#since I think it’s canonically stated that souls of vessels keep on living in his subconsciousness

[rae-irien-kimura]

Something not of this world.

[somelazyassartist]

Seems interesting but unlikely, since he dropped his family (Napstablook certainly didn't do anything wrong) because he was more focused on his own self-interests.

Actually, I'd have to disagree with you!

While yes, Mettaton is quite self-serving at times (and very full of himself), his goals weren't purely selfish and there is canon-based reasoning one might think that he knows about the True Lab!

Okay first off, just addressing the point of "he dropped his family because he was now focused on his own self-interests", which I suppose you could maybe view it like that, but even if you don't take his diaries as gospel Deltarune helps emphasize just how depressed he was back then. His diaries tell you that one of their only friends had just lost a sister and had become very closed-off, and that their other cousin had left to become corporeal, so he was more or less alone in his house with very few people to reach out to. He also states that he's effectively stuck in the closet and dreams of coming out but didn't have the opportunity to until Alphys came along (highlighted by Deltarune where the two don't know each other- Mettaton is so dysphoric that he refuses to leave the house or show his face in any regard, stating that he's "a nobody"). He didn't just leave Blooky for no reason, he left because he was insanely depressed and in the closet and finally had an opportunity to be himself and better his mental health, and he very clearly misses them, immediately shows remorse when Blooky calls him on his show, and the MINUTE the game ends he goes to reunite with them (he didn't even stay to see the surface with everyone despite that having been his entire goal throughout the game because he misses his cousin that much! Was it awful to Blooky for him to run away from home without warning? Yes!! He's a flawed character!! But he has legitimate reasons for why and tries to make up for it as fast as he's able to!

And then barring all that, there is some reason to theorize that their falling out could've been because he found out about the True Lab! He mentions that Alphys "acts like the good person he knows she's not" (implying he has some specifically negative history with her other than just leaving for stardom) and at the end of the game he says "she's trying to make things right- about time, haha!" Which means he knew about and was waiting for her to fix whatever it is he knew she did wrong. Bratty and Catty imply that Mettaton was somewhat of a test-run for the True Lab's experiments (though it's somewhat implied through his dialogue he wasn't aware of those intentions initially and found out later), with him being an artificial vessel for a living soul and helping Alphys get Asgore's approval to attempt making vessels for dying souls. Mettaton's hiding place in his quiz show appearance is directly next to the elevator shaft to the True Lab so there's absolutely no way he wouldn't have seen it and there's no way she would've let him hide there if she was trying to keep it a secret from him still, since she actively tries to hide any knowledge of it away. We know he left before she could finish his EX form (presumably also the reason he only has one eye), and that he stopped talking to her a bit before Lab Entry #11 (which based on the other entries before still gives a decent chunk of time between the start of the Determination experiments and their falling out- while the victims hadn't fully become amalgamations yet, they had started the process according to entry #10). Not to mention that he has a personal relationship with at least two of the victims; he used to be friends with Shyren (whose sister was one of the victims) and Snowdrake's father works as the comedian at his hotel (whose wife was one of the victims) so that would give him a personal reason to stop being friends with her if you feel like he's too selfish to be opposed to the experiments by themselves. Not to mention we know he wasn't actually invested in being Alphys' cover story during the game and simply played along, which also taking into account Alphys' high-valued relationship with Asgore based around the fact that Mettaton exists in the first place, would make sense that he doesn't want to outwardly defy them; if Mettaton gets sent to the dungeon for treason he wouldn't be able to stop Asgore from reigniting the war and if Alphys could no longer point to Mettaton as a "successful experiment" to give her enough credibility to keep working with Determination Asgore most likely would have set her aside and gone after the human himself since his last hope before that option had failed, again reigniting the war. While it's not explicitly stated this is why Mettaton stopped being friends with her, it's not out of the question to think it could be a possibility!

[popurikat]

Trying to make sense of parts of Future (Mystery Skulls)

Since my last analysis went so well I thought I’d make this post as well, especially because Future really did confuse me and I know others might be lost as well; so lets discuss this together! It will be lengthy as I am basically spewing my thoughts out right on the videos immediate release date (there will be a read more option after my first thought to avoid long positng). Well first things first, I wanna address that I've been curious about what kind of spirit Arthur's arm could be (since I am not too well acquainted with any canon on its background part at least) and I think I have concluded that the closest thing to it could be is a Tenome; which is a Yochai that possesses a man's body and moves the eyes to the palms. "found lurking in cemeteries, hands outstretched, as if he has only recently lost his vision and is searching for something. Get close enough, and you’ll find out in quick succession that a) he’s not blind, but looking with eyes embedded in his hands, and b) what he’s looking for is a snack." (fyi, most of my mythos information is coming from Wiki just as a heads up)

And sure enough he found a great source for his hunger. Something he has been EYEING since the start. Which now leads me to my next points on the video...

At first watch I was convinced that each strand found on Mystery’s heart represented a singular soul bond, I thought that blue was for Vivi, Green was for the hand, pink for Lewis, purple for Shiro, Yellow for Lance, Orange for Arthur, and black and white were unknown. Which, didn’t settle right for me. SO I went in and re-watched the clip a couple more times and saw this:

Vivi’s (blue created after she got hurt) and Shiro’s (white created after she died) strands were connected to the strands located next to them. A start and an end. Mystery’s promise to Vivi to stay at her side for generations as he was spared upon prior defeat of Mushi. And then of course we have the promise of power and sustenance for Shrio as they held a symbiotic relationship for most of their lives that was only severed due to an interference. These double strands of fate are especially clearer in the scene with Shiro in Future. As the black strand gets clearer the more she gets injured or emotionally hurt, it eventually leads to the leak of the white strand on her death. Meaning; Black/white=Shiro; Purple/Pink=Lewis; Blue/Green: Vivi; and Orange/Yellow: Arthur. And why am I inclined to believe Lewis and Arthur are apart of Mystery’s heart? Well that's because those two were the only ones fully streaming before Vivi’s and Shiro’s appeared. We know that Arthur lost an arm to Mystery and discovered his identity (ergo losing most of his trust in him) insinuating both strands to arise early on of his color scheme, as well as with Lewis’ death occurring under the protection of Mystery when they were grouped and having his soul go restless/ in pain. It wouldn’t make sense to add family members or side characters not included in the mainline story to this grouping unless they would play an important role in the finale, which isn’t likely since we have only one more video left as Ben stated it was going to be a 5 video series. I am also inclined to believe each person has two strands because of Kitsune lore: “ Kitsune keep their promises and strive to repay any favor. Occasionally a kitsune attaches itself to a person or household. They follow their word of honor. They become self-destructive if they break a promise, and when someone else breaks a promise, they become deadly enemies.” Plus, It would make sense as to why in this short battle Mystery sprouted his last 3 tails when it came to Vivi and Shiro and how their connections affect his power. (more on this in a bit) But, furthermore; if anyone else notices, the Band-Aids on the heart are also remotely located on the sections of Vivi’s and Shiro’s strands specifically because for both, Mystery has vowed to protect them and has failed. 

Now then lets talk about a few things on Mystery’s ultimate form shall we? The final form of a Kitsune, its celestial form as shown here is called a Tenko. (yes I am aware of the Kumiho, but that is a fully evil, flesh eating, 9 tailed fox that specialize in illusions and well Mystery has never been portrayed as human). The Tenko makes even more sense when taken into consideration that Mystery’s third eye (typically a form of wisdom connected to overpowering the mortality of ones self) opens. So how was this done in such a short amount of time? “Kitsune do not accept aid from those who are not willing. they do not ask for help, and as such, most aid must come from another's initiative. Kitsune are emotional and very vengeful. Kitsune will lose their temper at the slightest provocation. Once someone has earned a kitsune's enmity, the kitsune will begin enacting revenge that can become quite extreme. On the other hand, those who have earned a kitsune's trust and loyalty will see a friendship that can last through many trials. Freedom is very important to the kitsune. They do not accept being forced into something they do not wish, and do not like being bound or trapped. Doing so weakens the kitsune.” Mystery as we know is very much controlled by his emotions, going head first into things constantly based on reaction and his inability to control his power under distress. His tails arose in the fight sequence every time he fulfilled his oath AND used 100% of his form/power. Therefore, his tails grew because he wasn’t holding back anymore, not his grievances, not his appearance, nor his hesitance in his evident distress of being bound to two entities that both required his aid.  My last note on these images comes from a tumblr user’s reverse audio clipping (https://nebulous-rain.tumblr.com/post/633555549749952512/ok-so-yknow-that-one-reversed-part-of-future). The rewind of the clip of Mystery’s transformation plays “When I’m With You”, which yes, cool a possible Easter egg to the next song! BUT what is this song about? Let me just bring up the first line of the song: “You got me hanging by a THREAD...I wish I could turn back time...I wish I could rewind life...” and before the chorus “I’m gonna make it right”. We know that this can refer to rectifying the wrongs of Lewis’ death, but more accurately to do so we need to defeat the evil inside this mutt that is pulling the strings of this whole fiasco. And this might just be the intro portion of the next mystery skulls mind you as we’ve also gotten many false starts with the previous two videos where hellbent used “every note” and future used “enemies” alongside the main song. BUT WE HAVE TWO YEARS ANYWAY, WHY BABBLE ON ABOUT THIS. LETS MOVE ON!

Hearts in this series have not been just for identifying the dead or for aesthetic purposes, they are the life force of each powerful legend. I am actually surprised to see Shiro have a heart as she started off as a creation from Mystery and therefore her lifeforce is just his blood and without it she is nothing. I am curious about her color pallet though, her heart is purple and pink. Lewis’ is gold/yellow with touches of orange. And Mystery’s is just red, but it has a mix of everyone’s essence within it to keep it tied and whole. Shiro’s could be colored this way in reference to Lewis’ aid to help find her creator; which would explain why Mystery surrounds himself by color as he required outside help and how Lewis’ heart is yellow in reference to how recently Arthur helped him remember his friends/hidden memories. One thing we have learned about hearts is that they can be broken repeatedly and can be ripped apart from the body, but they can be repaired too through resolution/hope. Lewis restored his heart in hellbent by using Vivi’s flower petals and finding hope that he will get revenge, only for his heart to be repaired again through Arthur’s touch. Shiro may have withered away, but her heart is essentially not broken, she’d need Mystery to restore it as it was flung into space (and that again relies on Mystery finding his sanity and finding it in himself to even bring her back). And as for Mystery himself, he’s gonna need the whole gang to reach out to him to extract the parasite within and restore balance. I really want to know more about the heart properties and how they give their users their powers as well Vivi is able to summon her strength through a material connection (bat) that function in its own way as the vessel a heart does since its connecting her to her ancestry.

NOW to finalize, I offer you two queries:

WHO IS ARTHURS HAND REACHING FOR!? I know it seems like Mystery, but that would be counter productive for the hand demon if he has Arthur interfering with his control. Is it still after Lewis as we’ve seen previous times where his arm acts up only in Lewis’ presence and when specifically other “magic” is at play? If so, is the goal to ward off Lewis and Vivi from defeating Mystery? Is Arthur gonna use the arm to find his own power as we’ve seen when he is able to momentarily cease control of it he kinda ruins anything electrical he touches and well, electricity is currently running rampant in there.

and lastly, I am really curious how touch sensitive hearts are, We know that even the smallest of brushes can detect memory/links to the person holding it (as seen with how Shiro managed to get soul flowers in hellbent), but the fact that Lewis was so in touch with the feeling of Arthur EVEN THOUGH ARTHUR GRABBED HIS HEART THROUGH HIS METAL HAND MIND YOU!, that he still managed to feel the disturbance instantly. So my question is, is the touch sensitivity reliant on how close someone is to someone? I would like to say yes cause when Shiro touched his heart he didn’t react instantly, he felt her rummaging his memories and was awoken, but he didn’t kick her butt by fully reforming until after she had long since stepped on his heart and then forced the memory of Mystery to arise. But yeah, its a nice little detail.

Either way, thanks for reading! Feel free to add on, comment, or even dm me about more Mystery Skulls information and theories! Love to hear them!

[umbralstars]

Sothis, the Church of Seiros and Byleth: A Pagan Reading

Due to L!Byleth and the minor hyperfixation he caused I decided to make a whole discussion on how I personally view Sothis, the Church of Seiros as a whole, and examine Byleth's role in the story.

So just some ground rules before I begin:

This is just how I personally viewed the story as I played it, and my own perspective on the plot and meaning behind certain things. I am open to discussion in the comments and reblogs, and if you disagree with my opinion that's perfectly fine. Also so much of this is going to read like headcanons/assumptions loosely supported by canon's thin red strings and I am ok with that.

If any in-game quotes are used they will mostly come from the Church Library since it's easy to check but I'll paraphrase important scenes that I can remember.

Also after compiling a timeline of events best I can understand it I have made a few assumptions: worship of Sothis existed before the Church of Seiros (perhaps even going as far back as pre-Calamity times) and thus Church doctrine and beliefs is largely based upon previously established beliefs about the Goddess. This doesn't have too much to do with the analysis itself, but I just wanted to say it as I quote The Book of Seiros parts a few times and the writings in those books I hold to have a basis in that pre-Church faith.

With those in place, allow me to begin.

The Sothis/Church of Seiros Meta:

While there have been many metas comparing Sothis and the Church to medieval Christianity, I have always looked at them both through a distinctly non-Christian, Pagan lense. 

I myself am a syncretic polytheist who has a complicated history with Southern Baptists. These two core aspects of my spiritual life does color my perceptions of the religion presented in this game and I am fully aware of that. Three Houses came at a time in my life where I was finally seperating myself from my latent Christianity, and exercising my Pagan goggles on this was a major step I took towards that. My intention here isn't to say that Christian coding doesn't exist, but to simply give my ideas and perspective on the religion presented in this game.

First, allow me to give the define the Gods through the lense of a Pagan as it's important to the framing of my ideas:

"The Gods are real, sentient, disembodied minds with awesome greatness and powers beyond what we humans can currently explain with science."

This is the simplest, shortest definition of the Gods I can give and Sothis, beyond a shadow of a doubt, hits all of the criteria as she is presented in the game. The Pagan conception of the Gods does not require any pretense of tri-omnism, and I believe it's best to look at Sothis, and many other FE Gods, through this lense. Sothis, when she was alive and even when she is "dead," is capable of amazing feats such as creating life, turning back time in a limited capacity, and restoring entire continents to life after calamity. While she is not tri-omni, she does not need to be so to be a Goddess and one worthy of worship and reverence.  

Church doctrine itself also exhibits other fundamental aspects of Pagan practice and belief that are important to me and many others: animism and the reciprocity cycle. As stated by The Book of Seiros, Part 1,

"The Revelation.The Goddess is all things. She is heaven above and the land below. She is eternity incarnate. She is the present, the past, and the future. Her eyes see all. Her ears hear all. Her hands receive all."

Obvious allusions to omnipresence aside, another reading of this passage is a far more esoteric, and hard to put into words, aspect of Pagan belief about the Gods. In a sense , the Gods are not limited by the physical constraints of the world and their bodies are inherently an aspect of the very universe itself. They are not omnipresent at all times, but they can be wherever they wish to be especially wherever their presence and power is strongest. That is actually the purpose of idols, alters, and temples. The Gods are not idols or are bound by them, those things are simply repositories to allow us humans to connect with and worship them. 

The natural world as well can be the "body" of a God. Places where their spirits decide to dwell. Natural phenomenon one can feel their presence in. They are not limited to these places, but upkeep of them is necessary to maintain their power and spirit. In this way that passage can be read as Fodlan and the Blue Sea Star being the places where Sothis' spirit chooses to reside along with her actual remains needing to be maintained to keep her spirit maintained. Her sacred body likely extends across all of Fodlan and her spirit resides most strongly as the Blue Sea Star.

Gods in FE also, more often than not, have a physical body that is important for their connection to the physical world. FE Gods are not incapable of interacting with or watching over the physical world from the spiritual, but have much more free reign when their physical body is alive. The places where their bodies are buried are where their power is most heavily felt, and their spirits the strongest, as evidenced by the Mila Tree and the Good Ending of Future Past in Awakening. This what I believe the true purpose of the Sealed Forest to be. Given how protective Rhea is of the place, the strange alter and Crest of Flames that is just there, and that being where Byleth awakens and Sothis remembers, either parts or the entire rest of Sothis' physical body must be buried there and not actually in the Holy Tomb.

As an aside, the remains of the Nabateans can also be seen through this lense but to a lesser degree. It's obvious that parts of their souls and power remain with their bodies, and thus, maintaining the Relics, Crestsones, and the other Nabatean remains not fashioned into weapons would be of utmost importance to Rhea. Because, if they were to be lost or damaged her kin's spirits may forever be lost to the physical world. 

Fodlan being the sacred body of Sothis is also why I believe the Church of Seiros to be an ethnic religion and a henotheistic one to the people of Fodlan. The Goddess is only ever credited in the creation story and a lot of other Church doctrines as having created and choosing Fodlan as her sacred ground. The people of Fodlan likewise are seen as her sacred people. Nothing in Church doctrine says that Sothis is the only God to exist and I truly cannot remember a single instance where anyone says other religions outside the Church are false ones. Hence why I say Fodlanders are henotheistic, where they do not deny the existence of other Gods, but Sothis is the most important and only one worshipped by them. To the people of Fodlan as long as foreigners do not deny her existence and those of Fodlandic descent worship her as they should there is no cause for an uproar.

This is not to say other religions can be practiced freely on Sothis' sacred ground, as evidenced by the women in Abyss who says she worships there "because Abyss is where it is allowed." Along with Atheism among Fodlanders to be a taboo in their societies. Whilst I don't see the Church to be a beacon of religious tolerance (or that Fodlanders don't believe their religion to be the best), I also do not believe them to be proselytizers to places outside of Fodlan. 

The reciprocity cycle also has a place within Church doctrine. The Book of Seiros, Part V describes the various commandments Sothis gave to her people and how if they abide by them the Goddess pays the people back with blessings and gifts. Textbook reciprocity is doing something for the Gods, such as sacrifice or ritual, and gaining something back in return or the Gods do something for you and you give back to them in turn. Reciprocity can be as simple as giving thanks for the blessings the Gods give or complex as full ritual, sacrifice, and or prayer to gain a blessing/aid or give thanks for one. The best case of reciprocity I see in game is the restoration quest for the Saint Statues. Whilst the Saints are complicated in how I believe their divinity is handled there is no doubt the player receives blessings from them for restoring their icons. 

(While I would like to devote an entire section to them and the Nabateans in general like 80 - 90% of my ideas are headcanon that I'm still not sure of. I don't think the Nabateans are Gods like Sothis is however immortal or long-lived they may be. I also still don't know whether the Saints would be worshiped or venerated in the Church, as I still don't understand the distinction of those two things myself, so I don't want to make a judgement call).

What about Byleth?

Byleth...is tricky. Now, I must preface, that all of this is my opinion. Some of it may not be supported by the game, but this is how I personally write him and his status regarding everything we see in game.

Byleth is, for all intents and purposes, the 13th potential vessel for Sothis to return to the world as they were given Sothis' Creststone on the request of Sitri. Here's the thing. I personally do not believe that Sothis is truly dead or that Byleth manifested her consciousness on happenstance.  It has been my personal belief ever since playing the game for the first time that Sothis' spirit does indeed reside in the heavens and that the piece of Sothis that resides in Byleth until his awakening is only a fragment. Along with that I believe that Sothis' consciousness and power manifested in Byleth specifically because Sothis wished for it to be so.

My ideas are centered around a few aspects of the game that have always stood out to me as rather strange if kept in line with the larger context.

Why after all this time and Rhea's many attempts did Sothis manifest in a stillborn child?

How was Sothis able to speak to Byleth and wake him after his 5 year coma?

Why does Byleth loose the Goddess' power at the end of Crimson Flower?

How was Sothis able to speak to Byleth if you choose to S-Support her?

How exactly was Byleth able to dream about something that happened long after Sothis' death even if he can access her memories?

These sticking points have always struck as odd given everything that Sothis says before Byleth's awakening. Sothis should not be able to speak to Byleth at all, but still does so only a few chapters later and comments on the war that Byleth was only privy to the very beginning of.

Hence my belief that Sothis' spirit as the Goddess of Fodlan does reside in the heavens, watching over the continent, and only able to interact with it and its people in subtle ways. Some of her spirit and power laid within her Creststone as it passed from vessel to vessel. One way or another, she was able to foresee the coming war that would change Fodlan fundamentally forever and chose to manifest that piece of her consciousness when the opportunity presented itself. It's why Byleth can dream of a battle that happened long after Sothis' death because he's remembering something experienced by the Creststone and knowledge given by the Goddess soul who resides in heaven.

I also believe that Byleth and Sothis as we saw them during the game was a mistake in some way. Byleth as his own entity was likely not supposed to be and the piece of Sothis' soul that was supposed to manifest wasn't supposed to be amnesiatic or at the very least not separate from Byleth. There were a few times pre-time skip where Sothis would be talking and Byleth's model would be moving and his facial expression changing. Almost like their thoughts were so intertwined that they were practically the same even before the awakening. It's very likely to me that Byleth's memory issues, lack of ability to properly express emotions, and other aspects of their character to be directly connected to the fact that Sothis' soul manifested incorrectly.

The Sothis he hears before waking from his coma and the one he speaks to during his S support is likely the full spirit of the Goddess communicating with him through great effort and only able to because he's her avatar. She knows of the pain Fodlan is experiencing because she can see it and feel it even as Byleth slumbers. Same thing for why Byleth would lose her power and soul piece on Crimson Flower, as Sothis may have interpreted siding with Edelgard as a rejection of being her avatar and simply deciding to be human instead (I don't wish to speak too long on a route I don't particularly like, but I felt that strange ending should be addressed).

My experience as someone who follows a Kemetic path leads me to not see Sothis' soul being split in this way as strange. In this particular religion, as I understand it, the soul is encompassed as multiple different parts all combining to make a singular being. Both Gods and humans have multiple parts to their souls, so one residing in the Creststone, later manifesting in Byleth, and another part residing in the heavens is plausible to me. Also if I wanted to compare Byleth to another FE character, his situation reminds me most of Nagi from FE 11 & 12 who is an amnesiac and likely an incarnation of Naga to aid Marth on his quest. Nagi doesn't get much characterization in those games, but it does show that incarnations/avatar of Gods, who aren't the confusing mess of Robin and Grima for instance, isn't a new concept in series for Byleth.

In terms of what happens after Byleth awakens I do believe that Byleth himself becomes a God or at the very least a demi-god in his own right. As it was Byleth absorbing the piece of Sothis' soul into his own, the Goddess' power was inherited by him alone. The inner turmoil caused by two souls sharing one body finally ceased and Byleth was fundamentally changed becoming, well, an Enlightened One. As the game doesn't really explore Sothis and Byleth much post-Time Skip, due to the war taking precedence and Byleth's unfortunate existence as a silent protag, how exactly he changes is up to personal interpretation. I personally believe he gained not only Sothis' power but some of Sothis' memories and insight that the Creststone soul piece had. He also gained greater control and range of emotional expression and probably took on some of the characteristics Sothis had. 

Byleth is both an avatar of the Goddess and his own person at the same time. He is and is not Sothis.

[gusu-emilu]

Whumptober 2021 Day 1: “You have to let go”

Fandom: MDZS/CQL Ship: Mo Xuanyu / Nie Huaisang Rating: T, Major Character Death Wordcount: 1166 Tags: Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Angst, Implied Sexual Content, Grief/Mourning, Canonical Character Death

He and Mo Xuanyu have always been meant to part ways in the end.

"You have to let go," Huaisang tells the trembling figure in front of him.

The young man hangs his head, disheveled hair draping over his face. He leans forward as if to bury himself in Huaisang's chest, but not close enough for his face to touch Huaisang’s robes.

A lacquered wooden makeup case rattles in the young man’s hands as his fingers abuse its lid. The makeup case is empty, save for a trace of crimson dust. Several other empty cases litter the ground like bodies cut open after an ambush. They surround the name Mo Xuanyu and a collection of obscene words written in stark red and white on the ground. The sneering voices of Jin cultivators, long since gone, still slither through the air around them, as if crawling out of the crude letters they smeared into the ground.

So this is Jin Guangyao’s newly-discovered brother.

Huaisang feels a sharp pang of sympathy for Mo Xuanyu. To have his passions strewn to the floor, to be looked down upon and mocked, to feel alone in his own sect...

"It's alright," Huaisang says gently, not for the first time. "They're gone now."

But despite his coaxing, Mo Xuanyu still refuses to uncurl his fingers from the case in his hands, still refuses to speak or look him in the eye. Maybe Huaisang should leave.

"How about I give you some of my cosmetics?" he tries.

Mo Xuanyu grips the case harder. "Why...why would you do that?"

Well, that's progress.

Huaisang rests the edge of his fan on the makeup case. Mo Xuanyu flinches and looks up. Rage flashes through his eyes before mellowing to puppy-like sadness and confusion.

Even in this state of disarray, the white powder on his face wet, red streaks smearing down over his cheekbones, Mo Xuanyu is beautiful.

But Huaisang doesn't miss the startling forcefulness of that flash of anger, steely and concentrated like the tension of a wrought bow. He wouldn't have expected such rage from someone who seems to want to make himself as small as possible.

Mo Xuanyu is miserable.

Luckily for both of them, misery loves company.

"Consider it a gift of initiation," Huaisang finally answers.

"Initiation of...what?"

Huaisang slips a jade powder case from his sleeve and holds it out. Opening his fan with a spirited snap, he smiles and cocks an eyebrow. "Initiation of our friendship, of course."

Mo Xuanyu stares wide-eyed at the powder case and its intricate design of swirling patterns and twin magpies. He blinks, and the faintest smile appears on his lips.

He reaches for the case.

* * *

"A-Yu!" Huaisang says through laughter. "You have to let go!"

Giggling, Mo Xuanyu hugs the bundle of Huaisang's robes against his bare body and dodges out of Huaisang's reach. His grin becomes sharper when he's mischievous like this, his movements more resolute than his usual delicacy. He is something totally other when he is smiling and cheerful, transforming like a tattered sheet of paper folded into the shape of a crane.

Huaisang can't hold back his grin. "Give me my robes back!"

"Not unless we stay here a little longer."

"You do realize that it must be for something important if it's me, of all people, who wants to get out of bed."

"It's that important?" Mo Xuanyu asks, caught off guard.

Huaisang shrugs. "Maybe not. I don't know." He relents and lies back down, letting Mo Xuanyu happily join him once more.

Breathes in the giddiness that masks the truth of their relationship, lets the comfort drown out his thoughts.

Huaisang knows their joyful moments together are fleeting. Mo Xuanyu will return to his place of scorn in Jinlintai and resume his secret studies of demonic cultivation. Huaisang will return to Qinghe and do his best to keep Da-ge’s mind from splitting along the lines that Baxia has carved into him.

Even without their separateness of their lives, Huaisang’s relationship with Mo Xuanyu will never be appropriate to make public. And, Huaisang tells himself, it is not that significant of a relationship anyway. Just a fling. Just some fun.

He tries not to let himself feel too much, tries not to become too attached. He knows it’s selfish to toy with someone whose life is so precarious, someone so fundamentally alone.

But he and Mo Xuanyu have always been meant to part ways in the end.

* * *

"You have to let it go," Jin Guangyao says, hand on Huaisang's shoulder.

Huaisang wants to cut off that hand. Cut off the fingers that plucked deceit on guqin strings. Cut off his whole arm.

For that, Huaisang would pick up a saber. Would touch one of those cursed blades that poisoned Da-ge.

But he won't.

Not like that.

Huaisang clenches his teeth and swallows the bile, lets Jin Guangyao's palm sink into his shoulder, smiles and nods and plays nice and plays dumb for "San-ge."

For now, he lets it go.

* * *

Huaisang is in bed with Mo Xuanyu, drowning out his grief, when he has the idea to let his lover go.

His mind makes the connections in a flash as his heart sinks, the last piece of his plan fitting into place like a missing bone from a skeleton, like the final word of a curse.

Mo Xuanyu’s kiss seems to burn his lips that night.

Huaisang would call himself a selfish man, but he and Mo Xuanyu have always been meant to part ways in the end.

* * *

You have to let go, he tells himself when he finds Mo Xuanyu slumped over in a shack, clothes in tatters, blood weeping from his wrists.

This time, Mo Xuanyu hangs his head, but not against Huaisang's chest. This time, hideous crimson writing is scrawled on the ground around him, written not in Mo Xuanyu's cosmetic powder, but in his own blood, by his own hand.

This time, Mo Xuanyu offered the gift.

Why did you do it? Huaisang wants to ask, but knows the answer like it's written into his skin with the blood of the soul he helped kill.

* * *

As Huaisang sits alone in his room, he holds Mo Xuanyu’s jade powder case—the same powder case he had gifted to him when they first met—and thinks.

Mo Xuanyu had been consumed by revenge. Had let it take his body like a fire devours through a forest, stripping it dry, leaving only black, brittle remains of what had once been.

Had burned out in a flash and left the ashes for Huaisang to hold onto.

Huaisang can easily take things for granted, can easily throw away a vessel for happiness—he had always been selfish and only grown more callous each time something had slipped through his fingers and left cuts behind—

But they are invisible cuts, of course.

It is with smooth, unblemished skin that Huaisang caresses the carvings of Mo Xuanyu's powder case. Cradles the relic with clean hands.

Yet those hands are shaking.

Shaking, they refuse to let go...

[phynali]

Dean’s Body as a Punching Bag

Ever since I made this post about Sam and (his lack of) bodily autonomy (as well as the follow-up post that carries the theme through the other 10 seasons), I’ve been trying to determine what the corollary for Dean is. Re-watching 5x01 made it jump out at me in a huge way:

The bodies of the people that Dean loves are consistently used in a way that hurts/harms Dean and metes out violence against him. And it is specifically his loved ones’ bodies themselves, not shapeshifters or lookalikes or Leviathan either. It is the people he loves’ hands and fists and weapons.

(I need a snappier way to word that, but bear with me).

Where Sam’s bodily autonomy violations occur before he’s born, and are seen as early as the pilot with Azazel in his room and with the Woman in White, Dean’s analogous theme doesn’t sneak in until the mid-season finale with Asylum.

In this episode, Sam gets infected with a sort of ghost-possession/ghost-sickness (another example of a violation of his bodily autonomy) and his internal anger becomes external, focused on Dean. Sam attacks Dean violently, and Dean goes so far as to hand over a (thankfully unloaded) gun and in this altered state, Sam actually tries to shoot him. 

Ouch. The person Dean loves and most wants to protect had his body violated and used against Dean. This theme is going to carry us through the next, eh, 10 or so seasons, with some tail-end examples even after that. 

In Season 1 we have Asylum mid-season, and we have the finale in which John is possessed by Azazel and hurts Dean most grievously, almost kills him. In Season 2, Sam is possessed by Meg and shoots Dean (in the arm). In Season 3, we had a writers’ strike and a season cut short so I can’t think of any examples there (but lots of other shit to unpack for another day).

The in Season 4, we have Sex and Violence, which is super interesting. While Dean is the one targeted by the siren and therefore the one whose body is used against his brother to hurt him, the actual violence doesn’t start until Sam is also infected. Sam’s body is violated by being held at knifepoint by his brother and his mouth forced open to accept the siren’s venom, but then it’s a fist-fight, a showdown. Both brothers’ bodies being used to hurt the other, but getting to that point required Sam’s body to similarly be ready to be used against Dean.

Season 5 is literally bookended by instances of this happening. First, true to the idea that Dean sees Bobby as family, Bobby becomes possessed by a demon and he violently attacks Dean. And then Swan Song, most famous example by a huge margin, Sam is possessed by Lucifer and is fist-fighting Dean, destroying his face and killing him with his fists, and it is his overwhelming love for Dean that allows him to overcome this possession and save the world.

The theme is carried forward for a few more seasons, pretty much until that narrative turning point in Season 10 that I mentioned in my post about Sam. In Season 6, soulless!Sam allows Dean to be hurt by a monster, harming him by proxy. In season 7, Sam is hallucinating and almost shoots Dean. In season 8, Cass is programmed by Naomi to kill Dean, and in the episode Goodbye Stranger beats him to a pulp before overcoming this programming. In season 9, when Gadreel reveals himself and takes over Sam’s body and kills Kevin, he also attacks Dean. 

Skipping Season 10 for a hot sec (more on that below), Lucifer also later possesses Cass in Season 11 and harms both Sam and Dean. In Season 12, we get brainwashed Mary attacking her sons (and overcoming possession thanks to Dean). And possibly examples from S13-15 that I’m missing (Garth being affected by Michael? Cass being affected by Rowena’s spell? Both Sam and Dean were affected by the Witch from Wizard of Oz, right? I honestly can’t recall the late seasons near so well). But regardless we see the theme play out in the final 5 seasons, just less and a bit different than it had prior. 

-

Now, let’s unpack the S10 shift a bit, and why it changes things for this theme of Dean’s.

In S9, Dean takes on the Mark of Cain under the weight of guilt and self-loathing from having violated Sam’s bodily autonomy by tricking him into being possessed by an angel (and forcibly having him possessed by a demon to then fix that angelic possession). In this instance, Dean is willfully taking on something that alters his own body, and the narrative between he and Sam is flipped. Now Dean is the one with something ‘evil’ marring his body and impacting it outside his control, and now Sam is the one who is ignoring Dean’s protests and autonomy in order to save him from this thing, consequences be damned.

That 2.5 season role-reversal arc was huge for how it changed Sam’s storyline for the final 5 seasons, and similarly huge for how it impacts Dean’s.

Dean is now the one whose body is being used as a weapon against those he loves most, and he is the one suffering that loss of autonomy and control over himself. He is sick with bloodlust, is turned into a demon, is drawn to the First Blade, and is not in full control of himself. When the Darkness is unleashed and Dean suffers the emotional consequences of feeling tied to and drawn to this monster (woman? celestial being? godlike person?) against his will. 

The Mark/Darkness narrative shows us that Dean’s body might belong to him, but it too can be corrupted against his will. Dean learns that he won’t always be able to choose, learns what it means not to have control over his own body. That while he puts his family as his duty above all else, while he would sacrifice literally everything (his body, his soul, the entire universe) for his little brother, the opposite might also be true, even if Dean doesn’t want it to be. 

(And I said elsewhere that I fundamentally believe this narrative role-reversal was a consequence of him overstepping his ownership over Sam by tricking him into taking Gadreel. Their positions are swapped because they have to be, because narratively it becomes necessary for Dean to know what this loss of autonomy feels like, and for Sam to override his brother’s choices, or else they may never find a sense of equilibrium again).

By the time this Mark/Darkness narrative wraps up, Dean is fundamentally, irrevocably changed. Where in Season 5 it was completely unthinkable that he would agree to be a vessel for Michael, it is in the finale of Season 13, just two seasons after the Darkness storyline wraps up, that we see him take Michael into himself as a snap, in-the-moment decision. What was previously unthinkable is now canon. 

Because Dean is now different. Because his core of protecting Sam is the same, but his theme of how others' bodies are used against him has now upended itself, and he now has had his body used against others.

In my post about Sam, I said that in the end for the final seasons, the narrative has shifted from Dean owning Sam’s body to Sam also owning his own, and them acknowledging that they are in this together as a result of Season 10. I believe that happens with Dean as well, owing to this reversal. Sam has now taken some ownership over Dean’s body by getting rid of the Mark, and Dean has relinquished some of his tight-fisted control over himself. 

So Sam is sharing ownership over his body with Dean (in the vein of “I can’t pretend you won’t do whatever you can to keep me alive, even if I don’t want it, but we’re in this together” and “if we die we do that together too”), and Dean is also sharing ownership over his body with Sam (in the vein of “I’m no longer convinced you’re going to abandon me, so the things that I will do to keep you by my side will be met equal between us” and “when it comes to keeping you safe, it’s my autonomy I will give up first, not yours”). 

-

But what does this particular form of bodily-violence-from-family say about Dean from a thematic standpoint?

In my post about Sam, I talked about how the themes of possession (ghost and demon) and demon blood are inherently about bodily autonomy and free will. 

For Dean, thinking through this theme of his loved ones being used to hurt him, I’m torn trying to find the way to word it, but I feel that it has to do with his themes of self-effacement as love, as protection and duty. It’s about being willing to suffer anything (even to the point of death) to protect his family, the ones he loves most. Family is the end-all-be-all to Dean, and protecting his family (most especially his little brother) is the core and heart of his character. It is a duty and a responsibility and a calling and a purpose. 

To remix a quote from the film Legend, Dean’s devotion to his brother (and to a lesser extent, to everyone else he calls family) is how he measures himself. There’s no single word for it, as it’s a mix of protection as love, as an instinct, but also as a fundamental duty, an identity. His internal compass.

So Dean’s narrative invokes free will in a very different way than Sam’s. Dean always had and has free will. He had the will to sell his soul, the will to refuse Michael. He has autonomy over his body and he has choice, so much so that he makes choices over and over for Sam. Instead, Dean’s struggles with autonomy of self as related to his constant effacement (to the point of complete ego-destruction and physical loss of self) for the people he loves. He will die, sell his soul, let himself be beat to a pulp, and anything more that the situation calls for, so long as it means protecting or not harming his loved ones.

The original Swan Song end is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, in the style of Greek tragedy. Sam’s struggle for autonomy, and the moment he claims that autonomy for himself, he falls into the Pit for eternity. Dean’s original intended Swan Song ending is analogous: a struggle to exist as more than his duty to his family, and right after he accepts that Sam is allowed to choose Lucifer and death for himself while Dean may continue on living, he then chooses to fall into the Pit after his brother so they could be together (in Hell, in the Cage) eternally.

Both of them have these absolute tragic flaws and in the first Kripke-era arc, tragic sacrificial ends. Sam’s relating to will and autonomy, Dean’s relating to love, family and protection/duty. Both of them belonging to themselves and to each other.

-

-

A few extra things about this theme worth noting:

1. the people who love Dean are always in an altered state when they harm him, whether it be possession, brain-washing, siren venom, soulless, etc etc, which I think goes to show in some ways how this love as a given to people who will never deliberately harm him.

2. in a huge proportion of these instances, Dean is saved by the person who loves him reclaiming themselves over and above their altered state. John overcomes Azazel’s possession (arguably, I would say, deliberately from Azazel, but let’s not quibble). Bobby stabs himself in the stomach to save Dean. Cass overcomes Naomi’s brainwashing. Sam overcomes the literal Devil possessing him. Mary overcomes some brainwashing (I think?). Etc. So Dean's love as sacrifice is rewarded?

3. Sam’s body is the most frequently used to harm Dean.

[staggeringsmite]

ooh, top 5 moments you've had/witnessed as a DM? (please use this an excuse to hype yourself up if you want!!)

my players make dm’ing beyond worth it, so i really have to give credit to them for the joy of what they bring to a lot of these scenes <3 (also this is all wandering isles bc it’s been my most narratively satisfying and invested dm experience) Buckle Up it’s a long one!!!

bonus: i’m very proud of my individual character moments! throughout the campaign we’ve had about four of these (the intro session scenes, two dream sequences for every pc, and a set of individual trial scenes). we’re a pretty big party so it’s hard to narrow it down, but i just love writing and running those longer narrative moments bc i think it’s a v interesting insight into each character and gives them each a separate moment to shine <3

5. “promise you’ll come back to her” / burning of contingency letters

i put these moments together perhaps to cheat a little bit, but also because they deserve it. xarus, the party’s barbarian whose family was abandoned by his mother at a young age pulls theresa, a forge knitting cleric about to board the airship he is a quartermaster of in order to find a cure for her sick wife. he asks theresa to promise him one thing, that no matter what she will come back to her wife. along the way they write contingency letters to their loved ones in and outside of the party as their adventures grow more and more dangerous, and eventually, exhausted and worn, theresa and xarus find each other in the den of a safehouse to talk. recognizing each other’s willingness to self-sacrifice, their conversation ends with them burning the contingency letters they’ve written, committing to life. these scenes come together because it shows how far they have come together, and the theresa and xarus relationship will always be a highlight of the wandering isles to witness. sometimes the players do all the best work for you, and it’s so wonderful to sit back and watch <3

4. miles is missing

damien returns to the university he works at after an unprecedented amount time away to check on his office before he heads back out on another adventure with the party. while there he moves to put a sticky note (canonically a magical item in the wandering isles universe) on his rival colleague’s (and gay lover/roommate of 20 years) door only to find it entirely emptied without a trace. despite their bickering, miles and damien are very close, and miles would never pack up his things and go without telling damien.

this was a more subtle cliff-hanger for the session, but it was made so much fun as a dm because the players were excited and joking the whole session about miles’ second appearance (and only since the very first session) so his sudden disappearance was made much more severe based on everyone’s anticipation of meeting and having a light-hearted interaction with him.

3. the infamous sex rave

sometimes things go very right as a dm and sometimes things spiral out of control when a pc mislabels a situation which becomes a running joke of the campaign. either way i love being stubborn in my defense of “it isn’t a sex rave!!” whenever they bring it up (and immediately playing an npc who also calls it a sex rave). basically the players had a heist encounter in which they were hired to break a group of pirate prisoner’s out of a secret underground information center (where magical artifacts were also being held and studied, and there was pertinent information stored for the party to take a swipe at). the group split and one subset of party members were forced to hide from guards on the outskirts of a large, gladiatorial style ring within the compound, in which prisoners were competitively battling in order to test the abilities of certain unknown artifacts for the entertainment of anonymous nobles in masquerade getup. based on the magical lighting effects, the strangely dressed noble onlookers, and the,,,, Fighting Noises being some of the only things the pc’s perceived from the level of the auditorium they hid at, it was unfortunately misnomer’ed the “weird sex rave” and has only been referred to it as that ever since.

2. mother abel’s goodbye

hmmm am i making players cry again? yeah maybe. mother abel was an elder cleric of nosa crossing, the starting city of the campaign. she’d lived through its settlement, destruction, rebuilding, and given her all not only to the city but also to the jilted creed (a secret society dedicated to disrupting geline, a large and dangerously powerful island-state which is one of the campaign’s greatest evils). in the last use of her strength she took on a role as a conduit for a powerful plane shift ritual to transport the residents of the city to safety in the feywild as nosa crossing began to be overrun by potent wild magics in the prime material plane. as a low-level cleric, the spell took its toll on her, and as the party arrived in the feywild via a similar ritual to find the inhabitants, they were led to her side. theresa, a native of nosa crossing now reunited with her wife yodean, went to abel’s side with yodean. as yodean sat on the foot of the bed, theresa kneeled as though praying to hold abel’s hand cleric to cleric, confessing her gratitude but admitting that she cannot give as freely as mother abel did, that she and yodean deserve to live for themselves as much as they choose everyday to live for other people. with her final words in a soft, weak message, mother abel comforted theresa in her decision. the scene as a whole was so wonderfully sad, and the best dm moment of something so raw as telling aj, theresa’s player, that while there was no way to confirm it in any real capacity, something in theresa felt that perhaps mother abel held out a little while longer to make sure she was safe one last time and make sure she’d truly gotten everyone home.

1. rosa’s betrayal / lian’s resurrection

enough of that sad shit let’s get mean babey!! aslkjglfk i will be riding the high of this session for an eternity, but it’s quite a lot to break down. rosa rucksaw is the captain of the crew the party rescues in the heist sequence, who eventually reveals herself to in fact be xarus’ mom who fully left to assume a new identity and is Pretty Horrible as a person. at the safehouse, the party is asked by the people they were hired if they would be willing to take the crew to a longer term safehouse island, and the decision is left to xarus. not wanting to be like his mom, xarus agrees to endure a little more time with them in order to them this service out of convenience and kindness. a few hours from their destination, rosa finds xarus on the deck and honestly? kinda begins to admit some amount of guilt for all the shit she did,,,, literally seconds before she reveals that when her and her crew were caught by geline, she struck a deal in order to keep them alive, saying to her biological son “out on the cloudsea your crew is your family, and son, believe me, i’d do anything for my family” before her crew on the deck anchored the ship to an invisible gelinish war vessel and we snapped to roll20 for combat. the look of horror and betrayal on everyone’s face as her monologue hit those final lines, ugh and the fact that no one was super suspicious made it even better!! sometimes it Really Works, and this was one of those times!

flash forward in the battle, and an npc (it’s miles, the gay lover from a few numbers ago) being held hostage by the gelinish vessel is killed, as he is resurrected by two party members (damien and theresa) damien reaches for his soul, as theresa, who multi-classed into divination wizard after a pc named lian died (with failed attempts from theresa and xarus to hold her back) feels another presence in the grey, misty beyond. lian died in session four, and when i said her name to reference jack’s character everyone lost it mostly out of confusion before i began to narrate lian feeling restless in the afterlife, eventually reaching out and forming a celestial warlock pact with miles through his connection to damien and being called upon by her goddess sune as theresa reached out, offering lian the chance to go back. theresa returning to that moment with both her clerical and divinatory abilities, with the blessing of sune, lian emerging on the battlefield, now a vengeance paladin instead of life cleric, with a flaming sword and celestial wings at her back was such an incredible highlight to set up and run,, i just, <333 very proud of myself (and very thankful jack was on board for her coming back) for this moment

thank you so so much!! this was a long ramble, but i hope it was somewhat interesting to people not in the wandering isles <33

send a top 5 or 10?

[maximumsnow]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Faith (Airdorf Video Game) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: John Ward (Faith Video Game), Amy Martin (Faith Video Game) Additional Tags: Michael is kinda here too but not the main focus, yet anyway, First game has five endings but here's another one because I don't have problems, Faith Crisis, Other note John is Specifically called A Young Priest so he's like mid-twenties here, Canon typical violence referenced, I've been calling the verse this leads into the demon children au, But I'm not sure how much further I want to go with dedicated writing, So enjoy this and I may or may not come back with more.

Summary:  What if John was able to speak with Amy at the end instead of only having the option to shoot her or leave her to die?

The gun was heavy in John’s hands. There was only a single bullet in it, and the words written in red on the wall made it clear who it was for.

“KILL HER.”

This was the only way to finish the job, wasn’t it? Amy was already too far gone physically to be brought back, and putting her soul to rest was how he had to end it.

Wasn’t it?

That’s what his teachings had taught him. They had been very insistent that there was generally a point of no return, and Amy had crossed it.

Then why would she run? Was it a ruse?

Why was a demon telling him to end her life? That in itself should be a red flag, shouldn’t it?

When had he gotten to the point that killing a child would be the kindest mercy he could offer her?

John knew what the demon possessing her could do. He had been front and center to the performance, and it still haunted his nightmares, despite what he had told the psychologist. The fact that everyone kept telling him it couldn’t have been real only added fuel to the fire of his broken mind.

His reflection felt less and less like him as the days passed.

He shuddered as he stepped out of the broken down house. The woods were eerily quiet outside of the wind blowing through the trees. The white creature that had chased him was nowhere to be seen, and he didn’t hear the telltale rustling of trees that warned him of its coming.

Even if she was still possessed, Amy’s body would still be weak after the confrontation in the attic and throwing herself out of the window. Whatever he did next had to happen now, or all the lives lost would be for naught.

The blood trails were hard to follow, but even when the red blended in with the foliage, the sharp smell of rust would guide him along.

If she wasn’t dead yet, he doubted she would be alive for much longer. Human bodies only had so much blood they could lose, and demons were quick to forget that when playing with their pawns. The consequences were only temporary for them, after all.

He had to finish this. Not break down like he had a year ago.

That was what he told himself as he continued his hunt through the dark woods.

The sound of crashing through the underbrush caught John’s attention, and he swung the gun in that direction and waited with baited breath and a thundering heart.

When a herd of deer ran by, he didn’t ease his stance until silence fell again, and he was sure that whatever had spooked the animals wasn’t coming behind them.

He contemplated going in that direction, on the off chance Amy had gone that way, but the blood trail was too fresh for him to ignore. And the likelihood of finding something else was high.

Eventually, the trees opened into a clearing, and at the far end, he could see Amy. The torn hem of her dress was flecked with blood, and even from this distance, he could see blood seeping through the cuts in her back. She was facing away from him as she staggered towards the woods.

John had to make a choice.

He could shoot her and end it now. He could let her live, and the demon could use her for more death and destruction before she perished. He could leave her, and she would die from her injuries because the demon had already left.

One could never tell which ploy a demon would use to kill their victims. It was often safer to kill a vessel to make sure the demon couldn’t hurt anyone in that form anymore.

But she was a child.

And he wasn’t even a decade older than she was.

Please, God, take this cup away from me.

His eyes were starting to blur.

… When did his face get wet?

Trails of tears were falling down his face as the weight of what he was contemplating fully hit him. The grip on the gun had grown shaky as it pulled him down.

He dropped it when he dropped to his knees.

I can’t do this, Lord.

The safety was still on, thankfully, but the impact made a noise that made the mostly purple blur turn into a brown and purple blur.

When he wiped his eyes, he could see the red void her face had turned into pointed in his direction.

I’m going to die.

The realization should have scared him. Especially since he knew how violently his end would be at her hands. But all he could feel was a vague sense of relief and guilt. It would no longer be in his hands to do this, but everything indicated that he had failed her again.

Unless…

“Amy, is that you?” He didn’t mean for his voice to catch on her name, but he knew he was throwing a hail Mary.

“You’re that priest? Why are you...” He wasn’t sure how she could see given her condition, but the way her head moved indicated that she was looking him up and down. He could see her body tense as he assumed she saw the gun.

She backed away from him, but her legs did not agree with the movement and she fell to the ground. “It’s gone! I swear!” She started to scoot herself backwards. She probably didn’t think he’d believe her.

Did he?

The distortion in her voice was gone, but that was something the demon could easily turn off when it wanted to. That was how it convinced the officers that what happened the year prior was a vast misunderstanding gone horribly wrong.

John’s arms refused to move. “I-”

Why can’t I do this? I can’t fail her again. I can’t. I can’t. I can’tIcan’tIcan’t-

“Watch out!” Amy’s voice cracked as she suddenly jumped to her feet. The movement wasn’t smooth given her condition, but she started bolting in his direction.

He couldn’t do it. Instead he fell forwards onto his hands in fear as he waited for the end.

That’s when he heard it. There was rustling behind him, and he was again reminded of the other creature hunting in the woods.

“FAAAaaaATHhHEEeeeERRRrr!” The cry activated the habit of yanking his crucifix out, and he swung it around behind him as he tried to turn and stand at the same time.

It wasn’t necessary.

As the creature leapt towards him, a red arm swung out over him, caught its face, and threw it against the ground.

His eyes traced the arm back to its owner, and it went back to Amy’s face. The connection made him scramble away from her, but she collapsed as the arm retracted back into the void.

“Leave her, demon!” He cried out as he pointed the crucifix towards Amy. At this point, he wasn’t expecting the command to work, but the gun wasn’t practical to grab for now, and the protection the crucifix offered was better than nothing.

“Purge the demon, now! Before he gets back up!” She called out instead. She wasn’t jerking away from the cross, but she wasn’t really in a state to run, either.

… He couldn’t point the cross at both of them, and the tangled limbs on the white creature were already starting to scramble to stand up again.

He had to take a chance.

John finally stood up tall and pointed the crucifix towards the demon possessed creature and started to recite the Latin that Father Allred had forced him to memorize. Even if his own faith in a higher power was fading, his faith in the words was strong.

The creature caught on to what he was doing, and the unnaturally long arms and legs started to crawl backwards.

Until the red arm once again appeared and latched onto a wrist that was far too thin for a creature this size.

It struggled against the grip and screamed a wordless cry that reverberated in John’s ears, but he could vaguely still hear Amy over the horribly loud noise. “Keep going!”

He kept speaking the words of the rite even as his ears started to ring, and he persevered even as a clump of dirt was chucked in his direction.

As he finished the last word, the screaming and flailing suddenly stopped as the creature suddenly dropped limp.

The red arm disappeared as well, and John could fully take in the scene. The white vaguely humanoid creature was laid out like puppet with the strings cut, and the glowing red eyes were shut as if they were asleep. Amy’s bloody form was nearby, and since she was face down, it was easy to forget what had happened to her.

She hadn’t reacted to the crucifix even when the creature had pulled her into the line of fire, and he now had to consider what that meant. As well as figuring out whether the rite had worked on the other… what he had to guess what had once been a human.

Neither reacted to the cross being pointed at them now, and even if the host appeared unconscious, demons did not like holy symbols being directed towards them.

The gun was close by, he remembered. Even if it only had one bullet… He stopped.

Instead he stowed the crucifix away and stood over Amy with an offered hand. “Can you stand?”

There was a moment of silence, and he suddenly feared that maybe it was too late. Then a quiet voice said, “Yeah. It hurts though...” She turned over and weakly reached for his hand.

He pulled her up and offered her a shoulder to lean against. “You lost a lot of blood. I have some bandages in my car, but we have to get there first.”

“What about...” She trailed off as she looked towards the unconscious person.

John weighed his options, before lightly pushing her away. She got the hint and balanced herself so that she could stand without him. In a move that he only learned from one of his college friends, he picked them in a fireman’s hold. The hands and feet were only barely off the ground, but despite the their relatively large size, they were much lighter than he expected.

Whatever that demon had done to this person’s physical body was extreme. He highly doubted this would ever come undone. Much like what had happened to Amy’s face.

Thankfully, Amy could manage without his aid, because even if the other formerly demon possessed person was lighter than expected, he was not someone who lifted for a living.

The trek back to the car was extremely quiet. He had so many questions to potentially ask Amy, but he didn’t think she would be able to give straight answers right now.

He also had questions for the person passed out on his shoulders.

The car was a welcome sight on the side of the road, and for the time being, he laid the person down in the back seat. It was cramped, to say the least, but there was a chance that someone could drive by, and possibly freak out if they saw them.

As for Amy, he bandaged the worst of the wounds, but the first aid kit he kept in his car was not meant to handle so many at once.

“We should probably go to the hospital,” He said as he patched up a nasty gash on her arm.

“How are we going to explain this?” She said with a wave at her face. If her face had simply been mutilated, it would have been difficult, but the red void made it impossible to explain to an everyday person.

He sighed. “I don’t know. But you jumped out of a window-”

Amy interrupted, “I know. I was in the backseat of my own body.” The reminder made her voice tremble.

There was a visible flinch as he muttered an apology. Instead he tried to go back to the original topic. “We can try a mask or something, but most places don’t like it if they can’t see your face,” he mused aloud.

“You know that won’t work.”

“… I know.”

With the worst taken care of, she sat in the passenger front seat, and he got in the driver’s side.

Night was starting to fall as he followed the winding roads back to the town he lived in, and Amy passed out within a few minutes of the drive starting.

With both of his passengers out cold, he could think on the last few hours without interruption. He hadn’t needed to take a life tonight, and he was grateful for that above all else. He hadn’t signed up to be a priest in order to kill people.

… Frankly, he hadn’t really signed up to fight demons like this, either, but that was what his training had been focused on, for some reason.

While he once would have attributed his success to Providence, now he wasn’t so sure. There were a lot of lucky circumstances today, for sure, but a part of him was. Uneasy. About what was to happen next. He wasn’t considered experienced enough to say that the exorcisms were successful, but they had to be if they weren’t reacting to the crucifix anymore, right?

He wasn’t sure even what the next move could be for Amy and the other person, but he had a few contacts in the Church that were still willing to speak with him.

Maybe someone else with more experience would know what to do.

[stardomyx]

DISCLAIMER: Before I begin I would like to establish that NOBODY has to agree with or even like my Lore, especially since this particular post is on a Canon Character. These are purely my headcanons and my thoughts on this character, I am not about to force these ideas/headcanons onto anyone.

After re-reading Spaghetti’s backstory and thinking over the little system I have in place for Food Soul ranks, I realised that Spaghetti would be a pretty interesting subject for this theory. So lets talk about him.

First of all, I have to say that the way Spaghetti’s backstory is written is a little strange, as it seems to imply that he both was and wasn’t with his Master Attendant while he was still living in poverty. However it’s also stated in his story that his MA’s true family took him in because of his potential as an Attendant, a potential that no one else in the family had, therefore giving him the ability to summon a high ranking Food Soul in the first place. So with that being said I think it’s safe to assume that the first part of the story can be believed, and Spaghetti was summoned directly into the estate belonging to his MA’s family.

Which starts us off on the topic of this post:

I’ve stated a few times that most UR Food Souls are of such a rank because they’re one of a kind, whether it’s due to them having abnormally high power levels or some other reason. One of these reasons is that they were customised for whichever Attendant summons them, these Attendants will most commonly be those of the upper class like those in government, and of course, royal families. Da bourgeoise basically. You guys will have to forgive me for not knowing exactly how this customisation process works yet, but I do definitely think that the custom Food Soul would end up as a physical manifestation of everything their Attendant wants in a companion. To give an example; a Guild official would like a professional and hardworking Food Soul who would also be a good ambassador to the Guild, so that’s what they would get. The process is by no means cheap, and the resulting Soul is often a bit of an anomaly, regardless of what line they come from, thus creating a completely one of a kind UR.

So; Spaghetti’s Attendant, what do we have? We have a young boy who started off very roughly in life, living in poverty, who has recently been sought out and adopted into this very high class family. No doubt his mindset is a little bit scrambled, he’s got one foot on the gravy train and the other is no doubt still firmly set in the place where he had lived previously as he tries to adjust. So as a result of these mashed up mindsets we get canon Spaghetti; a Soul who - considering the dish itself - probably wouldn’t be considered by a lot of upper class humans, but because of the influence of the family and his Master’s background, canon Spaghetti turned out very differently to how the rest of his line would typically be. I would imagine that the rest of the Spaghetti line are mostly M and R ranks because of the dish itself being a staple food. It’s a very well known and common dish, so you typically wouldn’t find a Spaghetti soul above a R rank because they’re common, like a Tom Yum or an Orange Juice. But, because canon Spaghetti was summoned into an upper class family by an Attendant who had roots in a far more humble background, that all mashed together to form him, a custom made Spaghetti.

An UR rank Spaghetti. At least at first.

My theory is that canon Spaghetti started out as an UR ranking Soul for a couple of reasons, one of the biggest reasons is actually highlighted in the post’s header, (the art is by the always talented @gearfilledgoggles so please go and commission them if you have the funds.) The reason being that he has violently purple eyes, and with the exception of just two other SR Food Souls, Spaghetti is the only non UR to have purple eyes, which incidentally is what lead me to think about this theory in the first place. 

The two other SR Souls I mentioned both could’ve been UR’s themselves, playing into this theory of purple eyes = UR. But I’ll get onto that later. But they both strengthen this theory.

The second reason is because of the environment he was summoned into. His MA got a protector and a father figure in a Food Soul, I have no doubt that Spaghetti was tailored to what his Attendant had been lacking in his early life, therefore he was customised, making him one of a kind within his own line and therefore a UR. 

The third reason is actually something I have to provide some quotes for. If you guys remember the Castle Mystery event, we’re introduced to the Fallen Angel Bone Knight, a pretty fearsome Fallen who’s on the same level as Tsuchigumo and the Enhanced Uke Mochi as we see in the future team ups. This would add absolutely nothing to this theory if Spaghetti just happened across Bone Knight and chose to use its power for his own gain, but that isn’t the case at all. If we look at some of the dialogue from the Castle Mystery event, we see quite a lot of evidence that points towards Bone Knight being a product of Spaghetti’s corrupted Soul Power, here we go:

1)

"Oyster pushed the door open to find Spaghetti sitting on the throne in the main hall. In his hands, he was holding a pale blue stone. Behind him was the Fallen Angel that had ambushed them.” - Castle Mystery Main Story Chapter 8.

2)

“Let me introduce you. This Fallen Angel here took me a lot of effort to create-- Actually, it seems that you've already met Bone Knight." He couldn't tell for sure, but it seemed to Pretzel that Spaghetti's voice was more downcast than usual, and it seemed to have a self-deprecating tone. - Castle Mystery Main Story Chapter 8.

And finally 3)

"A Fallen Angel made from human ill will concentrated in Bluestones." - Bone Knight’s wiki page.

Blue stones, huh? Like the one we see Spaghetti looking for in B-52′s backstory? Curious. I’ve seen theories floating around that these stones are essentially for purification, they’re vessels for holding impurity until they can be cleansed - kinda like how humans use crystals and other such things IRL. My theory? This Fallen Angel was born out of the corruption of Spaghetti’s Soul Power, and because of the - well - power contained within that Soul Power, Bone Knight ends up being what we see in the event, huge, terrifying and destructive. Personally, I think it’s a bit odd that Spaghetti - a Food Soul who in game isn’t that great of a unit - was able to create something like this, unless he wasn’t always a SR unit, and the power he is able to use has been stunted somehow.

And the reason behind his power being stunted is.. Pretty much why he needs to siphon off that corruption using blue stones in the first place. It’s because of his contract with his Master Attendant being severed in such a cruel way. That severance didn’t just leave him with scars, it left him vulnerable to corruption, it left him vulnerable to the possibility of Falling. Spaghetti has taken part in a lot of unscrupulous activities - including murder - so it’s no surprise to me that he’s picked up enough corruption to Fall. Not only has it left him open and exposed to the possibility of Falling, but because of how traumatic that severance was, it’s also dulled down his Soul Power. Essentially the family who took in his Attendant played themselves by killing him, they had a UR ranking Strength unit, but because of their selfishness they ended up with a far less powerful Soul than they started with. A less powerful Soul who’s also capable of producing a destructive monstrosity like Bone Knight out of the corruption he takes on.

And lastly, as for the two SR Souls I mentioned above who also have purple eyes, I’m of course referring to Marshmallow and Fried Chicken, both of whom I think could’ve been UR’s too because of these reasons: In Marshmallow’s case, she’s deathly afraid of fire, which implies that she may have been in a traumatic event to form this fear. Key word here being trauma, something that I believe can cut down Soul Power and leave the Food Soul at a lower rank than they started with. And as for Fried Chicken, we don’t know exactly how he ended up as a SR unit, but we do have this in his bio on the wiki page: “He's searching everywhere for ways to become stronger, so he can keep up with his attendant.”  He’s trying to become stronger, huh? This need to become stronger and burn brighter is highlighted very strongly in his voice lines, which gives me the inkling that he’s trying to regain some power of some kind. If he was previously a UR unit and suffered some trauma to bring him down to SR, of course he would be fascinated with gaining more power and possibly climbing back up to his original UR rank. It may seem far fetched, but I think there’s some substance to it, all things considered.

Tl;dr: Spaghetti strikes me as a far, far more powerful Soul than canon portrays him to be. Because of his ability to form Bone Knight, because of the circumstances under which he was summoned and because of his eye colour. Lets just take a quick peek at what the colour purple can represent: royalty, nobility, luxury, ambition and power.

[fly-sky-high-bug-games]

Hi! I saw you answer an ask about your OC Alyssum and I was instantly pulled in. I went to your list of muses to go read some stuff on her but the link isn't working for some reason. Care to share? 😁 also what other hcs do you have about her (optional w/mugo) 👀

I THINK THAT’S MY FAULT, I keep tagging her as available muse but she’s technically listed as “npc” on the muse post because I didn’t want to introduce her yet (so far story wise, she only appears through dialog and hasn’t popped out yet, hard since she’s at Highgrove and setting is in Hallownest). However, her muse has been... oddly strong lately, I keep drawing and doing tiny rp scenes with her with few friends just to test the waters with her and BOY IT’S KIND OF... INTERESTING.

She might be “oopsie haha murder” kind of character but she’s also playing the nobility part quite well. She’s “polite”, invites bugs for a tea, a little chatter (maybe even a friendly one, she’s capable of it), possibly propositions, no refusal, nice job offers~ or death. One always gets to choose, acting like they have an option but forcefully narrows it to few and plays on mental and emotional state at such circumstances. Tricky~

I have yet to develop the details of her faction and who’s in it but very few people will be. Wasps I already covered, I just have to work around clan leader that’s in contact with Alyssum. Others would be black market dealers (lead merchant), underground snail-mail (postal snail), one of the weavers who’s good with seals and couple of others~ I need to brainstorm on this still. :0

Damn, I already rambled about this and didn’t talk about her much, hold on *throws Alyss tidbits under read more if tumblr allows it to work...*

She was looked after by Magnolia and basically raised by her, some time after she turned to be a queen. Fun tidbits about Magnolia family as a whole, they are not related to one another (mostly) but consider themselves a big family because they took down the previous queen and king of Highgrove while raising from poverty. However, Magnolia and her followers were never kind and forgiving, but with promises that there will be change in balance of the hierarchy, they got a lot of followers and supporters from commoners to usurp the royalty and did so successfully.

Alyssum was young when this happened so while she was somewhat birthed under poverty, she was fully raised as a noble. I don’t have much of her childhood worked out but there isn’t much to say aside from that she was raised and thought under the cruel but rich conditions of the kingdom.

The binding seal on her wings she earned not long before she met Mugo, almost like a sign for maturity and set under higher position in the family and not just as a student. The seals are powerful magic that uses soul, sewed in with magic by the weaver and afterwards trained to use it. It manifests through the shape of petals: swirling, cutting, chipping, slashing or severing, depending on the number of petals created, used, how fast, how they’re choreographed... It’s all soul but she can use regular flower petals that make less damage but not much soul required. Alyss can also use the wings as a shield since the binding is right on them and actually getting through them with anything is worse than trying to cut the metal open. (like, I imagined in game moves, if you know how THK blocks twice then slashes, she does similar things with wings, where she blocks two times but then bursts open the wings to blow the opponent back to the other side of the screen)

But you know, she’s a lady~ Of course she won’t get her hands dirty. :3c She has others to do that for her~

As for her and Mugo... (OH BOY HERE WE GOOOO~!)

I have to say, their relationship and love was rather genuine, it kind of makes me sad it ended up the way it did... With Magnolia, Alyss (and even Zeeke and his family) still visiting Hallownest some time before Pure Vessel was sealed and before infection went crazy (I canonize, by human years, that that was 20ish years before current events, since Hornet seems 15-18ish years old but who knows with bugs~ I just needed approximate idea for the setting). They were at City of tears but Mugo met her somewhere close to it, as she was hiding away from the nobles to explore the outside on her own and spotted Mugo.

Sure, Mugo crushed on her first but when she tested him by giving away her symbol necklace and pedant of White Magnolia for him to sell at black market and get good money, he refused because it was a memento from someone dear to him. It still is... he didn’t take it off because this is when their love was true and pure... Alyss never forget that either. It was very touching to her.

Their relationship was fine, both shared nothing in common but that was such a fun time for both because of it. They were clicking because they were like two different puzzles pieces that do fit together... but sadly, the pieces didn’t give the right picture when one by the other. (don’t you hate when this happens when you’re trying to puzzle grass or sky together?? *shot*) 

Alyssum explained to Mugo how Magnolia works. He didn’t like it one bit, as he ran away from Highgrove partially because they usurped the old rulers and rendered his family’s status almost homeless. Meanwhile, Alyss didn’t like that Mugo kept throwing himself in danger for his job, even if it’s a hobby that means a lot to him, all for sake of survival and geo.

They dated for some time, had fun, but slowly things started kind of... falling apart. The closer Alyss was to heading back to Highgrove the more she pressured Mugo to come with, become part of the family and live with her under riches the Magnolia offers. His counter proposal was, if they’re really in love and she is aware of Magnolia’s wrongdoings, that she would leave them instead and live with him while making the adventures she loved hearing about from him, together. Basically, Mugo put his love for her over riches or anything but Alyss wanted him for herself under the comfort and safety of Magnolia. She couldn’t throw that away, not after building the status and becoming a favorite to Magnolia herself. She thought this was selfish of Mugo but Mugo tried to explain it was for her changing a new leaf and starting over as something good, not ruled by fear and power.

So they started to disagree... argue... and finally physically fight. Of course, Alyss won. Mugo isn’t a fighter. At that moment, it was either she has him or no one does. For Mugo, he could only bark threats. So he did, angered, throwing words he couldn’t even imagine himself doing. When she lighted up her wings, he threatened he will cut them off. So in retribution, she cut him, scaring his face. He saw something or someone completely different then. Mugo ran for his life, leaving Alyss alone.

That was the last time they saw each other, 20ish years ago. Mugo hid away at the lake of Unn and suffered depression and withdrawal for a very long time. As for Alyss... she pulled off something she shouldn’t and Mugo didn’t know about...

He only got one last letter from her, to met her one more time at the Crossroads before she leaves for Highgrove, saying she wants to try one more time and... that she had a surprise for him. He didn’t respond. She waited for him there then left when he never showed...

That was that. :U Until now, at least~ :3 She got to hear about her ex thanks to Zeeke’s shenanigans at the Colosseum~ Oh, what are the odds of the noble meeting and having issues specifically with a certain, scruffy moth~

20 years is quite a bit of time for someone with a heartbreak and power to grow... kind of crazy. Of course she never let go of it. And now she knows he’s still alive too~ Wonder what Alyss will do. :3c

[keenerordeath]

Endgame Timelines

(except I don’t cry at the end)

Disclaimer: I have never read the comics, I am basing everything off of what I've seen in the MCU films and fans online that know more about the stones than I do. Add in my limitless optimism and you get this monstrosity!

What would happen if Tony hadn't been the one to snap away Thanos and his army? Would Peter Parker, the only other avenger with a Stark original nanotech suit, be the one to snap instead?

Let me show you what I think would have happened if Tony survived Endgame and Peter Parker saved the universe.

Below the cut:

what could happen to peter parker

how tony fixes everything

how I think the stones should all be returned after endgame

Peter Parker and the Gauntlet

Of course, something to address immediately would be Peter's probability of survival. We've seen Tom Holland's Peter Parker lift a fallen building's debris from himself and swing away afterwards. Since Peter hasn't been shot, or severely impaled, I don't have much of a reference to go by in terms of healing and regeneration, and he's certainly not on par with Deadpool in that department. BUT, I do have reference of Infinity Snaps from the Hulk, Tony, and Thanos himself. Hulk is strong, sure, and isn't all that fazed by radiation, since that was what created him. However, he was easily beaten by Thanos, and was injured just by wearing a gauntlet that held all six stones. The snap completely destroyed his arm. For Thanos, wielding the full gauntlet only caused a surge in energy but his body was intact. The snap itself left his arm injured but not completely immobile. The arm doesn't reach that point until snapping a second time to destroy the stones. To an average human like Tony, the snap cost his life. But we KNOW all this. What we don't know is how it translates to anyone other than these three.

 As a mutant, where does that leave Peter on the spectrum? Does using the stones leave a wound that will never heal, destined to be that way by the rules of the stones? Nothing is for free, right? My theory is that Peter would have a different experience. Do I want to see him in pain? Hell no. While our reality is that Spider-Man must move on in a universe without Tony Stark, I can't help but dream up endings a little more happy. So, what if? What if the one who will recover the easiest from using the stones is our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man?

 I would venture that the kid would be in intensive care under Helen Cho's watch. This woman has worked with super soldiers like Steve Rogers, created the cradle from Avengers: Age of Ultron. The avengers trust her with their lives. Tony wouldn't want anyone else to take care of Peter, because she would be the one to keep him alive. Not to mention, Peter heals quickly. The biggest issue may be understanding his metabolism well enough to administer antibiotics, pain killers, and other nutrients that his body would need to support his mutated healing abilities.

 Peter is in the hospital and Tony needs something to keep himself occupied while waiting for his kid to wake up.

Tony Stark and the Plan to Return the Stones

Anthony Edward Stark is not going to sit on his ass if there is a problem that needs solving. With everyone back besides Vision and Natasha, he's got a team that can execute the return of the stones perfectly. Even one thing out of place and alternate timelines are created.

Tony gets Dr. Strange to rewind time on the compound. It would be great if that could go back to not being rubble, you know?

Then he gets to work, getting the rundown from everyone.

What state were all the stones in when they were taken from the past?

What was Steve doing in 2012 after he left Loki and the others in the tower?

Where did he get the Pym particles from at the base?

When did Clint wake up with the soul stone in his hand?

Where was Natasha's body after she became the sacrifice?

Where did Rhodey and Nebula leave Quill?

Would it be so bad to leave the power stone on Morag now that Thanos cannot reach it there?

Will Gamora of 2014 want to go back to her own time or stay here?

Will Gamora want to stay if they manage to get her back alive from Vormir? Two Gamora's?

Where was the hammer before Thor summoned it?

What do they have to do to get the Aether back into Jane?

 He has a lot of questions, a lot of witnesses and resources, and a need for a distraction.

First thing he needs to do? Get as much information about the stones from Dr. Strange as possible.

any theories involving the actual powers and abilities of the stones are suuuuper yada yada-ed in some places because I have a very basic understanding of biology, atomic composition, time travel, neurological functions, artificial intelligence, etc. - they're flimsy in some places and I'm not sure how to fix that

Can the pocket universe in the Soul stone be accessed? Does it hold only Nat and Gamora's souls? Would they need their bodies to return the souls to? Would it just be easier to collect their bodies from Vormir and turn back time on them, too? Would their souls even be in their bodies anymore, or would they just be husks? Would taking their bodies back to the present create an alternate timeline that prevents their new alternate selves to be able to retrieve Nat or Gamora? Is it important enough to them to screw with another timeline like that? Will they have their bodies restored once they're puled from the stone?

Now, my understanding of the stones stems from the movies and an explanation I came across on Quora while researching the stones.

"To combat [their] weaknesses they all feed into each other and make each other more powerful. Also as a general weakness they will destroy most mortals without the use of a vessel (Infinity gauntlet, Ronan's hammer Etc) The Time stone makes each stone's effects permanent as well as permeate time. The Reality stone makes the others affect the world itself as opposed to just an aspect of the universe. The Power stone's raw power acts as a battery for the rest of them and amplifies their power. The Soul stone gives power over the souls of everyone the user comes across. The Space stone makes the effects of the other stones universe wide. The Mind stone allows the user complete control of the minds of everyone in the universe."

Another tidbit about the Soul stone that I found was this:

"Allows the user to steal, control, manipulate, and alter living and dead souls; as well as animate the motionless. The Soul Gem also acts as a gateway to an idyllic pocket universe. At full potential, when backed by the Power Gem, the Soul Gem grants the user control over all life in the universe."

Can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs. With the combination of the Power, Time, Space, and Reality stones they get Natasha and Gamora out of the Soul stone. It is a stretch, considering Hulk said he had tried to get Natasha back. I think maybe using the Soul stone puts up a bit of a roadblock. How well can the Soul stone resist the effects of the other stones when it isn't being used, then? Say you use the Space stone to move the women out of the pocket universe? (Maybe it is possible to rebuild or reshape them to how they used to be by using the Space stone, same concept as Thanos changing the Aether to the Reality stone using the Space and Time stones). Using the Reality and Time stones to solidify their existence in that time and space in the universe, they could bend reality to make it so. The Power stone will juice up the other three, surely allowing them to push past boundaries they couldn't on their own. And if it takes a little tinkering with a juiced-up Soul stone to get them both fully restored, then so be it. Whatever it takes to get them back.

Now… vision is an incredibly complicated puzzle to solve. What IS left after the stone is removed? If Shuri had been allowed enough time, what would have changed for Vision? My gut tells me that his best chance lies in the hands of Shuri and Dr. Strange. Vision has just been hooked up to Shuri's tech in Wakanda. Five years later she still has the scans she made, still remembers what she had to do. So Dr. Strange takes them back to right before Thanos' General attacks Shuri and her guard, taking Vision with him. Instead of letting that play through, Strange pauses time, leaving himself and Shuri to find what made Vision tick, remove the stone and see what is left, what they need to substitute in as replacement for the Mind stone. They gather all the information housed in Vision's body. Every piece that came from Jarvis, Stark, Banner, Thor, Ultron, the Mind stone. How can that be recreated to be able to house Vision's memories and consciousness, again? Restoring him to minutes before Thanos took the stone from his head is the end goal. Once Shuri has all the data she needs, they turn back time on Vision, leave him back on the table, and resume time before jumping back to their present. They'll need the cradle again, some more vibranium, some help from Helen Cho and Thor's lightning. Would complete reconstruction and an upload of consciousness work without the stone? Obviously, the flying and the strength and all his other powers from the stone would be gone, but is it really so bad to have a chance at being normal?

They have their lost family back now. But they cannot rest yet. What else do they need the stones for before they can send them back to where they came from?

Can they be used to heal Peter? Have they already weakened themselves from using them so much? Is there anyone else that can wield them and help to restore what was lost after half the population vanished and everything became overwhelming to maintain? The plan for returning them was set, they're left with a lot of time to use the stones for some good. Can Captain Marvel offer more help to others in the universe? Surely, Earth isn't the only place that desperately needed help in the aftermath. I assume she will do what she can, holding more hope than in canon, since losing Tony left most of them… less than motivated to get back into hero-ing.

Danvers did what she needed to with the stones. Time to start their return plan.

All the stones need to be returned to how they looked when they were taken.

Thanos used the Space and Power stones to change the Aether from its weird wiggly form into an actual stone. Great, let's undo that. Should we use the Time stone or the Space and Power stones? Either will work? Dope, done and done, moving on.

The scepter and its case are around the compound somewhere, Vision doesn’t need the stone anymore, let's pack it in there. Same with the weird orb thing Rhodey brought the Power stone back in. Let's get those packed and they'll be ready to go.

Mjolnir: check. Aether: check. Scepter: check. Power Orb: check. Space, Soul, and Time stones: check, check, check. (Dr. Strange will be hanging onto that Time stone until the last mission, though)

Now we know from Avengers: Endgame that each capsule of Pym Particles will give you two jumps. They can go from the present to the past, then the past to the present. After that they have to refuel. With that established, my estimate would be that they would need to use AT LEAST 19 capsules, not accounting for spares in case of an emergency.

So, Hank Pym, mind making those? We need them to fix our time travel mess. Thanks, pal.

Back in Time, Right on Time

Tony doesn't need everyone to make this go smoothly. He can work with a smaller pool of people.

Clint is not going back, not to Vormir, not to anywhere. He will stay in the present with Nat and his family.

His blue meanie, Nebula, is staying with him. He will not subject her to the pain of sharing her network with another Nebula from a different time, not again.

Tony himself will not be leaving. He will be right here, coordinating everything. Some of them will be leaving at the same time. Others have multiple trips they're going to make. No one makes a second jump until they have checked back in with him. They'll restock their suits, get some food and rest, gather the things they need to return, and venture back out.

No Avenger is going to be sent back to a time that will trigger bad memories from their pasts.

Many candidates and teams were dismissed pretty early. They're abilities may have been ideal, but if their personalities did not mix well, Tony could not risk the messes that incompatibility could cause.

 For this to work, the best chance of success for the return of every stone and avoiding any offshoot timelines will require these Avengers: Captain Rogers, Thor, Dr. Strange, The Wasp, Mantis, Scarlet Witch, and Ant-Man. Stay tuned because we're going to need one surprise extra along the way, but more on that later.

To know where to go first, Tony first had to figure out who messed up the worst, and needed the most stones to complete the mission.

 Loki's Vanishing Act

Let's start with Loki taking the Tesseract in NYC 2012. It is essentially a surefire way to change pretty much everything we know about the MCU. So how is Tony going to fix that Royal Whoops? Well, it's not going to be easy. To ensure that Loki and the Tesseract are sent back to Asgard with Thor, Tony will send the Wasp and Ant-Man to keep the Tesseract close to a collapsed Tony Stark and Thor, and away from Loki, Endgame Tony and Scott, and the slimy Alexander Pierce. If anyone besides Thor got the Tesseract then, Tony and Steve would never go to the army base even further in the past. Best not to mess with that.

 Really? Hail Hydra?

Now that Loki is once again in custody of the Avengers, we'll follow Captain America taking the Scepter from NYC in 2012.

(Enjoy the layout of this one, because there's so much to it I don't want to make this into more of a story than a presentation. You'll take all my bullet points and you'll like them, damn it.)

Triggers for alternate timelines:

Tricking Hydra into thinking he was their ally

Prematurely informing his 2012 self of Bucky being alive

Removing the Mind stone from the scepter (this one couldn't really be helped, you're okay Steve)

Conclusion: a seamless return without creating any alternate timelines will be enough to give me a migraine. (Tony probably had one, too, after learning everything Steve said to get his way to the scepter and out of the tower)

 So, how does he plan to fix it? By sending the Wasp, Scarlet Witch, and Mantis.

Elevator Mess

Upon arriving at Stark Tower in NYC 2012, Hope shrinks the scepter, along with Wanda and Mantis. Their job is to follow Steve Rogers and clean up after him.

One "Hail Hydra" later, Hope carries Wanda to where she can erase the memories of all those in the elevator. Captain America is not with Hydra, he never entered that elevator, and he never took the scepter.

Last step here is to take the scepter they've brought and leave it exactly where Cap took the original from.

America's Ass

The reason Cap even had to fight himself is because Loki escaping disrupted the timeline, pulling 2012 Cap from search and rescue and back to the tower to hunt down Loki.

With Loki secured, Wanda has to manipulate 2012 Cap into still believing that Loki got away. After disabling his communications, they send him on his way.

His "I have eyes on Loki," never reaches anyone, and once they've fallen and Steve has knocked 2012 Cap unconscious, Wanda goes about erasing his memory of learning about Bucky. (Does Wanda get a video of "that's America's ass," to make fun of him with later? It's a mystery, truly, we'll never know)

Search and Rescue

They leave after returning 2012 Cap to the ground floor and waking him up (Thanks Mantis, I love you), sending him to resume search and rescue as if nothing had happened.

 Ghosts of the Past

When Tony brings up Vormir, Steve volunteers. He won't let Clint, Banner, or Quill go. He was close to Natasha, spent the last five years with her. He wanted the chance to rid them of the stone that tried to take her from them. He knew that the other three didn't need the pain that would hit them should they see the place where the women they love had almost been lost to them.

What no one accounted for was Steve knowing who had been guiding people to the stone all this time. Facing Red Skull was not what Steve had expected. If it weren't so terrifying to see him again it would be almost comical. But there was nothing here to fix. He'd watched as Clint's craft took off, returning back to the others with the stone and without Nat. He handed the Soul stone off, tapped the device on his wrist twice, and went home.

 Frigga Knows All

Steve doesn't talk about the last mission, so they move on to the next one. Tony sends Wanda and Steve to Asgard with Mjolnir and the Aether. They can't change that Thor told his mother the truth, but they can stop the Asgardians chasing Rocket and erase their memories of the raccoon. Disruption handled, Wanda goes to return the Aether to where it resided inside Jane. A very unfortunate place for it to be, but she knew she couldn't make any changes. So she returned it and left to find Cap, who had found where Thor pulled the hammer from and put it back. Rocket and Thor had gone back, and now Cap and Wanda could, too.

 The God of Mischief

All of the Avengers were familiar with the Tesseract. Turns out it was just a cosmic cube used to contain the power of the Space stone. Interesting twist, for sure. But Thanos crushed the cube, and without it, they couldn't get the Tesseract back to Howard Stark's labs. At least the Pym Particles were a simple mission.

(Buckle up, I'm bringing back the bullet points)

Triggers to alternate timelines:

SHIELD suddenly having the Space stone rather than the Tesseract

Hank Pym losing important pieces of his research

 Army base employee reporting Tony and Steve to bunker security

Conclusion: only the best of the best could twist this situation back to where it needs to be.

Tony's plan went something like this:

Saving a god

Thor and Dr. Strange go to retrieve Loki from the wreckage of the Asgardian ship

They work together to gather all those lost onto a nearby planet.

Once all the Asgardians have been found, Dr. Strange turns back time on the ship and on those gathered, bringing them back.

Using the Time, Space, and Power stones, Dr. Strange opens a portal that takes the Asgardians and their ship to the present in Norway, where the rest of their people reside.

Thor returns to the present, knowing Valkyrie was already in Norway, prepared to receive everyone.

Fooling a King

Dr. Strange keeps Loki with him, being the only one they've known to be able to contain Loki and see through his tricks. Loki doesn't give him any reasons to contain him, though.

An extra quantum realm suit and some Pym Particles given to Loki, and they jump to a time well before Loki had even learned he was the stolen prince of Jotunheim.

Together, they take the Tesseract from Odin's vault and hide it away.

Loki disguises himself as a young Thor and "confesses" to breaking the Tesseract, presenting the Space stone to Odin.

The Space stone is soon contained once again in a cosmic cube, an exact replica of the Tesseract Thanos had crushed, and returned to the vault.

Not wanting to risk anything, they replace the hidden Tesseract, retrieve the repaired cube, and jump back in time once more.

Returning Particles

Dr. Strange opens a portal in the basement of the bunker, watching as Howard Stark and "Howard Potts" leave the room.

The Tesseract is returned to the container Tony took it from and they were quickly through the next portal

Steve Rogers was gone and Hank Pym had yet to return

The capsules of Pym Particles were placed in the empty space left by Cap.

Mission complete, Loki and Dr. Strange returned to the Avengers Compound.

  Can't Really Fix This One

There was one alternate timeline that Tony would never be able to fix, not that he would ever want to. The Thanos from 2014 brought his army and his daughters with him to end the Avengers of the present and take the stones for himself.

But once he and his armies were snapped away, there was no one to return back to 2014. They were gone. Nebula had no idea if Gamora had vanished along with all the others on the ships that brought her to a different time. Well, if they ever run into her, they'll offer her the chance to go back to the time she left, should she wish to return.

All that could really be done was send Wanda and Mantis to put the orb back in the temple, give Quill back his lockpick, toss him in front of the temple and wake him up. Maybe he would run into this Korath guy he mentioned, maybe he won't, considering he was a lackey to Ronan, one of those Thanos used to do his bidding. A Thanos that was no longer there. Either way, Quill wasn't just left for dead. He may never meet Gamora, but he still had other adventures to go on, other people to meet.

 It's Finally Over

The Ancient One was taking down Chitauri before Hulk showed up. Steve would follow her attack patterns and range, because once Hulk showed up to get the stone, she would be distracted, and the Chitauri she would have stopped would continue on into NYC.

After Hulk had left with the Time Stone, Steve immediately approached the Ancient One and handed her the stone. They shared a look of understanding, she turned to rejoin the fight, and Steve left the rooftop to return home for the last time.

and they all lived happily ever after, the end, happy hanukkah, goodnight - Rallow <3

[black-wolf066]

AOS Robbie Reyes Through the Seasons AU Part 1

(with bonus QuakeRider slow burn added into the mix cause i’m utter trash for those two)

-----Just a warning for those who haven’t seen the show, please stop reading as there will be spoilers in this post (as well as any future posts regarding this AU world. I will not be tagging it as spoilers, so once again, be warned.------- 

So, i recently watched all 6 seasons of AOS, and stumbled across this post [Agents of Shield AU] that intrigued and inspired me, and honestly the ideas for this “what if” haven’t left me alone since. Please go and check it out as i don’t wanna take all the credit for this idea.

In terms of turning this into a full fledged story, I more then likely will never start it given my terrible track record when it comes to multi-chapter fics (plus my muse to write anything multi-chapter is completely non-existent at this point). I do, however, love doing ideas/headcannons/story boards cause i find they are easier then taking the time to flesh out scenes and dialogue. Should anyone want to attempt writing this behemoth using my ideas, feel free (just please credit and tag me if you do, mostly cause i really wanna read it).

As I stated in my reblog of the original post linked above, it’s hard to think of ways to incorporate Robbie into the show from the start and barely change any of the plot. While some things will definitely be different as I continue to think up ways to incorporate Robbie into the main cast, i will be sticking to the major plot points (Hydra, Afterlife, Hive, etc). 

As far as season 1 goes, i’m still debating on how to proceed with it. Please correct me if i’m wrong, but from my understanding, it sounded like Robbie sold his soul roughly around the time frame of season 2 or mid-way through season 2. If this is in fact true, then i’m not sure if i’ll make it where the deal is struck even earlier or if i’ll be sticking to canon. I’m also not sure if i should make Robbie a main character of season 1, or just a here and there character (part time Agent) until after Shield’s fall. 

I have roughly 2-3 different scenarios/re-written backgrounds for season 1. 

Season 1 AU idea A: this idea sticks with canon in terms of the deal, so Robbie is a regular human until mid-way through season 2 (unless someone corrects me on my timing for this). Robbie is recruited long before the Bus Team became a thing (still deciding on the how’s, but i have a basic idea that he saw a speed chase and the vans shield was using, even with the tech, couldn’t keeping up with the target. Robbie managed to intercept said target with Lucy thanks to his skill set with racing and shield was able to apprehend the target thanks to his intervention. To me this idea is a little weak in terms of a believable scenario, but that’s the only thing coming to me for a “how he gets recruited” at this current time). Robbie is stationed mostly in LA (to stay close to his brother and uncle) and sometimes him and his team will cross paths with the Bus team. He’s at the hub when Hydra steps out of the shadows and with his team either being traitors or dead, he ends up going with Coulson and his team when they “go dark” and leave the Hub. 

Idea B: is basically the same thing as idea A; Robbie’s human, he’s recruited to shield before Coulson puts his team together, but instead of being stationed in LA, he’s one of the agents that Coulson wants to recruit for the Bus. This way Robbie is there through it all (even if he is only a level 1 agent) and his friendship with the team and Skye/Daisy has more of a chance to plant and grow roots rather then just being a reoccurring character.  

Idea C: takes either option A or B but with the difference of him being the rider from the start (maybe he’s recruited for the fact he is the rider and could be useful or they recruit him so he can be watched closely since no one knows how to contain the rider within him). 

Mostly, i would like to try and stay with canon, so i believe Idea B would be the most ideal since i want Robbie and Skye/Daisy to form a strong friendship in season 1 vs season 2. It would also allow Season 1 and part of season 2  to stay close to canon as possible (since the Rider wouldn’t be an issue)

As far as differences go, should Idea B be used, i would like Robbie and Ward to butt heads (not enough to be annoying, but enough to know that it’s clear they don’t like each other). Maybe Ward rubs Robbie the wrong way and vice versa, but eventually as they continue to do missions together they begin to grow on each other (which will make the betrayal all the harder to stomach)

Robbie is always amused by Fitz-Simmons, both of them reminding him of his uncle and brother in terms of their smarts and banter (for i head-canon that Gabe and Eli would constantly throw science ideas and what-not at the dinner table or in general conversation just as Robbie and Eli would talk cars). When Robbie feels home-sick, you’ll usually find him in the labs with these two, quietly helping where they need it, or simply sitting in a corner reading as the two banter for background noise. 

Robbie is a good cook and is usually the person who cooks most nights for the Bus (they may have a rotation to try and keep things fair, but Robbie tends to ignore it. He’s a man who’s hands can’t stay idle, so if he’s not being the team’s mechanic or helping Fitz-Simmons build things for the team, then he’s in the kitchen cooking/baking). 

Robbie has a healthy respect for Coulson and May and while Ward is Skye’s SO, May is Robbie’s unofficial SO when it comes to training/sparing (since the two of them are early risers and usually hit the mats around the same time anyway). 

Robbie and Skye get along easily the longer they work/live together. They’ll throw harmless insults and movie/tv show references at each other when there’s down time or high-stress situations (though the insults aren’t always so harmless when it’s the later). While Skye and Ward will usually play board games, Robbie and Skye will play Uno (occasionally joined by Fitz-Simmons) or racing games together.

Robbie has a deadly sense of humor that comes out the more he grows comfortable with people, and usually that humor comes out with Fitz or Skye (however that natural part of him will fade or dull once the Rider takes residence in his head).

When Skye breaks the teams trust when she helps Miles, Robbie doesn’t necessarily give her the cold shoulder, but he does make it clear that his trust won’t be so easily won back, she’ll have to earn it. 

When Trip joins the team, Robbie gets along with him pretty quickly (once it’s clear he can be trusted anyway). Trip just naturally has that way with people, that natural light and goodness that reminds Robbie of his brother. Not to mention Trip tells some interesting stories (and it also helps that he’ll occasionally give Robbie his grandmothers recipes for certain dishes/treats). 

Robbie is not at the secret base when Skye gets kidnapped by Ward, and he regrets it because he would have stayed behind with her, Eric and Ward had he not been so adamant in going on the mission with the rest (feeling too caged in the bunker and wanting something to do). He feels if he had stayed behind, maybe things would have gone differently, maybe Eric would still be alive, maybe Skye wouldn’t have been taken (though the counter-argument, from one of the others, is that he could have just as likely been killed too, since Ward is far more skilled then Robbie). 

Again all of season 1 and possibly all of season 2 is just friendship at this point, maybe some un-knowing or some teasing flirting here and there, but mostly just friendship between Robbie and Skye. I don’t think Robbie develops his feelings until after they both are different (with her becoming inhuman and him becoming the vessel for the rider). They bond over their shared differences and struggles as they go through these changes and learn to control it, etc. So i’m thinking more along the lines of beginning of season 3 when his feelings for her start to develop. Not sure if Skye/Daisy’s will develop around the same time, or if she does have similar feelings, they aren’t strong enough yet to warrant pursuing it, hence why she pursues Lincoln instead.

((((((I will end this here for now. I do plan on fleshing the ideas for some of the episodes out a bit more then this, as well as continue my ideas through the rest of the seasons, but for now I’ll leave Season 1 as partially finished in terms of background/relationship development goes.

Please, if you have anything to add to this, i’d love to hear it, or if someone were to attempt to write something like this, i would love to read it. 

This AU is such an interesting concept to ponder over, but i feel it’s also a way to see how Robbie was pre-rider. He seemed slightly more care-free, happier, and i really would love to explore that. Adding him into the mix at the beginning and also making him an agent pre-season 1, allows us to play with his character traits a bit more. To see how different he could be with this different path faced before him as well as the character development he’ll go through. 

sorry i’m rambling now, but i just can’t help it, i’m totally addicted to this idea and i just can’t let it go.)))))

[webcricket]

Looking Glass

Chapter 25 - Corollaries

Pairing: CastielXAU!Reader

Word Count: 1683

Summary: Tragedy derails halcyon days in the bunker and forces everyone involved to reevaluate their notions of safety. Warning for minor (canon in ep 13X23) character death. I’ve decided to stop pretending I know how many chapters this beast will end up being - this isn’t the final chapter as I originally intended (mostly because I want to keep them at the original 2K word limit and there is too much story left to cover and clearly I have no concept of what will make it beyond the final edit).

Miss a chapter? Have a Masterlist Link!

Raining cats and dogs. Under the weather. Flying by the seat of one’s pants. Speak of the devil.

Castiel never fully appreciated the expressionistic origin of idioms peppering human speech until he glimpsed the vibrant magenta of your jacket fitted to a lifeless female form lying on the leaf-littered trail ahead and he experienced the resultant  precipitous leaping of his heart into the upper echelons of his throat.

Swallowing hard against the ‘What if it were you? What if I failed to protect her?’ rise of anxiety to relocate the obstinate organ back into his vessel’s ribcage where it belongs, he closes his eyes in concentrated effort; in the lidded distancing from the light of day, he reminds himself the shattered shell, limbs limp and radiating residual heat, crumpled in the mist of cooling rain belonged to some other unfortunate soul, not you.

He left you safe in the bunker’s kitchen, breathing, physically intact, and very much alive, as you helped prep a mass lunch for the multitudes mere minutes ago. The knowledge, the fresh imprint in his mind’s eye of the slight questioning smile hovering on your mouth soundlessly saying you expected to hear the story later as an agitated and secretive Sam dragged him away from the task of scrubbing dishes to help handle a situation – this situation – however comforting in recollection, barely makes a diminishing dent in his reflexive fright at the sight of your jacket and the scent of you still lingering in the damp cloth mingling with the unmistakable odor of raw death.

The hitch and pause in his gait, the sharp gasp and blanching of pink lips as they press tautly together – the outer projections of disquiet as he battles to suppress his rebellious nerves and rapidly beating heart – presents the split-second opportunity for Jack to sprint past the distracted seraph.

“Maggie!” the boy shouts. Surging ahead, he circumvents Mary and Bobby on the well-worn path where they stand sentinel, gravely watching over the dead girl. Ruddy cheeks paling, his sneaker slips in the mossy earth, smearing through bloodied mud as he stumbles around the boulder where she drew a final breath and collapsed.

Sam’s lengthy stride and rational senses move him to the site in time to prohibit Jack from disturbing the scene further; grappling with the Nephilim’s shoulder to hold him back from kneeling to take the girl up in his arms, he manages to keep the boy from eroding what little detail remains that might clue them in to what happened.

“I-I said I’d protect her, and,” Jack’s guilty lament suspends fog-like in the air as he speaks, fingers uselessly flexing and balling into fists, “Sam…”

Cas forces his feet to convey him closer to the carnage. Blinking between Jack’s anguished aspect and the waterlogged coat, he tears his focus from the more personally emotionally unsettling elements to study the statically fixed girlish features of Maggie’s corpse; the peaceful ghostly skin-shade of pre-rigor smoothing the minute muscles of her face is perverted by brightly painted crimson where the bone cracks cleanly at her temple; rivulets of blood and rain mat her hair, the latter diluting the congealed edges of the fatal wound.

“Stop, Jack. This isn’t your fault,” Sam consoles in the rain-pattered hush, stating what they all – save the grief-stricken Jack – are thinking.

A pang of empathy at Jack feeling personally responsible for whatever befell her resonates in Castiel’s heart; the angel knows from long practice it’s often easier to assume self-blame and contend with the tangibility of failure in place of the seemingly unsurmountable impossibility of accepting that senseless tragedies do happen no matter how many vows one makes to prevent their occurrence. For all the fight for a righteous cause, free will and destiny coalesce into unpredictable outcomes. It’s a hard lesson to learn – one with which the angel constantly grapples and one made bearable by the bonds of friendship and love.

“What happened to her?” Dean huskily murmurs the question as if uttering it aloud will provide an instantaneous answer.

At the thought, Cas casts his blues skyward at the roiling grey abyss of clouds above; tiny droplets of rain smatter and collect on his unshaven cheeks, blending with the brimming brine of unshed tears to pool in the divot of his chin when his gaze again drops to settle on the distraught boy. If he could, he’d take this pain from Jack; he knows, in their way, Sam and Dean feel the same; since that feat is not within the realm of possibilities, perhaps Dean’s on to something and they can relieve the burden some by figuring out what really happened here.

“I don’t know. Doesn’t look supernatural,” Mary supplies to flesh out the unknowable.

Cas silently concurs with the assessment; someone, not something killed Maggie. Given the ambient air temperature, the wicking capabilities of water to rapidly cool core body heat, the angel determines the girl can’t have been left here more than a handful of hours ago.

Always ready with a surly remark in any incarnation, Bobby pipes in, “Looks like some son of a bitch beat on her until…”

“Who would do something like this?” Interrupting, regard drawn once more to the magenta fabric, remembering your walks together on this very same stretch of trail, the solitary outings you’ve taken since trusting in your safety, Castiel masks the fear in his tone with anger.

A lesser being might call it a tragic case of mistaken identity; for Lucifer, it was a fairly typical Thursday evening with a dash of prodigious fate thrown in for fun. The single regret clouding his glee and veiling the red glow of his pupils as the girl’s skull broke with a satisfying pop and an even more gratifying gurgle against the unforgiving mass of the boulder on the third strike was that – although she initially tricked his senses into thinking she was you wandering in the wilderness on account of outerwear absolutely reeking of his brother – she was not actually you.

Unfortunate for fulfilling his nefarious need to revenge an innocuous smack upside the head back on the bus, certainly; although he wouldn’t characterize it as a mistake. He knew before he throttled the scream in her throat and flicked her – sputtering for air like a boneless fish – onto the ground he had the wrong refugee. Too bad for her, on he devil’s non-existent moral compass, wrong exists as just as compelling a direction as right.

Finishing up the last of the dishes in the sink, you lay a gleaming plate carefully on the pile with a clink to dry and swipe the wetness coating your hands across the towel tucked into the waistband of your jeans. At the familiar bass angelic utterance of your name, you turn toward the doorway.

“Cas!” The smile skirting your mouth falters into a frown at the serious etch of lines hardening his countenance. Yanking the towel free and tossing it aside, you navigate the counter between you with an arm extended to meet him halfway. “What happened?” Your fingers delve beneath the hem of his coats, flattening to the rigid plane of his torso.

“We need to talk.” He peers beyond your fretfully widening eyes at the two other apocalypse expats currently inhabiting the space to aid in lunch clean up. One of them averts her inquisitive gaze back to the tabletop she’s polishing. “Leave us,” he growls; the order emerges significantly less kind than he is capable of being. “You too.” He gestures at the young man organizing a shelf.

“Cas,” you hiss chidingly under your breath, prodding his side. You’ve made great strides these past weeks in terms of angelic PR and here he is throwing everything out the window with rudeness.

He rolls his eyes almost imperceptibly. Almost. There isn’t time for niceties given the circumstances, although he knows you’re right. “I need to speak to Y/N alone. Leave us, please,” he amends and softens the request, punctuating his words with a strained smile for their benefit. It’s disingenuous, yet you appreciate the effort.

You mouth a polite thank you to your nodding cohorts for their understanding as they abandon their chores to slink out into the hall.

Upon their exit, Castiel engulfs you in a hug.

“Hey, I’ve got you,” you whisper, acquiescing to his tender demand for contact; rubbing circles into his back, sliding a palm to comb the chestnut curls at his nape, you wait for an explanation for his strange behavior.

Standing there, he lets the heat of you sink into his shrouded skin; he listens to the steady thrum of your heart and shallow respiration of life moving in and out of your lungs until nothing but the grounding succor of your body and soul quiet his senses. Exhaling a sigh into the crook of your neck, he shudders against you and pulls away to look into your eyes. Grey glints of somberness gild his irises. “Maggie’s dead.”

“Wh-what?”

“Mary and Bobby found her body in the woods, on the trail leading to town. That’s what Sam-”

“An accident?”

Regard falling to the sliver of space between you, he shakes his head.

You suck in a juddering breath. Choking on a wave of guilt, you remember your conversation when she took over your living quarters. “I-I told her it was safe here. I promised her-”

“This isn’t your fault. This isn’t anyone’s fault.” Repeating Sam’s earlier assertion to Jack – the words sounding no more reassuring to his ears than before – Cas folds you to his chest, tangles his fingers in your hair, and angles to kiss the top of your head. “We need your help. You’ve gotten to know these people better than any of us – is there anyone she was close to? Anyone who would know why she was out alone?”

“Yeah-” You nod in the solid casing of his embrace, sniffling back tears– “Allene. They’re friends.”

“Good, that’s good.” He balances a prickly cheek on your crown; feeling the warmth of your tears saturate his shirt, he resettles his arms to envelope you tighter.

Next: Ch. 26 - The World Ender (Final)

[deanssweetheart23]

Against All Odds - Part II

Title: Against All Odds: A Kiss To Build A Dream On (Part II) Series Rewrite

Summary: Dean knows their relationship is doomed when he meets her just a few months before going to Hell. Fate intervenes.

Author: deanssweetheart23

Characters: Dean Winchester x reader

Word count: 2333

Warnings: Fluff. Angst. Implied smut. References to hell, loss and grief. Slight canon divergence (there’s no Lisa).

Author’s Notes: This is the second part of a seven-part series rewrite going from season 3 to season 11. It’s also my submission  for the 31 for 31 Challenge by my love @torn-and-frayed‘s 31 for 31 Challenge –my prompt will be used in the next part. Special thank you to my sunflower @trexrambling for betaing this for me, she is the best <3

Guys, thank you so much for reading and loving this story as much as you do. I’m sorry I didn’t update earlier, but it’s been a rough few weeks. I am back, though, and I plan on posting the next parts sooner (and I’m working on something big to share with y’all).

Without further ado. Enjoy <3

Dean’s used to losing people.

He’s used to seeing the ones he cares about caught in the middle of crossfire because the angels and the demons have petty things to do with their time.

He’s used to being treated as God’s pawn, nothing but a soldier to help him in the greater scheme of things.

He’s used to grief.

In fact, he knows grief better than anyone, knows it in all its depth and darkness, in its hallowing emptiness and terrifying immensity, in the haste of whiskey and its cold, sleepless nights.

Dean knows grief, but when he loses Sam, he loses parts of himself with him, loses chunks of flesh and bits of soul he’s sure he’ll never recover. His entire existence had always been revolving around one simple request: Look out for Sammy.

And who is he if there’s no Sammy to look out for?

He takes a deep breath, runs a hand over his face roughly.

Ahead of him the state line stretches, but he’s not worried; he knows exactly which exit to take.

If anything, he’s stopped by her house multiple times since those three days they spent together over a year ago. He never talked to her, of course, never built up the courage to knock on her door and go inside, tell her how he really felt, how he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her after the nights they spent tangled in each other, those long walks by the beach, the coffee-laced kisses they’d stolen over breakfast in bed.

No, Dean never told her any of it, but he still drove past her house, the home she had without him, to make sure she was okay, safe and happy and cared for.

A car honks its horn behind him.

He blinks, slows down.

He wonders whether he should turn right.

He wonders whether he deserves to turn right, deserves to drive to her house and waltz into her life again, a mess even greater than Jay had been.

He wonders if he has the right.

The car honks again, louder this time.

He promised Sam.

He promised.

Besides, she’s the only person he wants to see.

He makes the turn.

He’s standing outside her door twenty minutes later, ringing the bell two minutes after that. Its sound travels across the rooms immeasurably, followed by the padding of feet against bare wood. The vibrations are familiar and they send him reeling, bring back memories of her in his oversized shirt, pacing the floor as he made dinner, a pout on her lips because he’d just made fun of her feet, clad in a pair of fuzzy socks in the most disturbing shade of pink he’d ever seen.

He waits for one, two, three long seconds, and then.

“Dean?” His name falls from her lips in a whisper, timid and startled and sweet, and it takes him back to the night they’d shared their first kiss, the way she’d called for him as he tasted her on his mouth, certain that nothing would ever feel as good as she did in that moment.

He tries to smile.

It wobbles right off.

“Hey, Doc.”

A shaky breath.

Brows arched in a way he finds absolutely endearing.

“Is everything alright?” she asks, arms wrapped around her middle. “That call you gave me a few weeks ago…” She pushes some hair from her face, takes a step forward. “It got me a little worried.”

He nods.

Their conversation, dragged and raw, echoes soundlessly in his mind.

“Dean?” he hears her ask over the phone, worried, skeptical. “Tahini said you called, but I was in surgery. What’s going on?”

Dean hesitates.

He shouldn’t be doing this, he thinks. Not after the way they left things. Not with the Apocalypse looming over their heads. And yet, he feels like a weight’s been lifted off his shoulders as her voice washes over him, feels like he’s Dean again, not the righteous man or Michael’s vessel, not a warrior destined for great things.

Just Dean.

“Nothing, I just… I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Honestly… Things are about to get really bad, Doc.”

“Bad?” she repeats, incredulous. “What do you mean bad? Dean, what’s going on?”

“I, uh… You’re gonna see stuff on TV. Scary stuff. But I don’t want you to worry. Whatever happens, you’re gonna be okay. M’ gonna make sure of that.”

The silence that follows is thick, taut.

She draws in a heavy breath. “I don’t understand. Have you been drinking?”

He lets out a bitter laugh, shakes his head a little. “No. Look, I know I sound crazy, but I need you to trust me. Can you do that?”

“Yeah,” she says after a long pause. “Yes. Just… Come over. Please. I’m worried about you.”

“No, don’t… Don’t do that. I know the life that I live, Doc. I know how that’s gonna end for me.”

“Dean–”

“S’ alright. I don’t mind. Not anymore. I just… I wanted you to know… When I do picture myself happy… S’ with you.”

He’d regretted the words the moment he hung up, had cursed himself for sneaking into the shadows of her life again only to say goodbye, but he’d been desperate, about to say yes to Michael and he needed to hear her voice, needed some kind of closure.

“Dean?” she repeats, face sculpted with concern. “Are you okay?”

His gaze slides to the empty space next to him.

Darkness wraps its way around his heart.

“M’ fine,” he lies, a lie that’s been ingrained into his jabbed heart by now.

She hums.

The look she gives him is enough to let him know she doesn’t believe him.

“Tell you what,” she starts, a reluctant smile softening her unease, “s’ getting dark outside and you look like you could use a drink.” She steps aside, lets him steal a glimpse of her empty living room. “Wanna come in?”

He lets out air through his nose, not quite a laugh. “Yeah.” He runs a hand over his face. “Yeah, I think I’d like that.”

She smiles then, perhaps the most genuine smile he’s gotten out of her that evening, and, with her eyes locked on his, she reaches for his hand, manipulates their fingers until they’re intertwined.

And, just for a second, he swears he can almost breathe freely again.

Six months pass.

Dean moves into the small cottage with her, finds a respectable job at a construction-sight nearby. He tells her everything about his old life the day before he signs the contract, speaks to her about monsters and angels and demons, about Sam’s sacrifice.

He’s reluctant to, at first, worries that he’ll lose her just like he lost Cassie, but he can’t really be with her if she doesn’t know, can’t allow himself to become a concrete part of her life without making sure she wants him, wants every dark and guilty part he keeps hidden.

She does.

It surprises him a little, because he’s not used to people choosing him, not used to being loved so wholly and unconditionally by someone, but he gives himself over to her, trusts her with everything he’s got because he can tell how much she loves him.

It’s written across her skin every time she traces his scars with her fingertips, etched on her body as it wraps its way around him at nights. It’s there when she goes grocery shopping for him and it’s there when she tries to make him laugh, no matter how bad her day had been. It’s always there and it’s comforting and arduous at the same time, because he knows he has her, knows he’s finally managed to have something good in his life while his brother is burning in the Cage.

Sammy’s burning, and he is in love.

Soft lips press themselves against his neck, will his guilt away.

He closes his eyes in a shudder, despite himself.

“A quarter past six,” he mumbles, eyes glancing at the clock etched on the kitchen wall as he places his hand over hers.

Y/N’s just returned from her morning run –a habit of hers that reminds him so much of Sammy it hurts– and he can feel a thin layer of sweat against his body as she stays close along his back, can feel her heat sinking into him.

“Not bad for a slow poke,” he adds when he turns around, enveloping her in his arms.

“Shut up.” She nuzzles his clothed skin, almost sighs in content when he presses a lingering kiss on her forehead. A heartbeat passes, and then, “You’re up early. S’ your day off, isn’t it?”

He hums.

Without looking up he says, “Couldn’t sleep.” He runs a hand over his face, wonders whether he should say more. “S’, uh… S’ six months today.”

The statement hangs between them, dark, heavy, and, for a second, he almost regrets putting it into words, worries that she won’t know how to navigate her way through it, how he needs her to respond.

But she does.

She always does.

She cups the side of his neck, runs her thumb over his skin soothingly. “I know.” Her eyes drift to the griddle in front of them, the ingredients scattered on the counter. “Tell you what, let me take care of this. I got some time before I leave for work.”

He grins a little, pulls her closer. “Yeah, you should use that time to shower.” His fingers tangle in the bandana she’s using to keep her hair in a bun. He takes it off, lets it fall onto her shoulders unceremoniously, wild and unruly like a bird’s nest.

He loves it.

“You stink.”

“That’s the price of staying fit, smartass.” She reaches for the cupboards, pulls out her favorite mug. “What are you making anyway?”

He hands her the coffee pot.

Nonchalantly, he says, “Pancakes.”

“Pancakes?”

“Uh huh.”

“Do they have chocolate chips?”

He nods, tries to keep a straight face as he leans in and whispers, “And peanut butter,” like it’s the filthiest thing he’s ever told her.

“Hmmm,” she lifts her mug, sips some of her coffee. “Knew I loved you for a reason, D.”

“C’mere,” he mumbles, a secret smile playing at the corners of his lips as he lifts her onto the counter, clasps a hand at the side of her neck.

He kisses her then, deep and ardent and bold, too bold for it to be a brief morning kiss, and she sighs into it, lets him drag her closer to the edge of the counter until it all becomes too much, and he breaks it off, buries his face into the crook of her neck.

“Thank you about last night, by the way,” he rasps out afterwards.

He can feel her smile at that, can feel the warmth of it seeping into him and his mind drifts back to the night before, the feel of her pressed up against his arms, the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse standing striking, commanding, miles away from him, the way its light brought the ocean to life.

They were supposed to go to her friend’s birthday party, but there was a kid there that reminded him so much of Sam he couldn’t stay for longer than an hour, and she’d agreed to leave without a second thought, had apologized to Tahini and walked out with him, her hand running soothing circles over his back.

A hum.

Gentle fingers stroking his cheek.

“Anytime, D.” She kisses the top of his head. “You know that.”

And Dean does know that, but he hates this, hates being so useless, so absolutely weak, a dead weight wrapped around her body that can only ruin her.

“Alright-” she straightens her back, makes sure to meet his gaze- “what is it?”

His eyes drift to the counter.

He licks his lips. “S’ just…” He runs a hand over his face, lets out a dark laugh. “I know how hard it was to take care of Jay after Iraq and I don’t want… I hate that I’m putting you through it again.”

She leans a bit closer, takes his hand firmly in hers.

“D, you just lost your brother.” The words are a statement more than anything, brimming with empathy and heartache. “I am not expecting this relationship to be all rainbows and butterflies, just like I’m not expecting you to give up on hunting just because you live here. And I’m not comparing you to Jay.”

“Kid–”

“No, I know we’ve talked about this before, but I just–” she juts her chin– “I need you to understand that all I want is to be with you.” Her thumb smooths over his jaw. “I don’t care if you’re a hunter or a construction worker or a frigging astronaut.” She tips her forehead against his temple. “M’ in love with you.” They kiss again, softer this time. “And, for the record–” she jabs a finger at him– “you’re the best man I could have ever asked for, okay?”

He smiles, a smile that’s broken and real and torn around the edges.

“God, you’re…” He takes his hand in hers, and grips. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Doc.”

She laughs.

The sound reminds him of sunlight falling through the trees on a dark path.

“The best?”

“Yup.”

She smirks, slants her eyebrow, and he can feel the tension of the morning scattering around them like dust.

“Better than meeting Dr. Sexy?”

“Obviously.”

“And the Cartwright twins?”

He squints at her. “How do you even know about that?”

“I have my sources.”

“You’ve read the books, haven’t you?”

“Maybe,” she shrugs.

“Doc–” his lips find their way against her throat, familiar, demanding– “you’re so much better than the Cartwright twins.” When she chuckles, he can feel it reverberating deep into his lungs.

He falls a bit deeper in love with her after that day.

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[bluewatsons]

Paladin of Literary Agon: A Conversation with Harold Bloom, Los Angeles Review of Books (May 12, 2019)

William Giraldi: One of the abiding pleasures of Possessed by Memory is the dual meaning of the title: not only to possess literature by memory, but to be possessed, demon-like, by one’s own history, by a memory that will not stop. You’ll be 89 this year; you’ve had a most fertile and fulfilling life, one enriched enormously by friendships with the poets and critics you most admired. I think of Angus Fletcher, M. H. Abrams, Kenneth Burke, A. R. Ammons, John Hollander, John Ashbery: hauntings by them help mold this book into a glimmering threnody. Did you start out to memorialize your friends in such a way?

Harold Bloom: I did not intend Possessed by Memory to be so elegiac. But most of it was dictated to generous assistants during several years in which I spent much of my time in hospitals and in rehabilitation. It started to become a meditation upon mortality. Worst of all, almost my entire generation of critics and poets, so many of them my closest friends, died during those years. My prime mentors — Frederick A. Pottle, Hans Jonas, Gershom Scholem, Kenneth Burke — had departed earlier, all save for Mike Abrams, who lasted more than a hundred years. With the recent deaths of William Merwin and Richard Wilbur, and of John Ashbery before them, my loneliness increased. These days, whenever I read, teach, or write, I am haunted by friends who educated me--Richard Rorty, Angus Fletcher, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, John Hollander. I was very close to the poets A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, William Merwin, and in quite a different way to James Merrill. They seem to be in the room with me. They also appear in my dreams. I have never written a poem. My only gift, as I understand it, is to have learned to listen: to students and to ghosts. I could wish the book were less somber than it is.

William Giraldi: Something occurred to me on my second reading of Possessed by Memory. Your essential friendships — those that were deeply reciprocal, that helped fertilize your work as you helped fertilize theirs — have been with poets and critics and not novelists or dramatists. You told me once about the ecstasy of being found by Hart Crane’s poems at the Bronx Library when you were a small child. The Pentateuch had always been a shimmering presence in your household, but it was Crane who opened the book your life would become, who put you in touch with the font of daemonic splendor, “the burning fountain,” as Shelley has it. I know what certain fiction writers mean to you — Cervantes, Kafka, Proust (and Possessed by Memory ends with a penetrating assessment of Proust) — but the poets (Shakespeare, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Crane, Stevens) have clearly meant the most to you.

Harold Bloom: That is most of the story, yes. During the 1980s and 1990s, I spent a great deal of time with Philip Roth. There were also interchanges with Tony Kushner and the novelist Walter Abish. Hart Crane broke the vessels for me. I then read Shakespeare, Milton, Whitman, the Romantics and Victorians and 20th-century poetry in English with a kind of fury that Crane had put into me. Probably my essential reading experience comes down to the Hebrew Bible, Dante, Shakespeare. I continue to read Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, and Stevens almost daily.

William Giraldi: Possessed by Memory begins with an epigraph by the divine Oscar Wilde from his essay “The Critic as Artist,” in which he speaks of “the highest criticism” being “a record of one’s soul” and “the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.” I think of how Wilde and Pater swerved from the prevailing critical ethos to make it new. In their departure from their predecessors, they honed their own aesthetic. You see these swervings and disruptions in English-language criticism--Coleridge moving away from Dryden and Johnson, Arnold from Coleridge, Eliot and Empson attempting to disrupt and correct Arnold while simultaneously taking from him. Your own critical program began with a focus on the Romantic poets, on making new paths from the likes of M. H. Abrams and Northrop Frye. Then you veered into the work that became your life’s mission, the elucidation of influence. To what extent were you conscious of needing to swerve from or to disrupt your own potent predecessors?

Harold Bloom: I had a bad nightmare on July 11, 1967, following my 37th birthday. I have written about this elsewhere. The next morning I came down to breakfast and began to scribble a long dithyramb that I called “The Covering Cherub or Poetic Influence.” I kept at it for another day or two, and it became, in time, much revised, the opening chapter in The Anxiety of Influence, published January 5, 1973. The original text was printed by John Hollander in his selection of my work called Poetics of Influence. I was sadly amused when Northrop Frye told mutual friends that he could not read the book because it was all about him. It is not. Nor is it about my humane mentors M. H. Abrams and Frederick A. Pottle. After years of meditation I have come to believe that the Covering Cherub, a figure out of Ezekiel and Blake, was smothering me with the massive heft of all the poems I had read, loved, remembered. If I have a potent precursor, it would have to be Dr. Samuel Johnson. I am a good schoolteacher--he is beyond me and beyond disruption. Had I followed family tradition, I would have become a rabbi. Instead, I am a secular rabbi like those celebrated by Wallace Stevens. I teach Shakespeare as scripture. When I teach Poetic Influence, in some ways I vanish, and in some modes I am exalted.

William Giraldi: I often try to impart to readers the Eucharistic component to the strongest literature, the necessity of its sacral communing. As a nonbelieving Catholic, I have no problem calling it a secular holiness, though I don’t, as you know, subscribe to the Arnoldian notion of poetry’s power to supplant religion, never mind to correct society. You’ve spent your life defending and explaining the pleasurable hardships in the strongest literature. I see this as the difference between the rare joy of aesthetic mastery in Dante and the mere enjoyment of a contemporary best seller, the difference between gravitas and gratification. In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis differentiates between strong readers and weak readers. Strong readers experience an important book as a sacral event, their worldviews revamped. Weak readers read an important book and nothing at all happens to them. Near the start of the The Western Canon, you acknowledge that reading for aesthetic pleasure and necessary wisdom has gone the way of the plesiosaur. Twenty-five years later, as the internet perseveres in the strafing of our souls, I wonder how grim is your outlook.

Harold Bloom: I regret not sharing your admiration for C. S. Lewis. After a few amiable encounters in the autumn of 1954 at Cambridge University, the distinguished defender of the faith and I fell out while sharing drinks at the Anchor Bar. Gnosticism upset him gravely. We did not speak again after that. He attacked my book The Visionary Company and I responded gently enough by writing that his A Preface to Paradise Lost was pure theology. Sometime back I published a brief book, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? I concluded by relying upon Saint Augustine, who taught us all how to read strongly and how memory, time, and consciousness relate to imaginative literature, though of course the Bible was for him the truth. Oddly I begin to be less pessimistic than I was in The Western Canon. Partly that is inspired by my students, but also I receive endless emails, straight mails, phone calls, and visits from good readers throughout the world who have been kind enough to want to tell me that I have been their teacher. There is a saving remnant. Young women and men the world over read and hear the call of wisdom and the urgency of intelligence. I am pretty much a relic, yet I believe the future — if there is one — will depend upon deep readers all over the globe. Without reading Dante, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Cervantes, and their few peers, we cannot learn how to think. And if we cannot think, then the future belongs to the Trumps of the world — that is to say, to the apocalyptic beasts from the sea.

William Giraldi: Since we must endure now the daily mauling of morality from our capital, the smiting of tact and taste and truth by such tanninim, I sometimes ponder what the state of our culture and politics would be if we had a populace educated in beauty and wisdom by Dante and Dickinson. But such considerations get quaveringly close to the erroneous Arnoldian line that comprehends literature as social corrective. From the beginning, and again in Possessed by Memory, you’ve been adamant in insisting that literature enhances and enlarges individuals only through aesthetic pleasure it grants individuals the vital discourse they must have with themselves if they are to be whole, if they are to enjoy more life and prepare for life’s end. But of course a society made up of such individuals is something to smile on. I think of your old friend Northrop Frye, “We can’t speak or think or comprehend even our own experience except within the limits of our own power over words, and those limits have been established for us by our great writers.” Literature says with John Clare, “O take me from the busy crowd, / I cannot bear the noise!” and “Lord keep my love for quiet joys.” I’m a touch surprised you aren’t more morose about our noisome cyber lives.

Harold Bloom: It is true and perhaps sad that the highest literature teaches us how to speak to ourselves rather than to others. Reading Dante and Shakespeare may improve an individual but will not make him a better citizen. I do not have much of what you call a cyber life myself because I don’t watch television, do not have a cell phone, and have to dictate to someone at a computer in order to write. More than ever I am a dinosaur. But I have to reason outward from my students. Doubtless they are all involved in these technologies. But last week I taught Macbeth and “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.” Most of my students were delightfully agile in discussing both. I grant that I choose them from a possible group that is already elite. And yet they are as good as any students I have taught in my 63 years at Yale. As I discovered again this morning, I no longer can read The New York Times, once I have glanced at all the dreadful events. Cultural coverage is so remote from my aesthetic experience that clearly I will go on provoking tired readers. Still, if I have a public function, and I doubt it, it would have to be as a living relic of an age that could give us Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery.

William Giraldi: Your age has given us also a clutch of thrilling critical voices who helped establish American literary comment as a worthy art, just as your own work has demonstrated that art and has helped complete the imaginative literature it sets out to evaluate and appreciate. Each week I go back to Wilde to be sustained, and I’m remembering now his contention, with a nod to Pater and Arnold, that “[w]ithout the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all worthy of the name.” Wilde underscores the essential and thrumming reciprocity of literature and criticism. If critics are analysts of pleasure, in Chesterton’s phrase, then their work is responsible for instigating its own pleasure, for creating its own wisdom and beauty. Mary McCarthy once defined weak criticism as “a quivering jelly of uncritical emotion” — which I suspect is an allusion to T. S. Eliot-- “The general mess of imprecision of feeling / Undisciplined squads of emotion” — and I wonder if you ever fear that our new autocracy of emotion is going to butcher the essential reciprocity of literature and criticism. What becomes of a culture that does a lot of feeling about itself but no longer knows how to think about literature?

Harold Bloom: High literature has three prime attributes-- cognitive power, originality, aesthetic splendor. Only by a disciplined harnessing of emotion can any of these three come forth. What you call our “new autocracy of emotion” is just stylized noise. It cannot touch the interdependence of criticism and literature because it is mindless. Culture is now cut off from fashion. Popular culture has become an oxymoron. Bad taste is not culture. There are still many valuable writers of imaginative works in our society. It seems to me that they prosper best when they take a stance apart from the immediate moment. Distraction is the enemy. I see no crisis in the reciprocity of literature and criticism because the culture industries are irrelevant to it.

William Giraldi: I’m reminded of your chapter in Possessed by Memory on Angus Fletcher and Whitman, in which you reference Fletcher’s Allegory and what he called “the crisis of scale.” You say that Fletcher “warned prophetically that any sense of sublime transcendence is going to vanish in our technological world. What is coming is the emptiness of allegory without ideas.” Fletcher died in 2016 and he seems to me to be a loving, guiding shade throughout this book. All along you have been not only continually in communion with poetic splendor, but continually in conversation, explicit or not, with those critics who helped cast you. Has your relationships with certain critics — Longinus, Lucretius, Pater, Hazlitt, et cetera — changed over your lifetime?

Harold Bloom: Samuel Johnson is always the rhinoceros in the room. Walter Pater taught me appreciation in all its senses. Kenneth Burke and I wandered around lower Manhattan while he taught me rhetoric and we both recited Whitman. But Angus Fletcher is the abiding presence. He is in the room as I teach, read, write. Our friendship was continuous from 1951 to 2016, and indeed he is my guiding shade. I think my relationships with mentors and friends changed only after they died. I am not an occultist nor a medium, but somehow they speak to me from the beyond. They are no different except perhaps a touch more urgent.

William Giraldi: My memory is all loops and lacunae. The poetry I have locked in me took lots of work to get there and takes lots of work to stay there. I once described your memory as a great bear trap, but let’s revise that, because I recently heard a cosmologist say that at the other end of every black hole is a white hole... nothing truly disappears but is born anew in another cosmos, at the other end. There’s poetic splendor in that, a Nietzschean eternal recurrence that pleases me. Your memory for poetry is a vortex birthing fresh light. I think of Robert Graves’s poem “On Portents,” in which he writes of “tourbillions in Time made / By the strong pulling of her bladed mind.” But I wonder if a pulling memory such as yours is ever a woe... it gives in verse but takes in tears. There must be morose moments before the bruising dawn when you wish you couldn’t remember with such vividness.

Harold Bloom: Memory can be a consuming fire or it can please like the taste of fresh fruit. From about 4 a.m. on, I am not happy about my memory though it keeps me going anyway. I surprised myself the other day by quoting swaths of Edmund Spenser to myself. At first I could not remember who it was, but that came soon. It is much easier to remember poems than to remember people. If I allowed myself to brood on all the people I loved who have departed, then I would never be able to go on reading, writing, teaching. In me memory has become cognition.

William Giraldi: Your combined work on Romanticism, influence, memory, Shakespeare, and religion amounts to a constant, branching dialogue--your books sing to each other­­ under the light of literature. You long ago came into possession of your own influence, and I wonder what you ponder now when glancing back at your tremendous output, if you’d like to be remembered as the explicator of literary agon, as fervent Bardolator, as defender of the Canon, or if you see your different stages as I do, as a single stage that progresses as your thinking progressed, from your first book on Shelley to this latest on memory.

Harold Bloom: I have been publishing books and essays from 1957 until now in 2019. I continue to write and to teach. I can hardly remember what it was like to be 25 or 27. I would like to be remembered as a teacher. Essentially I am a schoolteacher. I do not know whether I have developed or just unfolded. It seems to me dubious that any of my writings will survive. They were extensions of my teaching. Insofar as they have taught strangers, they have done their work. The work of teaching is never over. It has taught me how to listen. When I was young and middle-aged, I was a bad listener. Now I listen very closely as my students discuss Shakespeare or Wallace Stevens with one another. I think when I depart that I will think of myself as a secular rabbi. One reads to the congregation yet also to oneself. Yahweh bewilders me. I cannot accept him. I cannot reject him. The God of my mother and my father cannot be just an old story. I do not trust in the Covenant, but I cannot deny the transcendental and extraordinary.

[hnrywinchester]

Fare Thee Well - - 16

Summary: She hasn’t seen Gabriel since he died nine years ago, then a phone call changes everything.

Pairing: Gabriel x OFC

Series Warnings: ANGST, smut, swearing, PTSD Gabriel, Character Deaths, Canon Compliant

Beta’d by: @aquietuniverse

Words: 4.3k

Time was standing still. Liv and Rowena sat in the library of the bunker, and the silence was unsettling as Lucifer sneered at them, his eyes traveling between the two of them. Liv was one step away from despondent. She’d just sent the love of her life off on some suicide mission into a world she’d never be able to get to if anything happened to him. She’d spend the rest of her life trying, that was for sure, but deep down she knew she’d never get there. It was hard to consider that that could have been the last time he kissed her, or smirked at her or made some crude, sexual joke. He very well could have just told her he loved her for the last time. Now seemed like the time she should be committing him to memory, the sound of his voice, the golden flecks in his eyes and the way his fingertips danced so gently across her body despite being powerful enough to destroy entire civilizations at will. Those were all things she was going to want to remember, needed to remember. She mentally kicked herself for not snapping a single photo of him before he left, her phone had a damn camera on it but the thought of preserving that shit-eating grin forever hadn’t passed through her head until now. “Sidelined eh ladies?” Lucifer mocked, rage burning at Liv’s cheeks at the sound of his voice, “Kinda… misogynistic no? Leaving the women behind in the kitchen while the men go off and fight for glory.” Liv rolled her eyes, at this point she wasn’t sure which fate was worse, death or being stuck with Lucifer for an extended amount of time. Maybe it was one in the same. “I’m disappointed in you,” he continued, turning his attention onto Liv, “I didn’t take you as the type to let your boyfriend order you around. Thought you had more stones than that.” “Do you ever shut up?” Liv snapped, kicking a chair in his direction. With a shrug and a smug smirk at her failed attempt at hitting him, Lucifer laughed, “Typical Gabe, tryin’ to be the hero. Know how many times that’s worked? Zero. Kid can’t even save his own ass never mind anyone else’s.” “Maybe I wanted to stay behind. Marvel in the sight of you all tied up and useless, bleeding out like a pig on a spit.” “Oh, feisty. He always did like the lively ones. Honestly though, now that we’re here, I’m glad it happened like this. I think we need to get to know each other better. I mean we are family now, right? I have to make sure you’re apt to be around my son-“ “We are not family. Not now, not ever.” The thought sent a wave of nausea into her stomach. She found herself fantasizing about Gabriel finishing him off once and for all while simultaneously wishing he’d been able to do it when he had the chance earlier that morning. “What? You’re my brother’s wifey now, that makes us, what do they call it?” Lucifer droned on, his nose wrinkling up in confusion, “In-laws?” “Absolutely not,” she seethed, teeth gritted. “Accept it sis, you’ll see me at Christmas dinners from here on out.” “Not a wifey, one.” “Ah, but you will be! In whatever sense you two figure out. Don’t think I can’t see into that conflicted, melodramatic head of yours. You’re better than that. I see Gabe’s little lovesick eyes looking down at you when he said he’s gonna marry you.” Lucifer feigned a gag, and Liv fought back the urge to lunge at him, plunge the angel blade tucked into her jacket through his sunken in chest a few times. Like she needed the reminder of that little snippet right now. At the time she’d laughed it off, he was ridiculous and lame and corny, but now she saw an allure to it. Maybe it was just the thought that this eons old bachelor, the party boy, the pornstar for fucks sake, had even considered completely and irrevocably devoting himself to her that had her swooning, but if he really did ask she knew what her answer would be. You’re fucking insufferable,” she groaned, not wanting to egg him on further. “Whoa, geez. Okay dude… that hurts,” Lucifer whined, his face overacting offense. “This is how I die, isn’t it? Annoyed to death by Satan himself.” “What a way to go.” Moments ago she missed Gabriel, but now she was cursing his existence. What was he thinking leaving her here with this pompous asshole? It’s like he didn’t even know her at all. He should have been well aware that being stuck for hours, days on end with Lucifer was going to end badly. One of them was going to end up marred, beaten or dead. Rowena not ending up in the crossfires was her goal at this point. “I need a drink,” Liv stated, turning her attention to the witch watching on to the soap opera with a perturbed gaze, “Do you want a drink?” “Yes. Please,” Rowena groaned in agreement, throwing her head down onto the table. “What you want?” “I don’t care, whatever they’ve got will do just fine.” Spotting the liquor cabinet, Liv ran from the two pairs of prying eyes. Once she was out of sight, her breath huffed out in relief. Everything was spiraling out of control faster than she could reel it back in. Self-destruct mode was very much activated and no matter how many alarms were going off in her head she just couldn’t switch it off. She wanted Gabriel. It wasn’t some inherent need that she’d waste away without, it was purely an insatiable craving her soul was pleading for. It begged for his arms and his safety and how he’d know exactly what to say right now to make this whole unbearable situation completely tolerable. She wanted his lips and his wandering hands and that soft look he got in his eyes when she did something completely ridiculous, that look that screamed ‘you’re the most perfect thing I’ve ever laid my eyes on’. Maybe it came down to solely just wanting to feel… wanted. She’d wandered aimlessly her entire life, not quite finding her niche, until that honey-haired Trickster came around and showed her what it felt like to be loved. Grabbing the first three bottles she could find, Liv headed back into the library and was shocked to find Lucifer silent. Assuming he was just planning his next verbal war with her, Liv placed the three bottles down in front of Rowena and resumed her seat back at the table, propping her feet up onto the table. “Dealer’s choice,” Liv sighed, throwing her head back in exasperation. “You got old, Liv,” Lucifer taunted, causing her to groan at the unbearableness of this situation, “Like, really old. What’s it been like nine years? Red over here looks better than you and she’d got a couple hundo’ on you.” “Jesus Christ,” Liv mumbled under her breath, downing the entire glass Rowena had passed to her. Whiskey. Thank God. Before the tumbler had even hit the table she was already sending it back towards the witch for a refill. “I mean, gray hairs, wrinkles, I can’t even imagine the scars. It’s not a good look,” Lucifer continued with that nasally tone of his, “I’m shocked he didn’t run right past you when he saw you. You’ve seen some of his former conquests, right? Never knew how he did it… but wow. And then there’s you.” “Well Lucy,” Liv began, licking the burn of the whiskey off her lips as the devil grimaced at her nickname, “I’ve heard you’re quite the looker yourself these days. I mean, this vessel is cringe-worthy enough, can’t imagine what’s underneath is much better.” “You don’t want to know,” Rowena cautioned, smiling as she side-eyed Lucifer. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, Liv was really starting to like Rowena. She now saw why the Winchesters had yet to put a bullet in her brain. “You two are awfully chummy,” Lucifer noticed warily, “I don’t like it.” “Go on then, keep insulting us poor wee women. Anything to distract yourself from your profound, deeply emasculating humiliation,” Rowena tacked on, the smugness in her voice sending a little swell of pride to Liv’s heart. What neither of the women in the room saw, however, was the bindings holding their captive in place flickering as their self-satisfied giggles echoed across the cement walls. They didn’t know what he did. Enough rage, enough anger and he didn’t need grace to break this pathetic spell-work. One of them would crack. He’d been working on Liv but she was shockingly holding her own against him, maybe it was time to move onto good old Red. When he burst into song, digging through his archives to find the most obnoxious one he knew, their synchronized groan only egged him on further. Just a few more hours, and they’d both be goners. This world was a nightmare. There was no other word for it. As Gabriel marched on, leading the way for himself, Castiel and the Winchesters, he couldn’t help but feel displaced. The rain pelted against his leather jacket, his golden blade dripping as he thanked the universe for keeping Liv at home. This whole place gave him the creeps, and that didn’t happen very often, if ever. The ever-present darkness and gloom had him glancing over his shoulder every few seconds, the silence eerie enough to set his instincts on high. So this is what the world would have been like if the Apocalypse had happened. This may be the only instance where he was happy people didn’t listen to him. He’d been rooting for this for a little while there. Castiel stayed in step with his older brother, staying silent as Liv’s words echoed in his head. Dead or alive. He knew that she wouldn’t survive losing him again, getting Gabriel out alive had to be a top priority. “What’d she say to you?” Gabriel asked from beside him, almost as if he was reading his mind, “Before we left.” “She… she asked me to bring you back, “Castiel confessed, “Dead or alive.” Gabriel’s chest constricted at Castiel’s disclosure. She was under no illusions, and he knew that, hell he’d probably helped that train of thought along with his little final goodbye monologue he’d given her before taking off. Yet hearing that she’d pleaded for his dead body to be returned twisted his stomach. He pictured her face at the sight of Castiel carrying his limp, bloodied form back into the library, the wretched, soul shattering scream that would erupt from her chest echoed in his head. The ghost of her fingers trailing across his face traced over his skin, he could feel her memorizing his features, the ones he always thought so lowly of being some of her favorites. She’d kiss the round tip of his nose, run her thumb along his bottom lip that sat just a little too deep under his upper one as she’d plead in her head to see his eyes one last time. The thought of her losing him was almost as unbearable as him losing her. “Gabriel I… I need to ask something of you,” Castiel asked nervously, snapping Gabriel out of his turbulent thoughts, “Please just, hear me out.” “Okay…” Gabriel dragged on, eyebrows furrowing. “Heaven is dying. There are only a handful of angels left in all of existence. We need you help-“ “You already know the answer to this Cas. I’m not leaving her again. Plus, heaven doesn’t want me back. As far as they’re concerned I’m a screw up. Hell, as far as I’m concerned I’m a screw up.” “Well, heavens been run into the ground by upstanding angels. Perhaps a screw up is just the change we need.” “I can’t.” “If heaven dies, Gabriel, the consequences will be monumental. Millions of souls will come crashing down to Earth, vengeful and displaced. Whatever semblance of peace you’re considering would be lost. She’d be called back to war and die fighting, just like the rest of us. Except you.” “She isn’t dying.” “One day she will, and then what? Where will she go if heaven is obsolete?” This was not the place or time to be talking about this. Gabriel’s nostrils flared as he subdued the reflex to hurl Castiel against the nearest tree by the lapels of that ridiculous jacket he wore for thinking now was a good time to bring up Liv dying. He knew she was going to die one day, she was human after all. What he hadn’t planned on was all of his brothers being taken out, leaving him with no one to do the deed for him. No heaven to go to? So what, she was just going to walk around in the veil until someone burned her bones? He’d be damned before anyone took a lighter to her. There was another way to fix this all, there had to be. What did heaven expect him to do? Run the joint? “Stop. Just, stop! I can’t talk about this right now. I can’t run heaven, Cas. I can’t. You need some grace to fill the tank with, take it. Take all of it for all I care. But I’m not my father. Never was, never will be. Find someone else,” Gabriel panicked, his voice frantic. “There is no one else!” Castiel implored, his desperation growing. Castiel knew it was hopeless. He wasn’t going to leave her behind. Granted, he knew it was a slim chance to begin with but nothing Castiel had said had been untrue. If heaven fell, the world would burn. He glanced behind him, watching as Sam and Dean were deep in conversation as they followed. If heaven fell, Dean would be in danger too. This was an impossible situation, but what obstacle that stood in their way wasn’t? A scream in the distance gained the attention of all four men, all sharing a glance as they formed a small circle. “Not our world, not our problem, right?” Gabriel shrugged, hoping that these idiots didn’t want to play savior to everyone. The singing had yet to cease. It’d been hours. Liv had her head pressed into the cold wood of the table, the decanter of whiskey practically drained in her right hand. She’d given up on glasses a few hours ago. Her head was swimming, the usually delightful buzz from this much booze couldn’t even settle with the American Idol Reject bellowing on and on and on. Such a waste of really good whiskey she was sure Dean was going to be livid she cleaned house of. “Just kill me now!” she cried, theatrically throwing her head back. “That can be arranged!” Lucifer chimed, breaking from his tune just long enough to get the words out. “I need a break.” As she walked from the room, the singing ceased. Figures. How Rowena was keeping her cool through that atrocity was beyond her. If she had some way of making magical ear plugs and wasn’t sharing there was going to be hell to pay, that was certain. She meandered her way to the washroom, exhaustion from hours of boredom and anxiety finally kicking in during these moments of peace. As she waited for the water to warm up, she gazed at her reflection in the mirror. She had gotten old. She’d never really paid any mind to it before, but after hearing Lucifer dissect each and every one of her flaws they were glowing like beacons now. Maybe it was high time to get a box of dye from the pharmacy, she thought, as she realized those single grays in her temples were colonizing now. Gabriel hadn’t seemed to mind any of it, but, she really was no where near the level she knew he was used to. Back in the day, when they’d first met, she’d never considered herself a looker but she saw none of that girl in the reflection staring back at her now. It was truly a wonder Gabriel had even recognized her at all. Her eyes continued to inspect herself and when they drifted to her neck she noticed one of Gabriel’s careless marks he’d left along her throat. No doubt it was from their anger-fueled romp in the back of her car just that morning, they’d certainly thrown all caution to the wind and the evidence was staring her in the face. She ran her fingers over the welt, her chest tightening as her mind focused; the panic she’d been harboring reared its ugly head again. Gabriel. The archangel. The Trickster. The man who could fuck her in a rest stop bathroom and still make her feel like a queen, who loved her, above all other things, gray hairs or not. The man who would die for her, that would sit in hell for close to a decade in hopes of keeping her safe. The man she’d let wander off into an unknown world, prepared to die if he needed to, alone. The man that she loved, with every fiber and cell of her being. It was too late now, even if she tried she’d never find him over there. She was stuck here, in limbo, not knowing if she’d ever see him again. The steam from the running faucet had fogged the mirror she’d been staring into before her thoughts wandered. She shook herself from her wallowing, wiping the condensation from the glass, her worn-down reflection coming into sight once again. Knowing it was time to return, she shut the faucet off, not even bothering to splash her face down as she’d intended, before turning and heading back to the library. Her stomach was growling, but preparing food seemed tedious, there were bigger issues to be concerned with right now. The closer she got, the more she swore she heard… shouting. She ran, skidding into the library to find Rowena screaming at Lucifer, a handful of his hair locked between her fingers and the ropes of magic restraining him beginning to flicker. Whatever was happening was about to release the devil on them both. “Rowena! Stop!” Liv warned, but it was too late. The cords snapped and Liv watched in horror as Lucifer rose to his feet, grabbing the witch by her throat as his eyes blazed red. She was frozen in fear. This whole time she’d been worried about Gabriel dying, she’d never once considered that it might be her kicking the bucket. “Ah, Red. You shouldn’t have made me mad. Step into my office. Livvy, be with you in just a sec,” he sneered, his words barely audible over the sounds of Rowena’s gasps and chokes. In a flash the two were suddenly against the wall, the thud echoing through the room. Liv knew she needed to act, and quick, but she saw no real option. She had no weapon handy, she knew no magic, she was stuck. Instincts kicked in however, and she ran towards the devil, willing to do whatever it took to get his hands from Rowena’s throat and hopefully give her enough time to do whatever it was that she could. “You know… you and Gabe, you kicked me when I was down. I didn’t have any fight. I didn’t have anything to live for. But you… you… you gave me something to fight for again. My boy. So for that, I’m going to be quick-“ Lucifer droned on, Liv’s hands grabbing his shoulder stopping him short. “Defendatur!” Rowena called, effectively forcing Lucifer away from her. What Rowena didn’t know, was the passenger he’d taken with him. “Sammy!” Dean cried, following Castiel down the dark passage after his brother. Gabriel ran after them, but stopped short as he came beside the small human girl they’d picked up just hours before, his heart stopping. When he looked at her, he didn’t see the wayward survivor, all he saw was Liv. His brain begin firing off images and horrors, his head twitching as he fought to keep them at bay. He saw her bloody and lifeless on that warehouse floor, he heard her calling to him just as Sam had for his brother, her voice filled with fear. Gabriel! He watched as her lifeless body was dragged down that corridor, the monster’s hissing and snarls ricocheting off the walls. She’s not here. She’s not here. She’s not here.  He whispered the words under his breath like a mantra, doing his best to control the terror icing his veins as he watched Castiel return empty handed. Sam was gone. Liv would have been gone. He would have failed. When he saw Dean’s face, he felt that sorrow deep in his own heart, and selfishly a small hint of gratitude that it wasn’t he who had lost everything. He needed to get home. No more lost orphans, no more side missions, he needed to see her, feel her, again. “Dean, we should go,” Gabriel reasoned, knowing Castiel would never be able to take charge over this situation, “we can’t stay here or you’re all toast.” Dean glared at the angel, rage and despair mixed into his eyes, “Bet you feel real good about yourself right now, don’t you?” Gabriel looked at him confused, “What?” “Why can’t you save him!? If it was her you’d be barreling down that fucking…” Gabriel’s face fell in shame as Dean’s words caught in his throat. Even if he tried, he knew he didn’t have the juice. “Yeah I would, doesn’t mean I could fix anything,” Gabriel began, keeping his voice level, “I can’t, Dean. I didn’t even have enough for the spell, what makes you think I can raise the dead?” Defeat fell across Dean’s face as he grabbed Castiel by the shoulders, shoving him out of the way as he lunged at Gabriel. The archangel let himself be tackled by the hunter, their bodies tumbling to the dirt as Dean grabbed two handfuls of his jacket. Gabriel took it, knowing exactly how Dean felt, not like he could hurt him anyway. When a fist connected with his jaw, Gabriel could barely feel a sting, but as Dean’s hand came back down Gabriel stopped it with an outstretched palm. “What is this helping?” Gabriel yelled, “I’m sorry, Dean! But if we don’t keep moving, we’re gonna lose more than Sam and… whatever his name was.” Castiel came behind them, placing a hand on Dean’s shoulder both in comfort and warning that if he continued, his brother was not going to stay this complacent for long. With a snap of his arm, Dean pulled his fist from the angel’s grasp and stood, adjusting his backpack and jacket, before silently taking off down the passage alone. Castiel held a hand out for Gabriel, helping him back to his feet before running after the reckless hunter before he got himself killed. Gabriel then looked at the poor human that was stuck in the middle of all of this now, her face was dripping with fear. “Come on, we gotta go,” Gabriel instructed softly, clapping his hand on her shoulder once. “Who is she?” Maggie asked, slowly letting one foot fall in front of the other as they started down the cave, “the woman, that you would save?” “Uh… she isn’t here. She’s back at home.” “She’s human?” “Yeah, she is.” “And you… you love her?” Gabriel nodded, wondering why she was asking these questions, but as he looked down at her face he saw the confusion and the wonder. She’d been living in a world where angels hunted and murdered humans, something like him was unheard of. They walked in silence from there on, catching up to Dean and Castiel once they’d come out unscathed from the tunnel. Gabriel’s thoughts again traveled to the thought of it being her left behind in that wasteland. He swore he could still hear her calling out to him, the sound fuzzy and staticky, like it was coming through on a bad signal. This world was strange, and he needed out. Her cheek was firmly planted into the wet ground, the rain cold on her skin, a twig poking right at the corner of her eye as she came to. She was on her stomach, laying on the ground outside. That made no sense, she was just in the bunker… As she pushed herself up and opened her eyes her heart damn near stopped. She wasn’t in Kansas anymore. This world was void of color, barren and desolate. About thirty feet away she could see the rift, shining brighter than even the sun was, and she took off running towards it. She wasn’t stupid, she knew that she’d never make it out of here alive stuck to her own devices. She was weaponless, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, she’d freeze to death if some murderous angel or monster didn’t find her first. So focused on her destination, she was oblivious to the fact she hadn’t come over alone. Suddenly, a hand reached out and grabbed her by the arm, effectively stopping her from crossing back through to the bunker and her stomach dropped. “Oh no no, you’re with me,” Lucifer sneered, “partner.” “Not a chance,” she spat in response, pulling on her arm in his grip. “Uh, you don’t have a choice. Like it or not sis, we’re in this together now.” With a sharp pull, Lucifer dragged her along beside him, and she knew there was no escape. Gabe… Gabriel…. GABE! She called and called but no answer came. Surely he wasn’t dead already, right?

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