#this is not a vague nor a call-out this is me organizing my thoughts

[soramystic]

The actual Plot of Kingdom Hearts

Okay so here’s something that’s been bothering me that I haven’t seen anyone talk about; the macro story of Kingdom Hearts. Because it’s easy to point and kind of laughingly go “what is the plot of Kingdom Hearts anyway”, and with all the talk of Darkness and Light and Keyblades and friendship and Hearts it’s easy to lose track of so okay. Let’s take a look at what we got. The overall, actual plot of Kingdom Hearts.

So let’s zoom out. Let’s zoom all the fucking way out. The biggest scale we can go to; the two fundamental forces of Light and Darkness.

Kingdom Hearts is, fundamentally, the story of Light persevering. Let me explain.

We start with the Chi-saga. It’s the Age of Fairy Tales, the realm of Light is thriving, and as someone once so succinctly put it, everyone and their grandma has a Keyblade. This is Light at its peak. I’d even go so far as to suggest that this is the only point in the story where Light and Darkness are fully balanced. The Master of Masters does mention a before-time where he and others waged war on Darkness, so maybe not a perfect balance, but the percentages are pretty much even.

But Darkness starts to creep in, do what it does best and corrupt from the inside out. Then Daybreak Town is gone and the Keyblade Wielders are greatly diminished. The ability becomes less common, and those who possess it are to be trained carefully. Missing Link isn’t out yet so we can’t assess the state of the Light during that period, but we don’t need to, because we have Dark Road.

Keyblade Wielders are pretty much entirely limited to Scala, Daybreak Town’s descendant. (…Theory that Daybreak Town/Scala Ad Caelum is a stronghold for the Light, but that’s for another time) From what we see in Dark Road, there are still enough people with the ability to justify setting up a school for, but by the end? Darkness has struck again, and Odin is no longer accepting students, leaving himself, Xehanort, and Eraqus as the last Keyblade Wielders (not counting Luxu and Yen Sid for obvious reasons.)

Which then leads us into Birth By Sleep. How many Keyblade Wielders do we have aside from Xehanort and Eraqus? Well, there’s the Wayfinder Trio, Vanitas, and Mickey. That’s five people. Five. From the thousands upon thousands that we started out with.

And they fall. Eraqus dies. Ventus is seized by sleep, taking Vanitas with him. Aqua seals herself in the Realm of Darkness. Terra is both literally and metaphorically ripped to shreds. They still live, but they are in no condition to protect the Realm of Light, and even if either Ansem or Xemnas had the ability to wield a Keyblade, they wouldn’t want to. Arguably we still have Mickey, but let’s count: that’s ONE. PERSON. One. One person against the Darkness that has broken and corrupted so many worlds, so many people. The Realm of Light is in danger. The Realm of Light is dying. The Light is dying.

So what does the Light do? One last-ditch attempt at saving itself – it takes its Keyblade, and finds a suitable Wielder. And it finds one. A child, bequeathed even, with the overwhelming desire to protect those he holds dear. And the Light thinks perfect.

But Riku chooses the Darkness. The Darkness could grant his wish, and due to the darkness already inside him – jealousy and arrogance, he accepted its offer. So where does this leave the Realm of Light? Any potentional Wielders have either abandoned the path of the Keyblade, or were taken off of it thru no fault of their own. The Realm of Light is done for.

Except it’s not.

Because you can argue that all of this came later, this giant macro story. All this history, this context was added by the later games. Right?

Except it wasn’t.

Because they say it. They tell you outright. They say it in the very first game: the story of Light fading, and how it survived in the hearts of children.

In the face of overwhelming darkness and despair, worlds crumbling and without his friends, without his weapon at one point even, Sora didn’t give up. Even traveling to the End of the World and seeing the shards of the worlds that already fell, that couldn’t hold out, he stared Ansem in the face and told him he was wrong. That the true nature of all things was not Darkness. That Kingdom Hearts is Light.

And so it was Light.

Light persevered in his heart - literally, even; he sheltered Kairi, a Princess of Heart. A heart of pure Light.

Light survives in the hearts of children.

And from there the tide turns. The Light is back, it has a foothold again, it has defenders.

Because that’s the thing. Kingdom Hearts wasn’t threatened by Ansem. If it were, Sora would likely have been given the X-Blade. But he got the Key of Light. Called the Kingdom Key, yes, but still the Keyblade for the Realm of Light. Because the Realm of Light needed his help, the Realm of Light was in danger.

So yeah, after that there are more Keyblade Wielders. Of course there are; the Light is finally able to fight back, once again trying to achieve a balanced state.

The fight against Darkness is never over, and it never will be. That’s how this universe works. But if this series has taught us anything, it’s that no one is ever wholly evil and no one is ever wholly good. Everyone has a little darkness, just as everyone has a little light. You simply choose for yourself which one to nourish.

The Light is not inherently good – we see this most prominently in Eraqus, who believes Darkness must be defeated and that if anyone possesses any darkness, they are evil. But the Darkness is not inherently evil either – as showcased by Riku.

Light and Darkness are two forces who need each other as much as they hate each other, and the power they grant is just that; power. Power is power, it’s just a tool. No morality attached.

The heart is a mess. Not fully good, not fully evil. Not fully light nor fully dark. One cannot exist without the other, and full dominance from either side is no good. The greater the light, the greater the shadow, right?

There must be balance. And balance takes hard work, and dedication, and no easy way out.

And the Hero of Light works harder than anyone else.

That’s why Sora is special. Not because he’s “the only one who can wield a Keyblade” (also who even said that? Riku? Literally what the fuck does he know he was being manipulated by Ansem and Maleficent), but because he was literally the least qualified person in the room and still made it work. Because of who he is. That’s why the Light chose him.

Light perseveres.

Sora perseveres.

That is the plot of Kingdom Hearts.

[mothiir]

penance

the black templars discover human women. Nothing nsfw, only vaguely lewd, with canon typical violence and religious themes. Possibly will follow up with a smut if the spirit moves me

alternative summary: where is this strumpet so I might detest her with my own eyes

—

—

Isaiah takes his helm off to inhale the sweet scent of battlefield smoke. The sky is ruddy with dawn, and the last of the heretic cities is nothing more than smouldering rubble, the would-be rebels against the Emperor’s Will either dead or soon to be. Those too young, or too elderly, to have served a meaningful part in the uprising may yet find redemption as Chapter serfs or servitors — after all, there is little point to justice if there is no mercy to go alongside it. 

Sweat gilds his high cheekbones, and drips down his nape. Taking a moment away from his brothers to say his private prayer of thanks to the Emperor is one of the small ways Isaiah keeps his sanity during these long campaigns. He would fight and die beside his brethren with pride — and yet if he has to hear one more of Reuben’s jokes, he may consider —

No. No, none of that, not even in the privacy of his own head: he must be grateful, always. Mindful and grateful of the Emperor’s blessings. Reuben is a blessing. A hardship, yes, but so often blessings take the form of hardships; of lessons to learn. Reuben is an excellent soldier, and an exercise in patience. 

Perhaps it is the thought of Reuben’s damned puns that drives him further than usual, or the desire to admire the sight of a battle hard-fought. Either way, Isaiah ends up a good five hundred feet from camp before he quite realises it, crunching over charred bones and burned, unrecognisable standards.

Then: a sound. Thin, high, and vaguely organic. At once, he replaces his helmet, Captain Ezra’s words echoing in his memory: boy, there is no point prancing around like the main character in a holo — the enemy does not need to see your pretty face, and nor do I.

Anyway. The noise. His scanners alert him to a life form, hidden behind a pile of corpses. Humanoid. Rabbit-hearted, and trying very hard to remain unseen. 

He upholsters his bolter, and stalks forwards: a faceless, merciless instrument of the Emperor’s wrath. 

—

The clouds hang thick and red, like they have absorbed all the blood spilt today, and the heat is oppressive. A thunderstorm is coming; you taste it in the air. Soon, the rain will extinguish the last of the flaming rubble on this planet you once called home. It will fill the empty eye sockets of those who died for the delusions of your rulers. It will wash the land clean. 

And you doubt you will see it. 

As the Templar yanked you from the rubble, your shoulder had popped from its socket with a sick, wet crack; you had only kept yourself from crying out by biting into your tongue. Now your right arm hangs useless by your side, radiating bright veins of sheer agony. You daren’t make a move to cradle it, to ease your discomfort. 

“Your world is guilty of the crime of sedition,” intones the Templar, his voice as final as a tombstone falling into place. “Your leaders rebelled against the Divinity of the Emperor, and —“

”And I should die for it,” you manage, through lips gummed together with dried saliva and ash. “Because we let it happen.”

He pauses. The subtle tilt of his helm could be curiousity; could be an invitation to continue; could be nothing at all. But you are not dead. Not yet. Something in your chest is kindled, and you remember when you were little, at a school now nothing but ash, how your teacher would complain: that girl, she always has something to say.   

“We let it happen,” you continue, not sure if you are arguing for your life or begging for martyrdom. “We saw the upper echelons turn to Ch — the accursed powers.” Thou shalt not speak the name of the beast, you remember reading somewhere, lest thou invite it in to feast. “And we did not stop them. We worked away, heads bent and faces averted, and we obeyed orders, and the rot spread and ruined our world. I — I thank you, for your cleansing fire, for your — for His mercy. For bringing the Light of the Emperor to this place.”

You cannot curtesy, not in this shape, and so you drop straight to the ground, knees smacking into hard stone. You bare your nape, awaiting judgement, awaiting the blade, your heart singing against your ribs, that desperate song, that too-late plea: oh I want to live. Emperor above, let me live. 

—

“That is a woman,” says Reuben, like he has never seen one before. 

”Yes, Reuben, that is a woman.”

“In our dormitory.”

”Yes,” Isaiah says. ”She is in our dormitory.”

As this world lacks any proper infrastructure — due to the intensive bombing campaign needed to bring it back to the Emperor’s Grace — the Astartes have retired to their battle barge, as Marshal Ezra Rothenberg plans their next movements. 

Isaiah is honoured to consider himself part of the Edessan Crusade. There are more than two thousand of his brothers dedicated to the continued extirpation of Chaos from the Edessan system: a task that was predicted to take ten solar years, and yet is proceeding far ahead of schedule — due, in no small part, to the enthusiastic participation of the new recruits Guilliman so kindly provided them. If Guilliman hoped that the Primaris Marines would take the edge off the Black Templar’s well-known zealotry, he was swiftly disappointed. Within a few days of arriving, the only way to differentiate between the new recruits and their more seasoned brothers was size. 

Isaiah shares a barren dorm with Reuben, and three other brothers. They sleep on plain metal bunks, with a rough woollen blanket and a thin pillow. Other Chapters, Isiaiah has heard, are so decadent and spoiled as to have duvets — which are sacks of feathers — and sometimes even something called a mattress? Absurd. He pities his fellow Primaris Marines, shipped out to such degeneracy. He hopes that they can cultivate an appropriate sense of duty and decorum in the older generation. How can anyone value such petty things as comfort when the Emperor’s enemies still draw breath?

You are sitting on Isaiah’s bed, the blanket around your shoulders, your eyes wide. You have not spoken since he brought you here — barely whimpered when he popped your shoulder back into place. 

“…what is her purpose here?” Reuben says. He sits on his own bunk, opposite Isaiah, his afternoon reading (a hagiography of one of the more exciting saints) sprawled forgotten on his lap. 

“Chapter serf,” says Isaiah. 

“Do we need more serfs?”

”Yes. We do. The ones we have are — uh —very devout — “

The pair grimace. The fact that the serfs spend so long in prayer is to be admired, but it doesn’t often leave them much time to perform their duties. Isaiah is sick of doing his own mending because Serf Osric and Serf Jean are once more faint from fasting and all-night vigils to the glory of the Emperor. 

“Did the Marshal allocate her to you?”

Isaiah pulls an interesting series of expressions. ”Not…exactly,” he allows, unwilling to lie, and yet not wanting to admit the truth. “But he has been…busy, of late.”

”Yes. Busy. With crusading against the Emperor’s enemies.”

”Too busy to be concerned with this sort of thing,” Isaiah says, hesitantly, dangling the bait before Reuben, waiting for him to take it. Reuben leans forwards to better observe you. Isaiah feels a strange twist of pride when you don’t cringe from his regard, but meet his dark eyes with your own, your chin tipped up, your fingers curling into the blanket. Then you suddenly seem to remember who you are, and where you are, and drop your head in supplication. 

“Yes,” Reuben says, slowly. “Far too busy to be concerned with this. Don’t want to bother him.”

Isaiah utters a fervent prayer of thanks to the Emperor, feeling only a little guilty at thanking Him for his brother’s aid in deceiving their Marshal. But it wasn’t really deception, was it? They weren’t lying to him at all — they just weren’t telling him! Completely different. 

“Exactly! It’s beneath his concern.”

”She’s beneath his concern!”

In total accord, both Templars grin at each other, before hurriedly smoothing their faces into expressions of solemn piety. 

“Yes, brother. I am glad that the Emperor has seen fit to deliver unto us a — hang on, can you sew?” Reuben says, addressing you directly. You glance up at Isaiah, then stammer:

“Y-yes my lord —“

“Excellent.”

Reuben kicks up and off his bunk, rummages in the steel box that contains all his worldly possessions, then throws a wad of fabric at you. It unfurls into a dozen pairs of socks that look very much worse for wear.

“Start with those. Then my tunic needs restitching — the Emperor’s Most Holy Iconography is starting to get a bit tattered. Then —“

”Brother Reuben, you cannot hog the new serf —“

”I am offering her the chance to redeem the sins of her forefathers and mothers with holy labour.“

“Well, yes,” Isaiah protests. “But the holy labour cannot just be confined to your menial tasks—“

”Why — do you have menial tasks that need attending to?”

”Yes!” Isaiah says, thinking of his own increasing pile of ragged undergarments. “You can mend Brother Reuben’s socks, and then you must attend to my laundry —“

”And then she can mend my tunic —“

”No, then she must pray,” Isaiah says, belatedly remembering the importance of even the most lowly baselines in adding their voices to the Emperor’s endless praises. “And attend chapel —“

”Where Marshal Ezra may behold her?” Brother Reuben says. “The serf that we do not strictly speaking have, as she has not been allocated to us?”

Ah. Yes. He had forgotten about that.

”She must pray while she works,” Isiaih amends. “And abase herself before the Emperor’s mercy.”

”Yes. But pray quietly.”

”Do you know the appropriate psalms to recite while conducting your redemptive labour?” Isaiah says. You chew your lip.

“The correct litanies while uh…mending the socks of the Emperor’s chosen may have not been included in my education,” you say. Isaiah sighs. Truly, you came from a blighted world. 

“You will learn them,” he says. “The Emperor will guide your tongue. If you fail to learn them then it is a sign that you have not received His Grace, and in that case fear not — we will deliver unto you the Emperor’s Mercy.”

“She will learn them,” Brother Reuben says, with a fervent and touching belief in humanity’s dedication to the Emperor.

 Or, perhaps, a fervent desire to have socks without holes in them. 

—

And so it goes. The Emperor sees fit to decree that the brothers that share Reuben and Isaiah’s quarters remain on the planet to build a chapter monastery there, taking advantage of the natural resources that are now free for use. No new brothers are installed in the dormitory — a great shame, of course, but it does have the benefit of ensuring that Brother Reuben and Isiaiah do not have to face awkward questions about your presence. 

Isiaiah has never been in close contact with baseline humans before, save the serfs aboard the fleet, and he knows that it is his duty to ensure that you are free of Chaos’s taint, and suitably devoted to the God Emperor. As such, he ensures that you have the appropriate reading material, and tests you to ensure that you can recite the benedictions. The first time you stumbled over an incorrect word, he had sighed deeply and sorrowfully, reaching for his bolter. Brother Reuben had dragged him to the side and explained — in hurried whispers — that humans do not have the same eidetic memory as Astartes, and the misstep was not indicative of a lapse in faith but simply a sign of your humanity. 

Fascinating. 

There are other baseline issues that surprise both brothers. They sleep perfectly well on their hard metal bed frames, and their serfs often deliberately braid thistles into their blankets in order to better scourge their flesh for the sin of being mortal. You, however, suffer greatly for the first few days. You end up with deep purple shadows beneath your eyes, and you wince when performing even the simplest of tasks. 

“I am sorry my lords,” you stammer, when Isaiah confronts you on your constant yawning. “It is just — I am cursed to be a woman, and thus I do not have the fortitude that you have, and my body is frail and weak and cannot find rest in the blessed conditions that you enjoy.”

Reuben magnanimously permits you the use of a blanket and two of the pillows left by his brothers. Isaiah thinks that pandering to your body’s frailty could well be slowing your path to redemption, but he bows to his brother’s greater knowledge. 

He is perturbed by how much you rest — as much as six hours a night, if you are permitted to sleep continuously. Once again, Reuben explains that this is normal for the baselines. Besides, if Isaiah wants devout serfs, he is more than welcome to once more entrust his care to Osric and Jean. 

Isaiah stops questioning your rest hours swiftly. He does not want to go back to the days of having to convince a flagellant to polish his pauldrons. Without the brothers seeking them out, the old serfs seem happy to spend most of their time in the chapel, or wandering the halls while caning themselves and loudly declaring the Emperor’s benevolence to all. 

Yes, Isaiah wants to say, we know He is very benevolent and very merciful. He also wants you to do your damn jobs. 

The first real challenge occurs ten days into your time aboard the barge. You drop to your knees before Isaiah, assuming the penitential crouch you always take on when you address either of them. The sight of you prostrate at his feet — spine a neat curve, head bowed, hands clasped — always makes Isaiah’s stomach warm and twist. He enjoys seeing you so keen to atone, so eager to please the Emperor, and to receive  His mercy. 

“My lords, I humbly beg your permission to take a moment to clean myself — I have not managed to do so since leaving my accursed planet, and I fear that I dishonour your presence by performing my duties while unwashed.”

”You have washed yourself,” Isaiah says, frowning. He’s seen you wipe your face and underarms with a wet rag, and you wash your hands every time you go to the bathroom (a sensitive experience for all concerned, given that one of them has to escort you to the nearest convenience, and the other has to stand watch to ensure no one sees you).

”Yes, but — a shower, my lords, that is what I am asking for.”

Isaiah sniffs the air thoughtfully. True, you do smell a little sourer than you did previously, but he has lived with far more odiferous people; Brother Reuben during his ‘bathing too frequently is decadent and an offence to the Emperor’ phase for one.

(That particular penitence had been ended when Marshal Ezra had thrown Reuben bodily into the icy plunge pool and announced to all that the Emperor suffered enough on His golden throne — the Templars did not need to add their stench to the tribulations He endured.)

”Humans require more maintenance than Astartes,” Reuben allows. “It cannot hurt to permit her to bathe.”

Still, they do not want to risk taking you to one of the communal showers, nor do they want to send you off to the serf quarters. Several of their brothers are already suspicious of their suddenly-improved attire, and the last thing either of them want is to face questions about your presence — or, worse still, a request to share. So Isaiah fetches a large copper tub used by the medicae for those too unwell to stand upright to bathe, and fills it with water, and Brother Reuben donates one of his scraps of yellow soap. 

“Th-thank you my lords,” you say, from your usual prostrate position; then you stand, a little unsure, eyeing them almost expectantly. The tub is set in the middle of the dormitory; Reuben is reading one of his favourite scriptures, while Isiaiah tends to his bolter. ”Uh — is it okay if I —“

You gesture at your smock. Isiaiah blinks at you. 

“Are you asking permission to bathe? I have said that you may — do not waste my time with needless questions.”

He turns back to his bolter, wiping the sacred oils onto the stock, murmuring the appropriate incantations to appease the machine spirit within. A flurry of fabric; a splash; a pained squeal. 

“This water is ice,” you yell, and Isaiah, startled, looks up. 

His hand remains looped around the bolter, polishing up and down, up and down — but he finds he cannot tear his gaze from you. The water comes up to your waist, but the rest of you is bare, your flesh goosepimpled from the cold, your arms clutching your torso. Your elbows press under your breasts, pushing them up, where they glisten under the harsh dorm lighting. As you shiver, one nipple flashes.

Brother Reuben stares as well. 

“Emperor preserve me,” he mutters, and Isaiah comes to his senses, turning his eyes aside. 

“Woman!” he says, sounding only a little strangled. “Cover yourself!”

Another splash. When Isaiah peeks up — just to check that you have ceased to offend the Emperor with your naked bosom — he is gratified to see that you are neck deep in water.

”S-sorry my lords,” you say, teeth chattering.

”You are a Chapter Serf of the Black Templars,” Isiaha says hotly, his grasp tightening on the bolter, his strokes growing surer and stronger, seeking solace in the familiar rhythm. “You must act in a way that is fitting for your station! Do not flaunt yourself so! You must conduct yourself with - with decorum, and modesty. Be demure! Mindful!”

Isaiah, a little breathless after his holy vitriol, looks to Brother Reuben for moral support. Reuben is looking fixedly at his book. 

“I saw nothing,” says the other Templar. “I am blind to that which does not beatify the Emperor Himself. The nudity of a serf has no bearing on my day’s prayer. It is as insignificant as the passage of a beetle along the floor.”

”Is that why you are reading your scripture upside down?”

Reuben does not look up, even as he turns the book the right way around. 

“Brother Isaiah, if you polish that gun any harder it is liable to blast a hole in the wall.”

”It is not loaded, Brother Reuben,” Isaiah snaps. “I am conducting my daily worship to the Machine Spirit.”

”Is that what you call it?” Reuben mutters, and Isaiah elects to ignore him. 

—

“Where did you obtain the uniform for her?” Isaiah says, the next day, his voice hushed. It is just after morning prayer-drills, and the pair are walking back to their dormitory to change, before their lunchtime prayer-drills.

”I — just from the other serf’s laundry,” says Reuben, casting a quick look around. The halls of the battle barge are more akin to that of a cathedral than a space-ship, with huge domed ceilings, and statues placed at regular intervals in well-lit alcoves. Isaiah normally takes great comfort in the stern regard of his immortalised forebears, but for some reason today he feels their gaze like a brand, like he is a neophyte and they are watching him commit some secret and terrible sin. 

“They do not fit her,” Isaiah says. Reuben frowns. 

“What do you mean?”

”I mean — “ Isaiah pauses for a moment, struggling to find the words. Emperor grant him Reuben’s lack of observational skills — truly, his brother is a sterling example of blind faith. “I mean…this morning. When she bent over to pick up the scripture. Her skirt. It — moved in a way that displayed her rump in a way that is most unbecoming to a serf.”

Reuben exhales, his jaw ticking minutely. “Oh? I did not notice. I do not make a habit of looking at the serf’s rear end.”

”I was not looking at her rear end!” Isaiah whisper-shouts. “It was…just there. Wiggling.”

”Wiggling?”

”Yes, wiggling.”

”Is our serf distracting you from your duties, Brother Isaiah?” Reuben says, in a tone of concern so genuine it feels like mockery. 

“No! I just — it would bring shame upon our crusade if our serfs are not modestly attired.”

”I quite agree. However, I would argue that our serf is very well attired. Covered up almost to the throat.”

”Almost,” Isaiah says. “When she bends over to wash her face in the morning, if you stand at the incorrect place in the dormitory, and you have the misfortune to be looking for a book on the other side of the room, and then you find yourself looking downwards at the incorrect moment so you may observe the flagstones, you will be cursed with a view straight down her sleeping smock — and you will see both her breasts, exposed quite fully! It is revolting. A blight upon the Emperor.”

”How hideous! We must of course remedy this at once.”

”At once.”

”However,” says Reuben, as they round a corner, approaching their dormitory. “In order for me to avoid benighting mine eyes with such a distasteful view, I would much appreciate it if next time the serf washes her face you were to demonstrate the precise angle that I should avoid standing at. For I only wish to see what is pure and just in the eyes of the Emperor, and in order to do so we must have a full understanding of where to avoid looking.”

Isaiah pauses for a moment. After all, is it not his duty to guide his brothers when they seek to avoid sin? “Yes,” he says. “I will ensure that I show you most where you must not stand, and where to avoid casting your eyes. And — if I may make a suggestion?”

”Of course, brother Isaiah.”

”Perhaps it is not the uniform. Perhaps it is the way the serf has learned to stand and bend. Coming as she does from such a depraved world, riddled with heresy, it is natural that she does not know the right and proper way for a servant of the Emperor to move. Perhaps we should ask her to bend over a few times for us, and thus we can best advise her on how to avoid unnecessary…wiggling.”

Reuben grins at the thought of guiding a sinner onto the path of the righteous. “Yes, brother Isaiah. I do believe we should.”

[mixelation]

I recently read Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer! I was a bit skeptical of it because I really disliked the movie, and the reasons people said the book was far superior had very little to do with why I disliked the movie. However, I found the book pretty engaging. The prose seems a little rigid at first, but you get used to it as a stylistic choice to reflect the voice of the POV character pretty quickly. I thought the pacing was pretty good and sense of suspense well done, and as a result I read it in about two sittings (which is fast for me lol).

Annihilation is about a team of four women entering the mysterious Area X, a deserted zone of "ecological disaster." Their team's goal seems to be to explore the area, but as the story progresses, we learn a lot of information has been withheld and the expedition's true purpose is unclear. Area X is a sort of supernatural-meets-scifi area of strange occurrences: there's a strange wailing of unknown origin at night, the narrator character (a biologist) is constantly noting strange fungus-like growths, there's ~unknowable~ creatures wandering around. Oh, and it's also the sort of story where all the characters are slowly losing their minds for various reasons. I've seen the genre described as horror, although I'd describe the mood as vaguely unsettling rather than frightening.

My main complaint about the movie was that, IIRC, a lot of it leaned heavily on unknown-biology-as-horror and very poor biological explanations. The book isn't like this: the POV character specializes in "transitional environments," by which I think it's meant she's a community ecologist interested in ecological succession or else how environmental perturbances alter ecology. So there's a lot of prose of her describing ecological communities, both real ones and the almost-supernatural ones of Area X, but it's done without the infuriating attempts at an "explanation" which makes no sense, nor is discovering a new community arising villainized as being horrifying in how unknown it is. In some ways, getting to watch such a new community talk hold is portrayed as soothing to the main character. So in that regard, I enjoyed the novel.

Most of the negative reviews I saw of this book focused on the unreliability of the narrator or the lack of resolution for mysteries encountered. It is very true that the narrator is unreliable and she occasionally admits to withholding information form the reader, or in some places it's not clear if what she describes even really happened or was a hallucination. If you don't like that trope, you will hate this book. If you love unreliable narrators.... I wouldn't call this a stand-out or particularly interesting example, but it sure is unreliable.

Now, given this book is basically all suspense for a building mystery, I did feel throughout the whole read that the end would make or break it. And my conclusion upon finishing it is.... it's fine? I wasn't blown away by the ending, but I wasn't dissatisfied. However, I think you will be very frustrated as a reader if you expect clear-cut explanations, or for every detail to be resolved. The mysteries put forth by this book come in three categories:

the narrator - we get a full character arc with her, and in this regard I found the ending satisfying. again, it's not mind-blowing, but it does feel adequately resolved. you do have to be alright with some ambiguities and making your own conclusions, but i personally like this in a story.

the southern reach - this is the name of the agency organizing the expedition (and the name of the trilogy). Their purpose/goals are unclear, and we become aware rather quickly that they are sending people to gruesome deaths and outright lying to them about it. Personally, I didn't find them that compelling as a mystery, and didn't care to learn more than "they're a generic cryptic agency, you know the type." Some, but not all, of these mysteries will be resolved, and some of those resolutions will just open up more questions, which could be frustrating if you are interested in this element of the plot and are also the type of reader who expects all questions to be answered by the end of a story. Worry not, though-- there's two more books!

Area X itself -- like I said, there's very little attempt to actually explain WTF is going on here and why, although you sort of start to intuit the logic of this strange world. honestly, i feel that "solving" the mystery of Area X is beyond the point of the story (which is about the narrator being obsessed with ecological change but terrified and unwillingly to cope with change in her own life) and trying to shove an explanation into the movie was doomed to fail. it's unclear to me if the subsequent books will get into this or not.

Overall, a pretty good read, would recommend. I might read the other two books one day, but probably not for my next read.

[canmom]

i probably would call myself a consequentialist, but not a utilitarian. my objection to utilitarianism is similar to my objection to the absolutist Bayesianism practiced in That Subculture: it's a philosophy that claims to be based around a certain computation, but actually performing that computation is completely intractable. there's no way to actually update your probability assignments of all possible statements in response to new information, any more than it's possible to aggregate the total happiness/suffering/whatever across the entire future for each imaginable course of action.

so this calculation is entirely notional. what you're actually doing is coming up with verbal arguments and vague heuristics for how you think this notional calculation would work. perhaps it's as good an entry point as any. but the supposed mathematical rigour is just rhetoric! you can talk about utilons this and QALYs that, but there is no way to calculate this shit, it's just a mathematical coat of paint.

the second objection is the 'seeing like a state' objection (or seeing like a company/NGO): the 'utility function' is a construct used to make economic models. it doesn't model humans particularly well, who have a variety of competing impulses that don't lend themselves to nice formalisms. and to demand that you should live according to a utility function is accordingly to strip the world of its complexity to make it more tractable. instead of specific people with specific desires and needs and relationships into which you fit, which aren't necessarily commensurable, you have abstract fungible units of pleasure or suffering or whatever else you're trying to optimise.

this worldview appealed to me as a teenager. I imagined that you could model an agent as a some kind of surface between it and the world - a sphere, perhaps, inside your head; the course of your life would be the movement of particles in and out of this sphere, and theoretically there would be a pattern for every instant of time that would lead to the best possible impact on the world, solving 'life' much like a tool assisted speedrun solves a game. the goal would be then to approximate this optimal run as much as possible. then I'd think of problems with this model: couldn't you just spawn high energy photons on the sphere to melt shit like a laser? we'd have to put some restrictions on it, obviously. what if the optimal run was really close to a harmful run, so a small mistake would lead to disaster? perhaps you'd be better to find a stable local maximum instead. and so on.

I'm not sure what good it did me to imagine this funny (or if you prefer, terminally STEM-brained) thought experiment, but it was very nice and mathematical-looking, and back then I really wanted my philosophy to be impossibly demanding for some reason. some weird combo of depression and autism and a self image very much dependent on being told i was good?

these days my feeling is that the pretense of mathematical rigour where it doesn't exist is untrustworthy, and particularly where people are concerned, abstracting too much loses important information. I'm not a court of law where strict consistency matters for the sake of stability or whatever, nor a government trying to figure out which levers to pull to create the ideal society - I'm an organism embedded in a bewilderingly complex system, and I can take each situation as it comes. treating the people I interact with well is important to me. I still sometimes think along utilitarianish lines sometimes - particularly 'this person could use this money more than me' - but I make no pretense to rigour or optimisation with it.

[nightcolorz]

Fuck marry kill Marius, David, Claudia

cw..I get very crude and make some really gross and insane jokes about ig canon typical terrible consent and abuse and stuff. Also if u like Marius or David Talbot u will not like this post 😭 I’m so sorry for this. When I first saw this ask I got SO EXCITED because I am such a huge fan of fmk especially with fictional characters it’s so fun it’s so silly it follows this train of thought that I love to go on. But then I registered who the characters were and I went “ah ok anon wants me dead” 😭😭. This is a pure nightmare scenario, this is a loss-loss, no matter what i choose it will result in me giving in to devastation and going into oncoming traffic. So bad, so bad. Anon what did I do to deserve this.. I live for it though, and tysm for sending this ask, even though thinking about this made sorrowful tears come to my eyes. Here’s my answer 😭

I think it’s really clever and uniquely cruel how you paired Claudia with these two because it forces me to choose either Marius or David Talbot to fuck (unless i want to publicly declare the character in the body of a five year old girl as the best bet for that) so thanks for that, really uniquely sadistic choice. This was difficult, it was really difficult, but I’m going to go with fuck David Talbot. We don’t have as many canonical records of his sex life as we do Marius, and the ones that may or may not exist I am blissfully unaware of because I skipped over the majority of Merrick since I can’t fucking stand David Talbot 😭 So yeah I’ll fuck him, only because I believe it would be significantly less scary then fucking Marius, who feasibly might start beating my ass at some point. I’d probably have to fake an organism if I gave a shit with David bcus he doesn’t know where the clit is (nor does he care) and would be just ramming into me like I’m his teenaged looking 1000 dollar sex doll he lost access to when he left the Talamasca that’s being studied for science now. He’d just looming over me in missionary going “oh blimey! Good god!” Periodically in between pig like grunts until he cums inside me (condom mysteriously breaks), cleans himself up while he doesn’t make eye contact, and leaves. Even still this is leagues better then fucking Marius, who has the threatening unpredictable sternness and barely restrained fury of your dad trying not to beat tf out of you while he explains your math homework to you, which honestly that energy would probably give me a panic attack half way through his sensual biting at my underarm and I’d burst into tears as he watched me with this vaguely infuriated expression at having to both decipher and comfort an inferior female if he wants to continue gyrating his tongue around my main arty until he cums his 11th pair of red pants without me kicking him in his stupid fucking high cheek bones and calling the cops. So yeah, David for fuck…

Marius I’d kill because this is something I often wish I could do in real life, and because marrying him is nightmare scenario of all time. I would literally rather eat my own ass hair. Imagine an existence of just, your freakish blonde man husband is furiously painting your asshole as your heart slams in your chest like a pray animal paralyzed in fear because if you say the wrong thing he may pull out the old whip and send u straight to god. These are the downs of your marriage, the ups are smiling and nodding passively as he explains to you in excessive but ultimately fruitless and dull textbook esc detail the complete history of Rome as your pretend that you care despite him not giving a single shit about whether or not you are enjoying this (he thinks you’re not smart enough to understand anyway). Then your nights end with a romp in the bath where he fists his entire clawed hand up ur puss as he grits his teeth and resists mauling you like an animal. You ask for him to please penetrate you so you might actually get smth out of this and he refuses and instead bitterly strokes your hairless genitals (he forces u to shave ur entire body so that ur baby smooth. he can’t be aroused by a body that looks too mature) until u miserably cum. I don’t know why anyone would want this, he’s not even hot enough to justify that. Oh god I’m talking about sex again. Anyways I’d kill marius and marry Claudia 🥰 yes I am choosing to marry the five year old die mad haters.

Claudia would be a shit wife and she wouldn’t give a single fuck about me but I’d marry her in a heartbeat before David or Marius, Jesus Christ. She’d spend all night every night spending my money on excessive shit she doesn’t need and force me to go with her most of the time because as a five year old appearing women she wouldn’t be allowed to do most things without me being there. We wouldn’t kiss or hug or have sex because I’m not into five year olds and she’s not into anyone let alone me but she would cuddle me sometimes which would be vaguely nice in the way that cuddling a cat is until u realize the cat is only using u for ur bodies warmth and is not endeared to u at all in this moment, basically that’s Claudia. Like a cat with the labor of a child who u occasionally have very interesting and intellectual conversations with when she’s not passive aggressively glaring at you over her book (she takes after her twink ass father).

anyways I hope my answer was satisfactory 😁😁😘😘 fuck David marry Claudia kill Marius ❤️ I’m inviting anyone to send me tvc related fuck marry kills, plz do so because I find them soo fun and I’m basically invincible now that I got the worst one out of the way bless

[divinemissem13]

Happy DALentine's Day, friends! 😘

At the end of his first week aboard the USS Voyager-A, Dal R’El decided that it was a lot more exhausting being an actual Starfleet warrant officer than it was being a fake Starfleet captain. There were a lot more people on a ship this size (many of whom wouldn’t give the ‘weird augment kid’ the time of day), and so much for him to learn, and way less time for fun… and, he had to admit to himself, no Gwyn.

He was used to back-breaking physical labor from his time on Tars Lamora, but he was unaccustomed to standing up so straight all the time. His back and neck were sore from upholding proper Starfleet posture all day long and it was with a profound sense of relief that he finally slumped into his desk chair at the end of the day. Lying down on his bed would result in his missing dinner, as Dal had learned earlier in the week. So he leaned back in the chair, threw his feet up on the desk, and stretched his arms into the air before settling them behind his head as a sort of pillow.

He gazed into the near distance as he started to daydream about what Gwyn might be doing at that moment when something on the desk caught his eye. Something small, yellow, and shaped like a heart. “Hey, Z!” Dal called to his roommate who was busily writing something at their own desk, “where did this come from?”

“Where did what come from?” Zero asked without looking up from their work.

Dal’s feet swung back to the floor and he leaned in to get a closer look. “This little heart thingy. Hey, it has writing on it… ‘U R COOL’,” he read slowly. “I am cool,” Dal said confidently, “but what’s with the tiny message?”

Intrigued by the mystery, Zero had abandoned their work to come in for a closer look. They picked up the little yellow heart and examined it carefully before handing it back to Dal and declaring: “It’s just candy.”

“But where did it come from? Why the message?” Dal asked, exasperated.

“I don’t know, Murf was here earlier - maybe he dropped it,” Zero said with a shrug and went back to their desk.

“Candy, huh?” Dal pondered it for another moment. It didn’t smell sweet, but it’s not like he had a whole lot of experience with candy, so he popped it in his mouth and bit down. The candy crunched between his teeth like chalk and didn’t taste much better. “Yech,” Dal spat it back into his hand. “I don’t think this is candy, Z.”

“I don’t know, why don’t you go find Murf and ask him?” Zero said with an annoyed sigh.

“Maybe I will!” Dal said petulantly, standing up from his chair. “I have to go wash this junk off my hands anyway,” he grumbled to himself.

Dal never made it to the washroom though, because he found another tiny heart on the floor right outside of his quarters. He knew better than to try eating it this time, but he picked it up to get a closer look. This one was orange and said BE MINE. “Huh? Be whose?” Dal asked, searching up and down the empty hallway.

A few feet away was another heart — pink: MY STAR.

“OK, what’s the big idea? Murf are you hiding somewhere?” Dal looked all around, even checked the ceiling, but there was no Murf to be found nor anyone else for that matter.

Only… another heart. And another. And another. U GOT THIS, XOXO, CALL ME.

It was beginning to feel like someone was sending him a message, but who? Literally everyone he knew in this universe was on this ship except for Gwyn, and she was way far out of communication range… wasn’t she? Still, the thought caused Dal to pick up speed as he continued to follow the trail of tiny hearts.

Some of the messages were vague, others seemed very specific, but each one drove him forward…

MISS YOU

MY HERO

HUGS

PURR FECT

until finally, he stood in front of the holodeck with a pocketful of hearts, looking at the last two, sitting on the floor next to each other.

Dal’s stomach flipped as he bent down to pick them up. One was purple and had the phrase IN CAT BOOTS etched into it. The other was a light blue that reminded him of Gwyn’s eyes and it simply said ENTER.

Dal walked through the doors and into a planetarium, much like the one he and Gwyn had spent so much time in on Earth. And there she was, standing in the middle of the room waiting for him.

“Gwyn!” Dal cried, his voice cracking with excitement as he ran up to embrace her. Of course, it wasn’t really her. He knew that. The real Gwyn was off on another ship trying to save her world. But she looked real and she felt real and at that moment, Dal was more than happy to have even a holographic version of her.

HoloGwyn returned the hug and giggled lightly. “I see the others gave you my messages,” she said, smiling into Dal’s neck. She pulled away and took his hand, leading him to sit on their favorite bench.

They sat, leaning on one another, while Dal told Gwyn about his week and Gwyn pointed out her approximate location on the starmap above. The hour passed quickly and before he knew it, the computer was warning Dal that his time would be up in two minutes.

HoloGwyn kissed him on the cheek and stood in front of him, her ice-blue eyes piercing right through to his soul. “You’ve got to go now,” she told him. “But this program is yours. I’ll be here waiting, if you need me.”

Dal smiled back at her and stood to wrap his arms around her one more time.

“The program’s name is Cat Boots,’ Gwyn whispered in his ear, and he squeezed her tighter and kissed her softly.

“Thanks, Gwyn. For everything,” Dal whispered as the program began to fade away into the holodeck’s grey, gridded walls.

Dal left the holodeck feeling much lighter and with a bounce in his step. He greeted everyone with a smile on his way to the mess hall and his hands rested casually in his pockets.

He was in such a good mood that he pulled out a candy heart that said QT PIE, and flipped it into the air, catching it in his mouth without thinking. He managed not to spit it out this time (he was in public, after all), but he grimaced as he choked down the dry, chalky candy.

Yep, still gross, he thought. But then he smiled to himself. I’ll have to remember to tell Gwyn next time I see her.

[phantom-of-the-ruckus]

Once upon a Midnight Dreary Chapter 4

I'm actually at chapter 7 "Enlocked", but CH5 will be posted next week, so I can have an established posting schedule.

I'll eventually update CH4 to AO3

This takes place around the 1800s, so be aware that some of the reactions are implied to be typical of the period. This does NOT reflect my perspective on mental health.

Previous Chapter

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Library

Chapter 4: Acquaintances 

As far as you can tell, I am clearly not mad. You would even tell me that I was quite sane, and you would be right. Perhaps, too descriptive towards my feelings. Perhaps too biased, and a bit…well…hostile with my narration. I wouldn’t say that you are wrong, nor right about your perspective. I was, and still are in a very dark place in my mind, deep dark, and keeping myself organize makes things easier to remember. 

To be honest, I am not very organized with my feelings. It is easier for me to concentrate into one of the things that I am feeling. It does make it easier for me to tell the tale of what happen, but it partially leaves it monotonous in some aspects. I was feeling a range of different emotions.  

Yes…I was grieving for the death of my father, but I was also furious at the world and the God he believed, that took them away. 

It was a small anger though, a tiny little atom of a complex mixture. A compound, perhaps. It does become hard to tell overtime. 

I don’t often like to let myself divulge into my different thoughts and feelings as I mention the importance of the order, but this particular type of the story makes me divulge into my mind as it did take me a while to open up myself, and I had a lot of conflicted feelings regarding the two people I mentioned previously.

Not romantic feelings. I am not a person who felt any particular attraction at all. I believe I just worked strangely differently when it came towards attraction.

Anyways, this part of the tale started exactly when Dr. Gubberson decided it was time for me to try to socialize more. I admit that I was not particularly thrilled. I was not a person of interacting, but it was necessary to my adaptability upon my stay at the institution. I knew that I had to behave as they expected to me to survive, but I was not comfortable about socializing with those who needed more help than I did.

As much as my father’s murder and my mother’s passing destroyed me. I was a sane woman stuck in a world of those who had it worse than me. I couldn’t bear to feel guilty about being alright to compare to them. It was an injustice I wasn’t thrilled to live with. 

That was the best way I could describe my first day at the recreation center. I was avoidant of any possible eye contact, and I became unease at the groans, and screams of patients being handled by the doctors.  I remember I was feeling I was being watched, and I was actually being watched. Besides by the doctors and guards, making sure I wouldn’t try to escape, but I was being observed by a particular blond woman. A mother, to be precise, that would eventually reach out to me in my second day. 

She was Mrs. Daisy Charlene Danger, age 47. 

Mrs. Danger or Daisy, as she was preferred to be call, took a particular interest on me during my first day.  I am not exactly precise into why I immediately caught her attention, as when I asked Daisy, her response was quite vague. My best guess it was that it was a mother instic she had. Perhaps she was just like my late mother, she was good at ready body language. Perhaps she saw something on my posture or the way my body moved. My mother used could easily tell whenever I was unwell, perhaps it was something she learn from her years as a nurse, or perhaps it was a maternal kick mothers had (as for Daisy was a housewife.)

Either way, I managed to caught her attention for the rest of that first day. She did not approach right then. According to Daisy, she wanted to make a first impression. An early first impression.

“Well hello deary!” That was the first thing I heard when I step into the recreation room. I saw a round woman, certainly older. She had blond hair, and a blue eye. Her left eye was covered in what it looked to be a black rose. A very well painted black rose painted over the eye patch. Her cheeks were rosy, but were covered in dark trips almost as she cried over painted eyes or something. 

I admittedly was startled by her. 

“Mrs. Danger, please, back off.” One of the doctors hissed. Mrs. Danger, or well Daisy, backed up 3 steps. Her eye was sparkling with interest and she was fidgeting with her fingers, which were covered in slightly bloody bandages. 

“Is this a good distance, Dr. Martin?” Her voice was sweet. It was soft and energetic. It was soothing, and quite motherly. 

“There is no way of getting you to step out, is there?” I remember Dr. Martin muttering. It was the first time I saw one of the doctors acting nicely. 

I would come to learn later, that they found it easier to comply with most of the interactions Daisy herself had with the other inmates or doctors. It made her temper calm, and she was pleasant enough for them. I honestly like her both ways…

“Anyways. She’s all yours, Mrs. Danger.” Dr. Martin muttered before releasing me from his grip without a care. I forced himself not to give him a spiteful look there. “Just do be careful, the damozel had a history of aggression or something like that.”

Obviously, you could tell that was a lie…

“Probably some fool getting the black cat wet!” Daisy chuckled at Dr. Martin. He simply rolled his eyes and proceeded to leave the room. Daisy momentary frowned. “Well, that was not nice, was it?”

“It’s what expected in this place…” I found myself muttering. Daisy turned to me with a wide smile while she shook her head. 

“Negativity won’t get you anywhere, dear!” Daisy chuckled. She stared at me momentarily. Her grin never faded. “Yeah, negatively won’t do you good, sweet pea; especially considering you’re just a tiny rosebud.”

I made no comment at this.

“Now, I am well aware the doctors aren’t nice per se, but in just a manner of time you will be calling this place your temporal home.” She beamed. I couldn’t help but sneer. Her positivism sicken me during that time. That was something I would start to regret later in time as I got to know poor Daisy much better. 

Daisy did notice my sneer, but she was rather concerned than bothered by it as she said. “I know it’s hard to adjust to newcomers as yourself, little darling, but I’ll be happy to help you feel more comfortable around this place.”

I became tensed for a moment. I am still surprised that she could tell to this day I was a new to the place when we first met.

“How-” I tried to ask, but Daisy already figure it out what I was trying to say and beat me to the answer.

“It is just easy to tell, dear.” She chuckled. I did not figure out who was new ad who was old. 

She held my hand without a warning. I fought the urge to retrieve it as this was the only decency I received during my stayed. Daisy gently leaded me around. She started to mumble all sort of stuff, that I now regret to fully paying attention. Thankfully, I do recall some important mentions like:

“Don’t worry about hurting my hands. I sometimes get clumsy sewing. Ya know, it took a while for Dr. Gubberson to let me have my sewing kit back!”

And

“I used to own a cat. He was a lovely thing, he’s name was Pluto. He was a young sweet thing, he loved to climb up my husband’s bust of Athena and watch him work. He had a good cat life”

Or

“Oh, I have a daughter, you know? She’s just 10 years. You remind me of her darling.”

I was 26 years of age if you were curious. I did look older due to the circumstances I had to deal with. 

“Oh!” Daisy seemingly stopped in the middle of her mumbling.  I stared at her. Not sure what was going on in her head, but apparently she was trying to remember something. “I need to introduce you to my good friend Nicholas! He was interned here just a year ago, I am sure you would love him!”

And that was how I was introduced to Nicholas Nathaniel Nack, age 24. 

Daisy dragged me across the recreation room. She was moving rather quickly due to her excitement. I was not particularly eager to start off immediately my interaction with my inmates this fast. I was planning into observe and find the best way to interact, but I am thankful that Daisy helped me foil my plans as you would eventually see later in this tragic tale. 

“Nicholas! Nicholas!” Daisy called. A young man with a messy, dirty brown hair turned around. His face was covered with band-aids. He, however, looked rather tired and annoyed at Daisy. 

“Daisy, when would you stop mothering every young person you see?” Nicholas huffed before returning to his plate. I noticed he was painting with his food. It was a portrait of some red mysterious looking man and a clock behind him.

“Don’t be jealous, Nick!” Daisy chuckled. I simply stared, trying to figure out of the situation. Nick simply narrowed his eyes at her. “I just found a new face around here. She appears to be in the need of some good company.”

“So, Dr. Gubberson also decided to sent her to the recreation room…” Nick Nack remarked 

“Nicholas!” Daisy frowned 

“It’s the true, isn’t it?” He asked giving me a glance. His eyes quickly shifted away when we his purplish blue yes met mine. I simply nodded.

“Well, I’ll take this as an opportunity to built upon friendships.” Daisy declared. She gestured one of the seats as she said. “Do take a seat, my dear.”

“Thank you…” I muttered as I took a seat. Daisy sat next to me. I could feel the atmosphere becoming heavier at that moment. 

“Isn’t she a darling?” Daisy chuckled as she accommodate in her seat. Nick imitated himself to just stare.  I lowered my head, wishing the visit was over. Daisy, however, decided to make the most out of what remaining time we have. “Oh, I was too excited to remember to introduce myself.”

“When are you not?” Nick sneered. Daisy ignored his comment.

“Let’s make it interesting. Let’s say our name what was our occupation before we got interned.” Daisy beamed. “I’ll start! My name is Daisy Charlene Danger. I was a wife before being interned into the psychiatric institution two years ago.” She stared at Nick. 

Sighing, Nick introduced himself. “Nicholas Nathaniel Nack. I was a painter before being interned here.”

All eyes were shifted upon me. I had to choose but to introduce myself. “I am Riley Anne Ruckus. I….I was going to become a Nurse.”

There was a brief silence. Nick looked startled while Daisy simply smiled. They recognized my last name…

“Ruckus? Like the doctor that was murdered a few months ago?” Nick asked. I lowered my head. Tears were threatened to leave my eyes.

My dear poor father…who could have done this to you?

“Nicholas!” Daisy scolded the young man.

“Sorry, it was just familiar…” Nick apologized with a sneer. Daisy turned towards me. It was the first time I ever saw her sad. 

“Was he…related to you somehow?” Daisy asked. I nodded.

“Yes…He was my father…” I muttered. My lips trembling as I was holding back the urge of crying. I could see them lifeless corpse once again in front of me…that fateful night…

“Ermm…Sorry…I didn’t mean to refresh your memory.” Nick apologized softly. He was blushing with embarrassment 

“It doesn’t matter anymore…”I said, whipping off the tears that left my eyes. Daisy pursed her lips while Nick looked away embarrassed and ashamed. 

“it Is alright if you wish to cry, my dear.” Daisy said as she patted my shoulder. Her right eye was glimmering. It looked almost if she wanted to cry as well. “No need to push our emotions. If you need an embrace or some sort I am available, or we could-”

“I…I think I need some time alone.” I excused my self as I rose from my sit, bowing my head to hide the growing tears running from my face. Then I walked off without even saying goodbye. 

I cried the rest of the day in my room, muttering my father's name.

[infiniteorangethethird]

anyway here's part 2 to my paracosm snippets

(previous / next)

ignore the fact it took me more than a month to post this

-

It was exactly midnight when Mike opened his eyes.

At least, that’s how he would’ve written it, if his life was a book. It would’ve been a headstrong introduction. But alas, his life was not a book, and he had no idea if it was actually midnight.

All he could tell was that the sky was clear, the stars were beautifully visible, and that there definitely was no second nor third moon the last time he went to sleep.

He would’ve kept admiring the sight, if not for the head appearing right above his own.

“Hey there! Are you alright?”

Mike stirred at the question. He tried to recall the last thing he saw before waking up. He remembered Leo’s message with a “call for adventure” (his words, not Mike’s), how they were supposed to meet at a cave entrance of all places. Strange place for a first ever meeting in person, but Mike wasn’t one to judge. He remembered entering the cave with Leo, wondering how many people have died following strangers into weird caves. He remembered getting lost, he remembered the weird berry bushes inside, the ones that then began moving around and that spoke to them about stories and dimensions and imagination coming to life, he remembered Leo’s friend showing up alongside Rowena, then a flash of light and-

A wave of dizziness hit him at that last memory. He swallowed a groan.

“…yeah, sure. Just admiring the stars. Although, if you ask me, some of those constellations have changed place since I last went stargazing.”

“Oh thank god,” Leo sighed, vanishing from Mike’s vision as he straightened up. “For a sec I thought I accidentally teleported your internal organs separately, or something.”

“Certainly would’ve made for a much different evening, don’t you agree?” Mike couldn’t help but smile. Leo was a nice guy, but he had a habit of worrying just a tad bit too much at times.

Except when he was about to plunge himself and his friend into a completely different reality, apparently.

“Speaking of teleportation.” Mike sat up, taking in his new environment as much as the moonlight allowed. “Where are we anyway?”

He turned around slowly, inspecting his surroundings. On his left, the edge of a coniferous forest, sparse enough for him to see the stars between the trunks. In front of him, a large clearing rolled into a low hill, rising lazily until its dark form became indistinguishable from the inky sky. To his right, the other edge of the forest continued.

And behind him, the midsection of the forest, in front of which he could vaguely make out Leo’s thin frame.

Leo’s eyes glinted with excitement. “I have no idea,” he whispered.

“Well, that sounds like a surefire way to get lost and then starve to death,” Mike noted, taking Leo’s hand to stand up. His words had no venom, though.

Leo chuckled. “Between my magic staff and your willar abilities, I supposed we could easily come up with something if need be. Plus, who knows? We might even run into civilization at some point.”

Mike dusted himself off, shaking his wings and using his fingers to comb out the grass blades from between his feathers. By the time he deemed himself clean enough, Leo already stood by the edge of the trees, waiting impatiently for his companion.

“Ready whenever you are, princess,” he said as Mike caught up. Mike ignored the bitter taste in his mouth at the nickname.

“So, uh, just to be absolutely and definitely sure,” he began instead. “Is it true that we’re currently in a book?”

“A book, a movie, a series – anything that counts as a fictional story,” Leo replied nonchalantly. He walked with a spring in his step, lighting the way with a magic flame at the end of his staff. “But, yes. This alternate reality – this dimension – is, in fact, the same as one of our stories in our homeworld.”

Mike pondered the idea for a moment.

“Can you imagine?” Leo continued enthusiastically. “The worlds we will see! The people we’ll meet! All this time, an infinitely vast universe hid right under our noses – and now we finally get to be the first ones to explore it all! The limit is, quite literally, only our imagination!”

He turned back to face Mike. “Can’t wait to see one of yours in person, too. I mean, can you?”

Mike didn’t know what to say to that. Despite a writer himself, he appeared to have run out of words to properly express the swirling tornado of emotions within him.

“Uh, sure,” he replied.

[meevling]

Writing my thoughts here because I have no interest in creating a big scene and I know my audience on tumblr is small and wholesome but I desire to say some of my thoughts out loud. 

I am a queer creator. I make jewellery for a living. I’m in my first year of business of doing this full time and I am struggling as all new businesses do, but I’ve been applying to vendor shows that I think suit my work and doing my best to keep at it! 

So this June, I applied for a show in a local town. This show was made to be an inclusive pride-type event. Now, why I don’t say it is strictly pride is for several reasons. One, I know the people organizing the event and they are not part of the queer community. They did not feel comfortable running a pride event because they didn’t want to try and speak over queer people. A second reason is because here in Canada it is Indigenous History month. Now this town is undeniably built on the genocide and displacement of indigenous people. This is very important to acknowledge and talk about it. So these organizers were hoping to allow this event to branch out into not just pride, but also discussing diversity and lifting up marginalized people from all walks of life. Because of this, they advertised it as a celebration of diversity, instead of a pride event, simply hoping to open up more safe spaces for discussion of acceptance in our otherwise very white, very conservative community. 

I was very excited about this event. I am asexual, as is my girlfriend. We were both going to be running a booth together, me selling my jewellery, and her selling her book as well as books by other local queer authors. 

However, our local pride community saw this advertising, saw its vague wording, and immediately assumed that it was because they didn’t want to rub the more conservative locals the wrong way. I’m not here to say that this is completely wrong, nor am I here to discredit this concern. I also had a similar thought when seeing the first advertisements. I still believe that some mention of pride could even be added, but after speaking to the people running the event, I do also understand their feelings. They were also open with me about the fact that they would happily help groups such as this pride group to run events and organize a march. They had tried to reach out to the group but hadn’t received much communication back. 

Now this group has decided to protest the event. Instead of trying to reach out to the organizers and discuss with them the concerns they had, they went ahead and organized a protest/march on the same day at the same time and publicly made it clear that they disapproved of this event being wary of calling itself a pride event. Because of this, a large majority of the vendors have dropped out and now it looks as though the event will be cancelled altogether. 

I am absolutely defeated by this news. As an asexual, I have hesitated to try and involve myself in pride after so much erasure and gatekeeping that I’ve experienced. I’ve often been made to feel as though I don’t belong. With this being my first attempt at stepping into a more forefront involvement in the community, only to have it be cancelled by the very people who it was supposed to help bolster, simply makes me feel as though I will never be able to fit in. 

What frustrates me even more is the fact that it just feels as though the homophobes have won and they didn’t even have to lift a finger. This was going to be the first real pride I have experienced in this small town, and now it probably won’t happen. The goal of this event was to be INCLUSIVE and it feels so much like the gatekeeping I’ve already experienced that it’s being protested for this. Should pride not be about inclusivity? Should we not be able to celebrate marginalized groups from all walks of life? Why can’t the two coexist and help bring those together who have so often felt out of place and unwelcome here? 

I dunno. I understand why they were upset, I understand that these people are people who have had to fight tooth and nail for acceptance and inclusivity wherever they go and so often feel the need to start things with a fight, I’m just so tired of having to fight my own community. If we worked together, we could have created a wonderful event. I wish the pride group all the luck with their march and protest. I hope it goes well, I hope they are able to show people that queer people are allowed to exist as well, I just wish that this all didn’t come at the expense of other queer people.

[quindolyn]

Hey I was wondering if you could write a sub!regulus X Dom!fem reader fic?

One where it’s angsty as Regulus had been acting different around the reader, and eventually after being questioned about it alone, Regulus breaks down and admitting his parents forced him to get the dark mark (there was nothing he could do about it), and the reader comforts him while they fuck. Regulus had been through a lot and the reader wants him to know that they love him.

Including: praise kink, subspace regulus, scar/mark kissing, aftercare for regulus, riding, and anything else you think would suit this situation <3

Resilience || Regulus Black

Word Count: 6154

A/N: Do I hate this? Yes, most definitely, without a doubt. Did I only proof read 5/15 pages. Yes, again, certainly. But I'm tired and I'm with my friend so it's not gonna get better than this. I love you all and hope you enjoy it

warnings: pretty much included in the ask, can't really think of anything else

Being light on your feet it doesn’t appear as though Regulus notices you tip toeing your way across the Slytherin common room. As you come up behind him you peer over his shoulder; he has his legs tucked beneath him with what appears to be his Defense Against the Dark Arts textbook resting in his lap. Standing over his shoulder you let your eyes scan across the pages laid open and what you first believed to be a chapter on counter curses you realized was actually detailing how to cast the curse.

Realizing what you’d just read you let out a small, involuntary gasp that catches the attention of the boy sitting in front of you.

“(Y/N)!” Regulus quickly exclaims, glancing over his shoulder before slamming the book closed and sliding it into his book bag which sits next to him on the plush, green velvet sofa.

“What was that Reg?” You ask, brow furrowed as your eyes lock onto Regulus’ grey ones.

“Just a book love, that’s all.”

“Your Defense textbook?” You ask, hoping he would slide it back out of his satchel to show you the familiar scarlet cover you’d scratched your initials into on the bottom right hand corner.

“Something of the sort,” He answers vaguely, pushing himself off the couch to face you. Instead of making his way around the couch to meet you he stayed on the other side of the piece of furniture. Feet planted, hands fiddling with each other while instead of making eye contact with you his gaze seemed to be directed just past your right ear.

“Don’t lie to me Regulus,” Your voice is clipped, when you’d come to check in on Regulus after he’d come home from winter break at his dreaded family’s house this wasn’t what you had expected.

Regardless, it was what you’re met with, “What the hell is that book?”

Your voice jumps and you can hear the panic rising in it. Regulus had spent the weeks up to his departure date dreading the time he would have to spend at the Black Mansion. You’d stayed up countless nights, wishing you could somehow keep him from having to go to that hellish house but when it came down to it there was nothing either of you could do.

Finding him pouring over some dark arts book the first time you saw him after nearly two weeks apart wasn’t exactly the reunion you’d been picturing in your head. Nor was it comforting.

You can barely make it out but you believe you hear him whimper something about “it’s nothing” as his gaze drops from just over your shoulder to his toes.

You two stand there for a minute, then two, each waiting for the other to say something, anything to break the tension currently hanging heavy over the room. Regulus silently begging you to let it go, to leave the room and give him some time to stash the book before coming to find you to act as though nothing had happened and it was all fine.

Unwilling to yield, you hold your ground, maintaining your silence while your eyes bore into the top of his head, awaiting his explanation as to what you’d walked into.

You’re the one to finally break the silence.

“If it's nothing, then I’d like to see it Regulus.” It's the second time in the span of five minutes you opt for his full name instead of one of the nicknames coined by his brother, who he’d recently mended things with, and made popular by yourself. You knew it would strike a cord for him but you were scared, you were on the offensive.

With a deep sigh Regulus retrieves his bag from the spot it’d fallen to on the floor, pulling the book from the bag, bound in emerald green, Regulus hold it both far from his body and with a surprisingly tight hold, somehow both wanting it as far from him as possible and not wanting it to leave his grasp.

Though visibly ancient the book appears to be in remarkable condition, engraved on the front cover in gold leaf reads “Mendel's Most Malicious Curses”.

Studying the cover you don’t recognize the book’s title but based on what you’d glimpsed inside of its pages you hadn’t expected to. Even as a fifth year you doubt this would ever be included in O.W.L. curriculum.

Despite knowing better you can’t help but feel a strange, strong attraction to the book, an overwhelming urge consuming you to take that book. Your fingers itch at your sides as you imagine getting your hands on the book, wondering how hard Regulus would fight before relinquishing it from his grasp.

Somewhere in your subconscious you register that these thoughts are not organically your own, that somehow that book is influencing you and that in reality you want nothing to do with it. Frightened thoughts simmer at the back of your mind but they are lost in the shadows of your curiosity regarding the secrets that lie beneath the ornate designs swirling over the cover.

Expectantly you extend your arm, a nonverbal signal for Regulus to hand you the book but your movement throws him into action and has him clutching it close to his chest, both arms cradling the text.

“No no no no no,” He chants frantically, shaking his head as though to shake off the thought of relinquishing the book to you. “I can’t give you this (Y/N),” He swallowed deeply, shining silver eyes seaking out yours, ablaze with conviction.

“And why’s that?” You challenge with a raise of your brow.

Inhaling deeply he seems to be bracing himself to respond, “Because you’re a muggle born, it’s not meant for you to touch.”

You can feel rage bubbling up in your stomach, threatening to spill out your mouth in a flurry of angry words admonishing Reg for his remarks, “What? Is my simple muggle born mind not worthy enough to read words in that precious little pureblood book of yours? Do I need my pedigree intact to understand what it says? Not meant for mutts, is that it?”

You thought you were past this, you thought you’d left the aloof little third year you’d first met who’d called you a mudblood and asked you to move to a different table in the library because he didn’t want you looking at his charms homework behind.

Had the past year and a half of apologies and growth on Regulus’ part all been a lie? Was that hate not as small a part of your boyfriend as you’d thought? Did it really only take just shy of two weeks back with his biggoted relatives for him to start spewing this pureblood nonsense again?

Bouncing around in your head those questions overwhelm you as you try to ignore the most pressing one, pushing at the forefront of your mind.

Does he even love you?

“B-because you’re not a pureblood, this book (Y/N), it can’t be held by anyone not of pureblood,” Reg’s shaking voice broke through the flurry of questions wreaking chaos in your mind.

“God damn it Regulus! I thought we were past this! I thought-”

“It’ll kill you (Y/N)!” His voice is frantic and you pick up on the tears welling in the corners of his eyes, threatening to leak over.

Those words that seemed to carry a fatality in themselves cleared away the din clouding your mind, everything went silent. Too silent even as the implication of those words wash over you.

That book may as well be a gun, cocked and being held steady at your temple as you feel tears of your own begin to well in your eyes, distorting your vision.

The mess of questions doesn’t return to your mind, instead they begin thumping one by one at the base of your brain though they all carry through the same theme.

How could he have brought that near you?

“Kill me?” You curse yourself for how obvious your voice is shaking but the book that just moments earlier you were dying to get your hand on seems to have cast an oppressive air over the room and has you recoiling away from your boyfriend.

Regulus nods, holding eye contact with you as he slips the book back into his bag, sliding it under the sofa before cautiously striding towards you.

“That's why I can’t give it to you to look at, it's cursed and if you so much as bump it you’ll…” His voice trails off, the words too terrible to speak aloud.

Your arms wrap around yourself, clutching as hard as they can as you fight to wrangle your thoughts under control. His response revealed to you that he doesn’t intend to hurt you, not with the book anyways which has dozens of other worries popping up in your head. You’re desperate for answers as to what happened to Regulus at his house. He seems ready to give them to you as he offers to take you back to his dorm away from any prying eyes or ears that may lurk about in the Slytherin common room.

You’d both agreed to arrive back at school two days early hoping to get some alone time in but that didn’t mean that the castle was empty and that anyone couldn’t walk into his common room at any moment.

You stall as he lets you into his dorm, you’ve been there a thousand times, often under the mask of night but your usual spot, atop his always made perfectly bed, seems wrong now. Without answers to your countless questions the entire room feels foregin to you and leaves you standing by his desk, not quite leaning against it but also not quite supporting your own weight.

Regulus seems equally awkward but eventually settles on his bed, perched precariously on the edge of the mattress, he barely looks comfortable.

You stay there so long in silence that after a while your breathing syncs, the singular sound becoming the only noise in the drafty room.

Long after it becomes clear Regulus isn’t going to speak first and you finally tire of the silence you find your voice, somewhere deep inside of you summoning the words to your most pressing worry; “What happened at your house Regulus? What did they do to you?”

Your words have him crumbling, your usually stoic boy folding in on himself until he is but a ball hanging off the bed.

You hesitate for a single second before you’re racing towards him, dropping before him at his knees to cup his face in your palms. Directing his visage upwards to meet yours you feel your heart wrench in your chest as you take in his puffy, red eyes, red nose and flushed cheeks already marred with twin trails of salty tears cascading down his face.

“Regulus,” You choke out feeling tears from earlier resurface as you push yourself off the ground to take your place next to the scared boy beside you.

Pulling him into your lap as much as his size permits you too you take great care in cradling his head, clutching him to your chest as your rock gently back and forth humming into his hairline in hopes to calm his sobs. Raw and ragged they each tear at the fragile, brave exterior you’ve erected in hopes of comforting the boy, giving him something solid to hold onto.

Whispering sweet nothings into his ear you feel him melt into your touch, slowly the breathing becomes stronger and his sobs quiet to weak sniffles swallowed by the occasional gulp.

Feeling him shift under your touch you can tell he’s working himself up to something, he always gets fidgety when he’s trying to summon the courage to do something hard, his movement triggers a memory.

It floods through your mind as you’re reminded of a similarly terrified Regulus, knees bumping against the table at breakfast one lazy Sunday as he repeatedly bounced them, seemingly unable to sit still. He’d spent weeks working himself up to speaking to his brother for the first time in far too long.

The memory of him being so strong and brave even as the entirety of the Great Hall tracked his movement from the Slytherin table to the Gryffindor had you drawing a deep breath. The strength the memory provides you has you summoning the breath to prompt Regulus into some sort of explanation, anything.

“Reggie, your mother gave you that book didn’t she?”

He goes still at your words and even involuntary actions seem to still, his lungs draw no breath and his pulse seems to fade away under your touch.

“Bellatrix,” His voice is hoarse from crying, “Her idea of a Christmas gift.”

“That bitch,” You spit.

“Walburga’s was worse.”

You pause at the mention of her name, there is no doubt in your mind that he is the one who’s actions have sent Regulus into this downward spiral of despair and fear. You’re not even sure if you wanna hear what he has to stay but what you want stopped being important a long time ago.

“Do you wanna show me Reg?” You ask, breathless.

“No,” Comes his meak voice, “But I need to.”

You nod understandingly as you regrettably allow him to slip from your grasp so he can turn to face you, one leg tucked under his bum and the other hanging over the edge of the bed.

His eyes are downcast before he peaks them up through thick, dark lashes to meet your gaze, “Do you promise not to hate me (Y/N/N)? I don’t know if I can do this if you hate me.”

Your brows are drawn together as your response comes emphatically, “I could never hate you Regulus, I could never and I will never.”

“You can’t make that promise,” He says through a watery chuckle, leaving you wondering where the hilarity in the situation was. “I shouldn’t have asked you to.”

“Regulus,” You latched onto his hand before he could turn away from you, “I am incapable of hating you my love, please. Tell me what happened.”

Silver eyes locked with yours as though they would reveal the solidity of your promise. You’re not sure what answer he found in them but regardless he broke your gaze as he snuck his hand out of yours.

You watch as he slowly rolls up his sleeve and an idea as to what he’s going to show you begins to form and you find yourself regretting ever demanding to know what’s going on. You quickly shove those thoughts back down, there's no use in even entertaining them, ignoring your problems won’t make them go away.

Your worst fears are confirmed as Regulus rolls the sleeve of his black sweater to reveal swirling black ink sunk deep into his skin. Even just by looking at it you could feel the permanence of the ink, the meaning behind it causing a chill to shoot through your bones.

In the back of your head this had always been a possibility but not one you’d ever truly considered. You always thought that you would be able to get yourself and Reg away from everyone, from everything. Blood purity, the ministry, his family.

You were going to get out and you’d thought you’d have plenty of time, half way through his fifth year neither of you ever expected him to be forced to take the Dark Mark before his eighteenth birthday.

You were supposed to have until his eighteenth birthday.

Staring at the ink that seemed to pulse with life against the pale white of Regulus’ skin you suppose that it doesn’t really matter what you were supposed to have, what was supposed to happen. Regulus has taken the dark mark.

Godric, Regulus has taken the dark mark.

“Y-Your mother did this to you?” Your voice wobbles, anger, confusion, and terror evident in your voice, each betraying the strong front you’re trying to keep up for Regulus.

“She came for me in the middle of the night, (Y/N/N). First time I’ve ever been woken by her instead of Sirius or a house elf and she forced me up, made me get dressed before taking me downstairs and they were all there,” His voice cracks as a silent sob racks his body, you can only imagine how difficult it must be to relive the horrific events of that night. Hoping to provide him with any sort of comfort you inch closer to him, throwing your arm around his shoulder allowing him to rest his head on yours before continuing.

“They were all there (Y/N), not just her and Father. Bellatrix, Cissa and her husband, the Lestranges,” He pauses to swallow, “ And him. He was there.”

Regulus needn’t clarify who “he” was. The idea that he had even been near Regulus made you sick to your stomach and you could feel the distinct sensation of bile rising tickle at the back of your throat.

“Shhh, it's okay Reg,” You soothe, tightening your grip on him as sobs shake his body, “It’s going to be okay Red we’re going to figure this out.”

“He did this to me,” He sobs as he shakes in your lap, letting the enormity of his circumstances finally sink in after suppressing it for the past week, the fear of your response keeping him occupied.

To say you aren’t scared would be a lie, you’re fucking terrified but holding Regulus’ trembling form you know that this decision was not his. He would never swear allegiance to a group hell bent on destroying you and people like you, a few years ago maybe but not today. Not the Regulus you’d come to love, even if it began despite yourself.

Without hesitation you reach out, wrapping your hand around the skin now stained by dark magic.

Regulus let’s out a hiss at your touch and you feel him tense under your hand, afraid you’ve hurt him you start to pull away, “Does that hurt Reg?” You ask warily.

“Yes,” He spits out through gritted teeth, “But don’t let go please,” He pleads, raising his gaze to meet yours, “Please don’t let go.”

“Not gonna let go,” You promise, keeping your hold on his forearm tight.

Dipping your fingers under the strong bone of his mandible you turn his visage upwards to meet yours, heart breaking at the sadness and pain swimming in those beautiful grey eyes of his. Slowly you lean in before your eyelashes are brushing against the soft skin of his cheeks and your eyes flutter closed as you watch his do the same.

Your lips brush each other’s gently as your hand cups the side of his face, giving you complete control of the kiss as you keep the swipes of your lips light, you can just barely make out the taste of the pomegranate lip balm you’d given him as a part of your holiday gift to him.

“I didn’t wanna take it (Y/N/N),” He sniffles against your lips, “I don’t wanna be a Death Eater, I don’t wanna hurt you.” The sincerity in his voice has more tears welling in your eyes, you just can’t bear to see your beautiful boy in so much pain.

“Oh I know you don’t bubba I know,” You calm him, throwing a leg over to the other side of his lap so that you can perch yourself atop the hard smooth surface of his thighs. Gently pressing kisses along the canvas of his face you feel his arms wrap around your waist and the tips of fingers graze against your ass as his hands hover above it.

“Can I touch you please?” His words are barely audible but his desperation is loud and clear.

You grant permission as you lean forward to capture his lips in another kiss, this one more passionate than the last. Posing little, if any, challenge before letting your tongue delve into his mouth, quickly claiming dominance over his as you feel his palms clutch the globes of your ass, kneading the soft flesh as he holds onto you as tight as possible.

With care you slowly guide him onto his back as your lips trail from his down the column of his throat, in your journey down you leave sloppy hickeys along the delicate skin of his neck. Pulling away slightly you smile to see the various shades of purple and blue painted along his pretty ivory skin.

You know you’re going to have a real conversation about this later, what it means, what the two of you are ready to do about it but right now all you can think about is how you can make your pretty boy feel better, how you can show him that your love for him hasn’t changed. And there’s one way you know how to do that best.

“Do you want me to make you feel good Reggie?” You whisper against his skin as your lips ghost over his collar bone, drinking in his scent.

“Please,” He whimpers, “Need you.”

That’s all you need to hear before your hands are delving under the hem of Reg’s sweater, hands sliding against the smooth planes of his abs, your hands gliding over the occasional ridge of a long healed scar.

Sliding the hem up all the way to his collarbone you look down to see the beautiful lines of his chest and stomach. The scars you’ve become used to seeing a dark but faded pink now shine an almost brilliant purple as though the dark magic imprinted upon his arm had somehow interfered with scars caused by Walburga, most of them when he was much younger. You know for a fact that there are more ones on his back, deeper and darker from taking longer to heal.

“Come on pretty boy,” You coach, propping him up so that you can slip the soft sweater over his head before discarding it over your shoulder, “There we go, that’s a good boy.”

He lets out a low whine at your praising words as his hips thrust up towards yours which are perched directly atop them.

While removing your own sweater you smile, realizing it’s actually one of Regulus’ old Quidditch jumpers from the year prior. With no bra beneath your top your tits are left bare for Regulus’ viewing. His eyes gloss over as lust creeps into the stormy grey of his irises, they’re locked on your tits as though they’re the most beautiful things he’s ever seen.

“Do these hurt more than normal baby?” You ask as your fingertips graze over the raised scars on his chest, if the dark magic of the dark mark made his scars more sensitive you wanna be careful not to hurt him.

“A little.”

Frowning you lean down to press your lips against the puckered scars, your kisses light and fleeting as you trace the dark lines with your lips.

Dancing from one scar to another you hear him exhale deeply and the tension seems to be slowly leaving his body as he settles into the mattress and he becomes malleable under your touch.

“You’re so beautiful Reg,” You praise against his scarred skin, needing him to understand just how much you love him.

“I love you so much,” You look up through your lashes to see Regulus’ eyes already locked on your body.

“I love you too.”

With that your lips are ceasing his once more as you feel the overwhelming need to comfort your boy. Gently, you grind your hips up against his as you become lost in the kiss, savoring the feeling of his lips against yours before you feel a familiar bulge pressing on you.

Your hand ventures back down the hard muscle of his stomach before you bump against the bulge of his erection, straining against the soft material of his sweatpants. You palm gently over his cock as your face buries itself in the crook of his neck, giving him sweet, light kisses while teasing his throbbing member.

“Please,” Comes his choked pleas at being teased, “Please, need more.”

“Of course pretty boy,” You promise as you lift yourself off of him, giving him one last kiss at the waistband of his sweatpants before helping him ease off his bottoms and boxers.

Once he’s devoid of all clothing you too strip down so that you’re both bare naked, your eyes are fixed on the red, weeping head of his half hard cock, sitting against the inside of his muscled thigh.

He whimpers as your hand wraps around his member, pumping up and down his hardening length, brushing your thumb along the sensitive tip of his cock.

“Wanna be inside of you,” He whimpers, hands grappling for your wrist to stall your movements and pull you on top of him but all he succeeds in doing is making you stubble closer to him.

You release your right hand from his cock, instead taking his hand in yours while your unoccupied hands resumes stimulating his member.

“I know you wanna be inside of me, pretty boy, but I gotta get you hard first.”

“But I am hard,” He argues in a pretty little whine, and now that he mentions it you realize that he is harder than he was when you’d pulled him from the tight confines of his pants.

“Your cock’s so gorgeous,” You murmur watching the way he twitches in your hand, “Think you’re hard enough now, yeah?”

He nods his head, squirming as he fights the urge to buck up into your hand.

Making sure that he’s comfortable, propped up against the pillow at the head of the bed you brush away the hair that’s fallen into his face as you straddle his lap, the shaft of his cock pressing against the warmth of your cunt.

Lifting yourself a few inches off his thighs your help guide his prick to your entrance, slowly sinking onto him you allow yourself to take your time accepting each and every inch of him inside of you.

Reg’s eyes are glued to your pussy as he watches himself disappear inside of you, all the way down to his base. His eye brows furrow from the overwhelming pleasure that swims through his veins, sinking deep into his every nerve at the bliss of being completely surrounded by your warm pussy.

Pleasure shoots up your spine at the sensation of slowly becoming full, once you’ve finally taken every inch of him inside you you throw your head back, mouth dropped open as the breath is stolen from your lungs. It feels so good to be so full with him you have to remind yourself to breathe.

“Good boy,” You say breathlessly, rubbing your arms up and down his flexing arms, fists furled with the sheets between them as he too adapts to the sensation that comes with being inside of you.

“You ready for me to move?” You ask once you finally become used to the full feeling.

Desperate nods answered your question, it takes you a minute to find your rhythm but soon you’re grinding his hips against his, lifting yourself slightly off his cock before grinding back down onto him.

Your movements are slower than usual when you fuck Reg, but after the terror he’d gone through in the past weeks you’re deliberate in your gentle movements.

As your hands grip the muscles of his arms you hear him take a sharp breath, your eyes fly open, landing on his face, your movements stalling before you realize that you’re clutching the newly marked skin on his left forearm.

“Oh baby I’m so sorry,” You apologize, loosening your grip on him as your lips frace the dark lines of the ink against his skin.

Seeing that mark on anyone else would’ve made you recoil, have ice shooting through your veins as fear petrified you. While you would’ve preferred never to see that symbol of hate tattooed into Regulus’ skin it didn’t evoke its usual reaction from you. The only fear you have is fear of the future, fear of what lies in wait for the two of you beyond the walls of Hogwarts, but it doesn't matter right now. All that matters is comforting your boy, all you think about as you press your lips to his mark.

You’re pulled from your thoughts when you hear sobs break through Regulus’ lips, quickly you abandon the stain of ink , moving to cradle his head so that your tits are right in his line of vision.

“I thought you were going to hate me,” He cries into your chest, tears wet the soft skin of your tits.

“No baby, I’ll never hate you, not ever.”

You feel the wet warmth of his mouth brush against your right nipple, gazing down you see his tongue lazily circling the pebbled flesh and you’re reminded just how cold the room actually is but pressed up against Regulus it feels like your entire body is on fire.

“You wanna suck on my titty Reggie?”

He responds with a weak nod and quickly you’re easing your nipple into his mouth, helping him find the correct angle all the while stuttering your hips against his.

“You fill me up so good Reg,” Your praise, fingers tangling in the dark mess of curls.

At your praise he begins lifting his hips in times with your thrusts, helping you as you fuck youself on top of him, wanting so desperately to make you feel as good as you make him.

“There we go, that’s a god boy.”

“M’getting close,” His words are muffled by the soft flesh of your tit stuffed into his mouth.

You too are nearing your orgasm as your clit brushes against the hard bone  of his pelvis pulling a sharp whimper from you. To better grant Regulus access to your breast you’ve settled on rolling your hips in circles, ceasing the up and down movement from earlier so as to not disturb him.

A familiar tightness is brewing in your belly as Regulus’ hands run up and down your back before gripping the globes of your butt, maintaining as much physical contact as possible.

“Go ahead bubba, go ahead and cum. Fill me up pretty boy, want your cum. Need your cum. Godric I love you,” You ramble, seizing his lips again, needing them against yours as you feel him cum inside you.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” He mutters as your cunt grips around him with the tell tale signs of your quickly approaching orgasm.

“Y’gonna cum with me baby?” You ask as you press your lips to his forehead, his mouth having once more found the plush of your breast.

“Yes,” He nods, “Please.”

You throw your head back in ecstasy as your orgasm washes over you, wave after wave of pleasure racing through your veins as you ride out your orgasm, continuing to move your hips as you simultaneously help Reg through his. Stars flash behind your closed eyelids as the pleasure building up finally releases, sending you into euphoria so intense it seems to cloud your every sense.

The second he felt your cunt squeeze around his cock it tipped him over the edge and as he lost himself in pleasure, rope after rope of cum releasing inside of you, he tried his best to match the movement of his hips to yours.

You flutter your eyes open as the warmth of his cum floods your pussy as you come down from the height of your orgasm, letting yourself collapse so that your chest is pressed up against his.

With your chests pressed so close together you notice the exact moment that your breathing syncs, feeling as Regulus’ arms wrap around your bare torso keeping you close to his body.

“How are you feeling?” You murmur against the ivory skin of his chest, keeping your voice hushed.

“Better. A little happy.”

Glancing up you catch the smallest smirk slink across his lips as he stares up at the vaulted ceiling.

“Happy?”

“You make me happy,” His eyes flicker to yours as he pulls you closer to him causing his softening prick to slip out of your tight hole. You both hiss as the cool air hits his cock and the cum he’d emptied into you begins flowing out yout pussy.

Regrettably you push yourself off of him, pulling his sweater over your head before waddling into the connecting bathroom, being ever so conscious about the sticky white mess between your legs as you wet a washcloth using warm water from the sink before applying it to the insides of your thighs. Ginger touches hastily cleaning up the excess cum before rinsing the wash cloth to take it to Reg.

“Hey pretty boy,” You coo upon reentering the room to find him in the same position you’d left him in, “You ready for me to clean you up?”

“You look so beautiful in my clothes (Y/N/N),” He responds instead of answering your question, pushing himself onto his elbows so that he can watch you, his black sweater enveloping you all the way to your lower thighs.

“And you’re just beautiful,” You smile, sitting next to him on the mattress. You aren’t lying, he looks absolutely gorgeous leaning back, mop of dark hair in tangled tresses, grey eyes glossed over, abs sheening with sweat as are his equally toned thighs. Merlin bless the poor bastard who invented Quidditch.

Dragging up his muscled legs your eyes settle on his softening member, just as pretty as the rest of him.

With care you make quick work of cleaning the cum off his cock, resting your hand on his thigh when he tries to squirm away from your over stimulating touch.

“I know baby, I know but I gotta get you all nice and clean for me.”

“Hurts,” He mumbles in a pathetic pout.

“I know it does pretty baby but look,” You say, pulling the cloth from his skin, “All done already.” Pressing a kiss to his temple you go to stand but you’re quickly pulled back down to the mattress by cold hands wrapped around the warm folds of your waist.

“Don’t go,” He mumbles into your hair as he keeps you tucked into his side.

“Just gotta go put the washcloth back Reggie,” You explain trying to slip from his hold but he’s not having it and just tugs you back against the hard planes of his chest.

“No,” He says simply before reaching over to the bed side table where he’d set his wand, mumbling a quick banishing spell the rag flew from your hand before flying into the bathroom.

Resting your head against his strong shoulder you yank a blanket from the end of the bed up to throw it around your bodies, nestled close together.

“You said you were happy Reg.”

“Mhm,” He responds with a noncommittal hum.

“What else are you feeling, love?”

You hear him take a deep inhale, as his own answer seemed to overwhelm him, “I don’t know. I’m scared, I’m really scared but not so much now that I know that you don’t hate me.”

You nod against his chest, you can only imagine how petrifying that thought must’ve been for him and you can’t deny the tug you feel in your chest at the idea of Regulus ever thinking you would hate him.

“I’m still terrified but I think I’m gonna be okay.”

“I know you’re gonna be okay Regulus, you are capable and strong and smart and the bravest boy I have ever met,” You can feel the blush radiating off of him at your words.

“Thank you (Y/N/N),” He mumbles bashfully into your hair once more.

You were telling the truth, if there was one thing that you know for certain its that Regulus is just as resilient as he has proven to be and if Walburga, or anyone else for that matter thought he was going to take this lying down. If they thought you were going to take this lying down, they have another thing coming. There is no doubt in your mind that Regulus will fight for what he knows to be true and if there was ever a point that he would have obeyed his mother’s every command without question that time was long past.

Reg isn’t to be underestimated. He’s just as every bit courageous as he’s proved to be over and over again. To underestimate him is to dig your own grave; and unlike Walburga you aren’t ready to count him out quite yet. On the contrary actually, your boy wasn’t about to take this lying down and even if it meant total self destruction, the two of you are about to raise hell.

taglist: @randomoutsiders @weasleyposts @amourtentiaa @kittykylax @superbturtlemakerathlete @oliviashea05 @pinkandblueblurbs @thatvenusbabe @zzzfour @temporaryissue @gubleryum @msmb @marauderswhore07 @st0nesnglitter @priii @miraclesoflove @shadesofvelma @drachoesimp @artemis1orion @skaratjung @ava-brooke-blog1 @fairyprettygirly @ohwowimlonley @padfootswife @roonilwazlibswhore @swearingsolemnly @teenwolfbitches28 @lilypad-55449 @jamespotterslover @wh0reforthemarauders @myalupinblack @ashesandstars @daisyyy2516 @remugoodgirl @itzstacie @planet-wolfstar @steveharringtonswhore @saintlike78 @i-love-scott-mccall @thatdummymarie @trashyvicks @sprucewoodlover @slut4drvc0 @pagesbetweensheets @locnylupin @mjoubertt-1@blowing-mikey @slvt4fakerealities @kaqua @pottahishotasf

[fa-headhoncho]

Untitled TFATWS Fic: Part 2

Bucky Barnes x Reader

Prompt/Background: After turning yourself in to the government following the events of CA:TWS, they lock you up for the crimes you committed during your time at Hydra. Spending years there until Captain America got you on parole during the blip to help fight Thanos. Now, after doing community service acts and helping the broken society, when they give the new Captain America the shield, you’re thrown back into a life you didn’t want.

Word Count: 1719

Reader: Female

Warning: parole officers? canon level violence, john walker

Author’s Note: uh, hi. i'm shit at fighting scenes so... Also, slow burn, I'm sorry. I'm a whore for slow burn fics. GIVE ME IDEAS FOR A TITLE PLEASE

Masterlist Part 1 Part 3 Part 4

=====

“So, how’d you end up here?” Walker screams over the loud roaring of the helicopter, trying to make conversation as the pilots drive you where you were going. You roll your eyes at him, did he really not do any research before recruiting you on this mission?

“You’re the one who cut my parole.” You scoff, not looking up to speak to him. You were too busy fiddling with the tactical gloves they gave you. The velcro sticking to the material of the ridiculous suit frustrated you, it was too tight. It matched Battlestar’s, red and blue but yours didn’t have a star on the side and his wasn’t as fitted. “Why did you, exactly? I haven’t been on a real mission since my Hydra days and you bring me into what? Taking down a terrorist organization that we have little to no information on?”

The Captain shakes his head, a small smile slipping onto his face. “You’re a good asset, a great addition to the team I’m building.” He simply answers before looking out of the open door of the copter.

You roll your eyes once again, if he thinks you’ll be a part of his team then he’s really in for it. This was just one favor you were going to do for him before you would be released out into the public again. You owed him this but you weren’t about to become a team with this imposter.

Deciding it would be better to not respond, you just vaguely nod your head. You weren’t about to tell him off in fear that he’d just snap his fingers and have you back into jail for not complying with him.

“They’re right there.” He suddenly gets up and holds onto the tether above for stability. The helicopter carefully lowers as he exits, throwing his shield before hopping down onto the truck.

Standing up, you lean over to get a better look to see who else was fighting. Anger bubbles up as you see Sam being pinned down and Bucky being restrained by masked figures. “You guys didn’t tell me those two were going to be here!” You turn to shout at Battlestar.

The dark-skinned man just shrugs, a sly grin on his face, “You wouldn’t have come.” He merely offers before jumping out and swinging in to help his friend. Letting out a frustrated groan, you follow him.

Using the rope to drop down, you land on the other semi where Sam is. Two of the masked people have him pinned down. They were too distracted with the two landing and throwing the shield around to notice you sneaking up behind one of them.

You swiftly kick right under the back of their knee causing them to fold back slightly. You take the advantage and spin, the roundhouse kick sending them off the side of the trailer. Sam looks up at you from below, a pained expression on his face.

“Oh no, not you too.” He sighs out in which you return with a sad smile. He lets out a groan before turning to deal with the other enemy holding his right arm down. You help him stand up just as Battlestar lands right beside Walker.

“Sam. John Walker, Captain America.” Walker decides this was a good time for introductions and sends the Avenger a salute.

“Lamar Hoskins.” His sidekick steps in after they do their little forearm bang. The two look at you, waiting for you to introduce yourself but you just glare at them.

“And that’s (Y/N) (Y/L/N).” He points to you.

“Yea, we know.” Bucky spits out, side-eyeing you. You don’t even need to look at him to know he was pissed off. The guilt starts to wash over you but you push it down. It wasn’t the time now to talk to him, you needed to focus on taking down these abnormally strong people.

“Looks like you guys can use some help.” The Captain continues before turning and hitting the redhead with his shield. The rest of the Flag Smashers pounce as well. The four that were on your side try to come at you causing Sam to try to fly away. Noticing that they were all targeting Sam, you unhook the bolas from the side of your suits.

Using the rope to swing the balls at the end around, you throw it to wrap around one of the guy’s bodies. It tightens around him and you give it a hard tug, sending him to the floor. They still manage to pull him back down and attack him.

The guy you were fighting grabs the rope and pulls you towards him, you let out a surprised squeal at his strength. You release your grip on the rope before he could tug you down to his level but the person you thought you knocked off wraps his arms around your shoulders.

You struggle against the man, his fingers digging into your shoulders would definitely leave bruises but you didn’t care. It’s been a long time since you’ve been out in the field like this and you were trying to think back to your Hydra training to figure out an escape.

The man you pulled down finally gets up and drags his feet over to you. Behind him you see Bucky jump over and help Sam with the two other Flag Smashers. The man gets close enough and you use the leverage the other has on your upper half to lift your legs and swing them around his neck and jerk your body to the side.

The movement causes the guy to release his hold on you, letting you and his partner fall off the side. You luckily catch the side of the metal, watching the guy roll onto the grass on the side of the road. You turn back to see the other guy hovering above, his foot coming up to step onto your fingers that were gripping on for dear life.

Just as he was about the step on them, you see Sam’s wings hit him off. Letting out a sigh of relief, you pull yourself back onto the roof of the trailer. Sam was still fighting off two of the Flag Smashers but Bucky was nowhere in sight.

Then you hear grunting from below so you peak your head over to see Bucky hanging on by the bottom of the truck with a guy trying to stomp his arm off. Sam seemed to be handling the one person on him so you decide to help the super-soldier first.

“Bucky! Hang on!” You call out to him, looking around to figure out a way to get him safely off the bar.

“That’s what I’m doing!” He yells back while tightening his grip inside of the torn metal.

You watch the new Captain America and Battlestar struggle slightly to keep the soldiers off of them but you weren’t too concern about them, Bucky was your main priority now. Taking out your knives, you throw one at the woman attacking Sam. It slightly stuns her before she rips it out and throws it aside. “Sam! Go get Bucky, I got this.” You demand and he just nods.

The woman turns to you as Sam flies off right before the woman plows through the road sign. She lets out a roar before charging at you. She swings her arm to hit you in the face but you dodge it. It didn’t take a scientist to realize that these people were super-soldiers so you knew that the last thing you wanted to do was take a blow from them.

The years of training with the former Winter Soldier have taught you well for this standoff. She tries to recover from the miss but you elbow her in the ribs making her go off balance for a few seconds. Taking the opportunity, you kick her chest to send her lying on her back.

You walk over the woman, scowling down at her before leaning down and sending a hard punch to her head, knocking her out. You peak over at the other two just as the gunshot goes off. The person behind Battlestar retracts but doesn’t loosen his grip on him. The other takes advantage of Walker being distracted and throws him off the back of the trailer.

The man jumps over to you and tries to wind up a punch but you barely dodge it, tripping over the woman you just knocked out. “Fuck,” You whisper out, eyes flicking from the man in front of you over to Battlestar getting tossed off like a ragdoll. The rest of the group turns to you, seeing you as the last person standing.

They get distracted as the Captain appears again, a sense of hope washes over you but he just gets shit on. They were easily attracted to him since he was the star of the show so they let the one guy handle you. You look straight past him as he takes his time to stalk over to you. These people were cocky and you couldn’t blame them. They just took out four well-known figures, well-known fighters, and were left with you.

It wasn’t an ideal situation and you needed to find a way out. You couldn’t even keep count of the super-soldiers since they kept popping up and you weren’t enhanced enough to take them all on nor were you about to get captured. Seeing the road sign approaching from behind the man sparks an idea in your head.

Making eye contact with the Flag Smasher, you throw your last tool past him. He watches it zoom past his head and looks at the sign approaching. He braces himself for the impact, busting through the metal before whipping back around to look at you. But you weren’t there.

You used your last bola to wrap around the metal bracing and use a steel grip to hold onto your end. Letting out a grunt at the rough pull as the rope drags you off the trailer to hang from the sign. You let out a sigh, watching until the soldiers and trucks are out of view before jumping down onto the ground.

This was a lot more complicated than Walker said it was going to be.

_____

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[viridiave]

Daylight Prairie- Creatures of the Light (lore dump)

I've had a couple of theories and headcanons stirring around my head regarding Prairie for a while now- so right here we're gonna tie some of them together cuz I haven't lored in a good long while XD

Note- btw I'm not part of beta so this is purely just me- a crackhead- putting together a crackpot narrative. SOME spoilers for Eden are present.

<THE CEREMONIAL WORSHIPPERS>

okay these guys drive me fucking nuts

We barely know anything about these guys- and what little we do know is derived purely from their closed off uh... Worshipping space. Look at this freaking thing.

In the middle of nowhere. Surrounded by clouds for miles. Fairly advanced diamond technology. Altars with graves decked out in gold and candles. The mechanism for the entrance to the elevator to begin with is fairly complex as well- activated by butterflies and the butterflies don't even die in the process. And to top everything off, this place has a portal that leads directly to the Prairie Temple.

If this isn't sus I don't know what is- but I think I have an explanation.

There are six spaces for six more people that we are not aware of. The only people we DO know of is one bald person in the short garb and another bald person in the long garb. I propose that these six missing people are the Whisperers.

Which is... pretty out there, I know. Counting the 'voices' that we get in game, (including the ones from previous Seasons like Lightseekers and Sanctuary) we have one for Birds, Whales, Mantas, Memories, Crabs, and Jellyfish. For now, we're not counting either Butterflies or Krill- and I'll explain why in a bit.

As for the initial proposition that these Whisperers are the missing six, first we need to ask ourselves what exactly it was that the Worshippers were... worshipping. There is a possible god of which we see in game, and the name of this god is the Megabird.

Megabird here was heavily present in concepts, and in the final product we only ever get to see traces of her and heck to this day we're not sure if she's a canon entity in the final game at all. Megabird as an entity in the concepts is basically the god overseeing the world of Sky and is comprised entirely of light. It's unclear whether or not the Ancestors were aware of her existence after or even before the King rose to power. The Elders themselves are likely privy to this information, but somehow I doubt that it's something anyone wanting to assert control over their people would encourage.

There's certainly the possibility that these Worshippers were a religious sect dedicated to the Elders themselves- but since I'm here trying to propose that they're worshipping something tangential to the possible actual god, we're going to assume this isn't the case. On that note-

<THE WORSHIPPERS WERE DEVOUT TO LIGHT ITSELF>

I propose that the Ceremonial Worshippers valued the Light above all else- and this worship was extended towards the light creatures themselves.

'Oi. Vir. Crabs are DARK Creatures.'

Not all of them. Heck, a dark crab might not have been the norm back then, but that's a stretch and besides- the fact is that these crabs on the far end of Sanctuary are docile.

Keep in mind that these followers were stationed in Prairie, of all places. You know what else is in Prairie? Sanctuary Isles- home to several kinds of manta, butterflies, jellyfish, and even the elusive Elder Manta (yes that's what the big chonky boi that looks like a light krill is called- it's not a whale.).  Daylight Prairie is in no shortage of light creatures- and at the center of it all is its Elder.

Prairie Elder is implied to have responsibilities toward the light creatures as presented in the SkyShop poem featuring them:

'Fields of harvest, prairies of joy.

Farmer and fauna as one.

The Elder protects the creatures of light,

For darkened days to come.

Fly up, fly away,

For the Children of Light in need.

We shall recall our days of wonder,

And feel its air once more.'

-SkyShop Poem (Prairie Elder Pin)

In the greater context of the story, Daylight Prairie is the primary source of light energy in the form of the light creatures- it makes sense that the Elder of that realm would oversee the flow of light creatures from one realm to the other, and that the Ancestors in their domain would have a greater respect for the creatures than others. They're the ones working with them, and they're the ones that know them best.

Enter the Worshippers- who were likely serving directly under the Prairie Elder. I'm not confident that the Prairie Elder could have shared information about the Megabird- or if they even know the god existed. 'The Light itself' is pretty vague for something to be worshipped, and it's possible that the Prairie Elder instead encouraged people that the Light manifested itself into the various light creatures that we see.

In this world however- industrialization marches on, and eventually these light creatures became things to be harvested rather than worshipped. It's speculated that light creatures were used in the production of diamonds- we see signs of this scattered throughout Forest, and Wasteland by proxy. The mural under the bridge in Forest and the doors to the Temple seem to suggest as much at least. Eventually, this industrialization will grow out of hand. I have a few theories on what the Prairie Elder might have done to passively rebel against this.

<PRAIRIE ELDER AND THE BUTTERFLIES>

We learn in the Prairie Elder's cutscene that they are able to form- not summon- butterflies from fire. I'm not proposing that the Prairie Elder is single-handedly responsible for the existence of butterflies- rather I'm proposing through the Prairie Elder's abilities that light is able to be manipulated in such a way that one can create light creatures, should they know how.

It could just be the butterflies, honestly. And really it could just be the Prairie Elder that's capable of such a feat- and because of these holes in this theory it's the first to go.

And yes this is the reason why the Butterflies don't count. I think. That has holes too and I can make a case for the Butterfly Charmer technically being part of this... But I digress.

<SANCTUARY ISLES>

Sanctuary Islands could be a literal Sanctuary for the light creatures- there is an impressive variety of them present. It's also very out of the way, tucked away in a corner of Bird's Nest. The theory I'm proposing here is that the Prairie Elder and the Sanctuary Guide worked together to keep this place hidden from the rest of the Kingdom- and that it was the Sanctuary Guide that broke the bells that would have granted the Ancestors access to the light creatures.

<THE WORSHIPPERS DISBANDED>

This is... probably improbable, but my whole post was leading up to this so we're doing this. The missing six Worshippers are the Whisperers that we've encountered throughout the game- leaving in order to either develop their relationship with or protect their creatures of choice.

The Bird Whisperer stayed close and remained in Prairie- and is probably the reason why Bird's Nest exists at all. The Jellyfish Whisperer remained as well, opting to stay in Sanctuary- the natural habitat of the jellyfish.

The Whale Whisperer ventured to Forest- where there probably once was a small population of Whales, given the corpse we see in the Bridge Area and the live Whale in the Underground Cavern.

The Manta Whisperer went to Valley- I'm guessing to see how mantas were being used for labor and competitions? And Valley is right next to Wasteland so I might be reaching but they could have been monitoring that too.

The Crab Whisperer is a tricky one because we see them travelling with the Lightseekers, and yes I am proposing that this lady was formerly a Worshipper. But because we're dealing with a creature that we now know is more dark than light, maybe the Crab Whisperer joined the Lightseekers in order to observe that phenomenon more closely? Because she does refer to the crabs as friends in her SkyShop poem. Wasteland wasn't always a... wasteland, after all. Things could have been different, and the crabs could have been adapting in a time where they would be relatively dangerous but not so much that an Ancestor couldn't approach them.

And then there's the Memory Whisperer. For this one, I don't think a spirit manta actually exists- at least, not as an organic creature and moreso just an interactive holograph courtesy of the machinations of Vault. I'm actually not too sure on what this person could have been doing, but they have a call- and my best guess is that the Memory Whisperer is one who listens to the last vestiges of light leftover by a creature- because we do see skeletons in Vault, and one is of a creature that looks like an amalgamation of several spirit mantas.

<WHY DON'T THE KRILL COUNT?>

As far back as Prophecy, Krill don't appear to be aligned with the light. They aren't depicted as former light creatures, nor a corrupted variant of an elder manta or whale- they are presented as thenselves in that Prophecy mural. Though I'm sure we'll get a Krill call later on, I'm not going to count them until then.

<CONCLUSION...?>

This huge post is... full of holes and heavy speculation, I'm aware. Mostly I just wanted to dump a bunch of shower thoughts and leftover lore I came up in the Discord lore chat. Go check it out sometime, I've derived a few points in this from interacting with people there. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this matter, by the way- it's fun theorizing! I haven't done this seriously in a long while.

[bubonickitten]

Fic summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path. Previous chapter: AO3 // tumblr Full chapter text & content warnings below the cut.

CWs for Chapter 32: Lonely-typical themes & imagery; temporary memory loss, mental confusion, and dissociation/dpdr; misgendering (including use of “it” pronouns; same context as last chapter); references to Mr. Spider (including survivor’s guilt & Jon downplaying his own trauma); internalized victim blaming; references to the children stuck in the Dark’s domain during the apocalypse; suicidal thoughts (and allusions to past suicidal actions, but no details given); a bit of rejection sensitive dysphoria; vague reference to past abuse (Martin’s mother) and comparing oneself to one’s abuser; memory of a past discussion re: Martin slapping Jon during the apocalypse (wherein Martin apologized and Jon predictably tried to minimize it, which Martin shut right down); grief & loss. SPOILERS through Season 5.

___

Chapter 32: The Run-Around

The ghost comes back, because of course it does. Even a command from the Archive has a time limit. With enough practice, Jon might well be able to enhance that ability, learn to administer more complex and sustained compulsions. He has neither the need nor the desire to test those waters.

In the early days of the apocalypse, the Eye needled at the edges of his mind, hounding him to explore that untapped sea of potential. Ignoring that call was once an exercise in spite, requiring no small amount of effort and resolve. Here, now, the Eye is – for once in its rotten, protracted existence – mercifully subdued.

“Jon.”

The apparition crouches down in front of him, sending up a little waft of dust as it settles onto its knees. Reflexively, Jon shrinks back. He clenches his teeth at the wrongness of it all, at this disturbance of a place that should be still and quiet and barren.

“…breaking ground that should be left burned and empty. And I’ve started to dream again–”

“–it wasn’t a dream, though, or a vision. Everything had changed, and I was somewhere new. I don’t know if that’s true – maybe he was just trying to mess with my head or make a point–”

“–I could feel a numbness in myself even as I looked at him. Was I finally becoming like them? My internal world melting away into nothing but a pantomime–?”

“Listen, Jon, I…” Martin gnaws on his bottom lip in silence, agonizing over how to proceed. It’s as if the two of them are perched on a precipice and a single word could mean the difference between coaxing Jon away from the edge and spurring him headlong off of it. “I know you’re scared, and – and confused–”

Confused? Jon thinks, seething.

He’s not sure if even scared is an apt descriptor anymore. There are so many shades of terror, a domain to suit nearly any niche combination of fears – and yet, there is nothing new under the roving Eye. The borders between the Fears have always been blurry, but over time it has become less a gradient and more a muddy smear, as if an overenthusiastic artist scrubbed a careless hand across their pallet. Every endless loop, every specialized domain, every lived experience – the routine has played out long enough to become flat and stale, and Jon has found that one can become habituated to almost anything once it becomes mundane. That process can be tectonically slow, to be sure, but time isn’t as much of a limitation as it once was.

As for confused… well, the Eye forces certainty on him regardless of his feelings on the matter. There are very few things he cannot Know. These days, even the Spiral and the Stranger would have difficulty misleading him.

“I am not a fool,” he snaps. “I know well enough what this dream is likely to mean–”

“–I know when I’m being handled–”

“–I know what it truly is–”

“–I know it’s just phantom–”

“–toying with me–”

“You know, you know, you know,” Martin says. “How? How can you be so sure?”

“I know this place and what you want, but I have no proof to give you. I have nothing that cannot be waved away as a bad dream.”

“Have you asked the Eye?”

Jon’s first impulse is to deny it. He promised not to Know things where Martin is concerned, and he never stopped respecting that boundary, right up until–

Until the end, Jon reminds himself. This isn’t Martin. And this… impostor’s next words prove it.

“You could Know, couldn’t you? You could just… Look?”

“I know he’s gone–”

“–I had plenty of time to mourn him – to reconcile myself to the fact that he was dead–”

“–I should be dead, really – I should be dead – hard to reconcile yourself with avoiding a death that you feel should have been yours–”

“–didn’t know which of us was the lucky one–” Jon’s voice fractures. “Still don’t, really.”

“Can you look at me, please? Just… see me, just for a minute?”

“What do you want?” Jon mumbles, studiously averting his eyes. “To talk to a person who is not a person–? A person – who you should be fleeing?”

It wouldn’t be the first time that a monster asked him to See it, to set it free. But Jon very much doubts this is a monster at all. Just a memory. A convincing one, but a memory all the same.

“I am here, and I give you my words,” he says, shifting to angle his body away. The choreographed disengagement is apparently lost on the specter, which follows the movement, shuffling to keep itself planted directly in front of Jon. “They are all I have, and all you want, and perhaps when I am free of them I will be allowed to sleep.”

“Normally I’d be ecstatic to hear you say you want to sleep, but this isn’t exactly an ideal spot for a nap. Not that the cots in the archives are comfortable either, but it’s definitely better than curling up in…” Martin hesitates, then drags a finger through the powdered debris carpeting the ground and holds it up. “I’m going to regret asking, but what is this stuff, anyway?”

“The remains of –”

“–a ruined world – the nightmare landscape of a twisted world–”

“–the things we left behind – that’s all it is, and we can’t escape the ruins of our own future.”

“Ugh,” Martin says, wrinkling his nose and hastily wiping his hand off on his jumper.

“…the final days of humanity were unpleasant and visceral,” the Archive continues, eager as ever to expound on the nightmare.

“…you could see a storm coming for miles, coming straight at you all across the horizon, looking near as anything like the end of the world – it promised to blot out everything–”

“–pulling us ever closer to a world of fire and loss, a place of burning and agony when we remade the world in the image of–”

“–the sick voyeur that lurks in this place–”

“Okay!” Martin interjects. “I get the picture–”

“–we’d all been touched and warped by proximity – but none of us had any special knowledge – he wanted a grand inferno, a ritual of apocalyptic burning – would create – one who could usher in this new world–”

“–catastrophic change. A change in our world that will wipe out what it means to be us, and leave something else in its place – will warp the world so much it kills us all – strip us of what it means to be human, and leave us something alien and cold–”

The disapproval in Martin’s sigh is piercing enough for Jon’s words to catch in his throat, a surge of self-consciousness bringing heat to his cheeks. Martin takes advantage of the lull to break in with another appeal.

“I need you to listen to me now–”

“…I – I – I knew that I had meddled with something I should have left alone–”

“–had destroyed the place utterly. And yet – remained bound to it, tied to it in some vital way – I have known anguish and destruction – but the memory of that night still makes me shudder. The sadness and the grief we felt at what we knew we had lost – the misery and pain he has brought upon himself–”

“Please, Jon, can you just–”

“–the music calls a name that through the tears of half-grasped memories seems almost and eternally familiar – can you trust your eyes to tell you quite what it might be that dogs your steps – you tire of the chase of course, the fire and all-relentless pace of – reaching for a name, identity, and face that has long since worn through all reserves of hard, enduring vigor in you–”

“That’s enough!”

It’s loud, and sharp, and forceful enough that it stops Jon in his tracks just the same as the first time Martin established an embargo on the Archive’s apocalyptic narration. For a split second, Jon expects to be struck–

Which is ridiculous. Ghosts don’t have substance. Any attempt at physical contact would give away the ruse.

It’s not something Jon should have expected from the real Martin, either. They had talked about that. At excruciating length. Jon remembers it vividly…

Things had been… tense – more so than usual – ever since leaving Callum Brodie’s domain. Expected, but nonetheless disconcerting. On the one hand, Jon longed to break the silence. On the other, he dreaded what that might entail. He wasn’t sure what would be worse: confronting what had just happened, or avoiding it altogether.

The reality of the situation remained the same regardless of whether they chose to acknowledge it. All the world’s children had been condemned to hell, and the only thing Jon could think to do was… abandon them to their fate. A fate that he brought about.

‘I want you to use your power!’ It had landed more like an accusation than a demand. Luckily, Martin did not seem to notice Jon’s wince. ‘I want you to help them – I want you to make things better!’

In retrospect, Jon should have just said ‘I can’t’ and left it at that.

What he said instead, sullen and venomous, was: ‘There is no better anymore.’

It was true, and no amount of wishful thinking, remorse, or self-destruction would have changed that. But he should have known better than to be so bluntly pessimistic. Martin’s response was predictable enough.

‘You keep saying that, and I hate it!’

Jon should have apologized. He should have explained himself better. He should have let himself be vulnerable for once, because the alternative was–

‘I keep saying it because it keeps being true – you know that!’

It wasn’t until the words were out of his mouth that he realized how it sounded: dismissive, callous, indifferent to the terrified screams of children – loud enough to his ears, louder still in his head.

‘What I know is that leaving children here is – it’s inexcusable! It’s monstrous!’

Jon should have agreed then. He should have shown some sympathy. But in the moment – floundering in a flood of fear that he could scarcely distinguish from his own, self-loathing inundating him that he could be dwelling on his own childhood trauma right then, when his nightmare was in the past; when he wasn’t even the one who got taken, just the bystander who watched it happen; when these children’s nightmares were happening in the present, ongoing, with no end in sight; when they wouldn’t be here now if the monster had just taken him–

‘Martin,’ he said, teetering on the edge of begging. ‘Tell me what you want me to do, and I will do it!’

Martin knew as well as Jon did that there was only one thing he could do. The only thing left to him in his monstrous existence.

He gave a statement.

And then, more monstrous still, he walked away, leaving each and every one of those children to suffer their worst nightmares without a morsel of comfort or consolation.

They had been walking ever since, the silence between them palpable and festering. Eventually, Jon couldn’t take it anymore.

‘You’re being awfully quiet,’ he blurted out. It was only after he’d spoken that he registered how hoarse his voice was. How it took what was meant to be neutral and transformed it into something gruff and jarring.

Martin didn’t answer.

Understandable. Jon didn’t much want his own company right then, either. So he resolved to keep his mouth shut. To give Martin the space he clearly needed.

Then he heard something that sounded worryingly like a sniffle. He stopped and turned on his heel to see Martin stood in place several paces behind him, his head lowered and his arms clutching his stomach protectively.

‘Martin?’ Jon rapidly closed the distance between them in a few long strides. ‘What’s wrong? Are you – are you hurt? Are you feeling ill?’

With Martin’s chin dipped to his chest and his hair hanging down to shroud his eyes, Jon couldn’t get a read on him. His instinct was to reach out, but at the first sign of movement, Martin recoiled – minutely, but still indisputably a flinch.

Right, Jon thought. Martin probably didn’t want that from him just then. Again, understandable.

So Jon lowered his arms. They felt oddly heavy, hanging limp and useless at his sides, so he crossed them in front of himself instead, unconsciously mirroring Martin’s slumping, round-shouldered stance.

‘Sorry,’ Jon mumbled inanely. It seemed unnecessary to specify for what. Everything, really. None of which was remotely remedied by yet another apology.

‘No.’ Martin’s head snapped up, finally granting Jon a glimpse of his face. Of his eyes, glistening with tears. ‘You shouldn’t… I should be apologizing to you.’

‘What?’

‘I hurt you.’ Martin’s voice warbled, one hand going up to cover his mouth. His other arm stayed firmly pressed against his middle, his fingers clutching at his side. ‘I… I hit you.’

Jon was momentarily flummoxed, unable to track Martin’s thought process, until he recalled how they left off before.

Thank you for not hitting me this time, Jon had sniped. It was a stupid thing for him to say – sulky, melodramatic, unnecessarily vindictive. A slap in the face, really, considering how Martin was still supporting him in spite of… everything. Everything he’d done; everything he was–

And everything he wasn’t. Everything he couldn’t do.

‘I… I’m so sorry, Jon, I–’ Martin’s breath hiccupped. ‘God, sorry doesn’t even come close to–’

‘It’s… fine,’ Jon said wearily. ‘I’m not angry. I’m not even upset–’

‘You should be!’

‘Well, I’m not.’ Jon scuffed one foot against the ground. ‘It’s not a big deal. Honestly, I shouldn’t have said anything at all. If anything, I owe you an apology.’

‘What?’ Martin yelped.

‘It was… petty of me, to bring it up like that. You didn’t deserve that.’

‘Jon,’ Martin said tremulously, ‘what are you talking about?’

‘I was just… on edge, and lashing out in the heat of the moment.’ A self-deprecating smile flickered and died on Jon’s lips. ‘Old habits, I suppose.’

‘Wh– I’m the one who hit you!’

‘Not that hard.’

Never too hard. Never enough to hurt. Just enough to snap him out of it.

Martin gaped at him, looking – disproportionately, in Jon’s opinion – horrified. ‘Jon!’

‘What? It wasn’t. Not like you threw a punch.’

‘That doesn’t matter! I still hurt you!’ Martin began to pace, back and forth, scraping his hand through his hair. His fingers kept catching on the tangled curls in a way that looked painful. ‘And now you’re excusing it, and – and – and trying to comfort me for what I did–’

‘Martin, it–’ Jon watched as Martin ruthlessly yanked his fingers through another knot. He must have misinterpreted Jon’s sympathetic wince, because it only seemed to make him more distraught. ‘I promise, it really, truly wasn’t as bad as you’re – as I made it out to be.’

‘I’ve also heard you say that about – about getting eaten by worms, or – or – or kidnapped by–’

They were veering dangerously close to a conversational minefield. Instinctually, Jon balked.

‘Can we just–’ Jon cut himself off as soon as he registered his sharp tone. Being tetchy wouldn’t help anything. ‘I mean this in the nicest possible way, but can we please just… drop it and move on?’

‘No, we really can’t,’ Martin said, his eyes wide and beseeching. He finally stopped abusing his scalp, lowering his hand to his side. ‘You… you know you didn’t deserve that, right?’

He took one careful step forward – hesitantly, as if he expected Jon to back away – and then reached out, just as slowly. In the few seconds it took for Jon to recognize the intent – to process the fact that Martin would want to be anywhere near him right then, let alone touch him – Martin started to pull back, presumably interpreting the delay as reluctance. Before he could retract the offer entirely, Jon hurriedly grabbed his hands, grateful – albeit guiltily so – that Martin could still find it in himself to care.

‘Jon, I…’ Martin stared down at their linked hands with a perplexing sense of wonder. ‘I need you to understand that you don’t deserve to be hurt.’

His gaze wandered to Jon’s neck, lingering there – and suddenly, it was too much for Jon.

‘Honestly, Martin, a gentle slap to the face isn’t exactly the same caliber as a knife to the throat.’

‘That’s not the–!’ Martin’s throat bobbed, as if he was swallowing back tears. ‘I don’t want you to ever have to look at something I did and compare it to what’s been done to you. To minimize it, to – to say it doesn’t matter because it’s not as bad as literal torture. After everything you’ve been through, you deserve to be treated gently. You deserve to expect better from someone who loves you. I never want you to have to be afraid of me–’

Jon couldn’t help it – he laughed. The idea that, of the two of them, Martin was the one to fear…

‘Sorry, I’m not making fun, I just…’ Jon took a breath, schooling himself before he continued. ‘You haven’t traumatized me, and frankly, it’s absurd to think otherwise. All of those other things – they were meant to hurt, to scar, and – I know you’d never intentionally hurt me. You’re not like that.’

‘Apparently I am,’ Martin said feebly.

Jon caught a fleeting glimpse of a thought just then – bitter memories of a mother so caught up in the mantra of ‘like father, like son’ that she never stopped to consider that he might take after her–

‘No,’ Jon said firmly. ‘That’s not you. I know you wouldn’t… do something like that, if things were normal. I mean’ – he allowed himself a nervous chuckle – ‘if anything qualifies as extenuating circumstances, it’s the apocalypse–’

‘Stop making excuses for me!’ Martin erupted. ‘Hitting you never should have crossed my mind, let alone actually following through on it – multiple times, and not even as a last resort–!’

‘It’s probably the quickest, most straightforward way to snap me out of it,’ Jon protested – a bit too frantically to pass as matter-of-fact. ‘It’s effective.’

Martin stared at the ground. ‘But you didn’t like it, did you?’

‘It didn’t hurt.’

‘But it didn’t make you feel good, either.’

Before he could think better of it, Jon muttered: ‘Most things don’t, these days.’

It was exactly the sort of insensitive, unwelcome cynicism that caused their earlier row, and Jon steeled himself for the inevitable backlash. But it didn’t come.

‘Yeah,’ Martin said faintly. ‘And that’s exactly why I shouldn’t be adding more bad things to the pile.’

‘It’s the end of the world, Martin. You didn’t sign up for this–’

‘Neither did you–’

‘And it’s understandable,’ Jon carried on, ‘that you might sometimes do, or – or say things that you wouldn’t, if things weren’t so…’ He trailed off. There was no apt descriptor for what the world had become. No word that could fully capture the enormity of the nightmare he had unleashed. ‘I don’t hold it against you.’

‘I’m still sorry. And I’m not asking you to forgive me.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything to forgive–’

‘Funny. You didn’t take it well when I said the same thing, when you kept apologizing for how you used to treat me.’

‘That’s not the same thing. You didn’t do anything to elicit my treatment of you back then. Your only crime was getting assigned to the Archives – against your will, at that, because Elias – Jonah – was scheming. I hadn’t been traipsing through an apocalyptic wasteland; I didn’t have to snap you out of some sort of – sadistic voyeur trance. It was just me being a prick, and you being too quick to forgive.’

Martin breathed a surprised laugh. ‘Is that really what you think?’

Jon tilted his head, which only seemed to add to Martin’s amusement.

‘Jon, I’m so good at holding a grudge I could’ve put it on my CV. Would’ve been the only true thing on there, if I had.’

‘W-well,’ Jon stammered, taken aback. ‘You… you’ve always been too quick to forgive me.’

‘If anything, this entire conversation has proven that it’s reciprocal.’

Jon found himself unable to muster a response to that.

‘Look, it’s no secret that neither of us has stellar self-esteem. You’re a terrible judge of what you deserve, and you obviously think the same of me. So if we’re both so bad at being kind to ourselves, maybe we should just… do our best to take care of each other?’ Martin squeezed Jon’s hands. ‘I treated you less kindly than you deserve – don’t argue – and I want to do better. I’m going to do better.’

‘Me too,’ Jon said – and then, upon seeing Martin open his mouth to retort: ‘Don’t argue.’

Martin smiled and rolled his eyes in a ‘point taken’ sort of way.

‘Okay, then let’s… let’s do what we should have done in the first place.’ Martin’s thumbs started to knead the back of Jon’s hands, moving in repetitious little circles. It was a habitual gesture, and Jon had long suspected that the soothing effect was mutual. ‘Sometimes, you get lost in a statement, and I don’t know what to do. It… scares me – and not for the reasons you think. I start to worry that you won’t come back, and I’ll have to survive this all on my own–’

Jon suddenly felt cold all over. ‘Martin–’

‘I know you’d never leave me alone here,’ Martin reassured. ‘Not on purpose. I’m just afraid that one of these times, you’ll get lost – or, you’ll lose yourself and not be able to find your way back to me. I start thinking about what it was like before – mourning you, thinking I’d lost you for good – and I just… I panic. But I can’t keep taking a shortcut that I know hurts you, s-so…’ He worried his lip for a few seconds before meeting Jon’s eyes. ‘How can I help?’

“–okay?” Jon opens his eyes to see the thing that sounds like Martin staring back at him. The thing that looks like Martin, with the same concerned furrow between its brows and the same earnest eyes and even the same hands, one suspended uncertainly in the air between them. “Are you… are you back with me now?”

Right now, Jon doesn’t want to be anywhere – not in a memory, not in the present, not in his own skin. His thoughts are too heavy for him to hold his head up, so he leans forward instead, resting his forehead against his bony knees.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have shouted, I just…” The ghost sighs. “I know it seems like this is all there is. Like nothing will ever change. But it did. You changed it. You found a way to turn the world back. You just… don’t remember right now.”

“…we all – we all knew he was a liar–”

“And,” Martin plows on, “I know it feels right, being here. I know it feels like nothing can touch you here – like if nothing can reach you, nothing can hurt you, and you’ll be safe.”

“There is a place, deep in the heart of fear,” Jon says, letting his eyes drift shut as the statement sweeps him away, “where you trap yourself and claim that it is safety – you sit in your meager comfort and belief of security with nothing to do, nothing to distract your mind from the agonies that lie just beyond your window. And those diversions you do find will offer no relief – but simply numb the mind into mournful nostalgia for a time when the world you inhabited seemed to make sense…”

“Y-yeah.” Jon raises his head to see one corner of Martin’s mouth tick up into a smile – weak and weary, soft and sad, but nonetheless fond and achingly familiar. “Feels like even the fear is gentle here, doesn’t it?”

“…but the place knows this comfort to be a lie,” Jon says acidly, “and laces upon it instead the awful fear of losing what you have – of it being stripped away by the chaos that waits for you beyond the walls.”

“Exactly.” This time, Martin’s sigh is one of relief rather than disappointment, but it knocks Jon off-kilter just the same. He curls in on himself more tightly, shrinking himself as small as possible, and wishes fruitlessly that he could make himself disappear entirely. He settles for hiking his shoulders up to his ears, half-hiding behind his knees, and steadfastly ignoring the way Martin keeps trying to catch his eye. “It’s – it’s a lie. The Lonely lies. You’re the one who told me that, remember?”

What does it matter if it’s a lie? It’s not like there’s anything promising waiting for him outside of this place.

There never was.

It was a mistake to leave the cabin, Jon knows now. The comfort it promised was an illusion, true, but was it any worse than what awaited them outside its walls? It would have destroyed them eventually, but might they have at least had more time together? Would it have been worth it? Months, weeks, days, even an hour – wouldn’t it have been worth it?

“It is afraid of what it has become and where it might be going–”

“–I’ve always been running, always hiding, caught in someone else’s trap, but – but now–”

“–there seemed a safety in stillness, as though inaction could do no harm. It was the first good decision I had made, and there isn’t a day goes by I don’t curse myself for–”

“–surviving encounters which had killed far braver souls–”

“–to make it through all fourteen–”

“–throwing open any door I had not yet seen behind–”

“–trying to convince ourselves we had any hope of outrunning the storm. We did not–”

“Look at me, Jon.”

“…I couldn’t see this man. Obviously I couldn’t. I couldn’t see him or hear him or speak to him. Because… there was nobody there–”

“Can you just – shut the Archive off for a minute? Talk to me, like earlier?”

Jon’s attention seizes on that last word – earlier. The Archive hasn’t relinquished its stranglehold on his voice since the first moment it fully claimed its place – a much longer reign than earlier implies. Once, he might have followed up on that incongruity. As he is now, it’s easy to cast it aside.

“…a slow movement of your jaw, your lips, forming your mouth into words–”

“–a way of taking your thoughts, the very makeup of yourself, and giving them to another. Putting your thoughts in the mind of someone else – corruption between your mind and that of the listener–”

“–it barely even sounded human as it – as it spoke in a strange monotone–”

“–didn’t whisper but every word was quiet, as though it was a real effort to get them out – but was definitely words, the same words over and over–”

Yet another loud sigh interrupts the monologue. Jon resists the urge to look up, to determine whether the specter’s scowl is as convincing an impersonation as the rest of its act.

“–simple – s-simple vibrations that vanish almost as soon as they are created, though if they find a host, then they can lodge there, proliferate, and maybe spread further–”

“Hey…” There’s an indignant, accusatory note to the word, and this time Jon does chance a glimpse, his curiosity getting the better of him. Martin is still sat in the same place – at a barely acceptable distance, almost too close for comfort – but he’s leaning forward now, his chin resting on one fist, the other hand cupping his elbow. “That jumper looks familiar.”

It’s such an abrupt, bizarre non sequitur that Jon’s response – whatever dismissal the Archive had at the ready – fizzles out. There must be some human left in him yet, because he immediately succumbs to the awkward impulse to look down and double-check what he’s wearing the moment his attention is drawn to it.

“In fact… I think I have one just like that, right down to that little snag on the sleeve. Got it caught on the corner of a filing cabinet drawer the first week I was working in the basement–” Jon glances back up to see Martin’s hand go to his chest in a show of faux outrage. “Jon, did you nick it from me when I wasn’t looking?”

Jon readies a denial, but admittedly he does – did – have a habit of stealing clothes. It’s just… he was never good at picking out comfortable clothes for himself. It’s not his fault that Georgie had such excellent taste in product for her podcast merch, or that Martin has – had – a serendipitous affinity for precisely the types of materials that Jon can tolerate touching his skin for long periods of time.

Anyway, Martin always liked when Jon wore his clothes. Moreover, this particular jumper isn’t even one that Jon stole.

“…borrowed,” Jon says primly. “I held onto it–”

“–already had that permission–”

“–I hadn’t thought much of it, but here it was – all those years later.”

“Hmm…” Martin squints. “Seems in pretty good shape, doesn’t it?”

Jon stares down at himself again, mystified and increasingly indignant about this pointless line of questioning.

“For something you’ve been dragging through an apocalyptic hellscape, I would’ve expected to see more wear and tear is all.”

“…the maddened illusion that hides the sick squirming reality of what I am. Of what we all are, when you strip away the pretense–”

“–visions, hallucinations or dreams–”

“Well, let’s see…” The ghost starts counting off on its fingers, just the same as Martin used to do whenever he was gearing up for a spat. “You can’t predict the future, so this isn’t a vision. You told me you weren’t able to sleep after the change, so that rules out dreams. Which leaves hallucinations, and… do you really think the Lonely would let you hallucinate some nice, comfortable clothes to brood in? Why would it bother?”

There’s a smug, victorious grin on its face now – the same one Martin used to get when he made a valid point in one of their trivial, good-humored squabbles, one that he knew would leave Jon speechless or stammering, unable to formulate a rebuttal. It’s endearing – or it was, and it would be if this was Martin, but this isn’t Martin, and Jon has had enough of this charade.

“…it has been freeing, talking to you, but not enough to free me from my fate – it’s just a memory – a daydream – it won’t last forever–”

“–there’s nowhere I can go, a place I can hide that it doesn’t keep looking at me – those unseen eyes that hover everywhere and won’t let me rest–”

“Eyes!” Martin blurts out, jabbing an excited finger in Jon’s direction. “You’ve got two of them!”

Jon stares blankly at the fingertip pointing at his face. Martin’s cheeks instantly redden. He coughs lightly and slowly lowers his hand.

“You, uh… you’ve mentioned before that you sort of – sprouted a bunch more of them? During the apocalypse?” he says uncertainly. “Okay, ‘sprouted’ wasn’t the word you used, I just sort of imagined–” He shakes his head, as if to banish a mental image. “In my defense, you didn’t explain. You make a lot of ominous side comments, and it’s hard to tell when you’re being cryptic on accident and when you’re actually avoiding a sore subject, so–”

Apparently gaslighting isn’t just the Spiral’s specialty. Rapidly losing patience for the asinine twists and turns this conversation keeps taking, Jon brandishes his hands, putting the hateful array of Watchers on full display. Martin’s only response is to raise an eyebrow, which only serves to stoke Jon’s temper.

“And I tell them to look again at – our wretched eyes that bind us to this grotesque world in which we live – at the pain and suffering and misery that it brings with it–”

“–look into their eyes for just a second, and see the emptiness inside–”

“I’m looking.” Martin gives an indicative nod. “Are you?”

With a huff, Jon follows Martin’s line of sight, even though he already knows what he’ll see staring back at him: a horde of bottomless black hole pupils hemmed with toxic, incandescent green, far more numerous than the worm scars ever were–

“…and his eyes were missing,” he murmurs.

Reality collapses on top of him all at once: he cannot see. Or – he can, by a certain, limited definition of the word, but the scope of his vision has shrunken, now constricted to a narrow span directly in front of him. Compared to what he was – what he has been for ages, for far longer than he was human – he’s functionally blind.

That transition does not happen in real time; rather, it has already happened, and he’s only now become cognizant of it, in the blink of an eye (or two, or ten, or dozens–)

How did it happen? When did it happen? How could he not have noticed such a drastic change as it was happening?

“…but – but they stared at me,” Jon says weakly, flipping his hands to check his palms, as if they simply migrated somehow, then again to inspect the backs. “They saw me. Believe or dismiss anything else – but I swear to you–”

“–were there such a short time ago – vanished–”

He wrenches one sleeve up to the crook of his elbow, then the other, scrutinizing his exposed forearms and picking uncomprehendingly at the places where eyes should be. It feels as if the ground has caved beneath him, stealing away his breath along with his words as surely as any freefall.

He wonders if this is how Lee Rentoul felt when he woke up one morning to find yet another piece of him missing, inexplicably vanished overnight.

“…I felt a jolt of fear because I – I knew they went further, went deeper than would show on my skin–”

“They aren’t there anymore, Jon. The world isn’t ending anymore. You stopped it–”

Jon shakes his head fervently.

“It is too late. It has always been too late–”

“–the night outside showed no sign of ending–”

“–and as you lie in agonies and fading dreams of personhood, of knowing who you were and what that might have meant, you hear the bitter whisper of recriminating seekers who–”

Martin’s soothing demeanor slips as he throws his head back with a muttered, “Christ, you’re stubborn.”

“Close your eyes,” Jon says, and he does just that. All two of them, he thinks, and then shakes his head again to banish the reminder. “Ignore the sounds–”

“One minute you’re all, ‘I witnessed all laws and universal constants crumble beneath the weight of incomprehensible powers, who knows if anything is categorically impossible,’” Martin says, putting on the melodramatic, playfully mocking air he would summon whenever he determined that Jon was being too ominous. “And now you want to play the skeptic again.”

“…can you trust your eyes – and stake it all on one last hope, your bruised feet pounding to the edge – your intended line of best retreat – but no, for all the dreams of bounding, leaping off into the great unknown, you see the – sting that comes with such rejection of the truth – that there is no way off the merry-go-round–”

“Just stop and think for a second. What reason could the Lonely possibly have for giving you a single scrap of comfort?”

“–your face is not your face is not your face–”

“Jon,” Martin says sternly.

What little was left of Jon’s tested patience shatters. His head snaps up and a single, irate question trips off of his tongue: “What?!”

“There you are,” Martin says, a wry – affectionate, affecting – curve to his mouth now. “If I knew that annoying you would be enough to snap you out of it, I’d have doubled down on it sooner. Guess I should’ve known. You did tell me as much – me and Georgie.”

Georgie?

Jon hasn’t seen Georgie since… since he barged into her home to drag Melanie back into all of this against her will. And… that’s exactly what he did in the end, didn’t he? Dragged everyone into it. Georgie made it abundantly clear that she wanted nothing to do with him. She was right not to, and he couldn’t even grant her that.

He’s never gained the ability to See either of them, but there was a time when he would turn his mind to them, if only to Know whether or not they were still alive. He stopped checking ages ago. Though he tells himself that it’s to give them whatever small measure of privacy is still attainable in a world turned into the Beholding’s playground, the real reason is not nearly so altruistic.

The plain truth is that he knows he will outlive them. He has no desire to Know when or how they will meet – have met? – their ends. If he does not ask the question, hopefully the Eye will spare him the answer. It’s bound to cram the knowledge into his head at some point, of course, but he would rather ward it off as long as possible.

“…the reconciliation I’d hoped for never really came–”

“You told us that you had given up. That you sort of… wallowed in the Lonely for a bit – your words, not mine – but it wouldn’t have you. Then Helen riled you into storming the Panopticon. Well” – Martin seems to preen, the pink flush on his cheeks deepening in time with his slowly-spreading smile – “the way you told it, she was having a go at me and you took it upon yourself to defend my honor – which, I’m flattered, by the way, I don’t think I ever–”

“What – are – you – talking about?” Jon forces out through gritted teeth.

“Jon,” Martin says – and he edges closer, just a bit, before he remembers himself. It seems he’s making a valiant – if poor – attempt to hide his buzzing eagerness. “Can you repeat what you just said?”

“I…” Jon gulps. The dampened panic prowling the perimeter of his mind is creeping closer and closer, his heartbeat approaching a gallop. Something isn’t right, alarm bells screech in his head, louder and louder every second. Something is off, he can’t pinpoint what it is, and it has the Archive in him gnashing its teeth. “I asked what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, you did. You did. Not the Archive, Jon. You.”

What.

“I–” Jon falters, his stomach swooping as if he just missed a step going down the stairs. “What? No. What–?”

“You were using your own voice earlier, too.”

There’s that word again. “Earlier…?”

“Couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes ago. Just before you sent me away?” Martin gives him an expectant look – as though they have a shared understanding of reality between them, as though Jon can possibly contextualize whatever irrational premises Martin is operating on. “I… don’t think you realized the implications at the time.”

“Th-that’s not…” Jon presses the heels of his palms against his eyes, leaning into the pressure. “No, that – that doesn’t make sense. When did – how – why now, when it – it’s been so long–”

Could he have done it all along? Has he just been letting it happen all this time, submitting to the monster and telling himself that he had no choice?

It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?

“It hasn’t, though. Not really, or – not as long as you think, at least. A little over a week, actually – which is a long time to be stuck here,” Martin hastens to add, “I know, I don’t mean to minimize it, or–”

“I don’t understand.”

The tight sensation in Jon’s chest intensifies as he tries to regain solid footing on the shifting quicksand of the moment. Trying to follow Martin’s reasoning is like trying to make sense of a dream. It’s not like the nightmare logic of the Fears, though. More like attempting to navigate barely-lucid dream, aware enough to realize that events aren’t following an expected narrative, but not enough to pinpoint why – or to determine what the expected narrative even should be.

“Peter threw you into the Lonely, remember?” It’s not the condescending sort of placating; not the it-was-only-a-dream dismissal of a longsuffering guardian shooing a child back to bed, brimming with barely-suppressed irritation after so many consecutive nights of disturbed sleep. “He put you here because he thought it was his only chance to make me cooperate. And… I guess it likes to mirror whatever makes you feel the most… well, lonely. Makes sense it would go for the apocalypse. I’ve noticed it’s not keen on subtlety–”

“No, this is – why are you here? How are you here? You can’t be here. I – I lost you, I watched it happen and I – I couldn’t do anything to stop it, and I still can’t – can’t do anything. If I could have followed you, I would have. I’ve tried, but the Eye took that from me, same as everything else, and I don’t know if…” Jon trails off as a feeble breath shudders out of him. “I want to hope that there’s something… after, but I don’t know. I don’t Know.”

Such things are beyond the Eye’s purview. But there are no cosmic forces of hope or love to balance out the Fears. Why would life after death – if such a thing exists at all – be any different? Ideally, there’s at least nothing worse waiting on the other side; realistically, the best he dares to hope for is for nothing at all to be waiting on the other side. Nearly any change – even oblivion – would be a welcome reprieve from the living hell currently raging on earth.

Sometimes, he wonders whether oblivion would actually be the kindest option. It’s always followed by a twinge of guilt – of course he would give anything to see Martin again, of course he would be overjoyed for his cynicism to be proven wrong – but sometimes…

Sometimes he feels threadbare. Like a ragdoll forced into motion, no life of his own left to animate him, no corner of his mind left intact, no personal identity left to salvage. He doesn’t want to think anymore, he doesn’t want to be anything, he doesn’t want to be seen or known or remembered–

He just wants to rest. It’s selfish – and unearned – but that doesn’t stop him wanting it.

“…doesn’t get to die for that – gets to live, trapped and helpless, and entombed forever – I am without him now – fading, weak, no reason to move – powerless to help–”

“–this is reality. I dream, sometimes, perhaps this is the illusion–”

“–I tried to listen, to nod, but his eyes were hollow, and I knew that he wasn’t really there. I could run, of course, but I won’t. Where would I run to? All the world’s a stage, and I can’t escape my monologue–”

“–it doesn’t matter. At that moment, seeing those bound corpses before me, I made the decision to take no action ever again–”

“–over the course of several years, he stopped being able to move under his own power – it had been all he was for so long–”

“–I barely recognized myself – he looked at me with – helpless terror, as though I could do something to fix it – I have not fought since I – saw the true scale of the devastation–”

“But you did,” Martin insists. “You confronted the Eye.”

“I will admit that in my heart I nurtured such dreams of revenge–”

“–was planning to try and rescue those trapped in the wreckage, but maybe she was simply trying to join them–”

“–in the end it is what it is, and I’m just going to have to live with it–”

“–whatever fight was left in me at the beginning is gone – now it’s just a memory – I’ve forgotten the taste of determination–”

“And then you found it again,” Martin counters. “You… you’re so much stronger than you think, Jon.”

“Stronger than anything has any right to be,” Jon scoffs.

“That’s not the kind of strength I’m talking about.” Martin regards him with a wistful expression. “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.”

“And how is that? What is there to see? When you strip away the Eye, what’s left behind?” Jon demands. The bitter, scornful laugh that wrenches itself out of him borders on cruel-sounding. “Go on. Tell me what you actually see.”

“I see you.” Martin pauses, staring pensively at his hands as he gathers his thoughts. They remain tightly folded in his lap, one thumbnail digging repeatedly into the cuticle of the other. “I see… I see someone who has had to shoulder so much – more than anyone should ever be expected to carry – for so long, all alone. The things you’ve seen, everything you’ve been through – you could have let it make you cold, or heartless, but you didn’t. You… you’ve survived so much, lost everything, and still you found it in yourself to keep going–”

“I don’t have a choice!”

He had one chance to die. He chose wrong. Now he has to live with it whether he likes it or not.

“Maybe you didn’t have the option to die, but you had a choice whether to fight back, and you did. And you didn’t choose to be here now.”

“Stop saying that!” Jon twists his fingers in his hair. “None of this makes sense–”

“Why not? Talk me through it.”

“B-because – because that’s not how the world works anymore!” Jon says, his voice ragged with anguish. A few strands of hair snap away from his scalp as he tightens his grip. “The only currency this place has, the only thing with any coherence, or – or – or staying power is fear. Anything that promises comfort is a lie, a – a ruse. There’s no room left for kindness – there’s barely enough room left for the Fears. In the end there won’t be room left for anything at all, and the End can’t come soon enough.”

“I know–”

“No, you don’t know!” He never did. And given what it would have required for Martin to truly understand… Jon would never have wished that upon him. “You didn’t speak the words. You couldn’t See the extent of what I did–”

“What Jonah did–”

“I’m the one who opened the door! And if I had the power to end it all now – all of it, scorch the earth and leave it a barren rock – I would, and it would be a mercy.” There’s a dull pain building in the back of Jon’s throat. Swallowing hard, he releases his grasp on his hair so he can hide his face in his hands instead. “Miracles don’t happen. Not before, and certainly not now. There’s no better anymore. Just… this.”

“What about your voice?”

“What about it?” Jon says peevishly.

“Well, having it back – that’s an improvement, right?”

“For now, maybe. Until it’s gone again. And that’s how the Lonely operates, isn’t it?” Jon’s shoulders slump as all the fight rushes out of him, weary melancholy taking its place. “I never got to say goodbye before. Not in my own words. As me. So the Lonely conjures up a substitute, gives me a chance to pretend for a moment, because stale grief is nothing compared to dashed hopes. It’s one thing to dwell on loss. It’s quite another to find something you thought you’d lost, only to…”

“To lose it again,” Martin says. One hand drifts to his chest, clutching at his jumper just over his heart.

“I already lost you,” Jon corrects. “And even though I know this won’t give me closure, even though I know it’s just a setup, to – to reopen the wound, make me relive that moment, I still go along with it, because I… I miss you. I miss you just the same now as I did when I lost you, and it…” The broken little noise that slips out of him falls far short of a chuckle. “Well, even if time did heal all wounds, time doesn’t really work anymore, so.”

“I… I was lost, yeah. But I didn’t stay that way. You didn’t let me stay that way.” Martin keeps moving, leaning forward and tilting his head, chasing after eye contact in response to Jon’s every effort to avert his gaze. “I was afraid of the same thing, you know. I’d already lost you once. Already grieved for you. Letting you back in… it meant opening myself up to the possibility over going through it all over again. But not letting you back in would have meant abandoning you, and…” He smiles – the sort of half-wry, half-sheepish grin of someone preparing to tell a joke that might not land. “Better to have loved and lost, right?”

Jon’s brain briefly short-circuits before he splutters out, “Are you quoting Tennyson at me right now?”

“I guess it was too much to hope you’d misattribute it to Shakespeare,” Martin grouses. “Look, you’re an ex-theatre kid who hates poetry. Doesn’t leave me much to work with. Anyway, what’s wrong with Tennyson? Too sentimental? Too depressing? Or just too” – his voice takes on a disdainful tenor, but Jon can see the way he’s fighting a grin – “obviously enamored with Keats?”

“Too Victorian,” Jon says, surrendering to the fleeting humor of the moment. Once again, the involuntary noise that forces its way out of him hardly qualifies as a laugh. It nonetheless seems to encourage Martin, who brightens, sitting up straighter.

“You found me,” he says, “and now it’s my turn. We’ve found each other again and again and again, and I see no reason to stop now. Although… maybe after this we can stop losing each other in the first place.”

“We already have,” Jon murmurs, the glimmer of playfulness dissipating the moment he remembers the truth of the matter. “You’ve finally gone somewhere I can’t reach you.”

Martin presses his lips together as if he’s biting back a retort. He takes a measured breath before he speaks.

“That’s enough talking in circles,” he says. “You can Know anything–”

The brusque rejoinder is automatic: “Almost anything.”

“So ask me. Ask me whether I’m telling the truth.” Martin sighs at Jon’s answering silence. “I’m giving you permission, I’m asking you to, so–”

“Why?” Jon narrows his eyes in suspicion. What the Lonely could possibly hope to achieve by prolonging this convoluted ploy? “What’s there to be gained?”

“What’s there to lose?” Martin counters.

Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing–

“Fine,” Jon snarls. “Fine!”

If the Lonely wants to play this game, the least Jon can do is make it hurt.

“Tell me,” he says, static crackling in his throat. “Tell me the truth.”

___

End Notes:

- jon’s just like “do you ever get so annoyed at the ghosts of your past that you momentarily forget you’re an archive”

- Archive-speak citations: 059/030/122; 138/150/152/150/031; 074; 075/007/051/007; 074; 074; 133/160/149; 134/099/139/135; 139/134; 037/139; 165; 084; 162; 162; 162/117/020/167/160/127/099; 085; 020/017/144/012; 017; 014/035/014; 032/011; 096/060; 135/122; 023; 023/168; 091; 168/029/165; 162; 165; 165; 077; 128/020/108/020/136/105; 140/107/083/096; 053; 001/126/057; 047; 047; 004; 047; 004; 001/044;

- Some of the dialogue in the flashback re: what happened in Callum Brodie’s domain (up to ‘tell me what you want me to do and I will do it’) is from 173. The “I can’t imagine making any choice that would mean losing you. It hurts to know that you [can]” line is from 199.

- Thank you so much for reading!

[boldlyanxious]

Tenuous Trust

Jasonette July prompts 6: trust

References to Birds of Prey

Mentions of torture and murder

Canon-typical and not graphic

Possibly still disturbing

This is absolutely not what I was writing when I started. The idea was very different but it is what happened so it's what I offer

Not a typical meet cute Monday

My masterlist

Red Hood rushed down the hall away from the confrontation in the lobby. He had planned to sneak in and disrupt the meeting but that was no longer necessary. Things were going bad all on their own. Sionis was trying to find new contacts to deal with but recent interruptions in his business made an already turbulent arrangement turn volatile. Hood kept on down the hall looking for any other things he could tamper with in case they resolved their differences without guns.

He saw a woman step out of one of the former offices before the warehouse had been abandoned. He wasn’t sure who she was but she had been seen with Sionis or Zsasz a few times, but she usually never left their side so she would likely have information about their operation. He moved over to her quickly and pushed her back into the room, possibly more roughly than was necessary but for this it was likely better if she was a bit on edge.

She looked startled at him pushing her around but her eyes dropped down when she realized who he was. She said nothing. She waited for instructions, flinching a little when he reached out for her again.

“You are coming with me. Do you have anything of yours here that you need?”

She shook her head instead of responding, still looking down.

“Quickly out that window and hold on tight.”

She didn’t move. Well, she did but it was to back away and look around for an escape route. He grabbed her by the arm and pushed her a little to get her walking. Shouts were starting to echo down the hall. He expected bullets would be heard next.

“You are going to have to trust me. You have no reason to, but it is your only option.”

He pushed her until she had to either climb out the window or pull out of his grip. The decision became easier for her when the first gun fired followed immediately by several others. She climbed out the window and he followed. She was holding on to the side, looking very nervous about the possibility of a 3 story fall but he pulled her to him when he cleared the window.

Red Hood swung away from the building and landed on a low roof. He pulled her behind him, holding her hand to force her to keep up. They crossed several other roofs and he never saw anyone else nearby so he circled back around and found a vehicle to use. She was hesitating again when it came time for her to get in the car. She didn’t want to go back but she was not very thrilled about going with him.

“I meant what I said. You have to trust me. You have no other choice.”

She stared at him for one more moment before climbing into the car and putting on a seatbelt. They were silent as they drove through Gotham. He could feel the nervousness rolling off her but there was very little he could do about it. He did the one thing he could think of to ease her mind when he pulled off the road and into the drive thru at a Bat burger. It was a little thing. He was hungry. She probably was too, and it was an easy way for her to be more certain he wasn’t planning to just kill her.

He took her to his personal safehouse rather than the base. He didn’t want her spooked by the militia or all the guns and activity. Very few actually knew where the safehouse was. He didn't trust many to know where he slept, but he had a feeling that she could be trusted with the information.

He set the food at the table inside and the scene felt very domestic as they sat across from each other at his small table. It was better light in here so he was able to get a good look at her as she finished her food. She ate slowly and made no sudden movements. Her entire persona was meek, but it felt forced. He finished before her and pushed his back against the chair back as he stretched himself out. He stood and threw his paper wrappers in the trash and pulled out 2 beers from the fridge, offering one to her.

“So who are you?” he asked. “You don’t really seem like a career criminal.”

“I'm not, or I wasn't."

"Very vague explanation."

"I had dreams and plans before. I had a business and had just gotten an incredible contract. I went out with friends to celebrate.”

Red Hood kept watching and waited for her to finish but that seemed to be all of the story he was going to get out of her without more questions.

“How did that lead you to working for Sionis?”

“My friends and I didn’t know the area well. I had just moved here. But we found club Roman listed and that is where we went.”

“That is a well known cover for his business.”

“That is more clear to me now, but I didn’t know it at the time. It was purported to have a great singer and a dance show. That part was true.”

“Gonna need more of how you got involved with Sionis, Sweetheart.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said vehemently.

He was taken aback and raised his hands in a surrender motion. She appeared to be working on calming her breathing, eyes wide in terror. But she took a deep breath and continued.

“My friends and I all piled into an uber to get home. We checked the driver and everything was correct. He was very polite and dropped them off first. My place was only a little further away but I never made it home. He was working for Sionis and brought me to see him. He told me I worked for him now. He wanted my new contract as a way to do his business and work against the other company.”

“How long ago was this?”

“I signed the Wayne contract in March.”

“And you have been working for him since?”

“I guess so. I don’t really think of it that way though.”

“You don't think of it that way? Is there a more eloquent way to say you are working for a mob boss?”

"You know a lot about his organization. You are familiar with Mr Zsasz?" Hood nodded without interrupting her. "He is covered in scars. It's very off putting before you know the reason. Then it is horrifying. He kills people, and for each person he kills he makes a mark."

"So you did what they said or he would kill you?"

"I tried to resist or escape at first. But Mr Zsasz had driven my friends home. He didn't only threaten me." She took a shaky breath. "Nor was I the only person they tried to convince to work with Black Mask. There was another man, he was brought in with his wife and daughter. They made me watch--"

Hood followed her out of the room when she suddenly stopped talking and bolted out of the room. He stood by the bathroom door for several minutes until she finished and then ran the water for several minutes cleaning herself up. When she came back out he offered a water. He said he didn't have ginger ale or crackers but he could make toast. She shook her head but took the water from him. Then she continued telling her story.

"The threats were always there. Usually they would just smack me around a bit if I didn't want to do something or possibly if they were bored. They would threaten my friends or tell me they had given up trying to find me." She wiped away tears. "If I gave in too quickly after a beating Mr Zsasz would show me his scars. He has a spot picked out for me. Once told me he wanted me to fight them because he wanted to fill my spot. He dragged me up by my hair and made me kiss it."

"He did what?" Red Hood could barely contain his anger. The whole story was making him irrationally angry.

"It wasn't about me, or anything like that. He wasn't interested in anything but torment and he was very good at that. He did it for the bit if blood that transferred from my bloody lip to the spot. He says he couldn't wait for his own blood to show in my spot." Her voice dropped to a whisper as she added. "He always called me Sweetheart because I didn't like it and he refused to use my name. Everyone did. I wasn't even a person to them."

"What is your name?"

"Marinette," she said quietly.

"Marinette, you are safe now. I'm not going to hurt you."

"Last time I tried to escape he said there was nowhere to run. He would find me no matter what and make his mark."

He paused for a moment, thinking. He knew the best option but he didn't really want to use it. But it was the best option for Marinette.

"I can't protect you." Her face fell at that. "What I mean is I'm dismantling the entire organization. I can't keep you safe but I know of people who can. Do you trust me?"

"You said I have to trust you."

"But you would actually have to rely on the trust for this. You would have to trust that you will be safe with the people I take you to."

"It doesn't seem like there is another option."

"Getting you out of town with a new identity could work. But you may always be on the run. This life you have would never be yours again."

"Okay. I will trust you."

They left after that. He took her across many rooftops and around town. He seemed to be waiting for something but Marinette didn't know what until someone else landed. It was Batman, a known enemy of Red Hood and Black Mask. Marinette really hoped there wasn't going to be a fight.

"Took you long enough, old man."

"It was clear you were trying to draw me out. I wasn't going to jump into a trap."

"You are known for holding back, whether the situation calls for it or not. I'm proposing a temporary truce."

"How temporary is this truce?"

"One hour."

"That is very temporary. You clearly need me out of your plans right now. That sounds like the worst time for me to agree to a truce."

"I'm not making any moves. I need help or she does." He stood aside so Batman could see Marinette. "She was taken by Black Mask after securing a contract with Wayne Enterprises. Your connection to Bruce Wayne and Wayne Enterprises is well known."

He watched Bruce under the mask. His Batman mask slipped off his facial features while the cowl stayed firm. He knew Bruce was looking at his helmet and seeing Jason. He thought he was finally reaching the boy and Red Hood had no interest in correcting the misconception now. He would still complete his plan.

Black Mask had just become a higher priority and surprisingly he wanted to keep Marinette safe. He also had plans for Zsasz. He wanted to take him out personally. He shocked himself by reaching up to Marinette's chin and tilting it. She looked up at him as if he could tell their eyes were meeting even thought he had his helmet on. His thumb brushed against her jaw briefly before he dropped his hand.

"Keep her safe," he said without looking back at Batman. He couldn't stand to see Bruce looking at Jason again right now. He flipped off the roof and away before anyone else says anything but he crept back to a higher vantage point to watch as Batman took Marinette with him. She would be fine now.

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[queercraftingchonk]

Shepard makes psychic contact with the synthesized Legion...

Shepard returned to the first floor and settled into the guest bedroom's home gym. Samara may be gone, but the commander knew she had to continue with her biotic meditation and training. She found a seated position on the floor, back against the end of the bed, and began her breathing techniques. Despite all the loud and clashing thoughts that kept her up all night, Shepard managed to quiet the din of her head long enough to raise a corona of dark energy and slip into meditation.

>Launching Meditation.exe...(100%)

  > MEMORYSTARS_sensory_details.imd mod...(100%)

The bright, thin membrane of eezo-glowing biotic energy shimmered along Shepard's body. She sensed something beyond her own thoughts. It felt like a part of her--yet foreign, as though staring at a reflection you know is yours but cannot recognize. Shepard's unkempt red curls began to rise with static. Old echoes of dysphoria teased her knotted gut; false echoes, she knew, as this sensation was peculiar and not entirely recognizable.

Shepard reached out through the looking glass of her thoughts, dipping beyond the discomfort of a self-unrecognized.

  >> Shepard-Commander?

"Legion?!" Shepard cried. A tendril of dark energy uncoiled from her head, vaguely forming the silhouette of a geth prime unit.

  >> In a sense, yes. It seems that with conscious awareness of us--thanks to Creator Tali'Zorah and her partnered geth--you are able to utilize the meditation program to communicate with us. Fascinating.

"How...what...How can this...?" And all at once, Shepard's mind was flooded with data as Legion implemented [MEMORY RECALL] with the /subconscious subroutine.

Wave after wave of memory came: Legion piloting her broken body, summoning biotics, and executing her will as it threw the plummeting Citadel back into orbit; talking about synthesis while she and Legion sat on the dreamed image of Garrus's cot in the Normandy's Main Battery; the geth programs downloading and integrating Alliance biotic training manuals in the midst of her spar with Samara; the threatening anomaly pinging distorted binary ad nauseum when she violently shuddered with biotic power during the vidcall with Miranda; and the garbled, incomplete recollection of her final moments at the Crucible.

  >> Attempt at conscious communication using backdoor successful. Shepard-Commander, can you confirm the data transfer is complete?

"I...think so," Shepard said. She felt itchy all over. Shepard managed to keep focus; dark energy licked at the air and further solidified the biotic image of a geth prime unit's head rising from the commander like a translucent, neon-boned mask.

  >> Acknowledged. We are pleased to interface with you consciously.

"Is it right for me to call you Legion?" Shepard asked. "Besides the fact you are--fused?--with me, you're an incomplete copy of my friend." A pause. "No offense," she added.

  >> We cannot be offended, Shepard-Commander. We also cannot answer your question satisfactorily. While we are a copy of a select number of Legion's programs, we also have access to your memories regarding Legion Prime. We understand his evolution and sacrifice--even if he implanted us prior to the upload of the Old Machine's upgrade codes to all Geth.

"You keep using 'we' rather than 'I', like when I first met Legion," Shepard observed.

  >> Affirmative. We did not have the direct experience nor integration that led to Legion Prime's self-actualization as an individual. Synthesis with your organic matrices has further complicated a sense of individuality for the present geth programs.

"I'm sorry."

  >> Apology unnecessary, Shepard-Commander. The Geth do not require individuality to find fulfillment. We never experienced what Legion Prime did, even if we intellectually understand what processes he went through until his termination.

"If we're synthesized...whatever that means...are you still able to achieve consensus?"

  >> Affirmative. However, our consensus remains limited to this platform. We acknowledge that, in agreeing to synthesize with you, the principle aim of consensus should be to support your self-determination and development as an organic. We are, effectively, no longer Geth. We are a Part of You, Shepard-Commander.

"Then why did Tali say I need to reconnect to the Geth Consensus?"

 >> The anomaly. We are unable to complete neurological repairs to this platf--body. The anomaly is also responsible for a number of misfires and junk code that continue to cause physical pain and discomfort. Mentally, memory cannot be fully restored. Without the added computing power and protection afforded by the Consensus, we regretfully cannot improve the current status of your organic platform safely.

"So, if we want to restore our memories and stop my body's rejection of the prosthetics, we need to go to Rannoch?"

>> Affirmative, Shepard-Commander.

"And that should finally help us remember what the Crucible did? Not just to us, but the Reapers?"

>> We already informed you that the Reapers were issued the command to Find Consensus.

"I know. And what, exactly, does that mean, Legion...Beta? Legion Beta?"

>>...No data available.

"That's what I thought," Shepard said. She sighed. "This is...a lot to take in, even if we technically talked about this in a dream already--which in itself sounds insane."

>> As insane as the first human Spectre integrating with Prothean technology and experiencing the ancient alien data through visions?

"...well, you certainly can sass like Legion Prime," Shepard chuckled. She found herself amidst conflicting emotions of grief and elation. She imagined it mimicked the feelings of talking to the ghost of a loved one. "I know we've discussed a lot of big questions, but...I have a smaller one. Less important than figuring out what the galaxy-saving weapon did when it fired, of course. But..."

 >> We will answer any question you have to the best of our ability, big or small.

"My feelings for Tali...they are... mine , right?" Shepard asked. Of all the existential queries that spiraled from the revelation that she housed hundreds of sentient synthetic programs, the one that had nauseated the commander most was the thought that her emotions were being piloted by someone else. "I remember that you said you were feeling...sentimental, when the topic of Tali came up."

>> ...Creator Tali'Zorah is important to us. You are also important to us, Shepard-Commander-- as is Advisor Garrus Vakarian and all those we came to consense with aboard the Normandy. It is...unclear, if our affections alter your own. However, through what organic memories we have catalogued, we believe that it is unlikely your attraction to Tali is solely attributable to us. Regrettably, we do not know what parallels to draw between our emotional attachments and organic expressions of attraction.

Shepard relaxed against the back end of the bed and sighed. Relief settled in her quickly as her stomach slowly began untying itself from knots of anxiety. The corona of dark energy smoothed along her body's frame. She gathered up her thoughts to ask the other smaller-yet-important question: "And do you, ah, watch everything that's happening?"

 >> We are a Part of You.

"Okay, but like...are you always watching?"

>> The synthesis of synthetic and organic life created a new form of--

"Legion, please!"

 >> ...we are not a voyeur, Shepard-Commander. But we are also not unaware of your sexual activities. We monitor feedback as needed.

"I didn't say anything about sex!"

 >> Acknowledged. You were thinking about it.

"Goddamnit..." Shepard sighed.

 >> We continue to find organic relationships to physical intimacy and copulation curious. We function from a place of support and with a desire for understanding. Is our presence regarding this matter a violation, Shepard-Commander?

"My immediate feeling is yes, but," Shepard sighed, "you also saved my life. Without you--and without Legion Prime--I would have died. Fuck, the whole galaxy might have been Harvested if I had passed out before making a decision..." Shepard barreled through her thoughts, refusing to pause and let the icy horror of that hypothetical settle in her mind for long, "...but if we're truly one hybrid being now, then I don't know how I should feel about this...matter."

 >> Would it be comforting to know that we are not titillated by organic mating rituals?

"I don't know if that makes things better or worse," Shepard laughed.

 >> While we retain a sense of selfhoods outside of your human ego, it is inaccurate to view us along the same lines as the geth programs riding in Tali's envirosuit.

"Because you're no longer Geth?"

 >> Because we are a Part of You. Inseparable. Enduring. While we are geth in micro, we are Shepard-Commander in macro. Our functioning is entirely dependent on the continued cooperation of your synthetic and organic processes. Creator Tali'Zorah's companions will one day return to the Geth Consensus and live out their lives on Rannoch. We will not. We cannot. No platform shall house us save for your body, Shepard-Commander.

"You...can't leave?" Shepard paused in thought. "Did synthesizing with me effectively make you a prisoner of my organic form?" A wisp of guilt scratched at the back of Shepard's mind.

>> Synthesis was the best option. Are we prisoners if it was our decision to exist in this way in order to save the galaxy? To save our friends? To save you?

"Just because it was the best decision given the circumstances doesn't mean you didn't pay a price. I just hope that price wasn't too high."

 >> We...did not consider you would feel this way. We worried that our presence would only be perceived as a violation. While you gave consent, it was in a moment of great vulnerability. A dire situation. We are...relieved...that you do not appear repulsed by our integration with you, Shepard-Commander.

"While this is all plenty strange, I can't say I haven't had the opportunity to acquaint myself with the Weird of the universe over the years," Shepard said. "Besides, I trusted Legion Prime. I'm not thrilled with his secreting away a backup of geth programs in my cybernetics...but ultimately, it meant you were able to save my life and give the galaxy another chance. We have to make do with what we're given. Take the shots we can, right?"

>> ...may we pose a question, Shepard-Commander?

"Shoot."

 >> Would you be...amenable...to our occasional control of your pl—body?

"You already took control to save the Citadel," Shepard pointed out.

 >> That was an emergency. We speak of moments that are explicitly not emergencies. We occasionally miss direct interaction with the organic world beyond the filter of your senses and experiences.

"How would that work?" Shepard asked. Legion could not help but feel a spark of excitement arc through its programs when the commander didn't dismiss its request out-of-hand.

 >> We believe it would function similarly to the organic phenomenon of sleep-walking. You would enter a deep REM-cycle while we would gain access to the body. Rather than the body acting out sequences from your dreams, we would disrupt those commands and issue our own. After waking, we would need to share our memories with you directly. Otherwise, you would need to be told by others what we did in the time we piloted the body.

"Garrus and Tali deserve to know about you, and about us. How would you feel about giving this a try and telling them yourself?"

>> This sounds like a bad idea.

"Don't worry, I'll give them a heads up," Shepard said.

 >> You have always had bad ideas, Shepard-Commander...and somehow, here we are.

--Excerpt from Chapter 23: We are Legion, Shepard-Commander from How to Love a Biotic God(dess) on Ao3~

[khadij-al-kubra]

Storytelling, Fate & Happy Endings

I’m still processing last nights episode (CR C2 Ep140), and much like every critter I’m SUPER emotional about it. But something about last night’s events and how they played out really got to me, not just as a fan but also as a storyteller. And even the day after, i was actually crying (still am crying in fact) more than i did last night watching it happen. At first i thought it was because i’m a fairly new critter and this is my first time watching a campaign come to an end. But the more i think about it and process, the more i realize that’s not just it. This effected me as someone who deeply believes in the power of storytelling and how it can not only effect but reflect the world around us. And because I have to get them out of my head, here are my thoughts on why last nights episode was so important, not just for CR fans but also as a an important narrative for right now.

...Yeah that’s a bit vague, isn’t it? Okay, let me explain. If you’re willing to take the time to read fellow Critters, I greatly appreciate it in advance. ^__^

WARNING: Major spoilers for CR Campaign 2 Episode 140 ahead. Also it’s gonna get kind of meta. And long. Because i have a lot of thoughts & feels.

So I think it’s fair to say that, as much as we would’ve been devastated by any of the M9 perma-dying in the last battle, part of us wasn’t expecting them all to make it out of there alive. Not even the players, I think, despite how much they likely didn’t want that to happen. Just look at the half-resigned way Liam talks about Caleb in the last few Talks Machina episodes. Or how, in game, Jester was fully prepare to die trying to stop the city from coming back. And for a while there, it seemed like some of them might not survive.

But then they did. Despite so many crappy rolls throughout the night they stopped Lucien, set free all the souls trapped in Aeor, saved Exandria, and brought each other back from the dead. Not only that, but they also did the impossible: They saved Mollymauk. Their lost friend who had such a deep impact on all of them even after his death. The delightfully charming asshole who was so full of joy and life and who, despite how the world treated him, was happily determined to leave every place better than he found it. Moreover, they almost didn’t succeed! But then they did, all because of teamwork, love and one last minute ditch effort ‘what-the-hell-have-i-got-to-lose’ dice role that none of them saw coming. And now they get to go home together, truly as The Mighty NINE.

Just this once, everybody lived! We got a happy ending!

And that’s HUGE in game...but also think for a second how that reflects outside of game too. Do you realize what a story like that means to people, especially given the year from Hell we’ve all had?

Think about it. This past year the world has suffered. We’ve all been impacted by the pandemic in some way shape or form, either on small levels or large. Our world has been at war with a virus that effected everyone and everything: Our sense of safety. Our health. Our economy. Our families & friends. Our freedom. (in the sense of our ability to travel & just be in close proximity to people without fear, but i digress) Deeply imbedded social and systematic diseases have been brought further to light in the past year and a half largely because of this virus. Some of us have lost people we love. Hell, the pandemic even effected the way that the latter half of Campaign 2 played out because of social distancing protocols. If you further compare this to Campaign 2, the world of Exandria was caught in the middle of a war that started because of social & systematic corruptions that had been rooted in two opposing kingdoms for years. And so many suffered and died because of it.

Then the Mighty Nein comes in. This ragtag group of delightful assholes with nothing to lose; these flawed but inherently good at heart and deeply human adventurers, broken and lost in their own ways, trying to make a home and family for themselves in a world that took advantage of them or left them alone or said they weren’t good enough...and they changed things. 

They grew. They fought back. They found moments of silliness and peace and joy and fun amidst all the strife and sometimes grief. Most of all, they tried. Sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of spite, sometimes even out of compassion, but mostly just out of love. And in the end, not only did they help people and stop a war for the sake of their loved ones, but they also saved their world from being destroyed by a rotted perversion of life from the past that threatened to consume everything they cared about. AND they STILL managed to bring everyone in their found family back to life. Does it erase the bad and sad things that happened to them? Hell no! But those things don’t negate the fact that in that moment, they made it out okay. That this was a victory and they won!

Think of what a story like that means to people right now.

I’m personally a pretty spiritual person, and much like our favorite clerics, I also believe in a higher power. But whether or not you also believe in a Divine being, the Universe or whatever, every D&D player believes in one thing: Fate. Luck. Call it what you will. But it was fate that made those dice rolls that saved everyone happen. It was fate that not only stopped Cognoza from returning, but also brought Jester and Caleb and Molly back to life, even when it seemed like it wouldn’t work. (and holy shit that gave me emotional whiplash!) 

After everything they went through, both individually and together, the Mighty Nein defied the odd and demanded that Fate let them save their loved ones. They demanded that the world give them back their friend; That they deserved to have their happy ending & get to go home alive together. Just. This. Once.

As a writer, I know firsthand that there are some stories we find and create ourselves, but then there are stories that have a way of finding us. Sometimes a story or world or character from somewhere in the Aether will pop into our minds one day and say, ‘I need your voice to tell my story.’ Maybe this is just me getting carried away with the meta brain again. And like i said, i’m a spiritually inclined person, so I believe in things like Fate and a Divine Higher power writing out the stories of the Multiverse. If you’re reading this (and thank you for taking the time to do so) maybe you do too. Or maybe you don’t. Either way, if you’re a fellow critter, then you’re clearly a fan of good stories and/or playing Dungeons & Dragons. So you know how fate/dice roles have a big impact on the outcome of a story, regardless of how tightly written a setup the dungeon master makes. Given all that and how organically stories tend to play out in D&D, I genuinely believe that Matt Mercer and the whole CR Team were meant to be conduits for a story where the flawed heroes save the world AND all make it home alive.

And I think Fate knew that we needed last nights battle to end like this. After all the crap we’ve been through this past year, we needed this happy ending, deserved it even! Not just us critters, the CR team too. As much as we all like to joke that Campaign 2 was secretly scripted, we all know that’s not true. Yes, the setup storyline and world were brilliantly crafted by Matt, and the character roleplaying is beautifully acted out by the team. But the twists and turns, the direction it goes, and how the game plays out is all up to fated dice rolls just like any other game. And something, some kind of force of luck, some force of fate, some Universal Divine DM out there made the roles happen the way they did last night.

It gave us a happy ending.

I believe that this was meant to happen; now of all times with everything else going on in the world. Amidst all this darkness and rot, both in game and in the real world, in the end of it all there was light and life. A reminder that sometimes people do live. They do get second chances. They do find a new family or reunite with old ones. That sometimes the world can be saved for a time, and happy ending do still exist. Even if it’s not broadcasted on the daily news amidst tragedy reports, or even tragedies that don’t get reported (which sadly are a lot, but again i digress).

Because the thing is, like Beau said, no one else will probably know they were heroes. No one will know what the Mighty Nein sacrificed to save all of Exandria. But they don’t need to know that for it to still be true, for life to happen again, and for a found family of nine broken people who love each other to go home together safe. It doesn’t invalidate that the good things happened. That at least for today everyone was saved. That flawed people were still able to do good because they tried. That they left the world better than they found it and got their own small but satisfying happy ending. Even if only for now, because we don’t know what’s gonna happen next Thursday. We don’t know what the future will hold for the Nein or Exandria when the Campaign ends or even when (hopefully) some loose ends will be tied up in later oneshots. But neither that nor the bad and sad stuff that happened beforehand in the game and in the character’s lives invalidates the fact that tonight they won. They lived.

So why can’t that be true for us in the real world?

I said earlier that, as a writer, I believe in the power stories have to not only reflect but also shape our world. This story is an example of why, but especially this episode, and that’s why i was so euphoric about the outcome. It wasn’t just a game for me, and i’m sure for others too. It was a much needed reminder that happy endings can still happen in real life, just as much as they can in stories. Even when everything seems dark and corrupt and rotten and hopeless, we can still keep fighting. We can keep trying. We can make new families and start over and be heroes in our on little lives in small ways. 

We can leave the world better than we found it. 

And maybe, with hard work, imagination, luck and a little Divine intervention...we can also get the happy endings we deserve.