#like mans survived the minor family literally resigned and they let him. and now he's just chilling with Vegas Theerapanyakul

[magicaldreamfox1]

so i'm just thinking abt the reputation pete must have post-canon among main family bodyguards.

like as we know from pete himself, word travels fast amongst main family bodyguards and there must be a few who survived the ep 14, confrontation. obviously people would've known pete at least in passing, he's tankhun's head bodyguard that must mean something. and suddenly he's missing for a few days, rumour has it he went to the minor family's house (with the fit tankhun threw (rightfully so) surely people would've heard abt it right? right) and everyone knows what happens to bodyguards who are sent to the minor family's house. except pete returns and word spreads fast about that too. pete returned, covered in blood and injured but alive. then the family showdown happens, a lot of people die but surely a few main family bodyguards would survive. and they would hear abt it. pete left. he resigned. and they let him. which i'm sure not many bodyguards can say for themselves. rumour has it he went after vegas. and then shot a bodyguard of the main family dead for him. and that he's with vegas now.

vegas who has A Reputation, everyone knows that. so pete not only made it out of the minor family's house alive, he also managed to resign and then went to be with vegas.

and maybe they'd even see him sometime, pete coming to visit porsche or tankhun and he looks fine like he's doing well.

and like. they must be terrified of him. and like even when they get new bodyguards word would spread just as quickly. u don't fuck with pete bc pete has seen the worst of the worst of this world and not only come out alive the other end, he also willingly walked back right into it.

[rhinozilla]

Prompt; daryl gets bit

Thebite was shallow, just a ring of marks where the teeth had barely perforatedthe skin. It was enough to bleed, so it was enough to kill. Carl had seendozens of people suffer from bites that tore whole chunks out of their bodies,had seen people be torn apart and eaten while still alive. If there was anupside, it was that you died faster that way.

Thesmall bubbles of blood and the shallowness of the bite was almost crueler. Itlooked like nothing. If Daryl had sustained any other injury with that minor ofdamage, he wouldn’t have even made mention of it.

Buthere they were, a solid half day’s walk from home, in the woods, just the twoof them, minimally armed, and a walker bite in a place that couldn’t beamputated. Daryl waited just until the truth had registered to Carl before helowered his shirt, covering the wound over his ribs.

Carlwanted to burn the entire forest to the ground. He wanted to scream. He wantedto fight: walkers, people, Daryl, he didn’t know, he just wanted to hitsomething. There was no fixing this. There was no solution where Daryl survivedthis. Carl was literally watching one of his closest friends, part of hisfamily, his brother…spending his final day on Earth. Carl’s next words had tobe important…

“We’llget a car.” He sounded hollow. He felt hollow.

Darylsimply stood in front of him, unarmed, having lost his weapons during the fightwith the walkers. He looked fine. Tired and dirty, but not like he was dying.The only part of him that looked affected at all was his expression, and eventhen…He only looked sad for Carl.

“Nah.”God damn it. He even sounded casual! “Ain’t no cars ‘round here that’d run.”

“Thenwe walk. It’s just a few hours home, and you—“

Youaren’t in pain yet. You aren’t suffering yet. You look FINE.

Darylstared at Carl. “You’re gonna go home. I’m gonna…” he cast his eyes around thewoods, “…take a walk for a while.”

“NO.”Carl’s lungs fought him, and his breathing picked up. “What are you talkingabout? This…No. Fuck!”

Thedam broke, and despair ramrodded up his spine, forcing him to bend over. Hecurled down into a squat, lifting his arms and then helplessly letting themfall over his head, his forearms on the top of his head, fists clasped togetherat the base of his neck. His nose burned, and hot tears painfully rushed to hiseyes.

Darylseemed to let him go for a moment, but then Carl felt him near and kneel down,putting both hands on his shoulders. Before he could say anything a howl toreout of Carl and he grabbed Daryl to him, pulling him close and tight.

“Idon’t—I hate this. You can’t—You CAN’T,” he babbled, sobbing openly.“Please…Please, PLEASE.”

Fora moment, Daryl’s calm demeanor faltered, and Carl felt himself be squeezeddesperately into the hug…The fear and anger and grief was making Daryl tremble,and it only broke Carl further.

“Youdon’t deserve this,” Carl cried. “You shouldn’t have to—This isn’t right!”

Darylsaid nothing, and the emptiness in the air was too heavy. Carl couldn’t standit, but he felt powerless and muted. So he just cried, and Daryl…the dyingman…comforted him silently.

Hewas one of the only ones left. Carl’s world was steeped in the temporary, thefleeting. Everything since the Turn had been losses stacking upon losses, briefmoments of joy smothered in pain and blood and death. Everyone he had everknown from his earlier life was gone except for his dad. All his old friends,his family, his neighbors…Life was full of introductions to people who wantedto kill you or people who you might only know for a week, a day, an hour.

Darylwas one of the few permanent things left. Daryl, Rick, Carol, and Maggie: thatwas it. No one else alive in Carl’s life knew what he had been through, hadseen him through it. There was no one else he knew so well, trusted soultimately, and would well and truly kill and die for. Those four were the onlyones left that had known Lori, her memory, her voice, her face. Part of whatkept Carl connected to his own memories of his mother died every time he lostone of them: Glenn, Hershel, Beth, Shane, Andrea, Dale, T-Dog…too many tocount. What was the point of a memory if there was no one around to share itwith who had been there too?

Theyhad survived years in this world, and they didn’t deserve to be snuffed outlike this. It wasn’t fair, and Carl didn’t care how childish it sounded. Daryldeserved better. He deserved to die old, to be old and to live a life full ofjoy and comfort and love and care. Carl figured it had taken the apocalypse forDaryl Dixon to experience and to accept any of those things, and Carl hated theuniverse for yanking it away from him now.

Bythis point, he had stopped crying, and both he and Daryl were on their knees,holding each other. The childish thought occurred to Carl to just refuse to lethim go: to just flat out refuse to remove his arms and accept the reality ofthe ticking clock. It was denial, sure, but a few moments of unbridled denialwere a blessing in times like these…even if, at the end, it was all ripped awaylike a rug as reality came back to the forefront.

“Okay,”Daryl spoke with a resigned softness that made Carl break all over again.

Darylwithdrew a bit, starting to pop into a squat, wincing, and moving instead intoa kneel, to minimize the movement in his side. Carl stopped breathing when hesaw the redness of Daryl’s eyes, the rampant fear in his gaze, and the tensionin his neck as he was fighting to hide it. He was terrified; he didn’t want todie. Until now, Daryl had been a superhero. Even as Carl had grown up andstarted to recognize the human faults and weaknesses in his mother, his father,in all the adults in his life…Daryl was still a superhero, especially with hisfaults and weaknesses. He was permanent. He was a fixed point. There would beno filling that void when he was gone.

When he was gone…becauseit was happening…

“Don’t…”Carl wheezed, not sure where his own sentence was going. He squinted his eyesclosed and shook his head. “Please…”

Darylswallowed hard, his face crumpling a bit before forcefully smoothing. He huffedout a breath and looked South, back toward Alexandria. “Ain’t gonna become oneof them. I won’t.”

Damn,Carl wanted to believe that.

“Ain’tgonna wait around to expire neither,” he mumbled, then looked to Carl. “I got afew miles left in me…M’gonna go s’far as I can.”

Underthe overwhelming agony, a flash of anger bubbled up in Carl.

“Youcan’t,” Carl snapped. “You can’t just disappear. The others…Everybody…You’reokay right now…You could say good bye.”

Darylgave a quivering shake of his head, eyes roaming everywhere around the woodsexcept to meet Carl’s. “Nah. Better to remember me before things get—“ hisbreathing hitched in a short panic before he got it under control. “I’d bereally shitty by the time we got back…Then someone’d have to—“ He made a vaguegesture, which he abandoned halfway through. “Ain’t gonna burden none of themlike that.”

Carltrembled. “You aren’t a burden. Never. Daryl.” He stopped until Daryl finallylooked at him. “Family is not a burden, and you—we love you. We want to…help.”

Darylseemed to almost consider it, but a quirk of his lips at the corner of hismouth showed that he wasn’t swayed.

“Juststumbled across ya’ll back then, outside Atlanta,” he thought aloud. “Kindamakes sense to just stumble back out here at the end.” He looked gently toCarl. “Give a dying man his last request?”

Ashe said it, Carl popped the button on the holster on his belt, the web of histhumb settling across the butt of his gun. Daryl’s eyes dropped to it, wherehis expression stiffened, and he looked at Carl’s face.

“No,”he stated quietly. “You done enough mercy killin’. Ain’t gonna put that onyou.”

“You’renot. I’m offering.” Carl drew himself up as solidly as he could manage.

Hecould do this. He’d done it before, when he was younger, when he was morefragile.

Daryllooked reluctant at the idea, but Carl knew that Daryl didn’t want his finalhours to be full of pain and lonely misery, to slowly lose his ability to walk,to move, to breathe, until the fever burned him out and the cold black tookhim. Carl refused to believe that Daryl would want to die alone like this. AndDaryl wouldn’t have it in him to shoot himself. It was against human nature,Dale had once said. Self preservation was one of the last pillars of humankind.

Daryl’sarm fidgeted, and he looked away again. Panic was creeping through his frame now,Carl could see it, and what had looked like calm acceptance before had turnedout to be shock…and it was wearing off quickly.

“It’dbe easier my way,” Daryl murmured.

“Forwho?” Carl asked hotly. He sobered. “Back at the prison, you told me you were sorryfor what happened to Mom…but if there is never a universe where shesurvived…I’m glad I was there to end it. It had to be me then, and it has to beme now. Because, this way, it ends. To not know what happened…how you…how ithappened…Please, don’t just disappear.”

Theyboth continued to stand there, and the moment stretched long. The fidget inDaryl’s arm grew as the panic mounted, and Daryl clenched his jaw hard when theweight of it all compounded on him.

“I’mscared,” he mumbled, looking out at the trees. He exhaled slowly, and hisbreathing hitched as he did so. “I don’t want to go…”

“I’llstay with you,” Carl immediately stated, leaving no room for argument. “I’llwalk with you until…I’ll be here,” he promised firmly. “And then…when it…I’llhelp you. We…we do this on your terms.”

Darylwas already starting to look more tired, resigned to what was happening, and henodded, looking fleetingly to Carl, then away, haphazardly wiping at his eyes.

“Sawa cabin back there…” He tilted his head in the general direction. “I…uh…Mightbe nice…Bein’ out in the woods…like this.”

“Yeah,”Carl agreed softly, and they started to turn toward the direction of the cabin.“Mom used to say you were part deer, the way you were so at home out in theforest.”

Darylsnorted as they started walking. “Yeah, she was right…’bout a lot of things.”

Carlswallowed hard and smoothed his breathing. “Tell me about the woods, Daryl.”

Theytalked as they made their way back into the trees. By the time they were withinview of the cabin, Daryl was starting lean on Carl, and the fever had come.

Theydrowned that out with conversation about the woods, the trees, tracking,hunting, and memories of the first winter after the Turn, voices turning softat the mention of old friends long gone.

Thenext day, the road back to Alexandria had never felt so long as when traveledalone.

[teamwynn]

The Night Voice Retrospective, Pt. 12

[Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 11.5 | Part 12]

Well, here we are. The final scene. The last precious few moments of the saga. And they are, naturally, utterly wasted. Please, join me in reviewing this thrilling conclusion, and marvel at how dead I am inside.

Welcome Home, Wherever That Is (I guess we’re just done now)

Okay, so now that Team Wynn is fucking decimated with one exiled, one dead, and one suicidal, let’s see if Team Magiere can swing a happier ending. Let’s return to where the prologue left off.

The unbelievably good news is that Team Magiere is still all together. And I mean that “unbelievably” literally, because Chap is now about 50 years old, which is 350 in dog years. I’ll chalk that up to being majay-hi or Fay or whatever, but Jesus. Chill, man. Anyway, they’ve returned home where Leesil--in this book’s shining moment of having someone actually be in-character--apparently just keeps adopting, like, hordes of children. This horde includes Wayfarer, but Magiere’s already made it clear that she was going to adopt Wayfarer, anyway, so no surprise here. It also includes, at this point, at least 6 unidentified boys. And we receive confirmation from what was hinted at in the prologue that Wayfarer and Osha, at some point between the main ending and the epilogue, got married--

Okay, you know what. You know the fuck what. Fucking.

I need a moment.

…

Okay.

So, if the series tried to pull this kind of thing in Between Their Worlds, I probably could have bought it. Without the knowledge of The Dark and the Dark through The Night Voice, I could have bought that Wayfarer and Osha were able to work their way through the bullshit that Osha pulled on her. If it had skipped from BTW to this epilogue, I could have reasonably believed that Osha apologized and made up for abandoning Wayfarer at the end of BTW and that she would forgive him.

But! That’s significantly harder to swallow knowing what we know from the rest of Series 3, which is:

Osha’s     motivation for abandoning Wayfarer was entirely centered on his effort to     get Wynn to make out with him again and no other reason

Osha     deadnamed Wayfarer multiple times in FaLS

Even     after Osha appeared to learn his lesson about why deadnaming Wayfarer was     wrong later in FaLS, he continued to do it in TNV

Wayfarer     pretty explicitly indicated in TNV that she no longer had a crush on Osha,     and not only that, but that she didn’t want to be friends or even speak to     him anymore

Their     last on-page interaction before the epilogue is Osha freaking out over     Wynn being blinded while Wayfarer is right there and basically going, “I     mean, I’m risking my life in the middle of the battle too, but yeah, no,     keep throwing a fit about this like Wynn’s the only person in mortal     danger here. Asshole.”

So how did we get from that to married? And could it possibly get worse?

Why do I even pretend to ask. Of course it could. This scene is like 3 pages long, but it somehow packs even more bullshit into fewer words than the previous scene.

So, not only are Wayfarer and Osha inexplicably married, but when Magiere asks about how Osha is doing, Wayfarer indicates in no uncertain terms that he’s still hung up about Wynn--30 years later and after seemingly not ever speaking to her in that entire time--and that he might be dying from that weird elven sexual-imprinting thing because of it. That’s alarming news! How is Magiere going to react to that?

Why, naturally by laughing it off and making oblique references to Osha’s current profession, which is something that is entirely unexplained, though it’s doubtful an explanation would clarify the nonsense that is Osha the Reindeer Farmer or whatever the fuck he’s doing with his life. Again, Magiere’s reference to his current occupation is pretty fucking vague beyond that it involves those magical deer that Osha hated. Oh, that wacky Osha! Always playing with deer and literally dying of heartbreak! What a scamp!

There’s not really much more detail beyond that for either Wayfarer or Osha’s endings that I haven’t already covered, except for these uncomfortable observations about how they fit into Team Magiere’s family structure:

Wayfarer,     who had a massive crush on Leesil in Rebel     Fay, is now calling him “Father.” NO THANKS.

If     Wayfarer is Magiere and Leesil’s daughter and Osha is her husband, that     makes Osha Magiere and Leesil’s son-in-law. What. The fuck. How is that an     actual thing that happened in canon???

Okay, now that we’re all sufficiently grossed out, let’s go more over the core team’s ending. Of course, returning to Miiska is something that has been a long time coming for Team Magiere. They haven’t been home since Child of a Dead God, when Magiere and Leesil had their wedding surrounded by loved ones and held the reception at the Sea Lion Tavern, the Ground Zero of all this vampire nonsense. So their ultimate return home should be at least as celebratory and communal as that, right?

Obviously this scene is set some time after they arrive back home, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t necessarily still be partying about that, but there’s still something suspiciously… I don’t know, absent about their homecoming. Like… all the people. And the town. And the tavern.

Did… did they even go back to Miiska? The town and the tavern were both mentioned by name at least once (maybe exactly once), but there’s not really any sense of the characters actually being there. And none of the townspeople (those minor characters from Dhampir, etc. that I mentioned a few posts back) are present at all, even though a number of them should still be perfectly alive to share in this happy (?) ending. What we get instead is Magiere and Leesil existing in this textureless void with their family of nameless, faceless young boys and Wayfarer on the side predicting the doom of Osha as well as Chap (both of whom are off-page this whole time, mind. Oh, did I forget to mention that Chap doesn’t even appear in the epilogue, despite somehow unbelievably surviving the entire saga? Because he doesn’t.) But Magiere gives about as much of a fuck about any of that as she did about Wynn dying, which is to say, not at all.

So, what is… even happening here?

Well, aside from Wayfarer helpfully reminding everyone that Death Comes For All, Magiere is just kind of blandly resigning herself to the reality that that includes Leesil, and that someday it’s just going to be her and Chane, eternally avoiding each other. (And Pawl, too, but obviously I’ll give Magiere a pass on not bringing him up because she never even found out that Pawl existed.) There’s also some weird musings on Magiere’s part about the fact that Chane probably has a soul, which has never been in question before so I don’t know why she’s so amazed by this probability. Like, vampires having or not having souls have never been a part of the lore in the series, and even if it was it doesn’t pertain to anything now. And for some reason she essentially lies to Leesil about not killing Chane--it’s neither clear why Leesil is gunning so hard for Chane to be dead at this point, nor why Magiere was unwilling to admit that she didn’t kill him again. She just kind of avoids Leesil’s questions about the matter and goes on blandly commentating for a few paragraphs about Osha and Leesil’s army of children. But I guess Magiere is happy with her existence in this vague void, waiting for the clock to run down on all her loved ones, comforted only by her smugness from seeing Chane cry. And… um…

No, seriously, what is happening here?

Did the epilogue already waste up all its emotional weight on contriving Team Wynn into the most melodramatically tragic situation possible that it’s just completely burnt out here? This whole scene just feels like a shadow-puppet of Magiere strolling across a completely blank background going, “I have family, death happens, sad but also happy, END.”

You know what, Magiere? You know what? I’m glad END. This book couldn’t fucking END too soon. Over 400-pages of complete fucking gibberish to cap off my favorite series of all time, because it wasn’t enough for the Noble Dead Saga to END poorly, but it had to make a goddamn show of it. I am genuinely amazed at how little this book delivered on actually ENDing anything. The number of plot holes and loose ends and retrograding character arcs is truly impressive, and on top of all that, this book had the audacity to not be audacious with all of that. This wild departure from the rest of the saga couldn’t have included alien invasions or dinosaur clones or any shit like that, no--this book managed to be an utterly convoluted counter-narrative to all the books that came before it while also maintaining a complete cardboard blandness. Truly astonishing that a book so contrived could also be so utterly ankle-deep shallow. This book fucking tangled itself in knots with teleportation trees and dog armies and battles in the center of il’Sanke’s mind and whatever the fuck either the wraith or the necromancer were doing in this book at all, and at the end of all of that, Magiere’s happy ending is just being kind of quietly pleased that her husband isn’t dead yet.

I am beyond myself in amazement. And I am so, so fucking tired.

Well, that’s it for every plot point in TNV that sent me into a frothing rage. Tomorrow I’ll be writing up a conclusion to all of this, because god damn I need some proper closure somewhere.