#long titles are the death of me

[sparebutton]

(Across the Spider-Verse spoiler)

[sygneth]

"The Fall of the Starmaker"

[thresholdbb]

Can we talk about The Dying Swan moment in Coda? As someone who was once a very serious ballerina, I need to talk about the Dying Swan. Here's your context --

CHAKOTAY: Harry's clarinet solo was okay. I could have done without Tuvok's reading of Vulcan poetry. But the highlight of the evening was definitely Kathryn Janeway portraying the Dying Swan. JANEWAY: I learned that dance when I was six years old. I assure you, it was the hit of the Beginning Ballet class.

Have you seen The Dying Swan? It is dramatic.

Here, take a minute:

First of all, this dance is much too advanced for a six-year-old, even if they’re doing it in demi pointe. (Six-year-olds emphatically should not be in pointe shoes btw.) The dance is almost entirely bourees and arm movements done to very subtle musical cues, not the foundational ballet moves typically taught in Beginning Ballet.

This is a very vulnerable, dramatic dance that is effective because of its subtleties. The performer would need to embody that vulnerability in some way for a convincing performance. It's short, but it's a solo piece -- all eyes on you. I mean, it was choreographed for a prima ballerina, BUT THAT'S NOT MY POINT

Can you imagine our unflappable Captain Janeway willingly getting in front of her crew to do this ballet? I get that it’s thematically relevant to the plot of Coda, but since Janeway is only vulnerable in front of her crew when it means putting herself in harm’s way, it seems like a wild decision. She tends to hold herself apart from her crew, maintaining the professional distance of the captain. Further, when she does any creative pursuit, it is almost always in private, since her sister was the artist in the family and she was the scientist. As a captain, she commands Voyager in a much different way than she would as a dancer with this piece. I'm not saying she never shows vulnerability because she definitely does, but not necessarily in this way. Then when she talks about it with Chakotay, she just casually brushes it off with a laugh like no big deal.

There’s also the question of costume – would she have gone full tutu? Done it in her Starfleet uniform? An impeccable yet flow-y white suit? She does get into costume and command a performance in Bride of Chaotica!, but Coda is still kind of early days for our captain. Arachnia aligns more with what we know about Janeway's character.

Granted, it is Chakotay laying down these complements about her dancing ability and he is clearly biased. To be fair, Neelix does too before they leave in the shuttle. If she did this dance and performed it poorly or amazingly, I feel like the crew would look at her a bit differently afterwards.

Canonically she did The Dying Swan, but I certainly have trouble picturing it happening.

[laundrybiscuits]

(wait for the season to come back to me tag)

“We still on for dinner this Thursday, or are you gonna reschedule again? Because I swear to god, Steve, I will break into your apartment and set up camp if I have to. It’s been years. Centuries.”

“It’s been a month, Henderson.”

“I barely remember who you are anymore. What’s your name again? How do I know you? We’re actually very happy with our current cable provider, thanks.”

God, that kid is such an asshole. Steve loves the shit out of him.

“Listen, I’ll see you on Thursday and explain everything, okay? Actually, uh—I’m kinda calling to give you a heads-up. Got some big news, so you should, like…brace yourself.”

Dustin’s quiet for a long, worrying moment.

“Steve. You have got to know that that’s the least helpful thing you could possibly say. You’re not even gonna give me a hint, man?”

“Wish I could. It’s not a bad thing, okay? Just big. Like…Upside Down big.”

“Okay, for my own peace of mind, I’m going to pretend you’re completely overreacting about the fact that you, like, got a dog or something.”

“I’m not—”

“Peace of mind, Steve! See you Thursday at my place! Don’t cancel or I’ll kill you!”

Steve’s left laughing into the dial tone. Honestly, he’d mostly called so Dustin couldn’t complain afterwards about not getting an advance warning. There’s just no way to hint at the whole Eddie thing without Eddie being present and accounted for; it would be the worst kind of cruel.

Steve can’t imagine what he’d have done to anyone who tried to tell him Eddie was alive without any kind of proof. It wouldn’t have been good.

“So we’re telling Henderson on Thursday?” Eddie jostles Steve’s shoulder. Steve thinks he’s been doing that a lot more lately.

“Seems like,” says Steve.

———

They take the train to Dustin’s place in Wilmette as soon as it gets dark out. Eddie’s bundled up in a nondescript hoodie and one of Steve’s denim jackets, looking like every other Chicagoan braced against the cool evening air.

They haven’t been going out all that much. Robin keeps asking if Eddie wants to do any tourist stuff, maybe the museums or something, but he always shrugs off the offers. Steve would’ve maybe expected him to want to get out and explore, now that he’s not cooped up anymore, but Eddie mostly seems to want to sleep, read, and watch TV.

Robin’s been on a campaign to educate Eddie about the ten years of pop culture he missed. “It’s essential for rehabilitation,” she says. Steve is pretty sure it’s just an excuse to make them rewatch all of Robin’s favorite movies, because some of the stuff she brings home was definitely already out in 1986.

Eddie draws the line at letting Robin show him music, though: “Nope, nuh-uh, no freaking way. I wouldn’t have listened to that shimmery synth shit if I’d been alive and free every single day of the last decade, and I’m not gonna listen to it now.”

Steve does have a few metal cassettes, but he feels weird about bringing them out. It feels like he’s crossing a line, somehow—admitting to something. So instead, they’d all traipsed over to the Tower Records a few blocks over, and let Eddie roam around sampling things.

To Steve’s surprise, Eddie hadn’t actually picked up that many metal albums. He'd grabbed the new Accept and some Alice in Chains, sure, but he also picked up Nirvana and Soundgarden. He had gotten into a conversation with a very helpful clerk that ended with the clerk scribbling a number on a business card and handing it over with a grin and a promise to make Eddie try some local act called Wilco next time.

Obviously Steve’s happy that Eddie’s making friends and charming people. He’s legitimately fucking thrilled that other people are finally seeing how great Eddie is, because Eddie deserves that. Eddie deserves the world, and if he wants to date some random clerk, he should get to.

It’s just that if Eddie Munson comes back from the dead to start dating some random clerk, Steve is going to have to go live at the bottom of Lake Michigan. That’s all.

[edgar-allan-possum]

Very normal British girl's name.

[shibuiking]

I found you via tumblrs orbit system and you sounded kinda nervous about your ocs, so I’m gonna appear in your askbox and shout “yaaaay ocs!”

a idk if its nervousness per se and more just a combo of hope tht ppl will like+care abt them and me being awkward/not knowing what to say (but 40k ppl have been super nice ive never actually had ppl care abt my ocs before outside of my close friends ToT and they arent into 40k)

anyway. um yeah. ty tho 🥺 i rly appreciate it

[misdre]

once again i am thankful that jesus died to give us a 4-day weekend, real considerate of him

[creationsabyss]

Monstrous Devotion (It Will Devour You Whole)

Another piece for @m1d-45. It was meant to be short but as you can tell, got out of hand.

Desperation 

You remember it well

How it sparked your blood

And got it to run

How it tasted of bitter and tang

Much like the sting of blood

You remember how it kept you alive

Made your nerves so sensitive 

It prickled with every breeze

Every slight disturbance

How it kept your sleep light

And your dreams even lighter

Even now as you watch

The archons who adorn your body

With the most precious of gems

And the rarest of treasures 

They who once tried to shed your blood

To water their blade

You see the warriors of each nation

Who tried to rend your soul from your body

Attend your every need 

Degrading themselves as objects

As lesser than human

To try and exalt you higher

You feel more than you hear

As you watch once beloved characters

Stain themselves with sin

Desperation of their own

Rising to the surface

Their desperation is monstrous 

Predator to prey

Your own desperation has not waned

It has only grown

Writhing under your skin

Fueled by fine jewelry 

Silken clothes

And bloodstained manic smiles

Your forgiveness is not sincere

It is learned

Through a lifetime of pain

Of a death so vivid

You're desperate to stay alive

You are willing to do anything

But what once kept you safe

Will now be the one to deal a fatal blow

You already know this

Alarm bells ringing

With every minute move

But it's far too late

You're stuck in puppet motions

That are to never cease

Until the life drains from your eyes

Desperation made you learn to survive

And now that very same lesson shall be the one to end you

[svtskneecaps]

literally it's 3am where i live and i'm on mobile but FUCK IT i haven't posted any actual writing in like a YEAR on this blog whose description include the words "I WRITE" and i can't tell if i'm even going anywhere with this so fuck it under the cut is the prospective absolute mess of the first chapter of the flipo family time loop fic. (for clarity, flipo family as in slime, mariana, and juanaflippa) this covers loop 0, aka the relevant parts of canon. words: 1630

parts of it i popped off with and other parts i hate; up to you to identify them. also the italics and other formatting got erased when i copy pasted and i'm re-adding all of it by hand so if i missed a spot, no i didn't. if i missed an accent on a letter in spanish that was a typo, if i missed a ¡ or ¿ that may have been on purpose.

oh and for obvious reasons, content warning for mentions and mild descriptions of child death and child murder. no blood, and most of it is a three word mention; i'd say the brief paragraph beginning "Tilín didn't scream" is most of the reason this warning exists.

Charlie Slimecicle stepped off the train.

He’d been hoping for a bright, sunny day to start their vacation, but was sorely disappointed. The portal had apparently taken them pretty far, since they’d gone from noon to night time. Talk about jetlag. They hadn’t even been on a plane.

“What happened to the other guys?” he wondered aloud as he stepped onto the platform.

“Yeah no clue,” Phil said, scanning the empty station. “Thought they’d meet us here.”

“Guys!” one of the Spanish speakers--Vegetta, he’d said, when they’d all met up at the first station--called, from a lectern at the wall. “There is a book!”

They crowded around as he read the instructions aloud--something about pressure plates, Slime wasn’t paying that close of attention. He was a little more preoccupied with making sure it only felt like his brain was dripping out of his ears. That would be kind of embarrassing.

Which was not to say that he wasn’t enjoying the constant onslaught of people talking over each other using words he may or may not understand. In fact, it was the opposite; he was frankly thriving in the absolute chaos that kicked back up around him as a timer appeared in the wrist communicators they’d been provided along with their tickets.

“Como se dice ‘we are going to die now’?” He giggled, chasing Phil and Fit to one end of the station.

“¡Vamos a morir!” shouted Spiderman, echoed seconds later by the black bear in the collared shirt.

Giddy over the high of attempting to use his high school foreign language for the first time maybe ever, Slime absolutely didn’t contribute much to solving the puzzle, and before long the sound of the timer ticking down was accompanied by a loud buzzing alarm.

“It’s been an honor!” he shrieked at the top of his lungs. “It’s been an honor!”

The bear ran past them again, shouting, “I’m going to die!” in English this time.

“Adiós amigos!” Slime yelled.

The countdown ended.

And then his communicator buzzed, and there was a video playing on the screen, showing a cartoonish yellow duck in front of a blurry beach stock photo. He skimmed it absently--some generic welcoming message and another side quest for them--distracted by Maximus audibly losing his shit laughing across the station.

“Come on, I’m trying to take a vacation, I gotta work now?” Fit complained. “This is ridiculous.”

Slime wanted to jump on that bit, but the message cut off with coordinates marred by static and the noise of the emergency weather alert system and he lost his train of thought completely.

“I got the English book!” Spreen called, holding it with two fingers like it had personally offended him.

“English leader,” Vegetta said, seeming to find that amusing.

“English leader.” Spreen laughed and flicked the book away. Slime stepped back but somehow it still nailed him in the chest.

“Guess I’m reading then,” he said cheerfully.

“In Spanish?” Maximus said.

“Um.”

Vegetta called something, backing across the plaza with the book open in his hands. Phil backed up to the wall.

“Here,” Phil instructed, “we’ll read it here.”

“Okay okay.” He flicked it open. “So we have to get water wheel planks--”

Their peace lasted a grand total of thirty seconds as voices suddenly began shouting, overlapping in chaotic chorus.

“What is that?” Fit demanded.

“Is that coming from the other side?” Phil stared up at the top of the wall.

“This is the thinnest thick wall I’ve ever seen,” Slime said, giddy laughter bubbling out of him again. “Is this thing made out of pencil shavings? If I sneeze on it, is there gonna be a hole?”

“Nevermind, we’ll read it over here.” Phil dragged them away again, but the Spanish speakers were dispersing into the trees.

“Forget the book,” Fit said, “follow them!”

(In the end it was explosives that took the wall down, which in hindsight was a precursor to how a not insignificant portion of time on the island was spent. The first day, however, it was just funny, much like everything else.)

(That was to say, the first first day.)

The communicator had indicated that today there was something special planned, so he made an extra effort to wake up.

“Morning Jaiden!” he called to his upstairs neighbor.

“Hi Charlie!” He could hear her farming through the wall. “Glad you woke up on time!”

“Well you know, you know, El Backflipo couldn’t miss it,” he joked, sifting through his backpack. “Got any spare food? I’ll trade you uno backflipo.”

“I have so much toast, come here and get some, free of charge.”

With a quick backflip and some toast to start the day, he popped open the map.

“There’s a lot of people down the wall,” he noted, their green dots so clustered they formed one. “Wanna check it out?”

“Yeah sure.” Jaiden tossed some seeds into a chest. “Do you know what this event’s gonna be?”

“I have no idea,” he admitted cheerfully.

She laughed. “Yeah, me neither. I guess there’s an egg involved, but that’s all I know.”

He dug around in his backpack for a paraglider, nodding along. “Yeah, yeah, un huevo, I get you.” Shuffling the landmine from Vegetta to one side, he yanked out his glider and threw himself out her window. “Let’s go!”

(nothing like getting struck by lightning to wake a guy up in the morning)

Slime fiddled with the communicator as he waited for the line of people to get through the ticket machine; he already had his own, a nice B for Backflipo. The new live translations still boggled his mind. He had to fight the urge to chant weird shit under his breath, just to see what the bubbles would say.

He paid a little extra attention when Mariana walked up to the machine. That guy seemed cool. They’d done that pequeño dormir together on day one, and he had a good sense of humor. Egg parenting would probably be funny.

He was thrilled to see the B for Backflipo on the ticket Mariana stepped away with, even if Mariana was decidedly less so. This was gonna be good.

(it was, and it wasn’t)

So, Mariana wasn’t exactly the coparent of dreams. Then again, Slime was pretty sure Mariana could say the same about him. In fact he was pretty sure Mariana had said the same, but in Spanish, when he wasn’t checking the translation.

It was great. They thought they’d killed a child immediately and then decided to fake their own child’s death to get away with it, and then confessed their sins to a bilingual angel and built a farm and then he buried himself beneath an improvised cross and went into a coma until his sins were forgiven, or something, except his sins weren’t forgiven in time to save his own child’s life.

And then Juanaflippa was dead. Dead at Mariana’s hand.

His bitch wife killed their daughter.

(Everything went faster, after that.)

Slime wanted to kill him.

Slime wanted to kill him for killing their fucking daughter, but of course, Mariana couldn’t even be bothered to be around to take care of her alive, never mind to pay for his crimes when she died by his hand!

(in a better world, his rage started and ended there. in a better world, the anger fizzled out with the lack of a target.

this was not that world)

There couldn’t be an Egg Event with no eggs.

If he killed them all, it would bring her back.

(in a worse world, he succeeded. in a worse world, the Egg Event ended there.

this was not that world)

They held a trial.

If he won, it would bring her back.

(in another world, he didn’t convince them. in another world, they left his daughter in Hell.

this was not that world)

Tilín was still before she hit the ground.

Tilín didn’t scream. Maybe they didn’t have time. It happened so fast. He was sure it happened fast. Almost too fast. But everything went so fast, now, even though Flippa was back. Yet, time slowed down for this, like a rubberneck driving past a highway accident, watching him desperately trying to shock their heart back into motion.

“YOU KILL MY BEST FRIENDS,” Flippa wrote. He begged her to understand. She wrote, “i can’t believe it.”

She wrote, “I HATE YOU.”

(in a better world, the error would have been caught in April instead of July.

this was not that world)

His daughter fell to his bitch wife’s sword. The same way. The next day.

They’d only just gotten her back. And Mariana killed her again.

He only left eggxile for the funeral. She wouldn’t stay dead, but he had to be there.

Time went even faster after that. He was Gegg, or maybe Gegg was him, or maybe Gegg was Gegg, or maybe. . . ?

He went back to eggxile.

He wasn’t leaving without them. Tilín. Juanaflippa. He would do whatever was necessary. He would pray to any higher power. Lil J still owed him a goddamn favor, but the guy wouldn’t pick up his calls. Maybe if he put more shit in the shrine; angels liked shiny shit, didn’t they? He went back to the mine, where the gasses swirled in his head. He built the shrine. He mined. He built the shrine.

He went back to the mine.

He went back to the mine.

He went back to the mine.

“This is where I sit, this is where my bitch wife sits, and this is where my daughter sits, if I had one!”

He’d said that before. No he hadn’t. Yes he had.

No, he just needed to clear his head.

Charlie Slimecicle went back to the mine.

Charlie Slimecicle stepped off the train.

[marshmallowgoop]

They Only Murdered Him Once

Fandom: Detective Conan

Summary: The antidote doesn't fix everything.

Notes: My contribution to the DCMK Fanfic Server's noir zine, A Study in NOIR. You can find the whole thing here!

This piece is also available on AO3.

-------

The first time that she lays eyes on Shinichi Kudo, it’s nothing more than a passing glance from the backseat of a stuffy, unbearable car that she’d never be allowed to drive.

It could have been a newspaper. He’d tell her so someday, a pout on his thin lips and his face pinkening, only slightly, starting at his nose and threatening to spill over to his cheeks. She could have seen his photograph paired with an unbelievable headline, or glimpsed his likeness on the cover of the kind of magazine you might find stocked near the front of your favorite convenience store. Or perhaps she could have caught the now-familiar tuft of hair that never sits flat on the back of his head, and his too-big smile, and his eye-bleeding sense of fashion, splashed all across the evening news.

But that bland, ordinary October afternoon, she doesn’t see some recreation of him, composed of pixels and ink. She doesn’t see smudges of black and white that somehow combine to resemble him. She sees him in the flesh, walking casually along a pristine sidewalk in the opposite direction of her car.

His hands are hidden, concealed by the pockets of a brown coat too warm for the not-yet-biting chill of the season. He wears a goofy, toothless grin for the girl beside him, a beautiful, wide-eyed thing dressed even more warmly, with a rib-knit turtleneck collar wrapped tightly around her neck and a blush-colored jacket encasing her arms.

He doesn’t notice the car. Not the sound. Not the sight. Not the smell, the reek of the people housed within it. His entire world walks beside him.

So she stares. She peers out the rolled-up window, her face leaning into her closed fist, her eyes narrowed and her expression both utterly meaningless and the most meaningful expression she’d ever allow to come over her.

She thinks him a stupid boy. Someday, she’ll swear that this was the only thought that ever crossed her mind.

-------

The tenth time—eleventh time, twelfth time, she loses track eventually—that the girl at the doc’s place lays eyes on Shinichi Kudo, it’s in a place she least expected, at a time that should be impossible.

But as she drags the body, arms first, across the worn carpet of the home that is not hers, she looks down, and she sees him.

She very nearly drops the wrists to the floor.

-------

The sixth time—maybe—that Haibara lays eyes on Shinichi Kudo, it’s nearly fifteen minutes later than had been arranged.

He half-jogs his way to her table, his mouth opening and his hands coming together as though he means to pray, but she speaks before allowing even the slightest bit of sound to erupt out of him.

“You look like shit,” she says.

It’s true. Kudo has never been one she’d describe as stylish or up to date, but it’s worse than usual. His familiar bright red bow tie has been replaced with a tie of quiet purple, perhaps to stand out against the garish crimson polo shirt that he’s inexplicably paired with a white vest, and the resulting effect is as embarrassing as it is painful.

But his face fares more poorly than his outfit. It’s as though he rummaged through the makeup of the girl from the detective agency, uncapped her favorite mascara, and attempted to coat his bottom lashes in black, but he failed so spectacularly that the color leaked past his waterline and pooled up in the creases beneath his eyes.

He grips the cold edge of a metal chair across from her, sitting down with a scowl that looks as half-hearted as his apology undoubtedly would have been.

“Well, excuse me,” he says.

“You smell like shit, too,” she adds.

He does. There’s no way that his dark circles are the result of a makeup accident. He couldn’t have even walked in a bathroom this morning to brush his teeth.

Or comb his hair, which is covered in a thin layer of frizz and sticks up in places it shouldn’t. For all she knows, he could have rolled out of bed five minutes ago. He probably did.

The chair beneath him shrieks as he slides it back and lifts an arm. He presses his cheek into the brilliantly red fabric, his nose hovering near the pit, and sniffs.

“C’mon,” he says, after a moment of this. His arm comes down, and he directs his attention away from his body odor and back towards her. “It’s not that bad. Give me a break.”

She gives her order. Black coffee. She agrees to creamer without a thought.

He asks for juice. She raises an eyebrow but says nothing.

It’s only when the server has stepped away that she asks, “So? What did you want to talk to me about?”

Kudo throws her the coldest, hardest glare. “Don’t act like you don’t know,” he says, but his voice isn’t furious. It’s soft, tired. Haibara might even be inclined to call it sad.

“Not all of us are great detectives,” she tells him. She flips her hands so that the palms face the ceiling. Her shoulders sway, and her fingers bob up and then go back down again. “If your dolphin is causing you that much anguish, I’d suggest seeing a starfish over a shark.”

“What?” Kudo stares at her wearily, if one could call it that. His eyes appear to be barely open, nothing more than slits of blue. The table is small enough that the stench of his breath, even after uttering nothing more than a single word, is overpowering. He most definitely woke up five minutes before he came here.

“If you mean Ran,” he eventually tries, “then no. That’s not it.”

“Oh?”

“Well.” He pauses. “It is, but…”

“‘It’s not her, it’s me?’”

Kudo nods. “Yeah.” He brings his voice down to a whisper, leaning in closer and holding his hand in an arc around his mouth as though they are breezy teenage girls sharing worthless gossip at a slumber party.

“She called me last night,” he says. “Or early in the morning. Three o’clock. I was sleeping. She rang and rang and rang.”

Haibara doesn’t ask for elaboration. He continues without prodding, the volume of his voice dropping so low that Haibara very nearly decides to listen to the conversation behind her instead, about an old dog who’d been adopted and only recently started to warm up to its new family. Things certainly would have been better for her if she had.

Kudo says, “She was crying about…” but stops before revealing the answer, as though his life is a TV show and he’s deciding where the conveniently timed commercial breaks sit. But she doesn’t roll her eyes at him, doesn’t say anything. She watches, nothing more, as he swallows and lets the hand that had been brushing against his cheek fall to the table, only to then fall off the table too and rest in his lap.

He leans back in his chair. If he were one for smoking, Haibara could imagine him lighting a cigarette. He’d suck in the smoke and watch it dance through the air. He’d look at it as though it held all the answers that she couldn’t give to him.

But there is no cigarette. There’s only a server who places their drinks down in front of them and asks sweetly if there isn’t anything else she could do. She lacks the effortless charisma of the girl at Poirot, but there’s a warmth in her eyes and smile that tells Haibara all she needs to know.

Haibara shakes her head. She drinks her coffee without the creamer. Kudo eyes his juice, filled with ice cut into tiny cubes and poured in a tall, clear glass. There’s a straw placed inside, as brilliantly white as an old woman’s first dentures, and he gawks at that, too.

“She was crying about Conan,” he finally says, once the server is long past them. He is hardly audible over the barely muted screams from the old-new-dog table. Cute pet photos, shared by passing a smartphone across iced tea and minuscule pitchers of sugar syrup, incite explosions of giggles and laughter.

Kudo pays it no mind. The bubbles of excitement are probably why he continues here in a more normal voice. They’re not children anymore, not tiny and wearing clothes too big as adults stare or even yell but do nothing to help. They’re more invisible than that, situated so close to normalcy. No one would think twice about the words that spill out of their mouths.

So Kudo tells her, in a pointed not-whisper, “She was crying about Conan because he hadn’t come home last night. And he couldn’t have been at Dr. Agasa’s because the doc is out of town right now. So, she called me because she didn’t know what else to do.”

“I’m sure that was a mistake,” Haibara says. The coffee is bitter, biting. It’s so hot that it scalds her tongue. It’s delicious.

“It was a mistake,” Kudo agrees, without even a hint of sarcasm. “I… yelled at her, Haibara. I told her to stop bothering me about stupid things when I’m trying to sleep.”

Yes, Haibara could picture him doing so. “And?”

“And I went to see her this morning.” Smells like bullshit. But Kudo goes on, “The old man was hardly awake. I probably stopped by too early. But he mumbled something to me about going to her room. He probably wasn’t really thinking.

“But I went over there. I had to make sure that she was okay after last night. And I would have knocked on her door, but it was already open. She was sitting at her desk, holding an old picture and crying.”

He shakes his head. His half-lidded eyes watch the condensation drip down the glass in front of him. Water pools up at the bottom, leaving shiny half-circles on the table.

“I didn’t even know she had it framed,” he admits. Something like a smile comes over him, an expression that Haibara recognizes from the days they had been small. It’s nothing happy, where the corners of his mouth reach his eyes. She might describe it as angry, but even that wouldn’t be proper. It’s the kind of face you make when you couldn’t stop a murderer the first time, but you know who they are and can keep them from killing again. She’s seen that face a lot.

Kudo says, “It’s from back when we���” Here he pauses. “From back when Conan,” he corrects, “got stranded on a day trip with old man Mori, and spent the night in that temple.”

“Of course,” Haibara says.

“They all took a picture together, under this flowering tree. It’s a nice picture.”

“But?”

“But Conan is gone, Haibara.” It’s a different smile now, more relaxed, less tense, as though the pain from it is gone. “I thought Ran would be happy. No brat to wake up for school, no one else to feed, no more worrying about where I am and whether or not I’m okay.”

He sighs. His hands reach up to adjust glasses that are no longer there, and the color drains out of him. His half-lidded eyes become huge blue discs.

He should smoke. Or drink something much stronger than juice. He clearly needs it.

“She told me once that she wished we were the same,” he says, very quietly. Fingers run through his mussed-up, rustled hair. “But she used to stare at that picture of us from Tropical Land. I’ve seen her. More than once. Just clutching that brown frame and staring at this stupid detective’s face.

“It’s still in her room, of course. But it was covered in dust, when I came by this morning. She wasn’t even thinking about it. All she was thinking about was that kid smiling under the cherry tree.”

He’s silent, and so is she. The noise from the table behind them has become just that—noise devoid of any meaning or purpose.

It’s not a funny situation, but a smile, a real one, bursts out of her like laughter at a funeral. “Idiot,” she says. “Of course she’s not happy.”

“Of course she’s not,” he repeats, and then he repeats it a few times over. “Of course not. Of course not.”

No, most certainly not. Haibara can imagine it well, can picture the scenarios in her mind. The girl from the detective agency pushing her lips over her teeth and taking this man by the hand but feeling that the fingers entwined with hers are not big and rough and his but so soft and pink and small that the little fingers become engulfed by the lines crisscrossing her palm. The girl from the detective agency leaning close to him, running her hand up his chest, only to fall back as she finds the gunshot wound. The girl from the detective agency looking into his eyes and seeing the child in the hospital bed, the child whose face she has to wipe clean during dinner, the child whose glasses she removes as he falls asleep with a book in his lap, the child she wants to carry in her arms and protect forever as if he were her own.

“Of course not,” Kudo says again. He laughs like a dead man. “I used to think that I didn’t understand it. I could understand the emotion. I have a heart. I know hatred and jealousy and anger and misery and anguish and everything that drives a man to kill.”

He draws a deep breath. The juice in his glass has grown. What had once been ice cubes the size of thumbnails are now nothing more than insignificant slivers. They sparkle in the light that filters in from the window.

“But I couldn’t understand wanting to do it. I thought I couldn’t. I didn’t want to understand.”

The entire coffee shop, the place where Conan Edogawa had first become real to her, had been uttered by the sister she could never live up to, means nothing as he says, “But I did understand, Haibara. I wanted Conan dead, and I killed him.”

It’s not unexpected, that he adds, “We’re both killers, aren’t we?”

Her scalded tongue goes dry. A pit opens up in her stomach and consumes all the warmth she had stolen from the coffee.

But she only says, “You still call me Haibara.”

He stands. His fingers fumble through his pockets, and he drops money on the table. His eyes are wide, alert, surrounded by white rings. He smirks as though he’s figured something out—solved a complicated, ever-moving puzzle.

“Right,” he says. “Thanks, Haibara.”

And there is nothing more. Not another word. Not another sound. He leaves, and she doesn’t call after him. She watches him go and hears the bell ring as he opens the door and sprints down the pristine sidewalk.

When the server returns with a pleasant smile and puzzled glance at the untouched juice and creamer, Haibara smiles just as pleasantly back. It’s not as if the woman could ever understand.

-------

She refuses to see him, the next time that she can.

It’s the girl from the detective agency who finds the body. He’s collapsed in front of the gate by his house, the one whose handle had only months ago been too high for him to reach.

There’s no sign of a struggle. No dying message on the ground, or conveyed with his position, or in his pockets, which held nothing but loose change and a pair of crushed glasses. There’s only a boy in a green jacket and yellow shirt and blue slacks with his chest pressed against the sidewalk.

His face is so calm that he could be asleep. That’s what they say. That’s what the girl scientist hears.

The story reaches the black-and-white papers struggling to get by and the kinds of magazines stocked in the front of your favorite convenience store. It becomes the juiciest gossip of the evening news. The photo that Kudo had mentioned in the coffee shop, the one in the brown frame and him in his green jacket and yellow shirt and blue slacks smiling next to the girl from the detective agency, becomes synonymous with the case. It’s the thumbnail for every YouTube video, the picture attached to every Tweet, the cover image for every crime podcast.

But the girl scientist never looks. Never sees. Never listens to the claims of the girl from the detective agency being the killer, or his friend from Osaka, who’d left behind hundreds of text messages that ultimately went unread. It’s nothing but noise, the thought that Sleeping Kogoro’s daughter was mad at her boyfriend. That the Detective of the West was jealous. That the girlfriend lost it. That the supposed best friend lost it. That they lost it and used everything they knew about detective work to conjure up the perfect, untraceable murder.

In the end, law enforcement declares it nothing but noise, too. Unknown natural causes, they say. The body is burned and the girl scientist stares out Dr. Agasa’s window and watches the rain hit the glass, one hand in her pocket, her fingers twisting round and round.

It’s the Osaka friend who comes first, unannounced. The door is unlocked, and he lets himself in after a great deal of pounding against the metal.

“I know yer in there!” he says. He slams his fist and screams, threatening to break the whole thing down before he realizes that he can simply turn the knob.

When he enters, he’s sopping wet. His front is more drenched than the back, as though he had run nonstop from the train station, which he probably had. His hair clings to his face, his usual hairstyle reduced to nothing more than strands of deep, dark black that fall into his green, green eyes. His brown jacket sticks to him, and his eggshell-colored top underneath has become transparent, making the mechanisms of his breathing more obvious and real. She watches the rise and fall, listens to the hard gasps, takes note of his hand placed almost defensively on the brim of his hat.

“Welcome,” she says at the sight. She wears a scowl tinged with exhaustion. “Let me get you a change of clothes. But you’re stuck with only what the doctor’s got.”

“I don’t need nothin’ like dat,” he says, through his heaving breaths.

“You’re not spilling water all over my floor.

“Yer floor?”

“My floor,” she repeats. “If the doc’s not here, it’s mine.”

She leaves him there and finds the worst outfit in the doctor’s closet. She should kick him out. Push him out the door he barged into and make him go and never come back. He has nothing to do with her. She means nothing to him.

But she carries the clothes in her arms and somehow cajoles him into the bathroom to change. It’s as difficult as convincing a child to switch out a mismatched top, and it takes her until the light is flipped on and the stupid boy stands straddling two rooms for her to realize why.

“Kudo wore these,” she says.

His face pinkens, more than slightly, starting at his nose and spilling all across his cheeks. He fixes his eyes to the ground, where the tiniest puddles have already formed from the water dripping off his skin.

He says very quietly, “Bastard ripped ‘em, too. Had to sew it back up myself.”

“Why?” It falls out without thought. She stares at him, utterly bewildered.

But he smiles. It’s gentle and soft. The way he used to look at Kudo. “They… still smelled like him,” he says. “Even after washin’.”

“I don’t think that’s a good thing.”

“It is.”

He takes the clothes from her hands and goes into the bathroom. He’s in there a long time. When he returns, he looks exactly as ridiculous as she’d imagined, especially because he’d refused to remove his hat. The letters face her. S-A-X.

She brews coffee. They sit on spinning chairs on opposite sides of Dr. Agasa’s half-circle table. The rain continues to pour down in sheets, and the room is shrouded in a gloomy gray.

He calls her Sis. The sound brightens her cheeks and gets a stirring going in her chest, but if he notices the reaction, he certainly doesn’t show it. He leaves the coffee she’d prepared for him untouched. He holds the brim of his hat. She stares at the letters.

“I can’t let it rest,” he says. “It don’t make any sense.”

She looks at him blankly. She says nothing in reply.

“He was healthy,” he continues, and though he is swimming in the extra fabric of Dr. Agasa’s wardrobe, her eyes slide down from his wet hat to really look at him. The boy detective no longer looks so much like a boy. His shoulders have grown broader in the time that’s passed, and his eyes are no longer the wild, limitless eyes of someone who doesn’t understand. They’re tired eyes, worn eyes. Eyes that have seen too much.

“If you’re looking for answers,” she eventually says, placing down her own mug, “I think you’d be better off asking a detective, not a scientist.”

His unspoken words fill the silence. It’s not as though this conversation hasn’t happened before.

She says, “It wasn’t the antidote.”

“I know,” he answers.

“Then why come here?”

He sighs. His fingers stop fiddling with the brim of his hat and instead fall to his lap. He anxiously twists his hands, round and round, staring at them as though they’ll provide him with the answers he’s looking for but won’t find.

“I can’t talk ta anyone else. Yer the only one who gets it.”

“Who gets it,” she repeats.

But then she sighs, long and heavy. This isn’t how she intended to spend the afternoon, and a look at the watch on her wrist tells her that this shouldn’t have been how he spends his afternoon, either.

“You missed school for this.”

“Don’t act like you’ve been ta yer job.”

“School is more important.”

For a moment, he stares into the depths of his black coffee. Maybe he sees his reflection staring back, the reflection of a pitiful man who is both too young and too old for his body. But before long he looks at her, really looks, exactly as she had really looked at him, his gaze piercing and unrelenting. He looks at her like a detective would, as if everything he needs to know could be deciphered from a single glance. She makes no effort to stop him.

He says, “Look. I’ll quit beatin’ ‘round the bush. I think ya know somethin’ that ya ain’t told nobody.”

“Nobody would believe—“

“I ain’t talkin’ ‘bout dat. Kudo met ya just days before…” He stops. “…what happened happened. What did he want ta talk ta ya about?”

“Troubles with his dolphin,” she says easily. She ignores his confusion and doesn’t let him respond. “But if you want to talk about withholding information, I think that’s you, Mr. Great Detective. Did the police ever get a reason why you sent all those text messages?”

For the first time since he’d arrived, he doesn’t look merely tickled with embarrassment but absolutely flooded with it. “Jus’ had a bad feelin’,” he says, which she’d already known.

But then the embarrassment morphs into distress. He clenches his teeth. The hands in his lap still. “And I couldn’t get here in time. The little lady had ta find him like that.”

The girl scientist removes herself from the chair. She stands. “I think you should go,” she says. “And turn your hat the other way.”

His eyes widen. A million thoughts must race through his head because that’s as many facial expressions she counts coming over him in the span of a second.

He doesn’t move to go or turn his hat around, though. He stands and slams his hands down on the table. His mug clatters, and flecks of the black liquid mar the surface.

“Don’t ya dare,” he says—screams, more like. His hands reach for her, as though to grab her by the shoulders to try to shake the truth away. “Ya idiot—!”

But she doesn’t let him say a word more. She opens the watch on her wrist and fires the needle straight at his forehead. The life leaves him as quickly as it had exploded out, and she gasps for breath as he crumples to a pile on the ground.

“Sorry, Hattori,” she says.

She drags him, arms first, into the doctor’s room.

-------

It’s here that Ai sees Shinichi Kudo.

It’s nothing more than a moment. A split second. She looks down at the detective’s sleeping face, and it’s Kudo that she sees instead, the Kudo she had refused to see, with eyes that would never open again.

When the bell rings, it takes everything she has to shut the door of the doctor’s room and wipe her face and answer it.

“Ai,” says a voice, between bursts of chimes of alternating lengths. “Ai, please open the door!”

She does. The girl from the detective agency stands there, looking as starved for breath as the detective had, though she at least had the decency to run with an umbrella. It’s been abandoned on the ground beside her, still open and swaying with the wind. Her face is panicked, with huge blue eyes set against a pale backdrop devoid of color. The girl hardly hears when Ai tells her that she should retrieve the umbrella before it blows away. When the girl closes it and brings it inside, it’s as though she’s in a trance.

They stand by the closed door for what feels like a century. If the girl from the detective agency notices Hattori’s abandoned shoes, she certainly acts as though she doesn’t. She swallows and gathers her breath and sobs. “Please, Ai,” she says, unmoving, the handle of the umbrella still locked in her grip. “Shiho. Please don’t do what Shinichi did.”

“I haven’t the slightest clue what you’re talking about.”

“You do!” the girl bursts out. She drops the umbrella. It falls to Dr. Agasa’s floor with all the grace and noise of a corpse dumped from the top of a building. Puddles of water form and leak and ooze.

“You do,” the girl repeats, quieter now. Her wet hands find Shiho’s, and her wet eyes find dry ones.

Shiho pushes the hands away. It doesn’t stop the girl from the detective agency from running her mouth.

“I know you kept some,” she says, as though she is not the girl from the detective agency but the detective herself. Her voice is fragile, as if any sudden movement could cause it to break. “You couldn’t take too many. That’d be suspicious. Someone could get hurt. But one could fail. Two would be safer. Three, that would be the safest. ‘Third time’s the charm.’ They say that, don’t they?”

“You have no proof.” It’s the script Shiho’s heard, time and time again.

“Oh, stop it!” the girl detective says. “I have proof enough!”

“And what’s that?”

The other girl hesitates. Her white teeth make a mess of her bottom lip, and her eyes find the fallen umbrella, still leaking with water flecked with dirt from her shoes.

But eventually, she manages, “You knew what I was talking about, Shiho. And…” She bites her lip so hard that Shiho knows she tastes blood. “His pocket. He had Conan’s glasses in his pocket.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means everything,” the girl insists.

“Tell me what it means, then.”

The girl says, “It means that he didn’t mean to…” She shakes her head. Cries erupt from her throat. It takes a long time to calm, and when she speaks again, her words are scarcely comprehensible. “He didn’t mean for it to end up like that. It means that he wanted to bring Conan back. The pill just… did what it was supposed to do the first time.”

She wipes at her face. “But you already knew that.”

“Do you blame me?” It’s not like the answer matters. What’s done is done. But she supposes a part of her wants to know. “Do you despise me?”

“No,” says the woman. “That’s why I’m here. I know you don’t want to bring Ai back. I know that when you saw that Shinichi had taken it, you put the last one you had in your pocket. I know that you’ve been carrying it with you ever since. Your hands have always been in your pockets, ever since that day. I know you’re holding it right now.”

Shiho smiles. It’s cold. “If what you’re saying is true, then how did Kudo even find it?”

“I don’t know.” The woman smiles, too. It’s warm. Nostalgic. “If he were here, I know he’d say something like, ‘It was quite simple. The only place Haibara would hide anything like that is in something that we’d never touch because she’d kill us if we did.’”

She drops the impersonation. Tears fall freely from her face, but she does not cry. “If I had to guess,” she says, “you hid them in the back of a fashion magazine.”

Her hands find Shiho’s again. “But that doesn’t matter. Please give me that last pill, Shiho. I don’t want to lose you, too.”

The woman means it, so it feels cruel to smile, to drop the pill in Mori’s hand. But that’s exactly what Shiho does.

She laughs. “I’m the big sister who didn’t destroy this. He didn’t have to die. You should want to lose me.”

“But I don’t,” Mori insists.

The worst part is, as Shiho’s fingers turn round and round a final pill still in her pocket, she believes her.

[notstinky]

TIMING: Various (2007, 2010, 2016, 2022) LOCATION: Toronto, Ontario CONTENT: Sibling Death tw, death (described in obituaries), implied bullying SUMMARY: There are no friendships greater than those forged in the halls of public school. Too bad Cynthia ate all her friends.

Zainab Khan (2000-2022).

Zainab was a regular volunteer at The Yonge Street Mission and her friends and family remember her as a compassionate woman. She was attending Toronto Metropolitan University as a part of the real estate management program. She is survived by her mother, father and two younger brothers.

2007 - "Wanna trade?"

Cynthia looked up at the girl towering over her, shoving a tin-foil wrapped package into her face. Cynthia looked around, wondering when the joke was going to come. All the other kids had pushed their desks up together, even Cynthia's desk partner had pushed hers halfway across the room to join her friends. Even though the teacher had told her not to; even though they weren't supposed to do it.

They'd had a substitute for the day.

"Um, I'm..." Cynthia stared at her ham and cheese sandwich. She'd been picking apart the crust for a few minutes now and had earned herself a neat pile.

"It's a pizza pocket," the girl explained.

"Oh." Cynthia blinked. When her father went shopping, he told her that they didn't have the money for any of the stuff she pointed out to him. It was ham and cheese on white bread for her most days. She was lucky enough to get a few chips to carry around in a plastic baggie. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I don't like 'em." The girl sat down on the edge of Cynthia's desk. She unraveled her pizza pocket and snatched up Cynthia's sandwich. "I'm Zainab," she said.

Cynthia resisted the urge to tell her that she knew, because they did attendance everyday and she liked to listen to all the names and their accompanying 'present' or 'here'. "I'm Cynthia," she said and imagined that Zainab resisted the same urge.

Zainab took a big bite of her sandwhich and Cynthia's hand shot up into the air. "Um," she squeaked, flushing. "Can you eat ham?"

Zainab opened her mouth, revealing the unswallowed mush of bread, ham and cheese. "No," she spoke with her mouthfull. "Bha do I do?"

Cynthia held out her hands and Zainab spat the sandwich out on to them. The two of them stared at the slush and laughed.

Ham and cheese couldn't be switched but as it turned out, Zainab hated her orange juice boxes and Cynthia hated her apple juice ones.

Leslie Hsu (2000-2022)

Growing up in Vancouver, Leslie's parents moved to Toronto when she was nine. She was a student of The University of Toronto's science program majoring in Biology. Leslie is survived by her mother and father. Leslie Hsu will be deeply missed.

2010 -

"I'm not gonna talk to her, she's weird."

Zainab looked pointedly at her best friend. "You're weird," she responded.

"No." Cynthia turned red. "You're weird."

The sounds of Leslie's crying were, to her credit, rather subdued in her corner of the playground. Zainab reached out and pinched Cynthia before she shoved her forward. Her shoes squeaked as stopped herself from tumbling on to Leslie's hunched body.

Cynthia's thin body cast a small shadow across the asphalt and Leslie looked up, sniffling at her.

"Um, yeah, Montell's a real jerk. I'm sorry he, uh, pushed you." Cynthia kicked at the ground. "Or like whatever."

Leslie wiped at her cheeks. Cynthia's worn jeans, old off-brand sneakers and holey t-shirt were a farcry from her pristine spring dress and navy blue espadrilles. She twisted her body to face the other girl.

"Is this seat taken?" Cynthia laughed awkwardly, pointing to the spot beside her.

Leslie laughed because it was the sort of thing you did when someone asked a stupid question. Cynthia sat down quickly and Zainab joined them on the floor, moving around small pebbles.

"I'm sorry I called you poor," Leslie said all at once.

"Yeah," Cynthia shrugged. "Well, it was true, so..."

"No it's not," Leslie argued, because that was the sort of thing you did when someone called themselves poor.

"No, really." Cynthia perked up. "I'm so poor I roll around on the ground to get enrichment."

Leslie stared at Cynthia. Silence stretched between them and with each distant roar of laughter from the playground, Cynthia shrunk into herself. When Leslie finally spoke, it was with a smile.

"That doesn't even make sense," she said. "You're so weird."

Zainab kicked Cynthia's foot.

Jalisa Jordan (2000-2022)

Jalisa died in hospital from injuries following the gruesome Lakeshore Blvd. animal attack. She was a student of The University of Toronto's English program. She will be remembered as the energetic and friendly woman that she was. She is survived by her mother, father, and older sister.

2016 -

"I caught a new one."

Cynthia and Leslie looked up at the girl Zainab had her arms around. She looked at the two of them with wide-eyes and a tight smile. The two girls shared a look between each other and over the French notes they were sharing. Their half-eaten lunches sent the aroma of oranges and cheese into the air.

"Her name is Jalisa," Zainab broke the silence. "She just moved here."

"We're trying to study, Zee," Leslie said.

"Yeah, we're conjugating verbs," Cynthia backed up her friend.

"Oh, do you guys have Ms. Boni for French?" Jalisa asked, surprising everyone with the sound of her voice. Cynthia thought this might have been the occasion to cheer; the girl can talk! Ring the bells!

"Yeah?" Cynthia squinted.

"Oh, I have her in the morning. I just had the test."

At once, Cynthia and Leslie parted themselves, smacking the space of open tile that they made. Jalisa slid across the floor as she joined them laughing at their notes.

"'Êtes' has a circonflexe," Jalisa explained, pointing at the first letter.

Leslie snatched her notes up, holding them close to her chest. "I was about to add it," she frowned.

"Um, so where are you from?" Cynthia asked.

Jalisa responded quickly, "Mississauga."

Leslie's face scrunched up. "We had a French trip to watch some movie in a dank theatre there."

"Yeah." Cynthia brightened up, grinning. "Les Pee-Wee."

"Oh my god, yeah." Jalisa unfurled her crossed legs. "The one with the totally gay hockey players."

"Yes!" Cynthia's smile grew wider. She nudged Leslie. "See, I told you! They totally gave gay vibes."

Leslie countered, "they were not gay."

"They slept in the same bed! That's gay!"

Leslie sighed, "we sleep in the same bed sometimes."

"And it's gay when we do it," Cynthia frowned.

"It's kinda gay," Jalisa said.

Cynthia nudged them both, grinning wide. "I like you, Jalisa," she announced.

"Thanks." Jalisa bit the inside of her cheek. "You're okay."

Cynthia "Cindy" Liang (2000-)

2022 -

The lights of Jalisa's blue honda civic did little to cut through the unusual fog covering the streets. Her GPS complained loudly at her, reminding her that she'd taken a wrong turn and then several more wrong turns.

"I told you to let me drive," Leslie huffed in her place from the front passenger seat, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Leslie, I swear to god...." Jalisa groaned, tapping at the screen fruitlessly as she tried to adjust the route. Her car moved at a nonexistent pace and from the back seat, Zainab was thankful for the empty roads.

"Just do a three-point turn here," she suggested.

Cynthia growled.

"Cindy?"

Cynthia was doubled over, she'd undone her seatbelt a few wrong turns ago. She clutched her stomach; she clawed at it. Sweat turned her pale skin slick and drool spilled from between her trembling lips.

"Cindy, are you okay?" Zainab's hand was on her back, rubbing small circles. "Hey, Jalisa, pull over. I think Cindy's feeling sick."

"What?" Jalisa twisted around briefly before she snapped her attention in front of her. "But I just got on the right road."

"Jalisa." Zainab's voice turned severe. "Pull over now."

Cynthia's body twitched. From deep inside her chest, she let out a low, constant growl. Her fingers dug into her flesh.

Leslie spun around. "Cindy? Are you okay? What's wrong?"

The car halted; Jalisa clicked it into park, flicking the emergency lights on. She joined her friends in staring at Cynthia.

A cracking sound erupted across the car. Then a pop.

"Cindy?"

On the night of October 8th, 2022, a horrifying scene was discovered inside a vehicle on Lakeshore Blvd. W by Islington Ave. Two girls were pronounced dead at the scene with a third rushed to hospital. It is believed that the girls were on their way to pick up a friend. Authorities speculate that a bear broke into the parked vehicle but no word has been officially released yet. A warning has been issued for the city of Toronto and Peel region. Trips into wooded areas are discouraged.

[vapemaster42069]

you’re right next to me, but you’re a long way from home

Scar lay there, eyes glazed, eyes crinkling at the corners in his familiar, lilting smile. His red hands, now covered in dust and long-old calluses, his red hands made for killing that came back from the dead with a bouquet, his hands that planted rue and cloves and mint, his hands that cooked bundt cake on sundays and always burned a little when he turned out the cake too early, his hands that fit too perfectly around Grian's, fell from a gentle cradle around Grian's face. They hit Grian's useless wings, draped behind his body like a shield, with a thump, sending dust into the air. A loose feather caught between two of his fingers, dragging into the hot sand, Scar's warm blood all soaking all-too-familiarly into the soft tips of the scarlet primary.

Isn’t it that birds signal life? At sea, they release doves to find land, to find life. Pigeons carry messages of hope, of fate, of death and of no importance. Canaries signal when it’s time to leave a noxious cave. But who was the canary for a macaw? What dove would lead him to land? What good was a pretty bird with cut feathers? What good was a pretty bird but to watch? To perch? To crouch over a precipice, to give into the tragedy of falling in love, to wait for this simple, massive emotion, this love full of caveats, to pull him into the sky? What good was a pretty bird but to fall?

Grian stared, useless. His wings draped, useless. His hands cupped Scar's unmoving cheeks, useless. A tear rolled down the length of his nose, his lips, his chin. He hadn't realized he was crying. His lungs heaved, heavy. His drowning, his death, was a quiet, desperate thing, a long time coming, an instant shock. He breathed in, stale air forcing its way into his corpse, into his body where he was sure there was no soul. Grian was sure he had died. Something in him had died. He breathed in. He breathed out.

He looked up. He’d won. He’d lost. He was alone. Scar’s blood oozed with his own, his heart lay still with his own, his familiar smile reflecting one on Grian's face. He traced Scar's face, gently, wiped a stray tear and closed his eyes. He didn't linger. He stepped away from the home he built with the man he just beat to death. His hands were covered in blood he couldn't see, blood that dripped and oozed and slipped under his guilty, heavy feet. He killed himself.

The wind through his feathers reminded him of flying one last time.

A distant sun began to set over the desert, the sand beautiful and silent and distantly soft, ephemerally lethal, devastating and tranquil.

Their life was over.

[violetgarlends]

I have to give the people what they want (calamity!fx art)

[lilyminer]

God I wish I wasn’t too emotional on Saturday to take a picture of the sign with a cartoon pig on it in the breakfast restaurant. That’d make a really funny “everywhere I go I see his face” meme.

Everyone pretend I did that and made the memes he deserves instead of just staring at it for an uncomfortable amount of time and holding back actual tears.

[new-eyes-extra-colors]

@leavingautumn13 here. a fic snippet for @1-800-hellyeah featuring that deer hunting scene we were talking about, if you are still interested.

tw for animal death, gore, and blood. i cannot stress enough that an animal dies. also, dawn is like, 24 years old in this.

Dawn whistled, short and sharp, and the deer froze as its head jerked up and towards her, ears twitching—

Ori pounced in a perfect arc, flaring her wings at the last second before her talons slammed into the deer’s back. It squealed as its legs buckled under her full weight, and Dawn heard something crack as it hit the ground. The rest of the herd was gone in a heartbeat, bounding up the trail into the forest with white tails erect, sending birds scattering upwards across the clear blue sky.

The deer thrashed, eyes rolling and wide enough that Dawn could see the whites even from here, kicking its legs in a feeble attempt to throw off the gabite on top of it. Ori sank a talon into the back of its neck and her head arched towards its throat.

Dawn looked away.

Something crunched and then splattered.

It wasn’t any different than her sylveon hunting field mice, really. At least the gabite didn’t play with her prey.

Another heartbeat passed, and another, before Dawn could stomach looking down. Ori was standing still, one talon still gripping what was left of the deer’s neck, head tilted in Dawn’s direction but not making eye contact. Waiting for her flock leader. Right.

Dawn stood, noting impassively that her hands were shaking. She slid carefully down the embankment, and stepped around the rapidly widening pool of blood, moving warily toward her gabite. Ori was being remarkably still, and not hissing or booming, which was a good thing. She knew they were a team. Wasn’t going to turn all that ferocity on Dawn.

Ori chirped expectantly, peering at Dawn’s face for approval. Blood slicked her heavy jaw, and scraps of skin dangled from her teeth. Dawn reached out and placed a hand on her head, between her eyes, which squeezed shut. “Good girl,” she said quietly. Ori chirped again.

Now for the hard part.

Dawn untied her satchel, took off her jacket and gloves, and draped them across the low branch of a nearby tree. She rolled up the sleeves of her undershirt and plucked her knife from her belt. Turned it over in her hands. She could do this. Vertical slit from pelvis to breastbone. Let Ori deal with the offal and help crack the ribcage. Pack the body cavity with snow, drag it back to camp with the hide still on. Don’t get blood on your shoes.

Easier said than done.

[greyias]

Me on Wednesday night: I need to wait and figure out the underlying issues stalling out this story. This is the best thing to do, as I easily get distracted on large projects and people will naturally forget wtf is happening if there's months between chapter postings

Me, today: edits and cleans up the first two chapters and gets them in posting order "I could start posting this RIGHT NOW"