day. 

We didn't eat it as much as we should've because it was often bland in taste and we don't know how to make her stop (I know I can't). She ended up making a fuss when we tried to make suggestions, so we let her get what she wants even if it wasting precious ingredients we could've used to make something we could actually eat.

To make up for it, I often had to buy single cans of Spaghettio's at a time from the Dollar Store and call it my meal for the day. 

Now it seems like I can't even do THAT anymore. 

It got to the point where I even considered that any drink besides water, hell even soda, could have some sort of nutritional value. It was better that eating nothing, after all.

I often pondered mother's financial choices when came to these things but as we all have been told "mother knows best" and we as children should not be allowed to question our parent's decision.

She recently told me my SSI completely cut because the government labels me as "being able to work".  It turns out that they cut my disability check as opposed to SSI but I'm still left just as broken inside as before.

Why? Because there's absolutely no way I can save up such a large amount, we need every last drop to survive off of. I've used a very small portion of it to buy some little stuff to help me cope from time to time, but I'm gonna refrain from that from now on until I completely move out.

Even though the issue has been resolved for now, I'm tired of being dragged through hoops when I know they'll just try to cut it off again. I can't keep staying here because I'm sick and tired of having our only source of income dangling on a string.

I would really like to gain some much needed work experience and I plan on applying to Wal-Mart as soon as I upload this post.

However, there's one problem: I have no source of reliable transportation to get to my job.

My mother had to borrow money off of my grandmother (as she has done in the past) in order to have the gas to pick me up from therapy this week. While that tank of gas may last a bit, this is not sustainable enough for me to keep any sort of job regardless if it were part-time or full-time. The three job options in this very small town don't offer a position that would be comfortable enough for me to perform the tasks I am assigned and two are often known for mistreating their staff members on a regular basis.

Another reason I want to get a job in a bigger city is so I can continue to work once I move closer to Wal-Mart, which will save tremendous amounts of gas money and time. To avoid the trauma of driving, I will probably be using a transport bus as opposed to using a car.

The reason it appears that I don't look after my guinea pigs as much as I should is because their cages are inaccessible making it excruciatingly difficult to clean their cages and fufill their needs. With my own apartment to live in, I will have the ability make room for them and I can organize a place for my piggies in a much more open location free of mess.

I'd really like to keep them with me when I move alone, especially considering that I adopted one all the way from Louisville (I live around the west side of KY). I want to give Marlene the proper life she deserves after traveling across the state to take her beautiful soul home with me.

While I probably won't have access to a small animal veterinarian to get a proper diagnosis, my older guinea pig Chloe (about 4 years) had a massive tumor/cyst on her leg burst open a while back.

Her weight has drastically increased to the point where she feels like a limp water balloon when I attempt to pick her up, so it lead me to assume that her body is slowly being taken over by some form of internal cancer.

Even though there's nothing I can do to heal her, my ultimate wish is for Chloe to drift away peacefully in a safe environment free of bugs and other filth. This means that not only do I have myself to care for, but my two precious babies as well.

I admit that I have been going through a slow regression in regards to financial behavior, but I would love to learn how to shop responsibly while keeping my true interests at heart. I have plenty of plushies and figurines to keep me company at the moment. Some I'll sell to make room for new ones, but most of them will there to  comfort me during stressful times.

After buying one of the most beautiful children's lamps I had ever seen at GoodWill, I soon found out that buying doesn't have to be boring and dull like all the adults have told us all our lives. I learned that you should buy furniture and clothes based on how it makes you feel instead of relying on others to tell you what to do, I would love to purchase decorations for my apartment that reflect who I want to become as a person.

Not everything should have to be about scrounging for my next meal.

However, the funds from this will go towards covering down-payment, rental costs, and buying a new setup for my guinea pigs if they are allowed at the apartment (I don't want to track bugs from the old cages, plus they need a bigger space).

I wanted to let you guys know that I will have to use a portion of the donations

to cover my mother's monthly electric bill. As much as I want to talk myself out of it, she literally relies on me for money so I don't exactly have the ability to opt-out of that right now.

The extra stuff (such as small appliances, furniture, groceries, and of course... a limited-edition plush or two) will be paid for using a compilation of my paycheck and whatever I earn off of Redbubble.

I'd love to start a YouTube channel where I do things like art, gaming, and reviews to strengthen my voice and get it out into the world in a peaceful, sanitary environment free from interruptions or harassment over a seemingly innocent/important subject matter.

There's lots of things that I missed out on when I was younger and I bet it would be so awesome to finally express myself free of constant toxicity and hatred.

I deeply love OK K.O. and I'd love to honor the impact that this person of color and his creation has left on me someday, as well as continue down my path of original content that I've been waiting to share with you guys!

[liprps-blog]

i dont know why im bothering to make this post other than hoping two things will come from it. 1) that ill start to feel better about the situation and 2) that the people it’s about will creep my blog and eventually see it. under the read more for feelings

so, for one, im not going to lie about my actions. yes, i messaged erika and told her i know shes her. i absolutely did. should i have? probably not. did i anyway? you’re damn right. and you know why? i did it because i cared about the game i was in. i cared. had i not cared, i would have just been like “lol fuck this” and left when i realized and nothing was done. let me just repeat for the hundredth time that she shut uproar down and did so through her role as a gossip mod. i was trying to protect the game and my friends, i wasn’t doing it to be a bully or harass her. i just wanted her to know that i know. after i sent the message i logged back out because i wasnt trying to fight or harass her. i just needed her to know someone knew and was watching her. let me reiterate that, while im not saying it was completely her fault bc im the one in control of my own feelings and i understand that, she played a huge role in me almost killing myself and had it not been for a call from my grandmother, i would have. i would be dead right now. i would have died in 2013 if my grandma hadn’t called me that morning. i dont feel bad for sending her the message. i will never allow myself to feel bad for doing what i thought was right and i still think i was right in trying to protect that game and my friends who modded it. i know they dont agree and that’s fine but what i did was a gesture of love, no matter how ugly it was. sometimes to protect the people you love you have to be ugly to the ones you don’t.

on the flip side of that, its been said i was a bully and making people uncomfortable. with the exception of erika (bc as i said, i will never ever feel bad for exposing her), i do want to sincerely apologize to anyone who i made feel that way. it’s never been said of me before in my life so im not sure who felt that way or why but if it was anyone besides her, then from the bottom of my heart; i am so sorry. i wish something had been said to me so that i could have known and stopped doing whatever it was i was doing. the last thing i want is to make someone feel those things. im not making excuses here, nor am i justifying myself to make myself look better but the god’s honest truth is that im not always the best with understanding how someone else feels unless im directly told. so again, im sorry. and i want anyone reading this to know that had i been told that i was making people feel that way, i would have done everything in my power to correct it. but if im not told an issue exists and i think everything is fine, how am i ever supposed to fix it let alone know about it?

now that ive covered how others felt and done my fair share of apologizing for my actions, i want to cover my own feelings. 

i dont know how either of you can say what you did to me wasn’t bullying me out. i dont understand how you can think me going from zero warnings, and neither of you telling me the accusations against me to being kicked out because i stepped down as a mod is not bullying me out. maybe bullying isn’t really the right word but that’s how it felt. it felt like i was targeted and it was purely retaliation for me saying i wouldn’t mod anymore because no action was ever taken. i know it was because b literally came back with “you said we never take action so we took action” so you literally kicked me out because i stepped down. that’s what it boils down to. you kicked me out because i sent that message to mod teo and i stepped down but i dont think that the time you even knew the message had been sent. maybe you did. that’s still bullshit when other writers should have been gone a long long time ago and are still there, forcing plots on people and making them feel uncomfortable purely because they want a certain plot, purely because you’re afraid of backlash from roleplayers everyone hates and wants gone anyway. even if i had been put on like a final warning i would have accepted it and not caused a fuss bc for the erika thing, i probably deserved it. no matter what you say or do to justify yourselves, you both know you did me wrong. you don’t ever have to admit it and its fine if you don’t but between the three of us, we all know what you really did to me and how shitty it was after how close we had all become. i truly thought our friendship would be good, i thought we would all continue to be best pals and without the stress of the game, we wouldn’t be torn apart. but, i was wrong. that stupid game tore us apart. and it was just a game. its not even real. our friendship was real. it still hurts and i miss you both. it will pass. it always does. but i miss you.

and now i want to move on to your feelings. like i said before i dont know who i made uncomfortable or what i did to make them feel that way, but if it was ever either of you, im sorry. ive looked back and realized how much i hate erika and how insistent i was she is there and gossip modding and going to ruin blush may have made you guys feel negative things. im sorry for that. i didn’t want to upset either of you. i really didn’t. i could have gone about things in a better way even though tact isn’t always my strong suit. i still realize the situation could have been handled better and i shouldn’t have let my own feelings cloud my regard for yours. i know this is past repairing, and im not trying to make amends and us be friends again but i do want you to know that im sorry it ended this way and im sorry for any negative things you experienced that were my fault. i loved you both dearly and considering i dont want to make anyone feel bad ever, i especially didn’t want that for two of who i considered to be my closest friends. i hope for your sake you’re able to let go of whatever resentment you have for me and not carry that anger with you.

thats it. thats all i have to say and i really hope that writing this down and putting it out there for you to see helps me let go of the situation and move on. regardless of how things ended, i wish you both the best with your game and everything else you do in your future.

[edourado]

KASTLE?? ❛ Two corpses we were, two corpses I saw. ❜ :D :D

Hello, my dear. Here I am, with your prompt, so long after you sent it. 

I hate my writing pace. 

But I did it. Even I strayed a little from the song and it’s angsty feel, I did it. I hope you like it. 

Muah ♥

@carry-the-sky, yours is also ready. I’ll post it tomorrow ;)

We the dead

When he told her the plan, she had, for a good minute there, thought he had lost his mind.

But then everything started going to shit. She had to duck, run, shoot, hide, be quiet, she was bleeding, and she understood. It had to end. And she had to die for it to happen.

Officially, Karen had died. So had Frank. Drowned, shot, tortured, who knows. The last news on her were that she had been taken by the Italian mafia. Nobody was really expecting to find her body, not after the things she had written.

Frank Castle died with her because his name was involved. Indirectly, they were careful about that, but he was both after the Italians and running from the Italians, so it was not very difficult to put his name in the dead list.

He had gotten to her place almost 24 hours ago, asking her to hear him out. She was used to him being over protective of her, forever apologising with actions for using her as bait that one time.

This time, he asked her to let herself be captured. And Karen really did think he was crazy.

But then he explained. Promised he would be there, he would not take his eyes off her, not for one minute. But in order for this to be finished, this underground bounty on her head and the sheer reign of terror the family from Sicily was building, he had to have a way in. And she was it.

Karen from Vermont would never agree to something like that. Karen from New York did, paraded herself for two hours at the last place she should ever be, let herself be followed home, let herself be captured, didn’t put up much of a fight, prayed that Frank was there, behind her, like he promised.

He doesn’t lie to her. And he didn’t. As promised, he got to her right before she got a violent slap to her face, a shot to her head, God knows what else. Suddenly there was someone else’s blood on her skin, her clothes, her face. Frank was there, putting a gun in her hand, shooting a thousand bullets per second, pulling her through a door she never noticed was there, running towards a car, pressing a button, starting the engine at the same time an explosion blew behind them, driving away and she could not believe she didn’t have a scratch on her. Maybe her arms would be bruised from when they grabbed her at her apartment, but that was it.

Frank drove for hours. Three, four, maybe five. Maybe less than that. It didn’t occur to her to ask where they were going. She focused on breathing and looked at the night sky, the lights of the city fading behind them.

When he parked outside a house hidden in the middle of the woods, she saw Max looking out the front window, his excited breathing fogging up the glass.

“I got your suitcase”, Frank said after killing the engine. “It’s in your bedroom.”

“My bedroom?”

He nodded.

“The one you’re gonna occupy while we’re here”. He looked outside the car towards the two story house. “It’s the nice one.”

“What is this place, Frank?”

He looked at her and she didn’t know what to feel. Tired, scared, relieved, angry, sad, what? She was all of those things and a few more she couldn’t name.

He just shrugged.

“Belonged to a friend. Come on.”

He collected the bag of weapons he had put in the trunk and they made their way inside. The bag with her clothes and basic belongings and his were already there, he had brought them the day before, along with Max.

Karen let him look at her, looking for bruises, didn’t complain when he fussed over the simplest of scrapes, putting a bandage over it. She let him apply medicine to the one on her forehead she hadn’t noticed, let him examine the ones of her arms, answered all his questions of “does it hurt?”

They had microwaved frozen meals for dinner and she announced that she was going to bed after swallowing maybe a third of it.

He was right, her room was nice. Big bed and curtains on the windows and her own en suite bathroom. There was even a desk where her computer sat.  

It was one in the morning when she decided she was not going to be able to sleep.

Making her silent way downstairs, she spotted a blanket folded over the couch. Picking it up, she opened the front door and walked until she was halfway between the house and the edge of the woods.

She had been staring at the stars in the sky for maybe twenty minutes when he sat down next to her, and then lied down.

Karen waited for him to say something. To apologise again. He didn’t. Just looked at the sky and there they stayed.

When she opened her eyes again, the blue of the sky was not so dark. Dawn was threatening to break and she let herself cry, silently, tear after tear rolling down ter temples towards the blanket under them.

She was dead. They were dead.

She could feel herself calming down when his arm started moving slowly towards her and he pulled her to him.

“Did you tell someone?” she asked, voice small.

He took a second and then answered her, soft and slow.

“Red. And Micro.”

She sighed in relief. At least someone knew she was alive.

“Who’s Micro?”

“Associate of mine.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Yes.”

She fell asleep again after that, inside his arms, feeling safe.

.:.

Matt called once, that afternoon, voice tortured and sighing when she answered.

He asked all the questions. Was she ok? Was she hurt? Did she need anything? Promised he would help with this fucked up situation, promised to do his best.

Asked if she wanted to go back home.

Frank sat on a chair by her side, elbows on his knees, head down, cracking his knuckles, waiting for her to finish. Max sat in front of her chair, sweet round eyes looking at her and she reached a hand to caress his face.

“No. I’m ok.”

.:.

Frank spent a lot of time talking on that strange looking phone. Satellite phone, she realized. From what she could hear, he was giving orders, asking for status, giving more orders, adjusting plans.

Other than that, she was not allowed to log into her email or any other account.

“Don’t worry, they’ll all be there for you when we go back. Micro is taking care of it.”

All she could do in her computer was check the news and try to distract herself.

.:.

After just two days, she had cabin fever. And Frank was the one feeling it’s effects.

“Wanna to go for a drive?” he offered after she used too much force to throw the ball for Max, grunting, and the pitbull ran towards the trees after it. “Maybe pick up some stuff to eat.”

She realized what he was doing. And she wanted to snap at him, tell him not to treat her like a child. Instead, she got up and said “yes”, rolling her eyes as he sighed and bent to put his boots on.

They found a farmer’s market on the way. She had never, in her life, enjoyed a farmer’s market. When her mother forced her to go when she was younger, after church, she would complain the whole way. Today, it felt like the gates of heaven.

“Karen”, he said, using that voice she imagined he used when he was bossing people around in the army, when she asked him to stop the car.

“Don’t ‘Karen’ me. Come on”, she said, putting the leash on Max’s collar. “It’s just a bunch of old ladies.”

It wasn’t. But she enjoyed talking to people, buying stuff she doesn’t usually buy, like half a pound of cherries and a dozen donuts.

She held Max’s leash, who walked by her side and stopped when she wanted to stop, not complaining, just looking behind them here and there to make sure Frank was still there.

She was paying for apples when the lady giving her her change asked if Max wanted some water.

“Oh, yes, thank you very much.”

“No problem, dear.”

She filled a bowl and Max lapped it up happily.

“I have one, myself. Well, actually he’s my husband’s. He’s like yours.”

At first, Karen thought she meant her dog was like Max, but she motioned with her head and Karen looked behind her to see Frank, wearing his sunglasses and hoodie over a beanie.

(He looked good, a part of her brain noticed. Really good.)

“Only Charles does not look like that anymore”, the lady whispered, humor in her voice. “Military?” she asked, already nodding, a small smile.

“Uh, yeah”, Karen answered.

“Mine, too. After forty years, you learn to recognize them just by the way they walk and stand.”

Max finished his water, Karen thanked the lady and then walked back to Frank, saying that they could go.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

.:.

Two nights later, she was crying on the porch, thinking he had gone to bed already, but he opened the door and crouched in front of her.

“What is it?” he asked, careful, distant and present at the same time.

She tried to wipe her tears  away, tell him it was nothing, but he insisted, and insisted, and she told him she felt strange, knowing the world was going on without her.

“I’m…” she started, sighing, annoyed with herself. “I’m dead, and it seems to make zero difference.”

It was his turn to sigh, getting up, asking her to move, to make way for him.

He sat with one leg bent against the back of the bench, a foot on the seat, and made her sit with her back against his chest, his arms coming around her.

She thought he was going to hug her, but suddenly there was a gun in his left hand, and he was placing it on hers.

Before she knew what was happening, she was holding his gun and he was making her point it towards the trees.

“Do you see the thick one, a little behind?”

“What-”

“Do you see it?”

Confused, Karen looked and spotted the tree he was talking about. It was taller and thicker than the others around it.

“Yes.”

His thumb clicked the safety off and he cocked the gun, his finger guiding her own to the trigger.

“Come on.”

She blinked, not understanding why he wanted her to shoot a tree, a wild thought that there was someone hiding there and he was making her kill them crossing her mind, but vanishing when she realized his mouth was there by her ear. She could feel his breath, his chest rising and falling slowly against her back.

“Ma’am. Pull the trigger.”

Swallowing once, she did. And she felt so good after the shot echoed and she spotted the bullet mark on the bark of the tree, she did it again without prompting. And again. And again, again until the gun clicked empty.

Silently, Frank pulled a full magazine from his pocket and placed it in her hand. Karen changed it, letting him take the empty one, clicking it in place and cocking the gun herself, shooting again and again until there was a faint ringing in her ear.

She felt incredibly better. Her hands were vibrating, her heart was pounding and she felt she wanted to smile.

“Better?” Frank asked after she lowered the weapon. She nodded.

Getting the gun from her, he placed it on the floor near his foot.

“The world didn’t stop because you didn’t really die”, he said, picking her chin and turning her face to his. “If you did, everybody else would die with you.”

She had time to recognize a different quality in his voice before he put his lips on hers. He didn’t whisper, but his words were low, meant only for her, and she was close enough.

Or at least she thought she was.

She had always, somehow, known he would be a good kisser. And that he would, eventually, kiss her. The effects his mouth had on her, though, were a bit of a pleasant surprise. It was a natural thing, felt right and organic, but also an addicting one. The more she did it, the more she discovered, lips and teeth and tongues, the more she wanted, the more she craved, the more she needed.

Karen turned around and Frank latched onto her neck, hands gripping at her, the intensity of him making her shiver, her own hands grabbing at him when he slid his hands from her waist to grab at her ass, getting up, her legs instinctively going around his hips, mouth looking for his again,God, it felt like breathing.

Frank stripped her with his hands and covered her body with his mouth. The look in his face when he lifted it to look at her made her feel warm inside, but not the cozy kind. Warm like there was a fire starting in the pit of her stomach, spreading up her spine and through her limbs, making her skin ignite and she felt like she could conduct electricity, shock him the next time he touched her.

It didn’t happen. Frank lowered his face again and she ran her hands on the skin revealed by his shirt.

She was focusing on the feeling of his hands on her when he rolled them over, and she moved to sit on top of him, straddling his lap, no teasing, it was not about that, it was just about them, getting and giving, everything.

He tugged at the hem of her sweater and she removed it, watching as he watched, feeling powerful and beautiful, but cold without him pressed up against her.

Karen tugged on his wrist and he sat up, an arm around her waist, his tongue on her neck, teeth scraping skin, breathing intense and palm heavy. He held her firmly and she reveled in it, in his strength, how he didn’t touch her as if she was made of paper.

She forgot she had been crying, remembering only when he lied down again, after bringing two hands to her face and wiping the dried up tears from her cheeks, and she turned her face towards his palm.

Frank was on top of her again, her legs were up and around him, arms too, her back was arched and she was feeling so good, the world falling silent around them, moving slow, all she could see was him, all she could feel was him, all she wanted was him.

Karen and Frank needed to die in order to feel alive again.

.:.

It had been a week when his phone made itself known one more time.

Her computer had been off for days and all she wore were his shirts, not because she felt comfortable in them (which she did, but her own clothes were also efficient in that department), but because she liked the way he looked at her when she did. Watching her with precision, focused, chasing the movement of her legs with his eyes, unmasked, unguarded, no Punisher, just Frank.

She was wearing one of his hoodies, the grey one he loved to throw over his bare chest, perched on the kitchen island with her legs around him when the satellite phone beeped in his pocket.

Sighing, he picked it up, but kept scanning her with his eyes, and she brought her hands to his face, the tip of her fingers caressing his jaw, the contour of his nose, ghosting over his lips.

Damn it. She was in love with him.

She has heard some people describing that feeling as heavy. “The weight of realization”. To her, it felt the opposite. She felt like she would float away if he wasn’t holding her down.

“Yeah. Fine. Thanks, man. I’ll call back later.”

Hanging up, he drew a deep breath and leaned in to kiss her, sweet and gentle and… Devoted.

“It’s been a week”, he said, forehead touching hers. “We have to go back.”

It was her turn to sigh and cast a quick look around, to this mysterious house in the middle of nowhere, where she already felt so at home.

“I don’t want to”, she admitted, lacing her fingers on the back of his neck, kissing his forehead and he held her to him, chest to chest, tight and sweet.

“Yeah”, he said. “Me neither.”

“Can’t we stay?”

Lifting his head from her neck, he gave her a teasing look.

“Weren’t you crying over your own death just the other day?”

She smiled, pinching his side, making him squirm, smile, and she wanted to make him smile everyday, take him away from his demons, for good.

“That was before.”

“Before what?”

She kissed him once, open mouth and sliding tongue, and leaned back, back, his hands sliding from her back around her waist, lifting the hoodie, exploring, warm and heavy, she loved that pressure.

“Before you”, she said, laying down on the marble counter, arching her back, letting him lower the zipper, knowing his eyes were doing a sweep of her, reveling in it. “Before us.”

He grunted and he moaned and she breathed deep, lost in the feeling of him, sitting back up to hold him, unable to resist the allure of his mouth on hers for too long.

“I want to stay”, she told him again, hand on his chest, feeling his heart beating.

Alive. Both of them.

His burner vibrated in his pocket. The world called.

But they wanted to stay.

[zippdementia]

Part 57 Alignment May Vary: White Plume Mountain and the Death of a Friendship

We should have realized something would go wrong. From the time we entered the Mountain, he wasn’t himself. Or maybe he was more of himself, everything exaggerated. But we had grown too used to that look in his eye, too used to the shrill laugh, too used to everything coming out okay in the end.  ~ The journals of Nysyries  

Today’s blog post is difficult to construct. As I explained last time, we are taking a break from the main campaign to do a side quest inside the classic White Plume Mountain Adventure. The players meet with the Dwarves of the Wyvernwatch Mountains, who agree to send mercenaries to help Brindol but also mention that three legendary weapons forged in the Kingdom of Rhest (and partially responsible for the Kingdom’s downfall) were given to the dwarves for safekeeping generations ago... and now have been stolen! The thief seems to want people to come find the weapons, as he left instructions in the form of a riddle for where the weapons would be kept.

Enter White Plume Mountain, an infamous and still active volcano set in the heart of the Wyvernwatch. The dwarves agree begrudgingly to give the players directions to the Mountain with the promise that they will find and not keep the legendary weapons. To sweeten the deal, they offer a Wish spell upon the return of the weapons. With this, the players make their way to White Plume, entering it only to be greeted by a mischevious and seemingly all-powerful gnome calling himself Keraptis and welcoming the players to his “playground.” His instructions are clear: there are three paths, each leading to another of the weapons. The players need only pass his devious traps and monstrous guardians in order to retrieve the weapons. He also, in response to Tyrion’s boasting that Tyrion is going to beat up the gnome, turns our Blue Bard Tyrion polka-dotted and gives him a Bob Ross afro before disappearing. Begin dungeon!

White Plume Mountain has a very good conversion in Tales of the Yawning Portal and is pretty much a straight dungeon crawl. There is no need to cover every random encounter or detail of its trap rooms here. I had planned for this to be a quick side quest to give the players some cool weapons and buff them up before facing the final rush of the horde. My blog post would have covered some of the changes I made to the dungeon and then moved us back to the main plot with minimal fuss.

As it turned out, White Mountain was a huge turning point not only for all of our characters, but even for our group as a whole. So I have some explaining to do. I’m not going to cover every moment of White Plume Mountain. Let’s start where I intended, however, and talk about some important changes.

The Big Change: Weapons

Each of the three classic weapons hidden in White Plume Mountain has problems that left me feeling unable to use them in my campaign in their original form. First of all, for every weapon I decide to use the old legacy system (from 3.5 I think?) where weapons level up with the characters. So know that these all start as +1 weapons and will eventually grow to +3, with more powerful abilities. I’ll post a link to the redesigns below.

Blackrazor is the one with the most drastic change. Unless your party is going to be going up against epic-level challenges or you are going to be basing the rest of your campaign around this weapon or you are running a solo campaign, it is too powerful to use as is. The reason is that ability to gain temporary hit points. Already innately powerful in DnD 5, most temporary hit point abilities seem to average around 10 or 15 extra hit points. I could see 25 to 50 being reasonable at higher levels. But the ability to gain temporary hit points equal to the original hit points of the monster you killed and the fact that the player gets advantage on all attacks while having these temporary hit points can quickly break a slower paced game. There are some major weaknesses to the weapon, like the inability to hit undead and its propensity to turn its users completely insane, but from a purely mechanical standpoint, my game isn’t ready to withstand its full power yet. So I nerf that for now, having it grant 10+monster’s CR temporary hitpoints upon the monster’s defeat. Again, this will level up in time. I also change the weapon to a Longsword, as this is meant for Aldric Alright.

Wave is a little easier to work with. Mostly here I’m just trying to simplify things. Force cube is one of my least favorite D&D 5 abilities just because of how complicated it is and everything you have to remember. So I pull that as one of its constant abilities and replace it with some extra damage. This weapon is meant for Nysyries.

Whelm is the sad step child of the bunch. A cool little weapon, but with an awful penalty of being at disadvantage for everything you do outside during the day. Okay, so fair enough to say that most of D&D does take place underground or inside, but I’m not quite ready to put this major restriction on my players yet. So this weapon I replace entirely with one out of a third party Legacy Weapons book, the Heartcarver. I intend it for Tyrion, who has a thing for axes. I don’t end up using the stats for Heartcarver because something happens, something we will discuss next, but I’ve provided the first level of Wave and Blackrazor here for review. Keep in mind they will power up later and at a later date I’ll post the full tiered stats, but for now I want it to be a bit of a mystery for my players.

I’ll also throw in a brief mention about one possible encounter in the dungeon, and that is Sir Bluto sans Pite. That fight against him and his knights is incredibly deadly. Like, I’m not sure what the intentions of the designer was in that fight except that players should avoid it altogether. You need to find some way to make this fight doable. Maybe Sir Bluto is willing to let the players go if they bribe him or agree to give him one of the weapons (in which case he’ll follow them with his knights to the location of the next weapon and fight the players if they get it and don’t give it to him). Maybe Sir Bluto is arrogant and has his knights fight the players two or three at a time, hanging back until the end to finish them off himself. Maybe he challenges their strongest fighter to a dual, saying if that fighter can defeat him (take him down to 20 or less hit points), he’ll let everyone go. Maybe you expand the river and turn the whole scene into a chase, where the enchanted river flows by an illusionary forest, where the knights fire arrows at the players in their boat and then Sir Bluto gets in his own boat and gives chase with two of his knights, the two teams having to face off against each other as they ride the river rapids. Do something here, because this is otherwise a very frustrating fight unless your party has five or more players in it.

My players encounter the river, but Nysyries uses her spy fly (a little drone-like device that flies up the river to see what’s over there) to spot the attackers and they avoid the whole scene altogether.

Death of a Friendship

Today, news reached me in the form of a song called the “Blue Bard’s Ballad” that my old friend and companion, Tyrion Talltame, last of his name, has perished somewhere in the far east. The song is frustratingly unclear as to the exact manner of his death, ending simply with “he strode forward into fire and smoke, his shadow stretching to the sky, and the final words he ever spoke, they’ll never catch one small as I.”    ~ Diary of Karina, Mistress of the School of the Sworn

Dungeons and Dragons is a game played among friends and it moves to the mysterious tides of those friendships. Sometimes it waxes and sometimes it wanes. The bluntest way I can say this is that our friendship with Tyrion’s player has been waning for a while and it finally snapped during White Plume Mountain.

Handling the break up of a friendship without ruining your game of Dungeons and Dragons is not a subject I see talked about often. Maybe it’s somewhat superstitious, like we don’t talk about it because are afraid to invite that occurrence in. Or maybe we simply don’t like to think, or can’t think, of losing long friendships. Most likely I think it is because every situation is different, every group of friends different, and there is no advice that anyone can give that can be directly applied to this kind of situation.

For instance, in our group, I could point to certain behaviors of Tyrion’s player: a propensity to speak over the other players, ignore their ideas, become irritated if others were in the spotlight, and having extreme and borderline violent outbursts when his characters would die. I could speculate on certain things that were said recently and commitments to the game that were broken that gave us all the impression that he no longer was invested in the game. I can take responsibility myself and say that his gaming style had recently become something I wasn’t comfortable with as a GM, finding myself consistently locked into a “challenge” battle with him where his behavior would make me feel not like we were collaboratively telling a story but were instead competing to win the game, an impossible position to be in for Dungeons and Dragons where there is no such thing as winning... well, aside from everyone going home having had a good time. Maybe that was the key thing: not everyone was leaving the table anymore feeling like they were having a good time.

But the reasons go beyond this. I think the best way to explain it came from a conversation I had with another friend just last week about the incident. I am in my mid-thirties now, and the friends I have I value greatly. The people I chose to spend time with these days are people that I hope to have in my life for however long I am given to live it. At the same time, those friends are also well into or approaching their thirties and they are firming up who they are as people. Not that their situations in life will not change, or that they will not continue to grow as people and friends, but the core of who they are is now plain to see. The seed has split and we see the type of tree they are. And the person who played Tyrion, having now shown his shape, is not someone that I feel I can stay friends with. The rest of the group agreed. And so, after Tyrion died, we cut him out of the group and have continued to play with two.

These are hard words to type, made harder still by the fact that he may be reading these words. I believe he will not take them well. In his mind, he is the victim here, perhaps even a martyr for having stuck out the game until he was kicked out. He essentially told me afterwards that he doesn’t need friends who abandon him. From his own perspective, he is not incorrect. From my perspective, there are no victims or martyrs here. There are choices. The rest of the group, myself included, made the choice to remove him from our lives. We own that choice, we take responsibility for it. I only hope that he learns to take responsibility for his.

As grave as all that is, the actual death itself is almost humorous in its telling. Tyrion had been tackling White Plume Mountain like a wrecking ball. The first big trap, a hallway which heats up metal armor and weapons and requires some careful planning to make it through safely, he bolts down before the group can formulate a plan. This places him alone at its end where nearly a dozen ghasts wait to tear him to shreds before the party can catch up. No, this is not where he dies, believe it or not! This is where he gains a feather beard in a hilarious roll of his chaos armor (which, when hit, allows the player to use a reaction to activate a random wild magic). The ghasts leap at him, he unleashes the full might of his armor and... POOF! Feathers explode out of his face in a colorful beard. It’s a pretty great moment.

The actual death comes later, during the unusual Ziggarat aquarium room. For those who haven’t seen the room, it’s pictured above, a tiered step down of enclosed cages with various deadly monsters inside and a door at the bottom tier. The room is an unusual puzzle. Really, it’s about not overthinking it and removing the need to kill every monster. The real trick is getting to the bottom tier and just running through the door. It might sound stupid, but it’s a meta-challenge to gamers that challenges them to test the environment, learn that the monsters are docile as long as their area isn’t entered, and then to make the choice to skip confrontation. Skipping confrontation was a very cool and self-aware message to players back when White Plume came out. It is maybe less relevant today, but no less challenging.

Aldric and Nysyries are actually on the verge of figuring this out, using fish they got earlier in the dungeon to feed the top layer of monsters and observe their behavior, when Tyrion decides to smash the glass. The problem with this is that it then locks the bottom door behind a wall of force and now the players will have to at least fight the manticores.

I won’t go through every facet of this room. There are some very cool moments, like when Aldric makes a mighty leap into the manticore’s lair, jumping over one of the aquariums where the deadly (and literal) sea-lions live, just barely avoiding being snatched out of the air by a leaping sea-lion. Nysyries encounters a wight on the upper level, a random encounter who sneaks into the room behind her, and takes it on one-vs-one while transformed into a giant scorpion! Singlehandedly, she takes down the wight while Aldric faces off against three starved manticores by himself and actually holds his own.

Tyrion at this point is on the upper level. The manticores have had their wings clipped, so they can’t fly up to get him. Nysyries is fighting the Wight and doesn’t need help. The manticores have injured him down to three hitpoints with their tailspikes, but nothing is targeting him now that they are distracted by Aldric, a much more accessible piece of food inside their cage. Tyrion has leisure to heal himself, or to keep launching arcane bolts down into the manticore arena to support Aldric. So what he does next doesn’t make sense to us.

“I use misty step to jump inside the manticore cage!” he declares.

Well, there’s a few problems with this. First of all, the cage is actually outside of the range of misty step. He’ll land on the edge of the lowest aquarium level, and it has been well established by this point that that level has leaping sea-lions who will definitely attack anyone who goes there. Even if he survives this, there are three high-health manticores in that cage looking for an easy meal and who get three attacks a turn. Tyrion is asking to be torn to shreds by going in there with only three hit points.

Maybe he wanted to be in the spotlight. Maybe he was secretly tired of playing Tyrion, though his reaction to what happens next would suggest otherwise. Maybe he simply believed that he couldn’t die.

What happens next is Tyrion the Blue Polka-dotted Bard with a Bob Ross afro and a feather beard poofs in a cloud of smoke, appears on the edge of the aquarium, is immediately stuck from behind by a sea-lion, topples face first into the manticore’s cage, and is devoured by the nearest starved manticore who then burps up a burst of feathers.

When I tell the story to outsiders, they laugh. It’s a classic D&D style mishap, the ignominious and pointless death of a character, the sort of thing that you tell jokes about as you roll up your new character. And it is funny, I can’t help but chuckle even now as I type it. But it is also a little bitter, that it marks the death not only of a long-standing party member, but also of a friendship.

Further Changes: 2 person party

From here on out, we are a two person party. We have not added anyone else to the group, nor do we have a desire to just yet. And it turns out that a two person party is really a lot of fun!

Some benefits include being able to give each character more attention and more roleplaying moments. Challenge becomes something more interesting, too. You can highlight individual monsters more easily, since players are now more easily outclassed by the action economy, and can hand out more unique and interesting magical items, as they are less likely to break the game’s challenge completely. Combat goes faster and players are encouraged to come up with more interesting solutions to situations rather than “we run in and kill it” because that tactic is now potentially dangerous.

On the DM side, it does require a bit of tweaking to adjust fights where necessary, or to roleplay monster behavior so that they aren’t using their most deadly attacks and options each round. In White Plume Mountain, it leads to a couple of major changes in the dungeon:

The Oni Fight: The Oni who guards Blackrazor is a tough opponent and while Nysyries and Aldric could probably defeat him, it is not a sure thing. Possible death seems a harsh thing to put into the game right after such an impactful departure from Tyrion, so I mess with this encounter a lot. As written in the module, the Oni is in disguise as a Halfling, but unlike in the module he is not particularly interested in fighting the players. He despises the gnome who trapped him and has decided to take his command “guard Blackrazor and challenge those who would seek to claim it” more literally and leaves the nature of the challenge up to the players. Aldric chooses to arm wrestle and so they do. The Oni is not totally good natured though, so they do it over small orbs of annihilation which will decimate the hand of whomever loses. We drag this contest out over several Strength rolls, myself keeping track of the number of successes each party gains (big wins, like +5 or +10 over the opponent, count as multiple successes) until Aldric finally drives the Halfling’s hand down into the sphere. In this way, they win the encounter and are able to claim Blackrazor. I don’t let them linger, though: the Halfling is beginning to turn into his true form, compelled to fight them, and the players flee before he can fully transform. The Gnome congratulates them and moves them back to the start of the dungeon.

The Vampire Fight: The fight for Whelm (or in this case, Heartcarver) is against a vampire, an incredibly dangerous foe at this level and one that Aldric, weilding Blackrazor, would not be able to hurt. I just don’t feel that this fight is one that my two person party can win, so I decide to mix it up. When Tyrion dies, the Herzou demon that has lurked inside of him since Haggemoth’s Tomb finally is freed. It barely has time to gloat, however, before the Gnome appears and fascinated by the creature, decides to abscond with him. Really, he is imprisoning the demon in place of the vampire, enjoying the fact that the players will have a chance to fight against the thing that empowered their old companion. More on that later.

Encouraging them to go after all Three Weapons: One obvious question with only two party members is why even care about going for the third weapon? One could claim that they won’t receive their Wish reward unless they claim all three weapons but, really, the players don’t intend on returning these items anyway, though they are wary of the dwarves coming after them to retrieve the weapons. So I sweeten the pot. The Gnome tells them that if they get all three weapons, he will be so delighted that he will cast a massive illusion to make everyone agree that the players have always been the rightful owners of these powerful items. That’s a big incentive, but Nysyries asks for another favor on top of it: “Can you remove the curse that makes me feed on the souls of men”?

She is referring to the blood curse put on her by the Rusalka of the Wytchwood, Tywin’s wife and Jorr’s daughter, the one that forces her to feed every three days on the soul of a male humanoid or else face losing her druidic powers forever.

This is very interesting and as a GM I take it as a clear character goal for Nysyries. So I do some quick adjustments to Heart Carver and the gnome tells Nysyries that the blood bond is too strong for him to affect directly but that the third weapon they seek has the power to break such bonds.

“I can promise to transport you to where the woods wytch is once you retrieve the weapon,” he giggles. “That much I can do.”

And with that, we have our deal.

The Cream of the Crop: Key Moments in White Mountain

There are some key moments that I don’t want to skip over, things that were just too well roleplayed to not share.

Aldric’s Sacrifice: Like all of the sentient legacy weapons, Blackrazor demands something in order to be attuned to. In its case, it wants a sacrific, a show of its new owner’s devotion to it. I honestly don’t have any particular idea in mind when I ask this of Aldric. Obviously it has to be something he can do now, so he can use the awesome weapon in this dungeon. I’m thinking maybe he will offer a body part, or something metaphysical, like the memory of the names and faces of his old mercenary troop. So when he tells Nysyries he will be right back and leaves the dungeon for a moment, I am not sure what to expect. I’m trying to think what he is getting. Aldric is a Cavalier, the new fighter archetype from Xanathar’s Guide. He has some decent magical items that go along with the class and support his role as a mounted warrior. Any of these would be a big sacrifice if he were to let them go.

Then he comes back into the dungeon. And he’s carrying a bloodied saddle. What he’s done dawns on me, then. “OH SHIT,” I say out loud, genuinely heart struck. For years, Aldric has only had one companion, besides his own need for revenge, and that companion was his lovely mare, Enopi, whom he has just slain in his quest for revenge.

The Death of Knick Knack: There is a nasty puzzle in this dungeon (one of many) where a hallway heats up metal and ends in an encounter with ghouls and ghasts. The party is in the process of figuring this puzzle out when, bored and tired of puzzles, Tyrion rushes headlong into it, using dimension door to bypass most of it. That’s fine, except then he’s left alone to fight the ghouls and ghasts. The other players curse and rush into the trap to catch up. They survive the trap, but the ever talkative Knick Knack does not. Having some metal on him, he is melted into nothingness and his last words of banter are spoken as his spirit leaves the door knocker: “Make sure... you put this... in my book...”

Nysyries breaks: Speaking of demands, Wave (which goes to Nysyries) wants only one thing—devotion to the sea god, Poiseden, whose power forged it and whose divine hands once wielded it. Nysyries agrees, this seems easy enough, but she do’esnt realize how complete the devotion is. She now worships and believes ONLY in Poiseden, who claims her soul as his own. Poor Nysyries: she has had her soul bargained and affected at least three times in this adventure. This latest bargain shatters her agreement with Nazragul and in a sudden moment of sharp clarity, she is free of his influence, reverting from Lawful Evil to Lawful Neutral alignment. This will have heavy implications in the finale of the adventure as she now no longer feels compelled to retrieve and use the soul jar to decimate Brindol.

Random Encounter: I roll a few random encounters while in White Plume Mountain. It’s a dungeon from the days where this is part of the expectation of the dungeon crawl and we have some fun with bugbears, a wight, and an invisible stalker during the players’ time in the mountain. The last random I roll is a pair of gagoyles and with one casting of Blight, Nysyries shows that they are simply not a match for her and Aldric. Now, I am not against a good figbht to break up the pacing of a dungeon crawl, but fights that feel like they are cannon fodder just don’t appeal to me. Yes, yes, they use up spells so fights against bosses are harder, but anytime I feel myself getting bored as a DM I take it as a red flag that the adventure needs a twist.

Thus, the Gargoyles stop fighting and begin arguing amongst themselves:

“Hey, Bruce, these guys are pretty tough. Maybe they could help us”?

“Shut up Lenny! We agreed we’d do this on our own. It’s our home, it’s ours to defend.”

“Yeah, I know, but they are really tough. It’d be nice if they’d help us. And they do kind of owe us for attacking us like that. Look, my left wing is totally shattered Bruce!”

Yes, these are Lenny and Bruce (I know, it was the first two names that came to mind), two mated gargoyles who have lived in White Plume since before the gnome infested it with monsters and turned it into his own personal fun house. Now the two, having made a promise to each other ages ago that they would make this their home and not let anyone come between their love, are determined to take on the cosmically strong gnome and reclaim their home!

It’s a sad little hope, as the gnome will doubtless turn them into dust—or his puppets—but they make an impression on the players, who agree to have them along, thinking at the very least they can soak some damage or show them the way past any traps. I think it also goes to show that players like variety, too, and that random encounters don’t always have to end in two sides hitting each other until one dies.

Boots of Lava Walk: I think I mentioned in a previous blog post that one of Aldric’s magical items are boots of lava walk which make him resistant to fire damage and his feet immune to it? Then it also bears mentioning that the group comes across a room where they have to leap from platform to platform over a pool of bubbling lava.

Nysyries turns into a quetzalcoatl and flies over the lava, carrying another monster they won to their side: a Flesh Golem that Aldric names Brutus, and who loves Aldric like he is his creator. There isn’t much time to develop this relationship though, as Nysyries is knocked off course by an exploding geyser of lava which damages her enough to transform back into her draconic form. Lenny and Bruce save her, but Brutus tumbles to his fiery death in the lava and Aldric is left to find his own way across the lava room. This goes fairly well, as it is a series of atheltic checks he makes while the room explodes in lava geysers behind him, and Aldric is very athletic. But on the last roll, he rolls incredibily low and there is only but one situation that can arise from this (pun intended): the lava explodes underneath Aldric and he rides the lava geyser to the top of the room and leaps off to makes the final jump to the platform at the end of the room.

Laying Old Plots to Rest: the fight against the Herzou (whose health I have buffed) is just as epic as I wanted it to be. It starts with everyone expecting a vampire (I leave the coffin as it is in the original module, and Lenny and Bruce also know that a vampire usually lives in here). But when Aldric opens the coffin, he sees instead the body of Tyrion laying in the coffin. The gnome, Keraptis, appears and taunts the players with their final challenge (freezing Lenny and Bruce in place as they try to assault him). Moments later, the Herzou emerges from Tyrion’s corpse and attacks.

Fang, claw, and blade clash as Aldric and the Herzou rush at each other. The Herzou gets the best of this match up, criting on Aldric and throwing him across the room to slam into Nysyries. Lenny and Bruce leap to the rescue, each of them grabbing onto the Herzou and holding it in place while Aldric charges it again and Nysyries launches her moonbeam. But this only lasts a short time. The Herzou crushes Lenny’s head to dust in his hands and holds Bruce up to the moonbeam, using it to destroy him. Then he prepares to engage Aldric again.

This is the turning point of the battle. Nysyries casts contagion on the Herzou, inflicting it with slimy doom forcing it to be stunned after it takes damage. And between moonbeam, one critically failed roll, and Aldric still pounding on it, the Herzou remains stunned for four rounds, just taking massive damage during this time. But not enough to kill it. Now completely enraged, it shakes off the contagion and charges Nysyeries, who has retreated from the room into a small hallway. Aldric tries to leap at the Herzou to stop its approach, but it swings around and knocks him aside with another critical hit, flinging him unceremoniously across the room. Then it proceeds after the terrified Nysyries.

Nysyries uses her staff of swarming insects to create a wall of locusts, but the insects do little to hamper the Herzou, who ignores their stings and bites and comes through them like parting a curtain, his fanged mouth open wide to bite Nysyries in two. He charges, intending to knock her back into the lava room and cast her into the lava after taking a couple of bites out of her. They roll opposing strength rolls, the Herzou adding +8 to his roll for this charge and getting a total of 20...

... and Nysyries rolls a natural 20 and adds her strength, beating the Herzou by a slim margin. Against all odds, she plants herself and bears the brunt of the demon’s charge, holding it back.

As she does so, she hears a snippet of song coming down the hallway, sounding as if it emanates from the Herzou itself: “Smash the rock, crack the rock, bash the rock!”

Tyrion, She thinks, recognizing the verse and the voice. But no, Tyrion is dead. This is but the echo of him. It is enough though. It grants her bardic inspiration and she uses it to drive her trident, the powerful Wave,up through the Herzou’s mouth and into its brain, killing it.

As the demon dies, its body dissolves in a pool of hot flesh and blood, in the middle of which is the handaxe, Heartcarver. Heartcarver was once the handaxe of a young woodsman who fell in love with a dryad. His story was destined for tragedy, as his fellow woodcutters burned the dryad’s forest out of jealously. They used the young man’s own axe to fell the Dryad’s tree, inadvertently laying a terrible power upon the weapon. It eventually passed into the hands of the royal family of Rhest, who knew of its powers and how to wield them. And it, like Blackrazor and Wave, played an unknown role in the fall of that kingdom.

With this fabled axe in hand, Nysyries steps back towards Aldric, who is a little peeved that she and not he got the killing blow on the beast. But as they step towards each other, the cavern walls shift and blur and suddenly they are out in the forest, the final laughter of the gnome echoing in their ears:

“Thank you so much for playing my game! Hee hee hee!”

“Aldric.” Nysyries hissed the name through clenched teeth, trying to draw the bearded man’s attention back to her. But it was no use. He continued walking towards the woman half submerged in the water, pulling at his breeches as he moved forward, everything else forgotten. Even Blackrazor lay discarded back by the gnarled tree roots that snaked together to form a bridge extending partway into the lake.

The woman was beautiful. Never had a word more closely fit a creature, as if it had been invented for her, by her, invented for her use and traded out to others by her permission alone. The water lifted her skirts and they floated about her. Beneath them was a color that suggested pale, naked, skin and hinted at pleasures lying in wait for any who would join her in the lake.

But Nysyries knew better. This was her patron, after all, the creature she was bound to. She had tasted blood and death for her. Now she ran along the root bridge towards Aldric, who was being drawn into the woman’s embrace. She heard Aldric gasp in surprise as the woman’s lips closed over his and her long black hair rose from the water like a living thing to ensnare him and pull him under. His eyes were rolled back in his head. His lips were flecked with blood. As for her, her neck was exposed as she tilted her head to watch him sink under the water.

Nysyries brought the Heartcarver down on that uncannily perfect neck. It was smooth like sanded stone and, like stone, it did not break under the axe’s touch. Instead a fleck of blood beaded under the small cut Heartcarver had made and the woman looked up with eyes that promised death.

“Traitor,” she said, not loudly, but with all the menace of an approaching storm.

“Aim for the heart,” a voice said in her mind and without thinking on it, Nysyries adjusted the Heartcarver to her other hand and swung sideways as the woman reached for her. The axe bit into the woman’s chest and this time blood exploded out, the torrent like a wine casket split in two. Aldric began to cough and he pulled himself out to shore, scrambling away from the water that was deepening to a dark red behind him.

The woman wept. But she lived. Nysyries wanted to strike her again, to make sure this was ended, but the woman pulled away, clawing her way to shore after Aldric. Aldric grabbed Blackrazor and made to cut her down, but the sword spoke: “No!” it said. “Do not touch her. She is tainted. Tainted by my brother.” And for once, Blackrazor sounded afraid.

So it was that the woman of the lake lay herself down, her eyes wide and staring at the sunset lit canopy of trees above her. In time, Nysyries stood over her, but before she could lift Heartcarver again, the woman sighed.

“Twyin?” she said, the name a question. “I... see you. Do you see our son? He looks like you, Twyin. He looks strong.”

Nysyries waited, but the woman said no more. Nysyries felt a weight slough off of her. She knew the curse was finally ended.

“I’ve had better dates,” Aldric said.