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beatrice-otter · 1 year

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Fic: Little Ship Lost

Title: Little Ship Lost Author: Beatrice_Otter Fandom: Star Trek TNG Length: 11185 words Rating: Teen Written for: milficwriter (Thebiwife) in ficinabox 2022 Summary: On a routine mission, a wormhole opens up near Enterprise, and a ship pops out. It's challenging to rescue people who don't trust you. On AO3. On Dreamwidth. On Pillowfort.

Jean-Luc sat in the command chair on the bridge, stared straight ahead at the viewscreen, and did not fidget, sigh, or otherwise show how dull the afternoon was.

He didn't like to call any mission boring; while it was the lure of the unknown that had drawn him to Starfleet, he was a man devoted to his duty. Routine mapping and deployment of communications and sensor relays might not be the most exciting thing Enterprise ever did, but it was certainly valuable both to Starfleet and the Federation as a whole. And, of course, a period of routine duties between the more exciting missions was good for the mental health of the crew from the Captain down to the lowest crewmember. Counselor Troi had remarked that at the latest briefing, when Will and Geordi complained about the latest in a string of milk runs, and of course she had been right.

The problem was simply that while every other member of the crew had duties to carry out and a station to run, the captain did not. This freed him to make decisions without distraction. But on a routine mission like this, there were no decisions to make and no orders to give. And he had to spend at least some time, during his bridge shift, actually out on the bridge instead of in his ready room.

There wasn't even anyone to talk to. Will was taking advantage of the long stretch of quiet missions to rotate through Gamma and Beta shifts, and Counselor Troi was engaged in her counseling duties. With little possibility of first contact or diplomacy, there was no need for her particular talents on the bridge.

Jean-Luc had determined how long he should stay out on the bridge before retreating to his ready room where there was always work of some sort waiting. And truly, it wasn’t very long in the overall scheme of things. But the waiting was tedious.

There were five minutes left in the allotted time when Data cocked his head.

"Sir, there appears to be a wormhole forming, half a light-year away."

"Onscreen," Jean-Luc said. "Is there any chance it's stable?" They'd never found a truly permanent wormhole, but some could last for months or even years, allowing for all manner of research and sometimes even commerce.

"It does not appear to be," Data said. "I am detecting a high fluctuation of methogenic emissions and chroniton particles."

"Take us closer," Jean-Luc said. "But carefully." The wormhole was visibly unstable, expanding and contracting at random in a way that was slightly disturbing to watch. The helmsman brought them to a stop well clear of its effects.

They'd been monitoring the wormhole for about half an hour when Worf stiffened behind him. "Sir, there appears to be a ship caught in the entrance to the wormhole. It is damaged, but there are three life signs aboard."

"Hail them," Jean-Luc said.

"No response," Worf said. "The configuration is … difficult to make out. The computer cannot identify it."

"The wormhole's stability is rapidly decaying," Data said. "I estimate it will close permanently within the next fifteen minutes—possibly sooner."

"Tractor them out so that they are clear," Jean-Luc ordered.

The beam extracted the ship with very little time to lose, for the wormhole collapsed behind them as they came out.

"Try hailing them again," Jean-Luc said.

"No response," Worf reported. "The craft has writing on it in English, and a very rudimentary warp drive. It may be a 21st Century craft."

Jean-Luc nodded. The surviving data from that era was so fragmentary, it was unsurprising that the computer couldn't recognize it. "I seem to recall that Earth's development and use of subspace communications lagged behind that of the warp drive. Open a signal on a radio frequency, Mister Worf."

Worf nodded that the signal was broadcasting.

"This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Federation Starship Enterprise," he said. "Do you require assistance?"

A crackle of static came through the speakers. "This is Daniel Gonzalez, of the S.S. Ether Ore. What the hell just happened?"

***

United Federation of Planets Bureau of Social Services Department of Displaced People

Name: Daniel Mark Gonzalez Date of Birth: 2020 Place of Birth: Tacoma, Washington, United States of America, Earth Species: Human Ethnicity: Latino Preferred Form of Address: Mister, Sergeant, Sarge Type of displacement: Temporal Age at displacement: 49 Displaced with group: yes List of displaced persons in group: Starr Buckner, Owen Walker Last Place of Residence: Fayetteville, Georgia, Earth Citizenship: United States of America, Georgia Life stage: Middle Age Education: Masters of Engineering Profession: Starship Captain/miner (S.S. Ether Ore) Cultural and religious affiliations: Organizational affiliations: United States Air Force, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rise Up Space Mining Company, S.S. Ether Ore Allergies/sensitivities: None Physical Health Concerns: Mental Health Concerns: Social Needs: Trauma History: Lived through the Second United States Civil War, served in the military during World War III, lived through the Post-Atomic Horror Caseworker: Intake Assessment Coordinator: Deanna Troi, Lt. Cmdr (Starfleet), PhD (Counseling)

Time-Travel Specific Information: Was the time travel intentional? No Is the time travel repeatable? No Can the traveler be returned to their home time? No Are there any perceptible changes to the timeline? No Method of time travel: Unstable wormhole, since collapsed Is further investigation by the Department of Temporal Investigations required? No Date traveled from: 2070 Date traveled to: Stardate 44752.1 Are there family or other affiliative connections remaining? Strong connections with the crew of his ship (Starr Buckner, Owen Walker). Mr. Gonzalez had no surviving family to his knowledge. His company no longer exists.

Deanna paused and sat back in her chair. The question was, what should she put in the 'Mental Health Concerns' field? Gonzalez had layers of trauma—they all did—and all the symptoms one would expect from it: paranoia, anxiety, mood disorders, fatalism, hyperreactivity, and she suspected that a laundry list of other symptoms would manifest once they felt stable and secure in their new home. Beverly's medical report revealed a corresponding list of physical symptoms, plus a great many other problems: long-term radiation poisoning and chronic malnutrition were only the start of it.

Yet this form would have to be signed off on by Gonzalez himself as accurate. He couldn't override her analysis, but he could dispute it, and the conflict would impede their therapeutic relationship. He would be less likely to open up if he felt she would not listen to his concerns.

On the other hand, he wasn't going to be her responsibility long-term. Once the Enterprise was back in Federation space, he and his crew would be picked up (along with their ship) and taken back to Earth, where the ship would become a museum piece and the crew would become the problem of the DDP. And it might be better to have that fight now, with someone temporary, than it would be to pass the baton to whoever his long-term counselor ended up being.

On the third hand, while some of Gonzalez's issues were immediately apparent to her, she hadn't done anything like a full workup with him. He hadn't requested it, and officially all she was doing was coordinating his crew's intake into the Department of Displaced Persons client list. So there was a high likelihood of getting the details wrong.

Gonzalez was (despite everything) fully functional, and as such he couldn't be required to have therapy. Better not to antagonize him, to increase the chances of him being willing to work with a counselor wherever he ended up.

She kept it simple and wrote "Trauma" in the field for mental health challenges his caseworker would need to be aware of.

Beverly hadn't filled in the physical health section, only attached his medical records. And the same was true of the reports for the other time travelers. Deanna reached up to tap her commbadge, then realized it was almost lunchtime. Instead, she saved her work, stretched, and got up to head to Sickbay.

***

"How do we know that this isn't some sort of trap? Or trick?"

"Captain Gonzalez, we would have nothing to gain by that," Jean-Luc said. Stranded ships didn't usually have to be convinced to accept help. "Your ship is amazing for the technological and social state of your home, but it is quite literally centuries behind my own vessel. If I wanted to take something from you, I could simply do it. There would be no need for theatrics or traps."

The turbolift doors hissed open and Jean-Luc glanced back to see Counselor Troi emerge. He took a deep breath and continued. "My people have a strong principle of offering aid to those in distress. Your ship is damaged, and it is a short-range craft despite having low warp capabilities. Your own sensors should be able to tell you that there are no habitable planets within your vessel's range. Let us help you."

"How do we know you weren't the ones who did … whatever the hell that was that brought us here?" Gonzalez said.

"What could we possibly gain?" Jean-Luc said holding on to his patience with both hands.

"Maybe you want credit for saving us so our people will be more willing to do what you want." Gonzalez's voice was tense but even.

"Gonzalez, correct me if I'm wrong," Jean-Luc said, "but I believe your Earth is fragmented into a multitude of tiny local jurisdictions. Many of them are actively hostile to each other. All of them have trouble providing basic needs like medical care and safe housing and clean water to their population. If we had abducted your vessel to make ourselves look heroic, most of those jurisdictions would not care. And none of them have the sort of resources that would make it worth our while, even collectively. All we want to do is carry you back to your homeworld, and provide you with any needed medical care along the way."

There was a short pause. "I'll have to talk it over with my crew."

"Please do so," Jean-Luc said.

"The transmission has ended," Worf said.

"What is that about?" Troi asked.

"That was the captain of the S.S. Ether Ore, one of the early asteroid mining ships from the mid-21st Century on Earth," Jean-Luc said.

"During World War III?" Troi asked.

"The period immediately following, actually," Jean-Luc said. "The Post-Atomic Horror. Within a few years of Earth's first contact with Vulcans."

"No reliable records of the Ether Ore exist, as the period's documentation is fragmentary," Data said. "However, there was a late 21st Century 'ghost story' about the ship, which vanished within sight of a sister vessel and within range of Earth's limited sensors of the time."

"They fell through a wormhole," Jean-Luc said, "and their ship was damaged in the process. The wormhole is now closed, with few lingering traces on our sensors. But even in best condition their ship could barely make Warp One and it's not designed for long-term travel. They'll need assistance to get anywhere, and medical attention for their crew. But they are, as you heard, paranoid, and have so far refused help."

Troi turned and stared out the viewscreen which showed the small ship. "I don't know how much I can tell you that will be useful. They're frightened, wary. Suspicious."

"Hardly surprising, given the era they come from," Jean-Luc said. "That century is notorious for brutality, exploitation, and injustice."

"They undoubtedly have layers of mental and emotional trauma," Troi said, "but if they're functional enough to be running a starship, they will probably have decent coping mechanisms. They'll probably be expecting antagonism, and will react strongly to any hint of conflict. Be calm, firm, and let them have space—trauma victims often don't react well to feeling trapped. Lower the stakes whenever possible—don't raise them."

Jean-Luc nodded. None of it was new to him, exactly, but the reminder was good. He tried to let his irritation with Gonzalez's intransigence trickle away.

"With no wormhole and a ghost story about the ship vanishing, I'm assuming we won't be able to return them to their own time?" Troi asked. As the closest thing the ship had to a social worker, she would be the one responsible for coordinating their intake with the Federation's Department of Displaced People.

"Unfortunately not."

"They are hailing us," Worf said.

"Put them on speakers," Jean-Luc said.

"Assuming we were to take you up on your offer, what would that look like?"

"We would make room for your ship in one of our shuttle bays," Jean-Luc said. "You would receive quarters onboard Enterprise, and necessities such as food, water, and medical care. Once we're done with our current mapping assignment, we'll find a transport that can take you and your ship back to Earth."

"How much would that cost?"

"Nothing," Jean-Luc said. "We have the space for your ship, and it doesn't have enough mass to inconvenience us." And the ship was historically invaluable. Researchers on Earth would be fighting for access to it, should Gonzalez allow it.

"Right," Gonzalez said, drawing it out. "You're just going to help us out of the goodness of your hearts. You're going to haul us and an entire ship all the way from here to Earth—wherever here is. All just out of the goodness of your heart."

"That's right," Jean-Luc said.

There was a pause. "Fine," he said at last. "We'll do this your way. How do I dock my ship on your monstrosity?"

***

"Deanna!" Beverly brightened as Deanna popped her head into Beverly's office. "What can I do for you?"

Aside from the time travelers, things had been fairly quiet of late, which meant that Beverly had time to catch up on routine paperwork. There was a lot of it, as Chief Medical Officer of a starship, despite the competence of her staff. Besides setting the duty roster and personnel evaluations for her staff, and writing up her clinical work, she also had to oversee and manage all the medical research her people did, plus a variety of other more minor tasks. But Beverly had promised herself a few hours' research work this afternoon, on samples from the incident at Tarchannen III, as a reward for her diligence this morning. "If you're looking for a lunch partner, I'm afraid I've still got about half an hour's worth of work before I can take a break," Beverly said.

"Too bad," Deanna said. "Is filling in your part of the intake forms for the Department of Displaced People forms part of the work in your inbox?"

"No," Beverly said. "I'm done with that."

"You attached your full report," Deanna said. "You didn't give a summary for the main assessment form."

"Doesn't the computer do that?" Beverly said. The computer was quite capable of producing an abstract of any document in the system.

"I'm afraid not," Deanna said. "The DDP wants a personal evaluation of what you think their caseworkers will need to know. The full medical records are for their future doctors; the DDP assessment form is for their future caseworker."

Beverly sighed. "All right, I'll have it to you by the end of the day."

"There's no rush," Deanna said. "As long as it's done by the time they leave the ship and formally enter the care of their social workers."

"I'd rather get it done sooner than later," Beverly said. Chances were, there would be some new excitement or problem to solve between now and when their guests left, and she wouldn't want to have to finish the paperwork in a scramble.

"All right," Deanna said. "Sure you won't join me for lunch?"

Beverly made a face. "Next time, maybe." She watched Deanna go and turned back to her work with a sigh.

***

Jean-Luc stood in the shuttle bay watching the small mining vessel make its approach. Counselor Troi and Commander Worf flanked him, with Beverly and a nurse off to the side with an anti-grav stretcher and various medical supplies in case they were needed. LaForge and a team of engineers were present to make sure the primitive ship was parked stably and safely.

"Are you sure we should have security so visibly present?" Jean-Luc murmured.

Worf stiffened. "They are from a violent time period, and their responses to our offers of help have been hostile," he pointed out.

"Yes, but I don't want to feed into their paranoia," Jean-Luc said. "A security team outside the bay doors in the corridor would probably be sufficient."

"They are paranoid, and they're used to state violence," Troi said. "They'll never believe we don't have security, they'll just assume we're hiding it for some reason."

"And the last thing we want is to make them more paranoid," Jean-Luc said as the ship touched down.

It was an odd ship, boxy, with oversized nacelles that were braced with rather more struts than was usual. But then, they had only a rudimentary structural integrity field, and no artificial gravity; the purely mechanical systems had to be up to the stress of pushing the ship into warp drive. It was not designed to fly in atmosphere; those early mining ships had been little more than tugs, going out to the asteroid field, finding asteroids with suitable minerals, and towing them back to Earth to be processed.

Because it wasn't designed to be landed, they'd used the tractor beam to bring it in to the bay, and hold it steady while LaForge and his crew braced it. It was an interesting procedure, and Gonzalez and his crew stayed inside their ship until it was finished—the last thing anyone needed was for the ship to settle as they were climbing out of the airlock and crush them underneath. LaForge and his crew were competent, and it didn't take long for them to get the little ship secured. When it was, they radioed the Ether Ore's crew that it was safe to unstrap from their seats and emerge from their ship.

A brown-skinned male human with short hair emerged first. He was wearing a grey jumpsuit with lots of pockets, and he eyed them warily as he swung down out of the airlock. He stumbled slightly, but caught himself, and he took his time surveying the bay, his eyes lingering on the shuttlecraft tucked up against the walls, smaller but sleeker than his own craft. At last he whistled, and two more heads poked out of the craft.

The first to come out was a dark-skinned human female. She was short and heavy-set, with a solid weight to her that belied Jean-Luc's mental image of people from the Post-Atomic Horror being emaciated and starved-looking. She was more graceful than her crewmate as she jumped down, and seemed less interested in staring at Jean-Luc and his crew, though she found the shuttles no less interesting.

The final crewmate of the Ether Ore was, to Jean-Luc's surprise, an adolescent. He was fair-skinned, lean and gawky, with straight black hair and a prominent nose it would probably take him a few years to grow into.

Once the three had emerged, they walked over to Jean-Luc and his officers. The two adults kept the adolescent behind them, he noted.

"I'm Captain Jean-Luc Picard," he said. "Welcome to the Enterprise."

***

Ten Forward was fairly busy, as it usually was around lunchtime. Deanna had planned to take a seat at the bar rather than take up a whole table to herself, but one of her temporary charges was in the corner.

Starr Buckner was leaning faux-casually against the wall, face turned to the window, but the quality of her attention was not that of a woman absorbed in stargazing. She was tense, alert, with the edgy quality to it that came with hyper-alertness. With her dark skin and dark clothing, she blended into the shadows fairly well.

But none of it bled through into her body language, so Deanna wasn't going to address it directly. She approached casually, noting the difference between when Starr sensed her approach and when she turned to face her. "Are you here for lunch?" Deanna asked.

Starr shrugged. "Mostly here for the view, but I could eat."

"You're welcome to join me, if you want," Deanna said, gesturing to a table that a waiter was just clearing off.

Starr hesitated briefly, before smiling and saying "Sure," with more pleasure than she felt.

They sat down as the waiter bustled off. "You'll have to tell me what's good here," Starr said.

"All the food is replicated, so it's the same thing as is available in your quarters," Deanna said. "Are you interested in something familiar, or something new?"

"I've tried familiar stuff, and nothing's as familiar as it sounds like it will be," Starr said.

"How so?" Deanna asked. "Replicator recipes tend to be standardized to the most popular version, unless someone's uploaded their personal favorite."

"Well, for example, whatever version of French Fries your replicators are copying, I don't think the potatoes are fried in the same kind of oil we used back in my day," Starr said.

"Really?" Deanna said.

"Yeah," Starr said. "It was kinda weird. If I wanted to try something new, what would you recommend?"

"What are you hungry for?" Deanna asked. "What do you like?"

"Stuff with bread and meat and veggies," Starr said. "Not fried."

"How about a stuffed kimden roll?" Deanna said. "It's a Betazoid dish—kimden is a type of grain a little like rye, and stuffed rolls are baked with meat and vegetables and cheese inside. The replicator has a variety of recipes; you could try it with Terran meat such as beef or pork or lamb, if you wanted. Humans often prefer it that way."

"Sounds good," Starr said. "You're from Betazoid, right?"

"Betazed is the name of the planet, but yes," Deanna said.

"What's it like?"

"Quiet," Deanna said. "Both in the sense of peaceful, and also in the auditory sense. Betazoids are telepaths. We can speak, and have a spoken language, but we often talk mind-to-mind instead, when we're in public." She grimaced. "Well, it's quiet anywhere my mother isn't, I should say."

"Sounds like there's feelings there," Starr said.

"I love my mother," Deanna said. "But we get along much better when we're not in the same star system." She wasn't Starr's therapist, and this wasn't a counseling session, but sharing personal information could create a sense of intimacy, which might be helpful in promoting Starr's integration to her new timeline. Like all three of the Ether Ore's crew, she was still in a bit of shock at what had happened to them.

"My little sister and dad were like that," Starr said quietly. A yawning chasm of grief opened up within her, but all that showed on the surface was that she looked away, back out the window.

Deanna wondered whether they had still been alive when Starr and her ship fell through the wormhole to the future. It hadn't come up in any previous conversation. All of their time traveling guests had lost people to the wars and horror of the 21st Century before they lost the rest to time.

"What can I get for you?"

Deanna looked up at the waiter with a smile. "I'd like an order of stuffed kimden rolls please, the Fifth House recipe."

"I'd like some stuffed kimden rolls too," Starr said. "What kinds do you have?"

The waiter looked up the variations on his PADD, and Starr chose which one she wanted. He was back in a few minutes with their food, steaming and fragrant. Deanna tore into hers with gusto.

Starr took a nibble of hers.

"What do you think?" Deanna asked.

"It's weird, but I don't dis-like it," Starr said, taking a bigger bite. "So what's the Fifth House?"

"Betazed has a vestigial aristocracy," Deanna said. "I'm a daughter of the Fifth House, and this is the family recipe. I programmed it into the computer when I was posted here."

Starr nodded. "Why did you call it the Fifth House recipe instead of the Troi recipe, if your aristocracy is vestigial?"

"It's not a Troi recipe," Deanna said. "My father was Human, not Betazoid. It's why I'm an empath, not a telepath."

"Oh," Starr said. "So you're biracial?"

"We don't tend to group things in terms of races, so I've never heard that particular term used," Deanna said. "But it probably fits, yes."

From there the conversation turned to questions about what Betazed was like, and how Deanna came to join Starfleet. It was pleasant—Starr was a good conversationalist—but Deanna noted how deftly she avoided talking about her personal history.

***

United Federation of Planets Bureau of Social Services Department of Displaced People

Name: Starr Buckner Date of Birth: 2031 Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois, United States of America, Earth Species: Human Ethnicity: African-American Preferred Form of Address: Ms. Type of displacement: Temporal Age at displacement: 38 Displaced with group: yes List of displaced persons in group: Daniel Gonzalez, Owen Walker Last Place of Residence: Fayetteville, Georgia, Earth Citizenship: United States of America, Georgia Life stage: Adulthood Education: Masters of Engineering Profession: Spacer/Miner Cultural and religious affiliations: Organizational affiliations: United States Air Force, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rise Up Space Mining Company, S.S. Ether Ore Allergies/sensitivities: Peanuts Physical Health Concerns: Chronic radiation poisoning (in treatment), Mental Health Concerns: Trauma Social Needs: Trauma History: Served in the military during World War III, lived through the Post-Atomic Horror Caseworker: Intake Assessment Coordinator: Deanna Troi, Lt. Cmdr (Starfleet), PhD (Counseling)

***

Beverly had treated refugees, before, and victims of natural disaster; Starfleet ships were usually the first responders to any sort of calamity or crisis. And there were often cultural differences that made communication difficult. In many ways, this was the ideal situation: a small group (well within their resources with no need for triage), a language the translators could handle easily, no acute injuries.

She looked at the readout on the tricorder and sighed. Chronic issues, on the other hand….

"What is it, doc?" the boy said nervously. His name was Owen Walker, and he was an orphan, which was all the medical history she had for him.

She gave him a reassuring smile. "You have a lot of chronic radiation damage," she said. "It's not immediately life-threatening, but you probably have a number of symptoms related to it, and a higher risk of various cancers. Usually, radiation damage is fairly simple to treat, but this is old enough—and long-term enough—that it's going to take a number of treatments, and possibly some attention from a specialist when you get back to Earth."

"I didn't think you could treat radiation damage." Owen scrunched up his face.

"They can, but mostly the treatments are only effective within a couple of days after exposure," Captain Gonzalez said. He was on another biobed with Selar treating him; he'd been reassured to see a Vulcan. "And there weren't exactly enough doses to go around even for those closest to the bombs, much less the background stuff."

"That was certainly true in the Twenty-First Century," Beverly said, nodding. "But we have much better treatments available now, and can actually reverse some of the tissue damage. Perhaps all of it. I'm assuming you'll all need treatment for chronic radiation damage."

"That's a safe bet," said the third refugee, Starr Buckner, who was being treated by Doctor Martin. "What are the side effects?"

"That depends on what specific course of treatment you need," Beverly said. "There are several, depending on a variety of factors. None of them have severe or long-term side-effects. We'll have to do a more in-depth scan, and possibly consult with a specialist—we don't normally see people with this type of long-term damage in the Federation, because it's so easy to treat. Fortunately, if you've lived with it this long, a slight delay while we figure out treatment options shouldn't be a problem."

While they were talking, the tricorder finished scanning Owen. Ah. Radiation was not, unsurprisingly, the only problem. She lowered her voice. They'd all three declined to be examined in private, but there was no need to shout. "Besides the radiation damage and the various scrapes and bruises I already fixed, you do have a few other problems. You have lingering problems from minor chronic malnutrition at key developmental stages, which will require long-term treatments in addition to the radiation treatment."

Owen scowled. "My parents fed me as best they could. Sometimes they went hungry so that I could eat."

"I'm sure that's true," Beverly said. "You are in remarkable health for someone who was a child during a period of social and economic collapse, and that tells me your parents did a very good job taking care of you, and probably other people too. But there were things they couldn't control, and times when there wasn't enough food, and that left a mark. We can treat that, now, and you will live longer and healthier if we do."

"What would that treatment look like?" Owen asked.

"First, you are still growing, so we'll put you on nutritional supplements to make up for what you didn't get when you were younger," Beverly said. "Some of it will fix itself as you finish growing. We'll also have some treatments to stimulate brain development and strengthen your organs and bones. Like the treatment for radiation damage, it may need a long-term treatment plan."

"Okay," he said.

"The last thing you have is something that's much easier to treat," Beverly said. "You have a type of intestinal parasite called pinworms."

"Worms?" Owen said. "Gross. I assume you can get rid of them?"

"Yes," Beverly said. "I'll be giving you a medication to kill the worms, and you'll need to make sure you drink plenty of water over the next several days." She went over to the medication replicator, called up the appropriate anthelmintic, and loaded it into a hypospray. After that, she gave him all the vaccinations he needed and the first dose of supplemental nutrients.

"Do you need to take a break, get something to eat?" Beverly asked when it was done.

"No," Owen said. "I'm good. We actually ate, like, just before we got sucked into that thing—wormhole?—which wasn't good 'cause I almost threw up. But I'm not hungry yet."

"Do you need anything for nausea?" Beverly asked.

"No," he said.

"Are there any other symptoms or long-term health concerns you want to address?"

Owen hesitated. "No."

Which probably meant there was something, he just didn't want to talk to her about it. "You can come by sickbay any time, if you change your mind," Beverly said. "Unless we're in a red alert. Then only come by if it's an emergency. But any other time is fine, even during a yellow alert, even if it's something that seems trivial and stupid to you."

"How will I know if it's a red alert?" Owen asked.

"There will be red flashing lights and a siren. You can't miss it."

"Fair enough," Owen said. "So what's a red alert? Is that a specific problem, or just any problem?"

"Red alert is used for any major threat to the ship. It calls every crew member to their action stations, and heightens security, and several other things," Beverly said. He reminded her a little bit of Wesley, now off at Starfleet Academy. Wesley had grown up knowing all about Starfleet things, of course, but he had always been curious about the ships and the engines, and of course he'd been working an apprenticeship on Enterprise before he went away to Starfleet, just as Owen had been working on the Ether Ore. But she was in the middle of an examination, and it was unprofessional to dwell on her feelings.

She smiled at Owen. "Now that we've got the basics out of the way, I can have someone show you to the quarters that you've been assigned. But you'd have to come back in a day or two for us to look at that radiation damage. Or we can get started on the scans now, and you can settle into your quarters later. Which would you prefer?"

***

Geordi and Lieutenant Oblata were discussing the practicalities of a suggested change in the intermix formula that Utopia Planitia had just published, when the kid from the old mining ship wandered into Engineering.

"Engineering is restricted," Ensign T'Kaal said, from where she was working at the Master Systems Display.

"I just wanna see what a warp core that can go warp nine looks like," the kid said.

Geordi had occasionally tried to sneak into Engineering on his mother's ship with a similar goal. "It's fine," he told T'Kaal. He turned to the kid. "I'm Lieutenant Commander Geordi LaForge, chief engineer."

"Owen Walker, apprentice spacer."

Owen stuck out his hand and they shook hands.

"You still planning on being a spacer, in the new century you're in?" Geordi asked.

Owen grimaced. "Probably? Maybe? I dunno, there's a lot to learn and I don't even know what jobs there are in space now."

"Must be rough," Geordi said sympathetically. "But you'll probably get career counselling once you're on Earth, so you won't have to figure it all out on your own."

"Yeah." The kid let out a heavy sigh. "But I really do want to see your warp core, it must be amazing."

"Sure," Geordi said. "Come on and see." It wasn't like he was very busy at the moment; routine maintenance was all current, duty shifts for the next month were all set and published, and he had no paperwork waiting for him.

He gave the kid a tour of engineering; nothing classified, of course, and nothing about weapons or shields beyond noting that they existed, but fairly thorough for all that. The kid had a surprisingly comprehensive grounding in basic warp theory, considering he came from only seven years after the Human-built warp-capable ship, and Geordi said as much.

"Thanks," Owen said. "Starr and Daniel wouldn't have let me aboard if I didn't know all that stuff, even though I'm not allowed anywhere near the engines. I had to memorize every bolt and panel and wire and what they did while we were building her."

"You helped build your ship?" Geordi said. "How old were you?"

"Fourteen, when we started," Owen said. "What else did I have to do? There weren't any kids my age to hang out with, around the hanger."

"What about school?" Geordi asked.

"What about school?" Owen said. "I know all the adults go on and on about how much school they had to go through, but that was back in the old days. They would have had to send me back into Atlanta to find a high school I could have gone to, and it's not like I would have learned as much there as I did working on the ship."

"Right," Geordi said. He'd known that most social system—including schools—had collapsed after World War III and had to be rebuilt from scratch, but he hadn't really thought about what that would look like. "It's a good ship," he said. "Solidly built, from what I can see. I'd be interested in seeing inside it."

"As what, a history museum?" Owen said.

"Well, sure," Geordi said. "That's why we're taking it back with us instead of abandoning it. Do you know how little survives from the Early Warp era? A lot of ships had fatal accidents of one kind or another, and the ones that didn't break down or meltdown or crash were used until they fell to pieces and then taken apart and melted down for scrap. A first-generation ship in pristine condition? When you get back to Earth, you're going to have at least a dozen museums and universities competing for the honor of examining and displaying your ship."

Owen shifted uncomfortably on his feet. "Does the Georgia Institute of Technology still exist?" he asked. "Because they worked with us on the design and helped us figure out warp mechanics and helped train our ground crew and the crew of our sister ship the Firmametal. I think they should have dibs, if they're still around."

"I don't know," Geordi admitted. "Computer, does the Georgia Institute of Technology still exist?"

"The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech, is a public research university located in Atlanta, Georgia, on Earth," the computer intoned.

"There you go," Geordi said.

"If you want to see inside our ship, you'd have to ask Daniel about it," Owen said. "He'd probably say it's okay if you let him poke through your engineering room."

***

United Federation of Planets Bureau of Social Services Department of Displaced People

Name: Owen Walker Date of Birth: 2054 Place of Birth: Phoenix, Arizona, Earth Species: Human Ethnicity: Native Californian (Chumash) Preferred Form of Address: Mister Type of displacement: Temporal Age at displacement: 16 Displaced with group: yes List of displaced persons in group: Daniel Gonzalez, Starr Buckner Last Place of Residence: Fayetteville, Georgia, Earth Citizenship: Georgia Life stage: Late Adolescence Education: apprenticeship/no degree Profession: apprentice spacer Cultural and religious affiliations: Organizational affiliations: Georgia Institute of Technology, Rise Up Space Mining Company, S.S. Ether Ore Allergies/sensitivities: Peaches Physical Health Concerns: Chronic radiation poisoning (in treatment), stunted growth due to past malnutrition Mental Health Concerns: Trauma Social Needs: Trauma History: lived through the Post-Atomic Horror, parents died in childhood. Caseworker: Intake Assessment Coordinator: Deanna Troi, Lt. Cmdr (Starfleet), PhD (Counseling)

***

Chances were, Deanna's presence would not be needed while their new guests were in Sickbay being treated for the bumps and scrapes they'd gotten when their ship was trapped in the wormhole. However, her mediation skills might be useful if there was a conflict, her empathy might be useful to notice if something made their new guest uncomfortable or hostile, and her observations of them might be useful when she started their casefile.

Beverly had made smart choices about assigning doctors to their new guests; Gonzalez had been reassured by the Vulcan, and Buckner by Doctor Martin. (Deanna's knowledge of Earth history was hazy, but she recalled that Earth had a history of heightened ethnic violence and oppression based on phenotype, which might have had something to do with it; Martin's skin was lighter than Buckner's, but they shared a similar hair texture.)

"So, Doctor Selar," Martinez was saying quietly, "they tell me that we travelled in time, like something out of a bad science fiction movie. Were they telling the truth?"

"They are," Selar said. "I am uncertain as to the precise date on Earth as counted in your calendar, but it is approximately 304.7 Earth years after Vulcans first contacted your people." She glanced over at Deanna with a raised eyebrow.

Gonzalez followed her gaze. "Who's that?" he asked.

Interesting. Captain Picard had introduced her; perhaps he was testing to see what Selar would say.

"That is Counsellor Troi, the head of our mental health department aboard ship," Selar said. "She will be seeing that you are taken care of during your stay, and that you are connected with an appropriate social worker on Earth or whichever planet you choose to go to."

"We have a choice?" Gonzalez asked.

Since she was being talked about, Deanna stepped in. "Of course," she said. "You are displaced people, and all Federation worlds are required to take in displaced people as needed. However, different planets have different requirements, and provide different services. We assumed that you would want to go back to Earth because it is your home planet, but if you'd like to explore other options, I'd be happy to help with it; and if you try Earth and decide you don't like it, you can move to a different world—freedom of movement is one of the fundamental freedoms defined in the Federation's constitution."

Gonzalez nodded slowly, but went in a different direction. "So why did you look over at her while you answered my question about when we are?" he asked Selar. "Is she your superior?"

"She outranks me, but we are in different departments," Selar said, "and both of us are under Doctor Crusher's command. I looked to her because I wondered if an evaluation for clinical paranoia would be beneficial, and she would be the one to make that evaluation."

"Paranoia?" Gonzalez said. "For not believing a really fucking unbelievable thing?"

"It's less unbelievable to us because we have centuries more experience with space travel than you do," Deanna said. "Wormholes are exceedingly rare and temporary, but they do happen, and our scientists have studied them. They sometimes join two different times, as well as two different areas of space. It's a known phenomena. There are also a handful of other documented methods of time travel. All are rare, but Starfleet ships are science and exploration vessels—we seek out rare phenomena. We're far more likely to encounter such things than the average person."

Gonzalez nodded. "Okay," he said.

Deanna didn't think he fully believed them, but he didn't fully disbelieve them, either. He was wary, withholding judgment. If nothing else, arriving at Earth and seeing how different it was from the Earth he had left would convince him, and there was nothing to be gained by arguing with him at this point. He was so freshly arrived in the present (his future) that he hadn't had time to process it.

Gonzalez turned back to Selar. "Could we go to Vulcan if we wanted to?" he asked.

"Yes," Selar said. "Vulcan, like all Federation planets, takes in displaced people. There are several cities on Vulcan with a sizeable Human population, most notably Shi'Kahr and Vulcana Regar. But most Humans who move to Vulcan leave eventually; they find the gravity oppressive and the heat too much even for those comfortable with warmer temperatures."

"Yeah, but what about the social climate?" Gonzalez asked. "With three hundred years' difference between our ship and your ships, we're probably not going to be able to get jobs on a ship or space mining platform without a hell of a lot of retraining. Would we get it on Earth? What would we live on in the meantime? I know on Vulcan you make sure people are taken care of."

"Federation law requires that all people in the Federation be provided with the necessities of life including safe, accessible, and private housing, food, data access, education, and healthcare," Selar said.

"You won't ever have to work if you don't want to or can't find something that suits you," Deanna said. "Most Federation planets have substantial cultural and social pressure for people to do meaningful work and contribute to society, but that has nothing to do with whether or not you will receive what you need to live on. If you want to train to work in space again, your social worker will help you figure out what education you'll need and how to get it. But regardless of any other work you might choose, you'll probably be in high demand as an educational speaker."

"A speaker about what?" Gonzalez asked. "Not warp design and shipbuilding, if you're working with Vulcans."

"History," Deanna said.

"I'm not a historian, I barely know anything about it. Why would they want me to talk about history?"

"Because your life is, to us, history," Deanna said. "Time travel is rare, and we strive to return people to their own timelines if at all possible. Historians will be thrilled to get to speak with people who actually lived through such a momentous period in Earth's history."

Gonzalez sagged a little on the biobed and his eyes widened, but didn't otherwise show the freefalling chaos he was feeling. For the first time since she'd met him, he lost the edge of suspicion that this was all some great trick.

***

Enterprise, like all majority-Human Starfleet ships, synchronized its clocks with Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco. Which was convenient when consulting with the Admiralty, but not when consulting with other Earth bureaucracies that might be headquartered in other parts of the planet. The Bureau of Social Services was headquartered in Kinshasa (eight hours ahead of San Francisco), but the DPP was headquartered in Delhi, which was just about exactly opposite San Francisco. There was no time that worked for both of them, so it had taken a few days to set a meeting that was doable. But, at last, Deanna had a call with the Starfleet liaison in the Department of Displaced People.

"Good evening—or I suppose it's morning for you," Ms. Kulkarni said. "What can I do for Starfleet?" She was new to her job since the last time Deanna had needed to connect a displaced person with Earth's social services.

"Good evening, and thank you for meeting with me at such an odd hour," Deanna said.

Ms. Kulkarni waved that away. "I've often thought they should have the Starfleet liaison be stationed at one of our regional headquarters in the Americas, but that would make too much sense for government bureaucracy. I'm used to it. What can I do for you?"

"We just rescued a ship that fell through an unstable wormhole with both a temporal and a spatial displacement," Deanna said.

Kulkarni sagged. "Oh, gods and goddesses, is Temporal Investigations going to get involved in this?"

"I hope not," Deanna said. "The time travel was clearly accidental on both ends, it can't be repeated or reversed—the wormhole was very unstable and collapsed as we were pulling them out of it—and there's apparently an urban legend about the ship's disappearance, so I doubt the timeline was altered by their coming here. If we hadn't saved them, they would have been destroyed by the wormhole, so I would think there would be a greater risk of altering the timeline if we did send them back. But you never can tell about the Department of Temporal Investigations, so who knows?"

"All right," Kulkarni said, "I suppose there's nothing we can do about that at this point. When and where are the displaced people coming from, and what services are they going to need?"

"They're from Earth, a place called Georgia," Deanna said.

"So, Eastern Europe?"

"I don't think so." Deanna frowned. "They were displaced from the mid-21st Century, the year 2070, during the Post-Atomic Horror. Before the collapse of most of Earth's governments, the two adults held citizenship in the United States of America. Even fought in one of its militaries. Is there a Georgia in the Americas?" Her knowledge of Earth's geography was sketchy, but she was pretty sure that the United States of America had been on the North American continent, not in Europe.

"You are telling me that I am going to have two soldiers from World War Three dropped in my lap whenever they get back to Earth?" Kulkarni said.

"I'm afraid so," Deanna said. "For what it's worth, they seem fairly functional and not sociopathic. There's definitely trauma and trust issues that may shade over into paranoia."

"So I should look on the bright side, eh?" Kulkarni said. "Well, tell me all about them, and I'll find someone in the department who knows that time period—and hopefully also if there's a Georgia in the Americas. We'll have something prepared by the time they get here."

"The oldest, Daniel Gonzalez, is forty-nine years old. He voluntarily enlisted some years before World War Three, evidently because of poverty and the promise of education for soldiers. He was the ship's captain. Starr Buckner was his first mate. She was drafted at the beginning of the war. Apparently they served together, and formed a lasting friendship through their shared experiences. She's thirty-eight. Owen Walker is the youngest; he's only sixteen, and he was an orphan even before their temporal displacement. They've all been fairly cagey about how, exactly, he became connected with their group, but I don't sense anything untoward or concerning in their interactions—I'm an empath, by the way."

Kulkarni nodded. "There are a lot of reasons people from a time of societal collapse might be wary of giving personal information to a government official, so I'll take your word for it for now. We'll want a more thorough evaluation when they get here, of course, but it's enough to get things started. What are they like as people?"

"Gonzalez is the most openly suspicious," Deanna said. "And he seems to trust Vulcans more than Humans."

"I thought most Humans from the pre-Federation era disliked and distrusted Vulcans?" Kulkarni said. "Xenophobia was a noted hallmark of the period."

Deanna shrugged. "I know very little about Earth's history in any period, but there are always exceptions."

"True. And the rest?"

"Buckner is very good at concealing her emotions under a pleasant, conversational exterior," Deanna said. "It'll be easy for her to fall through the cracks, but she's not any less traumatized and grieving than Gonzalez is. Owen is fairly cheerful, all things considered, and interested in the future he's found himself in; he doesn't like talking about his past, but he always has questions about Enterprise and the Federation and Earth in the current century. But he's very defensive about his parents—he loved them and respects how much they sacrificed to protect him and make sure he had what he needed."

"Good to know," Kulkarni said, finishing up the notes she was taking. "Do they all get along well?"

"They seem to," Deanna said. "They will almost certainly want to stick together, at least to start with."

"Have you started on their travel arrangements?" Kulkarni said. "How long do I have to prepare for their arrival?"

Deanna shrugged. "It's hard to say—their ship is a priceless historical artifact, so it will be sent back to Earth for study and display. And they don't want to be separated from it, so it's not just a matter of booking passage for them on the most convenient passenger liner and shipping the ship home as freight. At this point, it's looking like they might have to hitch rides on cargo ships, which will be much slower."

"On the other hand, it might give more time to acclimate to the future, before arriving on a homeworld so drastically different from what they remember," Kulkarni said. "And coming from the Post-Atomic Horror, a crew berth on a cargo ship would probably feel like a luxury liner to them."

"You wouldn't believe how excited they were over unlimited hot water for showers," Deanna said.

***

"We've given you all quarters of your own," Deanna said as she led the three time-travelers through the Enterprise's corridors to their quarters, "though you can let me know if you would rather share quarters, and we can get you into a suite. They're all the same, though only one has an actual window—the other two are only viewscreens. Most people do prefer the actual window, but some prefer viewscreens, because you can set them to show whatever view you want. We assumed you'd rather be next to each other, which did cut down on the available options."

She showed them into the window-view quarters that she assumed Captain Gonzalez would take, and showed them how the replicator worked. It wasn't the first time she'd made this explanation for people from outside the Federation, and as expected they were impressed by it.

"Now this is some sci-fi bullshit, and I mean that in the best possible sense," Starr said.

"How does it work?" Owen asked.

"I don't care," Starr said. "We'll look it up later." She stepped up to it. "Computer, what kind of chocolate do you have?"

"There are 4,057 items containing chocolate," the computer intoned.

"I want a bar of milk chocolate with peanuts in it," Starr said.

A candy bar materialized. Starr took it and bit into it, moaning in bliss.

"A woman after my own heart," Deanna said, a little amused.

"Hey, Owen, have you ever had chocolate?" Starr asked.

"I don't … think so?" Owen said. "I mean, I know what it is, I've heard old people moan about missing it all my life."

"You're going to love it," Starr said, breaking off a square and handing it to him.

Owen popped it in his mouth. "Yeah, it's good, I guess," he said after a minute.

"It's good you guess?" Gonzalez said, with some outrage. "First chocolate he's ever had, and it's good he guesses." He gave Owen a gentle swat. "Philistine." He stepped up to the replicator himself. "I want hot cocoa made by melting real chocolate in milk, with a dash of cinnamon." He took his drink from the replicator and took a sip. "Thank you, Jesus," he breathed.

"Okay, my turn," Owen said. "Cherries," he told the replicator. A bowl of cherries materialized, and he popped one in his mouth. "Eh, I've had better, but they're not bad."

Once they were done with their treats, she showed them how to recycle the dishes and cherry pits, and showed them the bathroom.

"We have showers?" Owen said, awed. "In space?"

Deanna closed the shower door. "The shower compartments are sealed so that if the ship loses gravity—which is extremely unlikely, and hasn't happened in my entire time serving in Starfleet—the water can't escape to damage anything."

"How much water do we get a day?" Starr said. "What's the limit on shower length?"

"It's unlimited," Deanna said. "Unless something goes really wrong with either the water filtration system or the ship's power, which, again, hasn't happened during my time in Starfleet."

"Unlimited?" Owen said. "You're kidding. Is there a limit on hot water? Is that whole unlimited time in the shower with hot water?"

"Of course," Deanna said, bemused. Why would you have water but not hot water? Especially on a warp-capable ship? The power requirements for heating water were negligible compared to the power needed to run the warp drive even when they were hanging motionless in space. It was funny that they seemed to find the shower almost as awe-inspiring as the replicator. But then, she'd never experienced anything like what they'd been through; it was only natural that their ideas of unusual and important differed from her own.

***

"You know, we told ghost stories about ships that disappeared in space in the Engineering department at Starfleet Academy," Geordi said. Gonzalez had given him a tour, and now they were sitting in the acceleration couches for a while before climbing down and heading to Engineering so Geordi could show him the Enterprise's warp core. The couches were comfortable, but at an odd angle; the ship wasn't designed for gravity, and although there was a 'floor' (because human beings did better psychologically with one), there were controls and equipment on five of the ship's six sides, and 'fore' and 'aft' were more useful than 'up' and 'down.'

They'd had an interesting puzzle, figuring out how to brace the ship so that the nacelles wouldn't be stressed by the ship's gravity. If it weren't that figuring out how to tie everything down in the shuttlebay would be an equal challenge, he might have suggested they just turn gravity off in the bay and let the Ether Ore float. He'd suggested that they arrange for it to be towed, on the way back to Earth, rather than put in a cargo bay.

"Ghost stories, huh," Gonzalez said. "Was Ether Ore one of them?"

"Yup," Geordi said. "Vanished into nowhere within sight of another vessel."

"That would have been our sister ship, the Firmametal," Gonzalez said.

"How did you manage to build two ships—two warp capable ships—less than seven years after humans developed Warp Drive?" Geordi asked. "It's not like Earth had a lot of resources to spare—most of the planet had been bombed back to the stone age, and a warp capable ship takes a lot of resources to build."

"I served with one of Cochrane's team, during the war," Gonzalez said. "Lily wanted to make sure that the people building warp-capable ships were trustworthy, so we had a head start because she knew me. She'd been giving us updates even before their first successful warp flight—not enough to build our own ship and get credit for their idea, but enough that we weren't starting from scratch after they'd done their proof of concept.

"And she also vouched for us and Georgia Tech with the Vulcans. They'd show up every so often to give a seminar on Warp 101 and Basic Starship Design and stuff like that. And a couple of times when we couldn't get the raw materials or parts we needed because of transportation problems, they sent a ship to retrieve it for us from wherever it was on Earth. They promised that if we could figure out how to get asteroids back to Earth, they'd build us a refinery in space and train us to use it. They're really big on mining asteroids instead of habitable planets, are the Vulcans. Big on ecology and sustainable land-use management. And with the warp drive and an orbital refinery, it makes sense to do it. Maybe it wouldn't have before the War, when there were decent supply lines and international treaties and stuff like that, but you have no idea how hard it is to trade for raw materials and large commodities across any distance now." He made a face. "Then, I suppose."

Gonzalez sighed, slouching down in his cradle. "We'd just made our first successful run, and the Firmametal was gearing up for their first crack at bringing back an asteroid, when we fell through that wormhole. All that work, for nothing."

"Not for nothing," Geordi said. "You did it. And I bet your sister ship was just as successful."

"Then why aren't there records of it?" Gonzalez asked.

"There have got to be records somewhere," Geordi said. "It's just getting them all into the historical database that's the problem, and getting them all collected into a coherent form. The Vulcans have their own records, too, and they weren't in the middle of a global catastrophe. Bet you they could tell you what happened to the Firmametal."

"Yeah, probably," Gonzalez said. He looked down at his hands. "Why did you have to pull us out? Why couldn't you have shoved us back through to where we came from?"

Geordi shrugged. "We didn't know which side of the wormhole you were from," he said. "And even if we had, wormholes aren't like cracks in space, they're more like tubes between two points. When you're in a wormhole, you're in a space within our space-time dimension. The wormhole was collapsing as we pulled you out. If we'd shoved you in, you probably wouldn't have made it back through your side of the wormhole. You'd probably have gotten trapped … and nobody knows what that would be like, or if you'd ever be able to get out of it. We've sent probes into collapsing wormholes, but we've never gotten them back, or even gotten a signal from them."

The heat patterns on Gonzalez's face changed in a way that probably indicated the blood had drained out, a little bit. "Ugh," he said. "I guess it's a good thing you pulled us out on this side, then."

"Probably," Geordi said. "Wanna go see my engine core?"

As they clambered out of the Ether Ore, Geordi had an idea. "Say, can we get a picture of the two of us standing outside your ship?"

"Sure," Gonzalez said, and Geordi snagged a passing crewmember to take a picture with their PADD and send it to his account. When he was done showing Gonzalez around Main Engineering, Geordi sent a copy of the picture on to a couple of old buddies from his Academy days. Remember that old ghost story about that Early Warp ship that disappeared into thin air in front of its sister ship? The S.S. Ether Ore just fell out of a wormhole right in front of the Enterprise.

It took a couple of days for people to respond—his classmates were spread out throughout Starfleet—but he got back a wave of responses, everything from complaints that there weren't actual ghosts, to requests for pictures of the inside of it. It was a nice distraction from the tedium of the surveys they were doing.

***

"I've been thinking about the next play we should do," Beverly said as she and Deanna wandered through the corridors. They'd been at a concert in Ten Forward that had gone late, and there had been a reception afterwards, so they were both headed to bed as soon as they reached their quarters. "I've been sticking mostly to plays by or about Humans, because it's what I know and the majority of our crew is Human. Do you think many of our other crew members would be interested in having one of their favorite plays put on?"

"Probably," Deanna said. "Though not all of us have thespian traditions that can be put on by aliens—Betazoid plays, for example, all have telepathy as a major component of the art."

"True," Beverly said. "I'll ask around."

They came around a curve in the corridor just in time to see Owen furtively looking both ways before darting across the corridor to Starr's door, blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He glanced up to see them and sagged, as if he'd gotten caught at something.

"Is everything alright?" Beverly asked. "Do you need something?"

"Couldn't sleep, was just going to see if I could sleep with Starr," he said.

"Do you sleep with her on a regular basis?" Deanna asked.

His faced turned beet-red and he broadcasted the sort of mortification only an adolescent could feel. "Not that way! Gross! She's like my mom."

"I believe you," Deanna said. "I know what you meant. It was poor phrasing on both our parts. Would you like to have her added as a parent/guardian in your files? We could move you both to a shared suite, if you and she would prefer that."

"Would it be that easy?" Owen said with a frown.

"Certainly," Deanna said. "Why wouldn't it be?"

"I mean, there were a lot of hoops to jump through back home," Owen said. "She and my dad and I lived together for like three years before he died, but they weren't married and he didn't leave a will or anything, and it was easier just to have me officially emancipated and apprenticed to the shipbuilding company. One of the social workers had this thing about—there were all these rules and guidelines and laws they'd had, back before the war, and she was pretending they still applied, and I was like, dude, that was forever ago, but she was one of those old people who had trouble adapting."

"They had social workers in the Post-Atomic Horror?" Beverly asked, surprised.

Deanna was surprised, too; the very name conjured up images of barbarism and violence and decay. Though, she supposed if that were all there was to it, it wouldn't have lasted so short a time.

"Some places did, yeah," Owen said, scornfully. "The ones that weren't shitholes." He rolled his eyes. "Georgia was pretty good, especially if you were close to Atlanta. They made sure nobody went hungry and everybody got to see a doctor or nurse when they were sick. It's why Dad and I came to Georgia. And why we were building spaceships there, instead of Florida and Texas, which already had launchpads and control rooms and stuff."

"Thank you for telling us," Deanna said. "You and Starr can have your paperwork updated in the morning."

"Ok," he said.

"Good night," Beverly said.

"Good night," Owen echoed. He keyed open Starr's door, and slipped inside.

"Well, I guess that teaches us not to assume," Beverly said. She shook her head as they walked on. "I am glad he does actually have a guardian, though. Sixteen is just too young to be on his own."

"Not to mention, it makes being displaced far less traumatic," Deanna said. "He'll be healthier and happier than he would have if they'd been separated in time."

***

It took a little over a month for Enterprise to finish its mapping mission and make its way back to more heavily-travelled space, but at last their course intersected with a Caitian freighter headed in the right direction to take the Ether Ore and its crew on the first leg of their journey.

"You're sure this thing is safe?" Gonzalez asked, eying the transporter nervously.

"Absolutely," Deanna said. No need to go into the various transporter accidents she'd seen in her years in Starfleet; there were no unusual circumstances at the moment that might cause, say, a duplication of the people being transported. "I've used it many times myself."

"What does it feel like?" Owen asked. Starr put her hand on his shoulder.

"Not much," Deanna said. "It's practically instantaneous. I'm sorry Captain Picard couldn't be here to see you off; he got a call from the Admiralty he had to take."

"Thank him for all his efforts," Starr said. "And thank you for taking care of us all this time and helping us get back to Earth."

"You're welcome," Deanna said. "I hope your travel is uneventful, but if you have problems, you have my communications information as well as that of your social worker from the Department of Displaced People. One of us should be able to straighten out any problems."

"We'll try not to need the help," Gonzalez said. "We're fairly resourceful people ourselves."

"Of course," Deanna said. "But please do keep your social worker informed, at least."

"The freighter is signaling their readiness," the transporter chief said. "Please stand on the circles on the transporter pad, facing me."

The three time-travelers picked up their bags and stepped up to the platform. Starr waved good-bye.

"Energizing," the transporter chief said, and they disappeared.

Deanna thanked the chief and left the room. She had a full schedule of appointments this afternoon.

#dreamwidth #original post #fanfiction #fanfic #star trek #The Next Generation #deanna troi #time travel

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angryschnauzer · 3 years

Text

He’s A Keeper

Summary: Working as an artist hired by Durrell Zoo, you spend your days sketching the day to day life of the animals and the keepers. One keeper in particular catches your eye.

Pairing: AU Zookeeper Henry Cavill x Female Reader (no race or size mentioned)

Fandom: Henry Cavill

Warnings: NSFW, 18+, Friends to Lovers, Oral Sex (Female Receiving), Fingering, Safe Sex/Use of Condoms, Realistic Sex/Relationship discussion, Vaginal Sex.

Typo’s are allowed to run wild and free, only the finest organic free range fuck ups for me.

I do not operate a tag list, but if you follow @angryschnauzerwrites and hit ‘notifications’, you’ll get an alert every time i post something new. Back catalogue/masterlist can be found there and also on AO3

He’s A Keeper

Working the pencils over the sketchpad you quietly captured the beauty of the animals the zookeepers had nursed back to full health, the Ruffed Lemur currently hanging off the keepers arm as he spoke through the headset to the group of excited school children watching through the glass.

You’d been hired by the zoo to capture day to day life at the zoo throughout the summer season, drawing the animals and the humans, however there was one particular human you had found yourself drawn to numerous times, and that was the rather tasty zookeeper by the name of Henry. He also had one of the sexiest voices you’d ever had the pleasure to listen to, so as he explained about the Lemur’s your mind wandered, as did your gaze;

“... originally from Madagascar, and have been part of Durrell zoo since 1982 where they have been essential to the breeding program…”

Your mind fell even further into the gutter at the word ‘breeding’, your eyes raking down Henry’s body, taking in how the branded t-shirt clung to his chest before tapering down to a narrow waist where it was neatly tucked into cargo pants that did little to hide how thick his thighs were and a pert arse you could bounce a satsuma off of. Biting the end of the pencil you had all but given up drawing, only realising that the talk was over when the group of school children were being herded onto the next exhibit by their tour guide and teachers.

When the kids had disappeared you finally got back to drawing, watching as Henry finished up feeding the Lemur’s before he met your gaze and smiled at you. Tapping your pencil on the glass he frowned and shook his head, before smiling and pointing to the sign in the corner of the window that said ‘do not tap the glass’, getting closer you tried to mouth your words to him, but was surprised when his eyes went wide in almost shock, before looking down and realising you had pressed your chest to the glass, your low cut cami top helping to accentuate your cleavage. When you looked up again he was gone and you let out a sigh of disappointment, before he appeared through a door to the side of the viewing area;

“Hi” he had a smile that could charm the panties off a nun; “Did you want me?”

“God yes…” Oh fuck, did you say that out loud?; “Sorry, i mean, you’ve dropped the foam bit off your headset...”

He glanced into the enclosure just at the moment one of the larger Lemur’s picked up the small round piece of foam and staring straight at Henry, proceeded to rip it into tiny pieces.

“Furry little fucker…” he cursed under his breath before turning back to you, but before he could say anything a group of other keepers came walking in and soon you were hanging onto the periphery of their conversation where they were discussing going for drinks after work. Moving to pack your stuff up as you presumed they weren’t including you, but a call of your nickname drew your attention;

“Hey Da Vinci, you up for a few beers after work?”

You hesitated to answer, glancing at Henry who had a smile across his face and a hopeful look in his eye;

“We’re all going…”

“Ok, yeah sure, that’d be great” you agreed.

An hour later you were sitting on the wall outside the main entrance waiting for the rest of the keepers to finish their shifts, smiling as you saw them coming out of the doors, and the ensuing 10 minutes that followed as people sorted out who was driving and how many people could fit into just a couple of small cars. As spaces were allocated Henry laughed and shook his head;

“I am NOT riding five up in a Renault Clio, i’m too tall, i’ll have to fold myself in half! Where are we going anyway, i can take my bike and just walk home after”

Waiting as everyone discussed location and finished off seat allocation, they’d finally decided when Henry turned to you;

“Hey, i think the last seats are in the stoner wagon…”

“Oh…” you didn’t have anything against anyone smoking pot, but didn’t fancy being in a car you could barely see out of the windows of.

“But you can ride with me on my bike?”

Looking to where Henry was pointing, you saw a fairly large trails bike, the kind that could go 50mph over rough land and through forests;

“I… I don’t have a helmet…”

“Wait here, let me run into the locker room and grab the spare i keep here”

Everyone else pulled away as Henry ran into the zoo, and you glanced at the bike. You’d never been on a motorbike before, so this would be a first. Stowing everything loose in your backpack, you hooked it over both shoulders just as Henry reemerged from the building, swinging his keys from one finger as he came to stand in front of you;

“Hey, thanks for waiting”

“No worries! So, where are we going again?”

“The pub in Rozel does good food and pulls a great pint” he nodded to his left and you saw a row of motorbikes; “You ever ridden?”

Shaking your head you laughed; “No, never”

He carefully helped you put the helmet on, his nimble fingers helping to secure the strap beneath your chin before putting his own on and climbing onto the bike, pushing it off the kick stand and nodding for you to climb on. You tried to sit back, but he wrapped his arm behind his back and pulled you flush to his body;

“Gotta hold on tight, otherwise you’ll throw the balance off. Lean when i lean and just squeeze a bit harder if you’re scared, the ride won’t take long” he shouted over the thrum of the noisy engine idling.

The ride down to the small village of Rozel had been exhilarating, from the vibration of the motorbike between your legs to the way you were able to wrap your arms around Henry’s waist and cling to him as he hurtled around the country roads at what seemed like warp speed, when in fact it was little more than 30mph. By the time you arrived in the small fishing cove your heart was racing and you actually let out a reluctant moan at the thought of removing your arms from around Henry’s waist.

“C’mon” he grinned as he helped you off the bike; “I’ll buy you a vodka and coke to calm your nerves”

“It wasn’t nerves” you muttered to yourself, smirking as you know he heard you.

The group had managed to find a cluster of small tables chairs and benches in the corner of the pub beer garden, and as the sun had set behind the hills to the rear of the pub, the cold Atlantic sea had glowed in pale blues and pinks. You were squashed into a bench with Henry on one side and another enormous hulk of a keeper on the other, and as the temperature had dropped you’d found yourself thankful that Henry had casually rested his arm behind you so you could leech some of his warmth, but it didn’t stop a violent shiver involuntarily running up your spine.

“Cold?” Henry asked quietly, before gently wrapping his arm around your shoulder and pulling you close; “Any better?”

You nodded and let out a very quiet whine as you smiled at him, completely surrounded by his scent and warmth. It made your stomach do a flip and you clenched your thighs together, something that didn’t get past Henry as your leg twitched against his thigh. Before either of you could say anything an enormous bowl of cheesy fries was set down between you, your stomach growling at the aroma’s that wafted around you as it turned out someone had ordered sharing bowls for the whole table.

With the meal mostly devoured as you’d sat side by side on a small wooden bench in the pub garden, laughing as you fed each other and strings of cheese hung from your fingers. As the giggles of a joke faded away you glanced at Henry’s almost finished pint;

“Hey, you aren’t planning on riding that bike home are you?”

“Nah, i’d never drive after a pint, let alone three… my place is just behind The Navigator restaurant…” he paused; “Oh god, where are you staying, do i need to call you a taxi?”

“No no, i’m renting a studio up the hill, on the hairpin bend”

“Oh…”

It wasn’t a bad ‘oh’ and there was definitely something loaded in the subtext, so when people had started to leave and arrange ride’s back to St Helier and St Johns it felt natural for Henry to stand with his arm around your shoulders as you both waved everyone off.

“Can i walk you home?” he asked, his voice low and full of promise, and you nodded as he slid his hand into yours, leading you along the low coast road that skirted the harbour.

You hadn’t gotten far before the evening turned even better, a brief suggestion of a walk along the beach as the tide was out soon had your feet in soft sand as you were pressed to the weathered stone of the sea wall, Henry’s lips on your neck as your fingers dug into his back, his teeth nipping and biting at whatever exposed flesh he could find. You hadn’t even realised he was going lower until he was on his knees in front of you, those sea blue irises staring up at you as he pressed kisses to your legs where your shorts ended. His fingers softly rested on the button and he finally spoke, his voice low and thick with lust;

“May i?”

Nodding fervently you bit your lip as you watched him slowly unbutton you, pulling the garment down your legs until you were able to step out. Never breaking eye contact he lifted your leg and gently rested it on his shoulder, pressing open mouthed kisses up your inner thigh until his face was pressed against your panties and his wide tongue worked against the soaked cotton and lace. His finger crooked beneath them and tugged the scrap of fabric to the side, seeking out your clit before tracing down to your cunt and tenderly teasing the entrance.

“Henry… please…” you whined, desperate for more

“Don’t you worry, i’m gonna make you see stars…”

Pushing his head forwards his lips caught your clit as he slowly slid two fingers into your soaked channel. You let out a long groan at the feel of his lips and fingers finding the right spot immediately, his other hand cupping the back of your thigh before he ran it around your hip and caught your hand, intertwining his fingers with yours as he quickly drove you closer and closer to the edge with that added touch of intimacy. Suddenly he hummed against your clit and the world exploded, making you cum so hard you truly did see stars as a white heat bloomed in your belly and you rode Henry’s fingers until you were spent.

As you rested against the wall behind you he carefully withdrew his fingers, licking them clean as he tugged your shorts up your legs. You couldn’t help but to notice the obscene bulge in the front of his cargo pants, your hand rubbing over the smooth curve of it;

“You keep doing that and i’ll cum in my boxers… “ he panted out, his lips inches from yours; “What’s your room like?”

“Its a little summer cabin studio right at the end of the garden, away from the other holiday rentals and the main house… what about you…”

“Shared flat with two other guys from the zoo. They’re probably drinking in the lounge right now… so, your place?”

Unlocking the door you stepped inside and turned on a small lamp, standing aside so Henry could come into your small summer living space.

“Mmm nice” he nodded and looked around; “Wanna give me the tour?”

You snorted out a laugh at the formality, and held your arm out;

“Well this is the kitchen area, right next door we have the smallest shower room in Jersey, and here’s the bed” you didn’t need to take a single step for the ‘tour’, the room seeming even smaller as Henry took a single stride and wrapped his arm around your back, pulling you flush with his chest. Never breaking eye contact he gently trailed a single finger over your cheek, his thumb brushing your plump bottom lip;

“Are you going to be good for me?”

Your legs almost buckled at the deep baritone of his voice, igniting something within you that you hadn’t even known existed, eagerly nodding;

“Yes Sir”

Lowering his lips to yours he kissed you, his tongue pushing past your lips as he took control, walking the pair of you back until your legs hit the bed and you fell back onto the soft unmade covers. Covering your body with his, he quickly stripped you of your clothing, his mouth trailing behind his hands so every inch of you was gifted with a kiss.

Standing between your legs he pulled his t-shirt over his head and you couldn’t help but to moan at the sight of his body; toned and just the right amount of hair on his chest and a treasure trail on his abdomen that surely led to untold riches. Quickly sitting up your hands joined his on his button to his cargo pants;

“May i?”

Henry released his hands and nodded, watching as you carefully plucked the button before lowering the zipper painfully slowly, his boxers tented obscenely and you couldn’t help but to cup him in your palm, the searing heat of his engorged cock a welcome feel in your hands, the wide mushroom head clearly visible through the stretched fabric. Unceremoniously tugging the rest of his clothing down, you felt yourself getting wetter as his beautiful cock was finally revealed; big, thick and uncut, you had to taste him and quickly ducked your head forwards, swallowing his head between your lips as his hands flew to your hair to steady himself.

Now it was your turn to drive him crazy with your mouth, taking him as deep as you could even though it was barely half of his length, you wrapped both hands around what was left, the thick root of his shaft filling both palms. A few more pumps and he pulled his hips back with a gasp, a trail of spittle hanging from your lips to his bulbous tip;

“If you keep doing that i’m gonna cum far too soon…” he said, his voice shaking; “Lay back and let me treat you right…”

Scooting up the bed you settled against the pillows as you watched Henry shed himself of the rest of his clothing, his boots and socks hooked off, cargo pants and underwear all left in a messy pile at the side of the bed, before he crawled up the mattress like a Panther stalking its prey.

Capturing your lips for another searing kiss, you felt his hot shaft against your belly, burning against your skin and you so desperately wanted to feel him inside you. Pulling away just slightly you were already breathless;

“Just a second…” reaching for the small drawer at side of the bed you pulled out an unopened box of condoms, Henry sitting back on his knees as you ripped the box’s cellophane open with your teeth and pulled out a small foil packet, tearing it open before smoothing the latex over Henry’s shaft. Looking up to his face he wore a rather sheepish smile;

“Sorry, shoulda’ thought of that”

“S’ok, a girl’s gotta keep sharp these days…”

“Right…” he met your gaze; “But you know, if you had gotten pregnant, i would have stood by you”

“Umm thanks? But its for STD’s. I’m on the pill”

“Oh… good thinking…”

A tense pause hung over the pair of you, before you reached up and rested your hand on his chest;

“Shall we continue?”

At your words the tension in the room suddenly dissipated, Henry kissing you as he slid a hand between your bodies so he could position himself at your entrance, groaning as he pushed in slowly breaching your body. Your tight channel hugged him tight, unfamiliar with such a size splitting your walls so he paused, pressing light kisses to your face as your body grew accustomed with his size and the heavy weight of his dick in your pillowy soft embrace. Finally you moaned out his name;

“Henry… please…”

“What do you need?”

“Move… please move. Fuck me, please”

Pushing up on his forearms he started to fluidly move his hips, slow and steady, each thrust was gentle but firm, your body yielding to him as he started to increase the pace, the sound of hot bodies meeting filling the small wooden cabin as the gentle sounds of the sea not far away filled the rest of the night. Soft moans spilled from your lips at the feel of his body playing yours like a delicate instrument, waiting for the chorus and the inevitable crescendo. But he was going to play the entire symphony first, knowing how to get you to sing the high notes as the thrum of your bodies were in tune with each other completely.

With the stretch of his girth and the way the curve of it meant he was able to find your g-spot with every thrust you were fast approaching your orgasm, your body trembling as your lips found a life of their own;

“Henry… please, so good… keep doing that… oh god, i’m gonna cum…”

“That’s it, my good girl, cum on my cock, let me feel you squeezing me so tight… feel so amazing right now… that’s it, you can do it…”

With a cry you came, your legs wrapped around his waist as you pulled him deep whilst your body shook with a fierce orgasm, triggering his own as he pumped a heavy load into the condom.

Finally spent, Henry settled on top of you, his weight a heavy comfort as your sweaty bodies lay skin to skin, the gentle roughness of his chest hair against your naked breasts a tender reminder of his virility. When he started to soften he finally shifted, holding the condom at the base as he pulled out and staggered the few steps to your small bathroom;

“I’ll be back in a second, gotta sort this out…”

The door closed and you shifted on the bed, pulling the duvet back and sliding between the sheets, listening as you heard the tell tale sound of a man urinating and the high pitched, double barrelled squeak of a fart. The flush of the toilet and water running soon after meant you knew the second he would reappear, a flannel in his hand and he stopped dead, his cheeks suddenly bright crimson;

“You heard that didn’t you?”

“It's a small wooden cabin… yes i did”

“Sorry” he approached the bed and with a warm flannel he carefully cleaned between your thighs, pressing a kiss to your lips as he did. When finished he sat on the side of the bed; “Can i stay the night, or did you want me to go?”

“Have you got work tomorrow?”

“Nope. You?”

“Nope. Please, stay”

He quickly threw the flannel into the sink in the bathroom, before with a giggle climbed under the duvet and pulled you into his arms;

“So, how many more condom’s you got?”

The morning light broke softly through the trees that surrounded your cabin, your body sore but sated, knowing every bruise and ache came from soft lips, sharp teeth, or skilled fingers, apart from that one ache deep inside that you knew exactly what had caused that delicious soreness, and the owner and cause of all of it still softly slept in your bed. Climbing out you quickly used the bathroom, and as you came back into the room the artist in you couldn’t help but to admire how the dappled morning light cascaded over Henry’s body. Slipping his work t-shirt over your head you pulled your sketchbook from your backpack and settled onto the only chair in the room, quietly working carbon to paper.

Henry woke 45 minutes later, the gentle scratching of your art making him squint at the bright daylight, before laying back on the pillows with his arms spread;

“Still life class?”

Setting your sketchbook down you padded across the room and climbed onto the bed;

“Sorry, i couldn’t help myself… the way the sun was hitting the muscles of your back and shoulders, you were like an anatomy masterpiece”

With a laugh and moving much quicker than you thought he was possible of, he grabbed you by the waist and turned you, his body atop of yours;

“Well that’s enough of that, i would like to become better acquainted with your anatomy… and as we’ve both got the day off i suggest we make the most of it”

Laughing you fell into his embrace, sighing with happiness. Henry really was a keeper, as you were for sure not going to let him go.

#henry cavill #henry cavill x reader #henry cavill smut #henry cavill x you #henry cavill fanfiction

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royalnugget42 · 3 years

Text

Ok so now that I’m officially in the Resident Evil fandom here’s something

In the aftermath of the explosion in that little village, Ethan’s body is recovered. He is completely molded though, and has no memory except that he has a daughter named Rose, and he is sent to a secret facility to be contained and researched. He spends years being experimented on, poked and prodded and his regenerative abilities grow to astonishing strength.

He can regrow whole limbs now. He found this out the hard way, when the scientists started cutting off bits and pieces of him. Whole bones have been regrown from nothing but mold, though he has to eat a lot of rotten food to make up for it. His captors never tell him who he was or what he did, not even telling him his name, and referring to him only by Subject F-001, or Series F.

Their guess as to how he got like this without showing any of the homicidal tendencies of his predecessors is a mystery to them. Perhaps it is the memory of his daughter, perhaps it is his isolation from the rest of the molded, perhaps he just has something in his DNA. Whatever the case, when he is not being hurt he is resentful and angry, but never violent, nor does he seem interested in spreading the mold further.

It’s 16 years after they took him that funding starts to run out for the project. They’ve devoted all the time to research that they can, and now they must look to utilize him in other ways.

They begin with that question, of why he is different from the rest of the molded, retaining some semblance of his humanity. They can’t take his memory of Rose, though they’ve tried, and instead start to introduce foreign samples of mold into his diet, to see if he gains any of their traits.

Did they know what was left catalogued in the E-series mold? Did they realize that every infected soul has left a mark in that strain? Did they predict...no they couldn’t have. But they should have.

Ethan Winters goes to sleep and dreams of his wife. He doesn’t remember having a wife, how could he? But he supposes this must be her, she is lying in bed with him and calling him baby. This is Rose’s mother, and she is beautiful. But she doesn’t say his name. He doesn’t know hers.

When he wakes up he sees a little girl with black hair at the foot of his bed. She giggles at him, but runs when he calls out, vanishing through the concrete walls. When he mentions this apparition, the scientists dutifully catalogue the apparent hallucinations in their notes on him, but they do nothing to help him when he begs them for knowledge.

“Where is she?” he shouts into the stark, empty air. “Where is my wife, where is my daughter? Where’s Rose?” There is no answer. Just the buzzing of fluorescent lights and the quiet beeps of machinery.

The second dream is of a kitchen. Sunlight pours through the window, and the wooden floor is grimy, but only because it hasn’t been washed since breakfast yesterday.

There’s an old man at the table. His wife brings a meal to the table, and whatever it is smells delicious. Their son, it must be their son, sits off to the side, scrolling nonchalantly through his phone. Their daughter is gathering silverware.

They are the picture of an idyllic, loving family. They smile at him and ask him if he’d like anything more to eat, gently chiding him. He’s so thin, shouldn’t he have just one more helping? So he dutifully finishes off another, before declaring he is done. The old man turns to him.

“You’ve got to go back soon. When you do you’ve got to remember.” Remember what? He only remembers Rose, he doesn’t even know who these people are. They aren’t his family, he knows that, but in a warped and twisted way they also are. The edges of his vision are black with mold as they all beg him to remember, to break free, to be himself again. Zoe is the last to speak.

“I know you remember us. We live on in you, everyone does. We’re all counting on you, kid.” He feels like he’s too old to be called a kid by this girl, but maybe this girl is older than she looks. Maybe he’s younger than he thought.

The little girl is back. She doesn’t run this time, just stares at him. It seems she is waiting for a question, and it’s only as he realizes this that he knows what to ask. “Who are you?” he asks. “Who am I?”

She laughs at this, bright and sharp as glass. “I’m your daughter, of course! And you’re my daddy.”

Rose? Is this little girl Rose? But no, she isn’t. He’s not sure how he knows but he does. This girl isn’t his daughter, except she is, isn’t she? They’re connected. A family in reverse. He didn’t make her, not like he made Rose, but she didn’t make him either. He’s too new for that. How can he be younger than his daughter?

“Evelyn.”

She smiles at the recognition in his eyes. There’s fear there, but also familiarity. This is at least someone he knows. If she is his daughter, then he must be her father. That’s how it works isn’t it? All at once he feels like a part of his identity is locked into place. If he is a father then he has to protect his daughters, both of them. He must find Rose, and his wife.

She fades away before he passes out again. He dreams of pain, in his hand, in his legs. He dreams of terror and aching phantom memories. There’s a woman, tall and beautiful, with hands like long knives, her daughters all over him, many-legged. There’s a doll, there are so many dolls, and there’s a woman in mourning. A creature of water and filth confronts him, spewing out acid that burns in his mind. He talks to a man that moves metal without touching it. The man tells him to remember, tells him not to give up.

“You were always so stubborn. Don’t lose that. You’ll get those bastards yet.”

There’s a woman, and she has Rose. He kills her, and as she crumbles she whispers that she is finally with her daughter. She whispers to him that they are family, that they are both related and the same. He takes Rose from where she cries amongst the stones, and feels his hands fall apart.

Evelyn is a good daughter. When he is awake, he tells stories, about his dreams, about her mother. Evelyn tells him things too.

“You and mom tried to kill me, but I never knew why. I had a long time to think though, and I think I might’ve been a bad girl.”

For what it’s worth, he is sorry, but Evelyn shakes her head. “It was for the best, after all. You weren’t really my dad then.”

He doesn’t know what he is. The scientists call him series F, but he doesn’t know what that means. Evelyn used to be called series E. She says maybe his name starts with an F, but he knows that it doesn’t.

He’s different from Evelyn, but not so different that he is distant from her. Evelyn says that she tried to give him a gift, something she gave to lots of people. She gave it to his wife too, but she never gave anything to him.

“You have a gift too,” she says, “but it didn’t come from me. You made it all on your own. I came from this place, from these scientists, but you made yourself. It’s like you grew from nothing.”

Evelyn always wants to have more family, always wants to give more of her gift. She asks if Ethan is the same, and he realizes that he has never tried to give his gift to someone else. He doesn’t know if he wants to. He already has all the family he could ask for.

He dreams of his wife. Her name is Mia. He knows that now. His name is Ethan, and her name is Mia and they are family.

Scientists have been recording his conversations, and they’re growing concerned. Ethan spends so much time talking to his “daughter” Evelyn. They have realized by now that the E strain mold in his diet must have contained some trace of Evelyn’s consciousness, possibly along with others. They’ve stopped exposing him to it but it seems the damage is done. He asks for Mia and Rose at every waking moment that he does not spend talking to Evelyn.

They took a risk. They took far too many risks. Something happens one day, when a woman comes in to monitor his physical state. He was supposed to be sleeping, but the drugs wore off sooner than expected. He saw the woman through the door, and he begged her, to let him out, to bring him to his family. She ignored him. He pounded against the glass and she just rolled her eyes and took more notes.

Something snapped. No, not snapped. It twisted and warped and grew. It blossomed.

If this woman wasn’t going to let him see his family, then he would make more family. He would make her see his side, and once they were family she would have to help him. That’s what family does. His breathing slowed, and he closed his eyes. With every ounce of longing and loneliness he reached—

Agony.

#resident evil #re8 ethan winters #re8 #re8 coda #aftermath of the village #ethan winters #mia winters #rosemary winters #Evelyn resident evil #tw mold

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cucumbers-and-olives · 3 years

Text

Enemies to Lovers Part 3

masterlist <<part 1 <part 2 part 3 part 4 (coming soon!) >

Summary: You leave the Gillespie house and head to the airport with Charlie after an eventful two weeks. While at the airport, your flight gets delayed and you learn of some interesting news...

Category: enemies to lovers, angst, fluff

Fandom: JATP

Paring: Charlie Gillespie x fem!Reader

Word Count: 2.5k

Warnings/Includes: arguing/fighting, small panic attack, cringy songs i wrote

A/N: so... i can never post on time. and i know its been a while since i posted the last chapter. i really hope you guys like this chapter! please reblog and comment and let me know what you think! your support means everything, and keeps me going, so thank you.

Mandatory Thanking of the Betas: thank you to @wrhen for giving me help and feedback with this chapter!

AO3 link here (coming soon!)

Please don’t repost my work without my permission, in part or whole. My work can also be found on AO3 @cucumbersandolives. Thank you!

Ice & Fire, and Enemies to Lovers are both my own songs that I wrote. All song rights go to me.

“Charlie! Y/N! Your cab is here!” Ms.Gillespie called. You checked under the bed one last time before grabbing your suitcase and backpack.

“Thank you so much for your hospitality Ms.Gillespie,” You said, walking up to her. “If you hadn’t invited me I would have spent Christmas alone, and this was so much better.”

“Christmas alone? What a loser,” Charlie remarked as he put his bag into the trunk of the cab. You just rolled your eyes.

“Charlie, be a gentleman and grab her suitcase.” Ms.Gillespie said with a calm yet authoritative tone. He grabbed your suitcase and did as he was told. “I’m sorry about him, but I’m happy you had a good time. Maybe you can join us next year?”

“I would be honored,” You said, taking a last glance around the house you had stayed at for the past two weeks.

“Hey! Let’s go!” Charlie hollered from outside. “We’re gonna miss the flight!”

“Thank you, Ms.Gillespie,” You adjusted your backpack and stepped outside to the man who had become a whiny teenager.

“Finally,” He said as you sat down. “She’s my mother, not yours.”

“I’m sorry about him,” You said to the lady in the driver's seat. “We’re all ready to go now, sorry for the wait.”

She nodded and began to drive. The scenery was nice, but it only took a couple of minutes for you to start yelling at Charlie.

“Fuck this,” You pulled out his earbud. The niceties could stop now that his mother wasn’t here. “I have tried to be nice to you this whole time, but now I can say this: You want to act like a little boy throwing a hissy fit? Fine, be my guest. But at least do it in someone else’s company, I have been nothing but kind to you, you-” You almost cussed again, but you reined yourself in. He was worth your anger but not that much of it.

He just rolled his eyes and scoffed. “Whatever you say, princess.” His words, taken in another context, could have easily been mistaken for something other than the daggers they were.

“It’s delayed,” He said, and that simple fact destroyed the rest of the day. “The plane has some issue. They think it’ll be at least two hours, if not more.”

“God, every time I try to like airports, something bad happens,” You said, slumping back into the uncomfortable airport chairs. You knew it wasn’t the airline’s fault, (well it kinda was), but you needed to get back to work. You fiddled with the cord on your headphones before putting them back on.

“Ah- Not so fast,” Charlie said, blocking you from putting them on. He showed you who was calling him. “If I have to talk to the boss man,” He said, referring to Kenny, “Then you do too.”

“See but I don’t,” You said, as you received a different call. “I have a different boss to talk to.”

“I mean, I’m not your boss-” The girl on the other end of the phone said, but Charlie cut her off.

“Are you actually going to talk to Jadah?” He said, about to accept Kenny’s call.

“No, Charlie. Sav’s phone died, so you talk to your boss and I’ll talk to mine.” You walked around for a bit to find a quieter corner of the airport.

“You okay, Y/N?” Jadah asked, finally.

“No, but that's for another time. What’s up?”

“So… Kenny is telling Charlie about the song showcase, but there’s one thing that he’ll leave out.” She said, leaving you on a cliffhanger.

“That is?” You said, prompting her.

“I- I may have slipped him your demos?” Jadah said slowly, and at that moment, all sense of keeping up public appearances went out the window.

“Jadah! Those were not yours to share! In any capacity!” You took a deep breath and asked your first question. “Where did you get them? I thought that the sound guy and I were the only ones with copies?” “I may have bribed him for a copy,” She said sheepishly. Even though you couldn’t see her, you knew she was nervous.

“Jadah, I have one other question.” You paused, trying to figure out how to ask nicely. “Which songs did you give him? Cause if you gave him Enemies-”

“I gave him Ice & Fire, Enemies to Lovers, and I can’t remember the third one. Please don’t be mad.”

“I’m not.” You were, a little bit. “Can you put Savannah on the phone though?” She gave a quick yes, and you could hear the phone being passed between hands.

“Y/N?” Savannah said.

“Did you know? A-about the demos,” You clarified.

“I knew you recorded them, and Jadah had me listen to them. You are amazing!”

“Thank you,” You said. “Uh, E.T.L. isn’t finished yet, but I had the time in the studio so I recorded it.” “Y/N, if you want to be a songwriter, you would be amazing!” She said, but you could tell what she meant.

“I won’t leave you in the middle of a show, Sav.” You were honest with your words. “I know.” She paused. You both knew what amazing opportunities would open up if you did. “Hold on one second, I’m going to go on mute really quick, okay?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

You could see Charlie coming towards you. His walk had a purpose, but one that was unknown to you.

“Hello, Mr.Ortega! How can I help?” You put your hand out to Charlie, signaling to him that if he talked he would be dead as Kenny spoke.

“I’m not sure if the girls have told you, but we’d love to have you perform your songs at the showcase.” He said, and you chose your words wisely, so that way Charlie wouldn’t know.

“I’d love to! What time, and which ones would you like to hear?” You asked, as you pulled out a pen and rolled up your sleeves.

“Ice & Fire, Enemies to Lovers or uh, E.T.L., I believe that was how Jadah referred to it?” He said, and you could tell he wasn’t sure what to call it.

“Yeah, I can do that, any others?” You said, scribbling down quick abbreviations of the titles.

“Oh there was one more, How to Be a Heartbreaker, I loved that one.” He said, pausing. “And I believe that Jadah mentioned that you had a few others? If you want to pick one or two, that would be great!”

“Alright! I know it’s weird to ask this, but no one has given me any details, so what time is the showcase, and where is it?” You asked, excited for the opportunity to perform.

“4:30 this afternoon, in dance studio A.” You wrote down the time quickly.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“I’ll be landing from my flight only an hour before that.”

“Y/N?”

“Yes?”

“You can do it.”

You scoffed a bit as the call ended. “Fuck.” You cussed under your breath.

“Wow, you talked to Kenny, and that's your response to a conversation with him? Anyways, I’m going to grab a coffee, want one?” He offered.

“Uh, I’ll just take a muffin, if they have one.” As you walked away, your brain was moving a mile a minute as you tried to figure out how everything would work.

“C’mon Y/L/N, if there’s one thing you can figure out, it’s making this work. You can do this.”

“Owen!” You said, running over to him.

“Hi!” He said giving you a hug, and then he looked at you. “Sav told me, you look like a mess.”

“Yeah, I know. Look, can you fix my necklace?” You said pointing to the jumbled mess it had gotten into around your neck.

“Yeah, ‘course, turn around,'' He said, and you did so. He got surprisingly close as you moved your hair away from your neck, and as he fiddled with it, you could see Charlie out of the corner of your eye. He had a look that you couldn’t put your finger on, but it almost seemed like… jealousy?

“All done!” He said, patting you on the back.

“Thank you,” You said, adjusting your sweatshirt a bit.

“You got this,” He said, grabbing your hand. “Okay?”

“Okay-” You said, but Kenny’s voice rose above everyone else's.

“Hello everyone! If you could turn your attention to the mirror, that would be great!” Everyone’s eyes turned to him, standing on a chair with a mic in hand. “Here's how this is going to work. I’d like our lovely leads to come to the mirror. Anyone else who isn’t singing can stand off of the dance floor over there,” He pointed to an area.

“If you are singing, you can follow me,” Paul said, raising his hand.

“Okay, go!” Kenny said, and as you followed Paul, you could hear him as a question. “Where is Charlie? Jeremy, check that bathroom, and Owen, look in the break room.”

“That was amazing Anna! Okay, who is next?” Kenny said, motioning to the person in front of you to come out. “Ah, Kevin, what do you have for us?”

Kevin began to talk, but it was hard to hear anything over your beating heart. You tried to take deep breaths, but it just got louder, and your worries began to overwhelm you. You took a step back in the line, making your way to the back. That would give you some time to overcome your worries before you went out there.

The line seemed to move a warp speed, because before you knew it, Kenny was calling your name.

“Y/N? Are you back there?” He asked, and you could hear everyone start to whisper when you didn’t respond.

“Yeah, gimme one second!” You said, fixing your shirt a bit. You got this. You can do it.

As you stepped out onto the stage Kenny’s face lit up. “There you are! How was the flight?” His eyes were kind, but as you looked into the audience, there were many shook faces.

“It was rough, but I’m happy to be here,” You said, sitting down in the chair in the middle of the stage. You kept taking deep breaths, trying, desperately to calm your nerves.

“I know you have a couple, so whenever you are ready, just say the song's name, and what characters you wrote it for,” Kenny explained. You looked around to see who was there. There was the choreo team, some Netflix executives, the lead cast, and a couple of other people who you didn’t recognize.

“This is lce & Fire, and I pictured Alex and Willie singing it.”

“Oh the desire

Like Ice & Fire

Shout it out loud

They won’t bring us down

Not a disgrace

We’ve made mistakes

Our love is strong

So sing along

I’ve been looking for you for so long

(I couldn’t find you)

Now that I’ve met you I’ve

Done something wrong

Oh, Ohhhh, Oh

Oh the desire

Like Ice & Fire

Shout it out loud

They can’t pull us down

Runnin’ from our past

Met in a crash

Through thick and thin

We can win

I’ve been looking for you for so long

(I couldn’t find you)

Now that I’ve met you I’ve

Done something wrong

Oh, Ohhhh, Oh

The forces pullin’ us together

Can’t stop, won’t stop

Oh hold on a little longer now

We’re Ice & Fire

(Fire)

Two parts of one

(One)

Can’t you see the passion in my eyes

Of Ice & Fire.”

As you finished, the final chord rang out from your guitar. The room was silent until Kenny spoke.

“That was wonderful! Booboo, Owen, what do you all think?” He said, turning to the actors for their opinion.

Booboo nodded to Owen. “Well, I think that your song embodies the characters really well. Uh, I definitely would love to sing it in the show, and I, uh personally can see our characters singing it. You wanna go?”

“Yeah, I agree with Owen on so many levels. I’d love to sing Ice & Fire, if that's okay with you Kenny,” Booboo turned to Kenny and the smile that was on his face was slowly mirrored on yours.

“Let’s do it! You wanna sing any others?” The room held its breath waiting for a response. And so did you.

Your first song had passed the test. Made it through. Your knee started bouncing again and you looked up to Savannah.

You got this. She mouthed.

You cleared your throat and moved the capo on your guitar. “Yeah, uh, this one is called Enemies to Lovers, and I didn’t write this one about any specific characters so it can be changed to fit any of them.”

You started singing and getting into the song. A door creaked open and you looked up, curious, and you continued to sing and play.

It was Charlie. He looked like a mess, like he had just gone to hell and back. Moving among the cast to find his seat, he didn’t notice you singing. Until you started the chorus.

It’s like we’re written in the stars,

Enemies to Lovers

Swinging past the bars,

Baby, we’ll discover-

You, me, we’re not so different,

You, me, we always win it,

You and me, we’re better than we seem,

Enemies

He watched you as you sang, and you, in turn, watched him. As you went into the chorus for a second time, you saw something change in his face. A realization or something, and you turned back to face Kenny as you finished the song.

We are written in the stars,

That's how we became

Well, what we are

Bicker hard and far,

Maybe we’ll discover-

You, me, we are different,

You, me, we can’t beat it,

You and me, we’re worse off than we seemed

You strummed your guitar, leaving the song and the story unfinished.

“That was amazing, unfortunately, I don’t think we have space for it in our show.” He smiled. “Someone will contact you about using Ice & Fire.”

The panel along with the rest of the room, packed up their things and started to leave until just you and the main cast remained. You started to walk out of the room when someone called out.

“Y/N! Wait!”

It was Charlie.

You looked at him, “Yes?”

“What the fuck was that song? Who’d you write it about?” He asked, like a love struck boy.

“I wrote it about you, duh!” You watched his face turn into one of- slight happiness? You laughed and started to walk away. Of course, he would think it’s about him, but why would it be? “Fuck you, Charlie. I didn’t think you were that self-centered!”

“I’m not!”He countered, and you stopped walking to look at him.

“Really? Cause only a self-centered person would ask me that… Or, do you have a crush on me? Aww, that’s so sweet!” You mocked. “See you around, lover boy.”

I really hope you liked that chapter! Let me know what you thought!

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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “Creation”

Happy Saturday, everyone! Oh man, oh man, oh man. I think I'll need to steer clear of the general RWBY tags this week, simply because I know the sort of responses I'll see to this episode. From smug celebration at Ironwood's downfall, to bad takes about what makes us human, this episode is a petri dish of sensitive material handled insensitively.

Let’s unpack it, shall we?

We open on an action that feels like a summery of the last three volumes: a grimm attacks an airship from the front, no doubt killing its pilot, while the other grimm conveniently ignore our heroes, no masking in sight. The group looks a little sad at the destruction around them, but ultimately ignore it because they have bigger, heroic things to do. I could write a whole, additional essay on how the huntsmen code — to protect the people — has been warped and abandoned by our protagonists in their effort to do what they think is right. It's a tale that might have been compelling if only RT knew they were writing it.

We get a shot of Atlas drones unloading the bomb before one is taken out, presumably by Qrow and Robyn. Segueing to Ironwood and the Ace Ops, they're waiting for Penny to arrive, the former carrying a massive gun presumably capable of capturing her. Despite the horror we saw on their faces last episode at the realization that Ironwood would kill Marrow for speaking up, it seems that now the Ace Ops are entirely in agreement with these measures. A week ago the implication was that they fell back in line out of fear, but now Harriet talks passionately about "putting down" the group if they were stupid enough to accompany Penny. "The General gave his terms." Vine sighs at this, but doesn't actively disagree. He's just "retracing the steps that led us here."

So, congratulations on introducing four new characters, not bothering to develop any of them, killing one off while ignoring Qrow's hand in that, and having the other three become all, "Yeah! Mass murder is a perfect solution!" off screen. Marrow is the only one with something resembling development and, as covered in these recaps, that's been pretty badly executed too.

Ironwood sends them to deal with Robyn and Qrow after Winter reappears to "assist" him. That gets quotation marks because most viewers at this point have realized that she's who our two birbs spotted in the elevator. Winter isn't on Ironwood's side anymore, she's just skillfully clearing the field for the final attack. Indeed, we get a moment where she hesitantly brings up the bomb and Ironwood responds that he hopes she's not going to try and talk him out of it. No. Winter doesn't think that's possible. This was her final attempt at peace.

One of the reasons why I think I'll stick to my own blog for a while is because the fandom has a tendency to paint broad personality traits as evil when applied to some characters, yet simultaneously heroic when applied to others, when really it's about how that those traits are used. What I mean is, I've seen a lot of Ironwood critical posts that emphasize how stubborn he is. He thinks he's right and he won't back down. He wont listen to others. He's going through with this plan and if anyone tries to stop him? That's their mistake. Totally evil, right? Except, this is the exact same behavior Ruby displays, particularly in Volumes 6 and 7. She was stubborn about stealing from Argus and continuing the fight to the point where it endangered her and her teammates, to say nothing of the rest of the city. She refused to listen to Qrow, or Ironwood, or the Ace Ops, loudly announcing that she was right about, well, everything. If they didn't agree with her, the options were to leave the group entirely, or fight her. The actual difference here is that the writers have taken Ironwood to an extreme, one that's incredibly easy to understand as bad because it is bad: bombing Mantle has no defense. Ruby pulls the exact same nonsense, it's just not to that same extreme and her actions are followed by scenes that are meant to make us forgive her: a sad look because she didn't mean to get a city attacked by a leviathan grimm, a cry on the staircase because she didn't mean to risk the lives of an entire kingdom... even though she did. Ironwood is the bad guy because he's been written to take specific, OOC actions like shooting unarmed kids. He's not the bad guy because when other characters go, "Don't do this" his response is, "I have to." Because that's been Ruby's motto ever since she "had" to use the Lamp to rip Ozpin’s life story away. RWBY introduced those extreme actions of shooting the youngest in the group (for no reason) and threatening to bomb a city (for no reason) or shooting a councilman (for no reason) because when you remove those you've got a man who looks exactly like our hero. Ironwood's arc has been peppered with these confusing, unpersuasive actions because if you just keep the story as him stubbornly keeping to a plan he thinks will save the world, you're left with the reminder that all Ruby has done lately is stubbornly keep to plans she thinks will save the world. This moment with Winter just highlights how ill thought out Ironwood's descent has been because he does everything Ruby does... with a few, tacked on, “and randomly shoots people!” moments to ensure we understand that he’s definitely evil. No comparison to our heroes here, folks!

Ironwood is a bad guy now. That’s certain, but he was made that way so the story never had to grapple with the question of what that means for Ruby if we really start condemning things like lying, secrets, stubbornness, or endangering others for the greater good. Well then damn, if we strip away the hypocrisy then she might not be a good person after all. Or the people she’s simplistically labeled as bad might not be the devils Ruby claims they are.

But that’s a level of nuance RWBY would rather pretend doesn’t exist.

All of which is highlighted by Ironwood’s reaction to "Penny." He sighs and sags over the gun, immediately putting it aside. With his hand on her shoulder, Ironwood tells her she's "done the right thing." Precisely the same way Ruby would lower Crescent Rose and give someone a smile when they decided to fall in line with her.

Which, of course, is the moment when Emerald reveals herself, dispelling the Penny illusion and revealing Team JNPR The Second behind her. She gives a quip about it feeling "weird" to do the right thing before disappearing.

From there the action picks up fast. I really enjoyed this battle simply from a choreography and energy standpoint. It gets the blood pumping, Ironwood's hand-to-hand is spectacular — especially that moment against Ren — and the group actually displays teamwork for the first time in what feels like forever, all of them needed to land a hit on Ironwood. As always, out of the context of the rest of the show it feels and looks great. My primary issue is that we get this fantastic fight against Ironwood. Not Salem, not Cinder, not Watts (like last volume when Ironwood was still a hero), not even Emerald as a means of transitioning from murderous villain to the group's best bud. No, what's arguably the best action sequence in the volume thus far goes to beating up the guy they betrayed from the start. There's no catharsis for me here, only frustration as we watch Ironwood stand in shock as Winter powers up Nora — who's fine now, I guess — and she slams her hammer into his face.

It never should have come to this and when a good character is done so dirty, their downfall doesn't evoke the emotions the writers are looking for. Watching Ironwood fall doesn't generate feelings of victory, or even tragedy at a course of events others were powerless to stop. It's just frustration at watching years worth of bad writing, sprinkled with fantastic ideas that never go anywhere.

Oscar gets a few hits in, Ironwood snatches his cane, and just as he's about to throw a punch, Winter arrives with the most dramatic sword slash I've ever seen.

Ironwood's aura breaks and he falls, unconscious. We cut to an image of a droid's head separated from its body, one of Robyn's arrows through its skull. That doesn't have meaning or anything.

I suppose I should be grateful they didn't rip Ironwood's arm away during the fight, or outright kill him, though I'm still expecting him to die before the end of the volume.

Hmm. Wouldn't that be something? If after Salem's arrival, freezing cold, a Hound attack, grimm soup, a giant whale, a massive army, and a hack ending in self-destruction, the one character who actually dies is Ironwood.

It's looking more and more likely.

Honestly, beyond all the obvious, what's so frustrating about this fight is that characters are only now using their impressive abilities to their fullest. Emerald creates an entire fantasy of what's happening and then straight up disappears, but she only does a half-assed version of that when fighting against Penny. (And really, she put more effort into helping the heroes she just joined over Cinder, the woman she's been obsessed with since the start?) Marrow refuses to use "Stay" against a group they wanted to peacefully arrest because that's just too horrible an act, I guess, but he'll do it on his own teammates the second Qrow and Robyn don’t want to fight.

This is what I mean when I say the rules of the world bend to assist the protagonists in absurd ways. It's not nearly as egregious as Amity suddenly being up and running, but the fact that characters become substantially more powerful while fighting for the protagonists than they do against them is still a significant problem.

So Ironwood is down and out. As much as I hated watching that and didn't necessarily want more, am I the only one who felt like it was... a bit lackluster? I mean, the action was great, yes, but relatively short. There was no dialogue, such as another delve into the moral questions that led to this fight in the first place. There certainly wasn’t any hesitance against fighting a former ally. (Again, we’re meant to believe that the Ace Ops won because they just couldn’t bear to fight the group seriously, but every former ally here is capable of wailing on Ironwood without a single pause or pained look?) Ironwood just skillfully blocks for a while, is blindsided by Winter's betrayal, and then falls unconscious. Given that we learn he and Jacques will be evacuated after the rest of the kingdom, it's possible he'll escape somehow and we'll get a fight 2.0, but if not that feels like a rather tame end to the guy forced into the antagonist seat. Plus, what was the point of having Qrow frothing at the mouth to kill him this whole volume? I never wanted that to happen, I'm glad it hasn't, but I'm nevertheless left to ask why we bothered with that eleven episode side plot if we were going to erase it with one sentence from Robyn about Qrow being better than this. If that's all it took, let them work through Qrow's irrational anger while sitting around in a cell.

Winter tells the group to move onto "phase two" which is when we're treated to a flashback. We return to the ending of the last episode, with Ruby realizing that opening the vault is an option. Jaune, all smiles, goes, "We never considered using what's inside!"

This is what I mean about no consequences! This is what I mean about it all being a meaningless circle that ends with undeserved praise for the group! We started this horror show with Ironwood going, "We don't have a plan to protect the people, so I'm going to take what people we do have to safety" and the group going, "We don't have a plan either, but we're going to stop you implementing your plan because it's not perfect, risking a kingdom's worth of lives in the process." Now, the group has used two plans, one of which two characters knew about at the start and another they could have devised with the information they had. Oscar and Ozpin's, "We have an all powerful magical blast in our cane" and the group's "What if we used the Staff for something other than raising Atlas?" are both things that could have come up in the office debate. These were both always on the table! Instead, Ruby grew furious over the mere thought of cutting their losses, betrayed Ironwood again, attacked his people, denounced him to the world, and then two days later goes, "Oh wait! We could do something now that we could have easily done before if we hadn't made a needless enemy!"

Everyone realizes how much worse they made things, right? Turning against Ironwood, bringing everyone left in Mantle directly under Atlas, sitting around while an army was devoured, drawing it out until Penny was hacked... all of it would have been avoided if the group had thought and discussed things for a few minutes, not jumping straight to violently resisting what Ironwood came up with first. "We never considered..." Ruby says. Yeah, you didn't, except that's not something to smile about. The group made the situation a thousand times worse with their reaction when they could have just magically evacuated the kingdom from the start. “Maybe we could use it to save Penny and get everyone in Atlas and Mantle back to safety." Nothing has changed! They had this ability the whole time! Nothing about the last twelve episodes led them here, they just randomly thought of it after RT had padded the volume with needless drama. Considering that they're heading to Vacuo now, we could have just made this the finale of Volume 7 instead: big fight with Ironwood, revelation, get everyone evacuated while Salem attacks, leave her behind, then Volume 8 begins in Vacuo with the group knowing Salem is out there looking for them. This entire volume has been pointless. What did they accomplish?

Oscar got kidnapped and beat up, Nora was scarred, Ruby and Yang realized horrible things about Summer, and the whole world is panicking about a witch. Good things are... Ren and Ruby unlocked some semblance stuff? Weiss loves her brother again after he proved himself useful to her? Great work, team.

So this one moment makes everything they've done up to this point useless and, of course, once thought up the plan goes off without a hitch. Note that the summary of this episode says, "It's risky, dangerous, and nearly impossible — but it's the only plan they've got." Nearly impossible? That's a whole lot of talk for a plan that was implemented perfectly.

There is, admittedly, one snag, but one that is likewise made meaningless just seconds later. We'll get to that.

We see Winter call Weiss who also smiles at hearing from her sister. Obviously interactions like the group's with Emerald are the bigger concern, but it's still an issue that no one reacts as they should to people reappearing in their lives. Rather, RWBY continually confuses audience knowledge with character knowledge. We know Winter is on their side now, but Weiss hasn't a clue. Last she saw, she and Winter were agreeing to head down different paths. She has no reason to think her sister isn't loyal to Ironwood, so why isn't the group treating this call with suspicion? What if it's Ironwood trying to mess with them through a presumably safe party? I swear to god, with any consistency in the story this group would be dead ten times over because their decisions are so stupid. Oscar decides to believe in the guy currently beating him to a pulp, the group decides to trust a villain over a flawed ally, and now they see Ironwood’s second calling and are like, “Great, big sister Winter is checking in!” There’s a difference between a hopeful story filled with second chances and characters whose reliance on the narrative bending to assist them makes them come across as insanely naive.

None of which even touches on characters forgetting that other characters are presumably dead. Ironwood shot Oscar off the edge of Atlas, but doesn't react to learning he was kidnapped, or when he shows up to the fight. Thanks to Marrow's comment, Winter thinks YJOR have perished in the whale, but also has no reaction to them appearing to help with this plan. Absolutely nothing is followed up on.

We then get a flashback within the flashback (fun) of Winter — shock — not arresting Marrow. It's precisely as I assumed, with Marrow angrily asking why she hit him and Winter responding with, “Because you were about to get killed if I didn’t do something!” As I said last recap, I feel like I should let the marginalized groups lead this discussion, but I do want to add that no matter how well intentioned — or strategic, as I mentioned last time — the imagery itself is still harmful. No matter the context, we were still left with white woman Winter putting her knee on black man Marrow's back to arrest him, and it’s an image that everyone in the U.S. should be familiar with the horror of. Far more of a problem than the (presumed) ignorance of this scene is, I think, the choice to make Winter entirely unrepentant. I think some of this discomfort could have been alleviated if RT had written Winter as apologetic, contrite that it came to that and asking Marrow to understand that she only did it as a means of assisting him. Asking his forgiveness. Instead, we get this

So what, the only emotion we have room for is gratitude that Winter beat him up? Yikes.

As a lighter side note, I find the animation here unintentionally hilarious. Winter's assistive device makes her shoulders look too high, making this gesture more, "Woman exaggeratedly pouts about not getting ice cream for dinner" and less, "Woman sternly closes off during a disagreement about saving lives and betraying their general." Gotta find our humor where we can, right?

What's intentional, but far less funny, is the needless animation to show us that, yes, Marrow is peering at Winter calling Weiss. Oh, the shenanigans.

The elevator opens where Qrow and Robyn spot them. "Speaking of help," Winter says, as if she has any reason to believe Qrow didn't kill Clover. He and Robyn lower their weapons a bit, as if they have any reason to believe Winter and Marrow aren't still loyal to Ironwood. Would it really be so hard to have Winter immediately throw up her hands in the face of their almost-attack, blurting that she's not their enemy and needs their help, please listen? Again, RWBY can't remember which characters know what, let alone what their motivations and reactions should be.

We then enter the third part of the flashback where everyone piles into the Schnee dining room and discusses doing the things they could have done from the start. I'm metaphorically banging my head against that table. In RWBY's favor though, we also get a long shot of Jaune continuing to boost Penny’s aura.

Though it's only one of many issues, just the other day I asked, "Hey, why has Jaune always needed to hold onto the person he's assisting, but now suddenly he can touch Penny once and the boost remains?" It still doesn't explain why he was letting go before/why him needing to boost her continuously didn't put a hard time limit on their plan — not that Mantle's hour limit meant a thing — but at least they're showing more of that here.

Oscar notes that Atlas has enough gravity dust that it won't fall immediately when they use the Relic, but they will have to move fast to ensure no one is underneath. Yeah, like all the civilians you put there. He also cautions that the Staff isn't a "magic wand" that they can just wave to make all their problems go away... even though that's precisely what they're going to do. Ozpin gets some lines that aren't apologies or followed by attacks — hallelujah! — about how the Staff's spirit is a "character" and requires that you be able to precisely explain anything you want him to make. Blueprints, examples, a firm knowledge of how this will be accomplished — all of it is required to actually get what you're after. That's a cool limitation. It's just too bad we didn't know about it episodes ago, forcing our heroes to find ways to meet those requirements. Instead, they already have everything ready to go the moment they learn about it: Penny has her own schematics and Whitley apparently has knowledge of the entire kingdom after sending some ships out. Normally I'd go, "Really?" but I'm still just struck by how much good he's done compared to everyone else in this room. Your show is seriously broken when the side character the writers didn't even want the audience to like until a few episodes ago is more active, mature, and sensible than the heroes.

From there we see the group implementing the plan. They fly up through the hole Oscar left, straight to the vault. Penny opens it without any trouble and Ruby uses her speed to grab the Relic and stop time, halting her self-termination. I do like that combination of skill and their knowledge of how this magic works. That felt like a smart move. What's interesting though is that the Relic appears to stop time in the entire kingdom. We see people in Mantle and Atlas slowing to a halt too. I assume no one remembers that happening after time restarts, otherwise people would be freaked out by suddenly being frozen in place.

Wouldn't that have been cool though? The group often takes a while to use the Relics, either deciding what they need, or watching Jinn's information, so what if you had a population that blinks and suddenly, from their perspective, half an hour has passed? How long might Ozpin have sat on his knees after Jinn told him he wasn't able to defeat Salem? How long was that space frozen? We could have had a world built around rumors and fairy tales. Not the random stories Ozpin brings up to make a point and that we never hear about again, but tiny details that foreshadow these revelations. A Beacon where the kids tell each other spooky stories of people suddenly losing time, once a whole day. The wives, sisters, daughters, and nieces who disappear, or wake up one day with horrifying, unnatural powers. We see magic influence the world around it, but we've seen very little of the world reacting to that influence. The one time I can think of is Blake reading a book about "a man with two souls," the fiction clearly inspired by knowledge of Ozpin. And indeed, it felt great to recognize that as a significant detail and then be proven right years later as the lore was revealed. We could have gotten so much more of that if RWBY was better planned out.

I'm getting off track though. As time stops we see a series of images: Ironwood being led to a cell with Jacques, Penny succumbing to her hack, Team JNPR The Second preparing to contact the kingdom about what's going on. Then everyone is distracted by the giant, blue, buff Ambrosius who comes out of the Staff.

...there's a lot of innuendo in that last statement lol. At least RWBY is committed to the crazy design they chose? I was never particularly comfortable with the image of characters gaping up at a giant, naked woman in chains, so it's nice to balance that a bit with an equally giant, naked dude in chains.

From here things get confusing. In all honesty, I'm not sure if this is another moment where RWBY is trying to pass off a retcon as the group being brilliant, or if I, as an individual, simply didn't follow the logic. I won't bother to rehash the slow, meandering way that Ruby reveals their plan — that certainly didn't help with the clarity. Not in an episode where we didn’t even know these rules ahead of time — but it boils down to this:

The moment they have Ambrosius create something new Atlas will start to fall. Two of his creations can't exist at the same time.

He needs clear instructions about what he's making in order to create it.

The group has brought him Penny's schematics so that he understands how she's built.

They want, specifically, "a new version of her... using her exact robot parts."

They can't just create an exact duplicate of Penny because that would carry the virus with it.

They can't create an exact duplicate without the virus because that Penny would cease to exist as soon as they used Ambrosius to make an evacuation plan instead.

So they essentially want Ambrosius to create a new Penny by removing all the robot parts from the Penny that currently exists, carrying the virus with them, and leaving only the human parts of Penny behind: her aura/soul. Then, the purely robot version is destroyed when Ambrosius creates something new.

Except... this new Penny, this human Penny, still needed a human body. That's what Ambrosius created and that's the snag I don't understand. They want a version of Penny that's just her aura, just her soul, but that soul still needs something to be housed in. Ambrosius himself notes that. At first I thought the group would just have some wisp-like version of Penny they'd have to find a new body for — perhaps leading to a new one for Ozpin too — but she's just... given a human body when he takes the technology away, something she absolutely didn't have before. That is Ambrosius' creation. That is what should have disappeared along with the removed parts of Penny, leaving only her soul — what Ambrosius didn't touch — behind. Instead, the plot oh so conveniently has Penny get a new body for free and it's untouched as they move onto the next task.

Ruby drops a casual line about Ambrosius not being able to kill, or destroy, or something, which I think is meant to be the justification here. The rule (which, again, we JUST learned) about not killing anyone supersedes the rule of two creations not allowed to exist, allowing Penny to stick around. But even if that’s true, it’s a load of bull. What, does the magic think no one in an entire city might die if the floating mechanism is removed and it plummets to the ground? Ambrosius didn’t say, “Sorry, can’t stop floating Atlas because thousands of people are still here and they’ll die if I create something new,” but we’re supposed to believe the group skated by on, “Sorry, can’t destroy the last creation like everything else because there’s a single person still using that body and she’ll die if I create something new”?

Seriously, did I miss something? Or is this another, "Amity is ready because the group needs it" situation? The rule of creations ceasing to exist is bent because the group needs to have their friend around. Ambrosius is certainly enthusiastically complimentary, saying how "smart" the group is and that they've "done their homework," but I'm not so sure. It feels like a moment where the show is (once again) insistent that the group is far more talented and brilliant than their actions actually imply. It's only the rules of the world twisting and turning that allows for their success. To say nothing of how the episode dropped all these rules on the viewer in a ten minute info dump, ensuring we didn’t have any time to think about them before the deed was done.

It doesn't add up for me and honestly, even putting that aside? I hate this. I absolutely despise it. Look, if it turns out this really does make sense then props to the group for coming up with that plan. Our snag aside, the rest is a legitimately well thought out wish. I don't have a problem with the execution so much as the message. I've been saying since Volume 7 that RWBY has done Penny a disservice in terms of her "real girl" narrative. Whereas before we had a firm message that you don't need "squishy guts" to be human, to be real, Volume 8 continued to carry us further and further into the idea that it is necessary. That Penny's body is entirely inhuman, something to hate, but at least her soul is human and good. That's what the virus arc taught us: your terrible, technological body might be betraying you, but hold onto the parts of you that are really human. I hated that too, but I never thought RWBY would go this far. They made Penny fully human and went, “THIS is the version that always should have existed.”

And this isn't just me reading into the implications. It's right there in the text. Blake says that they're looking for “Penny, the girl who’s always been there underneath." Meaning, underneath the metal. The girl exists trapped in the robot body. Yang holds up her arm and says that the metal is only "extra," it's not really who you are.

That gets into two perspectives on disability that RWBY just doesn't have the nuance for: what's an integral and celebratory part of one person's existence can be seen as something separate and discomforting to another. Though there are many people with disabilities who would happily cure themselves with a magic Staff if given the chance, there are just as many who say no, this is a part of my identity. I don't want to change, I just want the world to accommodate my existence. However, RWBY takes a hard stance here, saying that any metal in your body is intrinsically bad. We didn’t use to have this take, but now the show has embraced it. Blake says the real Penny is trapped in there. Yang's words implies that she'd get rid of this "extra" bit of her if possible. Mercury with his metal legs is the enemy. Ironwood with half his metal body is the enemy. Whereas once difference was truly accepted, now it's shunned and fixed whenever possible. Those who can't be fixed, like Yang, must simply deal with the lot they've been dealt, reassuring themselves that the metal isn't really them. But Penny? Penny they can fix.

So they do and the very first thing Penny does is hug Ruby, exclaiming, “Do hugs always make you feel this warm inside? Wow. More!” and proceeds to hug all the others.

What's the underlying message there? Penny didn't understand hugs before this moment. She never experienced the "warmth" of them while an android, despite the fact that here warmth is entirely metaphorical and has nothing to do with a literally cold body. RWBY really went and said that the "real girl” android was never actually real at all — not as real as she could be — because it's only when she's given "squishy guts" that she understands the true happiness of a hug.

Wow.

I mean seriously, wow.

Never-mind that, you know, we've seen that happiness and warmth since she was first introduced.

RWBY is really rewriting all the core themes introduced in Volumes 1-3 and it sucks. The show is absolutely the worse for it.

To say nothing of all the other disservices to Penny's character here. There's all this buildup about whether she'll still be the same Penny once the wish is complete, but of course she is. We wouldn't want to have Penny struggle when she becomes something other than what she's always been, would we? After all, it took Yang an entire volume to work through the shock of a metal arm, but taking away a metal body for a human one is in no way traumatic. Having a normal, human body is intrinsically a good thing! Of course Penny accepts it with nothing but smiles. Becoming human is celebratory, but becoming more machine is a horror.

She gets to watch her body self-destruct, glitching out and collapsing in front of her. But again, nothing to unpack there that can't be covered with a hand over her mouth.

There's no discussion of whether Penny still has the Maiden powers, or whether a wish like that would mess with the transfer in any way. How did the group know this action wouldn't register as a clear-cut death, forcing the power out of her and into someone new? Obviously they couldn’t know, but no one even thought to bring it up?

And the entire time they're formulating their evacuation plan, there's no talk of whether these portals will appear before everyone currently alive in the kingdom. I mean, if they do then Ironwood and Jacques can just waltz through and escape into Vacuo. If they don’t, then Maria and Pietro don't necessarily have a way out. We still don't know if they're stuck floating in Amity, or if Amity crashed, or if they made their way back to Mantle or Atlas. More importantly, the characters don't know. I have no problem with RWBY keeping that a surprise until the finale, but I absolutely take issue with Pietro's daughter walking through a portal, seemingly not to care whether her father is going to make it out too.

It's been the same with Qrow and his nieces' relationships. The show is good at insisting that these families love each other because they hug and smile while on screen together, but when shit is actually going down, none of them care about pesky things like disappearances, arrests, or “The last time I saw you, you were with an old woman on a damaged station after a villain attack, potentially stranded in deadly cold if life support failed.”

So yeah, this entire arc with Penny has been a disaster. From throwing away her framing subplot, to giving her a virus that did absolutely nothing, to giving her the Maiden powers which she's also done nothing with, to erasing her android status for a “She's really human now” message, Penny has been done dirty by the show these last two volumes. Not nearly to the extent Ironwood has, but still. At this point I wish they'd just kept her dead dead. Why do I want her back when that resurrection produces no reaction, her conflicts lead nowhere, and one of the core things that made Penny Penny has now been magically erased?

I've been saying for weeks that killing Penny off and keeping Penny around each had serious downsides attached, yet I never expected RWBY to do BOTH.

Also, I'm warding off any, "But Pinocchio was made into a real boy too" defenses. RWBY is not Pinocchio. Penny is not Pinocchio. I thought the allusion was going to be the Pinocchio inspired girl heading into the whale, not the show forcing the exact plotline — down to a blue, magical creature — onto a character whose entire journey has been about accepting herself as an android. Congratulations, RT. You just obliterated years of work.

Again, if you'd like an example of how to do this far better:

As Penny's character falls apart, Atlas shakes, alerting Jaune and the other that a new wish has been granted. Jaune pecks at the screen and realizes "That did, uh, something…?” but doesn’t realize that there's a giant, red "LIVE" up in the corner.

Jaune tries to warn the entire kingdom about their plan, but what he actually says is

“Atlas is falling, but — !”

And then the communications cut out.

Watts, perhaps?

Our heroes are really good at saying things that make large populaces panic, huh? This is the one (1) snag in their "impossible" plan, but as said above, it doesn't amount to anything. We get a shot of Nora, horrified at the thought of kingdom-wide communications being down, but literally seconds later Team RWBY has made portals appear that everyone can walk through. So... why do we care about communications? More importantly, why does the show try to make us care? So much time is spent getting the viewer invested in problems that never come to mean anything.

Including the problem of Salem herself.

Because the group successfully creates that evacuation plan. This is it. Everyone is leaving while Salem still reforms.

Yang asks if they can use the vaults themselves as a single point for everyone to go to and Ambrosius agrees. So everyone is going to pile into the Vacuo vault that can only be opened by an unknown Maiden? They're going to put an entire kingdom's worth of people, including their enemies, into the vault where the Relic of Destruction is? Yeah, that's great. Prior to this — like if this had been the plan at the end of Volume 7 — I would have 100% agreed that these risks are better than death by Salem/grimm/cold. Now though, Oscar as axed Salem for an unknown length of time, the cold is having no impact on the civilians outside, and the grimm only attack background military personnel that supposedly no one cares about. They couldn't have spent another few minutes (especially with time stopped!) to figure out a means of getting to Vacuo that doesn't involve revealing and providing access to the location of a super secret vault? To say nothing of what they're going to do if Salem wakes up and snags one of those portals for herself. Two kingdoms for the price of one!

But that's what they're going with. Weiss gives Ambrosius a schematic of the kingdom, I guess, and he makes branching pathways appear with numerous portals for everyone to step through. They'll enter through one and, when they exit another, will be in Vacuo. Easy peasy, right? Especially since Ambrosius doesn't seem to have any limitations about how often his power is used. Is it three creations every 100 years like Jinn? We're not told, at least not to my recollection. However, I was expecting there to be a waiting period, that they'd fix Penny, go to evacuate the kingdom, and learn that sorry, I can't make another creation just yet. It feels like the sort of shit move these beings would pull — "Don't cry to me when it's not what you wanted" — it would have been another commentary on the group's insistence on putting friends over the people's safety (like demanding the Ace Ops not bomb the whale because of Oscar), and crucially, would have kept the action in Atlas. Isn't that what this volume is? The battle for and potential destruction of the Kingdom of Atlas? We have two episodes left and, unless something unexpected happens, we're moving that action to Vacuo. Why?

Meanwhile, Penny's corpse is just chilling in the background 😬

While all this is going on, Winter reassures Jacques that he and Ironwood will be evacuated too, though she makes it clear saving him was Weiss' idea. It checks out, considering Weiss is the one who turned her father's arrest into a joke last volume. Winter still takes his abuse seriously.

The group prepares to leave with a celebratory, "We did it!" from Weiss. I'm still banging my head against that dining room table. Before they can pass through the portal though, Ambrosius leaves them with one, dire warning: "Do not fall."

In any other story a line like that is a neon sign announcing to the audience that someone will absolutely fall, and maybe they will, but RWBY has dodged consequences so often I wouldn't be surprised if this was merely another way to string us along. Remember all the hype surrounding Salem? The cold combined with her army and magic? How she was going to decimate Atlas and leave our group broken in a Fall 2.0?

I mean, we still have two episodes left. Forty minutes of content. Salem might still decimate them, especially since something has to happen in the finale. But god, it's a problem that we've come this far without a payoff. Salem randomly decided not to attack anyone, was stopped by a weapon added in solely for this purpose, and now the whole kingdom is being evacuated with a plan the group could have used at the start. This volume really is meaningless.

“We go to vacuo and hope we’ve thought of everything” they say as the camera zooms in on Cinder's smiling face. For the second week in a row.

Bingo time!

Winter betrayed Ironwood, the group used the Staff of Creation, and I'm axing Maria on behalf of Pietro. You can't have the guy's daughter become human — after he was killing himself to give her his aura?? — and magically walk to Vacuo, not knowing if he's even survived since she last saw him, and expect me to think he hasn't been forgotten. Same with Maria. Has the group mentioned her since Amity cut out, notably for reasons they couldn’t explain? Of course not. Did they care to find out what happened? Of course not. I have no doubt they'll both re-appear in the next two episodes, Pietro crying over how perfect his girl is now and Maria congratulating the group on their actions, but we're still marking it.

This is the ugliest thing I’ve ever created, I hope you all are enjoying it :D

Another week, another couple feet added to the hole we’re digging. I know I keep saying I have no idea what's going to happen next... but I have no idea what's going to happen next. A Vacuo ending was not in the cards, not outside of them miraculously showing up in ships. Maybe they have been on their way to Atlas (somehow...) and will arrive precisely when everyone has left! Anything is possible at this point.

See you next Saturday, everyone. Hold on until then lol. 💜

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby volume 8 #mymetas #rwby recaps #rwby creation

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novantinuum · 3 years

Note

Hi, I was just wondering if you had ever thought about what would have happened in your story "Hollowed Moon" if you had continued it. I always thought it was such an interesting setup that could have gone in so many different directions. And there really aren't other stories focusing on Stevonnie and Spinel, so it was unique!

Hiya!

So, I do have some half-written, half-plotted out material to share. I gave this story some consideration the other day, and came to the decision that I don't have the desire to finish it out, alas- I have far too many other active WIPs to add it to the list. There's a few good reasons why I discontinued it, anyways... intimidation over the huge surge of attention it was getting back in 2019, some rude comments from overzealous Spinel fans, (I know everyone isn't like this, but a certain segment of the Spinel side of the SU fandom kinda burned me over time, hhh), and a future chapter containing a sensitive topic that I wasn't in a good headspace to write about at the time.

But! Anyways! Below the cut is all the existing material I have for Hollowed Moon past chapter 14, consisting of a mixture of descriptions, sketchy dialogue, and prose. It honestly feels nice to finally be able to put this story to an official rest.

Chapter 15

“I... I saw her.”

“Who-?”

“I saw Pink Diamond. I saw you, in this exact garden, in a dream. I- it was like I was experiencing everything through her. She explained your game, tapped your nose and told you to smile, then warped away—“

“That’s it, that’s what happened, almost exactly! But how could you even know that, I never—“

“I don’t know,” they blurt out. “I have empathic abilities, and sometimes that makes dreaming a little weird, but I have no idea how or why I saw any of this.”

[Pause for Stevonnie to think]

“Spinel, I’m so, so sorry,” they whisper brokenly. “But I think... she left you here.”

“What...?”

“She said she’d return, but before she warped away she whispered goodbye, like she didn’t actually intend to make good on that promise. She was lying to you,” they choke out, voice thick.

“No. No,” she says in clear denial, “no she’s not. She can’t be! She told me she’d come back! I can wait! I just have to wait—“

“But she’s not! She... she can’t, because Pink Diamond is gone. She- she was shattered, Spinel. Five thousand years ago, on the Earth. I- I should’ve told you this from the beginning, and I didn’t, and I- I’m so, so sorry—! But she left you behind, and now she’s never coming back.”

[Silence. Tears brim in Spinel’s eyes. Her eyes grow dark, pained, and then she glares at Stevonnie with such venom it almost knocks them backwards in alarm. ]

“NO!” she screams, tears streaming down her faded pink cheeks.

[She tears her feet up from the roots and runs away, using her arms like an orangutan to vault herself forward super fast so Stevonnie can’t catch her.]

___

Chapter 16

AN: Content warning for self-shattering attempt. Part of the reason why I had to stop writing this story at the time. I considered pushing the plot another way, but it didn't feel authentic to how I believed this scenario would play out for Spinel when she didn't have a direct target for her anger. Without someone to actively be jealous and upset AT, I could only imagine her breaking inwards instead of outwards, feeling that she's utterly failed in her life's purpose. Nothing more than a description for this chapter... and it'd be a short one.

[When Stevonnie finds her, she’s smashing her fists against her gem in her sheer anguish. She’s already cracked it. She’s glitching. It looks terribly painful. She’s about to strike her gem again when Stevonnie intervenes.]

___

Chapter 17

[Post timely intervention. Spinel is still cracked at this moment, though... her form glitching as she cries.]

“I was... her best friend,” she cries, fat, glistening tears streaming down her cheeks. “I was supposed to make her happy! Why wasn’t she happy? Why didn’t she come back?“

[Spinel reasoning that maybe if Pink came back for her, she wouldn’t have been shattered in the first place]

“What did I do wrong?” she whispers hoarsely, gazing pleadingly into Stevonnie’s eyes. “Wha- what am I doing? Why do I wanna hurt myself so badly?”

“Shh, now,” they reply, tears of their own brimming at the crease of their eyes, and pull Spinel’s head to their chest. “I’ve got you...”

___

Chapter 18

They know their throat is tight, and their voice scratchy. They know they’ve never sung this song in front of another living being, since it’s something personal they composed alone on one of their late nights back on Earth, thinking about all the difficult days Steven and Connie have had to face over the months. Pair this with their active crying, and there’s no way their singing will be anything pretty.

But pretty doesn’t matter right now.

Stevonnie opens their lips, and— clutching the broken hearted Gem close, rhythmically rocking with her back and forth— lets the wandering melody emerge from within.

“I guess I have to face That in this awful place I shouldn’t show a trace Of doubt...”

“But pulled against the grain I feel a little pain That I would rather do Without...”

“I’d rather be Free, free Free...”

[Hoarse, Spinel starts singing with them.]

“I’d rather be Free, free Free...”

“Free, free Free...”

“From here...”

[Stevonnie holds her tight while crying, their tears healing it back up.]

___

Chapter 19

AN: Don't have anything but a single bit of dialogue in this chapter note- I'm assuming I intended it as being a good few hours after the events of chapters 16-18... when Spinel has calmed down a little and has a moment to reflect on the upsetting news she's just received.

“I think... I always knew,” she says, voice hoarse. “In a way. It was so obvious how she felt about me.

___

Chapter ?

AN: From here on out, the plot hasn't been split into individual chapters.

[At some point shortly after chapter 19, Lars and his crew locate Stevonnie in the garden, and pick them and Spinel up. The next few bits of dialogue and description takes place on the ship.]

Rutile twins: “I haven’t heard of Spinels being produced in over five millennia.” “Me neither!”

Rhodonite: “Yeah, I heard they stopped making them entirely after the rebellion on Pink’s colony.”

[A bit of overwhelming conversation later, no one really noticing Spinel's conflicted emotional response to so many Gems hovering around her at once.]

Padparadscha: “I predict that you’re both going to make Spinel feel very uncomfortable aboard this ship.”

Rhodonite: “I’m sorry, we don’t exactly meet new Gems every century.”

Rutile twins: “Yes!” “It’s just been us until we met our captain!”

Fluorite: “Our new huuuuman friend helped us escape the tunnels on Homeworld. Now... we’re slooowly making our way back... to Earth.”

Spinel: “Earth?? You’re going to Pink’s world? But why? I heard she... was shattered.”

___

[Spinel feeling a sense of kinship with the idea that there’s other Gems who didn’t serve their rightful purpose and are now escaping their life on Homeworld to be free of that. Because now, without her Diamond, since she was unable to keep her happy, she’s an Off Color too. She failed her given purpose same as them.]

[Discussion of Earth, and the rebellion, and how there’s Gems living free there. And how Pink’s colony was siphoning life away, and that’s what these Gems were fighting to protect. Stevonnie points out all the plants and wildlife that used to live in the garden, and asks her if she felt happier when it was around. Spinel says yes. Stevonnie says that this is what the Diamonds are destroying, with each lifeless colony they forge. Everywhere they go, dead wildlife lies in their wake.]

Spinel: “I... guess I never thought of it that way.”

[(Stevonnie adds...) And while they’re very sorry for the personal connection there, and can’t imagine how painful that must be, that’s why Pink Diamond was shattered.]

[Spinel is given an open choice... Lars gives the invitation to stay with him and the Off Colors, and Stevonnie offers for her to come with them back to Earth. It's not a hard decision for her in the end, though. She's always dreamed of seeing what was once Pink’s planet, ever since she heard the Diamonds bequeath it to her.]

___

Stevonnie: “Okay, so… before we go, I need to be honest with you about something." [deep breath] "I’m actually a fusion of two separate people who are close friends. You... know what fusion is, right?”

Spinel: “Duh, o’course! What, d’ya think I was made yesterday?”

[...]

Stevonnie: “But even with that, I can’t be together as me all the time. Steven and Connie, the two who come together to form me... they love hanging out with each other so much, but they also have their own lives! Other friends, other hobbies, their own families. They still talk when they’re apart, but they know it’s okay to do things alone, too. Do you know why I’m telling you this?”

Spinel: [shakes head no] “No...?”

Stevonnie: [sighs] “I understand you’ve been left behind. Believe me, I know how bad that feels. So the last thing I wanna do is make you think I’m doing that too.”

Spinel: “Y-you— you’re going away?” Stevonnie: “Unfusing, yes.” Spinel: “But Stevonnie, you—“ Stevonnie: “Spinel. No matter what, you are my friend. Steven and Connie consider you a friend, too. And my hope is that you’ll keep making a whole bunch more on Earth, so you’ll always have people around who know and love you. But that can’t always be me, okay?“

___

[At home... on Earth. There's a bit of a close call for Pearl when Spinel arrives, and recognizes her as Pink's second pearl. This is news for Garnet and Amethyst and Steven, the first of which had somewhat suspected that Pearl used to be in the diamonds' service, but never knew for sure. Pearl, of course... can't say much on this due to her gag order... not that anyone else knows about that yet... but does manage a very concise and PD=RQ free explanation about her past in Pink's court, and her transition towards being a Crystal Gem:]

Pearl: “Rose Quartz set me free, and I’ve been a part of the rebellion ever since.”

___

[At some point between the last scene and the next, mention how Spinel had a bit of a relapse... she ended up poofing herself, and reformed differently. A little bit closer to the smudged mascara and frayed pigtails look of canon, but no rotated heart. Unlike in canon, she has a solid support system amongst the Crystal Gems, and she's working hard to recover from the heartbreak of Pink's abandonment.]

___

[Final scene is set post A Single Pale Rose. Steven and Connie fuse, and Stevonnie goes to find Spinel to check in on how she's taking the news. The final line of the fic is as follows:]

Spinel: “I know you’re not her, not really. And I know you’ll always be a better person than she ever was. But in some silly cyclical way... back in that garden... it’s almost like Pink came back for me after all.”

#su #spinel #stevonnie #su fanfiction #my fic stuff #hollowed moon #this isn't REALLY 'my fic stuff' since it's unwritten but #i think it deserves to be here. this is the full unfinished plot of a fic that got the most exposure of anything i've ever shared in fandom

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raendown · 3 years

Link

Just crawling out of my hole real quick to say that no one else used that stupid prompt generator they apparently wanted for @madatobiweek so I did it myself. The one I pulled was “blood”.

Fandom: Naruto Pairing: MadaraTobirama Word count: 2500 Rated: T+ Summary: If he thought really hard about it Madara still wasn’t sure if he would be able to remember what it felt like to live.

Follow the link or read it under the cut!

And All That I Loved, I Loved Alone

If he thought really hard about it Madara still wasn’t sure if he would be able to remember what it felt like to live. The freedom to run, the touch of grass under his feet, the taste of anything that wasn’t plain gruel with its minimum basic nutrients, it was strange how easily the memories faded. Then again, he couldn’t even remember how long he’d been here so who was he to say how quickly memories of his previous life should fade? All he knew and all he cared about was that Tobirama had been gone for three winters now.

This would mark the fourth when it came. Standing in line to receive his morning bowl of slop, Madara cast his eyes to what little sky he was allowed to glimpse and tried to remember the color of the eyes that used to watch him in the night. Red, of course, but what shade? What forgotten fruits and gems had he compared them to when they danced in the glow of torchlight? The air was growing cold again, frost gathering on the manacles that held him in place to sleep at night, and already Madara couldn’t recall the feeling of warm fingers pulling him close. Precious memories and they too were fading. Like so many of the others here liked to say, there wasn’t anything this place would not take from you. Some of the men who’d been worked until their fingers were little more than bone had even forgotten their own names. Madara once vowed to never let himself fall in to that state but without Tobirama everything here was so much harder and after waiting for so long he’d begun to wonder if maybe it hadn’t all been a fantastical dream.

Had he imagined the soft touches, the hoarsely whispered promises? To ask would be to risk knowing.

Several spaces ahead in line, a woman fell, body sagging and crumbling to the side. Her bowl clattered as it rolled away across the rocky ground. Madara stepped around her with everyone else as the line continued onwards, implacable, undeniable. Eventually someone would come to take the body away; he could only hope they got around to it before she bloated and filled the whole area with the stench of rot. Their unwashed bodies were stench enough - or so he’d been told by the latest additions to his work team. Madara couldn’t remember what the world smelled like away from unwashed bodies and the scent of burning metal.

They were building something, that much he knew, but asking questions generally resulted in losing blood and if there was one thing Madara had kept of himself it was that he was a very fast learner. He watched and he learned to keep his mouth shut. He observed and he learned that the guards were unkind to those who met their eyes. He listened and he learned that there really was no way out of this place.

Maybe he’d imagined it after all. No one had ever escaped this prison, that’s what everyone said. And if no one ever escaped then either his dying mind had crafted the illusion of Tobirama to keep him sane or the man had indeed once been real only to die in making his attempt at the impossible. Madara closed his eyes, shuffling along with the slowly moving line. He supposed it didn’t matter what the truth was. Whatever the case, Tobirama was not here and Madara felt the lack of him in every cell of his body. The few memories of imagining that were left to him were precious, hoarded like secrets to be remembered in the night and soothe him to sleep, dreaming of places his waking mind could never conceive of. Giving up on those little bits of himself were all that kept him from becoming like the wraiths that gibbered in their cells at night and cackled as their bloody hands worked the mines day after day, rattling the air around them with insanity like a siren calls a sailor to their doom. No, Madara was hopeless but he was not quite ready to give in to that.

Eventually. Some day. He knew his fate just as everyone here learned at some point. If they didn’t die from the lack of sun where their prison was sunk just below the earth’s surface then the exhaustion of their daily labors would do it. Madara couldn’t say what they were building, that wasn’t for someone like him to question, but he supposed it didn’t really matter. They could be constructing absolutely nothing just for the sake of punishment and it would all be the same to them, collapsing at the end of every day covered in sweat and dirt and their own filth. Endless cycles that began the day they arrived and ended long after forgetting that they had not always been here. Madara himself struggled to so much as envision a world outside of this place, let alone recall who he might have been, all the places he might have seen. Was Madara even his true name? Only the past would ever know.

Shouting from one of the farther encampments rose suddenly and Madara ducked his head low in time with everyone else. Any show of interest in whatever was causing such a commotion would be taken as a desire to get involved, something that would no doubt lead to punishment. Everything led to punishment here. It took breaking and reforging in to a shell of shattered pieces to go even one full day without punishment and that was only if you didn’t count their daily labors as a punishment unto itself. The entire line of prisoners before and after him bowed their heads, eyes on their own filthy toes, watching the cold dust rise as they shuffled along in search of food.

When the noise drew closer Madara wasn’t the only one to squeeze his eyes shut as though hoping he could disappear in to the shadows until whatever nonsense was happening had passed over them. The line moved and he moved with it. Foreign sounds echoed off the rough hewn walls around them but the only thoughts in his mind were reserved for prayers that Cell Block Fourteen would not be denied their morning meal for someone else’s stupidity.

A flash of light made him flinch away on instinct. Long burns scars on his back had taught him years before to be wary of anyone bearing torchlight. Then it flashed again and he realized it wasn’t dancing the way a flame should. The anomaly was enough to light a spark of curiosity in him that should not still have the energy to live, canting his head in time to watch something rise and fall, catching the light as it did, something long and shining. Not creating light but reflecting it. Madara watched it rise again and the curiosity was there, if dull, to wonder at the dark substance that sprayed from its tip. Strange, he could have sworn there was nothing to dull that shine the first time it raised. The prisoner in front of him stepped forward and Madara drew his eyes away. Not his business. He knew better than to look, he scolded himself.

Tobirama would have looked.

It was this thought that left him open and vulnerable to a scream that shook him down to his core, different from the others because this one was close enough to reverberate through his skull, real in a way he couldn’t escape when he looked round a second time just fast enough to watch a long blade slide through flesh and bone to come out stained on the other side, cold steel parting the crest of the guards’ uniform. He wasn’t the only one who looked. Suddenly the screaming was all around him as the line scattered and Madara was just slow enough to get knocked to the ground, nearly trampled in the stampede of terrified prisoners.

Somehow it was even more frightening from here where the constant thunder of flight knocked him back again and again, unable to regain his feet and unwilling to let his head be crushed. Madara rolled back and forth, dodging the flying limbs as best he could, and counted the new bruises on his legs out of sheer habit. At least these came without the price of blood. He’d had worse. Still, he was glad when there finally came a break in the rush, just enough space for him to roll his feet underneath him and stand. He stood to see a new world descending on the one that had subsumed him more years ago than he knew how to count.

Flashes of steel drew the eyes in too many directions at once. Blood sprayed through the air, stained the dirt and the walls and the heavy armor that marched inexorably forward. Prison guards lay dead and dying in broken heaps. One of them had been pinned to a wall by a long polearm weapon and Madara was morbidly fascinated to see the body thrashing against its own will. Good, he thought distantly, now they will know the pain we felt at their hands.

And then. Oh and then.

There he was.

Limned in golden torchlight with a face as implacable as the tides themselves he came, sword in hand, steel in his eyes. Madara knew those eyes. Had looked for them when his world was darkest and dreamed of them when all hope had left him. Had clung to the memories even as they warped and faded. Oh but he knew those eyes and the voice that roared beneath them. Three years apart had put muscle and flesh upon his bones, filled out the body now cased in metal, but Madara would have known him by the corner of an elbow glanced around a corner.

Tobirama had come. Promises whispered in the dark made real.

For all the chaos around him and the occasional body that tossed him from side to side Madara could do nothing but stand utterly still and watch as Tobirama cut a path through the bodies in front of him like they were nothing but chaff and shadows, white skin stained as red as his eyes and entirely unbothered by the death he wrought. The sword he carried rose and fell, swooped and slashed, death in the form of a dance, and Madara could not imagine that anything more beautiful could exist in any world. If there were a god then surely they had chosen this man as their avatar on earth, the instrument of their will. In every direction prisoners panicked and guards called out the alarm but in those moments as he watched the rebirth of his own dreams Madara knew safety for the very first time.

He realized that he might by his very refusal to move stand out from the writhing chaos around them only when he felt a hand close around his throat and a fire he hadn’t known was still there inside him flickered to life. Embers long buried coughing away the dust of imprisonment, both hands coming up to pull at the fingers choking him in a protest he would not have had the strength for only an hour before. Now was different. Now when his eyes fell closed against the fading air in his lungs he knew there was something to fight for, scrabbling and kicking with withered limbs, gnashing teeth when a second hand came around to cover his mouth. The taste of blood was a triumph he hadn’t known in so long he nearly stopped moving just to savor it.

As the world turned hazy it occurred to him that this might be the end and the thought was not a terrible one despite his instincts to fight. The awakening desire to live. So long he had spent in the darkness, so much time alone and uncertain, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that an end like this would be anything but a victory. Did he not have vindication? Proof that Tobirama was real, alive, that everything they shared had been as true as he remembered in the dreams that gave him warmth through the frosted nights? At least he would die with a kernal of happiness fluttering in his belly like something forbidden. One last grand rebellion to the ones that had made him so miserable for who even knew how many years.

Oxygen rushed back down his throat so fast he nearly choked on that as well when the hands upon him fell away. Madara coughed through the taste of dust and blood, stumbling back until his eyes could focus again and then struggling to clear his mind, to understand what he was seeing. Shining silver and dripping red. Fear and shock and some instinctual plea for mercy all twisted together in an ugly grimace as the guard who dared to touch him spent his death throes on the point of a steady blade. When the body fell it was gone from his mind as easily as that. What could ever possibly hope to hold his attention with a face like that staring back at him with such adoration?

“You came,” Madara croaked, voice hoarse with disuse and thick with emotion.

“Did I not promise?” Ah but Tobirama’s voice had always been a honeyed rumble, a caress upon the ear like nothing else. Time and distance had only made his tones all the sweeter.

His fingers were gentle, even encased in steel as they were, but even if he had been rough and unthinking Madara would have fallen in to his arms just as easily. Because he had indeed promised and he was here now keeping that vow. Keeping the dreams they had spun together alive, weaving new possibilities with nothing but his steady and undeniable presence.

Trust was not something easily come by in this place where only pain existed. It had been three long years since Madara knew what trust could feel like, the taste of absolute certainty that he could rely on anything but his own efforts. He knew it again now, after three long and endless years, resting his weight fully against Tobirama’s chest and closing his eyes. Chaos strained and flowed around them. Death rang out in echoes that flickered back against themselves over and over and over. Madara knew none of it. His world had been darkness, despair, and desperation, had been struggle, sorrow, and strife, and all of it had been worth it now to feel the arms that circled his waist and pulled him in close, the hand that cradled his neck like something so very, very precious. Tobirama had come. Whatever came after they would face it together again as they had before and that was all Madara could ever - would ever - need.

In the darkness where once he expected to die Madara learned again what it was to live.

#rae writes #madatobi #madara #tobirama #medeival au #sort of??#fanfiction

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zeta-in-de-walls · 3 years

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Themes in the Dream SMP

Hey guys, I’m kind of into analysis. I tend to like examining character motivations and why they take certain actions rather than speculating on lore and theories. Heh but right now the fandom is flooded with egg speculation. I am very curious about the egg and where the story might lead though! So I thought I’d look at it in terms of themes the story might end up exploring.

Themes are certain ideas/concept that keeping coming up in a work and get explored. Good themes can be traced from the very start of a work and carry on through to the end - they’re like threads that run through a work. Strong themes can help a story to feel more coherent and satisfying with the way they can tie a work together. Now the Dream SMP may be a bit of an improv roleplaying server but somehow a few themes can end up cropping up anyway.

What themes are there in the Dream SMP?

Here’s a few I identified, I guess they are topics that interest me? Also certain POVs may have different themes. I don’t watch Fundy myself but I’m pretty sure his viewpoint has some strong themes that are rather unique to his story. Certain arcs may have very strong themes as well which aren’t explored over the narrative as a whole.

-Power/control. A very common theme in stories. What drives many characters is to seek out power, either to have control over their own lives, or over others. The leadership of L’manburg was hugely important in S1. And now many individuals are hungry for power especially the powerless who have been pushed around by others for so long.

-Corruption. Linked to the above. Often when seeking power, people can become corrupted by it and their ability to control others with it. Dream is an excellent example. Wilbur as well. Technoblade believed corruption was inevitable and that any concentrated power was bad. But is it inevitable? Or were the systems just a little flawed? Is a way to handle power sensibly?

-Words over violence. More of a S1 theme but I’d love to see it explored more. L’Manburg most notable was not wearing armour because they believed in fighting battles with their words, not violence. Technoblade challenged this, believing violence is the only way to be really understood.

-Attachment. This is a very strong theme, one really ties the whole story together well. It’s most explored in the Tommy vs Dream conflict but it’s also noted that every character get attached to things and that’s what so often drives conflict. Yet these attachment can also inspire and unite people. Dream sees attachments as a way to control others. Attachments are both a strength and a weakness.

-Complacency/Neutrality The server is marked by many wars but in every conflict there are those who stay on the sides. Those people may see this as a strength but those who stay neutral are most in danger of being forgotten. Likewise, staying neutral may be allowing disaster to happen. In Doomsday one striking thing was how many people stood on the sidelines. L’Manburg was not merely destroyed, but abandoned. And now with the egg, it’s been in the background for a long time and it’s been overlooked. Now people are finally paying attention but is it already too late?

-Seeking Peace. After all the conflict on the server, many character long for a lasting peace. Both Tubbo and Tommy just want to have a quiet life, with Tommy staying independent and working on his little project while Tubbo builds Snowchester as a safe haven with nukes to discourage any who wish to challenge his peace. Dream also had his vision for a peaceful server by way of him attaining absolute control over everyone, crushing any sort of defiance. And now the egg, it means to take over the world and in doing so will try to unite everyone under its control. The people will lose their free will but it may mean an end to conflict too.

-Choosing People over sides. An interesting yet messy theme which became prominent with S2. When two people are in conflict is it possible to help both? Or are you inevitably choosing a side? Or is this just another impossible view of utopia where everyone is united under the same side, (like Dream envisioned) and there is no need for any conflict?

-Revenge/Forgiveness. When someone hurts you, can you reconcile or should you seek retribution? Once you suffer a betrayal is that relationship broken or can it be fixed? Does you own pain justify hurting others? What is too far? What is justice? Probably not the most consistent theme but I really like the few times when this topic does get explored.

-----

So, those are a few concepts that stick out to me about the Dream SMP. There’s probably more (like I was kinda thinking on one about history repeating itself/destiny or something about becoming what you hate maybe) also yeah, themes are probably not necessarily consciously thought of by the writers but that doesn’t mean they don’t end up trying to fulfil the themes and ideas that their story has started exploring.

SO that said, i think it’d be very cool if the egg arc really starts to challenge some of these themes. What’s interesting was how Bad, I believe, chose the egg because it had Skeppy and he wantd to be with his best friend. I wonder if perhaps therefore the egg will continue to use people’s desires to control them.

It creates an interesting parallel with Dream, trying to get people attached so he could control them. I wonder if Dream has any connection to the egg. It was discovered a long time ago now, during the Pogtopia arc I believe(?) and maybe that reflects Dream’s descent into villainy when he began to stop caring for his friends. and the eggs been so much more present this season as Dream’s also become increasingly detached. Maybe it means nothing. Either way it’s interesting how love and attachment may be used against the characters again in this fight against the egg. And whether love and trust in others might be a way to defeat it?

I also found something poetic about how they placed vines within L’Manburg’s crater and its one of the places its growing very vigorously. It was once a place with so many memories and with so much meaning and in its place we have the egg.

As I alluded to above, if the egg were to consume everything, there would be no more sides, no more conflict, everyone would be united in one ‘big, happy, family’ and there would be peace. Yet it’s like a warped vision of their beloved SMP. It’s peace, yes, but not the kind of peace anyone wants. The egg is terrifying.

And its spreading and it’s going to affect everyone. (And if they can’t be infected they will be killed.) So the time for neutrality must end! The people couldn’t band together to save L’Manburg because they’d lost faith in it, but it’s not too late to save the SMP if everyone were to band together and fight for the server they all love. Many of them did it once to imprison Dream. To do this, they might have to put old grudges aside, but it can be done.

As to why it affects people differently, I think we’ll be given an explanation. I’d be intrigued if it was to do with attachment or maybe something about power and corruption. (Metawise I’m pretty sure Tommy was unaffected because it woud seriously muddle his character to have a supernatural force messing with his head when his story had been a somewhat realistic depiction of manipulation and you do not want those two to mix and harm the impact of the exile arc.) But yeah, not sure what the reason is right now, but I figure they have one in mind already.

I’m liking this Egg arc. It seems like its been really well-planned and set up so I’m looking forward to seeing it all realised as I bet they have some great plans ahead and they potential for it to fit in with the existing themes would be amazing and again help the SMP as a whole to feel really satisfying and cohesive. If it wants to be wildly different of course, that can be great too, but everything seems very cool. Do love how it involves a huge cast of characters too - it’s very ambitious!

#dream smp #meta #analysis #heh this is how i like to analyse media #fun that it can be done even in new media #there's a lot of love that goes into the smp and it shows #long post #bloodvines arc #the disc war

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the11tailed · 3 years

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Fandom: The Magnus Archives, Star Wars The Clone Wars (2008), vague Dead by Daylight

Tags: @crc-general-orin, @crc-commodore-sana9

Reblogs are love ^-^

[Recorder click]

Statement of Tup Fett regarding an incident that occurred in a Junkyard when he was a child.

Audio recording by Tech Fett, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institution, London.

Statement begins

I never blamed my brothers for what happened, it was my fault in a way. I never should have gone to that junkyard. It was a dare. Just a dare. It was harmless.

I was 7 at the time. My brother’s Fives and Echo had dared me to go into the weird junkyard out by our old house. It's not a bad junkyard. It's just a dump a few meters back of the houses. Someone started a rumor that dead bodies were found there, but many members of my family is in law enforcement and they stated that no bodies were ever found, so I never believed those tales. Fives and Echo had been charged with taking care of myself and my twin, Dogma as all other members of my family were busy. Fives and Echo are good brothers, don't misread this, but they were not babysitters.

It was obvious early on they did not know what they were doing. They took us to the Junkyard, as they went there for fun a lot. It was a short walk, and sooner than I'd like, we were at the entrance. I was a bit scared, but Dogma was petrified. He clung to Echo and refused to go in. He said the "shadow people" didn't like this place. The shadow people were Dogma's imaginary friends (yet on some days I wondered if they were really imaginary) and he had them since, well, he was four after our uncle...did some disgusting things to him. I won't go into detail, but you can guess what our uncle did. He started seeing these "shadow people" everywhere. Anyway, I'm getting off track.

Fives only laughed when Dogma mentioned the shadow people. He dared us to go in

"It'll be fun!" he had said this with such glee.

I wanted to prove to my big brother that I was brave. So I went in. It was like any junkyard I've ever seen. It was just stuff piled high with no real order to it. I wandered for a bit, not long. It was when I turned a corner did I see the gate. At first, I couldn't figure out why it put me on edge. It was pitch black, with vines from some plant coiling around it so tight it warped the metal. I could see strange flowers bloomed on various and random places on the gate. I was curious so I got closer. I wish I hadn't. I wished I had turned and walked back to Fives and Echo and didn't go through the gate. But I did.

I stepped through the gate and the world around me warped. I don't really know how to describe it. The world almost folded around me and I felt really hot and really cold at the same time. Then it unfolded and refolding again and again. When it stopped I was standing in a junkyard but it was different from the one I had been in. This one had broken down cars everywhere. The next thing I realized was that the sky had taken a red tint, casting the whole area in a red glow that sent shivers down my spine. I turned, wanting to go back, only to find the gate slammed shut. I ran to it, but it had no handle. I saw a lever, but when I pulled it, nothing happened. I was scared and so utterly alone. I reached into my pocket for my phone, I need to call for help, but found my pocket empty of any phone, lost I looked around. I spotted the generator. It was an old thing, just sitting there. It wasn't on and I got the odd feeling that I needed to fix it. I walked over to it. I didn't know what I hoped to do, I was 7 and sure as hell didn't know how to fix a generator, and yet I did. I worked on it for 2 and a half minutes and fixed it. I still have no idea how. When it clicked on I got this odd sense of dread. I got up and walked to one of the red lockers that was sitting near the generator as the sense of dread grew into terror. I opened it and climbed in, closing the door. The terror I felt made my heart hammer in my chest. And then I heard it. The thump thump of something heavy walking near. The smell of rotting flesh was so strong I nearly gagged. I knew the smell of rotting flesh anywhere. My Grandpappy Jaster owned a farm, and one time I had found a dead cow that had been missing for days. She had wandered up into a wooded area and died. I found her and vaguely remember losing my lunch and crying into my older brother, Fox's, shoulder. Grandpappy did feel real bad about that, even though it was not his fault.

I heard a snarl of rage before the heavy footfalls got quieter and quieter. The sense of fear and dread went with it. Once I could no longer feel the dread, I climbed out of the locker and hurried off in the opposite direction of the footfalls.

I have no idea how long I ran. It was a while before I ran into anyone. I mean literally, I ran right into someone. A man in his 20's wearing a suit, now torn, ripped, muddy, and bloody. He had black hair and green eyes and I would later learn his name was Anthony. Anthony looked horrified to see me. I was confused back then, but I know why now. He was scared because I was a seven-year-old kid put in a demented game with a ruthless killer, but I'm getting ahead of my self. Anthony helped me up and hurried me along. I was went with him, too scared not to. He led me to another generator.

"I'm guessing you got the 3rd generator," he said and I just nodded.

"We just need two more and then we are free," he said that with such a hopeful tone.

There was another person with us, a young woman named Sarah. She was a young woman, maybe 19 or 20 with short, dyed pink hair and a few piercings. Her clothes were tattered and bloody and I noted she had a bandaged wrapped around her shoulder, yet I could see no wound. She was already working on the gen. Myself and Anthony knelt and helped her. Soon, with a rumbling click, the gen turned on. Then the dread crept in. I looked around desperately for a locker, but found none. Anthony grabbed me and dragged me behind a stone wall. There was a tree near us and I had to hold in a gag at the scent of rotten meat wafted from the crow slung up on the bark of the tree, stomach open. Anthony put his finger to his lips and we sat there crouched. The dread turned into terror and I heard the footsteps. thump thump. Loud and commanding. I was scared, far more scared than I had ever been in my life. I was shaking and Anthony knew that. He placed a hand on my shoulder, trying to console me. Then I saw Sarah run and I got the first look at the monster. It was humanoid, an arm covered in strange, boil like spots. I think the most horrifying part was it's face. It's flesh there was pulled, I have no idea how else to explain it. There were staples on various parts of it's body. It was terrifying. It held a chainsaw in one hand and a hammer in the other and it ran after Sarah. It activated it's chainsaw and I heard it whir and then the squelch of it hitting flesh. I heard Sarah scream, a sound so raw and so painful I wanted to cry. I think I was. I watched as it threw Sarah over it's shoulder. It carried her to a hook standing in the field. It was nothing special, but I found it odd that the hook was just there, swaying ever so slightly in the wind. Then, it threw Sarah onto the hook and she screamed again. He watched her gag for a second before limping off and vanishing into the tall grass. I tugged at Anthony's sleeve

"Shouldn't we help her?" I had asked through tears but Anthony shook his head

"Death hook" was all he said

Sure enough, long spider like limps emerged from the hook and impaled her. I watched in horror as they lifted Sarah's body up as more spider-like limbs descended down and grabbed her body and lifted her up into the void above. Once her body was gone, the limbs emerging from the hook, knocked the hook off and onto the ground. I let out a chocked sob as the realization hit me. I had just watched a person die.

"C'mon kid," Anthony had said and ushered me along.

I followed numbly, I was in shock, but the gravity of our situation shook me out of it quick. We found the last gen quick. We worked on it fast, but slow enough as to not make mistakes.

"I have a kid around your age," said Anthony, smiling at me, "Once I get out of here I plan to hug them and remind them how much I love them. You got any family,"

I nodded,

"Lot's of big brothers, a dad," I sniffled, "How does time pass?"

"I've been here a few minutes, what's the date,"

"the first of august, 2009," I responded and he looked pale

"No, it's-it's the second of January," I shook my head at that and we lapsed into silence. The dread came just as the gen clicked on. We both shot up, but by that time the dread was terror. It was here. Anthony ran at it and tried to draw it away from me, but it didn't work. I ran as it chased me, fear surging through my limbs, but I was seven, I wasn't fast enough. Do you know what it feels like to be slammed in the back with a chainsaw? I can't even begin to describe the pain. It hurt worse than any injury I had ever gotten and I screamed. Next thing I knew, I was being carried over it's shoulder. It was taking me to an open field. There were two hooks. Both faced each other. He threw me on one. The pain from that was worse than the chainsaw as the metal hook ripped through soft flesh and muscles and threw bone and I screamed a blood curdling scream. I was only there for a moment when I heard a strange noise. The gate had been opened. A sense of panic hit me. Had Anthony left me to die. But then I heard the whir of a chainsaw and a cry. It hooked Anthony right in front of me. He gave me a small smile as the creature ambled off.

"Listen," he had said, "Gates open, straight ahead, hurl yourself off the hook and run, don't stop, don't try to get me, I'm on death hook, Just run,"

"How?" I cried in desperation.

"Throw yourself off the hook," he said before the limbs stabbed him and dragged him away.

I wanted to cry, but it would have to wait. I took a deep breath and threw myself forward and off the hook. There was an explosion of pain, but I didn't register it. I ran. Ran as fast as I could. I saw the gate, wide open and tore forward. The whir of the chainsaw came from behind me and I got the idea to bob and weave. I did and it worked. I knocked over a pallet with strength I didn't even know I had and tore to the gate. I ran threw the gate out without stopping. Like before, the world folded in on me and repeated until, it stopped. I was back in the junkyard, no broken cars in sight and a soft blue of the sky almost made me sob. Warm blood trickled down and, to my horror, I realized I was still hurt. I reached into my pocket and was greeted with my phone. I called the first number I could think of. 911. I just said I was hurt in the Junkyard, fell and hurt my shoulder and that I need help and fast. The operator was a nice lady, helped keep me calm. The fire and rescue arrived fast and I felt happiness when the words 212 came into view along with squad car 1010. I wanted to cry as I ran towards them. I watched Helix run and catch me and I collapsed into my cousin's arms.

"Tup?" he had sounded so horrified and I guess he had the right to.

Fox rushed over and froze when he saw me. Helix was treating me as fast as he could as Fox knelt beside me and cupped by face with his hand. He told me it was all okay now, and that I was safe. I knew I was.

I woke up in the hospital three days later. I learned that I had been missing for almost an entire month. Fives and Echo felt so guilty, blamed themselves, but I could never blame them. Never.

Statement ends.

Another victim of the Entity's twisted games, and my own cousin. I remember the scramble for search parties when Tup went missing, but I still lived with my abusive mom, so my brother's and I were unable to search for Tup, who had been a close friend in high school for me. After this, Tup went through a lot of therapy, but he still struggles. He informed me one day, years ago, that he too now sees the shadow people. I've seen the shadow people too. All my brother's have. They are always there, just watching us.

As for follow up, there is not much we can do. The entity exists in a realm outside of ours and we have no way of stopping it or telling who it's next victim will be.

So another dead end, but not matter. Unfortunately, most of the files in the archives have statements made by members of my family. A lot mention a horrible tragedy and the sudden appearance of these shadow people. I wish to look into them, but my own shadow people have grow restless, usually that means-

[Static on recorder]

Yes, I know

[Static]

Yes

[Static]

Fine

End recording

[Recorder click]

#star wars #star wars the clone wars #modern au #the magnus archives #tma au #clone wars #tech bad batch #clone trooper tup #tw gore #tw dead animal #tw death #dead by daylight

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incarnateirony · 1 year

Text

Trying to sit here thinking of how my antis are negotiating events in their head to run from the truth right now. Spiral narrative. Tarot. Alchemy. The One. The Path of One. 13 tracks put together in a surprise order. Radio interference. Ticks and leeches. Queen bee. Art of Dying. Reflections. Rocky. The ego. Context. Traxxverse. Find the Queen. Magic Sex Chicken. All of it.

Like. OK. let's say they disbelieve origin stories. ok but what does that leave them as an option. am I just. So closely resonant to their brainwaves and thoughtforms and so good at this show that I knew all this shit in advance by a year or in some cases years?

Because like. even if I was lying about origins, I still have.... [points at all of the above]. So that still means I'm "speculating" correctly long before anything was ever released. Meaning my brain would be sharing the same story braincells as these authors.

So where, oh where, do they see an escape hatch where if they scream at me they can scream it away? Worst case in their own minds I've vibrated into the supernatural dimension to become a psychic attached to Robbie's mental basket. Or, realistically, I've been telling the truth the whole time.

Guys. The end is coming whether you like it or not. I told you LONG BEFORE my fellow worker bee did: Nothing can stop what's coming. Stand down, go home, and enjoy whatever life you have left. That's only a threat if you fear what's coming. And if you fear it, it's over, you lost, go home.

genuinely funny that for all of 2po's itk posing he's about to get blindsided. SPN ripping off the bandaid needed to flush the fandom liars, projection machines, conmen and more out. The authors are over your bullshit, guys. 100%. Direct. Like that context shit? 2po and those like him better take that as @ them personally, because this is in fact personal. They can't tell you that, but I can. You've attacked and fought them for years, and now, this is revenge. And some of us were more than happy to help.

Goodbye, you lying sons of bitches, you extortionists, doxxers, career liars and grifters. Goodbye, you agenda'ed bastards that think you can warp the truth however you want. Goodbye. It's time for a new empire. Long Live The GenderBending Queen.

(update he tweeted shortly after the post)

A terminal fandom disease, a plague, the lot of you. We're ripping out the rot at the root. We're opening that gay door. And you're going to cope. imagine if the fandom was as selfish seasons 10-13 for the Wayward fan pitch. Which antis like 2po also hide that Berens picked up AS a fan pitch, and nobody wailed about credits.

I don't find it a coincidence that the people that grift thousands out of fandom are obsessed with credits as proof. Well, yeah. People who believe in nothing but themselves and their material gain can't comprehend doing what's right for free simply because it is right.

Some of us actually stand for something. Believe in something. And fight for what we want instead of complaining all day. Even if it takes years. Even if it takes falling down again and again. There's a reason it's a representation battle, not a representation parkwalk, and that doesn't work if every man tries to be an island for himself. Sometimes, life is complicated, and sometimes, you Just Help whether you get benefit for it. Because it was what was the right thing to do. Because you knew the Truth. Because you listened.

You guys may understand the concept some day.

youtube

The real truth you missed is that for the last several years 2po was trying to argue with me and deny real things that came true, he was basically arguing with those same authors, because some of us don't just suddenly care when convenient. Some of us fight for years without looking for attention like the scripthunt members do.

And 2po is so set on his bad biases he convinced himself he got access, rather than for example wigglebox bitching and moaning her entire time in POLOL about never getting access, and his weird spies that fled when I nailed down 2po's doxxing attack all only having base permissions like lmfao bro. Perspective. You are years behind and clueless. The sooner you accept that the sooner you're going to understand what's happening. You didn't HAVE the context to understand the double-S tweet of Berens intentional mispellings being a silly slapfight with Meg Fitz over her giant bees and the fact that she spells Cas with two S'es, that even if they aren't credited they're all idea sharing still. And you'd know it's meg if you knew meg's interests.

Deep down even wigglebox knows that I used to prioritize speaking with the authors. She did not have access to the results, and I think she only possibly saw the one voice message from Bobo if she saw any at all, but she has to be aware that I chose a different path than they did and the potential that pass opened. She just does not want to look into that opening. Because she chose the wrong path. And it's everybody in script hunt

Amazing the things that can be done if you spend your time and years treating creatives like human beings rather than robots to abuse for demands, project intention at, or try to treat like a direct info spout. You want to know the reason you guys can't get info for crap? Every single one of you sounds like a desperate fan when you try to talk to them instead of appreciating their own work or interests. That's why you guys lost. You never wanted to listen. And that's the plot.

I do not envy the trap he's made for himself and his followers. It quite literally makes them the villains of the fandom story. And he's successfully manipulated people against the truth and the creatives for years, and now they have no choice but to deny deny deny deny until the bitter end or accept the truth I've told them for years. And it's that you guys are the problem. And you need to either grow up and accept the truth or go away and find a show you actually not just enjoy, but understand.

Wouldn't it be funny if this Cult Spiral Narrative and my Cult Mythos Alchemy Bible and Cult Cas As The Goddess shit were actually already circulating the author room by the end of season 14? Like right before Bobo wrote the confession I knew about. The year he asked for me at SDCC. Yeah. That'd be really funny. You know, the things 2po harassed us underground for while we. like. talked to writers about it.

Because he doesn't want the truth. And he's always been a leader of a cult of lies projecting his sins, ideas and fears at everyone else, telling people not to look at the truth and to only listen to his perspective and telling, and boy oh boy does this plot have surprises for him.

You'd think by now he'd give up denying the obvious of what's happening both in the plot in the metanarrative, but no. He's pinned his entire fandom conman career on his current angle and if he concedes then everyone he's been exploiting thousands out of instantly drops his ass. Congratulations dude, you played yourself. Good luck hope nobody sues you off the planet.

#there is a fog #but it only takes embracing #the truth #to lift it #this is what's right #and this is the path that i choose to follow #the ostium one might say #this is the way

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wickedsingularity · 4 years

Text

Can’t Sleep Without You [One-shot]

Fandom: Star Trek Pairings/characters: Jim Kirk x reader (but not really), Leonard McCoy, mention of Spock Words: 2359 Warnings: Use of medication, use of possible addictive medication, insomnia, nightmares, almost graphic description of a disturbing dream

Note: A somewhat self-indulgent story that I posted a little while ago, but had panic about after a few hours and then deleted. It felt too personal, too self-indulgent, amongst other things. I planned on giving it some time, and then rewrite it so it was less personal. I did give it time, but I haven't rewritten it, just edited. And now I'm giving it another go, hoping that I don't panic this time around and telling myself so fucking what if it's self-indulgent. And hopefully people enjoy it because I do like this story.

Summary: Having suffered from insomnia for a long time, Jim is the only thing that manages to calm me enough to function when it gets bad. But Jim is off on a mission...

"You look like something the cat dragged in, Commander."

"Thanks a lot, Doctor." I glared up at Leonard McCoy as he towered over me. Even if I couldn't stand the stuff, I was now on my third cup of coffee of the day. But I was also on my fourth day of barely any sleep, and I was desperate for something to keep me alert.

"Have you had trouble sleeping again?"

I downed the last of the coffee, cringing as the bitter liquid made its way down and sat the cup down on my empty lunch tray. I closed my eyes for a moment and grit my teeth, trying not to snap at the obvious question. "Looks that way."

The doctor sat down at the other side of the table and looked at me with worry, not even phased by my annoyance. "I've seen you getting worse the last few days, Commander. Why haven't you come to see me?"

"What you gave me three days ago made me wake up after four hours with a nightmare from hell. I'm still seeing ghosts in broad daylight."

He pursed his lips. "Please stop by the medbay at 2200 hours. We'll try something else."

I sighed, knowing that there was only one thing that would help, and it was not something our Chief Medical Officer could provide no matter how good he was. But I nodded. "Yes, doc." Then I pulled myself to my feet, grabbed the tray and went to put it back in the replicator for recycling.

For as long as I could remember, I'd had some form of insomnia. It hadn't been a problem when I was younger, I had been more energetic, more durable, not to mention more careless. But as I got older it got worse. Most of the time I managed to keep it under control, but sometimes it took on a life of its own. And when it did that, there was no medication, meditation or treatment that worked better than the captain of the ship, my boyfriend.

There was just something about Jim that calmed my mind like nothing else.

Funnily enough, insomnia was what brought us together. I had been wandering around the ship one night, after several nights of little sleep. Finding myself in the briefing room, I had sat down in the chair reserved for the captain, put my feet up on the table and gazed out at the streaking stars. After a few minutes of silence, the door had slid open and Captain Kirk had walked in. We were already on friendly terms, so I hadn't bothered taking my feet off the table or giving him the chair, even when he made a joke about it being his.

He'd been having trouble sleeping too, claiming his mind was running at warp 5 after an exhausting meeting in that very briefing room earlier in the day. He'd chosen to go back there in the hopes that it would clear his head.

We sat next to each other, him in the First Officer's chair and I kept occupying his, and chatted for a while. All the while we both seemed to gravitate more and more towards each other and I got sleepier at the same time, until I fell asleep with my head on his shoulder. He had gathered me up in his arms and ordered a site to site transport, dropped me off on my bed and pulled a blanket over me, before going back to his quarters, falling asleep as well. After that, our friendship had shifted and things escalated quickly from there.

Now though, he and Spock and several admirals were trying to work out a peace treaty between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. We had dropped them off on a colony near the Neutral Zone and had then gone off to survey a newborn nebula a couple of systems over. We weren't scheduled to go back for them for another two or three days, the trip itself took a whole day. And my body was kind enough to refuse to sleep properly without Jim now, no matter how much in control of the insomnia I was.

I made it through the day somehow, with at least two more disgusting cups of coffee. Thankfully, there was more than enough to do in Engineering that I decided to not leave once my shift was over, it was better to keep working than sitting in my quarters and feeling like I had been in the middle of a warp core breach. As soon as Jim and Spock came back, Starfleet wanted us to check out an uninhabited planet that a passing cargo ship had detected held large deposits of deuterium and our long-range sensors had detected too much atmospheric disturbance for transporting, so we had to adjust the shielding on several shuttlepods. I was barely conscious when I stumbled into the medbay at 2200 hours.

"Not looking any better, I see." Bones appeared out of nowhere and would have scared the daylights out of me if I hadn't been so sluggish.

"Your bedside manners are always so lovely."

He ushered me over to a biobed and pulled a tricorder from one of his pockets.

"There's no need to scan me. We both know what's wrong. Just give me what you think I need and I'll be off." I looked at the tricorder with annoyance.

He didn't answer but started scanning me anyway, so I sat there patiently, closing my tired eyes and listening to the whirring of the device. "It's a wonder they haven't found a cure for this yet, after 200 years of research," he muttered to himself.

I looked up at him and saw him analysing the results. "You've found a cure for some pretty serious viruses on your career, why don't you find the cure for this?" I argued.

"This isn't a virus, sweetheart."

"Still, I'm sure you're brilliant enough to find a solution." Bones always said that flattery would get you nowhere with him, but I found that more often than not, he enjoyed having his ego stroked. He was that good too.

He just huffed and went over to a cabinet. I saw him pull out a vial and fill up a hypospray. "I know you have tried this before and it didn't work so well. But that was a few years ago, it might work better for you now." I nodded and obediently bared my neck to him. One touch of the cold metal to my skin and it was done. "I want you to go straight to bed now. It should work quickly and you have to be in bed when it does."

"Yes, sir."

It did not work. Or, I did sleep through the night, but the dreams had me waking up more exhausted than if I hadn't slept at all. It had been worse than last time, the irrational, weird and disgusting dreams had just come at me, one after the other. I would honestly prefer good old-fashioned nightmares over this. I called Bones as soon as I had showered away the night and he was at my door by the time I had dressed.

"Sit down," he barked, the tricorder out and a deep furrow between his brows. "What happened?"

I told him all about the night, even gave him some snippets of the nasty dreams for emphasis, each one of them still crystal clear and disturbing in my mind. The way he cringed at some of it, told me just how disturbing they had been. It wasn't normal to dream that you're pooping out severed arms, after all. *

"This is very strange," he said after he was done scanning. "Barely any light or deep sleep at all. Dream sleep almost all night. I've heard about a few phenomena that cause a person to not have any dream sleep at all, but not nothing but dream sleep. You're not getting any more of this medication, and I'm making a note in your medical file."

I sighed, trying to think about what I could do to help myself that night. But Bones had suddenly gone very quiet. I looked up at him and there was a deep furrow between his brows, his eyes gazing down at the tricorder, but it looked like he was mentally lightyears away. "What's wrong, doc?"

He didn't react right away, but then he blinked and looked down at me. "There is something we can try, but it can be highly addictive if the dosage is off by even a fraction. Call Scotty and tell him you'll be a bit late. I need to take some blood for analysing."

All through that day, I felt a bit apprehensive about what Bones was planning on giving me later. And I missed Jim so much it ached. This was the worst it had been without him and it was also the longest we had gone without each other since we got together. I missed him because of his absence, of course. But in my sleep-deprived state, it felt a million times worse. It felt like there was a gaping, bleeding hole inside me where he should be. I needed him to calm my mind, to kiss me and tell me it's okay if I can't sleep, that I'll sleep when I'm ready and he would be there with me all the while. I needed him to breathe with me. I needed to feel him. He was able to relax me enough that I could function.

After working well past my shift again and forcing down too many cups of coffee, I forced back tears of exhaustion and desperation and went to the medbay, got the mysterious hypospray and went straight to bed.

Apart from the fact that I woke up every ten to fifteen minutes, this one worked a lot better. In the morning, I felt less like I had been hit with a meteor shower and more like I had just tumbled through a thick atmosphere without a spacesuit. Bones came to check up on me in engineering after lunch and I asked if I could get a higher dosage, hoping that maybe that would finally be what helped me sleep through the night. But he refused, he had given me as much as my body could handle without becoming addicted or suffering other nasty side effects. In defeat, I told him if I couldn't have a higher dosage, I didn't want it at all. Then I started counting the hours until Jim came home, and drank all the coffee I could stomach so I wouldn't feel like a zombie.

I was just starting to doze off. It was probably just an hour or so until my alarm, but I let sleep take me. I would take anything I could get. What felt like just a minute later though, the computer spoke to me.

"The time is 0630 hours. The time is 0630 hours."

"No no no," I moaned in annoyance, screwing my eyes shut to the illumination in the room becoming stronger. But then a pair of lips landed on my cheek.

"Forgot to turn that off," someone said.

I didn't process this right away, but in the back of my head I knew that voice and knew it was important, so I forced myself to open my eyes to the way too bright room. Jim was there next to me and judging by his one barely open eye, he had just woken up too. "Hi..."

My heart was beating wildly in my chest, the room seemed to be spinning a little, my vision getting blurry, but then he smiled with his eyes closed and started to clumsily kiss my cheek and jaw and everything cleared up.

"When did you come home?" I whispered.

Jim didn't answer but kept trying to kiss me, but he was struggling, he too seemed exhausted, not able to aim. "A while. Laid down minutes ago. Tired. Want lips."

I made a happy sound and rolled around to face him. He opened his eyes a fraction, revealing the brilliant blue I loved so much. His lips landed on my nose, then my cheek before finally finding my lips. The gaping aching hole inside me seemed to vanish. I moved closer, pressing my lips and my body to his and everything inside me seemed to settle down, mind was quiet, all tension washed away. When I needed air, I pulled back just enough so I could stare into his eyes and see every little shade of blue in them. "You're home."

"The time is 0635 hours. The time is 0635 hours."

"Home and tired." His breath washed over me when he spoke and I wanted to breathe nothing but him for the rest of my life.

"Ditto. Haven't slept since you left."

"I know, Bones told me. I'm so sorry, Supernova."

"'s okay. Just missed you." My voice broke, and all the frustrations from the past week made a few tears fall. Jim snuck one of his arms around my waist and I moved even closer, burying my face into his neck, breathing in the smell of stars and nebulas and galaxies. "How were the peace talks?" I asked between lazy kisses to the soft skin on the side of his neck.

Jim didn't reply right away. Instead, he kissed my hair, breathing it in for a moment. "Exhausting. I'll tell you all about it later."

"The time is 0640 hours. The time is 0640 hours."

"Have to get up," I mumbled against his skin, but my entire body felt like lead in Jim's arms.

"Computer, turn off the alarm." A gentle beep confirmed it was now turned off. Then Jim pulled back just enough to look into my eyes. "Bones told me to tell you that he has declared you not fit for duty today and that he has ordered bed rest, and if you disobey his orders, he will not hesitate to have you strapped to a biobed with a force field."

I blinked. "But..."

"And your Captain concurs. He recommends you spend the day with him in bed and sleep." He was grinning at me. "He's been flying fancy admirals in a shuttle all night and is in need of some tender loving care from the love of his life."

I knew there were things I had to do in Engineering. It would take time and almost all the Engineering staff to get the shuttlepods ready in time for exploring the deuterium planet. But as I looked into Jim's eyes, I felt exhaustion all the way to my bone marrow, and there was no point arguing with that, or the Captain and the Chief Medical Officer. I teared up with relief and buried my face in Jim's neck again.

Jim settled down on his back and pulled me halfway on top of him. I swallowed down my emotions and rested my head on his shoulder, tangled my legs with his, and laid my arm across his stomach. Peace filled me and I barely had time to mumble love you before I was fast asleep.

Note: * Yes, I have actually dreamed that as a side effect of taking melatonin.

#jim kirk x reader #chris pine x reader #jim kirk imagine #chris pine imagine #star trek imagine #jim kirk #jim kirk x oc #jim kirk x you #jim kirk fanfiction #jim kirk angst #jim kirk fluff #chris pine #chris pine x oc #chris pine x you #chris pine fanfiction #chris pine angst #chris pine fluff #star trek fanfiction

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hale-13 · 3 years

Text

Dazed and Confused

By Hale13

For the Summer of Whump Day 21 - Panic (Thanks @spideyhoarder for the prompt!)

“I’ll be okay,” he croaks out hoarsely with weak smile. May gives him a look like she doesn’t believe him and Peter tries to make his expression even more earnest. He, actually, really doesn’t want her to go but he knows that they can’t afford her to miss this shift since she’s already used all her PTO on his Spider-Man related hospital stays. Things have been a little tight lately and, even though May is careful not to talk to Peter about money much, he knows that one shift could make or break them.

Words: 2301, Chapters: 1/1 (Complete), Language: English

Fandoms: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)

Rating: Gen

Relationships: Peter Parker & May Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark

Characters: Peter Parker, May Parker, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Helen Cho

TW: Vomiting, Fainting

Read on AO3 or below the line break.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay baby,” May asked him for the fifth time, combing his wet bangs back from his forehead and surreptitiously checking his fever with the cool palm of her hand. Peter fights against the inclination to push his head further into her hand.

“Alright,” May says dubiously, looking torn and guilty about leaving him. “If you start feeling any worse I want you to have the desk page me okay? Promise me Peter.”

“I will,” Peter promised, crossing his fingers under his sheets. There was no way that he would pull her from work. Literally none.

“Okay,” May says still looking guilty and Peter hates it. Hates that its just the two of them now, hates that May overworks herself, hates that he makes her worry about him. She leans forward to pull him into a soft hug and Peter returns it, mindful of his strength and a little misty eyed – fevers always make him emotional. “I love you. Get some sleep; I left plenty of water and Gatorade on your nightstand and there’s soup in the crock pot for lunch. Eat some of it okay?”

“I will May,” Peter agrees, releasing her and pulling back even though he doesn’t want to. Even though all he wants is to cuddle up next to her on the couch and watch cartoons like he did when he was eight and sick and miserable. “You need to go or you’ll be late,” Peter says with a smile and May runs her hands through his hair one more time before standing from the bed.

“Love you,” she repeats as she leaves the room. He hears her grab her bag and then the sound of the door closing, her footsteps fading into the distance and Peter relaxes back against his bed with a sigh and glances at the alarm clock next to him.

Thirteen hours. He can make it thirteen hours.

———————————————

Peter can’t make it thirteen hours.

He gags again, leaning over the toilet to dry heave and feels tears of effort and frustration leak down his cheeks. God he feels so awful.

The fit subsides and Peter collapses back to lean against the tub. The cramped single bathroom in their Queens apartment smells like stale bile and Peter grimaces as it turns his stomach, grabbing his water bottle to rinse out his mouth. It’s only just after ten and Peter has no idea how he’s going to make it until nine in the evening, he can tell his fever is rising and he’s feeling so much worse. The Advil that he had taken that morning is doing absolutely nothing for him and Peter just wants to cry.

He should call May. He can’t call May.

He can call Mr. Stark.

“No,” Peter says, shaking his head vigorously to clear it and making his headache throb worse, the room spinning and leaving him dizzy. There’s no way he can ask Tony Stark, Iron Man, his hero since he was a kid to rub his back while he vomits and get him soup. It’s way too embarrassing.

“This is fine,” Peter says, pinching his eyes shut and swallowing convulsively against the rising nausea. “I’m fine,” he gags, leaning over again to dry heave.

Eleven more hours. He can do that.

———————————————

The subway is bright and loud and full of people. Peter sways with the movement and tries to remember how he got here.

He’s freezing, the thin hoodie jacket, sweats and beat up tennis shoes doing nothing to block out the October chill that’s seeping through the underground. He feels sweat beading the back of his neck and face, chilling him more and making him shiver weakly. The smartly dressed business woman sitting across from him is eyeing him with distaste and Peter hunches in on himself.

How did he get here? Where is he going?

May?

No. Not May. May’s working.

Then where…?

He lets his eyes slip closed. The swirling of his vision and the movement of the subway car are making him want to vomit again and he can’t do that. There’s nothing more pathetic than vomiting on the train.

Also it’ll probably get him kicked off. So.

He drifts.

Stark Tower looms over him and Peter sways, dizzy and confused. Why is he here? What is he doing?

The crowds of people walking on the sidewalk – on their way to lunch or meetings or whatever it is that business people do – swerve around him with irritation and Peter stumbles when one smacks him with their elbow.

Is it a lab day? What day is it? He’s so tired, he wants to sleep.

He has a bed in Mr. Stark’s penthouse Peter remembers. Mr. Stark got him a whole room once Peter started hanging around more often, surely the man won’t mind if he uses it for a quick nap?

The fluorescent lights of the elevator burn his retinas and Peter squints. When did he get here?

“Hello Peter,” FRIDAY’s disembodied voice echos through the elevator car. “You seem to have a temperature, do you want me to let Boss know you’re here?”

Does he want Mr. Stark to know he’s here? Yeah he does. He wants someone to take care of him – he’s so tired and he feels awful and he can’t do this alone what was he thinking?

“No,” his voice is quiet and broken from all the vomiting and from not drinking and it hurts to talk holy shit. He clears his throat once and winces, gripping tightly onto the rail that runs around the car and grimacing when he feels it warp. He didn’t mean to do that. He’ll fix it.

FRIDAY’s silence is telling and judge mental and Peter has things he wants to say about that, many things actually, but he doesn’t. He kinda feels like vomiting again so he needs to keep his mouth closed.

The elevator stops on the penthouse floor and Peter stumbles out, listing into the wall and panting as he exits. He’s got this – his room is just down the hall. He can make it.

The floor tilts threateningly in front of his eyes and he keeps both hands on the wall as he walks down the hallway. He’s so close. He can’t give up now. The door to his room is closed and it takes some doing but he gets the door open; the room is dark, the windows opaque and blotting out the weak morning sunlight. His bed is still in disarray from the last time he stayed over and it looks so inviting.

Peter lets go of the wall to walk in the room.

His vision tilts again and starts to grey and tunnel and he stops dead where he’s standing to sway in place.

Oh he’s definitely going to pass out.

“FRI…”

It’s all he gets out before the floor rushes up to meet him.

—————————————

“Penthouse FRI,” Tony says brusquely as he boards his private elevator, loosening his tie and popping the top button of his white dress shirt as he goes. There’s nothing he hates more than pointless budgeting meetings except for long pointless budgeting meetings that ruin his whole day.

The car starts to move and Tony goes to lean against the railing; the metal in his left hand is the smooth, burnished steel he is used to but the left side… He glances down and see the railing is warped and bent, clearly in the shape of a hand and he frowns.

“What happened here?” He asks himself, running his index finger over the blemish curiously. Oh well. He can easily ix it and he can look through the video footage later to see how it happened but his money is on the kid. The only problem with this theory is that if Peter did this he would have been falling all over himself to apologize and he’d be trying to fix it himself.

Strange.

The elevator opens to the penthouse and Tony steps out, pulling of his tie fully and allowing it to drape around his shoulders loosely. Something feels off and he can’t quite put his finger on what; whatever it is warrants further investigation but he wants to change first – his workshop jeans are calling his name.

The hallway is darkened as he makes his way to the room he shares with Pepper except for a square of light from Peter’s doorway. Tony frowns – he’s sure the door was closed this morning?

Quickening his pace, he approaches the door and peers in the room.

Peter’s laid out limp on the floor just inside the doorway, limbs sprawled out and face pale except his cheeks which are bright red with fever and his nose which is purpling and bloody from where he clearly hit it passing out.

“Shit!” Tony says, dropping to the floor next to the kid and rolling him onto his side in the recovery position. He’s positively burning, sweating through his clothes and matting his hair to his skull. “FRI how long’s the kid been here?” He asks as he checks Peter’s pulse (rapid and thready) and breathing (congested).

“Two hours,” she responds. “He didn’t want me to alert you he was here.”

“Update that protocol dear,” he snaps at her, moving Peter’s bangs out of his face. “And call down to Bruce and Helen in the MedBay to let them know the situation. Can I move him?”

“He should be safe to move”,” FRIDAY tells him, “Dr.’s Banner and Cho are preparing for you now.”

“This is going to be so bad for my back,” Tony grouses to the unconscious kid as he rolls Peter fully onto his back and slips one arm under his back and the other under his knees. He takes a deep breath and lifts, stumbling a little – the wiry and corded muscles Peter developed from the bite are heavy.

The elevator ride to the MedBay thankfully is quick and, soon, Tony is dropping Peter gently onto one of the beds and stepping back as Bruce and Helen converge on him, setting up monitors and sticking a thermometer under his tongue.

Bruce hisses at the thermometer readout when he pulls it from Peter’s slack jaw. “One hundred and four point one,” he declares, stripping Peter’s hoodie off and leaving the kid in just his sweats and a loose t-shirt. “We need to get him cooled down before he boils his brain.”

“How did he even get here?” Helen asks, confused, as she sets up an IV catheter and a bag of plasmalyte.

“Kid’s stubborn,.” Tony says sardonically as he scrolls through his phone for May Parker’s contact info – he’s willing to bet a few billion that she has no idea that he kid decided to go on a unapproved field trip today. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Probably the flu,” Helen says as she places the catheter and starts running the fluids. “It’s been going around and the strain is particularly awful this year.”

“Great,” Tony says, rubbing his eyes tiredly. “I’ve got to call his aunt.”

Tony just hopes that the tentative rapport he’s built up with May over the past few months will prevent her from gutting him when she finds out her kid was under his roof for two hours without him noticing.

—————————————————

When Peter wakes up he feels loads better. The ache in his head is subsiding and everything feels more clear, sharper somehow. He takes a deep breath and lets out a sigh, the nausea’s gone.

“You awake kiddo?”A voice asks next to him and Peter’s eyes shoot open in panic and, oh shit, Mr. Stark is sitting on one of the uncomfortable MedBay chairs beside his bed with a tablet in his lap and his glasses low on his nose.

“Oh shit,” he says again, out loud this time and his mentor chuckles at him, setting the tablet aside.

“Yeah you’re not wrong,” he agrees with a grin. “Once you’re better you, May and I are having a discussion about self-care.” Peter groans and closes his eyes, throwing an arm across his eyes dramatically and hears Tony snort.

“Sorry,” Peter apologizes, coughing a little as talking irritates his throat and he swallows, trying to wet his throat. Mr. Stark passes him a cup of water and Peter takes it gratefully and sips it slowly, the coolness like ambrosia. “Uh… how did I get here?”

“You took the subway apparently,” Tony says with an eye roll. “Although I have no idea how you got here in one piece – your fever was over a hundred and four. Bruce and Helen say you ‘re lucky you have a healing factor or it could have been much worse. You have the flu by the way.”

“Great,” Peter mutters, picking at the tape covering the IV in his arm and letting out a yawn. He’s so tired.

“Go back to sleep,” Tony tells him, leaning forward to run his fingers through Peter’s hair and lower the bed some so that he’s more reclined. “May won’t be here for a few more hours.”

“Thanks Mr. Stark,” Peter breathes, letting his eyes close. He falls asleep to the even breathing of his mentor sitting vigil next to him.

#summerofwhump #summerofwhump21 #Prompt: Panic #irondad #spider man #Summer of Whump 2021

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Whumptober 2021

No. 4 - TRUST FALL

"Do you trust me?" | taken hostage | pushed

Title: Scream Fandom: Shadow and Bone, Grishaverse, Siege and Storm Rating: Explicit Pairing: Darklina (primary ship), Malina Word Count: 2855 Summary: The Darkling is driven to find the Rusalye, and he'll use any means to get it, even hurting Alina in unspeakable ways. WARNINGS: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Rape/Non-con READ ON AO3

“Do you trust me?”

I scoffed, crossing my arms where I stood across from the Darkling in his cabin. The floor seemed to sway as the ship rode the billowing waves of the Bone Road. My collar of antlers felt heavy around my throat.

“Why would I?”

The Darkling approached me, all regal in his black kefta; it was still the silk I was used to, but beneath it was silver fox fur to keep him warm. Funny to think that the Darkling could get cold.

He seemed to grow as he closed in on me, becoming more than just a man. I tried to tell myself that he was just that and nothing special, but I knew better. He was ancient, powerful, and he wanted to use me.

I held my ground, even when he reached out to touch me. At the barest hint of our skin touching I inhaled deeply, suddenly flooded with power, feeling it roil through me all the way down to my toes. I wanted to lean into it, become part of it. He brushed his fingers against my collarbone, and then at the antlers that David had crafted around my neck: the amplifier of Morozova’s stag.

“Perhaps because I gave you this power, Alina.”

“And you used it,” I replied, tone as bitter as sour kvas. “You used me.”

“Because your power is extraordinary,” he breathed. “I want to help you wield it. That’s why we’re looking for the Rusalye. I want to help you.”

“If you really wanted to help me you would let me go. You would let Mal go.”

The Darkling stepped aside and went to his desk, rolling his eyes. “I don’t know what it is you see in that otkazat’sya. He will wither and die, while you remain.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

He gave me the barest hint of a smile. “Am I supposed to deny such a thing? There will just be you and me, Alina. He is nothing compared to what we are, what we can do.”

The adrenaline of being threatened above deck earlier wore off, and I had to resist the urge to slump where I stood. Instead, I took a seat before his desk. Or, I suppose it was actually Sturmhond’s desk, and he’d just taken over.

“I’m guessing you want Mal to think you’re doing unspeakable things to me right now,” I surmised.

“Would they be so unspeakable?”

My heart thrummed from the heat in his eyes, the curl of his lips. I frequently dreamed of what he spoke of, dreamed of the way he’d touched me and kissed me at the winter fete, having me pushed up against the door. I had wanted more then, and for awhile I still did. Did I now?

My shoulder twinged where the nichevo’ya had bitten me, as if it was thrumming with his darkness.

In a halting voice, I said, “I have wanted those things, but now—”

He interrupted, going around to sit on the desk before me, “Now you’re happy to roll around in the mud with the dogs. It’s beneath you, Alina.” His body was so close to mine that I couldn’t tell if I was imagining the warmth coming off of him or not.

I opened my mouth, hoping to say something clever, but there was nothing to say. He leaned in, putting a hand around my throat beneath the collar. I nearly moaned from the surety that flooded me, the golden light I could feel just beneath my skin. It wanted to erupt from his mere touch. I was breathless as I stared up at him, mouth agape. Then his hand began to travel down, down, and I wanted to squirm.

Alina, stop this. Stop him.

But it felt so right.

Yet…

He took hold of me at my waist, and pulled me to my feet as if I weighed nothing.

I tried to shove him away.

“No!” I cried.

No, I couldn’t do this. I shouldn’t. Just minutes ago he had threatened to tear into me with a knife, and now he wanted me? I couldn’t understand him. Perhaps the centuries he’d been alive had changed and warped what humanity was in him, but I wasn’t sure I could see that sliver of humanity now.

He ended up pushing me away, and snarled, “Fine, but tomorrow if your precious otkazat’sya doesn’t find the Rusalye, then I get to do what I want. Is that clear?”

I avoided his gaze, even when he grabbed my chin and tilted my head up. I just looked downward, at his chest, watching it rise and fall, wondering how he could be breathing the same air as me yet be so different.

“Is that clear?”

Stomach churning, legs weak and nearly shaky, I forced myself to look into his eyes, to meet that ancient gaze, and see the anger and the want within him.

“Do whatever you want to me,” I said, ashamed at the quaver in my voice, feeling it like a black pit in my gut. “It won’t make this ship go faster, or coax the Rusalye out of hiding. Mal can only work with what he has.”

“I find that people can do extraordinary things with the right motivation.” He turned me around and gave my rump a little tap. The sensation startled me, shooting star-flecked bolts all the way down to my toes. “Get going.”

~~~

The next day came, and the Rusalye still hadn’t been found. I had discussed what had happened in the cabin the day before with Mal that night, before I was forced back into my tiny bunk with Tamar. Mal wanted to do as the Darkling wished, if only to save me. I had begged and pleaded, telling him that I would be fine, even when in my heart I knew I wouldn’t. Mal could tell I was lying. So when I’d been escorted to the Darkling’s cabin Mal had been held back by Grisha. He’d fought till he was bloodied and screaming my name. I wanted to run to him, to reach out to him, but all I did was try and force an assuring smile on my face as a few tears rolled down my cheeks. This terror had ahold of me as surely as the nichevo’ya’s teeth had dug into me and had scarcely wanted to let go.

The Darkling wasted no time on talk. The door closed, and then I was shoved up against it. I tried to remember some of Botkin’s lessons, but the Darkling was so much bigger than me. Perhaps if I hadn’t let him get the upper hand so quickly I would have been able to fight, but he had me pinned.

I willed my tears away.

“Good morning, Alina,” the Darkling breathed as he leaned down, lips brushing my neck.

Even as a part of me wanted him—wanted him so badly that I would tear someone apart to get him—I squirmed, trying to move my neck away from his mouth. But his hands were on my body now, gripping my waist tightly, pulling me close.

I whimpered, and raised my arms to try and smack my hands against his chest. He just grabbed my wrists, and pinned them above my head.

He tilted his head, examining me. “I believe we’re both overdressed for the occasion.”

I stood, frozen, as the Darkling stepped back and began to divest himself of his kefta. His eyes were on me the whole time, and I wanted to sink through the wood of the deck, and into the waters of the Bone Road, drowning in the cold. I knew I could summon my light, try to make the Cut, but would Mal pay for my actions? Surely he would. Then there was the question of what would happen should I horribly fail. No, I couldn’t do it.

The Darkling didn’t bother with the rest of his clothes too much, just started undoing the ties on his trousers.

Oh Saints.

He reached out, taking hold of my wrist, leaving me breathless, and he tugged me over to his desk. I trembled as he tore at the skirt of my wool dress, and I worried about what I would have to wear after.

“Hmm… I did like you better in a kefta, but you never did take to my color. What a shame. Black suits you, Sun Summoner.”

“If all you want is my power, you don’t have to do this!”

“Oh, but I do.” He pressed me against the desk, facing away from him. There was an uncomfortable heat in my stomach, and I feared I was going to be sick. The wood pressed sharply against me. He lifted up my torn skirt, and reached for the stockings I had underneath. Leaning against me, he went on, “Because I want you. I have wanted you since I first laid eyes on you in my command tent at Kribirsk. And I nearly had you. Nearly. Now I will.”

He pulled my stockings down, and my skin puckered against the sudden cold, backside and legs revealed to him.

“Stop! Please!”

He put one hand to the back of my neck, over the collar, and bent me forward. I could scarcely breathe. I felt him, pressing up against me. He was hard in his trousers, which was not something I was all that used to, even with the nights I’d lain against Mal. I wasn’t ready yet. I wasn’t entirely sure why, but I wasn’t. And here the Darkling was, more than ready to take what wasn’t his.

He ground down against me, and I let out a discomfited moan. Fear trickled through my blood, like ice and fire battling each other, neither side winning.

“Are you going to scream, Alina? I think it would really encourage the otkazat’sya.”

My bottom lip wobbled, and I bit it. My mouth wanted to open, to let my voice out, to cry for help. But who would help me on this cursed ship? I was a hostage, being pushed over the edge so a dark tyrant could get what he wanted. It was all about him, even if he claimed he cared for me.

Yet I tried to lie to myself, tried to tell myself he did truly care about me as he pulled back slightly, and then was touching me again, only this time he had been freed from his trousers. I swallowed back sick as his hard length pressed up against me. A trembling started in my legs. Saints, he was big. How was he even going to fit?

He rubbed the head of his cock against me, and through my folds, leaving me squirming and whimpering. His breaths were heavy, laced with his voice, which had become rough and low.

I had wanted to hold in my voice, but I squealed as he pressed in just a bit, something tearing. He probably wasn’t even an inch in me, and still the sensation was painful and startling, yet... I could feel my power brimming just beneath the surface, wanting to let loose. It was stronger from his touch, and it wanted me.

“Alina,” he groaned, pushing in just a bit more.

A throaty moan left me, and I tried to relax, tried to take deep breaths. I didn’t know much about this, but I figured being wound up tight would just make it hurt.

Pretend he loves you. Pretend he loves you, I pleaded with myself.

When he pushed in further, I dug my nails into the wood of the desk.

I could feel him shuddering against me, over me. I was completely trapped by the heaviness of his body. His hips began to undulate, cock reaching just a bit deeper into me each time. He leaned over, kissed my neck, kissing the bite from the nichevo’ya. In time I was letting out cries that were timed with his thrusts. I felt like he was going to rip me apart. I was so full and stretched, and yet it didn’t stop.

Would my torment be endless?

With one powerful thrust that left me writhing and screaming, I felt his balls pressing up against me, hot and heavy with his seed. Tears built up in my eyes, and I was too overcome with how wonderful and horrible I felt to try and hold them back. One rolled down my cheek.

“Good, Alina. Good,” the Darkling crooned. “Now I’m going to need you to scream louder. We need your tracker to hear. And perhaps after I’ll show him your maiden’s blood.”

I had no choice but to comply. His hips moved mercilessly, large cock pummeling my insides. I tried to ignore the slapping and squelching sounds and just focused on how the desk shook, even though it had been nailed down to withstand the mercurial waters of the ocean.

Even that was too much. I felt like I was being taken over, like I would never escape this.

Again and again he plunged into me, and I did scream.

I screamed because I wanted more. I screamed because I wanted him to stop.

A fiery sensation was building up in my pelvis and lower abdomen. It was so foreign that I wanted to cry, that I wanted to push him away, and use the Cut to sever his head from his body. Instead he kept pushing, kept going, kept calling my name like a prayer.

The fire in me built and built, condensing into a ball until it couldn’t be held back anymore. The fire burst through me, and I was screaming again. My walls clenched around his driving cock rhythmically, and waves of pleasure rolled through me, leaving me light-headed and woozy. The only thing my legs seemed to know how to do was shake; holding up my body was beyond them.

I was stuck in that fire, that beautiful, searing light for what felt like eternity. The Darkling settled into me up to his balls, taking advantage of the contractions my end had brought about. Throaty moans left him, and his hands squeezed my bottom till it hurt. I clawed at the desk, wanting more, wanting it to end.

When my contractions stopped, and the pleasure ebbed out of me in gentle waves, he began to take me once more, with a power and want that I couldn’t understand.

Part of me wondered how I’d be able to handle this every day. Perhaps I’d just forget it, or become numb to it.

That numbness seemed to seep over me now, even as I hurt, as my hips were driven into the desk, and I was spread wide open for him, and dug into like some prize.

The scream I let out when he came wasn’t one of pleasure, or even pain. It was anger, fury.

How dare he!

Ana Kuya had barely taught me about any of this, but she’d made sure that I knew what this meant, what could happen when a man reached his end inside a woman.

I didn’t want a child!

Did he want to impregnate me? Did he want me to bear that burden so I would have to cling to him, depend on him? Or did he just seek pleasure from the fear and anger now coursing through me?

I tried to fight him for what might have been the millionth time, but it was no use.

The Darkling pulled out of me, and I nearly dropped to the floor. I managed to turn about, raising myself up with shaking limbs. The Darkling was smiling, breathing hard, and I could see the points of his nipples beneath his dark shirt. He breathed a contented sigh, running a hand through his sweat-slicked hair, cheeks all red. His other hand was stuffing his cock back into his trousers.

“That was… wow, Alina.”

“You did all the work,” I spat.

“But maybe I won’t tomorrow.” Now when he let out a sigh it was one of disappointment, and he put himself to rights again. “As much as I’d like to have you all day I have work to do, and we must check on your otkazat’sya.”

My cheeks burned at the mention of Mal. What would he think? Would he not want to be with me anymore? Was I tainted? Would he think that I had wanted it?

I was like a doll as the Darkling did what he could to fix my clothes, but there was nothing that could be done for my ruined skirt. He didn’t seem to mind, but I worried about the cold, whipping salt winds of the ocean that I’d feel above deck.

He took me by the wrist, and I fell into myself, tumbling, and tumbling until I wasn’t sure there was anything left. He presented me to Mal, who still hadn’t found the Rusalye.

The Darkling would have me the next day. Maybe even the day after that. I would have to scream for him, and in my heart darkened by the taint of him, I knew I would.

#whumptober2021 #no.4 #TRUST FALL #'do you trust me?'#taken hostage #pushed #shadow and bone #grishaverse #the grishaverse #fanfiction #graphic depictions of violence #rape/non-con #nsfwhump #darklina #darklina fanfiction #writing #my writing #nsft

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