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yandere-wishes · 3 years

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⭐Yandere Joestars⭐

(Parts 1-7 + Bonus Charcter: Joseph and Johnny’s characterizations are based off @dear-yandere ‘s interperations) I tried to write this mostly in the Joestars' POV. Their respective darlings resemble lifelike dolls rather than human beings to further illustrate how out of touch with reality the Jojos have become.

Warnings: Gore, kidnapping, dehumanization.

Edited: By the amazing Peri!! (@tealyjade-libran )

⭐Jonathan Joestar is possessive. ⭐

It's only when you lose something, that you start to cherish it...

It's an old saying, one that Jonathan remembers from an antique storybook his mother use to read him. It didn't mean anything back then, when he was still an infant too young and new, to fully comprehend what "owning" and "losing" was. But as the years ticked by faster than any clock could keep track of, things started to change. What had once been a passing quote in a chivalrous story about knights and dragons, soon turned into the epitome of Jonathan Joestar's life.

Soon love wasn't about saving a princess or impressing the neighborhood girls with his boxing skills. No, all too soon love became about own and guarding.

There may have been a time -long before "Jojo" and Dio met- when Jonathan was just like any other gentleman. Tender and sweet, flirtish at gatherings and charming in ladies' companies...but that was a Jonathan from a could-be-past that had been demolished the minute Dio Brando stepped foot onto the Joestar estate. From then on things depleted all so quickly. Everything Jonathan had come to unconsciously cherished had been so easily stripped from him by his beloved new "brother".

Everything he loved had been killed, destroyed, or broken in some inhuman way. His friends had abandoned him, his lover had distorted him, his father didn't even notice him...

"It's only when you lose something, that you start to cherish it". The second time he hears that phrase, it freezes him to the pavement, his body star-struck like he just received a message from the heavens. Although it's rather peculiar, why "heaven" would convey a message to him in such an unholy place.

With Dio having practically kicked Jonathan out of the mansion and countryside. Jojo had no other place to go but the back allies of London. Sure he still tried to be home for supper and bedtime and any other time his father may get an inkling of his absence. But when there was no need to 'appear' Jonathan took to the London streets away from Dio and his lackeys.

In fate's bizarre game, it's in a backstreet that reeks of days old licker and rotting flesh of paupers that no one has bothered to bury. That Jojo hears that life-defining idiom once more. His dulling sapphire blue eyes follow the mist of those melodious words. Staring until they're practically itching to cut through his sockets and run after those little words. But they stop right before they can leave their eyelets, they stop and stare at the figure that strolls out of the shadows, in such a way, that would make Jojo's father slap him across the face for being "barbarous".

It's luck or fate or maybe even destiny that leads the heir of the Joestar legacy to meet his darling in the slums of England.

"How my heart resonates when I lay my weary eyes on your enchanting face..."

There's an odd sweetness about the naivety that surrounds his little friend. A sort of innocence that comes with not knowing about the hell that he's gone through. It's charming in a moderate way, his darling can't come to despise him if they haven't got a clue who he is. Keeping both his worlds as far apart as possible is really the only option left. Dio and his friends can't hurt his new friend? Lover? Companion? In actuality, Jonathan really doesn't know what you are to him. At first, you're merely a distraction from his crumbling, lonely shell of an existence. A sort of invisible pillar holding up London's bridge before it collapses into the River Thames. Sure he views you as another person, unlike the other noblemen Jonathan has no desire to treat you as anything less than a respectable young lady despite your social statutes.

Dio can have the noblemen and ladies, he can have all of George's affection and favor, Heck Dio can have the whole goddamn world for all Jonathan cares. So long as he has his darling, his sunflower, his only means for living, then he will be content.

Jojo lost everything he once loved, but he swears it to every star in the night sky that'll preserve his darling from the wickedness that runs this cruel world. He'll cherish her while she's still in his arms...

He'll protect her, just like the knights did in the old bedtime stories his mother would tell him.

"...I swear on my honor as a Joestar that I shall never lose you to the likes of anyone, I'll be a true gentleman, a true knight and I'll protect you from any who wishes cause you harm."

⭐Joseph Joestar is Protective and all so patronizing.⭐

Why must Love hurt so much?

It's solitude, pure utter solitude that attracts Joseph to his darling. Oh sure, he must have known them from an earlier time in his life, back when the words Hammon and Ripple just sounded like fancy dessert names. Back when he was still a naive kid wishing on every goddamn star that he could just meet one of his parents for a fraction of a second. Back when life was easy when everything made sense. That's when he first met his darling. Although all so many years ago he probably just thought of them as the little sister he never got a chance of having.

There's a numbness growing inside him now that his life has slipped off its axes, hurling into unknown darkness that plagues him in the form of Pillarmen and red gems.

Everywhere he looks there's a reminder that nothing's going back to the way it used to be. No waking up to Granny Erina's voice calling him down for breakfast, no running around chasing Old Man Speedwagon. Everything is gone, replaced by Lisa Lisa's brutal training and Ceaser's endless taunting.

Day by day nothing changes, but once he looks back every little thing is different. Ruptured and mangled into something unrecognizable.

But then there's his darling. Someone -or rather something- that's still the same. Just like before. Her smile is still the same as ever, bright and cheery as she runs up to him wrapping her arms around his abdomen muttering about how much she missed her "Dear Big Brother".

(Y/N) is a comfort, a familiarity in a strange new world. She's something so frail and vulnerable, not to mention naive. Thrusted into a world where horror writers don't dare venture into. It's so likely that she'd be captured by one of Kar's zombie vampire things or -even worse- charmed by Caesar’s silver tongue.

It's thoughts like these that haunt Joseph at night, keep him up and wandering into her room just to gaze at her sleeping form. He's lucid enough to know how it might look. Like he's the bad guy trying to take advantage of a defenseless little girl. But he can justify his actions, he's her big brother, he has to watch over especially when she's at her most vulnerable. If Ceaser ever tried anything or some vampire freak snatched her away in the dead of night, Joseph would never forgive himself!

But what does he get for all his efforts? What does he get for all his sleepless nights and hours upon hours of worrying? Just a small smile and a fleeting kiss on the cheek. No sincere, "Thank you big brother," or, "You're my hero Joseph!" Nothing, nothing worthwhile anyway.

Now it's a competition, a battle to the death if it has to be -funny how he takes this more seriously than his match against Wamuu.- He's competitive by nature and he's willing to do anything to earn his darling's affection once more. He doesn't care who he has to beat within an inch of their life so long as he can have his darling back in his arms.

There is an aftermath to all of these, once all the fighting has ended and the battle's won. Once Joseph has finally claimed his prize. There's a certain way his darling has to act. She’s got to smile and play the role of the dotting little sister once more. Just so Joseph can justify his actions...

"And your next line is, 'I love you more than anything else big brother Joseph!'...at least I wish it was."

⭐Jotaro Kujo is cold and sadistic.⭐

Never learned how to love...

A lover by Jotaro's book is nothing more than a walking, talking doll. Someone who cooks meals, irons clothes, and kisses him on the cheek before he leaves for the day. Sure they have other uses, in flares of passionate moments, they're something to hold onto, another pair of limbs to get tangled in. Something hot and solid, someone to push down, to weigh his force on.

That's it, that's all there is to it...

A lover and a convenient toy are one of the same.

He knows it's wrong to think about someone that way. To deprive a living thing of all their thoughts and feelings just so it's suitable for him. But at the end of the day who wants to hear idle chatter and gossip or go outside for walks in crowded areas. All too social, it's all so troublesome. All Jotaro wants is a closed-off life, away from the scums of the earth...away from people in general.

It's such an inconvenience to seek out a lover, to hassle through dates and meetups in hopes of finding someone that clicks. Jojo would even go so far as to call it wishful thinking. So it has to be a pure accident that he even meets his darling. They're just someone who gets tangled in with the crusaders. A perfect living perception of 'wrong place, wrong time'. Someone who's life gets blown to bits and shambles just because fate decided to play a cruel joke on them.

And that's what piqued Jotaro's interest. The desperate, depleted look of pain cemented over their face. The sparse dying gleam of determination that blazes within their eyes. Oh, what Jotaro wouldn't do to snuff that little ray of hope. To watch as what little purpose they have is ripped from their arms. What he wouldn't do to see them in pain...

Pain is submission, that's really all Jojo wants. A darling submits, not out of their own free will, but because every little thing they've ever loved has been slaughtered, all that they cherished has been stolen from them.

But it's not enough

It's never enough

Although Jotaro adores the looks of anguish that decorates his lover's face. There's something more satisfying about maltreating them. About leaving marks all over, about leaving bruises that never lose their violet glow. He's claiming his darling, physically and mentally. Not a single day goes that Jotaro doesn't remind his lover who they belong to. From verbal taunts that plague his darling's mind day and night, to punches that break bones leaving them paralyzed on the floor begging for help, to cuts that are just a little too deep to ever heal properly.

Even when his darling is behaving, even when the poor little thing does everything her lover tells her to do, there's still going to be some sort of violence directed at her. Some backhanded remark about how useless they are just because they couldn't follow his mother's recipe. Some sort of blow just for greeting him 'too late'. Trivial things morph into punishments, just for Jotaro's sick amusement.

At his core, Jotaro is an unresponsive man, one with no regard for how others feel. He's distant, it's a trait he can't change. He likes how he does things, how there's no room for slip-ups when it's only him. Even his darling isn't someone he'd consider opening up to. Their opinion of him doesn't matter and their feelings are irrelevant. Most days he's gone until the last possible moment, leaving his darling an endless amount of time to mull over every word and scar.

But here's the catch.

As the clock ticks by, as the nights and days begin to merge into an endless existence, as all hope burns in the pits of hell, darling's mind is also going to stray. Ever so slowly losing its perception of reality.

'Maybe' spiders begin to spin webs of doubt through darling's empty cranium. The isolation begins to bite at her skin like the razor-sharp fangs of frostbite. They start to crave Jotaro's harsh touches, they start to miss the venom-like words. Every insult and slap to the face is welcomed, all the misplaced anger and death threats start to feel like sweet kisses and flowery touches.

Poor darling no longer sees big scary Jotaro as a monster. They've lost the ability to see him for what he truly is.

And what happens when Jotaro does finally come home? Oh, how little (y/n) will ravish in the gut kicks and loathsome words. How she'll take every beating with a sweet sugar-coated smile.

Cause this is her life now. A meaningless existence that revolves around Jotaro and his bleak personality. A life that's only worth living when Jotaro is around.

Is it even a life?

"Yare yare daze you're such a hassle, be glad I keep you around...”

⭐Josuke is obsessive with delusional tendencies.⭐

Maybe I'm the one you'll fall in love with next...

Just like his "father" Joseph, Josuke is stuck in a perpetual state between diaphanous and phantasm.

There's something all too wrong with Morioh nowadays. The narrow streets and verbose buildings have started to feel like a transparent cage. The town has always been small, barely reaching a population of 3,000 despite all the new families that keep moving in.

Nevertheless, everything has dulled, faded, and withered into a monochrome collage. The layers of repetitiveness had finally begun to pick at Joskue's nerves...

And yet somehow, by some diabolical twist of fate. In the mists of the oceans of familiarity, Josuke’s eyes grab onto some shimmering pearl lounged into between the crowd of familiar faces.

Sure he's seen this girl before, but he's never actually seen her. Never stopped to look at the odd way their eyes twinkle like newborn stars or how their skin shimmers with the glow of a thousand suns.

One second is all it took, a fleeting compliment as you passed by Jojo in the peppermint flavored afternoon. Your hair flowing like a tapestry of the galaxy as you disappeared in the crowd of dead pulsars. Not a care in the world, not for him, not for anyone.

Destiny was definitely up to its old cruel tricks again.

He's not stalking. Josuke will swear on his grandfather's grave that he'd never "stalk" a harmless little girl, like some distorted maniac. He just happens to bump into you at the beauty parlor when he's picking up a new brand of hairspray. And it's totally an accident when he meets you out in the abandoned fields! Honest! It's not his fault fate wants the two of you to keep meeting, it's not his fault that you guys are meant to be!

It's not technically a friendship that you two start to build up, it's far from one. Friends don't dream about sugar-filled kisses behind school walls. Or about ice cream that tastes like scandalous touches and candy induced moans. No, Joskue isn't your friend, he NEVER wanted to be your friend. He knows that! He knows what he wants...but with each passing day, he's beginning to doubt that you know that.

He'd never realized he's been so sensitive on you. So entranced by your out of tune voice that muttered rather than spoke. He's seldom been so eager to throw a punch and crack his knuckles on someone's skull, just for saying you looked "lovely today".

Whenever his eyes don't land on you, a rage-filled volcano bubbles in the pit of his gut, uncontrollable anger that festers inside of him, like lava waiting to spill out and burn anyone that wanders too close. His palms itch with the need to hold you, to feel your soft skin rubbing against his.

The jealousy is always there, pricking at his skin like rose thrones. Until they inevitably cut through his flesh and make him lose his composure. He's ready to kick and punch and hurt and kill anyone that comes too close to you, anyone that saunters off their orbit and makes a beeline for you, disturbing the balance of solitude that Josuke so eagerly sets you into.

Sometimes in the dead of night, when the world has finally dozed off, Joskue's mind begins to wonder. He thinks the way he feels about you is the same way an addict feels about his drugs. Maybe to him, you're even more addicting than heroin and ecstasy...and yet he can't quit you, he just doesn't want to quit you. Nothing in this world could compare to your sweet voice that tickles his ear when you lean in, to whisper a secret, or the may your full lips move when you throw another honey-filled insult at him.

He prefers when you're alone when he's the only one you talk to.

Sure there are exceptions like everything in life, although in the end

there's a sort of backhanded irony.

It's those exceptions that are going to hurt him in the.

Josuke trusts his friends, he knows that Okuyasu and Koichi would never do anything to hurt him...

But you're not on that list and to be fair you're surely the only one who can truly hurt him.

You fall for a friend of his. Not him, not the boy that's been driving himself insane just to earn a smile from you, not the boy that let you get away with insulting his hair and poking insults at his look, not him never him, it just can't be him.

"You're like an older brother to me"...Did you wash your mouth with acid before you spat those words at him? Did you intend to lace your words with knives and blades and rubbing alcohol before you stabbed him? It's figurative, sure. But it might as well be literal. No pain, no cut, no punch from any stand would ever hurt so much! You really don't know what you do to him, do you?

"I'm happy for you," it's a lie, blank and simple. Automatic words that he's practiced in the mirror a thousand and one times. He'd rather watch you suffocate on your own blood than in the arms of another man. He'd rather break every bone in your body than watch you kiss one of his friends.

How on earth had he ever come to love you? Someone as cruel and cold. Were you even human? You resembled some ice stand more than a flesh and blood person. HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO HIM.

He really hadn't meant for it to become an addiction, he hadn't meant to get all so used to the crunch of bones beneath his foot, and the bloodied lips quivering, shuttering out apologizes for having the gall to utter your name in his presence. But there's only so much a teenage boy can take, only so much torture that he can bury inside with a moonlight smile.

Addictions really do funny things to semi-sane people, huh?

It's a split-second decision, done in the heat of an all so regular moment. It's just a simple half-hearted punch when you beat him at another videogame. Then another

And another

Then a crack, another and another, and before either of you knew it you're on the floor screaming out in pure agony.

Josuke vows he's not being cruel when he breaks your bones so delicately. He can justify every crack, every fracture. Although it's rather repetitive and in certain cases borderline petty.

Five broken bones on your left leg just for "kissing" your new boyfriend. Your right leg is bent at an angle you're sure it's not meant to be. All because you hugged said new lover before going to class.

Josuke's once liquidy blue eyes that held the softness of clouds have been dulled over by a sort of thick mania. His once soft touch is nothing but nails digging into already bruised tissue. His lips wobbling as stray tears flow past his eyes. Muttering apologies and stuttering curses at both you and himself.

It's not really like his darling can leave after that incident. Josuke is known around town as the boy with a diamond heart. There's no way in hell anyone will believe what he did to you. It's just better, safer, to stick close to him, to swallow the indignities and paint a loving smile over your face when you gaze into his depraved eyes.

It's better to pretend to love him, rather than have another limb broken...

"Come on (Y/N), it's just a little crack. If you promise to give me a tiny kiss I'll let Crazy Diamond fix you right up."

⭐Giorno Giovanna is sneaky and manipulative. ⭐

Sono pazzo di te. Sei la cosa più bella che mi sia mai capitata...

There's a sleekness to Giorno, a cunning that's hidden behind layers of charisma and charm mimicking that of his birth father's. It's so easy for him to fool his darling into believing that he's a charming prince from a storybook. He's the good guy trying all so damn hard to make his dream a reality. He's admirable, he's noble, he's Giorno Giovana, the golden boy.

It's not like he ever intends to hurt his darling. He'd never dream of laying a hand on them, he's all too familiar with the wounds that come from endless beatings. The bruises and phantom pains, that get worse as the days slip by. He knows real pain, and unlike all so many others on both sides of his family, Giorno doesn't want his lover to experience an uncia of it.

He'd never repeat what his stepfather and mother did to him. He's going to try and do everything he can to make sure that his darling is safe...

Because isn't that what's important? To make sure the one you love is safe. To make sure they don't get swept off their feet by some masquerading drunkard or taken advantage of by some fanciful sadist.

Giorno will do anything to keep his darling safe, even if it means tampering with their mind a little. Nothing too serious, he'd never even considered changing anything about them. Although isolating them isn't completely off the table and a few verbal threats are fine from time to time. Just for precaution...

Giorno is a rather determined boy, he'll go to any lengths to isolate his lover. Scaring away friends by letting Gold Experience give them a small out of body experience. If they're persistent then he can't guarantee that that out-of-body experience will simply remain an experience much longer. It's not out of malice, but it's what must be done for the sake of his darling, the only other thing he cares about.

There's a shift, a difference between the young naive Giorno Giovanna, the golden boy with starry eyes, and the new boss of Passione, the Mafioso who holds the whole country in the palm of his hand.

Oh sure, as a simple Soldato Giorno was dangerous in his own right. But Don Giorno? He's the sort of monster written about in the grimmest fairy tales. Wearing the appearance of a true king but underneath the luxury suits and priceless watches, he's just another greedy, fire-breathing dragon.

As the Don of Italy's most influential gang, Giorno's manipulation tactics have gotten rather ....hazardous. He doesn't have time to waste getting rid of every single person that poses a threat to his darling. If someone looks their way, he'll send some goons to take care of them.

Although it's so much easier to keep his lover locked away, he even has the perfect excuse now. He's the head of the mafia, he has all so many enemies who jump at the opportunity to hurt him in some way. So he has to keep his defenseless little lover locked away in some mansion that's all so far away.

He's also a bit more violent now. Giorno's more physical, ready to break a bone just for a wrong word or a cracked jaw from a punch for even asking to go outside. He blames it on the stress of running an organization...although it's more likely that all the power from passion has begun to rinse away Giorno's caring side.

"Cuore mio, Resta con me per sempre"

⭐Jolyne Kujo is clingy and obsessive and delusional.⭐

I can't stay away from you...

Jolyne is a rather condescending yandere. Her rough ragged exterior does little to hide the clingy neediness that writhes inside her shattered heart.

She's soft, dependent, desperate at best. Wanting her darling to approve of every tiny trifling thing she does. Needing their words of praise and approving smiles to have the courage to live another day.

At times it seems like the only thing keeping Jojo alive is the "good girl!" and "I'm proud of you!" her darling throws her way. Chanting the words of praise with closed eyes and fluttering smiles of anxiety.

It's difficult to make her sweetheart realize how virulent this relationship is, far too hard to call Jolyne a Yandere. The derogatory term applies to someone who ceases all control from their lover, who locks them in a basement, and throws away the key. It applies to murders and

stalkers and lunatics that roam the streets in the dead of full moon nights. It applies to those who were thrown into Green Dolphin for a reason.

Not to some girl whose life has been demolished over and over and over again.

Not to the girl with a star birthmark that follows her darling around like a lost puppy in the freezing rain.

But even Jolyn has her limits. She's been let down time and time again, abandoned and framed by those she thought she loved unconditionally. From friends to boyfriends to even her own father, everyone leaves, they take what they want, and then they leave.

Flesh like strings, stitched into a web of antithesis and distraught moods, act as a solid, interchangeable reminder of who really holds the power in this relationship. Of how Jolyne can go from needing her darling to controlling her darling in just a fraction of a heartbeat. She loves them, she swears she does...but they need to stay close to her, they need to only think about her.

Her addiction gets worse as the days tick by. It's less romantic, less loving. Morphing into a dependency, a compulsion. Rotting thoughts of her darling suddenly leaving, plague her every waking moment. The once semi pleasant conversations between her lover and her friends, get cut off like a severed limb.

Even Hermes and Foo Fighters aren't "good enough" to be around Jolyne’s lover. She's all so, scared they'll try to take them from her. Stealing the ONLY good thing in her life.

There's a certain degree of control that Jolyne's willing to give to her darling. A sort of freedom to make, revolting appalling choices, so long as they include her. A freedom to boss her around and make her submit. Her darling is free, so long as that freedom revolves around Jolyne.

"(Y/N)~ don't look at them! You should only focus on me! I'm supposed to be your world!"

⭐Johnny Joestar is sadistic and manipulative.⭐

Arrogance disguised as affection...

It's all degradation, all harsh words that sting worse than bullet wounds. Glares from dull wicked blue eyes that might as well kill, cause it's better than the alternative. Smirks that make being alive so damn distasteful. Kisses that engrave the lingering taste of rotting lead into your tongue.

Johnny isn't sweet, he doesn't smile at his little sweetheart. He doesn't pat their head and kiss their temples while uttering sweet nothings into their blushing ear. No, his lover doesn't deserve a honey-coated life. They don't deserve to have what was stolen from him by his so-called "loved ones". Instead, he uses them as a living dart board, for both his acid-laced words and bullet-like fingernails.

There's no love when it comes to Jojo. He doesn't want to waste time on something so frivolous as a "significant other". But he does like having someone -or rather something- to play with, a form of entertainment that bends at his will. Not a pushover, not someone who's too proud either. But a living doll that can take a few verbal spats and survive an armada of fingernail bullets through the stomach.

Oh, sure he wants to break them, having a toy that's so conflicted, that questions their own sanity is so much more fun. But it's the intervals that count. Johnny wants to be the one to break his darling. To engrave the helpless look of distress into his memory. He wants to preserve every scream, every tear. That's the whole purpose of even keeping a darling.

Johnny rarely lets his darling out of his sight. It's so much easier to play with their mind if he's the only one they ever talk to. They'll become so easily dependent on him if he's their only companion. Although sometimes Gyro can get a little too touchy and friendly. And there will be occasions when Hot Pants start to pry into the darling and Jojo's personal life. But the incidents are few and far between. Not like Johnny minds, if anything these minor secondary "meetups" are useful to the paraplegic jockey. They refill his darling with the most precious thing..." Hope". Just so Johnny can beat it out of them all over again.

There's a darkness that resides deep within Johnny. A toxicity that laces his actions. His life is miserable and he's damn well sure it'll always be that way.....

So why not take his lover down with him?

"Don't you love me darlin' ? Cause I certainly don't love ya."

⭐Jorge Joestar is delusional and obsessive.⭐

What if we lost our minds, together?

A love story better than his parents, that's all Jorge wants. Flower field dates, and quick lingering kisses before midnight. Something sweet, that doesn't have a macabre end. A romance without body-snatching vampires and zombies that shed their flesh. Something normal, gentle, lovable.

Although with the family he's been born into and the kind of things that keep finding him. Jorge doubts he's ever going to get such a hopeful love life. He's all so desperate to carve a life for himself outside of his family's shadow, but in the end, it's simply eager wishing.

He's not exactly sure what he's even looking for in a lover. Someone sweet but strong-willed, an average answer. Someone who bears a sort of resemblance to Lisa Lisa. Not physically but rather mentally, he's not a coward, he swears he's not, but he just wants someone who can protect him. A fair exchange in his eyes. His lover will guard him against the bullies and freaks of the island and in turn, he'll protect them from the grim ghouls that run amok through the world. Although when push comes to shove he isn't sure if he'll really be 'protecting' his lover or running away and hiding somewhere with them.

He just wants to fall in love and not go insane, a reasonable request, if he hadn't seen the worst that the world has to offer. It's just wishful thinking, sweet dreams for a boy designed to attract trouble.

He doesn't want to have conversations with his dead lover's head. He doesn't want to wear their skin and waltz around town. He doesn't want any of that creepy, supernatural stuff that destroyed his parent's love.

He just wants normal. But as the years slip by Jorge's grip on "normal" slowly begins to decay.

Normal is something, but what that something is has become a blur. Normal isn't vampires and zombies and ghost clowns that throw nooses around people's necks...Yet on the other hand maybe it is?

He's so far gone that he can't even differentiate between methodical and irregular. His brain's capacity to understand the difference has gotten so altered and broken.

Once he finds his darling he does try to act like the ordinary people of the Canary Islands or England, depending on where he's residing at the time. He tries to follow the mode, just to impress his lover. It's a façade, a bloody masquerade that's bound to deteriorate once he and his lover have settled down.

Although a poetic, domestic life had always been Jorge's dream, he soon comes to learn that it just doesn't suit him. Jorge's paranoia starts to increase. It's comical at first, the way his eyes dart to closed doors, half expecting a killer to emerge. Although the same paranoid tendencies can become rather smothering at times. He's all so certain something is going to jump out of the shadows, some creature with sharp fangs and knife-like claws is going to rip his lover's body to rags.

He's gotten rather umbrageous now that he's the one who's married and living in the Joestar estate. His tendency to run away from any form of conflict has morphed into a rogue-like sense, much similar to a rabid dog barking at anyone who gets too close to its territory. He keeps his darling locked away inside, triple-checking the locks to make sure no one or thing can get in. He avoids the probing disquieting neighbors who still speak ill of his widowed mother and murmurs about the "curses" bestowed on the Joestar bloodline. Sometimes even getting physical when the insults shift towards him and his new lover.

Punches are thrown.

Insults exchanged.

And then the door and windows are locked once more.

Leaving both Jorge and his darling in the chilling company of the semi alive shadows.

It's safer in the basement. It has to be safer down there. After all his mother kept his father's severed head down there for decades before anyone found it. So it's only sensible that his lover will also be safe, tucked away in the darkness of a brick room some few meters under the earth. He's not acting like his mother -and deep down he prays that this isn't something his late father would ever even consider doing- It's a thin line of justification, but he can reason with himself so long as he knows it's not something his other family members have ever done. He does try to keep his darling comfortable down there. Buying them the most luxurious furniture and comfortable bedding. Constantly bringing them new forms of entertainment.

Keeping them in this preserved state is what any reasonable person would do. Not just another insanity driven Joestar.

"It's for your own safety" he's repeated that phrase an umpteenth amount of times, although every time the sculpted words leave his tongue, Jorge becomes less sure of who he's really trying to convince.

Jorge is all so sure that he's doing all of this for both his lover's safety and to erase whatever misfortune follows around the Joestars, like an airy plague. Even his enrolling for the great war is done with this mindset...

Even though in the end it's also this mindset that gets him killed. Leaving his darling a wide window to freedom.

"Darling, what do you think when you look at me?"

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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lorelylantana · 3 years

Text

The Difference

I was inspired to write by some of the amazing @ghostgirl19posts‘s work for Febwhump and with permission I’ve decided to write a little epilogue for the Ganon’sChampion!Link chapters, the first of which can be found here but you should also read parts two and three for this to make sense.

Overall rating: T

Warnings: Emotional Manipulation, unhealthy relationship that grows to be slightly less unhealthy.

“Did you really believe that anything would be different?”

No, she supposes she didn’t. Not really. She isn’t that stupid.

Zelda sees the dead sincerity in his eyes when he speaks, but the relief at Ganon’s fall has sparked a rebellious streak in her. She won’t let him get off that easy, so she masks her dismay with an apathetic flip of her hair.

“Just as well,” she hums, the picture of a bored princess, “As far as I’m concerned, my job is done so long as the kingdom isn’t actively on fire. I see nothing wrong with lounging about for the rest of my days. If you want to do all the paperwork, be my guest. In the meantime, I’ll be in the library. It’s been too long since I’ve read a good book.”

She doesn’t wait for permission, slipping out of his arms and breezing out the door. He stands there a moment, shocked into silence. He likely would have called after her if he wasn’t rooted to the spot by the dread sinking in his body.

“ . . . Paperwork?”

Despite Link’s insistence otherwise, Zelda did begin to notice things were different. The changes were small, incremental, but no less potent. She was not so foolish as to let her guard down, but a drop of water can cut through stone through sheer persistence.

Zelda woke up in the middle of the night needing to go to the bathroom. This was an increasingly common occurrence as her midriff expanded to accommodate the child growing there. She lay on her side, Link curled around her back and his hand on her stomach. The day after Ganon’s assassination his rooms were cleared and refurbished to house the new royal couple.

The first difference. Their rooms were divided no longer. At first, Zelda assumed that he was tired of having to summon her and this unification was an attempt to streamline his path between her legs. She thought it a decision driven by lust, but she had to admit that their nightly escapades had decreased. He still took Zelda into his arms often enough, unwrapping her with painstaking, almost precious care and leaving her skin open to be devoured. But there were also nights like these, where the days were long and Link seemed to sense her fatigue and was content to simply lie wrapped around her, his hand never straying from her abdomen. Zelda wondered if he was as tired as she was, adjusting to kingship, but most of her husband’s mind was still a mystery to her.

Her husband.

There was no royal wedding. No dress. No grand feast to celebrate Zelda’s return to royalty. There was only an acolyte and a set of documents to be signed before she was once again dragged off to bed. They couldn’t find a priest, so they said their vows in front of the closest alternative.

Zelda yawned and slipped out of bed to relieve herself. While she was washing her hands she took a moment to consider her reflection.

Zelda knew there were aspects of her marriage that were unacceptable, she knew that.

But there was no denying the privilege afforded to her as queen, even if she was only a puppet. Her hair still shone, her eyes were bright, and her cheeks full. A far cry from the gaunt, weary state the servants were in. She shuddered to think of how her citizens looked outside the castle walls. The conquest of Hyrule was her fault. It was her failure to claim her birthright that brought this ruin upon him. Yet here she stood, safely tucked away, insulated from the Calamity’s devastation.

Sometimes, when she was honest with herself, Zelda had to admit there was a part of her that was grateful for Link’s command that she stay within the castle. His mandate, cruel though it was, gave her a plausible excuse to hide from her mistakes. The castle walls were high and thick, strong enough to shut out the guilt that was her obligation.

Zelda jerked her head to the side, unable to look herself in the eye any longer. She padded back into the room. Instead of heading straight back to bed, though the promise of warmth against the late fall evening was tempting, she was drawn to the window. The guardians still roamed the streets of the shattered Castle Town. They were malicious no longer, only patrolling out of ancient duty, but none dared approach. Above all the ruin, the sky was clear of Ganon’s hateful red. At least she could see the stars.

“Come to bed.”

Zelda turned to where Link lay, staring at her. She supposed he finally lost his patience with her idling. If she were a more fanciful woman, Zelda would think he was fussing over her standing in a room that chilled when the fire died in the hearth. She returned to the massive bed Link claimed as theirs and sat down, kicking her slippers off before sliding back under the lush, heavy comforter. Link’s hand was back on her stomach before she settled, an imitation of a caring husband so convincing it was cruel.

She didn’t cry, because tears were a cry for help she didn’t deserve.

Before her growing stomach prevented it, Zelda spent most of her days firmly ensconced in Link’s lap as he looked over documents. He refused to ask for the help any of the few conquered noblemen that still lived, as he insisted such an action was beneath him. Besides, what better way to remind the captive queen of her place than to make her explain all of this bureaucratic nonsense?

“What exactly is the point of a crop rotation?” he huffed as he read the agricultural proposal over lunch. Zelda finished off her sandwich before answering.

“Different plants require different nutrients from the land to grow. If you grow the same crop in the same field every year, eventually those nutrients will deplete. Switching things up gives the soil an opportunity to regain those specific nutrients while reducing the amount of bad harvests.”

Link hummed as he signed his approval of the proposal. All of this drivel was really giving him a headache. He reached for the last half of his sandwich, but Zelda got there first, plucking it off of his plate and sinking her teeth into it. Child crafting was a hungry business, after all.

Link disguised his failed reach by redirecting it around Zelda so his arms circled her waist, both hands resting on her stomach. He supposed a sense of entitlement was a good quality for a queen to have.

He didn’t need that sandwich anyway.

The powers that be must have finally resigned themselves that he was here to stay. They must have given up on his downfall, and instead must have focused on encouraging what little virtue he had. They must be, for such a petty generosity to be rewarded by the baby’s first kick.

“The baby kicked!” he gasped, craning his head over her shoulder to look down at where her tummy peeked out under her breasts.

“Yes, love, I noticed,” Zelda deadpanned, then they stilled in tandem.

Love. A word that had no business between them. Obsession, perhaps. Possession. But ‘love’? It was laughable. Link opened his mouth to say something castigating, something harsh enough to bring back the status quo.

“Careful.”

Link’s head jerked back in surprise. She didn’t turn to look at him, ignoring him in favor of taking the apple from his plate, so he pressed.

“What did you say?” Who was she to caution him?

“Merely making an observation,” she said, turning her hand this way and that, regarding the fruit with a critical eye, “After all, what upsets the mother threatens the child.”

A chill ran down Link’s spine. Perhaps, even after all this time, he had underestimated her. He didn’t have the luxury of composing himself at his own pace, because she had turned to him. The calculating, sharp look in her eye brought him to heel.

“Wouldn’t you agree?” she asked.

Link’s hands started rubbing again, and his lips dropped to her shoulder. He had surrendered, but he wasn’t sure if the victor was Zelda or his own traitorous heart.

“Yes, dearest.”

Zelda hummed in response, bringing a hand up to comb luxuriously through his hair. He sighed, and she brought the apple to her lips, biting into it with a satisfying crunch.

After all, a marriage bed is an arena of equals.

Perhaps the statement was insensitive, but being a pregnant queen of a ruined castle did have some perks. Primarily, it was the absolute lack of regard for decorum. Despite the circumstances, Zelda felt a lighthearted thrill of walking around the palace, once a place of rigid etiquette, in nothing but a nightgown and silk robe. Link’s insistence, of course. When her corset was no longer comfortable to wear, Link inferred that her dresses would be too tight as well. He could have had new ones made, but why bother with garments that would have to be altered half a dozen times? No, it was far more efficient for his queen to lounge about in her nightgowns.

Of course, the knee length hem had absolutely nothing to do with it. Link didn’t even notice when a knee length gown in the first trimester stopped at the top of her thighs in the third. Or the fact that Zelda stopped wearing anything underneath when putting something on became difficult. Irrelevant, all of it.

If he happened to capitalize on the opportunities it afforded to him, fine, but that was an entirely separate matter.

Zelda stretches, trying to release some of the tension in her back, before falling stiffly back into her chaise. It was absurd, but the moment he realized she could no longer fit in his lap he’d commissioned a modified chaise specifically for her and had it brought to the office. She said it was overkill, but he didn’t care. That said, her back had grown to appreciate the reclined seat and cushions.

Still, one couldn’t help the stiffness that came with sitting for long periods of time. Perhaps she should take a turn about the room? Zelda swung her legs down, then started probing for her slippers. Surely they must be in the same spot she left them? Still, with her stomach as large as it was she couldn’t really see.

Link knelt on the floor next to her, having gotten up the moment he saw her sit up. He took her foot in his hand gently while the other reached under the chaise to pull out the missing footwear. He delicately put the slipper on one foot, perhaps wary of hurting her swollen ankles. He repeated the action with her other foot before wordlessly helping her stand, even though he knew she didn’t need it.

At least, she thought she didn’t. Turns out, fate had other plans, and Zelda felt an intense cramping in her lower abdomen, causing her to double over with a start.

“Zelda!? Zelda, tell me what’s wrong?”

She looked him in the eyes, the same concern held in his grip supporting her arms shining in his eyes.

“Call the midwives.”

The night was quiet. Link would swear that it was the first peaceful moment since Ganon’s rise. Although, it’s entirely possible that this tranquility was an illusion born of the chaos of the day preceding. Now his lovely wife was sleeping, exhausted, in the bed while he sat in a chair next to her.

The baby in his arms huffed, and Link’s attention was drawn from the Zelda sleeping in the bed to the one resting in his arms.

They had to name her Zelda. Of course they did. Other names didn’t seem to fit.

The people of Hyrule couldn’t be trusted to look after his daughter, they were losers! How could they be trusted with someone so precious when they couldn’t even win one war? They couldn’t, simple as that. No, the only ones who were capable of looking after little Zelda were himself and his queen, no others.

But then who would run the country?

Link supposed he could carry on, leaving the childrearing to Zelda as he made sure any and all threats were eliminated before they even looked at the castle. Baby Zelda squirmed, one of her arms coming loose of her swaddling and slapping him in the face.

What was he thinking? Zelda couldn’t hone these raw battle instincts. She can’t even do a backflip, much less after giving birth. Besides, why should she get all the time with the baby? He’s the king! He should get to do what he wants, and he wants to raise his little girl. Zelda can handle affairs of the state well enough. Not right away of course, she needs time to recuperate, but after a few months she should be more than capable of take Hyrule’s reins while he looks after the little one.

“Come here,”

Link looked to the bed, Zelda was sitting up. He moved to help her, but she waved him away, pulling herself into a sitting position with a wince. Once she was settled he slid under the blankets. Zelda undid her nightgown, allowing their sweet daughter to latch on her breast. She winced.

“Does it hurt?” he asked with a frown. She shook her head.

“It’s a bit uncomfortable, I’ll get used to it.”

Link put an arm around her shoulders and gently pulled her to him. She leaned on him, resting her drowsy head in the crook of his neck, and Link was overcome. He couldn’t fight anymore. It was time to admit defeat.

He pressed his nose into her hair, “I love you.”

When his statement was met with silence, he thought she had fallen back asleep, or perhaps his whispered words were lost in the crown of her head. Then, like a dream, she answered.

“I love you, too.”

Outside, a cool breeze blows through the land, a sigh of relief as the first sprout pushes through the earth, marking the beginning of a new era.

#the legend of zelda #zelink #tw #emotional manipulation #botw zelink #link #zelda #Lantana Lore #LoZ AU #LantanaLore #tw pregnancy

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lassieposting · 3 years

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otp questions for skugwife plz 🥺

1. Who said I love you first?

He did, about three seconds after laying eyes on her for the first time. He was Not Subtle. In his defence, he was in a field hospital at the time, covered in his own blood, and was high off his ass on pain relief, so.

2. Who laughs and kisses their partner on the cheek while their partner isn’t happy about something trivial to try and make them feel better?

Wifey. She's kind of handicapped here because Skug does his best to shield her from the worst parts of himself and the grim truth about war. He doesn't outright lie to her, but he'll censor what he tells her, leaving out the death and the blood and the gore, because he's grown up terrified of becoming his father and he's desperate to be the man she thinks he is, to be someone who's worthy of her love. He doesn't want her to ever look at him and see a killer. If she has to think of him at war, he wants her to think of her gallant hero who always saves the day. So a lot of the time, when he gets into a black mood, she doesn't actually know what's really distressing him. She knows he has nightmares, but he always claims he doesn't remember what they're about. She knows that sometimes he'll nick himself with a knife while he's helping her with dinner, and when she turns around he's just standing there watching his hand bleed like he's suddenly somewhere very far away, but she doesn't know why he gets like that. She knows he has days where she'll say his name four or five times before he even seems to hear her, and an unexpected gunshot from one of the neighbouring smallholdings will have him trembling and running to check on her. But she tries, when he's quiet and distant and sad. She'll hold him and stroke his hair or sing to him or take him out walking in the sunshine, and eventually he'll take her hand and kiss her knuckles and apologise for being an arse, and she never really knows how to tell him that she doesn't mind him having those days at all, she just wishes she knew how to make him stop hurting.

3. Who cuddles up to the other after a long day at work, and this soon escalates to a playful pillow fight?

Skug. They're a cuddly, affectionate couple anyway, but his favourite thing in the world is laying his head in her lap and having his hair stroked. The man melts. They'll cuddle up in the evenings and he'll keel over for her as soon as she pats her leg like come on then and they'll just. Catch each other up on what they've missed since the last time he was home, while she pets him. She'll tell him the latest drama in her friend circle and how her father's been dodging the advances of an elderly patient, and he'll give her a censored, family-friendly version of what he got up to at the front - so, all the funny stories, but with all the gore and death and hard choices edited out. If he says something sufficiently ridiculous, she'll swat him in the face with a cushion. Sometimes he'll fall asleep there and she'll keep playing with his curls until she thinks he's well and truly out of it, and then pick up her needlework to do over his head while he sleeps.

4. What is something that they gave one another that has a lot of meaning?

When they're courting, she makes him a scarf and sends it with the courier with one of her letters, because she didn't like to think of him being cold on night watches. It's red and has zero magical properties whatsoever, it's no Bespoke creation, but he wears it on every mission.

She has a locket with his portrait in it. He's ADHD as fuck and hates sitting still for hours, but she playfully tells him one time that he's "been away so long I almost forgot what you looked like," and he takes it seriously and makes sure that never happens again.

5. How would one another describe their partner?

Very similarly. They both think the other one is their better half and that they don't deserve them. She loves him because he's brave and clever and funny and not afraid to stand up for what he believes in. He loves her because she's good and kind and loving and makes him want to be a better man. They're that couple that are so caught up in each other's virtues that they completely miss each other's flaws.

6. Who wraps their arms around their partner as they look them in the eyes and compliments them with a goofy smile?

Skug, every time they go somewhere they'll be surrounded by His Kind Of People.

Wifey is a salt of the earth working/lower-middle-class sort of girl. She has a job. She's grown up doing all the cooking and cleaning for her father, and she continues to do a lot of it even after she gets married and Skug hires servants because she can't stand to be idle. She has a very limited education; she didn't spend her childhood being fussed over by governesses or taught to simper and dance and paint. So she feels very out of place at fancy Sanctuary parties, surrounded by Skug's superior officers and their sophisticated upper-class wives. She's worried about embarrassing him, she's worried about making him look bad, she's worried about being laughed at or insulted behind her back for being too common or too forthright or too lacking in pretty manners.

He'll pull her to one side before they're announced and remind her that she outshines every other woman in the room, that most of these people are boorish and ignorant anyway so who cares what they think, and that she's got nothing to worry about: she's far more charming than he is and the laws of probability suggest that if anyone is gonna put their foot in it and embarrass the other one, it'll be him.

7. Who loves saying ‘my wife’ or ‘my husband’ or ‘my spouse’?

Wifey, especially when they're newlyweds. She has absolutely no idea how she managed to land him. He's hers now, forever. She has to keep saying it to convince herself it's true. Skug is a bit baffled, but having someone so happy to lay claim to him gives him major heart eyes. He's not used to having someone be proud of him and want to show him off like he's something worth bragging about.

8. Who always talks about how amazing their partner is when their partner isn’t there and they just light up with genuine love and happiness?

God, both of them.

In Prussia, a few months after they get married, Morwenna Crow takes one for the team and spends three solid weeks indulging Skug while he talks about his wife just, constantly.

On Wifey's side, she has a gaggle of girlfriends who appear at the door of her lovely new home to take tea at the first opportunity after her honeymoon wanting all the salacious details. And? She has so much to tell them. Like a lot of young women at the time, the most she was given in the way of sex education was a vague lecture from an older married friend about Marital Duties that didn't really serve a purpose beyond making her really, really nervous about her wedding night.

(She tells Skug about this lecture while she's sprawled all over him somewhere between round two and round three on said wedding night. She's confused. She was told it would be distasteful and unpleasant and painful. Why would her friends lie to her? He laughs, and strokes her hair, and tells her her friends' husbands are clearly doing something wrong.)

So. She returns from her honeymoon with a lot of new information to share with her poor, deprived friends. She's not the only married woman in the group, but she's the only one who married for love, so the unmarried girls are looking at what they want for themselves, and the ones who married for wealth or status are lowkey living vicariously through her.

These gatherings are deeply unnerving for poor Skug. He'll pop into the parlour to kiss Wifey goodbye before he goes out riding with Ghastly, and like eight smirking women politely sipping tea will chorus good morning, Skulduggery like they know something he doesn't know, and something about the way they look at him makes him feel like they're starving and he's a juicy steak. And then he'll close the door behind him when he leaves the room and hear them all immediately explode into giggles. What the fuck do they talk about in there??? At least once he's asked Wifey if she's plotting to sacrifice him, or something.

9. Who loves it when their partner kisses them good morning?

Skug. When you've spent the last 6+ months snatching at sleep on a hard bed with itchy blankets in between night watches and enemy attacks and commando raids of your own, it becomes a real treat to get a full nights sleep and wake up in fresh sheets in your own bed with your wife pressed up against your back, kissing your neck and touching you under the blanket. He knows he's safe when he wakes up with her, and he misses feeling her burrow into his arms when they're apart.

10. Who shows the other how to balance a spoon on their nose?

Skug.

11. Who loves to pull pranks on the other? What type of pranks do they pull and do they pull their pranks off?

Wifey's favourite is to tell Skug she invited her father to stay for a week and watch him frantically try to arrange his face into any other expression than "horrified". This is doubly funny if he just came home and he's raring to get her into bed - "Oh, darling, we can't, Papa will be here shortly, and he's due to stay until Thursday next, you'll simply have to wait," - but she never lets him believe it for long. She's not, like, cruel.

12. What is something small that they would randomly pick up for one another?

Spending money is Skug's love language. He's always buying her "just a little something"s. Hair ribbons, jewellery, new dresses, books, paints...anything he sees and thinks she'd enjoy.

She bakes for him, when he's home. She doesn't think the army feeds him properly, and she knows he eats like a horse. Coming back from Ghastly's to the smell of homemade bread is one of his favourite things about being married.

13. Who is the one who can’t stop laughing when trying to tell a joke?

Wifey. She'll be doubled over wheezing, red in the face, and Skug will still have no idea what the joke is. She didn't get that far. She's the kind of person where, many hours later, he'll ask, "So what was that joke you wanted to tell me?" and it'll just. Set her off again.

14. Who would plan the other a surprise birthday party?

Skug. He's often away for Wifey's birthday, but he'll always try to wheedle some leave out of Corrival so he can come home and spend it with her. It doesn't always work - a lot of the time they simply can't spare him - but he does his best.

15. Who picks the other person up when hugging their partner?

Skug is a 6'4 beanpole of a man who likes small, petite women. Wifey is like 5'3 tops and he picks her up all the time. She weighs, like, nothing to him and she's really into how strong he is, so getting swept off her feet all the time doesn't bother her.

What does bother her is when his lanky ass forgets to bring things down from the top shelf before going away for a few months. She can't reach up there.

#skulduggery pleasant #sp headcanons #skugwife

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sleepymarmot · 3 years

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My reactions to Clive Barker’s The Forbidden. Under the cut I end up quoting like half of it because I have no self-control.

Surprisingly, Trevor’s relationship with Helen is very fleshed out, and he plays a major part in her initial motivation for the investigation. Also, nice setting description!

It was a chilly business. She was not an expert photographer, and the late October sky was in full flight, shifting the light on the bricks from one moment to the next. As she adjusted and readjusted the exposure to compensate for the light changes, her fingers steadily became clumsier, her temper correspondingly thinner. But she struggled on, the idle curiosity of passersby notwithstanding. There were so many designs to document. She reminded herself that her present discomfort would be amply repaid when she showed the slides to Trevor, whose doubt of the project's validity had been perfectly apparent from the beginning.

"The writing on the wall?" he'd said, half smiling in that irritating fashion of his. "It's been done a hundred times."

The mural is just as impressive as it is in the movie. Honestly, I halfway expected it not to be in the short story at all -- it’s such a cinematic image.

Here, the artists had also been at work, but had produced an image the like of which she had not seen anywhere else. Using the door, which was centrally placed in the wall like a mouth, the artists had sprayed a single, vast head onto the stripped plaster. The painting was more adroit than most she had seen, rife with detail that lent the image an unsettling veracity. The cheekbones jutting through skin the color of buttermilk; the teeth, sharpened to irregular points, all converging on the door. The sitter's eyes were, owing to the room's low ceiling, set mere inches above the upper lip, but this physical adjustment only lent force to the image, giving the impression that he had thrown his head back. Knotted strands of his hair snaked from his scalp across the ceiling. [...]

Was it a portrait? There was something naggingly specific in the details of the brows and the lines around the wide mouth; in the careful picturing of those vicious teeth. A nightmare certainly: a facsimile, perhaps, of something from a heroin fugue. Whatever its origins, it was potent. Even the illusion of door-as-mouth worked. The short passageway between living room and bedroom offered a passable throat, with a tattered lamp in lieu of tonsils. Beyond the gullet, the day burned white in the nightmare's belly. The whole effect brought to mind a ghost train painting. The same heroic deformity, the same unashamed intention to scare. And it worked; she stood in the bedroom almost stupefied by the picture, its red-rimmed eyes fixing her mercilessly.

After the entire beginning of the story set in the haunted neighbourhood, an absolutely stunning cut to the daily life of the Rich Intellectuals. I laughed out loud at the fancy italian name of whatever food that is, it was so jarring after the vivid descriptions of poverty and misery:

"The man apparently had a hook instead of a hand."

Trevor looked up from his plate of tagliatelle con prosciutto. "Beg your pardon?"

More of the Very Functional and Satisfying Marriage!

Helen had been at pains to keep her recounting of this story as uncolored by her own response as she could. She was interested to know what Trevor would make of it, and she knew that if she once signaled her own stance he would instinctively take an opposing view out of plain bloody-mindedness.

"He had a hook," she repeated, without inflection.

The story keeps bringing up how Helen and her circle are privileged and liberal. On another note, congratulations on being haunted! (I’m pretty sure in the movie this realization is shifted to the scene where she listens to Candyman’s horrific backstory, her expression distant and her face washed in a romantic soft filter.)

Why did it matter? Was it that she wanted to have her worst feelings about Spector Street proved false? That such an estate be filthy, be hopeless, be a dump where the undesirable and the disadvantaged were tucked out of public view—all that was a liberal commonplace, and she accepted it as an unpalatable social reality. But the story of the old man's murder and mutilation was something other. An image of violent death that, once with her, refused to part from her company.

The book makes a point of saying that Helen feels alienated both by her own hollow world of academia, and the hostile impoverished world of the neighbourhood...

The suggestion that she investigate was not a bad one, though doubtless he had ulterior motives for offering it. She viewed Trevor less charitably day by day. What she had once thought in him a fierce commitment to debate she now recognized as mere power-play. He argued, not for the thrill of dialectic, but because he was pathologically competitive. She had seen him, time and again, take up attitudes she knew he did not espouse, simply to spill blood. Nor, more's the pity, was he alone in this sport. Academe was one of the last strongholds of the professional time-waster. On occasion their circle seemed entirely dominated by educated fools, lost in a wasteland of stale rhetoric and hollow commitment.

From one wasteland to another.

...And the only thing that electrifies her is Candyman’s portrait.

She made her way to number 14 and spent the next hour in its befouled confines, meticulously photographing both the bedroom and living-room walls. She had half expected the impact of the head in the bedroom to be dulled by reacquaintance. It was not. Though she struggled to capture its scale and detail as best she could, she knew the photographs would be at best a dim echo of its perpetual howl.

Much of its power lay in its context, of course. That such an image might be stumbled upon in surroundings so drab, so conspicuously lacking in mystery, was akin to finding an icon on a rubbish heap: a gleaming symbol of transcendence from a world of toil and decay into some darker but more tremendous realm. She was painfully aware that the intensity of her response probably defied her articulation. Her vocabulary was analytic, replete with buzz-words and academic terminology, but woefully impoverished when it came to evocation. The photographs, pale as they would be, would, she hoped, at least hint at the potency of this picture, even if they couldn't conjure up the way it froze the bowels.

Reflection on the nature of the monster and why he needs to stay mysterious:

Standing in front of the charmless building, the wind gusting around her legs, she couldn't help but think of what had happened here. Of the man-child, bleeding on the floor, helpless to cry out. It made her queasy even to contemplate it. She turned her thoughts instead to the felon. What would he look like, she wondered, a man capable of such a depravity? She tried to make an image of him, but no detail she could conjure up carried sufficient force. But then monsters were seldom very terrible once hauled into the plain light of day. As long as this man was known only by his deeds he held untold power over the imagination; but the human truth beneath the terrors would, she knew, be bitterly disappointing. No monster he, just a whey-faced apology for a man more needful of pity than awe.

Helen enjoys scandalizing the Polite Company with the horrors she has learned, and I say, good for her!

The dinner guests looked gratifyingly appalled at the story, and Trevor, to judge by the expression on his face, was furious. It was done now, however; there was no taking it back. Nor could she deny the satisfaction she took in having silenced the interdepartmental babble about the table. It was Bernadette, Trevor's assistant in the history department, who broke the agonizing hush.

Unlike the movie, by the beginning of the story, Helen and Trevor’s relationship has fallen apart almost completely. He’s cheating openly, and she can’t bring herself to care, especially now that she has discovered something (or someone) more interesting. More haunted.

She didn't go back to Spector Street until the following Monday, but all weekend she was there in thought: standing outside the locked toilet, with the wind bringing rain; or in the bedroom, the portrait looming. Thoughts of the estate claimed all her concern. When, late on Saturday afternoon, Trevor found some petty reason for an argument, she let the insults pass, watching him perform the familiar ritual of self-martyrdom without being touched by it in the least. Her indifference only enraged him further. He stormed out in high dudgeon, to visit whichever of his women was in favor this month. She was glad to see the back of him. When he failed to return that night she didn't even think of weeping about it. He was foolish and vacuous. She despaired of ever seeing a haunted look in his dull eyes; and what worth was a man who could not be haunted?

He did not return Sunday night either, and it crossed her mind the following morning, as she parked the car in the heart of the estate, that nobody even knew she had come, and that she might lose herself for days here and nobody would be any the wiser. Like the old man Anne-Marie had told her about: lying forgotten in his favorite armchair with his eyes hooked out, while the flies feasted and the butter went rancid on the table.

More self-awareness!

Frustrated to the verge of tears, she stood among the overturned rubbish bags and felt a surge of contempt for her foolishness. She didn't belong here, did she? How many times had she criticized others for their presumption in claiming to understand societies they had merely viewed from afar? And here was she, committing the same crime, coming here with her camera and her questions, using the lives (and deaths) of these people as fodder for party conversation. She didn't blame Anne-Marie for turning her back; had she deserved better?

Helen is really in love with that painting:

One call demanded to be made before she returned to the car however: she wanted to look a final time at the painted head. Not as an anthropologist among an alien tribe, but as a confessed ghost train rider: for the thrill of it.

And yet, as much as she loves the thrill of looking at disturbing art, she draws the line at gawking at real death:

She turned her back on the woman and jostled her way out of the crowd. There would be nothing to see, she knew, and even if there had been she had no desire to look. These people—still emerging from their homes as the story spread—were exhibiting an appetite she was disgusted by. She was not one of them; would never be one of them. She wanted to slap every eager face into sense; wanted to say: "It's pain and grief you're going to spy on. Why? Why?" But she had no courage left. Revulsion had drained her of all but the energy to wander away, leaving the crowd to its sport.

Haunted!

"Forget the dog," Trevor said. "And the child. There's nothing you can do about it. You were just passing through."

His words only echoed her own thoughts of earlier in the day, but somehow, for reasons that she could find no words to convey, that conviction had decayed in the last hours. She was not just passing through. Nobody ever just passed through; experience always left its mark. Sometimes it merely scratched; on occasion it took off limbs. She did not know the extent of her present wounding, but she knew it was more profound than she yet understood, and it made her afraid.

Haunted so much that the neighbourhood feels like home now:

Nor was it simply the presence of so many people that reassured her; she was, she conceded to herself, happy to be back here in Spector Street. The quadrangles, with their stunted saplings and their gray grass, were more real to her than the carpeted corridors she was used to walking; the anonymous faces on the balconies and streets meant more than her colleagues at the university. In a word, she felt home.

Helen feels transformed already. And straight up goes on a date with that painted face...

She reached the maisonette and was surprised to find the door open again, as it had been the first time she'd come here. The sight of the interior made her light-headed. How often in the past several days had she imagined standing here, gazing into that darkness. There was no sound from inside. The dog had surely run off—either that, or died. There could be no harm, could there, in stepping into the place one final time, just to look at the face on the wall, and its attendant slogan?

"Sweets to the sweet." She had never looked up the origins of that phrase. No matter, she thought. Whatever it had stood for once, it was transformed here, as everything was; herself included. She stood in the front room for a few moments, to allow herself time to savor the confrontation ahead. Far away behind her the children were screeching like mad birds.

She stepped over a clutter of furniture and toward the short corridor that joined living room to bedroom, still delaying the moment. Her heart was quick in her: a smile played on her lips.

And there! At last! The portrait loomed, compelling as ever. She stepped back in the murky room to admire it more fully and her heel caught on the mattress that still lay in the corner.

I like how the hypnosis is explained as a sleepiness of a warm summer afternoon among flowers and bees.

She turned, and the light in the bedroom diminished as a figure stepped into the gullet between her and the outside world. Silhouetted against the light, she could scarcely see the man in the doorway, but she smelled him. He smelled like cotton candy, and the buzzing was with him or in him.

"I just came to look," she said, "... at the picture."

The buzzing went on—the sound of a sleepy afternoon, far from here. The man in the doorway did not move.

The emphasis on the overwhelming sweetness is very different from the movie.

The buzzing had quieted a little, and in the hush the man in the doorway spoke. His unaccented voice was almost as sweet as his scent.

"No need to leave yet," he breathed.

"I'm due ... due ..."

Though she couldn't see his eyes, she felt them on her, and they made her feel drowsy, like that summer that sang in her head.

"I came for you," he said.

She repeated the four words in her head. I came for you. If they were meant as a threat, they certainly weren't spoken as one.

I am delighted to learn that Book Candyman looks like a clown. Very funny how his entire aesthetic was flipped 180 degrees to Tall Dark and Handsome for the movie. The original certainly makes the imagery more consistent!

"I came for you," he murmured so softly that seduction might have been in the air. And so saying, he moved through the passageway and into the light.

She knew him, without doubt. She had known him all along, in that place kept for terrors. It was the man on the wall. His portrait painter had not been a fantasist: the picture that howled over her was matched in each extraordinary particular by the man she now set eyes upon. He was bright to the point of gaudiness: his flesh a waxy yellow, his thin lips pale blue, his wild eyes glittering as if their irises were set with rubies. His jacket was a patchwork, his trousers the same. He looked, she thought, almost ridiculous, with his blood-stained motley, and the hint of rouge on his jaundiced cheeks. But people were facile. They needed these shows and shams to keep their interest. Miracles; murders; demons driven out and stones rolled from tombs. The cheap glamour did not taint the sense beneath. It was only, in the natural history of the mind, the bright feathers that drew the species to mate with its secret self.

And she was almost enchanted. By his voice, by his colors, by the buzz from his body. She fought to resist the rapture, though. There was a monster here, beneath this fetching display; its nest of razors was at her feet, still drenched in blood. Would it hesitate to slit her own throat if it once laid hands on her?

Book Helen seems to find Candyman’s offer more appealing than her movie counterpart:

"If you would learn," the fiend said, "just a little from me ... you would not beg to live." His voice had dropped to a whisper. "I am rumor," he sang in her ear. "It's a blessed condition, believe me. To live in people's dreams; to be whispered at street corners, but not have to be. Do you understand?"

Her weary body understood. Her nerves, tired of jangling, understood. The sweetness he offered was life without living: was to be dead, but remembered everywhere; immortal in gossip and graffiti.

This dialogue makes much more sense as a single scene than it did as scattered dialogue in the film. I don’t think in the film he ever insist he won’t force death on her, which is fair, because he sure does absolutely everything to push her to the brink!

"I won't force it upon you," he replied, the perfect gentleman. "I won't oblige you to die. But think; think. If I kill you here—if I unhook you"—he traced the path of the promised wound with his hook; it ran from groin to neck—"think how they would mark this place with their talk ... point it out as they passed by and say, 'She died there, the woman with the green eyes.' Your death would be a parable to frighten children with. Lovers would use it as an excuse to cling closer together."

She had been right: this was a seduction.

"Was fame ever so easy?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I'd prefer to be forgotten," she replied, "than be remembered like that."

He made a tiny shrug. "What do the good know?" he said. "Except what the bad teach them by their excesses?" He raised his hooked hand. "I said I would not oblige you to die and I'm true to my word. Allow me, though, a kiss at least...."

Oh, so Helen fainted during the kiss on purpose:

The hook was at her neck. If she so much as moved it would wound her. She was trapped, as in her childhood nightmares, with every chance of escape stymied. When sleep had brought her to such hopelessness—the demons on every side, waiting to tear her limb from limb—one trick remained. To let go; to give up all ambition to life, and leave her body to the dark. Now, as the Candyman's face pressed to hers, and the sound of bees blotted out even her own breath, she played that hidden hand. And, as surely as in dreams, the room and the fiend were painted out and gone.

The residents actively conspired against Helen. Which is interesting, because I thought the point of faith in Candyman was that nobody knew the truth for sure. I guess they acted on their own volition, never interacting with him directly?

They were crazy, these people. They had known all along what her presence in Butts' Court had summoned, and they had protected him—this honeyed psychopath; given him a bed and an offering of bonbons, hidden him away from plying eyes, and kept their silence when he brought blood to their doorsteps. Even Anne-Marie, dry-eyed in the hallway of her house, knowing that her child was dead a few yards away. [...]

She could just make out Anne-Marie's figure, moving to the edge of the piled timbers and furniture, and ducking to climb into its heart. This was how they planned to remove the evidence. To bury the child was not certain enough; but to cremate it, and pulverize the bones—who would ever know? [...]

She fought to be free of him, to cry out for them not to light the bonfire, but he held her lovingly close. The light grew: warmth came with it; and through the kindling and the first flames she could see figures approaching the pyre out of the darkness of Butts' Court. They had been there all along: waiting, the lights turned out in their homes, and broken all along the corridors. Their final conspiracy.

The bonfire caught with a will, but by some trick of its construction the flames did not invade her hiding place quickly; nor did the smoke creep through the furniture to choke her. She was able to watch how the children's faces gleamed; how the parents called them from going too close, and how they disobeyed; how the old women, their blood thin, warmed their hands and smiled into the flames. Presently the roar and the crackle became deafening, and the Candyman let her scream herself hoarse in the certain knowledge that nobody could hear her, and even if they had, would not have moved to claim her from the fire.

Apparently, the pile of sweets and razors was a summoning ritual. Also, even though Helen doesn’t outright win as in the movie, she is effectively seduced to accept her fate:

Soon the heat crept down Helen's throat and scorched her pleas away. She sank back, exhausted, into the Candyman's arms, resigned to his triumph. In moments they would be on their way, as he had promised, and there was no help for it.

Perhaps they would remember her, as he had said they might, finding her cracked skull in tomorrow's ashes. Perhaps she might become, in time, a story with which to frighten children. She had lied, saying she preferred death to such questionable fame. She did not. As to her seducer, he laughed as the conflagration sniffed them out. There was no permanence for him in this night's death. His deeds were on a hundred walls and ten thousand lips, and should he be doubted again his congregation could summon him with sweetness. He had reason to laugh.

I’m glad Book Helen still feels the power over Trevor.

So, as the flames crept upon them, did she, as through the fire she caught sight of a familiar face moving between the onlookers. It was Trevor. He had forsaken his meal at Apollinaire's and come looking for her.

She watched him questioning this fire watcher and that, but they shook their heads, all the while staring at the pyre with smiles buried in their eyes. Poor dupe, she thought, following his antics. She willed him to look past the flames in the hope that he might see her burning. Not so that he could save her from death—she was long past hope of that—but because she pitied him in his bewilderment and wanted to give him, though he would not have thanked her for it, something to be haunted by. That, and a story to tell.

Alright, here’s my takeaway:

I liked the short story more than I expected! Didn’t think I’d enjoy a version of this story without the racial tension or the victorious ending, which were central to the movie experience. But even the short story’s more tragic ending doesn’t read entirely like a defeat. Which is helped by Candyman’s pursuit of Helen being much less horrifying and predatory than in the movie. The first meeting, the kiss, the bonfire are all a single sequence, unlike the movie, where he repeatedly hypnotizes her, terrorizes her, and systematically and purposefully destroys her life. This makes the dialogue between them flow better, too. So overall, I’d say I liked both the original and the screen adaptation, and neither of them really diminished my appreciation of the other, which for me is pretty significant praise.

#candyman #the forbidden #blah blah blah

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tarotdeckshuffle · 5 years

Note

Aaawww!! That Gladio pregnancy bit was painfully sweet... Could I request one for Ravus?

I’ve sort of been jumping around with requests, lately, doing whatever I have ideas and brain power for. Writing Ravus is my favorite.

This fic took on a life of it’s own! And I really enjoyed it, lol. Even if Ravus isn’t your fav, I hope you’ll give this a read.

As a note, my working titles for these fics are my favorites! The Prompto one was called Prego Prompto and Gladio’s was called Daddy Gladdy XD I don’t have a cute name for the Noctis one, though.

Taglist: @idiotflowerex, @laststory1013, @sayaoqueen, @jophinabean

If you like what you read, please consider supporting me on Patreon or buying me a Ko-fi!

Lavender Tea

Ravus’s touch may be fleeting, but his love is loyal.

You only see your love when he takes his leave from Niflheim and comes home.

Which is more often now that he gets to see you each time.

He may not get to spoil you the way he believes you deserve, but he will see to your every need.

You live in Fenestala Manor.

Cared for by graceful servants.

You honestly weren’t sure about moving in because…well, you’re not royalty.

But he insisted.

Saying that “Neither am I.”

This man has is always planning something, but he never lets you know what it is.

He’s so secretive.

It breaks your heart.

There’s a whisper on the wind, though.

That the Empire is going to try to make peace with Lucis.

Ravus returned home after being away for weeks.

It’s an unexpected visit.

You met him at the doors to the Manor,

Having not been ready when he reached the gates.

He greeted you with a small but warm smile and embraces you.

No, better, he holds you, pressing you tightly to his chest.

But the moment is brief; something was on his mind.

He swept past you, intent on making it to his office.

A whisper of his name trails from you lips after him.

A kind old voice spoke into your ear.

“You really should tell him.”

It was Maria.

She was a constant in the Manor,

Having served Sylva.

She had an old beauty to her, like a timeless antique.

And she was the only person who knew.

She may be old, but she was still sharp as a knife.

You had been sick one day after high tea,

And had been silently panicking over a missed period.

You thought yourself quite discreet.

But the old woman came to your bedroom with lavender tea one night,

And stories of Queen Sylva’s pregnancy with Ravus.

An knowing smile gracing her lips.

“It seems this manor shall see another child, yet.”

You begged the woman to keep your secret.

“My dearest, this is something to celebrate! You should be telling the world!”

But you protested that Ravus had far too much to worry about, with a possible peace with Lucis. And, that if Luna found out, Ravus would find out.

You would keep it all a secret until after the treaty was signed…if you could.

You weren’t really sure what you would do, but for now, you wouldn’t tell Ravus.

Ravus called Luna into his office for a “discussion.”

She emerged, later, coming straight to your door.

She sat at a chair, on the edge of the seat.

After keeping you in suspense as to what was so urgent, she spoke.

“It appears…that I’m getting married!” She beamed up at you.

You were shocked.

She explained that part of the peace treaty would include her and Noctis’s wedding.

But she was not upset at the arrangement.

You joked how she’d be getting married before you.

To which she offered to reprimand her brother.

The rest of the afternoon was filled with gossip and chatter with your best friend and possible sister in law.

Ravus had been suspiciously silent with you.

He had kept to himself, in his office.

Slamming the door each time.

Barely joining you at night.

When he laid down to sleep, he seemed off in another world of thoughts.

He was there, but still miles away from you.

Ravus had returned to Tenebrae to plan in seclusion.

He knew the Empire’s plans to overtake Lucis with a false peace treaty,

But his sister was involved.

And he was sure that if anyone thought he could endanger the plan,

You’d be targeted to reign him in.

The fate of Eos was at stake,

And his family was being used as the pawns.

He had to try to save both of you.

Even if it meant his life.

He wouldn’t let Lucis or the Empire take you from him.

But you had been distant from him, upon his return.

He couldn’t pretend he had been much better, though.

He had expected you to knock at his office door more often,

Or invite him to tea, or…anything.

But you had kept your peace.

When he turned in at night,

You were already in bed.

Should he kiss you? Should he say anything? Were you asleep? Were you angry?

He’d lay quietly beside you,

So close to the warmth of his life,

But you left him in winter.

He’d lay awake, watching you sleep.

Your beautiful face at peace.

Ravus had thought the silence would make focusing easier,

Instead, he tied himself in knots worrying about you.

Luna prepared tea for everyone, one day.

Demanding that Ravus leave his work to relax for one hour while he was on leave.

And personally fetching you when you claimed to be busy.

High tea could still be a tricky time for you.

You all sat at a cozy table in the sitting room.

Lemon flavored sweets and tea being served.

The smell was making your stomach turn.

Lemon, that was a “no” now.

To Ravus, it looked like you were scowling, uncomfortable at the scene.

Was something wrong? Did you not want to be here…with him?

He was so scared of your answer.

Maria came to your rescue, though.

“Lavender tea, anyone?”

She rushed into the sitting room like a sudden gust.

A new teapot in hand.

“YES!” you said, without realizing it.

She was already upon you, though, having made it just for you.

“When did a fondness for lavender tea, arise?” Ravus asked you, raising one white eyebrow.

Before you could respond, Maria jumped in.

“A woman’s tastes can change quite suddenly.” She winked.

You were worrying Maria insinuated why your tastes had changed.

Ravus was worried as to what your tastes had changed to.

That night, your beloved decided to retire early.

Everything felt so bleak, he needed to feel your touch.

He needed you.

But he also needed answers.

His mind was running away with reasons as to why you had been so distant.

Worrying that the smile Luna gave to you meant more than it should.

He knew it was his fault.

He had been away far too long.

Given you far too little attention.

But he loved you with every fiber of his being.

And he needed you to know that.

He had gotten a bottle of champagne on his way past the kitchen.

It was a halfhearted idea, but one he hoped would help.

As he strode past one of the many sitting rooms,

He noticed the door was open.

A fire was glowing inside.

On on old rocking chair sat Maria.

She was working two needles and forming a blanket.

He was past the door before he comprehended the scene,

Stepping backwards to make sure.

“What are you doing?” He asked the old woman.

She smiled up from the blanket she was making.

“Knitting. This manor can be very cold on small bodies.” She smiled kindly at him.

Ravus chalked it up to the hobbies of cold old women as he strode away.

His feet carried him to your door, but his hands hesitated.

Did you even want to see him?

But he was already here and he so desperately wanted to see you.

He knocked at the door, softer than he expected.

“Come in,” your soft voice called.

It was to your surprise that Ravus, and not Maria, entered.

“Oh! You’re…here,” you said, looking up at his handsome face.

“Yes, I am,” he answered, taking a seat in the armchair opposite yours.

Idle chatter filled the space between you.

You felt like you were new to this arrangement, rather than having known each other for ages.

Ravus popped the cork of the champagne.

You smiled. “Is this to celebrate the peace treaty?”

You hadn’t heard from him regarding the document.

His eyes grew somber. “No.”

“Then…what is it for?”

“To…us.” He poured the champagne, offering a full glass to you.

You smiled but held up your hands.

“I shouldn’t.”

Ravus sighed, looking down at the rejected glass in his hand.

“If none of this is to your…taste, anymore, do tell me.”

“To my taste,” You asked, surprised.

Ravus’s grip tightened on the champagne flute.

You have to be being obtuse, he thought.

“You and my sister have become quite close…”

“Yes, your sister has filled in during your…silence.”

“MY silence?” Is that what you called it? “And what of yours?”

“Mine?!”

What was this argument about? What was it becoming?!

But arguing with this oblivious man made your blood boil.

“And what are you accusing me of? Do you even know? No, you don’t! Because you’re not here to know ANYTHING of what I go through!”

What was Ravus on about?! He was accusing you of things but you had no idea what you had done! You had merely attempted to stay out of his way.

He wasn’t here when you found out, when you cried yourself to sleep, when you wondered if he would still love you if you had a child.

Yes, you had kept a, rather large, secret from him. But it was for his own good! He couldn’t understand the burden you shouldered for his sake.

Ravus wondered why you were being so cryptic with him. Why were you avoiding him. You couldn’t know the sacrifices he was willing to make for you, the things he wanted for you. But did you even want him!

By the six, just tell him!

“If you would prefer my sister’s presence over mine, just tell me!”

Ravus slammed the glass down hard enough that a crack snuck up through the crystal, starting at the bottom.

“Of course I want you here,” you shouted before you even realized it.

He simply stared at you.

It was a look filled with sadness, longing, and confusion.

Luna’s presence?

What did he mean…

Oh…wait…no, he couldn’t think that.

Did Ravus think…that you fancied Luna?!

The realization rippled over your face.

And you burst into laughter.

Now he was even more confused.

His mouth agape, he just stared at your beautiful laughter.

You stood, taking his confused face into your hands and kissing him.

He kissed you back, deeply, wrapping his arms around you.

Parting, you stared into those dual eyes.

“Darling, I was trying to spare you from the stress, but…you’re going to be a father.”

His eyes shot up.

“I’m…what?”

“I’m pregnant, love. That’s why I have been keeping my distance from you, I didn’t want to surprise you with this responsibility in addition to all you have to do for Eos.”

The great warrior sunk back into the armchair.

He didn’t speak. His face was frozen in shock.

The whole world muffled around his ears.

A…father.

Ravus was going to be a father!

Part of him was elated at the news! But much of him was…utterly terrified.

He barely knew his own father. Much less how to be one.

And if the Empire found out…

But…what of things to come? How could he protect you both?

“Love?” You whispered into the silence.

Ravus was lost, focusing on the ghosts of the future.

He sat up, taking the cracked glass and draining it.

“We must leave Tenebrae,” he said calmly upon finishing.

You thought the news would either be met by joy or anxiety…but this answer?

“Why?”

“To protect you and the baby,” he said, focusing on your eyes.

“Protect us? From what?” Utter confusion in your voice.

He took your hand and pulled you onto his lap, taking in the smell of your hair.

“The peace treaty…it is a rouse. Chaos will soon erupt.”

“But Luna!” You tried to pull from his arms.

He held you.

“I know. I’m taking…steps…to try to end this conflict before it begins. But if I should fail…I fear for your safety.”

“Is that what you have been brooding over?”

“If I have been brooding, then yes, it has been over that.”

“And what of your safety, my love?”

“Mine?” He pulled away, just enough to look into your eyes.

“Yes, the baby will need a father.”

A smile spread across his lips.

It was small, but it radiated love. He was truly excited and happy about the news.

“Then plans will change so that they may have one.” His lips met yours, warm and passionate, slowly, holding you close.

“But truly, there will be little need of me, for they will have one of the finest mothers time has ever seen.” He smiled against your lips.

The compliment was rare and sweet.

“Then I will need you, as I always have,” you replied.

Epilogue:

Neither of you told Luna of the plans. She would be at too great a risk knowing. You’re in jeopardy knowing.

The secrets are less than ideal, though.

But you tell her of the baby.

She is overjoyed!

And is planning your wedding!

And a nursery.

But soon, the plans must go into action.

As Ravus leaves, possibly for the last time, he turned to you,

“I’d die for you. You are my heart.”

You smile, because you know it to be his truth.

“Then live for both of us.”

Your words weigh on him, making plans change.

Ravus does return to you, albeit…changed.

He is hesitant of his magitech arm.

Refusing to touch you with it, at first.

But you show him that it doesn’t bother you.

That it doesn’t change who he is.

You flee Tenebrae as Altissa falls.

A beautiful knitted blanket wrapped around your shoulders.

When the baby is born, it is to darkness.

But Ravus is there.

He doesn’t want to hold the baby with his magitech arm.

He is so terrified that he’ll hurt them.

But he is truly an amazing and understanding father.

Taking utter joy in every moment he spends with you.

You and your family have saved the prince of Tenebrae.

#ffxv #final fantasy #final fantasy xv #ravus nox fleuret #ravus x reader #reader x ravus #pregnancy #taro writes #comedy of errors #fanfiction

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blankdblank · 5 years

Text

Taken With You

…You find yourself a hostage with none other than RA ... Hope you enjoy it :D

Note – I chose the land they were lost in out of random. Please forgive my errors, if there are any, as far as locations for trekking across Switzerland. Tried to avoid specific directions or markers between locations for that reason. I am not to be trusted with maps in real life, but I do try to improve a bit for my rambles.

…

All –

@himoverflowers, @theincaprincess, @aspiringtranslator, @sweeticedtea, @ggbbhehe4455, @thegreyberet, @patanghill17, @jesgisborne, @curvestrology, @alishlieb, @jogregor, @armitageadoration, @fizzyxcustard, @here2have-fun, @lilith15000, @marvels-ghost, @catthefearless, @imjusthereforthereads, @c-s-stars

X all Rich. A - @abiwim, @deepestfirefun, @thestorybookmistress

…

“What the fuck?” Under his breath Richard mumbled as he peered up from the cold wooden floor he was sprawled painfully across. His body aching from the clear manhandling of him being brought out to this seemingly abandoned cabin out in the middle of who the fuck knows where. Inside a metal cage with nothing past a simple open crevice in the wall with an outhouse toilet set up inside and a sad excuse for a mattress across the floor coated in a rust stained tarp.

A groggy grumble drew his eyes to the formerly unnoticed cage across from his. Inside, a mess of curls was polled over the bloody face of a young woman in split jeans and a faded near backless Rolling Stones tank top over a lime green bra matching her tall socks in her badly scuffed boots. Smacking her lips she raised her head adjusting her chained arms across her badly bruised back speaking in a thickly accented language he couldn’t place, “Why the fuck do I taste pumpkin?”

Shuddering hastily she planted her forehead on the mattress and groaned sliding her knees up to her chest, using the taught chain holding her arms up to keep her steady until she was able to straighten up. Quietly he wondered why her chains dangling from a hatch in the ceiling were tighter than the one draped across his back and thigh granting him plenty of slack to move around. Again she mumbled, “What sort of cheap sedative tastes like pumpkin? Cheap bastards.”

In a firm tug she grumbled at the tight chains and sighed clearly in English, “Not again.” Planting a foot on the ground she jumped up somehow raising her leg up over her head to coil around the chain that fell slack dropping her heavily on her back with an irritated groan at the fall and the heavy chain coiling down onto her chest. In a roll onto her side her eyes fell on him in his planting of his shoulder to raise onto his knees.

A weak chuckle left her and she flashed him a surprisingly wide and irritatingly dazzling grin while his eyes shifted to her stunning emerald green eyes shining out under her dark knotted curls she tilted her head to swing out of her face. “I suppose it’d be a bit much to say fancy meeting you here, Mr Armitage.”

Hastily he wet his lips feeling his brows furrow in both confusion at her eased behavior and his irritation at being in this situation now of all times. “Bit, ya.” Though the single pleasing glimmer was her correct pronunciation of his name, “Remember the little things” he chanted in his mind, a lesson from his mother he hoped could help him through this to get back to her again hopefully before it was too late. Knowing fully she didn’t need the stress of this either. “You know where we are?”

She shook her head, “Though I have a few ideas. It’d be easier outside.” At that he growled unintentionally in a heavy exhale making her grin, “Keeping you from something?”

With more bite then he intended he replied, “As a matter of fact yes! Now is the absolute worst time for this! I have to get back!”

She nodded and replied without the playful glint in her eyes or grin, “They show up once a day. Looks near to sunset, shouldn’t be long yet.”

He sighed then groaned shifting to sit along the wall to stare at the door, anywhere but at her really, growling out, “I don’t care whose neck I have to break I am getting out of this cage.”

Though his eyes snapped back to her at her laying back to prop her feet up against the wall staring up put the sunroof there, “That’s the spirit.” Making his eyes narrow as he watched her smack her lips then kick a wobbly board along the wall lowering a funnel that let out a stream of water falling into her mouth until she kicked it again.

…

Lying on the mattress Richard again glanced at his fellow captive feeling an irritating sting at the silence since their first conversation. Barely you had moved at all since your drink and each time he stole a glance your way he could see you lying there blinking up at the sunroof until the first flecks of sunlight. A shift of his head brought the distant wall into his view, two duffel bags, one of his and presumably yours was the other. Inside his sat the novel he could be reading through to rehearse for his audio book coming up, inside which sat the letter from his mother, now painfully bedridden in the aftermath of her first chemo session.

“She doesn’t need this. Not now.” He kept berating himself mentally trying to understand what he had done wrong. Full security until he got to that taxi on the way to the airport. Each moment he scrutinized wondering just what could have happened and slowly he began to remember the odd pumpkin taste in his mouth when he woke up. A taste you had attributed to a sedative. Clearly he had been drugged and somehow brought here. Not an easy task, for being pretty docile he had some heft to him and a far from comfortable body enabling stealthy transport. Somewhere there was footage of his slumped body being put on a plane or shoved into a vehicle for transport. Someone was looking for him.

The idling of an engine that shut off broke his thoughts and he watched as you rolled over and sat up looking over at the door. Through that a surprisingly scrawny looking man with sun stained skin coated in leathery wrinkles and freckles surrounding grey dull eyes walked in leaving his cowboy hat on the table he passed. His boots hitting the ground heavily and into the cages he tossed two packs of what appeared to be army rations and made to leave only to halt at your head nod.

With furrowed brows Richard watched the man storm over to kick the cage screaming in a foreign language, ‘Greek maybe?’ He asked himself before he heard your broken attempt to say something in the same tongue that stilled his rage. A shrug from you made their captor sigh and reach into his pocket for his pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Then followed by his keys he slicked across his palm finding the right one as you stood up triggering the chain to tighten in a straight recoil jerking your bound arms upwards earning a grimace from you missed by the man.

A click opened the cage and Richard swallowed dryly quietly inching up onto his knees keeping hold of his chain to keep it slack ready to help if possible. Eyeing you and your presumed innocent self the man passed through the door and took three steps to you. A cigarette was thumped out of the pack that he raised to your lips to claim before he lit it. A turn of his body signaled your jump up to grab the chain behind you while calling out something making him turn right into your kick to his face throwing him heavily into the cage on your left unconscious. The weight of your body slackening the chain again allowed you to loop your feet through your arms to raise the key hole to the cigarette.

The heat of the lit end releasing the cuffs and granting you the chance to rush over and drag the man back to the middle of your cage to cuff him in your place. Hastily you rummaged through his pockets shoving his wallet, cigarettes and lighter into yours, then you found and grabbed the keys off the floor to free Richard.

With lips parted he raised a brow blurting out, “You just kicked him in the face.”

With a shrug you unlock his cage and walk inside, lowering the cigarette between your fingers. Carefully helping him to his feet after unlocking his cuffs with the cigarette you then put out on the heel of your shoes. “He kicked me first.”

Walking out the cage after you Richard halted at your move to drag out your bags and to rummage through the shelving system there pausing at a fire extinguisher you passed to him, “This’ll work.”

Peering down at it he asked, “What is this for?”

You glanced up at him, “To hit the other guy.”

His lips parted to ask who the other guy was before he heard a shout through the closed door in a thicker accented muddled attempt at the first mans language. With a gentle nudge you guided Richard behind the door while you pulled the pin on the extinguisher saying, “Deep breathe, spray him then hit him in the face.” Without question as you moved behind him.

Richards skin coated in hair raising bumps at the blood curt king scream you let out between loud stomps on the floor signaling Bad Guy Number two into the cabin. Within moments a breathe was drawn and as the door was thrown open Bad Guy number two was coated in the white powder stunning him into a coughing fit ending with the hard metal canister that slammed into his head sending him flying into the cage you had been locked in.

A grin spread across your face in your move to rummage through his pockets, collecting his wallet as well and his cigarettes and solid gold lighter. Curiously the panting actor watched you drag him into his former cell and lock him in as well before returning to rummaging through the shelves.

“What are you doing?”

“Stocking up. No telling how far to the next city.”

Richard glances through the door, “They brought a four wheeler.”

You nodded catching his eye while he struggled not to focus on the scratches on the top of your exposed cleavage, “Ya, been there, gps trackers can be linked to your phones. You’re free to it if you like though. You might get luckier than I did.”

With furrows brows he watched out double bag the bag of food and random items in a trash bag from a roll you shoved into your waterproof duffel you shouldered in your path out to the porch. Rapidly he moved to shoulder his, leaving the canister on the ground to hurry after you unwilling to face whatever this brought on alone. No matter who you were you seemed to know something about how to handle this situation. Something he should be useful in after studying about spies and soldiers for years to perfect his prior roles, but what you read on paper has little use when needed in times like this it seemed.

…

Hours, you had literally been silent for hours. A few words was all he had spoken to you and none of it kind or grateful. Just a few steps ahead of him he eyed your dark bruises visible between the slits in the back of your shirt and tears in your jeans across your thighs. Each black and purple reminder of how you had been taken only angered him more. Clearly he would have some bruises but for a woman of your size there was no reason for you to have been treated like that. All only making him wish he’d hit that second man harder and gone for a few gratifying albeit morally unsound kicks to the chained unconscious man who had kicked you before.

Deeper and deeper he sank into his foul mood until his eyes rose to the ridge you were clearly walking to as a clap of thunder sounded overhead inching him closer to your back. Wetting his lips he eyed you again and shifted to your side on the wider path to ask, “We’re going towards the ridge?”

You nodded, “Yup. Should be able to figure out where we are from there.”

Wetting his lips he stated, “I shouldn’t have snapped at you earlier.”

A weak chuckle left you and you hopped over a high laying root and fallen log he easily stepped over, “You were taken, totally acceptable response to not be into my try to lighten the mood. Big premier?”

You glanced up at him and he furrowed his brows for a moment, “No, I um, I was at a television appearance out in Germany.” You nodded and lowered your hands for the start to the upward slop to the top of the ridge. “You?”

“Backpacking in Italy. No television appearance past wandering into the background of a news anchor the third day.”

Exhaling behind you he mumbled, “Italy?”

You shrugged, “Well, I’m personally hoping for Monaco.” He raised a brow and you chuckled weakly in your glance back at him, “Never been. Hear it’s breathtaking.”

He nodded, “It is.” Pausing for a moment then asking, “Where’d you go in Italy? Usual tourist stops in Venice?”

“Palermo actually. Not much for cannolis usually but they were nice.”

Weakly Richard chuckled and shifted the bag on his shoulder eyeing you in your lift up on the top of the ridge you walked closer to the edge and let out a breath mumbling, “Huh…”

Richard looked down at you, “Huh?” Then looked out to the snow capped mountains surrounding the tree coated smaller peak you seemed to be on, “Please tell me you have a clue where we are.”

With a nod you replied, “Jungfrau.” You glanced up at him adding, “Switzerland.”

Mumbling in another scan over the scenic view he asked, “Why the fuck…?”

You shrugged, “Logically, no reason for Switzerland. Though,” you sighed and started off again, “That way.”

Blinking at your back he paused for a moment then rushed a few steps to get to your side again, “You’re certain?”

Your head tilted, “Well, it’s either that or we’re in Japan, though I don’t believe that peak is on any Japanese maps.” You said pointing at a distant peak.

“You, you do this often?”

Glancing up at him you brushed your long curls from your face, “Backpack through Switzerland? Few times.”

“Backpack-,”

You shrugged, “Well what am I supposed to call it? Do I get taken hostage and have to escape through Switzerland often, obviously not. Who would, I mean you would have to have the worst luck ever for that to happen more than once.”

“I certainly wouldn’t call it backpacking. And you seem pretty at ease in all this.”

With a scoff and disingenuous chuckle you replied, “At ease? Who in the world is at ease in waking up chained in a cage.”

“You seemed to know what to do. In fact, you seemed to have the escape planned out, why stay then?”

You glanced back up at him after stating, “For one I always tend to have company a couple days out, so it pays off to linger a bit.”

A stunned expression flashed across his face, “So you have done this before. You’re in the service?” his voice picked up eagerly, “Like MI5? You’re a spy?”

Giggling again you shook your head, “Sorry to disappoint, but no.” His brows furrowed again, “Though the first time I did end up getting locked in with an MI5.”

“How often does this happen to you?”

“Um, not, often. Honestly this is the first out in the wilderness one. Usually it’s some panic room or some creepy guy’s basement after I ask too many questions about items for sale in the markets.”

“What job on earth would make people lock you up at all if not that then?”

“I’m a part time dog walker.”

“What? For spies?! How else would that put you in danger?”

“I travel a lot too. My Gramps was a museum curate. I also get asked to appraise inventories from time to time.”

He peered at you again, “That makes no sense unless you’re like some Indiana Jones style treasure hunter.”

You chuckled again, “If that helps you settle with why I’m out here, I suppose I can’t convince you otherwise on word alone.”

Another few hours later and you stopped at the side of a stream and set down your bag, dipping your hands into the clear water you rinsed off your face with while Richard refilled his empty bottle beside you for a long drink. Wetting your lips you eyed a small cove surrounded by rocks and then turned to draw out a shirt you knotted shut in your path to the rocks.

Curiously Richard followed after you and watched you kneel over the rocks weaving a strip of your hair into a braid while you twisted the rest up under your bra strap. Hunched over the pool his eyes sank to the water spotting you dipping your hands under the water, leaving the shirt on the shore as your braid dipped into the water. Anxiously as he tore his eyes away from the scratches across your chest he picked up the shirt, now seeing its use at the large fish poking its head out at the shady pool and braid weaving on the surface at the cautious sway of your head.

A grin spread across his face seeing it swim straight through the rocks your hands were against to be gripped in your hands and raised up as it latched onto your braid. Shifting it closer to him you dropped it into the shirt making him chuckle then watch at your rising up to return to your bags where he watched you dig out a small portable stove, skillet and cooking set. Weakly he chuckled in disbelief, and you replied with a grin, “No matter where I go when I travel alone I always end up roughing it one way or another.”

Even lost out here he couldn’t help but feel a sense of ease wash over him. For all he wished to be home his mind flashed back to the ache he felt out in New Zealand when he was so busy filming to truly explore and experience being out in the scenic lands. For all the trouble he found himself in, a deep ache at the constant motion and drive to keep pushing, even through his troubles with his Mother’s health, seemed to shake loose. Time seemed to still and he knew that the time to reflect and pause to settle into all possible outcomes he had been avoiding was now forced upon him. It could take days to get back to a town and now he had nothing but this mystery of a woman to keep him from facing what lay ahead of him back home.

Through the lunch he helped to fix the packaged potatoes you had swiped from the cupboard as well you ate with the fish then sat letting your burner cool allowing you to rest some more until you could pack it up and keep going. Each step taking you farther from your jail and towards a next mess of woven trees, another dig in your pack later he raised a brow, “Don’t tell me, you have a tent in there too?”

An awkward grin spread on your face and you replied, “Don’t you knock my tent packing readiness.”

A playful smirk spread on his face and he rumbled back, “And just what do you do with the tent if you end up staying in a hotel?”

Playfully pointing a finger at him you replied, “Who says I don’t still pitch it anyways?” Making him roll his eyes and chuckle, “Stream to the East, we can call the bathroom to the South. Trees are a good circle with Owl nests above so not likely to have rodents.”

He glanced up not even noticing the curious owl hatchlings peeking out at you both in his move to aid you in pitching the ridiculously small tent for the pair of you making him laugh again, “Oh that is adorable.”

You poked him in the middle, “Hey, again, don’t knock the tent. You’ll just have to curl up those legs of yours in my adorable tent.” Making him chuckle and nod, “It’s gonna rain anyways and if I let you get sick or injured your whole army of fans will track me down and kill me.” He raised a brow and you sent him a playful glare in return, “Oh don’t even act like your fans don’t call themselves an army.”

“I wouldn’t let you get hurt for my stubbornness.”

With another giggle you guided him towards the stream you took turns scrubbing up a bit before changing and grabbing one of the fish that came out at night for a simple dinner. Another dig in your bag made him laugh out loud at the twin travel toothbrush pouches you pulled when he realized his toothbrush was missing, one of which out he gratefully accepted and stored in his own bag after when you both climbed into the simple tent that was zipped up behind you. An awkward giggle or two later and you settled on your back with legs propped up while he laid on his side curling his legs under yours under the thick wool blanket you had packed barely able to cover the both of you.

Tangled under Richard’s warm chest and arms you woke up with his head buried into your neck and hair holding you tight to his chest under the bundled blanket pulled around the both of you. Groggily however he rolled over onto his back at your wiggle free to sit up and climb out of the tent in the early morning light. A few minutes later he stirred eyeing the empty spot beside him his hand tapped stirring a low groan from him at the absence of the warm pillow he had been wrapped around. Out and on his feet he eyed your bag and turned to grab the shovel and toilet paper you had left aside for use in the night before. As your back was turned he crept rather awkwardly into the distant trees searching for some semblance of privacy.

Sure it was expected, you had mentioned a week out alone, though in a group of guys a stop by a tree or trot off alone could be taken as a joke, but even for the most normal of bodily responses he still felt nervous expressing it around females. Tried to avoid it whenever possible, even with former girlfriends he tried, as many do in new relationships do, to hold off the bodily responses to remaining fed and hydrated properly. Shaking his head he turned his focus back to his task at hand. You weren’t his girlfriend, he had no reason to think you would be so naïve on this subject, you had in fact prepared for it.

But then the feel of you in his arms crept back, his ever growing wish to remain in your sight as if for your protection. Knowing somehow you could help him through any troubles ahead. The great lummox he was, following you around helplessly, such a sucker for a good cuddle. The more he thought the worse it got, mental jabs at himself for imagining this was more than it was. You hadn’t been waiting for him, but for anyone, in fact, anyone at all. Never a mention of being a fan or having a soft spot for him in return past the knowledge on how to correctly speak his name.

Buckled up and on his way back the realization hit him like a tone of bricks. Name. He’d been with you two nights and he still hadn’t asked you your name. “What a downright fucking arse I must seem like to her!” He growled at himself. “Alright, ask her name, and then learn more about her. We’ve got a week at least.”

A week for what he had no clue, but he was going to get to know you and forced the thoughts on what would happen between you after out of his mind. You had to get back, he had to get back but to think of how far your home would be from his he didn’t want to hear of it. He couldn’t possibly lose you too, not now.

At your side again to help you pack up the tent again while the next bout of food rations cooked slowly on your burner he wet his lips and cleared his throat. “Um, you must think I’m an unbearable ass.”

Locking your eyes on his your brows furrowed, “What on earth would make you think that. To be honest you’re my top escape buddies.”

Unable to help it he chortled and shook his head to keep from rolling his eyes, “I doubt that. I haven’t even asked your name.”

You giggled again patting your hand on his forearm flinching his eyes from that to your eyes again with an oddly hopeful glint in his eyes, “The MI5 I got stuck with he ranted endlessly on my heading ‘in the wrong direction’ out a few days out in the middle of the desert near Cairo. He caused such a huge stir I still can’t go back there. Stubborn ass.”

Richard chuckled again, “Wow. Were, you at least friends after?”

“Um, yes and no. We emailed, and a couple years later he comes back from this long trip out in who knows where and he asks me to dinner the next night.”

With a sting in his chest he sat back on his knees, “Ah, you dated then?”

Your brows furrowed through a curious smirk shaking your head, “No. He never showed and three months later I get an apology in my voicemail and he says we shouldn’t date.” You shrugged, “Irritatingly charming, that’s how he described me. To my face. He’s the one that nagged me into going to dinner then all that for just a, pfft,” you shrugged again and caught his eye again, “It’s Jaqiearae, by the way. Or simpler, Jaqi Pear.”

“It’s very pretty.”

You giggled again and turned back to the food, “Thank you. Though you shouldn’t feel bad. People tend to forget it soon enough anyways.”

“I doubt that.”

You looked up at him saying, “I was a triplet, even my parents forgot how to spell my name when I had to sign up for schools.”

“Were, a triplet?”

Wetting your lips you replied as your eyes fell to the cooking meal, “My brothers, back about 9, in little league with our cousins. Our uncle had been drinking and got into a car accident. It, um, ya, dad sort of stopped talking to me after that.”

His mouth fell open and he asked abruptly, “Your Mum?”

“Couldn’t look at me without crying. Though she got better when she got pregnant again. Then she swung badly back into anxiety and depression after. Dad decided we would road trip and camp often as we could.”

“Did that help?”

You let out a heart sinking wry chuckle, “I just turned 14, and we went to Yellowstone. 11 kids in all counting me, cramped rv,” you shrugged, “I just went to fetch a bag one of my younger sisters had dropped on the trail and I came back and they were gone.” Angrily his brows furrowed, “Managed to make it to an aunt’s house not too far away, she called them to let them know I was safe and they said I wasn’t missing I was weeding in the back as I’d been told. She had to get back to nursing school and Great Gramps called out of the blue and he came to pick me up. Never met him before, family fall out, and um, him and his son, Gramps, who home schooled me after that, took me around the globe with them.”

“I hope they set your parents straight.”

You chuckled weakly, “Well, Great Gramps left them a dollar each in the will and left the rest to me and Gramps, past a few bits for my aunt and other uncle. Ended up that my parents had to find out they were now my tenants and my siblings were irritated to find out I wouldn’t pay for their schooling as they’d hoped. So, far from fairytale family.”

Thankfully the food was done and you could focus on that until you cleaned up and got on your feet to keep on going to the distant somewhere.

A few hours passed and it wasn’t until your next break was reached when Richard had reached his emotional limit as your story had stirred up his decades with his Mother, such a loving family, so supportive compared to your painfully unfeeling parents and hoard of siblings possibly only dreaming of having a family like his. Right as he sat down your eyes landed on him your lips parted seeing a tear break free over his cheek drawing you closer to his side, “Richard..?”

Barely above a whisper he replied, “My Mum has cancer.” Your lips parted and your hand smoothed across his back gently while he poured out the whole discovery up to the terrible first bout of chemo she’d just finished.

Stroking his back again you said, “Well, I, um, we could try my phone when we stop for the night. We should be high and close enough to the towers to get a signal hopefully to let them know you’re safe.” Again you rubbed his back and he sniffled and wiped his cheeks, “We’re gonna get you home to her.”

He nodded again and looked to you, “We haven’t, shared-,”

You shook your head, “Don’t you worry about it. By my reasoning I would normally take waking up in cages and chains as a built in, what are they called, n-, the duct tape contracts.”

He chuckled weakly, “Duct tape contract?”

You tapped your fingers to your lips and mimed locking a key, “The silencing contracts.”

He nodded and chuckled again and you wiped his next stray tear away, “Non disclosure contracts.”

“Sure, if you say so.” You chuckled as he did again giving you another of his hopeful smiles, “You’re my escape buddy, the only thing I’ll share with the press was we had a lovely trek through the Swiss Alps, build up their tourists possibly. Compliment them, I read somewhere, you like to be a slob a bit, but no worries there I’ll tell them you smell like roses or, pine trees or, that bear bottle of old spice body wash if you like.”

He chuckled again, “At home alone, sometimes. I will try not to offend you too terribly with that.”

You shook you head and giggled again, “Oh I highly doubt you could.”

Pt 2

#Richard Armitage x Reader OC

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linelpisffxiv · 5 years

Text

5.0 Spoilers

After he watches everything, the Exarch makes haste for Kholusia. The city is free of Vauthry’s influence, at least, the most direct. The fact he is the lightwarden, keeping the island under the eternal, everlasting light, is another story.

He grabs a few bits, refurbished pieces of old Allagan machina, and makes way, hoping that the repairs to the ladder are just long enough he can join Lin on her way up.

In the end, however, he arrives when the Ladder’s elevator has reached the top for the first time in years.

“So you hath made your way here, Exarch,” Urianger says. “Despite the fact you know your limitations.”

He nods his head. “I refuse to simply stand by when I can offer my own hand in this last fight. I need to be here in the end.”

He needs to be there to die, take the powers from Lin. After everything, he knows he needs to play a part in the end. Someone who takes it from her. If she can hold herself together long enough, then he will just be a cutpurse, playing to get close enough to steal from her.

If not, well, it still would be better for her if he breaks her heart. She said she’s letting herself heal, and at most it’s been a few months since she let her husband return to the seas. She shouldn’t be ready to love again. He needs to remind her of that.

Urianger nods his head. “On that, I must agree. This fight can use all the help it can get. Vauthry hath made the peak of the Mount climb into the air. I cannot say we have a plan to avert the oncoming Calamity should we not find a way.”

“Well, tis good I planned to test one such way when I saw what happened through my mirror.” He takes one of the bits out of his bag and shows it to Urianger.

When they reach the top, he sees Alphinaud pacing. He talks to himself about everything.

“What worries you, Alphinaud?” he asks.

Alphinaud stops and stands up straight. “Ah, Exarch. Lin and Alisaie have set off to surveil the area. See if there are any remnants of the connections to the mountain we can use. I feel such a thing is fruitless, however.”

“I shall meet up with them and bring them back, then. You seem nervous about it.”

He shakes his head. “I-- I’m not-- Not a maid fretting for her sweetheart!”

“Quite specific in the imagery,” Y’shtola says.

“Tis a most accurate description as well,” Urianger adds.

He can’t help but laugh as well. “I must know where you came up with such a lovely turn of phrase, but this isn’t the time for such an action. Urianger, if you would not mind escorting me.”

So he does. he helps the Exarch with preparing the bits as they travel together. In the end, it is not the path to take. The Sin Eaters show they are more than organized enough to take on airships.

And sadly, Lin and Alisaie share the same news of luck on the ground.

However, from some idle chatter, a plan comes to be. One that sounds quite ridiculous. From what he heard of Operation Archon in his youth, along with everything that led to him getting his birthright, fanciful plans are Lin’s specialty. Some became even stranger from the tales he read.

And once again, he plays a role in it by her side.Helping her escort a young lala-- dwarf to gather much needed ore. Every word from his mouth compliments them. He tries to pass it off as her doing most of the work

One of the many SIn Eaters they must face on their job stuns her and charges for an attack that would surely--

He uses his magic to channel any force directed unto her to him. The blow is fierce, but he manages it well enough. The next words out of the young dwarf’s mouth surprises him

“You two make a good team!”

He feels his cheeks heat up, but he tries to focus on what’s to come instead. “Ah--! A’lin is a team unto herself, I simply follow her lead.”

She smiles and gives him a wink and a quick press of her hands to her lips before she turns around and returns to the fight.

He’s suspected that her own heart has moved past her husband. That her trip to Norvrandt has altered her fate. She may have had only one year left after the Battle of Ghimlyt Dark, but there were no lovers mentioned. One account from a member of the Ironworks described her as someone who buried herself as a field commander. She never spoke to anyone she hadn’t need to. Never said a word more that a situation called for. And one from the Garlean side claimed she called herself the Weapon of Light in those final days.

And so the fact she’s smiled and laughed, that she flirts with him now. Well, it will be hard for the betrayal he need make for her sake, but pleases him that she can. He only hopes she finds someone different to point such affections towards after this is done.

When everything is done, he starts to relax in the shade of the small bar in the town called Amity. It works for a while, but the powers he used before, so far from the tower, take their toll. Reprieve from the sun isn’t what he needs. He needs to return, but there is only so much he can do. Timing is important to his plan. If things go wrong, he needs to take the powers before she turns. If things are fine, he still should take them quick and not rely on luck.

It’s the very day of his death, and he still feels like it is far away.

He steps out, and for the first time in years, he sleeps. There’s no rest to it, a mix of hopes for more, reminders of what he must do. The past.

When he wakes up, he finds he speaks in his sleep, as he says the same thing he promised once before.

“The future is where my destiny awaits.”

His eyes clear, and Lin is in front of him. Her mouth is open. He wonders if she remembers.

“Forgive me, I was lost in a dream,” he says. Perhaps it will deter her from the truth. Perhaps not. Either way, it is not the time for her to know.

“The others were looking for you,” she says. “I decided I wanted to be the one to find you.”

He nods his head. “I see. Well then, it may be the last moment we have together. Sit with me.”

Lin smiles as she does so. “Whatever you say Exarch. I suppose I have some time to breathe. We have a some time before the talos is ready.”

He looks over to her. His hand is uncomfortably close to his.

“Anything you want to talk about?”

A finger slips closer to his. He pulls his hand away. Quick, a thought to distract her. “When this is over, what do you plan to do, Lin? Return to the battlefield on the first?”

She shakes her head. “Norvrandt has been enlightening for me. I feel I am in no hurry to return, especially should time slow down again. If I return, my fears of becoming the Weapon of Light again are sure to find root. I’m not ready to feel that again.”

He remembers the time he saw her soul break. How it used those words. How others called her that against the Garleans. He not only would hopefully unwrite her death, but that last year of grief.

“It would be well-deserved, should you wish to gather your breath.” He smiles as he imagines what she wishes. “You might consider roaming Norvrandt not as her savior, but as a simple sightseer. Viewed through such eyes, I am certain she would seem quite different.“

Lin moves her hand again, but he doesn’t catch it soon enough. She places hers on his, lacing her fingers with his.

“But whatever it is you decide to do, I have every confidence that you will do well. For you have the strength to forge your own path.“

“I should hope so, Exarch. While I know I can say no, sometimes things become too great, like I’ve entwined myself too deep that I would destroy others should I not live up to their expectations. It is why I love the First. I may not always want to save the world, but the people here seem different on the Source.”

She leans in. The past day has brought the scent of earth and sweat to her, but when he was young, he assumes he must have smelled much the same.

He tries to pull away some. Keep his distance. If he let himself return her feelings, then he could never betray her. He clears his throat. “You will leave countless lives better than you found them, and the souls you touch will never forget your kindness.Then, in trying times, when you question your worth and your choices, they will raise their voices to remind you of the difference you have made And thus will your deeds come to affirm your path. Remember this.”

“And you, Exarch?”

“What of me?”

“You give me such flattery, remind me any titles I have are earned, not given. Yet you have shared nothing of yourself. I want to know more about you, what you plan to do once this is over.”

He will kill himself. The Exarch will be no more. The Scions will no longer be stuck on the First. Lin will return, and push the technology forward so that the two hundred years he slept would be much shorter. Then she can love him as she needs him. Not this half crystal immortal caught up in his own grief.

Still, it is good to get lost in a dream. “Of me? You mean what I intend to do afterwards?”

A’lin nods and motions for him to continue.

“I once told you that there are things we can ill afford to lose. ‘Things,’ I said, though in truth I spoke of a person. One who is unaware of the full extent of my plans. Though she deserves to know, I have good reason to keep my counsel. I have come to terms with this in my mind, yet my heart yearns to lay everything bare. ”

She laughs. “That does not answer my question, but I think I’ve figured some of that out myse--”

He cuts her off, though not fully aware of the words she said. “For she is my inspiration, and I would give much and more for the chance to speak with her as friends, with no thought of concealment. Should she indulge me with her tales, I would regale her with my own─about my efforts in Norvrandt, perhaps.”

It’s a dream to plan things beyond the death of Vauthry, but a pleasant one.

He realizes Lin’s gotten closer. As she speaks, he can feel his hood flutter where her breath presses against it. “My tales are always yours to hear, and so I would love to hear yours.”

Her voice is like a Coeurl, primed to pounce. He feels nervous about her plans, but the hopes he has for his younger self are easy enough to share in hypotheticals. “Then, I would ask her about her next adventure. And if she should wish me to be a part of it, oh...how happy it would make me. Together, we would travel the lands and cross the seas and take to the skies upon the eternal wind. My heart swells simply to imagine--”

This time she cuts him off, but not with words, but her lips against his. Her hands don’t pull his hood off, nor do they slip inside. For such a kiss, she respects his secrets. The way her hand cups the back of his head. Her lips part for a nibble of his own.

He indulges her, but in truth he indulges himself. Lets her guide him into the way she wants him to kiss her. Mouth half open, hands on her back, getting lost in the dream.Have one unquestionably good memory to look upon in his final moments.

He pulls away once he starts to have doubts. Hopes.

“But all of this is contingent upon our victory in the coming battle. The people of this world have entrusted their hopes to us. We cannot fail them.” He smiles at her as he stands up.”Nor those who roused me from my slumber. Thank you for your company, Lin. Let us return to Amity.”

She stands up as well. “I suppose. I will just have to ask you about eternal winds later.”

Eternal winds. He has always been fond of those words together. So when she mentions it, he knows she knows. At least he hopes he won’t have to explain himself when he frees her of the burden her soul has taken.

If only he was the one who could travel with her, and not his younger self.

#G'raha Tia #G'raha Tia/WoL #Crystal Exarch #5.0 Spoilers #ShB Spoilers #Crystal Exarch/WoL #Tomorrow and Tomorrow #78 quests #CW: Suicidal Ideation

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stained-carmine · 5 years

Text

‘Come on, it’ll be fun!’

‘W-well, I’m not so sure...’

‘Trust me!’

...

‘Admittedly, I’m a little scared...but, if you’re by my side, then I don’t need to be afraid.’

‘Something like that...being a part of it? It’s like we’re pioneers in a new chapter of history...isn’t that exciting?’

‘As long as you’re here with me, holding my hand, I have the courage to face anything.’

“...ey”

‘Today’s the day! Are you ready to change the world?’

‘I-I won’t lie, I’m a little nervous...my heart won’t stop pounding...I’m afraid it might burst...but...I’m also excited, it’s so overwhelming...’

“Hey...”

‘Wait...Something doesn’t feel right...What’s going—’

‘AAAAAAAAH—’

‘It hurts...It hurts so much...I don’t want to die...! I’m scared! Where are you? I can’t...see you...anymore......Where are you...?! Please...don’t leave me....Don’t let me die here...Please...!’

‘BLAIRE!’

“Hey!”

A sudden touch brought you back to the present, and away from the nightmares of your past. You looked up to the individual who had shaken you from your trance. Before you stood the bartender, gazing at you with concern.

“Are you alright there?”

You stared at him blankly for a moment, like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle, then it dawned on you that he has asked you a question.

“Ah....N-no, I’m fine.“ You responded sheepishly.

The bartender frowned at you, unconvinced, but let out a sigh as he shook his head. “If you say so...” And with that he sauntered off, seeing to the needs of the other patrons.

As the man walked away, you lowered your gaze to the glass of whiskey you’d been nursing for the past hour or so. The ice cubes had all but melted away by now, leaving you with a mix of alcohol and water. It’s not as if you had your heart set on drinking the whole thing, but it was a little disheartening nonetheless.

Letting out a soft sigh, you pushed the glass aside. You thoughts wandered back to earlier that day, when you had told told Marcel you were leaving. Of course, he objected to it, saying you hadn’t full healed yet and that he could do more to help you recover—to help return you to your former self—at least physically.

You glanced down to your right arm, which was resting on the bar. The right side of your body had suffered quite a bit of damage from the fire, with scars extending from your neck, all the way to your ankles. While Marcel had told you that with skin grafts, you would be able to reduce the amount of scar tissue that covered your body, letting you return to the way you looked before, you weren’t ready for that. You weren’t ready to let go of the past, to forget what happened, to move on from your loss...

It was then that you heard something that caught your attention. The television in the corner of the room, anchored to the ceiling, had been set to a new broadcast since you entered the bar. It had mostly been local news, recent events and crimes, nothing of interest to you really—until now that is.

“It’s been six months since the tragedy that claimed the lives of over a hundred people in Hycasal, yet authorities are still no closer to finding the perpetrator.” On the screen were the remnants of a burned building, half collapsed in on itself, like someone had detonated a bomb in the building. “The man responsible for the disaster is Shin Kiromura, age 25, the former head of research and development at Alistarias Pharmaceuticals.” A photo of a man is brought up on the screen as the newscaster gives a verbal description of his appearance. A hateful glare replaces your sorrowful visage as you lay eyes upon that man, clenching your teeth as you scowled at his likeness. “He was conducting research into the effects of a drug his team was developing. Kiromura failed to report the possible dangers of a compound used in the creation of the drug to his supervisors, ignoring the risks and possible dangers this could pose to human health. With government funding, a clinical trial was carried out late summer of last year under the Caristalian Military’s watch. During clinical testing, an explosion occurred at the military facility located on the edge of Hycasal, causing a fire to break out in the lab. All 30 participants in the clinical trial died during the explosion along with 10 researchers who were in the lab monitoring the vitals of the participants. During the evacuation, the structural integrity of the building became compromised and the building collapsed, killing 73 more people, 16 of which were first responders. Eye witness reports from a survivor state that Kiromura fled the scene with the remainder of the highly volatile compound used in the manufacturing process of the drug. Authorities issued a warrant for his arrest and began a manhunt following the disaster, but have been unable to locate him.”

The screen displayed a series of shots, focusing on the building and the surrounding area, one of which caught your eye. At the main entrance to the building, a memorial had been erected in order to honor all the lives lost that day. You bit your lip slightly as you felt a twinge of pain in your heart. So many dead...and all for what? Some scientist’s hubris? A man who thought himself above the risks? Who didn’t care about how his choices would affect others? And to think that the police hadn’t caught him. For such a man to be free, to go unpunished for his heinous crimes, to still be out there with that reactive material, allowing him to create yet another tragedy if he so desired. It was infuriating.

“Kiromura is wanted for 113 counts of second degree murder, criminal negligence, and terrorism. This man is believed to be highly dangerous, and in possession of high explosives. If you see this man, contact authorities immediately, do not approach him. If you have any information regarding this man’s whereabouts, please contact—”

“Terrible, isn’t it?”

You flinched at the sudden voice coming from behind you, causing you to spin around swiftly. A man had sat down next to you at the bar, waving the bartender over to order his drink. You eyed the man with suspicion, ready to fight back should he have malicious intent, but he just gave you a friendly smile in return. “You seemed really focused on that broadcast, did you lose someone in that disaster?” He asked, raising the beer he had ordered to his lips.

You were hesitant to answer him. You didn’t know this man, you couldn’t tell if he had ulterior motives behind this idle conversation. Giving him another once over with your eyes, you didn’t see anything that would indicate he was armed. He also didn’t look like an officer, either of the police force or the military. Everything about him seemed ordinary, from the clothes he wore, to the way he carried himself. With a lingering doubt in your mind, you opened your mouth to answer him.

“...Yeah, yeah I did...” You replied, turning your gaze from him and lowering your head.

“Sorry to hear that...” The man’s smile faded, replaced with a concerned frown. “Can’t believe they haven’t caught the guy yet. You figure finding one man would be easy when his face is on every news station in the country.” The stranger took another swig from his glass before turning towards you. “You know, I heard that the military are offering a reward for his capture. Those meatheads and gun nuts can’t stand to have their pride sullied. Way I figure, they think if they can catch the guy, they can earn back the trust of the people. Like we could ever trust that shady general after that though. The military was supposed to be overseeing that trial right? How could they have missed that psycho hiding right under their noses?”

You had to mentally reel yourself in to stop yourself from snapping back at the man. Keeping a calm facade, you responded. “Is that so? How much are they offering?”

The man shrugged, downing the rest of what was in his glass before calling the bartender over for a refill. “Mm, not sure myself. Only heard about it from a friend you see. Don’t even know if it’s true.” Thanking the bartender, he raised the glass to his lips before pausing. “Though if it is, they’re awfully desperate. You’d figure they’d start by interrogating all the survivors first before offering rewards to the public.”

“They probably did already. Usually that’s the first thing they do in an investigation. Question witnesses, bring in the people that knew the culprit.” You had to catch yourself so as to not give away your former occupation. “...Or at least that’s what they do in police dramas.” If they hadn’t caught that man by now, interrogations probably turned up no leads. You felt your heart sink a bit. If you were going to go through with this plan of yours, that would have been your first course of action. You scowled slightly from beneath your hood, you might need to rethink your plan at this rate.

“My cousin’s friend was employed at the facility, and was in the building that day.” The voice came from across the bar, from the bartender who seemed to have overheard our conversation. After serving up some mixed drinks to a group a friends who had come into the bar to celebrate, the bartender wandered back over to the two of us. “Said the guy had been in a coma ever since.” Noticing the drink I had sat aside with no intention of finishing, the bartender took the glass and poured it out, washing and rinsing the glass out for a future customer to use. “Just the other day I heard the guy had just woke up for the first time in six months. My cousin was ecstatic. He was actually going to go visit him today actually.”

A spark lit up in your mind as this opportunity presented itself. “That’s great. Will your cousin be coming here to celebrate after?”

The bartender laughed in response. “You kidding me? He wouldn’t be caught dead in here. Too shabby of a place for him. If anything, he’d probably hit up one of the bars in the city.”

“Ah, your cousin is one of those guys. Too good for a small place like this. Needs one of those fancy restaurants where you buy a whole bottle of wine to go with your meal.”

“Well, I can’t deny that but still...” The bartender frowned at the man who had just finished his second beer, and was now demanding a third, garnering an eye roll from the man behind the counter. With a sigh he took the man’s glass and began to pour him another. “What about you? Did you want another drink?”

“Ah no, I’ve spent long enough sitting here, it’s about time I left. I have things to take care of.” You said, rising from you seat and waving the notion off.

“Is that right? Well, take care then. Thanks for the patronage.” The bartender said as he handed the man his third beer.

With a nod and a slight wave, you departed, making your way out of the building. One outside, the friendly smile you were wearing vanished, replaced by a stern frown.

With resolve in your heart, you stepped forward, away from all that tied you to this small town to the east of Hycasal. Taking what would be the first steps in a long journey, you pressed on, with goal in mind and a drive in your soul.

That broadcast, there was something off about it. The details didn’t add up. Memories of brief interactions with that man, with Shin Kiromura, flashed in your mind. He had seemed like a rather hopeful individual to you...so why would he suddenly sabotage his own experiment? It didn’t make sense.

You wanted answers—no, you needed them. If there was any hope of you being able to move forward, to accept the death of your dear friend and overcome the tragedy that befell you that day, you had to know why it all happened.

That was another thing the news had wrong, that no participants had survived that catastrophe. No, there was one participant that did survive.

You.

The burns that marred your flesh, the haunting memories of that day, and that feeling you had felt in the moments before the blast. All proof that you were there. That you survived. Against all the odds, you, and only you, had made it out of that room alive.

Out of the fires of hell you rose. Determined to get answers. And if one thing was for sure.

You weren’t going to stop until you found them.

#Notes of a Mysterious Researcher #Narrative #World Building #Original Story #Fiction #Original Fiction #The Game #500th Post #tw; death #tw; arson #tw; terrorism #tw; alcohol #The Phoenix

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arlome · 7 years

Note

Hi friend! Can I request number 10 for Carolight? You're the best 💓

Here you go, Megan! A little fluffy drabble to make you feel a bit better (oh, it almost rhymed!:P)

All in all, it’d been a reasonably good week.

It started off nicely with an uncharacteristic visit to church on Sunday, followed by a scandalous afternoon spent in bed. Then, on Monday and Tuesday, an invigorating ride to Sawle brought him to his ailing patients and he returned home in high spirits, having successfully delivered a healthy baby, bandaged a bad sprain, and cured a persistent stomach ache. Wednesday brought an invitation to sup with the Poldarks in Nampara, which he and his wife gladly accepted, and the company was well met and well dined. Thursday, however, greeted the recuperating doctor with a severe headache which he just couldn’t shake, and the night that followed was monstrous in its terrors.

Twice Dwight was pulled and shaken back to consciousness by his pale and frightened wife, who claimed that his moans and screams raised her from a heavy sleep. Twice he apologized profusely and begged for her forgiveness, and was embraced and kissed lovingly until Morpheus deigned to claim him once more. His sleep was fitful and full of guilt, so dawn, for once, did not wake him.

When Dwight finally awoke on Friday morning, the sun was already shining and his wife was sited in front of her mirror, fully dressed and ready for the day.

“What is the time?” he sprang out of bed, ignoring the leftovers of yesterday’s headache, and started pulling on his breeches, “why did you not wake me, Caroline?”

His beautiful, often neglected lately, darling wife turned to look at him with a sunny smile.

“Good morning, my dear!” she said cheerfully, applying perfume to her pulse points, “you have had a bad night, so I have decided to let your body reimburse itself with much-needed sleep.”

Dwight frowned and sighed as he buttoned his waistcoat. Caroline meant well, of course – she always did – but hadn’t she realized that he was needed? That by allowing him to lie idle in bed she was depriving his patients of much-needed medical care?

“Your concern for my health does you credit, my love,” he began, trying to keep the irritation from his voice, “but I am much needed in the villages today, as you must know –”

“Today and on any day,” she said bitterly, interrupting him, and turned back to her morning routine. Dwight stared at her face through her looking glass and blinked.

“We’ve talked about this, Caroline; I am a physician and, therefore, have an obligation towards my patients.”

She rose from her chair and turned to look at him, her countenance stormy.

“Dwight, you have only now begun to act and feel as your old self; recovered some strength and gained a bit of weight,” she stopped for a moment to compose herself while he stared at her; Caroline shook her head and cleared her throat,“ I have finally stopped fancying myself married to a ghost,” she said quietly, “this was a good week, you were almost in full-health…that is, until yesterday.”

She pulled herself to her full height, her arms akimbo, and gave him her sternest look. Dwight gulped.

“So no, Dr. Enys, you are not to leave the house today. You are to stay in bed and rest and, perhaps- if you were to feel better in the morning- tomorrow you may continue with your routine.”

The way she stood in front of him then, all indignation and riotous crossness, made him think of his governess – Miss Stevens- who used to react in that exact manner whenever he did something incredibly naughty.

So, in a paying tribute to all things naughty, and with a passing thought that he could always leave for Sawle a little later, Dwight licked his lips and smiled somewhat rakishly.

“Come over here and make me.”

Caroline’s eyes widened and her lips parted almost comically.

“I beg your pardon?” she asked incredulously, “what did you say?”

Dwight’s smile turned into a wide grin.

“I said, come over here and make me,” he repeated, unbuttoning his waistcoat, “unless you want me to leave –”

She flung herself at him and attacked him with a couple of strategically well-placed kisses; Dwight lost his footing and, unbalanced by the extra weight, fell back on the bed, taking Caroline with him. Trying to untangle themselves from under a heap of silks, they lay laughing wildly in each other’s arms.

“I only wish for you to be better, Dwight,” Caroline said quietly by his ear when they stopped laughing, “I do not intend to keep you from your precious patients; you know that.”

He turned to her, smiling softly, and pulled her towards and on top of him. She squirmed and gasped in delight and Dwight began to lose the guilt at the decision to stay in bed for a little while longer.

“I know,” he muttered against her lips and rose a bit to kiss her, “I am your obedient servant, Ma'am; and will do as you instruct.”

Caroline’s eyes shone devilishly and she smiled, her face fresh and lovely in the morning light.

“Oh, in that case, husband; I instruct you to undress. Doctor’s orders.”

#carolight #dwight enys #caroline pe #poldark #my fic #writing prompt

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overhere-series · 7 years

Text

Over Here: Chapter Five

Having a buffer is so lovely. Here you go! Next chapter goes up this coming Saturday if I remember among all of the laptop and self-care shenanigans that day. Love you folks!

Do let me know how you think things are going or share if you enjoyed it enough!

Marcy Faust takes both travelers by the hands and drags them toward the path, Hazel and her brother close behind. She makes her siblings look downright anti-social, twittering about how much they’ll like the kid’s mom and their food and every single detail about her and Mason’s day prior to finding the hole. The only thing keeping Cass from clamping a hand over the girl’s mouth is the thought of Hazel going bear over it.

Besides, Marcy’s story takes on manic speed when they come to the half-withered horse thing and its voice. “And Mason and me weren’t scared yet until we got under and it was so pretty with all the metal and Over There things everywhere but we did get scared when it got asking for our names, because we know what the stories say but it kept asking and asking and got scarier- but I was smart! I told Mason ‘don’t you tell’ and then you came and-”

“Breathe, Marce,” Hazel says.

“You were very wise to hold onto your names,” Winston assures. “And courageous, especially when a fragment requests them.”

The smile he offers only encourages Marcy to take one on, too. “Yeah! I told Mason not to say my name or his name, because I heard from my aunt you can lose your name if someone else gives it away-”

“Not possible, I’m afraid. You can only give away your own name, never another’s.”

Cass blinks but continues on. Already the list grows longer and longer for all the questions she’s got, but it’s all she can do on their walk to hide the tick in her jaw and the stiff steps to help her knee.

When they arrive the Fausts lead them to a private kitchen upstairs, the one in their home above the restaurant. It’s all tapestries and wall to wall cupboards, small and cozy and definitely better than the dining room below. They’re told to wait and then left be at a table in the center.

At the Fausts’ retreating backs, Cass eases into her chair. Her knee thanks her for it. Now seated and idle, though, Winston twitches, raking his hands through his hair, drumming his long fingers on the tabletop. Cass squeezes her eyes shut to ignore it, but eventually the tap-tap-tap of his nails and the bounce of the vase acting centerpiece grates on her ears.

“You wanna cut that out?”

“We need to be going and-”

Cass kicks back in her chair, arms folded. “Oh yeah, you really wanted to get out of here when you signed us up for this,” she mutters, throwing a wave over the room. She tries to keep her voice down but keeping her tone to a raspy half-yell takes more effort than she’s got left.

“That’s different,” Winston says.

“I don’t know, I didn’t get any input when you decided to play hero. Guess we’re even for that now, right?”

“Cass, this isn’t-”

“Except for you trying to sell me to a freaking monster back there. Want to explain that one to me, birdbrain?”

Winston quits drumming on the table. “Yes, that. My apologies, but I had to think quickly, you see. You should have come with me from the start,” he says. “The plan might have worked better, actually, though it’s amazing enough to believe the fragment fell for the scheme as it was. With a bit more preparation it could have been fun indeed.”

He’s got a wistful smile Cass doesn’t like one bit. “Yeah, no. That was the exact opposite of fun.”

“It made a decent plan, even if it relied on our friend being so very broken. And you proved yourself rather capable in there. All the same, I’m sorry I didn’t ask your thoughts. I just wanted to work quickly so we could be out of here.”

“We can’t just bail, they sort of owe us,” Cass shrugs, even if her jaw pangs a little from her low words. Under the table her foot bounces up and down. Just a little time to feel better and then they could get moving without making it worse.

But Winston straightens in his seat. “That is not why we do this.”

“What’s with the ‘we’? I’m not a warden. We’re not doing this again.”

“If the need comes I have no choice. It’s my job. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you much earlier, I just hoped things wouldn’t-” He pauses, closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath. “I hoped it wouldn’t be relevant so soon. Which reminds me,” he adds, “I need to scribe the others so they don’t worry.”

“Other wardens?”

Winston lays out his map and bottle on the table in front of him. The map sketches out four main countries, Ellis just beneath a group of mountains with a coast running its lower border. Haven’s marked with a big black dot on the far east of it. “Yes. Our work isn’t about reward, Cass. It’s about doing what must be done.”

“Poetic,” Cass says with a roll of her eyes. “Well, I’m not honor-bound or whatever. I got hurt helping them. I say we reap the benefits.”

“You could be, with time. Some training with Jermaine and Rissa and you’d- wait, why didn’t you say you were hurt?”

Before she can answer, his bare foot prods hers under the table. Her skin crawls, not just from his touch but like warm water spilling down to wash over her leg. Said comparison doesn’t thrill her. She shivers but the sting of her scrapes smooths away.

“Fascinating,” Winston says.

Cass stiffens. Being called fascinating, the way science experiments and unexplainable deadly accidents are fascinating, doesn’t endear her to the bird any more than his touchiness does. “Keep your magic to yourself,” she rasps.

“You’re no longer injured, yes? At any rate, it was not my magic.” His hands spread over the map, tracing the lines with his fingers.

“What’s that mean? Did you like pull out of the air or something?”

“No, I pulled a fair bit of it from you.”

“Like I had some on me.” Magic from some tree or other living thing, powdered on her like pollen. It’s not a question, just an explanation- even if she can’t see it, he claimed it’s everywhere.

Winston looks up from the map with a deep breath, folds it like he’s closing his mind on it until he’s handled the conversation. “From within you. Honestly I’m surprised the fragment noticed what little you have or it’d never agreed without a name. I wish you would have told me earlier or you wouldn’t have had to walk with your knee as it was.”

“Back the hell up to where you said I had magic in me? You said seeing magic,” she hisses. “You never said anything about making it.”

“I told you, magic is a fact of life here. It’s a system in the body, necessary as the heart or the brain. You don’t will its production any more than you can the blood in your veins. From the moment you fell here the roots have been forming around your nerves-”

“Magic equals life just sounded like some fancy fantasy BS! What is this, a virus? You’re telling me there’s nothing I can do?”

“Well, I can bind the magic in your vessel to slow the effect. You’ve got to keep me informed of how you feel, but… generally, yes. You’ll be able to control the magic in your body once it’s there, but there’s not much even I can do once you’ve developed an inclination. I must say, most otherlanders are much more pleased about it.”

Cass can’t deny to herself how much the idea pleases her, just a little bit. The same part of her that wanted to know what lay behind the gap once and for all, but look how well following that voice turns out. The heat in chest pulses out, humming through her spine and out as far as her fingertips in a ripple. Basically she’ll get magic powers. Something the little kid on the bridge always wanted.

Whether she wanted them here and now or not.

“So, what? I don’t get back in time, I turn into a bird or something?” How’s that for controlling jack?

“It’s quite possible, should that be how the magic decides to express. I doubt you’re therian as I am but taking other forms is just a single way the magic could adapt. Guiding magic in other organisms, controlling materials of life- changing yourself or the world around you. It’s personal as a name.”

Cass forces down the heat in her chest and plants her feet on the floorboards, ready to run. Get out before things get crazier than they already are. “Can we go back to the part where I can stop it? How long do I have?”

“Days, likely.”

“And we just wasted an afternoon here.” She tries to ignore how she factored into it, wasting even more time retracing their steps back.

“I wouldn’t call it a waste, Cass Douglas. We have time. Breathe.”

“I’m fine. I just don’t have time to sit here and you just put us off tracking knowing I had a time limit. What’s wrong with you?”

He chuckles, opening the map again. “I’m well aware of our time. I’ll try to keep you better informed, but it’s my duty as a warden to handle this sort of thing. Hopefully we won’t encounter many more incidents like this but I’m afraid our barriers are only going to get weaker the further we are from Haven.”

“Why’s that?”

Winston blinks, like he’s forgotten what he’s said. “Well, the amalgam we keep the barriers with is in Haven. The further the magic extends from the amalgam, the weaker its effect- with a whole country, quite a lot of room for holes and errors. We’re at the edge of Ellis as it is but even so, it shouldn’t be happening so soon.”

Cass flinches with the return of Marcy, who gives her a tap on the arm. “It’s ready! You want to come to the kitchen down there?”

“What’s ready?”

Marcy pulls on her arm again and they both rise to follow. With all her focus on the conversation, Cass had mostly ignored the combination of smells wafting up the stairs. Cheese, bread, some sort of fishy smell she remembered from camping on the coast with her parents...

They come to a table against a few barrels lining the walls, on them two plates with bread bowls on them. Marcy sits them down with a flourishy little bow. Cass takes a seat as the rest of the Fausts circle the table with chairs of their own. The aunt, the “guard” Perrin, a few more ladies who’d been cooking and might have been a couple.

“It’s lunch soon anyway so we thought we’d treat you,” the aunt says. “Perrin insisted, and you can’t sway them when they get an idea like this.”

Perrin puts an arm around each traveler, tears in their eyes. On first glance they look pretty feminine, but they just seem to go by guardian instead of Mom to the Faust kids. “You save my babies, you’ve earned a free meal.”

Cass eyes the bowls and tries not to blush. Or be tempted by the food, but by the time everyone’s seated Cass already has a spoon in hand. It ends up cramped, but she can’t care less.

Fortunately magicians don’t have a blessing and she can dive into her bowl with as much gusto as Marcy and Mason. Maintaining her level of activity requires calories and lots of them. The soup melts in her mouth, the bread stiff enough not to get soggy before she finish off the goods inside but not stale.

The Fausts listen while they recount the thing from the pool, although Hazel and Winston are careful to tiptoe around the parts that might frighten her. Cass pitches in with her kick to the thing’s face once they get there, which got a nice chorus of ew’s.

“I’m glad no one was hurt,” Perrin pops in. They stare into their bowl, tapping a foot under the table.

Winston ate half the bowl before anything else, but keeps drumming too like he’s waiting for a Faust to untie him from his chair. “It’s the least we could do.”

“We do need to go soon,” Cass adds. Not too eager-sounding, she hopes.

“Warden business?” Dani asks. A knowing grin crosses her face for the two guests. “Always curious when one of you longcoats come to town, but you didn’t look the kind until you said something.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, my dear.” His tone’s playful, amused even. “But yes. For that matter, we need to tend to a bit of closing business now. Thank you very much for your kindnesses today.”

There’s some hugging and promises from the kids not to go running off behind the barriers again, then they got the okay to finally leave. Yet again Cass tries to look miffed about stopping, but the kids’ reactions are too good when she winks at them on her way out the door. The last thing she catches is Marcy’s grin and Mason’s big ol’ saucer eyes.

“So where next? Clemence?” she asks the bird as they go roughly along the same path they’d come. For all the time-wasting they still got a map and a meal out of the afternoon. Time seems to work the same here as it does back home, so that leaves them a few hours before dark and the rest of the evening for travel. Not much in the grand scheme, not if she knows she’s got a timeframe on this trip.

They continue back along the stream, Winston keeping an eye out for the opposite shore. “To finish our business, yes?”

“You mean the hole? Why? That thing’s trapped, we’re good to go.”

“The hole’s still there,” he says. “I still haven’t scribed Finch to close it, and light won’t stop our fragmented friend for long. I wouldn’t like to see their attempts to take anyone else. Would you?”

“Alright, alright,” she says. “Back there and then back on track again, though. Right?”

“Right,” the bird agrees. He keeps his hands at his back as they walk the way they’d come, back through the mud and carefully across the stream where they found the hole again. He stands there a moment, considering the tunnel worn through the bushes.

“Would you like to come with me or would you like to wait?” he asks, peering still further inside.

Cass stares at him. What is this, a test? At least he’s asking her this time rather than just ditching her, but knowing what lies behind that tunnel doesn’t make her all warm and fuzzy about going this time. She gives the bird nod and watches him disappear into the bush.

Then she stands there and gives it a little more thought. The bird doesn’t see her coming this time. She can get the chance to see what he’s up to when he doesn’t think she’ll be watching, and to see the kelpie again at a safe distance.

She looks into the hole and lets out a groan, teeth grit together. Fine. Still growling she gets down on her hands and knees and crawls.

#chapter update #about to keel over so i'm posting now instead of in the morning #because nothing is waking me before seven that i can tell you #writing #over here series #ya fantasy #fantasy #finally getting out of this town

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raptorsenshi · 7 years

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Milk

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with milk.

We all had that phase, right? Where there was a food or drink we just couldn't get enough of and wanted it morning, noon and night. That was me with milk. I could drink it by the gallon. My parents didn't mind, they would rather I wanted something healthy like that to quench my thirst than be constantly after soda or one of those concentrate drinks full of sugar that you had to add water to.

I could make myself sick sometimes, drinking too much, too fast. But didn't every kid? Hell, even adults can have too much of a good thing and make themselves ill for it. It was never enough to put me off though, no amount of aching bellies could separate me from my beloved milk. Nothing could.

Or so I thought.

See, our kitchen was pretty small or at least it was too small to fit in the gigantic fridge (and freezer) my parents had. So it was kept in the basement instead.

One summer when I was around sixteen, my parents decided I was old enough to stay at home alone whilst they took off on a second honeymoon or something. I didn't mind, at that age I would rather have stayed at home with my friends than been a third wheel to my parents as they tried to rekindle the romance. Besides, if I needed another my grandparents lived right across the street. Yeah, my family was the kind who didn't stray far from their roots.

It was uneventful as you might expect: I had friends over and we played video games, pigged out on takeout and that was about it beyond my taking care of the house duties.

Until the third week.

The house was old so creaks and groans and other 'unexplained' noises were something I was used to and easily brushed aside. This one night, however, I had just come back up from the basement – the door to which lay in our kitchen – with a glass of milk, ready to crawl up the stairs and settle into bed for the night when an unusual banging came from the room I'd just left.

I tried to brush it off as just the ancient stairs airing their complaints after I'd trampled up them, but there was something so off about it. In my sixteen years of living in that house I'd never heard anything like it. I figured it might've been a wild animal, maybe a raccoon or opossum that had somehow got in during the day. Being a typical teen, that was not something I wanted to deal with late at night, so I simply locked the basement door to prevent it getting up into the main house and went to bed.

Morning came and I tentatively went down into the basement to check for any signs of a wild animal, and beyond the few cobwebs to be expected even in a furnished basement like our own, there was nothing, so I decided it really had just been one of the many noises of our old house, got my usual glass of milk and headed back up the stairs.

That night, the noise returned. This time I was sure it wasn't simply random creaking, because it started up at the exact same time right before I headed up to my room for the night. The only difference was I hadn't been down to the basement yet so it definitely was not the result of me stepping on some well-worn floorboards.

Being the not particularly brave teen I was, I bolted out of the house and across to my grandparents. Fortunately they were still awake and my grandfather was a bull of a man not to be messed with. He marched over with his shotgun to investigate, only to come back a half hour later claiming he couldn't find anything or anyone. He reasoned, like me, that it was maybe a raccoon and was hiding in a nook or cranny somewhere down there, and had locked the place up to stop it getting out much as I had done the previous night.

I stayed at my grandparents from that point on, going back into the house during the day to take care of any chores and play on my Nintendo for a couple of hours. I didn't go back down into the basement, opting to eat and drink at my grandparents' home too.

About a week before my parents got back there was a summer storm that caused a power outage. It lasted a couple of days but gave me all the more reason to spend the remaining time my parents were away at my grandparents.

When I returned one morning to open up the curtains I noticed a foul smell spreading throughout the house. Knowing the power had been out I assumed the heavy, pungent odour was coming from the food in the fridge and freezer that had begun to go bad. The thought of dealing with it was unpleasant but it wasn't something I wanted my parents to come home to. I didn't want to deal with the cleanup and my grandparents would be out of town for the night visiting my great-uncle and I didn't much fancy having to clear out rotting food alone.

So I did what any bone-idle teenager would do and left it. Sprayed some air freshener and dealt with it for the day, choosing to eat dry cereal and drink water rather than going down to the basement and be overwhelmed by the stretch seeping out of it.

That night was particularly hot – even for summer – and so I ended up turning the AC on. The cool air spreading through the house was a relief as I went to sleep, but it was soon a decision I was regretting.

I woke up at around four in the morning to find the air of the house thick and muggy, it was worse than when I had gone to bed. Worse still, was the stench so strong I could taste it in my mouth. It was sweet and sour all at the same time, mixed with the sulphuric smell of rotting eggs and something my adolescent brain could only describe as someone having missed the toilet.

I thought about a time when I was younger, when my dad had accidentally unplugged the fridge and none of us had noticed until the milk had gone off. I could remember that smell as I gagged and hurried into the upstairs bathroom, kneeling before the toilet as my stomach threatened to empty itself. It was sweet and bitter like this smell, with something acidic I've never known how to explain, and I could remember the thick, chunky sludge the milk had become, none of this helped me as the scent that filled the house seemed to flood into every pore of my body. I could smell it on my clothes, it was so strong my eyes watered and with one final, heavy flip, my stomach heaved and I vomited.

How could the smell have gotten so bad in just a few hours?

It was only when I was cleaning myself up at the sink that I noticed the air vents weren't pushing out any soothing, cool air. Knowing that I obviously hadn't turned it off as I had been sleeping, I assumed the system was still messed up after the power outage. I couldn't stay in that house with that heat and that smell and so, dressed only in my underwear, I hurried over to my grandparents and, once again, spent the night there.

When they arrived in the morning I explained the situation to them. Neither were pleased I hadn't taken care of the rotting food the day before, but agreed to help before it could get any worse.

'Worse' would be an understatement for the odour that smacked us in the face. My grandmother couldn't even make it into the house, she was an ashen white and bent over the table on the porch, gagging. Even my grandfather lost his hardened composure upon setting foot into the house, having brought a tissue out of his pocket to cover his nose and mouth.

"Stay here," he told me, a clear command even if his words had been a little muffled. I, of course, didn't listen to him – because it made no sense to me for him to make me stay out and have him clean up all the mess – and once I heard the basement door open I cut through the house to the kitchen.

I can only describe walking into that kitchen as having your face millimetres from an oven door when it's opened and the wave of heat knocks you off your feet. It was that, but only the smell. I could hear my grandfather retching and coughing as he descended the stairs, and I myself was soon doing the same as I made my way to the basement door with tears forming in my eyes.

Now my grandfather was a hard man, but I had never heard him swear until that moment. And it was as if he was making up for a lifetime of never saying a bad word with the string of curses leaving him. This urged me on through the heated murk of stench that made traversing the stairs a grinding task.

I wish I had listened to my grandfather when he told me to stay with my grandma.

He tried to urge me back up before I saw anything but it was much too late for that.

The noises I'd heard from the basement weren't from the house settling, nor were they from an animal.

They were from a human.

A human now rotting in the summer heat and half-hanging out of an air vent. Now I knew why they'd stopped working, and how the smell had permeated the whole house so quickly. It also explained why neither me or my grandfather had found anything upon investigating the basement- they'd been in the vents. The fact a person had somehow gotten into my home was chilling enough, to see them as the first dead body in my life was worse. Death is a part of nature, but a disgusting part when the usual human ways of dealing with it aren't in practice.

A body rots quickly in heat, and their corpse was hanging in such a way I'm sure that if it had been left another day or two the body would've snapped in half. Fluids leaked down the walls: congealed blood, dirty brown liquid I didn't want to think about, and the worst of it- something thick, white and pus-like that reminded me of that sour milk.

The smell of death clings to everything, and even after the body was removed, all furniture from down there tossed out and the basement professionally fumigated, it still lingered. I threw out the clothes I'd been wearing that day, no matter how many times they were washed it was still there. I couldn't go down to the basement, it still hit me like a truck each time I so much as passed the door. Even my parents who were fortunate enough to still be gone during the worst of it couldn't deal with it. They moved to the street over and from what my grandparents have told us, whenever someone new moves in they always complain about the smell.

We never did figure out how they got in, the police believed there must have been some open window I missed one day and I'm inclined to agree. They were homeless, looking for food and shelter, something I can't hold against them. I almost feel guilty in a way. The noises they made sneaking around the basement at night drove me away to my grandparents. Maybe if I'd stayed I would've heard them call or help – if they had called for it at all – when they'd got stuck in the vent. Maybe they'd still be alive. I don't know.

What I do know is from that day on, I couldn't drink milk. The smell of even fresh milk would bring the reek of death back to me, like it had just been trapped and waiting somewhere at the back of my nose. The sight of it reminded me of those fluids seeping down our basement walls.

When I was a kid I loved milk, now I hate it.

#horror stories #scary stories #stories #horror #sixpenceee #my writing #HEY LOOK I DID A THING

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theheartofcoding · 7 years

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An Inferno on the Head of a Pin

Today's processors contain billions of heat-generating transistors in an ever shrinking space. The power budget might go from:

1000 watts on a specialized server

100 watts on desktops

30 watts on laptops

5 watts on tablets

1 or 2 watts on a phone

100 milliwatts on an embedded system

That's three four orders of magnitude. Modern CPU design is the delicate art of placing an inferno on the head of a pin.

Look at the original 1993 Pentium compared to the 20th anniversary Pentium:

1993 Pentium 66 Mhz 16kb L1 3.2 million transistors

2014 Pentium G3258 3.2 Ghz 2 core / 4 thread 128kb L1, 512kb L2, 3MB L3 1.4 billion transistors

I remember cooling the early CPUs with simple heatsinks; no fan. Those days are long gone.

A roomy desktop computer affords cooling opportunities (and thus a watt budget) that a laptop or tablet could only dream of. How often will you be at peak load? For most computers, the answer is "rarely". The smaller the space, the higher the required performance, the more … challenging your situation gets.

Sometimes, I build servers.

Inspired by Google and their use of cheap, commodity x86 hardware to scale on top of the open source Linux OS, I also built our own servers. When I get stressed out, when I feel the world weighing heavy on my shoulders and I don't know where to turn … I build servers. It's therapeutic.

Servers are one of those situations where you may be at full CPU load more often than not. I prefer to build 1U servers which is the smallest rack mountable unit, at 1.75" total height.

As you can get so many cores on a die these days, I only build single CPU servers. One reason is price; the other reason is that clock speed declines proportionally to the number of cores on a die (this is for the Broadwell Xeon V4 series):

coresGHzE5-163043.7$406E5-165063.6$617E5-168083.4$1723E5-2680122.4$1745E5-2690142.6$2090E5-2697182.3$2702

Yes, there are server CPUs with even more cores, but if you have to ask how much they cost, you definitely can't afford them … and they're clocked even slower. What we do is serviced better by a smaller number of super fast cores than a larger number of slow cores, anyway.

With that in mind, consider these two Intel Xeon server CPUs:

E5-1630 V3 (4-core, 8 thread, 3.7 - 3.8 Ghz)

E5-1650 V3 (6-core, 12 thread, 3.5 - 3.8 Ghz)

As you can see from the official Intel product pages for each processor, they both have a TDP of 140 watts. I'm scanning the specs, thinking maybe this is an OK tradeoff.

Unfortunately, here's what I actually measured with my trusty Kill-a-Watt for each server build as I performed my standard stability testing, with completely identical parts except for the CPU:

E5-1630: 40w idle, 170w mprime

E5-1650: 55w idle, 250w mprime

I am here to tell you that Intel's TDP figure of 140 watts for the 6 core version of this CPU is a terrible, scurrilous lie!

This caused a little bit of a problem for me as our standard 1U server build now overheats, alarms, and throttles with the 6 core CPU — whereas the 4 core CPU was just fine. Hey Intel! From my home in California, I stab at thee!

But, you know..

Better Heatsink

The 1.75" maximum height of the 1U server form factor doesn't leave a lot of room for creative cooling of a CPU. But you can switch from an Aluminum cooler to a Copper one.

Copper is not usually all that necessary; it is significantly more expensive than aluminum, so it's usually cheaper to throw a larger mass of aluminum at the cooling problem when you can. But copper dissipates more heat in the same form factor when space is a constraint, which it definitely is in a 1U case.

The famous "Ninja" CPU cooler came in copper and aluminum versions so we can compare apples to apples. At 12v (max fan speed):

Aluminum Ninja had 24C rise over ambient

Copper Ninja had 17C rise over ambient

You can scale the load and the resulting watts of heat by spinning up MPrime threads for the number of cores you want to "activate", so that's how I tested. And each run has to be overnight to be considered successful!

Aluminum heatsink — stable at 170w (mprime threads=4), but heat warnings with 190w (mprime threads=5).

Copper heatsink — stable at 190w (mprime threads=5) but heat warnings with 230w (mprime threads=6).

This helped, noticeably. But we need more.

Better Thermal Interface

When it comes to server builds, I stick with the pre-applied grey thermal interface pad that comes on the heatsinks. But out of boredom and a desire to experiment, I …

Removed the copper heatsink.

Used isopropyl alcohol to clean both CPU and heatsink.

Applied fancy "Ceramique" thermal compound I have on hand, using an X shape pattern.

I wasn't expecting any change at all, but to my surprise with the new TIM applied it took 5x longer to reach throttle temps with mprime threads=6. Before, it would thermally throttle within a minute of launching the test, and after it took ~10 minutes to reach that same throttle temp. The difference was noticeable.

That's a surprisingly good outcome, and it tells us the default grey goop that comes pre-installed on heatsinks is ... not great. Per this 2011 test, the difference between worst and best thermal compounds is 4.3°C.

But as Dan once bravely noted while testing Vegemite as a thermal interface material:

If your PC's so marginal that a CPU running three or four degrees Celsius warmer will crash it [or, for modern CPUs, cause the processor to auto-throttle itself and substantially reduce system performance], the solution is not to try to edge away from the precipice with better thermal compound. It's to make a big change to the cooling system, or just lower the darn clock speed.

An improved thermal interface just gets you there faster (or slower); it doesn't address the underlying problem. So we're not done here.

Ducted Airflow

Most, but not all, of the SuperMicro cases I've used have included a basic fan duct / shroud that lays across the central fans and the system. Given that the case fans are pretty much directly in front of the CPU anyway, I've included the shroud in the builds out of a sense of completeness more than any conviction that it was doing something for the cooling performance.

This particular server case, though, did not include a fan duct. I didn't think much about it at the time, but given the overheating problem this 6-core CPU and its 250 watt heat generation was putting on our 1U build, I decided I should build a quick card stock duct and test it out.

(I know, I know, it's a super janky duct! But I was prototyping!)

Sure enough, this duct, combined with the previous heatsink and TIM changes, enabled the server to remain stable overnight with a full MPrime run of 12 threads.

I think we've certainly demonstrated the surprising (to me, at least) value of fan shrouds. But before we get too excited, let's consider one last thing.

Define "CPU Load"

Sometimes you get so involved with solving the problem at hand that you forget to consider whether you are, in fact, solving the right problem.

In these tests, we defined 100% CPU load using MPrime. Some people claim MPrime is more of a power virus than a real load test, because it exerts so much heat pressure on the CPUs. I initially dismissed these claims since I've used MPrime (and its Windows cousin, Prime95) for almost 20 years to test CPU stability, and it's never let me down.

But I did more research and I found that MPrime, since 2011, uses AVX2 instructions extensively on newer Intel CPUs:

The newer versions of Prime load in a way that they are only safe to run at near stock settings. The server processors actually downclock when AVX2 is detected to retain their TDP rating. On the desktop we're free to play and the thing most people don't know is how much current these routines can generate. It can be lethal for a CPU to see that level of current for prolonged periods.

…

That's why most stress test programs alternate between different data pattern types. Depending on how effective the rotation is, and how well that pattern causes issues for the system timing margin, it will, or will not, catch potential for instability. So it's wise not to hang one's hat on a single test type.

This explains why I saw such a large discrepancy between other CPU load programs like BurnP6 and MPrime.

MPrime does an amazing job of generating the type of CPU load that causes maximum heat pressure. But unless your servers regularly chew through zillions of especially power-hungry AVX2 instructions this may be completely unrepresentative of any real world load your server would actually see.

Your Own Personal Inferno

Was this overkill? Probably. Even with the aluminum heatsink, no change to thermal interface material, and zero ducting, we'd probably see no throttling under normal use in our server rack. But I wanted to be sure. Completely sure.

Is this extreme? Putting 140 TDP of CPU heat in a 1U server? Not really. Nick at Stack Overflow told me they just put two 22 core, 145W TDP Xeon 2699v4 CPUs and four 300W TDP GPUs in a single Dell C4130 1U server. I'd sure hate to be in the room when those fans spin up. I'm also a little afraid to find out what happens if you run MPrime plus full GPU load on that box.

Servers are an admittedly rare example of big CPU performance heat and size tradeoffs, one of the few left. It is fun to play at the extremes, but the SoC inside your phone makes the same tradeoffs on a smaller scale. Tiny infernos in our pockets, each and every one.

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#Coding Horror

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