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#and my brain just whirs emptily
kansaskissedlips · 2 years
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So glad you’re taking prompts again, I missed you! Can I just get some sweet, fluffy, later seasons Wincest cuddles? ❤️
"You sure you're okay?" Dean murmurs, running his fingers up and down Sam's bare back, mindful of where he's still bandaged from his gunshot wound.
"I'm fine," Sam sighs out, sleepy as he curls towards Dean. "Just a little sore." He closes his eyes, bone-deep exhausted.
"Sammy?"
"Y-Yeah?"
"I just - it's barely been a week since - y'know. You were shot. I just need you to take it easy out there." He moves his fingers from Sam's back, grazing them over Sam's belly - over the wound there.
Sam opens his eyes, tilting his chin up to look at Dean. "The pain's manageable, Dean. And I'm - I'm okay. Really. I survived. That's all that matters."
Dean pulls him closer, grip tightening. "Just checking. 'Cause if you need to talk to me about it...well, y'know. I'm here."
"I'm fine," Sam says again, "I swear." He goes quiet for a second. "That's nice. What you're doing on my skin."
Dean smiles. "Yeah?" He applies a little more pressure, letting his fingernails graze Sam's back and chest. He traces his name with his finger.
Sam grins. "What - you branding me, or something?"
There's a light snort. "You wish, sweetheart. 'Sides, I've already branded you six ways from Sunday." He gives Sam a little smirk.
"Perv."
"You love it."
It's quiet for a moment, and then Sam asks, "Dean - back there. Did something else happen?"
"No. No, Sam. Everything's fine."
They both know Dean's lying, but maybe that's a conversation for a different night.
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selinaneveahcrystal · 6 years
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Catharsis
A/N: Alright. I’d like to thank @themutantunderground and @blink-when-it-thunders for betaing this one shot Catharsis for me :3 I was terribly unsure of the ending itself, and didn’t know what things to cut or leave. Anyway, all the thanks to the prompts from the reblog of @quintessentiallygifted , which gave me the right inspiration from the word prompts I saw. (I even screenshot the post in my phone xD And I look through all 100 of them everyday to see which prompts stand out as inspirations before I form the prompt idea in my brain lol)
Now, a good warning ahead of time. A whole load of angst, and well..you guys would probably be able to guess what else from the compilation of word prompts I chose how this one shot will go.
Enjoy and Comment/Review! 
61. We need to talk.
58. I made a mistake.
36. I think I’m in trouble.
79. I don’t feel well.
19. Just breathe, okay?
91. I can’t breathe.
54. Talk to me.
82. I’m on my way.
85. I need to tell you something.
100. I love you
He calls her in the middle of a Hellfire Club meeting, at the most inopportune time possible.
She's been arguing with the snotty higher brass about the direction they wanted to take the Hellfire Club, and is pissed, because she can't believe he's managed to wheedle out her newest phone number from Sage (somehow, because she's been keeping tabs on him through Sage.).
So she snaps at him as soon as she picks up the phone, the embarrassingly loud ringtone bouncing off the walls of the whitewashed meeting room, the bright phone screen flashing the old nickname and his current number she couldn't bear to discard even after she left.
Their little girl has been keeping her up all night with her demands to see her father, her nights ending with scream fests from a five year old who has nothing but an old photo she printed out for Aurora to keep as a keepsake of her father at her daughter's demand. "What?" She snaps, regrets almost immediately, her harsh tone, because he's done almost nothing to deserve it. "We need to talk."
All her guilt at snapping at him rushes away as soon as he opens his mouth, and those words spill from his lips. Lorna heaves a deep breath. "Can't it wait? I'm in the middle of something important here." "Yeah, uh, about that. Nope. I don't think it can wait." He sounds off. No, just wrong, and Lorna can't put a finger on it. "Lorna, I think I made a mistake." "What?" Her stomach drops into a pit, because she suddenly hears his heavy breathing, laboured and tense, as though he's hurt. "Uh, I think I’m in trouble." He coughs, and she hears him curse slurrily, a suppressed groan barely transmitting over the line. Just barely. "I..don't feel well. And um, there's a lot of glowing blood." Her fingers tremble as they clutch the phone, almost crushing it in her tight grip. "Just breathe okay?" She's panicking inside, and it shows in her wide eyes, because suddenly Sage flies to the computer and starts hacking into the Mutant Underground servers that they've hooked to an open line. "Yeah about that." He draws another wheezing breath. "Can't breathe." There's a shuffle and clatter of objects as Marcos curses lowly over the line, his slurring lisp becoming more pronounced by the minute. There are shouts of other human voices over the line, and Lorna fights the urge to choose a direction and just run blindly, hoping to reach him. "I found them. They're being targeted by Hounds." Sage's urgent voice is loud in her ear. "Is that Sage?" He slurs at her over the line. "Yeah. Yes. Um yes." She's suddenly frightened and at a loss of what to say. This couldn't be happening. She'd left them for exactly the reason to prevent something like this from ever happening. To prevent herself from losing him to those anti-mutant renegades that hunted their kind. Her eyes burn, and her fingers slide away wet at the corners. She's shaking, but her voice is nothing but strong and firm. The line falls silent for a while, and her heart trips, her hysterics threatening to rise to the surface as she fails to hear the comforting rough pained breaths of his over the line. "Talk to me!" It's a desperate demand, and the barest thread of her hysterical fear slides through her words. "Marcos!" "Hmm?" He's always been compelled to answer her when she needed him, and he slurs out a low affirmative response. Lorna almost imagines him, down on the floor, encircled by a spreading pool of glowing blood, his lashes fluttering close as the pool of blood expands. That image horrifies her, because there's no way she was ever, ever gonna let that happen. She glares at Esme. Why weren't they sending some members of their team to help rescue their fellow mutants? Was she so incapable as to wait for every instruction to fall from her own lips? Lorna gritted her teeth angrily. "Aurora's been asking to see you, you know?" Her voice betrays a tiny tremble, and she shakes slightly. "She has a photo of you, and she's been screaming at me to let her meet you." A low watery chuckle flutters over the line. "Really?" "Really." She almost whispers, tears burning in her eyes. "I was thinking..uh, thinking about letting her meet you this Saturday." She makes up a wild decision last minute, grasping at ends of straws just to make a conversation with him, to keep him awake longer, until they could get a team and reach him. "Sounds good." He mumbles into the phone. "If I can make it of course." "What are you talking about? Of course you can." They both know what he's talking about, but Lorna refuses to consider it, no, she can't consider it, because losing him might just break her beyond repair. "Hmm." He hums, too tired to give her a snarky response that she knows must be on the tip of his tongue. "We've got the team ready. They're ready to get there. Five minutes tops." Sage reports back to her, eyes flashing, and Lorna strips her jacket from her shoulders, ignoring the meeting to stride out of the doors after Sage. It’s a given that she's coming with them, no questions asked. "Hey. I need to tell you something." Relief fills her chest as she hears him shift slightly, breathing deep into the phone. His voice is thick with tears and emotion, and she grits her teeth. "No, you can tell me when I get there. Yourself." Her voice is almost hysterical. She can sense him slipping from the edges, barely holding on. "I'm not listening to you!" She doesn't care that the rest of the team are shooting her curious and odd glares at her rare display of explosive emotion. "Can you tell this to 'Rora for me?" "You can tell her yourself!" She's nearly screaming into the phone, trying to stop him from saying those last few words and slipping away. "You just need to hold on, you hear me? I'm on my way!" Marcos inhales slightly, a bubble of soft laughter rising from his chest. "That's good to know." She doesn't need to be there to know he's holding the phone close to his chest---she can hear the pounding of his heartbeat vibrating through the phone. "I love you." There's a loud crash and whirring of mobile machinery that transmits over the line---and Lorna screams and screams and screams----till there's nothing left responding over the line to her voice but loud buzzing static, and the lack of the sound of his heartbeat. ... The funeral held for him is silent, simple, and tight knit.
No one questions the presence of the HellFire Club at the wake, and her daughter refuses to talk or even look at her throughout the funeral. Aurora simply sits on the chair next to the casket, her knees tucked to her chin as she stares wordlessly at the body lying in the casket, far too tearless, silent for a five year old who lost a father, and far too solemn for a child her age. There's nothing but a gaping hole in Lorna's chest as she gazes at her daughter, her eyes just staring emptily at the casket and the body. It aches, but she's Lorna Dane, and Lorna Dane no longer cried for a simple (life-shattering) loss of a loved one.
No.
She'd bigger things that she needed must complete. Especially after this. Marcos had been out getting supplies for the Underground when he'd been ambushed by two teams of Sentinel Services, eight evolving Sentinel Machineries and two sets of Hounds that prevented his escape. All for one man. Just because he was a mutant, and that he had relations to her. (That was your fault) The attack had been planned, targeted, and they all had been far too careless, too caught up with their differences to note the impending danger. (Your fault) And because of that, he was gone, and her daughter was robbed of a loving father she'd never met. (All your fault) Lorna's hands clenched as she patted Aurora's shoulders. They'd overstayed their welcome with the Mutant Underground by attending the wake. It was time to leave. For a moment, her daughter's angry eyes meet her own, similarly coloured and flashing with surging disobedience that Lorna thought she would flare and throw a tantrum to stay, but the little five year old simply slips off the chair to stand next to her. She holds out a hand gently, waiting for Aurora to place that small too warm hand in her own, and is startled when her daughter glances down at the offered hand, before sprinting off in the direction of the van, her offered hand foolishly held out in the cold open air. Lorna sighed lightly, eyes catching John's sad ones, before leaving. .... "Aurora..." Her daughter's door slams right in her face as she follows her little girl with quick rapid footsteps. She inhales a deep breath, and knocks, entirely out of politeness. "Go away." Her little girl's voice is muffled. "Aurora.." "I hate you! Hate you ! Hate you! Hate you! It's all your fault!" The sudden burst of loud screaming from behind Aurora's door sends a punch to Lorna's gut. (Told you, all your fault) Tears well in her eyes. She's hurting too, couldn't her daughter see? She loved Marcos too. "I'm sorry." Her voice with choked with emotion. "He wanted to say something to you. He told me to tell you when he was on the phone." Aurora's quiet now, and Lorna feels the electrical energy belonging to her daughter plastered to the door, so close and yet so far. "He said, Tell Aurora 'I love you.'" The words were whispered loud enough for her daughter to hear, Lorna's own hands pressed tightly against the door. There's a silent beat as the words sink in. Then her own tears fall as Aurora bursts into tears. …
Life goes on after that.
It has to. They never had a choice about that.
Lorna picks herself up, and so does Aurora, though everyone can tell that gaping space that lies in their hearts. Their smiles are never the same.
Aurora spends most of her time beside that small box of recordings that John gave her back at the wake. They used to record back in the good old days. Playing the old cheesy songs that were Marcos' favourite, hearing him belt out alongside Lorna’s own soft soprano,the strains of music on repeat.
Her daughter joins their fight far too young, at the age of ten, despite Lorna's own protests, her sword sharpened by years of training and a well cultivated hate of losing a loved one far too young.
She's inherited her father's love and talent for art, and her walls are decorated with pictures she's taken, paintings and drawings made by her own hand. Her masterpiece hangs in their hallway, a grey pencilled drawing of a deep pit, filled with hands reaching upwards for a light they could never reach. It's a work in progress, because it's a art piece that will never finish till their war finishes. Countless hands with small printed names in her daughter's handwriting reach up in that picture, detailed to the horrifying point of the recognizable scars on Lorna's own hands, from a fight that almost went wrong, Fade's own hands, half hazy just like his invisibility, and Sage's hands, toughened with the calluses.
Lorna's eyes always looks for one, right in the centre, dark, glowing and blazing, full of Hope that Marcos always held to when he was alive. Everyone's hands were there, all those that fought and were fighting this war between mutants and humans. She recognised John's and Clarisse's twined hands, joined in a fervent clasp amidst all the countless hands that reached upwards to the circle of light. Andy. Lauren. Reed. Caitlin. Carmen. Her stomach drops as she sees a pair of hands that do not belong, large, male, with a SS tag twined around his fingers. SS Services. Jace Turner. Her daughter's neat print flowered at the side of the drawing of his hands. Footsteps echo in their hallway, and Lorna recognises the familiar footfalls of her ten year old daughter that just finished her first mission. She stays silent as she sees the reddened circles under her daughter's eyes, and the tremble of Aurora's fingers, stained with blood. Aurora steps forward slightly, her hands shaking, before she adds another pair of hands to the deep pit.
They're pale, small, and delicate, fingers slightly callused with the regular gripping of a sword, with small splatters of blood patterning on the wrist and fingers---residues of taking a life, hands that were younger, far far younger than most hands reaching up in the dark pit. The pencil that her daughter holds stops, and both of them glance at each other slightly.
The pencil flickers between her daughter's fingers, and she feeds another name to the pit. Aurora. ~~~~
@eclipsepolarisxauroraborealis @themutantunderground @btahmisyan @thegiftedpredictions @dairdevil @countryole
@behappyitsemmalie This was the one shot I wanted reviewed and betaed xD But by the time you replied it was already betaed xD Well, if you have any comments or feedback, I’d be really glad to hear it :)
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septembriseur · 7 years
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11 questions
tagged by @havingbeenbreathedout!
What is the last book you read that you couldn’t put down, and why?
I read so few actual books. It’s shameful. I do listen to audiobooks. It might have actually been Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? I felt like it was helping me to understand (or at least prompting me to investigate) things I wanted to understand.
What is the last book you started, that you stopped reading, and why?
See above re: not reading many books, but: I think Andrew Pickering’s The Mangle of Practice, because I was just like, I don’t have time for this. Actually, I basically stopped reading all academic work in the last month because I was just like, I don’t have time for this. This is not a sustainable decision! [mildly hysterical laughter]
Talk about a thing that bothers you in a piece of media you love.
Even though I understand the argument to be made for not including a James/Thomas sex scene in Black Sails (namely: that the show as a whole tends to associate explicit sex with lack of intimacy, and as relationships grow more intimate there is less explicit sex shown, and James/Thomas is framed as perhaps the most intimate relationship on the show), I still think that there needed to be a James/Thomas sex scene, partly because I think that in re: mlm relationships it’s very problematic to portray intimacy as precluding explicit sex.
Talk about a thing you still love in a piece of media you generally dislike or which you at some point “broke up with.”
I quit watching Hannibal in the second season, but I think that first season is still quite beautifully strange in a cold, precise, delicate way. For me, there was a level of meaning in that season that disappeared afterwards. A lot of people whose opinions I respect love the whole show, but for me it became emptily aesthetic, whereas the first season was communicating almost desperately about the boundaries of the human, the nature of madness and monstrosity, and what intimacy is/can be.
Talk about a piece of fanfic that changed or deepened your perception of a character in, or other aspect of, the source material.
I think that @morgan-leigh‘s WInter Soldier fic really did a lot for me. There was this era of flourishing in that fandom where so much work was being produced that offered so much interesting analysis of Bucky and of Bucky & Steve. Other than that, cleanwhiteroom’s (now-defunct) Designations Congruent With Things didn’t so much change my perception of characters as invent characters from the most minimal source material in ways that were really philosophically provocative to me. I’m sure I’m forgetting other things— I read a massive amount of fic, especially considering how little non-fic literature I read.
Do you have particular articles of dress or manners of self-presentation that you use as “battle dress” (i.e. to bolster your self-confidence when you’re facing something nerve-wracking, or when the world feels like Too Much)? If so, what are they?
Bright red or orange lipstick. And headphones.
What is your fidget toy of choice, if you have one?
Tumblr. When I’m writing, and thinking very intensely about a particular sentence or paragraph, I will obsessively refresh Tumblr without really thinking about it, just to be doing something while my brain whirs. When I’m not doing that, I tend to draw crystalline structures of ever-increasing triangles on whatever sheet of paper happens to be handy.
Talk about a thing you made that turned out close to how you imagined it.
The Building of the House was that rare story that presented itself more-or-less fully formed and simply unrolled exactly as I thought it would and wanted it to. I knew exactly what it was about from the first paragraph, and I knew from very early on exactly how it would end, and I experienced very few problems getting it from point A to point B. As much as I complained while writing it (a lot; I always complain a lot), it was in many ways a perfect writing experience.
Talk about a thing you made that came nowhere near how you imagined it.
I don’t know if I’ve written something where this is the case. Unaccommodated Man is something I started with much less of a sense of what it was going to become. I knew what it was about; I knew what I wanted to do with it; but I didn’t know precisely what form it would take. A lot of what ended up being central and important to it arrived as I was writing, in part because I was doing research as I was writing, and the research birthed ideas that ended up being written into the story. It was exhausting because I felt I was discovering so much as I wrote. (The current story I’m working on has also taken a complete left turn, in even more drastic ways— it started out as a short piece from a prompt and has become, like, a full-fledged fic.)
What are your go-to methods of getting to sleep/combating insomnia?
I listen to audiobooks. I’ve been listening to the entire Aubreyad for the last however-long; I just finished Clarissa Oakes/The Truelove. It’s helpful because it forces my brain to stop running as fast as it does when I’m using my phone, but it also anchors my attention on something.
When you dream, do you tend to experience the action from your own point of view, the point of view of a character in the dream who isn’t the same as you in your waking life, or as if you’re observing the action at a remove (as if you’re a “camera” rather than a character)?
All of the above? Maybe? Certainly the first two.
I want to hear other people’s responses to the above questions, so I’m not including new ones! Feel free to consider yourself tagged, particularly (but not exclusively) if we’re mutuals! 
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