legitimately insane how to some people, "we should wipe out this ethnic group that we've violently constrained to a ghetto because they're just genetically more violent and dangerous" is a reasonable and justifiable statement but it's Nazi Rhetoric to say something like, "it's bad that Israeli civilians are being killed but acknowledging that as tragic includes acknowledging that the almost daily state-sanctioned murder of civilians by the Israeli government is also tragic and unacceptable"

btw guys speaking of Nazi shit - can we check in, alongside what's been done to Palestinians in the last 75 years, what's the Israeli government's take on the Azerbaijani government's newest round of ethnic cleansing of Armenians? oh are the Israeli government's actions maybe not determined by Jewish identity, but by a commitment to colonial supremacy which puts them on the same page as other violently genocidal states like Azerbaijan, the US, and the UK? god can you Even Imagine?

(framing speaking against Israeli war crimes as inherently antisemitic requires understanding the Israeli state as representing all Jewish people, when it doesn't even represent all Israelis.

framing Israeli war crimes as synonymous with Jewish identity is pretty fucked up if we're being honest. I don't think that controlling water and power and movement for a captive population and shooting children dead for throwing stones is an inherent value of Judaism, any more than I think the torture carried out at Guantanamo Bay is an inherent value of Christianity - in both cases they're atrocities carried out by a far right genocidal government using religious identity as a shield.

Calling statements like "Israel is committing genocide against the people it's displaced" inherently antisemitic is doing more to further the idea that all Jewish people are associated with Israel than saying "the Israeli government is doing war crimes," which is a statement of fact about a country that exists and does war crimes. Is criticism of Israel as a nation often used as cover for antisemitism? Absolutely. Does that mean the Israeli government isn't doing literal war crimes repeatedly, on record, while talking publicly about scrubbing an ethnic group off the map? Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh well in the last 48 hours they've definitely cut off water and power to almost 600,000 civilians and allegedly used white phosphorus against civilians so in an extremely factual and unambiguous way yeah man those are Literal War Crimes whoever does them.)

catch me falling

summary: in a world where quirks and soulmates exist, number one pro-hero deku must have angered the universe to have a soulmate he is supposed to take down － y/n, the league of villains’ newest recruit, and also his childhood best friend.

pairings: midoriya izuku x reader

bingo slot: on the run

prompts: “stay. i need you more than you think.” / soulmate au

genre: angst

warnings: cursing, violence, deaths, and kiribaku

word count: 2,317

notes: happy birthday, deku! this is for @bnhabookclub’s celebrating deku event, in honor of our number one boy, midoriya izuku’s birthday! also a cross-post for the hero camp bingo event! hope you enjoy! my event masterlist can be found HERE.

“Dabi!” You shout, both in desperation and pain as the throb on your sprained ankle flares up, and the raven-haired boy zooms past you.

“Keep up, princess!” He yells back and he’s gone.

“Fuck you,” you wheeze, eyes pinching close from the pulsing pain.

The alleyway you’re hiding in is dark even though it’s the middle of the day and the sun is high up. You faintly hear the blasts from Ground Zero somewhere, along with the general chaotic noises that you and Dabi started up.

The League of Villains had been quiet for a long time, with Shigaraki plotting up new crimes to take down these ridiculous Pro-Heroes. It’s been months since you caught Shigaraki’s attention and proposed to you the idea of joining them. Of course you accepted, and here you are now, with a sprained ankle and an asshole of a crime partner.

You’re drenched in sweat, the thick cloak around you not helping relieve the warmth in your body. It’s one of the things Shigaraki thoughtfully gave you to conceal your identity to the Pro-Heroes, but mostly to the Number One and Number Two.

It’s one of the reasons too, why Shigaraki wanted you.

You grew up with Bakugou and Midoriya. You were there when Bakugou got his Quirk, the same jealousy Midoriya had tingling within you. When you got yours though, it was Midoriya that left. It did something to get your bond stronger with the blonde boy. You were an arrogant kid too, so getting along with Bakugou was easy.

Despite the toxic relationship between the two boys, you were there to balance them. Sure, sometimes you’d join the jabbing at Midoriya, but when it gets too much, you were always there to stand up for him. But everything changed (when the fire nation attacked) during the last months of your middle school. Your family died because of a Pro-Hero and you were left with nothing but the scalding hot hate for every Pro-Hero. You stopped attending school because you didn’t want to spend the money your parents left behind on it. What good would it bring you anyway?

You resorted to stealing and being a street child when the money you’ve been keeping with you was stolen. For years, you lived in the streets with rats, under sweltering hot days and stormy nights. Sometimes you’d cry yourself to sleep, wondering if life would be better if you only sought help. For sure Midoriya or Bakugou’s mom would be more than happy to take you in, but your grief turned you blind to the world.

You hear a shout nearby and, using the large ass garbage can you’re propped on, you push yourself up with a wince, your ankle flaring up again. You’re barely walking away when a voice rings on the other end of the alleyway.

“There you are!”

Oh great. Your one and only friend’s soulmate is here. Red Riot barrels toward you, quickly followed by the gradually increasing sound of bombs going off. Your heart stutters when you realize it’s Bakugou. What startles you more is the green-haired hero running along.

“You won’t fucking get away from us!” Ground Zero calls after your quickly retreating form. Good thing the shadow of your cloak obscures the heroes from seeing your face. Ignoring the pain on your ankle, you push through, internally cursing Dabi for leaving you behind like this. You’re a hundred percent sure Shigaraki won’t be happy when he knows.

The wind whistles in your ears as you run away, all sweat and rattling breaths. Blindly stretching your arm behind, you release a laser beam from your hand.

“Kirishima!” Ground Zero shouts in alarm as the sound of a body hitting the concrete reaches your ears. You turn to look back at what happened, and that’s your greatest mistake. The hood of your cloak falls off and you make eye contact the with the Number One hero.

There’s a current that starts at your heart and spreads on the tips of your fingers and toes, shaking your whole body so bad you fall to your knees.

Deku abruptly stops as he feels the same wracking current through his body, almost falling over.

“Y-Y/N?” He stutters in wonder? Hurt? Disappointment? You don’t know. After all, you’re not even sure yourself if your old friend’s soulmate is still alive after that reckless trick you pulled. His eyes are wide as he stares at you, slowly standing up.

The blonde hero whips his head back around from the red-haired man on the ground to you when he hears Deku, gaze hard and cold.

“Fuck you,” he spits as he cradles the unconscious man on his lap, the side of his head bleeding. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

You see it, clear as the day. Bakugou’s right hand is shaking is it sizzles and sparks. But you’re quick, and you’re not thinking, so you raise your arm up before you realize what you’re doing, and a beam of light shoots off your palm again.

He barely dodged it with a heavy weight on his lap, but you’re running off before he blasts an explosion on the wall near where you stood.

“What are you doing fucking standing there!?” You hear him roar before you’re turning the same direction Dabi ran off earlier. “Go after her!”

There are crackles in the air as Deku runs after you. You shouldn’t have looked back. You should have just blasted another laser from your hand. Maybe if you did, you won’t be feeling this－ this guilt. You’re a villain, for fuck’s sake. You’re going to hurt people eventually, but it to be your old best friend’s soulmate? You didn’t ask for that. You didn’t want that.

“Y/N!” Deku calls your name. He’s close. Your feet have nothing against his Quirk so when you see a broken door, you go for it. The stairs leading up seems to go on forever. There’s an ungodly stench wafting through the air, probably a dead cat or something. What did you expect from an old, abandoned building anyway?

Your feet is heavy on the stairs and your breath is labored. There’s a reason why you hated too much running. Plus, the guilt of your unnerving act earlier is not helping.

You’re high up when you hear thumping footsteps following you. Shit. You’re not sure if you can make it out of here alive with your ankle. When you reach the top, it’s a clear room with shards of broken glass and ripped apart planks. There’s another spiral stairs leading to the rooftop. You run, feet banging against the metal steps.

You’re blinded by the light when you fling the metal door open. Running as far away from the door as possible, you’re now standing near the edge. It’s not long before Deku barges in, barely dodging the ray of laser you shot at him.

“Y/N!” He breathes out in relief, gauging your reaction. He reaches out a hand carefully, stance still on guard. “Let’s talk this out.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” you snarl. God, it’s so fucking hot here with the sun glaring down at your cloaked form.

“You’re my soulmate!” He cries. It’s not a happy cry. It’s not the kind of tone of someone who just found their soulmate should be like. “Let’s talk this out, please. Like－Like adults. Like old friends.”

You still at the word. Friends. What is a friend? Do you even have friends? The League aren’t your friends. They’re just people who has the same hatred you have for the heroes.

You consider his proposal, hands clutching your cloak tight around your body. You nod curtly and Deku visibly exhales, dropping the defensive hands that were in the air earlier.

“You’re. . . You’re with the League?” He asks, and his expression is unreadable. You nod again. Deku looks down briefly. “I heard your parents died. Why didn’t you tell Kacchan and I?”

You can’t tell him how your hurt turned to anger. You can’t tell him how you didn’t use your head and let your emotions rule you.

“It’s the Pro-Heroes that killed my family. They’re the reason why I was left alone. They took everything from me!” You reply, voice gradually getting louder as the pain blossoms on your chest again. “And you! Both of you! You wanted to be a hero so bad, Bakugou always bragged about how he’s going to be the number one. You were both dreaming of becoming the people that killed my family! And you expect me to come to you?”

Deku is panicking as you throw those words at him, eyes widening again.

“It was just an accident, Y/N!” He counters your shouts. “It was an accident. It was years ago. Can’t you let it go?”

Your eyes are stinging and your hands are hot, the familiar heat of your laser beams moments away from spilling again. “How fucking insensitive,” you bark out. “Is that what becoming the Number One made you? You weren’t the one who lost your family. You weren’t in my place so stop talking like it’s that easy.”

Deku flinches. There’s remorse in his eyes as he whispers, “I’m sorry.”

“If you’re sorry, let me go.”

His eyes widen, palms facing you again as he takes in your words. “N-No! We’re not done talking!”

“There’s nothing else to talk about, Deku,” you scowl, crossing your arms. “If you’re sorry, let me go,” you repeat.

He’s conflicted as his eyes darts from yours to everything else on the rooftop. “Come with me,” he says, desperate. “We’ll－ We’ll start over, and you－ you can become better! You won’t be tied with the League anymore.”

“But I want all the ties I have with the League.” You break his heart right then and there.

Hurt flashes in his eyes, a frown settling on his face. You can’t help but study his features. He’s grown so much. The remnants of the boy Bakugou used to make fun of isn’t here anymore. Standing before you is a determined hero and a brokenhearted man who just wants his soulmate.

“But I need you,” he says, and the words stab at your chest.

“You don’t need me,” you remark, “what you need is that man I may have killed.” You shift on your feet and the pain prickles again. Deku’s eyes falls down on your ankle when you grimace. “If I don’t get killed by you right now, Bakugou definitely will.”

He’s quick to find solutions to your problems. “I’ll protect you!”

That pulls a dry laugh out of you. “I don’t need protection, hero. I fucking need to get away.”

He’s distraught. Running a hand through his hair, his eyes are glassy as he stares you down. “Stay,” he pleads. “I need you more than you think.”

You’re a villain, but being one does not rid you of basic, human feelings. Your chest contracts when his voice shakes. You see the little boy you used to help patch up back then. You see the little boy gazing at you and Bakugou with awe. You see your old friend hurting, and you’re the reason why.

It’s enough to shake any villain awake.

And you’re standing there, eyes locked on your soulmate. Your soulmate. The person you’re destined to love, to live with, to grow old with. Deku is your soulmate, and it settles in your heart right that moment.

“If. . . If I stay, then what?”

There’s a glimmer of hope in his eyes, shining brighter than the scorching sun in this hell of a day. A smile is slowly growing on his face and his freckles are dancing with the way he’s talking so fast. His physical appearance may have changed, but somehow, he’s still the same old Deku who mutters too much.

A gloved hand reaches out towards you. “So. . ?”

The act is intimidating. Your hands twitch on your sides, weighing out your options again. But it’s been years since you felt warmth and love, safety and peace. The League could never give you that.

Your heart is pounding in your ears as you take the first step toward him. A lone sweat trickles down your temple down to your left cheek and that’s when a furious shout thunders through the air, coming with a blast that has you skidding backward. There are rubbles and smoke and a cry from Deku before you realize you’re falling.

Bakugou came crashing on that door with his gauntlets ready to fire, you the target. There’s a high-pitched, steady ringing in your ears and your vision is blurry, the brunt of the explosion too much for you. You weren’t even able to do anything. You didn’t even notice nor hear he was there.

Even if Deku comes to save you, you know it’ll be too late. Maybe Bakugou’s soulmate did die, and you’re going to pay for his life with your own. You’ll never know. You didn’t even know what Deku looked like before you’re falling. But that’s okay, at least before you’re gone in this world, you know someone was ready to take you as you are.

And maybe － maybe heroes aren’t so bad, after all. You just hope Dabi gets what he deserves when Shigaraki finds out you’re dead. And you hope the universe will give Deku another soulmate better than you, since it seems you were a wrong match, because you didn’t even have the chance to feel what it’s like having one.

The pain was only for a split second, like a sprain on the ankle, but a million times worse. But then you’re out like a light, very much resembling the glint in the Number One hero’s eyes as he leans down to see your body lying lifelessly in your own blood.

more notes: big thanks to zee @pixxiesdust​ and zann @savagetrickster​ for betaing this! u guys are the best! 🥺 also, aha, the fact that it’s for deku’s birthday does not stop me from writing angst and break all of your hearts (and his too lol)

Previous

    Ten couldn’t rest even if exhaustion was calling to him. Things were different, this isn’t what he imagined when forming a relationship with Taemin. He knew this place well enough that he could find Taemin’s office all on his own.

“We need to talk.”

“I expected you sooner.” Taemin’s eyes didn’t leave the tablet in his hands. “Although I still recommend you get some rest. Baekhyun’s hallucinations have lingering effects on the vision, especially after the first time.”

“Noted, but this is about you.”

“It’s not. This isn’t about me, it’s about you, and your concerns. Having doubts?”

“You told me we were going to work together to take down this group, instead you’ve locked up my friends and are torturing them! What reason do I have to trust you?”

“Then tell me what you’re going to do if you no longer trust me? Attack me? Find your friends and escape?”

“…”

“You don’t have options, Ten. You’ve made your choice, so stick with it.”

“Why should I?”

“Because y/n is safe.”

“Safe?” Ten scoffed. “Weren’t you torturing her five minutes ago?”

“I was looking for her limits, psychic energy is very dangerous when left unattended. She’s like a bomb, and if not for me, she would have gone off.”

“Huh?”

“My team was tasked with bringing just the four of you in, and the Organization had no idea about y/n’s existence. You tell me what would have happened to y/n if you were all suddenly ripped away from her? Didn’t you get a taste of that when we took Lucas? And while you were on the train?”

“She…”

“She would have lost her mind. Spiraled into madness and who knows how many people would have gotten hurt in the aftermath. You’re near, she knows that, so nothing I do will set her off, and I also know how to monitor her energy levels. She won’t hurt anyone.”

“But you’ll hurt her.”

“It only hurts because she’s never used her powers this way, she’ll adjust.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll be unstoppable.”

“You say all these things, but I don’t know what you’re planning! How can I trust you if you refuse to be honest!”

“Because how can I trust you when you’re not even at full power? How can I trust you to follow my lead and understand what we’re up against if all you can do is heal a paper cut?”

“What exactly do you think I can do?”

“Finally, we’re on subject. You heal, but all you’ve ever done are minor injuries. What happens if someone loses a limb?”

“I… we’re not that careless, and I doubt you are, so be realistic.”

“Good, that’s the attitude to have. So let’s focus on you. All you’ve ever done is heal your teammates right? Nothing too serious.”

“Yeah.”

“So we can say humans are organic material.”

“Yes? What-”

    Taemin grabbed the apple on his desk and bit into it. He tossed it over to Ten who held it in disgust.

“What-”

“Fix it.”

“Fix it?”

“Yes.”

“I… I don’t… what?”

“Aren’t apples organic material as well? They come from plants which are living things, just like people.”

“That doesn’t… I can’t heal an apple?”

“Have you ever even tried?”

“No, why would this-”

“Try.”

“I can’t.”

“Amuse me. Close your eyes, and whatever you do to heal your friends, do it now.”

    Ten sighed and did as Taemin asked. He didn’t expect anything to come from it, but he knew the other could be so persistent. When he healed someone, it just took a moment, and he wasn’t really putting much effort into this. He opened his eyes and looked at the apple, looking for the bite mark to show Taemin, but it wasn’t there anymore. He examined the apple over and over again before his gaze turned to Taemin.

“How…”

“You can heal life, is that so hard to understand? I’d just like to know how far you can take it.”

    Taemin’s phone chimed, and he checked the message. Without another word he walked out of his office, Ten quick to follow, still astonished by his own powers.

“How did you know I could do that?”

“I don’t know… I have faith.”

“Then… what exactly do you think I can do?”

“The better question is what do you think? I told you of Baekhyun yesterday, in order to figure out what you can do, you need to think beyond the surface.”

“But there is… a limit? Within my own abilities right?”

“Of course, you can heal, so build from that.”

“But I can’t… I don’t get this like you…and what about the others? What can they do?”

“That’s for them to discover, but I’ll indulge you once, you made progress after all.”

“Huh?”

“Pick one.”

“Ah… Mark, he can create portals, what more do you think he can do?”

“He’s only ever used them as a means of escape, never for combat.”

“Combat?”

“He has heart, that’s proven by the fact he’s still here even though he could escape. I fear he lacks the courage and confidence to do more.”

“Wait, what do you mean combat? How can he use it to fight?”

“Wouldn’t it be interesting to see him morph his portals into a shield? Create one like a suit of armor, covering him completely, and making him untouchable.”

“A shield… that’s insane.”

“As was healing an apple, wasn’t it?”

“Then… what is it you want me to do?”

“Good question.” 

    Taemin stopped, Ten right behind him. There was a large painting on the wall. For a moment Taemin glanced at it, and then it shattered. Ten jumped when the painting broke, a masterpiece ruined.

“What the hell?”

“I have faith… that you will restore it one day.”

    Ten stayed put, staring at the remains, and then down at the apple. He just discovered something new about his powers, and yet Taemin expected him to do this. He reached out to touch the painting, what was left of it anyway. It wasn’t alive the way he or an apple was, but in its own ways it had lived. The goal was to bring it back to life one day, and that he vowed to do.

❤

“Get up.”

    Taeyong wasn’t sure if he was hallucinating sounds, or if he was still dreaming. His world was still bathed in darkness, so he had to rely on his other senses, but he wasn’t that confident in them.

“I said get up.”

    A slight kick to the side assured him he wasn’t alone, and that was surprising. He found the mattress on the floor, and now he had to get up. Without his sight he was still pretty disoriented, but the smell of food motivated him to get up. Although he crashed into the table at first, he eventually managed to sit down.

“Eat.”

“How? I can’t-”

    Before he could finish food was shoved in his mouth. He choked a bit before spitting it out, not trusting the food.

“Aish, you think we’re going to poison you? After all that trouble we went through to bring you here? If we wanted to kill you we would have done so on the train.”

“Why am I here then?”

“To help.”

“Help?”

“We all share a common enemy.”

“And who would that be?”

“The people who cursed us with these gifts.”

“Huh?”

“Shall I tell you about how you got your powers?”

“I-”

“Eat.”

    Taeyong didn’t have much of a choice as food was shoved in his mouth, and he was hungry, so he ate as well. This stranger told him about that night, and the events that transpired.

“This… wasn’t some accident.”

“You and your friends getting powers? Don’t you think that’s too much of a coincidence?”

“How many… how many died…”

“Hundreds, and no one knows about it.”

“So we’re here then… with…”

“No. We’re no longer associated with them, so you’re safe.”

“Where are the others?”

“Safe as well.”

“Let me see them.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Cause you need to restore your vision.”

“What? You people are the reason I can’t see shit!”

“Then fix it.”

“Me? How!”

“You tell me. I thought you could make duplicates of yourself.”

“I can’t see through their eyes!”

“Says who?”

“Huh?”

“Let’s make a deal then.”

“Deal?”

“I’ll let you see someone when you can tell me what color my hair is.”

“Your… how many guesses do I get?”

“One.”

“And if I fail?”

“I suppose y/n will be upset.”

“Have you hurt her! What happened to her on the train.”

“Questions for another time. You can do more than you think.”

“Wait.”

“Hm?”

“Can I at least get your name?”

“Baekhyun. Don’t hurt yourself too much.”

    Taeyong let the words sit, trying to process the meaning. Being blind was driving him crazy, he was starting to worry he’d actually lose his vision. Baekhyun gave him some strange advice, but nonetheless it intrigued him. When he tried to create a double the collar just shocked him again, forcing him to stop. It wasn’t too bad of a shock, and he felt that if he pushed through the pain, he could actually achieve something. He took a deep breath, mentally preparing himself for another shot.

❤

    You opened your eyes feeling dizzy, the events of the past still unclear. You didn’t recognize the room you were in, let alone where you were. Regardless, the plain white walls were freaking you out. When you tried to get out of bed you just collapsed, the world still spinning. You were trying to reach the door, but you just didn’t have the strength. You tried to get up, and that’s when the door opened.

“Getting up probably wasn’t the best idea.”

    Taemin picked you up off the ground and sat you down in bed. He brought in some food, attempting to feed you.

“I can do it myself.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah…”

    You tried to grab the utensils, but your hands were shaking too much. Taemin chuckled over your efforts and fed you himself.

“Thanks…”

“I told you I would do it.”

“This… this feeling won’t last… right?”

“It’s temporary. You’ve never used your powers in such a way, so you need to adjust.”

“What did you do… to me…”

“You’ve only ever used your powers for conversations, you never done much else with it, like read minds.”

“I never wanted to do that…”

“It’s okay with the bad guys. You always could have done more for your boys you know, but I understand why they left you behind. Best to keep you safe, you couldn’t do much compared to them.”

“It was my choice to stay.”

“Of course.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You tell me? They’ve always babied you haven’t they? Keep you at home, give you whatever you want, even before you got your powers right? After all, they threw you a big party on your birthday.”

“That-”

“In their eyes you’re weak, always have been, and your powers only proved that.”

“I’m not weak!”

“Prove it then.” Taemin took off his necklace. “Read my mind dear. What am I thinking?”

“I…”

    Taemin just gave you a smile, leaning forward as if that would help. You tried to read his mind, or at least connect, but when you tried you just screamed in agony.

“Nice try love.” Taemin grabbed the necklace. “I’ll give you points for your effort.”

“What… how…”

“I knew I’d meet you one day, so I’ve prepared. Why don’t we try with someone less powerful?”

“I…”

“Let’s go.”

    Taemin took your hand and led you out of the room. The world wasn’t spinning anymore but you were still a bit dazed. You didn’t even know what time of day it was given that the halls were mostly plain, and there was no clock in sight. You wound up in a darker room, a man chained to the wall and gagged in the corner. You glanced at Taemin confused.

“What-”

“This gentleman here was our handler.”

“Handler?”

“Yes. The Organization wouldn’t just let us go out on our own, we had our handler here who would keep us on a tight leash and report back on our behaviors. We were a covert group after all, can’t draw too much attention.”

“What… what do you want me to do?”

“To practice, and get some answers for yourself.”

    Taemin sat you down in a chair in the room, restraining one of your wrists. You looked at him, panicked again, mentally cursing yourself out for trusting him too easily.

“Taemin, what are you doing?”

“I want you to focus, and not to do anything you’ll regret.”

“Huh?”

“You’re gonna read his mind, it should be easier.”

“But I-”

“Think of it like searching. You said you’re a radio, instead of picking up and receiving signals, look for them, and hone in on what you want to know.”

“But-”

“Have fun. And I’m not letting you out till you do this.”

“Taemin! Taemin, wait!”

    He shut the door with a loud bang, and you could hear the lock fall into place. You stared at the door frustrated, wanting to scream but knowing it was useless. Your focus shifted to the restraint but that was no use either. Finally, you had to look at your cellmate, who had been watching you curiously for a while. He was a stranger, and you didn’t necessarily want to connect with him, but Taemin said he wouldn’t let you out until you could read his mind, so you didn’t have a choice.

    You honestly hadn’t connected with anyone for so long you needed a moment to remember how to do it. Once you established a link you just felt weird, being in their head just felt like being somewhere foreign and it scared you, but you had to do this. Talking was the easy part, but you had no idea how to go about searching his mind. The boys would always share memories with you if you asked or they wanted, it was ever an intrusion, and you never pried, so this new experience was nerve wracking.

“Hello… can you hear me?”

“Yes, this is incredible, you really are telepathic.”

“Yeah so… you were Taemin’s handler… right?”

“Yes.”

“What… what does that mean?”

“I monitored his behavior and that of his team. Listen, you need to help me.”

“Help?”

“This is all a misunderstanding. Taemin’s gone rogue with the others, and is going to put millions in danger.”

“What? What do you mean? How does that make sense?”

“This Organization Taemin’s been telling you about is a lie. I’m from the government and we’ve been investigating the situation. We don’t know how you all got your powers, or who’s responsible.”

“What? But then… you were Taemin’s handler, you-”

“The boys wanted to know more than any of us where their power came from. They were more than willing to go out on the field to help us in this. When we discovered the rest of you, we were planning on approaching, but with your thievery and disappearances you were hard to track down.”

“Then why did Taemin go rogue? What does he want?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Yes, your powers. What you’re capable of and… we need to get out of here.”

“What about me? Why does everyone-”

“Do you have any idea where we are?”

“What? No, I was unconscious and that Kai guy can teleport, so we could be anywhere.”

“We need to find a way to communicate to the outside, I just-”

“Are you buying into his story?” Taemin’s voice came in over a microphone. “Cause all I’m seeing is chit-chatter.”

“I… what are you talking about?”

“Oh please, he’s probably told you some lies about how I’m the true bad guy and he wants to help you and your friends. You’re supposed to discover the truth for yourself, or do you want everything given to you on a silver platter?”

“I don’t know how to read minds! You know this!”

“Then try. How else will you learn if you don’t even make an attempt.”

    It went quiet after that, thinking everything over. You had two stories before you, and it’s not like Taemin was a saint in either one of them. He made it sound like reading mind was easy, you had an idea but had never really done anything.

“What do you know about the Organization?”

“It’s not real. Taemin made it up to gain your trust.”

“He doesn’t have that he-”

“How… how many people has he killed?”

“At this point, hundreds, and he’ll kill more.”

    You suddenly had something flash before your eyes. A memory that wasn’t your own, but one that had come to the prisoners mind. It was for a moment, but you managed to catch it nonetheless. You saw Taemin dragging someone into the room, the place seemed like a hotel, and a fancy one at that. Kai and Baekhyun came in behind him, staying back. The person was forced on their knees, begging for their life. That was all you managed to see, but it was enough to start telling you something.

“Who do you work for?”

“The government.”

“You’re lying to me. Who do you work for?”

“I’m not lying! Taemin is the one lying to you! He is going to use you for his own gain!”

    Another flash. Taemin and his team at some briefing, a briefing on your boys, and of course no mention of you. It seemed like some sorta plan to capture them.

“What can he possibly do to hurt me?”

“You don’t understand what he’s capable of! The more you use your power around him the more he learns!”

“Are you… afraid of Taemin?”

    This memory was old, but more intense. You were clearly in some lab, watching Taemin during one of his tests. It seemed to be going well, until Taemin turned on the researchers around him, attacking them, and no doubt killing them. You jumped in your chair.

“What?”

“You… you’re lying… you’re with the Organization, you experimented on him! On all of them!”

“I don’t know what-”

“You just thought of it! I saw it! You are afraid of him! Of them! He could kill you at-”

    Perhaps it was just all the emotions in you, but suddenly you were deeper in his head, seeing things he probably never wanted anyone to see. Images of files and experiment results, seeing Taemin and the others tied down to surgical tables and tortured in the name of science. Seeing strangers who displayed powers as well suddenly dead on operating tables. It was all so much you eventually threw up, finally getting out of that nightmare.

    The man was hunched over, clearly feeling the effects of your probing as well. You could see it in his eyes now, the real monster he was. He couldn’t pretend anymore, not after all the things you both had witnessed. Anger couldn’t begin to describe what you felt. They may have just been memories, and you were looking through his eyes, but you knew the others you had seen were in unimaginable pain. You got out of your seat, screaming at this man, wanting to beat him over the head for his crimes.

    The chair wouldn’t budge and your restraint was taut, so you were rather violently pulling on your arm. In the moment the pain didn’t matter, you just needed to act. You got your chance though when you actually managed to break your hand in a way that let you slip out of your restraint. You didn’t waste a second as you quickly pinned this man to the ground and started punching him, ignoring his muffled pleas for mercy.

❤

“Don’t we still need him?”

    On the other side of the monitors, watching all these events unfold were Taemin and Kai, taking in the show. Taemin had been watching everything intently, monitoring your brain waves, well aware that all you were doing at the start was talking. He let it happen, let the man get his lies out before interrupting and taking control of the situation. His hand was gently messing with the dial to force you into the others mind, and force you to go deep to see what you needed to. At least now he could trust that you knew how to read minds, and that he wasn’t lying to you.

“I want to see what she can do on her own.”

“I don’t expect her to have combat experience.”

“Emotions can be a great guide.”

“Are you just manipulating her powers again?”

“Just a bit. She’s a naive girl who needs a push, but she’s learning.”

“And how close are we to getting what we want?”

“We’re getting there, but it won’t do much good unless the others start finding their limits. How are we on that? I’ve sent Ten on the right path.”

“Baekhyun is speaking with Taeyong, and last I checked, he’s trying. We might have to spell things out for Mark, and Lucas… I don’t know, he’s probably still pissed.”

“Talk to him first. Your previous relationship should help things go smoothly. He’s just confused right now, so sort things out. As for Mark… I need y/n in a better place for him.”

“Got it, Lucas it is.”

“Ah, before you go, stop her, please.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

    Kai teleported into the room, Taemin walking over on his own. When he walked in Kai was holding you back as you kicked around, not done with the beating you were giving the prisoner. The man in question was shaking on the floor, a busted face bleeding on the floor, he was alive, and he’d live.

“Quite the fire in you.” Kai laughed. “Didn’t know you had it in you.”

“He should be dead! Asshole was trying to lie to me to help him! He’s a monster.”

“So you believe me now?”

    You stopped struggling, your anger fading to pain. You didn’t know everything, but you knew Taemin rightfully had a bone to pick with these people. You thought he was being a dick, but what was done to him was way worse.

“I’m sorry…”

“For what?”

“What they did… it must have been awful…”

“Something like that.” 

   Taemin approached, having Kai release you, and examining your hand. When he grabbed it you flinched from the pain.

“You broke your hand, that’s quite something. You wanted to get revenge for me that bad.”

“I was just… caught in a blind fury.”

“That’s quite dangerous. I suppose it can’t be helped, let’s go find Ten. I’m sure he’d love to see you as well.”

Next

maybe in another universe - ch. 1 [fic]

Jon isn’t expecting anything good when he’s evacuated to the countryside. Living with his crush rival he can just about handle. The secret magical world in the upstairs wardrobe, on the other hand, might just break him.

AKA: Narnia AU

Word Count: 2,707 | Also on Ao3 | Other Chapters: 2,

chapter one: the train to everywhere

As the train leaves the station, Jon doesn't look back.

The corridors outside his carriage are filled with other kids, craning their necks out of the windows to wave at their parents, tears streaming down their faces. It's a mess of loud noise and emotion that makes Jon wholly uncomfortable.

There's no one for him to look back to, no one to share tears with. No one to yell at him, you'll be home before you know it! and have fun, dear! it's okay!

He curls his arms around his suitcase and stares out the opposite window, at the vanishing buildings. Smoke shimmers over the horizon, mixing with the clouds, and Jon tries to imagine the view from above. When the planes fly overhead, do they recognise the smothered lights flickering below? Do they spare a thought for the bodies on the other side of the flames?

The corners of his suitcase begin to dig painfully into his skin.

Before he can spiral any further, the door to the compartment rattles open with a sudden gunshot sound that sets every nerve in his body alight.

He flinches and turns to see a girl roughly his own age, head swathed in a dark blue hijab, pressing her lips in an apologetic line.

"Sorry," she shrugs noncommittally, inclining her head. "Is that seat taken?"

"Uh, no."

"So I can take it?"

"Yes?"

"Thanks." She shoulders her way into the room, heaving her own suitcase up onto the rack above their heads with an easy movement. Jon grips his own sheepishly - several blows to the head have taught him that he is nowhere near strong enough to haul it up that high.

The girl settles into the seat opposite him, retrieves a book from the recesses of her thick navy trench coat. It's a weathered copy of The Iliad, well-thumbed and annotated.

He's leaning forward curiously before he can help himself.

The girl looks up with raised eyebrows. "Nosy much?"

"Sorry," he shrinks back behind the large bulk in his lap. "I just- I used to have that same copy. Before..."

The girl's face softens, infinitessimly. "It's one of my favourites," she offers, almost apologetically. "I started keeping all my books in the shelter a few months ago. It's the only reason this survived."

Jon says nothing - there's nothing he can really say. In this moment, they are just two strangers, sharing a burning world.

"I'm Basira," the girl says, with a decisive look. "I'm from Finchley, being evacuated to Dorset. You?"

"Uh- same," Jon blinks, surprised. "I'm Jon. I've- I've never seen you before?"

"I mean, I imagine you go to the boys' school."

"Not until last year."

"Oh."

Jon glances down at his hands, hoping Basira can't see the way his fingers are white-knuckled against his suitcase.

"Well, I was new before-" she waves her arms vaguely, "all this. Home-schooled. So not really surprising."

"Oh." Slowly, one by one, Jon allows his muscles to relax. "That must've been nice. Quiet."

"That's one word for it," Basira mutters in a way that implies a hundred other meanings than nice. "I was really looking forward to actually getting to know people, y'know? New people, my own age."

"Well, you know me now?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do."

Jon tries for a smile, but it comes out as something more of a grimace. All the same, Basira seems to get the sentiment, and returns it.

~/~/~/~

Martin hates trains.

In theory, they're the perfect vessel. Hours of uninterrupted time, the world moving beneath your feet as you curl into a seat with a hot cup of tea and your favourite paperback.

But he hasn't been on a train since his mother sent him away to London, and that sort of memory tends to leave one with a distaste by association.

Now here he is, only a few years later, being sent away again.

He's just glad his mother refused to take him in. He's not sure he could bear going back to that house, potentially indefintiely.

All the same, he's trying to make the best out of the journey that he can. He's heard horror stories of other evacuees, forced to work on farms or taken in only to be used for their ration cards. If that's the sort of fate he's headed for, he'll take the luxury of a nice cuppa and the drafting of a few poems whilst it's still there.

And he really is in the perfect place for it. The smouldering London skyline behind him, the fathomless countryside ahead. A world in flux and chaos, defined in fire and water.

He notes that down in his journal.

"Any good thoughts?" Melanie asks through a mouthful of sandwich.

Martin blinks up at the girl sharing his compartment, an embodiment of chaos if ever he's seen one. She's lying across the seats opposite him, her suitcase open and contents strewn everywhere - she'd been digging through it to find something inane which turned out to be in her pocket the whole time, and hasn't bothered to pack it up again.

Martin's hands itch to tidy the space - instead he grips his pen a little too hard and settles for a quzzical smile.

"Your writing," she points with the corner of her sandwich. "You look very deep in concentration and dramatic. Any good thoughts?"

"I suppose," he shrugs, retreating somewhat under Melanie's energetic gaze. "Something about dichotomies. Peace and war, fire and water. City and country."

"Men and women, nurse and soldier. Alive and dead."

Martin raises an eyebrow. "I guess."

"Hey- if there's any time to be morbid, it's during a war, dontcha think?"

"True. Do you write?"

"Nope. I do photography, though."

Martin can feel himself getting interested despite himself. "Really? Do you have a camera?"

Melanie nudges at the pile of clothes somehow still heaped in the boundaries of her suitcase, revealing the packaging of a beautiful, sleek camera piece that makes Martin fall a little in love with this stranger instantly.

"Is that a Retina I?" he asks, unable to quite keep the awe out of his voice.

"You really know your tech," Melanie says approvingly. "Yeah, it is. I'm going to be a supernaturalist."

"A what?"

"A supernaturalist, Martin. I'm going to be the first person to prove that ghosts exist. I'm going to get one on film."

"Huh."

Martin deliberately avoids Melanie's eyes. To believe in the supernatural is not generally approved of, let alone to talk about it with the sudden reverence and conviction that have crept into Melanie's voice.

He's gotten very used to pretending he's never seen anything out of the ordinary. The smoke that follows him around like a shadow, the spiders that seem to understand him just a little too intelligently - they all have mundane explanations.

He's never met someone so open about such things.

He lasts a matter of seconds before his tongue gets the better of him. "What've you seen?"

Melanie grins, as if she's been waiting from the moment they met just for him to ask. "I got shot by a ghost."

Martin almost knocks over his tea. "I'm sorry?"

"I got shot by a ghost."

"Yeah, you said that already. What I meant to say was, what the fuck?"

Melanie looks delighted to have his attention. She reaches down and rolls her sock to her ankle, revealing a garish red scar screaming across her leg. "London's full of ghosts, if you hadn't noticed. They just love the chaos that's going on right now, always wandering all over the place when the streets are empty and everyone's hidden in their shelters."

"I'm guessing you're not one for shelters," Martin says dryly, attempting to smother the sheer confusion and excitement doing battle in his brain.

"Of course not," Melanie scoffs. "They won't let me enlist because I'm a girl, but, I mean, have you seen some of the boys in charge of Finchley's bomb clearance?"

"A lot of them were in the year above me at school," Martin nods. He could say far more bitter things, but he keeps his mouth shut.

"They're kids, just like us," Melanie nods, a furious look in her eyes. "I wouldn't trust them to protect me from a particularly vicious duck, let alone the end of days raining from the sky."

Martin grins in agreement. Despite initial perceptions, he's starting to like Melanie a lot.

A shame they'll only get to know each other for this one train ride, likely never to hear from each other again. Unless Melanie does actually become famous for photographing ghosts, and he becomes famous for his poetry, and maybe they'll meet at a gala sixty years from now and not recognise each other at all.

Martin mentally kicks himself out of that particular spiral. He's always had a problem with melancholy, and the world being on fire has hardly done anything to improve him.

He's convinced it's what makes him a good poet.

"Hey," he says, to distract himself. "Where are you being sent to?"

"Some professor," Melanie shrugs. "Probably a stuffy old bat who'll put you to work if she finds a single fingerprint in the dust. Academics are all the same, from what I've seen."

Martin looks down at his own tag, brown paper tied with fraying string, looped around his neck by a disinterested attendant at the posting office. He hasn't actually had the nerve to read the name yet.

His heart picks up. "Melanie... it's not Professor Gertrude Robinson, is it?"

~/~/~/~/~

"...But Patroclus called to his comrades with a loud shout: “Myrmidons, ye comrades of Achilles, son of Peleus, be men, my friends, and bethink you of furious valour, to the end that we may win honour for the son of Peleus, that is far the best of the Argives by the ships, himself and his squires that fight in close combat; and that the son of Atreus, wide-ruling Agamemnon, may know his blindness in that he honoured not at all the best of the Achaeans-"

"Achilles is such an idiot," Basira interrupts, rolling her eyes and flipping the coin in her palm in absent, distracted movements.

Jon raises an eyebrow and lowers the book. "I can stop, if you'd prefer."

"No, no, you're okay. You've got a surprisingly good voice for this stuff. I'm glad you suggested it."

They've been taking turns reading aloud, switching out every few pages to pass the time, since Jon has no books of his own. But Basira seems to have quickly decided that Jon is a born narrator and delegated all further reading to him.

He's been glowing faintly from the praise ever since.

The journey has flown by - as time often does when Jon's hyperfixations make an appearance - but for once he doesn't feel guilty about indulging it. Basira seems just as fascinated, somehow, and he greatly enjoys her interruptions.

"You don't think Achilles is an idiot?" she asks, crossing her legs and leaning forward intently.

"No, I definitely do- he sends his boyfriend out to fight a war he isn't prepared for just because of a grudge and then throws a tantrum when that hubris gets him killed. He's definitely an idiot."

"Oh good," Basira says, visibly relieved. "For a moment there I thought we were going to have to argue."

Jon laughs, and the sound comes easier than it has in a while. This realisation crawls under his skin, cutting the sound short. He looks out of the window for some semblance of escape-

"Hey! Look!" He points out at the approaching train station, a quaint thing, barely more than a slab of stone emerging from a field. But the sign, rusted as it is, reads the same as the looping handwriting on the label around his neck does.

"Oh joy," Basira sighs. "Countryside air and a new family who'll probably hate me."

"Where are you being sent?" Jon asks, more hopeful than he's willing to admit. "Maybe we'll be neighbours."

"The household of Professor Gertrude Robinson," she reads from her own label.

"So am I!" Jon's heart leaps high in his chest despite himself. "You know, if we're with a professor, she might- I mean, she probably isn't a rough work kind of person- so maybe... this won't be so awful after all?"

Of course, Jon has always had a habit of speaking too soon.

~/~/~/~/~

Gathering Melanie's discarded belongings is a predictably chaotic affair, but she executes it with the practiced air of someone who lives that way every day.

Martin can't decide whether he's excited or dreading living with this girl.

As soon as they sprawl out onto the platform with seconds to spare, Martin realises that Melanie's mess is the least of his worries.

Because perched on the station's only bench, face knitted into his iconic perpetual frown, eyes squinting against the sun, is Jonathan fucking Sims.

Next to his suitcase, and wearing a knitted jumper several sizes too big, he looks tiny. The tall hijabi girl standing on top of the bench, looking searchingly into the distant fields, only serves to exaggerate this.

Melanie notices the sudden drain in his skin immediately, and follows his gaze. "For fucks sake."

"You know him?" Martin asks faintly, resisting the urge to brush his hands through his hair, or smooth his clothes. Jon doesn't care what he looks like, doesn't care about him. He should've learnt back in primary school that being rivals isn't something to be romanticised.

But his heart doesn't seem to get the message as a stray gust of wind dances in Jon's dark hair, and it skips a beat.

"Do I know Jonathan fucking Sims?" Melanie grits out, heaving her suitcase roughly over one shoulder. "That guy is such a wanker. 'Ghosts are for idiots, Melanie. Just a romantic ideal made up by delusional people afraid of the dark.'"

"He's not that bad," Martin begins to protest before he can stop himself, "he's just been through a lot."

"Doesn't excuse him being a dick," Melanie grumbles. "Not to mention he used to date my girlfriend. Always having a disaster and blazing back into her life. What I wouldn't give for five minutes one on one, I'd teach him..."

Melanie goes on muttering under her breath, but Martin barely hears, because Jon has just met his eyes and nothing else in the world matters. There's surprise, then panic, before his expression settles back into a frown.

Martin sighs. It's not as if he should've expected anything else.

"Come on," he says to Melanie, picking up his suitcase. "We'd better get it over with."

The walk to close their distance seems to take hours, and somehow no time at all.

"Martin," Jon greets him with a clipped, emotionless tone.

"Hey, Jon," Martin smiles, refusing to let the other boy's walls get him down. "And you are?"

"Basira," the girl nods, still standing high above them and glancing distractedly towards the dirt path, likely looking for whoever will be along to pick up evacuees. "I guess you guys already know each other?"

"They go to school together," Melanie brushes off the explanation, before introducing herself, too. "Now we're all acquainted, how long before we never have to see each other again?"

Basira's eyes flick silently between the three of them, clearly noting the tension, but saying nothing.

"We're in the same house," Jon says stiffly. "I don't know about you two. I'm sure there are other benches you can loiter at."

"Well we're in the same house," Melanie shoots back, linking her arm with Martin and holding tight. She's a lot stronger than she looks.

An awful thought dawns on Martin, quickly encompassing and eclipsing anything else. "Where..." he swallows around his dry throat, "who are you guys with?"

Martin watches as Jon's eyes widen. Glance down at his own label, across at theirs, and back.

"You've got to be kidding me."

Martin wants to burrow into the ground and hide somewhere his blushing cheeks could never be seen. He shouldn't be surprised, really. This summer was already looking down, being far from London, living with strangers, adjusting to pretending to be whatever fit in most.

Living with the crush who hates his guts is somehow the only escalation that makes sense.

Save you (Part 1) / Dhawan!Master x reader

Summary: Traveling with The Doctor had shown you incredible things: The existence of extraterrestrial live, the possibility of time travel and the most beautiful and remote places you could have ever imagine... But being with her had also made you develop some strong values. To be kind and always help those in need. But would you be up to help The Master now that he is the one who needs to be saved?

Words: 9112

Warnings: Blood, near death situations, smut (in future chapters).

Note: Since I’m isolated at home with an hyperfixation on Dhawan!Master, I decided to write my first fanfiction in like 4 or 5 years. I thought I might share it in case someone is in the same situation as I am and has nothing better to do than reading it (please, stay at home). It’s the first time I write in awhile and English is not my first lenguage, so sorry if this sucks.

What’s written in italics are the reader’s memories.

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

Gallifrey wasn’t how you had imagined it would be. At least, its current state wasn’t.

When The Doctor talked about her home planet –not that she really had lately, but she had told you about it sometime, especially when you had asked her about the Time War–, she always talked about the golden skies and the two suns shining above. It had always made you curious, to visit the place that had watched your friend grow up. But looking around you, you realized why she hadn’t brought you and the fam to visit what was left of it.

You were rushing through the ruins of what had been one of the most powerful civilizations in the universe, followed closely behind by Ko Sharmus, who had a rough time keeping up with your speed. The others had tried to stop you both from getting out of the TARDIS that The Doctor had prepared to take you home, but nothing they could say or do could have made you stay. You couldn’t leave that planet knowing that The Doctor was sacrificing herself and that you would never be able to see her again. You would never be able to forgive yourself if you did nothing about it, if you just stood aside. That wasn’t you.

“You may have made me but I have destroyed you…” As you got closer to the Matrix, you could hear The Master’s voice getting louder. You tried to follow that sound “Become death, become…” Breathless, you stood in the room, every ‘Cybermaster’ pointing their weapons at you while The Master focused his attention on your being before finishing what he was saying. “Me…”

Interlocking your stare with his sent a shiver down your spine. You hadn’t seen him in a few months, you never thought you would again after your last encounter, when the Kaasavin took him away. But there he was, right in front of you in the planet he had threated to pieces. Looking at him now, it was almost impossible to believe that he was the same person that had introduced himself as O so long ago.

The Doctor, seeing her childhood friend’s reaction, turned to see you. “Y/N! You shouldn’t be here!” She reprimanded as you looked behind you in search for Ko Sharmus, who you supposed must had gotten lost. “You can’t still be here I set the controls!”

“I followed you outside, I couldn’t let you do this on your own!” You quickly responded as you watched The Master approaching you, a slight smirk forming on his face. You didn’t have to be genius to judge by his reaction that he was scheming something.

“I believe we agreed on no party crashers.” Grabbing you by your arm and dragging you to the center of the room with him, he laughed. “But this might be interesting.” His eyes looked at you and then at The Doctor as he tightened his grip on you. “Will you be able to sacrifice your loyal, little pet, Doctor?”

The Doctor’s eyes looked at you in despair. One thing was sacrificing herself and the apocalyptic remains of her planet for the well–being of the universe, but you being in the middle of it made things infinitely harder.

“Just do it, Doc.” You tried to encourage her as she held the bomb in her hands, pointing it to the Master. “It’s okay, I chose to stand by you.” Looking at you in the eye, The Doctor lowered her arm, putting her finger away from the detonator of the weapon that would end all organic life on her home planet.

“For just a moment there I thought maybe…” The Master looked away from his oldest enemy, frustrated at the turn of events. He sighed loudly before speaking again, now talking to you. “She’s weak.” He informed you, leaning over to your ear. “And the universe and you both are going to suffer for her weakness. I can promise you that.”

You gave an apologetic look at your friend, still hoping that she found the courage enough to press the button and end this madness once and for all.

“Not if I have anything to do with it.” Ko Sharmus finally intervened, getting in the room as well and walking towards The Doctor.

“Excuse me, are there going to be any more surprises?” The Master asked rhetorically into your ear, his heavy breathing hitting the skin on your neck and making you feel quite unsettled.

“Why won’t anyone listen to me?!” The Doctor questioned in frustration. “I told you all to leave!”

“I wanted to make sure these things are gone. And now I can be.”

“No!” The old man tried to grab the device that The Doctor still had in between her hands, even though he tried to persuade him out of his intentions.

“You didn’t start this, I did!” Ko Sharmus began to explain to The Doctor how he was part of the team that had tried to get rid of the Cyberium by sending it back though time, getting the calculus wrong and not sending it far enough. You swallowed the lump in your throat when you realized he wanted to take The Doctor’s place. “This is my penance. Mine to finish…”

You unconsciously sighed in relief as you watched The Doctor give the bomb back to his owner, glad to know that, at least, she got the chance to get out of there. You, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be that lucky. The Master was still holding you close to him, with no intention of letting you go.

“It isn’t going to be that easy, Doctor.” The Master intervened, rage filling his tone once again. “I still have her, and she’s not going anywhere. I die and she dies with me.” He stated, as serious as you had ever heard him. He had nothing left to lose.

“You can have me.” The Doctor was quick to say, trying to find a way for you to get out of this one. “This is between you and me, let her go and I’ll take her place.”

“Tempting, but I think I’ll pass. You can still stay and die by her side if you want to.” He laughed again. You took a deep breathe, trying to find the right words to say.

“Just go, Doctor.” You told her, no trace of hesitation in your voice. “This was my choice. I was the one who ran away from the TARDIS when you told me not to. Don’t blame yourself, it’s my fault.”

“Look at that, isn’t it moving?” The Master mocked you both. “She’s dying because of you and she doesn’t even blame you for it, Doctor. I don’t know if that’s sad or pathetic.”

“Don’t listen to him! Just run!” You tried to convince her to do as you said. “Yaz, Graham and Ryan still need you! The universe still needs you!” Tears began to form in your friend’s eyes

“I’m so, so sorry, Y/N.” She told you sincerely before running off.

“Doctor!” The Master shouted in frustration, his grip around you getting even tighter than before, making you squirm a little.

“Still feeling confident?” Ko Sharmus asked the remaining Time Lord in the room, getting ready to push the button and end it all.

The Master looked at the human in front of him defiantly, furious because his plan had been turned apart once again. You took a deep breath as you did your best to accept your final destiny.

There are always risks when travelling with The Doctor, you weren’t the first one to face the consequences. And you weren’t oblivious to them when you first stood a foot in the TARDIS. Death is always imminent when you live that kind of life, it had been several times that you had found yourself in deathly situations. Luckily, you had escaped from them all except for, of course, this one. Yet, you were copping surprisingly good with it. There wasn’t much left for you on earth anyway, you thought, and you had live a deeply intense and remarkable life. The things you had seen, the places you had been… You wished you had time to achieve more things, but maybe it was time. Maybe this was how it was meant to be.

“Kill him.” The sound of The Master giving the order to his army got you out of your own thoughts.

“Kill you first.” The old man threatened as dozens of lasers were shot against him.

Watching your ally struggle to keep himself from falling to the ground and taking advantage of The Master’s distraction, you set yourself free from his grip. You needed to be quick to grab the bomb from Ko Sharmus's hands as he fell dead to the floor. He had failed to complete the task again, and you couldn’t let the Time Lord and his monstrous creation get out of the planet. It would be the first, and most certainly last time that you kill someone, but you owed it to The Doctor. One final sacrifice to save your beloved universe. It needed to be done, even though you didn’t want to.

Just when you were about to grab the device from the old man’s apparently dead body, you realized your mistake. Ko Sharmus was still alive and his finger was barely a second away from making disappear all life from Gallifrey. In what you thought were your last moments, you turned to see The Master’s reaction, seeing him manipulating a watch–like device that was on his wrist. Just in time before the bomb detonated, he grabbed your arm, teleporting you both away from that room.

Out of nowhere, you found yourself inside of O’s house. Well, it wasn't really a house, and O didn't exist. You already knew that it was in fact The Master's TARDIS, but it was still hard to process. It took a moment for you to realize that you were in fact alive while the Master ran to the console and began to introduce some coordinates.

“We’re still on Gallifrey.” He clarified as he rushed himself to get his ship out of there. You weren’t really sure if he was talking to you or to himself. “There’s only a few seconds left before the expansive wave gets here.”

You watched him in confusion, still trying to figure out what had just happened. You were supposed to be dead. Not that you weren’t glad not to be. But out of all people, The Master was the last one you imagined would get you out of that situation. He was the one to put you in danger in the first place. What sense did it made?

Standing there, you watched in shock as he successfully got his ship into the time vortex. Once you were certain that you were out of danger, you decided to open your mouth again. “Why did you do that?” You asked him, a deep feeling of confusion taking over you.

“Do what?” The Master asked you back as he tried to decide when and where to go.

“You saved me.” Your voice was low as you did your best for both of you to remain calmed. The last thing you needed after escaping a certain death was to get yourself killed by an angry alien psychopath.

“I didn’t save you.” He was quick to correct you in his usual, cynic tone. “I saved myself and you just happened to be there. Do I look like a dog walker or something? I don’t take care of other people’s pets.”

You stayed silent as he worked. He wasn’t exactly easy to talk to, and you didn’t want to push him with noisy questions. Instead, you decided to celebrate the fact that you were alive by sitting on a chair and taking the deep breath that you had been holding for the last several hours. You weren’t completely out of danger, you were still in The Master’s ship. But for some reason he had decided you were more valuable alive than dead, you only hoped he wouldn’t suddenly change his mind.

Still trying to process everything that had happened in the last minutes, you realized The Doctor didn’t have a clue that you were still alive. You needed to get back to her, but that seemed a bit difficult at the moment. Eyeing The Master and seeing that he was busy controlling his ship, you reached for your phone only to find that the screen was shattered and that it didn’t even turn on. It must had had broke when you fell while running from the Cybermen earlier. Now it was useless. Wasn’t that just perfect?

There was no way to reach any of your friends and inform them of your situation, so you supposed you should focus on getting out of there as soon as possible and find your way back to them. The only problem was that you had no idea of where or when The Master was taking you.

“Why am I still inside your TARDIS?” Deep in thought, you asked in a low tone. Unluckily, not low enough so that he could’t hear you.

“You can throw yourself into the time vortex for all I care” He replied bitterly. Well, even more bitterly than usual. “Just make sure to close the door behind you.”

You weren’t really sure of how travelling in time worked, but you were pretty sure that wouldn’t survive if you just jumped out of the ship now, so you supposed you were stuck there. After a few silent minutes in which you tried to figure the situation out, you decided to dig a bit more into his intentions. He had had several opportunities to kill you, so if you were still alive was because for some reason he intended on keeping in that way.

Your eyes were glued to him as he read the screen in front of him. “Why did you take me out of Gallifrey?” You finally inquired again, your voice more confident than before.

“Would you have rather staying there?” The Master took a few seconds before answering your question, doing his best to keep himself calmed.

“I’m just trying to understand why I’m still alive. That’s all.”

The Master turned to you, his eyes furious as he quickly walked towards you and grabbed you by the throat. You gasped for air as he got you up from the chair, his face a few inches away from yours. “If that causes you any problem…” He stopped before he could finish the sentence, his eyes closing as he let out a groan from pain. As you observed him closely, you realized that his skin was extremely pale and that there was some cold sweat forming on his forehead. His grip on you was also weaker than you had expected it would be. “…I can fix that.”

His gaze was upon you for a few more seconds before letting you go. You coughed a few times as you tried to regain your composure. Don’t mess around with the sociopath alien, lesson learned. The Master walked back to the console and tried to get back to work, but you could see how tired he was.

“Are you feeling okay?” The Master could sense the worried tone in your voice. He didn’t even look back at you, ignoring you completely as he pulled a lever.

In a matter of seconds the ship had successfully landed, even though you had barely noticed it. The Master was a better pilot, his manoeuvres way smoother than The Doctor’s. You had to admit him that.

“Where are we?” You asked in fear of whatever you could find at the other side of the door. Probably it was best not to know, just by picturing all the kind of sick, doomed places his twisted mind could have chosen to take you to.

Almost as if you weren’t there, he kept messing around with the controls of the TARDIS. “Why don’t you go out there and figure it out instead of making stupid questions?” He spat, once again giving you the less possible amount of attention.

That wasn’t really encouraging, to say the least. But you had to admit curiosity was too much to bear. You had tons of questions and an answer waiting for you at the other side of the TARDIS’s doors. Was it worth to take risk? You took risks every day just by travelling with The Doctor, but you could feel the chances of getting into trouble multiply just by having the company of The Master instead. Taking a deep breath, you carefully walked to the front door. Your hand rested on it for a few seconds before you finally open it up to reveal your surroundings.

Surprise took over you when you recognized the place where the ship had landed. You had been there before, some time ago. The Master had landed in Australia, where he was when you first had met him as he was pretending to be O, an agent from MI6.

The Doctor’s voice could be heard even from outside of her console room as she rambled about something you didn’t quite understand. It wasn’t unusual to find her talking to herself, so you weren’t bothered by it until you entered into the room and heard another voice replying to her.

You hesitated for a few seconds before getting closer to where she was standing, realizing she was on a video call with someone.

“Y/N, hey!” She greeted you when she noticed your presence, turning to you with a wide smile spread on her face. “Come here, I want to introduce you to someone.”

“I thought you were rambling on your own again.” You laughed as you walked towards your friend, placing yourself next to her in front of the screen. “Who are you talking to?”

“Y/N, this is my friend from MI6, O” The Doctor introduced you as you gave the man a polite smile and a little wave.

“Nice finally meeting you.” He waved back as you observed him. He was a fairly good looking man with big dark eyes. “The Doctor talks so much about you.”

“Does she now?” You laughed, trying to hide your embarrassment. “I’m not really interesting, especially comparing myself to her. Hope she doesn’t bore you much.”

“No, I have a great time hearing about your adventures.” O smiled as he gave you a reassuring look. “According to what The Doctor says you have saved her more than once.”

You grinned nervously as you placed a piece of hair behind your ear. “Well, I should leave you two to keep catching up. Didn’t mean to interrupt you.” You shrugged, feeling bad for crashing their conversation.

“Oh, don’t worry.” The agent told you. “We were already saying goodbye.”

“Yeah, O is working on a case at the moment.” The Doctor clarified. “See you around!” She happily put an end to the call. It was only you and her in the TARDIS now.

“So…” You sighed, thinking of the best way to ask what was on your mind without looking suspicious. You had liked him, but first you wanted to know if there was anything going on between the two of them. “What is the deal with this O? How did you two meet?”

“We met some years back.” Your alien friend explained as she wandered around the console room. “He really is into studying every alien thing that crosses his path.”

“Why isn’t he travelling with us then?” The Doctor turned to you as you asked. You had never heard her talking about O before, so maybe there was a reason why she didn’t want him in the TARDIS. “He seems like a nice guy, he would enjoy this kind of life.”

“He does an extremely important job on earth.” She clarified. Both Torchwood and Unit were now gone, so knowing that there was still O left working for MI6 made her feel more secure. If any alien being attacked Earth while she was away, he would still be there to try and stop them. “Maybe some day we can take him on an adventure. Now, how about we go get the rest of the fam and go somewhere?”

You smiled at her while you nodded your head, still thinking about O. There was no denying you had taking a like on him, even though the Doctor was too much of a dork to notice. It wasn’t nothing serious, just a dumb crush, but you were hoping on seeing him again sometime. Preferably in person next time.

“Have you ever been to Barcelona?” The Doctor got you out of your thoughts. “Not the city Barcelona, the planet Barcelona. Do you fancy a trip there?”

The sun was setting just now. If you started walking, you would get to the closest population in a couple of hours. Luckily, you could get into a plane in the morning and be back to London by the end of the next day. You were free to go home, to go back to your fam. But since The Master was the one that had taken you back to Earth, you supposed things weren’t as simple as they seemed. There had to be a trick. There’s always a trick with him. He wouldn’t make it that easy, would he?

After taking a moment to admire the beauty of your own planet, you decided to head back inside of the TARDIS. Probably The Master would dismiss every single one of your questions, just like he had been doing, but you couldn’t leave without trying one last time. You would always be wondering why he had helped you if you left now. Curiosity was going to be the death of you.

Confusion stricken you again when you didn’t see The Master around the console. You were beginning to think that he was setting you a trap when you spotted him lying on the floor, passed out.

“Master!” You kneeled beside him, shaking his body slightly in an attempt to wake him up.

Nothing you did made him move a muscle. Worried, you placed a hand on his forehead just to find that his skin was practically burning. His breathing and heartbeats were also way slower compared to what you supposed was normal. If he did in fact had two hearts his pulse should be way more intense, or so you supposed.

Being as careful as you possibly could, you dragged The Master to the closest piece of furniture. Not without some complications, you laid him on the couch and observed him, in hopes for him to make any kind of reaction. There was always the possibility that he was messing with you. That this was a part of some bigger scheme and that you were falling straight for it. But you knew that, if by any remote chance this was real and you walked away, leaving him there on his own, you would never be able to forgive yourself. Sure, he most likely wouldn’t do the same for you, but you weren't the type to run away when help was needed.

Besides, he had indeed saved you from Gallifrey, even if you didn’t know the real reason behind it. In a way, you felt like you owed him.

The only thing was, you didn’t exactly have a medical degree. You knew the basic things to keep yourself alive, and that was practically it. Also, you weren’t even sure if that knowledge could be applied to the Time Lord’s biology. Were they even able to get the flu? Is that what it was? A flu? It seemed kind of dumb to think that a race like the Time Lords, one of the most powerful ones in the universe, could pass out because of a simple cold. Yet, the symptoms were cold–like. High fever, cold sweat…

But you had never seen The Doctor getting ill. Until that moment, you had thought it was impossible for them to get a minor illness. If only she was there with you, maybe she could do something to help him get better. Or, at least, diagnose him. You, on the other hand, had no idea on what you should do.

Looking around, you laid your eyes on the console. It wasn’t a exact copy of the Doctor’s console, the decoration was extremely different, but you could still see that some of the controls were practically the same as hers. You remembered that there was a telephone somewhere in there. She used it sometimes to call the fam. Maybe you could use it to reach her, to let her know that you were okay and inform her of the situation you had in hands.

Maybe she wouldn’t want to help The Master, and you couldn’t blame her if that was the case. Their relationship wasn’t exactly at its peak right now, but it was worth the try.

You were about to get up and walk to the console when you found a blanket lying in the back of a chair. After putting it carefully over The Master, you finally made your way to the console. Sadly, the TARDIS wasn’t exactly human user friendly and the more you looked at the confusing buttons and levers, the more you wished for a ‘How to fly a TARDIS for dummies’ book to exist. As soon as you could be reunited with The Doctor you were going to ask her to teach how to use the damn thing.

Just when you were making your fourth or fifth walk around the console, you found a phone hidden right under it. You took it out of its shelf and dusted it off. Good, you had found a way to reach to her, now the problem was that you didn’t know her number by heart. You closed your eyes as you tried to remember the damn number. You had no luck with it, but you did remember something equally useful.

The TARDIS was a living being herself. She was able to communicate with their occupants as well as just change her interiors at her will.

“Please, help me find The Doctor.” You muttered, looking at the center of her console, begging. “I know she can help The Master. Do it for him. Please.”

A few seconds passed before the TARDIS hummed at you. You supposed it was a friendly interaction, since the phone immediately started to dial. Sighing in relieve, you waited for her to pick up at the other side. The seconds passed. Nothing. No answer.

“Can you please try again?” You politely asked once more.

“What are you still doing here?” His voice sounded weak, yet menacing, when he woke up and found you on his ship. You turned to him and observed him carefully. He clearly wasn’t going through his best moment.

“You passed out.” You clarified.

“That’s not what I asked.” He tried to get up, but he only got enough strength to sit on the couch. He was doing his best to try and keep his balance, but his headache wasn’t helping at all. “I brought you back to Earth, why haven’t you left yet?”

“It looks like you need some help, so I thought I would try–“

As soon as The Master saw you holding his phone, he cut you off. “What are you doing with that?”

“I was trying to call The Doctor, I thought maybe she could help.” You tried to justify yourself, but he didn’t seem very pleased with your answer.

“Don’t you even think of getting her here.” The Master angrily hissed, grabbing onto his side in pain.

You let go of the phone that was still in your hands, worried about his state. You should have imagined that he would have rather die than let The Doctor help him.

“Ok, I won’t call her.” You assured him, noticing that his skin was even paler than before. You had never thought you would see him in that state. So weakened, so defenseless. You almost felt pity for him. “But please, let me help you.”

“Help me?” He mocked you with a quiet laugh. Not even in the state he was he could stop being his cynical self. “You are just a pitiful human. You can’t help me.”

“Let me try.” You insisted. Most people would have given up on him by now, plus you knew your efforts wouldn’t have a reward. He wasn’t the grateful type, that was for sure, but you weren’t planning on letting him die on his own. No one deserved that. Not even him. “What is happening to you?” You asked after a few seconds of silence.

“Are we playing doctors now?” As The Master talked, he could feel the strength leaving his body. It was obvious that his sarcastic answer hadn’t pleased you, judging by the look you gave him. He was doomed anyway, so he decided he might as well keep himself entertained by watching you fail over and over in the attempt of finding a cure for him. “It’s the Cyberium.” He told you.

“What?” You asked in confusion. “What do you mean the Cyberium?”

“As you already know, its last host had gotten a bit… Indisposed.” He let out with a proud smirk, referring to how he had turned the half–converted Cyberman into a tiny doll. “So I kindly offered myself as its new host.”

“That thing almost kills Shelley.” You thought out loud, remembering one of your most recent adventures with The Doctor.

“Because you humans are weak.” He really didn’t pass on a chance to remind you that, did he? “It holds too much information for you to handle. No wonder his mind was melting.”

“To be fair, it looks like you’re also having a rough time handling it.” His eyes gave you one of the coldest stares you had ever received when you stated that.

“It’s not the same.” He assured, gesturing with his hands as he spoke. You supposed that was a good sign, one that showed that he was feeling slightly better. “I am more than capable of holding all its knowledge within me. And believe me, it does have some really interesting ideas.”

“Then why is it making you ill?” You questioned, already trying to think of something that could help him. So far, he wasn’t exactly making things easy for you. “Can’t you just regenerate and heal yourself?”

“I believe the Cyberium is quite disappointed that you and your beloved Doctor have blown our plans.” The Master explained, getting up from where he was sitting and walking to you. His moves were slow and clumsy as he dragged himself to the console. Once he reached his destination, he took a deep breathe to try and regain composure before answering your other question. “It is inside me and it doesn’t have the intention to leave until I’m dead. It wouldn’t let me regenerate. It’s trying to punish me for losing our whole army to that little bomb you and your friends exploded.”

“There’s got to be a way to get it out,” The Master laughed at your words as he placed himself in front of the screen of the console, reading something you couldn’t understand because it was written in Gallifreyan. “a way to get rid of it.”

“That’s exactly what I thought about you, yet here we are.” He sassily responded, not even looking back at you.

“At least I’m trying to think of something.” His attitude was beginning to irritate you. You couldn’t hold back a sigh.

The way he turned to you with eyes full of rage caused you to intuitively jump back. “Well, you shouldn’t force yourself that hard. We don’t want you burning out the one brain cell you have left.”

You crossed your arms in frustration, ready to put up a fight. But when you were just about to ramble back against him, you realized what he was doing, what he always did. He was trying to push you away. It was the oldest trick in the book. Maybe he thought he was better off dealing with this situation alone, or maybe he really thought you were in fact useless. Either way, you had already invested yourself in finding a cure for him. And even if he didn’t want your help, you still knew you could be useful. You were totally on board now.

“I know what you’re doing.” He ignored you when you finally talked again. “You can try all you want, but I’m not leaving. You’re going to have to put up with me.”

The Master watched you as you left the console room and got deeper into the TARDIS, looking for the library so you could make some research on the Cyberium. He was right about you being a complete pain in the ass, but maybe he had underestimated you.

By the time one of your adventures finally had you involved with the MI6, you had completely forgotten about O’s existence. You hadn’t heard a word about him since that time he was video calling The Doctor. But it was normal. The Doctor wasn’t much of an open book, she didn’t usually talk about her past or about her other friendships, and you had learned not to ask. It was no surprise that she didn’t talk you about him.

Besides, you were too busy visiting other planets on a daily basis, you didn’t exactly have time to think about the handsome stranger you had talked to once through a screen. You hadn’t even met him in person.

It wasn’t until The Doctor mentioned him to another agent called C that he popped back into your head.

Apparently, O had had a fall out with the rest of MI6 and was working from an unknown location. Well, unknown to his fellow agents. The Doctor just sent him a voice message and in a few seconds she got back a picture… Of a fish? As weird as it was you had to admit you had seen way weirder things with her.

Agent C was giving you more information on the case he was assigning you when he suddenly got shot by a sniper.

You and the rest of your friends were quick to run to the TARDIS, being as fast as you could on your escape. If someone had murdered one of the leaders of MI6 just like that, you sure were an easy target. When you all got inside of the safety of The Doctor’s ship, she started to process that picture of a fish she had showed you earlier. As it turned out, the picture was in fact a coded message. Some coordinates, actually.

But there was another concern hunting you and your friends right know. An antropomorphic figure made of light was trying to get into the TARDIS, and not even The Doctor knew what it was. Luckily, she did know how to get temporally rid of it. After doing so, she started to organize you all, sending Yaz and Ryan to investigate Daniel Barton, CEO of VOR and taking you and Graham with her to meet O.

Well, this day was getting more and more interesting.

In just a few seconds after dropping your friends in San Francisco, you were in Australia. Following right behind The Doctor, you just looked around you, seeing that you were in the middle of the desert. And right in front of you was O, with two other agents. He was shorter than you had imagined him, but still quite attractive.

“I see you decoded the fish.” He greeted your friend with a smile, which she returned. “Fancy a cuppa?”

“Very much.” The Doctor gladly accepted his proposal. “Hello! This is my friend Graham, and I believe you already know Y/N.”

“O.” He introduced himself to Graham while politely shaking his hand.

“Sorry, you’re…?”

“O.” The agent repeated several times until Graham figured out that ‘O’ was in fact his name. “It was… A joke, by the others at MI6.” He began to explain. “Whenever I came into the room to meet C, he’d go ‘Oh God…’” You laughed at his anecdote while shaking his hand. “It sort of stuck and now I’ve owned it.” He smiled at you as he finished telling his story.

He then proceeded to introduce the two agents from the Australian secret service that were with him, but The Doctor didn’t seem really interested in them. “Can I take a nose around your gaff?” She asked and took off without even giving O time to answer. Graham followed her closely.

“Is she always that spontaneous?” He asked you.

“You get used to it.” You assured him in response as you watched your friend get inside of the house. Both you and O started to make your way inside too. “It’s nice finally meeting you in person.”

“You too.” O dedicated you a warm smile.

“I wish we met under better circumstances though.” You added, nervously putting some hair behind your ear. “You know, one in which aliens weren’t threatening to end the world as we know it.”

“Well, you’ve got to admit there’s some thrill about this whole situation.” He said, looking in your direction.

“That’s true.” Your smile grew bigger. “But there always is when you travel with The Doctor.”

“How so?” He raised an eyebrow, intrigued.

“Things tend to get chaotic real quick.”

“And is that a bad thing?” You saw him smiling at you and looked away, feeling a bit embarrassed.

“Not necessarily.” You shrugged. “I kind of like chaotic.”

“It must be really interesting travelling with The Doctor.” O pointed out with the biggest smile on his face. “Maybe you could tell me about your adventures with her sometime.”

“Sure, as long as you tell me a few stories about your work on MI6.” As you both reached the door of his house, he opened it, letting you go first.”

“Oh, I mainly worked as an analyst.” He clarified. “But if you’re still interested I can show you some of my work.” You gave him a kind smile as you nodded, truly interested about his work. “Would you also like a cup of tea?”

As crazy as it seemed, The Masters’ TARDIS liked you. Well, you supposed she did. Maybe she just wanted you to figure out a way to cure The Master, your weren’t really sure. The point was that she was being very helpful, in opposition to the Time Lord.

While she helped you find The Master’s library and even created a room for you to rest in, The Master spent every waken second trying to push you over the limit, to make you give up. He didn’t have the slightest hope that you could find a way to help him. Mainly because not even he could find a cure for himself, so he knew there was no way you could come up with a realistic, practical solution.

If he couldn’t think of anything to get out of that situation, no one could. No stupid human pet of The Doctor’s could be able to outsmart him. He would rather die than to see that happen. And it was most likely to end that way.

Yet, nothing he could do or say seemed to persuade you to drop everything and leave. And it was not because he wasn’t trying. With the little strength he still had, he tried to torment you time and time again. Maybe if he had been in a better state, he could have gotten you to leave, but he barely could stand on his feet for more than a few minutes and you didn’t seemed to be bother at all by him.

Soon, The Master had fallen asleep again. The Cyberium could end him instantly, but it had chosen to torture him, to give him a slow and painful death. You thanked the quietness that his nearly coma state brought as you finally put yourself to study. You needed to know what the Cyberium was exactly, how it had been created, and most importantly, how to kill it without hurting its host.

Unluckily for you, the history of the Cybermen was surprisingly wide and the Cyberium was described more like an urban legend than something real. According to the only paragraph that talked about it, the Cyberium was the essence of all the cyberknowledge personified and the Cyberman that hosted it would be the one that lead its race to the total control of the universe.

“You must be the most irritating human to ever exist.” You heard The Master’s voice as he did his best to keep himself awake, the Cyberium attacking every cell of his body. You kept reading, ignoring him completely as you waited for him to fall asleep again. You had learned that that was the best way to deal with him. “No wonder The Doctor left you to die on Gallifrey.”

Those words hit closer than they should have.

“I told her to.” Without looking away from the book in your hands, you reminded him.

“It’s true.” He admitted, turning his head to you. “But she didn’t put much of a resistance, did she? You just told her to leave and she did.” The Master sadistically laughed. “If you ask me, she was taking an enormous weight off of her shoulders. And she was well aware of it.”

You could feel tears forming in your eyes as he spoke, but you did your best not to give him the reaction he was looking for. The Master was playing tricks with you and you couldn’t let yourself fall for them.

“I mean, she didn’t hesitate to leave you not only to die, but to die with me,” He continued, pushing harder. “knowing what I am capable of.”

“Are you capable of shutting up?” Your voice came out showing you more vulnerable than you would have wanted to sound.

“You don’t know The Doctor like I do.” He laughed again, even though it made every muscle on his body ache. “Not even she knows herself like I do. You were a burden. You had been for a long time, but she didn’t know how to get rid of you. Guess I made her a favor.” The Master observed you closely, waiting for you to finally melt down. “I know you felt it too. You were dispensable. The weakest link. That’s why it was so easy for me to approach to you as O.” You instantly stood up, closing the book with a loud noise and wiping away the few tears that were running down your face. “I didn’t have to do anything, and you were at my feet. You would have done anything I would have asked you to, wouldn’t you?”

“Shut up.” You demanded, taking your things and making your way to the interior of the TARDIS.

“Where are you going?” The Master asked when he saw you taking the book with you. He was hoping he had finally pushed you hard enough for you to leave, but apparently not.

“Somewhere where I can work in silence.” You held the book close to your chest, The Master sighing at your relentless attitude.

“Why won’t you give up?” He asked, his voice making you stop instantly in the place you were standing. “What do I have to do for you to leave me alone?”

“I don’t give up.” You simply said after swallowing the lump in your throat. “There’s only two things you can do to get rid of me, you either get better or you die. Whatever happens first.”

“I should have left you on Gallifrey.” His eyes were full of hate as he watched you clean your tears away. Human emotions were absolutely pathetic.

“Well, maybe you should have.”

“You know if I were in your position and you were the one dying, I would kill you myself.” His breathing was heavy, getting more upset by moments.

“I’m not you.” You reminded him. “The Doctor taught me to never give up and to help those in need, no matter what. Even if it’s you the one that needs help.” Your fingers dug on the book’s cover as you tried to relieve some tension. “I’m not doing this for you, and not even for her. I’m doing this for me, because these are my values.” You were about to leave the console room when you stopped again and looked The Master in the eye. “By the way, you have had several opportunities to kill me today and if I recall it correctly, all you did was get me out of the dying ruins of your home planet and bring me back to mine safe and sound. If you really mean to kill me, you’re doing a terrible job at it.”

The Master smiled as he watched you finally leave the control room. He didn’t know you had that in you.

The sun was rising outside and you had barely had a few hours of sleep.

It had been a crazy night, and not the good kind of crazy. It wasn’t every night that you were attacked by creatures made of light, you got to trap one to study them and then Yaz switched places with it. The Doctor was still trying to understand what they were and what they wanted, or how had they brought Yaz all the way from San Francisco to Australia in the blink of an eye. It had been a long night that had created more questions and given you no answers.

You had been talking to Yaz for a while, trying to be there for her as she told you about the place those creatures had taken her to. She seemed quite unsettled and, sadly, you couldn’t do much to calm her down. After a little chat with her on the front porch of O’s house, you decided to leave her some space and get back inside.

“Good morning.” You heard O’s voice coming from his little kitchen as he made some tea. “Want some?”

“Morning, and yes please.” You sat close to him, rubbing your eyes as a yawn escaped your lips. “I could really use one cup of tea now.”

“Did you get any sleep at all?” He asked in a worried tone as he poured some water to boil.

“Like an hour or two.” You held your head between your hands, elbows on the wooden table, as you did your best to stay awake. You raised your look to him, worried about him. O wasn’t used to all this craziness, so you couldn’t imagined what that night had been like for him. “How about you?”

“About the same.” O sat across from you while he waited for the water to start boiling. “Is your friend okay?”

“She will be.” You assured. “She’s one of the strongest people I know.”

“And how are you?” That question caught you by surprise.

“I’m holding up.” He looked at you with sympathetic eyes as he heard your answer. “I have seen a lot of things, but never something like these creatures.”

“That makes two of us, if it’s any consolation.” O said with a kind smile. “Apart from The Doctor, this is the first time that I see extraterrestrial live right in front of my own eyes.”

“It’s a bit crazy, isn’t it? Everyone denying the possibility of life on other planets when there’s actually so many species you can’t even know them all.” You sighed, immersed in your own thoughts. “For all we know, human race could have come from out of space too.”

“I’ve been gathering alien evidence half of my life.” He told you, looking at you in the eye. “And everyone treated me like I was crazy.”

“3 years ago I would have probably treated you like that too.” You admitted, remembering your life before meeting The Doctor. You had always been kind of skeptical, but your life had changed for the better when you found out about everything that was really out there. “But joke’s completely on all of us now.”

O laughed slightly as he got up to the sound of boiling water. He poured the hot liquid into two cups, handing you one. You thanked him with a kind smile.

“Why did you move to Australia?” You asked him as you stirred the sugar in your tea with a spoon. “Couldn’t you work from London or anywhere else in the UK?”

“I never really liked the city.” He confessed, taking a sip of his own cup. “Too many noise. I work better from here, in the middle of the desert.”

“Doesn’t it get lonely?” You asked without thinking about it. When you realized how your question might be perceived, you looked down at your cup and took a sip, trying to hide your embarrassment.

“Sometimes.” He replied, his smile not leaving his face. “But it’s for the best.”

The light was starting to come through the windows as you both had breakfast in silence. If it had been any other person, you would have felt awkward being in silence for so long. You would had probably forced yourself into some small talk to try and fill the silence. But for some reason you felt comfortable there with him. Just having breakfast without saying a word.

“How long have you known The Doctor, Y/N?” He asked you when you had both finished your cup of tea.

“It’s hard to tell.” You sighed, trying to calculate how long had passed in your own personal time line. “Things don’t happen in a straight line inside the TARDIS. Time loses all of its meaning.” O looked at you with questioning eyes. Maybe The Doctor hadn’t told him about time travel, you thought. “How much do you know about all of that?”

“A bit.” He shrugged. “Our paths crossed very briefly once when she was a man.”

“What do you mean ‘when she was a man’?” Disbelieve took over you as you tried to understand what was going on.

“Oh.” The smile left momentarily his face. “She never mentioned that?”

“I didn’t know she meant that for real.” The both of you laughed. “With her, you never really know when she’s being serious.”

“Her species has this ability, a way to escape death.” O began to explain you. “When their life is in danger, they change every cell of their body, giving them a random new face. They call it ‘regeneration’” Amazed, you opened your eyes as he spoke. “I’ve been trying to gather information about her too.”

“I kind of want to know what she looked like as a man.” You bit your lip as curiosity aroused in you.

“I was able to get some photos of some of her previous regenerations.” He stood up and walked to a shelf in which he had a bunch of papers piled up. “This whole shelf is full with all the information I could gather of her. There are a lot of inconsistencies, but it’s still really, really interesting” You looked at the documents almost like if you were starving and they were a delicious buffet placed in front of you. “Do you wanna have a look?” You energetically nodded as he offered you a way to satisfy your curiosity.

O took the folders and brought them to you, letting them on the table and taking the empty cups to the sink. You grabbed one of them and opened it to find the photo of a man in a brown suit next to a young blonde woman.

“Wow.” You couldn’t hold back the exclamation as you eyed the page in front of you. “Is this what she looked like when you met her?” You asked O as you pointed the man in the picture.

“Not exactly.” The agent shook his head. “She has had many faces. That is just one of them.”

You kept reading the papers in front of you, finding out more about The Doctor’s past. There was a lot of facts about The Doctor that you could have never imagined, so many names, so many organizations related to your friend. You were half through the first page when you stopped reading and put the paper away.

“I feel like I shouldn’t be reading this.” You sighed, feeling guilty. “Isn’t this like a violation of her privacy?”

“No.” He was quick to respond. “In fact, it’s not that you should, you must know all you possibly can about her. You travel with her, you risk your life every day for her. How can you let your life in hands of someone who hides her past from you?” Your gaze switched between the papers in front of you and O’s eyes, thinking about his words. “Do you know where she’s from?”

“She’s from…” You hesitated, not being able to remember the name at first. “Gallifrey. She has mentioned it sometime.”

“What do you know about Gallifrey? Have you ever been?” He asked you, his tone more inquisitive than it usually was.

“Not much. Just what The Doctor said about it.” You recalled the few conversations with your friend. “I believe she mentioned there are two suns instead of just one… But The Doctor never took us there.”

“I think I might know why.” O handed you another file about your friend’s home planet. You eyed it. “It was placed in the constellation of Kasterborous and it was home to the Time Lords, The Doctor’s species.”

“Was?” You asked when you realized that he was using the past tense.

“Something terrible happened to Gallifrey.” He pointed the picture of an enormous dome in an orange sky. “There was a war and–“

“Come on, you two. Everyone out front. Lots to chat up on.” The Doctor surprised you by coming out of the TARDIS. You quickly dropped the sheet in your hands and hid it in its folder. “I made ice tea. Possibly.”

Holding the large glass in her hands, she made her way out of the house as you and O rushed to clean up the mess of documents on the table. You helped him put the folders back to the shelf where they were before.

You were making your way outside when O stopped you by grabbing your wrist. He leant over your ear, careful not to be overheard by anyone.

“I’ll tell you the rest when we get a chance of being alone.”

Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 5

Interlude: Thomas

(reader beware: mature content)

It was strange to say the least to have David here again after all these years. (All these years and not a bit of change.) Sometimes Thomas felt that he was hallucinating it (losing his mind at last) or dreaming. But then again, that couldn’t be the case. If this were a hallucination or a dream, things would be easier. They would be happier.

They would be happy.

Thomas had never liked to think - or hallucinate or dream - about how things with David had soured, towards the end. It had been easy to remember the good things exclusively, the companionship, the tenderness, the comfort and thrill and love. David had stayed a joyful memory, despite the tragedy of his (supposed) passing, somehow still an oasis in a desert of grief. Perhaps this had been idealization. It is easy to idealize a dead loved one. It is less easy to keep up that pretense in said loved one’s bodily, live presence.

It was strange, yes. How often had he wished in vain that someone, anyone would come back, just one of them, it didn’t even matter who? Just one other occupied room. Just one person to turn to, when things got rough. Just one person who would understand. Now someone had come back. And not just anyone. David, within reach again, to see, to speak to... to touch. But whenever his hands started reaching out, there was that memory again.

“Well, I just almost got myself and half the men shot for mutiny.”

“Shot for...? Thomas, what on earth did you do?”

“I retracted my opposition. Not willingly, mind you. I am to supervise the rearguard. You, Lieutenant, with your expertise, will most likely be part of the task force that’ll retrieve the actual library.”

“They split us up?! Thomas... do you think they know?”

“What is there to know?”

“Songbird, please...”

“You got what you wanted, Davey. You won. Operation Spatchcock is a go.”

And yet, still, despite all that, he could only ever curtail, never stop, the urge to reach and touch.

It was David, after all. David with that beautiful hair so good for tugging, with his eyes as clear as always, with those sweet, sweet lips. Those capable hands. It was David whose body Thomas knew. Touching would feel like coming home. Touching might piece something back together inside him, something that remained by itself, broken and abandoned and forgotten, for decades and decades.

And there was something scary in that thought. That David might break him open and unearth that hidden something. That there would have to be a breaking. Thomas could not afford to break another time.

So he left David to sit at the dinner table and stare holes into his plate by himself, went and fetched Peter’s finished Latin homework and attempted to peruse it in the drawing room. Peter’s Latin was coming along, at a sedate pace but nonetheless, but today it was abysmal. Clearly he’d had other things on his mind. And who could fault him? After puzzling through the first paragraph of it, Thomas crossed the room to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a glass of Scotch. The bottle was almost (but not quite) as old as he was, and had been nearly emptied slowly, over the decades, a glass or two every other year, because Thomas wasn’t a man who drunk to excess.

He found he couldn’t concentrate on the paper before him as well as he would have liked. Scraps of old, old conversations kept reverberating within his mind, loud today, understandable under the circumstances.

“You’re being paranoid, songbird. I understand, but... I am certain Folly command wouldn’t muster every last wizard of serviceable age just to send them off to die. It will be a tough mission, I’ve no doubt of that. But I’m convinced that we’ll come out on top.”

“Bullshit. It’s hundreds of miles behind the front, David. We’ll be cut off from any reinforcements. Nowhere to fall back to. According to intelligence, the place is a death trap.”

“And who do you know in intelligence? How would you have gotten an intelligence officer to relinquish that information, hm?”

“This is hardly the time. I don’t need to blow intelligence officers to see what’s bloody obvious. You think command cares if we make it through this one? It’s high time you got that pretty head out of your stack of books and faced reality. They’re willing to bet all our lives on this bloody suicide run on the off-chance that someone makes it home with that library.”

“There is considerable empirical value to that library.”

“Oh? That’s what it’s about, eh, for you? You honestly believe that I am going to stand here and let them slaughter my men for ‘considerable empirical value’. My men, David! I’ve got them this far! I’m not throwing them into the meat grinder for your fucking research.”

“Would you prefer seeing said research in the hands of the Nazis? God only knows what they’re doing with it!”

“I would see it in the hands of no one. Chuck a few bombs at the place and bury all of it. Damn you and damn your revenge and damn your research.”

Thomas sighed and poured another glass of Scotch.

Just then, the reason for his discomposure entered the room and sat down in a chair by the fireplace, his back straight, his face resolute, determined. Like he was going to make it work. It irked Thomas, and he didn’t know why, that David wanted to get to the fixing of things. There wouldn’t have been anything to fix if David hadn’t been so stupid as to advocate for the Ettersberg mission.

“May I?” David asked, reaching for the bottle.

“Get your own.” Waspish. Juvenile. Why couldn’t he stop acting like this? Why didn’t he feel like even wanting to try? Thomas lifted a hand to his temples. His eyes stung. He’d been getting very little sleep lately; the return of David shook loose memories, and the night terrors had come back.

David’s face looked soft in the firelight. almost like before the war, when it had been a little fuller. If Molly kept making pies at the rate she was going, he’d soon get back to normal. Thomas clenched his hands in his lap, and it was as if they were sending him little impulses: touch him, hold him, have him. But spurn him, sang his blood, don’t let him near.

It was easier when... he didn’t finish that thought. Didn’t say it out loud either, because that would have been the height of cruelty. It was a lie, anyway. It had not been easier when David had, for all intents and purposes, been dead. It had been... differently complicated.

Thomas went to pour a third glass of Scotch, reconsidered and took the last slug directly from the bottle. It got David’s attention, so he flicked his tongue against the rim of it, just for a split-second, just briefly enough to have plausible deniability. Back in the day, he would have winked. He didn’t now. Tease him, ignore him. Reel him back in, push him away. His heart was loud and clamorous and contradictory tonight. It was like being fifteen again, or no, scratch that, it hadn’t been... he hadn’t been nearly as complicated at fifteen. He’d only known that he found the boy who tutored him and sometimes came to watch the rugby exceedingly pretty, so he had brought him wildflowers plucked from the wayside, and cakes nicked from the kitchens, and helped carry his books and quizzed him for tests and took him along for nightly excursions and eventually asked to kiss him behind the shed for the cricket equipment.

For practice, he’d said. An experiment, David had said. It doesn’t have to mean anything, they’d both agreed. But then they’d actually managed, somehow, to bump their lips together, and Thomas had been thinking, oh, and yes and so good and I’m never doing anything else but this. And eventually they’d had to admit to each other that the experiment only ever yielded a need for repetition, and they weren’t practicing for anything. Neither of them actually desired a girlfriend like most of the other boys at Casterbrook. They desired each other, and kissing behind the shed for the cricket equipment, forever.

Oh yes, he had known at fifteen, at eighteen, at twenty that what they were doing could have seen them ruined, jailed, ousted from society. It had been a thrill to his young mind, a scandalous secret, an adventure. The glamour had worn off of it as they grew older, as their schoolmates were settling down with wives and children and summer houses in the country and Thomas and David were still sneaking around like teenagers, and ducking behind tiring pretenses and stupid rumours and Molly’s skirts for their safety. But that had just been what their relationship had naturally been like, a mundane fact of life, like taxes. And then there’d been the men with the pink triangles. The stark and final reminder that nothing about having to exist thus in secret was thrilling or mundane, that the people around them genuinely wanted them dead.

But everything had gone to hell in a handbasket by then anyway.

Thomas set the empty bottle down, and it hit the table a bit harder than intended. His hand-eye-coordination was already slightly off. Besides that, his face was starting to warm, in a way that told him that it was about time to retire from drinking any more before things seriously went south. But he didn’t want to listen to the voice of reason tonight. He wanted to listen to the voice that said, perhaps another glass.

So he traversed the room again and unearthed another bottle from the liquor cabinet. Walking straight wasn’t a problem - yet. Thomas wasn’t, usually, a man who drank to excess. But exceptions must be.

He had just poured the third glass when David asked, “What were you reading?”

Thomas gestured vaguely at the papers still spread out on the coffee table. “Tacitus. It’s Peter’s homework.”

“Oh,” David said. “Can I help you revise it? You seem tired, and I always had a hand for--”

“No,” Thomas cut in and poured the contents of his glass down his throat in one quick, decisive movement. “I told you before, and I was very serious: I won’t have you interfere with Peter’s studies.”

David sniffed. “But I am allowed to talk to him, aren’t I.”

“I suppose. I’m thinking about it.” Thomas looked from his glass back to David, meaning to give him a stern glare, but his eyes ended up roving, caught on the lines of David’s face, slightly unfocused. Here he was, back here, to touch. They’d kissed earlier, down in the lab, and maybe Thomas had hoped that after that, things would appear easier, clearer, somehow. But nothing was easier. He’d hoped, in secret, not even going so far as to articulate this to himself, that a kiss would put them back on an even keel, erase the clamour in his heart, restore tranquility to him. But nothing was tranquil. In fact, he hadn’t desired like this in a long time. He’d gotten one kiss, nowhere near enough to slake this suddenly recurring need.

“Come to bed with me,” he suggested.

“What?” David exclaimed with an incredulous little laugh. “You don’t trust me to go over your apprentice’s Latin homework, but you’d take me to bed?”

“Yes.” It really didn’t seem too extraordinary a stance to take. Peter’s studies were meaningful in the greater scheme of things. Sex wasn’t. “Personal is not necessarily the same as important.”

David shook his head. “I never could agree with you on that.”

To keep his hands and mouth occupied, Thomas poured himself another glass of Scotch, and downed it quickly. He was beginning to lose count of how many glasses deep he was. But that hardly mattered, because it made his lips tingle and it burned on the way down and the reasons why he didn’t want to touch David now were swimming out of focus.

“I had hoped it would be different,” David said, “our first time back home.”

Thomas couldn’t help it, he had to laugh. Our first time back home. “Davey,” he said, and it came out rougher than intended, “you’ve hoped for many things.”

“That’s true,” David murmured. “I suppose you were right, back then. It really was high time I faced reality.”

And this... was wrong, that David should suddenly talk like this. He’d much rather have naively optimistic David with his head stuck in a textbook than this broken, humbled version. Reach, touch, Thomas’s heart whispered, and it was easy to forget why it was a bad idea. Thomas reached, put a hand on David’s cheek, ran the pad of his thumb across David’s sweet mouth. David shivered, lips opening in a gentle gasp. It felt familiar in a way Thomas had forgotten things could feel. Like reaching back across the decades, and it was a miracle that his fingers remembered, even ever so slightly, what it was like to touch David’s face.

Suddenly, something dark clawed at his chest, something frenzied, almost like panic, because how could this be, this ghost of a sensation, remembered from all these years back, how could it be that this was real, brought to life again? Suddenly he feared that if he closed his eyes, and opened them again, David might have disappeared.

There was but one thing for it. Closer. More. Now their bodies were flush against each other, their lips crashing together, greedy, desperate, ungentle. Thomas fisted a hand in David’s hair - David whimpered so prettily against his lips - the other hand pulling up his shirt to get at the skin beneath, warm, living skin. The planes of David’s body pressed against his front, so familiar. His head spun, and fear threatened to drown him, choke him, so he sought salvation in David’s mouth, licking inside, kissing him frantically. Oh, he had been starved of this, and one kiss was not enough, so he kissed him another time, and another, and another.

“Mh... Thomas...” David disengaged, shifting back a little in his seat, a hand coming up to cup Thomas’s face. He sucked the index and middle finger into his mouth without hesitation.

“Thomas... shsh... you’re, this is not... you’re shaking, please stop, just a moment.”

David‘s other hand came to rest on Thomas’s shoulder, maintaining an arm’s length of distance between them, and it irritated Thomas, being so pushed away. Was he shaking? Maybe. But what did that matter? He could figure that out later, or never. He put a hand on David’s thigh and leaned forward against the hand gripping his shoulder, trying to chase David’s lips. “Now you’re complaining, Davey?”

“No, but...” David got up. Thomas, attempting to follow him, swayed into him, and steadied himself by in turn holding onto David’s shoulders. Whoops. Hopefully that looked like he’d meant to do that.

“See, you’ve been drinking,” David said. “It’s not right. Let’s just get you to your bed, okay, and I’ll get to mine.”

“Or...” Thomas flicked David’s chest with his index finger to stress his point, “we’ll both go to my bed and stay there and see what develops.”

David shook his head softly. “Another time.”

“What makes you think I’ll offer another time?”

“We love each other.” David’s voice was steady, his gaze clear and firm, and it rubbed something raw within Thomas, something that did not like being so exposed at all. “That is the one thing I am still sure about, even in this new world, even after the war, even after... that place. We will figure things out, but not tonight.”

Thomas laughed, a bitter, mirthless bark of a sound. Because he’d been impossible to David ever since he had returned, he hadn’t been able to contain any of the ugly slurry of his feelings, and he hadn’t been able to afford David even the slightest shred of courtesy, and yet here David was, talking about how they would definitely figure things out. “What if we don’t figure things out?” he asked, breaking contact, disentangling his limbs from David’s. “What if I don’t want to? What if I won’t want to figure things out with the man who led us all to go to Ettersberg?”

David bowed his head, his eyes now hooded, dark. “I’d understand that.” He took a step back, in the direction of the door. “Do you want to break up?”

It was a genuine offer. David was offering.

Do you want to break up?

Had he taken another step back? He was so far away. So, so far away. It was too dark in the reading room and he was slipping away, away into the past again, no longer in reach to touch, and maybe it was really just the darkness of the reading room, maybe it was Thomas’s vision going black around the edges, and he trembled, and he ached,

and he was close again somehow, hands clawed into David’s sweater, his head buried in David’s shoulder, breathing in his scent in horrid, flat, hitching gasps.

“No,” he muttered, when he had the air for it. “No. No, no.”

“Songbird.” David sounded saddened, startled. The nuances of David’s voice, suddenly again familiar. There was a hand down his back, a hand in his hair stroking along the hairline, fingernails lightly scratching his scalp in a way he’d forgotten he found comforting. David hadn’t forgotten. “Oh... Thomas. You’re not okay.”

It ought to have been ridiculous, you’re not okay. As much was evident. But he couldn’t recall ever hearing it said, and it did something to him, and he held on to David’s shoulder like it was the only anchor in a sea of chaos, and he didn’t know how to ride this out, so he clung and waited and the tide tossed him about and did not recede.

“I forgot what you smelled like,” he heard himself say, detachedly. “The sheets in your room lost your scent eventually, and then all your clothes did because I wore them, and it almost broke me a second time, because I was losing more and more of you with each passing day and you weren’t coming back to renew anything. I forgot what it was like to touch you. The sound of your voice. The feel of your signare. The feel of your hand.”

“Eighty years,” David whispered. “I’m so sorry... I didn’t understand.”

No, Thomas wanted to say, no you damn well didn’t, but he couldn’t. All he could do was cling to David’s shoulder and be battered by this, wrenched open by his care. Walking wounded.

“But I’m here now,” David continued. “I will take care of things.”

Somehow, Thomas found his voice again. It sounded strange to his own ears. “What things? What will you take care of?”

David looked at him, so earnestly it hurt to observe. “Anything needs must,” he said. “You.”

“But I am not for taking care of,” Thomas said. He didn’t know why he said it. Except... here is my duty, mine, alone. Do not suggest you will relieve me. There was never any relief. There will never be any relief.

“Oh, songbird, but aren’t you?” David asked. “The others, they all went into the country and attempted to heal, or they are at rest forever. When did you rest?”

“I...” Thomas tried to gather his resolve, put the walls back into place that David was wearing down with all these questions, and he found he couldn’t. He felt... once, as a child, he had watched Mother dispel slugs from her rose garden by pouring salt on the creatures. He, then five years old, had burst into tears at the sight of the slugs squirming impotently to get away as they succumbed to the fatal substance, and he’d tried to wrestle the jar of salt from his mother’s hand when tears wouldn’t stop her, and received a thorough scolding for it. He felt like one of those slugs now: soft and unwitting and utterly defenseless before an almighty fate. Tomorrow, the walls would be back in place. Tomorrow he would be The Nightingale again, unapproachable and aloof. But not tonight. Tonight he was soft and lonesome and powerless and there was nothing but the dark of the reading room, the alcohol making swirls in his head, and his boyfriend, sweetly returned from the dead.

“I... don’t,” he said. “I didn’t.”

“That’s not right,” David said. His hand was still in Thomas’s hair, stroking in a way that was infinitely soothing, blunt fingernails against his scalp. “That shouldn’t have been asked of you.”

Well, life doesn’t care about shouldn’t, Thomas wanted to say, it simply was asked of me, even when I was in so deep I could barely lift my head they were asking it of me, and not least because you weren’t there, because you ran away, but what he ended up saying, murmuring into David’s jumper rather, was “They needed me.”

David snorted. “Command? You never--”

Thomas shook his head. “The lads did.”

“Ah, yes. Your ducklings.” The smile was audible in David’s voice.

It had been a joke between them, Nightingale’s Ducklings. The younger and younger recruits they had kept sending down from London in the latter years of the war. Fresh-faced youths, barely of age, looking like they’d been playing dress-up in their uniforms. Some of them scared, some of them vigorous and over-eager to prove themselves to the more seasoned veterans, most of them now dead. Thomas had tried, whenever possible, to do his utmost to protect the boys, but tossed up against a place like Ettersberg, there had been no protecting anybody.

“And how are the chaps anyway? I’m assuming you’re still in contact with them all?” David chuckled. “Oh goodness, they must be old men by now!”

“I’d like to go to bed now,” Thomas said.

“Hm? Oh of course, of course.” Getting what he wanted, David was quickly distracted from his previous line of inquiry. I do know him so very well, Thomas thought disjointedly as David wrapped an arm around his waist. On autopilot - even still! - Thomas slung his arm across David’s shoulders in return. They’d done this on unnumbered pub crawls, then later on similarly unnumbered battlefields. “There we go, ay-up, Captain.”

“I can walk,” Thomas protested, even as his head dropped back onto David’s shoulder. Really, he wasn’t that inebriated. Slightly tipsy, that was all.

“In a straight line?” David questioned.

“That won’t be a problem.”

David sighed airily and nosed into his hair. “Let me have this, Thomas.”

----

Thomas tried again, when he had David in his bedroom kneeling before him (between his legs) at the foot of the bed, as David took his hand and unbuttoned his cuff and pressed one chaste kiss to his wrist. It made Thomas shudder, being so kissed, and seconds later he was reaching almost blindly for David’s face again, tugging him up, crashing their mouths together, wanting David’s lips on his, wanting David’s lips all sorts of places. But David broke the kiss and smiled at him, a smile full of such love as he didn’t deserve, and didn’t budge, even when Thomas slipped his right shoe off and ran his foot along David’s inseam.

David gasped, and twitched a little, but he said, “No, songbird. Another time.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Thomas said, which he hadn’t meant to, in a strange, rough voice that sounded much more 1940s than 2010s. Why on earth had he said that? Tomorrow he would remember all the very good reasons for not recommitting to anything where David was concerned. But tonight he was wanting, nothing else.

“I hope so,” David replied as he got up and smiled sadly, because oh, he knew those reasons too. He bent down one last time and ran his thumb across Thomas’s cheekbone, and kissed him again, a soft, small peck, a kiss goodnight. “Sleep well.”

And he went back to his own room.

So bereft of company and the warmth of David’s body, Thomas groaned and pressed the heel of his hand into his crotch. Somewhere along the way wanting had become needing, and now he was alone with it. As always, alone with it.

For a split-second he considered going and getting his entertainment elsewhere. Peter was in tonight, some few rooms over, perhaps this would be the night he finally tried to... but no, that thought was, as always, firmly tamped down, because Peter’s pregnant girlfriend was a woman of formidable power, and besides, there was never any use to any attempts upon the tragically heterosexual. He hadn’t considered Peter in such a manner at all lately, what with David around again, so perhaps this was one of these rare problems that solved themselves.

His pool of potential applicants already depleted, Thomas took himself in hand. He hadn’t felt the need to do this in a while, and didn’t expect to last any time at all. As if a tightly locked floodgate had been opened, his mind conjured up images of David, things he hadn’t let himself think about in decades and decades lest the grief make him lose his mind for good. But the memories were no longer tinged with grief now, because David was back, and his mind delighted in recalling again the lines and dips and curves of David’s body and being able to do so freely, without the crushing sadness of permanent loss.

David before the war, softer then, solid, (he still was too thin now) no shell-shock dulling the light in his eyes. The sensation of tracing the dip of David’s hips through the soft fabric of one of his jumpers, the hard line of him in his slacks, backing him up against a bookshelf in the mundane library (so risqué but oh, so thrilling) and listening to his breath deepen, sticking a hand down his pants, being greeted with the velvet heat of David’s cock, watching David’s face pinch and, eventually, release, going from biting his lips raw and red in an effort to not be overheard to slack-mouthed pleasure. David’s mouth just now, so pink and slick from their kissing, David kneeling between his legs and where that might have gone, in another, ideal world. While Thomas very much loved giving oral, he knew with David the receiving was just as sweet. He imagined them taking a night and just alternating sucking each other off until they collapsed in bone-deep, delicious exhaustion into dreamless sleep, and he felt his hips cant upwards into his fist with renewed need, and gripped himself just this side of too tight. Yes, god, he thought, my David.

At about this point Thomas noticed himself crying, a clear stream of tears down his cheeks, but they felt cathartic, so he left them. His heart was light. He had done this once or twice just after the war, brought memories of David to the forefront of his mind for this express purpose, simply exhausting any possibility of chasing a few seconds of relief from it all. The resulting crash and burn and slew of self-disgust when he’d inevitably remembered his boyfriend (supposedly) blowing his brains out in this very building had never been pretty. (He’d considered turning to drinking to excess then for a bit, until Molly had put her foot down regarding that.) Tonight he knew there would be no crashing and burning, because David was just down the hall, hale and whole and sleeping the sleep of the less-than-innocent.

He had flagged a bit, with the crying, so Thomas sped up his hand and remembered that week they’d spent at David’s father’s hunting lodge, the two of them alone in the empty countryside, free to share the bed in the master bedroom, free to wake next to each other and make early-morning love unhurriedly, free to prepare breakfast in the nude and take it back to bed. They’d been younger then, and made love almost unflaggingly, pausing intermittently to eat and generally observe life’s basic needs, only for this moment or that to start another round, and before they’d known it they’d come together again, fevered with need for each other, drunk on all this unobserved alone time.

My Folly now, Thomas thought disjointedly, we can do it in every room we never used to dare to, and he released another moan as he felt himself cresting, and the back of his head hit the headboard with a thunk as he came, came and came with the force of his lonely years, eking the moment out and stroking himself to overstimulation, until his hips twitched and his whole body shook with the pleasure-pain of it. And if he fell asleep in the wet patch before he could gather the resolve to get up and fully undress, half in déshabillé with himself still in hand, it certainly was undignified, but there was no one there to witness it.

Black Gold (Chapter 2)

(Here’s Chapter 2 of the fic I’m writing! I hope you guys like it!)

The European Union Newsroom; November 6th, 7:39 P.M.

“You better tell us everything we need to know, EU! There are people we care about who could be in grave danger, but you won’t tell us anything about it?!” Germany said angrily, slamming his hands onto the EU’s wooden desk. “You three are the only people who I will not give any information to. I could care less if people you care about are in danger,” the EU replied firmly, looking at the three with his hollow black eyes. “My own grandchildren were involved! Along with my son! How dare you exclude us from this information?!” France shouted, glaring at the EU. “Especially because of you, France. You leak intel to our enemies. You cannot be trusted with such classified information,” the EU said. The UK sighed. “France, let’s go find out ourselves. It’s the only solution. Besides, the EU can’t stop us if we go with our own national passports and not the European Union ones he gave us when we joined this bloody union,” he said, taking his lover’s hand and leading her to their car. The airport was only a few miles away, so it would be a short drive, yet a long flight; 16 long, painstaking hours to be exact. “Shouldn’t Germany come along too?” France asked, looking at the UK. “No. He is needed here. We have to go and find Austria for him just so we can make sure everything is alright.” The UK answered. “Alright. There should be tickets booked for us in the glove box. I booked them earlier since we were planning to visit anyway.” France said.

16 long hours later, and both the UK and France arrive in Yellowstone, Wyoming. “America is waiting for us outside,” the UK said, checking his phone as they left. France looked around and noticed America’s car. “You guys weren’t supposed to come for another month! Why are you here?” America said to his mother. “We heard about the whole incident in Salt Lake Creek. How is Wyoming?” France replied, looking at America.

“She’s fine, but I still didn’t expect you guys to come until Christmas like you normally do,” America said. “Especially since the whole incident could’ve been explained then. But since it’s so recent, and none of us know who made those six OPEC members try to steal oil from me, I can hardly clear anything up.” The UK noticed there were medical supplies in the back of the car. “America, why are there so many supplies back there?” He asked with worry. America fell silent. “I’ll explain when we get to my place. Hop in.”

About an hour and a half later, the UK and France are sitting on the couch with America. “Mind explaining the medical supplies to us now?” France asked her son. America took a deep breath.

“Well, during the incident, as I was trying to reason--”

“You mean to argue, dad?” said Wyoming from the kitchen.

“Like I was saying.. While I was arguing with Saudi Arabia and Russia, there was sudden gunfire. One single shot had been fired, and it got Texas in the leg. He’s fine now, but it was one of the most restless nights of my life. Saudi Arabia said it was him, but I don’t believe it. He was in front of me, not in the East where the bullet came from. So now we don’t know if someone was trying to assassinate me, Texas, or one of the culprits,” America said. “It could’ve been a seventh OPEC member who they made a sniper just in case they got caught,” the UK said. “Maybe,” America replied. “But why Texas? Sure, he has oil, but that doesn’t make him a target. The OPEC organization strictly forbids and foreign oil rigs on U.S Soil... Well, I believe they do anyway.” France then noticed a drop of some kind of substance on the floor. She went to it and kneeled down, picking some up with her fingertip. “France? What did you find?” The UK asked. “I believe it’s some form of cyanide, but I’m not sure,” France replied, taking off the glove she had on. “Let me see it,” America said, taking the glove from France. “Yep. That’s cyanide. A dangerous form of it, too.”

“But who would bring cyanide into a home with over 50 people living inside of it? Wouldn’t that be considered manslaughter? Or mass genocide?” The UK asked, looking at both of them. “It can be in-between,” France replied. “Unless there is no doubt that this was attempted mass genocide. Then again, it could still be a danger. Who knows if we’re standing right next to something that should be killing us right now, but it isn’t.” America tensed a little at the thought of dying and leaving all of his kids behind. Who would take care of them? Canada or Poland? Both, possibly. But if his parents died with him, that would cause a mass panic all across the globe; not just North America and parts of Central America or the Caribbean. “Don’t worry. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Just as long as--” the UK was cut off by Canada suddenly breaking the door down. “Step away from that area! There were signs of a bomb from one of my own satellites right in that place!” Canada said, getting his parents and brother away from that area. “Sorry, America, but I have to break the floorboards open,” Canada then said to his older brother. “Yeah, yeah! Whatever! Just get that bomb out of my house!” America replied, staying near his parents. Canada grabbed a crowbar he brought and forced the floorboards off of the floor. He grabbed the bomb and studied it. He then found the date the bomb was made. “January 1915. The same year dad was bombed about 51 times by the German Empire,” Canada said. “The bomb isn’t going to go off. It’s been deactivated for years now.” The UK looked at America in shock. “Why in Heaven’s name do you have a World War I bomb in your own home?! As a souvenir of all of the people and money I lost?!” He said angrily, clearly upset by the memories. “Or as a reminder that your own father almost died because of that German wanker?!” France grabbed the UK and held him close. “Calm down,” she said. “It’s nothing but a decoy.”

“France, it’s still a bomb from when I almost died! Do you even know how upsetting that is?! What do you expect from me? To be calm about this whole situation?” The UK said, getting out of France’s arms. “You know what? This was a ridiculous reason to even come here. I’m going back to London.”

“But dad--”

“No buts! I’m going home. You can come along if you want to, France. Unless you wish to discuss the raids on London during World War I with our own children.”

France remained silent. She didn’t even look her own husband in the eye as he left. “Kids, you know full well your father cannot handle such sensitive topics. Do not bring that up again. It was nice seeing you, America,” she said as she left with the UK. Canada turned to America. “So what are we going--”

“Leave.”

“What..?”

“Leave, Canada! Don’t come back!”

Canada rushed out immediately. Why was his family suddenly getting torn apart? It was all okay before. Why now? Canada needed to find someone. Someone he knew would be on the other side of the world, and that America nor the rest of his family trusted. He had to find China. He would know exactly what to do.

Beijing, China; 12:35 A.M.

Another day had gone by just like that. China had not expected the days to go by so quickly, but that’s what he got when he was a workaholic and most of the world was against him. Then again, it was nice to come home to friends he lived with due to loneliness. Firstly, there was Mongolia. He was the more peaceful one of the household next to China. Next was Macau; a micronation very few nations even know to exist. He was rather uptight for a small nation, but anyone can get like that when they have not yet been internationally recognized by the United Nations leaders and the UN himself. Finally, there’s Hong Kong. She moved out recently, but before, she was a rather bright and smart girl with a lot of imagination, like the UK.

“Hey, China. What’s with the sad look in your eyes?” Mongolia asked, facing China as he kept making dinner. “What do you mean? I always look like this,” China replied as he opened the door to his room. Mongolia just sighed. “Alright, if you say so,” he said quietly, fixing the apron he had on. China closed the bedroom door behind him and immediately took off his jacket, hanging it on a coat hanger right above his door. He then grabbed out his portfolio and began flipping through the paperwork as he sat on his bed. The paperwork was mainly financial, war strategies, military costs, and a few other things that China despised working on. Especially since the UN leaders piled work on top of work on the poor man. He always kept working though, regardless of what people told him to do. There was a sudden knock on his bedroom door. It sounded rather familiar, but so did most knocks. “Come in,” China said, putting the paperwork away. He then heard the clicking of winter boots and immediately saw the Canadian’s face. “Oh, hello, Canada,” China then said in surprise. He had expected Macau of Mongolia, but not Canada of all people. “Hey, China. Can we talk? It’s about the recent incident that included my brother, my niece, and my nephew,” Canada said softly, looking at China. “Yes, of course,” China said, making room for Canada to sit on the bed. “What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Well, it started all the way back in Salt Lake Creek, Wyoming, at around midnight. America and Texas were taking shifts guarding the oil rigs and they were on break while some of America’s top guards took their places. While they were talking, Saudi Arabia and Russia were both found listening in for intel. Well, what we believe they were doing at best. Saudi Arabia won’t tell any of us exactly what happened. Four other guards caught Austria, Venezuela, Iran, and Nigeria in the other rooms with their own oil barrels trying to harvest the recently pumped oil. Algeria was supposedly there as well, but no guards found her. They are assuming she was the sniper they hired to try and take out either America or Texas or possibly the other OPEC members if they were ever caught and were forced to give out classified information. Wyoming is still trying to recover her heavy financial loss, but it’s hardly gotten better. Now, I’m one for being optimistic, but this whole situation is even getting me hopeless that there won’t be a possibility of a war or two going on at once,” Canada explained to China. He watched China’s face become terrified to upset as he spoke. “Yeah, I knew you would be upset when you heard that one of your best allies was involved.” China was indeed very upset at Russia. He would have jeopardized his own life by doing such a thing! He has kids! What kind of father would do that?! “I am upset. Russia should not have risked such a horrible thing. Especially when he has kids who look up to him and try to be like him. If they grow up with that image of their father in their head, they will attempt the same thing. So will their kids. And so on,” China said firmly, looking at Canada. He still had a hard time believing it even when he was told by Russia himself that he had attempted it. How could his best ally do this and jeopardize their relationship? Their ties? Unfortunately, China had to find out the hard way when he was suddenly pushed onto a flight to Tokyo, Japan, the very next day.

After a long, grueling flight to Tokyo, China finally reached Khaosan Tokyo Samurai Hotel in the big, technological city he would be staying in. Of course, he hated it. He and Japan had never gotten along, due to their major and minor conflicts in history, and the executions of China’s own people by Japan during the Second World War. He set his suitcase down next to one of the two single beds in the hotel room and sat on the bed. “Well, another day, another stupid conflict you got yourself dragged into, China,” China muttered to himself. As he was making tea, he suddenly got a phone call from an old friend, yet a slight enemy; a frenemy, in better terms. The United States. “Nǐ hǎo?” China asked as he answered the phone. “Hey, China! Old pal! Uhm, do you have any spare planes?” America asked.

“Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Dunno. You seem to loan them to North Korea a lot, even though you constantly barrage his name around the rest of us. Are you two a couple or something?”

China immediately freaked out at that statement. “What?! Are you kidding, Měiguó?! Why would you even assume that?!” China asked in shock.

“Whoa, calm down there, pal. It was just a question. Anyway, I need one of your planes at Yellowstone Regional Airport by next week. If that’s possible.”

“Yes. Yes, of course, that’s possible. By next week works. I’ll be out of Tokyo by then.”

“Wait why are you staying in Tokyo?”

China hung up before he even answered America’s question. Of course, it was only because there was another situation involving China, Japan, and, unfortunately, the Philippines. He wasn’t exactly ready for the meeting. At all. China just went to sleep so he wouldn’t keep himself up all night with his own paranoia.

The next morning, China was suddenly joined by Russia; the same person who was caught red-handed stealing Wyomingite oil from Salt Lake Creek. “Russia,” China greeted his former ally. Russia remained silent for a few moments. “China, I just wanted to apologize--”

“Apologize for what? Breaking and entering? Almost being annexed? Risking our whole relationship? Take your pick, Russia!” China replied firmly, glaring at Russia. He was more upset with the fact that Russia, his own ally, had the audacity to think an apology would just work. “China. Look at me when I say this,” Russia replied. China looked up at Russia, his golden and red eyes staring into Russia’s blue ones. “I’m sorry. For everything,” he said softly. China couldn’t help but forgive Russia. If only he wasn’t so gullible, then maybe this wouldn’t even be the person he was going to marry. “It’s alright,” China said with a sigh. “I forgive you, Rus..” China then noticed Russia was holding two cups of coffee. “Did you get one of those for me like usual?” China asked.

“You read my mind, Chai.”

“Hey, you and I both know only the UK can call me that.”

“Haha! I know. I’m still calling you that regardless. You can’t stop me, Chai.”

China just sighed softly, followed by quiet laughter coming from him. Maybe this was what he really needed: a good laugh. Just once in a while. He didn’t feel like he needed to keep being stressed out, but now with this whole upcoming meeting, he knew that yearn for happiness or just a simple laugh would return quickly as the meeting began.

United Nations Administrative Office, Shibuya-ku, Japan

It was now past midnight when the meeting finally took place. China was sat next to Russia and North Korea, like usual. North Korea wasn’t really allowed inside, but China managed to get him a seat next to him and as far away from South Korea as humanly possible. Along with Japan. The Philippines has sat next to Russia and Vietnam; one seat away from the very person he was enemies with. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, leaders also were forced to attend due to the Philippines’ and Vietnam’s presence in the room. “What seems to be the issue?” The UN asked firmly. “It has been going on for weeks now, and I suspect it has something to do with you two,” he added, shooting a glare at the Philippines and China. “Or possibly you.” Another glare was shot at Russia, along with both Koreas. “Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, what did I do?” South Korea asked when he was glared at. “I only have to come here because North has too as well!”

“Hey! Shut it, you K-Pop addicted, good for nothing, brother!” North Korea said angrily.

“Why don’t you, you closed-off, overly paranoid, maniac?!”

“Quiet! Both of you!” Malaysia said angrily, her voice rising for the first time in a long time anyone had heard it. “We’re already risking war because of Russia’s attempt to steal U.S oil, I’m not going to deal with another Korean War if I don’t have to!” Both Koreans fell silent, still shooting the occasional glares at each other. “As I was saying,” the UN continued, “we need to figure out who is responsible for all of the tension in Southeastern Asia. ASEAN and I have both agreed that we either need to isolate all of Southeast Asia until this issue is resolved, or we shall start closing off trading ports with American, British, French, and even Pakistani items. Make your choice, and choose wisely, or else all of Asia will suffer.” Now, it was up to everyone in that room to figure out what to do next. Only a few people would know exactly what to do, however. Those were the people of the Commonwealth of Nations. They would know exactly how to solve this. If not, the world could stop entirely, economies could collapse within minutes, and many countries could be annexed. It would be a massacre of men, women, children, and most of all… countries, even continents would be devastated.

A/N: Sorry for the really weird formatting! I couldn’t get the darn thing to cooperate with me! I still hope you guys like it!

I spent a couple weeks ensnared in a political process that I long ago abandoned having any hope for.  My original intention after experiencing the shit storm of 2016 was to hibernate back to an original state of cynicism that I’d fostered as a young guy under George W. Bush.  Back then, the lines in the sand seemed simple and they were drawn clearly.  If you don’t recall it, I’ll recap the eight year experience I had a teenager in the most concise way I can:

We had an administration that was oil hungry and I watched them send several of my friends off to die to line their own pockets.  We invaded countries under false pretenses, expanded governmental surveillance under a bullshit bill ironically called, “The Patriot Act”.  Our leadership governed on fear and they were brazen in their openness about it, even going as far as to declare WMD’s in places that had none and expanding war efforts with no intention of ever paying for them.  People took notice in a grand fashion upon countless blunders, a failing economy, and the death of small town America that existed and persisted under that administration.  Eventually, come 2008, there was a blue wave of immense proportions and that ushered in the era of Barack Obama.

Many people were hopeful.  Obama’s entire campaign rallied on that phrase, in fact, and he was elected as the truthful alternative to a war-mongering presidency plagued by idiocy and shortsightedness.  Barack Obama was charming, intelligent, and it really did appear as though he was who he said he was.

And he did some wonderful things in his eight years as president.  But he also played partisan and deepened my own personal sense of hopelessness in that time.  He expanded The Patriot Act after he said he wouldn’t.  He bowed down to his Republican counterparts and watered down his originally decent healthcare bill (ironically called Obamacare, though the finished bill more closely resembled Mitt Romney’s than his own).  He would authorize deescalation in countless wars and then attack other middle-eastern countries with drones and bombs.  He didn’t cut the military budget.  He didn’t expand on our infrastructure in any meaningful way.  It seemed that for every step forward we took, there were two in the other direction.  It was maddening for me.  Such a circus!  I promised myself sometime in his second term that I was done with politics.  If our leadership was going to fight for their own regardless of party affiliation, then it made more sense to me to bury my head in the sand and focus on things that I myself could personally improve.  I had absolutely no faith in the political process. 

And it came as no surprise to me that the new youth of America turned conservative with the same rabidness that my own liberal belief structure had some ten years prior.  The only bullshit they were familiar with was that of the blue variety, the same way that mine was influenced by the red flavor.  Both teams had the same coach, though, and I was confident that they would eventually realize the same thing.  I didn’t hold it against them at all (in the same way that I hoped my conservative elders didn’t when I’d only had one side of the picture).  Someday we’d have a conservative leader and though I sincerely doubted he’d be anywhere near as awful as George W., they’d see that both parties were full of empty promises and even emptier rhetoric.  

Boy, was I wrong about not electing someone worse.

When I was working on Forgotten Iowa in 2015, I received an e-mail from VICE with a proposal: they wanted to do a piece on the Iowa Caucuses and wanted to know if I’d be interested in telling the story through the scope of my lens.

“Fuck yeah!” I thought.  Free publicity is good publicity.  I failed to tell them that I had zero interest in the political landscape of America and, instead, spent the following week trying to catch up as much as I could.  That’s when I discovered Bernie Sanders, almost by accident, in a Des Moines register article that detailed his policy ideas and a long history of fighting for my kind of people.  I believed him, I really did, but I also knew the system fairly well and thought the dude stood no chance of getting any kind of real shot at a presidential run.

When VICE left, one of the crew members had accidentally left his lanyard in my living room and I used it to scam myself into the press area of a Bernie Rally.  Later, I would do the same thing to a Hillary speech and a few conservative rallies before I would eventually lose interest.  It was during Bernie’s speech in that crowded room, though, while I found myself sandwiched between CNN and MSNBC cameramen, that I briefly had a reconsideration.  Maybe my cynicism was unwarranted?  Maybe politics had changed a little in the last few years? 

“Fuck it,” I thought.   “I’ll give this another go.” So I caucused for Bernie.  I drove his sign into the dirt of my house and talked to people about his policies.  When I met him in early 2017, I even explained to him how I’d scammed my way into the press area and that’s how I initially formed my support.

“I like your gumption, kid.”  He told me.  And then when I met him again a year later, he remembered our conversation and asked if I still had the lanyard.  I, of course, didn’t, but it further solidified my support that he’d even remember the experience to begin with.  I was optimistic.  Bernie was the clear front-runner of the election and he was the candidate of the people.  But then the DNC fucked him over.  Media outlets put all their faith in Hillary Clinton.  The system that I’d long ago decided was arbitrary, a dog and pony show, was proving itself to be exactly that yet again.  All that effort was for nothing.  The powers at bay decided who they wanted and the people that elected them ate that rottenness with zeal.  Hillary Clinton would end up losing to an historically awful candidate with no political experience and that would eventually lead us to where we sit today.

And in some ways, life continues to mirror itself.  A month or two ago, I was contacted by another film-crew, another group of people wanting to focus a documentary on the Iowa caucus process and hoping to achieve a little bit of their story through my own scope.  

“Fuck yeah!” I thought.  Free publicity is good publicity.  I failed to tell them that I had zero interest in the political landscape of America and, again, spent the next several weeks familiarizing myself with the current political landscape of American politics.

I caucused for Bernie again. I drove those signs into my yard.  Again.  I talked to people and tried my best to shed that cynicism in one final hope that any of this actually made a single bit of difference.  If they fucked this up, I said to myself, then shame on me.  Fool me once, you know, but fool me like a dozen times?  At some point, I had to concede that nobody would ever speak for me.

And that’s when the results of the Iowa caucus started to roll in.  By that, of course, I mean that they didn’t roll in at all.  The Iowa democratic party screamed of application crashes, caucus inconsistencies, and made a general mockery of the people and the state itself.  I watched all of this unfold in a tiny bar while cameras were rolling.  Something smelled absolutely awful about the whole thing.  And then to learn that the same app to cause all these problems were financed by the same corporations that donated to the eventual winner of the caucus itself...well, the solidified it for me.

Nobody fucking speaks for me.  And these rats will do anything they can to keep their party at a status quo.  That’s one thing I’ll give to the Republican party (even though I find nearly every one of their positions to be intellectually bankrupt and hypocritical): their base wanted a shake-up and their leaders delivered one to them.  The Democrats will never be able to say that.  And that’s why they will likely lose again. And again.  And again.  And that’s why the country will continue to move right and the liberal-minded people of America will be steadily dragged with them.  In any other country, Joe Biden would be a conservative.  Not in America.  Here, he still has a real shot of getting the nod.  It’s ridiculous.  They’re every bit as hypocritical as the people they say they oppose.  They’re all bought and sold the exact same way.

“They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and once again bury my damn head in the sand.  I’m absolutely tired of our process.  There’s no such thing as truth.  It’s all deceit.  And maybe I keep becoming cynical about it because I SHOULD be cynical.  

If Bernie gets the nod, I will gladly eat crow.  But he won’t.  We’ll get another milquetoast candidate that the DNC approves of and the Democrats will lose again in 2020.  And, for the most part, they will not lose a single bit of support come 2024, well beyond any hope of a Bernie presidency.  They will lose and win at the same time.

The rest of us will just lose.

Mason Pines and the revival of a maffia

The city of Portland, Oregon has always been strange. But with pro-nats rallying in the streets and the supernatural population constantly fearing for their lives the tension has never been higher!

The city needs the dinner crew, but the dinner crew is currently inactive.

It's time to do something about that!

(yet another transcendence au fic lol) 

on ao3

´´BAN ALL THE MONSTERS! BAN ALL THE MONSTERS! BAN ALL THE MONSTERS!´´

She tightened her grip on the pole and held the sign up higher, the sound of sirens in the distance drowned out by the people all around her screaming.

´´BAN ALL THE MONSTERS! BAN ALL THE MONSTERS!´´

Warm bodies pressing closer to her own, she attempted to take a step forward, only to be pushed back by the behind of a large man slamming into her.

´´BAN ALL THE MONSTERS! BAN ALL THE MONSTERS!´´

Something seemed to be forcing the line of people back, in the split second that the man in front of her stepped aside she managed to catch a glimpse of several police officers decked out in heavy protection gear and wielding shields forcefully pushing her line of protesters back. Swept along with the sea of people, she struggled to stay on her feet as one of the protesters raised a small object up in the air and tossed it.

´´BAN ALL THE MONSTERS! BAN ALL THE MONSTERS!´´

Eyes tearing up, she struggled to take a deep breath as gas filled the air around her. People were pushing from all sides now, desperate to get away, but nobody able to see a damn thing! She could feel her chest tightening and heart beating faster as she threw her sign on the ground and started frantically trying to push her way through the sea of fleeing people.

´´BAN ALL THE MONSTERS! BAN ALL THE MONSTERS!´´

After what felt like forever, but what was in reality probably only about a minute, her outstretched hands finally made contact with a cold concrete wall. Following the wall she soon found herself stumbling blindly into an alley. She sank to the ground almost immediately, trying to calm down and catch her breath while rubbing furiously at her eyes.

Well, this was a catastrophe. At least dad didn’t know that she had gone here, he’d no doubt freak out once the gassing incident reached the news. Now she just had to make her way home and pretend that this never happened, maybe that she’d been out with a friend.  

A hand grabbed her from behind.

Fuck.

 *

 Robert Pines had been having a great day so far. The sun was shining, bird were singing, and all the bills had been payed on time, so yes, all in all a great day. That was, until the police came in with his daughter in handcuffs.

´´You sure are lucky miss. If you’d been anyone else you’d be spending the night in a jail cell.´´

´´Thank you so much for bringing her home then officer. I  promise that this won’t happen again,´´

´´hmph´´ the officer reluctantly uncuffed and handed over Robert’s daughter, before he turned around and headed out the door. Once the police were gone, Robert turned all his attention to the sulking teenager in front of him

´´I can’t believe you Mason! You should know better than to put yourself in danger like that!´´

´´…sorry,´´ Mason said quietly ´´it wasn’t that bad though,´´

´´Not that bad? You literally just came home in handcuffs! ´´

´´Yeah, unfair isn’t it? Doesn’t it make you mad-´´

´´Mason,´´

´´- it wasn’t me who should have been wearing them, those pro-nats -´´

´´Mason! Listen to me!´´ the girl went quiet, but kept her gaze focused on Robert ´´Thank you. Now, stop trying to change the subject and think for a second. I may not agree with their ideology, but what those people were doing was completely lawful – ´´

´´you mean trying to ban innocent people from existing?´´ Mason mumbled angrily, but Robert chose to ignore her

´´  - and anyone could have figured out that just waltzing up there and screaming in their faces would have ended badly.´´

´´but-´´

´´No buts! You’re grounded for the rest of the week, now go to your room!´´ Mason shot Robert a look of pure disbelief before she turned on her heels and marched angrily towards the stairs. Before she went up them though, she stopped on the bottom step and turned once more to face her dad

´´What a great Don you are. You’re not even trying to protect your own crew members.´´ Robert didn’t say anything, Mason didn’t either, they just held each others gaze for a few seconds longer than necessary before the girl turned around again and finally made her way up the staircase.    

Robert let out a heavy sigh and sat down on the living room couch.

Protect your own crewmembers, sometimes Robert really worried that Mason was taking the whole dinner crew thing to seriously. Yes, he had hear the stories, and yes, he knew exactly what the organization had been like in it’s glory days, but that was hundreds of years ago! Right now, the dinner crew was just a little more than an urban legend, giving the Pines family a special place in the eyes of the law and some level of respect from Portland’s oldest citizens but nothing more, and Robert fully intended to keep it that way. With things being the way they were, the world didn’t need more vigilantes roaming the streets.

If only his daughter could understand that.

  *

  Mason wasn’t angry at her dad. Sitting at her desk, scrolling aimlessly through social media, she knew that she should probably be more upset about the whole thing. Oh she was upset with the police for arresting her and taking the actual offenders side, she was angry at the protester who’d thrown that damn gas bomb at them and ruined everything, but dad? Dad meant well, he really did. And she knew that he was just doing his best to look out for her but really, she was almost 18, she could take care of herself! Dad should be more concerned with the preternaturals that the pro-nats were threatening. Wasn’t it the dinner crew’s job to protect them? Wasn’t that why her great-great-something grandpa had founded it in the first place? So no, Mason wasn’t angry but she was… disappointed. She liked another cat picture on her screen, and kept thinking. Dad really had to start taking his job as the Don more seriously. Sure, he insisted that there wasn’t much for him to do, with the crew having been very inactive for years now, but couldn’t that just be because no one had tried to put it back together yet? Really, how hard could it be, Mason bet that even she could do it!

Hey, maybe she should do it! Now would be a good time, right? But how would she manage to do that? Dad would certainly not approve, let alone help her. And Mason had no contact whatsoever with already existing members, not to mention that most of them had left Portland long ago. No, Mason needed help if she was really going to pull this of, the question was who would be able to help her…

 *

 The answer came to her 3 weeks later, while working on her personal project of compiling the family tree. She had already made it as far back as great-great-something grandpa Hank’s branch, and there she had noticed a bit of an… oddity. Namely, her g-grandpa’s old documents almost all contained mentions of an uncle. Someone who, according to every official record, should have been long dead and gone at the time of g-grandpa’s birth. And yet, here Hank was talking and writing about him as if though he’d known him personally. This piqued Mason’s interest, and the deeper she dug into it, the more she managed to find, until she was almost certain that she could link this mysterious uncle to another unexplained yet prominent figure in the family’s history.

Alcor.

It felt right. Even though all her internet searches had turned up nothing noteworthy when looking more into it Mason felt confident that she’d reached the right answer. Alcor was a Pines, and even better, Alcor had apparently been friends with Hank, aka the original Don Pines. Meaning that he’d at some point been involved with the dinner crew, meaning that any and all of the oldest members most likely knew him! Alcor was the person Mason needed to make this plan happen, no doubt about it.

She just needed to find a good way to talk to him.

 *

 He hadn’t planned to answer this summoning at first. The summoner had used a very basic circle, and the sacrifice used was nothing more than a half-eaten candy bar. Such a sloppy summoning was rarely done seriously, and the few times that they were well… what could a person with no means to find a better sacrifice than their own leftovers possibly have to offer him? However, this one felt different. Something about the feeling he got from the tugging at his being told Dipper that he’d better answer this one, so he went to have a look. He went to have a look, and was pleasantly surprised at the sight of his nephew’s current incarnation standing with her hands resting on her hips and a smug smile on her face in front of him. Still, Dipper didn’t know this person, better to play it safe.

´´W̢҉͜H̀̀͢O̷ ͟͡͞D̶͢A̛͟R̵̢͝E̷̛S ̸̡҉S͏U҉͏͘M̸̨̨M̴̷͟ON҉ AL͜C̢O͠R̡̀̕ T̵H̢E̵͏ ͝D͜RÈ̷A͜͠M̕͘B̧E̸N̡̡D̴E̴̛R?̢͞҉´´  

´´Greetings Alcor. Or should I maybe say, hi uncle Dipper?´´ a cold shiver ran down Dipper’s none existing spine, but he was careful as to not let the surprise show on his face. Did she know? How? She shouldn’t be able to remember, and while her aura emitted a sense of slight familiarity towards him, it was nowhere near the level that one would expect from a child that they’d practically helped raise. His surprise must have still shown though, because the girl grinned. ´´I’m right aren’t I? You really are Dipper Pines! I knew it!´´ Dipper raised an eyebrow and peered suspiciously at the girl.

´´… w̧h̷o ar̕e y̨o̴u͡?´´

´´Sorry, how rude of me.´´ the girl made a move to extend her hand, but seemed to think better of it and opted to give a little wave instead ´´Mason Pines, nice to meet you!´´ internally, Dipper laughed. She was a Pines! Of course! She was a Pines and her name was Mason! Externally though, he recovered from the surprise as best he could and tried to keep the mask on a little longer, because this may have been one of his niblings (in more ways than one apparently), but she was still a person that Dipper hadn’t met before. And she’d used one of his more well known circles, not the family one, so he doubted she’d summoned him just to hang out. Not to mention that it had been years since he’d last interacted with this particular branch of the family.

…it couldn’t hurt to be a little friendly though.

´´ Mason Pines huh? Well then, girl who shares my name, what can I do for you?´´ Mason’s face lit up a little as Dipper confirmed her theory, then it quickly darkened.

´´I need your help with something, but first I need to confirm something,´´

´´Oh? And what would that be?´´

´´How well do you know the dinner crew?´´      

Broken memories

Summary: Just some angsty/fluffy thing based on a few headcanons I have about Mr. Brass and his background story. (Also with the AU where the SCP only rescued him and kept him safe for a while before allowing him to live with his siblings)

The Automaton followed a hooded man he met just a few hours ago. He didn’t know what reason this man and his so-called “church” has to offer him safety, or what is this church anyway. The rain poured heavily on the two of them, soaking their clothes and bodies, yet neither of the two seemed to care.

When the two of them walked into a giant building, they were greeted by other people wearing the same hoods, calling Mr. Brass “their savior” and prying to him. 

“You are a part of our god.” one hooded woman told him, as she handed a towel to the confused robot. “We’ve been waiting for so long!”

As the rest of the hooded people cheered for him, trying to explain the situation to Mr. Brass (who didn’t understand a thing but decided to play along), the hooded guy who brought him there gave him a soft smile, giving the Automaton a feeling of safety, of hope, of home.

After the man mannaged to convince the excited crowd to give Mr. Brass some space, he decided to give him a tour of the church. He showed him the altar, the showers, the offices... the rooms themselves were boring, but the two of them enjoyed talking with each other. Mr. Brass even got to know him better.

The man’s name is Scott Travis, he’s the church’s message man. He told Brass he joined the church because they saved his life and he feels like he owns the “broken god” his life. Apparently, Scott’s relationship with his parents wasn’t great, and they kicked him out of the house when he was only 16 years old, and the church found him two years later, almost freezing to death. He has been there for the past 14 years and worked as a message man for the past 12. 

“And now, the big finale!” Scott said, leading Mr. Brass down a big hallway and opened the big door at the end of it. 

On the other side of the door lied a huge room, almost at the size of a living room and the height of a three-leveled building. The walls were painted in  Prussian blue, and the entire floor was covered by a dark shade of crimson red carpet. The first floor of the room contained some big bookcases, a big containment filed with metallic parts that were perfect for Mr. Brass’s “transformation” ritual, a sitting area with the softest chairs he ever sat on, and a big mirror. The wooden stairs to the upper floor of the room were clean and shiny, without a single hint of the existence dust there. The upper floor was covered with a softer teal carpet and had a big window to the fields near the church. It had a large bed with beautiful and warm mattresses, and next to it was a wooden desk and a chair.

“Welcome to your bedroom,” Scott said, smiling at the surprised robot, who scanned the room in disbelief.

“That’s... That’s my bedroom?” Mr. Brassed asked, trying to process this. “That’s... wow... That’s too big for a bedroom.”

“Hey, we want any part of our god to be happy and safe.” Scott said. “The parts in the containment are being stocked every week, and the window is unbreakable to avoid any danger. And if you need anything, my room is two rooms away from here.”

“You guys are the best.” Mr. Brass said.

“Oh, we know it.” Scott laughed as he turned around and walked to the door.

“Wait!” Mr. Brass said, causing Scott to stop and look at him.

“Thank you.” Mr. Brass said. “For everything.”

Scott gave him a soft smile as he walked over and hugged him.

After he released the robot from the hug, he turned back and left the room.

Mr. Brass looked at him as he walked away, smiling at the thought that he finally met people he can trust.

Okay, he can’t trust these guys anymore.

Sure, it WAS nice for a while. They gave him anything he needed, and Scott was awesome. They have warm food, he wasn’t homeless, nobody called him a freak... But when he said he wants to move on, they changed.

They locked him in his room, yelled and cursed at him, ignored his cries for help and begs for freedom. It’s been like this for a few months. A few long months.

One day, he was happy to see Scott opening the door to his room, telling him to come with him. He hugged Scott tightly, glad to see his friend, but Scott...didn’t hug back. He followed Scott down the awfully quiet hallways, asking him questions, hoping that the church is finally letting him go.

“Where are we going?” Mr. Brass asked. No answer.

“Are you guys letting me go?” Mr. Brass asked. No answer.

“Scott?” Mr. Brass said as he decided to stop walking, worried about his friend.

It took Scott a few seconds before he grabbed the Automaton aggressively by the arm and began to drag him to the altar, not even looking into his eyes. When they finally got there, Scott pushed him towards the high priest of the church and stepped aside.

“What’s happening?” Mr. Brass asked, confused and scared. “What do you guys want from me? Why can’t you just let me leave?”

Before he could ask the next question, the high priest pushed the poor robot to the floor, as he and a few other church members began to hit him and jam stuff to him. The rest of the church members watched. Most of them cheered them on, some repeated the robot’s cries for help in a mocking tone, but Scott? Scott looked away.

‘This is how I’m going to die, huh?’ Mr. Brass thought to himself.

After three or four painful minutes, the altar’s doors were slammed open, and a bunch of armed soldiers with the word “SCP” on their uniforms entered the room, and the chaos began.  People screaming and escaping the room, soldiers and church members shooting at each other, and all Mr. Brass could do was just to crawl quickly underneath one of the benches and hope for the best.

As he crawled away, one of the soldiers reached over to him. Mr. Brass thought he was about to shoot him, so he protected his face with his arms, but was surprised when he realized the soldier was just offering him assistance in getting up. The robot hesitantly grabbed the soldier’s hand, and the two of them ran outside of the building, into the wheat fields. 

That was when he felt someone else pulling him from the other side. When he looked, he saw Scott, with anger and sadness in his eyes and blood coming from a scratch on his left cheek. 

“You, can’t leave, Brass!” Scott yelled, pulling him violently from the soldier’s hand. “You’d be nothing without us! Nothing! You were just a freak when I found you!”

before Mr. Brass could response, a bullet suddenly hit Scott’s forehead, creating a big bleeding hole and coming out from the back of his head. The man was dead before he hit the floor. Mr. Brass saw the soldier holding the gun, looking at him with a worried face.

“Are you okay?” the soldier asked.

“I...I don’t know.” Mr. Brass said, looking at the dead body of the man he once called a friend. 

The soldier put his hand on Brass’s shoulder, looking into his eyes.

“Come on.” the soldier said. “The rescue helicopter is close.”

“How can I trust you?” the robot asked.

“I just shot a guy who almost ripped off your arm.” the soldier said.

“That’s...a good point, I guess.” Mr. Brass said.

The two of them reached the helicopter and waited for the others. There was a long silence between the two of them until the soldier took off his helmet.

“Edward.” the soldier said.

“Huh?” 

“My name is Edward.” the soldier said, giving Mr. Brass a friendly smile.

“I’m...” Mr. Brass said.

“We know who you are, Mr. Brass,” Edward said. “We were sent to rescue you, after all.”

He moved from his seat and sat next to Mr. Brass, looking at the damage the church caused him. Scanned every single injury.

“We were almost late, huh?” Edward said, still looking at each scar that was left by these bastards. “No wonder their god is broken. They might’ve done this to him.”

The two of them let out a giggle at that joke. 

“When we’d get to the base we’d fix some of that.” Edward said. “You might have to stay in the base for a while until we’d stop that church.”

“For how long?” Mr. Brass asked.

“Probably a year or two,” Edward said. “But we’re close.”

“These guys are a nightmare.” Mr. Brass said.

“Well, let’s just hope our people would get out of there before they activate the bomb.” Edward said. “This nightmare of yours is going down today.”

After the rest of the soldiers arrived (except for three of them who probably died during the gunfight) and the helicopter began to fly, they all looked through their window as one of the soldiers began to count down from ten. As he reached “zero”, they all saw the church explodes and goes down in flames. Mr. Brass didn’t feel sorry for these people.

“Good riddance.” he said, still shivering.

Edward, who seemed to notice the shivers, took off his uniform’s jacket and wrapped it around the Automaton like a blanket. 

He didn’t want to return it.

Mr. Brass woke up. It was the middle of the night, and he dreamt about those memories again. He looked at the robot lying next to him, who seemed to have a good night sleep.

He looked at the big jacket that was hanging on the chair. It was a black jacket with the SCP foundation’s symbol painted in white on the left side of the chest. He grabbed the jacket, hugged it and put it on him.

The sleeves were longer than his arms, and there was a little cut at the back.

He stood at the balcony, leaning against the fence and looking up at the stars, grabbing the sleeves tightly from inside. 

If robots could cry, he would’ve. He had been through a lot. His beloved Edward was long gone, and he mannaged to move on... but the memories still haunt him.

“Brass?” he heard a tired robotic voice behind him. When he turned around, he was surprised to see his boyfriend, Jeffrey, coming next to him.

“Did I wake you up?” Brass asked as he put a kiss on his lover’s forehead.

“No. I was about to go downstairs to grab a midnight snack.”Jeffrey yawned. “You had those memories again, didn’t you?” 

Mr. Brass nodded.

“It’s been almost 15 years now.” he said. “He’s been gone for exactly 15 years.”

Jeffrey held his hand softly.

“You never told me how he...you know.” Jeffrey said.

“I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.” Brass said. “I mean, usually when someone talks about their ex around their partner is kinda awkward.”

“Not when I’m the partner. You can tell me anything.” Jeffrey said, giving a soft smile. 

“Fine. I guess I can tell you.” Brass kissed his forehead again and sighed.

“Around three months after Edward and I met, we’ve started dating. He was the type of guy who would literally take a bullet for you.” Mr. Brass said. “We’ve been on a couple missions together since I wanted to help them take down the church of the broken god. The number of times he got injured just so I won’t was insane. Yet he survived most of them.”

He let out a sad giggle before he continued.

“After two years, we’ve finally managed to end these fucked up cult.” he continued. “But.. he didn’t make it out alive to see me feeling freedom for the first time.”

“What happened?” Jeffrey asked.

“Apparently these guys set up a time bomb, and on the way out lots of church members were chasing after us.” Mr. Brass continued. “Two people had to secure the rest to the exit, but the two wouldn’t have enough time to leave.”

Jeffrey remained silent, holding his beloved’s hand even tighter.

“When Edward volunteered I asked him to let me join him, and he refused.” Mr. Brass continued, looking at the night sky. “He also refused when I begged him to at least leave with us. “

He shivered a bit.

“I remember how he kissed me for a few seconds before ordering fellow soldiers to get me out. I remember the tears in his eyes when the soldiers got me out of there.” Mr. Brass said. “I remember how I found his burnt, torn body after the explosion.”

“Brass, I’m so sorry.” Jeffrey said, looking into his boyfriend’s eyes. 

“That’s okay.” Brass said. “It...it actually feels good to talk about it. And he probably did it for the best. He was smart, after all.”

“Of course he was smart!” Jeffrey said. “He knew how cute you’d look in his jacket.”

Giggling, he picked up Jeffrey and kissed him on his lips.

“Just so you’d know,” Jeffrey said. “I have no problem listening to your broken memories. No matter how hard they are, I’m here.”

“thank you.” Mr. Brass said. 

“Now how about we try to steal some of Mr. Hungry’s secret snacks stash and binge some anime?” Jeffrey asked him. 

“If he asks, it was Sweety.” Mr. Brass answered as the two of them went downstairs.

No matter how heartbreaking his broken memories were, Mr. Brass knew there are people who care. And god, did he care about this man too.

Underearth: Book 1 - Chapter 27

Moments after Frisk entered the curtained area, just as he predicted, Alphys called again.

"Okay, I'm back!" Alphys said through the phone.

"You never said you were leaving." Frisk responded.

"Oh, uh... sorry." There was a momentary pause. "A-another dark room, huh?" she finally said. "Don't worry! M-my hacking skills have got things covered!"

Your hacking skills seem to be rather situational. Frisk thought to himself, thinking back to the numerous puzzles that he's had to solve on this mountain.

After a few seconds, lights flickered to life, along with a massive flat-screen TV hanging on a large pillar to Frisk's left. To his right, Frisk could see a large cardboard surface, the TV screen showed him what was on the other side. Mettaton, along with a large news set with Frisk himself right in the middle. Mettaton himself was in the bottom-right corner of the screen behind a desk that read "MTT".

"Are you serious?" Frisk and Alphys said simultaneously.

"OHHHHHH YESSS!!!" Mettaton began. "GOOD EVENING, BEAUTIES AND GENTLEBEAUTIES! THIS IS METTATON, REPORTING LIVE FROM MTT NEWS! AN INTERESTING SITUATION HAS ARISEN IN MID-HOTLAND! FORTUNATELY, OUR CORRESPONDENT IS OUT THERE, REPORTING LIVE!" He gestured towards Frisk. "BRAVE CORRESPONDENT! PLEASE FIND SOMETHING NEWSWORTHY TO REPORT! OUR TEN WONDERFUL VIEWERS ARE WAITING FOR YOU!!"

Frisk looked around the area. He saw six items of noteworthiness (of course, being the only items there, anything was noteworthy): A basketball; a glass of water; a book; a white, motionless dog; a decorated box; and a small black case.

Frisk decided to approach the closest, being the basketball. As he got close, Mettaton began speaking.

"BASKETBALL'S A BLAST, ISN'T IT, DARLING? TOO BAD YOU CAN'T PLAY WITH THESE BALLS. THEY'RE MTT-BRAND FASHION BASKETBALLS. FOR WEARING, NOT PLAYING. YOU CAN'T GET RICH AND FAMOUS LIKE MOI WITHOUT BEAUTIFYING A FEW ORBS. REPORT THIS?"

Frisk looked around the room again. "Nah, I'm sure there's more interesting things around here." He said as he walked towards the glass of water.

"OH MY!!!! IT'S A COMPLETELY NONDESCRIPT GLASS OF WATER. BUT ANYTHING CAN MAKE A GREAT STORY WITH ENOUGH SPIN!"

"You're kidding, right? How could you make a glass of water seem interesting? Perhaps to someone who's never seen one before, you could."

"WHY NOT REPORT IT AND FIND OUT!" Mettaton responded. Frisk almost did simply out of curiosity but managed to stop himself and head towards the book. As it came into view, Mettaton began freaking out a bit.

"OH NO!!! THAT MOVIE SCRIPT!!! HOW'D??? THAT GET THERE??? IT'S A SUPER-JUICY SNEAK PREVIEW OF MY LATEST GUARANTEED-NOT-TO-BOMB FILM: METTATON THE MOVIE XXVIII... STARING METTATON! I'VE HEARD THAT LIKE THE OTHER FILMS... IT CONSISTS MOSTLY OF A SINGLE FOUR-HOUR SHOT OF ROSE PETALS SHOWERING ON MY RECLINING BODY. OOH!!! BUT THAT'S!!! NOT CONFIRMED!! YOU WOULDN'T *COUGH* SPOIL MY MOVIE FOR EVERYONE WITH A PROMOTIONAL STORY, WOULD YOU?"

Frisk could tell this was planted by Mettaton just to get this sort of cover, but he wouldn't fall for it. "Not a chance." he said, stepping away from the book.

"PHEW!!! THAT WAS CLOSE!! YOU ALMOST GAVE ME A BUNCH OF FREE ADVERTISEMENT!!"

Frisk headed up towards the small white dog. Mettaton immediately began his charade when Frisk got close to it.

"OH, WHAT A SENSATIONAL OPPORTUNITY FOR A STORY! I CAN SEE THE HEADLINE NOW: 'A DOG EXISTS SOMEWHERE.' FRANKLY, I'M BLOWN AWAY."

Frisk was beginning to get the feeling that Mettaton was just screwing with him by now, and just walked toward the decorated box without saying anything.

"OH MY! IT'S A PRESENT! AND IT'S ADDRESSED TO YOU, DARLING! AREN'T YOU JUST BURSTING WITH EXCITEMENT? WHAT COULD BE INSIDE? WELL, NO TIME LIKE THE 'PRESENT' TO FIND OUT!"

Frisk had never received a present before, at least not recently, but he couldn't help but feel really skeptical about everything in the area. In the end, he just decided to check out the black case.

"OOH LA LA! THIS VIDEO GAME YOU FOUND... IS DYNAMITE!!! THOUGH I DON'T MAKE AN APPEARANCE IN IT UNTIL THREE-FOURTHS IN. BUT I LIKE THAT. APPEARING FROM THE HEAVENS LIKE MANNA, SLAKING THE AUDIENCE'S HUNGER FOR GORGEOUS ROBOTS...  OOH! THAT'S METTATON! REPORT THIS ONE?"

Frisk took one last look around the room, then let out a sigh. "Yeah, let's report the game." he said. As he finished, all the lights went out except a few, which now cast a spotlight right onto him, as well as all the ones on Mettaton.

"ATTENTION, VIEWERS! OUR CORRESPONDENT HAS FOUND... A VIDEO GAME! THIS ACTION-PACKED GAME IS GUARANTEED TO BLOW YOU AWAY! STRANGE ENEMIES! STRANGE ALLIES! ATTRACTIVE ROBOTS! FEATURING UP TO SIX ARBITRARY DIALOGUE CHOICES AT ONCE! CORRESPONDENT! LET'S LOOK INSIDE THE CASE!"

Frisk opened the case, though what was inside was not what he expected at all. "THOSE RED CYLINDERS WITH BURNING FUSES..." Mettaton started again, "OH NO! THIS GAME LITERALLY IS DYNAMITE! I GUESS THEY WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG!!! VIDEO-GAMES DO CAUSE VIOLENCE! OR AT LEAST THIS ONE'S ABOUT TO. BUT DON'T GET TOO EXCITED! YOU HAVEN'T EVEN SEEN THE REST OF THE ROOM YET!"

When he finished that sentence, there was a loud booming sound and the curtain surrounding the area fell down, drifting off into the magma below. The cardboard sheet and desk Mettaton was near also suddenly began falling down as well. The rafters holding the lights too came down, falling into the magma below. Everything fell except for the rocky area, Frisk, Mettaton, the six items, and the massive TV. The area was now lit with its natural glow once again.

"OH MY!" Mettaton said. "IT SEEMS EVERYTHING IN THIS AREA IS ACTUALLY A BOMB!" Frisk looked around at the items. It was true. The box was open, and inside was a spherical black bomb, the dog's tail was lit, the movie script had a bomb resting on it's now opened surface, the basketball was slightly faded now, revealing part of a black bomb, and the glass of water was now rocketing around the area.

"BRAVE CORRESPONDENT... IF YOU DON'T DEFUSE ALL OF THE BOMBS..."

Mettaton flew up to the TV and pressed a button, causing the screen to change to a countdown timer, set to two minutes.

"THIS BIG BOMB WILL BLOW YOU TO SMITHEREENS IN TWO MINUTES! THEN YOU WON'T BE REPORTING 'LIVE' ANY LONGER! HOW TERRIBLE! HOW DISTURBING! OUR NINE VIEWERS ARE GOING TO LOVE WATCHING THIS! GOOD LUCK, DARLING!!"

"D-don't worry!" Alphys said through the phone after being silent for all of Mettaton's dialogue. "I installed a bomb-defusing program on your phone! You can use it to defuse all the bombs."

"What made you think to install a bomb-defusing program onto my phone!? Is Mettaton so predictable that you knew he'd do this?" Frisk questioned.

"Uhh... y-yeah. N-now, go get 'em!" Alphys responded before the call dropped.

Frisk pulled up the home screen and found a program labelled "BOMB DEFUSAL" and pressed it. Once done, an antenna extended from the top-right side of the phone. The screen had a green line going across from left to right every few seconds, and a green button at the bottom that said "DEFUSE". Looking up, he found that the bombs had been scattered around the area, and the only one still where it should be was the white dog.

Frisk pointed his phone at the dog, and an outline in green showed up on the phone. A green box surrounded the outline, shaking around for a bit before stabilizing along with the showing up of the text "locked on". Immediately after this text showed up, Frisk pressed the DEFUSE button. Once pressed, the dog sank down and fell over. Frisk then looked around for the next explosive.

Overhead, Frisk noticed the extremely agile glass of water soaring through the 'sky'. Pointing his phone at it, Frisk attempted to defuse it next. After a few seconds and a bit of hassle getting it to lock on, it finally took, and was defused. Once defused, the jet of fire out the back ceased, and the glass fell from the 'sky', landing not too far from where Frisk was, and exploded.

Cutting left, Frisk ran down a set of pipes. Off to the right was a set of lasers and the video-game-bomb. Bypassing the lasers, Frisk reached the game-bomb and defused it. He then did this to every other bomb in the area, the script on a conveyor, the present on an island, and the basketball near the pillar the TV was hanging on. After defusing each and every bomb, Mettaton once again spoke up.

"WELL DONE, DARLING!" he said. "YOU'VE DEACTIVATED ALL OF THE BOMBS! IF YOU DIDN'T DEACTIVATE THEM, THE BIG BOMB WOULD HAVE EXPLODED IN TWO MINUTES. NOW IT WON'T EXPLODE IN TWO MINUTES! INSTEAD IT'LL EXPLODE IN TWO SECONDS!" Mettaton pressed a switch and the countdown timer re-appeared on the screen, displaying two seconds. "GOODBYE, DARLING!" the timer ticked slowly down to zero, Frisk watching in silent horror, backing away from the screen. However, once the timer hit zero, nothing happened, and nothing continued to happen for many seconds after. Eventually, Mettaton spoke again.

"AH. IT SEEMS THE BOMB ISN'T GOING OFF." he said. After he said that, he began ringing again for a second before it stopped and Alphys's voice came from the metal box that was his body.

"That's b-because!!!" Alphys began, "While you were monologuing... I...!!! I f... fix... Um... I ch-change..."

"OH NO. YOU DEACTIVATED THE BOMB WITH YOUR HACKING SKILLS." Mettaton finished for her.

"Yeah! That's what I did!"

"CURSES! IT SEEMS I'VE BEEN FOILED AGAIN! CURSE YOU, HUMAN! CURSE YOU, DR. ALPHYS, FOR HELPING SO MUCH!" Mettaton then turned toward the camera. "BUT I DON'T CURSE MY EIGHT WONDERFUL VIEWERS FOR TUNING IN!!! UNTIL NEXT TIME, DARLING!" Mettaton then flew off, far out of view.

"W-wow..." Alphys said through Frisk's phone this time. "W-we really showed him, huh?" She then went silent for a minute. "H-hey, I know I was kind of weird at first... But I really think I'm getting more... Uh, more... M-more confident about guiding you!"

"I don't need to be guided, Alphys." Frisk interrupted. "I thank you for helping me with the bombs, but I'm doing just fine guiding myself."

"O-oh..." she went silent for a while longer. "S-sorry..." she eventually said before the call then dropped.

Frisk stashed the phone back into his pocket and found his way forward, back on track. After marching up a rather steep and narrow hill, Frisk found himself staring straight at the CORE once again. Pressing forward, he found the elevator, which turned out to be the upper section of the pillar the TV hung on. This elevator had the glowing letter and number "L2" hanging above its door. Entering the elevator, Frisk noticed that four of the six buttons were glowing this time, both bottom ones, the right-middle one, and the top-left one. Pressing the top-left one, the elevator proceeded to ascend. Half a minute later, the elevator came to a stop, and the doors opened to a once again new area.

A Whole New World : Explosive Entertainment

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Trained to Kill USA

Looking at my catalogue of Episodes that Never Were, I realize I have been rather biased in my choice of genres.  It’s not something I did intentionally, I just happen to like monster and mad science movies, and such films are often my favourite episodes of MST3K, so naturally they’re the first thing I go to.  But the show never limited itself by genre, and though I’ve managed to dig up a couple of Eurospy and 50’s Rebellious Teens movies, there are several things notably lacking.  I have not yet tackled a proper western, for example, nor a biker crime spree picture.  Time to pick up the slack.

I therefore present Trained to Kill USA, which I ran across quite by accident while searching for a copy of She-Gods of Shark Reef that didn’t make me want to claw my own eyes out (I never found one).  It’s got Sid Haig from Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II in it and Richard Slattery from San Francisco International, and it’s a nihilistic revenge movie as depressing as The Sidehackers and featuring an incongruously cheerful opening theme song that makes me think of Girl in Gold Boots for some reason. I’m not sure why, but Trained to Kill USA particularly reminds me of the latter movie, maybe just in its general late-60’s-early-70’s aesthetic and Ted-V-Mikels-like incompetence.

We begin with a couple of thugs under the leadership of a man called Prophet, robbing a liquor store and then fleeing from the sheriff, to the accompaniment of a terrible song and some egregious pan-n-scan. They stop at a farm where they assault the owner, elderly Mark, break his stuff, and try to rape his daughter Mary, but then flee when the man’s son Ollie arrives.  Mark wants Ollie to come with him and chase the two down, but Ollie refuses.  Later, however, the gang decides to steal Mark’s gun collection so that they can rob a bank in town, and during this heist Mark shoots Prophet’s buddy Parrish.  Believing Ollie to have been the killer, Prophet vows revenge.

That’s quite a truncated summary – a great deal actually happens in between the first and second attacks on the ranch, and almost all of it feels irrelevant.  Prophet and his men commit crimes, and Ollie sits around and drinks and has flashbacks. I know these scenes are supposed to be establishing character and so forth, but they just come across as filling time before the final showdown.  A family in a camper van get killed.  Ollie’s army buddies beat up Prophet’s men at a gas station.  Prophet fights with his girlfriend.  None of it’s presented in a way that makes the audience want to care.

Like a number of other movies I’ve reviewed, Trained to Kill USA is not this film’s original title.  It was released as The No Mercy Man.  Multiple titles are a common feature of terrible movies, but what’s interesting here is how the change re-focuses the audiences attention.  The No Mercy Man referred to Prophet – his friend Parrish uses that descriptor for him, and it suggests that this is his story we’re watching.  Trained to Kill USA, on the other hand, is obviously a description of Ollie, which leads us to expect rather more of him than the movie initially offers.

The film is actually equally about both men and their inability to fit into society.  Ollie is too damaged by his experiences in war to ever lead a normal life, while Prophet exists in a world where black men are automatically assumed to be criminals and there is simply no other role he can fill.  I think we’re supposed to see them as a pair of tragic figures driven inevitably to a confrontation that destroys them both.  It’s a little hard to say, because the movie is really bad at driven inevitably.  When it tries to set up fate and forces beyond these characters’ control, all it manages are a set of coincidences.  If there’s supposed to be a feeling that this all means anything, the movie misses it by miles.

Even more damaging to what I assume are the film’s ambitions (I’m really not at all sure what this movie is actually trying to do) is the fact that neither of these guys are characters we can root for. Prophet complains that his intellect could have taken him places were it not for his appearance: he is a tall, intimidating black man, and so people treat him as a thug.  Yet Prophet is the very stereotype of that thug, gleefully and gratuitously violent and a rapist of white women.  In both the RV theft and the bank robbery his original plan is to commit a crime in which ‘nobody gets hurt’, but in both incidents he drops this idea the moment something starts to go wrong.  The movie tries to bring some depth to him in his apparently sincere affection for his girlfriend Sally (the moment when he leads her in a circle around the fairground is the only thing in the movie that feels like real emotion), but he turns on her in the end, too, blaming her for the loss of his job.

Then there’s Ollie – he is a steaming mess of PTSD and we feel sorry for him, but we do not like him.  Actor Steve Sandor behaves like a robot and rather creepily looks like one, too. There’s something about his skin that makes him look like plastic.  If he is to be a tragic figure we should really have some idea of who he was before the war hollowed him out, but we see him only as the damaged hero, surrounded by people who are making his trauma worse.  His father is an old grouch living vicariously through his son, and his friends brag about his accomplishments in a way that triggers him repeatedly while they don’t seem to give a shit.  The movie seems to want us to root for him to give in to the violence in order to protect his family, but that is exactly what Ollie himself does not want and, indeed, is the worst possible thing that could happen to his already fragile mental health.  We do not want Ollie to be a hero.  We want him to get away from all this and into an environment where he can heal.

I honestly think the writers were trying to do something with this movie.  They believed they were going to make an important statement about war and racism and how both are damaging to the psyche.  They were trying to give us a tragedy about two gifted individuals who could have been so much more than what the world forced them to be. All they managed, however, was Trained to Kill USA, and the movie sucks.

The photography was bad to begin with and the pan-n-scan did it no favours at all – many shots look bizarrely off-centre, as is evident in the screencaps.  The characters are as flat as a creationist’s earth.  Fight scenes are awful: I don’t remember a single punch that I believed hit anything.  People go leaping over fences ahead of explosions that are obviously nowhere near them.  The ‘Vietnam’ flashbacks are shot in front of some trees in someone’s back yard.  The dialogue is terrible: characters say things like ‘Ollie, you’re the most decorated man in the state!’ and that’s supposed to be subtle exposition.  The Oblivious Camping Family have ‘victims!’ written all over them, to the point where they seem to belong in the opening scene of some slasher movie more than they do in this.  And at the time the film was made it didn’t matter that everything in it was outrageously, garishly seventies, but in the hindsight of a more fashion-conscious age, It just makes it that much harder to take any of this seriously.

The harder this movie tries to build tension, the worse it fails.  There’s a scene in which the criminals confront the Sheriff outside the bank, and while we should be on the edges of our seats, waiting for the bullets to start flying, all we’re seeing is a bunch of guys standing around awkwardly, exchanging terrible dialogue that aims for ‘badass’ and falls on its face.  The bank robbery itself is a free for all of guns and bombs.  It’s hard to tell who’s on which side because we’ve never met half these guys before, and both the criminals and Ollie’s army buddies seem to take such joy in violence that it’s hard to care about what they’re fighting for. The most memorable bit in the scene is the stunt guy who does a perfect flip as he falls from a roof.

At the end, the criminals attack Ollie’s family and he is forced to relive all the things he most wishes to forget as he finally takes them on.  This fight scene almost becomes effective in its brutality and crudeness.  There’s no choreography or sense of justice, just Ollie and Prophet beating the shit out of each other for reasons that have almost nothing to do with either of them.  When Ollie wins, it’s not in any way a victory.  Under constant pressure to give in to the violence, Ollie has lost, and it’s impossible to tell what the movie wants us to feel about this.  The ridiculously cheesy final song, with lyrics like no-one understands you ‘cause you can’t be understood, seems to agree with my gut instinct that this is a disaster, but didn’t we just spend the whole movie waiting for Ollie to kick some ass?  Haven’t we been told over and over that he is the only one up to the challenge Prophet presents?

As the credits roll, we’re left in a similar place to where we were at the end of The Sidehackers – nobody won.  Ollie will continued to be a shattered man held together by alcohol.  Prophet, who was supposed to look redeemable, is now beyond redemption because he’s dead.  What happened to the girlfriend Prophet blamed for getting him into all this trouble, we’ll never know.  How Ollie’s family feel about what he’s now done we’ll also never know, which is particularly annoying because their opinion of him was so important earlier.  Shouldn’t they come to understand why they’ve been treating him badly?  If you try to take their stories at face value, Ollie and Prophet both deserved far better than this shitty fucking movie.

Can You Hear the Call of My Heart? (Day 6)

Day 6: Soulmate | From the first moment he saw her, Keith knew there was something special about Pidge. 

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 7

Voltron Fic Masterpost

Also posted on AO3 and fanfiction.net

That Which Binds Us Together

Day 6: Soulmate

He felt drawn to her from the very start, even with Shiro's unexpected return and bulk weighing him down. He couldn't keep his eyes off of her. Adored the way she would always choose to stand next to him. The way she was fearless, with a temper equal to his own. The left arm of Voltron, to match his right arm. The perfect pair.

At least, that was what he thought.

“The download from the Galra ship was enough to at least get me in the right direction to start my search. I have a pod all ready to go,” Pidge told Shiro, not daring to look at anyone except their leader.

“You can't leave,” he blurted out, his tone taking everyone off-guard, but especially himself as an almost terror-panic welled up within him. She couldn't go. She couldn't. She had to understand! Didn't she feel it?

“You can't tell me what to do!” Pidge snapped, bristling at the way he tried to order her around.

“If you leave, we can't form Voltron. And that means we can't defend the universe against Zarkon.” He clenched his fists and took a step forward, unsure of what he was doing. All he knew was that something inside of him would break – was breaking – if she left. “You're putting the lives of two people over the lives of everyone else in the entire galaxy!”

“Keith!” Shiro's voice cracked through the air like a whip and Keith backed down at the unspoken command. He backed off, looking anywhere but at Pidge. He barely heard what Shiro had to say, so disgusted with himself for losing his temper in such a way.

He couldn't watch her leave.

Except she didn't leave. She had everything prepared, but then Sendak took over the Castle and she was left on her own to keep it on the ground until she could shut down the particle barrier and let him and Allura back inside.

Pidge stayed and the relief he felt when she told him left him breathless.

Time passed, and every fight, all of the training, all of the adventures, brought them closer together. Their teamwork was solid, both while piloting their Lions and when they were on the ground. They matched each other in speed and adaptability, the forms their bayards took giving them both an advantage at close range.

Things were perfect.

Until his mother's knife transformed in his hand and Kolivan spoke those fateful words that would forever condemn him in the eyes of the team.

“You've awoken the blade! The only way this is possible is if Galra blood runs through your veins.”

Keith squeezed his eyes shut tightly. He wouldn't cry. He refused. He slowly turned to face Shiro, awaiting judgement from his oldest friend – the one person in the universe he still called family. “It belonged to my mother,” he croaked, sounding broken.

“Keith...” Shiro stepped forward, wrapping his arms around the exhausted Red Paladin and holding him close. “It's okay, Keith. It'll be okay.”

“How can I face everyone?” he mumbled into Shiro's chest.

How could he face Pidge? She'd think him a monster for sure. The Galra were the reason her father and brother were missing and he was one of them.

“With your head held high,” Shiro said as he drew back. His words had the intended effect of getting Keith to look up and meet his eyes. “This doesn't change who you are, Keith. No one will think badly of you for this.”

He was wrong.

So wrong.

Allura's heated glare when he broke the news had him wishing he'd given up the knife from the start and never went through the trial. He couldn't look at the others. Hunk's nervous chatter told him everything he needed to know about how they were taking it.

He fled the bridge at the first opportunity, unable to handle the tension he'd caused. He could hear Shiro try to convince Allura to allow Kolivan on board the ship and the heated argument that broke out just as the door slid shut behind him.

Keith made it halfway down the hall before the door opened and shut again and then there were footsteps hurrying his way. He stopped, bracing himself for the confrontation that was sure to follow.

“Man, what a mess,” Lance remarked. He frowned and reached out to rest a hand on Keith's shoulder. “Hey, are you okay?”

“Would you be?” Pidge asked.

“Well, no...”

Keith breathed out, trying to steady himself before he spoke. His voice cracked anyway. “You guys don't have to do this. Don't pretend like everything is okay. Just... if you're going to yell at me, do it now.”

Pidge and Lance exchanged bewildered glances.

“What are you talking about? Why would we want to do something like that?” Lance asked, sounding hurt by the very suggestion.

Keith made a frustrated sound as he turned to face them. “Because I'm Galra! I'm... I'm one of them! They took your family, Pidge! They're the reason you can't go back to Earth yet!”

“That wasn't your fault,” Pidge said calmly. “Keith, you had nothing to do with that. And the existence of the Blade of Marmora proves that not all Galra want to enslave the universe. Not all Galra are the bad guys. And even if we didn't know that, I'm not going to hold you accountable for what they did. That isn't fair.”

As if to prove her point, Pidge took his hand and laced their fingers together. Heat raced up his arm at her touch and he almost yanked it away, but a stronger part of him refused to let go.

It was the same part of him that desperately wanted to kiss her in that moment.

“I don't understand. How are you both so calm about this?” Keith asked, beating back that impulse.

Lance sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck. “I kind of had a suspicion that you might be...? And I may have shared it with Pidge, because I needed to make sure I wasn't imagining things. It was ages ago. There was that control panel that wouldn't respond to me no matter how many buttons I pressed, but you did one thing and it suddenly worked? And then Pidge said the panels could only be operated by a Galra or their tech, so I kind of put two and two together.”

“But that was months ago,” Keith said, flabbergasted. “You've known all this time? Why didn't you say anything?”

“It didn't seem important,” Pidge said with a shrug.

“Either you already knew or you didn't. We decided not to make a mess of things by bringing it up,” Lance explained.

Keith looked between them, hardly daring to believe they were really okay with him being part Galra. “You really don't care?”

Pidge squeezed his hand. “We wouldn't be here if we did.”

“You're still you. Bad fashion sense and all,” Lance said with a grin.

“Lance!” Pidge scolded, trying not to laugh.

Keith found himself able to smile as they bantered, taking his mind away from his new discovery, at least for a while.

Pidge didn't let go of his hand.

More time passed.

He lost Shiro again. Allura became a paladin when Keith was accepted by the Black Lion and Lance by Red. He found Shiro again. And then, bowing to the pressure of being the leader no one wanted, Keith left.

There were tears in Pidge's eyes as he said goodbye. Her voice cracked as she hugged him and said: “We're really going to miss you!”

It was enough to make Keith hesitate, lingering just a while longer in the group hug. But he'd made up his mind and there was no going back. He had to leave. And maybe the distance would help. Maybe one day his heart wouldn't ache at the thought of her not being near.

Keith threw himself into working missions with Kolivan and the rest of the Blade of Marmora. As long as he stayed busy, he wouldn't think of how the others were doing back at the Castle. He wouldn't think of her.

He limited his contact with them, knowing his resolve would crumble if he didn't. It worked until Naxzela.

For something that started out so well, it ended in near disaster with a planet-sized bomb and an impenetrable forcefield. Keith acted purely on gut instinct, directing his ship for a head-on collision. There was not time to consider the what-ifs. There was only time to act.

And then Voltron's communication system came back online and someone patched the Paladins through the Keith's ship. Two things happened in that moment: the sound of panic in Pidge's voice had him maneuvering away from the barrier at the exact moment that his screen lit up in flames  as Prince Lotor struck the Galra ship with a well-timed shot.

It was all a blur after that. Keith could remember fighting to get a glimpse of Pidge, just to make sure she was alright, and then it was back to Marmora headquarters for a debrief. There was no time to rest from their massive victory and soon he was back in the field, putting the intelligence provided by Lotor to good use.

(And Keith honestly didn't know how he felt about that, after everything Lotor put them through, but he was no longer a part of the team and had no say in the matter.)

They emerged victorious and unscathed from their assignments.

Things slowly got better. Easier.

It was months before he saw her again. Allura opened the Castle to celebrate freeing another quadrant of the galaxy, enticing the leaders of the planets to join with the coalition. Keith attended at Kolivan's insistence, bringing with him a handful of other half-Galra members of Marmora, as well as his mother, Krolia.

Pidge was seated between Hunk and Lance and he spent all of dinner unable to keep his eyes off of her, taking in the subtle changes that had occurred while they were apart.

He narrowed his eyes as a young prince drew her attention and the sound of her laughter reached him all the way down the table.

“Keith,” Krolia murmured. “Calm down. You're growling.”

Keith stopped, more out of surprise than anything. He hadn't even realized he was doing it. He slumped in his seat, ears burning from embarrassment. “Sorry.”

Krolia's gaze flickered between him and the Green Paladin, unsure of what she was seeing at first. Then she laid a hand on his shoulder. “It's alright, Keith. It's only natural to be protective of your soulmate.”

“Soul... what?” Keith repeated in confusion.

Soulmate? Why would she think – ? Soulmates weren't real. It was just a fairytale.

“No one has told you...?” As always, Krolia looked upset by the knowledge that no one had bothered to explain important details of his heritage to him. Her jaw set into a scowl as she stood. “Come. I will explain to both of you.”

“Mom, wait!” Keith hissed, scrambling to his feet as she walked away without him. He hurried after her and tried to ignore the undisguised whispers directed their way.

“Green Paladin, I wish to speak with you for a moment,” Krolia stated as she stopped just behind the prince Pidge had been speaking to.

(Keith almost felt bad for him, as he looked terrified to turn around and see Krolia towering over him.)

Pidge looked utterly bewildered by the situation, but stood up anyway. “Uh, sure,” she agreed. Before she left to follow them, she quietly whispered something to Lance, who looked displeased but didn't argue.

Krolia took a moment to respectfully nod to Allura before sweeping out of the room with both of them trailing along.

“What's this about?” Pidge whispered to Keith.

He couldn't bring himself to say it. Pidge would laugh for sure. And he wasn't sure he believed it himself, even as seriously as his mom was treating the subject.

Krolia waited until they were a good distance away before she stopped them. “It has come to my attention that there are certain things Kolivan has neglected to explain to you. I've asked you to join us, Pidge, because I believe you are a part of this.”

Pidge's brow furrowed. “A part of what? What's this about?”

“Galra have soulmates,” Krolia explained. “Or rather, Galra have the ability to know the moment they meet their soulmate. We are instinctively drawn to them. It's a desire to be close, to protect them if we need to. No distance can break a soul bond once it has formed, nor will it cause it to weaken.”

Keith stopped listening for a moment.

He'd felt drawn to her from the moment he first saw her. He'd blamed it on their bond as the left and right arms of Voltron once everything settled and thought little more of it. (After all, Hunk and Lance had been very close as the left and right legs of Voltron. He'd taken that as all the proof he needed.) He'd blamed everything on their bond as Paladins. His awareness of how close she stood to him. His admiration of her brilliance. How he worried about how she would take the news of him being part-Galra, more than anyone else. How hard it was to leave her.

It all made sense.

Soulmate. Pidge was his soulmate.

“Are you saying that Keith and I are...?” Pidge whispered, unable to finish her sentence. Her eyes were wide with disbelief as she looked up at Krolia. When the Galra woman nodded, her serious expression unchanged, Pidge turned to Keith instead. “Is it true?”

“I...” Keith's words caught in his throat and he nodded instead. “Yeah. I think so.”

“You think so, or you know so?”

Keith closed his eyes. “I can feel it, Pidge. I always have. From that first day, when you held onto Shiro to keep him from falling off the hoverbike, I knew there was something. I just... I didn't know what it was. I'm sorry.”

Pidge tilted her head curiously. “So what does this mean for us? I mean, the term soulmate has heavy connotations of romance on Earth. Is it the same for Galra?” she asked, directing the question to Krolia.

“It depends on those involve, but in most cases love is involved,” Krolia said. “It takes time and hard work, just like any other relationship.”

Pidge hummed thoughtfully, her gaze sliding back to Keith. “Could we have a moment alone, please?”

Keith almost wanted to ask his mom to stay, but she was gone before he could make up his mind, leaving him alone with Pidge.

“So, we're soulmates. Okay, that's... unexpected. And complicated? I mean, it is right now, since you're always with the Blade of Marmora and I'm always at the Castle or doing Voltron stuff,” she rambled, beginning to pace. “But it won't be that way forever. One day the war will end. And then... and then maybe we could see about spending time together.”

“I'd like that,” Keith agreed.

And knowing that she wasn't horrified by the thought of being soulmates was enough. In truth, neither of them were ready for anything more than friendship. There was still so much to do. So much that could happen.

When another year passed and peace was won with Voltron leading the way, Keith and Pidge found each other again and made good on their unspoken promise to see where their soul bond would take them.

NEXT

nct song ask

okay but firts of all, i’m doing thsi just because @renjunlonjin challanged me to do ALL the nct songs ask and, as THE demon i accepted it :) (i think ill regret it soon but.. let’s see)

asks : 

0 mile: what is your favourite number and why?

my favorite number is 10, i don’t have a why actually, i just like the number ten :v

angel: what are 3 things you find really beautiful?

the ocean; roses (are my favorite flowers); @nanasboi;

another world: which fictional world would you like to like to live in?

narnia

around: what people do you like being in company of?

answered here

baby don’t like it: what are your pet peeves?

i have some but what irritates me the most are: people walking slow in front of me.. omg like CAN YOU WALK PLEASE ??????????? and it’s even worse when they are so many that block the other ways to pass them ??? # turists

baby don’t stop: your guilty pleasure?

ithink i don’t have one.. i don’t really know what to answer here because i don0t have one.. i think.. 

back 2 u: have you ever had your heart broken?

yes, a lot actually.. i fall in love too fast and too deeply so it’s very easy to break my heart. i’m such a emotional bitch and i creat a lot of feelings for someone easily (something i hate about me) and... a lot of people broke my heart before.. 

black on black: favourite outfit?

answered here

boss: who is the person you respect the most and why?

my mom. i love her so much even i don’t show it that much actually.. we fight a lot but i love her.. ofc i do it’s my mom..  why? she’s such a warrior and i don’t want to talk about it here but i have to say she passed through a lot and i’m so glad that she’s alive today.. 

cherry bomb: when was the last time you felt sexy?

i think it was last week when my class was photographying for a school project and i was one of the models. i felt sexy but insecure at the same time, as always.. (i have always to feel insecure about something wow)

chewing gum: what is your favourite candy?

UUUUUUH i don’t have a favorite candy buuuuut, my favorite ice cream flavor is mint and chocolate aaaa it’s so good~ 

cure: what songs do you listen to in order to relax?

2U - JK cover beautiful - Crush i love you boy - suzy if i could i would feeling nothing - blackbear it’s you - henry nothing like us - JK cover paper hearts - JK cover  spring day - elise english cover stay - blackpink try Again - d.ear ft. jaehyun i do - jenyer summer rain - gfriend lucid dream - monogram timeless - nct u the truth untold - bts ft. steve aoki

omg they are a lot i know but, if you listen to some of them, tell me~ 

dream in a dream: what’s the strangest dream you’ve ever had?

AHAHHAHAAH funny fact: i don’t remeber my dreams. only if they are nightmares and as a nightmare, it’s not strange or funny :) i’m sorry.. 

dunk shot: your favourite sportsperson?

HELLO CRISTIANO RONALDO EXISTS uwu

fire truck: your biggest fear?

my biggest fear is to lost veryone who i love the most, my family and my friends.. not only in a “death” siatuation but lost them even in life you know? idk i would react to it.. 

go: if you could go to any place in the world, which place would that be?

i really want to travel to japan. i think japan is a beautiful country and i really ant to know that awesome country better. who knows, onw day!

but if you’re talking in another way, maybe i’ll go to meet my jungwoo baby uwu pleaseeeee

good thing: what are your talents?

do i have any? maybe photography? well since photography is something i’m learning and not a talend i born with, i don’t really know. i don’t consider myself a talented person tbh, i don’t have nothing special

heartbreaker: what has made you cry recently?

KIM JUNGWOO YOU CAN ASK ALO, LIKE I LITERALLY SENT AN AUDIO TO HIM CRYING BECAUSE OF JUNGWOO AHQAHAHAAH WHAT A SOFTIE I KNOW

joy: what makes you happy?

music, photography, dance, my friends, the ocean, animals, men’s perfume, chocolate, roses, my utt bias... 

la la love: what’s the longest crush you’ve ever had?

was my first crush: 4 years :) wow a lot i know, and guess who got her heart broke (hint: me)

lemonade love: is there a thing you did during your childhood that you still do and if so, what is it?

play random songs and creat my own choreography, yes i do that a lot or just when i have time, as you can see, i love to dance a lot!

limitless: if you had to choose one person to spend an indefinite time on a deserted island with, who would it be?

uuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhh jaehyun.. idk why but i feel like he’s a good person for this 

mad city: where do you feel most like yourself?

when i’m alone. reallu i’m totally myself when i’m alone, dancing or listening to music! i love being alone 

my first and last: what was the first kpop song you heard and what was the last one you listened to?

first - monster by bigbang last - see you later by blackpink

my page: do you write a diary?

no :) i used to do it but i don’t do it anymore because i don’t have time to have one

neo got my back: have you ever had a near-death experience?

no, but tbh, i would like to experience one

once again: if you could go back in time, what moment would you go back to?

to the day my dog died.. i just wanted to say goodbye to her.. (uhh guess who’s crying...)

paradise: what is your dream vacation?

answered on “go”

radio romance: what do you think about long distance relationships? would you be comfortable being in one?

answered here

running 2 u: what’s the longest you’ve ever run?

i don’t know because i really dislike to run ahaisha 

spring blossom: what’s your favourite flower and why?

roses; they are so pretty and their smell.. nobody never gave me flowers even on my birthday or something but i really like them, they are so romantic.. OMG I LOVE ROSES

summer 127: your favourite memory from a vacation?

i don’t have. fun fact: i never traveled out of portugal :v

sun & moon: are you a night owl or a morning lark?

totally a night owl, it’s now 1am and IM DOING THIS 

switch: if you could be somebody of the opposite sex for one day, who would you be?

answered here

taste the feeling: what is your favourite beverage?

COCA-COLA AAAAAAAA

the 7th sense: if you could be talented in one thing, what would it be?

answered here

timeless: do you have a favourite piece of art and if so, what is it?

well, timeless is considered a piece of art? if so, it’s it :)

touch: are you a cuddly person or not?

YES I AM A LOT OMG I LOVE CUDDLING PLEASE I WANT TO DO IT RN AAAAAA :((

trigger the fever: have you been obsessed by something recently?

not really

try again: what’s the last thing you messed up badly?

not preparing the material to do my internship correctly, omg what a shame

vision: where do you see yourself in 10 years?

working in something related to photography

wake up: at what time do you usually wake up?

it depends.. during school days: 7 - 9 am  weekends: 1 - 2pm... :) 

walk you home: what songs remind you of home?

answered here

we young: what is one film from your childhood that you never get tired of?

ALL BARBIE FILMS AHHAHAAHAH I JUST LOVE THEM TOO MUCH SPECIALLY  THE PRINCESS AND THE POUPER

whiplash: what is the most painful thing you’ve experienced?

answered here

without you: what are three things you cannot go without?

my phone my headphones my keys  :v

yestoday: did you make new year’s resolutions last year and if yes, have you achieved them?

answered here

young & free: what is your earliest childhood memory?

i don’t really like to remember my childhood.. and even talk about it, i’m sorry

---

HEEEEEEE I DID IT @renjunlonjin !!!!! WHAT WILL I GAIN WITH THIS???

The ground shakes from the force of the hit. Sapphire cries out as she goes flying, splatting in the trembling mud of the camp. The breath is knocked from me as the entire world shakes, and I only just manage to steady myself before it falls silent. And then the screams begin. They are distant, almost unrecognisable in the wind, but they are loud for those who know to listen. Every single soldier around me freezes at the sound, their muscles shifting into defence mode and readying weapons that appear from folds of clothes I did not even know existed. In the small path that I stand in, the silver of blades and swords and guns and axes suddenly shine in the sunlight. The screams are not from this camp. They are from another one, a distant war camp. All I can recognise are the screams of terror and the roars of battle. And then I look around and notice that every single soldier is watching me. Waiting for my instructions, my reaction, my power. The gesture makes my knees weak. They see me with Damion, their General Commander, so they assume that I hold authority in this war. I do not. But people are dying. "What camp is that coming from?" I manage, my voice hardening into something I do not recognise as I shift my own stance. A cold begins to fill my veins; something I have never felt before. A deadly sort of focus. As Sapphire rises, covered in mud, she ignores it and she turns to me. I realise that she is awaiting my command, too. I have no power in these camps! Why do they think me- "It's coming from the West," A woman calls, "So it will be an Idal camp." Sapphire freezes. She goes so utterly still that I am afraid she has left her very body. Every soldier watches her reaction and mine. One full blooded Idal, and one hybrid. "Which one?" Sapphire suddenly demands, voice hard as steel as she focuses on calming her breathing. I can hear other soldiers running through the camp around us, but in this clearing no one moves one muscle as they watch Sapphire transform into a machine. Someone clears their throat before calling, "Most likely Camp Kuno." The camp of the Water Idal's. Sapphire's family and community. "Get there now," Her growl rips across the clearing for one split second before she shifts to her people, disappearing into thin air. We all heard the fear in her snarl. The terror. The soldiers shift without hesitation, responding to orders as swiftly as they can. Within seconds, they disappear and I am left alone. I do not hesitate before breaking into a sprint. I almost fall into Damion's tent as I enter, and I find him and a dozen other war commanders arguing and pacing and sharpening weapons. In the midst of the action and arguments stands my sister and Jeremy. And another girl. I knew Damion had retrieved Elana yesterday. He had asked me to come and greet her, to meet my youngest sister. I refused. I stride to Archery, shoving aside old men and their swords before stopping right in front of her. She stares down at me, face blank. We have not said one word to each other since our fight a few days ago. When we glanced at each other then, it was hatred that shone in our eyes. Now, with the Idal screams ringing in our ears, it is nothing but united focus. "There are two towers on each side of that camp," I breathe, "One to the West, and one to the East." The girl - Elena, my sister - stands beside Archery and peers at my face with an open curiosity. In the small glances that I have stolen, it has been gathered that this sister is the softest of us. Rosy cheeks and doe eyes and pink lips and a round face. A lovely sort of beauty. I wonder which power she dominates. I am fire, Archery is darkness, and I hope that Elena is something softer. There are already two toxic sisters, we do not need another. "I take West," I whisper, my voice steady. She does nothing but nod slightly. Before we can shift away, Jeremy's fingers wrap around Archery's upper arm. She glances down at it irritably. "Wait," Jeremy almost hisses, his entire body trembling in barely controlled restraint. There are Idal's dying out there, and he has been told - by Damion no doubt- to wait for orders. He knows we have to wait, too. "There's no time-" "Damion has orders for you two," He insists, the darkness clouding chocolate eyes as he stares down at me. Archery watches his gaze carefully, almost captivated by the night shining between his lashes. I ignore him, stepping back and rising on my tip toes to spot Damion in the tent. There; on the other side. He stands near his bed, sliding knives and daggers into his fighting leathers faster than I can count. "Damion!" I call, voice sharp yet calm. Despite the sea of voices shouting for the General Commander's attention, he glances up only at the sound of my voice. His eyes find mine, and there is no warmth or easiness in those green depths. His entire face is a mask of deadly focus and wrath. Damion has slipped away, and in his place stands the youngest and most powerful General Commander in the history of Ponda. The breath is knocked from me for one moment, and I struggle to remember my words. I gulp, "We know what to do," I do not yell the words, I almost whisper them. But he understands. I get nothing but a slight nod before he turns around. I turn back to Jeremy, Archery, and my new sister. I cannot help but notice that Jeremy's fingers are still upon Archery's skin. I am surprised she has not cut them off yet. She only stares at me, all three of them do. "Lilanna-" Jeremy warns with a growl. I cut him off by finally turning to the girl beside Archery. For one second of stillness, I study my youngest sister. 18 years old. Two years younger than me, and three younger than Archery. She stares back at me, her eyes shining bright and brown. A hazel colour like mine, but where my gaze is fierce and heated, hers is soft and welcoming. Cheekbones not as sharp as Archery nor I's, but instead a rounder face to match her eyes. She is as tall as I, and her hair is the exact same shade if not one lighter than my own strands. Within a day of arriving in this camp, both Archery and I took a fancy to fighting leathers for the comfortability and swiftness. But Elena still wears a light pink dress. "It is nice to meet you," I breathe to her, "I'm Lila." She manages a small smile. It is more beautiful than any Archery or I could ever create. "Elana," She introduces herself. Her voice reminds me of blooming flowers. "I've heard a lot about you." I try ignore that as I turn back to Archery. I do not want to know what has been said about me. "I take West, you take East." She raises an eyebrow, "And we attack?" "We defend." She nods in understanding. I glance across the room, and for a moment, in the space between moving bodies, I catch sight of Damion. He glances up just as I feel the world start to disappear around me, and the last thing I see before I shift away from that tent is his face. And the green of his gaze. --------------------------------------------- I arrive in the tower with a jolt, accidentally shifting into nothing but air and dropping a few metres onto the platform. My knees jolt at the impact, but I stand swiftly and stride to the edge of it. The first thing that hits me is the noise; the screams, the roars, the fire, the bombs. The entire camp is in ruins. Battles wage below and above. I have never seen this camp before now, but I know from looking at it now that even in the month of war it became a seamlessly beautiful one dancing with nature. Fires burn through it now, flames rising and roaring over the sound of screams. If I look carefully, from this height I can spot people running through the paths with both blades and water glistening in the broad sunlight. Ponda soldiers fighting beside water Idal's to save lives. And then one of the largest tents explodes into flames. I am thrown to the ground from the impact, and for a moment I drown in the sound of the screams. I jump to my feet with a gasp and race to the edge of the tower, staring in horror as Idal's from all areas of the camp change directions and sprint in panic to the flaming fire, their water glistening and sprouting from their fingertips in desperation. I know, somehow, that the tent now in flames was the medical tent. No other tent would trigger that reaction. I glance above me, and my blood runs cold. Above is a fleet of war ships. Floating boats with sails and masks that whip in the wind. I do not want to think about the amount of magic Kidna possesses to float those ships midair. Flowing around those ships are Kidna soldiers. They fly. I know that Kidna was harnessing The Oxy's power, but I did not think they would train their own soldiers to manipulate the magic into flight. The soldiers dip and whizz through the air as swiftly as eagles, gliding down low to release a shower of daggers and bullets upon the distracted Idal's. The flying Kidna soldiers are going to wipe out the water Idal legion with their deadly accuracy. I glance into the distance, my blood racing as I search for the other tower. I spot it, but I cannot tell if Archery shifted to the right place and stands upon it. I glance up into the sky and send up a quick and small flare of fire. In the midst of this battle, no one will notice unless they are looking. I pray Archery is looking. After one moment of nothing, I see it. A bursting star in the air above the Eastern tower. She is there, and she is ready. Without responding, I glance up at the legion of ships, studying the dip of the soldiers and their pattern of attack. I pick it up after one minute. They dip all at once, attacking the Idal and Ponda forces by overwhelming and outnumbering. Their shots are quickly killing hundreds, and if the Kidna soldiers get a chance to shoot one more time, I know all chances of Idal survival will be lost. A bang sounds in a clearing of the camp, and I glance down to find nearly one hundred soldiers shifting in and springing into battle. I know without thinking that it is Damion's closest commander's and generals. For a moment I think I hear Damion's battle cry amongst the roars. My mind stretches across the camp, and I find Archery's presence in less than a second. When I say go, I breathe to her focused thoughts, Go. She does not respond, too focused on the seconds passing and the magic radiating from my tower. She is awaiting my signal without any other words in her mind. I find my own mind and watch the Kidna soldiers. I know what they do. They swing up into the air, take a collective pause, and then they swoop. I wait for it. Swing up. I part my feet and roll my shoulders. Something deep within me stirs to life. Pause. The power flickers all the way down to my fingertips. Swoop. I release my magic with a roar. GO! Before the army of Kidna soldiers can reach the camp, I use almost all of my power to throw a protective forcefield around it. Almost instantly, another forcefield stretches around the camp right beneath mine, stretching across it to thicken the barrier. It comes from the Eastern tower, and I do not bother glancing over to check for Archery. My entire mind focuses on the strength of that barrier. The Kidna soldiers do not see it at first, and each and every single one of them smash into it at full speed before it sparks and throws them back from it with a violent force. I feel each and every hit like they are pricks of needles against my skin, and I clench my teeth to fight the distraction of the pain. I glance up and realise that my shield shines bright orange above the midnight blue tint of Archery's. The colours should create a brown tinge, but instead they shine together and against one another simultaneously. When you glance up, somehow you can see through the midnight blue to the flaming orange of my essence and catch the sunlight shining through both. The shine it casts upon Camp Kuno shouts that it is a powerful and ethereal magic. Something otherworldly. I feel it rip through me; the intensity of the magic swirling through my veins. It is so hard to contain that I fight the urge to curl in on myself, and the fizzling in my blood does not seem natural. I ignore it, this entirely strange and demanding magic coursing through my veins, laughing and dancing and roaring. It seems to whisper to me, amused by my measly mortal body summoning such intense power. I ignore the silky voice, unorthodox and godly. It only laughs when I clench my jaw and stand straighter, sending more power out. For some strange reason, the voice of the magic cooperates, allowing my body to release more power and strengthen the barrier as soldiers shoot at it over and over again. Below us, I see that Damion's group of superior's have dispersed through the many paths of the camp and invest in their own battles or rescue missions. I cannot see Damion in the midst, and I do not even bother trying. Despite the block of aerial forces, the camp is still grossly outnumbered. Every which way, Ponda or Idal soldiers are cut down by the overwhelming troupes of Kidna men. And then the other Idal's shift in. They are clearly Idal's from the closest camp, because their powers shine bright and clear in the light of the day. Dreamers. The Dreamers have come. All around the camp, white clouds suddenly appear in the streets. The army of Dreamer Idal's send the Kidna soldiers disorientating hallucinations before appearing in enemy faces and striking with blades. I know of the Dreamer fighting style; disorient and weaken before slicing. Amongst the white clouds, travelling in one distinct cluster as if surrounding a striding Idal, a smoky shadow teeming with night engulfs Kidna soldiers in it's path and leaves behind skeletons. Jeremy has finally been given his orders. I focus on the battle below as I watch the Dreamer Idal's shift the tides of the camp, efficiently taking down enemy soldiers without thought before sliding along to the next victim. Very slowly, Kidna soldiers begin to drop. And then the ships drop three bombs from above. I feel the blows like bullet wounds in my gut, and the jagged scream is ripped from my lips just as I collapse to my knees. My shreik echoes across the camp. Fire burns through every single pore of my skin, so strong that I think for one moment that I am actually on fire. The pain is so strikingly intense that for a moment it blinds me, and my entire world flickers in and out of darkness. As my vision flickers, as does my shield. It stutters for a few moments before weakening to nothing but a sliver, and in my moment of vulnerability the Kidna soldiers pounce upon it. They ram it over and over again with battle cries that ring out. On top of the agony rippling through my gut from those bombs, the stabs of the Kidna soldiers is enough to black out the entire world. I try to croak something as I pass out. All that escapes is a strangled noise. I am only unconscious for a few moments, but is is enough for the force of the Kidna soldiers to wear down on Archery's shield. I come to with an agonised moan, and I suddenly drown again in the noise of the battle. I ignore the ache that pounds through my veins and drag myself to the railing, standing heavily against it. It takes a few moments for my world to come into focus, and by then I already feel it. The warm trickle down my abdomen. I glance down and flinch when I find three gaping wounds on my stomach. The blood soaks the entire front of my leathers and slowly drips onto the ground. In my moment of shock, I accidentally project the image to the last mind I connected to. I hear her sharp intake of breath as she is hit with the image of my shredded stomach. "Idiot," She hisses to my mind, panic clear in her voice, "You threw too much of your essence into that barrier. When the shield was bombed, so were you!" I blink away the red hazing my vision and shake my head, "I'm fine," I manage to croak to her mind, "Just focus." I cannot feel the pain of my abdomen, and the loss of blood does not make my knees tremble, so I am good to keep fighting. I hold one shaky hand against the blood flow to slow it. And then I take a deep breathe and cast my power out yet again. The orange shield locks back into place, thicker and brighter this time than last. "Stop!" Archery growls to my mind, "You are throwing your life essence into that shield again. They are going to bomb it, and it will kill you this time, Lilanna!" "Shut up," I snarl, "Just FOCUS!" She growls but does not fight again. "Jeremy," I whisper into the void of minds around me, searching for my friend. I find him within one moment, and when I find his mind it is a mess of darkness and deception. A storm of night. There is no way I can penetrate that and talk to him. He is something unrecognisable right now. So I search for someone else. I do not even whisper his name before finding his mind. I find it in the darkness with a startling ease, following nothing but the tug in my chest and the warmth that seeps into my mind as I near it. "Damion," I breathe, a barely managed wheeze that he has no chance of hearing. Somehow, he hears it. "Lila," The sound of his thoughts is something harsh, dark, as he fights with killing calm in this battle, "Are you hurt?" I find it in his memories, so fresh and raw. His battle a few moments ago. The swift slice of his blade as he cuts down soldier after soldier in his way. He is war incarnate. Fighting without thoughts and shifting into another mode that does not let him exist as anything but a General Commander trying to win a battle. The way he fights is like nothing I have ever seen before. There are no noises in his mind but the clash of swords and his grunts as he is hit. And then above him the bombs explode against the orange shield the same time a broken and agonised scream echoes across the entire camp. My scream. I blink out of his memory with a gasp and find myself back in the tower, blood soaking my skin. I glance down at my stomach in worry as I stumble back, and I do not realise I am still connected to Damion's mind until I feel his entire essence recoil at the sight of the wounds that shred my skin. Even from the tower, I feel his body freeze in his battle, deadly still as he watches a sword swing towards his face. And then he shifts. He appears in front of me drowning in mud and someone else's blood. I do not have time to blink before his fingers are on my wrists, pulling my hands away from my wounds to inspect them. His face is dark, intense, powerful. I keep my power trained on the barriers, but I cannot bring myself to look away from his face. "What happened?" He breathes, voice dark and deadly with rage. It is not directed at me. "Don't worry about it," I breathe, strands of my braid dancing away from my breath. "Lila-" His anger simmers.   "You need to destroy those ships," I interrupt, voice calm and demanding as I flick my chin up to the war ships, "If they keep releasing bombs these shields aren't going to last." He glances up, studying the ships with his fingers still wrapped around my wrists. I watch his adams apple bob as he swallows. "Jeremy," I suggest heavily, "Jeremy will take them out within seconds. He is the only one." Damion shakes his head, kneeling to study my oozing wounds, "He is in another form of power. He is unreachable." "I'll reach him-" "You can't," Damion interrupts, ripping a sleeve off his fighting leathers, "No one can possibly reach through that darkness and pull Jeremy out right now." Damion ignores the battle beneath him as he wraps his long sleeve around my torso to slow the bleeding. I turn away from him but let him resume, steadying my power as I fight the pain of the Kidna soldiers attacking my shield. I know that if they do not stop within a few seconds my skin will begin to bleed. Archery is right. I have thrown too much of my essence into those shields that I have become them. But the entirety of my essence is the only thing keeping the power under my control. If I need to bleed to save these people, I know I will bathe in it. He turns me back around, and before he can growl out an order to leave this battle and find a healer, I speak. "Archery can." "What?" Even as he speaks to me, his eyes track the battle behind me. "Archery can get through the darkness," I breathe, "She can find him and give the order." "How?" Because a large part of her is darkness, too. They are the same; they both belong to the night. "She can find him. I know she can." He studies me for a few moments before nodding and stepping away.  "Tell her to drop her barrier while she does it. It will be easier to fight through Jeremy's defences with all of her focus. You will have to hold the shield on your own for a few minutes." I gulp. But when I speak, my voice is as sharp as lightning, "They need you out there. Go, now." "Ignore the pain and focus on the power that thrums through you," He turns to shift, but then looks back at me, "You are enough." His words are hard and steady as he speaks. And when he shifts away, it occurs to me that his voice is thunder to my own lightning. We are a perfect storm. "Archery," I call out to her mind, and she responds immediately, "We need Jeremy to take down the ships. You have to reach inside of his mind and find him. Fight your way past the darkness and tell Jeremy what to do. Let your shield down and do it. Now." She does not hesitate before slipping away from my mind. A moment later, her midnight blue flickers away, and I almost stumble from the support my shield loses. For these few minutes, I am all that stands between life and death for the hundreds of people down in that camp. I wonder why Archery did not ask why she was chosen to find Jeremy's essence. Perhaps she knows why. ----------------------------------------------- As the last ship explodes into darkness, the Kidna soldiers pause in their strikes against my shield. They all stop to stare as Jeremy turns their last battle ship into crumbling black sand. And then, without warning, they flee. Each and every single one of them disappear into thin air until there is nothing left in the sky but Jeremy's descending shadows as he free falls. He shifts right before he hits the shield, and the shadows whip back to life on the Eastern tower as he lands. The next five minutes are silent as the water Idal's flush out any remaining fires. And then, one by one, every single fighting soldier shifts away. I do not know which camp they go to, but both Ponda and Idal forces haul ass. Within five minutes the entire camp is empty save for me on the West tower, Archery and Jeremy on the East, and a brooding General Commander. As soon as the last Idal shifts away, Archery and I release the shields. As they crumple away, so does my strength. I slide to my knees with a weak moan, leaning back against the railing as my hands press on my wounds, drowning my palms in my own blood. I do not move for a long time. I know that on the other tower Archery and Jeremy sit in similar positions, drowning in their exhaustion. Only Damion keeps moving. I can feel him, somehow. He strides through the camp, tearing it apart as he searches for any hiding enemies or trapped Idal's. He sends out the small streak of power that Ponda's possess, searching for a presence that he does not find. He rides on his adrenaline and that alone. Soon it will crash. Soon he will do what Jeremy, Archery and I are doing. I wonder if I will bleed out on this tower. I summon enough strength and bravery to begin stripping off my fighting leathers. Every single movement makes my muscles ache and my wounds ripple with agony, but I clench my teeth and don't stop until I sit without a shirt, laying against the railing with jagged breaths. I glance down and study my bare torso. Three wounds shine ruby red and shredded. They are not as precise as stab wounds, nor bullet wounds. They are not deep enough to have hit organs, but instead they are wide and festering circles of flesh that shine on my abdomen. I glance at my arms. They started bleeding a long time ago, before Jeremy even began attacking the ships. The blood does not run, but ruby dots of blood spot my arms in small clusters. The blotches are so unusual that the image disturbs me, and I have to look away. I find Damion leaning on the other railing, arms crossed as he watches me. His green gaze is heavy as it studies me, taking in the extent of my stomach wounds and the unusual dots on my arms. The last thing he observes is my sweat stained and dirty face. I stare back. "A gentlemen would at least help me to my feet," I manage with a tired croak. He strides to me, grabbing my arms and hauling me to my feet. I hiss as the pain rips through me and glare at him. He does nothing but tug me closer, my hands buried beneath his. His green gaze drowns me as he looks down into my eyes. "Don't ever do that again," He demands, rough and angry. "What?" "Try to hide your injuries." "I didn't!" I object, "I showed them to you!" "That was an accident and you know it," He growls, dangerously close to my face. I fall silent, watching him. He is right. It was an accident. He is quiet for a long time before speaking, "You saved us today." His hands slowly let go of mine and come to rest against my wounds. I do not know why, but I do not flinch from his touch. "I just helped." "No," His voice is hoarse, unrecognisable as his hands begin to warm. My eyes flutter closed, and I know that he is healing me somehow. "You saved all of us, Lilanna. You did it." I manage to open my eyes, and I stare up into his expression. It is harsh, and dark, and brooding. The planes of his face are sharp, and dirt dances along his golden skin. In the fray of battle, his hair became a caramel mess of blood and dirt. I have never seen anything as intense and deep as his eyes, and I cannot speak for a moment as I stare at him. He stares back unflinchingly, unafraid. His hands are soft against my pain and the embrace of his body warms my cold and tired blood. The sunlight behind him shines down upon us, and we glow in the brilliance of it. "You are enough," He whispers. The world shatters into darkness as he shifts us away. ---------------------------------------------- "Where is your coat?" His voice is a smooth greeting in the cold air. I do not turn around to face him, only stare out at the ruins of the camp. In the darkness, I can see nothing but what is illuminated in the moonlight. Nothing down there but disfigured shapes and still burning embers. I glance up at the moon, studying the empty air that six hours ago held mine and Lila's shields. I study the darkness of the distance, trying to spot the Western tower that my sister fought from. I find nothing but stars and night. "Go away," I breathe to the boy of darkness behind me. He ignores me as he steps forward, slowly walking to the rail I lean against and mirroring my stance. His elbows rest on it as he studies the stars that shine above us. I do not look away from the distance. The cold wind pierces my skin and it flutters stray hairs from my face. In my peripheral, I see Jeremy watch my raven strands dance in the moonlight. "Damion sent me to find you," Is all he says, voice blank and bored. Why do they keep doing that? Why do they keep choosing one of us to find the other? "What does your General Commander want?" He shrugs, shifting to face me, "To talk about the extent of our powers, I guess. And probably to lecture us on safety." "Safety?" "Lila," The one word is explanation enough, "I think he was as mad at her as he was scared." "More scared, I think," My voice is a featherlike whisper. Jeremy does not respond to my implicit accusation. His loyalty to the General Commander is blinding and pathetic. Like a dog to it's master. "How did you do it?" He asks suddenly. "Do what?" "How did you get through the darkness and find me today?" I finally glance at him. His gaze is dark, and mine is steady. "I walked." He blinks in surprise, eyes flicking across my expression and studying me as if I am a puzzle to be solved. I fight the urge to grimace before pushing away from the railing and striding to the centre of the tower. I do not face him as I wait for him to catch up with me before I shift. I do not know why I wait for him. I do not know why I do a lot of things around him. His hand wordlessly slips into mine, and I try not to flinch from the unexepected touch. I don't quite succeed, and he freezes, watching me carefully as if that small wince was a secret that I gave to him; a piece of my past. I scowl. It was not. It is a secret I will give to no one. "Let's go," I growl, too tired to shift both of us. He only stares, "You know," He says softly, "You could be nicer to her." I blink blankly, confused. "Lila," The one word, again, is explanation enough. I hear the softness of his voice when he says her name. I do not know if it is friendly or loving. I do not care to know. "We have no time to be nice. This is war." His eyes flash, but he continues, "Your sister is trying her best-" "Lila," I emphasise her name purposely, and judging by the way his eyes narrow, he understands. I cannot stand it when people call her my sister. She is anything but. "Whether you like it or not, Archery," His voice is sharp, "Lila is your sister. Through and through." "We are NOT family-" "You are two halves of the same coin!" He snaps finally, his icy tone shifting into a brutal and frustrated yell, "You cannot continue denying that you care for her, Archery! Only people that love each other fight like cats and dogs." My words shrivel up and die. Only people that love each other fight like cats and dogs. Jeremy, the stupid, insufferable bastard, has the audacity to think back on his words and blush. Even in the moonlight, I can see the strawberry red that flushes through his smooth and pale skin. I hate him. I hate him for blushing. "No such thing as love," is all I say, ripping my hand from his and shifting without another word. The last thing I see before the void is his wild expression. Messy curls and flushed cheeks and eyes wide with recognition. Because Damion said those exact words to Lila a week ago. And we all know he did not mean them. --------------------------------------- Damion strides into the tent last. Almost. He looks tired. So, so tired. His hair is a mess and dirt dances along his usually shining skin. His eyes, usually bright and shining, are dull. He runs a hand through his short locks before scanning the room. His steps freeze as he counts all of us and finds one missing. Archery leans against the back wall, Elana sitting amongst the cushions in front of her. I stand by the table, barely managing to stand. Rafeal stands on the other side of the table, eyes idly drifting by the reports that litter it. I know he is not truly reading the information. I don't even think he realises he is in this room with all of us. Lila will be pleased that he's here, though. Her soft spot for him is so obvious it's almost embarrassing. My lips twitch just thinking about it. "Where's Lila?" Damion asks, voice rough. Rougher than usual. Neither of her sister's even glance up at Damion's words, so I clear my throat and shrug, "Probably sleeping. She could hardly walk after the battle today." "None of us could," He instinctively scolds, frowning and irritable as he walks to his desk, "That's not an excuse." Silence. "Should I get her?" I ask carefully. I can feel Archery's gaze heavy on my back, and I want to kick myself for sounding like a student talking to a mentor. A nervous pup. I admire Damion, but I do not think of him as a superior figure. I cannot seem to convince anyone of that. Or myself. Damion sighs, shaking his head, "No," He gives up, "Let her sleep." "Blatant favouritism," Archery calls in her blank voice, "If she is allowed to sleep, then I will be excusing myself now to go and rest." She takes a step to the door, but Damion's snarling voice stops her cold, "YOU did not nearly bleed to death while saving that entire camp. She gets to sleep. You stay here." Archery watches him for a very long and still moment before slowly stepping back to her position. Despite the insult he threw at her, something like smug victory shines on her face. She looks to me as if she has proven a point. I ignore it. Damion turns to me, "Jeremy," He addresses before turning to his papers, "You did well today. You singlehandedly took out an entire fleet of magic aerial ships," He meets my gaze for one moment over his shoulder, "That is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen." Something shines in me, and I cannot fight my grin. "Thanks," I nod back, "For trusting me with something important." Damion startles at my words, swiftly turning back to face me. He stares at me for a few long moments before opening his mouth. At first go, no words come out, but eventually he manages them. "Did you not think I trusted you?" He asks softly. This seems to be getting deep. I shrug, uncomfortable as I shift, "I'm an Idal," I explain. He blinks, "Jeremy you're the person I trust the most in this war." Now it's my turn to blink. "Oh," I mumble, my skin prickling with the compliment, "Cool. Thanks." Damion studies me for a few more moments before forcing himself to turn back to his papers. Despite the causality of the environment, I can feel my cheeks burning at his words. I did not consider myself even remotely important in this war. Knowing that I am trusted by the most important soldier in it... I can feel Archery's gaze on me again, but this time, for some strange reason, I know it is soft. Softer than she wants it to be. Damion opens his mouth to speak again, but suddenly Lila slips into the room. She does it quietly, without looking at anyone. But we all stop and stare. Tonight her hair is out, golden brown locks flowing freely down her back. The dirt and blood still stains the tips of it, but she does not even glance at it as she silently takes up a spot near Damion's bed. Damion stares at her for a few hard moments before speaking. "What's wrong?" Lila has never, not once, not even in the month we have been in this camp, silently entered Damion's tent. Every single time she has appeared in this room, she has burst in, body brimming with anticipation or anger or annoyance. She doesn't look up at his words nor his tone, "Nothing. I'm fine." She fiddles with her nails. Something about the movement is familiar. I stare at her fidgeting for a long time before she notices. Her hands ball into fists when she spots my gaze. I frown in worry before turning back to Damion. He watches Lila for one more moment before rolling his eyes and turning to face Archery and Elana. Archery stares at Damion with a blank expression, but Elana cannot take her eyes from Lila. Her face is awfully pale. "Archery," He calls, "You did well today. You and Lila saved lives, and I cannot thank you enough for that." She doesn't react. "I think-" He falters, "I think that from now on in battles you and Jeremy will do well to fight side by side." I blanch, "What?" Archery's face pales only slightly, but she does not move nor speak. "Why?" I blurt. Damion shrugs, "Jeremy, you are the most powerful full blooded Idal there is, and you work with night and terrors. It is obvious that Archery's dominant power is your darkness. Together, the two of you will be unstoppable. Terrifying." No one says a word. There is no point arguing. We both know he is right. Archery has an unbelievable ability to manipulate the same darkness that haunts me every day. If we were able to connect our energies on a battlefield, we would be a power of nightmares. Damion glances at Elana, "Elana, I think that you should start training with Lila. We do not know what your dominant power is, but Lila's is fire, so-" "Fire?" Elana rips her gaze away from a silent and hiding Lila to stare up at Damion. "What do you mean her power is fire?" Her voice trembles so much it is hard to understand her words. Damion frowns in confusion, flickering his eyes between Lila and Elana before speaking. As he does, Lila glances down at her watch, jaw clenched. I did not know Lila owned a watch. "She works with fire. Her essence burns with it; the flames." Elana stares at Lila for a long time. We all watch and wait, confused. Lila does not meet anyone's eyes, and instead glances at her watch again. I study the watch. I have seen it before. "Then why," Elana breathes ever so quietly, voice trembling, "Does her essence shine with dreams?" No one moves but me. I very slowly look at Lila. At her watch, at her fidgeting fingers. Lila looks up for one moment, as if the pull of my gaze is too much for her to resist. In her eyes, for one split moment, I see it. Something familiar. Something I could never forget even if I wanted to. My entire stomach drops. Before she can shift away, my power strikes out, hitting her square in the chest. She cries out as it wraps around her tight enough to suffocate, and I string my whip of darkness tighter. "Jeremy," She gasps through her pain as she falls to her knees. Archery positions herself in front of Elana without a thought, shifting into a defensive stance as she summons her own bolt of darkness. Whether to shoot me or Lila, she does not know. "Jeremy," Damion snarls, "What are you doing?" I ignore him, wrapping my darkness tighter around her chest. I know her limits. I know how long she can last without air, how hard I have to squeeze for her power to stutter to nothing. Just a little tighter. "Stop!" She tries to scream as I squeeze more, but nothing comes out. In her hazel eyes is pain and fear as she stares at me. She knows. She knows I recognise her. "JEREMY!" Damion snaps, stepping forward to shove me. Before he can, I squeeze tight enough. Lila finally releases a scream before it shatters. My whip loosens but does not disappear as Lila's image breaks to pieces. Kneeling in her place is a girl of chocolate skin and startlingly green eyes. Her hair, a beautiful mane of dark curls that I still dream about, hangs in a loose ponytail down her back. She looks up with a tear stained face, and something in me shatters. She still has her sun freckles. I forgot how beautiful she was. The tent is deathly silent. Damion adapts a predatory stillness as he stares at the girl watching me. I cannot move. Cannot breathe, cannot think. Waves roar in my ears. Memories almost blind me. Heartache almost chokes me. "Who," Damion breathes, "Are you?" And then I run. I do not look back or listen as Damion calls my name. I only sprint into the night, running as fast as my legs will possibly take me as the panic suddenly claws through my chest. It shreds me apart, cools my blood. I slip and slide in the mud as I pump my legs, but I do not slow. I cannot slow! My breath comes in jagged breathes and I almost sob as the realisation continues to pound through me. Please don't be too late. Please don't be too late. Please don't be too late. Oh, god. Oh, god, oh god, oh god, oh god- I send my power out as her tent comes into view, searching for her presence, her own magic. I find it. A flicker, dim and quiet and weak, but there. Alive. Here. I speed up with a gasp, running faster than I have in my entire life. I burst into her tent with a leap, my shadows immediately striking out to hit them, but the world suddenly slows around me. Until I am caught in the time she almost freezes. NO. NO! I should have known they'd bring her! I should have known they'd bring Georgia. And as the entire world slows, I have no choice but to watch. Watch my feet skid to a slow stop, watch my curling shadows swim as though air is water and my darkness is seeping ink. My head rises ever so slowly as Georgia manipulates time. And then I catch sight of the room. Lila, beaten and bloody, is tied up in silencing chains. The entire left side of her face is covered in blood that oozes like small rivers down her cheeks, and she is barely conscious. Her hair is matted with her own rudy red gore. Standing beside her, with his hand gripping my best friend's hips against him, stands Markos. His smirk is slow and evil in these hardly moving seconds. My mouth opens to scream, to roar, to sob. But my lips take almost years to open, and before I can even make one noise, they begin to shift. I can do nothing but watch my shadows strike towards them in slow motion as they disappear into the void. I meet Georgia's gaze just before her face disappears. Her deep brown eyes shine with regret, apologies. I feel my entire heart break in my chest. They finally shudder into nothing, and only when they disappear does time return to normal. I stumble to my knees with what turned out to be a scream, and my powers blast through the tent and hit nothing. The force of my darkness almost knocks the tent into nothing, but a moment later Damion appears behind me and rushes to steady the supports of Lila's room. I do not hear his panicked or confused words. Do not feel his rough grip as he drags me to my feet. I only see Lila, bloodied and beaten. Chained like an animal. Taken by Kidna. I should have known. I should have known the moment Annais began fiddling with her fingers! LILA DOES NOT FIDDLE WITH HER FINGERS! I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN- "JEREMY!" A new voice screams. Thin and cold fingers suddenly cradle my cheeks as my name is yelled again. That voice- it jerks me out of my mind. I startle, gasping back into the moment and finding my body again. Archery stares up at me, skin so startlingly cold that it is heaven upon my burning heart. "I-" I gasp, fighting the panic attack that threatens to shred me apart into nothing, "I should have known. I should have known! I was so close, so so close. I should have been faster, or smarter! I should have known!" My words sound like jagged sobs. Pieces of glass in my chest. "Jeremy," She says my name clearer this time, and I find the string of calm and power in her tone. I cling onto it as I fight the desperation and fear within me. My hands come up to lay over her own fingers, and I take deep breathes. "What happened?" She asks, "Where is Lila?" I cannot bring myself to speak, mind racing too fast. Where would they have taken her? Why? How did they know where she would be? How did they silence her powers so fast? How did they beat her? They're going to kill her- "Jeremy!" Archery snaps, dark eyes staring into my very soul, "Where is my sister!?" Sister. Where is my sister. "They took her," I manage hoarsely, choking on my words, "Kidna took her. They're gonna... they're gonna kill her, Archery!" I sound like I have been swallowing mirror shards. But that is only because I am drowning in my memories. In the pain I have fought so hard to block out, ignore, forget. Lila is going to live it. She is going to washed away in the things of my nightmares. "Oh, god," I whisper, trembling from head to toe, "They're going to break her." Archery's entire face stills. And then it shatters. She steps away from me without a word, and without her grasp I find myself falling to my knees. I have only enough strength to glance up and find Damion across the room. He stands frozen, so still that I am not sure if he is breathing. Terror shines clear on his face. Elana bursts into the tent behind us, chest heaving and face streaming with tears. I do not have the energy to speak. I cannot escape from the memories that begin to bloom in my brain. No, please no. Please no! I have spent a year trying to fight these memories. I have spent a year healing, removing them, forgetting. And now they're back. And they're drowning me. "It's not just Lila," Elana gasps, "It's more!" The panic in her voice is a dagger slicing across my skin, "They're taking so many more!" Damion is still for one singular moment before hurtling out of the tent, weapons drawn. Elana follows. Archery sinks to her knees in front of me, resting back on her heels as she stares into the distance, slumped over. "They took her where?" Her voice trembles. "I don't know." Silence. Around us, the camp echoes with shouts and flickers of power. "Is she going to die?" Archery asks, empty. I look up into her eyes. "No," I manage, "I think she's going to turn."   "What?" Archery flinches away from me. I do not care. I look down at my trembling hands. "I think they're going to turn her against Ponda," I look up one more time, "And then she'll destroy us."

unrequited