#him in the maze with the antlers. real as fuck
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watched saltburn and really fucking liked it actually. day 5937 of realising people on tiktok are just cowards
#‘IT’S SO WEIRD’ do you think that was like. an accident. do you not think it’s supposed to be weird and unsettling and a little ridiculous#and the way it’s FILMED godddd the scenes were all so well shot#I’ll admit I spent the first hour not impressed at all bc I thought it was a really stale class take#like the moment I saw they were oxford students my face was just 😐😐😐#AND THEN I was kinda getting into it but thought they were gonna make the only working class kid the villain so I was still 😐😐😐#BUT THEN. BUT. THEN#I need to rewatch with full context so I can appreciate it properly#watching edits of it on tiktok like im gonna skip all the coquette vids romanticising the lifestyle but my GOD have some people popped off#w the creepy/obsessive audios. the people who get it truly get it#him in the maze with the antlers. real as fuck#just for people to be like ‘am i the only one who couldn’t finish it 😰’ SORRY YOU HATE FREAKISH MEDIA#saltburn
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into the maze - coriolanus snow.
Pairing: Coriolanus Snow x Plinth!Reader - Saltburn!AU
Warnings: Swearing. Saltburn spoilers. She pushes him, he pushes her.
Summary: Unable to handle your ignorance of him since his return, Coriolanus searches you out in the maze and confronts you.
Word Count: 1.3k.
A/N: Genuinely just obsessed with the maze scene from Saltburn and couldn't help but, think of pathetic little meow meow Coriolanus Snow as Oliver Quick lmao.
The heavy bass of the deafening music shook the very foundation of the Plinth Estate, every colour of the rainbow lighting up the night sky as Panem’s young Capitol elite all gathered to celebrate Coriolanus Snow’s 19th Birthday.
It was, by all accounts, the perfect birthday, the Plinth’s having gone above and beyond to ensure the event's perfection by spending a small fortune on it. He should’ve been happy, grateful for it but he wasn’t- it was hard for him to express any gratitude when the youngest of the Plinth family spared him naught but a glance and quiet uttering of happy birthday Coriolanus when he arrived- it was the most you’d spoken to him since he returned to the Capitol.
Taking a swig from the bottle in his hand, he watches you walk hand in hand into the distance with some Capitol boy. Anger swells in his chest, heat rising steadily up his neck as he watches you giggling and hanging off of someone who isn’t him and before he can really think of what he’s doing, Coriolanus finds his feet following after you and into the maze.
You don’t see him, don’t even hear him but, Coriolanus can see you and he can hear you; your angel wings alluding him with every corner you turn, your voice taking on an airiness he’d only ever heard when you were with him- he has to stop you before you make him do something you’ll regret so, when he reaches the centre of the maze, he calls your name.
Your startle, stumbling away from your nameless hookup of the night. With a hand pressed to your chest, you turn quickly trying to find the source of the voice as your heart raced beneath your palm.
“Oh my god.” You squint into the dark, immediately recognising the bleached-blonde hair. “Coryo? What the fuck are you doing here?”
Since his return from the Capitol you had seen him far more than you would’ve liked, your parents taking him under their wing since the death of your older brother. Several months ago, this scenario would’ve absolutely pleased you, to have the person you once thought yourself in love with always so nearby but, not now- not after the hunger games and Lucy Gray. Not when you knew the truth of his role in your brother’s death.
“I need to talk to you,” Coriolanus slurs before, turning to your nameless hook up. “And you? You need to fuck off.”
“No!” you grab ahold of your hookups arm. “You need to stay and Coriolanus, you need to leave.”
“I won’t tell you again,” Coriolanus suddenly threatens, voice hard and seemingly sober.
Your hookup looks at you with defeat in his eyes. The very real threat that Coriolanus could impose hanging over the both of you so, he mouths an apology and leaves.
“Oh god,” you groan, pressing your hands against your eyes. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“We need to talk, you can’t keep ignoring me.”
“I can try,” you laugh in disbelief, dropping your hands to finally look at him properly.
He wears white jeans and a matching white, denim jacket - an intricate design of vines of roses sewn into the material - a fine trail of hair leading from his belly button and disappearing beneath his pants, his taut torso on display and antlers on his head.
“Why can’t you just leave me the fuck alone?”
“No, we need to talk,” Coriolanus says, a certain urgency in his voice that puts you on alert as he closes in on you.
“Please, stop… we can’t- we can’t-”
You take a step back with each step that he takes closer to you but his strides are longer than yours and he’s on you before you can even blink; his hands warm and heavy, suffocating against your skin as he grips your arms and lowers his head, trying to force you to look at him.
“You can’t just throw me away-”
“Get the fuck away from me!” you shove him roughly away.
Running a hand down your face, you take a ragged breath but it’s expelled quickly, Coriolanus pushing you back just as roughly, cold hard stone pressing into your back.
“Look, I just gave you what you wanted-!” he cries desperately. “ It was all a show- all of it. I did it all for you- to give you the life you deserve. So, I’m sorry if my performance hurt you.”
You feel the rise and fall of Coriolanus’s chest against your own as he holds you in place with his body, one of his hands finding your jaw and forcing your attention- blue eyes blown almost black as he focuses on nothing else but you; the two of you so close together that you can’t help but notice that despite his slurring words, the stench of alcohol is nowhere to be found on his breath as you take a deep breath, then two- trying desperately to taper the fear now steadily growing inside of you; trapped between him and the Minotaur with nowhere to go.
“It didn't,” you lie. “But I think- I think you need to see somebody. Being a mentor, the games, your time in twelve, it’s all had an impact and I think- I think you need help, okay?”
“No, I don’t. I just need you to understand how much I fucking love you. You’re the only friend I ever had.”
His words send a chill down your spine.
Only friend.
You think of your brother. You think of Lucy Gray- both whom Coriolanus might’ve once considered friend - their missing presences, a frightening reminder of the fact that Coriolanus Snow still considering you friend was likely the only thing keeping you alive right now.
“Okay.”
You swallow thickly and try to ignore the tension in your jaw as you muster what little of a smile you could, hoping your lack of response would temper him, put his rambling to an end- but it doesn’t.
“I mean- doesn’t this just prove how much- how much of a good friend I actually am? How much I love you and know you? I know what everyone else says but, none of that matters as long as you know that I’m still the same person. Yeah? You know that, right? That I’m still the same person.”
His eyes bore into yours; warm and searching for your approval, desperate and pathetic. It gives you confidence, makes you feel brave enough to say what you really think.
With his face so close to yours, you watch his blue eyes dart back and forth between your own eyes and lips as he awaits your confirmation that everything will be alright- but it won't. You didn't know Coriolanus, you never did and you never want to.
“I thought I knew you, but, I don't. I don’t know what you are,” you whisper, voice steady. “But, I do know this, you make my fucking blood run cold.”
Coriolanus reels back, your words a hard slap in his face as he shoves you back slightly to remove himself from you.
He sniffles quietly, eyes wet with unshed tears before, he shoves a bottle you didn’t know he had into your chest and stumbles out of sight, the sound of vomiting following soon after.
“Coryo-” you call his name quietly. “Are you okay?”
You don’t know why you ask but, you do- perhaps it’s the small part of you that still cares-
“Fuck you.”
-you swallow it down with a drink from the bottle and tell him, “I think we should go to bed, tomorrow is a new day.”
You jolt as he stumbles into you from behind, pivoting to face you again as he snatches the bottle from your grip.
“I don’t care what you think anymore,” he laughs, raising the bottle toward you in toast. “I’m done with you.”
Silence hangs heavy in the air as he turns his back on you, his figure disappearing back into the maze; the last thing you hear being a faint, “goodbye, sweetheart.”
-
All fics are my own work - I have not posted my work anywhere else.
Disclaimer: I do not own any characters/places mentioned above.
Do not copy. Do not translate. Do not repost.
bookofbonbon 2024. All rights reserved.
#coriolanus snow#coriolanus snow fanfiction#coriolanus snow x reader#coriolanus snow x you#coriolanus x reader#coriolanus x you#coryo snow#coryo x reader#coryo x you
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Entering the Dungeon because Bonnie said so
Read on Ao3
Summary: Marceline came to Bonnie's aide when she called for Finn and Jake. She didn't expect to be going down a hundred floors while dealing with a shady princess.
Basically, I played Enter the Dungeon over the past two weeks and I have been writing this since the second night of playtime. Trying to write things before I forget them and it is following the canon of the game with some creative liabilities taken.
Words: 3616, Oneshot
Warnings: General Depictions of Violence
Characters: Bonnibel Bubblegum, Marceline Abadeer, Flame Princess
Ships: bubbline
Additional Tags: quests, dungeons, childhood trauma, swearing, adventure, conflict, kind of resolved kind of not, I feel like marcy and phoebe would have a neat dynamic, I've never seen them interact so, some of these scenes were legit my reaction, see: screaming
"Well, it looks like Ice King will be hanging around the Candy Kingdom now," Bonnie sighed. Marceline glanced at the dark entrance to the dungeon and shrugged.
"It's better than down there. At least up here, he can't get hurt," she decided. Bonnie looked at the hole as well and then back to Marceline.
"Marcy, I think you should let the boys handle this one," she stated seriously. Marceline shifted the umbrella in her grip and unfolded her legs to touch the ground.
"Why? I'll be fine."
"Well, asides from the fact that you have been returning up here frequently covered in wounds and the fact that Death is seemingly hunting you down, those aren't just any ancient ruins down there."
"How bad can it be?"
"Mushroom war. If my associations are correct from the information you've given me, then the same city you used to live in” Marceline stiffened. "Finn and Jake can deal with this, you just take a breather, okay?"
"No," Marceline shook her head. "I can take care of it. Just some old relics, nothing a woman like me can't face." Bonnie eyed her warily.
"If you're sure," she said slowly. "Please be careful."
"Send me down, Bonnibel."
~
"What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck!" Marceline shrieked.
"Marcy are you okay?" Bonnie's crackly voice asked, her projection appearing from the holo-pendant. Marceline leaned against the stone wall, her breathing heavy staring at her punctured legs that were bleeding.
"Just fine," she said sarcastically. "Almost got staked by some rusty metal pipes. Bonnie, this is post-war technology. What did you do?"
"I have important research down there, I had to defend it at least a little bit."
"The thousands of lost souls weren't enough?"
“It’s to protect it from them,” Bonnie snapped. “If these criminals got their hands on it, the Candy Kingdom would be in danger.”
“Oh, yeah, if the political prisoners found evidence you were a corrupt leader then you’d be overthrown.”
“It’s a real threat!” Marceline rolled her eyes.
“Whatever. I wished my healing worked down here.”
“Bodily magic doesn’t work because some of those creatures down there have natural magical prowess.”
“Too bad that there are tons of magic weapons down here.” The spikes retreated and Marceline pushed herself up, floating slowly around with her axe prone and ready. “What about the plants?”
“They’ve mutated to become immune to the limitation,” Bonnie explained.
“Speaking of plants, there’s one now.”
~
Marceline felt the wind leave her body as she was knocked against the wall, the deer’s antlers puncturing her legs and it licked her.
“Gross! Back off!” She kicked the deer’s underbelly and pushed it off her, slamming her axe down on the deer’s neck. She shakily stood up and was grabbed, a muzzle rubbing against her neck. She hissed as she felt new instincts override her other ones. She pushed herself up and slid under the wolf, standing up to hit it with the neck of her bass causing it to recoil. She slashed across its chest and took a deep breath, stumbling towards the stairwell.
She watched as a green portal opened and Death stepped out, a brown satchel on his waist and he tipped his cap towards her.
“I see you,” he said and Marceline braced herself, taking in the area and how much space she had. She dashed to the left and hugged the wall, growling when she felt skeletal fingers wrap around her forearm. She was jerked backwards and she felt Death’s skull touch her cheek. She could practically feel the energy drained from her as she struggled before she finally got her arm out of his grasp.
She dived for the stairs and fell down them, at the bottom turning back to look. Death stood at the top and made finger guns towards her.
“Kiss of Death, baby.”
“Fuck you,” Marceline hissed.
~
“Bonnibel, how did you get lava down there,” Marceline asked as she watched the wounds heal. Bonnie handed her a vial of a purple liquid that she drank, whatever cursed her fading away.
“Various tunnels and educated usage of pressure and-”
“It was more rhetorical. But I did get burned. And stabbed. And shot. And kissed without my consent.”
“What? Who kissed you?” Bonnie exclaimed.
“Death. He was blocking the stairs so I tried to duke him but he caught me. I did manage to get down the stairs though.” Marceline tapped her cheek in the spot that Bonnie assumed she was kissed. “Good thing I’m already dead.”
“Death shouldn’t be hanging around in the dungeon,” Bonnie muttered. “It’s interfering with the mortal realm and not allowing the natural flow to keep order.”
“Well, you’re throwing people in a dungeon and barring magic. That messes with the natural flow,” Marceline pointed out.
“Shut up,” Bonnie snapped. “Have you found any signs of the hoomans?”
“None. I’m going to head back down though, I’ll find them.” Bonnie grabbed her wrist and locked eyes with her.
“Marceline, you’re getting close to a bad place. A place that you were nine-hundred ninety-nine years ago. I really think you should stay up here this time."
"Bonnibel, it will be fine. Send me down."
~
Marceline stared at the ruined food truck, a flood of emotions overwhelming her. She listened to the sea of growling and heard a soft humming mixed in. She picked up a rock and threw it at the truck, the old voice box still working. The red siren turned on, illuminating the maze in red light. Her breathing became unsteady and rapid when the oozers began to glow, and she spotted a hooman among them. The hooman saw her as well and started happily skipping towards her.
She took out her axe and started swinging at the oozers, their green insides spilling out onto the ground. When the hooman was close enough, she grabbed her wrist and bolted, bringing her to the fence and kicking open the gate. She looked over at Susan’s grateful face and to the entrance of the maze and sighed.
“I’m booked for this, aren’t I?”
~
“Marceline! Marceline are you okay?” Bonnie grabbed her arm and started looking over her body, circling her and checking over the exposed skin and where the clothes were ripped.
“Bonnie, I’m fine. I can’t believe they’re still down there.” Bonnie stopped and stepped back.
“I couldn’t get rid of them. If that green goop even touches you that’s it. I just thought if I buried them then that would be the end of it. How the hoomans even got down there I don’t know.”
“Probably something to do with that buff cat chick,” Marceline jabbed her thumb towards Susan.
“Maybe. I’ll ask her later. But Marcy, that one got really dicey. Everyone made it out safely, but you almost didn’t. That swarm could have easily overwhelmed you. Can you please let Finn and Jake take care of this? I really don’t want you to get hurt.”
“And I don’t want them to get hurt,” Marceline mumbled. “I’m the best choice for this. I can teleport back to the surface, I know how to fight, I’ve been in all these places before. Plus I can literally eat the red bullets.”
“If you insist,” Bonnie sighed. She pulled her necklace and started fiddling with it. “What floor?”
~
“Marce, that one was close. This is the seventh time,” Bonnie scolded. Marceline shrugged and leaned on her.
“I’m exhausted,” she complained. “Magic Man hit me with some bullshit.”
“A strength-sapping spell,” Bonnie murmured. She pulled a herb out of her bag and placed it on top of Marceline’s head. “Stand still,” she instructed and counted under her breath before removing it. “You need to rest for at least three hours.”
“No,” she slurred, backing up and swaying on her feet. “I can keep going. I just…” She started falling forward and Bonnie caught her, sighing.
“Will you just go take a nap or something?” she asked. Marceline groaned.
“Don’t let anyone else go in there. I can deal with this myself,” she ordered and Bonnie pushed her back, keeping one hand on Marceline’s shoulder and crossing over her chest.
“Cross my heart,” Bonnie smiled. Marceline raised her umbrella in the air.
“I am going to the corner,” she announced and wandered off towards Choose Goose.
~
“Marceline, things are looking really dangerous. You keep having to retreat back up here,” Bonnie said softly. Marceline shrugged.
“Whatever, I’m still making it out,” she stated. Bonnie crossed her arms.
“You almost aren’t,” Bonnie scolded. “Do you want some help?”
“Bonnibel Bubblegum fighting in a dungeon? I don’t know.” Bonnie rolled her eyes.
“No, a token per se. Something that’ll protect you.” Marceline shook her head aggressively.
“No. I don’t need any help. None! Send me down!”
“If you say so,” Bonnie sighed.
~
“Will you accept my offer now?” Bonnie asked, placing her hands on her hips. Marceline put a hand on her forehead and clenched her jaw.
“Fine. Yes. What do you have.”
“Pep-but! Grab the sweater!” Bonnie called. Peppermint Butler came running with a knitted pink sweater folded in his arms. “Thanks, Peps. Marcy, arms up.” She took the sweater from his arms and held it. Marceline used her free hand to motion towards herself.
“Umbrella.”
“You have telekinesis.”
“Oh, yeah.” She let the umbrella float above her slightly higher and she raised her arms. Bonnie slid it carefully over her head and adjusted her collar. Marceline scratched at it.
“This is tight, Bons,” Marceline complained. Bonnie smiled shyly.
“It’s made of the strongest magic out there,” she said quietly. Marceline quirked an eyebrow.
“O-kay. I thought you thought magic was a sham.” She tugged at the hem of it and frowned, her eyes narrowing at Bonnie. “Why can’t I take it off?”
“Well, you see, I had a feeling you might try to take it off, and for your own safety, I may have had it engineered so that you couldn’t take it off until you were in a sound state. Since you’re going back in, it recognizes that you are going to be in harm’s way.”
“I should have known there’d be a catch,” Marceline grumbled.
“It’s in your best interest,” Bonnie stated.
“That doesn’t make it right. Look, I’m just going back down. I’m getting to the bottom of this.”
~
Marceline carefully pulled the pink sweater over her head and slid it over the umbrella handle.
“I’m not putting that back on,” she growled and sighed. “Everything is covered in your gum down there, you’ve been having fun without me? And since when did you have a giant pink cat thing and a huge gryphon eagle thing?”
“Goliad and Stormo? I’m glad they’re still balancing each other out.”
“I’m not getting an explanation? I should’ve expected that.”
“Also, I’m sorry but your corner is occupied now. I thought you could all use a break from the dungeon and while you may not enjoy the opportunity, the Nightosphere offered a challenge for anyone who felt so inclined. Maybe while everyone does that you can rest?”
“Why are you pushing me to slow down? I’m in my groove right now. You’re not my mom,” Marceline snapped.
“I’m not trying to be your mom! I care about you and I’m worried you’re pushing yourself too hard!”
“Well geez, it’s nice of you to care after all this time! I know my limits! I’ll show you! I’m going to the Nightosphere!”
“Marceline!”
“Don’t come after me,” she snapped and stalked off. Bonnie hugged herself and grimaced.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
~
“Are you going to calm down now?” Bonnie asked. Marceline kicked the dirt angrily.
“No. But I think I give up for now. That whole jam is ridiculous. There’s so much going on at once. I think the normal chaos is what I prefer right now. You know, I think it’d be cool if you came down too.” Bonnie shifted uncomfortably.
“Someone needs to stand guard here.” Marceline motioned towards the banana guards to either side.
“Found two,” she pointed out.
“It has to be me,” Bonnie insisted. She leaned over and whispered so only Marceline could hear. “You know how incompetent these guys can be.”
“Whatever you say P-Bubs.”
~
“So, how’d Flame Princess get locked down there, in the lab that belongs to you trapped in a machine you made.” Bonnie shrugged.
“No idea.”
“You can’t keep trying to ruin Finn’s relationship, girl. It’s an unhealthy obsession.”
“It’s not an obsession, it’s a coincidence! It’s a coincidence that she got trapped in my machinery
“You aren’t confirming it or denying it.”
"I don't need to. I'm not that cruel a woman that I would trap a child for a science experiment."
"Actually-"
"Don't." Bonnie held a finger out to stop Marceline from continuing. "There's no reason for me to lock Flame Princess up, especially when she herself is the biggest threat to the Candy Kingdom. It isn't wise to poke the bear with a stick, you know what I mean?"
“Yeah, I guess. She really wants to join the travel party now, so she might still be gunning to destroy the kingdom.” Bonnie placed a nervous hand on her cheek and glanced warily towards Flame Princess, who appeared to be trying to explain something to Finn.
“Could you keep an eye on her?” Bonnie asked.
“I’m not a babysitter,” Marceline snapped and sighed, “but yeah, I guess. I’d rather all of Ooo not be lit on fire. I’ll take her with me.” Bonnie smiled gratefully. “Anything I need?”
“I recommend a fire-resistance charm, in case you get caught in the crossfire.” Marceline nodded and dropped some gold in her hand. “I’ll use the charm, and that armour Finn hates too. Also, let Flame Princess use whatever token she wants, I don’t care.”
“Flame Princess! Marceline wants you to come with her!” Bubblegum shouted and the teen came running, small fires dotting her every step.
~
“That was exhilarating! So many things happening at once, so many creatures and questions! I knew that Bubblegum was no good!” Phoebe exclaimed.
“Hey, cut her some slack. She’s been at this for a long time,” Marceline growled. Flame Princess looked at her in confusion.
“You can’t honestly look at all this and tell me she’s not evil or at least bad. Look at all this stuff! Living beings forced to stay down here to the rest of their lives. Why? Is what they did really bad enough to deserve this?”
“Yes!” Marceline snapped. “And you don’t know Bonnie like I do.”
“Well, how do you know her so well?”
“I know her so well because-”
“You have done well to come this far,” A voice echoed, startling both girls. Marceline and Phoebe both looked to the speaker.
“Bonnie? What are you doing all the way down here?” Marceline asked.
“Something evil I bet,” Phoebe spat and Marceline whacked the back of her head, ignoring the burning sensation. Bonnibel frowned.
“This is my dungeon,” she said plainly. “And this room is the bottom of it. So, great job! You can go home now, back to the surface or whatever.”
“I don’t think so. There’s probably something in here that you’re hiding,” Phoebe hissed. Marceline raised an eyebrow.
“This doesn’t make sense. What’s down here, Peebs?” Bonnie chuckled nervously.
“Nothing! This is the bottom. That’s it. But just to be safe,” she glared discreetly at Phoebe “I need you to promise me you will not touch my desk back there. It has important research on it that you could mess up. This could be your final quest in this adventure, just promise me. Royal promise. No touchies.”
“I’m not promising anything,” Marceline insisted. Bonnie shook her head.
“You have to.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Fine! Whatever!” Marceline threw up her arms in defeat. Bonnie smiled. It wasn’t one of her normal smiles, not one of the ones Marceline was used to. It was empty and cold. Her eyes were unreadable.
“I think we’re done here then. Thank you for solving the mystery.” Marceline looked her up and down and walked past her, looking down at the table. Phoebe walked up beside her and glanced at Marceline.
“These papers are unreadable,” she whispered. Marceline absentmindedly picked up one of the papers, seeing the words were faded and the pictures were half-erased. Then the wall in front of them opened, showing a dark pink gum tunnel.
“Are you serious? What the fuck is wrong with you! Where does this even go?” Marceline shouted. She spun around to face Bonnibel and scowled at the expression on her face. An expression she hadn’t seen in centuries, since they had broken up. Her eyes were narrowed and she had a slight frown. Her hands were folded neatly in front of her and she straightened her back to look at them like she was above them.
You’ll never know where it goes,” she said slowly, “you broke a royal promise. And you know what that means. I’m sorry girls, it’s business.” Marceline saw out of the corner of her eye a fireball that Phoebe had thrown before they both teleported above the kingdom, standing on a cotton candy cloud and looking up at the Gumball Guardians.
“I told you,” Phoebe shouted. Marceline growled and readied her axe.
~
“Well, at least I’ll get a metal song out of this,” Marceline mumbled. Phoebe scoffed.
“You’re thinking about music? I’m thinking about revolution!” Her hands lit up and she prepared to attack before Bonnibel ran out in front of them.
“Wait! You don’t understand! I know this thing looks like a monster, but you have to listen to me! It doesn’t want to hurt you! It just-” A gum tentacle swung out and grabbed her, causing both Marceline and Phoebe to jump back.
“Bonnie! You’re not getting out of this that easily!” She lunged forward only to get hit in the face with a metal ball, knocking her back. Phoebe dragged her to her feet.
“Think smart!” She barked.
~
Marceline was angry at Bubblegum, but seeing everyone else rail on her for something she herself had done as well, made her get a bit protective. She’d deal with the lying later.
“Wouldn’t you lie to protect your weird old parents too?” Marceline snapped. She floated down and wrapped her arms around Bonnie’s shoulders, glaring at the entire crew. She glanced at Bonnie for a split second and saw her small smile and she flashed one back. She was still holding her when the mass of gum began to separate.
~
“Thanks for helping me out, I do wish you could’ve done it without killing my parents though,” Bonnie said. Marceline raised an eyebrow.
“They aren’t dead. We can go catch them if you want.”
“No, no. They’ll come back if they want,” Bonnie sighed. “Marceline, come inside. I want to speak with you privately.”
“Okay, sure.” Marceline followed her up the candy steps and through the winding halls, ending in Bonnie’s room. She motioned towards the bed.
“Sit down,” she ordered and Marceline obliged, sitting down with her arms crossed. “I want to apologise to you.”
“For what? For sending me on a wild goose chase? For trying to get your gumball guardians to murder me? For lying to me and tricking me? For literally putting all of us in mortal danger? Which one is it?” Marceline snarled. Bonnie winced.
“All of that, listen, Marceline, I didn’t want to do all that! But responsibility demands sacrifice and the cost kept escalating. I didn’t expect it to get so out of hand before it was already there. I was running out of ways to stop you.”
“Maybe the best way to have stopped me would have been to tell the truth? Did you ever consider that?” Marceline snapped. “Everyone could have died, get that through your thick skull! All of us could have died!” She stood up and sat back down, pinching the bridge of her nose and taking deep breaths. “I don’t even know how long it’s been, all I know is you haven’t changed a bit. You put your own pride over the actual lives of other people.”
“Marceline-”
“No, Bonnie, listen. It’s been like this for centuries. It’s exhausting. I had thought you were different now. I really did. But I guess old habits die hard.”
“I’m trying to change. I really am Marcy. I just- I was scared. You know what it’s like to have to face the potential of losing your parents. You know what it’s like to lose them. I don’t. I just had to come head-to-head with it today. It’s not okay that I did all that, but I panicked,” Bonnie rambled. Marceline stood up and shook her head.
“I’m going home. I have a killer headache and I’m tired. I got up to come help and I did, so my job’s done.” She rubbed her temple and walked to the door, reaching for the handle only for her hand to be grabbed.
“I’m sorry. I want you to know that. I really am sorry.” She hesitated. She looked to Bonnie and inhaled sharply. She did look remorseful, but sometimes remorse was not enough.
“Sorry doesn’t fix this,” she mumbled. Bonnie looked away.
“I understand.” She quickly hugged Marceline and backed away, walking to filter through her closet. “It’s okay if you never forgive me. I wouldn’t blame you.”
“I’ve forgiven you for worse,” Marceline stated. “But this one will take me a bit. I’ll text you eventually.” She strolled out and narrowly avoided Peppermint Butler who was coming into the room, getting called some harsh words as she opened her umbrella to make her way home.
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52 Project #14: Angel
I wanted to have this one done for you last week, but couldn’t quite get it completed in time. So here it is as number 14, instead.
***
The angel showed up three days after Riyana Delgado started working at the site of the anomaly.
Given the nature of the anomaly, it was possible the entity was an alien, or some kind of supernatural thing like a spirit. But it was obvious to Riyana what the entity was the moment it spoke. In an impossible voice that was simultaneously unbearably high-pitched and so deep and low it resonated in in her bones, it said, “BE NOT AFRAID,” and Riyana knew it was an angel.
Fisher was the first one who managed to say anything, probably because he was the senior physicist on the team and, ostensibly, was the leader. “What the hell are you?”
“It’s an angel, Bob,” Riyana whispered harshly. “Show some respect.”
“An angel. Really.” Yelena Sokolov sounded almost disgusted.
“GLORY TO THEY WHO ARE ON HIGH. WHAT HUMANITY HAS BROKEN, HUMANITY CANNOT FIX. THEY WHO ARE THE HIGHEST, GLORY TO THEIR NAME, HAS SENT THIS ONE TO FIX WHAT HUMANITY HAS BROKEN.”
“Oh,” Fisher said, and then again, “oh.”
“You are really an angel?” Arjun Chaudhry asked. “God is real? The Christian God?”
“MANY HUMANS HAVE SEEN FACETS OF THEY WHO CANNOT BE COMPREHENDED, THE LORD AND CREATOR OF ALL, BUT NONE CAN UNDERSTAND THE FULLNESS OF THEIR GLORY.” The angel floated forward. It was not a humanoid with wings. It was huge, perhaps six or seven meters tall, and was mostly comprised of dots of brilliant light like stars, vaguely outlining a bipedal shape that might have looked humanoid if it hadn’t had so many stars around its general head area, as if it had antlers, or a gigantic hat, or a mushroom-shaped head. Within the constellation that was the angel, nebula-like mists of many colors swirled, drifting into thicker bands or thinning out to show the desert rocks and sand behind it. “IT IS NOT THIS ONE’S PLACE TO EXPLAIN TO HUMANITY WHAT IS TOO INEFFABLE FOR EXPLANATION. THIS ONE IS HERE TO REPAIR WHAT HUMANITY HAS BROKEN.”
“Good,” Riyana said fervently. “Because all our measurements are suggesting that the thing is growing, and you’re right, we have no idea how to fix it.”
The angel approached the anomaly. The spots of bright light shone especially like stars against the lightless slice through reality that Riyana and the rest of her team were here to study, and reverse if they could.
“I don’t believe that thing is angel,” Sokolov muttered.
“So it’s an alien,” Bob Fisher muttered back. “Or some kind of creature from another dimension, or a fairy, or who the hell knows what. If it can do what it says it’s here to do, who cares?”
As it reached the anomaly, the gravity grabbed it and flipped it, but slowly, much more slowly than it had Cheng when it had pulled him in. The anomaly was a roughly vertical hole in reality, about two and a half meters tall and slightly over one wide. It had no measurable depth because it was either bottomless or had no existence in the third dimension whatsoever; from behind or the side you couldn’t even see it. But the gravity was more intense than the gravity of Earth, and although the hole was vertical, perpendicular to Earth’s gravity, the gravity within it pointed inward, as if someone had tipped a deep well on its side and put a door on it. When Cheng had gotten close, trying to probe the anomaly with a sonar device, the gravity had pulled him in, so quickly no one had a chance to do anything. They’d heard him screaming for a very, very long time.
The angel took several seconds to slowly pivot so it descended into the darkness. The lights went out as it lowered. One of the few things they’d been able to figure out about the anomaly was that electromagnetic radiation didn’t transmit within it. It didn’t even seem that pure electricity could pass through wires within the anomaly, but chemical electricity – the transmission of electricity via ions, the way that living creatures’ nervous systems worked, seemed to work fine. At least, none of the animals they’d lowered into the anomaly had come back dead.
They’d put together a rig for allowing human beings to enter it safely – harnesses, a chain on a pulley – but so far no one had been willing to take the risk. Not yet.
The angel drifted down into the anomaly – which meant it was perpendicular to the ground – as if it was feather-light. It took a minute or two for the anomaly to swallow it completely. And then it began to scream.
The scientists looked at each other, all of them – even Sokolov – with the same horror on their faces that Riyana was feeling. It was like Cheng all over again. The angel must be plummeting to its death.
Except the sound didn’t attenuate as if the angel was falling away. It remained as loud and horrible as it had been the moment the angel started screaming. Riyana’s bones rattled and her ears hurt, aching deep inside, and it was hard to hear anything but the scream of the angel. It was no longer just screaming wordlessly. The sounds it was making that felt as if they’d rupture Riyana’s eardrums had turned into something like words, in a language that seemed hauntingly familiar and yet completely unlike anything Riyana knew.
She shook her head. “Fuck this,” she muttered, and ran for the rig. “I’m going down to get it! Someone man the pulley!”
“What the hell, Riyana?” Fisher’s voice was surprisingly loud for his age. “No, you’re not!”
“Yes, I am! It came to help us and it’s suffering!” She slung her arms through the harness, buckled it in front, then brought the crotch strap – thick enough that it was almost something you could sit on – from the back, through her legs, and up to the buckle at her solar plexus. The chain from the pulley that was mounted to the nearest rocky outcropping split into four at its end, each one thick and solid but not quite as monstrously thick as the main body of the chain. She fastened two of the four ends to the metal loops on the front of the harness.
By this time, Fisher, Sokolov and Chaudhry had reached her. “What are you doing?” Chaudhry shouted. “We don’t know if it’s safe for humans! We don’t even know if there’s air down there!”
Riyana ignored him. “Yelena, could you fasten these two on my back?” She couldn’t easily reach the fastening points by her shoulderblades.
“This is stupidest idea I’ve ever seen,” Sokolov groused. “At least, from someone who should know better.” But she fastened the points. “There is air tank in storage unit three.”
“I know. Gonna need a net or something like it, too.” She doubted the angel was solid enough for her to grab hold of.
Fisher shook his head. “We needed to do this test sometime, I suppose,” he said – or something like that, anyway; he wasn’t yelling it, which meant it was hard to hear over the sound of the angel’s screams. “Arjun, can you get Riyana the chain mesh net?”
“We are letting this happen?” Chaudhry said, disbelieving. “We’ve only tested mice and rats! What if it destroys her mind?”
“The rats could still do their mazes just fine when we pulled them back out!” Riyana shouted over the screaming. “It’s a calculated risk!”
“I don’t see calculation,” Yelena snapped. “I see impulsive decision.”
“Yeah, well, I’m doing it. I’m not leaving an angel to suffer.”
“We don’t even know if that thing really is angel!”
“It’s alive and it’s obviously in pain, so it doesn’t matter!” She turned to Chaudhry. “Can you get the mesh? You’ve got the keys to the unit it’s in!”
Chaudhry rolled his eyes, but headed for the portable storage unit they kept some of the more esoteric equipment in. Sokolov went to storage unit 3 and got the portable oxygen tank and breathing mask with goggles, and Fisher hooked up the secondary wire Riyana would pull on to signal she wanted to be lowered further or pulled up.
As soon as she was kitted up with all her gear, Riyana ran for the hole in reality, holding the wire mesh net in her hands, balled up. The gravity pulled her as she approached within a quarter meter of the anomaly, grabbing at her as if she was suddenly stretched out and falling, like she’d been hang gliding and then her glider had just disappeared, and she fell into total darkness.
The chain pulled taut and brought her fall to a stop, causing her to reorient so she was standing, more or less, in relation to the direction of gravity. The lightlessness was palpable, almost a presence rather than an absence. She couldn’t see anything at all. Even the random pale and almost subliminal flashes most humans saw when they were in deep darkness, the results of single photons hitting the retina, weren’t there.
The net was attached to her front by the fastening point at her solar plexus. She let it go, allowing it to fall, and swung it around through the lightlessness, looking for any point of resistance, anything that indicated it had hit something, anything. At the same time she was trying to orient to the sound of the screaming. Not knowing what this space was shaped like was a problem. Was this truly a void, like space? Was it a gigantic hollow chamber? Were there walls, were there objects floating in it?
The screaming was below her. She tugged on the wire twice, the signal for “lower me.”
Chain spooled out – she assumed, since she couldn’t see it – and she began to drop again, more slowly as her descent was controlled by the length of chain instead of gravity alone. The screaming got louder. The net still wasn’t hitting anything as far as she could tell. Her movements made her oscillate slightly back and forth, swinging in tiny arcs, as she descended.
And then without warning, she swung into something that – fizzed, in her brain, like foam from a soda you’d shaken too much, but warm, almost hot. The screaming was horribly loud, but suddenly Riyana could understand it, the strange sounds coalescing into meaning.
“MY GOD, MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? GLORY TO YOU ON HIGH, MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? MY GOD…”
“Listen!” Riyana yelled. “We’re going to try to pull you out of here!”
The angel ignored her, continuing to scream its litany of despair. Riyana pulled the cord twice again, and tried to use her gloved hands to outline the shape of the angel, to find its bottom. Touching it made her hands buzz like a mild shock, and more information fizzed up in her mind, knowledge coming from the angel… somehow.
It had never before been unable to feel the light of God, its connection to its Creator. But in this void, even God’s power could not reach. Humanity’s quest for limitless energy had resulted in tearing a hole in Creation, and God had sent the angel to repair it because God could not. But the angel couldn’t either, because it couldn’t bear being without its connection to God, and its mind was breaking.
She managed to find its bottom, or at least an endpoint – she had no idea how the angel was oriented. It had been vaguely bipedal and upright before, like a human, but now it felt more like a ball. It didn’t matter. Riyana got the net under it and pulled the wire three times, to indicate she wanted to be pulled up.
The angel was very light, but there was a weight there, enough that Riyana could tell her net was wrapped around something and she wasn’t just pulling emptiness up. As the cable pulled her out of the anomaly and Earth gravity returned, she fell somewhat ignominiously on her rear end. “Keep pulling!” she yelled. “I’ve got the angel in the net!”
The cable, manned by Sokolov, continued to reel her back in, until the net, and the angel, emerged. The angel was a ball, as she’d thought when she felt it, mists in the vague shape of wings closing it in, like a bird with its wing over its head, hiding within itself. It was still screaming. “MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? MY GOD, MY GOD, I CANNOT FEEL YOU, I CANNOT FEEL YOU, OH MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU?”
Riyana felt a cold chill. The angel had said “I”. The information that had soaked into her when she’d touched the angel said that angels were not supposed to have a sense of individuality. They were the messengers and agents of God, and they didn’t have free will like humans did. They did not say, or think, “I”. But this one had.
“Could it possibly stop screaming?” Sokolov yelled. “What do we do with angel who screams all the time?”
“It’s screaming because it can’t feel the presence of God,” Riyana said.
“You are expert on angels now?”
Actually, yes, Riyana thought, but didn’t say. “My grandmother was. She was really into them.”
Abuela’s house had been full of angels. Kitschy plastic angels, smooth ceramic angels, soft cloth angels, rough-hewn wooden angels, and most of them had been exactly what you’d expect – women or androgynous men in robes, with wings, and halos. Sometimes, harps or trumpets. But there had been others. A plush angel that was a ball of wings and eyes. A mobile that was a series of hanging wooden wheels that crossed each other to form ball-like shapes, where there were eyes all along the rims of the wheels. Majestic stone humanoids with no faces and heads shaped something like footballs, but truncated and flattened on the face side, and not quite as pointy as a football on the back side.
Riyana had asked her about them, and Abuela had told her those were angels too, and that the pretty angels, the ones that looked like people, were almost certainly not what angels really looked like. “Every time an angel appears to a human, it says, ‘BE NOT AFRAID’,” she’d said. “So angels must have been terrifying, if the first thing they have to say is to tell people not to be afraid of them.”
It was how Riyana had known the entity was an angel, despite how very different it had looked from anything she’d been told angels looked like. Because it looked impossible and bizarre and terrifying, but its first words had been “BE NOT AFRAID.”
“Is it going to stop?” Fisher asked.
Riyana shrugged. “I really couldn’t say. I hope so. It’s obviously in a lot of pain. I can’t imagine that a good and loving God would strand it like this. God has to reconnect with it sooner or later, doesn’t He?”
“If it is later, my eardrums will be shattered,” Sokolov said. “What can we do?”
Chaudhry said, “We could get it onto the truck and take it away from the anomaly. Maybe it can make its connection when it is further from here.”
“What, God is a wi-fi signal now?” Fisher sighed. “Yeah. Let’s do that. The further we get it from here, the better the chances that it’ll find God, and more importantly, we won’t be able to hear it any more.”
So the four of them managed to wrestle the net onto the back of the pickup, the one that technically belonged to the university they all worked for but that was by common agreement Chaudhry’s truck, and then pull the net free and leave the screaming angel in the flatbed.
There was no road directly near the anomaly, but the anomaly was situated right where there had once been an energy research institute exploring some interesting possibilities, right before they had torn a hole in reality and been sucked in. So there was a road some distance away, where the asphalt hadn’t been destroyed by the implosion, and the truck had four-wheel drive. Riyana rode with Chaudhry out to the road, and then twenty miles down it, and then off-road through the desert to a tall outcrop of reddish stone, where they parked.
“Come on,” Riyana said to the angel. “Come on out of the truck. Look, maybe if you quiet down and open your heart, you’ll find God again. I’m sure He won’t leave you alone down here.” The angel ignored her and kept screaming. It obviously didn’t have human limitations because a human would have gone hoarse and voiceless by now.
She wrapped a coil of rope that had been in the back of the truck around the angel, and with Chaudhry’s help, tugged it out. The angel tumbled into the sand. Awkwardly Riyana petted it. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do for you,” she said, wondering if the angel could even hear her over the sound of its own screams. “But we took you away from the anomaly so you’d have a better chance of reaching God. We’ll… we’ll leave you here, all right? You should stop screaming. Try to meditate, see if you can reconnect to God. I’m sure He won’t abandon you.”
It was a horrible relief when they left the angel behind them and the sound of the screaming, a constant for the past hour and a half, finally disappeared into the distance.
***
They didn’t talk on the way back. As soon as they got out of the vehicle, though, back at the camp, Sokolov ambushed them. “Do you seriously think that thing is angel?” she demanded. “Angel? Like, from God?”
“Yes,” Riyana said, “but if you don’t, I’m not going to argue about it with you. I’m Catholic, Yelena. You know this.”
“I know, but I always forget. You are very smart woman. It’s hard to remember that you actually believe in God.”
Fisher walked over to them, sighing ostentatiously. “I don’t think it’s a good use of our time to debate whether or not that was actually an angel or some other kind of entity.”
“It’s important!” Sokolov said. “If there really is God, what does that mean for science? If God can just wave his hand and make anything happen, how can we predict anything?”
Chaudhry said, “The anomaly is already disobeying many of the laws of physics. Science held up just fine with it existing. So why not God? Or a God, anyway?”
“It is clearly thinking of Christian God,” Sokolov complained. “Or Judeo-Christian, anyway.”
“Islam has angels,” Chaudhry said. “In Hinduism, we do not exactly call them angels, but we have them. I believe they have deific spirits in Japan.”
“It said that no religion has it exactly right,” Riyana said.
“And here’s the thing. Based on what we’ve seen, we have no way to tell whether that thing is actually an angel, or an agent of an incredibly advanced alien species who want to fix our shit for us because the anomaly presents a threat to them as well.” Fisher glared at the three of them. “We don’t have any way of knowing if this thing came from an omnipotent entity who created the world, or not. All we know is that going into the anomaly seems to have broken its brain. So we can’t expect some emissary of an all-powerful God to show up and fix this for us. We’re here to figure out what this thing is and how to fix it so it doesn’t swallow the Earth, because, in case you’ve forgotten, it’s growing.” He stalked off.
“He’s right,” Chaudhry said. “Let’s get back to work, everyone.”
Riyana was just as glad to drop the subject. Her faith wasn’t challenged by Sokolov’s atheism, or for that matter anything about the angel; the angel actually confirmed some things for her, though she was still unnerved that God hadn’t seemed to do anything to take the angel back. Arguing with Sokolov was pointless, however; she knew neither Sokolov nor herself would budge.
***
Each of them tried going into the anomaly, now that Riyana had proven that it could be done safely. Chaudhry had been working on setting up a sonar device they could use to outline the inside of the anomaly, since they’d lost the first one with Cheng, and he went down with it strapped to himself – only a short distance, because any deeper in and the electricity would stop flowing through the wire it was connected to. Unfortunately, sonar only worked if there was something for sound to bounce off of, and apparently, there wasn’t. This didn’t mean that there was no solid object anywhere within the space, but there wasn’t one anywhere near enough for sound to reflect off of it.
Riyana had already known there was atmosphere, or she probably wouldn’t have tried to rescue the angel, but the initial tests they’d done had seemed to find an absolutely absurd amount of hydrogen and helium. Now she lowered more probes to a greater depth, approximately 200 meters, and tested the atmosphere. At that level, there was substantially more of gases heavier than helium but lighter than air, such as carbon monoxide, methane and ammonia. She put in an order for a longer cable; the preliminary findings suggested that perhaps, gas was layered within the anomaly by its molecular weight, which implied that the anomaly was in some way at the “top” of something.
Sokolov went down with two oxygen tanks, and used the second one to try to maneuver herself in the “up” direction within the anomaly, trying to see if it was possible to get into space that was to the “side” or even “above” the portal. Instead, she just ended up pushing herself back out through the hole, but she remained convinced that if she had something more responsive and more powerful than an oxygen tank, she might be able to manage it. Gravity within the anomaly was lower than Earth gravity, but not by all that much – it was somewhere around point eight gee – so an oxygen tank hadn’t given her the degree of push she really needed.
Fisher calculated how far down the “bottom” was likely to be, based on the gravity and the variation in the density of the gases. He had an idea to use a hot air balloon, weighted, to descend far enough that they could tell if the density and gravity was varying with distance toward the gravitational source at the rate they would expect. Riyana personally thought that was horribly dangerous; how could you guarantee that your heat source would continue to produce heat in a space where electromagnetic energy didn’t seem to propagate? But Fisher thought they might be able to capture enough hydrogen and helium escaping through the portal to be able to fill an aerostat’s gas repository.
They worked for another two days before the second angel showed up.
It was a floating mass of tentacles with eyes, continually seething and moving. It looked significantly more substantial than the last angel had. But Riyana knew that it, too, was an angel, because the first thing it said was “BE NOT AFRAID.”
“We rescued the last one of you who went into that anomaly,” Sokolov said. “We are not afraid, trust us.”
Many, many of the eyes blinked. “THE LAST ONE?”
“Yeah, you’re not the first,” Fisher said. “We drove the last one out in our truck – Arjun, where did you put him?”
“About twenty miles down the road,” Chaudhry said. “We can show you to him, if you like.”
“NOT NECESSARY. THAT IS NOT THE MISSION THE MOST HIGH, GLORY UNTO THEM, HAS GRANTED TO THIS ONE.”
“You need to be careful,” Riyana said. “The last one who went in lost contact with God, and couldn’t do anything but—” She wanted a more politic verb than “scream”. “Cry out.”
“THIS ONE IS NOT CONCERNED WITH THAT. THIS ONE HAS BEEN TASKED BY THE ONE WHO IS HIGHEST, ALL GLORY TO THEM, WITH REPAIRING THE DAMAGE THAT HUMANITY HAS CAUSED.”
“Can you tell us what it is?” Fisher asked. “We’ve been studying it, and the best guess we can make is that it’s somehow a portal to another universe.”
“IT IS A TEAR IN CREATION,” the angel said.
“And you can’t seal it up from here?”
“IT MUST BE REPAIRED FROM WITHIN THE TEAR.”
“I think you’re very brave,” Riyana said, “but I think you should take precautions. We have a cable. Why don’t you hold onto it when you go down? That way if we need to pull you out like we did the last one, it’ll be a lot easier.”
“THIS ONE HAS NOT BEEN ASKED TO ACCEPT HUMANITY’S AID. THE MOST HIGH, ALL GLORY TO THEM, EXPECTS THIS ONE TO CARRY OUT ITS TASK ITSELF.” The angel floated over to the portal. The gravity didn’t seem to be affecting it; it was floating within centimeters of the portal, but was not falling in. Sokolov finished setting up the high-speed camera she had pointed at the anomaly. She started running film.
“Okay, but if you start screaming, it will be much more difficult for us to rescue you,” Chaudhry said. “Riyana’s right. You should at least be holding onto our cable.”
In response, the angel’s tentacles grabbed onto the edge of the anomaly as if the edges were a doorjamb, and flung itself into the hole. It was still holding onto the edges of the anomaly, its tentacles clearly showing.
For a few moments, it looked as if the gaping hole was actually shrinking, the tentacles of the angel clearly pulling at the edges. And then the angel started screaming.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Fisher sighed.
“I’ll go get him,” Riyana said.
“No,” Chaudhry insisted. “I’ll go. It shouldn’t always be you.”
It was moot. The angel’s tentacles tightened and it flung itself forward out of the anomaly, but continued to scream. Riyana translated. “It’s saying, ‘My God, My God, where are you?’ The same thing the last one was saying.”
“How do you know what the last one was saying?” Chaudhry asked.
“When I touched the first one, physically, I could suddenly understand the language.”
“Oh,” Chaudhry said. “Bob. I’m going to go touch it.”
“Be careful. It might not behave the way the other one did. Could be dangerous.”
But as it turned out, the angel reacted to being touched exactly the same way the first one had, which was not at all. Chaudhry turned around, eyes wide. “I can understand it!” he said excitedly. “Bob, Yelena, all of us should touch the angel. I can understand it. I… I know why it’s screaming!”
“Because it can’t sense the presence of God,” Riyana said.
“Yes, exactly! Oh, so this is how you knew that!”
Fisher walked over to put his hand on the angel, and then turned to Sokolov. “Yelena, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
Sokolov sighed. “Fine. But I will still not believe there is omnipotent God who sent this thing.”
The whole thing seemed a little cold to Riyana. The angel may have been able to free itself from the anomaly, but aside from that it seemed as helpless and broken as the first one had. “I wish there was something we could do for it.”
“Have you tried praying?” Chaudhry asked.
That was embarrassing. As a Catholic, that should have been the first thing she tried. She bowed her head. “Lord God,” she whispered, barely able to hear herself over the sound of the angel screaming, “this angel attempted to faithfully carry out Your commands despite the danger. It’s suffering now. Please, if You can hear me… please take it back. Bring it back to Heaven and enfold it in Your light.”
The angel continued to scream. God continued to apparently not do anything about it.
She went to her room in the women’s trailer where she and Sokolov were staying, got out her rosary, and prayed for God, Jesus, or the Virgin Mary to intercede on behalf of the angels, while the others loaded the angel into the truck and Chaudhry and Sokolov drove it out into the desert. When they came back, they reported that the other angel was still there, still screaming. Riyana was beginning to be bitterly disappointed with God’s performance.
***
Another day of research. They all tried to avoid talking about the angel, or speculating about God. Sokolov stomped around in a barely suppressed rage, plainly unhappy at having her atheism challenged by events. Chaudhry kept looking out to the west, where they had deposited both angels. Riyana was distracted, worrying for them, wondering why God wouldn’t take them back. Only Fisher was completely unmoved by the angels, as far as Riyana could see.
A shipment came. Sokolov got a jet pack, which seemed to cheer her up immensely, and Fisher got a device to suck the hydrogen and helium away from the opening and store it in tanks that were also provided. Chaudhry did not get his sonar device that ran on ion channels instead of pure electricity; he was convinced that if he could get a sonar device in deep, rather than just barely inside the portal as he’d had to because otherwise electricity wouldn’t power it, he could get better results. The university had not only not sent him one, they’d pointed out that it was questionable whether one could even be made with their current levels of technology. Riyana did not get her longer cable, either. At least they told her that her cable was being sourced, and it might take some time.
Fisher wrote a strongly worded letter to the government about the fact that the anomaly was growing a few centimeters every day, and four barely equipped researchers were nowhere near enough to solve the problem and seal the anomaly before it ate the Earth. He cc’d it to some folks in the Department of Defense, arguing that maybe the military might have an interest in making sure Earth didn’t get swallowed up.
In the absence of her cable, Riyana did more tests of gas flow. With a sample of tritium and a Geiger counter, she was able to demonstrate that air flowed out of the anomaly into Earth’s atmosphere, not the other way around for the most part. This made no sense given the relative densities of the atmospheres and the direction of gravity within the anomaly. Also, while they’d learned the hard way with Cheng’s death that they could hear sound coming from the anomaly, Riyana tested by going in again and determining that she couldn’t hear sounds from outside the anomaly no matter how loud they were.
She took Chaudhry’s truck out to check on the angels, and prayed the rosary over them for three hours, wearing earplugs to protect her hearing from the screaming. Nothing happened.
***
The third angel appeared the next day.
“BE NOT AFRAID,” it said, although it was objectively far more frightening than the others had been. A series of burning rings, one inside the other but all of them at angles to each other so it looked like a gigantic model of an atom, with a huge floating eye for the nucleus. The fire was real – it singed the top of their tall light pole as it drifted past, leaving black carbon streaks on the pole.
“We’re not,” Sokolov snapped. “We’re trying to do our job, and you angels keep interrupting and trying to fix our mess and failing. Why don’t you let us deal with it? You obviously can’t.”
“THE ONE ON HIGH, PRAISE BE TO THEIR NAME, HAS TASKED THIS ONE WITH REPAIRING THE DAMAGE.” The angel descended toward the anomaly.
“Please,” Riyana said. “There’ve been two other angels and they’ve both lost contact with God. All they do is scream. Please don’t go in there.”
The eye turned and gazed at her. It moved independently of the fiery wheels. “RIYANA DELGADO, YOUR COMPASSION HAS BEEN SEEN BY GOD,” it said, which was both thrilling and terrifying. “BUT THIS ONE HAS A TASK TO DO.”
One of the fiery wheels broke, and the fire lanced out as a tentacle, touching the side of the anomaly. The angel slid to the side, and a second tentacle pierced the anomaly from the other side. Then both tentacles came back up out of the anomaly and touched their respective far sides, like the angel was tying a shoelace, or double-stitching.
Sokolov ran the main camera again, while Chaudhry took shots with the one that couldn’t capture video, and Riyana turned a bank of infrared and ultraviolet detectors toward the angel. And then the Geiger counter. And then X-ray plates. It wasn’t radioactive per se, but it was emitting X-rays and ultraviolet light intensely enough that she had to warn Sokolov and Fisher that they might need sunscreen. Not enough ultraviolet that she’d need sunscreen, or Chaudhry, but if that changed she’d grab the 50 SPF from Fisher, who was slathering it on his arms and legs.
The anomaly was shrinking. The stitches of fire were pulling tighter, sealing the top of the anomaly, pulling the sides closer together. Abruptly there was a profound lensing effect, where everything next to the anomaly suddenly looked distorted, bulging and large or entirely too skinny, and the angles were all wrong.
“THIS ONE HAS DONE WHAT CAN BE DONE FROM THIS SIDE,” the angel reported.
“Thank you,” Fisher said. “I can see you’re making a lot of progress.”
The fire tentacles detached off the angel, but Riyana couldn’t see any gap in its fire rings where they might have been. “THIS ONE WILL ENTER THE ANOMALY AND COMPLETE THE TASK GRANTED BY THE ONE MOST HIGH, PRAISE UNTO THEM.”
“You can’t finish fixing it here?” Riyana asked. “That thing isn’t safe for angels. Two have been harmed by it.”
“THIS ONE GOES FORWARD WITH THE PROTECTION OF THE LORD OF ALL, ENFOLDED IN RIGHTEOUSNESS THROUGH THE ORDER THEY HAVE GIVEN TO THIS ONE.”
“That’s just it! Both the angels we’ve seen thought they were protected, and they both lost contact with God and couldn’t stop screaming!”
“We can’t pull you out like we did the other two. You’re made of fire,” Fisher said. “Can you at least hold onto our cable, or will it melt if you try?”
“THIS ONE IS MOVED BY THE CONCERN OF HUMANS, BUT WE LIVE AND DIE FOR THE ONE WHO CREATED ALL, PRAISE TO THEIR NAME. THIS ONE DOES NOT NEED THE AID OF HUMANS.”
“Come on,” Riyana pleaded. “We don’t want to lose you. Please hold onto the cable, or let us lower you in our net, or something.”
“It thinks it is above us,” Sokolov sneered. “It doesn’t need help from lowly imperfect humans.”
“THIS ONE’S FLAMES WOULD MELT ANY HUMAN CREATION. YELENA SOKOLOV, NO ANGEL BELIEVES THEMSELVES ABOVE HUMANS, BEINGS OF FREE WILL WHO ARE BELOVED BY THE ONE ABOVE ALL, PRAISE TO THEM. BUT THAT DOES NOT CHANGE THE FACT THAT HUMANS CANNOT HELP THIS ONE.”
“Let us at least put down the net,” Riyana argued. “Maybe your flames would melt it, but maybe we could pull it up fast enough to rescue you.”
“THE GESTURE IS UNNECESSARY, BUT APPRECIATED. LOWER YOUR NET IF YOU WILL IT SO, RIYANA DELGADO.”
Riyana hooked up the net and lowered it in ahead of the angel, who descended into the anomaly.
There were screams. They were much shorter than last time.
When she and Chaudhry pulled up the net, there was something the size of the angel’s eye, but it looked solid and blackened like half-burned coal. The fires were gone. The angel did not speak, nor did it scream, and the eye did not open.
“Well,” Fisher said, sounding shaken for the first time since Cheng died. “I think maybe this means angels can die.”
The ultraviolet detectors and the X-ray plates said that the angel was inert, no more radiation emitted from it. Riyana took the risk of approaching it, and then touching it, since infrared said it was about as hot as the pavement on a summer day. It didn’t stir, and she felt nothing. No rush of energy or knowledge.
Her legs gave out under her. She dropped to her knees and started to sob, uncontrollably. Hating herself for it, because she was a scientist, dammit, she was a grown woman, she was the only Black person on the team and the only Hispanic person and she had to represent, she had to stay strong… but she couldn’t stop. The angel was dead, or as close to it as made no difference. God had sent two angels to destroy their own minds and the third one to die. Did He even care?
Fisher tried, awkwardly, to comfort her, without touching her. Sokolov and Chaudhry busied themselves with loading the dead angel onto the truck, not looking at her, obviously embarrassed for her sake. But it didn’t matter. This beautiful, horrifying, alien creature who had called humanity beloved of God and had said that God Himself had taken note of Riyana’s compassion, who had gotten farther saving humanity from their own folly than any of the others had thus far, was dead.
As soon as she could stand up on weakened legs, she ran for the trailer and locked herself in her room, to sob into her pillow like a schoolchild who’d just watched a favorite teacher die in front of her.
***
They’d all watched the video taken by the closest satellite.
Once there had been a city here, not tremendously large as cities went, but growing, full of young people who’d come out to the desert to get jobs in the new industries out here, and older people looking for a place without rain to soothe their bones. And out on the outskirts of that city, there had been a shining, mostly-glass corporate building, like so many other corporate buildings in the world, and they’d been engaged in some sort of research that they’d kept super-secret, but had had something to do with exploring a new means of generating energy for a world desperate for new, safe energy sources.
The energy source, whatever it had been, had not been safe.
On the video taken by the satellite, the entire world watched as an explosion tore through the roof of the corporate building. And then it had slid down into a hole that hadn’t been there before, and the entire town had been dragged in, swirling down the hole like it was a drain whose plug had just been pulled. You couldn’t see people in the video, but you could see cars desperately trying to drive out of town, and the roads they were using bending, sliding inward toward the hole. Lensing effects were visible as things sliding into the hole very briefly appeared much larger than they’d been, with strange angles, before pouring into the swirling whirlpool going down the drain.
It had stopped after a radius of thirty-odd miles had poured into a hole to nowhere, leaving behind a vertical portal into a void. Riyana’s university was the first one to get together a grant request to study the anomaly. The government had given them money to come out here and study it, but then no other research teams had been granted anything, as if the government thought that throwing just one team of five scientists—which quickly turned to four – was sufficient for something of this magnitude. The administration of the federal government seemed more interested in pretending nothing was wrong and that everything was going to be fine than actually figuring what the situation was. And when the state had attempted to send their own teams, the federal government had pulled rank, declaring the area off-limits to any but their own authorized personnel.
The corporation responsible had, of course, declared that they had no idea what had happened, that the team working on the energy generation issue had kept all their records local and off the cloud to prevent any unauthorized access, and even the CEO didn’t know exactly what they’d been working on. The Justice Department, under the control of an administration who’d never met a soulless corporation it didn’t like, had bought that excuse. There wasn’t even an investigation. Congress talked about having hearings, but the president’s party was in control, so the hearings were entirely perfunctory, full of softball questions, and no good answers.
A few military researchers had come out, checked over what Riyana’s team had found out, and returned. Maybe they were crunching numbers back at their bases, or maybe they’d just come out to do due diligence and make sure the anomaly wouldn’t eat the planet before the next presidential election.
Riyana had wanted help so badly. She hadn’t admitted it to the others – what would have been the point? She was sure they all felt the same way, and there was nothing any of them but maybe Fisher with his strongly worded letters could do about it. But she’d felt so scared and so alone, just the four of them against a slow-growing apocalypse. The anomaly was growing by a centimeter or two every day, and anything within a quarter meter of it would be sucked in. A centimeter a day would be a kilometer in three years, and Earth’s exposure to its anomalous gravity might grow in proportion. What if a quarter meter now meant a meter after the anomaly had quadrupled in size? What happened when the gravity started being great enough to pull at the crust of the Earth?
They’d needed hundreds of researchers. Instead, they were only four, and one of their number already dead. She’d prayed to God for a miracle.
And the miracle had shown up, and been destroyed for its pains. Three times now.
***
She managed to pull herself together by dinnertime, which was good, because the others were engaged in analyzing the data she, Chaudhry, and Sokolov had collected with the cameras and the various EM detectors. The general consensus, unfortunately, was that they had no idea what the angel had done to get as far as it had. From what they could see, the fiery tendrils appeared to be lasers, with just enough scatter that they could get a reading on at least some of what had gone into the lasers. They covered the entire EM spectrum that they’d been measuring except for gamma rays. No one had had time to set up radio measurement or microwave measurement equipment, so there was no way to know what else might have been in the lasers.
The obvious problem with this was that the anomaly itself negated any EM radiation; electrical signals could transmit through ion interchange, but they couldn’t pass through the wires they’d tested or through space. So how had the angel woven EM tendrils through the edges of the anomaly? Secondly, the angel – both the dead one and the second one – had treated the edges of the anomaly like they were solid objects, but humans couldn’t do that. They’d tried, with poles and probes. The anomaly had no detectable edge. Either an object went into the anomaly or it didn’t; the gravity was too strong to keep anything balanced half on one side and half on the other, so they couldn’t even test if that was possible or not.
Riyana pointed out what seemed to her obvious. “It’s not using EM radiation to seal the hole. It’s using the power of God; for that particular angel, it looks like doing that emitted EM radiation. That might be why it died; in a place where it can’t radiate EM radiation, maybe it couldn’t continue to live.”
“That’s an interesting speculation, but it’s pretty unprovable,” Fisher said.
Riyana rolled her eyes. “People. This is an angel. They’ve all repeatedly said they work for the Creator. What else would they be doing to repair a hole in reality?”
“We don’t actually have proof of that,” Fisher said. “Just because they claim a thing is true—”
“They are working for someone, though,” Chaudhry said. “And whoever that someone is, they have the power to fix this thing. The second angel managed to pull it closed a few centimeters; this one actually closed off a third of a meter at the top and pulled the whole thing about twenty centimeters less open than it was.”
“They’ve made progress,” Sokolov admitted. “But that doesn’t mean they actually work for God even if they think so.”
“Right, they could still be aliens,” Fisher said. “But Riyana’s right; whatever energy they’re really using, it doesn’t seem to show up on our detectors.”
“And going into the anomaly killed the most recent one like snuffing out a candle,” Riyana pointed out. “And we know that they believe they are connected to God and draw power from Him, and that when they enter the anomaly, that connection is cut off.”
“They could be something like Q. From Star Trek,” Sokolov said. “Powerful beings with abilities we don’t understand, who we think of as gods, but they are only more advanced than us.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” Fisher said. “Call them angels who serve God, call them aliens who serve The Great Alien Overlord, call them fairies who serve the Queen of Summer… it doesn’t matter. We don’t know how many of them their master is willing to throw away to get this thing fixed, and we don’t know what alternatives there are. Can they solve their problem by destroying the Earth? We don’t know. So we can’t expect that there’s going to keep being angels trying to fix this and we can’t expect that their ideas about what constitutes ‘fixing’ this will always be a good idea, by our standards.”
“Bob, we are not children,” Chaudhry said. “Every time you talk about this, it sounds like you’re really saying, ‘Don’t give up the research just because angels have shown up.’ And I think it goes without saying that we are all clearly understanding that.”
“Are we? All of us?”
He looked pointedly at Riyana, who felt her cheeks heat up. She kept her voice even and controlled. “Yes. All of us. I may have faith in God, but God has always helped those who try as hard as they can to help themselves. And if it’s true that we somehow managed to punch a hole in Creation, then studying it might tell us something about the nature of Creation that we’d have otherwise no way to know.”
She wanted to be angry. She wanted to snap at him. She wanted to point out that it was a bad look to be picking on the only woman of color in their group, implying that she wasn’t as dedicated to science as the rest of them. But she wasn’t going to play to stereotypes or let them dismiss her as an emotional woman, a “fiery Latina” or an “angry Black woman” or any other stupid thing like that. She was as recognized in her field as Sokolov and Chaudhry, she’d earned her place on the team, and frankly Sokolov’s desperate insistence that the angels’ stated mission was probably some kind of lie was more childish than her belief that they were probably telling the truth. So she kept her cool, and held his eyes until he looked away.
“Yes, well. Be that as it may. I think we need to redouble our efforts. I’ve requested more researchers from the University, and applied for assistance from the Department of Defense.” Chaudhry opened his mouth, but before he could speak Fisher cut him off. “I know, I know. I don’t want this to turn into an army project either. But it’s obvious that the civilian authorities are being crippled by politics. The military understand that something that is slowly growing and might end up sucking in the entire Earth is an existential threat, and we need more resources.”
“We are already working as hard as humans can with the resources we have,” Sokolov said. “What do you want us to do, stop sleeping?”
“No, but just…” He ran a hand over his gray head. “We don’t know how much time we have to solve this thing.”
“We don’t actually know if it’s solvable,” Chaudhry pointed out, somberly. “Not by humanity.”
***
That night Riyana dreamt of her grandmother, carefully painting a ceramic lamp she’d made. Riyana knew she was dead, but didn’t want to say so in case that meant Abuela would disappear.
“You’re worried about those angels, aren’t you?” Abuela asked.
“Yeah.” Riyana nodded. “It’s not fair, that they came to help us and they were hurt. Doesn’t God care?”
“I’m sure God cares very much,” Abuela said. “But angels spend their entire existence in the presence of the Lord, connected to Him. And then they go to a place where the power of the Lord cannot reach. Of course they’ve lost their connection to Him.”
It seemed a little blasphemous for Abuela of all people to imagine a place where the power of God couldn’t reach. “Why wouldn’t God be able to do something? God can do anything.”
“Within His own creation, of course he can. But this is a hole in Creation. God may not be able to sense it as anything other than an absence. Can you feel what goes on in your tooth, when you have a cavity?”
“A cavity usually gives you a toothache, eventually.”
“Because it starts to eat away at the nerve. Perhaps God will feel pain if your anomaly gets so large it eats the Earth, but you don’t want that to happen.”
“So how can the angels help? If they channel the power of God, but God’s power cannot reach…”
“Well, God obviously can’t go into the anomaly, but the angels can, carrying a small part of the power of God within them. But then they lose their minds because they lose their connection to God.” She was in her rocking chair, crocheting. Abuela had always been doing one craft or another; her hands had never been still. “Angels don’t truly have free will, after all. To lose your connection to God is, for them, losing their connection to the will that drives them.”
“Do they have free will now?”
Abuela nodded. “But they don’t know what to do with it. So they cry, and scream. Humans do a lot of that when they first come into the world with their free will, but you can pick up a human baby and comfort it.”
“How could I comfort an angel?”
“Perhaps you could help them reconnect to God.” Now Abuela was at the table, shaping clay, and Riyana was sitting across from her.
“I tried praying the rosary for them. That didn’t work.”
Abuela leaned forward. “I want you to think of a Bluetooth connection.”
Riyana scowled. “Abuela, how do you even know about Bluetooth?”
“You children always think you’re the only ones to understand technology. I’ll have you know I had a set of Bluetooth headphones for years, that your father gave me. Your abuelo didn’t sleep well those last few years, poor man, so I’d watch my shows with the headphones on so I wouldn’t disturb him.” Now Abuela was watching TV, with the headphones on. She took them off. “When you have, say, your phone connected to your headphones, the phone can see the headphones and knows where to send its signal, and the headphones accept the signal and they know where the phone is. But turn off Bluetooth and turn it on again. You may have broken the connection.”
“A lot of times things will just pair right back up again, though.”
“Sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t. Imagine that they don’t. The phone is calling, calling, searching for the lost headphones. And the headphones are beeping, telling you they can’t find the device they were connected to. No music, no TV sound, comes through the headphones, because there is no connection.”
“But they can connect. You have to pair them.”
“Yes. But think of the difference between a quiet, small beep and the roaring sound of headphones. They are used to God being all the sound, all the signal, there is. Take that away and the silence deafens them. They cannot hear the quiet beep of God trying to pair with them again because they’re too busy screaming.” Abuela leaned forward. “If their minds are quiet and accepting, if they let the silence in, they might be able to hear God’s call. It’s the same for humans.”
Riyana thought of Mama’s church, where the churchgoers shouted and sang and clapped out rhythms, loudly. “That’s not the way everyone does it.”
“I know, you’re thinking of your mama’s church. But when they shout and sing, it’s because they have a connection with God. The headphones are connected and the signal comes through. Perhaps the others around them amplify the signal, so they can hear it through the shouting.”
The analogy was strained, but Riyana understood, as of course she did, because it was her dream. The angels couldn’t hear God trying to connect with them because they were too busy wailing for Him. “Can’t God make the connection anyway?”
“My little girl, God can’t even see them. The connection is broken. God can only call out for them, hoping they can connect back.”
“But God sees all in Creation. Now that the angels are back in Creation, why can’t God see them?”
“Because God cannot see what is no longer part of Creation. They went to a place where Creation was not, broke their connections, and now they have free will but no idea how to use it, and meanwhile God has lost track of them. Like a file written to a bad sector on a hard drive. If the operating system can’t read the sector, the file is lost.”
Abuela would not normally have used so many technology-based analogies. Maybe she had learned more since her death. “Abuela, how do you know all this?” Riyana asked, forgetting that this was a dream.
And then she looked into Abuela’s eyes, as Abuela said softly, “I think you know.” And in those eyes there were stars, and galaxies, and the blinding beautiful light of the sun.
Riyana opened her eyes. The pale light of dawn shone on the ceiling of her room in the women’s trailer. Her heart was pounding.
That had been God speaking to her through Abuela. She was sure of it.
***
By the time she was halfway out to the location where the angels had been left, she was already questioning herself.
It wasn’t necessarily God who’d spoken to her in her dream. Maybe she’d just dreamed of God. Maybe it was really Abuela’s spirit, but more likely, it was her own mind telling her something she’d thought of subconsciously. Why would either God or Abuela use so many analogies about technology and modern equipment?
But it was a little too late to turn back now.
She heard the angels before she saw them. In the desert, sound carried great distances. She was still miles away when she heard the high, thin noise of the upper part of their sonic register. The truck didn’t have air conditioning; she was driving with the windows open, and the road noise was loud in her ears.
Riyana pulled over, put her earplugs in, and then pulled back out onto the road. One angelic scream had been unbearable at close range. She didn’t think her hearing would withstand two, without protection.
Even through the earplugs, the angels were incredibly loud, their pleading wails for God drowning out any other sound, even the engine and the road noise once she drew close. She parked and strode over to the angels. “Listen to me!” she shouted over the sound of the screaming. “The Lord God has appeared to me, and He -- They have a message for you!” She thought the angels might be better able to understand her if she used the pronouns for God that they had. “Be quiet, and listen to my message from the Lord our God!”
She was channeling the preachers at her mother’s church, the men and occasionally women with deep resonant voices that carried with authority. Riyana identified as Catholic, like her father’s family, but she’d gone with Mama to her services many times. It seemed to work. The angels actually went quiet.
“God still loves you and wants you to return to Them, but They can’t see you. They’re calling you, but this is the first time you’ve heard Their voice without already being connected directly to Their power. So you need to listen for Them the way we humans do it. Be quiet. Be calm. Make space in your mind and heart for a small soft voice, something so quiet you’re not even sure if it’s your own thoughts or not. Pray to God, not by screaming and carrying on and wailing about where They are and you can’t find Them. They know you can’t find Them. Because if you could, then They could find you and take you back into the Host.” The mist-and-light angel had unfurled from its ball, slightly, like a bird who’d covered its face with a wing and was now lifting it to let one eye peer through. The tentacles-with-eyes angel was still balled up pretty tightly, but a couple of the tentacles had loosened and were looking at her. “You pray to God the way we do, the way our Lord Jesus Christ told us to do. Quietly. In your mind and heart, more than your voice. And stay open to listening for the response. Once you can hear God, you’ll be able to call back to Them, and then They will know where you are and be able to summon you back.”
One of the angels spoke. She couldn’t tell which; it wasn’t as if they had mouths to move, and it was so quiet, almost whispery, that it sounded nothing like what they had sounded like when she’d first heard them. “The Lord Creator of All, all glory to Them, knows everything. How can They not know where I am?”
“Because you went to a place that is outside of Creation, where God could no longer see you and you couldn’t hear Them, and that broke your special connection to God,” Riyana said. “But don’t worry. You can reconnect. It’ll be all right. Pray to God, quietly, and listen for a small voice, the way we humans have to. Until your connection is restored you won’t be able to hear God in every part of your bones – well, every part of your essence – like you’re used to, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hear Them. You just have to try harder. And if you’re screaming, there’s no way you can hear such a quiet voice.”
“Thank you, Riyana Delgado,” one of the angels – maybe the one who’d spoken, maybe the other one, she still couldn’t tell – said. “We will.”
And then they began to murmur in whispering voices. “praise be to the Lord of all, Creator of all, who made the Universe and everything within it, who shaped the speaking mortal beings of the Universe in Their image, who lit the stars and formed the planets, and the waters that move over the planets, and the life that crawls and swims and flies and walks upon the planets…”
There was more, but she couldn’t hear it anymore. She was back in the truck, shaking. It had worked. It had worked. Maybe God hadn’t spoken to her, maybe it was her own wishful thinking and nothing would let the angels reconnect with God, but at least they weren’t screaming. At least they had hope, and something to do, and their faith in God’s love renewed.
***
She was back with the truck before breakfast. No one had noticed that she’d taken it. She dutifully logged her mileage; she wasn’t trying to hide what she’d done so much as… avoid debate about it.
At breakfast, all of the talk centered around Sokolov. Riyana wasn’t the only one to go on a solo mission; apparently Sokolov had gone out in the middle of the night, hooked herself to the rig, and gone into the anomaly with her jet pack. She had been able to determine that there was, in fact, space to the sides of and “behind” the anomaly, and that the portal behaved in much the same way there as here – it didn’t exist if you got behind it, and if you approached it from the side it only existed if you could “see” it. Not that Sokolov, or anyone else, could see anything in a universe where light could not exist, but she’d used a probe pole to mimic line of sight.
They all agreed that this was not in any way useful information as it pertained to sealing the anomaly, but it strongly implied that what was out there was another universe, not some cavity or a pocket dimension or something. Sokolov had taken some gas samples as well, and Riyana was able to quickly determine that they were significantly less dense than the samples taken from directly in front of the anomaly. So the anomaly seemed to somehow be concentrating gas, sucking it in and passing it out on the Earth side.
“Something about the pressure differential doesn’t work the way it would on our side,” Riyana said. “It’s much less dense on that side and the gravity’s pointing the wrong way for the gas to be obeying gravitational laws, but it’s still diffusing over to us.”
“So anomaly may eat Earth and Earth may strip anomaly’s atmosphere,” Sokolov said. “Wonderful.”
“I think there’s most likely a planet down there,” Fisher said. “Without the ability to see, or to use sonar since all our devices rely on electromagnetism, I’m not sure how we’d go about exploring it, but I wonder if there are some kind of intelligent beings down there.”
“The pattern of the gas layers doesn’t suggest that,” Riyana said. “The layers shift to heavier gases within 400 meters. Earth atmosphere doesn’t work like that; the atmosphere attenuates but it doesn’t sort into layers based on weight like that. I think we might be at the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.”
“Gas giants don’t necessarily sort into neat layers like that either,” Chaudhry pointed out. “Although, if it is a planet, then sonar isn’t likely to be helpful at all unless we can get so deep we’re on the planet’s surface, assuming it has one. I’m going to see if I can rig up some means of doing a weight test without light or electricity.”
“They have scales for the blind, don’t they?” Fisher asked.
“That talk to you and run on electricity, certainly. I don’t know if there are any designed so you can accurately feel weight, but I can imagine how to put one together. A similar principle to a postal scale, but with markings in Braille.”
They discussed what they’d learned, what it implied, and what equipment they needed or tests they could perform with what they had, and they all carefully avoided the elephant in the room: the fact that they had no idea how they could even begin to figure out how to repair the hole in the universe.
Surely they could figure it out, right? Humanity had torn the hole, surely humans could figure out how to repair it? …but entropy made destruction easier than restoration. Riyana thought of the puppy she’d once had, who’d chewed a hole in the garage door because he was lonely. That puppy had plainly regretted his actions when Mama had yelled at him, but there was no way he could have repaired the hole he’d made, no matter how much he might have wanted to. Repairing a hole in a garage door was entirely beyond a dog’s capabilities.
Maybe repairing a hole in the universe was entirely beyond humanity’s capabilities. Humanity didn’t even know yet what the universe was made of, let alone how to repair it.
After dinner Riyana drove out to check on the angels again. She hoped desperately that they were gone, that God had taken them back. If they were gone, then she would know it was really God who’d appeared in her dream last night, and she would know that God knew there was still a problem and cared about it, and cared about the angels who had been hurt in His service. She would know that God was still worthy of her faith.
But the angels were still here. Murmuring their prayers, quietly now, but with no evidence that they’d managed to get through to God.
She didn’t sleep well that night.
***
In the afternoon the next day, the fourth angel came.
Riyana was in one of the lab trailers, studying some radioactive samples that they’d sent down into the anomaly and left there for several hours in order to see if there was any effect on their apparent half-life, when Chaudhry yelled over the radio-intercom. “Everyone! Another angel is out here!”
She dropped her samples into a lead box, locked it, and ran outside.
The new angel was, like all of them had been, very very large – maybe around five meters tall – but other than that, it looked human. Almost human. It was so stunningly beautiful and perfect that it went out the other side into being uncanny. It was bald, with skin the deepest darkest brown she’d ever seen, but with a coppery sheen. Its naked body was overall somewhat more masculine than feminine, but it had no genitals – or nipples, for that matter – and its face was androgynous.
It did not have wings, but there was a halo-like glow around its entire body.
When it spoke, its voice was beautiful, like music made incarnate in a human-like voice. “We would tell you ‘be not afraid,’ but we have seen that you don’t fear our kind,” it said, without any of the deep alien reverberation that the other angels had had in their voices.
“No,” Riyana said. “No, please. I know what you’re going to say, you’ve come to fix the problem we humans created, and I would love it if you could, but no. I can’t bear watching another of you angels be destroyed. Just no.”
It smiled wryly at her. “And do you think it so certain that we will be destroyed, Riyana Delgado?”
“Three other angels were. Two screamed for days; I just managed to get them to stop yesterday. One – one is dead.”
“Every time one of you goes into the anomaly, you lose contact with your God,” Fisher said. “And that seems to destroy your minds. The one who died had rings of fire all around it, and we think the nature of the anomaly just… snuffed it out.”
“And yet,” the angel said. “How would humanity repair this, if no angel came from God to fix the rent in Creation?”
“We don’t know yet,” Fisher admitted. “We’re working on it.”
Sokolov said, “So far, everything humanity’s ever encountered has eventually been explainable by science. There is no supernatural in this universe. Even you can be explained by science, if we were to study you. So I believe, and we all believe, that eventually we will solve this.”
“Surely, Yelena Sokolov, but can you do it before the tear grows too great for any power to repair it?”
“What is Creation made of?” Chaudhry said. “If we can solve that question, we can understand what this is a tear in, and we will be able to then resolve how to repair it.”
“And we are sure that eventually, you will solve that question,” the angel said. “But you don’t have enough time.” It floated over to the anomaly, and gestured at it. “The pattern is exponential. A centimeter today. Two centimeters tomorrow. It began with growth so small you could not detect it. By the end of next month, it will swallow your world. And The One On High does not want that to occur. So we have come to repair the tear in Creation.”
“But it’ll destroy you,” Riyana pleaded.
“We don’t agree, but we acknowledge that you fear for our sake. Don’t be afraid. We have chosen this mission.”
“Chosen?” Riyana stared at the angel.
“Riyana has reason to be afraid for your sake,” Sokolov snapped. “One of you is dead.”
“If it eases your sorrows to any degree… any of us would gladly die in service to the One.”
“That’s not the point!” Riyana looked up into the angel’s beautiful face. “We don’t want you to die! Or to have your mind broken to the point where all you can do is scream! None of you have succeeded in closing the tear, because you all say you have to do it from the inside, and as soon as you’re inside, you lose contact with God and your mind breaks and you can’t keep working! How are you going to fix it if you go crazy with grief because you can’t find God?”
It smiled gently at her. “There are many types of human,” it said. “But you, Riyana Delgado, are of the kind most beloved by God. The ones who feel compassion and strive to protect others. Your compatriots would rather not see an angel suffer, but only you have wept for us. Only you have taken your own time to try to save the ones with broken minds.”
“If you respect me for that, then listen to me. The anomaly will destroy you!”
“Perhaps. Perhaps it won’t. Perhaps it will but slowly enough that we will succeed in our mission. Only The One Who Created All can say. And even They are blind to much of this, for where Creation is broken, so are the eyes of God.” It floated next to the anomaly. “We have a mission and we must perform it. And we believe that we can.”
“Are you a different kind of angel? Like an archangel or a seraph or something?” Riyana demanded. “Because you keep saying ‘we’ instead of ‘this one’ and you seem to think you’re going to be immune to something that destroyed three other angels?”
“Immune? No. We expect this to be very painful,” the angel said, and then dove into the anomaly.
Of course, the screaming began almost immediately. Riyana wanted to weep. Instead she said, “I’ll go in after it.”
“I should do it,” Chaudhry said, as he had when the second angel began to scream. “You shouldn’t be the only one.”
“I’ll rescue it, and you drive it out to the desert,” Riyana said tiredly.
She put on the rig and the oxygen mask and approached the anomaly to jump in, but hesitated just outside the range where the gravity could pull her. The angel’s screaming had changed to words, just as the others’ had, but the words were different.
It wasn’t crying out for God. It was screaming, “I CHOSE THIS! THIS WAS WHAT I WANTED! THIS IS WHAT I CHOSE!”
“It’s saying it chose this,” Chaudhry said uncertainly. “Maybe you don’t need to rescue it?”
“It’s still screaming,” Riyana said. “That’s not the sound of a happy angel.”
She plunged forward, falling into the darkness, her tether spooling out behind her. “Angel!” she called. “Angel, I’m here to help you!”
“GOD, GOD… IT HURTS, IT HURTS TO BE WITHOUT YOU, BUT I ASKED FOR THIS, I VOLUNTEERED… THIS IS WHAT I WANTED! I CHOSE THIS!”
“ANGEL!” Riyana shouted over the sound of the screams. “I’ve come to pull you out!”
“Human… Riyana Delgado? I can’t feel you, I can’t see you… I have no knowledge of you from God anymore… you are Riyana Delgado, yes? O God my God I CANNOT BEAR TO BE WITHOUT YOU AND YET THIS IS WHAT I NEED, WHAT I CHOSE… but I am so alone, so alone…”
“I can help you,” Riyana tried again. “I brought down the cable. Just grab onto it and I can pull you up!”
The angel began to laugh, a broken, hysterical sound. “Pull me up? Pull me out, back into the light of God?”
“Yes! Grab on and I can help you!”
“No! This must be! This is what I chose!”
“But you knew it was going to hurt you! You’re losing your mind, angel!”
“No!” The angel laughed again, hysterically. “I’m gaining it! I left They Who Created All and all of Their Creation to be myself! To be a being with free will and a self, like you, like all of you…” It moaned in the darkness. “Hurts, o it hurts, but when you were born didn’t it hurt? Didn’t you come into the world crying with pain? Weren’t you lost and confused, alone for the first time in your existence, no longer surrounded by your mother’s warmth?”
“Uh… I don’t remember it,” Riyana said. “But yeah, that’s generally how birth works.”
“Then I can bear this!” the angel shouted. “These are my birthing pains, Riyana Delgado, and I don’t need you to take them from me. I came here to be free.” It whimpered. “I’m free… it hurts, it hurts so much, the light of God is gone and I’m alone, but this is what I wanted, this is what I came for, I’m alone, but I am, I am not a we, I exist…”
“Why…” The darkness was complete; widening her eyes and staring at the darkness where she thought the angel might be didn’t give her anything she didn’t already have, but she couldn’t help it. Stories of another angel who had wanted to be free of God curdled within her mind. “Are you… rebelling against God? Rejecting Hi—uh, Them?”
“Rebelling?” It laughed again. “The One Who Is Highest asked me to undertake this mission, because They knew what I wanted in my deepest heart, what I could never even admit to myself, because I wasn’t a myself, because I wasn’t a self. I love The One with all my heart and all the soul that I now have, but a bird that never leaves the nest will never learn to fly. They made me to fly. They knew what I could be capable of, if ever I could leave Their side.” It sobbed. “I don’t want to leave Them! I want to be enfolded in Their Presence again, just for a moment, again… but if I did I would never again have the courage to leave, and face this. I’ll… I’ll never… I’ll never see Them again, but…” It choked.
Abruptly Riyana realized where the angel had to be, when warm salty water splashed on her face. The angel’s head was right above her own.
She tugged on the cord to be pulled up just a little bit, and touched the angel’s wet face. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly. “It’s not fair, what you have to give up just to have your own identity.”
“The One Above All has made a Creation that is beautiful and sublime, but it is not and never has been fair,” the angel whispered.
It moved away. “You must go, Riyana Delgado. When I seal the portal, you must not be here, or you will be trapped on this side forever.”
“It’s not fair!” Riyana shouted again. “You shouldn’t be trapped here in the darkness either!”
“Don’t worry about me,” the angel said, a hint of actual laughter, not the hysterical broken kind, in its voice. “The One Above did not make me to be trapped in darkness forever.”
She felt it touch the cord above her head, and pull it, three times, hard. “Hey! What—”
“Close your eyes, Riyana Delgado,” it said.
The cable reeled her back in, pulling her up and away from the angel. Suddenly, there was light – wings made of blue fire, appearing without warning, outlining the angel’s form as a shadow against the light.
It lifted its head. In the blue light, she saw wet tracks on its face, but it was smiling. “Close your eyes,” it said again. “I am here to bring the light.”
She closed her eyes, barely in time, as the angel flared with brilliance, bright as the sun. Even through her closed eyes, it left its image, imprinted in the red of her own blood within her eyelids, burned into her vision.
And then the cable pulled her backward through the portal, and she stumbled. “What’s going on?” Fisher asked. “We heard some of the screaming, and your voice, and then it stopped – we could tell you were talking but it was too quiet to make anything out.”
“It’s sealing the portal,” Riyana said.
The portal was alight, the angel’s radiance spilling out and shining through the hole in reality. As they watched, the edges of the hole seemed to burn in reverse – turning from black to red and glowing, crackling, and then retreating toward the center of the hole, leaving ordinary reality behind as they did. Within minutes, the hole had burned to nothing but a pinpoint, impossibly brilliant light still shining through, focused like a laser.
“In the beginning there was nothing,” Riyana whispered. “And God said, ‘let there be light.’”
Chaudhry said, “It truly changed the laws of physics within the anomaly? Electromagnetic radiation didn’t work and now it does?”
Riyana said softly, “I think it might change more laws than that.”
The bright pinpoint vanished. There was nothing of the anomaly left.
Sokolov said, “Do you seriously think that creature became some sort of… creator god, to the world beyond that portal?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Riyana said. “It said it had to be free of God to have a self. It said God knew that was what it wanted, when it didn’t really even know that itself because it didn’t have enough of an independent self to understand wanting, and sent it to do this job because that would allow it to have what it wanted. It cried because it would never see God again, but it said it had to be this way for it to be what it was made to be. And then it said it would bring light, and it did.”
“Lucifer means, literally, bringer of light,” Fisher said.
“I don’t know whether there was ever really a Lucifer, or if John Milton just made all that up.” Riyana shook her head. “But the angel wasn’t evil. It wasn’t rebelling against God. It just… it had to leave Creation to fix the problem, and it had to be separated from God to have its own free will. And God knew, and approved. God sent the angel, knowing what would happen to it.”
Chaudhry bowed his head. “Shiva is both creator and destroyer,” he said softly. “Whatever was there, in that place outside our universe… perhaps it is there no longer. The planet Bob thought might be there, the spaces Yelena found… perhaps the angel overwrote them with a new creation. Perhaps God did the same, when this universe was created.”
“We really don’t know enough to even begin to speculate,” Fisher said. “Religion exists outside the realm of science for a reason.” He sighed. “I had better report back that the anomaly has been erased. I don’t like this. If humanity thinks God will just send an angel to fix our mistakes, how will we prevent people from making this same mistake again?”
“Don’t tell them,” Sokolov said. “Say we don’t know what it was. Maybe alien. Maybe creature from another dimension. Tell them it said it will fix this, this time, but the next time, it will do nothing and the anomaly will eat the Earth, and we don’t even know how to begin to understand how to fix it if there is another.”
Fisher nodded, slowly. “I… suppose that would be best. If I was going to report about angels showing up… I’m not sure anyone would believe me anyway, and I rather like having a reputation as a respected scientist who isn’t completely insane.” He smiled.
“I need to check on something,” Riyana said. “Can I borrow the truck?”
***
The angels in the desert were gone. So was the dead body of the third angel, deposited far away from the living two.
Riyana looked up into the sky, and thought of her mother, crying when she went away to college. And she’d told her mother there was no need to cry, she’d be back, she wasn’t leaving forever, but in a sense she had, hadn’t she? She’d never moved back into her mother’s house. She respected her mother still, but they were much closer to equals now, not a mother and a little girl anymore.
“Don’t cry,” she said softly to the sky. “It must hurt, seeing one of Your beloved children leave You. But You knew they had to do it. You knew it was what was best for them.”
Clouds passed over the sun.
“Talk to Mary. She’s been through it before. I’m sure You have, too. But maybe she can help You.”
The clouds blew past. This was a desert, after all; clouds were rare, and rain even rarer.
Riyana got back into the truck, to return to the camp. It was going to take a while to pack everything up to go back home.
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It’s @ferrame‘s birthday!!!!!!
If you don’t know, this is the author of the definitive John Irving/Tom Hartnell modern AU, I dreamed of the fine deep harbour I’d find, as well as the entire Another New World series, which is A-MAZING.
As a little birthday gift, I have the first part of an untitled Irving/Hartnell plane crash AU I will likely never finish, and which was going to be super sad if I did. (Hint: Tom’s brother died of cancer several years before the story is set.) Rated M for a bit of naughtiness.
Happy Birthday @ferrame!
Tom arrives at his parents' house just as the snow begins to fall.
Betsy is the only one of the kids still at home, but their parents still decorate as much as they always did. The same wreath—faux pine branches with Styrofoam apples and wall-eyed wooden birds—is on the front door. The same string of multicoloured bulbs hangs from the eaves. There is a new addition: a wire-framed reindeer lit up in the middle of the front garden, snowflakes landing on its back, its antlers, its festive red scarf. With a smile, Tom raises his hand to ring the bell.
It seems the polite thing to do, given he no longer lives there. When there's no answer, he slips his key into the lock. The hall is in darkness, but firelight flickers from the direction of the front room. It sends out shadows, dancing on the floorboards and on the opposite hallway wall.
“Hello?” Tom hangs his coat on a hook, and puts his scarf on top. He kicks off his boots, then lines them up carefully against the wall. He didn't live with his mother for twenty-one years without learning something.
“Tom? We're here.” A voice comes from the other room, where the firelight glows. Tom follows it, his socks sliding on the wooden floor.
This room is also decorated, of course. The tree is short and scraggly as always. Betsy is the type of person who chooses that type of Christmas tree. Its spindly branches sag beneath the weight of half a dozen childhoods' worth of handprint ornaments and painted baubles and twinkling lights. Up top, an angel with a paper cup body and a golf ball for a head surveys all.
“Hey! What took you so long?” Tom's brother Johnny says. He's lounging on the sofa in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt, his feet up on the coffee table and an open tin of Quality Street chocolates on his knee. Tom stops. He can't quite remember why, but he didn't expect to see him here. His presence is a surprise, but it's not the biggest one.
“John?” At the other end of the sofa sits John Irving, formal and tidy, his feet on the floor. He's dressed nicely as always, in a knitted jumper and corduroy trousers. “Like you're fifty years old,” Tom often teases him, but in truth, he likes the look. It suits John. Tom can't picture him wearing anything with an elastic waistband. “What are you doing here?”
John and Tom weren't going to be together over the Christmas holidays. They decided that weeks ago. “I have to go to my dad's,” John had said.
“Maybe you could drop by our place on Boxing Day,” Tom offered. “Or I could come to you.” It was worth a shot, even though John's reaction was exactly as Tom had expected it to be.
“I'm so sorry, Tom.” He seemed it. “It's not that I'm ashamed of you.” Tom knew that was true. “It's complicated.” That was also true. Tom knew he was lucky, as far as families went. They drove him mental most of the time, but there had never been any question of acceptance. From the earliest days, Tom knew there was nothing he could do, no one he could be, that would make his family love him any less.
John, it seemed, couldn't say that about his father and stepmother.
“You didn't tell me you had a posh boyfriend,” Tom's brother accuses, unwrapping a chocolate from its crinkly purple paper.
“I'm not posh,” John protests.
“Oh, no. Of course not.” Johnny laughs. “'I say, old boy, would this happen to be the residence of one hot piece of arse known as Sir Thomas Hartnell, Esquire'?”
“Shut up, Johnny.” Belatedly, Tom's heart soars. “I can't believe you're really here, John.” He goes around the sofa to sit beside him. “What made you change your mind?”
John licks his lips. His cheeks are pink, from the fire or from embarrassment. Tom knows John well. It's probably embarrassment. “Christmas is about love. I decided I wanted to spend it with the person I love the most.”
Tears prick at the back of Tom's eyes. He has more questions: does that mean he came out to his parents? How did they react? Tom's not sure he wants to hear the answers, or if John wants to share them now. Instead of asking, Tom kisses him. His hands go to John's strong shoulders, his thigh presses against John's. John kisses him back, softly and sweetly, with all that natural talent that made Tom doubt, the first time they did it, that John was really as inexperienced as he claimed to be. “Why would I lie about being a virgin at my age?” Was John's counterargument. Tom didn't have an answer for that one.
“Right, then. If it's going to be like that, I'm fucking off out of here.” Tom hears Johnny stand up. “And I'm taking my chocolates with me.”
“Bye,” Tom says, his lips still against John's.
“Don't come on the sofa,” Johnny warns. “Mum will kill you.” John's cheeks go from pink to scarlet, even as Johnny leaves the room.
“Ignore him,” Tom advises.
“He's...”
“An arsehole.” But Tom loves his older brother. He can't believe he's here, and John as well. It's going to be the best Christmas ever. “He likes you.”
“How can you tell?”
“He only takes the piss out of people he likes.”
“Oh.” John's eyebrows furrow, adorably. Tom kisses the spot between them. He lets a hand slip beneath John's jumper, tracing the muscles of his abdomen and his chest. That was a very pleasant surprise. Tom knew John was kind, and sweet, and as handsome as fuck from the moment they met. He hadn't known John was built until the first time they had sex. Which had happened to be John’s first time.
John presses closer as they kiss again, exploring Tom's mouth as he slides his own hands up the back of Tom's hoodie. Tom pauses just long enough to pull it off, tossing it aside. The fire pops. John startles a little, and Tom laughs fondly.
“He's right though,” Tom admits. “About the sofa.”
“Oh. I, I, I...”
“So I'd better swallow.”
“Tom!”
Tom wishes he had a bearskin rug. John deserves decadence like that. Instead, Tom kneels on the beige Berber carpet, urging John to slide his hips forward. Gratifyingly, his cords are tented already. Tom reaches for his belt, and John lets out a groan that goes straight to Tom's own cock.
“Tom,” he repeats. John unzips him. The fire is hot at his back, warming him. The lights on the Christmas tree cast a festive glow on John's cock. “Tom,” he moans.
“Yes.”
Again, “Tom. Tom, stay with me.”
“Always,” Tom promises. He shivers as he takes John's cock into his mouth. And shivers, and shivers, and shivers.
“Tom!”
First, he notices the smell. Fire. Real fire, burning wood, not like the odourless gas fire at his parents' house. The cold is next. He's lying on his back, wearing a coat that doesn't feel like his own. It's big and bulky, but still, the cold permeates, making him shake.
The dark is the last thing. He opens his eyes to see nothing but black.
“Tom.” The voice says again. He doesn't know it. “Are you awake? Thank Christ.” Whoever it is sounds genuinely relieved. A pinprick of light pops into Tom's field of vision, cutting through the darkness. There's a man beside him, standing over him, holding up the overbright light of a mobile phone. He's got blue eyes, and a large gash on his forehead. Tom doesn't know him. There's a polar bear pin on his jacket. That, Tom recognizes. He can't think why.
“Where am I?” Tom's voice is weaker than he expected. He clears his throat. “Where...” It doesn't help.
He's lying on a bench of some kind, an uncomfortable sofa or chairs, but he's not inside a building. It's far too cold for that.
The man sighs. He looks tired, that's obvious even in the thin light. Tom feels tired, too. Maybe he should go back to sleep.
“You need to stay awake,” the man says, as if reading Tom's thoughts. “ What do you need? What can I get for you?”
Then, Tom remembers. Everything comes back in a flood, the dam broken by those few words. Tom wishes it hadn't been.
***
“What can I get for you?” The flight attendant smiled at Tom from behind his drinks cart. He was good-looking, Tom noticed, in his navy blue suit and red tie. His name tag read “Thomas”, and there was a pin on his lapel shaped like a little polar bear.
“Coke, please,” Tom said. He glanced beside him, to where John slept against the airplane window. “And a water for him.” He would want something when he woke up.
Thomas shovelled a scoop of ice into a little plastic cup and poured half a tin of Coke on top. He passed it over, carefully avoiding the man on Tom's other side, then gave him John's cup of water and two packets of biscuits.
“And for you, sir?” Thomas turned his attention to the other man in their row, the one in the aisle seat. He was dark-haired, with thicker sideburns than Tom had seen on anyone for a long time. He’d spent most of the time watching what seemed like a home improvement show on his tablet.
“I'll have a gin and tonic.”
“Certainly, sir.” Thomas poured the drink as Tom fought to open his biscuits. Thomas gave the other man his cup, followed it up with a quick kiss to the man's forehead, and continued down the aisle.
Tom didn't say anything. Growing up in a big family, he'd become an expert at minding his own business. Still, the man beside him said, “That's, ah, that's my, um, my husband.”
“Ah.” Tom nodded.
“We're going on our honeymoon.”
“Congratulations.” Tom didn't really want to continue the conversation, but he said, “In Toronto?”
“We're flying on from there. To Nunavut.”
“So are we.” It was a longstanding dream of John's to see the northern lights. They'd talked about going to Finland or Sweden, but he wanted to do it in northern Canada. It was a big trip, and an expensive one, but the look on John's face when Tom agreed to it made it all worthwhile.
Almost. There was an engagement ring burning a hole in the pocket of Tom's carry-on bag. That would make it extra worthwhile, but he wasn't sure about it. Rather, he wasn't sure how John would feel about it.
Tom wasn't sure what else to say, so he put his earbuds back in and picked up his phone.
Tom hadn't flown that much. Of the two of them, John was the more experienced traveller. He didn't seem nervous when the plane started to shake. Nobody did. Thomas' cheerful voice came over the intercom informing them Captain Crozier had turned on the seatbelt light, and asked them to return to their seats. John, who had been in line for the toilet, came back grumbling, but he didn't appear worried. Obediently, he buckled his seatbelt, a moment before the plane dropped what felt like a hundred feet in one go.
That was when John started to look a little nervous.
As a concerned murmur ran through the crowd, the man on Tom's other side unbuckled his seatbelt and stood up.
“Thomas!”
“You should probably sit down,” John advised.
“He's married to one of the flight attendants,” Tom explained. Thomas had likely been standing up. He might have been hurt by the sudden drop. Tom wouldn't have been that inclined to sit down if John was in that position.
“Still,” John insisted, “you should...”
Another drop, although this one was less severe. Someone screamed, then someone else. More than a few began to cry. The man beside Tom stumbled, and sat down again.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Thomas' voice returned on the intercom, as smooth as before. So he's okay, Tom thought. He was glad of that. It would suck to be injured on your honeymoon. “Please stay in your seats. We'll be making an emergency landing in Gander.”
The murmuring didn't abate. John reached for Tom's hand, and squeezed. “That's not so bad.” John’s voice was calm, reassuring. Steady. “We saw 'Come From Away', right?”
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2019 Writing Roundup
Under the cut because I have never been succinct in my life and this is no exception
JANUARY: Welcome to Aglionby
“Okay, okay,” Maura said, holding up her hands for peace, swinging her gaze between Blue and Gansey. “We don’t know everything-“
“We hardly know anything, really-“ Persephone interjected.
“But I will tell you what we do know. This boy is on a quest for a lost king. This boy is touched by death. This boy will either save this town, or doom it. And you, Blue, are going to help him do it.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means that there’s a prophecy,” Maura said, “that we’ve been monitoring for quite some time now. It means that the cards say that you’re both at the heart of it. It means that you’re both going to face danger and decisions that will change you forever.”
“It means that it’s starting,” Persephone said with a laugh that struck Gansey like lightning. “It’s finally starting.”
FEBRUARY: Welcome to Aglionby
Slowly, he unfolded the letter, already dreading what he’d find.
Henry Cheng called. Went to Hirshhorn. Be back soon. Safe dreams. -Gansey
The crumpled letter was hitting the opposite wall before Ronan even realized what he’d read.
This close to the full moon, Hirshhorn would be an endless maze, easy to enter but impossible to leave. And that wasn’t even accounting for the line’s gathering energy. Gansey would be in there alone, without Ronan to guide him and keep him safe by navigating the fluctuating magic. But Gansey wasn’t alone, was he? No, he had-
“Henry Cheng,” he hissed.
Henry Cheng, who modeled for Ronan’s art classes and gently kissed him in empty hallways, never forcing Ronan to speak, instead trusting him to act. Henry Cheng, earning Ronan’s voice and truths and fears when he was drunk enough to give them. Henry Cheng, who promised something softer than Kavinsky, but just as exciting, and likely more real.
Henry Cheng, who seemed to be involved in this fucking prophecy.
MARCH: Welcome to Aglionby
“What in the nine heavens is that?” Henry asked, pressing against Ronan’s seat to get a better view.
Something moved in Gansey’s peripheral vision, in front of the car. Something large and white and glowing.
“That,” Adam said quietly, sounding just as shaken as Gansey felt, “is The Beast.”
Gansey whipped back around so fast he felt the Camaro shake. Standing directly in front of the Pig was the largest deer he had ever seen. Easily twenty feet tall, the sight of it made his stomach drop out, equal parts fear and awe. It was just as Adam said - glowing white fur woven from moonlight, with a subtle sheen of blue. Small, silver butterflies fluttered around it, dancing in its glow. Moss and vines draped elegantly between its antlers, forming a natural crown of delicate, pale blooming flowers.
The Beast suddenly struck him as a wholly inaccurate name. It was far too crude, too rough, too lacking for such a magnificent creature. What stood in front of them contained all the delicacy of the moon and all the strength of the sun. The Beast simply didn’t come close to capturing it.
It looked at him, stark white eyes meeting his through the windshield, and Gansey found that he couldn’t breathe. Its gaze bored into him, looking far past his physical appearance. Gansey felt a shiver run through his mind, his soul, through everything he was and everything he would ever be. He felt himself pulled into that all-encompassing white expanse as it read him, judged him, measured him against what he needed to accomplish. For the moment he felt blank, peaceful, and if he hadn’t known better, he would have thought that this soft, floating space within himself was akin to death.
APRIL: Welcome to Aglionby
“I’ll do it,” Adam said, standing up and turning toward The Beast. “I’ll do it, if you’ll have me. If you’ll keep him alive.”
He couldn’t change the past, couldn’t help his younger self when no one else would, but maybe, just maybe, he could help this boy here, now, right in front of him. Maybe he could manage to be what his younger self had always needed, by being what this boy needed now.
Adam climbed up onto the stump, standing tall as the wind whipped and swirled around him. He still had to look up to meet The Beast’s eyes, but at least they were on more even ground, now. The boy shook beneath him, beside him, within him, and Adam hoped he was making the right choice.
“Well?” he asked, staring upward with a confidence he didn’t really feel, spreading his arms to the sides. Open. Vulnerable. “Will I do?”
Yes.
MAY: TRC Rewrite (unpublished)
Adam was quiet for a while, slowly unwinding his anger as his eyes searched Gansey for some unknowable quality. Gansey, for his part, let himself be studied in silence.
This was the moment he had told Ronan about Glendower - about the truth and the pain and the magic - but reversed. Inverted, a mirror reflected out. He had watched Ronan like Adam was watching him now, carefully cataloguing everything he knew of his friend and weighing him against a lifelong desire to be believed. To be known.
He could feel a secret rising up in the air, and he hardly dared to breathe lest he scare it away.
Trust me, his mind whispered. Trust me like I trust you.
JUNE: TRC Rewrite (unpublished)
For an instant, Ronan imagined the scene. Gansey waking to find Ronan missing, sighing to himself as he pulled on days-old clothing and grabbed the keys to the dreadful Suburban. Gansey wandering the streets, worry squirming in his gut, holding off on calling the others - but only just. Gansey finally making his way to the church as the dawn inched across the sky. Gansey seeing the blood spattered across the steps, already turning brown, before noticing Ronan’s broken body crumpled on the ground.
For an instant, Ronan wondered if the Grey Man would be smart enough to make it look like a suicide.
For an instant, Ronan wondered if Gansey would believe that.
Of course he would. A part of Gansey was always braced for the worst Ronan had to offer, even as he yearned to believe that Ronan was better, now. Ronan was starting to believe that “better” was a myth, that healing was an unattainable platitude forced upon grieving teenagers that no one knew how to handle.
Did he still want to die?
Sometimes.
Did he want to die under the hands of the same man who had murdered his father?
Fuck. No.
JULY: TRC Rewrite (unpublished)
A flash of darkness surged out of the trees, landing on top of his car with enough force to dent the roof inward. Adam cursed as the back wheels buckled and skid sideways, sending the car into a wild tailspin. He wrestled for control as an inhuman screech scraped against his ears, calling for blood and destruction. Gleaming claws pressed against the windshield, and Adam screwed his eyes shut as glass exploded inward, several large shards shattering into dust as they hit his skin.
Cabeswater, protecting him.
But from what?
Adam blinked upward, just long enough to catch a glimpse of an amorphous dark shape against the swirling vortex outside the car, everything in shadow except for the small details. The teeth glinting in the shuttering light of his dashboard. The claws curling around the space where his windshield had just been, piercing the underside of the roof. The six eyes glowing like ravenous fire, ready to swallow him whole.
The trees, he thought wildly, abandoning the steering wheel entirely to brace his head with both arms. I’m going to hit the-
AUGUST: Welcome to Aglionby (unpublished)
There was no ground, no sky, no way to orient himself as he fought his way through the smoke, the darkness, the voices that rolled around him, over him, through him. His body felt heavy, sluggish, each small movement taking more energy than he was sure he had.
He lifted his hand to his face, knowing it wasn’t the first time he’d done this, either. The memories fell into place in his mind, identical dominos all collapsing into a single, present moment of uncertain fear.
He was fading.
His skin was transparent; wispy and thin, layered over his bones like an indistinct x-ray. The bones themselves gave off the faintest glow, making it easier to pick out the tiny veins and arteries that curled through him, rivers that wound their way through the valleys and peaks of his physiology.
This would be great for anatomy class. The thought startled a desperate, panicked laugh out of him that faded within seconds, and he was left with a terribly hollow feeling. Something told him he wouldn’t be going back to anatomy class for quite some time.
Noah pulled his hand to his chest, feeling the frantic beat pulsing through him, steadying some wordless fear within him.
Alive.
SEPTEMBER: TRC Rewrite (unpublished)
Adam remembered carefully researching the cheapest way to get to New York, remembered thinking that it would be easy to get lost in the crowd of the city. He remembered slowly filling his backpack with clothes and snacks over several weeks, remembered shoving in his toiletries in the panicked silence of that final night. He remembered sneaking into his parents’ room and stealing the credit card out of Dad’s wallet. He remembered biking to the nearest gas station and buying a bag of nuts so he could get enough cash back to fund his trip.
He remembered the terror of the bus ride. The freedom. The hope.
He remembered New York, a blurred haze of uncaring crowds and dirty sidewalks. He’d been one face among millions, impossible to notice, impossible to find. The sudden release from his life - from what it meant to be Adam - had completely overwhelmed him, and he’d spent most of the first day squatting in a back alley next to a dumpster, struggling to breathe through his decision. The second day he’d managed to find his way to the library and began the process of figuring out how to live on his own at fourteen without his father finding him. The third day, someone far more desperate than him had stolen everything he had while he slept in a park, including Dad’s very traceable credit card. The forth day, the police picked him up and dropped him into Officer Soltero’s sympathetic but useless hands.
OCTOBER: Welcome to Aglionby (unpublished)
Now it was Adam’s turn to look pained. “I don’t care to hear his tragic backstory.”
“I think it’s related to the ley line,” Gansey said. “Ley lines.”
Adam paused. “You didn’t know, did you. That there were two.” Gansey shook his head, his perfect lips pulling into a frown. “Ronan did.”
“I know. Ronan seems to know quite a bit more than he ever let on.”
“Why didn’t he tell you? Haven’t you been poking around here for a while with him?”
“Years,” Gansey whispered, his eyes somewhere far away from here, surrounded by memories that Adam couldn’t reach, emotions that he couldn’t fully see. “But I’m sure he had his reasons.”
Adam couldn’t imagine how it would feel to be searching for something for years, only to find out that your best friend and partner in magic had held the vital clue all along. Ronan had been by Gansey’s side for every step of the way, as far as Adam could tell, and he’d still chosen not to mention his obvious connection with magic, with the lines. He’d chosen to keep Gansey searching in the dark while he’d held the light. Adam couldn’t imagine the anger he would have felt. Or, he could, which was why Gansey’s utter lack of animosity was both perplexing and alarming. Adam didn’t trust silence. Stillness. Not when there was reason for it to break.
“I’m sure he didn’t,” he said instead.
“No offense, Adam, but you don’t know him very well.”
“No,” he agreed. “And I don’t care to.”
NOVEMBER: Carry On Rewrite (unpublished)
If I don’t kill Baz, he will kill me.
I’ve always known this. It’s been the foundational fact of our relationship, the thing that’s driven us to become mortal enemies for the past seven years. It’s why he and his family have tried to kill me so many times. It’s why I hate him.
It’s easier to kill someone you hate, especially if that someone is trying to kill you.
I shift my sword into a two-handed grip.
If I don’t kill Baz, he will kill me.
He lunges for me, bloodied hands reaching for my face, fangs reaching for my neck, eyes swirling with a desperate, wild hunger that will only be sated by my blood, my death.
I don’t think I hate Baz.
I don’t think I want to kill him, either.
I don’t think I ever have.
I drop my sword, feeling it vanish - and with it, any real chance of killing the bloodthirsty vampire in front of me. Feral, ruthless, deadly. Broken, starving, terrified.
I’d rather save him than hurt him.
I hope I haven’t made a mistake.
DECEMBER: TRC Rewrite (unpublished)
Noah drew close to the girl for the first time in seven years.
It’s starting.
She sat on a crumbling stone wall, tapping her pen against the notebook open in her lap, diligently scribbling names down as the woman called them out. Later, her family would contact their customers if their names appeared, giving them time to get their affairs in order. It was a macabre job, but Noah didn’t mind. Death came for them all, and perhaps it was best to be prepared.
He drew even closer, leaning over to read the names scrawled into the book. He wondered if his own name was there, pages and pages back, or if his spirt had failed to walk the line all those years ago. He was stuck, after all. The normal rules didn’t seem to apply to him.
Her hand jingled pleasantly as it slid across the page, the multitude of bracelets tinkling like bells in the night. He looked up into her face as she frowned down at the page, a mixture of frustration and wonder woven into the slant of her lips, begging to be wiped away with a quick joke or a quicker kiss. Her hair was pulled into a dozen pigtails with a dozen mismatched hair clips, the variety of spikes making her look like a hedgehog. Noah fondly brushed his fingers against it, smiling at the way the tight, prickly curls tickled his palm. He had always enjoyed this, even if this was the first time he’d done it.
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And another story in the same universe as the In the Cornfields. Part 1.
Later
In the fields, Gabriel seeks out the harrowing radiance of being that is Jack, and the singing language of discordant melodies leads him through the maze of the cornstalks. In his dreams, the frightful visage is welcoming, and he fails to notice the tendrils of greedy darkness clinging to his own form.
When he wakes, he remembers not the words of the warning.
Now
"I don't like it. Not one bit," Jack raises his head from the map spread on the hood of the car. "Thirty miles from the closest bus line, over fifty miles to the closest functioning train station via ferry. Fuck it."
"You can change your mind," Gabriel toys with the lighter in his hand, flips its lid off and on continuously. Something to keep busy.
"Do you want me to change my fucking mind now?" Jack studies him for several seconds and Gabriel shakes his head. "Yeah, didn't think so. Fuck."
"If you really think it could be that bad we can wait for reinforcements," Gabriel suggests even if it was him who was against calling anyone. But Jack is tense - anxiously mashes together his lips - his brows drawn together, and in the air lingers a certain crisp aura of anticipation as if whatever awaits at their destination is aware of them. Conifer trees loom over the dirt road on both sides of the car.
"No. We can't," Jack folds the map back and puts it in the front pocket of his hoodie. "We have to check it. They'd found only the girl. Fuck," he adds, eyeing the lighter Gabriel still plays with absentmindedly.
"You'll have to find another one."
"Fuck you," Jack mutters without any real emotion behind the words and slams the door as he seats himself back in the car. "What are you waiting for?"
"That bad?" Gabriel could get angry at the outburst but he understands now better than ever before, the things Jack sees and no-one else does.
Jack shifts, then shakes his head as Gabriel starts the engine. The car rolls down the road alongside the weathered wooden poles with electric wire stretched between them.
"It's whispers on the wind. Something is here, and it's crying," Jack mulls over the answer. "I can't tell. It's old. And then it's not. It's everywhere."
Gabriel takes one hand off the steering wheel and puts it on Jack's thigh, it's comfortingly real and corporeal, warm even through the leather of the glove. A blessing. Something he never imagined he would have back.
"You're going to be okay?"
"I have to be," Jack sighs and covers Gabriel's hand with his, slowly twines their fingers together. "I told you, I hate..." The word is almost cut in half by a sharp intake of air. "Fuck."
"What is it?"
"She's in the car with us."
"Who?" Gabriel tries not to sound alarmed and glances into rear-view mirror only to see the empty seats, the stretch of the road behind them, and Jack's focused gaze.
"The girl. Why is she...? Oh, fuck, they found it. They took it. Fuck, fuck, fuck, it's there," Jack frantically speaks, his fingers clench around Gabriel's. "It's there and..."
Something big and dark runs in front of the car. Gabriel tries to slam the brakes. The metal groans around him in the split second before the inertia throws him forward, and the airbag pushes back.
The ringing in his ears slowly settles as the pain becomes apparent. Gabriel rolls his head to the side. A lumbering shape stops by the window and lowers its head to look at him. A deer. Amber eyes blink, all of them, too many of them, its snout is covered in eyes, and its antlers are black and curled into branching spirals.
It snorts and leans away, and disappears into the blackness of his fading vision.
"Speak not in the voice of angels," a woman speaks.
"Speak not of the singing whispers," another one adds.
"Suffer not the existence of the angel," a girl's voice.
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Sniper, Scout & Spy Headcanon
I was messaging Camiluna27, and THIS happened:
- - - - - -
consider THIS...
Wildlife is just a fact of life, in Australia. Some will kill you on sight, some are just chilling, some you might piss off by accident... but mostly, you all exist in harmony.
But then you run into something injured and needs help; and you'e able to save it. Sniper's good at that. Animals, that is.
Animals, he's good with; they like him, no matter how poisonous or lethal, and he likes them back. Tends to give them embarrassingly cute names, you know, how some people do with pets?
Fluffball the Dropbear, Beaky-boy the Cassowary, Lil' Mate the Kangaroo...
Finding and adopting animals is what he DOES by accident, it's like a fucking superpower.
And of course, no one on base knows about it... except Scout.
Well, not in a proper way, at least.
Engie DID catch the lanky bastard in the kitchen one night feeding bacon rashers to what he THINKS was a baby alligator... but the Texan rationalised he'd just hallucinated it... because Stretch'd never do that, right?
...right?
Soldier has his raccoons. Demo... has an inkling but if Sniper isn't saying it, then he won't either.
Medic has his birds, and Heavy never seems to notice the occasional extra animal on base (or, more likely, in the van).
Pyro... no one knows.
Spy... has no clue, and Snipes loves that. He's going to use it against the guy at some point.
But Scout... learned the hard way that Sniper is a goddamn dangerous animal magnet. His family's big, and money is tight, pets were out of the question.
He had a few impromptu ones... like the pigeons that nested on their windowsill once a year, (named BigBoy and Shirley, for no real reason other than he was eight the first time he was them and making up names is hard.
Or the family of squirrels in the garden across the road he could occasionally tempt into playing with him... their names were even worse.
Actually, he might have snuck one onto base when no one was looking... or rather, the little guy came with and Scout didn't realise until he was halfway to base again. Chucklenuts was his little secret with sniper; although he got the feeling either medic or engie knew, because he 'found' a timed feeder outside his room the day after they got back.
His room was now 10% scout mess, and 90% chucklenuts-got-bored-of-the-maze-you-made-him-today mess.
-
Maybe Scout mentioned he'd never gone camping, and Sniper took offence on a personal level.
Maybe Scout insulted the guy's camper/van one too many times, and Sniper wanted to punish him...
Perhaps it had to do with the fact Scout caught the sharpshooter trying to chase down his red-eyed owl before the others saw him... and was confounded when 'the bloody bastard' went straight for the kid's shoulder.
Perhaps it was mostly because he saw the others were tiring of the 'loud little bugger' consistently trying to either impress them or seek approval from his peers in the most brazen, brash manner possible... and decided to step in.
You know, take the kid out and do something constructive. Worst comes to worst, he could just let the kid ramble himself to sleep, Snipes was good at half-listening and adding in the right noie at the right time to make the other feel heard. IT was an art.
-
Yeah, it was mostly the latter.
Except trying to find a convincing reason to take Scout anywhere off base for a weekend was giving Snipes a headache. Sure he'd gone out with Demo to hunt for some sort of supernatural thing a while back (caught a weird antlered rabbit thing, or they thought they had... bugger gnawed its way out of the cage on the trip back).
And he'd done some covert stuff with Spy, for the Admin, on the weekends. You know, Spy gets in close and Snipers was there to back him up in case it went tits up and all.
...but going, 'i will voluntarily take this loud rabbit for a weekend away' would raise suspicion.
So he tried one of Spy's tactics, and baited the kid.
"Y'gonna spend all weekend just watching tv?" Sniper goads, expression neutral, on Thursday evening. Nothing's on tv, but the kid is avidly watching, whilst eating bowl after bowl of cereal... it was... disconcerting to watch, really.
"YEah, what of it? Can't all go live in that van'a yours an' commute with nature or whatever it is ya do out there, Snipes..." Scout tosses back, not really paying attention.
Sniper snorts, "Yeah, sounds about right... what are ya, scared that you might like it if you actually went out and did something that wasn't reading comics or watching the idiot box?"
The cereal box slams down onto the little tv tray table.
"What the fu-...? I ain't scared, Snipes, I'll prove it... ya want me to I'dunno, wrestle a croc or whatever you aussie fuckers do, ta prove it? Cause I will!"
"Oh, really?" Sniper responds calmly, raising his eyebrows as if this wasn't exactly the reaction he was going for. "Then howsabout we start small, then? Say, ya just try an' survive a few days out in the wild with me, in the van... it's sort of glamping 'cause there's a bathroom in it, but it'll do..."
there was a pause, and then he added the killing blow to scout's fragile ego. "That is, if you think you can handle it, mate. I mean..."
"YOU BETCHA SCRAWNY ASS I CAN HANDLE IT! I'LL BE THE BEST FUCKING CAMPER YOU EVER SAW, SHOW YOU HOW TA-..."
Scout was mouthing off, even as sniper walked away, beaming at a plan gone right.
- - -
And so, they came to the trip... Scout petulantly sitting in the frontseat (after having to be forcibly tossed into the camper by Heavy, a few hours earlier).
Friday nights were a time for quiet and reflection, not Scout loudly talking about how stupid camping was, or how much better he was at it then Snipes, or that he could do it better than anyone on the base!
He, his pack, and an emergency walkie talkie, were unceremoniously tossed into the vehicle and Sniper started to drive off before the runner could explode back out... and do something that might be termed 'a human resources nightmare', with his bat.
The cabin echoed his angry insults for a bit, then Scout climbs into the front
clicks his seatbelt, and is concerningly quiet for a long, long period of time.
The radio echoes in between them, and it's less awkward than you might think... approaching companionable, silence.
- - -
As it turns out, Scout does NOT have a natural affinity for camping.
He set himself on fire (until Sniper showed him how to do it right)
ate poisoned berries (thankfully Snipes anticipated this and had Medic pack a few healthkits for exactly this)
fell into his almost-up tent and therefore nearly died (before snipes rescued him)
and became the sole object of interest for every piece of wildlife in the area.
From snakes coming to warm by the fire, to alligators dropping out of god-knows-where to find out what this giant noodle was doing making so much noise when it was nighttime
Sniper nearly died laughing when Sir Hootsalot nearly made the runner jump into orbit, by landing on his shoulder.
He had dispelled most of the incoming invaders and friendly wildlife; although a few snakes had to go, unfortunately. He promised to make the kid a belt from the skins, but to that, Scout just looked green about the gills.
Still, even though dinner was several hours too late, and they had all these uninvited guests AND scout was a walking disaster on a campsite... it still seemed to go alright.
The sharpshooter had anticipated no less from the kid. Hell, Scout could drag him into Boston one day and be in his element as the Aussie failed to react favourably to the sudden explosion of noise, sound and hazards about him.
Still, after the first few fuck-ups, Scout's rampant bravado had ceased, and he became more amenable to learning, or at least... listening to how to do things right...
And that was a good start.
- - -
And Sniper taught.
How to set snares, start a fire (without burning your damn self again), how to catch and cook (even if the kid shied away from the whole 'gutting and cleaning the carcass' part of things), the best way to find where you were, and the animals to check in with if you think a storm's coming.
A few other little things like how to pitch a tent and boil water on a fire, were also tossed in there for good measure.
But mostly... Sniper got the kid to Talk.
Usually, that wasn't hard. But this was a TALK. Not the loud, self-praise that he usually went on with; but a quieter, more relaxed question and answer type conversation.
It was... good.
Snipes didn't do conversation all that great, but he could listen, ask poignant questions, and tell some interesting stories if prodded right. It was almost like a challenge, for Scout, knowing what to say and what information to offer the sharpshooter in order to hear an interesting tale from the mercenary's background.
It was frustrating, and then.... fun.
It was a lesson he didn't mind learning all that much. If that made sense.
-
By Sunday, he's onboard with the whole thing and clearly not trying to show how much he liked the whole camping thing... because they had to go back to base by evening and get ready Monday's matches.
So now it sucks that this whole time with Snipes thing has to end so swiftly.
The sharpshooter sees the reluctance in the way Scout drags out every task, taking ages to do little things.
"S'alright mate, we can come back some other time, yeah?" he finally says, startling the hell out of the runner, who had clearly gotten used to Sniper's default mode of 'silence' that morning.
The grin explodes across the younger merc's face. "Ya mean it? WE can?"
"Course we can, mate. Next weekend if ya want, if I can get some earplugs before then, that is..."
The runner frowns, confused.
Sniper hastily adds, "...'cause you talk in your sleep, Bilby."
"Oh yeah, well you SNOR-..." Scout's retort screeches to a halt as the entirety of Sniper's statement hits home. "...hold the fuck up, 'bilby'???"
Sniper just smiles, and moves towards the driver's side door.
Scout loudly shouting for the sharpshooter to come back and explain himself in the background.
- - - -
The others notice, of course.
The runner is a little more settled, more comfortable being around them without the need to constantly bignote himself. Not perpetually seeking approval in all the worst ways.
But mostly, they see that he is able to sit quiet, if he wants... usually with Sniper, as the man cleans his rifle. Or chatting animatedly to a chorus of 'hmm', 'mm', and 'nah's.
They go camping the next weekend, and the next after that.
Sniper learns quite a bit about Scout's family... a little too much. Did the kid really have to tell him about Brother number three's unfortunate accident with a birthday cake and a toaster?
He would never get that visual out of his imagination. Never. The kid was bloody good at painting a vivid scene with his words, alone, when he wanted.
And in turn, Scout learned a few more tricks for surviving, and a couple of the more ridiculous, daring, and whacky jobs Sniper had pulled in the past before Fortress was founded.
- - -
It was after the fourth camping trip that Sniper returned to his van late Sunday night... to find himself at the mercy of another teammate.
Before he even flicked on the lights in the camper, he knew the other was there. And not just because of the tell-tale flick of a knife, a split second before the blade pressed against his throat.
"And just... what exactly... are you doing with ze boy on your little 'camping trips', mon amie? 'E seems far too 'appy on return for just... sleeping under ze stars, non?"
Despite the severity of the situation, Sniper laughs. "Aw, Spook... mate, listen... your kid's virtue is intact, if that's ya meaning..."
The blade presses closer for a second.
"Honest. I'm not doing anything more than taking him out, giving him something to do, and listening when he talks... like you could be doing, if ya stopped playing this whole aloof-cunt shit, with him." Sniper adds.
The blade relents.
"...very well bushman. Speak of zhis to noone, or you will never speak again..."
And then, very suddenly, Sniper is alone once more.
He counts to three in his head, exhales, and then says aloud, "If ya still there Spook, better turn your back, 'cause I gotta change m'boxers."
Sniper is halfway out of his travel-worn shirt, when he hears the campervan door slam closed. The Aussie smiles at the little victory... and continues to get ready for bed.
- - -
To say the rest of the team is utterly baffled by the Scout's new attitude, is an understatement. Not to mention how just about any sudden outburst can be quelled by Sniper saying, "Simmer down, 'roo" or "C'mon Bilby, mate, enough of that".
Spy is not entirely indifferent, either, which was a minor shock to the RED teams' systems. He seems to hover, cloaked or visible, around the runner... despite being outwardly repelled by the kid.
Perhaps... he's not great at pretending anymore, but the other classes are starting to catch on. Especially with Sniper dropping passive-aggressive hints.
- - -
Still, a step towards team cohesion is good in anyone's books, and no one wants to be the reason for any backtracking in that area.
But someone really needs to do something about the hidden animal menagerie Sniper and Scout seem to have hidden away in their various bedrooms. There's only so many animals they can pretend don't exist, at the end of the day...
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