#the storm as a poetic symbol

[g-h-o-s-t-2000]

The lost paradise and the last word Where will you find the truth?

[ziracona]

Do gotta hand it to FO4; there’s something very poetic about The Railroad, a group taking its name from a forbearer that also at great risk smuggled slaves to freedom, made up of this small, struggling, regularly brutally purged, yet defiantly resilient group of civilians and liberated slaves, during the course of the game, operating and living out of a little church of historical significance, a symbol of freedom in its own right, living out of the crypts beneath it, among the bodies and the graves.

[urlovebrini]

arranged marriage with ayato

⋆❀ — includes: ayato x fem! reader

⋆❀ — content: arranged marriage, kokomi's little sister! reader, angst, hurt/comfort, ayato is rude, ayato is bad at feelings, thoma is a sweetheart, traditions and rules, high expectations, conflict, fluff at the end, lots of water allegories, maybe a little to poetic, sfw

⋆❀ — a/n: hello everyone long time not seen, but i am back and will be writing more here! so i always love arranged marriages more if they are traditional, i try to investigate the use of japanese words the best i can but if i make a mistake feel free to correct me.

⋆❀ — arranged marries series: alhaitham | tartaglia | diluc

⋆❀˖°·࿐ ࿔˚ ayato

the strong sound of the rain lets you clear your mind and emotions a little, and even it makes you feel comfortable, it’s like the weather has decided to match your emotions, so you walk, walk to the middle of the storm, walk in the heavy rain trying to watch away all the feelings and emotions, trying to watch them and leave them behind, leave them behind as are you now leaving this house, this life, and this marriage. 

the arranged marriage with the head of the yashiro commission, kamisato ayato, was one of a show, a show of peace, a show of unity and a new beginning of relations between inazuma and ekanomiya, a marriage between one of the sangonomiya clan and one of the sanbugyou, to consolidate the peace between the two new lands, in this way, you took the responsibility, your big sister kokomi had always shouldered the heavy responsibilities alone if you could help her in something you would do, so you accepted and travelled to inazuma and married commissioner kamisato ayato, and you promised to your sister that you will be fine, in reality, you believed that you will be fine, you wanted this to work out. and maybe you were being naive, or maybe you are just weak but now you are walking in a storm hopping to get away, and as you walk you try to leave all the memories behind.

the day of the wedding was wrapped in expectation and solemnity, the gardens of the kamisato state were decorated with flowers and symbols that represent the honour of the union of ekanomiya and inazuma. the ceremony was simple and formal it was what it had to be. you remember your first big impression of ayato, cordial, charismatic, you could say charming, so you smiled, thinking that this could work better than you first thought. but when the ceremony ends and the night comes is a shift of reality, his attitude distant and cold, and you feel a gap between the two, but you try to understand.

the night came and your mind went to the room, you were nervous but you thought it would be a good chance to talk without people, get to know each other a little more, and maybe begin a friendship in the same way. so when the housekeeper of the kamisato clan guides you through hallways, surprise and confusion fill your thoughts as you take notice that your room is located apart from the main rooms. you didn't want to overthink things, but a sense of isolation starts to feel in your chest.

days passed, but the feeling grew bigger, you felt lost, but trying to take control you started to explore the new house, you were surrounded by strangers but that was a thing you thought you could change. and in the reflection of your thoughts you came to realise some things, one, the kamisato clan is always busy, the servants, ayaka, thoma and ayato are always working, two, ayato is keeping his distance from you, three, even if you are now a kamisato, you don't know what are you role or work in this house. 

you were in limbo, with a clear role or purpose in your new life, you are the kamisato ojousama, but is only in word, in reality, it is almost like you are an object a decoration, just a thing that doesn't even have a purpose and is just there. 

time goes by, and the rain gets heavier as the short memories started, you really never had a place here, it was clear since that afternoon that you walked into the office of your husband with nervousness and determination, and you really tried to integrate yourself in the kamisato clan.

“shujinsama” your voice is timid, his gaze rested on you, and although his expression was serene, you could see the trace of fatigue in his eyes. “yes, tsuma?” even in his soft voice, you could feel the distant formality that has characterized his interaction with you. his focus went back to the papers in front of him as you started to talk “i would like to help in the next event, maybe i could be in charge or something, or help in…” your voice stops as ayato eyes rest shortly on you and get back to his papers “is not necessary, all the events are managed fine by the kamisato clan, you don't need to worry about that things”

his voice was calm but your chest hurt with his words, even with that you tried again “i really wish to help in some capacity and be more involved” you don't know why but at that moment a tear slid down your face. 

silence fell between the two, as your tears slowly fell. ayato watched you, and for a moment, you saw a shadow of something beyond his facade of formality. but in the blink of an eye, his expression hardened again “ayaka is the one in charge, you are not needed” that was the first time you cried for his words.

you remember how thoma found you crying, not noticing his presence in your room as he brought you some tea, he was warm, and his words were warm, but you knew that he had a role, and you never would want to tear him from his position in the clan, so even there you were alone. and even if you are torn inside, you tried to believe in his words, in that it was only a question of time. 

for some time you tried to convince yourself that you would find a hold in this place, but is like destiny was laughing in your face, that was today, maybe yesterday, here all things have protocols, and without guidance, is difficult to not make errors. the last thing you remember before just taking a bag and getting out, was the cold eyes and cold words of ayato “your mistakes shows your negligence” you tried to control yourself, now your place “it was involuntary, i was just trying too…” but his worlds felt like knives it was confusing but you remember he saying things about responsibility, about your place, about you need to show your worth

so you try to get out, you come to a realization, even if you share the family name, you are not part of his family, even if you have taken his last name you are not part of the clan and you will never be, even if you are now a kamisato in law or paper, you realize that is not enough, there is a wall, the rain falls and in a strange way, the coldness and harshness recomforts you, without a plan you are walking away. 

"what do you think you are doing" a voice stops you, clear and loud, even in the middle of the storm, his voice is a bigger tempest to come, you can find more words, but you don't want to fight more, you never were a warrior, you never consider yourself strong and you don't want to be "going away". his voice is closer like a hurricane going your way "i ask again, what do you think you are doing?" you are in the eye of the storm "going away!, ayato i can take it anymore, i can't support a minute more” you are not looking at him, but hi looking at you his voice strong like always "and you think escaping is a solution? escaping your responsibilities here?"

your tears flow with the rain, the fear, the pain, the sadness and the desesperación flow inside you like a wave of emotions that they drag more and more into the sea, and all you can feel are those negative emotions, hoping to be washed away on a shore. 

the image of you can escape ayato eyes, his eyes fixed on you watching you, but in reality, seeing you for the first time. he sees you crumble, the intensity of your crying is even stronger than the rain, all the emotions in the wave that drags you more and more inside the sea drowning you, and you can't breath, all the weight of your emotions dragging you down. as more tears fall from your eyes, ayato sees how your breath runs out of air, your breathing more agitated and difficult. almost like you are drowning. he sees how thoma gets to you, face full of worry "breathe slowly, here with me..."

ayato takes his distance but doesn't leave, his eyes fixed on your trembling body, your reaction taking a toll on him, you can feel his gaze, his eyes, and you can feel him coming to you"i am sorry" "never have the intention to take you to this point, i… i should have managed things in a different way” but you feel your mind foggy like its an illusion, the rain pours strong over you, and your heart pours inside of you. 

you don't remember at what moment, you are taken inside the house, you don't remember at what moment you enter the bath, but now you are here surrounded by warm water and vapour, pleasant scents of lavender and rose, the room is lith in dim light, and the sound of rain continues outside.

and then the door opens, his eyes fall on you surrounded by water and spume, his eyes observe you, seeing you, he gets close, with slow and measured movements, ayato kneels next to the bathtub, is all silence only the rain until his voice breaks the silence “i have been a stupid fool, i have been also a despicable man, i made things difficult to you, and i have made you cry” his eyes fixated in you “i know apologies are not enough, but i will say sorry, and you have the right of not trusting in me, but seeing you cry like that… i don't want to make cry anymore” 

lost for words you look at him trying to form a sentence but the only thing you can say is “thanks” ayato smiles at you, and it seems like a real smile “i know I've made mistakes, that i have hurt you, and sorry is not enough, but if you are willing to give me a chance, to amend, i will change, i promise you will not longer feel trapped or unhappy”

you can only nod, this is all you wanted an opportunity, a chance, an open door, ayato hand travels slowly to your check, caressing your face, and it feels warmer than the water, his eyes are soft, his smile is soft, and he rolls up his sleeves “can i?” you nod even if you don't understand his hands travel to your hair and he starts to wash it  “ayato?” your voice is soft and he smiles to you “i promise i will make the things right”

⋆❀ — a/n: it was really a long time since i wrote something creative, but i am here and i will try to stay active and post constantly. really struggled with the start and trying to not make this a bible, hope that you enjoy it a little, maybe if it is received well i can make a long version for ao3, i like the idea of a young kokomi sister. like always commissions and suggestions are open, if you want to be tagged just tell me and be my guest, love you all have a nice day

⋆❀ — lovelies tags: @oveloof,

[comradekatara]

The Awakening is one of the most underrated episodes in the series.. this episode was such a turning point for aang

Aang first ran away in a storm to avoid his duty, and now he’s running away in a storm to do his duty. Poetic!

Love also Roku and Yue in this episode

yes! the way this episode establishes so many of the central tensions for the final season and parallels basically every character so deftly is perfect. the chiastic storm symbolism, the storm inside aang of crushing responsibility and guilt and grief and rage…. and in both cases, whether it’s to run away or to attempt to face his problems head on, leaving behind his loved ones (like he tried to do in the crystal catacombs) is always the wrong choice, he needs to rely on his friends. and his friends need him too. katara’s speech about how aang thinks he has to do everything alone kind of seems out of left field considering aang has always valued and cherished forming deep bonds, especially with katara. but then you remember that katara’s last memory of aang, that has been haunting her for the past however many weeks she’s been on that boat desperately trying to save him, was aang (unintentionally) martyring himself. and that would be traumatizing for anyone to witness, their best friend literally dying in their arms, but it’s especially triggering for katara because it’s happened before. kya died for her. hakoda left her. sokka emotionally abandoned her in his promise to die for her.

being a waterbender, the last waterbender, is such a complicated role for katara, because on hand she must feel immense guilt over the way her entire family and tribe prioritizes her life, and is especially motivated to become the world’s greatest waterbender specifically to prove that her mother’s sacrifice was not in vain. but it’s also that drive to be the best that awarded her the spirit water, that gave her the ability to heal aang when history repeated itself. katara couldn’t save kya, she couldn’t make hakoda stay, she couldn’t heal jet, but she can with aang. she literally brings the avatar, struck by lightning while in the avatar state (thus effectively ending the line of avatars were he truly dead) back to life. katara revived him as the inciting incident of the entire narrative, and then she revived him again in their darkest moment. because katara will continue to bring back hope to the world, resoundingly, through sheer force of will, with nothing but her bare hands and overflowing heart.

i do love aang’s arc in this episode, the narrative parallelism, the tragedy of him burning his glider, his last physical relic of his past and his people. i love the way he is so determined to perform the duty he has shied away from for so long due to the shame and humiliation of actually trying, and failing. of course aang was already motivated to perform his duties to the world, because guilt is a hell of a motivator, but the existential terror of actually being killed adds tenfold motivation. instead of running away from his problems, aang is now running towards them, equally as thoughtlessly and hastily. because he is too ashamed to care about tact, he just wants to rectify his devastating mistake. and that’s why he says that he needs to regain his honor. scarred and humiliated and lost, he finally understands how zuko feels.

zuko acts as the third side of a prism through which he, aang, and katara, are all refracted and reflected in one another. this episode makes use of that parallelism both in the contrast between zuko “finally regaining his honor” (illusory, of course, but he gets to come home and see his father again, and that’s all he’s wanted all along) while aang has lost it, and zuko confronting his father for the first time in three years, just like katara does. katara is angry at hakoda, her anger exacerbated by her grief over aang. she’s angry that hakoda left them, even if logically she doesn’t blame him for it. and she doesn’t mask her anger (i don’t think she’s even capable), and hakoda, for his part, receives it, listens to her, treats her with love and affection, holds her, acknowledges his own pain. it’s an incredibly beautiful scene; the episode is excellent if only for that scene.

it’s also immediately followed up with its opposite. zuko walks into ozai’s chamber, no anger only fear, kneels before his throne while ozai circles him like a predator (a move that both zuko and azula picked up from him). even a few episodes later, in “the beach” when azula asks, “are you angry at dad?” zuko’s face falls open and vulnerable, almost afraid at the accusation, and goes, “what?? no!!” even though it’s a perfectly fair question. ozai banished zuko for three years when he was still a child, whereas hakoda left katara for three years when she was still a child. katara resents hakoda for leaving against his will whereas zuko doesn’t even feel like he’s allowed to resent ozai for anything. ozai never once actually touches zuko, but zuko still flinches. zuko kneeling on the ground while ozai circles him like a hawk. hakoda and katara holding each other, both in tears, both open and vulnerable. zuko katara parallels always make me go crazy, of course, but this is one of the most insane juxtapositions in the entire show to me. i just love the katara hakoda reconciliation scene, and all the more for its narrative impact as it precedes zuko and ozai’s.

the ozai face reveal is also pretty incredible imo. for the past two seasons, ozai’s face as been obscured by shadow, framed only at angles that made him unknowable to the viewer. he is a larger than life villain, to both aang and zuko, not simply a man but something far greater and more terrifying. except no. he is just a man. zuko returns home, and immediately sees that. the ozai of looming shadow from zuko’s faulty memory is in fact just some guy. a uniquely powerful guy, of course, but he’s not gargantuan, too great to be comprehended by mortal eyes. zuko was just a child when he left, but he has since grown, in many ways. and while ozai still terrifies him to his core, because how could he not, we see, as zuko sees, that he is just a man.

as the image of aang’s goals becomes clearer in his eyes, he too, learns to see ozai as just a man. in the following episode he even crafts his likeness out of noodles (“impressive, i admit”). ozai is not some fantastical godlike being. no, aang is the fantastical godlike being in question, and it’s his literal god-given right to humble that man playing god who claims that aang has no place in his world. to obscure ozai’s face is to illustrate the sheer magnitude and terror of the power he wields. and to show ozai’s face, and then over the course of a season, continually undermine him and mock that face and depict it as noodles, or pantsless, is to take away some of his power, his cultivated, dictated, arbitrary power.

the awakening is a fantastic episode as it sets up the central internal conflicts for book 3, especially for aang and zuko, but also for katara, acknowledging the weight of her grief as it culminates in “the southern raiders.” (also her waterbending progress as it’s demonstrated in that one scene is incredible, i guess being at sea helps in one’s waterbending, who’d have thunk!) it’s basically a microcosmic encapsulation of the entire season, appropriately ending on a loving gaang hug as they promise to help one another through this. the heart of the show lies in that hug. it’s a fantastic episode.

[talonabraxas]

Yin Yang Dragon ☯ Talon Abraxas Embrace of Yin and Yang: A Poetic Dance of Eternal Love In the dance of two souls, entwined as one, A love ignited, a journey begun, With the grace of a butterfly, the strength of a tree, The wisdom of the ages, I offer to thee. Through the eyes of the dragon, I see your true heart, In the stillness of passion, our love an art, The water that flows, the fire that burns, Together we soar, as the world turns. In the depths of your gaze, I find my reflection, A mirror of truth, a divine connection, Our love a river, ever-changing, free, A dance of Yin and Yang, for eternity. In the whispers of the wind, your name I hear, A beacon of light, guiding me near, The harmony of our souls, a celestial song, In the arms of your love, I know I belong. The way of the warrior, now softened by grace, In the tenderness of your touch, my fears erased, Through the storms of life, and the battles we face, In the sanctuary of our love, we find our place. In the silence of our hearts, our love takes flight, As the stars align, on this moonlit night, With the courage of a lion, the spirit of a dove, In the mind of a dreamer, this is our love.

[cool-fancier]

A Butterfly’s Embrace

Synopsis: Childhood love, Bada, struggled with depression. A rediscovered necklace sparks memories, her ghostly presence consoles heartache.

Your relationship with Bada began in the peaceful environment of a tiny suburban town, when childhood friendships were created and memories were carved in the canvas of time. Both of you were brought together by the natural currents of fate, and your paths crossed in fourth grade.

The first meeting was pleasant like the first notes of a melody yet to be written. You were the quiet and wary newcomer, nervously wandering the school's strange corridors. Bada, on the other hand, was a whirl of energy and warmth, her laughter resonating  like a lovely symphony through the corridors.

In the beginning, your encounters were limited to passing looks and temporary moments in public places. As a social butterfly, Bada couldn't resist approaching you, finding a similar spirit beneath your quiet demeanour.

Bada approached you one day as you sat alone in the school courtyard, engaged in a book, with a grin that could light up the darkest corners. "Hello, new kid!" "What are you reading?"

You looked up, surprised by the unexpected invasion into your isolated world. "Oh, it's just a book." Nothing out of the ordinary."

Bada's eyes twinkled with interest. "Mind if I join you?"

With that, the first chords of your friendship were struck. Shared interests and conversations grew naturally, creating a tune that rang true with the innocence of childhood friendship. The connection between you and Bada became stronger as the days changed into weeks, and weeks into months, becoming a constant in the ever-changing world of childhood.

The dynamics of your relationship with Bada began to shift during a school project, a simple yet significant moment. The assignment required pairing students to work on presentations, and fate had chosen you and Bada as partners. The theme was animals, and you chose the butterfly, a symbol that would come to represent your relationship.

"I'm a huge fan of butterflies!" "They're like nature's delicate dancers!" said Bada.

You smiled as you realised the poetic beauty in her words. "Yeah, they are pretty amazing."

The project's combined effort became a symbol for your increasing friendship. Late-night study sessions devolved into mutual laughing, and whispered confessions took the place of educational debates. It was around this period that you realised the extent of your feelings for Bada.

The realisation came like a sweet tune, lingering in the calm times spent together. You gained the confidence to talk about what had been silently growing within your heart one evening as the sun dipped below the horizon and bathed the sky in orange and pink hues.

"Bada, there's something I need to tell you," you said, just above a whisper.

She turned to face you, her eyes shining with genuine interest. "What is it, Y/N?"

"I... I think I really like you, Bada," you admitted, your words dripping with vulnerability.

There was silence for a time until Bada's face lit up with a sparkling smile. "You do? Because, Y/N, I like you as well!"

And in that moment, the transition from friends to something more unfolded seamlessly, the melody of your connection finding a new rhythm. High school presented its own set of difficulties, but the power of your friendship-turned-romance endured the storms.

Your love for one other grew stronger with time, becoming a source of comfort and support in the difficult path that is adolescence. The shared dreams, whispered confidences, and stolen glances became the fabric of your story.

The idea of university loomed on the horizon as the final year of high school neared. The uncertainty of diverging pathways put your love to the test. Graduation was bittersweet, with a vow to reunite resonating through sad goodbyes.

The following chapter took place at university, where the challenges of adulthood put your relationship to the test. Late-night phone calls took the place of shared nights, and text messages became the lifeline that kept your connection alive. During these years, the first evidence of darkness appeared within Bada's heart.

As sadness wrapped its grasp around Bada's spirit, the lively soul you fell in love with became a shadow of itself. Late-night phone calls that used to be filled with laughing now bore the weight of silent grief. You could only offer words of comfort and love across the digital gap, helpless and miles away.

As the years unfolded, the facade of Bada's bubbly exterior began to crack, revealing the depth of her internal struggles. The enthusiastic partner who once radiated brightness became disguised in darkness, and her laughter became a distant echo of a time when joy came easily.

The indicators of Bada's inner pain became too obvious to ignore during your college years. She withdrew from social activities, her once-enthusiastic participation in gatherings replaced by a haunting isolation.  Conversations that were once lively and vibrant became increasingly sombre as the light in her eyes faded.

Late-night conversations that were once brimming with shared ambitions and aspirations had turned into hushed confessions of misery. Bada confided in you, confessing the tyranny of depression that had enslaved her. She described the tremendous emptiness that seemed to swallow her whole, leaving her in a state of permanent numbness.

Bada's pain weighed heavily on your shoulders, and you felt helpless in the face of her wordless agony. Desperate to help, you encouraged her to seek assistance from professionals and to confide in someone who might guide her through the confusing web of her emotions. But, like an insidious shadow, sadness had a way of distorting reality and convincing its sufferer that reaching out was pointless.

Bada's cheerful energy had been replaced with a listless version of herself. Her favourite activities had become burdensome, and even the simplest tasks seemed overwhelming. Every day seemed like a battle against an unseen power aimed at putting out the brightness within her.

Your love for Bada was strong, but the fact of sadness is that it rarely has simple remedies. As you watched her slowly sink into the abyss, you felt powerless, wondering how to save someone who appeared determined to avoid you.

There were brief periods of hope, when Bada would emerge from the shadows and enjoy the warmth of the world. But these were temporary times, like rays of sunlight bursting through a stormy sky, only to be swallowed up by the gathering clouds again.

Not because of a lack of love, but because despair had built obstacles that even the most sincere relationship difficult to overcome. Bada became a prisoner of her own mind, and you were a steadfast witness to a never-ending conflict.

Despite the difficulties, your love and dedication endured. You remained at Bada's side, providing a soothing presence even when words failed. The struggles with depression cast a long shadow over your relationship, but the love you shared became a lifeline—a flickering flame that refused to be extinguished.

Bada's gift of the rose gold necklace to you in the middle of her personal agony was a touching gesture, a statement of love that endured even in the face of misery. Little did you know that the year after this meaningful present would be the last you'd spend with Bada, and that the necklace with its delicate butterfly pendant would become a lasting remembrance of a love tale filled with both joy and grief.

As you rummaged through the neglected boxes, each containing a piece of your past, the air in the garage was thick with the aroma of dust and memories. Old photographs, paintings from your childhood, and even a collection of hockey awards brought you back in time. You discovered a small, dazzling jewellery box among the remains of days gone by, and a warm smile graced your lips at the memory it held.

The box, covered with various shades of blue glitter, was a memorial to your childhood best friend and girlfriend, Bada's, dedication. She had been saving for it for two and a half years, a symbol of the lovely affection that had characterised your friendship since the beginning. A flood of childhood memories washed over you as you ran your fingertips over the gleaming surface.

You took a deep breath and opened the box, showing the rose gold necklace that had adorned your neck the year before she passed.

As the weight of grief rested on your chest, tears welled up in your eyes. "I really miss you, Bada. I hope you're doing better than you were. "I'm sorry I couldn't be there for you or save you," you broke down your pain echoing in the garage's silence.

Unbeknownst to you, Bada stood behind you, mournful eyes on you. She knelt down beside you, wrapped her arms around you, and caressed your hair, a silent presence in a world where her touch was ignored. "It's not your fault, Butterfly. I was the one who couldn't hang on in this life. You're the reason I stayed for so long. You should be happy."

Your body was overflowing with tears, a frantic attempt to relieve the sorrow that had been growing since her departure. "My sweet girl," Bada said quietly, her voice a soothing breeze in the garage's silence.

As you continued to mourn, Bada's ghostly hug provided some solace. She hoped she could brush your tears away and tell you that the love you shared had been the anchor that had held her grounded for so long.

But the gap between the living and the dead remained, leaving Bada as nothing more than an imaginary witness in your most private times of grief.

And so, the garage held the echoes of a love that transcended the boundaries of life and death—a love that, even in the face of tragedy, refused to fade away.

[lilbagdermole]

Hello! It's always great to meet another Taang shipper!

What do you love most about Taang?

I hope you have a great day!!!

Hey!!

Oh, it's so nice to see that Taang is still loved by so many people (and it's always really nice to see active blogs about them ^^)

What do I love most about Taang?

I love their dynamics. They bounce off each other almost harmoniously, because they are opposites in so many aspects of their lives: beliefs and morals, elements, backgrounds and childhoods. They clash and struggle and are far from perfect, yet, no matter how big the storm, how complex the disagreement - they always reconcile, they always listen to one another, they always learn and grow and strive to become better people. They respect one another so much to work around their oppositions and thus balance and understand one another in ways that no other member of the ATLA cast can replicate (with Aang and Toph).

And though they are natural opposites, they still have so much in common if you delve deeper. Aang and Toph are the youngest in the Gaang - and share the same love for teasing and joking; they share a very deep connection with the the original benders of their respective elements (Toph with the Badgermoles and Aang with Appa); they both runaway from their homes at a young age because of paramount expectations; both are masters of their bending - even inventing a new form/bending style at 12 years-old (air scooter and metalbending).

Aang represented all Toph needed in her life - freedom, loyalty, companionship and a friend. He saw her beyond her perceived weakness and never underestimated her capabilities as an earthbender and his potential master. He taught her to trust and confide, understood her when no other person did and soften the hard edges that she'd constructed to protect herself from her suffocating reality. In a sense, Aang was a breath of fresh air in her life.

Toph, on the other hand, represented all Aang needed - stability, confidence, strength. Aang, being the Avatar, had been coddled and protected by almost everyone - Katara, Sokka, admirers, etc. He wasn't Aang, he was a symbol - a symbol of hope and peace. But Toph didn't care about his divine-like power, didn't care that everyone around him praised the very ground he stepped on - in Toph's perspective, Aang was Aang. A kid just like her and she treated him as equals; never afraid of pushing him to further his growth; she taught him to stand his ground, face his enemies head on, become a stronger, confident bender. She was the ground that anchored him to the mortal world and made him feel normal.

It's also poetic, in the finale - Toph is in the air whilst Aang is mostly on Earth. And, may I add, that at the end, whilst Zuko and Katara ultimately did teach him plenty so he could face the Firelord, Aang's preferred bending style, that was not his own, was Earthbending. The element that had once stumped him, frustrated him; the hardest element to master, his opposite... and now, he used it to protect himself, to shield and fight. He used every technique Toph taught him - rock armor, crushing earth, even seismic sense... Toph ultimately saved Aang during the Finale.

I can go on and on about them, but I'm in the midst of writing a dissertation on Toph and Aang's development and potential in ATLA - so I'll save most of my thoughts for that whenever I get to completing it.

And... let's be honest. Aang and Toph together just look so beautiful. They would be the IT COUPLE in ATLA - their canonical height difference should be reason enough to stan Taang. Avatar and The World's Greatest Earthbender... come on now! And it would just fit right - Aang as an adult would have to travel the world and Toph would gladly travel alongside him since she doesn't have a "home" (Aang is her home); and, as adults they could built Republic City from the ground up whilst also balancing raising a family... UGH! IT WOULD HAVE BEEN SO GOOD!!!

[blackoutspoetry]

The anatomy of starved dogs (part 3)(Ghoap) – FLASHPOINT

This is a chapter of a long form slow burn Ghoap fic I've been working on for the past few months.

This chapter alone is has 16k words, so it might be easier to read this fic on ao3.

Read the first few parts on ao3 here:

WARNINGS: gore and graphic depictions of violence, civilian death, acts of terrorism, torture and permanent disfigurement

4 APRIL 2019

CAPTAIN PRICE'S FLAT, UNDISCLOSED ADDRESS, ENGLAND

The most important thing to remember when it comes to human nature, is that the adult brain is shaped from childhood to pursue something which is mostly unattainable. People are defined by the constant pursuit of what they don’t have. 

The healthy brain, it chases after things it's allowed to get ahold of, grows accustomed to the idea of labour rewarded sweetly at the end of a long day’s work. Even if paid in peanuts, a reward is a reward. 

The unhealthy brain is grown from a childhood bid for survival. The young brain is made to endure and spring up like weeds in concrete, grow through difficulty because it becomes indoctrinated with the aesthetic of suffering. It knows nothing else but the weathering of the storm and has not yet learned the concept of injustice or fairness. 

 It learns its place quickly, grows around the stones and infertile soil and becomes a distended, etiolated seedling in the absence of the sunlight it yearns for. 

But grow, it will, forever doomed to reach with begging arms to sunlight that will not yield, until it begins to view itself as a poetic tragedy, see the beauty in the hollowness of needing and wanting. And once that point is reached, it romanticises having nothing until it  becomes afraid of actually grasping that thing it yearns for. 

There is even a point of hunger where the body has grown so used to not being full, that once fed, it rejects the meal to marinate in its own despair. A work of art, one tragic and beautiful, because it cannot fathom the idea that it was robbed of life. A better life. 

If, however, it realises the injustice, refuses to kneel to its feared master and learns that it too is able to bite, it uses this newfound discovery to its advantage. It cuts off completely from the idea of vulnerability and lashes out at anything that mildly gives it the taste of being subservient once more, so that even things that are only vaguely related to the oppression is now a symbol of the life it had fled from. 

It bites and devours out of fear of returning to that life, over correcting and becoming the very thing it had sworn to destroy. 

In the mind numbing hours following the briefing, Soap thinks Vladimir Makarov might be one of those people, grown from a hard life into a dangerous man, or maybe, he was something more dangerous, one planted in the soil of war fertilised earth from his conception. 

Either way, it only further convinces him that he’d made a mistake agreeing to Price’s terms in that coffee shop. He’s dug himself a grave and he’s damn well made his bed in it too. 

Though Soap is substantially pissed at Price, he honours his wishes and makes a point of laying low until they have to leave for Verdansk at midnight. Price had arranged for him to stay over at his flat for the time being and though his thoughts were consumed with visions of doom, he found it interesting to distract himself by the rare insight into the man’s personal life. 

It's a moderately large place, modestly furnished with two bedrooms, a living room, joint kitchen and dining area, a bathroom barely large enough to stand in and a sofa facing a TV. 

“Make yourself at home, I suppose I don’t need to babysit you, but you might benefit from getting some sleep in before we leave,” Price loosely gestures over to the spare bedroom with the single bed, freshly made and ready for him. 

“Thank you, sir.” 

“Anytime,” Price nods with a hint of guilt. He knows he’s got Soap in over his head but neither acknowledge it, they keep things civil. Whether Price had known about Soap’s talk of retirement remains a mystery to him. 

“I’ve got some work to get done before we leave, so if you need me, I’ll be here,” Price informs him, taking his things and disappearing into the other room where his desk was, leaving Soap standing in the living room.

 

 

It doesn’t take long for Soap to settle into the spare bedroom, throwing his suitcase on the bed with a dejected sigh before beginning to strip out of the thick jacket unsuited to the stale English weather this time of year. 

 

He’s just thrown it on the bed when he hears his phone buzzing with a notification. 

 

He’s put his mother on mute for the time being, so it couldn’t be her, possibly one of his sisters. He supposes he should do some damage control before shit hits the fan, though. 

 

Begrudgingly, he sits down on the edge of the bed and reaches for the phone, swiping at the cracked screen to unlock it. 

 

Five unread messages, better than he expected. Three from his mother, and two from someone he definitely doesn’t have the mental energy to respond to now. 

 

He opens the chat and begins typing back before he’s even formulated what he wanted to say to her.

Elena (barista): heyy so I know its been a while but I wanted to know if you're still interested in that second date?

John: Yes|

‘Yes’ is too short…

John: Ye |

John: |

John: abs |

No, that sounds too enthusiastic and she’ll get the wrong idea. 

John: yes, sure

Before he can change his mind again, he hits send. To his surprise, she begins typing back immediately. 

Elena: Great! How does tomorrow evening work for you??? 

Soap grimaces.

John: I'm actually at work at the moment...

He can almost feel her hesitating on the other end. 

Elena: Work?

Elena: I thought you’re not going back until the 15th??

Soap is unsure how much he should be telling her, but he wants to be as honest as possible. 

John: That was the plan but an urgent last minute thing came up. I only found out about it a week ago.

Elena: oh, okay. But tell me when you think you’ll be available?

John: sure :)

Soap exits the chat and quickly writes back to his mother to confirm to her that he had landed safely, but decides against entertaining the conversation any further after that. 

He tries to get a couple of hours of sleep in before Price comes to fetch him at well after dark for their return to base, but he’s still tired enough by the time they arrive that he has to take two shots of espresso for good measure. 

And then it's off to their designated aircraft, a three and a half hour flight outbound for Kastovia and another promise John MacTavish would inevitably fail to keep. 

 

Its just past midnight by the time Soap finds his seat with Sergeant Burns to his left and Ghost two seats on with Price in between them. Ghost gives Soap a nod of acknowledgement as Soap straps himself in leaning back against the cargo netting behind him and letting his head hit the wall with a thud. 

“You been to Verdansk this time of year?” 

Soap is surprised when Burns asks from beside him. The question is half muffled by the humming of the large cargo door being raised to a close but he shakes his head anyway. 

“Can’t say that I have.” 

“It's nice. Off season so it's not as packed with tourists as it is when all the schools are out. It's beautiful actually, when you’re not working.” 

“You think so?” 

Soap had never had the luxury of being in the city for anything other than a work related crisis. His best memories of Russia and the surrounding countries are the quiet moments when the weapons cease or he’s privileged enough to be in the safety of a fortified military base. 

His worst memories there are by far the most haunting of his career and some of the most life changing. He still has visions of that bomb going off, splatters of blood and shattered bone. He’ll never forget the stillness after Oliver had stopped screaming or the look on his parents' faces when he gave his condolences at the funeral. 

So no, Soap did not consider the idea of finding Kastovia beautiful or inviting in his days off. 

“It’s quite a sight actually. I brought my girl out there to propose last year, to get away from it all.” 

Soap raises an eyebrow. “You’re married?” 

“Almost, the wedding’s in two months. You got anyone waiting for you back home?” 

Briefly the phantom smell of smoke and warm blood fills Soap’s nose and he clutches at the chain around his neck, but the moment’s gone in an instant. 

“Nothing serious at the moment, no.” 

He curses the fact his mind had skimmed over Elena so quickly, but he can hardly call her a significant other. 

“Ah well, I’m sure you’ll find someone soon,” Burns says and reaches into his pocket for a half empty pack of gum. 

The plane had taken off with a rumble and Soap’s ears were having trouble adjusting to the change in altitude. 

“Can I have one of those?” Soap inclines his head to the pack. 

“Sure, but they’re nicotine. I’m trying to quit smoking before the wedding.” Burns tilts the pack in his direction nonetheless and Soap hesitates for a moment, feeling a distant suppressed ache in his chest warning him against it but he silences his concern. 

“That’s alright by me.” 

He takes the stick of gum and pretends not to waver as he pops it in his mouth.

They land in Verdansk three and a half hours later and Shepherd meets them on the ground. Its barely past sunrise and the air is heavy with a piercing cold fog that clouds his measured breaths as Soap steps out of the plane onto the landing strip where a man stood waiting for them. 

The man was around Soap’s height, but he carried himself with an air of authority. Something to indicate he was powerful and very much aware of it. 

He gave them a polite nod by way of greeting. Soap watches his overtly friendly interaction with Price and Burns and then the notably impersonal way he shakes hands with Ghost. 

“Sergeant MacTavish, you come very highly regarded by Captain Price, he’s told me a lot about you.” 

Soap feels himself stiffen but he smiles nonetheless, “all good things, I hope.” 

“ Excellent things,” Shepherd corrects.

“Well, I hope he’s got enough of that in him to live up to the Captain’s expectations,” Ghost chimes in from beside him, not with bite, but Soap can’t decide whether he’s supposed to take the joke as a sign of friendliness or hostility. 

As if sensing the uncertainty in the atmosphere, Price claps him on the back and gives his own response of almost flat feeling reassurance. “He’ll be up for it, I’m sure. But I expect we better get out of the wind before we get into any of the further details.” 

 

The drive takes a while. It isn’t long, but the road out is congested and Soap finds his eyes wandering over the densely packed sidewalks, gaze panning over the figures on the street, blissfully unaware of the danger pending over the city. 

It makes some uneasy feeling run a chill down his spine. An image from the carnage left behind by the street market bomb on Price’s slideshow comes into his mind unbidden and he tries to rid himself of the idea of Verdansk being reduced to rubble. 

The base they’d be operating out of for the next few days was situated on the gentle slope of a hill building up into the nearby mountain range, densely forested with evergreen spruce trees creating a thick coverage for the well maintained dirt road. 

Upon arrival, they pass through heavy security and are let to park on a reserved spot by a painted brick face wall rising into the upper floor of the building. 

Once inside, it is much more temperature controlled and Soap relaxes a bit once they’re through security and the doors are closed behind him. 

General Shepherd’s been in Price’s circle for years. Soap knows about the kinds of things he and Price have buried in the past and he’s got his own theories as to a couple of the more sketchy, off the records things. He gets suspicious about when the talk around base doesn’t match up with what’s on the news, so for him to be standing here in the room with both of them, while official records still have him safely tucked away in Glasgow is disconcerting to say the least. 

He glances to his side at Burns and even gives the futile look over at Ghost on his right, but both of them are tight-lipped and observant, their expressions betraying nothing.

An hour and two coffees later saw Shepherd introducing them to a few men from the local authorities they’d been working with and hurriedly getting them over to a more private room to discuss the details. 

Though Soap is still sceptical of Price’s anonymous source, he keeps his mouth shut for the duration of the discussion, listening intently to the plan for the next day instead. 

The airport had upped its security earlier that month. With Verdansk just gently nudging the border of the country and its frequent conflicts with the nearby Russians, the city has grown desensitised to the sheer amount of military vehicles patrolling the streets at all times. They wouldn’t suspect anything out of the ordinary for there to be a heightened military presence at the airport or the nearby areas. 

The good thing, they figured, would be that Makarov would not be anticipating it either. 

Once more, with detailed information from Price’s informant, they determined that multiple bombs would be left to detonate throughout the airport, but how they planned on getting them through airport security remained unclear. 

By the end of the discussion, they’d concluded that the four of them would enter with the rest of the local team Shepherd had assembled well before the window the informant had provided them with and keep a low enough profile so as to not worry the public but be present enough so that any suspicious activity could be flagged. 

By the time Soap was allowed to leave, he felt as though he was due another coffee with how little sleep he’d gotten in the last few days and the monolith of a task before them. He gets himself a coffee and tries to find some fresh air. 

 

By the next morning, Soap had developed an uneasy feeling about it all, a feeling he doesn’t manage to shake by the time he’s dressed and sharply awake at just before sunrise. 

The sun is high and expectant by the time they arrive at the airport the next morning. The world stands at attention. 

A thin smattering of clouds obscured the sun from view almost entirely and rendered the world washed out and lifeless on the drive out to the airport. 

By the time they’ve parked and Price is well out of earshot, Soap can’t keep it to himself anymore and turns to Ghost nearest to him by the open door of their vehicle. 

“I have a feeling that informant of Price has been feeding us bullshit.” 

“As much as I trust Price, I’m not so convinced either.” 

There isn’t time to talk about it after that. The day at the airport is tense. Speaking is difficult, airport security knows next to no English, with Price and another English speaking security officer needing to translate any time something mildly suspicious turns up. With the extra security keeping a keen eye on the ground, they were sitting in a closed off room watching the security cameras for signs of suspicious activity. 

Security flags a man but it's a bust. He’s pissed and cursing as he’s patted down for the forgotten pocket knife in his coat. A generous amount of similar issues turn up but nothing to write home about. 

A little after that, there was a brief issue on a forgotten suitcase left in a suspicious position on the other side of the airport, but after twenty minutes and broken exchanges, security confirms it was a false alarm. 

Soap doesn’t know if that should disappoint him or not. Even Shepherd starts to look frustrated by the time noon comes around and they’ve noticed nothing else. 

“Any news from your guy?” Ghost asks later and Price gives a frustrated shake of the head. 

“Haven’t been able to get through to him since this morning. Absolute silence.” 

“So he set us up?”

“It's too soon to call any of that, Ghost. Let's not jump to conclusions.”

 

The day’s still young when it all goes to hell. 

Security screens a woman potentially carrying drugs in her suitcase and she is immediately pulled away into a side room and searched. Her suitcase, marked fragile and wrapped in plastic, is thrown onto a table and opened for search. 

“What the actual fuck is wrong with you? There’s glass in there!” 

“An American,” Soap observes, finally glad to be able to understand what was going on around him. 

“Just standard procedure, ma’am,” one of the security officers relay in accented English and indicates for her to hold her arms out for her to be searched. Soap watches her disbelief morph into frustration when her handbag is also tipped out onto the table, sending folded receipts, loose coins and her cell phone clattering out onto the table. 

“Hey, you can’t just mess with my stuff like that,” she says as a man shuffles through her suitcase to find the suspicious item. 

The phone suddenly lights up with an urgent message.

Three missed calls. 

The phone suddenly lights up with an urgent message. 

Three missed calls. 

Mikhail: are you ok? 

Mikhail: answer your phone 

Mikhail: I can see the smoke from my window. Tell me u are ok. 

Mikhail: Jess please, are you at the airport? Did you see it?

 

“Captain, something’s not right here.” Soap reaches for the phone, beckoning Price over to show him the texts. 

“Hey, you can’t just look at my phone. That’s an invasion of my privacy–” 

The phone starts vibrating in his hand as another call comes in, Price turns to her, still kept in place by security. “Who’s Mikhail?” 

“My boyfriend, he’s worried about me.” 

“Why?” 

“Maybe I can ask him if you give me my phone.” 

“Bag is clear,” the man searching her suitcase behind Soap declares and she gives him a harsh glare.  

“I could’ve told you that myself,” she says angrily as she takes her phone back from Soap and calls the number back, hurrying to put her things back into her handbag. 

“I’m fine, I’m fine! Wait, slow down, you’re freaking me out… what… like, actually?”

Soap looks from her to Price. 

“No way… just now?... I didn’t hear anything… are you sure?”  

On the other side of the room, Shepherd’s phone rings in his pocket and he goes to answer it while security escorts the woman out of the room. 

Shepherd’s face morphs into a look of distress and Soap tenses in anticipation. “Say again?” 

Soap can’t make out anything on the other side but it sounds urgent. Shepherd relays the news as he terminates the call. 

“Reports of explosions at the stadium. No official confirmation yet, but it seems like the news has caught onto it.” 

Immediately, Soap curses himself for not trusting his instinct sooner. He knew something was off 

“Makarov used the airport as a diversion.” 

“He could still be at the stadium, we might still have a chance to nail this bastard,” Ghost suggests and they turn to Shepherd for confirmation. 

“Ghost and I can stay at the airport until security can get a read on the situation,  just in case he decides to double back while we’re out. Price, take Burns and MacTavish. The three of you head out and assess the situation at the stadium.”

 

 

The door shuts with a resounding, anxious thud as Price ushers Soap into the passenger seat and straps himself in behind the wheel, acting on muscle memory alone as he releases the handbrake and reverses out of the parking lot at an alarming speed. He turned towards the exit and gestures wildly for the security guard to raise the boom for him to exit the parking faster.

Within a minute, he has navigated out of the incoming traffic and headed onto the highway. 

“What’s the plan when we get there, Cap?” Burns asks from behind Soap. 

“It's difficult to say now. It's fresh. We’ve got no idea what the conditions are or what to expect. So we try to assess and contain the situation as best possible. But knowing Makarov, it's best to assume he’s not done yet.”

“And if he’s there?” Soap asks and Price’s grip on the steering wheel tightens. 

“Then we bring him back.” 

“And if he’s not?” Soap asks. 

“Then this entire operation is dead the water.” 

 

The over chewed wad of gum was bland in his mouth and did little to soothe the tension in Soap’s system as he cast a glance out at the world beyond the passenger window, seeing it pass in a smear of colour. They’ve been driving for a good five minutes now. 

 Heart racing a mile a minute, his anger was only spurred by the comms in his ear as Shepherd's voice came through, confirming the worst. 

“Gold Eagle to Bravo-6. Security confirms gunfire and at least one explosion in the stadium with multiple injuries, over… “

He watches the world in the muted grey, fade from obliviousness to panic as they neared the stadium, seeing the world descending into chaos around them. 

Price reached to press the button on his mic, face setting into a hard look as he yanked the wheel hard for the upcoming turn. “Copy, we’re inbound now.” 

Shepherd’s response was instant. 

“Be advised, Makarov and his men may still be inside. If he’s there, you bring him out– alive.”

Soap felt uneasy about letting the man go with his life, but pushed the concern down, silencing the thought with his own acknowledgement of the order, but it did nothing to ease the growing concern as he caught onto the shifting energy on the street around them. 

“Roger that. Where’s medical?” 

Soap couldn’t make out any words from the civilians outside or let his eyes linger long enough to analyse any of the reactions properly, but they were close enough to the stadium that he knew they must have heard something. 

“First responders will not enter until the scene is clear. The third floor VIP lounge may be Makarov’s next target.” Shepherd’s voice was clear and calm as he spoke, but it instantly added another thread of anxiety to the mix and Soap couldn't stop himself from cursing as Price took another left, narrowly dodging past a truck on the corner and putting them on a street funnelling to the stadium dead ahead. 

“You said it, son,” Shepherd acknowledges Soap over comms. “Ghost and I are ten mikes out. Let's bag this bastard. Out here.” 

The high rise office blocks seemed to shuffle them forward and usher them out to the open air, now enough for them to smell the acrid smoke emanating from the stadium in a rolling curtain of grey heat.

A car swerves onto the road and shoots past them at a speed as they merge onto the main road, panic palpable in the erratic driving of those still on the road and fleeing the scene.

The fear ripples through the crowd like a curtain of panic holding the world in a vice grip and descending over the street like a dire blanket of fear. Even the dying leaves on the trees seemed more dead and wilted into themselves with an unseen oppression, like an incursion of an unknown force pushing hostile tendrils into the ground that the earth itself, and by extension, the trees on the sidewalk, seemed sharp and alert to the whims of its enemy. 

The bleak sky was barren like the sun had withdrawn into itself to make way for the undulating spire of smoke curling into the sky before them from the blazing inferno that leaked from the burst windows of the structure, weeping fire. 

Unconsciously, his hand went for the chain around his neck, but it was obscured by his vest and the lack of that comfort made him feel like he was floating in a sea of disarray with no anchor point. 

“Makarov threatened the airport and hit the stadium instead,” Soap seethes through gritted teeth. Even Sergeant Burns, who had been quiet up until that point, had something to say to the carnage. 

“He’s a fuckin’ madman.” 

A row of orange boom gates that was meant to be blocking off the entrance to the stadium’s underground parking was raised for the hurried exit of the cars, now descended into complete disarray as a car drives straight out through the wrong gate into the incoming lane and almost collides with their vehicle. 

“Fuckin’ hell!” Price cursed as he swerved aside for it, missing it by a hair’s breadth and gunning it to the middle gate before another car could block them off. 

“Civilians are everywhere,” Burns noted, sounding as thoroughly shaken as Soap felt. 

Soap resists the urge to look back at the blaze beside him as Price turns down the ramp to the parking lot. 

“Alright,” Price begins, gathering their collective attention. “Check your shots. We’ll have a lot of unknowns inside.” 

Civilians are fleeing on foot and he doesn’t stop when a man trips on the incline of the road and scuttles out of the way before an oncoming car has the chance to plough him over. 

“And Makarov?” Soap risks a glance back over to the stadium, now towering over them like a lit funeral pyre. 

“You heard the order. ROE still stands. We take him alive.” 

Soap jolted when two cars collided in front of them and glass skittered across the junction. Price had been so fixated on the collision that he didn't notice the civilian rushing in front of them until Soap shouted at him to stop. 

There’s a heavy thud against the hood of the car and for a sickening moment, Soap worries they’ve hit her, but when she stands up unharmed, he breathes a sigh of relief. 

Irritably, Price gestures wildly for her to get out of the road. “Get out of here! Go!” 

They watch her stumble disoriented from their path before shooting off ahead into a dark tunnel. Cars piled up on the outgoing lane and Soap shouts for Price to watch it when a desperate soul reaching the back of the row decides to take a risk and turn onto the incoming lane, narrowly missing them again.

“Close one,” Soap says, trying to make sense of the cacophony of panic surrounding them as he watches for more civilians on foot and desperate cars. 

“We’re still in one piece,” Price concedes mirthlessly as he turns off from the incoming tunnel into a wider section that splits off to a higher floor. 

“Watch it!” Burns cries from the back. 

The wailing of an ambulance siren cuts through the panic and the oncoming glow of a pulsing red light gives them enough of a warning to get out of the way as it rushes past them and they turn up onto the ramp to the higher floor. 

For a moment, Soap has the chance to think its blessedly empty, save for a parked ambulance in his peripheral vision until he witnesses a speeding car mow down a civilian, letting the rest of the group erupt into panic as he reversed and rerouted. 

Soap curses. He glances back at the contorted form of the man as Price drives them past, determination set in his face. 

They can’t afford to go back for him now, probably dead on impact by the look of it, but that wasn’t their concern now. 

“This is chaos,” Burns says. 

“Yeah, it's what Makarov wants,” Price confirms. 

Right now, their concern was Makarov and getting that sick son of a bitch behind bars. Soap sends up a quick prayer for the man now, knowing he’ll forget to do it when they’re out of here and he has time to think, it will be lost to the chaos of the day. 

Price drives them into a single lane funnelling them to another parking block and Soap is relieved to find a welcome sight waiting for them. “Police up ahead.”

“They got here fast,” Burns says as they’re approaching the uniformed men, trying to talk down panicking civilians. Soap was even surprised to see them here so quickly, but he wasn’t going to ask questions with more hands– 

“They’re killing civilians!” Soap cries right as an officer guns down three people and turns towards them. 

He dodges out of the way, shielding his face from the spray of glass bursting inward. 

“Return fire!” Price shouts as Soap manages to get his bearings, tugging on the door handle and reaching for his gun and releasing the seatbelt clasp. 

He practically falls out of his seat as one of the men turns his gun towards them. 

With renewed fervour and hatred for the man they were after, Soap takes down three of the fake policemen in rapid succession. 

The concrete floor is slick with a mixture of blood and viscera and Soap can feel it clinging to the bottom of his boots as he crosses over to the entrance of the staircase leading into the building. A civilian lies slumped against a cold wall. The back half of his skull shot out and he lies marinated in a pool of his own blood.

Not far from him lies one of the officers Soap shot down, gun still tight in his grip. A bullet to the neck had been too merciful a death. His face has got the hard look Soap has come to know with the enemies they deal with, and his hand’s got an old prison tattoo obscured by the cuff of his sleeve. Soap’s seen them enough to recognise it instantly, though. 

“Inner Circle’s posing as police,” Soap relays as Price comes up beside him with Burns in the back, taking point and leading them up the staircase. 

“They’d have access to the VIP area," Burns confirms Soap’s concern. 

“It's on the third floor, let’s move.” 

Another bullet shoots off from an awkward position at the top of the stairs and Soap and Price make quick work of clearing the staircase before emerging into the furnished concourse. 

If he'd thought the parking lot was chaos, this was a step up. 

Several more of the fake first responders were opening fire on civilians, screaming and running for safety only to be shot down by a careless bullet. They trip each other and slick the tiled floors with red. 

Price says something in his ear, but Soap is too preoccupied to register what it is as another police officer pulls his gun on him. 

Soap takes cover behind an advertising screen as another one of Makarov's men fires on him. 

Soap shoots first and the man falls backward with a jolt. 

"Gold Eagle, Bravo-6, we're internal and pushing to the VIP area. Be advised, Inner Circle's posing as police, over." 

"Copy. All police on target are considered hostile."  

"Roger that," Price acknowledges. 

Soap gritted his teeth as he pushed forward against the torrent of fleeing civilians. A heavy weight knocks him sideways as a  man stumbles into him, eyes wide and muttering distraughtly in Russian as he scrambles away from him. 

Ahead of him, one of Makarov's men hurls something through a window and it erupts into flames. 

He ducks more gunfire behind a vacant information desk, scrambling for safety before he reports back to the others. 

"Fuckers are using grenades." 

His lungs burn from the hazy wall of smoke as he moves forward. The floor is covered in contorted bodies and coagulating pools of blood, smelling so strongly that the air around him is tainted with a stomach churning thick fog of burning plastic and stench of iron. 

Burns isn't far behind him, trying to get a civilian to safety but struggling with the language barrier. 

Price barely has time to warn him of the figure running out of the smoke before another one of Makarov's men emerge like a wraith from the haze and nearly manages to get a shot in. He dies with two bullets to the head and neck, hand still reaching for his gun. 

Another woman is shot down as she flees from her hiding spot behind a counter of glass cases selling refreshments, pitching forward into the smudged floor, a stone's throw away from Soap. 

"Fuck!" 

Soap aims to shoot and curses when it clicks empty, quickly ducking behind the kiosk to reload as he grimly locks eyes with the corpse of the woman. 

He takes a deep breath to steel himself before leaving his temporary safe haven and charging at her killer with a rage he didn't think possible. 

Taking the man down he dodges behind a pillar in the centre of the floor as another charges out of the smoke and fires at him. 

A bullet clips his exposed arm and blood runs a warm crimson trail down his forearm. 

He just needs to make it through the concourse and get to the VIP area. His arm can wait. The dead civilians, the smoke in his lungs causing him to become light headed, the mission's already half-failure– it will have to wait.

To his right, Soap finds an entrance to the gift shop, by no doubt shorter than the path around it. 

Soap coughs against the wave of acrid smoke hitting his lungs before he informs the team over comms of his detour. 

He steps around the mangled body in the centre of the floor. Even through the cacophony of screaming and gunfire, he has half the mind to notice how heavy his boots have become, slaked in the grime and glass littering the floor. 

Soap reconvenes with Price by the entrance of a stairwell, taking point. He dodges pasta man running them down two at a time, resisting the urge to move out of harm's way as a barrage of gunfire from the top of the staircase sends bodies tumbling the rest of the way to the landing and piling up together by Soap's feet. 

He makes quick work of shooting up the son of a bitch, wasting no more than two billets to make sure he was properly dead. 

At the top of the staircase, he's met with a dead end. 

"Exit's locked." 

"On it," Price says, coming up behind him to pry the door open. 

Burns comes to stand beside Soap, observing the words on the door. Clearly, his Russian was better than Soap's. 

"Executive level. VIP level is close." 

The door gives way and Soap quickly confirms the floor is clear. 

There is an eerie silence overlayed onto the shrill, mindless drone of the fire alarm. The entire floor is strewn with casualties, not a living soul in sight. 

Makarov's men had swept through like a pestilence. 

"Eyes on the VIP," Price says as he spots it to their left. "Got movement inside. Stay sharp." 

Price steps away as they reach the door to give way to Soap, inclining his head in Soap’s direction.  

"On you, Sergeant." 

Soap grips the door handle and twists it on the mental count of three. 

"Special forces," Price cries as Soap pushes the door open, gun at the ready. There’s several men inside, dressed in blue uniforms and tending to bleeding, half dead men on stretchers. Though Soap is glad for the help, he’s seen enough today to be sceptical of anything. 

Soap shouts for them to show their hands and they’re up immediately, all looking from one to the other with worried expressions. 

 "First responders! Don't shoot!" One of the men steps forward, eyes darting nervously from the gun in Soap's hands, to his face, to Price and back again.

The air conditioning is cold on his sweat damp skin. There’s a handful of TVs in the room, all set to mute, but they’re turned into the news, reporting from the outside of the stadium, still shrouded in a column of rapidly worsening smoke. 

"How did you get in here?" Price demands sternly. 

"Security," he stammers, flustered and shell shocked. "Security let us in." 

"Who are you with?" Price pushes. 

"Please, we are trying to save lives." Another of the paramedics is just barely suppressing the urgency in his voice. 

Soap casts a sceptical glance over to the poor half-dead man on a stretcher to his right. Other paramedics are gathered around him, trying to stabilise his condition as best possible. 

"Shit, I need help over here," A paramedic by the side of the body says as he looks up urgently and finds Soap's gaze locked on him. "Soldier, please?"

Taking a risk while the other is occupied by Price's questioning, Soap moves over to assist as best he can. He's no field medic but he knows the basics if he ever gets himself into a twist. 

"Stand fast, Sergeant," Price warns, but he's already halfway over when the man draws a gun from his drug bag. He's a quick draw, but Soap is just as fast.

Soap fires just as a blow to his chest knocks him backwards with all the power of a freight train and he hits the floor with a painful thud. The bullet proof vest absorbs the brunt of the impact, but the shot still hurts like a bitch. 

It is outnumbered by the adrenaline and he recovers quickly, assisting Price and Burns in taking care of the other Inner Circle scum. 

His ears ring in the absence of the gunfire and his free hand comes to clutch futilely at the phantom pain of the gunshot over the clamouring of his racing heart. The tac vest obscures its path and his fingers grasp at spare magazines, his sidearm, as it tries to tear a direct path to ease the pain. 

The shot is absorbed into the marrow of his ribs and he knows somehow he'll feel it worse tomorrow. 

"You broken?" Price asks in a serious tone and he shakes his head. 

"Just the plate." 

Soap makes his way over to the table where various medical bags and equipment was set out on the pretence of being useful, but upon closer inspection, Soap notices the heart monitor is ancient, at least from the 90s and missing its internal wiring. 

Burns beside him opens one of the bags and turns to Price. “Check it. They had explosives. This was their next target.” 

Price calls it in immediately. “Gold Eagle Actual, explosives located in the VIP area. No sign of Makarov.”

Soap moves over to the window, eyebrows knitting together as he sees the rubble beneath the window from where the roiling mass of black smoke was rising up from. The field was empty, but there were casualties twisted and dead in the seats, either blown to bits or trampled by the masses in their bid to weave through the labyrinth of seats. 

He cuts his attention back to the task at hand when Shepherd returns to comms. “Copy, make it safe. Local set up a cordon, so Makarov will have to exfil fast. We’re five mikes out. Don’t let him escape, son.” 

Soap checks the pulse on the nearest man on a stretcher, but he’s so far gone dead, he knows for sure the Inner Circle just had him up there as a cover. 

“Roger that.” 

“The garage,” Burns says. 

It's the next logical option, Soap reasons and Price seems to agree. “Affirm,” he nods to the bag they’d been looking at earlier. “Secure the explosives and get to the secondary exfil.”

Burns gives him a nod of acknowledgement and Price gestures for Soap to follow him, moving over to the door on the opposite side of the VIP area and back into the concourse, the shrill alarm still insistently echoing through the space. 

Along the inner wall, Price stops him short at an elevator and he and Soap just about manage to pry the doors open with force, only for them to slide open and reveal a dark void plunging down into the abyss beneath them.

The only sign that there was something down there was a dim red glow licking up the sides of the elevator shaft, catching on the rivets and dents in the metal plating. 

 Soap took an instinctive step back from where the polished floor dropped off, giving a sceptical glance up to the elevator’s resting point a fair bit above their heads. 

Wires jutted out from the dark and trembled slightly with a phantom tremor of the cables, like vocal cords vibrating an ominous metal groan. Soap was unsure how safe it was for them to be standing there with the metal contraption suspended in the air by nothing but rickety cold war era engineering and pure faith holding it up, but when Price seizes one of the cold cables and drops down into the darkness, Soap has no choice but to follow. 

He hits the floor below with a force he feels compress into his spine and he grimaces. 

Price meets him at the bottom. “Eyes peeled for Makarov.” 

Soap sets himself with new determination as they emerge into the larger space. Empty buses are parked on either side of the tunnel, forcing them to move away from the walls inward. 

A chill runs down Soap’s spine as he hears the echoing of footsteps ahead, run-shuffle across the cast concrete. He reaches for his gun instinctively but Price halts him in his tracks as the man comes into view at the other end of the tunnel. 

“Check fire, that’s a civilian.” 

His gun lowers, but only slightly. 

Ahead of them around the bend of the turn, the rhythmic pulsing of a red emergency light caught Soap’s attention and he stopped dead for a moment, straining to hear the sirens before Price could confirm his suspicion. 

“Vehicle incoming.”  

It rounded the corner slowly, like it was a cornered animal placing a careful step forward into the crosshairs of its pursuer. 

Soap stepped forward, but Price laid a hand on his shoulder. 

“Maintain distance, Soap. Could be Makarov.” 

An empty bus to his left stood as the only shield between him and the ambulance a couple of metres ahead of him. He takes a cautious step backward as the ambulance inched closer at an excruciatingly slow pace, lurching as it halted. 

Price held his gun at the ready, moving away from the direct line of the ambulance. 

“Step out of the vehicle!” 

Though Soap couldn’t see who was inside, it was as though its unmovable energy almost seemed to mock them. 

It happened almost out of nowhere and predictably quickly at the same time. The engine revved and there was a moment the ambulance reversed sharply, turned on the sirens and ploughed forward. 

“Incoming!” Soap shouts and he and Price move out of the way on either side of the oncoming vehicle, Soap knocking his already tender shoulder against the back of the bus with the force he falls backwards with. 

There's the echoing crush of metal as the careless driving of the ambulance sees it knocking into an abandoned car and barreling over onto its side, ceasing the urgency of the siren to a dead silence. The absence of sound and the shifting of angular shadows from the strobing of the red emergency light mounted on the roof drew on the vastness of the dark parking garage, threatening to send the already heightened atmosphere to a fever pitch. 

“It’s down,” Soap says with only a hint of relief. 

Price was already moving. “Move to secure.” 

Soap bit the inside of his cheek to avoid showing how much the strain was impacting him as he and Price made their way over to the upturned vehicle, wheels still spinning for phantom grasp in the air, like desperate waving limbs that couldn’t grasp the earth to flee. 

The doors remained resolutely closed, but Soap’s stomach twisted at what he knew he would find there. There was no question of it. That ominous energy, the itching of his sixth sense, he knows it in the marrow of his bones. 

“Open it,” Price motioned Soap over to the door. 

Though hesitant, he complied, tugging the dented metal door open with a firm yank and flooding the gutted ambulance with sharp torchlight. 

“Hands! Hands!” Price shouted for the figure in the blue uniform moving from his sprawled position, his face turned away from them for the moment. “Pokazat' ruki!” Soap shouted for good measure, drawing on his limited Russian to make sure the man got the message. 

Dead on impact, there were two fake paramedics sprawled on the now earthside wall, but his attention was fixed on the man crouching towards the back, shielding his face from the glaring light. 

His hand shifted away from his face to raise in vitriolic surrender and Soap cursed, instinctively readjusting his grip on his gun. “It's him.” 

“Vladimir Makarov, step out of the vehicle now!” 

Sending them a searing look, Makarov gritted his teeth and crawled across the uneven side of the ambulance panelling, knees shifting over the bruised, dead limbs of his men. 

“Nice and easy,” Soap warns when he gets a bit too close to the door for his liking. After all, he still had his firearm tucked into the holster on his bullet proof vest. 

“That’s far enough.” Soap held out a hand to halt him when he attempted to take a step further from getting out of the ambulance. 

“Now don’t fucking move.” Makarov’s attention shifted to Price as he ordered Soap to search him. 

Soap immediately relieves him of the gun and tosses it out of reach. Makarov’s face held a discontented but somehow still neutral expression that Soap struggled to read. 

“You scared Captain?” he asks in a condescending tone as Soap went through the cursory motions of patting him down for extra firepower. Makarov takes Price’s silence as a win. “You should be.” 

“Shut up.”

A little grin tucks into the corner of his mouth and Soap has had about enough of it. He’ll take silence, he’ll take anger, but he will not have enjoyment coming from someone on the wrong end of a gun. 

He’s a soldier. He does not play fair in the game of terrorists. 

“Get on your fucking knees!” Soap manhandles him into a kneel on the cold concrete. 

Without the usual decorum, Soap roughly completes the search. “He’s clean.” 

Not wasting any time, Soap reaches into his pocket for zip ties and tightens them a bit more than strictly necessary, using a second one for good measure.

“Are you going to kill me?” Makarov asks evenly, completely ignoring the hard plastic digging into his wrists and focusing his attention on Price. 

“Oh I’ve thought about it, yeah.” 

He scoffs. “I recommend you do.”

“And I recommend you tell your men to stand down.” Price’s eyebrows narrowed at him. The gun now hovered only a foot away from Makarov’s face, but he remained unfazed. His expression remained unimpressed and he shook his head almost imperceptibly. 

“They’re not trained to stand down. That’s more… your strategy.” 

Soap couldn’t believe the audacity of him. Even like this, he thinks he’s got the upper hand. It takes a heavy helping of self restraint for Soap not to knock his teeth out. 

Price ignores him, locking eyes with Soap. “Keep him close.”

Soap tugs on his bound arms to get him to stand, following behind Price as he radios in. 

“All stations. We have Makarov. We’re moving to the extract.” 

“Roger that, John. they’ll fight to get him back…” 

“We’re counting on it,” Soap says bitterly with a bit of a shrug. 

He doesn’t miss the way Makarov turns to shoot him a venomous glance and he gets a bit of a rise out of it. 

“Alright, take him left. We clear these vehicles, we move up,” Price instructs him shortly, taking the lead and Soap acknowledges him, yanking Makarov roughly to his feet and shoving him in Price’s general direction. “Get goin’.” 

Price confirms the area on the other side of the ambulance is clear, and Soap starts them out at an urgent pace, making sure not to give the man any chance at a rest after the tumble he’d just taken in the ambulance. 

“You think you can just walk me out of here?” Makarov’s voice doesn’t have a hint of worry or remorse.

“We can drag you out as well,” Soap reminds him, giving him a rough shove to make him pick up his pace, but if Makarov feels anything at the rough treatment, he keeps it to himself. 

“Capturing me… it means nothing.” 

“It means we beat you, Vlad.” 

Soap can just barely see him shake his head, huffing out a laugh. “Don’t be a fool.” 

“Contact!” Price shouts from somewhere ahead of him and Soap’s first instinct is to duck behind the nearest vehicle as the Inner Circle men Price had spotted come into view, irritably losing Makarov to the confusion. 

 He gets a shot in, risking a glance sideways to Price who reassures him he’s got Makarov secured, but Makarov and one of the men are shouting back and forth for another moment before he gets him down too. 

“We clear?” Price asks him when the last man falls. 

“Affirm.” 

“It's not safe here. Grab Makarov, we need to move.” 

Price waits for Soap to take him before they proceed down the tunnel towards where they would be meeting with the others outside. 

“You’re not safe anywhere,” Makarov tells him and Soap’s just about had enough. 

“Your luck’s running dry, Makarov.” 

They’re coming up by another skewly parked bus, promptly ignoring the dead body of one of the Inner Circle men Soap had shot down, lying slumped behind it, Makarov doesn’t even look in his direction, just keeps his eyes focused dead ahead. 

“I don’t believe in luck. I believe in planning. Bad luck, it's just poor planning.” 

“What part of your plan involves rotting in a prison?” 

“A man can be locked up,” Makarov reminds him. “An idea cannot.” 

Soap keeps him close, tightening his grip on Makarov when they pass a woman trying to flee the building and giving her a jump scare. Soap tries to give her an apologetic look, but she’s clearly shell shocked and just stumbles away from him. 

Price is up ahead, securing them a path through to where they were to rendezvous with the others. 

“Found a way through, Sergeant. Lets move.” 

Up ahead was a blockade of buses, narrowly parked together, pressed into the wall. As Soap neared it, he could see the arms of daylight reaching for them from the gap between the two. 

“I bestow my blessings on your courage, but curse your stupidity.” 

“Worry about yourself.”

“Every man is replaceable, even me.” 

The only way around the barrier would be to squeeze through the narrow gap between the two vehicles, but it appeared Price was willing to bet they’d fit. 

“On me,” Price calls to Soap and slots in first. 

Soap gives Makarov a shove, both to move him forward and to shut him up as they come up to the gap, making progress at a snail's crawl. Soap isn’t particularly put off by tight spaces, but this could change that. 

Still, he takes Makarov by the shoulders and forces him after Price, sucking in as far as possible to try to keep his gear from snagging as they move. 

What’s even more unnerving is the pained crying he can hear from inside the bus, a bleak chance that there were still lives that could be saved in this shitshow. They didn’t have the time to stop now. 

“You’re not a soldier, you’re a war criminal.” Price picks up on it too, giving a heated glance in Makarov’s direction as he shuffles sideways. He’s more than irritated with Makarov’s attitude in combination with the injured civilians just metres away from them.

“These people need medical.” 

“What’s stopping you from helping them, Sergeant?” Makarov asks condescendingly and Soap shoves him sideways to keep moving. 

“You.” 

Makarov looks back at Soap. “That's your choice.” 

“You did this, not us…” Price reminds him sharply.

“They’re innocent people,” Soap adds from the side.  

“No one is innocent. War is treachery.” 

“Enough of this shite.” 

Price groans as he squeezes past the last bit and emerges into the open, Makarov –still within Soap’s grasp– follows shortly and Price has them heading for the exit, just to the right, just a little further and they’ll be out of the smoke and into the light. It gives Soap the strength to push on. 

Just to the end of the tunnel. A smoking wreck of a car flickers by the end of it, a false beacon of hope, but Soap knows it's just a little further. He just needs to keep his head on straight. Maybe what he says next is to distract himself, maybe it's because he wants to throw stones at the enemy while there isn’t a glass wall and several government officials between them. 

He doesn’t want to admit that it's probably to cover a chip in his own hope they’ll get out of this in one piece. He’s learned that celebrating the victory too soon only turns a blind eye to the evil building in his peripheral vision.  

“Time for you to meet some friends of mine.” They’re so close that Soap can almost begin to sense the relief of a win drawing close. He’ll get to go home in one piece and he’ll make good on his promises, all the ones he almost failed on. He’ll get time to reconsider his resignation, maybe he’ll let Scotland and its people resculpt him into an honest man. 

“Where are they?” 

Soap doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of a full answer, lips turning into a conceited sneer. “Close.” 

Makarov gave a half-shrug, letting the cuffs jingle a bit behind his back. His hands were balled into tight, tense fists. 

“So are mine.” 

Soap worries it’s too late to save himself now, but he’s twenty-five. A lot of people find their feet at the age of twenty-five. He can still choose to rewrite the ending of his story. He can still return to the nostalgia of his not-yet-past youth, his mother’s home cooked meals. “You should know when you’ve lost.” 

“You’re still thinking about victory. Think about success.” 

It's another pebble thrown against Makarov’s unshakable demeanour, hitting nowhere vital but somehow still spurring him to give Soap a word of advice, sitting on that self-made throne. 

“The wicked prosper. They always will. Peace is invisible. War you can see…” 

Soap hates how evocative it sounds, how a weaker man might have thought it inspirational. Soap just thinks it sounds as though he’s pulled it from a fortune cookie. 

Soap’s nose scrunches up as the smoke thickens and burns at his lungs, blinking as his eyes water from the burn too. 

“Incoming!” 

He’s more prepared for the hits this time when the bullet zips past his head to disappear into the inferno. 

“Molotov!” Price shouts to him and he ducks away behind another wrecked vehicle as a bottle hurtles through the air and shatters on the floor just a couple of metres away, sending flames licking up the side of the wall. 

“I’ve got Makarov, you take ‘em out.” 

Soap swiftly takes care of the man running at him, catching him before he’s even spotted Soap behind the car and turns on the other man running to cover his fallen comrade. 

Soap takes down the next three in rapid succession, sidestepping another attempt at a molotov in his direction and finding the thrower with a bullet to the neck.

The last man catches him by surprise and he takes a hit to the arm before he gets a good shot in. The man slumps to the floor and Soap grits his teeth as he scans around for anyone else to materialise out of the smoke before relaxing slightly. Crisis averted. 

“We’re clear.” 

In his adrenaline high mind, the bullet wound, though only a graze, was a distant low hum, barely offering a distraction from the here and now. He resists the urge to clutch at his chest as he returns to Price. 

He’s by the gate, forcing Makarov to his knees with a gun pressed against his neck. 

“Lift it.” Price inclines his head to the gate and Soap drops to his knees to pull at the edge and lift it just high enough for them to duck under. Once out, he lets it drop with a thundering crash. 

“Gold Eagle Actual, we’re external. East side of the stadium. What’s your status?” 

Soap comes up behind Price, eyebrows drawn together and squinting at the too-bright sky for their helicopter flying over the building to land on the other side. 

“Bravo-6, we’re on station. Be advised, you have enemy personnel moving in from the North. Ghost will provide sniper support.” 

“Copy. We'll meet you at primary exfil. Six out,” Price says and turns to Soap. “I’ll handle Makarov, you clear a path.” 

Soap moves ahead, sticking close to cover as he eliminates those of Makarov’s men still looking to take him back. He’s briefly aware of Price behind him, but he makes sure to cover all their bases before the Inner Circle men can get the better of them. He’s too desperate for a win now. 

To his left, a man emerges from behind a white van, cowering behind a riot shield as he tries to get a shot at Soap. Soap moves back to duck behind a parked car but he lets out an involuntary curse when a neat bullet clips the man in the back of the head and he collapses onto the pavement with a heavy lurch. 

He follows the path of the bullet up to the helicopter hovering above their exfil point, finding the imposing silhouette in the doorway and he acknowledges the man with a nod. 

Ghost may be a bit of a prick, but as Soap looks down at the mess of the man’s skull spattered across the concrete, he can at least acknowledge he’s a good shot. 

“Watch right,” Ghost warns him over the comms and Soap turns and fires at a man ducked behind a parked car.  

There seems to be no further pursuit and Ghost confirms it a moment later, giving them the green light to proceed to exfil with Price and Makarov shortly behind him. 

The helicopter has barely touched down and Ghost is standing guard at the open door, expression completely obscured by the mask, but Soap can sense the tension in his stance as he just barely tracks their movements. 

Soap squints against the torrent of wind coming in his direction, finding Shepherd’s outstretched hand to tug him over the threshold of the doorway. And it's homeward. They made it. 

Price comes in after him, handing Makarov over to Shepherd before he wordlessly taps Ghost on the shoulder to signal him inside. 

The door shuts with a resounding bang and soon, they’re up in the air, watching the smoking stadium recede beneath them. 

Soap steadies himself against the wall to allow himself to catch his breath, resisting the urge to turn and face the monster of a man behind him as Price makes sure he’s secure. He takes a long look at the city beneath him. He can sense it writhing with panic and it itches beneath his skin in a way he cannot put word to. 

“Simon Riley.” Makarov’s accent registers behind him and Soap glances to the left to find Ghost still by the door, now facing Makarov at the mention of his name. Soap turns to meet Makarov’s eye for a moment, but his gaze quickly averted back to Ghost. 

“I expected you to stay at the airport… and die there.” 

“If you wanna live, do not threaten my men, Vladimir,” Shepherd warns him. 

“Are we on a first name basis? Herschel?” 

“So you know names,” Soap cuts in impatiently. “Anyone can read a bloody dossier.” 

A beat passes and when no one makes any move to ask any of the big questions, Ghost doesn’t beat around the bush. 

“What’s the rest of your plan?” 

“This.” He shrugs, almost nonchalant, staged in a way that put Soap’s nerves on edge. Like he knew this was eating at them and he was enjoying watching the scene unfold instead of worrying about the fact he wouldn’t be able to slip through the noose this time. 

Price sits forward. “What do you mean ‘this’?” 

“Amazing. You’re all dumber than you look.” 

“I asked you a question–” Ghost reminds him sharply. 

“And I have a question for you.” he addresses them all, inclining his head in Soap’s direction, hinting at his watch. “What time is it?” 

“What the hell do you care what time it is?” Shepherd asks impatiently and he gives half a shrug as partial explanation. 

“Timing is everything, General. I think we’ll all remember this moment. Some… more fondly than others.” 

It registers first as a distant rumble. A shaking of earth that offsets the balance of the air by such a dire tone it compels Soap to look out the window and find the source of the noise. His heart plummets into his feet. 

“The airport,” Ghost says with more concern Soap thought he was capable of. 

“He pulled us off target.” 

“You fucking son of a bitch!” 

Something in Soap snaps. He’s restrained himself far too long and before he’s even realised what he’s doing, he’s pulling his gun and grabbing Makarov with a fistful of the blue uniform he was wearing, knocking him against the metal wall with a reverberating bang before tossing him to the floor. 

“I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out, I swear I’ll do it.” 

Makarov locks eyes with him over the barrel of the gun, mere inches away from his face and finds Soap’s eyes with an intensity he didn’t think possible. 

“Soap, don’t do it,” Price warns him, but its dead noise in his periphery. Still, he hesitates. He feels the chain chafing against his neck.

The gun waits between them for Soap to pull the trigger. His finger itches, he clutches just a bit, with no pressure. But he could if he wanted to, he feels the impulse curl his finger in his mind’s eye but there is no gunshot and Makarov is still looking at him as though he’s bluffing. 

“Do it, come on,” Makarov taunts him. 

“You shut your mouth,” Price tells him, but his eyes never leave Soap. 

“Let me finish him.” Soap doesn’t know why he’s waiting for permission. He knows what needs to be done, but he can’t. He needs that bit of reassurance that its a necessary evil. 

Makarov gives a cynical laugh but Price pulls his attention. “John, we have him, he’s in custody. He’s not going anywhere. Stand down, Sergeant.” 

With all the self restraint he can muster, Soap pulls back before he can impulsively pull the trigger, reholstering the gun and taking a seat as far away from Makarov as possible. 

Price tugged Makarov up from the floor and into his own seat. 

“I thought you were the good guys.” 

“You gon’ rot in hell for this,” Shepherd tells him. 

“You’ll die in the gulag with the rest of the Russian rats,” Soap adds. 

Makarov glances at Soap, eyes drifting down to the gun now tucked uselessly into its holster. 

“You can lock me away, MacTavish, but I can promise you, the next time we’ll be seeing each other, you better hope your Captain didn’t just sign your death warrant.” 

Soap has learned over the years that the silence after the fact can sometimes be more haunting than the screams that came before it. Silence is a full stop that drives the hope into the ground and smothers any thought of change for the better. 

Silence is the whiplash passing of the first stage of grief and sinking into those later phases, the knowing that nothing can be done once the last breath has passed dying lips and all that can be clung to is the husk of what remains. 

Sometimes the acknowledgement of the silence is the victory for the sadistic intention, so tight lipped, Vladimir Makarov took the lack of words following the skirmish with Soap on the ground as a proof of this victory. 

Soap didn’t let it show, but he felt it in his knees, sinking into acceptance of the horror and he sank to his seat in bitter anger. He would not let Makarov have the satisfaction of being ignored, so he made a point of looking him in the eye as they made their way back to base, from which General Shepherd had informed them authorities were already awaiting their arrival to take Makarov off their hands. 

Halfway through the return trip, Ghost comes to take a seat next to him and Soap shifts an inch or two further away to allow himself to breathe. 

He’s aware of the motion beside him, Ghost clenching and unclenching his fist in Soap’s peripheral vision.

He’s surprised Ghost isn’t more visibly worked up by the situation, but Soap realises that idea might have come from a misjudgement of the man’s character on his part. Ghost was reserved and brash, but he was calculated, something Soap worried he fell terribly short on. 

“You’re a hard man to kill, Riley. My men tell me you’re dead on paper. Suppose it goes to show that even if you read between the lines, most of the story is left off the books.”

“You’ve got nothing to gain here, Makarov. You’ve lost. Throwing stones at us isn’t going to help your case,” Soap warns him harshly, but Ghost holds up a hand to silence him.

From out of the window, Soap can see them coming up on the base and the helicopter begins to turn in for landing. 

“No, let him talk. I wanna know what else kind of shit has been circulating.” 

“Only a fool lays all his cards on the table, but I will tell you this. Your system, your government is lying to you. They’re using you, tell you its for your country. But they’re all the same, your Captain,” Makarov nods to Price, “the General, they’ve got more skeletons in the closet than they’ll let on, just make sure you don’t become one of them.” 

“No one should be taking advice from a madman,” Price dismisses him. “And we’re coming up on your last stop before you won’t be seeing the sun for a long time, so you better take one long look at the world, because it's the last you’ll be seeing of it.”

The helicopter descended on the landing pad. 

A waiting group of armed men in uniforms stood close by and approached with urgency when the doors opened and Makarov was taken into official custody of the Kastovian government. 

The exchange happens in Russian and Soap struggles to follow along with it as they get out with Price after General Shepherd and the men escorting Makarov into the building, following behind at a respectable distance. 

Makarov is properly restrained and escorted off base to another facility in an armoured vehicle and Soap feels a strange emptiness settle over him as he watches them leave the premises. They’d gotten Makarov, but he cannot consider this a victory. “You did good today,” Price informs him a while later when they’re alone. “The outcome is far from what we hoped for, but we made sure he’ll never be able to do something like this again.” 

Burns arrives later with questions about Makarov’s arrest and the airport after the bomb squad had successfully taken care of the rest of the explosives on site at the stadium, but he’s got very little to say in return to Soap’s recollection of it. 

 

Finding he can’t manage to catch any sleep after an hour of tossing and turning, Soap supposes he should give up on sleep in general. 

He wants to reflect about the day, but his mind is cluttered with thoughts about the thousand of innocent lives lost in the carnage, its jarring to see those faces from the news, burned into his mind and superimposed over what the airport had looked like when they’d driven towards it just that morning, those people outside, saying goodbye to families, pressing kisses to cheeks with a promise of ‘see you soon’. Most of those people are crushed and buried under rubble and maybe even lost forever. The thought is sickening. 

Though it's futile and seems like a juvenile remedy to a problem that can’t be helped, he replays that moment on the flight out from the stadium over and over again, and in each instance, he pulls the trigger and Makarov is dead on the ground. He doesn’t listen to Price. 

Fuck. If only he hadn’t listened to Price back then. 

It wouldn’t have mattered though, he’d have felt just as guilty seeing it on the news, knowing he could have done something to help as he feels now, knowing that he’d been played for a fool. 

Lying back on the bed, Soap dips his hand under the hem of his shirt and pulls out the tangle of his dog tags with the cross over his chest. It dangles in the artificial heatless glow of the industrial strip light he’d neglected to turn off, clinking together as he holds it just a few centimetres from his face, skin warm and seeming to possess a life of its own. He clutches it all together over his heart and closes his eyes, trying to muster the words for a silent prayer through all the clutter of his mind. 

His mind jumps around, but it's sincere. He prays for the families he knows must be mourning their loved ones, for those in hospitals clinging to life, for the people who’d lost their lives today. He puts a conscious effort to word it understandably despite how utterly exhausted he is, even though he knows that God must already know what he has to say. 

Yes, he should probably stop swearing so much and he’s not proud of his history, but at least he’s trying. His hands are covered in the blood of people that despite their choices, God would have wanted to call his children and he’d killed them for material means. No matter how evil their actions, Soap had killed hundreds if not thousands of people over the years. 

It doesn’t matter how tainted the soul, blood is still blood. 

But he’s doing good with the darkness he’d been born with, the destruction he was always leaning more towards. He’d been entrusted with this attribute like a double edged sword he must use wisely and he reminds himself that he does it so that others can keep their hands clean. 

It's a noble thing to do, to sacrifice your own innocence for the sake of others. It's honourable. 

He can only lie there for so long before his skin itches for something other than the stillness of the stale room. Burns is knocked out on the bunk across from him and Soap gets up and leaves the room, turning off the light upon his exit. 

He decides fresh air might do him good and he takes his chance to slip out onto the roof to catch his breath and collect his thoughts. 

The night sky is almost completely obscured by the haziness of the smoke that had spread out from the epicentre of the airport, only letting in through pinpricks of blinking light from the stars. It takes Soap’s breath away for a moment. 

He hadn’t realised just how easily he could see the airport from the base, especially situated on the hill, overlooking the city. He can’t see all of Verdansk, but he can see enough to know how much the disaster has affected it.

He can hear the wailing of sirens and the dim flashing of red lights responding to the remainder of the disaster. 

Soap sighs heavily as he walks over to the edge of the roof, sinking down to his knees and scooting over to dangle his feet off the edge of the roof, he’s half startled out of the haze when his phone vibrates in his pocket. 

He debates answering the message later but goes to pull out his phone. 

Four unread messages. all from Elena. 

Elena: a guy came into work today and he looked almost exactly like you. It was sort of scary.

Elena: oh btw, you left your sweater at my house the other day in case you were looking for it. 

Elena: hey, how was your day?

Elena: Look, I understand if you’re busy and just don’t have the time to talk to me, but if you don’t want to see me anymore, I’d appreciate it if you told me. I can handle it. I really like you and I thought we had a genuinely good connection the other day, but I get it, the moment’s over and I was clearly reading the situation wrong. It seems like we went into it with two very different intentions and I just don’t think it's going to work. After everything that happened, I think I just need someone that’s present and I need some time to work on myself before I get into anything now. I’m sorry.

Well, fuck. Soap can’t be everywhere, he can’t fix everything, he can’t be there for everyone. Maybe he should’ve tried to respond sooner, but on top of today’s disaster, it stings. 

John: There's nothing to be sorry about. I didn’t mean to give you the impression that I don’t want to talk to you, really, I’ve just had a really long day. And I think you’re right, I don’t think this is going to work. I had a great time getting to know you but I’ve got a lot on my plate right now and things are very stressful here. I just have a lot of things to think of right now and I don’t think it's fair to drag you along with me.

It didn’t take very long for her to respond to him, quickly adding a heart emoji in response to his message before she wrote back. 

Elena: thank you for being honest with me. 

There was nothing more after that and Soap stared at the last message for a couple of moments, frowning at it as the screen darkened and died. He sighed heavily, shoving the phone back into his pocket, looking down at the cracked pavement two storeys below him, right to where they had parked coming into base just two days ago and how he couldn’t have ever imagined what was in store for him. 

“Just don’t fall, you’ll cause me paperwork.” 

The voice startled Soap to his core and he almost tipped forward by the sound of it, cursing as he stabilised himself again. 

He turned to find a small pinprick of light from where a dark clothed figure leaned against a wall not far from him. He hadn’t even recognised the smell of cigarette smoke, figuring it was the wind carrying the smoke from the explosion site. 

“Shit, Ghost, you scared me,” Soap laughed uneasily as the man approached him to stand by the railing. 

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he says. Soap gets to his feet and Ghost holds out a half empty pack of Marlboro cigarettes in Soap’s direction, an olive branch. Soap isn’t sure he’ll take it. 

“I don’t smoke. It's a filthy habit.” 

Ghost rolled his eyes, sighing around his own cigarette as he plucked one from the pack, lit it and offered it again, now with a thin curl of silver smoke distending from its orange glow. It highlights the edges of the skeleton motif on his gloves and somehow, Soap knows he’ll carry a part of this day with him for days onwards, because the smell of that cigarette will burn into the fabric of his gloves. 

“I don’t smoke,” Soap insists again with a frown, but all Ghost does is take his hand –not roughly, but not gently either– and puts the thin cigarette between his fingers. 

“After a day like today, everybody smokes, Soap.” 

Soap hesitates with it for a moment, watching the glow eat away at the unburnt part of the cigarette and inching closer away from the ashen end before he gives in and raises it to his mouth for a long, much needed draw. 

He wishes he could wipe the smug look he just knows Ghost has under that mask off his face as he watches the action, knowing how easy it is to fall back into dormant muscle memory. 

“You don’t smoke, huh?” 

Soap pouts, not sure how much he wants to let the strange man in on his past, but he settles for something basic. “I don’t smoke anymore .” 

Ghost nods, whether it was meant to be mocking or genuine is something Soap’s ego can’t discern. “Right.” 

They stand there for a moment in the pseudo-silence, filled with the ambience of night sounds and distant sirens echoing through the ether and surrounding the two of them in a lamentous hum. 

“If it was up to me, I’d have let you kill him today.”

“You would?” Soap asks with genuine confusion. 

“I would. Price doesn’t always think of it that way, but the world’s better off without having scum like him wasting space, even if he’s behind bars.”

Ahead, somewhere from out of the darkness, the glow of the burning airport stood out, a beacon of hellish light that made Soap’s skin crawl. They’re far away and the attack was hours ago, but it lingers on his skin like an itch he can’t run away from. 

He leans on the cigarette for comfort, and just a little, the presence of the taller man beside him helps to ease the loneliness of feeling like one tremendous failure. 

“Don’t think too hard about it Soap, it’ll make your hair fall out and we certainly can’t have that with that illustrious haircut of yours.” 

Soap jerked his head around so fast, he could’ve almost sworn Ghost startled just a little. 

“Oh you’re one to talk about appearances with that halloween costume shite you’ve got going on.” 

It takes two seconds for Soap to realise he’d chosen the wrong option. He’d overstepped one of the rules Price had very clearly set out for him. No questions about his appearance. 

To his surprise, Ghost just gives him a bit of a laugh, albeit a bit of a snide one. “To each their own, but I’m serious, don’t beat yourself up about what happened today, there’s no use in dwelling on it.”

Soap frowns. “How am I not supposed to dwell on it? If we hadn’t responded to the attack on the stadium, if you and Shepherd hadn’t followed after us, we would have died there too,” he gestures vaguely out at the glow of the still smouldering heap of rubble. 

“That’s just the way of the world, Soap. No one gets into this job thinking you’ll walk away with a bruise or a cut you can just slap a plaster over. People die, that’s how it works. We just happen to see more of it because of what we do. We are not entitled to living longer or dying later or easier because we’re supposed to be heroes. We could have died today, but what does it actually matter in the grand scheme of things.” 

“You’re a real ray of sunshine, Lt,” Soap says dryly, bringing the cigarette to his mouth again. In the corner of his eye, he can see Ghost do the same. 

“Maybe I’ve just been screwed over by the system that’s supposed to keep me alive more than I’ve been saved by it.” 

Soap shrugged, but it didn’t sit right with him, the idea that death was just an inevitable fact of life. He’s too stubborn to believe it. For someone who’d spent more than half his waking life trying to change the hand he’d been dealt when he was born to broke college student parents and the expectation to be utterly average, he didn’t take kindly to the notion of just accepting things he can’t change, even if it drives him up the wall. 

There’s a lot of other, more personal questions he wants to ask the man instead, but he settles for something safer. 

“How do you deal with it? Stuff like today?” 

“I’m not the person you should be asking for advice, Soap,” Ghost says with a hint of surprise. “That’s more Price’s thing.” 

Soap turned to face him, trying to analyse what little he could see of his face where the mask was pulled up just high enough for him to smoke. He can just about see the curve of his lip around the cigarette and the edge of what seemed to be a jagged scar extending from the corner of his mouth. 

Just as quickly as Soap had seen it, he lowered the cigarette, holding the smoke for a moment before he released it in a slow exhale. 

“I’m not asking for advice, I’m asking how you cope.” 

“I keep going. Sometimes the only way to cope is to endure.” 

The silence that followed thereafter was more comfortable, more settled. Soap could begin to see why Price had told him Ghost was an acquired taste. For all his cold facade, he was really just a man with a grumpy disposition. Maybe even one with a personality outside of work, but Soap struggles to comprehend what that might be. 

Reminded of work and everything they’d discussed in the wake of the attack, Soap frowned as he took another drag from the cigarette, now on its last breath.

“What do you think ended up happening to Price’s informant?” 

Ghost scoffed, stubbing out his own cigarette against the rail and crushing the rest under his boot for good measure. “Fuck if I know.” 

Soap shook his head, feeling himself getting riled up just at the thought of it. “Bet you the arse is sitting somewhere comfortable, getting piss drunk, laughing at the news.” 

Ghost shrugs. “Reckon you may be right about that one, sergeant.” 

“Wherever he is, I hope karma comes back to get him good.”

 

MOSCOW 

 

The man convulsed with a cry of pain as another shock of electricity surged through him, curling in a distortion of twitching muscles through the point where the cattle prod made contact with his bare, singed back and burned another snakebite pattern onto what remained of the undamaged skin. 

The small, uninsulated barn stank of singed hair and burning flesh, all emanating from a centre point where a young man, beaten and tortured beyond recognition, was bound to a bloodied kitchen chair. 

He shivered and twitched from the aftershock of electricity under the glaring warm buzzing of a bare filament bulb, fixed to the rafters above his head. 

Six other men, still residually wearing police uniforms and paramedic overalls, were gathered around him in a semicircle. 

The one in front of him, Andrei Nolan, was not holding the cattle prod. His hands were clean of blood, though there was a light spatter across the front of his body from his earlier beating, inflicted by the man now standing behind the chair, resting a gloved hand dutifully on the wooden backrest, waiting for further instruction. 

“I’m not going to say I’m surprised, Dmitri. But I expected better from someone like you,” Andrei says with mock pity, crouching down to find the swollen eyes of the young man. A trickle of pinkish saliva traced down his trembling lip and dripped to the cold floor by his bare feet. 

“Not even twenty with a whole life ahead of him. You could’ve gone and married that pretty young thing you’re hiding in the city. Could have fathered children to carry that name since the anti-communist rats snuffed out the rest of your Soviet supporter family and executed them like dogs, but your bloodline will end here because you wanted to be a bootlicker.” 

Dmitri flinched as Andrei pressed a calloused thumb into the burn on his inner thigh, drawing out a pained noise. He leaned away from the hand, but stripped naked and bound, there was little he could do to avoid the pain of Andrei’s finger scratching open the blistered skin and causing it to bleed again. 

Even Yuri, the man that had inflicted the burn waiting behind him with bated breath, began to feel nauseated at the sight of his own handiwork, but it did not show. He kept his expression even and serious. 

Andrei was a dangerous man and Yuri knows better than to cross him when he’s already angry. Andrei might think of Dmitri as a bootlicker, but he was just as much the same to Makarov. Still, Yuri stood by, idle, complacent. The cattle prod in his other hand was heavy and had more weight to it than it should have had. 

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Andrei asked. 

Mustering the last of his strength, Dmitri lifted his swollen face to look Andrei dead in the eye and spoke around a mouthful of busted teeth. 

“Preserving innocent lives… is not… the same… as bootlicking.” He threw in as much venom as he could into the words, punctuating it by spitting blood and phlegm into Andrei’s face, mere centimetres away from him. The man recoiled with a curse and reacted with a harsh backhanded smack to his already busted face. Andrei wiped at his face with the edge of his sleeve. 

“It would’ve been better for you if you begged for mercy,” he says, getting to his feet and moving a safer distance away. 

“Fucker thinks he’s Pavlik Morozov,” one of the other men laughs, shaking his head pitifully and the others join in. “But by all means if he wants to die a young hero, we give him his martyr fantasy,” another says. 

 Yuri feels himself stiffen. He agreed to rough up the kid, already uncomfortable at the thought of hurting him to teach him a lesson. He gave in when the Inner Circle wanted to use his house to lay low after that afternoon's situation with Makarov’s arrest, but he did not consent to killing a man that had seen him as a mentor. He’d practically fathered him from the age of fifteen when his parents were killed. 

“Don’t be so hasty, Pyotr,” Andrei scolded him. “Now that Makarov is in federal custody, we must make extra sure not to lose his sentiments to our own vision. We must be patient.” 

“We still have Zakhaev,” the first man suggests and Andrei turns to him, unimpressed. 

“Zakhaev is a puppet on a string. He knows what Makarov wants and he’ll be better in executing that vision than any other of his affiliates, but we must not forget that though Zakhaev was Makarov’s predecessor, he still had a different vision for Russia.” 

“It's better than letting the cause die off.” 

“Makarov has planned for this. The system has not failed us. All the more to show that this little stunt of yours has meant nothing,” Andrei directs his attention back to Dmitri, kicking his bare foot roughly. 

“But seeing as this stint didn’t play out as you planned and you have nothing meaningful to say, perhaps you shouldn’t be able to say anything at all.” 

Yuri frowned, unsure where this was going as Andrei addressed one of the men beside him. “Go to the van and fetch the white jug in the back. Should be under the spare uniforms. Don’t let the woman in the main house see you.” 

Andrei tossed his keys to the man. 

“What are you planning to do to him?” Yuri asks, now visibly becoming unnerved. 

“Nothing extravagant.”

“I am not going to kill him with my wife and child barely two hundred metres away,” he said sternly and Andrei scoffed. 

“He won’t die immediately. I’m counting on the secondary complications to do that. Keeps the hands clean and the conscience clear.” 

“You fucking murderer,” Dmitri says as loud as he was able, struggling against his restraints. “All of you will burn in hell.” 

“At least you’ll be there to welcome us,” Andrei says dryly. 

They all turned in tandem to face the creaking of the barn door behind them, just a little way away, the man how having returned and holding up a heavy, half-empty bottle that at first sight seemed to be some sort of laundry detergent, but Yuri’s heart dropped through the floor as he realised exactly what it was. 

“You can’t be serious– that’s insane,” he stammers as the man hands off the bottle to  Andrei, now making a play to thoroughly check the label. 

“Thirty-seven percent hydrochloric acid. A lower concentration is an irritant to the skin, but undiluted, it’ll corrode right through to the flesh. I wonder what it’ll do to those vocal cords of yours.” 

He roughly shoves the bottle in Yuri’s direction. “If you would do the honours.” 

“I am not going to pour hydrochloric acid down his throat.” 

“You’re not really in a position to negotiate here. It would be a shame if I were to show your little girl what her daddy is really capable of.” 

“You leave my family out of this,” Yuri warned. 

“Then you wouldn’t mind teaching the rat here a lesson?” 

Gritting his teeth and avoiding eye contact with a panicked Dmitri, Yuri took the bottle from Andrei and slowly unscrewed the cap. It looks just like water. 

 He moved over to Dmitri with much trepidation. 

“Don’t fucking come close to me– you asshole, I thought I could trust you–” he thrashes, scooting the chair back and lurches back with so much force, the chair tips and he crashes to the floor. He cries out in more pain as he takes his weight on his bound arms behind his back, no doubt dislocating his shoulder in the process. He’s still thrashing and crying out as Yuri approaches him.

He freezes, standing there with the open bottle, not sure what to do now. 

“Dinner’s almost ready Yuri, your wife might come out and fetch us soon. You better get a move on.” 

Torn between what he knows is right and the very real possibility that his family could walk in and see what he had done, he kneeled down by the upturned chair and reached for Dmitri’s face, still trying to move away from him. 

“I’ll fucking bite your finger off! Don’t touch me!” 

“Someone hold him still,” Andrei orders and one of the men dutifully comes over to roughly yank him by his hair into a flat position against the dirty floor, tugging his mouth open with a gloved finger. 

“I won’t be able to hold him like this for long,” the man says plainly, clearly struggling to hold him still but Yuri didn’t move. 

“I can’t.” 

“This isn’t a choice,” Andrei says sharply. 

“I let you stay in my house, share my food with you. I am not getting blood on my hands in my own house.” 

Andrei’s eyes narrowed at him, but he stepped forward nonetheless, taking the bottle from Yuri’s hands and knocking him out of the way. 

“I’m starting to question your loyalty, Yuri.” 

Yuri ignores him, pushing past the five other guys to leave the barn as soon as possible. He doesn't get out before the screaming starts, wet choking around the sound. 

He leaves the barn with his head in his hands. He can still hear him, now, halfway to the house. 

Yuri thinks he might continue to hear that scream five, six years down the line. 

It's not completely stopped by the time he reaches the kitchen and finds his wife standing there over the simmering pot on the stove, shoulders stiff and mouth pressed into a tight white line as she stirs the mix once more and forcefully knocks the extra broth from her spoon on the lip of the pot, clearly demonstrating her discontent while refusing to meet her husband’s gaze. 

“Anya–” 

“Don’t even begin,” she warns sharply. She doesn’t look at him, instead, shutting off the stove and looking out at the uneven plain of dying grass between the house and the barn that had now gone eerily quiet and empty in the symphony of night crickets. 

The barn door opens and five out of the six men still in the room step out and begin making their way over to the house. In the background against the chattering of the TV, Yuri can hear the little girl in the living room, playing with the scatter of toys on the carpet and giggling, blissfully unaware of the conversation unfolding in the kitchen and the horror on the other side of the lawn. 

He turns back to his wife, unsure of what to think, but she gives him something to hold onto. “We’ll talk about it later.” 

She gets him to set the table, clearing all the leftover clutter from the time he’d been away. He’s missed so much over the past few years in Makarov’s ranks, he’s hardly been around to see his child growing up. Still, she draws him in her wobbly doodles of the family. 

He gathers all the drawings together in a stack and goes to shove it in one of the cupboards in the living room, ruffling the kid’s hair as she doesn’t even bother to look away from the TV as he is passing–

“What happened to your hand?” 

Yuri goes back to the kitchen when he hears Anya’s concerned voice, now looking down at Andrei’s freshly bandaged arm as she began ladling soup into the bowls on the counter. 

“Cleaning accident,” he laughs it off, making eye contact with Yuri. “Was struggling with a tough stain that didn’t want to go out without a fight, but it gave in eventually.” 

Dinner after that was painfully quiet, interspersed with a few crude jokes and inappropriate glances in Anya’s direction every now and again when she went to fetch something from a cupboard that one of the men would order her around for, and though Yuri was having none of it, there was little he could do about the situation while being on such thin ice with Andrei and the others already. 

But he knows now, with how deep he’s getting into this, with the incident from earlier that day on the news, his furious wife and his oblivious daughter in the living room, that he has to make a plan to dig himself out of this hole. 

It's only later that evening, when the other men had retired to the spare bedrooms and guest cottage that came with the old farmhouse, that Yuri found his wife in their upstairs bedroom, gathering a bundle of stuffed animals into her arms and throwing it on her side of the bed. 

Their en suite bathroom door was closed and he can hear the faucet of the bathtub running. 

“I’m having Nadya sleep here tonight. I’m too worried about leaving her alone with them,” She informs in a hushed voice, fluffing up one of the pillows and arranging the stuffed animals accordingly. 

“I’m sorry about everything,” he begins to say but she holds up a hand to silence him, still too angry to give him the time of day. 

“Save it. People make mistakes. I didn’t marry you to sit at home alone for half of my life wishing you were here to see your child growing up, I didn’t marry to sleep in an empty bed and wander around in an empty house until the next thing I know is that my husband’s on the news because he was part of a terrorist attack on an airport. I made that mistake, and I have to live with that, but I swear on my mother’s grave, Yuri, you bring these people into my house again, and I divorce you, for real this time. So either, I go back to Kastovia to live with my family, and you forfeit your rights as a father, or you come up with a plan.”

[stalkerofthegods]

Straight to the point Thor offerings etc

Herbs •Oak, mountain ash, hazel, Donnerbesen/Teufelbesen, house-leek/Sempervirum tectorum, hawthorn, houseleek, tormentil, oak

Animals• goats, bulls, Tanngrisnir "teeth barer" and Tanngnjostr "teeth grinder”

Colors •Sky-blue, cloud-white, lightning-gold, and red, purity white. 

Crystal• moss agate, Amethyst, Lapis Lazuli, Sodalite, Turquoise and Sapphire, iron, Thunderstones, fulgurite, thunder egg

Symbols•Hammer, goats, belt, and gloves of strength

Jewelry you can wear in their honor • A hammer, a necklace of his runes.

Alter ideas• Thor’s hammer figures, model goats (ideally pulling a cart), weapons, shield, lightning-bolts, rainwater, garlic, leek, onion, hawthorn, houseleek, tormentil, oak, the runes Thurisaz or Sowelo, rocks, metal, rainwater

Diety of• God of war, fertility, thindrr and lighting and of the people, spiritual healing, sacred groves, protection 

Patron of The dead, rain, thunder, hallowing, spiritual healing, war, protecting, protection, birth, marriage, and death, burial, and cremation ceremonies, weapons and feasting, traveling, land-taking, and the making of oaths between men

Offerings• Mead, beer, goat meat, hearty foods with lots of meat, onions, and garlic, flavored coffee, whiskey, beer, hard cider, meat sandwiches on dark bread with good mustard, bacon, sausage, lunch meat and sources of protein that builds muscle, Donate time to an organization dedicated to protecting children from abuse, do heavy work for someone in need of it, Protect the needy, Escort someone to do something that scares them, and be there as a source of courage and moral support for them, hard wood, Dark chocolate (he said he likes it.), ground ivy

Devotional• working out, helping around the house, helping others and protecting them, Honoring your family and learning your history, keeping your personal space tidy or cleaning it up as an act of devotion, watch a storm from inside, spend time in the rain, put thunder/storm music when meditating or going to sleep, stand in the storm (at a safe place away from trees and metal objects), collect storm water, Write him a letter praising him, compliment him, read his stories from Prose and Poetic Edda, thank him for being the protector of the humankind, Light up a candle of dark blue/red/grey colours, Place your offerings at the base of a tree, Be yourself and honest, live your life honourably and truthfully, Wear a necklace of Mjölnir, Set and maintain your personal boundaries, stand up for yourself and others, give him something that you made, Take care of pregnant people, 

Ephithets•Tor, Ásabragr (Asabrag, Æsir-Lord), Ása-Þórr (Asa-Thor Æsir-Thor), Atli (The Terrible), Björn (Bjorn, Biorn Bear), Einriði (Eindriði, The One who Rides Alone, The One who Rules Alone), Ennilangr (Ennilang, The One with the Wide Forehead), Harðhugaðr (Hardhugadr, Strong Spirit, Powerful Soul, Fierce Ego, Brave Heart), Harðvéurr (Hardveur The Strong Archer), Hlóriði (Hlórriði, The Loud Rider, The Loud Weather-God), Öku-Þor (Oku-Thor, Ukko-Thor, Cart Thor, Driving Thor), Rymr (Rym, Noise), Sönnungr (Sonnung, The True One), Véþormr (Vethorm, Protector of the Shrine), Véuðr (Véuðr, Véoðr, Veud, Veod), Véurr (Veur, Guard of the Shrine, Hallower), Vingþórr (Vingthor, Battle-Thor, Hallower), The Thunderer and many others

Equivalents• Zeus (Greek), Jupiter (Roman), Hercules (Greek), Thonar (worshiped in England)

Signs of them reaching out• sudden signs of their animals, seeing goats, seeing hammers, suddenly drawn to him, all of the sudden interest in fighting 

Number• Thurisaz, Sowelo, nine

Morals• Morally grey, he does murder.

Courting• Sif

Past lovers/crushes• Járnsaxa (joutan), Sif (goddess)

Element• fire, air 

Personality• He’s a big flirt, he likes to be complimented and to compliment you back, He often displays a quick temper and is quick to engage in violence, even if violence may not be necessary, but he is kind, kinder than you would actually expect. 

Home• Asgard

Mortal or immortal • immortal 

Fact•Thor could even bring some things back to life, Thor was invoked at weddings, at births, and at special ceremonies for these abilities to protect and sanctify, his other names are Thorr, Thunor, Thonar, Donar, Donner, Thur, Thunar, or Thunaer.

Curses• tools randomly breaking, arguments with your spouse, you can your spouse fighting, marriage problems 

Blessings• safety at sea and bounty on land, blessing your marriage 

Roots• Indo-European make him generally accepted today as derived from a Proto-Indo-European deity

Friends• The Aseir

Parentage• Odin and Fjorgynn, or Jord, and Sif.

Siblings• Vidar, Baldr, Höðr, Týr, Meili, Váli, Bragi, Hodr

Pet• Tanngrisnir "teeth barer" and Tanngnjostr "teeth grinder (two goats that reincarnate every time they're eaten, and pulls a Thor's chariot)

Children •Móði, and Thrudr (Strength). He was also the father of three sons, Modi (Courage) and Magni (Strength), and his son Ull

Appearance in astral or gen• Thor is a huge, good-hearted, rough-hewn, red-haired and -bearded man with fiery eyes.

Festivals • Þorrinn, pronounced “Thorrinn” in English

Day • Thursday

Place• in sacred groves, including the one near Dublin.

Status• Norse deity in the asier, protecting Asgard 

Hates• Jörmungand (they kill each other), snakes.

His Tarot cards• Chariot

Scents/Inscene • Pine, Cinnamon, Musk, Nutmeg and Sage

Prayers• 

Sif & Thor 

I offer this prayer to Thor and to the Goddess Sif. Hail to You, Holy Ones. Hail to You, Protectors of Midgard, Hail to You, Son of Odin and Hail to You, His gleaming Bride. You hallow and drive out all pollution. You are mighty. There is no malignant force that You cannot banish. There is no threat, You cannot overcome. You are magnificent and Your grace protects me in the face of evil. Mighty Thor, wise, compassionate Friend of humanity, look upon us and wield Your hammer for our protection. Gracious Sif, You Whose gentle touch causes the grain to grow, please nourish us, restore us, and grant us the fortitude to walk in alignment with the Holy Powers always. Through Your blessings, may we grow strong in faith. through Your blessings may we grow strong in devotion. Through Your blessings, may we always resist impiety, may we be nourished as the grain is nourished under Your caring hands. In times of peril, come to our aid, I pray. In times of desperation, I place myself under Your care.nHail Thor, Son of Odin. Hail Sif, His Gracious Bride.

To Thor 

Son of Strength. I ask you to grant me that strength. That I may lift the weight of the day. Defender of Midgard. Grant me your skill in battle. That I may protect my family, my land and my kin. Bringer of Rain and Thunder. Grant me the ability to wash the weariness and pain of my daily work. That I may strike my next task like the blows from Mjolnir.  Son of Odin, Hammer Wielder, Giant Killer and Guardian of Man. I ask that you make me like the sturdy oak. That I do not break from the blows of misfortune. That I may not be crushed by the powerful. That I may be resilient and mighty like your own arm. That I may be brave to face the evil of this world. Hail Thor!

Links/websites/sources •

http://www.northernpaganism.org/shrines/thor/offerings.htmlhttps://www.reddit.com/r/pagan/comments/v3qn1e/offerings_to_thor/https://www.tumblr.com/freyjasdottirr/656705772435193856/how-to-worship-thor-for-beginners https://occult-world.com/thor/https://aminoapps.com/c/pagans-witches/page/blog/thor/7eop_a5jCPurvZk2W3QXxP55Yaen6YJzQZ taking-thymehttps://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Thor/313835#:~:text=Thor's%20wife%20was%20Sif%2C%20a,stepfather%20of%20Sif's%20son%20Ull.https://norse-mythology.org/symbols/thors-hammer/https://www.reddit.com/r/heathenry/comments/j30vk6/offering_prayer_to_thor/Charming of the Plough Prayer to Thor and Sif | Gangleri's Grove

@aretemisapollo

There you go, have a good thorsday

(it's funnier on Thursday)

[miraakulous-cloud-district]

Okay but can we please talk about how beautifully crafted are the final scenes of each episode in this season?

I'm gonna talk mostly about episode 4, but I need to praise the other ones as well. For real, the way the first three episodes end is just... pure poetry. Blackbeard's speech about the bird that spends its entire existence in the air? His crushing delivery and the way he fails to hide his emotions behind his mask anymore? The "Fuck you, Stede Bonnet"/"Good night, Ed Teach" tranistion? Poetic cinema!

The second episode with the storm scene is one of my favourite scenes in the entire show. The slow motion and the song are perfect and I thought that it was so God damned beautifully shot! And Ed's "finally" was perfect, that showed us that it was his plan all along to get the crew to hate him so much that they end him.

I don't even know what to say about the ending of ep 3 that hasn't already been said, the song choice and Stede talking to Ed and bringing him back to life was amazing AND THAT LAST SHOT OF ED TAKING STEDE'S HAND WAS PURE PERFECTION!

All of the final scenes are incredible, the end of episode 5 being yet another favourite of mine, I literally melt every time I see the thumb war! But the ending that really stood out for me was episode 4! First of all, that was a solid and amazing episode as a whole, but the symbolism of "People don't change. Not into birds or otherwise" but then!! Buttons turns into a seagull, and we can see in Ed's reaction that he is somehow filled with hope, hope that people *can* change. And just like that, as if on cue, Stede comes back for him, unlike he did in season 1, when he left him waiting. The song! Them running excitedly towards the ship and towards a future together!!

And back on the ship, Izzy smiling genuinely for the first time in the show! That last shot, with Izzy standing as a figurehead to the Revenge ship *and* to the revenge crew. He is their unicorn now, their protector, and so buttons flies off, showing once again that people *can* change, showing us that Izzy embraces his own change, and that he embraces this new life as a protector of the crew, and maybe he embraces feeling loved by the crew finally. We can see his reluctance when Fang embraced him in episode 1, but from this moment on, he never turns away from affection and we see it in future episodes as well.

THIS SHOW, I SWEAR.

[finchxs-revenge]

I want to talk about Ed breaking the wheel off the ship in the storm.

When I first saw that scene, I thought the broken wheel was the most striking, poetic, and symbolic thing Ed could have done to show how his flaws were consuming him. In so many situations in S1, Ed doesn’t take responsibility for where he ends up or what happens to him, he just lets the people around him decide. He turns away when Izzy duels Stede. He doesn’t return to the Revenge until the English are literally RIGHT THERE. (There are many, many other examples, but those are just two I readily remember.) He also disassociates himself from his actions, saying that he hasn’t ever killed anyone after his Dad. But, also, “the fire killed those people, not me.” Ed dodging responsibility for himself, and instead allowing whatever tide he happens to be in sweep him away is an unhealthy pattern that is getting in the way of keeping him from growing.

Which was why I thought the scene where he broke the wheel off the ship during the storm was so powerful. He just wanted so badly for someone else to step in and take it out of his hands, so he used his agency to put himself into a helpless situation. (I also think that’s why he wanted Archie and Jim to fight to the death. Even if he was going to blow the canon through the sail anyway, if some or all of the crew killed each other before he got to it, their deaths would be on them, not him.)

But I’ll be honest: Having that scene, and the symbolism of the broken wheel, made the rest of Ed’s arc this season feel like he never actually repaired anything and he was still not taking responsibility for himself and what was going to happen in his life. He starts to, with the conversation he has with Fang and then telling Stede he wanted to take it slow. But then that little step forward just back tracks and all his growth crumbles in my opinion. Ed ends S2 largely where he started in s1.

And honestly, a big issue I have with Izzy’s death being entwined with Ed’s story/development is that Izzy dying just took the matter out of Ed’s hands, just like the old unhealthy pattern.

I wanted to see a conversation between the two where Ed asks Izzy to stay and Izzy says no. And instead of clawing back into the old pattern of keeping Izzy around, they both separate because they chose to, because they can accept the fact that for whatever reasons, them being together or close was just keeping them from growing.

But instead, Izzy dying was just another way that Ed’s metaphorical wheel was broken off, and instead of working on an unhealthy pattern, he just floats in the direction fate takes him.

...

..

.

It was still a good scene, though. That “Run” sequence still gives me chills even though I’ve watched in 97 times.

[g-h-o-s-t-2000]

Under the mystery of the storm

[beigetiger]

The origins of the Forgotten Ark

Lore post! Using the murals on the Ark to interpret how the Forgotten Ark (and it’s magic) came to be. I will be using screenshots taken in order of going around the boat so you can all see too if you don’t want to go through the effort of actually going there in-game to look at it.

So first off, screenshots!

I’m going to presume this is the first one and say that this is a krill and some clouds! Totally not an obvious observation, but if this is the first mural, the implication that krill may have existed for much longer than the Kingdom’s corruption is definitely an interesting one.

Next up, a storm. There are also a few murals after this that depict light creatures and stars appearing from that storm, but I didn’t take pictures of them.

Some people hanging around, and what looks to be an aurora borealis.

A bit hard to tell in this pic, but it basically depicts stars falling down and the people collecting them and turning them into spells.

People learning to use said spells and magic to do things, including create fire apparently!

Bunch of people going off on a big boat (presumably the Ark) and carrying their spells with them.

Said boat being flipped upside down by a storm and the people all falling out.

So, those are the screenshots I’ve taken, and now I will share my interpretation of them!

I already talked a bit about the Ark in my super-long lore post, but I wanted to go into more detail here.

I know I said this already, but I do find it interesting that krill seemingly existed before anything else did, presuming that this is the origin story of the spellcasting community.

I also find the storm that appears to produce the light creatures and the stars very poetic, because it is also the thing that ends the lives of the people on the boat.

Now, the people. It seems that they are at first hiding under umbrellas, probably to protect themselves from falling stars. And did the original spell stars come from an aurora borealis? It’s also a bit odd that falling stars seem to produce both sentient children and things such as spells. Makes you wonder how much these two things are related.

The next image, they are taking those stars from the ground and transforming them into spells. I argue that this can be compared to humanity’s discovery of fire and how useful of a tool it could be. I also find it interesting that in the first image with the Skyfolk, none of them have those little crests on their heads. By the image where they are discovering spellcasting, a few of them actually do have the little head-crests.

And to add to the “Skyfolk’s discovery of spellcasting versus humanity’s discovery of fire” thing, the next image prominently features a campfire that has presumably been produced by a spell. It also seems to contain people practicing using the spells.

The next image is probably a long timeskip later, but it shows a group of people (and now ALL of them have headcrests) on a boat, carrying spells to some distant place. I could not guess for the life of me why they were moving, but they seemed to act as a close-knit community.

And finally, a storm comes and knocks the ship over, scattering the people inside and presumably killing many if not all of them.

So, two things. First, the headcrests. The more adept the spellcasting community seems to be at magic, the more of them are depicted with those little crests. Many of the people in Vault have those crests, including the Levitating Adept, whose whole thing is making objects float; and the Meditating Monastic, who can levitate in the air. My conclusion? Those little headcrests are symbols of magical prowess, and people who have them have a fair bit of skill and experience in some form of magic.

The second thing is those smaller boats that are depicted in the mural alongside the bigger one. When I initially saw the bigger boat flipped over with none of the smaller boats in sight, my reaction was “oh hey! Maybe they made it away to spread their influence elsewhere!” But then I went back to check and NOPE. There are definitely smaller boat ruins around the Forgotten Ark, and also this really big anchor.

Look at this cool anchor I found.

Anyways, using this anchor as proof that the whole area was a body of water (maybe a body of clouds?) when all the boats sank. But clearly someone must have survived them, they seem to have been spruced up post-crash to make it viable for use as a storefront.

Anyway, that was my ramble about the Forgotten Ark, I spent too much time putting this together 😅

[hackedbyawriter]

Chapters: 1/7

Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy

Rating: Mature

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Relationships: Poe Dameron/Finn, Jessika Pava/Rey, Kaydel Ko Connix/Rose Tico, qpr finnrey, Finn & Rey (Star Wars), Poe Dameron & Rey, Karé Kun/Temmin "Snap" Wexley, Past Poe Dameron/Zorii Bliss - Relationship

Characters: Finn (Star Wars), Poe Dameron, Rey (Star Wars), Rose Tico, Jessika Pava, Temmin "Snap" Wexley, Luke Skywalker

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Buzzfeed Unsolved Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff, Scared Poe Dameron, Believer Poe Dameron, Non-Believer Finn (Star Wars), Rey Skywalker is Neutral, Priest Luke Skywalker, Sequel Trio Needs a Hug, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied Sexual Content, however this will come much later in the fic and it will definitely be glossed over and skippable, fuck zorii bliss all my homies hate zorii bliss, if you dont know why read free fall, the writing is very silly please dont expect my usual poetic style, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Gay Poe Dameron, Bisexual Finn (Star Wars), Asexual Rey (Star Wars), Religious Imagery & Symbolism

Summary:

"Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too."

Poe Dameron, a Resistance employee, has always been fascinated by the supernatural, so under the company, he starts a show, called Unsolved, retelling supernatural events from history and visiting haunted locations with his long-time friends and co-workers Jessika Pava and Snap Wexley.

Near the end of the first season however Jess has to leave due to scheduling issues and Snap, newly married to Kare, is expecting a baby, leaving Poe with the rest of the season to film and no one to help him.

On a whim, Poe decides to ask fellow employee and family friend Rey Skywalker and her best friend Finn Storm to accompany him.

Whether it’s the best or worst decision Poe has ever made, he’s not quite sure, but it was bound to change his life forever.

Tags: @enviedear @british-strong-style @dhyanshiva @no-url-is-good-enough @foxglass0822 @the-bread-is-dead @finnpoeweek2023 @yourejealousofthisname

[lazypanartist]

While you’re in the onslaught brainrot mood, can you provide terms of affection for there SO?

YESSS

Wasn't expecting this to take so long to write 🙃 Got the ask a few days ago, started it, then got busy & fixated on other tasks & asks

Nicknames for their S/o

Featuring Onslaught

-----

Tommy Terror

Sweetheart and variations (sweetie, my sweet-)

I know that "Sweetheart - Derogatory" is a southern thing, but I can't see him using other nicknames, really

Expect to be used as an armrest; have him lean down to call you sweetie

Will RARELY use it when he's upset; if he's in a bad mood, it sounds super condescending

If he's upset, he'll just refer to you as "love"; just so if he's angry, you still know he loves you

Tuppence Terror

Doll or Dolly

Face it; she's stronger than you are

It's her power!

So to her, you're kinda just a lil ragdoll

She'll emphasize it by picking you up & squishing you

Psimon

Love

Simple and to the point, as he seems to be

He'll call you any others he gleans from your thoughts, but his go to is always "My love"

Typically not in public, but if he's working with new members of the Light and you're around?

He wants everyone to know that you're his

Devastation

Darling

Almost in the Yandere sense

Now that you're her partner, you're pretty much hers, period

Ofc she lets you do your thing and whatever, she truly loves and cares about you

But if she ever sees you being threatened or whatever, it's on sight

Icicle Jr.

Snowflake

Not in the Fight Club way that most people use it

You're so precious to him!

One of a kind!

..and, y'know. The ice thing

Typically calls you "My snowflake" when talking to others

Shimmer

Ember

Not to get poetic on main, but you're the key to lighting up her world

She's a pretty reserved person, so only expect nicknames in private

Also expect things like love of darling

Cheesy, but at least she's connecting with people ^-^

Mammoth

Dove

It's just a cute little nickname, he told you

Helpless little bird

Really, though?

Doves are a symbol of peace

To him, you are the calm of the storm; one of the only things that can ground him, a sign that there are still good things out there

[srbachchan]

DAY 5377

Jalsa, Mumbai                 Nov 1/2,  2022                 Tue/Wed 12:19 AM

💛🪔 , Catching up with the Ef birthdays .. November 2nd .. is the birthday of Ef Erlika from Indonesia 🇮🇩 .. happiness to you , Lika , and love from your Moti .. your co-scorpio .. and (almost) sharer of birthday .. since Saudagar was released on November 1st , or so I was told 😁 Nov 2nd is also birthday of Ef Abhijit Jagtab from Pune .. and .. Ef Dipagala Gala .. greetings to you both and affection .. November 1st .. be the birthday of Ef Vishan Lal from Gurugram .. the one blessed with divinity of verse and notes .. bless your Flute of Krishna , Vishan , and your Spirit of Poetry .. we are blessed to have you with us and grateful .. and , you shouldn't worry , we got your birthday date right this time 😁 .. 🙏🏽✍🏽✒️🎼🎶❤️ And .. for November 1st .. the birthday wishes go as well to .. Ef Vaijayanti Ravindra Damle from Pune .. Ef Ms. Honey Aishu , the Punjabi from Bangkok , Thailand 🇹🇭 .. Ef Nouranne Achraf from Egypt / France 🇪🇬🇫🇷 .. Ef Pankaj Shukla from Indore .. Ef Shubhra Rattan .. and Ef Somraj Mane from Kolhapur .. happiness to you all and prayers .. Ef Sunil Ganwani from Jakarta 🇮🇩 .. love and wishes to you for your birthday on October 30 .. And .. Ef SHESA Nayak from USA 🇺🇲 .. happy birthday again to you .. this is to express our apologies for mentioning your name wrong the other DAY and all those years before .. it's corrected now .. love to you and be happy ..

Another day and another realm to be exercised  ..  listen adjust comprehend and execute .. 

12:19 AM 

But the tragedy of life and the writing of this Blog is the slumber that much like a Beethoven Symphony drives with the intersperse of the soft fluted melody with the harsh heavy instrumental strain of music - almost like the gentle atoms of life which interpret as desire .. and the larger sound of the base and the harsh symbols clashing along with a multitudinous 100 piece orchestra that takes over and drowns the fluted melody - DESTINY .. 

Your fluted life , with its softness of all that is desirable is eventually governed and mastered by the heavy thrust of destiny, that converges as an impregnable cage , not permitting or allowing desire to escape and be free .. 

The eventual story of all life .. dictated by the sound of music .. the strings the instruments that when plucked , leave a plucked rose just by the stem, as the petals lie strewn on the ground .. to dry to perish, never to be born again - until another plant grows form the earth of life ..

a bit poetic in the early hors of the morning that pulls you ot of the slumber at 5  am and warns you much like those harsh orchestral bearings that many a routine needs attention - the Blog, the connect , to the waiting and exasperated, ever vigilant Ef .. 

It is not a compulsion .. it is the destiny of orchestral potent intent that drives the desire to wake up and perform ..

This morning .. no not this one , the one before was a satisfactory outburst of what had collectively been accumulated within and did not get the freedom of escaping the DESTINY caged room, filled with saturated exuberant content .. not one that had  been its ‘impotency’ .. but one that had remained potent enough for a cell to cohabitate with the egg of procreation .. 

the pregnancy was potent enough and the receptacle of birth occurred ... the ‘impotency of content’  gathered storm and was sufficient to break the barriers of resentful disconnect .. eventually converging on an emotional breakdown of realisation .. a realisation that who they were dealing with was not a ‘who’ but one that had deeper intent ; unfortunately of no lasting value , for the ‘pre’ had been preoccupied by the ‘others’ ..

the ➡️ moveth and the real of the reality takes precedence .. 

work ..

and the wave of fortune expectations ..

to the gestures of the client that sits before thee .. in his brilliance .. 

to them that make me in larger size and form .. they that make the divine God Lord Ganesh at the LalBaugh cha Raja Ganpati during the festival .. 

 and onto the spirit of drive .. in the strength of mobility that despite the lethargic limited consumption of food , must be given attitude of normalcy .. for the show goes on ..

drive .. the strength of hidden power .. of the energy which unless provoked never ever emerges .. and when it does .. it breaks that caged humēn .. boundless unbridled ‘want’ .. to give all that was never conceived before ..

ending eventually with the satisfaction of interaction with them that sit for hours for our creative hours to be complete .. to meet to look to speak to discuss to confess and to .. GIVE ..

the hand work of exceptional quality .. hand paintings .. that look beyond real .. that look like camera work but indeed are painted ..

... and the pride of regal wearings ..

And the DAY endeth .. for there is other responses to give to them that give so much for so little .. 

my love 

Amitabh Bachchan .. 7:30 am !!