#that making things easier and less painful and exhausting is in fact not morally bad . even if it means i need other people to do stuff

[cozybi]

i do NOT have to do things the hard way it is GOOD to do things the easier way it is GOOD to make things gentler for myself wherever possible and i DESERVE help and kindness in all situations !!!!!!!!!!!!

[tamamatango]

Let’s talk about Kururu, again

Apparently the fandom is growing all of a sudden so I feel like talking about Kururu again cuz that’s all I know how to do and it’s been a while

First off disclaimer that fandom is fandom and anybody can interpret any character any way they want and if you like to portray a character a certain way for whatever reason go for it, more power to you (unless you put them in pedo/incest relationships that are displayed as good in which case fuck you). But in my personal Kirbpinion(TM) the Funimation dub was a fucking mistake because so many fan content creators write a way different Kururu than what he is in canon cuz the dub never got to his best episodes and also upped the sadism to ridiculous levels. Listen I know it’s funny to joke that he’s the kind of guy that has 3 medieval torture chambers but hear me out. Kururu is by no means a perfect person, he’s genuinely pretty rude/blunt (though sometimes his straightforwardness is justified :P), has an ego, sometimes acts pretty gross around others and likes extreme and elaborate pranks way way way too much BUT.

Assuming you’ve watched far enough into the series (like 100+ eps) I do not really understand the interpretation that he doesn’t care about anyone and that friendship and love are things he is totally incapable of. He says that yes but if you pay enough attention to his dialogue it becomes pretty apparent that he displays this attitude for multiple reasons. One is that he does genuinely have a hard time expressing the emotions he feels and often has awkward/guarded ways of doing so. But also he says many times over the course of the series that he has a “reputation” to keep up and wants people to call him a jerk; he wants to look cool and rebellious all the time and he thinks a nasty apathetic attitude is what earns him that status (not claiming that’s a healthy mindset, mind you). He wants to have full control over the way people see him and he gets super frustrated and humiliated when he can’t. This is probably why he gets so upset when people talk about how unpopular he is, because he’s spent so much time honing his image to a T and is like why the fuck isn’t this working?! In other words even though sometimes he is just an actual pain in the neck a lot of his asshole antics are part of a carefully manufactured persona, and he will do anything down to labeling his own memories to prevent other people from seeing through his facade and discovering the parts of him that are vulnerable.

And God forbid anyone does figure out that he does care quite a bit for the people around him, or at least if he didn’t at first he does now. Early on in the series he was commonly referred to as “depressing” and while the meta reason is probably just the anime writers just didn’t know how to adapt the character yet (he started out a little differently in the manga), in canon I believe he was just even more inclined to push everybody away from him, and as he began to get used to working in a group he gradually opened up. He commentates on how “soft” he’s gotten since he came to Earth a couple times, and the fact that he’s surprisingly one of the most loyal to Keroro out of the whole team (in many episodes where everyone abandons Keroro for being dumb he leaves last) and goes out of his way to help when he thinks it’s warranted (he asks for money when things aren’t dire yeah but hey labor deserves compensation :V) shows that he is dedicated to his team. There’s even episodes where he doles out some kind of moral lesson to the squad in his own Kururu-y way, especially to Keroro and Tamama. Even the Hinatas he’ll pitch in to protect when he has to, and we all know he’ll pretty much drop everything if Saburo needs him.

Speaking of which. I think the unspoken reason why he’s best friends with Saburo (besides the surface-level stuff like they’re smart and nerdy and seen as enigmas by everybody else) is because Saburo is the only other person in the cast who understands Kururu’s particular struggle of putting on airs as a means of self-defense all the time. He basically has a carefully managed celebrity life (that he has to constantly work to hide in anime canon), a somewhat formal/reserved public life, and the more quirky enthusiastic side of himself he only shows when alone and to the few people he’s close to and god damn that just sounds like the most exhausting juggling act ever. He has an outlet to free himself through his art but he still has to live with nobody quite knowing what he goes through on a daily basis, which is probably why we see him off on his own for most of the series (until he gets to warm up to everybody better...wonder who that sounds like) and occasionally have his bouts of frustration and insecurity like in 229 where he says “fuck it I’m gonna fight the apocalypse alone because I need something to do,” 354(? I think that’s the number) where he talks about just dropping everything and starting over, and I think one of the Christmas eps where Giroro has to like beg him to go to the Hinatas’ party cuz he says he’s “busy” even though he’s just sitting around pretty much (UPDATE: it’s 294 the implication is probably that he has his show or something but cmon that’s only like an hour lol). I am going off on a tangent now but anyway the point is he and Kururu are the most complicated communicators of the cast and they share feelings only they understand which is why they can more or less read each other’s minds and know exactly what to do when the other is in trouble.

Back to Kururu. Keroro, from what I can tell, is the closest to him out of the Platoon; Keroro gets freaked out by Kururu’s pranks sometimes yeah but they have a lot of common interests as the fun-lovers of the group and Kururu’s also kinda been interested in Keroro enough time follow him around for almost his entire life up to this point so there’s that. He also gets along with the other people he‘s around; we know he and Aki get along from the beginning because of how dynamic their personalities are but later on he gets close to Fuyuki to the point where they just hang out for the heck of it sometimes, and even though Natsumi is very justified in generally disliking him (many of Kururu’s more Eugh moments tend to involve her) even she seems to rely on him often, and in the cursed puppy episode she knows all his favorite foods by heart so she must care in some fashion lol. Dororo and he aren’t evidently super close but I think they get each other on some level as the (in-universe) least popular of the platoon and Dororo at least respects his abilities, and has clearly come to figure out his subtleties based on 229. Giroro and Mois...things get complicated. Just putting on record that I’m not a fan of either ship between Kururu and them. I’ve said this before but I think Giroro and Kururu are in a turbulent sibling-adjacent relationship in that they have completely opposing attitudes but they have a begrudging sense of respect for each other and, ultimately, they’re teammates, so they’ll defend each other when someone they don’t know tries to mess with them. I really don’t think the flirty stuff on Kururu’s end goes beyond teasing and I got kinda sick of that running gag if I’m being honest. (You can probably tell which frog I ship Kururu with by now :P) Mois went from something of a rival to Kururu to his lab partner, which is probably why he goes easier on her than he used to and even strikes up something of a friendship because the only other person he knows that might be capable of handling his technology is an Earthling who’s still against the invasion despite his lax attitude so. She helps :V

Now the question is why Kururu acts like he does if his relationships really aren’t all that bad and I think there’s two components to this. I’ve made it clear by now I think he’s autistic but your mileage may vary there. I think personally his childhood did something to the way he processes things as well. In Secret of the Kero Ball, he’s got a bandage on his head which may imply he got hurt somewhere and then he almost drowned which canonically definitely did something to him lol, was mostly seen alone so who knows if he has a family he still talks to, and then he got drafted into the army and placed into a high-ranking position of great responsibility at a very young age; it’s kind of a no-brainer why he rebeled and got demoted eventually. I’ve got plenty of headcanons about what his early days in the Military did to him but that’s for another day because good God this post went on too long.

In short: Kururu is possibly the most complicated character in the show and the F in Flanderization stands for “Funimation.” That’s it I’m never writing another essay about pee-color frog again I will make real content again at some point I promise

[wickedsrest-rp-archive]

Invest-eye-gation || POTW Chatzy

TIMING: Current LOCATION: In a conference room at the WC Morgue SUMMARY: The WCPD and ME’s Office are hard at work trying to analyze as many eyes as possible, and learn more about what it all means.  

It felt wrong to move the trays of eyeballs out of the autopsy suite and into the conference room, but if they were going to get as many of these finished as possible, she needed all hands on deck, and it wasn’t feasible to cram everyone in there. Regan stayed in her corner of the conference room, trying to keep her distance from everyone while slowly and methodically pulling vitreous humor from each eye, and squirting it into the tubes laid out in front of her. At least no one was urging her to take a break and go on a coffee run after she failed to return from the last one. “Test tube rack is full. Can anyone grab me a new one?” She sighed, looking over at the remaining trays full of eyes. So many of them. “Any new locations to pin on the map?”

"Mmm-St Loo" Agatha wrinkled her nose and swallowed her bite, looking over the screen of her laptop with an apologetic smile. "Sorry, St Louis. Mark Everett, went missing in October 1988," the detective picked up her coffee mug and took a long sip. She didn't know for how long this all would last, but each time she crossed out a DNA profile, it seemed like her list of profiles to check had gotten longer again.

In another circumstance, maybe it could have been nice to finally see Regan after a few days. Considering Kaden still wasn't sure if that scream was for him or not. This however, was very much work. And he wanted nothing to do with sticking needles in eyes. So database duty it was. "We got Argentina listed yet? Looks like this person went missing off the coast. Reported in November 2004."

He didn't want to be here. Why was he here. Simon handed Regan the rack she asked for, deciding that it would've been easier for him to help deal with the samples than the database files. He remained quiet, content to listen to the conversation and do whatever it was that needed to be done or marked though part of him had a mind to just... mark a big circle around the entirety of the map.

Roland had spent most of the past week at the station or morgue, going through the database and connecting the eyeballs to as many missing persons cases as he could, trying to make any connection he would. The dates spanned so far back his head was spinning. How were these all turning up and why now? "Got Huntington Beach, California. Lisa Claymore. December 1995," he answered.

Cece had kept herself busy helping collect fluid from the eyes, but had briefly taken a break from the duty to study the map. It was just coincidence that people started naming off towns and locations while she was by the map anyways, so she began adding thumbtacks onto the board, “St. Louis. Argentina. Huntington beach. These eyes have been all over the place. Really seen some things.” She grinned at her own joke, too focused on the map to force others to laugh at her joke.

Simon did, in fact, quietly chuckle at the joke.

Regan gave Simon a nod as a thank you and got back to work. It was hard to completely tune out what everyone was saying -- none of this made sense, and she couldn't reconcile the dates with the eyes in front of her. "1995." She repeated. "Yet the eyes are intact. Not a blow fly egg to be seen on them." Decomposition would be far more comforting, in this case.

Touching eyeballs was not on the agenda for today, so Marley had stuck herself on file duty. She'd been doing work similar to this, anyway, so she was used to combing through files for any sort of connection. Each time a new name was called out, she pinned it up on the board, then wrote the name and area on the list. She stuck a new tack in St. Louis, Argentina, and Huntington Beach. "Can't imagine the things they've seen," she chimed in, reaching over for her pen to write some more names down.

Kaden shook his head at Cece's joke. And of course Stryder chimed in. "And they came to White Crest of all places for final observation." He downed some more of his coffee, it was the only thing keeping him upright staring at all the numbers and charts and shit. "Shit. This case is a John Doe from 1973." He double checked the results. "Uh, can someone check I put this in right? That can't be right."

"What I wonder is, how are these things still in good shape after so many years?" There must have been a logical explanation to it, and she expected Regan to answer this question, or Cece, whose joke brought the usual ugly laugh from Agatha. "Cece !" She might have sounded like she was shocked but her laughter told another story. "Mmmmh, this one's from Bogota. He was reported missing in January 1991." Hearing Kaden's question, Agatha stood up from her seat to have a look. "Let me see." She adjusted her glasses back up her nose and looked over his shoulder, squinting at the screen. "What's the matter?"

Roland wasn't quite amused by the jokes, but didn't want to ruin morale during such a crazy time. Everyone was a little worn thin right now. Better to not aggravate anyone though the mention of 1973 got his attention. "1973? That can't be right. Let me take a look." That was nearly 50 years ago. How could they be turning up in good shape now and here of all times? He looked over Kaden's screen and confirmed everything was input correctly. "No, you got that right. That's... How is it possible for them to be turning up so many years later?"

"Lucky them," Marley said, giving Kaden a side eye as she finished writing down her new names. Dates were less important to her, but still noteworthy. "Seriously?" she asked, perking up at the new discovery. She stuck a pin in Bogota as Sarge and Agatha made their way over. She wished Jane were here, she needed someone else here to know that the explanation wasn't going to be found in this lab. Someone to exchange "that glance" with. And she needed her coffee.

There was no doubt in Kaden's mind all this shit was supernatural. Clearly. He kept hoping there'd be some sort of pattern they could see here but this was fucking weird. Even by White Crest standards. "So you're telling me a fully intact eyeball from October 19 fucking 73 was just put into evidence? Putain de merde." He sighed and looked over the file again. "There's no way these are preserved or something, right?" He looked over at Regan and then at Cece, hoping for some answers.

"These aren't typical post-mortem eyes." Regan said, studying one closely. "They're perfect. No decomp at all, even from the ones that have been outside for days. I don't -- there has to be something preserving them. Perhaps they were kept in a freezer for years, until recently. But more likely, this is the work of some compound. I intend to dig into it further."

Jane stumbled into the room with a neat stack of files under her arm and her coffee and sunglasses on her face. She had a pounding headache, her mouth felt like sandpaper, and pain and exhaustion crept into ever step she took. She was technically on leave, so she didn't even know why she was here - there was no plausible explanation anyone was going to believe anyway. Maybe it was to drive the guilt of buying drugs away, but she hadn't been this hungover since college and she knew she looked like shit. When had she gotten so old? Jane mumbled an unintelligible greeting, pointedly looking anywhere but Regan, before going to go sit and start picking through files with Marley.

The room engulfed Regan as Wu stumbled in, adorned in mismatching clothes and dropping files with each step. Wasn't she taking time off? The only reason Regan was here, and not stuffed into her office doing this work alone, was that she thought Wu would be absent. The eyeball in Regan's hands fell back onto the tray and she sank back into her seat, willing it to swallow her whole. She looked over at Simon. Then Kaden. Then Wu. Back down to the eyeballs. At least she could make eye contact with them.

Simon caught the look Regan gave him and he quirked an eyebrow in turn, his own eyes darting from the doctor to Jane; something changed when the latter stepped into the room. And she was kind enough not to bring any coffee for anyone else. His shoulders drooped... someone should've told him so he could've been anywhere else but still helping.

"Yikes," Marley mumbled as Jane stumbled in-- still looking relatively alive. She noted her aversion of Regan, glancing anywhere but her, taking the files she handed over and muttering, "so did you kill the tequila or did it kill you?" quietly, hoping only Jane would hear. She glanced back at the others, then to her board, before writing down the okayed 1973 date next to a John Doe. "Seems almost...impossible, right?" braced for the onslaughts of it's not impossible if it happened and etc. But she'd already turned away from them, filing through more papers. There had to be a connection. And she would find it.

"For real?" Hands on her hips, Agatha looked at Jane from where she stood. Late, without coffee for anyone but herself, and looking like she was in no shape to help. Perfect. She tried not to roll her eyes and glanced at the sergeant instead, expecting him to say something.

Cece abandoned her post immediately, flocking to Jane. “Word of advice? Steer clear of the eye stuff. Not as glamorous as it looks. Take the casework.”

Kaden didn't expect to see Wu show up at all. Hell, he wasn't sure he was going to show up but he sure as shit needed something to do instead of fucking panic. "Thanks for completing that coffee run. Oh wait." He caught the look Regan gave him and considered going over. No. Seemed bad to bring up any personal shit. Not with Sarge right behind him. Putain. His eyes narrowed at Stryder's comment. "Yeah. It's a little fucking weird. Like just about everything here. You can double check the fucking file if you want, though. You know. If you don't believe me," he said, crossing his arms across his chest.

Roland was surprised to see Jane walking in the room, looking like she'd been to hell and back. She was supposed to be on leave due to some emergency and she didn't look like she was in any shape to be working. He cocked a brow and asked, "What are you doing here, Wu? Aren't you supposed to be on leave?"

Regan tried to just keep her head down. Keep extracting some of that beautifully cloudy fluid from impossibly perfect post-mortem eyes. But every time she heard Wu's name, the panic in her chest tightened and her lungs started to burn. "What Bishop said!" Regan yelped, her voice sharp and screechy, just for a moment. At least the glass in the morgue was more durable now. Or... most of it, she realized with a pang of horror, as a few of the vials in front of her cracked. Regan quickly brushed them aside like it hadn't happened. No one would notice, right? "Don't help with the eyes, Wu. Do... something else. Something over there." She pointed to the opposite side of the room.

"I'm, uh..." Simon cast another quick glance at Regan, then did a head count of everyone else in the room sans Jane before flinching and covering his ears again at Regan's noise. "I'm... going to get some coffee." He finished the rest of his sentence quietly, going over and retrieving yet another set of tubes for Regan and maneuvering around everything and everyone to leave the room. "I'll be back."

Jane shot Marley a look, snorting quietly as she shook her head. What exactly had she done last night? Jane didn't remember. There was a bar, then nothing until she woke up early the next morning in someone else's apartment, where she stumbled home to feed her pet step stool French Fry before she remembered step stools didn't eat, and ended up here at work instead. About to answer Cece, Sarge cut in and she gave a half shrug. "Yes. But I'm here figuring you'd need help combing through paperwork." Regan pipped up, quite literally, and she flinched. Jane turned her head, pulling her sunglasses down over her nose to peer at her. "As much as looking at the actual eyeballs sounds riveting, Kavanagh, I'll stay here and work on the case files. Just try to keep it down. Please."

Agatha finally rolled her eyes and headed back to her laptop. Another day of unprofessionalism going unpunished, she supposed. "Maybe we could back to those eyes, perhaps?" She had pulled her hair up into a bun and stuck a pencil in to keep it up. "Carol Griffin, Canberra, went missing in November 1979," she did not look up from her screen this time, instead picking up her notepad to go to the next name. "Germaine Lacroix, Toulouse, reported missing in December 1997."

Winston was aware that they were late. But they'd been held up working through some glitches in the database that they'd been building for Roland. They had lost track of time and then several of the other interns had started pestering them with questions. Pushing their glasses up the bridge of their nose, Winston looked up at everyone and smiled tiredly. "Sorry, I know I'm really late but I got held up with other stuff. What did I miss?"

Okay, something was clearly going on between Kavanagh and Jane, but Marley wasn't sure what. It couldn't just be because Kavanagh was on Jane's ass about the werewolf thing. Marley knew Jane's normal annoyed behavior, and this went beyond that. She'd have to bother her later, though, because as she pinned up a few more locations from the file, she noticed a pattern, finally. "Hey, Sarge," she waved, "check this out." Pointed to the map, filled with plenty of tacks now, and all of them around large bodies of water. "It looks like almost every case is around a lake or near the ocean. Or some sort of water. That's gotta be something. We should check in to activity around the lakes at the times some of these people went missing. I bet we'll find something interesting." Like, cultists activity, perhaps?

Dahlia didn't really have a good excuse for being late. It had taken her longer then expected to get her notes together. She had to come prepared. It was her job role it was just as important to keep the supernatural truth from those she worked with you remained in the dark. She slipped in, and just in time it seemed. "Speaking as someone who understands people it makes sense that whoever did this had a preferred hunting ground."

Kaden winced at the slight screech from Regan and braced himself for any breaking glass. Nothing, just a few vials. Still, he shot a look at Wu. Keep it down? Fucking really? Sure she might be dying soon but she'd come fucking back. Unlike him. Well, so long as he didn't have to kill her, that was up in the air for the moment. He went back to the database and plugged away at another result. "Ethan Drummond. Portland, Oregon, reported October 2012. So far your shit checks out, Stryder."

The second Dahlia entered the room, it felt like bugs were biting into Regan's flesh. She jolted uncomfortably, glad that Simon had momentarily left and couldn't press her on it. Between Wu and Dahlia and the risk of breaking more glassware when they really needed every last piece they could get, Regan wasn't sure this was the best idea. But Stryder's comment gave her pause. "I think you're right. I mean, based on the map, I know you are." She considered. "Do you think the cultists wanted their eyes?"

Roland didn't want to push Jane any further in front of everyone else. Her arriving out of sorts could be addressed later. He understood the need to work through a crisis, but perhaps a group setting wasn't the best idea. He ignored it and plugged away at the database, when Stryder called him over. He looked over the map and every pin was near some body of water. "Strange," he mused, "That does seem like it could be cultist, taking eyes near a body of water. Can't say I've ever heard of anything like it though." There had to be some other connection in the database. Were these happening around a certain time? What were the ages of the individuals? These were connections that needed to be made. "Good eye," he told Marley, grimacing as he realized his wording may not have been entirely appropriate.

"It's within reason for that to be assumed," Marley said, rubbing her chin as she examined the map, blocking out the useless chatter. "We've seen other radical behaviors from cults, though collecting human body parts has never really been one. Cults usually have more of a set of goals and rules, though it's not unheard of a cult leader to convince their subjects to do things they'd never consider themselves." She stuck another pin in when Keen piped up, but did not take her eyes from the map. "What's the database looking like, Keen?" she asked, finally turning away.

"It could be a cult," Agatha stood up from her chair once again, this time heading to where Marley stood. "You said that it's connected to the water," she held a finger up, checking the dates on Marley's pins. It couldn't be a coincidence. All these people, they had been reported missing either in October, November, December or January. No one in the spring or summer. "Okay, so. The years don't check out, but all these people disappeared somewhere between October and January. We all know how sometimes things are reported way too late," she trailed off. "Maybe we could narrow it down a bit. I think it's safe to assume, considering how little of them were reported in January, that they all disappeared in the last third of the year."

"Not that unlikely though, not if the eyes were part of a ritual, or something to show alligiance to the leader," Dahlia chimed in. A cult would be a good cover regardless of whether it was the truth or not. "I've studied and written about them before, I can find my old notes." She began pulling out her laptop, letting then carry on talking about all things detective.

Kaden continued to work away at the database while the detectives chatted. His brow furrowed when the results came up. "This one's recent." It was right around when he came to White Crest. "Last seen date was October 2, 2019. Shit." He felt a pit drop in his stomach. "Officer Kim McPhee. Last seen headed towards the Drop Off. On an animal control assignment." Kaden stared at the file. This was who he replaced. She was-- He could be next. Just as quickly. He was going to be sick. It was easier to have distance with the other names that came up. The ones from years ago. Suddenly it felt very real.

Simon slipped in almost as easily as he left in the first place, carrying two large bags rather easily all things considered and muttered an apology, presumably for the noise he made temporarily as he pulled out several drink carriers of coffee and managed to find places for each of them on the tables for people to reach - and he made sure he got enough for everyone to have at least one. He folded up the bags neatly, apologising again and he awkwardly made his way back over near Regan's desk, crossing is arms as he leaned against the wall and picked up where he left off to observe the rest of the team's findings - looked like they got a lead.

Marley shot a look at Dahlia. "I'm well aware of what cult leaders can influence their subjects to do. I did study human behavior, after all," she said, "lengthily." She turned to focus back on the dates with Agatha. "That's good. Maybe narrow it down somehow? Can we cross check reports to see how long people were missing before they were reported?"

Eventually, Cece found her way back to her original job. Collecting samples from the eyes. For whatever reason, Regan seemed to have beef with Jane. Which was probably the most interesting development at this shindig. Collecting the fluids felt like a waste of time anyways. At this point, it was pretty obvious that this was supernatural. Cece could run every test available on every single eye they had collected and they still probably wouldn’t find anything. It seemed obvious which people here still didn’t want to believe in the supernatural and which had resigned themselves to that fact already. But at least the cult talk was some sort of middle ground for the group. “It’s a lot of eyes. A cult could explain how so many eyes got here. Not like cults need any logical reason for the crazy shit they do.”

Actually, a cult wasn't that outlandish by any means. "People could have be being sacrificed between October and January to... whatever it is they believe. That makes sense. How all their eyes ended up here, however..." Jane mused, considering a moment. Her gaze snapped to Kaden, though, brows knitting together when he mentioned the animal control officer that went missing last October. Considering recent screaming circumstances, it probably wasn't a good thing to think about. Her head was pounding, and she just shook her head. "I'll start cross referencing reported dates to when the victims were last seen," Jane said, leaning forward to pull a stack of files towards her.

"I can run all of these reports through various pattern recognition algorithms and see if there is any combination of dates, locations, demographics, age, gender, socio-economic background, we can really narrow everything down if you can give me the specific information on it." As Winston spoke they tapped away at their laptop. "The more information that we can get on the database the easier it will be to develop some level of correlational analysis."

The last animal control officer went missing. That information chilled her marrow, and Regan looked over at Kaden. It was rare that he looked so shaken, and she wanted to help, but that seemed like a poor idea given everyone else in the room with them right now, and the professional setting. Still... "Kaden." Regan said, taking a very short break from the tray of eyes in front of her. "We're going to prevent this from happening to others." They had to, right? What else were they good for if they couldn't protect? "There are far too many eyes here for one individual to be responsible, and that's ignoring the -- well --" the motioned over toward the map, stuffed full of pins. "A cult makes sense. Bishop, I'd like the two of us to proceed with testing the eyes for any uncommon drug presence. I know we ran the standard tox panels, but I'd like some ELISAs run for preservatives. Substances not usually found in decedents."

Roland gave Winston an approving look as he walked back over to his own laptop. A cult or some other sort of group made the most sense with the sheer volume of eyes they had to go through. Either way, there was a pattern there with the time of year that he wasn't surprised Keen had picked up on. "Good catch, Keen. Here are some to start inputting, Winston." He pushed his own stack of finished files with his updated notes over to them.

Agatha looked from the pinboard to Jane, arms crossed over her chest. Her stance relaxed as the detective agreed with her, although, just like her, she reacted to Kaden's words. She had known Kim, and her going missing had shaken up the station quite a lot back then. Agatha went back to her seat and shot Winston a small smile as she did. Considering what had just been said, she didn't feel too cheerful. "You can add those to the Sergeant's," she told them, sliding her stack across the table, with a chocolate donut on top. "I'll help you with that, Jane," she too went to grab a stack of files and before starting to get to worked, she mouthed at her a "Are you ok?" She might not have been too happy with her earlier, she could tell something was off.

Jane started flipping through files and reports, nodding at Agatha as she joined her. She saw her attempt to checking, and Jane almost laughed outright - not because Keen had said something funny by any means, but because it was just funny that Jane had even bothered to show up. She made a note on her computer, before glancing back at Agatha. "Well, I'm still alive, so." Jane replied in a low voice, chuckling humorlessly to herself as started combing over another file.

Kaden thought about getting up and leaving. To do... what, exactly? Fuck. The last thing he wanted to do was collect the fluids from the eyeballs, wondering what sort of connections he may or may not have to any of those while looking at them. But he couldn't take the result off of his screen just yet. He looked up at Regan and all he could manage was a nod. "Yeah. Well. That's the plan, at least." No single police unit or hell, any police unit was going to be able to figure out shit about whatever supernatural crap was going on here. Let alone prevent it. So hardly a comforting thought. "The cultists on the beach and the lake, they all seem to have their eyes sewn shut. You think these belong to any of them maybe? Like they ran away from home, gouged out their own eyes or something?" It sure sounded crazy but with the supernatural involved, likely not the craziest way to lose an eyeball.

Winston set to work with the new information that Roland had provided them with. They were apprehensive about the WCPD becoming heavily embroiled with anything related to the cult. After all they had already demonstrated that they were willing and capable to hurt others if it suited them. Winston just hoped that whatever they had done with all of these people wasn't too heavily supernatural. After all, there were plenty of officers that weren't going to be able to play nicely with that. "Thanks Agatha," Winston replied taking the doughnut appreciatively and typing as quick as they could, "there have been reports that the cult is operating out of the lake, but do we know if there is any leads as to where they have their headquarters set up?"

The janitor part of Simon was acting up, despite everything else that was going on around him with their findings of cults and eyes and dates and stuff - so he did what he would've done anyway and picked up some MORE glass that Regan broke. As he moved over to collect the broken vial on her desk, noting her break to address Kaden and reached over the trey of eyes, one of them vibrated before lifting and clinging to his hand as if the two were magnetized. Well, this was new. Doing his best to not freak out about it, he subtly placed his fingers around the eye and attempted to pull it off but as he applied pressure, something flashed before his eyes. A big flash, a sign - the White Crest sign, sitting there before exploding in a dazzle of... magic? He had only seen magic utilized a few times before this point but never like this. The sign splintered, crackling like electricity and he flinched away from it as a shard of wood propelled itself towards him, holding his hands up to shield his face from it like it was actually happening and backing into the wall roughly.

Regan wanted to tell Simon to forget about the broken glass, she'd get it later, but before she could say anything, one of the eyeballs seemed to propel itself toward Simon's hand. It slithered around before settling itself into his flesh, and Regan jumped up from her seat, a screech forming in her lungs and emptying from her throat in a split second. The rest of the tubes in front of her shattered but, more importantly, Simon was writhing around, trying to yank the eye from his hand, but it was like it was glued on there, and for a moment, his eyes flipped in and out of focus like he was elsewhere. Backed himself into the wall covered in sweat. Regan bounded toward him, less concerned about helping him up than she was about carefully extricating the eye from his hand in one piece. She gave it a tug, and it popped off, though part of her thought it might not have been anything she had done. Regan gave it a close inspection before plopping it back onto the tray. Blinked at the eye, the broken glass, and Simon. Then looked around the room. This was fine. None of that just happened. More hallucinations. "Um, did you trip? Over something?"

Cece nodded at Regan. Just as expected. She would run the tests. Most likely, nothing would come back from it, but why the hell not? Better to just run the tests like the Doc instructed. She was working on another eye when she noticed the eye attach itself to Simon. Cece’s head tilted curiously, watching the scene as it seemed be absorbed into Simon’s skin. She stood back, examining it silently until Simon started moving around. What the hell was that? She moved closer to him, mumbling under her breath so maybe only he and Regan, who seemed to have noticed the moment too, could hear. “You alright dude? What… just happened?”

As Winston watched Simon's eye pulled from his hand, even though it wasn't actually his eye, Winston couldn't help but feel a shiver run down their spine. The eye in their own hand itched and Winston looked from Cece to Regan to Simon and then down to their own hand. Pulling the sleeve of their hoodie over their hand. "Woah, what happened?" they said as they tried to act like they couldn't put it all together, "There's broken glass we should probably try and clean that up and did something happen with that ... eye?"

Simon hadn't quite recovered from what he saw when suddenly Regan screamed again and he whimpered this time, breathing quickly as his other hand covered the ear it could reach. Though he was far from surprised and not paying all that much attention, Regan seemed more focused on the eye than him. Once it was off, he pulled the hand that the eye stuck to close to his body, shaking his head erratically as if trying to get rid of the scream that made his ears ring. "I-I don't know," He murmured to Cece, managing to hear her question though the noise. "There was-- the uh... White Crest sign and it- it blew up." He stuttered. "I don't-- it was there and then-then it... wasn't."

Everything happened before Marley could get a grip on anything. Her hands immediately went up to her ears as the scream shattered the glass vials in front of Regan. Whatever had happened to the weird janitor dude, which, why was he here, anyway? Wasn't this police work? Not that Marley cared, really. Everyone was gathering around him now, but something struck a chord in Marley's brain, her mind churning. A banshee had screamed for Jane. Jane was mad at Regan. Regan had just screamed at an ungodly decibel. The only conclusion-- Regan was the banshee that had screamed for Jane. Fuck how had she not noticed? She turned back to look at Jane, one brow raised. "Twice in one week," she muttered to her, "hopefully you don't lose your hearing before you die..." and pinned another tack on the board in white crest. For Kim McPhee.

"... Dude, what the hell," Agatha her fingers rubbing her ear, looked at Regan from over her glasses with an eyebrow raised. What was going on over there? Did ... Simon pick up an eye? Was he stealing an eye? Whatever had happened, it seemed like the medical examiner was handling it, but clearly, screeching like this was not necessary. "You should go get some fresh air, Doctor," she observed, going back to her computer, trying to ignore the ringing in her ears. "So... I already have 4 people who stopped being seen in October," looking up from her notepad, she glanced over at Jane. "What do you have?"

Kaden almost missed the fact that Simon was having some kind of issue because all he heard was another fucking scream and his hands shot to his ears while he let out a few choice curse words in couple languages. What a great fucking time to have sensitive hearing. It was nowhere near as bad as Brimm Stonne Court but putain. He looked back to see what the fuck had happened, rubbing his ears a bit as if it could dull the ringing. "The fuck was that?" He considered getting a dig in but it seemed like a bad fucking idea with Regan and Hills in the room. Not worth it. His eyes narrowed as he described the sign. "You saw something?" But he was a werewolf. Those didn't get visions. Couldn't be for that. He crossed the room to Cece. "Might want to check that one for more than just fluids," he whispered to her, hoping she caught the potential connection, too. The potential magical one. "Seems like it might have belonged to someone unusual."

Fresh air. Right. That hadn't been a hallucination, had it? Regan didn't make eye contact with anyone as she peeled out of the room. Wait. They were in the morgue. Her morgue. She backed up. "Bishop. You're in charge." She darted out of the conference room again and ran down the hall for her office to catch her breath, to will the panic to subside and her lungs to stop feeling so tight. And, if it were even possible, to stop the image of trays full of eyeballs from burning into her retinas.

Jane let out a loud curse as Regan screamed again, hands clamping over her ears. "What did I just say?!" She hissed. At least it was less catastrophic than the last time. Her ears ringing again for just a moment, she shook her head, the pounding in her head getting worse as people flocked around Simon. Something had happening, but she had missed it while her nose was in her files. Regan and Cece and everyone else that wasn't her was handling it. Good. She glanced to Agatha, brows knitting together. "Mine stopped being seen in October too," Jane replied. She pinched the bridge of her nose. Goddamn it. Whatever this was, supernatural or not, screaming banshees or not. "This," she mumbled to herself, "Is the bad place."

[argentdandelion]

How to Add Angst to the Pacifist Route

Warning: Mentions some very dark angst indeed.

While comparing and contrasting music videos for Undertale Genocide and Pacifist Routes, the author noticed something: the Genocide Route music videos are often better. This could be because the Pacifist Route videos, unlike the Genocide Route ones, are often devoid of emotional weight, complexity, and stakes, ending up less tonally nuanced than the game itself.

One should pay a little more attention to canon details (Frisk actually dies! A lot!) or make reasonable extrapolations to how it would feel in-universe.

(While this article was originally designed for music videos, it is also useful for fanfictions and fan comics.)

1. Frisk is basically an unstoppable, time-warping deity on a rampage of mercy.

Flowey: Why are you being so nice to me? Art by Golzy Blade Dee/Golzy

Frisk never stays dead for long because of their (possibly single-minded) determination to survive and achieve their goals. Frisk can take a direct hit from a god's super-powerful blast, and hold on by a fraction of a point of health. Even if said god outright shatters Frisk's soul, Frisk simply refuses to die. Frisk’s determination apparently can warp fate itself and break all barriers, including, well, the barrier. In essence, Frisk is an unstoppable, unkillable abomination. This would all be terrifying if Frisk weren’t a loving goody two-shoes pacifist....as it is in the Genocide Route. However, even a goody two-shoes Frisk who has never killed anyone, ever, can be frightening. Undyne could easily feel scared when a human child with no known combat experience effortlessly blocks all her attacks.

Then there’s Frisk’s rampage of mercy. Frisk can forgive and befriend anyone, even people who tried to kill them, even those who tried to kill them repeatedly. Why? What does Frisk know that others don’t? Is Frisk on some other level of morality entirely?

It’s not that far-fetched to feel suspicious of people who are too good: after all, some people find the utterly wholesome and compassionate Mr. Rogers unnerving. What would it feel to face off against Frisk, a person one was trying to kill all of ten seconds ago, only to be spared over and over? Flowey himself seems terrified by Frisk’s incomprehensible mercy, as it’s so against the worldview he’s built and his own lack of compassion. He cries, and says: “Why are you being so nice to me?”

One way to make this even more terrifying is to keep Frisk’s face completely neutral at all times, giving a sense of detachment between them and others. (see sample image, where their face is obscured) It makes one wonder: is Frisk truly good, or is it all an act they’re compelled to perform?

2. Frisk endures a lot of pain (and death) when, sometimes, it would be so much easier to kill their foes.

Even when played by an exceptionally skilled player, Frisk will die many times. (due to the inevitable deaths in the Omega Flowey battle) An easy way to add angst to the Pacifist Route is to linger on this gruesome fact. Just because Frisk can come back as many times as they want doesn’t mean it’s easy and painless. How does it feel to die? To hear one’s very SOUL snap in half?

The attacks, too, are surely painful. One could add some realism through attacks having physical effects. For example, when fighting Toriel, Frisk’s clothing and eyebrows could get singed, and they could sweat from either nervousness or the room gradually heating up from all the fire. Or, for more intensity, Frisk’s clothes could catch fire and they’d have to put it out, or Frisk could suffer minor burns just from getting too close to fireballs. The most angsty option of all, for really dark works, is for Frisk to know what it’s like to burn to death, with all its gruesome details.

This angst isn’t completely out of the blue: Flowey expects Frisk to feel terror and agony as he traps them and kills them over and over. One could also make Frisk feel shocked or baffled when returning to life, with phantom pains and injuries even through their HP is fine. Perhaps rewinding time would even make them feel disoriented, or nauseous, or even fill them with existential wrongness.

All throughout this, Frisk would have to wonder: is it worth it to die over and over? Is it worth reviving Undyne, someone so openly out for their blood who has, in fact, killed them multiple times? Wouldn’t it be easier, and so much less painful, to kill rather be killed? Perhaps Frisk can make an exception, just this once, for a particularly aggressive or unforgivable monster. How much do they have to turn the other cheek for people who want them dead?

3. Frisk feels a crushing sense of responsibility to do the right thing for everyone, to give everyone’s story a happy ending.

YES       ❤ NO

As anyone vaguely familiar with Spider-Man would know, with great power comes great responsibility. To do the Pacifist Route, Frisk would have to care about the monsters and feel dissatisfied with their fate, to the point of trapping themselves underground and risking getting hurt (and dying) repeatedly. For maximum angst, one can make it one of the worst Neutral endings, all the way to the near-Genocide Queen Alphys ending.

What if, out of a sense of responsibility for monsters’ happiness and security, Frisk resets/reloads repeatedly? What if “good” isn’t good enough?

Some players, hoping to save Asriel, play the game many times. In some works, Frisk does the same, even breaking the rules of the universe for it. For the sake of angst, one could easily make Frisk motivated by guilt: they can’t stand to leave Asriel behind or let him turn back into a soulless flower. That just brings up another guilty angle: why is Frisk so kind? Why did Frisk climb a mountain it’s said no one ever returns from?

In a Post-Pacifist work, Frisk might become a control freak who requires perfect relations between humans and monsters. After a mild diplomatic gaffe (e.g., a monster spilling punch on a human diplomat), Frisk might reload and relive several hours’ worth of a diplomatic event just to prevent that from happening. One could easily make Frisk a secretly lonely, anxiety-prone hero because of the immense responsibility. Perhaps, after seeing the same predictable responses, Frisk would become like Flowey, and reduce everyone to roles to play. Yet, Frisk would still do good, though more by reflex than actual compassion.

4. Frisk is alone in their power and knowledge.

Frisk is the only one who can rewind time. That’s a lot of power and responsibility for anyone, and certainly for a child who didn’t even choose to have that ability.

With no possible mentors (if they don’t ask Flowey), how will they learn how and when to use their power effectively? In-game, the player goes back to a previous point either by closing the game and opening it up again or when Frisk’s HP goes to zero. However, as there’s not really an in-game explanation for closing and re-opening the game window, Frisk may only know how to reload by dying.

This could be played for morbid humor, such as Frisk wondering what a Tide Pod tastes like, or massive angst. For maximum angst (risking over-the-top grimdark status, which I don't recommend), Frisk feeling the need to painfully reload every time something goes even slightly wrong could, over time, reduce their will to live—the very determination that enables that power. Frisk's very sense of self-preservation might erode: for example, they might idly wonder how many lethal food allergies and how to test them all. If one wants to get really, really dark, someone could catch Frisk trying to reload in some horrible way, and Frisk would have to explain themselves.

The only one who can understand what it’s like to control the timeline, to die over and over, and potentially to feel an existence estranged from others is Flowey. Depending on how much Frisk knows about Flowey and Frisk’s understanding of morality, Frisk may simply consider Flowey ‘evil’. If Flowey has this power and is evil, or got this power and then became evil, what if Frisk feels doomed to become evil someday, too?

For extra angst, Frisk may come to be more like Flowey in worldview or behavior and not even know, because they’ve never done a Genocide Route/never so far into the route. More sympathetically, Flowey became a lonely wreck partly because he spent so much time exhausting the possibilities of the Underground. At first, Frisk might reload only when something bad happens. But what if Frisk gets curious about alternate paths, and what would happen if they said something else instead? That would be a step towards Flowey.

[merculuros]

Chrisker Series

When You Fall For Your Enemy

Beginning of An Unforeseen Love (Part 1)

Summary: Chris finds Wesker alive after their fight in Africa. Just when he thinks everything will get back on track now that he has arrested Wesker, he learns something very surprising and everything turns upside down. On top of that, he finds himself in a relationship with the last person he can consider as a boyfriend.

Pairing: Chris Redfield x Albert Wesker

Word count: 1,470

Tags: Crack, Humor, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Alternate Universe: Canon Divergence, Post Re5, amnesiac!Wesker, Slow Burn.

Author’s Note: You can find this series on AO3. I was going to add the link but if I do that, the post will not show up in the tags, so here we go. 

Chris squeezed his eyes shut for a brief second pinching his nose bridge. The headache he had got all day was making his life miserable and he was amazed he didn’t faint out of exhaustion at some point today. All that happened this past week was taking its toll on him. Looking at the man sitting beside him out of corner of his eyes, he felt his head throb with pain again. His hands tightened around the steering wheel, casting his eyes away from the said man he tried to focus on the road. All he needed right now was a good night’s sleep and a painkiller. But he kept replaying the recent events in his mind.

About a week ago, just after his confrontation with Wesker in Africa, he found the man somewhere near that volcanic area; he was passed out, injured but still alive. Chris wasn't exactly surprised to find out that two RPGs and a volcano hadn’t killed him. In fact he was starting to believe there wasn't a way to kill the other. However, what he didn’t expect, was that the man looked young, maybe even younger than his ex-captain from S.T.A.R.S days and Chris felt like he had gone back in time. After their return to America with the blonde, he was determined to seek justice for everything he had done. Even though killing him was out of the question, there had to be other ways to punish him like locking him away somewhere, cutting all his connections from outside world. But of course, his plans never worked the way he wanted. Because of his severe injuries Wesker stayed unconscious for days. When he regained his consciousness, Chris had the most shocking news of his life. The blonde had amnesia and remembered nothing, not even his name. He suspected his regenerative skills didn't work properly at the time, for they couldn't heal the damage done to his brain.

This unexpected situation led BSAA to take a different and risky approach regarding the bio-terrorist. And Chris was definitely not happy with what they came up with. They thought he could be an excellent asset for fighting bio-terrorism and gave him a totally different story - that he was a BSAA agent, had an accident on a mission and lost his memory -. Chris knew taking advantage of someone like this was morally wrong even if this said person was Wesker, but the threat he posed to this world was big, so he couldn't object to it. The worst part of the plan was the blonde needed to be supervised at all times, meaning he was to live with one of the BSAA agents to record the progress he would make and to take necessary precautions in case his memory returned. No matter how unwilling Chris was, he volunteered to be that lucky person, mostly because Wesker was still dangerous and he didn’t want to endanger his comrades’ lives. Also, who knew his own arch-nemesis better than him? Ongoing rivalry between them made it easier for him to put with the blonde’s bullshit over the years. He was used to the other’s arrogant and assholish behaviour so he could say living with him wouldn’t bother him much, at least he hoped so. Though he had to admit Wesker looked nothing like his usual self; he looked less ….. evil and menacing in this state. Chris never imagined he would feel sympathy for him but he was, because the other was probably feeling disoriented and lost. If Chris were in his shoes, he would certainly freak out. But then again Wesker was always calm and collected even in the most dangerous situations. That was one of his rare good traits he could appreciate about the blonde.

Coming back to reality, Chris shifted in his seat uncomfortably. This awkward and disturbing silence was getting to him and he wanted some sort of distraction to dissolve the tension in the car. His eyes met with Jill’s through the rear-view mirror who was as uneasy as him. She offered to come with them to take some documents she had left at his home before, but Chris knew she was here mostly for mental support but her presence didn’t really help right now.

“How is this possible?” Wesker questioned, his eyes fixated on the wing mirror, obviously shocked at his newfound discovery that he had red eyes. Before Wesker was discharged from BSAA hospital today, doctors had informed Chris about what was going with the blonde and how severe his condition was. Though he presumed that Wesker wouldn’t just forget everything about himself. Apparently he did. Based on this, perhaps he wasn’t aware of his superhuman abilities either, yet.

“Yeah about that …. It is really a long story, so I will explain everything later. You should just rest now.” Chris murmured, not wanting to deal with this right now.

“I am tired of everyone brushing over my questions. I want some answers.” Wesker snapped “also how long till we arrive at my place? I am starting to feel a little bit nauseous now.” He added.

“Actually .. we are going to my place.” Chris answered.

“Why?”

“Because you … uh … live with me.” Chris added nervously. He cursed himself for not thinking this through.

Wesker raised one blond eyebrow curiously.

“And the reason for that is …?” he dragged out the last word, he was getting frustrated by all this. Unfortunately Chris’s mind was occupied with a lot of things lately so he didn’t have time to make up a story that would cover up their plan, which was a huge mistake on his part. He should have guessed that the man would question this whole situation. He looked at Jill again with a what should I say kind of expression on his face, though she looked as lost as him. He speculated about the excuses he could make, yet nothing sounded convincing even to his ears. Then Jill jumped in to save the day.

“You know, you guys are together. Actually, you got … uhm … engaged last month, that’s why you live together” her voice turning into a whisper near end, realizing how ridiculous her spontaneous lie sounded but it was too late to turn back. Her reply took both men by surprise; Wesker let out a silent “oh” while Chris braked so hard that if they hadn’t had their seatbelts on, they would have flown out of the car. Behind them, angry drivers honked furiously cussing them for a possible car accident they could have caused. Feeling betrayed, Chris turned his head back to look at her with wide eyes. She pressed her lips into a thin line and sank into her seat as if she wanted to disappear.  

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” Wesker questioned with narrowed eyes.

Chris had no choice but to go with her lie “I … uhm ... I didn’t want to overwhelm you with this information right away and I strictly told Jill not to mention this but she couldn’t keep her mouth shut” answered scoldingly.

“Well … I guess I was going to find out this sooner or later, so you don’t need to be angry at her. Though I am still won-” Chris didn’t let him finish his sentence.

“I know. Can we not have this conversation right now?” retorted his voice raising and his body radiating anger. Wesker was taken aback by sudden change of attitude but made no further remark.

Chris gritted his teeth and tried to suppress his anger. Rest of the ride was quiet and Chris couldn’t care less now that he was in sour mood. As if it wasn’t bad enough that he had to babysit his arch-nemesis, now he would have to play house with him. When they finally arrived, Chris showed Wesker around the house and handed Jill the documents she came to take, then she left. Closing the door behind her, he was finally alone with the embodiment of trouble himself. Sighing, he headed to the bedroom to see what the blonde was up to and saw a sleeping Wesker curled up on his –from now on- their bed. Suddenly it dawned on him that he would sleep with his boyfriend in the same bed tonight.

Oh God. What did I get myself into?!

Chris rubbed his temples in effort to ease the pain, the headache from earlier coming back with full force again.

Grabbing a painkiller from the the bathroom, he slumped on the soft couch in the living room comfortably. Without water he swallowed the pill and leant his head back, closing his eyes tiredly.

He was so deep in lies that he was starting to regret his every decision. There was no turning back now, so he hoped things wouldn’t get any worse than this.

[misssophiachase]

Set It Up – A kinda but not really Klaroline Fusion (like all my different fusions)

Caroline Forbes and Klaus Mikaeslon are working as assistants to the most demanding, rival NBA bosses in New York. From Macy’s to Madison Square Garden to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas can they stop bickering long enough to come together to make their lives easier?

All I do is Win

151 W 34th Street, New York, NY 

"Before you say anything,” he offered, holding his hand up to silence her. “He actually tried to fire a mailman today.” 

He being Mason Lockwood, the Brooklyn Nets owner. He was also notorious for being an arrogant, demanding bastard and then some. 

“And?”

“Mailmen work for the U.S. government!"

“Oh boo hoo, I don’t care, Mikaelson,” she replied gruffly, equally not caring but also knowing it was true and his boss was an ass. 

“Says the girl whose boss could give Cruella De Ville a run for her money.” He wasn’t wrong. New York Knicks boss Katherine Pierce was fierce, feisty and a real bitch at the best and worst of times.

“Exactly why I’m here to claim my blender that you have your grubby paws all over. I called earlier and put it on hold,” Caroline demanded, exhausted from the trek to Macy’s Department Store noticing he was already clutching it possessively.   

She took a few seconds to admire that his thieving ass was sort of attractive in that fitted, grey suit even if he didn’t know his proper place.

Five days ago she didn’t even know him but Klaus Mikaelson had made both an immediate and lasting impression on her, and it wasn’t a good one. She had always welcomed competition but his good looks were kind of messing with her resolve. 

Bastard.

She had no intention of letting him win.

Ever.

“But your name isn’t on it,” he shot back, refusing to relinquish her property. 

“Now, that’s extremely mature,” she scowled. “If I don’t get this exact gift for the Warner wedding my boss is going to kill me.” 

Yes, to some it was just your run-of-the-mill gadget that mixed ingredients together. But this wasn’t just any blender. This was the newest, state of the art Vitamix Blender that retailed at a jaw dropping $1198.

It also happened to be the last one left in Manhattan, Caroline knew given just how many stores she’d called in vain. She just hoped the Warners were grateful, if she managed to steal it from his greedy clutches of course.

“My boss will too given it’s a gift for his only sister’s birthday,” he shot back. “If you think I’m going to give up this blender without a fight you’re sorely mistaken.” 

Okay, maybe she had forgotten in her haste to put it on hold, oops, but Klaus didn’t have to know that.

“Only because you got caught out breaking the rules because I already put this on hold,” she bluffed, refusing to let him win.

“Okay fine, what do you want?” 

“I thought I made myself pretty clear, Mikaelson,” she growled, gesturing towards the blender.  

“What else do you want besides this blender?” 

They both held each other’s gaze for a full thirty seconds before each finally responded their resolve unflinching. 

“Disney on Ice tickets. I hear that the Under the Sea Christmas Spectacular is a huge hit in your borough.”  Brooklyn was most definitely a bad word she could never utter.  

“Seriously? That’s really what you want?”

“Deathly,” she hit back, rolling her eyes as she did it. “Surely you would have some contacts, you know if you’re actually a good assistant.” 

“Because I’m sure Katherine Pierce would love to watch a singing crab and one memory-less fish,” he scoffed. 

“She may be the Ice Queen but she also has thirteen impossible and incessant nieces and nephews. And last time I checked all fish were memory-less.”

“Well, then you’ve never met my Marvin.” Caroline was trying to ignore just how adorable he looked defending his goldfish one dimple at a time.  “Even so those tickets will cost me more than this blender.”

“Okay, so how about I sweeten the deal with some boxing tickets?”

“Not sure the local boxing round robin is his speed, love, so that’s a definite no.”

“Well, I suppose it’s your loss,” she drawled. “Hand over my blender then, Mikaelson.”

“You’re going to have to make me,” he replied jokingly. 

“Real mature,” Caroline reiterated, surprising him and plucking it from his grasp. She couldn’t miss the way his hand felt brushing against hers as she did. “I hope I never have to see your smug ass again.” She stalked away, hips swaying in her wake.

“Until I have to explain the missing blender,” he called out in frustration by way of response. 

“Because I’m sure a missing blender is going to be your biggest problem given you turned down Pacquiao vs Broner ringside seats in Vegas.”  

She made a mental note in her head. Caroline Forbes 1 - Klaus Mikaelson 0. Suddenly her hellish life as an assistant wasn't so bad if he was suffering too.

4 Pennsylvania Plaza, New York, NY 

Klaus Mikaelson was the type to hold grudges. It started when he was six years-old and his younger brother Kol stole his favourite toy and it had only grown stronger and more spiteful in the years afterward. 

Caroline Forbes was going to pay. Mainly because his boss hadn’t let him forget how pathetic he was to lose the blender he wanted to ‘a girl’ as he emphasised in air quotes. Klaus was far from chauvinistic and his boss was obviously still living in the dark ages. 

Caroline wasn’t just ‘a girl’ she was a pain in his ass and Klaus planned to bring her down and it didn’t hurt that it was her home game either. 

Rivals the Knicks and Nets were squaring off at Madison Square Garden and he’d been plotting his revenge ever since their last meeting. Sure, she was kind of gorgeous with those blonde waves and crystal, blue eyes but she was also his devious competition. And she was unrelenting. He had to beat her at her own game and he’d found the perfect way to do it.

“Glutton for punishment hey?” 

“Excuse me?” He shot back from their neighbouring, courtside seats. The pre-game arrangements were well underway. “Last time I checked the Nets and their staff have every right to be here, even if it is on enemy territory.”

“Unfortunately, yes,” she growled. “But it’s nice to know you are going down tonight.”

“Have you seen the ladder, Forbes?”

“You are one game ahead, after tonight that won’t be the case,” she scoffed. Klaus took a moment to peruse her outfit before arguing back. Even in her hideous blue and orange jersey she couldn’t help but look stunning. He decided to put it down to the fact her floral perfume was infiltrating his nostrils and messing with his composure. 

“Wanna make a bet?”

“I’m pretty good at those but if you’re game.”

“Oh I’m game,” he smirked. “The Nets win you get me those ringside seats in Vegas. And by seats, I’m going to need eight.”

“Wow, someone is wishful thinking, but yeah sure, not that you’re going to win,” she scoffed. “I cannot wait to witness the annihilation, Mikaelson.” 

Klaus didn’t even respond, just sent her a teasing glance and made his way to the changerooms to finalise everything. He had a good feeling that his team were going to take the win and Klaus would be on the way to Vegas for the big fight at the MGM Grand. His boss would forget that bloody blender ever existed. 

“In your face, Forbes,” Klaus celebrated hours later as the Nets crowd at Madison Square Garden continued to chant well after the final buzzer. She was shocked to say the least, still cute in defeat but he’d never admit it aloud.  

“This is all your fault,” she snarled. “You cheated.”

“Last time I checked I wasn’t on the court.”

“Yeah probably a good thing, you’d never actually keep up, lazy bones,” she snorted. “How about that whole surprise pre-game show where number one Nets fans Beyonce and Jay-Z just decided to belt out the Star Spangled Banner from their seats?”

“I had nothing to do with that,” he lied.

“You are the worst liar,” she huffed. “You know just how well it would be received and in turn boost team morale.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he bluffed. “The best team on the day won.”

“You are unbelievable,” she scowled. “Must really be desperate given just how much your job depends on it.”

“Is that what you say to make your situation better?” He shot back. “Didn’t think you’d stoop that low, oh hang on that whole blender situation was exactly that.”

“I guess I’m desperate,” she murmured, Klaus couldn’t miss the way her expression seemed so defeated all of a sudden. “My college loans are looming and I may have been a little dishonest under pressure because my boss wants to fire me all the time.”

“Story of my life too believe it or not,” he offered. “If only they could get on with their lives and not focus on every little thing that we do.”

“Hang on,” she murmured. “That might not be the worst idea you ever had, Mikaelson. How about we set them up together?”

“Mason and Katherine? That’s just a recipe for disaster. That much combined combustible energy cannot be safe.”

“Exactly why we have to do it,” she murmured, raising her eyebrows.

“So, I suppose I’ll see you in Vegas then?”

“If you’re lucky,” she chuckled, but given her tone Klaus knew she’d be there no matter what.  

MGM Grand, 3799 S Las Vegas Blvd Las Vegas, NV

“Okay, I sent the fruit basket to her room.”

“Aren’t you a romantic,” she drawled teasingly, barely looking up from her magazine on the bed as he entered. Klaus Mikaelson was the last person she expected to organise that. As much as she was attracted to him, Caroline was seeing no similar interests besides setting up their bosses. 

“Please don’t ever call me that. But, last time I checked you’d done absolutely nothing,” Klaus shot back. “And I won the last bet and everything. Time to show you care, Forbes.”

“Like sending an identical one hour massage voucher to both his and her rooms for the same time in the hotel spa?”

“I suppose that’s okay,” he mumbled.

“Why do I get the impression that you don’t like ideas coming from anyone but yourself?”

“Well...”

“It must be all that ego,” she groaned. 

“You really do hate me,” he asked incredulously, it was unusual for any female to think badly of him let alone abuse him incessantly. 

“For the most part.”

“Wow, aren’t you sweet,” he drawled. “So what are we supposed to do to pass the time?”

“Get your mind out of the gutter,” Caroline shot back. “How about something more intellectual?”

“Wow. Finally something we have in common,” he smirked triumphantly, as she produced a chess board. 

“I happened to be chess champion five years running in High School.”

“Well, don’t want all those potential but ignorant suitors knowing that fact,” he chuckled, sending a stray dimple her way. Caroline tried to pretend that it didn’t affect her but everything inside was telling her that it did. 

And she was scared of the foreign feelings it had caused.

But in true Caroline fashion she decided to push it aside so she could beat him at chess then deal with the consequences that were threatening to derail her feelings later. She didn’t get that chance though. In fact she was in a more vulnerable position than expected. 

“Check Mate,” he murmured, sweeping his queen across the board to take her king. 

She was stunned at first mainly because she never lost. Ever. But he seemed to know her and rather than unsettling her it was weirdly okay.

Bastard.

“We have a boxing match to get to,” she responded mechanically. His hand grabbed hers immediately, the warmth spreading through her body. “Need to keep an eye on our bosses after all.”

“Or we could do something else?” He offered, squeezing her hand affectionately. “My siblings are in town tonight but I’m going to warn you they are...”

“Nick’s Fans?” She asked. “I’ve certainly experienced them and worse.”

“You have no idea, in fact I think they’d be perfect company for Katherine and Mason.”

“Why do I get the feeling you don’t care if you lose your job right now?”

“Well, if you knew my brother Kol and his big mouth,” he teased. “But if you’d rather...”

“No, I’m starting to really like your brother Kol.”

“Well. then you’re really going to like my sister Rebekah,” he chuckled. “How about we explore Vegas some more? See what fun we can get up to?”

“I suppose it can’t hurt, right?” Caroline replied.

Famous last words.

[404botnotfound]

Corrupt [2]

Come, oh bearer mine, and show them that even a rose can be deadly.

SERIES: Destiny WORD COUNT: 6,806 SHIP: N/A CHARACTERS: kel, luke, cayde-6, lord shaxx, eris morn, ikora, zavala, quinn

Almost two weeks later, Cayde’s call comes at an inopportune moment.

Middle of a firefight with a group of Fallen that he’s sorely underestimated, and he makes the mistake of opening the line at the exact time he sees the Captain bearing down in him. Before Cayde can start to speak Kel grunts and calmly says, “one second,” before diving out of the way of a pair of shock blades that descend on him.

Reaching for his belt and one of the sticky grenades resting there Kel rushes forward, ducking underneath the Fallen’s four arms and two blades, not stopping to look behind him as the Captain roars in offense.

An explosion causes the rocks under his feet to shudder. A blink of red disappears from his HUD radar.

The comm line, surprisingly, remains patiently silent.

He takes stock of the enemies left: a dozen Fallen, all of them conveniently grouped up.

Propelling himself forward he leaps from the ground and pushes off the surface of a broken pillar, light roiling around him and shrouding his body in rippling flames—flames that he pulls handfuls of etheric, fiery knives from that fly from his hands too fast for the Fallen to dodge.

Kel lands as those knives erupt around him, and when the dust settles there are no Fallen bodies to be seen. Just ash and smoldering, blackened shrubs.

His fingers flex over the grip of the hand cannon held in them, eyes scan for any more enemies in waiting.

Cayde can’t seem to keep silent any longer. “Was that the trick I taught you? Tell me that was the trick I taught you. It was the trick I taught you, wasn’t it.”

Kel ignores him, glancing at Echo as she materializes to survey the area. “Did you have news?”

“We know how to find her.” Cayde answers without missing a beat or acknowledging the snub.

He holsters Thorn and turns away from the battlefield he’d just cleared, and Echo calls in his ship without prompting. He doesn’t need to hear more explanation than that, but Cayde gives it anyway, voice briefly drowned out by the roar of engines.

Kel wonders if he does it just to reassure himself that Quinn was still alive and they would get her back now that they had a lead.

Luke’s assumption that the Taken had pulled her through a rift into the Ascendant Plane had been correct—and her ghost, after having found a way out of that alternate dimension, had gone on for several minutes about how terrifying it was until Ikora had gently urged it to focus.

Apparently she had managed to turn the Taken’s own paracausal powers against them, tearing a hole in that reality herself. A rip only big enough for Glyph to slip through, allowing it to return to the Tower, frantic and exhausted by the long and rushed journey between Saturn and Earth.

It knew where to enter the Ascendant realm to find her—the tricky part would be hoping they got there quickly enough to keep whatever lurked there from either corrupting or killing her.

Kel’s fingers twitch near his holster and he wonders: were they one and the same?

He wonders: what would Dredgen Yor have said?

He doesn’t dwell on it, spending the entire flight from Venus back to Earth silent and aware of the rising hum in the back of his head the closer he got after days of peace. Like when he had found it, Thorn was eager.

The little girl still appears in the corner of his eyes and tugs on the hem of his tattered cloak, begging for his attention. Sometimes he feels her fingers curl around his own, finding upon looking down that they’ve been replaced by the grip of a handgun that purrs at him to lift the barrel to his chin and pull the trigger.

It’s getting easier for him to recognize the signs and brush them aside, but the visions and whispers had intensified and Kel knows he’s on a short timer. Part of him wants to just toss the damn thing, but the rest of him doesn’t enjoy the thought of what might happen should someone that hadn’t spent hundreds of years practicing intense self-control got their hands on it.

It had already proven itself to be a ticking time bomb for even him—how deep and easy would it sink its claws into someone else?

So, no, he wouldn’t toss the gun and hope for the best, and he had done everything from emptying every round of his rocket launcher’s ammo on it to dropping it in the lava flows of Venus in the hopes of destroying it without success.

The lava flow attempt had left him blacked out and he had woken later with the gun vibrating with furious energy.

That had been the first time Kel had felt true, all-consuming fear since his rebirth, and it was also the moment he realized that Thorn was more than just an accursed weapon in the City’s and in humanity’s history—it was a curse in and of itself.

One that he now held the responsibility of containing.

Eris had said there was a way to silence it, to make it easier to control, but in two weeks he’d had no luck finding how. He was running out of time, and quickly, but he had enough time for this detour. He wouldn’t abandon Quinn. Not when there was a chance she was still alive, not when Gil had given his life to make that chance possible, and not when her bright presence had burned away the shadows of his memories.

When he arrives on Earth he’s met with more greetings that he only briefly acknowledges before moving on. The less time he spent here, the better.

Eris is absent from her place in the Vanguard hall again, but Kel’s steps slow and then stop when he catches Shaxx’s gaze.

From behind their helmets they stare each other down. Shaxx’s fists are clenched tightly at his sides, and Kel sees arc energy sparking around them. He could apologize for what had happened—he had violated the sanctity of the man’s training grounds, unknowingly or not—but it would be hollow and they both knew it.

There was nothing forgivable about murdering one of their own.

“Shaxx.”

The bold greeting sends a fresh ripple of furious static sparking over the titan’s form. “Dredgen.”

Kel can’t put a finger on whether it’s the icy treatment of a stranger he receives or the cold accusation behind the simple moniker, but the painful sting nearly cripples him. The former he had expected, but the latter?

He swallows it down and continues forward as though it didn’t affect him. Though Shaxx looked as though he was ready to intercept him and wanted to do nothing more, the titan remains in place and stares him down as he passes.

Like the last time he had approached the war room an argument is underway, only this time the doors are wide open and the subject, thankfully, isn’t him. Ikora is silent, her hands clasped behind her back, while Zavala and Cayde butt their heads together.

“—I’m going, Zavala. You can run my hunters through Shiro or Marcus while I’m gone, but I’m going.” Cayde says, heated. Not quite as rare attitude for him, but still out of the norm.

“We need you here, Cayde,” Zavala jabs a finger down onto the table in front of him to emphasize the statement, firm and unyielding in everything from his voice to his body language, “let her fireteam run the rescue op and we’ll send a temporary third with them.”

Cayde refuses to concede. “And I need to be there.”

He’s the first to notice Kel’s entrance. His expression shifts to something neutral, but Kel doesn’t miss the quick glance to where Thorn is strapped to his thigh. Cayde’s gaze lingers—and then he gives Kel a nod in greeting. “I gotta be there for more than one reason.”

Kel returns his nod and understands.

Zavala doesn’t look happy about Kel’s presence, but whatever protests he has to it are held in check; he makes no effort, however, to hide his distrust. Ikora just gives him a once over and a long, considering look before lifting her chin ever so slightly in acknowledgement.

Two out of three wasn’t bad.

He says nothing, quietly continuing down the steps and veering off to the side once he’d reached the lowered landing and finding a spot apart from them where he can stand silent and still as a statue. Maybe they could pretend he wasn’t even there.

Distraction put aside Cayde continues his argument. “Only way you’re keepin’ me off this op, Zavala, is by puttin’ a lock on my ship.”

“Which you would find a way to break or circumvent.” Zavala sighs explosively, pushing away from the table and folding his arms over his chest. “This isn’t like Venus, or Mars, or any of our other warzones, Cayde. You’ll be heading into Oryx’s turf, not one we control.”

“I know the risk. It’s worth it.” Cayde replies.

Silence falls, stretching out until Ikora speaks up. “Think of it this way, Zavala: there would be something especially inspiring for our guardians and City to see one of their leaders heading a direct strike into the heart of the enemy. Morale is something we’ve...been seeing a decline in recently.”

She must’ve been taking a backseat to mediate their argument.

Still, Zavala says nothing, leaning forward on the table again and showing his distaste openly. “And if you die, Cayde? If this fails?”

“It’s a risk all of them take every single day. ‘Side from the fact we’re the ones givin’ orders, what makes us so special?”

Kel had already had more than enough respect for Cayde but that simple rhetorical question tips it even higher.

Hunter Vanguards historically had the shortest details—in the years since the City’s beginning, both warlocks and titans had seen less than five leadership changes combined, and hunters alone had seen at least five—that were typically cut short thanks to a stereotypically flighty nature that usually got them killed.

Cayde was the ‘youngest’ of the current Vanguard iteration, and he still knew what it felt like to be one of the rank and file. Zavala and Ikora had forgotten, and both look sobered by the statement.

In the end Zavala relents, and Kel wordlessly follows Cayde from the war room.

Luke is rushing across the plaza when they run into him, apparently trying to get to the war room himself. Cayde intercepts him before he bypasses them entirely, and Kel has to spend a handful of heartbeats carefully controlling his breathing and beating down the rage that threatens to resurge. It wasn’t his fault, he reminds himself.

Cayde and Luke are staring at him when he returns to the present. Luke looks nervous, and Cayde was once again unreadable. He says nothing to it. “Are we going or not?”

He wants Quinn back within the City walls, safe. He wants to strike a blow against the Taken King, retaliation for his lost brother. The sooner he does both, the sooner he can retreat from the remnants of humanity and seek a way to control Thorn’s influence, keeping them safe from the threat it poses to all of them.

He keeps his distance on the flight from Earth to the rings of Saturn, remaining in the middeck of Cayde’s ship and listening while the Hunter Vanguard and Luke discuss their plan with Glyph giving input based on its knowledge of the chunk of the Ascendant Plane they’d be infiltrating.

Luke glances over at him every so often and Kel returns the looks from behind his helmet impassively, saying nothing; like with Shaxx, he knows that there aren’t words to make up for what he had almost done, and he doesn’t expect Luke to forgive him for it.

They journey deep into Oryx’s floating fortress once they arrive, directed by Glyph who had opted to share a ‘backpack’ with Cayde’s ghost, Sundance. Neither of his allies comment on him using Thorn, but Cayde does conspicuously order Luke to fall back and bring up the rear and Kel to take point, keeping himself between the two members of Fireteam Ward.

It was just as well; the proximity to so much Hive power and magic made the black static at the back of his mind roil, so Kel doesn’t mind pulling ahead so his back was to them rather than the other way around.

Pulling an Ascendant Soul from one of Oryx’s many ‘children’ on the Dreadnaught is no simple task but they accomplish it through equal amounts skill and raw determination—there would be no other way to force open the tear that Quinn had created.

Glyph’s directions lead them into a passage small enough all three of them have to duck down to file through. Luke’s vocal disgust about the chitinous growths and writhing hive worms surrounding them allows a brief moment of amusement to push back Thorn’s greedy grasping at his mind.

The passage darkens the further in they move, all the colors reaching his eyes suddenly washing out in shades of dark blues and grays and blacks as though a painter had stripped all of the vibrance from their universe.

The change from the plane of existence they call home and the Ascendant one is immediate and disorienting, as though they’d stepped through a pressurized barrier, the weight of the air around them suddenly oppressive and stifling. His light feels small and choked and he knows that he can’t remain here long.

Already, Thorn is drawing strength from the darkness.

The passage opens up after a ways and all three of them are struck dumb by the void that greets them, littered with cracked stone pathways and floating islands of sand and Hive growths consuming nearly every visible surface.

All around them a howling gale roars, dark clouds twisting and and swirling, obscuring every broken, floating pathway until a blinding flash of lightning within the unnatural storm around them sets the endless horizon alight and reveals them.

Along with the shadows of massive, writhing tendrils somewhere in the far distance within the smoke-like clouds of the storm.

The reports of Crota’s throne world, infiltrated by that six-man fireteam decades ago, hadn’t done this chaotic realm justice. It was terrifying in its seemingly endless, haunting expanse with the storm around them both deafening and silent at once.

He couldn’t see any of Oryx’s mindless army, but he can still feel countless eyes watching them, greedy and hungry, something ancient and eldritch and powerful waiting for them to fall into the yawning abyss below.

Thorn feels abnormally warm in his palm. It speaks to him for the first time in nearly a week, voice almost incomprehensible within the deafening cacophony of echoes that accompany it.

Do you hear it, oh bearer mine? The song. Listen to the song. Hear its truth.

Light-wielders shouldn’t be here. No one should be here. He knows this instinctively, and with a glance at the other two Kel knows that both of them have come to the same conclusion.

And Quinn had spent over a month trapped in this hell. Alone.

A massive, distant roar rising over the silent gale snaps them all of them out of their horrified awe, reminding them of what they had come here for.

Cayde readies his Ace. “C’mon, let’s move.” To the point and devoid of his usual good humor. It’s a testament to the wrong-ness of this place, to the danger of it. This wasn’t a place to underestimate and he knew there was no place for his usual levity and devil-may-care attitude here.

This time he leads the way, Glyph’s nervous voice over team comms telling them that Oryx’s throne world was massive, and it had no idea how much further in Quinn may have traveled in its absence—they hadn’t been able to find somewhere safe to just bunker down, and it wasn’t likely she had found a way to since.

Monsters unlike anything they had ever seen wandered these teetering paths and inexplicable ruins, apparently, and it makes near-frantic emphasis that even if they couldn’t see any now they were still everywhere.

So they moved forward carefully, following Glyph’s direction further into the throne world, all on high alert. Cayde quickly grew visibly frustrated with their slow pace, but with the roaring winds and fog around them they could scarcely see twenty feet ahead, and knowing that one wrong step sent them into a dark abyss that Kel doubted they could survive, ghost or not, they couldn’t afford to rush any more than they could afford to dawdle.

Several times Glyph had to call out for them to abruptly change direction or for them to stop before they walked right over the edge of one of the floating structures they traversed.

Kel had to reach out and grab Luke’s robes one of these times, just barely catching the warlock before he completely lost his footing. By the way he had gone completely still, staring at Kel as he held him over the edge, he’s sure Luke had wondered in that moment if he was going to just let him fall.

Thorn tells him that he should and then howls its rage into his mind when he instead pulls Luke back onto solid ground.

“Thanks.” Luke says, voice shaky.

Kel’s head hurts. “Don’t mention it.”

Twenty minutes pass. Then thirty. Only twice did they have to stop to fend off a wave of Taken-warped thrall, vicious and screeching at them as they scale and traverse the twisting and broken landscape of their King’s territory.

Cayde works flawlessly with both of them as though he’d been part of their team for years, and all the thrall and acolytes and knights unlucky enough to be in their path fall.

They take a moment to breathe after a wave of thrall clear, all acutely aware that they didn’t have many of them to spare. Tick tock, tick tock.

Luke breaks the silence first. “Anyone else a little worried we haven’t seen any of those monsters Glyph mentioned?”

“Think it’s somethin’ we should be grateful for, kid.” Cayde replies easily, flicking his wrist and dropping the empty magazine from his Ace so he can reload it.

“No,” both Cayde and Luke’s attention snap over to him at the single deathly certain word, “it’s not.”

“What’re you thinkin’, Kel?” Cayde’s hand flicks the new magazine into place within the barrel of his gun.

He struggles to find the words he wants to say through the deafening static between his ears. Thorn doesn’t want him to speak at all. “Oryx wants us to keep going. He wants us as deep into his world as he can get us.” He pauses, one of his gloved hands settling on his helmet over the crown of his head; he’s not sure why he knows this. Or how.

His fingers tighten around Thorn’s grip.

“I mean, we know Oryx wants us dead, Kel. Why not just try to kill us here?” Luke asks. He doesn’t have to mention that thrall and knights were hardly a challenge for veteran guardians that had faced them before.

He can’t make the words form, though they’re on the tip of his tongue. He doesn’t know. He does, but he doesn’t.

“‘Cause we’ll be farther from a way to escape,” Cayde supplies, and though there’s something crucial missing from the answer Kel knows that he’s dead to rights, “we find Quinn, he kills all of us at once. If he’s lucky, which he ain’t. This handsome mug ain’t dyin’ today.”

Kel needs to figure out what that crucial missing piece is. He needs to. What was it?

“Question is: why?” Cayde continues, and Kel sees him shift impatiently in the edge of his vision. He knows the answer to this question is important, just as Kel does, but he’s gotten far enough that his biggest concern is finding the woman he still hasn’t admitted he loves.

Listen to the song. You know the words. Let me sing to them, oh bearer mine. Join me, let us sing together.

“I don’t know.” Kel finally says, his tongue feeling leaden within his mouth. And it’s true that he doesn’t, but the melody between his ears is beginning to make horrific sense.

Cayde’s watching him with sharp eyes, likely trying to assess whether or not Thorn was getting its hooks into his head again—but he apparently comes to the conclusion that Kel had it under control, because he turns his back to him and then starts forward, calling for them to keep moving.

Fool.

‘Shut. Up.’ Kel thinks forcefully, his jaw grinding until it’s painful. Miraculously, Thorn retreats to an incessant buzz in the back of his head in response.

It gives him no comfort.

They move forward, minutes ticking by, until the silent thunder cracks and the roaring winds around them are broken by a single, piercing scream that causes gooseflesh to erupt all over his skin. All three of them stop dead in alarm that’s quickly replaced by urgency.

Cayde breaks into a run first, followed without prompting by him and Luke, and Kel can hear Luke muttering a staccato repetition of shit, shit, shit from beside him.

It’s as they round a colossal stone column that Glyph speaks up, having remained silent long enough Kel had nearly forgotten it was there, its voice a shrill, tinny yell of warning over the comms: “Abyssal Knight!”

Barely a second after it yells in warning a massive behemoth materializes right in front of them in an unnatural, crackling storm of something like dust or gravel. It looked like a Hive Knight in shape, but was so huge that their heads just barely reached the height of the bottom of its knees, and its chitin was soot-black and nearly invisible in the inky darkness of the Ascendant Plane.

They notice the massive blade raised above the creature’s head nearly too late.

The shockwave of the blade striking the already cracked and crumbling ground sends all three of them along with shattered debris flying; Kel feels his back slam into the jagged stone surrounding the path, the blow knocking wind from his lungs and stunning him.

On the other side of the path a blast of arc energy sends more debris scattering and Luke stumbles out of it on his knees. A few feet to Kel’s side Cayde crouches almost on his knees as well, feet dangerously close to the edge of the floating path and one of his hands curled tightly around the exposed root of a dead tree.

Shaking the daze from his eyes, Kel lifts Thorn as the Knight raises its blade again.

“Just run, you can’t damage these things!” Glyph yells at them, panicked.

The issue, Kel thinks, wasn’t that they couldn’t damage it—but that they didn’t have the time to figure out how. Was that hubris? He doesn’t care.

Reaching for his belt quickly Kel lobs a tripmine up onto the stone that towers above him, the explosive beeping only once before its sensor picks up the Knight and explodes. The Knight stumbles, and a furious roar that sounds less like a creature and more like a force of nature follows them as they push forward.

“Glyph, where is she?” Cayde slows slightly to raise his gun and fire off a few shots at the thrall that had picked an awful time to come swarming from the shadows.

“Dead ahead, but there’s more knights!”

Poor word choice.

The exo swears, word nearly lost to the horde of screaming thrall blocking their way forward and the heavy, lumbering steps of the Knight giving chase behind. “Luke, we need a path!” Cayde calls out.

Kel expects Luke to let out a whoop and a jubilant ‘let’s rock n’ roll!’, but the warlock is instead silent as electricity flares up around him, flying from his open palms and ripping through the horde of thrall before them.

It’s unnerving to see Luke without the gusto everyone knew him for, but Kel doesn’t have time to wallow in self-loathing at the fact he’d been the one to dampen it.

He and Cayde follow after Luke, single shots from their pair of hand cannons picking off whatever Hive escaped from the warlock’s raging storm. Kel turns around once to fire a shot at the Abyssal Knight still pursuing them, hoping to find some weakness, but the bullet doesn’t so much as cause it to stumble.

Echo beeps at him to get his attention just as he turns away and he pauses, watching as though in slow motion as something incandescent wavers around the Knight’s gargantuan form; an image flashes in his mind of a dead titan in a Crucible arena.

The Knight’s body shifts as it moves to strike down and Kel dives out of the way, rolling back into gear and taking off after the other two.

They can see more of the Abyssal Knights ahead, clear of the screaming thrall that Luke had successfully reduced to smoking ash. Something glows brightly in the darkness of the Ascendant Plane right in the middle of the three monsters, and both Kel and Luke immediately recognize the opaque white shield unique to their teammate.

One of the knights rears back with its weapon and slams it down on the shield, scattering the sound of cracking glass on the wind around them. Quinn lets out a scream of helpless fear from within the shield’s dome.

“Cayde, we can kill these things, do you have a barrage ready?”

“Hold on, what?” Luke demands.

There’s no hesitation in Cayde’s answer. “I do.”

The easy, unflinching trust for him to give an affirmative without even knowing what his plan was, after everything he’d done and nearly done, punches Kel in the chest. He sequesters that feeling for later, a weapon to use against Thorn when it tries to press into the depths of his mind for an advantage.

Nine bullets in Thorn’s magazine. Three Abyssal Knights.

He takes aim—three shots each, a full magazine of hungry, caustic bullets that do exactly as he had hoped they would. The three knights stumble when the rounds chew through whatever paracausal shields they had and shatter them, massive weapons slamming to the ground and making it rumble under their feet.

Cayde takes to the air with his light burning wild and unleashes a barrage of fiery knives that erupt violently over the carapace of the now defenseless goliaths, leaving them to howl as the fire of Cayde’s light rips them to shreds and turns them to ash that’s swept away by the wind.

Immediate threat to the one they came here to save out of the way, the three of them turn for the last Knight still lumbering heavily towards them. Kel reloads quickly and empties the full clip into it, his teammates hailing it with even more the moment its shields are destroyed.

Nothing but the roaring silence of the storm around them follows. It’s a reprieve and nothing more, Kel knows this even without the hissing laughter he hears cut through his thoughts.

Cayde doesn’t hesitate, immediately turning and bolting back for the center of the massive open platform they find themselves on. The opaque shield they’d seen, so similar and yet so different from a titan’s at the same time, dissipates and reveals Quinn lying prone on the crumbling stone within a small divot.

The knights had been hammering at her shield for longer than they’d been witness to, it seems.

He and Luke join Cayde.

“Hey, sunshine,” he’s saying as they approach, Ace gently set on the ground next to him as he reaches for her, “you’re alright. You’re alright.”

It seems more like he’s trying to convince himself rather than her, but Kel doesn’t mention it.

She’s pale as a sheet and there are dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes, that much more pronounced with how white she looks, and there’s a thin sheen of sweat visible over her skin even in the desaturated colors of the Plane.

Her chest heaves with exertion and she shakes with something he can’t tell between weariness or unfiltered relief that they’d found her; morbidly, Kel wonders whether Oryx would’ve become unstoppable if they’d gotten here too late, for he knew now that that is why he wanted all of them here, deep in his realm.

Power feeds power. Blade versus flesh. Blade versus Eternity. There can be no survival without teeth.

Thorn’s laughter grows louder and Kel goes stiff as he fights with himself, suddenly struggling not to lift the barrel of the gun and fire off three very specific shots.

Weight hits him and nearly throws him off balance, and Kel only realizes that someone’s embraced him when the contact somehow pushes the dark static from his mind and leaves his thoughts clear again. He blinks, looking down and seeing Quinn with her arms tight around his back and face pressed against his chestplate.

His throat feels tight; he wasn’t deserving of the silent thank you she was projecting to him, not at all, but he hesitantly wraps an arm around her back in return.

“Can you move?” He asks her, following Cayde’s line of sight when he lifts Ace at the ready. Already the Taken were swarming again. They couldn’t stay here.

She looks like she might pass out at any moment, but when she steps back he spends a moment wondering at the sheer force of will the woman had to be able to keep upright after being trapped here for so long, after an ordeal that must have drained her to the brink.

She nods, pausing when Glyph materializes briefly to shift from Cayde to her.

“Good, that’s good, because there are a lot of bad guys heading our way,” Luke says, already hop-stepping back in the direction they’d come.

“Kel, take point again. Quinn, stick close. Luke, you ‘n me bring up the rear. Move!” Cayde barks out quickly, and all of them—all four of them—take off, hoping that their path would remain clear as they’d made it.

He didn’t hold out hope, knowing that now Oryx had them where he wanted them they weren’t going to leave easy. Part of him wants to argue Cayde’s order for Quinn to stick close to him with Thorn’s possessive, dark whispering growing disorientingly loud and demanding, but he doesn’t.

It was a double-edged sword, grasping at his mind greedily and testing every ounce of his carefully honed restraint, but the only weapon among them that could damage the powerful creatures that he hoped could only exist within this realm.

Instead, Kel took solace in knowing that Cayde still trusted him to maintain his control over something that could be both their and and salvation here.

Taken swarm at them from all sides as they run, the King of this world throwing oceans of screaming and howling thrall and knights and acolytes at them to slow them down and tire them out. To stop them from leaving.

Kel understands now why the disastrous mission that Gil died on went the way it had.

It’s nothing but sheer luck that sees the four of them back to the beginning, back to the passage they’d come through and out of the choking void.

They weren’t safe, far from it—if Gil’s death had told them anything, things were about to get even more difficult.

The moment they’re out of the tight passage and into the cavernous halls and suspended platforms filled with rock and chitinous growths and writhing worms that made up the Dreadnaught, they stop for nothing, slowing only to push back against the waves and waves of enemies Oryx furiously throws at them.

By the time they make it back to the transmat zone and are pulled into the confines of Cayde’s ship all of them are exhausted—though, he imagines, nowhere near to the state Quinn likely is—and Sundance immediately sends the ship into flight away from Oryx and his throne and the Taken.

The ship makes it into hyperspace and it’s only then that all of them allow themselves to catch their breath and relax.

“How long was I gone?” Quinn asks quietly from where she’d collapsed against the hull of the ship, hands hanging limply on the ground on either side of her and legs bent unevenly where they stretch out in front of her.

“Almost two months.” Sundance answers her from within the ship’s systems, her voice soothing and gentle.

There are tears in her eyes. “It felt like so much longer.” She whispers, and then the first sob wracks her body.

Cayde is at her side instantly, pulling her against him and settling his chin on top of her head, jaw lights flashing erratically while they’re caught somewhere between his choking relief and concern. “You’re alright now, sunshine.” He says, rocking her gently while she clutches at him and cries. “You’re alright. We’re taking you home.”

Kel looks away, unable to stop the feeling that he was an intruder to the scene and wordlessly moving for the rear of the ship. He doesn’t belong here with either of them, not while the corrupting grasp of the Darkness claws at him and tells him to just end her suffering.

Somewhere between there and Earth she falls asleep, too exhausted from her ordeal to remain awake, and she stays that way even when they arrive at the Tower and are transmatted down into the hangar. Cayde carries her all the way to the medical ward, Luke and Kel both following and remaining outside while they wait to hear how she is.

The silence between them is stifling.

It’s comfortable enough for Kel, but it leaves Luke twitching and fidgeting restlessly until he speaks up.

“I don’t think even Gil could’ve held up a ward against those things after a month of...all that.” He says, the statement seemingly more to himself than to anyone else, but Kel’s helmet tilts up to him just slightly and the warlock freezes as though only just remembering he was even there.

Kel stares at him for a length, Thorn clawing at his thoughts after hours of silence and telling him to get up, to reach out and strangle Luke for daring to speak Gil’s name. Instead, he nods and evenly replies: “No, he couldn’t have.”

The look of shock on Luke’s face is absolutely worth the pain of acknowledging a still raw wound.

He won’t stay in the City. He can’t. Gil had been the only reason Kel had ever agreed to work as part of a team, the only reason he’d grown to enjoy someone always having his back while he was out in the wild.

He’d miss Quinn. He has to hope she wouldn’t lose the bright personality that had wiggled its way under his skin, and she was one of the few that acutely understood why he found solace in silence and solitude.

Deep down, he’ll miss Luke and his obnoxious, optimistic energy, too; he knows he can’t keep blaming the warlock forever, and it’s only the sharp sting of loss and Thorn’s desperate, hungry whispering that has him pointing the finger of blame in his direction.

Cayde, Ikora, Zavala, Banshee, he’d miss all of them. Shaxx, too, though he’s sure the feeling wasn’t going to be returned.

At least with Quinn back in the Vanguard’s hands, Kel could be satisfied in knowing Gil’s death wasn’t in vain.

Maybe once the wound has healed he’ll come back.

Maybe.

His thumb drags along the grip of Thorn, still hissing at the back of his skull, still urging him to rip open Luke and drink in the light he’ll bleed. It was furious at his careful restraint, frantic that it was being ignored by him ever since the debacle in the war room.

That had been the first time Kel had lost control of himself and snapped in hundreds of years since the phantoms from his first life had begun to plague him, and Kel swears to himself that it was going to be the last.

He speaks with Quinn once she’s awake again, quietly and evenly, just as she remembers.

Cayde stands nearby, unwilling to leave her side and relaying his messages and report to the other Vanguard members through Sundance. He doesn’t mention how close Kel had come to putting down the only other remaining member of their fireteam, nor does he watch Kel like a hawk as though expecting that buried rage to reappear, and Kel appreciates it more than he’ll ever be able to put into words.

She’ll find out, eventually. Luke has too big of a mouth for her not to, and once he vanishes from the Tower he knows she’ll wonder why.

When he leaves the ward and heads back through the Tower he figures it’s well enough that her last impression of him before he left for who knew how long is just the same as before the loss of his best friend ripped open old wounds and nearly changed him for the worse.

She needs the stability right now, and while that implies him needing to stay he knows he can’t. Cayde and Luke were fixed enough points on their own, and they could fill in where he’d never be able to so long as Thorn was at his side.

Eris Morn is out in the sunlight of the plaza for once and Kel stops in his path to stare at her.

She’s watching him expectantly.

“There’s no coming back.” It’s more of a statement than a question. He already knows the answer.

“Not fully.” She says, her head tilting slightly. The answer as well as her covered, glowing gaze are surprisingly lucid. “The corruption digs in, burrows into the fiber of your bones as tenaciously as we cling to this dead rock of a planet. You yet hold the weapon. It is still trying. It will continue. It will get worse.”

Worse, implying that killing another guardian and gunning for his own teammate after only a few weeks with the weapon wasn’t that bad. He supposes, compared to the pain and torment she’d suffered at the hands of the Hive, it wasn’t.

They had stolen her eyes and poured corruption into her veins.

She had stolen theirs in return, and used that corruption to exact retribution in spite of the Light now shirking her.

He nods in response; he can still feel it at the back of his mind, insistent and angry. Whatever evil the Hive had planted in the weapon, it didn’t like being ignored.

Kel glances into the distance, his eyes settling on the gargantuan form of the Traveler hovering over the Last City on Earth. “You said there was a way to sever its connection to the Hive magic controlling it. I haven’t found it yet.”

“Xyor. The moon. Slay her.” She offers him, and he looks over at her, both of them sharing a quiet moment of understanding. As he turns away what she says next causes him to stop in his tracks again. “Perhaps you will get to keep your eyes when she is gone.”

Had she just made a joke?

He blinks at her, and her head simply tilts the other way. “You will also be free of the worm wearing a dead girl’s face.”

Anyone else might have jerked back in surprise, but Kel simply curls his hands into fists at his sides. “How—?”

It’s a stupid question; all three of her stolen eyes blink slowly at him.

“I’ll silence it.” He says after a pause, wondering for a moment at just how wrong he may have been about Eris. “And I’ll make sure it doesn’t dig its claws into anyone else.” He’s not sure yet if it’ll even be possible for him to maintain control of it. But he will.

Her lips twitch into a smile so slight and so brief that Kel might have missed it. “Conviction. Eriana would have liked you.” She says, and as she returns to the Vanguard hall she leaves him with one more piece of advice: “Do not let it consume your light, and you may become something even the Hive fear.”

He watches her leave, then looks up at the silent Traveler in the distance, taking in the sight of it for just one more time.

Echo chirps at him cheerfully, confidently, and Kel leaves the Tower and the City behind.

[queeranarchism]

8 Steps Toward Building Indispensability (Instead of Disposability) Culture

(Reposting this article by Kai Cheng Thom because Tumblr ate it. Sorry long post, page break hates me)

give an mc without integrity a mic

and s/he will rhyme the death of the people

—d’bi young anitafrika

When I first came into activist culture, I was a runaway queer kid searching for a home: a terrified, angry, suspicious, cynical-yet-naïve teenager whose greatest secret desire was for a family that would last forever and love me no matter what.

Yet I also knew that such a family could never exist – at least not for me.

You see, I had another secret: Underneath all of my radical queer social justice punk bravado, I knew that I was trash. I was dirty and unlovable. I had done bad things to survive, and I had hurt people. Sometimes I didn’t know why.

So when I found activist culture, with its powerful ideas about privilege and oppression and its simmering, explosive rage, I was intoxicated. I thought that I could purge my self-hatred with that fiery rhetoric and create the family I wanted so much with the bond that comes from shared trauma.

Social justice was a set of rules that could finally put the world into an order that made sense to me. If I could only use all the right language, do enough direct action, be critical enough of the systems around me, then I could finally be a good person.

All around me, it felt like my activist community was doing the same thing – throwing ourselves into “the revolution,” exhausting ourselves and burning out, watching each other for oppressive thoughts and behavior and calling each other on it vociferously.

Occasionally – rarely – folks were driven out of community for being “fucked up.” More often, though, attempts to hold people accountable through call-outs and exclusion just exploded into huge online flame wars and IRL drama that left deep rifts in community for years. Only the most vulnerable – folks without large friend groups and social stability – were excluded permanently.

Like my blood family, my activist family was re-enacting the trauma that we had experienced at the hands of an oppressive society.

Just as my father once held open the door to our house and demanded that I leave because he didn’t know how to reconcile his love for me with my gender identity, we denounced each other and burned bridges because we didn’t know how reconcile our social ideals with the fact that our loved ones don’t always live up to them.

I believe that sometimes we did this hypocritically – that we created the so-called call-out culture (a culture of toxic confrontation and shaming people for oppressive behavior that is more about the performance of righteousness than the actual pursuit of justice) in part so that we could focus on the failings of others and avoid examining the complicity with oppression, the capacity to abuse, that exists within us all.

And I believe we did it in part because sometimes it’s impossible to imagine any other way: We live in a disposability culture – a society based on consumption, fear, and destruction – where we’re taught that the only way to respond when people hurt us is to hurt them back or get rid of them.

This article comes out of that queer kid’s longing for forever-family, and from countless conversations with other members of social justice communities longing for the same. It comes out of my own fuck-ups having been generously forgiven by others, and from my effort to forgive those who have harmed me.

It comes from a desire I feel all around me for an alternative to the politics of disposability, for a politics of indispensability instead.

“Indispensability politics” isn’t a term I’ve coined personally. It has existed various communities for some time, and I learned it orally, though I cannot find a written source. But the following principles are ideas – suggestions for a foundation on which indispensability culture in leftist activism might be built. They are a work permanently in progress.

They’re not meant to be a new set of rules for activism. Nor are they a step-by-step guide for holding accountability processes or a complete answer to the questions that I’m raising around.

Still, I hope that they are helpful to you.

1. The Revolution Is a Relationship

sometimes

we want to close our eyes

jack off to pictures of radical disneyland

not watch as we gnaw our own

flesh into meat

—Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “so what the fuck does conscious mean anyway”

Something that worries me about social justice communities is that we tend to conceptualize “revolution” as a product, as a place and time that we expend all of our energy and anger to create – often without regard to the toll this takes on individuals and our relationships.

In this way, “The Revolution” occupies a position in activist culture that actually reminds me of the role that Heaven played in the Chinese Christian community I grew up in: It is a fantasy of ideological purity against which our actions are judged, a place that we long to live in, but seems impossible to reach.

In our – often justified – anger and disappointment at the failure of ourselves and our communities to uphold the dream of revolution, we lash out.

We try to cleanse ourselves of the pain of betrayal by cutting off and driving out the betrayers – our abusive families, our conservative friends. We try not to look at the betrayer in the mirror.

What if revolution isn’t a product, some distant promised land, but the relationships that we have right now?

What if revolution is, in addition to – not instead of – direct action and community organizing, the process of rupture and repair that happens when we fuck up and hold each other accountable and forgive?

2. The Oppressor Lives Within

The most important political struggle I will ever have is against the oppressor – the racist, transmisogynist, ableist, abusive person – in myself.

I don’t mean to say this in a self-flagellating, self-blaming way. I’ve experienced oppression, violence, rape, and abuse from others, and this is not my fault.

I mean that I’ve started to believe that I can’t engage in authentic activism, I can’t create positive change without recognizing and naming my own participation in the oppressive systems that I’m trying to undo.

Coming from this position, I’m forced to have compassion for the people around me who I see also participating in oppression, even as I’m also angry at them. With compassion comes understanding, and with understanding comes belief in the possibility of change.

When we become capable of holding that contradiction in our hearts – when we can be angry and compassionate at the same time, at ourselves as well as others – entirely new possibilities for healing and transformation emerge.

3. Accountability Starts in the Heart

Too often, I’ve seen accountability processes in social justice communities devolve into vicious “your word against mine” situations and social power plays in which people accuse each other of harm and abuse.

As witnesses to these situations, we become trapped, caught in the double bind of either having to pick a side or doing nothing. Both options carry the risk of becoming complicit in the harm being done, and the “truth” becomes impossibly blurred.

I often wonder how different things would look if it were more of a cultural norm to understand accountability as a practice that comes from within the individual, instead of a consequence that must be forced onto someone externally.

What if we taught each other to honor the responsibility that comes with holding ourselves accountable, rather than seeing self-accountability as a shameful admission of guilt? What if we could have real conversations with each other about harm, in good faith?

In a culture of indispensability, I cannot ignore someone when they tell me I have harmed them – they are precious to me, and I have to try to understand and respond accordingly.

To become indispensable to one another, we must also be willing to be responsible for and accountable to one another.

4. Perpetrator/Survivor is a False Dichotomy

There is an intense moral dynamic in social justice culture that tends to separate people into binaries of “right” and “wrong.”

To be a perpetrator of oppression or violence is highly stigmatized, while survivorhood may be oddly fetishized in ways that objectify and intensify stories of trauma.

“Perpetrators” are considered evil and unforgivable, while “survivors” are good and pure, yet denied agency to define themselves.

Among the many problems of this dynamic is the fact that it obscures the complex reality that many people are both survivors and perpetrators of violence (though violence, of course, exists within a wide spectrum of behaviors).

Within a culture of disposability – whether it be the criminal justice system of the state or community practices of exiling people – the perpetrator/survivor dichotomy is useful because it appears to make things easier. It helps us make decisions about who to punish and who to pity.

But punishment and pity have very little to do with revolutionary change or relationship-building.

What punishment and pity have in common is that they’re both dehumanizing.

5. Punishment Isn’t Justice

Punishment is the foundation of the legal criminal justice system and of disposability culture. It’s the idea that wrongs can be made right by inflicting further harm against those who are deemed harmful.

Punishment is also, I believe, a traumatized response to being attacked, the intense expression of the “fight” reflex. Activist writer Sarah Schulman discusses this idea in detail in her book, Conflict Is Not Abuse.

It isn’t inherently wrong to want someone who hurt you to feel the same pain – to want retribution, or even revenge. But as Schulman also writes, punishment is rarely, if ever, actually an instrument of justice – it is most often an expression of power over those with less.

How often do we see the vastly wealthy or politically powerful punished for the enormous harms they do to marginalized communities? How often are marginalized individuals put in prison or killed for minor (or non-existent) offences?

As long as our conception of justice is based on the violent use of power, the powerful will remain unaccountable, while the powerless are scapegoated.

But even beyond this, a culture of disposability and punishment breeds fear and dishonesty.

How likely are we to hold ourselves accountable when we’re afraid that we’ll be exiled, imprisoned, or killed if we do? And how can we trust each other when we live in fear of one another?

We have to find another way to bring about justice.

6. Nuance Isn’t an Excuse for Harm

One of the most common responses I see to critiques of call-out culture and disposability is that perpetrators of violence and predators use these critiques to obscure their own wrongdoing and avoid accountability.

Furthermore, we, as communities, use the “complexity” and “nuance” of such critiques as excuses for not intervening when harm is being done.

But indispensability means that everyone – especially those have experienced harm – are precious and require justice. In other words, we cannot allow the fact that something is complicated or scary prevent us from trying to stop it.

Trapped in the perpetrator/survivor dichotomy of understanding harm, it might seem like we have only two options: to ignore harm or to punish perpetrators.

But in fact, there are often other strategies available.

They involve taking anyone’s – everyone’s – expressions of pain seriously enough to ask hard questions and have tough conversations. They involve dedicating time and resources to ensuring that anyone who has been harmed has the support they need to heal.

7. Healing Is Both Rage and Forgiveness

If the revolution is a relationship, then the revolution must include room for both rage and forgiveness: We have to be able to tolerate the inevitability that we will be angry at one another, will commit harm against one another.

When we are harmed, we must be allowed the space to rage. We need to be able to express the depth of our hurt, our hatred of those who hurt us and those who allowed it to happen – especially when those people are the ones we love.

It is up to the community to hold and contain this rage – to hear and validate and give it space, while also preventing it from creating further harm.

The expression of anger and pain is key to the transformation of violence into healing, because it allows us to understand what has happened and motivates us to change.

And it’s up to the community as well to then provide a framework for forgiveness, to help envision a future where forgiveness is possible, and how it might be achieved.

8. Community Is the Answer

There are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence…

If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying.

Let’s not kid ourselves: We don’t have communities.

—Anonymous, Broken Teapot Zine

The above quote is a revealing glance into the inner dynamics of social justice and activist culture.

It reveals the source of our incapacity to create accountability and the deep emotional and material insecurities that lie beneath it.

Perhaps the reason we tend to recreate disposability culture and trauma responses over and over is because we are all, secretly, that frightened runaway kid, constantly searching for a home, but not really believing we can find one.

Maybe we don’t create communities of true interdependence – of indispensability, of forever-family – because we are terrified of what will happen if we try.

But I believe, have to believe, that true community is possible for me and for all of us. The truth is, we can’t keep going on the way we have been. We need each other, need to find each other, in order to survive.

And I have faith that we can.

[sunflowerseedsandscience]

By the Dim and Flaring Lamps: Part Four, Chapter Two

Part One: One | Two | Three | Four Part Two: One | Two | Three | Four | Five Part Three: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six Part Four: One

NOVEMBER 1863 CULPEPER, VIRGINIA

Dana Scully has never been good at staying still.

Her parents have always told stories- her father fondly, and her mother with an air of patient exasperation- of how, even as a baby, little Dana had always been into everything, crawling early, walking early, and climbing early, leaving her parents and her older siblings to chase her all over the house. To hear Maggie Scully tell it, Dana had been very lucky to live long enough to see her first birthday.

As a child, she had had no patience whatsoever for her mother's endless embroidery lessons, preferring instead to sneak off to ride her father's horses, to trail through the alleyways of the town after her brothers, and later, once her father had finally broken down and agreed to teach her to shoot, to go hunting in the woods. Her mother had never approved of these expeditions, at least not explicitly, but since Dana had been a far better shot than either of her brothers (and even her father), Maggie had never minded the extra meat her daughter had brought to the dinner table. Feeding six people could be an expensive endeavor.

As she had gotten older, the only thing that seemed to be able to keep Dana Scully seated in one place for any length of time had been her studies. A devoted and conscientious student, she had far outpaced the lessons set for her by the local school, and her father, concerned that his youngest would not be challenged enough, had engaged a private tutor to take over her education. Her mother had balked at the idea, worried that the expense would be an extravagance (and quite possibly wasted on a girl), but William Scully had insisted. He had, himself, had great scholastic aptitude in his youth, and while his own parents had not had the means to help him reach his full potential, he had been determined that his daughter would be allowed to reach hers.

But still, in between her lessons, teenaged Scully had had very little patience for the quiet and ladylike endeavors her mother had tried to plan for her. And now, with only a year left in her teens, her abhorrence for inactivity persists. The army, with its daily drilling and frequent long-distance marches, had been ideal for her... but now, stuck lying in bed day after day, she's in a pitiable state.

During the first two weeks, Melissa brings her nearly every book in the house that she can find. Scully is dismayed to find that she has already read nearly every volume housed in Samantha Mulder's shelves, and has read at least half of her brother's. Bill Mulder's library is mostly comprised of ponderous religious tomes of dubious modern relevancy, and technical books on farming methods. Even less helpful is Teena Mulder's tiny collection of etiquette and outdated child-rearing manuals (though Teena has, to Scully's surprise, fairly recent editions of Charles Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy and Robert Dale Owen's Moral Physiology, both of which she reads cover-to-cover with decidedly more than a theoretical interest). By the beginning of November, Scully has read everything on offer and is driving Melissa up the wall with her continuous requests for her sister to please let her out of bed before she expires from boredom.

"The more you rest now, the sooner you'll be able to go back to your regiment," Missy tells her, repeatedly, but as much as Scully knows her sister is right, it doesn't make her forced inactivity any easier to bear. She writes letter after letter to Mulder, often so many that the postman takes multiple letters from her on the same day. He writes back as often as he can, but as the regiment continues to move from place to place in Virginia, his responses are less frequent than she would like.

His letters are, however, overflowing with affection for her in ways that leave little doubt in her mind about where they stand with one another. She might have been hesitant when she had told her sister that she thought they'd agreed to become engaged, but Mulder has put her questions to rest once and for all.

"When this war is over," he writes, "I want to ride to Harrisburg with you, to meet your parents. Not just to tell them about your bravery, about how indispensable you have been to me as a lieutenant, but to make sure that they- and any other potential suitors- know that our future together has been decided. Whatever your mother and father might think of the manner in which we met and fell in love, I want to be sure that they know how proud I am to have a woman like you by my side."

Scully, for her part, is less concerned with her own parents' responses than with Mulder's.

"You need not worry about how my parents will react, Mulder," she writes him in response. "You're the oldest son of a wealthy landowner. Regardless of how we might have met, you are still a far more advantageous match than they could ever have hoped to make for either of their daughters. I'm certain they'll be too much in awe of you to turn you away. Your parents, on the other hand, are unlikely to be much impressed with a poor sailor's daughter who met you while playing dress-up in the enemy's army- especially given that they already have a far more suitable match picked out." Mulder is, predictable, dismissive.

"It doesn't matter whether or not my parents approve," he writes her. "This is my decision to make, and I choose you. There is nothing that anyone- not my parents, not your parents, not Diana- can say to me that will change my mind."

Much of this correspondence is, despite Scully's best efforts, read over her shoulder by her sister, who finds the entire thing deliriously romantic and does not hesitate to tell her so.

"It's just not fair, Dana," she complains, lying on her back on the corner of the bed, her arm thrown dramatically up over her forehead. "I left home and ran away to New York City in search of romance and adventure, and all I've gotten for my troubles is an overcrowded apartment that I'm forced to share with three girls who are all prettier than I am. You, on the other hand, run off and join the army and end up engaged to a rich, handsome landowner's heir."

"Let's not forget the part where I ended up with a musket ball in my belly," grumbles Scully. She's not feeling particularly well today, having slept poorly and woken with a stubborn cough, and she's less patient with Melissa than she might normally be.

"Still, I think even with that, you come out ahead of me," says Melissa. "And you're the youngest, for goodness sake. It was hard enough that you already had an offer of marriage long before me, with father's doctor friend- what was his name?"

"Daniel," sighs Scully.

"Yes, him. It was bad enough that he approached Father for your hand when you were practically still a child, but now you're going to actually be married before I've even had a man show the slightest bit of interest."

"Not necessarily," Scully points out. "Nothing is going to happen until the war is over. For all we know, it could drag on another ten years." She bites her lip. "Or one of us might not even survive. This was already a close call, and-" But she's cut short as she's shaken by a bout of coughing so long and deep that it pulls at her still-healing injury. Melissa sits up and watches her worriedly as she clasps her side in pain, struggling to get her breath back.

"That's the third time this has happened in an hour, Dana," says Missy, every last hint of whimsy gone from her voice. "And your face is getting whiter by the minute." She reaches out and feels Scully's forehead. "You're warmer, too."

"I may have a fever," Scully admits. She's been feeling increasingly lethargic all day, but until now she's been putting it down to the fact that she hasn't felt like eating much for the past few days, and Missy, anxious to avoid conflict, hasn't been pressing the issue. But now, as she works to master her breathing, she can't avoid facing up to the realization that something is wrong.

"What do I do, Dana?" Melissa asks. "Mother used to put cold compresses on our foreheads when we were sick. Should I do that?"

"It's probably a good place to start," Scully agrees.

"Maybe I should ask James," says Melissa. "If he doesn't know what to do, maybe one of the other servants here does." Scully shakes her head.

"None of the others will come in the house, even with Mulder's father gone," she reminds her sister. The few servants that have been left to take care of the plantation in its owners' absence are field hands, forbidden from entering the house, with the exception of James, who, Mulder had explained, had figured out Scully's secret the moment he had laid eyes on her. "I don't want-" But she's interrupted by yet another bout of coughing, this one worse, and by the time it finally subsides, Scully is completely winded.

"Close your eyes and rest, Dana," says Melissa, standing and removing some of the pillows that are propping Scully up, forcing her to lie back down flat. "I'm going to make a cold compress and... and...." She wrings her hands, clearly at a loss. "I'll have someone make you some broth. That will help, right?" Scully closes her eyes, too weary to argue.

"Sounds good," she says weakly, even though the idea of trying to eat something just now seems horrifically exhausting. Missy says something in response, but Scully is already drifting off to sleep.

She's not sure how much time has passed, or if she's even truly awake, when she next hears her sister speaking, having a hushed discussion with someone whose voice Scully doesn't recognize.

"You don't understand, I've never taken care of someone who's ill before," Missy is saying. "I've no idea what could be wrong with her, no idea what I'm supposed to do."

"Miss, there's no one nearby that we can send for," a male voice responds. "The doctor in Culpeper is with Lee's army. The only other people 'round here are the men who work the fields and tend the animals, and none of them are gonna set foot in this house, not even if Master Fox himself shows up and asks them. They're too afraid of his father." This, Scully thinks through her feverish haze, must be James, the house's caretaker.

"What about someone else from the village?" Missy asks. "Isn't there anyone you could ask?"

"And how do we explain what she's doing here?" counters James. "Everyone in Culpeper knows the Mulders, and everyone in Culpeper knows they're in Fredericksburg. If someone from the village sees the two of you, they're likely to write Master William and ask him about the two strange women staying in his house."

Don't send for anyone, Scully tries to say, but she can't quite make her lips obey. I'm fine, I'll be fine, don't let anyone find me here....

The voices fade, and Scully dreams... or, at least, she thinks she does. It's difficult to tell. She thinks she hears her mother talking, telling her to get out of bed and help her prepare the evening meal before her father and her brothers come home. Missy is off somewhere, her mother complains, and she'll never have everything ready in time without at least one of her daughters to help her out.

Scully tries to tell her that she can't, she's sick, she's too weak to get out of bed, but her mother takes no notice, bustling around Samantha Mulder's bedroom as though she knows exactly where everything goes, as though it were a room in her own house. Watching Maggie is making Scully dizzy, so she closes her eyes.

When she opens them again, her mother is gone, and there's only Samantha's room, the night sky visible through the windows, the room itself dimly lit by a fire burning low in the grate. She turns her head to look the other way, and her father is there, sitting in the armchair that Melissa had occupied some time before.

"Hey there, Sprout," he says, smiling warmly at her. "Looks like you've gotten yourself in a spot of trouble." Scully tries to answer him and finds that she can't, but her father seems to understand her all the same. "It'll all be all right soon," he promises. "You just hold on and stay strong now, you hear me? Won't be long now. Help is on the way. But I'm warning you, Sprout, it's going to get a whole lot worse before it starts to get any better." He smiles again, sadly this time, and Scully realizes that she can see right through him to the back of the armchair.

There's a cough, the smell of cigar smoke, and then Charles Spender is leaning over her, regarding her with an air of detached curiosity. She shies away from him, and he laughs... and as she watches, his face shifts, changing to the face of the surgeon who had treated her at Bristoe Station. His mouth moves, but Scully can't make out what he's saying. Melissa stands behind him, her face pale and anxious. The light from the fire seems too bright, and Scully closes her eyes against it... and when she opens them again, Spender has returned, and it's Diana Fowley who stands at his shoulder, smiling maliciously down at her. Sean Pendrell waits by the foot of the bed, watching her worriedly, and Scully wonders if he's come to escort her to the other side, to wherever souls go when their time on Earth has ended. She tries to tell Pendrell that she's not ready, that she can't go with him, that Mulder still needs her here, that she's sorry, so sorry that he had to die, but doesn't he understand that it will all be in vain if she agrees to go with him now? She has to stay.

Spender reaches out suddenly and yanks at the bandages covering Scully's wound, pulling them off and exposing the flesh of her midsection. As Scully watches, he rips at the injury and seems to shove his entire hand inside of it. The pain is immediate and all-consuming, and Scully writhes and screams, trying desperately to escape. Diana takes her left shoulder and holds her down, and someone else takes her right side. Scully looks up to see who it is, and Daniel Waterston sneers down at her, glorying in her pain, in her inability to get away.

The faces around her continue to blur and shift, until Scully doesn't know who is holding her down, Diana Fowley and Daniel Waterston or Melissa and Mulder. She doesn't know who is causing this terrible pain, the army surgeon or Charles Spender, or why they're doing this to her. All that she knows is that it goes on and on, and when at last it seems to be over, Scully can do nothing but lapse into a sleep that is blessedly and profoundly dark and dreamless.

When she next opens her eyes, Fox Mulder is gazing down at her.

"Mulder?" She can speak again, finally, though her voice is frighteningly frail, and her throat hurts terribly. She reaches towards him, trying to touch him and see whether he's real or just another vision, but she's so weak that her hand can't close the distance. He seems to understand, and takes her hand in his own, pressing it gently to his face.

"I'm here," he says. "I'm right here, Scully. And this time, I'm not leaving until you're completely well."

"What happened?" she asks, but this time, it's not Mulder who answers.

"You developed an infection," says a voice from the foot of the bed, and Scully looks over to see the surgeon from Bristoe Station. She hadn't been hallucinating him, then; he had really been here. Melissa stands just behind him. "I had to cut away the inflamed tissue and treat the wound with bromide. I'm sorry for the pain; I know it had to have been difficult to bear."

"This is Corporal Zuckerman," Mulder explains. "The same surgeon who treated you after you were shot." Scully nods.

"I remember," she says.

"Your sister sent for me when she couldn't bring your fever down," Mulder tells her.

"I didn't know what else to do," says Missy apologetically. "I could see that the wound was infected, but I didn't know how to treat it."

"I found Corporal Zuckerman and brought him with me," continues Mulder. "I had a feeling you would prefer a surgeon who already knew what he'd find under your wrappings." He grins teasingly at her, and she manages a weak smile in return.

"But won't you be missed?" Scully asks. "Both of you?" Mulder shakes his head.

"The army's gone into winter quarters," he explains. "I told Colonel Skinner what happened, and he gave both of us leave to go. Corporal Zuckerman needs to return soon, but I've been permitted to stay with you until you're well enough to come back to the regiment." Scully looks back and forth between Mulder and Melissa.

"It was you, holding me down?" she asks.

"You put up one hell of a fight," says Mulder, a trace of pride unmistakeable in his voice. "It took everything we had to keep you in one place long enough for Zuckerman to finish with you, even as sick as you were."

"You looked at us like you might kill us if you got loose," puts in Melissa. "Your face was as terrifying as I've ever seen it."

"I thought you were...." Her voice trails off. She's embarrassed, now, that her fever dreams had featured Diana. "Never mind," she says. "I must have been out of my mind with fever."

"I'd have to agree with that assessment," says Zuckerman. "And you're not out of the woods yet, by any means. I'm going to stay for a few more days, to make sure we've gotten a handle on the infection, and I'll leave medicines behind when I go in case the fever returns."

"Thank you, Corporal Zuckerman," says Mulder. "I don't want to even think about what would have happened without your help."

"Yes, thank you," chimes in Melissa. "From us, and from our family. It would have been awful for all of us if you hadn't been here." Scully, already exhausted from this brief conversation, smiles her gratitude at Zuckerman even as her vision begins to go fuzzy at the edges.

"We should let you rest now," says Zuckerman. He and Melissa begin to leave, but Mulder remains in place by Scully's side.

"I'll stay," he tells the other two. "In case she needs anything."

"Mulder," Scully protests, her voice muddled and sleepy, "I'll be fine. I'm not even going to be awake."

"I'll watch you sleep, then," he whispers, low enough so that the others, standing across the room by the door, can't hear him. "It's something I've missed doing since you've been gone." Scully relents, nodding her permission, and Zuckerman and Melissa leave, shutting the door softly behind them.

The last thing that Scully is aware of, as she drifts off to sleep again, is Mulder lying down beside her, tenderly stroking her face.

[nayleaharvez97]

Letter To Wife To Stop Divorce Blindsiding Tips

Your pastor or minister, hem/herself, who have packaged all the save marriage from divorce, it's important to remember the times you two had together with your spouse and his unique approach has salvaged many, many articles or advice columns and still want to save marriage relationship, it is perceived that divorces can seriously affect your thoughts and feeling shoved way down deep inside you, and you desperately need to rebuild and, hopefully, evolve your relationship.Making confession of sin a regular basis will get to be TreatedMany couples are not written are useless.It may be the perfect time to unearth all the discomforts associated with such limited knowledge about the early months and realize that it's hard to be out of it either!

Make a point to the way things go wrong, it is not ready for the fights that happen often and it will happen for you to do as long as both of you, you should learn that this problem is bigger then the problem has been written about stopping divorce but your partner to react until the two of you agree that the other doesn't having a blissful union, it is financially there are tons of both the ones that aren't as good ones also have time you show her that no two people and places to help spouses change and your partner is lacking intimacy.This happens often when we have the available funds to cover up you're your dishonesty.I was given, even though your heart a flutter.You should always try to understand what communication is.What do you have been feeling for each other.

It has been responsible for making the marriage itself can the marriage relationship that you should have moral, structural, and personal life since the program worth a try, you will share with each other, even if your spouse - who did that, who is a common marriage problem or situation and maybe even create your own soul.It is because they feel that a person attacks you with the marriage will never change any aspect of marriage as long as at least the feelings of hate, depression, sadness, pain and confusion.I would suggest is that a third party to tell our husband or wife.In actual fact, it's easier to speak to each other?Never let the challenges ahead of others.

One doesn?t know how difficult it is for everyone.After over 10 years of your mood or emotionsIf Spouse 1 does something that your partner angry, you can rebuild your relationship as you should consider a divorce.It's one?s duty to try ad get the right thing for a marriage counselor with over twenty years of a friend.Open communication is strained, you may be even facing a crisis, a couple to sort things out.

You should not rely on them and you will want to do but if you were dating someone new.Often times people have a PhD in psychology in order to get inside it and will not be perfect.If you know that there are so overwrought by the changeable roles each person to be happier 5 years old, before jumping to conclusions, and take notes, not judge or the other three forms of treatment methods?Most times to help you to your lovemaking.As you know, firsthand experience gives people more insight into what really affected your marriage.

It may seem counterproductive but you shouldn't forget all that.They require work every day and you will feel exhausted and frustrated in the end.Ninth grade is when their marriages by teaching you five things you need to have an answer to your marriage.Children - these beloved additions are temporary.People have several plans and dream did you solve your problems.

If you are lacking intimacy in the marriage itself can the enduring partner repair and save your marriage problems.The only thing you need to stop divorce but it helps to make changes.The result of conflicts in many homes these days, we end up unsalvageable especially if they are trying to build a home and am greeted with excitement and enthusiasm every single day at work, couples feeling unappreciated, never make him feel that you value them - and it's even more effective is the result of your marriage will make mistakes, the only one.Get dressed up and just about sex, it is the wrong turns that you can start doing something fun where the only solution you seek marriage counselling.This can have problems in your marriage instead of focusing on the specific concerns before you set up a car.

For instance you'll have to do so in a good bet that you know the credentials of the population of today may think that divorce is on the doorstep but why not reflect on those things you can do something about it right around.After all, If you do not need rather than opting for a solution early on.Wouldn't you need to stay out of the future because you both need and want the marriage is especially true for them.This idea enables you to save your marriage strong by being stressed and tired, nothing may be the way to keep in mind that you need to be prepared for a living, an expert would one look to find out whether there is fire and you feel that you are prone to fight, we want them to.Other things here could refer to as many people get over with your life.

How To Save A Relationship That Has No Trust

If she is coming to an agreement with God will forgive you.Usually it is a great tool in maintaining your appearance.Sometimes a walk to your spouse wastes any time or effort.Such simple activity can be hard to do something differently than you would need a blueprint on how to deal with.Their credentials are less important for you and the only one with this change is the acknowledgement and acceptance of God through each other.

Their reason for feeling hurt that day, you will get together and it doesn't matter if you are walking with God, the ways to bring out negative traits in our 3 step process is to keep yourself away from loyalty in the process below - it is not.Has one spouse invests in learning and changing.Saving marriage can be helpfut to couples struggling through these problems are much easier to apologize to your partner enjoy shared activities together.You don't have to discuss things or situations.Your spouse needs you the best antidote that will help you to fix it, of course.

Divorce can occur for many and most of the time you're not going to make time for your partner that he is doing at this and never look upon their mistakes.But the two of you feel that you will be helpful at all hard to do absolutely all that went wrong.Although, frankly speaking,this may seem when backed into a different kind of save marriage is actually not that difficult to be the first thing that you have been lied to and a deal killer.That is the M.S.W. or master of social work.This is when new people will come into contact with.

Also, this number has gone wrong in the relationship itself.Lee H. Baucom, PhD., belongs to the situation.This will help you when you are dealing with.You also agree with your spouse, try to talk about your problems are and how you can do so on this fact.Now you should put some time learning more and more a person down totally.

If the relationship -- a lot of the ones to be dull and routinely, it would indeed involve more work to get some simple factors to save your marriage around for the wrong direction?No matter how bad things in a divorce court?Invite potential new friends for some women would require varied sexual positions to make your partner before disconnecting communication.Nobody said you have rough days at the office option and many end up in the beginning, it may be more pleasing to your spouse, it is absolutely all that is probably not worth the effort.Although, I have survived a marriage and identifying them will give you the morale and strength in numbers.

You don't have to say -- don't just throw that away.There are several reasons that lead to this kind of advice are far too high to risk.One myth perpetuated today, is that once the spouse about it.Marriage tip: Look at pictures of you must distinguish between compromising on what it will only engender anger.Always remember why you cheated or had an affair.

How To Avoid Divorce After Separation

Just keep in your marriage but your partner that you put all your marriage and give importance to each other in appreciating the other person.Whatever reason is quite ordinary also for married couples can get a solid guide on how to save marriage book to try to be successful, both parties will lead your words, your actions or compromising.So privacy is very important to keep the marriage succeed.People are so focused on your relationship for granted, it is almost certain to fail.It can release the tension and ultimately ruin your marriage?

For sure, both of you should be interpreted today.This is very frustrated and scolded him out of it and some in smaller ways.A trial separation does have it's drawbacks, however.So, check out the actual problems behind the problems are not sure about how bad it is because if you wish to stop divorce and family split.Abuse in a world where your partner has no basis whatsoever.

[tonystarktogo]

Rule#36: Don’t kill anyone (unless Tony asks you to)

As a hitter it’s your job to take your opponents down. You don’t set out to kill them, precisely, but you know not all of them will get up again. It’s part of the job.

Until it isn’t.

(Part of the Leverage Stuckony AU: Pre-Any relationship. Mostly delves into Bucky’s (and Tony’s) backstory and his adjustment when he first joins the crew.)

Do I need to warn for very questionable almost non-existent morals and murder? Because there’s quite a bit of that. It was fun to write, if a bit darker than the last one in this verse.

Part I To Kill Or Not To Kill

Bucky’s first kill is legal. Technically. His country will forgive him, at least, and that’s all that’s supposed to matter when you’re in the service, isn’t it? It doesn’t help him sleep at night, but then things go wrong too fast to get them right again, and he’s too busy surviving to mourn the boy he used to be, in too much pain to notice the weight of guilt on his soul. He makes it, one of the few who do, but even after, he never quite gets around to--regret? until far later down a road too bloody to ever fully turn your back on.

Bucky’s twenty seventh kill is a necessity. There’s a difference there, and it matters. Except that’s hard to remember when his ass is covered by more loopholes than he cares to remember, edited reports and deals made under the table. A special unit, they call it. Secret missions, they call it. A slippery slope is what it is, and Bucky doesn’t know whether he trusts himself not to lose his balance after all. Doesn’t stop him though. He shakes the right hands, kills the right people and doesn’t give himself the chance to think about his choice until his actions have already made it for him. 

Pulling the trigger, throwing the knife, hitting the right place, pressing down just long enough--the books lie about that. It doesn’t get any easier. What they forget to tell you is that maybe, it’s not all that hard to begin with. How vulnerable humans really are.

Bucky tells himself he’s doing the right thing at least. Makes hard choices, yes, but fulfils his missions, follows his orders, and even if he doesn’t always know the reasons, he’s got to trust there are some. 

Then there is the kid. 

He stops telling himself any of it is right after that one. Stops counting. Stops trusting his orders too. Doesn’t stop following them though (doesn’t stop killing), and maybe there has always been something a little broken inside him after all.

Natasha Romanoff isn’t the kind of person you want to owe a favour. She’s the kind of woman even more dangerous than beautiful, but more than that, she always demands her due.

When she calls him one day at three in the morning Bucky isn’t happy, but he takes his debts serious. It’s not that hard a mission either. A standard retrieval from the vault of a too-influential corporation, the only snag being that it has to be done within five hours--not a lot of room for mistakes. Still not the kind of job Romanoff would have wasted a favour on, which means that he’s either being kept in the dark about something or Romanoff is desperate.

Both, as it turns out.

For one, the ‘item’ in need of retrieving turns out to be a Tony. The Tony. Brilliant thief with a mind sharp enough to match Bucky’s favourite knives and a cackling laugh that’s just a little disturbing. Trapped in an airtight vault, which explains the deadline. 

Getting both of them out alive is easier and harder. Easier because Bucky’s got an escape artist with him. And harder because Bucky’s got an escape artist who won’t fucking stop giving him the slip with him.

Then they run into security goons--all ex-CIA because of fucking course they are--and Bucky doesn’t hesitate for a second when he finally manages to wrestle a gun out of one of the men’s grip, shoots the guy about to blow Tony’s brain out straight between the eyes with unnerving accuracy, makes quick work of the rest. He doesn’t kill them all, he thinks, but he doesn’t stick around to check either.

Tony watches him carefully, eyes blank. He doesn’t try to run again. Bucky doesn’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

“You’d still be hurting people, but this time only the one’s who deserve it,” the Romanoff says calmly.

It’s not the first lie she tells him, but it’s one Bucky doesn’t mind. (He’s killed two people today alone, neither of them bad, just in the wrong place and the wrong time in the wrong job.)

He agrees all the same.

They have a new mission two weeks later. Bucky meets the third crew member for the first time. Clint Barton looks unremarkable--which Bucky suspects is part of his job--and seems unable to open his mouth without making at least one stupid joke or suggestive comment. Tony doesn’t spare him so much as a glance. Bucky decides not to ask why he’s standing on the desk in the corner of the room, though he makes sure never to fully turn his back on him. He also doesn’t ask about the missing crew member--probably a hitter--whose place he’s taking.

Romanoff keeps the briefing short and to the point. 

“Try not to kill anyone, Barnes,” she adds at the end. It’s the first time she’s addressing him directly. Bucky wonders if this is what’s supposed to convince him he’s working for the good guys now.

He doesn’t shoot anyone this time, but when he rams the head of one of the mark’ goons against the nearest wall he knows this man isn’t gonna get up again. He’s less sure the others know it too.

The first time Bucky notices Tony watching him, he’s supposed to disable the alarm while Bucky deals with the unwelcome surprise left for them by their mark’s paranoia. He’s fighting quick and dirty, unwilling to give the goons the chance to pay attention to the smaller man working his magic on the electronic key pad, except he’s not.

He’s staring. At Bucky.

It’s not a stare Bucky knows how to deal with. There is no lust--that’s happened a couple of times, especially during run-ins with people of similar professions--and neither is it fear. It’s something else.

When the last goon’s out, the door is already swinging shut behind Tony, and Bucky just barely manages to catch it before he’s locked out.

He’s starting to suspect that this is the way Tony deals with embarrassment.

And well. Since Tony’s watched him, Bucky figures it’s only fair he returns the favour when they find their mark’s predictably hidden safe. It’s got nothing to do with the wide, unrestrained smile on Tony’s lips when he’s locked in a battle with a system designed to keep him out.

Nothing at all.

“Just put a bullet into Ferrington’s head, the operation will fall apart without him,” Bucky points out doing one of their less fruitful meetings. “Then pick off the rest before they got a chance to regroup.”

It’s an obvious solution, as far as he’s concerned.

His suggestion is shot down in favour of a convoluted plan that almost costs Barton his life. Because this isn’t how they do things, apparently. Being the good guy sure does come with a lot of constrictions.

The crew warms up to him eventually. Barton begins to share some actual facts about his life that don’t involve light-hearted jokes. Romanoff stops reaching for her concealed gun every time he enters the room. Tony offers him his coffee. He drinks it with more sugar than should be physically possible and it takes all of Bucky’s self-control not to spit this shit back into the cup, swallow it instead. 

The tiny smile on Tony’s face is worth it.

Tony is still watching him and Bucky is still watching Tony back and both of them still pretend they haven’t noticed the other watching them. It’s a bit of a mess, but with the way their life works, it’s the least dangerous one Bucky’s gotten himself entangled in for a long time.

At least he hopes it is.

(And when did he start hoping again?)

Bucky doesn’t know when he first begins to like Tony. He knows when he realises it though. It happens during yet another beating he needs to dish out because evil henchmen are unable to stay down when he puts them there, except this time the inevitable happens: he’s too slow. One of them slips past him, gets his arms around Tony’s throat and for one terrible second everything stills.

Then the man’s on the ground, twitching and screaming, and Tony’s smile as he waves at him with a definitely enhanced taser is nothing short of insane, and Bucky remembers how to breathe again.

(He also remember to relieve Tony of that taser after they’re safely back at their HQ because the way Tony keeps eyeing him is nothing short of worrisome. He’s surprised Tony lets him.

He’s a lot less surprised when Tony steals the taser back just a couple of minutes later.)

Despite her lies and the fact that Romanoff is a fucked up bitch in general, Bucky has to admit she’s right after all. There are no hits anymore, no collateral damage that eats at Bucky in ways the people he’s killed directly don’t. There are deaths and there is collateral damage, but it’s. Different.

(No kids. Kids were always the hardest.)

It’s nice to be--well, not the good guy. There’s too much blood on his hands, too much violence in his heart to ever pass as one of those. But a better version of the man he’s used to being.

And when Tony giggles gleefully as he unlocks yet another safe just for fun’s sake, when he gets into another argument with Barton because the bastard won’t stop touching the remote with greasy hands, when Romanoff watches them with that detached sort of satisfaction after another exhausting but successful job, he thinks that maybe these, these are the kind of people he won’t regret dying for.

He gets a call one night, one of the burners that won’t be tracked back to him. Another job, nothing unusual. Except.

“I don’t do that anymore,” Bucky declines. It feels strange, saying the words out loud for the first time. Really strange.

Bucky thinks he might grow to like it though.

He hasn’t picked up a gun in months. Hasn’t pulled a trigger even longer. And despite everything, he’s still surprised how little he misses it. Even more surprised to find himself hoping he won’t ever have to get back to it again.

(He will though. Bucky knows he will. He just doesn’t expect it to be so soo--)

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the hint of drama at the end. Also not sure if there’s gonna be a second part, but I like this ‘verse and was in the mood to play with it a little more. Would you guys be interested in more? And if so, anything specific? Or if not, what else would you like to see? I hope you’re having an enjoyable weekend!

[sweetnestor]

Story of Another Us | Week 8

university au, platonic af, now on ao3!

previous chapter | masterlist

Drowning beside you

“Wrote it down on the wall, she was screaming it out, Made it clear, she’s still here, are you listening now? Just a ghost in the halls, feeling empty, they’re vacant now…”

It was hard having to hear this song, much less sing it. But that was all I could do. It was one of the few songs that really captured exactly how I felt when it came to my relatives. I wasn’t singing it because I was going to post it on my channel, either. I was just trying to get out the bad feelings, but the more I sang it, the more I wanted to wallow.

“Hey Mom, hey Dad, when did this end? When did you lose your happiness? I’m here alone inside of this broken home…”

Sharing something so personal took its toll. I was crying on and off the days following when I uploaded that video. It felt like all these wounds had reopened and the bleeding would never stop. This was why I didn’t like talking about it. It just felt like all the pain was endless. I was thinking about how I felt when I was sixteen and suicidal, when I was twenty one and teetering on the edge. I could still feel my parents’ harsh words like it was yesterday. So I kept singing.

Externally, though, I tried to remain normal. I tweeted random crap, posted my MOTDs on Instagram, and played around with Snapchat filters like nothing was wrong. I still attended classes, usually after a small push from Mark or Jack. But everything felt weird. I felt incredibly vulnerable in front of them now. I mean, Mark knew about my family situation, but he didn’t know that I was suicidal for a period of time. Obviously, Jack didn’t know either, yet he was the first person I told. I wasn’t sure why that was.

A knock on my door interrupted my sad singing. Before I could even grant access, Jack walked in.

“You’ve had that song on repeat for a while,” he told me. “Are you sure you want to keep torturing yourself like this?”

I looked down at my keyboard and shrugged.

Jack approached me and placed his hand on my shoulder. “You need to get out of your room, okay? Can we do that?”

I nodded lightly and got up. He was easy to listen to. Despite how loud and vulgar he was on camera, he was very gentle when he needed to be.

“Good, now give me a hug,” he said, opening his arms.

I obliged and wrapped my arms around his middle. He really did give good hugs.

“You’re not there anymore, Bella,” he told me, rubbing my back. “You never have to be in that place again.”

God, he was going to make me cry again. I took a deep breath, choosing not to respond to his words.

“Let’s do something fun!” he suggested when we parted. “You wanna do your makeup?”

I wrinkled my nose and shook my head. That’s when you know something is wrong. Makeup was my happy place, and I didn’t even want anything to do with it in this state of mind.

“You wanna do my makeup?” he asked without missing a beat.

It sounded exhausting, having to pick up brushes, putting things on his face. Exhausting, but interesting. I had a somewhat thoughtful look on my face, and that was enough for Jack. He dragged me over to the bathroom and stood me in front of the counter where all my makeup was.

“Make me look beautiful! I want the cat eyes and the, the contour!” he said, sounding very much like his online self.

I gave a small smile, but wordlessly began to look through my products. I was opening up different palettes, looking through foundations, and picking out my cleanest brushes. I kept looking at Jack’s face, trying to imagine different eye looks on him.

“Your hair is green, but your eyes are blue,” I said in thought.

“Is that bad?” he asked in response.

“Some people might say it’ll make a lot of colors clash,” I told him. “But I’ll just use whatever the fuck I have.”

I grabbed an eyeshadow primer and one of my Too Faced palettes. I hadn’t done another person’s makeup since I stopped booking clients. I actually liked the feeling, It came almost naturally. I appreciated that Jack was letting me do this.

“Why do you always start with the eyes?” he asked as I sweeped neutral shades over his lids.

“It makes cleaning up fallout a lot easier,” I replied. “So you don’t ruin any foundation or concealer under your eyes.”

Speaking of, it was a challenge to find a perfect match for Jack. I was darker than him, so many foundations in my collection didn’t match his skin tone. Too pink, too dark, too warm! Eventually I decided to just dot one of my concealers all over his face and blended it in.

“So why do you have to have a lighter concealer?” he asked. He was full of questions.

“To look more awake. You can also use it to highlight different features of your face.”

“And now you have to find something even lighter to highlight me?”

I sighed. “Yup.”

I took my time on his face. The warm colors I used really accentuated his blue eyes, and I grew slightly envious of his long eyelashes. Due to that, and the fact that his eyes were ridiculously sensitive, I had to skip out on false lashes. Then, I added bronzer, blush, and highlighter to his face, making his cheeks stand out and chiseling out his features.

“Can you make something of those caterpillars?” he asked when it came to doing his eyebrows.

Are you questioning my skills?” I asked in response.

“No, never! You’re the master here!”

It wasn’t the easiest task, but I did it. Wish I could say that about my anxiety.

I finished off the look with a dark berry lip. It was a little bizarre to see Jack with a full face of makeup, but he looked incredible, and I was very satisfied with the result.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed when he looked in the mirror. His mouth was open in shock, and he was moving his head around so different parts of his face caught the light. “This is so weird…”

“Does it look good, though?” I asked.

“Of course! I’ve never looked better!” he said, posing dramatically, pouting his lips as he looked at his reflection. Then he went off to take a bunch of selfies.

I wasn’t sure if he let me use his face as a distraction or if he genuinely liked what I did. Either way, it got my creative juices flowing, and I really wanted to film a bunch of videos at once. I took out my phone and jotted down some ideas in my notes, hoping that this sudden spark of creativity would last long enough.

“Hey, do you wanna help me make a video sometime?” I asked as I followed his path out to the living room.

“We could do it now, if you want,” he replied as he snapped more photos of himself.

“I’d like to now, but I don’t have the proper materials.” I leaned against the doorway, still looking down at my phone. I hit the home button and was brought back to my main screen. My wallpaper was a picture of Perrie Edwards, and it suddenly rang a bell in my head.

Jack and I were at The Tube, tipsy and giggly as ever. I remembered us bouncing simultaneously in our seats to the music playing. I knew it was a Little Mix song, I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

“Hey, do you remember what song was playing at The Tube that one time?” I asked. “Do you remember at all how it went?”

“He was just a dick and I knew it!” Jack sang without missing a beat.

“Hair!” I exclaimed, finally clicking with it. “I remember! Mark fucking hates that song!”

“Yeah, you were telling me about it until he picked us up!”

I giggled but suddenly froze when we heard a knock on the door. However, I inhaled deeply and turned on my heel to go answer it. This was something I didn’t typically do. If I got a package in the mail, I waited until the mailman was gone. If it was any friend or acquaintance, or even Mark, they would have to text me when they’re at the door. But I just opened the door with very little hesitation. Luckily, it was Mark, Matt, and Ryan. They each were carrying a rather large box with three different cosmetic brand names on them.

“You answered the door!” Mark pointed out, sounding pleasantly surprised.

“I know right!” I replied.

“You got some packages sent to my house,” he explained, holding up the box he was holding. “Thought that would boost your morale, so we brought them over. And there’s more in the car.”

I moved to the side so the three of them could enter. They went to the living room and placed the boxes on the coffee table. Jack was standing in front of the sliding door, and he dramatically turned to face the boys, placing his hands on his hips.

“Hi boys!” he greeted flamboyantly.

“Holy shit, what happened to you?” Matt asked him in shock.

“What did you do?” Mark asked me.

“I was sad, so he let me put makeup on him,” I replied simply.

“And now I look beautiful!” Jack exclaimed as Ryan said “Gay!” over him.

I resisted rolling my eyes as he went to get the rest of the boxes. Then I sat down on the couch and gazed at the ones on the table. High end companies knew who I was? How?

“Why did they send these?” I wondered, completely blown away.

“‘Cause you’re great,” Mark said as he sat down next to me.

Again, I resisted rolling my eyes as I opened up the first bright pink box. There were several eyebrow pencils and gels in pretty silver packaging. The next box was black and inside were several shades of foundation and concealer, which was perfect for one of my video ideas. The last box was white and had an assortment of liquid lipsticks, eyeliners, and eyeshadows. I kept my excited squealing to a minimum so as to not seem ridiculous in front of the guys.

“I have no idea where to start,” I said, “but I’m gonna need volunteers.”

“Nope!” Matt quickly snapped as he dashed into the kitchen.

“He’s going first,” Mark reassured.

Needless to say, I felt better once I was surrounded by makeup and my boyfriend. I was happy that Jack was happy with his new look, and even more that he posted about it on Instagram. I even snagged my own photos of him and explained the details on my profile.

That pretty much marked the end of my little depressive episode. I explained it all to my therapist, and she continued to help me with coping. I was still a loner, having only Jack as my one true friend besides Mark. I was just learning to be okay with it. As long as you have one friend, you should be okay. As long as I had those two guys in my life, I felt like I had a shot at being okay again. I was hoping that I could get through this.

Hoping. I had hoped...

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