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the-insomniac-emporium · 3 years

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Crimson Ties (Bela Dimitrescu/Reader, Soulmate AU) Pt. 1

Fandom: Resident Evil: Village Rating: T for language and mild medical drama Warnings: Brief depictions of medical treatments for blood loss and its symptoms Genre: Hurt + comfort Summary: Bela has always wondered who her soulmate was, the person she was connected to by red string. When she finally meets them, she's devastated to find them hanging in her basement, being drained of blood. But her soulmate won't die- not if she can do something about it. Notes: Soulmate AU in which people have a red thread tied to their left ring finger (or elsewhere if missing the finger/hand), which connects to their soulmate. By default the string is taut/tight, only getting loose when the pair is relatively close to each other.

1: Stem The Flow

How long had she waited for this day? How long had Bela monitored the red string tied to her hand, waiting for it to be anything other than taut? A decade, at the least, if not two or more. For so long she had dreamt of her soulmate, albeit discreetly, wondering about every facet of their being. Entire days had been spent imagining them, and how they would come into her life. Sometimes, on those days, she would gently tug her end of the thread. Every single time, without fail, her soulmate had returned the motion. It warmed her heart more than she’d ever admit, to know that her excitement was not one-sided.

At times, it did worry her, the feelings in her chest reminding her of her youngest sister. Daniela was obsessed with love, dangerously so, to the point of being downright delusional. More than once her “affections” had gotten their family into some sort of trouble. No matter how mature Bela considered herself to be, there was a part of her that worried about repeating her sister’s mistakes. What if her excitement about her partner led her to overlook something crucial? What if the person in question posed a threat to her family? How easy would it be, then, for her to cut them off?...

Today, perhaps, she would find out.

The sun had set over the Romanian landscape, and with the moon rose the Dimitrescu household. First out of bed, as always, Bela wasted no time in getting dressed. Hazy visions of her fading dreams clouded her mind, tugging on her thoughts as always. Most days they felt more like memories than anything else. Today, they are quieter than usual, easily fading into the background. When the last traces of her grogginess disperse, Bela finds herself glancing at her left hand. It’s a daily habit, although discreet, that always leaves her with bittersweet feelings.

“Wait…” Bela whispered, as her eyes took in the unexpected sight: The red string of fate, tied to her left ring finger, loose as can be. It trails to the ground, coiled a single time, before heading underneath her door. “Am I dreaming?” She does not bother to pinch herself to check. Instead she practically jumps into her shoes, dashing out of her room with unfamiliar glee. Maidens in the hallways have to leap aside to avoid her, but she does not care, for once ignoring the standards her mother had instilled in her. If her sisters could be chaotic, we couldn’t she?

So she follows the thread, eagerly, without even wondering why it was so loose. No, she didn’t think about the implications of the situation. In her mind, it did not matter why her soulmate was finally within her reach, it simply mattered that they were. Soon enough they would be in her arms, safe, with nothing else to bother them. And then she’d be happy, finally having someone she was on equal terms with. Finally having someone to confide in, to cherish, to whisper sweet nothings to in the dead of the night.

She doesn’t hesitate until she finds the string wrapped around the door to the basement. At last the signs click together in her mind, like a conspiracy board bound with crimson ties. Instantly panic replaces whatever excitement she had been feeling. Then she’s abandoning all sense of caution, throwing open the door and rushing forward, dispersing into a swarm to cover more ground. Even if she could no longer see the thread in this form, she was certain that she’d know exactly who her soulmate was when she saw them.

And, well, she does. Something calls her to the far corner of the main room, where a body was suspended from the ceiling by its hands. An all-too-familiar needle was sticking out of the person’s arm, leading down to a large glass container, which was slowly filling with blood. The scent made Bela’s nostrils flare, and her eyes go wide, but she did her best to fight against her instincts. Quickly she gets to her knees, examining the jar to see how full it was. Most of the measurement lines were faded, having been worn out over time, making it harder to estimate the volume. In the end, Bela guessed that the container could fit just over six liters inside. Which meant that the person had lost close to… two and a half. That was bad- behind bad, really. Horrible, actually. Immediately life threatening to the point of having been life threatening before Bela had even woken up.

“Don’t die on me, please,” she half cried half shouted, jumping into action as best as she knew how. Not even bothering to turn the nozzle on the device, she pulls the needle out of her soulmate’s arm, cursing when more blood rushes out of the hole. Then she’s applying pressure, hard as she can, beyond glad that they weren’t awake for this. One hand goes to tear a piece of fabric off of their shirt. Hopefully they wouldn’t mind, all things considered. Next, Bela ties the cloth around the collection point, making less of a tourniquet and more of a generic bandage. “Shit, you need a transfusion, don’t you?... Fuck, fuck, what’s your blood type?”

Knowing that she wouldn’t be getting a verbal answer any time soon, Bela settled for dipping a finger into the jar, bringing it to her lips, and licking. The difference in taste among blood types was subtle, but she was nothing if not a professional at this point. Still, the type is not immediately clear to her, and she knows that she might have to go around licking more blood from other prisoners. Unless… could someone receive a transfusion of their own blood? Such a thing had never happened at the castle before, but there was a first time for everything.

“Hold on, I’ll figure this out, somehow, I promise,” Bela said, gently taking her patient’s hand in her own. Taking your hand.

When you wake, you find yourself among the softest sheets you have ever felt, as if laying on clouds themselves. But your vision is blurred, and your head is besieged by waves of pain. A whimper makes its way past your lips. For a moment all you can do is tense up, unsure of any detail of your situation, unable to discern anything around you. Then you feel a hand on your own, squeezing gently. Something about it sends a rush of comfort throughout your entire body. Still, you are more confused than anything, and you find yourself trying to sit up out of instinct.

Without warning the hand lets you go, only for the owner to shift their weight, climbing on top of you in an instant. They’re holding you down, saying words that don’t quite reach your ears. For how light they are, they manage to put an impressive amount of pressure on you, easily rendering you immobile. Unfortunately, this position does little to ease your anxiety. The last thing you could remember was a very, very tall lady sticking a needle in your arm with a cruel laugh. Based on how you felt, there was still a needle in your arm. But you had been standing, or hanging, before, and now you were on your back.

“Whathe… wha the ‘ell… can’t 'hink,” you muttered, stumbling over your own tongue. Whoever sits on top of you tries to comfort you, running a hand through your hair. “Who are you?” You asked, even though you couldn’t understand a word this person said. Their voice might as well have been in another language, with the way your addled brain processed it. Had you lost too much blood? Or maybe you had a concussion? “I just. I just wanted to meet them. Please, I jus… I just wanna see my soulmate.”

Again, you cannot understand what the person says in response, but they finally seem to understand this. One of their hands reaches out and grabs your left one, slowly tapping your fingers, one by one. When they reach your ring finger, they pause, gently holding it. For a few moments you’re left even more confused. Then, with a surge of warmth in your chest, the dots are connected. Whoever is with you quietly grabs the thread attached to your finger, before tugging gently. In order for them to do that… well, there was only one explanation. They were your soulmate. They were the one you had gone to this accursed castle to meet. Somehow they had saved you, and everything was finally looking up.

Mind clearing slowly, you’re finally able to understand something they- or she, as far as you can tell- say.

“Rest now, my beloved. You are safe in my care, this I promise.”

#bela dimitrescu #bela dimitrescu x reader #resident evil: village #re8 village #brought to you by this enby and their criminal hands #this is shorter than most of my chapters but its also a bonus #so take what you can get my dudes #pls enjoy

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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Night of the Bloody Apes

I finally got back to this one after being distracted by Night Fright – and Night of the Bloody Apes is an excellent potential MST3K subject. It’s got Mexican wrestlers, bloodthirsty ape-men, and Rene Cardona, the director of Santa Claus. There’s a perfect stinger moment, too, when some old abuela comes across a corpse in the street and runs off screaming, oh! A dead man! A dead man! A dead man!

A wrestling match goes wrong and one of the contestants, Elena Gomez, hits her head on the concrete floor, leaving her in a long-term coma. Her opponent, Lucy Osorio, is distraught, blaming herself, and vows to retire from wrestling as soon as her contract is up. I bet you think that’s gonna be important, don’t you?

The actual plot involves Dr. Krallman and his assistant Goyo kidnapping a gorilla from a zoo so that he can transplant its heart into his dying son Julio (there is an explanation offered for how this will cure his leukemia, but trust me, it’s not worth repeating). In real life, if a mad scientist gave you a gorilla’s heart your body would reject the organ and you would die – but this is a stupid Luchador movie, so Julio turns into an ape-man and goes on a murderous rampage instead, all in his pajamas and bare feet! Even having read what I said above, I’m sure you still think Lucy’s gonna have to wrestle him, because where else could her plot possibly be going? Joke’s on the audience, it’s going fucking nowhere.

In the opening scene, we meet Lucy and her boyfriend Arturo Martinez, see her put on her devil-themed mask, and watch the match in which her opponent is injured. This still goes on a little longer than it should, but I cannot even express how much more interesting it is than the opening of Racket Girls. The simple reason why is that we’ve met Lucy. We know next to nothing about her, but we’ve at least heard her voice, and so we automatically go into the match rooting for her. Then there’s the unexpected turn when what we anticipated as a moment of victory becomes a tragedy instead. The music is absurdly overblown but other than that, this sequence is well-written and well-executed.

The rest of the movie is crap.

I’m sure you’re wondering what the subplot about Lucy and her injured friend has to do with the gorilla-man plot. There are a couple of very thin threads between them. Dr. Krallman is also treating Elena and eventually decides that he can declare her brain-dead and use her heart to replace the gorilla’s and cure Julio’s pithecanthropy (all the Greek I took in college was totally worth it to be able to coin that word). Arturo is a detective, investigating the murders the gorilla-man commits. Lucy, however, is irrelevant – she’s just the place where Arturo’s story and Krallman’s happen to meet. At the end her only role is to declare how sad the whole thing is.

The sound in this film is bizarre. The voice acting is bland but not awful – the writing is awkward as hell. When Arturo suggests that the murders are being committed by a beast-man, one of his colleagues declares (and this is word-for-word), “it’s more probable that of late, more and more you’re watching on your television many of those pictures of terror.” That’s a line the writers of Gamera vs Guiron would have thrown out! Meanwhile the music, as I already mentioned, is loud and bombastic, with screeching brass and ominous bassoon that sound like something from a melodramatic silent film.

The visuals are not for the weak of stomach. Julio’s heart transplant is represented by stock footage of actual heart surgery, with plenty of blood and bone and an actual human heart still twitching in the doctor’s fingers. On the one hand, it probably looks way better than anything the film-makers could have managed on their effects budget and is definitely preferable to the Ed Wood Jail Bait approach. On the other… I wonder who that patient was, and what he would think if he knew his heart operation ended up in Night of the Bloody Apes. The murder scenes also tend to be gruesome, with lots of blood and some surprisingly graphic effects moments, like an eyeball popping out. Despite being filmed in loving close-up, shots like the eyeball and a later scalping are stunningly unconvincing, especially with the actual surgery footage there to compare them to.

I’m not sure what this movie thinks about women. Lucy is a character who has goals and conflicts outside of men – Arturo does want her to retire from wrestling and marry him, but her reasons for actually doing so have more to do with Elena’s accident than with him. Her trauma, the way the people around her dismiss it, and how she attempts to deal with it could have been the core of the movie if anyone had cared. We don’t meet any of Elena’s other friends and are told that she has no family, so her death is a tragedy in its own right, rather than because of its effect on anybody else.

At the same time, women are something this film very much exploits. We get a nice look at Lucy’s ass as she gets out of the shower, and Julio spends his gorilla-man rampages murdering and raping random women in long, leering, extremely distasteful shots. None of these victims have names or backstories. If we knew them at all, it might be hard to enjoy watching them killed. I will say that at least they put up good fights – Victim One smashes a lamp over Julio’s head, and Victim Two kicks and thrashes so hard that the stunt guy in the gorilla-man makeup is having a hard time holding her down. She also has the presence of mind to go seek help not just for herself but for her boyfriend, who she has no idea is already dead. The grossest moment is when Krallman and Goyo prepare to remove Elena’s heart to transplant into Julio. This woman is in a coma, and yet the camera lingers on her bare tits rising and falling as she breathes.

Between this stuff and the surgery footage, MST3K would have had no trouble making room for host sketches. Hopefully one of them would have featured Crow and Servo in luchador masks.

There are several places where Night of the Bloody Apes comes perilously close to meaning something, but it always manages to swerve back into nonsense at the last minute. For starters, the gorilla-man is supposed to represent Julio devolving into an animal, but like Bela Lugosi’s character in The Ape-Man, his actions are often all too human. It is human women he seeks out to rape, after all, and killing them afterwards so they can’t tell who did it is a thing only a human being could do. Too, with some of his later victims gorilla-Julio begins using tools, like knives, in a very human way, and the coroner states that the damage to the victims’ bodies is more characteristic of a human attack than an animal. As in The Ape-Man, humans are always the most dangerous beast in the jungle.

There’s actually a fairly strong parallel drawn between Elena and Julio. For the most part we see both of them lying quietly in hospital beds (at least before Julio’s transformation), helpless to do anything about their own situation. Both have a loved one who doesn’t want to give up on them, and both have suffered an injury that leads others to regard them as less than human. The people the gorilla-man meets on the street see him as nothing but a monster, and Krallman fears he may be shot and killed before he can be cured. Elena, meanwhile, is unlikely to come out of her coma, and so Krallman sees her as nothing but a potential source of spare parts. When she vanishes, the hospital staff are more worried about their reputation than they are her welfare.

Night of the Bloody Apes may be thought of as a movie about, of all things, informed consent. We’re not told whether Elena consented to being an organ donor. Since Goyo says that using her heart would be a crime, I will assume not, and she doesn’t have any family to consent for her. Julio has no idea what his father plans to do to him to effect a cure and no idea of the possible consequences. Is it right to take Elena’s heart without her permission if it’ll save Julio? Is it right to perform an experimental surgery Julio doesn’t even know he needs if it’ll save his life?

The problem with all three of these themes is that the writers never seem to notice any of them! They’re not interested in examining the line between human and animal violence, it’s just there to lead the police on the right trail. They don’t see Elena and Julio as alike, nor do they try to confront the problem of medical ethics. Or even if they did do these things intentionally, they don’t take them anywhere.

Night of the Bloody Apes is another one that would be fairly easy to re-write into a better movie. For starters, the thing to do would be to set up Lucy and gorilla-Julio as opponents for each other – maybe she sees him attack somebody and tries to intervene, only to have the victim die in a way too close to what happened to Elena, leading her to decide she’s gonna track him down. Her wrestling skills allow her to beat him, but Krallman begs her not to kill Julio and explains the situation, leading her to suggest using Elena’s heart. This would allow her a way to come to terms with her friend’s death by knowing some good came out of it, and could get further into the idea of medical consent. Julio’s final transformation could have come out of ‘how could you do this to me?’ anger at his father.

I wonder if there weren’t some earlier draft of Night of the Bloody Apes that was more like that, because with the movie as it stands I can’t understand why Lucy is the first character we meet when she ultimately does very little. If I’m right, I guess they changed it because they thought nobody would watch a movie in which a woman does both physically and emotionally heroic things, but in the process they reduced their movie to scraps of what it could be. In Lucy’s own closing words, it’s unfortunate. Really sad.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #night of the bloody apes #tw: rape #60s

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