#river gave them something to make them live together till old age i tell you

[clumsygaydisaster]

SPOILERS FOR REDACTED but I just went to read Vastra's wiki page because there was a fuss on twitter and I've not listened to the audio but they basically??? Implied??? That Jenny is dead in 2022 and Vastra is still mourning her and no absolutely fucking not😭 I feel physically sick, I REFUSE to accept this😭😭😭

[givemeonebreath]

A big, messy Linked Universe playlist

Link for Links

Heavy on the angst, because of who I am as a person. (At the same time, don’t take it too seriously, man.)

Influenced by canon, manga (TP Link is really Going Through It™ ), my personal perceptions, and popular fandom canon.

A pretty wide variety of genres, with a bias towards metal and prog rock.

I kept snippets of lyrics for most songs, also because of who I am as a person. (Some were particularly hard to narrow down to just one verse or chorus.) Those - and a little more rambling - are under the cut if you really want, in the order of the playlist. But. It’s long.

I didn’t initially make this with the intent to share, but hey. Throughout my past year+ of listening, I’ve been haphazardly adding songs to a playlist I very creatively named Links. If something reminded me of them, whether through the music or lyrics or both, I threw it on the playlist, so some songs might seem odd or vague. Some are really on the nose, as subtle as a sledgehammer. (Sky for Sky? Dude. Sorry.) Some are there because of a fitting line or two that stuck in my head. Ultimately, music - like any form of creative expression - can be interpreted in a multitude of ways. 

My listening habits and tastes are erratic, which is why this is one big, jumbled playlist and not separated for different Links. Not to mention if I did that, some (Wild, Legend) would have a lot and some (Wind, Four) would have none, both because of my own familiarity with them, and because of the general themes of the music I tend to listen to. Most songs are a general ‘hero’s spirit reborn’ mood, anyway - those are the first part of the playlist. The second half is more nuanced to specific Links, plus a few Ganon vibes.

1. Deep Purple - April (Koji Kondo, composer of the original Legend of Zelda theme, was into Deep Purple as a kid, and it shows.)

2. Kamelot - Regalis Apertura

3. Au4 - So Just Hang On, Beautiful One (I’ve posted this here before. I can’t hear it without thinking of LU now.) So I slipped in through the gate almost unknown. All my border stamps were late. Seven days old. Cold hand griped my shoulder blade, broke the bone. Bloody nose and turned away, all the way home.

4. FC Kahuna - Hayling Don’t think about all those things you fear, just be glad to be here

5. Glass Animals - Youth Boy, when I left you you were young I was gone, but not my love You were clearly meant for more Than a life lost in the war

6. Pain of Salvation - Restless Boy A restless boy in a world too slow A flame born into cinder, ash, and glow I've given everything I gave it all Yet find myself alone

7. Haken - The Endless Knot Our design shifted frame by frame! Across the line our cycle starts to fail. Our design shifted frame by frame! Across the line we die to live again.   We need a story to believe in. We need a hero to prevail. We need a challenge we can overcome, it takes a tragedy to make us one 

8. Kamelot - Memento Mori (I particularly associate this with Time and Twilight) I am the god in my own history The master of the game I may believe if she would come to me And whisper out my name Sometimes I wonder where the wind has gone If life has ever been Sometimes I wonder how belief alone Can cut me free from sin

9. Katatonia - Fighters Look I told you so We never stop If we said that We'll back it up For sure You know We're fighters

10. Megadeth - This Day We Fight! (I mean, all Links, but particularly Warriors) For this I was chosen, because I fear nothing With confidence I tread through the dead of the night Off to another war-torn, faraway battlefield Wherein lies a demonic enemy horde

11. Moon Tooth - Igneous Well, the spirit took me And this old broken body leapt up and danced Settin’ out Settin' out with all my heroes in a bundle at my back Hawk am I More wings span in my shadow than overcast Yeah, you know what they say Always need something to look up to, ha

12. Samael - Moongate Destiny, tomorrow is today Destiny, without boundaries How many nights will we spend together traveling infinity back and forth and again How many times will we go together questioning eternity about us about our wonders...

13. TOOL- Parabola This body holding me reminds me of my own mortality Embrace this moment, remember We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion

14. Lunatic Soul - Blood on the Tightrope No matter how hard you try To shut down your feverish thoughts They hunt you down with no regret Cause you have to fix it all

15. Hybrid - Keep It In The Family

16. Soul Savers - Unbalanced Pieces Gone, now carry on Through violent seasons I call you mother, mother, mother In vain, absent chain The twilight's bleeding And the playing board has two unbalanced pieces

17. Steve Von Till - Valley of the Moon All she gives is a stone facade Like ill-given flowers at a dead man's wake Here we slave for the dreams of another And fight over scraps like wayward dogs

18. Ludovico Einaudi - Experience

19. Lunatic Soul - Summoning Dance Three stones on the right side Three stones on the left My vicious circle of life and death   “Oh you want it” I hear it again “Oh you want it” My burden Curse to break

20. Lunatic Soul - Through Shaded Woods Run through your shaded woods Run through your shaded mind Run through the night Run away Run through the darkness Run

21. Lunatic Soul - Naavie

22. David Bowie - Nature Boy There was a boy A very strange, enchanted boy They say he wandered very far Very far, over land and sea A little shy and sad of eye But very wise was he

23. The Dandy Warhols - Sleep Well, I could sleep forever But it's of her I dream If I could sleep forever I could forget about everything 

24. Au4 - Everyone is Everyone (and Everything is Everything) Tripping and tumbling, Flipping and fumbling. Flowing on the rivers of sadness That have been forever rumbling.   But from dawn until now Of all the paths that I could have gone down Of all the valleys That I could have been flowing through.   In spite of all the chaos And all that has come between us, How is it I still find myself Here with you. 

25. Kingcrow - Everything Goes Your hands again upon the ground Falling rain for hours and hours As you learn the game Time dispels the fog ... Ever been there? Ever felt like prey? Ever thought your mind was feeble? Lot of things that don’t make sense

26. Pain of Salvation - Icon As a child I felt too old And now when I'm grown-up I feel too young A different kind so I've been told Just slightly out of reach and out of time

27. Sophia Loizou - Divine Interference (I got spooky dungeon vibes. Also, the title.)

28. Carpenter Brut - Fab Tool Runnin Gunnin Forward in the phantom shatter so grand Splatter grand, arcanum fuel Wrought iron out of the sky Over me, tells no lie

29. Blue Stahli - Death Will Have to Run All on the open road Where none will ever grow A journey toward the known With countless miles to go

30. Gyroscope - Mistakes & Ladders I am the first? No I can't be the first A continuous nothing, destined for something Tell me who you are and why you trapped me here

31. Queens of the Stone Age - Run, Pig, Run Run, pig, run Here I come

32. Chali 2na & Krafty Kuts - Guard The Fort The swords are drawn and odds are stacked And we clash the impact's a thunderous clap Calm demeanor Even though we are under attack [...my turn to guard the fort ready for combat]

33. The Great Discord - Army of Me (lol)

34. Kongos - Terrified I think I'll start again and change my name You only live once or twice, what a shame Somebody fucked up when designing this game

35. Woodkid - Run Boy Run Run, boy, run! This ride is a journey to Run, boy, run! The secret inside of you Run, boy, run! This race is a prophecy Run, boy, run! And disappear in the trees

36. The Beta Machine - The End A million miles away from you this time I'll do what it takes I'm on my way If lines are in the sand I'll go under If I can make it in time I will bring you back with me

37. Devin Townsend Project - Gump When we last met who was I? I'm sorry we no longer see eye to eye The energy to keep you in while keeping myself out I'm sorry how you'll take this  But I just don't have the patience anymore 

38. Arrested Youth - Riot! I can't get much satisfaction living in this cave It's tough to breathe, I'm in the belly of the beast Can't sleep with all my rage With me and all my generations living in this cage Pick up your guns and tell your sons, tonight we break the cage

39. Led Zeppelin - Friends So anytime somebody needs you Don't let them down, although it grieves you Some day you'll need someone like they do Looking for what you knew

40. Faunts - M4, pt 2 (Wild) Fight your foes you're not alone Holy war is on the phone Asking to please stay on hold Bleeding loss of blood runs cold And I need you to recover   Because I can't make it on my own

41. Faith No More - Ashes to Ashes (Wild) I want them to know it's me, it's on my head I'll point the finger at me, it's on my head Smiling with the mouth of the ocean And I'll wave to you with the arms of the mountain

42. Devin Townsend - Jupiter (Wild) I know you At least I think I do Everything's changed But in the days that are so dark It's wonderful

43. Katatonia - Neon Epitaph (Wild) Shadow of my shadow Cling not to my grief I am long left behind now You are free

44. The Smashing Pumpkins - The Beginning is the End is the Beginning (Wild) Time has stopped before us The sky cannot ignore us No one can separate us For we are all that is left The echo bounces off me The shadow lost beside me There's no more need to pretend Cause now I can begin again 

45. Katatonia - Lacquer (Wild) My voice travelling Soaring bird above your head The house we lived in Ridden with disease ... The levee breaking I can't live to fight once more The road to the grave is straight as an arrow I'm just staying around to sing your song, baby

46. Eskimo Joe - This is Pressure (Wild) There is no romance in suffocation  The walls fall down like your expectations You want to scream  And you want to shout But you've built up steam  And you can't let it out This is pressure 

47. Portugal. The Man - 1000 Years (Wild) We'll wait 1000 years  Until the end of time We'll wait 1000 more Dressed up in gold and white We'll climb the mountain sides  To find what's in the sky We'll dig through mountain sides  To find what's deep inside

48. Au4 - An Ocean’s Measure of Sorrow (Wild) Forgot my name and who I was. Memories of nothing floating up. All of the sorrow we once knew, Colours the ocean's water blue.

49. Band of Skulls - Carnivorous (Twilight) I am corrosive and cohesive Like a chemical bond I'm all together undone I am the broken kingdom I'm just so, so, so  So carnivorous

50. Glass Animals - Flip (Twilight) I wanna go back with a club and attack I wanna take to my guns and break you I gotta make my little foe take his own

51. TV on the Radio - Wolf Like Me (Twilight) My mind has changed my body's frame, but, God, I like it My heart's aflame, my body's strained, but, God, I like it

52. Kamelot - The Spell (Twilight) All my demons cast a spell The souls of dusk rising from the ashes So the book of shadows tell The weak will always obey the master

53. OSI - Radiologue (Legend) I was dreaming I was heading west thirty days faster Had a fever woke up in a sweat bailing out the water  Can't go on Can't go back   Heard your voice coming through the noise wrote it in the radio log Hurt my head, wondering what you said so I threw it overboard  

54. Katatonia - Don’t Tell A Soul (Legend) I have been destroyed by the perfection that is a lie see I'm moving soon see my feet are already on the road and if you know where I’m going don’t tell a soul

55. Haken - The Mind’s Eye (Legend) The shape of things to come are closer than they seem Changing your design every time you disappear I'm planning my escape through portals of your mind Where people seem to drop like flies

56. Pain of Salvation - Species (Legend) Sometimes I hate my fucking species Yet most days I'll do anything to please it  My generation was fooled to pursue our dreams But it is not what it seems You never need what you want And you rarely want what you need

57. Euringer - Do You Kiss Your Mama with That Mouth? (Legend) All my life, misunderstood I'm fuckin' too smart, too smart for my own good The last question, before I go is "Hey motherfucka, do you kiss your mama with that mouth?"  Yes! I kiss your mama with this mouth

58. !!! - Pardon My Freedom (Legend) Like I give a fuck, like I give a shit Like I give a fuck about that shit Like I give a fuck about that motherfucking shit

59. Team Sleep - Ataraxia (Legend) Froze asleep Coma deep I dream I'm out with you Alone at sea

60. Oliver Tank - Embrace (Legend) You're in my dreams The world is torn apart at the seams And I don't wanna leave Wearing my heart on it's sleeve

61. Machine Gun Fellatio - The Girl of My Dreams (Is Giving Me Nightmares) (Legend) The girl of my dreams is giving me nightmares I don't know what it means but she's got multi-coloured hair When she stands in the sand I dream of peaches And I'm not sure what that means either

62. Earl Greyhound - Shotgun (Legend & Hyrule) I am nobody, nobody is who I am I am a traveler on this land And nothing, nothing, nothing in my hands

63. TV on the Radio - Staring at the Sun (Hyrule) You're staring at the sun You're standing in the sea Your mouth is open wide You're trying hard to breathe The water's at your neck There's lightning in your teeth Your body's over me

64. Echo & The Bunnymen - The Killing Moon (Time) Fate Up against your will Through the thick and thin He will wait until You give yourself to him

65. Sufjan Stevens - Sugar (Sky) Don’t break my heart, don’t break my flow now And all this rage has got to go now Let’s take up this lifeline Come on, baby, gimme some sugar Don’t make me wait Don’t make me wait too long Don’t make me sing the sad song Come on, baby, gimme some sugar

66. Obsydians - Ascension (Sky) Rise above the hardships you’ll face I will sign and keep on rising As long as you are giving me your soul and keep me awake Feel like home and spread your light around I will listen and just be there As long as you are giving me your love I’ll give you my soul

67. Sonique - Sky -_-

68. Enter Shikari - The King (Ganon) Watch your back, my friend I'm about to kickstart a cycle Of never ending revenge And this time it's primal, it's tribal

69. Saul Williams - WTF! (Ganon, Hylia) "You've been polluted, uprooted by time You have been muted, computed but I'm A living vessel of the one, of the moon, of the sun" Hey! You ain't as dead as you seem, what the fuck? Hey! But you keep living your lies

70. These New Puritans - We Want War (Ganon/ Dark Link/ any nemesis I guess) Shadows dance back up, it's happening again If you listen carefully you might hear them whisper: "We hold all the secrets, we hold all the words; But they're scrambled and broken so you'll never know" Can't you see them Floating like black ash? Can't you feel them Crawling down your back?

[xhanisai]

AU where Gabriel is Chat Noir and Adrien is Papillon

- And Marinette is still Ladybug

- Let's call this the Holy Shit Gabriel is a good guy? AU

- Adrien is the villain/anti-hero in this

- Backstory time :D

- Gabriel has been sentenced to jail for murdering his wife, Emilie Agreste, when Adrien was only eight years old.

- He was bailed out after two years, created a whole new identity and now goes by as Felix Roi (fuck knows why I just came up with the name just now)

- He works as taxi driver, trying to live a calm, redeemable life despite heavy burdens and guilt. No one knows he's Gabriel. He has facial hair, styles his hair differently and wears contacts. He sticks to the outskirts of Paris.

- Gabriel never meant to kill Emilie, it was an accident.

- Adrien doesn't know that (along with everyone else)- he thinks his father is a murderer and vowed to find Gabriel and kill him with his bare hands.

- Ever since the accident, Natalie became Adrien's legal guardian. They live in a modest yet comfortable house, with Natalie working day and night as a lawyer.

- This means that they rarely spend time much to Natalie's dismay.

- Adrien is a lot more tame, cunning and observational in this AU. He's a bit more selfish too. (Maybe a bit like his PV prototype character) He's still relatively polite, never modelled, never met Chloe.

- Adrien refused to socialise and stuck with homeschooling till he gave into Natalie's pleas and began attending Mari's school just before he turned fourteen (so yeah working along canon events)

- A few days before school, when visiting his mother's room in the old abandoned mansion, Adrien finds the butterfly miraculous in a hidden room.

- Here's a small snippet of the interaction between Adrien and Nooroo:

"This notebook says that you grant powers to the weilder, the ability to use the emotions of hosts and turn them into champions that will obey the weilder's whims..."

"Please...Adrien...you're a young child. Don't do anything horrific with this power..."

"Listen, I have no interest in taking over the world or any of that crap. I just need your help in finding my father, please."

"O-oh? That's a relief! You're a good host then aren't you? Pardon me for prying...may I ask a question?"

"You don't have to be so polite. And yes, sure?"

"Has your father gone missing? Or something along the lines?"

"Nope. He's hiding."

"...why?"

"Because he knows that once I find him, I will kill him."

- Adrien explains what Gabe did to his mother, his mindset has concluded that Gabriel would kill more people. Nooroo tries to reason with Adrien, saying how two wrongs don't make a right. Adrien remarks with:

"If you're not on board, then that's fine. I'll do this alone, just like I've always been doing so."

- The kwami then persists to help Adrien, internally vowing to change the boy for the better.

- Gabriel receives the black cat miraculous after saving Fu's life (the old man fell in a river, Gabe jumped in and saved him, even paid all the hospital expenses).

- The dynamic between Plagg and Gabriel is pretty hilarious. Plagg likes to annoy Gabe as much as possible, eat everything in the fridge and even pull pranks.

- The dynamic between Gabe when he's Chat Noir and Ladybug borders on father-daughter like. Gabriel is a bit awkward at first, having zero knowledge and little interaction with children. He's even a bit cold to Ladybug at first. He warms up to her soon, realising she's around his son's age and promises to protect her from harm. If he couldn't do anything right for Adrien, he could at least redeem himself with Ladybug.

- Ladybug lovingly teases him as Pére Noir to rile him up.

- Adrien calls his little butterflies "helpers" and the people he akumatises "Knights". He goes for negative emotions because they're the easiest to control. Only the Knights know that Papillon is after Gabriel Agreste specifically. The rest of Paris plus the heroes are left to guess as the Knights tear through the city, searching.

- Papillon, Chat Noir and Ladybug all meet face to face on the first day of the akumatisation (Stoneheart). Ladybug declaring that she and her partner will protect Paris whilst Papillon stands there silently with his hoard of butterflies. He leaves without a word, humoured by the heroes.

- Ladybug's first impression when Papillon appears:

"Oh shit he's hot-"

- Insert Chat Noir facepalming himself.

- Marinette becomes Adrien's first ever friend when he joins the school. They mutually fall for each other.

- Adrien shows his love by soft, subtle gestures (tucking the hair behind Marinette's ear, smiling at her, brushing his fingers with hers, etc)

- Marinette sometimes stammer but quickly gets over that, only blushing profusely when Adrien's around and letting herself sass him.

- The duo become so close, painfully obviously in love with each other yet blind to the other's affection. Neither want to pursue too much because of their side jobs lel.

- Both Mari and Adrien open up not just to each other but to their class as well. Adrien starts to realise what he's been missing out on in life.

- He gets jealous really easily. Also, since he's behind on social norms, some things he say is rather...odd...

"What's wrong with me saying I want the whole world to know Marinette's mine, that's why I gave her a bell necklace?"

"DUDE. YOU JUST DON'T."

"I only said she smelt good?"

"Adrien, boy, hun. You had the look on your eye that made us think you were going to eat her up."

- Papillon does come out sometimes as his Knights search through the city, observing. His butterflies are able to make a temporary shield around him to stop the heroes from nabbing him. One time, he was drinking tea within the shield, after he was defeated, letting the heroes make a fool of themselves in trying to pierce it.

- Papillon doesn't have a timer, rather, he is very vulnerable and can only possess one person per day.

- The real villain pops up one day, a peacock themed villain. She calls herself Mayura and is after all the miraculouses.

- The trio have no choice but to work together in defeating her villains. She's incredibly strong.

- Mid fight against her, Ladybug had to run off to recharge. The villain comes across her when she's currently Marinette, only for Papillon to save her.

- It's the first time she sees him engage combat.

- He swiftly takes her somewhere safe. Marinette is taken aback with how worried he looked as he checked for any injuries on her. She hates how her heart skips a few beats over this.

- With a relived sigh, Papillon leaves but not before giving a chaste kiss on the corner of her lip and telling her to stay safe before leaving away.

- Marinette combusts on the spot.

[no-longer-an-alley-cat]

A myth (or collection of myths) for a goddess of a particular pantheon heavily inspired by @thestalkerbunny’s “Grandmother Beetroot” comic.

Tabha is the goddess of familial ties and volcanoes. Within the pantheon she is associated more with the sun god, which means that she does not abide outright lies and does not kill.

Also worth noting: Rozia is the goddess of privacy, medicine, and magic, and the River Zed is domain of Zayla, an aromantic, asexual goddess whose preisthood serves a legitimate way for people to escape the obligations of marriage in this setting. ‘Jadda’ is an anglicisation of the Modern Standard Arabic for grandmother.

Jadda Tabha

Jadda Tabha lives high up on the slopes of the mountain, growing her crops in the rich volcanic soil. She does not live alone; the hunting cats and soaring eagles keep her company and she keeps many hives. When people ask her about what sort of company such wild companions can provide, she laughs and tells them that the creatures help her keep an eye on things. She never specifies what things.

Jadda Tabha has a mane of grey hair that glimmers with gold when the sun hits it. It frames her face like an old lion’s mane, making her stone-grey eyes seem fiercer and her olive-brown skin more weathered. This is merely an appearance, however, she is always pleasantly warm whatever the weather and gives the best hugs. 

Like many old people, Jadda Tabha moves slowly. She makes her way down the mountainside at the same steady pace in torrential rain as she does in the blistering sun. Travellers who have accompanied her up or down say that the paths she knows are less steep than the ones they can find on their own. Children who take it into their heads to attempt to climb to the peak are guided back down in less time than it takes to organise a search party with their scrapes tended to and their fears soothed by a piece of honey candy.

If you make the journey up to Jadda Tabha’s hut, you can hear the magma inside the mountain bubbling away in the crater further up the track and it sounds almost like a huge cauldron. She smiles when people tell her this and says that she has no need for a cauldron that big, she is only cooking for herself. Much of the food she grows she gives to the village people — she says she plants so much to give the bees something to do.

It is easy to talk to Jadda Tabha. She is a solid presence.

Dependable.

Once she overheard a young man boasting that he would marry only the ugliest eligible person because they were sure to be grateful and not ask him to do work around the house. Jadda Tabha gave him a cream to rub on his face before bed that would surely make even the prettiest person grateful to marry him.

He did so but noticed no change, so he when he next saw Jadda Tabha in town, he accosted her. “The cream did not work,” he told her. “I haven’t received any proposals since I used it.”

“Ah,” she said in her slow and steady way, “what did you do in the waking hours before you used the cream?” The man spluttered that he didn’t see how it mattered, but under her inexorable stare he admitted that he had spent the days lying around his parents’ house and drinking with his friends. Jadda Tabha clucked her tongue. “The cream requires the sweat of a day’s labour to work,” she explained. “Do you have a patch of land to clear, perhaps?”

“Why?” the young man demanded, brash like young men often are. “What sort of medicine are you giving me that requires me to help it?”

“Would you rather I give you someone else’s sweat to rub on your face?” Jadda Tabha asked, and the man admitted that he would not. 

And so he went to work, tilling the plot of land his ageing parents struggled with and applying the cream to his face each night. Each day he needed to do slightly more work to work up a sweat, and before the tub was half done he was tending to the farm all by himself and attracting many admiring glances from those that valued a committed partner who knew how to moisturise. 

One time a pair of feuding siblings came to her, a frosty silence hanging between the two broken only by pointed remarks made to a third party. It was difficult to tease out the reasons for the broken relationship, but Jadda Tabha was patient and while the siblings broke their silence to scream at each other she pieced together that a new baby sister was at the centre of the current storm. The elder sibling, having moved out before the arrival of the sister, accused the younger of trying to keep her away from the baby while the younger accused her sibling of trying to ‘steal’ her little sister from her.

“A baby is not a toy,” Jadda Tabha said, easily making her voice heard over the warring siblings. “Just because she can’t talk yet doesn’t mean that she’s an object to be stolen.”

“Yes, Jadda Tabha,” the siblings chorused, showing that they had been taught their manners, at least. But Jadda Tabha discerned that these were just words, and the sentiments here would not be so easily changed.

“Perhaps there is a way to test which of you is best equipped to play with this child,” she said carefully. “There are a few kittens I have been nursing after their mother tragically died. You will each take one and look after it for three nights; when you return them they will tell me which of you did the better job.”

The siblings agreed eagerly, enthusiasm waning slightly when Jadda Tabha presented them with a pair of fuzzy cheetah cubs rather than the housecats they had expected. After listening intently to Jadda Tabha’s instructions, they took the cubs home, each determined to procure the very best toys for the small creatures.

They spent their respective evenings keeping the cubs entertained with feathers and balls, but when night fell, they did not grow less active. They squeaked constantly and wriggled out of blankets, no matter how cosily they were arranged. They refused to eat, seeming to prefer instead to stand at the window and cry piteously at the moon. For such small creatures, they seemed capable of shockingly piercing cries. Finally, the younger sibling bundled her cub up and rushed to her other sibling, finding her in a similar sleepless predicament. 

No sooner had she entered the home of her eldest sibling than the cheetah cub had wriggled itself free, flung itself on the other, and soon the pair of them lay in a purring heap. The eldest sibling silently made up a bed for her younger sibling and the two of them went to sleep as quietly as possible.

The very next day, they returned the cubs to Jadda Tabha.

“We see what you were teaching us,” the elder sibling said respectfully. “When we force each other away, we bring suffering.”

“And that something small and cute can be insufferable,” the younger added.

“I’m glad to see you are such fast learners,” Jadda Tabha said, lifting a cub into her lap. “Though I half hoped I could spend another two nights without little claws tearing up my floors.”

The siblings accepted the compliment and beat a hasty retreat before Jadda Tabha could think of more lessons that could be learnt by fostering cheetah cubs.

Once a young woman climbed the mountain to knock on Jadda Tabha’s door. She accepted the cup of honeyed tea that she was offered, but almost before the proper observances had been made she requested a healing balm. Her excuses about being clumsy and prone to accidents shattered on Jadda Tabha’s stony stare and before she knew it she was detailing her husband’s rages, how he told neighbours that she was crazy and made her half believe it herself, how he never hit her where it showed. Jadda Tabha clucked her tongue. 

“Ah, child,” she said, “this is more hurt than one of my balms can heal. Why don’t you head east, where a temple of Rozia sits on the banks of the River Zed? They will be able to help you more there.”

“Oh, but my husband!” the woman cried. “He will be angry that I’ve been away as long as I already have been.”

“Don’t fret, child,” Jadda Tabha said, getting to her feet in her slow and steady way. “I will explain to your husband.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the woman said. But Jadda Tabha would hear none of it, providing her with provisions and sending her on her way before she made her own journey to the village. The young woman and her abuser lived on the outskirts of the village, so it was not as long a walk as it might have been. Jadda Tabha did not hurry, however, and arrived just as night began to fall.

As soon as the man heard footsteps on the porch he started shouting, only to stop and stare in disbelief when the door opened to reveal Jadda Tabha. “Where is my wife!” he demanded, scowling.

“Away,” Jadda Tabha said calmly. “I’ve come to tell you that she will not return for some time. Possibly ever.”

“Where did she go? What did she say to you? The dumb bitch is always lying,” the man sneered. 

“I know a lie when I’m told it,” Jadda Tabha said, her grey eyes sharpening to something more like steel. “You should worry less about what she has told me and more about what you are telling me now.”

“Insolent old woman!” the man proclaimed and he moved to hit her, as he had learned that this was a way to escape truths that he’d rather not hear. This is not true.

And, particularly in the case of Jadda Tabha, a mistake.

The man screamed as his hand broke across the old woman’s cheek. “You would be better off beating the mountain,” Jadda Tabha said as the moon rose in the east and the air rang with the cries of night hunters. She sighed, looking down at him as he sat crying in his own doorstep. “Ah, what am I to do with you, child? The priests of the sun would have you do penance, the priests of the moon would have you hunted. Either way, you would end up dead.”

“Mercy,” the man begged and Jadda Tabha raised an eyebrow.

“You ask for mercy? You, who hurt those you think can’t or won’t hurt you back? Who spread lies to hide your misdeeds? You ask me for mercy? Very well.” Jadda Tabha stepped back, holding the man in place with her steely gaze. “Perhaps you will be redeemed, after all. But if you harm another living being, it will be the end of you.”

And with that, Jadda Tabha turned him into a bee; another worker for her hives.

It is said that if a person is being abused by their family or lover and can not make the trek up to Jadda Tabha’s hut, it is enough to tell the bees. Even if uttering the words is too much, it can be worthwhile setting up a hive. The bees are eager to earn Jadda Tabha’s forgiveness. They help her keep an eye on things.

[zorilleerrant]

Coda to a Sixteen Book Epic Fantasy Series I Will Never Write

“How are you?” the Wizard says, and there’s a part of me that squeezes around panic, but most of me is shivering in profound relief because if he’s here then he’s real.

“Oh, gods,” I say, and it’s more of a prayer than I’ve ever said it before. There’s an image of laughter that keeps coming up, several of us around a campfire, and it’s not a cool day but I can feel the cold steaming out with the image of flames.

He looks at me in concern, looks around, looks back at me when he can’t seem to figure out what it is that has me frozen in place, all the muscles in my face gone slack. If he’s real, then the farmer is real too, and the farming tips she gave me that dance in my head. The blacksmith is real, and those comments about shoeing my horse.

“You’re real,” I say, and that wasn’t what I meant at all, what I meant was that was real, the bard, the mage, the thief, all of it was, but he seems to know what I mean anyway.

“Oh, if I’d known,” he says, and sighs, and scrubs at his beard. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it would be so confusing to you. If I’d known I’d have come sooner.”

“Nobody remembered me leaving,” I tell him, and there’s a whine in my voice, a pleading that won’t go away, higher and more fragile even than I expect it to be. Louder than it was the first time I spoke in that tavern, two weeks in, more confident, but still that old voice that I thought I had left behind. “Every single person remembers me here for the last five years, tilling the land as I always have. Going to market every Saturday. Nodding hello. Giving the trinkets I dig up from the garden to the neighborhood children to play with. Living my life here as if I never left.”

“It’s local,” he says.

I turn to look at the Wizard, really look at him, and he’s drawn now, looking haggard and rundown in a way he never does in my memories. Dark and mysterious and certain, stepping out from behind corners or just being where we planned to rest, offering up a knowing not-quite smile as he spoke to each of us in turn. He really is just an old man with too much magic swirling around him, but then, what else could he have been? He was never cruel, but we were none of us free to make our own choices.

He places an arm around my shoulders, gently, tentatively, but I feel no need to protest. After all, I know him better than anyone else in my life.

“The spell,” he says, “it’s local. It’s not – I don’t know how much you know about temporal mechanics? But if I’d really rewritten your history, that would’ve been Big Magic itself, and sort of counterproductive, don’t you think?”

“No one remembers,” I repeat, staring out at people just going about their day. No one remembers hands held in silent prayer, no one remembers fasting in solidarity or removing the curse, no one remembers voices raised together, none on key and yet together sounding exactly as intended in the quiet of the woods.

“No,” he says, “no, your friends don’t remember, as per the bargain. Everyone else does. Even the townsfolk would, if I hadn’t – admittedly it’s a bit intrusive of a spell, but it’s just an obfuscation focused on your person. Not true time dilation, it just takes what you’ve been doing and covers the gaps between when you left and when you returned, and it’ll fade as their memories fill in. It’s only so strong now because they keep questioning it. A little misdirection, a little credulity, and of course they’ve always trusted you.”

“My house was pristine when I returned,” I say, not looking behind me at the home I had assumed would fall to ruin. I had more important things on my mind, at the time. Though of course I’d forgotten the supplies I should have known to have, all of us had, and those first few nights struggling to fish for our dinner were a master class in patience for her, and you’d think a farmer would’ve been able to hold on to a struggling animal but we were neither of us used to it, though at least she managed to hold on and one of us had something to show for it.

“Oh, yes,” he says, “I had some people in to fix it.”

“You what?” I say.

“That’s hardly Big Magic,” he says. “It wasn’t even Small Magic. Well, the crew used some magic, I would wager, but they do this all the time. It wasn’t even ten gold for the whole house, and they threw in the vegetable garden for free.”

“Why would you do that?” I ask him, as he makes stern faces at me. It reminds me of being scolded for being too obtrusive while committing crime, and that from both sides of the law, the same expression I can see so clearly even when I can’t make out the features.

“Well, I felt bad, you know,” he says.

“It was a bargain knowingly made,” I say, and turn away from him. My mistakes are my own, and anyway, I’m not sure I should count it as one, even now. It feels in error too removed from the immediacy of the threat and not yet home as I should be.

“And it was the best one I could offer,” he tells me. “I never wanted to hurt any one of you. That’s why I wouldn’t take a death. I thought – I thought what you’d learned, what you’d fought for over the years, you could take that home and build a new life. Find new friends. That’s why I didn’t take your memories, even though it would’ve been kinder.”

“You could have left me their names, at least,” I tell him, as he looks at me with astonishment, and my mouth snaps closed. I just want something to cling to other than adjectives, jobs, the colors of their clothing.

“No, I couldn’t,” he says. “If I did, you could look them up anytime you wanted to, and it wouldn’t have been a sacrifice. It can’t power the magic if you’re just going to seek them out and rebuild everything I repurposed into the spell.”

“Oh,” I say, staring out into the middle distance again. It makes sense, of a sort, I suppose, and nothing for it now but to try to pick up the pieces of who I was before and start again. Soon I’ll have enough for another horse, perhaps a dog. The neighbor’s cat does well enough in my grains, but I suppose it can’t hurt to find a kitten or two. One of them had a kitten on the road, the tiniest thing, we fed it scraps and it gazed at us with orange eyes that only brightened with age. Of course, it was a familiar by then, and there’s no call to teach a mouser magic just for the barn.

“If you wandered out of town – I suppose you haven’t – you would’ve figured it out right away,” he tells me. “All those innkeepers and stablehands and oracles you met along the way would remember you, if you cared to venture back. I just thought you could use some peace and calm. Somewhere people wouldn’t ask questions you’d have trouble answering.”

“Seems a bit of a liability,” I tell him, thinking about all the hundreds, thousands of souls who could unravel the fabric of the thing with one misplaced word. A warm smile with bread offered freely in a town where the harvest fell short even so. New clothing from the same hands that pulled us from the river. Wary eyes, but clear directions still.

“Why?” he says. “Do you think they’d visit? All of them heroes in their own homes, congratulated on their victories? Even you haven’t left, and all you have to your name is quiet.”

“True enough,” I say, and wonder whether it’s fair to them, everyone who helped us achieve the impossible, why their names should all be forgotten to us as if they never mattered to the grand scheme of things. A coven and none else, that was the prophecy, but it’s never really none to save all, how can it be?

“Besides, again, far too much power,” he says. “I’d have to do Big Magic again, or else travel your footsteps for the last half-decade, looking each person in the aura, and who even knows if they would remember whether they remembered you? Besides. The number is off by one, and chances are they couldn’t describe you well. I doubt they know your name.”

“No,” I agree. What would be the odds they’d name me well enough to tug at strands of memory? No, not memory either, it would have to be emotion buried deep enough it would surpass the need for that. The Wizard promised all of that was gone, and nothing to fear. No single footstep fallen behind as we let the horses rest, no bed rumpled as I took a turn at watch. I didn’t give up all of it to be put right back where I started. Although, in a way, I suppose, it’s come to that regardless.

“Do you think you could be happy here?” he asks me.

I look around, but I see nothing I haven’t been looking at these past months. Nothing jumps out at me to spark either a yes or no, and I lapse deeper into silence.

“You always meant to retire here,” the Wizard says, “that’s what you told me. If too much has changed, I can find you somewhere else. It wasn’t meant to be a punishment.”

“Wasn’t it?” I ask, and too harshly. Someone yelled this at him already, not me.

He looks away from me. “I asked as little as I could, but there’s only so small of magics you can work with when you’re trying to save the world from destruction. All those little bits of energy, they have to come from somewhere, and there wasn’t time left to send you on a quest as I used to. If you’d been earlier – but there was so much in your way, and we didn’t have the luxury of sending you up a mountain to the blue roses that grow under the waterfall, did we? So I made do.”

“Would they have worked?” I ask, and there’s something else. Not roses. Smaller flowers, less ambitious, a soft yellow in color, and so many of them. A hand trailing through, someone asleep in the meadow, and a tale of childhood games.

“I don’t know if they’re real. It’s just an example,” the Wizard says. “It isn’t the roses that do the job, really, it’s the quest. You walk a spell into the land and the energy fills it back and forth, powering the Big Magic. That’s the idea, anyway.”

“Was it real?” I ask him, not daring to look him in the eye as I do.

“Your friendships? Of course they were. Taking them away wouldn’t have powered the magic if they weren’t.” He leans over to look me in the eye. “Hey. They were.”

“Any of it,” I say. Eyes meeting mine but I can’t put words to even what emotion sits in them. “How do I know it was real?”

He opens his mouth to speak, and pauses again. We wait in silence for an eternity before he finds a piece of proof strong enough to convince me against my own certainty, and even then he struggles to make it clear to me. “The prince has described things well enough, hasn’t he?”

And I have to pause to match my own recollections against those proclamations that have been issued, and perhaps they are close enough after all. Still. A few details bound in silk against the haze of words to a song I know I should recall.

“Write down what you remember,” the Wizard says, “little details, as many as you can, and I’ll tell him to fill in his side of the story, and you can compare them.”

“Why?” I ask. “Why would he do that for you?”

The Wizard pauses, unsure if he should go on, and I wait for him to speak for far too long before I realize his dilemma. I’m picturing instead a cobbler we visited once and the shine of a single buckle the whole time he’s contemplating answering what I’ve asked.

“He’s one of them,” I say. “He’s one of my companions.”

The Wizard nods in agreement, quietly, wary of breaking the silence.

“Should you have told me that?” I ask, picture the regal tilt of the head as he counted out coin to the cobbler’s hands.

He laughs. “What, you, a nameless farmer no one remembers? Yes, I guess you can just stroll right in and demand an audience. Or break in.”

“I could break in,” I tell him, lecture complete with disorienting reappearance fresh in my mind. “I haven’t lost the skills yet, I shouldn’t think. It’s only been a few months, and I still wake up thinking I need to practice.”

“Too many guards,” the Wizard says. “Please don’t, anyway. I shouldn’t have slipped up like that. I don’t think you’re likely to run into each other, though.”

“Which one was he?” I ask. “Did we know, did I know, he was the prince?”

“Oh,” says the Wizard, “I suppose you wouldn’t remember that either. I don’t know whether any of you knew. I would’ve thought you picked up on it, but I suppose we’ll never know for sure now. I mean. It was obvious from my end, but maybe I had more information than you did.”

“But you can’t tell me?” I ask. A word on the lips in candlelight, but I can’t make out which one. “It would be nice to put at least one name to my memories. At least one real name, anyway.” At least one name that isn’t just a bastardized pun.

“You never called him by the name we all know him by,” the Wizard says, softly, and there’s the lightest sprinkling of early morning rain amongst the trees, and there’s a name to the memories after all, a face, and everything in sharp clarity, and the pain, too, of knowing that whatever was there is gone. I hadn’t felt it so directly, not when they were still just impressions. When I gasp, my breath feels cold against my face, and I run my hands along my cheeks. His thumb was there, once, brushing them away.

“Oh,” I say.

“I can give you all their names, all their faces, if you promise never to seek them out,” the Wizard says. “If you don’t think it’s too much temptation.”

“No thank you,” I say, in a whisper, because I can’t go through this heartbreak again, not a dozen more times, temptation notwithstanding. Though I don’t think that’s an issue either, because how could I walk up to them and see their unsmiling faces, staring at me with blank distaste, knowing there was no way to get through to them? That even if I did, they’d never feel it, that if I ever did make them feel, even by accident, the whole magic would come crashing down around us? Better not.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and we sit in silence for a while.

“I can’t believe I slept with the crown prince,” I say.

The Wizard’s head snaps up as he turns to look at me. “You what?”

“What?” I ask him. Lips against my throat and a hand in my hair and now I can finally make out his whole expression. “The memories are real, aren’t they?”

“No, I mean, they are,” he reassures me, “I just. I didn’t know that. I mean, it tracks. But still. My gods. And that he was willing to give up.”

“What was?” I ask. “He’s the crown prince. I’m sure he can find sex anywhere he pleases, and it was never anything other than that.”

“Wasn’t it?” the Wizard asks me.

“Why should it be?” I return, but my heart isn’t in it. He whispered in my ear, holding me close before the others arrived and the distance between us with them. Maybe it wasn’t, but there’s no sense dwelling on it now.

“I knew he was in love with someone,” the Wizard tells me. “It wasn’t enough to power the magic, I didn’t think, but it was enough to be noticeable. But if it was you, maybe it would have been. I mean, you were central enough that it might have counted. Maybe I should have asked, but I assumed it was some barmaid or stableboy you’d found on your journey, not another major player.”

“You’re telling me the crown prince was in love with me?” I say.

“I think so,” he says. “And obviously he was willing to give that up, so I should’ve just asked him in the first place. It all would’ve been so much simpler.”

I sit there with the Wizard, watching them all say their goodbyes to me again, something I’ve been doing more than is healthy already, only now when his hands linger on mine his face is cast in sharp relief and I remember him, and the way his words echo make me want to claw my way through the memories to him, and now I know why the magic took their names and faces from me. He cries when he bids me farewell as always, but the tears are more immediate this time. Not just my sacrifice, but all of theirs, and him, if he was in love –

“What did you ask him to give up?” I say. “What was so much worse than lost love?”

“I don’t know if I should say.” He huffs and shakes his head. “I shouldn’t. It’s private. Yours to share, or not, as you will.”

It’s true. I never would have shared mine but they wouldn’t remember, and I needed the chance to say the things left unsaid. I stole your book, I broke your promise, I lied to you. Tell me what you need me to hear before you let me go. I don’t think any of them said what he asked them to give up, or if they did it’s too tied up in who they were for me to recall the details.

“Fair enough,” I say, and rest my head on my hands, phantom breath on my neck.

“You wouldn’t like it, anyway,” he says.

“Something he would value more than love?” I say. “It would have to be of utmost importance to him, and we don’t decide what we hold dear so carefully that I would judge him for it. There are always prices too high, and convictions too precious.”

“I think you would,” the Wizard says.

I glare at him. “Clearly you would like to tell me whether you say you would or not, but no, something he held in higher esteem than true love, as you so clearly think he was caught up in, is obviously a bit too important to make that kind of statement about.”

“It was a hundred thousand gold,” the Wizard says.

“What?”

“It was a hundred thousand,” the Wizard tells me, “that was enough to buy the reagents wholesale. You know what I said about your magic working as you work the land, and that feeds its way into the things you gather? Labor creates the magic, and enough small magic is enough to do Big Magic with. I would’ve just gone to the market, and fair compensation, no one needs to sacrifice anything at all. He said no.”

I stare at the Wizard in horror. “That motherfucker –”

[girlobsessed21]

The 100 season 6 - theories and predictions.

No episode this week, I know, it sucks. So, I’ve decided to do jot down some thoughts and conspiracies I have. Feel free to argue with me. I love hearing I’m wrong and why.

Episode 6 is called Memento Mori, Latin for "remember that you will die", is the medieval Latin Christian theory and practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

Episode 7: Nevermind -  used to tell someone not to worry about something because it is not important.

Episode 8: The old man and the anomaly aka Gabriel and time travel.

Episode 9: What you take with you - when you die?

Episode 10: Matryoshka: also known as Russian nesting dolls, stacking dolls, or Russian dolls, are the set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another.

Episode 11: Ashes to ashes -  derives from the English Burial Service. The text of that service is adapted from the Biblical text, Genesis 3:19 (King James Version): In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Episode 12: Adjustment protocol

Episode 13: The blood of Sanctum

All of the above refers to mortality and death. The entire season will thus focus on both the continuance and destruction of the primes. 

Murphine in cahoots

Luckily Murphy loves Emori, because that hookup would have made me nauseous. I HOPE IT DOESN’T HAPPEN. Okay, he will do whatever it takes to avoid hell and get eternal life. Call me a big old Murphy marshmallow, but I refuse to believe he’ll put his family in harm's way. 

Josephine will have to promise their safety in order to gain his co-operation. The rest he doesn’t care about. Including Clarke. I know he saved her during the eclipse but he needed her help to rescue Bellamy. He seems pretty mad at her, I’m sure he doesn’t want her dead, but she’s not on his list of top priorities.

Josephine needs to learn how to create nightbloods and only Abby knows how to do that. And Abby will swim across the Atlantic to save Kane. Ding Dong, create another nightblood to save Kane, but who will that be? One of McCreary’s crew, a fellow Wonkru warrior or will Abby sacrifice herself? Not sure if a man can utilize a woman’s body.

She is so determined to save the love of her life, that she ignores the gravity of her own daughter writing with the wrong hand. Further, she has already expressed her opinion on how Kane deserves to live while they don’t. She bears a lot of guilt for the things she has done. But Abby wasn’t comfortable with their experiments in Becca’s lab. It will take a lot of persuasion; can she be convinced to take another life?

Maybe Murphy and Josephine will tell Bellamy that there’s a way to bring Clarke back to get him on board. They’ll have to temporarily kill her parents to continue with their scheme. Russel is firmly against Josephine’s breeding plans and creating new nightbloods means murdering red-blooded people. 

Head over heart Bellamy would not be okay with this, but I think he might lose his head over the loss of Clarke. More on this later. Jordan will do whatever it takes to save Delilah, so he might board this “saving” ship too. Raven will torture herself when she finds out about this and probably go above and beyond to help bring her back. Echo and Emori might be indifferent.

Josephine vs Clarke

A lot of you have argued against my Mount Weather theory last week. I’m still not convinced it’s not time travel via the anomaly but I’m not psychic. So, my other option is that Josephine will experience Clarke’s past as dreams. Bellamy explains, in trig, that it’s how his victims haunt him. Perhaps a little foreshadowing.

Russel was in a hurry and distraught to clear the host (kill Clarke) and bring his daughter back. In my 6x05 review, I did a bit of research on the meaning of Gabriel’s biology terms and came to the conclusion that Clarke is not dead, only in a deep vegetative state. Gabriel stressed the fact that they had to wait for the serum to reach the claustrum. Perhaps it didn’t take full effect.

Josephine did not sleep her first night back, but when she does it might be restless and filled with Clarke’s demons. Clarke Griffin is a fighter, trust her not to back down. Not to give up. She’s gonna taunt you until you wanna crash the Ferrari. We know both Jake and Maya comes back, so this is probably where we’ll see them. Unfortunately, in the process, she’ll have to relive it herself.

The crazy smoothie that cleanses the body of all evils

Ingredients:

1 x Red Queen

1 x Terrorist

1 x Rebel named Xavier

1 x Old man

1 x Temporal Anomaly

Mix all the ingredients together and you have the perfect solution for a prime pest problem. Octavia and Diyoza are desperate to find Gabriel and if it means time traveling through the temporal anomaly, then so be it.

Octavia’s hand aged when it came into contact with the temporal flare. So, I’m fairly certain they’re either going back or forward in time. IMDB shows Hope as a little girl in 6x08, which means Diyoza visits the future and Octavia might go back to the bunker to slaughter Bloodreina.

Once they make it through, they finally encounter the old man himself, who has all the answers with regards to the primes, Sanctum and ridding Clarke of the devil that possesses her.

I have a strong idea that this will be how the Blakes bury the hatchet. Octavia will help Bellamy and the others to revive Clarke. Meaning Bellamy will see the good that still exists inside her. Even when he couldn’t see it, I never gave up hope of Octavia returning. A lot of you did not agree with his decision to abandon her, but I think it’s the best thing he could have done for her.

Madi vs Sheidheda

I’m still not sure what’s going on here. I’ve seen some theories about using her bone marrow in an attempt to create other nightbloods. It could be, but they have a lot of nightbloods to put to use. And Abby won’t use Madi, that’s for sure.

Also, Madi has machinery strapped to her head in the trailer, which made me think that Josephine doesn’t know how to reverse engineer “memory chip” technology like Gabriel did and will need to explore the flame to create one for Murphy.

Or perhaps Josephine fails in convincing Abby, finds out that Madi has Becca’s memories in her head and tries to download them from the flame? 

Either way, Madi’s nightmares are enhanced during the experiments and she will obviously battle the dark commander for power. Without Clarke and Gaia’s guidance, she might lose, become him and in turn the villain of season 7. I just hope it doesn’t cause her death. Can you imagine Clarke returning to find Madi’s gone? She’s had to live through numerous deaths: Jake, Finn, Lexa, Marper, Jasper, please don’t do this to her.

The romance section

I don’t think we’ll see Delilah again. Jordan will do everything in his power to bring her back, just like Clarke, but I have a feeling she’s gone. For good. So, RIP Jolilah.

Emori is also on my deathdar for some reason. It’s no secret that I ship Murven, but I really don’t mind Memori. They’ve had their problems in season 5 and Murphy’s fear of dying might push them apart again.  Look, some people die each season and so far it seems like there’s no further story for Emori.

Raven and Murphy have always been better when they’re in the presence of the other, but I like them as friends as well. Murphy somehow calms Raven and she inspires him to do better. 

I know it’s harsh and I want Raven to be happy, but unless Raven and Ryker are endgame, I hope they don’t set them up romantically. The writers probably had a bit of a muddle with Shaw leaving for another show while wanting to give Raven a happy arc this season. Somehow, I do think all the primes will be killed (the blood of Sanctum) with the exception of Ryker since he seems a bit hesitant towards their living style. If that’s where it’s heading then I’m fine with it because they did have instant chemistry and a lot of it. More than she had with Shaw. Don't @ me. But please show it to us over time.

Please don’t hate me but I don’t think Niyalah and Octavia will become romantic either. As far as I know, Jessica Harmon is working on Izombie and I think her death is soon. Besides Octavia has to mend in herself before she can focus on relationships with other people. Including her brother.

I spy with my little eye a Becho breakup

I’ve feared that Bellamy and Echo might be a long term pairing many times before, and I’ve even sort of accepted it because I refused to let it ruin the show for me. Now, more than ever, I believe they’re on their way out. In the 6x06 promo, Echo is in the woods, searching for Octavia? She may even team up with them.

Echo does not understand Bellamy’s complexity in a way that Clarke does. On the ring, they lived in harmony, whereas now they have countless tribulations to overcome and they’re not the same people. 

Also, there’s been continuous scenes where she’s shown as inferior and submissive to both him and Clarke. They bark the orders and she follows, Emori even called her out on it in 6x02. A relationship can only last between two equals.

If that’s not enough, there’s no way in hell, no mountain too high, no river too deep for Bellamy Blake to bring Clarke back. He’ll fight who has to be fought, kill who has to be killed, leave no stone unturned. One of those obstacles might even be Echo trying to convince him she’s gone. Bellamy will refuse to lose her again. When Echo sees this, she’ll realize what Clarke means to him and either confront him or cut him loose.

There is no more beautiful romance than Bellarke

Think of all the most romantic books you’ve read or movies you’ve watched. What was the trope? I bet you’ll find it in Bellarke.

Titanic - “You jump, I jump right?” - “If I’m on that list, you’re on that list.”

Beauty and the beast - Enemies to friends to lovers

Tangled - Deep, longing looks during firelight 

Love in the time of cholera - A love triangle due to logicality and comfort vs love

Romeo and Juliet - A girl from a wealthy family falls for a boy from poverty. Both willing to die for the other.

The Notebook - “I wrote you one letter every day for a year.” - “When you were on the ring, she called you every day for six years.”

The Time Traveler’s wife - Two lovers constantly separated by time and space but love always prevails.

I can sit here all night. The fact of the matter is that they love each other. Of course Bellamy notices that Clarke is not herself first. Even after six years apart, he is attuned to her and knows her on such a deep and intense level that he can’t be fooled. 

When she leaves to head to the school, he follows. He allows himself to be vulnerable with her when she apologizes. Clarke’s biggest regret is leaving him to die. She trusts him to bring her child home safely. He trusts her to bargain for their safety. Bellamy stares while she dances with someone else and asks about it later. Then his reaction to her overshare of the details is a mixture of confusion and jealousy. 

But the best part of all is the horror and heartbreak when he finds out he’s lost her. Again. That part of his heart, only reserved for Clarke, will now come to the surface and there will be no more denial.

To wrap up, I can only speculate based on what I’ve seen and heard. So, I can’t include all the characters that have been MIA. Indra most of all. I miss her. Please let me know if you think I’m crazy. I’d love to hear it.

[themadlostgirl]

Not Dead Yet (Part 84)

*This is a little number I like to call: condensing events for the purpose of pushing this story forward so we can finally get to the motherflipping end chapter! For real tho next chapter is last one. Let’s do this!*

Pairing: Reader x Peter Pan

Warnings: language

We burned Devin’s body. I didn’t have the emotional energy to bury anyone else. Neither did the boys. Placing his body in the bonfire was easier and I feel like it was what he would prefer.

Days went by. After losing Peter and killing Devin I stayed away from camp. I didn’t want to be around anyone. I needed to process this entire shit week. I stayed in the cavern underneath Peter’s Thinking Tree mainly. One day I got curious and went to Skull Rock. The giant golden hourglass was still there. It didn’t glow with magic anymore and the never-ending flow of sand was piled in the bottom.

This was Peter’s life. It wasn’t right. He was so much more than a pile of dirt in a glorified time keeper. I focused on all my anger and all my sadness and punched it straight through that stupid hourglass. It burst into shards. Maybe one day I’ll be able to erase this entire rock from the island.

I kept my mourning down to a week. I can’t spend my entire life mourning, though I feel like a part of me always will. Who knows. Maybe one day I’ll finally bite the big one and I’ll find Peter in the Underworld. We’ll take over and become the king and queen of hell.

As the boys went about getting used to the island without Peter around I was trying to get the handle of my new powers. It seemed every little thing I did somehow affected the island in some way. I did a lot of tests making clouds roll in and out and changing the temperature. It was easy to do physical things like make the wind blow but the one time I tried to conjure my dagger into my hand from my sheath I only managed to stab it through my hand. Trying to heal it after that didn’t go well either.

How does Peter do that?

Or did…

Stop thinking about it. I’m only going to make myself sadder. Let’s try to get rid of Skull Rock again.

~~~

It was hard to keep time in the Underworld. You would have thought Peter was used to not telling the days apart after spending centuries on Neverland. There though it didn’t matter cause he was spending everyday having fun. Here though...there was nothing to do but bum around the town.

Peter spent most days walking through the forest. Being surrounded by trees and not being able to see the bloody red sky made it easier to pretend he was home. Devin’s sudden appearance not too long ago only made it more so.

He had been worried when he saw one of his former Lost Boys show up in the Underworld not twenty four hours after Peter’s death. He thought that the transfer with Y/N hadn’t held and that Neverland had plunged into the ocean and killed everyone. It was a relief when Devin told him that Y/N had killed him.

That sounded bad.

He was a martyr for a good cause. To kill everyone in Storybrooke. What better cause was there?

Not that it actually worked because there was no one from that town in the Underworld now. His Lost Girl gave it a good effort though.

He knew it was selfish to think but part of Peter hoped that she would come down here. He waited twenty eight years to get her back now he was incapable of waiting any longer. He wanted to see her again. To hold her in his arms, kiss her...talk to her.

Peter pulled out the drawing of Y/N again.

“Pretty girl,” the voice behind Peter made him jump. It took a talented person to sneak up on him and even more so to startle him.

The man behind Peter was tall with fiery red hair and a boring face. “She yours?”

“What’s it to you?” Peter folded the drawing again but the man snatched it out of his hands before he could tuck it away. “Give that back!”

“Oh, I know this one. Her name is Y/N, isn’t it?” He inspected the picture closer, “The many times I felt her soul start to enter this domain but never did. Multiple near death experiences make people like you and her such teases. I was starting to worry that I’d never see you down here.”

Peter tore the picture out of the man’s hands and made sure it wasn’t damaged. “Who the hell are you? How do you know about Y/N?”

“Well as the god of death I know a lot about who sends me more souls and even more about those that vigorously avoid my realm.”

“You’re the god of the Underworld?” Peter scanned him from head to toe. “Have something against looking god-like?”

“We appear as we are most comfortable. Some of us prefer to be distinguished by age and a fine pressed suit. Others seem to be content as a whiny teenager in dirt smelling rags.”

“Was there a point to this or did you just want to insult me?” Peter snapped.

“I’m here to offer you a deal, Peter Pan. You are probably one of the longest living beings in the realms. Even more so than the Dark One. I know you have considerable skills and I would like to put them to use. Best to keep the mind sharp while waiting for lost love.”

“Put them to use, how?”

“A little this, a little that. General causing mayhem and other odds and ends. Interested?”

“What’s in it for me?”

“I can give you comfort here.” The god wrapped an arm around his shoulders but there was nothing kind about it, “A nice little place to call your own and my seal of protection. You’ve brought a lot of angry souls here while you were alive. It’s only a matter of time till they find out you’re here.”

“I can take care of myself.” Peter shoved him off.

“Okay, okay, I see where you’re coming from. You can but also consider this, up until the very moment of your death you were supposed to be wallowing in eternal agony as a bunch of particles in the River of Souls. That little lovey dovey kiss from your girl gave you an out but it can’t stop me from dumping your carcass in the river now. Thoughts?”

“Threatening me...I’d say I’d kill you but I guess that’d be a moot point.” Peter scoffed. “Fine. What do you want me to do?”

“Come to my office, we’ll talk more there. I already know exactly where I’m gonna set you up too. There is the nicest pawn shop on main street that would be perfect for you.” The god continued to talk his ear off as they walked down the street.

At least it was something to do.

~~~

It took over a year but I had finally truly mastered my new powers. I could bend everything on the island to my will, blink in and out throughout the island, heal myself, conjure fireballs and other cool stuff. I was still working on wiping out Skull Rock. It had been such a permanent fixture in the realm it was proving stubborn to get rid of. Reminds me of someone…

Living without Peter was still hard. I kept waking up expecting him to be right by my side. He never was though. Was this what he went through when I was missing? Day after day of misery and emptiness?

Neverland is my home but without any Peter it wasn’t the same. It was like the heart of the island was missing. Waiting for it’s real leader to come back and breathe life into it again.

Things had been going well despite how empty I felt. The boys were great fun, Felix was a good second in command, and Candace was still a wonderful pet. I didn’t hang out with Tigerlily as much anymore but sometimes I’d come across her while taking a walk and we’d catch up. She was the only person I felt like I could talk to about Peter. Everyone else didn’t want to focus on sad things long enough to have any real conversations about him.

I only visited Wendy once. She looked older and seemed a lot happier. Her brothers didn’t like the sight of me but considering how well I got along with their sister I got a pass. I hope Wendy is doing okay. I don’t think I’ll be able to muster the courage to visit her again. I don’t want to see her grow old and die. I want to remember her as the nervous yet energetic girl I rescued from the waves all those years ago.

I brought the pipes to my lips and blew a soft note. An old song from a time I can’t even remember anymore drifting up from the depths of my subconscious and floating out through the air. I think Peter and I danced to it once…

~~~

Peter had to admit. Being in Hades’ employ had its perks.

He got pretty much anything he wanted in reason. The one time he asked the god for anything major Peter had to make a deal. He’d trade in his usual Neverland jungle attire for a fitted suit like Hades wore. It was awkward at first but Peter had to admit it looked rather nice.

It made him think back to a time when he dressed up to sneak into a wedding reception with Y/N. They drank and danced and kissed and it felt like the world couldn’t touch them. He wished he could go back to that night. He’d never let the dance end if he could.

As used to the new additions to the Underworld Peter was it turned out he could still find some surprises. Like Hades telling Peter that one Captain Killian Jones had up and died. Peter got hopeful thinking Y/N had finally done the pirate in. No such luck.

His arrival was fortunate because the desperate residents of Storybrooke banded together to bring him back to the world of the living. Too bad it was impossible. Trust him, Peter tried. He tried again and again to find a way back to the living. They never worked out.

Then before Peter could wreak his havoc on him and the foolish heroes that ventured to the Underworld they were just as quickly gone without a trace and took Hook with them. How was it that someone so undeserving could cheat death?

Oh boohoo! The Saviour’s pirate that she’s only known for maybe four years died? Peter had been with Y/N for decades. Decades! If anyone deserved to be reunited with who they loved it sure as hell wasn’t that crusty pirate.

If Hook could get out though then maybe there was still hope Peter could too. He’d mention it to Hades when he was in a better mood.

~~~

Hook can say that he had sincerely wished to never have to return to Neverland. Not that it was his choice this time around. An increasingly absurd number of circumstances and wrong turns and here he was with no way out. What was even worse? He was tied to a pole about to be burned at the stake.

“Stop!” a voice hushed the hooting Lost Boys. “I leave for one day and you all turn into brainless baboons? What’s going on here?”

Hook’s heart dropped into his stomach as a figure parted the boys. She stared at him with a wicked knowing smirk. “Oh my. Well isn’t this a treat? An old seadog washed ashore.” the boys lowered their weapons as their leader stepped toward the pirate, “Hello Hook.”

“Hello Y/N.” he muttered.

“We have got to stop meeting like this. You tied up, me wanting to kill you, such unfortunate circumstances.”

“I agree. So how’s about you cut me loose, love, for old times sake.”

She let out a small chuckle, “There’s that strange sense of humor of yours. You’re not going anywhere just yet.” The playful smile dropped from her face as she turned back to the Lost Boys. “I want whomever was leading this idiot circus in front of me right now.” she barked at the boys.

No one came forward immediately. “I said,” the sky crackled with lightning, “Now!”

The boy that tied him up stumbled forward and dropped to one knee in front of Y/N. “Get up Verne, you embarrass yourself.” The boy quickly stood back up. “You started this?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s one of the people that killed Pan! Surely you must want--”

Slap! “What I want is to be respected. Yet, with my absence you plan a burning without my permission nor my inclusion. For this act of idiocy you can spend a couple nights in the cages.”

“But Y/N I was only doing what I thought you would--”

“And for arguing with me it is now a week. Now go to your cage or it shall be a month. Understood?” The boy dropped his gaze and shuffled into the jungle.

“What about Tigerlily?” one of the boys shouted. “She was helping the pirate!”

“Tigerlily,” Y/N sighed, “Is this true?”

“I needed to. To help the Saviour! Otherwise I would never have betrayed you, you know that.”

“I know but it hurts to think that one of my closest friends would do this to me.” Y/N started cutting away the ropes binding the former fairy.

“She needs help to win the final battle! The realms are in danger!”

“The saviour is the reason Peter is dead. Why would I ever want to help her?”

“Y/N, please, don’t harm the lass.” Hook said.

“I would never hurt her. I brought her here to protect her.” Y/N turned back toward Hook, “But you hold no such affection. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t burn you alive right now.”

“Because you’re incomplete.” he whispered so the words only reached her ears, “You may be the new ruthless leader of these boys and this island but it isn’t enough. No amount of treasure, adventure, followers, magic, or rum can fill that empty void. The one he left.”

She curled her lip up at him. With one swift motion she pulled the dagger off her belt and lashed at him. Hook closed his eyes expecting pain but was surprised to feel the ropes tying him loosen. He looked down as the ropes dropped to the ground.

Y/N sheathed her dagger once more. “Let’s take a walk captain. No tricks. No escape attempts. Just a walk between the two of us.”

“As the lady wishes.” Hook stepped down from his perch and followed Y/N into the jungle. The Lost Boys watched them disappear in confusion. Surely they must think that their leader was taking the pirate to be killed somewhere else. The idea wouldn’t surprise him one bit.

They trudged through the jungle in silence. What was she waiting for?

They stopped in front of a massive tree. Pan’s old Thinking Tree if he was correct. Y/N knelt to the ground in front of it. At first he didn’t realize what she was doing until he saw the stone marking the head of a grave.

“I try to forget.” Y/N murmured to the grave, “I leave, I play the pipes, I look for amnesia in the bottom of a bottle but no matter what I find myself right back here everyday. I come back here and think of how I could have changed things. How I could have saved him but failed. All those times he saved me and it was finally my turn and I couldn’t do it.”

“If you want me to feel sorry for what happened I won’t.”

“I don’t expect anything. You’re a hero now. It’s what you people do.”

“Why’d you bring me here?”

“You hear many stories when you travel as much as I. I heard you came back from the dead.” Oh no. He could tell where this was going and it was nowhere good, “That your hero buddies traveled to the Underworld to bring you back.”

“They did. But if you think that you can bring him back then you should know it’s not possible.”

“I know. I’m not naive enough to think I can just travel to the Underworld and pull someone back into life. That’s not the point I was getting to.” she took in a deep breath, “I wanted to know, was he there?”

“Aye, he was.” Hook answered. He never saw the demon boy himself but he knew he was there.

“Did he say anything?”

Hook was torn between telling her that he never said a word to the demon or giving her the closure she so obviously craved. In the end the latter won out. Hook knelt next to her. “In between his attempts to make it back to the land of the living he did tell me something. That if ever I found myself sailing these waters again for any reason to tell you that he wished you happiness in your life.”

“Thank you,” she muttered, “It’s a blatant lie but thank you.”

“Alright, I never actually spoke to him. I just thought it was something you may have wanted to hear.”

“Trying to butter me up?”

“Of course. How else would I make it off this island alive?”

“I don’t want you here. I don’t want you dead. I just want you gone.” she whistled to the sky and a dark shadow swooped down. “She’ll take you home. Stay there and never show your face here again or I will kill you myself. Is that understood?”

“Transparently.”

“Good. Now get the hell off my island.”

Hook didn’t feel like testing his luck by questioning why she was letting him leave and took the shadow’s outstretched hand. Soon he was far above the trees and the spot where Y/N sat in front of a grave was a pinprick in his vision. Despite all the hell she had put him through he couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for the lonely Lost Girl.

(First) (Previous) (Next)

[inudaughter]

My Daughter Part One

Ok so here's part one again but thanks to the wonderful help of @thetravelerwrites, who edited my writing. It now reads better than before. So thank you very much @thetravelerwrites for helping me. 😁

My Daughter

"I love you, my daughter," My father said to me as he placed his forehead on mine.

"I love you too, Father," I said, broken-hearted, as tears ran down my face.

Father was an old orc warrior, covered in scars, with one broken tusk and a blind eye. His hair was gray, long and braided in many different ways with many beads woven throughout it. His height was eight feet and two inches, and his body was well-built for battle.

Father had five children: three boys and two girls. I was the fifth child, though I was fully human. When I was twelve, he saved me from a prison where I had been locked away since age six. We had been running from them for nine years.

While traveling, he had taught me the ways of orcs; to hunt, fight, ride, and survive on the go. He raised me as his own, even though he didn't have to. He showed me love and kindness when I had no idea what either of those things were.

They had found us. Father could hear them in the far distance heading straight for us. I felt him grab my hands and rub my wrists, where the chains of my imprisonment had left large scars.

"I promised you and myself that I would protect you, and that I would never let them harm you again," he said, picking me up and placing me on his large black horse, Ryu. We had just finished packing up camp when father sensed them coming. All of our supplies were packed on to the horse in a frenzied rush. "Ryu will make sure you're safely away from here before stopping."

He then tugged my cloak tighter around me and pulled the necklace he gave me out from under it. It was an old orc coin with a picture of an ax and sword crossed over one another. It was used once as currency, though not anymore. Instead, they were now given to non-orcs as proof to other hordes that the wearer was a friend.

"Remember to show this to the next orc horde you meet. They will provide you with protection until you find your siblings. Then--"

"But how will I know it's them?” I asked, cutting him off before he could finish. “I've never met them."

I couldn’t stop the tears from falling, despite my best efforts. I felt his hand grab one of mine and I watched as he took off his father's necklace and put it in my hand. My tears fell harder, because I knew what this meant. This fight would be his last battle, and I was to deliver this to my eldest brother, Brugo.

         "Present this to the horde’s elders and chieftain. They will know who your siblings are," He said as he put our foreheads together one last time. I sobbed harder as he spoke the parting words. I heard howling in the distance; they weren’t far away now.

"Remember, my child: you are the daughter of Derthag, the hero of the last great orc battle. You are a great orc warrior, like those before you. Now, I present to you my sword." He took his sword off his side and put the strap of it over my head so it sat on my back. "Go, my child, I will be with you always." He then put Ryu's reins in my hands.

"Hold on tight!" He smacked Ryu's back side, and Ryu neighed and took off, startling me momentarily.

    I looked back to see my father staring back at me holding his large ax over his shoulder and yelled, "Ride, my daughter! Ride as fast and as far as you can!"

As I quickly rode away on his horse, I cried. The man who is my world is now giving his life so I could live. I heard his last war cry in the distance, which made Ryu ran faster. I cried for hours afterward with that ringing in my ears.

True to father's word, Ryu didn't stop till almost nightfall. By then I was cried out and we both were in need of water. Thankfully, we found a river right next to where I was going to make camp.

I took the hastily packed supplies off Ryu and set them on the ground, then started disrobing myself. I needed a bath and Ryu needed a scrub down, so I pulled him into the river with me. Usually he would fight me, but today he even wanted it. We got about knee deep into the river and knelt. The cold water felt good on my bruised legs and Ryu lowered his head to drink. I know this would be my only chance to bathe him for a while, so I washed him as best as I could before he got out of the water to eat the grass on the shoreline.

I then bathed myself, being mindful of my bruised thighs. While I was washing, I examined all my old scars. I don’t remember how I got most of them, and father never wanted to talk about the ones he knows. He would tell me why he couldn’t tell me. It would always be something about nightmares and not being ready to face the past.

So I examined my scars, starting with my wrists, looking at the way the wounds indented all the way around. Next, was my arms and abdomen. These scars were raised. My side had a large one, starting under my left breast and ending at my right hip. The five scars on my left arm are short and small, while the two wounds on my right arm were longer. I also know there were scars on my back but I don't know what they look like or how many there are. There were light scars that covered the tops of my thighs. However, my ankles looked like the same scars on my wrists, like shackles.

I sighed, then ducked my head under the water to wash my long black hair as best as I could without taking my braids and beads out.

I had finished bathing when I noticed the sun was starting to set. I quickly got dressed in my undergarments, pulling on one of Father’s shirts. I tried to start a fire but every attempt failed. So I laid out my fur pelt and settled for a night under the stars.

I felt my eyes begin to water up as I laid there staring at the sky. That night would be the first of many without my father by my side, and the thought made me heartbreak. My mind was swimming with emotions and I couldn't process them fast enough. The fear, heartache, and pain made me sob harder.  

I jumped a little when Ryu laid down beside. He must have since my distress. I sat up and curled my myself around his middle. He placed his head next to mine and started making a noise that sounded like a whimper. I let my tears flow freely as I put my forehead to his.

“I know Ryu; I miss him too.”

[rayraywrites]

Chapter 4

Pairing: Kuramochi Youichi x Sawamura Eijun

(minor: Furuya Satoru x Kominato Haruichi; Miyuki Kazuya x Kawakami Norifumi)

more ships to be added

Characters: Sawamura Eijun, Kuramochi Youichi, Furuya Satoru, Kominato Haruichi, Miyuki Kazuya, Kawakami Norifumi, Takigawa Chris Yuu (more characters to be added)

Rating: Teen and Up Audiences

Total Word Count: 4341

AO3

Summary:

In this universe, you don’t meet your perfect match by happenstance. You’ve grown up with them, maybe not physically, but they’ve always been there. In your mind. Speaking to you.

In this universe, humans are not the most powerful, and there’s pockets of our world that lead to the other. To the fae. And there’s so much more to them, than can ever be understood.

Eijun and Youichi. They stand upon the divide.

“It was as if I had emerged from a dream. The newly familiar trees suddenly gave away to the foliage I remembered from my youth. According to the villagers, I had disappeared for a few years, though they had long since given up on ever finding me. Even to this day, I’m not sure how I got to this other world, and that is the only word for it - a world, much unlike our own. Where strangely powerful beings with magic poured out of them like the way water flows down a river. But even more than the wondrous new experiences – I got to meet the one who completed me, the one who had remained suspiciously silent my whole life. His hair, a blushing pink, and sharp smile have begun to haunt my dreams.”

This diary entry was discovered amongst Isashiki Jun’s belongings following his return back to the human world (as he put it). He had vanished for a few years following a walk through his local forest. I have an instinct that he was able to cross realms because the forest was running along a ley line.

Based on this entry, I, and my esteemed colleagues, have postulated that his soulmate could have in fact been one of the elusive fae – but I cannot confirm this notion as he soon disappeared again. I have long assumed it is back to his matched.

Somewhere within me, I find pity welling up, as a match of that kind is doomed to fail from the beginning, by its very nature. The immortal fae and his very mortal human.

An excerpt from the “Book of Fae and Humans” written by Masuko T. (225 AD)

––––––

With a lively giggle, he clapped his hands together. Smiles were all that showed up on his face, for even when there was something that could make him unhappy, a small hum would appear in his head, or maybe sometimes an actual song could be heard bouncing around his head. It was always the same soothing voice, that wished him a “restful sleep” each night, or a “blessed day” each morning.

Not that he understood any of the words, nor their importance, as to him it was simply babble. But even when so young, he could sense the affection in the voice, and he responded in the only way he could.

Giggling and enjoying life to the fullest.

To his left, he could see his mother sitting on the big blue chair that she was always on when he went outside to play. He saw a dress in her hands, and smiled a wide, toothy grin at the pretty. sparkly material. He used to grab for it, even when she had refused, but the voice in his head would distract him when he threw tantrums.

So instead he laughed and clapped along to the music in his head, giggling at the lilting tones that rose and fell as they sang of a brave Fae warrior fighting her way through a horde of vicious hobgoblins. The song described the warrior’s near failure as a tremendous number of enemies encircled her, with bloody and disgusting weapons pointed down threateningly at her kneeling form. The little boy flinched, and cowered into himself. But then the voice soared, high in register, as it described the sudden surge of power that built up in the fae’s body, the support of her people filling her with the strength she needed to leap up. The voice sweetened slowly, describing the victory so earnestly, it almost brought tears to the listening boy’s eyes.

The boy was unable to understand the smooth flowing voice that sang in an otherworldly tone, and nor was he old enough to understand the meaning of the song. But yet, he felt the emotions welling up inside him, till he could no longer hold them back and instead large fat tears rolled down his cheeks. To his mother’s surprise however, there was no accompanying scream of pain or annoyance as was the usual occurrence, but instead only sniffles and fists struggling to wipe the tears and snot away from his face.

As the song reached its climactic finish, the warrior having defeated the hordes and returning to her people, where she was greeted by his loving and caring matched, who hurriedly began to heal all of the warrior’s wounds. The song ended with a joyous tone, pleasant and calming while also vivacious and lively, which managed to stem the flow of tears pouring down his cheeks. The ordeal left the little boy exhausted, for the changing emotions weren’t something his young body was accustomed to.

Slumping down slightly, he tilted his head back, to look up at the sky. A bright blue expanse greeted him, dotted with big, fluffy, white clouds. With a loud call for his kaa-chan, he began reaching up for the clouds, the tiredness from before quickly leaving him. Unconsciously, he shared images of the blue skies and clouds with his matched, unable to control his thoughts.

But these new images were soothing for the anxious fae, who had also received all the emotions and tiredness caused by the song. The clouds and sky indicated that things were fine, or at least, would be fine.

As the boy got distracted by the things around him once more, he clapped his hands again, trying to start another song, but unsure how he would go about it. Babbling came out of his mouth, his eyes crossing as he struggled to say the word that would get his wish across. Both in his mind and with his mouth, he tried to convey his desires, slowly but surely managing to shape his mouth around the word that he’d heard his mother say before.

唄 “Uta.” Song.

Giggling at the shocked gasp that reverberated in his head, mimicking the one that forced its way out of his kaa-chan’s lips, he called out again for a song.

For the boy’s matched, it was the first time the fae had heard the boy speak. And that the first purposeful word he ever said being for him, made the fae tear up just a bit. So he sang again, this time a soothing song of his own composition. It described the rolling hills of the Spring fields, melding with the Dark forest along their border till a fae could never tell where the Spring Court’s realms began, and the Autumnal Court’s lands ended.

And so the days passed, the little boy’s head filled with songs and stories, the fae spending his time crafting songs and absorbing everything he could from his young match.

––––––

He scrambled to sit down in front of his kaa-chan’s chair, the tone of her voice leaving no option but simple acquiescence. She had a soft smile on her face, and he never wanted to turn it upside down. He had heard from kids in the village that they never listened to their mothers, instead choosing to keep playing and ignore the demands of their kaa-chan. But he had seen their smiles turn upside down, frown his mother had said when he brought up the topic. So he promised himself to never let her frown, and instead did everything he could to make her happy.

So when she called, he came.

Settling himself comfortably at the foot of her chair, he tangled his fingers into the fabric of her dress, already impatient to go play games again. She seemed to sense his restlessness, as she quickly ran her fingers through his short hair, tugging lightly at the strands to bring his head up to face her.

“Youichi, you’re a big boy now, even if Kaa-chan wants you to stay her little boy forever.” He grinned toothily up at her, giggling when she tugged on an errant tuft of hair at his cheeky smile. He had seen his sixth winter just recently, something he brought up quite often, especially amongst the other boys in his village, all of whom were older than him and often teased him about his age.

She continued speaking in the soft, dulcet tones he’d come to realize meant that his kaa-chan was nervous. She didn’t want to discuss this topic, but had no choice. So he tried to control his wandering mind even more, and gave her his full attention. With a careful breath, both to stabilize her voice and for a final moment of stalling, she began telling him about the matched and soulmates. Immediately, he realized who she was talking about.

His Ei-chan!

They spoke in his head, and whenever Youichi was able to talk to Ei, he always felt really calm and happy. He didn’t tell his kaa-chan, but sometimes Ei even helped him with his reading, sounding out the words he was struggling with, and explaining the sentences till he understood them perfectly. His eyes sparkled as he reached out to his Ei-chan, excited to share the news in case his soulmate hadn’t known!

“Ei-chan! Ei-chan! Guess what? Kaa-chan told me that we’re matched! That means we’ll be together forever right?”

At first the only reply he received was a choked gasp, but then he heard the familiar soothing voice spill into his head. However, unlike the normal tinge of excitement that usually decorated Ei’s voice, some confusion and a bit of hesitance coated his words.

“I’m glad you know now Mochi! Forever is a long time kid, but if you’ll have me,” Ei’s voice broke a little, as if he was struggling even to think those thoughts, “I’ll be there for you, forever Mochi.”

Over the rest of his conversation with his kaa-chan, she told him everything she knew about the matched, about the inability to introduce yourself truly to your matched, about how all matched always meet up, even if it’s for a very short period. Youichi kept repeating all the information he understood to his Ei-chan, wanting to tell all the good news to his best friend.

But something made him confused, if everyone always met their matched, what about his kaa-chan’s matched? She rarely spoke about tou-san; only brought him up once a year in the middle of Winter. She would pull out a small frame from the back of the shrine, and move it to a place of honour at the head of her bed. Youichi had sneaked into her room once, to see that it was a painting of a man that looked a lot like him. Was that his tou-san?

Hesitantly, he placed a hand on his mother’s knee, pausing her in her speech, and asked his query with all the tactfulness he had gained in his six-years of living. “Kaa-chan, where is your matched? Where is tou-chan?” Unlike all other times he’d asked about his father, she didn’t seem as surprised by the question, though her face took on an expression of melancholy. She gently stood from her chair and moved to sit down on the porch alongside him. With a soft pull at his arms, he tumbled into her lap and cuddled into her chest.

“Your father, your tou-san, was one of the most loving and caring men I’d ever known Youichi.” Her voice shook slightly, as if trying to suppress the tears that were welling up inside her. “You’re right, he was my matched, and I’d known he was my soulmate from when I was very little.” Youichi saw the soft smile on her lips, a smile that only came out when she was exceptionally proud of Youichi.

He started slightly when he felt her hand raise to his shoulder, but settled again when she simply began running it down his back. “He was only a few years older than me, but he would defend me against all the boys in the village when they would go pick on me. You’re a lot like him Youichi,” she poked his nose lightly with the tip of her finger, pulling a small giggle out of his mouth. “We grew up together, one of the lucky pairs to be born near each other. Guess that should have been a sign?”

He was shocked to see tears building up in the corners of her eyes, and immediately reached up with his right hand to try and wipe them away. In his haste, he nearly smacked her in the face, but his concerned panic was enough to pull a watery chuckle from her, “it’s okay Youichi, Kaa-chan will be fine.” She took a steadying breath before continuing to speak, “anyway, a few years before we had you,, your father began began struggling with walking, and was often very weak. We were all concerned about him, but unfortunat–” she could no longer hold back her tears, so he watched in growing horror as they rolled down her cheeks. Clearing her throat, she managed to finish her sentence, “unfortunately, whatever problem he was facing it spread to his eyes as a ghostly film where he couldn’t see.” She smiled sadly, brushing away the errant tears with her fingers as she whispered the last bit, “he eventually succumbed to the pain just about a year after you were born.”

He felt a pressure building in his chest, something that had never happened before, which made him panic. The pressure continued to grow till it erupted out of him as a loud wail, and tears streaming down his cheeks. His kaa-chan looked so sad, and he wanted to remember his tou-chan. His chest was heaving as he struggled to get all these sudden emotions under control.

His mother chuckled weakly, recognizing the penchant for explosive crying as something her son had definitely inherited from her husband. Shushing her son gently, she slowly began to bracket the truth with a much happier ending. “But he loved you very much Youichi, in fact the first time he held you in his arms, he turned towards me and said that even if he loved me with his very being,” she paused to bend down and place a soft kiss on his brow, “he would fight for you with everything he had.

With that, she let the, now much calmer, boy go off to play with his friends, trusting that he had taken what was important from their conversation. As he glanced back towards his mother one more time, he saw that she had stood up on their porch, her hands clutching onto her sunhat tightly, but her eyes were focussed upwards on the skies. He turned back towards his friends, laughing loudly as they chased each other. He sent off short messages of affection to his matched, descriptions of the flowers and bugs they would find while playing.

For a child’s mind, those heavy emotions and feelings were short-lived, as they were slowly written over with events occurring in front of him. He didn’t remain concerned about his mother for very long.

But while he played, he would never know that she was praying for her husband to watch over their precious son, praying that the boy would never find out the true pain his father had to suffer in the last ten years of life. How there had been days where he hadn’t been able to sit up from the pain, but hadn't been able to simply rest his aching body. Or times when he couldn’t eat because swallowing hurt too much. She hoped Youichi never realized that she had felt all the pain her husband had, as with that level of inner torture, he hadn’t been able to block their connection enough – she had gone through it all.

But what she prayed for the most? Was that her son would never experience that pain.

––––––

Taking a deep breath, he let his shoulders relax slightly, keeping them pulled back. As he took another breath, he could feel the quiver of the feathers on his arrow brushing lightly against his cheek. For a moment it felt as if his entire sight was limited to simply the target sitting a good distance from him. He forced himself to ignore the distractions around him, how the branches of the trees swayed from the power of the wind, how many arrows that had missed his targets only to land harmlessly onto the grass. His vision narrowed swiftly, till all that was left was the red marking at the center of the cloth. He forced his senses to a point of awareness limited only to the weapon in his hand, and the target crying out for him. The hand holding his bow was steady, like a rock in its firmness, while he could feel the itch of the fingers pulling back the arrow, ready to let another loose.

Finally his fingers eased off on their pull, and he could feel as the tips of the feathers brushed their final touch against his cheek before soaring far from him. He felt the bend and sway of the arrow as it glanced against the bow, eventually leading to its direct trajectory. His eyes remained locked on the target, but he knew this one, this one would make it directly into the center. It gracefully made its way to the target, sinking forcefully up till the fledgling feathers were all that peeked out from the target.

He had closed his eyes just before the arrow made its mark, so the thumping noise of arrow piercing its way through the target was all he heard, and it was all the sign he needed.

Success!

Opening his eyes, he smiled brightly, staring at the target with a feeling of contentedness running through him. He had only managed to make his mark every fifth or so shot, so getting this one had felt so good, he almost shouted out in joy. In fact, he saw no reason to not shout!

“Kyahaha!! I did it!” He threw his hands up in excitement. Laughter bubbled up inside him, the relief at finally making such a good mark, but also amazement of the fact left him in an unstable position, where laughter was the only response he could produce. Still riding the high of his success, he excitedly reached out to his matched, knowing that Ei had been instrumental in his ability to make it.

Ei was never one to do any hunting himself, which was something Youichi didn’t fully understand as Ei had said that he lived in a village much like his own. But even so, he always gave Youichi all the support and advice he could. So he was extremely excited to be able to share this moment with his match.

“Hey Ei! Guess what?I” In the meantime, he began gathering up the arrows that had missed their targets, internally wincing at how many had simply soared beside them. He also made sure to pick up the game he had caught in the traps he’d set earlier in the day. For all his inexperience with hunting animals, Ei was inordinately good at figuring out the best way to trap small animals.

“What is it Mochi? Did you finally figure out how to walk without tripping?” He scowled and sputtered at the teasing Ei sent at him, even if his sudden growth spurt had in fact made it difficult for him sometimes. But he just wasn’t used to it! Not something Ei should have been teasing him over!

“Shut up baka! I meant I made my mark! The arrow sunk directly into the middle of the target!” He waited for the joy and elation that he knew Ei would be feeling, and he was absolutely correct when he heard the response.

“Really? That’s fantastic Mochi, I’m very proud of you – you’ve grown so much in such a short time.” He couldn’t help but blush at the praise Ei was heaping onto him, but simply laughed and continued to excitedly babble to Ei, receiving all the pleasing hums and “ahhs” he wanted.

That was something he had always appreciated. The fact that even when Ei didn’t seem to grasp all the nuances, he was always willing to listen. At first he had thought the maturity Ei showed was because he was older than him, but there was a voice inside him that said there was something else here at play. He could have excused the maturity, and the more formal manner of speech, but the almost ethereal singing and the complete lack of awareness of normal everyday things made any excuses futile.

There was only so many times he could explain the concept of a school to Ei before he felt something was off. Regardless of age, he would still know what a school was right? Or why they hunted for food. Or what a birthday was – Youichi had turned thirteen just the previous month, and like always Ei had been completely lost. But Ei was also exceptionally intelligent in certain areas, holding a mastery in artistic ventures as well as explaining strategy to him. Youichi rarely lost schoolyard battles after Ei started coaching his thinking.

One day, he hoped he would get to meet his matched, and be able to get the answers to the questions he’d been asking since he was a little boy. And maybe then, instead of Ei singing him to sleep, as he did each night, Youichi would be able to whisper his good night! and sing for Ei in his warbly voice.

“A really good job Mochi, I know how much you were struggling with your bow and arrow, but you did it. Just keep practicing each day. You got this!” Youichi blushed brightly again, laughing louder than before to mask his giddiness.

Kyahaha!

––––––

He remained light on his feet, running with a speed he had quickly become famous for in his village, but with the grace and agility he had trained into his body. Soundless he remained as he leapt over logs, avoiding brambles and branches with an ease that spoke of limitless comfort in these woods. His eyes barely glanced around his surroundings, instead locked onto the small tail of the deer he was following.

He had patiently waited for this deer to isolate itself from the herd, watching as it searched for better food, for access to clean water. He had seen that it was a strong deer and knew it would be a worthwhile catch for his village. Even though he tended to follow only those that were old or frail, listening to Ei would rub off on anyone, this time he couldn’t avoid the prize that walked willingly into his arms.

However, he still had to chase after the deer, so he followed along, trying to cut off the deer where he could but easily getting left behind by the much faster animal. For a second he debated giving up, returning to his hiding post to seek out one of the weaker deer, but then it paused almost briefly and glanced back at him. As if to mock his inability to keep up. So he glared, and forced himself to pick up the pace, managing to catch up to the deer enough that he was only an arm’s distance away.

As they ran, he began to notice that he was struggling to recognize some of the plants that he passed. And even when he recognized a shrub, there was a life to it that he’d never seen before. The sunlight that had been streaming high in the sky, it being midday and all, slowly disappeared which prompted him to take a peek up at the sky. Rather than a high noon sun, it seemed to be approaching the early morning rising sun.

His confusion inadvertently caused him to slow down till he was barely jogging. The deer had long ran away by that time, though he was already quite distracted from the chase. Running his fingers along a few of the low-hanging branches of a large willow tree, he noted that it felt much softer but more importantly, it almost felt more alive. He had also never seen a willow tree this deep into the woods, only ever near the village where they’d been purposefully planted many years before he’d been born. But even though he was distracted by the odd foliage, his ears remained attuned to his surroundings.

So when he heard a branch snap, he immediately became alert, hands grasping his weapons tighter, and feet spreading slightly so that he could run again, should the need arise. He could see that there was someone standing behind one of the trees to his left. Everything inside him was screaming for him to get away, not trusting anyone who simply stood and watched others, but he found he couldn’t convince his legs to cooperate. He remained rooted to the same spot, wincing as the person slowly stepped out from behind the tree. His eyes widened marginally as he gazed upon the resplendent beauty of the figure approaching him.

He felt his shoulders shudder from the nervous energy coursing through his body. The hand resting on his quiver twitched, ready to notch an arrow and let it fly if necessary. There was something about the ethereal being in front of him that made him want to come closer, but everything he had learnt growing up told him that a decision like that would only lead to doom. He trembled slightly as they stepped closer towards him, away from the tree’s shadow. Immediately his hand clenched his bow tighter, ready to spring into action. In his mind he kept repeating the same wish for the person to leave him; something made him hesitant to yell this desire out loud – he trusted those instincts.

But suddenly, the approaching person froze, and a shocked expression passed across his face, before it turned into hesitance. Then he heard it.

“Mochi?” The figure’s voice was soft and smooth, but what shook him to his core, was the accompanying familiar voice echoing in his head.

Mochi?

[violets-silence]

Violet Had A Life

-cause I make fan fictions for myself. Imma have fun man-

You may think that after the great scandal of Violets many-greats grandmother, Meteora, being forcibly dethroned for a time being, that the MHC would reconsider their stance on monsters joining the Butterfly ranks.

In fact, they were incredibly happy to do so while Queen Star was pregnant with her firstborn. Upset, yes, that it was a boy and not a girl, but nonetheless happy. After all, she was married to a human, not a Mewman.

Yet it wasn’t too long after the birth that the MHC seemed to have changed their minds. Not wanting to be connected to yet another dethroning, or a murder, the entire MHC stepped down, only to replace themselves with a new, younger, and ruthless MHC.

The entire new group hated Prince River with a passion, making their dislike known. Star attempted to defend her son, but was severely shut down every time.

Star and Marco tried to live their lives; after all, it was supposed to be good times, only three months after the baby was born. Sure, he didn’t have cheekmarks yet, but hey, you win some you lose some.

That is...

Until River disappeared.

Star was openly distraught and grieving when he vanished, questioning every guard and every citizen, begging for her son back, with Marco being twice as bad as she was.

“You need to let him go. He is gone.”

The MHC warned them, their stance ever lasting.

Despite the Queens begging, nothing brought her son back into her arms. Not three months after Rivers disappearance, Queen Star made an announcement: she was pregnant again.

The MHC celebrated, especially when Star told them it was a girl, and she had cheekmarks from what Marco had told her during their ‘ultrasound’.

Everyone, except Marco, failed to notice the Queens emotions.

They ran wild, feelings of betrayl and horror filling Stars waking moments, along with her dreams. She dreamt of her son running away to someone she couldn’t see. No matter how loud she screamed for him to come back, he simply kept running.

By the time Star was eight months along, her son had vanished from her dreams. Instead, her life became filled with Violet.

Eclipsa was with her every step of the way, telling her she was sure the child would be fine in life and would even have a lively one.

Star wanted to smack her, but shoved every feeling deep down inside.

Star felt bitter when Violet was born.

Why was she born with cheekmarks and not River? Why was she the one with magic? Why was Violet the one approved and not her son? Why did violet have to come now? Why couldn’t she wait until a few years later? Why now when there were two deaths in the family, both so close to one another?

Star blamed Violet. It was all her fault.

Marco tried to change stars feelings when she told him, telling her that it was silly and unethical to hate a baby for being born.

Star agreed. In reality, she shoved the bitter feelings deeper.

It slipped out now and again. Of course it did.

Violet was only two when the first incident occurred. She had been innocently playing and had grabbed the hem of Stars dress, smiling up at her.

Instead of returning the smile as she normally would, Stars gaze instead hardened, eyes narrowing and mouth turning into a frown.

It had startled Violet, who ran off to her father instead. It was then on that Violet grew to be alone. Despite what Marco told Star, he understood her feelings all too well, and he created a rift between them and their daughter.

Violet has no way to understand what she did wrong. After all, there were plenty of good times! Like when Dad taught her to make nachos, and when Mom taught her to use the wand!

Yet...

She was alone far too often.

Deafening herself proved to be hardly a huge change in her life. Once it had been proved that the magical injury was not fatal or too scarring, Violet had returned to her daily activities.

Running around, singing to songs she couldn’t hear, coloring and dancing. It was normals

It was only when some village boys came around that impacted her greatly.

They stood nearby to her, and watched her babble about some thing or another. They seemed to be laughing, motioning to Violet a couple of times. Then one of them signed to her.

‘You sound funny when you talk. Like a monster with a mouth full of teeth.’

The boy then pulled at his lips and bared his teeth, laughing at her.

The others joined in, ‘telling’ her that her voice was funny, how she said words all funny, how it was hard to hear her, on and on.

For fifteen minutes, Violet stood and watched, shocked and confused. How could people she called friends tell her such horrible things?

It was only when Marco came out that they ran off. He attempted to comfort his daughter, but Violet shoved him away from her, running to the woods.

From then on, it was the place she remained the most. Days could go by with her not returning to the castle and no one would bat an eye. It was all too common that Violet would sleep out in the woods, making make-shift campsites, and eating food she found that she was aware of being edible.

She read hundreds of books, and even earned her dimensional scissors on her way down a strange path through the woods.

The rare times Violet saw her parents, they simply grew more distant from her. They couldn’t understand her reasoning for being in the woods, or her taste for the basics in life. Star didn’t understand why she wore a simple, Greek-like dress with little to no accessories, and she certainly didn’t understand Violets reasonings for not looking for a dare, even when she was approaching the age of 15.

It all changed on the one day she chose to stay at home. To recharge, grab some good supplies, etc etc.

It wasn’t even something fun that she was doing, she was just walking and daydreaming when she’d smacked into someone, knocking them both down.

She’d sat up, red in the face and ready to demand an explanation-

When the stranger raised herself off the ground.

Violet, in all intents and purposes, adored those taller than her. Which is easy, since she’s a simple 5’0.

This person, however, was at least 5’6, 6’0 including the horns on her head. Her red eyes were gleaming with pain and anger, and her mouth twisted and opened, speaking.

Her hair was multicolored, somethin Violet found odd. And to top it all off, she was a demon, with the eyeliner, and the demon tail and the pointed ears.

The girl kept talking, before becoming aware that Violet wasn’t listening.

She said something again, this time with Violet reading the lips.

‘Who are you?’

She tilted her head a bit, then it seemed to click for this beautiful stranger.

She snagged a paper and a pen from her bag she had, handing them over to violet after scribbling a message onto it.

‘Your name?’

Violet took the offering, scrawling her name down.

‘Violet Rose Diaz-Butterfly’

The strangers eyes lit up in a strange way as she read the message.

‘My name is Victoria Lucitor. I believe I am in the wrong dimension.’

‘Do you need help getting back?’

‘No, I need help being shown around. Will you help me?’

Victoria smiled, offering a hand when Violet finished reading her offer. She beamed, nodding and taking Victoria’s hand.

For a good few years, everything was amazing for them.

Victoria seemed to come by every day. They’d go on dates (even if violet was clueless until the fourth one), but each other gifts, even shared a good many ‘firsts’ together.

Of course, when the goings good, something has to give.

The sickness Violet has grew worse. Make no mistake, she’d had it all her life and had figured out what caused it. She’d even expected it when her parents started fighting.

She didn’t have to hear them for her to pick up that they were arguing more and more. When they had a family dinner, the air would be thick with tension, making Violet nervous. The fighting would never occurr in front of her; no, that’s hurt her.

However, her parents failed to pick up on the fact that even when she was away, their relationship hurt her.

The more they fought, the more Violet coughed. The more Violet coughed, the more redstuff she coughed out. And the more red stuff that came out, the more sick she felt.

It was in too small of doses to kill her all at once, but her doctor gave her the ugly truth: she only had till the best case scenario of living til 42 years old before the sickness overcame her.

It broke her heart.

She thought of Victoria, and her plans of the future she’d told Violet all about. She thought of her parents. Maybe they’d be dead when she herself died? Unlikely, but probable.

What if she had kids? She’d leave them lonesome.

So she promised herself: I would rather die than let Victoria figure out what’s going on. All we need is happy memories.

Victoria thought Violet was trying to get over a flu. She thought that Violet starting to do more things with her was just her feeling better and celebrating.

Hell, Violet even got into pastel goth, and made Victoria happy time and time again.

She pushed the social anxiety away long enough to go to a club, and would return exhausted but happy.

They lived like this for years, dancing between the dimensions. Violet met her siblings, being doted on by a different pair of Marco and Star. They were much happier and loving.

Violet started vanishing for longer and longer amounts of time, slowly easing her parents into living without her for a full year. By now, she and Victoria were in their later 20s, with violet being 29.

Victoria sat on the throne now; her parents had passed it down with their blessings. Victoria was a wonderful Queen; three years had passed with no huge hiccups when it became apparent that something was changing.

Violet wasn’t feeling good anymore. She thought this was normal, but it got worse and worse. Even ‘talking’ with Victoria became too tiring to accomplish, and Violet retreated to their bedroom.

Victoria, ever so worried, sent a nurse to figure out what was wrong.

“She’s not eating enough.”

“But she eats, and just throws it back up again.” Victoria followed hurriedly, heels clacking on the floor. “She can’t eat any more unless she wants to throw up more.”

“She can eat just fine, it’s normal morning sickness that does that to you.”

Victoria nodded before realization dawned on her. “Wait what-“

“I know what you’re going to ask. Yes, she’s with child, Your Majesty. No, it shouldn’t be possible considering how babies are normally made. My best guess is that your bond was so deep, that your magic entwined together and chose one of you at random to carry this piece of mixed magic.”

“So we’re having a magic baby?”

“Yes. Now excuse me.” The nurse had left.

Five minutes passed. Then ten.

Victoria slowly took a deep breath before shrieking with joy and then panic.

“I’m gonna be a mom!... oh gods I’m gonna be a mom.”

While the pregnancy (or incubation, there’s no right answer) went smoothly in everyone else’s eyes, it was a horrible drain on Violet. The sickness was back full steam, and she could feel her life being shortened by decades.

Little Draven Lorenzo Lucitor was born on July 23rd, late into the night. He was a minute off from being born on the 24th.

They welcomed little Draven, and enjoyed his very exsistance.

At least... for a time. Then Victoria spoke with Violet.

“You have to talk to your parents, Vio. You have to let them know they have a grand baby.”

-cliffhanger lol-

@freaky-fan-art

[andanete]

there is never a moment [dw]

Summary: for as long as she has lived, beyond the falls and rises of civilization, past the turns of an ever changing world, there is never a moment she is without her doctor.

or, this is the story of a long-living spirit and a time-travelling alien.

[1]

The first time she meets him, she is running away from her village.

As the surviving granddaughter of the Village Matriarch, there was an expectancy that burdens her since birth. A sort of responsibility that was never struck well with her sort of soul. Her mother, may the spirits bless her, often tittered about her runaway tendencies.

She was the sort of girl that never stayed to make pottery nor was she the type to scour for more silkworms. The kind of girl she was an anomaly. She often strayed past the village’s boundaries, gone for days to look, to search. For what, exactly? She was never very certain then and the sentiment still stands true right now. It was why she always come back to the village, succumbing to the Village Matriarch’s teachings and deal with the ons and bouts of the tiny village of a couple dozen.

When she stumbles upon him, him and his strange contraption whose blue is deeper than the storms that sometimes overtook the skies, curiosity overwhelms her. A male for certain, though she was unsure of what sort of creature he was. Pale, paler than the whites of the Village Matriarch’s hair, dressed in fabric she could not quite name, and eyes wide and viridian—nothing like the sharp, narrowed browns of her own eyes. He was walking around the strange contraption, his lips tugged down into a resigned frown. He waved a stick, although she was quite unsure if it was a stick and if it were what a strange stick it was, around it before scrutinizing the item itself.

Strange, she thinks.

She stays there though, watching him. She does not bother to hide, content in observing openly. She had not quite realize that the man had known she was there the moment she walked within vicinity till he looked over his shoulder, lips twisting into what she would call a smile.

“Hello there,” he says, his accent oddly strange in the language that she recognizes. She nearly startles at that, she had not realized that he could speak. “I am the Doctor.”

He does not ask her who she was, though the look in his eyes which twinkle with a sense of familiarity that she only ever sees amongst the people of her village, tells her she does not need to. It takes her minutes to reply, unsure on how to approach the strange male.

“What are you doing?” She finally asks, voice soft against the wind and trees and animals that surround them.

She almost doubts that he heard her but then he replies, eyes crinkling. “Had a bit of a malfunction with my TARDIS here, so I decided to make a quick pit stop to see what’s wrong. Meant to go visit Cleopatra, nasty girl she is but splendid company, but the Space-Time Vortex spat me out here instead. Although, I don’t quite mind where I’m at right now considering.”

Her mind whirls with the words that she does not recognize. TARDIS. Cleopatra. Space. Time. Vortex. Unconsciously she leans a little bit closer, a motion that does not go unnoticed by the strange man who calls himself Doctor. His lips widen further, flashing white teeth.

“So!” He claps his hands together, turning away to look over his strange contraption—TARDIS. “Let’s see what’s the problem here, shall we?”

Before she could even think twice of coming a little closer to the man and his contraption, she can hear her grandmother yelling for her. She glances at where her grandmother, the village, is then back to the Doctor who was staring at her with a strange look in his eyes.

“Go on, then,” he says, not unkindly. “We’ll see each other again.”

He sounds so sure of it that she believes him easily, even though logically, she knew that it was a little more unlikely than so. However, the eye-crinkling smile and the way he mouths silently at her (words, a name perhaps? She doesn’t know for sure) reassures her. She leaves, glancing back at him all the way till his figure grows smaller and smaller as she walks off.

———————————————————-

She meets a witch.

Her name is sweet on her tongue, never uttered louder than whisper for her name was as sacred as the witch herself. She is not quite so beautiful, not like one of the farmer’s oldest daughter, but there was an orphic aura to her that draws her near like a moth to a flame. Hair unique and unlike she has never seen, reminiscent of a wild, bright flame. Eyes alight in colours she’s only ever seen in one individual. Free-spirits come so far and few, especially amongst those in the valley. She relishes in the witch’s presence for as long as she could, in between the times she devotes to her village and the times she devotes to her daughter.

The witch blesses her with a kiss, a name, and an eternity.

She never saw the witch again.

———————————————————-

The next time she sees him, she is far older than she looks.

Her tan skin, burnished by the constant exposure of the sun, remains unwrinkled despite odds. Her hair is still as dark as it had when she was younger, long and treading past her waist. Her face was devoid of the wrinkles she associated with her Village Matriarch and other elderly women. She stays young and she never knows why.

(A sweet voice serenades chants into her ears, hands grasping gently, smiles shared over the herbs of the Yellow River Valley.)

Her village of people were put out by the fact that their Village Matriarch (her, for the previous one had passed away with wrinkled skin and grey hairs that she does not hold despite the fact that old age titters closer each day) never seems to grow old. They call her the loved one, kissed by the immortality of the trees and valleys and rivers. They call her the kind one, hands as healing and kind as sage and ginseng. For, much like the nature that surrounds them, she remains constant against the adversaries of the years.

(This is my promise. You will live, beyond me and beyond everyone else, for you deserve to see the world beyond this valley, beyond the river. And thus time and time will be yours to hold and have, for as long as you need.)

She is old. Older than one such as she, free-spirited and impulsive, deserves. Although the wrinkles of time never wears her appearance, it does at her soul. She is tired. To overlook a village is a responsibility she could no longer bear. Responsibilities were never the sort of thing that her soul likes to deal; it was why she only ever had one child.

(“The mother is dead. Who will take care of her?” Her heart aches and the burden grows heavier but yet, “I will.”)

Her daughter, juvenile in that she was so many decades younger than her, was not quite so ready with the idea of looking over the village either.

However, she never gave her a choice. Much like how the Village Matriarch never gave her a choice either.

Looking back, decades and centuries later, she would wish that she had given her daughter a choice. She would wish that she was not quite so selfish.

But then the strange man, a different man but the same name (his mannerism are different but the look in his eyes, brown this time and not quite as benevolent, are still the same so she never questions) appears before her. A tad lost without his contraption (TARDIS, TARDIS, TARDIS, her mind whispers, ingraining the name into memory) and the decision was far too easily made. The tensions of burdens and responsibilities ease away, disappearing at the sight of the strange man’s jovial grin.

“Oh, hello! Long time no see—!” He stops before he finishes, a word (or perhaps a name?) hangs on the tip of his tongue. It never comes and he just waves.

“Long time indeed,” she inclines her head, smiling shyly. “Where is your…TARDIS, Doctor?” The words taste strange in her tongue but it left her heart warm and she wonders when did she grow so fond of strange things like the Doctor and his contraption.

At the mention of his TARDIS, the Doctor gives a sheepish grin, snatching the back of his neck. “Er… about that, actually, I was wondering if you’ve seen it…”

She raised a brow at that, lips tugging into a smirk. “No, unfortunately, I have not. Would like some help in looking for your lost TARDIS, Doctor?”

“I wouldn’t say lost, but rather, misplaced if you will,” he says, tugging at the cloth in front of him. “I don’t mind having some company in looking for my misplaced TARDIS, however.”

She laughs, freely as she feels. “Of course, Doctor.”

They did not have to go far, the TARDIS was only a couple of miles away. Still, in that time between, the Doctor and her chat about nonsense things like the colours of the land, the pottery that she sometimes dotes her time on, the strange things he mentions. Sometimes it was hard to communicate even though they both understood each other perfectly, there was a barrier that keeps them apart.

The Doctor offers her a trip in his strange contraption. Something in her gut stops her before she could accept—no, not yet—and she shakes her head. He seems to slump in rejection before he smiles again, saying something about how the time will come. She does not understand but she believes him nonetheless. The same look in the other Doctor’s eyes appear in his and it tells her enough.

They part ways, and she wonders if the Doctor is a man of the future.

She never realized the Doctor had, not once, addressed her or asked for her name.

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Specialist's Hat

Kelly Link (1998)

“When you’re Dead,” Samantha says, “you don’t have to brush your teeth.”

“When you’re Dead,” Claire says, “you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.”

Claire and Samantha are identical twins. Their combined age is twenty years, four months, and six days. Claire is better at being Dead than Samantha.

The babysitter yawns, covering up her mouth with a long white hand. “I said to brush your teeth and that it’s time for bed,” she says. She sits cross-legged on the flowered bedspread between them. She has been teaching them a card game called Pounce, which involves three decks of cards, one for each of them. Samantha’s deck is missing the Jack of Spades and the Two of Hearts, and Claire keeps on cheating. The babysitter wins anyway. There are still flecks of dried shaving cream and toilet paper on her arms. It is hard to tell how old she is — at first they thought she must be a grownup, but now she hardly looks older than them. Samantha has forgotten the babysitter’s name.

Claire’s face is stubborn. “When you’re Dead,” she says, “you stay up all night long.”

“When you’re dead,” the babysitter snaps, “it’s always very cold and damp, and you have to be very, very quiet or else the Specialist will get you.”

“This house is haunted,” Claire says.

“I know it is,” the babysitter says. “I used to live here.”

Something is creeping up the stairs, Something is standing outside the door, Something is sobbing, sobbing in the dark; Something is sighing across the floor.

Claire and Samantha are spending the summer with their father, in the house called Eight Chimneys. Their mother is dead. She has been dead for exactly 282 days.

Their father is writing a history of Eight Chimneys, and of the poet, Charles Cheatham Rash, who lived here at the turn of the century, and who ran away to sea when he was thirteen, and returned when he was thirty-eight. He married, fathered a child, wrote three volumes of bad, obscure poetry, and an even worse and more obscure novel, The One Who Is Watching Me Through the Window, before disappearing again in 1907, this time for good. Samantha and Claire’s father says that some of the poetry is actually quite readable, and at least the novel isn’t very long.

When Samantha asked him why he was writing about Rash, he replied that no one else had, and why didn’t she and Samantha go play outside. When she pointed out that she was Samantha, he just scowled and said how could he be expected to tell them apart when they both wore blue jeans and flannel shirts, and why couldn’t one of them dress all in green and the other pink?

Claire and Samantha prefer to play inside. Eight Chimneys is as big as a castle, but dustier and darker than Samantha imagines a castle would be. The house is open to the public, and during the day people — families — driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway will stop to tour the grounds and the first story; the third story belongs to Claire and Samantha. Sometimes they play explorers, and sometimes they follow the caretaker as he gives tours to visitors. After a few weeks, they have memorized his lecture, and they mouth it along with him. They help him sell postcards and copies of Rash’s poetry to the tourist families who come into the little gift shop. When the mothers smile at them, and say how sweet they are, they stare back and don’t say anything at all. The dim light in the house makes the mothers look pale and flickery and tired. They leave Eight Chimneys, mothers and families, looking not quite as real as they did before they paid their admissions, and of course Claire and Samantha will never see them again, so maybe they aren’t real. Better to stay inside the house, they want to tell the families, and if you must leave, then go straight to your cars.

The caretaker says the woods aren’t safe.

Their father stays in the library on the second story all morning, typing, and in the afternoon he takes long walks. He takes his pocket recorder along with him, and a hip flask of Old Kentucky, but not Samantha and Claire.

The caretaker of Eight Chimneys is Mr. Coeslak. His left leg is noticeably shorter than his right. Short black hairs grow out of his ears and his nostrils, and there is no hair at all on top of his head, but he’s given Samantha and Claire permission to explore the whole of the house. It was Mr. Coeslak who told them that there are copperheads in the woods, and that the house is haunted. He says they are all, ghosts and snakes, a pretty bad-tempered lot, and Samantha and Claire should stick to the marked trails, and stay out of the attic.

Mr. Coeslak can tell the twins apart, even if their father can’t; Claire’s eyes are grey, like a cat’s fur, he says, but Samantha’s are gray, like the ocean when it has been raining.

Samantha and Claire went walking in the woods on the second day that they were at Eight Chimneys. They saw something. Samantha thought it was a woman, but Claire said it was a snake. The staircase that goes up to the attic has been locked. They peeked through the keyhole, but it was too dark to see anything.

And so he had a wife, and they say she was real pretty. There was another man who wanted to go with her, and first she wouldn’t, because she was afraid of her husband, and then she did. Her husband found out, and they say he killed a snake and got some of this snake’s blood and put it in some whiskey and gave it to her. He had learned this from an island man who had been on a ship with him. And in about six months snakes created in her and they got between her meat and the skin. And they say you could just see them running up and down her legs. They say she was just hollow to the top of her body, and it kept on like that till she died. Now my daddy said he saw it. — An Oral History of Eight Chimneys

Eight Chimneys is over two hundred years old. It is named for the eight chimneys which are each big enough that Samantha and Claire can both fit in one fireplace. The chimneys are red brick, and on each floor there are eight fireplaces, making a total of twenty-four. Samantha imagines the chimney stacks stretching like stout red tree trunks, all the way up through the slate roof of the house. Beside each fireplace is a heavy black firedog, and a set of wrought iron pokers shaped like snakes. Claire and Samantha pretend to duel with the snake-pokers before the fireplace in their bedroom on the third floor. Wind rises up the back of the chimney. When they stick their faces in, they can feel the air rushing damply upward, like a river. The flue smells old and sooty and wet, like stones from a river.

Their bedroom was once the nursery. They sleep together in a poster bed which resembles a ship with four masts. It smells of mothballs. Charles Cheatham Rash slept here when he was a little boy, and also his daughter. She disappeared when her father did. It might have been gambling debts. They may have moved to New Orleans. She was fourteen years old, Mr. Coeslak said. What was her name, Claire asked. What happened to her mother, Samantha wanted to know. Mr. Coeslak closed his eyes in an almost wink. Mrs. Rash had died the year before her husband and daughter disappeared, he said, of a mysterious wasting disease. He can’t remember the name of the poor little girl, he said.

Eight Chimneys has exactly 100 windows, all still with the original wavery panes of hand-blown glass. With so many windows, Samantha thinks, Eight Chimneys should always be full of light, but instead the trees press close against the house, so that the rooms on the first and second story — even the third-story rooms — are green and dim, as if Samantha and Claire are underwater. This is the light that makes the tourists into ghosts. In the morning, and again towards evening, a fog settles in around the house. Sometimes it is grey like Claire’s eyes, and sometimes it is more gray, like Samantha’s.

I met a woman in the wood, Her lips were two red snakes. She smiled at me, her eyes lewd And burning like a fire.

A few nights ago, the wind was sighing in the nursery chimney. Their father had already tucked them in, and turned off the light. Claire dared Samantha to stick her head into the fireplace, in the dark, and so she did. The cold, wet air licked at her face, and it almost sounded like voices talking low, muttering. She couldn’t quite make out what they were saying.

Their father has been drinking steadily since they arrived at Eight Chimneys. He never mentions their mother. One evening they heard him shouting in the library, and when they came downstairs, there was a large sticky stain on the desk, where a glass of whiskey had been knocked over. It was looking at me, he said, through the window. It had orange eyes.

Samantha and Claire refrained from pointing out that the library is on the second story.

At night, their father’s breath has been sweet from drinking, and he is spending more and more time in the woods, and less in the library. At dinner, usually hot dogs and baked beans from a can, which they eat off of paper plates in the first floor dining room, beneath the Austrian chandelier (which has exactly 632 leaded crystals shaped like teardrops), their father recites the poetry of Charles Cheatham Rash, which neither Samantha nor Claire cares for.

He has been reading the ship diaries which Rash kept, and he says that he has discovered proof in them that Rash’s most famous poem, The Specialist’s Hat, is not a poem at all, and in any case, Rash didn’t write it. It is something that one of the men on the whaler used to say, to conjure up a whale. Rash simply copied it down and stuck an end on it and said it was his.

The man was from Mulatuppu, which is a place neither Samantha nor Claire has ever heard of. Their father says that the man was supposed to be some sort of magician, but he drowned shortly before Rash came back to Eight Chimneys. Their father says that the other sailors wanted to throw the magician’s chest overboard, but Rash persuaded them to let him keep it until he could be put ashore, with the chest, off the coast of North Carolina.

The specialist’s hat makes a noise like an agouti; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a collared peccary; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a white-lipped peccary; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a tapir; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a rabbit; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a squirrel; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a curassow; The specialist’s hat moans like a whale in the water; The specialist’s hat moans like the wind in my wife’s hair; The specialist’s hat makes a noise like a snake; I have hung the hat of the specialist upon my wall.

The reason that Claire and Samantha have a babysitter is that their father met a woman in the woods. He is going to meet her, tonight, and they are going to have a picnic supper and look at the stars. This is the time of year when the Perseids can be seen, falling across the sky on clear nights. Their father said that he has been walking with the woman every afternoon. She is a distant relation of Rash, and besides, he said, he needs a night off, and some grownup conversation.

Mr. Coeslak won’t stay in the house after dark, but he agreed to find someone to look after Samantha and Claire. Then their father couldn’t find Mr. Coeslak, but the babysitter showed up precisely at seven o’clock. The babysitter, whose name neither twin quite caught, wears a blue cotton dress with short floaty sleeves. Both Samantha and Claire think she is pretty in an old-fashioned sort of way.

They were in the library with their father, looking up Mulatuppu in the red leather atlas, when she arrived. She didn’t knock on the front door, she simply walked in, and up the stairs, as if she knew where to find them.

Their father kissed them goodbye, a hasty smack, told them to be good and he would take them into town on the weekend to see the Disney film. They went to the window to watch as he walked out of the house and into the woods. Already it was getting dark, and there were fireflies, tiny yellow-hot sparks in the air. When their father had quite disappeared into the trees, they turned around and stared at the babysitter instead. She raised one eyebrow. “Well,” she said. “What sort of games do you like to play?”

Widdershins around the chimneys, once, twice, again. The spokes click like a clock on the bicycle; they tick down the days of the life of a man.

First they played Go Fish, and then they played Crazy Eights, and then they made the babysitter into a mummy by putting shaving cream from their father’s bathroom on her arms and legs, and wrapping her in toilet paper. She is the best babysitter they have ever had.

At nine-thirty, she tried to put them to bed. Neither Claire nor Samantha wanted to go to bed, so they began to play the Dead game. The Dead game is a let’s pretend that they have been playing every day for 274 days now, but never in front of their father or any other adult. When they are Dead, they are allowed to do anything they want to. They can even fly, by jumping off the nursery beds, and just waving their arms. Someday this will work, if they practice hard enough.

The Dead game has three rules.

One. Numbers are significant. The twins keep a list of important numbers in a green address book that belonged to their mother. Mr. Coeslak’s tour has been a good source of significant amounts and tallies: they are writing a tragical history of numbers.

Two. The twins don’t play the Dead game in front of grownups. They have been summing up the babysitter, and have decided that she doesn’t count. They tell her the rules.

Three is the best and most important rule. When you are Dead, you don’t have to be afraid of anything. Samantha and Claire aren’t sure who the Specialist is, but they aren’t afraid of him.

To become Dead, they hold their breath while counting to 35, which is as high as their mother got, not counting a few days.

“You never lived here,” Claire says. “Mr. Coeslak lives here.”

“Not at night,” says the babysitter. “This was my bedroom when I was little.”

“Really?” Samantha says. Claire says, “Prove it.”

The babysitter gives Samantha and Claire a look, as if she is measuring them: how old; how smart; how brave; how tall. Then she nods. The wind is in the flue, and in the dim nursery light they can see the little strands of fog seeping out of the fireplace. “Go stand in the chimney,” she instructs them. “Stick your hand as far up as you can, and there is a little hole on the left side, with a key in it.”

Samantha looks at Claire, who says, “Go ahead.” Claire is fifteen minutes and some few uncounted seconds older than Samantha, and therefore gets to tell Samantha what to do. Samantha remembers the muttering voices, and then reminds herself that she is Dead. She goes over to the fireplace and ducks inside.

When Samantha stands up in the chimney, she can only see the very edge of the room. She can see the fringe of the mothy blue rug, and one bed leg, and beside it, Claire’s foot, swinging back and forth like a metronome. Claire’s shoelace has come undone, and there is a Band-Aid on her ankle. It all looks very pleasant and peaceful from inside the chimney, like a dream, and for a moment, she almost wishes she didn’t have to be Dead. But it’s safer, really. She sticks her left hand up as far as she can reach, trailing it along the crumbly wall, until she feels an indentation. She thinks about spiders and severed fingers, and rusty razorblades, and then she reaches inside. She keeps her eyes lowered, focused on the corner of the room, and Claire’s twitchy foot.

Inside the hole, there is a tiny cold key, its teeth facing outward. She pulls it out, and ducks back into the room. “She wasn’t lying,” she tells Claire.

“Of course I wasn’t lying,” the babysitter says. “When you’re Dead, you’re not allowed to tell lies.”

“Unless you want to,” Claire says.

Dreary and dreadful beats the sea at the shore. Ghastly and dripping is the mist at my door. The clock in the hall is chiming one, two, three, four. The morning comes not, no, never, no more.

Samantha and Claire have gone to camp for three weeks every summer since they were seven. This year their father didn’t ask them if they wanted to go back, and after discussing it, they decided that it was just as well. They didn’t want to have to explain to all their friends how they were half-orphans now. They are used to being envied, because they are identical twins. They don’t want to be pitiful.

It has not even been a year, but Samantha realizes that she is forgetting what her mother looked like. Not her mother’s face so much as the way she smelled, which was something like grass, and something like Chanel No. 5, and like something else too. She can’t remember whether her mother had gray eyes, like her, or grey eyes, like Claire. She doesn’t dream about her mother anymore, but she does dream about Prince Charming, a bay whom she once rode in the horse show at her camp. In the dream, Prince Charming did not smell like a horse at all. He smelled like Chanel No. 5. When she is Dead, she can have all the horses she wants, and they all smell like Chanel No. 5.

“Where does the key go to?” Samantha says.

The babysitter holds out her hand. “To the attic. You don’t really need it, but taking the stairs is easier than the chimney. At least the first time.”

“Aren’t you going to make us go to bed?” Claire says.

The babysitter ignores Claire. “My father used to lock me in the attic when I was little, but I didn’t mind. There was a bicycle up there and I used to ride it around and around the chimneys until my mother let me out again. Do you know how to ride a bicycle?”

“Of course,” Claire says.

“If you ride fast enough, the Specialist can’t catch you.”

“What’s the Specialist?” Samantha says. Bicycles are okay, but horses can go faster.

“The Specialist wears a hat,” say the babysitter. “The hat makes noises.”

She doesn’t say anything else.

When you’re dead, the grass is greener Over your grave. The wind is keener. Your eyes sink in, your flesh decays. You Grow accustomed to slowness; expect delays.

The attic is somehow bigger and lonelier than Samantha and Claire thought it would be. The babysitter’s key opens the locked door at the end of the hallway, revealing a narrow set of stairs. She waves them ahead and upwards.

It isn’t as dark in the attic as they had imagined. The oaks that block the light and make the first three stories so dim and green and mysterious during the day, don’t reach all the way up. Extravagant moonlight, dusty and pale, streams in the angled dormer windows. It lights the length of the attic, which is wide enough to hold a softball game in, and lined with trunks where Samantha imagines people could sit, could be hiding and watching. The ceiling slopes down, impaled upon the eight thick-waisted chimney stacks. The chimneys seem too alive, somehow, to be contained in this empty, neglected place; they thrust almost angrily through the roof and attic floor. In the moonlight, they look like they are breathing. “They’re so beautiful,” she says.

“Which chimney is the nursery chimney?” Claire says.

The babysitter points to the nearest righthand stack. “That one,” she says. “It runs up through the ballroom on the first floor, the library, the nursery.”

Hanging from a nail on the nursery chimney is a long, black object. It looks lumpy and heavy, as if it were full of things. The babysitter takes it down, twirls it on her finger. There are holes in the black thing, and it whistles mournfully as she spins it. “The Specialist’s hat,” she says.

“That doesn’t look like a hat,” says Claire. “It doesn’t look like anything at all.” She goes to look through the boxes and trunks that are stacked against the far wall.

“It’s a special hat,” the babysitter says. “It’s not supposed to look like anything. But it can sound like anything you can imagine. My father made it.”

“Our father writes books,” Samantha says.

“My father did too.” The babysitter hangs the hat back on the nail. It curls blackly against the chimney. Samantha stares at it. It nickers at her. “He was a bad poet, but he was worse at magic.”

Last summer, Samantha wished more than anything that she could have a horse. She thought she would have given up anything for one — even being a twin was not as good as having a horse. She still doesn’t have a horse, but she doesn’t have a mother either, and she can’t help wondering if it’s her fault. The hat nickers again, or maybe it is the wind in the chimney.

“What happened to him?” Claire asks.

“After he made the hat, the Specialist came and took him away. I hid in the nursery chimney while it was looking for him, and it didn’t find me.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

There is a clattering, shivering, clicking noise. Claire has found the babysitter’s bike and is dragging it towards them by the handlebars. The babysitter shrugs. “Rule number three,” she says.

Claire snatches the hat off the nail. “I’m the Specialist!” she says, putting the hat on her head. It falls over her eyes, the floppy shapeless brim sewn with little asymmetrical buttons that flash and catch at the moonlight like teeth. Samantha looks again, and sees that they are teeth. Without counting, she suddenly knows that there are exactly fifty-two teeth on the hat, and that they are the teeth of agoutis, of curassows, of white-lipped peccaries, and of the wife of Charles Cheatham Rash. The chimneys are moaning, and Claire’s voice booms hollowly beneath the hat. “Run away, or I’ll catch you and eat you!”

Samantha and the babysitter run away, laughing, as Claire mounts the rusty, noisy bicycle and pedals madly after them. She rings the bicycle bell as she rides, and the Specialist’s hat bobs up and down on her head. It spits like a cat. The bell is shrill and thin, and the bike wails and shrieks. It leans first towards the right, and then to the left. Claire’s knobby knees stick out on either side like makeshift counterweights.

Claire weaves in and out between the chimneys, chasing Samantha and the babysitter. Samantha is slow, turning to look behind. As Claire approaches, she keeps one hand on the handlebars, and stretches the other hand out towards Samantha. Just as she is about to grab Samantha, the babysitter turns back and plucks the hat off Claire’s head.

“Shit!” the babysitter says, and drops it. There is a drop of blood forming on the fleshy part of the babysitter’s hand, black in the moonlight, where the Specialist’s hat has bitten her.

Claire dismounts, giggling. Samantha watches as the Specialist’s hat rolls away. It gathers speed, veering across the attic floor, and disappears, thumping down the stairs. “Go get it,” Claire says. “You can be the Specialist this time.”

“No,” the babysitter says, sucking at her palm. “It’s time for bed.”

When they go down the stairs, there is no sign of the Specialist’s hat. They brush their teeth, climb into the ship-bed, and pull the covers up to their necks. The babysitter sits between their feet. “When you’re Dead,” Samantha says, “do you still get tired and have to go to sleep? Do you have dreams?”

“When you’re Dead,” the babysitter says, “everything’s a lot easier. You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to. You don’t have to have a name, you don’t have to remember. You don’t even have to breathe.”

She shows them exactly what she means.

When she has time to think about it (and now she has all the time in the world to think), Samantha realizes, with a small pang, that she is now stuck, indefinitely between ten and eleven years old, stuck with Claire and the babysitter. She considers this. The number 10 is pleasing and round, like a beach ball, but all in all, it hasn’t been an easy year. She wonders what 11 would have been like. Sharper, like needles, maybe. She has chosen to be Dead instead. She hopes that she’s made the right decision. She wonders if her mother would have decided to be Dead, instead of dead, if she could have.

Last year, they were learning fractions in school when her mother died. Fractions remind Samantha of herds of wild horses, piebalds and pintos and palominos. There are so many of them, and they are, well, fractious and unruly. Just when you think you have one under control, it throws up its head and tosses you off. Claire’s favorite number is 4, which she says is a tall, skinny boy. Samantha doesn’t care for boys that much. She likes numbers. Take the number 8, for instance, which can be more than one thing at once. Looked at one way, 8 looks like a bent woman with curvy hair. But if you lay it down on its side, it looks like a snake curled with its tail in its mouth. This is sort of like the difference between being Dead and being dead. Maybe when Samantha is tired of one, she will try the other.

On the lawn, under the oak trees, she hears someone calling her name. Samantha climbs out of bed and goes to the nursery window. She looks out through the wavy glass. It’s Mr. Coeslak. “Samantha, Claire!” he calls up to her. “Are you all right? Is your father there?” Samantha can almost see the moonlight shining through him. “They’re always locking me in the tool room,” he says. “Are you there, Samantha? Claire? Girls?”

The babysitter comes and stands beside Samantha. The babysitter puts her finger to her lip. Claire’s eyes glitter at them from the dark bed. Samantha doesn’t say anything, but she waves at Mr. Coeslak. The babysitter waves too. Maybe he can see them waving, because after a little while, he stops shouting and goes away. “Be careful,” the babysitter says. “He’ll be coming soon. It will be coming soon.”

She takes Samantha’s hand, and leads her back to the bed, where Claire is waiting. They sit and wait. Time passes, but they don’t get tired, they don’t get any older.

Who’s there? Just air.

The front door opens on the first floor, and Samantha, Claire, and the babysitter can hear someone creeping, creeping up the stairs. “Be quiet,” the babysitter says. “It’s the Specialist.”

Samantha and Claire are quiet. The nursery is dark and the wind crackles like a fire in the fireplace.

“Claire, Samantha, Samantha, Claire?” The Specialist’s voice is blurry and wet. It sounds like their father’s voice, but that’s because the hat can imitate any noise, any voice. “Are you still awake?”

“Quick,” the babysitter says. “It’s time to go up to the attic and hide.”

Claire and Samantha slip out from under the covers and dress quickly and silently. They follow her. Without speech, without breathing, she pulls them into the safety of the chimney. It is too dark to see, but they understand the babysitter perfectly when she mouths the word, Up. She goes first, so they can see where the fingerholds are, the bricks that jut out for their feet. Then Claire. Samantha watches her sister’s foot ascend like smoke, the shoelace still untied.

“Claire? Samantha? Goddammit, you’re scaring me. Where are you?” The Specialist is standing just outside the half-open door. “Samantha? I think I’ve been bitten by something. I think I’ve been bitten by a goddamn snake.” Samantha hesitates for only a second. Then she is climbing up, up, up the nursery chimney.

[otaku-daydreamer-4673]

Short Story #4

Unequivocal Sacrifice 

There’s a realm that’s similar to the world we live in, but the difference between ours and theirs is that there is such a thing as mythical creatures and beasts. And most of them are able to live alongside humans in peace and harmony. But there are still those beings that are shunned by society, and the townspeople want nothing to do with them. And those are the dragonoids. Full fledged dragon when they want to be once at the age of 19, and have the ability to have a human-like form, while still retaining some dragon features. Such as scales and pointed ears, a tail, long fingernails, horns and their reptilian eyes. Society wanted nothing to do with these creatures. And those who did decide to give these parasites any sort of acknowledgement were shunned along with the dragonoids.  

  But in a small town, there was girl who had done just that. She had a dragonoid for a friend, and he was her best friend. She found him in the woods as a kid, eating off of scrapes. Feeling bad for the red haired boy, she gave him food and some old clothes. The boy of course didn’t trust her at first, thinking she’d turn him into the authorities. But as the weeks passed and she continues to come multiple times throughout the week, bringing him food, and even helping him to make a small fort in the forest, the odd pair somehow became friends. And in return for the girl’s kindness, he decided to do something that was taboo for his kind, and that was to make a promise. And that promise was to become her protector and lifelong friend. And a dragonoid’s promise was sacred, and he’d be bound to it till the day he died.

 The little boy who was about the age of 8, looked over at the girl beside him. She was about his age, that much he gathered from being around her these past couple weeks. And even so, they had never even exchanged names. The boy swallowed the bread he was given by the girl earlier. How was she not turned off by his claws? Or the horns that were beginning to protrude from his head? The fact that he had a tail! The young boy shook his head. ‘This is one weird girl.’ he thought to himself. He looked at the girl next to him, as she made a flower crown. “Hey girl.” he asked looking at the mysterious brown-haired girl next him. She looked up from what she was doing and eyed the dragon boy curiously. He didn’t usually talk much and kept to himself. 

   “Yes?” she asked confused, eyeing him curiously. His tail swung from side to side on the forest floor a few times before looking at the girl with a look of interest. “What’s your name?” Her eyes widened in shock from his question, this was a little out character for him. “I-It’s Mika.” she said with a faint blush on her cheeks. “A-And yours?” The young dragon boy scrunched his nose and folded his arms, turning away from her. He didn’t answer her for a few minutes before a small puff of smoke came from his nostrils and mumbled, “It’s Yato.” He had his back to her, but suddenly felt a tap on his shoulder. When he turned around to look at her, his expression became confused. She held out her hand to him with a small smile on her face. “Well Yato, would you like to be my friend?” 

   She looked at him with innocent eyes, and he looked down at her hand and blushed slightly. Her small hand was pale and looked soft to the touch. Compares to his rough hands that has some scales that went up to his shoulders. He looked at her hand and reached his out hesitantly, refusing to touch her, his hand in mid air for a minute or so till their hands finally came into contact as they shook hands. The girl smiled genuinely, as the boy looked at her with a serious gaze. “What’s wrong?” she asks raising an eyebrow at him from his intense stare. He looked at her, his gaze serious as he made a vow that would stay with him for the rest of his life. “I’ll be your friend and your protector. I promise to stay by your side from this day forward. And you can always count on me to have your back. No matter what.” The girl looked back him in shock from his confession, of sorts. And once she grasped what he meant she smiled from ear to ear that seemed to tug at the young boy’s heart. “Sounds like a deal...Yato.”

  …..Eleven years later, and a now 18 year old Mika is soaring above the clouds. She has her hands firmly planted on the back of a scaled creature, and held on for dear life as the beast decided to go at a faster speed. She squealed and laid her chest down on the beast’s back. “Slow down Yato!” she shouted both excited and terrified at the same time. Yato had turned 19 a week ago; the age where they could turn into dragons at will, and he was testing out his flying skills. Over the past 11 years, the two became inseparable, and the best of friends. They did everything together, and as the two got older, Yato always kept his promise to protect her. Even if that came as a consequence for himself. When he was 16, Mika had been followed home by a drunk, and she had called his name, and Yato had come in an instant and protected her. Although, now he had a scar across his eye, from the drunk getting him with a pocket knife he had. But he had kept his promise, and he would do it again in a heartbeat. He had also become very attached to his best friend. Sometimes dragging her out of her house in secret in the middle of the night so they could play in their secret spot in the forest. Simply because he was ‘bored’.

  The two of them were above the clouds and having fun, as Yato tried to show off by doing tricks in the air to impress his best friend. “Yato, i’m serious! I’m going to fall off! ”They soon found out Yato couldn't talk in his dragon form, but the two of them were so close that all they need to do was have a silent conversation to know what the other was thinking. Yato decided to do a flip in the air, and that didn’t end up going well for Mika, who lost her balance and lost her grip on the dragon’s back, and began to plummet down to the earth’s surface. Her screams caught Yato’s attention and as he looked down to see her terrified expression, he dipped down at an incredible speed as he was finally able swoop her up in his clawed hands. He then made his way down to the surface quickly so no one could see them, because any dragon sightings and the townspeople would call the authorities to capture him; with dragonoids still being seen as disgusting and inferior.

  Once they landed, Yato carefully released her from his clawed grip as she gently fell to the grass, and he crouched as he quickly began to morph back into his human-like form. Once he finished transforming, he ran towards his best friend; pale and terrified. “Mika!!” he ran to her side and picked her up in his scaly arms. “You okay?! Talk to me dammit!” he looked at her like she was so fragile. And when she finally looked up at him, she smiled and leaned up to hold him close. “You did it again Yato. Thank you.” 

   He pulled back from the hug confused. “For what?” Mika giggled and smiled brightly before poking his nose. “For saving me again, you idiot.” She giggled at his irritated expression, of her calling him an idiot. He blew smoke in her face in retaliation, and it only made her laugh more. And god how he secretly loved her laugh. He’d never tell her, that he’d grown a crush on her after all of these years. Because he knew in his heart she could never be his. So he was careful not to let these feelings grown any stronger than a crush. But in moments like this, she made it very hard for him not to fall even harder. She stood herself up and grabbed his hand, “Come on! Let’s go over by the river again!” she said cheerfully, pulling him along with her. She was always like this. Hyper and energetic, while he was the more mellow of the two. Although he could have his hyper moments too.

  As the months continued on, Mika’s 19th birthday finally came around, and he had surprised her to a private waterfall as they swam till dark. His gift to her was a necklace that he had made out of jewels he found near an abandoned mine in the forest he lived in. “I love it Yato thank you!” She put it on excitedly, as Yato looked at her with a lovestruck expression. Puberty had been good to her. She wasn't exactly tall, and she was very petite, with a few curves to her figure. But to him she was perfect. He swallowed a lump in his throat as he approached her. He was usually so confident, but in this moment he was a nervous wreck. 

   Mika had finished putting the necklace on when she turned to face him. “How does it look?” she asked, her eyes sparkling. But when she saw his gaze and the way he was looking at her, she looked at him curiously as if confused. “Yato? ...you okay?” Instead of answering her, Yato wrapped his tail around her waist and pulled her towards him in one swift motion. The action took her by surprise as she placed her hands on his muscular and exposed chest for balance. “Yato what are y-” He had cut her off by sealing his lips against hers. 

   Despite his best efforts, he had fallen for his best friend. And he couldn’t hold it back anymore. Backing up from the embrace, Yato had a large blush across his face and looked away from her. He was about to mutter an apology when a familiar laughter filled his sensitive ears. He turned back to her, now confused as to why she was smiling from ear to ear. She giggled as she leaned in closer to him. “About time you did something.” She teased, closing the gap between them once more. Yato was still in shock from what had happened right before his eyes. But he decided to worry about it later as he wrapped his arms around the girl who stole his heart. She seemed to feel the same, and he couldn’t be happier. Maybe miracles were indeed possible, in this screwed up world they lived in.

  Two months had passed since that day, and Mika and Yato were in their favorite spot by the river under their favorite tree as they lay in the grass as they held hands and gazed at the morning sky. It was a normal day for them, but that is until something caught Yato sensitive ears. He placed his hand over Mika’s mouth to silence her as he put a finger to his lips to keep her quiet. There was a noise in the brush, and after a while it stopped. Thinking they were in the clear, they breathed a sigh of relief. But it was at that moment that soldier’s came out of the brush with nets and weapons. “There he is men! Get the creature before it has the chance to escape!” Yato growled as protectively put Mika behind him, snarling at the men as he bared his fangs. His tail slapped the floor with a loud thud, and smoke escaped his nostrils as he roared in an animal-like way. He spread his wings and created a gust of wind to blow a few of the men back. Some of the men had a net made of pure silver and tossed it over Yato as it began to burn him. Pure materials such as this in their raw form could badly hurt dragonoids. 

   Yato struggled against the net, as some of the men came with swords and were about to stab him when a someone blocked the men from their goal. Yato’s eyes widened in fear, “Mika move! Get out of here! Leave me, I’ll be fine!” But Mika didn’t budge, and stood her ground. The men were growing agitated and three men came over and threw Mika to the side and held her down as the other men came over and smirked at the dragonoid. “Your kind don’t deserve to live.” Said the man with the sword, “So why don’t you go and join the others in the afterlife!” He plunged his sword, and Yato closed his eyes waiting for the blow to come. But it never did. 

   He felt a liquid drip on his face, and he opened his eyes in horror to the sight before him. Mika had managed to get away from the men’s grasp and run over in front of Yato to block the blow, but the sword ended up getting her instead. She coughed up blood, and looked down to see where the sword had pierced her. Her skin color already began to pale, when the men stepped back and gasped at what they had done. Some backed away, and others ran into the brush ashamed. Mika fell to her knees as she held onto the sword still lodged inside her chest. 

   Yato’s eyes filled with rage as he screamed “MIKA!!” he began to tear up and thrash against the silver net. “NO! Please god no!!” With the remaining strength she had, Mika managed to get the net off of him. And his immediate response was to cradle her in his arms as his tears fell onto her cheeks. He stroked her hair softly with his sharp claws and leaned down and pressed his forehead against hers. “Don’t leave me...please..” he begged her, as he could feel her body begin to go cold. He gasped when he felt her hand tightened around his. 

   She was looking up at him with a smile; a smile on her face as she slowly died in his arms.  She coughed up some blood as she looked at him, “It was my turn...to protect you..” she said breathing unevenly. “Go on and live your life. For...b-both of us.” she coughed again as her grip on him tightened. “I love you….n-never forget that...” she smiled at him one more time before she finally went limp in his arms. And the only thing that could be heard in that moment were agonized screams. It spread throughout the town, and everyone knew...that this was the sound of a broken creature….

[whatitellmyfriends-blog]

Turning the BIG 40!!!

I can't even believe I had to write the above title! How is it even possible that I am almost 40? How did I get here so fast? What did I think 40 was? What do I think 40 will be? Truth is I never gave it much thought until it was closer in front of me rather than something in a galaxy far far away.  Everyday that passes though here it comes faster and faster!

I get that 40 is just a number, deep down I still feel like an awkward teenager.  Im the one looking around thinking “oh that mom is way older than me, look at all her responsibilities” then “that mom” tell she she's only 34 and I gasp in shock! I hang out with my 26 year old clients and feel like one of the girls mean while Im almost twice their age! denial?..maybe..but i would prefer to say that with a Jamacian accent explaining it is simply a river in Egypt.

40 is something my parents once were, 40 is like real adulting, in your 40′s weird stuff happens to your body, 40 is halfway to 80, 40 is like there is absolutely no excuse to not have your sh*&t together!!! 40 is when I should be able to understand my kids math homework but somedays math homework still has me in tears!!

40 is just a number, bigger than 30 but still just a number..lol..there is nothing wrong with being something my parents once were, truth is everyday I wake up and put my feet on the ground is a great blessing that i give thanks for everyday. Looking back I just never really thought one day I would be where my parents were, but here I am killing it!! lmao! “real adulting” as I like to call it is something I have been doing for quite sometime now, managing my own business for 15 years, being a wife for almost 10, a mom for almost 9, owning our own home and maintaining it well ( minus weeds, weeds don't count they pop up faster than my grey hairs).  We pay bills and taxes on time, have a family calendar and no car alone..lol. 40 is halfway to 80 (dang maybe I'm better in math that i think..hahahahaha) wouldn't it be really awesome to be 80 one day! and Lets be honest I have my sh*t together thats never been a problem!

40 is just this new found stage.  Im not having anymore babies, or planning a wedding (just a big birthday party).  Im not buying my first house or even my first car.  Girls nights are few and far between.  Im not spending $120 on a single digit pair of jeans or even buying sexy bras and underwear (sorry dave lol) There are no more impromptu vacations to far away lands, the gym is so much work now, weight doesn't fall of like it used to, instead hairs pop up in unwanted places and i have to pluck a grey eyebrow here and there(wth??).There are no more weekly playdates with mom groups or long walks through the mall with a sleeping baby.  This new found stage I find myself venturing into has me searching out small babies to have a wee cuddle with, handing them back thankful I have some independent children.  It has me planning a 10th anniversary and big birthday bash.  It has me decorating and picking out furniture for house I am blessed to have that I Love and get to watch my kids grow up in.  It has me walking the aisles of a thrift store relishing in a great deal for a growing family.  I may not be a single digit size anymore but I am thankful everyday for a body that made two beautiful healthy children and allows me to keep up with them everyday, and lets be honest, who needs sexy bras and underwear.  I want comfortable, Id consider it like winning the lottery if I could just find one pair that fit properly.  I mean if they aren't rolling down under my mum tum I have to pull them up so high some weird stuff falls out the sides! Butt wedgies, Vag wedgies! (struggle is real don't deny) Lets not even talk about bras! Seriously ! Th prices for something to hold my boobies! Remember the good old days when boys would do that for free!! hahahahaha!! Now I have to pay like $60 for something that holds my front boobs but does absolutely nothing for my back boobs!! (oh the horror!! shock! gasp!) I never ever feel like the flawless victoria secret model when I put that on! what a scam!!

This stage finds me walking beside girlfriends going thru marriage struggles, divorces, miscarriages, financial stress, job loss, career change.  This season has me realizing I need to set boundaries for healthy relationships, that my health and well being isn't just for me anymore.  I have people under the same roof as me that count on me for their daily needs.  During this season I am most days overwhelmed with laundry and dishes, noticing the dust under the couch, resigned to one piece bathing suits and thinking about eliminating underwear completely to avoid all noted issues above.LMAO! Also I have noticed that when u are in your 40′s its totally an unwritten rule that you never go to a girlfriends house without wine and you never leave without drinking the whole bottle together.  Wine becomes a staple like salt on the dinner table, “and heres mommas wine”.  All of a sudden your drinking daily and its totally acceptable..LMAO.  Girls nights and impromptu vacations have turned into a family calendar that takes up a whole kitchen wall, gigs, events and activities are all written down.  We plan who’s in charge of finding a sitter and when gramma is coming back to us from vacation!! We do our best to squeeze things in , no one sleeps till noon anymore, there is always something to do.  Vacations circle around kids enjoyment and are never restful, but boy they are fun!!

So I have decided to prove to myself that age is just a number I have made a list of 40 things I want to do before I turn 40.  I made my vision board and have started making them happen and it feels so great for the self-care aspect of life.  I mean if we don't look after ourselves how on earth are we supposed to look after others.  This year before I turn 40 I just want to push myself a little bit harder to get to somewhere I have never been before. 40 is coming and it is coming fast!!  I want to make sure that everyday I am blessed with is the best day! that I am living my best life! Wish me luck! if I figure out how to post this, the list will follow..lol!!

[berrystrange]

Worth Dying For

Disclaimer: All characters belong to Pixelberry.

Pairing: Jake x MC (Rosie)

A/N: This is the result of me drinking several cups of coffee and missing Jake. I just can’t wait till ES 3 for Jake and MC to reunite so, I made them reunite on my own. Haha, the power of fanfiction. Also, there’s one line here, about the Jake McKenzie guarantee, I don’t really remember the actual promise or the chapter, I just made it a promise of staying alive because I think that’s what it was?

Rosie woke up, sweating and shaking from her nightmare. No, that wasn’t right. This wasn’t a nightmare concocted by her brain filled with imaginary demons. They’re memories, memories of the previous 2139 lifetimes she’d spent trapped in La Huerta.

The Endless hesitated giving her the memories but, she had insisted, stating that if she was to save everyone, she needed to know everything. She certainly regretted her choice now, as she suffered from nightmares. This, being the fifth night in a row.

Rosie sat up, careful not to awaken the Yvonne and the Endless. Uqzhaal left at her request a few days before, wanting to know whether anybody had reached Elyss’tel safely. She knew everyone was alive, the fact that the idols worked proof enough but, that doesn’t mean they’re safe.

Sighing, Rosie exited the cave, opting for a walk to free herself from her thoughts. The Endless has forbidden her from going too far from the cave, her still being too weak from the transfer of memories. But, she can go to the river close by.

Lying down by a patch of grass close to the river’s edge, Rosie gazed at the heavens above, the beauty of the La Huertan night sky providing little to no comfort to her aching heart. She missed her friends. These past few days have been nothing but practicing her new powers with the Endless, or if not that, French with Yvonne.

Rosie missed spending time with her friends, even Michelle’s constant comments about her clothing or Zahra calling her a noob. She missed sparring with Estela, talking with Quinn and Grace. She missed Raj’s cooking, Sean and Craig’s attempt to teach her football. She missed being with her best friend, Diego and his not-so-subtle nudges about her love life. Hell, she even missed Aleister. She still can’t forgive him for what he did back at the complex but now that she’s had time to think, she couldn’t entirely blame him for what he did. But most of all however, she missed her Top Gun.

Rosie sighed, her mind wandering over to Jake. She can’t believe that it’s been almost a week since she’d last seen him. She can still remember his face as she fell, his scream still ringing in her ears.

Rosie!

“He must think I’m dead…” Rosie said aloud, heart heavy by the thought. She was beyond ecstatic when he told her he loved her back at the tent that she couldn’t help saying it back. She was so certain that there was nothing she wanted more than spending the rest of her life with him, even if it meant being in Costa Rica with him. She loved him too much to care about where they were, as long as they were together. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

Rosie had told the Endless of her relationship with him, sparing no detail. She had been understanding of her desire to not leave him but, she warned her that her love may seal his fate. She didn’t believe her then but, looking over the memories of her previous lifetimes, it seemed like her love for Jake has caused only trouble for both of them. She can’t even begin to count the many times he’s died in order to save her. She had half a mind to stop loving him, just to keep him safe.

“But how can I do that? How can I just stop loving you, Jake?” The wind drowned her words, her tears drying.

“Don’t.”

Rosie sprang up, head turning at the voice she thought she’d never hear again. Her tears welled again, at the familiar sight of him.

“Jak-” Rosie’s words were cut short as Jake crashed his lips to hers, hands wrapping around her waist just as her hands burrow in his long hair. She eagerly responded to him, opening her mouth to him, surrendering herself completely to his kiss. They kiss for a long time, unwilling to let go even for a second, both afraid that this was just all a cruel illusion by their tired minds.

Eventually, they parted for lack of air, foreheads touching, still refusing to let go of each other.

“Jake, is it really you?” Rosie said, cupping his face, her eyes meeting his blue ones.

“Yeah, it’s me, princess.” Jake brushed his thumb over her cheek, a sad smile appearing on his face. Rosie could see the unshed tears as he whispered, “I thought I lost you.”

At his words, Rosie pressed her lips to his again, a mere whisper of a kiss, nothing like the ones they shared seconds earlier. “I’m here, Jake. I’m never going to leave you.”

“Then why were you talking about having to stop loving me?”

Rosie began, taking a deep breath to steel herself for what she was about to say. “There’s something I have to tell you, Jake. It’s about the Endless.”

“She’s you.”

Rosie stared at Jake as she processed his words. “Wait, how do you…”

“Uqzhaal told us on the way over. He also told us how we’re actually trapped in a cycle that’s lasted 2139 times and in those 2139 cycles, we’ve always died.” Jake answered, sitting down on the grass. After a heartbeat, Rosie moved to join him, their legs brushing against each other.

“Are you okay, Jake?”

“I really don’t know, princess. It’s kind of hard to believe that I’ve already died 2139 times and it just makes me feel… small.” Jake confessed, looking at her. Seeing her downcast expression, he smirked, nudging her knee. “But what I feel is nothing to what you must be feeling. How does it feel seeing a 2000-year old version of yourself? Is she hot?”

Rosie laughed, the first she’s done since she met the Endless. “Honestly, Top Gun, I do not age well.”

“Yikes.” Jake whistled. “Don’t worry, princess. I’m sure that I’m probably gonna look far worse if I was over 2000-years old. Maybe then you’ll stop loving me.”

Rosie bristled.

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed you haven’t yet answered my question, princess.” Rosie gazed across the river, focusing all her attention on the other side, stubbornly refusing to meet his eyes. “Princess, look at me.”

Rosie refused even as she felt Jake shifting to look directly at her. “Rosie, please…”

Damn it, Jake. Rosie cursed, unable to resist him whenever he calls her by her name. She turns to face him, noting that his normal easygoing nature was gone. “You said it yourself, Jake. You’ve died 2139 times already but, do you know how you died?”

Tears appear for the third time that night as Rosie remembers the various ways in which the man she loved has died. “I remember each and every single one of those times, Top Gun. And most of those times, you die because of me.”

Jake scowled at the news but, said nothing.

“Jake, I love you so much but… If you’re going to die because of that, then I’d rather not love you at all.”

Rosie’s words hung in the air, both unable to find words in response. She turned around, wiping the tears from her face. She’d finally said it, the words that have been weighing her down for days. All that’s left is for them to say goodbye to one another and hopefully, they’d-

“I’m sorry princess but, that’s not up to you.”

Stunned, Rosie turned back around to find Jake glaring at her. “Princess, love me or not love me, I’m still going to protect you. Even if you love someone else, even if you hate me, I’m still going to happily die if it means saving you.”

Jake’s eyes soften, seeing Rosie’s expression, his hand moving to tuck a stray strand of hair to her ear. He gives her a soft smile, the same smile he gave her when he told her he loved her. “I can’t choose how I die but, I can choose what I’m dying for. I thought I had that when I joined the air force, or when I met Mike. But, I was wrong. I didn’t know anything until I met you.”

Jake cupped Rosie’s face, meeting her eyes, his gaze filled with nothing but love. “Princess, I love you and for the first time in my life, I’ve found something worth dying for. So please, don’t ask me not to die for you because I can’t do that.”

“Jake, I can’t watch you die.” Rosie whispered, heart overflowing with emotions with his confession. “I’ve already seen you die over two thousand times. I can’t do it anymore.”

“Then, I won’t.” Jake moved closer to Rosie, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “Do you remember what I promised you?”

“A Jake McKenzie guarantee…” Rosie’s eyes widened, remembering his promise to stay alive for her.

“You’re worth dying for but more than that, you’re also worth living for, princess. I can’t wait for a future with you,” Jake kissed her on the cheek, “marrying you…” on the other cheek, “having a home together…” on her nose, “having kids with you…” on the corner of her lips, “growing old with you…”

Rosie was breathless as he finished, his lips just above hers. “Even if I don’t age well?”

Jake cracked a smirk. “Even if you grow up to look like the female version of Jabba the Hutt, I’d still do you.”

Rosie laughed before Jake finally kissed her.

Maybe Rosie, both the older version and her, was wrong. Maybe she didn’t have to give Jake up for him to live. The Endless said it herself, this is the first time they’ve reached this far. Maybe, just maybe… they can make it. They’ll be okay.

As they walk back to the others, hands clasped together, Rosie can’t help but feel something she hasn’t felt since the MASADA complex. She gazed over to Jake who met her eyes and smirked at her. She smiled at him in return, giggling as he kissed her again.

Finally, she had hope.

[rossjohnlungan]

Hello Philippines, hello mga ka bansa. My name is Ross John P. Lungan and I live in Benito Soliven Isabela. And I have different hobbies; Playing basketball, and watching movies. I also love cooking,and playing beat box. It is hard to express yourself hahahahahaha. But I will try my best to do this blog. More information about me. I'm the youngest in my family and I'm the tallest in my siblings and also in family of Lungan. My favorite subjects are Mathematics, Science and PE. Every individual have strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths is my family. Because my family is very supportive of what I'm doing now, like in my school they always cheering me up when I'm down and when I'm stress they always makes ne laugh and happy to forget all my problems especially in my schoolworks. They always motivate me to strive more in my school. Co'z it is for my own goods and in my future. And one of my weaknesses is also my family because I'm not comfortble if I don't see them. I'm sad or I feel bad if I don't see them. I can say that they are my weakness because, what will happen to me if they're not around. Yesss I can say that I'm indipendent but its different when you always see them. Because my environment here in Tuguegarao is differ from the environment in our house. Cut that DRAMA HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!. It's only a commercial but it is also a part of myself. Let's continue my blog. If I'm bored, I have the attitude that its better to sleep than to make a non sense things like GALA GALA HAHAHAHAHAHA. Atleast while you are sleeping it makes you comfortable and you get enough time to rest. Love yourself because HEALTH IS WEALTH. Your body and nutrition is your wealth. And after sleeping I go to the dining room and I will cook PANCIT CANTON for my snack hahahahaha. What a nice hobby sir!!!!hahahahaha. Then after eating I go to Municipal coliseum to have an exercise. Playing basketball is considered Exercising. More information about me. My name is came from a greek word "rosos" which means "handsome" hahahahaha I'm just kidding 😂😂😂. My name is came from my Father naming MARIO T. LUNGAN supported by my Mother naming LENI P. LUNGAN. That's my FATHER'S AND MOTHER'S NAME. I forgot, I'm 17 year of age and I have a girlfriend. But it doesn't mean that I will not focus on my studies. I know my priorities and having a relationship with others doesn't mean you can't finish your school. Its a motivation to strive more and to study well to get high grades for you to pay off all the efforts and sacrifices of our beloved parents and to make them proud and to have a better future. One of my goal is TO MAKE MY PARENT PROUD OF ME. Finish your college is the best gift to our beloved parents. I'm so proud of my mother because eventhough she is widowed she can handle our family and she gave our needs not only our needs but also our wants. My mother is my hero ❤❤❤. And for my conclusion "ALWAYS COME UP WITH A GOOD DECISON" CO'Z OUR DECISIONS ARE VERY IMPORTANT. IF WE MAKE A GOOD DECISION WE WILL NOT REGRET IN THE END. GOD BLESS US ALL 😇😇😇

Answer the following questions:

• Where do I see myself 10 years from now? Is my learning in SPUP vital to where I'm leading to?

- I see my self as a good public servant. Yes

• Was STEM the best choice after all?

- Yes because I know STEM strand will help me to pursue so my dreams in my life.

• What course will you take in college? Why?

- Seriously till now I can't decide of what course I will take in my college but I want to become a good public servant someday.

• What topic would you like to learn more in this subject?

- How to make an website and how to edit different pictures

• Ama ( ASK ME A QUESTION )

- HOW TO MAKE WEBSITES 😁

TECH-REVIEW

• CREATE A TECH REVIEW

CELLPHONE

• I chose cellphone because it has many purposes.

• You can use cellphone in communicating others.

• In your studying, in your assignments if you need to search you may use cellphone.

• You can watch movies and you can downloads all your wants but remember the internet tips.

• You can make an power point. If you don't have laptop, you may use cellphone. Then after making your power point you can transfer it in a flashdrive. To copy it in the laptop for your power point presentation

• Cellphones can also use in editing such as videos, pictures, etc.

• May you use cellphones in taking a picture not only in taking a pictures it can also use in shooting if you don't have DSLR, GO PRO or other technology may use in making a movie.

• But remember, cellphone has disadvantages. Users get addicted especially online games. Students may fail in their subjects, get a low grades because they are addicted in playing online games. Most of us especially students who addicted in their gadgets, when they wake up the first thing they do is to check their social media accounts and texting their girlfriends/boyfriends. We are becoming lazy interms house hold task, reviewing our lessons, making our assignments. And because of too much addiction in using our cellphone or gadgets, we can't avoid using of cellphones.

• Using cellphones or having a cellphones have so many advantages but I will not mention it anymore.

Blogpost 3-5

Room

In a room, there was a mother and a child. The child name is Jack. Ever since Jack was born he wasn’t go outside the room. He didn’t see real trees, real rivers, real animals and he also didn’t see other people except her Mom and Dad. Yes, he has a Dad. His Dad was the one who always locked that room and he is the one who knows the code of the door that’swhy Jack and his Mother cannot go outside.

As years passed by, Jack wanted see real trees, real rivers and animals but his Mother cannot find a way for Jack to go outside.

Enable for them to escape from the room, Jack’s Mother has a plan. Jack will play sick so that if his Father came home he will found out that Jack is really not and he need to go to the hospital and in that way Jack can call help but that plan failed

The next thing that Jack’s Mother plan is that Jack will play dead. Before Jack’s Father cake home, his Mother trained him what to do. That plan succeed. And his Dad convinced that he is died. The Father carries his son rolled with a floor mat to the room from his car to bring him to the hospital. While driving Jack escaped from the car and there is someone who help him and call a police.

And from that, the police officer also find his Mother. And they live freely outside that room.

Guied questions:

1. What life lessons can be learned from the movie?

The moral lesson I learned from the movie is that, lesson to love the people around you and don’t you ever take away their nights to live free.

2. What part of the story told by the movie was the most powerful? Why?

The most powerful part in the movie is that Jack escape from his Father’s car while driving and he call for help. I found it powerful because eventhough Jack’s life is it in danger, he find a way to call help just for his mother to escape too.

3. Who was your favorite character in the movie?

My favorite character is Jack’s Mother. Because she will do everything just for her son to escape from that room.

4. Did anything that happened in the movie remind you of something that has occurred in your own life or that you have seen occur to others?

From the current situation, the others find a way ti escape from the hard situation they face right now they’re ready to do everything for their love ones to have a good life free from any harm.

5. If you had a chance to ask a character in this movie a question, what would it be?

If I had chance to ask a character in this movie I will ask Jack’s Father and that would be... Why did he do that to his Family?

Miracles from Heaven

There was a family named Bean family who always praise God together. Family that always do good things. But one day their 2nd daughter, Anna got sick. And that sickness challenge their faith to God especially her Mother, Kristy. They go into different hospitals in Texas but no doctor can tell them the condition of Anna.

Until Kristy was searching online and she saw Boston's children hospital. She started contacting the doctor who are in charge for the new patient.

Several months later, Anna's condition is still the same and because of this, most of their assets are sold. By that, they decided to take home Anna.

One day, while Kristy have a phone call, Abbie, the first child of Kristy ask Anna to play with her.

They so big and old tree in front of their house and they decided to climb on it. While they are sitting in a branch, the tree is suddenly cracked so Abbie told Anna to get away from it. Accidentally, Anna fall inside the tree. After a few hours, the Police came and they got Anna.

And there's a miracles. After falling from above 30 feet the doctor says Anna is alright. No scratch and no fracture. The other day, Kristy observed that Anna's condition is becoming well. So they go to the Boston's children hospital again to make sure if Anna is really in a good condition. And the doctor says " She is".

Because of that, they will praising God together again and they share experiencesto others and serve as an inspiration to others.

1. What life lesson can be learned from the movie?

Guide questions:

Don't lose hope and always have faith to God because nothing is impossible.

2. What partbof the story told by the movie was the most powerful? Why?

The most powerful part of the movie is that Anna got sick. This is the beginning that the characters struggled. And by this, it serves as an inspiration to everyone because it shows there the things that they must do when hard situations come.

3. Who was your favorite character in the movie? Why?

My favorite character in the movie is Kristy, the Mother of Anna. Because eventhough the situation challenge her faith to God she always keep praying. Ang she will do everything for the seek of her daughter.

4. Did anything that happened in the movie remind you of something that has occured in your own life or that you have seen occur to others?

Many people experiencing struggles in life and also me. I was young my Grandmother had a stroke. I felt aad in that time because I guess that would be her last time in this world but becuase of faith she survived and until now she is alive.

5. If you had a chance to ask character in this movie a question, what would it be?

If I had a chance to ask a character in this movie that would be Anna Beam and the question that I will going to ask her would be... " When she got seek, is there a time in her life that she wants to GIVE UP"

Wonder

There was a child named Anggie. He is not that Handsome and he is not that ugly, it just that he has a survey from his face because when he was born it has a caplication and it causes 27 surgeries for him to survive.

When he became older, he always had a home-schooling and he never experiencedgoing to school himself. At his fifth-grade his parents decided to go him in school.

At the first day of school, he experienced discrimination from the others because of his face. But behind these, Anggie keep studying so that he will excel.

As they passed by, Anggie had a friend named Jack will. They ate very close. In Halloween day, Anggie hear that Jack will is a backfighter. And from that Anggie don't want to trust anybody again. There was no days that Anggie didn't encounter discrimination and bullying.

Here come a child named Summer. She decided to haved friends with Anggie. At first Anggie don't want to because of what happened to Jack but at last he said yes.

But that, Jack realizes his fault so he said sorry to Anggie and ask him if they can be friends again and Anggie said " okay "

Anggie came through many discrimination but he used this as a inspiration to graduate with an award.

Answers:

1. The moral lesson is that NEVER GIVE UP

2. The most powerful is that when Anggie graduated with an award. Because it shows there that eventhough other people discriminating you never give up. And in the end you will succeed. It doesn't matter what you look like but it matters how you treat other people.

3. My favorite character in the movie is Anggie. Because he didn't let other people to push him down, unless he used them as inspiration to reached his goal

4. My brother, they always bully him because of his body and the way he play in basketball game. Until now they always bully him when we are playing.

5. Anggie. "Did you try to report them in the Principal's office?"