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athina-blaine · 2 months

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you can’t carry it with you if you want to survive (Nimona 2023) - Chapter 3 (Preview #1)

(Note: this is not the finalized draft; anything featured is subject to edits or deletion)

Chapter 2 (Recap)

As Ambrosius edged towards unconsciousness, he vaguely registered a harsh scratching noise, like nails scrambling against tile. Above him, someone yelled, followed by terrified screams and a mix of pained yelps and animal-like snarls. "Monster!" "Fucking hell–!" "It's got me, man, it's got my leg–!" The next thing he knew, the cadet's pinning weight disappeared, the shadows looming over him gone. The cadets had vanished, leaving Ambrosius alone on the hard floor, chest rattling as he struggled to breathe through the saliva and blood pooling in his mouth. Exhaustion enveloped him like a thick, suffocating fog. His body, heavy and sluggish, refused to cooperate as the adrenaline wore off. Despite his best efforts, his eyes started drifting closed. The last thing he saw was the muzzle of some creature as it stepped into his line of sight, its hot breath rustling his hair as it stared down at him with black, glittering eyes. Everything went dark.

Chapter 3 (Preview #1)

As Ambrosius regained consciousness, he gradually became aware that he was being slowly crushed.

Groaning, he writhed in discomfort, a dull, throbbing pain pulsating through his head. Prying his eyes open, he tried looking around, squinting underneath the harsh glare from bright lights above him. When he recognized nothing, panic squeezed his chest.

Before he could make sense of anything, however, a figure emerged above him, flashing a smile filled with impossibly sharp, jagged teeth.

Monster.

Ambrosius lurched upright, gasping as a wave of dizziness crashed over him and sent him toppling back down. Bile rose in the back of his throat and he had to screw his lips shut—the only thing that saved him from being sick was the fact that there was nothing in his stomach left to empty.

Struggling to keep his eyes open, he turned back towards the figure. “You …”

The shapeshifter’s grin widened.

“Me,” she said. "Good to know your head isn’t completely meat-soup, nemesis. I was putting it at 3 to 1 against, personally.”

With a forceful swallow, Ambrosius attempted to lift himself once more, slower this time. The shapeshifter’s scarlet eyes remained fixed on him, shimmering with both curiosity and amusement. Human eyes, he noted. And yet, he had to fight back a surge of unease as he cast his gaze around the room, trying to take in his surroundings.

Instead of the trashed hotel lobby, he found himself inside a shabby, rundown shack of some kind. He was lying on a threadbare couch and had been buried under a truly staggering number of thick, fuzzy blankets. A fabric ice bag lay on the ground, melting in a small puddle of its own condensation; it must have fallen off his head just when he'd been shifting around.

He tried recalling those last few moments in the lobby, but his memory was a blur. There had been the cadets. Some kind of a commotion. The muzzle of a beast. And then, nothing.

Countless questions burned his tongue. When he opened his mouth, however, the shapeshifter shot out her hand.

“I already know what you’re going to ask,” she said, “and the answers are, in order: Here, there, don't know and don’t care, and, yes, this is a new top, thank you so much for noticing.”

Ambrosius blinked, wondering if perhaps his head had indeed been turned into meat-soup. She shot him an unimpressed look.

“Tough crowd. What, you hit your head or something?”

Laughing, she doubled over, slapping her knee. Ambrosius drew in a slow, deep breath, summoning all of his patience, and decided that it wasn't his head that was the issue here.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Oh, nowhere in particular.” Leaning forward, she dropped her voice to a low whisper. “Just the hellscape that haunts the dreams of good men. Where hope goes to die.” Straightening, she threw her hands over her head. “Welcome to the evil lair, nemesis.”

From the corner of his eye, Ambrosius took in the shack’s dilapidated walls and the junk scattered across the floor. An old board game sat abandoned on the coffee table, surrounded by dirty dishes and an almost empty jug of soda. A pizza box lay tipped over on its side, a few forgotten pieces of crust still inside.

He scrunched up his nose. Well. It certainly wasn’t like any evil lair he'd ever imagined when he was a kid.

“Where are the cadets?" he asked, turning back to the shapeshifter. "Where’s Officer Laurel?”

Pinky digging into her ear, she lifted a brow. “Officer who now?”

“She was with me at the scene. Dark hair? Wearing a uniform? ”

“Oh, her!” she said, wiping her finger on her pants leg. “Yeah. I ate her.”

Ambrosius’ jaw slackened. Her sharp smile didn’t abate. His eyes widened. “You–”

She shoved his arm. “Freakin' relax, dude, you’re as gullible as the boss, you know that?” Shrugging, she started picking at her teeth. “Eh, she took one look at me and hit the deck. Like, fainted, like in an old movie or something.” Her eyes grew thoughtful. “Wouldn’t it be funny if she thought I was trying to eat you? That’d be pretty messed up, right?”

Ambrosius grimaced. Poor Officer Laurel; he'd need to check in with her as soon as possible. “And the cadets?”

“Those guys? Had them screaming for the hills. I’m pretty sure one of them peed his pants. Always, always funny.” Her eyes jumped to something over Ambrosius’ shoulder. “Oops, hold that thought.”

Ambrosius' eyes followed the shapeshifter as she rounded the couch before they dropped to his hands, his head still trying to process everything. Feeling dangerously close to overheating, he wriggled out from under the mountain of blankets, tossing them aside before sitting up. As he pulled out his phone, however, he scowled; the device had been crushed. Most likely a result of the fight. Another issue on his ever-growing list of problems to deal with later.

Thankfully, the screen still lit up for him at his touch. Dialing the most recent number, mindful of the cracks in the glass, he gingerly brought his phone to his ear.

“Sir!” said a voice as soon as the call connected. “Thank Gloreth, I didn’t know– I saw the cadets scampering off and I went inside and I saw this– this–”

“Officer–”

“Sir, I saw this wolf-bear thing standing over you!” she exclaimed, her voice sharp with panic. “I think I must’ve passed out because when I woke up you were gone–”

“I’m okay, Officer,” Ambrosius said. “The wolf-bear thing is a …”

Friend?

But the word fell apart on his tongue. “… It was trying to help.”

“Oh! Well, that’s– That’s good, then!” She let out a forceful exhale, the sound crackling through the receiver. “I’m not sure what I would have done if something had happened to you, sir.”

Embarrassment crashed over him, sinking to the pits of his roiling stomach. He still couldn't believe he'd let a bunch of academy rookies get the better of him. How utterly disgraceful. “I’m okay. I just wanted to check in with you, Officer, make sure you weren’t hurt.”

“Forget about me, sir, it was five of those bastards against one of you! Are you sure you’re alright?”

For the first time since regaining consciousness, Ambrosius took a moment to assess how he was feeling. The side of his face was stinging, his knee aching as if it were being stabbed with a hot poker. He ran his tongue over a gash in his bottom lip, nausea rising at the metallic taste that burst in his mouth. Dizziness teased the edges of his vision, the room rocking gently on its side. Likely the results of a concussion.

The old injury in his shoulder was throbbing, pulses of dull, tingling pain shooting down his arm. He must have pulled it when he’d been throwing his weight around. He hadn’t even noticed.

“I’ll live,” was all he said. Sighing, he lowered his head into his hand, wincing as he brushed his nose. Broken. “I'm sorry for frightening you, Officer, it wasn’t my intention. For now, you should just try and put all this behind you and return to your regular duties. I’ll take care of everything from here.”

He’d need to file a report first thing in the morning, and he tried keeping his pessimism at bay at the thought of the uphill battle that awaited him. Rarely had the objectionable behavior of cadets resulted in more than a terse reprimand during his academy days, and he knew things would only be more difficult in the kingdom’s current frenzied, emotional state. After the events of tonight, he’d likely just be seen as chasing a vendetta; the disgraced knight, in cahoots with monsters and villains, seeking revenge against the youths entrusted to protect the realm. He ran the very real risk of blessing those drunk, violent clowns with martyrdom. In fact, it felt inevitable.

His one consolation was that perhaps it would smooth things over with Starcrest's CEO if he’d already completed the bulk of the paperwork necessary for an insurance claim. A paltry comfort after a disastrous day—but it was something.

It took a moment for him to realize he’d yet to hear a response from the patrolwoman. He frowned. “Officer?”

A watery sniffle sounded on the other end of the phone. Alarm shot through him. “Officer Laurel?”

“I’m so sorry, sir,” she said, her voice thick with misery. “I shouldn't have gotten you involved. None of this would have happened if I'd just tried harder sorting this out on my own."

His heart dropped, exhaustion settling over him like a heavy, smothering fog. “None of this is your fault. Your captain was wrong to put you in that situation in the first place. Rest assured, I’ll be filing a complaint with your senior staff first thing–”

"Frankly, sir, I don't give a rat's arse about my captain right now," she said, drawing in a deep, shuddering breath. "They hurt you. You could have … you could have been … And it would've been all my fault.”

Ambrosius squeezed his eyes shut, guilt clawing at his chest. Of all the regrettable things to happen tonight, upsetting the patrolwoman might be the thing he regretted the most. “You did the best you could with the situation you were put in, Officer. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

She sniffled. “I'm sorry, sir. I just wisssshhhhzzzzzzztttt–”

Ambrosius flinched at the abrupt, strident static. “Hello? Officer?”

“Ssssszzzziiiiirrrrrrr–”

The line went dead. Ambrosius blinked, pulling his phone forward. The screen remained dark, however, and refused to respond to his attempts to turn it back on.

Cursing, he threw the device onto the coffee table and lowered his head, cradling his face. The patrolwoman’s melancholic words bounced around his skull, juxtaposed with the memory of the almost childlike delight in her eyes from earlier that night. It already felt like eons ago since he'd teasingly offered her an autograph—he should have known that he was setting himself up for disaster showboating like that. How would she look upon him now, if she saw him in this sorry, defeated state?

A dusty hand mirror rested on the coffee table. With a morbid curiosity, he picked it up, and, at the sight that greeted him, recoiled.

A furious, purpling bruise bled along the contour of his cheekbone and jawline, accompanying a bluish-black ring circling his now grotesquely swollen eye. Smaller bruises and cuts marred his lips and lower face from where the cadet had struck him, and the line of his nose had a slight crook to it. Broken, as he'd suspected.

The shadows beneath his eyes, a familiar sight in recent months and easily dismissed, now hollowed out his gaze with a stark, gaunt emptiness. He looked like a skeleton. A tired skeleton.

Tracing the discolored ring around his eye, Ambrosius tried to stamp down the hot, burning hopelessness constricting his chest. All the coverup in the world wasn’t going to fix this. He had no idea what he was going to do for the cabinet meeting tomorrow. He didn’t even want to think what Ballister was going to say.

Bal …

Amidst his brooding, he didn’t see the figure looming over him until it had leaned well into his personal space. When he noticed, he suppressed his urge to flinch. The shapeshifter grinned.

“You see a mirror and you just can't help yourself, can you?” she said, elbow resting on the arm of the couch. “I gotta hand it to you, though; you can really pull off a shiner.”

#nimona #goldenheart #fanfiction #fic #WOO i am COOKING yall #couldnt think of a better place to cut this off so take a big juicy preview for the road lmao #ambrosius and nimona's team building corporate retreat episode starts NOW :burning_elmo:#side note over 15 years ive been writing fic and i still grossly underestimate the final word count of my long fics #every time #give me a character introspection scene and ill take however many miles it takes to wrap around the moon #god help me if this gets to 10k words ...

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entropic-saudade · 1 year

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Something that gets me the more I think about it is how based on 2x14 Born Under a Bad Sign and 12x21 There’s Something About Mary, along with other things we see throughout the show, is that most hunters still had homes. It doesn’t always have to be a life on the road.

As liminal as apartments can be, it’s still a stable living space. All the hunters Meg-as-Sam and brainwashed Mary (notable also, Sam and Mary both under the influence of an evil force making them kill other hunters, invading their homes and ripping what they have apart: just as what was done to them) killed had their own home or apartment.

Bobby had a home. Rufus had a home. Garth had a home. The Harvelles had a home. Jody had a home. Donna had a home. A lot of them had several living spaces if you include their cabins, or the various homes they moved to.

But Sam and Dean never had a home. John never tried to give them a base camp, he just kept moving them from place to place, motel to motel. They stay in other people’s homes instead: Bobby’s, Sonny’s.

They don’t have a stable place until they get the Bunker, because even after John died it didn’t occur to them that they could have one. And even then— like Sam says initially, the Bunker is just the place where they work. They both make it a little more lived-in over the years, but the Bunker’s status as “home” and “fortress” is one that is tragically and repeatedly broken down: despite the establishing episode claiming that no one could get in without the key and that the Bunker was impervious to any supernatural threat out there, repeatedly we see the Bunker broken into by demons, angels, monsters, reapers, Death, God and Amara, the British Men of Letters, etc. It gets haunted by Kevin (not blaming him here, just noting— everywhere they live and go becomes touched by ghosts of their past). Their home gets torn apart and almost set on fire by the Stynes, it gets searched and bugged by the British Men of Letters. In later seasons it becomes a working space and refuge for the Apocalypse World hunters, overrun to the point that Dean feels the need to retreat to his room (& again I’m not blaming anyone here, they did the right thing in homing them. But Dean also deserves a space to himself, as does Sam).

Their safe spaces are always violated— whether it be their bodies, their home, their car. Nothing they have is ever really their own.

[I’d also like to note, bc it’s kind of funny but not really, that the Bunker’s red alarms only go off a few times throughout the show despite the presence of dangers: in Chuck’s other endings, when the BMoL lock Sam and Dean and Lady Bevell in (the irony of their home becoming their grave). But the most notable example and also the quickest the Bunker ever is to set off the alarms is when after Dean used the bhaozu pearl thing in Lebanon, John shows up. I just think it’s so funny that the Bunker’s alarm system never fucking works properly but the minute John shows up the Bunker sounds off bc forget God and Lucifer and God’s sister— John Winchester is the real fuckin threat here]

#supernatural #dean winchester #sam winchester #they can never go home #yada yada all this to say it makes the finale all the more maddening bc it sends the message you can only get that in death #if the bunker were sentient it would want to kick John Winchester too #the way the pilot showed them on a bridge and the ghost said she can never go home and after 15 years of this mess they ended on a bridge #& they still didnt have a home #Just an endless road #a bridge is a transitory space not a home #i have many more thoughts but this is what came out rn #meta #my writing #there’s no place like home #spn meta #supernatural meta #i can never go home

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