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theknightmarket · 6 days ago

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What if Damien regretted his life choices so much? So much so that when he died, he went back to the past with memories retained from his last life? With a little help from the entity [(*cough* the one inside the manor*cough*)for what reasons? It is unclear whether it is to mock or help him. Whatever it is, he was still given a second chance ]

before the (allegedly or not) scandalous affair of his twin sister and his best friend, before deciding with his little monster to keep their love remain hidden from the public, before mark shutted himself off from the outside world......and especially even before accepting the invitation to that poker party...

Will he be able to change the outcomes of these events? Will he be able to prevent multiple death casualties? Will he be able to prevent william losing his mind? Will he be able to protect his little monster differently this time? After all, they weren't supposed to be involved (died, and everyone else too) in the first place. Or is he doomed to face this for eternity? As a way of punishment for the sins, he had also committed.

......I think i read to much of those types manhwas-but oh dear-- its a such a great plot for them tooo ajdhshaja ideas are popping and its haunting me for days ajdjajaj

I really wanna see this be written in your style cause number one its damien- two the way you use the words is just so mwah! Like stiching them together so flawlessly till it brings it to life! As if it was intertwined naturally-- no pressure if you want to or not, its just i feel like i want to share this idea to you! Have a lovely night/day. Stay hydrated! :3

"What did you expect?"

In which Damien lives a life in a second. Part 1 - Part 2 TW: cursing, angst Pages: 21 - Words: 7500

[Requests: OPEN]

The rhythm of chopping wood, the thump-thump-crack, was the closest thing to comfort that Damien had in those woods, the closest thing to stability. Everything was routine, but nothing was safe. The twins were forever living on a knife’s edge between warmth and starvation. He took care of the former, while Celine went out with her gun whenever he returned. It was always the same. Always a cycle. Always one event after the other, swapping duties, changing of the guard, one went in and the other went out – they never spent any time together anymore.

He supposed they were both to blame for that, as much as anyone else. Celine bought into Mark as the villain, which she had the right to do, but didn’t they have a hand in it all? Didn’t they make a deal with that thing in the manor? Didn’t they choose to trade their friends and family for vengeance?

Didn’t he?

The next log split in half under the force of the axe.

Sometimes he wondered, in the gaps between the strikes and the sounds and the silence itself, where it had all started to go wrong. When. What the pivot was. On the days when he felt kind, it was just that night, after he had stepped through those doors and spoken to Mark. On the days when he felt bitter, it was the night of Mark and Celine’s wedding, when he had sworn the look of disappointment on William’s face was a trick of the light. On the days when he felt hopelessness nestle into the soft marrow of his bones, it was always meant to end like that.

He swung. He connected. He moved on, tossing the kindling to the side and replacing it with new wood.

But he had infinite time on his hands, so his thoughts never stopped where they should have. It was as though everything that crossed his mind was a sequel to a book that was never supposed to be published. They warped and twisted, becoming the sick distortions of a creature more like what was on the outside. That Dark-thing.

Swing. Connect. Move on.

He, it, they were a subject Damien never liked to dwell on. There was nothing to be done about that part, the part that moved in reality too far out of his reach. He made the past his playground, instead, where theoretical situations were made better or worse or just different.

Swing. Connect. Move.

The thing he changed the most was his greatest regret. In no experiment did it stay the same. With the knowledge he had now, keeping it the same meant there was no point in it at all – and that was normally where the thoughts led to.

Laid at your feet.

He wondered if, had you the chance, you would forgive him.

Swing. Connect. Move.

But he took that chance away.

Swing. Connect. Move.

It was his fault.

Swing. Connect. Move.

And he didn’t have the power to change that anymore.

Swing. Connect.

The crack of wood echoed differently, and when Damien’s focus returned to what was in front of him, he realized why. In fact, it hadn’t echoed at all, and it hadn’t cracked but simply snapped because it wasn’t wood that he was cutting anymore.

Damien’s neck ached with the pain of straightening to look around his surroundings. He didn’t have the survival instincts of his sister, so it was shock, not suspicion, that coated his vision. Tainted, she would have said, but wherever Damien was now, she wasn’t there.

He dropped the axe that wasn’t an axe but a small knife for cutting vegetables. It clattered on the countertop, the dappled granite so similar to the snow that he had grown used to. And yet, it was more than that. The closest thing to the surface was his old kitchen, and, when he followed its outline, he found no differences. Not a single thing was off. No unfamiliar nicks or scratches – he’d always kept his furniture in perfect shape, but who didn’t?

Questions wracked him like gunfire. He wasn’t surrounded by trees, but this also wasn’t the cabin. The walls were painted, eggshell over plaster, and he was warm as though he had never felt cold in his life. Shakily, his eyes trailed down to see a dress shirt. His jacket was gone; this was an outfit for presentation, not survival, he wasn’t in danger, he was standing in a kitchen where biting winds couldn’t snap at him, sheltered by stable walls and ceiling and windows that had become so unfamiliar – but why?

The smooth texture as he ran his finger along the edge jolted him with memory. It was so simple, so common, so unsubstantial, but his body flinched as though he’d been hit.

Internally, he was begging for a difference, for something so glaringly obvious to be wrong, for this all to be wishful thinking. The cupboards, the table, the stove. All correct, but that didn’t mean anything. It didn’t.

Tears welled in the corners of his eyes.

It didn’t mean anything.

The only thing he was able to stomach was scanning the rest of the room. Going deeper beyond the surface risked confirming fears he didn’t want confirmed, but, even as he moved to inspect everything, he found no faults, only ghost-like feelings threading through his heart. The dining chairs were too close to the china cabinet so that nobody ever sat that side, and the drapes swept the ground at the perfect length because he had measured their cut three times.

All that evidence came to the same dreaded conclusion. This was the same house that he had lived in before everything happened, but, although his heart leapt to decide that this was his house, his mind held back. It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. It might have been the same house, but it could not have been his.

Damien didn’t know if it was delusion or hope that led him to the hallway, where he stared at the pictures along the wall and willed for them to show another life. One that wasn’t his and didn’t mean he was back where he had started and all of what had happened was – what – a dream? Something induced by a fever that meant nothing despite what he had gone through?

His stomach made attempts to swallow itself as he flitted from frame to frame, each showing a memory. It started with a family, a mother and a father, hands placed on the shoulders of their sitting children. This house held a flood of emotions, but he was almost able to convince himself that this photograph wasn’t of himself, if only for the disconnect it stirred that told him it wasn’t his family. That had always been par for the course, however, and would have meant nothing either way.

No, it was the next frame that stirred those stereotypical familial bonds within him. Damien remembered his graduation fondly, and so too did he remember the captured moment. Everyone who mattered to him had been there, but that pride mutated into despair as he looked at their faces. They were all in a row, Mark, with his arm around Celine, and William on the opposite end, then Damien and…

And you.

Both in the middle, squished into the center of the photo because neither of you had wanted the spotlight, but your friends had been so insistent on preserving your happiness. The two of you sported shared bashful smiles, faces glowing like sunburns against the rain that was barely starting to spit down. He remembered the next few minutes, when it had started to pour and forced you all inside, but the grins never left.

Despite the self-consciousness, your expression was loose, all the stress of exams and classes lifted from your shoulders and replaced by the nebulous ‘moment’. You would stay like that until you joined your law office, and the weight of the world crushed down on you again. By that fateful night, pressure had worked its way into the lines of your face and festered in the bags under your eyes. That day was the last time either of you was recklessly free.

He was mourning you as though you were dead, and, to his knowledge, you were.

But Damien never knew everything, and in this moment, when he stood in front of his own timeline, what he did know was dissolving.

“Damn, could it be any colder?”

No.

No, this wasn’t fair.

He had done wrong by a lot of people, by you, but did he deserve this? Being returned to his life before that fateful night, fine, he could handle that – not happily, but he could handle it – but not this, not you, not when he knew this wasn’t real, just a tease that held you like a speck of light in an ocean’s trench.

Damien could do little more than stare at you as you walked closer, letting the door fall shut behind you while you pulled yourself out of your coat.

If he reached for you, you would disappear, pulled back into the darkness and the maw of some great beast that would swallow you both.

When you were close enough, you stabilized yourself on his shoulder to lean in. The pressure of a kiss on his cheek sent sparks through his skin and veins, relighting the flurry of his heart that seemed so foreign to him now. The last time either of you had been idle enough for that was a time that he couldn’t remember. It had all been so busy, but he felt the want to just relax into this sudden, frightening freedom filled him.

But this wasn’t real.

“Sorry I’m late, Dames, Miss Jones is out of town for the week, so I had to schedule all my meetings before I could leave,” you said offhandedly, moving through to the kitchen.

His heart longed to follow you, but his body refused and stayed rooted to the ground as though taking a single step would cause the floor to crumble beneath him. Instead, he was overtaken by a thought; Miss Jones had been a secretary at your firm. Both aspects of that caused him to furrow his brow because you had stopped working at that firm upon your promotion to District Attorney, and, even more shockingly, Miss Jones hadn’t worked with you in two years.

In fact, she had never returned after taking a week off for a family-related emergency, which, as he thought about it, sounded an awful lot like your explanation.

Damien was quite proud that he was keeping a steady breathing pattern, but he wasn’t able to make it further than turning back towards the kitchen.

You poked your head around the corner, and, although you smiled, it was the kind you held that mixed with concern.

“Are you alright there? I know the welfare vote is due soon, but maybe you should take it easy before then?”

The welfare vote. Hospital grants. Two years ago.

“Are you feeling okay? You really do look…”

He only realized you had gotten closer when you pressed a hand to his forehead. He didn’t have it in him to flinch or to do much of anything, really, besides keep his eyes on you.

“Are you hot? Nauseous at all?”

Damien forced his voice into action, “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

You sounded so worried, and he barely restrained the urge to spill everything to you. You deserved to know what was going to happen, no matter how far into the future it was, but the words strangled themselves in his throat.

“Yes, I’m quite—” He removed your hand and brought it down between you, though he kept it as tight as he could risk, “—I’m quite fine, dear.”

A hum showed you weren’t convinced, but you didn’t say anything more as you guided Damien back to the kitchen. He let himself be moved, not trusting his own legs to do their job and not willing to be alone again, especially when you were right there in front of him. It was difficult to remind himself that this was some dream when the warmth of your hand caressed his own.

It was also difficult to stay focused on what you were saying. From the few words he managed to tune into, you were just talking about your work, but it felt unnatural. You weren’t supposed to be talking about the cases you were handling, you were supposed to be going over theories with the detective or interrogating Benjamin over the split wine in the cellar – and Damien wasn’t supposed to be continuing with cutting carrots, he was supposed to be yelling at William for his petty attitude.

And yet there you two were, going about your lives, as if nothing had happened.

Maybe this was the real part, and nothing did happen, and that was all a fantasy. Ghosts and zombies and magic had to be fake.

Life wasn’t that kind. His memories, the pain and panic of the night’s events, told him it had all been real. Resolving that with what felt like reality as he laid out two plates of food was no easy task. Letting himself get swept away in all of it, however, was playing with fire, dancing with fate, giving over what little control over the situation he had left. No matter how strange it felt to wish for that night to have happened, he didn’t know if he could stand it if it weren’t.

Damien put a hand on the back of a chair. It was solid. Pulling it out brought the weight closer to him at the exact speed. His movements were mechanical as he pulled the one next to it out as well. It was just the same, completely normal. His logic argued that, of course, it was normal, there was no reason for it to change – but it fought against his memories that said it was supposed to change.

The parts of him were still fighting, tearing at each other, as he slipped into one of the chairs. For a brief moment, he wondered if this was what that Dark-thing went through, but then you joined him at the table, and the whispers went silent.

“So, how was your day off?” you asked, picking up a fork.

Damien fell at the first hurdle. He didn’t remember what he was supposed to have done this day, and though he could have lied, it wouldn’t have worked. He tried to imagine the most likely situation, but his thoughts swarmed to the events of that night again.

Oh, yes, darling, your mutual friend was murdered in his own home, you were, too, by the way, but that didn’t come until later.

“I, um, well—”

First, he had to argue with Will because he didn’t care that Mark was dead, then he found out the body disappeared, and everybody thought he was a zombie – it really was quite funny!

“—I, I think…”

It all took a turn for the worse when his sister – oh, and another detail he forgot to mention was that Mark and Celine were divorced because she and Will had an affair, but don’t worry about that – arrived and took you off for a séance, after which they both died.

Now, why did you look so concerned?

Damien recognized he was not handling this well.

You must have caught his disorientation, the pallor of his face, because you put the utensil back down and turned to him in your seat.

“You did take a break today, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. You told me to.”

That was one of the few things he remembered distinctly; after a certain point in his mayoral term, you had started to enforce his breaks, like a warden for a considerably disruptive prisoner. Both you and Damien were too stubborn for your own goods, which led to the arguments that pockmarked your latest years together. They were never violent, never greatly upsetting, never vicious, but they were common, far too common for his liking.

“And it’s for your own good,” you continued. Your focus flickered around his face, wandering from his cheeks to his lips to his eyes. “You need to take care of yourself, Damien.”

“I know, I just- I don’t know,” he sighed, trailing off. What else was there to say? To him, there was a very fine line between being good and bad at his job, and that was a line his feet didn’t fit very well. He always found himself cutting pieces of himself off just to keep within the boundaries, and that was without the inevitable instability that had him struggling to stay balanced.

Your hand pressed against his arm, but he barely registered anything beyond what added to his thoughts in that moment. He felt like he was going insane, or that he had already gone insane, as his mind tried to bend reality around what he knew. The circle didn’t close, though, and it sprang back into its rigidness, cracks closing in at the edges. It left him with two conclusions sewn together into a too-fictional, too-real abomination.

His memories and the current reality were both correct. That horrible night had happened, but he was also reliving what had happened two years ago. After all, if he could technically die and also be alive, who was to say he had to be alive in the present?

A voice whispered that he had seen what that looked like, bringing with it the image of William’s breakdown, but then your voice promptly shut it up, for which he was grateful.

“Hey, hey, hey,” you muttered, getting up from the chair and pushing it away. Your action centered Damien’s attention on you, like a deer startled in the brush, and he kept his eyes on you as you knelt down in front of him.

Just as he started to miss your hand on his arm, you wound your fingers around his own. He might have laughed at your old grounding technique you’d manufactured for him, but then he noticed your knitted brows and stern frown.

“You’re fine, huh?” You sounded unconvinced, which was fair, given Damien wasn’t convinced himself. Not when he was staring straight at you, at least, forced to face just who he had lost.

When had he last seen you? His memories were woven with one another so close that he lost the order, and all that null time in the forest didn’t do him any favors. Chaos was the only constant in what he remembered, but the séance had been the separation point. He had last seen you as the detective escorted you away while he stayed with Celine.

Celine. Where was she? If this really was two years ago – and that thought made him want to laugh – was she still with Mark? Or had she and William been together even before he had known?

How little did he really know?

“Come on, we’re going to get you to bed,” you said as you stood from your kneel, “see if we can’t deal with this somewhere more comfortable, okay?”

Damien eagerly rose with you but broke off just as he was steadied on his feet. That balance disappeared within the second, sending him stumbling towards the phone on the wall. He practically fell against it, draped an arm over the box, and tried his best to focus on the chill of the metal instead of your concern. It radiated from you like the warmth from the sun as you made your way, more graceful than he, towards the reason for that concern.

“Damien?” you asked hesitantly.

“Just a moment,” he mumbled in a response that barely reached your ears.

Dialing Celine’s phone number was no easy task, what with the combined struggle to remember it and the emotional toll he was expecting. He didn’t know at what point she left, if she made it a habit to leave the manor during the day, he didn’t even know who would pick up, considering it wasn’t only her number that he was calling.

As Damien’s thoughts ran wild, you watched on. Your gut stirred with unasked questions, but you were wary of overloading the man in front of you, who had a sheen of sweat gathering on his face, who was breathing faster and faster every second that passed, who you trusted to tell you if anything was important but suspected had a different definition of ‘important’.

In the end, you settled on standing next to him. There wasn’t much else you could do.

The line picking up sent Damien’s heart through a loop. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or scared.

“Hello, Iplier residence, this is Celine speaking.”

Relieved. Although that whole twintuition thing was beyond stupid, he and his sister had a knack for telling when the other was hiding something.

Or, at least, Damien used to think so.

That spurred him into talking. “Celine, it’s me. Are you- are you okay?”

“Damien? What…” She cleared her throat, “Of course, I’m okay, what are you talking about?”

No, she wasn’t lying. He had faith she wouldn’t cover up anything as small as her current state, after all, but then another concern struck him.

“Is Mark there?”

There was a moment of silence, and then Celine’s voice sounded slightly more distant as she called for Mark. It hadn’t been his intention, but getting to talk to his current brother-in-law was a nice litmus test for how they were acting towards each other. He didn’t remember anything being particularly wrong at this point, but knowing what was going to happen shed a new light on the past.

Damien figured that was going to be happening a lot, and it was as though the energy it would take to think about every implication was starting to sap out of him then and there.

He’d need to be more vigilant in the future, though, because his thoughts were overshadowing the hushed exchange of words on the other end of the line. The crackle of the phone drowned out what he might have been able to hear at a superficial level, and he was left in the dark by the time that Mark began to speak.

“I’m surprised you’re the one calling us,” came his voice through the phone. Even in his daily life, he seemed to be projecting for the sake of the audience at the back of a theatre. “Normally, it’s hell to get a hold of you. Something must really be wrong.”

Damien wasted no time addressing either comment. He wasn’t in the mood for the teasing, he was barely in the mood to talk to anyone.

“Good,” he forced out. “Good. You’re both there.”

That was one box ticked off; Celine and Mark were still married, still living together, still alive. Alongside that, though, they were still confused, and you were, too. Damien watched you hover in the corner of his eye, as if you were just managing to restrain yourself.

“I’m sorry,” he sighed to everyone involved. “I just had a bad feeling is all. I thought—” The words strangled themselves in his throat, clogging the space and pushing him into a silence, “—well, never mind what I thought.”

He did this a lot, or he used to. It was as though all of his decisiveness was directed towards his job over his daily life – the majority of that being his job notwithstanding – so that left a lot of backtracking, apologizing, and ‘never mind’s in the place of choice. It was all he could hope that you all would think of it as another of his hesitations, and not the cover for what was really going on.

He still had one more base to cover, and he tended to that as he asked, “Have you heard from Will?”

Damien was unaware of it, but the pause that followed contained a confused look shared between Mark and Celine. He was aware of the deepening of your brows, though, as you watched on, and of the silence accompanying these movements. He didn’t like any of them.

Mark was the one to answer, saying uncertainly, “Not in the seven hours since we went to lunch.”

Dammit. He hadn’t remembered that. Internally, he scrambled for an explanation but came up short every time. His behavior up to this point meant a momentary lapse was off the table, but so was giving in. He had things to do now, choices to make, he couldn’t let himself be swayed into slowing down.

“Right, of course,” was all he said. If he didn’t offer any time for questions, he wouldn’t have to answer them, so he followed it up by apologizing for bothering them and dropping the phone back on the hook.

You were almost aghast at the lack of manners – in anyone else, you would have dismissed it as a bad day or them just being a jerk naturally, but this was Damien you were talking about. The same Damien who once spent midnight to sunrise talking to some head of a bank who fell asleep six separate times, without complaint to the man! And that was a stranger, instead of his childhood best friend and his own sister.

Steeling your resolve, you took a step toward the man. “I think you should take another day off, Damien.”

“No, no, I can’t.”

He caught that look in your eye, the one that meant he was in for a challenge. Convincing you against what you believed in was an exercise in futility, but he didn’t need you to be completely against getting him a break. He just needed to delay you.

The prospect was becoming more and more unreachable with every step closer you took.

“Don’t worry about me, dear, I just had a moment of—”

Absolute dread that buried itself in his stomach like a corpse?

“—forgetfulness.”

Uh-huh, sure.

He wasn’t even convincing himself.

“I don’t want you passing out at your desk.”

“I won’t, I know my limits.”

“It doesn’t matter if you know your limits when you keep ignoring them anyway.” It was one of those comments that appeared in multiple situations, only you said it bluntly and without a telltale smile that came with the playful moments. “The city will survive without you for another day.”

“It will survive, but it won’t be better off.”

He felt like he’d had this argument before, and it wasn’t only because he was reliving part of his life. No, this was a topic, rehearsed to perfection, that had come up time and time again in your conversations. He wished it wasn’t as prevalent as it was, but it was, and it was never fixed. At this point, he didn’t think there was a solution, no compromise that made both of you happy enough. Pride in your work was common ground for the two of you, but he couldn’t deny that it got in the way of that exact thing, the two of you.

Damien felt as helpless as he always had when you stayed quiet. No solution meant no conclusion, which meant an awkward silence, which meant you were going to be hesitant with each other for the rest of the night.

“Alright. I won’t push it,” you said after a moment. Shoulders dropping and eyes averting themselves, you retreated, metaphorically and physically. You stepped back away from Damien, and it was as though winter had come early. A chill lay itself over the room, his skin prickled, and you rubbed your arms absentmindedly.

It felt a lot like the forest.

“But I think you should go to bed early tonight,” you continued, your voice a similar shade of bleak. “Make sure you have enough energy if you’re so insistent about going in.”

You took a step in the direction of the doorway, and an impulse shot through Damien’s veins, bypassed his heart, and darted to his muscles. His hand grasped yours before he was aware of it, and he had the opportunity to drop it, apologize, let you go to wherever you were headed without question, but he refused. Instead, he gripped tighter. It was something he had considered many times, but he always reminded himself that you were a person with your own will and resolve, and who was he to challenge that? He would let it be and talk to you when you came back.

Not this time.

If this weren’t a trick, if this weren’t a dream, if this weren’t all a fantasy that he had put together for himself to cope, then he had another chance to do it all again. To do it better. Make it right. Hell, he had the responsibility to fix everything. Just repeating the same things over and over again was a waste when he had spent however long hoping for this very chance amongst the trees.

You looked at him with slight surprise, as if you knew Damien hadn’t intended to catch you.

“We should do something tomorrow night,” he said.

Your surprise grew, and then you squinted in thought.

“It’s not our anniversary, is it? It’s not your birthday. It’s not my birthday.”

“There’s no occasion. I just…” he trailed off, trying to think of an acceptable reason.

It was true that neither of you was the spontaneous sort, especially at this point in your lives; all the impulsiveness had been sequestered to your days at university, and he had been careful not to let it leak out. Late at night, however, in the haze of twilight, you hadn’t been able to help reminiscing over the parties and the drunken cram sessions when you remembered a test in the morning halfway through those parties. Other classmates would sometimes join in, other times you’d be cheered on by students of other departments. Both of you missed it, but there was the silent agreement that they would never return.

But as you both knew, enforcing verbal contracts was an uphill battle. Moments of spontaneity were going to be toned down, of course, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be there.

“I just want to spend some time with you,” Damien finished.

For a second, he thought you might refuse, but that possibility was wiped in a flash of your grin.

“Okay, I won’t say no to that,” you replied, giddiness escaping through your voice. “We’ll get dinner, or something. Oh, maybe we can try that restaurant that reopened last week. They used to have amazing sponge cake.”

You caught yourself as you almost tipped into a rant. In a strange show of shyness that Damien hadn’t seen in years, you chuckled quietly and fiddled with your sleeves, pulling them up and down before you realized yourself and switched to pulling around your cuffs.

“Unless you had something in mind?”

He shook his head, redness spreading to his face. “No, no. That sounds great.”

Another laugh, slightly louder than before, shook your chest. This moment, seemingly disconnected from the rest of your bustling lives, felt so much like the first time Damien had asked you out romantically.

Little outings between you were normal by then, but they were usually contained to the university campus. A library, an empty class, the law department’s break room – nothing that wasn’t secluded and geared towards study. But then, one day, Damien had invited you out for coffee, in such a roundabout way that you hadn’t been sure what he was asking at first. You wondered if he had a fever from how red he had gone, asked if he was alright, leaned closer to inspect his face. His fluster had been adorable, and after he had explained what that invite meant, you had accepted and made it your mission to get him to that point again.

Needless to say, you had succeeded.

The memory of that night sparked a whole host of nostalgic feelings in your chest, and you couldn’t pull down the corners of your lips.

“It’s a date,” you said, finishing off your little reenactment with a kiss on Damien’s cheek. You could practically feel the warmth against your lips, and it remained even as you moved to do something about the cold food on the table.

Moving forward, Damien would have to strike a balance; going around, telling everyone what was going to happen, wasn’t an option. Best case scenario, their entire worldview would collapse, and, worst case scenario, he’d be throwing himself into the madhouse. However, it was also a bad idea to let everything go ahead as normal. He knew exactly how that was going to play out.

So, the answer had to be somewhere in between. He would have to be subtle about it, but he planned to talk to everyone involved about what he knew was going on. There was a long time until the poker night, but he had no idea how long the affair between Celine and Will had been going on for – getting a grasp of the current situation was vital, and he knew exactly where to start first.

Sitting in Will’s living room, Damien felt strange. Not uncomfortable as such, but he was acutely aware of everything. The texture of the couch, the smell of smoke, the sound of his friend in the adjoined kitchen. Will’s back was turned to him at the counter, where he was filling up two cups of coffee, but that didn’t give him the right to stare. He did stare, obviously, but what else was he supposed to do?

Looking around the room was no better. It brought back the mental image of what happened to it when Celine and Will ran off together. They weren’t gone long enough for it to be considered legally abandoned, though the emotional strain of its emptiness took a toll on Damien.

As Damien currently saw it, it was alive with color and the sensations of humanity, and yet he was still uneasy.

“Now, not that it’s not good to see you,” Will said as he entered the room with the cups in hand. The dark liquid spat over the edge of one of them, landing on the wood just before he smoothed it over with his shoe. “But twice in one week? You might make a man nervous.”

Damien hoped that he was joking, and he seemed to be, going off the grin he shot him when he placed a cup on the table, but one could never be certain with Will. Even before his breakdown, he wasn’t the most stable after his time in the war.

Nevertheless, Will flopped down on the opposite armchair, sending a few more specks of coffee flying.

“I’ve come to realize that I haven’t been,” Damien paused as he searched for the words, “maintaining my relationships as well as I should be.”

Will’s eyebrows shot up in amusement and curiosity, which were one and the same when it came to him. “Oh? And what prompted this? You’re not having troubles, of the, eh, romance type, old boy?”

And there it was. The matter at hand.

Damien pulled at his collar before starting to speak, “No. No, I’m not.”

A deep breath didn’t make him any more prepared, but he couldn’t back out now. If he did, he’d never look Will in the eye, let alone get to this point again.

“But it’s funny that you brought it up.”

The two men shared a moment of silent eye contact.

A beat passed.

And then Will muttered a small, “Ah.”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

The seconds of returned quiet that followed were tense, like a bow string pulled taught that threatened to snap at any change. Even breathing seemed a risk, but – despite Damien’s mind screaming at him to just drop it, leave, and never look back because this was all stupid and he didn’t have to go through with this and couldn’t he just go back to how it used to be – he forced his words out of his throat.

The words came out rough and battered. “I don’t know what you’re going to do about it, but I can tell you what you’re not.”

“Please.”

Damien had never seen Will so desperate, but he didn’t have time to ask before he was stuttering out an explanation. It began like the sputtering of an old car engine, but then he got a hold of himself and rushed into saying, “I-I don’t know how Celine feels, and I would never do anything to intentionally hurt Mark, but I can’t go on like this.”

He placed the coffee on the table, shaking.

“I thought that, after I got back, everything would go back to how it used to be. But it didn’t. The moment I saw Celine, I just…” He dropped his head into his hand, elbow on the arm of the chair so that Damien barely saw his face. “You know her, probably better than me or Mark. Any advice you have, I’ll take.”

“Will, this isn’t just advice. It’s a demand.”

He didn’t have the ability to waste time. Appeasing every party wasn’t an option. He was no longer on the sidelines, watching everything go down, he was in the mess now, and he had to help fix it without losing anyone.

He reached over to place a hand on Will’s arm. It was both a sympathetic gesture and a vehicle for getting his attention solely on him.

“You can’t pursue Celine while she’s married to Mark.”

“Adultery? Damien, who do you take me for—?”

“You know damn well who I take you for!”

Both men froze. All signs of life dropped out of the house in an instant, as though Damien’s shout had fractured reality itself. It felt like it had to Will, who stared at his friend with unfamiliarity. Never had he raised his voice like that, not in front of him, not in front of anyone. He was willing to bet not alone, either.

Damien recognized the blank space in the conversation where he was supposed to scribble in the backtracking and move on, but he wasn’t doing that anymore, so he continued ahead. First, he said a quick, “I’m sorry,” before he pressed on, “but it’s so important that you do this right. You can’t run off together.”

He couldn’t leave him to pick up the pieces.

In a weaker voice than he had ever heard, Will muttered, “I wasn’t planning to.”

Damien believed him. Damn, did he believe him, but that wasn’t enough. The planning wasn’t the problem, it was the act itself.

“I know, but I couldn’t let that thought tempt you.”

“It won’t.”

And there was the doubt. In the first go around of everything, he had, and his promise would have been a lie. But maybe this time, if he were naïve enough to put his faith in Will once more, maybe it would be okay. Maybe his intervention meant something, and this moment marked the start of something new, without all the mess and the vengeance, and that night would be the fantasy he was still a little sure it was.

Slowly, Damien nodded. “Right. Good. Everything’s fine, then.”

Then, he reached for the coffee that he had yet to touch on the table. The first sip was bitter, a lack of sugar that Will probably hadn’t noticed.

The proceeding moments were tense – not as tense as it had been before, but neither man was relaxed. They averted their eyes, stayed silent, didn’t know how to move forward, until a thought crossed Will’s eyes.

“Is everything fine with you, Dames?”

Both men raised an eyebrow for different reasons; Damien was obviously confused, while his friend had shifted back into that sly expression of invasive curiosity that always made him slightly worried.

“With your relationship?”

“And to what relationship are you referring, Will?”

“With our attorney, of course.”

Damien choked.

Will continued to talk as if his friend weren’t coughing and spluttering on his coffee right in front of him. “Who else would I be referring to?”

“What kind of relationship would we have?” His words came out all too fast for a genuine question. “Other than platonic. Which we all have. With them.”

He levelled him with a blank look, and Damien felt his heart rate pick up for reasons other than the near-death experience.

Okay, yes, that was hyperbole, but come on! What was he supposed to do? Just nod, confirm that they had been carrying on a romantic relationship behind his friends’ backs without telling them, right after accusing him of pining after his own sister, who was in a relationship with another of their friends? No. The fallout from that would have destroyed them all, made his opinion completely uncredible, it would have harmed both of you.

“You know,” Will said, “the war made me deaf, not blind. I’ve seen how you look at each other.”

Damien wasn’t paying attention to his words, too caught up in the sudden overflow of thoughts. It would have harmed both of you. It would have. Wouldn’t it? Or was Will right, was it obvious and everyone else had figured it out already? No, no, no. You were both good at hiding things. As much as he hated to say it, you were both good at lying. It was in the job description of a lawyer, and what was a mayor but someone hired to make bitter truths sweet for the public? It had hurt every time you had to pretend you weren’t together at events. When someone from the press stopped either one of you to ask about your love lives, sometimes right in front of the other, and you had to say that you were far too busy for that.

Was it all for nothing?

Had he been overcomplicating this?

For the first time in a while in pleasant company, Damien mumbled under his breath a small, “Fuck.” Then, he followed it up with a much more audible, “Yes, we’re dating.”

“I mean, I’ve seen how you look when you’re not together, too, and you’d think the other had died while you weren’t looking.”

“We have been for a year.”

“There’s no point in denying it.”

“I’m not denying it.”

“We’re all just wondering when you’ll spill.”

It felt like they were having two different conversations, so Damien remedied that by standing up, placing his hands securely on Will’s shoulders, and staring him straight in the eyes.

“Will, I am telling you explicitly that we’re in a relationship.”

And he had the gall to look shocked, so much so that Damien wondered if he hadn’t actually been speaking for the last minute.

“No. No, you’re…”

He blinked and then sprang to his feet, sending Damien stumbling back. He would have tripped over the coffee table had Will not grabbed his upper arms, but he could still practically feel him vibrating with excitement.

“Oh, you sly dog!”

He let go in order to move around the couch, ridding himself of his excess energy as he paced. Damien watched on in concern, partly out for his reaction and partly for him rubbing holes into his floorboards.

Will came to a stop a few steps away from him, gasping, “Well, I’ll be—” He snapped his fingers, “—Mark owes me a dollar.”

And just like that, he was moving again, skipping towards the front door in a happy-go-lucky fashion that had Damien furrowing his brows. He only managed to stop him before left the house by calling out, “Is that all?”

“You’re a very private man, Dames, and any more than a dollar would have been—”

“No, I mean… is that all you have to say?”

Will huffed.

“What did you expect?”

This time, Damien didn’t stop him. He let him go outside, presumably heading towards the payphone on the street to call up Mark, which was a problem in and of itself that he was going to have to figure out later, because his current thoughts centered on one thing.

What did he expect? Not this, that was for certain, but what? Perhaps he had suspected that his friends would turn their backs on him, on you, on both of you, but he couldn’t reconcile what he had just seen with that idea. There was the chance that his friends would push and push and push for information that he didn’t want to give and then your relationship would collapse under the weight of it – but that prospect fit more with the stress of your jobs than your friends.

Standing in the middle of Will’s living room, no more hurt or pressured than he had been before, he couldn’t explain exactly what he had expected. In a way, this was worse than he had expected because it meant that the years you had spent covering up your love for one another were utterly and completely unnecessary. It shattered his heart to think that he had put both himself and you through all of that for nothing.

But the idea that it could change was the glue that he used to reconnect the pieces. He had spoken to Will, that was another box checked off his list, and it was early enough that he figured sealing up the initial cracks would be easy. Nothing had broken apart yet that couldn’t be fixed, and he was equipped with the time and resolve to fix them.

This time around, he couldn’t let it end up like it had before, no matter how loud the voice in the back of his mind was.

He just couldn’t.

[I mean, we all know what has to come next, right? I joke, but I started with just this part in the script, and then I was thinking about how it would all play out in WKM, and then it ended up being twice the length, so... But thank you for requesting, I really appreciate both it and your comments <3! Also, I haven't gone this direction here, but it is so interesting to think about the affair never actually having happened, because that would make everything hurt so much more and I love it. Still, thank you for reading, and I hope you've enjoyed so far!]

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theknightmarket · 10 days ago

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soooo happy you enjoyed my thoughts on it! i’ll continue to send in any more that i find, i love putting songs with characters!

-epic!anon

Hehehe, me too <3 I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a song without thinking ‘oh, this is The Character’ (which is probably why I listen to a lot of musicals)

(Also, on the note of eternity, the artist put out another couple of lines preceding the other part, and it is making me slowly more desperate for the full thing to come out in 2 weeks)

#fanfiction #💌 letters 💌#🎺 musings 🎺

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theknightmarket · 12 days ago

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epic!anon again about the eternity song with dark and da, and all i can say get ready for a lengthy one because this is all i can think about. so after thinking about it more and i’m now specifically thinking about dark coming back, trying to get the da back (kinda like in “What do you get out of this?”) and this is what i have to say:

and it feels like an eternity since i had you here with me

feels like an eternity because time is weird in the mirror. da literally had no clue it had been a whole century. and even when the were talking when da is in the mirror, they were actually THERE together like physically. and i know that time da is missing because they’re with mark feels like forever to dark, already on top of the 100+ years. so it’s literally been an eternity since they’ve been together

since i’ve had to learn to be someone you don’t know

EXACTLY what you said. dark isn’t damien, he isn’t celine. he’s some other strange amalgam that’s having to learn to be “a person” (or wtf he is idk). da has also changed so much. become bitter to dark for the time left in the mirror. and if we talk about when they’re stuck with mark, they’re literally a whole new person, fake memories, fake life, all because of him.

to be with you in paradise, what i wouldn’t sacrifice

they just wanna be together man. that’s it. no matter how bitter or angry da ever was at dark or damien, they still love him. and no matter the reason dark left them for so long, fear, guilt, self-loathing, whatever, he STILL came back for them BECAUSE HE LOVES THEM. he goes through so much to bring his lover back only for them to be swept away by the man he hates, and he’ll do ANYTHING to get them back.

as i walk this world alone

da is literally trap to live in the same emptiness for a 100 years. and dark shuts himself away from them, living his ‘life’ by himself too. and even when da finally gets out, they’re still separated, forced away from the one they love more than anyone else.

sorry if this makes no sense, i typed it out at like 1 in the morning when i couldn’t sleep <3

Bro. You can't do this to me (this is amazing)

All of this is so good - I just want people to read and appreciate this <3

Plus, I am going to take this opportunity to preach the goodness of analysis. Being able to sink your teeth into a piece of media, no matter the size, is genuinely addictive because you could go in so many different directions on so many different levels. Maybe it's the literature nerd in me, but I love it so damn much, and I'm so happy you're here to talk about it.

Again, thank you so much for bringing the song to my attention and also for this glorious analysis!

#fanfiction #markiplier egos #writing #💌 letters 💌#markiplier egos x reader #x reader #darkiplier #🎺 musings 🎺#I'm gonna explode #darkiplier x da #wkm darkiplier #wkm #who killed markiplier

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theknightmarket · 13 days ago

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"I could ask the same about you."

In which Engineer delivers on his promises. Part 1 - Part 2 TW: amputation, cursing, blood, violence, guns, torture mention (not graphic) Pages: 21 - Words: 8500

[Requests: OPEN]

Getting in was the easy part.

Trying not to pass out from blood loss was harder.

When your crew leads had dropped you off on the edge of the city, it wasn’t long before you were spotted by one of the patrols. It was just a small group, but even the lowest rank guard members were bolstered by the guns that they carried close to their chests. All at once, they aimed at you as you stepped closer, half the red lights trained on your heart and the other half on your head, like you were a zombie that would get back up if they didn’t kill you dead enough.

You’d raised your hands, stayed still, and let them take you without a fight. The message of your escape hadn’t gotten out to the public yet, apparently, given that they took the backroads to the main complex. Maybe afterwards Mack would make an announcement to demand higher vigilance. Maybe he’d make you out to be some kind of supernatural monstrosity that could take the shape of friends and family. Maybe he’d keep it to himself and use it against you. It really depended on how he was feeling at the time, whatever area of weakness he thought was particularly vulnerable. The people or you.

You were somewhat glad he liked to pick on you the most.

And he would have his fill in the upcoming days – weeks if he got especially bored – while you were in solitary. That cell was the belly of the beast, the darkest pits of hell where he didn’t have to worry about damage because time healed everything important and time was infinite and you would lose track of time and time would betray you because time was infinite because—

Your head flopped like a dead fish to the side. Your cheek smashed itself against the cold table.

Right, the blood loss.

You had been doing well for the first hour or two. Mack was busy, and they were still trying to figure out how you got out. It was the second day that they resorted to getting the information out of you, so you had been gifted a moment of preparation.

It was a shame that all you could think about was Mark’s fissure of a smile that only made you miss him more.

But that mental strain was minor in comparison to what was to come. The questions and the demands and the prodding and the poking, needles and knives that teased sounds out of you of wounded pride and dignity. Laments against the background bells of your own funeral. That had all been at the hands of the guards who worked in solitary. You called them guards because that was what they were – they just also happened to be as sadistic as Mack. At least they didn’t hold a petty grudge against you.

You supposed that was the reason why he was so much worse. He was the leader of the colony, sure, but that didn’t mean jack to you when everyone held the same scalpel. It was his motivation that made him worse. He was determined, in a way that you might have once found inspiring, to make you suffer, and he was smart in a way that made his hatred stronger.

It spat out when he first showed up in person, like a solar flare, and tried to burn you alive.

You were sitting on the floor of your cell, heat leaching from your body into the concrete. You’d stopped standing at some point, but you couldn’t remember whether it was your decision or not. Getting back up didn’t appeal to you, even when the distant tapping of shoes on the floor set your nerves alight with terror.

A visitor never meant anything good. Meals were sporadic and unsatisfactory, designed in that way in order to break your internal clock, and every fake out came with a new bruise, which was probably the point. If there was one thing that Mack didn’t augment, it was torture methods. Still, even though you knew the tactics, it didn’t mean you survived them any easier.

Those footsteps, the march to the sea, ended up outside your cell. A lack of windows meant that you didn’t have a visual cue for who it was, but your gut knew. It flipped and churned and tried to swallow itself as the code was tapped carefully into the number pad at your door. No simple key would suffice for solitary, no, it had to be fancy and overcomplicated lest the most dangerous villain of all time get out, which was you, obviously, and no one wanted that, oh, all the havoc you could wreak with your terrifying vitamin D deficiency!

The panel of metal slid to the side to reveal Mack, who smirked at you as if he could read the unravelling of your mind on your very face. Maybe he could, but he had always been happy to see you in a sorrow state.

“And to think,” he said, practically skipping closer, “this could have all been avoided had you just answered my questions.”

Yeah, right. There was a half chance he would have thrown you in a cell for his own sick amusement regardless of what you told him. It probably wouldn’t have been solitary, but a concrete box and cattle prods were still on the table. Rarely were they off the table in any situation.

“Still don’t feel like talking?”

You stared him dead in the eyes, completely motionless. He was leaning over somewhat, lording his superiority complex over you, but he stayed out of arm’s reach. Smart man. They had finally stripped you of your gloves, but your claws remained. Scratching and biting were not below you, and both of you knew it.

“You aren’t very receptive to the usual methods of persuasion—” Read: torture, “—so I am quite curious as to what would works.”

He took a step forward. Smart man, yes, but an arrogant one, too. If he thought he could get away with an inch, he would go a mile. Right now, it was an annoyingly safe decision, given that you were surrounded by guards and guns. One wrong move on your part, and you’d find out what a gut-full of bullets did to a person. The first time on the Invincible didn’t make you eager to refresh your memory.

Mack tilted his head to the side as he looked over your body. He started at your head, taking stock of your bruises and saying, “I would image you’d care more for the public than yourself, but nothing I seem to be doing now is inspiring your cooperation.”

He had been using terror as control for much longer than he had been after answers from you. The motivation changed but the method stayed the same. If Mack thought you were dumb enough to suddenly think this was all your fault, you had been giving him too much credit.

Getting slightly closer still, he hummed to himself, looked this way and that along your shoulders. You wondered if your broken clavicle were visible, and, by the way that the corner of Mack’s mouth ticked up at the side, it was.

“Seeing them in person might make you more sympathetic,” he muttered. “It would involve you more, make you feel more responsible for their suffering – which, of course, you are.”

You couldn’t give him a reaction. You had to restrain yourself, no matter how much you wanted to launch forward and put him in the line of fire of his own soldiers. He wouldn’t risk putting a gun in your hands, so executions that would happen anyway were just going to be in front of you. You could handle that. It wasn’t your fault they were dying, they were going to die anyway, it wasn’t your fault, you knew that.

So why were you trying to remember what he had asked you? As if thinking the answer would help get those faceless victims out of harm’s way?

“So, I get a select few of the people you’re refusing to help, show you what happens when you refuse to help, and then you decide to help.”

Shit. Your hesitation must have been visible. Mack’s smugness was plastered over his face like a blood splatter. Civilian blood. Your blood.

His impassioned creativity washed away as he stepped forward, leaned down, tilted his head even closer. “But, hey, that’s just a theory, and a theory needs to be explored,” he said, cheerfully, “or what good is it?”

What good were you if you let people pay for your silence?

“Who should we start with? I doubt just one is going to work on you, so we should prepare for the worst. You always liked engineers, didn’t you?”

Mack continued to prattle on about his gallery of prey, but you weren’t listening. Time hadn’t been kind to you in solitary. It never had been. All it did was allow thoughts to soak through your skin, thickened by scars, and into your heart. They were most dangerous there because that muscle worked like a machine, taking in the abstract trolley problems and injecting emotion to spit out a confused mess of morals and practicality. Lives of the many over the lives of the few, until you knew or you were one of the few, in which case that went out of the window. As a captain, those problems had fallen on your shoulders before, and this was no different, but it was so much harder to make the call this time because someone close to you was at stake.

Mack had stopped talking.

And that was never a good sign.

You snapped out of your internal debate, the chaos of your thoughts, to the stark reality that sent a shiver through your spine, like a lightning bolt, all the way to your wrist.

When you had finally been deposited in solitary, the guards had taken you out of your old clothes and put you in new ones. Your gloves were removed, probably to join your helmet in the museum, but they had left the gauze, assuming that the colony’s medics had patched you up before you had been sent to the cell.

Both you and Mack knew damn well they hadn’t.

“Where did you get that?”

A lot of things happened in the next fifteen minutes or so – your sense of time took a beating when your head hit the bricks – but you recognised the whispered threats and barked orders that surrounded you, miasma-thick, as you were brought through the halls of the complex. Whether it was to the medical wing or the mortuary was unclear to you; they were so close to each other, which wasn’t optimistic, but you had little other choice than to let yourself be taken while you dipped in and out of consciousness.

A lot of uncertainties piled up on you as you laid on the table – you didn’t know where you were, you didn’t know if the cold was from the table or from shock, you didn’t know if Mark was still okay. The moments that you spent in the cracks of time gave you a certain floating feeling, the closest to freedom you had experienced since your encounter with your crew leads.

Their mail-plan was going to have to wait a bit longer, it seemed, though it would give them a few more days to iron out the kinks.

A dismal thought occurred to you through blurry vision and brain fog. The effectiveness of the plan relied on you actually getting to the mail room, after all, and it was up in the air whether Mack knew it was rebels who patched you up. Arguing that you had done it yourself was a possibility, but random med kits weren’t easily found. Could you have broken into the infirmary? Security cameras killed that lie as soon as it appeared, so not a med kit. A roll of gauze, then? Lying on the ground, accidentally dropped off a cart?

Your train of thought broke off as you slipped back into darkness.

The thing about the past was that it was, well, the past, which meant that it couldn’t be changed, no matter how much one wanted it to. That was why Celci didn’t dwell on things that had already happening, she only built plans for the future. Helping to lead the rebellion against Mack had tried that belief time and time again in every kind of scenario imaginable, but she got through it. She always did.

It had been difficult to reconcile her ideology with the sight of Mark ever since they had found you. She was tempted to say he was moping, maybe brooding, but both would have been a disservice to what he was going through. They butted heads like bulls in a foot-long square, and she wasn’t always the most sympathetic to his plight, but she would have to have been a monster to tease him now.

The last month had been spent with a strange air of hesitation, both in the general crew of the rebellion and the leads themselves. Everyone was waiting with bated breath to hear news from inside the colony, but it had yet to come, thus a state of limbo had been imparted on the group. Cryostasis, as someone had once joked and been quickly shut down by glares.

On the part of the crew leads, however, their eyes were fixed on a single member – the acting captain – who had suddenly dropped his professionalism and, worse, fallen himself into a vacuum of emotions. Mark did tasks, wrote notes, sent people out missions, all without a word. More than once had Celci caught him staring at the black screen on his gauntlet, not moving a muscle, possibly not even breathing. Worst of all, he had started delegating to Gunther, Burt, and, the most worrying sign, Celci. All the nicknames, all the insults, all the programming directly into the AI to curb her power went out the window.

That was why Celci was the one conducting the general meeting instead of Mark. He sat in the corner, chin on his fist and eyes glazed over, as she checked off duties and asked after reports. She was mid-way through the summary of the latest ammunitions delivery when the front door burst open.

“We’ve had contact from the captain!”

And just like that, the factory floor became a mosh pit for exactly three minutes. Whispers were just as loud as the yelling, people rushed towards the messenger like a tidal wave, Gunther, Celci and Burt all convened to establish order, and Mark? He was barely blinking back to life as the crew leads spread out in the hall. They each used their own method of persuasion, but calm was enforced with only minor damages to people and infrastructure. There remained the thrum of adrenaline, as though a drum beat laid under the building itself, and yet everyone was happy to accept this peace, if only to watch Mark’s next move.

His state of unease had been no secret to the crew, nor was the reason why.

This development risked capsizing the very unsteady equilibrium.

He was slow at first, muscles atrophied after so many days of disuse, but Mark rose from his chair and stalked towards the messenger. A postal worker, if he remembered correctly, which meant they had gotten information from the colony, which meant the plan had worked, which meant you were alive.

Now, he just had to figure out if you were safe, and the chances were looking slim.

When Mark was standing in front of the woman, he muttered, “Come with me. We need to talk privately.” Not a second later, he was walking out the door and down the hallway. The only sign that she was following were the tentative taps on the concrete flooring in his wake.

The room they arrived to was much smaller, designed specifically with discretion in mind. Some might have mistaken it for a broom closet, others for an interrogation room. Neither were correct, as it was little more than a convenient place to talk, but the latter rang more and more true as the messenger stepped inside. She could see the look in Mark’s eyes – it was far removed from his recent bout of haziness, but the emotions broiling barely beneath the whites of his eyes weren’t much better. Anger, hope, desperation all mixed into one volatile substance that popped and sputtered.

Both Mark and the messenger sat down facing one another at the singular table in tandem. She stared, wondering if there were security cameras hidden around the room, while Mark tapped through his gauntlet, pulling up a form for the communications they ran within the colony. Preferably, the report would have been filled out during or immediately after the conversation, but such a high-risk situation needed a get-in-get-out protocol more than accuracy.

“Give me the full course of action,” Mark said. “I need to know everything you remember, no matter how small.”

It was almost mechanical the way that he wrote down the information. She had received a letter for someone in the Department of Agriculture, got sent to the mail room, handed it over to a secretary or someone, yada yada yada, Mark would admit that he didn’t pay as much attention as he should have, but all he could think about was your arrival in the recount. He waited, mouth on the backburner, for you to show up.

“Celci said I might not recognize them,” she said, cracking the smallest of smiles, “being out of uniform and all. But they looked just as handsome and/or beautiful as they always have, plus the prosthetic arm was a real attention-grabber—”

Mark’s heart stuttered to a stop, a car stalling at a junction and getting plowed through by a truck, debris scattering along the highway, sending him careening over the edge and into the pit of his stomach that filled with dread.

A prosthetic arm?

They cut off your arm?

The messenger kept talking, handing over information that was more important than what he’d already written down, but Mark’s hand remained completely still. All of his energy went towards that little detail, brain generating so many questions that he didn’t have it in him to even stop the meeting.

At some point, the messenger paused for a response. There was no chance of finding context clues for a boilerplate comment, so Mark drummed up the small amount of effort it took to wave her away. Confusion and light concern appeared on her face, but he was in no position to assuage her worries – he was barely doing it for his own. For now, she would have to talk to another of the crew leads, which he hoped she was on her way to do when she pushed out from the table and left the room.

Mark was left alone, the emotions that had been kept beneath the surface gradually heating up again.

So, that was what happened in solitary. It wasn’t the simplistic holding cell he had assumed it to be, it was a torture chamber where bits and pieces were taken from you. And for what, to send a message to the ghosts of the cell? To the guards who already wouldn’t step a foot out of line?

Did Mack know about the rebellion? It could have been a warning, a threat, a ‘look what I can do that you can’t prevent’. The Earthen HQ hadn’t told him of the check-up crew sent after him, but he could have found out about them anyway. Maybe one of their spies had been caught, or a double-agent was within their midst, or you had—

No. Mark put a stop to that thought as soon as it breached the surface. You wouldn’t have talked; you had the constitution of a wall, if your resilience through the universe jumps was anything to go by. He wouldn’t put it past Mack to go overboard in punishment for your silence. He liked to hear himself talk, but being ignored was another thing entirely, so that just begged the question of what he wanted out of you. Information on the rebellion or information on something else – like that damn machine.

A sickening screech echoed through the room as Mark slid back the chair, metal creating white tracks of grit in the concrete.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. No matter the motivation, he had to get you away from Mack.

He shouldn’t have let you leave the first time. He shouldn’t have let you or Celci convince him that this was for the best because it wasn’t for the best, it was for the worst, and you paid the price. He just had to get to you before it got higher. The mental image of you losing another arm or a leg or finally being executed as nothing more than a message played behind his rush through the factory.

The meeting should have wrapped up by now, so the crew leads would be alone. If Celci was as efficient as she normally was, the messenger would be gone, too. Mark never liked pulling rank in front of the general crew – in fact, he never liked doing it at all – but this was going to be a difficult conversation. It was going to be easy for them to argue that his decision was entirely emotional, impulsive, and reckless, which he wasn’t denying. But what was revolution sparked by if not passion? Sympathy for the people that Mack victimized? Resistance wasn’t driven by logic alone, it couldn’t be, or else it would all crumble. They weren’t doing this because the economy was collapsing, or the planet was heating up – they were doing this because people were dying.

And you were one of them.

Were you any less deserving of being saved just because Mark loved you?

It took you a week or so, in total, to get used to the new arm. Seeing it for the first time had been the largest hurdle to get over; it started with the shock of having your arm cut off, obviously, and then morphed into suspicion that they would bother giving you a new one, which ended on a stark dread when you considered what it was capable of. The technology for it had come from Mack’s dictatorship, after all, and you knew they had no qualms over controlling people, metaphorically or literally.

However, it wasn’t as though you could just take it off; the surgeons had hardwired it directly into your muscles. You could feel the sensation of wires wrapped around your veins, like chameleons sticking to a branch. The next time that you were alone after your operation, you had brushed your fingers over the meeting point where metal changed into flesh. It practically melted between textures, the silkiness of titanium so much greater than the bumps and scars that made up your skin.

And yet you had no massive explosion of feelings. There was no outrage at the surgeons who did this to you. Sure, you felt a bubbling rage towards Mack, but it was no more than before. This was just another of his methods, after all, and your reaction mostly consisted of questions, not emotions. You wondered if the arm needed to charge, if it could do anything more than hold stuff, if it would carry through to the next universe. You even chuckled quietly at the thought of them putting your old arm in the museum.

The few days after that were a learning curve, in which you tried hard not to favor your non-dominant hand. Ignoring it was accepting an optional disadvantage, so you had to learn how to use it. You’d started with simple exercises, picking up and moving small objects, then moved onto folding clothes and getting yourself dressed, and, before you knew it, you were functioning close to your original levels. It all happened so quickly that you suspected the surgeons had tampered with your cerebellum while you were out, which seemed feasible given that they had, y’know, cut off your arm with no hesitation.

You tried not to think about that part.

Besides, there was a silver-lining; Mack had deemed you ‘rehabilitated’ enough take you out of solitary, so you’d spent that learning process outside of the cell. Supervised as it was, you didn’t begrudge the wider space to move around in or the visible day-night cycles.

Things got even better when you found your way into the mailroom. It hit the sweet spot between Mack’s desire for productivity and his petty distaste of you; the finnicky process of fitting paper into envelopes and pasting stamps on the corners gave you enough trouble that he got his kicks for the day. You’d never liked mail, even before the prosthetic, and neither had Mack. His love of progress included a reliance on emails over actual letters, so you weren’t going to get direct information from him that you could leak to the rebellion. What you did get, though, were the words of a few higher-ups who had the guilty pleasure of bygone communication.

You had been passing on the secrets of Mack’s dictatorship for a month when everything went down. You weren’t anything drastic to happen, perhaps not even for another year or two, though you weren’t upset that you were caught off guard. It was easier for you to give information out than get it yourself, and there was little you were able to do with it anyway. You were left relatively in the dark about the goings-on within the rebellion, which was a smart move.

At the moment that the floor of the armory exploded, you were lying over top of your bed, picking at the fibers of the stitched-in name. As you plucked out the end of a ‘C’, a distinct feeling of déjà vu struck you. You had been in this position the night before you reunited with your crew. Despite having gone years without contact with them, just a month apart was giving you a homesickness that you couldn’t amend. You knew you had to be within the colony, but you couldn’t wait to get back to them.

And then you heard the sound of gunfire, and all the wistful thoughts wiped out of your head.

The two guards posted at the door had a similar reaction as you, swiveling on the heels of their boots to aim their automatic at the only entrance point. Slowly, one walked backwards towards you, never once letting their attention slip, while the other listened out for any attackers getting closer.

“Do exactly as I say,” they ordered when they were within arm’s reach, “exactly when I say it.”

They didn’t wait for your agreement before they were instructing you. You didn’t have much choice in this moment, so you went along with it, getting up from the bed and putting your hands behind your back, though it wasn’t their order that prompted you to roll your eyes. Even under siege, they saw you as a danger. What were you supposed to do against two trained guards with reflex sight?

To prevent you from smothering them with the dog bed or something, the first guard reached for the handcuffs at their belt, but your obedience was waning. If they got you in those, you’d be losing the use of both of your hands and a lot of your mobility along with it. You were a captain, not a soldier, which meant you had to stop it there.

As soon as the guard’s hand was off their gun, you sprang into action. A punch to the gut had them bending over, and sweeping their legs sent them crashing to the floor. You stomped on their neck for good measure, which gave you plenty of time to rip the strap from the base of the gun so that you could heft it into your old hands.

In the flurry of movement, the second guard at the door was caught between the threat outside and the threat within. One posed considerably more threat to the regime as a whole, but it was self-preservation that won out by the time that you had a weapon. That was far too late a decision, especially for the first guard, who didn’t have the opportunity to scramble out of the way of a bullet.

Blood spattered against your face, barely avoiding your eyes. You’d feel bad later, when you had the time to think about this being your first time directly killing someone. For now, you had to deal with the other one.

They didn’t spare the corpse a glance, instead aiming directly at your chest, the red spot mimicking exactly what would have happened had you not moved at the exact moment they pulled the trigger.

However, apparently, your prosthetic served well as both an arm and a shield. The expression on the guard’s face told you that their thought process was the same as yours.

They were going to regret replacing your arm.

One bullet through the heart, and blankness replaced their shock as they crumpled to the floor. Now you had a defense mechanism, two guns, and a whole lotta rage to take out on the entire complex.

Even though your mind yearned to track down Mack and put as much metal into him as he did you, your heart was quicker on the draw, and your legs were pushed to move towards the source of explosions deeper into the complex.

“This is dumb.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

Mark shoved the butt of his gun into a guard’s forehead, knocking them out cold, and stepped over their body. At this point, the conversation they’d gone through this six times. Twice when he had first proposed the idea to get you out, once right before they left, and three times on the shuttle over. Celci had only stopped complaining verbally when they reached the edge of the colony, reserving her disdain for scornful looks sent across the carnage. Now that they were approaching the heart of the main complex, she was piping back up.

“Gunther, back me up here,” Mark huffed.

A bang rang out through the hallway, coaxing out a yell from the target.

“It’s kinda dumb,” Gunther admitted, which earned a glare, “but I’m just happy I get to shoot things again.”

“Will anyone back me up?” And by ‘anyone’, he meant the only other person who was within hearing range.

Burt pulled the pin off a hand-grenade, chucked it into one of the rooms, closed the door, and turned to Mark.

“Black milk of morning we drink you evenings—”

“Oh, come on!”

The leads continued through the halls at a steady pace, spotting members of the general crew scattered in each and every department. Security, electricity, ecology – all of them had been taken over with the advantage of the induced chaos. Every guard had been focused on the armory, so very few noticed the shadow creeping up behind them under a knife was lodged in their back. Those who did were only granted a second or two more of a struggle before they went down.

It was a general rule to avoid killing people if they showed no genuine threat; the majority of admins at their computers were spared, while many of the patrolling guards were shot in as efficient a fashion as they could manage. The only exception to that was a brief moment in which Gunther stole an automatic rifle and spun around in circles, landed bullets in person and object alike. It was excessive, of course, but everyone who was witness to it immediately put down their weapons and held up their hands.

That same man shouldered open the door to the fifth level, leading the crew heads out of the stairwell and towards the offices of the elites with his pistol out in front of him. Each person took a different direction, making their ways through hallways, meeting rooms, anywhere that could be harboring government officials. These were the kinds of people that created the most debate; Gunther had argued that they had the most blood on their hands metaphorically, so why not make it literal? Celci had preferred a more legal approach, saving them to deal with later when they could get the opinion of the Earthen HQ. Neither Burt nor Mark really cared what they did with them, the former because that wasn’t his responsibility and the latter because he only had one thing on his mind.

They all convened in front of the next stairwell, having scouted out the level and finding only a few people. It was likely that news had spread to everyone else, who either cleared out for their own safety or retreated further up the building. As long as Mack wasn’t among the escapees, things were still on track. There were only so many places he could run off to within the four walls. That left only one more level of daily business, which just so happened to include Mack’s office.

Their proximity to him was exactly why all four of the crew were put on edge at the sound of rapid footsteps coming from the stairs. Tap-tap-tap, and then a dull thump as someone’s boots collided with the platform. The frosted glass of the door’s window blocked them from seeing exactly who it was, but the very fact that someone was coming down to them prompted the group to raise their weapons and aim. Two pistols, a rifle, and a hand-grenade were stilled on the entry point as soon as it was kicked open.

Mark would have never forgiven himself had they fired.

“Captain!”

Another sense of déjà vu stirred in both of your minds as you collided in the center of your path. This time, luckily, you stayed upright, though you teetered on your feet as you wrapped your arms around Mark’s torso. One hand of his did the same to you, though he managed to wedge his other arm between your chests in order to cradle your jaw. The thumb brushed up against your cheek, as if he could ascertain your state by touch alone. You weren’t against him trying, but you were more occupied by the sensation of him in your embrace.

A goofy grin spread across Mark’s face.

“If you say, ‘you’re alive’, so help me, Mark, I will—”

Any chance for a repeat performance was erased as he crashed his lips into yours. You were, however, almost knocked to the floor again before you were pulled close to his chest, the source of stability letting you slip seamlessly into the kiss. He tasted like gunpowder, which was a point for concern that you catalogued for later, too wrapped up in the sensation of touch. It was brief, barely three seconds until he pulled away, but you knew suns had been born and died in the time span. You felt it, too, the heat of a supernova burning on your both of your faces.

You heaved a breath just as someone coughed.

Your gaze shifted over Mark’s shoulder, where the three other crew leads stood, awkwardly trying to avoid looking at you. Well, Celci was – Burt was doing so more out of respect than embarrassment, while Gunther was staring straight at you with his thumb up.

“I-it’s good to see you again, Captain,” Celci mumbled.

You nodded, suddenly extremely self-conscious, and stepped away from Mark, though you kept one hand on his waist.

“Mack will be upstairs in his office,” you started. You tried to push what happened to the side, but your mind was not giving up on the feeling of Mark’s lips against yours, so it was with a heavy heat burning up your face that you continued to speak. “He’ll have weapons and soldiers and anything he can get his hands on to defend himself with – which is a lot.”

“We broke into the armory first, so we have what they don’t. We’ll get all the crew together and then go in.”

Mark shook his head. “That’ll take too long. Mack’s probably making plans against us as we speak, and the longer we give him to do that, the harder he’ll hit us.” Then, he turned to you, that damnable smirk that always heralded a bad option. “If we go in guns a blazin’, we’ll get the drop on him.”

Standing behind Celci, Gunther raised his hand. “I agree with Mark. More people surprised means less people to fire back.”

She turned to him with a scowl. “You just want to shoot people.”

“I can want two things.”

“Is anyone nearby?” you interrupted. You couldn’t get distracted now, as Mark had said, you didn’t have the time to spare.

“We have two groups mobilized on the fourth floor, the rest of them are dealing with the surviving guards.”

“Get those two here with as many guns as they can carry.”

Celci nodded once and immediately shifted her attention to her arm’s gauntlet. The screen lit up with the contacts of crew members you couldn’t read, but they sparked with a white sheen as she tapped through them. Eight of them in total were summoned to the fifth floor, which would let the rebellion outnumber Mack’s men. If you remembered correctly, he had ten experienced guards at his disposal, all of whom you bet were gathered in the office to protect him. Getting through those people with skill alone would bring a swift end to the revolution, so you needed something else.

“Burt, you have grenades left?”

“Yup.”

“We’ll throw those in first, wait for the explosion, and shoot under the smoke.”

If nothing else, you’d get the element of surprise, but you hoped for more. With luck on your side, a few of the guards would be killed in the explosions, injured, or thrown completely off balance for your crew to take care of in the aftermath.

“You’ll know if you hit someone,” you said, when everyone’s attention was returned to you, “so don’t risk trying to find a body. There’s at least ten other people besides Mack, all of them trained and ready to kill on his order. Maybe even without it if he gets hit early on.”

“What do we do when the smoke clears?”

“Fire at anyone still standing, but keep your eyes on downed guards, too. Shooting blind means we won’t get an exact shot, you might just get them in the leg, in which case shooting back is still an option for them.”

You didn’t like issuing such orders, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and pacifism was not an option you were willing to tolerate. Maybe it was your emotions bleeding over into your decision-making, but you weren’t going to let those people get away. You saw the suffering they put the public through, every shaking civilian who got close to the complex, and you saw the look of fierce determination on your crew’s faces. The time for mercy was gone. Now was the time for consequences.

After taking a deep breath, you made a final, simple command, “Don’t let them.”

All four of your crew leads saluted you, and you hoped beyond hope that you would see them do it again. You didn’t want any of the deaths that were on your shoulders, but these were ones you refused to bear. They were going to live, and that was that.

As you stepped to the side so that they could brief the new arrivals who were marching down the hallway, Mark joined you.

He didn’t say anything at first, and both of you simply watched the rebellion walk past you. Some of them spared side-long glances at you, others more blatantly stared at your arm, but all of them were putting their lives on the line for the rebellion. For freedom. For each other and everyone in the colony.

For a moment, all you could think about was your own universe. All the people you had left behind, who you had failed to save. Hundreds of thousands of people every time you got sucked into another universe – but things were going to be different this time. This universe was going to be fixed, whether by you or someone else if you didn’t make it.

In the midst of Celci’s speech, Mark leaned over to whisper. At first, you wondered why he was doing it now, but then the words reached your ears.

“If things go wrong—”

“Mark.”

“—If things go wrong,” he insisted, “you have to tell me.”

“I think you’ll notice if things go wrong.”

“I don’t mean with the rebellion.”

You opened your mouth, turned to Mark to reply, and then promptly closed it again. Ah. He meant that kind of ‘wrong’.

There was a certain look in his eyes that you both hated and missed. It was the determination that made Mark himself, the stubbornness and the resolve to do what he wanted, even if it was an awful decision. If he wanted to put windows on a spaceship, there were going to be windows on that spaceship. If he wanted to go down with you…

You grabbed his hand, immediately tightening your grip.

“Okay.”

You didn’t think you were supposed to notice him shuffling closer, but you were practically shoulder to shoulder by the time that the meeting was adjourned and supplies were handed out. You and Mark kept your original weapons, but the ammo was filled up and a spare magazine was jammed into your waistband.

Locked and loaded, the plan was set in motion.

As silently as possible, you lead the charge up the staircase and to the first door. Luckily for you, whoever was the last to escape to Mack’s office was as dumb as they were frightened; what should have been locked with a keypad was left ajar, so you pushed through into the hallway.

You made a few signals with your hands that prompted one team to break off, headed by Gunther, to go rat hunting, as he had so gracefully put it. The rest of the crew, meanwhile, continued deeper, passing doors that select members stopped to search before you came to the crossroads. Going straight meant you would end up outside the main entrance, which was equipped with that sensor rumored to vaporize visitors.

You didn’t want to risk it, so the other two ways were the best options. They came with the extra surprise, considering it meant going through a kitchen or what appeared to be a broom closet, but you’d have to plan the shots carefully. If two teams were going to be on either side of the hall, they risked shooting straight across and hitting your own people.

This was a possibility that you warned the group about in a low voice, suggesting that shots were only fired at an angle or in the direction of Mack’s desk. At least, at the beginning. Things were bound to get hectic when the guards realized what was happening – that was the point, after all – but minimizing casualties on your own side was a top priority. You needed all the people you could get to match up to Mack’s guards.

Half of the crew went down the left, headed by Burt and Celci, while you and Mark took the others. You wished them luck before you left, but you had full faith in them. After you were done, Gunther’s people would arrive with medical supplies for the injured.

Your team marched through the hallway, through the kitchen, and up to the door. The weight of the situation pulled down the air, clogging your throat and pushing you to breath harder.

“Ready?”

In tandem, everyone nodded.

You’d asked the question, but you didn’t know if you were. Nevertheless, there was no going back now.

This was it.

You entered a state of limbo for the few seconds that you were waiting. It felt like you were floating, like you were crushing against the ground, like you didn’t exist at all.

And then a grenade exploded, and a hail of gunfire sounded.

You yanked open the door and leapt into the fray, the rest of the team spilling in after you. Sparks of light appeared and died instantly within the smoke, miniature supernovas that filled the room with adrenaline. It fused through your skin and lit you up, and for a moment, that was all it was. Energy. All the noise and the movement and the heat traded between the rebellion, your crew, your people, and Mack’s.

You were blind in the havoc but overwhelmed by everything else. Who screamed? Was it one of yours? Were you the one to hit them? Your gun clicked, empty, you quickly reloaded, barely dodged a bullet that whizzed by your flesh arm and then flinched back at the one that buried itself in your metal like a parasite, throwing out sparks in the gray. You couldn’t move one of your fingers. You shifted your gun to the other hand, trigger finger pressing down constantly. You hit something, what did you hit, didn’t matter, you pressed down.

And then the smoke began to clear. Bodies were uncovered – some wore the berets of Mack’s guards, some didn’t. Now was not the time to mourn, please not Mark, but to process the survivors. Three guards, but no Mack.

Your crew turned on the survivors within seconds of seeing them alive. One got a lucky shot at Burt before collapsing to the ground, but he simply waved you off when you turned to him. A shake of his head and a gesture to the main door confused you momentarily before a stream of Gunther’s team came through, as if by magic. Or, since you had relied on it so much, dumb luck.

A cue from you sent everyone relatively unharmed to look over the bodies.

The pangs of guilt at seeing members of the rebellion on the ground hurt more than the bullet in your prosthetic. You’d have to call in for retrieval of their bodies, and, when you were in touch with Earth again, tell their family. Of course, it was an honorable death, a detail you wouldn’t hesitate to divulge, but it didn’t make them any less dead. More people you failed to save.

You were only brought out of your lament by Celci’s voice.

“Captain! Over here!”

Her rushed tone had you furrowing your brow in concern. Was someone unconscious, had someone broken a bone? You hadn’t heard any melee combat, but the gunshots weren’t easy to ignore.

As soon as you saw what she was crouched over, though, those thoughts wiped from your mind, as if someone had pushed a reset button.

Oh, karma, you absolute beauty.

Three bullets were imbedded in Mack. Once in the shoulder, twice in his arm, the same that you had lost to him. He was bloody elsewhere, but it looked like splatter from whoever had been protecting him. There were a few bodies surrounding him, so it was anyone’s guess as to who the idiot was.

Celci pressed two fingers to his neck.

“He’s alive.”

You pulled up the barrel of your gun and fired straight into the heart that you were surprised Mack still kept around.

“Not anymore.”

Celci looked surprised, if only because you didn’t warn her of the gunshot, but she muttered a quick comment of understanding and backed away from the body. You could decide what to do with him later. For now, he didn’t deserve a single thought while your people were still here.

A hand pressed against your upper arm, and you immediately relaxed at the sight of Mark. Your eyes trailed up from his gauntlet to his shoulder to his—

“What happened?” you whispered, a hand coming up to rest on his cheekbone just beneath the eyepatch.

Mark tugged you closer by your waist. “I could ask the same about you.”

Initially, you were appalled. You weren’t even able to keep Mark safe. Your stupid plan that relied on pure, dumb luck, no better than wishing upon a star, got him hurt. You were fine with your arm, you could relearn your coordination, but sight was harder. It wasn’t just something that could be replaced, especially not with a group of trained surgeons that – while you weren’t all that happy with the events – you had received.

But then you looked at Mark. Really looked at him, not just the eyepatch, but him. He was smiling. It was a small smirk, prideful and victorious and happy to be alive. Dimples appeared, his eye crinkled at the corners, and he had his arms wrapped around your back as though you were the only thing that stayed constant.

You were, to him, not that you knew it. In every universe, he was going to find you. It took a little longer than he would have liked this time around, but he had found you in the end, and he would find you in the next, even if it took a decade and both of his eyes.

Your exhale slowly morphed into a light chuckle, and you were forced to drop your head to Mark’s chest in a sorry attempt to muffle the sound.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, fighting to keep his own giggle out of his voice.

When you’d brought yourself down from your little fit, you mumbled, almost drunk with the adrenaline leaking from your bloodstream, “Grizzled war-veterans.”

You two did look the part, he had to admit. “True futuristic revolutionaries, thank you very much.”

Amidst the wreckage of the complex, holes made in the floor from the explosives and blood seeping into the runner, both you and Mark laughed. You weren’t at all safe, you didn’t know when you’d be spit back into another universe, but you were sure of one thing and one thing only.

You were going to get through it at one another’s side, guns and governments be damned.

[I wrote about five pages when someone asked for another part, and then the other 15 in the last 14 hours. As always, thank you so much for reading, and I hope you've enjoyed <3]

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theknightmarket · 13 days ago

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Now that I'm imminently posting a second part to the Engineer/dictator!Mack fic (and because I forgot to mention it the first time), I get to point out a little tonal theme while doing it! I tried to keep the moments with Mack a lot more serious, like in the whole thing with the Captain's wrists, the terror, etc. A lot of it drew on stuff that happened in the USSR, just because that's what I've been studying for the past two years, but also other dystopian media, like the reference to May-day from the Handmaid's Tale.

This was intentionally juxtaposed by what happens with the Invincible crew; I tried to keep this more on the slap-stick style, in line with the whole rag-doll joke in Mark's projects.

My favourite demonstration of this contrast is when the two guards are taking the Captain to solitary, which is meant to be this completely inhumane place only used for torture, and they are interrupted by Celci and Gunther literally just falling onto them and possible straight-up killing them? (They don't actually die, but it's still funny that an ultra-high security building was defeated by the power of gravity)

But yeah! I just thought it was a nice theme that I forgot to talk about :D

#fanfiction #🎺 musings 🎺#markiplier egos #writing #markiplier egos x reader #x reader #one shots #iswm captain #iswm #iswm head engineer #iswm mark #iswm mack #I love having themes

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theknightmarket · 15 days ago

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epic the musical anon here on my damien/dark x da!reader again. i’ve been hearing all over tiktok but the song eternity by alex warren. i have more thoughts but this is all i have the enegery to type out for now

okay well did you have to shoot me in the damn heart with that one? i hadn’t heard this song before this and now i’m going to explode—

But in all seriousness, I love your brain and need it in a jar to shake because Dayum.

First of all, though, this song. This song. It’s literally only a snippet, barely 30 seconds, and yet I have played it on loop for a good 10 minutes just thinking about it. Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention and also how dare you. SO LET’S GET INTO IT-

‘It feels like an eternity’; given the vague timeline of the main events (i.e, ranging from the 1920s to literal space travel), time would definitely feel pretty screwy for both Dark and the DA because they’re separated into two different streams of time. On one hand, Dark is something of an outsider to the main events, having been part eldritch entity and part human. On the other hand, you have the DA, who either stays in the void where time literally doesn’t pass or who runs around in Actor’s stories. (If you take the DA as also being the Captain in ISWM, this is a whole other thing about time loops and ‘I spent an eternity in hell rebuilding this stupid machine’)

The way that it says ‘since I had to learn to be someone you don’t know’ - because Dark would totally have to put in effort to A) be a person and not an amalgamation and B) not be like Damien after the events of ‘Damien’, when he mostly influences Dark as a being. AND- (this plays into the Epic thing of Dark as refusing to see himself as Damien) how he steadfastly decides that the DA no longer knows him because he’s been oh-so-successful at creating a new identity.

Yeah, right.

OH, and the ‘what I wouldn’t sacrifice’, which contributes to Damien’s regret over ‘sacrificing’ the DA, because now he knows what really happens to them when they agree to help - getting trapped in the mirror - and he wants desperately to go back.

AND ‘WHY’D YOU HAVE TO CHASE THE LIGHT’??? get it, because he’s, y’know, Dark? (And also an ISWM tangent, but the light at the end of each ending in part 1 = ‘the light’ as they drop further into the rabbit hole) But more importantly! The pleading, the ‘please come back’, the ‘it’s not my fault but also I’m so sorry’.

And it’s ’somewhere I can’t go’, not only because I don’t think Dark can really die anymore, but also because he can’t interact with Actor’s stories well enough to be able to truly follow the DA in them. Sure, he talks to them in Date and Heist, but he can’t get them out.

So, he’s left to ‘walk this world alone’, instead.

Anon, I’m gonna explode, and I’d love to hear your (and anyone else’s) thoughts on this when you have the time <3 For the meantime, though, go listen to the song and suffer like we do. We’ll form a club, I’ll make t-shirts, it’ll be grand.

#fanfiction #markiplier egos #markiplier egos x reader #x reader #darkiplier #💌 letters 💌#eternity #darkiplier x da #darkiplier x reader #da x damien #mayor damien #i’m gonna cry

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theknightmarket · 23 days ago

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"You haven't left yet."

In which Actor gets a reprieve, momentarily. Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 TW: drowning, cursing Pages: 14 - Words: 5500

[Requests: OPEN]

From somewhere in the manor, the sound of rushing water echoed.

Only a small part of you was cognisant when you first woke up, and all of its energy was aimed towards figuring out where you were. If you were of any sounder mind, it would have been an immediate answer, but the 1:30 AM version of you was notoriously resistant to outside stimuli.

Soft sheets, hazy light, the distant hum of electrics through the walls. Mark’s manor, you remembered, where you had ended up the night of your ill-fated dinner. Not that you were complaining – again, soft sheets.

You pulled the comforter back from your body, promptly regretted doing so, and glared around. The curtains were drawn, but the moon had slipped its way between the threads. They fit the aesthetic of the room more, though you still preferred your age-old technique of throwing a military-issue blanket over the rod. Living in the city meant you had to be smart in how you blocked out the sights and sounds, but Mark was lucky enough to be stationed out of the way.

Briefly, you wondered how much use this room saw, the thoughts trickling through your brain like a broken tap. Drip-drip-drip.

Drip.

The water had stopped.

You forwent changing out of the sleepwear in order to dash over to Mark’s room. That sinking feeling got worse, the pit got deeper as you shouldered open the door, revealing the empty bed, the thrown-back sheet, the light from the ensuite bathroom that you lunged towards. He could have just been going through some convoluted late-night skincare routine, but you knew, you knew, that wasn’t it.

When you twisted the handle and found the door locked, there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation before you were taking a few steps back and launching yourself. The faint thump in your shoulder from the last door quickly spiked to pain, but adrenaline numbed it as soon as it registered. Space had to be made for your one goal in this moment.

Get to Mark.

And get to him you did; the door swung inwards, slamming against the wall and littering the ground with splinters. Your eyes zeroed in on the hand that laid over the porcelain, red robe clinging to the skin, and then you were reaching beneath his arms to lug him over the side and onto the floor, probably sticking him with a few of the wooden filings when he flopped backward onto the tile. Water sloshed out with him, coating the floor, him and yourself.

You shallowly inhaled only three breaths in the time it took to flip Mark onto his front and start pressing down on his back. The method was muscle memory, so you were still left with the ability to panic.

“Come on, Mark,” you muttered. Down, up, down, up, rest.

“C’mon, you can’t do this.” Down, up, down, up, rest.

You knew he couldn’t die, that his body was physically incapable of that – you’d seen the aftermath plenty of times – but there was no room for that reminder. You were here, kneeling in front of a body that belonged to Mark and was not breathing. He was drowning, and you weren’t just going to wait for him to come back. You had to do something about it.

Another barely-there whisper of, “Don’t be fucking stupid, come on.” Down, up, down, up, rest. You tried to go again but your heart stuttered in your chest. Grinding your teeth, you managed to say, “Mark, if you fucking die right now, I swear, I’ll kill you. Don’t you dare.”

Down, up, up, down. You were starting to lose the rhythm. The fabric of his robe was starting to bunch up, and you had to push harder to compensate, but you were shifting away from the focus point at every push, and your heart was thumping louder and louder in your chest, and your only thought was that if you failed him now, what good were you?

“Please, you can’t die.” The words were out of your mouth before you were aware of them on your tongue. They hung in the air, surrounded by nothing but silence, painful silence.

Until they weren’t - until Mark spluttered and coughed up water from the lungs to add it to the puddle on the floor. It ran along the tile and tipped into the grout, but you were preoccupied by his rapid breaths. Listening to them flooded you with both relief and fear, a combination that made you jump to help him into a better position than barely an inch off the ground.

You let him have the moment to collect himself, mostly because you needed it too. The sudden leap from that sleep-haze to the adrenaline of a hostage situation threw you through a loop. Your feelings and your body were out of tune, and you could do little more than watch Mark draw his sodden sleeve over his mouth.

Your emotions were given the cue to return when he made eye contact with you. Grabbing his shoulders, you hissed, “What the hell were you thinking?”

He didn’t say anything. There wasn’t much point and you both knew that. What would it help? You were supposed to be in familiar territory now. Cleanup duty. The ‘aftermath’ that you had mentioned earlier. What you were supposed to be good at.

But you felt boneless, and you collapsed against the bathtub, bringing Mark with you. You forced him into the tightest hug you could muster with your eyes fixed on the bedroom window directly opposite.

“Never do that again.”

Tentatively, Mark’s own arms encircled your neck. “I won’t. I promise.”

Your thoughts were racing a mile a minute. All of the issues you had pushed to the back of your mind came crashing through the barricades; the aching shoulder, the broken lock, the waterlogged clothes that were getting worse the longer you stayed on the floor. Each of them would have to be fixed, but you didn’t have it in you to move.

Meanwhile, Mark squeezed his eyes closed and tucked his head closer to your nape. The manor’s ambient sounds acted as a pleasant background to the moment, but the house was silent. No prompts or reminders, it was just you and him on the floor of his ensuite bathroom.

“Are you okay?” you asked, after a minute, or five, had passed.

“I think so.”

“Good.”

You lazily searched the walls for a clock, but you came up empty. That window was the best indicator for the time, and it was still dark.

“You should go back to bed.”

“So should you.”

And yet neither of you moved. Doing so felt wrong in some intangible, ancient way. You didn’t believe in magic, but breaking whatever spell had settled over you seemed dangerous, like shattering a diving helmet leagues under the sea.

Although getting up made your brow furrow, it was also unavoidable, and Mark gave no sign of a plan, so you had to take the first step. You struggled to your feet, bringing Mark up with you and trying not to slip.

“Do you have another robe?” you asked.

He nodded in the direction of his bedroom. “Closet.”

After you stepped over the threshold, you made a beeline for his collection of outfits, no doubt all of them a similar, if not exact same, shade of crimson. As you parted the red sea and forced out a chuckle at your own joke, you were acutely aware of Mark closing the door behind him. A grimace wormed its way onto your face when there was no click. You’d fix it in the morning. Probably.

Your hands secured around a clothes hanger, you handed it to Mark and turned around so that he could change his robe in peace. You took the opportunity to peek into the hallway, wondering if Benjamin had heard the commotion. There didn’t seem to be any disturbance, but that wasn’t exactly a bad thing. He’d fretted enough over Mark when he found his body, you didn’t want to see him were he to watch it happen. Luckily, an early morning call to the local station was not necessary this time.

When the shuffling behind you had ceased, you threw a cursory glance over your shoulder to see that Mark was comfortable, but all you noticed were the darkening spots on his collar where his hair had dripped onto the fabric. The blossoming deep red placed a weight on your heart, and you sought a solution, quickly finding one by his vanity.

Hair dryers were a relatively foreign concept to you. They just seemed so clunky and, strangely, a waste of time, given wet hair had never impeded you before – but one new experience led to another, and using a hairdressing tool was one of the better outcomes for that. The alternatives were…

Worse.

Although you stayed quiet, Mark seemed to realize what you were suggesting by your little wave of the hairdryer. With the smallest of smiles, he positioned himself into the cradle of the ornate chair.

You just about avoided flinching when you turned the thing on, the sudden gush of air more befitting of a lion than the little chunk of metal in your hand. You got the hang of it though, not without a few seconds of aimless gesticulation, which gave you the focus to expend on Mark’s face. His eyes were open by mere centimeters, lashes batting against his lower eyelids gently - fluttering, almost. Even after that whole debacle, he maintained an aura of regality. Elegance.

Like a prince, but not the kind that did chores for wicked family members. Sleeping Beauty, instead, came to mind. You had never been told stories like that when you were a kid and you didn’t care to ask for them, but you knew the classics, so you might as well have heard all of them.

When Mark’s hair regained its fluffiness, the natural state before he doused it with enough gel to start a fire, you turned the hairdryer off and swept your hands through. No tangles the first time you went through, nor the second time, nor the time after that. It got to the point of a subconscious movement, but when you regained your sense of self, you were equally hesitant to stop; Mark was slowly leaning further back into your touch, and there was no way in hell you were going to stop without his say-so.

The stars twinkling in the corner of your eye reminded you of the time, however, so you quietly asked, “Ready to sleep?”

Mark’s only response was a hum as he leaned closer. Whether that was agreement or objection was up to you, it seemed, but, regretfully, you knew what the better assumption was.

Untangling your hands from his hair, you matched Mark’s frown in the mirror with a light laugh. You patted his shoulder as a silent prompt to get up and, as he begrudgingly stood, follow you to the bed.

You hovered by the side while the mattress sunk under his weight, comforter falling into the depression with it. The plan was to let him get situated, get comfy, and then get asleep. It was pretty simple with only three loose steps, and yet it stopped at the first hurdle; Mark was just staring at you, initially silent, as both of you waited for different things.

“Are you going back to your room?” he asked, barely breaking the quiet.

“I can. If you want.” That had been the idea, and the memory of the soft sheets sang to you like a siren, but that expression of disappointment on Mark’s face was swiftly becoming your Achilles’ heel.

The latter won you over, not that you were sure there was ever a competition. “Or, I can stay,” you said.

A simple ‘please’ was all that it took to convince you, though you weren’t without surprise. It had to be serious if he asked so nicely and without the usual cover of haughtiness. You supposed that there couldn’t be any doubts, what with the seemingly permanent dampness of your clothes that stained your skin.

Hearing no protests about wet footprints, you shuffled back to the vanity and promptly collapsed into place. Even the chairs were cushy, but it was the one specifically for the vanity, so Mark must have spent a lot of time in it. You almost laughed at the mental image of him using your office desk chair. If that nightmare ever came to pass, you would never hear the end of it.

“You can’t sleep there all night.”

Your focus slid back to just the man you were thinking about, and he looked just as perplexed as you had imagined him to be. This was no back-breaking spinner, however, and you shrugged casually back at him.

“Won’t be the first time I’ve napped in a chair.”

“It’s six hours until morning.”

“I take long naps.”

Mark rolled his eyes, and you felt a sudden rush of pride. It was good when he was being dramatic, that meant he was getting back to his usual self. A Mark with no quips or complaints was not a healthy Mark.

“You don’t need a stiff neck on top of everything else. It would—” he paused and glanced to the side, “—it’d make more sense for you to sleep in the bed.”

“It’s your bed, Mark, and you need the beauty sleep more than me.”

The blank look he leveled you with told you that you weren’t getting out of this so easily.

“Let me rephrase; I would appreciate it if you slept next to me.”

“Are you sure? I really don’t mind sleeping in the chair.”

“That is a wooden chair with one cushion, this is a piece of furniture designed for sleeping.” He tossed the comforter aside. “Get in the bed, detective.”

No escapes for you, no outs, no other choice than to huff half-heartedly and move, slow and purposeful, towards the bed. Each step echoed around the room, but it was soon overshadowed by the rustle of sheets and pillows while Mark made himself fully comfortable on his side.

Which, as you found out when you landed on the other half, was not a difficult task at all, because, damn, if you thought that guest bed had been soft, this was as though Mark had plucked the literal clouds out of the sky. You had half the mind to check if your hand would go straight through and come out slightly wet with unshed rain, but you settled for completely relaxing into the hold.

Although the body heat radiating into the air next to you reminded you what this was for. You hoped it would help; there wasn’t much else you thought you could do at this point, but the mere thought of leaving him alone filled you with a pit in your stomach that quickly filled with nebulous dread like cement in a pothole. That thought was the only thing that kept you aware in this moment.

It was a similar experience for Mark, though the subject of the dread was slightly different. This was, after all, the first time that he had shared a bed with someone since… before everything happened. It felt both wrong and right at the same time, and he didn’t know what to do with that. If he told you to leave, he was certain he’d just grab your wrist and beg you to stay again – but if he moved closer? His throat tightened and he forced himself to take a deep breath.

Talking. That was safe. Mark was good at that. Usually.

“I have never met someone more stubborn,” he muttered.

You were quick on the draw to reply, for which he was thankful. “I have.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yep.”

There was a brief moment of silence, but he could have sworn your smirk was audible. His scoff broke the quiet.

“I think you’ll find you have been more stubborn than me.”

“You think?”

“Seven times.”

A slight movement in the sheets told him you were looking over, no doubt with an incredulous look on your face. He stayed staring at the ceiling, if only not to fall into laughter.

“You kept count?”

He had, mostly because it was in line with how many interactions you had as a whole, but he started at the beginning, saying, “You refused to leave when we first met.”

“You refused to let me investigate your death.”

“I had to force you out of your apartment to see a movie.”

“Yeah, you forced me, and you didn’t take no for an answer.”

“As soon as I showed my face at a crime scene, you made me leave.”

“I had to make you leave.”

“See, now you’re just copying me.”

A light chuckle escaped you at his whining, but you cut yourself short as an idea came to you. Flipping onto your side, you planted an elbow in the pillow, momentarily grieved the lost plushness, and made eye contact with Mark.

“You didn’t cooperate with Rider,” you pointed out, pride swelling in your chest.

He closed his eyes in a poor attempt to deflect. “I gave a statement in your office.”

“Right after you came back, you told him it wasn’t necessary. You tried to get him to leave, and he had to actually threaten you so you would go to the station.”

You had been busy that day, of course, so you didn’t have the front-row seat you normally had to Mark’s ‘resurrection’. Instead, you had to settle for the ear-full about what a boy scout he had been from Rider the next day. Your first hour of paperwork had the background music of his ranting, complaints about Mark’s rudeness and his haughtiness and, yes, his stubbornness. You thought you had an ace in the hole.

And you did, though only because Mark refused to explain exactly why he had initially resisted going to the station. It wasn’t the time for such a talk, and, even when an appropriate moment did surface, who knew if he was going to go through with it?

He was forced to scramble for another point, hopefully one that you wouldn’t be able to turn back on him.

“I had to practically drag you out of your office to eat dinner.”

“Same situation as before,” you waved off.

“You didn’t budge on what counted as ‘work’.”

“We both did that one, so it cancels out.”

So far, everything was tit-for-tat, apart from your argument that gave you one point over him. On the surface, it wasn’t a difficult gap to close, but there were very few moments when it wasn’t a case of butting heads.

“You refused to stay the night.”

“And you didn’t let me go home.”

Your gaze drifted back to the ceiling, though you stayed propped up.

“Besides, if you think about who won, we’re basically even because whoever got their way must have been the most stubborn, right—”

“You haven’t left yet.” Mark sat up. “You haven’t left.”

Your attention arrested, you couldn’t help but stare at him. All throughout your jokes, you had been happy to see him getting more comfortable – not only physically but mentally. And yet, now, he was on edge again. Not the same as before, when he looked like a rabbit staring down the barrel of a hunter’s gun, but a deer on the opposite side of a lake to that same hunter, wondering if they were going to aim or not. You felt the gun in your hand, that metal weight dragging down, but you kept the tip securely in the dirt.

“I’m not going to. As long as you need me, I’ll be here, dead or alive.”

“Thank you,” he said, simply. “I truly appreciate that.”

You couldn’t throw the gun away yet, or you’d risk spooking him with the thud. You’d have to lower it, slowly, show him your intentions and let him deem you a non-threat first. Mark seemed on the way to doing that as he readjusted himself back down into the sheets.

“You know,” you started, “I’d rather you be alive.”

He shot you a confused look, which was expected but you didn’t have a response ready yet. Emotions weren’t your strong suit, the vulnerable ones even less so, but this wasn’t something you could pull back from.

Tentatively, you explained, “I don’t—I don’t actually like seeing your body, and tonight, I just… I know that you’ll be back, because you’re not dead, but you are dead. Maybe it’s a primal instinct, or it’s something else, but I think that was the most scared I’ve ever been – because I don’t know much about this whole reviving thing, I don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, and, for all I know, you might not come back.”

You couldn’t face Mark as you spoke. You couldn’t face much of anything, and you shifted into a sitting position with one of your legs bent over the other.

“I care about you, Mark, and that’s dangerous. I don’t think I’ll ever stop caring about you, and if I feel that way every time you die, even though I know it doesn’t mean anything…”

You trailed off, and Mark didn’t know how that sentence was going to end, nor did he want to find out. Instead, he took your hand and shuffled closer. His reservations were thrown out of the window when your eyes glazed over, all too familiar in a much more concerning context.

“I promised that I wouldn’t do it again, and I won’t.” And then, tightening his grip into a gentle but firm lock, he said, “I can explain the process to you, if you’d like.”

Maybe one day you would face the reality of your situation. You weren’t refusing it, per se, just pushing it into the future when you had the capacity for it. Right now, you weren’t in a position to hear about forces beyond your understanding, so you shook your head.

“I’d rather not know but thank you for the offer.”

A small smile slid into place on Mark’s lips. “Too much effort?”

“Way too much.”

You both laughed lightly, but, behind the exterior of mirth, you were terrified. It was inevitable that you would hear the truth eventually, but the thought of him telling you something that suggested he could actually die sent a shock of fear through your bones. A hint or an implication would be the end of you. You were smart, you had to be in order to be the detective that you were, but this was the only time that you didn’t want to see the full picture, probably because a bloody torso didn’t impact you personally.

But you didn’t have to think about that right now. All you had to do in this moment was resituate yourself into the divine cradle that Mark called a bed, and you did, sliding down and settling against the pillow. It was slightly difficult to find a natural position for the hand that Mark held, but he solved that when he disconnected and moved his arm around your shoulder instead.

You had expected that to be that, and for both of you to slip into sleep. A beat or two passed, however, before he started to speak in a low tone, almost as though you were not meant to hear it.

“Young soul put off your flesh and come with me into the quiet tomb.”

You glanced at him, and the first thing you noticed was that his eyes were closed again. The second thing was the sheen of red that coated his cheeks like a Colombina.

“Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet; the earth will swing us, as she goes, beneath our coverlid of snows and the warm leaden sheet.”

You murmured a vague, “Oh, I get it,” as you pushed further into the crook of Mark’s shoulder. If he was going to lull you to sleep with romantic poetry, you were going to get as comfortable as possible, and that just so happened to include using him as a firmer pillow. Any complaints had to wait for the morning, not that you imagined he had any with the way he oh-so-subtly pulled you even closer.

“Dear and dear is their poisoned note, the little snakes of silver throat, in mossy skulls that nest and lie, ever singing die, oh, die.”

There was another stanza before that one, but it was largely a repeat of the same last lines, and there was little point in backtracking.

“Thomas Lovell Beddoes,” Mark explained. “He was a nineteenth-century English poet, who studied medicine so that he could discover evidence that the spirit survives the death of the body—” He interrupted himself with a giggle, “—until he got expelled.”

He decided, with a self-awareness that often eluded him, to not mention his committing suicide, but it would matter little if he had spoken it aloud considering he would have been the only one to hear it. You were already pressed securely into the sheets, eyes closed and soft breaths escaping you. Good; you deserved to sleep after the night you’d been through.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t help but stare. What kind of person were you to be lulled to sleep with such a dreary poem? What had happened to you for you to turn out like this, relaxed in the bed of a dead man? As far as his other relationships went, Mark knew very little about your life before you had met. Where did you grow up, where did you go to school, who was your family, did you even have a family? All those questions deserved answers, but there were none to be found.

And yet he didn’t feel like finding them in the first place. This was enough. You trusted him on his relationship with death, and he trusted you with your life. Anything important would come up, and he’d deal with it then. For now, Mark simply pulled himself further down in order to make himself cozy at your side for the rest of the night.

This time, it was not dripping water that you woke up to, but the alarm in your original room. You were, for once, happy to be a light sleeper, despite your muted groan at actually being conscious suggesting otherwise. What time had it been set for? You didn’t remember, exactly, but the clock on Mark’s beside table showed the minute hand ticking barely past seven. A half-hour, then, was what you had to get ready for the workday, which ordinarily would spur you into groggy shambling about your apartment. However, you found yourself oddly energized as you made to remove yourself from the bed. Was this what sleep was meant to do?

Multiple points of pressure stopped you in your tracks. Your arm was sandwiched between the bed and Mark’s back, and another, not your own, was strown across your stomach. With four legs tangled into a knot, you wondered how nothing had gone numb in the night, but the question was quickly exchanged for how you would get out of this.

The next minute or so felt more like extricating a fossil from rock. One little misstep risked waking Mark up, and you could only imagine how he would react to interrupted sleep. You’d seen him come out of his post-death state, and you were pretty sure it was on par with that.

Painfully gentle and painfully slow, you managed to shift his arm onto his own chest. That was the easy bit, leaving your legs to be a slightly harder challenge. One inch, two inches, three, and then you’d planted a foot onto the ground. The other followed after a slight fear-inducing struggle so that the only thing remaining was your arm lodged under Mark’s back.

This was going to force you into moving him, which was a last resort that you did not want to resort to. Maybe if you went slow enough, he wouldn’t notice, and maybe if you thought optimistically enough, he wouldn’t wake up when he inevitably did.

With bated breath, you grabbed your elbow and started to shift it. His eyes were still closed when you got a quarter out, but it also felt like you had gotten nowhere. Even with the added boost from a good night’s rest, you were not lucid enough for this. The sudden launch into adrenaline was affecting your thought process, probably being the cause of your stress about this relatively unimportant moment, but you were already committed to not waking Mark up, so you had to follow through with it, because he deserved the sleep after last night, and he didn’t need to be rudely woken up when he didn’t need to be—

Dammit.

But what could you say? You were a detective, not a surgeon.

“Morning, Mark,” you said, trying to hide your disappointment.

His eyes fluttered upon, bleary in his semi-sleep state, before they landed on your wrist that he had caught in his grasp. His brain startled as though an electric current had been run through it, and his gaze flitted around the room.

“What, uh, what time is it?”

Wow, he was just so eloquent in the morning – not that you particularly minded his morning voice, which was a fact you would take with you to the grave.

You answered, “Seven.”

“Ugh.”

“Yep.”

You left the sleeping beauty to lounge in the thousand-thread-count sheets – or whatever egregious number he got his hands on – to get changed in your own room. The clothes in the closet appeared to be spares, either bought especially for guests or left behind by other people, but you raised an eyebrow at the quality. They were much too fancy to just be extras, though you had to admit that so too was the rest of the guest room.

You pulled on the bottoms and draped the shirt around your shoulders, layering on the red tie like a scarf afterward. Normally, you would omit that from your uniform, but you felt like spurning such an offering was too rude, even for you. Still, whether you would do it up was a question yet to be answered.

Fingers fiddling with the buttons, you returned to Mark’s room, where he had spread out further across the bed.

“Do you have to go in today?” came a groan from amongst the swathes of comforter.

“Yes. Don’t you?”

“No, and I resent being awake at this hour when I don’t need to be.”

Hey, you were right. He was pouty when his sleep was disturbed.

Not trying to hide a chuckle, for which you received a glare, you said, “Then go back to sleep.”

Mark nestled further into the sheets, but he didn’t take his eyes off of you. There was some part of him, the all-too-familiar voice that only saw the bad in everything, that told him this couldn’t be it, that there was something wrong, that something would go wrong, that it was inevitable. It whispered that you would leave and wouldn’t come back after everything that you’d seen.

His eyes trailed the outline of your figure and then slid off to the side.

As if by magic, you said, “I’ll be back.”

Mark hummed in confusion.

“I’ll come back after work. Six-thirty, maybe seven?”

You adjusted your collar, shifting the tie out of the way but not tying it, and glanced around for your coat. Wherever Mark had put it yesterday, it wasn’t in plain sight, so you took the liberty to search through the room.

As you pulled open a closet door, Mark asked, “No overtime?”

“No overtime,” you affirmed, catching the beige shade in between stark reds and blacks. You pulled it out before you turned around, having to stifle a large grin at the sight of Mark splayed out, the epitome of the cat that got the cream.

“I’ll see you at six-thirty, then.”

You rolled your eyes, but you couldn’t bring yourself to be genuine about it. What was the point? You were well aware of the warm feeling in your gut that ran up to your heart and curled around the muscle like sunlight. Denying the vigor in your step as you made your way down the stairs and out of the manor’s door was an exercise in futility, and you didn’t want to waste that extra energy on such a thing. Instead, as you watched the driver pull up to the manor in that familiar boxy, black car, you accepted that you might have just had some non-platonic feelings for Mark.

[This one is shorter than the others, if only because both this one and the next are heavy, so I don't want to get too angsty in just one chapter (and also it would make one chapter, like, fifty pages long). But yeah! Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it and that you have a good day :D]

#fanfiction #markiplier egos #markiplier egos x reader #writing #markiplier #x reader #one shots #actor mark #actor mark x reader #wkm actor mark #who killed markiplier #wkm #drowning #cursing #📜 royal decree 📜#canon death #detective au #omg two fics in less than a month wtf

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theknightmarket · 25 days ago

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Even though it's a relatively-throwaway line from the Colonel for the sake of a joke in a pre-WKM request I'm writing, I feel like addressing a headcanon I have for the Colonel (and by proxy, Wilford), which is that he's legally deaf.

Having fought in WW1, presumably on the front lines, I would imagine Will's lost some of his hearing from the guns and explosives, and add to that his flagrant use of guns within the manor in WKM, I would wager he has pretty bad hearing.

Translating this to Wilford just means that the discos he goes to are pretty normal volumes for him, and when Abe clears everyone out with his gun, he doesn't notice because he literally can't discern the shot amongst the sound of the music.

This might come as the result of my love of context and having the plot impacted by era-accurate events, but, y'know, who doesn't love a little Will headcanon?

#fanfiction #markiplier egos #one shots #wilfordmotherlovingwarfstache #wkm wilford #markiplier wilford #🎺 musings🎺#deafawareness #headcanon

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theknightmarket · 1 month ago

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"You're alive!"

In which Engineer engineers something more political than a ship. Part 1 - Part 2 TW: swearing, description of wounds (not graphic), mentioned violence Pages: 24 - Words: 9000

[Requests: OPEN]

When you had been the captain, you had seen Mack in the hallways of the ship. He was always repairing something, fiddling with the screws of a vent or tapping away at a diagnostic pad. When he was on his break, which only lasted ten minutes at his own request, he talked non-stop about ways to improve. Although Mark had built the Invincible II, you had no doubt Mack tended to much of the general upkeep.

In simple terms, you liked Mack. But you placed great emphasis on the past tense.

That was before he completely took over the colony – your colony – and designed it in his own image. That was before he overrode any semblance of your control and made you his ‘personal assistant’. That was before you spent the nights awkwardly stretched over a dog bed, plucking at the stitched letters that spelled out ‘Lil Cappy’ and hoping you would, for once, wake up without a crick in your neck. That was before Mark disappeared.

You didn’t know where he went. Even though it was an alternate universe, you were certain that he had been around. At least, initially. You had seen traces of him scattered across the ship, ones you were certain could have only come from him, and some of the colony’s technology had his trademark techniques. It was mainly the explosives, but you were glad you had been allowed access to them long enough to figure it out.

Mack had stripped you of any and all of your personal freedoms. A dictator through and through, but he had apparently fostered a grudge against you in this timeline, and, given the evidence, it was an old one. It had time to fester, and it was just your luck to be caught in the crossfire when he eventually gained enough power to unleash it.

How he became the Head Engineer in the first place was beyond you. Maybe the actual captain of this universe deserved it for their poor thinking, or maybe you were just feeling petty. You had a lot of time to think things over, and your moments of boredom normally resulted in one of three thought processes. One, you hated Mack. Two, you hated the captain. Three, you missed Mark.

But you would inevitably be dragged away from your meaningless deliberations, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally. This time, thankfully, it was the former; you’d had quite enough of the handcuffs recently – something about missing a quota that you hadn’t been aware of. That was a common occurrence, though, and you were half sure your wrists evolved to be thicker every time.

No, they didn’t. You had permanent crimson rings mirrored on both arms that burned every time the metal clanked roughly against them, the skin peeled and rubbed into flaky epidermis.

The guards didn’t give you time to dwell on it as they yanked you up by the shoulders. You stumbled when you were dropped onto your feet, only getting a few steps forward before your elbows were pulled from your sides. Paralleled, you were forced to walk.

You were never told what you were doing each day, but a pattern of degrading servitude had long since been established. Bleach made your wrists worse, though the smell of the sewers wasn’t kind either. They weren’t rats, per se, being the size of dogs and possessing the biting force of a hydraulic press, but they had to be removed from down below regardless. That had been your job the last time you tried to leave the building without permission.

However, instead of turning left in the direction of the Department of Hygiene, the guards shoved you down the right-hand hallway. That was okay. There were plenty of offices on this side of the complex. Most likely was the Department of Agriculture, from where you had been ordered to assemble the tractor-like machinery developed for the unfamiliar crops. You had actually quite enjoyed that, which was probably why you only ever did it once.

The more turns you took, the more branches you checked off your list. Each room passed by like sand falling in an hourglass. You could see each grain absorbing into the mass in your mind’s eye, the steadily emptying top that marked your inevitable demise.

No, not demise. There were other places left. His office was right next to the Department of Engineering. You had never stepped foot in there, but you still had a chance. Maybe they wanted you to meticulously redraw the blueprints as the copier next to you worked five times as fast, maybe they wanted you to spend hours upon hours shredding old documents without getting up from the floor, maybe, maybe, maybe—

The guards came to a stop in front of a towering pair of doors.

Maybe not.

The sensor would tell Mack when there was someone to see him. Receptionists weren’t his style, and he much preferred the momentary terror slapped onto a person’s face as the red beam drifted over them at a leisurely pace. If you weren’t who he wanted, vaporization was in the cards, though that was only a rumor you had overheard from other staff.

With a debatable amount of luck, the doors swung open in tandem to reveal the hall that Mack had taken for his office. It stretched 45 feet, a distance you were soon crossing on a crimson runner rug, with a desk at the very end against the backdrop of the skyline. Even from the exit, you could see those silver pillars and the sunlight that reflected off of them. You remembered the plans for the main city just as vividly as the sight in front of you.

Envy and disgust made your stomach churn when your eyes landed on the man standing now just a few steps away from you. His back, more precisely, as he took in the view like you had been.

“Marvelous, isn’t it?”

Mark had always been the more academic out of your pair, but you tried to calculate how much force you could run at him with and the tensile strength of the glass. Adding in your likelihood of survival made it a morose thought, though a little heroic sacrifice was not a scenario you were hesitant to consider.

Mack turned around and flashed you that smug grin.

Roughly 1000 newtons, which seemed achievable.

“This empire I’ve built.”

The sentence for treason, blasphemy, being honest, or whatever else it was branded as was about ten years in the prison system. Manual labor, usually, to build things that simply wouldn’t work, like canals too shallow for the boats to pass through or factories too unstable to support the weight of its produce. You had never been subjected to it, but who knew? Mack could have gotten bored of you and deemed you a threat despite your hands hanging on by a thread.

“Wouldn’t you agree?”

Listening was a good idea. It wasn’t as though Mack needed someone’s attention to talk, just the presence of an audience, but it always turned out better for you when you did. It was just so hard these days. Your focus would drift at the exact moment he would ask a question and if it was supposed to be rhetorical or you answered incorrectly, the corner of his mouth would perk up and he would tilt his head like he’d caught a misbehaving child elbow-deep in the cookie jar.

Except you weren’t a misbehaving child, you were the ex-captain of the first colony in space. And you weren’t elbow-deep in the cookie jar, you were enwebbed by a dictatorship run by a man you used to trust. And you weren’t going to be sent to your room with no dinner, you were going to be…

You missed Mark, so much. Everything would be better if you knew where he was.

“But you know what?” Mack dropped gracefully into his chair, one leg over the other. “It could be better.”

You stared at him, unblinking. Better? What could be better than having an entire planet at your beck and call?

“I want to ask you a few questions.”

Your surprise kept rising. He had never asked your genuine opinion before. Any questions were always in the company of others, whom he could either entertain or threaten at your response. But there, in his chapel, you were alone, save the guards that were nothing more than glorified robots.

Mack didn’t wait for you to respond, only rearranging himself in the chair so that he could plant an elbow on the desk to hold his head in his hand. You weren’t sure whether the interest was real, whether this was an actual conversation or just something to catch you out with. A trap that you didn’t have a choice in stepping into.

“Do you have the original blueprints for the ship?” he asked, all too casually for the dynamic between you.

Hesitantly, you shook your head. The Invincible hadn’t been your domain; your job was to take care of those onboard the ship and, upon landing, lead the development of the colony. You had failed at both. You were billions of years, light and Earth, away from your people, and even when you’d been granted another try, you’d gone and thrown it away. Some captain you had been.

As if he could see you were starting to drift, Mack spoke again. “I expected as much. It’s not a problem, of course. In fact,it gives us an opportunity to improve from stage one.” He hummed as he drew out a tablet from a drawer. “How expansive was the AI system?”

You paused, longer than at the first hurdle. The built-in AI was, as the title suggested, built in. It was part of the ship, not an external feature, akin to cryogenics and the reactor. From what you remembered, the computer chips and mechanics to house that system were detailed on the blueprints he had just asked you about. Did he think you were holding out on him? Did he think that getting more specific would incentivize you to give in?

Or, as it slowly dawned on you like dripping honey, did he not know at all?

“I’m on a strict schedule, here, so compliance would be appreciated.” Mack painted his voice with that faux nonchalance, but there was that ever-present reminder of his power in this situation. Realizing he was in slightly less control than you had once thought didn’t take away the cattle prods that he had at his disposal.

You shrugged. It was the truth. You didn’t know how expansive it was because you didn’t build the ship – and Mack didn’t know because he didn’t build it either. Not the one you knew, and not the one that belonged to this universe.

Desperately, you fought back a laugh. The Head Engineer of the first galaxy-fearing spaceship, and he didn’t know the first thing about it.

“Alright. Not a problem,” he said, his teeth audibly grinding together, “we’ll work around it. Protocols run smoother when they aren’t given dumb names, after all.”

That was the first time you felt like talking – or, more accurately, felt like launching a string of expletives at Mack for the smallest suggestion of removing the naming convention you held so dear. They were dumb, but that was good. When you were surrounded by fire and debris, the distant voice listing off the most inconvenient procedures made everything seem that much more optimistic.

But you held yourself back. Barely. You set your jaw, dropped your shoulders, and stared coldly at Mack as he tapped at his tablet.

When he was finished, he met your eyes. They were the windows to the soul, as the saying went, so you hoped he saw the bubbling urge to strangle him that overshadowed all your other emotions. You hoped he didn’t see your longing to see Mark again.

He didn’t react to either sight. No smile or frown. Just another question.

“How did you get here?”

Your heart stilled, your lungs shriveled, your eyes blew wide, your throat swelled. You froze.

No.

No, he didn’t know. He couldn’t know. Had this really been a test? Were you supposed to know about the ship, had the old captain known, had they built the Invincible, how absolutely, catastrophically cued were you?

You couldn’t tell him. Physically or morally. Your mouth welded itself shut as tight as the pieces of the Invincible, and your mind bore visions of the horrors Mack would unleash upon the multiverse. You couldn’t tell him.

However, you didn’t have to.

Not a moment later, Mack was speaking again, tone betraying no lie. “The warp core is proving a pain to replicate. My engineers have devoted quite some time to figuring out the logistics, but their work so far has been… disappointing.”

His shadow propelled itself up the desk as he stood. The dark edge parallelled the tips of your boots where it stopped. You supposed it was meant to be intimidating, but the adrenaline was flushing out of your body, and there was no rush to replace it. Instead, you felt the sobering effects of a more positive outcome.

Making sure he didn’t find out was another problem. As long as you kept your mouth shut, Mack would stay safe in his assumption that the warp core only traveled in time and space, and your little universe-hopping discovery would disappear when you did.

“You wouldn’t be able to offer any guidance on that, would you? A little information to help us, help the colony, just like you’ve always wanted?”

You weren’t stupid, even if Mack thought you were. It wasn’t going to help the colony, only him and you didn’t give a damn what he wanted. There was no ideological internal debate, no what-ifs, no way in hell that he was telling the truth. Your mouth remained closed as you stared him down blankly.

“No?” he asked.

No.

“Fine—” He waved a hand for the guards to seize you, and they grabbed your arms like wasps swarming an attacker. “Take them to solitary.”

Your skin burned underneath the gloves, pulled taught and twisted in your struggle. Pulled back, you were forced to bend and lose your balance, stumble over your feet, scramble for purchase against the runner. Solitary was worse than a death sentence. Its Earthen namesake was a light slap on the wrist in comparison. You couldn’t go there, anywhere but there. Give you the rat-dogs, give you the bleach, give you anything but solitary.

By the time you were wrenched out of Mack’s office, you had gotten nowhere in your escape attempts. The guards simply grasped you tighter and held you further down, practically dragging you down the hallway and to the back of the complex. Solitary was no ordinary cell in a prison – it was a single room buried as close to the planet’s core as possible. The gates to hell. The belly of the beast. You felt like you were going to throw up.

Some part of you wanted to talk to the guards, beg and plead for them to let you go. But they were Mack’s lackeys, and you had all seen what happened to traitors. There was no point in playing on morals or humanity, so all you were left with was kicking and screaming.

When you heard banging from above, you assumed that backup had been called. Mack had long ago instilled in his followers the idea that you were dangerous, despite your apparent weakness. Siege mentality worked a charm in drawing attention to you at all times, because surely you were just pretending to be beaten within an inch of your life, and you would spring out to attack if anyone gave you the chance. Your current similarities to a rabid dog warranted more people with more weapons.

Wild as you were, you disregarded the inconsistency unbecoming of Mack’s troops. The volume of the sound was both too far away to be in the same corridor and too quiet to be on the floor above, but you ignored that, too. As the guards exchanged confused glances before stopping in their tracks, you preoccupied yourself with straining against their holds.

You thought you had broken free just seconds later with your resistance to solitary, and you prepared yourself to sprint as far as you could get before fatigue made you collapse, but a glance behind made you stop short.

The two guards, now merged into one small pile of uniform and indoctrination on the floor, were shadowed by another pair. You might have wondered how this happened in such a short amount of time had, one, it not been obvious from the sooty boot prints on the guards’ backs, and, two, you not been overwhelmed with relief.

Celci was the first to speak, stating, “No time to talk, we need to get out of here.” Her air of stern objectivity followed her as she began to march down the hallway, but you didn’t miss the look she sent back.

That left you to be straightened up with a slap on the back from Gunther. He shot you a lopsided grin, somehow managing to stay audible even with the cigar between his teeth as he laughed, “What she means is it’s good to see you again.”

Had you any energy left from your failed escape attempt, you would have tried to convince yourself that the water welling in the corners of your eyes was from the smoke. It billowed from the broken ceiling and provided a great cover story, but you didn’t have it in you to pretend. You relied on the vague shape of Celci and Gunther’s hand around your shoulders to guide you through the complex while you gave in to the silent tears.

You weren’t aware of where you were headed, but you trusted your companions. Wherever they were taking you, you were going – it took a few minutes for you to get your bearings, but you only registered the change in environment when sunlight warmed your skin.

A window was propped open with a spanner, letting in the mid-‘May’ breeze, which would be completely normal anywhere else. The fact that made your brow furrow was that the complex’s windows were nothing but see-through walls; they weren’t supposed to open.

Celci pushed the glass upwards, tilting the pane so that she could slip underneath and out. Your nerves exploded, and you launched yourself forward as her hand left the frame, but she didn’t fall. Leaning over the edge, you saw a cleaner’s scaffolding swaying side to side next to the wall, and you sighed.

Gunther nodded at you, so you took the cue to duck out, too. Immediately, you were overwhelmed by the sun on your skin and the coolness of the metal frame. Just being out there for a second without a guard breathing down your back was a euphoric feeling like no other. You hadn’t gone outside alone since…

Ever. It dawned on you that you had never stepped foot on this planet without an escort.

And, technically, you still had yet to. Gunther popped up beside you and aimed an ‘okay’ sign to the ground as Celci let the window fall shut again, making sure it was nice and quiet. The scaffolding was just the same, descending with little more than a momentary squeak. Given the height you were at, you had a tense minute. Though your heartbeat bashed your ribcage like a caged zoo animal, you were forced to wait in silence; any talking ran the risk of raising the alarm, and you would sooner have thrown yourself from the 450 feet you were currently at than go back to Mack’s office.

The only thing you had to bide the time was your thoughts, the company of which you had dealt with for far too long. No matter how hard you resisted it, however, the voice at the back of your mind reminded you that the Celci and Gunther beside you were not yours. They weren’t from your universe, they weren’t your crew, and you weren’t their captain.

The voice that you much preferred pushed back against the first – they still saved you. Even though you didn’t know their history with the captain, it didn’t mean they weren’t there. You had to be thankful for that more than disappointed.

When you were close enough to the ground, you saw where the rope of the scaffolding trailed off to. Barely distinct grey lines led within the bushes – the kinds put near hospitals or business parks for a faux-welcoming atmosphere. It wasn’t the perfectly pruned leaves that had you grabbing the side, nor was it the evenly spaced roots that led you to vault over the side. No, what had you stumbling across the white concrete was the figure obscured by only one wayward branch.

You all but slammed into Burt like a torpedo.

Vaguely, you heard him groan, “Yup.”

Your arms wrapped around him without giving him a second to process, and, when Celci and Gunther got close enough, you grabbed them too. It was a veritable knot of limbs, and you were half sure you had caught the scaffolding’s rope in your little trap, but you weren’t about to let go to find out. For now, you just wanted a moment to relish the company of your crew leads.

That voice returned and was promptly banished to the recesses again.

This was good. Maybe it was selfish, but you didn’t want to ruin the moment yet, even if it meant being wilfully ignorant. Standing in the clump, awkwardly stretched around them, your eyes grew misty again. You’d missed human contact. Totalitarian regimes didn’t accommodate the human need for touch, and Mack went out of his way to avoid it altogether. Any physical interaction was through layers of leather gloves, and, for you, it had only ever been the vice grips of the guards.

The mental image of those two unconscious guards sobered you. You were still on Mack’s territory, after all, and time was of the essence.

Everyone peeled back from you, Celci catching your serious expression in her retreat.

“We have a headquarters set up in one of the disused factories. We’ll head there, patch you up, and plan what to do next.”

You stored any questions in the back of your mind for later, though one in particular fought back to the top multiple times throughout your journey. Every time you turned a corner, you expected to see another familiar face, and every time you were disappointed. Having seen Celci and Gunther literally drop out of the sky, it was hard to temper your hopes, and you had to force yourself to focus on anything else – the hard lines of shadows, the faint discussion of civilians, the rhythmic click of boots.

Gradually, the environment shifted. The painted buildings developed cracks and silence filled in between quiet directions. Two by two, you walked out of the edge of town and into an old industrial compound. You assumed it was old, at least, with architecture and wildlife left to rot. News never made it as far as you in the colony’s main complex, so you had to guess what happened here – from the craters in the middle of roads and scattered, smaller holes in the walls, it wasn’t difficult.

Eventually, after a good hour, Celci veered off from the main path, and the rest of you followed, you slightly more confused than the others. Most factories were linked up to the road, with the only exceptions being the very first ones. You assumed that this was one of Mack’s failed experiments to maximize productivity, now hidden behind abandoned streets and brutalist structures.

Everything was so rundown that you couldn’t begin to guess which one was the factory until you were standing right in front of it. That was good for a revolutionary base, but worry stirred in your stomach for its integrity. Your companions didn’t harbor the same fears, it seemed, as they guided you through the front door and into the main area.

The inside was just as bad as the outside, decorated with bits of rubble and rusty machines. The sight of it made you wonder if tetanus existed on this planet, though it wasn’t as concerning as the fact that it was empty. Was the resistance movement so small that you’d met all the members already? Celci, Gunther, Burt…

You shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up. For a force in the hundreds, or for just one more man. Getting away from Mack was good enough, you supposed, you assumed, you tried to convince yourself, poorly. It seemed so much more of an impossibility when there were just the four of you.

Distantly, metal slid against metal.

Your eyebrows furrowed.

Light tapping grew louder and louder.

You had the distinct feeling of déjà vu.

Somebody yelled indistinctly from further into the factory.

Your hopes soared through the ceiling as quickly as you sprinted towards Mark. He was already at full speed after skidding around the corner, so it was barely a second before you were throwing yourself at him, locking your arms around his shoulders with his around your waist, crashing to the ground in a tight ball.

Heart pounding in your chest, you registered little more than the sensation of touch. The pressure of Mark’s hold was the only thing keeping you together; not even the surprised stares cast your way prompted your composure.

Years ago, you might have grimaced at the thought of being so undignified in front of your crew, but now? Now, you didn’t bother to hide the soft hiccups of tears, too focused on the presence of Mark, your one and only Head Engineer. The grin that fractured across your mouth like a fault line was more becoming of you, and, although the nature of the emotion didn’t matter with formality, you kept both the smile and the tears.

Celci’s voice broke you out of your single-mindedness as she said, “Uh, Captain?”

Right. Despite doing away with regulation for the moment, you did still have an audience looking for direction. A proper reunion – preferably without the dull thump from landing on the floor – would have to wait.

A final squeeze of assurance was shared between the two of you before you staggered to your feet, taking Mark by the hand with you. It was only then, when you were both secure, that you cast a look over the group assembled. It was bigger than before, now comprised of your crew leads and whoever had followed Mark to the front room. Confidence was rising in you at every instance of eye contact you made, internally counting five, six, eight, twelve, twenty, all of your crew from your original universe were gathered on the factory floor.

The Invincible II was back.

For the next four hours, you were taking stock of everything and everyone that the group, this resistance, had. The majority of it was weapons, which also meant the majority of it was useful for an all-out offensive but not for subtle tactics. You were pretty sure you knew why explosives were so plentiful if Mark’s sheepish look as he checked off another shipping container of mines was anything to go by. You couldn’t bring yourself to do more than teasingly tut at him.

It was during those hours that you learned what you had been missing in your time as Mack’s PA. From Celci, you found out that the Earth-based Headquarters was completely disconnected from the colony after the warp to the current planet, which explained the incautious disregard for ethics and human rights. From Gunther, you discovered the routes they had established to steal from work sites, armories, and warehouses for all their supplies. From Burt, you were told just what had happened to your crew that drew them here.

Mark was gone even before everyone boarded the ship for the first time. Nobody knew why, and he hadn’t told them in all the time they had worked together – Burt presented this in his usual poetic fashion, making it out to be a tragedy of emotional guardedness, but you knew it was because Mark wasn’t the one present for his own removal. Another Head Engineer took the brunt of that punch, and you knew intimately how not knowing your own story would put someone on guard.

He went on to tell you what he did know, though, and that, surprisingly, started with Celci. Questioning Mack’s decisions had come at the cost of her position. Not respecting his authority given by the Captain, as he had described it to the other leads, or backtalking, as Burt then called it. She was soon shipped back off to Earth, but it hadn’t been quick enough to stop word of mouth. Rumors spread on the ship, crew members started ‘failing’ tasks that they had completed hundreds of times before, the shuttle back to the planet took more and more each day until near everyone was replaced.

Burt and Gunther had been among the few originals still standing on the ship, but it wasn’t for long; poetry was Burt’s downfall because Mack, ever the STEM addict, took no more a liking to his metaphors than he did you. He was gone the second the last syllable left his mouth, sent back to Earth to join his oh-so-traitorous compatriots in, apparently, gearing up for another flight.

Burt told you what he had been filled in on, and, before you could be lost in the he-said-she-said of it all, you learned of Earth’s backup shuttle that they sent to check up on Mack. The sudden transfer of power was jarring and definitely not state-approved, leaving HQ little choice but to send a team back after them. Who better than the people who were just there?

The last member to join the crew, with a smug grin despite having been fired, had been Gunther.

You had always wondered where Mack’s bullet-sized scar came from.

The story was wrapped up with simple luck. It was chance that the old crew arrived back at the Invincible II just as the wormhole opened, able to tag along through to the next planet. If they had been a few minutes late, they would have never found the ship. They would have never found Mack. They would have never found you.

Even recalling the tale made you grimace. You tried to shrug off the shiver that sprang through your body as you cataloged the medical supplies, but, although it had been hours since your conversation with Burt, it was difficult. In this world, double the number of people got involved, and now you were carrying the weight of disappointing 600,000 more people. The captain had failed to keep everything together, and that meant so too had you. Everything that Mack had done up to this point was punishment.

Though, that thought was tempered when Mark emerged in the doorway, poking his head around the corner in the cautious way he always did and checking the room for anyone else. When the search came up empty, he crept in and closed the door behind himself.

You supposed now was as good a time as any for that ‘proper’ reunion – and yet neither of you spoke. The air between you was filled with distant clinking and hammering, chatter from every other member of the crew except for the two of you.

He looked good, for a rebel. He missed the grizzled war-veteran style of a true futuristic revolutionary, the kind you’d seen in movies with the eyepatch and prosthetic arm, but he did well enough with the specks of gunpowder and stubble. The sheepish grin that barely held back his excitement didn’t exactly help the image, but you preferred it to the stern stare he had been aiming at the crew while you counted equipment.

Mark took one step forward, waited, and then took another. He tentatively made his way in front of you, as if going too quickly would spook you into hiding.

When he was firmly placed less than an arm’s length away from you, he whispered a simple, “Captain.”

Your voice was rough from years of disuse; you’d actively avoided talking to anyone in the colony, but you had no reservations now.

“Mark.”

And then down came the wall.

You were back in one another’s arms in the blink of an eye, like you had never been separated in the first place. Being on your feet gave you the ability to spin around, a childish display but you refused to care, sending you off-kilter and forcing Mark to stabilize your pair by grabbing the edge of a container. When he pushed off, though, you were dancing across the room with reckless abandon, twirling, jumping, laughing so hard that you thought your lungs would explode.

“You’re alive!” he gasped.

Your shoes squeaked against the floor as you slowed to a wobbly stop.

“So are you!”

Another round of desperate laughter ensued, muffled only when you brought Mark closer and buried your head in the crook of his neck.

“You’re alive,” you mumbled.

“So are you,” was his equally quiet reply.

To save yourself another repetition, you breathed the moment in. You’d missed this – you’d missed him – and suddenly, in this brief respite, nothing else mattered. You were back together again, and you weren’t going to be leaving any time soon. With the way that Mark secured his arms around you like a seatbelt, you imagined he felt the same.

“Where did you end up?” you asked. Had you been able to see his face, you might have noticed the red rising in his cheeks from the feeling of your lips batting against his skin.

You did notice the shaky breath he let out. You attributed it to the memory of his arrival, which was not all the way incorrect.

“I was in the storage hold. I would have come out, but I overheard some of the crew talking. About me. How- how I was apparently gone, and nobody was supposed to ask questions about it. CC was already gone by then.”

“She questioned Mack,” you filled in.

“Sounds about right. When I met up with her again planet-side, she refused to talk about it. Still hasn’t told me exactly what happened; she’s been preoccupied with all this revolution stuff.”

“All it took for you two to get along was a dictator and near-zero chance of survival.”

Mark chuckled, but it was weaker than before, and he didn’t say anything until you moved apart from one another. Enough distance was created for you to see the frown pulling at his lips.

“What’s wrong?”

It was somewhat of a dumb question given that you were standing in a disused factory amongst the beginnings of a revolt, but you both knew that wasn’t what you were talking about.

Eyebrows furrowed, he inspected your face.

“Your helmet.”

While the corners of his mouth dropped even further, you shot him a look of confusion.

“I don’t have a helmet.”

“I know.”

Ah. Yes. You knew you had forgotten something. Divulging the details of your time as Mack’s ‘personal assistant’ wasn’t something you wanted to do in that moment, but Mark had given you some background, so it was only fair to return the favor.

“A little after the colony was fully constructed, Mack fully stripped me of my title. He’d let me be a figurehead until then, but I guess he was tired of not getting credit for all his work.” You wanted to laugh. The stinging of your wrists stopped you. “He took my title and my helmet. I wasn’t in touch with the public anymore, but he pushed me into the spotlight just so everyone could see me… dethroned, as he put it.”

A sudden thought did get you smiling a little, though. “He had it put in a museum with the rest of my uniform.”

“I thought that was a replica.”

You switched back to confusion, which Mark noticed and responded to bluntly, “Reconnaissance.”

Even as you pondered the possibility of having seen him, he stayed staring at you. If this hadn’t been the first time he had seen your face, you might’ve been nervous.

Oh, who were you kidding? You were nervous. Beyond nervous. Was he mad at you? Disappointed? Did he regret placing his trust in someone who couldn’t maintain their position, let alone protect the colony they were hired to keep safe? Now he had to do it, shoulder your responsibility for you because you couldn’t—

“Hey, hey.” Sensation spurred against your cheek. “You’re okay. You’re back now. You’re safe.”

Mark repeated those phrases like prayers, one after the other, order switched around to the point that the words swam through your head and overshadowed every other negative thought. He gradually drew you to a nearby workbench and deposited you on the metal surface. Standing in front of you, he kept his hands firmly secured on your upper arms.

You were okay. You were back. You were safe.

You weren’t going anywhere.

“Captain, you need to go back.”

You flinched at the new voice, attention jumping to the door that had opened without you noticing. Mark had been so focused on assuring you that he too jumped, but he righted himself in a split-second and threw an arm in front of you.

When Celci marched into the room, your shoulders dropped, and your heart rate slowly but surely followed suit. The conditioning you received from Mack made your body register any surprise as a threat, but you weren’t sure what had happened to Mark for him to still be on guard as she got closer.

Gently, you pressed down on his arm, only managing to get it down a few degrees before your focus was redirected to Celci.

“Sorry, what did you say?” you asked as you pushed off from the table.

Mark repeated your words with a far more suspicious tone, bordering on a growl, “Yeah, what did you say?”

“You need to get back to the capital.”

“No.”

Your mouth was still open to respond when Mark’s single word registered, and it stayed open for the tennis match that proceeded between them. At each swing, they took a step closer.

Celci was the first up, saying, “We haven’t been able to get someone on the inside yet.”

Mark’s boot thunked against the floor. “Yes, we have. We have engineers and soldiers and doctors.”

“Nobody gets as close to Mack as they do.” Ten feet and closing between them.

“That only puts them in more danger.” Eight feet.

“He can’t afford to kill them outright. They’ll survive.” Five feet.

“Survival isn’t good enough. They were surviving before we got them out. They aren’t going back.” Two feet.

“We can’t throw away this opportunity to target Mack directly—”

“We’re not sending them back there, Celci!”

Your crew leads stood face to face like bulls trying to get the other to back down. Apparently, you had been wrong earlier; for them to get along, they needed more than a dictator and the constant threat of death.

They needed you to be gone.

And, from what it appeared, the rebellion was stronger when they did work together.

Placing a hand on Mark’s shoulder, you said, “I’ll go.”

You were surprised Mark didn’t break his neck with how fast he whipped around to look at you. You had to glance away before guilt could settle in your stomach.

“No,” he ordered, “no, you can’t.”

“Yes, I can. I can help more from inside than out.”

He huffed, spluttered, gestured vaguely with his hands. “Captain, if you go back, he will kill you.”

“Celci is right, he can’t do that without a good reason.”

“And he had a good reason for all the other people he killed?!” The yell echoed down the hallway, which had become noticeably quieter since Celci had arrived, but it faded out as Mark forced his voice lower. “Alright, okay, okay. Let’s say he doesn’t kill you. He has to do something to you. You won’t just get off scot-free.”

“That’s fine.”

“No, it’s not!”

“Mark, this is not your decision to make.”

“Yes, it is!”

A tense silence flooded the room. A beat passed. His chest heaved while you tried to keep yourself in check.

Swallowing thickly and gritting his teeth, Mark said, “I know you’re the captain, but, while you have been away, I have taken charge. I can’t send you back into that death trap of a colony in good conscience.”

He sounded almost composed. Formal. Leaps and bounds different from the man who designed the ‘wakey-wakey’ protocol for the Invincible II. You might have liked to take credit for influencing him, but, if what he had said was true, he had been leading this group since he landed in this universe. You had no authority to challenge his.

But that didn’t mean you were going down without a proper fight.

“Mark,” you spoke softly, “I know you want to keep everyone safe, but you can’t do it all at once. Sacrifices have to be made.”

You held up a hand as soon as he opened his mouth, and, luckily, he closed it.

“Think of it as a long-term investment. If I go back and get you information, you can take down Mack quicker, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

“How are you going to get back? We broke you out, we can’t just break you back in.”

Ordinarily, you might have laughed at Mark’s puppy-dog eyes, but there was a certain desperation that went beyond the usual want. How you wished you could stay with him, how you wished you could just let it all go and stay safe – but you couldn’t. You had to prove yourself useful to this cause, or else what good was all this? What good were you?

You took a deep breath, just about coming to terms with what you had to do, and you secured both of your hands on his shoulders. It was more for your sake than his in order to ground you. If you stored up the lightning that was thrumming in your veins, you would surely burn from the inside out.

“Before Celci and Gunther knocked the guards out,” you started, “they were taking me to solitary. Mack no doubt knows I disappeared, but if they find me where I was meant to end up, it won’t be so bad.”

He squinted at you. “What’s solitary?”

“A cell beneath the main complex.”

His squint deepened. “And why is it called solitary?”

“There’s only one, and you don’t have any communication with anyone.”

That last bit wasn’t a problem for you – after all, this was the longest, and possibly only, conversation you’d had since you were dropped into this universe – but it was one of the few things about solitary that you were willing to share. If you were to divulge all the intricacies of the punishment, there was no way he would let you leave, and saying them aloud would force you to confront your future.

Still, his squint dipped even further, to the point that you weren’t sure his eyes were open, but then he switched his attention to Celci as if to confirm what you’d said. She only nodded, so either she was just as unaware as Mark, or she really wanted this to work. Knowing her, it was a 50/50, but you would prefer the former because it meant no crew member had been sent there yet.

When Mark looked back to you, he took a second to study your face. Expert liar as you were, he had the uncanny ability to tell when you weren’t being wholly truthful. You couldn’t have that, which meant you were quick to draw him in for a hug. It both hid your expression of dawning fear and let you get your last dose of human contact for however long you’d be in solitary.

But you could withstand it. Weather the storm, and all the other metaphors for staying stable in the face of life-threatening odds. For him. If you gave up, you’d end up separated again, and you didn’t know where each of you would end up – but if he stayed in this universe while you were thrown into another? You would never forgive yourself.

“Okay,” Mark whispered against your ear, clutching you tighter.

You returned the gesture in kind, assuring, “It will all end up alright.”

When you pulled apart, you kept one hand on Mark. Going too far risked slingshotting you back into the hug and getting out a second time would definitely prove harder than the first.

From the side, Celci said, “Thank you, Captain.”

You nodded your acknowledgment, choosing not to point out that you hadn’t done anything yet. Instead, you asked, “Do you have plans for communication while I’m in the colony?”

“Yes, but they’re tough.”

If she hadn’t said that, you might have figured it out from Mark’s huff. Clearly, whatever plan had been agreed on wasn’t satisfactory to everyone, but a democracy, as you’d experienced, was better than a dictatorship.

“We have some people working for us within the colony, but we haven’t been able to touch the main complex,” Celci explained, “which is why we need you. Whatever you find out, no matter how small it is, we need you to report it to some of our members.”

She went on to list the spies and their locations, ranging from some regular civilians to the most useful of postal workers and shipment coordinators. As she said, none were within the walls of the capital building, but she mentioned that the mailroom was soon to open as a drop location for information. That would be the link between you and the rebellion depending on who was assigned that route.

The first problem would be getting there. It wasn’t as though you were in any position to request a job, but you figured showing enough disdain for addresses and glue would inspire Mack. Too petty for his own good, and a way to prolong the pain with papercuts would meet the status quo.

The second problem was your supervision. Smuggling out information was going to be difficult with one of Mack’s lackeys breathing down your neck at all times, and any moment of your speaking would garner attention. This one relied on spontaneity because you would have to drop information the second the guard’s focus waned.

The third problem was the question of identifying who to talk to. Luckily, that was as simple as two code words, for the sake of avoiding a false alarm and blowing your cover completely. ‘Golden’ and ‘retrieve’ were those chosen, and your thoughts immediately drifted to the little space pup who had accompanied the Invincible II’s flight.

“Don’t worry,” Mark said, immediately noticing your far-away expression, “Chica’s fine. Mack doesn’t believe in emotions, so he pulled her from the ship. The next shuttle brought her back, though, and she’s been the best security guard since.”

Well, you were pretty sure Mack knew spite at the very least, but you were able to relax as Celci continued through the protocol. The only thing left after she was finished was to actually do it all, the first step of which was landing yourself in solitary. That was a hurdle you were going to deal with when you came to it, though you were sure you could convince a guard to chuck you in anyway with the infamy Mack had drawn up for you.

“Whenever you’re ready, find me at the factory entrance. We’ll drop you off at the edge of the city, but we can’t risk going any further,” Celci said, bowing her head slightly. She wasn’t one to apologize for things that weren’t her fault, but the disappointment was visible in her effort to avoid eye contact.

With a final nod in your direction that you returned, she marched off to prepare.

While you weren’t all too happy with this turn of events either, you were willing to postpone your freedom for the sake of the rebellion. The man who stood at your side, however, was less accommodating.

Mark’s voice was dull as he scoffed, “I can’t believe you’re just going back.”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

“Stay.”

Your gaze flickered to him. In your conversation with Celci, he had started fiddling with the medical supplies. A med kit was splayed open on the workbench in front of him, showcasing painkillers, scissors, bandages, and everything else a resistance could wish for.

“You know I can’t. I have to help somehow.”

“You’re the captain—” He stretched out a roll of gauze, “—you should just be the captain.”

“And what would that entail? You’ve been doing a great job so far; I don’t know how to do I would be better than you.”

“I’m an engineer, not a leader. Everything that I’ve been doing, I’ve just been copying you.” As he spoke, barely above a whisper, he cut through the fabric at a sizeable distance and spun on his heels.

“It’s called learning, Mark. Hands-on experience, and all that, and—and what are you doing?”

He’d stepped closer and taken your hands, neither of which you minded, but then he pushed up your sleeves and started winding the gauze around one wrist.

“If you’re going back, you have to be in top-tip shape… top-tip?” He had started strong, but, as he went to tuck the tail of the length between two belts, he began to mumble his words. He went back and forth between ‘top-tip’ and ‘tip-top’, testing them on his tongue, and despite his struggle being endlessly entertaining, you knew what this was.

With the opposite hand, you gently guided the gauze into place and tied it off. Mark followed along willingly, but a frown pulled at his lips.

“Do you trust me, Mark?”

There was no hesitation before he said, “Of course.”

“Then you have to trust that I’ll be okay. We’ve gotten out of worse scrapes than this, right?”

As if he had forgotten the reality of the situation, he sighed. Maybe he had gotten swept up in the revolutionary spirit, which wasn’t that hard given this was the longest you had gone without another wormhole taking you out. Briefly, you wondered what was so different about this universe that you hung around for so long. You hadn’t been given the opportunity to die, so that escape remained untested. With Mark still alive, though, you weren’t going to take that route any time soon.

“Just- just don’t do anything dumb.”

“What, like throw myself out of the airlock without a suit?”

He stared at you. You stared at him.

He did not laugh.

“I won’t. Buzzkill.”

“Speaking of buzzkills…” Mark trailed off, but he gestured towards the door. “She’ll get you back to the city, safe and sound. Your escape hasn’t been announced yet, so you should be able to get a little far in before someone finds you, if you’re stealthy about it.”

“You’re telling me to be stealthy?”

Pride swelled in your heart as he cracked a smile. It was small and dropped within the second, but it was there. You’d hold onto that for as long as it took to refresh the memory.

“Whatever. Just don’t be offended if they take off as soon as you’re at the edge.”

“You’re not coming?”

That prompted a grimace that he tried to cover up with a confident grin. You had to give it to him, he tried to keep it up even as you raised your eyebrow.

“Gotta keep the crew in line while the leads are gone. You know how it is, Captain.” He walked as he talked, guiding you out into the hallway with an arm around your shoulder. “Speeches of encouragement, separating fights, awarding medals of honor, all those captain-ly duties.”

You went along with his rant out of courtesy, and Mark was glad you did. He was already doing a poor job of hiding the real reason why he wasn’t seeing you off; if he did go with you, there was a chance he would lock the door and refuse to let you out or, failing that, follow you right into Mack’s office itself. Crying would occur in either situation, and the stirrings of a revolution were no time for that.

He'd have to save it for when you came back alive and well. Because you were coming back. Alive and well.

His heart stuttered in his chest as he shot you a sideways glance.

Alive and well. He was going to make sure of that.

Your escort stopped just before the entrance to the main factory floor. Now was supposed to be the cliché goodbye, the hugging, the whispering, the exchanges of ‘good luck’ and ‘be safe’. The phrases were baked into the look Mark gave you, which you returned in kind. Behind him, you saw familiar faces rushing around like worker bees, all contributing to the cause of taking down Mack.

You would not abandon this crew to a fate you forced upon them. You had failed so many times, you would not fail again. There was so much potential for this universe – the colony had been developed, food and fuel problems solved. All you needed to do was get rid of Mack and put the planet under the leadership of who it was meant to be led by. And then, maybe, you and Mark would get back home, too.

But there was still work to do first.

[Wherever you are right now, stay safe and pull through. Support friends and family, and make sure that you're okay. As always, thanks for reading]

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theknightmarket · 1 month ago

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hello apologies if this is super odd but I have been DEVOURING your whole blog recently, the way you characterise the egos (and yn) is delectable

You're such a talented writer and I can't wait to see what you do next 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

Are you ok with fanart?? Because as soon as my exams are over TRUST I would love to draw art based on your fics

Obviously, not odd at all! And thank you so much, I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed my stuff :D And if you would like to draw me fanart, I would absolutely love to see it, and probably promptly faint like a Gothic damsel with woman-disease (/pos).

(I’m currently also in the midst of exams so my updates are a little slow but when haven’t they been lol and seeing art would be a shining beacon of hope before the results are out. Good luck with yours too!! <3)

#💌 letters 💌#x reader #oh my god i'm freaking out #fiskqhysicntieiwhYydjfri #fanart #markiplier egos x reader #I’m in love with you

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theknightmarket · 2 months ago

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"Don't you trust me?"

In which Actor falls through. Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 TW: swearing, strangulation Pages: 30 - Words: 11000

[Requests: OPEN]

At two o’clock on a Thursday, there was very little to do. No late-night benders to produce manslaughter that wouldn’t be remembered in the morning, nor any last-minute break-ins to pay for said late-night benders. In this area of Los Angeles, prohibition was certainly having the adverse effect of what it had intended, so it was anyone’s guess as to why they still toted that stupid ideology. Hell, the station was a ghost town because everyone else was out drinking their pay cheques away.

And that was why Detective Rider was leaned back in his desk, absentmindedly throwing a baseball up and down while he stared out the window. There were a few open files on his desk, paperwork that needed to be filled out before he could get out of that damned office, but nothing he really wanted to do. So, there he was, with no interesting cases to work on and no interesting people to talk to. Technically, he wasn’t completely alone; there were the few janitors and receptionists who were forced to stay behind, but they were no fun, and you—

You were around, as always, probably yelling at a suspect, which always made people shy away from the interrogation rooms.

And even though talking to you was a last resort, you were too busy, and yet not busy enough.

Something had happened recently. He didn’t know exactly what, but he knew it was important enough that you seemed different. Joyful wasn’t exactly the word for it, but there was a certain weight lifted off your shoulders that made you happier, if he had to give it a name. Of course, being around one another overlayed any interaction with a fog of annoyance so that he never saw you at your best, but he gleaned what he could from years of sitting across from you.

However, those years had also made him accustomed to a certain way of doing things – perks of having a work-addicted partner, like being able to shove boring paperwork their way instead of doing it yourself. That one was both Rider’s favorite and the very reason he was cursing the ‘something’ that had made you resist it. He wasn’t immoral enough to actively prevent your happiness, but it was certainly easier when you weren’t so focused on yourself.

The baseball collided with his nose as the sharp screech of the phone arrested his attention.

“Fucking dammit,” Rider muttered, rubbing the bridge that would surely be covered in a bruise by nightfall. It took him a few seconds to debate answering the call. On one hand, whoever was behind it had already gotten on his bad side by causing him physical pain, but, on the other hand, he would be in worse condition if the chief found out he’d ignored it.

In the end, it was incredibly begrudgingly that he kicked the desk chair away and went to grab the receiver. Metal clanked against metal as he brought the mouthpiece close.

Silencing a groan, he said, “Hello?”

“Yes, hello, it has happened again.”

A relatively young man’s voice spoke, with a suspicious amount of familiarity for someone contacting the police. Rider stared straight forward with a blank look that threatened to mutate into a scowl. Three questions popped up instantly; who was this, why were they teetering between composed and nerve-wracked, and what was ‘it’?

He asked the latter first, “What’s happened again?”

On the other end of the line, the breathing stopped, as though the call had been completely cut off. That was fine by Rider. He trusted a person’s judgement of their own situation, especially when it meant less work.

A silent groan broke out when he heard the voice start up again. No such luck.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I thought this was—”

He interrupted before the man could finish, already fully aware of who he was talking about. “Yeah, I’m their partner, Detective Rider.” Only the two of you used this phone, and he was starting to put together some clues towards the ‘something’. Just because he didn’t like doing the work, it didn’t mean he was bad at it.

Very timidly, the voice replied, “Yes, of course.”

A moment of silence followed, and so too did Rider’s growing suspicions. This was a police call, wasn’t it? What crime could warrant this combination of action and hesitation? A murderer having a fleeting lurch of morality – a scenario much more interesting than the sheets of legalese wasting away on his desk.

He was dead wrong, not that he knew it; formality and manners were simply creating a battle against the fear of introducing someone new to this maddening situation. In the end, after a few seconds of back and forth, etiquette won over the voice on the other end.

Rider prompted him, saying, “Sir, are you going to tell me what happened?”

“Ah, yes, my apologies.”

In this part, the detective was deemed correct. The story of a strangled famous actor was indeed more enticing than paperwork, though the bar was low, and it didn’t take long for him to gather a team of officers for the journey.

It was only halfway through sending out the order that a memory knocked at the back of his mind, distant and hazy and right on the tip of his tongue. You had mentioned something like this. An actor murdered but also alive and well. He’d mocked you for it, obviously, because he understood how reality worked, but perhaps he was going to find out for himself. It would be a surefire way of pissing you off by getting the last word in a case that you had been working on for nearly a month.

Gleefully, Rider grabbed his car keys and waved the assembled team over to the bay.

Benjamin fretted to-and-fro in the foyer, rubbing a path through the rug and into the floorboards. This was the third time Mark had pulled something like this, and it was a miracle he hadn’t gotten sick from all this worrying. Being a butler was supposed to be easy. This was anything but! When he applied, he thought he would be delivering letters on silver trays, and dusting the mantle of the fireplace, and answering the front door. Oh, he did the last one often enough, but did it have to be for non-stop detectives?

And he adored Mark. He considered him the closest friend he had, and a life without him was without everything that made it life.

But was a break, one day where he wasn’t fearing for the master’s life, so much to ask for?

Apparently, for now, it was. Benjamin was pulling the front door open at the cue of a knock.

“Detective Rider, please, come in.”

He did so, proceeded by a stream of police officers who made his stomach churn. There were far too many people in the face of Mark’s order. So far, the first encounter was the only time he felt comfortable letting in a large group, and he had only just gotten used to having you in the house.

Though he tried hard to keep his face neutral, a frown pulled at his mouth, curiosity and concern for you stirring.

Rider turned to look at Benjamin, looking no more pleased. “Where’s the body?” he asked bluntly.

“Upstairs, in his room.”

A second passed before he realized the detective was waiting. Of course, he didn’t know where the room was – this would have been much simpler if it were you – so he had to return to the role of escort. Even retracing the steps up the staircase reopened the wounds of that first night, and Benjamin was quick to get to the main bedroom so that he didn’t have to dwell on the thought any longer.

He gestured to the door in a silent invitation. Rider nodded, wasting no time in pushing over the threshold and into the room.

As he disappeared from sight, Benjamin had another thought. When you were on the case, there was the general agreement that everything would end up alright. The scene of Mark stabbed through the heart on his bed wasn’t going to ever leave him, but it had been okay when everything was said and done. Miraculously, Mark was still alive afterwards, and although Benjamin didn’t believe in magic, there was something about you that gave him hope for a positive outcome.

Rider did not inspire that optimism, and he found himself setting up outside the bedroom on a decorative chair to wait for him.

Back inside the room, the detective himself wasn’t optimistic either. There was no reason to be. The butler had said the man was strangled, and, clear as day, he was. A corpse laid out on the sheets, face an ashen blue from the cravat tightened around the throat, and…

He knew that face. The last time he had seen it, it had been more of an olive color, less-dead, obviously, but it had also only been two days ago.

In spite of the cadaver lying in front of him, Rider smiled minutely. This was your friend. Given his little performance at the crime scene, it made sense he’d be an actor. Why he was there in the first place was another question, but, if he had to guess, it was likely to do with you. Both cases were open and shut. This man was the impetus for your professional carelessness, and he was dead. And if this friend was indeed the same actor that you had visited before, his luck had run out. He supposed it went to show that you couldn’t cheat death.

And then, seconds later, he supposed it was all wishful thinking.

Coughing and spluttering, the body lurched from the mattress. Rider watched the man tug the fabric away from his skin, trails of red and white left behind in the wake of nails scratching for purchase. The blue tone was beginning to fade, faster with each breath that he greedily gulped down. He was still out of it, so focused on scrambling back to life that he had yet to register the other figure leaning against the wall. Understandable but inconvenient, as most things with the public were.

Commendably, Rider didn’t have to get his attention. Mark, as the file had named him, took a glance around his room as he rubbed the fabric-burn away from his jugular. Initially, the sight of someone else had filled him with relief – a return to routine. You moved fast enough that the beige trench coat of yours stayed above the ground, but it always fell against the floorboards when you stopped. Just an inch cut off it, and you wouldn’t have that problem, as you appeared to have figured out given it was cinched to your waist.

His attention landed on the detective, and his eyes narrowed, his shoulders heightened, his mouth pulled down into a decisive grimace. One glance at your face, and everything came crashing down. It wasn’t you, but that man from the crime scene.

A sour taste appeared in Mark’s mouth. Maybe it was a new after-effect of dying, or maybe it was the sight of your detective partner in his bedroom instead of you that put him on high alert before he could open his mouth.

“Detective Rider,” Mark said bluntly.

“So, what happened?”

He opened his mouth to reply with some sarcastic joke as he threw the fabric to the bed. What had happened was that he spent two hours trying to figure out self-strangulation without the use of a noose, only to throw all of his extensive but convoluted methods away and simply jam the knot of his cravat into his throat. No clean up, but only because getting there was a nightmare.

But then his conscience caught up with him. This wasn’t you – and he didn’t need another detective on his back. One was enough.

With a second’s hesitation, he answered, “I was attacked.”

“Attacked?”

“Two men, early 20s.” The story came flooding from his mouth, information steady, as though he had done this a hundred times already. “They came in through the window and pulled my cravat tight against my neck. I’m fairly certain they tried to make off with some of my jewelry.”

Rider prowled over to the bed, his eyes fixed on the supposed weapon. Tampering with a crime scene was frowned upon, so to speak, but this wasn’t a murder. Mark had already changed things by throwing it off, so he was free to poke and prod at the thing while Mark settled in near his vanity. He didn’t think he would be there too long, but it allowed him to grab a fistful of rings and cufflinks from the dish and chuck them out the window. At least fate had been kind enough for him to have left it open before he acted.

“Right,” Rider muttered, standing straight once more, “I’ll take you down to the station to get an official statement while my men look around.”

The mere suggestion of it made Mark internally groan. Officers crawling around downstairs, getting into things they weren’t supposed to while he was stuck listing factoids for hours on end – it was all awful to imagine.

“That won’t be necessary, Detective Rider.”

“I’m afraid this isn’t optional. Standard procedure, and all that.” The tone he used suggested it was more out of his own entertainment than business practice. “You understand, don’t you?”

Mark had no idea how to get out of this, every method he thought of a dead end. Waiting him out wasn’t an option, and he would sooner die again than admit the truth. It hadn’t worked with you, and it wouldn’t work now. Rider’s hand placed not-so-subtly on the handcuffs at his side didn’t give him any hopes of forcing him out, either, so he found himself gritting his teeth and taking a step forward.

He spat out a quiet, “Fine,” and tried to ignore the smug smirk on Rider’s face as he walked past.

He did count himself lucky that he didn’t die in his robe this time, though. It was the little things like that which kept him going between the more substantial ones, like the sight of Benjamin springing to his feet in the hallway. One of his gloves was caught between his hands, worried into creases and folds he would never abide in a sounder mind.

“Sir, you’re alive!” he gasped, searching Mark’s face for that telltale brightness of blood.

How Benjamin hadn’t gotten suspicious about this habit was beyond him, but he appreciated the concern, nonetheless. If he weren’t in such a rush to keep up with Rider, he would have stopped to assure him of his health, but the man was already striding towards the staircase.

After sparing a tut to his rudeness, Mark said, “Yes, Benjamin, I am.” He then swiveled on his heel and moved to follow to the lower floor.

“Sir?” There was less worry in his voice and more curiosity but still the underlying confusion that made Mark turn back around.

“Detective Rider is taking me to make a statement regarding the attempted murder.”

The latter part could not have been less satirical, but Benjamin was too busy seizing up with fear to notice. Undoubtedly, hearing about an attempted murder right above his head took a toll on him, but there was little to be done about it now apart from conceding to Rider’s orders. The man was waiting at the top of the stairs, tapping his fingers along the banister in his impatience.

“Do you need me to send for your driver?” Benjamin asked.

“No, no, it’s quite alright—” Mark glanced towards Rider, “—I trust I’ll be back before the evening?”

“We’ll see.”

That was as good as it was going to get, apparently; he disappeared before either could raise an objection, shouting out demands to the rest of the officers who were inspecting every nook and cranny. Mark didn’t remember where your team had been that first night, but he hoped that Benjamin would be able to deal with them like last time. There wasn’t anything to hide in the manor, but privacy was a sacred thing.

Faith was the best thing he had to comfort him as the two men stepped onto gravel. Against the backdrop of labelled cars, the closest one stood out, being completely black with no identifying features. This was the one that Rider pulled himself into, barely waiting for Mark to settle down next to him before he started up the engine. The open sides only made him feel more uneasy, and it worsened when they peeled onto the main road.

The minute or so it took to get down the hill was spent in complete silence. There was no need for conversation, nor an inclination from either man. While Rider wasn’t known for his politeness, Mark was more focused on the thoughts stirring in his own skull. His second ride in a police car was shaping up to be much worse than the last, even though they weren’t completely different; both had him being escorted away from a crime scene, which was better than the alternative. Still, it was obvious what the deciding factor was.

He glanced at Rider in the corner of his eye. How and why you put up with him was beyond all human knowledge. He would readily admit that you could be brash and blunt and overwhelmingly stubborn down to the smallest detail – but at least you had some charm about you. Whether you were aware of it or not, you were good about dedicating your effort to where it mattered. You didn’t need to understand how the void worked to deal with the aftereffects. Curiosity was human, of course, but Mark appreciated that you didn’t ask. It gave him an escape from that voice and all its incessant suggestions. Or, normally, it did. It was only really effective when you were the one he woke up to. Which begged the question—

“They’re busy.”

Mark’s head snapped to look at Rider.

“What?”

Focus still on the road, he said, “You’re wondering why I’m here and not my partner.”

“So what if I am?” He dragged his eyes back to his side of the car, but his attention stayed on his words. He tried to curb his thoughts, but, unsuccessful, he was forced to ask, “Busy with what?”

“Another case. Usually, that wouldn’t be an issue, but they’ve been falling behind recently. Taking a full day to finish a simple report, spending their breaks out of the office, showing up to work with an empty bag.”

A rhythmic tap-tap-tap, fingers on the wheel, overshadowed the sounds of the street.

“You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“It sounds to me like they’re taking care of themself, finally.”

Mark was genuinely happy to hear of your self-care – if it could be called that. Being a step closer to a normal work-life balance didn’t get you to the pinnacle of health, but anything was better than nothing, especially when your state had been scratching through rock-bottom. Unfortunately, he couldn’t take the time to commend you for it.

A hint of disapproval in Rider saying a quiet, “Maybe,” was more pressing. “But then again,” he continued, “a hell of a lot more people got caught when they were dedicated to the job, and they haven’t exactly given an excuse yet.”

The car jostled as they pulled into the station’s parking lot. Good. There was a half chance that Mark was going to push Rider out of the car if he kept talking, which would have been bad for both of them. He still had time, though, and he proved unwilling to go without pushing a few more buttons.

“Actually, you know what?” Rider said, making eye contact for the first time in the last half hour. “You two seem awfully close.”

“We are.”

“I think they’d react to it better coming from you, so, if you really don’t want to give a statement, you could always tell your dear detective to get back to work.”

Bribery. Mark almost laughed. Corruption was alive and well in the police department, it seemed, and he was getting a front row seat. Getting out of here quickly was a nice thought but one that he pushed from his mind before it had time to even register properly. Betray your trust, and for what?

No, Mark was a selfish man sometimes, but he saw the line in the sand and wouldn’t dare to cross it that flippantly.

He spun his legs towards the side of the car, one foot already touching the ground as he asked, “Do you want my statement here or in your office?”

He didn’t have to look at Rider to notice the red-hot glare. He felt it on his back, like those children who burned ants with a magnifying glass. He did little more than send him a glance. The entrance to the station was clear, so he ignored the growing resentment behind him and strode towards the doors.

The other man was at his side by the time he got to the reception area. While it wasn’t exceptionally full – barely a quarter of the seats were occupied against the wall – there was still an overlying awkwardness that was out of place in such a building. People who came to visit relatives, to pay for bails, to laugh at friends’ misfortunes were all deadly silent in a very specific way. Everyone was both unwillingly listening to and desperately ignoring some distant sound that echoed down the hallway, indeterminable shouts from deeper in the station.

Rider marched past the receptionist, only stopping long enough to tell a security officer that the out-of-place actor was with him, and then he continued towards the source of the noise. That guard was one of many to shoot a questioning glance at Mark, and, although being somewhat famous came with a certain amount of notoriety, he deigned to chase after his escort over relishing in that attention.

The yelling was growing louder as the two got closer, to the point that some of the words were discernible, but it was when they rounded a corner into the belly of the place that Mark’s brow furrowed. The voice was not only understandable but recognizable.

And then he saw you. Through a cross-hatched window, the corners of which sported worrying spiderwebs of cracks, he identified your figure hunched over a metal table. Your hair was slightly tussled, no doubt owing to you running a hand through it with reckless abandon in your stress, and the sleeves of your shirt were rolled up to reveal fists clenched against the surface in front of you. Vague shapes of bones pressed into your skin, visible even at your shoulders.

Someone was sitting opposite you, handcuffed to the table and glaring anywhere but you. Not much of them registered before they had passed by the room, and all of his thoughts were soon engulfed by that scene.

You were angry, obviously, that part wasn’t up for debate – but if Mark had learned one thing since meeting you, it was that you were never angry for the sake of being angry. It was always preceded by stress, and, especially now, fatigue. You were tired. Briefly, guilt smeared itself across his heart. All of his stunts in the void added to your piles of work, and despite Rider’s opinion that you were taking it easy, you clearly weren’t.

But the guilt faded as another thought knocked on his mind. A solution. No use regretting the past when there were ways to make it better for the future. It would take some time, and some convincing, and maybe a small bit of better-used-bribery, but, as he dropped into a chair in Rider’s – your – office, the plan turned concrete.

It would be an hour or two later, after the exhaustive, glorified interrogation that went on just for the sake of pettiness, that Mark stepped through the doors of his house once again. A few strides forward and he was standing in front of his telephone, number dialed in seconds and the pieces brought closer.

When the line picked up, he was the first to speak. “Hello, is this Abe?”

A gruff grunt was his only confirmation, but it was all he needed.

“It’s Mark. I have a favor to ask of you.”

Your physical and emotional state were at odds with one another. For the former, you were bone-tired, half-dead on your feet at six o’clock and with bags under your eyes deep enough to fit a refrigerator. Your body was actively betraying you as you tried to shamble through the halls of the station, but you had to admit that you were happy. Relatively, at least. For years, you’d been scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of mindset, and, while it wasn’t a recent epiphany, you recognized it wasn’t a great way to live.

Maybe it was that acknowledgment that made you so aware of your fatigue. You had pulled all-nighters throughout your career, from your training to your practice, so why the recent days were so different was a mystery to you. You didn’t like it, but you were far too exhausted to figure it out.

Resetting a table you had bumped into, you tried to drag your thoughts back to the present. There were fresh crimes on your desk just waiting to be cracked open, and you still had to fill out the last murder report to finish up your latest case. While a break sounded like heaven, you knew letting the stack pile up was going to be the death of you, so you’d keep trudging through the mud until your next day off.

And you very much looked forward to it. It was a new feeling, but, damn, did you feel it. Your memory was apparently starting to fail you, too, which was a layer of exhaustion you didn’t need. You had mistaken someone else’s office for your own, if the person shouldering themself out the door with an armful of files was anything to go by. You couldn’t even distinguish the room you had worked in for seven years from the ones you’d never stepped foot into.

You weren’t that big on coffee, but maybe this was a sign to start a new habit. The rest of the detectives spent half their days parked near the pot, so you didn’t see the issue—

That was your office. Wedged between two men in their sixties and the pair of newbies, that was your office. Your quick acceptance of doubt pushed aside, your mind went haywire at the sight of the random stranger who had just pilfered official documents from your room. They were coming straight for you, but you were quick to close that distance regardless.

“What do you think you’re doing!?” you shouted, uncaring of the few officers around you who would undoubtedly be drawn to the drama. Gossipy little vultures.

They looked at you, unconcerned themself. In a gruff voice, like the texture of coal, they answered, “A favor, apparently—”

You cut them off by snatching the files out of their hands, sending unsecured papers fluttering to the ground.

“Those are private cases, you can’t take them out of that office, let alone look at them!” you hissed, “I mean, do you not know how this works?”

You’d barely scanned the first title when your attention was caught by the person’s face, which, amongst the annoyance and impatience, struck you as familiar. Your shoulders dropped but your eyebrows remained furrowed, more confused than concerned.

“Abe? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Like I said before, if you’d listen, I’m doing someone a favor.”

In your defense, you were too tired to properly process faces or words being spoken to you at that moment – but you neglected apologizing in favor of wondering who that ‘someone’ was. There were very few people who had the power to get Abe into the station without raising alarm bells, and even fewer who would bother.

Pressure appeared in your mouth as you ground your teeth together subconsciously. Technically, your primary subject didn’t have that kind of influence, but that didn’t stop him from acting as though he did, and your options were limited as it was.

You started to ask so you could confirm your suspicions, but Abe simply nodded at something over your shoulder, and resignation stirred in your stomach.

Who else could it have been except Mark?

“Ah, detectives…s,” he greeted with a pleased smile. “Good, you’re both here.”

Neither you nor Abe returned the smile, though it was probably for differing reasons. Mark didn’t make you feel any better about his appearance at the station when he looked you up and down before settling on your face. The most likely culprit was the set of bags under your eyes.

He grimaced. “Oh, you do look terrible.”

“Hey, you- you don’t have to say it so bluntly.” You might have tried harder to defend yourself had your brain been working at more than 12% processing power.

Still, Mark’s expression softened slightly, a small sigh escaping his semi-parted lips, and you felt a small force of something else in your heart. It wasn’t the stabbing pain you’d come to associate with anger, nor was it the smooth caress of happiness; it was as though someone had hit you gently with a sack of sand. For a moment, you felt guilty.

Replacing the smile, he said, “Luckily, I know what will get you back on your feet—” He grabbed the stack of files out of your hands and dropped them into Abe’s, “—Abe here is going to take some of your cases, while I take you out for dinner.”

Alarm bells went off the second the last word left his mouth. “I’m not falling for this twice, Mark, I need to do my own work. I can’t just pawn it off on other people, especially ones who aren’t legally detectives.” You spared a glance at Abe, who looked like he’d rather be anywhere but there. “I could lose my job.”

Mark had that kind of squint he got when he knew he was incorrect, but it was matched by the tilt of his head that showed he didn’t care.

“You’re not pawning it off,” he said, gently. “It’s a kind gesture from one coworker to another. I mean, it’s not like Rider is doing anything to help you.”

The squint became more of a glare, but you weren’t going to be distracted. His stubbornness had caught you out the last time, you couldn’t afford for it to happen again, even if it meant letting a few questionable things slide.

“He never does, and he never has, and I don’t expect him to.”

“Isn’t that what partners are supposed to do?”

You almost retorted, but the words caught in your throat. There was a certain glint in his eye – unbeknownst to you, it was regret at his own phrasing – that made you back down. The communication took less than five seconds, and yet you were going back on your word and shifting your focus to Abe.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m already here, aren’t I?” he asked, the same tone as usual.

In fact, he looked almost bored with the scene before him, as though this whole thing was an inconvenience instead of what he’d agreed to. Although, you didn’t suppose Mark told him that you weren’t expecting him. You’d known Abe for a long time, not intimately but as much as your line of work afforded you, and he had the same attitude to work as your fellow detectives did. The job was the job, nothing less and certainly nothing more. The only reason you could see as to why he took your official cases on was for a friend.

You wondered just how it was that Abe knew Mark.

But that was conversation for another day, or maybe never. Mark was staring at you, surprisingly patient but with a few hints of nervousness tainting his normally confident exterior. You didn’t have it in you to reject him, despite the re-emerging want to collapse into any half-comfortable surface.

Shaking your head, you muttered barely loud enough, “Okay, then. Mark, lead the way.”

His grin perked up, worry exchanged swiftly for pride, as he grasped your hand. It was fortunate that you were supposed to be clocking out now, but you were still being yanked away from your plans of overtime.

Abe was left behind to collect the few scattered papers on the floor, while you were practically paraded through the station. Someone even sent you a sarcastic wave as you followed behind Mark. That thought from earlier returned to you – gossipy little vultures – they were going to get a kick out of this in whatever bi-weekly bull session they held.

You received a couple of odd glances when you got to the reception, but you were out the front door before anything could be whispered by way of you or your escort. Some part of you dreaded coming in the next day, when you would be swarmed by rumors that you had tried so hard to protect yourself from, but the majority of your brain cared more about the prospect of plush, leather seats for you to fall into. And, you would admit, just a small section, not even a full percent, completely-negligible-in-practice-part, was excited about spending an evening with Mark.

But that was clearly the fatigue getting to you, wasn’t it?

You almost walked past Mark, initially too distracted by your thoughts and then too confused by where he had stopped.

“Right here, detective,” he teased as he leaned over the door.

He was standing next to a car, but it wasn’t the usual one, or at least it wasn’t the one you had been driven to the theatre in. Instead of being boxy and black, this was sleeker, thinner, and painted a red so deep that you thought it a trick of the light. The most intriguing thing about it, though, was the completely empty seats.

Tentatively, you asked, “You’re driving?”

He leaned forward slightly, tilting his head. “Don’t you trust me?”

You didn’t say anything, and neither did Mark, as you rounded to the other side of the car and pulled open the passenger seat. Despite your inspection of the interior, you were well aware of his smugness in the same way one would be aware of the presence of a cat. Quiet but undoubtedly there.

“You can’t keep doing this, you know.”

Mark settled into the driver’s seat and went through the motions before he glanced at you out of the corner of his eye. “Hmm? Can’t I? It seems to be working out well so far.”

In any other vehicle, you might have put your feet up on the dashboard, but you were conscious of your boots staining the upholstery. Though it was clean of visible dirt and grime, everything about the car screamed ‘expensive’, and the last thing you wanted to do was give Mark, or whoever he hired, extra work. So, you kept them down and bobbed one foot in a rhythmic pattern to sate yourself.

As the wheels rumbled against the parking lot’s concrete, you muttered, “Eventually, it’ll catch up to you.”

“Yes, my philanthropy will be a death of me.”

“The death of you.”

“Not for me it won’t.”

You shifted your attention to the passing houses. An uncomfortable feeling stirred at the bottom of your stomach. You’d never admit to Mark’s face that you had grown fond of him, but that didn’t mean you liked hearing about his bad habit of keeling over every weekend as if nobody would notice he was gone. Because people would notice. His friends would notice. Benjamin would notice. You would notice.

Getting him to realize that was another problem entirely, and one for a more morose moment, so you kept your mouth shut for the rest of the journey.

The next word you said was a quiet, “Damn,” when Mark pulled up to an unashamedly fancy restaurant. ‘La Rotonde’ was written out in cursive signage above the main door, bulbs glimmering around the edges. Just being in the vicinity of the building felt like you were offending it with your battered work uniform. You had the good sense to shrug off your trench coat, at least, abandoning it to the car before Mark started walking towards the entrance.

Potted plants lined the stone path, and you made sure to give them a wide berth. Knocking one over would probably cost a month’s rent – maybe the guy standing at the door was the guard, watching out for inane stuff like that, or maybe you were just making things up to distract yourself from how out of place you felt. Maybe you were failing terribly.

By the time you had reached the front steps, Mark caught notice of your awkward gait. His lopsided grin hinted at a suppressed laugh. “What? Did you think I’d waste this opportunity by taking you to some dive bar?”

You decided not to tell him that you probably liked what he considered a ‘dive bar’, which was to say any place that offered food that wasn’t also insanely expensive.

“Who do you take me for?”

The ‘guard’ opened the door for you at your approach, to which Mark gestured you in first. Nodding your appreciation, you scuttled inside, and Mark followed. Silently, your only exit was sealed.

Pushing away your unease, you replied, “I know you wouldn’t be caught dead somewhere like that. But I thought we’d be going somewhere, I don’t know, more casual?”

He didn’t respond other than with a gesture to his suit.

“You act like you’ve ever been out of that thing.”

“I have!” he refuted, aghast. “You’ve seen me in my robe before.”

“I mean, in public. Nobody cares what you wear in the privacy of your own home. You could wear your formal suit or your birthday suit, and it wouldn’t change anything.”

Even the time you had seen him in his dressing room, he had been in a suit. You barely tolerated your work clothes, which weren’t quite a uniform given how many alterations you had done for comfort, so you had no idea why he chose such stuffy outfits.

You opened your mouth to ask just that, but you stopped when someone, new and beet red, appeared in the corner of your eye. Etiquette prevented them from saying anything, but their desperate avoidance of eye contact told you they had heard. Still, if they were going to keep quiet, who were you to force them to talk?

They stuttered their way through a greeting, busying their hands with a pen as they guided you and Mark to a table. Deeper into the restaurant, it was darker, specks of light like stars waving about in candle holders that were dangerously close to centerpiece flowers. The place wasn’t overly busy, and the section that you arrived at only had a trio pressed to the opposite wall as where you stood. Its emptiness made your shoulders relax ever so slightly.

The host scuttled back to the stand as soon as you were both settled into the chairs, and it was at that moment that it hit you. You were at a restaurant for dinner with a friend, the first time in years, and you didn’t know what to do with yourself.

Mark, on his part, looked to be in his element. His sharp jaw was loosened and he cast his gaze languidly around the room. Even his smile, which was normally more of a smarmy smirk, was light and underlined by the swaying flame.

“What do you think of it so far?” he asked.

“Well, the sixty seconds I’ve had in here have been nice.”

Tucking his fist underneath his chin, he teased, “Come on, you can’t say this is worse than the other places you’ve been.”

“Way to flaunt your wealth, Mark.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

Yeah, you did. While Mark was a good actor, he had a habit of fishing for praise without putting those abilities to use. You didn’t hold it against him because, in this moment at least, he was right; it wasn’t worse than other places, but there was still something about it that prevented you from really letting go.

“I like it, it’s very… upper-class.”

Glancing around, you were seeing a common theme in the patrons. Some of them were couples, some were families, some were business-partners, all of them were pre-war aristocrats with clothes costing more than your yearly salary – and yet that wasn’t the detail that struck you with restlessness. It was that each and every one of them reminded you of one of the cases that Abe would be hunched over at that moment. The shape of a murder for inheritance burned in your mind, and you had to yank your attention away from the woman who looked just like the victim in a robbery gone wrong.

“You are comfortable here, aren’t you?”

Focus snapped back to Mark, you noticed the corners of his mouth had dipped, and he was leaning forward to take up more of your field of view. He didn’t need to be worried, but he obviously was, which itself had you frowning, too.

“Yeah, I am, it’s just—” You cut yourself off, furrowing your brow as you tried to think up an explanation. Emotions weren’t your strong suit and conveying them was a feat harder than beating death.

However, Mark filled in the space before you could. “Work,” he said, simply.

And you repeated it somberly, confirming his suspicions.

“Okay, then.” He drummed his fingers along the cloth. “That subject is banned from this table.”

You almost laughed, but you stopped yourself at the dead-serious expression he wore. “What?”

“We’re not talking about jobs, or anything remotely related to them.”

His declaration was so confident that you almost went along with it without hesitation. You took a second to think, though, in which that acceptance became confusion which became amusement. You sat back in your chair, crossed your arms, and made a mental bet as to how long this would last. A minute, maybe two if you were feeling generous about Mark’s chances.

“Alright, then. Let’s talk about something else.”

If there was one thing you knew about him, it was that he liked to talk, so you were sure that letting him go on long enough would land you in Hollywood.

“Oh, I have been meaning to talk to you. Or, rather, I wanted to let you in on a trade secret.” He settled his elbows on the table in a rare display of poor manners. “There have been rumors of talking pictures—”

“Ah-ah-ah.”

Apparently, one mere minute was generous in the first place.

Mark drew back like he’d been scratched by a cat.

“Pardon?”

“That is your job.”

It was his turn to go through the wringer of emotions; conflicting emotions flashed on his face as he switched rapidly between offence and horror. You watched with a growing smile on your face.

In the end, all he had to say was a quiet, “No, it’s not.” Even then he didn’t sound sure.

“Or anything remotely related to them, I seem to remember you saying.”

Mark continued to flounder. Simultaneously, he looked like he’d been thrown into the deep end of a pool without knowing how to swim and like a fish gasping for water. The thought had you subtly moving a hand to cover your mouth and the snort of laughter that threatened to break the spell. He huffed and spluttered and sent you a dirty yet half-hearted look when he realized your struggle.

Only when a server came by was Mark saved. You silently relished the moment while he tried to order water without exposing his flusterment. This involved looking the complete opposite way and confusing the poor waitstaff, but it was successful in the end. They walked away, leaving Mark to get to grips with himself again.

“I will have you know that- that, while the rumors were not completely related to my profession, I am perfectly able to—” The drumming started up again, taking up space in a brief pause, “—to talk about… another topic of conversation.”

“You’re stalling.”

“I am not…” He took a breath. “…stalling.”

One second passed, and then another, and then three were gone and you decided to take pity on the man. Or, you did after a sensible chuckle. Conversation came easier to him when he’d just come back from the dead, it seemed.

“Why’d you pick this place?” you asked.

Almost immediately, Mark melted into his chair. “I used to come here with my father and mother when I was a child.”

“It was around back then?”

He nodded. “This has been a restaurant since restaurants were invented. Ever since I could fit into a suit, my parents brought me here on a Sunday evening. It was tradition, and it stayed that way until the very second the Duke was shot – but it was more beautiful before the war.”

A brief lull in his explanation let him glance around the room. You traced his eyes, noting the reflections in them that bent around the irises.

“Or perhaps it was just simpler.”

“Are we still talking about restaurants?”

“Were those the skills that net you the detective job?” he snapped.

You both registered the snark at the same time, and as you grimaced over your own intrusiveness, Mark swallowed.

“I’m- I apologize. You’re right. Everything was simpler. Everything—” He hesitated for a moment and then amended, “—most things were simpler.”

That awkwardness from the start of the dinner was returning to you. A single misstep knocked you out of this dance altogether, and even the interlude of the server returning to pour water didn’t help. The soft crunch of ice beneath the bottle in the bucket was the only sound for the next minute.

“Can’t argue with that,” you said, eventually. You hadn’t been too impacted by the European War, around as much as the rest of the country had been on a general level. No family fought on the frontlines or lived abroad to experience the full period, so you were left to your career. Crime didn’t just stop because people were dying elsewhere, and that was before you were a detective. Just patrolling had you dealing with common bouts of theft and assault.

“You’re welcome to talk about it, you know, if you want to,” you offered as your reminiscing drew to a close.

“No, I don’t want to.” Mark’s response was abrupt but not unkind. “Not right now, at least. But I thank you for the offer.”

He took a sip of his water with the distinct air of wishing it were wine, and you were inclined to agree. Although you had never been a drinker, drastic times called for drastic measures.

Mid-swallow, he hummed in alarm. “And, again, I apologize,” he said, narrowly avoiding choking, “this was meant to be a night of escape from all the dreary death and dismay that you’re surrounded by on a daily basis. We’re talking about something else.”

You thought that was going to be a tall order, considering how red he had gone earlier, but he was surprisingly fast to say, “Oh, here’s a question for you. You’ve met Benjamin, my friend, so when am I going to meet any of yours?”

Good, that was easy. A lack of obvious things to talk about normally led to hard-hitting questions, but you were well prepared for this one.

“You aren’t.”

Mark didn’t recover quick enough to hide his expression of offence, and it seared itself into your mind’s eye in the short second that it existed. This wasn’t his usual insulted dramatics, no, his eyes widened, his breath hitched, his lips parted in painful shock. And then it was gone in the flicker of the underlighting flame, replaced by that exaggerated, comical, fake ire.

“I’m hurt. Do you not think we’d get along?”

“It’s not that, Mark, it’s—” You sighed, “—there aren’t any.”

“What?”

You shrugged. It was all you could do. At least, his expression had been wiped away in favor of confusion, which was markedly better than what had been there before.

It wasn’t as though you cared about your lack of friendships, but admitting it aloud, and to Mark of all people, was a challenge. Something of a defeat that only became true when someone else heard it.

“The job keeps me busy,” you explained, “and my last method for befriending someone isn’t in any of the handbooks.”

Mark levelled you with a blank stare at your roundabout mention of work.

“You asked.”

“I didn’t expect that answer.” The drumming started up again. Gentle pat-pat-pats, like a rabbit thumping its feet when it was annoyed. “You seemed to know Abe.”

“Who is also something like a detective, and a private one at that, so I never see him outside of encounters in the field.”

Or in the doorway to your office, which was strangely one of the weirder places you had found him. You hadn’t thought he knew which building you worked in, never mind the specific office, and you were forced to conclude that Mark had told him.

Mark, who was beginning to take on that look of offput concern again, who was leaning further over the table to get your attention, who was currently taking you out of that office for a meal you hadn’t asked for.

“You have to have some kind of connection with other people. This isn’t healthy.”

“You’re one to talk. Aside from the obvious signs, you just called your employee your friend, and Benjamin is nice and all, but you haven’t said a thing about your other one since last month.”

This was how Mark remembered it. He had brought you here for the experience of fine dining and all the things that came with that – but, apparently, fighting was a part of that just as much as appetizing food was. For once, he wanted the good without the bad. He wanted the impossible.

He didn’t want this reprieve from life to be tainted in the same way that everything else was.

Weakly, he said, “I’m just worried about you.” And then, even weaker, so weak that the words almost disappeared into the depths of the restaurant, “I can’t have you getting lost.”

You challenged his tone with conviction. “I won’t. I promise.”

Your statement was left to sink in for a moment, as both of you started to relax. Emotions had been running high, and even though it lasted barely five minutes, it was enough to mark a significant change in the atmosphere. This was no longer a nice night out, as you might have wished it to be, but that didn’t mean it was any less important for you. It was heavy, that was all.

But conversation started to flow, the release of a cask when the keystone was finally wedged out. A few jokes were shared, a few lighter topics bounced around, including a story from Mark about his private chef’s latest culinary adventure. You hadn’t seen any house staff besides Benjamin, but it wasn’t as though you were in the manor around mealtimes, anyway.

As if that train of thought were a ritual, the server returned, and you realized that you had to even glance at the menu. Eating had taken a backseat up until then, so you very hurriedly pulled the card from its holder and picked the first thing that made any sense to you.

Mark watched your struggle – enjoying the karma as a dark haze spread over the bridge of your nose – before he turned to say his own choice. He had long since figured out what was objectively the best meal there, and yet the familiar words died on his tongue.

He froze, stuck staring at the person. Their hair was cropped midnight-black, their eyes were curious and sly, their lips were pulled back in an accommodating smile. There were some differences, the slightly too soft jaw and slightly too pale skin, but the sight was still a bolt of lightning through Mark’s chest.

“Have you been able to look at the menu, or would you like more time?”

It wasn’t her. She wasn’t working as a waiter. She wasn’t in LA anymore. She wasn’t haunting his life despite choosing to leave. It wasn’t her.

But his brain refused to process logic – it refused to process anything at all, and that left him completely still, save for the gradually increasing pace of his breath.

“A few more minutes, please,” you said, though you only paid attention to Mark.

“Of course.”

And just like that, she was gone as quick as she’d arrived, but the damage was done.

She was barely a foot away before you were saying, “Mark? Hey, are you with me?”

His gaze was distant, blurry, unfocused on the present. When you shifted, his attention snapped to you, prey catching sight of a predator in the brush, and you instantly paused again.

“I-I,” he stuttered, “I’m sorry. I just- I can’t. I can’t, I—”

He devolved into vague imitations of words. The poor sensitivity training kicked in and, though you knew little of what was actually happening, staying in the restaurant for any longer was not an option. On impulse, you dug out a dollar bill from your pocket, slammed it on the table, and took Mark’s hand.

Some looks were sent your way of varying kindness, but you shoved them to the back of your mind. You locked in on the exit and made a beeline, towing Mark behind you and hoping that he didn’t get stuck along the way, but looking back meant taking longer to get out, and that was a no-go, so you rushed between tables and chairs recklessly, barely remembering that opening the door was a thing when you got to it.

You burst out of the doors, no doubt scaring the man outside, and launched down the steps in the vague direction of Mark’s car. You had to course correct at one point, but it wasn’t long until you were depositing him into the passenger seat. Dimly, you thought to wrap your coat around him. You let go of his hand to move around the car but, when you’d clambered behind the wheel, you grasped it again. To ground him. To ground both of you.

“Mark, can you hear me?” you asked. You tried to make eye-contact but his were going everywhere except for yours. “I need to know what’s wrong so I can help you. Can you tell me what the problem is?”

He only squeezed your hand tighter.

“Alright, okay, calm down first and then you can tell me.”

You weren’t sure who the instruction was meant for, but, regardless, you sat and waited with him while he breathed. It was still shallow, but it wasn’t getting any shallower, so you took that as a positive. There was little else you could do, and if you thought pessimistically about it for too long – Mark was going through ‘something’, you were of no genuine help, you weren’t even able to get him home without the car keys, what good were you – you risked spiraling.

Your other hand cupped his.

It took a couple of minutes for Mark to come back to his senses enough to speak. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“You don’t need to apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No, I—”

As you shook your head, refusing to hear it, Mark deflated. One deep – shaky – breath in and out.

“Yes, no, I know.”

“Let’s get you back home, yeah?”

It was slow, but Mark nodded and handed you the keys. You didn’t know what he was thinking, and it worried you; normally, guessing what was going on his head wasn’t difficult because it was also what was coming out of his mouth, but now? His eyes were fixed to his lap, there were no quips about keeping his car safe, and you felt dismally helpless.

Though, Mark was fairing no better than how you estimated. Everything had been going so well. There was that bump at the start, but it was getting better, and then he just had to go and… what? See someone with the faintest resemblance to her and lose it? Just like that? He couldn’t hold out for a few minutes, no, he had to go and ruin everything. There was no way you would ever trust him like that again and tricking you wouldn’t work twice. His thoughts were running a million miles a minute, no reprieve from the conclusions he was drawing except for flashes of your concerned expression. Nothing short of blackmail would get you in the same room as him.

On your part, as the wheel curved beneath your fingers, there was only one question on your mind.

Was Mark okay?

Eventually, you found yourself making the turn onto the manor’s hill. You hadn’t been initially sure of where you were going, being unfamiliar with that part of town, but you sure as hell weren’t going to ask for directions. It turned out alright, though, and it took only another thirty seconds for the steady crunch of gravel to fill your ears.

When you punctuated it by killing the engine, you were the first to get out. Mark followed after you rounded to his side. He refused to look at you, but you forced his focus, pressing the keys back into his hand.

“Thank you,” you said.

This got him to raise his gaze back up. “What for?”

“Getting me out of the office today.”

“It didn’t go to plan.”

You shrugged, limply. Even if the actual dinner hadn’t played out the way it was supposed to, you weren’t hunched over your desk and running the lights to the point of a fire hazard.

“It worked, though, didn’t it?”

Mark started off towards the front door, muttering, “Barely.”

You took the few steps to get to his side at the porch. “It worked, Mark.”

What did it matter more than that? He didn’t dare debate you; both of you knew well enough he wasn’t in shape for that. Instead, he silently stared at the building, which made you realize that this was the end of the night, which made you realize you didn’t have a car.

“Well, it’s late,” you said. “You should go inside. I’m sure Benjamin’s worried sick about you.”

Mark didn’t move, only squinting his eyes at you. “What about you?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll figure something out. Get a cab or call someone. Hell, I haven’t done much exercise recently, maybe a walk will do me some good.”

The joke fell flat. It wasn’t your kind of humor, and despite your awkward laugh, Mark didn’t react. Having exposed your lack of connections not an hour ago didn’t do you any favors, but there wastechnically somebody you would call. While getting a response would be difficult, it wasn’t impossible.

In the midst of trying to convince yourself that Rider wouldn’t laugh at you and hang up, Mark interrupted your thoughts with a simple, “Stay here.”

It surprised you, but you answered quickly, “Mark, I can’t.”

“Just for the night. I don’t want you going into the dark alone at this hour.”

He wanted to make it up to you. It wouldn’t reverse all the damage that had been done, but it would be a start – if you accepted, of course, but his powers of persuasion were returning to him. Besides, backhanded as it was, he now had certain aces up his sleeve to use at will. You weren’t going to let him down in his oh-so-fragile state, were you?

However, he was able to keep his advantage for the moment. You took one glance at him, then at the car, and then back at him.

“You have enough space?”

“More than enough.”

It was his turn to grab your hand and practically drag you up to the door. You might have resisted, but you felt it was warranted after the tug through the restaurant, and you also really didn’t want to.

Light flooded out from the foyer the second that Mark reached for the handle. Benjamin stood there, still in his uniform and making a good effort to appear casual.

“Good evening, sir,” he greeted. A blink later and he’d processed you standing next to him. “Oh, and detective.”

“They will be spending the night here.”

His shoulders dropped minutely, a more genuine smile overtaking the one he’d plastered on at seeing the master of the house in the driveway. Truth be told, he was glad you would be close by given the state he had been finding Mark in lately. It saved him a phone call should anything have gone wrong.

He stepped aside and gestured for the two of you to enter. A chill in the air barely nipped at your heels before it was blocked by the warmth of the manor swirling around you.

“Will you require any help settling in, detective?” Benjamin asked.

The title didn’t sound right, not when you weren’t here on business, and you opened your mouth to suggest just using your first name, but Mark beat you to the punch of answering first.

“Only in calling the driver for tomorrow morning to take them to the station. Thank you, Benjamin.”

With a short nod, he slinked away deeper into the manor. Mark didn’t respond to your look and guided you upstairs. You knew your way by now, but you didn’t stop him from linking your arm with his. The pressure reminded you where he was, right next to you, where he stayed until you were standing in front of another door. A bedroom, you assumed, across from the one you frequented and bordered by pots of gardenia. It was a surprisingly well-decorated entrance for a guest room, and it was the same on the inside.

A closet and a bed were all you had expected. What you found, however, was a full-body mirror plus a vanity stashed into the corner, some towering plant by the chair that was adorned with pillows and a throw blanket – and oh, damn, the blanket. It was the softest thing you had ever felt, and some part of you wanted to fall asleep then and there. But, ever the gentleman, Mark forced you to get changed into more suitable clothes. Spare ones, and yet it was the first time you had ever worn silk.

When you were good and settled and all but ready to knock out, Mark was drawing the curtain and fussing with the cushions. Hovering.

“There are clothes in the closet for the morning, you can leave today’s things here and they’ll be clean by tomorrow afternoon. Is there anything else you might need?”

“I’ll be fine. Thank you.”

He hummed and moved to the door. Your eyes trailed him, and you weren’t surprised when he stopped to ask, “You’re sure?”

“Yes, I am. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Another hum, but this time he actually managed to get into the hallway.

“Oh, actually, Mark?”

Immediately, he ducked back in, as though he’d never left. An eager, if slightly embarrassed, grin was spread across his lips.

“Yes?”

“Get some sleep.”

You got him there; he drew back slightly, that embarrassment overtaking it.

He was surprisingly shy as he said, “I will.”

“Goodnight, Mark.”

“Goodnight, detective.”

The click of the door left you alone, and you promptly collapsed backwards into the soft cotton comforter. Compared to your bed, or the desk chair that you spent more time in, it was what you imagined a cloud to be like. Enjoying it was chancing getting used to it, but you were willing to take that bet for a night of comfort.

But there was something bugging you.

You didn’t know what it was, but something was off. Weird. Wrong. Or it was going to go wrong. A shallow pit appeared in your stomach, prompting you to reluctantly leave the bed and hunt around your work-clothes. It took a moment for you to remember you’d left your cigarettes in your coat, which was probably still with Mark. Sitting at the window, you would have to settle for the smoke of the night, the kind that floated from a distance from unknown locations and both sucked out the warmth and gave you warmth anew at the same time.

Though, that feeling stayed with you the entire time.

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