#like i guess logically my room is my safety bubble and i don’t have control of who/what/when goes in there

[sscrambledmeggss]

girl help, selling your house and being a college student is not easy. ALSO having ocd while having people you don’t know (who you can’t even see), go into your room and walk around and touch shit, this is actually awful

[iovchlde]

hi!! may i request some reverse comfort headcanons for diluc, kaeya, childe, and xiao? maybe about relationship insecurity or something of that sort??

relationship flaws and insecurities.

no one is perfect— so what exactly are their flaws in a relationship? and what do they feel most conscious of in a relationship?

featuring diluc, kaeya, childe, xiao

diluc

he feels that he might scare you off with his overprotectiveness. he’s already lost someone before, and he doesn’t think he can handle losing you either.

it’s not that he wants to control your life— in fact, he wants you to live it to its full extent. but there’s always that small worry, an annoying voice, in the back of his head that reminds him that the wilderness of teyvat is dangerous.

subconsciously, he may find himself interrogating you if you plan on leaving the house early in the morning, or late at night. there’ll be times where small quarrels stem from this, and inevitably it can get heated sometimes.

if you walk out on him for more hours than what feels comfortable, to cool off, he might start to think if you’ve left him for good.

diluc’s sitting at the edge of the bed, and there’s a consistent tapping on the floor as he anxiously drums his foot against it. it’s way past his assigned time to sleep, knowing he has to be up early to run his business. he doesn’t have half the mind to check what time it is, at least, not right now. all he can think about is that you’ve been gone for way too long.

he expects this from the two of you, especially after a heated argument. you two take the time away from one another to cool off and collect your thoughts, but this? this is just outrageous. if he were to give an estimate for how long you’d been gone— it would be two hours longer than you’d typically be gone for. and this just feeds into his worries from earlier, about your well-being.

the whole fight was about you and your safety after all. you would tell him that you’re fully capable of looking out for yourself; he’d say that he has enemies who may come after you; it goes back-and-forth. sensing that the argument was getting nowhere, you took it upon yourself to see yourself out first. “let’s just,” you pinch the bridge of your nose. “let’s just take time to cool off for a bit, shall we?”

“it’s been longer than a bit,” he mutters to himself.

he’s snapped out his thoughts as he hears the bedroom doors open slowly. you peek your head in, just to make eye contact with diluc. you two freeze, simply caught off-guard in the moment. he notes how your hair is a mess— it sticks out in certain areas, and obviously has not been brushed down— and you look a bit rugged. “hey,” you mutter sheepishly.

he wonders if he should ask you where you’ve been, but he holds his tongue. “are you okay?” diluc asks instead, and there’s a certain tenderness in his voice as he addresses you. “you look a bit... rough.”

you snort, throwing a feign hand of offense over your chest, at his words. “gee, thanks. nice to know i’m looking very appealing right now.” you joke. he stares at you, but you can see the faint smile on his lips at the way you’re joking around already. it’s good to know that you two are still okay. “but to answer your question, yes. i simply tripped over a pebble— it was so dark out and my foot got caught. who would’ve known that a pebble would be the one to take me down.”

he laughs at this, and you feel the tension from the argument completely lift.

kaeya

he’ll often wonder if you’re slowly becoming untrusting of him. he’s generally reserved, and quite mysterious— and it could easily be read in the wrong way.

kaeya knows that a relationship is all about communication and trust, well, for it to be healthy at least. and for the most part, he’s pretty open with you.

but there’s still certain aspects of his life that keeps in the dark from you. from his unknown past, to the business he does out of the knight of favonius— he likes that you look up to him as a respectable knight.

sometimes, you’ll ask him why he has duties to attend to at the dead of night, to which he reassuringly tells you that he’s simply off to bother diluc at the tavern. but he knows you’re catching on— diluc hasn’t seen him in the tavern for quite a bit.

“i know you haven’t been at the tavern.” you finally speak up, and you keep your eyes trained on the plate of food in front of you. you dig at the food, poking it around with your utensils— anything to keep your mind off of the fact that your heart is slightly racing right now. you don’t mean to be confrontational, but to be frank, you’re fed up that kaeya hasn’t been honest with you. “you can say that it came as a surprise to me when diluc said you hadn’t been there for a while now.”

“i guess it was only a matter of time before you’d ask diluc about me, and my whereabouts.” he sighs. he’s leaned into his chair by now, and he’s looking at you. your lips are locked into a tight line, a little peeved at the way he still talks so smoothly, and treats this so casually. as if he weren’t taking this seriously, and that this was just some other conversation to him. “i’m simply handling nightly duties.”

your grip becomes slightly tighter around your utensils, and he notices; your knuckles are turning slightly white, and your breathing is slightly out of pace. there’s a small change in his expression, and you can see the way his eyes narrow slightly.

“does it hurt to be honest to me about these things?” you ask him, genuinely hurt at the way it feels like he doesn’t trust you enough. “as your significant other, i guess i’d expected you to be more open to me. i’ve already told you countless times that no matter what, i’ll stick around— and even right now, i mean those words.”

once i tell, there’s no going back, is what he wishes to say. that it’ll be hard to look at someone the same way you’ve done before. “look,” he says as he sighs. kaeya wracks his mind for a way to respond— in a way where he wouldn’t be lying, but he wouldn’t subject you to danger either. “these matters, my nightly duties if you will, are matters between the abyss order and i. i’m afraid that if i tell you anything more about what goes on, you’ll become a target as well. too much knowledge can be harmful.”

“and you couldn’t just tell me that from the get-go?” it’s a fair point, and he throws you an apologetic look from across the table. “i understand, okay? just,” you swipe a hand through your hair. “no more secrets. i don’t think i’ll be as understanding if there’s a next time.”

“of course, my love.”

childe

he fears that one day, he’ll come home and you won’t be there anymore; his involvement with the fatui doesn’t make it any better.

the fatui is known for... it’s notorious deeds, to put it lightly. he had warned you beforehand, that dating a fatui harbinger will be exhausting. mentally, that is.

he’s bloodthirsty and thrill-seeking— it’s his nature. but he knows you don’t agree with the brutal ways the fatui handles their business, and he tries his best to take your mind off of it.

but it’s hard to ignore the words that circulate around liyue about certain things that he’s been up to. childe wonders that if you’ll get fed up one day, and just leave him.

there’s always a small amount of anxiety that bubbles up within childe whenever he approaches the doors of your shared bedroom. there’s that slightly irrational fear that he’ll walk in, and the room will be empty; you won’t be beneath the sheets in deep sleep, and your small breaths wouldn’t fill the room. his hand is hovering over the doorknob, and he almost laughs. a man like him, who stares death in its eyes, too afraid to open the door in fear that he’ll see something he doesn’t like.

childe gathers the courage to twist the knob, and the door creaks softly as he pushes it open. he pauses halfway, the fear taking over him for a second, but pushes through. he lets out an audible breath of relief— seeing you alive and well in front of him, and the comforts of just seeing that. his shoulders slack visibly at the confirmation, and he allows himself to enter the room.

he strips himself of clothes that he’s worn outside, changing into ones more fitting for bed. he’d jump straight into your arms if he could— but he knows that even in a sleepy state, you would still scold him.

he stalks towards the bed after doing the necessities. you stir at the way the bed dips beside you, feeling a pair of strong arms wrap around you. “childe?” you mutter. your voice is laced with sleepiness having just awoken, and you’re rubbing at your eyes as you turn to face him. it takes a second for your brain to start functioning, and you blurt out the first word that comes to mind. “hi.”

“hi to you too,” he mirrors, a small smile gracing his lips. your eyes are barely open as you glance at him, and your words are slightly slurred— but despite that, he truly thinks he’s the luckiest man in the world that he has someone as good as you. someone who sticks around, despite his affiliation. “i’ve missed you a lot, y’know.” he says.

“i missed you more,” you challenge, even in your sleep driven state.

he chuckles at you, before pressing a small kiss to your nose. “sure, sure. let’s fight about who misses each other more in the morning, okay?”

xiao

he’ll often doubt why you’re with him— and wonder if there’ll ever be a day where you run out of patience with him.

he’s getting better with affection, and he’s not finding it as weird as he had before. he doesn’t initiate things, still too embarrassed about the last time he failed to hug you. he wants things to be intimate, but there are still times where he flinches if you touch his hand or hug him, after forgetting to give him a heads up.

you always smile at him, and tell him that you care for his comfort the most. he can see the pain behind your smile though— almost a year of dating and he still hasn’t warmed up to you.

xiao still doesn’t fully understand the logic and need behind affection. but what he does know is that humans seek affection. they are social beings after all. knowing that, he worries that you’ll eventually want someone else who can give you the affection that you deserve.

“i’m sorry,” xiao apologizes in a panic. he was so thrown off-guard and so deep in his thought, that when you’d given him a back hug, he had reacted more violently than intended. thus, he had instinctively pushed you off his shoulder. it was hard to miss the flash of hurt in your eyes as you stumbled back, a little baffled, not expecting xiao to react in a such a way. “i... i apologize for that, y/n.”

it’s easy to notice the literal distance between you two and he reaches out for you, to which he stops himself midway. there’s just something that feels so wrong about touching you right now, especially after he’d just shoved you— it doesn’t feel right. even to now, he’s still scared of touching you. he finds himself getting frustrated at the way that he just can’t wrap his head around doing things in a romantic aspect. even he’s running out of patience with himself, so why do you still have so much?

you notice the way his hand stops, and you can see the countless of emotions within his eyes as he stares at his hands. there’s little glimpses of worry, of self-doubt, and you can tell right now that he’s being critical of himself. you don’t blame him for reacting that way, now that you look back on it in hindsight. anyone would’ve reacted like that as a form of self-defense.

“it’s alright, xiao, it really is.” you reassure him. “don’t be too harsh on yourself, okay? i said we’d take it as slow as we have to, and i plan on keeping my word for that. now... may i?” you gesture to his outstretched hand. he gives you a blank look at first, but nods slowly.

you take his hands in yours— you take your time to link your fingers, intertwining them and appreciating the way they mold together perfectly. you let him feel the way you draw soothing circles on the back of his hand. it’s such a simple action, but it flows with intimacy, and it has a weird feeling erupting in his stomach. (butterflies, he recalls you telling him.)

“see this?” you raise your linked hands. “if this is what you’re comfortable with at the moment, then i’m more than willing to hold hands for as long as you want.”

he wonders if you’ll grow impatient with him— but for now, he’s reassured you’ll stick around.

author’s note.

i’ve put this off for so long, and i intended on keeping it short— but then i felt bad and so i decided to indulge just a little

[ddarker-dreams]

Puppet Strings. Yan Ghost Josuke x Reader [COMM]

Warnings: Josuke’s temper flaring, typical yandere elements, brief alcohol mention. Word count: 3.1k

i.

You didn’t think much of it when you saw your window wide open. 

No, it wasn’t that particular moment that sent alarm bells ringing. It’s remarkable what the human mind is capable of scrounging up to justify an otherwise horrifying situation. Moving from one place to another is an exhausting effort -- you reasoned to yourself -- maybe you reopened it and forgot. That sounds perfectly plausible. Sleep came easily to you that night and all was forgotten the next morning. There were some other minor occurrences, cabinets being open, the television flickering. Nothing incriminating, nothing to worry about. 

For a time, this logic worked in your best interest. The last straw was when your personal belongings started going missing. Lip glosses, shirts, and even some sketchbooks. Contacting the police served to be no help. When they asked who could hold a vendetta against you, you had no solid leads. You’d only been in Morioh a little over a month. Earning an adversary in that short a time felt unlikely, if not impossible. Classmates were interviewed, their alibis clearing them of possible suspects, the investigation stagnant. Your neighbors hadn’t seen questionable figures lurking around your home. Days went by, and a few patrols later, the police claimed there wasn’t much else they could do. There were no signs of breaking and entering, no fingerprints, no leads. 

No peace of mind.

You’ve explored every logical avenue. Not knowing what to do next is the worst part, it’s what serves to frustrate you the most. Sighing, you dry your hands off, mulling over what to do next. Now that you’ve finished washing the dishes, there are no other chores to procrastinate with. Guess I better get started on that project, you think. God, but it’s so hard to focus anymore. 

Without noticing it, you felt drawn to the living room. Anyone would understand, that from the stress you’ve suffered, it’s fine to take a break. A distraction from reality sounds great right about now. Your PlayStation 2, which has been collecting dust, can finally get used. The multiplayer games are bugged -- a Player 2 shows up even when you play it with yourself -- so you haven’t used it in some time. Scanning over the various game choices, you never get a chance to pick one out. 

“Huh, so they released a sequel to that?” An unknown voice, masculine and lighthearted, chimes in behind you. Your immediate reaction is to whip your head back, searching for the source. Heart pounding, you realize this is exactly what you feared. That whoever was stalking you would eventually come to settle things for seeking help from law enforcement. You don’t see him, even though the voice had been close enough to assume he’s behind you. There’s no way you imagined it. Where is he? 

That’s when you see him. 

Whether or not it was intentional, he stands blocking your path to the kitchen, where your phone is. A young man of imposing size, easily dwarfing you. His style throws you off, it’s like he was ripped from another time. That hair… a pompadour? Narrowing your eyes, you stand from your kneeling position, preparing to hold your ground. He might be blocking your ability to call the police, but there’s still the option of running out the front door to alert your neighbors. It’ll be fine, you tell yourself, not entirely convinced. Just don’t panic. 

“Who are you?” Is the first question that slips past your lips. There’s unfiltered hostility in the words, despite your hesitation to aggravate him. Your eyebrows furrow when he puts his hands up in defense. It gives an impression of mockery in an otherwise grave scenario.

“Woah, calm down there,” he lets out a nervous chuckle that further irks you. “You can call me Higashikata Josuke.”

This person -- Josuke -- is acting too casual about this. There’s no doubt in your mind that he’s the source of your torment these past few weeks. How else could he be standing in your home, acting in such a deplorable manner? For your own best interest, you bite your tongue, that’s dying to hurl numerous insults his way. In contrast to his polite speech, he’s dressed like a stereotypical delinquent. Who knows what Josuke would do should you provoke him. You’ve heard rumors of rambunctious youths in the area and don’t want to test the validity of those claims. 

“Alright, Higashikata-san, I’m going to ask you to leave. This is my house. If you just… leave me alone, I won’t contact the police. Alright?” You feel like your proposal is a considerate one, even if you don’t intend to follow through. Once you get to safety, like hell you’re going to let this punk get away with it, he just doesn’t need to know that yet. Josuke shifts weight from one leg to another, contemplating your words.

“I can’t do that. Besides, the same way you feel this is your house, I equally feel like it’s mine.” Josuke replies, scratching his cheek. His tone almost sounds… apologetic. As if it isn’t completely within his control to leave. You gulp when you realize your approach might not work. Maybe he’s not mentally sound? That’s the most plausible solution. Taking a deep breath, you shift to a less combative posture, still hoping to talk him down.

“Is there someone I could call? A guardian, a friend? Let’s figure this out.” You will yourself to keep each word steady to lure him in. The innocent inquiry doesn’t have the intended effect, Josuke frowning as soon as the word guardian left your lips. Shit. Was that a sensitive topic? The scowl is gone in a split second like it never existed. He takes a step closer to you and you take a step back.

“There’s not much to figure out. I’ll be honest then since I’m sure you’re freaking out right now. Which makes sense. I’d be freaking out too…” he trails off, going deep into thought. Finally, Josuke manages to choose the proper words. “How do I go about this? Alright, I’ll just come out and say it.” 

“Well, to put it in simple terms, I’m dead.” 

You blink. Tilting your head, you conclude that this Higashikata Josuke is not mentally well. Getting in contact with a professional is your new top priority. Josuke picks up on your hesitant body language and rushes to give credence to his claim.

“I know, crazy, isn’t it? I’m sorry about your stuff, by the way. Felt like the best way to understand my new housemate without sending you running right away. I’ll return it now,” Josuke’s demeanor doesn’t give you the impression of a liar. Still, a spirit? You don’t know what to think anymore. He sighs at the sour expression on your face. “How to prove this to you… ah, I know. Hey, check this out.” 

Josuke points to the controller sitting on your couch. Not a second later, it starts levitating in the air, your jaw-dropping at the unfeasible spectacle. Josuke lets out an airy chuckle at your bewilderment. “Sorry, that was pretty lame. I didn’t know what else to do.” 

“There’s… really a spirit, in my house.” You struggle to say it aloud. The people living in Morioh could be superstitious, a view you attributed to living out in the country. This paranoia, or sometimes reverence, never fell in line with your beliefs. There was no solid proof that the supernatural existed. It made for riveting local stories, for youths to gossip and movies to adapt, but the line was drawn there. A timeline plays in your head of the past few weeks. It would explain how no one in this active community spotted an intruder, or how the police never found physical evidence. 

“Our house, actually.” He corrects with a beaming smile.

ii. 

Maybe it’s not so bad. 

Josuke, with whom you have an unusual relationship, makes for decent company in your otherwise uneventful life. You still can’t help but feel on guard around him for his earlier behavior. As he explained it, borrowing your belongings was just a way to get to know you. He apologized wholeheartedly for the stress he put on your life. It felt genuine, but an apology doesn’t make everything go away at once. Little by little, Josuke’s grown on you, worming his way into your heart. Memories and feelings fade, your first few weeks after the move are no different. 

“Have you seen my red scarf anywhere?” You call out, peeking underneath your pillow. Josuke appears from thin air -- an element that took some getting used to -- helping to look around your room. One of your conditions for remaining here was that he’d show up in your room only when invited, a condition Josuke was more than happy to agree to. You guess everyone is lonely in their own way.

“It’s not over here,” Josuke yells from beneath your desk. “What do you need it for, anyway? Can’t you just turn the heater on?” 

“Well, I could, but that wouldn’t do me much good. Some friends invited me to karaoke tonight, and the weather report said it’ll drop to four degrees celsius.” Feeling defeated, you plop onto your bed, staring at the ceiling. Josuke leans over, popping into your line of sight. He’s lacking the trademark smile you’ve grown used to seeing. For such a minor change, it packs a punch. Josuke sulks like a kicked puppy.

“Karaoke, huh?” He mutters, more to himself than you. “My old classmates used to do stuff like that. Sounds fun.” 

You sit up and cross your legs. Josuke’s tone is a longing one, wishing to fulfill a dream that can never be, visage painfully bleak. Guilt bubbles up in your stomach for the insensitive comment, not realizing he has a lot on his mind too. Josuke’s bubbly personality stood on a thin sheet of ice, ready to plunge into the depths at any moment. You wrack your mind to try and appease him. 

“It really isn’t anything that exciting. I was going to say no, but they insisted. Just imagine it as a bunch of tone-deaf people drunkards belting, that’s all it is.” You console. Josuke doesn’t light up at your joke, his eyes hollow. From what you know about spirits, if they linger in this realm instead of moving onto the next, that means an obligation is holding them here. You’ve never asked Josuke why he hasn’t passed on. That leaves room for speculation, numerous hours spent ruminating over theories. Maybe he’ll tell you one day, or maybe he won’t. Either way, it’s still tragic he never got to live his life.

“Mm… guess so, yeah.” He isn’t paying attention to your words. Guilt as sharp as knives slices through you at Josuke’s gloomy mood. For a split second, you consider canceling with your friends, to stay home and cheer him up. He always loves playing games with you or just speaking over trivial matters for hours. You push the idea away. Fraternizing with a spirit on the daily isn’t enough to supply your social needs, only friends of flesh and blood can fill that role. 

“Hey, I’m sorry for mentioning it. If you want to talk about--” 

“No,” he cuts you off, shaking his head. “Go ahead. Go live life.” 

You don’t offer a rebuttal. Josuke probably needs time to think, you decide. We can talk about it later.

iii. 

“What’s up?” 

You lean against the wall, payphone pressed against one ear and your hand covering the other. Music blares in the background, terrible acoustics of the crowded bar making it difficult to hear the other line. One of the workers grabbed you, saying you had a call, your guesses of who it could be next to nonexistent. You scrunch your nose up when you hear Josuke’s distinct voice on the other side.

“It’s late,” you hear him say. His voice is muffled, but the exasperated tone is hard to miss. “Shouldn’t you be back by now?” 

Sighing, you struggle to rationalize why Josuke’s pestering you like this. You never gave a time when you’d be home, not thinking it was necessary. “I was going to leave soon. I don’t have class in the next few days, so it’s fine.” 

“It’s dangerous to be out on your own--” 

“Josuke,” you deadpan, rubbing your temples. “I appreciate the concern, really, I do. But I used to live in Tokyo, remember? If I could survive the city at night, I can survive here.” 

“That’s not the point here,” Josuke counters, voice dropping dangerously low. Your patience is wearing thin at his attempts to police your autonomy. It’s not his place to enforce a curfew on you. “You don’t know what kinds of danger lurks in Morioh.” 

Josuke’s statement is full of bone-chilling conviction. Almost like he was speaking from firsthand experience. You take a deep breath, remembering that you’re speaking to someone who likely died in a traumatizing manner here. Maybe extending a little grace wouldn’t hurt. It’s a shame to cut the night short, but it’s not that big a deal.  

“Okay, I get it. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk back home. I’ll see you soon, alright?” 

Softening your voice seems to have the effect you intended. Josuke takes a second to consider, the two of you waiting in tense silence. This is the first time you’ve gone out with friends, maybe he just wasn’t sure what to make of it. You hold no intention of bending to his every whim, but this one time, you’ll offer him peace of mind. There’ll be major boundaries set up in the future. 

He sighs begrudgingly. “... Right.” 

iv. 

This is getting ridiculous. 

Josuke’s behaving no better than an entitled child, your paper-thin patience starting to give way. The circumstances you’ve been placed into were unusual enough, to begin with, but they never felt malicious, not until Josuke’s personality seemed to switch in the blink of an eye. What you can only describe as sabotage has become a regular occurrence. It perfectly parallels the problems you had upon first moving into this house, only now you know the one responsible. He’ll act none the wiser, claiming innocence in what has to be his doing.

Cut phone lines, missing shoes, personal journals disappearing into thin air, nothing has been spared. Maybe you were foolish for trusting a spirit. You’d like to have thought you were on solid terms with Josuke, your mortal mind doing its best to wrap around the otherworldly events. You’re at your wit’s end, now fully prepared to confront him on this unacceptable display. It’s a shame it came to this, you think. Confrontation is the worst.

“Josuke.” 

“[First].” 

The two of you sit in the living room, on opposite sides of the couch. Ever since the karaoke disaster a few weeks ago, Josuke’s attitude has taken an undesirable turn, as evidenced by how he’s acting now. Never did you imagine he could be so petty. You straighten out your posture, squaring your shoulders, and placing your hands on your lap. He stares at you with faint interest, cerulean eyes shining at your attention. 

“I’ve tried my best to be understanding,” you wince at how dramatic your words are. It almost sounds like you’re breaking up with a partner. “If I did something that upset you, please just be honest about it.” 

Josuke gives a nonchalant wave. “Nah, it’s not that important anymore. I recently made up my mind, so I don’t feel too concerned about it.” 

There weren’t many expectations in place for this talk, but Josuke dismissing you this fast wasn’t an outcome you envisioned. It feels like a slap to the face after you spent days dreading this talk. What did “recently making up his mind” even mean? Irritation rises in your throat like bile, words snapping out before you can stop them.

“You don’t just get to be that dismissive,” you point out with a scowl. “I know what you’ve been doing. Taking my stuff again, right, Higashikata? I’m fed up with this shit. Maybe I should just move out--” 

Your sentence gets cut off by the coffee table’s glass shattering. The high pitched noise makes you jump, shards flying in multiple directions on the floor. Glancing from the mess back to Josuke, you find the sight of him as a stronger cause for worry. He looks thoroughly unimpressed with your emotional outburst. Thick eyebrows knit together, his face contorting from friendly to enraged. You gulp when a sudden chill in the air sending shivers down your spine. With how friendly your relationship with him had been up to this point, you forgot to watch your tongue, the initial reverence wearing off long ago. 

Josuke stands up, flaunting his towering build. Looking down at you through lidded eyes, he reaches down, and you catch a glimpse of light blue and pink. Huh? What was that? A trick of the lights, maybe? As fast as it was destroyed, you watch in awe as the pieces return to their original place. Broken glass, chips of wood, screws and all, become whole as if it was a movie playing in reverse. Is this something else a spirit can do? 

“Y’know, [First],” Josuke begins with a humorless laugh. “This is great. I wasn’t sure how to do this part. Now I don’t have to worry about that, so let me cut right to the chase.” 

You feel the blood draining from your face, goosebumps dotting your skin. This is wrong. Whatever he’s doing now, you can’t stand another second of it. “Josuke, you’re scaring me.” 

“That’s fine by me.” He smiles. There’s a palpable thickness in the air, tension elevating as each second crawls by. Your mind trips over itself in search of a solution to this, but deep down inside, you’re filled with dread. A dread that this damage is beyond repair and that you’ve made a fatal mistake. Would screaming even help you? Could you outrun a ghost? Your heart pounders against your ribcage and you pray it isn’t Josuke who’s trying to rip it out. 

“You saw that table,” Josuke points to the once destroyed furniture, now neatly put back together. He frowns at your lack of confirmation, pressing further, voice increasing in volume. “Right?” 

You somehow manage to nod. Your throat and tongue are too dry to use and the room feels like it’s spinning. 

“That makes this simple then,” Josuke sits back down to his spot from before and stretches his arms. “There’s a lot I’m capable of. Way more than I’ve shown you. Breaking things apart and fixing them is my specialty, but… that last part can easily be omitted.” 

Josuke turns to face you, eyes peering into the depths of your soul.

“Threaten to leave me again and I won’t even bother to put you back together.” 

[aster-aspera]

One place to fall

@badthingshappenbingo

Prompt: Can’t go home

Relationship: Jon/Martin/Tim/Sasha

Warnings: food, Jon just generally being a bit sad? Idk, if there’s something you want tagged, feel free to tell me

Masterlist

If you liked it, please reblog

Jon woke up that morning with a strangled gasp, the afterimage of his dreams still burned into the back of his eyelids, keeping him from falling back to sleep. He rolled over, expecting to find the comforting warmth of one of his partners to keep him company in the lonely hours of an early day. Instead, what greeted him was the cold grey wall of Georgie’s guest room. It didn’t take long after that for the memories to flow back.

Three days. He really should stop expecting them to be here at this point.

They’re not here, they can’t be here, and he can’t go home, not for a long while, not till the police stop suspecting him for a murder he didn’t commit.

He sighed, rolling over onto his back when aches started running up his side. He stared up at the off-white popcorn ceiling, trying not to think of how Tim was probably sprawled out over Martin and Sasha, stealing most of the blankets and driving his sharp elbows into their sides. He tried not to miss Sasha’s warmth against his side and the sound of Martin’s soft snores. He always used to complain about their sleeping arrangements, but now he would do anything to be back in that bed.

He groaned and rolled over a few more times, trying in vain to find a position that was comfortable enough to attempt sleep again, not that that would go very well, with the nightmares plaguing him as soon as he closed his eyes.

Eventually, he conceded and got out of bed, grabbing his cane from the wall and taking a moment to work the stiffness out of his limbs. He limped into the kitchen and smiled at the Admiral when he raised his head sleepily. He wondered if he could convince the others to get a cat when he got home. If he ever got home.

The smile slipped off his face and he turned to open the curtains, letting in the greyish light of an early dawn. The Admiral mewled plaintively at his feet, pushing against him. He bent down carefully to run his fingers along the cat’s back, closing his eyes for a moment and just letting the feeling ground him.

He straightened and made his way over to the cramped kitchen, intent on making himself a small breakfast to keep him company whilst he waited for the world to wake up. He reached towards the cabinet over the sink, and for a moment expected their mismatched collection of mugs with ridiculous quotes and terrible puns. He shouldn’t have felt the disappointment he did when instead it was just a shelf of plain white cups.

He shut the cabinet door a little more forcefully than strictly necessary, breathing deeply against the sudden swell of emotion in his throat.

In the scope of all that had happened to him, this should have been minor, this should have been fine. It was just Georgie, the person he had used to love, the person he still cared for. And his partners were really just a phone call away.

So why then, did it feel like he was breaking? Why did every little reminder this wasn’t his home tear something apart deep in his gut?

Home had always been his safety net, and now, he had nowhere to fall.

And now he just had to sit here, stare at the blank walls and hope the police would finally realise he hadn’t been the one to kill jurgen Leitner. Every day that hope felt a bit further away.

He opened the group chat he shared with the others. There were no new messages, of course not, none of them were awake yet. Six am was a bit early even for Tim. He scrolled back to their conversation from last night.

A picture of Tim grinning into the camera while a pot bubbles over behind him.

Sasha: Tim’s cooking tonight, send help

Martin: If the house burns down or he poisons us, I want you to know I love you

Jon: I’m sure it won’t come to that.

He scrolls back down to the bottom of the chat, a small smile on his face at the easy conversation of last night. It wasn’t the same as being there with them, but it was a small comfort.

The three dots that signalled someone was typing popped up on his screen and he noted with surprise Sasha was already online.

Sasha: Youre up early

Jon: I could say the same for you.

Sasha: Needed to pee

Jon: Yes, I suppose that makes sense.

Sasha: So what’s your excuse

Jon: My back hurts again.

Sasha: :(

Sasha: And is that the only reason?

Jon: No

Jon: I miss you.

Sasha: Darling

Jon: I’m alright, I just wish I could see you

Jon: In person that is.

Sasha: We could come over?

Jon: I don’t think that’s wise.

Sasha: Yeah, i guess

Sasha: We miss you too

A swarm of emotions bubbled up in Jon’s throat at the words, threatening to spill over in a mess of heartache and sorrow and fear. They press against the bounds of his throat, choking him, filling him with so many feelings he could not even begin to parse them out. He just wanted to go home.

He swallows it down, tucks the whole mess into a corner of his mind and puts down his phone. He doesn’t want to bother Sasha, or any of the others. He’s already put so much on them, dragged them into the fear and confusion that was the archives, he had no right to bother them with more.

And he knew he was just being dramatic, he was a grown man, he should be able to handle being away from home for a while. He just needed to get himself together, focus on the next step.

He picked up a stack of statements from the coffee table, slipping on his glasses and burying himself in the comforting rhythm of paper and pen. At least this was something he still controlled, still knew how to do.

Georgie appeared at some point, giving him a disapproving glance to find him working so early and coraling him into eating breakfast with her. She can’t stay long after that, and both Jon and the Admiral watch her leave with the same forlorn air.

Jon looked up from his work as a heavy knock resounded from the front door. His first thought was that it was Georgie, back from her errands early. But she would just have let herself in, and Jon knew for certain she had her key with her when she left.

And who did that leave? The police? Some avatar coming to settle a score? Gertrude's killer finally come to finish the job?

Every option was bad, and every option would not let a flimsy door stop them. He stood up, walked into the kitchen as calmly as he could with dread and paranoia hanging over him like a dark cloud and grabbed the largest knife he could find. The knock came again, and he could hear indistinct whispering from behind the door.

Multiple people then. That wasn’t good for his chances. He gripped the knife just a little bit tighter.

“Hey boss, open up,” came a familiar voice, one he used to hear rough and sleepy in the mornings and soft and loving in the evenings. His heart brightened in a momentary thrill at the thought of his partners, or at least, one of them, being on the other side of that door, so close to him again after all those days without them. And all he had to do was open up that door and pull them into his arms once more.

That thrill was almost immediately dampened again as he realized they should not be here. It was why he had left in the first place. They were too connected to him, too wrapped up in his messy web of conspiracy and paranoia. If the police saw them here, if Elias saw them here, they would be leading all of it right to Georgie’s doorstep.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” He told the door and tried not to think of the warm hands behind it.

“We’re not supposed to do a lot of things,” Came Sasha’s amused voice.

“Like date each other,” Tim filled in, “But here we are, so you going to let us in now?”

“No, the police could find out, and you might get Georgie in trouble and there’s just so many reasons this is a bad idea.”

“Jon please, we’re worried about you, Georgie said you weren’t doing well,” Martin said softly

Jon sat down on the couch heavily, knees protesting from standing up too long. He stared at the door.

“And standing out here is probably a lot more risky than being in the apartment, so best let us in.”

He sighed. You never could argue with Sasha’s logic. The others looked up victoriously when he finally unlocked the door.

“There he is!” Tim crowed, as Sasha and Martin offered him a warm smile while bustling into the apartment, both laden with grocery bags. Sasha pressed a light kiss to his forehead as she passed and he tried not to start crying at the feeling.

“You have to leave,” He said as he shut the door, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Martin and Sasha didn’t look up from where they were unloading piles of vegetables and snacks from their bags.

“What? No, hey guys, I missed you, happy to see you all?” Tim complained as he draped himself over Jon’s back. Jon scowled at him.

“Jon, stop being stubborn, we’ve all been through hell the past few weeks, and right now we just want to be here to keep you company,” Martin said in that firm yet gentle voice of his.

“You really shouldn’t be alone after all that,” Sasha said as she dumped out a tupperware container into a pot.

“I’m not alone,” Jon said grumpily, “I have the Admiral.” Though he had apparently decided to make himself scarce for the time being. Jon cursed him for the betrayal.

“Are you saying you prefer the company of a cat to ours?” Tim asked, pulling them both back onto the couch and settling a blanket over them.

“Maybe,” Jon pouted, burrowing into Tim’s chest despite the fact that he was still upset with them, “He doesn’t uselessly endanger everyone to come give me cuddles.”

“Well we’re here now, and we’re not leaving till you feel better.”

“And admit it, you’re happy we’re here,” Martin said, apparently finishing up with his preparations in the kitchen and curling up next to Jon on the couch.

Jon did not want to admit it, but something warm and content curled up in his stomach, the warm feeling of home returning to his bones. A warm and savoury smell drifted through the room, clearly coming from whatever Sasha was warming up on the stove.

This apartement did not look like home in the slightest, the walls and ceiling all wrong, the furniture hard and uncomfortable and unfamiliar. But with all of them here, and that familiar smell of soup and Tim’s conditioner surrounding him, it wasn’t all that bad.

Sasha sat down on his other side, handing everyone a bowl of soup and giving Jon a gentle kiss on his knuckles. Martin pressed one to his temple and Tim just ruffled his hair fondly.

A few words were exchanged between them, but Jon didn’t bother paying too much attention. He knew he should still be angry, or at least have a firm conversation with them on what they had agreed on. But not now, not when they were here and he was home and for a moment he could forget all about Leitner and the institute and just be safe.

[rigmarolling]

Top 5 Things That Will Kill You In the Victorian Era

If you’ve ever spent more than two seconds with me, you know that I live and breathe the fog-choked air of Victorian London. All day. Every day of my life. 

See, in many ways, the Victorians were the first version of us--overwhelmed by rapidly-changing technology (and its awful effect on the climate); dealing with incredible wealth gaps; grappling with rising crime and faster travel and out-of-control media and the whole, “God is dead, oh no” thing. 

Also, everything was trying to kill you.

Like, literally almost everything.

From your clothes to your doctor to your canned food, here are the top five things that will kill you in the Victorian era.

5. Other Victorians

If the rise of penny dreadfuls (cheap magazines stuffed with horror stories for us morbidly-inclined goth types) was any indication, Victorians loved them some true crime. 

And there was no shortage of subject matter to choose from: depending on where you ventured in London, at least, you could be subject to anything from pickpocketing to mugging to violent assault and, of course, murder. 

There were a few reasons for this:

For one thing, the population in London alone increased by millions in the 19th century, and approximately no one was prepared for that. So, to accommodate the rapidly-booming population, the wealthy folks in charge reached out and lovingly ensured the masses of the disenfranchised poor were taken care of by redistributing resources and education and access to opportunities that improved lives on a both a personal and social level.

Lol, no, I’m totally kidding; they shoved them into slums and tenement buildings and pretended they didn’t exist.

So of course, there was a rise in crime, because if you have five kids and you can’t find gainful employment and your family will starve if you don’t steal that basket of food over there, or that purse that lady left sitting over THERE, what are you going to do? You’re going to steal the food and the purse to survive, Jean Valjean, I understand, I do.

Except the powers that be did NOT understand, and instead routinely espoused the idea that if people were poor, it was because they were morally bankrupt, or inherently bad, somehow, and the “criminal classes,” as they came to be known by the growing Victorian middle and upper-middle classes, were simply considered genetically bad to the bone and therefore undeserving of assistance.

Basically:

So ANYWAY.

Crime was on the rise and there were multiple efforts to stop it with varying degrees of success, but big city usually = big crime, especially when there’s a massive gap between the one percent-ers and THE REST OF US, WASHINGTON.

Ahem.

All that crime? The booming news industry loved it. The press ate it up and then spit it back out in salacious headlines that never even bothered with journalistic objectivity, like this gem:

I mean. Full disclosure: I, too, agree that cutting off a woman’s head, arms, and legs and then burning them is “awful, inhuman, & barbarous” but just...maybe...maybe tone it down? Just a bit?

No? Okay.

See, here’s the thing: crime sells. It always has. And papers went nuts with full illustrated spreads about the latest brutal murders so you could sit in your parlor and get anxiety poops thinking about how the butcher down the street looked at you funny the other day and oh, God, you’re probably next, oh God.

The most famous murderer of the era, was, of course, Jack the Ripper, which was just the orchestral climax of a hideously corrupted society that had bubbled into naught but a festering carbuncle, an ulcer upon the very soul of man, trussed up as a city of industry, but which is merely Salome, dancing with the Lamb’s head upon a platter and sending us all tumbling into a fiery pit.

....Ahem, again.

Some popular ways your fellow Victorians could kill you included: dueling (with swords but usually with revolvers), stabbing, garroting, and, probably the most popular method of the era, poisoning.

Speaking of which...

4. Anything dyed that hip shade of green

In 1775, a guy named Carl Wilhelm Scheele invented a new shade of green, cleverly called Scheele’s green, and it instantly became a hit. Pretty soon, manufacturers and tailors were dyeing everything this color. 

Look at it. Bright, airy. Calls to mind a fresh, spring meadow. (What’s that, you ask? Well, before the Industrial Revolution belched out black smoke onto absolutely everything, there were these things called plants and grass and they were all over the place and you could frolic through them and it was very nice for your serotonin levels.)

I mean, listen, this isn’t really my color because anything vaguely yellow-ish makes my already yellow-ish skin look especially jaundiced, but it’s a lovely shade:

Besides using it to create beautiful dresses and tasteful waistcoats, they used it inside book covers:

And it was a super popular wallpaper color:

They had green candles and green cups and green kitchenwares and green paint.

But while Carl Wilhelm Scheele didn’t exactly murder anyone (even though he has three names like every serial killer ever), he sort of, accidentally, indirectly, kinda...did.

Because that springy dye contained every Victorian black widow’s favorite method to dispose of a troublesome husband: arsenic.

Scheele, of course, had no idea--no one did--so I’m fully exonerating him here, but the poison nonetheless started to take its toll.

Reports began to surface of kids getting sicker and sicker and then dying in their green wallpapered rooms; of fashionable ladies rocking those green dresses at balls and then ALSO getting sicker and sicker and breaking out in horrible sores before dying. 

They even used this stuff to dye food green, so of course, anybody who tucked into Victorian green eggs and ham also, you know. Died.

And if they DIDN’T die, they got cancer, because if arsenic doesn’t kill you, it will give you cancer. And then kill you.

Eventually, as science advanced and went, “HEYO, there’s literal poison in this stuff,” consumers were like, “Well, shoot, this summer’s hottest beach shade just killed an entire boarding school,” and Scheele’s green finally fell out of favor.

It was, however, used as a pesticide up through the 1930s, so...way to use the...leftovers? I guess?

3. Your canned food

Hey, now that we’re on the topic of deadly chemicals being where they absolutely should not be, let’s talk about canned food. 

In the Victorian era, it was the new Hot Thing (next to arsenic green). You mean I can can my food now? Like? Forever? Oh, only for a few months. Okay, cool. Still cool. 

Above: Road trip snax.

Food preservation methods had existed long before canned meats and veggies and soups, but canned everything really started to gain traction around the middle of the 19th century, and people were stoked. Remember, the population exploded; people needed new methods of obtaining cheap food that didn’t spoil immediately. So: cans to the rescue! 

Recycling hadn’t really been invented, though, so today, archaeologists constantly find giant Victorian trash pits filled with empty cans.

You know what also hadn’t been invented? Consumer health and safety boards.

So guess what was in the tin cans themselves? 

No, no, don’t worry, it wasn’t arsenic.

It was lead.

Which, in case you weren’t aware, is also very, very bad for you.

So bad, in fact, that today, scientists are pretty sure lead-lined tins of canned food were partially responsible for the deaths on the disastrous Franklin Expedition, an ultimately futile trip to discover the Northwest Passage lead by Sir John Franklin in 1845. Every single man on board the two ships stranded in the Arctic died, and in the 1980s, when scientists discovered perfectly mummified bodies (GRAPHIC, if you don’t like that sort of thing, but awesome if you do) of some of the sailors, one of the mummies contained insane amounts of lead. They later tested the cans found scattered across the wreck site and whoops, they also contained insane amounts of lead.

Above: Some of the tin cans from the Franklin Expedition, which contained items like salted beef, vegetables, tea, lethal amounts of lead, and Chicken of the Sea.

Granted, other factors contributed to the Franklin deaths, like, you know, being stranded in the Arctic and starving to death, and also tuberculosis, but lead-lined canned food certainly didn’t help things along.

2. Your doctor

Here’s my advice if you’re in the Victorian era and you’re starting to feel sick: do not get sick. Just don’t. Because then that means you’ll have to go to the doctor. Which probably means you will die.

Hospitals in the 19th century were deadly. Often even more deadly than just staying at home, according to Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris, author of The Butchering Art. Nobody knew how to treat anything, really, because medical understanding of biology was in its infancy and antibiotics didn’t exist yet, so you were absolutely, definitely going to get some kind of infection the second you stepped foot in a Victorian hospital.

Above: The surgery, where nobody has any idea what they are doing, ever.

Doctors weren’t trying to kill you on purpose--they just didn’t know any better. And it super duper didn’t help that common treatments for everything from the common cold to tuberculosis included taking mercury (which kills you) and blood-letting, (which can also kill you) the tools for which are shown below:

Those might look like fun doodads for your astronomy class at Hogwarts, but they’re actually vials and a really, really sharp needle that pricks you until you bleed out a critically dangerous amount of blood into those vials. 

The (ancient) school of thought behind blood-letting was that draining patients of “bad” blood would rebalance their “humours” and get rid of the icky thing that was making them sick. We might laugh at it now, but if you don’t know any better, logically, it makes sense.

Medically, oh my God, it’s the worst.

So if Doc didn’t bleed you to death, he might try surgery--done without anesthesia or antibiotics (until good old Dr. Lister came along--read The Butchering Art!), and then ship you and your amputated stump leg off to the hospital ward where, instead of healing, you’d get wheeled through hallways stained with every bodily fluid imaginable into rooms filled with people coughing up every bodily fluid imaginable, some of which would get into your leg stump, infect it, and then kill you dead.

“But what about medicine?” you ask. “Can’t I just take medicine?”

Sure! Just be aware that it definitely contains morphine and probably contains cocaine, or mercury, or arsenic, or sulfur, or pulverized bits of ancient Egyptian mummies (I am not kidding. True, the latter had started to fall out of favor in the 19th century, but, like. Stop).

Above: Hard drugs, but just for you.

You think I’m joking?

Above: PARTY TIME.

Sometimes, a doctor would just advise that you move to a “more temperate climate” like Rome or Spain if you were feeling chronically ill, which might help you get a tan and COULD help if you had sucky lungs, but eventually, you’d just die anyway, because what you really needed was a strong antibiotic or antiviral medication and the closest you were gonna get was Mrs. Hopplebopple’s Temperance Tonic, which was probably filled with ground up baby bones and just so much heroin.

And don’t even get me started on Victorian surgical tools:

Open wide.

1. Water

There are three rules in this life: don’t watch any Adam Sandler movies except for maybe Anger Management, don’t eat the yellow snow, and do not, ever, for any reason, ever drink water in Victorian England.

That’s because it was about as clean as a Victorian hospital. 

Meaning it wasn’t. At all.

Victorian water--of the Thames variety--contained:

Cholera, one of the deadliest killers of the era and bad water’s favorite roommate.

Poop, human and otherwise, because a functioning sewer system? I don’t know her. (At least, not until the 1860s.)

Pee, human and otherwise, because nothing says, “Jolly Old England” like an open trench of piss rolling through the city.

Dead things, like animals, fish (which are animals, so why am I listing them as a separate thing?), and, occasionally, humans.

Chemicals, which spewed forth from the great factories in billowing, bubbling, belching rivers of sludge. (Ha! Omg, yes, I was an English major!)

The Thames was so filthy that Londoners called it “Monster Soup.”

Above: Same.

In 1855, scientist Michael Faraday (who was also kind of hot; tell me I’m wrong), wrote a letter to the Times about the disgusting state of the river:

"Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind. ... The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water; it was the same as that which now comes up from the gully-holes in the streets; the whole river was for the time a real sewer."

Tl;dr: “It smelled like ass.”

In fact, it got so bad, so putrid, so horrifically clogged with every disgusting thing your mind and your butthole can possibly conjure up, that it lead to one of my favorite things to read about in the world: The Great Stink of 1858.

Yes, that’s the real name. I did not make that up. History is incredible.

Above: Summer vacation, 1858.

The summer of 1858 was miserably hot in London. And the Thames was miserably clogged with poop, and pee, and chemicals, and dead things, and, uh oh, cholera. During July and August that year, the smell wafting from the river was so offensive that Parliament was actually adjourned because everybody kept throwing up. Cholera devastated the city. The water was killing London.

Faced with either the prospect of living with a city-wide vomit-and-diarrhea smell for the rest of forever OR finally cleaning things up, the government actually did something right and chose the latter. They contracted civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette to overhaul the city’s sewer, to which Bazalgette, pinching his nose, responded, “FINALLY.” 

Above: Joesph Bazalgette, savior of the London sewers and purveyor of a truly beautiful mustache.

Bazalgette proceeded to build the London sewer system still in use today. His efforts greatly reduced the number of cholera deaths, cleared the Thames of its Cronenberg-esque muck, and ensured that poop goes where it’s supposed to: way the hell out of HERE and way the hell under THERE.

Water sanitation still had a long way to go, though, which meant you either had to boil your water to kill the bacteria in it, or you could just drink alcohol instead, which was the safer option but which would also leave you very dehydrated and also, if imbibed excessively, would leave you very dead.

So really, you were doomed in some way no matter what you did, and if that isn’t the moral of the entire Victorian story, then I don’t know what is.

[thanksjro]

Dark Cybertron Chapter 12: That’s the Power of Love, Babeyyyyy

Thank fucking god, it’s almost over.

Our issue opens up with Ironhide deadnaming Slug, like the out-of-touch grandpa that he is. Everything is going to shit, the whole city’s covered in lasers like the world’s worst rave, and someone thought it was a good idea to let Swerve have a gun.

As the Ammonites try to murder everyone in sight, Whirl and Arcee have a little chat about how Whirl’s seemingly caused every problem ever in the last four million years.

…Whirl, you have been keeping up with your appointments with Rung, right? Like, I know he’s not the best therapist around by any stretch of the imagination, but surely something would be better than nothing in this case.

On the Lost Light, Hound, Perceptor, and Mainframe are keeping track of how many Ammonites have been killed. Everyone is extra British in this bit. Perceptor basically calls Hound a fucking idiot, because even with all the guys who’ve been taken out, there are still literally BILLIONS of these suckers running around.

Which seems a little overkill to me, but what do I know? Warcrimes aren’t my specialty.

Meanwhile, in the Mystical City of Making Science Cry, Starscream apparently knows what cosplay is, and takes a potshot at Jhiaxus for stealing his look. Metalhawk explains how the Ammonites got here in the first place, which, y’know, is cool. Love me some technobabble exposition.

I don’t actually love it.

I’m sorry for lying.

I WOULD ALSO LIKE FOR METALHAWK TO PUT A STOP TO THIS

BUT WE’VE GOT ANOTHER 19 PAGES TO GO

SO I GUESS LIFE JUST ISN’T FUCKING FAIR RATTRAP

While Metalhawk contemplates ending the comic event early, Starscream is getting his ass kicked by an old man who spent the war sitting on his butt in the Dead Universe.

Over with Team -Imus, Brainstorm’s taking a breather after getting Robertsed at the end of last issue. Ultra Magnus makes a pun, I guess to cope with the fact that he doesn’t understand anything that’s going on. Cyclonus is still dying, but this isn’t about him. Nightbeat is also dying. Oh, and Kup. Turns out, being a part of the Dead Universe is sort of an issue when you’re out of it.

Even though Galvatron was fine. And Jhiaxus. And Nova Prime, for the little bit he was out of it.

I feel like this plot point kinda just shows up when it’s convenient.

Anyway.

Brainstorm has shit in his lab that can help them not die, but he and Skids are gonna need help to get all these undead morons back to the Lost Light, which means that only two folks would be going to face Shockwave in this final confrontation.

Speaking of Shockwave, he’s gone full Burning Justice with that time drive shoved into his chest, as he makes fun of Megatron for being a dumb stupid idiot who gave him everything he needed to end the universe. He reveals himself to be a nihilist, claiming that a Cybertron which only exists for existence’s sake- and without any form of life- is the ultimate in perfection. Also, he’s a communist now. A nihilistic communist.

Just… whatever, Shockwave.

Megatron’s annoyed by all this posturing- which, same- but enough about him, it’s time for Ultra Magnus and Optimus Prime drop down from… somewhere… to kick some ass. Shockwave promptly shoots Magnus, and is about to do the same to Optimus, when this starts happening:

Huh. Wonder what all that’s about.

Shockwave snaps out of his stupor and proceeds to fire on Optimus, yelling about being the only thing that exists as he does.

Over with Rodimus and friends, Cyclonus is bitching about Rodimus not leaving him behind so he could go fight Shockwave. Nightbeat, who I guess just doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, tells Cyclonus to quit it, because they all know that he just misses his boyfriend. Cyclonus, though blatantly annoyed, doesn’t actually refute this claim. Brainstorm wonders aloud just how this gaggle of assholes managed to escape the Dead Universe without murdering each other.

Rodimus explains that when they heard the singing at Swerve’s, it proved they could still get out of the Dead Universe, so they desecrated Nova Prime’s corpse to make a space bridge. Brainstorm became a doorway, because he’s very nearly dead, and oh yeah, he should probably fix that when they get back to the lab, and also reconsider his lab safety protocols.

The gang reaches the outside world, and Rodimus is given a chance to spout off his personal philosophies.

Fantastic, you funky little man.

Then everyone looks up in the sky and sees some real bullshit.

Hey, Cahill? I just wanna talk, man. Just wanna talk about this boobie Windblade you’ve cursed my eyes with.

Back over with Jhiaxus and Starscream, Jhiaxus just cannot shut up. He just keeps waxing poetic about how smart Shockwave’s plan is. I couldn’t even tell you what the guy’s saying- my eyes glaze over whenever he gets a speech bubble.

Metalhawk at this point has had quite enough of all this nonsense, and decides he’s gonna throw himself into the equation that allows the Dark Cybertron prophecy to manifest.

By killing himself.

He just fuckin’… tosses himself into some heavy machinery and explodes, and that throws all the ores out of wack, since he’s got the Resurrection Ore in him. Jhiaxus is distracted by a man just straight-up dying in the same room as him, and this give Starscream the opening he needs to stab Jhiaxus in the gut.

Then the background just straight up disappears, as Rattrap lets everyone know that it’s all still going to shit, but in the opposite direction.

Really not sure about this art direction, but whatever. I’m over it.

Back outside, all the Ammonites are exploding. All of them. Billions of the little suckers, just popping off like fire crackers. The environment’s going to be ruined at this rate. Metroplex is having a great fucking time. Happy for him.

The Lost Light calls the ladies inside Metroplex’s brain room, and lets them know that they’re gonna break up Monstructor like the mediocre boy-band he is, though not without Mainframe being difficult beforehand. The ladies jump out and enter the fray, admiring Arcee’s style as they do.

Back with Rodimus and pals, Nightbeat’s being fucking cryptic, and Brainstorm gets to work making it so folks aren’t dying from being in the wrong universe, after a little prodding to his ego.

Back in Shockwave’s Super Saiyan Energy Bubble of Pure Unadulterated Logic, Shockwave says that’s he’s fucking ripped, and Optimus couldn’t beat him in a fight. Clearly, this means we’ll have to use our words to resolve this, like adults. Optimus isn’t too sure about that option, however.

I mean, do I even have to- Optimus, that’s GAY.

I have the sneaking suspicion that Roberts wrote this portion of the script. Y’know, just given his track record.

Then Megatron blasts Shockwave with his fusion cannon, and makes fun of Optimus for being a sentimental fool.

The fact that “Dark Cybertron” is telling me this makes me so mad. Like, you don’t get to talk, Exposition Central.

It’s at this point that Megatron drops a bomb on everyone present- he’s done with being a Decepticon. He’s gonna be an Autobot now.

See, ol’ Megsy here has seen the error of his ways- that by fighting the Senate, he allowed them to change him into a murderous warlord. To prove how much of a nice guy he is, he’s ripped the Autobrand off of Bumblebee’s lifeless body and duct-taped it to his chest.

Which seems a tad disrespectful, but okay.

…Megatron, you do realize that, as the leader of the Decepticons, you could just tell everyone that they need to be nice, and that would more or less be the end of it, right? You could just say “not evil anymore, I want to be loved now”, and everyone would be all “sir yes sir.” This is going to be a PR nightmare, I can already tell. Shockwave certainly seems to agree with me.

I really like this panel structure. Want to say this is the only place it happens, too. It’s just too bad it lives in “Dark Cybertron”.

Shockwave’s not having a good time right now, and he’s convinced that Optimus and Megatron have teamed up just to make him upset so he loses control of the time drive. The two spout off a little Autobot propaganda, and then Shockwave Remembers™.

Shockwave, having had his shadowplay reverse violently and abruptly, is horrified to find what he’s become. Alas, it’s too late for him- the only way to stop the time drive is for Optimus to kill him. Optimus promises to remember who Shockwave was- a callback to the line Shockwave gave him back before his empurata- and then shoots the everloving fuck out of the guy. Megatron helps.

And that’s a series wrap on Shoc-

-holy fucking shit.

The gang high-tails it outta there, IDW Optimus once again proving to be the shittiest version of everyone’s space-dad, as he leaves Bumblebee’s body to be consumed by the Shockwave Singularity. It’s looking pretty hopeless, but luckily none of these bastards can die without fucking up Season 2 of MTMTE, so the Lost Light swoops in to save the day.

Down below, Soundwave and his gaggle of small children and animals watch as the Lost Light fucks off into the distance. Soundwave’s having a time and a half, as he realizes with his balls-to-the-wall senses that Megatron’s joined the Autobots. Galvatron shows up to try to work out a deal. We won’t be seeing where this goes, because that’ll be covered later on.

The Lost Light lands in front of Metroplex, and over to the left of that are Rattrap and Starscream, climbing over the wreckage of the city. Rattrap tries to warn Starscream that things are gonna be tough, now that the Dark Cybertron prophecy has come to pass, but Starscream isn’t really having it. He’s gotten very paranoid, likely due to stress, and tells Rattrap to not play this game, because he’s the best player who’s ever lived. Then the Lost Light gang shows up and we get this face:

Sure.

Later on, Megatron and Optimus are hanging out in the Sky Roller, not-talking, until Megatron tells Optimus to get on with it, since the issue’s about to end. Megatron was totally serious about becoming an Autobot. Optimus isn’t really sure what to do with that. I don’t think anyone’s really sure what to do with that, to be honest.

Megatron, in turn, asks Optimus if he really could look past all the bullshit Shockwave pulled in the last several million years, and he gets a non-answer, because addressing your feelings is for losers, clearly. The two exit the ship, and I guess everyone else was just… standing outside waiting for them to talk it out. Weird.

...And with THAT, I am finally released from Comic Event Hell!

If you hear any distant, triumphant screeching right now, that’s likely me.

[fandomlurker]

A Ponderous Rewatch: Opportunity Knox and Cameo

We’re treated to something a bit special this episode! No, not the art and animation quality, as that’s…kinda weak this time. Or maybe I should say Brain is drawn and animated kinda nightmarishly in a lot of parts? Well, you’ll see.

No, the special thing about this episode is that it’s written by Tom Minton, the writer at Warner Brothers who was the original inspiration for The Brain! The general idea for Pinky and the Brain as characters and as a show came from Tom Ruegger having an office close by to Tom Minton and Eddie Fitzgerald, two writers and storyboard artists who he would often hear laughing and joking around together but usually couldn’t make out what exactly they were saying. Minton usually spoke low and quietly and was more introverted, while Fitzgerald was much more outgoing and loud…basically already like a cartoon come to life (Eddie actually did exclaim things like ‘Narf’ occasionally in reality, which was an aspect that was added to and exaggerated in Pinky’s character). The fact that these two guys who were viewed as total opposites by their colleagues were good friends and spent so much time working together in secret lead to everyone joking that they were secretly trying to take over the world.

That isn’t to say that Pinky and Brain are 100% cartoon copies of Eddie and Tom—our mouse duo definitely veered off into their own distinct personalities very quickly—but the basic bones of their characters came from these two real life men. That makes me wonder about how surreal it must have been for Tom Minton to write for episodes starring Pinky and the Brain. He only did so four times in Animaniacs (and Eddie Fitzgerald never directly worked on Animaniacs or Pinky and the Brain, to my knowledge).

In any case, let’s move on to the actual episode.

We open to a multitude of bubbling beakers of mysterious liquids and one scientist working alone at night in the Acme Labs. She sneezes a few times, and then exclaims that she’s only a few steps away from curing the common cold.

…Man, Acme Labs is a total shitshow when it comes to their work, aren’t they? In addition to all the blatantly cruel experiments on animals that they do, just look at how lax this scientist is about lab safety. I’ll give her props for at least wearing her lab coat properly and tying her long hair up, which is something most media usually gets wrong. The fact that she’s doing this medical experiment while not wearing gloves or proper eye protection or a mask is very troubling. Not to mention that she’s doing all this while being very sick, if her violent sneezes are anything to go by.

Hmm, that cage is looking suspiciously empty.

Well, well! Looks like our mousey duo is up to something.

“Ahehehehe, oh this is gonna be great, Brain! Narf!”

“Quiet, Pinky!”

OH LORD, SHE JUST CHUGS IT HERSELF! Lady, PLEASE! The fact that this “cure” is piss-coloured only makes it worse.

Sweetie, I think this needs more peer-reviewed, double-blind tests before you can truthfully say that you’ve made a cure for the common cold. You have no proper safety gear on and you’re doing this experiment all alone at night with no one to check up on you.

Oh no. Boys, what are you doing?

So they catapult some powdery substance on her and she goes into a more violent sneezing fit than before. She leaves the room to go “back to the drawing board”, but honestly I’m hoping that she just goes home and isolates herself for a while.

“Success, Pinky!”

“Egad, Brain, what is this stuff?!”

“A new strain of pollen I created myself, Pinky. It causes a temporary but uncontrollable fit of allergic sneezing in man.”

Pinky looks very disturbed by this (although I suppose it doesn’t help that Brain has that very smug and devious look on his face) until Brain says that the effect is temporary. It’s a nice little detail that shows us approximately where Pinky’s lines of morality are. Brain makes his own strain of pollen to cause humans to have severe sneezing fits? That’s amazing but horrifying! Oh, it’s only temporary? Well okay, then. It’s fine if it doesn’t cause any lasting harm.

“No human is immune.”

AAAAAAHHHHHHH! Holy fuck, show, don’t give me a jumpscare like that!

“Do you realize what we will do with this pollen, Pinky?”

“Umm… Open a boutique?”

GAH! I told you to stop doing that! Seriously, what’s up with the way Brain’s draw in this episode?

“Yes, that’s it. We’ll open a boutique and sell ladies’ clothing and pollen.”

“Egad, Brain, what fun! I like this idea, I do! Hehehahahaha!~”

Of course he would. Of course he’d like working in a more domestic setting and selling ladies’ clothing.

…Say, now that I think of it, I think this might be the first time we get a hint as to Pinky’s love of what’s stereotypically thought of as women’s clothing. Hmm.

BONK!

“Focus, Pinky, FOCUS!”

Brain, sweetie, not everyone goes into tunnel-visioned hyperfocus like you do.

“We shall do no less than go to Fort Knox, Kentucky: keeper of the nation’s gold supply. There, we will expose the guards to our pollen…”

Despite the general awkwardness of the animation this episode, I like the way Brain is drawn here from over the shoulder. Very nice work.

Also…”our” pollen? Brain, you made that yourself. I guess this is just another example of Brain subconsciously including Pinky in everything.

“…and while they’re sneezing uncontrollably, we’ll move into the vault and take the gold!”

Brain’s plan blueprints are such a treat. Gold! Gold! Gold!

“For he who controls this nation’s capital, controls the nation!”

Okay, this close-up is a little better.

“Off to Fort Knox!”

“Oh! Wait! But isn’t the nation’s capital in Washington, DC?”

BONK!

“Capital as in money, Pinky!”

Oh come on now, Brain. It was an easy mistake to make. Also “capital” in this instance can mean more than money if you want to get semantic about it.

Brain grabs Pinky’s tail to drag him away again. It’s a wonder that Pinky’s tail isn’t as kinked up and injured as Brain’s is by now.

Ooo, improvised tools time!

“But how are we gonna get to Fort Knox, Brain?”

“We’ll simply borrow one of the lab’s technological resources:”

“The minivan!”

Pinky, are you mildly swooning over Brain acquiring a minivan? I…

This does bring up a point I wanted to make, though. Sometimes fans will question why Pinky and Brain stay at Acme Labs despite being put through so much inhumane and humiliating bullshit. While it’s true that Brain doesn’t much like the experiments he’s subjected to (Pinky is…another story entirely), I’m pretty sure he keeps the labs as his home because it’s incredibly convenient for his world domination plans. These are ACME labs, after all, and regardless of how terrible the experiments are, Acme has access to just about every bit of technology in the Warner Brothers cartoon universe. Brain can find or order whatever parts he needs for his latest world domination plan whenever he wants, and no human bats an eye at mysterious bits and bobs showing up because, well, it’s Acme. Acme is in the business of doing absolutely everything. No matter what daytime tortures Brain goes through, the lab is an incredible asset to him, and he’d be foolish to give that up.

Hello again, Warner siblings! I hope you’re having fun tonight.

That’s an awfully tiny sack of pollen to take for this trip…

“Won’t we get in trouble, Brain?”

“’Get in trouble’? Pinky, we’re going to take over the world!”

I just like the tiny silhouettes in this screencap.

“Besides, we’ll have the van back here by 8 am.”

“Oh! All right, then!”

[Quickly googles how long it would take to drive from Burbank California to Fort Knox]

…Are you sure about that, Brain? Are you really, positively sure?

Oh my goodness, a little winch and pulley system! That’s a little convoluted, but it’s adorable.

“Oi! Nice threads, Brain! But, err, why the disguise?”

“If we are to succeed in our mission, I must pass for an average, non-descript motorist, Pinky.”

I agree, Pinky. Brain always looks good in a suit.

Also he’s on a literal soap box, holy shit.

“So while we’re driving, call me Mr. Perkins.”

A trillby?!? Put it back! Putitbackputitbackputitback!

“Say no more! Brilliant, Brain!”

“Mr. Perkins.”

Oh no, he’s threatening to punch the audience now!

“Ooo, right, right. Narf! Heh, Mr. Per-kins.~”

“Pinky, start your engine!”

So Pinky tugs on a rope tied to the car keys to start the minivan, and I bet we can all already tell that he’s going to be doing most of the hard work for this roadtrip.

“Now depress the brake!”

I half expected a joke here where Pinky would say depressing things to the brake, but that didn’t happen. It’s just as well, I suppose. Pinky’s not usually the type to be mean to anyone or anything.

Instead, he pushes himself into the brake.

This made me curious about how strong real mice are. According to this scientific article, the average mouse can lift approximately 70 g in weight.That’s not a lot compared to us humans, of course, but seeing as the average weight of the common house mouse is 19 g (and common wood mice are on average 23 g), that’s really impressive! Still, for Pinky to be able to depress the brake is quite a feat that’s worlds beyond what the average real-life mouse can do.

Yes, yes, I know. It’s all cartoon logic and physics. That’s not going to stop me from having the headcanon that Pinky and the Brain have both been modified so much by Acme Labs that in addition to becoming sapient and intelligent, they’re basically little mouse superheroes in strength, too.

“Yes! Now I’ll shift the transmission into gear and…you give it the gas!”

Man, Pinky just slams his entire body onto the gas pedal with all his mousey might! You can hear him physically strain against it. Well done, Mr. Paulsen!

“Now Pinky, let us, in the vernacular, ‘take this hog out on the road and see who’s boss’!”

Oh lord, Brain’s on a slight power trip just from being able to drive a vehicle. If he ever does rule over the world one day, I fear he may explode from the sheer ego-high of it.

Anyway, on the way to Fort Knox they get stuck behind a rather slow transport truck. Well, Brain can’t have that! He’s got to get back to the lab by 8 am after all!

“Pinky! Prepare to pass a slow-moving vehicle!”

“Righty-o, Brain!”

Again, Pinky, I’m pretty sure you really aren’t supposed to stick your ass and chest out while saluting. You’re supposed to keep your posture straight.

…What am I saying? Pinky can’t do anything straight.

“Call me Mr. Perkins! Activate left turn indicator now.”

Aww, a little hop!~

Unfortunately it’s the wrong lever.

“…Let’s try that again, Pinky.”

“Narf! Wrong switch.”

He sits down to think and of course he gets it right that way.

Anyone else enjoying a lesson on how to drive from Pinky and the Brain? No? Just me? I mean, I already know how, but this is super cute.

“Exemplary work, Pinky!”

Brain, he just…he just pulled a switch. By accident. The fact that he’s so sincere about complimenting him for this is very cute but also very odd. I guess Brain’s in a good mood tonight.

“But we’re slowing down. Quickly, step on the gas!”

“Gas, check!”

Pinky, no!

Oh lord, he just lets himself fall directly on the gas pedal. You okay there, dude?

“Maintain pedal pressure, Pinky!”

I don’t think he has much of a choice, Brain.

So they get beside the freight truck and the driver of it picks up his CB radio mic.

“Hey, breaker breaker one nine, this here’s Big Red. Eh…what’s your handle, good buddy? Over.”

“The name’s Perkins. MISTER Perkins. Just an average, non-descript motorist.”

Wh—Why is there a CB radio installed in the Acme Lab minivan?

Pinky chooses this moment to lift himself off the gas pedal and then jump back on it in a weirdly showy, semi-acrobatic way. The first screencap has the tip of his tail almost in the shape of a heart, so I had to include it.

Our duo pass by the freight truck. Needless to say, the truck driver is still pretty rattled by his run-in with “Mr. Perkins”.

“I gotta quit eatin’ them double onion chili dogs!…”

Usually people just run with it on this show, but this is one of those rare moments where a human being doesn’t inexplicably fall for one of Brain’s horrible human disguises.

The minivan’s grill looks like teeth here and it’s almost menacing.

Uh oh, Brain’s getting dozy.

“Pinky…I’m in need of some music to keep myself raptly alert. And use the cruise control this time so we don’t lose speed!”

I don’t know why I’m so charmed by Pinky pressing the cruise control button like this, but it’s very cute.

“Cruise control on, Br—aaaerr—umm, Mr. Perkins!”

He is trying his best. :3c

“[yawn] Stellar, Pinky. Now see if you can locate a local radio station frequency.”

“Narf! Wrong knob…”

Smacking the hell out of the right knob make the radio explode into a loud yet incredibly mild generic rock tune. I’m surprised Pinky’s so alarmed. I wonder if Brain—

JEEZUS FUCK! You gotta stop giving me a heart attack with these sudden messed up close-ups of Brain, episode!

“Turn off the radio, Pinky!”

“Heeey! This knob’s loose!”

Aaaand there he goes.

“Oohoo ahaha! What’d’ya know? The lighter works!”

I wonder if Pinky knows what that’s actually for at this point, considering his utter disdain for smoking later in the spin-off?

“The radio, Pinky!”

“Ooo, right. Almost forgot!”

Uh oh.

“Whew. Suddenly I feel downright feverish, I do…”

Pinky has become a Charmander, and he’s not happy about it.

So he’s screaming and shouting his verbal tics all over the place and what’s Brain’s reaction?

“There’s no need for you to entertain me personally, Pinky. I’m quite awake now.”

BRAIN! You wipe that smug smile off your face right now, you little jerk! I know Pinky will be okay because he always is, but still.

One screen wipe later…

“Kentucky, Pinky! We made it!”

“All right, Brain!”

“Mister PERKINS!”

Brain, I think Pinky’s just not into this roleplay tonight. Or it might be your trillby. Lose the damn trillby.

“Fort Knox is mere miles away. Nothing can stop us now!”

Well, looks like you jinxed yourself.

I’ve got no love for cops, but his “what the fuck” expression here is choice.

“Good evening, officer. Was I exceeding the speed limit?”

“By about a hundred miles an hour.”

Oh, is that all? They’d need to be over by, like, a thousand or so miles an hour to make as good of a time as they did getting here.

Maybe this guy is going to arrest them for breaking the laws of time and space.

“I’m sorry, y’see—“

Shining a flashlight directly into your eyes? Yup, this is definitely a cop.

“I’m Mr. Perkins, an average, non-descript—“

“Can I see your license and registration, please?”

And then Pinky immediately interrupts the shakedown with a happy, matter-of-fact “We don’t have any! Zort! :D” and now my mind wanders off into let’s-overanalyze-the-shit-out-of-this-joke-scene territory because… Look at this. A cop pulls over a vehicle from Acme Labs doing about a hundred miles over the speed limit and finds Brain, a mouse in a suit trying to pass as a human driver. Then Pinky, who is dressed in no such disguise because why would Brain ever think of an obviously important detail ever in one of his plans, pops up to say that they don’t have a driver’s license.

…So what does this scene look like at this point from the cop’s perspective? Besides the very rare outlier like the truck driver from before, humans usually take Brain’s word for it that he’s also human, no matter how shoddy his disguise is. There are a few possibilities here, and I honestly can’t decide which is funniest:

1.      The cop can see through Brain’s poor disguise just like the truck driver from earlier can, and knows that these are actually two mice that have stolen a truck and have been speeding down the highway with it.

2.      The cop thinks Brain is a very odd-looking human without a driver’s license who’s been driving down the highway at insane speeds with his loose pet talking mouse by his side.

3.      The cop believes that Brain really is an odd-looking human who has no license and has been wildly speeding down the highway and also there’s an equally odd-looking human man with him who is stark naked for some mysterious reason.

I’ll let you decide which one is the most likely canon scenario as we continue as Brain tries to clear up this scenario.

“If you must know, we are two lab mice out to control the world by seizing its gold assets. But when we assume power, rest assured our budget will result in substantial new funding for law enforcement.”

…

Leave it to Brain to truthfully spell out his global domination intentions for no good reason and then lie his little mousey ass off to try and bribe his way out of going to jail.

Also, again, it’s “when we assume power” and not “when I assume power”. Hmm.

“…Oh.”

“Bwuhyuube… Be--best be on your way, then.”

“Thank you, officer.”

I’d say I was surprised that white privilege extends even to white lab mice here but…that would be a lie.

“Oh man, I do miss them witless teenage speed demons…”

So they finally make it to Fort Knox.

…And I guess the Warner siblings do, too!

The two mice have parked on a hill overlooking their target and gosh Brain, you’re looking extra pudgy here.

“It’s time to make our move, Pinky.”

Judging by the look on his face here, I think Pinky just noticed how thicc Brain’s behind has suddenly gotten.

Nevertheless, they begin their pollen assault on the guards.

Finally, the moment has arrived!

Brain’s head is shaped like a football and is almost as wide as Pinky is tall here, but besides that this is a cool shot.

This bit was also used in the spin-off’s theme for some reason, but now it will forever remind me of the absolute chaotic laughter that erupted when I got some friends to sit down and watch an episode of PatB. The stream decided to stop on this specific shot for buffering and they all just lost it. Most of the reaction was through voice on Discord, but luckily there were some friends using text chat too:

I live for moments like these when we’re streaming shows and movies.

“Egad! This is even better than a Ducktales episode, Brain!”

That’s pretty high praise, Pinky. I love the shadowing done on him here as well.

“Pinky… Are you pondering what I’m pondering?”

“Wha—I think so, Brain, but balancing a family and a career? Oof, it’s all too much for me!”

Pinky did…did you see all this gold and immediately begin envisioning yourself using the money to settle down and start a family?!? And so far in this series you aren’t dating anyone and you probably don’t even know anyone besides Brain and…

Okay, listen, I know it’s established later on that Pinky has wishes and daydreams about having a very domestic life, culminating in that one “Somewhere That’s Green” parody fantasy where he and Brain live together like a 50s couple in the Elmyra spin-off but… But…!

Well, you’ll kind of get a family along with your world domination “career” in a few years, Pinky. It’s probably not going to be quite how you envisioned it, though.

“The gold, Pinky! It’s all ours. Let’s move it out!”

Umm…

“One…two…three…and lift!”

I just realized that out of context the poses and faces in this screencap could look, uhh, questionable. But will that stop me from sharing it? No.

“I believe my plan has a…fatal flaw…”

About 27.4 pounds worth of a fatal flaw. You two might have super strength in comparison to other mice, but it looks like you both have a hard limit.

“I am in intense pain, Pinky.”

“Ditto, Brain. Zort!”

Well, okay, I guess it’s good that you are both cartoons, then. You boys should be able to shrug this off pretty quickly, especially Pinky.

OH GOD!

Is this what all those nightmarish close-ups of Brain were preparing me for?!?

“Fear not, Pinky, for the unwieldy atomic weight of gold will not thwart us tomorrow night.”

“Why? What are we doing tomorrow night, Brain?”

“The same thing we do every night, Pinky… Try to take over the world!”

You know, most cartoons would settle for them just being covered in bandages. Not Animaniacs, though. In Animaniacs were have to know that their removal from under the gold bar was so difficult and painful that fur was pulled out and they were left with bare, raw patches of skin. T-thanks, Warner Brothers?

Let’s end with a somewhat longer cameo appearance, as I suspect at this point Tumblr will have another fit if I try to combine two full episodes again.

The very next episode of Animaniacs has a skit called Hercule Yakko, which is a vague parody of Hercule Poirot mysteries. We get a good handful of cameos from the stars of other Animaniacs skits as passengers on a luxury cruise boat on the Nile.

The basic premise is that the Marita, one of the Hip Hippos, awakens in the middle of the night to find her comically large diamond necklace missing. The Warner siblings are a detective team who happen to also be onboard the ship and offer to help the hippo couple find it.

Before you ask, yes, this is the same episode as the infamous “fingerprints” joke.

Eventually the Warner siblings begin to go around knocking on the doors of the other passengers’ rooms to ask questions. They come across Slappy Squirrel first, who knows nothing about the missing diamond and just wants to be left alone to sleep. Then they meet Minerva Mink and, well, you can guess how that went. Then Yakko knocks on the last door.

“YES?”

Smol.

Look at them in their matching lederhosen! That’s absolutely adorable. Bravo to whichever of the mice had the idea for these “disguises”.

“Did you steal a big diamond?”

“No. We are Swiss hikers on holiday.”

Okay so maybe I’ll deduct a few points for wearing lederhosen, which is more associated with Bavaria and Germany, but claiming to be Swiss. Not that people in Switzerland didn’t also wear it, but you’d probably want to make your cover story as unsuspicious as possible, right? And that’s not even going into the idea of wearing a garment made from leather in hot, hot Egypt. These mice must be drenched in sweat…

“Look at me, Brain! I’m Heidi! Yodelehe-NARF!~”

Well at least someone in this duo is trying his best to reference things from Switzerland.

…Brain is the one that fucked up the lederhosen cultural background thing, isn’t he? Goddammit, Brain.

He just bonks the hell outta Pinky and silently slams the door in Yakko’s face.

After briefly talking with Marita, Yakko exclaims that he knows where the diamond is and asks that everyone assemble together in the state room. And so they do!

Aww, they’re sharing a chair because they are so, so tiny. :3c

“You’re probably all wondering why I called you here!”

“To reveal the thief?!?” says everyone in unison.

Minerva, you’re looking kind of weird in that second pic.

“No. It’s because you can’t play charades with three people.”

“That’s it! I’m goin’ back to bed.”

“So am I. I didn’t take the diamond!”

Man, Minerva really got a raw deal in the 90s. She only has two episode skits of her own and makes a few tiny cameos elsewhere, like in this one. I get that she was put on the back-burner as a character because her skits were considered “too suggestive”—and to be honest they were a bit over the top—but there are certainly ways that you can write a character who uses their sex appeal for comedic effect without it being disrespectful. It’s a shame they never tried to tweak the tone of her episodes just a tad.

But anyway, mice!

Brain is looking at Minerva with…worry? Concern? Confusion? Which is a very atypical reaction to Minerva. Gee, I wonder why.

Pinky is Looking Respectfully.

I’m never going to get over how cute they look in these outfits.

“I also am innocent.”

“Umm… I may have done it! I walk in my sleep, you know.”

Pinky, sweetie, I know you’re trying in your own odd little way to help but there’s no way you’d be able to carry a diamond of that size.

BONK!

This is the very last clear shot that the mice are in and it’s not very significant but I liked the angle of it.

Oh, you’re asking who took the diamond? No one did. The diamond was lodged in Marita’s butt fat the entire time. It’s the typical style of “humour” from skits with the Hip Hippos. Now you all know why no one is clamouring for their return in the reboot.

That’s it for this post, though. I should have the next episode that I promised would go with this one up in a day or two.

See you next time, folks, when we go off to the races!

[aboyandhisstarship]

i want a foxiyo Pendragon fanfic

ok...but it’s not really my best work, let me know what you think:

Pantora:

Riyo was sitting in her family home, in front of her was a human she had never met before, he was down on one knee saying “Riyo, it’s so nice to meet you I’m Press Tilton, and I have something very important to tell you.”

In his hand was a ring.

 years later:

Journal number 15, Coruscant:

SPACE! Now that I have your attention Mark and Courtney, this one is a bit weird; ok in fairness they are all weird.  You see this territory, is a not a single planet in an instance in time but a galaxy…like a full on alien life galaxy it is honestly sick.

One rub as there often is, is that this galaxy is in the middle of a civil war, ya I know that screams ol Saint Dane, But so far no signs of him.  Of course that does not mean he is not around. This is Saint Dane we are talking about the guy can be anyone.

But let’s get into it. I climbed out of the flume and I was in a concrete style  room. So this place is at least slightly advanced.

I glanced to the floor and saw the clothes of this territory. Yea, I was not a fan, in my time travelling Halla I have run into some questionable fashion choices. But this, this was rough.

First was a puffy shirt, a bright pink puffy shirt. Kind of like pirates wear, Bell bottom looking pants with weird metal boots.  And a Petty coat looking jacket, as I was getting dressed (leaving on my Second Earth boxers, I have to draw the line somewhere) I was thinking that maybe Saint Dane left these clothes here. I mean come on, I looked like a rejected Pirate in a Disney movie from the seventies, there is no way people actually dress like this.

Underneath the small pile of clothes was a black item, it looked kind of like a Nurf gun, but this bad boy did not fire foam darts, nope…it shoot lasers! Again Pretty cool.  But of course my bubble was burst pretty quick after all a weapon meant only one thing, Quigs…god damn it.

I gently pushed open the exit from the flume peaking my head out gun at the ready to shoot any yellow eyed freak I saw, but the room outside of the flume was pretty quiet, it looked some kind of spare parts storage room.

Scattered all around where scraps of metal and wire in what looked kind of like giant plastic boxes. I stepped out of the room closing the door to the flume, it looked like it was built into the wall, the Star was visible, craved into the wall as always.

I kept the blaster close as I crept out of the machine room and there I spotted them, robots! Like something out of Sci fi! I was starting to worry that maybe Coruscant was a territory of all Robots. Honestly that sounded kind of cool but then again, I was not fond of the idea of Saint Dane logic bombing an entire city.

As I crept along trying to figure out how to get out of the machine shop, a robot turned to me…and it’s eyes they were yellow.

Quigs…yea Gulp.

The machine let out a loud chirping and his buddy’s came calling, close to 20 or 30 of them carrying tools of some kind eyes glowing and they were coming for me.

I aimed the gun and pulled the trigger and nothing happened. Now I have not actually fired that many guns in my time travelling the universe, most territory’s don’t have them.  I looked to see if I could find a safety like switch, as *ZAPPPPPPPPP* some kind of electric blade sailed past my shoulder, I rolled onto the ground and took off running picking a direction.

For once I actually chose right, the robots were hot on my heels but I saw an opening, where something that looked vaguely car shaped was waiting.

Ignoring the nagging reminder that I left Second Earth before I ever learned to drive I dove for the car thing, A robot jumped on after me but I managed to kick it off. Before I crawled into the driver’s seat saying “oh god oh god, ok pedals?”

I scanned the ground, no pedals; I didn’t see a key like cars on Second Earth.

Then on the steering wheel, ok it was not a wheel, at least not in the way you are thinking of, and more like a yoke, like on planes. Anyway there were two buttons on the wheel I hit them and the Car thing took off hard super hard.

“Woah woah slow down! Uhh breaks!?”

I scanned the controls for the brakes as I pulled up ending up in traffic, as I was bobbing and weaving saying “Please breaks, auto pilot, something anything.”

Now then I heard sirens, great the police…this will be fun to explain.

The police demanded “pull over!”

I called back to the police were on hover bikes along side of me “believe me I would love to, but I have no idea how to drive this thing!”

The cops fired a dart thing at my car and took control, think god.

We gently landed on some kind of platform, Aliens walked by clear as day. And they were dressed more cohertly then I was, as I was looking around before the cop said “sir, we need to see some ID.”

Uh oh, I turned to the cops, they were white armor with red stripes and they were armed, blasters at the ready, I smiled sheepishly “would you believe me if it told you I lost it?”

Another cop spoke “sir, put your hands up please.” It was a different guy from the one that talked before, and yet sounded the same, maybe they were robots.

They aimed at me saying “sir, hands up!”

I slowly raised my hands above my head, as they reached into my coat and pulled out the gun that was left at the flume…I forgot I had that.

I was surrounded as they said “hands behind your head!”

I did and was swiftly handcuffed, great start.

One of them asked “are you with the sepies!?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, well it was coin flip time. “uhhh yes…?”

The cops tensed up, welp wrong answer the officer said “on your feet I think you need to see the commander.”

I was shoved into their car thing as they went a lot smoother then my driving, which in fairness was not hard.  I looked around at the active and vibrate city of  Coruscant and I noticed the lack of green, I mean New York had Central park, in fact most Big cities I could think of on Second Earth had some kind of Green plants, but here nothing…it was literally all city.

We spent about 5 minutes travelling through the city before we arrived at a building, it was rather bland in design, and made of the same slate material as the rest of the city, I was led inside and shoved into a small room, but not before being searched again. I figured they would take my ring, but they examined and scanned it before handing it back to me and leaving me to stew.

After a few minutes I started to look around, after all I needed to bust out of here, either high tail it back to the flume and come up with a new plan or hopefully dodge the heat.

Well the room was escape proof, or at least seemed that way, so I was stuck there in my pink shirt feeling like a fool.

A few minutes later another cop entered wearing the same armor as the others. I was still not sure if this guy was a robot, he said flatly “my men tell me you are a separatist.”

A Separatist, I thought they said, ohh I guess I should have seen that one coming as I scratched my head “yea that’s me…big Separatist.”

I mean I had literally no other option but to stick to the story at that point, and just hope these guys would not shoot me.

That’s one the guy walked over to the camera in the corner and turned it off, uh oh I had seen enough detective movies to not like where this was going.  Then he maundered his armor before pulling out something on a piece of string it was a heavy sliver ring, with a large slate stone in the middle, a traveler ring!

I exhaled “oh thank god, I thought I had really screwed the pooch on that one.”

The guy took off his helmet and revealed a man, he was dark skinned, the closest thing I could think of in Second Earth terms would be the natives of Hawaii.

The guy said simply “my name is Commander Fox sir; I am the acolyte for this territory.”

I nodded “Bobby Pendragon, so what is Saint Dane doing here?”

Fox looked down, the guy looked tired. Honestly I was a little worried as he said “Kriff I have no idea, I mean if he is looking to cause Chaos, then he need not bother.”

He reached over unlocking my handcuffs as I asked “that bad huh?”

Fox nodded “worse, thousands dying a day, millions more displaced.”

I bit my lip, yea this had Saint Dane written all over it, I asked “can you get me out of ya know jail?”

Fox scratched his head “yea I will say…you’re an undercover spy for us?”

I looked at him “will anyone buy that?”

Fox answered “probably.”

Probably probably! I’m looking at whatever the punishment for treason is here and he is hitting me with the probably!? I stood up saying “I sure hope it does, I’m not in the mood to get the lethal injection.”

Fox looked at me before saying “yes I suppose, so you have done this kind of thing before?”

I followed him toward the door “the getting arrested after arriving thing? because honestly, this is a first.”

Fox said “no the, fighting Saint Dane saving the day thing.”

I sighed “honestly…I have lost count I have done it so many times, I mean I win some, he wins some…but every day is a new one.”

Fox pushed open the door “yea that makes sense.”

9 hours later, that’s right guys…it took 9 hours to get out, but when we did I was taken toward a truly impressive building., Fox told me “this is the galactic senate, the seat of government for the republic.”

Again, cool…but my gut was telling me something was off, I mean this territory was at war. The question was why and what role did Saint Dane play.

As we walked through the lavish halls, I saw some oddly dressed folks, Most glared at Fox like he had run over there dogs. And nodded at me like I was one of them.  I tried to blend into the background best I could, but it was hard.

After a few minutes we arrived outside of a room.  Fox knocked and a second later a voice said “come in.”

The door opened to show a quiet office, inside was a woman with blue skin, she looked to be maybe 20 years old, and her hair was purple she had strange gold streaks along her cheeks. She seemed flustered rushing to meet me.

The girl said “Bobby Pendragon? Press told me all about you, Riyo Chuchi traveler from Coruscant …but you knew that.” She babbled

I raised my hands “pleasure to meet you; you have a nice place here?”  Honestly my experice in this territory had not been super positive so far.

Riyo looked me up and down before asking Fox teasingly “this is what you left for him?”

Fox blushed “look…my fashion sense is not exactly.”

I jumped in to cover for him “it’s not the worst thing I ever had to wear on a territory.”

Riyo looked at me asking “oh and what is?”

I answered easily “Eelong, Humans are not considered to be intelligent beings, so they are…well long story short I had to wear rags…yea that place was not fun, almost gotten eaten by a raptor…oh and the Quigs were…”

I looked around the room  seeing there eyes start to glaze over, I scratched my head before saying “so you know what Saint Dane has planned here?”

Riyo looked down “I have no clue, he could be anyone…there is a lot of corruption in the galaxy…but there is one woman who can perhaps help us find out who is playing all sides.”

I plucked down on her couch asking “any paper around here, I got to start my journal?”  Fox hugged Riyo real deep before leaving…oh looks there is something there, nice.

That’s when I was given the freaking sweet holo recorder I made this journal on Mark and Cortney, I think this one is even better then Veelox? Your thoughts…well as I am writing this, tomorrow Riyo and I am visiting two important types…I am pretending to be from the distant planet of…Bronx, let’s hope they don’t space google it.

The fellows I’m meeting is a Senator like Riyo, Padme something and her secret husband a General Anakin Skywalker, who belongs to group of solider monks…sounds pretty cool. Oh and Riyo tells me they can read minds…great

 Miss you guys stay safe

 End of Journal 15:

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 126 Review

TFW you know you’re going to die. 

Just…where to even start.

God damn this chapter.

Rushed. Rushed. Rushed. Rushed. Rushed. Everything about this chapter was rushed. I don’t know what Isayama’s final destination is, but he sure pulled out all the stops to get there as fast as possible. Every possible chance Isayama could cut a corner, he took it. In every possible way.

People are speculating that we’ll get flashbacks that’ll sooth the sting of this chapter. I doubt it.

Attack on Titan has been pretty flashback heavy this past arc, but that was an artistic decision that served the story.

There was a three year time skip and that time needed to be filled out. We jumped ahead three years and suddenly Eren is AWOL and working with Zeke.

Showing events unfolding on Paradis interspersed with flashbacks to key moments during the time skip was a storytelling device.

Firstly, it allowed Isayama to control how much we knew about our character’s motivations.

Stuff happened in those three years, and those events have shaped the character’s actions in the present. Through strategically placed flashbacks, Isayama was able to slowly reveal new, relevant information about everyone’s motivations.

Secondly, flashbacks also allowed Isayama to build suspense. Again, flashbacks are strategically placed to reveal only what’s relevant.

When it seemed Eren was working with Zeke, we only saw stuff that made it seem like he was working with Zeke. Now that we know Eren was always working against Zeke, we’re seeing stuff that more directly deals with his true motivations.

And finally, having flashbacks helped keep things interesting. There’s a lot of political maneuvering during the post-Marley Arc chapters, and while well told, it could easily have been boring. Cutting between past and present was a way to break up these sequences of people mostly just talking with each other with something most would find interesting.

Having flashbacks actively improved the story.

Now think about chapter 126. What purpose would flashbacks serve here?

The answer is none. No artistic purpose, anyway. There probably will be flashbacks, but that’d be damage control, not artistry.

My hunch is that the gaps in the story are more due to rushed pacing, or even worse, Isayama just not caring. I think this becomes clear when you look at the totality of…whatever this chapter is.

True, we don’t see when Hange and co. made contact with Armin and co. and when they hooked up with Jean and Mikasa.

And it’s true we also didn’t see important beats like why Annie decided to join up, or why Magath and Pieck joined, too.

But we also didn’t see a lot of smaller stuff that we, nevertheless, *should* have seen.

Falco said he heard Connie mention Ragako Village while they were camped out. That didn’t happen on screen, but Connie was shown talking out loud, briefly. We are apparently supposed to take it as a given he mentioned Ragako, too. At some point.

When Armin and Gabi confront Connie in Ragako, they ride in on horseback and stop when Connie threatens Falco. But towards the end of the scene, we see that Armin and Gabi are standing on the ground. At some prior point, they dismounted their horses off screen.

Falco loved his brother. Then Colt died and Falco had a role in that. He died in Falco’s transformation. Hugging him. Crying for him. Falco never knew before now. His brother was dead and he never even realized. Now he learns it.

Off. Fucking. Screen.

He’s crying with Gabi and at first it seemed he was just overwhelmed by what happened.

Then I saw his speech bubble.

Falco [sobbing]: Colt.

Are you fucking kidding me. 

Things reach peak IDGAF during Onyankopon’s execution scene. In one panel, Jean is standing to Onyankopon’s back right. Next panel, he’s teleported to the back left. Then Jean points his gun at Onyankopon, and he’s on the back right again! When Jean pulls the trigger, he’s back to being on the left.

I doubt there’ll be flashbacks to any of this shit. These moments were obviously skipped because Isayama dropped the ball.

Maybe the homebuilder will go back and add that much needed support beam, but considering they seemingly forgot to fireproof the chimney, they probably aren’t.

I call it the Principle of Brown M&Ms. Whenever Van Halen played a concert, they stipulated in their contract that their dressing room be furnished with a bowl of m&ms, no brown ones.

If there really was a bowl with no brown m&ms, they could be sure that venue management was diligent and on their game. If they cared to fulfill a small detail like that, they could be trusted to care about crew safety, etc.

Van Halen should trash Isayama’s house I will crowd fund the money.

I have little trust in Isayama to do this right. Looking at the totality of the chapter, it’s clear these are mistakes rather than decisions.

The through line of this chapter is suicide.

They’re all going to die. All of them. And they know it.

Just look at their faces in the final shot. Expressions range from stone-faced (Armin) to shitting the bed (Gabi). They all know this means death.

No one is doing this because they think they can win, except maybe Annie.

Connie’s logic was that he wanted to be a soldier his mom would be proud of. Fighting Eren is where this logic takes him. No plan for actually winning is brought up, he just decides fighting the good fight is what makes a mom proud.

Hange is doing this for the sake of not running away. They consider doing what Shadis rejected: living the rest of their days shitting on a mountain. The reason they’re not currently doing that is just what Levi said: they don’t stop.

Magath admitted last chapter that they couldn’t win, but that informing the world of the apocalypse was better than waiting to die. Fighting Eren against all hope isn’t far from that, so that’s probably their primary motivation as well.

I’m willing to bet Armin is similarly motivated. There’s a very revealing parallel between Armin and Connie in this chapter, though an underdeveloped one.

Connie wants to be a soldier his mom could be proud of. But, of course, Erwin is Armin’s idea of a soldier to be proud of. Erwin was charismatic, smart, and kept calm under fire.

Connie and Armin strive for essentially the same ideal. Being a good soldier. That means slightly different things to each of them, but broadly, it’s the same.

Mind you, Armin’s idea of Erwin is significantly more sanitized than the real Erwin was, but that’s not the point. For all his flaws, Erwin genuinely was someone to look up to. He showed true leadership, intelligence, and empathy. He was a good person all around.

Armin didn’t even want to think about fighting Eren; he had given up hope on that. Would Erwin have done that?

My guess is that Armin thinks taking down Eren is how he can truly become like Erwin Smith. Erwin never lost sight of the main objective, even if it meant long odds. Save humanity. That meant getting to that basement, so they went to that basement. 

Right now, saving humanity means stopping Eren.

Chances are slim, too, but that never stopped Erwin, either. Armin knows that. Once a goal was set on, Erwin never wavered. He pushed towards it. 

So you’ve got humanity’s fate on the line and an impossible obstacle to fight if victory is to achieved. Sounds like a classic survey corps mission. No wonder Armin is doing this.

Jean is doing this because of his conscious. Floch tempted him with a chance to peace out. Instead, he chose to peace out and kill Eren. 

He could have lived a quiet life. Not just a life he wanted before, but arguably the life he deserves after all the misery he’s endured. He said no.

He let Marco infect his brain and now he can’t not be good.

This is what happens when you huff ashes.

Levi is doing this because he made a promise to Erwin and he stands by that. Killing Zeke was the last order Erwin gave him. Levi promised he’d carry it out. If he fails, he fails Erwin. I don’t think Levi’s ever contemplated failing, but honestly, it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t take that shame to his grave.

Gabi’s already resolved to fight Eren, so she’s just sticking to what she’s already planned.

No idea why Annie is doing this, so don’t ask. >.>

They’re doing this because they refuse to roll over. They can’t respect themselves if they do. Not Hange, not Connie, not Jean.

They can’t take pride in themselves otherwise.

So they’ll march to their deaths, and they don’t care if there’s no hope. They’re throwing their lives away, but they know it’s the right thing to do.

Unfortunately, most of this, admittedly pretty cool, character work happens off screen.

God damn this chapter.

So. Much. Of this chapter was mishandled.

Connie’s subplot resolution was the most blatant example.

I already mentioned Falco hearing stuff from Connie off screen. And Armin and Gabi dismounting their horses…at some point. The BS continues afterwards.

Armin pleads for Falco’s life, but Connie claims Armin is telling him to give up on his mom, and Armin is totally shut down by this.

LOL.

This is the exact same objection Connie raised the last time they spoke. What stopping Connie would mean for his mom was specifically on Armin’s mind when he set out with Gabi.

Like, Armin, bruh, you really had nothing to say to that?

He really, really didn’t think to come up with a response. Armin. The guy who tends to overthink things.

Fine, whatever. So Connie’s objection causes Armin to spiral into self-loathing despair.

The stakes are dizzyingly high.

A child taken hostage.

A deranged man threatens to kill him.

The boy’s girlfriend is there. She’s smart, but still just a kid. And she doesn’t know this man. She doesn’t know how to talk to him, she doesn’t understand his motives, she’s not very emotionally mature herself.

But she’s desperate. Desperate.

Armin is the only one who’s kept his head. It has to be him.

He needs to calm the madman down, convince him killing the kid isn’t the right way, and maybe assure him an alternative solution exists.

Erwin probably could’ve done it. He was charismatic, smart, and calm under fire.

Armin…was not that here. It was genuinely stupid of him to not have come prepared. Like, at even a basic level.

He failed.

So fuck it, at least if the mommy titan ate him, Falco will live, the mom will be back, and Gabi can have her boyfriend.

So Armin throws himself at the titan, and it was only happenstance that everything worked out.

That’s the logic of this scene, but it’s all muddled. The stupidity Armin displayed dampened the drama. 

The speed with which he falls into despair was unnatural. Armin’s badly insecure about living up to Erwin’s image, but it’s never been shown to be this bad.

There’s no believable progression to Armin’s feelings. He tried to be a hero, he face-planted, now he wants to die. They sort of skipped a couple of beats here.

Then Connie says maybe the stupidest thing he’s ever said in the manga: that inheriting the Colossal Titan would only have made his mom suffer.

???

So giving her the Colossal Titan would be bad, but not the Jaw?

I just assumed Connie thought turning his mom into a titan was worth it in the end. Did he just now realize how bad that would have been?

The series can’t just not address this. Connie named killing Falco and Armin as the bad things he did. Is he really not going to grapple with almost turning his mom into a titan, which he only implicitly admits was a bad thing?

Next scene is Louise and Mikasa.

Louise is a very devoted person. She cares deeply for Mikasa because Mikasa saved her life, and inspired her to devote her heart. She enlisted in the military, risked her life for her country, and now she’s on her deathbed, mortally wounded in battle. Not many people would speak ill of her like I would.

…

Is there anyone in this manga as pathetic as Louise?

Really, is there anyone?

Louise was saved from a titan by Mikasa. This inspired her to fight for her country.

Ok, that’s good.

She admires Mikasa and dreams of fighting by her side.

Yeah, that’s fine. We all wish we could hang with our heroes.

Then she took the scarf Mikasa threw away for herself. Because she thought it’d bring her closer to her.

Like how a stalker rifles through their victim’s trash for keepsakes.

That’s. pathetic.

It is pathetic how much Louise pines for Mikasa.

Compare Louise x Mikasa to Mikasa x Eren all you like, it’s not the same thing.

Mikasa and Eren were family. Their love is at minimum familial. Mikasa pines for Eren, which she very annoyingly never addressed, but there’s a sense to it.

When Mikasa lost her family, she was a helpless kid who had nothing. The Jeagers, and especially Eren, helped her rebuild her life. They took her into their home and accepted her as a family member.

The scarf matters, but only because it represents the humanity Mikasa was shown when she needed it most. She is endlessly grateful for that.

So of course she’d break the law for Eren, many family members would. Her willingness to do anything to save Eren bordered on derangement, but she’s gotten better at that. And she’s reevaluating her image of Eren in light of recent…happenings, which is good.

Louise is just a goddamn fangirl.

She doesn’t know Mikasa. She doesn’t pal around with her. She just stalks her like a creep.

Maybe they could have been friends. If Louise had just approached her, explained her story, and tried to befriend her, they could’ve become good friends. Certainly, Mikasa would have been flattered to see she inspired someone so much.

But that’s not what happened. Louise chose to be a stalker instead of a friend. I don’t think she was ever really interested in Mikasa as a person, though.

This is the likely last time she and Mikasa will interact, and Mikasa was so cold to her. Louise didn’t care. She got to fight alongside her hero for a time and that was enough. That’s so childish.

She looked up to Mikasa, but never seemed to want to befriend her. She just wanted to fight alongside her. I don’t think I’ll ever understand people like Louise.

If you respect someone so much, why wouldn’t you want to get to know them?

She said she’d die with no regrets because of this.

No regrets over never befriending her hero. No regrets over Floch, who lead her movement, putting people against the wall. No self-reflection. Nothing.

What a sad life to have lived.

She never questioned herself or what she felt. Just stunningly unself-aware.

…Maybe Daz would be more pathetic, but he’s more of a caricature of a pitiable person, so he doesn’t count.

Louise was a perfect fit for the Yeagerists. Louise, Floch, Eren. These people think with their hearts instead of their brains. They act on their feelings with no thought. It’s animalistic.

Eren loves his country, so now he’s off killing everyone else. Floch feels righteous indignation, so now he’s fucking over everyone who opposes him. Louise feels admiration for Mikasa, so now she’s dead.

Floch is holding his Trump rally, and declaring ultimate victory. i swear, Floch talks like a politician giving a stump speech. It’s the same prepared remarks with the same talking points over and over and over again.

“We are persecuted. All hail Eren the Liberator. He will set us free. Make me King of Ape Mountain.”

You can just tell Floch isn’t a very creative person. He’s repetitive as hell, a real one-man act. 

Then one of the dumbest moments in the chapter happens.

Mikasa is watching Floch’s speech for some reason. Then Some Guy approaches her, and casually asks if she wants to help lead Paradis.

Who is this guy?

Why is he asking her this?

Why is this guy pointing out Jean for no reason?

Clearly the point is to establish Mikasa’s stance on helping the Jeagerists, and to hint at Jean’s coming betrayal, but, jeeeeeez, was this badly telegraphed.

Isayama’s never been all that subtle, but this is just bad. It reads like the first draft of a story than a finished product. 

Next dumb scene.

Connie, Armin, and the kids are eating their way to Reiner, and they just bump into Annie, and even though she admits she’s committed awful crimes, Connie just starts paling around with her.

Huh?

His friends betraying him and killing other friends was, like, a thing with Connie. He had major beef with Eren for this exact reason. He specifically named Annie as an example of this.

Eren, Reiner, Bertolt, Annie. He trusted these people; they betrayed that trust and he was tired of it. Good people were killed by that betrayal. Including Sasha, whom he cared for more than anyone. 

Now it’s all good?

This is terrible character writing. Connie’s character was totally shat on by this chapter. 

I doubt we’ve seen the last of Hitch. That line about not finishing the pie alone is obvious set up for her searching Annie out and helping take down Eren.

Finishing off a pie is a group effort; the more the better. Also finishing off the zombie savior thing Eren’s become. That, too.

I’ve already talked about Jean, but wow, he’s such a good kid now.

The plan was for the Cart Titan to grab Yelena, Onyankopon, and Jean, and get out. They couldn’t have accounted for everything, though, like Floch happening to be in danger of being crushed as the Cart did her thing.

Floch and Jean do not get along. They’re enemies, politically and personally.

Jean still pushed him out of the way.

That was nice, but it was a critical blunder.

If Jean had held Floch close instead, they both would have been taken. Floch could have been their prisoner along with Yelena.

But, nope, Floch will continue to solidify his power and even if everyone survives, they won’t be able to oppose him.

The future looks super bleak no matter what happens. Eren will destroy the world and Floch will rule the Earth, or Eren will be stopped and the world will destroy Paradis in retaliation.

There is no way this is some gambit by Eren to unite the world. That makes no sense.

The world hates Eldians because they fear the Wall Titans will crush them.

The exact thing Eren’s doing now.

Eren will unite the world, but only in hatred of Eldians. If Eren is stopped, the world will be more committed to eliminating Paradis than ever before.

…Did the dialogue seem worse this time around?

“Titan doctor Hange.”

“We’ll listen before we shoot.”

“You just told me not to say a word, so I’ll show you with my actions.”

“Those burned bones would never forgive me.”

Who wrote that?

This chapter in general suffers from what you could call Season 3-itis. The anime adaptation of the Uprising Arc, in season 3, had a similar problem with rushing important moments. In season 3, part 1 important stuff happens and the characters engage with these events like real people. They react to what’s happening.

In the anime, stuff just happens. There are plot beats to get through, so the characters perform their beats and then it’s off to the next beat. The characters don’t react to what’s happening, they perform the story beat given to their character. It’s a robotic form of storytelling with no humanity behind it.

There is no gravitas.

So it is here. The fast pace of this chapter is unnatural. It breaks immersion and makes the story seem unrealistic.

This chapter was so inexplicable. Isayama just…stopped caring. Some other explanation would be nice, but in a vacuum, this is the likeliest one. He just stopped caring.

Never forget, this is Attack on Titan. A story about everything good in the world getting ruined. Up to and including the quality of the story itself.

So will they succeed?

Eren is apparently doing this to protect them, so if they just stood in a line in front of him, and dared him to kill them…

It might give him pause.

……They’re dead.

[stevenuniversallyreviews]

Episode 125: Doug Out

“It can't be all ‘Bam!’ ‘Pow!’ action all the time.”

(First things first: Lamar Abrams’s delightful promo art leans away from traditional cards with the title and storyboarders, and this is my favorite of the bunch. He really knocks the visual pun out of the park.)

Dr. Maheswaran is a titanic presence in her daughter’s life, and while she does have a canonical first name—Priyanka, according to Ian Jones-Quartey—it says a lot that the show itself only presents her as “Doctor” or “Mom.” She, not Doug, is the person Connie must reconcile with in Nightmare Hospital. She, not Doug, is the one that’s late picking Connie up in Storm in the Room. She, not Doug, takes the role of Yellow Diamond in Stevonnie’s psychic dream from Jungle Moon. And Doug, as should be clear now, has a first name that we actually hear on the show. Hell, it’s in the name of the episode.

Doug’s status as a background character allows his characterization to be more fluid than his wife’s. In Fusion Cuisine, which is a weird episode period in terms of Maheswaran behavior, he tells a joke to break the tension and disapproves of Steven and Connie hugging. In the far superior Winter Forecast, he’s frustrated with Greg in the bad timelines, appreciative of Greg’s cherry sweater in the good timeline, and we learn that he can’t drive in the snow (but thinks he can). Connie has told us that her parents are strict, which logically means he’s strict, but we see more impatience than strictness in his voiced appearances.

None of what we’ve witnessed lines up too well with the Doug we get in Doug Out: sure, we’ve seen his awkwardness, and I guess his tendency towards jokes at inopportune times means he can be funny, but he’s super silly in this episode. Normally such a huge shift in characterization would bug me, buuuut:

Doug is such a minor character that it’s not a huge deal that his personality adjusts to fit the story better, and

We’ve only seen Doug with Dr. Maheswaran nearby and I can totally buy that he acts differently when she’s not around.

It would’ve been nice for the canon if a little more of Doug’s behavior from Doug Out had been established earlier, but yeah this isn’t a dealbreaker for me. It’s already weird that Connie said in Bubble Buddies that her family moves around a lot because of his security job, considering they don’t move at all over the course of the show and her mother’s job certainly pays more than her father’s, so at least showing Doug at work lends some consistency to her claim.

Entering the episode by pulling a prank on Steven is a succinct way for the show to tell us this is a new Doug. We do get references to the Maheswarans being all about safety, namely his concern over Steven's hydration after eating salty fry bits, but he’s simultaneously silly with the kids and proud that his daughter is a “swashbuckling swashbuckler.” Plus his dopey smile is the same as his daughter’s dopey smile and it’s the most precious thing in the world.

There hasn’t been any indication that Connie is distant from her father, despite his lack of screentime; in fact, one of my favorite unspoken bits of characterization for the family is how she (and through her, Stevonnie) often wears his signature flight jacket. But it’s still great to see them get along so well, keeping up the light mood from the beginning of the episode and amplifying it through paternal playfulness. 

While bringing kids along for a security mission after hours doesn’t sound like something an ultra-responsible parent would do, I choose to see it as a sign of Doug’s respect for his kid and her friend. He knows they’ve handled dangerous situations before, and it’s neat to see him acknowledge this by allowing them to ride along. Moreover, the whole point of the episode is that he doesn’t think his job is exciting, so it’s not like he thinks he’s throwing the kids into a violent situation. And considering he wants to see more action like his daughter does in missions or his wife does in the hospital, I’m glad that this jealousy never turns petty or mean-spirited: this wasn’t a given, as he’s been unfriendly in the past. Doug sort of rules in this episode, and it’s nice that veteran voice actor Crispin Freeman finally gets something to do with him.

The goofiness isn’t limited to Doug, as half of what makes him great is his playing along with Connie and Steven’s prepackaged goofiness. The kids are in top form in Doug Out, dressing as ridiculously-named parodies of Carmen Sandiego and Mario while they’re on the case (Connie’s assertion that Pizzapoppolis sounds more Greek than Italian is in contention with her bemoaning the laws of physics in the Gravitron for the best “Connie’s A Nerd” joke of the night). They’re down to mess around and ruin a teen’s night, and I’m here for it.

Still, I wouldn’t call this a full-on goofy episode, particularly when it evolves into a sequel of sorts to Gem Hunt. Aivi and Surasshu’s soundtrack evokes exaggerated noir as Doug talks shop, but shifts to a menacing drone as the trio encounters evidence of something sinister afoot at Funland. Steven and Connie stay in-character during the chase, but drop the act when discussing the possibility of a Gem Mutant or Homeworld Gem. Whatever they’re hunting is clearly hunting them, and perhaps the most impressive aspect of Doug Out is maintaining a tone of genuine looming danger that isn’t undermined by the episode’s numerous jokes.

The mystery, as in Gem Hunt, is complicated by a red herring. During Connie’s first big mission we’re led to believe that a Corrupted Gem might be healing itself, given the multiple distinct footprints, but we learn in the third act that it was Jasper all along. This time we get a wide array of dangerous possibilities, so the third act Onion reveal initially comes as a relief. But we’ve never seen him this scared before, and his distinct silhouette doesn’t match that of the shadowy figure on the roof.

Before we can think about the hints that Onion isn’t our perp, the focus shifts back to Doug as we conclude his character’s episode-long arc. He wants to be taken seriously, projecting a badass vibe that’s often undermined moments later by an intentional joke (like calling his daughter by her “Cucamonga” alias with a straight face) or by the emergence of his inner square (pretending to be undercover by removing his glasses then instantly relenting because he needs them to see). He’s not incompetent, correctly deducing that the culprit isn’t a regular teen and quieting the children to listen for clues, but he’s just a normal security guard in a family with a surgeon and a kid hero. You can’t blame the guy for developing a bit of an inferiority complex.  

So again, I really appreciate that his behavior doesn’t devolve into toxic overcompensation, because that’s the obvious route to go and it would’ve made this episode so much worse. He respects the kids and doesn’t pretend he needs to protect them, and he doesn’t let his desire for action let him get in over his head—in another similarity to Gem Hunt, he stresses the importance of calling for backup instead of stubbornly going it alone. When Connie talks about how much she loves and values him, we’re allowed to feel it, because she’s reiterating what we’ve seen rather than letting a petty control freak off the hook.

We’re coming off another terrific Dad Moment in Lion 4, but Greg being great is par for the course. Most Dad Episodes are understandably about him: other father/child relationships have their days in the limelight (Fryman and Peedee in Frybo, Kofi and the Pizza Twins in Beach Party, Bill and Buck in Shirt Club, and Yellowtail/Marty and Sour Cream in Drop Beat Dad), but Greg gets more focus episodes than all of those combined. So while I would’ve liked to see more of him in an arc that hinges on the phrase “my dad,” I love that we get one last new Dad Episode to kick off the end of Season 4, especially if it lets us see Connie again before her kidnapping.

Onion may be a red herring, but the whole ending with Doug and Connie’s sweet talk is another red herring, tricking us into thinking the episode is wrapping up and that despite the suspicious inconsistencies, Onion was just being Onion. Unlike Gem Hunt, our heroes don’t solve the mystery, and because they don’t, neither do we. We have more information than Steven that something sinister is afoot, with an alien threat that for some reason is going after Onion, but before our sleuths can learn more, we cut to black.

After the victories of taking the ocean back from Lapis and saving the world from the Cluster, Act III of Steven Universe is the first with a tragic midpoint, and the fallout of Steven’s sacrifice at the end of Season 4 ripples through the first third of Season 5. Episodes like Storm in the Room and Lion 4 bring plenty of angst as well, so Doug Out wisely gives us some comic relief before the sweet-and-somber flavor of The Good Lars and the tension that follows. That tension is still present here (we get a cliffhanger, after all), but I’ll take moments of pure happiness where I can. This isn’t a silly episode in the vein of The New Crystal Gems, but it’ll still be a while until we have this much fun in one episode again.

We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!

It’s time again to expand our Top List, from a Top Twenty to a Top Twenty-Five! Most are Act II classics that got pushed down by the sheer volume of great episodes, but Lion 4 makes the cut as well. We’ll keep it at 25 until Change Your Mind; normally I’d switch to 30 at Episode 150 to keep up the Top 20% trend, but it seems more fitting to expand when the original series concludes.

Doug Out sadly does not make the cut, but it’s still an episode I love. We’ve had plenty of cliffhanger episodes that feel incomplete, and while this one also leaves us wanting more, it still works as a full story and not just setup. And the story is great!

Top Twenty-Five

Steven and the Stevens

Hit the Diamond

Mirror Gem

Lion 3: Straight to Video

Alone Together

Last One Out of Beach City

The Return

Jailbreak

The Answer

Mindful Education

Sworn to the Sword

Rose’s Scabbard

Earthlings

Mr. Greg

Coach Steven

Giant Woman

Beach City Drift

Winter Forecast

Bismuth

Steven’s Dream

When It Rains

Catch and Release

Chille Tid

Lion 4: Alternate Ending

Keeping It Together

Love ‘em

Laser Light Cannon

Bubble Buddies

Tiger Millionaire

Lion 2: The Movie

Rose’s Room

An Indirect Kiss

Ocean Gem

Space Race

Garnet’s Universe

Warp Tour

The Test

Future Vision

On the Run

Maximum Capacity

Marble Madness

Political Power

Full Disclosure

Joy Ride

We Need to Talk

Cry for Help

Keystone Motel

Back to the Barn

Steven’s Birthday

It Could’ve Been Great

Message Received

Log Date 7 15 2

Same Old World

The New Lars

Monster Reunion

Alone at Sea

Crack the Whip

Beta

Back to the Moon

Kindergarten Kid

Buddy’s Book

Gem Harvest

Three Gems and a Baby

That Will Be All

The New Crystal Gems

Storm in the Room

Room for Ruby

Doug Out

Like ‘em

Gem Glow

Frybo

Arcade Mania

So Many Birthdays

Lars and the Cool Kids

Onion Trade

Steven the Sword Fighter

Beach Party

Monster Buddies

Keep Beach City Weird

Watermelon Steven

The Message

Open Book

Story for Steven

Shirt Club

Love Letters

Reformed

Rising Tides, Crashing Tides

Onion Friend

Historical Friction

Friend Ship

Nightmare Hospital

Too Far

Barn Mates

Steven Floats

Drop Beat Dad

Too Short to Ride

Restaurant Wars

Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service

Greg the Babysitter

Gem Hunt

Steven vs. Amethyst

Bubbled

Adventures in Light Distortion

Gem Heist

The Zoo

Rocknaldo

Enh

Cheeseburger Backpack

Together Breakfast

Cat Fingers

Serious Steven

Steven’s Lion

Joking Victim

Secret Team

Say Uncle

Super Watermelon Island

Gem Drill

Know Your Fusion

Future Boy Zoltron

Tiger Philanthropist

No Thanks!

     6. Horror Club      5. Fusion Cuisine      4. House Guest      3. Onion Gang      2. Sadie’s Song      1. Island Adventure

[naruwitch]

Code Geass: Paladins of Voltron Chapter 25: Battle Plan

There was complete silence on the bridge as the video message closed. The Paladins stood still, watching Lelouch closely. It was clear that Nunnally was now a captive of Britannia, one of the things that Lelouch feared the most. They all knew that when it came to his sister, Lelouch could act purely on his emotions, barely thinking things through.

However, that was when Lelouch was alone. He had support now. Friends and allies that he could rely on to help him.

A good thing too, as the next thing they knew, Lelouch had spun around and tried to make a beeline for the Black Lion's elevator.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa! Lelouch, where do you think you're going?!" Kallen shouted, grabbing onto his wrist tightly.

"What does it look like?" Lelouch snarled and fiercely tried to free his arm, but the Red Paladin held firm.

"You-you're not just going to go barging in there without a plan, are you?!" Rivalz exclaimed, wide-eyed.

"Every second Nunnally's, there is a second far too long!" Lelouch shouted, still struggling vainly against the Kallen, C.C., and even Coran's holds.

Then abruptly, Suzaku stepped directly in front of Lelouch and placed his hands on his shoulders. He looked the Black Paladin dead in the eye. "Lelouch! You need to calm down! We'll rescue her! But you running in there like a psycho isn't going to make her condition better!"

"Suzaku's right Lelouch," Milly agreed with a determined frown, "First, we should find out where she is. Rai, see if you can track that signal. Maybe we can pinpoint where that broadcast was!"

"Already on it!" Rai growled as he practically flung himself into his chair, barely waiting for the screen to load correctly before getting to work.

"I know I likely don't need to point this out," C.C. said, calmly releasing Lelouch after she ensured he wouldn't run again, "but we could be walking headfirst into a trap. Nunnally is the perfect bait for it."

"What makes you think that?" Shirley asked nervously, eyes shifting back and forth between Lelouch and the witch.

C.C. hummed thoughtfully, "What I mean is that it is likely that Charles either knows or strongly suspects that Lelouch is a part of Voltron. Hell, for all we know, he may have figured out that Lelouch is Zero too. He knows Lelouch and knows that he loves Nunnally, and will do anything for her safety. Therefore, Nunnally becomes the perfect bait to try and keep Lelouch, and by extension, Voltron in check."

"Whoa, time out!" Rivalz exclaimed, his hands making the 't' sign, "If the Emperor already knows that Lelouch is Zero, why didn't he just say so in that broadcast? If you ask me, that could've been the perfect time to expose his identity."

"Best guess? He likely kept the information to himself because if word got out that a member of the Royal Family was openly opposing Britannia, other nations like the EU and the Chinese Federation could start to believe that the Emperor is losing control of his Empire. This would only encourage them to fight back against Britannia even harder," C.C. theorized.

"That makes sense," Milly nodded, "I know there was a bit of contention between Britannia and the Chinese Federation as of late. So caution is understandable."

"So then… what do we do?" Shirley asked, looking around nervously.

"We won't be able to do anything without more information," Suzaku quickly said, "it's just like with the Balmera. We can't just start shooting down the Viceroy's Palace. Until we locate Nunnally, we're stuck."

Lelouch, having been quiet for a majority of the conversation, could still feel panic bubbling in the pit of his stomach. He knew what Suzaku said was the most logical, but his instincts to protect his sister were waging war within him right now.

He suddenly felt a weight against his leg and looked down to see that Kaguya had hugged him again, "Don't worry Lelouch, Nunnally will be okay! And you'll definitely get her back, now that you have the Goddess of Victory on your side!"

The group chuckled at Kaguya's declaration, but only a tiny curve shook Lelouch's lips, his own heart still pounding in his ears.

A hand on his shoulder made him jump. Turning to the source, he saw Rai looking at him, having gotten up from his Paladin seat.

"Lelouch, I can't read minds, but I believe I know what you're thinking. And… I understand. I feel the same way about Sophie and my mom. Ever since I discovered that they're still alive, I've wanted to find them. But I know I can't just fly out blindly into the next galaxy we come across. That won't get me anywhere. Until I know for sure where they are, all I can do is keep looking. So I promise, once I find where Nunnally is, you'll be the first to know."

"Rai…" Lelouch murmured, staring back at the Green Paladin. Another hand suddenly jerked him forward a little.

"You want Nunnally back, right?" Kallen asked, a stern frown on her face. She continued before Lelouch could answer honestly, "Then you need to be Zero right now. Nunnally needs Zero right now. So use that big, scary, strategic brain of yours that I know you have and figure out how to save her!"

Kallen's statement was the last bullet needed to break through Lelouch's wall of despair and panic. He straightened himself, eyes set, and determined.

"I will do everything to help as well," Sayoko said, giving a short bow, though her eyes and posture were heavy with regret, "It's my fault that Lady Nunnally was captured after all."

Lelouch hated to put Sayoko on the spot, but he had to know, "How did this happen?"

He hoped his voice didn't sound harsh, but if it did, Sayoko paid it no mind.

"I don't know how, but Lady Nunnally and I were tracked to the safe house that you had set up. When I found out that we'd been discovered, I quickly made arrangements to leave. But it seems I wasn't fast enough. Forces led by your brother, Schneizel, surrounded us. I held back as many as possible, but at one point, when I was fleeing with your sister, I was knocked unconscious and fell into a pit. Whether it was a trap set prior or not, I don't know. By the time I woke up, I was alone, and Lady Nunnally was gone."

Then, to Lelouch's shock, Sayoko collapsed to her knees and bowed to Lelouch deeply, "I'm sorry, my Lord, I failed you."

It took a couple of seconds for Lelouch to shake himself from his shock, but he quickly knelt next to the kunoichi. "You're not to blame for this, Sayoko," he gently lifted the maid up, "I was a fool. I should've suspected that Schneizel would figure it out. He always has, and likely always will be, the worst foe I've faced. Minus Zarkon, of course."

"'Your worst foe'?" Shirley said, "What do you mean, Lulu?"

"Let me put it this way," Lelouch said, turning to face them again, "We used to play chess together when I was still living in Aries Villa, and he was the one person I could never beat."

Various reactions erupted from everyone in the room, gasps of shock or wide eyes, and Rai paused from his rapid typing. Coran and Allura, in particular, looked stunned. They still remembered when Lelouch and Coran played their first chess match against each other back on Arus, and Coran had commented to Allura later that Lelouch was likely on par with King Alfor in skill, maybe even more so. So to hear that there was someone that not even Lelouch could beat was both shocking and terrifying.

"Wait... wait... hold on a second!" Rivalz sputtered after picking his jaw up off the floor, "Your brother, actually beat you. At chess. I've seen you take on pretty much every kind of noble out there, and you always total them in ten minutes or less! And you're saying that there's someone that you could never beat!?"

"Yes," Lelouch replied quite bluntly.

Stunned silence followed as everyone digested this new information.

"Okay… that's a little terrifying," Shirley said, voicing everyone's thoughts at that moment.

"Anyway, that's a topic for another time," Lelouch said, waving his hand in dismissal, "Rai, make sure to scan every Britannian communications link that you can to track Nunnally. When you do, inform me immediately."

"You'll be the first to know," Rai nodded before practically diving back into his seat.

"Anything I can do, Lelouch?" Kaguya asked, smiling kindly. Lelouch smiled back at the young woman. He remembered that Kaguya had been one of the few people at the Kururugi Shrine to be kind to him and his sister. He remembered the two girls becoming close friends. Therefore, he knew precisely what Kaguya could do.

"All I can ask of you right now, Kaguya, is to be a friend for Nunnally when rescue her. Can you do that?" Lelouch asked, bending down to Kaguya's eye level.

Kaguya nodded happily, "Of course I can do that!"

Lelouch nodded before straightening again, "All of you be ready to leave at any time. The second Rai locates Nunnally; we're moving out." He then swiftly turned to leave the bridge, "C.C., come with me."

"Where are you going?" Kallen asked as she and the others watched him leave.

Lelouch stalled for a moment, looking over his shoulder, "I'm gathering the Black Knights. It's time that they know the truth about me… and about Geass," everyone's eyes widened at this proclamation, "Best to get this out of the way."

o~o

"Schneizel, what is the meaning of this?!" Cornelia roared as her brother calmly walked into the Viceroy's throne room. The moment that the broadcast had ended, Cornelia had requested… no… demanded that her brother come to the Viceroy's Palace immediately. Standing close by her were Nonette and Euphemia, as well as Guilford and Darlton. The two knights were positioned closer to the walls while her sister and the knight stood side-by-side with her. Cornelia's eyes glared angrily towards the Prime Minister as he approached with his own loyal subordinate, Earl Kanon Maldini.

"If you knew that Nunnally was alive all this time, and had her with you, why weren't we informed of this immediately?!" Cornelia shouted again.

"Your reaction is understandable dear sister," Schneizel answered calmly, "but please think rationally for a moment."

"RATIONALLY?!" Cornelia shrieked and nearly drew her sword from her waist.

"Viceroy!" Darlton gasped, stepping forward for a moment, "Please, we must hear him out before any rash actions are taken!"

Cornelia growled before forcing herself to calm down, as she knew he was correct. Despite his protest, though, Darlton and Guilford looked less than pleased with the Prime Minister too.

"Thank you, Lord Darlton," Schneizel nodded, "I do apologize for my actions as of late. However, you must first understand when I found Nunnally, I was given direct orders from the Emperor himself to not reveal her presence until deemed necessary."

This statement only further confused the group rather than calm them down. Why on Earth would the Emperor want Nunnally's presence hidden? He could have at least told them about it.

"What about Prince Lelouch?" Guilford cautiously asked, "Have you been able to find him yet? Or any of the students from Ashford Academy?"

"Unfortunately, we haven't found any new information regarding Prince Lelouch, or any of the other Ashford Academy students," Kanon answered with a shake of his head. Though the Ashford students were not top of the priority list, everyone also knew that if they could track and find even one of the students, that could lead them to find Prince Lelouch.

"Can… we see Nunnally right now?" Euphemia timidly asked.

"We apologize, Princess Euphemia, but that is not possible at this time," Kanon answered with a sad expression.

"What?! Why?" Euphie gasped, tears gathering in her eyes.

Cornelia scowled angrily, not liking the answer either, "Yes, why the hell can't we see our own sister?!"

"I'm truly sorry, Cornelia," Schneizel said, his tone pacifying as he held his hands up in emphasis, "but Nunnally is in a very fragile and emotional state. We don't want to add any more stress than she's already experiencing."

This response didn't seem to dull Cornelia's ire even slightly as she shot her brother an almost murderous glare, "Schneizel… if you do anything to her…"

"Cornelia, do you truly believe that I would harm our own sister?" he asked plainly.

The Viceroy scoffed, "To be honest… I really don't know what to think of you right now, brother."

Schneizel frowned, "That hurts. Truly, it does. But I can understand that. Our family is quite broken, isn't it?"

Though she didn't voice it aloud, Euphemia immediately agreed with that statement. It had been for a long time. Perhaps longer than before she had been born. What happened to Lelouch and Nunnally did little to nothing to repair it and only spread the rift among the Royal Family broader. A tear escaped Euphie's eye.

With this statement, Schneizel turned to leave, but Maldini stalled and turned back to the trio, "Princess Nunnally is scheduled to be transported back to the homeland before day's end. Prince Schneizel and I can pull some strings to have your unit serve as her protection, Viceroy."

"Indeed," Schneizel glanced over his shoulder again, "Don't worry, once Nunnally is home, you'll all be seeing her again very soon."

With these final words, the Prime Minister and his escort left the throne room, the door closing behind them. Cornelia's scowl never left her face.

Guilford sent his princess a wary look, "Viceroy, pardon my ignorance, but how could you distrust the Prime Minister. He's your own brother."

Cornelia rolled her eyes before addressing him with a sigh, "Guliford, if you grew up with a man like him, you would have some trust issues yourself. I promise you that."

Meanwhile, as Schneizel and Maldini continued their walk away from the throne room, Maldini turned to the prince, "Are you sure you know what you're doing, Prime Minister?"

Schneizel turned to his subordinate with a small smile, "Kanon, do you trust me?"

His answer was immediate, "Of course, my Prince," he said with a small bow.

"Then rest assured, I have everything under control."

As the two exited the palace, Schneizel remained deep in thought. There were very few things in this world that would make him lose his composure. However, he could certainly add the arrival of that Voltron machine to the list of things that did. Though he would never admit this aloud to anyone, when he saw the footage of Voltron for the first time, he had nearly fallen out of his office chair. After a brief discussion with Earl Asplund, Schneizel agreed with the scientist that the machine, mainly the Lions that made it up, couldn't possibly be of Earth origin. Otherwise, he was sure they would have discovered the Blue Lion long before its debut two months prior.

That brought him to his second line of inquiry. According to confirmed reports, Zero, as well as the seven Ashford students, disappeared around the same time that the Blue Lion showed itself. He already had strong suspicions that Zero and Lelouch were one and the same. As it was true that Lelouch had been one of the seven missing students, not to mention that there were, conveniently, seven Lions that made up the machine, it was likely that his brother hadn't been found yet because he was off with the other teenagers with Voltron.

His thoughts eventually led Schneizel to think about their father, the Emperor. Was he aware of this as well? And if so, that would undoubtedly complicate some of Schneizel's plans.

The Emperor's order to transport Nunnally to the homeland was no doubt a ploy to try and lure Zero, a.k.a. Lelouch, out. She was the perfect bait for it, after all.

If his brother was to come for Nunnally, and Schneizel had little doubt that he would, he hoped to at least have a talk with him to resolve all this violence peacefully, if not for Nunnally's sake, then the world's as well.

o~o

Lelouch and C.C., along with the space mice that were perched calmly on her shoulders, carefully watched to gauge the reactions of the Black Knights as they all sat in one of the castle lounges. Lelouch had just finished telling them his history, his current mission, and finally about the Geass power that he, along with three other Paladins, now wielded, though he didn't mention which ones.

From what they could see, the group's initial reaction was one of stunned shock, though he did spot Inoue and Minami shooting him looks of pity and sympathy.

"And that's everything?" Ohgi eventually asked as he was still trying to process not only the information given to them but also the fact that they were being trusted with it as well.

"Yes, that's everything," Lelouch nodded, "Now, you all know."

"Damn…" Tamaki murmured with an expression that Lelouch couldn't quite identify.

"Heh, our mysterious, masked leader is a Prince of Britannia? Who knew?" Inoue chuckled in disbelief.

Lelouch bowed his head slightly with a pained expression, "I do apologize for hiding my identity from you, but I'm sure if you knew who I initially was, you wouldn't have been as inclined to join me."

Ohgi waved the apology off, "Don't worry, we get it."

"So… this Geass thing, what exactly does it do?" Sugiyama asked cautiously from the back.

C.C. shrugged slightly, "It depends on the user. No Geass given out by people like me is the same as any other. It can be anything from reading minds to turning invisible. The particular one that Lelouch has is called Absolute Obedience. If it's activated and he makes direct eye contact with you, he can order you to do anything he wants, and you'll have no choice but to obey him no matter how outrageous the order. The drawback that we've noticed so far is that it only works once per person. In other words, once he gives you an order using Geass, he can't do it a second time."

C.C. then smirked playfully, "So, anyone of you want to form a contract with me? Get some mysterious, supernatural power?"

A couple of the Black Knights couldn't tell if she was serious or not as Ohgi smiled nervously and scratched the back of his neck, "Uh… no thanks. Maybe some other time?"

C.C. didn't seem offended by the statement. Only more amused as she chuckled.

"I have a question," Tamaki said, raising his hand, "What's with the rats?"

To the surprise of the Black Knights, the mice seemed to actually take offense to that comment. All four of them simultaneously turned and glared at the red-head. The skinny light blue one started hissing at him, its hackles raised.

"They are not rats, they're Altean mice," Lelouch emphasized, "They somehow managed to sneak into Princess Allura's cryopod and were asleep inside it with her for the last 10,000 years. Due to that, she somehow developed a telepathic link with them. Basically, she can understand them, and they can understand her."

Tamaki shrugged and nodded, apparently accepting the answer.

Despite that pleasant interruption though, Lelouch still had a serious question for the Black Knights, "Anyway, now that you know who I am, and why I'm doing this, I'll understand if you don't want to work with me anymore. After all, I'm the prince of a nation that you all hate so much, so if you want to leave, I won't stop you."

"Well, even if we did want to leave, you could just use that Geass thing to make us stay," Inoue pointed out matter-of-factly.

"I won't do that," Lelouch answered immediately and folded his arms, "That's one of the few things I'll never do. Otherwise, I'm no different from that man I have to call a father."

Ohgi stood up from his spot on the couch, "You saved all of our lives in Shinjuku, and showed us that we're more than just simple rebels. You proved that we can stand up to Britannia. You've given us hope when we thought we'd lost it. And if what you've told us about the Galra is true too, that they're more dangerous than Britannia, you're going to need all the help you can get. You're our leader, and the fact that you willingly revealed not only your history but your power to us means that you trust us. We trust you, and we're with you."

"Heh, yeah, you're stuck with us, kid," Tamaki smirked as the rest of the Black Knights smiled and nodded in agreement.

Lelouch couldn't help but smile in relief as he looked at all of the Black Knights. He was extremely grateful that they were willing to put their faith in him, and he was going to do everything he could to not let them down.

"I thank you all," he said with a nod.

"So…" Yoshida started, "Sorry, but what exactly do we call you now?"

"Hm? Oh!" Lelouch gasped when he realized what Yoshida meant, "Well, out on the field and on missions, you'll address me as either Zero or the Black Paladin. It'll depend on the situation. Otherwise, when we're just in the Castle like this, just calling me Lelouch is fine."

"Alright," Ohgi nodded, grateful that Yoshida had thought to ask, "Also, Lelouch, we were all wondering... Do you have any plans yet regarding your sister? And if you do, is there anything you need us to do?"

"...We're currently trying to gather information regarding Nunnally," he told them after a moment, "but as of right now, I can't think of anything where I'll need your assistance yet. I do not doubt anyone here, but as of right now, we simply lack the resources we need for you all in a fight."

"Coran and Allura are currently making arrangements with Lady Kaguya and the other heads of Kyoto to have some Knightmares brought up to the Castle," C.C. added. "Coran is going to try and see if he equip them properly for space use, as well as prepare the needed equipment you'll need for your own use. If his modifications are successful, the Black Knights will be the owners of likely the most advanced Knightmare frames on the entire planet."

This statement sent a wave of excitement through the Black Knights. They all looked at one another with broad smiles on their faces. Even Ohgi's eyes sparkled excitedly.

"Ha! I'm really starting to dig this whole 'teaming up with aliens' gig we've got going on!" Tamaki grinned.

Before any other comments could be made, the intercom crackled to life.

"Lelouch. We need you on the bridge immediately!"

o~o

After a quick farewell to the Black Knights, Lelouch practically sprinted to the bridge with C.C. hot on his trail. The other Paladins, as well as Coran, Sayoko, and Kaguya, were already there waiting for him.

"Did you-?"

Before the Black Paladin could finish his sentence, Rai pulled up a radio message that he managed to intercept. On it, they could hear the voices of several officers discussing Nunnally's transportation from Area 11 to Pendragon, Britannia's capital.

"Have you managed to trace it at all?" Lelouch asked Rai urgently.

"Already have coordinates," the Green Paladin promptly answered.

"You have a plan, Lulu?" Milly asked, turning to him.

"Yes," he nodded, "if everything goes according to plan, we should be able to get in, get Nunnally, and get out fairly quickly. However, I want to make one thing clear. And that is that Voltron is not going to be used for this mission, not if we can help it. Any objections?"

All of the Paladins shook their heads. They didn't need an explanation. Not only could using Voltron make it more challenging to rescue Nunnally, but from the beginning, the goal was to keep Britannian casualties to a minimum. They were going to need those soldiers after all, once the Galra caught up to them.

"Good. Alright, this is our plan of attack," Lelouch typed into the computer, bringing up an image of the transport, the Avalon, that Nunnally would be escorted in. "We need to wait until the transport that has Nunnally is in the air. This will allow us not only more room to maneuver, but will also allow us to inflict as little damage to the transport as possible. We can also avoid combat with any Knightmare frames. We'll have Zen, Zerith, and Zinnia stationed underwater in the Pacific Ocean until further notice. Meanwhile, Aka, Yoru, Polaris, and Maeraka will fly in the air and keep any Britannian aircraft at bay, as well as drop off myself, Sayoko, Rai, and Shirley at these three points of the ship," three parts of the Avalon highlighted in red. "Rai and Shirley will take port and starboard and sabotage the engines. While they're doing that, Sayoko and I will search for Nunnally. Once we have her, you'll pick us up. Worst case scenario, though, the Paladins that are on the Avalon can use the bonds we have with our Lions to call them to us. After that, we return to the Castle. Any questions?"

Most of the Paladins shook their heads, but Suzaku, surprisingly, raised his hand slightly, "Lelouch, I...I was wondering. Could I somehow come with you to get Nunnally? She's my friend too, and I want to help more."

Lelouch smiled but shook his head, "I appreciate it, Suzaku, but we can't risk Britannia learning your identity, and you already know why."

Suzaku grimaced, but nodded, "Yeah, got it."

"Alright, we leave in half a varga. Be ready!"

As everyone scrambled to prepare for departure, Lelouch managed to snag Sayoko's arm.

"Sayoko, may we speak in private?" he asked politely.

The maid nodded, and Lelouch led them down the hall, not too far from the bridge.

"Do you have it with you?" he asked urgently once he was sure they were alone.

Sayoko immediately reached into her pocket and pulled out an object wrapped in fabric. She handed it to him without protest.

Lelouch took the object and carefully unwrapped the cloth. Underneath it was a knife. But not just any knife. The metal of the blade was a purple color and had a familiar symbol engraved at the bottom of the hilt.

Lelouch bit his lip. Theories and possibilities all pooled within his mind, some making more or less sense than the last.

"Master, if I may ask, what exactly is this? How did you get it?" Sayoko asked.

Lelouch took a breath before answering... "...It belonged to my mother. I came across it completely by accident. Details aren't needed, but let's just say that the noble I was playing against that day bit off a little more than he could chew with the gamble. In exchange for keeping half of the money, he offered this knife as a replacement. He told me it was one of a kind and that it didn't need much maintenance. I was feeling generous that day, so I agreed. I will admit, though… the second I touched the knife, I felt some sort of… connection to it… does that sound strange?"

"Not at all," Sayoko shook her head.

"Anyway, a couple days later, when I was taking a closer look at it, I found a note hidden in the knife's sheath. That's when I found out it belonged to my mom. I also learned the name of her father this way. How that nobleman got it, I don't know, but I was actually able to learn a lot about my mom's family because of this. My mom was born a civilian, and her father, my grandfather, was a fireman, and he died like one too. Lost his own life in a house fire while he was trying to save a little girl..." he smiled sadly. When he learned about the man he would've called grandfather, he was sad that he hadn't been able to meet him. He seemed like a good man to have raised a woman as wonderful as his mother.

"...Is there another reason you're so interested in this knife, my lord?" Sayoko asked.

Lelouch's face went from a whimsical smile to severe and determined again, "Before we arrived back here, we, Voltron, ran into a Galra operative who was working against the Empire. He apparently was a member of a Galra resistance group. They call themselves 'The Blade of Marmora.'" Lelouch tightly held the knife by the hilt, "All of their operatives apparently carried blades just like this. Though the one that Ulaz was carrying was much bigger than this one…"

"...What does this mean then?" Sayoko asked, her face looking troubled.

Lelouch shook his head, "That can wait for now. Nunnally needs us."

Sayoko nodded and bowed, "Of course."

Before she could leave to prepare herself, Lelouch grabbed her arm again, "Wait… Sayoko. I just wanted to tell you, I'm thankful for everything you've done for Nunnally and me all these years. You know who we are, and yet you've stayed by our side through everything. I don't think I can thank you enough for that."

Sayoko smiled and placed a hand on Lelouch's shoulder. He looked up at as Sayoko caught his eyes with her own, "Lelouch. You and Lady Nunnally are both precious to me. I think of you as my own. And I want to promise you right now, if I ever meet that monster that you call your father, the only thing he will get from me is a knife between his eyes."

Lelouch's eyes widened. He knew that Sayoko was dedicated to her work, but to hear her say that she would kill someone so willingly aloud took him by surprise.

Before he could think, he pulled Sayoko into a hug. The ninja stiffened for a moment before quickly returning it.

As they pulled away, Sayoko smirked at her young lord, "Now, let's go get your sister."

Lelouch smirked back, "Right."

o~o

"Attention all personnel. The Avalon is scheduled for departure in ten minutes," a voice announced over the radio.

Sitting alongside the massive ship that her brother was currently prepping, Cornelia sat impatiently within her newly repaired Gloucester within an escort ship. Nonette was stationed in a separate ship on the other side, with the Lancelot and Schneizel's research team as well. As Kanon and Schneizel promised, they managed to make arrangements for Cornelia to be with the group that would escort Nunnally back to the homeland. While she still wasn't allowed to see her sister, much to her great annoyance, she was at least grateful that she would know Nunnally was safe. And once she finished officially cleaning up the terrorism in Area 11 and left it to her sister, Euphemia, the first thing she planned to do was visit Pendragon to see Nunnally. She would assure her that she nor Lelouch had been abandoned, that she had secretly never stopped looking, and wouldn't until she had physical evidence of their deaths.

Being unable to save them during Japan's conquest was a regret that weighed heavily on her shoulders, and she planned to do everything in her power to make up for it in the future.

Meanwhile, at the ground level, Jeremiah Gottwald and a small squadron of soldiers, including Villetta, were standing guard on the runway. They watched as the last of the supplies was loaded into the Avalon.

The soldier couldn't help but frown with frustration, "This is unacceptable… I should be on that ship, protecting Princess Nunnally personally!"

His radio wasn't on, so he received no response to his lament. Thinking of the young princess, though, his mind soon wandered to darker, more painful thoughts. He remembered being there on the day that Lady Marianne had been cruelly shot down. And he had been on his first assignment as a guard as well. It had been his chance to prove his loyalty to Lady Marianne and the Empire!

But he failed. His loyalty didn't carry through. And now, the woman that he loved and respected was gone, and her children followed shortly after.

Then, just over two weeks ago, he received the news that nearly had him fall to his knees with joy. Prince Lelouch and Princess Nunnally were alive! And in good health from what he could tell. Once the Viceroy learned of this, she had all units, all units, out searching for clues on where to find her brother and sister.

Jeremiah had leaped on the opportunity to prove himself once more. It had to be him that found them. Not only could it repair his reputation and honor that he had lost due to the 'Orange' incident (he grit his teeth just thinking about it), but also redeem himself from his failure eight years prior. And once Prince Lelouch and Princess Nunnally were safe once more with the Royal Family, he would never leave their side again. He would do everything in his power to keep them safe and happy.

Due to his prior history with Lady Marianne, he was one of the first to piece together Ashford Academy's connection with vi Britannia siblings. He felt like an absolute fool for not thinking about it before, either! The Ashford family had been one of Lady Marianne's top supporters. They had lost nearly everything when she had died, so it would make sense, therefore, for that same family to provide the vi Britannians with refuge.

But when they finally had been given the okay to infiltrate the school, they were once again too late.

The clubhouse that they found out the vi Britannians had been living in was deserted. There were no signs of life, and the home appeared to have been uninhabited for a week at the most. When he heard Villetta recheck the school attendance, his heart gave another pang of despair when she told him that their names, Lamperouge, had been removed from the school.

This discovery only proved to Jeremiah another horrifying revelation. The vi Britannia children weren't being held captive like some conspiracy theorists thought, but it was more likely that the children were purposefully hiding from Britannia. The more he thought about it though, the more it made sense.

The day that Prince Lelouch confronted his father was a harrowing one. Jeremiah's loyalty was only to his Lady Marianne, and being one of the ones there to witness the Emperor openly saying that his son was nothing to him had made his blood boil. To this day, he wondered why he didn't act differently. If he had defended the prince in that throne room, or at the very least insisted on going with them to Japan, things likely could've ended up differently.

Jeremiah was shaken from his thoughts, though, when the ground beneath his Knightmare rattled. Sirens and warning sounds rang wildly throughout the base. Knightmares scrambled into defensive positions, and soldiers rushed to finish the Avalon's preparations.

Then with a fantastic boom, three of the Voltron Lions, the black, green, and orange one, landed hard right in the middle of the base, tails thrashing, and teeth bared.

Jeremiah had been unable to get a good look at the Lions when they had first appeared at Narita. Now that he was practically standing in front of them, he could understand the panic that they seemed to inflict on many of the soldiers that day.

However, this didn't deter Jeremiah. If the Lions were here than that had to mean-

"ZERO!" Jeremiah shouted as he raced towards the Lions in his Knightmare.

"Lord Jeremiah, wait!" Villetta shouted after him.

"Zero! If you're here, come out and face me!" he shouted, "Come and face Jeremiah Gottwald!"

"Well, well," a voice came from the Black Lion, "it's been a while, Jeremiah. So, you're still in the army? I'd love to stay and catch up, but I'm afraid I don't have time right this minute, Orange boy."

There it was. That name. The name that now made Jeremiah a near pariah among the rest of the soldiers. Red slowly bled into Jeremiah's vision.

"Orange?!" he howled in rage as he stared at the Black Lion, and he could swear the Lion itself was smirking at him as it waved its tail haughtily, "DIE!"

Jeremiah charged forward in a fury with his Sutherland. Before he could land a single blow though, the Black Lion's mouth opened, and a single laser blast collided with his Knightmare, throwing it backward in pieces as it erupted in flames.

"Lord Jeremiah!" Villetta gasped in horror as she watched another soldier and comrade meet his end right in front of her eyes. Looking behind the Lions, Villetta noticed the Avalon finally beginning to take off, along with the other escort ships. Thinking fast, she raced around the Lions and leaped onto the Avalon just as the loading doors closed. Jeremiah died trying to protect Princess Nunnally. The least she could do was honor his death by doing the same thing in his stead.

As Lelouch watched the Avalon take off, he smirked, "Just as planned. Now!"

Zen, Zerith, and Zinnia all leaped into the air, pointing their heads downward, and began blasting at the ground below, blowing dust and debris up everywhere, making a makeshift smokescreen for their escape.

As the dust finally cleared around the remaining Britannian forces, they were shocked to see the lions had vanished.

o~o

"Alright, phase one complete," Lelouch reported through the comms as the Lions dove underwater, "the Avalon is now airborne. Meet at the rendezvous point."

"Understood!" a chorus of voices responded. It was music to Lelouch's ears. Even now, he was amazed at the support and assistance he was receiving from his fellow Ashford Academy peers.

As the three Lions descended to the seafloor, a reasonable distance ahead of the Avalon's current location, Lelouch spotted the other four Lions gliding towards them. Waiting for them within the other Lions would be Sayoko and C.C., who insisted on accompanying the infiltration team onto the Avalon ship as well.

The trio gently set their Lions down on the ocean floor, before their helmet shields automatically pulled up. They then quickly left the cockpits of each Lion and were soon submerged into the depths of the sea. Using their jetpacks, the three effortlessly glided through the water to the four Lions waiting for them. Lelouch swam into Yoru's mouth, Rai into Polaris, and Shirley into Maeraka.

As Lelouch emerged and entered Yoru's cockpit, Sayoko and Suzaku greeted him with a nod and smile. The maid was now wearing an outfit nearly identical to Allura's and C.C.'s, only hers was red and light blue.

Same with Rivalz when Rai arrived. The two shared a fist bump before bracing for action.

Shirley also made it safely to Maeraka's cockpit, with Milly and C.C. waiting for her.

"I thought you would be with Lulu, C.C.," Shirley said when she got there.

"I decided that I'm going with you at the last minute, Shirley Fennete," the immortal answered.

"Oh… okay," she said awkwardly.

"I probably don't need to remind you, Shirley, but there won't be Galran sentries up there this time. The soldiers we'll be fighting will be real-life people. Are you willing to do what it takes to complete the mission? Are you willing… to kill to do so?"

Milly looked warily between the two women. She had thought about this too and turned her concerned face towards her friend.

"Th-that won't happen!" Shirley stuttered, "I-I'll just use my Geass and sneak past them. I don't have to kill anyone!"

C.C. sighed, "You realize you can't solely rely on your Geass forever. Sooner or later, you'll have to fight and possibly kill, to survive."

Shirley didn't answer. How could she respond to that appropriately?

Turns out, she didn't need to, as the shadow of the Avalon finally fell over them.

"Kallen, use your Geass to check the ship for Nunnally. Is she on there?" Lelouch asked urgently.

Kallen promptly activated her Geass, and her vision zoomed in on the ship. She scanned the interior before her eyes fell on a room near the center of the Avalon. In the middle of the platform, she spotted a familiar figure.

"Yep, she's there. This definitely isn't a decoy!" Kallen confirmed.

"Good! Alright, commence phase two of the operation!"

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 139: Deku and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hallway

Previously on BnHA: The cops and Nighteye’s pro hero group took about nine pages to approach Overhaul’s house, only to be stopped by some massive troll of a man before they could ring the bell at the front gate. Everyone was all, “HOW DID THEY KNOW WE WERE COMING?” while ignoring the fact that there were like 70 guys all conspicuously gathered outside this place for like an hour prior to them getting started. Ryuukyuu turned into a dragon and I wanted it to be like this, but so far all she really did was hold the guy down with one of her big dragon claws. Which to be fair was still pretty cool. So she and her group are staying outside to deal with the cave troll while the rest of the heroes head on in. Meanwhile in the secret underground labyrinth beneath the house, Overhaul plotted to have his underlings stall the heroes while he made his getaway. And this is why you don’t ring the fucking doorbell before invading a mafia capo’s house. Just FYI.

Today on BnHA: The heroes finally make it inside the house! So thrilling. Nighteye uncovers a secret passage, and the heroes proceed down below. After smashing their way through a blocked wall, they discover a hallway doing its best impression of that Salvador Dali clock painting. This apparently is the work of one of Overhaul’s henchmen, Mimic, whose quirk allows him to enter objects and control them. Apparently he shot himself up with some Trigger and became a “living labyrinth.” Since Mirio is the only one not physically deterred by this, he activates his quirk and runs ahead before the others can stop him. The rest of the group suddenly falls into a big hole that opens up beneath their feet, landing in a room with three more henchmen. The pros get ready to fight, but Amajiki holds out a hand to stop them, saying he’ll be the one to take them down.

(As always, all comments not marked with an ETA are my unspoiled reactions from my first readthrough of this chapter. I’ve read up through chapter 171 now, so any ETAs will reflect that. My son the musical prodigy.) 

okay, time to get back on this. some holdover thoughts from the previous chapter since I’ve had a couple days to reflect on it:

why the hell didn’t everyone wear kevlar or some shit. you know you’re going up against enemies that will be shooting at you, and if they hit you you’ll lose your quirk. it blows my mind that the pros didn’t suit up with extra body armor knowing this

even worse, because of the way the house is designed, they’re basically going to be sitting ducks. they only know one way in and out of the lower levels of the house. seeing as it’s underground, that means lots of long, narrow tunnels and hallways. they’re in just about the worst strategic position they could be for a raid like this: the enemy knows they’re here, and unlike Nighteye’s team, they actually know their way around the hideout. meanwhile the raid team is inevitably going to either have to split up and get themselves lost, or stick to this stupid plan of taking the most direct route possible to get to Eri, and meanwhile have bad guys shooting quirk-destroying bullets at them the entire way

that being said, they should stick Kirishima out in front and use him as a human shield lol

(ETA: to be fair, the only one that actually ends up getting hit is another one who is normally for all intents and purposes bulletproof. and in his case kevlar wouldn’t have done jack shit because he would have ended up shedding the vest anyway due to his quirk. so fair enough, but the others should have still geared up. no one cares about safety huh)

all right. so let’s see just how screwed these guys actually are

okay so we’re opening with the mafia dudes demanding to know what’s going on, and the cops explaining that this is a raid suckas

the lower level pros are holding the mob guys back while the cooler pros go on ahead

FG’s apologizing for not stopping to take off his shoes since this is an urgent situation. how fucking rude. tracking in all that dirt

oh my god

fucking kidding me with this shit. Bubble Girl in the lead? she barely even has a shirt, let alone any type of armor? is her quirk defensive in any way? let’s hope so

is Nighteye’s quirk even active again yet? right now he’s just a guy in a suit, isn’t he? although he did work with All Might for years, so he probably does have wicked combat skills that we just haven’t seen yet. hopefully

(ETA: wicked combat skills and a six-pack)

I can’t even see Kirishima in this shot. jeez. ridiculous

so as they run, they’re all discussing how the bad guys seem to have known they were coming, and that this is Not Good

I don’t really care about what Aizawa is saying in this panel, but I like that he’s right next to Deku

taking that promise very seriously. well good, since we all know that literally the instant Aizawa lets him out of his sight, Deku is somehow going to end up facing the final boss or something

(ETA: fucking uncanny, though. every fucking time, Deku)

anyway, so they’re logically concluding that Overhaul and the top brass must already be in the basement either hiding all their shit or getting ready to escape

this makes Kirishima very angry

well yeah, Kiri. but bad guys gonna bad guy

still, if it gets you fired up, you go ahead and feel that righteous anger boy

and now Nighteye’s stopping at a random panel in the wall and says this is it

oh, cool

please be a secret door please be a secret door please be a secret dooooor...

yay!

oh shit lol

never mind. close it

ughhhhhhh the centipede guy is using his quirk nooo whyyyy

he’s picking up two of the guys with his centipede arms

to me this is a fate worse than death

WHYYYYY

now Bubble Girl’s using her bubble quirk!

she’s... making bubbles. from her body

they’re floating over to the last bad guy

and they popped in his eyes and he’s screaming “my eyes!!!”

are these... are these just normal bubbles

I don’t really get it but hey! at least it’s not centipede arms!

so she’s restraining the dude and telling the others to go on ahead

and down they go. off to the garden of madness

except that almost immediately they’ve come to a dead end??

this doesn’t look like a normal quirk though. maybe someone has a wall-building quirk? similar to what Cementoss has?

(ETA: this is most definitely Overhaul’s reassembly quirk)

anyway, Mirio says he’ll take a look

oh my god. I finally get to see just how Mirio deals with immediately shedding his elaborate costume and then having to put the whole thing back on again later

oh snap

WELL ISN’T THAT FUCKING CONVENIENT. OKAY THEN

so if Mirio can have a costume that phases with his quirk, why can’t Hagakure have one woven out of her hair that turns invisible along with her? is it just because Horikoshi is a pervert. okay then

(ETA: I’m not even gonna bother getting into this anymore, but just know that I am rolling my eyes at this obnoxious fucking mangaka so damn hard)

anyway, so Mirio’s taking a peek and then reporting back that the path up ahead is exactly like Nighteye described. he says the wall is very thick though

oh, riiiiight

I keep forgetting about the “reassemble” part of Overhaul’s quirk

oh well. time to bust a wall

lol, FG and Static are like, “whoa”

I think this is the first nice thing Static has said about any of the kids

oh shit. now there’s something else happening

the floor is getting all weird and uneven? like it’s getting all warped somehow

um

well this is. annoying

(ETA: actually, “annoying” is the mildest, nicest, most undeservedly polite way possible to put it)

my god I hope none of them is claustrophobic. or ends up being claustrophobic after this, because I sure wouldn’t blame them

the head police guy says this has to be Irinaka’s quirk. that’s the HQ chief

so wait, is that the little guy from chapter 132 who made an arm grow out of his head??

and it doesn’t even sound like they’re sure it’s him

although FG points out that if he got all doped up on quirk enhancers, this isn’t outside the realm of possibility

oh snap! it is him!

oh my god. “I’m not on the ship. I’m in the ship. I am the ship”

LMAO at Fat Gum though

what kind of pathetic excuse for a pro hero can’t even predict that a guy is going to turn into a basement

he’s asking Aizawa if he can erase the quirk, but Aizawa says he can’t without being able to see the quirk users’s body

hold up, does this mean illusionists would be immune to Aizawa’s quirk?? because that is some bullshit. (which I now really want to see)

Amajiki seems like he’s starting to psych himself out here. he’s muttering out loud that if the path keeps changing, they’ll never reach their goal, and the enemy can easily get away

oh shit, it seems like he’s starting to get overwhelmed...?

hey, hey. easy there bud. you guys got this

OH SNAP MIRIO TO THE RESCUE

what a manly dude coming to the rescue of his bro who was starting to freak out. I love Mirio so much

ahhhhhhh he says he can still go on ahead as long as he knows the right direction

ahhhhhhhh I’m suddenly so fucking worried?!?! HE’S SO BRAVE AND I’M TERRIFIED FOR HIM

SON OF A BITCH HE JUST TOOK OFF JUST LIKE THAT BEFORE THEY COULD STOP HIM

oh my god. in the first place, isn’t he blind whenever he uses his quirk? don’t all of his senses disappear? so he can keep pressing forward, but like what happens if he turns the quirk off because he thinks he’s made it through, only he hasn’t made it through? because this isn’t an illusion, as far as I understand it; the Mimic guy is actually warping the passageway

oh my god. forget just the characters; I’m going to end up becoming claustrophobic at this rate

(ETA: yeah this still nopes me out thinking about it. Mirio’s definitely braver than I am, that’s for sure)

but at the very least, Mirio bravely pressing forward seems to have snapped Amajiki out of it

hey guys, guess who ships the shit out of these two now btw. yeah that’s right. me that’s who

so Mimic is thinking that he can’t stop Mirio, but that even if he does make it through, “he won’t be able to do a thing by himself”

idk about that. you should’ve seen what this freak of nature did to almost the entirety of class 1-A in a matter of seconds. while naked no less

wait. this is starting to sound a bit eyebrow-raising. I promise you it was a g-rated beatdown though

oh snap, Mimic is warping the ground and dumping all of the important characters deeper into the basement while closing up the path back up

well that’s nice. so now they’re all sealed up in this death chamber. cool. that’s cool

not that I want it to happen, but a part of me is wondering why Mimic hasn’t just crushed them all yet if he has control over this entire basement

so are they purposely trying to keep them alive? is it to avoid as much legal trouble as possible? are they hoping that if they just incapacitate them, Overhaul can later use his quirk to wipe their memories like he did with that Tarantino gang?

incidentally, every now and then I wonder to myself why someone as intensely rational as Aizawa would keep his hair so long and not just cut it short or tie it back to keep it out of his way. and then panels like this come along and it’s just, “oh yeah, because it’s hot”

(ETA: but ain’t it the truth)

so yeah, they’ve landed in this pit and now here’s some more bad guys!

literally all they have to do is have Aizawa incapacitate them with his quirk one by one and have Deku or Kiri punch them. the rest can sit back and take it easy

(ETA: the fact that they refuse to follow this most sensible of plans throughout the entire arc is one of the more frustrating things about it)

oh snap, but it looks like someone else is finally ready to jump into action after seeing his boyfriend disappear down the enchanted hallway of doom

WELL SHIT, LET’S FUCKING DO THIS THEN. TIME TO EAT SOME SUNS

also. that flashback panel though. that was a middle school uniform. these two have known each other since childhood just like Kacchan and Deku. omggggg

AND MIRIO USED TO HAVE A FUCKING PONYTAIL. TALK ABOUT A 180 DEGREE STYLE CHANGE. NIGHTEYE THIS IS YOUR DOING, DON’T LIE

BONUS:

glad to see the minds that brought us the yaoyorictionary and ochachakaleg are back at it again

so what exactly is the point of the lemilliohelm. I don’t get it. “it was designed so he could put it on quickly and then inevitably have it fall off again almost immediately”

consider my interest piqued at the mention of him being rescued by a hero in the past, though! I went back just now and looked at his flashback in chapter 152, and yeah! now that you mention it!

also! BnHA kids really need to be more careful on flashback bridges because those things are slippery as fuck

so can we get a name for this guy who saved him and inspired him to become a hero, then? I’m super curious about him now

[clean-bands-dirty-stories]

Survivor ~ Graydon

A/n: I didn’t know if his name was Braydon or Graydon so.... here goes I guess. Also it’s kind of a rushed ending and it’s just because I really liked this idea but like... I wrote this over like. Week and forgot some of the movie and lost momentum for writing it, so I hope that you guys enjoy this :)

Summary: Being locked up with your dad as you both wither away to nothing slowly but surely isn’t ideal. The first chance she gets’ she’s gone. When her father doesn’t follow, she makes an instant choice to bond with one of her rescuers, and it soon drives her to far reaches and crazy lengths. But who wouldn’t do whatever it took to survive with a cute boy, right?

Pairings: Graydon x female!reader

Song Suggestion: “Famous Last Words” by My Chemical Romance

MASTERLIST

I didn’t have the energy to move, so when I heard the lock turning I just closed my eyes, accepting my fate. Dad had been wrong. They’d gotten smarter and had found us. Or they were just trying to see what was in here. Did they need clothes? Blankets? Or did the warmth in the blood they ate satiate their sensitivity to the cold? If that was the case maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to eat another person. My old man was milliseconds from losing it. It wouldn’t be a big deal...

The door opened and there wa as gasp, a hand on my arm. I whimpered, recoiling, waiting for the hold on me to tighten as hands dug into my abdomen and teeth sunk into my arm. Neither came. In fact, the hand dropped my arm immediately. There was a swish and my dad started so I knew he’d been exposed. I opened my eyes, looking over to see two men bundled up, trying to calm my flailing father.

Didn’t take the old man more than a second longer than it took me to realize these people were not one of Them. These people were too controlled, curious, and concerned. Too humane. My eyes moved as the hand come back, pushing my hair out of my face. “Hey,” a soft voice greeted. I smacked my lips, trying to talk and respond, but my mouth had long ago gone too dry to respond. “Let’s sit up.” He offered me his hand and I took it, letting him pull me to a sitting position. He then reached around and I tensed before he came back, a water pouch in his hand. “Here,” he offered. I took it, not caring whether it was poisined or not. I would die either way so who cared if I died of poison or of human limitation?

The second the water hit my mouth I was sucking it down and the boy next to me took it back again. “Whoa whoa whoa,” one of the other men by my father mumbled at the same time. “Don’t drink all of it in one go. Won’t do you any good if you’re weighed down and sick from drinking too much after you hasn’t had any in so long.”

The man not offering water to my father looked at the boy next to me. “Is she okay?”

“Yeah,” I croaked, wincing at the pain as the words bubbled through my raw throat. The second man smiled at me, nodding. He recognized my ability to, at the very least, answer for myself. A good sign. It also meant he now had to direct his questions at me.

He moved closer. “My name is Sam,” the man greeted. “These are my friends, Briggs and Graydon.” He pointed first to the man who had offered my father water and then to the boy ho had offered water to me. I filed their names into my brain, forcing them to stick. I would not forget the people who had saved me.

“My name is-“

“No!” My father croaked. I looked at hm angrily. “If you choose to ever listen to me in your lifetime, do so now,” the old man chided warningly. “We don’t know if we can trust these people.”

I rolled my eyes, my emotions coming back weakly as the words and warmth followed the water. “You’re paranoid, old man,” I snapped. “They saved us. We would have died without them. If they wanted to eat us we’d be gone and if they wanted us dead all they’d have to do is leave us behind. There’s no logical reason for someone who means harm to us to help us as they have.”

The old man glared back at me. “You’ve had your voice back for thirty seconds and you’re already back talking me.”

Briggs chuckled. “Father and daughter?”

“How could you tell?” I asked, my head lolling back as I slowly popped my neck, trying to stretch my joints as well as I could. “I mean I know the regular situation is ‘you have his eyes’ or ‘your noses match’ but I’m sure the insanity I inherited from him gave us away, huh?” The other men actually laughed and I could tell that we’d get along. Before everyone had died it had been teased that I was the sunlight in a dark world. Warm and caring and hilarious. A lot of people liked to have me around to cheer everything up. Now, after watching all of my friends and family be eaten alive, their screams still echoing in the back of my head and maybe not-so-much-of-a-joke insanity eating at the edge of my brain... At least my sarcasm and sass could make people laugh. I hadn’t lost my touch, just changed my strategy.

I leaned against something as the trio talked to my father, switching information and getting everyone caught up. Everyone moved toward the screen as my father went to show them the broadcast of Paradise and as the boy - Graydon - went to follow, he suddenly paused and then stopped next to me, craning his neck to see what was going on from his spot by my side. “Whoa,” he whispered, his body leaning forward, giving away how much he wanted to be closer.

“You can go,” I told him. “I’ll be fine by myself.”

Something must have given me away in my face because he looked at me a second before shaking his head. “You’ve been alone waiting to die for too long. I’m not leaving.” I didn’t know if it was him or me that took more comfort from the other’s presence, but I instantly felt better and didn’t urge him to leave again. He was right. I hadn’t completely alone in this room, but a lunatic like my father really wasn’t much company.

It made me briefly wonder if I was crazy and it just hadn’t manifested yet. I’d seen my dad stare at me like I was a meal and knew that if I didn’t keep an eye on him he’d turn on me. I knew HE was crazy by the things he bailed about and the ideas that came out of his mouth. He’d been crazy before They came. You could see it in the way he stood and the way he talked and the way he moved. You could see it in the folds in the fabric that made his body, soul, and person. How could you tell if you were crazy without that silent bodily context?

Graydon scooted closer, his shoulder bumping mine to try and knock me out of my thoughts. “Thanks,” I mumbled. He nodded.

When it was time to go, I volunteered to go first. Graydon helped me to my feet and then we were walking, him guiding me as I got the feeling back in my feet. They had fed us soemthing small too and I already felt my body arguing to lay back down but I knew that if I lay down I wouldn’t be able to get up again and then I’d rot away in this one room and die. Or worse, They’d find us and then I’d spend my last moments weak, helpless, and in complete pain.

When we were all out, I turned back to see Sam suddenly shoved, tumbling into me. I caught him and then he stabilized himself and returned the favor, catching me as my knees gave out. The door slammed and locked and we all turned to face it. “Shit,” Sam cursed.

“He locked it,” Graydon grunted.

There was a pause before Briggs looked at me. I shook my head, shooting down the question in his eyes. He won’t come. No matter what we do, he wouldn’t come. Briggs sighed. “Leave him,” he told the others. There was a loud knocking and I gasped, going completely stiff. Vivid images colored in sickly vibrant reds and suffocatingly dark blacks filled my head and I shivered. It was Them. Oh god I was out where they could get me again. I took a step toward the door then forced myself to stop. I had to get out. Hiding wouldn’t bring me anything but a slow death with a mad man I’d once called my father.

Briggs began to move toward the noise, Sam immediately following. Graydon went to follow and I reached out, grabbing his wrist. My heart was racing, fear coursing through my veins. “Don’t go!” I called, the three men looking back at me.

“Why not?” Sam asked.

“They’re down there,” I told him, my eyes begging them to understand the words I couldn’t form. “They... they eat... they killed everyone to eat.” I shivered again, leaving against the wall as my legs turned to jelly at the very thought of going toward where They were. “Please, it’s not something you can’t understand just from what I’m saying. It’s not something you need to see.”

Sam frowned. “They eat... people?” My hands curled, fingers turning into claws against the wall. I nodded and Briggs and Sam exchanged a look. I looked at Graydon who was already looking at me. He moved closer, trying to comfort me but not sure how to do it.

“You okay?” He asked. He immediately cringed. “I know you’re not I just mean... you’re willing to leave your dad behind?”

That surprised me. “I lost him a long time ago,” I reasoned. His frowned deepened. “Just... please don’t leave me.” I wasn’t one to be vulnerable, but I knew that I couldn’t lose him. Any of them. I’d already lost everyone else. I LIKED these people. If I was on my own again it would be absolute Hell. I hadn’t even been truly alone, not a single person around to look at in times of hopelessness. If they were gone, the loneliness is all I would have. And I don’t think I could bring myself to fight for that.

After seeing the look in my eyes, his face set and he nodded. “Promise.”

That set me at ease. Briggs moved, catching both of our attention. “Can you shoot a gun?” He offered me the weapon and I looked at it with the slightest of pauses before nodding, taking it. He stepped close, pointing things out. “Safety, trigger... pull that when you want to shoot. Safety’s off so be careful.” I nodded. “Let’s go,” he mumbled, turning away from the noise and toward the exit and I relaxed. “Let’s get out of here before they find us.”

We were moving again but a second after we took a step I heard my dad ram against the door, screaming my name at the top of his lungs. I gasped, skittering away. Graydon was immediately right against me, his body then moving in front of me.

After a few beats, Sam chuckled. We all looked at him like he was insane. “Got brave all of a sudden, hm, Graydon?”

Graydon glared but there was a sudden awkwardness in him that made me wonder how accurate Sam’s statement had been. “Guess it’s easier to be brave when there’s something to fight for,” I mumbled. “Maybe he didn’t want to come in or be here, but he has to get out now.” Sam looked at me like I hadn’t quite got what he’d meant and maybe I hadn’t. Sam’s smile and Graydon taking a step away from me seemed so out of place and nonsensical that it didn’t add up in my mind as I tried to draw a conclusion as to what Sam was insinutaing.

My dad started smashing against the door again, violent and loud. “Let’s go,” Briggs muttered darkly as I tensed, the split second of almlst light heartedness completely disappearing in a second as screeching voices echoed in the distance.

We were running now, me leading the group because I knew the layout of the base I’d once called home better than they did, especially while panicked and running. We were about twenty feet from escape when a body landed from the ceiling. I gasped, my eyes going wide as an arm tugged me back. All I saw was black as guns went off. My hands flew to cover my ears and I pressed my face into Grayson’s back. When the fight cleared, the groans echoing from behind us made me lock up.

Graydon turned, pulling me after him. No one had to say anything- the four of us took off. We ran and ran and kept running until we hit outside, where we only stopped because Briggs has to blow up the opening. "Keep going!" Sam yelled, motioning at me and Graydon when I whined, hopping from foot to foot. I didn’t pause, turning and taking off, and Graydon was only too happy to follow.

Running through snow was not easy. My feet kept sinking and catching in the holes and I almost tripped several times. When we finally got to the bridge, both of us were having a hard time breathing. We got across when I finally stopped, not able to go any further. "We got over the bridge," Graydon gasped. "Let’s wait here for Sam and- and Briggs." He said his words between gasping breaths. I nodded and he kneeled next to me.

The world was spinning and I groaned. "Graydon I... I don’t feel... so good."

He looked at me and then back at the bridge. There was a pause and then a loud explosion. I shivered as the air hit me from whatever had happened and then something hit me over the head and I was out cold. The world was gone and I fell into black.

-

It was dark when I woke up but unlike I’d g-them use to, it wasn’t cold. I was laying comfortably on soemthing soft, a thick blanket over me. A door opened and I looked over to see Graydon walking in with a bag in his hand. "You’re up," he greeted, smiling. He sat next to me on a beaten down chair, offering the bag. "Food. You hungry?" I nodded, taking it from him.

"Thank you." I reached in and pulled out a lumpy sandwich, smiling. It was the most delicious thing I’d laid eyes on in weeks.

I dug in and he chuckled. "Don’t eat too fast, you might choke." After a few bites and swallows, it was gone. "Shit, a girl who can eat her food. You continue to impress." He seemed awkward, a weird lilt to his voice that I couldn’t quite pin.

My head tilted. "Are you sick? You keep looking at me weird."

Graydon rose a hand, running it through his hair. "Guess Sam was right," he sighed. I rose my eyebrow. "I... know I don’t know you well, but... but I kinda- well-"

His face went red and I scooted close, pushing the blanket and the food to the side to plant my feet on the ground, leaning my elbows on my knees so I could reach out to him when I pressed the back of my hand to his forehead. "Now you’re red, and your face is kind of warm. Maybe you are-"

"You’re beautiful." I froze, my hand still on his head as I met his eyes. It was suddenly very apparent how close we were. "And you saved our asses back there," he added quietly. "We got out a lot faster than we would have if we’d ins[ected like they had planned and soemthing really bad could have happened. We’re back at base and Sam found the clearing where there might actually be a good place to restart normal life on Earth. We’ve been waiting for you to wake up so we can go. Whenever you’re ready, we-"

"You said I was beautiful." My hand dropped to my knee and he swallowed. His eyes were wide, full of fear, and I couldn’t help but note that he was very attractive. I sat back. "I’m flattered and... and I haven’t had real company in a long time. But Gray... I... I’m really messed up. Looks aren’t everything."

His lips tugged as he fought a smile. "I’m not asking you to have sex with me, it was just the truth. I would like to get to know you. You’re strong and brave- it amazes me. You sat in the same spot for DAYS and then got up and ran faster than ever I could in the far below freezing weather without proper warmth and you just... took it so well. We thought you were dead when you didn’t wake up for four days, constantly taking your pulse and checking your breathing... I don’t know."

A shyness I hadn’t experienced in a long time bubbled and poked, my body hinting at a possibility. His promise ring out to me, the idea of always having someone by my side at all times and through everything - especially in the way that I hadn’t had the time to allow myself to think of but had wanted for as long as I remembered - was promising. It was good. I smiled. "Sure, Gray. I’d love to get to know you."

"And no pressure," he added. "If we become just friends, then it’s just friends." He laughed, shaking his heads. "I didn’t think this was how this whole thing would go down but I also didn’t realize how awkward I was around a pretty girl, so here we are." I blushed and he reached out, the pads of his fingers gently moving across the tinted skin before slipping a piece of hair behind my ear. His hand dropped. "I like that nickname by the way. I’ve gotten Aydon but never Gray."

We sat in quiet for a few seconds before he pointed to the food and conversation continued as I picked up my sandwich again and continued eating. Despite the terrible circumstances we’d met under and the awkward beginning to our relationship... I didn’t mind. There was a lot more to someone than just looks, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Graydon wasn’t just looks. We had a lot ahead of us but for now, this was fine. But, I have to say, I was excited for the future. For the first time in a very long time.

[windingdrabble]

     “Y’ look nice.”

     ‘Nice’ doesn’t exactly cut it. It works, sure-- Ruby’s crossed the ‘nice’ bar easily, it isn’t incorrect, but it isn’t enough. His fur looks nice when the light from the moon hits it. The nurses gave him pain medication, and it’s working well enough to where his smile is small but constant and there and soft and calm and nice. Ruby makes a joke at his eyes’ expense every time he gets the opportunity to, but he keeps fluttering them open and closed and the quick, delicate blinks are curtains to his foggy eyes that Sonic can’t bring himself to think aren’t nice still. Maybe he’s covered in bandages and bruises but he’s still nice, even if calling it ‘nice’ adds to the bubble of frustration and confusion in him. Nice isn’t quite right, but it’s the only thing he can bring himself to think of, and that’s already enough to make him break eye contact.

Ruby’s eyes open and stay open for longer this time, looking up at Sonic. There’s a bandage on his cheek, but Sonic grins a little stiffled grin when he bets to himself the blush could probably show through the gauze. 

“I look like shit,” the other deadpans, turning his head a little to the right on Sonic’s lap. The motion gets him a little closer to the hand Sonic has hovering over that side of his face. Sonic’s reluctant thumb tucks in closer to graze over Ruby’s nose, and after a few beats of serene (odd, misplaced, but not unwelcomed serene-- serene is a luxury to them both) silence, Ruby buries his muzzles into Sonic’s palm with a sigh. Sonic can’t help but not be able to stiffle the grin any longer, chest warm and cheeks red. He can’t tell yet if Ruby’s naturally this touchy or not-- he’s more often than not on some sort of pill or pain killer and SOnic knows from experience that definitely is a factor to consider-- but it’s-- also nice. Sometimes, when they both seem to gravitate towards sitting in the same spot and lean into eachother, it’s nice.

“How would you know?” Sonic replies, a little amusement in his voice. Ruby just... ending up half-asleep on his lap was already endearing (endearing-- endearing is nice, and it’s a little better than nice, but endearing doesn’t fill up the space in his heart Ruby has carved himself a home into) but hiding his face in his hand makes him smile crooked-- he can feel it.

“I just do,” Ruby replies, in his endless, stubborn wisdom. Sonic rolls his eyes, tracing the outline of Ruby’s eye with a stray thumb.

“Flawless logic, O’ Wise One. I’m the only one who can tell if y’ look like shit or not.”

He feels Ruby smile the smallest bit wider, and his heart skips a beat, and Ruby hides in his palm again and sunlight falls over Sonic’s back.  

“You are biased,” Ruby replies not-exactly-incorrectly (he still looks nice, still looks endearing wrapped up in all the bandages and casts), quiet and muffled. “You are the second least qualified to tell me if I look like shit or not.”

“Hey, I’m not second best at anything,” Sonic feigns insult, despite the smile in his voice. Ruby’s face isn’t as warm as it was when he was in the throughs of sickness weeks ago, but Sonic prefers it this way. If Ruby’s fever had come back that quickly that fast he would’ve been kicking down the doctor’s door forever ago. “If I gotta be unqualified I gotta be the most unqualified or no dice.”

Ruby opens his right eye to roll it, and Sonic huffs. Ruby complains that his eyes are useless now, but of course he doesn’t skip out of putting up a show of annoyance. 

“You make no sense,” he comments, closing his eye again when Sonic’s other hand gently brushes the fur near his ear. Sonic’s familiar with longing now, or familiar with it enough to at least recognize its pull at Ruby so easily giving in to the affection, at his still-relatively-peaceful smile under the moonlight still streaming in through the window, at the breath he feels dance over his hand as Ruby eases into him more. Sonic hasn’t made sense for a long time now, and for once, it isn’t daunting or scary or stressful.

“You don’t either,” Sonic shrugs, brushing over the pathways on the side fo Ruby’s face that are starting to become somewhat familiar, that are still drawing out that longing. 

It shouldn’t be too long before the hospital discharges Ruby. He’s getting his casts removed... in a few weeks (Sonic tries to keep track of all the dates, but for the life of him everything is still so liquid and runny and it blends together a lot), he’s been face mask free for a while now, he’s allowed to be carried outside and to hobble around more and more with Sonic to keep an eye on things. He won’t need to be tied down to a bed pretty soon, he won’t have to take as many medicines, he won’t have to move so little. He won’t have to get pain meds and curl up like this and joke in a quiet voice, the only voice in the room, and the only voice in the world Sonic wants to listen to at the moment. He won’t need distractions from the hospital at night, he won’t need conversations at four am (it was four last time he checked, before climbing on the bed), he won’t need Sonic to brush his quills absentmindedly (he isn’t absentminded-- he’s very present and very aware and very invested in where Ruby moves, what he says, how his fur moves against Sonic’s fingers, how his lips move against Sonic’s palm, how he looks so okay for once in forever and Sonic wants him to be okay forever), he won’t need Sonic to ‘accidentally’ have to stay where he is for the rest of the night, back to propped up pillows and hands gently discovering where he can scratch to get Ruby to be less grumpy.

The longing tugs, familiar anxiety seeping into the calm atmosphere. 

Where would Ruby go after this? Sonic may be working on the whole Chaos Control... Control thing, but he can’t manage as much back and forth as he does from the hospital to anywhere else in his world. That’s his world, where everything is a five minute run away at most. Ruby’s home is in his corner of the multiverse, and Sonic shifts uncomfortably at the thought of leaving Ruby (stubborn, way too godamn stubborn Ruby) to his own devices with a hole in his chest, alone in a world Mephiles likes to frequent. Sonic hasn’t been able to track down that thing since the whole mess went down-- his Super Sonic memories have always been a little... dreamlike. 

Ruby could want him to stay away, now that he won’t need as much care. Sonic is the emergency contact for a whole host of reasons, but half fo them are for the safety of everyone around Ruby. Sonic woudl be hard-pressed to find someone as explosive during a panic attack as Ruby is, and when you’re a ticking time Chaos Energy time bomb who was made to sock people’s jaws in his sleep, only someone with the same jaw-socking dayjob can keep you at bay. Ruby would still need someone to keep him from hurting /himself/, yeah, but... Ruby’s stuck here, one way or another. When he bails out fo the hospital, he won’t be stuck anymore-- stuck with the hopsital, or stuck with Sonic. 

“Hey, uh-- you,” he licks his lips, twirling a few strands of Ruby’s fur. “You.. going to stay.. at your place when they let you outta here?”

“You mean I am not here for the rest of my endless life?” Ruby laughs, and this time the skip in Sonic’s heart is bittersweet. There’s something about hearing Ruby laugh and it being the only sound in the room. 

His eye opens again, and he shifts in Sonic’s lap. “I... no.” Something taints the peace that had blanketed Ruby for most of the night, something shadows over his face and knits his brows. “No, I... I will look for somewhere to stay here, I guess.”

They’ve talked about a lot of things in Ruby’s hospital stay. Guilt, anger, hurt, regret, mistakes, apparently mutual feelings (though they haven’t said they’re anything other than friends, which Sonic doesn’t complain about), but Sonic doesn’t think it’s ever going to be a comfortable subject to bring up. Given what he knows now about Ruby’s history, he doesn’t blame Ruby for skipping out on home visits. Sonic runs his fingers down Ruby’s face, trying to draw the tension from his expression and shoulders again, somehow. 

“I-- You--” he stutters, never a good thing to be unable to keep back. Sonic the Hedgehog is witty and fast-talking and confident, and when Sonic the Hedgehog isn’t witty and fast-talking and confident the red flag it raises sticks out like a sore thumb. “You-- Y’know, I don’t... I don’t know if..”

“Spirit, relax.” Ruby’s head tilts, away from Sonic’s hand to attempt to make eye contact. Sonic bites on the inside of his cheek, ears flicking like an anxious beat pacer. Ruby’s hand lifts from the messy blankets all around them, enough telegraphing to tell Sonic to meet him halfway. Blind, and all. Sonic rolls his shoulders, holding onto Ruby’s outstretched hand, which squeezes when they made contact. 

“Stuttering does not sound like you,” Ruby continues, softly enough to where Sonic doesn’t start thinking the same thing, to his own detriment. He stutters rarely, although if he does it’s usually around Ruby. “What is it?”

Sonic blinks down at him, at the glassy eyes he hasn’t come to appreciate any less, at the genuine emotion in them despite their lack of eyesight, at Ruby’s slight head tilt, concerned and curious and nice and endearing and cute. Cute also doesn’t occupy the space he needs it to occupy, but it slots in a little better. A more snug fit, even if the longing is making it cold and Sonic involuntarily holds Ruby’s hand tighter. Ruby rubs his knuckles with his thumb, still inquisitive. Still allowing Sonic his own pace.

“Tails’ house,” Sonic manages, blinking down and then away from Ruby at the door of the pale white room. “I.. have a room. In Tails’ house. He could... I think I can cash in a few favors, and you could.. crash there, for a bit.”

Sonic laughs without intending to. “If you aren’t tired of having me around so much.”

Ruby shifts again, a little more than the last few times. He’s still frowning, but still inquisitive-- curious if anything. Curious, confused. “Why would I be tired of that?” 

Sonic blinks, scrambling through the logic in his thought process for an explanation. He laughs again, nervously. “Well, I dunno. If you’re just.. making due with what ya’ got here, I mean. It isn’t like you sleep much at all-- or if I sleep much at all, either-- and if you’re stuck in the hospital and not moving, and I’m not moving to make sure you don’t run away, then you- might as well.. do this, I guess.”

He shrugs again, ear twitching. “I dunno if this is your-- first choice for spending the night. I’m just a free pillow and conversation.”

Ruby shakes his head, taking back his hand to blindly hover over where he probably imagined Spirit’s cheek to be, and when he makes contact, he finds his way to Sonic’s chin to tilt it enough to get Sonic’s runaway eyes.

“Making due? Spirit, did you miss out on that whole conversation we had where we both said we were hypocrites and liked eachother?”

The question and the hand at his chin make Sonic run a blush. “No, ‘course not, but.. it ain’t like I know how this works, and you don’t either, and we’re both not exactly the ‘let’s immediately get married immediately and never leave until we get sick of eachother’ kind people, y’know?”

With his hands free, Sonic tugs on the cuff of his glove. “We both need our space, we already talked about that, and I don’t.. I don’t know how much y’re doing this cause you’re bedridden?”

“No, I know, but why would I be tired of you? I... like spending time with you, I told you that. You make staying here bearable...”

Sonic shifts again, opposite ear twitching. “Just a hunch.”

He looks away again, despite Ruby’s eye contact being mostly for show. His stomach twists into familiar anxiety. “A few months ago I barely figured out if I woudl throw up if you held my hand or not, dude. I ‘unno where your line is drawn.. If you’re just here right now cause it’s convenient or...”

He twitches, not exactly discreetly. “You know I’m bad at this.”

“I know,” Ruby replies, a little fond and a little concerned and a little in thought. His ears swivel towards Sonic. “...You think this is going to stop.”

Sonic tilts his head, a ‘so-so’ kind of thing. “Hell if I know.”

And he doesn’t really know, not clearly. It isn’t a clear cut deal, sorting through his thoughts when they get tangled up in the mess that is emotions. It’s-- a lot, a lot of overwhelming, anxious stuff and things and Sonic can’t even differentiate the stuff from the things, but it sounds close enough, it sounds resonant enough, it sounds familiar and sort of... close. He didn’t think Jules was going to stop. He didn’t think Bernie was going to stop. 

“It... at least sounds like it,” Ruby sighs, cupping Sonic’s cheek, to which Sonic replies by nuzzling into his palm like Ruby had done earlier with him. 

“...I worry about that, too,” he says, vaguely like a confession. “That this will stop. That you will change your mind.”

Sonic blinks, leaning into Ruby’s hand. Smiles a little, a little sad. “That it’s temporary, yeah?”

As if he can detect it, Ruby returns the sad, empathetic smile a little. “Yeah.”

Sonic sighs in the quiet of the night, slipping his fingers inbetween the ones Ruby has on his cheek. They hold eachother’s remaining hands. “Do you.. think it’ll stop?”

Ruby shakes his head, bringing their held hands closer. “Why would I say no to a free pillow and conversation? You are annoying, but not that annoying.”

Sonic laughs, louder and more genuine than his nervous, awkward laughs. He fully tangles his fingers with the hand Ruby keeps on his cheek, pulling it down. His head falls, his nose bumps against Ruby’s where he closes his eyes and breathes through the insecurity clouding his head. Ruby worries about the same thing. He opens his eyes again, and inhales a little relief when Ruby smiles.

“The.. line. The 'this isn’t my thing’ or ‘I got bored, I guess’ line. D’you know where you draw it yet?”

Ruby’s eyes are close and Sonic can see him thinking, ears twitching, blushing. It’s... cute. “Do you?”

“Well-- doing this isn’t the end of the world,” Sonic says, somewhat playfully, and more relief filters in when he recognizes his own playfulness. “I think it’s... a mood-dependant thing, but.. you?”

Ruby leans up a little, enough to nuzzle their noses together, and Sonic snorts as he answers. “I think I can make do.”

[the-pontiac-bandit]

we can take the world

alright so i blame @jakelovesamy @dmigod and @elsaclack for this e n t i r e l y. i was never going to write ng fic. i wasn’t going to do this. and yet winston and aly sucked me in and, like, four deep binges later, i’m 6k words into a pregnancy reveal. so here you go, world. (title from take the world, by johnnyswim, which has dominated all playlists for several weeks)

also on ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14193303

Aly is sitting in the stall, feet kicked up against the door (how she ended up a married adult woman living in a loft with a bathroom stall she doesn’t quite understand. She used to have covered parking). The timer on her phone is running, ticking off the seconds as a white stick develops in the corner. She can see it out of the corner of her eye, so she does her best to look anywhere else, to think about anything other than the timer counting down on her phone or the pee-soaked pregnancy test exerting an irresistible pull on her gaze. She isn’t particularly successful.

They’d talked about this before, of course. Once when Winston was still sweaty from a bobcat costume (and from the celebration after) and they were curled up in bed, planning their new futures together. And once this time last year, when Winston, uncharacteristically serious, spent a day in careful manipulation to ensure the loft would be empty at dinner so they could talk about starting their family.

But then she’d found out she was on the shortlist for a promotion, and then Nick and Jess had gotten engaged, and then her new job was busier than she’d expected, and then...and then...and then Jess had grabbed a box of tampons during a Target run and then Aly got a sinking feeling in her stomach because she hadn’t needed one in weeks and then that sinking feeling turned quickly into the violent nausea that had been dogging her for days and then—oh.

She’s staring out the pebbled glass of the small bathroom window, trying to identify indistinct shapes on the street below (trying to think about nothing) when she’s jerked out of her reverie by a far-too-familiar voice humming indistinctly. She doesn’t need to peer through the crack to know it’s accompanied by a well-tailored suit and a custom shower caddy with at least twelve hair products.

Schmidt.

She can feel the seconds ticking down with each heartbeat, but she spends several of them paralyzed. She had been alone in the apartment - she’d waited for that. It was just past noon on a Tuesday, but somehow, Schmidt was in the bathroom of a loft he no longer lived in, apparently to do his hair.

She remembers the timer on her phone with just seconds to spare. She’s fumbling for cancel as she watches the seconds tick from 14 to 7. She almost sighs in relief - Schmidt doesn’t seem to have noticed he’s not alone, and she’d prefer to keep it that way - but she manages to suppress the noise. And then, the reason she’d set a timer in the first place forces itself back into her consciousness, driving her heart rate through the roof and stealing her breath.

She tries to turn slowly, to stay calm and measured, as though controlling her movements will control the response. But then she’s leaning, snatching the test, unable to stand another second of suspense. She turns it over in her hand, her heart skipping a beat, and immediately brings the test to eye level, to see the two pink lines at close range. She stares them down like they’re a perp she’s interrogating, as if her scariest glare (the one that makes criminals cry but makes Winston weirdly giggly) will force one line out of existence.

Schmidt’s humming has transferred to full on beatboxing, using the word chutney as a rhythm, which she’s thankful for only because it provides cover for the small sigh she lets out as she drops the arm holding the test. She leans sideways against the wall of the stall, praying that the emotions knotting her stomach don’t make their way back up her digestive tract, dragging her breakfast with them. She wants nothing more than to sprint for her car and drive to the precinct, drag Winston outside, and spill it all to her partner. But outside the door, she can hear Schmidt uncapping the first bottle and apparently beginning to narrate the process to his hair follicles, so she settles in for a long wait.

——

Twenty three minutes and forty seven seconds later, Schmidt announces loudly over the god-awful noise he calls music that his hair can get ready for step six. Aly knows it’s been twenty three minutes and forty seven seconds because she’s been timing the ritual, but based on the early markers of insanity clouding the corners of her brain, she’d guess it’s been at least three million years.

At minute three, she’d typed out a text to Winston explaining her predicament, knowing he’d find it funny, that he’d do that silly little giggle he saves for when she’s truly gotten herself stuck. But then she’d realized, finger hovering over the send button, that text was probably not the best way to tell him about his impending fatherhood. So she waited.

At minute twelve, she’d rediscovered the joy that had bubbled up in her chest last year, when she’d seriously pictured for the first time a little boy with Winston’s kind eyes and penchant for terrible pranks. The first knot in her belly untangles, and her fingers drift from the windowsill, where they’d been silently but furiously tapping a rhythm, to her still-flat stomach.

At minute seventeen, she’s established a comprehensive work plan (what can she say? She’s efficient) and resolved the fifteen most likely potential conflicts in the coming months. She’d started drafting an email to their captain, to set the wheels in motion for the mountain of paperwork before her (who knows, she might be able to finish it all by the time Schmidt finishes his hair care routine in six weeks). But then she remembers that her captain is at the precinct. With Winston. Who should probably know first.

At minute nineteen, Aly realizes that she totally could have flushed when Schmidt came in and snuck the test out in the waistband of her pajama shorts. There was no need for her to sit in painful, torturous silence, listening to him lovingly address eleven specific “hair regions” (she misses the days when he had a job). She hits her head against the stall wall in frustration, and sure enough, he’s far too immersed to notice.

At minute twenty three, Aly has lost all her lives on Candy Crush, and her thumb is hovering over Winston’s name in her phone, vain thoughts of whispering the news into the microphone riding a tide of rapidly amplifying excitement over all the change to come. Every additional minute that Winston doesn’t know feels like an eternity, and she would literally slit Schmidt’s throat if it meant she could be bouncing on a trampoline with Winston to celebrate (after a brief google search about the feasibility and safety of trampoline jumping while pregnant, she revises the thought).

And so, at minute twenty four, Aly decides her only logical solution is to army crawl out.

Schmidt is so immersed in his routine that he probably won’t notice, she reasons. And she can be quiet when she wants to. So, test in hand, doing everything in her power to block out questions of when someone last cleaned the bathroom floor, she drops to her elbows and knees and lowers herself slowly to the floor, suddenly thankful for the small stature that her roommates love to mock. As she inches forward, ducking her head below the stall door, she silently lifts a prayer to whoever’s listening that Schmidt - currently mid-dance using some kind of electric hairbrush as a microphone - stays this distracted.

------

She’s so close she can taste it. The fingers of her free hand are reaching for the threshold, inches from the hardwood of the hallway, when the beat of Schmidt’s music changes. All of a sudden, he’s spinning on one heel, jar of hair chutney in hand. She freezes, breath held, as though if she’s still enough his eyes will pass right over her. Tragically, if unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work, and all she can do is stare open-mouthed, pressed flat against the bathroom floor, as Schmidt falls backwards, his hair chutney flying across the room to crack against the far wall, and lets out an ungodly shriek.

“Aly!” His voice has risen at least two octaves, to a pitch that makes her want to clap her hands over her ears. “My chutney! That cost--do you have any idea--you hooligans--”

He’s livid, his face slowly turning red, as he leaps over her body across the room to start scraping it off the wall and onto his head, muttering about the importance of proper hair hydration and disgusting roommates, but he loses steam quickly as the futility of saving his chutney washes over him. She can see in his face the processing as he moves beyond his chutney, dripping down the far wall in a trail of purple slime that will definitely stain, wondering why on earth an actual resident of this apartment is crawling across the bathroom floor. He scrutinizes her closely as she pushes up to her feet.

“What--how long have you--why--is that--is that a pregnancy test?”

Aly had almost forgotten about the little white stick still clutched in her hand. She decides deflection might be the best course of action. “Why on earth are you in my apartment at--” she glances at her watch, “--12:34 on a Tuesday afternoon?”

She’s inching for the door as he mumbles some incoherent answer about mirror size and sink depth, considering making a break for the front table where she can picture her keys in a haphazard pile next to a picture taken by some unfortunate ex of a room full of people double-fisting beers on top of furniture and shouting FDR. But her feet, already beginning to move, suddenly stop cold when Schmidt retorts:

“Are you pregnant?”

Something about hearing the words out loud stops her in her tracks. All plans for deflection, or for straight-up avoidance, run for the hills as a mixture of joy and apprehension and nerves and excitement and love for this thing she doesn’t even know yet all wash over her at once. The word echoes, reverberating around all the corners of her brain she’d thought atrophied while she learned about the intricacies of Schmidt-level hair care. She hasn’t managed to find her voice, but her free hand drifts reflexively to her stomach while she belatedly tries to shift the test behind her back, out of sight. It’s all the confirmation Schmidt needs.

“You are! A sibling for Ferguson! A miraculous chocolate-vanilla swirl!” And then his arms are around her back as the artificial blueberry smell of his hair products engulfs her. And she’s laughing breathlessly into his shoulder as her arms move to hug him back. At the feel of the stick making contact with his shoulder, though, he jumps back. “Pee stick! Pee stick!”

“Right, right,” she acknowledges, still giggling in some combination of shock and disbelief and overwhelming happiness. “The pee stick.”

“Does Winston know?” If she didn’t know him better, if she hadn’t seen the douchebag jar in person, she’d swear his voice was cracking (maybe Ruthie’s changed him more than he wants to admit. But she shakes that thought to the back of her head).

“No. I’m on my way to tell him now. So if you don’t mind, I’m gonna--and you can finish whatever--just, please, please be done when I’m back from my shift.”

“You’re just going to tell him now? At work? When Cece was pregnant, I bought out the entire florist! Pregnancy is grand, a miraculous occurrence, Allison! You can’t leave the reveal to some germy precinct hallway!”

“My name isn’t Allison.”

“Alexandra! Aurelia! Eulalie!”

“Really, just Aly is fine.”

“Alright, Aly. The point is you can’t just tell him! Where’s the ceremony? The pomp? The circumstance?”

She sighs, but she can hear her sister’s voice echoing his. And then her brain is providing her with flashes of picnics with a common cactus in Malibu and a bobcat costume in a public bathroom and the choreographed dance he led at their wedding and a thousand other silly moments. And then half-baked plans are forming, before she’s even given them permission to exist, of him opening a present with a onesie or finding the pregnancy test in a backpack confiscated during an arrest, and the way his eyes would light up is making her heart skip a beat. So instead of doing the sane thing, instead of bolting for the door or punching this idiot in the face, she settles onto one hip, arms crossed.

“Any ideas?”

------

Mercifully, when she arrives at the precinct for her afternoon shift, Winston is out after a perp. She can’t focus on any work-related task for more than thirty seconds at a stretch, and she spends the better part of the afternoon alternating between reading mommy blogs about pregnancy that make her want to tear her hair out and planning how she’ll tell Winston on an elaborate Excel spreadsheet that is getting increasingly complicated but not bringing her any closer to a solution that perfectly toes the line between loving exchange and psychotic prank that Winston finds so effortlessly.

By early that evening, only an hour from the end of her shift, she’s begun drafting an email to the Los Angeles Zoo, to find out how much it would cost her to rent their new baby panda and its mother for the day, as part of some yet-to-be-determined baby-panda-baby-Bishop reveal. She’s not quite sure what she’d do yet, but she knows that Winston cried over the panda when they had to work the press day and it’s really cute and it’s a baby and she’s having a baby and she’s praying for inspiration to strike and--

“Whatcha up to?” Winston’s voice sings into her ear, his breath tickling her neck. She almost falls backwards out of her chair, clicking away from the letter what she knows must be just a second too slowly. She knows his face so well that as she turns to face him, she can see the split second where he processes the words he read, filing them away for analysis at a later date.

But then she’s just looking at his face and it’s so stupidly cute and she’s got butterflies in her stomach worse than when he told her she’d be a beautiful bride someday and for a split second she’s worried it’s nausea but it passes and then she realizes she’s definitely been staring at him for at least three seconds too long with a dopey smile on her face. So she sticks her tongue out and crosses her eyes instead, and his smile brightens as he throws back his head in laughter. He’s turning to walk away, to go back to work (because they are at work), but before she knows it she’s on her feet, grabbing him by one arm.

She loves the look on his face as he turns, mostly confused with a hint of the surprise that makes his eyes pop. And then she’s pulling his head down to kiss him, and the last time they did this at work they were in an evidence locker and they got caught and almost lost their partnership, but they’re married now and she’s so happy she can’t quite bring herself to care. He stills, and then pulls her closer, moving his lips gently against hers with one big hand pressed between her shoulder blades, holding her close for exactly five seconds longer than would be strictly appropriate. From the corner of her mind, she can hear the wolf whistles of their fellow officers, most of whom have stopped working to watch the scene.

He breaks away first, leaning his forehead against hers. “So, what was that for?” he asks, not quite able to pull off the reproachful look he’s going for.

“Just wanted to kiss you,” is the only reply she can come up with, half-focused on how close Winston’s hands have drifted to the baby he doesn’t know exists yet.

“I know I’m irresistible, but we should probably keep our hands to ourselves, Officer Nelson,” he retorts, breaking away to continue towards their captain’s office, skepticism and happiness etched in equal measure on his features. She manages to swat his head as he retreats, and turns back to her desk, resigning herself to a long evening of catcalls and reminders that no matter how often she sleeps here, it isn’t her bedroom.

------

By the next afternoon, Aly has become so weirdly stilted around Winston that she’s sure there’s no way he doesn’t know. She’s so distracted she can’t even muster an eye roll at the grainy cell phone pictures of her and Winston kissing that have been printed out and taped to her desktop, her captain’s office, and even the mirrors of the women’s bathroom. That morning, when she’d woken up at 6 to throw up (for the tenth day in a row), she’d shouted him out of the bathroom. Over breakfast, she’d panicked and accidentally-on-purpose dropped the cup of coffee he handed her, shattering a mug and making them both late for work. And she’d been so engrossed by her spreadsheet all morning that she’d barely looked up when he asked her for help on the work they were supposed to be doing.

She’s learned a good bit about pregnancy in the past twenty-four hours, most of it on her phone under the covers when Winston was asleep. She’d learned that, by her best estimate, their baby is now as big as a raspberry, and she’s considered everything from renting a raspberry costume to purchasing a giant statue of a raspberry on the internet (a bargain at only $8,000) to removing the furniture from their bedroom and filling it with as many raspberries as $8,000 can buy. Somehow, none of those feel quite right, and they’re all over budget.

By that evening, she’s getting desperate. Raspberries have turned into a full litter of kittens for Ferguson to adopt, which have turned into purchasing a house and decorating a nursery, which somehow turned into saving tomorrow’s vomit in a jar for the announcement. She shudders in horror at the thought (and swallows hard to choke down a fresh round). Part of her wants to simply tell Winston, wants to get to curl up in his arms while he laughs into her hair, fancy announcement be damned. But the rest of her can’t quite shake the need to surprise him, so she finds herself ready to tear her hair out, carefully positioned on the couch with her socks clad in fuzzy feet in his lap so that he can’t see her computer screen, where she’s doing extensive research into the biggest loaf of bread available for purchase (she’s trying for a play on “bun in the oven”, although these loaves are far too large for any domestic oven).

She’s vaguely aware of the click in the lock and the creak in the front door that means Nick or Jess is home, but she doesn’t bother looking up - she’s far too busy drafting an email to the owner of a roadside statue of a stork in Nevada about nearby hotel options. It’s not until he stops by the couch that she acknowledges his presence at all.

“Hey, guys, wanna go grab a drink?”

“Nick, you just came from the bar,” she points out, hoping that will be the end of it.

“I just came back from bartending, Aly, there’s a very big difference. You see, it’s all about your state of mind -”

“I don’t care.”

“C’mon, I guarantee you guys aren’t doing anything better right now! What are you even doing, anyway?” he asks as he cranes his neck, like changing his angle will allow him to see through the backs of their laptop screens.

She and Winston simultaneously mutter noncommittal answers about work, neither of them making eye contact with their roommate.

“No, it’s Wednesday. That means Winston is editing pictures of Ferguson for his weekly Instagram post. You should stop playing with the contrast, by the way, that way you can use that hashbrown no filter thingy.”

“There’s no way you don’t know that it’s hashtag, Miller.”

“Which brings me to Aly.” He’s got that look in his eye, the one she’s come to associate with his sudden fixation on solving a self-created mystery.  “You’re not normally on your computer this late on a weeknight when you don’t have a case, and I know you don’t have one because you’ve been coming and going at all your normal times lately.  Which obviously means you’re--” he starts to move around the couch, to catch a glimpse of her computer screen, and she’s just a second too slow in slamming her laptop shut. “You’re emailing--”

“My captain! Nick, can I borrow you for a sec?” she inserts, far too quickly to sound casual.

“I thought you said you and I don’t ‘have that kind of relationship’,” he replies, clearly caught off guard, but she’s already lept off the couch, kicking her husband in the stomach in the process, and grabbed him by one arm, her laptop clutched tightly in the other. She’s dragging him towards his bedroom before he even has a chance to react, leaving Winston gaping on the couch. As they turn the corner, though, she can hear him muttering something about Ferguson’s unique fur patterns requiring more contrast, not less.

When they turn into his room, she slams his door behind her.

“I know trying to look at other people’s screens is kind of a dick move, but it’s not illegal, okay, I know my rights--”

She cuts him off before he can get any further down that rabbit hole. “I’m trying to prank Winston, and I’m bad at it. I need your help.”

“Why do you need to prank your husband? I thought your anniversary was in April…”

“Does it matter?”

“In terms of pranking?” He seems to ponder it for a second, thoughtful gaze drifting to the ceiling, before snapping back down to her face. “Not for Winston, no.” he shrugs, shoving his hands in his pockets and waiting expectantly for her to continue.

“Anyway, I’m running low on ideas, and nothing is clicking. What would you do to prank Winston?”

“You’ve come to the right person for assistance with this matter.” he says, backing away from her slowly. “In fact, you’ve come...to the master.” He pauses, hands held out on either side of him like she’s seen pastors of megachurches pose, and her eyes feel like they’re bulging with the effort it takes to keep from rolling them at him. He quickly drops the stance. “Lemme just grab the binder--”

“The...the binder?” she asks, but he doesn’t answer the question. Instead, he’s moving towards a shelf of binders in the corner, pulling off one that’s noticeably messier than the rest, shoved into one corner with lopsided labels and bent tabs.

“You have...a prank binder? Just...why?”

“Well I used to just keep ‘em on bar napkins, but then Jess suggested I put ‘em all in here to keep ‘em straight and it’s been pretty useful.” he replies, answering only half of her question as he scrolls through section after section (she’s pretty sure he even flips through a tab for Ferguson). She sighs, wondering for perhaps the trillionth time in the past three years how she ended up living with these idiots.

“Anyway, Winston. He spooks easy, so you’re going to want to focus on shock factor. If I were you, I’d go for a basketball angle. Start with his old Latvian teammates - I have their numbers right here, although the international rates are a bitch. If you can manage to get them all to agree to fly them here, that’s your best bet. You’ll also need at least 200 basketballs, and a square acre of basketball net, but that’s hard to buy, so you might have to buy a bunch of individual nets and then sew them together. I’ll ask Jess to help you - she loves crafts. You’ll want to--”

She cuts him off, a little impressed by the first page of what’s apparently a very elaborate plan. “I don’t really think that’s what I’m going for. Got anything else?”

“Dammit - I was looking forward to seeing those guys again…” She rolls her eyes and uses one hand to motion that he continue. “Well, paying someone to kidnap him is always a great option. You can go in a lot of different direc--”

He’s cut off suddenly by Winston bursting through the door. “Miller! Just what kind of relationship are you trying to have with my wife?” he shouts as the door slams into the wall, knocking several balls of yarn off the dresser behind it.

“The kind where we’re actively plotting your murder,” Aly replies automatically, face serious as Winston drops his angry facade and starts laughing.

“Nick would never murder me,” Winston sighs, before his gaze flicks from Aly’s face to Nick’s over her shoulder, his smile disappearing at once. “I know too much.”

She furrows her brow, staring at her husband, wondering what ridiculous expression is contorting Nick’s face behind her.

“I know my rights,” Nick says again, though significantly more fearful than before.

“He was helping me with some details about bar financing. For a case,” Aly fills in, saving him from what would likely have been minutes of floundering.

Winston looks suspicious, letting out a long mhmmmmm and raising an eyebrow. Her mind has jumped into overdrive, thinking of every possible way to distract him.

“We don’t have any cases in a bar right now, Aly,” he points out slowly. His arms are crossed, and his expression has transformed from confusion to cockiness; he’s sure he has her dead to rights. And he does. So she pulls out all the stops.

“Hey, Winston! Wanna have sex?”

Nick groans. “Guys, we’ve talked about this. It’s Amendment 72C in the Loft Agreement - the Bishop-Nelson Public Disclosure Clause! In your room only!”

“Cool then,” she shrugs, doing her best to sound nonchalant. “Winston, wanna go to our room?”

Winston looks a little whiplashed from the sudden change in topic; his face is changing expressions approximately twice a second, shifting from confusion to arousal to deep thought and back again faster than she can recite police codes. She can tell he’s still pondering what on earth could have brought her to Nick’s room in the first place, but she also knows her husband, and she’d guessed right when she’d assumed he’d rather have sex than think about it further.

So as he grabs her hand and drags her out of the room, she mouths a thank you to Nick over her shoulder, wondering as Winston pins her against the wall in the hallway if kidnapping is really a viable option - she should really find out about hotels near the Nevada stork…

------

Aly should’ve known what was coming as soon as she got a public disturbance call while Winston is out on a coffee run. She definitely should have known what was coming when Leahy, who volunteers to accompany her, willingly drops back and lets Aly push through the door to the abandoned warehouse that’s supposedly the site of “giant and violent game of human monopoly”. She absolutely positively should have known when the warehouse is empty. But it’s not until a door on the far end opens and at least fifteen badgers come flooding out that all the pieces click together.

Winston.

Later, when he asks when she knew, she’ll lie and say she’d known what he was up to all morning, will insist that she didn’t jump even a little when the first badger sticks its nose out the door. But she has to mask an ounce of surprise as she calls out calmly, “Winston, where are you?”

No reply. She tries again. “Bishop! I’ll shave Ferguson tonight if you don’t get out here right now!”

A beat. Then two. And then Winston is following the badgers (who are now either sleeping or fighting in the middle of the open warehouse, the humans on the other end entirely disregarded) out the door with a shout.

She takes a second to take him in as he whoops and hollers, running through the badgers to startle them into continuing their path across the room (she turns and sees that Leahy has been dropping food strategically just behind her. Of course.) He’s wearing a giant badger costume, all but his face obscured by synthetic fur and a big red sweater. His arms are flailing, and she can already see the sweat glistening on his face on the warm September day. He’s out of breath by the time he reaches her, so she gives him a moment to catch up as she turns on the safety and re-holsters her gun.

When he finally takes his hands off his knees and stands back up, she gives him a look. “Wh--just...I mean...I know I signed up for…” She sighs. “Why?”

“Badgers are objectively the best prank animal, Aly! They’re small enough to be easily transportable, but big enough for effective attack! Random enough for full shock value, but instantly recognizable! Remarkably aggressive, but they’re only rabid, like, 20% of the time!”

“Haven’t you...used these before?” She’s conjuring vague memories of a photo album filled with pictures of an angry badger and a collapsed chuppah, Winston tangled in the middle, and stories about arranged marriages and vents and Jess’ crush on Nick. “Running out of new ideas, Bishop?”

“Hey!” He’s indignant at her implication that he’s getting rusty. “That was one time! You weren’t even there! And this was the perfect prank if you hadn’t ruined it - the badgers were gonna--”

She cuts him off before he can build up too much steam - she wants to know as little as possible about what awaited further in the warehouse. “Badgers are fine, Bishop, but why were you gonna prank me?”

“You were gonna prank me!” he practically shouts, hands flailing wildly as he explains. “I had to strike first! You can’t prank Prank Sinatra! He’s everywhere, Aly! All the time, everywhere, Prank S. is there!”

“You idiot. I wasn’t going to prank you.”

“Marriages aren’t built on lies, Aly! You were so gonna prank me! I heard you asking Nick - did you decide to go with the Latvians? Or the kidnapping? I should warn you, if you called Genadijs, he will poop on our welcome mat as a sign of respect - there’s some weird head injuries that come from outdoor basketball on a hill, and--”

“I didn’t call the Latvians,” she replies, deeply glad they’ve never saved enough money to go back and visit Latvia.

“Okay, so the kidnapping. You’ve been weird for days - all those emails! I knew something was coming, so I had to act!”

His eyes are a little wild, and she can see the glisten of sweat turning into beads that are starting to run down his cheeks inside what she’s sure is a literal oven of a mascot suit. So she takes a deep breath, trying to calm herself for what comes next. She resists the urge to bring her hand down to her abdomen, a gesture that’s become shockingly habitual in the past forty-eight hours, and instead grabs his paws.

“You’re so...so…” She tries to find the word for the combination of affection and frustration that’s welling up in her chest, but she can’t find a single word to describe it. So she finishes, “You’re so...you.”

His eyes are looking down, all attention on her now, and she sees a hint of concern there. She’s sure her cheeks are bright red, and she can feel her hands shaking in his a bit, but his eyes ground her as she whispers the next sentence. “I’m pregnant, you maniac.”

She’s braced for a kiss, or a bear hug, or even a tackle. She’s ready for him to take a step back in shock, to ask when or how or are you sure. She’s not ready for him to fall backwards, collapsing in laughter.

“Oh--you’re preg--oh, that’s a good--you really had me for a sec--” and then all coherent words are lost to deep belly laughter that has him literally rolling on the ground, clutching his stomach.

“I am! I took a test and everything! I had to army crawl out behind Schmidt - did you know he still does his hair in our loft while Ruthie’s at school? And I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you all week!”

“Pregnant--Schmidt in our bathroom--oh you’re good, Nelson! Good!”

She realizes she’s not going to get through until he manages to calm down. So she walks over and stands by his head, looking down with her arms crossed, waiting patiently for him to catch up.

Slowly but surely, he starts to catch his breath. And that’s when he finally notices that she’s not laughing with him. “Hahahaha...ha...ha…...ha…...h-Aly?”

“Yep?”

“You’re….you’re….pregnant?”

“Yep.”

And then he’s on his feet, pulling her up in his arms. She feels her feet leave the ground, and then she’s spinning. She can hear his laughter, somewhere on the corner of her consciousness, but it’s less loud now. It’s softer, happier, and she can hear his breath hitching on the downbeats. His arms are holding her close, and she’s deliriously happy, or maybe it’s just dizzy, but she never wants this moment to stop. Until her breakfast starts making moves in her stomach, and she’s suddenly acutely aware of the distinctly badger smell behind her and the way her stomach is churning as she spins.

A little squirming, and a few squealed stops do the trick, and her feet make contact with the ground, much to her relief. She stands for a few moments, one hand on her knee while her other holds her nose closed to block the smell. She’s doing her best to breathe deep and even through her mouth when she feels a soothing hand between her shoulder blades, rubbing gently.

“This is why you’ve been sick…” he says, his words full of a degree of awe she’d never expect from the love of her life as he watches her choke down vomit.

She doesn’t manage a reply for a few more seconds. “Yeah…” Another breath. And one more. And then she straightens. “I think it’s passed.”

“Thank God, because now I can do this.”

And he’s leaning in to kiss her. It’s gentle, far gentler than she can remember, like he’s scared she’ll break. Her hands have found his face, her thumbs smoothing his beard, while his hold her sides, ghosting over her stomach. He’s smiling against her lips, and she knows she’s about three seconds away from her face splitting into a smile almost as wide as his. And then he’s breaking away, leaning his forehead against hers and looking down into her eyes.

“You’re really….you’re really pregnant? It’s really happening?” His voice is quiet, as though he’s a few moments away from tears.

And she doesn’t even make an effort to swipe away the wetness she can feel below her eyes as she replies, “Yeah. Best I can guess, it’s about as big as a raspberry.”

And then he’s laughing again, a gentler chuckle, more out of happiness than humor. “A raspberry…” He trails off, then freezes entirely.

“If you’re really pregnant, we should definitely get out of here.”

“What did you do?”

“You really don’t want to know. Suffice to say badgers and...a number of other things in this room are definitely not baby-friendly. We can let Leahy clean up.”

He slings his arm around her shoulder as they turn to walk out, and she pulls him close, leaning her head against his shoulder.

“You know, I spent two whole days trying to figure out this prank thing. I really just don’t get it.”

“Oh, you are about to be so outnumbered.”

[kasiopeiae]

Mind on a Mission

A/N: Part 2 of the series Rotation.

// Another Man’s Treasure // Mind on a Mission // Take the Lead // Worth the Pain // Wings of Butterflies