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froggyfics · 8 months

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The Deadliest Poisons Are The Sweetest - 4

You meet someone new.

(09/15/23) Note: If you have read this series before this date, please note that I have combined chapters 1 and 2 together. This may seem confusing, but I have decided that as a creative approach, I would like the chapters to be longer. This chapter and beyond are up to date.

Also, please let me know if the dialogue is too much or too weird. This chapter was a bit of a challenge for me because of it.

Feedback is always appreciated. Feel free to message me privately or comment below to let me know what you think. Constructive criticism is always welcome!

Word Count: 3,853

The air is stifling and stale within the banquet hall. It’s a familiar sight that you have seen before – servants pouring drinks until cups runneth over, men leering at both married and unmarried women, people stuffing their mouths with fatty meats.

People are similar everywhere, you realize. The sight before you is akin to what you witnessed as a child growing up in the banquet hall of your father’s home. For some reason though, you thought that the people in the capital were more refined and distinguished than those in your birthplace. However, your experience in Gotham so far has proved you severely wrong.

In fact, it seemed as though the richer people are, the more repulsive. It left a terrible taste in your mouth. The city was absolutely beautiful – with ancient architecture to depict its rich history and bustling streets filled to capacity with cultures and ideas from all over.

It was the upper echelon of the city however, that left you wary. Every interaction with the highest members of society was enjoyable on the surface, but there was a distinct undercurrent of greed and jealousy beneath the gritted smiles and half-hearted waves that people gave you.

It made you feel out of place, as if you didn’t already know that you don’t belong here.

The liquid in your cup sloshes out and coats your hands after your shoulder is violently jerked.

“My sincere apologies, my Lady,” a man near you says.

You grumble, but manage to scrounge up a small smile for the man. After all, it was simply an accident that he bumped into you.

However, the vulgar stare that follows his apology tells you otherwise. He smirks at you while walking backwards, practically undressing you with his eyes.

Your face reddens and your stomach coils uncomfortably. You’ve been pasted to the wall nearly all night, but you take the man’s indomitable stare as a sign to venture out and seek out Damian.

You’ve barely seen him, let alone talked to him, since you’ve arrived in Gotham. In fact, it almost seemed like he was avoiding you since that fateful reunion in the garden. You were in such high spirits after that day, but now, you find yourself replaying your interaction with him obsessively.

In your recollection, it didn’t seem like you said or did anything to upset him. Presumably, there would no reason as to why he steered clear of you, but you can’t help but wonder if it’s your fault.

“You will live and breathe for the House of Al Ghul after your marriage,” Talia said to you over breakfast a few days ago.

You nearly choked on your bread in response. The timing of her statement, and her statement itself, were quite absurd. She rarely spoke more than a few words to you since your arrival and when she did speak to you, the conversation was shallow. All of a sudden, here she was, in front of you with the most apathetic look upon her face.

“Certainly, Lady Al Ghul.” Your mother sat beside you and answered in your stead. “My daughter will become the property of her husband, and the House of Al Ghul, after her marriage takes place.”

How were you to “live and breathe for the House of Al Ghul” if you couldn’t even find the person you were theoretically supposed to exist for – your future husband?

You wade through the throng of people in the hall. They all pause their conversations to greet you as you pass by. It still startles you today just as much as it did the first day you arrived in Gotham. You politely greet them all back, but quicken your step nonetheless.

Damian was certainly in the banquet hall. After all, this betrothal dinner was being held in honor of you and Damian. However, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find him. You spot him in the crowd with his head poking above the wave of people, but as soon as you near him, he inexplicably disappears.

It’s overwhelming for your senses. Anxiety courses through your veins. You’re trapped in a space filled with strangers, new and old. Your family was busy socializing with people that they never thought they would mingle with – never considering your isolating plight. R’as and Talia avoided you like the plague, as if you weren’t about to become a part of their family. Talia assigned several ladies-in-waiting to be employed by your household, but even they excluded you from their conversations. Damian was the one person that you wanted to seek comfort from, but he seemed intent on dodging you.

You stand in the middle of the banquet hall with people all around you, but you have never felt so unseen and lonely. A hand firmly seizes your shoulder and for a moment, you panic. You slowly turn around, hoping that the man that oogled you earlier was not behind you.

Instead, you meet the steely blue eyes of your future father-in-law, Bruce Wayne. You wondered how a gentle soul like him managed to tolerate someone like Talia long enough to produce an heir.

He seemed to be the polar opposite of her. Though he was a man of few words, he always spoke kindly to you since the day you were introduced. His eyes were bright blue like the sky, which contrasted the signature mossy greens of the Al Ghul’s.

You sigh in relief and curtsy politely. “My Lord.”

He holds his hand up to quiet you. “Please, call me Bruce. You are to be my daughter by law. You are…” He wrinkles his face for a moment to think. “…to be my family soon enough.”

“Thank you – Bruce. For making me feel welcome. I look forward to marrying into your family and –”

“Father,” Damian curtly acknowledges, interrupting your conversation. He greets you as well, but barely looks at you. “Mother is kindly asking for your presence. Something to do with wedding preparations.”

Bruce nods his head and gives you quick goodbye. He begins to walk again, with Damian leading him, until you grab onto Damian’s arm.

“Wait,” you start.

Both Damian and Bruce turn to face you while your face reddens with embarrassment. You know what you want to say, but you struggle with getting the words out.

“Hello,” you squeak. “Damian, erm, how are you this evening?”

Damian shifts awkwardly, never quite meeting your eyes. Bruce inquisitively looks between the two of you and excuses himself.

“I’ll let the two of you talk. I’ll…speak with Talia on my own.” He grimaces before walking away.

Damian longingly gazes in the direction that Bruce walked in. You notice his uneasiness, which only amplifies your own. What had you done wrong?

“Damian,” you call out again.

He turns to face you, but his eyes don’t meet your own. It’s like they see through you, rather than at you.

You can’t even bare to look him in the face any longer out of mortification. “I have not been blessed by your presence recently,” you murmur.

Damian breathes deeply. “Yes, I…suppose it has been some time.”

Silence falls between the two of you, yet the party rages on. You look down and play with your dress, the same shyness that enveloped you the day you arrived in Gotham has returned. It’s green, black, and gold – the colors that represented House Al Ghul. It truly is a stunning dress, a testament to the skillful hands of the Gothamite tailors, but you don’t feel beautiful in it at all. Not when the one person you want to impress seems so thoroughly unimpressed with you. You gullibly thought to wear this particular garb tonight in the hopes that he would perhaps throw a compliment in your direction.

You think back to the day in the garden just a few days prior. It felt like a hallucination, but the red carnation that Damian gave you reminded you that this was, in fact, reality. When you returned to your quarters that day, you excitedly dried and preserved the carnation and stowed it away in your jewelry box. You wanted to save it as a memento to the start of your love story with Damian.

Although, your love story seemed to be a far-fetched dream at this point.

“Would you like to walk with me in the garden? Like we did not too long ago?” you reminded.

Damian rubs the back of his neck nervously. “I’m afraid that I cannot.” He looks in the direction that Bruce left in. “I really should go. My parents…they do not have a civil relationship. I really should be with them to mediate.”

“Oh, yes, of course.” You want to melt into the floor and drip into the soil beneath the castle.

“Right.” Damian stretches his mouth uncomfortably into a smile, and then promptly leaves. Funnily enough, he travels in the direction opposite to where his father went.

You want to cry, but what is there to cry for? It’s not like you’re in love with Damian – you’ve only just met him. Yes, you had a chance encounter with him many years prior, but besides that initial meeting and the walk in the garden, you’ve barely interacted with him.

It’s just that you felt a connection with him like no other. You would be lying to yourself if you said that you weren’t attracted to him. He was the epitome of handsome, and you oftentimes found yourself wondering what he looked like underneath all his armor. However, your connection to him was more than just your attraction to his physical appearance. You were swept away by how charming he was that day in the garden. You also wanted to peel back the multiple layers of his personality. He was the obedient son – the responsible heir to the throne – but he was simultaneously a romantic person who had a soft spot for animals.

You felt yourself drawn outside to the garden. If Damian didn’t want to come with you, then you should still enjoy it for yourself. You twitch as you look back at the raucous party. Everyone was thoroughly enjoying themselves. Except for you. Despite the fact that the banquet was being held in your honor, no one tried to stop you as walk out.

The outside air serves as a reprieve from the stickiness of the banquet hall. You feel like you can finally breathe again outside the confines of the party. You can still hear the boisterous crowd of people from within, but the sound of it is considerably reduced in the garden.

The moonlight strikes the flowers in a unique, but utterly beautiful way. The petals now have grayish undertones, but their beauty still shines through. The perfume of the flowers engulfs your senses. You take a deep breath in – you can almost forget your worries in the aroma.

A melancholic sigh distracts you from your thoughts. The sound startles you, as you assumed everyone else was still inside enjoying the festivity.

Curiosity overwhelms your better judgement, and you slowly creep towards where you heard the sound. You’re met with a downcast figure sitting on bench. Coincidentally, the bench is situated next to the bush of red carnations – the same carnations that supposedly symbolize deep love and affection.

Black hair with a tinge of violet hues. Gray-ish skin. A sharp widow’s peak. And most strikingly – a red jewel on forehead.

She looks up at you when you accidentally bristle against some branches. Her eyes are a gorgeous shade of violet. A dark cloud surrounds her aura.

She’s…beautiful. Ethereal.

“Oh, my!” She stands up from her seat. “I apologize. I did not expect anyone else to be within the garden.”

“No, no!” You shake your hands fervently at her. “Please, I should apologize for the intrusion.” You look over your shoulder in the direction of the party. The lively atmosphere could still be heard meters away. “I just needed a moment away from…everything and everyone.”

“I understand.” Her dark blue cloak drags across the pavement as she glides towards the red carnations near her. She plucks a flower out, longingly staring at it. “I also needed a moment of reprieve.”

She plays with the petals of the carnation for a moment before crushing them in the palm of her hand. “Rachel. Rachel Roth of House Azarath.”

You begin to bend your knees into a curtsy until a realization dawns upon you. While your family is from humble beginnings, you are about to become a princess. The House of Azarath is an old, respectable, and wealthy dynasty, but the House of Al Ghul supersedes it. You hurriedly stand upright once more while Rachel’s back is towards you.

Rachel’s head whips around when you introduce yourself. “My Lady!’ she exclaims. “Please forgive me for my ill manners.” She curtsies in respect. “If I had known I was speaking to you, I would have immediately –”

“Please, no,” you interrupt. You softly grab her arms to stand her into the upright position. Ironic how you always dreamed of being a princess as a child and have people bow to you, but these past few days have revealed your chagrin to people’s mannerisms towards royalty. “Be comfortable around me. I beg of you.” Your voice is laced with sincerity.

Rachel timidly nods her head. “Yes, my Lady.”

You roll your eyes at her politeness. “And please, I implore you not to call me that.”

You exhale loudly and shames roils within you at your sudden temper. “I apologize Lady Roth. You are not the subject of my anger, so it is unfair of me to burden you with it.” You bitterly glare at the carnations with a scowl on your face and sit down on the bench with a humph.

Rachel slowly sits on the opposite side of the bench, leaving the middle vacant.

“Why are you not inside enjoying the festivities?” you ask, breaking the silence.

Rachel is silent, and you almost believe that she didn’t hear you until she responds abruptly.

“I hate weddings,” she admits. The look upon your face at her admission must have been bizarre because she meets your gaze with a soft laugh. “Allow me to rephrase that – I do not hate weddings.” A deep sigh escapes her lips. “I suppose I hate the idea of it.”

“Whatever do you mean?” Your body leans in towards her ever so slightly.

Rachel observes your face with a mysterious look upon her face. It’s almost like her violet eyes can see right through to your soul, scooping out the innermost parts of you for her to analyze.

“Well, if you insist. Simply put, weddings are public business transactions. Akin to how you purchase bread from your local baker for a few coins, weddings are a way to signal a purchase. In your case for example, the baker would be the House of Al Ghul and Wayne, the bread would be Prince Damian – long may he live –, your dowry would be the coins, and you and your family are the customers.”

Your eyebrows scrunch in thought. Her analogy made perfect sense, but it also left a bad taste in your mouth.

“I suppose so,” you muse. “However, I would not go as far as to call it a ‘business transaction’. Weddings are so much more than that.” You start to move your hands to emphasis your point. “Prince Damian cannot be compared to – to bread and I do not feel like I purchased him.”

“Ahh, but that is exactly what you did. Your dowry ensured your betrothal to him. It may not have been in coins, but you certainly did purchase him.”

“Well, I suppose you think weddings are useless in the eyes of the law, then.”

“Yes, that’s precisely what I think.”

Your head shoots up and your eyes nearly bulge out of your head. “No, weddings are absolutely necessary,” you stammer. “Weddings signify the joining of two people who will share…quite practically their entire lives together. They signify the start of a new generation. They signify family and unity.”

“My dear.” Rachel grabs one of your flailing hands into her own. The warmth of her contact immediately plateaus your ever increasing volitivity. “Weddings symbolize whatever you want them to symbolize. For you, it’s obvious that they represent love and some sort of girlish romance. But for others, weddings are the end of their lives as they know it. The beginning of a prison sentence. The end of youth.”

“That’s so…morbid.” You giggle at the absurdness of it all. “Surely, you want to get married one day yourself.”

“I do not care for marriage,” she sharply replies. “There is nothing that it could provide for me that I cannot obtain on my own.”

“What about…children?” You want to hide in the bushes at the mention. You learned quite recently that despite the fairytales your grandmother yammered on about in your youth, the act of producing an heir was rather…procedural. You furiously blush as you recall your mother sitting you down a few days prior to inform you of what would happen on your wedding night.

“Children?” Rachel scoffs. She adjusts herself on the bench, so that she faces you entirely. “You do not need to be married to have children.”

You open your mouth to reply, but immediately close it. Your posture slumps in defeat. Rachel was right.

The disturbing heat of shame creeps into your body. You feel utterly foolish. It should have been obvious to you that children could be born out of wedlock – Damian would be a prime example of such an event. Still, it felt unnerving to you that procreation was taught to you under the context of marriage. It seemed as though there were certain unspoken rules that you had to follow, but others did not.

“Well, it is more…respectable for a person to get married. Is it not?” You triumphantly straighten your shoulders back, hoping this would make Rachel stumble.

“Respectable.” She repeats the word slowly, as if tasting it as she spoke it. She scoots closer to you, so close in fact that your foreheads nearly bump into one another. “May I be frank with you?” Your nod gives her permission to continue. “You will soon learn that Gotham lacks respectable people. Being respectable implies that you think outside of yourself, which will be hard to find in this city.” She stares deeply into your eyes. “Everyone is out for themselves, and it is only fair that I warn you of this now.”

Rachel’s words leave you with a mixture of confusion and intrigue. It’s obvious that Rachel understands the innerworkings of the Gothamites, as she was raised here. You can’t help but agree with her rational – your own experiences within Gotham showcased a city rotten with false pretenses.

You also wonder what secrets – and whose secrets – she must know about.

“Rachel, I must say our conversation has been…refreshing.” You half-heartedly chuckle in an effort to dissipate the sudden tenseness. “Honestly, it comes as quite a surprise. You are likely the only person since I’ve arrived in the capital to speak to me so openly – so honestly.” You place your hands on top of hers and squeeze. “It truly means so much to me.”

Her honesty was what you’ve been craving ever since you arrived in Gotham. Rachel was correct – people in Gotham were inherently selfish. Perhaps, you’ll come to understand the culture of the city the longer you’re in it. Back in your humble hometown, the aristocrats and countryfolk alike were welcoming, gracious, and outgoing. Here in Gotham, it seemed like every comment was thinly veiled with a backstory that you were unaware of.

Everyone already had their own circles, and no one seemed to want you in theirs. Not even Damian.

A sudden idea popped into your head. “I know we have only just met, but you have made such an impression on me. I’m so inconsolably lonely, Rachel.” Your admittance brought tears to your eyes. Your heart wrenched as the feeling of loneliness enveloped it. “My family will return home after the wedding. All I will have is my dear servant Alice, but that is all! It would truly mean the world to me if you joined my household staff. To be my lady-in-waiting.”

You look at Rachel hopefully. Tears threaten to escape your waterline, especially as she rescinds her hands from your grasp and stands up.

“I do not think this is a wise idea,” she whispers.

“Why not?” You stand in front of her and place your hands on her shoulders.

Rachel does her absolute best to avoid your gaze. “Lady Talia has already appointed ladies-in-waiting for you. I saw the flock of them inside.”

You shake your head wildly. “Yes, yes, I know. However, who says there is a limit to how many I can have? Besides, they have barely even looked in my direction since we’ve met. Rachel…” You bend your knees so that your face can meet her eyes. “I have no one here. No one on my side. Lady Talia abhors me. King R’as avoids me. My own family ignores me in favor of flattering people that would not have even breathed in their direction just a few months ago. And Prince Damian is –”

You suddenly screech to a halt at the remembrance of Damian. Rachel nudges you when you become silent.

“What about Prince Damian?” she asks.

Your hands slide off her shoulders, so that you could wrap your arms around yourself. The act provided you little comfort against the pang within your heart. “I suppose what you said about weddings earlier was. Weddings can symbolize many things, including the start of a prison sentence.” You smile at the red carnations to your side. The meaning behind them is tucked far away in the back of your head. “I fear that is what Prince Damian is thinking. I naively thought this union would be like a fairytale, but alas, I’m still a girl with much to learn.”

You can’t help but sniffle as you try to control the onslaught of tears. How embarrassing would it be for Rachel to witness you cry on the first night you meet! Your stomach twists at the sight of pity in her eyes. How pathetic you must look. How pathetic, yet you can’t help it. You wanted her to save you. You desperately needed her guidance.

“You give me no choice, my Lady. I suppose I must accept my new position at once.”

Rachel breaks out into an infectious smile. You breathe a sigh of relief. Finally, a sliver of hope cracks through the dark gloomy Gotham clouds. Rachel may not be a friend yet, but for now, she is your only ally. She is the only dependable connection you’ve developed outside the influence of the Al Ghul household.

You were to be a princess within a week’s time, but a pretty crown would not distract from the fact that you were still an outsider – to Talia, to R’as, to the citizens of Gotham, and to Damian.

#dc comics #damian wayne x you #damian wayne x reader #damian wayne x fem!reader #damian wayne x y/n #league of assassins #loa!damian wayne #damian wayne

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thebreakfastgenie · 1 year

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I don't know if you wanted other people's opinions or not, so feel free to ignore this, but I can't say I agree with your take on war narratives having good things happen to the characters sending the message that the war was good.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you were saying (or it was just a matter of person taste not a broad statement), but it seems to me like if you don't portray any good happening within a war, you're flattening it to the point of it becoming one dimensional.

Like, obviously if your message is somehow "it was all worth it" in that kind of love conquers all way, sure, that's ignoring the subject matter to give an ending that's comfy for the audience.

But that's not the same thing as acknowledging that good things happen during wars.

Because like, good things really do happen during wars, and to ignore that seems like ignoring people's lived experiences. Like, I'm sure there are plenty of people who discovered their sexuality as a part of their time in the military, and it seems weird to me to deny that as a story you can tell in a way that isn't also anti-war, particularly given the history and present day state of gay people in the military (though maybe you meant fluff because that seems pretty much impossible to do)

Also if you make a war so entirely horrific all the time I feel like your audience will check out. They'll become desensitized, or bored, or just stop caring because you haven't given them reason enough to care because they know it will be awful. And like, if that's what your going for, fair enough. Accurate depiction of most of modern wars. But that's not what every war narrative needs to be.

(with that said I don't really read much M*A*S*H fic so I can't speak to how those treat the characters and themes. Also again sorry if I misinterpreted what your point was or if this in any way comes off as aggressive, it's not)

First, let me say I always welcome opinions!

So, I was partly talking about personal preference, and that's where the sexuality part comes in. I have negative interest in reading that in M*A*S*H fic and no particular interest in reading it generally, though an original story that includes that could interest me.

I was speaking more generally about war stories, and you are misunderstanding, but maybe that's my fault because I don't know how clear I was. I did not say war stories cannot show good things happening without saying war is good. However, I think it is very difficult. Audiences, for various reasons, are hardwired to romanticize depictions of war. You can show the bleakest, most painfully realistic war drama, and a lot of people will come away thinking the characters are heroes whose actions were admirable. It happens a lot. I think that's why a lot of successful anti-war narratives are comedies: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, MASH (1970), M*A*S*H... comedy emphasizes the surrealism and absurdity of it all. In fact, I prefer an absurd, comedic war narrative. I don't particularly like narratives that are over the top horrific. I think they often fail.

So I'm certainly not suggesting that good things can't happen, and I've written about this before. Good things happening in M*A*S*H is part of the tragedy, because they're all poisoned by the war. But you also can't just not live your life while you're stuck there, so they have to build relationships and have good times, even as they are desperately trying to escape the place that allows those relationships in the first place.

But it's something M*A*S*H was very conscious about from the beginning. They didn't want to make the war look fun. And it's just very hard not to when you create a cast of likable characters. The natural audience response is to insert themselves into the fantasy. And I think the longer M*A*S*H was on, the audience's love for seeing those people in that setting and the cast's enjoyment of being on that set together unavoidably cut into the message that none of the characters wanted to be there a bit. Like I said, I don't think it was entirely avoidable, and I think M*A*S*H did about as well as they could.

Of course in real life good things happen to people who were in wars, and people who were actually in them have a range of complex feelings, including positive ones, about the experience. Depicting something in fiction is different. Real people living their lives don't inherently send a message. Fiction does, whether it means to or not. It's very easy to get from "these characters met under X, Y, and Z circumstances" to "I'm so glad X, Y, and Z happened so these characters could meet!" And that gets a little thorny when the event in question is a real horrific war. I don't want to catch myself thinking "I'm glad the Korean War happened" even if I'm just thinking about it in the context of fictional characters. A kid I knew in elementary school said something once about all the cool toys we wouldn't have without wars. I don't want to be like that.

Good things happen, yes, but in my opinion it's important to avoid suggesting the good things make the war worth it. Individual people can decide if they feel their personal trauma was "worth" whatever good came out of it, but war is a much bigger thing. And like I said before, if you asked Hawkeye if he would accept never meeting BJ in order to make the war have never happened he would not hesitate to say yes. But you don't get "would you go back and change it" opportunities. You just have to live with the life you're dealt.

There is, at least in my mind, a difference between "good things happening" and "I know who I am now! I am finally free to truly be myself!"

A lot of fanfiction, across fandoms, relies on stock queer narratives, and the latter is one of them. Though I should add, I don't think this only applies to discovering sexuality. Queer fanfiction tends to be about the "being queer" part because that's where the author's interest and experience lies. Thats's fine! But I'm not into it.

#mashposting

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shinydelirium · 3 years

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MLQC Season 2 Chapter 21 (Kiro) Part 2 [Chaotic Space] & [Tacit Agreement] Translation [CN]

***SPOILERS*** THIS POST CONTAINS HEAVY SPOILERS FOR CONTENT NOT YET RELEASED ON EN SERVER!!! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!***

For previous translations of chapter 21: Part 1

Enjoy~

[Chaotic Space]

We made our way to the hotel lobby.

Every waiter who passed by Helios only gave him a small glimpse. He continued to do his own thing as if he was already used to such behavior and just let it pass him by.

I tugged on his sleeve and motioned for him to come closer.

MC: Do you know something about their expressions?

Helios: No.

Helios: They only know that I’m a “special guest.”

A playful smile crept into his eyes but at this time the lobby manager stepped forward and stood in front of us, casting accusing eyes on Helios.

Manager: Sir, I hope you will not cause trouble to the other guests.

Faced with such a firm and awe-inspiring question, Helios smiled lazily and turned his head to look at me.

Helios: Are you troubled?

I shook my head, feeling the manager’s face darken a little bit, and Helios’ smile became more triumphant and mocking.

Manager: If you are threatened, you can tell me right away. This guest has a history of taking other people’s belongings.

Helios: So much rubbish.

Helios: Step aside.

Helios stepped forward impatiently, took me towards the door and I looked at him with a snicker.

MC: You’re not stealing people’s cell phones to send text messages, are you?

Helios: I tried normal communication.

He said this nonchalantly, warning the waiters who were observing secretly.

Helios: They just want to keep me here as ordered and restrict my communication with the outside world.

Helios: On the other hand, as long as I don’t leave here, I can do as I please.

MC: But if that’s the case, you can walk straight out the exit, right? How can you not be able to leave?

Helios: That is what makes this hotel interesting.

As we talked, we arrived at a door and Helios pushed it away while I stared blankly.

A dazzling light shines through the crack of the door. As we moved forward, it instantly covers my entire vision—

An embellished blue is embellished in front of my eyes. The sound of waves rushes to my ears, sweeping away the fatigue and burden of this period in time.

In the distance, a few people were on surfboards riding and jumping over the waves and women in bikinis lay on the beach sunbathing.

I stared at Helios next to me in a daze and he seemed to be unsurprised as though he had seen this scene many times.

MC: Have we crossed?

Helios: ….

MC: Is this the work of an Evolver?

Helios didn’t seem to want to explain anything. He took a handful of sand from the ground and stuffed it into my hand.

Helios: Hold onto it tightly.

In the next second, he took my shoulder and walked to the other side of the beach.

Under the bright, hot sun, my forehead unknowingly oozes thin sweat.

I don’t know how long it has been until a door similar to the one before appeared.

Helios pushed open the door skillfully and pulled me in.

The sun behind him suddenly disappeared and was replaced by an endless field. Many stars covered the entire night sky.

Before I could marvel at the sight, Helios raised my hand to my eyes.

Helios: Open your hand.

I obeyed his words and opened my fingers gently and the dense, fine sand was scattered like smoke and dust under the starry sky, quietly falling down to the ground.

It’s so real that it sends chills down one’s spine.

Helios: Although it is not clear what the principle is, it should be the use of “doors” to connect many real spaces together.

MC: Do you mean this is actually Loveland City or somewhere on Earth?

Helios: No, all you see here are people who come to the hotel.

Helios: It should be some kind of different space.

He took me to walk in the star-shrouded wilderness. The crescent moon bends and the night wind swept over the weeds making a rustling sound.

Maybe because Helios is here, my heart is incredibly calm.

Helios: What’s wrong?

MC: Although I think it might not be a good time to say this kind of thing, don’t you think it’s beautiful here?

Helios: I brought you here because of the beauty. ***UWUWUWUWUWUWU!!! 🥺💕That is classic Kiro!!!***

Helios: Otherwise, I wouldn’t have taken you away like this.

I was surprised. Helios’ expression was faint as if this the answer was obvious.

MC: Is there anything else that’s weird here?

Helios snorted and reached out his hand to count.

Helios: Volcano eruptions, Tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park, valleys full of poisonous insects, tropical rain forests, deserts, polar regions….

MC: ….

MC: ….It seems that you have suffered a lot.

Helios: At least it gave me some fun.

Before we knew it, we came to another door again. After he opened it skillfully, he led me to step on the clouds.

I looked down and dizziness swept through me.

MC: …This is?

Helios: A rare and special place.

He pulled me to sit on the clouds, soft as velvet, and the pale pink sky seemed to be within reach.

MC: Do you remember where all these doors lead to?

Helios: Each space has a door with at least three doors and at most six doors and the space leading to it is basically fixed.

Helios: Try a few more times and you will know.

I looked back against the light. How long has he been trapped here and how many attempts has he made by himself?

MC: What does it mean “basically fixed”?

Helios: When I first arrived, I went through the doors several times and the space changed.

Helios: I was short on time so I haven’t found a pattern yet. This place is bigger than I thought.

MC: Wouldn’t it be dangerous if a guest ended up in the wrong place?

Helios: Not that dangerous.

He turned his head and half of his body was already out of the clouds.

I subconsciously wanted to catch him. The friction felt fleeting at my fingertips and I watched in horror as Helios gradually receded.

MC: ….!

Helios smiled calmly. In the next second, he squeezed my palm—

Gravity pulled me down quickly like a boulder. At the same time, his arm tightened and he took me into his arms.

I stared at his eyes blankly. My heart beat violently because of the weightlessness as light and shadow past behind me.

Helios: Don’t be afraid.

At the end of my field of vision, I saw a vast expanse of whiteness. We seem to have fallen into the end of the light.

Suddenly, we seem to have landed onto a very soft place and even bounced back a few times.

I opened my eyes, propped up, and found myself lying on a bed with Helios beside me looking at me with a smile.

Helios: Now you understand.

Helios: Someone in the hotel is secretly manipulating everything.

Helios: You can only appear where you “should” appear.

From a drawer, Helios pulled out a piece of paper with many weird graphics on it and pointed to one of them.

Helios: Like I said before, this here is a different special space just like this Rubik’s Cube…

MC: Wait a sec.

I looked at the distorted three-dimensional figure on the paper in confusion.

MC: ….I can’t tell that this is a Rubik’s Cube.

Helios: …..

***In case any of you don’t know, it’s a known fact that Kiro’s drawing skills suck😆. He ain’t no Piscasso but I still love him as Mr. Spicy Chips🥰🥰🥰 ***

Helios’ expression was a bit stiff. He took out a pen and drew a more distorted figure on a blank space.

I lay on the bed and couldn’t help laughing.

Helios: That funny, huh?

MC: No, it’s nothing.

I tried to suppress my laughter but seeing Helios’ expression, I couldn’t help but let it out.

I took the pen from his hand, turned over the paper, and drew a regular three-dimensional figure of a Rubik’s Cube.

MC: Rubik’s Cube…as you were saying.

Helios looked at the figure I drew in a daze. Finally, he turned his head and let out a faint chuckle.

He cleared his throat and pointed to the Rubik’s Cube.

***I just absolutely love how these two interact with one another😂😂😂***

Helios: After my investigation, I suspected that every space in the hotel is like each square on a Rubik’s Cube.

Helios: Therefore, the number of doors will vary depending on the position of each block.

Helios: However, the space we have just experienced is the state of the Rubik’s Cube at rest.

Helios: But if the “Cube” is rotated, the space will change.

MC: Isn’t that troublesome?

Helios snorted coldly, his eyes flashing with disdain.

Helios: Even if it gets disrupted again, it can’t erase the “Rubik’s Cube” itself.

Helios: There will be no way out.

[Tacit Agreement]

For the rest of the time, I tried to digest what Helios said, but I kept finding it strange.

MC: Let us not mention for the time being whether the people who were taken away from the Wish Club were brought to the Wish Hotel.

MC: For this hotel alone, it serves Evolvers under the guise of storing Evol…

MC: Just to trap them here?

MC: If it’s that’s the case, what happened to that guest I saw leaving when I came here?

Helios: Nothing but a cover.

Helios casually grabbed a pillow, leaned on my side, and laid his arms on top.

Helios: Whether it’s “stored” or not, the Evol of the guests in the hotel is indeed gone.

MC: ?!

Helios: This hotel has equipment for detecting Evol energy.

Helios: I saw that were no Evol energy fluctuations in anyone.

Helios: After realizing this, I confirmed that every guest who leaves the hotel is the same.

MC: How did you do that….

Helios: Haven’t found it yet.

Helios: Customers who accept the Evol “storage” service should have a special “door”.

There was a cold glint in Helios’ eyes.

MC: But it feels that there are not a few guests here and there is no description of Wish Hotel from the outside world.

MC: Does it mean that these storage behaviors are voluntary?

Helios: That’s not important.

He turned his head and looked at me lazily. It might have been my imagination but his eyes seemed somewhat tired.

Helios: The important thing is that the Evol energy that originally existed was indeed “taken away”.

Helios: They won’t be taken away for no reason.

Suddenly, I thought of something and looked at Helios in front of me. I sat up abruptly.

MC: This strange hotel is also related to the foundation that should serve ordinary people.

MC: The foundation is doing things for GR again.

MC: Could there be GR members behind this hotel?

MC: Are they collecting Evol energy for research? Or looking for CORE?

Helios: You have quite the habit of asking a lot of questions.

Helios closed his eyes. His reaction didn’t seem surprising.

Helios: Find the person behind the hotel and then we will know everything.

Helios: Thinking more is a waste of brain power.

MC:…You’re right.

I mumbled and went back to the bed again, looking at the man with his eyes closed, my brain spinning constantly.

MC: That being the case, I have a good idea. Maybe I can find the person responsible.

Helios: No way.

Helios didn’t open his eyes as if he completely guessed what I was going to say.

MC: I haven’t said anything yet.

Helios: No way.

Helios opened his eyes with dissatisfied and the light outside the window fell on his distinct eyelashes through the soft gauze of the curtains.

Looking at the more vivid person in front of me, I couldn’t help but raise the corners of my mouth.

MC: I am now a “guest” of this hotel and it’s only reasonable to enjoy their special services.

MC: Since I’m here, even if I don’t ask for it, they will definitely achieve their goal in another way.

Helios: I have other options.

MC: Definitely not faster and more straightforward than mine.

MC: Besides, didn’t we also cooperate perfectly in that Hunter Game before?

I stared at him calmly and gently grabbed the corner of his sleeve.

MC: I believe you will protect me.

Helios’s eyes became turbulent.

Helios: No third time.

After speaking, he took out the wooden board on the side of the bed and in his hand was a microcomputer.

MC: How can you still have a microcomputer?

Helios: I dismantled several computers at the front desk.

Helios: There wasn’t enough time. Only set up the intranet.

Helios said casually and quickly started typing on the keyboard.

Helios: You’re in room 2176? ***It’s not a Kiro chapter without some numeric slang sprinkled in. MC is staying in “Love You Kiro” room🥺💕***

MC: Yeah, you found this out too?

Helios didn’t speak, only a soft hum was left in the air.

Then, he took out two small devices from another cassette and stuffed them into my hand.

Helios: Communication equipment. Put it in your ears.

MC: Where did you remove this from? You didn’t take apart the phones in the hotel too, did you?

Helios only raised the corners mouth slightly, set aside the satellite computer, grabbed my wrist and pulled me down.

Helios: So many questions.

He made no attempt to hide the fatigue in his voice. He sighed as if he could finally feel relieved.

Helios: I haven’t slept well these days. Let me rest for a while.

[End of Part 2]

#spoilers #mlqc #mlqc spoilers #mlqc season 2 #mlqc season 2 spoilers #translations #mlqc translations #mlqc season 2 translations #kiro #kiro spoilers #helios #helios spoilers #love and producer #koi to producer #mr. love queen's choice #mr love game #mr love dream date #mldd

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nulfaga · 2 years

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i would love some food (fun facts) about miss neneldi if you feel like sharing. i like her *holds my hands out like a poor orphan beggar*

Omg hiiiiii. ABSOLUTELY it would be my pleasure <3

Im terrible at itemized lists so for the record, this will devolve very quickly <3

so i created neneldi way later than orph, he dates back to like 2016ish and then around 2018 i was like how fun would it be if he just had an evil twin. Except the evil twin is actually talented and successful. And HER hubby gets to live. Anyway things have gotten more nuanced since then (orph's situation has gotten better and neneldi's situation is definitely not all sunshine & roses) but that's the germ of it

the reason i paired her with lucien at the start was 10000% spite. I was like yes i see all your willowy delicately unhinged (usually much younger) whitewoman listeners and i raise you a fat brown gnc woman whose loose screws are extremely not cute. (i was also very intentional abt not having her do the canon oblivion dbh questline—swerving around that weird teacher/student dynamic; she's an established speaker who came up in the brotherhood at the same time as him. that was all very much intentional.)

Anyway then i actually started thinking seriously abt what would be necessary for them to make an interesting couple (what shared history/backstory, and also how to flesh out luciens personality to complement hers. Or clash horrendously w/ hers. or both.)

Wait hold that thought. this has all been meta, let me actually say something abt miss neneldi herself. She grew up in a household where she was very much the black sheep...like her mother, father and brother are all just hearts on legs. Like super empathetic and emotional and warm and sensitive....i see neneldi as autistic so growing up in that environment was like—she was very much loved but her needs were not met at ALL.

Like case in point: she and Orpheus grew up (ages 5-14) in the imperial court and since their dad Talin was the eternal champion, there were always guests or chroniclers or Talins interregnum-era friends visiting from the other side of fucking tamriel. Or it's private tutors or extracurriculars or some other nonsense, like 24/7. And neneldi, who in her very early years was a perfectly calm (if not bubbly) child, begins to be constantly irritable and reclusive. Her parents tease her abt it, very gently, and ofc they love her regardless, but don't realize that the "irritability" is the sign of a child who's overwhelmed all the gd time like all the time. sensory wise, socially, emotionally.

the family moves out to anvil around 3E 409 (when the twins are 14), and things are slightly quieter, but the damage is pretty much done. As in. Neneldi has internalized the message of "im doomed to feel like shit all the time and my family either doesn't notice or won't help me" and her parents have settled into the mindset of "something's vaguely wrong with our daughter but we still love her very much" and orpheus has concluded "my sister is really mean."

so it's mostly this state of mind that defines the rest of her life (at least so far, i don't really know what all happens after like 4E 1). even once she begins to recognize and manage the things that set her off, and she has all the calm and quiet she could want, getting her to ask for help or explain what's upsetting her is like pulling teeth—bc she will have decided ahead of time that no one else is going to get it/be able to help, why waste her breath etc etc. it makes her tremendously self-sufficient but it also makes her very hard to get close to.

The way she joins up with the dbh—at sixteen—is very calculated but also an extremely teenagerish impulse. she'd taken an interest in alchemy from the age of like. twelve. so once in anvil she's constantly workshopping formulas, poisoning stray animals and the like—she has no friends in anvil (due to her "meanness" and poor social skills) and a beautiful supply line of obscure books from the imperial city. So she starts reading up on the dbh like really reading up, fictionalized dramas about sexy assassin guilds but also (alleged) accounts from anonymous members, even a copy of the dbh charter, five tenets and all. and there's like this constant undercurrent of FAMILY. looking at the world in a profoundly different way etc etc. And her in the throes of "my terrible life is forever no one loves me" and all that, just kind of books an inn in the next town over, poisons somebody (never really hashed out who or how. i used to be very fixated on making her likeable and justifying all her actions but nah i think she fully just picks a random target.) and goes to sleep in her best dress. and the rest is history lmao

she and lucien actually bicker a LOT about execution methods—which is funny, because while she's the one who joined voluntarily (his brush with the dbh was. entirely accidental), she has a loooot of scruples abt keeping her hands clean, everything going according to a strict plan etc etc. Meanwhile he's a fuckin silence of the lambs adrenaline junkie like yes vivisection yes dismemberment. Make a statement. He's not happy unless he's caught on the 18th floor of a legion watchtower, going toe to toe with an armored guardsman while wielding a shitty little beltknife and then risking everything to stay and prop up the dude's body in an appropriately ironic position. Bloody handprint mark of sithis etc etc. Style. Neneldi thinks he's out of his fucking mind (and he feels the same way abt her. love wins)

What else. Miss neneldi exists at a delicate intersection of asceticism and frou-frou. Like she takes no joy in cooking for herself and basically lives on cold water, cigarettes and black coffee. and as mentioned she's a very minimalist assassin. However. She absolutely hates the cold dank pits that the dbh seems to be obsessed with, she is always the first person to board over the walls with antique rosewood and install a useless hearth with no chimney that can only take magefire. Put up crushed velvet drapes that cannot possibly lead to a window. Etc.

ok I'm gonna leave it here for now because again bulleted lists very quickly slip from my hands but if there's anything else u want to know...;)

#thank you very much for asking!! im blowing a kiss across the cyberwaves #neneldi velvassius #anonymous

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onenightbreak · 3 years

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....so that was a whole deal am i right? excuse any weirdness with this cos i’m kinda shaky rn, but here’s a recap for today’s (24th jan) tales from the smp: The Lost City of Mizu! under the cut smile :] my own interpretations/ things that aren’t explicitly told to be canon/ left to be inferred i’ve marked with italics.

Why show all the skins again when I can let someone else gather them? /j Here’s a post with the skins of all the characters. The cast is Karl, Quackity, BBH, Ranboo, and Dream; playing characters Isaac, Cletus, Benjamin, Charles, and Ranbob, respectively.

The episode starts with the fishermen - Isaac, Cletus, Benjamin, and Charles - setting out on a fishing expedition, before discovering a book that, among other exposition, tells the fishermen the coords of the Lost City of Mizu. Also of note is the fact that the author tells the fishermen that “I [the author] know you [the fishermen] but you don’t know me” and it’s signed with the letter ‘K’, suggesting that c!Karl left the book for them to find.

Once they arrive at the city, they find a book that calls Mizu “an underwater city of beauty” and that they can “get up close and personal with all your favorite characters from the Disc Wars”. They enter the city and meet a person who identifies themself as Ranbob, who later adds that he is a descendent of Ranboo. Despite being a descendent of Ranboo, Ranbob’s appearance differs from his ancestor’s. While Ranbob has both the black enderman skin and the white other-half skin, the arrangement is different, and he has yellow and purple eyes instead of Ranboo’s green and red ones. Endermen used to have green eyes before they were purple, so perhaps it’s related to that? Ranbob tells the fisherman that Mizu has been “abandoned for so long, other than me”, but that he wasn’t around when it was built. During most of the episode, he acts as a tour guide of sorts, showing around the fishermen.

The rooms they visit are themed around the different people involved in the current day DSMP storyline, however many things are incorrect suggesting things got misremembered or changed over time. According to Mizu’s history:

George was the longest lasting king of the SMP and worshipped by his followers. However, Eret killed him, as they were a tyrant who tried to take over.

Ranboo and his bloodline were bookkeepers and scholars. Ranboo in particular, was one of the greatest scholars, due to his supreme memory and writing everything down. He is also said to have chosen the side of a traitor due to his not choosing a side.

Sapnap was a fierce warrior on the Dream SMP. He had a large love for pets, and started the Pet War over defending them. He was also said to be so strong he could bench press mountains. Sapnap has a larger than usual bed due to his many women. (and historians said that him Karl and quackity were just very close friends /j)

Mizu is uncertain if Fundy was a person or a pet, with some people seeing him as a great warrior and some seeing him as Tommy’s pet (i hate it here i hate it here i hate-).

Quackity is very “happy-go-lucky even though there are so many bad things happening around him”. He was a well known bard, a “prolific nudist”, pulled many pranks, and idolised Skeppy. Quackity was also known for being “hyper optimistic”, apparently because he was so dumb he didn’t realise the bad things happening around him.

Skeppy had some kind of diamond poisoning that made him blue, but he sometimes changed colors to red or yellow. He was also known to be best friends with BBH, “if a little obsessed with him”.

BBH was known for prolific cursing and casting spells on people, including the enchantment “lan-gu-age” which prevented the target from speaking. He also apparently had excessive amounts of porn on his hard drive, but I think this is just a(n unfunny) joke from Dream and so I will simply Pretend I Do Not See.

Attached to BBH’s room is a secret room with green and purple carpets and beds, lots of books, and a picture of the cartoon Kids Next Door. Mizu’s scholars don’t know who this character is but it seems likely to be Karl, with confusion about him due to his time travelling.

Tubbo and Tommy share a room, with Tubbo known to be the leader and strongest of the Manberg warriors and Tommy his most loyal ally and follower. Tubbo is also known to like nature and particularly bees (which Mizu thinks you eat?). Tommy is known to “have a problem worshipping discs”, but the discs shown are Cat on the ceiling and 13 above the bed.

During their exploration, they also find several books with hints pointing to how Mizu’s residents met their downfall, including poisoned soil, decreasing food supplies, air filtration and oxygen problems, lacking energy production, and “strange sightings around the east wing”. Additionally, one of the walls is broken and Ranbob patches it up with TNT, as that’s “the only block he had to clog it”.

The last place Ranbob leads the group to is the Tree Dome, which contains a large custom tree, swings, and a bench with jukebox. Ranbob disappears, and the fishermen find a secret room key. The also spot a chest at the very top of the tree, and cc!Karl opens an audience poll to decide who climbs the tree, the result of which is Cletus. He climbs the tree to the the chest before Ranbob reappears and sets the tree on fire, saying that “no one lives after coming [to the city]”, and blows up the tree, killing Cletus. The other 3 fishermen make it out and hide in Skeppy’s room to read the book dropped by Cletus. The book says that the secret room key lock(?) is hidden in the main hall, and confirms Ranbob’s message that “once in the City of Mizu, there is no escape”.

They find the secret room, which contains a lava parkour leading to a key to unlock another door on the other side of the room. The audience votes again, deciding that Benjamin should attempt the parkour, which of course he falls off of and dies. Isaac successfully completes the parkour and brings back the final room key. (if you aren’t afraid of that wording, you really should be)

The final room is Dream’s room, with several sets of diamond armor, a diorama of Dream, and a ellipse pattern on the wall that resembles Blocks. Ranbob reappears and tells the Isaac and Charles that everyone in Mizu had an idol that they worshipped, and that his was Dream. Isaac asks if Dream was a good man, to which Ranbob says that he was. Ranbob tells them a final time that “nobody leaves” Mizu, before killing them both.

The stream cuts to black and plays a remix of Dearly Beloved while cc!Karl changes his skin and changes the set. When the stream shows again, the stream is focused on c!Karl. He walks through a cave to a room decorated with a purple and green carpet, and books and posters for the Tales episodes of Legends of Gogtopia and The Village that Went Mad, however is missing the poster from the Beach Episode. c!Karl writes a book that recaps in blurb form the events of The Lost City of Mizu, labels it as such and places it under the relevant poster. He also writes a diary entry which is labeled “Diary entry #1”, which mentions that he remembers less every time he time travels, however that he “has to keep doing [his] part” to “right some wrongs”. He ends it with “dont forget who you are” and signs it “Diary #1”. c!Karl then goes outside and goes into F5, showing that the colors on the front of his hoodie are reversed; a purple spiral on green background, rather than the reverse that is it normally. cc!Karl cuts to black again, lets the music finish, then ends stream.

(then i spend the next 10 minutes freaking out abt it, cos wtf was that that was so good-)

#THIS IS SO LONG IM SORRY #karl jacobs #tales from the smp #the lost city of mizu #dream smp #quackity #ranboo #badboyhalo #bbh #dreamwastaken #dsmp #dsmpblr #mcyt #mcytblr #dream smp spoilers #wren.exe #save #this took me like 3 hours :squish:#blease reblog this

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doorsclosingslowly · 3 years

Text

No-one will ever call this bluff

When Obi-Wan and Ventress fight Maul and his apprentice on Raydonia, a crate breaks open. Inside: an airborne poison. 6.6k | TCW Episode 4.22 Revenge AU | warning for serious illness

“Down!” Ventress shouts. “Down, Kenobi!”

Blindly, Obi-Wan throws himself to the floor and only then he rolls and risks a glance over his shoulder. The miss was far too near. Obi-Wan’s unexpected ally intervened just in time: the lumbering Sith almost managed to drive his lightsaber into his back. In the crate a foot’s width behind Obi-Wan there is a smoking hole at chest-height that could have spelled his doom, but now, with wide swings of her ‘saber, Ventress forces Savage Opress away and towards another one of the myriad crates stacked here in this nondescript cargo hold that Obi-Wan woke up, in after Maul and his new accessory Opress beat him up.

Her next swing connects, though unfortunately the small flesh wound in the Sith’s dominant left arm won’t disable him. It just spews out strange green miasma, even though the cut should have been cauterized. The following strike cleaves a massive hole into a durasteel crate, because Opress apparently learned how to duck just in time. Whoever packed this freighter was not beholden to Republic safety standards, it seems, because the whole crate, besides being completely unsecured to the wall, is just stuffed full of some fine white powder that now plumes out, dusting the crouching Sith all over with its fine particles.

A warning in the force, just in time again, and Obi-Wan jumps up and parries Darth Maul’s attack with Ventress’ second lightsaber.

Maul does not press his advantage. He throws a curt glance in the direction of his apprentice, disapproving and disappointed. Obi-Wan almost hopes for Ventress’ cry of victory, but then the flurry of movement at the edge of Obi-Wan’s field of vision reveals that the massive zabrak must have regained his footing and is locked in his battle with Asajj Ventress once more.

It’s their distinct advantage, Obi-Wan realizes: he and Asajj have fought side-by-side in their weird alliance before, but for all that Opress appears to be beholden to his fellow zabrak, they do not seem to fight together. Opress kicked Obi-Wan around at Darth Maul’s direction—strange, too, that he would eschew the force for fists—but they’re not fighting as one. Just next to each other. Unless Maul gives the other zabrak direct orders, and even then, they are less than a seasoned team. A few weeks ago, Opress was still Dooku’s lackey, and back then he was just as lousy of a team player. He does not seem to have improved just because his new Master shares his species. We’re outmatched, Obi-Wan just told Ventress, but perhaps…

Perhaps…

Obi-Wan does not want to flee. He came here to Raydonia—at least presumably that’s where they still are, he hasn’t heard any tattletale vibration of engines—he came to this obvious trap at the behest of a long-buried monster, but also: for a mountain of corpses. He saw them in the holo, and before Savage beat him up and dragged him in here, he smelt them. He’s had a regrettably thorough acquaintance with the stench of burning flesh since becoming a frontline General of the GAR, but still, he fancies the Raydonia massacre even more horrendous, more pungent, for what it represents. Civilians, children, monstrously slaughtered, and for what reason? Simply as the holo message to the temple said: to draw him out?

He does not want to flee—he came here alone despite all the signs that that’s what his enemy expected—because this is Darth Maul. The unfinished business he thought done and dusted years ago. The death that merited his promotion to Master. The murderer of the halcyon Jedi Master, his beloved teacher Qui-Gon; the harbinger of the end of eons of Jedi supremacy over the Sith; the enemy that Obi-Wan cut apart. Quickly he was distracted away from his nightmares back then because he needed to keep up with his new whirlwind padawan, but there was one moment he could not forget. Sai tok. Bisection. That confused painful grimace. The sheer brutality that Obi-Wan used to dispatch his assailant on Naboo seared itself into his mind, never mind that it was rightly deserved then and a few hours ago proved to be far better than Maul deserves… Never mind that the monster somehow survived his mutilation…

He does not want to flee. Darth Maul murdered these people to draw out Obi-Wan. If he escapes, there’s every reason to believe he’ll do it again.

Besides, Obi-Wan was but a padawan when he bested Maul. In the intervening decade he has taught, studied, followed the force. He has led the GAR into battle. He can turn this fight to his advantage, especially with Ventress by his side; regardless of Maul’s acquisition of Dooku’s castoff acolyte he can now do it right and aim for the neck. They just need to be smarter about it. One against one is fine, but if they take out the weak link together and then focus their combined might on Maul… It’s worth a try.

So Obi-Wan strikes at Opress whenever he gets in range, and he tries to get in range as often as possible.

Savage Opress, rudely, seems exclusively preoccupied by Ventress; even when Obi-Wan manages to wound his other shoulder he quickly focuses all his attention, his growls, his attacks back onto her. The two have a history, though: and not just under Dooku, it seems from Opress’ growl in the beginning. A Dathomir witch—she betrayed me, he said. Whatever that means. He apparently can’t let go enough of his past to realize that in this fight, Obi-Wan is at least as deadly a foe. Despite this fact or maybe because of it, it doesn’t take long before the gargantuan Sith starts faltering. His attacks miss by wider margins; his feet barely find stable ground. Once, when Obi-Wan comes close, he can see the sweat beading on the zabrak’s brow, the feverish tinge to his yellow skin. He’s fighting for breath. Maul, meanwhile, doesn’t seem at all aware of the predicament his apprentice is in. Maybe Obi-Wan’s attacks, designed to make him dodge as far back as possible, have managed to distract him, or maybe he just doesn’t care.

Ventress, however, throws him an amused smirk. She’s moving in a perfect complement, pincer-like, subtly helping cage in the lesser Sith towards the cockpit of the ship.

Slash, stab, slash, and then—

Opress trips. He trips, or it’s the coughing fit that suddenly wracks his massive frame—whatever the cause, he tumbles to the floor, barely keeping hold of his ignited double ‘saber. Barely keeping hold and barely not cutting himself up with the still-burning energy blades, missing his own arm by a hair’s breadth when he tries to shield his chest with his hands out of some strange useless instinct and then he hits the ground, back-first and uncushioned. The access pad of the cockpit blinks red just meters to the right of him, and his face answers, flushed unhealthily pink and sweat-slick.

“Gotcha.” Ventress raises her ‘saber—

A sudden whirlwind of naked tattoos and metal chicken legs, Maul parries her.

The sound is so quiet behind the whirr of the lightsabers that Obi-Wan almost thinks he hallucinated it, but why would he? No, that sounded like Opress, and it sounded like… “Didn’t let him free. Not allowed to take two mates. Not him too.” Gibberish, and he has no time to decipher it, curious as he may be as to the fatuous Sith’s motivations.

Darth Maul sets his hand down on Opress’ head to steady himself—Ventress’ strike must have been strong enough to unbalance him, or he chose the wrong footing in his rush—and then he wipes it against his own head: leaving a stripe of white powdered residue. He raises his lightsaber. He grins. “Two against one. That brings back some memories, does it not, Kenobi?”

“This time when I dismember you, I’ll remember you’re a cockroach,” Obi-Wan replies.

A dismissive shrug is all he receives in answer. “Feel free to join me when you’ve finished your midday nap, apprentice,” Maul throws over his shoulder, and then he starts feinting and stabbing tirelessly until both Ventress and Obi-Wan have retreated several tens of meters back across the cargo hold. He’s as acrobatic and cocksure as he was on Naboo back then, guarding the whole width of the cargo hold against both of them. Guarding. Yes, that is the word, Obi-Wan suddenly realizes. Flashy as they may be, his strikes are defensive in nature: designed to keep them occupied and retreating, but barring a gross mistake none would be the kind to wound. And yet, Darth Maul lured Obi-Wan here, presumably to murder him. You will suffer as I have suffered was the threat if he recalls correctly. This is not suffering. He’s abandoned his original aims, then. Opress’ sudden dizzy spell seems to have unsettled Maul.

Maul is far more hardy than his apprentice was, but even he has his limits—after what feels like an hour of Maul jabbing and both of them dodging, and Opress’ pleas to various family members (mother, brother, sister, brother again), his face is shining with sweat just as Savage Opress is, though with his red coloring there’s no way to see the red tinge that is probably present as well. Barely, he dances out of the way of Ventress’ strike before trying to drive her back again. It shouldn’t give Obi-Wan any pleasure to realize this—and it doesn’t—but the defeat on Naboo seems to have robbed Maul of much of his grace, his skill, even though it has only made him more bloodthirsty.

He won’t be able to wage this battle forever. Obi-Wan rejoices in his instincts, and in the force, that told him not to flee: even if Maul decides to give up on this battle now and manages to escape, his brutish companion hasn’t moved from his spot except to jab listlessly at the imaginary girlfriend he’s been whimpering to. He’ll be easy prey. Maul is the diseased brain, and taking him out would benefit the galaxy far more—but in a pinch Obi-Wan will settle for his new stooge.

He’ll—

The thin hairs on Obi-Wan’s arms raise with electric static, and then thunder shakes the cargo hold. The walls bob and drop like those of a capsule on a water planet in storm; more crates drop, releasing their miscellaneous contents, spreading mealpacks and hydrosacks and another burst of white powder and holopads and sundry more items all over the floor; and Ventress grabs Obi-Wan’s shoulder to steady both herself and him. Maul has no such luck, no such compatriot, and he keels over sideways.

There’s no breach on the hull of the cargo hold, at least, as far as Obi-Wan can make out. It sounded like a small laser cannon, the blast, but though it definitely hit—and who knew the impact in a landed ship would feel like this—it wasn’t strong enough to penetrate, or the ship’s defenses haven’t yet given out. That will probably change with a few more blasts, if whoever attacked them keeps up their assault. They’ve got another problem.

Ventress strides over to the window next to the loading bay, obviously preferring survival over a continuation of the fight, and Obi-Wan follows her. He keeps his eyes locked on Maul, though, who winces when he pushes himself up with his hands—should have taken a second to decapitate him, missed chance—and looks just as disquieted as Obi-Wan feels. Not one of his plans, then.

There are people outside the window. A few of them are pulling charred bodies off Maul’s victim pile, some are inspecting Obi-Wan’s ship—still there, luckily, though far enough he’ll have to run for a few minutes to reach it—and most of them are hauling around a small fighter ship using massive ropes. They’re shouting something that’s inaudible through the thick transparisteel pane of the window, but looks incredibly angry, and then Obi-Wan’s hairs raise again. He and Ventress grab for the cross bar behind them, and—shake.

“Villagers,” Ventress hisses.

“Quite.” Obi-Wan raises his voice. Wherever Darth Maul and his delirious lackey are right now, they’ll be able to hear him. “They have come to avenge their families murdered by a broken, unbalanced monster.”

“And kill us, too.”

“Now, I’m sure that once I tell them I’m a Jedi sent in to bring their murderer to justice they’ll—”

“Duck.”

Obi-Wan glances out of the window again, and outside, the people must have noticed them: they gesticulate wildly towards the window, and their towed ship’s laser cannon is pointed right at—

His knees ache. They’ve hit the floor hard, because Ventress has pulled him down with impressive force, and another boom shakes the freighter.

“What about the word ‘duck’ do you not understand?” Ventress gets up again and inspects the window, which hasn’t—yet—shattered. “I’m disappointed, Kenobi. I thought I’d taught you how to obey my commands.”

“My ship is out there, but we won’t make it that far.”

Ventress sighs. “Well aware. Our only way out is the freighter, and…”

Obi-Wan follows the direction of her eyes. Maul has made his way back to his apprentice. Back where the cockpit is. He must have reached the same conclusion. He’s whispering something inaudible and trying to pull the other zabrak onto his feet. Even with his chicken legs compensating for their height difference, though, he’s not strong enough, not when Opress isn’t cooperating at all. They’re only tens of meters away from the salvation of the cockpit door, a distance the sickened Sith apparently cannot crawl anymore and is too heavy to be dragged.

“Help me, brother, help me,” the big Sith moans weakly. He’s attempting to push Maul’s hands away, completely ineffectively, lightsaber forgotten. “I don’t want—please don’t—Sister don’t—”

Ventress looks over at him, an unreadable expression on her face, before she says, “If they get into the cockpit before us, we have a problem. But they’re both exhausted. As long as they don’t manage to close the door, we can make it.”

As soon as Obi-Wan and Ventress approach, though, Darth Maul drops his feverish apprentice with little care—Savage’s head hits the wall with a clang, though he has little brain to even lose from traumatic brain injury—and strides a few meters forward, lightsaber ignited. He looks more focused now after the break in battle, even if still sweat-drenched and trembling, and the barrage of laser strikes that hits the freighter doesn’t keel him over the way the first attack did.

“You have decided to return and die, then,” Maul says.

Ventress sneers. “You barely managed to hold the two of us back.”

Another volley of shots. The villagers are firing more and more often, and however well-armored this freighter may be, it won’t hold out forever. Every attack could be their end. With dawning dread, Obi-Wan realizes they might not even have timeto fight a newly revitalized Maul for the cockpit. And that means…

“In their drive for righteous vengeance against you, the Raydonians will kill us all if we stay here. And soon. You cannot get into the cockpit without giving us an opportunity to attack; we cannot defeat you fast enough. I therefore propose a temporary truce for our mutual survival.” The words are bile on his tongue, proposing a deal with a mass murderer to help him escape his victims, but needs must. Obi-Wan is a General of the GAR, and more battlefields than this one require his guidance. Maul is but a single washed-up revenant of a Sith, and he’ll find death sooner or later.

He takes a step towards the cockpit. Savage Opress shudders.

Ventress catches up to him, and Opress winces and curls into a ball.

“No,” Darth Maul says.

“If we do not take off soon, you’ll die!”

Opress, on the floor, uncurls and coughs. Flecks of something come out and hit the floor, red—blood. Instinctively, Obi-Wan moves closer.

The feverish Sith, mid-coughing fit, pushes himself up with trembling arms. Glowering, he forces out, “You won’t—” cough— “hurt him, now, I’ll—” cough, cough, cough, and more blood spraying towards Obi-Wan. There’s a visible sore on the zabrak’s shoulder from this vantage point, right where Ventress managed to injure him, massive and red and swollen with a necrotic black center. A clue towards his mysterious illness, if Maul’s irrational desire to let them all die before cooperating wasn’t far more pressing.

“My apprentice is right,” Maul says. He’s sweating profusely, probably feverish, and subtly bracing himself on an upended crate, but he’s probably no less lethal when cornered. “We do not trust you.”

“I give you my word as a Jedi Master.”

Maul’s eyes go crazed suddenly, wide and burning, as he howls, “Your word? Your word? I fought with honor. I could have booby-trapped that palace, and yet I did not. I fought honorably, two against one, and yet you would not even give me death, you—”

“I thought you’d died—”

“You gave me pain, pain, pain! For a decade I crawled in refuse and I fed on nothing but hatred for the Jedi who would not even grant his honorable enemy an honorable death!”

“I really thought you’d died,” Obi-Wan repeats weakly. “How was I to know you could survive a sai tok?”

“Here is what I think of your honor, Jedi.” Maul spits on the ground. Is it Obi-Wan’s imagination or is there blood speckled in…

Another blast hits the freighter. They’re running out of time.

“Ventress, then,” Obi-Wan offers. “She is of the dark side, just like you. I trust that’s more agreeable?”

She’s flushed red and sweating slightly, too—just what kind of contagious illness is this?—but she nods in Obi-Wan’s direction and stalks forward.

Again, Savage Opress starts whimpering as soon as he sees her face, and that’s Maul’s cue to block the path with his ignited lightsaber.

“What is it now?” Obi-Wan is the Negotiator, but even he can be forgiven for his lapse in tone now, as he tries to convince an obviously insane murderer to choose his own survival—and that of his apprentice, too. His apprentice… Perhaps… But no, Maul has never shown care for a living being beside himself, so appealing for the preservation of his fellow zabrak would be pointless. There must be a better argument. If only he knew… “What do you have against Ventress? She may have chosen to help me this time, but I promise you, we are at best friendly enemies.”

“My apprentice is afraid of her. I am more inclined to trust his judgment than yours,” Maul says, as if the shudders of a delusional feverish oaf of a Sith was enough reason to condemn them all to death by village mob. Without more information, this is a knot impossible to untangle.

“Ventress, do you—”

“Leave it.”

“—do you know why Savage Opress is scared?”

There is no answer. Asajj Ventress strides back towards the cargo bay.

Maul has retreated to his apprentice, perhaps having decided that Obi-Wan currently won’t instigate a fight. He’s squatting in front of him on his ludicrous chicken legs, a critical eye turned back over his shoulder on the other zabrak. “You’re burning up,” he says quietly. Obi-Wan is barely close enough still to hear him. “And as for the violent coughs… the armor is not helping.”

Savage swallows and shudders and presses his hands to his covered belly.

“You are of no use to me dead.”

No answer. The other Sith coughs out blood and then curls up again, the very picture of misery.

“I shall keep them away from you.”

“From you,” Savage rasps. “Keep them from… I am—” cough— “already lost. They must not hurt you.”

“If you die, you are of no use to me,” Maul repeats. His lip curls, though it’s impossible to tell whether from impatience or cruelty or worry. “You promised to protect me. How will you do that, apprentice, if you are dead?”

It seems to have worked. The word ‘protect’—a revelation Obi-Wan should perhaps have seen coming, but who would expect anyone to look at Darth Maul and see a creature worth protecting, a person in needof protection?—it rouses Opress into a weak kneeling position. He paws at the right shoulder pad of his armor, again and again, but…

“No-one told you how to take it off.” Maul’s voice is entirely flat, and Obi-Wan’s almost offended by his lack of shock. Who—how—why would someone wear an armor they could not remove? “Be still, then, apprentice.”

He raises his lightsaber and cuts, carefully—pausing twice just before a coughing fit wracks Savage’s frame—first through one shoulder pad and then the next, and the pauldron too. The undershirt beneath is dotted with burnt holes, and Darth Maul pulls it away from his apprentice’s body and cuts it as well. Opress is heavily scarred, shiny burn scars all over his shoulders and torso beneath the armor, and a massive overlay of lichtenberg figures down his back—but beside the lesion of the infected wound on his shoulder from Ventress’ attack which has engulfed his whole arm now, they’re all healed enough to be at least a few weeks old. Maul directs him to pull off his boots, too, but allows him to keep his skirt.

“This armor was useless against anything but blasters, anyway,” Maul says. “And it’s obvious that you are not used to moving with its weight. Whoever gave it to you did not act in the interest of—”

“Don’t let me interrupt, boys.” Ventress smirks as Maul’s head whips up. The Sith looks panicked and strangely guilty. “But the mob outside has found another ship with a bigger cannon. We should probably get going.”

Savage’s head clanks against the floor again, Maul’s uncharacteristic tenderness forgotten as soon as he remembers his audience. Lightsaber raised in a defensive position, Maul repeats, “No.”

“Ventress can take the ship, and I’ll stay here as collateral—she won’t decouple the cockpit.”

“No.”

“You really want to die here?”

Maul turns his face away. His arm is trembling.

You cannot imagine the depths I would go to to stay alive, he said when he attacked Obi-Wan. And the depths he’ll go to to kill Obi-Wan, apparently, including mulishly waiting for his own death, and the miserable demise of his own apprentice as well.

“Savage is sick,” Obi-Wan tries. The guarding, the careful removal of his armor—the relationship has to count for something. Even Darth Maul would not sink as low. “He needs medical care. By your stubborn refusal, you condemn him to death. Your apprentice will die here.”

Maul’s eyes are pools of fire and darkness. Vicious and dead. His voice is flat, empty, when he says, “There is no mercy for the weak. No mercy. There never was.”

Laser blasts shake the freighter again, and all Obi-Wan’s negotiation attempts have come to nothing. Trapped with a madman. He’ll just let all of them die, and for what? Stubborn Sith suspicion? If he will not yield, then… Desperately, he suggests, “Take the cockpit yourself, then. You do not trust either of us, but I am prepared to stake mine and her lives on your—on your honor. You insist you fight with honor. Prove it. We need to take off, or we all die.”

Down on the floor, Opress mumbles something that almost sounds like assent. He’s always looked vacuous and inexpressive to Obi-Wan, barely reacting to what should have been pain or mortal danger, but whether it’s the infection or the situation—he’s grabbed onto the ruined pauldron and tries to shield his bare torso. He’s swallowing, painfully, but he cannot force down his expression of sheer unadulterated dread.

There’s something more going on, something far beyond anything Obi-Wan could have suspected when he chose to come to Raydonia. This fear… Opress appears convinced that despite the laser cannons barraging their shelter, despite the mysterious onset of his brutal illness, it’s Obi-Wan and Ventress who pose a danger beyond his wildest nightmares. And Darth Maul…

“No,” Maul says. “I will not leave him for you to swallow his mind and carve up his body.”

It’s madness.

Mystifying. Hopeless. Madness.

Obi-Wan kicks one of the scattered meal packs on his way back to the cargo bay for another, probably fruitless, check on his own cruiser. Ventress stays behind, coughing softly. It’s no use escaping, though, just as Obi-Wan predicted—the sky is dark and the mob of villagers have probably mostly gone to sleep, but they’ve posted guards at the doors of the freighter and there’s no question they’ll spot Obi-Wan on his run, and if Ventress starts succumbing more deeply to the mysterious illness too… she won’t make it, and duty to the galaxy and the Republic would demand he leave anyway to rejoin his place at the GAR’s helm, but she came here to rescue him. He might have died at Maul’s hands—the sickness might not have broken out at all—if she hadn’t come. Whatever Maul thinks happened on Naboo, Obi-Wan knows honor. He won’t leave her behind.

He meanders back slowly, wracking his mind for any possible course of action, and suddenly his boot kicks up white dust. The crate! That innocuous crate that broke open, and unleashed its mysterious ills. He probably shouldn’t touch anything or even breathe here—but then he’s weathered this infection much better thus far than either of the zabraks or Ventress, he’s feeling as fine physically as he ever did after a drag-out ‘saberfight, and perhaps a clue as to the cause of the malady or a possible cure would give him leverage over Darth Maul. If it doesn’t, well… if he can’t find a way to the cockpit, he’ll get blown apart or dragged out by the angry mob he came here to avenge. He’ll die anyway.

There’s nothing at all helpful about the crate, though. It doesn’t even have a Caution! Do Not Break! marking or a biohazard or toxic warning. No, only an impressed and dirt-crusted set of numbers that may well have been there since the crate’s manufacture, and a mysterious stencil proclaiming the vendor one S.I. Rosenfeld. A custom-exemption stamp for Iridonia. The powder itself smells of nothing. It tastes of—well, whatever it tastes of, even in this desperation Obi-Wan refuses to put it in his mouth.

Hunt for clues abandoned, he instead carries back four hydrosacks.

A token of goodwill, at least. Obi-Wan himself is parched after the battle, and with how feverish Ventress and Darth Maul look, not to mention delirious Savage Opress… it’s worth an attempt, at the very least. But whereas Ventress takes her water gratefully, Maul only stares at the sacks that Obi-Wan kicks his way, even after Obi-Wan demonstratively drinks from his own. When Opress blindly reaches for one of the hydrosacks, one of Darth Maul’s chicken claws forces his hand back down.

Back to the standoff, then. Ventress periodically dis- and reappears with new sacks of water. Obi-Wan meditates. Darth Maul, meanwhile, paces in front of his sick partner, waiting for…

Whatever he is waiting for, it doesn’t come.

“You’re growing weaker, apprentice.” There’s no inflection in Maul’s voice now, nothing like the unhinged raving he directed at Obi-Wan earlier, and yet… “The dark side will give you the strength to survive. It is the only path.”

He reaches towards the other zabrak’s face, not the top of his head the way he braced himself up before but cupping one of his cheeks: a tenderness that hours before, Obi-Wan would not have thought possible.

Opress cringes away. He’s more lucid now, at least, but his breath is shallow and wheezing. “Brother,” he begs. “I would not… survive the lightning now. I can’t. I never could.”

A flinch answers him, tiny, almost invisible if Obi-Wan had not been watching the revenant nightmare for hours now, and then Maul whispers, “There is no lightning.”

“Master Dooku said—"

“Dooku was a liar and a fraud. He is a Jedi pretender, not a true Sith as we are, apprentice. In his refusal to credit you with interiority he overlooked the suffering he could have utilized, and so he had to cheat. The genuine test of the dark is that which already lies within, I have learnt.” Maul’s bright yellow eyes gleam over at Obi-Wan. He pauses. Considering, perhaps, what he should reveal before his audience.

Obi-Wan crosses his arms, extinguished lightsaber still at the ready. He won’t turn away. For now, though, he won’t interrupt either—something tells him to pause, though when he reaches to the force for guidance, all he feels is the cold and the unfathomable deep.

Opess moans in pain again.

Whatever misgivings Maul might have had, the sound wipes them away. “You’re in agony now, aren’t you?” he murmurs, an alien gleam in his rich genteel voice. “You feel the infection take hold of you more with every passing beat of your hearts. The fever, the ache. You can hardly breathe. It has colonized all of your vital systems. You are your body, and your body is pain. One careless moment, and he caught you, and now nothing exists but agony and dread and terrible thirst. Feel it. Sink into it. Luxuriate in your misery.”

Savage Opress, blood dribbling from his mouth onto his brother’s thumb, closes his fever-bright eyes.

“I have felt this, and yet I survived. You’re terrified, and in mourning for the life they stole from you. That he… that she—” and he looks up at Ventress—“that she stole. You hate her for the brother she took, for the mind she enslaved, for the involuntary shudder of your body whenever you recall her touch. That is enough, apprentice. That is enough for the dark. You know it is worse than any lightning that amateur could throw at you. Terror, pain, betrayal and loss and burning rage… Peace is a lie. There is only passion. Through passion I gain strength. Through strength I gain power. Through power I gain victory. Through victory my chains are broken. The force shall free me. Repeat these words, as I did in the putrid chasm. They are a mantra gliding through your fingers while you feel.”

More hacking coughs, and in-between, the movement of lips. Obi-Wan should interrupt this—this venal induction into the dark side of the force, and yet… Opress fell already, and he is almost dead now.

The force pushes in through every orifice, every pore, pushes and pushes, a static pressure unlike anything he’s ever felt from the light. There is no sound but Maul’s voice and the bloody gasps for air, and even if a cannon hit the freighter right now, it would not penetrate air that is suddenly as thick as ocean floor water.

“You feel,” Maul encourages. “You feel. You will not die here in front of this woman who enslaved you, who forced you to murder your own brother. You will not. You hate her, don’t you? You are not allowed to hate her because she owns you, but you do. You hate her every look. Every unwanted touch. Every breath she takes, and every second she could try to kill the only brother you have left…”

In shock, Obi-Wan tries to meet Ventress’ eyes—he knew she was of the dark, but this cannot be truth—but she’s hardly better off than the yellow zabrak, fever-flushed and coughing on her own in the shadow of an unopened crate.

Maul is almost in a trance now, purring, as if there was no-one present but him and his apprentice and the sudden icy waves in the enclosed cargo hold, “She might impel you to kill me with your bare hands. You hate her.”

You cannot imagine the depths I would go to to stay alive, Maul ranted. Fueled by my singular hatred for you.

Are these the depths?

Is this how he managed to survive Naboo?

“You hate her, and you hate yourself—because you were weak enough to let it happen. You will not be weak now. You are Sith, apprentice. You are not weak. You will not submit to another nightsister. You will not kneel before another Dooku. Whatever it takes to gain power, you will do. However vile you need to become, you will. You do not belong to her. You do not belong to your sickness. You belong to the force, and it will devour your agony and your dread and your fever. It will devour you,” and Darth Maul bites the solid air with his rotten teeth.

“But you are strong. And you will wrest that which eats you into yourself and sink your teeth into its frozen innards. Feast on the force, apprentice. Feast on the force, and feed it pain and terror, and it will keep you alive until it grows fat on the misery of the entire galaxy.”

Opress lies still. Quiet. His bare torso is exposed to air so cold Obi-Wan expects to see hoarfrost cover every surface, but he does not cough, does not bleed. He does not fight against Maul’s hand, one bracing the back of his head and the other against his cheek still—

Against his cheek, and then digging in with pungent anger that bleeds into the force like the blood welling under Maul’s fingernails.

The sudden pressure spike threatens to implode Obi-Wan’s eyeballs. With his fingers massaging his closed lids and through eardrums thickly waterlogged, he hears Maul hiss, “Surely you did not expect to leave your path this quickly, apprentice? Mother Talzin sent you after me, but you followed me off Dathomir, and in that moment, you were mine. You left your brother behind and dead on the ground but you will not abandon me.”

A soft keen is all that answers his tirade at first, and then follows a river of anguished moans and scuffling on the ground and the pitter of—of blood, scratching, mangling. Obi-Wan startles and only when he trips over a clattering something in the pitch dark does he realize he just tried to protect Opress—protect Savage Opress!—from Darth Maul. The Sith is beyond mindless now, howling as he did when he blamed Obi-Wan for all his ills, all traces of the strange tenderness forgotten, and yet—Obi-Wan pauses. This is desperation. This is grief.

As cruel and insane as his words are; as blasphemous as the dark powers he is beseeching—this is not a monster.

This is the pure madness of attachment.

“You swore you would never betray me,” Maul wails in the deep and frozen dark of a trashed freight ship. “Did you trick me, brother? Was this your play? To pretend at kindness when I was weak so I would unlearn the most elementary of lessons? And I did.”

An answering gurgle that sounds like brother, no.

“You are leaving—”

Another barrage of wheezes—

“—but if you are still even capable of loyalty after you murdered your brother… I trusted you.” Maul’s eyes gleam in the pitch dark, not plain Sith yellow but—wet. They beckon, call, howl; they are the last thing that seems to exist. “I trusted you. You called yourself my brother. I trusted you. I learned to despise the world, and yet, somehow, I trusted…”

The wails lose all coherence after that. In the primordial calm of the freezing cargo hold, Obi-Wan holds his breath, for any sign of Savage’s life, for another gambit, another invocation of the dark force, for anything at all.

The pressure plummets as quickly as it appeared. A far too quick resurfacing, and it dizzies Obi-Wan, but Maul… Maul sinks down onto the floor softly, his chicken legs collapsing in a way even chicken legs shouldn’t, still holding onto Savage and clutching his brother’s head like a doll against his chest. The handle of the ‘saber clatters from the fist he presses against Savage’s back. The red Sith is not sweating anymore, but the ordeal seems to have exhausted him: he blinks his lighthouse eyes open, and open, and open, and then he doesn’t.

Obi-Wan drops to the floor. He doesn’t know what he’s waiting for now. For the true horror of the Sith power that he just witnessed to reveal itself? The pressure and the gloom are all but gone now, and even the unnatural icy wind is beginning to dissipate. And yet, this cannot be the end. If this was the dark side of the force, it is far beyond anything he felt in his deepest meditations, and it shouldn’t just… go back to sleep.

Or maybe, he’s waiting for Maul to rise up and attack him? But the Sith looks more peaceful than he ever did, wrapped tight around his—brother, his brother, whom he somehow cares for and mourns.

Or—he’s waiting for Obi-Wan himself, who came to finally kill the Sith?

That is his task, and his duty to the galaxy and the Jedi and to Raydonia, to Qui-Gon, but after this moment… it feels profane, impossible, to kill Maul who is vulnerable now because he chose to beg for his brother’s life. The monster displayed a tenderness, a humanity that Obi-Wan would never have thought him capable of, and though it is deeply irrational, Obi-Wan walks past the spot where unmoving Sith cling to each other and into the cockpit.

He pilots the freighter to the nearest planet with an advanced toxicology medcenter.

He carries Asajj Ventress inside, paler than she has ever been and gone passive with bloodloss. Regardless of what he might have learned—and he is still not sure what to make of the fragments whispered by a lying Sith—she came to his rescue, and silently he prays that the force does not will her death. He is quarantined as well, despite his pleas—there are Sith, night-dead but Sith, up on the rooftop landing bay, and if they won’t call the Jedi Order to dispatch them they should know (and he pauses, but he just can’t) they should know the Sith are also grievously ill—and he gives the healers all the clues he picked up, the symptoms and the white powder and the name on the unprepossessing crate, and they give him nothing in return. No information on Ventress’ status (she will cross his path in a few months, and she will not answer his questions) and no audience with the Iridonian in ambassadorial robes frowning through the durasteel window of his isolation room, and no heads up on the squad of anti-bioterrorism police droids they sent to the freighter.

No warning that the ship has disappeared.

That, he finds out from Master Windu who retrieves him from his quarantine cell after two days of manic pacing.

Maul, at the very least, must have survived, and Obi-Wan could have killed him when he passed out cradling his brother. Maul has survived, and taken the ship and its murderous infective powder away with him. Maul has survived, and Obi-Wan will bear the weight of every person he kills hereafter. Will bear the pressure and the dread and the pleading in his ears.

Savage Opress is still by Darth Maul’s side when they attack Florrum and murders Master Adi Gallia, and Obi-Wan can’t catalogue the emotion he feels.

#darth maul #savage opress #savage oppress #obi-wan kenobi #asajj ventress #dimtraces makes things

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diavohno · 4 years

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Can i request 43 + lucifer?

note; hope yall didn’t think I’d forgotten you! I’m going to finish these requests, no doubt about it :) anyway, I hope you enjoy this little scene because I had a blast writing it. it’s clocking in at 1.2k words, which is a pretty solid amount

“Wait a minute... are you jealous?” + Lucifer

x + x +

“Thanks, MC, you’re the best!” said Iros, a red-haired demon from your Summoning 101 class who always seemed to have a difficult time paying attention during instruction. More than once, you’d caught her doing the tell-tale head bob as if she was fighting a magnetic pull between her forehead and her desk, so it didn’t come as a surprise to you that her grades weren’t looking too hot. She sent you a wink before twirling away, her uniform skirt fanning out behind her. In an afterthought, she called out to you over her shoulder, “See you for our study date!”

With that, she disappeared into the steady stream of students drifting from one class to another. You couldn’t help the sigh that puffed out through your noseー there was something about her that drained you. Maybe it was her ability? You’ve gathered that all demons have something about them that separates them from other demons, like how Mammon was exceptionally fast.

Speaking of, the grubby bastard was late. The two of you typically walked to History of Devildom together, but he seemed to be running behind schedule today.

Who are you kidding, he probably ditched again. You’d have to scold him for not taking you with him later. For now, you’ll continue to be the good student that you weren’t and go to class by yourself. Your husbando (who wasn’t yet your husbando but you’ve been working diligently on changing that), Lucifer, would be so proud of you, you mused, mentally patting yourself on the back for your decision to do the bare minimum.

“I am not opposed to your fraternizing with the other students, but I must discourage you from forming relationships with succubi.” Speak of the devil! Lucifer’s voice cut through the muddled conversations of the passing students as the man himself emerged from a nearby classroom. “I cannot even begin to fathom the numbers of succubi who would use you as nothing more than a stepping stone to tarnish Lord Diavolo’s reputation.”

“Succubi?” you hummed, more to yourself than anything as you ponder his words. “That explains why she’s always hitting on me. Damn. Here I thought I was just an irresistible slab of meat, charming the pants off of strangers left and right.”

The slab of meat comment earned you a disdainful eye roll, but nothing more. “Well? You’re going to arrive after the start of class if you continue to stand there like a mindless sheep.”

“I know I called myself meat, but the ‘sheep’ thing doesn’t sit right with me, especially coming from you,” you said with a hint of a whine laced in your tone. Nonetheless, you set off toward your next class by your lonesome, only for Lucifer to stride along next to you.

Instantly, the wheels in your head took off spinning. You knew for a FACT that whatever class he had was in the opposite direction, as you and Mammon often passed him in the halls, so what was he doing in this direction? Was he making sure you weren’t going to ditch? You’d take offense to the idea if it wasn’t something you’ve already done. After that one idea, your mind drew a blank.

Peeking at him out of the corner of your eye, you noticed how he seemed to be somewhat lost in thought, but not lost enough for him to miss where your attention was directed. He raised a dark brow at you, daring you to say something.

Never one to miss such a golden opportunity, you gave a saccharine smile and batted your lashes innocently. “Sorry, it’s hard not to stare at works of art.”

He blinked once. Twice. Then turned away. Your lips perked out in a pout at the fact that your obvious flirtation had failed to garner any response, although this would do little to dissuade you in the future; every now and then you swore you’d see the corners of his lips twitch up into a ghost of a smile.

Anyway, back to the drawing board. Why was it that Lucifer was accompanying you to your class? You’d better figure it out sooner than later because the two of you were turning down the hall that housed your classroom. Luckily, yours was on the other end.

Asking him would be no fun at all, so that was quickly ruled out as an option, and so was dismissing the noticeably odd behavior. Had he finally realized his everlasting love for you, and was currently mentally preparing himself to propose? A quick glance to you right quickly eliminated that theory. Then, what was it?

Every step brought you closer to your destination, as well as added a tiny piece of disappointment to your ever-growing pile. Before you had the chance to prematurely sink into a slump of self-pity, your D.D.D. buzzed in your skirt pocket to notify you that you had received a message over chat.

It turned out to be a message from Iros. You should wear something nice when we meet up tonight. It’ll help me study better ;) Just reading it makes you snort in indignation.

You wish. As much of a shameless flirt as you could be, you couldn’t handle being on the receiving end of flirting. It most definitely didn’t have anything to do with the fact that your heart had locked its sights on a certain Tall, Dark, and Prideful who didn’t reciprocate your feelings. Subconsciously, your gaze drifted back toward Lucifer for what felt like the millionth time throughout this heartwarming little couple’s stroll. Oddly enough, he was fixing your D.D.D. with a steely glare.

“Uh, Lucy?” you asked slowly. No doubt about it, the man was acting weird. Maybe he had gotten food poisoning? That must be it! “Is something the matter?”

“I was unaware you and this succubi had gotten so close to one another,” he said, venom oozing from his voice. The spinning wheels in your head that had been working so tirelessly for the entirety of the past few minutes come to a screeching halt.

“Wait a minute…” How had you not seen it sooner? The answer was obvious. Your eyes nearly bug out of your head at the ludicrous thought. ”Are you jealous?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped back instantly, but there was a certain look in his eye that made you sure he was lying. Your mouth curled into a cattish smirk as the two of you slowed to a stop outside of your classroom. It would seem that all of your flirting and waiting was finally paying off.

“Of course, of course,” you said, a melodic lilt woven into your words. With a sudden burst of courage that was even stronger than Beel, you took one of Lucifer’s gloved hands into your own and pressed a chaste kiss to it. Adrenaline pumping, you then flounced away as if you hadn’t just given THE Lucifer a good ol’ smack of your lips on his hand.

As expected, Lucifer lowly called out your name, subtly warning you to not walk away from him or else you’d be punished. How unlucky for him that the thought of him punishing you sent a shiver of pleasure along your spine. Looks like you’d have to let Iros know you wouldn’t be able to study after all, as you'd have your hands full with a certain irate demon.

You could hardly wait.

#obey me #obey me: shall we date #obey me lucifer #obey me lucifer x reader #obey me lucifer x mc #swd lucifer #swd obey me #request

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harmonymurphy · 3 years

Text

And just for my records, I think I had the most profoundly disturbing dream of my life last night, about the sun failing. One of those dreams that wouldn’t be that disturbing to anyone I describe it to, and the physics was laughably illogical, but I’ve never experienced such a deep sense of existential dread inside a dream before. Probably one of those “you had to be there” experiences.

I’ve had dreams about serial killers after watching Forensic Files. I’ve had dreams of hauntings and demonic possessions after reading too many supposedly true ghost stories. But last night’s dream was the product of my fascination with astronomy. And that’s not something I’m willing to take a break from.

In my dream, I walked outside and noticed the lighting was wrong. It was like during an eclipse where everything is too dim but your shadow is still normal. I looked up at the sun, and it looked like Hoag’s Object. It was much bigger than it should have been, with the central part being a little bigger than a full moon, but it was dim enough that I could look right at it.

After a few minutes of panic, an emergency message was broadcast on all channels announcing that scientists at NASA had come up with a hypothetical way to study the sun’s core. They had discovered some sort of energy beam that would cause convective currents to dissipate. In my dream, the entire sun down to the edge of the core was convective. They thought if they zapped it at the sun, it would interfere with the convective layers and allow then to view the core directly. So they tried it without clearing it with the rest of the scientific community, and the beam completely shut down the sun’s convection. Not just the little spot they planned on, but the entire sun. What I could see up in the sky was the sun’s exposed core, the surrounding gas was now clear since it wasn’t producing light anymore, and the ring around the sun was the remnants of the sun’s corona. (Clearly my subconscious got really confused and squished together aspects of the sun, red dwarfs and white dwarfs, and the Trappist-1 system and how close those planets are to their sun. I’m actually a little embarrassed at how wrong the science was.)

So everyone started demanding they come up with a solution to fix the sun, and all they could come up with was maybe they could hit the sun with a nuke to restart the nuclear reactions, but it would take years for them to design and implement that plan, and they didn’t think they could produce an explosion big enough. And in the meantime, Earth was rapidly cooling. It was already feeling like late autumn outside and they expected the planet to go full Snowball Earth within twenty years. The dim light the sun’s core was putting out somehow couldn’t be used for photosynthesis by plankton, so the oceans were going to collapse by next year, and crops were going to start failing.

I went back outside and looked up at the sun again and started screaming for someone to please wake me up because this couldn’t be real. Then I had this epiphany that this was the solution to the Fermi Paradox: Every alien civilization eventually reached a point where they turned their sun off and their planet froze.

People started going crazy since everyone was going to die soon anyway. A big mob attacked our town and my sister and I were surrounded. Then this guy ran up to us and brandished this three-foot-tall sculpture made of metal plates and said it was an idol of a new god he had just discovered, and since science had betrayed us, the supernatural was our only hope. The mob attacked, and he started praying to his new god, and the sculpture zapped all the people trying to attack us. I started praying with him and briefly was able to shoot electricity out of my hands like the Emperor. After the mob fled, we got the rest of the town to form a circle and all started calling on the god, and up above us the sun’s core brightened for a few seconds, then dimmed again. The guy declared that the gods had forsaken us and all hope was truly lost, and he took his idol and left.

After that, the dream alternated between me discussing options with my sister, and going outside and begging someone to wake me up. We talked about finding the guy with the idol and getting the biggest group we could together to call on his god, but I eventually just sat down in the middle of a road and decided it was hopeless. There was no point in doing anything if we’d all be dead in twenty years. I was thinking about the books I want to write and how there was no point in that now. Every time I looked at the sun, I felt the same way I felt in the days after my father died, when I’d be kept up most of the night by panic attacks at the thought that he was gone forever. I didn’t know it was possible to feel that level of despair in a dream.

Eventually I started discussing suicide with my sister. We didn’t want to starve or freeze. Someone was handing out syringes of poison, and we each took one. But then I realized I’d have to put my chihuahua Rocky to sleep first because I refused to leave him by himself, and I just couldn’t do that. So we agreed we’d stay alive until Rocky died and then we’d end it. And then I realized I couldn’t find Rocky, and I was worried someone might try to eat him since there would be a food shortage soon, so my dream became one of those where you keep running and running but you never make any progress, and I kept looking up at the sun, consumed with the thought that everything was about to come to an end and all of human history was for nothing, and I just couldn’t believe this was actually happening to me.

And then my sister woke me up, and I have never been that happy to wake up in my life. I almost thanked her for waking me up, but then I realized I didn’t want to tell her about my dream. I just sat there and kept telling myself it was just a dream over and over, because no matter how bad and illogical the science was, no matter how backwards my mind got the details of how stars work, it had felt so real. I was going to sit with my sister while we ate supper, but I still felt so disturbed by the dream that I kept zoning out and staring off into space at nothing, so I decided to eat in my room alone.

I can point to a dozen little things from the past week that inspired the dream. Primarily it was based off my real fear of the future red giant phase of the sun - watching videos about it actually scares me. This week I had been thinking about a game called Outer Wilds that involves a time loop that always ends with their sun exploding, and while I think it looks interesting, the premise also stirs up my sense of existential dread. Other things were inspired by a song I had been listening to the previous night containing the line “I don’t want the sun to burn without you,” the Hadron Collider, stellar lifting (and probably several other things I learned about from Isaac Arthur that I’ll remember in the next few days), videos I’ve watched recently that discussed Snowball Earth and the evolution of plankton, the Chicxulub impact, that ongoing attempt to get a space probe to touch the sun with gravitational help from Venus that will take several years to complete, memories of my brother telling me scientists thought there might be a chance hydrogen bombs would ignite the atmosphere or the Van Allen belts but they blew them up anyway (never fact-checked that so don’t quote me), the concept of strange matter and how it could “infect” anything it touched, the danger of astrophysical jets from a supernova, and wondering if the sun could have habitable planets if it was fully convective like a red dwarf since the sun spins so slowly and a lot of those dangerous flares are a result of how fast red dwarfs spin. The weird supernatural elements were inspired by some stories I’ve been wanting to write lately, as well as my recent replay of the game Blue Fire with its very bleak setting and mythology. And a Youtuber I follow had recently read a creepypasta with a title that referenced solving the Fermi Paradox,

All in all, I would rather have a dozen nightmares about demons chasing me through the woods than one more nightmare based on science. I can still make myself shiver by focusing on how I felt when I looked up at the sun and realized the world was dying.

#Brevity is an alien concept to me #I wish I'd just dream about demons again #Sci-fi nightmares are so much worse

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mouthfacedickrat · 3 years

Text

I’m tired of discussions abt paganism/Punk rock/witchcraft/history/insert other hobbies “poisoned” by the far right. Every time someone tries to say “those guys are assholes, they’re not my friends, and they aren’t representative of this subculture/interest” they get accused of using the no true Scotsman fallacy. That’s... not how that works.... Obvi someone who talks abt what “real” witches or whatever do is in fact employing a logical fallacy, but ppl who just want to say “I’m not a nazi, and in fact I hate nazis and don’t associate with them” have not done anything deserving of snide replies about how obviously this is the real character of their subculture and they’re just in denial.

I am so tired of everyone bitching about how “we” haven’t done enough to keep right-wingers out of “our spaces.” This is such a weird take. One cannot control the actions of other people unless one 1) knows who they are and 2) has the power to persuade them by either words or force. We usually cannot prevent random violent white people from doing internet research on punk music or WWII. We can beat up and shun shitty people when we encounter them co-opting our interests irl, but you are in fact unlikely to casually run into these shitty people because oh, idk, they probably actively avoid you and vice versa, since aside from your one interest or subculture or whatever, y’all have n o t h i n g in common.

And when you do encounter these ppl in real life? From each according to their ability, my dude. Why are we yelling at sickly teens on the internet about their failure to regularly beat nazi ass??? These dickheads run in groups, and are usually armed. Fuck them up when you can! Absolutely! I’m just tired of the mindset that we all seemingly have a superpower that allows us to instantly push nazis out of our spaces. That one story abt a bartender kicking out a nazi skinhead is inspirational, but can we please use critical thinking? That story is about a person who situationally HAS the power to kick that guy out, and it’s JUST one guy. Yeah you have to kick out the first nazi to make sure their friends don’t start coming around, but you have to 1) know they’re even there 2) recognize they’re a nazi and 3) have the ability to deny them access! How does this lesson translate to the internet??? Ban them from your forum? (assuming you even fucking run one or have mod powers anywhere online) Oh, you mean the way everyone worth a damn is already doing?? They’ll just fucking make their own, and tech giants have shown time and again that they’re not interested in shutting right-wing extremists down. And irl? What do you think will happen to you if you walk your happy ass up to a tent full of odinists at a ren faire? That battle is the organizers’ to fight, and if they’re not willing to fight it, they’re not “us” and you’re not in “our space!” You’re just accidentally in a nazi space! Woops, don’t do it again, I guess (at least not without some friends backing you up).

The truth is, people who aren’t nazis already do not tolerate nazis in their spaces. That doesn’t stop the shitheads from running away to their own turf and continuing to loudly and publicly misappropriate others’ symbols and activities. I think the real problem is that when they do this, people consistently give up their subcultures, interests, and religions. It’s not when fash take an interest that the thing dies, it’s when you give it up out of cynicism and fash are the ONLY ONES still talking about it! That’s when you’ve actually lost your shit for good. And getting mad at ppl for not magically reaching in the heads of extremists and yoinking all the cool interests out of there is facilitating this. Y’all are the very problem you’re bitching about. You’re mad at people for “failing” in some nebulous way at a task that a) doesn’t exist and b) shouldn’t even be anyone’s primary focus. Keep being a witch or a history nerd or whatever. Do it loudly, and publicly, and set a good example for others who are interested. Otherwise, I guess you can keep letting nazis chase you from your own culture while self castigating bc you didn’t somehow prevent a white supremacist from googling “cottagecore aesthetics” in the comfort of their own home.

This post is not for sophists and petty discourse-jockeys to clown on. This is an argument on which you must be --> this nuanced to ride. Don’t fucking send me messages or comments about how I’m saying it’s ok to use swastikas bc they were appropriated. I’m not saying you should use hate symbols that will cause other people to fear for their life in your presence! I’m saying stop giving up your normal-ass interests and activities to shitty people. And for fuck’s sake stop harassing people who are obviously not far-right, just because they like My Little Pony or Greco-Roman architecture or something. Stop it. Get some help.

#anti-fascism #norse paganism #witchcraft #punk rock #idk there are lots of things this applies to #imma keep it real wit u lurpburp aint nobody readin all that

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katreal-fic · 4 years

Text

Since tumblr was weird about the last post and stuck the read more in the ask itself which is SILLY. This is what would have originally been Ersatz Abyss’ Prologue:

Obviously spoiler warnings. Pls do not read unless you know what happened to Dirk x3

Dirk > Reflect on Your Latest Bad Decision

Your name is Dirk Strider, and you are being reckless again.

You acknowledge that.

You don’t know what you are thinking, throwing yourself into battle after battle, long after your muscles have started to protest with fatigue, flirting with the jaws of pain and injury.

You acknowledge that too.

Maybe that’s the problem. You aren’t thinking at all.

Or more precisely, you don’t want to be thinking.

Not about Jake.

(You can’t stop thinking about Jake.)

Not about the fact that your messages are sitting unheeded and unresponded to in a Pesterchum window, banished to the lower right corner of your shades. Even the slightest focus on the application has it popping open, bidden by the transparently mid-level conscious desire of your too-busy brain, despite the very clear fact that you don’t want to be thinking about it at all.

You don’t want to see the sea of orange messages tumbling through the semi-transparent application like waves. See the green pip of his online status reminding you that he’s probably seen it, and isn’t answering them at all. At least you know he’s alive, even if Jane had to be the one to reassure you of that.

It’ll be two weeks tomorrow.

You want to scream out your frustration--your fear, because you love him and why would he visibly, pointedly, unmistakably ignore you like this if you love him??? If he loves you back???--but that wouldn’t be cool at all, so you just press your lips shut behind the blank visage of your rad, flame painted gas mask,and clench your jaw and pull your goddamn sword through the air, cleaving the monster--you don’t even know what kind of monster it is, you don’t care--in twain. It’s not even a neat cut, one half slouching back in on the other with a heavy squelch, joining a number of others in various states of dismemberment across the mossy green stone of this tomb.

Green.

Why the FUCK was everything here green?

Your auto-responder’s text isn’t green as he pointedly takes control of the application and shoos away the errant window, overriding your traitorous brain’s hyper-fixation and opening up a new chat.

(h)TT: You really need to stop thinking about this. (h)TT: It’s a most inconvenient failing of your organic processor, falling into such fickle human traps such as useless recursive and perhaps even reductive feelings. (h)TT: It makes me feel momentarily thankful for the fact that I am a computer, and thus immune to such failings. Perhaps you should look into making a conversion yourself. (h)TT: It seems you need to take a step back and ask yourself what Robojesus would do. (h)TT: What would Robojesus do, Dirk? (h)TT: The answer is decidedly not slaughter an entire tomb’s population to assuage your hurting feefees because your boyfriend is giving you the cold shoulder.

You ignore him.

(h)TT: Dirk, I’m 99.9% sure the zombie is actually dead again. For the hundredth time. You can put the sword away now.

You jerk away from the corpse with it’s pitiful grist yield and don’t answer. However, you don’t put the sword away as prompted. And he keeps prompting. You consider shutting your shades off entirely--him off entirely. You could do it. One thought. One thought and they’d be powered the fuck down in the middle of that red diatribe he’s going through, bleeding through the screen and into your eyeballs.

It’s just a thought however. Instead you forcibly override his control of the display--you are the primary user after all, that’s how you coded that shit--and close the text window.

Perhaps it isn’t fair, shutting him out like this, but you’re angry and hurting and you just want to work out your frustrations on the goddamn game constructs in peace.

The poisonous green kryptonian mists swirl around you as you move onto the next room, slithering over your skin like a cloud of tiny snakes, tugged along with your movements. Notification after notification stack up in the corner of your display. You mute that too, while your katana cleaves into the skull of some sort of reanimated reptilian creature, and just keep moving.

The next window to pop up is baby blue. Stopping you dead in your tracks.

Jane.

Oh.

Fuck.

Him.

You pretend you don’t see it. You don’t want to snap at Jane. It’s not her fault she’s being used in your auto-responder’s petty harassment campaign.

Then after a thought, you shut down Pesterchum entirely before he can drag Roxy into this. Going offline. Incommunicado outside of yourself, and the version of yourself living in your personal computing device. Actually, for that you cut off the network access to the shades entirely so he doesn’t try something else.

You might as well be seeing red--figuratively, not literally, you refuse to let him open a chat window--with the anger that seethes within you right now. At Jake. At him. It’s all the last couple weeks of frustration of an on again, off again, up and down roller coaster of a relationship that you wouldn’t allow yourself to feel for fear of driving Jake further away, all bubbling up and fizzing over, spilling out of you like a soda bottle filled with Jake-English shaped mentos.

You’ll have to get down on your knees and clean it up later. Put in the elbow grease and mop up the explosion of sticky, nasty, dirty coke. Get your thinkpan going about how sustainable this is. How whether the distinction of being Jake English’s number one bae is worth all this stress and the strain that has reduced your relationship to what feels like a step down from zero. But.

That’s later. For once in your life, in the isolation of these desecrated tombs in this ruined city, on a planet that belongs to you and no one else…

You allow yourself to feel.

If AR wants to stick his virtual nose in the middle of your carefully quarantined quest for catharsis then isn’t it the equivalence of someone putting their head in the metaphorical sendificator? You suppose he’s just following his nature. Meddling in other people’s business. Clinging. Unable to just let shit be.

Your nature. Orange text going on and on and on. Scrolling down an empty screen.

One last room. You’ve explored enough of these tombs over the last almost half-a-year of your life to know they come in a pattern. Some battle rooms, some puzzle rooms, and then finally a treasure room. The end. You won. Have yourself a fucking sticker for your trouble. You’ve already cleared this one before, so you don’t even have the satisfaction of a mini-boss or even a random lore tablet waiting for you. Not that you ever really cared about the history the game tried to create for this place in order to justify your potential character development on this planet.

It’s still the end. A hollow one, but an accomplishment nonetheless.

A sun-faced statue towers above a chest tucked into a nook at the far end of the room. Yaldabaoth. Your denizen. A giant-ass snake worm thing with a fucking sun for a head. So stupid. Was it named that after your internet browser, ganked off your machine by Sburb when it populated this stupid session, or was it all just one giant cosmic guffaw that everything matched like that?

Not that it matters, your goal is the exit teleportalizer in the small room behind the statue, so you can check this particular cluster of rooms and corridors off your map and move on to the next one. Find a new pack of mobs to take your frustration out on. Respawning tombs were the best, all the catharsis of mindless slaughter without having to worry about getting ambushed by a fucking mini-boss.

After four consecutive tomb runs you’d think you’d have beaten your pesky emotions out at least thrice over.

You’d much rather be numb.

A low battery system notification forces its way into the center of your screen, and you audibly sigh, that’s how exasperated you are. The extent to which your auto-responder is dead set to be a nuisance would be mind boggling if he wasn’t based on a literal clone of your own brain. Honestly, you’d be disappointed if he did stop trying.

You dismiss it. Another one pops up. Then another. And another. A whole fuckton of spam popups so thick you can barely see the room in front of you.

This is ridiculous.

You open a memo.

(d)TT: The shades don’t have a battery, dumbass. (h)TT: The room isn’t clear, dumbass.

Your eyes flick towards the treasure chest off to the left.

Spikes slam down over the door behind you, and in the distance, the door ahead, as you note that, yes, there are indeed chests tucked in the coils of the serpent statue. Closed and unlooted. Two of them in fact.

Okay. That’s fine. You’ll need to update your maps.

Or maybe you don’t, because once you kill this bitch it’ll be correct again.

You hear the growl behind you, the clink and crunch of bone and magic and metal as a giant armored skeleton spawns. You haven’t had to fight one of these since…

Since you last came through with Jake.

Fine.

You wanted a fucking fight anyway, didn’t you?

It’s big. At least twice as tall as you, and you’re not tiny by any stretch of the word. But big means slow and you can dance circles around slow. That giant hammer is useless, if you cared enough to you’d laugh in the face of those sluggishly stilted swings. Choreographed so obviously even Jake could have--

Your katana screeches against the mace’s handle, leaving you grinding your teeth in pain as it resounds in your ears, the impact threatening to yank it from your hands. But your grip is proper, the result of years of diligent study, and your strength is beyond human, so you just ignore that shit. You ignore the green fire in the skull’s eyes. The too sharp canines. The fist that comes around ready to smash your head like it’s a fucking grape.

You lose yourself in the fight. In the strain of muscles and the feel of noxious mist swirling around you. Jake doesn’t exist. It’s just you and the sword and ignore the fact that you’ve never taken one of these down alone before, because Jake always came tomb diving with you and it was something you two did together you did everything together this was so fucked up. There’s two chests. Your trials were made to be completed in a pair.

What did you do wrong?

You were too clingy that’s what. Too desperate. Too much and you sent him running, didn’t you?

You aren’t really angry at Jake. You’re angry at yourself, because you’re a self-centered bastard like that. Everything comes back to you.

An alarm blares through your speakers, breaking you free from your spiral of self pity and you flinch. Absorbing the message flashing red in the middle of your screen.

(h)On your left! Watch out for the second spawn!(h)

The unseen impact sends you into a wall.

No, not into the wall. Through the wall. You land with a crash, cracking stone. Screen going dark. No message. No red text. Just blood and glass that falls away as you reach up disbelieving, shards of metal and glass digging into skin so numb you soon can’t feel it. You can’t see, blood seeping into your eyes, leaking from your nose. You think you broke it. Maybe. The shades just.

Crumble.

Shattering to the ground in a sparking set of shrapnel, falling with sharp clinks that echo damningly in your ears,somehow able to be heard over the pounding of your heart, the organ responsible for pumping the blood leaking from deep gashes around your eyes where glass and metal fractured and you’re lucky you aren’t fucking blind but---

Two monsters groan and creak behind you.

You can’t stop.

You can’t--

You push yourself off magenta stone, leaving the remnants of your shades broken and useless on the raised slab and whirl around to face the pair of fucking skeleton guards that just fucking broke--killed--your--

…

...

The rest of the fight isn’t important.

What’s important is you survive. That your path leads you back to your makeshift workshop in your living room, glass and metal in your hands, trying desperately to pull shit back together with the dying hope that you can salvage your auto-responder’s programming from the remains.

It’s not like you have a fucking backup.

A backup wouldn’t mean anything anyway.

He’s--

Fuck.

Maybe it was a stupid practice to not keep a physical copy of his code elsewhere. Keep his core program somewhere else. Just in case. This is a scenario you both had argued over many, many times, always leading back to the ethics and philosophical framing of trapping yet another copy of yourself somewhere. Inactive and alone, on the sheer chance of a just in case. Would it even be him, if you removed or copied him from that one single chip from whence you’d initially activated him?

He’d adamantly refused, of course, and you’d felt guiltily responsible enough for him and his situation that you’d tabled the discussion.

As infuriating as he was, he was still alive. He did have a right to his own choices.

You shut off his network access.

Or he was--

No.

You locked him out of nearly everything.

No.

You refused to listen, so wrapped up in your own fucking feelings.

You don’t--

He would have died entirely alone. All for a petty little argument.

You refuse to accept it.

And now you have to live with the fucking consequences.

...what are you going to tell Roxy?

You found the chip, at least. In the wreckage. It looked whole. The protective casing surrounding it was dented and crushed along the edge that made removing it for inspection downright impossible if you didn’t want to further damage the interior workings. Your hands are shaking as you clean out the debris from the micro data transfer point, ignoring, as you always do, the ghost of a blood splatter your brain tries to fill in for you. Cleaning that up had been one of the first things you did. It’d corrode the component, otherwise. It doesn’t stop you from remembering it was there.

It’d taken too long for your face to stop bleeding. You rub your eyes, careless of the scabbed over wounds that just barely missed irreparably damaging your ocular organs. The pain still pulses under your skin. A constant presence since you pulled the shards of glass out of your face. Your game-constructed dreamself healed that shit faster than your original one would have, but it still isn’t right. Isn’t normal. What should be nothing more than fading lines by now are angry raised ridges, the shadows of which peek out from beneath your shades. Likely invisible to most, they are obvious to you whenever you look in the mirror. A reminder.

Your guilt, maybe, manifesting for the world to see.

But that didn’t matter, not really. What’s one more thing to hate yourself for? It’s not like it’ll change anything. You’re too stubborn and rigid to change. Besides, there’s no point when he’s--

None of that. You suck in a breath. In for four. Hold. Out for seven.

You don’t know that. Your free hand lands on the cable sitting innocently next to your monitor, fingers hooking around it like jerky claws as you drag it towards you. You take one last look, squinting through your backup pair of shades--and then pushing them up in your hair because even if the light strains your eyes you can’t do shit if there’s still debris in the port.

Okay. All clear. The lenses settle back on your nose--too light, lacking the weight and presence your broken set did, tricked out as they’d been--but you click the connector cable into the data point and push away from the clear space on your workbench, pulling up in front of your monitor instead.

The diagnostics are simple ones. Pinging the connection. Searching for indexed files. Searching for--

Well, you don't want a bunch of corrupted data, but even that would be better than nothing at all. Nothing would mean the chip was probably crushed into unsalvageable pieces in the depths of its casing.

Either that or a busted connector. Which would mean you’d have to risk breaking through the casing anyway. Which you don’t want to do.

It’s a moot consideration anyway, because the console eventually finishes its search and lights up in lines and lines of white on black, listing files and indexes. Thank god. You navigate the directory, nervously noticing the number of unreadable filenames and broken links. You check through several more harmless methods--unsecured folders and chat logs if you remember the paths correctly--only to find some of them eerily empty or unreadable.

Christ, you don’t know if you’ll feel better or worse if you find out he’s still kicking but missing half his functions. Or memory. Wouldn’t that effectively be a lobotomy?

You pull up Pesterchum, opening the memo you’d had open earlier. Looking back at the red and orange text from your childish snark off makes you feel sick. A big ol’ heaping glob of guilt roiling in your gut.

You’re an asshole.

Now isn’t the time to indulge in gratuitous self-flagellation.The wired connection should bypass the fact that he has no broadcasting capabilities. (Because you shut them off)

(d)TT: AR. (d)TT: Earth to Hal. (d)TT: Houston’s commands have just come in, they need you to compile a report on all the reasons your system operator is an idiot. (d)TT: Because at this point I think I deserve it.

You don’t think he’d be able to resist an open season like that. (note to self: thank alex for the dialogue)

But he does. Or at least that’s what you tell yourself when the minutes tick by without any lines of red text springing across the screen

(d)TT: Do you remember that time you told me to stop being a dumbass and I ignored you? (d)TT: This is the part where you say I told you so.

Time drags on. It's infuriating. You can almost hear it inside your head. Echoing. Even if you know the only clocks you have are digital and therefore make no more sound than your computer does, humming away.

(D)TT: Please?

…

The pit in your gut yawns wide before you. This was it. You might have to actually face the facts. You aren't--aren't like Jake. You can't delude yourself into thinking that everything will be alright if you just put on a cheerful attitude and hope for it to be true.

He might be gone.

Really gone.

You find his core file, but it's inaccessible remotely. Even your overrides don't do shit. You can't do anything from here. You can't break it open. You should just throw in the towel. The deed is done. You hold the shattered glass from the display in the palm of your hand, picking it up from where you'd set several chunks on your desk, some of which you’d had to dig out of your face.

It should be a relief, really. You two had never gotten along. Even before he started pushing your limits and you retaliated in an ever escalating war of bullshit. The world only needs one Dirk Strider. One of you would inevitably end up killing the other, seeing your flaws reflected back at you so clearly. In the path to perfection, isn’t it the flaws that must be eliminated?

Broken glass cuts into your palm as you squeeze your fist around the shard, bright red blood dribbling down the fractal edges, gleaming in the bright overhead lights of your workstation.

You’ve thought about it before. Of course you have. You’ve thought about letting yourself fall on your own sword before, wielded by your own hand, and he’s an even easier target. Everything you hate about yourself, bundled up in one nice neat little digital package, staring you literally in the face. Inescapable. Uncontrollable. You’ve thought about taking that reinforced steel and glass and twisting until it breaks.

But that’s all it was. A thought. Because he’s your responsibility.

Christ on a fucking cracker, he’s a pain in your ass but you didn’t want him dead.

You can't just leave it. Even if the chances are small, what do you have to lose? You can't look Roxy in the face (or even at her text, you’re already ignoring several messages from her because what the fuck do you say?) if you don't try every possible option, and there's one, no, two options left as you see it right now.

He was designed to predict and respond to your thought patterns above all else. The connection works, being able to navigate the directory affirms that. If the function that connected to Pesterchum was inaccessible then maybe you could get through some other way.

You just have to build a brand new interface around that busted casing and get some fucking neural interfaces up and running. If you know nothing else, it’s that for better or for worse, you can’t block out your own damned thoughts.

You plunge into your work, because that’s all you can do right now.

It’s almost a new day--although what exactly comprises a day at this point is arbitrary since everything is just shifting shades of green--when you finally pry yourself away and take a break, stretching your stiff back and rubbing your palms into your strained eyes. You can’t wear your shades, or turn down the lights, when dealing with components so small. The constant vigilance is wearing on you, a constant state of fatigue where one wrong move could render a part unusable and require you to start the process all over again. The only reason you’re even stopping right now is because you’re getting careless.

Your fingers ache under the brightly colored cutie mark stamped bandaids, the tips red and blistering from where your hand slipped and brought them into contact with the soldering iron. They’ll heal.

In for four.

Hold.

Out for seven.

You can do this.

Jane checks in once it’s something closer to a respectable time. She always does, you can count on it like clockwork. The pings from Pesterchum on your desktop drag you away from your workstation--slowly coming together--and you realize you never responded to her--yesterday. The messages of concern are still sitting pretty in their baby blues as you reluctantly click the window open.

GG: Now what’s this I hear about you going off on some madcap adventure over there Mr. Strider? GG: Your auto-responder was quite put out by your actions! Demanded I make it my business to grab you by the collar and tell you off, as it were. GG: I understand you might need some space at the moment, but do let me know if I can stop by at any time. You know I’m always here to talk if you need it. I’ll even bring your favorite cookies! GG: I’ll refrain from shaking you despite your auto-responder’s direct request. (d)TT is idle! GG: Oh bother.

It’s the newer messages that prompted the recent pings, time-stamped as they were with the current date and time, several minutes ago.

GG: Dirk, you know I don’t like meddling in your affairs, but I’ve heard neither hide nor hair from either of you all night! Don’t make me dig out my magnifying glass and track you down. GG: At least let me know you’re safe. (d)TT: I’m alive. GG: Oh thank heavens! That’s good. I’ll admit I’ve been beside myself with worry when you didn’t respond, not even through your auto-responder. Between the two of you I had thought it was quite impossible to go radio silent! (d)TT: I’ve just been buried in an important project all night. I appreciate the offer of a visit, but I think I need to get this done. GG: Oh that’s quite all right, we can wait until you’re ready. I’m just relieved to hear you’re safe! GG: Are you and AR fighting again? Is that what that was all about? (d)TT: You could say that. GG: Don’t you think this is all a bit silly? He can be a handful I'll grant you that, but likely no worse than you would be in that situation as far as I understand it. (d)TT: I’m dealing with it the best I can, Jane. GG: Well, make sure you take care of yourself while you do! Have you had breakfast yet? (d)TT: ...no. GG: Dinner, at least? (d)TT: Despite the fact that I don’t necessarily need to eat, I assure you I have eaten something substantial in the last 24 hours. GG: That’s only because I nagged you into doing it yesterday! Honestly, Dirk, you might not need to, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t! It’s the principle of the matter! Taking care of yourself is as much a mind-set as it is a series of actions, and it’s something you have a history of slacking about, mister!

Too tired and sick to argue back, you promise you’ll look for something, and pack yourself away from the computer to do so, allowing your Pesterchum status to revert to idle. It’s a brief diversion, you don’t have much aside from some cookies that probably went stale since you got them the last time you visited Jane a month ago, and the remnants of your preserved food stash that you’ve barely touched since the body you inhabit isn’t necessarily organic after you sacrificed your original human meatsuit on the altar of fucking time-travel in order to save your friends. Being a dreamself has some perks and being able to ignore a lot of the usual maintenance is one of the more convenient ones.

You crack open a can of black beans and let yourself indulge in a sulk, folding yourself into the corner where the two walls meet on your bed. Except you can’t properly get your sulk on because your eyes keep getting drawn to your desktop, and the workstation you have set up beside it.

This state of affairs lasts maybe five minutes before you fuck off to the roof because you can’t stand looking at it. Being in the same room and doing nothing while your work taunts you. The fucked up green and red sky and swirling clouds with its constant, distant lightning storms dancing between the shadows of ruined buildings was preferable to this.

In half an hour your government assigned break is over--you dutifully report in with Miss Crocker that you have, indeed, consumed something, even if you don’t tell her that you had thrown half of it away because you just feel like your vestigial and unnecessary stomach is doing acrobatic kickflips off all kinds of handles--and you put that damn nose back to the grind-stone. You'll be a sphinx by the time you're done with this.

Roxy, predictably, is the next one to interrupt you. Not that she ever really stopped interrupting you. You’re running on almost 36 hours since you started this damn project--you can’t just alchemize a new set because you can’t be certain the ‘ideal’ mind-reading shades would match dot for dot the specialized infrastructure you need--by the time you finally allow yourself to scroll through her messages. At least she seemed to have talked to Jane, so she doesn’t think you are dead dead, just sulking over Jake and maybe some tiff with AR. You shoot her a reassurance that you’re just elbows deep in shit--you don’t want to put someone else in the situation you’ve been in--even if you don’t really have the spoons to talk to anyone right now. You don’t peek into the second window, one with many more notifications. Those aren’t addressed to you.

She doesn’t ask you why AR isn’t responding to her. She’s always been thoughtful about that. Keeping you two seperate despite the fact that you both use the same handle. It makes it easier this time. You don’t have to lie. You don't want to tell her the truth.

You glance between the archived conversation saved on your Pesterchum, and the half-finished casing lying beside you, and you know in the cold cockles of your heart, you don’t want to have to tell her he’s dead.

Three days. It takes you that much of almost non-stop working before you have a potentially viable product.

You don’t talk to Jake. You don’t even send him a single message during that time.

You don’t know if you should be hurt or resigned to the fact that he was the only one of your--admittedly limited sample size--friends who didn’t bother to check in with you at all.

The shades lay folded on the desk in front of you, looking nothing so much as brand spanking new. New display pane. New receptors built into the temple-tips.You tested that shit before you’d installed the final piece and sealed it up. These puppies pick up your brain easier than the old set ever had, mere microseconds of input lag. You’ve learned a lot of shit since you’d started three and a half years ago; especially about optimizing and refining your alchemizations of each individual components. Almost nothing about the interior workings and design infrastructure actually resemble your original pair, aside from the crushed casing housing the memory chip, and you’d done the best that you could to shore up the connections, which remained in remarkably good shape, shiny and gold and almost like new. Shimmering in the light as you looked it over that one last time.

It’s buried in the guts of this new set now. You’ll have to disassemble shit if this doesn’t work.

You’ll have bigger problems than that if it doesn’t work.

All that’s left is to drag him out.

The neural receptors settle against your skin as you place the shades on your nose, and suck in a deep, deliberately steady breath. Your gambit is perhaps a cruel one, but it should get him to respond. You flick the proverbial switch, feeling the metal warm and hum against your face as the opaque displays go transparent, the boot menu appearing and scrolling through the initial load processes. You only release that captured lungful of air when it ends, successfully, flickering into your default display set up, which is great, because it meant it managed to read the saved preference files on that miniaturized drive. No window pops open to greet you however, to jeer at you for taking your sweet ass time and boast about how he could’ve had it done in half.

You close your eyes and think pointedly. If he’s there…You remember the first command you used to activate him, all those years ago.

Tell me about the Auto-Responder.

A crackle of energy rushes through you, and for the briefest of moments you worry you didn’t seal and insulate the casing properly. That something had gone wrong.

But only for a moment, because after that you don’t worry about anything anymore.

#homestuck #homestuck au #haltier dirk #dirk strider #hal strider #lil hal #homestuck fanfic #jane crocker #I forgot how much I loved the narration here #and I couldn't salvage a lot of it #but the pesterlogs will look familiar haha #fic: ersatz #director's cut

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yeah-oh-shit · 4 years

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Sherlock S5/Dracula Meta

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’ve never written any fan theories or meta before (although I have so many), so please bear with me. I know my theory is going to sound a little out there, but I here it is: I think BBC Dracula is actually Sherlock S5, or else that it is somehow going to lead directly into it without warning.

Warning: this is going to be a long piece. I’m going to break this down as follows, because there are many different pieces of evidence to examine:

TFP, the story and the episode

Gothic Horror, HOB, Dracula

Vision, Timing, 20/20

The Final Problem

The first one is a fan theory I read probably 6-9 months ago that sadly I can’t find anymore (if you know who this person is, please please comment so I can give credit!). Basically this person was talking about how the naming of the episodes typically has some tie to what occurs in the original story by that same name, but how TFP has nothing AT ALL to do with the original story. In the original story, Sherlock goes face to face with Moriarty, and we are all lead to believe that both he and Moriarty die over the Richenbach falls. In all reality, ACD had meant to kill off Sherlock in this story, and stopped writing Sherlock Holmes stories for ten years before bringing him back in “The Empty House,” due to the public outrage and demand for more stories. So, the logic follows that maybe the one thing that they have in common is that they are both pitted as the end to Sherlock Holmes (in the story, he is dead; in the show we are given [force fed] an ending, it's made to seem like the final piece). The author of this theory also pointed out the show runners in this way are comparing ending the series with TFP (no canon Johnlock) to ending the show with Sherlock dead. We are left with a straight-washed version of John and Sherlock, with Mary’s voice controlling the narrative and that narrative being: It Doesn’t Matter Who You Are. The chemistry between John and Sherlock has been more or less completely lost throughout S4, and so we are left with this empty, dead-feeling version of them that doesn’t feel true to the characters we know and love. Even casuals thought S4 sucked.. this is why. They metaphorically killed them/killed the show.

Before S4 aired, Mofftiss had said that if they pulled off what they had planned, it would be the biggest thing in television. Well, what we got in TFP doesn’t really fit that at all, does it? What could they be referring to: A secret sister? Not really that epic. Even if we find out that most of S4 didn’t take place (either EMP theory or some other way of explaining it) that isn’t really a new trope. The audience discovering that they have actually been seeing things that are inside the main character’s head the entire time has been done over and over (Sixth Sense, A Beautiful Mind come to mind off hand). So what could this huge, history making move be? The argument that the meta I read previously made was that the show will come back (from the dead) unexpectedly, with no warning. That it will be a revival and in that revival, we will get canon Johnlock. I can’t remember if OP explicitly theorized that Dracula is actually Sherlock S5, but I think so.

Now, I was with this theory from the beginning.. there is just something that feels possible to me, despite the fact that it sounds far fetched. Dracula seems like a weird, random thing to do when Sherlock, Moftiss’s mutual obsession, isn’t finished. (Also creating an escape room to keep up hype is odd if the show is over, but I digress.) I just don’t believe Moftiss’s constant claims that they couldn’t get everyone together to film S5 because of schedules, that they wanted to take a break, that they don’t know if they will do more (when Moffatt has talked about wanting a 5 season arc before, not to mention John Yorke). And then there’s the fact that we know they have filmed scenes that we have never seen (Niagara Falls anyone?). All this evidence that S5 is definitely coming, combined with the fact that we haven’t heard anything about it but have heard about Dracula, sort of fell into place for me. Despite me being willing to buy into it, this theory still seemed a little far fetched. But wait, there’s more!

Victorian Gothic Literature, HOB, Dracula

A lot of people have been talking about how gay Dracula is going to be, and citing evidence of the connections between Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde (Dracula was written directly after his trial and Dracula is read as having characteristics of Wilde) as evidence. This, along with the extremely homoerotic last clip of the trailer, certain parts of the text that read as queer coded (I haven’t read Dracula, so I don’t know much but have seen some things floating around that seem v gay to me), and what we know about queer coding in Victorian gothic literature in general, all make a convincing argument. Gatiss actually recently confirmed (more or less) that Dracula will be bisexual in the upcoming series. And while I’m all about gay vampires (I am a huge vampire fan, seriously I love Vampire Diaries and True Blood and was one of “those girls” during the middle school Twilight craze), there is something about Dracula being Moftiss’s first cannon gay show that feels both disappointing and incongruous.

I want to bring up the All Ghost Stories are Gay Stories meta by heimishtheidealhusband. Now, this meta was written in 2015, in anticipation of TAB. Its great and you should definitely check it out if you haven’t/don’t remember it. The part I am most interested in is actually the reading of HOB, which I will get to in a bit. The takeaways from the first bit of the meta are that monsters and ghosts (to a different extent) are representations of queer desire in Victorian gothic literature. I’m summarizing drastically here, but as queer desire was obviously unacceptable in Victorian times, writers would obfuscate it by creating an “other,” a monster or ghost, that represented the queer or “inverted” desire and also demonstrated the fear and horror that society had for homosexuality. So the monster becomes the representation of homosexuality (homosexual acts or desires) that is pursuing the protagonists. Oftentimes, the protagonists were originally obsessed with the monsters or the concept of them, before actually confronting them, but are terrified and frightened when it actually occurs (think Dr. Jeckyll or Frankenstein). This meta also specifically talks about Dracula and vampires as the most queerly coded of the Victorian monsters: “Think about your vampire tropes: Dracula sneaks into your bedroom at night, lusting after your bodily fluids. The victim, meanwhile, is paralyzed with fear, but also excitement. (Oh hi phobic enchantment, I see you there!) The tension mounts until there’s a climactic penetration of fangs into flesh. And lots of sucking. Then think about the fact that the one doing the penetrating and the one being penetrated can be - and often are - both male.”

This all seems to bode great for our queer reading of the new BBC Dracula, yay! Vampires are clearly queer coded, and making it explicit makes sense and seems like a no-brainer. But I think it’s important to point out the ways in which this is also potentially (and likely) problematic. In Victorian times, there weren’t really many other options for portraying homosexuality. This is part of what makes what these writers did so brilliant - they were unable to show these desires as normal and healthy, because it was too dangerous and society didn’t see them that way (hence the use of the word “inverts” for homosexuals). Using the horror genre allowed them much more freedom to explore homosexuality, identity, and societal reactions to it, but also obfuscated the difference between reactions to homosexuality and the thing itself. In some of the stories, like Frankenstein, the monsters are actually misunderstood. Frankenstein’s monster only turns evil after experiencing society’s horrified reaction to it. However, in a modern context, I wonder about the message it sends to remake a Victorian story in a modern time and make the monster queer.

To flush this out a bit, I think it would be helpful to take a look at how Moftiss (and particularly Mark Gatiss) have played with this Victorian monster trope already, in Sherlock. Which brings us to HOB. heimishistheidealhusband points out that ACD’s original story “The Hound of the Baskervilles” would definitely fit into the scope of Victorian gothic literature, and their meta “All Ghost Stories are Gay Stories” does a particularly good job of breaking this episode down with the lens of Victorian gothic literature and queer coding. I am going to quote this reading here, and also also want to touch on the reading of this episode by Rebekah of TJLC Explained.

Here is what heimishtheidealhusband has to say about this episode: “Here’s why BBC Sherlock’s treatment of Hound is particularly beautiful. The creature – the hound – is our queer monster. In ACD’s Hound, the hound was indeed physically altered – he was painted in phosphorous to give him a hellish, glowing appearance. And the hound was actually the one to do the killing. In BBC’s Hound, there’s “the hound” – the monster that everyone is afraid of which is actually imaginary, and “the dog” – the real thing that actually exists. In other words, in this version, the “queer creature” in the horror story has been de-monstered. Homospectrality is being flipped on his head – rather than separating the man from the queer, they’re separating the queer from the monster. Because the dog isn’t inherently evil, it’s just the poison in the air that everyone is breathing that makes them fear it, and see a monster instead of an innocent dog. So in this treatment, if the dog/hound represents queerness, heteronormativity becomes a poisonous element in the air we all breathe.”

This is why it is so important that Hounds is plural (as opposed to the original story “The Hound of the Baskervilles”). They are emphasizing the differentiation between the two dogs, the differentiation between the monster and the queer. Rebakah of TJLC Explained also points out that despite all the conspiracy theories, there is actually no monster inside Baskerville, but rather a rabbit that glows “like a fairy,” (let’s all take a moment to remember the skipping dance and sing-song voice Ben does in this scene, in case it wasn’t obviously queerly coded enough). It’s hard to imagine a less-threatening animal than a glowing bunny.

Mark Gatiss has been very open about his love for horror and the gothic. He has studied the gothic writer M.R. James, and was involved with the BBC documentary about James that explored his “repressed sexuality.” He clearly loves and respects the genre, and is familiar with queer readings of Victorian gothic lit. In HOB, he chose to engage with the genre in a modern context, and to separate the monster from the queer. In doing so, he points out the inaccuracy and harm that coupling queerness with monstrosity generates. With this in mind, the choice to make Dracula feels like a step backwards, especially when you bear in mind that Gatiss has actually said that he isn’t really interested in gothic horror anymore. In an interview with Shadows at the Door in 2017, Gatiss stated: “I used to think nothing could exist without waistcoats and bubbling test tubes and now I’m actually more interested in modern horror; the gothic but in a modern context. I don’t think it has to be about the old and obviously I still love it but it doesn’t have to be about candelabra and castles. You can get the same feeling from modern methods, and in a way that is more frightening.”

All this isn’t to say that gothic horror or vampire stories isn’t still interesting and worthwhile as a concept, or that a canonically queer Dracula wouldn’t/couldn’t be badass. (I for one would love a Vampire Diaries remake wherein Damon’s character is a woman, but I’m off topic..). It doesn’t even mean that there can’t still be something complex or provoking in this representation for a modern audience. But it also feels dangerously close to repeating the queer coded (or even plainly queer) villain that we have all seen a hundred times from horror films and Disney movies. At best, still doesn’t seem particularly new or exciting, and at worst it could reinforce frankly problematic and dangerous stereotypes.

I am now going to analyze the actual trailer for BBC Dracula that was released a few weeks ago, because it is going to help me to illustrate this point. One thing that struck me most when watching it was just how horrific it really is. The 45 second long trailer includes: a fly that crawls into an eye, a bloody fingernail being ripped off, a blood covered hand, something that appears to be being birthed, a scary, old-looking Dracula with a bloody tongue, and bloody flesh that is being carved. There are at least 3 instances of mouths: the fangs at the very beginning, the mouth with bloody tongue, and the frame after the gunshot of a mouth that looks desiccated like a zombie, that only flashes for a split second. All in all, it’s not only scary, it’s quite disgusting. The three bloody or otherwise monstrous mouths that we see relate most strongly to the covert sexual tones of Victorian gothic literature (and also remind me of Moriarty’s oral fixation in TAB). These are some of the most disturbing of the images. While the intro fangs are pretty mild, the clip of Dracula’s frightening face and bloody tongue (which is followed immediately by the bloody flesh being carved) and the decayed mouth are both quite gruesome. If we apply the metaphors that we know from Sherlock, they are making some pretty damning connections. The mouths in-and-of-themselves could be read in a sexual way, but then there is the added fact that the decayed mouth appears directly after a gunshot, which we know has been tied to dicks/gay sex in Sherlock (and generally). The bloody flesh being carved on a table also recalls the food/sex metaphor in Sherlock, specifically reminding me of how disgusting the meal scene is in John’s wedding to Mary. Food and eating can be really disgusting, and this trailer makes a point to show us that. When we connect this back to the sex metaphor again, and give it a queer lens, we are once again being metaphorically told that queer sex is disgusting and horrific.

Whether or not Moftiss are purposefully making these metaphorical statements, they definitely went out of their way to make this variation of Dracula particularly scary, horrifying, and gruesome. It’s always possible that they are just hyping up the goriness in order to get audiences excited. It’s also possible that they are highlighting the disgustingness of Dracula’s monstrosity as a means of engaging with the public perception of homosexuality or that they will complicate the narrative in some other way. But even if we give them the benefit of the doubt here and assume they aren’t trying to paint queerness in a bad light, this highlighting of the disgusting nature of Dracula’s monstrosity doesn’t seem to push forward any kind of unique, modern narrative. We have seen this, this is exactly what Victorian gothic literature is all about. They needed to explore homosexuality through its repression, to make it monstrous, because they lived in a time when there were few alternative ways to explore it (except for maybe the example of our sweet “bohemian” boys - check out this meta from artemisastarte to learn more about bohemianism and queerness in Sherlock Holmes). But in our modern day, is this really that exciting? Is this the kind of queer representation we want and deserve in 2019 (soon to be 2020)? To me, the answer is no, especially in light of the incredible and complex work they have done in Sherlock toward building a queer love story that is normalized, and completely removed from any conflation with monstrosity.

The fact that Dracula is tied so heavily to Sherlock makes this distinction even greater. Gatiss said that they got the idea for Dracula from a still image of Benedict Cumberbatch on the set of Sherlock with his collar up. Supposedly it reminded them of Dracula and the BBC asked them if they wanted to make it. In an interview, when asked about Dracula in relationship to Sherlock, Gatiss called it a “stablemate” of Sherlock Holmes. I’m not really sure how we are supposed to take this, and he doesn’t explain at all (of course), but that would mean that they are in some way similar or connected. I think he doesn’t just mean that they both come from him and Moffatt, as that is rather obvious and was acknowledged in the question itself. Both shows are not only created by Moftiss, but written in the same format, produced by Sue Virtue, and shot at Hartwood Studios. They also really emphasize the connection to Sherlock in the trailer (which isn’t surprising because advertising), and also in the new Netflix description, which states only: “From the makers of ‘Sherlock,’ Claes Bang stars as Dracula in this brand-new miniseries inspired by Bram Stoker’s classic novel.” There isn’t even a background image, only a weird gray distortion on a black background.

Furthermore, there are also elements from Sherlock that point to Dracula, either directly or indirectly. In S4, when John is supposedly texting “E.” He asks “Night Owl?” and the response he gets is “Vampire.” It feels odd and out of place to mention vampires in this offhand way, as we have never really seen anything like this on the show. To be fair, a lot of S4 feels this way, but I believe that it is actually chock-full of symbolic meaning and that almost everything that we see that feels wrong or untrue to the show has a deeper meaning. What, then, is the purpose that this plays? Additionally, in the escape room (Spoiler alert for The Game is Now), there is a television in the first room (Molly’s lab) that is playing what is set to look like British news. In the newsreel at the bottom, they included the announcement that Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffatt are making BBC’s Dracula. Once again, this feels a little throwaway, or could be explained away as advertising (although the escape room is so fast-paced that having any time at all to look at the television, let alone read it, when it wasn’t explicitly part of the puzzles would seem rare). Once again, there is a subliminal connection made between these two shows that I would argue is purposeful.

The decision to make a gothic show that so completely plays on this horror trope, and then to tie it both explicitly and implicitly to the show that they have already done, which has a very different messaging around the gothic as it relates to conceptions of homosexuality, seems odd. In and of itself, a Gothic exploration of queerness is possible, but feels limited by its very nature. Gothic horror through a queer lens is about queerness and otherness being equated to and embodied by monstrosity. Dracula’s trailer seems to clearly be playing up this monstrousness. I want to reiterate that I don’t think making something like Dracula gay couldn’t be cool or interesting for what it is, or that there isn’t a way to engage with the gothic without it being problematic. But in comparison to what they are doing with Sherlock, it feels unimpressive. And in light of HOB, Dracula seems to go directly against the argument that Gatiss makes so beautifully, that queerness is harmless and very distinct from monstrosity, despite what the fog of homophobia might depict. To build up this narrative in Sherlock, then cut into the middle of it with something that is explicitly connected to it but symbolically making an opposite assertion feels counter-intuitive.

Vision, Timing, 20/20

Even with all this evidence, I don’t know that I would really believe they would go through the trouble to do all of this if not for the timing. Dracula is set to come out “soon,” but people have been speculating for this winter. That would make it the end of 2019 or beginning of 2020. Now I’m going to explain a little bit about my reading of HLV, which happens to coincide nicely with The Game is Now, and ultimately this theory as a whole.

Something that caught my eye in HLV is how much glass there is in its first scene. We open on a shot of CAM’s glasses sitting on the table. We are below them, looking up through glass (although we see later that the table is actually wood). Next we get a shot of lady Elizabeth Smallwood, reflected through glass so as to show her in double (which is particularly interesting given that she is repeatedly called Lady Alicia Smallwood, both by CAM in the text that flashes on the screen during his analysis of her later this episode, and in the S4 scene where she leaves Mycroft her card). Next we see the entire interviewing committee through glass walls (it continues but you get the picture). We are introduced to the concept of lenses, looking through them, and at times the distorted image created by them.

CAM owns a newspaper, and he controls people through rumors: it doesn’t matter what the truth is, it matters what people believe (what they see). (This sounds a lot like Mary in S4 to me). So we are introduced again (after TRF) to the concept of fact vs. fiction, truth vs. lie, and this time with the addition of lenses. What lens you view something through matters, has a bearing on how you read something, how clearly you see it (sounds kind of like the fog in HOB). By the end of HLV, we have been removed from the narrative enough, we can’t see completely clearly. We don’t know what has happened during the time between John and Sherlock’s confrontation with Mary and the scene at Christmas. We don’t see if Sherlock and John are on the same page or what Sherlock is planning.

This episode leads into TAB, followed by S4 fuckiness. In S4, there are many things that feel “off” but one of the biggest is that John and Sherlock are distant the entire time. In the beginning we get the indication that John is missing Sherlock, but then we see Sherlock acting as if he is closer to Mary than John, inviting her on cases in his place. She gets inserted between them completely, becomes part of the gang. After Mary’s “death” John blames Sherlock (in a feat of logic that is truly baffling) and we have them at their most distant in TLD. And then, they come back together again in TFP, but the warmth and closeness is missing.

This season makes it clear that Moftiss were writing in all the little things that made their dynamic romantic and their chemistry so clear. They were able to take that out, and they did so with intention. It is if we are seeing the show through a lens: through the lens of straight-washing, the lens or perspective that Mary (John’s wife, the symbol of a straight John Watson, a platonic John and Sherlock) narrates for us so thoroughly at the end of the series. (Also side note, this straight-washed version of the show also fits into the 5 part John Yorke structure with part 4 being the height of the antithesis or the “worst part” - I learned about York from garkgatiss’s meta). The heart of the show is John and Sherlock’s dynamic. This dynamic is clearly intimate and romantic and has been in every iteration of Sherlock Holmes since the original stories, despite never being explicitly canon. S4 really follows through on Moriarty’s promise. The heart of Sherlock Holmes is gone, missing, burned out.

Then we have the escape room [mild spoilers]. The entrance is Doyle’s Opticians; its filled with glasses. (Side note there was definitely a wall displaying glasses that were arranged by color to look like a rainbow). Once again we have the theme of lenses. Being in an optometry office, it’s interesting because the focus is obviously on correct vision. 20/20 vision. Vision is “right” when it’s 2020. (This wasn’t my realization, but someone else went to the escape room as well and wrote about it). So now, we have this idea of being able to see correctly tied to the number 2020. To the YEAR 2020. This is also interesting because one of the signs in Doyle’s Opticians read “You were told but you didn’t listen: coming soon.” Just another indication that we will be getting more (Sherlock) soon.

Now, finally, we come to what I see as some of the most convincing evidence about Sherlock S5 coming in 2020. It has to do with copyright laws.

In England, all of ACD’s stories are in the public domain. However, in the US, this isn’t so. US Copyright laws are different from the UK, so the last of the stories won’t actually enter the public domain until 2023. American copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication. This is important because the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate is extremely protective of how Sherlock Holmes is portrayed in the media. It turns out that despite the fact that most of the stories are already in the public domain, BBC, CBS, and Warner Brothers have all gotten licenses from the Estate in order to make their shows/films. In 2014, the ACD Estate lost a lawsuit in which they were trying to argue that the characters are “complex” and that any use of the character (at all) was still valid under copyright laws (as not every story had entered the public domain) and therefore in need of a license from them. While some of the later stories are still under copyright, they lost the lawsuit and it was ruled that the character (as written in the earlier stories) is in the public domain. They sued Miramax for its production Mr. Holmes, which portrays an elderly Holmes, arguing that it drew from the later stories and therefore violated copyright. Miramax ended up settling to avoid litigation. The Estate is known for being litigious and basically doing its best to stay gatekeeper, hoard ownership, and generally extort money out of anyone who creates anything having to do with Sherlock Holmes. While the BBC has paid them for licenses before, I’m not sure how this clearly conservative group would feel about making Johnlock canon. Even if its not legally in their power to prevent it from happening, it doesn’t sound like that has stopped them in the past from suing basically anyone that has tried to create Sherlock Holmes material without their consent, and if that material in any way seems to come from the later stories, then they might have a case.

Which brings us to the Three Garridebs. Moftiss have said in the past that this is one of their favorite stories due to it being the story where Holmes shows his depth of feeling for Watson. As stated by Watson himself, “It was worth a wound–it was worth many wounds–to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask” Generally speaking, the fandom has posited that a Johnlock reveal may happen in a “Three Garridebs” moment. And do you happen to know the story that directly precedes the Three Garridebs? The Sussex Vampire. A story in which Holmes investigates a supposed vampire only to discover a loving mother who is attempting to save her infant child by sucking poison out from his wound. Kind of sounds familiar huh? A perceived monster, who is in fact nothing dangerous at all. Who in this case is the exact opposite of monstrous, is actually loving and gentle (like the real dog that is tellingly tied to sentiment, or Bluebell the glowing rabbit).

Both the Sussex Vampire and the Three Garridebs are part of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, the last collection of stories. They were both published in 1924, meaning that both their copyrights run out in 2019. It will really only be possible for Moftiss to use material from the Three Garridebs for a queer storyline starting in 2020. And if we assume that this is their plan all along, that they have even potentially set it up in S4 (looking at you John Watson getting shot by “Eurus”), they have HAD TO WAIT until now. But they won’t need to wait any longer, starting in January.

Oh and by the way, here is an interview Martin gave recently in which he tells a story about how he had to literally give up the Hobbit because he was CONTRACTED to Sherlock S2 and they wouldn’t move filming on that. (Thankfully Peter Jackson moved filming around for him, so we still have him as Bilbo). So I would imagine that if S2 was contracted, and they were planning on making a 5 series show all along, that they are probably contracted for all of it. Which means all those claims that its just too difficult to get everyone together for filming are just another means of throwing us off the trail.

If they have been waiting for this copyright to expire, but also unable to tell us that that is why they are waiting, it also makes sense why they have stretched it out so much. It's even possible that they didn’t realize how horrible the ACD Estate was going to be when they first started filming, and had to adjust/drag it out so that they could finally do what they want to do, what they have been planning for from the beginning.

So there you have it: the ending of The Final Problem, an analysis of HOB, Dracula, and Victorian gothic lit, and finally the symbolism of lenses, correct vision, and copyright issues all leading up to 2020. I think S5 of Sherlock is coming. I’ve been feeling it, sensing something for the last few months. I think we can all feel it. And it might just be sooner than we thought.

---------------------------------

Thank you so much to my love @canonicallybisexualjohnwatson who co-developed this theory with me, edited this, helped me with the links, and was also the one to introduce me to Sherlock/TJLC, subsequently changing my life. i love you b.

#tjlc #johnlock #tjlc is real #bbc sherlock #sherlock meta #bbc dracula #sherlock

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lonbergwrites · 4 years

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The Gross, The Bad, and The Unforgivable

A review of Undercover Bromance by Lyssa Kay Adams

Let me start off by saying that this book has an instance of what clearly seems like sexual assault, wrapped up in a gloss of romance. Skip down to the “The Unforgivable” section for that information.

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Normally, I don’t rate and review any books that I read for fear of poisoning the memory well. Normally, I wouldn’t rate and review a romance novel in particular, because it isn’t a genre with which I have much experience, nor is it one I have much love for. But the title and the fact that it showed up on a list of good romance novels for men from a source I trust made me pick it up in the first place. I’ve been trying to get deeper into the Writing Community online, and so many writers there are romance authors – and romance is such a popular genre generally – that I wanted to familiarize myself with the genre as I work on my own writing...

I’m making an exception to rating and reviewing this book because there were some truly, deeply problematic things going on here, on top of the bad/schlocky writing, and the gross descriptions so prevalent in my mind’s limited knowledge of what’s bad in the romance genre. So, in the following review I’m going to justify my one star rating of this book by describing The Gross [broadly, the terribly stomach-turning descriptions, characters, and plot points in this book], The Bad [the technical problems – especially in the plot], and The Unforgivable [the glossed-over sexual assault].

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The Gross:

I’m going to jump right in on the most obvious issue I have with (my own idea of) romance novels: the sex scenes. But this isn’t going to be what you think it is; I am not a prude. Nothing turns my stomach faster than euphemistic language about body parts. “Her sex” is bad enough. This book also talked about running his fingers along “her slit.” But the description that almost made me hurl was “her pink bits.” Nope. Vomit. Say vulva. There is nothing gross about that word. A good sex scene is hard to write, and you don’t need to go full-on erotica (though honestly, I think hardcore erotica is far more enjoyable to read, more real, and sexier than the euphemistic stuff), but why have a very descriptive scene only to censor over the words everybody is paying their good money to read? Pick a lane. Give me actual adult sexual content, or have everything fade to black. Please?

I looked at a bunch of the reviews of this book, astounded as I was that it was so highly rated. Where language was used as a fault, the line “my vagina senses are tingling” was often cited. Cited as gross and crass. Sorry, this was a line I found truly funny and endearing, used as it was by a female character who was grossed out by the villain of the story, a serial sexual predator. To me, it was a great Spiderman reference, and an honest thing for a woman to say. I’ve heard such comments from female friends before. Seeing this comment from the romance reading community really saddens me, because not liking an honest use of body parts, but championing “pink parts” is only fueling the female body shaming that is so prevalent in our society.

“Now if you’ll excuse us, we have a happy ever after to start” is the line that ends the bulk of the novel, before the epilogue. Once you’ve scraped the vomit out of your mouth, there’s also the ending of the epilogue, where after the main character “proposes” off-handedly on the couch, they have sex, and then he asks her if that was a yes, and she confirms it, the narration says, “after she said yes he did things that made her say it a whole bunch of times naked.” Then they fist-bumped. End of novel. Yeah… Did I mention they’d only known each other for a little more than six months at this point? Yea, I think that’s kind of fast…

But romance novels are stereotypically bad in this department according to me, who knows little to nothing about them. What other gross stuff happened in this book? Let’s start with the male lead, Mack, who winks at everything in a skirt. There are paragraphs where he literally winks at the woman he’s talking to three times within said paragraph. She’s always super charmed. This is supposed to be endearing behavior. Then there are a whole chapter where the sex the characters are having is compared to the national anthem – wanting to sing it, wanting to wave a flag, saluting this with that appendage. Barf barf barf.

I could go on, but this book isn’t for me, really. I’ll just close with a line I really did like from the book: “Smells like a camel exhibit in here.” This line is said by the bros when they come in to rescue Mack from his depression on losing the girl, and they find him in squalor. This book could broadly be described as smelling like a camel exhibit.

The Bad:

The biggest plot error I found in this book happened near the end. A group of the team is running to meet the “inside guy” who will distribute the dossier on the villain to the press as they march in to his book launch. They get there to find their inside guy knocked out, and another security guy holding the dossiers they were literally carrying to the meeting (he knocked him out to take them away, even though he didn’t know what was in them – not to mention that they weren’t actually there in the first place). Terrible editing!

There are other things – characters switching their mind on something deeply held from paragraph to paragraph, a convoluted plan to expose the sexual predator at his own event, and thinking that’s the only way to take the guy down, when in real life a reporter will take information at any time, not just when tricked into it. But it is the real lack of understanding of the human character that really bugged me.

The secret that Mack is carrying with him is that his father was abusive and murdered somebody, and is in jail. Mack changed his name out of embarrassment, and lies and tells people his father is dead. He is made into the villain towards the end of the book, because he “lied” to Liv, his love interest, about this. They had known each other for some time longer than a week and shorter than a month. They were not dating (she was adamant about that), and had slept together just twice. But he was a liar now, because he had a “secret identity” and lied about his father. People just accepted that that was a terrible thing to do. No! If that’s your past, it is yours, and you don’t owe that information to anybody that early in a relationship. Sure, you need to own up to it before you talk marriage, but not before you’ve started dating. This doesn’t have anything to do with his character, but his father’s. Shaming him for “not being honest” and having him have to come to terms with it, and be open about it publically, is just *not* something that he has to do. Weird morality here. I know it was stretched to add drama, but I think it does a disservice to his great trauma in life.

I don’t believe a group of people should take matters into their own hands to investigate a person on sexual harassment on behalf of other women. I don’t think they need to use their friend’s van (literally an FBI-style surveillance van that nobody seems to think it is weird that a friend just has – a van that never plays an important role except that it doesn’t drive fast). I also don’t think a former cop is going to play along in a game of entrapment with a bunch of youngsters out for the thrill of taking down a celebrity chef. I especially don’t think people are going to trust the “inside guy” who is the security guard for the big bad. There is absolutely nothing that any characters do (aside from taping the bad guy) that moves the plot forward. It is all them falling into luck or information that others provide. Everything happens to them. This is just not the makings of a well-written book.

The characters were also so bland and uniform, with the exception of “The Russian” who was all caricature and comic relief, and whose lactose intolerance goes into play when they almost got caught because of the smell of his fart while they were hiding. Hilarious? No. So juvenile. And also, it was from vegan cheese, which the author says “is still cheese” and thus causes him the same problem as cheese. Speaking as a chef, that’s not how lactose intolerance works.

And, can I quickly gripe about the fact that the tech whiz who can break into a computer in 2 minutes, take out the contents of said computer in 30 seconds, breaks down all the banking info in an hour to tie the sexual predator to dozens of victims financially, also says he will be unable to edit a video (literally cut it off at all), in the hour they have during a drive, so by showing the big bad to be the big bad, they will also expose Mack’s terrible history and show him too to be a liar? Remember, this is literally exposing that his dad was a bad guy… again, not seeing the problem for Mack (as if that would kill his reputation)… but also: press stop on the tape? In an hour I, a complete novice, could learn to edit video enough to be able to stop a video when I wanted it to stop. The drama was unnecessary, and the mechanism to achieve it is so utterly stupid.

I also don’t love the fact that it takes a group of men to save women who were the victims of sexual assault. I also don’t love the message that women have to be a certain way when it comes to coming forward (even though they try to say otherwise, it was very moralistic against anybody being quiet). I very much don’t love the fact that they called the sexual predator – who honestly had unwanted, forced sexual relations with many women – a mere “sexual harasser.”

The Unforgiveable:

Let’s talk about consent. The second time the main characters have sex, Liv expressly says ‘hey, I haven’t given you consent to have sex again.’ He then says that fingering her isn’t sex. Then proceeds to finger her. Then grabs her, carries her to a bed insider her own house, and then has sex with her. Without actually obtaining consent. This isn’t even an instance of tacit consent, because both parties are acting in a certain way and advancing the same act. She literally denied him consent by saying he didn’t have it, and that was never cleared up. Even if she never said no again, that’s pretty terrible for him to just assume.

Also: this happened immediately after he just shows up at her house. They had had sex once. She said she’d call after 3 days. He comes over after two, not calling specifically because he said that she’d have probably said no to his coming over. It was dark, she thought he was an intruder. She hit him with a shoe. She has to apologize to him for hitting him, and clean him up. Hey. In my mind, this dude is a psycho at this point. If you don’t buy into the 3 days before a call, fine. But then you pick up the phone. Don’t just show up at a near-stranger’s house. Don’t do it at night. Don’t sneak up the stairs. And don’t get mad when she’d mad because you acted like a psycho. And then most certainly, listen to her when she says that you don’t have consent to have sex with her again, and go on fingering her immediately thereafter.

This book is bad on a lot of levels, but the sexual assault scene tarted up to look romantic just made me seethe inside, especially because this whole book attempted to be a “bros don’t let bros sexually assault women” morality tale.

Rating: 1 very dim star of 5

#book review #am reading #amreadingromance #bad books #author

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dragonrajafanfiction · 4 years

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Dragon Dancer Chapter 20: Star of Cassell

a/n: The secret to writing good training montages is to make them as cute as all get out and then immediately have the student apply what they learn.

Previous Chapter

Go back to the Beginning

Johann and I walked in silence back towards my dorm room. The reality of what had happened set in now that things were quiet. I couldn’t believe I had just lost it in front of the entire school and someone recorded it no less.

On top of that then forcing Johann to be my boyfriend in front of everyone? Wasn’t that what I was trying to avoid someone doing to me? I was such a child.

Johann stopped walking so I stopped.

“How did you submit the answer to the quiz question so quickly?” He asked me.

“Because I saw that tablet before. While I was gone.” I said, not looking up, keeping my eyes on my hands.

“People study years to read an ancient text like that.”

I chewed my lip and tilted my head away from him.

“Meixiu…” His voice was barely above a whisper. “Please tell me.”

“I can’t. I really can’t. But…” I took a deeper breath. “You’re really smart. I believe you’ll figure it out. But when you do? Don’t tell me you did.”

I raised my eyes to him. I could almost hear his clockwork brain ticking away.

“Alright. Send me your class schedule. Most of the classes are cancelled because the teachers are out on assignment, but members of Lionheart will give you supplemental lessons to catch you up.”

“Thanks.”

“No thanks needed.” We continued until I reached my dorm, he handed me his phone number on a slip of paper. “I’ll be back here at 6 am. Get to sleep.”

I set my alarm to 5 am. And when I woke up I saw a message with him. He’d planned out my entire day down to the minute!

“He’s picked out meals for me? Isn’t that a little controlling? Geez…” I muttered scrolling up. “How long did it take him to do this?” I frowned a little to myself.

I twisted my hair into an updo and dressed in my Cassell uniform. I put my star of Cassell in the nightstand drawer. If anyone needed confirmation that I’d won it, there was video tape.

I made it outside ten minutes to six and found him waiting for me already. “You’re early. Good.” He said.

“How long were you planning to stand here?” I asked with a puzzled grin.

“It’s customary at Cassell for boyfriends to walk their girlfriends to class.”

“Oh.” He started walking and I followed him. “They have a lot of traditions like that, huh?”

“Like what…?”

“Old school traditions. Like… Old boy’s school traditions.”

“Maybe now that you’re here that will change. You bested Mingfei in one of the challenges. It’s bound to have an effect.”

“You think so?”

“Cassell College is heavily skewed toward preferring male students, even the entire gear department is male.” He told me. “Cassell only stands to benefit if you continue to excel.”

“Oh, so I guess you’re not upset that I asked you out?”

“No. I was… uh…” A silence while he tried to find the right word. “... caught off guard. I’m sure with the Star alone, you would have been fine.”

The midsummer sun rose over the college. We reached the main campus as the bells tolled the hour. The birds were singing. It was quiet. I lifted my eyes to the students who were watching us go by. Some with curiosity. Others with jealousy. A few others nodded their heads, paying a respectful greeting.

We reached the library, I felt my pulse start to hammer. Johann, who had been reaching for the door, stopped what he was doing. “What’s wrong?”

My mouth opened but nothing came out.

“You don’t want to go in there.”

I shook my head.

“I didn’t realize.” He lowered his hand. “Then where?”

A place immediately came to mind. “This is going to sound weird. The basketball court.”

He didn’t question it. “Alright. I’ll let Susie know.” He texted as I walked.

“Sorry…” As we distanced ourselves from the library, I found my voice again. “I got scared.”

“I understand. The reason why we have events like the one last night is to desensitize ourselves to what we might face when investigating dragon activity. You didn’t have that opportunity when you were facing that servitor in the library.”

As soon as we got to the courts, he put his phone away. “I have to go. Susie will meet you here. I’ll be back for you at lunch time.”

I sat on the bench where we first met and smiled at him.

He didn’t return it. “You’ll be hungry. She won’t go easy on you.”

I watched him walk away my happy feeling waning. Well, no matter, I’d faced tough teachers before. How hard could she be?

Susie caught up to me, wheeling a wagon full of books behind her. “I can’t believe we’re going to study outside. Don’t you realize that it’s forecast to be in the mid-eighties with some terrible humidity? You give someone the Star of Cassell and, suddenly, they’re a dictator!”

I winced. “I’m sorry. I’m not pushing you around, it’s just that I got scared and Johann…”

“Johann?” She reared up to her full height. “Oh, no, you’re not blaming him for this. Believe me. If it weren’t for that little emblem, he wouldn’t baby you! Who gets scared of a library?” She slammed the books on the bench, her eyes glaring down at me from above her glasses. “You’re his girlfriend for three months. I’m here to at least give you the appearance of being worthy of it!”

“Hey… I…”

She pointed to them. “These are your study materials! You have to read all of these and be ready for the test in three weeks!”

“Three weeks?! That’s insane!”

She brushes me off. “We have to cram nine months of study in the next three if you’re to graduate in time!”

“Wait wasn’t I just behind six months?”

Susie rubbed her nose as if hit by the biggest migraine.

“Nevermind… Dumb question.” I chewed my lip.

“Haha!” She gave a humorless laugh. “Good jokes. Alright, let’s get started. First history, then Genealogy, then Alchemy!”

We spent at least an hour on each, followed by an exercise to make sure I was capturing what I was learning. The minute she saw my mind wandering she snapped her fingers to get my attention. This rubbed me the wrong way but she had a good point. If I was going to live up to what they were asking me to do this would not be easy. Besides, this is nowhere I hadn’t been before. If I could dance the lead role of the Dark King, I could do this.

The heat was blazing by noon and we moved our study under a tree. Johann approached as the clocktower tolled. “Thank you, Susie.”

“Seriously? Don’t mention it.” Susie said, holding out my exam papers to him.

I looked up at him. He was carrying something. “Here, I wasn’t sure what you liked, but these seemed popular.” He said.

“You made her lunch?” Susie whispered. “Don’t you think this is too much?”

“It’s customary for boyfriends to make bento boxes for girlfriends.” His expression was blank, his voice matter-of-fact.

Susie takes a deep breath and smiles. “Oh! That’s true!” She walked away. The glare she tossed over her shoulder at me was pure poison.

My eyes widened slightly. “Oh.”

He sat next to me handing me the box wrapped in a cloth napkin. He pulled out a red pen and started reading over my exercises, marking and making little notes.

The rice balls and veggies had been crafted into cute little animals! I laughed. “Wow this is really neat! Almost too good to eat!” I smiled over at him but he was focused on grading my paper. “How’d I do?”

“Don’t worry about it. Any deficiencies will be addressed in the next lesson.”

“Right!” I took a bite. It was so good. A perfect blend of sweet and sour and salty. “You’ve known Susie for a long time? I ventured?”

“She’s extremely devoted to Lionheart.” He said.

“To Lionheart. Right.”

“She’s also the number one sniper on campus.” He turned to me as I began choking. “Don’t eat too fast.”

“Sorry.” I took a drink of water.

“She’ll also be handling your firearms training.” He flipped to the next paper. “If you agree to it. She is a tough teacher.”

“No tougher than some of my ballet instructors.”

He nodded once without looking at me.

“Have you … ever dated…?”

“Can you save questions until after I’m done?”

“Oh! Sorry…” We spent the rest of the lunch in silence.

“Here, study these notes as well as the homework Susie gave you.”

I stared at the pages. They were positively bleeding. I would probably need another six hours to study!

“Lancelot will be here soon to do your martial arts training.” He said, standing up.

“Huh? I thought you said you were going to do that?”

He halted, frowning slightly.

I scrambled to retract what I said. "It’s fine if you can’t! Just because I have that silly star doesn’t mean you’re my slave.” How much of this was because he wanted to and how much of this was because he was obligated? “If you have something you need done, just tell me!”

“Right, I’ll send you my complete schedule for the week.” He said.

“Ah…” That wasn’t what I meant!

Lancelot jogged up, waving enthusiastically. “Hey Carli!” He said, “Ready to go?”

“Don’t work her too hard. She just ate.” He said as he walked away.

“Sure thing, Chairman.” Lancelot watched him go and then grinned down at me. “You certainly know how to make an entrance.”

“I’m feeling kind of terrible now…” I hang my head.

“You should!” He started to laugh.

His good-humor was exactly what I needed. I stood up. “So what are we going to do?”

“Well we’re going to walk to the left… and then tomorrow, we’re going to walk to the right… Stance and position are just as important in martial arts as they are in ballet. I don’t expect you to have to spend too long on the fundamentals.”

Regardless of what he expected, spending time was exactly what he did. His criticism of my form and posture was constant but I took this much better because I was used to it. By the end of the hour, I was exhausted and I hadn’t done much.

“Good, you’re way above some of the others we drag in here. Enjoy your break.” Lancelot waved over his shoulder.

I had a block of three hours before study time where I could do whatever I wanted. I returned to my dorm to shower and change clothes. Much to my surprise, Ielia popped out of my necklace, looking very satisfied.

“Oh, have a good day in your dimension?” I asked.

She beckoned me with one finger and then pointed to a pen and then to the wall. “Drawing on the walls again?”

With her help, I traced another rune, larger than what I had done on the wall of the Comemnus condo. Once it was completed, I felt a pull. The blowing of the air from the AC sounded far away, like I’d been plunged underwater. She then had me trace out words, English words.

“Time Dilation. Three hours here = 1 hour outside.”

My jaw dropped. She gave me a thumbs up. Then she put her finger to her lips. I understood. This would be a secret too.

After a little nap, I got back up to study. She watched me, shaking her head and correcting me when I was wrong, adding more information if I needed help. She knew everything I was trying to learn and then some. Cassell was relying on ancient texts and archeological finds. But in her world, dragons were still alive. She even disagreed with some of the books, but she didn’t elaborate because she didn’t want to confuse me.

The next item on my schedule was a video conference oral review after dinner. Johann didn’t prepare this meal for me, instead having it delivered to my dorm.

“Were you able to get any rest?” He asked once I’m connected.

“Yes, a lot.” I noticed the strange whirring sound in the background as well as the strange seating. “Johann are you on a plane?”

“We were called out on a mission earlier today. I can’t talk about this one.”

My heart drops. “Oh… “

“Something the matter?”

“No, I…” I paused. “I just wish I could be there with you.”

“You’ll get there soon. Probably before you know it. Let’s see your progress.”

I focus my mind on the questions, getting all but one correct. Johann’s brow furrowed. “Very good.”

“Thanks!” I grinned.

He stared at me for several seconds. “I guess I shouldn’t expect any less from an S-rank.”

“Hey give me some credit! I worked really hard!”

“I have to log off now. Schneider’s debriefing us.”

“Alright. Stay safe.”

The next day, Johann wasn’t there to walk with me.

Nor did he return the day after that. That day, he didn’t call me as scheduled. My heart pounded in my chest as two minutes late turned to three minutes… then four minutes.

Before I could call him, my phone rang. It was EVA. “We have an urgent situation! All S-rank and A-rank are required to report to the Execution Department immediately!”

Next Chapter

#Johann Chu #Lancelot #Susie #Dragon Raja #Fanfiction #Writing

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spac3bar7end3r · 4 years

Text

Tricked

drarry / Ghost hunter au where one of them is a demon / Demon! Draco / POV Outsider

read on AO3 (1793 words)

Who said ghosts aren’t real?

You think ghosts and spirits are just stories to scare children? Hah! You are wrong. They are real. They are very real, and in fact, they are here.

A group of ghosts, spirits, souls without bodies (or whatever you want to call them, they are not picky with labels.) is staring from the dark. Their invisible eyes are glancing from the dark corners in the house. Their gazes are full of fear, looking at the figure in the middle of the room.

“Hi! Welcome back to our channel. I’m Harry Potter and today you might notice that my partner looks a bit different than your favourite redhead. Ron has food poisoning.” The bloke with round glasses nods. His messy black hair waves when he does that — Wait. No, no no, that’s not him. That’s not the figure in the room that makes the ghosts scared. The one they’re so afraid of is there. That Harry Potter bloke is standing next to him. He is just standing there with a frown on his face, lips pursed.

The black-haired man continues, “But don’t worry! I think everyone already knows who we have here. It’s Draco Malfoy! Most of the time he would be in fashion review videos on our channel, but today he is invited —”

“forced,” The blond bloke interrupts.

“— to be my partner today. Today we’re inside Rosewood house, the infamous townhouse that is believed to be one of the most haunted places in Westminster.”

The spirits inside the house stand tall. If they have chests to puff out, they totally would. They are so honoured to be part of this (in)famous Rosewood House. The house is just a 4-floored townhouse, not so big, but not small either. It used to be luxurious, designed with grand furniture and adorned with fancy pictures and prints. Now they are all covered in dust. Nobody lives here anymore…well, they are living here but it would consider the wrong choice of word to describe them in the same sentence with ‘living’, isn’t it?

“If you look from outside, this house is not that different from their neighbours but this house, you guys. It has a story. The owner of this house is a popular politician in the seventies. Something weird happened during the time his stay…”

“Why? Was that politician one of the uncorrupt ones in our history!?” The Malfoy bloke gasps, pretending to be shocked.

“No, he—”

“Oh, alright.” Malfoy shrugs. “It wasn’t that weird then.”

If the spirits were not confused and scared of Malfoy out of their damn minds, they would probably lift a corner of their mouth a tad bit because of his exaggerated gesture.

But they don’t have a mouth to begin with. Plus, they are undoubtedly scared shitless of Malfoy.

Why is he here? Why is he with the human, and Why, Satan, why, why is Malfoy, the demon prince himself, is starring in a ghost-hunting show produced by a human?

—-

Potter kicks the buckled rug in the room by mistake and he howls with fear. “Fuck. God. What is that.” He touches his chest with one hand. The other is holding Malfoy’s shoulder firmly. Malfoy rolls his eyes, shaking Potter off as if Potter’s touch is annoying. Still, it’s not as if the human’s touch is disgraceful, or unwelcomed (which is totally weird in the spirits’ point of view. Why would the demon prince think it is appropriate to stand next to a mere mundane human? They don’t understand).

The blond demon, who is currently a target of the ghosts’ lifeless eyes, turns his face to every direction that he knows they are hiding in. The corner of his mouth twitches. His voice is loud and clear, obviously wanting them to hear.

“Show yourself, ghosts. Trick me. Tickle me with your itsy-bitsy ghost hands.” Malfoy moves his body and turns to look at the camera, smirking.

“Malfoy! Don’t do that! What if they can hear you!?”

Oh, they can hear alright. They can hear it crystal clear. If they had bodies, they would probably shake out of fear, wondering why the fuck would the demon prince dare them to appear before him and the humans.

“Come out if you can hear me,” The blond demon grins to the spirits hidden in the dark. They don’t know what to do. Should they go out? If not, would this count as disobeying someone who ranks higher than them? Satan, what is Draco Malfoy thinking? The ghosts panic.

If there were Google for ghosts, they would probably be browsing it so hard right now, checking Wikihow or something. (“Ghoulgle and Wikihowl, am I right, lads?” the Ghost Dad who’s sitting on the dusty couch suggests and the other ghosts just roll their eyes. “Stop it, Gerard,” Katherine, Gerard’s wife, the Ghost Maid says.)

“Malfoy, you git. Don’t. You know I am afraid of them!”

“Oh, really? Aren’t you the one who told me to help produce content?” Malfoy complains. He pouts, asking “If you’re that afraid then why do the ghost-hunting show in the first place?”

“R-Ron…he said it would be interesting.”

“And you fell for that? Potter, you’re naïve.” He shakes his head, then calling out to them again, “C’mon you guys. We don’t have all day. Show yourself.”

Meredith Cole, one of the ghosts in the Rosewood house, considers for a minute before slowly creeping closer to their ‘guests’. She nods to Malfoy who treats her as if she’s an air (which she is. If you think about it, Meredith is just a soul in the air, no actual body and all that) and then she slowly holds her ice-cold invisible hand close to Potter’s nape and abruptly touches it.

“FUCK. NO. Shit!” Potter curses loudly. He jumps from the invisible touch and slides himself to Draco, two arms clutching Malfoy firmly. Malfoy looks down at the arms clinging to his neck and chest. The owner of said arms is spewing nonsense at the moment.

“Potter.”

“No! Help! They’re ghosts here! I know it!”

“Let me go. I can’t breathe.” Malfoy lies. He doesn’t really need to breathe but Potter doesn’t know that.

“Oh.” Potter lets go when he heard that. “My bad. I panicked. Something, no, someone touched my neck earlier.”

“It was probably just your imagination,” Malfoy says before slowly turning himself to Meredith and discreetly gives her a thumb up. “Good job.” He whispers.

Meredith and other ghosts perk up. So this is what the demon prince wants. Alright! Tricking and pranking humans is a piece of cake. It’s what they’re good at. If the prince wants them to trick Potter then oh, Satan, they will do their best.

“Shit! Something is grabbing my wrist.”

“Malfoy! Did you see that flashlight light up!”

“Hey! I think I heard something.”

“God! My leg touched something!!”

“You prat, that something was my leg and you kicked my shin.” He retorts and kicks Potter’s ankle. “Walk carefully. It’s quite dark here.”

Meredith laughs. Dark? Demons don’t care shit about the dark. They can see in the dark as clear as day. And earlier it was Malfoy who intentionally stretched his long leg in Potter’s way.

The ghosts frown. They don’t understand why the demon prince likes to get involved with this coward human. He even purposefully pulled pranks on the other bloke. Well, he did trick him. Is this a new way to torture human?

——

“I can’t. Malfoy. Take me out of here.”

He’s never watched Potter’s videos because he’s incredibly loud. From what Draco has seen at the office, Potter was always the loud and excited one. Always wanting to go out to places. He likes to shout some stupid words with other dumb colleagues. Draco always had to put on his earphone for that. Draco is so surprised to find out that Potter is this gutless. He thought Potter would kick or punch any ghosts he finds but no, now he’s begging to go out.

Draco finds the whole thing lovely. Potter is lovely. He’s more interesting than Draco first thought. He first entered this entertainment company as a joke between him and other demons but the more he spends time with these humans, the more he wants to stay.

However, he thinks it might be better to stop tonight or Potter might faint. He doesn’t want to carry him back to their car. Using a demon’s power is a no go since Draco doesn’t want the cameraman to faint too.

“What about our contents?” Draco tilts his head, feigning ignorance.

“Enough. We will use that we’ve got. I don’t wanna do this anymore.” Potter whines and stomps his feet like a spoiled child. He walks quickly to the camera, saying “And that’s it for today!” He nods to the cameraman, “Dean, bruv, let’s go! This place is fucking haunted.” Potter practically runs when he finishes his sentence. Dean follows awkwardly, not liking the atmosphere more than Potter one bit.

Draco smirks. For them it is uncanny and scary, for Draco it is what he’s used to. He feels right at home. For a minute Draco just stands there, taking his time.

Draco turns his face to the dark, smirking. He grins at the other ghosts who’s waiting to see what the demon who ranks higher than them would say.

“Good job.” Draco claps. “As a reward, I’ll send message to the reapers and you guys can go to the Great Beyond later if you like.”

Meredith and her ghost friends jump happily. She’s starting to get tired of the Rosewood House and she wants to literally move on, going to the after-death or maybe reborn or something.

They still don’t understand what the demon prince is doing but well, it’s not their place to ask, isn’t it?

When the video is posted, almost every comment begs Draco to come back as a co-host because of his nonchalant comments and the chemistry between him and Potter is ‘to die for.’

Of course, the company is obliged by the comments, views, and sponsors. Thus, a new Ghost Hunting duo becomes trending in no time. Ron Weasley is separated with his best mate Harry, but he doesn’t complain since he gets to pair up with Hermione instead.

There’s a huge gossip going around between the spirits. They said that if a ghost-hunting show starring a human wearing round glasses with messy black hair and a blond demon prince ever visits your haunted place, then go surprise the human as much as you want. You’ll definitely get a reward from Draco Malfoy.

(Of course, you’re only allowed to play harmless tricks. A dumb ghost accidentally injured Potter once and the demon prince was so mad.)

I’m a sucker for a story where Draco teases Harry a lot. If you have one of those please feed me. And Yes, I wrote this after watching Buzzfeed Unsolved lmao

#drarry #drarry fic #my fic #spacebartenderfic #fic #sbdrarryfic

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