#sliding in as a fog cloud when they fill up the grave? surely there was better ways to keep out of the sunlight

[trinkettes]

Regarding the grave, that’s what everyone’s been assuming, since Mr Swales was found dead by his seat near the grave and that dog went berserk were its own trued to bring it near and became paralyzed with fear once brought near it by force.

ohh that makes sense, i assumed it was just because swales had been killed by a vampire. i think i have to reread the bit where mina finds lucy, i completely lost track of what she was seeing and just brushed past it, i thougt she saw a dracula/spooky figure on the steps up the hill and followed him.

[teaplease1717]

Story: Ashes of Love and War

Chapter: 14 / ?

Couple: Todoroki Shouto / Yaoyorozu Momo (TodoMomo)

Rating: M (for language and violence)

Betas: @flourchildwrites​ (Link)  & C’s Melody (Link)

Ao3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21638800/chapters/73273167Shouto laid the unconscious pirate face-down on the makeshift cot.

Thank you everyone who follows and supports!

XXXXXX

The flames burning in the bronze tripods flickered, casting long shadows across the man’s pale, sticky skin. Shouto sat back on his heels and tilted the man’s head to the side to make sure the pirate didn’t choke if he got sick.

The man stirred as Shouto adjusted him. His eyes fluttered open, and he moaned as he stared unseeing at Shouto for a moment before his eyelids closed again — hopefully not for the last time — and he shivered.

Shouto leaned down to the edge of the cot to grab the blanket but paused, hesitating. He stared down at the pirate, studying the gashes running across his back.

The skin had been shredded by the stympahlian’s talons. The veins streaking out from around the wounds had turned green and purple from poison. And on the man’s arm was a nasty cut from one of the stymphalian’s feathers. It had sliced along his forearm, exposing bone.

The man shivered again, and Shouto wavered on whether he should cover him.

He decided not to. It wouldn’t be safe to have anything touching either wound until they had been properly cleaned. The pirate would be lucky enough if he didn’t lose his arm; he didn’t need an infection on top of that.

Shouto folded the blanket back up and stood. The rest of the room was filled with the other gravely wounded. Pallets were stacked almost on top of each other in what had once been the dining room. Yet, the space wasn’t big enough; only a third of those who were injured fit. The tents the pirates had brought with them were tattered. Men without life-threatening injuries were set up on cots in the courtyard or crowded in the hallway.

It was uncomfortable. Despair and pain hung over the house, sliding down Shouto’s back like cold claws as it dredged up memories of the war. Of his comrades writhing in agony from incurable wounds, begging the gods for mercy — which they would never grant. And the civilians of Troy, the soldiers and innocents he’d killed, their screams and pleas as he tore Endeavor through them.

Shouto’s fingers twitched, and he turned and walked outside.

The warm night air met him. During the dark, a heavy fog had crept out over the mountain, covering everything in a thick veil. It was denser than normal mist and most likely influenced by the dark magic lingering in the air.

Shouto walked until he got to the edge of the cliffs. The scent of burning stymphalian corpses from the courtyard stung his nose.

He closed his eyes and tried to ignore the smell. There was a hollow sensation in his chest as he thought back on the attack. The timing. The coordination. Was it the patron’s doing?

It had to be.

Shouto flexed his fingers and brought his hand to rest on Endeavor’s hilt. The uptick in stymphalian activity had started a month ago, right around the time his brother had attacked their ship. Were the incidents related?

It was hard to say with the evidence they had. Dabi was certainly sadistic enough and petty enough that Shouto wouldn’t put it past him to use monsters to accomplish his goals. But, Dabi hadn’t known he was going to lose when they had fought. And even if he had, Shouto found it hard to believe his brother would have been smart enough to plan something like this himself.

Besides, Aizawa said it was a bird with purple and green plumage that had come to the island…

That didn’t sound like Dabi. His brother’s colors were purple and blue.

So who was the patron?

Shouto’s lips thinned, and he tapped his finger against Endeavor’s hilt. The only god he knew with purple and green as their banner colors was Overhaul — or Phobetor as mortals knew him — the god of nightmares. He had heard rumors that the god had some sort of relations with Dabi, but from what Shouto knew, the god hated monsters and considered them filthy beasts. So, there was no apparent reason he’d be involved with the stymphalian.

A headache was building in the back of his skull. There were too many questions without any answers. Shouto sighed and opened his eyes to stare up at the silvery moon waning in the brightening sky.

At the end of the day, it didn’t matter who the stymphalian’s benefactor was. Shouto would just have to do what he always did. He’d fight, and he’d win because he was–

His throat closed abruptly, and he gripped Endeavor tighter as his hands began to tremble. Heat burned across Shouto’s chest.

Strong.

Was he really strong? After everything that had happened, did he really get to call himself that?

Yaoyorozu had been injured because he hadn’t been able to protect her. And Haimawari and Rin had been kidnapped due to his negligence.

How many countless others had been hurt because of him? Sero. The sailors tasked with bringing them back to Sparta. A flurry of other nameless faces flashed through Shouto’s mind — all the men injured because of his mistakes.

Shouto reached up, and his fingers traced the marred skin around his left eye.

It was the way of life: the strong lived, and the weak died. He had accepted that. It was the motto of Greece. And Shouto had always been strong, or at least he thought he had. But, ever since the injury....or even before….

He dropped his hand and drew in a sharp breath through his teeth.

He had become careless. He had let these fake emotions for Yaoyorozu cloud his mind. And after last night, when he had cracked the stymphalian’s neck with his bare hands to save her, it became abundantly clear the curse wasn’t going away.

The thought made anger bubble in his chest, and Shouto forced his mind away from that line of thinking. It wouldn’t do any good. He didn’t know how to break it.

A voice in the back of his mind wondered if he should finally tell Yaoyorozu.

Shouto gritted his teeth.

The right thing — the honorable thing — would be to tell Yaoyorozu about a curse that was tied to her. Especially on the eve of the operation, it was even more important for any loose strings that could affect or influence the mission be addressed. He didn’t want any more innocent people to be hurt because of the spell.

So why was he hesitating?

His fingers twitched. This wasn't like him at all. Shouto wasn't known for overthinking or being indecisive. If anything, he had been accused of being too rash. But anytime he thought about admitting his failure to Yaoyorozu, somehow, he couldn't get the words to form.

What was wrong with him?

At first, he had thought it was his ego and the notion of telling civilians from a former enemy nation about his weakness, but now he didn’t know. Yaoyorozu was smart and could help him deal with the side effects. It was almost like he didn't want to...like he was nervous.

Could it be...was he afraid of Yaoyorozu’s reaction?

Shouto felt something in his heart twist, and he sighed deeply and tried to focus on something else to calm his temper. It felt like all the thoughts he had been pushing down for the last month had exploded within his chest like magic.

That’s right.

Shouto lifted his left hand and stared down at his palm. His fingers were shaking, but Shouto ignored the tremors as he focused on the slight pulse under his skin.

His magic had come back. Not fully, but he could feel it shifting in his veins again. Dormant but there. Like a dam with cracks beginning to form. He just needed to find a way to unleash.

And by tomorrow.

Before they went on the offensive against the stymphalian.

A noise behind him caught his attention. Shouto dropped his hand and looked up as Fukukado approached. She slid up next to him and stared out over the mountain. The long shadows of the night had grown shorter, and he could see the captain’s face clearly in the morning glow. She looked tired, but some of the distress and unease from earlier was gone.

After a moment, Fukukado asked. “How are you and the girl—Yaoyorozu, was it?” Shouto stilled at her name, his stomach knotting as Fukukado continued. “How are you two fairing?”

To the south, the pirate ship’s sails were barely visible through the fog.

Shouto forced himself to shrug faintly as she turned to look at him. “Fine. I wasn’t hurt. Yaoyorozu sprained her shoulder, but after some rest, she should be okay.”

Fukukado mouthed quirked faintly. “I didn’t mean like that.” Some of her color returned. And, for a moment, she looked like how she had yesterday when he had first met her. Then her playful expression fell. “We haven’t been here for long, but I’ve noticed that you keep to yourself. You’re always alone.”

Shouto shifted, and he brought his hand up to rest upon Endeavor. “Sometimes it's better that way,” he said stiffly.

Fukukado shook her head. “Sometimes. But not like you.” She stared at him pensively for a moment before saying, “As a captain, I have to pay attention to my men. See who they work well with and who I need them to avoid. I need to know how to read people to stay alive. And I’ve been watching you. You don’t socialize with anyone. You purposefully stand apart from others, like you don’t trust anyone. You seem partial to Yaoyorozu, but even with her, you seem hesitant. It’s like you’re a house, and you don’t want to let anyone in.”

Shouto’s grip on Endeavor tightened. He didn’t want to have this conversation right now.

Fukukado seemed to read something in his expression because she continued quickly. “The reason I’m bringing this up now is because tomorrow will be difficult, especially if a god is involved. We are going to need to put our best effort into defeating the stymphalian, and the best way to win any fight is by having something to fight for.”

Fukukado’s expression tightened, and she looked away. “It took ten years to defeat the Trojans not because they were wonderful fighters or because they had an impenetrable city, but because they had things they were fighting for.”

Shouto didn’t say anything.

She sighed. “We aren’t meant to be alone, Todoroki.” Her voice was soft. “Humans, I mean. Whether that's a lover or children or friends. We all need someone. I have my men. They’ll get me through this, but who do you have? Yaoyorozu?”

Shouto’s hand tightened on Endeavor. His throat felt tight. “Yaoyorozu doesn’t want anything to do with me. I’m respecting her wishes,” he said stiffly.

Fukukado was quiet for a moment.

“I think she relies on you more than you think.”

Shouto tried to ignore the way his heart rose at the comment.

“I’ll do what I need to. Is that all?” he finally asked.

Fukukado sighed. “Yes, that’s all I wanted to say. Anyways, enough lecturing. I guess I’m more tired than I thought.” She stretched. “Get some sleep too, Aizawa told me you’ve been up for the last two days.”

She returned inside, leaving Shouto to stare at the rising sun.

Did he really need someone?

Shouto turned and headed back into the house.

He had people back in Sparta, thousands of miles away—Sero, Bakugo, and Midoriya. He liked to think of them as friends (or had thought of them as his friends), but he had frozen Sero. Bakugo had sent him away and everything that had happened with Midoriya before he left…did he really have anyone anymore?

His heart pounded in his chest.

He blinked and realized belatedly that he was in front of the kitchen. Yaoyorozu was inside, busily cutting bandages out of extra sheets.

Shouto paused in the doorway. He had been so lost in thought he hadn’t even been paying attention as he walked, and his feet had brought him back to her.

No.

It was the curse, he reminded himself.

Shouto scowled. Everything stemmed from Kaminari’s arrow. He curled his hand into a fist at his side and was about to walk away when Yaoyorozu looked up.

“Todoroki?”

His feet paused, and he felt the curse pull at him. Shouto sighed. It wasn’t like he was tired anyway. “I can help you, if you need it.”

Yaoyorozu wiped at her forehead with the back of her forearm. She nodded, and Shouto moved closer, ignoring the way his heartbeat stuttered.

“Thank you.” She gave him a thin smile as she handed him a pair of scissors and one of the blankets. “If you can just cut these into long, thin sheets. I’m making them into bandages. Try to make them even, if you can.”

Shouto hummed as he took the scissors from her. From up-close, underneath the exhaustion and despair that they all wore, he could see that Yaoyorozu’s eyes were red-tinged and the thin skin under them slightly puffy.

Realization dawned on him like a kick in the gut.

“You've been crying.”

“Oh,” she twisted away. Reaching up, she self-consciously wiped at her face. “It's nothing.”

A lump formed in his throat. “Are you okay?”

She sighed but didn’t meet his eyes. “Is anyone okay right now?” she asked softly.

“But I mean-”

“It's fine,” she cut him off sternly. Her expression flickered, and she swallowed, dropping her head to stare at the table. “We can’t be infighting right now.”

The anger in Shouto’s chest stirred, but he pushed it down and forced himself to get to work. The logical side of him understood.

He couldn’t make Yaoyorozu talk. Forcing her when she wasn’t ready to speak would only upset her further. And besides, he’d promised only yesterday that he’d be better and more considerate of her feelings. He couldn’t fail, not even a full day after he had made that vow, just because of a stupid curse making him impatient. Shouto gripped the scissors tighter as he sheared them along the sheet.

She’d tell him when she was ready.

But he couldn’t help to wonder what had happened.

Shouto knew she had been angry with Aizawa’s decision. However, when he had left the kitchen, she hadn’t looked so upset that she’d cry over it.

There had been an angry resignation in her expression, but not sadness. But now, she looked sad. And lonely. It felt like something had occurred after the meeting, something more painful.

‘We can’t be infighting right now.’

Shouto’s lips thinned. What did she mean by that?

“Todoroki.”

Yaoyorozu’s voice snapped Shouto out of his thoughts. He jerked his head up to find Yaoyorozu staring pointedly at his hands.

“You’re cutting the sheet too small.”

Shouto followed her gaze down to the table. The makeshift bandages he was cutting were frayed at the edges and definitely not meeting Yaoyorozu’s request for evenly cut strips. He looked back up at her and felt his ears turn red. “Sorry.”

Yaoyorozu shook her head faintly, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “You’ve never used scissors before, have you?”

Shouto shifted, and he looked away. "No."

In fact, Bakugo had explicitly barred Shouto from ever helping with what he called “household chores.” According to the prince, any time Shouto was around, work only seemed to double. Shouto thought the judgment was unfair, but looking at his poorly cut bandages, maybe Bakugo wasn’t wrong.

Yaoyorozu made a noise in the back of her throat that sounded like suppressed laughter as if she could read Shouto’s thoughts. "Here. I'll show you a trick to cutting straight."

She moved closer. Shouto tensed as the heat of her body leaned into his, and she took his bedsheet, her fingers skimming against his.

"First, take your fabric, and hang some off the table.”

Warmth curled in Shouto’s chest as he watched Yaoyorozu work. She seemed calmer now. Her shoulders were not as tense, and there was a faint smile on her lips.

'I think she relies on you more than you think.'

Shouto inhaled slowly through his nose. Fukukado couldn’t be right. There was no way that Yaoyorozu would rely on him, especially if she ever learned about the curse. She'd never trust him.

“Then cut along the edge of the table to get an even strip," Yaoyorozu continued demonstrating, unaware of Shouto’s thoughts. She sliced an even line along the bedsheet, and then looked back up at him. Her smile dropped slightly as she blinked, scanning his face. "Todoroki? What is it?"

Shouto shook his head and then stared down at the perfectly even fabric she had cut. “Nothing.” He exhaled slowly. Then wavered for a moment before adding, “I’m just glad you don’t seem as sad anymore.”

Yaoyorozu opened her mouth and then closed it. Her shoulders dropped. “Is that so,” she said slowly. Her eyes grew glassy. She pressed her lips into a thin line and ducked her head.

Shouto froze.

Fuck.

Did he mess up?

His heart rate quickened. He didn’t understand what he did wrong, but when Shouto opened his mouth to apologize, Yaoyorozu looked up at him from below her long dark eyelashes. Her eyes were still red but a small genuine smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. “Thank you,” she whispered.

It felt like all the air in the room had suddenly vanished. His heart rose in his chest.

Shouto swallowed thickly. Unconsciously, his fingers moved towards her hand when footsteps against the flooring drew Shouto’s attention. He looked up as Tokoyami stepped into the doorway and hesitated.

“Yaoyorozu, I wanted to talk…” The bird half-monster trailed off as he froze and looked between them. His expression hardened. “Todoroki.”

Yaoyrozu stepped back. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said quickly. She dropped her head, her long hair hiding her face as she turned away. “I have to go tend to the wounded,” she said, picking up the makeshift bandages and hurrying quickly towards the door.

Tokoyami visibly wavered as she drew closer. “Yaoyorozu, may I have a word in private?”

Yaoyorozu paused. Her back was to Shouto, so he couldn’t see her face, but when she spoke, there was a faint tremble in her voice. “After. I have to go finish up first.” She straightened and walked out the door leaving Shouto and Tokoyami alone.

Shouto looked back at Tokoyami. The half-monster shifted. His hands curled into fists at his side.

Then it hit Shouto; the reason Yaoyorozu was upset was because of Tokoyami. He had done something to hurt her.

Fury welled up in Shouto's chest, and he pressed his lips into a thin, hard line. His fingers twitched.

‘We can’t be infighting right now.'

Shouto exhaled slowly. That was Yaoyorozu's decision. He needed to respect her wishes. He swallowed the anger back as he waited for Tokoyami to leave.

Except he didn't. Tokoyami straightened and met Shouto's gaze. "What were you doing in here?" He asked finally.

Shouto inhaled deeply to try and pace his rage. He could feel the curse pulsating in his veins. “I was helping make bandages,” he said, holding up his pile of poorly cut sheets.

Tokoyami hesitated. It was hard to read his bird-like expression. After a moment, he inhaled deeply. “I thank you for saving her earlier," he said in a strained tone. His expression rippled. "But please…you should leave Yaoyorozu alone."

“Just like you’re leaving her?”

Shit. Shouto meant to keep his anger in check, but now that the words tumbled out, he could feel how angry he was for Yaoyorozu.

Tokoyami's eyes widened. "I’m not leaving her!" He shifted as he met Shouto’s gaze. “But she needs to stay behind; it is for the best. She’s human and our only healer outside of Aizawa.”

“You made her cry.”

Tokoyami’s yellow bird-like eyes flickered momentarily before they hardened in anger. “Yaoyorozu knows it’s the right thing to do. She’s a healer, not a fighter.”

“Then why did you teach her to fight?” Shouto growled.

Tokoyami clicked his tongue. “We were at war. Of course, she needed to know.”

“But you doubt her now?” Shouto asked, his voice low as he stepped around the table.

“It’s not about doubting or not. It’s about not having another healer and the fact that she is human. Her body won't last fighting the stymphalian or a god…not like ours.”

“She doesn’t need your protection. She’s strong.”

“I never said she wasn’t strong. But I’m not risking her. I don't know what you see her as, but she's like a sister to me,” Tokoyami said, eyes flashing in challenge. “I won't lose any more people I care about because of you.” His voice was hard and tight. “But she’s your slave. If you want her to fight, then order her.”

“I’m not going to order her,” Shouto hissed indignantly. "Never. If I made decisions for her, I'd be no better than you."

Unconsciously, his hand moved to Endeavor.

Tokoyami’s eyes flickered down for a moment, then back up to his face. His eyes grew hard. “You say that, but as soon as we leave this island, you’ll hurt her. If you really cared about her, you’d use your powers and end this, but you haven’t.”

The accusation hit him like an arrow in the gut, poisoning him with the truth of the situation.

If only he had access to his power...if only he wasn’t so weak...

Shouto’s tongue twisted with all the anger and frustration he had been feeling since arriving on the island. He wanted to pour out his rage on Tokoyami, but that wouldn’t do any good.

His fingers shook, and he curled them tighter around Endeavor’s hilt as he forced himself to swallow his fury. “I won’t hurt her. Ever. That’s a promise. We’re on the same side now. You're the only one hurting her.”

A shadow appeared in the doorway behind Tokoyami, but Shouto ignored them as he stepped closer.

Tokoyami’s yellow eyes flashed, a hint of regret flickered in their depths before hardening in defiance. “I only said what was necessary.”

“Enough,” Aizawa’s gravelly voice snapped.

Shouto rolled his jaw but didn’t look away as Aizawa approached and stepped in between them. The older man pushed Shouto away. Reluctantly, Shouto took a half a step back.

“That’s enough, both of you. I know everyone is tense, but we can’t be fighting before tomorrow’s operation.” Aizawa’s eyes flashed as he looked between them. His lips thinned, then he turned towards Tokoaymi. “You two can’t seem to comprehend the situation, so I’ll split you up. Tokoyami will take my place for the morning patrol. Everyone else will stay here and prepare.”

Tokoyami’s expression hardened. “No complaints,” he muttered darkly.

Notes: Deimos – is the god of terror and one of the banner men of Ares. In this story, Dabi is Deimos. Phobetor – is the god of nightmares. In dreams he takes the form of animals or monsters.

[chaosinaspoon]

Reflection

Part of me is stuck in a mirror. A large, glistening, silver mirror hung in the light, sunny hall of a large Adam style mansion in Scotland. There is no getting out of the mirror. I became trapped somehow, but I can’t remember how it happened, just that it did. My tangible body can leave the mirror, but only at night. During the day, I spend my time serving as a reflection for those I can’t touch. Having your soul anchored to a mirror is not very fun so I make my own entertainment.  

Sometimes I mangle the reflections of the occupants, grossly exaggerating their faults; other times, I simply point them out, hinting at things here and there. When I do distort their reflection, I enlarge or shrink their limbs, turning their eyes a stony black or misty orange. Perhaps I will show their nose and lips frosted with brilliant red flakes, or a scalp like a granite bald spotted with lesions and corkscrew curls slipping off onto the plush, carpeted floor. Other times I will bloat their heads, so they swell like a new blister, if they are especially full of themselves. This is only if I am in a bad mood or they are incessantly vain or spiteful. 

Often though, I work with small hints; paling the mistress of the houses cheeks when she has forgotten her blush or showing a maid's laundry as filthy rags so she will glance into the basket and see there is a blotch upon the cloth. Sometimes I strip the master’s coat of its buttons, so he looks down and notices one is missing. My helpfulness has never been questioned by the inhabitants, for they are thankful, but it is not uncommon that a guest I do not like will come running from my hall babbling about a demon-possessed mirror. They are put off as having drunk too much, besides, I am not a demon but a stuck vampire.  

Once, I was messing around and didn’t notice that the master’s son was standing in front of my mirror. I hadn’t even felt myself shift into his body, but I had conjured spiders in my ebony prison. The master’s son is almost deathly afraid of spiders, but he stood before me as if he was entranced. I froze, spiders still dangling from my fingers and crawling across my shoulders. He glanced at his own shoulders and fingers, finding nothing. Confused, he looked back to me. I continued to play with the spiders, letting them crawl across my knuckles like I was flipping coins like so many expert magicians do. The master’s son mimics  my actions like he is the reflection instead.

I expect him to say something, or run away screaming; he doesn’t. After a few moments he pads away. Frowning, I feel myself shift back to whatever I was before he appeared. Minutes later he comes back, cradling one of the long, thin, limbed spiders that frequent the dusty corners of the house in his hand. He looks from the spider and then up to me. Then he breathes on the mirror, tracing his fingers in the fog. When he finishes his fading words spell out ‘I’m not afraid.” I suppose I helped him overcome his fear.

The master’s son comes back a few times after, but otherwise, I spend my days changing. My nights are much more fun, well for me at least. As soon as the sun goes down, my physical essence is released from the mirror, free to feed. I don’t dare try to feed upon my house. The occupants are too important because they protect me. Instead I flee to the surrounding villages and towns.  

After I feed, I race back to my residence. I have a few hours before sun rise so I roam the house, searching for clues of how I became trapped. I wander the halls, my barely existent feet whispering across the carpet. I start in my hall, staring at my nonexistent reflection. I do not know what I look like since I never appear as myself. I don’t even know what people see when they look at me outside of my mirror. 

Brushing away my self-consciousness, I start to stalk the shadowy halls and spacious rooms. I find no clues, I never have; I have no idea how long I have been dead, but I know I have been searching ever since the day I woke up on the other side of the glass. I remember banging my fists against the crystal, the pounding echoing through my prison along with my screams which never grew gravely like my voice would have if I were alive. If I hadn’t been undead. 

I can still recall how badly I scared the one maid without meaning to. I don’t think she could hear my screams, but I could see my reflection in her eyes, my horrible, horrible reflection. My body was contorted in a horrifying way, my nails elongated, my mouth wrenched open like my jaw had been broken, my obsidian dark hair floating around my head like a devil’s halo, my skin as pale as the glass before me, and my clothes falling off of me like strips of bloodied flesh. The worst part was that I wore her face. She screamed and bolted. I never saw her again. After that, I learned how to control my transformation and I would always watch their eyes, trying to find my own face. I never did. It was always theirs.

I brush away my brooding thoughts, putting them in lockdown; no more depressing notions for tonight.

I decide to try something new. I search for the room of one of the master's daughters. I find her door cracked, a light spring breeze blowing through. I nudge open the large oak door with my foot, making sure the thick iron hinges don’t squeak. She lays in her bed, white sheets and furs piled on her body. I slip through her room, sticking to the shadows like the parasite I am, until I reach her mirror. It is a unique style; it looks nothing like mine. The glass is cloudy, and it rests in a simple wooden frame. I peer into it, trying to decipher my reflection from its murky projection. I see only a light silhouette framed by faded black locks. 

No face looks back at me. It seems I only carry a bit of my soul and that little piece reflects nothing but a silhouette. I weep silently, my features still schooled into a practiced stare. I am a statue; nothing moves except the salty tears that drip from my cheeks, hang from my chin like icicles, and trace trails down my throat. I weep for my lost humanity, for the person I will never be, for that small bit of who I used to be. My tears are the only thing I can keep, and I spend them frivolously, wasting them on my pain and heartache.

I hear something shifting behind me. I swirl around, my loose clothing swirling with me, dark ribbons of crimson flashing through the air. The master’s daughter has sat up, blinking, and rubbing sleep from her eyes. Her eyes sweep over me, up and down my ruby clad figure. She gasps as we stare at each other. I don’t feel my flesh rippling, I’m not changing. She hops up, lighting a candle as she fumbles for something on her desk. I am afraid she will try to attack me with a stake or a rosary. 

I back up, bumping into the icy, clouded, mirror. She whips around, the candle’s flame flickering through the air as it is buffeted by the spring zephyr. She is holding a tablet of paper and charcoal. Plopping on the floor, she begins sketching vigorously on the tablet. Her brow furrows and I find mine doing the same. I creep closer, trying not to spook her. I am the one that spooks, the one that freezes when she glances up and studies me. Then she glances back down and brushes the paper furiously with the charcoal. 

Stalking closer, I examine what she is drawing, my head bent so close to hers that my dark hair brushes her blonde tresses. She’s drawing me! Fear fills me, I am not ready; after being a reflection my whole life, I am not ready to see my own despite wanting to for years. I flee from the room, my feet racing me back to my mirror. Shoving my hands onto the frigid glass, I am sucked back in. I curl in one of my stony corners and weep.

I sleep, something I don’t think I have done before. When I wake, I find something pressed against my mirror. It’s me. I stare at myself. I feel my muscles force themselves into a reflection, but it isn’t a reflection, it's me. It’s me before I died, it doesn’t matter that I am paler than I think I should be. I feel whole. 

The master’s daughter stands behind the picture, her tanned hand pushing the paper to my mirror, with her brother at her side. I look at them and my face doesn’t change. I stay me and they see me. They smile at me, the daughter glancing over at her brother as he lifts his hand. In his palm, he cradles the same spider he had held the day he, no we, overcame his phobia. He smiles brighter and his sister looks at me. She nods and I answer it with a grateful smile. Two silent thank yous and two acknowledgements. 

She pulls the paper away, kneels at the mirrors base and slides it into the same, simple wooden frame that once held her mirror. Standing back up and grasping her brothers' free hand, she hangs the picture across the hall where I can see. Nodding at me again, they pad down the hall. They helped me find myself, something I used to do for others. Grateful and satisfied, I return to my corner, which seems more kind than before. I nestle back in and sleep.

[hlwim]

Not All of Me Will End [3/3]

Summary: Nothing remains of her but what must be left behind. Tags: Character Death, Cancer, Tragedy, Angst, Bittersweet, Post-Canon Pairings: Royai, Edwin, Havolina AO3  ff.net

who tells your story

From the peak of the roof, Ed can see the long and lonely stretch of the rail line disappearing into the mountain. He still loves the cool whisper of its whistle far-off and heading in, but it doesn’t fill him with a longing for the road the way it used to. He’s a husband now, and teacher frequently and village councilor sometimes, and soon—alarmingly soon—a father.

The nearness of coming change is what’s driven him up a ladder, to straddle the shingles and, with nails clamped between his teeth, to patch holes and join new trestle to old. The house is getting cramped—the front half’s a real clinic now, with a proper doctor hired in from Rush Valley and the automail shop having swallowed all the basement. They get patients and clients and more visitors than they reasonably have beds for, and three months now Winry’s been asking when he’d get around to building that extension. He tried putting it off until Al was back, because of course alchemy will speed the work, but excuses are excuses are excuses.

“I’m not holding my knees closed for another four months!” she’d said, jabbing dead-center of his chest. “You’re plenty handy at carpenter work, and you’re owed about a million favors in town.”

And this was true—Ed never liked charging for his services, as the dregs of his state stipend are enough to keep them flush for ten lifetimes. But people around here insisted on showing gratitude in practical ways, like extra pounds of meat from the butcher or hand-wrought yarn for Granny’s knitting. Ed had had a crew up for most of the day: boys that hang around after class to hear his stories and poke at the holes, and the girls who spend summers baling hay and shearing sheep. In the space of a morning and an afternoon, they’d raised walls and laid the floor and wedged in a dozen or so windows. He sent them off to their homes for supper and admonished them not to return tomorrow, knowing anyway that there would be a cart of eager hands on its way back by dawn.

He sets the hammer against his knee and leans back, breathing deep. The breeze carries to him the quiet lull of church bells, and then Winry’s voice.

“There’s a telegram come for you,” she calls up, as Ed slides down the ladder and tosses his work gloves over a rung. She’s getting slower, huffing and waddling adorably, which Granny keeps mentioning is a sure sign the baby will be along any day now. “It came in with the invoices, but I didn’t open it.”

“Brigadier General Mustang,” Ed snorts, raggedly tearing the envelope open with his thumb. He only reads the first line before his fingers go numb, letting the delicate carbon sheet flutter to the ground.

“Ed, what is it?”

Breath seems suddenly hard to come by—though not from exertion.

“It…”

He wants to read it over again and won’t.

“It says Riza Hawkeye’s died.”

He has to be the one to tell Al. No telegram is going to find him in the chaos of the Chang clan’s village. It takes long enough to connect a call—Ed listens to the tick and buzz and tick for a good twenty minutes, and he holds the telegram flat beneath his hooked thumb and index finger. The words flash disconnected in his gaze: regret and informand Hawkeye and died. Funeral tomorrow—the telegram was a day late in arriving.

Mei Chang’s grandmother answers, and Ed has to negotiate with the little Xingese he knows to be passed from house to house and reach his brother. Al answers with a breathy laugh, expecting happy news.

“I can’t remember the last time I saw her,” he says, voice cracking.

“Me either,” Ed replies quietly. The kitchen is black with night, and the light switch is too far for him to reach. “I think it was Central. Their engagement party? She looked so happy.”

“She did.”

There is a long silence where they can both cry, quietly, connected even through this distance.

“I’m going to have to decide soon, aren’t I?” Al asks helplessly. “I can’t have two homes forever. When I’m here, I feel like I should be there. And I should be, now, of all times…”

He takes a shuddering breath.

“I can’t believe she’s gone. Just… someone else we didn’t get to say goodbye to.”

Winry refuses to be left behind, so Ed pays extra for the private sleeping car, where cushions keep her from jostling left and right with the train’s sway. They’re west-bound, to some spit of a village called Wellesley and then ten miles farther. He’s received the instructions from Jean Havoc, who answered the telegram’s indicated number with a thick sigh.

“How long was she sick?” Ed had asked, twisting his empty hand against his leg.

“Not long,” Havoc said. “But too late to do anything about it.”

“How is he?”

“Bad. You’re probably going to miss the funeral, but there’s a thing after, at their house.”

“We’ll come.”

He expects the platform to be busier and maybe wreathed in black drapery, but it’s a little place hardly bigger than Resembool’s station. There are two benches inside, empty and facing the only window—rosette, perched high in the roof beams.

The village is small and packed densely, houses circled close against the encroaching trees. Half the streets are paved, but enough mud has tracked across the cobbles to paint them the same indistinguishable red-brown. Ed hates the car ride, for the way the poorly-upholstered bench forces them tightly together. The temperature seems to rise as they crawl farther and farther west—he’s the first to step out of the car when they arrive, and humidity nearly knocks him back against the fender.

The front door of the house is closed, and it seems no one is waiting to let them in.

“It’s lovely,” Winry says, huffing her way out with the help of Ed’s hand. “Except for the trees, we could almost be home again.”

Which is bizarrely true—unlike the wattle-and-daub look of West City or even the river-stone cobbles of Wellesley, the Hawkeye house rears back symmetrical and clad in white, imperiously simple in its understated decoration of blue paint on its shutters and doors. The windows look mottled in the sunlight: glazing thicker at the bottoms of each pane and fogged up, with the vaguest of colors and shapes moving behind them. He expects somehow for the house to extend up into the clouds, but it stops after two stories, beneath a slate tile roof and a chimney that lists against the tide of winds high above the trees.

Ed helps the taxi driver stack their bags on the grassy pavestones.

“Do we go and knock?” he asks, but Winry is already halfway up the walk. The door opens before she can reach for the knob—Jean Havoc on the other side, looking somewhat narrower than the last time they saw him, in his dress uniform and black sash.

“You made it,” he says, leaning in to Winry’s greeting hug. “I hope it wasn’t too hard.”

“It was nothing,” Winry says. “But we’re not imposing?”

“No, there’s plenty of room to stay. Someone’ll get your bags upstairs. We thought—”

He sighs, stepping aside to let them pass. The house is many degrees cooler than outside, despite the quiet hum of the implied crowd further in. The hall extends straight through to the back of the house, splitting two rooms on either side, and it is lined with tastefully sparse chairs and hanging lamps.

“We thought, it was better he wasn’t alone.”

“Where is he?”

“Kitchen, I think. Führer's receiving in the sitting room here. If you’re hungry or something, there’s food set out banquet-style, so help yourself.”

“Is—is she…?”

Ed can’t quite form the thought into words. The air is dense with cold and feels closed, dusty, disused.

“We buried her this morning,” Havoc says. “Real nice place, by some trees. Rebecca and I were here the day before she—”

It’s a visceral reaction, a wince that travels to a shudder.

“She didn’t want people to see her like that.”

“I wish we could have said goodbye at least,” Winry says.

“You did. Last time you saw her—whenever that was, that’s how she wanted you to remember her.”

At the far end of the hall is a closed door, puzzled together out of narrow squares of glass. The garden beyond bounces sunlight off its leaves and paths, tainting the white paneling green and yellow. No one outside—the wind that bothers the treetops can’t reach the ground, and the world enveloping this house is motionless as a painting.

“Let’s go on through, and you can get some food,” Havoc says. “I have to get back to Rebecca.”

He heads for the front room, and they follow. Winry keeps a hold of Ed’s hand.

The room is too crowded for furniture—he can guess at the location of a chair by the awkward gap between mourners, but for the most part, the memorial is standing room only. A sea of dress uniforms broken by the occasional black hat or short veil. The führer is sequestered behind his guards on the far left and snuffling into a handkerchief, surrounded by a crowd of lower officers Ed doesn’t recognize.

“Let’s go over to Mr. Armstrong,” Winry says. “Didn’t that other man there with him used to work with General Mustang?”

“Falman, yeah. He stayed up at Briggs after the big fight.”

Lieutenant General Armstrong is concealed by her brother’s broad, bowed shoulders, and she keeps one hand resting habitually on the hilt of her ceremonial saber, but her frown seems a different inflection.

“Hello, Fullmetal,” she says. “They weren’t sure you’d make it.”

“Gave up that title a few years ago. Now I’m just Ed.”

“Of course, Edward.”

Alex, gravelly and grave as ever, turns slowly to bring them into the small circle.

“I hope your journey here was not particularly arduous, considering your current condition.”

“Oh, I get into more trouble now than I did before,” Winry says with a small smile. “Lieutenant General, ma’am, I’m sorry for your loss.”

“It wasn’t really mine.”

But her gaze doesn’t quite connect.

“Captain Hawkeye was a gifted officer—one of the finest I’ve had the privilege to serve with. She performed her duties as adjutant admirably, and she left me with a decent replacement.”

“I try my best,” Falman says, briefly tipping his wine glass. “It all happened so quickly towards the end—I saw her only a few months ago, and part of me was so certain this was all a hoax or a big misunderstanding. She never wavered. Never looked ill. It’s madness that she’s gone.”

“I gather it was a family affliction,” the lieutenant general says. “Her father died in a similar way, although I understand he had a little more time.”

Ever so lightly, Winry touches the back of Ed’s hand.

“I think I’d like to find a place to sit down.”

She won’t want company, but it’s as good an excuse as any to duck out. Winry finds an empty seat in the corner, on some antique-looking lounge, and she waves him aside.

“Go on,” she says. “Plenty of people around to get me whatever I need.”

He bends down to kiss her hairline and then straightens up again, catching the eye of Heymans Breda across the room.

“He’s not going to thank you for being here, but it really means a lot to him, to have us all around.”

“Havoc told us not to make arrangements for lodging,” Ed says, keeping his wrist straight and grip firm. Breda’s always been a bit of a hand-crusher, but Ed’s grown enough now to equal him out.

“Plenty of bedrooms,” Breda confirms. “Falman’s gotta go back with the Armstrongs, and the führer should be leaving any minute. But me, Havoc, you guys, Rebecca, and Gracia are all set upstairs. Not that you have to stay—if there’s something more pressing back home.”

“No,” Ed says. “We’re here, and we want to be here.”

Breda jams his hands back into his pockets.

“So how’s it been, being back home? Kept man—you miss the road at all?”

“A bit,” Ed says with a shrug. “But not enough to go out again. Al’s stories are enough for me.”

“His name’s always coming up in reports from Xing,” Breda says. “He thinking about making the move permanent?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think he could be away from home like that. I think he likes going between. Especially now, with little niece or nephew on their way.”

“Congrats, by the way. We put your postcard up on the wall at work.”

Ed thanks him, and they fall silent for a while.

As predicted, the führer is gradually making his exit and filtering the crowd of most unfamiliars. Ed shifts slightly, half-wishing he had left his hair down to better hide his face. His gaze falls on a collage of photographs littering the wall to their right—shots of buildings and crowds and the insides of pubs he’s never seen. Only one of just the two of them that he can see: embracing in a snowfall, surrounded by friends.

“When were they married?” he asks.

“Right after they moved here. They were planning on a long engagement, until she made major and got moved out to Central as Armstrong’s proxy. Sounded like it was only a few weeks away, when…”

Breda grimaces.

“I hate this. I really hate it.”

They watch the führer and his guards file out. The old man walks heavily, leaning most of his frame on an ornate stick, gold-tipped and dark wood.

“Granddaughter’s fucking funeral, and he still has to show off his trophies.”

“That’s seditious,” Ed says, eyebrow raised.

“Who gives a shit? He’s gonna retire in a couple months anyway, and then we’re under Armstrong’s thumb.”

“Really? Not…?”

Breda shakes his head.

“So who would take over Briggs?”

“Whoever’s next in line, I guess. Funny how we put in all this work, and nothing changed.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Ed says. “A lot of people down around us are talking about organizing district conventions.”

“That should be fun to watch,” Breda sighs. “First woman führer in the history of this country, toppled by democracy.”

The entourage passes by Armstrong, but she doesn’t glance, keeping that imperious chin high in the air. She doesn’t look bored, exactly, but contemplative—as though always waiting for the start of the next engagement.

“I should go find him,” Ed sighs. “Tell him… whatever the hell you’re supposed to tell someone.”

“Look for Gracia. He’ll be nearby.”

She is found not far from the closed kitchen door, and she hugs him long enough that Ed can still smell her perfume after she steps back.

“It’s Mrs. Cotter now, actually,” she says, a bit sheepish.

“Oh, that’s—”

He stutters his way through it.

“I’m so happy for you. Is he… here?”

“No, he stayed back home to mind the shop. We have a bookstore together. He—”

She half-smiles.

“Herman and I met at a social group for widows and widowers—he lost his wife young, to sickness, and all of this… it’s too close for him still.”

She falters a moment, and then brightens again, like instinct.

“He’s really a wonderful man. They didn’t have children of their own, but he loves Elicia so dearly. And he likes Roy, and he liked Riza, too, but—someone had to run the shop.”

“What about you?” Ed asks. “Are you alright?”

“Maes was different,” she says, after a pause. “It was sudden. There was a lot we hadn’t had the chance to talk about, and there was so much left… undone. With this—with Riza, and with Herman’s wife—there was time. Decisions and plans that could be discussed.”

“Hard to know which one’s worse.”

She smiles again and gently squeezes Ed’s hand.

“He’s just in the kitchen. He needed some time away from the crowd, but you can go in.”

The door is heavy and seems only recently white-washed. The kitchen beyond is dazzlingly bright and decorated with jar after jar of wildflowers. Roy Mustang sits at the table with a faraway look in his eyes, one hand upturned and held loosely by Elicia. She has a canvas and palette set out and idly paints a quiet meadow scene.

Ed pulls out a chair, and as he drops into view, Roy blinks, suddenly focused.

“Have I seen you already?” he asks. “It’s been such a long day.”

“No, we just got here,” Ed says. He feels obligated to speak softly, to half-smile with sadness and temper his gaze with gentle understanding—but that is not, and has never been, how they were with each other. “I’m really sorry, Roy. But I wish you’d told us.”

“It wasn’t on purpose this time, I promise.”

“Yeah, Havoc said as much. That it’s how she wanted it.”

Roy nods, and beneath his elbow, Ed can see the glint of silver.

“You smoke now?” he asks. And Roy looks down, following the point of Ed’s finger, surprised almost to see the lighter.

“No,” he says. “It was hers.”

Something is engraved on the front, but it’s probably rude to ask. Elicia mixes blue and green on her palette.

“Where’s big brother?” she asks.

“He’s in Xing. He couldn’t make it back in time.”

Her nod is as slow as Roy’s was—she still wears her hair in twin bunches, but it’s long enough now to plait over each shoulder, and she doesn’t bother to look up. Her brush moves the canvas slightly on the polished wood, but she doesn’t let go of Roy’s hand.

“You know you can’t call me little brother anymore,” Ed says. “I’m gonna have a baby soon.”

“Mommy told me. She said you’re having a girl.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Well, I know it,” Elicia says. “I know everything. What’s her name gonna be?”

“We’re still not settled on one.”

Roy has returned to the blank stare—although it has shifted to the window and the empty garden beyond.

“I should go out,” he says, wearied by exhalation.

“Grumman just left,” Ed offers. “It’s probably safe.”

Elicia lets go without a look upward, focused solidly on her artwork. It’s encouragement, not callousness, as Roy closes his eyes and then stands, scraping the chair back. Every movement seems drawn up from a deep well of pain.

“Winry’s here?” he asks, focusing on Ed. They’re the same height now, but the hunch of shoulders shortens Roy—his uniform is hanging so horribly loose.

“Yeah, in the parlor. She needed to rest her feet a bit.”

He feels, half-heartedly, that he should offer a shoulder for Roy to lean on, but, soldier that he is, Roy straightens up, takes a breath, and steps through the door with shoulders square. No one notices—or at least they all have the courtesy to pretend otherwise—and Roy exhales, eyes focused on the floor. He still holds the lighter tight between his fingers, little flashes of silver catching Ed’s gaze now and again.

Winry is alone, but someone’s brought her a glass of water and a plate of little pastries. She smiles at seeing them and Ed smiles back, half-relieved, before realizing that Roy is no longer beside him.

He must have looked up at some point, and landed his gaze squarely across the room, on an over-large portrait of Riza Hawkeye. Ed can’t remember if he himself had noticed it until now—the führer had been standing in front of it, with his coterie of hangers-on, and Ed had always done his utmost to never again attract the attention of military men. Maybe there’d been a curtain draped across it.

It is clearly a depiction of Riza—blonde hair, brown eyes, pointed nose and chin, sharp jaw—but something about it is fundamentally, unshakably , flawed. He remembers a piercing gaze that could read a room and every man’s intentions in ten seconds flat, a quirk at the corners of her mouth that betrayed the arrival of a rare smile, and a squareness to her shoulders, as though she couldn’t fathom any posture but parade rest. The woman in the portrait wears Riza’s face, but she isn’t. Distant, demure, wrapped in some old-fashioned frock the color of sour milk. This woman sees nothing, feels nothing—sits silent and unblemished, pressed like a dead flower between sheets of cracked wax paper.

“Why?”

Roy is ash—unable to break the painting’s stare, knuckles white, swallowing hard against the tears watering his eyes. Gracia materializes at his elbow, arms ready to brace him from dropping like a stone.

“The führer wanted it out for display,” she says quietly. “I tried to tell him no.”

“All her pictures—”

“They’re safe. We’ll put them back up.”

“It’s not real.”

His voice breaks barely over a whisper, and Ed looks away, half-ashamed and unsure why. It seems most of the guests had the same instinct—only Breda and General Armstrong are watching, silently angry in their own separate ways.

“That’s enough for today,” Gracia says. “You don’t have to do anything else. Let’s just go upstairs, alright?”

He is, in so many ways, diminishing by the second. He speaks to no one as they move back through the parlor to the hall, and Ed has a vision suddenly of a hammer suspended by spider silk above a sheet of glass.

Winry slides her arms around his shoulders as he sits heavily on the cushion beside her.

“Everybody said the service was nice,” she tells him.

“But it wasn’t her?”

He feels her shrug and leans into it.

“Funerals are more for the people left behind. They’ve always been.”

A door closes somewhere upstairs, and Breda crosses the floor, seizing the painting at the corners. It lifts awkwardly, and he turns it to lean face-down against the wall, exposing an expanse of white paint and a series of empty nails.

The house empties in a trickle not long after—enough will be taking the same train back to Central that any residual mourning can be wrapped up at the station. Havoc takes up the mantle of awkwardly gracious host, shaking hands at the door and thanking each guest for their exit. Rebecca gathers Winry up to deal with the kitchen. They’ve been eating small plates all day, with no time to stop for a proper meal.

“Come on,” Breda says to Ed. “Let’s put things back the way they were.”

The portrait goes first—they carry it into the cellar together, to the pile of paper wrapping and snapped twine that had clearly been protecting it from view.

“When was this made?” Ed asks, draping the scraps as best he can.

“Couple years ago, I think. I guess he had one made of her mom once. Riza hated this thing.”

“They didn’t put in the scar on her neck.”

“Does that surprise you?” Breda sighs.

“No.”

The oil lamp hanging from the ceiling is set too high up—the shadow of a floor joist cuts sharply across the face, from cheek to cheek.

“I’d hate it too,” Ed mutters.

There’s several couches and tables to carry up and arrange, rugs to unroll, and lamps to dust off and plug in. Sunset floods the room as Ed adjusts the final cushion, frowning, and Breda stands at the empty wall with a handful of photo frames.

“I don’t know what order they were in,” he says, when Ed joins him.

“Does it matter?”

“I think it did.”

They try—the position of each nail gives a hint at the pattern, but something in the arrangement is definitely wrong to Ed’s eye. The muted swirl of colors, when viewed from a distance, are unbalanced, but he can’t think how to fix them. There isn’t even a common theme in the photos themselves to act as guide: flowers, rainy street scenes, crowded bars, books spilling from shelves all take equal space in simple frames. Breda gives up with a shrug.

“That’s gotta be good enough.”

Dinner is stew and bread at the table where Elicia’s left out her paintings to dry.

“I’m going to give one to Herman,” she says, kneeling on her seat to reach equal height with the adults.

“Can I have one?” Ed asks.

“If you pay me,” Elicia says with a shrug.

“Hey, I have to save money for the baby.”

“That’s not true. Uncle Roy says you’re loaded.”

Breda laughs, and smiles slip across a few other faces.

“You were an alchemist like him,” Elicia accuses. “And he said alchemists get lots of money from the military, so you’ve got lots of money to pay me.”

“Darling, please,” Gracia scolds, biting down her own smile. “It’s rude to discuss money at dinner.”

“Someone’s gotta fund that tuition,” Havoc says quietly.

Winry reaches beneath the table and squeezes Ed’s hand. He wonders if she’s thinking too of similar quiet moments of levity after a hard day of mourning. After Mom’s funeral, Granny had made them dinner and tucked them in and read funny stories from the newspaper until they all fell asleep. He’d felt wrong laughing, but it helped some.

Havoc and Rebecca are sorting through stacks of condolence cards and telegrams at the opposite end of the table, organization as soothing instinct. One pile is for strangers, diplomats, and sycophants—and a much smaller pile for the few that merit response, although Ed doubts Roy will be writing them himself.

“Poor kid,” Havoc sighs, setting another telegram on the response pile.

“Fuery?” Breda says, and Havoc nods.

“Where is he?” Ed asks.

“Middle of the Aerugian sea. Testing long-range communications. Still has six months on the tour.”

“That’s awful.”

Havoc nods at the piles.

“Especially now.”

Having picked the chair nearest the hall, Ed is the one to see the front door creak open, though Havoc hastily excuses himself to greet the newcomer—a large, stately-looking woman wrapped in black furs and a veiled hat, who sets down a pair of polished cases and envelopes Havoc in a hug.

“That rotten bastard had all the rail lines shut down like he was the only one who needed to be here. Where’s my boy?”

“Upstairs.”

“His mom,” Breda says quietly, to Ed’s unasked question. “Call her Christine.”

She leaves her bags for Havoc and takes each step heavily.

There’s no call for nightcap. Everyone is tired—Gracia collects plates as though to wash them, but Breda stops her.

“This isn’t important. It can wait for morning.”

Elicia leads Ed and Winry upstairs to their room: a study at the end of the floor, with desk and chairs pushed against the wall to make room for a low bed. A fireplace is set between the windows, but only as facade. The grate has been bricked over, and the old opening covered by a decorative screen.

“Mommy and me are next door,” she says. “Other side’s a bathroom and then Uncle Roy’s room. You got enough blankets?”

“We’ll be alright,” Winry replies for him. Elicia kisses them both on the cheek and closes the door—she has to use both hands and walks backwards to manage the weight.

Ed can’t find sleep. Winry hardly has a choice in the matter, barely settling on the mattress before she’s out. He doesn’t mind, though, loving the sweet openness of relaxation that smoothes every wrinkle of worry from her brow. He sets a hand on her belly to check, but really he hopes the baby will let her sleep.

Unfamiliar houses at night always seem to belong to another world entirely—he steps with care, knowing he has no chance of predicting which footfall might produce a creak. Every door is pulled shut, and there’s no sliver of light beneath any to betray whether he’s less alone than he feels.

Breda took the the sitting room for himself, and Ed hesitates at the top of the stairs, waiting in a long silence until the radio is switched off, and the rustle of fabric and cushions has stilled. He will not be able to explain to anyone who asks what he is doing, or why it must be done now, when stillness has closed over the house.

He at least remembers that the door to the basement is inside the kitchen, and that a box of matches is sitting beside the oil lamp at the bottom of the steps. It’s as cold as he’d expect, and he curses himself a bit for not bringing shoes. His automail foot might not mind, but the flesh one is burning on the dusty flagstones.

The portrait has already shed some of its paper veil—there must be a draft down here—and the peaks and valleys of paint pick up the lamp’s approaching glow and begin to glitter.

Again, he thinks, it’s not really Riza. Just the ideal of her: a porcelain mask with her lips and nose and something like the serious tilt of her brow. He’d only seen her hair down a handful of times—never styled in such old-fashioned curls. The dress as well is an oddity, lace and low-cut and gathered at her shoulders in little puffed sleeves. It reminds him a bit of Winry at five, in the church dress she ruined with mud.

Too much is missing. That thick line of flesh on her neck which stretched from ear to clavicle, the little spray of freckles perched at the end of her nose. She even had a thin scar on her cheek—he presses a finger to that stretch of canvas, knowing it’s wrong, knowing that he is diminishing what was intended as perfection. But hadn’t Breda said she hated it? And of course she would, knowing better than anyone the futility of hiding from all the ugly little truths she had to carry with her every day.

Ed wishes the artist had painted her looking away. The effect of unreality is greatest in her eyes, its eyes, with that dead stare straight forward, soulless and immobile. He would expect the sensation of being tracked—but shifting left and right, the pupils don’t seem to move. Fixed, forever. He wants to look over his own shoulder, seek from the shadows what must be lurking, what must be holding that frozen gaze, but he won’t.

She looked like this and not like this at the end, he’s certain—though he couldn’t bear the idea of asking, when the memory of his mother’s face is swimming so close beneath the surface. The stitched-shut eyes, the puffy dusting of powder to hide her already sinking features, the hands linked by fingers that were too stiff to bend right. It fills him with an aching hollow to think of Riza the same way. Like a scissors set beneath his ribcage and sawing straight across.

He cannot remember the last thing he said to her—it may have been as simple as good night.

Before leaving, he turns the portrait to face the wall, letting the shreds of paper spread limply across the floor beneath.

Only an hour of rest—then he’s up again, defeated, braiding back his hair and sliding uncomfortably into yesterday’s clothes. The sky outside is just beginning to gray, and he doesn’t want to bother anyone with running water. Breda’s still asleep in the sitting room. His snore rattles the glass a little, and Ed smiles, nudging into the kitchen door.

Someone else is awake. The coffee on the stove is warm, and there’s fresh crumbs of bread beside the butter dish. An apple core, perfectly cylindrical and neat, rests upright on the counter, just beginning to brown. But nothing else in the kitchen is disturbed—the chairs are pushed in, the dishes stacked in the sink, the empty jars lining every window sill sparkle with dust. Ed takes an apple for himself and pours a cup of coffee, not bothering to reheat it first.

The house seems to have gotten smaller somehow, overnight. The steps between the study upstairs and the basement could have covered a quarter mile, but now he hesitates even to lean against a table, as though the smallest scrape of sound will jolt everyone sleeping on the other side of a fragile curtain.

Haze dabbles the garden. The sun will have to work its way up through the trees, so lingering shadows fill the lawn like fallen leaves. Ed stands as close to the windows as he can, staring blankly through the mottled glass, thinking of nothing.

It takes a moment to notice the little bistro table sitting outside, one of its chairs askew on mossy flagstone. There’s a mug on the table, and an empty plate, and half a folded newspaper spilling from the cushion. Early risers always seeking solitude of some kind—he can smile at this, knowing it now so intimately himself.

From the right, Hayate suddenly enters the frame, trotting purposefully, sniffing out a path. And, behind him, swinging a stick to throw and be fetched, is Roy: gaunt, pale, grayed out and wavering through the window, like a branch caught beneath rushing waters. He whistles, and tosses the stick high, and then he returns to the chair and the table, neatening up his discards and pulling a thick leather satchel Ed hadn’t noticed, from the seat of the unused chair.

Their eyes meet through the window, and Roy raises a hand, either greeting or goodbye. Grateful he’d thought to put on his shoes, Ed crosses quickly into the hall and then outside, breathing the dewy air deep and coughing.

“Hey,” he says, wary.

“Hey,” Roy replies. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No. I didn’t sleep much.”

Ed feels the sting of rudeness. What does that matter? Roy only nods, and Ed half-expects his head to shear from his neck completely, like tearing wet cardboard.

“I didn’t want to bother anyone,” Roy says. “They all did so much yesterday. Figure they need their rest.”

“What about you?”

Roy glances down at the satchel, slung over his opposite shoulder. There’s something inside, something bulky and solid.

“That part hasn’t hit me,” he says. “I know it’s coming. Grief is exhausting, and your body doesn’t know what to do but sleep—but I’m not there.”

The yet doesn’t come. They stare at each other, fifteen feet apart, shoes sponging up every bit of water clinging to the grass. Ed feels a knot balling up in his stomach, and Hayate comes trotting back from the brush, happily depositing the stick at Roy’s feet and leaning against his leg with a contented huff. Roy’s fingers drum against whatever’s in that satchel.

“Listen—” he says, and stops himself with a grimace. “There’s something I need to do.”

Ed’s fingers go cold.  He shoves them into his pockets, hoping to hide the blanch.

“Could I come with?” he asks, knowing either answer is pointless to his intentions.

“Yeah,” Roy says, as a little awful smile flits across his mouth. “I think she’d like that.”

They go on wordlessly. Roy leads, stepping into the brush while Hayate gallops back and forth, more interested in the worried birds than the stick Ed helplessly tosses ahead. A twinging part of him worries about poison oak, so he follows almost directly in Roy’s wake, figuring he’ll at least get some warning this way.

The trees rise up fast around them, dense almost as soon as they leave the lawn. It’s not too dissimilar from the forests at home, if a bit thicker, and Ed is warmed by the sudden rush of memory, of trailing along behind his mother while she scoured the forest floor for blackberries.

Distantly, crows scream themselves awake and are answered by the trill of songbirds irritated at the interruption. Vaguely, Ed can see rodents scampering through the branches and starting fights over the meaty rinds of not-quite-ripe walnuts. The branches overhead protected everyone from the night’s rain, and the air as well feels thinner and cooler threading through his lungs.

Roy stops suddenly and points up.

“Do you know what that is?” he asks, and Ed can see a small, sturdy lashing of planks jutting out from a tree, maybe fifteen feet up. No ladder, but the greenish remains of rope hang from one corner, hinting at past ascensions.

“No,” he says.

“It’s a deer blind.”

Roy is smiling, eyes fixed on the wood.

“She built it. And then it collapsed, so she built it again until it stayed up. She never had anyone to tell her how—she learned it all in books. What to do.”

“How old was she?”

“I think seven or eight. It was before I met her, anyway.”

Ed feels a little strange for having assumed the place belonged to Mustang—which of course made little sense in the context of Mustang’s money and the sparse living style Ed had seen of Hawkeye’s apartment in Central and, later, her quarters up at Briggs. He’d always felt a kind of kinship in pragmatism with her.

Of course Roy is city-bred—it shows mostly obvious in his shoulders and the casual disregard of his stride. He’s moved a few steps, close enough to rest a hand on the tree’s mossy bark.

“Sometimes I’d climb up with her, when I was bored or her father was in one of his moods. I’m sure I always ruined hours of work—drove every animal in a square mile far away with the noise I made climbing up. But she liked it. She’d ask me to read sometimes. So I’d bring whatever text I was studying and just drone. I don’t know how it didn’t drive her crazy.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“What?”

“You grew up together.”

Roy shrugs.

“Sort of. I asked her father to take me on as his apprentice in alchemy, and he agreed.”

Ed cranes his neck up, as though he could see the top of the blind with just a shift of perspective.

“Sometimes I’d bring her food, if she’d been out a while. We’d climb down at night, and she’d always stop to check her traps before going. I never understood how she could see, but I think she just had it memorized.”

Roy laughs a little—he looks down, and Ed follows, seeing now the narrow, clear path of dirt sheltered by overgrown weeds. They turn back and walk on, and Roy eagerly points out various landmarks that barely rise above the overgrowth. A split-rail fence where she used to walk and balance and then overtip in his waiting arms, a jagged boulder which marks the end of the property in only a technical sense, a tree that forks half-dead and points on one end to a deep pool.

“She said we couldn’t go too far,” he says, pausing to whistle Hayate back. “I never found out why, but I think she was just messing with me. She did that a lot. I knew nothing, and I was a fun target for teasing.”

He breathes deep, with a ragged half-smile.

“We’re almost there,” he says. “Over left.”

The path slopes down and turns craggy—Ed follows Roy’s cautious lead in picking his way down the jutting stones and roots. Somewhere very nearby, a creek is whispering its way through pebbles. Roy stops about ten feet down the incline, jostling between the satchel and Hayate’s thumping tail, and he pulls aside a section of hanging leaves.

“Here,” he says, nodding at Ed to step through first.

On the other side of the curtain is a strange, squat room lined in crumbling stone and mortar. A few wood beams remain of a roof, and flowered ivy grows thick as thatch across. Part of the collapsed wall on the eastern side forms a narrow shelf, and Ed can see a series of dirty glass jars and small animal bones strewn across it as decoration. The stream must be nearby—it echoes quietly around his ears.

The floor is half stone and half dirt, pitted with moss and soft under every step. Pollen perfumes the air, and the haze of coming sun swamps the small space.

He feels—enveloped. Warm, solid, as though the air could take shape and form itself into comfort. The quiet here is reverent, a stillness so close to the peace of an undisturbed pond moments before a pebble stumbles from the shore and breaks the surface.

“What is this?” Ed breathes.

“It used to be a mill,” Roy says, dodging. He nudges a patch of moss, revealing the cool glisten of old leaves beneath. Decay, but a sweetness of promised renewal. These ruins sit untouched by rot.

“A mill?”

“Probably a hundred years ago. They dammed the river up in town, and all the little creeks like this one dried up. You can still see the wheel outside.”

He points, and then indicates the shadow of a long pole past their feet.

“They’d hook a donkey to a harness, and he’d drag the wheel into the water and out, as they needed.”

Roy goes silent, and Ed nods.

It’s a nice place—this deep in the woods, truly indistinguishable from home. Here, Ed can conjure the memories of stick forts he’d built with Al as easily as if he could step back through that curtain of vine and find his baby brother, mud-splattered and impatient to play.

“This was her temple,” Roy says quietly. His voice is thick—he’s staring down at the leather satchel on his hip, and Hayate leans patiently against his leg. “When she was little, they taught her about Xerxes—how they had a hundred gods, and all the gods had temples. But she got it wrong. She thought—she thought that the people built the temples first, and then waited for the gods to show up.”

There’s the slightest streak of blackening against one wall—a fire she built as she built the blind? Where she might have sat and she might have watched, willing the effort to be something less than vain?

“So she made this. She’d used it before, as a place to rest during a hunt or as a shelter when her father was in one of his moods. But she thought it would do good as a temple—she planted those vines and cleared space, and tried to assemble an altar.”

Even now, gone, Ed cannot picture her as anything but the woman she was. Full grown, she parts the veil and passes through, solid determination painting her face as she gently twists the flowering vines around the roof beams, as she gathers wildflowers into the glass jars, as she arranges the littlest bones into the vague shape of an invented summoning ritual.

“But no one ever came, of course. So she gave up on it. She kept using the place because she needed it, but she said it sometimes felt a little like failure. When she first brought me here, and told me, there was so much disgust for herself in her voice… but I thought it was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard.”

The satchel unbuckles beneath his careful fingers, and then Roy is lifting a small vase into the air—a flat, reflectionless glaze stoppered with a dark wood lid. No bigger than a milk jug, and hefted so perfectly in the cradle of Roy’s palm. He catches Ed’s stare and nods.

“Yeah. She told me, when it came down to it, what happened after was my choice. Funerals and burials—she said whatever it was, I’d be the one who had to live with it. When she wanted to come back here, to—”

The tiniest little split. It had happened, it was happening, even now. Even with all that she was, contained in so small a space.

“To die,” Roy finishes, as though the word might pull all his insides out. “I knew immediately this is what I wanted.”

“Did you tell the old man?”

“No,” Roy says. “He thinks he buried her next to her mother and the man they both hated. He has no right to this.”

A sentiment Ed can find no fault in.

“I always thought we’d…”

A tear escapes, twisting towards the corner of Roy’s mouth and then disappearing down his chin.

“I thought if we had a daughter, we’d bring her here.”

He rotates the urn around in his hands, gently caressing the surface.

“This is where you should be,” he says to it, and then steps forward, clearing a little space between the jars and bones, and he nestles the urn at the center.

The sun follows them back to the house, tracing their steps and silence. Even from the edge of the lawn, Ed can see movement inside the kitchen. Winry will still be asleep, and hopefully it’s early enough that no one will have thought of sending a search party.

Roy pauses at the table on the patio, still with its dirty plate and folded newspaper.

“I wonder,” he says, “if I could ask you a favor.”

“Anything.”

Too quick—Ed winces, hoping it won’t fester into regret.

“She spent a lot of time writing. Towards the end.”

“Memoirs?”

“Some of it.”

Slowly, imperceptible maybe from the right distance, Roy is beginning to crumble. It’s over, and it’s just starting to catch up with him. Without a thought, Ed sets one hand on his shoulder and the other on his arm, and he guides Roy to sit in the empty chair, clearing the cushion of the other for himself.

“She had so many ideas,” Roy says. “Things she wanted to say, things she wanted. Not for herself—for everyone. The future of the country.”

The last he says like he’s quoting something. Tears fill his eyes and spill over—more blind now than when he crossed through the Gate, all those years ago. Ed wonders, idly, fleeting, if she’ll wait for him there, if she’ll rise and meet him with hand outstretched, all time and distance collapsed to the infinite they still step through and see together.

“I can’t look at it. Not yet.”

A ray of light hits his eyes directly, and Roy blinks, shutting it out for only a moment.

“But it’s not right to hide it. Everything she wrote is important, and people should see it.”

The door behind them opens: Gracia steps outside with a cup of coffee, approaching them slowly.

“I had ulterior motives putting you and Winry in the study.”

“So you need an editor?” Ed asks.

“Only if you’re willing.”

“I’m honored that you asked.”

Gracia crosses to his side, glancing at the empty bag between his feet.

“So it’s done?” she says, rubbing gently between his shoulders.

“Yeah. Ed came with.”

“It was beautiful,” Ed says with a nod. “It felt like the right place.”

“I’m glad.”

“I’m tired,” Roy sighs. “I think I’m going to sleep now.”

He rises with a sudden heaviness, as though his center of gravity has suddenly rushed upwards above his heart. Hayate curls along beside him, a brace to rest against once or twice on the long walk back inside the house.

Everyone else is up and filtering through the various rooms, maintaining a reverent silence. Even Winry, having folded the bed linens neatly at each corner before heading into the bathroom. Through the walls, Ed can hear alternately the thrumming chant of water rushing through the pipes and the indecipherable murmur of Elicia’s voice.

He closes the door and crosses to the desk pushed up against the wall. Too dark or too distracted last night to notice, he sees now the cascade of papers spread across its surface.

This cannot be disturbed just yet—he feels this commandment sharply, so instead he simply looks. Leaning over, scanning his gaze across the jumbled words, picking up only flashes of the sentiments contained within. A torn shred, somewhat standing free of the pile, makes him turn his head against his shoulder to read more closely.

It’s a list—of titles, by his guess. Anarchist from the Deathbed, Non Omnis Moriar, Rights of the Amestrian Citizen: strong, stout, even a little seditious.

The chair is still pulled out a little ways, and with a bit of effort, he manages to sit without moving it. The window on his right pours sunlight across the desk top. A pen lies between his hands, he realizes, tossed against a seam of parchment and then rolled back to rest in a crease, sideways, careless of a dribble of ink, as though any moment she might return and take it up again.

He sets his fingers along the grooves—she was right-handed, and held the tip between three fingers, leaving her little finger to trail on the page, to guide the lilt of her writing.

He holds it just the same. He breathes. He pulls the first, the last, of her words forward, and he begins to read.

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on this earth.

“Late Fragment” by Raymond Carter

[panamastayed]

ft. @hebled / @lostvvife

SHE’S ROTTEN

SHE DESERVED every ounce of punishment he has to give. STORMING into the room feet practically creating tremors from how enraged he is, she’s going to PAY.

she’s going to pay She’s going to pay SHE’S GOING TO PAY

He’s blind, VISION begins to blur a little door SWINGING open and slamming so hard it leaves a dent in the wall on the other side, EVERYONE in the room jumping as Sarah casts her gaze at him. SHE’S going to wish she hadn’t pushed his buttons. SHE’S GOING to wish he was willing to give mercy. WHAT HE HAS IN STORE FOR HER WOULD MAKE A GROAN MAN CRY.

‘Well look who it is, the STREET RAT. I was wondering when you’d drag yourself in here.’

He doesn’t say anything, he continues moving forward, BECK strapped down to a table behind her. She’s made a grave error. She could try and hurt him all she wants but she’s crossed a line, and now she needs to be punished. He storms forward, ECHOING sounds of a snarling animal as she continues to taunt him.

‘Oh darling! You won’t lay a hand on me with BECKSY here! What would he think of his precious boy toy hurting his WIFE?’

SHE’S BUILDING UP. He’s getting flashbacks of SIMONE. Choking the life from her. SEEING her cockiness devolve into sheer terror. BEGGING him to stop. PLEADING for mercy and her pleas falling upon deaf ears. SARAH WILL HAVE IT WORSE. He’s going to make her SCREAM for her life. But as he closes in on her she stands her ground. Cocking her head to the side.

‘You won’t do a thing! I can–––’

He comes to a halt before her, and before she can get a word out edgewise a FIRM CALLUSED hand come flying around, slapping her SQUARE across the face nearly knocking her backward.

“Whores don’t get to speak.”

SHE STAGGERS to the ground, SMALL body propping herself back up as she wears a wicked grin.

‘You see that Becksy? He’s an URCHIN. An ANIMAL just like I–––’

She’s talking again. IT MAKES HIM ANGRIER, so this time he makes his POINT more clear, GRABBING her by the collar of her shirt and SMACKING her across the face again HARD enough to leave a mark.

“Did I fuckin’ stutter bitch?”

THIS TIME she doesn’t have enough time to speak before a KICK is slammed into her stomach, audibly knocking the wind out her as he stands above her menacingly, WAITING for her to come to so he can DRAG this out. She’s ran her mouth, crouching down before her GRIPPING her by the chin with a ROUGH aggressive grip before snarling.

BUT SHE spits, BLOOD on his face now as she turns back, TRYING again to plead at BECK who seems to be begging for mercy from this torment he’s enduring. 

‘Becksy! PLEASE!’

She’s crying now, BUT THIS TIME Karter’s patience has worn out what LITTLE he has left and the AGGRESSION heightens, his hands carrying her to her feet forcibly, SLAPPING her rough again before taking her by the head and SLAMMING her down upon the table where all her ‘tools’ reside, HUFFING AND PUFFING as she falls to the ground, WHIMPERING like a wounded animal.

“Whores. DON’T. Get. To. Speak. Last fuckin’ warning. An’ y’can’t pop yer fuckin’ PUSSY t’get outa this one skank.”

She reacts differently, HER EYES flooded with fear as she tries crawling away from him, HER eyes now SLIGHTLY teary from the abuse, BUT she doesn’t get to cry FALSE tears. NOT WHEN BECK HAS CRIED REAL ONES OVER HER. HE GRABS her by the leg CRIES, WHIMPERS of terror fill the room

‘No, no, no please––!’

But her pleas ( LIKE SIMONE’S ) fall upon deaf ears, HIS knife pulled from its HOLSTER as is SOARS down PUNCTURING AND WEDGING all the way through Sarah’s leg, a SCREAM of pain escaping her and she claws & kicks trying to ESCAPE him, her eyes turning to BECK as she pleads for help again.

‘Becksy! Becksy please! Please baby I love you! I was selfish but I just wanted you ba–––’

A FIRM backhand swings across her face, KNOCKING the daylights out of her, THE ROOM spinning a little as DARKNESS seems to shroud around Karter, VISION blurry, FOGGED by his clouding UNBRIDLED animalistic blood lust. Watching with TWISTED delight as she cowers away from his touch. KARMIC JUSTICE.

“You don’ FUCKIN’ speak t’him skank. You don’ fuckin’ THINK ‘bout him, YOU don’ even fuckin’ LOOK at him. YOU LOST THAT RIGHT BITCH. He gave you his FUCKIN’ heart. HE PROMISED HIS FUCKIN’ LIFE t’you. HE MARRIED you. An’ what’d you do? USE HIM. Use him ‘til he WOULDN’T give ya whatcha wanted an’ then y’threw HIM ASIDE. LEFT ‘IM like he was a fuckin’ TOY y’got tired of. SO YOU DON’T EVEN THINK ‘bout lookin’ at him again. NEXT TIME Y’DO I’LL CUT YER FUCKIN’ EYE OUT. You HEAR me you worthless BITCH? EYES. Y’only got TWO an’ ONE OF’EM’LL be mine ‘f ya try a stunt like that again.”

TEARS stream down her cheeks, DESPERATION and TERROR in her face mixed with the warped pain that comes from the KNIFE still wedge in her LEG. He SLIDES the blade out, TWISTING IT for good measure to make sure she REALLY feels it. MORE terrified screams escaping her as he places a HAND over her mouth.

“Shut the fuck UP.”

MORE SCREAMS now muffled through his fingers as he FINALLY frees the knife, TUGGING her back to her feet and WIPING the bloodied BLADE across her lips.

“TAKE yer tainted fuckin’ BLOOD back.”

Beck remains motionless, LIKE A DEER in headlights. but Karter’s TOO FAR GONE. HE KNOWS that Beck is fully aware of what’s going on. 

KARTER’S GONE TASMANIAN.

SARAH continues to sob, PLEAS for mercy to make the pain stop falling from her lips as Karter SHOVES her into a nearby TABLE situated by where Beck is laying HUFFING AND PUFFING like a BULL as he holds her in PLACE throwing the KNIFE to the side as Sarah pushes HIS BUTTONS AGAIN, TRYING to dig her meat hooks into Beck once more.

‘Baby please! It hurts! Please baby it hurts so much! I’m sorry! Please baby! BABY please make him stop! It hurts!!’

SILENCE from BECK, he’s turning away because he can’t bear to watch, and this time KARTER’S PATIENCE is gone. DEVOLVED into animalistic GRUNTS as HE ROUGHLY shoves her into the table a WHINE of agony escaping her as CALLUSED hands SECURE around her neck.

“Y’JUS’ don’ get it DO YA? YER MARKED. That means yer fuckin’ MINE bitch. I OWN YOU. NO ONE’S comin’ t’save ya. NO ONE.”

She struggles, CHOKING & GASPING trying to suck in air, STRANGLED pleas for mercy escaping her as her FINGERNAILS dig weakly into Karter’s HANDS & ARMS, ripping into his SKIN, begging helplessly. HE’LL DO IT. He’s ready. READY TO FREE THE WORLD of the cancer that is SARAH BECKETT. But in a moment amidst Sarah’s CHOKED begging he spies Beck. THE WORLD STOPS. Time halted in its tracks as the LONG GAZE into Beck’s eyes FREEZES him, HANDS still locked around Sarah’s neck. A WEAK but FORCED smile on his face.

He doesn’t want this.

Karter can see it on his face. HE’S TRYING. He’s trying so desperately to treat this like every other time. EVERY OTHER TIME the devil reared its ugly head. The worst of Karter brought to life. But this was different. THIS WASN’T EVERY OTHER TIME.

This his WIFE.

Whether or not he still does, BECK LOVED HER AT SOME POINT. And that meant that this was different. THIS WASN’T ABOUT REVENGE. This wasn’t about penance. This wasn’t about quenching A BLOOD THIRST.

THIS WASN’T ABOUT HIM.

This was about Beck. And KEEPING HIM SAFE. Reminding him that HE WAS WORTH the world and then some. And in a MOMENT NOTICE, Karter’s vision CLEARS, hand RELEASING Sarah’s NECK as she scrambles away in fright, FINDING a nearby CONCRETE support beam within the confines of the room and PINNING herself to it. HER BODY SMALL as she curls up and TEARS stream down her face, STRAINED voice still HOARSE from being nearly strangled as Karter holds his gaze with Beck for a moment. MOUTHING quiet words.

‘I’m sorry’

SORRY he’d forced Beck to see that. SORRY he’d forced Beck to EVER have to watch Karter become a monster. SORRY he forced Beck to watch his EX-WIFE nearly PERISH by Karter’s hand. HE DOESN’T touch him. KEEPS HIS DISTANCE FOR BECK’S SAKE. Instead he dips his head. MOUTHING a single greek word. 

LOVE is still a hard word for Beck to say OR HEAR. But maybe saying it another LANGUAGE would soften it just a little.

‘σ ' αγαπώ’

HE TURNS TO SARAH, still slightly gasping for AIR, leering but wearing a BLOODY SMILE.

���I knew you couldn’t do it.’

She’s trying to play strong, BUT KARTER’S THE PREDATOR, not the PREY. HE won’t be a victim, and he won’t let BECK BE EITHER. Not anymore. So he’s going to put this to an END. Once and for all. HE strolls over, THE VERY SIGHT of her COWERING proof enough that he’s won the fight. HE LEANS over, MAINTAINING a safe distance to avoid an assault from a cornered prey. His tone is EVEN and CALM.

“Oh no...I absolutely fuckin’ CAN. But...”

He glances at Beck for just a moment before his PIERCING stare falls to Sarah again, the BOND torn as he speaks softly, CAREFULLY. Gentle, as though he easing her into her fate.

“...S’not worth it. YER not worth it. Yer not worth killin’ ‘f it’s at HIS expense.” 

HE’S PANTING, wiping her blood from when she spit on him off his face as he draws in a QUIET breath, EYEING her like a HUNGRY lion does an INJURED gazelle. She’ll never escape. NOT with what he’s GOT planned for her. He speaks and continues.

“...jus’ count yerself lucky...that I love HIM more than I fuckin’ HATE you.”

WITH THAT he takes ONE last course of action smacking her head against the concrete to KNOCK her lights out. He didn’t need her getting up and MOVING about. It’s AFTER that that his body near goes LIMP sliding & staggering BACK against the table near THE BED Beck is on, PROPPING himself up, NOT meeting Beck’s eye as he undoes his restraint, FALLING back into a seated position against a nearby SUPPORT beam as he PANTS softly, ADRENALINE coming down until he PUSHES up again.

Scooting OVER to handcuff Sarah to the PILLAR and leaning over to WHISPER words of TORMENT in her ear.

“...I wonder what’ll happen ‘f they found th’DOLL chained up an ON TH’DOOR STEP....bet you’ll make ONE pretty trophy fer someone in PRISON.”

He was thanking the GODS he remembered to LEAVE the evidence in the bag he had DROPPING it on the ground with a SPECIAL note. 

‘Here’s your pretty doll wrapped up in a nice bow’

Seeing Beck struggle to his feet Karter comes to his aid. SILENT. Not making eye contact. He can’t IMAGINE what Beck is feeling but his EXPRESSION suggests it’s overwhelming. Sliding himself UNDER Beck’s arm and guiding him BACK out into FREEDOM. Night had already fallen and Karter wasn’t even sure what to do with himself. He guides the taller man, ALLOWING him to crawl himself into the bed of his truck and SECURE HIMSELF, a small BLANKET draped over him GENTLY with care as Karter shuts the bed of the truck, making his way to the DRIVER’S seat so he can flee the scene without problem or WORRY. 

HE MUST HAVE driven for an HOUR before finally stopping, SOMEWHERE quiet. IN THE MIDDLE of the woods where the two of them could have some PEACE while Karter’s PLAN to have Sarah locked away for the rest of her MISERABLE existence pans out. 

He slides out from the driver’s seat, MOVING to check on Beck, seeing him still situated in the bed. HIS EYES are closed and a VERY gingerly finger comes to slide UNDER HIS NOSE to make sure he’s still breathing.

HE IS.

A silent sigh of relief escapes him as he undoes the BED of the truck LETTING it hang open as he takes a seat UPON IT the pickup shifting a bit under his wait as he keeps himself turned away from Beck. GIVING him the silence, peace, and privacy he deserves. He gazes up, THE STARS filling the sky as he just BREATHES.

HE DID IT. HE SAVED BECK.

And even if Beck NEVER wanted to see him again for what Karter had done, Karter could rest easy KNOWING she’ll NEVER be getting her meat hooks into him again. And for Karter, KNOWING he was safe was enough.

[writeanapocalae]

The Falling Plane of Loss

The World of Gray | The Sleeping World | The World of Gray | The World of Gray | The Falling Plane of Loss

The world was crooked, when Casteval stepped into it, the entire horizon an obviously cascading fall, hanging left. He could feel the gravity pull at him, his hair and his clothes and his weight going in the way that it desired. There were other things, leaves, branches, papers, man made objects, that cascaded as if dancing on a wind that didn’t exist, falling off of the world whenever it ended.

The sky was a deep blood red, broken up by black clouds that ran as if made with a brush too heavy with water, letting rivulets of paint make their own patterns towards the edge. The grass was a dark chocolate brown, tall and itching as it slide up Casteval’s pant legs, still in the lack of breeze. There was no fog, there was no water, there was nothing of that dead gray world that Casteval had just left. It smelled of gunpowder and earth and in the distance, not too far but enough that Casteval knew it would be hours before he reached it, there was a city, entirely made up of white ivory.

Casteval turned, trying to see if there was an alternate route. He was there for a sword and, he had to assume, it was a very specific sword, the one in his hand wouldn’t do. Behind him, like graves were the red doors. Some of them stood like the one he’d come through, still wet with his blood, but most had fallen over and were half buried, using the earth as their frames. Casteval wondered if any of them would lead to a million other versions of this hallucination, or if they were as dead as they seemed, only leading to the earth beneath them.

Casteval made a fist, feeling the blood ooze through his fingers. He’d sliced through his palm, a mistake he was sure, as he pain had flared substantially. Smearing it against the door hadn’t felt much better, and he could feel the skin push apart as he’d done in. Now it was a burning flare in his skin and his nails digging into it made that flare explode into a thousand searing needles, but it was still bleeding and he had to put pressure on it. He didn’t have anything else.

He started his walk, heading towards the city.

Each step felt like ten, both in exhausting him and getting him closer to his goal. His feet hurt, his shoes made for looks and sitting at a desk all day, not for long treks through strange worlds of his own subconscious. He was going to spend a lot of time sitting after this and a lot of time at the drug test place. He never wanted this to happen again.

It didn’t take long before he could see other footprints, the grass flattened into a path or dead and fallen out to reveal the steps. There were all kinds, animal, person, and other, but they were all heading towards the city. They all had to have a good reason to go there and not just because it was the only city in sight. There had to be other cities, other doors, other areas to this place.

That gray place had been between the living and the dead, the dragon had said. Casteval wondered what this place was. It wasn’t Hell, he was sure of that, as it wasn’t all that unpleasant, but it wasn’t a good place to be either.

The ivory towers didn’t look like they were built as much as carved into buildings, a large chunk of it that had been gauged into to make the appearance of a multitude of smaller locations. The windows were glassless, just gaping holes in the sides, and, as far as Casteval could see, there were only a few still there. He couldn’t tell if they were human or not, but he was sure he saw at least one large monstrous cat strolling from room to room.

The grass was gone, all of it stomped out. There were still some marks of individuals, Casteval’s among them, but most of the ground was smooth from so many feet. The city wasn’t filled enough for this many feet. Something had happened, either to the people or what had drawn them here, for it to be so barren.

There was an archway, that let Casteval through and into the city proper, though it became immediately clear that the city worked as a labyrinth, once through the arch and past the first ring of buildings, there was another ring and another after that and there was no way to know without getting terribly lost how many rings there were, how many turns. Casteval didn’t even know where he was going.

He looked around, peering through buildings, looking for people who looked like people. He called out to the man who’s head was on upside down, with purple bruised skin and eyes on his chin but was not heard. He called out to the woman with what looked like wings but were actually a mass of arms and eyes that looked like iron but she ignored him. He called out to the children that were little more than gray shapes, transparent and squeaking. They, at least, stopped and stared at Casteval, though they did not answer.

“They’ve lost much and have much to lose still,” a voice explained, calm and warm, even if a bit weak. “You have lost nothing yet, you must be new.”

Casteval looked for the owner of the voice, finding them leaning against the side of one of the buildings, obscured by shadow. Casteval approached them, but stayed in the light, even though he’d seen no sun. He didn’t trust things that hid in the shadows, not here.

“I am. Who are you?” he tried to see some of their features. It was too dark to see, but they looked to be even more exhausted than Casteval felt, breast heaving.

“Sorry, sorry,” the figure pulled into the shadows further, “I must have scared you with that whole talking without introduction, without letting you know I’m here. My name is Eramot, what’s yours?”

“Cas-“ he cut himself off. He didn’t want to reveal himself as Casteval. He didn’t want to go through the whole thing of convincing someone he wasn’t that great hero. In the real world Casteval was a beacon of light, a role model, as glorious as he could possibly be without ascending to sainthood. Here though, more people seemed to fear the name than cherish it. Eramot already seemed frightened enough.

“A pleasure to meet you, Cas,” Eramot nodded. They shuddered and leaned forward, extending a blackened hand, filled with pockmarks and ending in terrible claws. Jewelry hung off of their fingers and wrist like dew in a fell morning.

Casteval took at and found it clammy shaking, and when they shook it was weak. “Are you alright?”

The hand snaked back into the shadows, to go to Erimot’s mouth, “I should think not,” they sighed, “I’m being poisoned.”

Casteval reached out, grabbing for Erimot’s biceps, forgetting about the blood on his hand, tossing his sword to the ivory floor. They flinched, jumping away, but Casteval’s hands were feather light, there to steady in case of falling, there to show solidarity. “Poisoned? What should I do? Where can I get you help?”

Erimot chuckled sadly, shaking their head, shaking in his hands. “The poison is to help, though it feels as wretched as you would suspect. I’m sorry to worry you. I spoke to help you, not to call your attention to my own problems.”

Casteval was glad of that, though he thought that the poison was a much more pertinent issue. If they thought being poisoned was to help them, there must have been something even worse going on. Casteval’s own problems could wait.

“I’m looking for a sword but that’s nothing, that can wait,” he pressed, “Who’s poisoning you? How is it supposed to help?”

Erimot slid down the wall into a sitting position, still hidden by shadow. They reached out and took the sword that he had dropped, looking over it with only slight interest. “I am going to guess that you’re looking for a specific sword, not this one. I was poisoned by one who loves me and I, in turn, love and loathe in equal measure. There is something inside of me that must be killed, and it must be done so slowly enough that it does not catch on. That is why I am poisoned.”

Casteval joined them in the shadow, sitting across from them, suddenly blind from the change in light. “That’s not right, even if it’s to help you, there must be a way that doesn’t hurt you too.” He wanted to reach out, to touch this person, to give some comfort. He was frightened of them, their claws had looked so terribly sharp, but that was nothing compared to how hut they were, how much Casteval instinctually needed to help.

“Methods for other things have been far worse,” they shrugged, voice catching. “Poison also lets me stay in control.”

@anhathaway, @mynameis3-14, @kly-writes, @itskassidywrites

[austennerdita2533]

Day 5: Mythology and Creatures

A/N: I bring you a Hades and Persephone AU today, lovelies. It reads a little bit like a myth/fairy tale. Also, there was supposed to be a Klaus POV to this but I’m a writing sloth and ran out of time. Shhhh. If you’re interested in the part 2, let me know and I’ll finish it and post it at a later date. I hope you like it because I’m not sure how I feel about it. 

Anyway, happy reading! :)

(FF.net)

xx Ashlee Bree

Fill Me With Your Kissing Death

Long ago, back in the days when wolves still trotted and crouched low in her honeysuckle eyes, hungry for something with no name but afraid to prowl too close to the surface of desire, midnight rose like a chariot from a tomb to tickle the soles of Caroline’s feet. It tilled the earth. Exposed her lampshaded dreams like cartilage. Snapped denial against her two bony kneecaps until she screamed out the letters of her own fate. The rattle roar of ghosts she’d long refused to know stepped out from graves beneath her skin. They zipped into her throat with ease because they were no longer shunned for their shouts which demanded wicked mercy; they were no longer lonely. Cracking open the dual riot in her heart.

Midnight vined her through with darkness pronged in hush. All of that guileless power licking love into old scars until they felt jagged and whole again instead of split open and dripping red with shame. It happened at a time when hunting for blood was deemed wrong for any spring darling because ‘sunlight should be enough to fill up anyone who’s been blessed with a green raindrop touch’; but also in a moment when Caroline could no longer crush the wildness inside. That part of her desperate to grow thorns from her thumbs…that part dying to poison herself with the freedom to seethe.

She’d grown weary of lying. She’d grown so sick of pretending to flourish in a half-life where she spent all her time courted only by the warmth of the sun. For what of the moon? Or of the knifing feeling of night as it’s swallowed like ice through the lungs of the guilty?

What about the withering of seeds after August’s multitude of sins have sucked out all the colors except grey and black? How about the rickety quiet of branches swaying somberly because they’ve paid for their crimes in crumpled brown leaves? Why should it be so wrong, Caroline wondered, yet feel so right, to harness Nature’s brutal tools? Why should it be so terrible to bury the weediest of weeds back beneath the dirt where they belonged?

What if—what if it wasn’t?

Stunted, that’s how she felt. Stuck.

Her head spun and spun in clouds too bright. Her chest heaved, gasping for a squall that tasted of swords and teeth and sweat instead of a rain scented in pinks.

Deep down, Caroline craved transformation and piquancy because she knew she needed more room to cultivate the dueling extremes the gods had planted inside of her. She needed a different kind of garden. One that’d accommodate her bloom-wilting, shiver-burning, rain-droughting ways because the pleasure to shine wasn’t enough anymore.

The sun felt muted.

One-dimensional.

Uninspired.

Warmth was too tepid, too predictable…

It would never fill her up. It would never be enough.

Caroline needed nightfall, too. She needed fog and shadows and obscurity. She needed the enigma of the moon with its various phases and cratered multiplicity.

She required the chill of the wind’s tendrils scraping through her bones with a whistle which wakened to widen the marrow, fattening her full of vigor and vice. She wanted the heaviness of souls to press down and burden her shoulders with questions. With emotion. With finality. She wanted penance for sins to blister across skin like ivy because sometimes suffering was payment, because sometimes suffering was the only justice.

She craved the flavor of revenge sliding through her teeth, along her gums, and she longed for it to boil and bake and brew in her blood without guilt before erupting to penalize the deserving with pain.

She wanted everything—she was over feeling half-enough.

Done.

The time had come to seek sanctuary for the defiant aconite seeds which were frozen in her gut. Caroline needed to nourish them in deeper soil where both she, and they, could come into their own and thrive. The time had come for her fear to fall. For her fists to rise. For the hollowed-out roots of her spring-stasis life to be pruned and snipped away for good so only her punishing purple petals survived.

And so, as a flock of bluebird-ravens wreathed ‘round her head chirping a song about beautiful wraiths, the squishing grass between her toes sounding less and less like a place she yearned to call home, she approached the Forest of Forgotten Age with determined footsteps and ambition to claimed what she was owed.

“I know who I am,” she said, “and I choose power. I choose instinct. I choose to chase after the missing pieces I still need.”

Caroline followed the stars, the eerie wood before her sparkling with serendipity, with eventuality.

A horn sounded when she passed through a bouldered gate as if to confirm that she’d left spring behind for good and had finally found the leafless ground where she was meant to be. Lowering her head, kissing the bundled green stems she carried in her hands, she knelt before the enchanted Unseen Tree to plant her dandelion offering like a wish. She waited for Mr. Midnight himself to come. She waited to for him to convey her over the threshold and into the undulating world below, sweeping her into the black magic of moonlight like a bride.

“Touch me, I am ready to burn,” she recited in a whisper. “Take me, I am ready to turn. Teach me how to command my extremes, and I am yours to adore in the realm you rule beneath my earth-sodden feet.”

“Like a Sun Queen who falls to kiss the horizon each and every night, I want both light and dark in my life,” she went on. “I need a world where both blood and mercy collide, where love still wins but hate’s a battlecry.”

Her heartbeat was as percussive as a clang of bone on obsidian.

“It’s why only a hybrid home like the Deadlands can shelter me. It’s why only you can stop time to take me in—saving me, enriching me.”

Her narcissus soul was ablaze with hope, with hunger. Veins pulsated, thick and green and bulbous, in the whites of her eyes until they looked almost black.

“I appeal to you, King Klaus, Kindred of the Damned. Save me with your killing breath; fill me with your kissing death,” she said feelingly, her fingers clawing into the molten dirt like talons. “Please, free me from this half-lived hell!”

The ground cracked under Caroline’s muddy palms as she spoke.

Blades of grass parted like a greasy cowlick to reveal a black mouth where a blanket of green used to be. Through the cracked lips, a whisper of smoke snaked left then right before reaching up and out to handcuff her wrists in silk; thumbing a path up her arms, along her ivory neck, across her apple’d cheeks. It caressed her sweetly, possessively, tickling her skin as it encircled her head like a crown.

The smoke feathered across her forehead, its edges thinning until they were no wider than an eyelash that could prick its way inside softly and open her mind to a land of bone and snow, of flame and ghosts, and of thorns which curled and swooped to form dead rose bush thrones. It wove white lily skulls under her skin. It galloped images of cobalt castles made of glass, fire-breathing horses, silver chariots, and scepters stained in ichor, through her thoughts. It rolled mint under her tongue to give her a taste of the Deadlands’ crisp power.

Then slowly, smoothly, the smoke pulled back and let her go. Like a vanishing serpent, it sunk back beneath the chasmed ground from where it sprang, leaving her with nothing except memories of grandeur, yearning, and a small trifle which rested atop the dirt like a stone.

Round, thick, juicy, and rich with color, the object glistened at Caroline like a weeping ruby and hummed a kind of skeleton melody. The music called to her; it beckoned. And before she knew it, she’d plunged her arm into the center of the Unseen Tree’s trunk and closed her hand around it, squeezing.

“I’m all yours now. And you—you are all mine. But the Deadlands?” she said as she plucked the item loose with a tug and raised it into the air. “I’m afraid that you’ll have to learn how to share.”

Lowering Death’s forbidden fruit to her mouth, she then bit into it hard. Her canines pierced the frostbitten rind with a smile that sliced as she added, “Say hello to your new Queen of Midnight.”

In that one moment, and with that one bite where she was able to savor Free Will’s taste as it spilled across the blade of her tongue, dripping endless Time down her chin, Caroline not only swallowed an entire kingdom of riches and ruin, but also a destiny that’d open her pomegranate heart to the wonders of the dark. And to Klaus. For, in him, she found not a god, but a mate who filled her half-empty parts with a violent love that would never die.

And the rest, as they say, was history.

[therealsymmetra]

//Six Feet

“Don’t look back, keep running,” Bray’s voice was hoarse as they dashed through the frozen wilderness.

           His hand was pressed firmly to the smaller Awoken’s back, keeping them within arm’s length so that he could easily cover them if needed. He could hear their panicked breathing, nearly matching his own, the frigid winter air stinging his chest with every breath. He felt like his lungs were bleeding, like he would soon collapse in on himself, but the sounds of dogs barking and men yelling kept his burning legs from stalling.

           They dashed out of the tree line, ambient light from the compound behind them casting an eerie glow on the fog that hung lowly across the ground. Their boots crunched over snow, and as they traveled further into the mist Bray started to feel the beginnings of hope, that he and Cas had made it unlike the others. They were free. It wasn’t until Cas slipped from his grasp that that hope began to fracture. He heard them yelp, go down quickly and a peculiar rumbling noise echo out from beneath their feet. He tried to stop himself only to slide as well, searching wildly for Cas as he hit the ground hard. All the air left him for a moment as he tried to stop himself from slipping further away from where he and Cas last were together. It was then, laying on the ground that he realized their grave mistake. He swiped at the earth below him, pushing aside snow to be face to face with a thick sheet of ice. Bray didn’t know the area well before he was taken to the complex, they could have very well wandered onto some kind of body of water, frozen due to the winter.

           “Bray!” He heard Cas cry, not too far from him, his heart jumping into his throat as he searched them out, squinting through the night until his eyes adjusted and the moon peeked out from behind thick dark clouds.

           He saw them, a couple yards away, on their hands and knees, white hair hanging in their face as they tried to right themselves.

           “Cas don’t move!” Bray warned, a hefty creak echoing out from where Cas was trying to stand.

           “They’re coming!”

           “I know, I know, please, don’t. Move.” Bray tried to even his voice, tried to calm them, but he could see the panic grip them as the voices grew closer. Bray dropped onto his stomach, pulling himself painfully slow across the ground, the slipperiness of the ice losing all meaning as it caught on his jacket and pants.

           “I’m coming to you stay down Cas.”

           They weren’t listening, they were too frightened, he could tell in the way they kept throwing glances over their shoulder back from where they came. The ice continued to groan and shutter, with every move Cas made Bray could feel it vibrate out to him.

           “Stop! Cas! Listen to me, please love! Listen!”

           “I can’t go back! I can’t go back!”

           “Cas!”

           The ice gave one last protesting groan before the sound of shattering glass filled Bray’s ears. If it wasn’t the frigid water that would kill them Bray knew they couldn’t swim. He saw their lower half splash down into the water, the utter panic on their face as they scrambled to find purchase.

           “Bray! Oh my god, Bray!”

           “I’m coming! Just hold-,” another deafening crunch followed by the frantic struggles of a body trying to tread water before silence.

           “Cas! Shit, Cas!”

           He knew his shouts were futile, that any effort made to find them, to bring them up would be pointless, but he pulled himself across the ice anyways, shoved his arms into the water that near instantly numbed his skin and soaked his jacket, he moved to plunge his head under when he felt someone grip his hood and yank. Blinding white light washed over his vision, his breath caught in his throat as suddenly he wasn’t on the lake anymore but on dry ground, staring up at the sky, the clouds moving in to blanket the moon in darkness, then there was the man.

           “Thought you two could just waltz on out then?”

           Bray’s breathing was labored, his face wet with tears he hadn’t noticed he was crying, but hatred boiled up inside of him, energy coming even as his muscles felt stuck with ice. He scrambled up with a shout, launching himself onto the other man, fists flying, hands so numbed he couldn’t feel the impact, only the crunch as he broke his nose.

           “You fucks! You sick fucks! You did this! You fucking killed them!” He screamed.

           He wasn’t sure what came next, all he could remember was something hard and heavy colliding with his face, knocking him sideways and onto the ground, blood filling his vision, one eye having gone dark as he struggled to lift his head from the ground.

           “That ones on you Bray, if you hadn’t run, she woulda been safe.”

           It was a different voice, he knew this voice, a man by the name of Joffrey, older than the rest but just as cruel. Time seemed to skip, he wasn’t sure how long, but when he opened his eyes again the moon was somewhere else and the wash of oranges and pinks started to paint the sky as the sun had started to rise. He was being dragged, his right eye having still gone dark since they hit him, his knuckles throbbed and he was sure he had broken his hand at some point.

           “There’s good, throw ‘im in.”

           Bray sucked in a breath as he tried to right himself but the energy never came. They were somewhere outside the complex, that much was certain seeing as no half fallen buildings could be seen from where he laid on the ground. He felt arms underneath him, hoisting him up, he was larger than most but with such a sluggish mind he had no way of fighting back. He tried to will his brain to work, to start up, but as he was dumped from a short height he couldn’t get himself to move. It wasn’t until he tried to lift his arms, tried to kick out only to find sturdy wood that he started to panic, that the adrenaline started to course through him. He saw faces, far away and blurred, moving as if part of a movie that kept skipping, like his mind kept stalling.

           “Rest in peace abomination,” was all he heard before he was enveloped in darkness.

           Something was very wrong, this was all wrong. But his head hurt too much to process it, they were mistaken, he was alive. They knew that right? He was alive. Why was he in a box? He was alive.

           “I’m… I’m alive… wait…” his voice was raspy and forced, like he was trying to breathe through a straw.

           “I’m… I’m alive! Wait! Wait I’m alive!” He screamed, aching fists pounding halfheartedly on the lid.

           “I’m alive! Stop it! Help! Help me! I’m alive!”

           He felt the wooden coffin groan around him, shuttering slightly before he felt a drop then silence. His pounding became more insistent, more frantic, then he heard it, the shuffling of dirt, the sound of movement becoming farther and farther away until he couldn’t hear anything but his own breathing.

           “Please! Stop! Cas! Cas help me! Please, god! I’m still alive!”

           He felt sobs shake his voice, he was suffocating on his own tears as he tried to tear at the wood above him. His shoulders hurt, shoved at a wrong angle, his legs ached from how they were positioned, it was all too small, too cramped, he felt like he had been squeezed into a trash compactor. It was becoming harder to breathe and if he didn’t know better he would have thought he was under water.

           “Please—god I’m dying. I’m dying down here… Please, Cas,” he started to choke, oxygen becoming harder to find, the darkness around him utterly crushing him. He closed his eyes, tried to find their face amid the panic that flooded his brain, he was so cold he felt like he was burning. A ringing drowned out everything else, it pounded in his temples, behind his eyes, and slowly but surely it was all that he could sense.

           Air was hard to find at first, his stinging lungs making it difficult to take in a chest full, but there was a creaking above him, before a splintering sound.

           “Are you sure?” Came a voice, rough and far away, one he didn’t know.

           “Yes yes, they’re here,” came another, this one softer, accented slightly.

           “Okay, let’s get them out then.”

           There was the sound of more splintering, and suddenly sunlight burst over his eyesight, causing him to hiss and recoil, even if everything in his body told him he need to get out.

           “There they are!” Came the second voice, and then there was a robot. Small, looking like some kind of star, they flitted back and forth for a moment before settling on his shoulder.

           “My person!” They chirped gleefully.

           “Hello, I know this must be jarring for you,” a hand reached forth and he took it without hesitation, the need to get out of the hole around him his only current motivation.

           As his eyes adjusted he was greeted by a man, dark skinned, human, cropped hair and kind eyes. He wore heavy utilitarian armor and he too had a small robot that floated just over his shoulder.

           “Where…” he nearly startled himself, his own voice deep and raspy.

           “It’s best that we get you to the temple first, get you settled, then we can explain everything.”

           He nodded in response, glancing back at where he had come from.

           “My name is Saladin, do you know yours?”

           He looked around, as if his surroundings would give him some indication of who he was.

           “Bray!” the little robot chirped, he hadn’t realized but they had moved from his shoulder to hover beside him.

           “You shouldn’t give him a name if he-“ “-Bray.”

           Saladin paused, taking him in a moment.

           “My name is Bray.”

           The little robot chirped happily, spinning around his head before settling on his shoulder.

           “Alright then Bray, shall we get moving.”

           “Wait wait! What about me?”

           Bray pulled them from his shoulder, taking them in a moment.

           “Cas,” he said, a warm feeling blossoming in his chest at the name, “your name is Cas.”

           The little thing didn’t moved, staring up at him and if it could show expression he was sure they were wide eyed, but soon enough their shell shuttered with excitement.

           “Cas! I am Cas, I am your Ghost!”

           Bray nodded, letting the Ghost float up beside him.

           He returned his attention back to this Saladin and smiled.

           “Alright then, Cas, Bray. Shall we?”

[goodlucktai]

Nothing long of time (1 /2)

summary: 

Kitamoto says, “If you guys want people to believe you about yokai stuff, why don’t you just get this weird cat to talk in front of them? It’d convince me.”

Tanuma blinks. “I guess… I never thought about it?”

set in the full circle au

story tag / ao3

x

Satoru is experiencing the strangest sense of deja vu as he listens to Natsume’s ugly cat complain about all the trouble it’s going through. He’s heard this grumpy old man’s voice before, he thinks. He remembers hearing Natsume talk to it once, a long time ago.

“It’s always you that seems to find trouble, brat,” the cat says without any real heat, jumping from Tanuma’s lap to cross the floor to where Satoru is sitting. It puts its paws on his knee and lifts up to get a better look at him, staring without blinking through narrowed green-black eyes. “There’s definitely a cloud of something nasty hanging over you. Let me see the curse mark.”

Satoru slides his sleeve up out of the way and offers his arm. He’s too surprised to do much more than obey, and throws Taki a bewildered look over Nyanko-sensei’s round head. She smiles encouragement at him, and even does a really good job of not looking worried.

Next to him, sounding as dumbfounded as Satoru feels, Kitamoto says, “If you guys want people to believe you about yokai stuff, why don’t you just get this weird cat to talk in front of them? It’d convince me.”

Tanuma blinks. “I guess… I never thought about it?”

A symbol lights up Nyanko’s head, a strangely squiggly character that Satoru doesn’t have a chance to study before it beams a blinding white that fills the room. When it fades, everyone in the room has flash blindness but Taki, who was the only one sensible enough to cover her eyes.

Blinking through sunspots, Satoru watches Nyanko pull away from the mottled bruising on his arm with distaste.

“It’s not something my light can break,” it says. Kitamoto stiffens, and Taki and Tanuma both look grave and frightened by the news, but Satoru isn’t overly surprised. In his experience, it’s never that easy. “Does it seem to wax and wane? Get worse and then better intermittently?”

“Yeah,” Satoru replies. It’s remarkable how quickly he’s getting used to having a human conversation with the same lazy housecat he’s snuck table scraps to, and carried around in the summer heat. “Earlier this morning it was almost gone.”

“Then it’s probably psychosomatic,” Nyanko says. “How you’re feeling affects the curse. What have your moods been like?”

Satoru blinks rapidly. That’s a big question to unpack. Uncertainly he says, “Normal, I guess? I’ve been a little stressed lately, but -- “

“He’s been acting different,” Kitamoto says right over him. His hands are folded into tight fists. “Guarded. Overshadowed, almost. I thought it was just the weight of this secret he’s been keeping, but maybe there’s a little more to it than that.”

“And he acts as though we’re strangers to him sometimes,” Taki puts in quietly. “Especially the other day, when we tried to get close to his arm. He looked at us as though he didn’t know who we were.”

“I didn’t,” Satoru starts, heart racing. “I wouldn’t -- “

“You didn’t mean to,” Taki says quickly, leaning towards him. “We know you didn’t mean to. You don’t realize it, Nishimura, but the rest of us do, because we can see you acting strangely.”

“Maybe it’s the yokai.” Tanuma’s contribution is abrupt, as though the revelation just occurred to him. “The books Taki found in her grandfather’s library made us think this might be a type of sympathetic magic, the yokai that cursed him affecting him from afar. Could it be the reason Nishimura’s been acting oddly lately? Maybe it’s psychosomatic and sympathetic at the same time.”

“So the yokai is affecting Nishimura’s mind, and Nishimura’s mind is affecting his body?” Kitamoto says slowly, in the tone of someone taking apart a horror story word by word.

“That sounds feasible,” Nyanko says at length, and as one, everyone else in the room turns to look at Satoru with varying degrees of pity in their eyes.

Satoru stands up, and it feels like he’s moving through fog or water. “I’ll be right back,” he tells the room at large, but even his own voice is muffled in his ears, and if any of his friends reply he doesn’t hear them.

He makes his way down the hall of Taki’s huge house, and he’s glad he finds the bathroom on his first try because he’s sick almost as soon as he’s in front of the toilet. He throws up until his stomach is cramping and all that’s left in his body is dry heaves and a headache.

He doesn’t look at his arm. It hurts so badly he knows what it must look like.

A cool hand settles on his forehead, pushing sweaty fringe out of his eyes and lifting his face from its awkward cradle against his arm. It’s Kitamoto, sitting on the lid of the toilet and shifting Satoru’s head to rest against his knee instead. He doesn’t take the hand out of Satoru’s hair, continues smoothing it back in a gesture that’s as familiar to him as Kitamoto’s bedroom, and his mother’s homemade dinners.

“I understand why you didn’t tell me,” Kitamoto says softly. “Taki and Tanuma were talking to the cat when I left after you. They think the yokai behind the curse on your arm is making you feel -- isolated. It’s the reason you’ve been doing so much by yourself, acting like there’s no one around to help you. It makes sense now. I’m not angry with you, okay?”

Pressing his mouth into a firm line for as long as it takes to fight tears and win, Satoru just sits there and leans against him for what could have been a minute or an hour. When he thinks he can talk without crying, he says, “At first I really was trying to handle it by myself, though. I don’t know -- when it changed -- “

He’s been acting differently, and he didn’t know. Overshadowed, his friends said in worried voices, guarded. Unfamiliar.

And he didn’t even realize, and that’s the scariest thing. What if the people who loved him were any less nosey, and this curse managed to turn him into a different person right under their noses? What if he lost to it, and no one knew how to help him? What if there was no one left to try, because he pushed them all away?

“It’s Natsume’s secret, isn’t it?” Kitamoto says into the quiet. “The one you’ve been keeping.”

Satoru feels too hollowed and hunted to do more than close his eyes and nod. On top of everything else, this is a personal failure he’s seen coming, to the point that it almost feels anticlimactic now. He couldn’t keep it from Kitamoto forever, he doesn’t know why he even tried.

“It makes sense. Later, when I have time to think about it, I’m sure it will make even more sense. I just wish -- one of you had said something. I wish you didn’t feel like it had to be a secret in the first place. You could have trusted us with it from the beginning.”

“It’s not about that,” Satoru says plaintively, “it’s the principle. Natsume -- he’s always -- he’s never had people like us. Like you and me, and Taki and Tanuma, and the Fujiwaras. I know, and you know, that we all would’ve believed him if he told us -- I mean, you believed me without asking for proof, and you’d believe him, too. We know that, but Natsume can’t yet. And then I found out, by stupid accident, and he asked me not to tell. So I -- wanted to keep this secret for him.” It sounds childish and lame, and Satoru is abruptly glad Kitamoto can’t see more of him than his profile, because he feels so stupid. “I wanted to prove that it was different here. Maybe if I kept his secret, he’d come a little closer to -- trusting. In us, and this place. Maybe he’d feel more at home here, if he knew he could count on me.”

But I ruined it, he thinks, and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. It’s all a mess now.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admits, and his voice comes out thick and wobbly. He’s always been quick to cry, and his eyes feel hot behind his hands. “I can’t take any of it back, and I almost wish I could. I’m so tired, Acchan.”

Kitamoto shifts, dislodging Satoru to sink to the floor beside him and wrap an arm around his shoulders instead. Maybe it should be at least a little awkward, but it’s the closest to safe Satoru has felt in a long time.

“We’ll figure it out,” Kitamoto says, so firmly his words could have moved mountains if he let them. “We’re not gonna let that monster get its hands on you again.”

The thing is, Satoru isn’t Natsume. As close as he might come to understanding the way Natsume thinks and the way he experiences the world, they're never going to be the same. Satoru grew up with a mother that didn’t have time for him, and a brother that grew out of him, and a best friend who took both their places as easily as breathing. Kitamoto walked home with Satoru after school and poured over their homework together and made him feel better when he was lonely or hurting or sad, and when Kitamoto says everything will be okay, Satoru believes him.

And there's very little a curse can do in face of something like that.

[wayward-demons]

Helping Hands Part 3

Word Count: 2,768

Characters: Dean Winchester, Y/N,  Sam Winchester

Warnings/Notes: Smut, Agnst, XXX rated stuffs.  (Requests are Open)

Part One / Part Two

Dean tapped his fingers on his lap as he sat on the edge of your bed. He looked around the room, drinking in the fine details that let him peak into your life that let him understand a bit about you. There wasn’t much, though he hadn’t expected too much since you too were a hunter.

He’d never been in your home before, his mind racing quickly over to the last time he met you, and how quickly things had ended. He sighed, running a hand down his stubble. What was he doing here? Why had he rushed to come down with just a phone call?

He could hear the shower running, hear the water hitting the tiles. And then he heard it, his name breathy and sexual out of your lips. Dean perked up at this, jumping to his feet and walking to the door. He pressed an ear against it, trying to hear beyond the water.

He opened the door just enough, steam rolling out into the coldness of the air. He could hear it now, the soft little moans leaving your lips. Dean wasn’t sure what came over him as he entered the room, silently shutting the door behind him.

The room was filled with steam, the mirror fogged up completely, so he was just a figure standing there. “Oh, fuck.” You moaned, and Dean lost himself. He could feel the tightness in his jeans, his body moving without him thinking. He could hear your heavy breathing, could hear your soft little moans from behind the curtain.

He stripped quickly, his clothes falling at his feet. He cursed to himself as he pried off his boots, letting them join the mess of clothes he had created. He wasted no time. He threw back the curtain, his hand reaching for you as he stepped in and joined you.

His fingers wrapped around your throat, only giving you enough pressure to let you know he was there, and he needed you. He pressed himself against you, your back meeting with the cold tile. The water washed over him, but it seemed almost nonexistent at this point, all he could think about was your naked body before you, how he had caught you with your hands in naughty places.

“Say my name again.” Dean’s voice was low, gravely and deep. You could feel his hardness against your thigh, your hands wrapped around his wrist as you attempted to pull him off of you. That was until you knew it was him.

You licked your lips. “Dean.” You said, and Dean pressed his hips harder into you, you hissed, closing your eyes before you could focus on Dean once more. “What are you doing in here Dean?” You asked, and had you been able to blush, you would have. But the heat from the shower was already making your body red.

Dean didn’t reply.  His eyes boring into you, pitch black and full of sexual desire. Why was Dean in here? Even Dean didn’t know the answer to that. Dean focused on your lips, parted and panting. He licked his own, his cock twitching against your thigh. He tightened his grip, fingers pressing tightly into you. He watched you close your lips and felt your throat as you swallowed.

“Kiss me.” You breathed, “Please.”

Dean did as he was told, lips mashing into yours with a newfound hunger that you both shared. He released you from his grasp, hand running up into your hair he pushed your face against his. His tongue drove inside you, creating a shattering moan that was music to his ears.

You arched against him, pressing your wet skin against his. Dean’s lips brushed against your cheek, “Tell me what you were thinking about.” Dean breathed into your ear, his stubble pressing into your cheek.  

“Wh-what?’ You asked, your body was shaking in need. You were confused by his question, the sudden stopping of his teasing, and yet this was the most teasing thing he could do to you. The steam clouded your vision, or was that because of Dean’s body being pressed against yours?

Dean pulled himself away from you, looking deep into your eyes. “Tell me- what were you thinking about while you-“ Deans fingers found you sweet spot, pressing fingers against your already swollen clit. “Is this how you were doing it?” He asked, rubbing small circles against you.

You moaned at his touches, body practically writhing because of him. “I was-“ You gulped, trying to regain your composure, it was hard to concentrate with Dean’s hands where they were. “I was thinking about that night.” You breathed in, his fingers were moving faster now, sliding down your folds and threatening to enter you. “I was thinking about you tasting me.”

Dean groaned at this, “That was a good part. You tasted so good Y/N. So sweet.” He ran his fingers up your stomach, careful to not touch any of the stitches covering you. He trailed his thumb against your nipple, “Tell me, what you would like me to do to you now?”

He thrust one finger inside of you, crooking it and hitting you in the spot that turned your moans into one long high-pitched scream. You shuddered against him, legs shaking. “I want-“ Your breathing was fast and ragged, “I want you on your knees. “

He dropped down, almost instantly, knees hitting the tub below him.  “Like this?” his breath was hot against you, his hands holding your hips as he kneeled ready to wrap his lips around you. The water was directly on him now, washing over him, rippling down his chest. But Dean wanted to tease you, looking up at you as he slowly made himself grow closer to you.

“Mmhmm.��� You moaned, no longer wanting to wait for him to become closer. You moved your hips closer, inching yourself towards Dean’s mouth. “Dean Please.” You begged, closing your eyes and hoping Dean would grant your wish.

He gave you a smirk, raising your thigh, letting it rest on his shoulder. He gave one slow lick over all of you. And then Dean didn’t waste time, licking and thrusting his tongue deep inside of you. He used his skill to quickly build you up and push you over the edge. Licking, sucking, and nibbling in all the right places to make you moan his name again.

You pressed your head into the tiles, arching your back to help him get deeper inside of you. You whimpered, you hand reaching down, fingers tangling in his wet hair. “Dean!” You moaned.

Dean ran his tongue soothingly over your sensitive and soaked flesh once more before pulling away. He licked his lips before he spoke, savoring the taste of you like he was never going to get anymore. “Is this what you were thinking about while you played with yourself?” He asked, pulling away and letting his fingers do all the work.

You whimpered at the sudden loss of him, but welcomed his fingers pumping in and out of you, driving you over the edge. He stood, once more towering over you. “You thought about how good it would feel to have my tongue inside you like that?”

“Yes Dean. I did.” You said between breaths, you were putty in his hands, able and willing to do whatever he wished of you. Dean knew just when to slow his movements down, knew just when you were about to reach your climax and stopped himself from letting you.

You gripped at his length, hand feeling just how hard and erect he was. Dean growled, pressing his forehead into the tiles to cool himself off. Your hand stroking up and down slowly. It was your turn to tease him.

Dean smirked, his confidence growing. “Tell me Y/N,” He asked, his fingers slowing until they rested inside of you, your hand still pumping fingers wrapped around him in that perfect way. “What else do you want from me?” Dean’s voice was gravely, his teeth clenched tight as he tried to hold back his own moans.

You licked your lips, mind racing as you tried to think of what you wanted from Dean. But his fingers were twitching inside of you, sending shockwaves of pleasure throughout your body. “I want you-“ You breathed, “-inside of me.”

Dean’s mouth found yours again, lips tasting sweet with a little tang from your pussy. Dean’s hands were carefully running down your sides, when he felt like he was at a safe place, he gripped your thighs. “Jump.”

You did as you were told, Dean catching you and hold you up. He didn’t say anything as he lined himself up, his lips still pressing into you as he entered you. His movements slow, feeling every agonizing inch of your tight wet hole. “Jesus Y/N.” He groaned.

He didn’t slow his movements, giving you full, hard thrusts. Your breasts bouncing with each. Every point of your body sparked with desire, noises leaving the both of you unwillingly. His thrusts gained a steady tempo, your hands clawing into his back. Dean clamped your hips to your waist, driving him further into you until your water-slick bodies were sliding together.

“Dean-“ You pleaded, so close to your own release.

“I know.” He grunted, his movements suddenly moving faster. A hand moved to your back, and Dean’s hips started grinding deeper and harder into you. Your legs tightened around him as you came, hard. Your body shaking against him. Every muscle tensed and then relaxed, sweet bliss washing over you. Dean was only a few moments behind you. His body twitching a few times before he stopped moving all together.

He slipped out of you and grunted before helping you back down. The water was cold by now, still washing over your hot bodies. You both breathed heavy, heart beats starting to return to normal. Dean loosened his grip on you, reaching over to turn the water off with a flick of his wrist.

Dean stepped out of the shower first, water droplets falling to the rug at his feet. You joined him not long after, your muscles having a whole new reason to ache as you tried to step over and join Dean in your bathroom.

He was already toweling himself off, watching you as you stood, nervously trying to cover your body. “Y/N, don’t do that.” He said, suddenly standing before you. He was still naked, his now wet towel in his hand.

“Here.” He said, grabbing at a new towel, a dry towel and dabbing it against your body. “Don’t want these to stay too wet.” He breathed, patting your stitches gently. He would stop when you’d hiss, knowing that they were a pain in the ass. But he tried, he tried so hard to be gentle with you.

Dean ran the towel along your legs, taking his time and making sure he was doing the best job ever. He was on his knees again, hands trailing up your legs. He stopped at your throbbing pussy, licking his lips before he gave it a gentle kiss and stood back up.

“You don’t have to do all this Dean.” Your eyes were half open as you spoke. You suddenly realized just how long this day had been. “I really will be okay. I know how to take care of myself.”

“I think you meant to say thank you.” Dean didn’t say it out of spite, he didn’t say it in an angry way, no. He knew where you were coming from, but that didn’t stop him from running the towel over your breasts, nipples still erect.

The difference was, he wasn’t doing this because you were hurt, he was doing this because he cared and wanted to do something sweet. He’d never tell you that though. It was easier for you to think he cared less, that he was just trying to make sure he took care of you and your wounds. Easier because eventually he would pack up the Impala and be out on the road again.

Dean wrapped himself in a towel before slipping out of the bathroom in search of his bag. You wrapped yourself up, leaning against the counter and replaying what had just happened in your mind. ‘You fucked Dean. Again.’ You sucked in your lower lip. ‘And it was just as great as you remembered.’

Dean returned, fully clothed as you were almost done dressing yourself. You opted for all the layers and just threw on an oversized shirt. It covered all it needed to and served its purpose of being pajamas. “Sam pick the room upstairs?” You asked, not even bothering to look over at Dean as he sat on the corner of your bed.

“Yeah. And hey, you don’t have to give me your room. I’ll take the couch really.” Dean scratched at his arm, he was watching you, but he had to look away or else you’d be repeating what happened in the shower. And Dean was suddenly reminded of your condition, and how he should have never fucked you like that. Had he hurt you? Did he open any stitches? All questions he wanted to ask, but not asking was easier.

“I’m not making you sleep on that thing. It’s half the size of you.” You turned to him finally. He looked so childlike, bent over scratching at his arm, his hair drying flat against his forehead. It was fluffy, your fingers itching to run through it before he gelled it up and styled it.

“I don’t mind.” Dean looked up at you, “I probably won’t be doing any sleep anyway. I’m going to look over your notes and try and figure out this case.”

“There’s the Dean I remember. His nose buried in lore.” You rolled your eyes. Dean had taken his job very serious. More serious than any other hunter you had met in the past few years. It’s what drew you to him in the first place, he was so dedicated and passionate about it.

“That’s not all I bury my nose in.” He joked, giving you a wink.

“Dean.” You crossed your arms over your chest.

Dean raised his hands, “I know, that was bad.” He stood, “But please, you need the rest more than I do. Sleep in here. I’ll be fine out there.”

You sighed, “If you can’t sleep out there you can come in here. But no more funny business.” You pointed a stern finger at him.

Dean nodded in understanding, “I don’t know what that was.” He said, eyes flicking to the bathroom. “I didn’t come here to do that I promise.”

You couldn’t help but laugh. In there, Dean was confident, Dean was controlling. Same when he was on a hunt, he walked around with his chest puffed out, you could practically taste the testosterone when you stood near him. But now, he was embarrassed, his cheeks were flushed, he couldn’t look at you directly.

“It’s okay Dean. I think we both needed that. And hey, now that it’s out of the way we can focus.”

Dean left your room after ordering you to get some rest. He made a joke about you looking like shit which you both laughed about, and he shut your door. There were a stack of blankets on the table where the pizza boxes had previously been, and Dean made quick work of setting them all out and making a makeshift bed for himself.

The couch was small, he wasn’t even sure he would fit on it, let alone be able to actually fall asleep on it. But like he said, he wasn’t planning on catching any Z’s any time soon. He was wide awake now, head clear and ready to work.

“Really?” Sam said, leaning against the frame in the stairs. “You couldn’t wait?” He asked.

Dean didn’t have to turn around to see the judgement on his brother’s face. “Don’t Sam.”

“I heard every part of it Dean, don’t tell me not to go there.” Sam was angry. “She just passed out from blood loss. She had a knife wound that I’m actually surprised didn’t kill her. You saw the house, did you not see how much blood she lost? And then you come back here and couldn’t keep your hands off of her?”

“Sam.” Dean turned to his brother, the last thing he wanted to do was fight with him right now, but that’s where Sam was going, his hushed yelling echoing in Dean’s mind.

“Your right Dean. I’ll just go to bed.”

[[Part Four]]