#record the day before and put it in your apartment for when the new archivist inevitably goes snooping

[empires-au-ideas]

Sorry for being a bit inactive, I've been away on school trips and had to catch up on homework. Take this thing!

And yes. Katherine will be the Martin of thus au. This is evident by the fact right now Shelby fucking hates her.

Please tell me if I should tw this as anything!

...

Curse

...

[Click]

Archivist Shelby:

Statement of Katherine Gaming, regarding at MUSH she has put ON MY DESK-

Katherine:

Yeah, well I wouldn't have HAD "mush" if you actually bothered to notice I was gone!

Archivist Shelby:

You were texting me! You said you were out sick!

Who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?!

Katherine:

My phone was here! I forgot it, how could I have been texting you?!

Archivist Shelby:

Of course. Leave it to Katherine to forget all her stuff at work-

Katherine:

Do you want my statement or not, Shelby? Cuz I can go back to my mushy apartment and die like my parents want and it'd be all your fault and you'll never get my "precious statement".

[Silence.]

Sorry.

Archivist Shelby:

I uhm- yes. Let us start over. Personal arguments should not go on the recorders, even if they are with Katherine and even if I am right.

Katherine:

Hey!

Archivist Shelby:

Statement of Katherine Gaming, regarding... well, regarding the mush she has put on my desk.

Statement begins.

Katherine:

Okay, this might sound a little crazy. Well, I've never seen a statement that DIDNT sound crazy, but at least all the real ones are self aware?

I guess it started earlier this week when I met that new Sausage guy. He was funny and nice and all the good qualities you want in a person you'll have to hang around everyday but...

Looking at him made me HUNGRY.

Which was... a little concerning, as according to his statement the monster people were hungry around him too. And...

Actually, this story starts WAY before last week.

My house, growing up, as a teen,my apartment now, anywhere I've lived could never stay clean. But I always did my best. I grew into quite the anxious neat freak, I was that girl who always had hand sanitizer or baby wipes or whatever.

And I knew, for whatever reason, my parents blamed me for it. If you met them you would never suspect the mold in a the corners of all their rooms, they act like stereotypical fancy party goers that get their jewels stolen when the lights go out. I... think I might know why now.

But the... rot got worse as I got older. When I was a kid it was mold or Ant problems. But when I was a teen it was maggots and wasps nests and even. More. Mold.

I remember waking up from a nightmare when I was fourteen,my skin felt fuzzy and damp. It was only AFTER I had awaken my parents from their "beauty rest" did I feel normal.

That never stopped. The waking up feeling like I was made of mold part. And I always caught the WORST... oh what do I even call them. Sicknesses? Bugs? I got sick always after the nightmares.

I'd throw up violently, I'd be exhausted for days after cuz I'd have gained no energy from the food I spewed out. I'd cough blood, like I was in a movie that put in no research to their diseases. I could barely breath as my nose plugged up.

And... well they'd stop. If I went to the attic.

My parents never went up there. If they needed something from the attic, they'd buy a new thing. They avoided it like- hah. Well, like the plague. The point is I knew I'd get in trouble if I went up there.

The first time when I was fourteen when I was sick like that. I woke up and saw I was in the attic. I was holding a book. I wasn't even concerned I had apparently sleep walked up a ladder, I was scared I woke my parents.

But I wasn't scared as I looked down at the book. It was leather bound, clearly very old- my parents liked old and stiff boring stuff, so I didn't find it too out of character- it was dusty. I swear the edges of the pages had... hundreds of bite marks. Like rats had gotten to it.

I read it front to back. I read it front to back every time I got sick like that, which would be three or four times a year.

I could not tell you a SINGLE detail about this book.

I remember no details about a plot, or if it was nonfiction, or if there were characters or anything.

Have you ever seen those documentaries? The ones about the intelligent mold or spores or whatever that could move and grow towards food?

Slime mold! Yes, that's what it was!

Slime mold crawled out of this book and would borrow in my skin, my mouth, nostrils, eyes, ears, anywhere it could it crawled. I screamed but it covered my throat, and I knew why adults told kids not to put plastic bags over their heads.

And then I'd wake up again. Not sick. Skin feeling fuzzy and like it didn't fit right the rest of the day. But not sick.

Pets would die when this happened. I woke up after reading the book one day to my pet rabbit dead, rotted with yellow slime mold from the inside out. Fish weren't safe. Cats. Our old chuiawa. Hell, even plants! It broke out into fungus and mold and my parents gave me the dirtiest looks when they had to go bury whatever pet they decided to get.

I never knew if the thing with the book was real until my dad caught me. He called the ambulance and I was in the hospital for three days, even though I was better from the reading.

The next time it happened I awoke in the attic, but I had no book. No mold. I was almost relieved until I woke up again in a coughing fit. I stayed sick for five weeks, where as it was usually only a day or two with the book.

Got caught when I was what, seventeen? So it's been a rough... been a rough ten years. Ten years. Yep.

But back to... our new coworker.

I'm gonna sound like a huge creep, but as I was sitting in my apartment I couldn't stop thinking about him! It was honestly just scary. I knew I didn't want to... eat? Eat Sausage, but- it sounded like what I imagined a full colony of ants to sound like- it wanted me to FESTER and FEAST on him.

So I'm going about my day and I'm just really Lazer focusing on anything I could. I figure if I get distracted enough, I won't hear the ants.

But as I'm making dinner, the ants grow louder. I get several sharp pains in my head, and that feeling of like, when you think there's a bug in your ear. When I fall to the ground what do I see but the mush.

And it's like I'm back with the book again. It covers my eyes and ears and I think I'm dead. It stabs into my wrists, trying to get into my blood stream, but I wouldn't let it. I hobble over to my bathroom and turn on the water as hot as I could and jump in. Which was scary enough on its own, I felt like my SKIN was burning off, but it was especially scary since I already couldn't breath or see or hear. I thought I was gonna drown and die.

But my head breaks the surface of the water and I gasp for air, the mush floating around me, dead and unmoving. The water was cold, but i thought maybe it had to do with the mush. I collect what I can and I try and check my phone, but I've left it at the archives again!

I drive down here and everyone's looking at me. Which is usual, you don't work directly under the head archivist without getting a few glances of jealousy. Or pity.

I pick my phone up off my desk, not without a big fuss from Sausage about how concerned he was, and check my phone. And lo and behold, it had been nearly three weeks.

And then I go to your office, but not before Fwhip stops me. He laughs about something... Orion? He laughs about something and I'm just trying to get out of there because there was mold in my lungs for nearly a month and I was not to keen on having sand in there either.

I tried to ask him a question, why isn't he working with us anymore? How was his trip with Gem? Why is he green? Why is he always in the tunnels? But he just says something about Pix funding out he's still there and I kid you not- he melts into the ground. Like he was made of sand the whole time.

I walk into your office and put the mush on your desk. We argue a bit, I give you my statement-

Archivist Shelby:

Right right right. I know that part. Uh-

Statement ends.

Okay so... I guess the mush is proof enough of this one being real. As well as your absence and the book and Fwhip incline me to believe you I guess.

Katherine:

Ever the skeptic.

Archivist Shelby:

I'm just... what do YOU think happened to Fwhip?

Katherine:

I don't know, Gem said she helped him move to a different city. He wasn't able to work at the institute anymore cuz he lived to far.

I didn't question it, they're twins after all, oh gosh this place is just FULL of nepotism. You know how long a line the head of institutes go? I could trace Pix all the way back to Vigil.

Archivist Shelby:

Oh. Uhm... okay. No yeah uh... Fwhip is here to hide from something for the time being. Like Sausage. He's leaving soon. He just.. feels safer in the tunnels?

Katherine:

You are a TERRIBLE liar. But I really don't care right now. All I feel is the crawliness. And the hunger...

Do you... think it's okay if I stay in the archives? Like Sausage? My apartment still feels all sticky. It should be fine if I'm not near him, right?

Archivist Shelby:

Ugh... fine.

Please tell me if you wake up in the mush again that sounds... interesting, and I'd like to record it.

Katherine:

Gosh, you're worse than Gem was. You know once this guy came in with all this ice and fog and she just let him stay in the archives! I swear I had to wear my coat in every day! In the middle of spring!

All I'm saying is if you're letting this many people stay in here, you should start charging rent.

Archivist Shelby:

Do you want me to start collecting rent from YOU?

Katherine:

Apparently my rent is being your little lab rat when I get sick again.

Archivist Shelby:

Lab- oh no! No no, I didn't mean it like-

Katherine:

It's whatever, Shelby. It's fine. I grew up with more doctors than friends. I get it if I'm just another cool beetle of a statement for you.

I'm gonna see if Gem had a spare toiletry bag, I'm CONVINCED she lived in here at one point as well.

[Door opens and closes]

[Archivist Shelby sighs]

Archivist Shelby:

I swear, one day I'll get the courage to fire someone. And fist on that list is one hundred percent Katherine.

Oh, that's embarrassing.

Statement ends.

[Click]

[Click]

Archivist Shelby:

You wanted to see me, Pix?

Pix:

Shelby! Long time no see! How has the new job been treating you?

Archivist Shelby:

Good, good... hanging in there! Ooh, I feel like I'm getting closer to the statements and how they're connected. Names reappearing. Scott Smajor and his fog, there's another Scott that's all colors, the new hire, Sausage, is brought up a lot by the spooky people-

Pix:

Spooky people?

Archivist Shelby:

You know, the ones that make people scared on purpose.

Joel... Joel forgot-his-last-name that throws people off buildings, Pearl Moon that... kills people. They all kill people sometimes, but that seems to be like HER THING-

Pix:

Well I'm very excited of the prospect of you possibly connecting all of these. I'll send out Katherine or Sausage to investigate the "spooky people" and-

Archivist Shelby:

Oh no, Pix! You can't do that. All of them want to eat Sausage!

Pix:

And Katherine? Anyone want to "eat" her?

Archivist Shelby:

Well no but... but...

She's... scared. Of heights?

Pix:

All right then. She can go investigate Scott with the colors.

Archivist Shelby:

And... hallways. Terrified of hallways.

Pix:

Shelby, I understand if you are frightened for assistants or if you have grown fond of them-

Archivist Shelby:

I am NOT fond of KATHERINE-

Pix:

But this is their job, as much as archiving is yours. Please do not hinder their work. I understand you fear for their safety, especially after meeting Fwhip-

Archivist Shelby:

And you haven't... told them what happened to him? Katherine didn't seem to know...

Pix:

I don't want them to get too scared, because then they get sloppy and that's when they become like Fwhip.

Archivist Shelby:

Oh. Got it.

Pix:

So Fwhip's fate stays between us. Katherine nor Sausage will know about it, correct?

Archivist Shelby:

Correct.

Pix:

And speaking of, I don't want them to know about your... notes either, the ones about the types of statements.

Katherine nor Sausage will be finding out your "categories" of monsters or "spooky people", correct?

Archivist Shelby:

Correct. Thank you so much, Pix.

Pix:

Thank YOU, Shelby. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some calls to make. You are dismissed.

[Door opens and closes]

[Quick echoing footsteps]

[Bag rustling]

Archivist Shelby:

I need to talk to these... these people. The kind that want Sausage. The kind Katgerine is becoming.

Fwhip is one, but he won't give me answers if he's scared of Pix.

I wonder if Sausage might be... no. I can't ask him to do that.

I need to find Pearl Moon and I need to speak with her. Alone.

[Click]

[kiwixlime]

Pride

Part One of the Seven Deadly Sins Series

Pride is more than the first of the seven deadly sins; it is itself the essence of all sin.

Warnings: Angst.

Notes: The historical figures, treasures, etc. are all made up because why not. I love to put fictional things in my fictional writings lmao. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this short series! Thank you so much for reading. <3

After a long, grueling week at the office, you’re relieved when Friday rolls around, telling your boss you’re heading out early for a party. She doesn’t bother arguing with you, already signing off for the day. She’s happy that you’re putting yourself out there and being social. Emmy is your boss, sure, but she’s also a friend, always looking after you, wanting to make sure that you’re using the city to your advantage.

When you moved to New York a year ago, you were a bit of a shut in, only heading to work and the grocery store when you absolutely had to. It took a while for you to come out of your shell, a bit closed off and cautious to those around you. So it makes your boss extremely proud when you ditch work for social events.

You’re thankful for her and her kindness and you feel guilty lying to her, but the truth is you don’t have a party tonight, or any night for that matter. Your big plans for the weekend include eating takeout, relaxing in front of your television, and catching up on journaling. Sounds boring, sure, but what few people know about you, is that your journals are filled with adventures and tales of pirates and treasure. And in your downtime, away from the museum, you work on a case that you’ve been chasing for years.

Selena England, infamous female pirate from the 1680s, who exists in only a few historical studies and stories. There are records of her having lived in Spain at one point, but other than a few details, she remains a mystery to explorers and historians alike. No one truly knows enough about her to put together a whole search.

One of the main reasons you took a job as a museum archivist was to see what you could find, if you could find anything else that would lead you to her. Over the year, you found some scraps, put together a couple more pieces of her story, but it hasn’t been enough. You haven’t given up, though. And you don’t intend to.

When you get home, you immediately kick off your shoes and head towards the living room. You plop down on your couch, grabbing your remote and finding the historical documentary you’d been watching for the past few nights. Once the next episode starts, you pull out your phone, putting in a quick order for Thai food and settling in for the night.

Your journal is already on your coffee table, open to the last entry, with a pen next to it waiting for your next idea. You, of course, write about your day, any new artifacts that came into the museum that stood out to you, and how Emmy tried and failed to set you up with her assistant, again. After catching up on your life, you dive right into your thoughts on Selena and where her treasure could be…

About an hour passes when the bell to your apartment rings. Expecting food, you eagerly jump up and buzz the door open without a second thought. A minute later a loud knock follows and you prance over, some cash in hand for a tip. You open the door with a smile. “Here you go--”

Your smile falters at the person standing before you. Most definitely not your food delivery. For a moment, your brain stops working, all thoughts, feelings, emotions on pause. A hundred different words form a sentence on your tongue, but you only settle on one thing.

“You’re not Thai food,” you say with a frown.

“Uh no,” the man says with a small smile. “But I can be whatever you want me to be,” he chuckles and that chuckle pulls you out of your trance. You huff and shake your head, anger quickly replacing your confusion.

“What are you doing here, Sam?” You ask incredulously, crossing your arms in a defensive stance. His eyes look you up and down and you feel your face get hot, pissing you off even more.

You sneer and walk away from the man at your door, not bothering to wait for an answer. He takes it as an invitation, following you into your apartment and closing the door behind him. Ignoring his presence, you sit back down on your couch with a pout, unpausing the program you’d been watching on one of your streaming apps.

“I came to see you,” Sam says, still smiling at you, but you don’t look at him. You can’t. You hate him. He broke your heart.

“I have plans tonight,” you tell him, eyes glued to your television screen. “You should leave.”

“Dollface,” he uses the nickname that always makes you blush. “I know your plans tonight are just watching a documentary, eating noodles and spring rolls, and writing in your journal. You’re forgetting how much I actually know about you,” he laughs.

You don’t say anything to that, wishing you had some magical powers to will him far away from here. Silence hugs you both until there’s another buzz at your door. This time, you know it’s the food you ordered, finally. You move your journal from your lap to get up, but Sam motions for you to stay in place and for some reason, you listen.

Instead, he walks over to your front door and buzzes the driver in for you. He waits by the entry way and when there’s a knock, he opens it, grabbing your food. He nods to the girl, giving her a small smile and pulling out his own wallet to give a tip. After saying a “thanks”, he walks back to where you are and hands you the bag of food.

Even though the gesture was nice, you glare up at him, practically ripping the bag from his hands. “Thanks,” you mumble and shift back into the couch, scooting away from him as much as you possibly can. Either he doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care about the distance you’re putting between the two of you, because he takes the opportunity to sit down next to you. A bold move on his part.

“What are you really doing here, Sam?” You ask, digging into your food, not caring that he watches you. You don’t ask him if he wants anything to eat, or drink, you just don’t care. You can’t.

Next to you, Sam clears his throat and throws an arm across your shoulder. You freeze, mouth open, spring roll between your teeth. Angrily, you shrug him off of you, but don’t move, finishing the bite you started to take.

“I told you, girl,” he smirks and nudges you. “I came to see you.”

This time, you can’t ignore his tone and as much as you want to stay next to him, inhaling his faint scent of cigarettes and basking in his warmth, you can’t. So you sigh, setting down your food and standing up. You look down at him and frown, emotions you haven’t felt in well, a year, hit you again. Emotions you thought you’d finally gotten rid of.

“Full offense,” you start, hands on your hips as you speak to him. “But are you fucking stupid?” You snap.

He raises an eyebrow in question, leaning forward on your couch, elbows on his knees. He looks upset, offended almost, and you can’t help but roll your eyes. So he is fucking stupid.

“Dollface, I’m not sure I know what you mean,” he answers, standing up slowly. You step back as he towers over you, intimidating you, invading your space in the way he always does. He’s so tall and when he stands this close to you, you feel uneasy, for various reasons.

“I mean,” you sigh, peering up at him with watery eyes. “I mean I hate you, Sam,” you whimper. “I really fucking hate you.”

He frowns and reaches out to touch you, barely brushing against the soft skin of your cheek before you’re slapping his hand away. He groans and his once happy face turns cold. Good, you think. He remembers.

“You hate me?” He asks bitterly. “You hate me?”

“Don’t fucking start with me, Sam,” you hiss, walking away from him to take a minute to breathe. You stand in your kitchen, hands grasping the counter top as you choke back tears. It’s been a year since you’ve seen Sam and his showing up, totally out of the blue, is not what you had anticipated for this Friday night.

Your history with Sam is complicated. You were there after your friend Rafe broke Sam out of prison. You three went on an intense adventure where you and Sam bonded more than you anticipated. Quickly, you developed a friendship, and that friendship grew into a crush, and that crush turned into adoration, and then you had sex, and that turned into love. For you.

Yes, you fell in love with Samuel Drake. And you thought he felt the same way. So you told him. And boy, what a mistake that was. Sam didn’t love you. He used you. And you’re still not over it.

“I have a job,” Sam says, capturing your attention. You wipe at your eyes with the back of your hand before looking at him. He frowns, feeling guilty for causing you such pain. But it’s not the first time, you’re sure it won’t be the last. He has a way of breaking your heart.

“Well, that’s great for you,” you scoff. “Maybe you should leave and get back to it, huh?” You say and pull yourself together, walking past him. He groans and follows you because of course he does.

“I want you to come with me,” he tells you, taking you by surprise. Your steps come to a halt as you process his request. No, you tell yourself. No, he’s fucking insane. How could he ask you something so stupid? Does he think he can win you over just like that?

Something inside of you snaps, that thread finally being pulled too tight. A year’s worth of frustration pours out of you as you turn, stomping towards the man who once held your entire heart. Without hesitation, you bring your hand up and slap him across the face. His eyes widen in surprise, as do yours, not thinking you had that in you. Your voice is quiet as you speak, a stark contrast to the loud, bright red stinging on his cheek.

“You must be out of your goddamn mind,” you whisper, holding your hand back softly. The force in which you used to slap Sam is now shooting up your arm in pain.

He stares at you, cradling his face. Something of a proud smile sits on his lips, but you ignore it. You’ll die before you give Sam the satisfaction of seeing you happy again.

“Look,” he says calmly, rubbing his face with a laugh. You hit hard, something he forgot. “I’m willing to put the past behind us if you are,” he states.

You groan in annoyance, anger, and disbelief. He’s willing to put the past behind him? Oh, well, super for him. Of course he is, he’s the one who hurt you in the first place. But it’s not that simple. And you remind him how not fucking simple it is.

“You’re unbelievable, Sam,” you say, but it comes out soft, quiet, with tears following. “You think I haven’t tried to forget?” You ask him. “I told you…I told you I loved you and you…you chose another woman over me. Someone you’d known for a month. You know,” you scoff, looking around. “Where is Mandy, Sam? Huh? Where is she? At home, with the kids?”

“Stop,” Sam pleads, guilt flashing in his eyes. “Just stop. You know it’s not like that.”

“Not like what?” You pretend you don’t know what he’s talking about. “It’s what she wanted, isn’t it? A nice husband, a family…”

“We’re not together anymore,” he snaps, shooting down your mocking. “Haven’t been for a long time.” Sam, a family man? Hardly. The second Mandy mentioned wanting to settle down, he probably bolted.

You laugh and make your way towards the couch once more. You sit down, grabbing your food before it gets colder. “Wow,” you smirk. “So it didn’t work out with the beautiful, busty brunette. I am so surprised,” you say with a chuckle. “You were soulmate level lovers, weren’t you?”

“I get it,” Sam sighs, dropping down next to you. “I don’t know why you’re acting like this,” he says. Lie, that’s such a lie. He’s such a fucking liar. “You’re the one who hooked up with Rafe.”

“Oh!” You yell, slamming your food back down onto the coffee table. Sam sits up, glaring at you.

“You tell me you love me, but then you fuck Rafe? Explain that!” He exclaims. Oh, the audacity of this man. The nerve!

Your anger is reaching new heights and you have to stand before you completely pounce on, and strangle, Samuel Drake. Hands trembling, you look down at him. The dam inside breaks and tears begin streaming down your face. He looks at you with such pain and for a second you think he’s going to apologize, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything.

“You abandoned us, Sam. You abandoned me,” you cry, sniffling loudly, not caring if you’re a mess of snot and tears. He did this. He needs to see that his actions have consequences. “I know you wanted to get Nathan. And if you would have told me, I would have understood. I would have supported you. But you just left. Then you show up with your gang and some chick named Mandy. You flirt, make me feel like you still care about me, but you just…you chose her! After everything! And you left Rafe and I alone again!”

Sam sits on your couch, head down, twiddling his fingers. He knows he’s in the wrong here. He’s known it from the beginning. And if he were a better man, he’d tell you what you want to hear, what you deserve to hear. But he’s not.

And he can’t get the image of you and Rafe out of his head. He’s the one who fucked up first, he made a mistake with Mandy, but he’s never been able to tell you that. And when he found out that you and Rafe were a thing, well, he hated it. And it still drives him fucking crazy.

“You slept with Rafe,” he mumbles, shaking his head before standing. He wipes his sweaty palms on his jeans, not daring to make eye contact with you. He hates seeing you cry. More than that, he hates knowing he’s the reason you’re an absolute mess.

“After you left me, you arrogant asshole!” You scream at him.

He deserves that. He deserves everything you’ve been throwing at him. He’ll never say that out loud, though. He’s much too stubborn to ever admit defeat.

There’s always been one question on his mind, though. He knew you’d move on, you wouldn’t wait around for him forever. After all, he did run off with another girl. But knowing that it was…him…of all people to help you move on… It just makes Sam sick.

“Why Rafe?” He asks you, finally making eye contact. His stomach twists at the pure agony on your face. He’s an asshole for coming here, for ruining your night. Maybe even your life. But you still let him in. It just solidifies the fact that he doesn’t deserve you. He never did. “Of all people, why did you choose him?”

“I hated myself,” you respond way too quickly for his liking, like a knife to the gut. He doesn’t like hearing those words come from you. To him, you’re perfect. There’s no reason for you to think such horrible thoughts. But what you say after, sinks the knife even further. “Rafe loved me.”

Sam tenses up, nodding his head at your words. They’re harsh and make his heart lurch, but he asked and he got his answer. Unsure of what to say, he begins pacing around your living room. When he has the courage to look at you again, the need to wrap you in his arms surges through him. But he doesn’t. You wouldn’t let him, anyway.

“You know the difference between you and Rafe?” You ask, breaking the silence that has fallen over you.

His eyes bore into yours and he nods. “He was an evil prick?” He answers, though it comes out as a question.

You roll your eyes and sigh in agreement. “Yeah,” you murmur. “Exactly. He was an evil prick. But at least he knew that about himself. He never pretended to be a nice guy. Not like you did, Sam.”

Your words are crushing and inside, Sam feels something break. There’s a lot he wants to say to you, but he doesn’t know how, or where, to start. Just say you’re sorry, you idiot, Sam thinks to himself. He glances at you, your tear stained face and the way you cower. He hates himself for doing this. He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come on. Nice, jackass.

Since he can’t seem to tell you that he’s sorry for breaking your heart, he settles on the next best thing. The thing he came to tell you in the first place. He knows it won’t make up for his lack of apologies, but it might put the smallest smile on your face and he’ll take whatever he can get.

“I found her,” Sam says and suddenly, the atmosphere in the room changes.

You freeze, mouth gaping at the man in front of you. Blindly, you reach for the arm of your couch so you don’t faint onto the floor as his words replay in your head. I found her. Does that mean…?

“What?” Your voice cracks as you question Sam. Weakly, you sit down and he uses your shocked state to his advantage, joining you on the couch. He watches as you try to process.

“I did,” he nods with a small smile.

“Selena,” you breathe, holding your hand to your heart like it’s the most beautiful news you’ve ever received.

“Selena,” he repeats, biting his lip. “I know how much she means to you and I won’t do this without you.”

You’re almost too stunned to speak, a thousand thoughts swimming in your head ranging from Sam to Selena to Rafe to your job and back to Selena again. “B-but how?” You stutter.

Sam reaches into his pocket and pulls out a few folded pieces of paper. Setting them down onto the table in front of you, he unfolds and smooths them out. He fans them so they’re all on display and points to each one.

“Sully and I are working for this guy,” he starts, motioning to the signature that’s on one of the papers. “He’s supposedly a descendant of Selena and he hired the two of us to help find anything about her. He had a few leads, so he’s pretty legit, but I found this stuff on my own.”

You glance at the papers before you, mostly written in Sam’s sloppy style, but you’re one of the few who can actually make out his writing, so it’s clear to you.

“The guy has some pretty rare artifacts that definitely helped us,” Sam chuckles and pulls out his phone. He opens the photo album of his work and flips through each photo to show you what he’s talking about. “Basically, he led us to the general location,” Sam says. “We were in Costa Brava one night, just relaxing before our next trip, and I went out on my own, stole a boat, and ended up on this small, pristine piece of land.”

Sam looks at you with sparkles in his eyes and damn it, you can’t help but smile a bit. He’s always been so passionate about his work, it’s nice to see that hasn’t changed. And the fact that he’s sharing all of this with you? Well, that’s a nice extra.

“I’m tellin’ you, doll,” he smiles. “It looked too perfect. I explored a little, saw some markings that I thought looked familiar. They weren’t whole symbols, most of them having faded, but pieces stuck out. I put them together and…it’s her symbol.”

“Sam,” you breathe, taking his phone from his hands. You zoom in as much as you can to see the faint marks within the stones. It might be nothing, but it’s more than you’ve been able to find in a year.

“I came straight here, babe,” he tells you, placing his hand on your shoulder. You stiffen, but the look in his eyes is so captivating, you give in. “We wrapped up our search, I said Sully and I needed some time to analyze, bring in a third party to help, and head home.”

You shake your head, pushing his phone back towards him. “If you’re working with someone else…” you start to say, but Sam stops you.

“I didn’t give them everything,” he whispers as if they’re in the room with you now. “I just told them a little bit, but this? This is for you and me, dollface.”

“But--”

“They know the basics, but they don’t know everything. We’ll have a head start.” He tells you and you find your insides twitching with excitement. “They’ll be out for blood once they find out that I’ve betrayed them, but…I don’t care. I know how much Selena means to you. I want your help, babe.”

Too much, it’s too much. You stand up again, putting necessary distance between yourself and Sam. Your brain feels like it’s about to explode with information. First, you have to deal with Sam’s reappearance in your life and now Selena? You can’t process fast enough. On one hand, here’s this gorgeous man you once loved telling you he’s found clues to the treasure you’ve been after for years, but on the other…

“How can I trust you?” You ask him, silently pleading that he’ll give you the one thing you’ve been craving since he left you.

“Because,” he shrugs and your hopes deflate. “There’s no one else I’d rather do this with.”

You wait for him to say that he’s sorry, but deep down, you know he never will. He’s Sam Drake. He’s got too much pride. He’ll never admit he was wrong. But this isn’t for Sam. This is for Selena. So you put all of your fears aside.

“When do we leave?”

Masterlist

[rayofspades]

How to Write a Horror Story: The Magnus Archives

This post is kinda weird since most tumblr fandom content is based on the assumption that Everyone Has Seen The Thing, but since this is a transcript of a video essay, it’s more broad. 

I might link the video in a reblog since, you know, tumblr doesn’t like links.

Anyways, here’s the post:

Hello Jon, apologies for the decep-

I’ve seen a lot of mystery shows in my day, and some supernatural shows, and the common thread between them is that they kind of...fall apart as they go on. 

Obviously, this is a generalization and I haven’t seen every mystery show or every paranormal show, but it’s a pretty common problem. 

At this point in pop culture criticism, it’s basically common knowledge that these shows fall apart due to a lack of planning. If a mystery series is making shit up as it goes along while trying to surprise the audience, it’s going to stop making sense at some point. And if an episodic paranormal show is constantly trying to up the stakes, eventually it’s going to become absolutely ridiculous and stretch the audience’s suspension of disbelief past a breaking point. 

Other people have already talked about this stuff to death, but today I want to talk about a paranormal mystery show that actually succeeds at what it set out to do.  

The Magnus Archives is a podcast written by Jonny Sims and directed by Alexander J. Newall. It ran from 2016 to 2021 and it’s...really really good. It’s an episodic horror story, taking place at the fictional Magnus Institute where the head archivist reads various statements about people’s encounters with supernatural entities. It’s got it all; scary stories, mystery, an overarching plot, office comedy, office romance, office tragedy, a villain that’s making straight men everywhere question their sexuality, and an overall really solid structure. 

If you listen to the Q+As put out by the writer and director, you’ll hear them talk about how they planned the series from the beginning, setting up the layout for each season. Some things were definitely changed throughout the actual writing process; that’s just inevitable and necessary when you’re working on a long running show, but in a general sense, they knew where they were going. But, writing a good story doesn’t just involve knowing where you’re going; it’s about executing whatever plan you have effectively. And I think the execution of The Magnus Archives is pretty brilliant, so I want to talk about it. 

And for the record, I said “brilliant,” not “perfect.” I do have a lot of criticisms of this show, and I’m definitely going to talk about those too, because honestly? Even the problems with this show are interesting in their own right. 

Ok, let’s go. 

Oh, spoilers by the way. For the whole plot. Whole thing. 

Part 1: Horror and Mystery 

Ok, so The Magnus Archives has two separate plots going on: the episodic stories that can be listened to individually, and the underlying meta plot. The former is where most of the mystery storytelling takes place, and it’s a really engaging mystery. It’s starts off slow, and almost undetectable at first. The main character, Jon, also known as The Archivist, is just reading out old scary stories that people have delivered to the Magnus Institute. Stuff like; a college student sees a ghostly inhuman figure asking for a cigarette, a woman’s fiancé dies and she finds herself trapped in an empty graveyard, there’s this goth kid who apparently murdered his mother and then skinned her? But she’s kind of still alive? What the f*ck? Hope we never see that kid again. Also, this “Jurgen Lietner” guy wrote a bunch of cursed books and Jon knows about this? Are more books gonna come up? And then you’re like, wait is the goth kid who killed that burn victim the same goth kid who killed his mom like 8 episodes ago? Holy shit the family of that girl’s dead fiancé FUNDS THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE? Did this famous youtuber meet one of the missing people from episode one? The goth kid is back and he’s looking for Leitner books? The name “Michael” has come up like 6 times? Are they all the same guy? I just—who the f*ck is Jurgen Leitner? 

So yeah, as you can see, a lot of these stories connect in cool ways, and I’ve only mentioned like, 0.2 percent of all of those connections. Furthermore, these stories are told out of chronological order, and sometimes the same scenario appears in more than one statement, told from different perspectives. This asymmetrical storytelling and odd doling out of information creates a mystery that’s really interesting. It also makes for a great re-listen, since you can retroactively see what elements were set up before you even realized that they were going to come back.  

The audio format contributes to this too; you can’t just see that the table from episode three matches the pattern on the box in episode eight. You have to pick up on clues that were mentioned and pay attention to what people are describing, and it’s highly rewarding when the pieces all start to fit together. 

There is a bit of a downside to this though. Technically The Magnus Archives is a horror story first and a mystery second, and these two elements can mesh in weird ways. 

The horror is element is really strong. Each story is completely different, sometimes focusing on psychological horror, body horror, or supernatural versions of more primal fears like heights, darkness, enclosed spaces, etc. Basically, if you’re afraid of anything, there will be at least one episode of The Magnus Archives that gets under your skin. 

Jonny Sims can really sell his stories through both his writing and acting. He plays Jon, by the way, and plagiarized his own birth certificate for the character name. (For future reference, Jonny is the actor, Jon is the character). Overall, he’s really good at writing prose, and each narrator has a very distinct voice even though the large majority of the stories are being read by one character/actor.  

Obviously not every episode is a bull’s eye. Sometimes it’s due to the subjectivity when it comes to what you as an audience member are scared of, and occasionally it’s just weird writing decisions. I’m thinking specifically of episode 21 where the line “the sky ate him” is said, and it is the worst line in the entire show. The whole goddamn show. That’s it. That’s the number one worst line. 

But still, overall, the horror storytelling is incredibly solid, and some episodes even gave me brand new fears, like the unholy isolation of being in space, or the concept that someone you love could be replaced by someone completely different without you noticing.  

But here’s the thing; 

A lot of good horror is based on the absence of explanation. Most of the episodes that gave me the most visceral reactions of genuine terror come from the first two seasons, because that’s when the audience has the least amount of information. 

For example, in episode two, a really terrifying coffin is introduced. It’s creepy, it reacts very strangely to water for some reason, and appears to compel people to try opening it. By the end of the episode, the audience never finds out what’s in that coffin and that is a good thing. That is a huge part of what made that episode so unnerving.  

And then a few seasons later, we do find out what’s in the coffin, and to be fair the answer is both very creative and very scary, but it also takes a lot of the punch out of episode two. 

 No matter how f*cked up your thing is, it’s not going to compare to whatever the audience can conjure up in their own mind after such a creepy set up. This problem isn’t just stuck in this one scenario either; there are a lot of early episodes that, while still good, seem a lot less creepy in hindsight after you learn more about the scenario. 

I don’t think it’s bad writing, but I do think it’s a double-edged sword. Jonny Sims even mentions this sort of issue in the first Q+A. 

But yeah, to sum up; the narration is good, the ideas are creative, and seeing the mystery unfurl itself is deeply compelling. And for the record, the mystery elements aren’t of the Sherlock Holmes variety. It’s less about finding out who did the thing, and more about discovering how all of these individual points are intricately connected, pulling on each other as they move. Woven together like a... oh shit what’s the word? Gah, it’s on the tip of my tongue. Ah, whatever, I’m sure it’s not like a running motif or anything.  

Part 2: Stakes 

One of the main reasons I stopped watching Supernatural is that it devolves into complete f*cking nonsense. At the end of season five, the boys literally defeat the devil, and then the show...keeps going? Which would be fine. It’s also, largely, an episodic show, so if they have more creative ideas, they could definitely keep going with it. In fact, there are some post season five episodes that I thought were pretty good. But as they kept trying to outdo themselves with Bigger Bads, it got kind of difficult to suspend my disbelief. And the final nail in the coffin for me was the end of season nine, when Crowly basically points out to the audience that the main characters keep dying and coming back to life, so there are no stakes. The most-badest bad guy can always be defeated because some new Thing can just come out of left-field, and dying isn’t even on the table as a threat since people have tons of ways of coming back to life. 

The Magnus Archives, while being a show based in the supernatural, notably doesn’t bring anyone back to life, even though some very beloved characters die. I say “notably,” because in the season three Q+A, Jonny even says, “We make a point not to bring people back from the dead in Magnus, I know it sometimes feels like that, but we are very careful to never actually resurrect anyone.” 

Upon listening to this I said “oh my god, these guys are the only writers left who at least kind of know what they’re doing.”  

Also, as far as plot progression goes, The Magnus Archives is lowkey structurally perfect in the way the threats escalate in the underlying plot; both in terms of destruction and power and in terms of emotional consequences. Season one starts off with one major threat that’s dealt with by the end of the season, season two reveals the main villain, season three lays out the grander forces at play, season four ends the world, and season five is about un-ending the world. The difference between season one and season five is vast, but how we got there makes perfect sense. 

As for the emotional stakes, let’s talk about themes and characters. 

Part 3: Themes and Characters 

At the very end of season two, it’s revealed that the supernatural happenings in the Magnus universe are the result of entities far beyond our understanding. Since their existence is so fundamentally different from what we can comprehend, they interact with the world through cursed items, creatures, and humans who have dedicated themselves to an entity.  

A lot of people read this as a metaphor for late-stage capitalism, and I am one of those people. A bunch of faceless entities exploiting humans through means of dehumanization and causing people to suffer because it feeds them seems like an appropriate metaphor. 

While we’re on this topic, I do want to talk about Elias, since he’s the main villain of the entire series and also one of my favorite villains of all time. The Magnus Archives is a series that deals with a lot of moral questions and has a lot of characters who do morally questionable things, so one might assume that the villain of said series is, you know, morally ambiguous and sympathetic to some extent despite being “the bad guy.” 

Nope! No stops, full bastard. It’s great. 

He falls under what I’ve deemed the “unbeatable boss” archetype. He just doesn’t tolerate insubordination or resistance, and that combined with his lack of empathy means that anyone who crosses him is either killed or brought to heel. His power set is cool too. On the surface the ability to see out of any eye and read minds sounds useful, but not deal breaking, but the way he uses that power to manipulate people and anticipate threats...yeah, it makes him kind of impossible to beat.  

He’s just...so evil and he loves being evil and every single f*cking thing he does pisses me off and makes me want to kill him. It’s. Great. 

Anyways, I think Elias’s role as the central antagonist is what makes the capitalist reading so common. He’s the head of the institute, he’s wealthy, he’s powerful, and he dehumanizes people in ways that are both brutal and chillingly indifferent. He seems like an appropriate stand in through that lens. 

I also love how voice actor Ben Meredith plays him like’s he’s trying to seduce the audience.  

With all of that said, I wouldn’t call this the critique of capitalism a direct allegory or anything; in much looser terms, this could be a metaphor for any power structure that exploits humans. Organized religion or cults might be even more on the nose, considering there’s a lot of mentions of rituals and worship within the show. 

But if we boil it down to its barest aspects and focus on the avatar characters, The Magnus Archives is a series about people becoming monsters. Or, at the very least, becoming worse versions of themselves. That can mean a lot of things to different people in a metaphorical sense; the tense relationship between desperation and morality, the eagerness to please at the cost of one’s own mental health, the psychological traumas that lead people down dark paths, and how personal choices can still be dictated and manipulated by outside influences. It’s kind of heavy stuff, but put into a digestible package through the show’s abstractions. 

Well, for the most part.  

There’s some debate as to whether or not Daisy’s arc was handled tastefully. While her demise and Basira’s character arc were clearly meant to condemn police brutality and the deeply corrupt system that allows it to foster, it’s still a weird subject to discuss in such a fantastical context, and there is a strange sympathy for the devil angle that can get kind of uncomfortable for some listeners.  

Okay, stepping back from that for a bit, let’s talk about Jon and how he fits into this whole “people becoming corrupted” thing. 

Jon has one of my favourite brands of character arc, which is one based in deterioration alongside growth. The most obvious way this takes form is his departure from humanity as his relationship with the Eye drives him to psychologically harm others, and he finds himself sympathizing more and more with the people he was afraid of, stating in episode 152 that anyone listening to his recordings might compare him to the other avatars that have had their minds and morals twisted. 

Over the course of the series, he is repeatedly traumatized and the show makes a point that he is being both physically and emotionally scarred. These happenings are what drive his motivation for revenge in season five, and he even states that revenge is making him a worse person. As a character he’s constantly berating himself and his own monstrousness, much to Martin’s dismay.  

That’s why the finale destroys me in the best way. Upon seeing that Jon has betrayed him and basically given himself over to the Eye, Martin asks “how much of you is even left?” And when Jon tries to reassure him that he’s still himself, Martin’s response is “how would you even know?” This cuts through me every time. Up until this point, Martin had consistently stood up for Jon and Jon’s humanity, even in the face of Tim’s doubt, Basira’s mistrust, Elias being cryptic, and Jon’s own self-hatred. This is the ultimate breaking point, the point where even Martin, the love of Jon’s life, doesn’t really recognize him. It’s brutal. Because at the end of the day, Jon is still himself; he’s a deeply broken person trying to make the right decisions.  

We’ll come back to the finale later, but for now I want to talk about the romance. 

Jon’s emotional growth throughout the series is largely tied into Martin. Martin’s the first person that Jon really opens up to, and this later grows into trust which then turns into a genuine emotional connection.  On the flip side, Martin’s growth in season four is largely tied into Jon. Martin starts season four basically waiting to die, but Jon’s return gives him a reason to keep living, and he’s later able to recognize his own value outside of the pure utility of ‘you need to set yourself on fire to keep everyone else warm.’ Both of them give each other reason to push onward despite everything becoming more and more hopeless.  

It’s a good romance. I wish the two had had a few more scenes together before the culmination, but it is built up over the course of four seasons and comes together in an utterly fantastic confession.  

And yeah, the scene with Martin and Jon in the Lonely is cheesy as hell, but it is the highest quality of cheese. These are some gourmet nachos.  

Umm, also kind of stating the obvious here, but it’s also pretty cool that the main character in this horror story falls in love with another man. You don’t see that a lot, and it’s cool that no one even makes a big deal out of it. It’s just a normal romance, but with two guys. It’s nice. 

So, they go to Scottland, they hang out, they’re in love, Jonalias starts the apocalypse through Jon, the world ends, and season five starts! 

...Let’s talk about season five! 

Part 4: Season 5 

At the very start of this post, I said that supernatural mysteries tend to get worse as they go along, and I am deeply sad to report that I don’t think that The Magnus Archives is an exception. It just goes downhill in a very different way than its ilk. 

And, so we’re clear, I don’t think season five totally tanks or becomes unlistenable, it’s just, in my opinion, notably worse than the rest of the show. 

As discussed earlier, it doesn’t fall apart due to a lack of planning; everything still makes sense, but the presentation has changed drastically. The episodic statements are no longer scary stories, but more like slam poems about the various hellscapes that Jon and Martin are trekking through. Honestly if these were published in a book of slam poetry, I would probably think they slapped pretty hard. I genuinely believe that Jonny Sims is a good writer, but as a podcast a lot of these statements just made me zone out. There’s at least four that I don’t even slightly remember. Myself and many others have noted that they just...aren’t scary, unless there’s a specific episode that really gets under your skin due to a certain fear or phobia. 

To quote my friend, “it’s harder to feel a solid impact when the setting is literally divorced from reality. People would either go numb or insane to the point where their fears become unrelatable.” 

And, to be honest, I think that this same surreal odyssey set up could have worked with a slight shift in narration. Two stand out episodes for me were “Strung Out” and “Wonderland.” Both of them show the tormented target actively trying to resist and interact with their tormenter, instead of just trying to escape or live through their situation. “Strung Out” is also more of character study; you learn about Francis’s life before the apocalypse through their interaction with the Web hellscape. Meanwhile “Wonderland” is just...f*cked, and you get to see Jon take the perspective of first-person Bad Guy throughout the whole thing, which is its own level of disturbing. 

But the majority of episodes feel so abstract that I kind of forget the people trapped in them are supposed to be characters and not just concepts, so it’s harder to feel their dread and pain. 

But I’m still here for the metaplot, the drama, and the romance. And when that’s good, it’s great! I think the final handful of episodes are really solid in that regard. 

Buuuuuuut... 

A decent chunk of season five is dedicated to the “kill bill” plot. Jon discovers he has the power to smite people, and while at first, he’s embarrassed about this, since he actively enjoyed killing Not!Sasha, Martin is super into it! He’s encouraging Jon to murder people.  

This is actually the set up for a really good arc. As Jon gets more and more into his own avenging angel persona, Martin could get more and more disturbed by it so by the time they get to London, Martin could be really upset that Jon is so willing to wreak his own divine justice by killing or torturing all of the avatars. 

And this does kind of happen. We do reach this end state, and it makes for a good final conflict, but the way we got here was borderline nonsense. Thematic gibberish, if you will. 

Throughout the journey, Martin is clearly motived by a sense of justice; these people are bad, and so they should die. Whereas Jon is clearly more motivated by revenge; he only goes after the avatars that hurt him personally. At one point, Jon admits that maybe all of this killing isn’t making anything better, but just making him worse. Martin apologizes for egging him on, Jon absolves him by saying he started it, and then Martin’s like “I’ll keep my apology then.” This is the second worst line in the entire series, right after “the sky ate him.” And it’s close. 

But it kind of feels like we’re back at square one. Jon is back to being ashamed of killing and Martin is still keen on his justice stance, but now just less pushy about it. The arc is basically half resolved at this point. 

But then it doesn’t matter, because Jon kills Helen anyway. So, Jon’s back on his revenge/justice thing. Then what was the point of his earlier revelation? Why have that if it’s not going to matter and the conflict that was escalating still culminates with Jon leaning into the avenging angel stuff, and Martin being disturbed by it? It just makes both of them look like huge hypocrites! I f*cking hate it when they’re in the tunnels and Martin says “you weren’t meant to enjoy it this much,” regarding Jon’s smiting. Where did this come from?! Why didn’t you say this earlier? Third worst line in the series. 

And yeah, I’ll say it; the boys fight too much in this season. I loved their romance up to season five, and their cute moments and more lowkey serious discussions are still good in this season, but God, they fight so much. And I’m not saying couples can’t have fights or tension, that’s just realistic and also stories need conflict to be interesting. Jonny Sims is on the record saying that balancing a healthy romance with the stress of a literal apocalypse was a priority, and I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s well balanced.  I’m just saying that sometimes it feels like they don’t even like each other and it really started to grate on me. 

Maybe it would have been better if the beginning of this season was dedicated to charming romance at first, so we as an audience could better appreciate how strong their love is and how it’s truly being tested. But obviously that was never on the table— 

ALEX NO. 

So, yeah, I have a lot of problems with season. I think it’s the worst one by far, even though there is a lot of it I still enjoy, including the ending. 

As I mentioned before, the moment where Martin confronts Jon in the panopticon absolutely kills me, and Jon’s reaction kills me even harder. Throughout the season, Jon had largely been motivated by revenge, martyrdom, and the subconscious call of the Eye, and all three of those factors led him to his position as the pupil. He’s getting revenge against the powers, sacrificing his humanity to get rid of the Fears, and taking his place as wearer of the watcher’s crown. But all of this gets thrown out the window when he realizes that Martin is going to die. And not only is Martin going to die, Martin is going to die specifically because he loves Jon and refuses to leave Jon alone to die horribly. Martin had always been an underlying motivation for Jon, his “reason” as stated in episode 167, but now love as a motivator has come to the forefront, and Jon can no longer go through with his plan because of it. But at this point in the series, they’re both utterly doomed, and Jon concludes that the only possible chance they have of surviving, however unlikely, would be to sever the pupil of the eye, technically killing Jon, but maybe, just maybe, allowing them to escape with the Fears. Whether that’s meant to be literal or more ethereal is left unclear. Hell, maybe Jon’s just making it up completely and creating his own potential happy ending. It’s a pretty potent ending in emotional terms; Jon has to release the Fears and Martin has to kill Jon, and those are the two things they were dead set on not doing.  

The Web, arguably the real main antagonist, basically won, and their manipulation of Jon worked. The destruction spread, and there is kind of a bleak underlying tone to that. 

But at least this ending has some semblance of hope to it. I’m not saying that releasing the Fears was objectively the correct moral decision; the entire point of the dilemma is that there was no objectively correct moral decision. But, while Jon’s solution does have merit, it was also the most hopeless. I think dramatically, any one of the choices on the table could have worked if the writing was well executed, but thematically this one seemed like the perfect combination of grim and optimistic. Like, all of the evils that plague humanity can’t just be defeated forever and things could get worse, but maybe not. Maybe everything works out... 

So yeah, The Magnus Archives...is a podcast. And it’s a really good podcast. Great, even. I can complain about season five all I want, but regardless of how that worked out, you can tell throughout the entire show that the people working on it were trying to tell a genuinely excellent story. 

It’s good. Go listen to it. Even though I spoiled the entire thing and if you’re still here, you’ve probably already listened to it. Listen to it again. 

[bondsmagii]

Regarding what was lying in mom's bed three months after she had passed.

ARCHIVIST

Statement of Bonnie Jennings, regarding a discovery made in her mother’s bed three months after her mother’s death. Original statement given May 18, 2009. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)

Mum and I… we weren’t close. That’s probably an understatement. I suppose the correct word for it is that we were estranged, but that’s always seemed far too gentle for my liking. If I’m being honest, Mum and I hated one another. I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but my mother was a difficult woman to get along with. She drove everybody away in the end, but not even in the tragic, oh, she can’t help it kind of way. No, she knew exactly what she was doing. She revelled in it, I think. Well, I know she did. I’m not sure what she got out of it, but she liked to… to hurt people, I guess. She got a kick out of it. She was never quick about it, never in-your-face, because that wasn’t fun for her. She was so insidious. She would draw it out, let it take its time, ensure you never had enough to directly confront her about it. She never had a kind word for anyone or anything, and especially not for me. You know, I absolutely hate it, because whenever I mention that my mother and I didn’t talk much people always assume it’s because of well, you know. Somebody like that, you don’t expect them to be accepting of these kinds of things, do you? They always assume I had the classic story of coming out and being booting into the street, but no. That’s just a tragic story that gets parcelled up and delivered out as sad little stories meant to tell everyone how brave we are, and how much we endure, and it always ends with a reconciliation or with us getting back on our feet, stronger for it. Really, that’s not what happens most often. Of course it still does, and I’m not denying that, but I think people need to talk more about the more subtle kind of dismissal we might face. When I told Mum I was trans, all she said was “alright”. That’s it. Just the one word. She didn’t want to know anything more about it, she didn’t want to ask what it meant. She was completely disinterested, but not even in the way that some parents might be – struggling to deal with the fact that they’ve lost a child or whatever crap they come out with. I’m charitable about it – I know it is a shock. I have a lot of trans friends with good relationships with their parents who reported that their parents did need some time just to get used to the idea, but I think that’s normal. When somebody has an idea of you and you tell them they’re wrong, and that you were never that person, it’s a shock. But Mum was so self-centred, so absorbed in her own existence, that she really didn’t care about anything or anyone else. It didn’t matter that her son was actually her daughter. It didn’t centre on her, so who cares? It was infuriating, because on the surface she looked like a model mother. She began using the correct name and pronouns immediately and didn’t slip up once. She advised me on clothing and hair and makeup and gave me beauty tips. She looked so supportive, but really it was just her controlling criticism repackaged. I think, in a sick way, she loved having a daughter. Now she was the expert, as the older woman, and she could boss me around and condescend to me even more. It was an absolute nightmare, but I’m not here to talk smack about my mum – even though I could quite happily do so all day. No, this is about what happened after she was dead and gone. You hear that? Dead. She’s dead, and she’s still causing me problems.

I hadn’t spoken to Mum for over a year when she passed. She never even told me she was sick. None of my business, I guess. It was just Mum and me growing up, and there was no extended family. As I said, Mum drove everyone away in the end. There was absolutely nobody there at all, and that’s why her body rotted in her house for months before anyone found her. She died in the winter, and it was so cold her body basically froze  – she never left the heating on a timer, always turned it on manually so she could have more control over the cost. It wasn’t until the weather started getting warmer that neighbours noticed all the flies on the window, realised they hadn’t seen Mum for a while. They called the police, the police broke in, and they found the putrid mess that used to be my mother. Pretty messed up, right? Somehow I was still her emergency contact, because I guess there was nobody else, and so the police called me and broke the news and I was shocked but not really that upset. I mean, that sounds bad, but she’s been dead to me for some time, you know? Really it was sort of nice to know she was actually dead, because grieving for a living person – especially a person you never really had – is a very complicated business. Now she was dead, I thought I could finally just close that chapter. Of course it’s never that easy.

As her next of kin, I was responsible for her… estate, I suppose. That sounds so grand considering it was just a small semi-detached in rural Lincolnshire, but little though it was, it was mine. She never made a will, as I found out when I expressed surprise she’d left me anything at all. She hadn’t actually bothered, so by default it had all gone to me. I was living in Peterborough at the time, and Mum’s house was only in Spalding, so we didn’t live that far apart at all. It didn’t take long for my then-boyfriend and I to get in the car and head down there to see what all we needed to do. I wasn’t interested in keeping the house for myself, because why would I want it? Not to mention Henry and I had been considering buying a place together – later, when he proposed to me, he confessed he had been planning to pop the question that weekend but then they had to go and find my mother’s corpse, which was kind of funny in a morbid way – so we figured if we could sell the place it might be good money to put towards our own first house. Of course, there was the small matter of trying to sell a house where somebody had died, but I figured it wouldn’t be that hard. It wasn’t a brutal murder or anything like that. If we could clean the place up nicely, I didn’t think it would matter too much.

Well, they hadn’t exactly told us how bad it was going to be. Did you know that the family are in charge of cleaning up a house after a death? I didn’t. I thought that would be something that would be covered, you know? By who I’m not sure, but I didn’t think it would be down to family members to scrub up blood and worse from the carpets or the walls or whatever. I at least thought the police would warn us, and maybe it just slipped their mind, but whatever happened or didn’t happen ended up with Henry and I walking into that house not knowing what to expect at all.

We soon got the idea. The stench was abysmal, even just walking up the garden path. Of course, the body itself had been taken care of, but a body that’s been laying in the house for three months leaves behind a lot of evidence, even if it did spend most of that time mostly frozen. Mum’s bedroom was just… it was a nightmare. Words cannot describe the stretch. Sweet and sticky and sickly; you can taste it more than you can smell it. Cloying. That’s the word that came to my mind. I always thought it was a stupid word, but in that moment I understood exactly what it meant. Cloying. I could feel it in my throat and in my nose, thick and viscous, like having a cold and needing to cough up phlegm. Thank God I hadn’t had anything to eat or I would have thrown up. Poor Henry wasn’t so lucky – though he just about made it to the bathroom. I suppose I’m just morbidly curious, because despite the stench I walked right in there, holding my cardigan over my nose. The covers were pulled right back from the bed and there was this incredible stain on the mattress, almost like a bruise in the way it faded into different colours and shades. Sort of like a bruise meeting a patch of rusted iron, black and deep red and dark purple and then lighter shades of brown and grey, all in the vague outline of a prone body at the darkest parts, spreading out like some messed up halo as it grew lighter. It was absolutely vile, but fascinating in its own way. At the very least, she had done us the favour of dying in the bed rather than on the floor, because the carpet would have been a lost cause. With this, I reckoned we could throw out the bed and everything on it, air the room out, and it would be good as new.

I needed a little fresh air myself, so I opened the windows wide and then went to see if Henry was alright. He was still retching pretty badly, so I snooped around the spare room a bit – nothing much to see, if I’m honest – and then decided to wait for him in the back garden, where I’d be able to take advantage of the breeze. I was sure I could smell that heavy stench clinging to my hair, and do you know for weeks afterwards I still thought I could smell it? It doesn’t come out, no matter how much you wash it. Anyway, I obviously glanced into Mum’s room on my way out, and immediately I saw something was wrong. The covers were all back on her bed.

Now, I know for a fact they weren’t there before, because I saw the big stain on the mattress. Now the covers were back in place, not tucked in or even overly neat, but definitely covering the bed and tossed around like somebody was curled up under them, asleep. Strangely I didn’t feel scared or even very confused. I kind of… stood there for a moment, wondering how I was seeing what I was seeing, and then quite quickly I just accepted that I was seeing it and there was nothing I could do about that, so I decided to check it out. It’s not something I would ordinarily do, I don’t think – I’m curious, but I’m not touch a bed covered in decomposing body juices curious – but for some reason I just walked in there and pulled back the covers. One fluid movement, like a mother trying to get her teenager up for school. I just yanked it back from the top, near the pillows, and then I finally felt the horror that should have come much sooner.

It was… maggots, obviously. They were everywhere, writhing around in a huge pile, twisting their way over the stain and out of the bedsheets and even crawling up my arm, where I was still holding the covers. I screamed and shook my arm frantically, sending maggots flying in all directions, and immediately they began making their way back to the mass on the bed. It was like there was some kind of gravitational pull dragging them back to that pile of wriggling, twitching creatures, and as I watched I became convinced there was some kind of method to their movements. They were arranging themselves, forming into a shape, and I only dragged my eyes away when Henry appeared in the doorway, looking alarmed. I realised then that I’d screamed, and I tried to play it down – in that moment I wasn’t overly surprised, now I’d had a second to think about it, because yeah, of course there are maggots. They like dead bodies, right? I guessed that after the body was removed there were probably a ton of them in the mattress itself that had wriggled up in search of food, though thinking about it again, I didn’t recall seeing any holes in the cover sheet or anything. I tried to calm down, but something drew my eyes back to the maggots – I think it was the way Henry was just staring at the bed, horrified in a way I’ve never seen before – and I saw that the maggots had… how do I even describe this?

They had sat up. They were sitting, and they were in the vague shape of a person. I could see a head, shoulders, the arms limply by the sides. There was a torso that joined on to the bend of hips and legs stretched out in front, over the bed, the feet disappearing into the covers that were still left. I could see the slight rise in the covers where the feet were. The maggots were still moving around, so the shape was constantly shifting, but I could distinctly see details beginning to emerge. Hair. The sunken pits where eyes should be. A gaping mouth that was opening and closing, a black void behind it, as though the figure was trying to say something. And it was. I could hear this strange voice, like an exhale of air, a voice that was barely there at all – but I knew it was saying my name. Bonnie. Bonnie. I could hear it as clearly as anything. In that moment, it was the loudest thing in the room.

I stumbled backwards, but it was as far as I could go. I was frozen, even as I watched the figure swing itself out of bed and get to unsteady feet. It stumbled towards me like a drunk, wheezing deep in its throat, and I thought it sounded like a laugh. I’m not even saying that with hindsight – it was laughing at me. It was my mother’s laugh, and in that moment I knew she was doing this. I mean, I don’t know if she was, because how could she? But in that moment I thought I knew she was doing it, anyway, and I was so angry at her. I was so damn mad at her, for dying in such a horrible way and leaving me with the mess, for all the stuff she’d pulled on me growing up, for every single thing she had done to me, the big things and the petty things, and now this! She couldn’t even die properly, she had to come back and terrify me and traumatise me and ruin everything! I screamed again, but this time it was just pure, animalistic rage – I’ve never heard myself make such a sound. I looked around and I saw the chair sitting in front of the mirror and I picked it up by the back and chucked it into the air, catching it by the back legs and swinging it at the maggot figure with everything I had. I don’t even know what good I thought it would do, because it was just maggots, but the figure disintegrated around the torso and the maggots scattered to the floor. The figure half-collapsed, just a pair of legs wobbling towards me, and I let out this manic laugh before I saw the maggots were already regrouping. Finally I gathered some of my senses and I turned for the door, yelling at Henry to run. He didn’t need telling twice. We both sprinted down the hall and I think we both jumped clean down the entire set of stairs – or it at least felt like that. We ran out into the street and I pulled my cardigan off and started jumping on it, because I was sure I could feel all those maggots crawling on me. Henry finally grabbed me and pulled me away, and we got into the car and drove off. Left the cardigan right there on the street.

We didn’t really discuss what had happened. I hired a cleaning company that specialised in that kind of clean-up, and they never reported any problems. The house was cleaned up good as new, aired out, all Mum’s stuff either sold or thrown away. Eventually the house sold too, even if it did take a little longer than I’d like. Henry and I got married, managed to buy our first house, and while we’ve mentioned it vaguely a few times we’ve still not really talked about it. I think we both probably mutually agreed that we must have been seeing things, and to be honest I let myself believe that for a while. I mean, there’s no way, right? But recently it’s just been bugging me, and I’ve been dreaming about it. It’s just been on my mind, and I can’t pretend that I didn’t see what I saw any longer. I don’t know if this will be of any use to you, or even if it’s the kind of thing that you go in for, but I thought I would write it down nevertheless. I do feel a little better now, weirdly. I thought reliving it all would make me feel worse, but I’m not going to complain.

ARCHIVIST

Statement ends.

Well. That certainly makes me wish I hadn’t eaten lunch before recording. It all seems mostly standard up until the sentient maggot hivemind, and if it had just been Mrs Jennings present I would say it’s possible she might have been mistaken. It’s a fairly specific thing to see, but given the circumstances and the inherent revulsion most people experience when seeing that many maggots at once, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the stress of the situation resulted in Mrs Jennings believing she saw something unusual. There is, however, one more thing included with this statement – a brief affirmation from Mr Jennings, which, while he chose not to go into detail, does affirm that everything in Mrs Jennings’ statement is true to what he himself witnessed. Of course, he wasn’t present with his wife for the entirety of the time period the statement covers, but he was there at the most important part. One person having such a highly specific hallucination would be a stretch, but two people experiencing the exact same highly specific hallucination is even less likely.

Tim contacted the current residents of the house that used to belong to Mrs Jennings’ mother, but they reported nothing at all unusual in the time they had been living there. They were aware of the fact a death had occurred in the house – just as well, really, as Tim was quite happy to tell them about it – but didn’t seem overly bothered. In fact, Tim reported that they seemed almost disappointed that the house hadn’t come with a resident ghost, though looking at Mrs Jennings’ description of her mother, I’m not entirely sure that’s the kind of ghost they would want to have to house share with.

Tim also managed to get in contact with John Atchieson, owner and operator of Atchieson Cleaning Solutions, a company based in Peterborough that, alongside general domestic and commercial cleaning jobs, also specialises in cleaning up biohazardous materials – crime scenes, accident scenes, natural deaths. The case of Mrs Jennings’ mother was found in their records, and Mr Atchieson could remember nothing unusual about it. In a rare stroke of luck, the employee assigned to oversee the clean up at the house was Mr Atchieson’s son, also named John; Mr Atchieson Senior was able to contact him and ask if he remembered anything specific from the site himself, but apparently there was nothing remarkable about the job at all – just a standard decomposition job, hauling away the hazardous materials and cleaning the room with heavy chemicals to try to get rid of the smell. Mr Atchieson Junior helped remove the mattress himself, and reported no maggots of any kind.

Given the lack of physical evidence I would like to claim that there is no basis to this statement, but considering the fact there are two witnesses and this wouldn’t be the first time that a being apparently made of some kind of larvae or insect has been observed wandering about, I’m more inclined to worry about where Mrs Jennings’ mother may have gone, if she was no longer in her bedroom.

End recording.

[ghostbustermelanieking]

okay hear me out on this; archivist melanie au

• the major switch in this au is that melanie's encounters with war ghosts and the end of ghost hunt uk happens earlier -- right around the time gertrude dies. the other major switch is with melanie's father. who is still in ivy meadows when the corruption and john amherst comes, but he manages to survive. melanie is visiting when it happens and gets him out alive, but not before they've both encountered plenty of the corruption

• when gertrude dies, there's no obvious candidate for the archivist in elias's eyes. there's sasha, but she isn't marked by anything yet, and since gertrude wanted her, elias wants to avoid promoting her mostly out of spite. there's others who have been marked -- tim for example -- but none of them feel quite right. he transfers sasha, tim, and martin to the archives with the subtle offer of a promotion to head archivist for one of them, but he makes no promises, like he is still holding out for someone else... and then the very first week, they get a live statement for the Archives, a real one. from former ghost hunter, doubly marked by the entities already, melanie king

• melanie is as skeptical of the Institute as she is in canon, but it seems worth it to go in and give a statement. just to talk to someone who might believe her. (georgie has been telling her she should talk to SOMEONE about this, and this qualifies, right?) she hits it off with the archival staff, particularly sasha, and feels a surprising release after giving her statement. she keeps staring at the Archives, all the statements and unanswered questions -- and yes, maybe all of them arent real, but odds are that some of them are. that some of them might have answers. she definitely isn't expecting to be offered a job by the creepy apparent head of the place, but, well. she's gotten weirder offers

• melanie's primary focus in archiving is on investigation, and accrediting the various statements. she figures out the correlation between the digital and tape recordings pretty quickly, and starts disregarding any that will record digitally. and there's an even larger focus than usual on chasing down leads post-statement, something that melanie will often participate in herself. tim and sasha and martin are a little skeptical of an outsider taking a promotion that should've gone to one of them (or at least another employee), but they all warm up to each other at a decent speed. melanie and sasha hit it off to the point where melanie starts inviting her out with georgie, and then sasha starts inviting tim, and then martin, and the resentment more or less goes away after that

• melanie stays invested in war ghosts, and trying to figure out what happened with sarah baldwin (she reads the anglerfish statement and her eyes bug out when she recognizes the name from the follow up), but she latches onto figuring out other things. one of these things ends up being gertrude's disappearance. melanie has literally none of the history before she gets hired, and she gets curious after a few months, starts asking questions. sasha's able to provide the most context, having actually MET gertrude, but tim and martin have heard rumors of their own, and they end up swapping conspiracy theories for hours one night at the pub. someone throws out elias offing her. melanie can't quite let the stories go. she starts digging into gertrude's history in her spare time, wanting to put the pieces together. sasha helps her on that one, too.

• this is where jon comes in: he never works for the institute, but he stays interested in the supernatural. he also stays closer to georgie over the years, helps with research on what the ghost sometimes. this results in georgie being the only one who knows about the mr. spider incident. she ends up suggesting jon give his statement to the institute -- maybe a little reluctantly; she doesn't fully trust the institute, has seen how obsessive melanie has grown over the past few months, heard her talk about how creepy it is when she loses herself while recording statements. but she trusts melanie, and the others, and she knows they'll do proper follow up. maybe put jon's anxieties over the whole thing to rest.

• so jon goes in and gives his statement. and despite the fact that he and melanie don't see eye to eye on a lot of things (ghost hunt UK, how the institute is run, etc), he hits it off with everyone in the Institute, and seems intrigued by everything after it's all over. they promise to follow up on his statement, but there... isn't much to find. aside from a few mentions of the book on old internet forums, and a few potential missing person cases in connection, there isn't much to find. (jon's bully never reappeared, but this isn't a surprise.)

• the dead ends are disappointing, to a number of people. jon seems dissatisfied when he comes to follow up and they have nothing for him. georgie seems disappointed at the lack of clear answers. martin mentions once, to melanie, of how the statement reminds him of the carlos vittery statement, and maybe the two are connected? melanie suggests they look into it that evening.

• this time, jane prentiss doesnt follow martin home. why bother when the archivist is right there?

• georgie notices when melanie disappears; prentiss doesn't bother messaging her. she calls sasha and the others.

• georgie encourages melanie to quit after it's over, when melanie is staying in her guest room. tells her how worried she is. melanie agrees, she really does, but she isn't sure what else to do. even if she quits, the worms will still be in the institute (tim finds a nest under his desk three days after melanie gets out), and the mystery will still be there. she'll never know what happened to gertrude, never know the truth behind all these statements they've found. she wants to leave, can feel herself changing the longer she stays, but she isn't sure how she can leave

• things go pretty similarly after that. the only thing that's different is that jon feels guilty when he hears what happened to melanie, and comes by the institute to apologize. then he starts hanging around, asking sasha and tim and martin questions about statements and experiences and all of it, laughing stiffly and quietly at sasha and tim's jokes. martin sees how interested he is and actually invites him out on an investigation one night. melanie sighs and tells georgie to start inviting jon to pub night

• prentiss comes. this is the same. melanie kills the spider. she and martin and sasha end up in the storage room, tim is on the other side. tim saves melanie and martin. sasha goes up to artifact storage

• this is where things really change: sasha is taken, although she doesn't die. she's put in the table. but when the not-sasha comes up and hugs tim and martin in relief, asks worried questions, talks to the police and the employees and everyone like she is sasha... melanie still sees through it. she doesn't understand why this is happening because that is NOT SASHA. and tim and martin and georgie have no idea what she's talking about. the not-sasha just smiles at melanie when she protests and says, "don't you know me, melanie? it's just sasha. your good friend, sasha."

• melanie won't let it go. and she won't stay home and recover. she insists and insists until georgie says she believes her, and agrees to go along and help her look as long as melanie doesn't strain her leg. they go and they look in the archives one night, nearly tear it apart, and somehow they find it. the adelard dekker statement. it's the table.

• melanie tells tim and martin, but they don't believe her until she brings an axe down on the table, splits up and sends a shivering sasha tumbling down on the floor. until they are being chased with something with the face of the only sasha they'd recognize, and the real sasha is telling them again and again that it's not her

• they decide to quit, all four of them, tim and melanie still worm-scarred, tim and martin wide eyed and horrified by the way they don't recognize sasha. melanie ignores her sneaking suspicion that it won't work, ignores the sinking feeling, right up until she's standing in elias's office and he's smirking at all of them, stammering, unable to force the words out. i quit. but they can't

• melanie is furious. she shouts, she threatens, she pulls a knife on elias, but none of it works. it falls on deaf ears. no way out for any of them, even after everything

• the next morning, elias brings someone down to the archives and introduces them as a new archival assistant. it's jon, who's maybe a little eager, and certainly confused and hurt when everyone responds with horror

• elias meets melanie's eyes over her assistants' heads. he mentions how nice it will be to have someone new around, someone with experience in researching the supernatural... and what a shame it was that it couldnt be that nice young host of the what the ghost podcast

• they understand each other now. melanie grits her teeth and looks away. no way out now

[ihaveatypeanditstrickstergods]

Operation Hearthfire Chapter 1: It’s Better Warm

Finally, it’s up!

Post-Avengers canon divergent.  Loki is exiled to Earth, placed under magically binding house arrest in a SHIELD safehouse, watched by a bevy of highly trained agents... and one "caretaker," who up until recently had been a low-level archivist.  Heather Seagin doesn't know why she was chosen for this job any more than anyone else seems to, but she'll be damned if she isn't going to do it to the best of her abilities, even as surrounding circumstances and Loki himself endeavor to make it as difficult as possible.

Read it on Ao3!

@loki-yoursaviourishere  

(if you want to be tagged for this, just let me know!  If you asked before and I forgot, I’m sorry!  if you thought you wanted to be tagged for this and changed your mind, also let me know!)

It was one of SHIELD’s smallest facilities: an archive, built in Upstate New York sometime in the 1950’s, filled with reports, both news and scientific, then left mostly alone.  It was tended by only two low-clearance staff members, who were each only at the facility a few times a week (rarely on the same day), or by appointment if one of the files there needed to be consulted.  A woman who, until her recent recruitment for a more... unusual job, had been one of those two staff members was seated in a chair facing her former desk, looking over it at her supervising agent.

“Long-Term Operation Codename Hearthfire, Verbal Status Report 3,” Agent Richardson said into the pocket recorder, “27 August 2012, present Level 6 Agent T. Richardson and Exceptional Level 1 Archivist H. Seagin.  Recorded at 0900 hours at archival building designation 023.”  He set the recorder down on the desk and sat down in the chair.  Heather always thought that Richardson looked like he’d just stepped out of an episode of Law and Order, which didn’t help her nerves when they met at the archive for these status reports.  It made her feel like she was being interrogated.

“Alright, let’s start with general thoughts.  How have things progressed with the Subject since the last report?”

“They haven’t,” Heather replied bluntly.  She was now into her third week as Loki’s caretaker since he’d been exiled to Earth, and she could count the number of words they’d exchanged without taking off her shoes.  Or well, words she’d spoken to him.  He had yet to acknowledge her existence past a few glares, never mind speaking to her.

“Loki--sorry, the Subject,” she was still getting used to the phrasing SHIELD wanted her to use for these reports, “is still just staying in his room all day.  I did try staying up until when he usually gets up Wednesday night, but he didn’t leave his room then either, so I think he’s waiting until he’s sure I’m asleep.”  

“So, no progress, okay...” Agent Richardson nodded as Heather winced, then he went on to the next question.

“Have you been able to make any contact?  You were talking last week about leaving notes.”  Heather let out an uncomfortable chuckle.

“I tried,” she admitted.  As far as she was concerned, part of her job as the exiled god’s caretaker was helping him adjust to the minor details of life on earth.  At the time, leaving post-it notes explaining how to use various items across the isolated SHIELD safehouse where they’d been placed seemed like a good idea, but in practice, well...

“I do think he read some of them, anyway, at least it seemed like he was able to successfully use the shower, but there was no response, unless you count me finding them torn up the next morning.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess.”  He folded his hands, “Alright, elephant in the room.  Let’s talk about the attempted perimeter breach.”  Heather sighed.  “I think I already said what I wanted to say in the incident report,” she remarked.

“Can you just humor me and go over what happened again?  I need to have this on the record.”

“Fine.  So four days ago around 5 AM, the Subject,” she emphasized the last two words with a frustrated gesture, “attempted to leave the house and was knocked unconscious, I assume by his inhibitor cuff.”  The cuff was Asgardian, part of the provisions for Loki’s house arrest.  Neither Heather nor anyone else in SHIELD knew how it worked, and no one wanted to risk taking a closer look at it in case that disabled it, but it was supposed to keep him from using magic and, apparently, from leaving the house.

“I was asleep when it happened,” she continued, “since, you know, he only leaves his room when I’m asleep, but the team watching the house was able to bring him back in without incident,” even if it had taken six of them.  “One of them woke me up and brought me in, so I was present when he woke up about five minutes later, but he didn’t say anything and went back to his room pretty quickly.”

“Have there been any changes in the Subject’s behavior since then?”  Heather had to think about that question, but only for a second.

“Yes, actually.  He’s stopped making messes every night.”  At first, Heather would often wake up to find one room or another turned upside down--couches taken apart, drawers removed, the works, but she hadn’t since Loki had attempted to leave.  “At least for now.  It’s only been four days.  He might just be giving me a break.”

“Interesting.  What about changes in his psychological state?”

“I wouldn’t know.  He’s been avoiding me and refuses to make contact with me.”

“That’s fair.  Anything else?”  

Heather hesitated.  She did have one more thing to say, but if she did, either Agent Richardson would shoot her down or she’d be committed to this course of action, and at this point, after talking over what a bad job she was doing, she wasn’t sure which she was hoping for.

“There is one thing,” she said, deciding to go for it, “I want to try to directly attempt to establish contact tonight.  I have a plan.”

“I take it the plan’s more involved than post-it notes?”  Richardson raised an eyebrow, causing Heather to internally roll her eyes.

“Yes, it’s more involved than post-it notes,” she said with a small annoyed sigh, “You watch the house at night, right?”  She had trouble keeping track of the monitoring squads’ shifts, but he’d been there during the attempted perimeter breach.

“Some nights, yes.  Why?”

“Is there a usual time that he eats?  I know that he has been pretty much every night.”  At least if the dishes she found in the mornings were any indication.

“It varies, but usually between 0200 and 0400.  So you’re gonna try to get him while he eats?”

“Yeah.  Last time I stayed up it was in the living room, which is closer to his room... I think if I stay up in the sitting room by the kitchen, he might think the coast is clear and go about his business, then I can approach him when he enters the kitchen to eat.”

“And what, you’ll ambush him while he eats and try to get him to talk to you?”

“Hopefully.”  To Heather’s surprise, Agent Richardson leaned forward and paused the recording.

“Look, Heather,” he said, “I can tell you’re trying, and I appreciate that you’re taking this job seriously, but honestly?  You shouldn’t feel like you have to do this.  Given what Loki’s done and what he’s capable of, no one would blame you if you just let him sulk.”

While she could sort of see his point--they both knew that she wasn’t qualified for this, that there wasn’t anybody really qualified to share space with a demigod war criminal--something in his tone made her temper flare.  Only three weeks in, and he was already telling her to give up?

“I appreciate the thought,” she said, trying her hardest not to scowl, “but y’all brought me in to be Loki’s caretaker.  Last I checked, that meant more than just letting him eat my leftovers while I sleep.”  This job was aggravating, a little terrifying, and more than a little potentially dangerous, but she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to try her utmost to do it.

“Hmm,”  Agent Richardson tilted his head, and if Heather hadn’t known better, she might’ve picked up the slightest hint of a smile on his normally inscrutable face.  He leaned forward and turned the recorder back on.

“Alright,” he said, “sounds like a workable plan.  Puts you at a bit of risk, though, so I want to go back over contingencies for if he reacts negatively.”  Heather was silent for a moment, surprised at the agent’s change of attitude, but decided to continue on with her plan before he tried to talk her out of it again.

“So, first off, the sitting room by the kitchen is connected to the back door.  The perimeter breach proved that he can’t go too far outside the house, and if I come in while he’s eating, he’ll probably be sitting down, so as long as I stay by the door I’ll have a decent chance of making it out if he reacts physically.”

“Uh-huh.  And if he’s faster than you anticipated?”

“I say the cuff’s command word.”  It was the ultimate failsafe, a single word she could say to make the cuff knock Loki unconscious as sure as if he had left the house.  The perimeter breach had proved that the cuff acted quickly enough that she’d most likely be fine.

“Good,” he said with a nod, “Sounds like a plan.  Hopefully we’ll have some more positives to talk about next week.  End recording.”  Agent Richardson turned the recorder off and stood up, pushing the chair out behind him as he asked, “Was there anything else you needed to take care of here?” causing Heather to shake her head.

“No, I don’t need to do any of my fake job today,” she joked with a small grin, tension reduced now that she wasn’t actively being interviewed.  Officially she was still employed at the archive, although she only ‘worked’ in the building once a week. “Got some errands to run, though, so I’d better head out.”  If she hurried, she’d be able to get a nap in before her stakeout.

“Are you alright, Heather?” She was almost out the door and nearly missed the agent’s question, but turned around when she did.  There was a look of concern on his face, the most emotion she’d seen him express since they’d met when she first took the caretaker job.

“I’m fine,” she assured him with a small smile, “frustrated more than anything, but hey, maybe I’ll actually accomplish something tonight.”

“Alright.  Just... be careful.  This is Loki we’re talking about.”

“I know.  I will.”

***

After a grocery run and a couple of other stops, Heather did, in fact, make it back to the safehouse in time for a nap.  The house was tucked into a forest just far enough away from civilization that people were unlikely to come looking, although not so far away that cell service was nonexistent.  Until she’d been recruited by SHIELD, first for the archive job, then as Loki’s caretaker, she had lived in the downtown area of a small city in Virginia, so the quiet still weirded her out a little--although it was very nice when it came to napping.  When she woke up a few hours later--hopefully enough sleep to get her through the night--she had something to eat in the kitchen, took care of both her dishes and the ones Loki had left the night before and headed through the door on the far side into the sitting room.

Despite more or less having the run of the house, she didn’t usually bother with the small sitting room by the back door--she was pretty sure the most time she’d spent there was putting the armchairs back together after Loki had trashed the room one night--but it was perfect for her stakeout. It was adjacent to the kitchen, on the far side from the rest of the house, and the door between the two rooms created a blind spot that would hopefully keep her hidden.   Leaving the door just ajar enough that she could hear what was happening in the kitchen, she settled herself in a chair with a book. Soon it would be too dark to read, but she could at least get some in now before she had to try to keep herself awake on nerves alone.

One hour crept by, then an hour and a half, then two, each easily seeming twice its actual length.  Bringing a book had seemed like a good idea at the time, but she was so focused on the night ahead that she’d barely been able to pay attention to the words in front of her.  It was after two hours, around 9:40, when it finally got too dark to even pretend to read.  On the bright side, even if she hadn’t taken that nap, she was pretty sure her nerves would keep her from falling asleep.  As she sat in that chair, watching the door and waiting for any sign of life, she found herself wondering what if he didn’t come into the kitchen, what if he left as soon as he saw her... And what if she succeeded?

According to her phone, it was 2:27 AM when she finally heard footsteps entering the kitchen. Heather sat upright, muscles tense, the drowsiness of a moment ago forgotten. She could go in now, she supposed, but she wanted to wait until he was eating. Hopefully a plate full of food in front of him would make him less inclined to leave as soon as she came in the room--or at least put a table between the two of them if he reacted violently. The footsteps stopped, replaced with the sound of the refrigerator opening, followed by a drawer. Heather waited for the buzz of the microwave, but it never came. Instead she heard more footsteps, then a chair being pulled back.

Oh god, she thought, has he just been eating cold leftovers?  She mentally ran through a list of everything she’d put post-it notes on and internally facepalmed as she realized that she’d forgotten about the microwave.

She slowly began to stand up, her brain rapidly running through all the things she’d considered saying during her wait, only to freeze when she heard a voice--his voice--through the gap in the door.

“I know you’re in there,” Loki’s voice was hoarse, rougher than she’d expected, although she supposed that no one sounded their best after not speaking for three weeks, “Did you really think to hide from me?”

For a moment, Heather remained frozen part way through getting up from the chair, unsure of how to respond.  Somehow, all the times she’d run through this moment in her head, she’d never thought he might notice her--or at least if he had, she hadn’t thought he would acknowledge her.  For a moment, fear spread over her mind and she regretted even coming up with this plan in the first place.  But no.  She’d stayed up this late so she could try to talk to him, and dammit, she was going to talk to him.  Slowly, cautiously, as if approaching a skittish animal, she opened the door and stepped into the kitchen. 

“I just wanted to talk to you,” she admitted as she closed the door behind her, “this was the only way I could think of to do it.”

Moonlight shone through the window, hitting Loki like a spotlight.  The god sat at the kitchen table, arms loosely folded across his chest.  His blue-green eyes stared intently at her as she emerged into the room, the casserole dish of baked ziti sitting on the table seemingly forgotten.  As he watched her, still as a statue, she struggled to remember even a single word she’d planned on saying.  For a moment, the two just stared at each other, he in interest, she in apprehension, until finally the god spoke.

“Who are you?” he asked, his eyes scanning her face as if it was a book in a language he couldn’t quite comprehend.

“My name’s Hea-”

“No, who are you?” Loki stood up from the table and took a slow step towards her.

 “I had wondered,” he continued as he slowly and casually walked towards her, “if Odin would choose to exile me to Midgard.”  Unconsciously, Heather took a step back, backing herself against the door.

“I had even considered the possibility of being turned over to my previous captors,” his stare broke away from her for a brief moment as he looked into the room's camera, adding, “never mind that they only held me briefly, and only because I willed it. But I never anticipated you.” He turned back to her, closing the space between them as he asked, “What are you meant to be to me, hmm? A jailor? A servant?"  He leaned a hand on the doorframe, looming over her, "A sacrifice to an angry god?"

Heather looked up into Loki’s face, her eyes meeting his. She was sure he could see her fear, her wide eyes, her trembling legs. Her fight-or-flight instinct was screaming for flight, urging her to back through the door to the sunroom and either make a run for the perimeter or use the newly gained space to say the cuff’s command word and drop him. But instead, she took a quick breath, steeling herself.  If she ran now, she knew, she may as well leave the house, because she’d never get another opportunity to really talk to him.

"Your caretaker," she answered his question with only a slight tremble in her voice, "So a little bit of all three, depending on who you're asking."  

Loki’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment that seemed an eternity, he said nothing and stared into her face, his head cocked in what Heather hoped was just curiosity and not anything more sinister.  Finally, the god let out a sharp exhale through his nose--she wasn’t sure, but part of her thought it might have been the smallest hint of a chuckle--and shook his head.

“A caretaker?” he asked mockingly, “Your masters would throw a rabbit into a wolf’s den to, what, leave me notes explaining the obvious?  To wait up all hours of the night, for naught but a chance to speak with me?  No, you’re no caretaker.”

Any other time, the way he sneered the last word would have been enough to demoralize Heather then and there.  Her report that morning had been a reflection of how little an idea she had of what she was doing, and even now, the situation she’d engineered, one she’d intended to have full control over, had been all but usurped by the god who was now practically pinning her to a door.  By all accounts, she could be doing a lot better.  But then, that was why she was there.  After all, how the hell was anyone supposed to know what kind of caretaker she was when her charge made it this hard to even try?  Heather took a breath, straightened her shoulders, and began one more attempt to shift the conversation in her favor.

“So,” she said, pointedly looking past him to the ziti on the table, “you’ve been eating cold leftovers this whole time?”  Her nerves made the question spill out of her mouth more quickly than she’d intended, and she wasn’t sure if the confusion on Loki’s face was because the question was abrupt or because it was unintelligible.

“What?” the god asked, glancing over his shoulder to follow her gaze.  She continued while she had him off balance.

“I can heat it up for you,” she said, gesturing towards the table, “The ziti, I mean.  It’s a lot better warm.”

He actually did laugh at that, a rolling chuckle that seemed to come right from his chest as he turned back to look at her.

“Such tenacity,” Loki murmured, more to himself than to her.  She tensed, preparing for more insults or possibly even threats, but instead he stepped back, finally giving her some blessed breathing space.  

“Very well,” he said, “if you’re that dedicated to your role, by all means, show me.”

Heather took advantage of her newly-gained space to make her way towards the cupboards, still tense as she braced herself in case Loki tried anything.  The god remained still, but she could feel his gaze following her as she opened a cabinet and a drawer, removing a plate and butter knife--anything sharper was locked up, and she didn’t really want to deal with that at the moment--and approached the table.  The fork he’d had was still sitting next to the casserole dish, and between that and the butter knife, she managed to put what she thought was a good-sized serving of ziti on the plate.  She carefully walked the heavy-laden plate to the microwave, put it in, and pushed a few buttons, wondering once again how she had forgotten to leave a post-it explaining that--although, she didn’t know if it would’ve done much, given the shredded paper she’d found all over the house the morning after she’d placed them. As the microwave buzzed, she turned back to face Loki, who was still standing by the door.

“It’ll be ready in a moment,” she informed him, “so you can sit back down.”  To her surprise, he complied, although his eyes continued to follow her intently as she removed the now-steaming ziti from the microwave.  As she set it in front of him, he gestured at the chair across from his.

“Sit,” he ordered.  When she hesitated, he added, “You wished to speak with me, did you not?  You may as well sit where I can see you.”

“Oh, okay.”  That made sense.  Heather sat down, looking at the god now seated across from her.  Despite his claimed desire to look at her during their conversation, Loki was barely paying her any attention, instead focusing on the steaming plate of food in front of him.  He almost looked human now, a tired part of her brain noted.  As that thought ran through her head, he looked back up at her, one eyebrow cocked as if silently asking Well?   Right.  He wasn’t human.  He was a god, he was her charge, and this was quite possibly her only opportunity to talk him around.

 During the silent hours she’d waited for him to come into the kitchen, she’d mentally run through this conversation dozens of times.  She’d put together a speech she was confident would have had Loki understanding her position, and of course she could only remember it in scrambled bits now.  But she could tell that his patience--such as it was--was running thin, so she let as much as she could fall out in whatever order came to mind.

“Look,” Heather said, “I’ll admit that a lot about this situation is... weird.  I don’t know if there’s any sort of precedent for it, I mean, I’ve never been a god’s caretaker before, but I want to do the best I can for you.  To help you out here, I mean.”  As frustrating as Loki’s avoidance was, she understood why he would be wary of her--she was, after all, working for the organization that had helped to assemble the Avengers to defeat him a few months ago and now was overseeing his confinement. 

“Obviously I don’t expect us to be friends or anything,” she continued, “but I do think that things would be a lot more comfortable for both of us if we communicated... or at least if you didn’t completely avoid me.  I get if you need space, but...”

“Enough.”  The sudden clatter of Loki’s fork hitting the table cut off whatever she was going to say next.

“I’m impressed with your persistence,” the god pushed his now nearly empty plate forward, “I’m sure that some would even find it admirable.”  He picked the fork back up, idly playing with it in one hand,  “But you needn’t treat me like a fool.  We both know that you didn’t consent to being locked up here to ‘do your best for me’.  You’ve all but given yourself to a god who invaded your world not one of your years ago.”  His eyes narrowed as he stared directly into hers, “I would know why.”

“Why?” Heather hesitated.  Shit.  She’d hoped he wouldn’t have asked that.  Up until this point, she had been completely honest with him--she was sure Agent Richardson would say too honest, given Loki’s reputation for manipulation.  But she’d even kept her full reasons for agreeing to the caretaker job from SHIELD; there was no way she could tell Loki.  It would leave her far too vulnerable.  Maybe she could tell part of the truth, just enough to--hopefully--satisfy him.

“I mean...” she began, looking up to meet his eyes, “I was offered the opportunity to live with a literal god.  I knew that it was going to be dangerous, but, well... if I’d said no, I would have regretted it.  I would have spent my entire life wondering what would have happened if I’d agreed.”  Her words hung in the air between them for a moment, and she was afraid she’d said too much, but then Loki shook his head, a smirk twisting across his face.

“And you never thought you might regret agreeing?” he asked.  Before Heather could come up with an answer, or even properly register the question, Loki stabbed his fork into the table, leaving it standing straight up.  She started, almost knocking her chair over.  Before she could even right herself, she was looking up at the camera, shaking her head and hoping that Richardson or whoever else was watching wouldn’t come barging in.  If Loki had meant to hurt her, some part of her brain that wasn’t panicking reasoned, he would have hurt her, and she didn’t want to ruin whatever miniscule progress she’d made.

The god snickered, flashing his teeth in a vicious grin.

“That’s what I thought.”

By the time Heather turned away from the camera, Loki had stood up and was silently making his way to the doorway.  Before he left, he casually said over his shoulder, “You were right, by the way.  It was more... palatable warm.”

Supplemental Status Report 08/28: Subject S has successfully made verbal contact with Subject L.  L seemed unaware of any significance S may have to Asgard, although he and footage can both be deceiving.  For the time being, continue observation and noninterference unless Subject S appears to be in imminent physical danger.

 - T. Richardson, Level 6

[polyamorous-selfinserts]

case #0091104 - almost dead

trigger warnings: mentions of death, drowning, suicide, cutting, explosions, fire, depression

jon finds a tape in the archives that looks familiar...what will he learn about the archive’s resident teenager?

tagging @astralshipper @shippin-in-the-rain @grimms-heart @ghostlyvenus​ cause i’m super proud of this! 

this takes place during season two, but there’s not any major spoilers. just jon being paranoid, plus mentions of michael becoming the distortion.

Recorder clicks on

Jon: Found this tape under a box in the archives. It’s, uh, it looks like one of Gertrude’s tapes, but the handwriting....that’s Charlie’s I think. I guess I knew sh- they were here before I was, but…

Jon: Could they have killed Gertrude? I suppose it's possible. They would’ve been, what? Thirteen, fourteen?

Jon: I found this about a week ago, and I’ve been watching them. They spend a lot of time in the archives. I don’t think they go home. Come to think of it, I don’t even know where they live. I tried asking Elias - I couldn’t find the information in any of our records - but apparently they don’t work at the Institute. Which is, uh, alarming, to say the least.

Long exhale

Jon: God, I…

Recorder clicks off

Tape player clicks on

A low voice with an American accent. Probably 16-25, female?

Voice: Uh, hello? This is Charlie Finn. I uh...well I guess I’m kind of an archival assistant? Not officially though. Over my dead body, Elias.

Exhale, snort of laughter

Charlie: I’m uh, I’m making a statement, I guess? I think I’m already in more of these than Ger- uh - Gerard, but uh, I’ve never actually made one so…

Rustling of papers

Charlie: Statement of Charlie Finn, regarding...um, their life, almost-death, and subsequent paranormal existence.

Deep inhale

Charlie: So, uh, I uh, I tried to kill myself when I was eleven. Jumped into the Thames tied to a cinder block. Guess I should’ve tied the rope tighter, or maybe skipped swim team, cause the knot came undone. It was cold. Late February. When you’re drowning, you go into a panic - but there’s this point, at the end, where it’s so peaceful...you can almost see it - the end. I don’t remember not dying. I had almost reached that point, where I just...wouldn’t be. And then I was breaking the surface of the water. I - I tried again. Tied the rope tighter. But my hands were shaking so much. I couldn’t tie it fast enough, and dawn was coming. People had started to wake up - I guess one of them saw me jump in this time.

They take a shaky breath

Charlie: I could barely see - the edges of my vision were going - but I fought against his hands. He was an EMT, going in for the early shift. White guy, college age. When he pulled me to the bank of the river, I realized he’d - uh - (humorously) he’d pulled the cinderblock up with him. Couldn’t get the knot undone, I guess, so he just pulled me out, and the block came with it. I think he gave me CPR - not sure, I was kinda out of it. There was a crowd around me when I came to - of course there was, but, uh, they looked so concerned - (huff of laughter) - the ambulance arrived, and they asked all the questions - finally it came to the one I was dreading - my parents.

Charlie: I guess I should back up a bit. Some background info. That’s how these usually start. Um, so my parents are both teachers - we had moved to London when I was maybe ten? Not long before this happened. I hated changing schools, but my parents got really good jobs at some schools - my mom was offered the principal position at a private school - and my dad was offered a position as a child psychologist at some elementary schools. My sister was too young to really get it, but I hated my new school. All the kids were rich - and honestly, I preferred American homophobia. Anyway, this school was maybe five blocks from the Magnus Institute. Or, is. (humorously) It’s not like it’s just gone and disappeared, now is it.

Charlie: Peter Lukas doesn’t like me that much.

Charlie: So, um, yeah. My relationship with my parents has never been great. My mom’s downright emotionally abusive, and my dad...well he just… he doesn’t really have a backbone. My mom’s always been high strung, and I know she wants the best for me, but...the best to her isn’t something I can do. My dad tried his best to defend me against my mom’s criticism, but, I mean, he had his own critique for me.

Charlie: I’ve uh….I’ve never been the skinniest of people. And I’ve got narcolepsy - which means I sleep a lot. My dad - he’s one of those people who, just, well. He doesn’t understand disabilities. Like, I mean, he understands them, obviously, but he doesn’t really get that sometimes, I just can’t do stuff. So he pressured me a lot into exercising and not eating a ton.

They take a shaky breath

Charlie: So, I um, I was depressed, obviously. And therapy in central London isn’t exactly easy to come by. I was cutting, but that was - that wasn’t because I wanted to die. It was more for control. I could control that. (inhale) I um, I made the decision when my friend, um - I had a crush on him. His name was Nathaniel. He um, he stopped talking to me, just after my birthday. He just...never texted me back.

Charlie: I somehow got it into my mind that he - um, that I’d like, done something? To make him leave me. Which, I mean, I think that’s dumb. Sometimes people just leave, but my brain decided it must be my fault. So I, um. I jumped into the Thames.

Charlie: So yeah. Um, the ambulance people asked for my parents phone number and I just - I couldn’t deal with that right now. I just - (humorless laugh) - I told them my parents were dead. They didn’t know how to respond for a second, but they asked if I had someone else to contact. At this point, I’d visited the Institute a few times and met Gertrude. I was doing a school project on, like, local businesses, and I thought it would be cool to do the Institute. Gertrude had helped with a bit of the project - she was head Archivist after all. Looking back on it, I think she probably did it cause she has this sixth-sense about people who’ve been marked. I probably walked in that first day marked up to the wazoo for the End, and she took an interest in me.

Charlie: Whatever it was, I knew she would at least cover for me. So I told the ambulance staff to call the Institute, ask Rosie for Gertrude Robinson. They looked alarmed, but maybe half an hour later, I was sitting in a hospital room, Gertrude Robinson acting like she was my grandma.

(laugh)

Charlie: She’s rather convincing, when she needs to be - had a whole act about being a kind old lady. She was all (imitating an old woman) ‘my sweet little Charlie’ (laugh) Knowing what she’s done now, I’m not sure if I should’ve been impressed or afraid…

Charlie: Probably afraid.

Charlie: Anyway, she got me out of there real quick. Since we were in Chelsea - and my parents lived and worked in central London - I wasn’t much afraid of them finding out. It wasn’t in the news - (sarcastically) lucky me - and as far as I know, they never found out. Gertrude walked me home, which was...nice? I don’t know why she did it. Maybe she was actually worried for me. Probably not though.

Charlie: I stopped really going home after that. Or to school. I told my parents I’d got a job, and I was living with a friend. Both sort of true. I emailed my teachers, told them I was in a ward and I would pick up the work I needed to do at the beginning of the week and drop it off on Fridays. People aren’t exactly keen to pry into that sort of stuff, and as long as I got the work in, no one really cared. So I effectively moved into the attic of the Magnus Institute. Elias said it was fine, as long as I wasn’t disruptive. I became a sort of assistant - I took statements, filed them - I was one of the only ones who could understand Gertrude’s system - and looked into some cases for Gertrude. But my real job was in artefact storage.

Charlie: I know people don’t love it there, but I’ve always been interested in them. Gerard says it’s stupid teenage curiosity, but...he’s not my mom. Even if he was, I wouldn’t listen to him. Anyways, my job was to look into the objects that really messed people up. Not gonna go into super specific detail, cause the really bad ones are technically, like, classified or something, but lets just say there’s a reason I hate bugs.

Charlie: This was all fine, and I kind of fell into a routine for a few months. But I started to notice something. When people came in to give statements, I could, kind of, feel something about them. Like they were still going somewhere. The statements I took were always unfinished somehow.

Charlie: It got to a point where Mikey had to stop an interview because I wouldn't stop asking the woman if she was sure that was everything. I didn’t know what was going on, until one day I was walking home from the store - there’s no real food in the Institute fridge so I lived off of microwaved meals mostly - and I felt this pull. It wasn’t, like a literal pull. More like - (sigh) - you know when you’re walking back to bed in the dark and you feel like something’s about to get you, so you, like, throw yourself into bed and pull your covers up. Yeah, well, it felt kinda like that, except...except I was the thing in the dark. I don’t know how long I walked for, but it was after midnight by the time I came to an apartment complex.

Charlie: The women before, who I had been interviewing. She said there was something wrong with her gas pipes, but whenever she asked the landlord to check it out, they said there was nothing wrong. But she kept smelling gas. I could certainly smell it, as I walked up the stairs in a daze. I came to a door, 407. The door was locked, and when I put my hand on it, it burned. But I didn’t flinch - instead I turned the nob and I could hear the lock snap.

Charlie: Inside the apartment looked normal. I walked into a side room and the woman was asleep in her bed. She looked terrified. She asked me why I was here, was I going to kill her?

Charlie: I shook my head. No. I wasn’t going to kill her. But she was going to die. And -

Charlie: And the building, it exploded.

Charlie: I don’t know why I didn’t die, but she certainly did.

Charlie: (laugh) Jude was pretty pissed about that. Said I ‘took’ her sacrifice. Like everything doesn’t already belong to death.

Charlie: It doesn’t happen a lot, anymore, but I could tell when it would happen. I don’t know why the deaths are important. It didn’t happen when (shaky) when Gertrude left Mikey. Though I suppose he’s not really dead...is he.

Charlie: I don’t know. There’s a couple statements that mention me, but I don’t like to read them. It makes me feel guilty. I guess it’s not really my fault - they would’ve died anyway, but…

Charlie: Yeah, so. Um. Statement ends.

Tape player clicks off.

Recorder clicks on

Long, shaky exhale

Jon: Well, that’s, enlightening. I’m going to be honest though, I have more questions than answe -

Door opening

Charlie: Jon! Hey, I’ve got a question about this case, I think you might’ve misfiled it cause Martin said - 

Jon: Um, actually I was -

Charlie: Oh, are you recording right now, sorry! What’s this statement about?

Footsteps, sounds of shuffling papers. Charlie’s voice is much closer to the recorder now.

Charlie: Is that a tape? One of Gertrude’s? I thought the police had taken them all?

Jon: (fumbling) No, um, it’s -

Charlie: Wait, is...is that my tape Jon?

Jon: I mean - well - yes - but I - oh god - I just, I didn’t think -

Charlie: (cruelly) No, you didn’t think, did you Jon. (voice breaking) I hope you’re happy, now you know. I defended you, you know. Tim’s been so pissy and I - (voice cracks) I wanted to believe you weren’t that type of person but…

Jon: Charlie--

Charlie: No. I’m… don’t talk to me Jon. I don’t want to hear it.

Loud footsteps, door slams

Jon: Shit.

Recorder clicks off.

[ginnyzero]

Completely Harmless Ch. 63

Completely Harmless An SSO SilverGlade Re-imagining Story (Or Fix it Fan Salt fic) By Ginny O.

When Lily and her friends wanted to buy horses and were directed to the Silverglade Manor and its myriad of problems, they didn’t expect to start a revolution. They were just a bunch a stable girls. Completely harmless. Right?

A/N: Things are only canon if I say they’re canon. Pre-Saving the Moorland Stables compliant for the most part. Posted in its entirety on my website. Posted in 2000 to 4000 word bits here. Rated T for Swearing Word Count 177,577

Chapter Sixty-Three Rescue Time (but First Needling Mr. Sands)

Lily took another slice of lasagna. “This is actually decent lasagna.”

Mr. Sands’ brow twitched.

“Did you get the recipe from Catherine?” Lily asked.

Alex and Justin left. Justin giving a tour guide type of spiel. Lily figured he wouldn’t s how Alex anyplace sensitive. Which was fine. They didn’t need to see anything sensitive.

Mr. Sands stared at Lily.

She continued to eat. “When are you going to tell that poor boy that you killed his mother’s friends?”

“He wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t.” Mr. Sands frowned. “His father hid his heritage from him.”

“Hmm, I’m not sure how telling anyone that your grandmother is the Baroness of your district but we can’t associate with her because your grandfather, her ex-husband is an immortal alien who wants to take over the world is going to go over well.” Lily licked the fork suggestively. “I mean, there are May December romances, and then there’s you.”

Sabine and Jessica snickered.

“You know quite a bit more than you should.”

“What can I say? I have a face that people trust.” Lily shrugged and continued to eat. “You smile. You nod. You let them talk. People love to talk about themselves. The Baroness though, she was a tougher nut to crack. She doesn’t do talk. She does actions. Deeds. So, was it something you did or didn’t do that tore you two apart?”

Mr. Sands snorted. “Don’t be foolish enough to think I had any feelings towards her. She was a means to an end, no more. She didn’t have what I needed.”

“Hmm, it’s interesting to me that you were able to contain Anne, but not Lisa.” Lily stuck the fork into the lasagna.

“Oh, they fought,” Jessica said.

Sabine smirked. “But not enough.”

“You don’t need a Dark Rider,” Lily mused. “So, why keep Anne imprisoned?”

“Elise is not my recruit.”

“Oh, contingency plans.” Lily nodded. The name Elise sounded familiar but she couldn’t place it off the top of her head. “Clever enough.” She finished her slice and set down her plate. “I’ll go catch up with Justin and Alex. They might need minding. And I’m the one they think is the flirt.” Lily pushed her hair back over her shoulder strutting from the room.

She found Alex and Justin pretty easily.

“Hanging out here all day sounds like a bore,” Alex said as they wandered around a large room.

“There are plans to be set in motion,” Justin said. “And it’s not that bad.”

“No place to ride. No elbow room. Everyone on top of each other.”

“Sounds kinky,” Lily spoke up.

Alex jumped. “Don’t do that, Lils.”

Lily checked her phone.

Alex strode away from Justin. “Wait, wait, wait. At least you know what you’re waiting for I suppose.” She jerked her head to one side.

Lily waited to make sure Justin had his eyes on Alex before looking where Alex had indicated. A book rested on a book stand.

“The day is important. All the generals agree that to do it early would only bring disaster. The Keepers are too fixated on their prophecy to be paying attention. And without the other Soul Riders, they can’t stop us even if they wanted to.”

Lily walked towards the book slowly.

“They’re down to one now,” Alex said and shifted her weight. She moved towards Justin. “We’re going to be together, no matter what, baby.”

“You and me against the world,” Justin said.

Alex rested her hands on his chest. “That’s right.”

Justin frowned and turned his head to look for Lily.

Alex put a hand on his cheek and turned his head back to look at her. “Justin, look at me. I’d burn the world for you. You used to feel the same. It’s still in her.” She rubbed a circle on his chest.

Lily snagged the book and stuck it in the back of her pants under her trench coat. “Do I need to tell you two to get a room?” She leaned against the stand.

Alex flushed. “Are any of these generals hot so we can get Lily her own May December romance?”

“Only one person can rule the world, Alex,” Lily said. “And it’s going to be me.”

“Yes, yes, all hail the Queen.”

“I keep moving up in the world,” Lily murmured.

“Empress even. We can be the Empress’ advisors.” Alex grinned. “Ruling sounds so tedious anyways. You need a champion. I take champion.”

Lily snorted.

Justin rolled his eyes. “Garnok is going to rule. Not us.”

“I guess I better figure out a way to kill Garnok,” Lily said dryly.

“Come on, you have to be here for one reason or another. Show me.” Alex took Justin’s hand and tugged him away.

“Fine, there’s a control room. I can show you that,” Justin said. “It’s just a bunch of screens and drones though. There probably isn’t anything very interesting going on.”

“But it will kill time,” Alex said.

“Ugh, don’t talk about killing time,” Lily groaned. “You want the entire world to fall out of whack.”

Alex winked at her and urged Justin forward.

--

Evergray polished the keystone with a rag. “Keystones truly are a thing of wonder. You wouldn’t think a thing of such humble origins would be able to part the veil of space and time.”

Linda double checked the tuning of the harp like Lily had shown her. It was mostly nerves. She turned her head.

Horse hooves clopped against the stone of the path echoing into the Dale.

But not one set of hooves, multiple.

Elizabeth Sunbeam, Rhiannon, Avalon and a host of druids in robes and hoods swept into the Dale on horses of all colors.

“What is going on here?” Elizabeth asked.

Avalon cleared his throat. “I told you to leave, brother.”

“Tsk, as if I listen very well,” Evergray said and coughed.

“Linda,” Elizabeth scolded. “I thought better of you. Evergray isn’t to be trusted. He’s a thief.”

Linda stood up holding the harp in her arms. “He’s been more honest than you have been.” She lifted her chin.

“What is that?” Rhiannon nodded at the stone in Evergray’s arms.

“You don’t know.” Evergray shook his head. “Twenty years and all the new recruits are base ignorant. This never would have happened while I was chief archivist.”

“Evergray, you have violated the terms of your exile,” Elizabeth said. “You were warned what would happen if you ever returned. We have come to take you into custody.”

“I see how you are, Elizabeth.” Evergray turned his head and coughed. He looked back at her. “You’ve come full circle then.”

Elizabeth flushed. “I don’t know what you mean.” She straightened on her horse.

“If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be so mad. Come, now, we haven’t actually answered your questions.”

More horse hooves echoed in the Dale, this time, they were alone.

A grey dapple horse with a white mane appeared at the end of the Dale.

The druids murmured and moved aside.

“Concorde,” they whispered and murmured to each other.

Concorde trotted between them. He lowered his head to Linda. “Soul Rider,” he murmured.

Linda pressed her forehead against his. “You’re safe and alive.”

“What do you need me to do?” Concorde asked.

“Make room, make room,” Evergray said. “I believe this is our cue.”

Linda quietly explained to Concorde the plan.

--

Alex had managed to wheedle Justin back to the horses.

“It’s time,” Lily said.

“Justin, baby, your lips look super chapped.” Alex grabbed his chin.

Justin tried to move his head. “They’re fine.”

“No. They’re definitely chapped. Can’t kiss you with chapped lips,” she said. She took out the chap stick and popped the lid off with one hand. “Hold still.”

Justin’s eyes widened and he leaned back. “Alex.”

She smeared it onto his lips before he could say anything else or get away.

Justin stilled and stared ahead barely blinking.

Lily reached into her saddlebag. “Catch,” she said and tossed potions at her.

Alex caught them and opened the first one over Saga’s rump. “There, there, boy, you’ll be yourself in no time.” She hurried over to the other horses.

Lily juggled the other three potions. She poured them over the backs.

“Last one,” Alex said.

Lily tossed it to her.

Alex poured it over the back of the horse.

Lily went for the halters. “Ten minutes, and counting,” she said.

Justin blinked and rubbed his eyes. “What happened? Where am I?” He looked around. “What’s wrong with Saga?”

“Saga’s going to be all right, give her a few minutes,” Alex darted over to him.

He stared at her. “Are you wearing lip stick?”

She flung her arms around his neck. “That’s my Justin,” she said tears in her eyes. “You aren’t going to do this to me ever again. No more mind control from evil grandfathers. You hear me Justin Moorland. I can’t go through this again.”

He wrapped his arms around her. “It’s all so fuzzy. Except there was lots of lasagna.”

Alex laughed and hiccupped. “Of course you remember the lasagna.”

“Tasted like mom’s,” Justin mumbled.

“Justin, I need you to help Lily get the horses to the gate.” Alex cupped his face. “Can you do that?”

“Sure,” Justin said. He rubbed his face. “I’m just, there’s this fog.”

Alex handed him the chap stick. “Apply if you think you need more.”

Justin looked at it. “For the record, my lips aren’t chapped.” His hand closed over it.

“Sure they aren’t.” Alex kissed his cheek. She went to Lily’s saddlebags and grabbed her tools and the keystone.

“Five minutes,” Lily said.

“On it.” Alex jogged off.

“Help me get them saddled. They probably won’t fight you.”

Justin nodded.

Together they saddled the horses who tried to move away, but the further time went, the less they fought.

Justin tightened the last girth as the first spell broke over the horses.

They tossed their heads and locked their legs.

“Easy, easy,” Lily said. “We’re going to get all of you out of here. Come on.” She grabbed the reins of Nimbus and two of the others.

Nimbus took charge.

Justin took the other horses including Saga.

Alex had the gate mechanism ripped open and was fitting the keystone inside fitting the wires to it.

Lily took the book out of her pants back and put it in her saddlebag.

Alex flipped switches.

Justin’s brow furrowed.

Alex pushed the lever up. The entire rig hummed. Purple energy swirled around.

“Stop!” Jessica shouted. “They’ve opened the gate!”

Lily got on her horse.

Alex selected a horse at random and mounted.

Justin got on Saga.

“Run!” Lily shouted and Nimbus vaulted forward jumping through the portal and running flat out, the two horses behind him.

Justin urged Saga forward. The other horse followed him.

Alex gave the running Dark Riders the finger and her horse, not willing to be left behind even if the way ahead was pink energy ran after the others.

They ran as fast as they could down the winding floating stone road, jumping the gaps and through the other portal.

Alex jumped through the portal into Pandoria. It fizzled and snapped shut behind her almost taking her horse’s tail.

Justin stared around. “Where are we?”

Lily moved into view, Nimbus’ wings pressed tight over her legs. His horn gleamed in the odd light. “Welcome to Pandoria.”

--

The Soul Horses moved into their positions at the bases of the statues. They looked upwards. Magic swirled around them and they became more than what they were. Starshine’s grey mane and tail turned electric blue, a crystal horn jutted from his head. The end of it gleamed with pink light.

At the base of his statue, magenta light filled the carvings making them grow brighter.

Meteor was no longer just red. He was the red of the Harvest Moon and scattered with crater markings with moving clouds. His mane and tail white gold and glowing. His beard curled under his chin.

The magenta light swelled in the carvings of the Moon Soul Horse Statue and lit up the Dale.

Tin Can stomped his hooves. They turned cloven, like a deer rather than a horse. Lightning swirled around his bronze body and crackled in his golden mane and tail jumping off in jagged sparks and spears.

The lightning jumped from him to his statue. It turned pink and crept up every leg and around the body lighting up the carvings.

Concorde spread his glowing white wings. His coat had turned silver with lighter white gold spots. A feather fell from his wings, drifted down and fell at the base of the statue. A rainbow flared around it and then it turned pink and disappeared. The carvings glowed pink.

Linda carefully shifted the keystone into place.

Magenta light swelled at the base of the broken statue and raced up the carvings of the stairs to the gate. Pink light swirled around like a galaxy, small at first but growing until it stabilized into a door.

Elizabeth’s voice sharpened. “Is that the Harp of Aideen?”

Linda cradled the harp in her arms. She moved to the base of the stairs and plucked the strings. And with the music, she sent her heart after it.

FOR THE ACCOMPANYING IMAGES PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE MY WATERMARK AND CONTACT INFORMATION. THANK YOU. I get it. Some of you might get excited and want to see this stuff in the game, especially the clothes, tack, and pets. However, the only way I want to see this in the game is if I get paid for it. If I see it in the game and I’m not paid for it, there will be hell to pay. You think I’m salty. I’d be angry. Personally, I’m not going to send this info to SSO. If you do, leave my contact information there! Don’t give them any excuses to steal.

Now, I’ll know you haven’t read this note if you leave me comments about how ‘salty’ I am about the game and if I hate it so much I should do something else. I am doing something else. It’s called Mystic Riders MMORPG Project. Mystic Riders however is a very baby phase game. You can check out our plans on the game dev blog. (Skills, Factions, Professions, Crafting, Mini-Games, 25+ horse breeds!) If you know anyone who would be interested and has money or contacts about game making, direct them to the blog.

[drummergirl231-2]

A Recap on the Buzzards

Now that we officially know the Buzzards are the heads of F.O.W.L. as @astrodances​ speculated, I think it’s time we review their actions from the show so far (and of course  I have to add my own commentary afterwards).

“Woo-oo!”

Episode notes:

Bentley Buzzard informs Scrooge business is expanding in the Spoonerville and St. Canard markets.

Bentley informs Scrooge they are cutting funding to “unnecessary departments,” including Historical Research, Experimental Tech, and Deep Sea Exploration.

Scrooge, devoid of all enthusiasm, sarcastically replies, “Fantastic...”

DG notes:

In one of the earliest scenes in the show, we see Scrooge isn’t making the financial decisions in his own company. The Buzzards were cutting funding from departments for things he once cared about, and he raised no objections. Once he got his family back though, he also regained his enthusiasm for adventure and life in general, and those departments became necessary again. Within a few hours of meeting his great-nephews, he decided to take them on a deep sea exploration adventure, and I’m sure the Buzzards didn’t like that at all. They would have had to come up with a new strategy to maintain control of his company since his grief as a bereaved parent wasn’t enough anymore.

“The Great Dime Chase!”

Episode notes:

They call an unscheduled meeting with Scrooge shortly after his nephews move back in.

Bradford informs Scrooge that, as he knows, revenues are down in several international markets. He lists four of them and says, “We feel that...” before Gyro bursts in.

After Gyro’s spiel, Bradford asks him how he plans to ensure Li’l Bulb won’t achieve sentience and turn evil like all his other inventions. 

Li’l Bulb shakes his fist and runs a finger under his “throat,” to threaten Bradford. Bradford asks what it’s doing and Gyro says, “Waving. It likes you.”

Bradford shares a glance with each of his colleagues and then denies Gyro’s request for funding.

Scrooge tells Louie his board are the only people cheaper than he is, and he trusts them completely to make good financial decisions.

Bradford interrupts Scrooge and says they are calling the meeting “to discuss cutting your unnecessary spending here at the... money bin.”

The first cut they propose is on Scrooge’s $15,000,000 he’s spending on magical defense, to which Scrooge replies, “Do you have any idea how many vengeance curses I have on my head?!”

Bradford asks Scrooge how he can justify spending $5,000 on a velvet pillow for a dime.

Scrooge calls them “ya penny-pinching Buzzards!”

Scrooge says if they can find him 3,000 gallons of silver polish for cheaper, he’d love to hear about it. Bradford replies by saying this is getting them nowhere, and if Scrooge refuses to make cuts, they’ll be forced to fire bin employees to save money. 

Bradford says the obvious first choice is the archivist. Scrooge argues Quackfaster has kept his archives secure and orderly for 50 years. Bradford says, “Fine, Quackfaster stays.”

Bradford then says Gyro is “definitely unnecessary.” Scrooge argues Gyro is one of the most brilliant minds of their time.

 Scrooge sarcastically says if they’re going to fire all the employees, why not shut the whole bin down? And Bradford points out he does have a perfectly good office downtown before asking:

Scrooge tells the Buzzards if they fire his crazy employees, they’ll definitely seek revenge. Bradford asks for a vote: “All those in favor of keeping the bin and everyone in it far away from our offices?” The other two reply, “Aye.”

DG notes:

Isn’t it interesting that once Scrooge’s nephews moved back in, the Buzzards held an unscheduled meeting to try and get him to cut funding to his defenses and/or fire Quackfaster and Gyro? And possibly even shut down the money bin?

I’m sure the Buzzards knew exactly what they were doing in asking Scrooge to cut funding on magical defense. They knew there was something dangerous he was keeping locked up on an island somewhere. They also likely knew he had vengeance curses on his head and they wanted him defenseless. 

When they questioned him about the velvet pillow under the dime, it’s possible they were fishing for information about his dime, which we now know is more than just sentimental.

Then they tried to get him to fire Quackfaster, who keeps Scrooge’s records... even any existing records of the Spear of Selene. They probably figured since Scrooge’s family was back in his life, the event that drove them apart was bound to come up again, and if you’re familiar with this blog or @alliterative-albatross’, you’ll know we have reason to believe the Buzzards have something to hide when it comes to the incident. We believe they may have threatened Gyro to sabotage the rocket (and Gyro would have pretended to go along with their plans to buy himself time, but not actually plant real bombs on the rocket).

After they failed to convince Scrooge to fire Quackfaster, they tried to get Scrooge to fire Gyro, who built the Spear of Selene and would definitely have information to spill to the nephews if they came asking.

Then they tried to get the whole bin shut down, and deep inside Scrooge’s archives at the bin is the shrine he built in Della’s memory to process his grief in his own way.

Fortunately, with Scrooge’s family back in his life, we see a drastic change from the bored, depressed, broken, and submissive man he appeared to be in the pilot episode. With his family back, he has the strength to fight back against how the Buzzards want to run things. He said he trusted them completely to make good financial decisions - a sign they’ve had him under their thumb for years - but this was his first meeting post-reunion, and he’s not the doormat they’re used to anymore.

“Jaw$!”

Episode notes:

The Buzzards called to say Scrooge’s adventures were causing costly damages to Duckburg.

They also had Beakley pass along the message that they had set up a television interview for Scrooge with Roxanne Featherly to help boost his character.

DG notes:

Either they really did want Scrooge’s reputation to get a boost because that’d be good for the company and therefore good for them if they could regain control, or they knew Scrooge would make a fool of himself and they hoped he’d come to the conclusion again that he needed to listen to them.

“The Last Crash of the Sunchaser!”

Episode notes:

In Scrooge’s flashback of the events following Della’s disappearance, we see the Buzzards telling Scrooge his spending on the search for Della has far exceeded its budget and every other area of spending in the company. This is followed by a clip of his own private funds from the money bin draining drastically.

We see another clip of the bin draining again, followed by a clip of two of the Buzzards dragging a frantic Scrooge away from the control panel and out the door while the other stands in the background.

DG notes:

I’m willing to bet the Buzzards - while they had possibly hoped to get Scrooge killed with this rocket - found Della’s disappearance just as useful, if not more. If Scrooge had died on the rocket, that could have led to an investigation of what went wrong mechanically. But with Della lost in a cosmic storm, and with Scrooge believing she stole her own present for a test run (rather than knowing she discovered the conspiracy and was confident she could bust it on her own), the whole thing could look like a tragic accident... no one to blame but Della herself. And with Scrooge a broken and grieving man, he was easily manipulated.

The Buzzards would have known all they had to do was occasionally tell Scrooge he was spending far too much to look for Della when it was hopeless, knowing he wouldn’t listen to them, and only when Scrooge was “nearly bankrupt,” as Beakley said he was, would the Buzzards swoop in and put a stop to Scrooge’s search efforts, making them look like the heroes who saved his company and pulled him back from the brink of the abyss. From then on they had his trust and cooperation... until he reunited with his nephews.

“Last Christmas!”

Episode notes:

The Buzzards attended Scrooge’s first annual McDuck Enterprises Christmas Party in the 1960s.

Duckworth pushes present-day Scrooge toward the Buzzards to talk business. Scrooge asks them if they are enjoying the party and they huddle up to discuss the question for a moment before answering him in unison, “No.”

Bradford tells Scrooge with the economic downturn, having a Christmas that is both holly and jolly isn’t fiscally responsible. 

DG notes:

Calling a holly jolly Christmas fiscally irresponsible should have convinced more fans of their evilness. 

That aside, let’s look at the timeline a bit. This party took place after the events of the flashbacks in “The Confidential Casefiles of Agent 22!” Beakley was at the party, so she and Scrooge were already friends, so Scrooge had already worked as a freelance operative on a S.H.U.S.H. mission where they thwarted the F.O.W.L. agent, Black Heron.  When present-day Scrooge arrives at this Christmas party in the past, we find out it was the first one for McDuck Enterprises because he’d just started his company. The Buzzards, who have since been revealed as the heads of F.O.W.L., have been stationed in his company since it began because he was already an enemy of F.O.W.L.

“The 87 Cent Solution!”

Episode notes: 

They attended Scrooge’s staged funeral.

DG notes:

How much d’you wanna bet the whole time they were thinking, my gosh, the things we have to put up with to play the long game... 

“The Richest Duck in the World!”

Episode notes:

The Buzzards called a meeting after Louie spent $100,000,000 on an ottoman. Brandford asked him how exactly the ottoman benefits the company. 

Bradford tells Louie McDuck Enterprises is a business, not a bank account, and the money has to come from somewhere. Louie tells him to figure it out, since that’s what he pays him to do.

Bradford brings up the money spent on magical defense that he tried to have Scrooge cut in Season 1. He says it’s spent on a dark, mysterious island. Louie, not knowing what’s on the island, tells him to cut that. Bradford pulls a device with a single red button right out of his suit jacket and presses it, releasing the Bombie.

While on the island and trying to escape the Bombie, Louie calls Bradford and tells him to cut the funding to the McDuck satellite system immediately and drop them all on his location. Bradford asks him if he’s sure he knows what he’s doing, and he tells him he does. Bradford drops the satellites on the island and they explode. 

At the end of the episode, we find out the McDuck satellite system was a series of defense satellites, and once they went down, Lunaris was ready to invade.

DG notes:

Scrooge may have known all the ins and outs of McDuck Enterprises, but Louie did not. Scrooge knew that 15 million on magical defense was important and he knew why. Bradford probably also knew exactly what he was doing when he suggested cutting the funding to magical defense again, even though this time he didn’t bring up how much the company was spending on it and, if he had, Louie would have realized the 15 million wouldn’t have made up for the 100 million he just spent. It wasn’t about making up for the money he’d lost at all. They just wanted to get rid of Louie and get control of the company again, whether it was through becoming the heads of McDuck Enterprises themselves, or manipulating a grieving Scrooge again.

They also would have known those satellites were defense satellites, and while they’re evil, they’re not out to destroy the whole world (as Bradford later said in the finale, “...without the world, who would we larceny against?”). Bradford asked Louie if he knew what he was doing and while Louie said he did, of course he didn’t. (“The ducks almost cost us the world today...”)

“Moonvasion!”

Episode notes:

We find out the defense satellites were also useful for communication.

At the end of the episode, it is revealed the Buzzards are the head of F.O.W.L., and Bradford gives the following speech: “This has gone too far. The ducks almost cost us the world today, and without the world, who would we larceny against? The pieces are finally in place. Time to come out of the shadows, take control, and end Clan McDuck. If the McDuck family wants an adventure... we’ll give them their last.”

DG notes:

While I was certain the Buzzards were evil (we even had that IDW comic panel that proved they were trying to get rid of Scrooge), it still feels unreal that their evilness has been revealed in the show. #BlametheBuzzards2019 is officially valid.

There’s a lot to unpack and unravel when it comes to enemy spies being planted in Scrooge’s company from the beginning. Our new little conspiracy theorist Huey will have his hands full. 

And while Season 1 showed the parallels between Della and Dewey (their personalities, confidence, and love of adventure), and Season 2 showed the parallels between Della and Louie (seeing the angles and stressing out when their plans don’t go the way they thought), Season 3 will almost certainly show parallels between Della and Huey. And if Della did take the rocket because she tripped the wire while investigating a conspiracy, that would definitely parallel Huey’s search for answers. Seeing Huey try to bust a conspiracy on his own could be quite triggering for Della. She may try to stop him before he gets hurt.

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what the Buzzards have been up to and how the family will find out about it all.

[bubonickitten]

i'm so happy you got into tma!! i've always enjoyed seeing you write meta posts for dragon age, so seeing you write meta for tma is such a treat! thank you for your words! i hope you have a lovely day :)

Thanks!! it’s been awhile since I’ve written meta for anything, I forgot how much I liked it. Once I realized how emotionally invested I was getting in the characters, I should’ve known I’d end up having to make a dedicated TMA meta tag. 

And not to be dramatic of anything, but TMA really is a masterpiece of horror imo. I like horror, but it’s always a minefield because so much of horror really does (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not) employ some really awful racist, ableist, etc. tropes, or rely on sexual violence or hate violence as a narrative device without making any critical commentary on those subjects. So sometimes there’s a horror story that has a neat premise, but then it’s so saturated with unnecessary and harmful tropes that I just end up feeling alienated and frustrated. 

Even a lot of supernatural horror falls back on Lovecraft, and a lot of people don’t realize how racist and xenophobic his works really are. admittedly, there are some cool, more recent transformative works that reappropriate Lovecraft into something new (e.g. some stuff in the New Weird genre), but sometimes people just grab the aesthetic without knowing its roots. And I get it, it’s a cool aesthetic, I love monsters and tentacles and things that slumber in the deep and the dark -- it just ends up being bad when people aren’t conscious of what Lovecraft was actually saying. which, I know, is how tropes work sometimes -- creators reuse tropes because they’re so salient in fiction, but sometimes the roots are really horrible and we just don’t know the history, and horror is a genre that is really susceptible to that. 

Getting off topic -- what I mean is, I really think Jonny Sims is a brilliant writer and this is one of my favorite horror stories I’ve come across. He’s a master at character development and foreshadowing. I’m on my third time listening through and there’s just so much detail that I didn’t notice on my first listen, so many thematic elements and parallels and keywords that he snuck in from the very first few episodes that become so important later. It starts out as having a horror anthology vibe, with really brilliant short stories embedded in a larger framework, but then you realize that every single one of those stories is connected to the larger metaplot. 

I joke about Jonathan Archivist Sims and his conspiracy corkboard thinking, but I’m really sitting here listening with my own conspiracy corkboard during each episode -- sometimes reading too far into things, sometimes not, but damn is it enjoyable to try to pick apart the web (so to speak). 

I think it’s incredible how well Jonny Sims manages to pull all those strings together. It’s partly because he had the whole plot mapped out before they even recorded episode one, but it’s impressive to me, because I always have trouble following through on a story -- I’m not good at being decisive or consistent with my writing, I’m always changing my mind and losing the threads of what I was originally trying to do, and honestly most of the time I don’t have an end in mind anyway, so I end up giving up on things too early. 

One of the other things I appreciate is just... how compassionate Jonny is when writing his characters. One of my biggest complaints about Dragon Age was always that I felt like certain characters weren’t written with real compassion and weren’t given a chance to grow and so much of their potential was wasted. Jonny Sims, otoh, puts his characters in some dark, painful situations, which can be heartwrenching and anxiety-inducing to listen to (especially when it’s characters I relate to), but he also allows them to grow and change throughout the story, and that adds to their complexity. Even the characters I hate, I can still wrap my head around their motives. Without giving away too many spoilers for anyone who hasn’t listened and wants to eventually, the Big Bad is repulsive in every way but his motives are so realistic and emblematic of real world horrors like imperialism, Machiavellianism, totalitarianism, and a willingness to abuse, manipulate, groom, and oppress others for self-profit. 

Jonny Sims manages to utilize common fears, horrors, and phobias to present some really clever and thoroughly unsettling short stories. Even the ones that explore a fear that I don’t personally have make my skin crawl -- he’s just that good at descriptive imagery and conveying psychological horror. And a lot of the episodes also have social commentary (which is a hallmark of good fantasy, sci-fi, and horror for me) -- sometimes it’s subtle, but then sometimes he comes out with these episodes that knock the wind out of you. Especially the most recent episodes. He comes right out of the gate sometimes with a treatise on war or institutional violence or xenophobia and it’s... well, it’s powerful. 

And, god, I could write forever about how this story deals with the question of what it means to be human in the most horrific of circumstances -- what choices we make, what we are versus what we do, whether we grow or stagnate, the importance of human connection and trust and love even (and especially) when the world seems against you. The potential for character studies is... oof, I want to write an entire essay.

You know those books that are like, “The Philosophy of [Fiction Story]”? Oh, I am so tempted to write a full essay on the philosophical concepts presented in TMA. Especially existentialism, lmao. “What use is a philosophy minor?” people asked. Apparently the answer is, “Spend time during quarantine writing a treatise on existential philosophy in a horror-tragedy podcast I binged within a week and now can’t shut up about, because it’s been nine years since I had a philosophy class and I forgot how much I enjoyed pointlessly navel gazing about the nature of existence.”

I’ll shut up now. TL;DR if anyone wants to ramble at me about TMA, chances are I’ll be excited to respond. I’m having trouble focusing on creative writing right now, and I think my hype over this podcast might be helping me with writer’s block a little bit. 

[haberdashing]

fog on a mirror

TMA fanfic. Sasha begins to unravel, but an unexpected meeting provides some relief.

Continuation of breath in a graveyard by @akosyy. Definitely read that before you read this.

on AO3

Sasha had known that Tim was her anchor for a while now. Even before he knew it was her, knew that they’d been close well before she became little more than a voice on a tape recorder, they had talked, long hours spent together, their voices intermingling when their bodies no longer could. He had cared about her even when he hadn’t known her name. Even her death hadn’t been enough to force them apart for good.

His death, on the other hand...

Some part of Sasha had hoped that he would turn up there in the Institute, stuck here like she was. Not that it was a fate she’d wish upon him, or upon anyone, really, but... it would be nice to have the company, at least. It seemed, though, that if Tim was haunting anywhere it would be that damn wax museum in Great Yarmouth, far from her domain, far from her watchful eye.

Sasha wasn’t all that surprised to find that when Tim was gone, she began to drift away, unanchored as she was.

Martin tried, bless him. Martin really tried to be there for her when nobody else was. But there was only so much he could do to help. She wasn’t the only one who was suffering because of the aftermath of that explosion, after all. She wasn’t the only one who’d lost her anchor.

Maybe it would be different if Melanie or Basira knew about her, but while Martin could conceivably had told them about her, given Sasha others who could both hear her and recognize what it was they heard, he never offered and she never asked. It was probably for the best, really. Neither of them seemed like they’d take the idea that somebody they didn’t know had been watching them all this time without their knowledge or permission terribly well.

Maybe it would be different, too, if Sasha could say anything useful, pass along the information she’d learned along the way, but that old static still rose up when she tried to explain about the Institute, about Elias, about anything of any real importance. All she could offer was a conversation partner, and as it was, it sounded like Martin talked to a ghost often enough when he visited Jon, though Sasha at least could talk back. Martin was probably growing tired of having only ghosts to speak with, anyway.

As it was, Martin’s chats with the tape recorder grew less and less frequent as days turned to weeks turned to months until they ended entirely. Sasha hadn’t known their last conversation would be exactly that when it happened, but then Peter Lukas...

Well. Martin was still technically in the Institute, but once Peter Lukas got a hold of him, he might as well have been gone, too.

All of them were gone, then, and Sasha began to fade as the aching certainty of it set in.

She’d pass by someone she knew and not remember their name, or how she knew them, or any of the little things she’d gleaned about their life in her time spent as the Institute’s resident ghost. She’d forget the lyrics to the songs she made herself keep singing despite everything, would mix up tunes and not realize that they didn’t go together until she was through. She’d see something that triggered a memory of her life before her death but the details would be hazy, like she was trying to see them through a thick pane of glass, or through dense fog.

She knew that this place was hers, that the people in it were hers, that she was here to watch and listen and not to act, but little by little, the rest started to fall by the wayside.

It was... some months later, though she couldn’t have given a date, or even a number of months that had passed, when she saw him, a thin, dark man with a cane slowly but steadily making his way down the stairs into the Archives.

A lightbulb went off in her head as the man turned the lights of the Archives on--it was night, now, and the residents of the Institute had already long since left--and she knew he wasn’t supposed to be here, though details beyond that initially eluded her.

Her first thoughts were that he was an intruder, like that man with far too many limbs who had attacked the Institute months ago, the sight of the Archives staff fending him off both fascinating and horrifying to her uninvolved eyes. But no, he didn’t look like an intruder, thin and weak as he was, and he clearly knew exactly where he was going as he wandered into an office that had been vacant for quite a while now and sat down within it, sighing slightly as he sank into the chair.

Then she remembered, distantly, that he had died. That it had all gone wrong--that was the phrasing that Martin had used, then, that it had all gone wrong--and he had died. He wasn’t the one who had been her anchor, but they had died side by side, fighting the same fight. Except that he was here now.

He was here now, and he wasn’t a ghost like her. He’d turned the lights on, after all, was able to take his jacket off and adjust the chair and turn on the computer in front of him. He had died, and yet he was physically present in a way she could only dream of, in a way she had only been in those distant, foggy memories of hers. A zombie, perhaps, but not a ghost.

And as she stood there and watched this strange visitor to the Archives rifle through dusty files, after a moment, he looked up and watched her right back.

“...Sasha?”

It took her a moment to realize that that was her name, and another moment to think to speak up, and another silent moment to remember that speaking didn’t work like that for her, not now, not anymore.

If the man noticed her silent, slow processing, though, he didn’t show it, shaking his head--his hair was long and shaggy, black and silver strands clinging to his face after every movement--and smiling weakly before digging through his bag for...

Ah. For a tape recorder. Which he set on the desk, looking her in the eyes as he pressed the play button.

“Sorry, is that better?”

Her breathing came through the tape recorder loud and clear. How long had it been since she’d heard the sound of her own breath?

“For a certain definition of better, I suppose.” The words came out of her almost as smoothly and naturally as her breaths did.

“Right. Right, that makes sense.” He laughed, soft and sharp, with no humor in the sound.

“Jon?” It had taken her longer than it should have to remember that name. They had been close, once. Too much had changed, but perhaps that part didn’t need to. “Jon, what happened? Martin said you were dead.”

Granted, Sasha knew that that wasn’t entirely true, given that hospitals generally weren’t in the business of taking care of dead people, but while Martin had touched on Jon’s condition in their chats back when they’d had them, he never outright explained what state Jon was in now; Sasha had gotten the feeling that it was something of a sensitive subject, and she hadn’t pushed. She knew that Jon had been in the hospital, that he was still technically considered dead, and that he wasn’t expected to recover, but that wasn’t enough to put together the full story. She’d assumed brain death, when she’d assumed anything at all, but that didn’t exactly match up with current evidence.

“Not quite.” Jon broke eye contact with Sasha, looking down at his cane, which he began to fidget with absentmindedly. “It’s... it’s a long story.”

Sasha shrugged. “I’ve got nothing but time.”

“Do you?” Jon stared back up at Sasha. “You look... fuzzy. Are you alright, Sasha?”

She could tell he was trying to change the subject, but she couldn’t entirely blame him, either. Maybe he wasn’t ready to talk about his near-death experience, or whatever, yet. That was fair enough.

Besides, he had a point.

Sasha laughed, her laughter soft and shaky and slightly tinged with static as it rang out from the tape recorder. “I do feel a little... fuzzy, actually.”

“Probably not a great sign, that.”

Sasha shook her head, her laughter a little louder this time, but still shaky and filled with static. “No, probably not.”

“Do you want to... to talk about it?” Jon went back to fidgeting with his cane, though he kept his gaze locked on Sasha, the gleam in his eyes downright eerie in the dim archival lighting. “You know, I never did get a statement from you, even though I thought that’s what you were here for at first... maybe that would help, getting to tell your story, having someone hear you out.”

Sasha thought about it for a moment. On the one hand, she suspected Jon had more reasons than he was sharing for wanting to hear her story, and she could tell he was still trying to get out of explaining what had happened to him. On the other hand, he looked about as bad as she felt, and... and maybe it would be good for her, being able to explain it all to somebody who’d be glad to listen.

And she wasn’t the only one without an anchor here, was she?

“I’ll tell you my story if you tell me yours afterwards.” Jon opened his mouth to speak, and she held up one hand to stop him. “Doesn’t have to be right now, right away. But I want to hear it one of these days. When you’re ready.”

“I...” Jon let out a long, slow breath. “Alright, fair enough. We have a deal, then.”

“And the tape recorder’s already running, of course.”

“Of course.” Jon laughed a little, and Sasha noticed that his voice sounded slightly hoarse as he did, just before he cleared his throat. “Statement of Sasha James, regarding...”

“...Her death and subsequent existence.” Sasha finished, trying not to notice how Jon’s eyes lit up as he switched into statement mode.

Jon nodded silently before continuing with his speech. “Taken direct from subject, 16th of February, 2018. Recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.”

That bit was new, and it stuck out clearly enough in Sasha’s mind; Sasha had heard him record statements more times than she could count, now, and it was always always always “Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London”. A few times she’d spoken the words along with him, when she’d known that she wouldn’t be heard, getting the same rhythm that he always used down after a couple practices. The fact that he was calling himself just “the Archivist,” now, the term she’d only ever heard used by those who were in too deep and saw people as roles more than as individuals... well, it wasn’t a great sign.

But then, neither was the fact that Sasha was apparently fuzzy to Jon’s eyes, albeit not to her own, or the fact that the static crept up on her sometimes even when she was saying nothing of consequence.

They were both drifting, perhaps. They both needed an anchor.

Sasha forced herself to summon up a smile, weak but present just the same, and Jon smiled back at her, and though he looked like hell and his eyes gleamed unnaturally as they stared up at her, in that moment, everything seemed almost okay.

“Statement begins.”

[nox-scrie]

Shady Bussines

What do you mean it’s the 27th and I should have posted this a day earlier for the TMA5 Countdown? Sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of recovering my senses from a senseless previous day. Anyway. This is the second day of TMA5 Countdown wow!! The fears were The Corruption and The Buried and because I love that coffin with all my heart I decided to bring it back for another round. No, this one is not corrected either and no, I’m not sorry. I hate rereading my works. It happens. Hope y’all gonna enjoy it though!!

Fears: The Corruption; The Buried brieeef mentions of The Eye

Content Warnings: Death, Paranoia, some mentions of Insects

Rating: Teen and Up Audience

Characters: Jon  “Tired of your shit before you even started talking” Sims, Martin “What even is going on” Blackwood, Jane Prentiss, some mentions of Tim “Love of my life” Stoker and Sasha “WHY WON’T YOU LET ME LOVE YOU” James; also some OCs and one of them appeared in Day 1 too!

Setting: Season 1!! a little after episode 22, with Martin’s time spent in self isolation (hah.)

Word Count: ~3670

~~~                                            Shady Bussines

Jon stepped into his office, viewing the piles of unread, unordered statements, and felt another headache forming. He was having none of the former Archivist's shit, not after last night.

There was little light in his office, and he turned off almost all the ones that were still on. The buzzing of the light bulbs was annoying what was left of Jon's sanity, and he wanted to be in the best of his mental capacity when he read a statement he has prepared, one that seemed to be related to Case #9982211.

He slowly dragged himself to his office anyway, putting on his reading glasses that were hung around his neck and tightening his tie. This was his job, and he didn't want to be fired after barely a month of being the Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute because of a pretty bad hangover.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he opened a drawer, the only fucking thing in order in this room, and got a tape recorder out. He sighed, thinking with half a mind to call Martin and ask him for a cup of tea and a Paracetamol. Hah. Good joke, Jon. Not after last night.

He took a deep breath, slowly picked up a lint from his skirt and cleared his throat. Maybe he could burry himself in statements until his headache goes away, and forget everything he has said to Tim last night. Yeah. That sounds like a good plan.

"Statement of Horace Dwayne regarding his experience with a strange coffin, Archway, London. Original statement given October 17th, 2013. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement beginns.

I knew my fiancé's job was not one of the legal kind. There was simply no way a person with no college education can make enough money as to afford as moving in together in our apartment, barely five months after we got engaged. Yet, I never mentioned it, and I think they were grateful because of that.

We first met a few years ago, on a dating app for LGBTQ+ people. It was a casual thing, we just hit each other up when we needed company, and never talked about anything in particular. Until one day, they asked me if I lived in Manchester and I said that yes, I did. They came to my place a few hours after that, rain soaked and bleeding from a wound on their torso.

That was the first time I met Morgan Doe in person, and it was me, clumsily stitching up something that looked like a kinfe wound on their side. I asked for some details, but Mo didn't tell me anything. They just thanked me for taking care of them because they couldn't go to the hospital. I remember ranting about how they should take better care of themselves, and how Mo looked at me in the eye before bending to kiss me. Or maybe I was the one bending. In that moment, though, it didn't matter: we were kissing, and after I started ignoring the wetness of their lips and how they hissed when I climbed on top of them, it was actually really good.

Mo asked me to be their boyfriend a month after that, and I said yes. We moved in my crappy, ranted apartment in Manchester, and lived there for almost a year before I asked them to marry me. I knew that we couldn't get married right away; I was between jobs at the moment, and even though I still wasn't sure what Mo actually did for a living, I knew that they will not be able to afford a wedding in a matter of months

Or that was what I thought then. One day, when I got home from a failed job interview, I found Mo in the kitchen, happily mumbling the lyrics of some song that was playing on the radio. I asked them what got them so cheery, and they just turned to face me and started dangling a set of keys in front of my eyes. Mo kissed me, and said that they managed finally get us a place for our own.

I knew that something was wrong then. I knew that something was painfully, terribly wrong, from how fast they managed to find us a place right after we got engaged, to the glint in their eyes, that mischievious glint, when they shared the news. I tried getting the information out of them, how did they actually manage to find us a place so fast, but Mo just shooshed me and said that I shouldn't worry, because they were going to give me the wedding of my dreams, and the life that I deserve.

A month after that, we were already settled in Archway, London. Apparently the apartment has been pretty cheap because of the loud neighbours, especially a woman who claimes to hear wasps in the attic. The first night we got there, I saw her in the garden of the apartment building, staring at the basement door. Her eyes were bloodshot red and she looked ill. When she turned her face straight towards me, I was too surprised to turn away. I think she smiled, but I don't remember her lifting the corners of her mouth. It felt like she was smiling, though.

I had a job now, in a shopping centre, selling vegetables. It wasn't much, but somehow we never dealt with money problems in our house. It seemed like the money never ended, in fact, and Mo told me more than once that I shouldn't be concerned about that. And I tried very hard to not be, but in the darkest of nights I still remembered that gilnt in their eyes when they showed me the key.

It was an usual evening when the coffin came. I was having my tea and reading a book that has made its appearence in my house, ignoring the weird noises the woman from upstairs, Jane something, made. There was a knock on the door, and I hoped it wasn't that creepy woman asking for some flour. I really wouldn't like to know what she did with it.

But it wasn't Jane. The two men sitting in my doorway were so tall I had to crack my neck to see their faces, obscured by some big caps. They spoke in some sort of accents, probably russian, and said they were from a delivery serivce and they had a package for Morgan Doe. Mo was not home at the moment, and chills were creeping up my back when one of them extended a clipboard for me to sign. I told them that Mo is my fiancé and that they're not home yet. The two men looked at each other, and one of them shrugged. I signed the papers and the two placed the big box in my kitchen, the first room of the apartment, and left without a word. I only assumed that the package was already paid.

I didn't know what it was, but if Mo has ordered something for the house they would have told me. I thought that maybe it was something for work, and that thought made me feel unwell. I called Mo, but they didn't pick up. I only thought they were busy, and I eyed the big box suspiciously. I went back in the living room for my tea, and I got back to the kitchen with it. It couldn't be something from work, I thought, work doesn't deliver such big packages. So I opened the box.

The shock I felt when I saw the wooden box inside, the coffin inside, made me take a step back and stumble into the table, spilling the tea. It was a coffin, an adult sized coffin, and a pretty new one from appearence. Well, except for the words "DO NOT OPEN" scribbled in the wood. That was not the strangest thing, though, but the fact that it was chained up so heavily it seemed to hold a living person, not a wooden box.

I called Mo again. And again. I was so panicked I could barely breath, and they were not picking up. I couldn't afford to leave the room or lose sight of the coffin, who did not move, speak or gave any sort of clue about its origin or its content. I noticed the key attached to the chain, and that image made me laugh. There was a coffin in my kitchen, a chained up coffin, with a key! I was going crazy.

It was almost midnight when I felt like I couldn't stay awake any longer. I took the key and placed it in my back pocket, careful not to touch the wood or the chain too much. If it was a cursed object, I didn't want to be in more contact with it than I already was. Mo still hasn't came back; they do that sometimes, leave overnight, but they always give me a heads up at least a week before. Of course the only time they left without telling me was the same night that a strange coffin, probably with a very weird thing inside, made its way to our home.

I dreamt of bugs slowly crawling their way on my skin, through my ear and inside my brain, bitting and pinching it as if it was a sponge, whispering about the hive, its importance, its puropose. It was a very unusual dream for me, but when I woke up and found out that I wasn't in my bed anymore was even stranger. I was in the kitchen, in front of the coffin, with the key in my hand. The key from my work pants, which are in the drawer.

I never sleepwalked before, and to think that out of nowhere I was not only sleepwalking, but dreaming of bugs and searhing for things in my asleep state was impossible to understand. It was the middle of the night and I took out my phone to send Mo another message, begging them to come home. I don't know how I fell asleep afterwards, but I know that the key was on the nightstand where I put it before going to bed.

Mo came back that morning, and I found them in the kitchen, their back turned to me. They were staring at the coffin, and I slowly made my way towards them, anger and relief that they were okay starting up in my stomach. But they didn't turn towards me, not as I slammed the door on my way inside. They jusy sat there, and stared. It took me only a moment to realize they were crying, and Mo has never cried as long as I know.

They turned towards me, their cheeks stained with tears, and hugged me. There was no word shared between us as we sat there, in front of the coffin, Mo crying softly on my shoulder. I think I understood them better in that morning then I did in the entire time I knew them.

Our lives for the next few days has been like that: staring at the coffin for sometimes hours on end, waiting for it to make a move, and then quietly chatting about what we did that day. We have got used to it, too. Mo placed it in our storage closet that we never even used, and it fit perfectly. Both of us tried to ignore the little tapping from inside when he touched it. I think we both convinced ourselved it was just in our imagination.

When the first rain came, it was during the nighttime. I'm a very heavy sleeper so I usually don't awake unless somebody hits me with something, but the noise from that night woke me up. Mo's side of the bed was empty, and the bedside table's drawer was open, with the key for the coffin missing. My heart skipped a beat, and I ran for the kitchen, bursting through the door.

There was a moaning coming from the storage closet, and the door was opened. As I scrambeled for the light bulb, I realized that the moaning was almost musical. When I turned the lights on, the moaning hasn't stopped, but grew even louder. The door to the wooden casket was open, the light glinting off the chains mockingly.

I took a deep breath, and started screaming for Mo. I didn't dare leave the kitchen, not with the casket open, not when I didn't know where my partner was and if they got in there. I realized they must've been the one who opened it. They might have had went there every night, and this time, with that awful moaning, was too much for them. They gave up.

I'm not sure when I fell to the ground, a mass of sobs and pained screams, covering my ears to stop the sound of moaning, but I know when a knock came at my door. I couldn't move, couldn't leave, and the person must have been so impatient they just bursted through the door. It was the two delivery man, accompanied by a guy with a very common face. I couldn't catch the man's name, too caught in the two delivery men as they closed the casket and chained it up again. The jackets they were wearing had the words "Breckon and Hope Delivery" written on the back.

The moaning only grew louder as they placed the coffin on a trolley to take it down the stairs easier. I barely managed to get on my feet and catch the other man's rain-soaked coat by the fringes of the sleeve.

"Why did you do that to them? How has Mo wronged you?" I asked, and I was not feeling angry, or empty, but rotten. As if my insides have been eaten by insects slowly and only now I can percieve the damage.

"Oh, child. They didn't do anything to me. All that happened was their own fault, their own making." at this the man stopped, gently extracted his hand from my grip, and looked around the apartment. "Nice place you've got here. I'm certain it was worth it."

I moved out the next week, when I started hearing weird insect noises. I never managed to get the door fixed, not that it mattered. The whole building burned up a few days after my departure, and I couldn't help but feel this was the perfect ending."

Jon paused for a few seconds there, thoughts flying around in his head, never focusing on just one. There was so much information here, so many points to connect. It felt like a conclussion was coming, and Jon hated that he wasn't able to see it fully because of his stupid, throbbing headache.

"Statement ends." he said, an afterthought. "Well, this is not only connected to Case #9982211, but may also be related to Case #0161203, the one of Martin's from almost a week ago. If that is true and the Jane who lives in Archway in this case is the same as the one that locked Martin in his apartment then... that would be very interesting, indeed. I should ask Sasha to make more research regarding this case. I... Recording ends."

Pressing the red button to stop the recording, Jon started scrubbing at his eyes before letting out a heavy sigh. It felt like he was caught in a web, all of these statemenets connected one way or another, with him caught right in the middle of it all and yet unable to see where they started and with whom they ended. He got up on unsteady feet and caught the edge of his desk in order to not lose balance. God. He would make his own fucking tea and get his own fucking Paracetamol-

The door to his office opened, and Martin came stumbling in. He was wiping sleep away from his eyes and masking a yawn at the same time with the back of his hand. He was also wearing one of Jon's baggy sweaters he has left in the room of the Archives Martin occupies now. The recorder turned itself on, unoticed by either of the man looking at each other.

"Oh, Gosh, Jon. God. What are you even doing here? It's not even 7 a.m. yet."

Jon didn't even try to mask the scowl on his face when he gave his snappy reply. "Some of us get to work on time, Martin."

Martin stopped wipping at his eyes, his glasses now slightly askew. Jon looked behind him and turned his hand into a fist. Why was he like this?

"Still, the Archives don't open for at least another half an hour. Jesus, Jon, I'm still in my pajamas."

"I can see that." Jon replyed, meaning to be bitter and mean, and hating the softness that managed to slip into his tone. He scowled harder in return when Martin looked down at himself and jumped.

"Ahm... I... my clothes. Are at cleaning. All of them. And you forgot this and I... meant... to give it back to you... not now I mean! But I didn't have anything else to wear and..."

"Martin. Stop making a fool of yourself. It's fine that... that sweater has a hole in it anyway."

"I sewed it." Martin said, matter of factly, his face still red and expression flustered.

"You did?" Jon asked, more surprised than anything, and when Martin started biting his lip Jon looked back at that spot above his head, that was now becoming his favourite part of the Archives.

"Yeah... It was nothing anyway and I didn't want to return it with the hole in it. Not that! Not that I am.. wearing it often or something."

"I said it's fine. The blue fits you better than it ever fitted me, anyway."

Martin looked at him in the eyes, something strong and fierce in his look, and Jon didn't turn his head this time. Neither of them said anything for a while, but then somebody coughed in the doorway and both of them jumped, the moment having vanished.

"Did we intrerrupt something?" said Sasha, sidestepping Martin and leaving some papers on Jon's desk. Tim, who was behind her, remained next to Martin and sent a big grin in Jon's direction. The scowl came back to the archivist’s features.

"No, nothing, what? Of course not. I was just... Jon, why are you holding onto the edge of the desk so tightly?"

Jon looked down at his hands and saw that they were white with effort. He stopped clenching them, and immediately started feeling dizzy once again. Sasha caught him before he could fall backwards, with an arm around his middle.

"Easy there, Jon. Are you okay?"

"Just.. feeling a little ill." Jon said, and Tim let out a bark of laughter that he quickly covered with a caugh.

"Godness, this is just awful, isn't it, Martin?" Tim said, making a show of his words and softly touching his heart with one hand. "I'm certain one of your famous teas would make him all better, don’t you think?"

Before Jon could give a snappy reply, Martin jumped slightly again, as if Tim's words just activated all of his "taking-care-of-people-via-tea" senses. He nodded eagerly and looked over to Jon, who was too tired to scowl in full force anymore.

"And a Paracetamol." Martin agreed, before leaving the office.

"He hasn't even asked me if I want some tea..." Sasha asked, more confused than offended. "What did you do to him during that staring contest, Jon?"

"What?" barked Jon, extracting himself from Sasha's hold and throwing himself on his desk chair. "I didn't do anything to him, thank you very much."

"Oh but there are so many things you'd like to do." Tim said, and anger started bubbling up in Jon's throat as he turned his eyes towards him. "You drank so much last night you can barely hold yourself up now, boss?" he asked, innocently.

"Tim, for the love of everything good on this planet, stop. This is all your fault."

"What is?" Sasha asked, confused.

"Your big crush on Martin is my fault, or the fact that you got so drunk you told me all about it is?" teased Tim, and Jon wanted to get off his chair and throw himself towards him, but didn’t.

"WHAT?" shouted Sasha, and both Jon and Tim shooshed her.

"I don't have... a crush on Martin. I just think that he's a good person, and a good person can't work in this place of horror stories and insufferable people. That would be you, Tim."

Tim laughed. "Copy that, boss. But I'm sure that if you just told him he would.."

"No. And that's final. I don't want to engage in a romantic relationship with anyone, especially not my assistants, especially when there's so much work to do here. I think I just found some important information in Prentiss' case."

"Jon... likes Martin..." mumbled Sasha, probably talking to herself. "You idiot!" she exclaimed, turning towards Jon. "He likes you too! Hell, he almost broke his legs running to make you tea. And wasn't that your sweater he was wearing, the one you lost some time ago, "my favourite article of clothing" or whatever?"

"It totally was." said Tim, ever the helpful.

"So do something about that, Jon! What are you waiting for?"

"For the two of you to get off my office and do some actual work. Leave, now."

Sasha sighed and Tim stuck out his tongue at him, telling him something about how we only have one life and we should make the most of it. As Jon drank the too-good tea Martin has made for him, he admitted to himself that Tim was right and that he really should do something about that. The more persistant thought, though, was the fact that he was never going out drinking with Tim, ever again. He did not see, nor hear when the tape record clicked itself shut back.

[anamaleth]

Twins

Summary: Statement of someone unknown, regarding the appearance of something that was not their twin and the events following said appearance. Original statement given April 10th 2011. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Content Warnings: Imposters , people being replaced/showing up and only you notice, paranoia, mental breakdown, brief mention of drugs (no references to actual drugs/drug use!), people forgetting who you are

read on ao3

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Statement of…huh. That’s odd. It doesn’t list a name here.

Well, statement of someone unknown, regarding the appearance of something that was not their twin and the events following said appearance. Original statement given April 10th 2011. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

Before I start this, I need you to know that I am not crazy. I’ve never had any problems with my mental health, and as far as I’m aware, neither has anyone in my family. My childhood was perfectly normal and, despite the occasionally skipped class, I’ve never been much of a troublemaker. I’ve never taken any drugs in my whole life, I’m not the kind of person to get involved in those sorts of things.

I need you to believe me. This isn’t the confused rambling of someone who isn’t thinking clearly – this really happened. Even though no one would ever consider listening to me, much less believe anything I say.

But that’s what you guys do, right? Listen to people’s crazy stories and believe them? Try to help them?

To be honest, I don’t think you can help me. But I do feel like telling you this is the right thing to do. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do. It’s not like I have anywhere else to go.

I’ve been an only child my whole life. When I was younger I used to love it – always being the centre of my parents’ and relatives’ attention, always getting lots of presents on my birthday and on Christmas. It’s such a childish and selfish way to think, isn’t it? I grew out of it, eventually, but it took me quite some time, especially with pretty much all of my friends having siblings and always telling me how jealous they were of me getting so much cool stuff on the holidays.

I was never a jerk about it, though – my parents didn’t raise a spoiled brat. I always shared my stuff with other kids when they came over, always made sure they’d feel “right at home”.

I was about 12, I believe, when I first found myself thinking about wanting to have a sibling. That’s when I met my best friend, or well, former best friend, Charlie Baker. Charlie had…well, has a twin, Alex – and the three of us spent a lot of time together.

Even though Charlie had told me that I was their best friend, I found myself envious of the relationship they had with their twin. They seemed to be – it’s hard to explain. They seemed to be in sync, like two pieces of the same puzzle that fit together perfectly. They teased each other, like siblings always seem to do, and sometimes they fought, but they always had each other’s backs when it mattered.

I wanted nothing more than to have someone like that. A twin. Someone I could be in sync with. I guess I should’ve been more careful what I wished for.

It’s been two months since he…it showed up. I was walking home after having taken the school bus back to my village. I said goodbye to Charlie and Alex, who live just a couple of blocks away from me, turned into my street and walked towards my house. That’s when I realized that I didn’t have my keys with me.

Not that big of a deal, right? I’ve always been pretty forgetful, have been accidentally leaving my keys at home ever since my parents gave them to me. It’s never been a problem though, my mom works from home so she was always there to open the door for me when I needed her to.

I didn’t think much of it when I rang the doorbell and no-one opened the door. I thought “Hey, maybe she just didn’t hear me”, so I rang the bell once more. Again, nothing.

Just when I decided to take out my phone and call her, the door swung open. In front of me, inside of my house, stood someone I didn’t know. Someone who looked almost exactly like me.

I wish I could say that there was something wrong about him that I noticed immediately. But even now that I’m looking back, there was nothing particularly unsettling about him. Nothing that I could remember, at least.

He was completely ordinary, just like me; had the same hair colour as me, a similar hairstyle, the same facial structure, the same height. It was like catching a glimpse of your own reflection in a mirror out of the corner of your eye, without focusing on it.

He - no, it – smiled at me. A smile that was so perfectly normal, so innocuous that it seemed almost artificial. It said four words to me, then, four words before it turned around and left me alone at the doorstep.

“There you are. Finally.”

I didn’t understand what was happening. Panic rushed over me and my breathing began to fasten – not even for a single moment did I consider the possibility that this was all just a terrible joke.

I have been an only child all my life, and I have never been anything but an only child. Yet at that moment, that moment of confusion and horror, it was clear that whatever had opened that door was pretending to be my twin.

In an attempt to make sense of all of this and to rationalize what was happening to me, I ran up the stairs to my mom’s office and barged straight in, not even bothering to knock or wait for permission to enter.

The look of worry on her face when she saw me quickly made me regret that, though. I don’t know what exactly happened after that, but I do remember breaking down crying, demanding to know who that stranger inside our house was who looked just like me; sobbing as my mom held me in her arms, completely overwhelmed.

I doubt that anything I told her had made sense. Even now, putting it into coherent sentences is anything but easy.

She must’ve thought that I had suffered a nervous breakdown. And honestly? After listening to her trying to soothe me for a while, hiding her pain behind calm and steady words, I believed that as well. At least momentarily.

Hearing her talk about me and “my twin”, our apparently shared childhood, and all the memories she clearly seemed to have that I lacked – all that assured me that I was losing my mind. Somehow, something must have happened to me and whatever that was must’ve caused me to fabricate a reality in which my twin didn’t exist.

It was a terrifying thought, but I didn’t see any sense in trying to justify my situation in any other way. I mean, someone who looks exactly like you showing up in your house one day who everyone, if asked, assures you is your twin with an irritated – or worse, pitiful – expression, acting like they’ve known this stranger for their whole life and that the very idea of questioning that is preposterous - that’s not something that just happens, right?!

Of course, I had only talked to my mom about it then, but that was enough to convince me.

I was trying and failing to grapple with my apparent madness when I saw it standing at the door, watching me and my mom - and on its face was that same artificial smile. It was mocking me; it found amusement in my despair.

That’s when I knew that I couldn’t possibly be crazy. Still, it took me way too long to find proof. And even that changed nothing. I should have come to you guys immediately, I suppose. Maybe it could’ve been stopped, then. Not that it matters now.

You know, I’ve never believed in the paranormal. No offence, but all those stories about ghost-sightings and demons or whatever always seemed like crazy talk to me. Most of it is, I think. But not this. Not this.

After it left again, I must’ve made up some excuses about not having slept in a few days and being dehydrated. That was a lie, of course, and not a very good one at that, but I wanted - needed - to get away from everyone.

I went to my room, or what I thought was my room. To my horror, where there had previously been an empty wall, there was now a second bed. It wasn’t a new one either, it looked like it had been there for years. And on it sat that thing pretending to be my twin.

Some part of me honestly considered just packing up my things and running away. Maybe I could’ve stayed with Charlie and Alex for a couple of days. In retrospect, I know that it was already too late for that. But even then, even when I didn’t know the amount of damage that thing had already done, I still had too much goddamn pride to admit defeat like that. Apart from that, I couldn’t just abandon my parents. Sure, my mom was convinced that whatever had invaded our house was her son, but that didn’t mean I would just leave her alone with it. So I stayed.

I did, however, manage to convince my parents to let me sleep in the attic. I don’t know how, really - what with my mom having witnessed that breakdown of mine, but after spitballing a story about “wanting to feel like I’m on an adventure”, they reluctantly agreed. If it hadn’t been for the fact that there was an imposter lurking in my now former room, I think it would’ve felt like a sleepover. A sleepover during which I was sure I was breathing in more dust than air, but a sleep-over nonetheless. Especially because I was barely able to get any sleep.

So, after what felt like hours of lying awake, I gave up and instead did what I could do: I started looking through the boxes we stored up there. It was, unsurprisingly but disappointingly nonetheless, mostly stuff my dad’s parents had owned before they passed away. We had kept most of it, even though I never understood why. I suppose it was nostalgia? It made me feel nostalgic, at least, made me think of all the summers spent in their backyard, playing football with my grandpa or watching birds with my grandma-

Anyway, I guess that doesn’t really matter now, does it? It doesn’t contribute anything to what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t know, it just felt good to talk about clear memories of the past. It’s all been getting so blurry as if it’s fading away from me.

I’m sorry, I’ll get back to it now. So, I looked through those boxes and found an old photo album. I’ll be honest, when I saw those printed out lies – hundreds of photos that showed me and this…thing, I nearly ripped it apart. But eventually, I stumbled across a Polaroid photo of me and my parents. My grandma had taken it way back, said she wanted to “capture some memories”. “Happy family” was written underneath it, in that neat handwriting of hers I had always admired. I burst into tears when I saw it.

We had taken multiple pictures that day and I knew that she had given one of them to me so I could put it into my diary. My diary. I had kept one back then, and if I could find it, if that thing had left it unaltered, that’d be all the proof I would need. And I found it!

It was all in there, all of the diary entries scribbled onto the pages in the scrawly handwriting of my younger self, all the dried flowers and leafs I had put into it, all of the stickers my mom had given to me, and, of course, the polaroid photo of my family and I. My grandparents, my parents and me. We had driven out to the beach and one of the nice people there had offered to take a picture with all of us in it. And all of was documented in blue ink on white paper. I fell asleep reading old diary entries, my face hurting from smiling too much.

But of course, my happiness didn’t last for very long. When I woke up the next morning I realised that while this was enough proof for me to know that I had been right all along and that I wasn’t losing my mind, it certainly wasn’t enough to convince anyone else.

My mom made me and “my brother” walk to the bus stop together. I didn’t have it in me to protest. We didn’t talk, I avoided looking at him as much as possible and for a second, I considered the possibility that maybe this wouldn’t be as bad as I’d feared it would be. I was, of course, proven wrong mere seconds later. When I looked at him briefly, his hair was completely black.

I immediately stopped walking. “Hey, is something wrong?” he asked me as if it didn’t know exactly what was wrong. “Your hair is black“, I stammered, and he had the audacity to laugh.

“Duh, so is yours!” And he…it was right. My hair had always been auburn. Its hair had been auburn yesterday!

This was all its fault, I knew that, and I was just to punch it in its face when I heard Charlie screaming at me to stop whatever I thought I was doing.

Alex pulled me away from “poor Ben”. “Ben” played along, played the victim. And the three of them left.

I will skip over the next couple of weeks for two reasons. The first one being that it’s getting harder and harder to remember all the details, and the second one, well, what I can remember hurts to think about. It hurts so much.

Naturally, Charlie and Alex had sided with the thing that called itself “Ben”. They had abandoned me. Every day when I drove to school, the three of them sat together and talked and laughed while I sat alone in the very back of the bus. They acted as if I didn’t exist.

Do you know what it feels like to helplessly watch as everyone around you starts to forget you? Teachers you’ve known for years not remembering your name, your friends forgetting the things you told them about yourself, acquaintances forgetting your existence? Waking up every day with the knowledge that with every passing hour whatever makes you “you” will fade away more and more and that there is nothing you can do about it?

But do you want to know what hurt the most? The final drop of water in my overflowing barrel of misery!? Coming home late one day, having my mom open the door and her not recognizing me. She smiled as she tore my heart into smithereens with her words: “Good evening. Who are you? Oh, of course, you must be a friend of my son. I’ll go get him!”

I stood there, frozen still until it stood right in front of me. Its lips twisted into that same, artificial smile that it had smiled the day it had invaded my life. And again, it said four words. “Oh. Who are you?”

That’s when I ran away and came to see you guys. It’s been…I don’t know…4 hours, maybe? I’m sitting in this room and no one is looking at me. I brought the photo with me, I suppose you guys can have it. I had kept it with me as some sort of proof that I was still sane, but it feels wrong to keep it. I feel as if the wind is blowing right through me and there isn’t even a window in this room. I don’t know what to do.

My name is M̴̭͔̓ä̴̮͜r̷̹͉͑̏s̶̱̈̚h̶̦̪͘a̷̬̠̕l̷͈̍̉l̵̺͆ ̴̱̱B̸̳̥̅ȱ̶̯͎l̷̜̇͘ṯ̶͝o̸͇̹͛n̷̢̙̂. And I’m ceasing to exist.

Statement ends.

This is an odd one, certainly. Especially since I see to immediately forget Mister…Bolton, was it? Yes, Marshal Bolton. I seem to immediately forget his name after I read it.

We’ve had statements before in which people have been replaced by supernatural entities – creatures we’ve come to refer to as the “Not Them”. This one is different, though – a “person”, if you want to call it that, inserting itself into someone’s life as someone new, instead of replacing someone else. Still, the statement giver seems to be the only one who was able to notice the change.

It’s quite common for the “Not Them” to toy with people’s memories and they have a history of altering photographs and voice-recordings. Polaroid photos, however, seem to be mostly unaffected. The Polaroid photo mister Bolton mentioned has been left with his statement – as he said. It shows a little boy with auburn hair, his parents and his grandparents at a beach.

I’ve asked Tim to look into this statement, and his research has shown no record of anyone called Marshal Bolton having lived near London around the year 2011. He did, however, find one “Benjamin Bolton”. And, as you would expect, he is an only child. Any follow-up requests have been ignored.

I would’ve been keen to brush this whole statement off as a bad joke, presumably by Benjamin who could have found this photograph and decided to make up a scary story about it. However, knowing as much about The Stranger as I do, I doubt that I’m that lucky. Nevertheless, this seems to be a dead end.

Recording Ends.

[leavyes-a]

meta on media consumption as beholding, and the creation of the conservator role, based on conversations with @hdtvtits​. content warning, as always, for addiction, compulsive / obsessive behavior, aggressive hoarding, and implied terminal illness, all of the eldritch variety. also allusions to real-life hollywood dramas, though nothing remotely specific is discussed in this post.

foreword: this is just the first part of a bunch of meta i’ll likely end up posting on why levi is what they are and why their beholding manifests the way it does, because like... for secrets and the underbelly of film production i have a lot to say but a lot to source as well. but there are a few things i want to address in this post, namely: what the eye feeds off of, whether or not levi is feeding the eye in their media consumption ( and how ), and how it ultimately serves the eye’s purposes to have this be levi’s method of feeding. this probably won’t even be my last post on the subject as i keep sort of logicking out the way that beholding works and how it can manifest. it’s important to me though that it exist and function outside of just what happens in the institute ( which is proven in the statements ), mostly because fear entities are global and primal and jonny said that the story really is britain-centric. now, media consumption isn’t particularly groundbreaking; it addresses a more american culture, but that’s still western-centric and sort of ‘typical’ of europe and america, though i will say that european filmmaking as an institution is... different. it has its own history and quirks. hollywood is its own beast. someday i’ll make a post on levi’s judaism and how that interacts with beholding and manifests as more than their aesthetic, because they haven’t even used their ayin hara on this blog yet though it’s a ( minor ) power they possess, but that deserves its own post. ANYWAYS. with that said.

what does the eye feed off of? the eye doesn’t just function based off a primal fear, it has a drive that it imbues its servants with: “it is the manifestation of the fear of being watched, exposed, followed, of having secrets known, but also the drive to know and understand, even if your discoveries might destroy you.” i think that most of the entities function in a similar way, with the things they inspire and feed off of on the one hand, and avatars with a desire to evoke that fear in the other; i.e., avatars create food to feed their entity, and if they don’t, the entity devours them instead. that’s pretty basic knowledge. ( i also have stuff to say about entities consuming themselves because every time claire says autocannibalism i go absolutely hog wild about it but that’s for another day. ) there are, then, multiple ways that an avatar can go about gathering fear for its entity, but what sets the eye apart from others, i believe, is that it doesn’t need to directly cause the fear it consumes -- though i think that it finds the fear of being watched more filling than just watching other people be afraid, it can still ‘survive’ off of that. this is where eye shit starts to get confusing and it’s why these posts are so longwinded and involve me talking myself in circles, because the eye both has a specific fear that it’s linked to and can devour other people’s experiences of fear that it did not cause, yes even before the apocalypse. that’s just how jon feeds for the majority of the series. for a good long while, he’s not going out and getting statements himself; and even when he does, he’s double dipping on both the fear they convey to him about their experiences ( knowledge gained ) and the fear that this man is pulling information out of them ( secrets exposed ). 

but that’s jon and we’re not talking about jon, we’re talking about levi, and my ever-evolving thesis on voyeurism in / and media. 

so what does an eye avatar need to do, exactly, to eat? it needs to accumulate knowledge, that’s the baseline that it can survive off of -- knowledge of the other entities is best, but i don’t know that it’s a requirement... and i don’t know if it’s not! i am going to make the call that eye avatars can survive off of just hoarding information because the eye isn’t super picky and wants to know everything anyways, but not feeding off of fear for a long time is going to leave the avatar really weak. and for an eye avatar to develop its powers and grow, it needs to take statements directly, or else give other people the distinct feeling of being observed against their will. the more people it feeds off of as a result of its own actions, the more powerful it becomes. that said, i don’t think this is common, which is why watchers ( heads of institutes ) have set up these systems where they’re generating food for themselves on two axes simultaneously: fear of people who give statements, and fear of people who have to work at their institutes ( either taking statements or working directly under the eye ). that just sort of accumulates power upwards within eye bureaucracies, though the archivists who take and sort the statements are also going to become remarkably powerful if they lean into their role.

( also side note: these systems work for the english, american, and chinese institutes, but there are ways for beholding avatars to thrive outside of them, and again someday i’m going to post about oral traditions and the ability to craft stories in different regions of beholding that feed the eye. but i need to do research first and we’re talking about levi! )

here’s the thing... levi is not an archivist. levi is not powerful. levi does not have a strong connection to beholding. they worship it, but fanaticism does not equal feeding, sadly, and the role they’ve been given is not one that pushes them to go and gather statements for themselves. they have taken read and statements at afi, because wyatt was raising them into an avatar, but, though conservators and archivists can overlap in the real world, they ( in my word of god for this blog’s canon and the monster i made up ) are two very different things under the eye. essentially, conservators serve archivists ( and watchers ) by witnessing, recording, and playing back statements that archivists can then maneuver through. the more experienced the conservator, the more they can shift the camera, allowing the archivist to comb through statements in detail and pull the knowledge that they want from them. remember that the beholding grants knowledge, not understanding, and while that may be fine for the eye, sometimes its ‘human’ servants need to put the pieces together in order to advance its plans.

the conservator is a relatively new position within beholding, because it does function like a film camera. i think that, in other times, places, and cultures, there were similar avatars who filled a similar role, but it wasn’t the same. the conservator really is a miskatonic / american experiment to help the institute delve into the information it already possessed. for one example of how conservators are useful, consider what happened with sasha: the archivist had his voice recordings of her, because it can’t effect magnetic tape, but jon the person still had her wiped completely from his memory. that wouldn’t happen to a conservator, because all of their memories are converted into (meta)physical tape stock. they are a lockbox that cannot be opened or altered unless you’re a more powerful beholding avatar. ( the limitation here is that they only have so much storage space, they will need to expunge some memories to store more; though those memories can be kept in physical containers, film stock obviously degrades and is a very unstable and extremely flammable medium; their body will also internally decompose to make room for more data and that is a painful process that eventually renders the conservator just a storage without any ability to function beyond sitting still and replaying witnessed / read events. )

we’ve established that levi feeds normally. they take statements, they are present in an archive, they’re hearing the scary stories. finally, finally on to why levi consumes media and how levi consumes media, because the one is intrinsically linked to the other. let me start by saying that just watching television or films does not a beholding avatar make. yes you are watching, but the distinction is in whether you are passively or actively viewing. and the power that is drawn from someone zoning out and being addicted to passively consuming media does not go to the eye. that is neither a fear of being observed ( for the one watching or for the actors / writers, because nobody is going to care about an audience that doesn’t form an opinion at all beyond basic emotional reactions; uncritical consumers are milk and honey to them ) nor a pursuit of knowledge ( passively accepting knowledge is, according to elias, far less effective in raising up eye avatars than letting them learn to ‘see’ on their own ). all that power goes to mx media ( @hdtvtits​ ) or, if you don’t like crossovers, Just Definitely Not the Eye. it’s when you start performing analysis that the eye takes interest -- which is why the eye continues to thrive in academia ( au where i write meta on just how bad that gets, historically, but again there are things we don’t get into until we research thoroughly ). the more you lose yourself in compiling information, to the exclusion of everything else, the more you appeal to beholding. and when you start unveiling secrets, which there are plenty of in film and film production, things kept private from the audience, ‘movie magic’, then feeding can begin.

this may come as a surprise, but levi does not have a response to whether or not they ‘like’ movies. if you ask them, ‘did you enjoy that movie?’ they will not say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they will just start launching into ripping it apart. levi probably started out enjoying movies recreationally, but at some point, they became not just unwilling to but incapable of watching films without analyzing -- and what separates this from normal people who are conscientious and engaged viewers is that this is a mania that spans hours. their ‘digestion’ of a film is obsessive and has a physical component because it is eldritch in nature. i can’t stress enough that levi isn’t just a pretentious film buff who says ‘oh i can’t consume media for pleasure or uncritically’, though they may have been at some point in their college career! they have a physical and metaphysical makeup that drives them to frenzy over what they watch. the instant they finish a film, they’ll begin a rapid accumulation of knowledge of anything they can dig up: the who, what, when, where, why, how. if they do have an emotional response, it’s incredibly removed, and their way of processing it is to drill into how and why the film made them feel that way. 

if they try to avoid this step in the process -- if they just watch a movie, turn it off, and attempt to go to bed -- they will start to weaken immediately. watching the movie isn’t enough for feeding. if it was, the eye wouldn’t take any interest at all. it’s the genuinely out-of-control driving impulse to keep researching and researching until there is nothing left about a piece of media that isn’t known, shredding through academic papers and script drafts and director’s notes and interviews and everything they can get their hands on, that stems from and feeds beholding. they do not settle for what is put on the screen. they will even cold call creators in a fit and try to get them to talk about the production ( which is, yes, invasive -- beholding is an eldritch entity, it is not healthy or good and does not inspire healthy or good habits! ). 

they may not even be capable of enjoying a piece on its own merits; it’s all about the world it opens up to them, it’s about stuffing themselves with information until they can’t breathe and overstimulate and pass out. then recovery from that can take days as they process what they learned and sort it all out in their mind. they don’t really do much with this information; just knowing it is enough. if an archivist or watcher wants to take action about it, they can ask levi to spit it back up for them. but ultimately, despite the impact that this has on their health, this is still low-level feeding for a low-level avatar. unless it’s a truly gruesome movie or has an exceptionally shady production background, it’s not really the fear that the eye is looking for. levi is feeding one half of beholding, the half that wants them to consume knowledge and secrets. if levi didn’t take / read statements as well, or go out and witness live horrific events, they would probably starve -- their body would eat itself processing knowledge.

and i will talk about the component of parasocial relationships, anxiety that stems from being an actor / director / content creator in general and having your work and your image spiral out of control as it’s ripped apart and dissected by consumers, because that is beholding territory as well. it’s just not actually what levi does, but because it relates to the media-beholding relationship, i’ll have it on this blog.

[glassc0ffin]

Spreading

frankie has a haunted tattoo its pretty neat. another transcript fic

pairing: oc (frankie james)/jonathan sims

words: 2049

warnings: yearning

[CLICK]

FRANKIE JAMES:

Oh, I've missed that tape recorder. I still haven't got one, y'know.

ARCHIVIST:

There are some spares around somewhere, I could try and get one for you. I-If you wanted.

JAMES:

You'd do that? ...What if you get in trouble?

ARCHIVIST:

With what's going on around here, I doubt anyone would notice one missing tape recorder. But, I digress. What are you doing back here? I thought the voices had stopped.

JAMES:

Well… They did, after a while. Thanks for looking into that, by the way. I was a nervous wreck for a good while, there.

ARCHIVIST:

It was no problem. I'm glad you're doing at least a bit better.

[PAUSE]

You are doing better?

JAMES:

I mean, I thought I was. Up until –

ARCHIVIST:

Wait, I-I should –

JAMES:

Oh, yeah, go ahead.

ARCHIVIST:

Statement of Frankie James, radio DJ at Tranzishon Rock, London, regarding?

JAMES:

A tattoo I got recently.

ARCHIVIST:

Recorded direct from subject by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of The Magnus Institute, 5th of October, 2019. Statement begins.

[PAUSE]

A tattoo? Would you mind showing me?

JAMES:

I - Okay, it's a little… Complicated. A couple of days after I saw you the first time, I decided to treat myself, seeing as I felt like shit – Don't worry, I'll show you in a little bit, I just need to explain something first – and I texted my tattooist, Sarah, if she had any appointments soon. She said no, that she was booked up until Christmas, but that she had an apprentice in who could do something quick for me. And I thought, well, I trust Sarah, she wouldn't let some newbie who's never held a tattoo gun before into her studio. That, and I kind of wanted to be a learning experience. There's something about being a living canvas for someone that's a little appealing. 

ARCHIVIST:

[SIGHS] I'm not quite sure I relate, but go on.

JAMES:

She books me in for a session a couple of days later. I had my heart set on a space sleeve, with stars and planets and stuff, and a supernova exploding on my elbow. I had come into a little bit of money recently so instead of doing the responsible thing, like paying my rent, I wanted to spend a ridiculous amount of money on myself. I commissioned a friend to design the sleeve and went to Sarah's with it. 

ARCHIVIST:

It sounds beautiful.

JAMES:

[QUIETLY] I can think of something more beautiful.

ARCHIVIST:

Hmm?

JAMES:

I-Er, nothing, don't worry. [WHISPERED] Shit.

[PAUSE] So, yeah, the tattoo. The newbie, I learned his name was Jimmy, transferred it onto my arm and started work. Funnily enough, we got off on the same foot as you and I.

ARCHIVIST:

Really? How so?

JAMES:

Y'know how I was obsessing over your tape recorder because of how cute and vintage it is? He had an antique tattoo gun he was using on me, paddle-operated and everything, it was really cool! He was as enthusiastic about it as I was, he said that he got it from a fancy vintage place. I can't remember what it was called but he said the bloke running it was called...Salesa? I think? 

ARCHIVIST:

...I see.

JAMES:

Anyway, it hurt a lot more than I was expecting. I just put it down to the gun being old and that was just what people used to have to deal with. I remember thinking I hope that gun's passed some safety checks. I mean, it wasn't rusty or anything, but I didn't want it to just fall apart while it was still stabbing me and fuck up my tattoo. Wait, am I allowed to swear?

ARCHIVIST:

I-It's not against regulations, as such. I'm not going to tell you off, anyway.

JAMES:

Aw, thank you. I'm not really a bleeder when I get tattoos, I have enough now to know what to expect, but with this one, i-it was like I had anemia or something. Every half hour we had to stop so I could eat something or I'd feel like passing out. Eventually, after 3 hours, I hit my limit. I was getting light headed and kind of annoyed, so I told Jimmy I'd be back in a week or so to finish it off. It was only from my elbow and down to my wrist, he hadn't even started on my upper arm yet. 

After that, I went straight back home - I had moved back there since the voices had stopped by then, don't know why they did but I'm thankful anyway - and collapsed onto my bed clutching my arm. It was already hot and swollen, trying to heal already. There was some cling film put over it and bandages. I soaked right through them overnight and onto my bedsheets. The next morning I could barely extend my arm. It was twice the size of the other and just oozing yucky stuff. It probably wasn't the best idea for an open wound, but like everyone does when they have an open wound, I stuck it under the cold tap. It was only then, in the harsh light of my bathroom, that I saw my tattoo properly that morning. 

There was a planet in the blackness of inked space that wasn't there before. I'm sure of it. It's not even in the original design. It was ringed, like Saturn. I even tried rubbing it off my skin but that just made it bleed more. It was way too early in the morning for me to deal with that shit, so I just wrapped it in some new bandages and went out to get food. It was aching the whole time I was out, and when I rolled up my jacket sleeves I saw I had leaked through the bandage again, and through my shirt.

It hurt. It hurt so much. More than any of my other tattoos healing. But again, I just thought it was that old tattoo gun, and because I hadn't protested when Jimmy brought it out, it was my own fault. My own stupid fault that I'd probably have to get my arm amputated because I caught fucking gangrene off an antique tattoo gun. 

I just resigned myself to cleaning it again when I got home. In fact, I ran a bath. And as I took my shirt off I looked in the mirror, and the tattoo had gotten bigger. I swear. We had stopped at the elbow, I promise, but it was at least an inch higher than that before, all the way around my arm. In fact, the new area was sore to touch, as if it had just been tattooed on, where the area at my wrist had already started to scab.

And as another day passed, the tattoo grew, and I cleaned it. And another day. And another. And now I'm here. Again.

ARCHIVIST:

Statement ends. Will you show me? The tattoo I mean?

JAMES:

Ah, sure. [CLOTHES RUSTLING] There. Careful, that part only appeared this morning.

ARCHIVIST:

[GASPS] I-I see what you mean… Frankie, I-I don't think you - uh - needed to take your whole shirt off...Wait a minute.

JAMES:

What? What is it?

ARCHIVIST:

It's on your back as well, here…

JAMES:

[SHARP BREATH INTAKE]

ARCHIVIST:

Sorry! I didn't mean to poke you.

JAMES:

No - you didn't hurt me, it's just - your hands are so cold! [LAUGHS, NERVOUS]

ARCHIVIST:

Jesus...I-It's moving!

JAMES:

WHAT?

ARCHIVIST:

The - That planet is spinning! The stars, they're twinkling as well! 

JAMES:

FUCK, dude, WHAT?

ARCHIVIST:

Frankie, you can't go home like this. Your skin is raw, I don't know how you're dealing with this…

JAMES:

I'm not. Painkillers, mostly. I…try not to think about it. 

ARCHIVIST:

We have some medics here who can help you, we can keep an eye on you, on that tattoo. And track down the man who sold your friend that gun.

JAMES:

I, er, need some stuff from my flat.

ARCHIVIST:

[SOFTLY] If you'd like, I can come with you to help. I doubt you'd be able to lift much with your arm in that state. 

JAMES:

Thank you… Why are you doing this?

ARCHIVIST:

What do you mean?

JAMES:

Well, don't you have assistants and stuff to deal with this crap? You don't do this with every person who gives a statement, right?

ARCHIVIST:

You're right. I don't. [PAUSES] You're different.

JAMES:

I-I am?

ARCHIVIST:

Yes...You're the first person I've ever met who is evidence of their statement, living, breathing, evidence that you weren't lying. And if I'm being honest, it's fascinating. 

JAMES:

[NERVOUS LAUGHTER] Thanks, I think… Can I put my shirt back on now? 

ARCHIVIST:

Oh, yes, o-of course. I can turn around if you want.

JAMES:

What's the point? You've just seen my boobs, seeing them covered isn't really going to make a difference.

ARCHIVIST:

[UNDER HIS BREATH] Good lord. [COUGHS] Yes, quite. Oh, er, recording ends.

[CLICK]

[CLICK]

ARCHIVIST:

Are you feeling any better today?

JAMES:

Not really. Still hurts. Thanks for asking, though.

ARCHIVIST:

I’ll see about getting you some painkillers. Would you mind showing me how far it’s progressed? I need to get it recorded.

JAMES:

Yeah, just… Gimme a second. It’s a little hard to move my arm now.

ARCHIVIST:

I can help. I-If you want.

JAMES:

...Yeah. Yeah, okay. [CLOTHES RUSTLING] Ow!

ARCHIVIST:

Sorry! Sorry. Was that part new?

JAMES:

I think so. It’s all a bit sore.

ARCHIVIST:

Yes, I can see. Your skin is red around the edges of the thing. Hold on, let me put some gloves on. [STRETCHY ELASTIC NOISES]

JAMES:

So you want me to bend over and cough, doc?

ARCHIVIST:

[SNORTS] Stop, I need to be delicate. I can’t do that if you’re giving me the giggles. Oh, let me - [COUGHS] Supplement of Statement #421904, recorded on the 6th of October, 2019, examining the tattoo of Frankie James, given to him from a gun sold by Mikaele Salesa. Statement begins.

JAMES:

Your hands are still deathly cold.

ARCHIVIST:

Sorry about that. Tattoo originally started at the wrist of the subject, and ended at the elbow. Today, approximately one week after the initial application, it has extended over the subjects hand, up his arm, and is currently spilling onto his chest and back. The tattoo is of a galaxy, with a number of planets and stars dotted about. On the subject’s elbow is a supernova exploding.

JAMES:

That part hurt the most.

ARCHIVIST:

I can imagine. Originally, the tattoo only had four planets and six stars, all located on the forearm, but as of today, the number has increased to eight planets and [COUNTING UNDER HIS BREATH] fifteen stars. It also appears to...move...at times, the stars seem to twinkle, and the planets spin on their axis. [BREATHES OUT] Very unusual.

JAMES:

That’s an understatement.

ARCHIVIST:

I’m just going to take some photos, if that’s alright?

JAMES:

Yeah, just get my good side.

ARCHIVIST:

[LAUGHS] You don’t have a bad side. [PAUSE] [CAMERA SHUTTERS 5 TIMES] There. That should be all I need for now. You can pop your shirt back on.

JAMES:

Can I just leave it off? It really hurts and having to peel it off again later to clean it will just hurt even more.

ARCHIVIST:

A-Alright. I’ll see you in a bit, Frankie.

JAMES:

Jon, wait.

ARCHIVIST:

Hmm? What’s wrong?

JAMES:

Nothing, I just… Thanks for helping me bring some stuff over here. You didn’t have to do that.

ARCHIVIST:

I wanted to help. Frankie, when you came in, you looked terrified. I was...very worried for you.

JAMES:

[NERVOUS LAUGHTER] Shit, I thought I was hiding it better. Okay, but, surely everyone that comes in to give a statement is going to be bricking it?

ARCHIVIST:

Well, like I said before, you’re fascinating. [PAUSE] It! It’s fascinating, your tattoo, it’s -

JAMES:

[SNORTS]

ARCHIVIST:

Not to say that you’re not fascinating, I-I- [SIGHS] I should leave, before I make an even bigger fool of myself.

JAMES:

Bye, Jon. You’re not too bad, yourself.

ARCHIVIST:

R-Right. Thanks. Goodbye.

JAMES:

Jon, wait! [PAUSE] And there he goes. I guess I’ll end this myself, then. Shit, I hope I don’t break it somehow. Erm, statement ends?

[jovialyouthmusic]

Uneasy Lies the Head

Follow up to Royal Romance AU Fanfic ‘Charlotte’s Choice’

3 Damage Limitation and Diversion

Charlotte and her advisors search the archives, and Drake brings some welcome respite

3 Damage Limitation and Diversion 

Later, after an initial meeting to tell all concerned of the slip in security, Charlotte received one of the archivists who had been looking into the historical records.

‘Your Majesty’ the man bowed as he entered the study, carrying an armful of documents and scrolls. ‘I have good news’

‘Please, tell me what you found’ Charlotte said ‘Professor Green, isn’t it?’ He nodded, and put down his burden. He picked out a scroll and opened it out over the desk.

‘Your Majesty, as you know, your father wore the crown he was to pass on to you. However, it was made for a King, not a Queen, and as you know, the very first monarch of Cordonia was a woman – Queen Kenna Rys. It bodes well that you are descended directly from her and bear her surname. We still have the crown that she wore, and that crown was used before the split between the families of Rys and Severus.’ He opened out another dusty document. ‘There are two schools of thought – first, that the first Monarch outranks all other subsequent monarchs, or that each one made some reform and remade the rules regarding the crown used, or some other element of the Royal succession. Although he wore the present crown, your father did not stipulate which one was to be used. It can be argued that a return to the original queen’s crown is a legitimate procedure.’

Charlotte listened carefully, weighing up the words of the archivist, going over her situation. She was born into her role, could barely imagine doing anything other than rule her country, but if Anton had been a different man, it might be easy to let him win, give up her right to the throne and live life as an ordinary person with the man she loved. But Anton was not trustworthy and would be a tyrant, misuse his power. Charlotte had been brought up to understand responsibility and duty. Only weeks ago she had expected to marry for duty, not for love. Now she had been blessed to find someone who loved her and shared her values, understood her role and would support her as leader of her country.

The archivist was saying she could still be Queen without the crown her father wore. It might be argued as a point of protocol or law, but she was not beaten yet. They may not know who had taken the crown yet, but it would almost certainly end up in the hands of Anton Severus.

She could only hope that the Council would uphold her authority – with a sick feeling, she realised that the one thing she had done was to revoke the Chastity law. If they didn’t accept her authority, that would be reinstated, and it would be discovered that she was no longer a virgin. She didn’t know how that would affect her claim to power either. She had planned for the Crown to give up some power in the long term, but in order to bring her reforms into being, she had to have the power to start with.

She was exhausted from the drama of the day, and becoming more and more ungrounded. She sent the archivist away and was about to order dinner to be served in the study, when she became aware of Drake standing in the doorway.

‘Your Majesty’ he said ‘ I thought you might need my company’ Charlotte pinched her forehead and shut her eyes.

‘How did we come to this, Drake?’ she asked ‘I never realised how hard it would be taking over from Father.’ She looked over at him ‘I’m afraid, Drake’ He closed the distance between them in seconds and put his arms round her.

‘It’s okay Charlie’ She almost sobbed at hearing her pet name falling from his lips ‘Tell me what scares you – we can face it together, you’re not alone’

‘I’m afraid of becoming like Father – ruthless and cold’

‘You are your father’s daughter’ said Drake ‘But remember how warm and loving your mother was. You have that in you, and I will help you remember’  Charlotte sighed and softened. Drake kissed her cheek. ‘You need reminding of what you have - of what we have’ he said softly. He took her hand and drew her to the door.

‘Where are we going?’ She asked ‘I was going to order dinner in here’ He stopped for a moment

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked, and she nodded

‘A little – but I can wait’ Drake smiled and took his mobile phone out, and tapped away for a while, then put it back in his pocket. He smiled

‘Taken care of – but first, follow me.’  He paused in the corridor outside to tell Lewis that Charlotte was clearing all her tasks and appointments until the following morning except for emergencies, and carried on. He led her up a back staircase, up two flights of stairs and along narrow stone corridors, in the older part of the palace, a place she had seldom explored. ‘I want you to imagine we’re ordinary Drake and Charlie’ he said ‘I came back to see you after that first time we met. I’m renting an apartment for a couple of months, staying in New York for business. I offer to take you back to my place and order pizza.’ Charlotte smiled

‘Okay, that sounds – ordinary. But where are we – oh!’ she suddenly realised where they were headed. ‘your old room you had when you were a teenager – that’s where we’re headed, isn’t it?’ Drake nodded

‘Got it in one!’

‘I can’t believe I never went there’

‘Well for a start, your father would have skinned me alive’ Drake grinned. ‘And just for the record, I never brought another girl up here – only Max and Tariq penetrated my sanctuary’

At the word ‘penetrated’ Charlotte felt warmth deep in her belly. In the few days since they had consummated their love, their lovemaking had been slow and tender and comforting. Now she felt a spark like the one she used to feel when they went out riding, when she was hungry for him, when she denied that it was him she wanted. Drake didn’t see her eyes grow dark, but he heard her sharp intake of breath and smiled to himself.

The possibilities that opened before them made her feel dizzy – those times she had thought of them in the gardener’s hut with him making love to her, face to face and belly to belly, and all the other things she had imagined… She hurried along behind him, impatient to reach his room, and he sensed her urgency without even seeing her. They climbed a narrow winding staircase up to a single door, and he fumbled with a key before opening it and stepping in.

Charlotte took a look around, her curiosity at seeing his sanctuary momentarily overcoming her physical need. The room was neat and masculine, uncluttered but cosy. The single bed was flush with the wall, a desk and chair by the window overlooking the stables, three floors below, the view of the Palace grounds impressive. The walls were part stone, part wood panelled.  A dark mahogany wardrobe stood in the corner, and strangely there was a washstand with a jug of water and a bowl. Drake saw her eyes run over it

‘Ah – this room was built long before the invention of modern plumbing, so I have that to take a wash or shave without having to leave the room’ he explained. Charlotte’s curiosity was satisfied and her eyes flashed.

In a trice she surged toward Drake, kissing him passionately, pressing him against the cold stone wall. His kiss matched her passion and he grabbed her and pivoted so she was the one against the wall, his tongue sliding past her teeth for a sensual dance. They fumbled at each other’s clothes, eager to find flesh, discarding clothes on the floor and stumbling back to the bed. The room was cold and the bed was narrow, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was their naked bodies pressed together and frantically seeking release.

‘I want you inside me Drake, take me now’ her voice was husky and low, dripping with desire, arms round his neck pulling him toward her.  His fingers went to her folds to explore her readiness, finding her slick and warm. He manoeuvred his hips between her thighs, propping himself over her on the narrow bed. He lined up, her hand guiding him to her willing entrance and he slid inside easily and quickly despite his length. They just seemed to fit together perfectly. Charlotte moaned and wrapped her legs around him, matching thrusts as he filled her and drove into her. She wanted to fuse with him, know his thoughts, understand and fulfil his desires like he fulfilled hers.

‘We can make as much noise as we like’ he murmured in her ear ‘Say my name, Charlie’

‘Drake’ she said throatily, grinding up against him between thrusts

‘Louder Charlie, I can’t hear you’ he picked up speed, dizzy with pleasure.

‘Drake, oh - DRAKE…’ He carried on pounding into her, blinding her senses as the waves of pleasure started to build, driving all other thoughts out of her head, only her molten core and his hard body, the wet sounds, the slapping together of flesh, primal and urgent

‘Charlie, my sweet Princess, my wanton Queen’ he growled deep in his throat. ‘you’re mine, all mine’ She arched her back in ecstasy, her breath quickening

‘Drake, my lover, my consort’ she groaned, her voice getting louder. He felt her starting to flutter around him, felt her tremble and shake, screaming his name out ‘Draaaake…I – oh God, Drake… oooohh’ she cried as her climax peaked and crashed and fell around her, and he erupted into it, hot and sweaty and messy, leaving them a heap of tangled limbs and quick panting breath. Bizarrely, Charlotte found herself laughing breathlessly, body shaking with relief and happiness.

‘Drake, I never thought – never expected it to be like this’ she breathed as she calmed and slowed. He smiled, fetching a flannel to clean up then lying by her side on the cramped bed.

‘I never expected my bed would get action like this’ he laughed ‘Though I often wished it would’ Charlotte curled into his side.

‘Did you think of me up here?’

‘Yes I did, long before I understood why’ he answered, taking a lock of her hair and twisting it around his fingers. ‘how about you?’

‘My knight in shining armour looked remarkably like you’ she smiled ‘And I had a few interesting dreams over the years’ Charlotte’s stomach rumbled, and she laughed. ‘There was mention of pizza, though I’m not sure how serious you were’ Drake grinned

‘Easy, I got Olivia to order it in and leave it at the bottom of the stairs – it should be there right now’ He untangled himself from her and pulled on his boxers and trousers ‘I’ll just be a minute’ He left the room and reappeared with a takeaway box. The aroma rising from it made her stomach growl again. She smiled, wrapping the sheet around her and sitting on the edge of the bed, bare legs dangling over the side, feet on the soft rug over the varnished boards of the bedroom floor. Drake pulled a chair over and opened up the box.  

The Queen of Cordonia and her prospective consort sat, she in his shirt, he bare chested, eating Pizza from a takeaway box like any ordinary couple save for the fact that they were in a stone tower in a palace. She sat on the bed, bare legs swinging, and smiled, tomato sauce on her cheek, her lips greasy from the cheese. He sat on the only chair in the room and reached into the bag that came with the box and brought out a can of soda, cracking it open and taking a sip before handing it over to her. She drank, and licked her greasy fingers, and moved off the bed to kneel in front of him and kiss him.

‘Thankyou’ she murmured ‘Thankyou for keeping me grounded. I love you, Drake Walker’

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