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wangxianficrecs · 3 years

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Follower Recs

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Hi! First of all, thank you so much for running this blog, It's become one of three reasons why I haven't yet committed arson (I jest but the Feeling is true). [Hee, hee, hee.] I have a rec for you! It's called "wholesome life usurp immediately" by comfect on ao3 and it's. So good. It's unfinished but the author updates it literally every other day if not faster! It's a lovely fic, I hope you enjoy it. 🌻

Wholesome Life Usurp Immediately

by Comfect (T, 55k, yunmeng sibs, qingli, wangxian, WIP)

Summary: Wen Qing examines Jiang Yanli at Cloud Recesses and has a cure for her poor cultivation.

Now there are Three Prides of Yunmeng.

Everything kind of fixes itself from there.

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hello mojo!! I would really like to recommend standing still (but we keep going) by lwjromantics!! it's really good!!

standing still (but we keep going)

by lwjromantics (justfantaestic) (T, 5k, wangxian)

Summary: Lan Wangji supposed that if having to take care of little A-Yuan and Mo Xuanyu and having to look at the reminders of Wei Ying in their habits and mannerisms was punishment for his actions, he would willingly take it and flay his own back open.

— There are children in the Burial Mounds.

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hii mojo! I just read this cute fic and I loved it so I wanted to rec it :)

Word Up, Talk the Talk

by Larryissocute (G, 2k, wangxian)

Summary: It wouldn’t have been a problem (it really wouldn’t) if they weren’t best friends. Wei Wuxian doesn’t know what good deeds he did in his past life to be blessed with Lan Wangji as a friend nor does he know what evil things he did to be cursed with being only a friend to Lan Wangji.

Or the one where Wei Wuxian kisses Lan Wangji and then runs away.

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Hey! Love your account — and proud of you for taking the hiatus you needed. [Lol - it was really nice!] Idk if you take fic recommendations, but I'd love to rec Roots by ardenrabbit. Fantastic characterization, I really love it!

Roots

by ardenrabbit (E, 46k, wangxian, WIP)

Summary: After Wei Wuxian's duel with Jiang Cheng, he finds that stab wounds aren't so trivial when he doesn't have a core to heal them. He wakes to find Lan Zhan in the Burial Mounds with him, already beloved by the Wens and making himself at home. When Lan Zhan tells him that he wants to stay and offers more help than Wei Wuxian knows how to accept, he fears that it's only too good to be true.

Lan Wangji knows that Wei Ying is doing the right thing, and he couldn't live with himself if he let him do it alone. For everything Wei Ying has sacrificed, Lan Wangji is determined to give something back to him.

Hanguang-Jun has turned his back on the clans to join the Yiling Wens and their demonic cultivator leader, and every clan has a different opinion on the matter.

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Hello! I wanted to rec a fic on ao3 called "Restoration" by jelenedra. It's complete, an alternate universe of the sunshot campaign told nonlinearly. It has strong fairy tale and fae elements, with a touch of mystery. Bit of a fix it. Some delightful one liners, and the final ending imagery is just LOVELY. The fic deserves much more love. There's also some YilingWei, wwx not raised by Jiang, and sentient Burial Mounds elements. Enchanting read that keeps you enthralled and curious and intrigued.

Restoration

by jelenedra (M, 85k, wangxian)

Summary: They say he was thrown into Luanzang Gang by the man who killed his parents; they say that he is an immortal cultivator who had been in a deep trance until the Wen sect disturbed his rest and incurred his wrath; they say that he is the fierce corpse of a cultivator who had somehow regained his mind and his spiritual powers.

When Lan Wangji sees him for the first time, he understands why people talk.

Meng Yao wants safety. Xue Yang wants vengeance. The Sunshot Campaign wants victory. Yiling Laozu provides, for a price.

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I usually read all your recommendations. Thanks for gathering all good recs of wangxian. I am in love with every single story your recommend especially the favorites. [I’m so glad!] I just wanted to suggest a fic i came across while searching for phoenix!wwx. Its a new story I think as author has published it today. The first chapter was very interesting that i thought ill recommend it you and know your opinion. The legendary phoenix and his dragon -Devipriya and Hidden Path to Love by ShadowTenshiV

Hidden Path to Love

by ShadowTenshiV (G, 78k, wangxian)

Summary: Wei Ying is a servant working at the Gusu Lan castle. One day he enters through a secret passage way connected to the library where he meets a Lan for the first time. He may have left quite an impression, gaining the other´s attention and slowly becoming friends. They would like to become something more, but a servant can´t be with a prince, but maybe his secret can change that.

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hello mojo! i was wondering if I could make a fic rec? it’s called “and the calm is deep where the quiet waters flow” by izanyas. it used to be on ao3 but the author has since moved it to eir own website and has started posting updates there. i was wondering if this could also act as a signal boost bc some old readers on ao3 might not have known that it is now on another website. Author's been through a tough time so I think it deserves a lot more love.

For new readers, please mind the warnings in the prologue and the beginning of each chapter! it’s omegaverse and a very heavy read as it deals with (possible spoiler) off-screen rape that results in an unwanted pregnancy, as well as secondary gender oppression which runs deep, but for people who can bear it the writing, worldbuilding, and emotions are truly spectacular.

and the calm is deep where the quiet waters flow

by izanyas (E, 270k, wangxian, WIP, link is to WordPress rather than AO3)

Summary: Cangse Sanren was the first of her kind to become a cultivator. Talented, passionate, free-spirited, she bested everything that ever came her way until the very end.

Jiang Fengmian refuses to see her son deprived of that same freedom.

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Hello Mojo! I dunno if this's been recced before, but here's another ficrec for you? It's complete, on ao3, "The Third Young Master of Qishan Wen" by KouriArashi. It's 'if wwx was raised by dafan wen, but gets recognized as 3rd heir due to his skill' scenario. Some really nice banter and characterization. Wwx and lz get together before the sunshot campaign. Story follows the live action but diverges into au, and does some cool callbacks to original canon. Love Meng Yao in this! [Oh, I know KouriArashi from my last fandom, I love her works!]

❤️The Third Young Master of the Qishan Wen

by KouriArashi (T, 139k, wangxian, my post)

Summary: The fic where Wei Wuxian is adopted by the Dafan Mountain Wens instead of the Yunmeng Jiang.

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Hi Mojo! I can count the number of times I’ve spoken on Tumblr on one hand (I’m shy heh) but I found this fic that I think you and others would really like? I’m a sucker for emotional hurt/comfort and this was just too sweet for me not to share (did I go through 20 pages of bookmarks just to make sure you don’t already have it? Maybe …) [Aww, you can do a sidebar search in the bookmarks for the author’s name. But I hope you found other good fics by carding through the whole catalog!] It’s “Close Your Soft Eyes” by timetoboldlygo! I also wanna say thank you for all the hard work you put into this blog! It’s a treasure beyond compare. :D [Thank you so much!]

Close Your Soft Eyes

by timetoboldlygo (G, 12k, wangxian)

Summary: When Lan Wangji woke, the first thing he noticed was the slip of paper, folded and tucked between his index and middle fingers, not Wei Wuxian’s absence. His fingers trembled as he unfurled the paper. A donkey with a little smile beamed down at him.

On the nights that Wei Wuxian was gone, Lan Wangji woke to gifts on his pillow.

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Hey Mojo! I love your blog it is beyond awesome! [Thank you!] I was wondering if you would consider reading JaenysBloodcourt series "A Bond to Takes us home"? The summary is weird but I like the fics and would love to hear your opinion on LWJ POV (it's part 2). Part one is Mingxian but part two (Wangxian) reads as a standalone for the most part. Anyways, thank you for all your hard work! <3 [I’ll put it on my list!]

A Bond to Take Us Home

by JaenysBloodcourt (T, 10k, mingxian - nmj/wwx, wangxian, series in progress)

Summary: Wei Wuxian has two soulmarks. He has two soulmates that seem to be the opposite of him. During his first life he meets both of them, loves only one and longs for the other. In his second life, the one he loved first is dead, and the one he pined after is pining after him.

These are the many tales of his soulmates and the raucous they made across the cultivation world.

Some are dark, some are light. Beware.

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I forgot to send this in for Mother's Day a few weeks ago, but have you read dragongirlG's "into the light of a dark black night"? It's a short canon divergence where Mama Lan escapes the Cloud Recesses after spending one last, heartbreaking night with her sons. It's so beautiful and bittersweet! [Oh, ouch. I just read this author’s time travelling juniors au, but hadn’t seen this one.]

into the light of a dark black night

by dragongirlG (T, 3k, Madam Lan & sons)

Summary: The night that Wu Yuhua, formerly known as Madam Lan, plans to escape from the Cloud Recesses, she runs into an unexpected complication.

That complication comes in the form of her younger son A-Zhan running up to her door and kneeling in front of it, hushed whimpers escaping from his throat.

Wu Yuhua knows it's not the full moon, knows that it's not the one day a month she's allowed to see her children—but like hell is she going to leave her six-year-old son out there trying to stifle sobs in the snow.

She opens the door. "A-Zhan," she says, bending down and reaching out a hand. "Come in, my sweet boy."

On a snowy night in the dead of winter, Wu Yuhua, formerly known as Madam Lan, unexpectedly spends one last night with her sons before escaping from the Cloud Recesses.

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Hello queen I’d like to recommend for ur follower rec posts Avatar: The Untamed Waterbender by KouriArashi. Banger of an ATLA au, def the best one I’ve seen. It’s a WIP but the author updates pretty regularly and it’s all around an A+ fic [Oh, yes, I’ve been waiting for this one to finish before I jump in.]

Avatar: The Untamed Waterbender

by KouriArashi (T, 123k, wangxian, WIP)

Summary: You know the drill. Long ago, the four nations lived in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.

100 years later, Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli find Wei Wuxian sealed in an iceberg.

Featuring: avatar WWX, waterbending JC, firebending Wens, airbending Lans, earthbending Nies and Jins, Jiang Yanli in possession of the brain cell, et cetera.

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[My ko-fi.]

#follower rec #wangxian fic rec #I HAVEN'T READ THESE YET #wangxian #mdzs #follower recs

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novantinuum · 5 years

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Shattering Atlas (a corrupted!Steven one-shot)

Fandom: Steven Universe

Rating: T (TW: depression and body horror)

Words: 4.2K~

Summary: A boy can only carry an entire galaxy upon his back for so long before the weight of it all finally becomes too much.

Folks, here it is! I’m finally finished. AO3 link to be posted in the reblogs.

Disclaimer: This is absolutely far darker and more drastic than I believe canon would EVER tread if this theory had the faintest chance of being anywhere close to the truth, but sometimes you just feel like being super angsty for angst's sake, y'feel? It was an interesting writing experiment nonetheless. Not gonna lie, this is kinda a vent piece. Please do heed those tags. This delves into some difficult territory both mentally and otherwise, as it's written entirely from Steven's POV.

_____

Steven knows he’s messed-up.

It’s not something he tries to advertise to all the sweet, innocent people who somehow after all this time still choose to stand by his side, but he can’t lie to himself. Spending a significant chunk of your childhood actively doubting your own personhood shatters you in ways no amount of unconditional love can ever hope to mend. And sure, he’s not his mom. He knows that. Been there, had the mental breakdown, seen it, done it. The proof’s in his gem half. He knows. But as much as everyone in his life coddles him, gently tries to reassure him while he tirelessly works day and night to realign the foundation of an entire ancient civilization...

“You’re almost an adult now, isn’t that exciting?”

“Don’t worry about the future, the futures I see for you are as limitless as they are bright.”

“Take a break if you need to, ‘kay? You totally deserve one, little man.”

“Y’know, Schtu-ball, the wonderful thing about adulthood is that you can choose to fly wherever the wind takes you!”

...it’s clear none of that matters anyways. Because it’s not true, not for him. Because beyond his identity as a Crystal Gem, beyond that bottomless desire for belonging he’s been chasing all his life, ever since the fateful moment early in his childhood in which he finally realized— small, pudgy hands clutching at the oversized hand-me-down shirt right over the pink hand-me-down gem in his belly— that he isn’t like anyone else and never will be, the truth is that he genuinely doesn’t know what he wants. Who he is.

Everyone else does.

Connie has plans. Hopes, dreams. A future. She’s already thinking about college, and aims on double majoring in political science and environmental science. (A combination only she’s daring enough to pursue, but if anyone’s got the drive to succeed in that it’s her.) Dad’s still manager for Sadie Killer and the Suspects, and they’re going strong. Amethyst has been playing tour guide to all her fellow Prime sisters lately, galavanting with them all around planet Earth. Garnet is currently on the search for terrified cross-fusion Gems still in hiding across the galaxy. Pearl, Bismuth, and a number of the boardies have spearheaded a campaign to help slowly teach and integrate the humans of the Zoo into modern day society. Lapis and Peridot recently built another barn in the outskirts of Little Homeworld, and are enjoying each other’s company.

But him? When all is said and done, as the restructured Gem society stabilizes and soon no one will need him for anything anymore, when Gems and humans alike stop knocking on his metaphoric door with handfuls of their problems for him to drop everything and solve, he has nothing left. He’s no one. No future, no clue. He’s been drained empty.

He’s just drifting through life with the parking break on, continuously waiting— his nerves jittering at every quiet moment— for the next big crisis to crash into his universe and drop feed him even the tinniest shard of purpose.

After all, what is one to do when they’ve spent their entire life training to save the world, but the world has already been saved?

_____

He can’t recall exactly when his current predicament began anymore.

Time’s been hard to keep track of as of late— the days and weeks blending together in an incomprehensible fashion— and yet simultaneously, he might as well have lived a lifetime in the span of the blink of an eye. That being said, he’s pretty sure his most recent gem troubles didn’t truly kick into gear until after the incident with the, erm... cactus monstrosities.

He genuinely didn’t mean to hurt anyone, he didn’t. He only wanted to help... to heal. To try and repair but a shred of the damage Homeworld wrought on this innocent world. It worked when Earth was poisoned, so it should work in the Kindergartens too, right?

Wrong. Very wrong.

His stomach churns as he catches a glimpse of a silly photo of Peridot and himself hanging on the wall by the stairs. A static monument to his shame. Lapis is (still, days later— or is it weeks?) taking care of her gemstone at this very moment, sure, but remembering what happened before that... holding Peridot’s cracked gem in his quivering hands, biting back cries of hopelessness as he ran to the nearest warp pad, escaping from the malformed, hurting creatures born of his own magic... it‘s the kind of horror that he’s sure will linger in his dreams for a long time yet.

It’s like he’s broken. Like his powers just aren’t coming as naturally to him anymore. It’s not quite like that time with the rejuvenator. There’s no sickly glow flickering in and out of existence. No external force acting upon it. No, it’s deeper than that. It’s not a gem sourced problem, it’s him. He’s just... wrong. He’ll try to use his healing ability and it’ll backfire, he’ll summon his bubbles and shields but they’re noticeably less durable, he’ll birth life from his very soul and it’ll grow bitter and corrupt, every bit a mirror of his present mental state. He’ll jump up high in the sky to burn out years of repressed stress in semi-peace and before he can actually do so gravity will grab ahold of him like he’s a petulant, disobedient child and drag him back to the shore. It makes him want to scream, to grind his fingers into the sand so hard his knuckles go white as he sobs out every last one of his stupid, meaningless frustrations, but instead his house is always swarming with people, and his bedroom has no real door, (and he’s too embarrassed to ask for one), and in sum he can never find enough time alone to freely be his genuine messed-up self. It’s fine, though. He doubts he’s capable of crying at this point anyways.

“Dude, you okay?” Amethyst asks with brows furrowed in concern, snapping him back to reality.

His GameStation controller rests precariously in his loose grasp, entirely forgotten in the previous moment. The game they’re playing is paused. He must have blanked out again, and completely ruined their co-op fight. He lets out a shaky breath as he tightens his fingers around the plastic grips, digging into them as if they’re his sole handle on reality.

“Yeah, sorry,” he says swiftly, plastering a smile on his face with the ease of someone who’s been growing adept at this endless charade for months and months. “Didn’t sleep too well last night. Muscle cramps from training, y’know?”

He watches her closely, catalogues every minute shift in her features. Her eyes narrow so slightly that anyone else might’ve missed it. But he doesn’t. He’s observant. He’s gotta be. It’s the only way he’s kept going for this long, the only way he can ensure no one else knows. They don’t need any more worry. Regardless, Amethyst’s lack of subtlety betrays her, because it’s clear she’s searching his expression and body language right back. His chest pounds. Hastily, he holds up the controller, feeling his face go pale under her scrutiny.

Geeze, how pathetic.

No matter how hard he tries to mask it, he‘s already falling apart.

“So... we gonna play another round, or?” Right as he says this, his stomach chooses to let out an inopportune gurgle. He bites at the insides of his cheeks, inwardly cursing at the bad timing.

It’s thankfully enough to divert Amethyst’s attention from... other matters, though.

“Yo. Ste-man. Your stomach’s straight up monologuing. Have you even eaten today?”

He dimly considers this as he tries not to focus on how empty and faint his body currently feels, mind turning to fuzz. “Uhh...”

She frowns, and promptly pulls herself to her feet. “Yeah, so I’m gonna take that as a no. I’ll be right back, ‘kay? Gonna get us some cheese!” she declares bombastically, putting on a mock announcer voice.

He watches her leave his room, prancing downstairs like she doesn’t have a care in the world. A faint huff of sheer relief passes through his nostrils. Absentmindedly, his thumbs jiggle the controller’s joystick, unable to strike the earlier image of Amethyst— concern engulfing her usually carefree self— from his mind. He really should be more careful about what he says. How he acts.

He honestly couldn’t live with himself if he slipped up and became yet another emotionally taxing problem for them to deal with. Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl... all his family, his friends. They deserve peace. They deserve to be satisfied, they deserve their happily ever after. They certainly don’t deserve him, self-destructing all over the bright and shining future they’d won.

Or nearly shattering them.

Putting them in needless danger, danger that’s all his fault, because he’s broken.

His throat grows tight, airway constricted, images of black beady eyes, razor sharp fangs, and malformed limbs invading his thoughts, clawing away at insecurities long scabbed over until they ooze a bitter red. Peridot’s shrill yelp as she’s overtaken in an instant. That dreadful, immediately recognizable sound, a cracking Gem, seared onto his heart for the rest of time.

He... he can’t deny it anymore. His magic’s gone toxic. He’s toxic, bringing suffering and decay where once he brought healing. All his Gem powers are fading, maybe forever. And with them fading, he’ll soon be of no use to anyone, and when they realize why they faded they won’t want him around anyways, and y’know, it’s probably for the better they’ll have a concrete reason to finally push him away. He’s not stupid. He’s always known what an emotionally taxing strain he’s been on everyone, ever since the day Mom died for him to be born.

Steven grips the controller so hard that his fingers grow numb, mind stewing in the dark fantasies of what he’d like to do with himself when he’s left behind for good.

And then... his heart leaps in his throat as he dimly hears Amethyst begin to whisper to the others (they’re back? They’re back?? When did they return, why didn’t you notice them, how could you just miss—) downstairs.

“Y’guys,” he hears her say frantically, under her breath, “I think we really gotta talk with Steven. Something’s seriously wrong, and he won’t tell me what.”

“What, you mean to say he’s in danger? Garnet, do you see anything?”

“Hmm. I don’t foresee any external threats to Steven’s safety in the near future, but...”

“Amethyst, he’s clearly still upset about Peridot. And once she reforms in a few days, when she’s ready, he’ll be fine! Trust me.“

“No, trust me, I genuinely think this is more than just Peridot! It’s getting me super worried. He hasn’t been eating like he should, y’guys. I don’t think he’s showered in days. Sometimes it’s like he’s... I dunno, like, he isn’t even fully present. And y’know, thinking about it now? It’s been like this for a while. Since before all the cactus stuff.”

“Well, if he doesn’t want to talk about it, I’m not sure how we could—“

“We need to call Greg over,” Garnet interrupts Pearl, a new, thinly veiled panic rising in her voice. “Right now.”

His eyes stretch open wide.

Oh.

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no... Not here, not now, not— please, not now!

His breath hastens, his body outright shaking now. He curls tight into himself, the game controller dropping from his slackened fingers onto the floor as he clutches his knees to his chest. Sweat beads in droplets on his forehead. He outright yanks at his hair.

Amethyst, she can’t just waltz downstairs and!—

I don’t want to—

Peridot, getting cracked, I- it’s all my fault and she didn’t—

I- all of this- I’m so useless, careless, l- I’m losing my mind, what’s even wrong- why are you panicking!- I don’t—

T-they can’t know, they can’t know, they CAN’T—

He can’t fully bite back his cries as his gem flares burning hot, a rush of pure, unadulterated agony spiking through his hard light veins in an indescribably eternal split-second, the very experience of hypocrisy. Every single muscle in his body seizes. His ears ring, filled with a cacophonous clamor of sound that slashes through his mind with the deadly force of a long blade. Crippling. Debilitating. All-consuming. Hell. This is hell. Because then his head is pounding, and his limbs are all weak and shaky, and for a moment he’s bathed in a faint wash of pink, the glow enveloping him like his own corona of sickness as he succumbs to the pain he’s sequestered inside, bitterly festering for all these years.

Hell eventually recedes, both its note and its physical touch, but the dark clouds looming over his mind do not. Slowly, he loosens his grip on his curls, trying desperately to bring balance to his breathing. His ears are still ringing. His head is still cotton. Questions abound. For instance: what on Earth was that?? Stars, is something else wrong with his gem now, too? Thoroughly disorientated, he yanks up the hem of his shirt.

“Steven?!” Pearl calls frantically from downstairs, right as his trembling fingers gently trace the exposed facets of his gem. “Are you okay up there?”

He squints, features compressing in his sheer confusion. Visually, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. No imperfections, no flickering light, nothing. So then what’s—

“Hey, Steven? Yo?? You, uh- maybe wanna come eat downstairs, or?”

A shudder runs clear through his form, starting from his gem and coursing outwards to the furthest extremities. He grits his teeth as he rides through the stabbing discomfort, clutching at his stomach. It’s like he’s about to vomit. Sure, so maybe he was really hungry before, and maybe that has a little to do with what he’s experiencing now, but... this... still doesn’t feel right. Spots swim in his vision as he glances down again.

And that’s when he sees it, slowly creeping across the skin of his bare forearm as clear as day.

It’s a patch of dull, pinkish hide. Not human skin, hide. He runs his index finger along its perimeter, all of reality screeching to a halt as his brain performs somersaults in a desperate last-ditch attempt to contextualize the information his eyes are sending him right now.

“What?” he whispers in disbelief, (even though he has a few terrifying theories), frantic heartbeat pounding in his ears like a drum.

“I’m checking on him,” Garnet says, just loud enough that he knows for certain she intends him to hear. Solid footsteps creep across the floorboards, advancing towards the foot of the stairs.

It’s frankly impressive how fast a single stimulus can turn panic to outright paranoia.

He almost trips over himself diving to retrieve his jacket off the floor, forcing his arms through the sleeves faster than any of the Gems could ever summon their weapons. Hide it. Hide it away. They can’t see you, they can’t know you’re corru- NO! Stop.

Bathroom. He needs to get to the bathroom.

His bare feet solidly connect with the floor, toes curling inwards as he shudders again. A pulsing ache settles into the bones of his skull. Then a prickle at his neck. Reflexively, he slaps his hand against the affected locale. There’s another spot steadily growing there.

Alone, NOW.

The whole world’s spinning as he turns on his heels and flies across the length of his bedroom— sprinting past the TV, shoving past Garnet, who’s already halfway up the open stairwell, and leaping clear over the couch from midway down the last set of steps. (Everyone’s shouting in blind panic as he enters their sight. Fear. Needless, unwanted worry. Calling his name, calling for peace, but his ears are still ringing and their voices are overlapping and he can’t distinguish any of it.) When he reaches the bathroom his hand grips the knob so hard that the metal almost crumples under his force, and he swings himself through the doorway, slams it shut, and turns the lock with pink-splotched fingers faster than any one of the Gems can move to stop him.

For a split moment, things are okay. He’s alone. Moreover, he’s safe.

(But are you really?)

His head is pounding again, the pulsing at his temples soon coalescing into a constant inescapable misery. Letting his eyes flutter shut, he lets his forehead lull against the door. Flexes his knuckles, imagines the splotches disappearing from sight as easily as eye bags under makeup. He tries to calm his breathing in the meditative way Garnet once showed him. In for four counts... and out. In... and out. Come on, just ride it out, Universe. You’re a Gem- a diamond, for cripe’s sake! Control it. Conceal. Move on.

“Steven?!” Amethyst calls from outside. “Please talk to us, what’s goin’ on?”

"Whatever it is, you don't have to be alone!" Pearl adds. He doesn't even have to see her face to know that she's crying.

A renewed burst of panic spikes through his veins at this realization.

“Stop worrying about me, I’m fine!” he bites back on impulse.

“No, you’re NOT!” Amethyst hollers, and then... after a thoughtful pause, her tone softening: “I- I know you’re not.”

He stares down at his hands, brows threading together, watching as the patch of hide continues to inch across his skin. The genuine concern interlaced in every syllable of her speech is enough to make his gut churn with guilt.

“Steven, I... stars, I know you probably overheard me talking to everyone jus’ a second ago, and I know I probably betrayed every scrap of trust we ever had ‘coz of that, and I wanna say I’m sorry, but I can’t just stand aside and watch you treat yourself like garbage. Please, the door’s jammed. Let us in. We just wanna help!”

His lip quivers, despite himself. “I don’t need any help!” he insists, stubbornly pushing past the crack in his voice. “I’m just—“

He’s interrupted by a rush of crippling agony radiating upwards from his gem once more, the ache at either side of his head intensifying into three points. Hands rush to the site on automatic. Fingers grasping, searching. Discovering.

There’s something growing at his temples, he realizes with a rush of horror. Something hard, faceted. Disturbingly cold to the touch.

There’s no way to bite back his screams as the growths fully protrude, none at all, even with his mouth clamped shut, and even though he can’t see them he can sense their weight as they wind upwards and back, up and out of his curls, and he’s shaking, oh stars is he shaking, chest heaving up and down so hard he’s not sure he’ll ever be free of these awful tremors ever again, and— A hoarse sob forces its way to the surface as a third growth crowns his forehead. Trembling fingers scrape down the length of the door as he collapses to his knees, nails sharpening into gnarled talons as they sink further and further into the wood, carving through it like butter. He clenches his jaw back together so hard that with any greater pressure he might shatter his own teeth.

Still quite woozy under the threat of hyperventilation, he slowly turns his head. Extricates those dreadful claws from the door. Dares himself to look. Forcing himself back up to his feet, he gazes deep into the depths of the mirror. And as the creature trapped on the other side stares back through sickeningly pink irises— blotches of color steadily creeping up their jawline and across their cheek, inching to meet the base of those glistening crystalline horns— all known reality shatters into smithereens.

Not me, not me, not me, is the mantra he chants to himself like a prayer, stubbornly clinging to any vestige of normalcy as if this is all but a vivid nightmare he can stir awake from.

(As if deep down, a tiny, beaten-down part of himself still wants to believe he deserves a future too.)

But the darkness reflected in that mirror is following his every jerky, erratic movement as all the despair and guilt and self-hatred festering within continues to consume him like a matchstick to fire.

Not real. It’s not real! I don’t need help. I don’t need the Gems, they don’t need to know, I’m fine, I’m FINE, this isn’t corru - NO, DON’T THINK ABOUT IT! YOU CAN’T—

They’re yelling outside. Arguing, probably. (And true to form, Pearl‘s cries are the shrillest.) But he can’t be certain of anything anymore while smothered under the fog’s thickening surface, with the rest of the world relegated to mere static and stimuli. Not a word, not a clue. No way to know if it’s an argument about him or with him.

And in his mind their distress stands as yet another sign. Just another slice of proof that they truly are at their happiest without him, that his continued existence only serves as a complication. He can’t deny it anymore. He can’t lie, can’t tiptoe around the inevitable truth; like this, he’s nothing but a liability. A ticking time bomb, set to shatter everything and everyone in his path. Shaking like a leaf, he unfurls his fists, watching as the dull pink hide overtakes the last clear patches of flesh upon his misshapen, monstrous fingers.

They’re better off without you.

The passing seconds cease to exist as he convulses again, this time centralized at the base of the spinal column. He doubles over, leans into the pain. Rides it through vertebrae by vertebrae, raking his claws deep into the wood floor as a fifth limb emerges from where the spine left off, steadily lengthening— fortifying itself with jagged crystalline spikes as it grows ever longer. Its weight is entirely foreign, yet it shifts upon his slightest command. Panic overruling all logic once more, he thrashes about, the tail swinging across the bathroom counter like a whip. His toothbrush, comb, and other various toiletries he hasn't made use of in days clatter to the floor, abandoned.

R u n.

The thought rampages through his shattered soul like an avalanche. Yanks him by the horns. Consumes his mind and body like a trance. He has to escape from here, from the house, the Gems, has to run quick, before it’s too late and you can’t do anything more but wordlessly scream.

He doesn’t stop to question this impulse. Doesn’t stop to peer at that poor tortured creature in the mirror again. For a moment his claws struggle to grasp the crumpled door knob, fumbling in failure’s wake.

When he finally forces the door open, the whole world holds its breath.

Pearl’s eyes blow wide upon the no-doubt horrifying sight. Her hands fly to her mouth. “Steven?!”

Even Amethyst reacts in an adverse manner, stepping back towards the support of the wall. “Holy...” she breathes, face paling.

And just knowing he’s out here now, every gnarled, nightmarish feature exposed in front of his family like a raw nerve, makes his blotchy, spot-covered skin crawl.

“DON’T LOOK AT ME, I’m FINE!” he hollers as he sprints to the warp pad, barbed tail whipping wildly behind him. Pearl yelps in alarm as she only barely dodges its mace-like swing. Unable to hold back his sobs anymore, he collapses to his knees on the hard crystal. Coils his tail around himself by sheer instinct. Hides his face away behind arms. Hot tears spill from his eyes, vision blurring and sharpening in rhythm to the unbearable ache pounding in his head. “I’m fine,” he whispers pathetically, voice catching.

He can practically feel the vibrations through the floor as someone approaches. It’s Garnet. He doesn’t know how he knows, but it can only be her. His breath hastens against his better wishes. Can’t stop, won’t stop, can’t stop... The vision of the temple door begins to pirouette in dizzy circles around him as he arches his back, and with a sharp gasp feels something tear its way through his shirt and jacket right above his spine, all jagged and spiked and— NO! He grinds his jaw together, shrinking further into himself. Not real. It’s not real, not real, not—

“Steven,” she says in a measured tone as he heaves for air. (No, with hesitation. Fear. She’s hesitating because she’s afraid of you, she’s afraid because you’re a monster NO.) “I know you’re hurting, but I need you to take a deep breath with me, and try to calm down. Please, let us help you...”

A heart wrenchingly familiar hand reaches out to him, adorned by a ruby gem and a golden wedding band. His fingers clamp around thick, greasy curls, brushing against the horns protruding from his temples. A keening cry slips out from his mouth against his better wishes. They want to help. They only want to help...

He peeks at her through the crook of his arm, his most likely reddened, blotchy eyes meeting hers. She’s taken off her visor. She’s crying too.

For a glimmer of a second, he considers reaching out. Taking her offered hand with his own clawed one. But then...

Haven’t you been a burden enough already?

His face screws up, and his hands clench into fists.

“NO,” he shouts, slamming them down upon the warp pad. It activates, (blessedly still accessible at this early stage of corruption NO don’t think about it!!), glowing a bright cyan as he envisions where he wants to go: no particular destination in his mind but away, away, away.

After all, he already knows he’s a monster.

So... he might as well become one too.

_____

Notes:

Some days you just gotta have an entire mental breakdown and go full wyrm, y'hear?

HCs I tapped into for this fic:

After being healed, formerly cracked Gems take longer to reform than Gems who were only poofed. Peridot will be okay eventually, she just hasn’t reformed quite yet.

Steven is still able to warp because he hasn’t quite passed the threshold of corruption that prevents a Gem from accessing the warp stream. I imagine it's very much a matter of mental connection, and having the right presence of mind to tap into it. Probably a few minutes after this, if Steven were to continue going downhill and his mind fully fell into the fog of corruption, he’d no longer be able to warp. He got super lucky here.

This potential future blindsided Garnet because previously- like how Steven’s newfound maturity threw her off as discussed in Pool Hopping- she hadn’t factored in the idea of Steven being in such a low mental state. Amethyst was the first to really see past his attempts to mask it because she personally had dealt with depression like this before and knew what it looked like.

Maybe one day after SUF airs I'll write more on this topic, but as for now this will remain a one-shot. I 100% imagine Steven would ultimately be okay in this timeline, though. They'd be able to help him, stop the corruption. Steven goes to heckin' therapy. He'll live on, he'll begin to recover and cope. But that's a whole 'nother story.

Thank you for reading!

#su #su future #steven universe #corrupted steven theory #su fanfic #garnet #amethyst #pearl #su fanfiction #corrupted steven #corrupt!steven #body horror #my writing stuff #the mighty 500

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reallifesultanas · 4 years

Text

Portrait of Gazanfer Agha / Gazanfer Aga portréja

Origin

Gazanfer Agha may have been born into a Venetian family around 1545-50, he had two sisters and one brother. He presumably traveled with his mother and siblings to their father who settled in Albania, when they were abducted. His mother paid a ransom to save herself and her two daughters, but she did not get his sons back even for a ransom. Gazanfer and Cafer thus went to Istanbul and were educated in the Enderum. From there they then entered to the personal service of Sultan Selim II after his accession to the throne.

It was also suggested that he may was a Hungarian, but this has been refuted by several evidences. It is more likely that his nickname "The Hungarian" was given to him after accompanying Sultan Mehmed to the Hungarian campaign in 1596 and there, frightened by the war, he suggested to the sultan to hide in a carriage and flee from the battlefield. It is possible that there was also a truly Hungarian agha in the palace at this time, and since in many cases the agas were invoked only on the basis of origin, the two blurred.

Rise

Selim II liked the brothers so much that he offered them access to the highest possible positions, but for that, they had to castrate themselves. The ambitious brothers agreed to the operation. The sources do not agree as to whether Cafer also survived the castration or not. Some say he died, others say he died of natural causes in 1582, and until then he served as an influential agha. What is certain, however, is that Gazanfer recovered after the operation and was in Selim's personal service.

However, his real rise happened during the reign of Murad III, the son of Selim. He was first in charge of the turban for three years, then, replacing his brother Cafer, he became the agha in charge of the sultan's residence in 1577. Then, in 1581, Gazanfer also became the chief eunuch, with which he actually reached the highest possible position, which was roughly similar to the rank of Grand Vizier. The chief eunuch was the head of the whole palace, so the chief black eunuch who controlled the harem was under him and everyone else who was responsible for the sultan’s personal residence also. However, Murad liked Gazanfer so much that in addition to his chief eunuch position, he also left him as the eunuch responsible for his apartment(hasoda basi). Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Gazanfer slowly became the most influential person in the empire. Contrary to legends, he was never an ally of Nurbanu Sultan, since at his true ascension the Sultana was already retired and soon passed away. Gazanfer's main ally was Nurbanu's enemy, Safiye Sultan. After Murad III's death, with Safiye's support, he gained an even greater influence and was the first (outside the imperial family) to establish a religious school, madrasa, in downtown Istanbul in 1595. Although he did charity from his vast fortune, he did significantly less than other influential people.

Influential relatives

Around Nurbanu's death, some ambassadors reported an incident that also affected Gazanfer's life. At the end of 1583, an elderly Venetian woman visited Istanbul and was also able to enter to the Imperial Harem. This was possible to do so if they were a relative of an influential person living in the harem. The Venetian woman, Franceschina Zorzi Michiel, was allegedly the mother of Gazanfer. The woman did not interfere in political life, she certainly just wanted to meet her son one last time, as she did not stay in the imperial capital for long. Fate brought her to Istanbul once again in 1591, but this time she took one of Gazanfer's sisters, Beatrice, with herself Her mother, unfortunately, passed away on the day of her arrival, but Beatrice remained in Istanbul and immediately converted to Islam and adopted the name Fatma. Some say Beatrice's stay was backed by an agreement between Gazanfer and Beatrice's second husband. According to this, Gazanfer paid a huge sum of money to Beatrice's second husband to send the woman to Istanbul so she can be with him.

Gazanfer had a huge palace in the city with hundreds of male and female servants, but since he had never lived here, he offered his palace to his sister, who happily moved in. Beatrice didn't want her two sons from her first marriage to be brought to Istanbul, but Gazanfer did not think so. He brought one of Beatrice's sons, Giacomo Bianchi, to the capital in 1600, to educate him. Beatrice's other son, Baldassarre, remained in Venice and, at the request of his mother, married the daughter of an influential Venetian family. Although Beatrice converted to Islam, this was certainly only for political reasons, as she regularly sent home money and supported Christian organizations. However, her convert provided an opportunity to increase her own and Gazanfer’s political strength. As the sister of the most influential eunuch, she was a good party, because, through marriage, the lucky groom could become Gazanfer's brother-in-law, and thus gain influence. He had plenty of suitors, but in the end, Gazanfer chose a circassian sipahi, Ali agha, who, with Gazanfer's help he eventually became a janissary agha.

Beatrice not only sent money home but also a wealth of information, in fact serving as a kind of spy for the Venetian bailo. She also pursued a policy of openly supportive of Venice, in which she also enjoyed the support of the Valide Sultan, Safiye. She moved so freely in the palace and enjoyed the support of the valide so much that she once argued in front of the sultana with Esperanza Malchi, the sultana's kira, on a Venetian cause. Beatrice was able to remain in a prominent position throughout, even when her brother died. Beatrice did not move home, but with her son Giacomo, who took the name Mehmed after converting to Islam, remained in Istanbul and continued to move in the highest circles. Giacomo / Mehmed reached such heights that he finally was counted as one of the favorite companies of Sultan Murad IV.

Downhill

Gazanfer had unimaginable wealth and influence. His wealth was not comparable to that of any other eunuch or vizier, he almost rivaled the wealth of the sultan and the valide sultana. In addition, he had such an influence on political affairs that many saw him as almost superior to the Sultan himself. With this, of course, he did not win the favor of the constantly rebelling soldiers. For the first time in March 1600, there was an uprising against Sultan Mehmed after he instead of giving the fee of the soldiers to the soldiers, he distributed the fee among the statesmen. The soldiers demanded the heads of all rich, corrupt statesmen (and women) from the Sultan and wished the death of the Valide Sultan, Safiye. Eventually, the sultan managed to reassure the soldiers - though several of his supporters had already fallen victim to them by then - saving the lives of his mother and Gazanfer.

Then on March 21, 1601, the sipahs also returned to Istanbul and repeatedly demanded the death of Gazanfer agha, and in fact, he was the absolute main target of the soldiers during this uprising. The soldiers sent a delegation to the sultan, demanding that he oust Gazanfer, as his excessive influence and corruption is dangerous and if the sultan does not act as they wish, he could easily be the victim of dethronement. Mehmed frightenedly agreed to extradite Gazanfer, but then Safiye Sultan, Grand Vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha, and Yemişci Hasan Pasa convinced the Sultan not to betray his faithful friend, who was otherwise indispensable to the empire. Interestingly, both Damad Ibrahim Pasa and Yemişci Hasan Pasa were in their place thanks to Gazanfer. The chief mufti, Sunullah Efendi - who, by the way, secretly supported the uprising - eventually persuaded the soldiers to leave Gazanfer agha because the agha promised that he would no longer behave in a corrupt manner. The fact that her sister, Beatrice's husband, Ali Aga, was the commander of the Janissaries, may have helped to save Gazanfer since most of the Janissary's corps did not take part in the revolt against Gazanfer. The fact that Sunullah Efendi, who otherwise supported the uprising, as well as Damad Ibrahim Pasa, Yemişci Hasan Pasa, Admiral Cıgalazade Sinan Pasa, all sided with Gazanfer and the Janissaries did not take part in the revolt, all are a good indication of how big influence the chief eunuch had. The fact is, however, that in the end, although Gazanfer was not extradited, Mehmed respected the other demands of the soldiers and dismissed everyone else demanded by the soldiers.

The inevitable end

In January 1603 another rebellion took place against Mehmed. At this time, however, in addition to the Sipahis and Ulema, the Janissaries also joined the rebellion. On January 6, the insurgents captured Gazanfer agha along with the chief black eunuch, Osman, and dragged them out of the palace, all the way to the third gate of Topkapi, where they were beheaded in front of the crowd and the sultan’s eyes. Mehmed did everything he could to save Gazanfer's life until the last moment, but he had no power over the rebels. After the death of the chief eunuch, the sultan began to sob. A few months later, Gazanfer's brother-in-law, the Janissary agha, Ali, was also executed for his wealth and influence.

Consequences of his death

Although Gazanfer was a supporter of Safiye, he still kept order in the harem. He never allowed Safiye to act too harsh against Mehmed's concubines. He also did not allow the concubines to try to gain power. However, with his death, hell broke loose in the harem, as his successor was unable to control the women of the harem. Halime, the mother of the eldest prince, Mahmud, was repeatedly openly confronted with the Valide Sultan, Safiye, and Handan Sultan, who Safiye supported. In fact, this eventually led to the execution of Prince Mahmud, who was otherwise supported by the Janissaries but feared by Safiye, in June 1603. Gazanfer and Mahmud were soon followed by Mehmed III, too, and the Empire entered one of the most difficult periods of its history.

Used sources: M. P. Pedani - Safiye's household and Venetian diplomacy; G. Junne - The black eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire; G. Börekçi - Factions and favourites at the courts of Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603-17) and his immediate predecessors; L. Peirce - The imperial harem

* * *

Származása

Gazanfer Aga nagyjából 1545-50 között születhetett egy velencei családba, két húga és egy bátyja volt. Feltehetőleg édesanyjával és testvéreivel utazott Albániában élő apjához, amikor elrabolták őket. Édesanyja váltságdíjat fizetett, hogy magát és két lányát megmentse, azonban fiait váltságdíj ellenében sem kapta vissza. Gazanfer és Cafer tehát Isztambulba kerültek és az Enderumban kaptak oktatást. Innen kerültek aztán Szelim szultán személyes szolgálatába trónralépése után.

Származásával kapcsolatban felmerült az is, hogy magyar volt, azonban ezt több bizonyíték is cáfolja. Valószínűbb, hogy a magyar előtag nevében egy gúnynév volt, miután 1596-ban elkísérte Mehmed szultánt a magyar hadjáratra és ott megijedve a harcoktól, azt javasolta a szultánnak, hogy bújjanak kocsiba és meneküljenek el a hadszíntérről. Lehetséges, hogy volt egy valóban magyar származású aga is a palotában ebben az időben, és mivel sok esetben csak származás alapján hivatkozták az agákat, összemosódott a kettő.

Felemelkedés

II. Szelim annyira megkedvelte a testvéreket, hogy felajánlotta nekik a lehető legmagasabb pozíciókba juthassanak, ám ehhez kasztráltatniuk kellett magukat. A becsvágyó testvérek beleegyeztek a műveletbe. A források nem egyeznek annak tekintetében, hogy Cafer is túlélte a kasztálás vagy sem. Egyesek szerint belehalt, mások szerint 1582-ben hunyt el természetes okok miatt, addig pedig befolyásos államférfiként tevékenykedett. Az azonban bizonyos, hogy Gazanfer felépült az operáció után Szelim személyes szolgálatában volt.

Igazi felemelkedése azonban már III. Murad, Szelim fiának uralkodása során történt. Először Murad turbánfelelőse volt három évig, majd bátyját Cafert váltva a szultán lakrészéért felelős aga lett 1577-ben, miután bátyját a kapu aga feladatkörre osztotta Murad. 1581-ben aztán Gazanfer lett a fő eunuch is, mellyel tulajdonképpen kiérdemelte a lehető legmagsabb tisztséget, mely a nagyvezíri ranggal volt nagyjából hasonlatos. A fő eunuch alá tartozott a fő fekete eunuch, aki a háremet irányította és mindenki más, aki a szultán személyes lakrészéért volt felelős. Murad azonban annyira kedvelte Gazanfert, hogy fő eunuchi pozíciója mellett meghagyta őt a lakrészéért felelős eunuchnak is. Soha korábban nem történt hasonló.

Gazanfer szépen lassan a legbefolyásosabb személy lett a birodalom életében. A legendákkal ellentétben, sosem volt Nurbanu szultána szövetségese, hiszen igazi felemelkedésekor a szultána már visszavonultan élt, majd hamarosan elhunyt. Gazanfer fő szövetségese éppen Nurbanu ellensége, Safiye szultána volt. III. Murad halála után Safiye támogatását élevzve még nagyobb beolyásra tett szert és elsőként a birodalmi családon kívül 1595-ben egy vallási iskolát, medressét alapított Isztambul belvárosában. Hatalmas vagyonából ugyan jótékonykodott is, ám más befolyásos személyekhez viszonyítottan jelentősen kevesebbet.

Befolyásos rokonság

A Nurbanu halála körüli időszakban néhány követ beszámol egy eseményről, mely Gazanfer életét is befolyásolta. 1583 végén egy idős velencei asszony látogatott Isztambulba és bebocsátást kapott a birodalmi hárembe is. Erre csak akkor volt lehetősége bárkinek, ha a háremben élő valamely befolyásos személy rokona volt. A velencei asszony, Franceschina Zorzi Michiel állítólag Gazanfer édesanyja volt. A nő nem avatkozott a politikai életbe, minden bizonnyal csak találkozni akart még egyszer utoljára fiával, hiszen nem maradt sokáig a birodalmi fővárosban. A sors úgy hozta, hogy édesanyja 1591-ben újra Isztambulba utazott, ezúttal magával vitte Gazanfer egyik lánytestvérét, Beatricet is. Édesanyja sajnos a megérkezésének napján elhunyt, Beatrice azonban Isztambulban maradt és azonnal áttért az iszlám hitre és felvette a Fatma nevet. Egyesek szerint Beatrice maradása mögött Gazanfer és Beatrice második férjének egyezsége állt. Eszerint Gazanfer hatalmas pénzösszeget fizetett Beatrice második férjének, hogy küldje a nőt Isztambulba, hogy mellette lehessen.

Gazanfernek hatalmas palotája volt a városban több száz férfi és női szolgálóval, ám mivel ő sosem élt itt, testvérének ajánlotta fel palotáját, aki boldogan beköltözött. Beatrice első házasságából született két fiát nem kívánta Isztambulba hozatni, ám Gazanfer nem így gondolta. Beatrice egyik fiát, Giacomo Bianchit 1600-ban a fővárosba hozatta, kitaníttatta. Beatrice másik fia, Baldassarre Velencében maradt és anyja kívánságának eleget téve egy befolyásos velencei család lányát vette el. Beatrice bár áttért az iszlámra, ez minden bizonnyal csak politikai okokból történt, hiszen rendszeresen küldött haza pénzt és támogatott keresztény szervezeteket. Azonban áttérése lehetőséget teremtett arra, hogy saját és Gazanfer politikai erejét növelhesse. Ugyanis a legbefolyásosabb eunuch testvéreként jó partinak számított, hisz egy házasság révén a szerencsés férfi Gazanfer sógorává válhatott, ezzel pedig befolyást szerezhetett. Rengeteg kérője volt, ám végül Gazanfer egy cserkes szpáhit, Ali agát választotta, aki segítségével végül janicsár aha lett.

Beatrice nem csak pénzt küldött haza, hanem rengeteg információt is, tulajdonképpene egyfajta kémként szolgált a velencei bailonak. Emellett pedig nyíltan Velencét támogató politikát folytatott, melyben a Valide szultána, Safiye támogatását is élvezte. Olyan szabadon mozgott a palotában és olyannyira élvezte a valide támogatását, hogy egyszer a szultána előtt vitatkozott össze Esperanza Malchival, a szultána kirájával, egy velencei ügyön. Beatrice végig kiemelt helyzetben maradhatott, még akkor is, mikor bátyja meghalt. Beatrice ugyanis nem költözött haza, hanem fiával Giacomoval, aki az iszlámra való áttérés után a Mehmed nevet vette fel, Isztambulban maradt és továbbra is a legfelsőbb körökben mozogtak. Giacomo/Mehmed olyan magasságokig ért, hogy végül IV. Murad szultán egyik kedvenc társaságaként volt számontartva.

Lejtmenet

Gazanfer elképzelhetetlen vagyonnal és befolyással rendelekzett. Vagyona egyik másik eunuchéval, vagy vezírével sem volt összevethető, szinte a szultán és a valide szultána vagyonával vetekedett. Emellett olyan befolyása volt politikai ügyekre, hogy sokan szinte még a szultánnál is feljebbvalónak látták őt. Ezzel természetesen nem nyerte el az állandóan lázongó janicsárok kegyét. Először 1600 márciusában volt egy felkelés Mehmed szultán ellen, miután a katonák jussát a szultán az államférfiak között osztotta szét. A katonák minden gazdag, korrupt államférfi (és nő) fejét követelték a szultántól valamint a Valide, Safiye szultána halálát kívánták. Végül a szultánnak sikerült megnyugtatnia a katonákat, igaz több támogatója addigra már áldozatul esett nekik, ezzel megmentve édesanyja és Gazanfer életét.

1601. március 21-én aztán a szpáhik is visszatértek Isztambulba és ismételten Gazanfer aga halálát követelték, sőt ezen felkelésnél ő volt az abszolút fő célpontja a katonáknak. A katonák delegációt küldtek a szultánhoz, követelve, hogy mondassa le Gazanfert, ugyanis túlzó befolyása és korruptsága veszélyes és ha a szultán nem cselekszik úgy, ahogy ők akarják, könnyen trónfosztás áldozata lehet. Mehmed ijedtében beleegyezett Gazanfer kiadatásába, azonban aztán Safiye szultána, a nagyvezír Damad Ibrahim Pasa és Yemişci Hasan Pasa meggyőzték a szultánt, hogy nem adhatja ki hűséges barátját, aki egyébként is nélkülözhetetlen a birodalom számára. Érdekesség, hogy mind Damad Ibrahim Pasa és Yemişci Hasan Pasa Gazanfer segítsége által jutottak magasra. A főmufti, Sunullah Efendi - aki egyébként titokban támogatta a felkelést - végül meggyőzte a katonákat, hogy hagyják Gazanfer agát, mert az aga megígérte, hogy többet nem fog korrupt módon viselkedni. Gazanfer megmentésében segíthetett az a tény is, hogy húgának, Beatricenak a férje Ali Aga a janicsárok parancsnoka volt, így a janicsárok legtöbb hadteste nem vett részt a Gazanfer elleni lázadásban. Az, hogy a felkelést egyébként támogató Sunullah Efendi, emellett Damad Ibrahim Pasa, Yemişci Hasan Pasa, a tengernagy Cıgalazade Sinan Pasa mind Gazanfer mellé álltak és a janicsárok sem léptek fel ellene, jól bizonyítja mennyire kiterjedt támogatókörrel rendelkezett a fő eunuch. Tény azonban, hogy végül bár Gazanfert nem adta ki, Mehmed a katonák többi követelését tiszteletben tartotta és mindenki mást lemondatott, akiket a katonák követeltek.

Az elkerülhetetlen vég

1603 januárjában újabb lázadás történt Mehmed ellen. Ekkor azonban a szpáhik és az ulema mellett a janicsárok is csatlakoztak a lázadáshoz. A felkelők január 6-án elkapták Gazanfer agát a fő fekete eunuchal, Osmannal együtt és kirángatták őket a palotából, egészen a Topkapi harmadik kapujáig, ahol a tömeg és a szultán szeme láttára mindkettőt lefejezték. Mehmed a kivégzés előtti pillanatig mindent megtett, hogy megpróbálja megmenteni Gazanfer életét, ám nem volt hatalma a lázadók felett. A fő eunuch halála után a szultán zokogni kezdett. Néhány hónappal később Gazanfer sógorát, a janicsár agát, Alit is kivégezték vagyona ��s befolyása miatt.

Halálának következményei

Gazanfer bár Safiye támogatója volt, a háremben mégis rendet tartott. Sosem engedte, hogy Safiye túl erősen lépjen fel Mehmed ágyasaival szemben. Emellett az ágyasokat sem engedte, hogy bármivel próbálkozzanak hatalomszerzés érdekében. Halálával azonban a háremben elszabadult a pokol, hiszen utódja képtelen volt kordában tartani a hárem asszonyait. Halime, a legidősebb herceg, Mahmud anyja egyre többször került nyíltan szembe a Valide szultánával Safiyével és az általa támogatott Handan szultánával. Tulajdonképpen ez vezetett végül odáig, hogy a janicsárok által egyébként támogatott, de Safiye által félt Mahmud herceget 1603 júniusában kivégezték. Őt pedig hamarosan követte III. Mehmed is, a birodalom pedig egyik legnehezebb időszakába került.

Felhasznált források: M. P. Pedani - Safiye's household and Venetian diplomacy; G. Junne - The black eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire; G. Börekçi - Factions and favourites at the courts of Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603-17) and his immediate predecessors; L. Peirce - The imperial harem

#gazanfer agha #gazanfer #safiye sultan #halime sultan #handan sultan #nurbanu valide sultan #Nurbanu Sultan #Selim II #Murad III #mehmed iii #sehzade mahmud #esperanza malchi

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florbelles · 3 years

Note

background and personality for miss lyra ❤❤❤❤❤

thank you so much, lovely! sorry this took an eternity and a half xx

PERSONALITY

what’s their alignment?

d&d alignments are not her friend!

having said that, she leans towards neutral or chaotic ( very rarely lawful ); neutral in that she does not attempt to disrupt order for the sake of it and does not prioritize personal freedoms over the general ( what she believes to be ) good, chaotic in that she’s willing to do whatever it takes to meet her goals regardless of legality or acceptability and thinks little of the laws and values of society; she considers herself above the law insofar as she does not respect the law or believes it to be fundamentally flawed, but does not opposite the concept of order on principle ( while, on the contrary, she is an enforcer of order and principles within the context of the project; no one is above the judgement of god, herself included ). her loyalty and unconditional love where she gives it earns her high points in the morality category in traditional d&d quizzes, as does her commitment to her cause ( whether that’s with the project or in her life before, conning or murdering corrupt or vile members of society in retaliation ). practically speaking, though, her methods align her with the evil sector, particularly in regards to the lengths she’s willing to go to; she also gets personal enjoyment out of inflicting suffering on those she deems unworthy, derives pleasure from the atrocities she commits. she is driven by passion more than anything else, and is consumed by rage and loathing, meaning she is never truly neutral; because she gets personal satisfaction from her work as the judge, it can’t be said that she’s acting selflessly in the pure interest of upholding the values of the project, so the merit of her devotion in and of itself isn’t without ambiguity. she believes herself to be a monster, but believes her cause is righteous – it takes evil to know it, judge it, and exterminate it – but she has never once in her life done something #fortheevils or in the interest of promoting ( what she believes to be ) evil for the sake of it; for that reason she’s difficult to categorize based on the traditional understanding of the alignments.

tl; dr: given that she truly is driven by rage & passion and very much wants the world to burn ( at least at a certain critical point in her arc ), and given the depravity she’ll resort to in order to reach her end goals, she’s probably best aligned as chaotic to neutral evil ( though she believes herself to be doing right ).

which one of the 16 personality types do they fit into?

enfp-a; the campaigner.

what are their hobbies and interests? do they have any particular “favorites” (food, books, and so on)?

setting sinners free, anna karenina, fleetwood mac, driving with the windows down, sinner roasts bonfires in the summer & autumn, watching the sun rise.

favorites are answered here ( x ), activities and interests here ( x )

what are they bad at?

bar games & team sports (anything she can’t cheat at, really).

what kind of things do they dislike/hate?

apathy, willful ignorance, obstinate self-deceit, the song oh john.

do they have any vices/addictions/mental illnesses?

she turns to risky behaviors, inflicting pain on herself ( via the provocation of others/combat ) or others ( whom she feels are deserving ). she has flirted with most forms of substance abuse in the past, but never crossed the line into full chemical dependency with anything but tobacco ( more because of using nothing specific habitually than out of moderation ).

what are their goals and motivations?

to do right even if she was born wrong ( she might be a monster, but she’s a monster for a cause, and surely that means something ); to keep what she has ( her family, john ); to fulfill her purpose as the judge of eden’s gate; to cast out the unworthy; to get her family safely to new eden. after the collapse, she simply wants to lead and protect the only family she has left — the faithful — until the shepherd joseph promised arrives and releases her from her duty.

what are their manners like? any habits?

full rundown on her mannerisms here. extremely extroverted, open body language, usually smoking; draws herself up to her full height even when seated. often holding a cigarette, talks with her hands. very animated, but graceful and deliberate. uses eye contact and physical touch to either intimidate or establish intimacy; disregards personal space for the same reason.

what are they most afraid of?

answered here.

becoming her mother. losing john. losing herself to her wrath, to an extent, but she would rather burn herself alive than become isabela. ( that was always more something that she would go to any lengths to avoid than a fate she truly feared, at least before john’s death and the collapse; that was the first time she was actually tempted to numb herself and embrace oblivion, but she never did ).

BACKGROUND

where were they born? what was their childhood like?

lyra was born in the hamptons, but she spent most of her childhood (that she can remember) on nantucket island; early childhood she spent out ruling it herself, on beaches, frolicking with the summer people, still trying to get her parents’ attention, then, still wanting what she saw other families have; not perfect, perhaps, but something.

what’s their family like?

BIRTH FAMILY

lyra maintains, for the most part, that the problem was never with her parents, but with her; she told joseph at one point that the difference between the rest of them is that they might not have been born monsters, but she was; nothing made her that way. the reality, of course, is different; because of the fact that lyra’s abuse was tied primarily to neglect as a young girl and later the emotional abuse, exploitation and manipulation by her father, she does not feel entitled to the trauma she carries from it matched against some of the horrors she’s witnessed. ( of her father’s business associates and the men she would target later in life, lawrence was never the worst of them, and for that, she considers herself fortunate ). she’s very aware of the fact that she had the best education money could buy ( provided it also got her as far away from them as possible ), that she was not beaten or, truthfully, reprimanded; her father never touched her, but that was a universally true statement — the most physical contact or affection he displayed towards his daughter was a hand on her shoulder at galas, steering her towards an associate she was meant to beguile, or lifting her hair to fasten his latest bribe around her neck.

she never, in her entire life, felt more like a whore, not even when she was fucking men she met along the road to rob them.

her mother, isabela, was not inherently malicious; she was extremely depressed and jaded and, as a result, heavily self-medicated; she did not turn a blind eye to her husband’s affairs, or to the way he slowly made lyra her replacement, but she smothered it with drugs. she did not hate lyra, and never expressed open animosity towards her and that, to lyra, was the worst of it; she would attempt to provoke her often, would scream, fight, threaten, sob, but isabela was unmovable entirely. she was dead to the world.

the opposite of love, to lyra, was never hatred, it was indifference, and isabela was completely indifferent to her.

it’s the only thing lyra could never forgive.

she ran away often throughout her childhood, and as her sixteenth birthday neared, she finally left for good; she ensured she wasn’t found. they disinherited her within the year upon receiving notice from the family of one of her highschool girlfriends that she was visiting them ( an unintentional betrayal, but one that prevented her from making the mistake of contacting anyone from her old life again ). they sent her an official letter forbidding her from contacting them or returning home, swearing her off and stating that they did not recognize her as their daughter ( though, since she was a minor at the time, the only legal aspect was her removal from their will ).

lawrence would tell his colleagues and friends years later that he did what was necessary because he was afraid of her, that he truly believed she had the capacity to kill him for the inheritance. it was a ludicrous claim; for all of his insistence that she was like him, scheming, manipulative, opportunistic, incapable of feeling, all she ever wanted was to be loved and accepted by her family. she did not want to be a monster, she was simply told she was one all her life. she began to believe it, and, ultimately, she chose to become it.

still, she would have forgiven lawrence everything, in the end, if he’d ever cared to ask. she loved her parents, and later she hated them, but she could never be indifferent. she could never be like them. that, perhaps, was why they never loved her.

THE SEEDS

she loves her chosen family desperately. faith is her best friend and the sister she never had, and though their form of enmeshment makes them occasionally toxic, they truly do love each other; jacob is her mentor and trainer in her role as the judge, they’re quite close; joseph she has perhaps the most tumultuous relationship with because of his concerns about her intemperance and the way she and john indulge each other, but she respects him and understands him in a way john does not — she does not personally seek his approval or fear his rejection, so she views him more objectively. later, of course, they’re all that’s left, and while john will always be the person closest to her heart and the most important part of her life, joseph is the second.

she does make overtures to befriend ethan, but she is only an amplifier of his feelings of isolation and resentment towards his father; no matter what he does, the loyalty of both the flock and his father will always lie with lyra, and that is difficult for him to accept. despite joseph leaving new eden in his hands, ethan is under no illusions about the fact that lyra stayed behind to watch him, and her presence undermines him at every turn, regardless of her intent — she is the de facto leader, for reasons he will never fully understand, and he resents her for it.

john is her whole heart. he’s her soulmate. having him, however briefly, makes everything worth it to her in the end; she can’t ever regret it, no matter what it cost her; she tells poppy that “god gave him to me, and for that, i forgive [god] all the rest.”

what factions or organizations are they a part of? What ranks and titles do they hold?

prior to hope county, none; lyra is her own contractor and the center of her own networks.

with the project, lyra serves as the judge; she serves as a sorter, an intel gatherer, a judge of the worthy and unworthy, oversees the realm of the damned; she shows those who are submitted to her judgement their true selves and allows their choices and actions to speak to their character and determine the fate. after all, who is she to judge?

post-collapse, she leads new eden in practice, though not in title, in joseph’s absence.

how do they fit into their “story”?

lyra is the judge of eden’s gate and a seed by marriage. she’s a career serial serial killer and conartist come to hope county seeking refuge after a murder gone wrong; she is a damned woman, and the project is her last resort. she’s the sealbreaker, the lamb, and the wrath of god. in terms of far cry 5 canon, she replaces the deputy as the prophesized hell that followed, though she never has any allegiance but to the project; hers is a cautionary tale in that, in their attempts to avoid the fate joseph foresaw for them, the seeds ultimately bring ruin upon themselves. there’s no junior deputy in her canon; they called in sick the morning of the arrest.

where do they currently live? what’s their place like?

before hope county, lyra was perpetually on the move seeking targets, as her lifestyle demanded; after joining the project, she lives at the seed ranch with her husband.

post-collapse she lives in new eden until the arrival of the highwaymen brings joseph back to oversee it. she retakes prosperity and lives in what’s left of her old home until her death.

how do they eventually die?

she and john get hopped up on rads!bliss on their 70th wedding anniversary and put each other into mutual cardiac arrest. yeah, they fucked to death, what about it. this is the only way either of them ever die. shaggy finds them in a final insult to him.

lyra dies at forty-three — seventeen years later than she’d have liked — after taking a knife between the ribs via her nephew. while that’s the wound that technically does her in, the reality is that it was probably survivable; lyra had been dying for a long time, physically and emotionally broken by the holy war, though she put on a convincing front for the sake of joseph and the flock. she kept herself going until she had done her duty by new eden and fulfilled her purpose, bringing the shepherdess that was promised to the flock; she tells poppy that she’s her sacrifice, and she’s finally free to go back to the grave where she belongs. she does, happily; letting go is a relief.

#pardon the essay #oc: lyra fairbanks #answered #spicevalleys

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fullmetalscullyy · 4 years

Text

royai week 2020 - day 2: little pistol, mother mother

summary: roy and riza have an uncomfortable conversation regarding what has happened in the ishvalan civil war, and their next steps

rating: m | words: 1857 | warnings: mature themes

read on ao3

Up on my side, where it is felt

I pack a little pistol on my pistol belt

I think it might be fear

Of the world and the way it makes you feel afraid

Under the skin, against the skull

They put a little chip so that they know it all

I think I might be scared

Of the world and the way it makes you feel afraid

And how it gets in the way

Riza’s hand shook as she holstered her pistol. It was a backup in case she was subjected to close combat. Her party was moving out in less than half an hour.

The rustling of the tent behind her caused her pause. Exhaling softly, Riza’s eyes fluttered closed for a moment. She didn’t even need to look to see who it was. She just knew. She knew he’d come. A part of her wished he didn’t. If he did, then that meant she was right, and god, Riza did not want to be right about this.

“It’s not just a war, is it?” she whispered to the room.

Silence. She steeled herself for the answer, praying she was wrong in her conclusion.

“It’s not.”

“Extermination campaign,” Riza whispered, sounding the words out. It sounded awful. She hated it. It left a bad taste in her mouth.

“Yes,” Roy Mustang whispered. “It is.”

A shaky breath left her. Eyes fluttered closed once more as she composed herself. Tears of horror later, she told herself.

She hadn’t turned to face him yet. It wasn’t that she couldn’t bear to. No, she didn’t want to because if she did, she’d come undone. Roy had always been the one capable to see right through her and make her break. She had no one left, either. Roy Mustang was all she had, and it may kill her to see the look on his face, because he was already aware of what was really going on here in the war. He’d come to that conclusion before her.

“You figured it out.”

It wasn’t spoken like a question, but Riza needed to confirm it for him. She nodded. “I did.”

And now I want brimstone in my garden

I want roses set on fire

And I, well I want what's best for me

And I, I think I know just what that means

Just what that means

Today I coo, today I caw

I have a pistol party and I kill 'em all

I think I might be scared

Of the man and the men with their hands inside

And the women, oh, the women all they do is cry

And I, well I lose my mind

Riza turned slowly. Uncertainty had pooled in her stomach, then it turned to dread. In the lamplight in her tent his features were much sharper. He looked thinner. Roy looked like a ghost, a shell of the boy he’d once been. The war was weighing on him heavily and Riza was sympathetic. She wasn’t much better than him, but at least she wasn’t razing towns overnight. He was reigning fire and brimstone down upon their enemies thanks to their superiors. The “Hero if Ishval” they called him. Riza despised it, and she was quite sure he did too.

“You’re going to fight?” she asked.

Roy nodded slowly. “I am. Hughes is in too.”

“Count me in.”

Determination burned in her veins. She was ready, especially after seeing what they’d turned her best friend into. The dark circles under his eyes and the haunted look in his eyes matched hers and would be burned into her memory forever. She’d use it to fuel her against them. It would be what they deserved.

“Are you sure?”

Her eyes flashed angrily. How could he ask her that? Her mouth opened to protest, but Roy quickly approached, hands up in surrender and in peace. He’d recognised the look in her eyes.

“That’s not what I meant,” he reassured her frantically. “Sorry. I just… I need to be sure.” His eyes were cast downwards. “I’m surprised you haven’t turned and ran after all you’ve seen.”

“We look out for each other,” she replied. It was a call back to a promise they’d made years ago as kids. Roy’s head jerked up in surprise. “Right?” she prompted.

“Right,” Roy agreed quietly, letting out a long and loud breath.

And now I found brimstone in my garden

I found roses set on fire

And I found Jesus, what a liar

So I trade licks with Muddy Waters

And I, well I found what's best for me

And now I see no tragedy

And I, I found a burning rose

And now I won't be packing little pistols

No, no, no more

“Riza?”

He sounded so concerned as she’d fallen silent. She was still trying to find the right words to say. It was a struggle, and it showed on her face as she grimaced.

A part of her felt like she didn’t deserve to ask, not after what she’d unleashed upon the world with her father’s alchemy. However, it needed to be done. She had the power to prevent another Flame Alchemist from coming to life. She had to use it.

“Before we do, can…” The request died on her tongue. She knew as soon as the words were out there, they’d be interpreted, either in the right or wrong way. She’d need to explain herself. She’d probably need to result in begging him to burn the research off her skin.

“What, Riza?”

His voice so soft. It contradicted the harsh environment out here and the horrors she was subjected to by those she worked for. It was unfair. It was one step closer to making her lose it.

“Can you burn his research off my back?”

Her request was almost silent. She hated to speak the words aloud, to subject him to that, but she needed to. She trusted no one else. She had no one else. She was alone without him. Flame alchemy couldn’t live on. Not after it had been stolen by the wrong hands – the Amestrian military. Both she and Roy were young and naïve. They were idealistic and stupid. At first, she’d been furious at him because of their actions. Then, Riza began to listen. Around the camps she heard things…

No one paid attention to snipers. After all, it was her job, her speciality, at becoming unseen. It meant she heard a lot of things that people probably didn’t want her to. She saw a lot of things through a scope that people thought were hidden.

“Extermination Mission 4. Women and children in this sector.”

“Mission 18. All warrior monks. Strong bastards. We’ll need to double up on men. If half end up dead, we’ll be laughing. They’re so damn strong.”

“Extermination Mission 20 was a raging success. Got them all with only ten casualties!”

Riza would pull no punches. If this was the way the Amestrian military, her superiors, were conducting themselves, then Riza would rise to the challenge. They’d rue the day they decided to give her a rifle and drill it into her to fight the enemy. Because the enemy didn’t have red eyes and brown skin. No, the true enemy, the person who’d stolen everything from her – her innocence and her best friend – only had one eye.

“Are you in?” she choked out.

A hand was placed on her shoulder. Comforting. She didn’t want it. Didn’t deserve it.

“Is this what you truly want?” Roy asked. His voice shook and she felt his fingers trembling through her clothes.

“I do,” she whispered.

“I…”

“Please.” Her plea made her voice crack as she lifted her eyes heavenward. “I don’t have anyone else.”

“I’ll… I’ll have to… burn you –”

“You’ll free me,” she countered.

“I’ll maim you, Riza.”

“You’ll remove the burden from my back.”

Roy was clearly struggling with this. His breaths were heavy as he tried to find a way out of it – out of hurting her – but came up with nothing.

“I hate to ask this of you. I really do, but there’s no one else. And I know you’ll do the best job.”

“Riza… You’re asking me to burn off the skin of the woman I love.”

Dropping her eyes from the heavens, Riza saw his eyes were watering just like hers.

“I… I need more time to think –”

Her shoulders dropped in defeat. Two hands were placed upon them. Roy dipped his head, trying to catch her eye.

“I understand how much this means to you. I’m sorry, it’s just… a difficult request to process.”

“I know,” she mumbled.

“It’s not as simple as burning flesh.” Riza saw him swallow. “I’ll have to calculate it properly, make sure I don’t do too much damage –” He cut himself off and his jaw clenched. The grip on her shoulders loosened, his hands slipping off them. “I’ll need a little time to think about everything. I’m… I’m sorry it driven you to this –”

“They twisted you into this thing,” she interrupted fiercely. Roy looked taken aback by her sudden ferocity, and one tear fell as he blinked in surprise. “They gave you no choice.” Her breath hitched as her voice faltered on that last statement. Of course they had a choice. Of course they fucking did, but they’d get nowhere, they’d never prevent this from happening again if they walked away. Riza was ready to lay down her life to protect the future. She was read to give everything up if it meant her children would never know this horror she was experiencing.

She was more than fucking ready.

“It will always be your choice, Riza,” Roy whispered. “I couldn’t take that away from you. Not after what I’ve done.”

Her arms wrapped around his body tightly. She buried her face in front of his dusty coat. The smell she remembered from her childhood enveloped her. It made her feel safe. It made her happy. If she closed her eyes tightly, she could almost imagine them back in the garden of her childhood home, playing happily, but quietly, so they didn’t disturb her father.

A sob left her throat unwillingly as the pressure of his arms eventually wrapped around her shoulders and back. It was a reassuring weight. It was freeing. Roy’s presence, and his acceptance, meant she would never be alone in this, and neither would he. She was happy to join his fight because she would be by his side.

“If we survive…” she ventured. “After the war?” Her expression was hopeful as she glanced back up at him. His face screwed up in pain.

“All right,” he finally agreed.

They better be ready, Riza thought. Because they would be coming at their enemy with more than the shitty pistols they distributed at the weapons centre. Bradley’s orders had moulded them into killing machines.

Riza hoped he would be ready for them. Both of them. Because Riza Hawkeye and Roy Mustang were ready to unleash hell upon him. Together, Riza was sure there would be no stopping them.

#royai #royaiweek20 #royai au #royai fic #royai fanfic #emma writes

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inactiive-shit · 4 years

Text

Empty

Fandom: Sanders Sides

Masterlist

Warnings: none

Pairing: platonic Royality

Words: 1,240

Summary: Patton feels empty

If you would like something tagged, let me know!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Patton stared at his coffee table, mind flipping. He didn’t know what the problem was, but he felt kind of sad, kind of gone. Like a motel room whose guest checked out before their money was up. Or maybe that wasn’t quite right, maybe that didn’t convey the feeling he meant. Empty, lost, alone. That was right. It was exactly how he felt, despite the fact that all his friends had been in his house just an hour ago, hanging out. They had played through some more of their d&d campaign and Patton had been enjoying himself the whole time. But now that he was alone, he found himself slipping away from that sense of contentment like water through a sieve.

A knock on his door startled him back to animation and he dropped the mug in his hand. Tea spilled over the rug. Patton cursed quietly and threw a towel over it before going for the door. The stain would have to wait.

“Hey, Ro!” he exclaimed, seeing Roman’s face and then his body standing on Patton’s porch.

“Hey, Padre. I realized I forgot my jacket over here when I left, and I figured I’d stop back by for it.” Something in Patton’ chest collapsed but he forced the smile to stay and stepped back to let Roman in. He shoved the door shut behind him and followed him to the living room. Roman crossed to the chair by the kitchen and picked up the jacket, smile blinding just like it always was. Did Roman ever feel so disconnected from the moment they stood in?

“What’s that?” Roman asked, picking the towel up from the ground. “Pat, did you spill something?”

“Oh, you just surprised me when you knocked, kiddo!” Patton reassured him, taking the towel out of Roman’s hand and wadding it up. Roman’s eyes wrinkled, a telltale sign of his concern, and Patton laughed to dispel what was uncalled for. It wasn’t a big deal, not at all. “You know your dear old dad is just clumsy.”

“Well, I suppose that’s true,” Roman said slowly. Gallantly, he bowed. “As it was my intrusion that caused such a grievous wound to be inflicted on your innocent carpet, allow me.” He slipped out of the room before Patton could object to get cleaner, and Patton threw the soiled towel in the laundry basket.

“You really don’t have to do that, Ro,” he said. Roman knelt down on the ground.

“But what if I want to?” Roman responded, spraying the carpet.

“Then I guess I can’t stop you,” Patton said, hands on his hips. He didn’t want Roman to leave, so why on earth was he trying to rush him out of his house? Whatever he was feeling didn’t make any sense at all.

“Patton?” Roman asked, and Patton jolted, looking up. Roman was staring at him, concerned. At some point, he had stood up and walked over to where Patton was standing.

“What’s up, kiddo?” Patton exclaimed, smile suppressing a cringe. How long had he been zoned out?

“Are you doing alright? I said your name like, three times,” Roman said, placing a hand gently on Patton’s shoulder. Patton felt a shudder run through him at the contact, saw that Roman seemed even more concerned now than he had a few minutes ago, and sighed.

“I-I don’t know,” Patton said shakily. “I felt fine earlier, but I’m kind of-” he wobbled his hand in the air. “I don’t know.”

“Hey, that’s okay. It happens sometimes,” Roman said. “Is there anything I can do?” Patton looked up at him, shrugging miserably. “Well, let’s see. I can make you food, or I can turn on a show. I can read. I can clean. I can ask somebody else to come over. I can give you a hug. I can stay the night, if you want me to.”

“Can I-I-” Patton forced a breath out and smiled up at Roman. “I am in desperate need of a hug, I think.”

“Of course,” Roman said, wrapping his arms around Patton without a second of hesitation. Patton’s eyes slid shut without his say, and he savored the feeling of safety there. “Is there anything else you need?”

“No,” Patton mumbled. “This is good. Well, maybe let’s sit on the couch.” Patton giggled quietly. Roman maneuvered them over to the couch and Patton never even had to open his eyes. Roman pulled Patton onto his chest, brushing his fingers through Patton’s curls gently. Tears slipped out of Patton’s eyes before he could stop them. It seemed this considerate kind of care was exactly what he needed.

“Oh, darling,” Roman said. “I am so sorry none of us noticed.” He swiped a finger carefully over Patton’s cheekbone, smudging away the tears. Patton shrugged helplessly as the tears kept coming.

“You’re allowed to cry,” Roman whispered. “I’ll hold you, okay?” That made the first sob burst out of Patton’s chest before he had the thought to stop it and after that it was like an avalanche or a downpour. He took a shuddering breath and it shot back out in jagged gasps that shook his whole body. Roman cooed over him the whole time, never once letting go.

They sat together, Patton letting out so many bad feelings that he had never understood ( why him, why did he feel so bad, why wasn’t there ever a reason, why why why ) while Roman held him securely in his arms and waited out the storm.

Once Patton’s breathing started to become less hitched and the tears had dried up, Roman quietly asked, “do you feel better?” Patton nodded shakily.

“Thank you, Ro. I appreciate it.” Patton forced a wobbly but genuine smile. “I appreciate you .”

“But of course,” Roman agreed. “And I you, Padre. If you ever feel bad, all you have to do is call me. Or even text. I’ll be here in a second. You don’t have to feel like this alone.” Roman smiled. Patton snuggled into his chest.

“Thank you,” he repeated, voice muffled. Roman laughed softly, exhale ruffling Patton’s hair.

“Anytime, Padre. What’s family for?” Roman leaned to the side, tilting Patton with him, and then sat back up. He pressed something cold into Patton’s hands. “Drink this. You’re going to get all crusty and dehydrated.” Patton giggled but obligingly opened the water bottle and sipped at it. He felt less empty now that he had let so much out. It was contradictory and confusing, maybe, but he couldn’t complain with Roman’s deep, steady breaths under his head making him feel less alone.

Patton recapped the water and passed it to Roman to put back on the table. It was weird, kind of funny, that the way to get full of the good stuff would mean emptying out the bad stuff first. As tired as he was now, Patton did feel a little fuller. It wasn’t bad.

“Go to sleep,” Roman said, pressing a kiss into Patton’s hair. “I’ve got you.” Patton believed him and he let himself relax fully into Roman. Tomorrow, in the morning, Patton would get up and make breakfast for them both and maybe they could go to the park before either of them had to work. But for now, right now, Patton just let himself feel fuzzy and mellow and full and drift off into soft dreams of things that he wouldn’t have to worry about in the morning.

#sanders sides #ts patton sanders #ts roman sanders #patton sanders #roman sanders #ts patton #ts roman #ts morality #ts creativity #royality #platonic royality #fanfic #my writing #empty

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harryimaginestuff · 5 years

Text

Sarcasm is the Lowest Form of Wit

A/N: here is the request the anon requested ages ago (sorry for the long wait) Ngl I struggled to come up with how to write this one but I like how it turned out.

Genre: Fluff

Word count: 2k

The one where there’s a side to you that he’s never seen before.

Harry had met you almost five months ago on the set of his newest Gucci campaign with you being the assistant to one of the camera operators. He approached you the same as he did with anyone else, after all that was how he was raised; to treat everyone with respect and kindness. However your coy and shy behaviour drew him in, the way you bit your tongue on topics that you had little interest in, but as soon as videography or anything of that matter was brought up you would dive in, your hands moving in sync with whatever words came out of your mouth. You were passionate about your work, just as he was. And it was your passions that bonded the both of you the most.

And now almost four months later you were his girlfriend, after a series of dates and casual hang-outs, he had been the one to make it official. He had taken your hand in his across the dining table as he looked deeply into your eyes as he proposed the question to which you quickly replied with an ecstatic yes.

But for such a charming man, he had never been as nervous as he was now sitting beside you as the two of you awaited the arrival of all of your friends. You had begged him to accompany you to your reunion with your friends from school to which he hesitantly agreed to.

It wasn’t as if this was the first time he was meeting the friends of whoever he was seeing, but the fact of the matter is that this was different, because you were different. He’s had his fair share of models and their model friends and although he found you extremely attractive, he felt this stunning beauty radiating off of you that he had never felt elsewhere. Therefore, he was well aware that the friends that were coming now, were the ones you had grown up with, they had watched you transition into the woman you were today, and there was no way that they didn’t love you, after all who wouldn’t which only mean that they would be 10x more protective over you.

The two of you had already had a couple of drinks since you had agreed to come a little bit early to save some space, and although this was the first time you had properly drank in front of him (a glass of wine with dinner doesn’t count) he could see the sobriety in your eyes slowly leave as alcohol took its place. He was listening to you reminisce about your time in school whilst simultaneously playing with your ring-clad fingers.

“Y/N!” he heard causing his gaze to turn from your intertwined hands to the owner of the voice.

“George!” you said with the same amount of enthusiasm. From what you had just told him, George was one of your best guy mates and one of your first ones at that. He had been there for you when one of his mates had broken your heart as well as you being each other’s rocks during the rough exam periods. “What the hell have you done to your hair?”

Harry watches on as you embrace the man, lightly ruffling his shoulder-length hair as you smile brightly at him. “You look like Tarzan but in a more ‘I’ve let go of myself way’.”

Harry is left in slight shock at your words, and although they’re not outright rude they are certainly not the kind of words that he’s used to, especially coming from you; the sweetest person alive.

He let out a breath that he wasn’t aware that he was holding as soon as George cackled loudly and pushed your intruding hands away, “Wow, Y/N I have not missed your crippling honesty that’s for sure.”

Harry reckons that he’s never seen you like this, on the fast track to being drunk, your hands moving animatedly during whatever you were discussing, not just when talking about work. He figured that he liked drunk you, although he liked sober you more. With every drink you had you fell deeper into his side, your body slowly melting into his, and with every drink he had, the sloppier the kisses to your head and cheek got.

But your displays of affection weren’t the only thing that had progressed as the night went on, it seemed that the more comfortable you got the easier the insults spewed out of your mouth. You had something to say to everyone apparently.

He’d watch as you’d reply with a long and dramatic ‘noooo’ every time someone had made a dumb comment and the way you’d reply sarcastically to any question, but then immediately break out into a big grin as soon as the words came out of your mouth, even when you tried to be rude the kindness in you always managed to shine through.

“Who’s this bitch?” that was another thing, apparently, drunk you was a fan of swearing a complete opposite to the way you cringe every time a foul word left anyone else’s mouth when there was no alcohol running through your veins. Harry turned to look at whoever was at the other end of your jabbing and seeing as everyone else was here, he assumed that the last girl to arrive was Anna, the last girl that you had spoken about as you prepped him for the arrival of everyone a few hours ago.

“Late as I ever I see, I guess nothing’s changed.” You hummed, jokingly shaking your head.

“Well I may be the same, but you’ve sure changed. The last time I saw a man attached to your side was back in school.”

“At least I didn’t have a different man hanging off of me every second.” You laughed, patting Anna’s shoulder as she took her place next to Harry.

“Bitch! You’re just jealous that I had boys all over me, but you were always too awkward to make any moves.”

“True!” you pretended to sob, digging your head into Harry’s neck. He couldn’t help but laugh as he felt you inhale deeply, the hot air from your breath causing goosebumbs to rise on his skin, and his heart couldn’t help but stop as soon as you sent him a cheeky intoxicated smile before jumping back into conversation with George and the girl, Lily, who was sat opposite, whilst Harry properly introduced himself to Anna.

“Karaoke!” he heard bringing him out of the conversation he was having with two of your friends. He turned his head to you slowly and cautiously, after all he knew how much you adored it. He recalled the first time he was at your flat, it was 2 months down the line, and you had dragged him into the living room and pushed him onto the sofa. And if he was being honest he did think that something sexual was about to happen, especially when you had reached into one of the cupboards, bending down but those dreams had immediately vanished as soon as you had turned around, with the widest grin he had ever seen, a karaoke microphone in your hand. That night you had begged him to sing a song, and since then it had become almost tradition for you to pick a song for Harry to sing.

Which was why now, although hesitant to do so, he was sitting on a stool in front of the whole bar, with the opening track to Nirvana’s ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ playing on the speakers. And despite the deafening noise, he still heard your voice ring out above the crowd, he didn’t know what to expect, perhaps words of encouragement like you always did whenever he sang songs but this time it was different, this time you continued with your insult rampage and lightly ripped into him.

“Boo!” you shouted, hands cupped around your mouth, “Get off the stage you can’t even sing.” And despite the bright lights shining in his face he could still vaguely make out your figure. He could still see the way you laughed so hard at your own joke that your hands clapped together, kind of like a seal, he thought. He could see Anna lean over to you and whisper something in your ear causing you to crack up even further, your hands now moving to hold onto your stomach as your legs lifted off of the ground. If it wasn’t for the loud music playing by his ear, he would’ve missed his cue. But even as he belted out the lyrics to the song you had chosen, he still couldn’t help but stare at you, and the way your eyes crinkled, and your nose twitched as you laughed. He couldn’t help but think that there was so much more to you, because turns out you had some sort of twisted sense of humour that entailed making fun of your friends, and whilst many people go too far, you knew exactly when to stop. You were the perfect mixture of naughty and nice.

You were perfect for him.

And as the song ended, and soon the night he realised he never wanted to not see your smile again. You were special, and there was no way that he’d be letting you go.

The both of you were now laying in your bed, cuddled under the covers, the alcohol slowly leaving the both of your bodies.

“Did you have fun tonight babes?” you asked, twisting a stray strand of hair that fell into his face with your pointer finger.

“I did. Learnt some new things too.”

“You did?” you hummed sleepily, this time resting your head on his naked and warm chest.

“Learnt that you were quite the bitch back in school.”

You let out a breathy laugh in reply, your chest vibrating slightly as you giggled at his words. “A bitch? Who me? Never.”

He thought back to the night, and all the days and nights prior to this one. He thought of the way your hair and swished every time you turned your head and how every time you had walked past him you had left the most heavenly scent of coconut, which he now learnt was a result of your dousing your hair in coconut oil once a week before bed, something you ad roped him into doing now too. ‘For soft, thick locks,’ you had said.

He had thought back to the way your hands would always find their way to his, and the way your fingers would grip onto his.

He thought back to the first time you had cried in front of him after he convinced you to watch ‘Marley and Me’ to which you had originally objected because ‘it makes me cry like a baby’. And just as you promised, you had been reduced to a crying mess by the end of it, and despite the fact that snotty tears should be the least attractive thing in the world, he thought you’d never looked cuter. That was the one of the first times where he saw just how big your heart was.

He thought back to tonight, and the way you found rude humour so funny and how you took joy in mocking and teasing the people you loved most. He thought back to the way you couldn’t even keep on a mean face for more than five seconds as immediately after something remotely mean came from your mouth, you would break into the biggest smile.

It was this moment, when he was playing with your hair, and you were lightly stroking his back that he realised that he loved the way your eyes crinkled and your nose twitched, he loved the way you always smelt like coconuts, and he loved how you had shared your routine with him. He loved the way your hands would always hold onto his and he loved the way your soft finger tips felt against his calloused ones.

He even loved the way you cry, how your whole body would shake with every breath and how you would do your best to hide the tears that streamed down your face. He loved your crappy humour and your dead jokes too.

In fact…

“I love you.”

#harry styles #harry #styles #harry styles imagines #harry imagines #harry styles fluff

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katzuyas · 5 years

Text

hp au twitter thread

in which when yuuri is still in school he gets involved with the bad crowd and ends up a follower of a dark lord, whose main agenda is ruling over the world and bringing dark magic to its former glory.

yuuri doesn't hate dark magic, he's fairly proficient, but he's far from being able to harm another person with malice. he's a great duelist tho, so he quickly becomes one of the leaders of the dark lord's inner circle. japan falls, then china, korea, all of asia. they triumph. and so the dark lord sets his eyes on russia -- their nearest neighbour.

while they campaign at the border, during a skirmish with the light community there, yuuri meets HIM. they're on the opposite sides of this battle, but yuuri thinks they might be one at heart, because while they duel none of their spells are lethal. yuuri takes a hex to the leg, he sends a curse to his shoulder, but it's clear that they are more than evenly matched.

yuuri can't help but admire the other wizard. his long silver hair blows in the wind and colours with the light of every spell that silently leaves his pale wand with the force of shooting stars that yuuri sees in his eyes. other spells fly around them, but in those moments yuuri can't help but stop and clutch his wand harder, because this is not what he wanted to do with his life. fighting, duelling, this was never his dream. he wanted to create spells, to give himself to knowledge, and yet...

he gets a curse right into his chest.

he falls back into the muddy ground, gasping for breath. there's a bleeding gash there, but it isn't deep. yet another reminder that the other doesn't want to hurt him.

yuuri hears him come closer, sees him crouch next to him, feels the tip of his wand press against his neck.

"I will let you live if you stop," the man says.

yuuri thinks of the dark lord, his family that would die should he betray him, and he laughs.

"do you think it's that easy?"

the smile he gets in return surprises him. it's sad, pitying, and something unfurls in yuuri's heart.

"I know it isn't," the man says before yuuri can decide what he's feeling. "but would you want to, if you could?"

yuuri looks into his eyes. the man who's more than his equal is, in fact, the most beautiful human yuuri has ever seen. even despite the dried blood on his face.

"but I can't," yuuri says.

and then he grabs his wrist, pulls hard, and rolls them over so that he can thrust his wand into the man's face.

"obliviate."

the man goes slack as yuuri withdraws the memory of their meeting from his mind, only to leave him there. alone, in the mud.

he thinks that's it. he hopes. but he sees him again. and again. and again. at every raid, the man with silver hair comes to find yuuri, duels with him, wins, and yuuri uses all the tricks he has to erase his memory.

but that only helps as much. his own memories are intact.

it becomes a habit to seek the head of silver among the light wizards, to make his way through the battlefield towards him, to fight him with all he has only to end up losing. oddly enough, yuuri finds some enjoyment in it. even more in the snippets of conversation they share.

but then, one day, the enjoyment is replaced by something else. something more. because that day, yuuri sees him fall.

and his heart falls with him.

he doesn't think twice before he races down the hill to where he saw the silver hair blow back as the man falls, blood spilling onto his fur-lined robes. yuuri drops to his knees next to him, murmurs all the healing spells he knows, and it helps. the cut is nasty, but it heals.

there will be consequences, yuuri knows this even when the clouded blue gaze traces the lines of his profile. there will be consequences, yuuri knows as he touches his wand to a silver temple and casts a sleeping spell. there will be consequences, yuuri knows as he lets him live.

and there are.

yuuri screams under the wand of his master, promises to fix his mistake, cries and sobs later while his body aches. but the feeling in his heart, well. it's light. it's lighter than anything he's felt before. so he protects the small flames of hope, of life, of love, with all his might. and then... then he meets him again. it's like a part of yuuri's heart has transferred to him during the brief minutes of his healing, but it's undeniable.

and he isn't the only one who feels it.

"why did you save me?" the man asks, wand pointing to the ground.

yuuri hasn't dropped his, but no spells were cast between them.

"I don't know," yuuri replies, honestly. "it just felt like the right thing to do."

"why, then? why hurt others? am I so different than them?"

the man waves a hand in a broad gesture and yuuri lowers his guard when he takes a look around him. wizards are dying everywhere he stops his eyes. light and dark, all for one madman's gain.

"we can't stop him," yuuri says. he meets blue eyes. "I can't. no one can."

"we can try."

yuuri's heart aches, longs, but his reason is stronger still. "what use is trying when I know we will fail?"

the man doesn't answer for long. he walks closer, so close that yuuri can smell him.

"if we stand together, we have a chance. please, stay with us."

yuuri opens his mouth to argue, but the man takes his hand. yuuri's fingers are gnarled with tension, but the other hand is warm. slowly, yuuri's fingers uncurl, slide into the warm, open hand that holds him.

"stay with me," the man asks.

"i can't," yuuri says, closing his eyes as they fill with tears. "my family... they will die for this. I have to-- I have--"

he rips away, barely able to breathe. he turns his back on his worst enemy, and freezes when he catches him directly in his arms.

"don't go," the man begs. "we will find a way. we'll rescue your parents, your friends, and then--"

"can you rescue the whole nation?" yuuri asks, looking into the night sky.

a star winks and falls. yuuri closes his eyes and makes a wish that he knows will never come true.

"I can't, but--"

"what's your name?" yuuri interrupts him.

"what? why would you ask that now?"

"I want to know. please."

the arms around yuuri tighten. "it's victor."

"victor... thank you."

"for what?"

"for trying." yuuri pulls away from victor's arms. "I will do my best."

"your best? at what? I don't understand--"

"my name is yuuri," yuuri tells him instead. "I will see you again, victor. in this life or the next."

the wide blues eyes are the last thing yuuri allows himself to see of victor before he stuns him and apparates away.

yuuri has never been good at planning. he was the passionate type, always. he did things first, then thought and regretted them later. not this time.

months of careful planning, of plotting and seducing and making connections and allies and friends, have brought fruit. the inner circle of four generals of death stood surrounded by the dark lord's followers. the portkeys that meant to transport them have been rigged, destinations changed in secret. the three generals apart from yuuri have been caught and imprisoned, replaced by polyjuiced fakes. armies of european light wizards’ coalition waited for them, ready to contain the dark lord's forces as soon as they would apparate in.

and the dark lord knew nothing.

but, oh, how naive it was of yuuri to think that.

the moment they apparated in, he realized the mistake. this wasn't the place they needed to be in. this... this was hell. this was his punishment.

he watched his friends fall as the dark lord triumphed again. and there, surrounded by his former comrades, now turned enemies, yuuri turned around and faced the dark lord.

he didn't stand a chance. of course not. but the dark lord was arrogant. he didn't kill him with his first spell, not his second or third, no. he liked to play. so he played, and tore yuuri apart at his leisure. a cut here, a curciatus curse there, a blood boiling hex later.

just as yuuri's screams turned into howling and his thoughts into mindless prayers for death, the pain stopped. through hazy with agony eyes, yuuri could see white, white and brown and...

and silver.

silver of the hair of the man who now stood between him and the dark lord.

yuuri wanted to stop him, to shout and scream at victor to run away, but his throat was too sore. he couldn't speak, couldn't move -- not with how badly wounded he was. all he could do was watch victor duel the dark lord, while his heart hurt more than it had during torture.

yuuri watched how victor kept up with the dark lord, how he stood between them fiercely and protectively, and then he watched how he began loosing ground, how bit by bit the dark lord's smirk returned to his face. and so, finally, yuuri watched how victor limped and fell and--

groping half-blindly for his wand, yuuri pushed himself up with the last effort of his body. the dark lord's wand was already raised, the killing curse at the tip of his tongue, yuuri is sure. victor's eyes met yuuri's over the distance and victor smiled as if it was his last.

yuuri has never used it purposefully in his entire life, not once, despite having cast it several times. but this time... this time he did so with his entire heart in it. he lifted his wand, lifted his eyes to the dark lord's back, and said:

"avada kedavra."

two bodies fell to the ground at the same time.

yuuri's breathing was harsh and desperate, and his grip on his wand loosened when blood begun pouring out of him faster, as if to make sure he doesn't see more of this madness.

but the dark lord was dead. and so, yuuri was free.

he didn't think he'd wake up, but he has. to a white ceiling, white sheets, a bed in a hospital. and to a head of silver hair resting against the sheets. victor, silly, wonderful victor, who fell asleep in the chair right next to yuuri's bed.

tears fill yuuri's eyes. he fights against his body to lift his arm and gently touch victor's head. he could've whispered 'rennervate' as well, because victor bolts awake at once. blue eyes meet yuuri's and victor's mouth drops open.

they don’t speak for a moment, just look at each other. and it's enough.

"you killed him," victor says at last. "it's over. we won."

"his followers?" yuuri asks in a voice scratchy with disuse. victor helps him get a drink of water, before he answers: "caught, imprisoned. gone. we're safe now. we've won. and it's all thanks to you."

yuuri smiles.

"no. it's all because of you. if we never met..."

"will you please do something for me then?" victor quickly asks. "to repay me, if you will."

"anything," yuuri promises before he even hears it, and it makes victor smile.

victor's hand takes yuuri's. their fingers slide together.

"stay," victor says.

yuuri closes his eyes and nods.

and he stays. in the light, where he belongs, and where his heart belongs: with the man it has chosen, and who chose him as well. against all odds.

patreon | ko-fi

#yuri on ice #victuuri #viktuuri #victor nikiforov #yuuri katsuki #my fic #wow this was a wild angsty road #I don't even know where this came from #quite literally I just said this morning that I wasn't ready to invest in sarazanmai bc of the angst #and now this #tydcfvugihj #WHAT HAPPENED

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nightbearers · 5 years

Text

The End - Emptiness Campaign

youtube

The following read is from Apa’s arc of the Emptiness Campaign where a group went to another shard that eventually got ‘destroyed’ I started with friends back before Heavensward was released. Apa was originally made as a NPC based on G’raha, but I and others ended up too attached to him (mostly me). So instead of him being locked away in the aetherial sea to make sure none of that world passed into the source--another NPC was left and he continued to be a character. Some new and some old friends finally helped me give the campaign proper closure a bit ago. My slow butt is just posting this piece now though. ( I don’t write for SE I swear! ) P.S. This is a very long read.

Apa's eyelids twitched as he slowly opened his eyes sitting up slowly. He looked around standing in darkness his ears drooped and brows furrowed. "This is it I guess..." His gaze softened sadly sighing head tilting to the ground. "Not a single flower, only darkness... Now to just wait for my essence to fade away." He turned as his eyes caught a light off in the distance. A brow rose slowly his mouth opened, but no words came out as he closed it again closing his eyes tightly as well as his fist. He stood there for moments, his teeth also gritting before he turned fully towards the light lifting his head and opening his eyes walking towards it. As he walked through the darkness he could feel himself getting slower and slower. "...I am getting very tired..."

"Then why not rest, come, join me." The demon Amon appeared sitting on dark stone stool, before him a dark stone table with chess board and pieces on top. The demon motioned to the chair across from him.

"Again? Last match we had you won you know..." Apa walked over staring at the chessboard.

"Yes, you lost and I won... After so many times of loosing, and that made all the difference did it not?" Amon picked up a pawn moving it. Apa sighed after some hesitation sitting down across from the demon. He moved a piece on the board.

"Yes, you said that match that I would fall apart in the end and become my own undoing. Everything I truly believed in and felt would go in silence as the world ripped my heart apart." Apa gazed empty at the chess board as Amon moved another piece.

"For this match, I will bet that the hearts of others is something you will never understand." Amon chuckles as Apa moved another piece.

"The hearts of all are tainted grey, more to the black then white." Apa sighs as he goes to move another piece blinking as his arm would not move. He tried to turn his head but could not, instead moving his eyes towards his arm seeing a blue silk thread wrapped around his wrist. "What..?"

"A wondrous light hangs in the atmosphere, but your eyes are too focused on the dark around you to see it. Though you do not lament in it, you grow bitter, not because of what has happened to you..." Amon tilted his gaze from the chess board to Apa. "But because you locked everyone out, and caused them to never understand... You believe they will never understand and in the end--no matter what words you give them--you believe they will hate and turn on you in the end." Amon tilts his head, "Riddle me this friend... How long will you reject those who care for you even though they've done you no wrong?"

"I..." Apa couldn't move as the blue silk tugged on his wrist.

"Your mind is a different world from reality. You wander aimlessly without guidance, you do not know whether to go left or right. You lose sight of the familiarity and it becomes an eerie pain instead. Your true voice and wishes become deaf even to your own heart. Your own mind... Your downfall will be you falling again, slowly, painfully, you will wish for it to speed up--but it will never change." Amon moved a piece on Apa's side before his own again.

"What is the point of you lecturing me... I am dead Amon, this is the aetherial sea and soon I will be gone forever." Apa closed his eyes unable to move. Slowly another blue silk thread crept up from behind wrapping around his other arm's shoulder. Amon chuckled as he moved a piece on his side.

"So eager to cut the ropes then? You will never realize your mistake like that." Amon moved a piece on Apa's side looking back to his own. Another blue silk thread crept behing wrapping around one of Apa's knees. "You know... For someone who claims not to lament over anything--you sure lament over everything." He moved a piece on his side before looking up to Apa. "It appears I have a checkmate, and I've won again."

"That is because you are moving the pieces without me having any say." Apa sighs opening his eyes gazing blankly forward with sadness. "I can finally rest..." Another silk blue thread crept around the ankle of his other leg.

"I suppose since my last win brought you death..." Amon looked at Apa's neck as another blue silk thread wrapped around it. "This is only fair."

Apa closed his eyes again sighing. "Make it swift then..."

"Good bye friend, I am sure you will realize the depth of your mistake..." Amon chuckled as suddenly more silk threads shot out at Apa wrapping around random places. Apa furrowed his brows taking in a final breath as suddenly he was yanked away into the darkness by the threads.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Apa's eyelids twitched as he slowly opened his eyes sitting up slowly. He blinks furrowing his brows as he looked around, Sagolli desert. He slowly stood up confused as he spotted a young black haired miqo'te boy crying next to the oasis alone rubbing his eyes. "That..." He slowly walked closer to the boy but stopped as he sobbed.

"No... It's not fair..!" The boy cried rubbing his eyes, "It hurts... Why do I hurt." Apa stared opening his mouth but froze as he moved a hand to his cheeks feeling as tears welled up and fell from his eyes. "I just want them to let me in... Why doesn't anyone love me..." The boy cried curling up as he sat hiding his face into his knees. Apa closed his mouth as he continued to take steps closer standing behind the boy staring down at him. "I just want... Want to make them happy..." The boy sniffled. Apa moved a hand to reach out towards the boy's head to comfort him only to have his wrist grabbed and wrapped by blue silk threads, then the rest of him as it yanked him away into the darkness.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Apa's eyelids twitched as he slowly opened his eyes sitting up slowly. He blinks furrowing his brows as he looked around, Pearl Lane. He slowly stood up looking over spotting a young miqo'te boy with black hair and in cult like thaumaturge robe standing before a young purple haired miqo'te girl. The boy was performing for the girl until finally she smiled.

'I want to make them happy... Don't let them feel what I did... Nald'Thal... Please let me take their sins away... Let me carry every burden for them to smile...'

The voice echoed in Apa's mind as he furrowed his brows taking a step forward as blue silk threads shot out wrapping around his ankle and yanking him causing him to fall forward and into the darkness.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Apa's eyelids twitched as he slowly opened his eyes sitting up slowly. He blinks furrowing his brows as he looked around, the fountain in front of the Quicksand. Slowly he staggered standing feeling weak as he turned his gaze. Seeing a young miqo'te teen in cult robe yelling at a keeper woman in bard attire. Begging her to stay, the woman placed a hand on his head. Apa gazed sad and longingly as his own lips subconsciously moved the same as the woman's.

'You would make for a better tactician then a cultist!'

She laughed before turning towards her party and heading out to fight their way to Mor Dhona. Apa furrowed his brows moving though weakly to try hopping over the railing and stop the woman only to be grabbed by the neck by blue silk threads and yanked away into darkness.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Apa's eyelids twitched, "I guess... You really do see your life flash before your eyes when you die..." He opened his eyes standing before the arcanist guild in Limsa, staring at a green haired miqo'te teen staring towards the door with clenched fist. "...Don't go in..." Apa gazed at the teen who shook his head taking a breath before walking it. Apa gazed sadly furrowing his brows and looking to the ground, "...It was cycles of emptiness..." He gazed down his vision blurred as tears welled up in his eyes and fell to the ground. "All the emptiness... Please make it stop..." He went to move his hands to his face stopped by blue silk threads that spun him around and yanked him away into the darkness.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

"You might end up with someone you wish to protect without meaning to someday."

Apa opened his eyes standing before a small refuge in the goblet. He tilted his head to look up towards the roof, seeing a late teens green haired miqo'te writing in a grimoire. "...It wasn't that I didn't have someone... It was that I wanted to protect everyone..." He gazed at his younger self who was grinning proudly as he wrote into his grimoire. Apa closed his eyes tilting his head back down opening them towards the yard at his Carbuncle sitting and looking up to him on the roof. He gave a somber smile as tears fell from his eyes. "You could not speak... But you always believed in me... You always trusted my judgment when no one else would trust me... You took their side to try showing me the right path... But I couldn't... I couldn't see it..."

Apa hunched down covering his face with his hands as he sobbed. "I couldn't see it..." Blue silk thread wrapped around his torso as he was yanked away by force into the darkness.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Apa signed opening his eyes slowly looking as he saw himself standing before him.

"This is the end isn't it?" The apa before him stared at him, "It's been an odd run really."

Apa closed his eyes furrowing his brows with a pained expression, "I deserve this... After everything I've done--after I tried so hard to protect them--to make them smile..." He clutched his fists as tears rolled from his eyes. "I deserve this--I didn't protect them--I made them suffer--I didn't make them smile I made them cry tears and lose their sanity over worry..!"

"Wow you really are dense..." The Apa before him sighed shaking his head.

"D-dense!?" Apa opened his eyes gazing to the blurry figure before him. Blue silk threads creeping all around him attaching themselves.

"This isn't your end... It's mine." The other Apa put a hand over his chest, "I never knew my purpose, who I really was, where I really was meant to be..." He shakes his head moving the hand from his chest to point at Apa. "But you... Look at them."

"Them..?" Apa furrowed his brows looking around.

"Yes... Look at all these threads of fate connected to you. After everything, after all the lies. The silence that are lies. All the pain. All the trouble. All the suffering... They came for you in the end." The other Apa moved his hand back over his chest. "You are a fool, no matter how smart you are--you are a fool."

Apa gazed at all the blue silk threads touching and wrapped around him. His brows still furrowed, "...I was happy... To hear them... To know they were still alright... But still--because of me some of them di--"

"It's not your fault! You can't save everyone nor can you save the world! Or any world! Not alone! Not with an army!" The other Apa took a step forward leaning as he moved hand before him waving a line motion. "You say you don't remember because you want to lament--but to be stronger for the future! But what I see is a man wallowing in his pity! A man who took it over and over and over again yet did not ask for anything in return! For help from anyone! And guess what?! Maybe you should have!"

Apa opened his mouth, "I--"

"You're pathetic! No matter how smart you are! No matter how many times you win! In the end you lose! Wake up! How much do they have to chase after you and how many times do they have to bang on the door for you to let them in!?" The other Apa narrowed his eyes as he moved to stand back up. "It took me shattering my own soul to realize this--all the silence you shut away--everything you tried to shut away... When I woke up in that lab..." He clenched his fist.

"I'm sorr--"

"You're not sorry! You knew perfectly well what you were doing! You locked that part of the lab away so no one could find it, just like with Husui! Whenever people couldn't find you--you went there! You put on that helmet and you prayed! You hoped to erase it!" The other Apa before him stomps his foot clenching his fist and gritting his teeth in anger. "You shut me away and simply bent over to do everything for everyone else!" He motioned to himself. "But what about me!? What about the feeling that wanted to be loved?! The feeling that wanted to have friends--family?! ANYTHING!?"

Apa opened his mouth as tears cascaded down his cheeks. "I-I--"

"You made a mistake! You're not some god who can't make mistakes! People died! People die all the time! You tried to throw me away--but you can't just simply throw your heart away and only listen to your mind! You tried to make you believe your own words by saying them over and over in your head--BUT YOU COULD NEVER TRULY FEEL THEM!" The other Apa shakes his head angrily, "I suffered too... I found my way out--I found my way into one of the clones and I broke out... I didn't know who i really was... What I really was... I could do everything you could--but I knew I couldn't be you... I took on the name ‘Fia’, But now I know." Fia closed his eyes looking towards Apa. "I am not you, but simply a part of you that you tried to throw away with Oneiromancy. I am not a darkside... I am literally the part of your mind and memories you tried ripping out--the feelings and the reasons... You're not strong. You speak of strength and you may have power but you're not strong... You're weak... Pathetic... So much that you tried to rid of me so you could move on... But no matter how many times you try to get rid of these feelings..." Fia moved over placing a hand over Apa’s chest.

"...No matter how many times I try to throw them away... They'll always come back... They came back weaker and weaker... Until I felt like I could not tell my mind or heart apart. I could not tell if I even belonged on this world anymore... I even spoke to Tray and Haname about it..." Apa placed a hand over Fia’s that laid on his chest. "Of everyone I made suffer... I made myself suffer the most..."

Fia shakes his head moving his free hand placing it over Apa's head. "It's about time... You wake up again... Isn't it? You have people waiting for you, don't you..? Didn't you tell Kymora that you would accept their judgment? Didn't you feel that fleeting happiness hearing from Xauko and her words that they were trying to save you? Didn't you tell Tray and Haname to look after Mirelia if you died? They're not around anymore..."

Apa furrowed his brows smiling softly as his tears listened, "...I feel them now... More then before yes..."

"This time, don't make a mistake with me. Of you..."

"B-but... What if I make a mistake again..." Apa closed his eyes shivering.

"You know you'll make a mistake again. That's why you need to let them in..." Blue silk threads began to tug at Apa pulling him away from the blurring figure of himself.

"B-bu--"

"We were always scared. Of the future... But not of disaster--but of continuing to walk alone forever, for every face to turn away... Let them turn away if they will, just be sure you keep making new faces smile. It'll happen over and over... But there will always be someone else somewhere."

Blue silk threads yanked him away into the darkness...

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

Apa opened his eyes standing in the darkness. Empty darkness far as the eyes can see, blue threads hanging off him all over. He turned his gaze upwards tot he dark sky, then down to the dark floor. A sigh as he took a heavy step forward gazing out into the nothingness. 'I feel myself slipping away...'

"May your soul finally get eternal rest." Chanto’s voice rang within his head.

Apa stopped pausing looking around as words echoed through the emptiness. "May I finally get my eternal rest..." He turned his head back forward as he walked heavily.

"So, you couldn't make it back after all? Part of me believes that you wouldn't die to something like this, but if this is truly where we part ways, then I wish you well on wherever it is you go next, my friend. If you do come back though, make sure to visit, my castle will always be open for you to visit." Solmundr ’s voice rang within his head.

Apa closed his eyes slowly as he walked, "Not everyone can be fully immortal like you..."

"I still... love you." Mirelia’s voice rang within his head.

"I never deserved your love... To be honest I looked to you like a precious family of mine I could never let anything happen to... I'm sorry I could never love you the way you wanted me to." Apa continued to walk as the silk blue threads dragged behind him.

"He was really cool. He made all these amazing things and knew so much. I still have so many questions I wished I could have asked him. It sucks how I knew him for such a short time... I think we would have been wonderful friends. I hope he knew how cool he was." Xauko’s voice rang inside his head.

Apa furrowed his brows smiling softly closing his eyes softly. "I wish I could have gotten to known everyone better. Wish I was able to tell everyone so much more, as much as I fear others--I'm sure... Maybe we could have been friends..."

"There's probably a lot that I wanted to say to you, but never quite got the chance...but even if you are gone, I feel like you managed to make me a better person; though, I have the hope that you'll come back again, after all, we're immortal aren't we? It's like you said, a soul is a soul, and a body is a body, it doesn't matter to us in the end, we just keep going on. Rest easy, Apa, till we meet again." Kymora’s voice rang inside his head.

Apa chuckles softly as he walked, "A soul is a soul... A body is a body... A body does not define a person... It is our souls that define us." He tilted his head downwards sadly as he walked heavily.

"Hey Apa...I hope that you're able to get some actual rest this time, true rest, not just being forced into another body or whatever happened when you became Nai. I still don't really get what happened, I haven't even really asked I guess, but I'm sorry for all that happened while you were both Apa and Nai, hell even before hand I guess too. If by somehow you escaped death once more...well, the Futon will always be ready for you, in your spot. Everything's the same as when you left it, and it'll probably stay being the same too. Throughout everything I without a doubt will always call you my friend, rest well old friend." Kyuu’s voice rang inside his head.

"Rest... It doesn't matter what face I carry, how I look, does it? Everything will be the same whether I return or die..." Apa sighed as he tried to move though could not, blue silk threads limiting his movement.

"How many times are you going to die, dumbass." Lazne’s voice rang inside his head.

Apa furrowed his brows again, "Just this one--" He stopped his movement opening eyes as the blue threads became taut all over.

"Still got a promise to uphold, you're not getting out of it that easily." Akhutai’s voice rang inside his head.

"I--" Apa moved his lips to answer as a dim light shined from behind him though he could not move. Suddenly he was tugged away from the darkness shooting towards a blinding light.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

While they were all busy with the crystal and focused on it... There was a soft groan from one of the beds...

#complete campaign stuff

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the-happy-hellbrute · 7 years

Text

SUIT LOG 4

This is the writeup of the second-to-last part of the first ‘arc’ of the Black Crusade campaign I’m playing in. Other players are @imkelborhal, @metalboxes, and @screamingatthevoid. The campaign is run by @why-things-are-terrible. They have made a few odds and ends about the campaign as well, so check them out!

BEGIN SUIT LOG 4

For a split second after Dreadbringer ignited the pool of fuel, I was back on Icarus. I saw reaching figures in the flames as they washed over me, and heard their screams in the roar of the fire.

Then, as quickly as it began, it was over.

I looked over the scene as the remaining fires died out. The thralls that had been assaulting us had been driven off by the flames, some killed or wounded by the conflagration, but most scattered due to the purifying aspect of the flame, anathema to the simpler followers of the plague god. Dreadbringer and I were mostly unharmed, our armor being more than capable of weathering a simple fuel fire. Siodell was somewhat burned, but her respiratory implants negated any effect of smoke inhalation, and her Mechanicum robes protected her with their fire resistant properties, a product of the common hazards of Martian engineering.

My main concern was Ser Aifric. While his carapace armor would have protected him somewhat, he still had a large amount of his body that was only covered by his fatigues or was entirely exposed. This, combined with having been soaked in fuel, made it likely that he would have severe, perhaps life-threatening, burns. I also suspected that his throat and lungs could have potentially been damaged by inhaling smoke or superheated air from the fire. I quickly went to look him over. If I had been examining him for triage, I would have tagged him for lowest priority, as he would be unlikely to survive without expending supplies that could be used on those with a better chance of recovery. However, with allies currently in short supply, I decided that I would do my best to stabilize him. My initial examination showed that he had gotten very lucky. The fuel appeared to have burned off very quickly, and the way he fell smothered any of his clothing that had ignited. However, Aifric still suffered severe burns to his upper and lower arms, as well as some lesser but still worrying burns to his calfs and thighs. Most worryingly was the fact that his fatigues had bonded to his skin in some places, but as I did not have the proper tools or sterile environment to treat that properly, I focused on treating the most immediately dangerous symptoms.

I washed out his burns the best I could with my power armor’s internal water supply, and then wrapped them in all the sterile antiseptic bandages that I had. I was worried about the possibility of infection, not only due to the non-sterile conditions, but also the nature of combat with Nurgle-aligned warriors. Unfortunately, the only antiseptic I had on-hand was pure alcohol for tool sterilization, which would further aggravate his burns, so I had to hope the bandages would be good enough. I then checked his breathing with my auto-senses, to see if his respiratory system had been compromised. I observed a rasp to his breathing, though he still appeared to be getting oxygen, so it was not an immediate concern. It was likely that he had inhaled smoke from the fire, and that had resulted in irritation to the tissue of his throat and lungs. Moving on, I then injected him with a small dose of stimm, to get him moving, and a dose of pain suppressant, so he would be able to function for the immediate future. Normally I would not mix a stimulant and an analgesic, but conditions required he be able to move under his own power, so I judged it worth the potential danger. Soon after, he began to awaken. I preformed a quick examination to ascertain if he was coherent. While he was in pain, he was alert and capable of movement, albeit slowly.

With the most pressing concern out of the way, I moved to speak with Dreadbringer. I began by briefly berating him for endangering everyone by igniting the fuel, but only receiving a curt response of “It was the most effective course of action,” I decided to move on. We then discussed how to proceed. I was in favor of continuing on in the direction our guide had indicated, as he had said that the wreck of the Explorator was very nearby, and it was likely that the scanning systems aboard would be able to locate the exotic particle traces that would indicate a concentration of psychic individuals. It also would contain the valuable medical equipment and supplies that the merchant had indicated was there, which I would now need to provide adequate treatment to Aifric. Dreadbringer was less sure. He started to argue that we should go back to the market in the hanger and get a new guide, but slowly trailed off and said that he had a better plan, which he did not elaborate on. He walked to the lift platform, and then casually stated something that sent me sprinting after him.

“Warsmith, the thralls fled in the direction of the child. Is he able to protect himself?”

I was on the elevator in an instant. The grind up to the next floor was an agonizing wait, though my suit chrono marked it as only two minutes at most. While Dreadbringer was still and stoic as ever on the ride up, I found myself pacing up and down the platform until eventually, the bell chimed, and the doors opened to the landing above.

I quickly scanned the room. The guide was still where we had laid him, but Telemachus was nowhere to be seen. In that moment, I felt the closest that I have ever felt to true fear since I was uplifted to the Astartes. I ran through the passageways of the hulk, desperately bellowing out for Telemachus. The search felt like hours, calling out to him constantly. Thoughts of the dangers he could be facing, things that could have happened, and what I should have done instead raced through my mind. Eventually, I heard sounds of crying. Rounding into a small dead end corridor, I finally found the child.

Telemachus was huddled with his knees gripped to his chest at the end of the hallway. Though he appeared unharmed, he was obviously in distress. I can deal with a gunshot wound with ease, set a broken leg in a matter of seconds, attach an augmetic with such skill that it was like the limb was never gone, but this? Being presented with my son in tears, I feel more helpless than I can ever remember.

I did not know what else to do besides walk to him and sit by his side. We spent a long time like this, simply being seated next to each other. Eventually, Telemachus’ sobs quieted, and he spoke to me. He told me how he had been worried by the sounds of fighting coming from below, but then when he heard the explosion and the silence that followed, he thought that I had been killed. The thought of this terrified the child, and he ran back through he hulk, terrified and distraught.

I let the child speak, hoping that by talking it through that it would help him. When he finished, I said to him that he did not need to worry, that I was safe and at his side. This seemed to calm him somewhat, and he responded that he would learn to be stronger. He ended this by holding up his hand and stating the beginning of the immortal words of the Iron Warriors: “Iron Within.” I gently took his hand and guided him to his feet, responding “Iron Without.”

Telemachus seemed to recover from his momentary panic, and slowly began to stand straighter as we walked back to the freight platform. Though I was worried by the boy’s momentary lapse, his recovery showed he had strength. I knew he would continue to grow, and that he had the will to become the heir I am raising him to be. This was tested once again moments later.

As we approached the cargo lift, I began to hear a cracking sound, followed by low, wet squelching. I motioned for Telemachus to stay behind me, and drew my boltgun. I prepared for another engagement with the shambling thralls, and then entered the lift chamber. In the low light, I found a large figure hunched over the remains of our guide. The figure had cracked open the man’s skull into a bloody ruin. Hearing our approach, Dreadbringer looked over his shoulder from where he was crouched to face us. His helmet was on the deck to his side, allowing me to see the man’s face for the first time. It was a horrific ruin, part of his cheek missing, metal plating replacing part of his hairless skull. His skin was the color of ash, pulled tight and thin over his features. But the worst were his eyes. The irises were shattered, spreading out haphazardly into sclera the color of yellowed parchment, shot through with deep red veins. His face was caked in blood, and I could see pieces of half-chewed brain matter leaking through the rent in his cheek, making it grimly clear what his plan had been.

The Omophagea. One of the more bizarre organs implanted into an Astartes, it allows us to gain memories from eating the flesh of a sentient creature. Dreadbringer had decided that it was easier to devour the man’s brain than to wait and see if he would awaken.

I began to berate Dreadbringer for his impulsiveness, but quickly gave up. He quite clearly didn’t care about what I was saying, simply stating that he now had the necessary information and that was all that mattered. I felt it was pointless to press the issue further, so decided to just activate the elevator and rejoin the rest of the group.

It seemed as though Telemachus took the situation surprisingly well, possibly because he has assisted me with surgery in the past. He did now try to avoid looking at Dreadbringer when at all possible though. Having seen what lies beneath his helm, I don’t entirely blame him.

I did a quick check on Ser Aifric once we regrouped with the the others, and once I confirmed he would be able to walk, we set out. We walked for around a half an hour, before we came to an impasse.

Due to the way that the ships making up the hulk had smashed together, some did not tend to be oriented the way that their designs intended. This was shown rather obviously when we came to a breach leading to the ship connecting the Rad-Hulk and the Explorator vessel. It was situated nose down, making what was once a simple passageway into a hundred meter drop. We spent some time trying to figure out a way to safely make it down the shaft. I rather quickly tired of complaints about lack of rope and thoughts of reactivating the gray-plating, and decided to make my own way down. I securely grabbed Telemachus, and then stepped off into the inverted hallway.

Now, I am not a suicidal fool, so I had more of a plan than “jump and hope that I land softly”. A split second into my fall, I thrust my hand into the side of the passageway and ripped down through the plating until it slowed my decent to a stop. It was around that moment when my action registered with the rest of the group and the confused cries arose. I called up that we were fine, and I had possibly left a path for the others to climb down with. I repeated the process of falling and ripping down through the plating a few more times before I was safely at the bottom. Dreadbringer imitated my process and landed soon after. Siodell carried down Aifric on her back while she used her servo-arm to do a form of crack climbing down the rents Dreadbringer and I created. This took a bit longer, but got them both down safely.

Having made it past that obstacle, it was a short walk to the second breach leading to the Explorator vessel. We found ourselves in what appeared to be a research deck, filled with broken cogitators and dust shrouded laboratories. Dreadbringer continued to guide us through the vessel. Soon, signs on the walls began to point us towards the medical bay.

Eventually, we stumbled upon a large room filled with specimen tanks. There were several xenos species taking up residence in the stasis tanks, a half dissected ork in one, a Hormagaunt in another, and the strange long limbed form of a Hrud in another still.

But what stood out among the various aliens was the nude form of a human woman. She had dark skin, and the tell-tale scarring of neural implants ringing her bald head. They looked relatively recent, though that was potentially misleading given the nature of stasis containment. After all, if a person was asked to judge Telemachus’s age by look alone they would reasonably say that he would be in the range of 10 standard years. However, he has spent decades in a stasis pod as an infant while I looked for a place to safely raise him, making his chronological age something close to 121 years old.

Needless to say, this piqued our curiosity. Before we moved on to the medical bay, we decided to find a way to open the stasis chamber holding her and find out just what made her so special.

END SUIT LOG 4

#the saga of daedalus #black crusade #warhammer 40k #warhammer 40000 #chaos space marines #iron warriors #fantasy flight games #chaos daemons #role playing game #role playing

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serendipitousrambles · 7 years

Text

Stand By Me (Stranger Things AU)

ao3

It happens sometimes, friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant... I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody? - Stand by me, 1986

1983

The cold November air sent a chill down Mike's back as they walked along the train tracks. Dustin insisted despite Mike's protest that it wasn't particularly safe; it would be easier to find their way rather than get lost in the trees. A little further ahead, Dustin and Lucas walked along a track each, balancing on the thin metal with a stick held between Dustin's right and and Lucas' left hand. Their laughter and jokes relaxed Mike who was feeling a little nervous about being along the tracks, a train could come any minute - even though deep down he knew trains hardly ever passed through the small town. The boys and El had been walking most of the day, but the silence was filled with songs they had learned from school or camp, cheerful, walking songs. Dustin's voice had begun to squeak slightly as he tried to hit higher notes causing the kids to burst out laughing. Mike glanced at the girl walking next to him, she looked a little uneasy as well.

"Hey, El? Are you ok?" he had only known her for a short while but he had become worried about her very quickly.

She quietly nodded and gave him a weal smile, but her eyes still had a trace of fear. She had told them it wasn't safe, but Mike knew they had to find Will, they just had to. What if the bad men got there first? Who knows what could happen to Will. They were already on the run from the bad men, they couldn't go home. Not yet anyway.

They had been walking for a while when Dustin called back to them, "Hey guys! I think we should make camp for the night."

They hadn't had much time to grab supplies before running away from the men, but they had managed a few sleeping bags, blankets and some food - courtesy of Dustin. They had told their parents they were sleeping at each other's houses for the night, but that plan would only work so long as none of their mothers call each other.

The night was cold and dark, but Lucas knew how to build a fire which burned all night. The kids sat around the campfire, roasting marshmallows as if they were at camp, not on the run from the government. El had curled up in a blanket, content with simply listening to them joke and chat with each other.The conversations turned to ones you can only have with your friends - weird topics that would make absolutely no sense to anyone else: Who would win in a fight - Superman or Darth Vader? What would you rather - have feet for hands or hands for feet? What kind of animal is Goofy anyway?

"Mike, tell us one of your stories." Lucas reached for another marshmallow. Mike was good at that. The stories he came up with for their Dungeons and Dragons campaigns were always the best. He was so animated that the story seemed to come alive right before their eyes as if they were watching a movie, not some twelve year old boy.

"Alright, alright." Mike laughed as he looked at their expectant faces - El had even propped herself up on her elbows, looking up at him with excited eyes.

Mike began to tell the story of the lost knight who was taken by the evil monster. But have no fear for the brave band of knights and their fierce Princess warrior - El smiled at that part- were on their way to rescue him. Running from evils that couldn't even be described.

When he had finished, the camp burst into rounds of applause. Mike jokingly bowed in his seat.

The group had tried to get to sleep, but the fear of suddenly being found kept them awake.

"How about one of us keep guard? We'll take it in turns and that way we can get some sleep but aren't going to be caught unawares." Lucas stood up and pulled out his slingshot. "I'll take first watch."

Everyone was slowly drifting off to sleep when Lucas started mumbling under his breath. "Sinclair, Lucas. Keeping watch. No signs of enemy life. I will remain vigilant, calm, strong -"

"LUCAS!" Dustin and Mike shouted in unison.

"Can you stop your army role play? We're trying to sleep." Mike rolled over onto his back, looking back at Lucas who was a few feet away leaning against a tree. His slingshot at the ready in case of a surprise attack.

Lucas begrudgingly stayed quiet the rest of his shift. Dustin was up next and then it would be Mike. They had decided that El should probably stay asleep- she needed rest if she was going to use her powers, they didn't know when they next might need them.

Dustin noticed the fire had begun to die down on his watch and decided to try and get it going again. He sat down on his sleeping bag between Mike and Lucas'. A small, muffled whimper came from Mike's side. Suddenly he sat bolt upright and looked at Dustin. They exchanged an awkward look.

"Do you wanna talk about it?" Dustin whispered. They had never really spoken about personal things like that - it just wasn't how their group operated.

"I uh..."Mike started but he couldn't find the words. They were caught in his throat. He gave up and shook his head, lying back down on his sleeping bag.

Dustin understood and went back to his post, sitting down himself. It was too much effort to stand all night. He was suddenly aware of another presence sitting down beside him. Mike.

"Mike, you don't have to-"

"No, I want to." Mike whispered, his hands playing in his lap.

Mike explained about his nightmare: his dad shouting at him, calling him useless.

"He wants me to be someone I'm not. Thinks, writing stories is a waste of time, useless, unimportant skill that takes away the focus from anything good." Mike's voice wavered as he held back tears. His dad never understood or cared about his passion for story telling and writing. Sure science was cool, but he had a real talent for writing but his dad didn't seem to care. "He wants me to be some athlete jock and it's not me. I'm not the son he wanted..."

Dustin put his hand on Mike's shoulder and took a deep breath. "You are the son he wanted. You're a great kid, you're talented,smart. You're gonna do so many great things one day. Not like me." Dustin looked down and brought his knees up to his chest. Mike had never seen him like this. Dustin was the prankster, always having a laugh. Nothing bothered him, not bullies, not parents. Nothing. He always had a smile on his face, always knew just what to do. But know, Mike was seeing him for the first time as vulnerable. As a kid.

"I have to act like nothing bothers me, but the truth is? I'm terrified. I don't know what I'm doing in the future. All I have is science. But science can't help you if no one takes you seriously. I might laugh all the time but it's because...if I'm not laughing, then it just leaves way for others to laugh at me. At me, not with me." Dustin's voice was cracking also and Mike could see that there was indeed a small tear rolling down the side of his face.

They had never seen each other cry - except for that one night they thought it was Will's body.

"There's so much pressure on me to be the guy that cheers everyone up. But what about me? I can act all jokey in order to make everyone else happy. But how can I be happy all the time? I have to fake it, because if Dustin isn't smiling then who is?" Dustin's breathing became more hitched and uneven. He was choking back a sob, he didn't want Lucas to wake up and see him crying.

"Sometimes, I just want to go somewhere where nobody knows me. Where I can be myself, not this dumb facade I've put up. But I'm never getting out of Hawkins." He buried his head in his arms that were resting atop his knees. Muffled sobs came and Mike didn't know how to react except awkwardly pat Dustin's back. This had never happened before but he knew it was something he had to keep between him and Dustin.

When the morning came, it was as if last night hadn't happened. They were able to keep moving, and found a way to the Upside Down. Will was rescued of course, but Eleven had sacrificed herself...

2004

Over the years, we all grew apart. Becoming just another face in the halls. Sure, a friendly smile would sometimes be exchanged, memories returning. But that was all it was, fleeting memories gone just as quick as they arrived. It happens sometimes, friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant. You never think it could happen, but reality tells a different story. It's not like the movies - can anyone really be friends forever? It sucks losing them, but the memories are one thing that you can hold on to.

I don't quite remember what happened to the others. Lucas joined the army after high school, wanting to follow in his father's footsteps but last I heard he finished his service and runs a business. I think Will went to art school, I remember reading about his artwork being on display in the newspaper. His brother and Nancy didn't end well, it affected our friendship slowly until we just lost contact. And Dustin? Well, he got out of Hawkins. Became a lawyer and people finally took him seriously, just as he always deserved. I haven't heard or seen any of them for at least ten years now.

Oh but El. Eleven. I don't know where she is, if she's even alive...The heart never does let go, I never gave up hope. It's true what they say, you always remember your first love, and your first heartbreak. Although I didn't know her for very long, I know I'll miss her forever. I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody?

#stand by me #stranger things #fluff #angst #bit of both #i'm emotional #crossover #one shot #mike wheeler #eleven #lucas sinclair #dustin henderson #will byers #canon divergence #au

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zippdementia · 5 years

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Part 71 Alignment May Vary: Into the Aether

Having left Hell behind, the players are about to embark on a journey through the planes, though as envisioned by me, the planes are actual planets and their vessel an actual spaceship. My plan is to take them through the four main elemental planes: air, water, fire, and earth, with some space opera adventures in between before we make it back to Toril, Faerun, and the finale of our three year level 2-20 campaign (probably four year by the time we actually finish).

Air is first on the list. For inspiration on each planet, I’m using the Manual of the Planes from 3rd edition and the brief bit about each plane that’s included in the DM’s guide for 5e. For air, I’ve envisioned the planet as a giant vortex of open air and atmosphere, filled with clouds and floating islands, frozen floasting caves made of air particulates, spires that rise from nowhere, and endless voids of currents and maelstroms. Civilization is mostly spread out and disparate, but there is one great conglomeration of cities that orbit the largest city of all, the fortress-city of the Citadel of Ice and Steel.

This citadel is a constructed thing, made of magic steel and ice that is cool to the touch but harder than stone. The Citadel of Ice and Steel consists of level upon level of gardens, courts, and labyrinths. It is a palace without stairs, and visitors who can’t fly get genie guides to escort them through the citadel. Smaller citadels orbit the Citadel of Ice and Steel, each the home of a trusted adviser or powerful lesser caliphs. At the heart of the citadel is said to be a prison cell for the grand caliph’s greatest enemy.

And somewhere on this planet is the Crystal of Air, which the players need in order to power their ship to move onto the next destination, for the crystals of Hell take them only so far as fuel.

This is a really nice break session: we have no combats, few dice rolls, and we get a chance to roleplay for about three hours as the players first move through interactions on board the space ship and then into interactions down on the planet of Air, known as Maseckael (Ma-Sec-kay-ale), where it turns out Star is originally from.

The interactions on the space ship are led by the player interests. We have a nice banter with the restored Fiona, who teases Aldric when he implies he’d like to try sleeping with her:

“You were the stupid one, right, who didn’t know what space was?” “No, I’m pretty sure I was the one you were madly in love with.” “Oh... Carrick! It’s so good to see you again! I didn’t recognize you” *sad facepalm*

Fiona also tells them, when they ask what went wrong with the spaceship in the first place, that her memory banks were erased but that there was a fourth living person on the ship. They don’t know how this is possible or what this means, and Imoaza becomes suspicious that maybe someone among the Hell’s Rebels was on their ship and sabotaged it. She decides to get a listing of all the crew from Captain Krisp. She asks Fiona to keep trying to repair her memory.

Some other fun things happen here. Hilariously, it turns out that Aldric got one of his goblin paramours pregnant and she is going to have quadruplets in a very short time (Goblin gestation period... I tell ya). He gives her possible names for them (Rodrick, Adam, Kyle, Bobbie, Sasha, Baily, Rebecca, Charlotte) and also she becomes his first recruit for his rebuilding of the Green Company, which Aldric is trying to promote. The promotion... doesn’t go the way he hopes. Captain Krisp doesn’t want to be involved in the Company (”too many captains of one ship, you know? And everyone would end up choosing me anyway.”) but he has no problem with Aldric recruiting for it, as long as it isn’t a front for a union. He even helps out with posters: the shirtless Krisp pointing a finger out at the viewer, with big bold letters: GO GREEN. No one really knows what it means, but Aldric’s goblin lady friend starts putting it around that it’s for the Green Company, a band of mercenaries that she and her children are going to give their lives for. Also, to be initiated, you have to have sex with Aldric (not true, but she misunderstands the circumstances). We all have a good laugh over this, but I really do intend it as well to be a solid downtime activity for Aldric, as his actions and rolls will determine over the course of this adventure whether his efforts to rebuild the company are successful or not.

We also try (and fail) to come up with a good name for the Surveyor’s ship. Imoaza favors The Dominion, but it seems a little domineering for the others (something Imoaza is like, “yeah, and your point is?” about). Carrick reaches inside his memories and says it was once named the Monument, but that doesn’t stick either. Puck finds the whole thing hilarious and suggests “Broken Dreams” as the name of the ship, which everyone ignores.

During this conversation, Imoaza asks Krisp if he ever met a woman named Karina in her travels, recalling that the tortured Bronze Dragon they met in the Yuant Ti temple had desired to give her a message. Krisp gets a distant look in his eyes and says it does ring a bell, but the details of his past life are hazy now, leaving him only with his old desires, not the reasons for them. He suddenly recalls the name of his old ship, the Mankey Bastard, but can’t remember how he died (”Probably saving this Karina from hordes of enemies! I leap into combat, two rapiers in my hands and a dagger in my teeth, thrusting and stabbing dozens of enemies apart before they finally bring me down, my last view of Karina making it safely to the longboat!”) He briefly suggests naming the ship the Swanky Bastard, but then determines it should really be the companions naming it as they, after all, are the reason everyone is making it off of Hell.

The rod of storms comes up when Aldric asks Otto the Warlock about it. Otto examines it and realizes it is tied now to Aldric’s lifeforce, wrapped around his soul in a way it’s not supposed to be, the result of Aldric forcing the weapon to work for him in the Demon’s Belly. Otto offers to help teach him to use it, or to help him break free of it, but he says breaking free does carry a risk of ripping Aldric’s soul asunder (he uses a minor illusion spell to illustrate hooks ripping the flesh off of Aldric’s body as a visual aid).

Carrick also has an interesting an unexpected encounter, after rolling a perfect 100 on a percentile die while looking for fellow paladins: he runs into Ramon, the young Paladin he killed during his evil days.

Time out: I’m actually not sure how much I’ve talked about Carrick’s past on these blogs? Carrick once was a corrupted Paladin who sought power for power’s sake and began to dominate and destroy villages and towns. One day, a young paladin (Ramon) hunted him down, believing as youth sometimes do, that they are destined for great things and are indestructible besides. Ramon found out the hard way that he could not kill Carrick when Carrick used his powerful dark spear to impale him and murder him. Yet in a way, Ramon did win the fight: After murdering the youth, Carrick was struck with sorrow and regret and this prompted him to put away his spear for good (though he still carries it) and to turn to a path of redemption. His meeting with Ramon now is a powerful character moment, as the two share a drink and Ramon absolves Carrick of his guilt, telling him that he was shocked he, Ramon the brave, ended up in Hell after his deeds and it made him question whether he had truly followed the will of the god of light in pursuing Carrick’s death. “Maybe the reason the god is shown with his sword always sheathed is not because we are meant to be that sword,” he ponders, “but because the god does not believe in drawing it. Perhaps true justice is not found in the blade, but in the heart.”

He tells Carrick he hopes they can fight alongside each other now, instead of against each other and ends by telling him that he recognizes that Carrick ultimately chose mercy even when fighting him, dealing him a blow that killed quickly, instead of slowly and painfully. That’s too much for Carrick: he breaks down into sobs, a conflicting wave of emotions pouring through him. Of regret for the man he was; of sorrow for the boy he killed; of relief at finding him again; grateful for the men they have both become.

As a break from all this sadness, one other ridiculous thing happens. Fiona bakes cookies and the group discovers an unknown flaw of Imoaza’s: she has a MASSIVE sugar addiction. Like, she gets high from sugar. We roll for all of this, which is part of the reason it is so unexpected and hilarious. Aldric eats cookies with her, though a little cautiously when he sees the way she attacks them (her favorite turn out to be these chocolate shortbread cookies with white chocolate swirls and candy baked into them). We also roll to see how many cookies she snags before she leaves the ship for the planet of air: it turns out to be around two dozen. I decree that each cookie heals her a hitpoint. But only for Imoaza.

Several people decide to accompany the players down to the Air Planet: Alyss goes, as does Star (who knows this world). Puck flits along as well, riding on Carrick’s shoulder. Jacobs (recovered from his mental injuries in the City of Ghosts) flies them down to the Citadel of Ice and Steel and they land in an atmosphere of unease and prophecy: a great storm is said to be building, greater than anything the planet has ever seen. Indeed, dark clouds have been forming around the companions ever since their arrival and they begin to suspect it has something to do with the Rod of Storms.

Star is very nervous being back home. When asked why, she tells them she belonged to a crime syndicate here, the Whispering Way. If anyone can help them locate the air crystal, it would be them, but Star isn’t sure how happy they would be to see her. After all, she tells them, it was the syndicate which murdered her the first time around. When Carrick asks her what kind of crime the syndicate specializes in, Star tells him “accidents.” She explains that killing is not allowed in the Citadel of Ice and Steel on pain of death (or worse) so accidental deaths, or at least deaths that LOOK like accidents, become a bit of a commodity and a source of power and wealth for those who have the skill to arrange such things.

While wandering one of the Citadel’s many bazaars, they are greeted by a familiar face: Immerstal the Red, who says he appeared here after spending an indeterminate amount of time in his pocket dimension brothel after the Battle of Brindol and he and Aldric’s last rambunctious night together. He had to destroy the dimension in order to escape and has rebuilt a brothel here in the Citadel instead. He is extremely pleased to see Carrick and Aldric, both of whom he knew from Brindol, but has no idea how much time has passed since he left Faerun behind (albeit, accidentally). His manner changes when he sees the Rod of Storms: “Why would you bring that here? Here of all places, its power is going to be immense!”

But before the players can respond, they are approached by less friendly individuals: a group of pale blue Genasi, genie born half breeds, approach and demand they come with them. Star tells the companions that they shouldn’t fight, reminding them that killing is not allowed in the Citadel of Steel and Ice.

Alyss says she’ll wait at the brothel with Immerstal, and so the others accompany the Genasi to their leader, Lakosa, the head of the Whispering Wind crime syndicate.

Lakosa is a Genasi as well: her ears are pierced in multiple places and she has eyes of pure blue and shards of crystal growing from her bald head. The players are brought to a grand structure surrounded by beautiful pools and gardens, wherein Lakosa resides. Her fortress is draped with greenery: vines and ivy cover most of the surfaces and trees sprout at odd, but obviously deliberate, angles from the fortresses’ spires and battlements.

Inside, much is made of silver, crystal, and glass. Lakosa herself greets the companions from an ornate couch, where she lounges, her sleek blue body blending in with the azure cushions. Carrick looks around appreciatively. Imoaza is, as usual, unimpressed. Aldric smiles brightly at Lakosa, liking what he sees. Puck yawns. Star is extremely uncomfortable.

“You look great, for two hundred,” she tells Lakosa.

“Oh girl,” Lakosa purrs. “You’ve been dead longer than that. I’m nearly two hundred and fifty now.”

“And yet you still remember.”

“When you’re my age, time goes a lot faster. Doesn’t seem that long since you were last here. Definitely not long enough to forget.” “

Long enough to forgive?” “

Maybe. Depends.”

Aldric actually takes the lead here, rolling well on charisma for his interactions with Lakosa (despite the dampening influence of the Rod of Storms) and winning from her favorable words and flirtations. She remains calm and in control of the situation throughout the conversation, asking what the players need and considering their answer when they tell her of their quest for the crystal. While they talk, she drifts about her chamber, graceful and smooth in her movements as if she floats upon a cloud. She drinks from a pale yellow bottle a liquid the color of sunset and eats strange berries from a crystal bowl. When Aldric tries one, he finds it to taste oddly of milk and to make his lips tingle.

Here, too, we get Star’s back story. She was a famed air racer and ace flyer who dreamed of escaping off world with her lover, Feserania, in her own spaceship. One hundred years ago, she accepted a bribe to throw a race, costing the Whispering Wind and Lakosa (who sponsored her) a ton of money. She was going to use the bribe to buy a ship and get off world with Feserania, but before she could, she was caught by the Genasi and her ship was given bad coordinates: directed into a maelstrom. She managed to eject Feserania before they hit the storm. The last thing she saw was Feserania screaming and reaching for her before the maelstrom ripped her ship and Star apart.

She asks Lakosa what happened to Feserania. “Dead,” Lakosa tells her. “The fey born live a long time, girl. But not as long as that. Not when they have a broken heart.”

Lakosa tells Star that it turns out Star has returned at a fortuitous time. There is a race coming up and Lakosa needs a ringer. The champion of the races is named Heatstroke (“a gauche name,” Lakosa says. “That’s funny,” Carrick answers, “Coming from a group that calls themselves the whispering wind”). He’s unbeatable and probably under some kind of service to the Cloud Giant who runs the race. Whether a slave or a well paid racer, he has dominated the races and is making it hard for anyone else to make money off the races.

“Win this race for me, and I’ll give you a cut of the earnings and help you with whatever you need.”

Star muses, “if I’m going to race, I’m going to need a bird.” The races, back in Star’s day, were always held on large bird-like creatures called Aether Craws, great big feathered birds shaped a little like long horses, with huge necks and four mighty talons. Lakos tells her, though, that the rules have changed: now people can enter on machines or using magic. But she believes there is still no match for a well ridden Aether Craw. Technology is known to glitch out in the environments the racers pass through and the Aether Craw are fast, maneuverable, and vicious... all good qualities to have in the race.

“But my old Craw, Lone Star, has to be long dead,” Star says. “Where am I going to get a bird and train it so quickly?”

“He is dead. But his brood is alive. They roost on the Vortexian Spires, above where the endless waterfalls form from the mists. You’ll have to claim one from the nest in a show of strength. It’s the only way it will respect you enough to let you fly.”

The group knows now what they must do. They depart the Palace of Mists, Lakosa’s fortress, and plan their next move. Star muses, telling the group that Feserania had her own bird that she was raising from an egg. “It had a withered wing, which meant any sensible breeder would have killed it. A mercy, really. It could never compete. But for Feserania, well, that was the very thing that made her pick it! She was raising it to care for it, not to use it. She believed it could still live on its own in the wild someday. I think she thought the same of me.” Star reminisces silently for a moment. After Star died, she kept praying she would see Feserania in hell. “I guess, though, that’s why I was there. Anyone who would hope their lover would go to hell just so they could see them again. It’s a selfish thing. I’m glad she’s somewhere better.”

Carrick tries to comfort her, but cannot find the words. Star smiles sadly and the subject is dropped.

That’s as far as we get this session! Next time, we go to the Vortexian Spires to try and tame an Aether Craw and then we’ll have ourselves a sky race.

#dungeons and dragons #dnd 5e #Alignment may vary #Campaign Journal #Plane of Air

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5hfanfiction · 7 years

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Metanoia [ 1 ]

Summary: Karla Cabello is the only heiress of the Cabello-Estrabao family and was bound to marry someone around or above her social status. Also, as a Cuban woman of her stature in 1950s America, studying was looked down upon. However, Karla is gifted with the talent to paint, she spent all her childhood painting the beautiful lakes of Miami and made use of her time falling in love with nature. That was until one day she came across the most beautiful face she had ever seen, Laura Michelle Jauregui, two years her senior, who happens to be a woman.

Eighty-seven years later, a young high school student with the name Lauren Jauregui struggles to cope with the death of her parents, which causes her decision to limit verbal communication to the world. While on the other hand, a struggling youngster named Camila Cabello continues her battle with her inner demons, as she rebels against her parent’s divorce. Life couldn’t be more complicated for these two teenagers, but fate has a solution and it’s destiny that forces them to be together.

Chapter One: A Strange Flower that Blooms in Between Seasons

Jan 9th, 1949 - Miami, Florida.

It was a dark misty night and almost everyone was deep in their sleep, tucked in carefully in their beds, unaware of their surroundings. But, it doesn’t seem to apply to Karla and Laura who met up in the woods after they both sneaked out of their own households. It was always the same place where they would both meet up, the woods nearby the only lake near the Cabello Estate. It’s the only place where nobody was in their way. Karla and Laura both amorously hugged one another and kissed, as if their lips would never be able to touch one another again.

“I dearly missed you, my love.” Laura gasped as she reluctantly pulled away from their kiss, her hands were clasped tightly around Karla’s cheeks.

“I, too. I missed you so much, my love.” She smiled upon leaning her forehead into Laura’s, as her arms clung around her lover’s waist and held on like her life was depended on it.

They both stared at one another’s eyes while their breathing steadied after their heated kiss. But, time is short and they didn’t come here to waste time. Laura gently ran her hands down Karla’s waist, the younger’s long beige dress that covered her petite body didn’t even matter when Laura grabbed her by the legs, lifting her up with no effort. Karla fitted right in Laura’s strong arms. Karla clasped her arms around Laura’s neck, her lips plunged on her lover’s as she softly sucked on the soft red lump that she passionately adores.

A moan then escaped Karla’s mouth, as Laura’s hands roamed around her bottom, her hands gave her a soft squeeze before Karla found herself leaning on the old oak tree. This particular tree has lived long before the both of them was even born, Karla often painted it because of it’s remarkable golden green leaves that grow throughout the whole summer.

“Laura…” Karla quietly mumbled against her lover’s lips.

“Yes, my love?” Laura questioned, but still continued to touch Karla’s body.

“Shaun came to visit.” She blurted out.

Just like that Laura froze. She paused and looked at Karla, as she propped her head apart from hers.

“The boy your father wants you to marry.” Laura scoffed, as she let out a deep sigh.

Karla embraced her lover in her tiny arms that barely circled Laura’s shoulders. She leaned her head to her lover’s right ear and placed a soft and gentle kiss. The kiss was so innocent that it made Laura smile. Then, just before Laura can reply Karla whispered, “But it’s you I want to marry.”

Jan 9th, 2017 - Los Angeles, California

It’s a mournful day for the Jaureguis, as Michael, Clara and their two other children, Taylor and Chris, died in a plane crash on their way back home to Los Angeles. Lauren was supposed to have been on the trip to Australia with her family, but she was called to lead a charity campaign her parents were leaders of. Her parents had always trusted her with almost everything, because to them, Lauren can do anything. Their eldest daughter wasn’t one to complain, she’d always find ways to do the job right. That’s why they were very proud of her. But now her parents are gone and so is her siblings and everything doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

“Lauren, would you like to say a few words?” The priest from the funeral questioned the young brunette.

There was only silence as Lauren stood in front of her family’s coffins, her hands curled into fists while her eyes tried to bat away the tears and agony. The priest understood and proceeded with the funeral ceremony, which lasted about two and a half hours. Everyone in the funeral – friends and colleagues of her mother and father, as well as friends of her two siblings, threw their white roses on the coffins as caretakers began to roll it down six feet under the ground.

Lauren sat silently on the corner of her chair, she tightly held a single red rose, the red rose being her mother’s favourite. Her eyes tried hard not to water in front of so many people, it wasn’t Lauren’s forte to show emotions to strangers anyway.

It feels like it was just yesterday when Taylor was telling Lauren about how she’s going to become a successful fashion designer, and how she heard her mother praise Taylor for her dream. Taylor has always been the closest to Lauren, she looked up to her older sister and Lauren made sure she was a role model for her younger sibling. Lauren misses Taylor. She misses them.

She’s fighting the tears away when she feels a firm hold on her right shoulder, her head jolting upwards as she sees her grandmother standing beside her. The old woman stared at Lauren sympathetically, and before Lauren even knew it, she stood up and hugged her grandmother. The embrace was so sudden and so tight that they would’ve fallen down, but thankfully Laura held her ground and gave her precious hija a soft pat on the back. It was only just then that Lauren burst into tears, her eyes were shut tight while tears ran down her now rosy cheeks.

“There… there… my little girl.” Laura mumbled softly, words only for her granddaughter to hear.

Lauren said nothing in response, but her sobs began to fill the whole funeral and everyone there heard the cry of child who had just lost part of her life. Everyone stared at Lauren and Laura, even though Lauren was almost as tall as her grandmother, her cry was still of a child in pain, and they all understood that they’d be no use. Instead, everyone just offered the two a moment of silence.

After the funeral, when everyone was gone apart from Laura and Lauren, there was a long silence before Laura spoke to her dearest granddaughter. “You know your father hugged me just like you did when he lost Buster that one day. He cried and cried, pleaded to your abuela and then to me to find Buster before dawn.”

Lauren didn’t reply, but her facial expression softened before she looked up at Laura as she crouched down on the ground.

“Everything will be okay, Lauren. I’ll always be with you.” Laura says as she took a deep breath and stared at the tombstone of her son. “I promise.”

Lauren smiled faintly before she turned her gaze over to the red rose on her hand and carefully placed it in the middle of her parent’s graves. Lauren whimpered softly before she wiped her last tears after she stood up to leave the cemetery with Laura.

Jan 9th, 2017 - Manhattan, New York City

It was in the middle of the night when Camila sneaked out of her bedroom window and out the streets. She walked down a couple of blocks away before three boys gathered around her, they invited her with a wave before she approached them. “Got it?” whispered the guy with a black leather jacket, he wasn’t as big as the blond one to his left, but he was still taller than the guy to his right.

“Why the fuck are you whispering? No one can hear you, Austin.” Camila scoffed as she handed Austin an envelope filled with cash.

Austin chuckled grimly before he took the envelope and smiled in satisfaction. The blond guy patted Camila’s shoulder and nodded at her, but the guy on Austin’s right was absolutely dead silent.

“Hey Justin, why are you so quiet today?” Camila asked, her tone coming off strong but she was genuinely curious. Usually, Justin was a lot more talkative.

“I’m not comfortable doing this out in the open.” Justin replied quietly, his voice was almost inaudible.

“Oh please. Anyway, where the fuck is my deal?” Camila looked up to the blond guy with a brow raised.

“Your reputation proceeds you, here you go. And thank you, plus you’re welcome.” The blond guy responded with sarcasm as he handed Camila a transparent plastic bag filled with white powder.

“Screw you.” She replied with a cheeky grin, as she examined the contents of the plastic bag.

“You don’t have to be a big bitch, you know.” Austin says as he went on to count the money.

However, before he could even finish counting, a siren startled all of them. The three boys looked at Camila with horror as panic spread all across her face. Camila didn’t even dare to look behind her, all she could think about was how she could maybe outrun the cops or ways to lie about her package. But, it was all too late.

“You! Turn around.” The cop called out. He clearly meant for Camila to turn around as the other boys were already facing the officer.

“Ahh… damn.” Camila muttered under her breath before she slowly turned around. “Ah!” She winced as bright light directly made contact with her eyes.

There was a silent pause before the officer half chokingly called out. “C-Camila?”

“Oh… shit.” Camila looked up to confirm the voice and her worst fears finally came true. “Dad, look, I can explain.”

“Please do.” He stood straight and aimed the flashlight to the three boys at the back, and just as Camila was about to speak, her father sees the small plastic bag filled with white powder on her possession. “Fuck. Is that what I think it is?” He spat out before he snatched the plastic from Camila’s hand.

“Shit. Shit. Shit.” Camila tried to make a run for it, but her father held her hand and handcuffed her around the lamppost. “Da– ow! What– why are you cuffing me?”

“Stay still!” He growled at her before he turned to the boy and grabbed the envelope he was holding, he opened it and saw cash, around two hundred dollars worth of cash. The officer also saw more of the transparent plastic bags filled with white powder inside the blond boy’s jacket pocket. “You three are going to jail. Right now.” He commanded before he took out his gun and pointed at the three boys, as his partner started handcuffing them.

He turned to Camila with sheer anger in his eyes as he yelled at her, “And you! You’re coming with me.”

Camila swears she’s never seen her father that angry before and she reckons this will cost her more than just a month’s worth of no internet connection.

Perhaps, she’s taken things to the extreme, but she never meant to use the drugs for herself, it was for a friend of hers who was asking for a favour. But, she knew her father would never believe that, he’s the captain of the police precinct and she knows what her father saw: Camila buying drugs for herself, nothing else.

It took an hour and a half to get everything sorted. Camila’s father, Alejandro, had to pull a lot of strings to get his daughter out of jail with only a minor misdemeanour. Alejandro couldn’t even face his daughter, he’s utterly disappointed in Camila, not once did he thought she’d ever get herself involve in affairs such as this.

There were no words exchanged on their way back home, the ride consisted of only silence and a growing tension between father and daughter. When they arrived home, Camila went straight inside the house and sat down on the couch, sighing deeply as she prepared herself. She was waiting and waiting for her dad to follow, but it took him at least fifteen minutes to follow her back inside their house.

Camila sat down quietly and looked at the ground with a pair of ashamed eyes, any movements from her father made her flinch and even though she tried hard to conceal her fear, it was no use. Just then, the front door clicked open and a short brown haired woman came inside in a hurry.

“Alejandro, what happened?” She rushed in as soon as she saw a glimpse of Camila.

“Why don’t you ask your daughter?” Alejandro replied to the question, there was a hint of bitterness present in his tone.

“Mila, can you please tell me what the hell is going on? I rushed here as soon as your father called about an hour ago. What happened, mi hija?"Camila’s mother ignored Alejandro’s reply, instead she knelt down in front of her daughter and stroked Camila’s hair.

Camila felt both guilt and anger hit her. Guilt for what she caused and anger for the presence of both her parents. Camila clenched her fists, her hands trembling as she furrowed her eyebrows and stayed silent upon her mother’s question. Her mother, Sinuhe, shot a look on Alejandro and he finally cracked, saying: "Your daughter tried to buy drugs.” The first look of disappointment appeared on Alejandro’s face once again, but his ex-wife’s reaction stiffened and she grabbed Camila’s shoulders.

“Why would you do that?” She raised her voice at Camila, her tone is serious and clear of any sympathy. This only further infuriated Camila that she actually pushed her mother off her. Camila stood up and yelled at both of her parents, “Try living a life with an absent mother, who by the way, I haven’t seen since I was five because she doesn’t even bother visiting, since she prefers her other life with her other family, and a father who works twenty-four-seven, who also doesn’t give a flying fuck about you, then go back to me and ask that question again!” This caught Camila’s parents by surprised, both speechless against their daughter’s outburst.

“Camila…"Alejandro’s voice trailed off.

Camila ignored her father and stormed off the living room, she ran up to her bedroom and slammed the door close. There was silence between Alejandro and his ex-wife before she fell down on the couch and sobbed.

"Why does this have to happen to my daughter?” She questioned herself, still ashamed to admit of her absence as Camila’s mother.

“Sinuhe, she’s right. Camila was only a child when you left, but it still had a huge impact on her and you never, not once after that, visited her again.” Alejandro stated, his fingers stroking his temples. “But, I didn’t do much better than you either.” He admitted, as his voice slightly cracked at his last sentence.

“Mamá…” Camila cried as she hugged her mother’s waist. “Don’t leave.” She barely mumbled against her sob.

“Mila, mommy has to go. I’m so sorry.” Sinuhe unclasped Camila’s tiny arms around her waist, she held her tears and tried hard not to sound too strong. “Let go, Camila.”

Alejandro stood behind his daughter and watched his ex-wife push their daughter away from her. He crouched down and carried Camila on his arms, his facial expression was cold and uncaring. While on the other hand, the five-years-old Camila struggled to break free from her father’s strong arms, as she still tried to reach out for her mother. “Mamá!” Camila screamed and cried out. Her eyes were already swollen, blood red face calling out for her dear mother, as Sinuhe walked further and further away from her.

Camila’s screams grew louder and louder, yet there was no response from Sinuhe. She walked out of the door and walked out of Camila’s life, essentially breaking the bond between mother and daughter.

Weeks passed and Alejandro buried himself with work even more now that his wife was gone. He had different women take care of Camila when he’s busy at work, often he’d bring home some woman with him too. Camila continued to play in the background for Alejandro. He knew she existed, but he never paid attention to his daughter unless she made herself visible, which she often doesn’t bother doing anyway.

Sometimes months would go by that Alejandro and his daughter wouldn’t share a single sentence to one another. Camila found comfort in the voice of her grandmother, Karla, instead. On holidays, if she’s lucky, she even get to spend an entire day with her grandmother.

“Mamina, when are you going to take me home with you?”

“Oh, my little angel, this is your home.” Karla says with a small smile, as she continued painting the Christmas tree in front of her. “With your Papá.” She added, not noticing the hollow look on Camila’s eyes.

Camila tugged on her grandmother’s sleeves and tried catching Karla’s attention away from the canvas she’s painting on. “Mamina, I want to go home with you.”

When Karla turned around and saw a tearful Camila, she couldn’t help but notice how similar their eyes look when crying. There’s a sharp ache in her chest too. The immediate pain Camila was feeling, Karla could literally see it and feel it in those expressive eyes of hers.

“My sweet angel, Mamina’s here. Don’t cry.” Karla dropped her palette and reached out to wrap her arms around her granddaughter.

“Please, don’t cry my sweet little angel. Mamina will always be here, I promise you.”

A/N: (TRIGGER for mentions of drug dealing) Hey, fellow Camren squad, hope you enjoy this story! xD let me know what you all think. Should I continue?

Also on wattpad: seriousvanity

Karla Cabello is the only heiress of the Cabello-Estrabao family and was bound to marry someone around or above her social status. Also, as a Cuban woman of her stature in 1950s America, studying was looked down upon. However, Karla is gifted with the talent to paint, she spent all her childhood painting the beautiful lakes of Miami and made use of her time falling in love with nature. That was until one day she came across the most beautiful face she had ever seen, Laura Michelle Jauregui, two years her senior, who happens to be a woman. Eighty-seven years later, a young high school student with the name Lauren Jauregui struggles to cope with the death of her parents, which causes her decision to limit verbal communication to the world. While on the other hand, a struggling youngster named Camila Cabello continues her battle with her inner demons, as she rebels against her parent's divorce. Life couldn't be more complicated for these two teenagers, but fate has a solution and it's destiny that forces them to be together.

#UPDATE #series #AU #slash #trigger warning #camren #angst drama #family #submission #Metanoia

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tumblngdice · 6 years

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Manchester City’s plan for global domination

Football has already been transformed by big money – but the businessmen behind Man City are trying to build a global corporation that will change the game for ever.

By Giles Tremlett, Fri 15 Dec 2017 06.00 GMT

On 19 December 2009, Pep Guardiola stood and wept in the middle of Zayed Sports City Stadium in Abu Dhabi. The 38-year-old Barcelona manager clasped a hand across his face as his body gave way to huge, shoulder-heaving sobs. Zlatan Ibrahimović, the club’s towering Swedish striker, wrapped a tattooed arm around Guardiola’s neck and then gave him a vigorous push in order to jolt him out of it. But Guardiola could not stop. It was a strange place for the world’s most celebrated football coach to break down: Barcelona had just won a game that few people watched on television to secure one of football’s most obscure titles, the Fifa Club World Cup. But the victory secured an unbreakable record: Barcelona had won all six titles available to any club in a single year.

That is why Pep was sobbing.

Back at home in Barcelona, it was a bittersweet moment for Ferran Soriano. A hairdresser’s son from the city’s working-class district of Poblenou, Soriano had become one of FC Barcelona’s top executives – and had helped build what could now claim to be the greatest football team the world had ever seen.

“I was happy, but it was also painful not to be there when the team reached its pinnacle,” he told me. Instead, he picked up the phone and called Guardiola.

Soriano had overseen Barcelona’s finances for five years until 2008, and the club’s record owed much to the ideas he had developed after running a US-style political campaign to bring a group of swashbuckling, sharp-suited young men to power at elections for a new board of directors in 2003. He had even written a book, La Pelota no entra por azar (“The ball doesn’t go in by chance”), in which he argued that Barcelona’s success – and, by inference, that record – was the result of good, creative business management. Vicious political infighting had driven him to resign from the club the previous year. But even before that, he had seen one of his more ambitious ideas – to set up franchise clubs in other countries – thwarted at Barcelona. This was a step too far for a club owned by 143,000 voting fans, firmly rooted in their city and Catalonia.

But Soriano’s big idea has now been brought to life by two men who were watching very closely on the night Guardiola wept in Abu Dhabi: one is a member of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and the other is Khaldoon al-Mubarak, a youthful executive and adviser to the royal family. With their backing, Soriano is now upending football’s established order by building its first true multinational corporation – a Coca-Cola of soccer.

That corporation is City Football Group (CFG). It already owns, or co-owns, six clubs on four continents, and the contracts of 240 male professional players and two dozen women. Hundreds more carefully picked teenagers and younger children who aspire to greatness play in CFG’s lower teams. The longterm ambition is huge. The company will trawl the world for players – shaping and polishing them in state-of-the-art academies and training facilities across several continents, selling them on or sending the best to the clubs it will own (and improve) in a dozen or so countries. Supplied and shielded by the vessels around it, the flagship of this new football flotilla – Manchester City FC – will continue its already startling rise to become the world’s greatest club.

That is the Soriano idea – or at least, a simplified version of a complex plan.

The corporation is only four years old, but it is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful forces in the world’s favourite sport – watched with awe, envy and fear by those who wonder if it could become football’s own Google or Facebook.

In a game where top players cost £200m, televised matches attract audiences of hundreds of millions and club owners are among the wealthiest potentates on the planet, no expense is spared in seeking any competitive edge. Once upon a time, money alone was enough to make the difference (if it was spent wisely), but that is no longer the case, in part because there is so much of it sloshing around the game.

When Manchester City won the Premier League in 2012, Sheikh Mansour was widely accused of “buying the title for £1bn” – the amount of money he had poured into City since purchasing the club four years earlier. It was City’s first league title in 44 years, and grown men cried when Sergio Agüero’s goal in the penultimate minute of the season’s final game secured the title. Mansour watched it on television: he had only ever been to one match at City’s Etihad stadium, and did not enjoy the fuss his visit caused. In the hours that followed, his phone hummed, filling up with 2,500 messages.

But this was also the end of an era. European football’s regulator, Uefa, had brought in new rules designed to stop clubs spending much more than they earned. Critics dismissed Mansour as a spoiled hobbyist, and even today some wonder to what extent his “private” ownership might become an instrument of Abu Dhabi’s soft power. But his few public statements made it clear that he had bought City – and ploughed money into it – as a genuine, long-term investment because “in cold business terms, Premiership football is one of the best entertainment products in the world”.

The ambition, then, was double – he intended to win at both football and business. But with the Uefa spending brake, that was about to become much tougher. He needed something new. Could City win without losing money?

In fact, when Soriano’s gang of smart young businessmen took over Barcelona in 2003, it was a loss-making club. As finance chief, Soriano helped deliver a spiralling “virtuous circle” of high investment, trophies and then even higher revenues. Forceful and analytical, he had built and sold a global consultancy business by the age of 33; at Barcelona, where he was nicknamed both “the Panzer” and “the Computer”, he made a strong-willed but sensible counterpoint to the club’s mercurial president, Joan Laporta. But Soriano also saw Barcelona as something far bigger than a city club, while realising that the global football business itself was poised to enter a new era.

In 2006, at a talk Soriano delivered at Birkbeck College in London, he presented 28 slides that set out his early vision. Thanks to the phenomenal growth in their worldwide fan bases, he noted, big clubs were being transformed from promoters and organisers “of local events, like a circus” into “global entertainment companies like Walt Disney”. If big clubs seized the opportunity to “capture the growth and become global franchises”, they would soon stand apart from their rivals, creating a new, world-conquering elite.

“He thought, and thinks, in a different way to most other people in football,” says Simon Chadwick, now a professor at Salford University, who had invited Soriano to give the talk at Birkbeck. At the time, Soriano himself was disappointed to find English football so in thrall to a model in which managers such as Arsène Wenger and Alex Ferguson appeared to run their own clubs, while “the level of conceptualisation of the business model was zero”. Even the language was telling. “They called the coach ‘manager’, as if he managed everything,” Soriano recalled.

With his abrupt departure from Barcelona in 2008, Soriano’s dream of turning that club into a global franchise, with a first satellite team in the US, was definitively dashed. Instead, Soriano threw himself into running an airline, Spanair. But five years after his presentation in London, as Mansour sought a fresh competitive edge, both on and off the field, Soriano found himself, in October 2011, sitting down for a 7am meeting in a Mayfair hotel with the globetrotting New York lawyer Marty Edelman – who was tempting him back into football.

Edelman had been drafted on to City’s board by Mansour, working alongside his appointed chairman, the US-educated Khaldoon al-Mubarak, from the very beginning. Edelman, a real estate expert, was already a trusted adviser in Abu Dhabi, and the choice of an American was an early sign of the club’s new cosmopolitanism. Soriano initially brushed off City’s advances. He was used to associating Manchester with its glittering rival United, and he still distrusted what he called “the stereotype of the rich owner”. (In his book, he had even described City as a club that provoked “savage inflation” through “irrational investment”.) But the two sides were slowly discovering shared values. Chief among them was ambition – and with that came a willingness to challenge the status quo.

Even then, it was an off-and-on affair. Meetings followed in Paris and Abu Dhabi, before, in April 2012, Soriano was sneaked through Manchester airport (where the club says it “can get people in without anyone knowing they have arrived”) and taken to a room at the Lowry Hotel booked in someone else’s name. A former rugby second-row forward, Soriano is, at 6ft 3in, difficult to hide. By now it was a mutual seduction, with City wanting to persuade him that, with Mansour’s long-term commitment, the club could be as great as Barcelona.

Soriano, in turn, pitched a mould-breaking plan that required deep pockets, imagination and a steady nerve. Both sides agreed that City should aspire to being the world’s top club – a position long held by either Real Madrid, Barcelona or Manchester United. “And I mean number one – not number two or three,” Soriano told me.

The idea of becoming the world’s biggest club was not just vanity or business machismo. Soriano had spotted long before that a tiny group of elite clubs would capture the new global market, but he also wanted to build something “far bigger”. Football clubs, he pointed out, were massive brands but absurdly small businesses: a team with a global following of 500 million fans might have an income of only €500m. “That’s one euro per fan,” he says, “which is utterly ridiculous.” In business terms, this was “a combination of a lot of love and, literally, no love” – because fans in, say, Indonesia spent nothing on their club.

“So what can we do? The answer was pretty simple, maybe too simple, but very bold. You have to be global but local. You have to go to Indonesia and open a shop.”

He outlined his idea for a corporation that would have both a global brand – in Manchester City – and lots of local brands, developing talent through a network of clubs that would also provide a pipeline of players for City. He knew this might sound far-fetched. “If I had pitched this idea to Real Madrid, the answer would be ‘you’re crazy’ – and that is actually what had happened in Barcelona,” he told me.

But City was already going through a revolution, and was ready for more. For Edelman, the plan put flesh on the skeleton built with Mansour’s millions. “Any great idea needs to have a host, right? And we were a great host,” Edelman told me at his Park Avenue offices. “You couldn’t take Ferran’s idea and just put it on a blank sheet.” Soriano’s idea (which he now terms his “artistic challenge”) was a way of taking Mansour’s original vision – summed up in his early pledge to build “a structure for the future, not just a team of all-stars” – and putting it “on steroids”, in Edelman’s words.

#feature #manchester city #ferran soriano #pep guardiola

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fen-at-work · 7 years

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Work Sample #3 Sci-Fi/Tragedy/Pseudo-Noir (Alternative)

I sit on my haunches, cloaked in the shadows of the city. The back alley is littered with wads of paper soaked in piss and filth, not to mention all sorts of other trash.

And you better believe I’m not just talking about wet, crumpled newspaper. Curling tendrils of smoky clouds stifle the light of the moon to a dull glow, casting the city into pitch black.

A man walks into a single shaft of light provided by a flickering street lamp, pausing to pull a stack of stained bills from the pocket of his sweats. My heartbeat picks up, pounding against my breastbone. Eyes narrowing below black hat covering my scalp, I soundlessly inch behind my prey.

His eyes are bloodshot, his clothes ratty, and his face young. Yet it’s already too late for him to turn his life around. He’s on my turf, made it onto my radar. He may not live long enough to regret it, depending on how cooperative he is with me.

A deep breath.

Exhale.

The flat of my palm shoots out to make contact with his temple as I slither deftly to his side.

The hit is solid and brutal. He goes down quickly after, hands moving to protect his head from further assault. His youth shows in his inexperience; he makes no attempt to fight back and the cash he’s obtained from the day’s work is left forgotten in the puddles filling the crevices between the cobblestones in the alley.

Falling into a crouch next to his recovering form, I speak softly, “You sold to a few guys today, eh, buddy? Based on the amount of cash you just dropped.” He groans and I wait, unmoving as my breath puffs warm and damp against the mask covering the lower half of my face.

“What’cha peddling tonight, friend?” I hum lowly.

Another groan escapes his mouth and nearly I roll my eyes. I barely touched him. Whatever pain he’s feeling now is nothing compared to what he’s going to be feeling. I reach into my waistband a pull out a penknife, flicking it open with a casual flip of the wrist.

The man whimpers and curls tighter into a ball, shaking.

He’s still exposed. That won’t help him.

Either way, I’m starting to think my reputation among the rabble might be preceding me.

“Please—P-please don’t hurt me…” He mumbles, covering his face.

“Tell me what you were selling tonight, and maybe I won’t.” I’m just toying with him. I already know what he’s been selling. And he knows I know.

Otherwise he wouldn’t be blubbering so pathetically.

His breathing picks up and he begins to hiccup, struggling to get the words out, “I-I—”

“Quit being such a bitch and spit it out,” I snarl, nicking his shoulder with my blade as a warning.

“Alternatives,” he sobs, flinching away, “I was selling alternatives. Please don’t hurt me…Please.”

Alternatives—the memory cards for SEATs. It’s not the worst offense I’ve stumbled upon this week. In the grand scheme of things, however, that doesn’t matter. All the dealers start small, but they spread and become absolutely uncontrollable.

Just like mold.

I almost feel bad for him.

“Give me the ones you didn’t sell.”

“W-what?”

Glowering, I hover. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

His eyes go wide; frantic, he turns his pockets inside out and I stare as the squares of plastic clatter onto the stone.

I promptly crush them under my boot, grinding them into pieces.

Somehow, I’m no longer paying attention to the man on the ground, if he can even be called a man with the way he’s caterwauling. I’m even considering letting him go.

A sharp pain slashes across my leg and I inhale sharply through my teeth. My head jerks to the side to watch as the man attempts to scramble away, stumbling along with a little pocketknife in hand.

Idiot. There’s only one way in or out of this alleyway.

I made sure of that.

“You really shouldn’t have done that, friend,” Shaking off the pain, I lunge towards him, knife gripped tightly in my hand.

No one’s awake to hear him scream as I tear through his flesh with the vigor of an animal.

He doesn’t stand a chance.

_________________________________________________

Once I got home, I showered until the water ran clear, no red swirling stark against the porcelain tile.

Padding into the kitchen on bare feet, my toes curl against the cool feel of marble, robe swishing loosely around my thighs. I’m lucky it didn’t take long to wash the blood from my hair; I keep it short and cropped close to my head for exactly this reason. I could only imagine what my fiancé would say if he found blood caked in it. It’s a risk I can’t take and the questions that would inevitably follow wouldn’t be ones I could answer.

More importantly, no one can use long hair against me in a fight anymore.

And believe me, everyone goes for the hair; it’s a shitty move, but highly effective.

I pull the stainless steel fridge open, marveling at the pretty arrangement of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats as I pull out a head of lettuce to prepare salad. Moving to the sink, I quickly turn on the faucet and begin pulling apart the leaves and placing them into a bowl.

The door creaks open slowly and the squeak of new shoes follows. I don’t see him yet, but I know it’s Quinn. He tries to approach me quietly—perhaps to surprise me—but I’m too tightly wound from my evening out in the city.

A strong arm snakes around my waist from behind, hand laying flat against my abdomen. A normal person would be surprised. I try to emulate that reaction. A gasp pulls from my lips and I place my hand against my chest, as if trying to calm a rapid heart rate. “Oh my God, Quinn!” I exclaimed as I turned my head, eyes wide. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“I’m sorry, Mae,” Quinn pressed a kiss to my cheek, “I didn’t mean to. How’d you know I was going to be home so late? It’s 12:00 A.M.”

I smirk, “Because I know everything, Quinn. Particularly, you. And that you had a case to work on with the police department downtown, Mister District Attorney.” That much is true. Quinn always works late when he has trial the next day. He has trial tomorrow.

That, and I have access to his schedule through the iCloud on our home computer.

“Such a smart one,” he teases gently.

“You have good taste,” I shrug in response.

Quentin’s touch lingers on my torso as he moves to put the head of lettuce away and grab a little Tupperware container of pre-cut vegetables and vinaigrette dressing, “Only the best for me. Speaking of which, where’d you hide the scotch?”

“You have trial in the morning,” I remind gently.

Quinn makes a face at me before turning to get a cup of water.

It isn’t long before we’re both sitting down to a late night dinner at our little kitchen table, joking around and telling each other about our respective days. I tip my head back and laugh about his snide commentary on one of the greener detectives, crossing a leg over the other.

“Mae!”

The tone of alarm in his voice jolts me into awareness, “What? What is it?” My hand moves down to my hip out of habit.

“Your leg. What the hell?” Quinn leans forward to get a better look at the little knick the man in the alley had made earlier.

“Oh.” I hadn’t even checked to see if the wound had stopped bleeding. I need to be more careful; Quinn doesn’t know about my “nighttime activities” and I have no intention of making him aware.

Moving quickly, I pull my robe over the cut and paste on a smile, “Don’t worry. I just cut myself shaving. You know how they always look way worse than they actually are; they just bleed a lot. The cut is actually pretty small.”

My fiancé raises his eyes upward and shakes his head, “You’ve spent twenty years shaving and you still can’t manage to come out unscathed. How am I marrying such a klutz?”

“You picked me, fair and square.”

He softens, “Yes, I did.”

I take a bite of salad, chew, and swallow. “Don’t you dare get all sappy on me, Cassidy.”

“Yes ma’am,” Quinn drawls with grin, leaning back in his chair. “So you remember we have the department gala this weekend, right?”

My eyes roll, “Yes, you’ve only reminded me about it every five seconds.”

“It’s for a good cause, Mae,” He reaches out toward me and grasps my hand, running his thumb over the inside of my small wrist. “It’s going to raise awareness of SEAT trafficking.”

I cast my gaze to the side. Despite SEATs being outlawed after a lot of virtual reality-related deaths cropped up, the business of selling SEATs is still rampant on the black market. The department had been on the verge of cracking down hard on the main trafficking ring, but politics had gotten in the way.

“Right. I know.”

_________________________________________________

Our police department may not be the wealthiest, but even I can’t deny it pulls out all the stops for the annual awareness galas. The cause is different every year—we’ve done celiac awareness campaigns, domestic violence, sexual assault, drugs… This is the first year we’ve ever done SEAT trafficking and I know it’s a move to appease. In any case, the campaign itself doesn’t actually matter. These galas raise money for the police department so that they can “put a stop to” whatever their issue of choice for the year is.

This year, their cause happens to be the same as my own; no one is stupid enough to believe that’s a coincidence.

The turn out is good though. There are politicians of all kinds here: senators, representatives, a governor, a few wealthy benefactors… All more than willing to open up their pocketbooks if it means bribing the police department to look the other way from their shady dealings with the man holding the center of the room: Dominick Carmine, the local entrepreneur who’d made his money in “meat-packing.”

Everyone knows that’s a farce, though. Dominick Carmine is the city’s mob leader and he holds the monopoly on SEAT trafficking. Everyone in this room probably owes him something. Unfortunately, that includes the chief of police and if that doesn’t cement a mobster’s power, I don’t know what does.

“You look beautiful, lieutenant. Valentino suits you,” the chief approaches me, eyes stony behind his painted smile as he reaches out to shake my hand.

His grip is bruising.

I push back, matching his grip, “Thank you, chief. I’m blushing. But we both know there’s no need for formalities since you placed me on an indefinite leave of absence.” My smile is full of cyanide, “It’s just Mae tonight.”

“And what is ‘just Mae’ doing here?”

A hand slips around my waist. “Keeping her devilishly handsome fiancé company,” His timing ever-impeccable, Quinn flashes a winning smile, but I know him well enough to see the condescension being directed at Chief Boydston. “And now, I will be stealing her away for a dance.”

His grip tightens as he pulls me away, dipping his head to murmur in my ear, “Why can’t you ever just stay out of trouble?”

“You know you love it.”

In lieu of responding, Quinn opts to sweep me out onto the dance floor for a waltz.

The opulence of the room is startling and almost too difficult to take in all at once. Warm and low, the lighting is complimented by glittering crystal chandeliers and golden filigree on every surface of the room. Exquisite marble pillars lead up to the high ceiling at every turn, red velvet curtains hanging luxuriously between them. The catering staff attempts to weave their way through the crowd, offering hors d’oeuvres and glasses of champagne and wine. There is a gloriously rich, spiced scent floating around the room. It’s dizzyingly good. Or maybe I’ve just taken one too many turns with Quinn.

I could hardly believe when he came home one day, toting a large Valentino box. The purchase was hardly financially burdensome between the two of us, but it had still seemed like a waste of money for something I would only wear once. Despite my voicing this complaint, Quinn had persisted. As I watch the emerald green fabric flow like water along the polished mahogany flooring, I admit to myself that I’m glad that he had. I feel like a queen with his thumb rubbing slow circles into my silk-clad hip as he leads me around the floor. My head rests on his broad shoulder, feeling the subtle scratch of his tuxedo jacket against my cheek. His sharp aftershave wafts just under my nose and my eyes begin to fall closed.

“Well!” A voice booms from next to us, breaking the spell. “If it isn’t District Attorney Cassidy and little Mia!”

Inhaling deeply to steel myself and separating from Quinn, I paste on a demure smile and hold out my hand, “It’s Mae, actually, Mr. Carmine. How are you this evening?”

Dominick Carmine shakes my hand with such vigor that he almost seems sincere, “Oh, I do apologize Mae. There’s just so many names—so many other important people. I just can’t remember everyone. But I’m wonderful, thank you for asking”

I grit my teeth behind a simper, “Oh, none of us would expect you to Mr. Carmine.”

A warning squeeze from my fiancé.

“And how goes the meat-packing business?” I question, staring Carmine in the face with an intensity bellied by our cheery atmosphere.

“’Don’t ask me about my business, Kay,’” The mobster waves a playful finger at me, much to the enjoyment of the crowd, which erupts into boisterous laughter.

I recognize the reference.

And the threat.

Quinn laughs along, but I can feel the tenseness of his body against my own, “It’s been a wonderful evening, but it’s time for us to turn in, I think. Mae, let’s go get our coats.”

Without fighting, I allow Quinn to steer me away, but I turn to glance behind at Carmine.

He wiggles his fingers at us, a mocking smile curving his mouth.

_________________________________________________

“Mae, what the fuck?” Quinn fumes, stalking through the door of our apartment.

Coolly, I follow him inside, taking my time as I hang my coat in the closet and remove my shoes, arranging them neatly on the shelf. The door closes with a click behind us.

“Why the flying fuck would you provoke Dominick Carmine like that?” He demands.

Whirling around, I approach him with narrowed eyes, “Are you seriously asking me that question? After what he did to my family?” It’s all I can do to choke back my tears, to keep the lump in my throat at bay with the anger.

“That was careless, Mae. Even more so since you know what he’s capable of.” Quinn attempts to steady me, reaching out to place his hands on my shoulders, a worried look in his eyes.

I shrug him off and flinch away. “No. I knew exactly what I was doing. He couldn’t touch me, Quinn.”

“Maybe not right then—I don’t want to see you get hurt, Mae. I don’t want to lose you to some careless remark you made in the heat of the moment, under the influence of champagne, to Dominick Carmine.”

I can’t take it anymore. The mounting pressure behind my eyes breaks through the dam and I snap, feeling the rush of anger I had been pushing aside all night. “He took everything from me!” The words burn as they escape my throat in a howl of pain and grief and I collapse onto the marble tile, feeling my insides fracture as my knees hit the ground and I slump. Another broken, enraged screech rips past my mouth, tears rolling down my face as I wrap my arms around my body.

I feel Quinn fall to the ground next to me and gather me into his lap, rocking me back and forth and murmuring comfort into my hair.

All I can do is scream and shudder in agonized fury, over and over.

“He killed them.”

_________________________________________________

After my parents died when I was young, I was sent to live with my maternal grandparents. I never knew my paternal grandparents. There was a time back then when I had wanted them to meet me, just once. I grew out of that desire.

When I was twelve, I saw my paternal grandmother’s obituary in the paper. Two years later, I saw my grandfather’s. I like to think he died of a broken heart, but that would imply he’d had one.

Only a few years back, my maternal grandmother also passed. Grandad, however, is still alive and kicking, always too stubborn to back down. I try to visit him as often as I can. Even though he claims that he’s fine alone, I know he misses Nana.

Trekking up the porch steps and wiping my feet on the mat, I knock on the door to his aging brownstone. It takes a minute, but I hear limping footsteps and a smoker’s cough, then the click of a lock turning. The door opens.

“Mae?” A grandfather he may be, but my Grandad isn’t so old that he should have been retired from the force. His face is relatively young, with none of the aging spots. He has a smoker’s mouth and an inordinate amount of laugh lines. Perhaps for criminals, his large stature had been intimidating, but I had always found him to be rather comforting.

“Hey chief. Can I come in?”

Grandad snorts, but saddles out of the doorway with the help of his cane, “I’m not anybody’s chief anymore, doll. That asshat, Boydston, has the office.”

Crossing the threshold, I shut the door behind me and follow his slow-moving limp to the living room. Along the wall, pictures of my mother hang, covering peeling floral wallpaper. I have her eyes, Grandad always reminds me. I have her everything, I think as I pass an antique mirror: her tall, slim build, her angular face, and her little, pixie-ish nose. I glance away from the startling green that stares back at me in the mirror.

As Grandad finally makes it to the living room, he sinks into the old leather couch with a deep, long-suffering sigh. “So. What’s on your mind?”

“Well,” I fidget, perching on the edge of an old stuffed armchair in front of him.

“A hole with water,” Grandad grumbles.

“I’m marrying Quentin in six months.”

“Yes, I recall. He came, asked my permission, and I imagine I’ll be buying you a wedding dress soon.”

I stare into my lap.

“I’m… not buying you a wedding dress, am I?” Another sigh.

“As long as Carmine is out there, I will never be happy,” I admit, looking up at him with no small amount of shame. “I thought I could let go. For Quinn, for Mom—for me. But I just can’t.”

“You still going out at night? Beating up on those dealer boys?” His disapproval is tangible.

I cover my face with my hands and exhale long. “I killed one the other night,” I confess into my palms.

I hear Grandad breathe deep. “Jesus, Mae.”

I don’t tell him how many others I’ve killed before that.

“I just want to leave it all. I want to go away with Quinn and forget all of this—let Carmine rot in this rat hole.” My hands drop into my lap. “But I can’t forget.”

“The idea isn’t to forget, Mae,” Grandad intones, “It’s to make peace. Move on. Let dead things lie.”

“How can I find peace knowing that Carmine will never face punishment for what he’s done?” I demand, frustration evident in my nails digging crescents into my leg.

“I don’t know. But trust me when I say I do know that if you pursue Carmine, you can be certain that peace won’t follow, Mae. And it’s naïve to hope it will. But what you have with Quinn…? You could learn, in time, to be happy. Yes, some days, you will feel your loss more than others. But you will also feel loved, as long as you’re with Quinn. He’s a good man, Mae.”

Grandad is right. That’s nothing new.

Am I really prepared to put myself, my own desires, before Quinn? I love Quinn and he gives me everything in return. Can I be so selfish?

But isn’t it also selfish of me to go off and live my happily ever after with Quinn and leave the city under Carmine’s control? So that he can hurt more people, tear apart more families…?

I don’t know the answers right now.

_________________________________________________

I return to the streets, knowing that Quinn will be home late again—not too late though, so I’ll need to make my little errand quick. The night fell quickly, and the sky is cloudy again, not a star to be seen. A light mist touches the upper half of my face left unprotected by a mask as I dart through the twisting alleyways of the city, sometimes hopping a fence or two for a detour. As I make it to 34th and Way, I realize I’m in luck. Leaning against the wall with his arms folded over his broad chest is just the man I’m looking for.

“Artemi Yanayev?” I question, approaching him with measured steps.

“Who is asking?” He pushes off of the wall, taking in my figure, likely assessing my threat level. He would be smart not to judge me based on my appearance. Sprite-like and sinewy, I know I don’t amount to much at first glance.

And I like it that way.

Artemi apparently finds nothing to be afraid of, as he steps closer, “And what is such a little bug doing out so late at night?”

A huff of laughter escapes my mouth, warming my mask, “The smaller the scorpion, the more concentrated its poison.”

He freezes, eyes blown wide. “That’s…”

“Yeah. I know. I look a lot smaller in person.”

With my ever-increasing infamy among the dealers, they’d come up with a name for me. It isn’t exactly the cutest, most flattering thing I’ve ever heard, but I’ve been called worse things.

“You are—“ the man pauses and exhales slowly, looking as if he just can’t believe his terrible luck.

Neither can I, honestly. Being named after a scorpion? Ouch.

“Yeah. Let’s not call me that. We’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to talk about you.”

Artemi waves his hands pleadingly in front of his face, his babbling taking on the slightest Russian accent. “I do not deal. I do not even want to be working for Carmine. He is a villain.”

“He is,” I agree, “And he’s wronged you, hasn’t he?”

“Carmine continues to wrong me this second,” Artemi spits, raking a hand through his dark, disheveled hair.

“Tell me.”

“My brother,” He begins, “Carmine facilitated his addition to the SEATs. Everyone knows Carmine is the only one with a warehouse now. My brother got into that virtual reality shit. He was an addict. Spent all of his time in that God damned coffin. Then Carmine starts peddling ecstasy. He says it will heighten the effects of the SEAT. Of course, my brother tries it.

“It heightened the effects, all right. He was so over stimulated that he went into cardiac arrest. No one knew until it was too late. So now my brother is dead and I am stuck paying off his debt to Carmine.”

“Then it seems that we’re friends,” I place a hand on my hip.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Artemi, we have a common enemy. And I don’t know about you, but I want to see him burn. Very literally. Which is handy, because, uh, word on the street is that you can accommodate me there.” Allegedly, Artemi Yanayev is Carmine’s top demolitions expert. Artemi’s dislike for Carmine isn’t much of a secret either. I stick out a hand for him to shake, “Whaddaya’ say, Art?”

The Russian squints at me, “Are you aware of how dangerous that is? I barely know you. You are asking me to put my neck on the chopping block?” A snort. “You have balls, I will say that much.”

My hand drops to my hip, chin lifting to glare up at the man. “If you don’t help me, Carmine will get away with everything. Nothing will change. And you keep running around in circles for a thug.”

“I do this and I am dead.”

“Is that really so different from now?” I question.

Artemi is silent.

“Your neck is on the chopping block everyday. You deal with explosives. You risk your life. For the man who killed your brother. At least with me you get revenge. And if you die… At least it won’t be for Carmine.”

“… What exactly do you have in mind?”

_________________________________________________

I return to my apartment at around 10 p.m.

Sliding the key into the lock, I give it a small jiggle and a twist, then hike my oversized tote further onto my shoulder and open the door.

“Hello, my dear.”

I jump, holding a hand to my chest, and turn to face Quinn, “Seriously?”

There he is, clad in pajamas and munching on celery, leaning against the granite countertop, “I thought we were getting dinner at 9:00?”

“I stopped at Grandad’s,” I explain. He won’t question that. “Let me change into pajamas too. Then we can order pizza or something.” I run to our bedroom, eager to stash away the tote holding my mask and other things from earlier in the night.

Not an hour later, Quinn and I are picking up the vestiges of peperoni from our pizza out of the empty box and popping them into our mouths, our legs tossed over each other’s as we lounge on the couch.

“Six months,” Quinn sighs happily.

“Hm?”

“Six months and this will be the rest of our lives.”

A soft smile curves my mouth as Quinn reaches to pull me into his chest. I situate myself, laying my head in the crook of his neck.

“Remember when we first started dating?”

I snort, “You mean when you were district attorney for Organized Crime and I was still a rookie and we had to sneak around? Yeah, I remember.”

“We used to pull late nights all the time to work cases, eat sloppy pizza…” His fingers trace my lower back.

“Nothing’s changed then, huh?”

“Not yet. But in six months your last name will be Cassidy instead of Gibson.”

“I like the sound of that,” I sigh. It’s true, I consider as I listen to the slow beat of Quinn’s heart. I want nothing more than to marry this man and forget everything from my past. But how can I do that in good conscience?

We lay there for a long time, limbs fitted against each other’s, before we clean up and go to bed.

As I pull back the covers on my side, Quinn looks up at me.

“I can’t wait to marry you,” He says.

“Me too,” I assure, pressing a kiss to his mouth before crawling into bed.

“I love you.”

“Love you too.”

As I lay there in the dark, swathed in sheets and comforter, warmth emanating from the other side of the bed, I feel the urge to see my plan through. I feel uncontrollable, violent, and the warmth I had been feeling turns into licking flames as I clench my hand into my pillow. I feel the intensity of the burn and know the spark has caught me.

I take my last looks at Quinn. He’s an older man, seven years my senior, but his sharp wit and strong sense of justice caught my eye. My mouth tilts as my gaze lands on his increasing waistline; he needs to ease up on the scotch, but I love him, faults and all.

I wait until approximately 1:00 a.m. to slip out.

_________________________________________________

Carmine’s warehouses are easy to find. The man refuses to be subtle. He uses one of his older meatpacking plants as a holding location for all of his SEATs; somehow the department could never get a warrant.

Crickets chirp in a low murmur as I prowl around the side of the building, looking for a sizable entry point. The moon is out for once, reflecting upon the glass of the windows in the smallest sliver of light. The window is my way in.

I pull it open and slither my lean body through with ease.

Thanks to Artemi, who has managed to shut off the alarms, I remain undetected. It’s not likely that will last. Carmine has security swarming this place.

And yet, Artemi had managed to get blueprints for the whole building, and map out where to strategically place bombs to make the whole thing come down. He’d placed them earlier in the evening and delivered the detonator to me at an alternative location. If he’s smart, he’s getting out of town right now. Perhaps crossing the state lines.

I wander, feeling the weight of the detonator in my hand, waiting for Carmine’s security to happen upon me.

“Hey! What are you doing in here? This is private property.”

It’s like they come at my beck and call.

They approach me with quick, aggressive steps, one reaches out to grab me and I side step, holding up the detonator.

“Ah-ah. Don’t touch,” I wave the detonator at them a bit, “Bring me to Carmine. Try to take this and we all go up. How many of you have families?”

Three hands go up.

“Get out.”

Shuffling footsteps follow; I turn my head to watch them leave.

“All right,” My attention returns to the others, “Let’s go.”

The security team walks with me through the winding, windowless halls. The last time I felt this type of dread going anywhere was when I went home for the first time after the deaths of my parents. There was still yellow tape around the apartment door, I remember. My Grandad held my chubby little hand as we entered and although the SEAT my father had been found in was gone, there was still the lingering stench of his decaying body. A red so deep it neared brown still splattered the walls in the kitchen. A marble rolling pin lay on the ground in a puddle of congealed blood and what I now know to be brain matter.

I had thrown up.

The security team stops at a set of large double doors.

“This his office?”

A few nods.

“If it isn’t, I will blow this whole place before you have time to get out. Is that clear?”

More nods, vigorous this time.

“Go.”

They scurry off.

Taking a deep breath, I run the pad of my thumb over the ridges of the detonator in my hand. When I finally gain the courage, I push open the doors.

Carmine sits at his desk, at ease in his wingback chair, only deigning to glance up at me as I enter, my hand on the detonator stuffed in my pocket. “Little Mae Gibson,” He chuckles a bit, “What can I do for you?”

I don’t say anything, but continue to stare at him.

“You know, I always wondered why you were so dead set on going after me when you were on the force. It didn’t take me too long to figure out, Madeline. Or did your mom call you Maddie?”

My fist clenches, “I fail to see how that’s any of your business.”

“I made it my business when you first started sniffing around my factory like the rat you are,” Carmine stares down his nose at me, arrogance evident.

“Well, good for you. You’ve seen my files. Not exactly a feat since you have Chief Boydston eating out of your hand like a little lap dog,” I snort, “So you’re aware of your transgressions. You killed my parents.”

Carmine shakes his head as if he feels sorry for me, “No. I didn’t. Your father killed your mother. And then he died from his unhealthy addiction to virtual reality.”

“Which would have never happened if it weren’t for you,” I hiss.

“Don’t be naïve, Maddie,” Carmine condescends, rising from his seated position, “Your father already had an addictive personality; he was a deadbeat. And your mother was a nagging whore.”

“How dare you?” I snarl, “My father was put on your fucking case, when you sold all those organs. You told him about the SEATs and then his whole personality changed, he started staying out late, he lost his job. He would have never touched my mother if your Goddamn SEATs hadn’t driven him insane. Don’t fucking talk down to me. And even if my mother was a whore, you had no right to take their lives. To take them from me. You don’t get to decide who lives and who dies. You aren’t a God. You’re just a pathetic man who refuses to take responsibility for his own wrongdoings.”

Carmine looks bored, “That was a very inspiring speech, Maddie. Pardon me while I go dismantle my entire business because I’ve been so touched by your story.”

I smirk, and pull the detonator from my pocket, “No need, Dom. I’m more than happy to do it for you.”

His eyes widen, “Wait—“

Without giving myself more time to think, I press the button that will end it all and squeeze my eyes shut.

Nothing.

Nothing, but silence, I mean. My eyes are shut so tight that I’m seeing white flurries floating across the black of my eyelids. Slowly peeling my eyes open, my gut begins to sink, mouth trembling.

Carmine stares me down, a triumphant sneer curling the seam of his lips. “Did you truly think you could get my people to turn on me? Do you think my power over this city is so feeble?”

As he rises from his chair, I step back, feeling intimidated for the first time since I’d entered the room. Carmine is on the prowl, a lion with power rippling under his pelt and a dangerous, jagged set of fangs bared right at me.

I feel small.

“Maddie, Maddie. This is my city. I see everything, hear everything. I knew every move you made. Artemi would never betray me; I own him. I gave him blueprints to show you. As if access to my facility would be so easy to gain; as if my security would be so pathetic. You already know Boydsten’s been mine for ages… But there is one… You had no idea.”

My hands clench. “Who?”

“Your little lover—Quinn, I believe it is.”

Something inside me shatters.

“Oh, not knowingly, of course. Well, a little bit,” he mock-placates. “Quinn’s been coming to my warehouse for months. Really partial to the SEATs; excellent customer. The late nights make a little more sense, don’t they? The inability to kick his dependence on scotch? His unusual, shall we say… respect for me? Perhaps healthy fear would be more accurate.”

My mouth opens, closes.

“Go home, Maddie. Go be with your fiancé.” Unconcerned, Carmine turns his back to me, ambling back behind his desk and taking his seat once more. “Maybe it will make up for not being able to save your parents.

_________________________________________________

Exhausted, I open the door to my apartment and drag myself inside, closing and locking the door behind me. Blank is the only thing I feel; no actual emotions, just a void.

The rustling of a newspaper draws my attention to the couch. There’s Quinn, setting down the paper, expression relieved. “There you are—you weren’t in bed this morning when I woke up. Thought you got cold feet,” he jokes.

I say nothing, shuffling my shoes off with my feet before padding over to him and settling myself across his hips, knees at either side of him.

“Mae?”

Hands at his shoulders, I pin him back against the couch, then begin running my hands over his chest, down to his waist.

His gaze becomes worried, but nevertheless, he jokes, “Well, I don’t know where this is going, but I think I like it.”

Unresponsive, my fingers slip into his pockets and pull them out. Nothing.

“Mae?”

They venture up to the sport coat he’s put on for work, pulling at the lapels, and reaching into the silk inner pockets of the garment. My heart seizes as they brush against plastic. I pull the memory card from his jacket; an alternative.

“Mae…” His tone has changed into something more dismayed, perhaps. Ashamed? Sorry.

Looking up at Quinn, I notice the things I should have seen ages ago: the sunken cheeks, the bruising dark circles under his eyes, a certain restlessness to his gaze, twitchiness. Things I would have noticed if I had been less absorbed in the past—with myself. I’m the one who ought to be ashamed. I’m sorry.

I practically fall into him, burying my face into his shoulder, letting my tears trickle into the crook of his neck. My hands clutch tight to his shoulders as his arms band around my waist.

He begins to cry, body shaking against me, sobbing apologies into my hair.

“Shh…” I hold tighter to him. “Shh… We’re gonna fix you, baby. I’m gonna fix you—I promise I’m gonna help you.”

We comfort each other on that couch for hours, my fingers rubbing soothing circles against his trembling back. I still have him. I can’t save anyone from my past, but I have Quinn.

I won’t let him go.

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