#this is a real half scrabbled together thing but in my defense

[astralcurses]

it is 6:45 am and the sun is shining. everything seems to be aligned exactly like it was one mundane spring day when i was 14. its amazing that the littlest things in the atmosphere can feel so familiar. and its amazing how much beauty there is in the mundane. nothing special happened that day, nothing to set it apart from the rest, but i can remember it clear as day now. i dont remember much very clearly, so thats saying something. i miss it. i miss the mundane. i dont miss anything grandiose, but the loss of the little things are what hurt the most. its 6:45 am and the sun is shining and i feel it in my soul

[dat-town]

wish you were here

Characters: Mark Lee & you

Setting: wish dragon au (and a bit of aladdin because mark even has a tiger in their garden like jasmine did. don’t ask why, just blame the regular mv), childhood best friends to lovers (at least there’s potential?)

Genre: fluff and humour

Warnings: mentions of a sick animal and a wild animal kept as a pet in a huge garden (just like jasmine’s tiger, it’s very tamed)

Summary: A magical teapot, a dragon that wants everyone to be happy and an old friendship being revived. Oh yeah, have I told you that you have 3 wishes?

Words: 6.4k

For @restlessmaknae​ 💕

When your mother told you you got delivery to your childhood home, you certainly did not expect this: a brown box as big as a small watermelon with your old Canadian address and MARK LEE scrabbled next to your name as another recipient but no sender. Not to mention, the first stamp on the thing was dating back to the early 2010s. Where the hell was this package for 10 years? And what would you and your old neighbour slash best friend have gotten together?

Okay, first things first:

You and this clumsy, kind of cute kid, Mark had been quite tight while growing up. You were born in the same year, only a month apart, and his family lived in the house next to yours in the suburbs of Vancouver, so it was kind of natural. You two might have been against the world kind of comrades, playing hide and seek when you were six and wondering about whether time travelling was possible through black holes at twelve. But no matter how close you used to be, you fell out of touch when Mark's family moved to the other end of the world, back to Korea, their roots when you were fourteen. You slowly forgot about him, and started university in the city, moving away from home, so nothing really reminded you of him ⎼ and your stupid, big fat crush on him that you had no courage to tell him about in middle school ⎼, nothing until this box.

You put the delivered package on your kitchen table while you make some dinner for yourself out of what you have gotten during grocery shopping earlier just before you picked up the mysterious stuff at the post office. You eye it suspiciously over your pasta, really not wrapping your mind about what it could be but instead of annoying yourself with this pointless curiosity, you put your fork down and stand up to open it. It’s a struggle at first, the box being secured with multiple adhesive tapes over the years but when you finally get rid of all that and can look inside of it, an intense feeling rushes through you… immerse disappointment.

“A teapot? For real? What were we thinking?” you furrow your brows taking the small, green and pretty old teapot into your hands. It looks like a piece of a traditional Asian set with its jade colour and dragon pattern. It couldn’t have been in a much better shape 10 years ago either seeing how wayworn it is but still, you expected something more… exciting? Something funny that might or might not give you an excuse to look up Mark Lee on the internet and message him for the sake of old times. But how lame it would be to befriend him on Facebook only to tell him that you got delivered a teapot under both your names. Hah, you would rather not embarrass yourself like that.

You shoot one last glance at the teapot before leaving it on your counter and going back to your food, you successfully forget about the whole ordeal. You carry your life on with only one small difference: Mark Lee back on your mind after long, long years.

It was just a small crush, you tell yourself, sighing as you look into the mirror, absentmindedly wondering how he’s doing. Does he think of you sometimes as well? Did he go to music college like he has always wanted? Is he happy? You wish he was even if he’s half a world away and with that thought you think it’s time to go to sleep despite the upcoming weekend days. You don’t want to mess up your sleep schedule over some boy but as soon as you pull the blanket over your chest and close your eyes, something explodes in your kitchen.

You jump out of bed faster than lightning, in slight panic over the fact that your neighbours will hate you for bothering them late at night and your landlord would kill you if you managed to blow up your microwave. But the sight that welcomes you is like no other that you imagined. The whole room is covered in thick pink glittery smoke. Like your worst Barbie nightmare.

“What the⎼” you cough, waving your hands to clear the air and once it dissolves into nothingness with its weirdly cotton candy smell, there’s a boy in the middle of it all, sitting cross legged on your kitchen counter so casually as if he owned the place. His pink-ish purple hair hangs into his eyes and he seems to find your coffee machine strangely interesting. You grab the first thing you can ⎼ a blender ⎼ and hold it up in defensive before yelling at the boy: “Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my apartment?”

The stranger’s mouth pulls up in a charming smile, his eyes sparkle as he turns his attention to you, hopping off the counter. He’s all thin and long limbs, so you hate how you hate to look up at him as he walks towards you before bowing ceremoniously.

“Hello, sorry for the sudden appearance, I just couldn’t wait any longer! I’ve been stuck in that teapot waaay too long. I didn’t mean to be rude or anything. My name is Taeyong, I’m a wish dragon and you’re my new owner,” he smiles and what he says makes absolutely no sense.

“A wish dragon?” you mumble in shock, looking around to see if this is just another prank of Johnny. You wouldn’t be surprised to see him jump out from under one of the cupboards. Or maybe you just fell asleep and you’re dreaming. Yeah, that seems like a realistic scenario.

“Ah, yes! I know I don’t look like it but modern times require modern solutions. Most people freak out because of my dragon form, so human it is,” the boy who seems only a few years older than you grins as he’s chatting and you have to give it to him, he takes this role pretty seriously. “You have three wishes as my owner. You can ask for anything as long as it’s not about death or love.”

So you got yourself someone who thinks he’s basically a genie? Oh gosh, is he that drunk?

“Aha, very funny. I’m too tired for this prank, so I would appreciate it if you left the same way you came...” you point towards your window because there’s no way he came through the door. Putting down your blender because the guy looks pretty harmless despite his crazy blabbering, you move to go back to your bedroom.

“No, no, no, I can’t do that,” the boy, Taeyong as he introduced himself, appears in front of you within a second and grabs your shoulder as if he could shake some sense into you. He looks pretty desperate. “I can only get a new owner if I fulfill all wishes of yours. It was super stuffy in that box the last decade, you know.”

At that excuse you let out a laugh.

“You don’t even fit it the⎼”

“You were saying?” Taeyong is suddenly nowhere near ahead of you but instead a small creature, supposedly a dragon, in the size of your palm flies in front of your eye level. “It’s magic!”

Okay, now that sight makes you feel like it’s you who is drunk. Or worse.

“Am I dead?” you have to ask in a small, uncertain voice, trying to think back what could have happened. Maybe that explosion literally blew your apartment up? But it hurts when you pinch your arm and turning back into his human form, Taeyong wants to prove the very same thing. Not the hurting but the not dead part, obviously.

“No, you’re very much alive and a happy owner of a wish dragon. Not permanently, of course, but still,” he tells you as he drags you onto your couch in the living room. As if sitting down could help processing all this.

So you have a wish dragon in your home, a magical creature that can casually switch between its dragon and human form and he says you should wish for three things, so he could leave and you could go back to your old, boring life without magic and things that scare you to death at 11PM.

“Can I ask… why? Why me? I’m not really owner-material,” you whisper because heck yeah, you even managed to kill your cactus before. Taeyong purses his lips as he sits down, a hand at his chin.

“Well, it’s unusual indeed to have a peasant girl, no offence, as my owner but as far as I know, you and your friend asked for a sign that magic was real.”

Oh, you remember that, being so obsessed with shooting stars and other stuff like that, you two used Mark’s brother’s computer to browse the internet, trying to find evidence about all that. You were kids wanting to believe in a world beyond the one you knew. But...

“That was like 10 years ago,” you furrow your eyebrows, not getting the timing.

“Well, sorry, you weren’t put on the top of the Heaven wish list and the shipping from Shanghai to Vancouver isn’t the fastest either,” Taeyong shrugs as if it was supposed to be natural. As if that was the most unbelievable thing. Well, delivery services are sometimes a pain in the ass, that’s true but getting a wish delivered by Heaven was something you would have never thought of and it all drains down on you. Strangest realisation of your life.

“So… it’s all real,” you whisper ahead of yourself: magic, dragons and all that. You could basically see your old best friend’s I told you so smile and let out a soft chuckle. “I wish Mark could meet with you, too.”

At that the guy ahead of you claps his hands and rubs them together, creating the same purple smoke from before. You look at him alarmed.

“Your wish, my command,” Taeyong grins and lifts his hands and before you could make a sound of protest because gosh, you didn’t mean it literally, you feel the ground move under your feet and you’re falling, into the darkness but despite shutting your eyes automatically, fearing the impact of the crash, nothing comes. Only the smell of soy sauce in the air and warm sunshine on your skin… Wait, what?

Your eyelids fly open and you notice in shock that you’re not in your flat anymore, ready to sleep. Instead, you stand in the middle of a goddamn street somewhere in Korea based on the signs still in your PJ shorts and tee. Oh my gosh! You hide in an alley right away and yank the seemingly proud Taeyong with you.

“I didn’t tell you that I meant right now! I can’t meet Mark in my PJs and I need my phone and wallet to function anyways. Not to mention, I don’t speak Korean at all...” you ramble panicking, the realisation that you’re indeed on the other side of the Earth due to some magic is yet to register. But the awkwardness from the stares you have just gotten has already turned you bashful.

Listening to you, the wish dragon seems sheepish and slightly embarrassed as he scratched his nape, his colourful hair falling into his cast down eyes.

“Oh… sorry. I got so excited over the wish that I didn’t think about it! It’s been a while since I did teleport magic but hey, I still have it in me. Anyways, sorry. Phone and wallet, you said? Here you go,” he pulls out something from his pants which magically seems to be indeed your belongings. That definitely makes things earlier.

“Uhm, thanks. Where are we exactly?”

“Ah, well you mentioned your friend Mark Lee, so we’re here. Well, one bell away because I did remember that it’s rude to intrude other’s houses without permission first,” oh now, you know, you snicker internally and gulp because hell, even if you wanted to see Mark, you wouldn’t have thought that the meeting would come so soon. You didn’t have enough time to prepare yourself mentally.

“So… you’re telling me that this… is where Mark lives?” you point at the impressive apartment complex on the corner of the street but Taeyong shakes his head.

“Nope, This is where your Mark lives,” he says and before you could object about the ‘your’ part, the dragon points at the other side of the road at a luxurious house with a huge garden, basically a palace. Seeing the beautiful fountain, the modern and yet traditional Korean style building beyond the fences makes your jaw drop.

“Hahaha, alright for a magic dragon you must have made a mistake. There’s no way the Mark Lee I know lives here,” you look back at Taeyong finding it funny that the kid who used to wore his favourite tees until his mother basically threw them out would live at such a place.

“Mark Lee, korean name Minhyung, supposed to be 22 years old internationally soon. Bad eyesight, contagious laugh, clumsy but has surprisingly good reflexes, gets embarrassed easily. Sound familiar?” Taeyong crooks a brow at you as he reads the information off from a parchment he just took out of his pants. Everything he listed is just so Mark that you’re left in disbelief.

“Uuh… that sounds about right.”

“His father hit it big in 2016 with a tech company, their net worth has too many zeros to count,” Taeyong explains, seeing how surprised you were over the fact that he lived a lavish life like this. Not that he doesn’t deserve it! Mark is such a sweetheart, so of course, you would only want the best for him but as if half the world wasn’t enough, now you have another huge gap between you.

“Gosh, I really can’t believe this. How am I supposed to just ring the bell and say hello after so much time?” you sighed with your head in your hands. “Argh, I need to buy some clothes and change.”

Taeyong approves the idea based on how enthusiastically he hollers, you wonder why nobody on the street seems to pay no attention to him. Maybe only you see him, just more reason for you to be crazy.

“Good idea because we’re having dinner with Mark!”

“What?” you look up in shock, not following through. Taeyong grins down at you, flashing a giddy smile and with a twirl he’s changed from his baggy, casual clothes to something more chic but still laidback.

“Your wish was him meeting me, so I arranged everything. I can't meet him without you and the teapot there, you know,” he explains as if it was supposed to be obvious. You aren't ready yet though.

“You just want to eat all the fancy delicious food he has,” you squint at him suspiciously and the dragon stays silent, so you must be right. He laughs nervously.

“Maybe, but can you blame me? I haven’t had a feast since a literal decade!” he hollers and somehow you really cannot find it in yourself to be angry at him. You are in Seoul for god's sake after all and magic is real, you can put up with the inconvenience of buying clothes and making yourself look decent before dumping all this surprise on Mark.

An hour later you stand in front of the gates of the Lee mansion and nervously you wipe your sweating hands into your dress. You can totally do this, you just say hi to an old friend, it's not like you're afraid he wouldn't remember you, hah, of course not–

"Y/N!" 

You whip your head at the call of your name to the source of that all too familiar voice. Sure it's deeper than you remember but there's no mistake in whose it is. Plus, who else would call your name in South Korea of all places.

"Mark, hey!" you wave the boy who just got out of one of the fanciest cars you've ever seen in your life. And yet, despite the Prada suit and expensive shoes, styled hair and Swiss watch on wrist, Mark Lee still has that goofy little smile and the doe eyes that used to make you weak in the knees. Hah, who are you kidding? They still do.

"Oh my god, dude, you… you got pretty," Mark jogs up to you and having no filter like always he blabbers immediately only to stutter as his ears turn red. It was so him talking before thinking, so you didn’t really mean to dwell on his words. Although you felt your cheeks dusted with pink soon enough. "I mean, it's really good to see you! I was so surprised to see your name in my calendar for today's dinner! You should have told me you were coming to Korea, I would have picked you up at the airport."

His calendar? Ah, of course, he must have been busy and all that. You wouldn’t have been surprised to see an assistant run after him at this point, so you wonder how your wish dragon magically put you onto his list of important people to meet. Gosh, it was so weird.

"Ah, I have a funny story about that…" you chuckled to yourself but before you could have get out anything, even a please, can we go to a more private place? Mark’s eyes zero on the guy next to you and his eyes grow comically wide.

"And uhm, who is your friend?" he points at Taeyong who waves him in exchange with a kilowatt smile. He looks back at you with his mouth agapé. "Oh my god, you came to invite me to your wedding?"

He says oh my god way too many times for an eloquent rich kid, he really is the Mark Lee you knew.

"No, never! I mean, of course, I would invite you but Taeyong and I– I literally met him on my way here," you explain hastily cursing yourself for the silly lie. You came to tell him the news not to try to make it believable. 

“I heard there’s food,” the wish dragon pipes in very helpful and you shoot him a disapproving glance he doesn’t notice. Luckily, Mark doesn’t seem to mind.

“Oh, yeah, of course, dinner! Come on in, let’s get you two settled,” he grins albeit a bit awkwardly as he leads you through the gate after opening it with his card.

On the way through the very, very, very big garden, he’s chattering about how he misses the Vancouver weather, especially on humid, hot days like this and talks about how he thinks the fountain in their yard is a bit too much but his mom loved it and then before you know it, you sit by a huge dining table with fine food in front of you. Suddenly you can’t decide whether you're grateful for Taeyong’s shameless presence – he digs into the jjigae right away – because at least the situation isn’t awkward because of your silence or you’re annoyed by it because you must seem like a weirdo because of him. That’s why you decide to rip off the bandage and tell Mark as soon as the last maid has disappeared too.

“Okay, so actually I came here because I have a surprise,” you speak up, probably too serious because the boy almost chokes on his food due to how fast he turns his head towards you.

“More surprise?” he coughs out and you offer him a glass of water which he takes with a smile.

“You literally won’t believe this one!” you assure him and wait until he gulps down the drink. Only then you point to Taeyong and tell him that your childhood wish has come true. 

Mark almost falls off his chair this time.

Not after you tell him that though. He laughs at that with that wheezing laugh of his as if you told the joke of the century then pats you on the shoulder murmuring That was a good one, bro and turning back to his food. But then you look at the magic dragon pointedly and Taeyong puts down his chopsticks with an exaggerated sign. Then he flexes his magic: turning into his dragon form among additional sparkles and Mark suddenly looks like he’s about to faint. He reaches out to tap on your shoulder while not taking his eyes off the wish dragon.

“Am I dreaming?” he whispers and honestly, you totally get his reaction while Taeyong mumbles something about ‘people these days not believing in dragons’ as he shows off all the things he could do: gift riches, make one stronger than they are, giving skills of whatever one wants. He starts rambling about how this one Chinese emperor became wealthy thanks to this, how that one actor in martial arts and all this before changing back to his human form and he continues eating his pasta like nothing ever happened.

“I can do this all day,” he shrugs as if he didn’t just perform the coolest magic tricks.

“This… this is the best thing ever!” Mark exclaims with those sparkles in his eyes you missed so much. He was always so excited about new things and it automatically makes you smile how he bombards Taeyong with million questions like: ‘So you are the wish dragon that grants wishes?’ or asking him about his scales, his unique color, how it feels to live in such a small teapot, how old he is and the dragon glows under all the attention. Can’t blame him but Mark has always been so curious about the world, it’s endearing.

“So your first wish was to meet me?” he turns to you after long minutes of interrogating Taeyong and suddenly, under the spotlight you don’t know what to do with yourself. You can feel yourself blushing because you didn’t necessarily mean to wish for that but it’s not like you’re regretting it, it’s just… you don’t want him to misunderstand.

“I thought you should meet him, too, after all the package was delivered for the two of us,” you look down, trying to sound nonchalant while picking your food, avoiding Mark’s gaze. No matter how open armed he welcomed you, you still aren’t convinced that it’s okay to be here because the more time you spend with him, the more you would like to stay a part of his life. “It’s just… I wasn’t really sure we could ever meet again. We didn’t keep contact after you left.”

With dropped shoulders, you try not to sound too downhearted because of what happened because you know all too well, it wasn’t his fault, it was a family decision and look at him, it did good for him! He seems happy, they live in a practically mansion but most importantly, he didn’t seem to change with the wealth. He might wear expensive clothes but under it all he’s still the boy with the most loveable smile.

“I… I was thinking about you a lot, I just thought you forgot about me,” Mark admits with a sheepish smile, tucking his hair behind his ear shyly. He really still is the same and it’s playing silly little games with your heart. If this was a cheesy Disney movie, a slow bgm would start to play as you look into each other but your moment is broken when Taeyong accidentally kicks into his chair as he stands up. At first he looks alarmed but then giggles.

“I will just… go. Don’t mind me,” he disappears like smoke with a wink, leaving you two alone at which Mark lets out a woah. You chuckle at his cute reaction, heart doing somersaults in your chest.

You thought it would be awkward, just the two of you alone after long years but Mark has this thing that he makes people feel comfortable around him, so it’s actually quite nice. You catch up on everything and anything that comes to your mind: old neighbours, studies, friends, what are you doing now and what would you like to do, too.

After finishing the delicious dinner, Mark offers a home tour which you would never refuse and you jaw drops at the huge crystal chandelier in their living room as well as their swimming pool but your favourite place in the whole mansion is Mark’s room because it’s just so him. You can’t describe it well but the moment you step inside, it feels like home. It’s cozy to the point it makes you want to cuddle a pillow. It has colours of pastels, a synthesizer here, a guitar there, posters of singers framed on his wall and vinyl records hanging down. His window has a view of sunset and Namsan above their green garden and although you haven’t been in Seoul before, you’re pretty sure it’s your favourite place in the whole damn city, too.

“Wait, there’s someone I would like you to meet,” Mark suddenly exclaims while you’re looking through his pictures and he pulls you out of his room, out of the house, into the garden: You giggle all the way as he’s being so secretive about it but then your steps halt unexpectedly and the hand you have in Mark’s yanks him back.

“Mark… why is there a tiger in your garden in the middle of Seoul?” you ask as quietly and as immobile as you can. You don’t want to attract the sleeping animal’s attention to yourself. But to your biggest surprise, the boy just laughs, his thumb caressing your skin soothingly.

“She’s Jasmine and she won’t hurt you,” he reassures you but needless to say, you’re not too calm and you’re pulled close to the wild animal that lifts its huge head towards you lazily. “She was abandoned by her mother as a cub and she was outcast in the zoo because she’s a bit sick, so she has always been weaker than her siblings. Dad made a donation and we have raised her since she was young.”

You hiss when Mark reaches out without fear but the tiger basically purrs as he strokes down his fur at the neck. You watch in awe as this big wild animal becomes a soft cat under the hands of Mark Lee. When the boy encourages you to pat her too, you hesitate but he promises you that it’s gonna be alright and you take a leap of faith. 

“What’s her sickness?” you wonder aloud as your fingers get lost in the soft fur of the tiger. You hope she’s not in a lot of pain.

“It’s an immune system thing, not sure what exactly but she wouldn’t have survived this long in the wild,” the boy tells you and his mouth curls up in a smile when Jasmine licks your hand. It seems like you’re tiger-approved. You look into its warm brown eyes and your heart churns at the thought of her condition.

Mark tells you stories of Jasmine, about that one time she crashed his birthday cake or how much she likes to swim with him in their pool during summer and gosh, you could listen to him go on and on forever. You’re only reminded of the reality, that all this is just a possible one-time thing, a weekend getaway with magic when Taeyong shows up in swimwear, ready to crash in said pool.

“I guess he might have been bored in that teapot,” Mark laughs, not minding at all. He even offers you to join but you have a better idea.

“Taeyong, I have my second wish!” you call out for the wish dragon who’s suddenly much more excited about that than the water. He’s beside you in a moment, beaming and curious. You glance at Mark with a soft smile before looking at your personal genie confidently.

“I wish Jasmine would be healthy,” you whisper, playing with the tiger’s furry ears which she seems to enjoy. You were a little bit afraid the dragon would say it’s not possible, that he can’t cure sickness but to your relief, he just grins.

“Your wish, my command,” he nods and puts a hand over the animal. Nothing but a smoke of purple signals the magic being done but you believe in it and so does Mark by the looks of it. He reaches out for your hand and squeezes it gently. 

“Thank you,” he smiles and you smile back. He used to be your best friend after all, it’s the least you can do for him.

Mark convinces you to stay the weekend and there’s no way you could tell no to him, not when he clears his schedule just for you. He never complains about how busy he must be working for his father’s business while being a music major at a local university. All he ever talks about is the places he wishes to show you and he takes you around Seoul as if he was your certificated tour guide. It’s lovely how enthusiastic he is about it while what really matters to you is the time you spend together. He makes sure you two take a million photos to remember by, Taeyong posing on half of them since he joins you on your little trips and sometimes it’s just the two of you watching the wish dragon being genuinely in awe by modern technology, 10 years is a long time after all.

On the last day before you have to go back to Vancouver (thanks to Taeyong’s kind offer to take you the same way you came back since he misunderstood you, you don’t have to sit through a 10+ hours flight and you have more time), Mark not only tries to make you breakfast despite having an in-house chef (his eggs are ugly as heck but you appreciate his efforts and can’t help but coo at his dreamy smile under that grey hoodie when you tell him it tastes yummy) but he also introduces you to his friends in Korea. Of course, they tease you (mostly Mark) about where he has been hiding you but it’s all chill and fun you’re not quite ready to say goodbye. But you should go because the more you stay, the more you don’t want to leave. You’re lucky enough for this chance to reunite with Mark but all good things end eventually.

“Let’s not disappear from each other’s life again, okay?” the boy grins at you as you’re ready to go, Taeyong already working on his magic.

“Yeah, let’s not,” you agree easily, looking forward to your video chatting and constant texting even if it’s from the two opposite ends of the Earth with a terrible time zone difference.

You glance at the wish dragon who’s drumming with his fingers while pursing his lips as if he was waiting for something and you let out a huff before working up the courage to actually do something about these feelings inside of you. You might have regretted not confessing in middle school, you have spent years wondering about the what ifs, so you don’t want to make the same mistake twice but still, you want to give Mark a chance to ignore it all if he wants to. So you step forward and wrap your hands around him as you hug him close. It’s obvious that your action takes him aback, he suddenly doesn’t know what to do with his hands and his body tenses under you but it all melts as you say those words that have been threatening to fall from your lips all this time:

“I have missed you.” you confess, honest and based on the hitch in his breathing, Mark must be surprised. You can’t blame him though, you just wanted him to know. You step back with a weary smile, his big Bambi eyes on you but before he could say anything you nod at Taeyong and you feel yourself falling, purple fog pulling you in. A few moments later you’re back in Vancouver, in your apartment, without him.

The first few days pass in a blurr, you can still barely believe what just happened. Your weekend with Mark feels like a too good dream but Mark kept his side of promise and texted you almost immediately as you left. He sends you selfies, songs that remind him of you and you talk about your days like you never did before. Still, it feels like you’re dancing around certain topics which are basically the elephant in the room and maybe that’s why Taeyong tries to cheer you up in his own way. Though, he soon realizes that you not being happy isn’t the problem, you are happy, you just… miss Mark more than you ever did.

“Enough of moping, you still have a wish left!” Taeyong exclaims, throwing himself onto your bed. “Come on, close your eyes, imagine what you want the most in the world and make a wish!" he singsongs. However, before you could even just indulge him, your phone pings with a new notification.

fullsun00 tagged you in their post!

You click on it right away, wondering what Mark’s friend Donghyuck is doing online at 1AM. The uploaded post turns out to be a photo of you and Mark when you all hang out near Han river. You were too busy at the time laughing at how the boy almost lost his whole scoop of ice cream before he could have had a single bite to notice his smile while looking at you. Based on his caption Donghyuck apparently wasn’t.

fullsun00: just old friends, they say. friends my ass @buttercupyn @onyourm__ark

You click your tongue wondering what Mark thinks of the callout but you press like on the post anyways. You put your phone aside before you could see how his other friends join the teasing in the comment section.

“Actually, I do have my third wish,” you speak up as you turn to Taeyong before he could make a remark on your tinted cheeks.

You’ve been thinking a lot about it during the past days. You could wish for anything but you’re at a point of your life where no riches or fame would make you happier because you’re happy enough just the way it is. It might not be perfect but you don’t want to be selfish and you want to make decisions you won’t regret: like catching up with Mark, curing his tiger and bringing happiness into the life of somebody who only ever served other people in his life.

“Ooh, what is it?” Taeyong claps, giddy as if he was waiting for this to happen. He probably did.

“I wish you would go on a vacation and enjoy life,” you tell him but unlike his usual reaction, this time the dragon’s smile fades and he blinks at you, confused.

“You could ask for anything in the world and that’s what you want? Are you sure?” he furrows his brows, not quite believing your words but you just smile, knowingly.

“Yes, Taeyong, I’m sure.”

“Your wish, my command,” he bows with his hands put together and with a twirl suddenly he’s in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, looking as ready for a holiday as one can be. You chuckle and tell him to just go, you’ll be fine.

You’re fine, you really are. Life goes on, you study and work, you laugh with your friends, you video call with Mark regularly and his friends are regulars on your social media, too. It’s just sometimes the feeling of missing something hits you harder than other days. Especially when you’re looking through the pictures you have from your Seoul weekend.

“I wish you were here,” you whisper ahead of you at one particularly good photo of Mark and the sunset, smiling at you behind the camera. You miss his smile, the cute wrinkles around his eyes when he crunches his nose, the sound of his laughter, his hand on your wrist… you miss him.

Ding-dong.

You stand up startled at the sound of your flat’s bell, running to the door to open it even though you have no idea who it could be so early on a Saturday morning. Not having a better idea, you expect it to be either a neighbour of your landlord but on the other side of your doorstep stands a boy who you thought was a continent away. He’s dressed semi-casually this time, his shirt tucked in his jeans, hair lightly falling onto his forehead and a nervous smile on his thin lips.

“Mark! But I⎼ I don’t even have more wishes,” you blink, taken aback, looking around to look for Taeyong in case he came back. But your behaviour just manages to confuse Mark instead.

“What?”

“I just wished you were here,” you blurt out without thinking, your words only processing later in your brain and it’s then when heat creeps onto your cheeks. Mark tries to but can’t really hide his growing smile at that.

“Really? I’m glad then. I just took my new private plane on a test drive,” he says bashfully, a silly excuse for real.

“All the way to Vancouver?” you tease, watching Mark fumble with the hem of his shirt. Your heart beats overtime just because of the fact that he’s there. 

“Well, what can I say? I did miss the weather here,” he plays along with a shrug but he’s more serious when he looks deep into your eye and adds: “And you left without letting me answer.”

Oh yes, you did. You were kind of afraid of his reaction but seeing how he was ready to travel across the world just to see you, maybe there’s no reason for you to be so afraid. It feels like deja vu but a reversed one in a way as Mark gently pulls you into a hug, his lips grazing your hair with a whisper that makes your heart skip a beat: “I have missed you too.”

You really wouldn’t wish for anything more.

[in-tua-deep]

Vanya is so tired of all the bullshit at this point in unviable au and like just Vanya being a tad bit p snarky is great

honestly if you hang around Klaus long enough you have to develop snark in sheer self defense. ESPECIALLY a Klaus who talks to not one but TWO ghosts so you only get like, a whole half to a third of the conversation and have to fill in the blanks yourself smh

And Vanya?? she protective where it counts. In the show itself, Leonard gets there first and when Allison questions him, Vanya gets defensive. In the unviable au, Klaus gets there first and makes Vanya feel included. So even though he’s an absolute pain in the ass she comes down resolutely on his side

And Klaus, who is used to having none of his (living) siblings on his side... it’s nice. When Allison accuses him of just wanting to grift Vanya for drug money... she defends him.

Even Diego, who also loves Klaus, would probably just gruffly say that that’s his problem.

So Vanya and Klaus get pretty close in this au actually, and you know what that means???

It’s Klaus who technically stops the apocalypse. Just by being there for her.

Actually now that I think about it, this might genuinely be an everyone lives au?? Except Five ofc, but like. Leonard Peabody hasn’t been able to get close to Vanya yet, so he probably doesn’t kill Helen Cho so that Vanya can be first chair. Wow like, so far no one except Five and Ben has died what a wild ride.

So they get team apocalypse together and recruit two more (hello boyfriend Dave, who is going to help Klaus keep clean!!) and then... what?

With all the stress and everything going on, Vanya probably... forgets to take her pills. She doesn’t even think about it in between trying to figure out what they’re supposed to be doing to prevent the apocalypse when their only clue is that someone related to Vanya might cause the apocalypse? And even then, could be a chain effect so the number of people who could end the world is like... weirdly high. 

And hey, Vanya has other things to worry about than her pills anyway. Klaus keeps trying to raid the fridge, if Diego puts a hole in her walls with one of his knives she’s actually going to commit murder, Dave keeps politely asking where she keeps various things so that he can make everyone tea. Five keeps rattling things to prove that he’s there (and he really needs to stop because being physical with items takes energy he needs to conserve)

Anyway, since Hazel and Cha-Cha were asking questions about Vanya, they realize that Vanya’s place... probably isn’t the safest? So they all end up going to the library to camp out because lets be real the library is an excellent public resource, and lots of libraries have private rooms - nowhere better to brainstorm

“If they know about my apartment, then they know about the mansion.” Vanya points out, absently rolling a marker across the table. 

(The room came with a whiteboard, presumably to help students or something, that Five has already capitalized as his own personal writing surface since Klaus tends to prefer paraphrase over direct translation.)

“The mansion?” Dave asks politely, because he really has no idea what the fuck he’s in for.

“Where we grew up.” Vanya informs him, because she’s a nice person and figures he doesn’t deserve to flounder considering he’s literally out of time here. 

“I told you about how dad sucked.” Klaus says offhandedly as he swipes a purple marker from thin air so that he can continue doodling flowers on the whiteboard.

“Okay okay,” Dave says, waving his hands, “Slow down. Was everything you told me true? Because I will be honest I thought most of it was like. Your uh, vivid imagination.”

“Probably true,” Diego says over Klaus’s outraged squawk, “But very... embellished. Klaus has that effect.”

“I resemble that remark!” Klaus pulls himself together admirably.

“I know you do, babe.” Dave says, leaning over to take Klaus’s hand in his own, smiling fondly. Klaus absolutely melts and a large E W is written across the whiteboard in bright red ink. 

“Mind your business, junior.” Klaus says, sticking his tongue out in the direction everyone assumes Five to be. Immediately after this comment, Klaus gets beaned in the head by said red marker.

“Children, children.” Vanya rolls her eyes, “Can we get along for five minutes?”

“In this family?” Diego snorts dismissively. And then starts because Vanya smacks him on the arm for being an ass.

In the last few days, Vanya has attended the funeral of the man who emotionally fucked her up, found out that her two dead brothers were hanging around, found out the apocalypse was incoming, is being stalked by time traveling assassins because she is somehow related to the apocalypse happening, lied to people to get info on an eye, bailed on practice, crawled out a bathroom window, rescued her kidnapped brother only to watch him vanish before her eyes. Honestly she is all out of fucks to give. She’s tired, cranky, and more than a little stressed.

“Can you order pizza to a library?” Klaus muses absently, head turned in a way that means he’s probably talking to Ben. 

“No, Klaus. Stop.” Vanya all but begs.

“Not that I don’t love the library.” Dave observes, looking around. He looks around a lot, constantly marveling at the differences between the world back in his day and now. “But if Vanya’s apartment and uh, ‘the mansion’ aren’t options. Where are we supposed to be staying?”

Bless Dave for keeping them on topic.

Vanya and Klaus look at each other. And then as one they look at Diego.

“No. Absolutely not.” Diego protests, crossing his arms. “I live in a boiler room. That doesn’t even count. It can’t have four people staying in it.”

“Six people.” Klaus emphasizes, gesturing at thin air. Diego mumbles apologies, which is in self preservation really because Five really does have fantastic aim and doesn’t give a fuck about manners. 

“We can have a sleepover!” Klaus cheers, clapping his hands like he’s at a one man party. 

“No.” Diego emphasizes.

They all end up in Diego’s boiler room. 

“Five says he wants the bed.” Klaus claims as soon as they walk in.

“Five is dead.” Diego growls, “He’s not getting the bed.”

“Ben says that’s dead-ist.” Klaus accuses pointing a finger at Diego, who slaps it away. 

“Well I suppose the youngest should get the bed.” Vanya muses out loud, which just makes Klaus burst into laughter. This in turn means that the pillow on Diego’s bed seems to move on its own in an attempt to smother the lanky man.

“I’m fine with the floor.” Dave offers, “Used to way worse in the jungle. This’ll actually be pretty nice. No bugs at least.”

Klaus pauses in wrestling with the pillow, “Aw, babe. That’s so sweet. I’m on the floor, too!”

Diego sighs deeply, “Ugh. Fucking. Fine. Vanya can have the bed.”

“Thank you.” Vanya says gracefully, picking her way through Diego’s... place is a generous word, to sit on the bed. 

“Do you have any movies?” Klaus asks, and has has somehow transitioned to being sprawled across the floor kicking his feet in the air with his face in his hands, “Oh! Or popcorn! Nail polish?”

“This is not a sleepover.” Diego growls, “This is... this is a tactical base.”

“I have some hairties in my pocket?” Vanya offers, fishing out one and tossing to towards a squealing Klaus. 

“Yes!” Klaus cheers, holding up his prize with great victory, “Vanya, can I do you hair?”

“Sure.” Vanya says shrugging, scooching over to allow for Klaus to scrabble onto the bed to sit behind her. 

“Hey Diego do you own a hairbrush?” Klaus asks, pulling Vanya’s hair out of her ponytail and running his fingers through it. Diego scowls. “I’ll take that as a no.”

Klaus scooches over enough so that Dave can sit behind him and they manage to cram three adults onto the bed as Dave starts ruffling at Klaus’s hair, humming thoughtfully. 

“I hate all of you.” Diego growls, crossing his arms and definitely not pouting. 

“I love team apocalypse.” Klaus says as cheerfully as possible.

“Don’t you have two other siblings?” Dave asks, brow furrowed in slight confusion. Klaus probably told him all about his fucked up family while they were in Vietnam together, to pass the time. At the time Dave hadn’t actually believed Klaus (body of a monkey? teleportation? tentacle powers? but you know what he’s in the future and he’s either having the worst acid trip, he’s dead, or this is real and why not roll with it).

Vanya, Klaus, and Diego all grimace as one.

“Luther and Allison... have their own issues they’re working on right now.” Vanya says diplomatically.

“Hold up.” Klaus says, craning his head around to look at Diego, “Is Luther still on that ‘dad was murdered’ bullshit?”

“Your dad was murdered?” Dave asks, looking a little shocked.

“What is Allison even doing?” Diego tilts his head a little bit, ignoring Dave’s question entirely.

“Judging my life choices.” Vanya mutters reproachfully. Klaus, as the terrible life choice in question, pats her shoulder sympathetically. 

“In all fairness, if it weren’t for. You know. Everything. I probably would have robbed you for money.” Klaus admits with a simple shrug, and gets a pat on the shoulder from Dave in return.

“I know she cares or whatever.” Vanya says sighing, “But like. The way she goes about it. Like she knows everything and has to impart her wisdom on us lesser beings. Like she didn’t ruin her own life.”

“Wow.” Klaus hums, tugging on the end on Vanya’s new braid, “I didn’t realize we were onto the shit talking portion of the sleepover.”

“This isn’t a sleepover.” Diego’s protest falls on deaf ears.

“I’m open to building a relationship.” Vanya says firmly, “But that’s what it needs to be. Building a relationship. Because quite frankly, we don’t have one. She acts like, I don’t know, the fact that we’re sisters should trump the fact that she ignored me at best for like, the last twenty-nine years of my life.”

“Go off, queen.” Klaus says gleefully, running his fingers through Vanya’s hair and undoing the braid he just finished entirely. “Where have you been hiding all our lives?”

“In my room, mostly.” Vanya deadpans, “Sequestered away like all of Dad’s boring treasures.”

“If your dad was still alive I’d fight him for all of you.” Dave says very seriously. Seriously enough that it makes Vanya snort, and Klaus burst into giggles, and even Diego shakes his head. 

“I love you so much, Dave.” Klaus says seriously, and then looks over Dave’s shoulder, “No I don’t - it’s a different sort of love Ben. You’re still my favorite brother! Wait, no Five - actually yes Five because Ben is everyone’s favorite brother - ”

“Confirmed.” Diego immediately says, which makes Klaus whirl around, his hand at his chest and gasping like a Victorian maiden. 

“Sorry Five.” Vanya says, nodding along mock seriously. “Ben never lost my violin bow and tried to blame it on the monster under the bed.”

“Hold up, hold up hold up.” Klaus says immediately, eyes pingponging between Vanya and someone the rest of them can’t see, “I smell a story. Pray tell, Vanya. Do you have a tale that paints the illustrious Five in a... less than pristine light?”

“Oh Klaus.” Vanya practically purrs, mischief lighting up her eyes, “I was Five’s favorite sibling. I know all the dirty little secrets.”

And that’s the moment when Diego’s shitty bed flips and dumps Vanya, Klaus, and Dave onto the floor.

“Five!” 

[bang-to-the-tan]

Stray Cat Strut

Chapter 6

Reader x OT7

► Faerie!AU

Fluff, Comfort

Warnings: Mention of Death, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Faerie Mischievous Bullshit

↳ Summary: When your grandmother passes away, she leaves her countryside house in your name. The longer you stay, the harder and harder it becomes to explain away the odd happenings. What kind of secrets does this sleepy town hold? And why do the local animals act so strangely around you?…

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Barking. Taehyung is barking. Silly dog. Silly, silly dog.

He’ll wake Granny with all that ruckus. Scritch, scratch, scrabble. Scratching at her window—she doesn’t like it when he does that. 

You giggle in your half-awake state, reaching under the blankets for him, waking slowly as you come up empty, seemingly alone in your bed but not in your room. Taehyung is quiet for a half second, panting, before he launches into a new tirade, breathlessly excited. You shift, opening one eye to see him standing delicately on top of the desk underneath your window. He has both paws on the window, and digs at it furiously while he yaps. Scritch, scratch. 

“Taehyung, shh,” you try to shush him, but he only throws you a quick glance before returning to his sentry at the widow, head moving intently as he follows something’s path through the yard. “You’ll—” You pull up short of what you were about to say. ‘You’ll wake Granny.’ Sadness sinks into your heart briefly, but you shake your head, pulling yourself up further on the bed and threading a hand through your hair in exasperation. “You’ll give me a headache is what you’ll do,” you finish finally, though there’s no real bite to it. You sling the covers off your legs and go to stand, settling your feet into the floor familiarly, feeling the chilly, polished wood with a stretch of your toes. 

Yawning, you stride over to him, hooking a stabilizing arm under his chest to stop him from moving while you survey whatever it is he’s hunting. The tree outside waves in a slight breeze, and brings attention to a small shape bouncing impatiently on a branch nearby. Round, pink. The little bird chirps merrily at you when it sees you, and Taehyung explodes into a volley of excited whuffles, squirming in your grasp. 

“That bird,” you say to Taehyung, after a beat. “Are you...is that what has you so riled up?” 

Taehyung whines. He places a small paw on the thick glass pane, and you can feel his tail wagging underneath your arm. 

“You want to go outside, huh?” you continue, partly talking to him, partly muttering to yourself. “But if I let you outside, are you going to attack that little bird? I can’t have you eating what is probably a faerie, Taehyung. You’ll get us both in trouble.” 

The bundle of fur in your arms starts thrashing again, his snorts of excitement turning up in pitch and volume along with the violence with which he struggles. Eventually, you have to let go of him so you leave him on the desk. He taps off it immediately, landing by your legs with an expectant wag of his tail. You stretch again, and go to walk out into the hall. The entire time you make yourself breakfast, meandering around the small kitchen with a comfortable familiarity (though it feels weird to be able to reach all the cabinets), he’s rushing underfoot, dodging and rolling beneath you, huffing all the way. You make yourself a nice, warm mug of tea and move to the front door, pretending like you aren’t one misplaced step away from accidentally squashing the energetic ball of fluff shooting across the floors with the skitter of small claws against wood. 

“You can’t—Taehyung, listen to me—you can’t eat it.” You warn, laying your hand on the handle. He bounces and snuffles impatiently. “If you hurt that bird, I won’t let you in the house ever again. Do you understand, Taehyung?”

He yaps, once, and you elect to take that as a yes. Slowly, you open the door, being careful to mind his tiny snout when he wedges it excitedly into the doorframe. As soon as he can wriggle his body through the space, he’s off like a shot, tearing through the bushes towards the side of the house, legs flying, fur waving in the air. 

“I’m watching you!” you call after him, following with as much haste as you can muster, first thing in the morning and cradling tea in your hands. But the scene that greets you when you peer around the corner is far from the violence that had you concerned. The bird has dropped to the ground, bouncing and chirping just as Taehyung circles it, paws outstretched in play. Their dance is frenzied, musical, inexhaustible, but even with the frantic motions, the wild spinning, they’re both so extraordinarily careful with each other. At no point does Taehyung land a paw on his feathered friend, and the bird, in turn, seems to dip its beak out of his way when necessary. Together, they dance and call, the noise almost too melodic, too full of joy to be annoying, even this early in the morning. 

You settle yourself on the edge of the porch to watch them, warming your palms with the hot tea, breathing in the gentle scent of tea and fresh morning air. It’s not so cold that you would need a jacket; even with the sun only just now peering over the tops of the trees, casting warm shades across the grass and painting the world in a new beginning, the temperature is mild and pleasant. You catch a whiff of the lavender plants by the front of the house and throw a saddened glance at one when you realize that it’s wilted even further, threatening to give up the ghost any moment now. That gardener...You’ll have to give him his candy soon, see if perhaps that’ll be enough to convince him back. And if not, you’ll have to find some way of keeping it yourself. Maybe Namjoon has a book on gardening. Taehyung returns to full-force barking in the background.

“Good morning.” 

You start faintly at the voice that comes from your gate, blinking up in surprise at the tall man leaning on it. Ah. The reason you could hear Taehyung again is because he’s spinning himself in mad circles beneath your visitor, yapping and leaping upwards at him, snapping. His antics are promptly ignored by the both of you. The bird has returned to its perch high in the tree, watching the scene, head cocked.

“Good morning!” you reply, looking up at the newcomer with a vaguely incredulous expression. “Good early morning!”

“Ah, is it too early?” Jin asks, shaking his head to the side. “Sorry. I was just excited to pay you back.” He smiles, soft lips pulling upwards, eyes sparkling. “I really appreciated your hard work yesterday.” 

“No, no! You’re fine!” You rush to make sure he doesn’t think you’re sending him home straightaway. Your chest glows with his praise, and you can feel your cheeks flushing. “No, it’s alright! I only just woke up. If you just give me a minute to change…”

“Of course.” 

“I’ll be right back out.”

“I’ll be here.”

 You hop back inside, clutching your tea and heading quickly to your room. You throw some clothes on—something you won’t mind ripping or getting dirty, and drink the rest of your tea, setting the empty mug on the counter for later cleaning. After a moment’s thought, you grab the small bag with the cat’s totem and slip it around your neck, rubbing at it to again smell that lovely combination of wood and cinnamon. You hide it under your shirt collar as a precaution. Just in case. As you approach the front door, you can hear Jin speaking in a low tone. Is he...is he talking to Taehyung? You push the door open, craning around the side to find him leaning over the gate, his brows arched, lips pursed, as he argues quietly with your dog. Taehyung, for all purposes, appears to be listening intently, legs in a defensive stance, small body completely still as he stares down the man.

“—know to begin with that it was her,” Jin continues, blinking. “But it’s too late now.”

You hesitate in the doorway, amused, as Taehyung yaps once under his breath, bouncing backwards a little. Jin isn’t just talking to Taehyung, it’s like they’re having a conversation. It’s...adorable. You don’t want to interrupt.

And then Jin’s expression smoothes into something unreadable. “No,” he says, his voice dipping into silk as he stretches upwards, eyeing the small dog beneath him with an air of almost disdain. It gives you chills, raises the hair on the back of your neck for reasons you don’t understand, to watch him curl his long fingers over the fence and return the animal’s gaze so coolly. You aren’t sure what it is, but he almost looks different. Taller, older, more intimidating. “No. I don’t think I will. I—” He glances up and meets your eye. He blinks again, surprise crossing his face, and whatever shadow that was creeping over him evaporates. “Hello.” 

“Hi,” you laugh, closing the door behind you as Taehyung revs back up into a volley of barks. “What were you two chatting about?” 

Jin scoffs, throwing his head back playfully. “We were arguing over you!” 

“Me?” You’re giggling anew, raising an eyebrow as you step forward and reach to collect Taehyung. You’ll put him outside the gate as you let Jin in—that way, there’ll be no potential mauling of trouser legs. He tries to duck from your grasp, but can’t run far with the fence in the way. As you lift him to your hip he tries to lunge for Jin, but you tuck him closer into you with one arm.

“He doesn’t want me to come in.” 

“That sounds like him,” you reply, “but it’s ridiculous. Of course you’re welcome here.”

“He disagrees.” 

“Seokjin,” you intone, teasingly formal. “You most certainly can come in.”

The ball of fluff in your arms breaks into a howl, ears flattened on the top of his head. You roll your eyes and you open the gate for Jin, inclining your neck to welcome him inside. He hesitates for a moment, looking to the gate itself and then at the restrained animal struggling against your grasp, before stepping inwards and immediately relaxing into a broad, warm smile. 

“Well, good,” he returns. “How else could I hold up my end of our bargain?”

“Indeed.” 

Taehyung jerks violently when you move to put him on the other side of the fence, his legs splaying as if that could keep him on the side with you. When you place him down gently, he whimpers, starting up a forlorn cry as he spins to face you with a doggy expression of heartbreak. There’s a flash of pink and a flutter of wings dashing past you as the bird alights from its branch to land beside him, peeping and chirping brightly. He only snuffles, miserable, searching your eyes for understanding as he melts into a dejected fluff pile on the grass. 

“You can’t just attack my guests,” you retort, turning back to Jin, who smiles all the wider at you. The new light looks good on him, the purple haze not quite faded from the air, drawing out the softness of his face and the shimmer of his eyes. 

“So!” he says, clapping his hands together once with an air of finality. “This famous shed. Where is it?” 

“It’s this way,” you reply, moving to lead him out towards the back. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Taehyung perk up and trot to follow you in-step around the perimeter of the fence. 

 You and Jin immediately get to work taking things out of the shed, organizing and cleaning up the shelves and spaces in between. There’s dust everywhere, cobwebs; you doubt your granny could have cleaned it by herself, so it only makes sense that it’s been a while. Boxes of beautiful, old china, tubs of decorations, some gardening supplies...Most of it is stuff you can repurpose and use. Jin cracks jokes every so often, awful, awful Dad-jokes that have you laughing just because of how bad they are, but he lights up when you do enough that you don’t try too hard to resist him. Again, he listens to you intently as you speak, talking all about your life before this town. It’s quiet but for the two of you, laboring in the fresh sun. You half expect Taehyung to spend the entire time screaming, but instead he only lays there, occasionally whining, ears flitting forward whenever your eyes meet. 

You’re on the last trash bag when you realize that one of the containers has a book inside. A scrapbook, from the looks of it. It cracks open easily, with a thick puff of layered dust, and you retrieve the book with all the gentleness of handling a child, shifting to sit down for a moment on a large cobblestone. Jin follows suit curiously, head cocked, kneeling beside you and turning away from his work wiping down plastic tubs. 

“Oh wow,” you breathe as you open it, immediately recognizing the young woman in the photographs. “Granny’s old pictures.”

“She was beautiful,” Jin says softly from behind you.

“She was,” you reply with a smile. She smiles back at you from age-worn pictures—her clothes dated but her face bright and youthful, a sunny grin like she’d never known sadness. 

You keep turning the pages, taking you on a journey through her life, where she lived before here, the people she knew and loved, long buried now. Love and recognition rises in you when you come to her wedding. It wasn’t a big wedding, not too many people, sparsely populated around a new shiny bridge, crowned by the weeping willow, everyone cheering as she and her husband stand there, eyes locked and so deeply, deeply in love that it makes your own heart ache. 

Your eye is drawn to a figure standing to the side. 

He’s clapping politely, a small smile pulling one edge of his plump lips upwards, his eyes shining. Raven hair, dark even for a black and white photograph. You blink, your grin fading into confusion. 

“Jin?” 

“Hmm.” 

You crane over your shoulder at him, perplexed. “Jin, that looks exactly like you.” 

“Yes,” he says, low, eyes glued to the photo. “Yes, it does.”

“Weird,” you shake your head with a laugh, “I mean, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were there! Wow, that would make you....over seventy years old. At least.” You laugh again. “That’s so amazing. Is that your dad, then?”

He hums again, noncommittal, shifting a little behind you. 

You try to peer closer, staring into the beautiful man’s eyes, this man who looks so much like Jin, but there’s a strange blur that prevents you from seeing him as clearly as the other people in the picture. Just over his shoulder, at his back, you recognize a white smudge—like feathers—rising from behind him. A swan, most likely. Must have been landing on the water behind him just as the photo was taken…

“Everyone in this town has so much history,” you murmur, feeling a strange pang of almost jealousy. “So many stories that intertwine like this. I wish I had something like that.”   

Jin moves, and you feel his hand drift over your side, to the hand you’ve placed on the book. “You’re in this town now,” he points out, gentle. His long fingers caress yours, curling to hold your hand in his. He’s warm against you, and you can smell the faint smell of lillies. His cologne? It’s so gentle, though. “Our stories are already intertwining.” 

“Thanks, Jin,” you reply after an awkward beat. You extricate your fingers from his to turn the page again, flushing. “I like to think that I’m working on it.” 

You skip a few pages, furiously trying to will the heat away from your cheeks. He turns back to his cloth and his bins, as you try to process the atmosphere that grew between the two of you in that instant. 

You don’t have long to think about it uninterrupted. There’s a rustling on the other side of the fence, and you look up just in time to catch Jungkook’s inquisitive, sleek face peering out from the leaves at you. You smile at him before Taehyung suddenly springs up with a shriek, all four legs leaving the floor at the same time, rocketing towards the rabbit with all the force of his pent-up frustration. Together, they disappear into the underbrush, crashing all the way, Tae baying anew, the bird following the chase on swift, silent wings. You chuckle softly, rolling your eyes. On the one hand, you might be able to spend the rest of your afternoon without listening to him whine but on the other...now you’re left completely alone with a gorgeous gentleman who’s only real flaw so far seems to be taking conversations with your dog too seriously. Who might be flirting with you? It’s hard to tell with these things.

You turn the page again, and this time you’re greeted with a familiar face and a trinket that leaves an indent in the aged pages. Beaming out at you with a grin that’s missing teeth, hair mussed from some run through the woods no doubt. A small you, flecked with dirt and clutching a stuffed animal to your chest tightly, as though no army in the world could wrest it from you. Wait. 

You look closer, confused. That’s not a stuffed animal. It’s a dog. Small, fluffy, round, with eyes slightly askew and tongue lolling happily. It looks just like Taehyung. Did you have a dog?...it would explain why you feel so comfortable with Taehyung. It makes sense. Still, it’s strange to you, this idea that not once, but twice, you’ve come across the ancestors of people and animals you’ve met recently. And that your granny has pictures of them.

It’s a small town, you try to reason, feeling a chill creep up your neck. There isn’t going to be much in the way of diversity—not when it’s remained largely unchanged for who knows how long. You try to distract yourself with the item pressed into the book, despite the feeling curling in your gut of missing something, of not seeing something important. It’s a bracelet. Childish in style, but professional in make, in the skillful way the knots are threaded just so precisely. Faded red thread, woven into an adjustable clasp. You turn it with a finger, brushing the thread surrounding the centerpiece. A tiny bell that still rings faintly when you jostle it and a small pearl. It’s teardrop-shaped, and through the gaps, you can see the antique silver that once cradled it to some sort of fixture. A bead? Strange. You slip a fingertip over the smooth surface, and a second heartbeat suddenly thumps through your arm, in your chest for a minute, two, making your head spin, stealing your breath. Your senses flood, the rays from the sun climbing the sky glowing so brightly, you can barely make out the shapes around you, and you smell honey on the breeze. 

“Did you hear me?” 

You blink, turning slightly to look at Jin, who’s crouched by his pile of conquered bins, looking back at you with a curious look. The warm yellow of the sunlight cards chocolate through his hair, sets patches of his skin alight. You can see him just fine.

“Uh,” you manage. What was going on? You don’t recall what gave you pause. Not anything more than a general feeling, a snatch of a moment in time. Something from a dream, surely. Some memory pulling you out with the tide. You don’t know. “No, sorry.”

“Is there an order you wanted these back in the shed?” he repeats. “I mean, for ease of access.”

“N-no.” You hesitate, taking a breath. “Um, actually, Jin?”

He smiles. “Yes?”

“I-I’m out of garbage bags.” His face falls slightly. “I was just going to go get some more, but...I mean, most of the shed is done now.”

“...you want to take a break?”

“I think it’s a good stopping point for today.”

“Ah.” He pauses, looking away from you to study the pile beside him. You turn back to the page, realizing with faint shock that at some point, you put the bracelet on and fastened it around your wrist without even knowing. But of course you did. That’s where it belongs. It feels good. It feels...right. You look again at the child in the picture. She’s wearing the same bracelet. 

You notice another blur. Another smudge. Behind her. Like smoke, unfocused, a play of the dappled light forming a crouching form in an unsteady photographic development. A long, dark sweater made of shadows and flowers, jeans made of some light flare, what would make his face out of frame but for a trace of a wide, boxy grin of a distant reflection. 

“I’m going to go see Namjoon,” you say finally, closing the book before you give yourself a migraine looking so hard at things you don’t understand. 

Jin stands as you do, poorly hiding obvious disappointment. You raise your wrist appraisingly, trying to brighten his reaction by reminding him what the point of all this was. 

“What do you think?”

“What do I think of what?”

“This bracelet.” You jiggle it once, watching the pearl catch the light and hearing the soft chime of the bell with another flush of familiarity. “Do you think it’ll be enough for the book?” 

Jin watches you for a moment in silence, deadpan. “...What bracelet?” 

You scoff. “Don’t be like that. I’ll see you…?”

“Tomorrow,” he puts in quickly, invisible bracelet immediately forgotten. “Tomorrow. The pond isn’t finished.”

“That’s fine! I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He pauses again, but finally nods and smiles, though you can tell he’s still turning things around in his head. 

“I like being with you,” he adds. “I like this. I want…” He reaches for your hand again, but thinks better of it, returning awkwardly to his side with a sigh. “I want to keep seeing you after the deal is fulfilled.”

“Jin, we live in this tiny town together,” you remind him with a faint chuckle. “We aren’t going to be able to get away from each other.” 

He doesn’t smile back. He looks...earnest. “I hope so.”

The two of you make your way to the front of the house again, and you close the gate behind as you stride through it. You walk in the direction of the library with him trailing behind you, in a strange kind of silence. You can’t but feel like you’ve hurt his feelings, somehow. That you’ve put him on edge. You don’t know why. What you could have done. You take another look at the bracelet ringing your wrist, raising it to the dappled light streaming through the trees on either side of the road.

There’s a lot you don’t know, you think. 

You turn the corner, coming into view of the signpost and immediately recognize that there’s a young man standing there. His shoulders are hunched, his blue hoodie bulking up a slim frame. His hair is black, but the light catches off strands dyed a fashionable, subtle blue. When he looks up, you meet catlike eyes, swiped down at the edges and impossibly dark. He maintains eye contact a little too long and you cock your head as you walk towards him, aiming down the street to his left. 

“Can I help you?”

“I was thinking more like I could help you,” he replies in a terse drawl. His voice is a lot deeper than you would have thought, gravelly and thick. He peers at you, scrunches his nose. “You’re really making me nervous, you know.”

That catches you slightly off guard. Your steps falter. You throw a glance behind yourself for help from Jin, but the taller man has seemingly disappeared, melted into the trees around you. “I-I don’t know what you mea—”

You jump backwards when you turn and the new arrival is much closer than he had been, eyes searching yours. He’s well within a couple feet of you, despite having made no noise on his approach.

“The longer you have it, the less convenient for everyone,” he adds in a deep rumble, pulling it past a pout. You can smell cinnamon on his breath, like he’s been eating cinnamon sugar pastries. “If you’re not going to use it, give it back.” 

Are you being mugged? Your brain is short-circuiting and you can only balk at him, eyes wide. You can’t get a read on him at all, you don’t understand what he wants or why he’s threatening you. ‘It’? What is ‘it’? What is he talking about? What do you have?

The next second happens in fast-forward, in a space that takes half as long as usual. The man’s half-gloved hand suddenly reaches forward, towards your neck, and without thinking, your own hand shoots upwards, trying to bat it away with a flash of panic, the bell at your wrist now loud, clear, ringing in your ears, and you wish Taehyung was here. 

A force from behind you, an arm from over your shoulder, grabs ahold of the dark-haired man’s wrist, shoving it back towards him, and for a moment, you think gratefully of Jin, until he speaks. 

“Don’t touch her.” That’s not Jin. Jin’s voice isn’t so deep, so low in his chest. You can almost feel him talking through your back. The other man takes two or three reluctant steps backwards, his hand lowering to slip back into his jacket pocket. 

“I was just—” he starts reproachfully, almost hurt. 

 “Don’t touch her.” Your savior repeats, dark, and you feel him shift to angle his body in front of you, protective, moving into view as he does so. He’s tall. Broad-shouldered. He’s wearing a blue and black sweater that hangs over his arms, and a winter hat that clashes with the grim, warning tone of his voice. The other man’s eyes flit from him back to you. He blinks, lazy, before sniffing once, shifting his shoulders. He turns on his heel and avoids your gaze as he begins stalking down the path towards Jin’s pond. You stand, frozen, watching him go, all senses now honed on the guy in front of you. You watch the black hair disappear down the road, swallowed by the trees. A beat passes. Two. 

The tall man suddenly whirls around, and you’re shocked to find that he’s grinning so wide your cheeks ache in sympathy. Before you can react, he’s lunged forwards, gathering you in an all-encompassing hug, pulling you close and intimate to his chest, burying his cheek into your hair with a deep almost-sob noise. You catch a whiff of honey as you remain frozen, eyes wide, limbs stiff. He’s warm around you, long arms holding you like he never wants to let go, but still so gentle.

“I knew you’d find it,” he’s babbling through sobs. “I knew you’d find me. I knew I’d find you.”

He leans back, wide hands sliding to your shoulders, to survey you with eyes squinted hard as he half laughs, half cries, threatening at any moment to spill over into tears. “Ah, look at you. I’ve waited so long to do this.” 

He hugs you again, tight and tender, and this time you finally snap out of it. You struggle, worming out of his grasp, trying to find your footing enough to take a few steps away from him, staring at him in bewilderment as you part. His face immediately starts falling, though he lets you go easily enough. His arms are still holding air as he gapes at you, mouth open, looking more confused than anything.

“Th-thanks for your help,” you manage to stutter out. “But I need to—”

“You don’t remember me?” he interrupts, eyes going wide. He looks at you like his heart is breaking. He steps forward, and you take an instinctive step back, and he immediately reverses back as you’d stung him, his expression shattering. “But I—I’m your—”

“I don’t think you mean me any harm, and I’m glad you were here to protect me from that other guy,” you amend hastily, holding your arms out at him, placating, “But just...just stay away from me. Okay?” 

He only watches you, crestfallen. 

“Stay away from me.” You repeat, your bracelet jingling faintly when you gesture again. You take another step back. He doesn’t move. You turn, looking towards where the road to the library is. Actually, on second thought, you aren’t sure you should leave him any kind of loophole. The people in this town are weird, and used to dealing with faeries. You whirl around.

“And don’t follo—” you begin, but pull up short when you realize he’s gone. A breeze casts through in his place, the faintest whiff of honey before it dissolves into trees and green and sunshine. Even the birds keep silent for a moment.

You’re alone.

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[zrtranscripts]

Season 9, Mission 13: Dig Your Own Hole

Green Route

~

[helicopter takes off and flies away]

SAM YAO: Well, that was incredibly cool! All my Airwolf fantasies come true. Besides, that chopper was a lot more comfortable than Skull-Kicker's little plane. Although can people have dropped us off at Red Scorpion Base instead of way out in the desert?

JANINE DE LUCA: They would have been shot down. Red Scorpion Base is protected by automated surface-to-air defense systems, highly sophisticated. It must contain something valuable indeed.

MARYAM ABANI: Hmm. Oh, a deadly secret.

JANINE DE LUCA: Red fungus run rampant, perhaps.

PETER LYNNE: Or one of Van Ark's little experiments.

JANINE DE LUCA: Whatever it is, Bakari's message said that getting it out of Red Scorpion Base would prevent countless deaths, and we must proceed on that basis. Now, we're approaching the checkpoint. I trust you have all prepared your cover identities. I am Steel Fist. Peter, you are Visage. And Five, Vampire Squid. Dr. Abani, your alias is Doctor Death. And Mr. Yao, yours is Sven "Psycho" Mountback. It is imperative that we remain in character at all times.

SAM YAO: Why are you looking at me?

[footsteps rustle through sand, a tap on a glass window, window opens]

GUARD: Papers.

SAM YAO: Here you go, officer.

GUARD: Put your feet in the prints. Looking at the cameras. Keep still.

[camera whirs]

SAM YAO: So how's your day going? Gets a bit boring out here, I'd imagine. Not much I Spy material, is there? Also, there's only one of you. [whispers] Ow! Why are you kicking me?

GUARD: Done. You guys are running pretty late. Gets a bit spicy this time of day. Still, you'll be all right, long as you stick to the green route.

SAM YAO: What's the green route?

GUARD: Brad, raise the gates.

BRAD: Copy that.

[gates raise]

GUARD: Okay, you can go. Do not deviate from the green route. Better run.

~

SAM YAO: Oh wow. Surprises me every time I see it, the color of the sand. Sort of burnt orange, like it soaked up the sunset. Not seeing much green, though. Where's this route?

PETER LYNNE: You know it's not literally green, Sam. It's green as in safe, I'd imagine. As opposed to, you know, red for painfully fatal. They must have sent the route to the real Death's Hand, and we'll just have to guess.

JANINE DE LUCA: According to Mr. Boujettif's sources, the principal threat en route to Red Scorpion Base is zombies. We have sight lines for miles in every direction, we should be fine. The principal threat when we reach the base would appear to be Mr. Yao.

SAM YAO: Me? Why?

MARYAM ABANI: Uh, your behavior at the checkpoint wasn't very... assassin-y.

SAM YAO: Oh, right. Yeah, sorry. You should have seen me at immigration. You know that bit where they used to look down at your passport and then up at you like 20 times? Just had to fill in that silence.

JANINE DE LUCA: But Sven Mountback would not. If he is famed for one thing other than prowess with illicit software and garrotting wires, it is taciturnity.

PETER LYNNE: Yes. We're sort of looking for um, gruff monosyllables rather than this whole sweaty, needy thing, charming though it is, obviously. But you've got it easy. I mean, Five's identity is Vampire Squid, and that's all anyone knows. I will say, I am highly impressed with your interpretation, Five.

MARYAM ABANI: [giggles] Yes. I wish I had your imagination. I had to base Doctor Death on the villain from a Nigerian children's television show.

SAM YAO: Ooh... oh, was that the one with the child detectives? Because Frances was talking about that the other day. Her grandmother used to put it on and -

JANINE DE LUCA: Don't get distracted. There are a number of bones in the sand, human bones. The desert may not be as empty as it appears. We must cross before darkness falls. Let's run.

~

MARYAM ABANI: I don't see any zombies. Maybe we found the green route?

JANINE DE LUCA: Perhaps, though the human remains are troubling. Hard to tell if they are old or recently picked clean by vultures.

PETER LYNNE: So uh, speaking of uh, bones to pick, we have some... reunions coming up. Van Ark, for instance. We've all got a few things we'd like to say to him. And um, Bakari might remind us of certain things, people. Raw nerves, maybe.

JANINE DE LUCA: Yes, Peter. Tom has been much on my mind.

PETER LYNNE: Oh. Uh, right.

JANINE DE LUCA: I've been allowing myself to dwell on... such matters, to work through them perhaps, as you have all encouraged me to do.

PETER LYNNE: Oh. And uh, are you... okay?

JANINE DE LUCA: It has been... a difficult time. Bakari... his betrayal was unforgivable, of course. But the thought of him... it has brought back memories. When Tom and I moved in with him, that wasn't an easy time, either. We'd just lost our parents, but we were together. That closeness... it has been years since I felt that. But... well, I feel it now. I feel it with you, P- on the horizon, to the east. What is that?

PETER LYNNE: Hmm? Oh. Uh, uh, well, I think that's a camel.

JANINE DE LUCA: Then there may be people. Perhaps they're following the green route. Runner Five, binoculars please. [bag rustles] The camel is laden with packs, but no one is leading it. What happened to... the camel would appear to have been sucked into the sand.

SAM YAO: Crap.

PETER LYNNE: Hooray, a monosyllable!

JANINE DE LUCA: I fear that was not a natural phenomenon. Quicksand does not claim its victims that fast. We must redouble our pace to reach Red Scorpion Base before it claims us. Run.

~

SAM YAO: These dunes are bigger than they looked, aren't they?

MARYAM ABANI: It's because they're featureless, no scale. During my training, I provided medical support to ultramarathon runners in the Namib Desert and they found it very difficult to pace themselves on the dunes.

SAM YAO: Yeah, what are these ridge things criss-crossing all over the sand? Looks like there's tubes underneath. Maybe they deliver water to Red Scorpion Base.

PETER LYNNE: Yeah, I reckon Sod's Law is that they're actually just something really, really horrible.

JANINE DE LUCA: Let us not conjure threats because we have seen something unusual. Perhaps we've simply witnessed a camel falling down a hole.

MARYAM ABANI: There was sucking, too. I-I definitely heard -

[zombie screams]

SAM YAO: Screamer, top of the dune! [gunshot] Nice shooting, Five.

[zombies scream]

MARYAM ABANI: Looks like the screams attracted more zombies.

JANINE DE LUCA: We may be able to use this to our advantage. I will position myself atop the large dune to the east. The screamers will be drawn towards you, and I will have a clear shot. Steel Fist's weapon is an M82 rifle. I will dispatch the zombies long before they reach you. Continue on your current heading. I'll rejoin you once the threat is eliminated. Run.

~

[zombies scream]

SAM YAO: Okay Janine, we're between two pretty steep dunes. Don't fancy scrabbling up those with zombies screaming at my heels. Oh God, look at that one. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Also, my skull's gone and there's maggots in my brain. They're close enough to make out the maggots, Janine. You all set up to shoot them? Janine?

JANINE DE LUCA: I... I cannot remember how to assemble the rifle.

PETER LYNNE: Hey hey hey, that's-that's okay. Just-just relax, Janine. You let your hands just do their thing. It's muscle memory.

JANINE DE LUCA: The memory has gone, lost when the nanites rebooted me. I... I can't do it.

SAM YAO: Right. Well, we're gonna need a new plan, like now! Those zoms are getting really close -

VERONICA MCSHELL: Janine, it's Veronica. I will guide you. First, remove two pins from the lower half of the rifle. One is at the front of the body. Pull it out. Good. The second is located approximately four inches from the grip. Draw back the bolt, remove the pin, and replace the bolt. You're doing well.

PETER LYNNE: Ooh boy, they are close now. I can smell the rot. Um, no pressure. Running out of time a bit.

VERONICA MCSHELL: Remove the barrel from the case, locate the spring, and attach it to the bolt.

PETER LYNNE: They're coming from both sides.

VERONICA MCSHELL: Draw back the bolt, slide the barrel onto the body. Finally, replace the pins.

PETER LYNNE: Janine? Did you do it? Um, Janine?

[gunfire]

SAM YAO: Thanks, Veronica.

PETER LYNNE: Uh, Maryam, uh, the sand by your feet is, it's crumbling. I think that it might cave in. [MARYAM screams] Maryam! Maryam, are you all right down there?

MARYAM ABANI: Not really. I'm in some kind of tunnel. There's scratch marks on the walls, like they've been dug with hands. I think something's living down here.

JANINE DE LUCA: Runner Five, extract Dr. Abani from the tunnel immediately.

MARYAM ABANI: Thanks, Five.

JANINE DE LUCA: More screamers have our location, and I do not want to find out what lives in the tunnels. We must leave this unstable ground immediately. There are rocky outcrops to the northwest. Run.

~

PETER LYNNE: Uh, give me a hand up to that rock, would you, Five? Cheers. Are you all right, Janine?

JANINE DE LUCA: It is disconcerting to lose a memory. I'll be sure to discuss it with Dr. Myers. For now, we have more pressing concerns.

SAM YAO: Yeah. like that rumbling noise.

MARYAM ABANI: And whatever lives in those tunnels. The tunnels were person-sized, Janine, some bigger. And something made them. But what kind of person would dig a tunnel like that with their hands?

JANINE DE LUCA: Nothing lives in the tunnels. They and the rumbling sound are the result of tectonic activity.

PETER LYNNE: Um, Janine?

JANINE DE LUCA: We're on top of a fault line - what was that?

PETER LYNNE: Oh, that. Well, that was a bit of a camel. See, the desert just spat it out miles from where it got sucked down.

SAM YAO: Oh God, that's a hump. Something definitely does live in those tunnels. It hunts camels. Camels are big. Oh crap!

PETER LYNNE: Yeah, it doesn't just hunt them, it uh, also dismembers them, of course. It's um, ripped that camel to pieces and then chosen to lob it at us across half a desert. So in short, guys, I don't think this is the green route!

SAM YAO: Oh my God. Look, Five, new tunnels! Over there. Oh, and there. Oh bloody hell, everywhere! They're burrowing towards us!

JANINE DE LUCA: The tunnels form a web. We are at its center, and the predator can sense our movements like a spider does a fly. At the rate the tunnels are approaching, we will need to run as fast as we can if we're to reach Red Scorpion Base before they reach us. Go now, run!

~

JANINE DE LUCA: The tunneling has stopped. The ground feels firmer here by Red Scorpion's entrance. Metal must have been sunk beneath the ground to prevent the... borrowing entities from reaching the entrance. We have found the green route at last.

SAM YAO: Yeah, and the uh, entities aren't happy about it.

JANINE DE LUCA: Their presence complicates our exit strategy, but we have a more immediate problem: me. What happened with the rifle may happen inside the base. I may be unable to recall the details of my cover. I might put you all in danger. Perhaps I should return to New Agadir.

[alarm blares, gates raise]

MARYAM ABANI: Too late.

JANINE DE LUCA: We must compose ourselves. We've been running hard and the guards will look askance at our exhaustion. Mr. Yao, dab your forehead.

GUARD: Welcome to FOB Red Scorpion. You're late and sweaty.

SAM YAO: [deep gruff voice] Zoms.

GUARD: You must be Mountback. Heard you killed 10 men with nothing but dental floss. And I guess you're Vampire – [radio beeps] Sir? Roger that. General Bakari has some pressing matters to attend to. He will see you later.

JANINE DE LUCA: Fine. Please show us to our bunks.

GUARD: Of course. Follow me. The cells are this way.

PETER LYNNE: [whispers] Come on then, Five. Into the dragon's den we go, and there is absolutely nothing to worry about. Except for, you know, deadly red fungus, Van Ark, oh, and the fact that we're all lying through our teeth and could get caught at any time. Yay!

~

Thanks to @mrs-elijah-wood for help on this one!

[secret-engima]

Sloppy Unedited gift for SparkleCryptid

(So the last Aeon chapter broke my Feels so obviously I HAD to do an angsty fusion piece with my Corling Frisk. Obviously. There’s a humorous Omake at the end to make up for it tho? @sparklecryptid  I hope you like it!

...

-Frisk falls back into his … original world when he’s 15. It’s his choice to leave. His choice to make the leap rather than let himself be used as a reset. He won’t let it happen. His family has their happy ending, a REAL happy ending, where everyone is alive and Asriel is whole and and HAPPY and not trapped as a flower like he nearly was. Frisk will not let his ability be what ruins that for them.

-And so Frisk jumps and falls.

-He wakes up in a strange world where there are no sentient Monsters, where there are only humans and the night-creeping daemons that have no Souls, no Hearts … nothing. They are empty. They are terrifying.

-It’s hard, being a blind teen in a strange world.

-It gets both harder and easier when, in the middle of stumbling his way through the wilds, his body shakes and sweats and all his senses Wake Up until it physically hurts. Until he can hear the heartbeat of wildlife what feels like half a mile away and feel the whisper of the air on his skin like a knife blade.

-How he survives what he will later learn is called Presenting, out there in he wilds he will never know.

-But he does. He picks himself up and survives. He finds odd jobs in little places that take pity on a blind teenager —Omega Sentinel, they whisper, and Frisk does not know what it means but it makes them treat him kindly and so he accepts it for now—.

-But Frisk never stays in one place for long, he doesn’t like it, but if he stays for too long, people ask Questions that he cannot answer. So he leaves before they can.

-He should have stayed put.

-He finds the Tempering Grounds by accident, drawn there by the voices of the ghosts, the lingering whispers of energy and Soul that reminds him almost- ALMOST of monster kind.

-He realizes too late that this place is the rare place with an automatic save point that overrides his last one only once he’s deep inside the Grounds, leaving him without an easy way out.

-Gilgamesh finds him moments after that.

-And Frisk is a Pacifist, but he does not want to die, he’s died too many times already since falling into the Underground, and then coming here, so when Gilgamesh attacks, Frisk fights back. He fights defensively, but viciously, and his magic gives Gilgamesh pause. Frisk flinched when metal fingers grip his chin too tight and a cold, hollow voice orders him to open his blind eyes.

-Frisk doesn’t know it, but his eyes are distinctive.

-Gilgamesh has only seen one person with that shade of blue before, and with talent so bright that this blind, untrained Sentinel child can survive him for even a few moments, let alone as long as Frisk has.

-Gilgamesh knocks Frisk out and drags him deep into the grounds.

-Frisk is only 16 years old.

-He doesn’t know how long he spends there, fighting, learning, scrabbling to survive when Gilgamesh keeps trying to push him into fighting to kill and Frisk refuses to do so. He dies three times before he learns it’s better to take his beating and crawl to the garden to recuperate rather than try to escape. The save point is too close to where Gilgamesh finds him, and he is so very tired of fighting Gilgamesh and praying he takes an interest in Frisk again rather than slipping past his guard and killing him, forcing another reset to that blasted save point.

-Frisk doesn’t know how long he spends in that place with the things that are like Souls but Not. But eventually … he is no longer along.

-He hears Gilgamesh return from the entrance, can tell by the shift of fabric and flesh and the heartbeat thrumming to his constantly enhanced hearing (a necessity around Gilgamesh, who takes no pity for the headaches learning to control his “Sentinel senses” causes, who’s only mercy is to let Frisk writhe on the ground in a zone-out without stabbing him until Frisk can drag his senses under control and use them to compensate for his blindness) that Gilgamesh does not return alone. Gilgamesh flops the unconscious body Frisk will soon learn is the boy named Aeon, and coldly tells him that this is his brother and they will both be trained.

-And Frisk is no longer alone.

-For Aeon’s sake, Frisk wishes he still was.

-And Aeon is not like Frisk. Aeon is quiet and cold and predatory, all raw edges and anger that Frisk remembers too well and refuses to bend to again. Aeon takes to Gilgamesh’s training like a fish to water, even when the water is poison and makes him scream.

-Aeon tries to stay away from Frisk at first, but Gilgamesh is a brutal master and survival is hard enough without trying to remain aloof. He throws them into joint training, forces Aeon to guard Frisk when he loses control and falls into a zone-out, forces Frisk to use magic to defend Aeon while Aeon shudders on the floor from the breaking of a forced Bond.

-When survival is on the line, it is impossible not to become close. When the only other living being there is in the same boat as you, it becomes impossible not to trust. Despite their vastly different personalities, despite how Gilgamesh learns to hurt Aeon to try (and fail) to force Frisk to fight to the death, despite how Gilgamesh starts to punish Frisk every time Aeon does not “live up to his potential” … they trust each other. Wholly, Utterly. They do not agree on everything (Aeon does not understand why Frisk has so much magic yet will not kill, Frisk does not understand why Aeon is so stubborn he will not run away while Frisk covers for him, because he would if Aeon would just agree to leave him behind) but they are all the other has. And so there is trust.

-(And if at night Frisk curls around his younger, littler brother and whispers stories of the Underground, of Mercy and Resets and Souls, if Frisk tells Aeon the secret of the Dust on his hands and how if he starts killing again he won’t be able to stop, if one day Aeon sees Frisk anger Gilgamesh too far and screams as the armored ghost snap Frisk’s neck, only for the world to shiver and reset to just before that disastrous spar gone wrong because Frisk has chosen to lock himself deeper in the Tempering Ground with save points to keep from leaving Aeon alone… well.)

-(Aeon may not understand where his older brother is coming from, or why he choses a cycle of death over landing a killing blow himself, Aeon believes. In the Underground, in the Save Points, in Frisk’s genuine inability to kill being something other than cowardice or lack of skill. He does not understand, but this is Frisk. There is no one else in the world he would believe more at this point. He can’t afford anything else)

-Together they spend a long time in the Tempering Grounds, scrounging for food in the garden, whispering stories to each other of their respective pasts and the different Outsides they grew up knowing. Gilgamesh tries to mold them into perfect weapons, torments one when the other will not break, batters both when they do not yield, and in the process forges the two into a conjoined pair. A set of tools that any warrior craves. Because Aeon is a sword, sharp and unyielding and deadly. And Frisk still will not kill, but his magic is fast and strong and unyielding as a finely crafted shield.

-It is Frisk’s magic that buys Aeon a moment to get under Gilgamesh’s guard and draw blood.

-Gilgamesh laughs as he lets them go.

-Frisk shivers under the touch of sunlight and fresh air, cannot even bring himself to care about the stranger who makes interested noises at finding two feral children rather than the one he threw into the Grounds (Frisk still watches, still tracks with ears and nose to make sure the man does not get too close to Aeon).

-They wander. It never occurs to them to separate. Somewhere amid the hunts that they both take (Frisk will not kill, but he is not afraid to flip grand horns onto their backs to keep Aeon safe, and Aeon no longer questions why he is always the one to land the killing blow), Aeon Presents. Frisk mutters curses the entire way back.

-Dave the Hunter teaches Aeon how to Shield and it’s clear from the other lessons he throws in that he expects the two of them to bond. Apparently that’s the norm for Sentinels and Guides that are as conjoined at the hip as Aeon and Frisk.

-They don’t bond. A bond is not a gift to them. It is a chain. It is the pain and freezing cold that bites Aeon’s soul, and the agony of being pinned down by a metal foot and forced to listen as another screams. So they don’t bond. Frisk will not ask that of Aeon, and Aeon will not offer.

-Aeon does, however, reach out and wrap his newfound shields around Frisk’s mind when the world becomes too much, and the iron control that keeps him balanced on a knife’s edge of “seeing” the world through enhanced senses and losing himself to a zone-out slips and he falls into the white hot jumble of too much world-sound-smell-life. Aeon’s touch is rough when he pulls Frisk back and wraps shields around his mind, but that’s alright. Frisk trusts him. Frisk knows him.

-It’s not his old home. It’s not the family he misses so deeply, but it’s … well enough he supposes. It could be worse.

-They overhear talk of the prince, and Frisk does not flinch as his younger brother carves a bloody path to the back of the truck.

-Aeon growls when Frisk agrees unthinkingly to walk the prince back to Hammerhead … or until the Crownsguard find them.

-When Cor spots Noctis, the little prince is leading not one, but two bedraggled boys, one in each hand, and something in Cor screams when he sees Aeon’s face and blue eye. The other boy is a mystery for a moment, but then he shakes his shaggy brown bangs out of his eyes and Cor sees that specific shade of ice blue, sharp against Frisk’s naturally darker skin.

-Aeon goes down to the sniper, and before the Crownsguard have even reached the halfway mark to him, Frisk’s magic is there as he screams. Blue bones of magic erupt from the ground, cracking ribs and pinning the enemy down in a strangle-hold JUST shy of being fatal while Frisk presses his hands against the bloody wound and wails like a wild thing.

-Cor ends up knocking Frisk out, it’s the only way to let anyone even reach Aeon to give him medical care, because while even in his panic Frisk will not kill, that does not stop him from summoning Gaster Blasters to threaten all who come too close.

-The brothers wake up in Insomnia. Cor convinces Aeon to stay, and where Aeon goes, Frisk goes.

-Cor is Very Unhappy about the state of both his newly discovered sons. One a feral weapon with scars, the other a blind boy with even more scars and magic unlike anything they’ve ever seen (it’s not Lucis Caelum or Oracle magic, Regis is certain, but what option that leaves … they do not know).

-Frisk is … just wondering if maybe this place will be okay, if these people who treat them with kindness will be alright, when the snap bond happens between Aeon and Gladio. All thoughts of how they are a bit like the Monsters of his home get thrown out the window when he hears Aeon’s wail and feels the emotions that erupt. He knows that reaction, he knows what it means.

-Frisk is not a violent person by nature, but his sole understanding of bonds comes from listening to Gilgamesh force and break one in Aeon over and over and over (Frisk only spared because he is a Sentinel and no bond can be formed between two Sentinels as far as I know?). As far as he knows, a bond is a weapon, a chain meant to break people and this stranger has just attacked Aeon.

-It’s instinct to lash out, to slam down a wall of bones around Aeon while Aeon tries to finish the problem, and it’s a Very Good Thing Cor is as good as he is (and had backup), otherwise Gladio might have gotten seriously hurt.

-Frisk makes no sound as Aeon starts to break and cry, just huddles in a corner and shakes silently. He has to stay calm, he has to stay focused, this is Aeon’s pain, not Frisk’s, so Frisk has no right to cry too. He doesn’t. He has to stay strong. He is the Shield and Aeon is the Sword and Frisk needs to protect.

-But how can he protect against something he cannot touch?

-How can he protect against scars already there?

-Later on, Aeon passes out and Frisk flinches from Cor’s hesitant touch. His skin is burning with sensation, he’s maybe an inch away from a very bad zone-out, but he holds on, because these people are Not Safe and Aeon is unconscious. Aeon needs him. So Frisk huddles by the bed and sets his sightless eyes on the wall and stretches his senses out to keep watch as Cor fidgets and hesitantly asks questions only to give up and leave after Frisk’s prolonged silence.

-It’s only when it’s just him and Aeon, when he knows there’s only one other person nearby (in the next room, with clothes that sound like a uniform and scent that reeks of frustration and rage even though it’s restrained, not Cor, but that glaive who was there when he and Aeon first woke up and needed to find Aeon’s beads), that he lets himself whisper, “I want to go home.”

-There is no answer.

-But he knew that already.

-Frisk buries his face in his knees and focuses on breathing. Things will get better, he tells himself. Things have to get better. Even in the darkest hour in Gilgamesh’s clutches, even back when he was a tiny child and was told that it was Kill or Be Killed, he had hope. The only time he didn’t have hope was when he was on the Genocide Run, and he is never going to slide that far again. He and Aeon will find a way to fix this.

-He just has to stay Determined.

-He just has to stay …

-He just…

-Frisk clutches his knees tight and reels his senses in until he can only sense the room around him, granting himself a vague illusion of privacy as he cries.

(Cheerful Omake since the Angst in this hurt me!)

What if Flowey Was There:

-It’s funny watching his little brother lose a war with a flower.

-Not that he’ll say that.

-“Flowey,” Frisk calls dryly, “Please let him up, Aeon isn’t going to run off and do something stupid without us.”

-Flowey just scowls, trying to look hateful but only coming off as stressed while Aeon squirms, face slowly turning red from being upside down as he wrestles Flowey’s vines, “Oh really? Then why did I find him in that ghost ground with you that I had to break you two out of huh? He wasn’t with you before, so he must have wandered in on his own like an IDIOT- OW.”

-Aeon flips, landing on the ground in a smooth movement, then rocks a little as his blood pressure settles. Flowey curses up a blue streak as his vine regrows. Aeon just sheathes his sword with a sour look, “You’re a plant, not my PARENT. You can’t tell me what to do.”

-“The heck I CAN’T. You’re Frisk’s baby brother, which means you’re MY problem until Frisk decides you’re not worth it! Which is going to be NEVER because Frisk is an ANNOYING EMOTIONAL SAP LIKE THAT.”

-Frisk steps in before another fight can start, “Let’s just track down our mark for that hunt alright? It’ll be easy and simple.”

-It’s perhaps a good thing Frisk can’t see, otherwise he would have died of laughter from how Flowey and Aeon pulled off identical deadpan expressions, “Well now that you’ve SAID that,” Flowey grumps, “we’ll probably have to go rescue a kidnapped prince or something.”

-Frisk can literally hear Aeon roll his eyes, “The only prince around on this continent is safe in Insomnia.”

Four Hours Later:

-Flowey: “I TOLD YO-”

-Aeon and Frisk at the same time while Noctis stares wide-eyed at the talking plant poking out of Frisk’s backpack, “Shut up Flowey.”

[theladymeera]

A Little Ghost-Breaking, Part 1

A short fic for @gendryxaryatrash, happy new year!

Things got a bit busy this week and today I had to sit down and read an entire book before overdrive could delete it from my shelf so I didn’t have time to finish this today. Instead we’ll all have to live in suspense until tomorrow! Enjoy!

Bears strong influence from The Haunting of Hill House (the novel), The Ghost and Mister Chicken, Stranger Things, and Ghostbusters. Oh, yeah and there was definitely no influence from that family trip to the Grand Canyon when I was seven.

Here’s the link to it on AO3 [x]

“Wait, are you telling me that you believe in this shit?” Arya asked Gendry, incredulous.

Gendry drew himself up defensively, “Hey, you can’t tell me what I did and did not see. This was way before I ever met you.”

“So you were what, five?”

“Twelve.”

“And you trust your twelve-year-old eyes and brain to tell you that you actually saw a ghost? Not some green light –”

“– it wasn’t green this isn’t Ghostbusters.”

“Or a sheet floating in the wind or whatnot?”

“It didn’t look anything like that.”

“Oh yeah, what did it look like then?”

“It was just this sort of – form – thing, and it spoke. It was muttering something about people I’d never heard of that no one else had heard of when I asked about it but some of those names were in an old family bible that was up in the attic.”

“The ancient family bible was being stored in the attic?”

“Yeah, don’t ask me why it was put up there.”

“Look it was freaky, it was real, and I saw it four different times over that week. And that wasn’t the only weird thing that happened while we were there.”

Arya waved him off and was quiet for a minute. She grabbed her coffee and took a sip, it was starting to get cold. “Well what if we went up there this weekend and checked it out? Then I can prove to you that it was all some elaborate scheme or Joffrey’s or something.”

“Fine. I’ll make the arrangements and this weekend I’ll prove that it was all real and you’ll have to admit that you’re wrong for once.”

Arya rolled her eyes at him but the wager was agreed upon – if she could prove it was all fake he’d have to concede to her restaurant picks for the rest of the year, if he won she’d have to admit that she was wrong and come to all his boring events for the rest of the year.

The drive up to the old farmhouse was long but the scenery was lovely. It was peak season for looking at leaves and Arya made Gendry promise that they’d stop and get pumpkins and cinnamon sugar donuts on their way back on Sunday. The farmhouse was old and dilapidated, about three hundred years old Gendry told her. Considering the age, the distance from any other people, and the long dirt driveway leading to the place Arya figured that Robert Baratheon must have chosen the spot for a vacation with all his children as a way to punish the wealthier ones such as Joffrey. Though Arya had no doubts someone as messed up and vindictive as him would have found some way to entertain himself anyway. She hoped the barn cats had all steered clear of the cretin.

The boards on the porch were a bit shabby from decades of feet pounding on them, Gendry knew a surprising amount about the house and could tell her that the porch had been replaced within the last fifty years. The floors inside the house were much older though, the original hardwood had been cleaned and polished recently – obviously the owners would have had the house cleaned before the weekend guests got there. These boards were truly well-worn with slight grooves in the paths that feet tended to go often. Arya tried to avoid those spots as much as possible, making a game out of stepping in the oddest places. Gendry’s teasing her by shouting “Parkour!” every time she made a particularly difficult move didn’t stop her.

There was nothing remarkable about the three-story house Arya thought. There weren’t even any particularly old and shabby blankets or memorabilia that she was used to seeing in such lived-in places. In fact nearly everything in the place was new except for the structure itself.

“Remind me again why you thought this place was so creepy?” Arya asked her boyfriend as she peered into the disappointingly empty chest at the foot of their bed.

“You haven’t seen the root cellar yet for one,” Gendry told her as he deposited their bags in the closet. “It’s also very different at night. Even without the ghosts there’s the wind coming up off the coast and sometimes I could’ve sworn we were hearing wolves howl outside even though they were killed off centuries ago.”

“So there are ghost wolves too? Sounds like my kind of thing.” Arya flopped down on the bed, checking the firmness of the mattress. It was new and felt just right for her back. She’d been expecting one of those ancient ones that are either rock hard and squeaky or that are so worn the springs would stick into her back.

“This is a nice mattress,” Gendry sighs, “Way better than the old ones.”

Arya twiddled her thumbs over her stomach, letting herself relax for a moment. It was a nice mattress, just not what she was expecting from the age of the place. “What’s this about a cellar?” she said when Gendry got relaxed enough to start snoring.

He woke with a start and begrudgingly led her to the trapdoor into the cellar. He hadn’t been joking about it being creepy. The place was a dugout under the house, the shelves were clearly ancient and covered in cobwebs. Both Arya and Gendry avoided those because if there was any place to get bitten by a spider it was down there or in the barn. Arya got several fantastic pictures of the light shining through the cracks and spaces in-between the slats and of the abandoned tack and farm equipment. By the time she was finished it was getting dark out. The coastal wind whipped Arya’s hair into her face determinedly on the walk back to the house and Nymeria was howling for her dinner. “I think I found your ghost wolf babe!” Arya shouted back to Gendry.

“Does she normally howl for dinner?”

“Nah, but I’m not right there or anything tonight. Don’t be such a wuss.”

Their dinner was a fresh clam chowder and sourdough bread that Arya had insisted on picking up when they passed through the nearest town. Arya had developed a fondness for seafood and sourdough bread in college and while she liked cooking and was good at it she didn’t have much experience with seafood or sourdough and she figured it was worth it to get some since she didn’t get towards the coast very often. “Besides,” she told Gendry when they stopped for the food, “I’d like to spend our first night at the cabin-thing doing something other than cooking.” Gendry appeared to have gotten the wrong idea about her planned activities but she didn’t correct him, after all she might lean that way herself later.

“So,” Arya started when they’d finished washing up, “do we need to do anything special to make the ghosts come out or d’ya think they’ll come on their own.”

Gendry glared at her for a moment before answering, “I don’t recall anyone acting out of the ordinary before the ghosts showed up last time.”

“I think I saw games in one of those cupboards upstairs, do you want to play Monopoly while we wait?”

“The real question is,” and Gendry leaned forward across the table, “are you ready to lose Monopoly?”

Arya did lose Monopoly, or so Gendry insisted she would have had she not decided the game was over and packed it up by the time it became clear she wasn’t going to win. She won the drawn-out game of Scrabble that was made more difficult by a lack of cell service – “Odd,” Arya thought to herself, “I still had coverage when we got here.” But to admit that it was weird would have felt like she was conceding to Gendry’s insanity and she would not allow that. “It’s probably just because of the wind or something,” she assured herself. After they’d either played or rejected all of their options Arya excused herself to the creepy shower and with the exception of the spiders she had to wash down the drain it wasn’t so bad. Her dorm had been much worse. “At least we don’t have to use the outhouse,” Arya said to her reflection as she brushed her teeth. The thing was still standing and had been filled with very large spiders when Gendry had opened the door on their tour. It reminded her too much of her family’s vacation to the Grand Canyon when she was little. She’d gotten a urinary tract infection from holding it too long because her only opportunity to relieve herself for a five-hour period when she needed to go was in an old, creaky outhouse and she hadn’t gone because there had been a tarantula on the seat.

By the time the two of them had curled up together, Gendry’s arm thrown over her waist and Nymeria laid out along the foot of the bed, Arya had nearly forgotten that she’d come there for a possible ghost-breaking. But Gendry was already asleep and he’d sworn he and his half-siblings and cousins hadn’t done a thing when he was here before, the ghosts had just shown up during the night though they weren’t as interactive as they were in A Christmas Carol. Arya shifted so there was less weight on her arm and went peacefully to sleep.

Much later Arya began to wake, faintly aware that Nymeria was growling on the edge of the bed and Arya could have sworn she heard a long “CREEEEEAAK” somewhere nearby. It was also freezing and Arya pulled the blanket tighter around herself, snuggling back towards Gendry’s warm embrace.

“Nymeria hush there’s nothing there” Arya mumbled but the wolfdog didn’t listen. Instead she stood up and growled louder, Arya could see the whites of Nymeria’s teeth in the dim light that filtered through the window. There was nothing there in the space between the bed and the door. Only there was. Arya froze. There, in the three feet between the chair by which Arya had deposited her shoes and the door to the hallway there was a – a shape. The faint outline of a person. It was sort of luminescent like the little glow-in-the-dark stars Arya and Sansa had both once collected and stuck all over their shared room.

Then, over Nymeria’s vicious growls and little warning yips Arya heard murmuring. She couldn’t quite make out the words but they were coming from the direction of the vaguely colonial historical-reenactment womanish figure Arya could almost make out in the dim light. Arya didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t breathe but Nymeria kept growling, the figure kept murmuring, and Gendry’s arm tightened around Arya as he woke up. There was a ticklish sensation running up Arya’s leg and she twitched, there was a slight sting on the back of her thigh and she yelped. Nymeria lept off the bed towards the door and the figure – whatever it was – was gone.

Gendry struggled and rolled out of the bed, landing on the floor with an unmanly shriek and a thump before he stumbled to his feet and turned on the lamp. He threw back the covers and Arya turned to see what he was about. She saw a rather large spider running across the sheet before Gendry’s hand flipped it off and into the darkness towards the wall. Arya scrambled away and said shakily “did you see what kind it was?”

“No, sorry.”

Arya turned back towards the door, “Nymeria get back up here” she said, patting the bed. “I don’t know what got into her” she lied, settling back down and keeping her face away from Gendry.

“Oh sure you don’t know. I know you were awake and scared out of your little mind,” he grumbled but he climbed back into the bed and turned off the lamp. Arya did not deign to reply.

[angryhausfrau-writes]

I Travel Troubled Oceans: Chapter 8 - In Which Jack Embarks Upon an Illustrious Career and Anne Needs a Fucking Break

If Anne had thought Jack was annoying as all fuck before, it's got nothing on how he is now that he's decided to actually be a fashion designer instead of just pretending at it and using his money to hide a lack of actual talent or effort like every other rich person. But Anne supposes that he's going to be a perfectionist in this scheme just like he is in every other fucking thing he does. She just wishes he'd leave her out of all the madness.

He's actually treating her like his fucking PA, if you can believe that. Trying to get her to schedule meetings with various rich idiots who might want to be patrons or some shit like that. Like he's fucking Michelangelo or whoever the fuck the Borgia patronized. And all this when Anne and Jack both know full well her job is to intimidate all the people Jack might need intimidated, not acting as his fucking secretary.

Though, in Jack's defense, the meetings are a good way to figure out new marks. Anne might not be much for subterfuge, but she's good at determining where wall safes might be hidden and an expert at valuating Rolex's and the like. When someone's got fifty thousand pounds worth of Swiss watch on their wrist, they're generally going to be a more worthwhile target for a con than someone with only fifty.

And she does get to do some intimidation. Sitting in the back of Jack's meetings, staring at the marks over the top of her blackberry. Like they're ants, like they're nothing and they're wasting her valuable time just by existing. The sort of looks men like that used to give her, when they realized she wasn't fuckable.

It's almost fun, watching them squirm. Cathartic, maybe, it you wanna be all fancy about it. Anne's always had a vindictive streak to her.

So she don't really mind that part all that much, though she ain't gonna let Jack onto that fact – he'd just rope her into more of this play pretend bullshit.

But what she does object to is the everything else that goes along with the meetings. Because if Jack's going to be a fashion designer, then he needs things like a sewing machine and dressmakers dummies and a truly bullshit ridiculous amount of fabrics and buttons and who even fucking knows what else. And he makes Anne go and get all of that shit, which is a real pain in the ass and takes considerable time away from her preferred activities of fucking Max and lounging threateningly at their new posh neighbors.

Fortunately, Mr. Scott knows Eme, who used to work for Eleanor – and is since out of a job because of her fall from grace and obscene wealth. And she's more than willing to come work for Anne and go round up all of Jack's stupid shit. And she knows a bunch of people looking to find jobs as housekeepers and gardeners and cooks. So they're gonna have a household staff like all the other posh fucks they've surrounded themselves with.

Charles had been pissed about it at first, which makes sense. But none of them can cook for shit or particularly want to spend time dusting all the stupid posh shit they've accrued as a cover for their new life as upper-class twats. And Mary had backed Anne in her half-pretending threats to mutiny if they've got to eat Jack's burned eggs one more morning. So Charles had eventually been persuaded into it – him being the fucker who don't have to bear the brunt of Jack's latest obsession and therefore not getting as much of a vote.

Though Charles had insisted on looking over the employment contracts Jack drew up. And they've ended up paying a comparatively obscene amount – which just means a living wage for London – but everyone's relatively happy with the arrangement. And ain't that what partnership is supposed to mean? Them all in this together. Compromising.

So Anne'll suck it up and deal with Jack in a tizzy over whatever fucking thing he's so worried about that particular minute. And she'll know everyone else in her crew's got her back when she needs it.

Which is a bit of a novel thought, if she's being honest. She's always had Jack, always trusted him since they met – but it's a real cock fight out there and Anne's had to scrabble for every fucking inch she's ever carved out for herself in the streets. It's nice to have Mary here with her along with Max. Someone who knows, someone who understands what that's like.

And Mary's been a real help wrangling Jack. Talking him down off whatever imaginary ledge he's got himself on. Keeping up his instagram and twitter and whatever so that when he schedules meetings with posh fucks they've at least heard of him. And she's started putting together little files on potential marks based off whatever she can find on their own accounts as well as the gossip Charles collects and the intel she and Jack report.

It's all the bullshit busy work that Anne has no patience for. But Mary's real good at it. Keeps everything nice and neat and organized, which Anne knows Max appreciates.

And she ain't half bad on the eyes.

Really, taking her in when Lord Hamilton's deadbeat son left her behind may have been one of Jack's smarter ideas. And to hear him talk, he's had a lot of 'em.

--

Jack is an idiot. An ignoramus. An absolute fucking moron.

Why on earth had he thought it would be a good idea to have his character's cover be a fashion designer?

He knows how to sew and has even made some of his own clothes – or altered charity shop finds into something half wearable. But he doesn't know the first thing about fashion. And certainly not the avant garde shit he'll be expected to trot out for Kaylen's gallery show.

Max's suggestion, backed by Charles, of just having the models be as near to naked as possible and letting the quote unquote sex appeal carry him through would probably work. But it's detestable to him. It does nothing to showcase Jack's talent or ability. Nothing to prove his worth or further his name.

Plus, it's cheating. And he may be a crook and a con, but he's not a cheater.

So he gets Max to round him up some women to use as models. And they're corner girls, not the sleek, starved models most people would probably use. But they're real people, with personality and preference and something for him to at least start basing ideas for outfits off of.

One woman had told him straight out that she'd knife him if he dared put her in anything with sequins, and that's something to work with.

So Jack commandeers one of the empty upstairs sitting rooms for a sewing room and starts sketching just reams and reams of absolute garbage. Nothing's right. Nothing looks right.

It's so endlessly frustrating.

He's got a feeling, a sense, ephemeral and fleeting, of what he wants to do. But he just can't draw it out. Can't get it out on the page, not for the fucking life of him.

And Charles has been less than helpful. Hanging around Jack's workshop and lounging there, having the time of his fucking life, while Jack's tearing his hair out by the roots.

When Jack had snapped at him, asking what, exactly, the fuck he was doing there, Charles had simply replied, “I'm supposed to be your muse, aren't I? I'm musing.”

And it had been such a terrible, horrible, awful thing to say, Jack had balled up his latest shitty drawing and chucked it at him, starting off a sort of indoor snowball fight that lasted until all rejected sketches were exhausted and they lay panting on the rug.

“Feel better?”

Jack groans dramatically. But he does feel a little less like banging his head against his desk, so probably.

“I'm beginning to think that all of this was a terrible mistake.”

Charles snorts. “Just now, you're thinking that?”

“Oh fuck off, Chaz. It's not like you've got to do anything but sit there and look pretty. Not exactly a difficult task for you.”

“Aw, you think I'm pretty.”

Jack laughs, despite himself. “That was not what I meant you to take away from that.”

“I know. You were trying to call me a lazy piece of shit.” Charles shrugs. “Maybe you're working too hard, Jack. Thinking too hard about this.” Like he always does. “Maybe you should just start doing shit instead of agonizing over if it's right or not.”

Which is just such a fundamentally Charles way of going about things.

But maybe he's right. Jack's approach certainly isn't working. And he's not really wasting anything by mocking up some of his ideas in muslin. Nothing that he hasn't already wasted by fucking around with paper and pencil and bad idea after bad idea.

“Maybe you're a fairly decent muse after all, Charles.”

Charles grins at him. “I can take my shirt off, too, if you think that'll help. Like Mary keeps telling me to for all those pictures.”

Then again, maybe not.

[mechagalaxy]

John T Mainer 28840: It was that kind of war

It was that kind of war You have to understand, events from that war aren't going to make a lot of sense to people on the outside.  I was there, and at the time I totally understood and accepted that this was just right and holy, but even now watching the gun camera footage, it wierds me out a little bit.  Buckle up mecha jocks, its about to get strange. Time 3362 Faction War Battle 2 Place:  Division 1            Ice World Hoth Defending: Bouncing Blue Berserkers Our base in Hoth had been exposed by poor communications discipline by one of the supply ships.  As a result the Sith Lords had descended.  Their fleet of wedge shaped cruisers dominated the nearspace and the steady flow of mech sized laser blasts saturating the landing zone kept us from interdicting their landing.  Our own mining operations had revealed large caches of new mecha, including an up armoured version of the Fext, somewhere around a 4% stronger baseline with matching developmental improvements.  The Fext is the leading multipurpose 100 ton utility mecha in our fleet.  If you can't have a specialty mecha for any purpose, you can outfit a Fext to be a field expedient good enough to match any but the most dedicated specialty mecha.  We wanted them, everyone wanted them.  To get them we needed to hold Hoth. We aren't really all that good at defense.  I mean we are solid strategically, hard core professional soldiers and all that.  Mercenaries, and the top end of our trade, but there is something special about those called to be Bouncing Blue Berserkers.  The BBB or Bouncing Blue Brotherhood drew together in ancient times from the Smurfs, the Bunnies, Myth and Legend, Slaughterhouse 5, Star League, united by a common desire to stand together in the face of a galaxy where every hand was turned against the other.  We were united by one thing; we were crazier than the galaxy, no matter how wierd it got.  The Bouncing Blue Brigade went to war with a song on its lips and laughter in its heart.  That wasn't us. We were the Bouncing Blue Berserkers.  What was our problem on defense?  We had this little problem when the enemy came into sight. The majestic legions of the Sith lords marched in lock step across the ice plains,  sensors warned of sub formations moving into the badlands to flank us, 10, 20,30, 40. 55 ton scouts fought in ice caves and rift marked fells, on wind torn scree slopes where their claws scrabbled to hold onto the cliff side while armour flenced from their flanks like blubber off a butchered whale, but the main mass of unlimited tonnage walked with arrogant surety right into the heart of the plain, daring a confrontation of force on force their greater weight of metal made a foregone conclusion. Their challenge rang out with all the arrogance of the Sith. "Your pathetic defenses are no match for the power of the dark side.  Your friends cannot save you now, your alliance ends here.  Surrender and accept your fate" So Daniel "Hellbunny" Halbany hit him  with a Proton Blade, burying the axe helve deep in the Xango's intimidating cockpit.  I let Paladin my Redeemer cut loose with my Mjolnir which hit like the hammer of Thor himself to render a Sith Penner into a very finely polished heap of scrap iron.  I gave the only command needed to unleash the berserkers. "BLOOD AND SOULS!"  I screamed "BLOOD AND SOULS!"  They answered, and we unleashed hell. It was an oddly friendly hell, as both sides bathed in a soul deep love of slaugher, of rage.  Berserkers who gave themselves to the transforming ecstasy of rage, who drank pain and fear like lesser mortals drank wine, and chased it with the blood of their enemies met Sith Lords who powered themselves on hatred, on cold murder hunger, hot violent rage indulged in what was technically a battle, very nearly an orgy, and quite possibly the highest expression of violence as an art form. In a battle with Terry Cole, I nailed him cleanly with a Juggernaut, the power of the cannon punching through his shields with the true hunger for the murder-make that is the gift of the berserkerr, and I knew my shot hit true, for the energy surge of a critical kill washed over his Penn Killer Penner, only to see the dark crackling Force of his Sith arts restabalize his engine shielding.  The warning flashed on my screen "Critical Kill blocked".  Damn them and their dark side powers.  His return fire slammed my shield so hard it spun me around, and his second shot broke my mecha's spine.  That is when I saw it.   A lone Fext wandering across the field, a group of techs chasing it accross the ice calling "Here Fexty fexty fexty, come on boy!" I hit the open channel and screamed "CODE FEXT!" Like street hockey when someone yelled car, all the fighters locked their weapons down as the lone fext wandered accross the field like a lost pupply looking for its master, or someplace to pee.  When the techs gave us a cheerful wave and got the Fext into the hills away from our fire, we screamed at each other and resumed killing. As my former point mech Bun Bun (an old school Regis with more critical kill than sense) held a Notas by the cockpit in its Ferrite and crystal fangs as the pilot in the jaws laughed and urged him on. "Good, let your hate flow"  He said, ignoring his own position.  Bun Bun cut loose with his Galaxy Eye and tore the head from the armoured shoulder paldrons and neck baffles, to crunch in his fangs. I was standing on the ice in my body armour when it happened and swore intently.  "Odin curse you Bun Bun, we talked about this.  NO EATING PILOTS.  Bad Bun Bun.  They are Sith Lords not Telemarketers, and you can't eat them!" A rasping voice sounded behind me, I turned and Terry, sporting his dark creepy as all heck Sith Robes (which I noted seemed to be well heated for Hoth's ice world, better than my unpowered armour)..   "Don't discourage him, that Regis has a soul that was born for the dark side" Its not that he was wrong, its just that when the AI of our Regis was purged of its Forerunner sabotage, it got imprinted by one of our mecha bay bunnies.  Bun Bun the bunny had anger issues which were cute in a tiny fluffy bunny, and a serious war crime tribunal waiting to happen in a 90 ton Regis.  I guess Sith Lords have a really epic legal department, because they just thought it was cute not "lawsuit and bankruptcy risk" like we did. All across the field hatred was given free rein, perfectly good defensive positions were ignored by screaming maniacs closing to knife fighting range so they could feel the coolant splash on their armour from each strike, and bathe in the plasma flares of each engine kill.  The Sith were no better, pausing to coach and encourage each act of insane blood hungry murder frenzy they encountered, half way between being a death squad out to destroy us, and particularly good coaches who see real potential in an athlete and wish to push them past a performance plateau into a higher level of function. We had a good killing. The issue was settled within hours, the battle for Hoth was lost with the shattering of our main defenses, but both sides seemed to ignore this as trivial.  The battle was such a cluster frag that Sith mecha were spotted dragging Berserker mecha to the Sith repair depot to repair and rearm because they figured our repair backlog was getting bad enough that without help this pilot might not be able to get back into the fight in time for another round.  At one point I know I saw our field techs loading a Sith Specter with our missiles, shouting at the pilot  "Don't worry, we'll invoice you later".   When the horn sounded, the guns fell silent, we looked up and let the adrenaline fade.  Berskerkers and Sith were mixed in clots around the icy wasteland.  We had shot up the landscape so badly none of our mapping programs could identify our position.  Not one of either sides satelites were anything but radioactive slag from all the reflections and rebounds , so our GPS was out.  So much energy had been put into the ionosphere that we couldn't get a solid lock on the bases signal to direction find it for even a rough guide back to base.   There was an Apatotron burning in the middle of the field, and one of my mecha threw a Notas on top of it.  A Sith lord tossed a Humbaba with legs only on one side to join it on the pyre.   Pilots began to cluster around, tossing bits of battle killed wildlife on the armour plates sticking out of the fire as a makeshift BBQ.  Bottles began to circulate.  Screw it.  The techs can send speeders to collect us in the morning.  It had been a day of rage and murder, of fury and blood.  It would be a night of drinking and swapping lies.  We were at war yes, but it had been a good killing. A good killing indeed. John T Mainer 28840

[spiteweaver]

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“All right, Dreamy,” Banrai said, “how did Phantasos do it?”

Dreamweaver plucked a small shard of pink celestine from the air. Ever since Phantasos’ departure for Aphaster lands, it had taken to floating. Parts of it came together and attempted to rebuild, but were ultimately unsuccessful. Whatever spell Phantasos had cast, it was potent and lingering and reacting to the celestine in unpredictable ways.

The whole of Observatory Hill had been cordoned off. Only Arcane dragons and those with Dreamweaver’s explicit permission were allowed at ground zero. Truthfully, as Abaddon had implied, even they should not have been there. The air was heavy with Arcane magic, but thus far, the protective web they had spun around themself and their mate had held out.

Holloway was overseeing the clean-up effort. With his expertise in crystal magics, he had managed to clear away much of the dust--which, he had confided, was the most dangerous part, as smaller particles were harder to detect and, thus, more likely to be missed and left to regrow. The larger shards remained where they were, hovering several feet off the ground.

Crucis had yet to stir within his chrysalis.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Dreamweaver confessed, and released the crystal back into the air. It bobbed before them for a moment, then meandered lazily toward its siblings. “Our inherent magic is that of dreams,” they went on. “The light-based magic I possess was gifted to me by Her Grace. Unfortunately, that means I don’t know very much about it. I can wield it, bend it to my will, but the fullness of its nature remains elusive.”

“You never told me that.”

Dreamweaver smiled and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “You never asked, my love,” they replied. “I’ve been able to keep many of my secrets simply because you are so wonderfully uninquisitive.”

Banrai wanted to press the topic, but seeing Dreamweaver smile made him weak. He returned their kiss with a soft peppering of them across their face. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” he said. “I was terrified you would be inconsolable after all this.”

“You are safe,” Dreamweaver said, “and our son is safe. I have no more need for sorrow.”

They walked the site’s perimeter hand-in-hand, surveying the damage done to the surrounding area. A few growths of pink celestine remained here and there, stubbornly refusing to bow to Phantasos’ will. There were holes in the observatory, caused by the sudden, violent growth of the colony, and the inside of it was still humming with Arcane magic so thick that Dreamweaver dared not venture near.

“My guess,” they began, “is that he experienced a controlled loss of control--a bit like what we believe happened to Xerxes. His emotions took him, and he unleashed a massive amount of energy in a very small space. Of course, Xerxes’ was more than likely a defense mechanism, a calling of the elements to him, while Phantasos’ was an expulsion of magic, but it’s the same general concept.”

“So if he hadn’t been able to concentrate it--”

“Everyone would be dead, yes--excluding, perhaps, myself.”

Banrai gulped. “We’re grounding him for that, right?”

“Oh, most definitely!” Dreamweaver replied. “Still, it was an impressive feat. Even I’ve never managed something like that--truthfully, until today, I didn’t know it was possible.”

“How did he withstand the Seat’s power?” Banrai asked.

“Technically,” Dreamweaver said, “I’m not elementally-aligned. The only reason I’m weak to Arcane magicks and proficient in Light magicks is because I chose to serve the Lightweaver, and tuned myself to Her element by choice. Phantasos hasn’t chosen to serve Her yet, though--and he’s only half a ‘proper’ Acolight, on your side. His weaknesses will, therefore, be greatly diminished.”

“Magic is confusing,” Banrai grumbled.

“Magic is a mystery we have yet to unravel,” Dreamweaver replied. “Even the most learned of us have much yet to discover.”

“Dreamweaver!”

Holloway waved to them from the far side of the hill, where Crucis lay dormant within the remnants of his colony. Banrai and Dreamweaver exchanged nervous glances. “What’s wrong?” Banrai called. “Is it the Seat? Have you found it?”

“No,” Holloway said, “it’s Crucis!”

Crucis’ eyes were wide and rolling in their sockets. They could see his mouth moving, but the pink celestine encasing him was too thick for any sound to escape. Holloway pushed more insistently against it. Small cracks appeared along its surface, but none large enough for him to get a foothold.

“Why is he panicking?” Banrai asked. “Is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” Holloway said, “for now, but I think he knows his shield is weakening. Once it’s gone, the celestine will consume him, and he’ll die. If I can’t get him out now--”

“Do what you must,” Dreamweaver said. “No matter how dark the magic, I will turn a blind eye. Get him out of there, Holloway.”

“I don’t need to go that far,” Holloway assured, “but I need a push.” He looked up to meet Dreamweaver’s gaze. “I need your energy.”

“My...energy...?”

“Demons can siphon energy from other beings,” Holloway explained. “Among dragons, and even among your kind, I suppose that’s not a common ability--but among demons, it’s innate. We can all do it to one degree or another. If you let me siphon some of your magical energy, I can break him out.”

“I’ve heard of such things,” Dreamweaver said, “but the only demons I’ve dealt extensively with are dream demons. I don’t know, Holloway. Our energies are very different, and if it’s anything like mixing magics, it could have catastrophic results.”

“I’ve done it before--not from you, obviously, but from ‘opposite-aligned’ beings.”

“My magical potential is so much greater than yours--no offense.”

“None taken, love, it’s the truth.”

“Are you sure it won’t overwhelm you?”

Banrai’s head was spinning by now, his mind well and truly lost among a sea of words he knew the meanings of, but that, when paired together, made no real sense. “Please,” he said, “I don’t speak magic.”

“Think of it like borrowing a cup of sugar from your neighbor,” Holloway said. “I need more sugar to make my cake, but I don’t have any in my kitchen. I go to Dreamweaver and ask to borrow some from their kitchen. They give me their sugar, I return to my own kitchen, and I finish my cake.”

“So energy is the sugar,” Banrai said, “your kitchens are your bodies, and the spell to free Crucis is the cake?”

“Right.”

“What happens if it ‘overwhelms’ you?” Banrai asked.

“Similes aside,” Holloway said, “I’ll die.”

“Let’s just wait for Lutia,” Dreamweaver suggested hurriedly. They were wringing their hands in that way they always did when they knew they were about to give in to something reckless.

“When will she be coming?” Holloway asked.

“Well,” Dreamweaver said, and their voice grew progressively quieter as they went on, “considering she can’t tell up from down at the moment, my guess would be, ah, several days.”

“Yeah, we don’t have that kind of time,” Holloway replied.

“If it overwhelms you, you’ll die and then he’ll die, too,” Dreamweaver pressed. “I hate to say this, but isn’t losing only one better than losing two?”

“Yes,” Holloway agreed, “but we might not have to lose any. Dreamweaver, I have done this dozens of times in my life. I know how to control it.”

“But what if--”

“Oh, in the Dark Name of Astaroth, give me your hand!”

Dreamweaver tried to reel back, but Holloway was too fast for them. He lunged, grasping their wrist, and another brilliant golden flash lit the hilltop up like the Beacon. Holloway grit his teeth, his arm spasming with the sudden influx of foreign magic into his body. Dreamweaver’s eyes had gone yellow again.

Finally, Holloway fell forward limply, gasping against the grass, and Dreamweaver returned to their senses. “You idiot,” they hissed. “You could have died, you absolute fool!”

“I’m fine,” Holloway panted. “My, that was a bit of a rush. A demon could get addicted to it.”

“Don’t you dare!”

“Stand back. I’m busting him out.”

Banrai did not bother trying to pull Dreamweaver back. Instead, he wrapped his arms around their waist, lifted them straight off their feet, and took off down the hill with them. Their protests fell on deaf ears. All he knew was that Holloway was about to perform a volatile bit of magic, and he didn’t want his mate anywhere near it when it went off.

He’d already almost lost too much today.

A resounding crack split the air, and, suddenly, Dreamweaver was very glad their husband had carted them off when he did. Arcane magic exploded from the hilltop, so raw and powerful that it turned the sky above it pink. They buried their face in Banrai’s chest and pushed more of their own magic into the web of shields around them both.

“The Seat!” Crucis cried, scrabbling from his cocoon. In his arms was the piece of the Seat, clutched tightly, protectively, to his breast. “Run! Run, go, get out of here! Forget me, I’m already dead, go!”

“Crucis,” Holloway said, “Crucis, it’s all right. You’re all right.”

“No, no, the--the colony! Pink celestine! It’s reacting to the Seat!”

“You’re disoriented,” Holloway persisted. “You were under for quite a while. Take a deep breath. Have a look around.”

Crucis did as he was told--reluctantly, because every fiber of his being was screaming at him to do whatever he could to save Holloway from a fate worse than death. His eyes fell first on the piece of the Seat cradled in his grasp, then on his ruined observatory, then on the floating celestine shards all around him.

At last, it fell on Holloway’s face. “It was an accident,” he said, and collapsed.

“I’m telling you, I don’t know how it got into my workshop.”

Crucis hissed as Hollyhock applied another treatment of healing salve to a cut on his cheek. He was battered and bruised, but free of pink celestine--Holloway had confirmed as much before allowing him out of quarantine. Now he sat, piping hot cup of tea in hand, staring glumly at the piece of the Seat that rested between himself and Dreamweaver.

“Hold still,” Hollyhock commanded when he raised his cup to his lips. “I’m almost done. Oh, poor thing--you’ve had a difficult time of it lately.”

“I see why Solaire married you,” Crucis said. “I don’t like people, but I think I could grow accustomed to having you around, Hollyhock.”

“High praise coming from you,” Hollyhock replied.

“Are you sure, Crucis?” Dreamweaver asked again. “Are you positive?”

“Dreamweaver, you can tell when people are lying to you,” Crucis reminded. “If I were lying, you would know.”

“But if you forgot something, some small detail, I’d be none the wiser,” Dreamweaver said. “I’m not accusing you, Crucis, it is clear to me that you had nothing to do with this--but if there’s anyone you can think of, anyone at all, who might have access to the Seat, who would want to harm you or the village, you must tell me.”

“Of course,” Crucis said, “I would if I knew, but I don’t. I’m sure I’ve garnered a fair number of enemies, but none with access to the Seat. No one should have been able to access it--not for long enough to take a chunk out of it, let alone one of this size and power.”

“It would have to have been an Arcanite,” Banrai reasoned, “but none in Feldspar could have done it.”

“No,” Dreamweaver said, and it was as if a haze had come over them. “No, there is one who may have been able to manage it, but I--I cannot imagine what motivation he could possibly have. He’s a conniving, scheming coward, so I doubt he’d go to such great lengths without equal reward.”

“Who?” Crucis asked.

“Atsushi.”

A rare (less so in recent weeks) flicker of emotion crossed Crucis’ face. For the first time since Dreamweaver had known him, he was visibly perplexed. “Atsushi’s like that, is he?” he said. “He always seemed well-adjusted enough to me.”

“He’s no worse than Ambrosius or Armand,” Dreamweaver replied, “just your run-of-the-mill undesirable, the kind who only cares for himself. I would suspect him, but, as I said, I cannot fathom what he stood to gain.”

“He’s not the power-hungry sort?” Crucis asked.

“Mmm, no,” Dreamweaver said, “not that I’ve gathered.”

“No grudge against any of us?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t suppose he would do it for the sake of Arcanite curiosity.”

“Gods, no.” Dreamweaver gave a short, mocking laugh. “As I said, he’s a terrible coward.”

“Should we really talk about one of our own like that?” Banrai said.

“Sorry...” Dreamweaver touched their mate’s hand. “I suppose I am being a bit cruel, aren’t I? He hasn’t caused any trouble since coming here, so perhaps I should be softer on him.”

“Still,” Hollyhock said, “it’s odd, isn’t it? He’s been going off on his own a lot lately, and he wasn’t at the hill with Junior. I didn’t smell him there, anyway.”

“He...” Dreamweaver’s brows furrowed. “He wasn’t there?”

“No,” Banrai said, “come to think of it, he wasn’t.”

“Then where is he?” Dreamweaver asked.

“I thought you said he wasn’t a suspect,” Crucis said.

“I still don’t like that the only person in our clan capable of approaching the Seat in any capacity isn’t here when a piece of it has turned up out of place,” Dreamweaver replied crossly. “Banrai, ask Vladimir to fetch him. It will put my mind at ease.”

[archiveofolives]

Ring of Keys and Other Stories V

A/N/SUMMARY confessions is set in the younger days of baze malbus and chirrut imwe when high school crushes were all the rage. also i got lazy and totally just used real world foodstuff in this fic. i should also thank adam and eve from only lovers left alive for telling me about einstein’s spooky action at a distance

RATING/WARNINGS g/n/a

WORD COUNT 7,072

AO3 here

—

Being a Guardian of the Whills, one must always look to the Force as an example to model oneself on. It was perfect, graceful, subtle even in its power.

And being the most devoted Guardian of them all, in training though he still was, this was a lesson Baze Malbus understood only too well. Although the beauty of the Force was not something he could realize completely, at least not in his lifetime, he was still determined to take anything that the Force would be generous enough to share to him. Grace was easy—with proper discipline and diet, their bodies could be honed to dance to the music of the Force. But subtlety, that was a different trial altogether.

Especially if one required it to confess one’s feelings towards another. More so if that person was none other than his best friend, Chirrut Imwe, who was probably one of, if not the most observant person he had ever met.

He was the reason why Baze had had to go all out of his way just to set his plan in motion. There was a cherry tree growing out on an abandoned lot towards the eastern face of NiJedha, just a stone’s throw away from the lip of the natural mesa. He and Chirrut had discovered it once during a field trip, when they’d broken off from their friends in search of entertainment. At that time, it had been young and skinny but years of being left to its own devices had fattened it up and laden its lush canopy with bright, red fruits. Baze had been worried that the fast growing industrialization of the Holy City would have required its sacrifice but he also knew that it wouldn’t be long until it would be forced to make way.

What a sad day that would be when it came, Baze thought, as he looked upon the shaggy sentinel which was more foliage than trunk. He had to send out a prayer of thanks to the Force that he wasn’t yet too late when he flicked open a small knife he’d nicked from crafts class (he would return it before the teacher caught him, he swore) and set to work, driving the tip of his blade in scratch by scratch. After that, he ran back to the direction of the Temple of the Kyber.

It was an hour later when he returned with company chasing after him. “Come on!” he cried back to him.

Baze raced him to the side of the cherry tree, just under its full roof and turned to see Chirrut picking his way up the slight slope that would soon be leveled once a building claimed its place. The younger man fell forward with a graceful stumble, scrabbling at the earth in a sort of half-crawl for balance. “Old man! Tired already?” he teased.

“I was doing chores before you found me!” Chirrut hurried towards him, tripping a little on the way. He reached out, aiming for Baze’s shoulders and arms.

Baze gripped him by his elbows instinctively to steady him. He was laughing. “Old man!” he jested again.

Chirrut glared at him. They tousled briefly, each hand and kick landing in the air or in a block, no one quite managing to grapple the other to fling them to the ground. They stopped, breathless and laughing.

“So what?” the younger man gasped, all smiles now. “What did you want me here for?”

Just you, Baze realized with a slight and delightful surprise. It made his heart flutter, in a way that only Chirrut could whenever the popular boy chose his company over anything. He was up here alone with the one who held his affections. He felt so important. He could think of so many things they could do, things they could talk about, so many games they could play.

“Look at the bark! I wrote something there.”

“What?” Chirrut turned towards the dark trunk. “Where?”

“Just there!”

“Where is it?”

“Look closer!”

Chirrut shuffled towards the tree, leaning, eyes squinted. There were several times that Baze’s heart stopped beating when he thought his friend would spot his work but Chirrut kept looking. He would often raise his hand as if to feel the wood but at the last minute, he would always put it back to his side.

“Look down,” Baze advised.

Chirrut did. He peered a little closer, then broke out in a grin. “Chirrut and Baze were here,” he read. Actually, it was only supposed to be Chirrut & Baze but panic attached a small were here just under the second name. Okay, so maybe it was too subtle.

Chirrut appreciated it happily all the same. “You’ve left our marks!”

Baze prepared to lie. He had put together some speech about NiJedha’s growth and how he wanted to tell the world they’d been there before the chance was taken away.

“But why is your name under mine?”

Well, he certainly didn’t expect that criticism. And he doubted he could explain that when he began, he’d wanted to enclose their names in a heart. His thoughts stammering, Baze only shrugged, unseen though he was, and said, “No reason.” Damn observant Chirrut!

“We must always be together,” Chirrut decided with scholarly authority, nodding in agreement to his conclusion as he straightened up, hands behind him. “Our names must always be next to each other, in the same line. We are sworn brothers. We stand as equals.”

Baze remembered the time he and Chirrut had playfully picked up a pair of willow branches and pledged fealty to each other to the same tree. They were much younger then, still children, but though the years had passed, no one was yet backing out on an oath that wasn’t meant to be so serious and permanent.

With half a shrug, Baze acquiesced to Chirrut’s observation. “So I’ll find another tree and carve it in the correct way.” That would give him another excuse to write Chirrut’s name—and his name beside it.

Chirrut looked back to him and smiled brightly, clearly equally pleased by the prospect. Baze could feel his heart swelling and his ears burning. It was difficult not to smile back in the same way. “I’d love to see that,” he said. He looked upwards towards the bountiful canopy. “It’s too bad there aren’t any fruits, though…”

“Fruits?” Baze blinked, then craned his head up to point at the blushing bunches overhead. “There’s lots of them right here.”

Chirrut hurried beside him to look up the same way. “Oh…oh, oh! You’re right, of course.” He laughed. “Shall we eat them together?”

“What?” Baze sputtered, snapping to the shorter man who stared back at him in the same heartbeat, eyes as big as the cherries themselves. He’d almost repeated the question back to Chirrut but just the thought of mentioning it to his crush was enough to set him on fire. But even still, he had to say something because Chirrut looked like he was expecting him to thaw the ice.

As a natural defense, both broke out in a boyish laughter.

⚭

Eating cherries together.

Weeks have passed since. Now it was nothing more than an old joke, the newest of many, shared between two dear friends, unspoken—never spoken of—but one look is all it takes to set them both cackling and snorting.

Even the comfort and protection of Baze’s solitude were not enough to stop its intrusion. In his quiet hours, when he was supposed to be memorizing his verses or preparing his mind for his prayers, he would suddenly chuckle and grin like a fool. In fact, these days, just the thought of his friend alone could do that. A little mental discipline was all it usually took to ask Chirrut to sit at the back of his mind while he finished the task at hand.

And then it rained one day, one of those big, gigantic ones that only happened rarely. Baze was ecstatic and went off to find his best friend to share his excitement.

He spotted him in one of the outer, higher gardens of the Temple, soaked to the bones but he wanted to finish his forms. The other disciples had given up, hurrying out of the rain in squeals, passing him with barely a nod of respect. At any other time, he might have had a mind to speak to them about this behavior, no matter if he wasn’t all that much older than them.

But he was too entranced to care about politics just then. They say that people often loved someone who reminded them of another loved one—perhaps a mother or a father. But the one Chirrut reminded Baze of was the Force—beautiful, everflowing. He knew that if the Force ever became a person, Chirrut was how it would look like. The way he curled his fingers, twirled his hand and spread it out like a flower in spring. The way he reached for the rain and spun to its beat. The way he arched his body.

Chirrut ran to him after his final salutation, laughing while Baze chided him for his stubbornness and foolishness and ordered an urgent visit to the bath. He embraced him tightly, frantically rubbing warmth onto his back and into his arms while he dragged him inside. Ever since then, he could dream of nothing but Chirrut’s laughter, and the shape of him in his arms.

Now he carried a basket full of cherries under a white cloth while Chirrut rambled on about his duans on their way to one of the training rooms; there was something he wanted to try, he’d said. The last time Baze tried to confess, he’d been too subtle and worried that the message would not be acceptable. Now, he wondered if he was being too forward, even though the official story was that he enjoyed the joke too much.

“…so once I reach my next duan,” Chirrut turned to face him as they stepped through the threshold, “we’ll be together more often.”

Together more often. That sounded like a dream.

“So is that what this is all about?” Baze asked, setting the basket next to a rack of fighting sticks. Across the half-open double doors was a set of windows looking over the sprawl of NiJedha where walls would have stood. The afternoon sun set the polished, patterned floor gleaming like a mirror.

As he collected a pair of staves, Chirrut took his place in the middle and wrapped a length of fabric across his eyes, his silhouette surrounded by an aura of the sun. Baze wondered if there was anything this man did that was not impressive, and if he really wasn’t handpicked by the Force for all his inherent elegance.

“This is something else,” Chirrut said, turning slowly to the direction of Baze’s voice. He stretched out a hand. “Staff.”

Baze pressed one to his calloused palm. Doubts anchored his lips to a suspicious frown. “Are you sure you wouldn’t much rather get an Elder to walk you through this? Someone with more experience.”

“You trust the Force with your actions but not yourself?” Chirrut laughed, backing away. “How can you be a true Guardian if you cannot trust your own vessel?”

“You speak like a book of verses.”

“I trust the Force.” Spreading his feet, Chirrut aimed the top end of his staff to his friend, who imitated his form at the opposite end. “That’s why I covered my eyes. I want to see if I can do it.” He grinned at the pun he made. “Talk me through the forms. Like you do with the younger classes you assist.”

“I thought you trusted the Force?” When Chirrut refused to honor the jab with another, he had no choice but to begin.

They went through the forms in order, moving around each other at such a careful pace that would have made it seem like they were practicing a difficult dance—which Chirrut may as well be. His brows met, tight with concentration, under his plain blindfold and he had such a frown on his face that it seemed as if every step he made was a violation against his very reason for living.

This was quite unlike the man in his dreams—who even under the mercy of the weather moved as if the rain had been summoned by him and no other. Baze knew it was the blindfold that threw him off. Sightlessness could do terrible things to one’s balance. Even Chirrut’s breathing was graceless, mindful where it should have been natural. It improved a little towards the end of the session, when he could predict when their poles would meet and turn his closest ear to the sound in time, but it was still ragged.

Was Baze worried? He couldn’t say he wasn’t but he couldn’t say he had reason to be either. There was logic behind Chirrut’s mission that anyone in the Temple was sure to understand. But Baze could not shake off the impression that Chirrut walked on thin ice. That the price of Chirrut’s failure was much higher than he could see.

By the time they had finished, the light beyond the windows had burned to a golden glow. Soon a rosy, purple dusk would be among them. Baze remembered the basket of cherries he’d brought along as he returned the staves to their stand. He cheered up a little. It would be good to make Chirrut laugh, again.

“Hey, Chirrut. You hungry?” He spun to look at his friend. Chirrut stood frozen, off-center in the room. His blindfold was off, and there was an alarming look on his eyes that Baze could not have predicted but felt so easily across the distance.

Fear.

Chirrut stared at where Baze once stood,  looking so much like a boy faced with a nightmare. If one didn’t know Chirrut all too well, one might have thought that there was a bug that disturbed him, but Chirrut was devoted to preserve the lives even of pests—for they, too, were a part of the Force. That the object of his horror was invisible only served to alarm the man who loved him, even more than he already was. “Chirrut?” he called to him, hurrying to his aide.

He was within Chirrut’s reach when the younger man looked up in shock. There was something about his eyes that had changed that Baze couldn’t quite put his finger on—but then he smiled. And everything but Chirrut’s smile faded from his memory. Fingers reached for each other and entwined themselves. Baze gripped him tightly.

“I’m here,” he reassured him, savoring Chirrut’s relief. “I’m here.”

⚭

“But that’s what I don’t understand,” Chirrut spoke suddenly. “If permanence is a myth, then what proves the law of entanglement?”

They’d come a long way from the war Baze had waged that morning when Chirrut woke him up with a roach dangling helplessly by its antenna. He’d insisted then that he wouldn’t forgive and forget but there they were, walking side by side down a corridor, him juggling a pair of peaches the size of his hands, that would lead one to the prayer room and another to the Elders’ quarters. Dusk had fallen and the automated light panels on the walls, upon detecting their movement and the time of day, came on slowly with a soft honeyed glow. This was the usual scenery that greeted them beyond the training room after what Baze had come to call as their Blind Sessions. Progress was kind to Chirrut; several meetings after the first had honed the man to be sharper and faster in spite of his challenge.

But Baze still worried. This was no initiative that came from the Elders, cascaded through their networks and their comms. Chirrut refused Baze’s offer to invite their teachers to see his growth, insisting that he only wanted to do this with him, and him alone. Honor was quick to fill Baze—until he noticed that it was not so much that he was Chirrut’s undeniable favorite, but that Chirrut had become cagey about his motive.

Even to him, his own best friend. Chirrut kept a secret from him, even as he let him, and only him, in one.

He hoped the Elders could help him. He was at a loss; guilt curdled his bile just at the thought of him confessing his unease, breaking his promise to Chirrut but nothing killed him more than seeing the same haunted face on the man he loved the first time he’d taken off the blindfold.

These days, Baze was always trying his best to cheer him up. He did the same now. And it would be good to be distracted from the sin he was about to commit not long now. He raised a brow, and asked, “Why do you ask that?”

“Well—” Don’t mind if I do, Chirrut may as well have said. He always loved to speak of the Force and all that it affected. Raising two fingers that touched at the tips, he drew swooping brush strokes in the air until each had parted, one to each side. He explained, “—it is true and proven that two entwined particles, when separated even at opposite ends of the galaxy, will continue to be altered and affected in the same way as the other. As if they were never parted. That being the case,” his fingers swam in the air once more to be reunited with each other, “how could permanence be a myth when we have two elements that will always be as one?”

Baze had to remind himself that he was not in a conversation with the most perfect pair of hands he had ever laid eyes on, and that Chirrut was not speaking about the two of them. “Well, I think,” he stopped juggling (he’d actually long stopped juggling for the opportunity to watch Chirrut move) and cleared his throat, buying time to collect his wits, “I think…that there must be a law or a theorem that we’re leaving out here.”

Chirrut twirled his hands again to make fists, then moved both to the small of his back. Matched by a pensive pace, he turned to face his elder brother.

Baze burned instantly at the attention, a heady mix of its source being Chirrut and the pressure he was laying on him. “Y, you must be mistaking me for a text book!”

“It’s hard to see the difference in the dark.”

Baze swung a fistful of peach at Chirrut in retaliation who bent back in the same heartbeat, leaving a wide gap between himself and the offending hand. At the next, those nimble fingers which he’d just earlier admired enclosed upon his sleeve in a death grip that broke open his fist. The peach rolled off and landed smoothly in Chirrut’s free hand while he ducked and spun to the direction of a corridor branching out sideways. Man and fruit bounced in happy meeting, although the man put on a shit-eating grin for good measure.

“I’ll see you at dinner, Baze!” Chirrut waved and started backwards to the prayer room at the end of the path.

Baze was too busy flexing his stunned fingers and waving his hand, trying to regain some sensation in it, to return Chirrut’s goodbye…but mostly, he was also too busy pretending he was upset and not actually fighting off his own grin and failing miserably. Perhaps it was true that even if Chirrut beat him to an inch of his life, Baze would still be too drunk with adoration to avenge his pride. He loved watching him move as much as he loved watching him, period. That slender form, that long arm, those broadening shoulders of his.

But he did come up with a plan for revenge when he remembered that he still had one peach left—and by revenge he meant an excuse to engage Chirrut’s attention again. Because clearly, he couldn’t wait for dinner.

“Oi, Chirrut!” He didn’t wait for the man to turn before he pitched the round fruit with a force to attack. Chirrut had tensed to receive it, and for a second, Baze wondered what sort of acrobatic splendor the man was going to grace him with again.

So imagine his surprise when Chirrut’s acrobatic splendor sent him crumpling to the floor after the projectile landed with a clear smack on his face.

He might have ripped his throat to pieces when he roared his name, or beaten the speed of light when he dashed to his moaning friend. “Chirrut!!” Panic echoed on the quiet walls. No doubt one too many droids would have heard it and reported it to an Elder. A grand mixture of worry, horror, shame and hysteria gave Baze confusing signals; he wanted to cradle the bleeding man for there was suddenly so much blood but he didn’t want to joggle him in case they were dealing with a concussion. He couldn’t see it so well, Chirrut was hiding half his face in his hands. “Chirrut…!” he wheezed, tears coming on. In a spark of inspiration, Baze grasped his shoulders to steady him before he did himself more damage. “Chirrut, I’m sorry!”

“It’s okay,” Chirrut groaned, his voice stuffy and his own eyes leaking. “It’s okay. Just call the medi-droid, please. My nose is broken.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” Baze was wheezing while he fumbled for his comm piece to send out an alert.

“Baze, please, call the medi-droid.”

“I just did. One should be on its way. You’re going to be fine, Chirrut. I’m here.”

“No, I’m fine! You don’t have to stay here.”

“Chirrut, I can’t just leave you!”

“Baze, please!” Chirrut was crying, voice high and thin with fright. “Just go!”

It stung—more than Baze could ever imagine, could ever be prepared for even when he knew he deserved more than that. His body was frozen. He could sit still and pretend that he wasn’t there but he couldn’t just leave!

Fortunately for the both of them, the coveted droids had arrived to sort out the mess before Baze could make the wrong decision. Chirrut was carried onto a repulsor lift and escorted to the med lab with haste.

Baze remained where he sat on the floor, next to two peaches the size of his hand.

⚭

He couldn’t come up to an Elder to spill Chirrut’s secret after what he did. The guilt was bad enough—but now he couldn’t imagine betraying his best friend after what he’d done.

He didn’t see Chirrut at dinner, couldn’t find him no matter who he asked. He skipped his own prayer, reading and meditating hours because he couldn’t focus on anything other than his dear friend and was practically stuck in the dinner hall like a ghost lingering between life and the Force.

It was late in the evening when one of their Elders told him that Chirrut was having his dinner in the kitchen. Baze ran.

By the time he had reached the massive room, a wide circle doused in bright, golden lights that was filled with panels, machines, fresh produce and polished surfaces, the kitchen droid was already collecting Chirrut’s dishes and he was refusing seconds.

Baze had not yet formulated his apology when he crept next to Chirrut drinking his tea and sat down near him on the looping bench. He opened his mouth to speak.

“Baze?” Chirrut asked the room, and everything went still. The question repeated itself to him in weak echoes. Guilty, Baze couldn’t give an answer.

So Chirrut’s hand darted next to his knee and found Baze’s fingers. They gripped each other, like tethers in a storm. That was the only time Chirrut turned to face his friend. Baze had to stifle a wince when he saw what laid across his best friend’s face, a silver band of sorts with its own quiet lights, meant to prevent infections and further damage to the already wounded nose.

But Chirrut smiled, and all was well. The gesture was slight but it spoke volumes to Baze’s heart, enough to melt away his guilt.

“You don’t look so bad,” Baze said suddenly, even though his face looked swollen and the bruise was creeping up to his eyes. The kitchen droid wheeled back in and placed fresh cups of tea and a steaming kettle for the two friends. “I was really worried about you…there was so much blood.”

“They say my nose will heal in three weeks,” Chirrut reassured him, looking embarrassed but still cheerful. His voice had a nasal quality to it, mixed with the effects of his medical band, like it had gone through several channels before it cracked out of a comm system. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Does it still hurt?” Baze whispered, a hint of dread in his voice as he crept closer.

Chirrut tested his cheek. “A little if you touched it.”

Baze sighed, drawing back. He appeared discouraged even though they both knew how these injuries worked. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…I didn’t know why I did that.”

“It’s not your fault. It was an accident,” Chirrut responded quietly. “I know what you were expecting me to do. I tried but…” he shrugged, “I might have had one too many peaches.”

“That ought to teach you to stop stealing peaches from your elders.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Baze growled and Chirrut laughed. Too bad it was short-lived, cut out by a wince and Chirrut touching his cheek again. Baze frowned, drawing his eyebrows low between his eyes.

“It hurts to laugh,” Chirrut explained with a voice that asked to be excused for being such a killjoy. “So you better not make me laugh until it’s all healed up.”

“That’s going to be difficult.”

Even Baze surprised himself with how much he meant what he said, how much of his heart bled out to those quiet words. The kitchen seemed to still itself, anticipating the silence that could only come from so much honesty. Chirrut’s face remained impassive, but he kept his eyes averted from his friend. If he blushed, the lights hid it well.

The Force strike him but Baze wanted to kiss him so badly! He didn’t realize how full those lips were until the absence of words—for Chirrut loved to talk—stopped them from moving.

Maybe he would do it. He inched closer. He just had to put an arm around Chirrut’s back, move in slowly so Chirrut would know what he wanted to do and could speak up if he so wished. Just the slightest touch just enough to feel those lips on his…

“Don’t make me smile, too,” Chirrut ordered him. His voice popped Baze’s balloon and sent him falling back to reality, where he hadn’t noticed that Chirrut had been fighting off a grin. “It also hurts to smile.”

Well then, it would probably hurt him to kiss his lips, too.

Baze couldn’t say he wasn’t disappointed…but at least they were still friends. Eloquence left him, it was the price he had to pay for dreaming about Chirrut’s lips in front of the man himself. The Force probably thought that was very rude of him and saw fit to punish him this way.

He tried to recover with a shrug. “For what it’s worth, I still think you’re—” —handsome. That would make Chirrut smile. Baze bit his lip hard.

Chirrut turned to look at him in some sort of expectation. But when Baze refused to continue, he understood why and turned away from him again, facing forward. With a decisive nod, Chirrut said, “Say it to me when I’ve healed.”

Three weeks sounded like a long time, but maybe then, he’d have sorted out his feelings properly in a way that would allow Chirrut to receive them easily. With a nod of his own, Baze agreed.

⚭

A week later, the swelling had gone down—so Baze was alarmed to find out that his best friend had gone to see a doctor.

“Did he say where? Or who?” he’d asked one of their common friends who’d told him the news when he came to call on Chirrut that morning. He’d filched some freshly steamed maple cakes from the kitchen, a shared favorite of his and the younger man. That Chirrut appeared to have left in a hurry—for he had not even thought to leave a message in his comlink—worried Baze who thought this must be some sort of an emergency. He wanted to follow and make sure he was okay, that he had a friend when he needed one the most.

He received no suitable answer to his question, however, and was left with no choice but to wait for Chirrut’s return.

Baze dropped by to check on Chirrut again mid-afternoon. This time, he’d just caught the man as he was leaving his room. He raised the bag of maple cakes that was supposed to have been their breakfast as his greeting. Nothing in the world would have prevented that smile from splitting Chirrut’s face ear to ear.

“So what did the doctor say?” Baze asked, chewing down a mouthful of cake. They sat by one of the Temple’s outer ledges, feet dangling in the air, overlooking sprawling NiJedha. It was exactly the kind of place that would earn them a night in the detention room if they’d been caught.

Chirrut coughed and cleared his throat with some sweet tea. “Doctor? Said who?” he popped another cake in.

“Wany.” Baze frowned. “I’d gone to look for you this morning.”

“Must have mistaken me,” was Chirrut’s easy conclusion, shrugging. “I was in one of the quiet rooms, meditating. I had a dream and I wanted to reflect on it.”

“Ohhh?” Shifting closer until they were elbow to elbow, Baze nudged his friend and whispered conspiratorially, “What did you dream about?”

Chirrut only looked at him, smiled, and stuffed a maple cake in Baze’s mouth.

⚭

A week later, Baze chanced upon Chirrut hanging kneeling pads in one of the outer gardens of the Temple, just one level up from where he had been chiding a pair of younger girls for causing mischief on one of their older teachers. Giddy with excitement, he might have called this meeting fated.

He put his hands side to side of his mouth and whistled. Chirrut looked down, and he waved.

He wondered if maybe his eyes were fooling him, but Chirrut hadn’t raised his own hand in response before he returned to the task at hand. Baze tried again but was met with the same cold response.

“What?” He couldn’t even put his confusion to proper words. Chirrut could hear him but how could he not see him? He’d been tempted to try again, this time with his name, reproach from the Elders be dammed, but Chirrut had picked that opportunity to leave.

“What in Jedha’s…!” Frustration bubbled up from within Baze’s chest. How could Chirrut not have seen him! It made no sense at all. It wasn’t like Baze stood against the light, in fact he stood in a position where he would have been more easily noticed from above! It was almost as if Chirrut was…

Realization dawned slowly on Baze, but still too fast for his liking. He didn’t believe it at first, and knew that the chances he could be right would be staggeringly low with so little evidence. But how could he have thought of that…if he had no reason to?

⚭

A week later, Baze could no longer keep his silence.

There could be no subtlety this time, and there can be no guilt. He wondered if he should have at least tried to hesitate when they hailed a speeder that would take them to the edge of NiJedha but it was hard to consider it when every distance that separated them from the Temple of the Kyber, from safety and comfort, was something he rejoiced. Because it meant that finally, there was no going back. He would have no choice but to do this.

After their lectures, just before the sun was about to set, they’d taken a detour to the market to buy half a watermelon to share between themselves. They raced each other to the most number of seeds spat over the edge of the mesa, a contest Chirrut won unanimously, and sat back in blissful satisfaction, trading stories and rumors and gossips. They were comfortable.

Baze seized his chance when he started to get scared of ruining the moment. He jumped to his feet gaping at the skies, then jabbed a finger up at them with all the strength he could muster. “Chirrut, look at the size of that thing!!” he cried.

“Where!” Chirrut got up after him, searching the horizon. “Where?”

“There, over there! It’s so huge,” Baze gasped, shaking with excitement. He ran past Chirrut in an effort to follow it with his outstretched hand. He stood back when Chirrut took chase. “You see it? Look at it go!”

Chirrut stood gaping, and then finally: ��Yes, I see it! You’re right, it’s so big.”

The sound of Baze’s heart breaking, under the weight of so many sudden revelations. Now he didn’t know what to do. He’d exposed Chirrut but what for? What then? Should he even have tried?

“What do you think is it, Baze?” Chirrut asked, eyes still on the empty skies. Was that a hint of desperation on his voice?

Baze wanted to embrace him. Baze thought about pretending that the lie was not a lie. “I don’t know…a ship?” He tried anyway, for what it was worth. He threw his voice but he could no longer put his entire being in it. This was all a mistake. “It looks like a freighter.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Chirrut said. Baze flinched. “I wonder why it’s so quiet, though…”

Finally, the truth. Baze breathed a sigh of relief, even though he knew that the worst had only come, perhaps to ruin them once and for all. The growing silence seemed only to draw a raging river between them.

Slowly, Chirrut turned back to look at him past his shoulder. “There was no ship…was there?” he asked, voice quieter than the wind.

Baze shuddered at its frostiness, like a brisk wind had passed. He shook his head, then added conscientiously, “No.”

Chirrut frowned. “That was a very cruel trick, Baze.”

Baze wanted to crumble like the rocks of Jedha, right where he stood. But he nodded, and said, “Yes.” Not even a day into the relationship he so wanted, and he was already experiencing the pain of hurting the one that he loved.

Chirrut’s steps made scratchy echoes as he turned around to face Baze finally. He looked pale, all of a sudden. Baze had never seen him look so…unhappy. “How long have you known?” he asked.

“Since you’ve been lying to me,” Baze said. He wished he hadn’t. Chirrut looked stung but they could no longer allow themselves to be complicit to falsehood. “About the blindfold and the time your nose broke. About seeing the doctor…” Now that he spoke of them out loud, he couldn’t believe he’d missed all the clues when they were just there, waiting to be seen. Baze had to wonder if things would have been much better had he realized the signs sooner but he thought it was impossible to say. Maybe things wouldn’t change, or maybe things could have gotten worse, much, much worse than his imagination could prepare him for. Like what was happening right now. “How bad is it?” he asked.

Chirrut refused to answer, casting his gaze down to his feet.

Baze couldn’t take it anymore. He marched up to his silent friend and reached for an arm. “Chirrut, how bad is it—!”

“Nearly!” Chirrut snapped, snatching his wrist from Baze’s grasp, stumbling back with his momentum. Pain was the artist that etched his features, his face a canvas for his frustrations and his fear but the tears would not come. He gritted his teeth in a bid to be the master of himself. He glared at the dirt between himself and his friend. He could not look at him. “I’m nearly blind,” he snarled. The final admission.

Was this what Baze was expecting? Maybe. It should have felt good to be right, to finally know the truth, to have reached the bottom of the well.

Baze wanted nothing more than to disappear, though. To be gone from that moment, to be back in the market when he and Chirrut were out-haggling another humanoid who wanted their half of the watermelon. At least Chirrut had been happy, then. Mischievous and playful.

“I can,” Chirrut choked, raising a hand to an invisible wall, “I can barely see past my arm anymore. And even then,” he sniffled, “even then it’s coming closer.”

Baze tried to imagine it. To have this wall of blackness close into you, day by day and there was nothing you could do about it. No power. No help. No friend. He tried to see himself in that position, standing at the top of a cliff, a heavy nightfall devouring all that he loved. No matter how much he shouted, how much he prayed, it would keep coming. How could you defeat something you couldn’t touch?

He came close to Chirrut, his feet shuffling loudly in the empty afternoon. NiJedha was somewhere behind him but he’d forgotten all about its existence. A hand rose to press itself against Chirrut’s outstretched palm. Their fingers parted and curled around each other.

“I’m here,” Baze said to Chirrut’s sad countenance, hoping to comfort him. “I won’t be far. I won’t let go.” Chirrut nodded, simply so he could make some sort of reply. “What did the doctors say?”

“That it’s hopeless,” Chirrut said. “That I’ll go blind in months…weeks.”

“What did our Elders say?”

“Trust in the will of the Force.” Finally, Chirrut looked up to him and that was when he saw it. Some parts of his eyes…had gone milky white. That was what he’d seen back in the training room, when they’d first tried the blindfold. “It’s not that I don’t believe them anymore, or that I no longer believe in the Force…but I wish that it was not all that they say. I’m scared, I don’t know what to do! I’m alone in this fight.”

“Is that why you never told me?”

Chirrut smiled a little, sad and small. “I thought that if one less person in my life, the most important person in my life, didn’t know about my eyes, I could still pretend that it was not happening. If I’d told you, I’d just as well admitted to myself that I was going blind.” He shrugged. “I should have realized that the most devoted Guardian of them all would find out soon enough.” That was a joke. Baze knew Chirrut was just trying to lighten things up.

If anything, it just made him want to kiss him more, this noble fool whose struggling spirit would not lose its mettle. He restrained himself with the back of Chirrut’s hand, pressing his lips to his knuckles. It was the first test, maybe, of Chirrut’s acceptance of his affections but Baze wasn’t even thinking about his own heart now. Chirrut’s comfort preceded all of his. “I was…coming up with all these ways…to show you how much I’ve come to love you. Writing our names on the cherry tree, picking the fruits because we enjoyed that joke too much,” they both chuckled, “stealing maple cakes…but I kept sending the wrong messages because you couldn’t see.”

“I wish I’d seen them all,” Chirrut said, making Baze’s heart beat a little faster. “I would have enjoyed tormenting you, playing dumb.” For once, a grin broke free from his sadness when Baze snorted and frowned. “I would have driven you mad. That would have been a sight to see.”

“That plan wouldn’t have worked,” Baze grumbled.

“No,” Chirrut agreed quietly, his thumb stroking Baze’s finger where they touched. “No, it wouldn’t have. The most devoted Guardian would have seen through my ruse.”

So that was that, then.

In Baze’s obsession with making the right moves, doing all things at the right time, he never did imagine how Chirrut might respond. That it might have been possible that they were both nursing the same kind of love for each other. He might have been disappointed to find out that there was no breath of relief, no burst of a song or mad whooping. But this quiet admission was how it happened. And Baze was fine with that. Now, he was just glad that the last secret had been spoken, and there was no need to hide anything from each other, anymore.

They drew closer. Baze pressed his lips upon each of Chirrut’s fading eyes, then kissed him on his forehead, like a pledge of his devotion. His arms wove around Chirrut’s sturdy form just as Chirrut had sealed him in his own embrace. Far beyond them, a bruised dusk began to swallow the golden sun.

“What do you think should I do?” Chirrut asked suddenly, voice small and quiet. He tightened his arms around Baze.

Baze did not answer immediately, even though he knew all along what he wanted to say. “Trust in the will of the Force,” he said, “when you’re ready.”

“I like the sound of that better,” Chirrut said after a thoughtful pause.

“I know the Elders always taught us how bad fear is, but we’re only mortals. We can’t always be immune to fear, which clouds our minds and our hearts and our judgment.” It was fear that led them to where they stood—the fear of the truth, a truth mishandled. Baze could see it all now, and he was gladder for that. “Give yourself some time, Chirrut.” He kissed his forehead again. “And I’ll be here.”

“It’s sad,” Chirrut said. “The days where I can still see you and look at you with my own eyes are numbered. Soon I might forget how you look.” A bleak face of the future.

Nevertheless, Baze could find the will to assure him, “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

[ice-cream-beat]

Roxas and Ven with 12? :)

I HAVE DONE THE THING and I’m sorry this is so stupidly late! this was a super cute prompt tho ahhhh ty for suggesting it!

#12: Enjoying the first snow together

Summary: Ven was definitely the outgoing type, but Roxas couldn’t really compare him to anybody else, not directly. Ven was straightforward, but lacked Hayner’s brashness; he was considerate, but bolder than Xion; he was similar to Sora in a lot of ways, but there was something… calmer about Ven, or maybe gentler. [Ventus + Roxas, post-KH3.]

Ao3 version here

/ / / / /

“You really haven’t seen it before?” Ventus’ eyes were wide and bright and curious, a cheerful smile belying his tone of surprise. Then again, Roxas was quickly discovering that it was rare for Ven not to smile.

“No,” he confirmed with a shake of his head. “I’ve never even felt it get this cold.”

“Huh.” It was a neutral sound as Ven shuffled the toe of his shoe against the cement, shifting the undisturbed layer of perfect white. Like Roxas, he was dressed for the cold with only his face showing any skin. “We get a ton of it every year where I’m from. We usually make bets on how long it takes the first snowfall of winter to arrive.”

“How much is a ton?” Roxas wondered. The snow that already coated the sidewalk, roads, and rooftops of Twilight Town was impressive, especially considering it had only started falling a couple hours before, but he figured an inch of the stuff could hardly be considered much.

“Mm… about knee-high, I guess? Well, for me, anyway. One time we got a lot more, though.” Suddenly Ven turned to him, looking excited. “Hey! So that means you’ve never had a snowball fight or any of that!”

“Well, no. I never–hey!”

“Come on!” Ven had a hold on the crook of Roxas’ arm and was already trying to break into a run. “We gotta hurry!”

Roxas humored him and matched his pace, but shot him a puzzled look. “To where?”

“I’ll explain when we get there!”

Ven half-led, half-dragged Roxas through the snow that continued to swirl in the chilly breeze. They earned a few glances as they went, a few of them knowing Roxas well enough to do a double-take when they noticed Ven, but nobody tried to dissuade them from their trek. “There” turned out to be the park: Ven abruptly stopped at the edge of it, finally releasing Roxas and scanning the area thoughtfully. When his eyes found the playground at the far end of the small field, he grinned and gave an indicative nod. “Down there! Let’s go!”

Now curious, Roxas didn’t need to be pulled along this time. The two of them crunched over the frozen grass and made for the collection of equipment – swingsets, a merry-go-round, climbing nets – all of which was now colored white. After another moment of looking around, Ven quickly led them over to the tube slide, a tall, winding tunnel of orange. “This should be good,” he decided. His cheeks were pink and his visible clouds of breath were coming quicker than before.

“For what?”

With another grin Ven crouched down and began gathering snow between his hands. The top layer was still dusty and slipped between his gloved fingers, but the rest stuck together as he rolled it into a tight ball. “Preparing,” he replied. He let that unhelpful answer hang in the cold air for a few seconds before raising his head. “By the time everybody else gets here, we’ll have a head start.”

“Everybody else?”

“Uh-huh. Is this is the only park?”

“The only one around here, yeah. The other one’s a train ride away.”

“Good! Then we’ll get a lot of people.” Noting Roxas’ perplexed expression, Ven added, “C’mon, help me make some more.” Once Roxas had also squatted down to start crafting snowballs, Ven nodded back towards the open field. “There’re lots of kids here, right? I bet this is where the snowball fight happens.”

Oh. Well, that explained a couple things, but– “How can you tell?”

Ven’s smile was the widest yet. “Because you always have a snowball fight after the first snow. And since this is your first snow ever, I’ll make sure you’re prepared.”

That caught Roxas by surprise – but the smile was contagious and he couldn’t resist a quiet laugh, even if it was a little self-conscious. Ven was definitely the outgoing type, but Roxas couldn’t really compare him to anybody else, not directly. Ven was straightforward, but lacked Hayner’s brashness; he was considerate, but bolder than Xion; he was similar to Sora in a lot of ways, but there was something… calmer about Ven, or maybe gentler. Roxas wasn’t sure what to call it or why exactly he thought that, but that was the impression that had stuck with him ever since (properly) meeting him several months ago.

Roxas glanced up at the slide. “So what’s this for, then?”

“You need somethin’ to hide behind. While everybody else is buildin’ theirs, we’ll already have one.” Ven had definitely thought this through.

With nothing else to do but accept the offer, Roxas set to work on mimicking Ven’s motions and adding to their snowball repertoire. It was pretty easy, similar to handling wet sand but more malleable, although he was feeling the bite of cold through his gloves within half a minute. Ven was much faster at it.

A few minutes after that, Ven’s guess proved right: others began trickling in, ranging from small children who had already begun to hurl snow at one another to teenagers who quickly took to constructing short walls out of the stuff. The two Keyblade wielders were already way ahead of the rest.

When a sudden thump sounded right beside Roxas’ left ear, they both whipped their heads up to see snowy remains crumbling off the slide. Together they turned to search the field for the source, a tricky endeavor given the size of the crowd at this point–

“Watch it!” Roxas jerked aside as another snowball flew in their direction, narrowly missing his face. He felt Ven catch hold of his sleeve.

“Come on!” he laughed. “Behind cover!”

As if by some silent command, the park erupted. The air filled with snowballs lobbed in every direction, accentuated by laughter and the occasional cry of surprise. The slide proved to be good defense, after all, tall enough that they could stand when they needed to and wide enough to let them each take one side. While other kids scrabbled to make more ammunition between throws, Roxas and Ven were well-stocked and kept pushing the offensive.

Roxas certainly didn’t have bad aim, but he noticed that Ven’s shots were on-target the majority of the time. Whenever somebody risked dashing out through the open field, becoming an immediate target for the rest of the crowd, the snowball pitched beside him always found its mark.

After several minutes of receiving only glancing blows and slim misses, Roxas was startled by the very wet, very cold slap of snow against his face, seemingly out of nowhere. He quickly scrabbled to dig it out of his collar, but a few icy chunks were already tumbling down his neck and the back of his shirt in sheer torment. Laughter drew both their attentions, and they looked left to see three more warmly bundled teenagers huddled behind the monkey bars. Specifically, they saw Olette trade high-fives with Hayner and Pence as all three of them flashed amused grins.

“Aren’t those your friends?” Ven panted. He was leaning over with his hands on his knees.

“Uh-huh. This just got a lot harder.” Despite the new challenge – because of it, rather – Roxas was smiling.

/ / /

Ven hadn’t spent enough time in Twilight Town to get used to the perpetual sunset, so it was a bit odd when he and Roxas finally withdrew from their fortified space an hour later and the sky gave no sign of the time passed. He could appreciate the sight, though, because the snowfall had eased up to a gentle flurry that allowed him to look skyward without constantly getting condensation in his eyes.

Both boys were flushed and panting from the exercise. With the ground covered in snow and their bodies already a few degrees too cold to be comfortable, they claimed the nearby swingset for seats. Some of the other kids remained in the park, building snowmen or pulling one another on sleds, but the battleground had died down for the most part. It ended up pretty quiet where they were, but Ven didn’t try to fill it with talk just yet. Like Roxas, he just watched the activity with mild interest while he caught his breath, hands cupped around his mouth to try and warm up the air going into his stinging lungs.

“It’s nice.”

Ven looked over. “Hm?”

“I don’t remember the last time I went all-out like this. Doing something that wasn’t a fight, anyway,” Roxas mused. “Or training. Maybe I never did.” That last remark sounded uncertain, but not sad. Like the light smile he wore, it just seemed distracted.

“Oh.”

“But it was nice,” he repeated. “Just… moving without thinking, you know?”

Ven nodded. “Yeah. Sometimes you need to stop thinkin’ and start doin’. That’s why you like sports, huh?”

Roxas tilted his head as though debating his answer. “I guess. I mostly do those ‘cause my friends like them. Well, I like them, too, but I probably wouldn’t bother if I didn’t have anybody to do it with.”

“I gotcha. I’ve got my friends to thank for some of my hobbies, too.” Taking hold of the chains on either side of his shoulders, Ven kicked lightly against the ground to get his swing moving. “If you liked this, you should come to our world sometime. You haven’t had real competition until you go up against Aqua.” Terra could throw a lot harder, but Aqua’s aim was legendary as far as Ven was concerned. She’d taught him a lot, although he was still lacking compared to her. He suspected she worked some magic into it somehow.

“I can go there?” Roxas asked, sounding slightly bewildered.

“Sure. Why couldn’t you?”

“…Oh. It’s just… It’s a really important place, right? So I thought only the really important wielders could go there.”

Ven laughed, cocking an amused eyebrow. “No. I mean, you have to have permission, but all you gotta do is ask. Who counts as a ‘really important’ wielder, anyway?”

“I dunno. Real ones, I guess.”

Ven dug his heels into the mulch to cut his momentum. Now he just looked puzzled, no longer smiling. “Real ones?” he echoed.

“You know. Wielders like you and your friends. The ones who got their Keyblades from their Masters. Not by chance.”

Frowning, Ven stared, but Roxas still didn’t turn to him, still didn’t sound anything other than thoughtfully neutral. After a moment Ven dropped his gaze, thinking over his response as he toed the tracks he’d left in the snow.

“Y’know, Roxas… I don’t believe in chance,” he said resolutely. This time Roxas did glance over, and Ven met the look with an easy smile. “And I don’t think there’s any difference between wielders when you get down to it. ‘The Keyblade chooses whom it will,’ ” he recited. “Even if we don’t understand why, that’s all right. We don’t have to know everything. Our role as wielders is to walk the path we’re given no matter what.”

Roxas appeared to take that to heart. At least, he thought on it for the next few silent moments. “Did your Master teach you that?”

“Yep.” Both of them did. “But after everything that’s happened… I don’t think you need a Master to tell you that. We’ve seen destiny in action. Up-close and personal and everything.” Ven grinned. Roxas didn’t return it, but there was something decidedly less serious in his expression as he looked out over the park again. After a few heartbeats, he gave a small but knowing smile.

“You’re saying… I’m no accident, huh.”

“Nobody is,” Ven countered without hesitation. “That Keyblade’s yours, Roxas. You’re as real a wielder as I am.” Standing up, he shoved his cold hands in his pockets and turned on his heel. “But your pitchin’ arm could use some work.” He grinned again. “How about some practice?”

Roxas blinked at him, but then after a beat laughed quietly. “You two really are alike.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” Pushing off his swing, Roxas caught up to him and gave his shoulder a friendly shove. “All right! Show me what you know.”

[dreamsinthefoxhollow]

Zombie bear

I was leaving work. The building was a simple single-story business with attached warehouse. I had been putting things into my truck in preparation for leaving. This was not an ordinary end-of-the-day affair. Things had gone horrible in the world. Really, really horrible.

Zombies.

It was on the all the news broadcasts. People were killing each other, but they were still getting back up and then going after other people. They moved erratically, like badly-animated marionette puppets, but were strong and deadly.

So I was packing some things into my truck to get out of town.

Some of my co-workers were barricading themselves into the building. They figured they were better off staying put until help arrived. They scorned me for leaving. I grabbed the last pack and tossed it into the cab, then climbed in after it.

It was a large truck, feeling like something military, perhaps an armored cab-over of some kind. I started the engine and turned on the headlights, then pulled away.

The streets were chaos. The zombies had already swept through the area and everything was a war-torn mess. Cars were on fire and wrecked. Litter was everywhere. I thought I had seen one or two of the creatures wandering around.

(Something happened to the truck that I don't remember, and I had to go on foot, and fought off zombies and thought I got infected with the zombie bug)

And I ended up seeking shelter in an office building that was maybe 7 or 8 stories tall. Some people were in there already and they seemed to not know what was happening outside. They were having an office party.

I instantly made some angry or scared by bursting in looking deranged and talking about dead things murdering everyone. I got them to turn on a tv and found a broadcast still showing the chaos.

They decided to hole up in the office. They blocked several doors. But I still felt uneasy about the situation. One of the women seemed to be sabotaging the efforts. She seemed a little unhinged and seemed to want the creatures to come in and get everyone.

I found my way to a back office. There was a small window overlooking a construction area, and some scaffolding outside with no walkways on it. There was only one metal doorway in and out. So I moved furniture and stuff against it and blocked myself in.

There was something piled in a corner like a set of black metal piped and bars all fastened together. It reminded me of the framework of some kind of small racing vehicle, or perhaps part of the undercarriage of one. Some of the bars were bent and others broken or sheared. One or two would make good self-defense weapons ... if I could remove them from the mess. It looked like a few bolts were holding things together.

For some reason I didn't have a single tool on me.

I heard shouting and banging at the door. I think the zombies had found the building and the others were keeping them from getting in. But they were also trying to find other ways to get out just in case. The noises died down and I heard them shouting to each other. They were doing well to keep them things out. But I also heard them talk about other things trying to break in and how they couldn't keep them out much longer.

I focused on the pile of metal, intent on getting something to use as a weapon.

I was desperately trying to take the metal framework apart with no real tools. I was only able to use other pieces of discarded scrap. It was not easy getting the nuts and bolts to budge with scraps of metal. But it was working, albeit slowly. Too slowly.

Over my shoulder I noticed a wavering glow and then heard the ragged hissing. Someone was cutting through the door with a torch or plasma cutter. I was almost out of time.

I gave the framework some desperate tugs and wrestled another bolt free. One more to go and I'd have a rather fashionable steel bar club ... or spear. The reason I picked this piece was the far end was crushed and flattened and jagged and semi-sharp.

The door gave way and I heard it fall over. I wasn't done working on the framework. I grabbed a small piece of metal bar, perhaps arm length, and ran over.

It was that one worker who had given me all the trouble earlier. She was backing away with a crazed look on her face. I took a swing at her but I was quite literally a hallway away from her so it was largely ceremonial.

The door had been cut in half. The top part had fallen in but the bottom was still reinforced by the boxes and furniture I had piled up. It was a useless barricade, now.

The other worker who had shared my sentiment on the ordeal appeared at the end of the hallway and came over. She was powerless to stop the others, but nodded to me in support of my actions. She was going to say something when we both were startled by a crashing sound from the far side of the room I was in.

One of the creatures had smashed through a portion of the wall and window and was crumpled up in a huge, black ball in a part of the framework. There was nowhere for me to go to get away except out the hole it had made. So I jumped out and managed to catch hold onto the bare scaffolding outside. It was better than falling three stories to the ground.

The creature landed almost right next to me, having jumped out after me.

It was huge, probably a large bear at one time. But now parts of it had fallen off. Not limbs just various patches, revealing semi-dry, bloodless flesh and bone.

I lashed out while it scrabbled for a solid hold and somehow jammed the metal rod into its neck. I twisted it around and jumped while holding tight to the bar, managing to swing around and twist the monster's head completely around.

I barely caught a grip on the scaffolding and held tight. I was glad the array of metal pipes and braces was solid because I knew it would be bad if everything started to fall apart. It was bad enough there were no walkways and just bare metal bars. Swaying around would be the end of me.

The creature's head dangled off fibrous sinews while the body clawed and grabbed for purchase on the cage. Then the head and body both toppled, head first, then body a moment later, leaving a heap of fur and sinews clinging to the bars.

The lump of fur was moving. So were the sinews. The spaghetti-like fibers were swishing around and seemed to be alive. They were clinging to the scaffolding, and they were animating the lump of fur in the center.

It wasn't a lump of fur. It was a pile of dark kittens. They were half-digested with bones showing and fur missing. They roiled around aimlessly as the fibers undulated through them. It was even more horrifying that the animated bear corpse.

I only noticed a swash of movement next to me. I reacted by jumping backwards without plan, and barely managed to grab hold of some scaffolding before falling. It was the body of the creature, still attacking me without a head. Instead, those flailing sinews were protruding out the stump of its neck. Somehow, even with no head it was still able to track me, and moved to jump to where I was.

Something hit it from the side as it jumped, causing it to tumble and catch on nearby scaffolding, but not near me. I looked quickly to see the woman who had been sympathetic to me standing at the hole in the wall of the building. She had thrown something at the creature to distract it from me. She nodded at me.

I jumped backwards from the scaffolding and landed on a tall fence at the edge of the lot the building was in, and I shuffled along quickly to move away from the beast and the scaffolding. The creature did not follow me.

I hoped that the woman was lucky enough to survive, and thanked her under my breath as I dropped to the open sidewalk.

I still had the metal bar so I wasn't completely defenseless. But I felt sore and tired and scared. I could just see myself in the immediate future, skin dried and yellowed, eyes crusted over, walking the streets as a mindless undead creature.

But that wasn't what I was right now. I needed to keep it that way.

[chasingthecosmos]

Call Me But Love

Fandom: Doctor Who Rating: T Pairing: The Doctor/Rose Tyler, Twelfth Doctor/Rose Tyler (The Doctor/Clara Oswald, Twelfth Doctor/Clara Oswald) Chapters: 4/40 Read on AO3 here.

“‘Oh, dear. Looks like we might have picked up an extra passenger,’ the Doctor grumbled to himself. His gaze raised to Rose’s once more and she was struck by the sheer intensity of it and the way that he managed to look at once so familiar, and yet so different from what she was used to. ‘Best find something to hold on to,’ he warned her ominously.”

A Season 8 & 9 AU centering around Rose Tyler and her newly-regenerated Doctor as they both struggle to maintain their relationship in the face of some unknown force that seems to be drawing them together. Will they be able to solve the mystery of who is pulling the strings before it’s too late?

This is a direct sequel to “By Any Other Name” and might be a bit confusing if you haven’t read that first. Tags will be updated as I go.

Rose felt an intense sensation of foreboding as she and the Doctor cautiously began to navigate what he so cheerily referred to as "the larder". It seemed that they had landed in what should have been a basement, but was actually a crashed spaceship that was somehow out of its time. It wasn't long before a group of killer cyborgs from the future began to wake up and reanimate around them, but Rose only had enough time to force the Doctor through the doors and into safety ahead of her, leaving her trapped behind to deal with the danger on her own.

"Doctor, open the door!" she hissed as her hands scrabbled uselessly against the thick layer of metal that separated them.

"Sorry ... too slow," he muttered under his breath, his unfamiliar blue eyes blinking back at her through the grate that allowed them to look at each other but not touch. "No point in them catching us both."

Don't you dare! Rose growled as she pointedly yanked at her end of their mental connection, but he ignored her completely as he turned his back on her and ran down the hallway towards freedom without her, abandoning her all on her own, just as he had been doing ever since he had changed into this new body. Rose couldn't help but wonder if this was just going to be a thing that he did now - was the Doctor always going to be leaving her behind in his wake, keeping a distance between them when she desperately longed for familiarity and connection?

Doctor, what are you doing? she demanded as she pleadingly pulled against his mind and begged for him to come back. Don't leave me ...

The Doctor flashed her a small wave of reassurance that ended abruptly when he steadfastly shielded his mind from hers once more and his thoughts suddenly went eerily, deadly silent within her head. Rose felt her heart break in utter betrayal and she made sure that she projected it as strongly as she could across their dim connection as she faced off against the encroaching cyborgs, who quickly saw through her attempt at disguise and immediately brought her forward for questioning.

"Where is the other one?" the man who appeared to be in charge demanded from where he sat on his charging station before her. "You will tell us, or you will be destroyed."

"Go on, then," Rose muttered wearily, forcing herself to her feet despite the utter hopelessness that weighed down on her and begged for her to simply give up and give in. "Do it."

She was still silently brooding over her hurt and disappointment as she glared up at the strange half-faced man and dared him to try and test her. She honestly didn't know why she had expected this time around with the Doctor to be any different, really. It was all turning out to be exactly the same as it had been that first Christmas that they had spent together - the Doctor was out trying to reconfigure himself, and Rose was left to pick up the pieces and face off against the alien menace alone, with no tools and no plan and no clue as to what was going on or who to get out of this situation alive.

The robotic man before her tilted his head in question as his eyes looked blankly over her, seeming to try and assess the poisonous glare that she was leveling in his direction. As Rose met his gaze as evenly as she could, she suddenly sensed a strange prickling in the back of her mind that she wished very much would just shut up and go away. She was tired - tired of running, tired of fighting, and tired of chasing after a man who clearly wanted nothing at all to do with her.

"I'm not going to answer any of your questions," she continued stubbornly, squaring her jaw in retaliation as she stared down at the cyborg before her and determinedly called his bluff. "So you have to do it - you have to kill me."

The prickling in the back of Rose's mind was growing more pronounced now, and she had to fight not to choke on the lump in her throat as she suddenly recognized it for what it was - the last remaining hint of her bond with the Doctor slowly reawakening within the back of her thoughts. It seemed that he hadn't completely abandoned her after all - in fact, he was still close, lurking somewhere in the ship nearby. Rose wondered if he was actually planning to just sit back and watch as these cyborgs from the future killed her and used her for spare parts. Did he really have so little regard for her now, just because he had changed his face? Would he even mourn her if the cyborgs made good on their threat and destroyed her?

Rose realized, belatedly, why this whole situation felt so familiar to her - it wasn't just Christmas from 2005, it was eighteenth-century France, too. The Doctor was off galavanting about without her and leaving her to fight off the deadly robots all on her own.

Well, if she had managed to make it through back then, then she could certainly make her way out now, and Rose wasn't about to go running off after the Doctor and begging for his help when he clearly had other things - or other people - that he deemed to be more important than herself.

Suddenly, the itch of consciousness at the back of Rose's mind came roaring back to life as the Doctor loosened his hold on the barriers between them and his presence instantly came rushing back into her head. Don't give up on me, Rose, not yet ... he commanded silently.

Rose didn't need to use words to convey her intense sense of distrust and betrayal as she clearly displayed for him why she had very good reason to doubt his conviction.

Hang on just a little longer. I'm here, I'm with you, he whispered gently.

"You will tell us where the other one is," the half-man insisted, instantly shocking Rose back into the present danger that surrounded her.

"Nope," Rose answered him as resolutely as possible. You'd better have a plan ... she added venomously as she went against her better judgement and begrudgingly reached out to the Doctor once more.

Working on it, was the only reassurance that he offered her before he retreated back behind his mental barriers and the added presence in the back of her mind grew still once more.

"You will be destroyed," the cyborg stated plainly.

"Destroy me, then," Rose dared him ominously.

"The information can be extracted by means of your suffering," the man continued, the clockwork pieces of his brain rattling away as he seemed to consider her.

"Are you trying to scare me?" Rose muttered darkly. "Well, I'm already bloody terrified of dying, and I'll endure a lot of pain for a very long time before I give up the information that's keeping me alive. How long have you got?"

She stepped closer in an attempt to seem more intimidating, but was immediately startled back again when the half-man rose to his feet before her, detached his human hand from his right wrist, and began to advance on her with a glowing, blue torch of fire that extended from his arm.

"Okay! Okay, okay, okay, yes - I am crying," Rose admitted desperately as she felt the panicked tears beginning to spring up and overflow from within her, "but it's just because I am very, very frightened of you, and if you know anything about human beings, that means that you're in a lot of trouble!"

"Where is the other one?" the half-man repeated determinedly, taking another step towards her and brandishing the dangerous flame in her direction.

"I don't know," Rose admitted with a small, defeated sigh as she gazed up at the cyborg's face in unrestrained terror. "But I know where he will be - where he will always be." Please, Doctor, please don't leave me now ... she begged silently as she reached her hand out into the empty air behind her and closed her eyes tight as she also reached out with her mind. Please, please don't abandon me again ...

The hum in the back of Rose's mind swelled once more and formed into a deep, complicated emotion that she had never felt form the Doctor in any form before - something new and powerful that she had no name for at all.

"If the Doctor is still the Doctor," she continued, glaring at the cyborg as her confidence slowly began to return, "he will have my back."

Rose gasped in surprise despite herself as a hand suddenly grasped her own and pulled her roughly backwards. She turned around just in time to see the Doctor pulling a skin mask from off of his head to reveal those new features of his once more, a bright grin drawing up his features in the first real smile that she had seen on this body yet. She noticed that it made his lips look oddly crooked, as though he wasn't quite sure of how to form the shape of true amusement anymore.

"Hello, hello, rubbish robots," he greeted the cyborgs grandly. He turned to flash Rose an appreciative wink as he added, "Five-foot-one and crying - they never stood a chance."

Rose shot him an indignant look, but he ignored her as he turned his glare back on the man currently threatening her and Rose felt a swell of defensive anger sweep through their bond before he rushed forward and knocked the cyborg's flaming arm aside. "Stop it," he growled menacingly. "You're out of your depth, sir." He flashed Rose a considering look over his shoulder as he added, "You're brilliant on adrenaline, by the way, did I ever tell you that?"

"Yeah, and you're rubbish with timing!" she snapped back as she crossed her arms against her chest and stubbornly glared at him.

"Sorry, just got ... caught up in the moment," he muttered sheepishly.

"Yeah, isn't that what happened last time?" she sneered petulantly.

"What are you talking about?" the Doctor asked, narrowing his eyes on her in confusion.

"Although, I guess I really shouldn't be complaining," Rose continued as though she hadn't heard him. "At least this time you're not sneaking off to snog Madame de Pompadour!"

The Doctor's eyes grew wide as he stared at her in silence for a moment and Rose might have laughed at his expression if she weren't currently so cross with him, but as it was, she simply glared as realization slowly dawned over him.

"Ah!" he shouted in sudden understanding. "Ah, yes, of course! How could I forget Reinette!"

Rose could only stare at him with wordless, indignant anger as she pushed her burning hurt and resentment into her bondmate's thoughts and watched his big, dopey grin immediately disappear into a look of chastisement. It seemed that a lifetime spent being married to the Doctor still wasn't enough time to erase all of the pain that he had caused when he had abandoned her to go chasing after another pretty blonde woman all those years ago, and Rose had plenty of spite and anger left to go around.

"Right, sorry ..." he muttered awkwardly as he quickly attempted to backpedal and regain control of the conversation once more. "That's not exactly what I was meant to say ..."

"Oh, just get on with it," Rose growled as she rolled her eyes at him and forcefully pushed eighteenth-century France and the Doctor's silent, pleading thoughts for forgiveness out of her mind.

"Just say the word, dear," the Doctor muttered as he crossed the room to join her at her side, his movements stiff and awkward as though he wasn't even sure how to stand next to her anymore, let alone talk to her.

"I don't want to say it," Rose snapped stubbornly as she crossed her arms against her chest and the two of them stepped deftly out of the cyborg's reach.

"I've guessed it already," the Doctor assured her with a lofty, put-upon sigh.

Rose gritted her teeth in frustration once more as she reached up to press the comm link that Strax had inputted into the top button of her dress before she had come to the restaurant to seek out the Doctor, and in unison they stated the codeword that Madame Vastra had put in place: "Geronimo."

[keaalu]

Remember Me, chapter two

Title (chapter): Remember Me (02)

Series: Transformers, G1-based “Blue” AU

Rating: PG-13

Notes: In which we find out that what do you know, Ramjet’s trine aren’t a bunch of total incompetents, or at least not all the time.

               Today was apparently Slipstream’s turn to spark-sit.

               It hadn’t been, to start with – but Footloose had been called away at short notice to an emergency in the recycling plant on the edge of the district and pleaded his help. He didn’t mind giving his twin a hand, especially if it might lead to the opportunity to blackmail her later.

               Skydash might have been small, but that first-instar frame apparently had oversized tanks because she always had energy to spare. Keeping up with her was usually a collective affair. Only her dam Celerity seemed to be able to manage it on her own, and that was probably only because she was big enough for a cold-fusion core generator. (Slipstream tried not to be jealous of it.)

               Slipstream had collected his little cousin from Surefire, currently on spark-duty in the makeshift nursery in Celerity’s office, then joined up with a small group of close friends and family to take his mid-orn break in one of Deixar’s small new parks. It was greener than most Cybertronians were familiar with, but the trees weren’t just decorative – a small energy collector grafted onto each plant’s trunk fed power into the grid, or any tired machine that wanted to take advantage of it.

               After downloading the latest news to his wafer, the blue mech crashed out in the shade of a nice mature tree to read it while he charged. Longbeam and Whitesides sat together nearby, catching up on the gossip, sharing the remains of a bag of bright fulminating candies (probably swiped off Pulsar’s desk). Sunspot, one of Slipstream’s housemates, lounged full length nearby, chewing a stylus and preparing a playlist; the little yellow bike had almost offlined in shock at being invited to put something together for the Vosian celebrations, and had since spent at least ten orns solid doing nothing else.

               All the inactivity had left Skydash bored. Nobody was doing anything except talk and sit. She wanted to call “Unnolawp” and get him to take her flying, but her little transmitter didn’t have a good enough power output yet to reach him (she knew; she’d tried already) and Unnolseem wouldn’t call him for her.

               Unimpressed by having her family refuse to take her with them to New Vos, Skydash was busy trying to get to the tallest point on the small tree nearby, to see if it’d be tall enough for her to see all the way out there. Unfortunately the spindly trunk wasn’t really up to supporting her weight, and every time she got a fraction higher than halfway, it bowed almost all the way in half to dump her back on her small aft.

               So frustrating!

               She sprawled dramatically over her cousin’s lap, on top of his newssheet, scrolling through a dozen or so pages at once. “Unnolseem. Why Day not take?”

               Slipstream set his wafer to one side and flicked one of her tiny wing-nubs. “Didn’t we go through this two breems ago, Scraplet? Because he’s at work, and it’s a building site, and you’re still little and squish-able.”

               “Took before.”

               “He wasn’t at work before.”

               “But want see! Make fly!”

               “Footloose said she’d come and pick you up as soon as she was done with her latest trauma case, remember? Isn’t she good enough for going for a fly with?”

               Skydash thought about it for a few seconds. “Yes? Not Day.”

               “Ugh. Some people are never satisfied.”

               With an exaggerated roll of the optics, Slipstream rolled her out of his lap and tumbled her down the little slope; giggling, she finally fetched up against Longbeam. The tall femme peered down on her for a second before posting a candy into the small mouth that opened expectantly at her, like the gape of a baby bird.

               No wonder Dash kept them running most of the time. She was always getting topups.

               Slipstream stretched out more comfortably and flicked his way back to his place in the news. It surely wouldn’t have been that big a deal to take the little scrap off to Vos? It wasn’t like she often actually detached from Thundercracker’s shoulders when the big jet was looking after her.

               The sound of approaching jet engines shaded subtly into his awareness. Slipstream looked up from his wafer, curiously – of his family, no-one was due back in the region for ten breems, and no other airframes lived very close to Deixar.

               He couldn’t see anything, and sent out a broad-ranging positional request instead.

               …and got nothing.

               Uneasy, he stood up to get a better look around. Why would someone privacy lock their basic signal data? He dipped into a police channel instead, and turned it into an official request for an ident.

               Still nothing. Slag. He felt his pumps clicking subtly into a higher gear and defensive protocols coming online.

               Longbeam picked up on the use of the official cipher and looked up at him. “Problem, Seemo?”

               “You didn’t hear jets, just then?” At her nod, he added; “They’re not responding to my pings.” The sound of engines had disappeared; too abruptly to have just passed over. They must have landed.

               “You think they’re in trouble?” She stood and moved closer, lowering her voice.

               Something about the exact subharmonic frequency of the engine noise had upset his diagnostics in a very familiar way. “I think they are the trouble.”

               She straightened, subtly, suddenly anxious, and mouthed Decepticons? at him.

               “Not sure. Maybe?” He whispered the words back to her, even though he was aware that suddenly everyone was listening closely to him. “Might wanna get everyone out of the open, just in case.”

               “Good idea.” Longbeam crouched next to her sibling. “Whitesides? Might need you to run interference for me…”

               Slipstream turned his attention towards Thundercracker, out in New Vos. -sent anyone to Deixar?- he asked. -got company, no ident-

               No reply. Wait, no. Not no reply… his signal wasn’t even getting out. Something was jamming him-!

               At last, Slipstream realised Skydash was talking to him.

               “…Who they, unnol? Who coming?”

               Slag! Too close already!

               Slipstream turned, alarmed, and barely had the chance to register the large white body hurtling in his direction before he was impacted by a violent tackle that sent them both crashing into the vegetation. The poor tree didn’t stand a chance, exploding into matchsticks around them.

               The final impact with the ground destabilised all his gyroscopes and left him flat on his back, groaning. Ramjet!

               “You’re coming with us, short stuff,” he heard the jet snarl, over the disorienting echo of rebalancing audios. A big hand clamped down on his wrist and yanked him unceremoniously back to his feet. He promptly went all the way over and ended up on his hands and knees instead, almost falling on top of Whitesides.

               The smaller mech was already tensed into a subtle crouch, fingers curled into fists, looking like he was about to hurl himself into the fight; alarm flashed like cold fingers up the back of Slipstream’s helm. What the bike thought he’d actually achieve by joining the brawl, Slipstream had no idea; Ramjet must have out-massed him by three times his own weight, and was damn near impossible to incapacitate through brute force alone. The diminutive mech would get flattened in an instant.

               “No, run! Get helmmmf!” Slipstream managed to splutter, before an arm came around his throat and a big hand flattened over his mouth, hauling him backwards.

               Whitesides didn’t need telling twice. He folded up into his alt mode and was gone in a flash of dust towards the station. Sunspot high-tailed it in the exact opposite direction. Longbeam was already nowhere to be seen.

               Late to the party, his wingmates dithered on the pavement, not sure which one to chase.

               “Leave ‘em!” Ramjet snapped, struggling to wrangle the smaller mech. “Gimme a hand here, will you?”

               “But they’re gonna raise the alarm-!” Thrust protested.

               “Of course they are, Primus-! That’s the point! Leave them! The block on their comms won’t last long, we’ve gotta get back to the bridge before they can stop us getting through-”

               Using his captor’s momentary inattention, Slipstream got his feet back under himself and shoved backwards, hard. It toppled Ramjet past his centre of gravity, and both went sprawling with a crunch. The smaller mech threw himself away to one side, scrabbling for his footing.

               Ramjet secured a tenuous hold on one ankle and tripped their quarry over again. “So help me Primus, if you two frag this thing up-!”

               Stung into action, Thrust finally piled into the fray. Before the teleport could triangulate an escape route, he lunged and landed square on his back. “Well if you could try and keep a grip on the sparkling, that’d be real helpful.” Wrenching Slipstream’s arms back behind him, he hauled him right up off his feet – unintentionally giving their prey a platform to launch a kick that connected with Ramjet’s face with enough force to knock him clean onto his aft.

               Ramjet snarled and cursed; the kick had fractured his cheek. “He’s a slagging cop, for Primus sake, steal his pitfragged cuffs-! Dirge! The frag are you even doing?”

               The blue jet was barely paying attention, approaching the splintered ruins of the tree Ramjet had destroyed. “I think I see something-“

               “Dirge-! Primus, we don’t have time-! ”

               Dirge ignored him, focused on the shape he’d spotted. Rounding the mess of broken branches, he found something tall and white, trying to pick something up off the floor without drawing too much attention to itself.

               Their optics met and for an instant, they just stared at each other.

               Dirge’s lips drew back in an unhealthy smile.

               Longbeam exploded into action, apparently going to try and outpace him on foot, something small clutched in her arms. She barged into him with her shoulder as she passed, overbalancing him into the bushes, and was halfway up the street in seconds, apparently aiming for a narrow alleyway.

               “Oh please.” Dirge watched her run, amused, then revved his thrusters, creating that precise engine harmonic that put even his allies on edge.

               The bike made a little noise of alarm and stumbled, tripped against a kerb and fetched up on her hands and knees. The small bundle slipped from her arms and tumbled away across the pavement, disappearing into the alleyway.

               Dirge followed, at a more casual pace. “Running away? Nice. That’s one I haven’t seen in a while.”

               Longbeam was fast – already back on her feet, her small sidearm was in her hand, her arm swinging up to shoot – but Dirge was faster. He delivered a quick pulse from his cannon, instantly obliterating the weapon… and most of the hand holding it. The force of the blast spun her around and slammed her shoulder-first into the wall. She choked out a horrible half-sob of pain.

               Dirge ambled over, still purring that hideous fear-inducing sing-song. She scrambled backwards on her aft, away from him, injured arm clutched across her chassis and fans huffing out increasingly warm air. She whooped her siren, trying to threaten him away.

               “This almost makes up for not being allowed to shoot Starscream.” The blue jet dropped to one knee beside her, and flattened a palm over her mouth. “Tell Skywarp I said thanks, Squeaky,” he murmured, before pressing the emitter cone of one cannon into her midsection.

               She knew immediately what he was going to do and braced her feet against him, to try and kick his arm away, but the battle was hopelessly one-sided, over before it even started. The shot was underpowered, but tore all the way through her flank, shredding superstructure. She arched under his hands, screaming against his palm, thrashing against the unforgiving dirt. A sludge of energon and other fluids immediately began to puddle beneath her.

               “All right, that’s enough of that.” Keeping his hand flattened over her face, he gave her a single sharp shove, cracking the back of her head into the ground. Her siren died with a strangled squeak of pain. “Now, where did your little friend go?”

               Leaving his wingmates still trying to wrangle Slipstream, Dirge followed the signal into the alley, towards a little gap between dumpsters. A chilly, flickery blue light filled the space, leading him precisely where he needed to go.

               He crouched to find Skydash huddling into a corner, trying ineffectively to hide from him.

               Dirge picked the small body up in both hands, and held the sparkling at arm’s length; she turned her face away, frozen in fear by the subtle noise of his cycling thrusters. “My. You have been a busy mech, Skywarp. I’d have thought your two little pit-spawn were more than enough.”

               He re-emerged to an assortment of glares, and Thrust had his hands over his audio venting, as if that’d somehow help block out the sound. In spite of Dirge’s uncomfortable broadcast, they’d maintained the upper hand; with both his wrists and ankles finally cuffed, Slipstream had crumpled in the restraining arms, huffing softly in fright.

               “Do you have to do that?” Ramjet snapped.

               Dirge smirked. Yellow fingers had left three bright streaks of warpaint across his cheek. “Sorry. Only way I could catch it.” He lifted the sparkling with a hand around her neck, unable to help preening at his wingmates’ sudden looks of amazement.

               “Where in Pit did you find that?!”

               “I’ll tell you on the way.” Dirge tucked his small prisoner into his cockpit. “Didn’t you say we needed to get to the bridge before anyone could raise the alarm?”

----------

               In the recycling plant in Deixar West-13-B, Footloose straightened up bolt upright, promptly dropping the arm of the poor mech she was working on. “Seem?”

               The mech gave a shriek of pain and turned the air briefly blue, making her fellow paramedic jump and almost drop his other arm. Footloose ignored him; no-one capable of that many decibels could be too badly injured.

               Without any warning, her twin brother’s signal had just… vanished. As split sparks, they could almost always perceive each other’s presence in some way, and now there was just nothing. It either meant he was a seriously long way out of range, or had stopped transmitting, and neither was good. For a spark to stop transmitting? Yeah, that was some seriously bad slag.

               She lurched to her thrusters. “Sorry, Braze, I’ve got to go. This is our last patient, right?”

               Her fellow paramedic looked up at her, alarmed. “What’s happened?”

               “Seem’s gone right off the registry. I can’t see him any more. I’ve gotta chase this.” She shook her head. ”You can cope, yeah? Love you!”

               She kicked off and after barely an astro-second of flight, teleported out of view.

               Braze stared at the spot she’d occupied an instant previously, and wondered how bad the trouble was.

----------

               In the breems after the Coneheads had fled, Longbeam had somehow managed to regain her feet, heeling dramatically over on her injured side and trailing dirty purple footprints.

               After a small eternity, she finally staggered into the reception area of Deixar Central Station, still trailing a slimy mess of mixed fluids behind her, and collapsed against Whisper’s desk. She was dimly aware of the desk sergeant leaping from his chair and yelling for help, even as her legs lost their strength and she sagged to the floor, dragging energon-covered paperwork down with her.

               A confusing swirl of colleagues surrounded her, but she couldn’t pick anyone out of the mass, or even process the words being spoken, any more.

               “Decepticons,” she managed, before the light in her optics guttered and consciousness finally left her.

[writerly-owl-blog]

Undead: Chapter One

Summary: It’s been a year since the unexplained rising of the dead and mass infection of the millions, but Lance is managing to survive. He even thinks he’s doing pretty damn well, as fighting for your life goes, until he meets Keith - the boy with the sword and quiet words and constant plan. Mix in Hunk and Pidge, and they’ve got a solid team of four and a solid method of survival, but when they stumble into a hostage, an experimental, mad genius, and the odd truth, keeping some semblance of a nice, unconfrontational life may not be as easy as they had originally thought.

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

On AO3

CHAPTER ONE

Lance had gotten so used to the groans and moans of the undead that an actual, real life scream startles him more than anything.

He jumps in place a bit, broken glass crunching beneath his worn-out boots, and gingerly steps to the side to avoid getting properly speared via the wide gap in his shoe that spans from his callused toes to the middle of his foot. He isn’t having a repeat of the car window incident the other day, that’s for sure. He refuses.

“Oh, god,” Lance mutters with his mouth full, his eyes rolling of their own accord. His hand clenches into a fist at his side, the muffin wrapper noisily crumpling between his fingers.

Of course, a cry for help had to come around when he had a blueberry muffin half-stuffed into his mouth for the first time in what seems like years. His eyes close, his throat humming an old tune that he can’t quite remember the origin of,  his tongue swirling around the bits of gloriously sugary yet admittedly stale muffin. Lance isn’t complaining about it, though. Not at all. Honestly, he’s had much worse, like the raw fish he’d somehow managed to catch a few weeks ago, his feet plunged into the muddy water, his hands attempting to grasp it by the tail or the middle. The fish was like a bar of soap in the way it struggled to escape from his damp fingers - a bar of soap that bites, leaving him a nice scab for his troubles.

So, given the risk of eating raw local wildlife in a land filled with the diseased undead, he’d been thrilled to see a prize for his troubles few days later while walking down the interstate with the sun beating on his back - a perfectly wrapped, dainty granola bar, sitting there in its tantalizing way on a piping-hot leather seat in the back of a car. Nice and shiny, its silver wrapping fiercely reflecting the sun. Undisturbed. Perfect.

Yes, the glass of the car window had stuck into Lance’s elbow - he couldn’t find anything else better to ram the window with. Yes, he’d spent a good thirty minutes afterwards picking it out by the car after he’d claimed his meal, hissing curses underneath his breath. And yes, once he’d stepped forward, patting himself on the back for a job well done, he’d stepped on a particularly nasty shard that found itself lodged in his foot.

No, he was not happy about it. So really, all fish and granola bars considered, the muffin was a steal.

“Hold on, m’comin,” he mutters to himself after he stuffs the rest of the pastry into his mouth, his hand reaching for the old-fashioned pistol that he’d swiped from a raid on what seemed to be an old woman’s house, judging from the doilies and the dolls. She’d had plenty of ammo, too, which made Lance question her hobbies, but whatever hobbies they were, he hopes she’s having a grand old time doing them in the afterlife. Or wherever she is.

Whatever. He doesn’t care. But he does care about the yell that rings out again, right from beside the gas station in a separate building that houses an old run-down car wash.

“I’m coming! Jeez, stop yelling!” he says again, louder this time. Lance quickly checks the ammo  - five more rounds, wonderful - and he has to ram his shoulder into the rusted-out door in desperate need of WD-40 to burst it open, curving a hard left toward the Soap n’ Suds.

He vaguely remembers Soap n’ Suds from when he was very small, just a tot in a car seat, and and absolutely, mortifyingly terrified of car washes. Nothing struck fear into the heart of young Lance like the smiling red cartoon car looming outside of his window, telling of the horrors of strange tornado-like wipers that were looming just around the corner.

Nothing strikes fear into Lance’s heart like the rotting stench of walking corpses, either, which blasts into him like an unwelcome sauna of smell the moment he enters the car wash through the back end instead of the front. Call him a rebel. Bad to the bone.

Also call him a scared soul that screeches as a teen his age just about backs into him, his muscles straining as he hefts up an old-fashioned, rusting sword and swipes it toward one of the many zombies that stutter toward him on uncertain feet. One of them is nothing but half of a formerly full person, both of its eyes completely missing, but thankfully nowhere around, dragging itself forward by its surprisingly muscular arms, scrabbling at the boy’s ankles. The boy grunts, delivering a swift kick to the zombie’s head, but another zombie has just about caught up to him, its hand scattered with bloody hangnails, open flaps of flesh that ooze out purple and yellow and all the colors Lance would rather a wound not be, frankly.

“Get it!” Lance screeches, taking deep breaths to calm himself into the Sharpshooting Zone - a certain state of mind that he indulges himself in, whenever the situation calls for it.

Step back. Take a breath. Aim for the head. Shoot.

His finger slams against the trigger without a second thought.

His bullet smashes into the crawling zombie’s brain while the other teen sticks his sword clean through the neck of the other, grimacing as it crashes to its knees, gore and gut spilling from the cut. He plants a foot on its chest for leverage and yanks the blade out, looking toward Lance with wide eyes, and in that moment, Lance can only think one thing, zombies be damned.

“Is that a mullet?” he asks in bewilderment, pointing toward the other’s hair that curls ever so slightly at the nape of his neck. The other frowns, his self-consciously hand raising to his hair, but his eyes widen as Lance abruptly swings the front of his pistol toward his head, eyes narrowing, breath bated.

“Don’t move,” Lance mutters, gritting his teeth. The other freezes. Lifts his hands in surrender.

The pistol goes off, steadied by Lance’s hand, and something whizzes past the other’s ear, sharp as a whistle. A groan scooped from the pits of something’s belly wheezes into the air. Slick, hot blood pools against the back of his legs, spreads on the ground like a messy art project, minus the glitter. Glitter would be nice. Maybe a bit morbid, given the circumstances, but nice.

The other boy quickly takes a few steps forward, twisting around to glance at the fallen zombie for a moment or two, before locking eyes with Lance.

And oh. Lance has never seen eyes like that.

Or a mullet like that.

“Seriously, man, a mullet?” Lance says again, clicking the safety on his pistol, pressing a hand to his belly as he begins to laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

“Hey!” the other groans at him, chin tilted up. “I love my mullet.”

“Good. At least someone does.” Lance cracks up at his own joke, flashing a smile at the pinched look on the other’s face. “You deserve to be teased after ruining my  muffin moment.”

“Your…” The other trails off, eyebrows knitted together.

“My muffin moment. Yes. It’s hard to find food, y’know,” Lance says defensively, shoving the pistol into his oversized pocket attached to his oversized pants that barely hang on to his hips, their saving grace an old brown belt. “If you’re looking for some, it’s in that gas station over there.”

“Oh. Thanks.” The other pauses for a moment, pursing his lips, before his eyes flick back up toward Lance’s. “What’s your name?”

“Lance. Otherwise known as the man who just saved your life. You?”

“I’m sure I would’ve been just fine. And it’s Keith.”

“Nice.”

And the two stand in silence.

“Sooooo. Where’re you headed?” Lance awkwardly asks, shuffling a foot into the concrete.

“I…have no idea.”

“Cool. Same.”

More silence. Then -

“Safety in numbers.” It’s Keith, his eyes locked on Lance’s again. Purple? Blue? Lance doesn’t know, but he tries to search out every individual fleck of color, out of sheer curiosity, of course. Not because they’re pretty. Of course not. That would be ridiculous.

“Yeah. You wanna come with?” He pointed his thumb proudly to his chest, flashing a cheesy smile. “I’m the best sharpshooter on this side of the country!”

“Yeah, I saw,” Keith says, whirling his sword in his hands. “And I stab.”

“A sharpshooter and a stabber. What else does one need?” Lance jokes, beginning to stroll out of the small stall of rubber tornadoes and endless smiling car doodles. He doesn’t ask about the sword. He’s seen weirder weapons in this new world.

“That’s a good question,” Keith dryly notes, beginning to follow, and there’s no trace of a smile on his face. In fact, Keith hasn’t laughed at any of Lance’s jokes. Not a one.

Challenge accepted.

_______

One of the first thing Lance notes about Keith is that he isn’t a talker. Notably so.

This first occurs to him in the first few hours that they’re walking on the road, the dry, hot sun sending sweat pouring down their necks, pooling in the collars of their shirts, but besides the obvious, imminent heat stroke approaching, Keith still can’t seem to take that damn red jacket off.

“Aren’t you hot?” Lance pipes up a few miles down the road, his hand carefully rested on his pistol. Keith’s eyes flicker to his as if alarmed, or waking from a particularly intense dream. Or both.

“Uh. No.”

“Oh…well.” Lance chokes on his words, pulling down on the sleeves of his old green jacket that’s tied around his waist, marked with bold yellow rectangles on the side. He remembers when it wasn’t so tattered and faded, particularly in the house - draped over the wooden dinner table, hung up in him and his brother’s walk-in closet, in the corner of his eye during the occasional scuffles they’d get into over who was to wear it that day, or that week. It was rarely washed, always crusted over with the  remains of beans they’d had for dinner, or a spot of sticky Coca-Cola, but when it was washed once in a blue moon it was as soft as a piece of prized felt, smelling of the old familiar detergent his family used. It was always the same brand, for as long as he can remember - it smelled of lilac and lavender, like clean, space-themed sheets and the hoodies he’d used to wear all the time.

He doubted he’d ever smell that ever again, given what’s happened. If they ever  were blessed by the miracle of stumbling by a grocery store, he’d probably scan the cleaning aisles, searching for it. Just for a whiff of home.

Home. Safety. The opposite feeling that flashes through Keith’s eyes as they  zero in on his arm, carefully scan over his trigger-happy fingers.

“Not for you, buddy. I thought I’d proved that earlier,” he says, pursing his lips.

“Yeah. It’s just. You can never be-”

“Too careful, yeah.” His sister had always said that. Her and her smart mouth, and her tough attitude that knew just when to be soft on him. Her and her sisterly advice to her clumsy, rambunctious younger brother.

Lance sniffs.

Keith whips his head toward him, an odd look plastered on his face, as if he were about to perform open-heart surgery on someone without even knowing how to  do chest compressions.

The old Lance would joke. Flash him a set of finger guns, say some joke to throw the whole situation on its head, blowing the other person’s mind - obviously. When did he not blow anybody’s mind? Never, that’s when.

So the old Lance is still there. Obviously. Just dormant. Hiding, ever since his mother was the first to go. Afraid to let go, drown into itself, lose all the seriousness needed to survive.

But damn, if it didn’t burst out sometimes. Just…not now.

_____

During dinner, or during the meal in which what meager food they’ve both stacked up and traded is choked down as soon as humanly possible, Lance actually decides to try.

He had to admit that he was liking the current fire they had going - the land had a habit of turning from a summer-in-California kind of temperature to one of an indoor penguin exhibit the moment the sun dipped below the horizon, the kind that caused Lance to shrug his green jacket back on and lean towards the pocket of warmth, the leaping licks of orange and yellow. The two are closely surrounded by leafy greens in the untamed bits of vegetation on the side of the two-lane highway, just off the road sign that warns of deer and car crashes and things nobody has to worry about anymore.

“So you know how to make a fire, woodsy guy,” Lance says as they plop down on the ground, tearing into his beef jerky like a wild beast. He grimaces as soon as the unfortunate taste hits his tongue. Pepper jerky. He’d never been a fan of it, sure, but he’d be a fan of Spam itself if it meant he didn’t have to starve. “What were you, a boy scout?”

Keith doesn’t answer for a moment, and Lance thinks he’s not going to respond at all, before he does. “Nah. I used to live in the woods,” Keith muses, slipping those poor excuses for gloves off of his fingers, letting the flames flicker closer to his fingers than probably advised by Smoky the Bear. “I made a lot of them. It always came naturally.”

“You lived in the woods? Like, in a tent?” Lance hates camping. Poison ivy. Mosquitos. Which is a lot like the position he’s in, right this second.

Probably not a good time to mention that. Or think too hard about it.

“No, I lived in a cabin.”

“With your family?”

“Nope. Just me.” He says it so simply, without much emotion, and Lance can’t quite pick up on how he feels about that. Just a vagabond teen, living in the woods. No big deal.

Lance can’t imagine life without his family.

Well. Actually, he can, now.

“Oh. Did you like it?” Lance hesitantly asks, sipping loudly on one of the multiple water bottles that he has stuffed in his industrial-grade, probably atomic-bomb-proof backpack that he’s had since the 8th grade. He imagines himself like a Lance-shaped camel, hoarding his goods in the bag hump for a later day. Or a camel-shaped Lance? Either way, Keith speaks before he can delve into that particular topic.

“Sometimes.”

And that’s all Keith has to say about that.

The silence means that Lance can hear the fire peacefully crackling, a low, comforting noise that reminds him of home almost as much as lavender and lilac, taking him back to the fire pit they’d built in the back yard when he was six and had a hankering for some s’mores, a trait that never really left him. But it also means that he can hear the eerie whistling of the wind rusting through the trees as if disturbing them on purpose, cruelly tearing its leaves off and slamming them into the ground. One of them, an enormous, broad oak leaf, slaps Lance square in the forehead, pasting itself firmly to his face thanks to the wind, and Lance lets out an almost feral growl as he scrabbles at its edges, flinging it into the fire.

“Stupid leaf,” he mutters, scrubbing his hands all over his face to rid it of its itching, and Keith’s head is bowed, his bangs flopping over his forehead in an oily mess.

It takes Lance far too long to recognize the solitary shake of his shoulders, the crest of a grin glinting on his face for a blessed moment, before it disappears.

“Are you laughing at me?” Lance squawks, winding his arms together in a tight knot. “I’ll have you know, that leaf was brutal! I could have died!”

Of all the things that made Keith laugh, it had to be a leaf attacking Lance’s face. If that momentary scoff could be counted as a laugh, that is.

When Keith looks up, however, his expression is much more sober, his eyes glinting with something drained of all amusement and filled with wary, careful flickers of…something. Fear? Apprehension? Confusion?

“I wonder where they are,” he quietly says, his voice carrying along with the wind, but Lance manages to hear it.

“Who?”

“I mean, we haven’t seen many today. I wonder if they’re hiding.”

Oh. Them.

“Or maybe there aren’t many in this area. We’re kind of in the middle of nowhere, here,” Lance counters.

“It’s still not…right.” Keith’s face is pinched, even more than the regular, run of the mill Keith-pinch that Lance has begun to recognize in such a short time. His hands fiddle in his lap, turning something over, and over, and over, and Lance would ask, pry into it, if he wasn’t hit with a sudden wave of exhaustion. His little-sleep high had just crashed. Shit.

“Hey, I’m gonna get some sleep. Wake me up when it’s time for me to be sentry,” Lance murmurs, wincing as he shoves his backpack off his back and huddles onto it like a pillow. Only the pillow is filled with the uncomfortable edges and bumps of plastic water bottles.

Water bed. It’s a water bed. Sure.

And despite the screeching of the wind grating against his eardrums, and Keith’s constant poking at the fire, leaving the logs of wood rolling over each other, he somehow finds solitude, pulled down into an uneasy yet dreamless sleep.