#smuggle it out with his now brainless body

[runnerfivestillalive]

This is from the book, while Crowley is trying to talk Aziraphale into helping him stop armageddon, and does his drunken ramble about eternity. Apparently God enjoys The Sound of Music.

“You’ll enjoy it. You really will. You won’t have a choice.”

I feel like this line gets overlooked a lot. It’s an important line, for sheer horror potential.

Whatever the control mechanism is, clearly it isn’t running on every angel at all times, because if that was the case, a rebellion never would have happened. Aziraphale wouldn’t have six thousand years of doubts piling up to critical capacity. Gabriel wouldn’t have been able to escape.

But it’s also clearly very easily turned on, since they both accept that it would be used for something as petty as enjoying a movie. This lack of will can be rolled over angels at any time, for any reason.

Aziraphale clearly has some dread of this. *Crowley* knows it, and used it to convince Aziraphale to help him stop armageddon. But Aziraphale is very good at letting one part of his brain know something while another part of his brain denies it, so it’s not clear how much *Aziraphale* knows he dreads it, even as that dread shapes his character.

He’s never really broken free of Heaven. Even when he was being called a traitor, he wasn’t fallen, and so he was expecting to be called home eventually. And he’d be happy, of course. He won’t have a choice.

Aziraphale’s been trying to walk away from Heaven for at least six thousand years. He walked away from guard duty. He gave away his sword. He lied straight to God’s face about it. He lied to the archangels, and then straight up told Crowley he was ready to go to Hell. Several millennia of trouble-making and demon-fraternizing later, he stood in the middle of Heaven, declared he wasn’t going to fight in any war, then escaped via the demonic act of human possession. He is ready to GO.

And still his wings are snowy white. He’s just as angelic as when he first worried the pretty starmaker might get in trouble, and tried to protect him with a warning.

But he can’t escape. Heaven isn’t letting anyone else go. And he knows what his future holds. Eventually, no matter how many times they put it off, eventually he will be called back to Heaven.

And so, what promises can he make Crowley?

To stay with him always? Of course not. To love him? Can he even promise to love him? No. He’ll eventually be dragged back to Heaven, and he’ll be happy to go, and he won’t even miss him. *He won’t have a choice.*

And perhaps that’s the problem. He loves Crowley too much to make promises he can’t keep.

[safestsephiroth]

#20: You Pick (Free Day) - Otto Aurumtaker (FFXIVwrite2020)

More information on FFXIVWrite can be found here: https://sea-wolf-coast-to-coast.tumblr.com/tagged/ffxivwrite2020+prompt+list

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Otto Aurumtaker was not a name known well within the Ul'dahn underworld, and that was why he had chosen to adopt it in his later years.

An Ala Mhigan refugee with no interest in mining or being trod upon, he was an easy recruit to the organization which now had died, nearly to the last.

It would be a fool who said Otto had not seen it coming, however. He had distanced himself in their twilight years, and seemingly only stuck around because of the girl.

Her father, Jack, had been dealt with. Otto had been there to kill him, himself. His best friend, and when they asked if he was okay with it, he volunteered to /help./

He murdered the girl, her mother, and then Jack. Brutally, terribly. So many looked upon Otto, after that, as a brainless, blunt weapon. And from then, he was happy to let them think as much.

Because he had a girl to oversee. The mother had abandoned her for Twelve knew what, and the near-dead Jack had been unceremoniously escorted to the ocean, where he was dumped with a knife ‘forgotten’ in his pocket, which Otto knew Jack would reach for and cut the flimsy ropes at his ankles, and then Jack would of course swim to the shore, and Jack would, in his fury, have no qualms about stealing the abandoned rowboat left a malm down the cliffside. The cuts looked gruesome, but would prove too shallow to kill Jack. Incredibly lucky, any onlooker would say.

The trip would give Jack plenty of time to think, and Otto was sure his best friend would see the upside, that he was now free from the criminal organization he had never truly belonged in, and had wanted out of.

He was out.

Of course, what would then transpire was that Jack would come to get revenge on Otto, and Otto would explain the whole thing, and the daughter would be smuggled out to Jack - Twelve knew her mother wasn't going to be any good for her, she'd been practically happy for the whole charade to happen without realizing Jack would survive - and everyone would be happy. Otto would be in a perfect place to take over everything, being viewed as loyal, capable and ruthless, and he'd prove himself the latter two for certain.

That was supposed to be how it went.

Otto had planned it meticulously, down to the last detail, but Jack did something Otto had never seen coming.

Jack didn't come for revenge.

Jack didn't come back at all.

The boat was gone, and he knew Jack had taken it. No one else would have found it, and the body never turned up.

This left Otto in a precarious position. All his plans hinged on Jack doing what Jack would, of course, obviously have done. But then Jack didn't, and there had been no backup plan, because it had seemed so incredibly certain that Otto hadn't considered one necessary.

This was the last time in his life Otto Aurumtaker made the mistake of not having a backup plan.

He became the girl's mentor. She had been hidden away for a time, and then he abandoned her to be picked up on her own, as he knew she would be. Her eyes too clever, her hands too quick - of course she'd be recruited. And that was the moment the danger came in.

Because now, all he had left of Jack was his daughter, and he wasn't going to lose that. Imagine how pissed Jack would be if he came back and his sweet little girl hadn't been dead after all, except she died stuck in the ribs in her teens instead?

And besides. When he looked at her, even though everyone else saw her troublesome mother, Otto couldn't help but see Jack.

So he had to help her. He had to guide her. But he didn't have to make it easy. She was too smart for that. Too clever. The child-turned-teen-turned-young-woman grew far faster than he himself had. She was a prodigy, to be sure of it.

It was only once he was certain she could handle herself he started to drift from the organization. Being a pseudo-parent was far more ambitious than he'd ever wanted to be. Leading a gang of thieves and criminals was nowhere near as much work or worry as watching over a dangerously-clever girl. Coddling her would have been trivial. Claiming her his own daughter would have been a breeze. The trick was to guide her without making it obvious he was at all. Tricking the ‘peers’ who already thought he was stupid, that was easy. Tricking the little genius took everything he had.

She taught herself to pick locks. The thought hadn't occurred to him she'd have figured out how locks worked from looking at a key. Just from seeing the way the teeth bite, the way the key turns, that was all it took and she was sneaking out every night with a custom-tool filed-down from a railroad spike and a makeshift hook from a discarded pair of spectacles she found in the alleys.

She learned to sneak not by watching him, but by stalking him. The first time he felt a blade at his spine and heard "You lose" was the first time in his life he'd felt proud. She’d earned that gil.

And that was the sort of pride that lasted forever. Not the fleeting sense of a job well done, not a story of which to reflect on later and nitpick at all the slightest mistakes. He was proud, still, over a decade since.

It was when the girl came back to him, after he'd been distancing himself from the decaying husk of what was left after the adventurers and the blades and the heyday getting stomped by that damned recklessness and stupidity that the worthless chaff thrived on, after he had resigned himself to solo work and obscurity... It was when she tracked him down herself and made him an offer that he felt the proudest yet.

She offered him an opportunity to work /for her./

She outlined her plan. What was to come, what would happen next. What it might cost her, what it might cost them, what it might cost everyone. She showed him the secondary, tertiary, quaternary plans. She showed him the escape routes, showed him the contacts she'd lean upon, the dead drop locations she'd decided upon, where the meetings would be, how much she'd offer initially and where her actual limits were.

She showed him the disguises she'd put together all on her own, how she could mimic a half dozen different men and women and get away with it, how she could switch between the voices and mannerisms on a whim and the outfits in under twenty seconds. She showed him the makeup, the lockpicks, the fake blood, the self-made maps, the cipher she'd created just for this mission and how she'd derived it. She had answers for every question he asked, and no matter how hard he tried he was unable to find a single angle she hadn’t already covered.

Some would chafe under working for her. But he knew what it meant, and further that she knew it as well.

He wasn't a thug. He wasn't a footpad. He wasn't some toady or gopher. He was her advisor. He was her support. He was the hidden blade of a Queen the underworld would one day know well.

And he was so godsdamned proud.

[smallandinsignificant]

im more tired today. i have yet to do the interviews, they start at 12:45. i really want to get over with it but also i wish i was better prepared, had read some articles and such. i am not entirely sure what im looking for. i want to sleep. i danced last night and it felt good to move, but now im tired in my body. i hope i have enough energy after the interviews to finish some work stuff and also start on some serious thesis stuff. i need to plan for what articles im gonna read the coming days. i’m a little short on money for some things but i found some physical cash last night that cheered me up. tomorrow is dinner at granmas house so tonight ill probably be at mom’s. not tomorrow night  i think then. maybe. i dont know.its very tiring to be up and down all the time. one moment i have energy and motivation and inspiration and pumped up about doing things and the next i just want to sleep all day. its really annoying and tiring and frustrating.

im gonna write down my dream it was scary.

It starts with the story of a young boy who from a very early age has been rained (along with other children by an organization) for espionage, smuggling and assassination. he looks strangely a lot like victor from yuri on ice. One day during the inbetween of missions him and a girl in the same situation (me in the dream) decide to just...leave. And they do, they are just teenagers but he finds a way to get by and when we see him again he is a young adult/college student/but work? anyway he lives above this guy he’s very closewith now, someone who is very different from him. he lives with his mother and father and does everything, he tries his best at a lot of things despite not excelling at them,and his parents roast him lovingly about it. he is happy. And white haired guy likes him a lot. He does however pick up on some strangeness shifting in the winds. Turns out there is a race of mechanical bees hypnotising people to becoming flesh eating brainless creatures. They target everyone who is outside or have their windows/doors open and buzz to cause the effect. One of these bugs get into the home of the brown haired neighbor. meanwhile white has been investigating these buzzings hes been hearing around and recording them. he notices a special lilt to one of the buzzes, and also comes into the house to see brown almost attacking his parents. he somehow manages to activate the sound and brown snaps out of it. they hear mayhem coming from down town and decide to check it out/getting out of the area they’re in. 

The highways are stuffed with cars if people trying to get out or zombiefied people going home. they are to target their closest people, and as our gan gets into ana apartment area through the car garage, and to the first floor, we see and hear one of the zombies coming form behind us. we all instinctively freeze and he passes through our group and goes into the apartment. his girlfriend greets him and he greets her back in a slight monotone, robotic tone. “Hello, it is me, your boyfriend.” she drops something and it makes noise and he goes “are you alarmed? don’t be afraid of me” as he closes in. we cant see it but i sense it in the dream, we look at each other alarmed and white tries the buzz noise on his phone right as we run past and see that the guy has grabbed his gf in a chokehold and is trying to eat her arm. He snaps out of it and they both thank us for helping them, the girl says the guy is a famous man and he leads us downstairs to help us figure things out. as we are talking white senses someone coming through the other door, he keeps glancing at the door nervously and moves us closer to the kitchen area. the door opens, it’s the brother of the guy and he has this blank look on his face.he walks in and introduces himself “hello brother, it’s me, _____” and starts walking towards the guy. White turns off the lights and gestures towards the big window by the kitchen, i try to open it but i can’t(i am brown at this point), a girl in our group takes over and opens it wide and climbs out, as well as the rest of our party, but the previous zombie guy is a little paralyzed. On my way to climb out the window i clank through some cans and the zombie brother goes “are you alarmed? don’t be afraid of me” and as he says that i freak out a bit and throw myself head first out the window, not even taking care of where im falling. when /I/ fall the building is by a cilff, so tall and menacing and i fall to my deth. i try to repeat this scene a few times where i dont fall to my death but its difficult. i end up just waking up being severly creeped out.

I dont know if i fall asleep again but i remembe rdreaming that the bugs plans are to take over someone who has a bigradio station in order to broadcast their hypnotising buzz all over the world, and it instead becomes our plan to broadcast the cancelling buzz all over, and we try to do that after finding out about the bugs’ plans in a camping site full of those car houses. Eh, yeah