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silhouetteofacedar · 3 years

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Fox Mulder, Closet Romantic Ch. 25: Prima Materia

Previous Chapter - AO3 - MSR, rated E

Five Months Later

Friday, November 13th, 1998

“I can’t believe you,” Scully hisses as they exit Skinner’s office. “We’ve discussed this, Mulder. Multiple, no, countless times. You can’t just accuse someone of being a supernatural entity based off a… a wild hunch!”

“A hunch? Scully, we have concrete evidence. It’s literally documented in the folder you’re holding right now.”

“That ‘evidence’ is obviously subject to interpretation,” Scully retorts, stomping down the hall in an attempt to keep pace with Mulder’s long strides. “An interpretation I thought we’d agreed upon before going into that meeting. And I don’t appreciate you abandoning a solid hypothesis, that we discussed at length, in favor of whatever the hell that just was.”

Mulder stops outside the elevator, turning to her. “That was the truth, Scully. It’s out there, if you would just open your mind a little and accept that there are things science still can’t explain.”

“But science can-” She reaches out and punches the button for the elevator, “-explain it. You just like the sound of your own theories and ideas better than fact. Fox Mulder, the champion of truth, the only man willing to consider the extreme.”

“You know you like it,” he says in a low tone.

Scully’s eyes go wide, and she grabs his elbow. “Do not-”

The elevator doors open, and they scurry into the lift. Mulder presses the button for the basement.

“Do not use my weaknesses against me at work, Mulder, that’s not fair,” she says as the doors slide closed.

“Weaknesses?” Mulder asks casually. “Am I your weakness, Dr. Scully?”

“I’m serious. We’ve have a few close calls in the past few months; if we’re not careful, we’re going to be found out.”

“How, by arguing? We did that before we started fu-”

She gives him an imploring look.

“-working after hours,” he corrects. “Besides,” he continues, angling his chin downwards to reach her ear, “I happen to know arguing turns you on.”

Scully licks her upper lip. “I’m just saying we have to be more careful,” she insists, staring straight ahead.

“Then I guess this isn’t the best time to invite you out for a drink,” Mulder says.

Scully glances at him out of the corner of her eye. “It’s Friday the thirteenth,” she notes with a twinge of a smile. “Don’t you think it’s a little risky?”

Mulder shrugs as the elevator doors open into the basement. “Historically, the thirteenth is my lucky day.”

“You know, it’s been nine months since our first date,” Mulder says conversationally. They’d walked to Casey’s Bar from the Bureau and are now perched on stools at the far end of the counter, nursing a beer each.

Scully furrows her brow, obviously doing some quick mental math. “February… that was a date?” she says, somewhat amused. “You should have told me at the time. I wouldn’t have waited so long to put out.”

Mulder raises his eyebrows. “Dana,” he says in mock surprise. “I thought you were a good church girl.”

“What gave you that idea, my penchant for kneeling?” she mutters into her glass.

Fuck, she’s good.

They’ve been together for six months now, and it’s surprising how little has actually changed between them, in the practical sense. They’ve been pretty good at keeping their relationship a secret, Mulder thinks. It helps that everyone in the Bureau already thought they were crazy, codependent, and tanking their respective careers. Apparently, bad reputations make the best cover.

He and Scully arrive at the Hoover building in separate vehicles, squabble over conflicting viewpoints, have lunch together almost every day. He rests a hand on her back, guiding her through the halls, and she gives him withering glances and dramatic eye rolls when appropriate. From the outside, they’re still the same Mulder and Scully.

And then they go home to one of their respective apartments and tear each other’s clothes off.

Well, they usually make it home. That quickie in the office annex was an outlier.

Nine months seems significant somehow. The length of human gestation, Mulder thinks absently. It seems like a length of time worth celebrating.

“Would it be terribly corny of me to propose a toast?” he asks.

“A toast to what?”

He’s suddenly shy. “Us,” he says softly. “How far we’ve come. And how much,” he adds, giving her a nudge with his elbow. She rolls her eyes at him, and it feels overtly fond.

Scully lifts her glass. “To us,” she says warmly. “And to spooky shit.”

“You remember,” Mulder says as they clink glasses, recalling that first toast in Casey’s all those months ago.

“Mm,” she replies, sipping her beer. “I do. It was a… notable evening.”

“What made it notable for you?” he asks.

“We had an actual conversation, for one,” Scully muses. “About our personal lives, attraction, about how we relate to the outside world; and by extension, how we relate to each other. I remember very clearly feeling like we were close to something.”

“So did I,” Mulder admits. “So what happened, on your end?”

“I don’t know,” she sighs. “The spell wore off, maybe? When I got home that night I remembered all the reasons it would be a mistake to let myself feel. And then Mark happened, and you know the rest of that story.” She turns on her stool to face him more fully. “What happened for you?”

“I took you on a very cold, very dark picnic,” Mulder reminds her.

“Which was wonderful,” she offers.

Mulder nods. “But then when I asked you out again, you had a date. I don’t know, maybe I was going too slow, being too subtle. But when you started going out with that jackass it felt like… in a way, you were saying that what I had to give wasn’t enough.”

Scully doesn’t say anything, just stares down at her glass.

“And I realize that it’s selfish of me to project that onto you,” he amends. “Your choices aren’t about me. But fuck, I wished they were.”

“You’d be surprised how many of my choices actually were about you,” she says softly. “I surprise even myself. You told me before that you didn’t think I’d last a full year working with you, remember? There was validity in that. This job… it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. So much is at stake for us, so much has been taken. But I chose to continue because I believed in you, and in our work. We have different methods and come to different conclusions, but we’re working towards the same thing. That’s what I believe.”

He reaches over beneath the cover of the countertop and takes her hand, clasping it atop his knee. They sit in silence for awhile, taking sips of their drinks, palms pressed together.

The truth hides in many places, Mulder is learning. Places more secret and sacred than dusty file folders or abandoned warehouses, more mundane than the locked rooms of the Pentagon or trapped beneath thousands of years of ice. The greatest truths are scattered pieces he stumbles upon every day; reflected in his bathroom mirror, scribbled on post-it notes in their office, hidden under Scully’s warm tongue. He knows he’s an obsessed man, prone to irrationality and impulse; but in quiet moments with his partner, he finds small fragments of peace he never thought he could reach.

“Where are you?” Scully says softly, drawing him back into the present. A dim barroom, a sweating glass, her soft hand in his. He wonders if the day will come when his mind wanders too far for her to follow.

“I-I know how crazy this is going to sound, Scully but bear with me… do you ever think that we’re… that we’re bonded somehow? Like we were always supposed to end up here. Together.”

“Like here, here? In this bar?”

“Maybe. Maybe less specifically this bar and more generally this time and place on earth. This universe, this dimension. With each other.”

She shakes her head gently, smiling. “Mulder, it’s been a long week. If we’re going to talk about the metaphysical I need to either have more to drink or be under the influence of a postcoital surge of oxytocin.”

He leans closer to her. “Do you have a preference as to which, because I’d gladly provide either.”

Scully pushes her half-empty glass away from her, eyes dark and soft. “Take me home, Mulder,” she whispers.

His heart squeezes. “Will you stay?” The night, the rest of our lives, until our boat drifts over the edge of the earth?

She nods, and another piece of the truth slides into place.

#fmcr #my fic #fox mulder closet romantic #txf fic #xfiles #It Is Finished #oof #i need to lie down

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inskz · 4 years

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lucky charm - lee minho

pairing - lee minho x reader

genre - college!au, best friends to lovers, very cliche fluff (lucky girl starring lindsey lohan kinda vibes???)

words - 4k

note - this is just a cute little drabble i wrote while im still waiting for my covid test results to come back so that i can leave my room and see the sun again 🤪 pls be careful everybody take care of your health 💚 enjoy!!!

- - - - -

“You must be kidding me,” you sigh when you see Minho’s hand has turned into a fist, his rock crushing miserably your scissors. Once again, you lost at rock, paper, scissors. And once again, you’re the one that is going to wash your best friend’s dishes that have piled up in is tiny kitchen sink throughout the week.

“Fuck that. This is so unfair,” you grumble, throwing the dishtowel in Minho’s stupid yet perfectly chiseled face.

You make a beeline for his bed, which is actually only a few steps away from the kitchen. Being a broke college student definitely doesn’t allow him to rent a spacious studio, let alone a two-room apartment. You throw yourself headfirst onto his uncomfortable mattress, whose springs always poke your back at night.

“Life is so unfair,” your friend mocks you, dragging out every vowel of his sentence dramatically.

No doubt, you would be strangling him at that very moment if you weren’t so busy playing dead, hoping he would forget about your pitiful existence.

But there is no way mister Lee Minho would miss out on an opportunity to have his gross plates cleaned by someone else. Grabbing onto your ankle, he drags you out of bed until you plop down on the dirty carpeted floor (Minho has the unfortunate tendency to procrastinate vacuuming too). At this point, you are fake crying, throwing a literal tantrum, like a 6 years old child would.

“Life is unfair!” you yell, your feet kicking in the air in pure anger.

At least it is to you. You can’t remember the last time you’ve been lucky. The only instance you got remotely close to it was when you found a four-leaf clover last summer. Well, only if you disregard the fact you stepped into dog poop on your way to picking it. Oh and that you were wearing brand new white Converse.

On the other hand, it seems like the boy has the whole crew of the Olympus gods on his side. Not one day goes by without his guardian angel manifesting its presence.

Minho has always been the lucky type. The type to get an extra nugget in his box of 10. To find 20 dollars bills on the ground. To win every single Instagram giveaway he participates to (and lord knows how much he likes participating to them).

But how can you be mad at him when he always happily shares his food with you, invites you to the restaurant without you even asking, and gives you his prizes, pretending he doesn’t need them? You don’t believe him when he says he see no use in a panda onesie or a waterproof bluetooth speaker. Deep down, you know it’s his way to silently love you.

But well, you can still blame him for occasionally taking advantage of your misfortune to make you do his dreaded house chores, just like right now.

Everyone thinks you are a bizarre duo. Even you can’t fathom how in hell you two became best friends, considering how awfully your first encounter went three years ago.

On orientation day, he asked you for the time, probably because his phone was dead (or maybe because he was dying to talk to you?)

Without hesitation, you lifted and rotated your wrist so that you could see your watch. Little did you remember; you never actually owned a watch and you were holding a fancy 7 dollars iced coffee, which, of course, did not have a lid on because plastic is bad for the environment (duh).

Minho couldn’t help but burst out in hysterical laughter when the whole drink spilled on your jeans. For your defense, you didn’t sleep at all the night before since you were terrified of being alone in your new dorm room the first few days (weird stuff happens all the time in dorms, okay?). If he had asked you for your name, you probably wouldn’t even have been able to tell him.

But Minho thought you were the funniest person on campus, and he really needed a clown like you to entertain him throughout his endless college semesters. That’s what he told you anyways. Not that he thought you were the cutest human being he had ever seen.

Why would he when you are the literal definition of a mess: always having toothpaste stains on your sweater, bags under your eyes, messy hair, tripping and falling, missing buses, breaking things, losing stuff.

Most of the time, you just forget your keys and Minho lets you crash at his place since he hasn’t got any roommate and he isn’t used to sleeping alone, especially without his cats. It surely isn’t because he loves waking up next to a very groggy but adorable you every single morning, no.

Minho manages to bring you back to the countertop despite your reluctance. Positioned behind you, his arms trapping your body to make sure you can’t run away from your duties, he dips your hands into the soapy water, and you can’t help but squirm at the touch of an unknown substance sticking to a plate that has probably been soaking here for a week. You despise doing the dishes and your friend knows it.

You hear him giggle in your ear while he is playing with your arms like you are some type of marionette, making you to take the sponge and squeeze dish soap onto it.

You’ve never been the kind to like proximity nor seemed to be Minho, but for some reason, you always end up glued to each other. You hate public displays of attention and pet names a little less when it comes from him. Or maybe you don’t hate it at all and actually crave it every single minute that goes by.

Before he has the time to come up with the Machiavellian idea to soak your pajamas in dirty water (because you know he would inevitably have at some point), you yank his hands off of you and start scrubbing angrily the dirty cups.

Minho stays behind you anyways, observing your every move, his chin propped up on your shoulder like a curious little bird. To be honest, his presence is kind of getting overwhelming. But whatever, it’s not like his slightest touch makes your heart warm up in comfort or that he smells like fresh linen drying out on the porch of a cottage house on a sunny Sunday morning or anything.

“You missed a spot. Here” he murmurs teasingly, his lips almost touching your earlobe, while he points at the handle of his hideous ‘world’s greatest dad’ mug Jisung gifted him last christmas.

You know he has noticed the way you shivered violently at the feeling of his breath tickling your skin because he starts snickering loudly.

“I swear to god if you don’t shut up and go seat on the couch, I’ll slap you so hard with this spatula you’ll regret you were even born,” you say, turning around suddenly to menace him with the plastic utensil.

Of course, he isn’t afraid one bit. Right now, you really wish you could make the smug, but oh so attractive, look on his face disappear.

“Alright, ma’am” he laughs, holding up his hands in surrender. “I’ll let you do your thing”. He lets himself fall onto his dingy couch.

You can hear him humming one of his favorite songs above the sound of the water running. It would probably be getting on your nerves if his voice wasn’t so pretty.

“Chan’s sick, so we’re not going to the gym tomorrow night. Do you wanna eat tacos? El Huero has even better deals than usual” he asks you, scrolling mindlessly through his phone.

“Aren’t the deals supposed to be on Tuesdays?” You frown and scrub a little harder the frying pan Minho has burnt the night before while trying to make chocolate chips pancakes for diner, because why eat savory food when you can have dessert for every meal, right? It is one of the few advantages of living without your parents you both truly enjoy.

“Yeah, that’s what I said. Tomorrow,” he yawns, probably exhausted after what you put him through last night. You forced him to catch up on the entire season of Love Island because you desperately needed someone to bitch with, and what better partner than Lee Minho.

You take a quick glance at him and see him stretching himself across the cushions like a cat. You always thought there was something feline about his features. While you’re drying the mugs with the dishtowel, your mind wanders uncontrollably, thinking about his piercing eyes, his delicate nose, the corners of his lips that curl up a little…

All of the sudden, your hands freeze. Minho is too immersed in TikToks to notice the stupor on your face. “Wait. Today is… Monday?” you stutter.

Alarmed by the sound of your voice, his eyes finally leave his phone’s screen to look up at you. “Yeah” he repeats slowly as if you are the dumbest person he has ever encountered.

And you truly are. You are pretty sure your heart has stopped beating. Minho’s “world’s greatest dad” mug you’re holding slips between your fingers and comes crashing on the floor with a deafening sound. The pieces are now scattered all around you, making you unable to make out what’s written on it anymore. Not a big loss, if you ask.

“Y/N, you know that’s my favorite mug!” he exclaims, leaping up from the couch. “I’m sure you did it on purpose,” he mutters while he’s trying to collect the small fragments, in vain.

But you’re too shocked at this very moment to pay attention to the glare your friend is giving you. To be honest, Minho has only two moods: glaring at you or teasing you.

“My interview,” you finally manage to say, and Minho’s eyes go wide as he realizes the critical situation you’re in.

You check the time on the microwave: 10:45. In 30 minutes, you’re supposed to be on the other side of town, being interrogated by boring businessmen that are going to decide whether or not you’ll be accepted for a paid internship in one of the most reputable music label of the country. Basically, decide whether you’ll live a happy and fulfilling life, working in the sector you’ve always dreamed of or end up miserable with a boring office job and a massive college debt.

“Holy shit,” Minho whispers. You can see a wave of panic washing across his face for a split second, but, as always, he manages to find his composure back immediately.

He has never been the kind to lose his cool, except to scold you when you forget the names of his cats and their respective coats’ color (which you unfortunately often did forget).

“What are you doing? Get dressed!” He tells you when he sees you’re still standing there dumbfounded in the kitchen, like the famous Robert Pattinson meme, wearing an oversize Kermit the frog shirt with a dozen holes in it and his favorite Adidas sweatpants you always stole from him.

“No, it’s too late. I can’t make it,” you mutter, your breath short. You’re paralyzed, as if there is a 20lbs rock sitting at the bottom of your stomach, pinning you to the ground.

This isn’t bad luck, you think. This is karma. This is what you get for skipping classes to watch telereality shows in your bed with your best friend and not even realizing it isn’t the weekend anymore.

“Miss me with that bullshit.” He runs to his closet and rummages through his drawers, throwing every piece of clothing that’s on his way to find an appropriate outfit that would fit you.

“You’re gonna go do this interview even if I have to drag you all the way there.” He pushes you into his bathroom since you still haven’t moved an inch.

You manage to brush your teeth and your hair, fighting through the nauseous feeling that is building up in your tummy.

When you come back to the living room, Minho has found dress pants and a sweater that might not look utterly ridiculous on you. He lets you change in a corner, while he runs around the room collecting all your essentials.

“You’re coming?” you ask him when you see he is already wearing his puffer jacket.

“You really think I’m gonna let you go all by yourself when you’re literally not even able to put your shoes on properly”. You are, indeed, struggling with your laces, as if your fingers are suddenly made out of butter.

Minho ties them up for you and you literally feel like he’s your babysitter. You know you’re gonna hear about this for months – what are you saying- years! But all you can think about at the moment though, is the fact that sneakers are definitely not appropriate for an interview.

He throws your warmest coat at you, grab his keys, and by some type of miracle, you’re both out to the door in less than 10 minutes.

You try to call the elevator, but Minho grabs your arm and leads you to the staircase. His hand never leaving yours, he runs down the stairs and you have no choice but to follow him as fast as you can.

You can’t count how many times you missed a step and fell at this particularly slippery spot, between the 5th and the 4th floor, but weirdly enough, it doesn’t happen today.

When you finally reach the ground floor, you exit the complex and Minho hops on his old and rusty bike that he had attached to nearest tree the night before.

“There’s no way I’m riding behind you on this death machine,” you laugh nervously. The memory of that one time Minho convinced you to seat into his bicycle basket (as if you could even realistically fit in it) and you both fell seconds after he started to pedal is coming back to your mind.

Sure, it was after a long night of drinking, you were both tipsy and it was the only way to get you home since you had spent all your uber money at the bar, but still! You’re pretty sure the bruise on your butt hasn’t disappeared to this day.

“Hurry up,” Minho groans, ignoring your complaint. You unwillingly seat on his flimsy pannier rack and wrap your arms around his torso.

You haven’t even left, yet you’re already holding onto his puffer jacket for dear life. A giggle escapes your friend’s mouth (which you think is very inappropriate in such a desperate situation) before he lifts his feet off the ground and starts pedaling.

You try to ignore the loud squeaking of the bicycle drive by shutting your eyes tighter and rehearsing your introduction you have prepared over and over in your head. No matter how hard you are trying, you can’t remember what you are supposed to say just after your age (which, as you can imagine, isn’t really far into your monologue).

By the way the wind is lashing your face, you can tell Minho has picked up the speed. His breathing is getting louder, his heartbeat faster and you can’t help but think you’re probably way too heavy for him to bike you around like that. Maybe he shouldn’t skip his gym sessions with Chan so often. Or maybe you shouldn’t have eaten the leftover pancakes for breakfast after all.

You find the courage to open your eyelids and are pleased to see you’re already halfway there, probably because every single one of the traffic lights you encounter is green, and your friend is going surprisingly fast. Is luck finally starting to smile upon you?

Your mad race comes to a halt when you reach the address of your interview. You hop off the bike and so does Minho who, by the way, is a panting mess. He’s barely able to catch his breath, strands of hair sticking to his sweaty forehead, but he’s beaming at you when he realizes you’re just on time.

“Go” he gasps, pushing you in the direction of the building’s hall.

You walk up to the glass door but as your hands are about to push it, you pull a 180. Your friend sighs loudly, already knowing what’s coming next.

“Wait. No. I can’t do this. I’m not prepared” you tell him frantically. “I’m freaking out. I think I’m gonna pass out.” You are now walking in circles, mumbling incoherently.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Your heart is racing in your chest and your hands are getting clammy at the simple thought of failure. But guess what? You can’t fail if you don’t even try! One more good reason to just go back to bed and forget about your sad life for a good 8 hours, right?

“Y/N, you’re the most talented person I know, you’re gonna do just fine” Minho catches you in his arm to stop your endless pacing. You would probably think this gesture is endearing if it wasn’t just meant to make sure you couldn’t run for your life.

“No, I’m not. What if I throw up in front of everybody like that one time during the Romeo and Juliet musical?” You look up at him and his face is only inches away from yours. You’re sure you would be swooning at how beautiful he looks if you weren’t so terrified at this very moment.

“You were nine,” your best friend says, and you swear you have never heard him speak to you in such a sweet tone before. His voice is like honey and lavander but it doesn’t soothe you like it should.

You manage to break free from his embrace to crouch down, in an attempt to slow down your breathing. If only you had data left, you could be watching those short relaxing videos on your phone. They always work. But no, you had to spent it all on online games, just one week into the month. You really are beyond help.

“Y/N I know you’re scared, but if you miss out on this opportunity, you’re gonna regret it for the rest of your life.” Minho is lowering himself so that you can hear him, even though you’re curled up in a ball.

“And I’m warning you, I won’t want to hear you complain about it,” he adds, this whole situation obviously starting to get on his nerves.

If you were him, you would have probably left a long time ago. But this isn’t your best friend’s way of behaving. You know he would never abandon you no matter how annoying you could be (and you could be very annoying sometimes). After all, he is always the one holding your hair while you puke in the toilets when you had a couple too many drinks.

It takes all your willpower to stand up but there is no other way, you have to do it. You can hear the time ticking dangerously in your mind, as if your brain had turned into a clock.

“You’re right. Slap me,” you say, looking at him straight in the eyes, dead serious.

“Wha -“

“Slap some sense into me. They do that in movies when people are panicking. It’s like throwing a bucket of cold water in someone’s face. But clearly we don’t have a bucket and we don’t have cold wa- “ you start blabbering.

“What the fuck are you talking about? I’m not gonna slap you!” Your friend isn’t usually that horrified at the thought of beating your ass. In fact, he has felt the desire to rip your head off more than once, especially when you’d steal all the duvet at night, but at this moment he is just scared you might have actually lost your mind.

“Just fucking do it Minho!” you scream, your hands clenching the front of his grey hoodie he always looks so divine in.

Minho has never obeyed you, and this is not the day he is going to start.

He puts both of his hands on the sides of your face and crashes his lips onto yours.

You would be lying if you said you have never imagined the day your best friend would kiss you. It happens pretty much every single time you look at his cute pout a little too long. But one thing is certain, it isn’t like you pictured it to be at all.

You were convinced your heart would go so wild it would burst out of your chest and your head would spin so furiously you’d lose your balance. You thought your stomach would fill with butterflies to the brim and your whole body would be on fire.

But none of that is happening. On the contrary, every single muscle in your body relaxes under his touch. The way his soft mouth presses gently against yours makes you calmer, almost at peace amongst all this turmoil.

Minho is kissing all your tension and stress away and you catch yourself letting a sigh of relief escape your parted lips.

As if you have kissed him already hundreds of times in your past life, Minho feels like home. He’s a safe haven you can always take refuge in during troubled times. Ever since the day you met, he has never left your side.

When he breaks away from the kiss, you notice your breath isn’t so ragged and your mind isn’t so foggy anymore. You’re serene. His cold hands are still cupping your face, slightly squishing your cheeks, and you feel like an idiot sandwich for asking him to slap you seconds before.

“That can work too, I guess…” you mutter.

“You’re okay?” he asks, staring at you with the softest eyes you’ve ever seen.

You just nod, unable to say one more word, and sprint to the entrance, not wanting to make your interviewers wait any longer than they already have.

“Good luck!” You hear him yell just before the door closes behind you and you can’t help but grin from ear to ear.

- - - - -

Thirty minutes later, you finally step out of the fancy lobby to find a very bored Minho leaning against a tree, patiently waiting for you.

“You’re still here?”

“Of course, I am,” he says, his mouth full of croissant. He gives you a large iced coffee he probably went buying to kill time. Your lips unconsciously curl up into a smile when you notice it comes from the same chain that the one you spilled on your lap on the day you first met him.

“How did it go?” he asks you, sticking his buttery pastry into your mouth so that you can take a bite.

“Way better than I thought” you answer, right after you swallowed. You hate the way flakes would always get stuck between your teeth. But Minho is always there to warn you about it before anyone else notices, and even pick them for you if you can’t manage to, which, when you think about it, is kind of gross.

There are two things the boy knows about you: you’re the greatest pessimist on earth and you’d rather die than admit you were wrong (especially if it meant he was right). So for you to even say it wasn’t that bad, means it went phenomenal.

“I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’ but I told you so.” He smiles so wide you can barely see his eyes anymore. You have to look away, otherwise you know you might become instantly blinded by love.

“Maybe I could use some more of your luck” you mumble, staring at your shoes and kicking the red leaves that were surrounding your feet on this sunny autumn morning.

“Really? And what makes you think I’ll share it with you,” he teases you, leaning forward to incite you to look at him in the eyes.

“That.”

Your hand finds the back of his neck and pulls him in, in order to close the space that is still left between your mouths.

At first, Minho stiffens, taken aback by your bold move. But soon enough, he caves into your touch. He kisses you back fervently, like he means it.

His fingers entagle in your hair, his arm wraps around your waist and his chest presses against your body. You’re melting in his embrace, submerged by a wave of bliss which he alone seems to know the recipe.

It feels new, yet so familiar. Like it was supposed to happen, like it was written in the stars.

He tastes like croissant and Americano. Like fortune and fate.

And you can’t help but think you’re the luckiest person on earth.

Who cares about winning the lottery when Lee Minho is your lucky charm?

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dent-de-leon · 3 years

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Do you think we all (cast included) misunderstood Lucien's plans and intentions (and a few of his actions) as surely evil because of our impression of Molly? The closer we get to the city the more I think it's less of a world ending emergency and more of a conman's dreams and delusions, twisted by a hive mind entity. I can't say he's just a victim but I have my doubts on where he actually stands without Nonagon. Any thoughts on...everything...? I love reading you talk about all of them!

Oh, this is definitely a tricky question. I think it’s hard to pin down what Lucien wants exactly--especially since he, that shard of Molly, and the Somnovum have all bled together. But we do get some interesting clues to try and piece together where he’s going in terms of the big picture. And I think you’re very much right about Lucien’s original intentions being misguided by the Somnovum.

I think Caleb is able to express a very intuitive understanding of what ultimately drives Lucien. When he’s explaining everything to Essek, Caleb says, “Our understanding of this is rudimentary at best, but these Tomb Takers--this purple one we have mentioned--believes that he can achieve all his dreams if he brings this city of dreamers back into the world, we think.” At his core, I think that’s what Lucien really wants. And during the last episode, he echoes this again and again:

Lucien: “Long ago, there was a group of people who had an idea to get away from oppressive minds, and pursue their dreams. And when destruction came out of their making, they were ready, or so they thought. And they shunted their people across the planes to safety, in the Astral Plane, where they knew they could make their dreams a reality...And there’s so much that they could do, but they just lack the guidance. It’s a waste of potential. But, I think I could show em. And, maybe if you decide to be more friend than foe, when all is done, I could make your dreams come true as well.”

It’s reminiscent of when Lucien asked each of the Nein if they had an imagination, and what they’d do if they could have any wish of theirs granted. He’s a dreamer. He believes he has some grand plan for the City that will bring clarity to them, change the course of their doomed fate. He’s doing this for himself, certainly. But bizarrely enough, he sees himself as a kind of misguided savior, as someone who simply knows better. Who, given the chance and power, could salvage the remnants of the City and break them free of their living nightmare.

“I’m their savior as they were mine. I will save them from their pain. From their wasteful existence.” I mean, he calls himself a king so we know he has a nice seat on the throne lined up for him when this all goes down. But still. He seems to think he’ll be a good king for these people, someone who can save them. And that’s....certainly interesting. It suggests there’s a kind of misconstrued sense of supposed nobility to his intentions.

Of course, it’s important to remember that Lucien wasn’t always this way. He’s not someone like Vess, who started off seeking this kind of otherworldly power, who set out to rule the world. He was scared of the book, once. When he first saw the Eyes of Nine, he admits to Jester that he was horrified. “But, then the dreams started coming. Something was spilling into them. And it wanted my help.” At a certain point, Lucien himself and what he originally wanted began to fade. “So at that point, Luicen became more of a--more of a costume. The Nonagon became more of a presence.” His wants and dreams became one with the City, and he was powerless to resist.

Lucien is quite literally the perfect candidate for the Nonagon, because he’s exactly like all those denizens of the Cognoza ward. Lucien describes everyone in that city as having their souls shattered and slowly reforged by the Somnovum, put together until they became one with the Eyes of Nine, entirely driven by this world of dreams, the fanatical belief that they could make all their desires a reality.

Lucien: “Unfortunately, they didn’t account for was this terrible psychic storm that awaited them, that wracked every mind and spirit and shattered them until they became one with their own city. Death would have been a mercy. But instead, thousands of people, and the Somnovum that guided them, were broken. And overtime slowly reformed. Powerful. The instinct of their dreams guiding them, in the place where they could will their dreams to be--were their will not so fragmented.”

Sound familiar? It’s exactly what happened to Lucien after Vess broke his spirit and scattered all the broken pieces into the Astral Sea.

Lucien: “Imagine if you will, you, the very idea of you, your singular conscience and every thought you had, was accompanied by a hundred screaming thoughts fighting for attention...That was the prison I was sent to. My spirit broken and blown across the Astral winds. But it took the Somnovum following my scent, much like I followed hers, to find all my pieces and put them back together again.”

Lucien was himself destroyed, his sense of identity obliterated. He is whatever shape the Somnovum have made them, a patchwork of their ceaseless chorus of screaming voices in the endless dream. Lucien expresses gratitude to the Somnovum for saving him, painstakingly piecing him back together. And he seems to genuinely believe he can save them in turn. But they undoubtably did so in a deliberate design, with their own path for him in mind. He is of their own making, and I think that shows in his all consuming desire to rejoin them in their world.

But I think he does believe, in his own misguided way, under the thrall of the Somnovum, that he can change this City for the better. Make both their dreams and his--even the Nein’s--a reality. I don’t think that was just him baiting the Nein. Molly’s fondness for his friends still holds some sway over Luicen, even if he can’t quite understand it. “Because try as I might, a part of me still likes them.” Molly seems to be waking, bit by bit, and I think his wants and impulses are now bleeding into Lucien. It’s why he can’t seem to bring himself to kill them.

So yeah, I don’t think Lucien wants to bring about an end to the world, or some large scale destruction. I think he wants a new start for himself and Cognoza. A rebirth. Lucien may not have been “good,” but certainly some part of him was. Or was at least capable of it, as we’ve seen through the softer heart of Mollymauk. But I don’t think Lucien was ever really evil either. I think he’s more complicated than that, and his intentions reflect that.

“And you plan to go there and stay there? Or bring something back, and make this world better than how you found it?” I think there’s a reason why Lucien was able to look at Caleb and say “Yes” so easily, so genuinely. I think some part of him really does believe it. But those wants and dreams are also tangled up in that shard of Molly’s desire to keep the Nein close and grant their dreams as well, and both of them are caught up in the web spun by the Somnovum. It’s messy.

#critical role #critical role spoilers #mollymauk #lucien #thanks! and sorry this got so long lmao

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nonagesimus · 3 years

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For ur bday fic prompts: maybe something preseries, just before the Stanford fight? Something showing the growing of tensions, could be case fic or character study or whatever you wanted

ok this is going to be casefic but also it's not DONE so here is a preview

Sam has a secret tucked in the small of his back.

Literally.

The lining of his backpack had already been torn – sliding some paper inside before he made a slapdash repair was the easiest thing in the world. Keeping it tucked under his tongue, not letting the words spill out, that’s harder. Sitting in a diner in mostly silence. Shoveling dirt back into a grave. Dead air, thick with familiarity. It begged to be filled but Sam kept his mouth shut tight. They’d driven through Monterey three months beforehand and he’d almost spilled the beans. There’d been rumours about sirens, but all they’d found was sea lions and wind whistling loud through a rock formation, and John had been in a terrible mood, and Sam had thought, well, if he’s already mad. Make it worse. Let them leave him with half a day’s bus ride. It wasn’t like they were likely to get that close to Palo Alto again. But it had been too early, still. Part of him still feels like if he finds the right way to phrase it he can avoid it blowing up in his face.

It’s not a huge amount of faith, but it’s there.

So, they’re in Nevada, and John’s chasing witches, because nowhere loves a luck spell like Vegas. John’s wary of letting Sam too close to the hunt – he always is with witches. But Sam’s best at recognising spell work so he gives it maybe two more days before John stops sending him to the library for ‘research’ and starts just taking him with them.

As it is he keeps in touch via phone and he and Dean wake Sam up when they get back to the motel at three in the morning.

Day three and Dean shows up at the library and drags him out to the desert, hands drumming on the steering wheel the whole way. They pull the Impala in beside John’s jeep and stroll out to where he’s standing beside scorch marks on the packed dirt.

“You find anything in the books?” he asks.

Sam says, “No,” without shame, because they hadn’t sent him hunting for anything specific yet anyway. He’s already looking at the patterns on the ground, eyes avoiding his dad. “That looks Celtic, right?”

“Right,” John says. “Seems like a ritual site.”

No duh, Sam thinks. There’s mostly ash, but the wind must’ve blown some of the ingredients out of the fire, because there’s still some herbs scattered around Henbane, and poppy, and something that looks like sage, which makes him wonder if they wanted vervain but ran out. Some pieces of what looks like bone. Something glints in the centre of the scorch marks and he crouches, ignoring the abortive movement John makes when he moves closer, to see shiny black rock. Volcanic glass. Could be an ingredient, could be a by-product.

“What’s the ritual for?” he asks.

John’s boots shift on the packed dirt. “I was thinking you could tell me.”

Sam glances up at John. Feels those words heat up under his tongue. His dad’s gaze is impenetrable, expectant, as always. He breaks eye contact instead, pulls out a notebook. Starts to sketch down the burn pattern. Notes down the herbs he recognises. Picks up a few of the least-fragile fragments. Doesn’t touch the obsidian. He knows John wouldn’t let him get close enough to the middle of the pattern. With everything noted down he stands back up.

“I don’t know it off the top of my head,” he says. “I’ll do some research.”

“Ok,” John says, the weight of judgement colouring the syllables. He follows it up with a flick of his eyes up and down Sam’s body. “Don’t take it as an excuse to blow off your training.” Sam’s supposed to run through an exercise regime every night. He hasn’t in three days, because John can always tell but he’s barely seen him. He nods without protest. “Dean, take him back.”

The whole thing took half an hour and a quarter tank of gas, but Dean doesn’t seem at all put out that he’s being used as taxi service, still drums his hands cheerfully on the wheel, and throws Sam sidelong glances for the first mile and a half

Sam breaks first. “What?” Snapped with a little more force that he means it. He’s scared; of the secret, of John’s reaction to the secret, of Dean’s reaction to the secret, of the knowledge that everything will change. And he’s frustrated, because he always breaks first. Because he tries so, so hard not to, but he can never quite manage it.

“You gotta come out with it,” Dean says. “Whatever it is.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sam says, ignoring the pulse under his tongue.

“You’re all quiet,” Dean said. “You haven’t been fighting with Dad, you just take it.”

“You’re mad at me for not fighting with Dad?” Sam asks, even though Dean isn’t acting even a little angry.

“Of course not,” Dean says, the roll of his eyes clear in his tone of voice. “It just usually means somethings up, is all.”

“Nothings up,” Sam lies, and he knows Dean knows he’s lying.

But Dean doesn’t call him out on it, just drops him back at the library and then heads back into the desert. Sam doesn’t even know why John’s still out there, if he expects to find other ritual sites or what. But it’s not like there’s anything he can do about it, so he just carries himself back inside and hits the books like they’ll have the answers he actually needs right now.

#supernatural #supernatural fic #sam winchester #dean winchester #john winchester #my fic #birthday prompts

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where-is-caithe · 3 years

Text

Thinking about how Rhowan gets her griffon, and more when she gets her griffon. Rhowan is a very emotional person, on top of being a literal empath and feeling the emotions of everyone around her, she has her own that sometimes overwhelm her.

Vlast's death was one of those times.

Rhowan dutifully followed Yden across the Highlands searching for his memory crystals, listening to his voice, and trying to keep herself from slipping away, her resolve nearly worn away. She felt little more than despair at his death, and hearing how angry and sad he had lived, only caused her more grief. What she had felt from him, when they had locked eyes, just before Balthazar's sword raised, was something more than just a meeting of gazes in the middle of the desert. It was a spark of connection, of two souls who had no idea they'd been searching for each other, finally finding what would make them whole.

He dove in front of her as the sword was thrown, and the connection was shattered as his body was.

Had he lived, she knew she would have stood at his side as his Champion.

Rhowan, Champion of Vlast, first Scion of Glint.

Vlast, who had lived protecting the people of the desert from Kralkatorrik's branded horde. Vlast who gave his life for a stranger. Vlast who would only live on in her memories. Who she would only hear through scattered crystals. Pieces of him. Fragments.

Vlast.

They'd come across high cliffs on their trek through the desert, the air was getting colder and clouds hovered low and heavy above them. Yden was looking for another crystal across the horizon, she said she could sense it, because of Aurene. Close by, she said, it's close by.

Rhowan was barely listening, so distracted by her own grief, and the first time she felt a pang of jealousy because of Yden, because of Aurene.

Because of Vlast.

A bird's shrill cry carried across the wind. Rhowan looked up the cliff. In the distance she could see a griffon, beautiful with dark brown feathers and dark eyes, struggling against a couple of harpies, protecting her nest, her eggs. From here, Rhowan could see the animal was half starved and weak, the harpies were stabbing at her and clawing. She was bleeding from many wounds and still she stayed on her nest.

Without a word, Rhowan sprung into action, sprinting to the cliffside and climbing as fast as she was able. Yden yelled after her but she was not swayed. She only saw the griffon in pain, she only heard her cries, and the harpies trying to kill her.

When she reached the top of the cliff, the next few seconds were a blur, the harpies turned their attention to her as she drew her sword and yelled. Her grief and her anger overwhelmed her, she rampaged against the harpies, ignoring her own cuts and wounds, until all that was left were feathers and the echoes of screams.

She turned to the griffon, and felt all of her fight leave her.

There were no eggs, only shells, long cracked and broken, and a starving mother who would not leave even to eat, so consumed by her grief. She lay dying, succumbing to her wounds. Her breaths shallow and ragged.

Rhowan stumbled to her, falling to her knees and resting her hands on the griffon's bleeding body, clutching her thick feathers.

Another thing about Rhowan is that she is a healer.

I can save you, she said. I can save you.

Rhowan's emotions are very strong, and today they were fueled by the grief of losing a loved one. Someone she might have saved, had she been just a little faster.

You won't die today.

A mantra that repeated itself over and over, was it for the griffon?

Light as bright as the sun enveloped the two souls on the cliff, the world was still, their hearts beat together. And then it faded. The day was cold and cloudy again. Rhowan sat back on her heels, her vision blurred, tears streaming down her face, and she collapsed back onto the sand.

Yden found her moments later, landing on the cliffside from her glider. She was speechless at the sight.

Something had happened to the griffon. She was no longer a dark, sleek brown with eyes to match. Long feathers were now golden and shining, glowing, imbued with the power of the sun, imbued with the power of someone who could channel it. She regarded Yden with eyes like bright lights, not scared or curious, but knowing she was coming.

Yden felt something cold in the pit of her stomach. Fear, almost. What had happened to her? What had Rhowan done to her?

When Rhowan awoke she realized she and the griffon were connected to each other. Bonded. And the griffon would do anything she asked.

Was the griffon still herself?

The thought sent a cold shiver down her spine. What had she done?

She did not feel triumphant. She did not feel like she had saved a life. This was not a victory.

#gw2 #gw2 sylvari #anyways this was much much longer than i anticipated #i wasnt even gonna write #rhowan #yden #there's a lot to unpack here but lets just throw that under the bed to deal with later!#here's how rhowan gets her griffon!#dont let your emotions overwhelm you kids!#corruption of light or whatever #thinkin about it

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mor-beck-more-problems · 3 years

Text

Creatures in the Woods || Morgan & Dani

TIMING: Current

PARTIES: @surmamort & @mor-beck-more-problems

SUMMARY: Morgan loses control. Dani walks a gray line.

CONTAINS: animal death, references to domestic abuse

The moose died from a blow to the head, bashed in when it hit a tree after being ambushed by a pack of wolves. The broken shards of skull pierced its brain and the bitter fluid that once protected its thoughts of soft meadows and sweet bark leaked out along with its blood and puddled on the ground and fed the soil until the grass wilted with its weight. When Morgan found it a day later, tense with dread, it was the brain-blood smell that pulled her off the trail of the rabbit she was hunting and into the ground. The last thing she noticed was the lullaby of the flies circling its head and the way the gore-slick skull fragments shone in the summer sun almost like porcelain. The last thing she felt was the mouth of death salivating inside her and the plunge of gravity when the ground falls away.

“Nnnnnggghh…” Morgan scraped the soaked ground with her mouth. The fluid made her appetite come alive. She growled, following the trail to the corpse. The wolves had torn away much of the muscle meat, but there were still crepe thin lungs dangling behind its ribs and a fat heart waiting to burst between her teeth. She tore her way through the carcass up and up until she was kneeling in it and tearing the skull apart to get to the brain. It was half eaten by scavengers but what little Morgan’s mouth could find made her moan with relief and a need for more.

Dani felt brittle in every sense of the word. Weak, weak, weak. Dani stood still in the small clearing she’d parked in. It was far enough away from the town’s edge that she felt it a good place to settle, at least until she either found somewhere else, or until she felt herself welcomed back home. It had only been a day, and yet, it felt like an eternity. In the back of her truck were a few different bags. Some with weapons, some with clothes, and some with food. She’d been out there a few weeks already, and while she’d been taught to live off the land in case of emergency, she needed to live quietly. There was a stream nearby that’d aid her in getting her hands on clean clothes.

She moved along the trail that seemingly only her feet traveled as she pursued the bubbling stream. She could hear it from where she was, but she could hear something else. Ahead of her laid a dead moose, its organs spilled from its insides-- or, what was left of them. It was picked clean, a crow to roadkill, all aside from its hide. It was ripped from the inside, blood smeared against the grass. It was so red. So was the individual ahead of it, bent over, hands gliding against sinew, fingers picking, digging for more. Dani felt her heart in her throat as she drew her crossbow and charged an arrow into the slot of it. She pulled back and leveled it with the zombie’s head, only to falter as she got a better look. Morgan Beck. Of fucking course. Dani watched as the woman dug for the moose’s brains, her fingers picking cleanly as if she’d done it before, or as if it were foreign and she was trying to be careful, the hunter couldn’t tell. It’d be easy, she realized. To kill Morgan now. She could end it here. The back and forth, the way that Dani’s skin crawled every time she saw her… It could all end here. The only issue? As soon as Morgan’s face flashed before her, Bex’s did too. The desperation in her friend’s face, the love that’d shown. Not only on Bex’s, but Morgan’s, too. The way that their care for one another was palpable. Dani felt like she was going to be sick, and not because of the gory scene laid out before her. She kept the bow raised out of her own protection but looked around them. Would Morgan try to attack her? She swallowed thickly before she pushed through the trees, closer to her. “Morgan,” Dani said, her voice leveled and careful.

There was only so much fluid and viscera Morgan could find. She tore the moose open, screaming with frustration. “NNrrrrggg!” More. The ache. Feed meat. Eat death. She heard a sound and looked, sniffing and licking her lips. She was a mess of blood from her nose to her feet. Patches of moose fur cand bone chips stuck to her clothes and bristled in the hot wind as she crept forward. She growled. Somewhere, there had to be more. More meat. More death.

Dani stared ahead at Morgan as she turned, gore dribbling from her chin. It was caught in her hair, at the lapel of her shirt. She was… disgusting. The hunter swallowed thickly. The urge to shoot, to put Morgan down, numbed her fingertips and clawed at the back of her throat. She couldn’t, though. Every time she thought about it, the documents with her father’s name attached appeared. Each time she met Morgan, she’d known her to be unlike what she’d been taught about zombies, but this…? She was playing right into stereotypes and a part of it made Dani’s chest ache. She took a step back. “Morgan, what the fuck?”

Morgan shambled forwards, her mind beyond any language besides hunger. Death’s appetite needed more than an abandoned carcass could provide. Noise meant food. More. Eat. When she could get her hands around the noisy body and eat the pieces, maybe then it would be enough.

“Fuck,” Dani grunted as she stumbled backwards. Morgan moved towards her, mirroring that out of a horror film. She glanced over her shoulder. They were going deeper into the woods now, away from the stream. The clothes she meant to wash were left behind in a bag dropped at her side. She should kill her, she should just do it, the hunter thought. But Morgan wasn’t herself. Dani had seen Morgan. This was not her. What was she supposed to do? It was clear now that she was starving. Dani would need to get her something to eat. “Over here,” Dani decided to say as she moved off in the opposite direction, closer to the stream. Hopefully there’d be deer there, or maybe another moose, or literally anything.

The body moved and Morgan lunged. Her hunger drooled in her open mouth, teeth bared, but the only thing she caught was the air. She stumbled and followed the body. It wasn’t a quiet body. The grass and twigs screamed under its feet. Squirrels scattered up the trees. Morgan reached for them. What moved could die. What died could feed. But they escaped and Morgan grunted with desperate frustration and then there was nothing but the tall moving body ahead and the sustenance it promised.

Dani easily evaded Morgan’s lunge with a step backward. Immediately, the zombie became distracted by a few squirrels that scurried near the trunk of a tree. As Dani watched her, she felt the pit in her stomach grow. Ever since she’d found out what her father had been killed for, the idea of hunting had left a bitter taste in her mouth. Morgan before her, clearly not herself, only deepened the wound. Had her father died like this? Helping one of the many fae he’d been forced to experiment on? She blinked back the sudden anger that ripped through her and turned towards the stream, hitting a stick she’d picked up against a tree to gain Morgan’s attention again. The stream was a quiet trickle, and as Dani looked around, she saw nothing at its bank. A little further, they’d have to go a little further. She made sure to maintain a careful distance between herself and Morgan.

A guttural scream came from Morgan’s blood-stained mouth as the body evaded her. Her staggering steps grew quicker, angrier. There was life under her fee and the shrieks of feathered flying meat and in the rushing river. It splashed in swimming meat unseen. It panted in the distance on fur covered backs of meat that ran.But Morgan knew none of this. All she wanted was death. She would cannibalize herself for it if she could, her stomach clenched so desperately. But she would take the body dancing in front of her. She lunged, teeth bared, and caught the edges of Dani’s clothes.

Dani had seen starving zombies before. She’d taken care of them with chicken wire and a dagger into the brain. She knew all the steps. She could easily hide Morgan’s remains, but there was no way she’d do that, not when Dani knew how much this… zombie meant to Bex. She knew it was dangerous, too, what she was doing. For a moment, the hunter wondered what Bex would think, seeing Morgan like this. Could Dani hold it up in front of her, explain to her that this was what she was trying to protect the world from? But as much as Dani didn’t want to admit it, this was still Morgan Beck, brought to the brink of her existence as a zombie due to her hunger. What had happened? Dani wanted to know, but felt it futile. She was a monster-- the kind of creature that Dani’d been taught to slay, so why was she helping her now? Irritation festered, licking at her skin, once Morgan lunged at her. She shoved her shoulder into the zombie at her advances and side-stepped once again. “You’re making it really fucking hard to hel--” Dani froze at the sound of something. A deer. She saw it with her own two eyes.

Morgan only knew the pull of hunger. The body shoved her back, tripping her to the ground, but once there, she began to crawl. Her reach was short but her urge was swift. She clawed at the body’s clothes salivating for the closest thing to relief she knew.

Dani wanted to remark how pathetic Morgan looked. She wanted to be cruel, to be as callous as the brunette had been in the thrift store, but everything that the hunter wanted to say fell short on a venom filled tongue. She pressed her lips together and turned her attention to the deer. If she left Morgan out here, how long would it be until she found someone incapable of taking her down? Or… helping her? Dani took a deep breath as she aligned the bow with the deer and let the spring go. The arrow shot through, and the deer kicked up for a moment before making an awkward run towards the stream only to fall to its demise.

Morgan was trying to gnaw through the body’s clothes when the sound of fresh meat falling tore her attention away. It was big and fresh and red where it was pierced. It was motionless. It was silent as death. It was hers. She scrambled across the ground until she reached it and tore in. Her blunt teeth pulled up more soft hide than meat, but her hands wrenched the red spot open so the death meat could spill out. She couldn’t open it fast enough. The tissue went down so well, soft and soothing as love. She stopped once to choke down a liver. Once again to crack open the skull. The gray meat was the best meat. She ate it so desperately she ended up smearing some on her face trying to fit all of it through her mouth at once.

Time means nothing to hunger or death, and so it felt like nothing at all for Morgan to gorge herself until all the good flesh was picked from the bones and she fell over, sated.

But time means a great deal to people, and so when the rest of Morgan surfaced, the first thing she noticed was the new tint to the sky. Hours had slipped past her in a few hazy moments. The second thing she noticed was the blood and flesh staining her hands and nails, and the taste of raw flesh l in her mouth. Trembling, she looked down at the horror show splayed across her curled up body. If she could slip under again, if she could stop thinking, if she could not know-- but she did. Too well. Morgan screamed. “No, no, shit, no…” She tried to wipe her wet hands but there was hardly any part of her still clean.

Immediately, Morgan seemed drawn to the deer. At least it had worked. Dani watched silently as the zombie clambered towards her meal. The way that Morgan ripped open the deer with such ferocity, she wondered what kind of harm could be done unto a human. She wondered how far she would’ve gone, should it have been somebody not immune. It was clear that the zombie was not in her right mind. Dani had seen gore. She had seen death. She had pressed others’ organs into the stomachs until help came. She had seen brain matter and loosened veins and sinew and bone. She’d seen it all, but not like this. Dani swallowed down the bile in her throat and gave Morgan a moment of peace, willing herself to look away. It was sickening, allowing the zombie to exist like this, to not end it. But her father and what he’d died for, as well as Bex’s face, it all flickered before her. Weak, weak, weak. Jeanette’s voice rang loud. She gripped the crossbow tightly until the sound of Morgan’s fingers squishing through the meat of the deer had ceased.

Dani heard Morgan’s scream and it made her jump. Unprepared, she drew her bow again and took a step back. Morgan was searching herself, probably for her humanity. Dani watched her carefully, and even though she couldn’t see her face, she knew that the zombie was scared. She hated herself for doing this, for allowing this, but she had to. She couldn’t kill Morgan Beck. Morgan Beck was a zombie, but she… Dani clenched her jaw. She knew that the sight of her would be less than ideal, but it’d only be a matter of time until the zombie turned around. She instinctively lowered her bow and set it on the ground, lifting her hands. The last thing she needed was for Morgan to tell Bex she had pointed a bow at her in her greatest time of need. It went against everything she had learned, and against everything she knew, but she did it. With trembling hands, she held them up to where Morgan could see them, the sleeve of her own shirt shredded from Morgan’s desperation. “Morgan.” It was like last time, only softer. There was no anger, no rage. It felt weak in her throat, the words. They felt twisted and gutted.

Morgan jumped at the sound of her name. Her body hunched to hide itself, but it was no good, she was drenched and dirtied all over. When she saw who had called her, panic flooded her body. She scrambled backwards into the stream, panting and whimpering and struggling to hang onto any thought beyond No, please, I don’t want to die. No, please… She was screwed. She was thinking like prey and she’d lost her bag with her knife and her phone and she couldn’t concentrate and she was so, so screwed. But this is just what Odell had hoped for when she strong-armed all the butcheries in the county to stop selling to her, wasn’t it? At last she managed to say, “What do you want from me?” She just barely managed to keep her voice even, but she was kidding herself if she thought she could come off as a threat like this.

The shock and fear that splintered across Morgan’s features should have gone ignored, and Dani knew it. She should have felt nothing but contempt for this woman, this zombie. But the contempt did not come. Nor did the anger. What Dani felt was relief-- relief that the deer had been enough to satiate the monster in her. The bow was still on the ground, and though she had her dagger strapped to her forearm beneath her sleeve, she had no intent to actually use it. Morgan scrambled backwards and Dani stayed glued to the spot. She had no energy to fight, even if she wanted to, even if it came to that. Another flicker of Bex, another flicker of her father. She took a deep breath, but all she smelled was blood, and it was so red. “No, nothing.” She stayed put. “I…” Did she dare admit what she had done for Morgan? It wouldn’t matter, and Dani wasn’t sure if she cared whether or not Morgan understood what had happened. “I found you all fucked up. You kept trying to eat me or some shit, I dunno.” She shrugged. “I--” She looked towards the deer, bones and hide melting into the water. “Shot that for you.” She pursed her lips. “Then you came to.” Dani tried her best to keep her voice level.

Nothing Dani said to Morgan sounded plausible. But there was a deer, ravaged clean. Something in the bit of her stomach wanted to fall down and lick the hide, just in case, but it was just a whisper, and she could tell it no. Behind the deer was a trail of blood. And Dani’s clothes looked like they’d gone through a shredder on one side.

Had there been anyone else in between. Morgan couldn’t sense any aftertaste of human and she didn’t have any intrusive thoughts that felt strange but maybe she was too scared to know for sure, maybe she had already washed down the taste with all that deer. Morgan stood slowly and took another defensive step back. As much as she knew she shouldn’t take her eyes off an opponent, the smear of blood that led back through the woods held her gaze firmly.

“What was I--um--” Her voice was small and stammered so badly she had to stop and try again. “I remember a rabbit. I was hunting a rabbit. But I was me,” she added quickly. “I wasn’t like this, I was trying to catch it before I got like this. I haven’t--” Her voice broke again. “The butchers won’t sell to me anymore. Not anymore in the county. I tried. I did. And rabbits aren’t so filling but I didn’t want to lose it being picky but then--” She searched her mind. What had happened then? “There was something. Something big and half eaten and beautiful and I know it was an animal but I don’t remember what kind. Do you know if I-- if I might’ve done something to someone? In between?” She couldn’t live with wondering, and no one would tell her the truth like the slayer who hated her.

Dani kept her gaze on Morgan. Despite having helped her, maybe against her better judgement, she was a hunter. She had fought against her purpose. It felt wrong. She felt her skin tickle with the wrongs she committed in not taking Morgan down when she saw her that way. There’d been no telling whether or not Morgan had gotten to a human prior to their coincidental meeting, but Dani had to trust that what she’d done was the right thing. Not so much for Morgan, but for Bex. For the memory of her father, too. Still, Dani kept her hands where Morgan could see them. She felt silly. No matter how wrong it felt, Dani couldn’t kick the feeling that there was some part of it that’d been right, even if it was something she’d wrestle with in her days to come. “The butchers?” Dani raised a brow. So that was how Morgan got her… sustenance. That’s what she had meant by not being like what Dani thought-- not being animalistic, not like now.

The hunter could see the fear and the frustration on Morgan’s features. It was loud, even to somebody like Dani who normally wouldn’t care. As Morgan rambled, Dani continued to search the zombie’s features. Her gut continued to twist. Whether due to the smell of blood that laid thick and heavy in the air, or because she was allowing Morgan to explain herself. Finally, Dani pulled her gaze away and allowed it to settle onto her shoes. They were caked with mud and dirt, but it hadn’t ever been anything she cared too much about. “I don’t know, Morgan.” The name felt weighted differently on her tongue than before. The malice was gone. Exhaustion followed. “It was a moose that I saw you snacking on, you know. When I first came up on you.” She bit the inside of her cheek. “I led you here because deer typically are down this way. It seemed like the best option.” Despite knowing how to kill zombies and that being her priority, the texts, and everything else that Dani had learned from, told her how to satiate, how to bring them to. She supposed scribes included that information due to their own conscious being flooded with guilt due to the idea of being accomplices to murder, even by word of mouth. “I can’t tell you if you killed anyone. I wouldn’t know.” I hope you didn’t, because then what the fuck am I doing here?

Morgan’s face crumpled at Dani’s non-answer, but she nodded and did not argue. A moose fit the description of the blurry creature she remembered, but she was only half sure and maybe that was only because she didn’t want to be a monster someone had a reason to hunt down. She waited for Dani to go on. To explain how she couldn’t be too careful. How, now that Morgan was conscious and could be ashamed of herself, she should tell Dani how right the hunter was before she received a quick shot to the head. But there was only silence between them.

Finally she turned her gaze away from the bloody path and back to the hunter. “Why did you bring me back?” She asked.

Everything was quiet now, aside from the sound of the gurgling stream, swallowing and spitting past the corpse of the deer that laid against the cool rush of water. She made a note to move it after they were done here. Dani tensed at Morgan’s question. She had an answer, but it felt… wrong, explaining that it had been for Bex. A part of it had been, but her father had been involved, too. If she hadn’t approached either Jeanette or Lauren prior to this meeting would Dani have reacted the same? She inhaled sharply through her nose and looked up at the sky, taking note of the birds that fled in a hurry from the top of one to another. “It felt wrong. Killing you. Like that.” The words came out stiff and her voice sounded small. After a moment, the hunter finally leveled her gaze back to Morgan’s. “I’ve seen you. Maybe not like you are right now, but when you’re…” Almost human. “Not… covered in blood.” She tested out the words, but they still felt wrong. “It seemed wrong.” She nudged a rock just next to her foot with the toe of her shoe as she looked back down. “And, I guess… for Bex?” It felt odd, passing up on her obligation for others. Would it have been what her father would’ve done? She had nothing to offer either Jeanette or Lauren, she realized. They had lied to her about her father, about how he had died. No matter how many times Jeanette’s voice hummed in her ear, she knew it to be wasted.

Morgan gave a bitter laugh that came out like a sob. It must have been a while since Dani had talked to Bex, or Bex was too generous to tell her new slayer friend how upset she really was with Morgan. She wasn’t sure how much she could believe that this child soldier of a hunter was suddenly having a change of heart, but she did understand what it meant to do something for someone else. And just how fickle that could be. Would Dani regret sparing her if Bex ever said, oh I'm never talking to Morgan again? Would she come back to finish the job and take the question off her conscience? The longer Morgan stayed, the closer she came to testing that out.

“Good to know,” she said flatly. “Are you going to tell her about this?”

Dani was exhausted. There was no denying that. She wondered if Morgan could see her lethargy. The laugh that escaped the zombie caught her off guard and she took a small, tentative step backwards before she halted. She swallowed thickly and looked at Morgan once again. “Am I going to tell…” Dani thought for a moment. It would benefit her. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe Bex would be compassionate to Morgan’s situation, maybe it’d backfire. Dani hadn’t thought about telling Bex, not until Morgan brought it up. As far as she knew, it would be better that Bex didn’t see somebody who she cared about like this. At their lowest, at their most detrimental. “No.” She shook her head slowly. “It’s not my shit to tell. I’m a hunter, not a gossip.” She lowered her hands finally and crossed them against her chest. She dug her fingers into her forearms. “Why did your access to the butchers get taken away?” Dani had known very little about how zombies sustained themselves aside from eating living, breathing, innocent humans. At least, that’s what had been fed to her. If Morgan was telling the truth, then it meant she went against every urge she had to tear into a random human’s skull. It meant that all this time, she’d been telling the truth. Hell, the zombie had even admitted to hunting rabbits.

Morgan’s laughter spilled out a little easier this time and sounded even more defeated. “I tried to talk Bex into leaving her parents’ house. And then when her mother came by to gloat about taking away my office and my job security, we got into it and I tried to make it so she couldn’t hurt Bex for a while. But that seriously backfired and now--” She splayed her arms out, showing what she had so easily been reduced to.

Satisfied that she wouldn’t have her head cleaved off in the next few minutes, Morgan knelt in the stream and started rinsing herself off as much as she could. “She warned me. Both of them. But I figured I’d lost everything enough times over to learn how to deal.” But she hadn’t been a zombie with a conditional grip on her humanity for any of those other times. As bad as things got when she was alive, she’d never been put in a place like this.

If Dani weren’t so concerned for the words that came out of Morgan’s mouth, then she might have found it odd that they were able to have a conversation like this. At the end of the day, the two of them cared for the same person. Bex had become increasingly important to Dani, and ever since she’d almost lost her to Frank… Dani would do virtually anything to protect her. To protect anyone she cared for, really. Bex was strong, there was no doubting that, but it had become apparent that she thought she deserved to be hurt, and it was now obvious to Bex who the other perpetrator was. Her mother.

“That’s where Bex is now, right?” Dani ground her teeth. She could hear it in her ears and feel it in her jaw, the anger she put into the movement. “After--” She wasn’t sure if she should mention this, but Dani kept replaying Morgan’s expression then, and even now. One thing was for certain, Morgan Beck cared for Bex. “After Frank attacked her, after I got her to the hospital. I got thrown out of the hospital and Bex started to cry about how she couldn’t be found by her. I figured it was her mom, but I didn’t…” She felt disturbed. Was it right airing this information to Morgan? Though, she’d already been so much with Bex’s mother. Dani dug her fingers deeper into her forearms. “I didn’t know how bad it was.” Frank wasn’t Bex’s only concern. What kind of mother was she to hurt somebody who genuinely cared for her daughter? What kind of things did she hold against Bex?

Morgan stopped washing. “Frank what?” But why? There was no reason to use him to keep Bex in line. And stars above, she was with a boy even more closeted than she was. Wasn’t that torture enough? It didn’t make sense. Morgan realized too late that she’d revealed how out-of-the-loop she was, but that was bound to come out sooner or later, wasn’t it? She looked down at the blood still caked under her fingernails and felt the weight of her helplessness all over again.

“Wouldn’t make much of a difference if you had. Bex is too scared of this happening to someone else to let them in. And you hunters never lift a finger against a human no matter how horrible and dangerous they are.” She went back to splashing her face clean. Her warbled reflection in the water made her look like someone’s nightmare demon. It was a shame she couldn’t give this face to Odell and make her keep it.

Dani swallowed hard. It felt wrong, airing out Bex’s dirty laundry like this. But Dani had tried to help. It had taken Bex awhile to finally accept her help, but it’d only been recent, and she hadn’t actually gotten to any of the actual protecting parts of it all. “He…” She reached up to scratch idly at the back of her neck. “Stabbed her. She took the knife out.” Dani left alone how odd it seemed that Bex hadn’t relayed any of this information to Morgan, but decided against bringing it up. A wild guess told Dani that the two weren’t exactly on speaking terms, and Dani wondered if that had anything to do with Bex leaving with her, especially when Morgan had begged for Bex to go with her. “Bex said that it’s her ex-boyfriend.”

Morgan’s words struck Dani, but she swallowed the urge to bite back. She had no energy to do so. She’d been drained. Lauren and Jeanette’s words lingered, as did that fucking Prince song. It was on a constant loop. The distraction Morgan brought was welcome, believe it or not. “Yeah, well..” She trailed off before picking back up a moment later as Morgan stared into the water. “It’s in the code. We’re not meant to hurt humans.” Dani thought about her father. Despite him being a hunter, he’d been human, but they took him out regardless. Dani felt a pang of anger and it began to fester. “But I’m starting to figure out not all hunters feel that way. Frank is one, but he tried to kill Bex, so.” She dropped her arms to her sides. “She asked me… to protect her. Or be around her more. I don’t know.” It felt like a lifetime ago that Bex had asked such a thing, even if it’d only been a few days.

“Your hunter code is just a way of keeping things simple and shirking off responsibility for your actions. I’ve met a few of you by now and I haven’t found one decent hunter who wasn’t thinking for themself and using their own ‘code’ whether they admit it or not.” Morgan said, finally calming down enough to feel angry. She stood up from the stream, knowing this was as good as it was going to get, and started trudging out of the water. “No offense, but if your code says I deserve to die more than Odell Ochsenstein, I think it’s pretty bullshit.”

When she was back on solid ground she stopped and gave Dani a good long look for the first time. “Are you going to? Protect her? Because from over here, it looks a lot like everyone who’s ever beaten and used her is a hundred percent whole-grain human. What’s your plan for that?”

“I don’t do that,” Dani snapped. She carded a hand through her hair and took a deep breath. The hunter squeezed her eyes shut. Getting into an argument with Morgan wouldn’t help the situation. Bex was clearly in more trouble than Dani had originally thought, and by helping Morgan, Dani had uncovered just that. “I don’t do that. I don’t-- I don’t want to be like that. I only…” She swallowed thickly. Why couldn’t she push her father out of this? She hadn’t even known him, but she knew his stupid smile, and the cruel way in which he died. He had tried to help others, not even humans. Was she more his daughter than she was Jeanette’s? Despite never knowing him? “That’s…” She cleared her throat. “I’m not trying to kill you anymore, so.” She knew it didn’t solve for the time she had.

Morgan’s question made Dani’s skin crawl. “Of course I am.” She knew the implications. Frank was a hunter. Her mother was human, or at least that’s what Morgan had implied. Dani didn’t actually know any of that. “She’s…” Dani took another deep breath. “Important. To me. To other people.” Dani picked at the fabric at the hem of her shirt for a moment before dropping her hand away. “There’s a community of us. They’ll know what to do. But I won’t kill him. I’ll make it impossible for him to hurt her again, but I won’t kill him.” Dani looked up at Morgan evenly. “I’m afraid that Bex might try. She doesn’t know what it means to kill someone.”

Morgan wasn’t very comforted by what Dani had to say, but it had been so long since she’d felt soothed she wasn’t surprised. She shook her head. “You mean you’re not trying to kill me right now. Because I’m a well of useful information and you don’t want to make Bex cry. If I gave up everything I knew, if you called her up and she said she kinda hates me now for how badly I screwed up, that would change. Because I’m not a person to you. I’m something that used to belong to Bex.” She started walking back the way she’d come. The one good thing about her demon zombie self was that she knew how to leave a good trail home.

“Do your best to keep her hands clean,” she called over her shoulder. “Because, murderer to murderer, we both know she doesn’t deserve to learn how to carry someone’s life on her conscience.”

Dani steeled herself against the cruelty that Morgan provided. Logically, the hunter knew that Morgan did not owe her kindness. Dani didn’t even want it. Not really. What she wanted was to not see her mother’s gaze, but it was embedded now, even in Morgan’s features. Weak, weak, weak, weak. Dani closed her eyes and tried to focus on the beat of her heart and the way it felt in her throat, in the tips of her fingers, in her ears. She could hear Morgan’s footsteps fade, and only then did she open her eyes. The young hunter watched as the very thing she should want to put into the ground walked away, following the carnage she had created. Unable to provide an answer, she reached down for her bow and turned on her heel, moving toward the deer’s corpse. She dragged it out of the water and started back towards her truck. Morgan Beck was wrong. She had to be.

#wr dani #wr chatzy #wr dani chatzy #domestic abuse tw #creatures in the woods

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kiridune · 3 years

Text

On Hallowed Ground

Sat, Sep. 07, 2002 Miami Herald

By DAVE BARRY (http://davebarry.com/misccol/hallowedground.htm)

On a humid July day in Pennsylvania, hundreds of tourists, as millions have before them, are drifting among the simple gravestones and timeworn monuments of the national cemetery at Gettysburg.

Several thousand soldiers are buried here. A few graves are decorated with flowers, suggesting some of the dead have relatives who still come here. There's a sign at the entrance, reminding people that this is a cemetery. It says: "SILENCE AND RESPECT."

Most of the tourists are being reasonably respectful, for tourists, although many, apparently without noticing, walk on the graves, stand on the bones of the soldiers. Hardly anybody is silent. Perky tour guides are telling well-practiced stories and jokes; parents are yelling at children; children are yelling at each other. A tour group of maybe two dozen teen-agers are paying zero attention to anything but each other, flirting, laughing, wrapped in the happy self-absorbed obliviousness of Teen-agerLand.

A few yards away, gazing somberly toward the teen-agers, is a bust of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address here 139 years ago, when the gentle rolling landscape, now green and manicured, was still raw and battle-scarred, the earth recently soaked with the blood of the 8,000 who died, and the tens of thousands more who were wounded, when two armies, 160,000 men, fought a terrible battle on July 1, 2 and 3 that determined the outcome of the Civil War.

Nobody planned for the battle to happen here. Neither army set out for Gettysburg. But this is where it happened. This is where, out of randomness, out of chance, a thousand variables conspired to bring the two mighty armies together. And so this quiet little town, because it happened to be here, became historic, significant, a symbol, its identity indelibly defined by this one overwhelming event. This is where these soldiers - soldiers from Minnesota, soldiers from Kentucky, soldiers who had never heard of Gettysburg before they came here to die - will lie forever.

This is hallowed ground.

On the same July day, a few hours' drive to the west, near the small Pennsylvania town of Shanksville, Wally Miller, coroner of Somerset County, Pa., walks slowly through the tall grass covering a quiet field, to a place near the edge, just before some woods.

This is the place where, on Sept. 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93, scene of a desperate airborne battle pitting passengers and crew against terrorist hijackers, came hurtling out of the sky, turning upside down and slamming into the earth at more than 500 mph.

That horrendous event transformed this quiet field into a smoking, reeking hell, a nightmare landscape of jet fuel, burning plane debris, scattered human remains.

Now, 10 months later, the field is green again. Peaceful and green.

Except where Flight 93 plunged into the ground. That one place is still barren dirt. That one place has not healed.

"Interesting that the grass won't grow right here," says Miller.

Nobody on Flight 93 was heading for Somerset County that day. The 33 passengers and seven crew were heading from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco. The four hijackers had a different destination in mind, probably Washington, D.C., possibly the White House.

Nobody on the plane meant to come here.

"I doubt that any one of them would ever set foot in Somerset County, except maybe to stop at Howard Johnson's on the turnpike," Miller says. "They have no roots here."

But this is where they are. And this is where they will stay.

No bodies were recovered here, at least not as we normally think of bodies. In the cataclysmic violence of the crash, the people on Flight 93 literally disintegrated. Searchers found fragments of bones, small pieces of flesh, a hand. But no bodies.

In the grisly accounting of a jetliner crash, it comes down to pounds: The people on Flight 93 weighed a total of about 7,500 pounds. Miller supervised an intensive effort to gather their remains, some flung hundreds of yards. In the end, just 600 pounds of remains were collected; of these, 250 pounds could be identified by DNA testing and returned to the families of the passengers and crew.

Forty families, wanting to bury their loved ones. Two hundred fifty pounds of identifiable remains.

"There were people who were getting a skull cap and a tooth in the casket," Miller says. "That was their loved ones."

The rest of the remains, the vast majority, will stay here forever, in this ground.

"For all intents and purposes, they're buried here," Miller says. "This is a cemetery."

This is also hallowed ground.

In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln was essentially trying to answer a question. The question was: How do you honor your heroes? Lincoln's answer was: You can't. No speech you give, no monument you erect, will be worthy of them, of their sacrifice. The best you can do is remember the cause they died for, finish the job they started.

Of course the passengers and crew on Flight 93, when they set out from Newark that morning, had no cause in common. They were people on a plane bound from Newark to San Francisco. Some were going home, some traveling on business, some on vacation.

People on a plane.

Which makes it all the more astonishing, what they did.

You've been on planes. Think how it feels, especially on a morning cross-country flight. You got up early; you're tired; you've been buckled in your seat for a couple of hours, with hours more to go. You're reading, or maybe dozing. You're essentially cargo: There's nowhere you can go, nothing you can do, no role you could possibly play in flying this huge, complex machine. You retreat into your passenger cocoon, passive, trusting your fate to the hands of others, confident that they'll get you down safe, because they always do.

Now imagine what that awful morning was like for the people on Flight 93. Imagine being ripped from your safe little cocoon, discovering that the plane was now controlled by killers, that your life was in their bloody hands. Imagine knowing that there was nobody to help you, except you, and the people, mostly strangers, around you.

Imagine that, and ask yourself: What would you do? Could you do anything? Could you overcome the fear clenching your stomach, the cold, paralyzing terror?

The people on Flight 93 did. With hijackers in control of the plane, with the captain and first officer most likely dead, the people on this plane got on their cell phones, and the plane's Airfones. They reached people on the ground, explained what was happening to them. They expressed their love. They said goodbye.

But they did not give up. As they were saying goodbye, they were gathering information. They learned about the World Trade Center towers. They understood that Flight 93 was on a suicide mission. They figured out what their options were.

Then they organized.

Then they fought back.

In "Among the Heroes," a riveting book about Flight 93, New York Times reporter Jere Longman reports many of the last words spoken to loved ones on the ground by people on the plane. They're not the words of people in shock, people resigned to whatever fate awaits them. They're the words of people planning an attack. Fighters.

Here, for example, are the last words of passenger Honor Elizabeth Wainio to her stepmother: "They're getting ready to break into the cockpit. I have to go. I love you. Goodbye."

Here are flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw's last words to her husband: "We're going to throw water on them and try to take the airplane back over. Phil, everyone's running to first class. I've got to go. Bye."

And of course there are the now-famous words of Todd Beamer, who, after explaining the situation on the plane to an Airfone supervisor in Illinois, turned to somebody near him and said: "You ready? OK, let's roll."

They're getting ready to break into the cockpit.

I've got to go.

Let's roll.

We'll never know exactly what happened next. Some believe that the fighters managed to get into the cockpit, and that, in the ensuing struggle for control, the plane went down. Others believe that the hijackers, trying to knock the fighters off their feet, flew the plane erratically, and in doing so lost control. Inevitably, there is Internet-fueled speculation that the plane was secretly shot down by the U.S. government. (The government denies this.)

But whatever happened, we know two things for sure:

We know that the plane went down before it reached its target - that the hijackers failed to strike a national symbol, a populated area. They failed.

And we know that the people on the plane fought back. On a random day, on a random flight, they found themselves - unwarned, unprepared, unarmed - on the front lines of a vicious new kind of war. And somehow, in the few confusing and terrifying minutes they had, they transformed themselves from people on a plane into soldiers, and they fought back. And that made them heroes, immediately and forever, to a wounded, angry nation, a nation that desperately wanted to fight back.

And now these heroes lie here, in this field where their battle ended. This cemetery. This battlefield. This hallowed ground.

Wally Miller, coroner, has walked this ground hundreds of times. He spent endless hours among those collecting human remains and picking up plane parts. Even now, he walks with his eyes down, looking, looking. Every now and then he reaches down and picks up a tiny piece of plane - a thimble-sized piece of twisted gray metal, a bit of charred plastic, a shard of circuit board, a wire. This is what Flight 93 became: millions of tiny pieces, a vast puzzle that can never be reassembled. Despite the cleanup effort, there are still thousands of plane parts scattered for acres around the crash site, just under the new plant growth, reminders of what happened here.

The site is peaceful; no sound but birds. Miller walks from the bright field into the hemlock woods just beyond the barren spot where Flight 93 slammed into the earth. It's mid-afternoon, but the woods are in permanent dusk, the tall trees allowing only a dim, gloomy light to filter down to the lush green ferns that blanket the ground. The woods look undisturbed, except for bright "X"s painted on the trunks of dozens of hemlocks. The "X"s mark the trees that were scaled by climbers retrieving human remains, flung high and deep into woods by the force of the crash.

Some of the hemlocks, damaged by debris and fire and jet fuel, had to be cut down. These trees were supposed to be trucked away, but Miller, who, as coroner, still controls the crash site, would not allow it. Some of the trees have been ground into mulch; some lie in piles of logs and branches. But they're all still here. Miller won't let them be removed.

"This is a cemetery," he says, again. And he is determined that it will be respected as a cemetery. All of it. Even the trees.

Almost immediately after the battle of Gettysburg, people started coming to see the place where history happened. More than a century later, they're coming still.

Some are pilgrims: For them, Gettysburg is a solemn place, where the suffering and sacrifice of the soldiers still hangs heavy in the air. Some are purely tourists: For them, Gettysburg is another attraction to visit, like the Grand Canyon, or Graceland - famous, but not particularly relevant to their everyday lives. You park, you look, you take a picture, you leave.

I think that most of the visitors to Gettysburg, even today, are some mixture of pilgrim and tourist. But as the battle has receded in time, as the scars of the war have healed, tourism clearly has come to dominate the mixture. Despite the valiant efforts of many to preserve the soul of this place, to explain to the waist-pack hordes why this ground is hallowed, Gettysburg, surrounded by motels and gift shoppes, accessorized by a wax museum and a miniature-golf course, is now much more a tourist attraction than a shrine.

But soldiers are still buried here. And people still come to place flowers on graves. And the sign at the entrance to the cemetery still makes its plea: SILENCE AND RESPECT.

Immediately after Sept. 11, people started coming to see where Flight 93 went down. The site is a little tricky to find, but they found it, and they're coming still, every day, a steady stream of people who want to be near this place. They're not allowed on the site itself, which is fenced off and guarded, so they go to the temporary memorial that has been set up by the side of a two-lane rural road overlooking the crash site, a quarter-mile away.

The memorial - the word seems grandiose, when you see it - is a gravel parking area, two portable toilets, two flagpoles and a fence. The fence was erected to give people a place to hang things. Many visitors leave behind something - a cross, a hat, a medal, a patch, a T-shirt, an angel, a toy airplane, a plaque - symbols, tokens, gifts for the heroes in the ground. There are messages for the heroes, too, thousands of letters, notes, graffiti scrawls, expressing sorrow, and love, and anger, and, most often, gratitude, sometimes in yearbookish prose:

"Thanx 4 everything to the heroes of Flight 93!!"

Visitors read the messages, look at the stuff on the fence, take pictures. But mostly they stare silently across the field, toward the place where Flight 93 went down. They look like people you see at Gettysburg, staring down the sloping field where Pickett's charge was stopped, and the tide of war changed, in a few minutes of unthinkable carnage. There is nothing, really, to see on either field now, but you find it hard to pull your eyes away, knowing, imagining, what happened there.

There will be a permanent memorial for Flight 93. The temporary one is touching in its way, a heartfelt and spontaneous tribute to the heroes. But it's also haphazard, verging on tacky. Everyone agrees that something more dignified is needed. The official wheels are already turning: Congress has begun considering a bill to place the site in federal custody. Eventually land will be acquired; a commission will be appointed; a design will be approved.

Wally Miller frets about the memorial. He worries that, in the push to commemorate this as The Defining Moment In The War Against Terrorism, people will forget that it was also - maybe primarily - a personal tragedy for 40 families. He believes that, whatever is done at the site, there should be a place set aide for the Flight 93 families to grieve in private, away from the public, the tourists, the sightseers, the voyeurs, and what Miller calls "the metal-detector assholes."

Tim Lambert, who owns the woods where many of the remains were found, agrees that the paramount concern has to be the families.

"They are forced to live with this tragedy every day," he says. "The site itself is, for the most part, the final resting place for their loved ones. People need to remember and respect that."

One of the most heartrending quotes in "Among the Heroes" is from Deena Burnett, the widow of Flight 93 passenger Tom Burnett, who is believed to have played an active role in the battle on the plane. Mrs. Burnett is describing what it's like to be the widow of a hero:

"In the beginning, everyone asked, 'Aren't you proud of him? Aren't you happy that he's a hero?' I thought, my goodness, the first thing you have to understand is, I'm just trying to put one foot in front of the other. For my husband to be anyone's hero ... I'd much prefer him to be here with me."

So we need to remember this: The heroes of Flight 93 were people on a plane. Their glory is being paid for, day after day, by grief. Tom Burnett does not belong to the nation. He is, first and foremost, Deena Burnett's husband, and the father of their three daughters. Any effort we make to claim him as ours is an affront to those who loved him, those he loved.

He is not ours.

And yet ...

... and yet he is a hero to us, he and the other people on Flight 93. We want to honor them, just as we want to honor the firefighters, police officers and civilians at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon who risked, and sometimes gave, their lives to try to rescue others. We want to honor them for what they did, and for reminding us that this nation is nowhere near as soft and selfish as we had come to believe.

We want to honor them.

And so in a few years, when grass grows once again over the place where Flight 93 hit the ground, when the "X"s have faded from the hemlocks, there will be a memorial here, an official, permanent memorial to the heroes of Flight 93. It will be dedicated in a somber and dignified ceremony, and people will make speeches. Somebody - bet on it - will quote the Gettysburg Address, the part about giving the last full measure of devotion. The speeches will be moving, but they will also prove Lincoln's point, that the words of the living can add nothing to the deeds of the dead.

Thanx 4 everything to the heroes of Flight 93!!

There will be expressions of condolence to the families, and these, too, will be heartfelt. But they will not take away the grief.

I'd much prefer him to be here with me.

And then the ceremony will end, and the people will go home. And the heroes, the people on the plane, will remain here in the ground of Somerset County.

And years will pass, and more people will come here, and more, people who were not yet born when Flight 93 went down, coming to see this famous place.

Let's hope, for their sake, that the world they live in is less troubled than it is today. Let's hope they've never had to feel anything like the pain of Sept. 11, 2001.

Let's also hope that, when they stand here, they know enough to be silent, to show respect.

Let's hope they understand why this is hallowed ground.

#9/11 #current events #life

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fascinatedhelix · 4 years

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Okay so in your NSR/HK AU is there anyone else who learns about the lord of shades? Also since Ghost is very much implied to around the same age as the Hollow Knight in the game, do Mayday and Zuke ever learn that Ghost is just as old as the hulking beast that is Stearling?

Ooh, fun stuff!

Something that’s important to note is that I kind of doubt any of the humans would fully understand just what the Lord of Shades is/was, given that they’re a collective entity regarded as divine, which doesn’t blend with the world of Vinyl City one bit.

If any of the humans learn about the Lord of Shades, Eve’s probably actually going to be the first to learn, if only because her encouragement of Riley’s artistic expression means that they’re going to paint about things that incur a strong emotional impact on them, and the whole becoming part of an eldritch god with your thousands of siblings thing is a pretty powerful experience. She initially mistakes it for a metaphor for whatever strange and tragic events led to their arrival in Vinyl City, but learns later that it was very much a literal thing.

While Eve’s the first to learn about the Lord of Shades, she’s not the last; most of the older trankil (as in, the ones that weren’t literal babies/toddlers when they died) who are close with their caretakers and companions do eventually try to communicate their origins, but the memories of most are so fragmented and scattered that they can’t articulate just what happened beyond something along the lines of “Many became one and Ascended, then were reborn.” It was a powerful moment for them all, but even they tend to struggle to describe just what happened. Riley was lucky enough to be encouraged to work through these memories to piece together what happened, with the help of Eve’s powers, but most of them weren’t lucid enough to really have any idea how to describe it.

Ghost is probably the only one that knows what happened in detail (as much detail as there is to it, anyway), but they hesitate to communicate it if only because it’s not really... relevant? They’ve fulfilled their obligation to Hallownest, they don’t see the point in lingering beyond what may prove useful in the future; the Lord of Shades, as a form used primarily for fighting gods, has no real purpose in a world that lacks beings on that level (at least, ones that need to be fought). If Mayday and Zuke ask, they’ll try to sate their curiosity, but they won’t go full exposition mode; it’s just not Ghost’s style.

As for the age thing, Sterling’s the one to break that news. A little while after their integration into NSR and being taught human writing, Tatiana asks them, “There seems to be quite the age gap between you and your kin, though you claimed they are your siblings. Why is that?” All vessels are clutchmates, but did not live the same times, they wrote, we have been reborn in the condition we died in. Considering all but the one were children when they arrived, including quite a few that were clearly babies, Tatiana opted to break out the whiskey that night rather than dig deeper.

Tatiana would eventually tell most of the NSR artists, barring Yinu and instead telling her mother, and later Mayday and Zuke. Of course, they were all horrified to learn just what happened to their companions prior to their arrival in the city, though Eve and Neon J already knew bits and pieces from their own. DJSS keeps Comet on his person almost 24/7 for a week after that, repeatedly brushing a hand over the pocket he keeps them in to reassure himself that they’re there. Remi, Tila, Sofa, and Dodo shower Bunny with affection and toys when they return from the meeting, much to their confusion. The Sayu team figured they had a lot of catching up to do. Yinu and Thorn are confused when Yinu’s mom is suddenly way more physically affectionate than normal (which is saying a lot, she’s a hugger!). After some prying she has a conversation with them about the origins of the trankil, and Thorn’s place in the family is set in stone. The news seriously freaks out Neon J, so by the time he comes home he has to be stopped by 1010 to avoid setting up even harsher security measures in the mansion. “We don’t need more buzzsaws!” Eve throws herself into her art, as she tends to do when she’s stressed. Riley doesn’t think much on it (she just does that sometimes) until they see the subjects of the work. A thousand tiny void black hands reaching to a fading light above, and she’s sobbing by the time they see it. Later, they add bigger hands, of all shapes, sizes, and colors, reaching down to meet the smaller ones. It’s an instant hit. Mayday blubbers like a baby and gripping Ghost like a little girl gripping a teddy when she learns of it, and Zuke’s just barely keeping it together once it sinks in. They opt for staying in and hashing it out over pints of ice cream and sad rock.

Mayday and Zuke at first assume Ghost died around the same time as most of the other vessels, but got super confused when they denied that. Zuke put two and two together when the trankil began molting a little while after the rock revolution, after they’d told them about the conditions they lived in prior to their return to Hallownest and subsequent arrival at Vinyl City. “You spent who knows how long in a dangerous wasteland with no reliable sources of food, water, or shelter; no wonder you hadn’t grown an inch until you got here!”

#hollow knight #no straight roads #crossover au #headcanons #crossover shenanigans

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ryttu3k · 4 years

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could you post the ending where you side with the SI and Julian gets pissed off by your decision? I also noticed that Julian never really introduces himself to anyone or says a simple goodbye to the courier, like, ever. I mean even after ten years or so he just resumes the conversation as if nothing happened. Not even the courier calls him out on this. I wonder why that is lol

Heh, regarding Julian’s conversational patterns, there’s a really interesting post here on friendship degradation mechanisms with ADHD! And Julian absolutely has ADHD.

And for the SI ending, ooh, I haven't got that one written down. I do want it handy for reference, so time for a speedrun with my SI-affiliated Toreador! Here's all the dialogue from the SI attack onwards.

Before you can speak, Lettow jumps up.

"What?" Julian says.

Your phone chimes. You run, throwing yourself out the door just as the missile hits.

Fragments of stone and metal fly over your head. You get clear, reaching your Escalade, and look back at the blown-apart warehouse.

Flames are everywhere. Your Beast screams in wild terror and only the greatest exercise of Willpower keeps you under control, but your body shakes uncontrollably. You have only one clear thought—run! Still, you grit your teeth and force yourself to look around.

Only the vampires survived the blast, and they look badly hurt. Prince Lettow took a direct hit; his clothes hang in tatters, like a shroud, and his skin is blackened. Julian and his helmeted assistant, Z, are burned and stunned. Julian's servants are gone.

Hunters are inbound. You see Bearcats and Humvees, police cruisers and Buick Avenirs. The floodlights turn on, illuminating the burning warehouse and hiding almost a hundred hunters in the glare as they advance.

A bullet zips past your head as a hunter in militia gear opens fire. An FBI agent waves for him to stop—it looks like there are orders for you not to be harmed—but that's hardly a perfect defense. You duck behind the Sprinter van. It might be time to get out of here.

There's just one problem: Julian is standing between you and your Escalade, a karambit in both hands. He spins the little blades.

"You did this," he says. "You betrayed us all."

[The sight of so much fire means that you are now in a fear frenzy and cannot think clearly unless you focus your Willpower or escape.]

> "I tried to warn you! I told you we were monsters, and I told you I would stop you."

Another explosion obliterates the computer shop. Bricks and pieces of rebar rain down.

Julian screams and rushes you, quick as the wind. Then he breaks away before he gets into karambit range. Even as he moves, his silhouette breaks up, becoming a pixelated gray blur as he fades from sight and circles you, looking for a chance to strike.

> I need to talk him down. "You can still escape, Julian. Don't let them kill you here." [CHA/MAN+Persuasion]

"How could you do this?" Julian cries.

"To save people!" you say. "And I'm trying to save you. Run, before it's too late!"

He looks at the raging inferno all around him, the ruins of his project, then back at you. Then he fades away.

That's the last time you see him.

More gunfire arcs around you and hammers the Sprinter van. You duck, then get into your Escalade and get away from the burning warehouse.

So I thought that was it, but hey! Apparently Lettow wanted his say, too!

You slide into heavy traffic, scanning the late-night vehicles for signs of pursuit. No hunters, no cops. Good. You have a moment to think as you scan the streets.

Front, back, left, right. Nothing. If you breathed, you'd be breathing a little easier. You're just turning your thoughts to the next step of this desperate plan when a shadow passes over you.

You look up. Riga.

Then you crane your head out of your window.

Something like Riga, but with a wingspan like a light aircraft.

Lettow is following you, and it looks like he cares more about revenge for your "betrayal" than about preserving the Masquerade.

And here come the hunters: Buick SUVs close in on your location. Others are on a nearby bridge. They're tracking Lettow, trying to get close enough to open fire with rifles or even heavier munitions. You're not sure Donati cares about collateral damage anymore. The SI will blow holes in Tucson to take down its Prince.

This is it, you realize. The Eagle Prince plans to destroy you here and now. But with so many hunters around him, he'll only have one shot at you. If you can buy yourself a few seconds and slip out of his sight, he won't be able to try again.

But how?

> My supernaturally keen eyes will let me spot alleys, vacant lots, and other places where I can hide my SUV from Lettow. [Auspex]

You drive slowly, looking for little-used routes that Lettow won't be able to track from above.

Tucson is a low, flat city, but finally you spot a messy construction site next to a parking garage.

You turn hard, cutting off oncoming traffic and racing into the construction site as Lettow dives for you.

But just as you planned, he has to back off. Tarps cover most of the site, and he'd get tangled if he dove. You keep moving, weaving through narrow alleys, then blowing through a Chevron station—the covering over the pumps prevents Lettow from reaching you easily.

Then you reverse right into an unfinished apartment complex that you saw last week, going straight through the building itself.

And he's lost you.

You roll out with your lights off and look up. Lettow is on a nearby building, scanning the darkness with his golden eyes.

That's when the SI lights him up. Heedless that they're operating in the middle of Tucson, dozens of agents and soldiers open fire with rifles and truck-mounted weapons.

Lettow lurches in midair. But he's still an elder vampire. The huge eagle dives, scythes through a truck full of agents, killing five in a single pass, and then rises into the air, higher, higher, until he and Riga disappear into the clouds.

The last you see of Prince Lettow, he's flying east, away from Tucson, out of his fallen domain.

You disappear into traffic, getting away from the SI as quickly as you can.

An inescapable element of existing as a vampire is ignorance. The Masquerade is a shadow that swallows clarity and understanding. People suspect and imply, but they rarely know for certain.

Your final nights in Tucson are frightening but uninteresting. You check the news, divest from your real estate holdings, and listen to word on the street.

Over the next few nights, during which time the news reports a few strange acts of violence, a terrorist attack, and a zoo escape, you learn that Prince Lettow was almost certainly destroyed. Dove perished in a midday raid on her haven, and nothing remains of the Viper but a gutted heap.

The city's Kindred are scattered and leaderless, easy pickings for hunters that are now free to operate during the day, dragging vampires out of their havens and destroying them.

Despite the chaos in the shadow-world you inhabit, Tucson looks the same. The city's downtown is not ablaze, the national guard hasn't been mobilized. It's just another shadow-war for vampires to fight.

And it's time to leave.

Your plans to escape Tucson run into surprisingly little red tape as you sell your bungalow and liquidate your other assets.

You got what you could out of your deal with the SI, but now it's time to go.

Go where? Tucson never felt like home, but it was, at least, a base of operations. You can't just stick to the road forever; the highways are too dangerous right now, with the SI active and your bridges with the Camarilla burned. You see a few possible futures.

From what you hear, Seattle is a key city for the Camarilla's blood trade. You could head up north and, if you have enough venture capital, try to strike it rich, really establish yourself.

But maybe money isn't everything. Could you work with hunters to stop more Cainite depredations? From what you hear, Dallas/Fort Worth is now completely out of control, with open fighting in the streets among different vampire factions. If the SI trusts you enough, you could return there and try to protect humanity from the predators in their midst.

But you still feel the alien vitae inside of you: the 2100 Formula. You've heard that a scholar of the Blood dwells in Denver, someone who could answer a lot of your questions. With the briefcase full of Julian's Program research, you should be able to make inroads there. The only difficulty will be finding this scholar, and avoiding the hunters who suspect what kind of power you carry in your Blood. If you head for Denver, you'll have to hope that you've left the Masquerade intact enough here that you can reach Colorado without an army of hunters following you.

Finally…maybe you could just try to live a life. You're dead, of course, but you could try existing as a person, if only for a few years. You've heard that San Francisco is a good place for that sort of thing ever since the old Prince left for LA. Maybe you could cultivate your Humanity and try to live, instead of simply exist.

> I drive east to Dallas/Fort Worth. I'll use my Inquisition contacts to fight the vampires there. [Second Inquisition Hostility]

One month later...

Dallas is burning.

Not literally, not really. From your vantage atop this parking garage, you can't see any fires. But you know that the Inquisition has torn through the city, scattered its warring factions, dragged predators screaming into sunlight every day for the past two weeks. You know all this because you've commanded them from the shadows.

You finish your work tonight.

"We're the masters of this city," one of D'Espine's beautiful ghouls says through bloody teeth. "Even if you kill me, we'll always be here. Feeding and taking and ruling from the shadows. We are immortal! We—"

The other hunters have heard enough. They toss him off the roof and head to their van.

You get back in your SUV because your final target is on the move. D'Espine—the last Cainite of any real power in Dallas—has left the Cinderblock.

This is how you've succeeded in Dallas: not just through your network of hunters, but because you know how to move through a city. As the Cainites have crawled into their holes, believing themselves safe, you've never stopped moving, never stopped striking. And now you're almost done.

You roll out of the parking garage and point your Escalade at the Cinderblock. By tomorrow night you'll be done here, and you'll hit the road.

RIP Lettow and Dove. Julian did get out, though!

#vampire the masquerade #vtm night road #vtmnr spoilers #baron of 2100

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