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theunvanquishedzims · 3 years

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The Michigan Fleet authors posted their AUs so here are mine

theunvanquishedzims: I have SO MANY Boat Boy ideas but I'm sitting on them because I came up with a bunch halfway through the book and they got jossed by the end rollerskatinglizard: Hah! Uhhh, sorry? I think?? theunvanquishedzims: (i.e. Basil gets sad and weepy over Rich and Liam flirting at a party, Trimmer plays fairy godmother a la ripping half his shirt off, giving him a pep talk, and sending him back out there to Win Back His Man) rollerskatinglizard: *whooping* theunvanquishedzims: Jossed so hard rollerskatinglizard:Okay, that's DELIGHTFUL rollerskatinglizard: Trimmer is the most terrifying fairy godmother rollerskatinglizard: Anything else? :Dc theunvanquishedzims: Lemme get my notes rollerskatinglizard: *gleeful wiggling*

theunvanquishedzims: Okay so I stopped reading when the Sympatico grabbed Rich during the storm and it took me a month or so to get back and finish, so I was under the impression that the ship was still being fixed in drydock and not, y'know, actually being crewed and sailed. (Trimmer yelling "just let her sink" hits reeeeeaaaallly different when you know that) rollerskatinglizard: Ahaha oh dang theunvanquishedzims: So the big idea was the gangsters needing something from the Sympatico. Not the general thugs and delinquents crewing the Sympatico but the actual organized crime of the Fleet, who were getting pretty used to using ships like the Sympatico to run their dirty deeds through. Except it's basically impossible to get what they need out of it, even when they drag out one of the old IST guys. He finally tells them Rich was the one who did the heavy lifting for the past few years rollerskatinglizard: Ooooh! rollerskatinglizard: What an interesting idea! theunvanquishedzims: Hang on I need to restart rollerskatinglizard: Ah yes, computers theunvanquishedzims: Sorry, that turned into a dinner break and running errands During which I came up with a couple new AUs theunvanquishedzims: Okay, back to mafia: they track Rich down, probably snag him after he's been out boarding. Off work, not expected back on the ship, tired from all the exercise, etc. They're not overtly threatening, just pick up his skimmer and politely suggest that he comes help them, and he probably goes quietly because there's like, six of them. I'm thinking only one of whom was actually posted on the Sympatico theunvanquishedzims: So they get back to the Sympatico. She's been temporarily decommissioned until the Fleet can fix her broken processes, but that's also a cover story by the mob. They want to clear out all the smuggled goods and information, but she's basically a ghost ship, silent and empty, and even the other IST guy couldn't get more than a few blinking lights. She's sulking basically, she knows they're not there to fix her so she's digging in her heels and playing dead. Like a toddler going ragdoll when they don't want to go to bed. theunvanquishedzims: They explain to Rich that they can't get a response and want him to take a crack at it. "Has she said anything?" "Who?" "The Sympatico." "...we didn't talk to it." "Well that's half your problem right there." theunvanquishedzims: At this point you should watch Show Yourself from Frozen 2, and the crystal scene from Atlantis the Lost Empire. Stepping into the place you've been called, making your presence known, and having a greater power reach out for you. Shiny lights, chasing the spark of life to its source, and having the power consume and embody you. Rich is used to it but it's probably pretty freaky from the outside, and way less magical-looking than a Disney movie. Probably more like when Magneto activated the machine in the first X-Men movie. Step up, turn it on, and suddenly it's sucking the life out of you, making you a living battery theunvanquishedzims: In my head I am picturing the glowing blue eyes, lights cracking along the skin like lightning or circuit patterns, the implants glowing in his temples, standing at a terminal like a star trek deck, maybe a faint breeze-like movement of the hair and clothes to indicate the sheer power radiating off of him. In reality it's probably more like he falls down, gets up, stumbles along to a good spot out of the weather, and curls up in a secluded defensible spot to stare emptily at the wall for a few hours while lights randomly go on and off around the ship theunvanquishedzims: Just being trailed by six very wary mafia dudes who have probably never seen someone mind-meld a ship, and definitely not solo. He's like a zombie, and when he does talk it's very clear he's talking for the both of them theunvanquishedzims: If any of them are in sync with the ship they definitely feel the !!!Rich you're back!!! vibe theunvanquishedzims: No idea how that resolves, I guess it depends on how powerful the mafia is. If they're the kind of entrenched criminals who are ongoing characters, then they have Rich scrub out what they need then dump him back on his skimmer to face the fallout alone. He might report it to the spooks? Or at least try to tell Basil and Mitch theunvanquishedzims: If they're not recurring characters then they were definitely being tracked by the spooks, who move in once the Sympatico comes back online. Rich has to answer some very tough questions but he cooperates fully and winds up digging up a LOT of dirt out of the Sympatico, now that the mafia showed him where to look. It's another one of the super traumatizing moments that makes him look cool and heroic. Oh yeah, totally got kidnapped, single-handedly piloted a ship, and helped bust the mafia, please stop talking about it, I need a nap, and also someone to go with me next time I go boarding. theunvanquishedzims: (And then I finished reading the book and found out that the Sympatico had a new crew and was out on the water with her AI still fried and broken, how did no one notice that)

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theunvanquishedzims: Okay I don't have Trimmer's voice well enough to write this fic so I'm feeding it to you raw: Trucker AU theunvanquishedzims: Rich is a long-haul trucker, much to the disappointment of his elder sister Angela, who is in law enforcement and thought he had a decent future in it too. Athena is a pro wrestler and totally down to support her brother traveling the country (and hopefully being in the same city as him sometime, she wants him to see her kick ass!) Rich wants to pursue a degree in [tech or engineering] but college is expensive, and trucking is a good way to make money, on top of which you don't have to pay rent when you're on the road. So he's saving up for school, probably listening to a lot of audiobooks, podcasts, and training guides while chugging along. theunvanquishedzims: Not nearly as bad or sketchy as the Sympatico, but life on the road can get pretty sketch sometimes, especially when you're alone. Enter Trimmer. Or rather, enter Rich into the middle-of-nowhere trucker stopover bar where Trimmer is getting his ass kicked. theunvanquishedzims: (Gonna go ahead and say the bar is called the Sympatico, and this is a very bad night to be there, which is saying something because any night at the Sympatico is a bad night to be there.) theunvanquishedzims: Fortunately, Rich is not trapped there by the cold uncaring waters of Lake Michigan, he can just turn around and leave when he sees the nightly fight brewing. Unfortunately, he has a weakness for cute twinks, and no matter how much the guy is insulting their mothers four on one is really not fair, so he winds up wading in, scooping Trimmer up, and murder-stalking to the exit theunvanquishedzims: [At this point I pause to stare out the window and wonder wistfully what their canon meeting was like, who approached who, if Trimmer just straight-up used his lunch to hire a bodyguard or if Rich did the "are you gonna finish that" puppy-eyes and Trimmer realized how easily he could be bribed, etc etc] theunvanquishedzims: In the Trucker AU Trimmer waits until they're outside to go feral goblin on the arm that's holding him, Rich drops him, and negotiation commences theunvanquishedzims: I don't have Trimmer's backstory nailed down, the "teenage runaway" archetype doesn't really suit someone with a large loving family, but safe to say that whatever lead him to hitchhiking across the Midwest he is determined to see through out of sheer bullheaded stubbornness. The only thing worse than calling your parents to bail you out with bus money home is calling your grandma. It might have involved stabbing a college advisor when the guy got rapey, he's technically not on the run from the law, he DEFINITELY is not on track to getting his degree. Halfway between college dropout and missing person. If he was wealthy he'd be backpacking Europe for a semester, but he's not, so he's hitchhiking America. And getting molested by truckers, because Trimmer can't have nice things. theunvanquishedzims: He is really not interested in getting molested by Rich! But, as Rich points out, he did just save him from getting stabbed, Trimmer doesn't seem to have any exit options for this backwater town, and holy #&$^ the bar's on fire. (The Sympatico burns to the ground that night, to the betterment of the world at large.) rollerskatinglizard: You have no idea how much I'm enjoying this But you should totally post it Splick and Roach would both scream in glee theunvanquishedzims: Rich and Trimmer get out while the getting is good, and it's nearly dawn before they finally hash out details. Rich offers to drop him off at the next town, but they're still pretty close to the epicenter of the mass exodus so the next few hundred miles are probably not going to be safe for Trimmer. By this point Trimmer has found a bunch of the old textbooks Rich bought secondhand to study in his free time and come to the conclusion that [this nerd is a nerd] his story checks out. Just a college kid trying to scrape together the cash to get an education and make a decent living. Reminds Trimmer of Trimmer. (Reminds Trimmer of Joey.) rollerskatinglizard: ;u; <3 Beautiful theunvanquishedzims: So now Rich has a little traveling buddy! Helps him stay awake on the long hauls, lets him use the carpool lanes, even reads to him out of the textbooks sometimes, with commentary. Trimmer is really smart and surprisingly easy to get along with. They nap in the cab, eat in diners, and share motel rooms. Trimmer unclenches a little. Rich is good about not asking personal questions. They definitely watch Athena's fights on tv more than once, much to Rich's chagrin and Trimmer's loud encouragement. He started fanboying over it to annoy and embarrass Rich, but it is surprisingly cathartic to watch someone get trash-talked and respond by just BODYSLAMMING their opponent. ("Why are you rooting for her, you're the biggest trash-talker I know," Rich mutters into his beer, face bright red as Trimmer whoops and high-fives the waitress he got to change the channel in the sports bar.) theunvanquishedzims: ("She would wipe the floor with me," Trimmer responds with a smirk, watching smugly as Rich tries to figure out if Trimmer is having impure thoughts about his baby sister) theunvanquishedzims: (They have already established that Trimmer does not have impure thoughts about Rich, that Rich DOES have impure thoughts about Trimmer, but as long as he stays in his own motel bed that's fine.) (Trimmer still sleeps with a knife under his pillow but doesn't bother in the cab, where their co-naps occasionally verge on snuggling.) rollerskatinglizard: <3 <3 <3 *perfect* theunvanquishedzims: They finally reach their destination. It has been [days to drive a rig between NJ and CA] and they make it there slightly ahead of schedule. Rich drops off the delivery, Trimmer comes face-to-face with the reality of the trip ending. He'd been hitchhiking for months and felt like he was going nowhere, and now a few days and suddenly he's crossed the entire country, and almost kinda maybe had fun doing it! And California's as good a place as any to stay, at least he won't freeze to death if he doesn't find a place to crash for the night. theunvanquishedzims: Then Rich comes back and hands him a wad of cash, pocketing a stack of his own. "Got a cash bonus for finishing early! And since you're the reason I made it here this fast, I just figured part of it is your share..." he peters out, trying to explain his reasoning. They sit in silence for a while, both thinking about Trimmer in California, far away from anyone who would want to hurt him, with a few hundred dollars in his pocket. theunvanquishedzims: "...Let's get lunch," Trimmer finally decrees, and Rich can't keep the relieved smile off his face. They renegotiate some things over lunch, and then go to pick up the next load to haul cross-country. Together. rollerskatinglizard: AWWWWWW!!!! *YES,* I love it!!! theunvanquishedzims: And then eventually they go to college together, and get their degrees, and good jobs, and meet the families, and Trimmer absolutely drags Rich to as many of Athena's fights as they can manage on the road. It's just to save money, things are cheaper when you split the rent, Trimmer hollers on the phone. You put a ring on that boy's finger, y'hear?! Hellbender hollers back. I am so glad the word moirail exists rollerskatinglizard: YES God yes Also this AU pleases me greatly rollerskatinglizard: Blessings upon you for it theunvanquishedzims: ...technically the Michigan Fleet takes place in a post-Homestuck world, so theoretically it could have time to enter mainstream lexicon. It's better than "bromance" theunvanquishedzims: JUST THROWING THAT OUT THERE >.> rollerskatinglizard: Yeah, totally different feel than bromance!

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theunvanquishedzims: Speaking of Homestuck! Wanna hear the Helmsman AU? :3 rollerskatinglizard: YES PLEASE theunvanquishedzims: Okay gimme a minute to get my notes, it's not based on One of Our Submarines but I can't remember the fic title. Have you read the one where the kids redesign the helmsrig and use that to garner support for Feferi as Empress? Lots of political drama, Sollux-centric, [spoiler], and in the end they win *but at what cost* (((If someone knows what fic I'm talking about please link me, I can't find it.))) rollerskatinglizard: No, I haven't theunvanquishedzims: It's good, if you like the nitty-gritty of rebellions. The piece I'm cherry picking is the new Empress introducing a new way of helming that allows more freedom. Instead of a single enslaved lowblood being hung up in tentacle wires until they drop dead, it's something you can unplug from, allowing psionics to swap out, take shifts, etc. So Empress Clearwater (yay seadweller name) is dead, long live Empress Clearwater, and she shakes things up by introducing her new helmsrig and orders it implemented Fleet-wide theunvanquishedzims: I don't think this universe is as bad as canon but it's still pretty rough on the bad ships, and the Sympatico is a very bad ship theunvanquishedzims: Angie is still a security officer, probably fairly high-ranking as a greenblood. Athena is a pro wrestler. Sports are probably a bigger part of life in a Fleet that doesn't center around conquest. The three probably grew up in the same neighborhood, maybe dabbled in quadrants before settling on hatefriends. Oooh, or ash, Athena setting them up to talk out their issues over lunch and then heckle each other over their other quadrants could fit in that quadrant. theunvanquishedzims: Rich is, of course, a helmsman. It's rare for someone that close to jade to be so powerful, he was actually planning on a career in tech, but when he got called in for psionic testing he basically crushed it. Possibly literally. And olive is still technically a lowblood, so off to the helm with you. theunvanquishedzims: His first posting is the Sympatico, and it's a nightmare. The one bright spot (dark spot? How do trolls even. *insert rant about Kanaya being pastel goth not goth-goth*) theunvanquishedzims: The one bright spot is Trimmer, a technician whose survival method is to lock himself in the helm dock and stab anybody who tries to mess with Rich when he's piloting. It's basically how things work in the superstorms, but 75-90% of the time instead of a few times a year theunvanquishedzims: Rich can barely talk most days, they communicate via chat client, and even that requires a lot of brainpower so they can't do it when the Sympatico has to fight something or do difficult maneuvers in space, which is pretty frequently. But Rich keeps an eye out for Trimmer, directing him through the ship to help him avoid people and fights, and tweaking things like hall lights when things get hairy. I think at least once he turned off the gravity, it cost him but it got Trimmer out of a really bad situation and gave him an excuse to hole up in the helmsdeck for a few days until things cooled off theunvanquishedzims: But all that is in the past! There's a new Empress, a new crew, and a new way of helming! theunvanquishedzims: The Sympatico is one of the flagships to roll out the new helmsrig. The original crew was disbanded, culled, reassigned. Trimmer was allowed to stay (at Rich's request) to ease the transition. It's a big day, lots of media attention documenting the new helmsmen, and Rich is doing his best to keep calm. He had to do some physical therapy to stand upright and be able to walk from the big speech to his shiny new helmsrig, but as a fairly young recruit he's not nearly as bad off as some older helmsmen whose bodies have atrophied. He's still pretty skinny though, especially when compared to Angie and Athena, who he reunited with (for the cameras) #helmsmenaretrollstoo, #greenc3<green, #omgishipit, see things are much better now, people can reclaim their lives and quadrants, helming is something to be excited for not scared of, etc. Lots of propaganda, lots of attention, lots of pressure to get this right theunvanquishedzims: And then he walks into the helm and Trimmer is there. Rich would probably have had a meltdown if he hadn't been, but no one can tell because they're so calm and professional. They're both cleaned up and impeccably uniformed, the plugging in goes smoothly, and the Sympatico comes to life and lifts off into the sky into a sunset that would make a Hollywood director weep. The cameras turn off, great job everybody, and things return to normal. Except Rich and Trimmer have no idea how to handle normal. For the first 8 hours it's fine, it's good, it's a little weird that Trimmer looks so tidy and that Rich is sitting in a padded chair instead of being flesh-jacked by tentacles, but it's fine. They chat over text, a little stilted but plenty to catch up on theunvanquishedzims: Rich spies on the new crew and gossips about how boring they are and how weird the ship looks with everything cleared out and well-lit, and wow where did that section of storage come from? Oh right that used to be a hidden smuggling nook. Haha nook. See they're fine, they're laughing at the same old jokes. DEFINITELY weird that Rich is physically laughing. And then their relief shift comes on, with the new 2nd shift helmsman, and it's time for Rich to get unplugged for the day and go. Go to his room, which he has now, or to eat, which he can do now, or any one of a million things that normal trolls do, because he's a normal troll now. (This is turning out a little different from in my head but I like it.) He makes it about two hallways, walking silently side-by-side with Trimmer, before he breaks down. Or rather Trimmer breaks down. Or maybe they both simultaneously break, there is a lot of breaking happening, and it's not great that it's happening in the hall where anybody could walk by and where the new helmsman is almost certainly seeing them and possibly reporting them, and Trimmer's flight instincts are to run back to the helm where it's safe but Rich isn't there, RICH was the reason it was safe and he's not at the helm, he's right there in the hall. Rich, I know not how, picks up Trimmer and gets them to him room. It' close by, thank goodness, and it has a lock on the door, how weird, and Trimmer is there. He missed Trimmer so so much. rollerskatinglizard: ;u; <3<3<3<3 theunvanquishedzims: [The following scene contains content too graphic for wigglers under the age of seven sweeps] rollerskatinglizard: *laughing* Hardcore conciliation!!! theunvanquishedzims: From Trimmer's POV: Merrill requested him to remain a tech on the Sympatico. Makes sense, he was the only one who treated the guy like an actual troll and not a drooling mass of computational power. They got caught up, it's weird how clean and quiet the ship is, no fights to report beyond a spat in the cafeteria that turned out to be pitch flirtation. His shirtcuffs itch and he wants to roll them up but it's day one of the new empire and he doesn't want to get culled for being untidy on the Empress's pet project ship. There's so many other things to get culled for, anyway. And then shift is over. (Weird, he's used to working 16-hour days and sleeping in the helmdeck half the time.) And he has to unplug Merrill (double weird, he's not used to touching Merrill unless it's for a physical repair. Very aware of Rich as a physical person, especially when he's standing up and not obscured in a mass of tentacles.) And then they leave, together, which is WEIRD, because for sweeps Trimmer has been sneaking out of the helmdeck to go on a food run with Merrill texting him directions, and there's no Merrill on screen providing guidance to avoid fights, but there's not gonna BE any fights, and everything is the same but different and looks weird and shiny and there's a giant troll right next to him, stalking him, why didn't Merrill warn him?! rollerskatinglizard: Oh NO, ahaha, oh these poor doofuses theunvanquishedzims: From Rich's POV: he's been seeing these hallways for sweeps, but not from this angle, the ship is so familiar but so foreign to him, and he can't hear her, can't feel her, and he keeps reaching out for her even after all that training he did to get used to the new tech, there's still an absence and some part of his brain that says not being linked to the ship means something has gone catastrophically wrong and everyone onboard is going to die, TRIMMER is going to die, Trimmer is freaking out and hyperventilating next to him, Trimmer's running out of oxygen and the ship isn't responding to him to tell him what's wrong with the oxygen, and then Trimmer goes to bolt back to the helm but that's full of strange trolls and a new helmsman, and that knowledge is enough to shake him back to the situation at hand. He doesn't know where he finds the strength or the presence of mind, but he manages to grab up Trimmer and get them back to safety. It's just that safety is now his berth, not the helm. They're alone in his berth. And Trimmer is still freaking out. Sh-shoosh? Shoosh. Shooooooosh. theunvanquishedzims: Everything is diamonds and snow and beautiful shining crystals (in the movies that will someday be made about this day.) In the moment there's a lot more hyperventilating and snot. Basically, culmination behind the entire fic: do they actually have feelings for each other, or was it just about mutual survival the whole time? rollerskatinglizard: INCREDIBLY ADORABLE AND INTIMATE COMFORT, *YESSSS* Thank you yes, I'll have a dozen God that's splendid theunvanquishedzims: And they're both freaking out, Rich is hungry and physically tired and needs to do a lot of stretches, Trimmer is not used to Rich being huge and mobile and right next to him, and they both have crazy big trust issues, but...yeah, they're pale. They're so pale for each other, and it was so hard during the transition not seeing each other and not knowing how the other felt, not knowing how THEY felt, if they really had feelings or if it was all a bad situation. And now they know. They have feelings. And because they're trolls and not humans, they can flop on a pile and talk about those feelings in a non-platonic way, and Rich can pet Trimmer's hair and tell him how pretty he is and how Rich is glad that Trimmer got it properly cut instead of just hacking it too short for someone to grab, and how much he worried in the hall about not being able to see farther than his own field of vision to keep Trimmer out of harm's way, and how this whole thing is so weird and Rich is so scared but he's just really, really happy that Trimmer took the posting on the Sympatico, because he pities Trimmer and he wants him around and he was so glad that Trimmer wanted to still be around him too theunvanquishedzims: The media always depicts piling as either the traditional fairytale highblood freakout, or an extremely mellow ASMR-ish chillout with lots of hairpetting and horn polishing. Not two midbloods looting a mostly-empty room for enough junk to make a large enough pile to sit on, shrieking at each other about their feelings and how weird this is and why didn't you SAY something, me?! why didn't YOU say something?! Three SWEEPS we've been dancing around this! Well I didn't know if you felt the same way or if you just needed me to survive! Etc etc etc. Lots of getting up and stomping around , pacing the floor while ranting, trying to scavenge more stuff to throw on the pile. Rich owns basically nothing and it's the first time he's not judging Trimmer for keeping his room a garbage heap, even empty pizza boxes would be better than trying to make a pile out of two sweaters and a toothbrush. rollerskatinglizard: XDDD TuT aaaaah, YES theunvanquishedzims: Rich definitely rips off a wall panel and pulls out some wires, Trimmer doesn't even question it, they've lived and breathed this ship long enough to know what every wire does and which are nonessential to ship functioning. And with the wall panel crunched up they can pile stuff around it to make it seem less sparse, and wow it doesn't even matter that he pulled a panel down, this is HIS wall in HIS room now, he can "redecorate" as he sees fit, cue more yelling about how he doesn't know what to do with himself or his newfound freedom. The whole thing is just yelling and cussing and grabbing and shaking. It probably looks black from the outside, but they are swimming in palest cream. theunvanquishedzims: Eventually they give up on the pile. They go through Rich's entire perigee of snack rations to avoid having to go to the cafeteria, halfheartedly make fun of Rich's chewing, then crawl into the recuperacoon together. Thank goodness there was such a big push to show off how great helmsmen's lives will be, Rich scored a blueblood-huge 'coon and he's still skinny enough that they can both fit in it together. They sleep together, in sopor like proper trolls with proper lives as opposed to surrounded by pink tentacles and misery. Tomorrow they'll have to venture out for food, and do Rich's stretches and physical therapy, and head to their shift like the galaxy hasn't flipped upside-down, but they're handle that together. rollerskatinglizard: Oh help, my heart!! TuT It's SO CUTE, AAAAAAAH theunvanquishedzims: Okay my computer has been trying to shut down for the last three paragraphs so I think it's time to log off for the night, but I hope you enjoy the AUs, I will tell you more tomorrow rollerskatinglizard: Thank you so much!! Have a good night! theunvanquishedzims: (In the original version Rich and Trimmer came face-to-face for the first time since the Sympatico was busted up and Rich pulled out for rehab, and basically had a giant pale meltdown right there against the wall. There was purring, and crying, and confessions, all caught on film. Athena and Angie definitely saw. It had to be censored out of the broadcast. Someone uploaded it to Troll Pornhub and it won a Troll Pornhub Emmy for Truth in Journalism, which was not a category the Troll Pornhub Emmys had before, so congrats Merrill and Trimmer) rollerskatinglizard: *dying* oh my GOD Rich would blush so hard he'd keel over

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theunvanquishedzims: I woke up to the idea of Rich as Fezzik and Trimmer as Inigo Montoya (book version.) rollerskatinglizard: Hah! Oh man, delightful theunvanquishedzims: Soft-hearted giant and stabby little friend rollerskatinglizard: Yesss theunvanquishedzims: Only problem is Trimmer's grudge seems to be against the entire world, not any particular murderer theunvanquishedzims: But they could definitely take on the Zoo of Death together rollerskatinglizard: It could be both, in the AU! Specific grudge and also he hates everyone theunvanquishedzims: Instead of not being left-handed he pulls his feet out of his boots and surprise! More hands to stab you with Makes the acrobatics on top of the cliff more exciting rollerskatinglizard: *dying* YES Perfect! theunvanquishedzims: I don't know who the Man in Black of most beautiful woman in the world would be, but Rich catching them jumping out a window to whisk them away on horseback is lovely rollerskatinglizard: *strokes chin thoughtfully* If Rich is Fezzik, I think Basil might as well be the beautiful love interest, and Mitch is his farm boy turned dashing rogue theunvanquishedzims: Mitch and Trimmer sword fighting rollerskatinglizard: YES theunvanquishedzims: Mitch going through hell and back to save his lady love, then Rich shows up with the horses and says "hello pretty lady" and Basil is just swooning over him rollerskatinglizard: Mitch is pretty chill with Rich by then, he can handle sharing Rich didn't try *hard* to kill him, after all theunvanquishedzims: He even made it a fair fight instead of ambushing him He put down the rock and Mitch put down the sword and they tried to kill each other like civilized people rollerskatinglizard: *laughing* Yes, exactly theunvanquishedzims: Rich even helped bring him back from being mostly dead rollerskatinglizard: They're practically best buddies now! theunvanquishedzims: Which I imagine is 1000x funnier because Trimmer hates this guy and doesn't want to help him but he has info Trimmer needs rollerskatinglizard: Rich just being reprovingly like Come on, buddy, he's cool really I KNOW you bonded over your sword fight with him Don't lie Trimmer: HE'S STILL A DIPSHIT theunvanquishedzims: Trimmer: It was a little fun to take the boots off I guess, I don't get to do that often rollerskatinglizard: Hahaha yes theunvanquishedzims: Downside of being the best swordsman in the world, nobody can touch you. UNTIL NOW. Trimmer: I killed the guy but now I have nothing to live for. Mitch: Have you considered piracy? Stabbing people all day and all the rope ladders you can climb rollerskatinglizard: *dying* theunvanquishedzims: Now Trimmer's life goal is to reclaim his title of Best Swordsman, which means fighting Mitch a lot rollerskatinglizard: Which they both enjoy Sometimes Trimmer wins, sometimes Mitch does rollerskatinglizard: Roach points out that Liam would be Miracle Max theunvanquishedzims: I was just about to type that! rollerskatinglizard: Heee! Good brain wave theunvanquishedzims: You need a cure for death? Nope, sorry. You need to it humiliate my mortal enemy? Coming right up! rollerskatinglizard: YUP theunvanquishedzims: Slipping Rich the holocaust cloak "because it fits so nice" rollerskatinglizard: Pfff yes theunvanquishedzims: Which is said with a million more winky faces than the movie rollerskatinglizard: XDDD Naturally Liam is a much higher-libido mad scientist-substitute theunvanquishedzims: He doesn't have a wife he has like six boyfriend minions hanging around in various states of undress. He got fired for banging the king when he was the royal miracle man, he did a good job but the prince found it icky. rollerskatinglizard: *dying* YES theunvanquishedzims: Basil as Buttercup tho. Basil: Mitch is a good friend. :) Just a great buddy. :)) Kind of smelly but a nice boy. :))) Someone: *might possibly find Mitch attractive* Basil: What? Why. No. Why would she. I mean yeah he's smart and muscular and tan and broad-shouldered and has perfect teeth and his sweat glistens in the sun as he does his chores shirtless, but c'mon, he's not THAT much hotter than her middle-aged husband. No way. rollerskatinglizard: *snickering* rollerskatinglizard: My cowriters very enjoy this AU concept, btw, thank you theunvanquishedzims: Excellent theunvanquishedzims: Trimmer: I told him I was there to kill him and he just...ran away? Mitch: Who does that? rollerskatinglizard: *snickering* theunvanquishedzims: Basil being a slobby peasant until two minutes after Mitch leaves, then realizing he has to take care of himself if he wants to keep Mitch's attention, and only then starting to regularly bathe and brush his hair and work on his figure. rollerskatinglizard: Snirk! Sounds about right, doofus nerd that he is theunvanquishedzims: Then he becomes a princess and has two servants per limb to keep him clean and shining, so when Mitch sneaks into the wedding announcement crowd his first view of Basil is 1. clean 2. shiny hair 3. dressed like a queen

_______________________________

General book chit-chat, no specific AU

theunvanquishedzims: I saw the post about the Sympatico crew having a very different view of Rich than his friends and now I am consumed with the idea of Rich being seen as scary by anyone who knows him for more than a single minute. Like, he flinches at the sight of a uniform, he can't stand to be in a room with more than one other person in it, and he's so busy working he doesn't really have time to go around carving out a territory rollerskatinglizard: Right? You'd think it'd be tricky, but apparently no theunvanquishedzims: And now there's video of him covered in kittens, and doing cool board tricks, and pretending a little barbel is too heavy to lift, and also he might be in the news for taking down a murderous conspiracy at the Mall. rollerskatinglizard: *laughing* Indeed theunvanquishedzims: Where did big scary monster Merrill go, who is this marshmallow rollerskatinglizard: What scam is he trying to run?!? theunvanquishedzims: Oooh, I pity the fool who is assigned to a boat with Officer Merrill. Double flinch response rollerskatinglizard: RIGHT? *OH SHIT, THERE'S ANOTHER ONE* And she's ARMED theunvanquishedzims: Try to blow off some steam by watching some wrestling, A THIRD ONE rollerskatinglizard: Some poor dumbass who sneered at Trimmer once ends up hiding out on a penny boat bc there's MERRILLS EVERYWHERE, IT'S NOT SAFE OUT THERE theunvanquishedzims: *dying laughing* I imagine a non-terrible Sympatico crew member meeting reformed Rich is like those Very Special Episodes where the hero's high school bully or childhood bad influence friend comes to town, and they're so nice and friendly and apologetic about what happened back in the day rollerskatinglizard: We actually have an encounter something like that planned! theunvanquishedzims: The hero's friends are all charmed and the hero can't convince anyone that it's all an act, he's secretly still terrible, look I'll prove it *does something that makes the hero look bad and the reformed guy look like a victim* Yaaaaaaaaay!!! Outside perspective is the BEST rollerskatinglizard: Rich and this random dude, both acting like the other one is a total menace Meanwhile, anyone who's known either of them since is like ....No?? He's a fine guy, perfectly reasonable Merrill, stop growling theunvanquishedzims: Two Spider-Men pointing at each other rollerskatinglizard: Hah! Yes theunvanquishedzims: Also the fact that Rich has gotten BIGGER since leaving the Sympatico is probably a shock rollerskatinglizard: OH yeah theunvanquishedzims: Richard "Cranky Because He's Slowly Starving To Death" Merrill rollerskatinglizard: I mean, it's a shock to Rich When he hits another growth spurt So it's definitely a shock to anyone else theunvanquishedzims: Oh yeah, he was like 17 when he was first assigned there, nowhere near done growing yet Richard "My Shirts Rip When I Flex Wrong" Merrill rollerskatinglizard: *snickering* He'd look so sheepish and disgruntled if someone gave him that "I flexed and the sleeves fell off" shirt theunvanquishedzims: I am so glad Trimmer got to him before, like, a gang could figure out he's easily bribed with food. Things could have gone so much worse, corruption-wise rollerskatinglizard: YUP theunvanquishedzims: I just finished Athena and the Midnight Chicken and WOW Rich was actually kind of close to giving in to peer pressure there, if Athena hadn't thrown herself towards the proverbial sword he might have let himself be talked into something he really didn't want to do. rollerskatinglizard: It's possible! Baby Rich is very weak to peer pressure theunvanquishedzims: If they had been smart and manipulative and laid the groundwork first it would have been even easier, not just "here's a knife let your ingrained killing instincts do the work" rollerskatinglizard: Yeah! It could've gone much worse theunvanquishedzims: In the wrong hands Rich would make a very good, very sad soldier But like, deep down inside sad where no one could see it. rollerskatinglizard: That was actually close to his original story when I came up with him

[I’ll check with Skates to see if it’s okay to post that bit]

theunvanquishedzims: I'm already nervous about those two Horrible Old Men rollerskatinglizard: Which two? theunvanquishedzims: My face went D: at the idea that there's more than two rollerskatinglizard: *pats u gently* theunvanquishedzims: The werewolf guy with the boys on leashes is the one that makes my instincts scream KILL IT WITH FIRE, but there's also the one with the scar on his face? I wanna say Arthur Carroway rollerskatinglizard: >u> Gosh, Zims, idk WHY you'd be worried about him Just bc my tablet keyboard knows how to spell Carraway That's no reason to be concerned! rollerskatinglizard: Maybe Splick made him the [tarot] Devil bc he's devilishly handsome! Did you think of that?? theunvanquishedzims: I am terrified of him showing up, I know I'll be cringing too hard to keep reading right away. Men who abuse positions of power are so squicky, I couldn't even stand to watch the Office and Michael Scott is like, the most benign example of the trope But yeah a guy like that getting to Rich as a younger more mallable person, fresh-faced and eager to please. Ugh. Such a bad ending. rollerskatinglizard: YUP theunvanquishedzims: William Sandgren is the other one, I think rollerskatinglizard: Fortunately Rich did get rescued originally! I don't do sad endings theunvanquishedzims: He looks cool, I don't immediately want him dead for my own safety rollerskatinglizard: <u< theunvanquishedzims: ...I will ignore that face and continue to think of him as the lesser of two evils for now rollerskatinglizard: Absolutely feel free! ^u^ theunvanquishedzims: When I thought about this earlier I imagined Liam actually being the one to start a pissing contest with Arthur. Rich guy vs criminal guy, my grandmother bedazzled the skulls of her enemies, your teeth would make a lovely necklace, etc etc "Well I'd love to get them around your throat" ;) rollerskatinglizard: You know Liam QUITE well theunvanquishedzims: I'm a visual learner, so all the illustrations are helping me flesh out characteristics. Liam smiling like a psycho while his face drips blood is very telling. rollerskatinglizard: Hah!!! Right? God, he's SUCH a little firebrand theunvanquishedzims: (Also, AU where Liam is the babydoll heir and Rich is the soldier mod bodyguard he climbs like a tree) rollerskatinglizard: We have definitely discussed that AU thoughtfully >u> It's good, v tasty theunvanquishedzims: Rich is all THIS GOES AGAINST THE RULES and Liam is all oh you like being told what to do hmm? >:3~ rollerskatinglizard: Rich: God this is SUCH a bad idea, I'm gonna get so fired Liam: Not if you're good enough at it! theunvanquishedzims: I imagine without a pregnancy they'd be able to keep it under wraps slightly longer than grandma Beaker rollerskatinglizard: True! theunvanquishedzims: "Under wraps" like everyone in the house can't hear them rollerskatinglizard: Pffff YUP theunvanquishedzims: Ugh now I'm remembering Trimmer being scared of Rich getting drunk and pushy and I'm sad again rollerskatinglizard: No one likes Rich's drinking except Rich rollerskatinglizard: It's okay tho, Trimmer trusts Rich more after that theunvanquishedzims:I think he'll figure it out given enough time. Rich: Well everyone drinks because work sucks. Basil and Mitch: Nope! Rich: Well I'm a soldier mod so it just LOOKS like I'm drinking a lot. Angie and Thena: Nope! Rich: Well I have trauma from the Sympatico so I need alcohol to deal with that. Trimmer: Nope! Rich: ...well I guess I have a problem then. :< Everyone: Yep! rollerskatinglizard: Indeed theunvanquishedzims: I am so curious about their origins, how the relationship developed, how apparently they had half a handjob between them and went NOPE NEVER AGAIN, how they wound up co-sleeping, if they ever cried on one another, etc etc rollerskatinglizard: I'm 100% certain that Rich cried on Trimmer at least once, while Trimmer awkwardly patted his hair and gently called him a wuss or something If Trimmer ever cried it would've been in the middle of the night, and none of them would ever mention it in the light of day theunvanquishedzims: Was that Trimmer's first posting? I know it was Rich's, so he kiiiind of didn't know any better, but Trimmer is older by a bit rollerskatinglizard: It definitely wasn't Trimmer's first, no, the latest in a long string of postings that went from okay to bad to worse theunvanquishedzims: Oh nooooooo No wonder he finally said screw it and got a solo boat rollerskatinglizard: Yep

#michigan fleet #boat boys #AUs are still my favorite thing #long post #richard merrill #joseph trimmer

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theweekinarrowfic · 3 years

Text

Completed Arrow Multichapters on AO3, December 20-26, 2020

NOTE: I’m now crossposting to https://theweekinarrowfic.dreamwidth.org. Also, I'm looking for volunteers to test out my fic recommender! Need more Arrow in your life? Why not try one of the multchapter fanfics recently completed by our talented fic writers?

Olicity

Initial Contact by sidhe_faerie (2/2, 21 Dec 2020) - Hacker and Assassin verse

Contac: Hiding: Out by sidhe_faerie (2/2, 21 Dec 2020) - Yahtzee Set 2 Large straight all five connected in one story,

my love had been frozen deep blue (but you painted me golden) by MagusLibera for damnsmoaky (4/4, 22 Dec 2020) - Twenty-five years after Sozin's Comet was used to wipe out the airbenders, the war is making it's way to the Earth Kingdom. After realising that the cause he was fighting for was a lie, Oliver defected from the army to fight against his own people with his team - an earthbender, two former army comrades and a girl from the Southern Water Tribe. But his mission is interrupted when news from the Fire Nation reaches him, forcing him to head home for the first time in five years.; Set during the Hundred Year War from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Knowledge of the show will enhance the story but is not necessary to read it as this is set before the first episode.

all I want for Christmas is a divorce (is you) by thecomebackkids99 (6/6, 24 Dec 2020) - Oliver Queen and Felicity Smoak divorced over a year ago. But just a few days before Christmas, the tabloids dig up a juicy tidbit: the divorce was never finalized. Which causes a few fights, an exasperated friend or two to say something crazy, and an awkward car ride that brings the bitterness, the pain, and the truth to light.; Because Oliver Queen and Felicity Smoak are technically still married.

The Trouble With Tabloids by starrnobella (24/24, 26 Dec 2020) - All that tabloids are good for is to spread rumors.

Other Ships/Characters

As Long as it Takes by mizar24 (Dinah Drake/Earth-2 Laurel, 2/2, 26 Dec 2020) - laurel thinks that if they date, dinah will eventually end up leaving her so dinah's going to prove her wrong - as long as it takes

Dysfunctional Families by KleptoElf (Laurel/Oliver, 3/3, 23 Dec 2020) - Oliver just wants to get away from his life for a few hours. Laurel just wants a distraction from having to spend another Christmas with her dysfunctional family. Maybe they can both get what they want.

Scientific Method by kitkatt0430 (Barry Allen/Oliver, 5/5, 21 Dec 2020) - Barry Allen arrives in Starling City intending to get his foot in the door on a particularly unusual and interesting case. Maybe find out a little more about the Starling City Vigilante if the topic happened to come up.; He did not expect to be saving that Vigilante's life, but the world is a weird place. Barry's known that much for a very long time, after all.

The scientist and the dog by 47652 (Barry Allen/Felicity, 6/6, 22 Dec 2020) - Basically a AU of the scientist where Berry Allen has a service dog.; This Follows the events of the scientist (season two episode eight of arrow)

An Arrow Christmas Carol by Xenia (Laurel/Oliver, 7/7, 24 Dec 2020) - Oliver is trying to make things work with Felicity. Tommy, his parents and Shado think that Felicity isn't right for him. And what better period for some friendly ghost visit?

Crisis on Infinite Earths by IAmMattis (James "Bucky" Barnes/Laurel, 10/10, 26 Dec 2020) - The time has come. Worlds will live, worlds will die and the Universe will never be same. Discontinued. Final chapter and epilogue are now posted.

Byline by Write_To_You (Barry Allen/Caitlin Snow, Oliver listed as character, 11/11, 25 Dec 2020) - “Flash Missing, Vanishes in Crises, by Iris West,” Caitlin repeated. “Thursday, April 25... 2018.” She stumbled a step back, blood draining from her face. “Oh my gosh,” she whispered. “That’s next week.”; OR the third installment in the Flux series, in which Team Flash realizes that Crisis is coming a lot sooner than they ever thought.

Attack on two earths by Stand_with_Ward_and_Queen (Steve Rogers/Caitlin Snow, Sara/Oliver and Thea/Roy among side pairings, 12/12, 21 Dec 2020) - Sequel to 'Torn between two timelines'. Two months after their engagement, Steve and Caitlin's closest friends all gather for their wedding. Unfortunately, ghosts from the past are unwilling to let the happy couple celebrate this moment in peace.

Bird in a Storm by Ray_Writes (Laurel/Oliver, 17/17, 26 Dec 2020) - The confrontation between the Hood and SWAT on the roof of the Winick Building goes differently, altering the course of Laurel's career, relationships and efforts to save her city forever, the shockwaves of such an altered path making themselves felt throughout her family and friends.

The Traveler by Darth_Rainbow_Queen_Of_Coconuts (OFC-centric, Oliver listed as character, 32/32, 25 Dec 2020) - Lucie Aconite ran away from home.; The trained hunter away from past traumas, ran away from dark memories, ran away from a twisted family. She joined the Travelers, an organization that exist outside of any temporal zones and made of people who will never matter. Their purpose? Lend a hand to heroes in need, make sure those are the ones history will remember.; So now, Lucie travels. To very, very, different places. Different universes, different worlds. Along her way, she met Shadowhunters, Demigods, Werewolves, Warlocks, Seelies, Emissaries, Vampires, Passlings, etc. But no matter how far she goes, something will always take her back right where she started...; I own nothing but Lucie and the adventures she will live.; [AU including Shadowhunters, Teen Wolf, The Chronicles of Narnia, TVD, The Originals, Charmed, PJO/HoO/Kane Chronicles, and others. Very freely inspired though.]

Vigilantes' Dawn by Kylia (Laurel/Oliver, 32/32, 20 Dec 2020) - What if Oliver Queen hadn't let his commitment issues sabotage things with Laurel? What if he'd invited Laurel onto the Queen's Gambit, instead of Sara? And what happens in Starling City when, five years later, The Arrow and the Black Canary, together, go after the List and the rest of the City's criminals? And what happens when Detective Sara Lance finds out her sister is one of the two Vigilantes that are bringing on the dawn of a new age?

#arrow #Olicity #lauriver #olivarry #dinahsiren

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the-river-person · 3 years

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Any interesting world-building tidbit that wasn't included in your tales? This is a very interesting world you've got

I have three major bits that I desperately wanted to include in the story but never could find the right moment for. 1. (This hilarious dialogue snippet from Gaster and Alphys that never made it into the story but I decided was too funny to not save.) Alphys: (laying on floor) I’m nothing. Not a scientist. Useless. I’m just garbage. Gaster: (glances down at her briefly, looking thoughtful).... you’re recyclable. Alphys: !?!?!?!?!?? 2. I wanted to better explore the area below Waterfall, the deep pits that all the falls plunge down into, where once Alphys stood and considered throwing herself down into. The concept of it was a sort of transformation for Alphys and Undyne. They return to this place that might have been a place of tragedy, and they make it the start of something amazing. The cliffs below were riddled with caves and openings, an entire city carved straight into the rock, with grand staircases that lead down, and elevators that see a lot of use for those who don't want to walk (or can't). Can you imagine the place? Beautiful caves where every window opens up to the underside of the cascading, thundering waterfalls. And because they had hundreds of years to develop it all, the Lower City had gardens and fascinating landmarks to visit, a gallery devoted entirely to the art of Alphys' favorite animes (and oh boy were there some truly gorgeous works there. For some reason there was also a portrait of Mettaton as God and Alphys as Adam in a lovely oil painting that is a sort of imitative transformation piece of Michelangelo's very famous "The Creation of Adam". Nobody really knows who painted it, nor why, but the gallery director informed the public that it was donated anonymously as a gift to commemorate the gallery's Grand Opening.) Because Undyne had a huge part in the City's inception, there ended up being several small schools for various physical activities such as: Wrestling, Ballet, Clogging, Modern Dance, Taekwondo, Spear fighting, Sword fighting, and Water Aerobics. Also one very tiny school for Piano that consisted of Undyne herself and whoever she was teaching to play at their lessons three times a week. Down below are the Depths, the deepest and darkest part of the Underground's caverns. A massive lake that the falls plunge into. Most of its life has been spent without light of any kind, and even now it's still very shadowy. The Lower City of the cliffs sort of spills out between waterfalls to drift around the shore of the lake. But even 300 hundred years later it hasn't all been explored and the Lower City hasn't expanded much more (even with the Underground populous trying their best to spread out, they can't possibly fill every space. I'm working with an upper limit of 1,400-2,000 monsters total in the Underground, with a lower limit of 322 for the souls visible coming from Asriel in the game when he breaks the barrier. Due to the fact that Ghost Monsters were excluded from the soul snatching event, and the fact that there is literally no way to estimate how many spiders are in the Underground, both have been excluded from this counting.) At the far end of the dark lake a lonely outpost sits, home to a very very few monsters who either prefer the total solitude and darkness, or have come there for reasons of science. To study the pools of super-heated water and geysers, or the aquatic life somehow managing to thrive in the pitch black lake that is swimming with garbage from humans and monsters alike, or even geological strata that possesses very interesting formations this far down. There are numerous guidelines in place that prevent Monsters from staying at the Outpost for more than two months at a time for Mental Health concerns. Both Royal Scientists tried (separately) to use their position to override this rule. Undyne was sent to retrieve Alphys and bodily carried her back despite protests, and Queen Toriel herself came to order Gaster back to the Upper Underground (there were fireballs thrown before he finally gave up). 3. And finally, I actually fully intended to have a scene in the story where Sans demanded that Gaster tell him exactly how long they spent trapped down there, after all, he's the only one who kept track of it if you recall. But I completely spaced it when it came to writing those last few scenes. So I'll tell you my final calculations here. We know that Determination had a strange effect on the magic of the Barrier. Whenever a Reset happened, time in the Underground would move a tiny bit slower than time outside. The time spent inside the Barrier, counting both the truly ridiculous amount of time wasted in resets by both the Human and by Flowey, as well as the 300 years afterward that this story covers, comes somewhere around the area of 51,967,952,715 years. Or Fifty One Billion, Nine Hundred and Sixty Seven Million, Nine Hundred and Fifty Two Thousand, Seven Hundred and Fifteen. An insane amount of time. What’s my explanation for how the minds of various characters remained intact? Well, Gaster spent long long periods of time sleeping. He wasn’t fully himself yet as his assistants hadn’t managed to collect enough pieces of him. So unstable and having a warped perception of time kept him from actually going insane, instead letting him sleep for centuries at a time. Sans actually didn’t start to become fully aware until quite a long ways into the resets, and then spent a while trying to figure out what was going on, fought with everything he could for a while in endless genocide routes, and then eventually lost hope entirely and sort of... went on automatic for a long time before he woke up enough to change something (a single question was all it took). And Flowey stayed in a similar state for thousands of years, quietly repeating the exact same conversations, the same actions, the same patterns. The only times he was even aware enough to notice the passage of time was when something new happened. These are not in any way realistic ways of reacting to such a vast period of time. From what science we understand about the brain, it would barely last more than a couple hundred years at the very most, but probably less than that. And that’s if you can keep it in perfect condition without any decay. Memories would begin to go long before that, only fragments remaining and the brain keeping only what is relevant to you now. But lots and lots of old stories depict supernatural and magical beings as sleeping for centuries in forgotten temples, under castles, in sealed magical caverns, in caves on beds of treasure, and a thousand other variances. So I wanted to explore that in the way of a part of the Monster Soul that would act as a self defense mechanism to the Mind of the Monster who was somehow living and living and living without possibility of dying and needed to be able to stay sane throughout that. So it either makes them sleep, or in severe circumstances it can put them on a sort of automatic mode where they repeat a sequence ad infinitum. Both have their roots in folklore, but the way it works is my own interpretation of the idea. Outside the barrier, however, is a different story. The full total of time that has passed out there is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Known as Duotrigintillion, or also as one Googol. While the Underground got slower and slower and slower, the rest of the Universe continued on at its usual pace. The planet earth was destroyed by the Sun going into its Red Giant Phase, and then it became a White Dwarf. Then a Black Dwarf. Galaxies and super-galaxies went slowly dark, matter was dissolved or eaten by black holes, even black holes eventually began to decay due to Hawking Radiation. And because the light, garbage, and air being let into the Underground were the exact same stuff that was being let in at the beginning and was just on repeat forever, the Monsters never noticed. It was only when a run went on a little longer than usual, when the Barrier started trying to correct itself by syncing up time again, when you could see the darkness beyond. A darkness without stars and without life. Only cold and shadow, forever. The absolute and inexorable Heat Death of the Universe. Is it the only Universe in the Multiverse that has lived its full possible lifetime from beginning to end? Possibly. Ink would know. Whatever the case, its certainly a very very old Universe indeed (It probably is one of several branches off the original Universe, a stray timeline become a Universe in its own right).

#aeontale asks #aeontale #asks #ask #feel free to ask #worldbuilding #worldbuilding tidbits

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stephen-narain · 3 years

Text

The Work of Art in the Age of Virtual Reproduction

By Stephen Narain

This essay received the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing.

We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.

—Jay-Z, Decoded

I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

—T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“Cut” by Kara Walker (1998)

1. The Disintegrating Sugar Sphinx

This essay is about not seeing the physical exhibit of Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety.” This essay is about seeing hundreds of its virtual reproductions online.

I first encountered Walker’s work in 2007 at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. At the time, I was an undergraduate preparing to tell my parents—Guyanese immigrants to the United States—that, no, I would not be applying to law school. I wanted to become a writer. Still, my family’s pragmatism shaped the vision of the writer I wished to become. Socially conscious. Committed to a community’s particular experiences. Unafraid of upsetting that community’s standards if necessary. I had big ideas about the novel and about what the novel could do. Yet, I was also aware that the bridge between aesthetics and politics was a difficult one to build. Add to this the sophomore’s struggle with interpretation. A discerning professor during a course on the American counterculture of the 1960s encouraged me to constantly examine the assumptions guiding my claims about the political uses of art. Such proclamations might best be made after a more nuanced study, she suggested more than once in red ink on my C- papers. My response in the months to follow was to run in the opposite direction of grandeur: to read so minutely that I could never be charged of falling prey to the affective fallacy. The ideal criticism, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley wrote in 1949, “will not talk of tears, prickles, or other physiological symptoms, of feeling angry, joyful, hot, cold, or intense, or of vaguer states of emotional disturbance, but of shades of distinction and relation between objects and emotion.” I might as well have tattooed that quotation on my arm. I don’t think I laughed or cried my entire senior year.

Viewing Walker’s exhibit, which included silhouettes of slaves superimposed on lithographic renderings of Civil War battle scenes, I tried to remain as “objective” as possible. But a slave’s decapitated head was floating in a cloudy sky. Blobs that could either be blood or feces were nestled in a valley. Entire appendages were flung into the lithograph’s white borders, beyond the image entirely. I tried to be subtle when what I felt was disgust. What was the nature of this disgust?, I wondered. And how do I ensure my response to it became neither parade nor parody? How do I neither scream the near-platitudes of Amiri Baraka nor dwell in the ignorance of those people privileged enough to proclaim “art for art’s sake?”

Writing on her visceral response to E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View, Zadie Smith suggests: “We are aware that there is an emotive response for which the novel explicitly applies that is not properly requested by an atom or a rock formation or a chemical compound. Sensing the anomalous nature of this emotive quality within the university, we have resolved not to speak of it much.” My gut emotive response upon seeing Walker’s modified lithographs was a sense that they were gesturing toward the stories that remained hidden within my family, within my country, within the region I choose to call home. Walker’s pieces were the most brilliant evocations of historical revisionism I had ever encountered. The vital differences between American and Caribbean slavery aside, I wondered how my particular experiences as a West Indian person related to those “objective” criticisms I was tasked to make in the classroom. Was I supposed to suppress these experiences? Channel them in some measured, productive—and ultimately palatable—way? What, in the name of “nuance,” might I elide? And those basic facts of biography—a Bahamian childhood, a father who grew up on a Corentyne farm, Indian ancestors who crossed the kala pani many generations ago—what became of them?

Seven years later, I still have not answered these questions. (I might spend a lifetime as a writer trying to do so.) I follow Walker chiefly because her work encourages me to not only examine my assumptions about the political uses of art as Sullivan instructed—but to constantly examine the professor’s assumptions as well. I was sad when I arrived in New York a week too late to see Walker’s thirty-five-foot-tall sugar sphinx, but I was grateful that I could experience her work the way most young people living in the world experience things these days. I scrolled through hundreds of photographs posted on the Instagram and Twitter and Facebook pages of people I did not know. Things got complicated, however, whenever I clicked the hashtag #karawalkerdomino. Disturbing images loaded on my screen—the skinny boy sitting next to me at the coffeehouse might have assumed I was interested in some strange pornography. “Sowapowa” angles her camera to make it look as if she were squeezing the sphinx’s impressive areolas. “Bulzeye”—in an unfortunate accident of nomenclature—inserts his tongue into the sphinx’s vagina. “Nealmaffei” smirks beneath the sphinx’s derrière.

The virtual fourth wall demolished, I wonder how Wimsatt and Beardsley might react to the Brechtian theater that art-viewing has become on social media. I wonder what they might make of the constant bombardment of images we encounter where individuals have inserted themselves into the text. I wonder what they might make of Kara Walker.

This essay poses—and refuses to answer—questions about the nature, production, and consumption of art in this current age of virtual reproduction. It is written by a Guyanese-Bahamian-American person three days after he faced the Domino Sugar Factory for the first time, holding a fancy camera his great-grandfather could never afford, preoccupied not by the onus of history, but by all the aggressive facial hair to be found in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A photograph is stored in his imagination. In it, a forty-year-old hipster with a handlebar moustache stands in front of an artisanal cheese shop. A young orthodox Jew—hat black, locks brushing against his ears—holds his son’s hand.

They are all waiting for the light to turn green.

2. Good Selfies/Bad Selfies

“The photograph,” Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, “represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.” With each social media post, we experience the ghosts of our previous selves. For a Caribbean community that has had its identity reduced for centuries, this layering of character can provide a powerful tool for cultural change. Frequently, the region’s social evolution has been framed in postcolonial language, and I wonder if changes in media consumption might serve as a viable alternative—or complement—to these critical constructions.

In his 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners, Samuel Selvon paints a portrait of a balkanized metropolis. “It have people living in London,” Selvon writes in the inimitable voice of Moses Aloetta, “who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening to the other ones except what you read in the papers.” Newspapers, in the past quarter century, however, have radically evolved in their platform: when was the last time you sat down with a hardcopy of The New York Times or the Trinidad Guardian or the Stabroek News? Moses’ nostalgia in Londoners is fed by his physical distance from Port of Spain—but in a visual sense, his nostalgia is fed by his distance from real images of the city. If nostalgia is built from a triangular interaction between memory, desire, and sensation, the Internet has radically transformed how we remember, want, and feel.

The post-independence generation of artists emerging from the Caribbean and its diaspora are hyperaware in narrative effect—if not in poetic intent—of this cultural tide change. Christian Campbell, in his poem “Lightskinned Id,” takes a joy in the simultaneity of his skin’s multiple shades—and in what effect such a coexistence might have on the evolution of his perceptions. In “Disappearing Houses,” a collaborative project published in the Summer 2013 issue of Wasafiri, Andre Bagoo and Vahni Capildeo employ photometric techniques to disrupt our often vision of Trinidad’s economic progress. They create otherworldly images of working-class detritus in tension with the vision of glass and steel development promoted by tourist boards and self-fulfilling prophecies. The works of Shivanee Ramlochan, a journalist, poet, and editor, and Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, a painter and poet, are preoccupied with the spiritual shape-shifting we might trace back to Hindu mythology.

Boodoo-Fortuné, influenced by Frida Kahlo, works in watercolor and ink. Her exhibit “Criatura”—Spanish for “creature”—ran last summer at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago. The forty-four pieces, the artist writes, were intended to “prompt reflections on the alchemy that governs a mixing of selves, straddling life and death, their natures fed by forces of both fruition and decay.” The title piece portrays a woman, part human, part tree. Wildflowers grow from her hair. Her elongated neck is composed of skin and bark. Her eyes are exaggerated like an anime temptress, yet sadness resides behind seduction. This balance of boldness and vulnerability marks Boodoo-Fortuné’s representations of the feminine spirit. Each of the painting’s women can be interpreted as conversing with one another. But this observer wonders if the piece “Separate and Same” provides a key to understanding the exhibit as a whole. Might all the women in Boodoo-Fortuné’s collection reside in a single body, the way Parvati and Durga and Kali belong to one entity? Is Boodoo-Fortuné’s collection a yoga of sorts? And if so, is a walk through the gallery akin to clicking through a friend’s Facebook album—that peculiarly twenty-first-century mythopoesis—titled “2013 was a great year!”? Image one: a kiss on a mountaintop. Followed by a stare behind a glass of Cabernet. Wisps of hear behind a commencement cap. A contemplative look into nowhere. Then a click. A true nowhere. A white space. Until we choose to close the page, to log off, and to get on with our ordinary lives.

3. A Brief Note on Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s Tumblr Page

The title of Boodoo-Fortuné’s Tumblr page, “Wings & Fire,” further signals the artist’s fascination with flight and destruction, with hubris and humility, with Icarus and Daedalus. My interpretation of Boodoo-Fortuné’s work fundamentally changes because I follow her on Tumblr. Below one of “Criatura’s” paintings, “Mother of the Hummingbirds,” is a quote by Sandra Cisneros: “I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin (via radicalheart82), 16,625 notes.” On June 20, Boodoo-Fortuné posted an animation of a turtle with a Band-Aid on its shell. The caption: “Don’t knock my shell. It hurts a lot.” Two weeks prior, Boodoo-Fortuné posts a picture of puppy prints in her studio floor. A week before, a statue of a lady grasping wilted flowers. The same day: what looks like mortar and pestle and ferns on a woodblock. That same day again: a GIF of a woman like a 1960s Elizabeth Taylor with a halo over her crown, an image of the sun eclipsing the moon, and moving constellations, dippers—big and small—Orion, Hercules, all these stars I cannot name.

4. Anatomizing Self Construction

If Boodoo-Fortuné’s gallery exhibition represents an endpoint—and epiphany—her Tumblr page provides a glimpse into the rough work behind the artist’s elegant proofs. This is a very modernist sensibility, something I can only now articulate in this manner, in this moment because of the discerning professor allergic to bullshit. A scholar of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, the professor helped me realize that the works—The Waste Land, The Cantos, Ulysses—I romanticized as spontaneous acts of genius experienced passionate revisions by their respective their editors. These works were not created in isolation. They were the product of many hands.

“What happens when a new work of art is created,” Eliot writes in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.” In our current age of virtual reproduction, Caribbean artists frequently—and subconsciously—shuffle inherited sequences. The texture of old ideals is constantly impacted by the Caribbean artist’s engagement with, or negation of, those ideals and by her reifications of historically marginalized forms, be they of griot storytelling traditions or of the aesthetics of creolization or of the Walcottian mythology-mixing created within the region’s social web.

Through Tumblr’s interface—consisting of patterned visual displays, a dated archive, and a dynamic social network—we can glimpse, in unprecedented ways, the versions of the Caribbean artist’s self she wishes to represent to the world. Boodoo-Fortuné’s Tumblr page reveals a deep interest in gender roles, in spirituality, in the factors that facilitate—and hinder—empathy with fellow human beings and with nature. We see the influences she wishes us to see. Insodoing, we also see the content of each influence differently. We see Cisneros in relation to Boodoo-Fortuné’s “Mother of Hummingbirds.” We see bruised turtles in relation to Boodoo-Fortuné’s “Mother of Hummingbirds.” We see the stars in relation to Boodoo-Fortuné’s “Mother of Humingbirds.” And somewhere along the way, our perceptions are altered, our foci shift. The life of a hummingbird’s mother becomes foregrounded in our minds. What might that life entail? And I think back to Walker’s Civil War lithographs. I think of Toni Morrison’s Sethe.

“Every negro walk in a circle,” Marlon James writes in The Book of Night Women. “Take that and make of it what you will.”

5. Bridging the Uncanny Valley

Right eyebrow arched against social media, Smith writes in her essay “Generation Why?”: “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way, it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.” Yet, the impulse to acquire multivalent information is precisely what drives many Caribbean users to social media in the first place. It’s difficult to deny that Facebook inspires narcissism (it’s called “Facebook”) or Instagram, idiocy (young man licking the vulva of a sugar sphinx). But this generation’s online capacity to curate their visual representation—individuals actively insert themselves into dominant images, if they wish—facilitates a freedom denied to many individuals in the colonized Caribbean.

I won’t risk grandeur by arguing that Facebook feeds political independence, but I wonder how the Arab Spring might have turned out if millions of people took Smith’s skeptical route. She is correct on this point, however: the Internet user loses himself in the social network’s vast garden of forking paths. The pornography addict, the terrorist recruiter, the pro-democracy activist: all of them transcend their physical selves online, becoming the “set of data” points they wish to project to the world.

Two of the most promising voices in Bahamian culture—the novelist A.L. Major and the academic Angelique Nixon—both engage with the ways in which the expectations of the tourism industry have impacted, for good and for ill, the prism through which Bahamian people view their history and themselves. “When colonialists discovered the islands,” Major writes in a Michigan Quarterly Review blog post “Going to Watch Junkanoo,” “they found a way to instantly categorize those areas, a way to describe and recognize the islands easily. Tropical birds, exotic fruits become the recognizable features of a tropical landscape, and not, for example, poorly maintained roads or overburdened garbage collection sites. It’s this brochure self-knowledge, an ability to see the world as tourists might, that stifles creativity.”

Uncovering the garbage, for Major and for other post-independence Caribbean thinkers becomes a call to action, even as—for the sake of propriety and tourism advertisements—many Bahamian citizens might want to keep these images concealed. Yet one can’t help but feel that figures such as Major and Nixon take an end-justifies-the-means approach to criticism: in their ethical cost/benefit analysis, their people’s self-understanding far outweighs a Norwegian tourist’s ability to enjoy her suntan.

If Major uses a literary magazine’s blog to interrogate the images coming in and out of the region, the Barbadian photographer Risée Chaderton uses a TED talk to interrogate how such images, in real ways, impact the Caribbean body politic. In “Shaping Who We Are,” Chaderton discusses the rise of eating disorders amongst Caribbean men and women. She studies the “uncanny valley”—a perceptual space where non-human images appear to be human. Near the cusp of this valley might be robots or Disney characters—as well as many of the models on the covers of style magazines that make their way into Caribbean dental offices and public libraries and teenage bedrooms. Chaderton’s photographs, committed to celebrating healthy Caribbean body images, necessarily oppose the images that fall within the uncanny valley, just as Major’s blog opens a space for Bahamians—and non-Bahamians—to interrogate the assumptions guiding the country’s history-writing.

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What artists like Chaderton—and Walker and Boodoo-Fortuné—encourage is a radical reconception of the Caribbean female body, a site that has been abused, distorted, and commodified for much of the region’s history. Understandably, these artists’ work is in constant battle with the sheer force of incoming images from international media. However, the intimacy of these artists’ visions allows us to anatomize self-construction—physically and spiritually—in the tradition of Janine Antoni, Paule Marshall, and Jamaica Kincaid, three of the most innovative Caribbean artists of the twentieth century. As Walker’s giant sugar sphinx appears lower and lower on the public’s collective Instagram feed, I wonder how these artists’ work will evolve in the years to come. I wonder what their art (and their tweets) might teach us about who they are individually becoming—and about what the Caribbean, as both a region and a sensibility, seeks to represent down all its plural avenues.

#Alice Yard #Caribbean #Art

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whumpster-fire · 4 years

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Man, I’ve paid like zero attention to the Five Nights At Freddy’s fandom since, like, FNAF 4 or 5 came out, and today I tried to look up the full lore and timeline, and like... what the fuck is all this shit?

So I guess nothing’s changed in that despite there being multiple books now apparently, nobody actually knows what’s going on, but apparently there’s crazy shit like at least one murderer who’s running the company making the animatronics and designing them specifically to kill people, the killer’s Mike’s Dad or something but Mike may or may not be an actually robot or something.

So I’ve got some really hot spicy takes here that’ll probably get me put into a Cringe Compilation(TM), but w/e.

Hot Take #1: FNAF 1′s lore was actually really fucking good, because (a) while it was vague, it was simple, and both of those things are your friend in a horror franchise, and (b) while it had supernatural / sci-fi elements it was, on a basic level, grounded in reality enough to be genuinely scary.

Seriously: a serial killer using child-friendly mascot costumes at a Chuck E Cheese type restaurant to disguise himself as an employee, and/or an actual employee wearing these things, to lure children away, is scary because it feels like something that could actually happen, like you could turn on the news and there’s this story about this crime happening in some city a couple states away that you’ve only heard of like twice in your life but you know exists. Serial killer hiding victims’ corpses inside the animatronics? More of a stretch. It’s not something that feels like it would actually happen IRL, but that’s exactly the kind of shit that there are real urban legends about.

“Someone murdered some kids in a Chuck E Cheese like twenty years ago and stuffed the bodies inside the robotic mascots and nobody noticed until the customers complained about the smell” is something I would not bat an eyebrow and hearing while watching a “Top 10 Creepiest Rumors About Beloved Kids’ Franchises” video at 2 AM on YouTube or something. Add in the robots coming to life at night and attacking the security guards, and like... FNAF 1 is basically a creepypasta - i.e. classic folklore ghost stories but they’re on the internet now - as a video game. Somebody telling this story as a “I swear this actually happened to me!” first person account, claiming they worked the night shift for a week a while back in college and they saw crazy shit and they were afraid from their lives and it seemed like they got hired because the guy who had their job before them was killed? That fits in perfectly.

Hot Take #2: Every game after that made FNAF’s lore worse - and rarely for sequels it actually retroactively fucked with the original too.

2 and 3 weren’t that bad because they added a kinda interesting backstory and a satisfying ending that tied it all together, but the fact that both of the major events of the original game’s plot - the murders and the Bite of 87 - almost certainly involved an animatronic that didn’t even appear at all in the first game actually retroactively makes the lore introduced in the original game less satisfying by throwing a red herring on obvious leads like: “Foxy has been shut down for years and his jaw seems to be fucked up HMMMMMM...” and “What even is Golden Freddy he’s just a suit HMMMMMM...”

But when you get to the point of having to go... wait a minute, were there two separate incidents where a robot bit someone’s head off? Were there two separate incidents where five children were murdered? That’s a massive red flag that your lore has become a convoluted train wreck and you’ve passed the point where it was time to stop. Not every horror franchise should try to be Dark Souls or Bloodborne with its lore. I’m admittedly not a huge horror fan but I can’t think of a single horror franchise that has been improved by having a massive expanded universe with a ton of lore.

Hot Take #3: Mangle is the scariest animatronic in the entire series. Not because of the fucked-up-ness or because of the static or even because of the probably biting Jeremy’s face off. Mangle is the scariest because they had this piece of extremely powerful, mobile machinery sitting around, with the power on, with all of the safety covers preventing someone from touching something dangerous removed, and they were literally letting small children physically interact with it with no apparent supervision. Yes, let the toddlers play “take apart and put back together” with the exposed wiring on an electrical system that is probably capable of pushing hundreds if not thousands of amps through a conductive object, that’s smart.

Hot Take #4: Mangle is adorable and sad and somebody should give that sketchy death-machine a hug despite what I just said. An abused probably-sentient robot that’s falling apart from being abused by douchebag bratty kids and the maintenance techs just stopped giving a shit and were like “fuck it I hate her anyway, kids do your worst?” This character is perfect for this blog! Also in SL the guard gets to abuse sentient robots with a taser, so more Just Gold robot whump content.

Hot Take #5: IDGAF what this says about how immature my sense of humor is: Five Nights At Fuckboy’s is still a masterpiece and one of the seminal artistic works of the 2010s. I N H A L E.

#whump #fandom meta #dumb rant #dumb rambling #Five Nights At Freddy's #Fandom Discourse #robot whump #Chuck E Cheese mention cw #OSHA Violations

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tendaysofrain · 5 years

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Random Stuff #3: Peach Blossom Springs--a Place Not of This World (《桃花源記》)

For a Random Stuff post, this is a very long one. Sit tight y'all, it's story time.

In the Taiyuan years of Eastern Jin (1), there once lived a fisherman in the Wuling (2) area. One day, he paddled his way up a stream, eventually forgetting how far he'd ventured.

All of a sudden, the fisherman found himself near some woods consisting entirely of blooming peach trees. Within two-hundred paces of the water, delicate flowers, lush green grass, and fallen peach blossoms carpeted the banks. Astonished at this sight, the fisherman decided to press on, determined to reach the end of these woods.

Arriving at the source of the stream and the edge of the woods, he found a cave in the side of a mountain. A light beckoned at the end of the tunnel. The fisherman, now filled with curiosity, abandoned his boat and gingerly entered the tunnel.

At first the passage was narrow and could only fit one person, but after walking for a while, the walls abruptly gave way to the scenery on the other side. Fertile farmland and rows of houses framed by plains spread out before the fisherman, decorated by ponds, mulberry trees, and clusters of bamboo. Little paths fringed the fields, reaching into all corners of the village, while the clucking of chickens and the occasional woofing of dogs formed an audible backdrop. The villagers worked among their crops, dressed in much the same way as everyone outside of this paradise. There were elders and youngsters as well, and all seemed to enjoy their lives.

The villagers also seemed shocked to see the fisherman, so they asked him where he was from. The fisherman answered their question, and was promptly welcomed into their homes as a guest, where they prepared a feast for him. The news of the fisherman’s arrival soon spread, and other villagers who caught wind of this man from the outside came to greet him.

From the conversation the followed, the fisherman soon learned about how these people came to settle in such a secluded place. Over half a millennia ago, their forebears fled from a war (3) that destroyed much of their hometown. Eventually the refugees found this paradise, so they settled here with their families and never moved out again. When the fisherman asked if they knew the current government, the villagers apparently didn’t. They didn’t even know about the previous dynasties (4), so the fisherman recounted all that came to pass in the past few hundred years: all the tales, the wars, the changes. The villagers could only react with sympathetic sighs.

After the conversations and more feasting over the following days, the fisherman finally bid goodbye to the villagers. Before leaving, the villagers requested him to refrain from telling others about their village.

Unfortunately, the fisherman did not plan to keep the secret. Upon emerging out of the cave, he found his boat and began rowing back slowly, while marking the way he came. Once he was back in Wuling, he relayed his discoveries to the mayor. The mayor immediately ordered some of his men to follow the fisherman back to the village. However, they could not find the marks left by the fisherman, and soon became lost.

Nevertheless, the rumors of the “Peach Blossom Springs” circulated far and wide. A hermit in Nanyang (5) by the name of Liu Ziji (6) heard the rumor, and came to search for this place. The hermit failed, and died soon after. Since then, no one has tried to find the place again.

(Notes and Interpretations/Background below)

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Notes:

Taiyuan years of Eastern Jin: 376-396 AD.

Wuling (武陵): a city during Eastern Jin dynasty. Around the same place as Changde, Hunan (湖南常德) today.

Over half a millennia ago; war: refers to the Warring States era before Qin dynasty was established, or ~5th century BCE to 221 BCE.

Previous dynasties: refers to Han dynasty, Wei dynasty (including the Three Kingdoms era).

Nanyang (南陽): a city during Eastern Jin dynasty. The city still exists today under the same name.

Liu Ziji (劉子驥): a real person who lived during Eastern Jin era; his birth name was Liu Linzhi (劉驎之), Ziji (子驥) was his courtesy name. He has an official biography in The Book of Jin (22nd biography under the Hermits chapter).

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Interpretations and Background:

As you can probably guess from the story itself, the Peach Blossom Springs isn’t a real place. It’s a story, after all, and it’s the very story where the four-character idiom 世外桃源 (meaning “a paradise beyond this world”) originated. But as stories go, people have different interpretations.

The most well-supported interpretation was somewhat based on the author’s life. The author of this story was Tao Yuanming (陶淵明, 365-427 AD), and at the time he wrote this story, the country was again in turmoil, people were suffering, and the government wasn’t doing anything to help. This story was also written as an introduction for his poem of the same title and subject. The last 2 lines of the poem, however, gave a hint of his motivation: “The average mortals of this world, how would they know the wonders that lie beyond? / I would rather fly away with the breeze, to search far and wide for my soulmate.” (請問世間凡夫子，可知塵外此奇跡？我願踏乘輕雲去，高飛尋找我知己。) Thus, the Peach Blossom Springs could be understood as Tao Yuanming’s version of an ideal world, a sort of utopian dream, born of a harsh reality.

The second interpretation was more or less the same as the previous one, except it was slightly more morbid. It proposed that perhaps instead of the Peach Blossom Springs being an utopian dream, it might have been Tao Yuanming’s vision of what the afterlife looked like.

The third interpretation likely came about in the age of the internet, and, the internet being the internet, this interpretation is the darkest of the three. People theorized that instead of the story being about an utopia, it was all an illusion. The refugees fleeing the war died, and the Peach Blossom Springs was actually an ancient neglected cemetery where they were buried. All the villagers the fisherman saw were ghosts.

But, regardless of the interpretations people came up with, there’s one thing that everyone agrees on: the Peach Blossom Springs is not of this world.

#random stuff #my translation #peach blossom springs #chinese literature #storytime #桃花源记 #陶渊明

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anthropwashere · 4 years

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i’m still, still dreaming magnificent things (part 4)

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

(Alternate site locations, plus a handy dandy GSheet of all the Resembool folk, plus a Spotify playlist to come. Head’s up, this chapter’s 19k words.)

It can't be.

Dad ran off. Dad left them. Dad died penniless and alone, with neither identification or cenz on him, and so was buried in a pauper's grave in some far-off corner of the world. Once upon a time—when Alphonse had still been alive—Ed had declared this to be the only acceptable reason for Dad's continued absence. It's a sad scenario to be sure, but it's one Alphonse reluctantly agreed with, then and now, if for no other reason than that it's the only one that makes sense.

More recently—and more hardened by the world and all its indifferent indignities—Ed considers Dad—"That bastard"—the type of creep to leave a string of broken-hearted single mothers behind him. Granny had all but boxed his ears the one time he'd said as such near her, and Ed had fled back to East City in a huff that same day. He didn't come back until his automail was practically a dead weight dangling from his stump, and then it'd been Winry's turn to berate him senseless.

(Ever since then Alphonse has tried not to linger on the bitter thought. He likes to think Mom had been a better judge of character than that, and even if she hadn't been there's no way the Rockbells would have ever opened their arms to a sleaze like that. Better he be dead, taken by the same illness that took Mom, taken by a terrible accident, taken by a petty thief with an itchy trigger finger. Better orphaned than abandoned.)

Dad is dead and gone. He has to be.

But there's no mistaking him.

Alphonse has seen this same face smiling sheepishly out of aged photographs a hundred times if he's seen it once. He knows this is the same face found in the family portrait pinned to the corkboard in the Rockbell's house. Ed had wanted to get rid of that picture but Granny wouldn't hear of it, so he'd compromised by covering the half of it with him and Dad entirely with pictures of Alphonse. That photograph is what, thirteen years old now?

And Dad still hasn't changed at all.

Without warning the little flock of birds all scatter in a burst of shed feathers and furious wittering. Alphonse shields his face out a habit not yet broken, only lowering his arm once the sound of flapping fades. The man—Dad, it can't be, it can't be, it is—watches them fly off with an absent-minded furrow to his brow. Alphonse is too far away to see what color his eyes might be behind his glasses, but he knows they'll be the same rare yellow as Ed's are and his were and something about that stings.

"You can't be here," he whispers aloud.

The man—Dad—moves on, heading up the dirt road out of town. It's baffling to see him in motion. There've been too many years with only photographs to know him by, too many years speaking of him in only the past tense. This—

This doesn't feel real.

He follows, half-expecting the broad-shouldered man to be a figment of his imagination, half-hoping he'll wink out of sight at any moment and things can go back to normal. He's almost—offended by the appearance of this absurd apparition, this inane interruption to his perpetually dull purgatory. He no longer expects surprises from any corner but Ed's, and even Ed can be fairly predictable in his own off-kilter way. In the years since Mom died, the only family he's had is Ed and Winry and Granny. Everyone else has gone away, taken away too soon, Dad in that number. But here—impossibly—he is again.

"You can't be here," he repeats, more adamantly this time. "This isn't—it can't actually be you. There's no way you're really Dad—"

The man stops, frown deepening as he turns back to regard the town proper laid out behind him. Alphonse follows the line of his gaze on reflex. It's a nice view from here, sure, but he's seen it a thousand times before and he'll see it a thousand times again. He looks back at the man in time to see him startle like he's just remembered something urgent. Whatever it might be doesn't matter a whit to Alphonse, of course, so he shelves that instinctive curiosity and glares up at him.

"No," he says, churlish and childish and damn near pissed. "This is stupid. This is bullshit. Why'd you come back now?"

The man says, "Alphonse."

The man—Dad. Dad isn't looking at the town proper. He isn't. His gaze is lower, focused on something far closer. But this is an empty stretch of dirt road, no houses nearby, nothing interesting to catch the eye at all.

There's nothing here except him. And Dad just said his name.

He shakes his head like a dog. No. No way. He—he heard wrong. He imagined it. There's no way Dad could possibly know he's standing here. Dad's alive; the fresh footprints in the road are proof of that. Only another ghost could see him, so there's no way Dad said his name—

Dad breathes shakily. Dad has the audacity to say, "It is you. Oh, Alphonse. What happened to you?"

He can't speak. He can't even move. If he does either thing he's sure this impossible dream—nightmare?—will fall apart. Dreamstuff and wishes, all of it useless to a dead thing like him.

This can't be happening.

Can it?

(Oh god, please. Please let this be real.)

"You—" His throat isn't real enough to choke, but he feels the need to clear it and start again anyway. "You can see me?”

"Of course I can," Dad says.

"He shivers. That—that was a reply. A real reply, not happy coincidence. A real reply from a living person. "Y—you can hear me too?"

"Yes. Yes, of course I can. Alphonse—"

"Stop."

Dad stops. His hand has twitched from his side, reaching out, reaching like he means to touch Alphonse. A hug, or to ruffle his hair, or whatever small gesture fathers do to sons they haven't seen in ten years. Dad doesn't know. Dad hasn't realized.

"I'm dead," Alphonse chokes out. "I died. Years ago. You shouldn't be able to see me. No one can."

Dad's hand hovers a breath longer, then falls. His overcoat hisses against itself. Hush, it says. Hush. "What happened?"

Everything. Too much. Too many years. Too many moments Dad should've been here, should've helped them, should've taught them to know better, should've stopped them—

"You left," he musters. "You left."

"I...." Dad seems to straighten. To harden. He recovers from his shock, and becomes so still he could pass for a statue. "I had to. I was always going to come back."

The laughter that bubbles out of him is nothing short of arsenic, bitter and foaming. He's as surprised by it as Dad seems to be. "Back to what? There's nothing left!"

Dad looks away from him, out across the rolling hills and the silver ribbon of the river bifurcating Resembool proper and Resembool rural. He looks to where their house once stood, to where there's only a tree half-blackened and a shrug of weedy ruins. Dad looks, and looks, and after a heavy moment he asks, "Where is my house?"

Not "our." His.

For a moment Alphonse hates this man just as much as Ed seems to. He hates him for his arrogance and his ignorance, his narcissism and his dismissal of the only living family he has left. Alphonse would be sick with fury if he were still capable of feeling anything, and so he sees no reason to be kind when he snarls, "Ed burned it down after he became a State Alchemist. You left. Mom died—" He clenches his fists raising his voice to be heard over Dad's sharp inhale, "—I died. Ed's gone. There's nothing left for you here, so why'd you come back?!"

"I—I didn't...." Dad steps back from him, shaking his head. He wavers; unmoored, floundering. "I didn't know. I don't—I'm sorry. Alphonse, I'm sorry, I don't...."

Alphonse knows he should do better than sling accusation and demand answers. He should be better.

But it's too much.

He can't. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Anger, black and stormy, fit to rival Ed at his most unhinged and spiteful, all but overwhelms him then. For all that he has no throat he still finds himself choking on bitter grief for what should have been.

(If only Dad hadn't left. If only Dad hadn't left when he did. If only he'd been here when Mom got sick. If only he'd been here when Mom died. If only he'd been here when Ed first voiced the idea of human transmutation. If only, if only, if only—)

He jabs a finger up the road. "Go talk to Granny. You owe your old drinking buddy a visit, at least. She'll be happy to fill you in on everything you missed."

"Alphonse—"

But he kicks off of the ground before Dad can finish, uninterested, unable, darting away. He doesn't care where, so long as it's somewhere he can be alone, away from living and dead both. He needs to be alone. He needs time to calm down. He needs time to breathe for all that he can't breathe, to find his center the way Teacher taught them to. He needs to find some distance so he no longer feels like the stupid little boy asking Mom when Dad will come back. Mom's gone, dead twice over—

(And guilt gnaws at him, as cutting as it had been the day he watched Granny bury the thing they'd made.)

—and Dad is—

Dad is—

Dad's alive.

Dad's come back.

None of this makes any sense. None of this fits the tidy little afterlife Alphonse has resigned himself to; watching the rest of his family live out their lives and pass away without ever knowing some shade of him was still here, crying out and going unheard.

From the moment he realized even Ed couldn't sense him he's known he'll have to watch the three of them die. He's been dreading the inevitable report of Ed's messy death in the news for—for too long, really. Granny's only getting older. Already there have been a few occasions where he found her napping and thought the worst before some small twitch or snore relieved him. Winry's the only one he expects to see 1920, and beyond that besides. She'll finish her apprenticeship in Rush Valley and no doubt follow a similar path as Granny did at her age. She'll travel for a few years, or many years, but eventually she'll come back to Resembool to keep Rockbell Automail going strong where it's needed most. Maybe she'll marry one day. Maybe she'll have a child of her own, or even children. She and Granny have talked about that possibility once or twice, and Alphonse had laughed at the way she'd wrinkled her nose. But it's a nice thing to imagine on her behalf. A lineage that will last beyond her own small lifespan, the Rockbell name carrying on.

(Winry doesn't really strike him as the type to take her husband's name. Not with the weight Rockbell carries in the world of bioengineering.)

He's seen how the other ghosts all keep wistful vigil over the generations that have survived them and come after them. Watching them watch the living is the closest thing to a mirror he's got, and it's a sobering reflection. Sobering, lonesome, and yes, more than a little creepy, but it's all he's had to look forward to. He'd resigned himself to a state of uninterrupted observation, of decades and eventual centuries of quiet obsession.

But now here's Dad again, come back from the metaphorical rather than the literal dead to throw an enormous fucking wrench in everything!

He's had to watch Mom die twice already. He's going to have to stand over Ed's grave one day soon. He doesn't want to have to do the same for Dad too.

In hindsight, he realizes he ought to have gone to Rockbell Automail too. He could've heard word for word what Granny's spitting in Dad's face right now, found some petty gratification in whatever justified vitriol she's slinging. But it's....

It's too much.

All of it is too much. Dad here, alive, seeing him. If he were so inclined he could ask Dad any old question that comes to mind and be answered. He could tell Dad all the nasty, cruel things Ed might snarl if he were here in his stead. He could fill Dad in on every nasty, cruel detail Granny might be so inclined to gloss over out of kindness toward her old drinking buddy. He could do more today than he's been able to since that nasty, cruel night, and it's—

It's too much.

He's retreated to the cemetery for now. Not many people come out here to visit their dearly departed in the middle of the day, nor are there any ghosts perched on their headstones either. There's only him and the encompassing, comforting silence of a summer morning not yet overwhelmed by buzzing insects or birdsong. There's a breeze, heard rather than felt as it hisses through grass in need of a trim. There's the crinkling of the paper wrapper on a bouquet of flowers on a nearby grave (infant son of Filip and Katerina Danchey, born September 18, 1913). The sun is high. The sky is clear. It's probably warm out, not that he can feel it. He can't feel any of it; not the sun or the wind or the grass or the fabric of the clothes he died in. He can't feel anything, numb in a way the vocabulary of even the most precocious of ten year olds can't express.

(It still manages to surprise him, sometimes. How much dying has hollowed him.)

Dad didn't know.

All these years since Mom died, all these years since they tried and failed so terribly to bring her back, and Dad didn't know.

What kind of world can allow that? There must have been a thousand opportunities that Dad could have saved them from years of grief and pain and loneliness, a thousand days he could have picked up the pieces of their broken home before they could cut themselves to ribbons on the terrible hope of what if. A thousand chances at salvation, but Dad hadn't known he was needed here. All these years, Dad thought a happy home waited for his return. He'd thought Mom perfectly fine, taking care of their too-clever-for-their-own-good sons, living in a home Ed hadn't burned down just so he could keep treading water all on his own.

It's too much.

Better Dad dead than ignorant.

He sits at the foot of Mom's first grave, curled up with his arms wrapped tightly around his knees. Granny's been by recently; the headstone looks freshly scrubbed of moss, the nearby grass pruned of weeds, a small bouquet of white gladioli only just beginning to wilt beneath Beloved Mother. He sits, tightly wound, listening to the wind. His thoughts are a perfect match to the rushing, senseless noise.

He's overwhelmed. Overstimulated even, if such a word can be applied to someone who only has sight and hearing left of his senses. Either way, this tight knot of mute panic is a sensation he'd nearly forgotten the feeling of; the sticky way it clings, the choking way it squeezes. Funny, how quickly things fade without new stimuli.

Fucking hilarious.

He doesn't know what to do. How to react. How to act in the first place. There's someone new and alive to interact with, and it's Dad. Can Dad see other ghosts, or just him? If it's only him is it a matter of blood that lets him? If that's the case, then why can't Ed? If Dad can see ghosts, period—why? How? Is it something that can be taught? Would he be willing to teach Ed? Could Ed be restrained from punching Dad long enough to learn?

(Mm, that last one probably not. Granny though, she's impressively patient. She'd been putting up with Ed and Winry's constant fighting for years now. She deserves a sainthood for that alone, honestly.)

Time passes. Hours, probably. The shadows of the headstones are beginning to stretch thin and dark when he hears footsteps on the dirt road skirting the cemetery. He doesn't look when the footsteps soften on the grass, coming closer. He doesn't look when a man's broad shadow spills through him, darkening his own edges so that, for a moment at least, he almost looks solid in the burnt afternoon light. He doesn't have to look to know who's there. Funny, how he already knows—remembers?—the sound of Dad's footsteps.

Nothing is said for a long time.

Alphonse chooses to break the silence first, lifting his gaze to Mom's headstone. Her name, her birth, her death. The pretty but meaningless words carved beneath those facts to sum up her few years. 26 had once seemed like such a mature and far-off age. Funny too, how perceptions can still change even when you can't get any older.

He asks, "Why can you see me?"

Silence.

Then—

A soft, stifled sob.

He twists around to look up at the man, expecting....

He doesn't know what to expect anymore. All of his expectations have been wrung out and frayed to meaningless scraps in the wake of Dad's return. But tears? Dad's face contorting as he sinks to his knees? Dad tearing his glasses off to scrub his eyes? Dad, overcome with grief?

Shame is a salve and a salt both. Alphonse finds it easy then, a relief even, to let his anger and resentment bleed away. He was cruel to think so poorly of Dad, and an idiot too.

By the time Dad quiets his face has become a splotchy mess, eyes red-rimmed and a few strands of his hair clinging to his damp cheeks. Hair and eyes the same color as Ed's. The same color Alphonse's were too. He looks nothing like the man in Granny's old photographs, nor like the closed-off paper cutout Alphonse had built in his head out of secondhand stories and fuzzy memories. Dad looks miserable and wrung out. He looks like anybody would when they'd been told their whole world had crumbled when they hadn't been there to do anything.

Dad paws his eyes dry, slipping his glasses on again. "I didn't know," he says hoarsely. "I didn't. I thought she'd be.... I didn't realize I'd been away so long. If I'd known—" He takes a shuddering breath. "I would have come back. I swear to you—"

"I believe you," Alphonse says.

"I'm sorry. Truly I am. Trisha—" Dad's whole face crumples.

Alphonse considers him for a moment. "You never got any of our letters, did you?"

"...No."

Well. That's alright then, isn't it?

"Why can you see me?" He asks again.

Silence.

Then—

One large hand reaches out to cup the empty air where Alphonse's shoulder hunches. He grimaces, pulling away. "Stop that. I can't feel it."

"I...." Dad lets his hand fall back to his lap. "I've been able to see the dead for a long time. A very long time."

All those old photographs. Decades passing Dad by without touching him. "How?"

Dad breathes.

"I'm a monster."

It's dusk by the time Dad finishes his story. His impossible history. Lost Xerxes and the Philosopher's Stone. The Dwarf in the Flask. Unwanted immortality at the cost of so many dead. Centuries spent hiding away in Xing, learning the breadth of his curse. Learning too, everything he could about every single soul caught inside him. The sheepish admittance when pressed for details that the Xingese think rather highly of the man that came to be called the Western Sage. Friends come and gone, come and gone, come and gone. Growing weary of a reverence he'd never asked for nor sought to keep once given it. Going west, and farther west still. Decades spent wandering until Pinako strong-armed him into a friendship that led him following her hangdog to Resembool. Building a house, meeting Mom, falling in love.

On and on, and every word as impossible as the story all told is absurd. But it's true. It has to be. What reason would Dad have to lie to him? He's hardly even real.

"Are you alright?"

Alphonse blinks. Dad's moved to lean against Mom's headstone, slouched like it's become too much to support himself. Like he'd be leaning against her, shoulder to shoulder, if she were still here to be part of this. Dad seems thinner for the telling, scoured and sore, but relieved all the same.

Alphonse musters up a smile. "Yeah. It's just.... It's a lot to take in."

Dad's own smile is the one from the old photographs, small and sheepish, like he knows he's the butt of a joke he can't take offense at. "I'd understand if you didn't believe me."

"I didn't say that." He leans back on his hands, lets his elbows fail. He stares up at the sky, painted deep purple and burnt orange, too early still for the first dusting of stars. "It'd be pretty crazy to believe you," he says. "But I mean, I'm a ghost. It's... it's just a lot. That's all."

He falls quiet, turning everything over in his mind. Dad stays quiet too. Giving him space and time to reconcile. It's an unexpected kindness, and he feels a pang of shame for assuming it should be unexpected. Granny never shied from telling stories about Mom and Dad. He should have kept listening even when Ed turned tail and ran.

The sky deepens. By now the wind has calmed. No one else has come by, nor are their any houses within shouting distance. He tucks his chin to look at Dad discreetly. To drink in the realness of him through his eyelashes. Dad sits so still, carved from stone again. He's powerfully built, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested. He'd look like any older farmhand if he weren't dressed like a scholar, his clothes well-tailored and well-cared for. Under a patina of dust his shoes look hardly broken in. His beard is neatly trimmed, though both its styling and his long hair are, from what Alphonse has gleaned reading magazines over any number of shoulders, out of fashion. There's a touch of crow's feet to his eyes, laugh lines bracketing his mouth, a roughness to his large hands that are at odds with how eloquently he speaks. He sits with one wrist perched on one knee, his other leg stretched out before him.

He sprawls the same way Ed does.

"So," Alphonse begins slowly. "You can see me because you're a Philosopher's Stone?"

"That's right."

"Do you know about the other ghosts here?"

"I do."

"Private Shriver? Mister Teller? Nurse Nichols?"

Dad nods. "And the rest, yes."

"Mister Sauter died after you left," Alphonse points out doubtfully, sitting up. "Mister Cuttler too."

"Sauter," Dad says, turning the name over in his mouth. "I know that name."

"Steffie Sauter's one of the other ghosts you'd know. She died in a house fire in 1870. Owen was her husband. He remarried eventually and took over his family's—"

"Boutique," Dad finishes. "Yes, I recall now."

"Did you see him when you got off the train? He died when a group of Ishvalans came here and bombed the station. That was near the end of the Civil War."

"I think I must have. I didn't realize he'd died."

Which begs the question, "What do ghosts look like to you?"

"Like anyone else, more or less."

When the Sauters get upset, they burn. Mr. Teller falls apart in a terrible streak of gore. Mrs. Morgenstern and Mr. Cuttler pale and bloat, spilling a poor shadow of foamy water. Private Shriver's face goes to ruin, and Ada gets flushed and waxen as her fingernails and lips turn blue and her voice goes hoarse and wrecked by the cough that tore her lungs apart. Uschi, Mr. Tafano, and the scritch-scratch ghosts are all too far gone to really show how they'd died, so that just leaves Mr. Beckenbauer as the only one of them unscathed by the heart attack that took him too soon.

Well, maybe. Alphonse only ever looks the way he did the night he died, at least to his own eyes. He's seen the others' gazes drift when he gets in a snit about something (usually Ed), tracing the edges of something he can't see. He's never had the courage to ask what they might be seeing.

Dad sighs, slipping thumb and ring finger under his glasses to rub his eyes. "And Cuttler?"

"Gil," Alphonse offers. "He was a soldier. Granny outfitted him with below-the-knee automail a long time ago. He drowned in a flood in the year the Civil War ended."

"Ah," Dad says. And that's apparently all he has to say.

Alphonse narrows his eyes at him, scrutinizing, calculating. He's tempted to ask—of course, it doesn't matter what he wants anymore.

But—

But it could, at least with Dad. He could ask questions, and be answered. Who's to say he'll ever get an opportunity to talk to another living person again? Why is he hesitating? He ought to just ask—

"What—" He winces anyway, and the wince turns into an irritable grimace at his own hesitation.

Dad's smile is gentle. Reassuring without words, the glint of his eyes nearly a tangible weight. Something about being looked at with so much—intent, forgiveness, love—leaves Alphonse almost dizzy. "It's alright. Ask whatever you like."

Alphonse looks away, out across the rolling hills of Resembool. His home and his purgatory both. The shadows have all been gently smothered by nightfall now. In distant fields lightning bugs are beginning to blink, blink, blink. Calling out to each other in a language he can't understand. "What's it like not being able to die?"

Dad hums. Thoughtful rather than offended as Alphonse had half-feared he'd be. He seems like the type of man to always turn the other cheek no matter how hard he's pushed. Patient. Well, with how old he must be—as old as the scritch-scratch shadows? Older?—patience is something that he must have had to learn or break otherwise.

"Well," Dad says softly. "It's.... I'm not going to lie and say it doesn't come in handy. But it's not worth watching everyone I love die before me."

"Like Mom. And me."

Dad's face threatens to crumple again, but his voice remains even. "Yes."

Sympathy pangs in the place Alphonse's heart once beat. He thought he'd become accustomed to being dead. The emptiness, the loneliness, the boredom. The threat of inches shaved off his reach every year until one day he's as trapped in as narrow a space as the rest.

Resembool is a little town with little worries and even smaller aspirations. It's unlikely this will change no matter how many decades pass. Only the faces, the fashions, and the brikabrak inside each home are sure to change as generations come and go. He's realized this, rejected the finality of it for as long as he could, but ultimately he's resigned himself to joining the others in their quiet madness. Mr. Tafano, snarling at anyone who comes too near his tree. Ada feverishly taking inventory in the clinic's supply room. Mr. Beckenbauer stood in the corner watching his great-grandson, tapping out a noiseless pattern on his thigh from a time before the radio and the gramophone, a song from when he still lived and breathed and laughed, tapping and tapping and—

Clinging to their coping mechanisms for lack of anything else to hang onto. Breaking under the weight of their own inanity all the same.

His own inhuman existence has only lasted four years, and some days he feels driven half-insane by it. He does everything he can to stave off imagining the centuries that await him still, obsessively follows the townspeople so as not to think of his own inexorable winding down, tolerates even the dullest conversations and radio broadcasts so he doesn't think of the inevitable day Ed will go where he can't one last time, for good.

He wrenches himself out of that dark turn. There are better things to focus on right now. "I don't remember," he admits. "Dying, I mean. All I can remember is our transmutation circle going... wrong."

In the failing light he can just make out Dad's frown. "How do you mean?"

"The color," he says, and describes the event as best he remembers. It's a truncated summary, all the blood and terror wiped carefully away because Dad doesn't need to hear those details. Not when his frown deepens after hearing only the barest outline. "Like I said, I don't remember what happened to me. Everything went dark, and the next thing I was alone in the basement, apart from—from what we made."

"I'm sorry," Dad says after a moment. "I should have been here. To stop you from trying, if nothing else."

Alphonse nods. He'd thought the same a hundred times if he'd thought it once since that night, and now he knows for sure that Dad would have stopped them, if only he'd known he needed to. "Mom used to tell us you were coming back," he says. It's petty to say so, even cruel, but someone's got to. It might as well be him.

Dad does the right thing by flinching. "I... I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Alphonse, I—I thought you'd all be fine without me here."

They'd thought so too, even after Mom died. So much for that.

He floats easily to his feet, slipping his hands into his pockets as he nods toward Rockbell Automail. "You should head back. Granny'll be expecting you for dinner."

It's strange, watching Dad and Granny have dinner together. How they so easily share new stories and reminisce over old ones. They've been friends for decades and it shows in how easily they fall back into finishing each other's sentences, in how naturally they move around each other, in how Dad knows where the cutlery drawer is and which cupboard Granny keeps her shot glasses. It's strange, because for the first time since he died a living person knows he's there. He feels almost—guilty whenever Dad's eyes flicker in his direction. He feels like he's intruding on something especially private, like he's eavesdropping on the adults when he ought to be in bed. It makes him feel more like a kid than he has in—years.

(Granny certainly wouldn't have recounted that particular story about the man she'd bested in a drinking contest when she was 22 if she'd known he was there, listening in. At least not without a significant amount of censoring.)

He sits in a corner out of the way beside Den, who remains a coiled, growling knot all evening. The usually even-tempered dog doesn't so much as flick an ear at the sound of his cajoling. "What's the matter with you?" He asks in a huff, running his hands down and through Den's raised hackles. "Easy boy, easy."

Dad's eyes meet his again; when Granny's not looking he twitches his shoulders in a mute apology that baffles Alphonse for a moment until he puts two and two together. Half a million souls squeezed into one man's body, and dogs are sensitive enough to hear ghosts... well. Alphonse might not be able to hear so much as a whisper out of whatever might be in Dad, but clearly Den doesn't want any part of it.

"And I suppose you'll be needing a place to stay while you're in town?" Granny asks with a sly look over the rim of her glasses. Dad in turn smiles wanly.

"Oh, I wouldn't want to impose. The inn will be—"

"Don't even think of finishing that sentence." She grins at him, sharp despite the whiskey she's put away. "The nice guest room belongs to Ed these days, so you'll be in the new one. You've got good timing, you know; I freshened it up just the other day."

The new guest room is Auntie Sara and Uncle Yuriy's old bedroom. Granny, pragmatic as always, had boxed up their things while he and Ed had been in Dublith, selling or freely giving away anything that would do better in someone else's possession. She'd bought new linens, hung up a few paintings bought from a couple local artists, but to Alphonse's eye all that hard work carved something intrinsic out of the Rockbell's home. The room is too ascetic now, too barren. It's nice enough, but there's nothing homey about it at all.

Dad leans back, dismayed. "I couldn't possibly—"

"Oh, look at the time, you daft old man. Do you really want to drag Reuben and Starla out of bed now?"

"You might as well give it up," Alphonse says over Den's surly growling. "There's no winning an argument with her about anything."

This time when Dad's eyes flicker in his direction there's a faint smile to his mouth. "...Thank you."

In the morning Dad goes for a walk after breakfast, nodding discreetly when Alphonse asks him if it would be alright if he came along.

(How strange, to feel the need to ask permission for anything. How gratifying, to be answered.)

It looks like it's going to be a clear day, presumably still chilly out as Dad takes his coat from the stand as he leaves. A strong breeze comes and goes like it can't make up its mind, sheeting through the fields along the road. There's a riot of birdsong that breaks apart to angry chattering as Dad passes beneath them. Alphonse watches a particularly furious male scold Dad from the safety of a fence post, all its iridescent feathers puffed up and gleaming in the morning sun. As scared of Dad as Den is, who'd spent breakfast backed into the corner with his teeth bared and his tail between his legs.

"That must get old," he says, nodding at the bird when Dad only looks at him curiously. Had he really not noticed?

"Oh." Dad chuckles. "It can make things awkward, sometimes. There's nothing I can do about it though."

"Can all animals sense you? What you—are, I suppose?"

"Just about, yes."

"Can people? Granny didn't seem to notice anything weird."

"It's not common, but it's possible." Dad's gaze travels east, his eyes heavy with memory. "In Xing some are naturally attuned to the Dragon's Pulse, while others dedicate their lives to learning the flow of it. Alkahestrists, warriors, monks; any who wish to know the body's strengths and weaknesses see this understanding. These individuals are able to sense the presence of people and even animals around them by the energy flowing through their bodies. So too, they can sense things that go against that natural flow."

Alkahestry had been one of many topics Dad had spoken of yesterday, embarrassed as he'd glossed over the Western Sage's influence on the Xingese practice. Until yesterday Alphonse hadn't even known alchemy of any kind was practiced east of the Great Desert. Then again, what he knows of Xing could fit on an index card with room to spare. Here in Resembool there's been virtually no influence from any quarter but its own. Sure, there are a few odds and ends to be found in a number of homes, purchased by traders from before the Civil War or brought home from larger cities. Some tapestries and small statues, a handful of silk scarves and embroidered slippers. Little things easily fit inside a suitcase. A touch of the exotic in otherwise firmly rural Amestrian homes.

Their home hadn't been different in that regard either. For one, Mom had owned at least one Xingese-styled dress. And for another—

"You had books written in Xingese," he says, faltering as he tries to drum up details from the hazy memories of their home. He can only reach back so far before it becomes so much dreamstuff and hearsay.

"Yes," Dad replies softly. "I did."

"What? Oh! Oh, no no, Granny saved those. There's a crate full of your things in her basement."

It was the only other time Alphonse knows for sure she went to their house after she'd buried Mom again. He knows she'd done it while Ed had been off in Central earning his pocket watch and Alphonse had been clawing uselessly at the invisible barrier all around Resembool. He hadn't learned she'd taken anything until months after, when he'd found her one evening paging through one of Dad's strange old books. As far as he knows Ed still has no idea Granny salvaged anything from their house. Ed had never asked Winry to collect anything he couldn't make use of.

Dad's expression softens. "Did she? I'll have to thank her for that."

"After you figure out a way to explain how you know she did it," Alphonse points out wryly.

Or maybe she'd write it off as one more of Dad's harmless oddities. God knows she puts up with some odd habits from him, and accepts him for the whole of it with hardly a question or wary side-eye. But then, she's known him for so long; either she already knows all about him or trusts him enough to leave well enough alone. That's just how Granny is, honestly; whenever she sees someone hurting she'll offer them a good meal and her dry humor, and a bed to sleep in too if they need it. She helps others because she can't bear to sit idle, never mind a person's personality or history. No wonder she and Dad get on so well.

It's only as they crest the hill to where their home once stood that Alphonse realizes Dad wasn't walking for the sake of some fresh air. He slows, stops, hangs back as Dad presses on to the soot-blackened fence. Shame curdles within him, visceral enough he very nearly feels it twist a memory of his stomach and winch his throat tightly shut. He tangles his hands together as if he might wring out some fitting justification for everything that's happened these last ten years. He wants to say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, we both are, we just wanted to see Mom smile again, I'm so fucking sorry—

But what good would that do?

So he stays silent, choking on guilt he doesn't know how to express to a man he barely knows.

In the end, Dad doesn't ask any questions. He doesn't hurl accusations or fall to pieces again either. In the end, Dad wipes his eyes and turns away from the ruins of their home without saying anything at all.

"So," Granny says after lunch, and the way she glowers as she cleans her glasses on the hem of her apron makes Alphonse flinch clear across the kitchen. "Do you plan on sticking around?"

Dad doesn't even bat an eyelid at the ice in her voice. He must be hell in a poker game. "No. I have unfinished business elsewhere. I'll be leaving in a few days. Sooner, if you prefer."

She harrumphs. "Is this business of yours going to take another ten years to sort out?"

"No."

Unimpressed, she puts her glasses on and seems to leave it at that, right up until they've settled on the porch with fresh cups of coffee. Then, in true Granny fashion, she goes in for the kill. "I expect Ed to turn up soon, if you can afford to stay a few more days."

Dad tenses. It's subtle, but Alphonse had caught the grimace with which he'd looked at the few pictures of Ed up on the corkboard. He gets it. There's something off about Ed's smile these days, something that sets a set of teeth on edge, and that's not even taking the new scarring into account. One look's enough to know Ed's been through too much for somebody who's only fifteen.

Granny, shrewd as she is, doesn't miss it either. "That's right. I heard from Jeannie Mandelbaum that Ed and a few other odd characters went out East recently. Practically bought all their horses, and cleared out the general store too."

Dad looks nervous for a moment, then his face smooths back into the familiar mask of passivity. "East? Not to Ishval, I trust."

"Ha! As I hear it there's not enough left of Ishval to still call it that." Granny sneers. She's spent plenty of evenings down at the tavern exchanging vaguely treasonous opinions with the other old timers. Almost no family in Resembool escaped the War unscathed. Far too many headstones were planted in the cemetery during that time.

"No one's sure where they went," she continues, "Only that it was likely they'd be sleeping rough and bringing along quite a lot of water besides. There's nothing beyond the mountains but desert, of course, and all that sand's going to be hell on Ed's automail without proper protection. Makes you wonder why he tore off without visiting me first, doesn't it?"

Dad hums, giving away nothing, and Granny barks laughter again. There's a game happening here Alphonse knows neither the rules nor the score of, but he's pretty sure Granny just took the lead.

"That was some time ago," she adds. "He ought to be back any day. So long as he intends to come back, anyway. I'm sure there's quite a few things he'd like to talk to you about."

Alphonse can't help but snort. "That's one way of putting it."

Dad's eyes flicker between him and Granny dubiously. She grins.

"Ah, like you deserve anything less and you know it. He deserves some answers out of you, don't you think?"

Dad sighs, and nods.

There's a comfortable lull the three of them fall into. Routine settles in with its usual mute and mule-headed determination. Having Dad around again, however temporarily, becomes normal.

Turns out, Dad and Granny don't need to say much out loud to understand one another just fine. Alphonse has seen the same familiarity among a lot of the older folks in town; in long-time spouses that hold hands after dinner and have whole conversations without saying a word, and old friends that developed elaborate bartering systems built on decades of inside jokes and IOUs. Dad and Granny know each other inside and out so well that a decade apart has done nothing to diminish their laughter and harmless ribbing.

It makes Alphonse wonder, the second night after Dad's return long after he and Granny had gone to bed, how time might touch him as it spools by. If he'll fall apart like Ada, or if he'll still be able to muster up a joke for Mrs. Morgenstern when loneliness drags her down to the bottom of the river. What was Mr. Tafano like when he first died? What other ghosts huddled in the hills of Resembool long before a town was ever built here?

He wonders what things will be like fifty years from now, and a hundred, and on. The stories he'll tell Uschi and Mrs. Morgenstern and Mr. Cuttler of the going-ons in town. What other unlucky dead will wake to find themselves mute and invisible but to a handful of people who'd died long before. He thinks of the jokes that lose all humor when explained to someone who hadn't been laughing along from the start. The petty slights that no number of years can soothe, the bickering that will continue out of habit long after the first argument's been forgotten. The private things kept between two people; not out of a need for secrecy, but out of a soft desire to keep something good going a little longer.

Well. He's already doing all of that, isn't he?

Fifty years, a hundred, and on. How will Resembool change in that time? Cars, certainly. Plumbing and telephones and electricity in every home too. Paved roads, at least in the town proper. What else might come and go or turn the town on its head?

He's not sure he'd admit it out loud, least of all to Dad, but he's... kind of excited to see what the far-flung future might bring, for all that he'll never get to do more than observe it.

"Pinako," Dad murmurs, drawing Alphonse out of his musing. He and Granny are sat at the dining table, going through a new shipment of approximately eight thousand sizes of screws. She hums absently, so Dad waits until she marks down a number down on the notepad next to her coffee before asking, "Why isn't there a headstone for Alphonse?"

Alphonse flinches.

There's no way Dad doesn't notice.

"...It was Ed's decision," Granny says. Her tone is neutral, her narrowed gaze anything but. "He's convinced he can bring Al back one day, you see."

Dad says nothing, though his eyes narrow in turn.

Granny nods like he's confirmed something anyway. "Yes. He's gone—mm. A bit strange, after everything. Joining the military didn't help that any, but I think in some ways it might have been the best thing for him. Lord knows he's never minded anything I've tried to tell him. Of course, for all that I might think he sounds half-cracked whenever he gets going on all that—" Another nod, this one at the corkboard where all the pictures of Alphonse are prominently on display, "—I never could make heads or tails of alchemy. Maybe he really is onto something. Or maybe not. Maybe he's just dead set on killing himself."

Alphonse flinches again, unable to stifle the miserable sound that escapes him, hating to hear his own morbid fear said aloud by someone so steadfast and reassuring as Granny. If she's thinking the same thing, then there really is no doubt about it. Ed's going to die trying, and there's not one thing any of them can do to stop him.

The seconds stretch. Dad remains silent, passive, counting out screws as if he hadn't heard her.

Granny's measured look deepens to a glower that could curdle milk. "The way I see it," she says archly, "Ed needs someone else he can blame before he runs himself aground. And the way I see it, you're the best candidate for the job. Being his father and all."

"Blaming me won't change what happened," Dad replies coolly.

"He's fifteen, you idiot," she retorts. "Do you think he cares? All blaming himself for Al's death has gotten him is a short leash and a trail of gossip rags hounding his every step. No boy his age should go through half of what he's endured, and all without more than me left to try and talk sense into him whenever he manages to limp all the way out here for maintenance." She takes a swig of coffee like she wishes it were something stronger, then sighs out her anger until she's just—tired. Old and tired and afraid of standing over another grave of someone she loved. "I've known you for a long time, Hohenheim. I know you're a coward and a bastard to the core, but you don't get to run from this. I'll tie you to the goddamn bed frame if I have to."

Dad's eyes flicker to Alphonse as the silence rings. Then he looks away, hunching a little, grimacing at his own coffee mug squeezed in his two large hands. "I know," he says. "I... I know. I'll talk to him."

On the one hand, Alphonse is glad to hear Dad's willing—more or less—to at least stay long enough for one conversation with Ed. On the other hand, oh, but that won't go well.

"He won't appreciate a thing you have to say," Granny warns. God, but Alphonse loves her.

"I wouldn't expect him to," Dad replies, and Granny nods like he's passed another test, and that's the end of that.

One of Granny's out-of-towner customers arrives the next day. Krista Lusk's service dog Charlie likes having Dad around even less than Den does, so Granny gives Dad a wad of bills, a grocery list, and a stern order not to come back until suppertime. She locks the front door after she's shoved him through it for good measure, and Alphonse smothers his grin behind one hand as Dad's left blinking in the mid-morning glare without even his overcoat.

"You better hop to it," he says. "She hates it when people don't do as she says."

"I know," Dad says, but he's smiling too. It seems to come more naturally to him with every passing day. Granny's a good influence on him. He ought to stick around for that alone, though Alphonse is beginning to suspect the man's as bad as Ed is at taking care of his own needs before anybody else's. Exhibit A: Dad remains standing on the porch like he doesn't have a lengthy honey-do list burning a hole in his pocket, staring down the dirt road with another one of his impossible to read expressions. His eyes flicker behind his glasses; left, up, then down in a grimace. Chasing after ghosts again.

Alphonse waits. A couple of days of—acclimating, is perhaps the best word—to Dad's myriad eccentricities has been long enough to learn that waiting is better than hounding Dad when he gets distracted like this. It must be terribly noisy in Dad's head with half a million souls clamoring around in there. He's only one more ghost vying for attention.

Eventually Dad blinks, looking down at Alphonse with a shrug of his broad shoulders in a gesture that'd look like nervousness on anybody else.

(Will Ed's shoulders ever be so broad? Will Ed live long enough to find out?)

"So," Dad says bracingly, "You seem to be adjusting well."

Alphonse stares.

Dad stares back.

The unspoken part of this observation—that he's adjusting well to being dead—sits between them like overripe roadkill that Dad doesn't appear to notice at all. Alphonse does his best not to laugh out of sheer disbelief. "You—you're not very good at talking to people, are you?"

Dad shrugs again, slipping his hands into his pockets as he goes down the porch steps. "Not really, no."

Oh boy. Well. Dad's trying, which has to count for something, right? He ought to at least try to meet him halfway.

He steps lightly into the air, staying a few feet off the ground to be at Dad's eye level. It'll be a little less awkward if they happen across anybody on the walk into town this way. Dad looks at him as he floats an easy half-circle around him, eyebrows raised but otherwise perfectly content to give him all the time he needs to sort his thoughts out. "It's not what I expected—" he begins, then corrects himself. "Well, I don't suppose I ever expected anything, really."

Organized religion and all its trappings is a concept he's never put much stock in, too much of a scientist even as a little kid to find comfort in the plans of some abstractly benign celestial being. Especially not any thing that had the audacity to try and justify orphans. He never chafed as brazenly as Ed did when well-meaning people told them God took Mom for a reason, but he'd bitten his tongue every time he'd held Ed back to avoid causing a scene.

"Ed and I, we never talked much about what we thought might come after death. We wanted there to be something, and it made sense to us that there would be more to a person than their physical composition, something more fundamental than a series of chemical reactions. But we never believed in all that, you know—" He waves his hands vaguely to encompass all the fluffy clouds and harps horseshit, as Ed would absolutely call it if he were here for this conversation. He's a little tempted to say the same, but he doesn't want to put his foot in it if it turns out Dad can still somehow muster faith in a higher power after everything he's endured.

"I mean, what Pastor Darbinian talks about sounds nice, sure, but it never sat right with me, and Ed—" He can't help but laugh a little, and is gratified that the corners of Dad's mouth curl upwards rather than down. "Well, if God's real, I don't think Ed would be happy with anything less than a chance to take Him in a bare-knuckle brawl."

Dad's mouth twitches outright, but he doesn't say anything yet.

"We believed there had to be some spark, divine or otherwise, something we could reach and subsequently bind to the body we designed. I guess that's a long way of saying we liked a good ghost story as much as anybody else, but we never believed they were real. Not really. So to wake up like this after we tried bringing Mom back...."

He shrugs off the old horror, the old terror, the bleak realization that he'd died—

Well. It happened, and there's nothing left for him now but the after party.

"It took some adjusting," he adds slyly, and grins when Dad has the decency to look chastised. "But the others all helped me understand what had happened."

Dad hums, almost starts saying something, then notices the cart coming up the adjacent road as they approach an intersection. He purses his lips into another bland smile that doesn't really seem to mean anything at all. Omar Springer gawks openly at Dad, barely reacting to his polite greeting. His son Rick, turned fifteen not even three weeks back, shows off the gap in his grin where Ed knocked out his tooth years ago as he waves. It's only after the dust of their wagon's passing has nearly settled that Dad speaks.

"There's a girl," he says. "A little younger than you. There used to be a gristmill out on the edge of the western woods—"

He's surprised enough to drop out of the sky. "You don't mean Uschi, do you?"

Dad stares. "You know about her?"

"I know her," he corrects, momentarily baffled when Dad only stares harder. "Wh—oh. Right. You wouldn't—I mean. I've got a much wider range of movement than the others."

"Really," Dad says.

"Yeah. I can reach just about anywhere within Resembool's borders. I"m not sure why, but I think it's because of how I died—" Oops, maybe he shouldn't be quite so glib about that. "—uh. I'm the only ghost here who, uh. Was in an alchemical accident?"

That's a stretch by every definition, but for all that he's certain it wasn't a rebound that killed him he still doesn't have a clue what really happened. It's likely he never will. If he's honest with himself he's still grappling with that. Not just not knowing, but being completely incapable of taking any steps towards knowing eventually. He's intangible, invisible, mute, useless, pointless—

Well. He'll get over himself one day.

"I see," Dad says, looking more uncomfortable than ever.

Desperate to pave over that particular gaffe Alphonse offers, "I had no idea anybody used to live out there until I met her. I don't think anyone else does either."

Dad is quiet, again, as he so often insists on being. Then he surprises by offering more than his usual wry noncommittal replies. His tone turns wistful as he speaks, in the same manner as Granny and other older folk in town whenever they reminisce about the days when they were young and the world's hardships still seemed worthwhile. "Pinako and I first came across the gristmill not long after I bought my house here. She was livid that I discovered something she'd never known about so quickly. Of course, I only knew something was there because I saw Uschi flying above the treeline."

Alphonse bites back the urge to ask what year that was because—

Because Uschi can't go that high anymore. Sometimes, not often, he finds her floating on her back, pressed flush to the invisible ceiling that keeps her trapped beneath a clear view of the countryside. She cries if he tries to distract her; this terrible keening that guts him straight through. When she gets like that... well. He's learned the hard way that it's best to let her grieve alone.

"Do you—?" He falters. "I mean, I've never asked outright what happened to her. She gets upset whenever I bring up anything about—that—for either of us. Do you know?"

"It was before I came to Resembool," Dad replies, instead of It was before my time, which is what any normal person would have said. Of course, he's older than the entire country. Talk about putting things into perspective. "I did some digging after I'd spoken with her a few times. The first settlement was located on the western end of the valley. It was all but destroyed in a fire. The Žitnik's gristmill was the first to burn down." Dad hesitates, mouth thinning, eyes flickering. "From what I gathered, her family was targeted by the other villagers."

"What? Why?"

The bland mask Dad's proven to be so keen on wearing slips; for a moment his eyes blaze. "For being different. Why else?"

Alphonse—

—stills.

He knows how isolated he is. How isolated his childhood was. As he is now, he hears and sees all the things the adults do their best to keep from children, yes, but Resembool is only a village, and not a very large one at that. More than that, it's thrived the way it has for generations. It's comfortable with itself, all its people familiar and familial and wary of upset. It's a place founded on traditions and expectations. Worse, it's insular. He knows there had been two Ishvalan families who had lived here before the Civil War that are gone now. The why and how behind their absence is a mystery he's never heard spoken of since his own death, which in some ways is a red flag all on its own. There are a handful of other races and ethnicities besides pure Amestrian here still; there are mixed families, and families that don't attend church the same day as everyone else, and plenty more who’d spit in God’s Eye if they believed there was an Eye worth spitting at. He knows those people are looked at askance, but he's never sensed any malice.

But that isn't the same thing as acceptance, is it?

Broadly speaking, Resembool is as uniform as the minuscule military unit on the northernmost edge of town. The same families have lived here since its founding, the population bolstered by farmhands and soldiers and the rare handful of those who wanted and could afford a fresh start away from the hustle and bustle of city life. He's heard stories of what the Civil War cost so many other places in Amestris, Ishval most of all. He knows, perhaps better than most, that a human life is worth more than the sum of what can be measured and weighed.

Still. Still, it's disheartening to be told that the cruelty and ugliness of the world at large festers here too. That people, long gone now, but people just like those he's gotten to know so well since his death, could look at another person and think something positive could come from murder.

"That's awful," he says.

What else is there to say?

The townsfolk all circle Dad like a flock of vultures as soon as he steps foot onto Main Street. Word of his return has clearly been making the rounds, and from the toothsome expressions flashed at him it's not likely all opinions are positive. Not that Alphonse can blame any of them; he and Ed were hardly the only ones to assume Dad had died, and most of the adults are appalled that their parents never married to this day. Scandals, however small, get their mileage here.

Mrs. Cartwright hails Dad from the newsstand with an artificial smile and a lot of arm waving. Alphonse doesn't even bother to stifle his laughter as Dad visibly steels himself before approaching. It'd be nothing short of delightful to watch her put the metaphorical thumbscrews to Dad, but she'll be at it for roughly forever. He can happily spend that time better elsewhere, so he leaves Dad to suffer on his own and hangs a left onto Miron Street.

He goes past the smithy, a rush of clanging and billowing black smoke as always, heading for the poorest part of town. Cris Street, all its houses settling crookedly into their foundations, are some of Resembool's oldest homes. Few of them are kept up half as well as those just a street over. No part of Resembool is impoverished, not really, or at least not to Alphonse's limited experience. Whole swaths of Dublith had been run to ruin by the on-and-off troubles with Creta and the terrible toll the Civil War had wrecked. He knows that for all that Resembool had been targeted directly once, it survived almost entirely unscathed.

That's not to say there aren't those hurting here. Alphonse has gotten to know everyone in town intimately in the years since he died; some better than they know themselves. He's learned that even in sleepy little villages there are people that hurt in ways there might be no way to ever fix.

A prime example of that—and the reason he's gone onto Cris Street—is George Petrescu. Mr. Petrescu only left the Eastern region once in all his 64 years, and that excursion left all but five of his company dead and his leg and shoulder riddled with shrapnel. All he'd gotten out of continuing the family tradition of military service was a few shiny medals, a lifetime of chronic pain and debilitating nightmares, a failed marriage, and a disability paycheck that just about covered the cost of whatever booze might pickle his liver fastest. Once upon a time he'd been a happy husband and loving father; Alphonse only knows he'd had twin girls once upon a time because he's seen the photographs Mr. Petrescu fishes out when he gets too deep into his cups. He's watched the man's face soften to a spongy mess of grief over what he'd had and thrown away more times than he cares to think, and every time he steps inside this ramshackle house he walks away sick with shame and second-hand embarrassment for all that this good man had once been.

He comes back anyway, because no one else bothers to intervene anymore.

Once upon a time, Mrs. Petrescu—Claudia, and Alphonse only learned her name through tutting gossip one night when Mr. Petrescu had embarrassed himself once again two years ago at a wedding he hadn't been invited to—had grown sick of her husband's unpredictable rages and called it quits after he'd hurt one of their girls. Molly or Holly, Alphonse has never heard which, only that Granny had needed to get involved, and that things had grown grim enough that Mrs. Petrescu had decided that the shame of raising her girls on her own elsewhere didn't outweigh whatever love she still harbored for the good man her husband had once been before the military had torn him to pieces. She'd left long ago, before Ed had been before, before even Aunt Sara had come to Resembool to apprentice under Granny. Mrs. Petrescu had left with her girls and all their belongings and gone north, and no one's heard anything from them but hearsay and supposition since.

There are a number of people in town with long, lonesome histories and no one living left to lean on. God knows Granny's three-quarters of the way to joining that number, for all that she'd deny it if Alphonse were capable of pointing it out to her. He worries after her, but at least she still has Winry calling two or three times a week. There are too many unlucky few who don't receive so much as a letter from those who might feel some obligation to keep in contact, but don't for their own reasons. Alphonse has come to know too well since his own death that there are worse things in this world than being invisible, things worse even than being dead. He could still be alive, still be heard and seen and everything living entails, but instead be purposefully shunned by his fellows. He could be shameful. An embarrassment. Someone the whole town pretends its hardest to never notice, never mind he could be stood right in the center of things screaming his head off.

Mr. Petrescu is one of those unlucky few, but it's not his fault. Not really. Not in any way that counts.

Alphonse passes through the front door of Mr. Petrescu's ramshackle home, all peeling green paint and sloughing apart roof. He squints into the darkness until his eyes recall he doesn't need to falter in the half-light. Old habits, still unbroken. Inside is the usual heap of detritus; stacks of broken, useless things that inch higher toward the cobwebbed ceilings with every passing year. Deeper inside the house is a bedroom, and buried in that dim room is a bed—that must surely reek to high heavens if the scrunched-nose expressions everyone makes around Mr. Petrescu when he fumbles his way out of his house is anything concrete to go by—and in that bed is the man of the house himself.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake," Alphonse tuts to himself. "I leave you alone for three days and this is what you do with yourself?"

There's no reply, of course, not that Alphonse expects one. Besides, from what he's gleaned Mr. Petrescu isn't a chatty man even with people who are willing and able to have a conversation with him. He doesn't even spare more than a few grunts for Mr. McElligott or the gaggle of teenagers that run the register at the General Store, and they're the ones he interacts with most not that the Pugh family won't let him patron the tavern anymore.

"Come on now, rise and shine!" Alphonse says, hopping over a pile of something-or-other to kneel on the bed, wiggling his fingers menacingly for his own small amusement.

It's the same thing he does for Granny, and for a number of others besides. Those lonely living souls who sink too deeply into maudlin rituals that hide them away from friends and neighbors alike, clinging to the outskirts of their own lives out of something adjacent to stubbornness and second cousin to habit. He's invisible and essentially mute, sure, but a cold spot like him can be a right tenacious little shit when he's so inclined. He grins as he sticks his hands through the blankets and wriggles them around until the lump on the bed grunts, grunts louder, swears even louder than that, and finally sits up.

Mr. Petrescu might have been handsome, once. Now he's a gray and pallid thing, gaunt in some places and flabby in others, covered all over in bristly gray hair that looks as coarse as steel wool. He snuffles and hawks up something thick into the trashcan by his nightstand. He reaches for the bottle by the full ashtray, scowling when it turns out to be empty.

"Good," Alphonse says. "You ought to get some sun, you know. It's a lovely morning out. A bit chilly, I think, but you'd be the better judge of that. Why don't you go and find out?"

The man looks around his dirty bedroom blearily, grumbling something that's more vowels than consonants and completely unintelligible for it. Then finally he fumbles for his cane and hoists himself to his unsteady feet. It always worries Alphonse terribly, those first few hobbled steps that seem to cost Mr. Petrescu more than he can afford. Sometimes he yelps like a wounded dog and sinks defeated to the floor, and those are days that are better left smoothed over and forgotten. Today is a better day. Not good, no. It would be unkind and inaccurate to ever say Mr. Petrescu has good days anymore. But he gets to the bathroom and sorts out that business and gets dressed in clothes with no obvious stains, and none of it with more than a few yawns and sleepy grumbles.

Alphonse leaves the man to all that personal stuff, more interested to see what the rest of the house looks like. He hasn't been by since Dad turned up and he's curious to glean what he can about what Mr. Petrescu's been up to. Hopefully more than dulling his senses with drink, and if he's not in much pain today that might not even be a fruitless hope.

The curtains are all drawn tightly shut so only thin outlines of gray light spot the living room and kitchen. Spots of reflected light glitter damningly throughout every room he peers, bottles left to gather dust where they'd been dropped. It looks like the house is dry, though there perhaps something was squirreled away in the bathroom because Mr. Petrescu starts to whistle as he gets dressed. That's alright. Alphonse can understand needing a little help to get a hard thing done.

Mr. Petrescu totters out of the bathroom, snuffling some as he paws his wet hair out of his eyes. Alphonse steps close to wriggle his cold hands up and down the man's spine until he jerks absentmindedly toward the couch to fetch an oversized knit sweater. It might have fit him well once, but that would have been years ago. Still, it's another layer to warm him, a bit of armor against the cutting gazes of his neighbors. It's better than nothing.

All told it must take twenty minutes of nagging before Mr. Petrescu gimps outside, but that's the hard part handled. From here Alphonse can trust the man to make his way onto Main Street. There the usual gossips will cluck their tongues to see him buying booze so early in the day, but there will likely be food bought besides and if it's Mr. McElligott or Ilya Jarrett running the register at the general store they might coax him into getting a few other necessities besides. If Alphonse hadn't been by today it's likely Mr. Petrescu would have gone without anything until nightfall, if he'd decided to leave his house at all.

It's the little things that matter. The little things are all that are left to him, and to Mr. Petrescu, and to who-knows-how many people out in the world. He has to appreciate the good he can still do, no matter how small it might be.

The truth of the matter is that there's a kernel of unlovely familiarity he sees in Mr. Petrescu. There are times the man barks insults at his fellows, scowling thunderously when no one has the spine to give him the fight he's angling for. There are times the man can't leave his bed for the pain he's in, bitterly cursing as he kneads the knotted muscles of his thigh. There are times when he stares unblinking at old photographs of what he'd had once upon a time, and his eyes become two nickel coins in his lined face. There are times the man rouses from another terrible nightmare sobbing apologies to the dead, and the rest of those nights are spent huddled near a lantern or sat on the rickety chair in his backyard watching the stars wheel overhead.

How can he see the rut Mr. Petrescu has slowly but doggedly dug himself into and not see a funhouse mirror reflection of what Ed might become one day? If Ed hangs on half as long as Mr. Petrescu, will he retreat into a bottle for comfort? Will his myriad hurts twist him hunchbacked and limping even on his good days? Will he become too bitter and sharp of edge for anyone to consider him worth befriending?

It is so, so easy to see the worst of what Ed might sink to in what Mr. Petrescu's life has quietly fallen apart to. He hopes things will improve for the man one day, that one of the living will take pity on him, that they'll take the time to help him when the scrap of pride and stubbornness he buoys himself with won't let him. Alphonse doesn't want to be the only one who cares. Not when he can do so little to help. He wants there to be others for Mr. Petrescu to lean on, and Ed too, and all the lonely hurting souls beyond his reach.

He catches up with Dad in the general store—it is Ilya running the register, that's a welcome relief—and perches on the counter to watch as the pair haggle through Granny's list. Then it's to the café for a coffee and sandwich to go that Dad takes to the station. There's a terrible moment where Alphonse briefly thinks Dad intended to leave now, but then he recalls the long-since memorized train schedule. There's no train due until tomorrow, and it won't leave until the day after that. He watches Dad give Mr. McCahan and Ms. Seelin a bland smile as he passes them at the ticket station, then settles himself on one of the white benches on the platform.

"Well, there's the talk of the town himself!" Mr. Teller calls out cheerfully, floating up off the tracks to land beside Alphonse. He hovers his hand over Alphonse's head, as close as he can get to ruffling his hair.

"Is it as bad as that?" Dad asks.

"If I know the hens are all a-flutter, then you know it's worse."

Dad grimaces. "What seems to be the common thread?"

"Oh, they're all right scandalized, of course. Aston had to break up an argument before it came to blows. I heard it secondhand, of course, but I think it had something to do with your imaginary fortune again."

Dad tuts, though it might be because he spilled coffee on his fingers. "I thought Pinako had taken care of that nonsense."

"Yes, well, you've not been here to remind folks of the facts stood right in front of them. Welcome back, by the way. Missed your arrival with all that hubbub with the hogs."

"Aston, you said?"

"Aston Clark. That'd be the painter. Or, well, I don't know if he'd picked that up yet before you left."

"What the fuck," Alphonse says loudly. Both men blink at him like they'd forgotten he was there.

"Oh," Mr. Teller says, looking guilty.

"Mm," Dad agrees, making a face like he thinks he should be unhappy his youngest has figured out foul language in his absence, but also knows he doesn't have any right to chastise. Good thing he realized that, because at this current moment Alphonse is discovering heretofore unrealized depths of outrage that might rival Ed and Winry both at their most rancorous.

He turns the full force of it on Mr. Teller. "You knew he could see us?!"

"I thought you knew," Mr. Teller says defensively.

"I think I would have mentioned it if I did!"

So it turns out every ghost that was around when Dad left Resembool knew he could see and hear them, and none of them thought this an important enough fact worth mentioning to Alphonse in the years since his death. Alphonse spends several minutes telling Mr. Teller—and Mr. Sauter too, when he decides to turn up with an altogether too cheerful wave greeting for Dad like there's nothing absurd about greeting a living person—exactly what he thinks of this slip-up, raising his voice every time the man ineffectively hides his grin until he's shouting. Dad, as ever, appears unaffected. He eats his sandwich. licks his fingers clean, and only then bothers to intervene.

"I don't think it's something that would come up too often."

Alphonse whips around to give him a distinctly unimpressed glare. "I'm pretty sure it should have." It's not like there's a wealth of gossip for the dead in Resembool to busy themselves with! It would make sense for one of them to mention to Alphonse that his own father would be able to see him if he weren't dead and did end up coming home one day, as turned out to be the case. Torn between keeping the glare on Dad—who's proven thus far to be wholly harmless, and apologetic to the point of second-hand embarrassment—and Mr. Teller—who won't stop grinning like the Winter Solstice has come early, the bastard—Alphonse opts for the middle ground of glaring at Mr. Sauter.

"Hey," Mr. Sauter protests, holding up his hands defensively. "I died after he left. How was I supposed to know?"

Alphonse goes back to glaring at Mr. Teller. "You didn't tell him either?"

"Nope," Mr. Teller says, entirely too giddily.

He throws his hands up. "What's the point of you!"

Mr. Teller pretends grave offense, clutching his chest like Alphonse has put a knife through him and making a whole laundry list of ludicrous faces. "Ah! D'you hear that, Hohenheim? No respect! No respect at all. What did that ol' Pantheress teach him for manners without you there to mind her, eh?"

Dad hides his amusement behind his paper cup. "Pinako's always known better than to listen to my advice."

"Shut up," Alphonse says, stamping on the urge to strangle—nobody, yes, but that’s only on a technicality he hasn’t figured a loophole around. "Stop. For—god, seriously? Don't make jokes. I've been dead almost four years and nobody thought to mention my own father happens to be an—an immortal medium? What the fuck!"

"Well hang on now, scale it back, lad," Mr. Teller says, turning his delighted grin on Dad. "What's this about being immortal now?"

"He's immortal, he's ridiculously old, we can talk about that later," Alphonse snarls. "The subject at hand right now is that you knew he was weird from the start and never said!"

Mr. Teller continues to be an absolute bastard and waves his hands dismissively at Alphonse without taking eyes off Dad. "Hush it, you. You might be able to talk to any ol' stiff you please, but shy of a funeral you and Owen are the only ones I get to talk to, especially after this one took off without so much as a warning! I never mentioned his, whatever, ability I suppose, because I figured the same as you; that the ol' bastard was dead."

"Hey," Alphonse says feebly, and only when it becomes apparent Dad's not going to speak up in his own defense. Being untroubled by some persnickety dead guy insulting him suggests he won't mind Ed calling him the same in a few days, which is good, though time will tell how well being a Philosopher's Stone will protect Dad's teeth.

"I don't make a habit of announcing what I am," Dad says, neutral enough that Alphonse can't tell if he'd like it if Alphonse stopped going on about it or doesn't care if he starts shouting it from the rooftops. Whatever, it's not like more than four people'd be able to hear him if he did that.

"What are you, anyway?" Mr. Sauter asks curiously. "It's been—what, a decade since you left? And you haven't aged a day!"

"Looks the same as when I was still alive too," Mr. Teller adds pointedly.

"It's a long story," Dad admits. "I'm sure Alphonse would be happy to share it on my behalf another time. I'm afraid I need to g—"

"Granny's stuff can wait," Alphonse says. Dad raises his eyebrows doubtfully. "It can. She only tossed you out because the dogs don't like you—"

"Oh, I remember that!" Mr. Sauter says. "My Lalea just about strangled herself on her chain whenever you came near. Course, she didn't like most folk, but she hated you. What's that got to do with anything?"

"Oh my god," Alphonse says loudly. "Never mind all that. Can we please, for thirty seconds, stay on topic? Mister Teller, you knew! Not just that he can see us but also that he's—weird! The kind of weird that made it liable he wasn't dead in a ditch somewhere!"

Dad blinks. "A ditch?"

"We had to assume something. It was that or go with Ed's idea."

"Oh, don't," Mr. Sauter interrupts, distressed, while Mr. Teller—bastard—giggles outright. They'd both been at the station for that cheerful conversation between Ed and Winry. Mr. Sauter steps up, hovers his hands over Alphonse's shoulders like he'd try to settle him if only they could touch. "Al, come now, that's enough. You know Walt only meant well—didn't you, Walt?"

Mr. Teller bobs his head, as sincere as he ever gets. "I can't say what the rest were thinking, but you always look so torn up whenever the topic of your parents came up. I didn't want to be the one to bring your dad up when the chance of him coming back seemed slim to none."

Dad's mouth thins. Alphonse ducks his head to hide his scowl, embarrassed of all things. It's Mr. Sauter who speaks into the empty space couched between them, smiling genially. "It is good to see you again, Van."

Ms. Lusk won't be leaving until the train wends its unhurried way back down to Resembool in three days time. Granny, usually happy to let her out-of-towners stay under her roof free of charge—seeing as how they're already paying out the nose for the limbs she's built them—surprises Alphonse when she phones Mrs. Forney to arrange for a room at the inn instead.

"I'd have you here as long as you needed any other time," Granny tells her as she finishes writing up the bill, nodding toward the back porch where Dad stepped out to put some distance between him and the dogs, "But that one's a dear friend of mine and he won't be in town long."

"It's no trouble," Ms. Lusk assures her, and even goes out of her way to stick her head out the back door to wish Dad a good day. Then she gathers her things and her usually even-tempered guide dog Pepene and strides off down the road. She'd come up with an obvious gimp in her ankle but today she strides off whistling. Alphonse likes when Ms. Lusk has to stay a few days. She's always good for a few fun stories. Maybe he'll stop by the inn around suppertime to listen in.

Granny waits until Ms. Lusk is all but a speck in the distance before she goes to stick her head out back. "You can stop hiding now."

"I was admiring your garden," Dad corrects woodenly.

"Get in here, freeloader," Granny says, grinning. "I've got a lot of work to get through today. You can do me a favor and make dinner."

Dad smiles as he comes up the steps, holding the door so both Granny and Alphonse can walk "Any requests?"

"A fellow so well-traveled as you has surely picked up a few novel recipes along the way," Granny replies dryly. "Surprise me."

Turns out Dad expected Granny to put him to the test at least once while he's here, because along with everything else she had him but he'd added a few purchases of his own, paid for from his own pocket.

(How do wandering alchemists slash itinerant scholars earn money, anyway?)

"What are you making?" Alphonse asks, perching up on the corner counter out of the way to better watch him work.

Dad hums. "She's always liked it when I make something she won't find elsewhere. I… hmm. Yes, I think so." He offers a smile in Alphonse's direction. "Do you like eggs?"

"Not anymore," Alphonse replies archly.

"Before, then," he corrects, completely unruffled.

"I did, yeah."

"Would you like to learn how to make a Xerxesian dish?"

There's a note of hesitation in his voice, so soft that Alphonse nearly misses it. But for all that Dad tries to go around like he's carved from stone, he looks away from people he's wary of hurting the same way Ed does. For that alone Alphonse has no trouble hopping down to join him by the sink, grinning up excitedly. Dad falters, then returns it as honestly as whenever Granny startles laughter out of him.

"Well, then. It's a bit like an omelette, or perhaps a frittata is a better comparison…."

Dad doesn't share the same sure grace as Granny or Teacher have in the kitchen. He pauses at odd moments, chops and measures everything as if being even a hair's breadth off would mean having to scrap the whole dish and start fresh, and for all his caution he nearly burns it anyway. Dad's panic is charming in its own way; in how another rough edge in Alphonse's impression of him is smoothed away by watching this impossibly complicated almost-stranger nearly spill his hard work on the floor no less than three times. Still, he lays out a charming spread for two before going downstairs to fetch Granny.

Kuku sabzi, he'd called the dish. Alphonse turns the foreign words over in his mind, regarding it like a clear piece of polished quartz found among river stones. Unexpected and almost alien, but beautiful in a way that demanded curious hands to pick it up and take it home to display.

Of course Xerxes had its own language. He wonders if anyone else survived the country's destruction, merchants or soldiers or a handful of lucky farmhands working just beyond the array. Are there any descendants of those few? Are there any others who still know Xerxesian?

(Has Dad had even one opportunity to speak his native language with anyone outside his own head in four centuries?)

Dad comes back up after a few minutes and, after another of his pauses, moves the pan to the sink to soak before attending to the fresh-brewed coffee. "She'll be up shortly," he murmurs.

Alphonse hums, still half-lost in thought, imagining how Xerxes might have been once upon a time. The faces, the fashions, the brikabrak inside each home. So many dead. So many ghosts caught up in an even smaller space than the scritch-scratch ghosts huddle and weep, an even smaller space than the buried basement he'll huddle in one day too.

"You must miss it," he says. "All of you, I mean."

Dad does not flinch, nor freeze. There's no hunch of his broad shoulders as he stirs in milk and sugar, no tremble to his hands as he picks both mugs up. When he turns, however, his smile is brittle. His eyes are as flat as two bronze coins. "Yes,” he says. “Very much."

The following morning Dad goes for another meandering walk. When he meets other people he dips his head and bids them good day and always seems completely immune to the gobsmacked looks he gets as he hops over a property fence or through somebody's garden. Alphonse can't decide if Dad's just that distracted by so many conversations in his head or if he's a fan of petty vengeance. Granny had been thorough on filling Dad in on all the unkind things said about Mom and Ed, and who had said them.

Honestly, Alphonse prefers meandering the countryside with him instead of following behind in town. There, as yesterday had proven, any number of toothsome so-and-so's were eager to know just what Dad's been up to, and where he's been, if he's heard Ed joined the military, has he heard a fraction of the madcap adventures Ed gets into, and isn't it a fright, the military taking him at such a young age? What's the world even coming to, child soldiers and the threat of war on three borders, it'll be Ishval all over again if Bradley's not careful—not that Ed would be shipped to the frontlines at his age, surely things aren't so dire as that! But he must worry, mustn't he? And oh, how terribly sad it is, Trisha and Alphonse, what tragedies, so young when they passed, and he and she never did get around to tying the knot, properly, did they? The poor dear, it was so hard on her after he left, raising two boys on her own, such a strain on her frail nerves, it's no surprise what happened—

On and on they'd gone, killing Dad with kindness until he managed enough feeble excuses and pleasantries to satiate them for the time being.

Yeah, Alphonse is nothing short of relieved that Dad opts to avoid town altogether today.

Dad had told Granny that he didn't want to be in the way while she worked through a small backlog of paperwork, and she'd told him about the box of his things she'd kept without prompting, clearly keen to keep him around. She's coerced a number of people in town to keep an eye out for Ed and bribed a few more to strongarm Ed up to Rockbell Automail if need be. Dad had given her a look like he knew exactly what she was up to, but thanked her anyway.

(Alphonse loves watching them snipe at each other.)

Of course, Dad's real reason to leave the house is so he can talk freely with him. Alphonse didn't even need to ask; Dad had smiled at him first thing this morning, then told Granny he was going to get out of her hair for a couple of hours.

So they walk, and they talk, and every time Dad meets his eye and replies to something he’s said it’s a thrill that nearly electrifies him, leaves him almost-warm and almost-shaky, giddy and tripping over his words.

But.

But there’s only so long he can skirt the edges of what matters, however uneager he is to breach an unhappy topic. He wants to know why Dad left. He’s desperate to know, but terrified all the same. What if Ed was right? What if, despite or because of what he is, Dad fled from the responsibility of being their Dad and into the arms of another woman? Women? What if Dad really has left a string of brokenhearted single mothers behind him, going back farther than even Ed’s cynicism could ever imagine?

What if, what if, what if?

The memory of physical pain is a slippery thing he’s lost his grip on, but grief and fear wound him daily. For all that he yearns for answers, for information and truth and knowledge, this is something he finds himself shying from. He fills the morning, as he has the previous days, with inanity. How did Dad meet Granny? What other countries has he been to? What was the tastiest thing he ate in Hermetica? Did he ever learn to play a musical instrument? Has he ever seen the ocean?

These are safe questions with answers that almost always require lengthy anecdotes to explain the answers. Alphonse exults in the new information, in tales of far off places and wonders that make Dad light up with fondness and nostalgia for people who’ve long-since passed away.

But.

But something akin to guilt gnaws at him the longer he puts off asking the obvious. His time with Dad won’t last forever, this he already knows. Soon, in a handful of days at most, Dad will face whatever cruel—and justified—vitriol Ed will sling at him, then be on his way to….

To what?

He doesn’t know. This is what he’s been too afraid to ask. He’s been too cowardly to ask.

It’s far, far from Rockbell Automail that he finds his spine. He wheels a tight circle in the air to meet Dad face-to-face and asks, “Why’d you leave?”

And Dad tells him. More than that, he tells him why he has to leave again. He doesn’t soften it; the danger, the stakes, the truth of what’s coming. He pays no lip service to the age Alphonse was when he died, speaks as plainly as he would to Pinako or any other adult he trusted. He tells him that nothing short of the fate of the world hangs on the outcome of next spring’s solar eclipse. All of Amestris will die in a handful of moments if the Homunculus isn’t stopped, killed the same way Dad’s people were. He tells him about the array he’s spent the last ten years designing and implementing. How even if he’s incapacitated it will remain a viable—and the only sure—counterattack. Dad tells him he left to save the country and who-knows how many millions of innocents.

It all sounds so absurd, so impossible. The same as every other story Dad’s told him, really. Van Hohenheim: the impossible man. A liar, many would call him. But even as small a town as Resembool has more than its fair share of liars, and Alphonse has seen them all caught in the act time and time again. Dad’s no liar, of this much he’s sure. He’s just a man caught up in a very long and very strange tale.

But a word settles like a bruise he can't ignore. “Incapacitated?”

Dad’s eyes crinkle like he knows exactly where the conversation is going, like he’d much rather not have the conversation at all, but knows better than to try and change the subject. “I’ve never been one for fighting. If it came to that alone, he’d have the upper hand.”

“He’ll kill you,” Alphonse realizes, horrified.

“I’m sturdier than I look—”

“So you’re going to let him keep killing you, or maiming you, or whatever, as a distraction until your counter-array can un-kill the entire populace?”

Dad hesitates, which says enough.

“What about after? It’ll still be you versus him. If all you do is stand there, he’ll just kill you again and again until you stay dead, and he’ll still be there afterward to do whatever he likes!”

“I won’t be facing him alone. My friends—”

Alphonse barks unkind laughter right in Dad’s face. “What use are any of them? They’re dead!”

For a moment Dad towers over him, broad and burly and strong despite the scholarly way he dresses. For a moment his face clouds with anger. For a moment it seems he might shout. For a moment it seems as if he would do more than shout if Alphonse were as real enough to punish as any other child that’s spoken out of turn.

The moment passes.

Dad sighs, his eyes shuttering. Whatever strange anger that filled him gutters to so much smoke. “Are you upset you don’t have a headstone?”

“Wh—? What?”

“I said—”

“I heard you.” He shakes his head, blinking like that’ll bring some sense to this conversation. “Who cares? You’re going to die next year if you don’t—”

“I do.”

“What?”

Dad starts walking again, charging ahead with his long-legged stride through grass tall enough to tickle his knees. Alphonse keeps up for as far as he can. “I care. About you, and Edward. Would you feel more at ease if there were a headstone for you beside—beside your mother’s? Do you think it would help put Ed’s mind at ease?”

“I don’t see how that—”

“Was there anything left of your body? Have you looked?”

“Wh—no?”

“No, there wasn’t? Or no, you haven’t looked?”

“No! I—what does it matter? You should be worried about yourself!”

Dad turns abruptly, fast enough that his ponytail whips over his shoulder. “I’m not,” he bites out. “I’m nothing but a cage for the dead inside me. I wanted to be more with your mother, but I squandered that too. If I’d been here, I could have—” He sucks in a breath, forces it out slowly before speaking again. “I owe you so much, Alphonse. More than I have time to give now. Please, answer the question.”

This—

This means a lot to Dad.

And they’re running out of time. Ed will be here any day, and after that inevitable fallout Dad will leave for….

Maybe for good, depending on how this apocalyptic eclipse turns out. Alphonse is still reeling, still trying to make sense of the scale of such a thing, of the chance that all of Amestris could be gone in the blink of an eye on the whim of a false-faced monster from a fairytale. How absurd. How terrifying.

“I….” He takes an unnecessary breath, watching the wind play with the loose ends of Dad’s hair, ruffle the grass in waves. The edge of the forest is a song of whispers, leaves rustling and boughs creaking. They’re far from any house out here, on the very edge of Resembool’s border. "Whatever happened that night, it wasn’t a rebound. There was nothing left of my body before Ed burned our house down.”

“Was there any blood? Any sign of injury at all?”

“I followed Granny back to our house when she went to bury the thing we made. All that was left of me were my clothes. Not a drop of blood or anything on them. I just….” He makes a popping gesture with his hands. “Pfft. Atomized, or something. I don’t know. What does it matter?”

Dad—

—turns away without a word. He walks off, the tension sloughing off his broad shoulders. “If I’m remembering correctly, there are a few others like you out in these woods. Their Aerugan is a bit older than what I picked up, but last I was out to see them we could get on well enough.”

“They’re back the way we came,” Alphonse calls after him. “South of here.”

“Three of them, yes, but there’s another half dozen just beyond that ridge. All killed in a skirmish around the founding of Amestris. Signore Rovigatti was an alchemist, incidentally, and he—”

“Dad.”

“—has the most fascinating opinions regarding the applications of geothermal energy in large-scale transmutations—”

“Dad.”

He turns back, the picture of surprise to see that Alphonse hasn’t moved from where he’d towered and demanded details and ditched the original topic of conversation entirely. “What’s the matter?”

Alphonse musters up a smile he hopes is more apologetic than grimacing. “I can’t go any farther.”

Between them is an invisible wall that may as well be a yawning chasm. Here they stand; the restless dead, and the wandering immortal.

“...oh.” Dad’s voice is very small. Very quiet. “Well. I…. Pinako probably finished that paperwork by now. Would you like to head back?”

Why is he trying so hard for so little? Isn’t he afraid of the Homunculus? Of the risk of dying? Of what might happen if he’ll fail? Does he even have a plan B? These and a hundred other questions squeeze the empty space where Alphonse’s heart once beat; he’s almost breathless, dizzy with worry for a man he’d thought dead until a few days ago.

But Dad doesn’t want to worry him. Dad’s treating him like a child, like he’s too young for the hard truths of the world. He wants to pretend, and make amends, and be as much of a father as he can be to a ghost.

A part of Alphonse is insulted.

A far greater part of him is grateful for the attempt.

While they were gone Granny dragged the crate full of Dad’s things up from the basement. The two of them go through it after lunch, Alphonse overseeing with a grin hidden behind his hands. It isn’t much, in the scheme of things. A shelf’s worth of old books and handwritten journals, a few photographs, an inkwell Granny had made him decades back, a few other odds and ends. Alphonse is really only interested in the books; there are pictures a-plenty of Mom strewn around Rockbell Automail, and plenty more of Mom and Dad in the same photograph book that’s got the pictures of Dad going back fifty years.

The enormous book of mythology that Ed had read obsessively during his rehabilitation is a beautiful thing, richly illustrated and covering a number of cultures. Dad lingers overlong on the scant chapter on Xerxes for Alphonse's benefit; the thinnest by a suspicious margin now that Alphonse knows the truth. It praises the Philosopher for hiding away the Stone that destroyed Xerxes in its hubris. Even the woodcut of the Philosopher is a mockery, broad-shouldered and square of face, lording over a sea of grateful followers. Dad-adjacent in a way that’d make Alphonse's skin crawl if he still had any.

In addition to that there are several other books written in Amestrian, none of them less than seventy years old. History and alchemy, chemistry and philosophy, medical and theological; a traveling scholar's primer on a foreign country's state of mind. There are a few slim volumes in unmistakable Xingese; intricate characters printed vertically in faint red columns, with the odd page filled with illustrations done in sweeping black ink. Alphonse recognizes the art style from a few houses around town, though those wall scrolls are all on wall scrolls all done in far greater detail and by hands of obviously better skill.

There are notes scribbled in the margins of all of them, indecipherable cursive that he and Ed had never been able to make heads or tails of. They'd concluded it was either a foreign language they'd never seen before, or a cipher, or perhaps even both. It's only after going from the medical text straight to the last book Granny saved from the fire that Alphonse puts it together. He doesn't think he makes any noise when he realizes he's been futilely attempting to read Xerxesian since he was five years old, but Dad does give him an appraising eyebrow when Granny isn't looking.

"I remember this old thing," she says, tugging it carefully from Dad's loose fingers and the soft cloth it had been wrapped in. She tuts when the spine cracks loudly. "Lord. How old is this anyway? It looks like it ought to be on display in a museum."

"A little older than you," Dad teases.

"Ha, so half as old as you?"

Dad hums noncommittally, and Alphonse can't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Granny leans closer to get a better look at the fully-colored illustration she'd opened to; a beautiful picture of two men in embroidered robes on a hillside. The younger man has been drawn with a beard the exact color of Dad's, and both have unmistakable yellow eyes. "You had this with you when we met. You clucked at me if I so much as breathed on it funny."

"That's because you kept breathing pipe smoke on it," he reminds her. She only cackles again.

"What language is this anyway? Ishvalan?"

Dad glances at Alphonse, clearing expecting—something. What though, Alphonse has no idea. "Xerxesian, actually."

Granny sits up abruptly, all the better to turn astonished eyes on Dad. "You're joking. It's not an original, is it?"

"I came across it in a museum in Almaliq just before I left Xing. Beautiful, isn't it?"

"You stole it."

"I did not."

"So you were more than a drunken scoundrel back in your prime, eh?" She's grinning now, wider the more Dad flusters. "Had to get your kicks with a little art theft, is that it? What other priceless artifacts did you ferret away? Should I have been prying up the floorboards for your secret stash? Are you the one who ran off with the crown jewels of Oirialla?"

“Pinako….” Dad practically whines. It’s incredible.

"That doesn't sound like a 'no' to me!"

"I didn't steal this." He plucks the books out of her reach, giving her a reproachful look over his glasses as he settles it back onto its protective cloth. "It was a gift."

Granny laughs herself straight into a fit of smoker's cough, deep and wracking in a way that always worries Alphonse a little to hear such a loud noise boom out of someone hardly taller than him. "From who? The Emperor?"

"A friend," Dad replies simply, but when Granny looks away to wipe her eyes, still chuckling, he looks over at Alphonse and nods.

"Of course you were friends with the Emperor," Alphonse sighs. "No, wait, I bet it was more than one. How many Emperors have you known?"

Dad thinks about it as he turns to another illustration in the book, this one of another blond and yellow-eyed man on horseback. Overhead, a bird with crimson plumage soars through a faded blue sky. After a moment of consideration Dad taps two fingers on the table, then taps again.

"Four?" A slight shake of his head. "Twenty-two?" A nod.

Alphonse doesn't even know why he's surprised.

Granny, recovered from her mirth, settles her spectacles back on her face and picks up her mug. "Why in the hell would a 'friend' give you something like this?"

Dad's mouth curls in a sly little smile. "He had a thing for blonds."

Granny toys with him like a cat that's caught a bird it hasn't decided if it'll eat or not, and he pretends to be cowed as anything right up until he sees an opportunity to make her choke on her coffee. No wonder she liked him enough to drag him back to Resembool.

There's a cold front coming in. The radio promises rain all through the southeastern regions, warning of flooding likely in some areas and reminding of the proper measures that ought to be taken for those who live near bodies of water. It's not likely to rain much here in Resembool, not this close to the cusp of summer, but Alphonse feels a twinge of anxiety all the same. He knows all the parents down in the town proper will be corralling their younger children inside until after the storm dissipates, barring windows and guarding doors from any of the more adventurous breakout schemes that might get drummed up as boredom sets in. He knows that tongues will wag, as tongues do, telling again the cautionary tale of the poor Elric brothers to any who need a sharp reminder of how dangerous the river can be.

Edward: lost a leg, lost his family, lost his mind, likely to lose his life off in the military.

And Alphonse: lost.

It's a shame, really. He loves rainy days otherwise. The smell (such as he remembers), the cool wind (such as he remembers), the peace (such as he remembers). He still has his sight and hearing at least, and he can still appreciate the cool gray skies, the pitter-patter tapping of strange music on rooftops and tree boughs, the flush of new green staining the countryside, all the little mushrooms that spring up like a magic trick. He tries to not let the story the town cobbled together to explain what Ed and the Rockbells won't sour his mood, but sometimes....

Sometimes the silence before a storm is the loneliest place to be.

But he's not alone now, is he?

He glances over at Dad, who appears as lost in thought as he's been. More, probably. Neck-deep in five hundred conversations at any given moment. Alphonse has no idea how he manages to get out of bed every day and pretend that nothing's wrong. Probably the same way so many others out there manage the same thing; knowing that the less attention drawn to oneself the better, no matter the personal cost. It's one thing to be weird or sick or broken; it's something infinitely worse to be caught in the act.

Alphonse looks back the way they came, where the sun's well along its westward arc. Sunset isn't far off. Most of Resembool is bathed in a warm afternoon glow, all its rough edges softened, made distant and easy to forgive. He and Dad had come up from the town proper before this; Dad carefully carries a modest bouquet in both hands. Mrs. Caddeo had made her usual attempts at simpering conversation, but it had run off Dad's cool passivity like water off a duck; she'd left him to browse in an uneasy silence.

Dad only went to the flower shop after Alphonse mentioned Ed's habit of making wreaths. Would it have occurred to him to bring flowers to Mom's grave otherwise?

He supposes it doesn't matter. It's not like Mom's ghost is hanging around to take offense.

There's someone else visiting the cemetery when they arrive. Mitch Corcoran nods politely as Dad passes, murmurs something too low for Alphonse to hear. Dad nods back without replying but doesn't stop. Alphonse is relieved when Mr. Corcoran takes the hint and goes farther down the row where he buried his wife in 1882.

They come to Mom's grave.

They stand there quietly.

Nothing needs to be said. Nothing needs to be forced. This grave doesn't hold Mom. There's a body quietly decomposing under their feet, but her soul's no longer bound to it. Mom's not here. She hasn't been here for ten years. Mom is a few pictures in Granny's collection, a few knickknacks saved from the fire, a few stories, a few memories. That's all.

Mom's gone. This grave is simply someplace for the living to come to grieve now and then, some place tidy to bury what she left behind. Alphonse hopes it's nice, wherever she is. He hopes she's happy. He hopes she's not angry with him and Ed for trying to bring her back. He hopes she's not disappointed they failed.

"I don't remember what she sounded like," he admits quietly.

Dad stirs slowly, swimming up out of whatever mental labyrinth he'd been caught up in. He kneels to place the bouquet before the grave. Alphonse expects him to transmute it into a wreath too, but he doesn't. The paper wrapping crinkles under his rough fingers as he adjusts the ribbon; purple, to match the flowers. Mom's favorite color.

"She never raised her voice," Dad says, standing again. "She never needed to, to get her point across. She had this way of looking at someone she was angry with that would make anyone feel two inches tall."

How many times had she given him and Ed the gimlet eye for making another mess? "I definitely remember that."

Dad glances down at him with a look like he knows exactly what he's not saying, though the knowing twinkling in his eyes is softened by memories. "She loved to sing. She had a real gift for it too, for all that she never had any formal training. She only needed to hear a song once to memorize it perfectly, and when she got tired of whatever the radio had on she'd come up with her own songs, just like that."

Alphonse remembers that too. Not the songs themselves, but the way she sang them. Swaying her hips as she washed the dishes. Spinning circles in the living room with him or Ed stood on her feet. A hum that vibrated down her arm, through her warm hand on his back, and settled deeply in his chest as he fell asleep.

"You met Mom when she was, what, eighteen? Nineteen?"

Dad hums noncommittally, like he's hoping Alphonse won't press for details so he won't have to say something like, Younger than that, but I'd prefer it if the ghost of my dead son didn't think I was a dirty old man.

Which, pfft. It's a bit late for that, not that Alphonse would ever say as such. A 400-something year old man showing interest in anybody can't really help but look like a dirty old man. There comes a point where what matters most is the intent behind the interest. If it turned out Dad really was the type to leave a string of broken-hearted young mothers behind him then sure, Alphonse would have happily shouted himself cross-eyed until Dad displayed appropriate contriteness. But he'd have to be blind to not see the way Dad loved—loves—Mom. He'd have to be cruel to ignore the waver in Dad's voice whenever he says her name.

He doesn't care that Mom had probably only been a handful of years older than Winry and Ed when she met Dad and decided this weirdo was the one for her. He just wants to know more about Mom.

So they talk. Alphonse asks the questions that he never thought to when he was still alive. Little things, little details that aren't—important. Not on any grand scale, not compared to the grand and tragic end of Xerxes, the rich history and political minefield of Xing, the far more literal minefield of Amestris' endless border skirmishes. He asks how they met, and where, and what their first date was like. He asks every single variation of "What was Mom's favorite..." he can think of. He asks if she ever wore her hair short, if she ever saw East City, if she'd ever gotten drunk and done something stupid for the sheer fun of it. Dad seems happy for the excuse to go on about her in detail, perking up even more once Mr. Corcoran leaves and it's just the two of them in the cemetery.

A question occurs to him that he mentally flinches from, but that only means it's too important not to ask. "Did she—want to be a mother? Or was Ed an accident?"

"He was," Dad confirms after one of his usual pauses. "You were too, though we'd settled here by the time she realized she was pregnant again. Ed, however...." Dad chuckles.

"What? What is it?"

"I'm a bit embarrassed now, but—well. Before, when I was still human, I always liked the idea of starting a family of my own. I was a freedman, with a title and more wealth than I'd ever dreamed of having, but it didn't feel right to keep it to myself. I wanted to share—everything with someone. There just wasn't time, not when I worked in the King's court, not so close to.... Well. It was only ever an idle wish. One the Homunculus never did understand. He only saw families as a handy unit of measurement for how humans breed for the continuation of the species—"

"Charming," Alphonse remarks dryly.

"Yes, well. What I mean to say is...."

Dad sighs deeply, considering his words with great care. "When she told me we were going to have a baby, I panicked. The idea of being a father terrified me. Of being responsible for something so fragile and temporary. Or what if turned out as monstrous as me? What if, what if. A baby isn't a choice to be made on a whim one day. Children are—important. Incredibly so. And there I'd gone, all but forcing Trisha into shelving every other potential thing she might be considering to do. Her whole life ahead of her, and she was so young...."

Another sigh, this one a quieter thing. A letting go of what was. Acknowledging that for all that the past can still wound, it can't be changed. "Well, she tracked me down in short order. Scolded me soundly for making her run around in her condition, then asked me what I was so afraid of and tore my every last worry into shreds in no time at all. She told me everything would be fine, better than fine, and of course I believed her. But I was still—nervous. Even after Edward proved to be perfectly human, and you as well, I was still so scared of hurting you boys. She never saw the sense in that. Loving you both was the easiest thing in the world for her."

Dad looks at him, direct and matter-of-fact. No room for argument at all in his eyes. "She loved you boys. Don't ever think for one moment that she didn't."

Alphonse smiles up at him, wishing he could do more than say, "Thank you. Really. I—"

"HOHENHEIM!"

They both twitch, though it's Alphonse who recognizes the furious snarl and the figure in black practically sprinting up the road. "Oh no."

"Is that...?"

"Yup. Sorry, in advance. Or maybe not." He shrugs, flustered. "Just—he's definitely going to keep shouting at you."

Dad visibly steels himself as he turns around. "I suppose that's the least I deserve."

===

((Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and stick with me to the end.))

#fma #fullmetal alchemist #fmab #fullmetal alchemist brotherhood #alphonse elric #my writing #magnificent things #mobile users i am. SO sorry if the read-more breaks

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ask-de-writer · 4 years

Text

LOST TIME (part 2 of 3) A fantasy of Flocking Bay.

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to Flocking Bay

LOST TIME

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

5556 words

written 2003 by Glen Ten-Eyck

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express written consent of the author or proper copyright holder.

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Morton Hewitt did not last. He bought the house for back taxes in 1944. He lived there for a week. He painted the hardwood floors and then hanged himself in the garage the next day.

Byron Thomas bought the house from Hewitt’s estate. He was a grave digger for Trinity Graveyard. He updated the plumbing and lived there quietly for several years. Apparently he liked his work a little too well. He buried two people who were not yet dead. One of them lived. He was adjudged sane at his trial and hanged for his crime.

Mark Altman bought the house next. He was a reclusive sort and lived there for a quite a number of years before it was discovered that he’d had some visitors who had never left. He died in prison while awaiting trial. There was an interesting hand written note attached to the autopsy report which stated that the coroner had ruled out both suicide and homicide but refused to pronounce the death natural.

Dora Greene got the place next. She was Mark’s sister. Like Mark, she lived there quietly for years. One day she walked into town and set fire to the school, killing five and maiming six more. She spent her last years in a lunatic asylum, setting three more fires and killing two more people. She herself died in her last fire.

While she was in the asylum, one Tony Fisk, age twelve, urged on by several other urchins, had thrown some stones at the windows of the Vekin place. He had missed. Becoming angry, he took careful aim and they all watched the flight of the stone. In the young malefactor’s words, “It went away without falling.”

It would not have been worthy of a news story, except for the fact that each of the children who had watched the stone had gone severely and permanently cross-eyed. In a small town like Flocking Bay, that many kids going cross-eyed at once could not be hidden.

George Abbot bought the house and rented it at a very low price to a Michael Farley. The two had been feuding, down-state, and the house was supposed to have been a peace offering. Farley stayed only a few weeks. He went out and dynamited Abbot’s automobile. Farley was quite mad and lived out his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. The county coroner ruled Abbot’s death to be suicide. After all, he had known the history of the house and had knowingly rented that house to an enemy.

Cornelius Baker took the house next. He upgraded the kitchen and installed modern wiring. He lived there quietly and apparently got on well for about five years. He was a long-haul truck driver. Bodies followed him about the country. Finally, he was caught with one in his truck. He drove his truck into a bridge abutment at over ninety miles per hour rather than be taken alive.

Now, I had the place. I mentally withdrew my blessing. He had not been a good man at all.

Lois saw that I was finished with the file and making good inroads on my sandwich. She asked, “Did you sleep there, last night?”

“Yes, I did. Most restful sleep I have had in years.”

“What is your full name?”

“Vandervekken,” I replied, getting out my driver’s license. I was used to this. “No first name or middle initial. Just Vandervekken.”

“How old are you?”

“I don’t know, at least seventy.”

“You don’t know how old you are? Seventy? You look like you’re in your early twenties,” she said incredulously. “I told you that things connected with the Vekin place get interesting.”

“I got a head-wound during the war. Traumatic amnesia.”

“Viet Nam wasn’t that long ago. It would only make you in your fifties.”

“Not Viet Nam, Lois. WW II. Apparently, I was helping the French Underground.” I handed her the military fingerprint record. Her eyes widened as she realized that I was serious. “The amnesia’s been permanent, so far. I have language skills . . . too many. I’m a fluent, accentless polyglot. I even speak Basque. I know how to do an amazing number of things . . . no trace of name or personal past. No ID either.”

“Couldn’t they trace you by these fingerprints or something?”

“They tried. I was found among the bodies of a wiped-out unit of the French Underground during the German withdrawal from Paris in 1944. Someone from another unit was able to say that I was an American volunteer with a name that he could neither remember nor pronounce ... something sort of Dutch. That inspired my current name. I got back with a temporary ID and that military fingerprint record, which I still carry.”

“That’s sad, and eerie, too. What’s it feel like?”

“I’ve thought about that a lot. I think the best way to describe it is like a house that’s furnished but nobody is home. Empty. Alone.”

“So, how does that relate to your choice of name? You must know what having only one name does to our systems for indexing things and people.”

“True. I want to stand out, in case somebody recognizes who I am. As for Vandervekken, he was the Flying Dutchman, who swore that he would take his ship around the Cape of Good Hope, against a gale, if it took until Judgment Day. That was in the Seventeenth Century and he is still sailing. His ghost is seen as a Dutch East India Co. galleon with all sails set, sailing into the teeth of a gale. He can’t get home either.”

“I see,” Lois said, adding to her notes. “What brought you to Flocking Bay?”

“I was just passing through. I like small towns, so I avoid the main highways and big cities whenever I can. I liked the atmosphere of Flocking Bay enough to inquire about the possibility of settling here.”

“Look, we both know that small towns are dying. You could have had your pick from any of a dozen houses. Why the Vekin place?”

“I was shown fourteen places, actually. I know that it seems a bit forbidding at first, but it felt good. Like a warm glove on a cool morning. Have you ever actually been there?”

She shuddered, “No, and before you, I have never heard of anyone who said that the Vekin place felt good ... You say that you are a writer. What have you written?”

“Charles said it very well, ’Pseudonyms are great for privacy.’ My own writing aside, I do translations but you won’t find my name on most of them. Archaeologists like to take credit for their finds. I mentioned that I’m a polyglot? I sight read ancient languages as well as modern.”

I extended my hand to Lois and invited, “Would you like to come and see for yourself this house of dark history? I promise that you will find it worth your while. In all of those stories, not once was the interior of Vekin House described. Do come.”

“I have to return the file and get my camera,” she responded gamely.

“I shall await you in my auto, in front of the Voice,” I answered. As I walked her back across the street, I had the pleasure of seeing her stare at Lilitu.

“If that’s what I think its, I’ll ride with you anywhere!” she called over her shoulder as she entered the Voice’s office. True to her word, she emerged in a few minutes with a camera. Not one of those tiny little cameras that have become fashionable, but a business-like press camera. I opened the car door and gave her a hand up.

As I got into the driver’s seat, she asked, wonder in her voice, “Is this really a Packard V-12 Touring Car?”

We pulled away with the almost uncannily quiet, vibration-free ride that the car was famous for. I replied, “You bet she is. Lois, meet Lilitu. Lilitu, meet Lois. After the war, there were still quite a few of them to be had, and I liked both the ride and the durability, so I hunted one down and had it fixed up like new. I’ve kept her that way ever since. She’s only had two owners in over two-million miles. The first owner only put on about sixty-thousand of them.”

“You drive a lot,” she stated.

“I was looking for something ... I think that Flocking Bay has it. My turn for a few questions , if you don’t mind.”

“Fire away. If I don’t like the question, I won’t answer it.”

“What did you do before you took up the Voice?”

“The same thing that I still do. The stock and futures markets. I’m good at it. I got out of college with a degree in the sociology of medieval witchcraft. I got a job as a waitress on the strength of my looks. I put my first fifty dollars in tips into a risky stock that kited way up. On a hunch, I dumped it three days after I bought it. It nosedived shortly after I sold out. After commissions, I had three hundred and fifty dollars. I rolled it over the same way. The rest is history. So far, my hunches have always worked for me.”

“What brought you to Flocking Bay?”

“Like you, I was passing through. I was on my way to Lakeside Resort about three years ago. I got a hunch that I should stay, so I did. The Voice was failing. When a small town loses its paper, the end is in sight. I didn’t want the end to come, so I bought the paper. Here I am.”

“And here we are,” I said with a flourish as I pulled up in front of the house. We both stared. The yard was neatly trimmed, though the bushes and trees still retained a slightly forbidding aspect. Going up the path to the front door, I noticed that the flagstones had been leveled, the weeds removed and the joints and refilled with fresh sand. The iron fence and balustrades had been cleaned of rust.

“You’ve been busy,” was Lois’s comment.

“That’s just it,” I replied, puzzled. “I didn’t do it. I thought that stocking the fridge and setting out a snack last night was something that the real-estate agent arranged. Sort of a welcome wagon. This is beyond the call of duty.” Opening the front door, I felt that comfortable, welcoming feeling that had caused me to buy the house in the first place. Impulsively, I said, “Hello, house, you certainly look nice today.”

Lois looked at me quizzically and asked, “Do you talk to everything, or is this special?”

I thought for a moment before answering, “Actually I only talk to things that have personality enough to warrant a name, like Lilitu, my car, or Drachen, my typewriter.”

“Typewriter? You do like antiques, don't you? What are you going to call the house, then?”

“I’m not sure,” I answered. “Something good ... What does the place feel like to you?”

“The place actually looks and feels . . . well . . .” Lois groped for the right word, “I’d have to say . . . happy. Not what I expected, at all. It feels like what you see when a pup that loves its master is greeting him. No wonder you slept well, if it feels as good to you as it does to me . . .” She sort of trailed off. “I wouldn’t normally say this, but I’m getting a hunch about this place . . .” she trailed off again.

“I guess that the house was just waiting for the right kind of person,” I responded. “It was pretty rough on everyone else. I’m glad that you like it too.”

“Look at these floors,” she mused, “They were beautiful before Hewitt painted them over. You can still make out some traces of the parquetry patterns. If he hadn’t already hanged himself, I’d help you to do it.”

<==Previous Next==>

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Return to Flocking Bay

#LOST TIME #Part 2 of 3 #Flocking Bay #Written by De Writer

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yoongi-sugaglider · 5 years

Text

Daegu Quarantine

Jungkook x reader

Gang/ zombie apocalypse au

Warnings:

Gore, violence, zombies, mention of drugs and drug dealing, weapons discharge in self defense, possible future main character death, zombies, course language, zombies, drinking, did I mention zombies?

Summary:

They were the top of their game, known throughout the city as the smartest and most dangerous crew to ever hit the Daegu streets. But what's going to happen when this group of young men encounter something right out of a horror film?

Word count: 4,004

Part 1 === Part 2

I remember the day he was initiated. Body bloody and bruised and beaten as Namjoon supported him through the front door of our tiny apartment,one arm slung over his shoulder and his free hand tightly gripped around the black bandanna that would quickly become his new status symbol.

I'd screamed and begged and cried as Namjoon lowered him into the ratty armchair of our meagerly furnished living room. But it fell on deaf ears.

“It's better this way.” Words murmured between bruise swollen lips.

Four words I grew to dread,even hate.

It's better this way.

He'd always say that when things got tough.

Gunshot wounds hastily sewn closed at our kitchen sink as sirens chased the ghost of his crimes through mute neighborhoods and empty streets.

He was a good kid, my childhood sweetheart and long time best friend. Though we’d gone through so much together it never ceased to amaze me just how close we were or how little there was that could tear us apart.

“Babe, did you see where Hobi hid the scales?” He rifled through the drawers of our now larger kitchen. We’d bought a house together, the money having been obtained through his hard work and determination to come out on top. Not to mention a few hundred thousand illegally gained dollars.

“Top right hand drawer by the stove. He was using it yesterday to weight out a couple sacks for Yoongi to put on the corner today.” I watched as Jungkook grunted in response, finding the scale in question and shuffling his way back to the office he’d set up to deal with sales and distribution.

I shook my head, returning my attention to the news article I’d been reading.

“Hey y/n. Find anything interesting yet?” Namjoon entered the kitchen from the living room, a ghost of a dimpled smile flashing towards me as he joined me by leaning casually against the kitchen island.

“Yeah actually…” My eyes continued to skim the article,trying to make heads or tails of the medical jargon being thrown at me. “There’s this big thing going on in some of the major cities. Something about people coming down with some kind of altered form of rabies. They say it’s spreading fast and they’re having a hard time finding a cure.”

Namjoon frowned, pulling the laptop towards himself and scanning the headlines. “Looks like it started somewhere in China or something. And it’s making people bite other people?”

I shook my head in wonder. “I swear sometimes I’m glad we live where we do.”

“Daegu may not be the biggest city, but we’re technically landlocked. It’d be pretty shitty if something big happened and we couldn’t get out.” He pushed the laptop back towards me and straightened up.

“Yeah but we live on the outskirts of town. If something big were to happen we could just hole up here right? Or get out into the countryside and find a place to hide out until things clear up.” I gazed up at him, worry creasing my brow as I gnawed at the skin of my lower lip with my teeth.

“Don’t worry about it too much kiddo. Even if something were to happen on a scale like that, the Americans would have it figured out in no time. Plus you’ve got us and the gang to protect you. We both know Jungkook would never let anything bad happen to you. That boy would lay down his life for you if he had to.” Namjoon reached across the counter and patted my head.

My frown darkened as I pulled out of his grasp, smoothing down my hair as he turned and walked out of the kitchen with a pleasant wave over his shoulder.

“That’s the part that scares me the most…” I muttered to no one in particular as I stared down at the article once more before shutting the laptop down.

***

Darkness descended quickly. Early winter always had this ability to put me on edge. The days shortened and temperatures dropping rapidly to leave me on edge no matter what I did or what mindset I tried to put myself in.

Jungkook and Hoseok had gone out earlier that evening to make a delivery. Big money having been put on the line in order to ensure that our suppliers didn’t go into hiding for the winter months like they liked to do when the snow set in and the streets got too cold to huddle on the corners for a quick sale.

Namjoon and I sat in the living room, eyes focused on the news from overseas as our lookouts Yoongi and Jin called in occasional reports from the police scanners.

“Looks like it’s going to be a slow night.” Yoongi grumbled from his corner of the room as he set down his headphones and stretched.

Namjoon shrugged, flipping to another news channel in order to refresh the cycle and perhaps get a new perspective on the details that were flooding in from China. “We can only hope it stays slow. Jungkook’s gonna be out with Hobi most of the night making that delivery and I’d hate for things to heat up before they can get back.”

Jin glanced over from his station, gaze dulled by boredom as he switched between the radio channels. “Fire out at the high school. Looks like multiple trucks going in, no injuries.”

Yoongi grunted, standing from his chair and heading towards the kitchen. “Anybody need anything while I’m up?” He quirked his head in my direction, seeming to have aimed the question at me more than anyone else.

I shook my head, giving him an appreciative smile which he reciprocated with a quick nod before disappearing from the room.

“Hey, I…” Namjoon stuttered before giving up at Yoongi’s disappearance. “Well never mind then hyung.” He muttered before turning his attention back to the television.

“We interrupt this broadcast to bring you new information on the developing situation in Mainland China.”

“Hey Joonie turn that up would you?” I scooted to the edge of the sofa, watching intently as Namjoon fumbled with the remote while raising the volume enough for us to hear the report.

“According to authorities the South Korean government has elected to refuse all planes and ships inbound from China and other asianic coast bound countries. There have been multiple cases of attacks in airports that seem to have stemmed from the disease along with several hundred casualties and dozens more in major cities all across South Korea that have been injured. Hospitals are filling up rapidly all across the country with people in a panic over supposed symptoms. Doctors are citing an inability to keep up with the influx of new patients.”

“Looks like people are starting to panic.” Namjoon mused over the report as he watched the ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

“I don’t like this…” I said more to myself as I sat back and pulled my blanket around me. Huddling into the warmth my attention was pulled to the phone in my hand, checking once more for any messages that I may have missed from either Hobi or Jungkook.

“Have either of you heard from Jimin?” Jin’s calm voice pulled me from the phone and I looked up at him, eyes furrowed with increasing worry.

“He said he was on shift yesterday but I haven’t heard much from him since.” Namjoon worried at his lower lip as he answered, attention now drawn to his own phone as he shot the young doctor a message.

Jimin worked at a local clinic, having been sort of initiated into our group after Yoongi and Hoseok had ended up having to bring him back to our place one night when Hobi’d been shot in the shoulder after a deal gone wrong. He’d quickly become our go to doctor when injuries happened to occur and going to a mainstream hospital had been out of the question.

He didn’t ask questions the first year or so that we’d known him but eventually we’d clued him in to our business and despite his misgivings he’d been pretty much considered family ever since.

“Says he was on call late last night and spent today catching up on sleep. He’s on his way over now but that he might get called into work if the panic starts to get worse.” Namjoon sat his phone on the coffee table in front of us and returned his attention to the news reports that continued to flash across the screen.

I huffed, pulling my knees to my chest and wrapping my arms around them as my eyes stared off into nothingness.

With everything we’d gone through, from turf wars to money loss, supply runs to foreign countries and a handful of betrayals that’d almost landed half our crew in jail a few years back, I'd never been truly scared. Worried yes, but never actually scared. This though…

This new...whatever it was that seemed to be making its rounds, really had me on edge.

I didn’t even notice when Yoongi set a cup of hot coffee in my hands, despite me having told him not to worry about me. I barely acknowledged Jimin when he’d walked in the door and taken over Jin’s spot at the police scanners. My mind was too focused on the news, and the hundreds of things that could and probably would go wrong.

Namjoon and Yoongi’s phones rang at the same time, pulling them from their posts to either side of me as they got up and left the room. I looked over to Jimin who’d exchanged worried glances with Jin as he waved the elder boy over to the second scanner across from him.

“Channel's 15 and 8.”

Jin nodded that’d he’d heard, placing the headphones over his head as he spun the dials back and forth between the mentioned stations, pausing only long enough to listen with wide eyes before moving on to the next station.

“What is it, what’s wrong?” I could feel the panic begin to rise as I watched the two men begin to get increasingly agitated.

The news grabbed my attention.

“We’re coming to you live from Daegu where there has been a reported outbreak. Multiple injuries reported, many….lives are...stay...inside...danger…”

The reporter seemed to have been live on location, the camera man struggling to keep up with the running reporter. It looked to me like they were running away from something,or someone.

“That’s at the hospital!” I just about shrieked, jumping to my feet as I watched with wide eyes. The cameraman turned, aiming the shaking camera at a massive crowd of people that seemed to be running in terror from a hospital.

One person went down, being virtually trampled to death and a woman screamed as an older man jumped on her back, tearing into her neck like some starved animal.

“Jesus…” Jin muttered as he watched the news. “This is happening all over. The cops can barely keep up with all the calls that are flooding in.”

My hands trembled as I scrambled to pick up my phone, quivering fingers struggling to type in the numbers needed to reach Jungkook.

“He’s alright. I just got off the phone with him. He’s on his way back here but it sounds like Hobi got hurt when they were trying to escape.” Namjoon had reentered the room, Yoongi following close behind with his phone still to his ear.

“Taehyung’s with them. Hobi wasn’t bit just got shoved into the street. Fucking car hit him and fucked up his leg.” Yoongi hung up the phone, eyes pinning me down with a concerned look. “Jungkook is okay, just like Joon said.”

I nodded,barely hearing anything over the screaming on the television and the sound of blood rushing through my veins. My vision wavered for a moment as panic began to set in and Yoongi reacted immediately.

He stalked across the room, hands around my waist as he lowered me to the sofa. His touch was reassuring as he guided me through the panic attack.

“Just breathe. Focus on my voice.” He turned to Namjoon with a glare. “Fuck’s sake turn it down she’s freaking out.”

Namjoon compiled, lowering the volume to a quiet drone as I began to get a handle on my emotions. Yoongi crouched before me, cat like eyes boring into my own as a focus point.

“There we go little sis. Breathe, it’s okay. We’re safe here and Jungkook’s on his way back.”

I nodded, inhaling deeply through my nose and letting out the breath in a slow whistle through pursed lips.

“It’s alright. I’m okay Yoongi.”

He glanced over my face, checking for residual signs of lingering doubt. Satisfied with what he saw he shot me a nose crinkling grin as he gave my hands one last pat and came back to his feet.

Shaking out the last of my nerves I stood as well, realizing that without Jungkook there they were going to end up looking to me for direction.

“Alright. Joon get on the phone with East Side. Make sure they’re stocked up and tell them to hole up until this blows over. The last thing we need is for them to go wandering off and get caught up in the police barricades.”

Namjoon saluted, reaching into his pocket for his phone as he left the room once more.

“Yoongi, you and Jin check our ammunition and make sure all the doors and windows are secure. I want the garage ready to be locked down and bolted once Jungkook and the others get here.” The two men saluted as well, both looking grim as they checked their concealed weapons while leaving the room together.

“Jimin?” I turned to the young doctor, reading the fear in his eyes as he stared down at his ringing phone.

“I...the clinic is calling…” He seemed unsure of himself as he looked up at me with tears in his eyes.

“I kind of figured they would.” I moved over to him, hands coming to rest on his shoulders as he sat at the corner table. “Listen, I know you have a job to do. I understand trust me.”

We both glanced down at the phone as it went silent before starting up again with the urgent ring.

“Hobi’s hurt and we need you. But...if you think…”

“No no.” Jimin shook his head as he interrupted me, hands going to turn the ringing phone off.

“You guys are my family. I know they’re gonna need me at the clinic but considering what’s going on I’d much rather stay here with you guys than get stuck holed up at a clinic with a bunch of guys infected with God only knows what.” He seemed determined, despite the slight tremble in his voice and the shake to his hands as he stowed the phone back in his pocket.

“You sure?” I couldn’t help but worry, knowing that he’d always been the first to volunteer should there be an emergency that required his aid.

“Yeah. Just. Keep me busy here until Hobi’s back. I wanna stay here. I’d rather be home.”

I gave him a soft smile, pulling him into a hug before letting him go and stepping away. “That much I can do. Go to the kitchen, grab a pen and paper and head to the basement. I need a full inventory of all the emergency MRE’s that we have. After that check the mini clinic and make sure you have everything stocked up and ready to go.”

“Do...do you think it’s going to come to that?” He asked as he stood from his chair.

“Come to what?” I asked, already knowing what he meant.

“To us being stuck or trapped here for a long time?”

I shrugged, glancing over at the TV which was showing more places that’d dissolved into panic and chaos.

“I honestly don’t know but I’d rather be prepared than caught in some dumb situation where we aren’t ready for whatever this could become.” I heaved a sigh before returning my attention to him with a forced smile.

“No matter what, we’ve got this though. We’re stronger when we’re together and we’re the best this town’s ever seen.”

Jimin nodded, giving me a hesitant smile before leaving to attend to his assigned duties. After taking a moment to ground myself I made my way upstairs, passing Yoongi in the hall who gave me a quick nod.

“Upstairs rooms are secure. Gonna head to the garage and check the cache.”

“Alright,” I replied, patting his arm and giving him a strained smile. “I’m gonna work on getting the guest rooms set up for everybody. Clean sheets and all that. Shouldn’t take me too long. Let me know when Jungkook gets home okay?”

He departed with a nod and I set to work, going from room to room and making sure the hidden weapons were loaded and that all the beds were made up for my boys.

When we had them all spend the night some of them usually shared rooms. Jimin and Taehyung shared a room and Joonie and Hoseok usually shared while Jin and Yoongi opted to have their own rooms.

I paused at the door to mine and Jungkook’s room, standing just inside the door as I surveyed the interior. Jungkook’s hoodie from the day before lay discarded on the floor and the chair to his computer desk had been left pulled out. I walked over to the hoodie, grabbing it off the floor as I dropped into the rolling chair and hugged the hoodie to my chest.

Bringing it up to my nose I inhaled his scent, finding comfort in the realization that he’d stolen my peach body spray once more despite me fussing at him about it before. It always struck me as odd that he could use the same sprays as me and still come out smelling so manly and yet so much like home.

With a sigh I folded the hoodie, placing it on the computer’s keyboard. Just as I went to stand though a shout came from downstairs, followed by what sounded like a groan of pain.

I dashed quickly from the room, making my way across the landing to the stairs just in time to see Jungkook supporting an injured Hobi as they made their way to the basement door tucked beneath the main staircase.

“Kookie?” I hollered, stumbling a bit over my feet as I took the stairs down two at a time.

“I’m good babe, where’s Jimin?” Came his breathless reply.

“Should be in the clinic. Hey Tae, you okay?” I skidded to a stop as Taehyung rushed over and grabbed Hoseok’s free arm, helping Jungkook support the injured man as I opened the basement door for them.

Taehyung gave me a brief nod, motioning to the garage with his head. “Yeah, Yoongi hyung and Namjoon hyung said they needed you. Something about the bolts on the garage doors.”

I worried at my bottom lip with my teeth as I eyed the trail of blood leading from the three men out into the garage.

“Hey, angel. It’s alright. We got this.” Jungkook gave me a look, one that calmed me instantly and reminded me of my roll in the group.

“Keep them busy. Don’t let anybody panic and make sure we’re secure.” He shot me a smile, soft and sweet and filled with love and trust in me.

I returned the smile, tilting my head a bit to look at a very pale Hoseok. “Hang in there okay? Jimin’s gonna get you fixed up real quick.”

He nodded, gulping to bite down another groan of pain as he gave me a shaky grin. “I know. I’m good. Just..the blood…” His voice trailed off to a whimper as he shut his eyes.

“We gotta get him downstairs before he loses anymore blood guys.” Tae interrupted, his tone urgent as he motioned to the torn flesh of Hoseok’s left leg.

I gave Jungkook a quick kiss to his cheek before letting them go, more so as a reassurance for me that he was real and alive than as a show of affection.

***

I made my way to the garage, fingers dancing along the grip of the 9 mil 1911 that I kept strapped to my hip at all times. It’d become almost like an extra limb to me, days where I wasn’t able to carry it close leaving me feeling bare, almost naked to the public eye.

“Jin, make sure to grab the extended clips from storage.” I hollered into the expansive garage.

Yoongi and Namjoon stood by the large door, both seeming in deep conversation as Jin jogged by me with a nod of deferral in my direction. I inclined my head towards him and continued on my way, stopping before the large doors and listening to the tail end of the two elder’s conversation.

“I know it’s a pretty sturdy lock but I still feel like we should barricade it just in case.” Namjoon seemed pretty adamant on his opinion as he’d been gesturing wildly ever since I stepped into the place.

“That may be so. But think about it Joon. What if we need a quick getaway?” Yoongi frowned at his younger partner, arms folded over his chest as he spoke quietly despite the heated state of the conversation.

“Yoongi, Namjoon, you’re both right. We do need to barricade it but a quick exit needs to be an option for us.”

I glanced over the large double doors, eyeing the motor and mechanisms and taking stock of the two large SUVs parked in the large space.

“Got any suggestions then Miss Queen of the household?” There was no snark or sass in Namjoon’s voice. Quite the contrary, the title was something the boys often used when they were waiting on me to figure a way out of a shitty situation.

Yoongi hushed him as my eyes wandered back to the garage door motor. Trailing along the power cord that trailed from the motor and along the ceiling to an outlet in the corner of the room my eyes and mind lit up.

Piled in the corner of the room where a bunch of 12 foot metal beams and a handful of shorter ones. Iron left over from when Jungkook had added a railing to the back porch 2 summers ago.

“Joonie...do we still have that plasma torch in the basement?” I asked, turning to him with excitement.

He nodded, clearly not following the plan that had begun to form in my head. As I began to outline the idea to the two a sort of giddy excitement fell over our little group.

“Yeah, I think we can manage that.” Yoongi nodded as he went over to the workbench Jin had insisted on having. The bench in question was piled with tools, some put away properly while others had been abandoned in half hazard piles in the middle of whatever project the group happened to be working on.

Pulling a pen and pad of paper from the pile he began sketching out my idea, making sure that he’d gotten all the details down before turning to me with a tooth filled grin.

“This might just fucking work.” Namjoon said as he went over measurements and calculations in his head.

“Just be sure that after you’re done you line up the SUVs and unplug the motor to the door.” I gave each of them a hug, praising them for their earlier work and gaining reassurances that the two would put my plan into motion immediately.

Yoongi went to work gathering what he would need as Namjoon followed me out of the garage and down to the basement, the two of us now grim faced as we could hear Hoseok’s groans of pain from the doorway just beneath the stairs.

#bts #jungkook x reader #jungkook reader insert #jeon jungkook #bts jungguk #bts gang au #bts zombie au #bts jung hoseok #bts park jimin #bts kim taehyung #bts min yoongi #bts kim namjoon #bts kim seokjin

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