#worms roundabout
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...... The Funny Green Man By The Marry Go Round ......
..... Does AnyBody Else SEE HIM Or Does He SEE US .....
.... SEE US Through The Green Diamond EyE ....
... Does He Want OUR EYES ...
.. maybe we are just seeing things ..
. we been spinning too much again .
time to go home
#cult of the lamb#cotl#cotl leshy#bishops of the old faith#cotl bishops#Mr Leshy#funny green Man#the worm#liminal spaces#liminalcore#naturecore#merry go round#or#roundabout#carousel#trying to go for a cryptid vibe#photo edit#just go home for today and night#weirdcore
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i drew some silly boys
side note: i had never seen the show mio mao until recently because the sped up version of the theme song has been playing in my mind constantly. so i had to draw the silly kittens.
#mio mao#magic roundabout#inch the worm#bob bilby#sewaddle#wiggler#tbh creature#sherman the worman#silver's doodles
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List five things that make you happy, then put this in the inbox of the last ten people who reblogged something from you, get to know your mutuals and your followers! ♡
The Owl House,
sweet + tart candy (sour gummy worms, my beloved),
playing games with my friends,
seeing/imagining blorbos in stupid fluffy cheesy fun scenarios,
and the rare times I can look at my reflection and say "DAMB I'm hot!" instead of some self-loathing bullshit.
#ask games?#positivity chain?#a weird and roundabout form of data collection?#who tf knows at this point#i mostly only answered this because im craving sour gummy worms and needed an outlet to express that (but im broke and so cant get any)
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law + morning coffee
masterlist || commissions
tagging: @willowbelle @queenmimi2817 @risenwrites @eelnoise @cloudzoro @kaizokuniichan @mirillua @atanukileaf @sanjisprincesswifey
though the murky, dense darkness of the early morning still hangs in the air, almost to the point of suffocation, law finds himself reluctantly tearing himself out of bed. he's exhausted, worn out, and lets out a deep sigh as he throws his sweatshirt on and wraps a blanket around his shoulders, sleepily shuffling into the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee. he passes clione and uni on the way, headed back to their beds after working through the night; the pair wave to their captain, but he's borderline unresponsive as he hunches over the kitchen counter, sipping at the steaming dark liquid in his mug, immune to the burns its leaving on his tongue.
he's waiting—impatiently tapping his foot as he strains his ears listening for the slightest hint of a whistle from the tea kettle. the second it starts to squeal, he pours the hot water into an insulated cup, tosses a tea bag and some honey in, and trudges back towards his bed. law sets the cup on the nightstand, and huffs with exhaustion as he crawls back under the covers and pulls you close, his weary bones screaming out for the comfort of your warmth; the caffeine coursing through his veins won't take effect for another half hour or so, and he plans to take full advantage of every extra second of sleep he can get.
his movements wake you, causing you to stir slightly against him, but you're far too tired to do anything except readjust yourself and fall back into a deep slumber, slender fingers interlaced with his. when the two of you wake up for real, tied into a tangled mess of limbs, law will be considerably more well-rested and agreeable, and your tea will still be piping hot on the nightstand.
one morning, you ask law why he goes to so much trouble each morning to ease your morning routine; he simply gives you a crooked half-smile and replies that he did it on a whim. in return, you give him an appreciative grin back as you sip on your tea, with the knowledge that you've truly wormed yourself into his heart, even if he expresses it in the most roundabout and indirect of ways.
#one piece x reader#law x reader#trafalgar law x reader#law x you#trafalgar law x you#law fanfic#trafalgar law fanfiction#one piece fanfiction#one piece drabble#one piece scenario#trafalgar law#x reader
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seeing a woe.begone url posting about worm is like ah i see you're a fan of creators with a terrifying output rate
my love of wbg actually did lead directly to my discovering of worm in the most roundabout way possible so like
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"Would you still love me if I were a worm?" Part 1
Feat: Spica, and Alpheratz
Genre: Fluff, Humor, Crack
Warnings: Second half has very mild spoilers for floor 2, and the limited beach event.
Navigation: Part 1 | Part 2: Pollux, Sirius
Spica
There's an infinitesimal moment of silence as you wait for his response, his emerald orbs stare back at you. The two of you are leisurely drinking your warm beverages that he prepared on a cold morning when you asked him the question.
"Pray tell," he begins, setting his now empty cup down on the table with such grace befitting someone as elegant as him, before sending you a questioning look. "Why would you be a worm, of all things—"
"It is a hypothetical question," you cut him off.
"Did someone threaten to alter your form—"
"No. No one did," you cut him off again, not wanting him to go off into a tangent about how you must summon him if anyone is bold enough to harm you; he really can be a worrywart at times. This earns you a disapproving look from the sorcerer, though.
"I am just asking purely because of curiosity," you add. That's a lie, you are asking not out of pure curiosity, but because you're bored and what greater way of entertaining yourself than engaging in nonsensical casual conversations with the First Sorcerer of Virgo. But he doesn't need to know that. You offer him a smile, which you hope looks innocent and unassuming enough to be taken as a form of assurance.
"I will try to find a way to turn you back into—"
"No magic allowed!" You interject. "Come on, like I said, it is just a hypothetical question."
"Y/n," Spica utters out, sounding almost exasperated, "I am not liking this new habit you developed where you kept on interrupting what I have to say."
You give him a sheepish smile as you mutter an apology.
He gives you a curt nod in return, before promptly crossing his arms against his chest along with closing his eyes in contemplation. "Mind telling me why you ask me such bizarre question?"
Holding back the urge to groan, you reply, "I already told you, I'm just curious. Just answer with a yes or no, please?"
Spica remains eyeing you for a moment, eyebrows knitted tight enough to form subtle lines on his forehead. He's so confused and the facial expression he has makes him look constipated, you are at the brink of breaking your resolve and to just let your laughter bubble out, but you persevere.
"Well?" You egg him on.
He decides there's no harm in indulging you.
"To answer your question, yes, and I'd still care about you just the same. Though, if I have no way to turn you back into your original form, then it's important for us to find an environment which will be optimal for your new one," he responds, nodding to himself, "I would have to take you to your natural habitat."
"Wow that's a roundabout way of saying you'll get rid of me."
"That is not my intention, y/n . Neither the mansion nor the Contell Academy is the ideal place for a worm to live in. What if you get caught up and trampled on during a dorm war or something even worse? I take it you don't fancy having to live in a jar just to secure your safety, do you?" Spica tries to reason out.
Really, he's not certain why he still hasn't detached himself from this trivial conversation. A change of topic is very much welcome, but seeing how invested you are with this inquiry of yours, he goes against his better judgement.
He sighs before continuing, "The best solution I can see is ensuring you'd reside somewhere more convenient for you. I'd monitor your condition on a regular basis. Under no circumstances would I ever abandon you."
You're not sure what could be worse than getting trampled on by rowdy sorcerers, maybe the idea of living in a jar that had been repurposed into being your new home. Atleast he made it clear that he'll still have your back even if you hypothetically transform into a worm. You stifle a giggle and opt to feign disappointment as you merely look at him, trying to appear sullen.
Spica looks conflicted upon studying your face. "What course of action is acceptable to you, then?" He heaves a sigh of defeat, "You're hard to please."
You crack up laughing, finding this whole ordeal and his exasperation amusing. Once you regain your composure, you finally take pity on the man before you, deciding you've entertained yourself enough. Afterall, you still have more important matters to discuss. Besides, you'll have more chances of bringing up questions like this in the future.
"You know what, let's drop this. So, why did you request for me to meet you?" you say, referring to the message you received on your stella tab earlier.
Spica sighs for the umpteenth time, but this one is of relief. "Yes. I am in need of your help for this particular visit. As a matter of fact..."
He lays out the details of the mission and you dutifully listen. You voice out your queries relevant to the current topic every now and then whenever something seems unclear to you. Spica is more than happy to address your queries, since these kinds of questions are much... easier to make sense of than the one you asked him earlier.
Alpheratz
"You really woke me up for this?"
"You weren't asleep."
"I was just about to be before you smacked me." Alpheratz deadpans, before closing his eyes again. You remain quiet as you let him go back to trying to get a nap.
You don't really want to disturb him, especially since he's the one who graciously invited you to settle on the spot next to him under the tree. You suppose he assumed you're in need of a nap too like himself, but you're not feeling particularly sleepy. Hence, why you tried to start a conversation meant to be humorous for you, but it seems like the man beside you is not up for it, which is understandable given how trifling your question was.
Accepting that you'll have to pass the time on your own, you turn your attention towards the sky. You recall that large mammals, which roam the oceans on Earth or Mid Eartheim as they call it in this world, are instead can be seen roaming the skies of Bound Arlyn. You squint as your eyes strain from the sunlight, scanning the horizons to see if you can catch a whale fleeting by.
"I don't know what you want me to say, but I'll tell you what I'd do instead," Alpheratz suddenly drawls out followed by a deep sigh, eyes slowly fluttering open to find yours.
You're pleasantly surprised, you're no longer really expecting a response from him. There's a triumphant grin on your face as you bask in the fact that despite of his 'i-can't-be-bothered' bravado, you most often than not managed to make him relent to your whims, even ones as nonsensical as this.
You turn the upper half of your body from your sitting position and tilt your head down to face him, still laying on his back on the grass, both of you shielded from the sun under the shade provided by the abundant leaves of the large tree you're resting your back against. You blink at him as you motion for him to continue.
"I'd pick you up," he starts, sounding nonchalant. "Like this," —He then brings his arm forward, reaching out to present his hand to your eye level, making a show of pinching his forefinger and thumb close together until they're almost touching— "and then put you on my shoulder. Carry you around Bound Arlyn with me, like a talisman to ward off troublesome situations and bothersome people."
"First of all, please, that's disgusting. Second, I did not say that I'd be capable of warding off anything!"
"A feature you should consider having if you decide to live in that form." Alpheratz grins, chuckling as you shoot him an indignant look.
Quickly, you change tact. "You still haven't given a direct answer to my question though, a simple yes or no would have sufficed," you point out.
Alpheratz props himself up on his elbows, adjusting his body into an upright position as he throws you a look of disbelief. "I just told you that I'd put you on my shoulder even if you're a... worm, out of my own free will Y/n. What else do you want from me? Profess my undying devotion for you? That'll give the both of us goosebumps."
This elicits a bright laugh from you, something that Alpheratz finds endearing and somehow makes this odd topic more bearable.
"If it's anyone else, I'd use them as fish bait instead," he adds.
"As if," you quip. "The last time you went fishing you didn't even bother to use a bait."
"Nevermind then, I'd just feed them to a bird," he says airily. "But since it's you, I'm doing none of those. I'd be taking care of you instead. If that isn't love then I don't know what is."
"Should I feel honored?" you ask in jest. Alpheratz only casts you a furtive glance as he barks out a laugh with his eyes turning into the shape of crescent moons in reply.
"Now to think of it, wouldn't that be beneficial for the both of us should you really turn into one? I won't have to go to greater lengths in driving the old man away, and preventing you from getting involved even more in our mess," he casually remarks. Humming to himself as his eyes subtly shift to the side, seemingly caught up in his own mind, deliberating about turning the idea into reality.
You gape at him incredulously. "I don't see how that would even be beneficial to me."
"Whaddya mean? You'd be safe. How is that not beneficial to you?"
"I'd be literally a worm?"
"But, an alive and well worm," he counters, "Now, should we really turn you into one? Which do you prefer, flatworm or roundworm? I'll even let you choose what kind you'd like to be."
Your eyes widen at the prospect. You've seen Sirius use transformation magic before, that time when he appeared as Betelgeuse. You're aware that other sorcerers are capable of altering their forms, too. However, in your stay in Neb Aula, not once have you seen anyone use any kind of transformation magic towards someone else, atleast not yet. You wonder if it's really possible, perhaps it is. Knowing Alpheratz' exceptional prowess in spells and magic, you don't want to risk subjecting yourself into the life of being an invertebrate.
"Hey," he breaks the silence, after several seconds of not receiving a response from you.
You whip your head back to his direction, your eyes are met by his lavender ones, with his brows raised and his visage tinged with mirth.
"If you can't already tell, which you obviously can't, I'm just joking," he snorts, "You look like you're ready to bolt."
You really are, to further prove this point, you stand up from your position, opting to escort yourself out from this situation without so much as saying goodbye to your companion. You can hear Alpheratz' jovial laughter as you make your hasty escape.
a/n: Based on those tiktok videos trending back in 2020.
It's been a LONG while since I've written a fanfic. But I was so smitten with ArTw that I can't help myself from contributing something to this community. I've been playing for only 3 weeks as of writing this, so I may not have a firm grasp of each character's personality. I apologize if I haven't managed to portray them very accurately. Regardless, I hope you'll enjoy this piece.
#arcana twilight#arcana twilight fanfic#arcana twilight x reader#arcana twilight alpheratz#arcana twilight spica#arcana twilight headcanons#arcana twilight x y/n#arcana twilight x you#arcana twilight x mc#alpheratz#spica#ArTw#arcana twilight mc#arcana twilight fluff#arcana twilight imagines#lucy dream#storytaco#spica arcana twilight#alpheratz arcana twilight#writings
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Hungry eyes
Henry Winter x reader
Warnings: suggested auto-aggression, abuse and medicine abuse, thoughts of violence, breakdown (dni if you fell like any of the warnings mentioned, even described in a very roundabout way, may impact you negatively, please and thank you)
Chapter 9
Two points of view
Chapter 9
Hours passed. Days. Weeks. The snow fell, perched on my shoulders, on top of my head, in my hands, like a particularly annoying case of dandruff. Years, decades. I was sure that the white powder that made my skin turn pale and then red, that chased shivers all around my body should have already been gone after such a long time. Or maybe it was not snow, truly, but dandruff indeed. After all I had been standing there, in the dodgy parking lot outside of the Cherry flavour, that it might have been as well. Centuries. Lifetimes. All that I had witnessed on that evening and all of it before, the calm before the storm and its sorrowful, unnerving resolution, it all had flashed before me, in my mind’s eye. It all came and went so suddenly, so abruptly, that the screaming memories of the past appeared almost violent to me. Like a crazed stranger running your way along the pavement, screaming, tearing at his hair, tossing, and stumbling, zigzagging along his path, and then passing you and disappearing in the crowd, somewhere behind you, as you shiver once, push your eyelids together in the ultimate expression of horror and disgust.
God, please don’t let him touch me; you think. God don’t let him see me; you pray.
And then the stranger passes, his torn, dirty clothes, a marksman of a homeless bum, disappear from your field of vision, and the only thing that stays with you, the testament to his sorry existence, is that sweetly nauseating smell he leaves behind.
Millennia. Eons. It all passed me in a blink of an eye, or they had not passed at all, and I had just been imagining things. But my body hurt, my arms felt taunt, packed with an unmeasurable tension and my gums swirled with restless swarms of worms. An unwanted, painful reminder of what had been and what turned into ashes in matters of mere seconds.
Standing there, a few meters behind Henry it donned on me how terribly cold it was outside. Only garbed in the delicate, summer shirt I used to wear only at the inaugurations of school year, I started to shake uncontrollably. A full-body convulsion overtook me and a chirp chatter of my teeth, ones hitting the others, filled my ears. My body submitted to the rising wind and the falling temperatures, but I could not feel the cold at all. To the contrary, the pain that shook me so, was birthed directly by the iron-hot waves of heat washing all over my intestines, my skin, pulling over my brows in pearly droplets of sweat.
Henry’s cigarette hit the ground, then the heel of his impeccable, shiny Oxford smothered the last glimpse of flame still flickering with orange hope at the very end of the butt. Merciless stomp, half wet splash in the melting snow on the pavement. And that was it. His hands were shaking, but his face stilled in a terrifying grip of ever frost.
A few weeks later and nothing changed. Not really. We all acted normal, or at least appeared to act normal. Bunny was his usual cheery self, Camilla and Charles kept on with their Sunday dinners, of which we had two before the winter break came tearing us apart and throwing all around the world and Henry maintained his stoic, cold disposition. Nothing shook him no more. He froze in one moment and his face kept that taunt, expressionless grimace I saw right before the bar. His eyes turned sharp, strangely calm. He seemed both very aware of his surroundings and completely detached from them at the same time. In the matter of days, he regressed into the Henry I knew from my first encounter with him – chill, full of distaste and afloat, above all the filth of this world. Even Francis seemed unbothered, or worse, completely oblivious to what has happened in the Cherry flavour. To my deepest surprise, even she herself, wasn’t overly bothered. She talked, she smiled, even joked around. Some of her jokes landed punches against Bunny, but there was nothing aggressive in them, just her characteristically sarcastic remarks mixed with her usual witty climaxes. It was truly, as if nothing had happened. As if I, myself had thought out this elaborate drama in one of my drunken fantastic apparitions and convinced myself of its authenticity. But there was something more to this frozen normalcy of our group. Not only had they brushed the incident, like it was nothing, they had reset themselves to a state of complete neutrality, the one in which I had met them. All the characteristics of the group I came to know and adjusted myself to suddenly vanished leaving behind a bunch of empty, hollowed vessels, of which I knew nothing and whose lives had once again become a complete mystery to me. They changed the sitting places in Julian’s class once again. No longer was Henry besides her. What’s more, I don’t think I saw him anywhere near her since the night at the bar. Long forgotten were the brushes of hands, the solemn and longing stares thrown across tables. No one raced in the gathering snow anymore, nor did anyone read Argonautica Orphica, crammed into some dark corner of the library. No one mused in hushed tones to some other twin soul the passages of Greek dramas.
With time, even her jokes and laughs simmered down to an untaxing hum, and one day, I could not say which, but the paste of the change seemed so alarming I had to note that in my memory, they stopped all together.
I asked Francis about the bar once, mostly because after Henry’s silent resignation from his previous seat, the ginger boy seemed to be the closest to her.
‘Say,’ I had asked him one day, when we were all leaving class, and her coat had long vanished from my field of vision ‘What are you going to do with the whole Bunny situation?’
He threw me a look, a dumbfounded, confused look, one would expect from a pupil being called to the board and not a grown man asked a simple question, such as himself.
‘Whatever do you mean, Richard?’
I shrugged my shoulders forward and wagged my head from side to side with disappointment. Resigned, I had never asked him about that again.
It was as if the past few weeks had not happened at all. Well, I guess there was no more need for all that, because she herself seemed to be more and more absent from our private, antic world. She became quite unresponsive during the lessons, although she kept her marks up and if only asked, she responded with the same vigour and fervour as usual, there was a special air of vacancy around her, whenever her lips sealed into that thin, pensive line I adored so. Her interactions with us became more and more scarce and suddenly, right before the break had begun, I realised that for a few days now she had been coming into class, nodding in greeting, and then staying silent for as long as she possibly could. That one nod, sometimes two, if she remembered to draft it before leaving class, was the only remnant of her usual sunny and loud greetings. I could not remember how did her voice sound before, but I knew that slight rasp and a gravel undertone weren’t always there. But now, whenever she spoke those qualities seemed ubiquitous and synonymous with her. A dark smudge on the crystal timbre of her vocal cords.
I noticed that she had not decided on changing her shoes. The dark-shining vices gripped her feet at all times, mercilessly and gave her steps a slight rhythm akin to that of a lame. I could not understand why was she still insisting on torturing herself with this terrible choice of footwear, but seeing as she would not talk to anyone, not even Henry, I did not feel especially invited to starting a conversation with her about that. Especially when all I could focus on was the dubious existence of that fateful evening I witnessed. If I could not trust myself with remembering a night such as this correctly, what else must’ve my mind gotten wrong?
The pages of my sketchbook suddenly filled with frantic notes of recollection and quick, messy drafts of those boots. From side, front, back, upside, dark, atmospheric, and linear. Shiny noses, black shoelaces, bits of mud on the soles and slight blemishes of salt on the delicate leather. I saw them every day, and every day I committed them to paper, slowly perfecting the ovoid shape. And all the while my pen hit the yellowed, stylized pages, all my ears registered was the unrhythmic clack of her heels on the frozen pavement. I tried to remember every clack and every click. Every broken shade and glimmer of artificial light that reflected off that polished leather as they laid beneath the table in Cherry flavour. And the longer I thought of them, those two black holes consuming my every waking thought, the longer that sick obsession with the shoes’ glimmering noses unravelled into a twisted spiral over the pages of my notebook and transformed them into some sort of mythical regalia of martyrdom, the more I started to think that I might’ve been in fact overexaggerating a bit. After all, it was not the first time I would completely submerge myself into an obsession that would ultimately prove pointless and redundant.
Only, no! I had eyes, I could see, I was not a blind man, nor was I marginally stupid. It did not take a genius to mark the pain in her stride, to see, how her laugh and her smile did not bear any water, how they died on her cheeks, never reaching her eyes. How, when she finally stopped the charade and alongside it, stopped talking altogether, those shine-less eyes, those once magnificent pools of sheer starlight became empty and dark. How she shrivelled and thinned in the matter of weeks – days! – and how her hair matted over with a thin layer of patina. Like a beautiful, bronze statue, knocked down into the murky waters of a lake it once guarded, her whole being overgrew with pondweeds and widgeon grass. Something dimmed her, a duckweed casted deep shadows on the crystal-clear surface of her face, and yet I could not comprehend what could it be. Bunny choked her, that I got. But that… that silence, that burnout… it all seemed far too much. And then Henry. So cold, so angry… and then completely uninterested. It was all, at the same time too much and too little for what I had gathered from a few glances at them. I wasn’t close with neither of them, except for her. I could’ve asked her then, at the bar, but that ship has had already sailed by the time doubts gripped at my throat. I was just so sure that Henry was going to take care of things, weed the pond water, that I didn’t even think of doing anything myself. Even though I knew, I swear to gods, old and new, I knew she needed… something. Someone. And I knew they knew that as well.
But they kept quiet. Cheery even, submerged into the deep waters of the Red Sea, running alongside the mystical warriors, sons of gods, storming the beaches of Troy, focused solely on the past, they stayed blind to the unsteady march of their friend. Henry, most of them, seemed to be shockingly cut off from all that surrounded him. Once again, I saw him reading the Iliad, alone. Once again, I had heard his snarky comments cutting the air like knives swishing at warm butter. I glanced at his hasty, unnecessary translations of old books into even older languages. And in all of that he remained solitarily unified with what has been. He had not even so much as spared a glance towards her way since that night. Not even a discrete, throw-away look, or a passing stare. His eyes remained polarised, sharp, and empty, investigating the dark swirls of letters on the old papers. Amongst all the shine of the glory that once was he surrounded himself with, he appeared somehow ghostly. Pale skin turned almost grey, and as time went on, violet swirls of broken capillaries dusted it with random cracks, here and there. Deep shadows marked his face from the waterlines of his eyes, right to his immensely sharp cheekbones, as if he had not been getting enough sleep. And his hands, they shook. Constantly and perpetually, small temblors shook his palmar nerves, forcing him to close and open his fists. Pain painted on his face the most magnificent landscapes, even more frequently when she fell silent. Still, he kept on with his studies, unbothered, pinning his button, shark-like eyes onto the inanimate objects of his admiration.
Once, I even saw him picking Bunny up from some restaurant, dragging a bummed-out boy behind him. I knew the precedence. I recognised the apologetic scowl on his face, when he drove off with the boy crammed up in the passenger seat of his car and I wonder how such a heartless, blind person could ever be let behind a wheel. As his car glided over the dangerously slippery street, the glimmer of Bunny’s blonde head, turned in half-chirp caught my eyes. I gagged. I simply could not watch this flock surrounding Tiresias with a straight face. I might have not understood the situation at hand, might have even assessed it wrong, but what got me the worst was the collective dismissal of the state my Diogenes found herself in. the turning of a blind eye, the dismissal, it made my blood boil.
Getting more and more angry with the silence surrounding something I was absolutely sure of witnessing, I decided to go back to the bar. Looking for something, anything, even now I would not be able to describe what for exactly, I decided to snoop around there. And I would, I really would. If it wasn’t for the stomped-out butt that greeted me on the pavement right before the entrance. Pathetic and soaked it had already dissolved under the immense pressure of humidity and dirty water that had washed over it during the days of my absence. It was there, it was real. And it had red letters – Lucky Strikes – engraved on the white band dividing the ashy end from the orange body. It stared at me from the distance of approximately six feet. The same ciggy Henry had stomped out.
My knees popped when I squatted over that piece of evidence. I stared intently, with bated breath and hands covering my mouth, just not to somehow contaminate that butt. Like a careful investigator I examined the unexpected piece of evidence with utmost unction I looked and watched and glanced at it, considered all the ways it had creased, soaked in the dirty water. I wanted to notice something, somehow connect the dots, tie it all up with one swift revelation. Maybe notice a certain shape or conjure a poetic, dramatic metaphor that could somehow describe it, take that mystery to a higher plane on which I could finally achieve enlightenment and deeper understanding of the situation. I thought that staring at it would help me capture at least a bit of Henry’s essence, that clasping my hands at the phantom thread tied to his mind at the moment of him smoking it would allow me access to his mindset, explain what was going on inside of him, when he mulled over the Latin phrase. Desperately searching for the slightest trace of reason in it, or some kind of symbolism, like a pair of grey, ashy bunny ears or a cute, fluff tail poking out of the mangled cotton end of the ciggy which’s visual allegory would bring me any closer to an explanation. But nothing appeared. The butt was just a butt. Nothing more, nothing less.
Sudden anger gripped me by the throat, poked at my eyeballs from the inside of my pained skull and coloured the whole world before me in vivid splashes of red. For the simple fact of my ingenuousness, the unreasonable investigation that refused to bear any fruit at its infant stages, the way the others did not seemed to be bothered by the whole Cherry flavour situation, savage frenzy sprouted in me, took root in my brain, slithered around my muscles, and took all inhibition from the body that once had belonged to me. For a split moment I was not human. For a short second, in which I jumped to my feet and with a brutish yap escaping my mouth, felt my muscles convulse with unpredictable movement, I was not even an animal. The accumulated rage was not me, not my own, but a whole other entity, alive, smart, hungry, vicious. Akin to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis it wrapped its way round me and guided my whole body into a fit of purely obscure seizure. My brain, my mind, it was there, although set still and useless, as if numbed and enslaved by that foreign rage in a sort of gilded cage it revelled in. Oh, the golden splendour of my inhibition, the sudden servitude to my own emotions, it all left a deliciously sweet taste on my tongue. My foot, one I had not realised had been risen, hit the ground with a terrible wet splash, perfectly pinning the dreaded butt beneath itself. The scream that followed the spontaneous motion echoed uncomfortably against each and every building that surrounded me. Tearing my leg up once again I struck anew, well the fungal rage reigning my body did, with both viciousness and force doubled. After three more dealt kicks like that I was sure the butt was not only stomped out, but completely obliterated, and yet I could not stop myself. I could not stop the stabbing motion of my leg, nor could I muffle the thick, grating bays coming out of my throat at every hit I/it had dealt. Dirty thawed snow splashed miserably all around me and landed on my trousers, on the cars parked in the parking lot and the poles dividing pavement from the road.
It was not far. No fair at all.
Splash!
How were they treating her!
Smack!
How she looked!
Splat!
What Henry had said! What he promised! What he didn’t do!
Plop!
Henry, that bastard! Bastard-Henry! Henry-Bastard! Blind fool! King of fools!
Slam!
He and that insufferable brat Bunny! Bunny, Bunny, Bunny! Idiot! Moron!
Nothing coherent crossed my mind in that moment. Nothing of higher importance or sense. But I knew that what had, was the purest form of frustration, the truest vent for every single one of my doubts and problems that had snowballed during that year in Hampden. I knew that those frantic kicks, those incoherent bellows of mine, they were not just empty swings at an already burnt-out cigarette. No, each strike was a protest, a manifestation and a drub against the nature of every single person entangled in the pattern of neglect and disinterest surrounding my Diogenes. Angry stomps surrounded me whole and muffled all the other sounds with their hateful nosegay.
In my fevered state the butt became Henry’s head, his chest, his hands, and the dark hair sprouting above his white, aristocratic forehead morphed into the sunlit grains of Bunny’s coiffure. Images, imprints really, of his pastel, nauseating outfits inflamed my nostrils with a smoke-stained dragon breath. They sharpened my teeth, turned me further and equipped me with diamond-sharp claws, armoured me with thick scales. I was a mystical dragon of pure, liquid fury and I was ready to melt down mountains. What’s worse is that I always knew what I had felt towards Bunny. It was nothing new. Detestation, slight indifference, unease sneaking its way beneath my skin with terrible itch whenever he appeared somewhere near me – the purest form of unknowing discomfort. But the unadulterated, all-consuming hatred I felt towards Henry was. In all honesty I was willing to admit my distaste regarding the blonde quarterback, and yet to this day, I quiver before the thoughts that ghosted and rattled over my mind when the acrid taste of venomous loathing filled my mouth when I saw the dark eyes, the jet-black hair and the cynical grin of Henry Winter being stomped out by my own foot. Yet I did not falter in that moment, not one step back. I did not quelched my thirst for blood, stomping my foot around I did not stomp out the desire to melt those two until there was nothing left of them, and then further scorch them until even the memory of them, the last trace of it has been completely purified and forged anew. I was a monster willing to turn them into a breed of creatures of my sort. For a moment a violent fantasy, of me stepping up, cornering them, and tearing them apart in two-to-one combat, clouded my vision. Oh, what I could have given in that moment to possess any kind of skill in martial arts. Of even owning a knife with which I could threaten them with. A kidney, or a lung, or even a heart would not be equal to the bargain I was willing to make in order to suddenly become apt, athletic and strong. A whole world would not be a sacrifice big enough for my willingness to hurt nor was it enough to bring me the levels of courage and skill I needed to face and best those two. After all, I was but a boy. Not a dragon, not an investigator, and not an infection-ridden insect. Just an angry little scrawny boy, scared and confused stomping in the molten snow like a capricious brat. More than anything I was a pathetic child. My knees buckled beneath the weight of that realisation, and I collapsed into the disgusting greyish-brownish pulp. Wet matter soaked into my pants and despite the moderately mild weather I swear, I had never felt such seeping cold.
Once again time stopped and galloped around me with no rhyme or reason. I could not tell how long I was kneeling there, pinned to the ground by the sheer gravity of that tiny, obliterated butt. And I think I would stay there for far longer, until darkened sky came in the marvellous shade of indigo and frost coated the perimeter with spiky-white fur, until I’d had lost feeling in my toes and the overwhelming cold of the night steadily slowed and slowed my pulse to the point of a dangerously gentle halt if it wasn’t for the shy shadow creeping over my form.
Small and bleak shape of a person sliding carefully on the pavement, mixed with the strange fragrance of a muffled, warm scent, domestic in that slow creep, nice and soft with the cautious steps of its owner. I knew that scent, that shape, that rhythm, swayed slightly to the right, as if the person guiding it avoided putting their whole weight to the left. I knew it and I longed for it for so, so long. My head snapped back, eager, almost wanton, and my gaze was met with a slightly bent figure, big, hollowed eyes gazing right, no, trough, mine and tightly pressed pale lips. Her. The intensity of that sudden stare, despite its murky and diffused, or maybe precisely because of that thinly spread quality, forced goose-skin to come forth on my clothed arms. She was slimmer, so much so, that when her jaw clenched at the shock surfacing on my face, I could see and count the small bones of her skull sliding smoothly beneath her taunt skin. Paler and somehow yellow, like a thin, thin, thin papyrus left for too long on the scorching sun of a desert, the rosy fresh bloom of her skin, just an afterthought left in the broken capillaries of her eyes and the reddish rim of them. The hair that fell over her arm, when she leaned in some more into my private space, as if to sniff me or confirm that I was in fact me, slid over her shoulder with a quiet dry shuffle, akin to the jerk of wheat fields in the middle of July, forgotten or abandoned by their farmer. No more gilded halo, rather bone-dry empty stems. In that dimension she was not so far away from the ghostly grey shape her body casted over me, even more so, she herself seemed like a shadow of her former self. A vessel that would drag behind her a fortnight before. A shape that would break over silvery-white snow caps, hide and split under the influence of light seeping into the campus library. There was this newfound quality about her, an air I had no words to describe then. I just knew that she didn’t quite feel like herself, somehow hollow, unfilled, not really finished, just like she herself was not complete, not whole, like the part of herself that kept her whole being by the seams, suddenly vanished and her frame fell apart, spitting out that lively, sweet part of herself, the cottony filling that gives puppets their shape, and all that was left of her was that skin, those glossy eyes, gleaming like two polished buttons. All I could think of, while desperately trying to bear that bone-chilling stare of hers, was that she had cracked into two halves, and the one – the cold, silent, limping, and tight-lipped creature – was the only half that survived that tragic severance. The worse half.
Now, that I have assisted in an attempt on someone’s life, I know that she looked like what death feels like. Cold and un-personalised ghostly presence that hoovers over you, seeps into you and stays somewhere there, in your body, in the stems of your fingers, forever curved around an already non-existent neck, slots itself right between the globes of your brain, playing the imagine of body muddled in snow over and over again, sits in your ears, echoing the never-ending crack of neck, settles on your skin with sheer dust of dried blood, and holds you hostage in constant state of fear for the rest of your miserable life. Once you’ve tasted death, once you’ve looked into dead man’s eyes, it stays with you, just like that imagine of her stayed with me, imprinted forevermore in my being.
And I had said before, ever since that night in her apartment, when I laid on the couch, half-drunk and dumb with fascination, and she kissed Henry over that one-piece table, three deaths had been prescribed in her lifetime. What I was seeing then, in the dodgy parking lot of Cherry favour was a tell-tale sign of the first one.
‘What’s up, pup?’ Mors dicit. Or was it her? ‘A lovely weather we’re having, huh?’ She croaked my way, as she crouched next to me with a slight hiss.
The weather was nice indeed, not that I had noticed before she so gracefully pointed that out for me. Chilly, yes, and, courtesy of the lingering snow, covered in a thin tint of sepia, but overall nice. But none of that mattered. Not really, when she was there, so close that I could smell her, feel the faint warmth of her body leaving a shallow indentation on my arm.
‘Hey.’ My tongue darted to wet my horrid, chapped lips. She smelled naturally, of herself, like no other fragrance in this world, broken by slight notes of cigarette smoke and fresh coffee carried forth on her breath, although the smell was muffled, weathered and I had to breath unrealistically deeply to get a real sense of it. ‘Wasn’t expecting you here.’
Her brows furrowed, as if she had no idea of what I was talking about, and only when I pointed my finger up, to the neon sign, turned off for the time, had a sharp spark of comprehension light her eyes. For a second, she seemed suspended in time, when she considered and took in the sight of the establishment, and I thought she might break down crying, because her lower lip wobbled and the skin around her eyes tightened dangerously, but no, nothing like that happened. Instead, her white teeth peaked from beneath the pale barrier of her lips and a snarl, something I would take for a laugh if it wasn’t so primal, so angry, fell from between them.
‘Oh, that’s rich, that’s rich.’ She gurgled some more, before turning to me. Something in me, cowardly and slimy, suggested that I much preferred her giggling at the bar, and not looking at me. Truly, something in those washed-out, wandering eyes, did not feel quite… sane. ‘I was… out for a walk. Wanted to go to the post office. Guess I lost my way.’
I nodded, not knowing what else to say. And I wanted to say so many things. Maybe too many for any of them to come forth. Something in her face told me that she understood, and so I didn’t feel as restricted as before. Somehow, that one shift in the muscles on her face convinced me that she, the Diogenes I loved so much, the accomplice I adored with all my might, was still there.
‘What for?’
‘Oh, just… wanted to buy more letter writing paper. I’m writing a lot recently…’
I nodded and promptly decided I had to keep up the good karma of her talking, because with every word she uttered I heard that terrible rasp fading and fading away. I really wanted to hear that crystal-clear laugh of hers once more. Icy and fresh, like the coldest creaks flowing down from the highest of mountain tops. Although before I could ask her another question, she beat me to it, her ever perceptive gaze falling to my wet, dirtied knees. Something like a smile, real heartfelt smile and not a cynical crack of lips, flashed across her face and she cocked her chin towards that bizarre view.
‘You’re kneeling in the snow, Richard Papen, have you noticed?’
I nodded, again, and scoffed a little, noticing how strange that must’ve looked for someone who wasn’t privy to my melt-down, or anyone perfectly sane for that matter. Although, looking at her, I wasn’t sure I could apply the latter category to anything currently concerning her person.
‘Ya. I did. I just read somewhere that winter swims can work wonders for your nervous system. You know, I find it quite refreshing actually, the dirty water getting soaked in by my pants, I mean.’ I stomped my knees a few times, splashing the water around a bit, as if I was trying to paddle in real, deep water.
To my utter surprise, she giggled. And by gods, I’d be damned if I didn’t blush at that sweet, treacly laugh. My lips curved with hers, and widened even more, when she continued with her interrogation. Every second word she managed to utter was interrupted by a new wave of giggles.
‘No, really. Why are you… why are you kneeling like that? Come one, don’t give me that look, don’t look at me like you know something I don’t!’
She pulled me by my arms, her slim, tender fingers digging into my used and shabby overcoat with such surprising force I feared for the stitches that held it together. I grabbed her back, maybe out of that fear, or just simply because I missed the feel of her, her body somewhere near mine, the touch I could squeeze out of our short interactions, how her arms felt in the palms of my hand… I pulled her towards me, with the fullest intent of dragging her to the ground with me, but she was far stronger than I imagined. Now, the prospect of her catching Henry if he’d fall did not seem so abstract, when she somehow managed to maintain her equilibrium and slip from my grasp, jumping a few steps back, still, balancing perfectly of the balls of her feet. She flashed me a toothy grin, and I, the weak man that I was, tried again, just so I could see it again. I reached for her once more, but she was too agile for me, even with her limp, even in that state of suspended half-death, she jumped around me like an eager, young heifer, drafted circles as I wagged and dragged behind her.
‘Quick, Richard, you gotta be quick! Answer me, or you won’t catch me! Come on now, it’s not that hard, just tell me.’
After some more tittering coaxing, that went in a more-or-less similar tune to her first question, I finally gave in. Giddy myself with the marvellous melody of her happiness I could not help but tell her everything she wanted to know. Who was I to refuse her, after all? Before I started though, I waved my hand dismissively in order to lighten the impact of what I was going to say. I didn’t want her to take me for a hopeless case, but I figured that maybe the sheer ridiculousness of my behaviour might help in holding up that magnificent smile a while longer on her lips. I went for so long without seeing it, that now, that I finally got the chance to, I threw myself at it with abandon and hunger of a starving person.
‘I just had an epiphany. A pretty grim one.’ I admitted, pursing my lips, and nodding my head in a very pensive, over-the-top way. Her smile did not widen, but neither did it falter, so I took it for a small success. Her head tilted though, in that feline, interested burst of expression I had seen her making in classes before.
‘Grim? How come?’
Squaring my shoulders, I nodded. To be fair I did not really know if I wanted to tell her all about what just had gone through my head. The violence… the desperate need for it. But I figured that if I ever wanted her to open up to me, to keep on smiling, trusting me like she did a few weeks before, I had to give her something. So, like a coward, I went with the safest option, one that could give me the desired results.
‘Henry.’ I said, and her smile faltered until it faded completely. ‘He… he told me something, and I believed it, and now… well, now I know it not to be true. The epiphany, I guess, was about him.’ A dash of malevolence glimmered in her irises at the mention of his name. She craned her neck backwards, slowly, and very carefully like king cobra lazily hauling her body up and spreading the beige collar in the ultimate warning before dealing the lethal blow. Her hair electrified around her beautiful swan neck, seemingly willed by the sheer force of her ireful mind, and for a second, I thought I caught a glimpse of perilous white fangs, dripping with saliva down onto her tongue.
‘Guess you’re not the first one to be deceived.’ Venomous, was her comment. Stabbing and full of intent to kill. I nodded, half in understanding, half in agreement. ‘What has he said to you?’
I allowed myself a longer pause, just to swallow and gather my thoughts, although I already knew what I was going to say, the second his name left my lips.
‘Henry said he was going to help you. Deal with Bunny.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, he said something like, an eye for an eye. You know, for choking you in the bar. I guess I thought he was going to scare him a bit, take him for a small tumble or…’
A spasm of fear run through my body when her face suddenly twisted and morphed, elongated by the purest iteration of despair. Her lips quivered and curved downwards, brows squeezing and releasing her high forehead in an iron grip of pain. Her eyes screwed up, until her face flooded in stramineous red and then popped back out, capillaries prominent, lashes fluttering, gathering unwanted wetness. She kind of choked, or gurgled, her throat waved and resonated with a snarl of an animal wounded and then a long, desperate whiz. Her hands, pale and thin, shot up, tangling her fingers into the already unruly coiffure. With another panicked exhale she pulled the tightly gripped strands over her face, strained them to their fullest length, and then some more, to the point where I saw the roots of her hair pulling the skin of her head up, and up. Her body convulsed, and then went completely taunt, her chest collapsing over her bent knees. Something in me broke, seeing her like that, something snapped. Not with the fiery, almost-too-cold rage of a mythical beast I felt before. Rather with soft, damp resignation that fills oneself when they find a dead mouse in the trap, they had set themselves the night before. I scooted closer, slowly, announcing my movement to her, so that she would not be scared with my presence, like a good hunter would do with a yet alive prey in need of a final blow. She nodded, still whimpering quietly as I shuffled across the wet pavement. I let my arms snake around her shoulders, tug her head to my chest, so that she would hear the steady beat of my heart, know that it was me, that I was real, and I was indeed there, by her side. She complied, fell forward into my embrace, as if longing for it. Her knees hit the ground, wet splash marked my lap, but none of us cared as I pressed my jaw to the crown of her head, as another wet splash hit my chest. Small, almost unnoticeable droplets slid from her eyes, from the bridge of her nose. The street was empty, just the two of us bundled to the side, shivering, pained and scared together. She could cry as much as she wanted, I shielded her from the rising wind.
‘Shhhhh, hey sweet thing. What’s happened? Come on. It’s all right. It’ll be all right.’ She sobbed into me, and I felt it, not in the physical when the waves of her voice went to crash over my body, but in a much more piercing way. My heart clenched at that. ‘I know, I know. Come one, let’s get up, you’ll catch a cold. See? your pants are already brown from the snow.’
Another froth of waves came crushing my chest, but I managed to haul her up. She nodded frantically over and over, clearly not knowing what to do. Embarrassed, or confused she begun to dry her face with quick, hard stokes, that left long red trails over her cheeks.
‘Yea, yea, you’re right Richard. It’s all so stupid, I’m so stupid, sorry… let me just… just… I’ll be fine in a second. Just. Can you stay a while longer?’ Her voice trembled and fluctuated between a nasal gags and whispery retches. Her head lunched forward and for a second, I thought she was vomiting, but she managed to straighten up. Iron heat rushed to my head, swirled in my stomach. ‘Just stay a bit longer, please. It’s stupid, it’ll pass.’
‘It’s not. You’re not. None of it is. You have every right…’ Red rimmed eyes shot to me, wet with all the things unsaid, undone, longing and hungry. The hunger of her soul reflected in those starry windows overwhelmed me, took my inhibitions, and threw them far, far away. Those were not the eyes of a human, of a mortal. Not with their sharp glints, soft edges, the magnificent colour, knowing glances. Older and wiser than any other eyes I’ve ever seen before. Kind but hardened by life. with the little lines at their corners, that stayed there as a testament to her laugh. But then, when she looked at me, when she mulled over my words and I saw her pupils retract, sag in helplessness and anticipation, to me those were the eyes of an immortal creature, burdened with ancient depth, the eyes of the magnificent daughter of Peneus. Sorrowful, forced to submit, yet unwilling. The eyes of a running Daphne. Then it clicked for me, and venom raised in furious fumes up my throat, bail-chased nausea spined me around, tightened my fists over her elbows, desperate to find a semblance of grounding, as the revelation, slipped the ground from beneath my feet. ‘Hey… you. Come, let’s get you home, how about that?’
One nod for her and I was already dragging her across the pavement, far, far away from the bar. I wanted to take her away, haul her to me and teleport to someplace safe. Salvage her from the dirt and gutter of the streets, from the gaze of people who might cross our way, from the words I, myself spoke. Her feet shuffled on the ground, disoriented and irregular. The shoe, I thought, the damned shoe. The limping leg, scratching the tumbling surface of pavement almost made my ears bleed.
‘I’m going to carry you now,’ I said, surprised at how deep my voice had come out.
Thankfully, she did not object to my statement, I don’t know what I would have done if she did. I took her into my arms, her legs hanging over one of my arms, head snug to my chest. Her arms snuck up and grabbed a hold of my shoulders, seemingly the straw that a drowning man is to clutch. I lunged forward then, my steps long, far apart, almost jumps. The streets passed me in a blur, the people, their wandering, bewildered stares. I did not care for them, for anything other than the slight flutter of her heart, beating slightly under my ribs, other than her warm body pressing into mine. She sobbed into my chest, and that gave me an edge, a mission to complete, a goal. Finally, I had something to do, some means to help. I had never walked as fast, stretched my legs as far apart, as I did when I devoured the steps of the stairwell of her apartment building, fort, sometimes five at a time. All the while I muttered to myself maybe more than to her, words of affirmation, calming phrases. And she was so small, holding onto me. God, so utterly small and shaky, I barely could feel her weight in my arms. I felt like sobbing myself. And my heels clacked along the pavement, and my breath bated, my heart clenched and aching, a steady drum of my steps, as I tore through the darkened bluish veil of night shine. She stayed cooped in my arms, small, sizzling out, yet still breathing. Her leg, the hurt one, marked with carnation-esque blemishes of copper blood, twitched over my bent elbow.
‘Hey, pretty thing, you hang in there, all right?’
I shook her body slightly in my grasp, just to make sure she heard what I said. Glancing down, I noticed that my breath had turned into a puff of grey mist, obscuring her silhouette a bit from me. But it didn’t matter, as long as I could feel the rise and fall of her chest, the small beat of her heart, so, so close to my own. She shrugged. The streets of Hampden appeared to be longer than I remembered. Stretched by a touch of an invisible hand. Darker, than I was used to. More cramped despite there being almost no sole in our field of vision. The unrelenting quiet of the eve, a sound box for my shaky tone. As I walked, the buildings before me appeared to be bending towards me, as if the same malicious hand pushed them with the force of gravity towards me, so that they could close over our heads, burry us in never ending piles of rubble. I would not complain if that was really the case. I would not mutter a word of defiance, only if she would speak to me, answer my question. But the silence between us stretched long and morbid, just like the distance I desperately tried to cover.
‘Are you okay?’
Her sad, big eyes gleamed at me through the canopy of our tangled breaths. Hers – short and shallow – mine – unsteady but deep.
‘No, Richard. I don’t think I am,’ she said, her voice snotty, clogged by the unrelenting stream of tears flooding her face. I had never heard her like that. The rasp, the croaking, all of that it seemed I could take. I could ignore it, or accept it even, purely because those screechy vowels, and high-pitched consonants, those sounds were hers. Formed a part of her, even if it was ugly, deterring. I still could see the beauty in them. Some sort of sardonic fascination, or grotesque appreciation for the abhorrent reality of her. But that mushed sob, she seemingly clawed out of her squeezed windpipes? That wasn’t her own, wasn’t of her making nor intention and so, as it wasn’t purely her, I could not bring myself to muffle the crump tearing my soul in two at the sound of it. I was sure, that if I only tried to respond in some kind of way, opened my mouth, the bone-chilling, banshee scream would fly out of it, scare her so utterly, that I would not be able to hold on to her squirming, scrambling form. And so, I stayed quiet, soaking the prolonged silence of stretched streets.
‘It’s opened,’ she murmured when we finally arrived at her door. By that time, she somehow managed to calm down, and now in her voice rung rather tiredness than the despair from before. ‘I left it open.’ Something in the way she said it, the numb undertone of resignation, when she announced it, chased shivers down my spine. I pushed; the door was indeed left open. Its hinges creaked slightly when they swung, revealing a whole other world to me. The ascetic landscape of her flat took me by surprise and made me stop in my tracks. Nothing, and I mean nothing was where it had been before. No plants, no coffee mugs or glasses, no ashtrays. The one-piece table had been pushed up to the window, while the couch with the glass coffee table stood, crocked and strangely in a line, in the middle of the space. Books, now stacked into neat piles had been gathered around the fireplace. Alarmingly – the Alexander the Great print was nowhere to be seen. Without it, the flat presented itself rather miserably. Like the Mona Lisa without her smile, or the Lady with an Ermine, with her companion scavenging for prey, somewhere outside the frame. I didn’t notice any plants either. Strange how a jungle-like kitchen turns to a complete replica of the Gobi Desert, in matter of mere days.
‘Where do you want me to…’
‘The couch. Please. Thank you.’
I let go of her, letting her body fall and submerge itself into the cushions of the meuble. As she laid back, the soft material of her dress slid over my arms, cold and silky, making me realise how hot, almost feverish, my skin had become. It was her, all her. Splayed in that mangled pose, her knees raised slightly up, hands thrown over the headrest, hair tangling everywhere, she looked most tragically. Most divine. Sudden hunger rumbled in my stomach, resonated along my spine and ribs, and I had to dip my head down, kneel before her in a mock attempt at loosening her shoelaces, in order to mask the scowl, it had produced on my face.
‘We should take off those shoes, you hear me. Matter of fact, we should burn them at once, or throw them into the river. See? How bloody your socks are? Completely soaked. No, you should never wear those again. Why didn’t you return them? They’re clearly too small for you.’
I tried to force every fibre of my body to bend into an apologetic, careful pose, one that would pose no threat to her. Not that I did, I just didn’t want her to feel uncomfortable, as I fiddled with the leather at her feet. I tried to be as small, as servile as possible. I wanted her to remember that moment, to rely on it in times of fear. Or then, right in that flat, squatted around the couch, I wanted her to see me as I was, Richard Papen, the most reliable, safe presence in her life. Better than Henry, than Bunny, than Charles or Camilla, or anyone else. Anyway, it did not matter what I did or did not do. She remained unresponsive to my every query. Only when, halfway through unlacing her second shoe, I proposed that I could maybe make some tea for the both of us, seeing as we were drenched in brownish-snowish pulp, head to toe, and our noses, resembled more a ripe set of cranberries in colour than a normal part of a human body, she murmured something, rather unbefitting of a lady, and I decided to take that as a ‘no’.
‘Aye, those are real torture devices, I really can’t understand why you keep wearing them.’
Her legs were daft, almost waxy as I gently slid off the shoes from her feet. It seemed as if I was catering to a giant doll, unable to bend her knees, or change positions. Like finest crockery her skin glistened with a sheer sheet of sweaty glaze, moon-kissed and pale, even at her lowest she rendered such a powerful aura around her, I, the sane and most certainly more empowered out of us two, felt like game. Game to the real hunter – my own desire.
‘Have you ever heard Richard… there is this thing those cool, riotous dads tell their children when they get slightly injured and raise inadequate ruckus. Something like… well, if your finger hurts, then hit your head, then the finger will stop hurting.’
I laughed, dryly, rather focused on the copper smudges soaked into the white cotton of her socks, than her. I knew that if I looked up, faced her beaming, pleading eyes, I would not be able to control myself. I would unravel before her, cry or wail or fall to the ground to roll in my gloom and ineptness, and that was the last thing she needed.
‘I don’t quite know what you mean. If I ever cried, my dad just told me to shut up and soak it up.’
‘That’s tough love for ya,’ Over my scoffing I heard her snort as well, although she had to snarl right afterwards and prevent snot from overflowing her nostrils. ‘But no, the bang your head method actually makes some sense, to me at least. If something hurts, like finger, and it hurts real bad, then maybe hurting your head more will, well not alleviate the pain from the finger, but focus your attention on the splitting headache you get next. A bait and bleed, but for pain.’
‘So, does your finger hurt?’
Her hands moved. One grabbed at the scarf woven around her neck, the other lifted the hem of her skirt, slowly bunching it upwards, cumulating the small creases into her fingers, one after the other. Agile and skilled like a tiny spider gathering its web. As the folds of her clothes compressed further, diminished, as they slid slowly against her body, the more and more of waxy-pale skin I saw. What I saw, at least up there, on her neck, I somehow anticipated. Black and blueish marks forming a faint shape of a hand, big and spread across her larynx, imprinted with conviction and goal – to muffle any sound that it might’ve produced. But down there, where her skit got hiked up to her hip, I could never prepare myself for what I saw there.
‘Finger. Fingers. Thighs. Neck, calves, wrists, ribs, ears, eyes, chest, lungs, stomach.’
Her monotone voice filled my ears with an oceanic roar. Purple stains, red scratches and spotty chafing jigged and bounced a pagan dance across her skin, I saw them and in a sort of semi-empiric sort of way I felt them stomp on my thighs, hurt, and twist my nerves in a hellish grip, dastardly burning through right to my bones like and acrid pools of venom. I could only suspect how much she was suffering. The muscle above my knee twitched and spasmed painfully, bringing me back, polarising on the here and now, as her daft fingers weaved through the silky waves of her skirt. And the bruises I saw there. Burgeoning, at the precipice of her thighs, in a bedlam of rioting, furious reds, nauseous greens and mournful purples. Vulgar motley splayed all the way from her bony knees to, as far as my eyes could reach, the slight peaks of her quadriceps. Brutish handprints grabbing at her with a phantom, everlasting grip, swallowed every paled inch of her skin, and looking at them I felt how they burned on me.
‘Everything hurts, Richard. The shoes though… they’re more physical.’
Then she looked away, into the void above my head, and it seemed she found some familiar comfort in that unfocused blank state.
‘We’ve all got good many things that pain us, I just never thought I would prefer the horrid burn of flesh over my ethereal torments.’
‘Lean back, sweet thing, all right?’ It was hard for me to take the skirts out of her fingers, but I managed to do so, even with the trembling of my stems, I pulled the material in most gentle manor and yet it staggered on her knee and stayed there. She didn’t mind. ‘You need anything else?’
For a second, I saw a shadow of focus march across her face. And then the stare came, the terrifyingly polarising, pulverising gaze that crossed universes and souls, crush them, crush me, the game to the hunter of her eyes. Contagious, like a mood that passes into you, a sound that creeps on the border of your mind a tune you repeat, on and on and on, and with time you begin to dread and hate it, until it loops, and you cannot hear naught, but that single melody. Her will, so strange and strong, shined amongst that onslaught of power stirring in her pupils like the tolling of a bell.
‘The pills. The ones in the cupboard. Right there.’
I followed the path her finger drafted in the air right to the kitchen. Clean, empty, eerily not her. I reached into the cupboard, surprisingly containing no cups, just a messy pile of packets and bottles with different kinds of medicine. Some of them green, others pink or purple or blue. Safe to say the cupboard seemed to be containing all the colour drained from the apartment. In the corner of the shelf, I thought I saw a greyish piece of cloth or canvas, like the one stretched over the hearth with Alexander on it, but I did not let myself linger on that.
‘Which ones do you want?’
I observed the back of her head from where I stood. She wasn’t moving and if she hadn’t responded to my question, I’d thought that the second I walked away, she transcended into the plain of death by the sheer power of her hollow stare.
‘Duragesic.’
‘Forte?’
‘Ye, ye. And water, please.’
‘I can bring you some in my hands, otherwise, I don’t see how.’
‘Oh, yeah, right. Then no water.’
She said that as if the marginal lack of any glasses or cups in her apartment was some cardinal truth, she just so happened to forget.
I brought the whole package to her, although I pondered a while if it would be safer to just squeeze a couple of the pills out and hand them to her like that. But I ultimately thought she wouldn’t like that. So, I just threw the silver leaflet her way, and like a starved animal she nearly tore her way to the pills through the plastic safety-packing. I watched in horror as she downed not one, not two and not three but four white, oval pills. And then she swallowed, without blinking an eye. She must’ve gathered some saliva in her mouth beforehand to help them go down, either way the bulge that painfully dragged down her throat went down uncomfortably slow, and I could see her face contorting at the unsavoury, bitter aftertaste. But then she moved, really moved, and smiled, like nothing I’ve seen her do on that day, or the weeks before. Her body loosened and lost a certain quality of strain as if some magical, invisible rope feel from it, releasing her consciousness into a more senile, easy state. Worry evaporated from me like dew on a hot, summer day, and I smiled back at her.
‘What now?’
‘Now, Richard dearest, I go to sleep. And you, you do what you want. Make it worthwhile. Be happy while you do it. Do not hurt.’
She started to shift clumsily on the sofa and so I came closer to lift her legs and help in making herself comfortable. Her head dragged along the pillows back and forth, heavily, filled with woolly haze of the medicine. Her eyelids fluttered in a drowsy rhythm, shoving away the waves of sleepiness as she stared at me and mouthed something, some kind of advice I could not read. I shuffled closer, bent my neck so that my ear could gather the soft nectar dripping from her lips.
‘Or take some pills, I’ve money for some more. And sleep. Sleep is the best solution for dwelling my dear. In sleep you don’t remember, you do not feel. It is just you and the dark void all around you.’
I jumped back at the slurring onslaught of her words, vicious and sad. In doing so I carelessly stepped on the tale of my coat and crumbled to the floor. Her laugh, deranged and dry followed me in my way down, resonated in my bones as I came into the contact with the cold, hard ground. Wind whistled in that cruel giggle as she quickly switched into a humming tune, mocking my fall. Any humour run away from me at the sound of that maddened croak, like liquids seeping out of a corpse. She was right, the physical pain of my backbone might’ve been grounding, comforting against the cruel tear I felt when she pointed at me and laughed.
‘Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme, ce beau matin d'été si doux: au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme sur un lit semé de Cailloux.’
Pointing an accusatory finger at me, as if I were the aforementioned carcass, she swayed to the rhythm of her words, wild smile stretching her face, pupils dilated and gleaming with a strange glow. Sweat came onto her forehead and her eyes bathed in a strange mist of pure delirium. I plucked my eyes away. It was like hand-picking them out of my skull.
‘Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique, come on, open your legs Richard, brûlante et suant les poisons, ouvrait d'une façon nonchalante et cynique son ventre plein d'exhalaisons.’
A strange lullaby, and so it was, but so was she. And she chanted like that for a second more, mesmerising me, pulling with the gravity of her flawless French and taunting words down, down the spiral with her, until her wrist limped, her hand slowly lowered, and her eyelids closed. Her breath steadied, deepened and soon I realized she fell asleep mid-sentence. I watched for a while, took a hold of her hand, and counted the pumps of her blood. Then her neck, as I studied the slow ticks on her face. She dreamed, I gathered, instead of sleeping, like she intended, but at least in that state she was left alone. Terrified of leaving her like that, in her solitude, to awake in an empty, cold apartment I stayed there for a while. But my body twitched and squirmed into action. As her breath came in, poisonous rage flowed into me, burning every inactive cell. The dragon-slaying knight in shining armour awakened inside of me once again and without thinking, I stumbled onto my feet, took off my coat to put something around her, so she would freeze, and staggered out of the flat. My gait strayed uneven, but my steps gained in audacity and purpose with every meter devoured. With bitter taste of upcoming glory, I directed myself towards Henry’s layer.
My head was light, soaring miles away from Earth, breaking through the cotton barriers of clouds, shoving stars out of my way, dispersing galaxies, I was hot and cold at the same time, waves of burning strain crashed within my muscles with every stretch and cramp, and the wind cooled my body, now bared to it, rid of the safe layer of a coat. Greatest discomfort resonated all the way from my feet to my knees, as the soles of my shoes slipped every now and again against the wet cobblestone of the streets. Every cant of every stone, every empty space left by a stray foundation of the pavement filled me with utter desperation and an emotion so strong, so indescribable, I nearly threw up. Everything was too tight on my body, too damp and too cold. My hands suddenly appeared to bony and fragile as I balled them into fists at my sides to stop the antsy ticks that dripped over the joint of my fingers. At the back of my skull formed a sort of pressure familiar to some, especially those suffering from strong migraines. I experienced pain like that before, mainly due to alcohol overuse or exhaustion, never like that though. I had never feared for my precious eyeballs so much, never dreaded and anticipated the moment the pressure would become too much, and they’d pop right out of my eye sockets. My cheeks hollowed out, pulled to the inside of my mouth and I nibbled at the soft tissue to distract myself from the growing dizziness radiating straight from my corneas. Iron floated to my tongue, brought out bitter taste of anger even more. Ire and pain fumed in me like twin forces spurring each other on, keeping their flames burning.
I don’t remember much of my journey, how I got to where I had to be, how I managed to not crush into anyone or anything or any particular details of the spaces I run through, just the angry swelling of the darkened sky, as the clouds gathered to bring forth a snowstorm. I prayed, all the way there, that Henry would be home. And if not, I was wholly ready to roam across different apartments, even the campus to find him and shove my fist as far back his throat, so that he could see the stars that currently jumped around my field of vision. Seething, manifesting I arrived at his door, and I don’t know if thanks to my stupid luck, or the power of divine beings listening in on my pleadings, he was. In a matter of seconds, he answered to my brazen knocking, his dark head poked through a crack of an opened door, gold, short chain of a lock resting slightly against his curls. And maybe it was the sheer existence of the chain, maybe the austere face beneath it, but my tongue suddenly stuck to the roof of my mouth, dry and stiff as a log. I had so many things I wanted to say, to do, so many scenarios I planned in my mind, a myriad of quips, of angry yaps and barks, and yet in the face of a real challenge, when he measured me with his cold, distant gaze, I found I had nothing to say to him. I took a breath and stopped. My lungs swelled, pushed my chest out, he stared, not even bothering to unlock the door, as if I was just some peddler, bothering him. I shifted, trying to gaze into the apartment, he moved with me, squaring his shoulders, and obscuring my view completely. Either way I would be able to see anything like that, the light inside was turned off.
‘Richard,’ he said finally, his voice empty and flat. ‘What brings you here?’
I wasn’t able to speak yet, not even force myself to breathe properly. So, through some strange, dreamy influence, I raised my hands to the sides of my head and wagged my fingers back and forth, like when little kids do, if they want to imitate a bunny, which gathered no reaction from him, so I lowered my make-believe ears and wrapped them around my throat. And when his brows soared across his forehead, clearly not understanding what I was trying to communicate, I started to toss my head around, squirm and convulse. Muffled gurgles escaped my throat as my fingers tightened and tightened, squeezing my larynx in a grip I would never suspect myself of being able to pull. This must’ve come as quite a shock to him, to see me choke myself right at his doorstep.
‘What the- Richard, Jesus Christ! What are you doing?’
In one swift motion he tore the chain out of its place and swinging the door open, pulled me in by the collar. The move was so unexpected and at once so strong that I staggered forward, struggling to find any footing and by the end of my tumble I swung in the grasp of his extended hand – the only thing that saved me from smashing my face against the floor. My shirt creaked and I think popped unexpectedly at the seam, right over my left scapula. I whined, baffled, loud enough for the two men sitting inside to turn towards me.
The room I found, or rather forced, myself into was dark. Not dark like the night, that snuck up on me, quiet like a thief, right outside the building. No, rather dark like lack of any light. The curtains were drawn and only the luminescent outer line of windows. The rest of the room got drowned out in a blue-black cold of darkness. The air inside was stuffy and reeked of alcohol mixed with sweaty fumes of tobacco, likely suspended in the small space of what I could only assume was a saloon, for long hours. To the sides, against the walls and between various shapes, most probably pieces of furniture, poked some strange, sharp, and fuzzy or delicate and swaying objects. Plants, I thought to myself as I saw that some of them stood proudly on lean wooden stems, and other chose to bend down and slither right into the murky embrace of dark sliding across the floor. Heavy mist of conspiracy wrapped itself around the whole space, tucked itself into every nook and cranny. What struck me the most about the apartment though, was the utterly perfect silence scattered across it, disturbed only periodically by the cars passing slowly by, down, down, down below. Against the backdrop of obscured rectangles of windows two man sat, lit from behind, their sharp features presented themselves disturbingly alien. Their hair, accumulated around their heads into thick manes of dark matter, lighter only at the ends, when the moon could tear through the sheerest layers and colour them in coronae of copper and gold. Long faces starved and caved in at the edges, bone-showing, dead-eyed, terrifying sculptures tasked me with unison judgment. The smaller, gilded boy nursed a glass against his abdomen, the other, red judge held up a smoking pipe. God, how I wished to be drunk in that moment.
‘Oh, Richard, fancy seeing you here.’
‘Do you really, Francis?’
Once Henry released me, I stumbled a bit forward then regained my balance. Somehow, I discovered it was much easier to regain my previous rebellious disposition when I didn’t have to face him. It was easier to be a dick towards Francis, than Henry. To spit all the venom the bile accumulated throughout the day, days, weeks. It was easier to speak the truth when the person I feared most telling it to wasn’t facing me. The boys in the chairs shuffled uncomfortably, Charles swirled the drink in his glass a couple of times. Dark liquid swirled into a small tornado and then fell back into its given shape. I bit the inside of my cheek.
‘Are you alone? Is it just the three of you?’
An uneven drag sounded somewhere behind me, most likely announcing that Henry chose to change positions or chose his sitting anew.
‘What’s it to you?’ He asked. ‘You come over unannounced, barge in, you don’t even answer our questions, and now you expect us to answer yours?’
Something in his voice, maybe the cold distance or the chilling indifference towards my exemplary rudeness, unnerved me. As if he wasn’t even bothered nor interested by it all, cut off completely from me, from the world, from its actions. Maybe it was his resignation that rendered him so inhuman, stirred him to ask and answer and act like a robot, inquiring on auto pilot, that took me to the hights of my ire.
‘I met her, I was at her apartment, she’s got the bruises still, she’s a mess. I’m here because you’re here. Sitting. Doing nothing, and she withers. I’m here because you don’t even know that, because you don’t even bother to check. So now, are you alone?’
A quick glance exchanged by the boys in the chairs told me they knew. Three steps and I was by them, starring daggers into the beautiful, alien aureoles of their heads. My hands gripped the headrests above them, ruffled them into my fists, successfully closing in on them, creating a circle of my arms so that they could not escape me.
‘She does not have water at her apartment, no lants, no books, nothing. It does not even look like her apartment no more. She lives there alone, sleeps on the couch, leaves the door open, and you won’t even talk to her, you talk to Bunny, miserable traitors.’
‘What traitors, Richard? We’re all friends here, she just focuses on her studies more right now, come on, why so angry?’
‘Oh, don’t give me that shit Francis. There is something terribly wrong going on inside of her, she faced and managed to get away from a terrible fate, we didn’t act in time and now you act like nothing happened?! You cut her off when she needed you, you let her disappear, you-‘
I spun on my heel, not carrying about the yaps of the boys raising from their chairs grabbing at me, when I already stepped away, decided on my new direction. I pointed an accusatory finger into the dark, where a lean dark shadow stood perched, no sign of shame seeded in its body. ‘You let her go you allowed to go away, you changed your school desks, you bastrad. You might as well be the reason for her being like this right now!’
Something hard and overwhelmingly heavy hit my back, settled between my shoulder blades. A sweet smell, floral and light hit my nostrils as I felt a sharp cheek bone digging into my jaw, bony hands sliding across it, trying to grip and close my mouth.
‘Stop screaming, stop fucking screaming, Richard, stop it, now I tell you!’
High-pitched squeals of Charles filled my ears as I dug my elbow into his ribs and shrugged his weight off my shoulders in an unbelievable fit of athletic prowess. Somewhere, in the corners of my eye I noticed that he stumbled a few steps back and knocked into Francis, who apparently was hot on my heels. I took the opportunity and lunged forward, tearing my throat out.
‘You shut up, you shut up, just shut up, and do something! You abandoned her, you-‘
I didn’t not expect the clash. Nor did I expect the arms, the bronze snarls, that wrapped around me, my nape, my head, auspiciously muffling my screams, tugging me into the grey mass that was my opponent. The tumble was unfair, predestined from the second I took my first step, I knew it, when Henry’s surprisingly hot breath fanned my ear. Funny, at this point I thought he would cough and wheezing with icy stilettos, instead he huffed pure fire. Matter of fact, his whole body fumed with ghastly feverish heat waves, unbalancing the air around us. I felt something rumbling in his chest, like a thunder, and then as his fingers comped through the locks at the back of my head and pulled it backwards, painfully far, strikingly ungentle, I saw his face clearly, for what I could gather, first time in weeks.
All fell silent when I met his gaze and the room, the boys, their animalistic pants, the plant, it all disappeared, and all that existed, all that lived, and breathed died and focused inside of those black, soulless shark eyes.
Scrupulously austere, locked into a heavy mask was his physiognomy. And yet, up close I could see the cracks. Harsh and deep in how his brows furrowed, how his lips turned down their corners, how a vein popped regularly on his forehead. His glasses cast no reflection, no shadows over his dark eyes as they filled with such torment, such ache I don’t think I would be ever able to gaze into them if he wasn’t holding me still, craning over me like a gargoyle swinging off a cathedral’s roof, judging the sinners, scaring off the unfaithful. In that bend he looked starved, famished and lonely for something. I though, in a brilliant second of sobriety, that, as I had noticed before, those eyes were a mirror image of hers. He too, surprisingly enough, had not took the severance too well. Maybe the half that she lost, and he so desperately searched for in my face, the filling they both lacked and without which they could not live, was one and the same.
I did not expect to see through his heart’s frosty discipline so easily, so abruptly and so it was not the grip truly, that had settled me into stillness, but that beggar’s stare. For a split moment we stood in silence, locked in a hug so uncomfortable, on both physical and metaphysical plane, I cringed. From the depths of me surged disgust, slimy and languid, and as his eyes flew over my form, I felt it crawling up my throat. Pathetic, I thought, he was pathetic gripping me like that, lazy for expecting me to hand him a dagger of words that could disembowel him. And yet between the irregular crack of his face, amongst the frosty spikes of hoar and rime I saw a soft spark of something strong, still not forged into completion, but nursed and thought over countless times. It was not ire, not anger, not pain. Calculated and mixed into a brew stronger than any combination of those emotions, he, probably yet not aware of the fact, has flung himself into a spiral of vicious madness, unrecognisable to those, who had not experienced misery. So, I spoke, handed him the tanto.
‘Where is your honour, Henry? What are you doing, pushing her away? Do you want to punish her, instead of him?’
With that, his guts spilled, the truth gushed out of his mouth. And his eyes, like the shark’s buttony orbs dilated at the smell of his own blood.
‘I’m not punishing her. I’m protecting her, keeping away from the just punishment I plan to deal.’
His voice sounded husky, gravely in my ear as he seeped venom into it. It burned, the temperature, the words, the slight tremble of his vocal cords as it all splashed against the shell and soaked into the eardrum.
‘I’m going to kill Bunny for what he had done to her, to us, to others, and she’ll have nothing to with this. With me.’
Stunned, I mulled over his words, I let the marinate inside my brain and I nibbled on every syllable like a capricious critic. I took them in, broke the pallet of tastes, analysed. Finally, after swallowing the context, after understanding the bitter flavour he has served me, slowly, I nodded.
‘But I will,’ not a question, a statement. ‘They will as well.’
Two shadows hummed in unison behind me, giving me an almost silent confirmation of what I’ve already figured out. A Cheshire, lucid grin cracked opened on Henry’s lips, as he too let out a pleased sound. His teeth, straight and white gleamed in the dark, two rows of beastly weapons.
‘I don’t think you have a choice, Richard, now you join us, or you join Bunny.’
Fear and trepidation scurried cross me as I realised, I had walked right into a murder council. Worse, elation washed over me with the realisation that the head of the jury, the demented predator, currently holding me in his grip, had no mercy to give to the swine I most desired to see dead.
#bunny corcoran#camilla macaulay#charles macaulay#francis abernathy#henry winter#henry winter x reader#richard papen#the secret history#afab reader#fanfic
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Coming soon! A fic for @discordantwords, whose old prompt for Sherlock and John on a carnival ride wormed its way into my brain and never let go.
Roundabout: When John and Sherlock find themselves stuck on what just might be the oldest wheel in England, they finally run out of excuses and confront their feelings. Confessions abound.
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Thinking about Mara Sov as the one who made Savathun into a Guardian, in the sense that she got the killing blow in on first-life Sav via performing the exorcism of her worm mortally wounding her in the process...
I do wonder how Mara feels about bringing a new Lightbearer into the world, given her sentiments toward Guardians, and a Lightbearer Hive at that, given all that they’ve taken from her, and it being Savathun, with whom she has tremendous personal animosity.
And more than that: by lifting the curse of the worm leaving a power vacuum for the Light to claim its millennia-denied place, she essentially acted as the second mother of the Lucent Brood in a roundabout way. The Lucent Brood would not exist without the Witch, Radiant, but She wouldn’t exist without Mara Sov.
So we have a situation where Mara has transfigured a whole people twice, first with the crew of the Yang Liwei (directly), second with Savathun’s brood (indirectly), twice where she helped deliver a species from darkness, but ushering in untold and unforeseeable new conflict and strife in the process.
And if you consider Savathun’s role in the collapse, protecting the Traveler which perhaps allowed for its final stand against the Black Fleet, the burst of Light that mingled with Darkness which saved Mara Sov and opened the path for the creation of the Awoken . . . well, the case can be made that Savathun set forth the chain of events that allowed for the existence of Mara as we know her today.
They are each other’s banes and neither would exist if not for the other.
#destiny#mara sov#savathun#the witch queen#destiny 2 is a game about girls transforming each other into newer and better and more terrible things <3<3<3
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Can you do Stan, Ford, and Bill (gravity falls) headcanons? If not that’s completely fine! Take your time!!
☆⑅Felony Trio Headcanons⑅☆
(Stan, Ford & Bill)
~No idea if these three have an actual group name or not, but this is what I'm going with. You can't tell me they haven't committed at least one a piece, accidentally and/or on purpose. These sillies will always have a special place in my heart as one of my earlier obsessions. Thank you for requesting!~
❓Stanley💵
General:
Silly con-man gives me ler-leaning switch vibes. Loves wrecking his family, but wouldn’t mind the occasional giggle-fest.
Over the years, he’s developed the elusive “can say the t-word whenever” power, though it definitely didn’t used to be that way. Ford reminds him of that whenever it’s most annoying.
Can easily admit that he likes tickling others, but receiving it? Yeah, good luck. He’s willing to die on that hill.
Lee:
A bit rare, but he will get lee moods. He’s a “ride it out in silence” kinda guy, but Ford can sometimes catch onto his bullshit (definitely not bc he does it too what-)
If he DOES try and solve his problem, it’ll be in the most roundabout way possible. Provoking his brother, teasing his great niece and nephew until they try something, you name it. If it works, it works.
Worst spots are his armpits and the area right beneath his belly button. Enjoy watching him lose his mind if you target either one ♡
Melt spot is his ears. You can’t tell me his goofy ears wouldn’t make him giggle his heart out; he’d love every second of it.
Very gruff, choppy giggles. Sounds kinda like he’s been chain smoking, then saw the funniest thing in his life. When you really get him going, deep and rough belly laughter. Occasional snorts if you wanna kill him.
Ler:
When he gets in a ler mood, he’ll either bother his overworking brother or mess with one of the kids. Sometimes his family can tell, though he won’t normally admit anything.
Such a wonderful asshole of a ler-
Teases, smart-ass comments, horrible dad jokes, and more! Definitely the one to go to if you want a shameless wrecking.
“You’re a lil’ squeak toy, huh? I just squeeze your side and- yup, just like that.”
“Ya know, you could’ve just pushed me away by now. Don’t worry, I noticed.”
“You sure squirm a lot, don'tcha? Like a lil’ worm, could use you as fishing bait!”
“It tickles? Wow, that must really suck for you.”
Pretty good with aftercare. He'll ruffle your hair and tease you, of course, but he lets you lay on him while the TV plays. Fair trade, honestly.
👓Stanford🖋️
General:
Can you really tell me he isn't at least a little lee? After all those years with little to no comforting contact, he loves a good giggle fest.
Making his great niece and nephew laugh, though? Even better.
He doesn't always get that feeling, so I'm going lee-leaning switch.
Lee:
If you even mention it around him, he'll blush, no matter his mood. It's real bad when he's lee.
You can kinda gauge if he's in a mood by just saying the t-word (if you can, that is)
If you don't have that magic, then he's still pretty obvious in other ways.
Extra stuttering, constantly adjusting his glasses, eyes lingering on your hands, wobbly smiles. If you've got eyes, you'll be able to tell.
Will deny it at first, but it's pretty flimsy.
“I-I don't know what you're talking about. I survived the roughest interdimensional plane there is. I don't need…that.”
He falls apart the minute you wiggle your fingers at him.
Worst spots are his hips, followed by his ribs. A few squeezes to either will have him snorting up a storm.
Melt spots are his ears and the tops of his thighs. Like his brother, his ears are lovely to run a feather across for both him and the ler. He loves gentle traces on his thighs, though. Have him a melted, giggling puddle in seconds.
He loses tickle fights on purpose at least 76.4% of the time. Don’t ask me how I got that number: I just know.
Ler:
His ler moods are rare, but if he’s feeling a bit distant from his family, he’ll try and piece things with some giggles.
Soft, playful ler. He never wants to go too far, but he isn’t afraid to goof around and tease while he’s at it.
“I think I’ve got a leg up here, huh? Thanks to my extra fingers, this has gotta be at least 20% more ticklish~”
“You really do blush quite a lot. It’s pretty cute to watch.”
“As a scientist, it’s my job to conduct experiments. Let’s try now. Hypothesis: if I get your worst spot, you’ll laugh at least twice as loud as you are now. Time for the experiment~”
The moment you say stop, even if you don’t mean it, he pulls away. If you want more, you’ll have to ask him.
Pretty great with aftercare. Will absolutely cuddle you, maybe even tell some stories if you’re interested. He’s got plenty from his time in the portal, though he keeps the angstier ones to himself. Any tale he tells is almost guaranteed to make you smile.
🎩Bill💛
General:
Believe it or not, the chaotic dorito does like tickling. In fact, after him and Mabel’s interaction, they seem to randomly plague his thoughts at the most inopportune times. It goes in either direction, his moods as random as his personality.
Considering this, we’re gonna go straight-up switch.
Lee:
These moods are especially hard for the demon to satiate. His friends are insane, but none completely batshit enough to try something like tickling him. When he needs a fix, he usually has to outsource it or suffer until it goes away.
On the off chance he does outsource, he goes for one of the Pines twins. They’re hesitant to let him in, but he’s a sweet-talker. Once he’s inside, it barely takes an hour for him to provoke someone into wrecking him.
His spots vary based on the body he’s inhabiting. The one time he was tickled in his own (Weirdmageddon incident, don’t ask), he found that his hat and feet got him laughing the most.
(don’t come at me, his hat re-grew flesh when he got shot in it)
He doesn’t really have a distinct melt spot, though he loves being tickled right beneath his bowtie. It makes him kick and squirm, but it also makes him incredibly giddy.
Ler:
I’d tell you to run for your life, but it won’t do you much good.
Evil, sarcastic and rough ler. Good luck breathing o7
The kinda dude to go for all your worst spots first, and only explore the softer side if he’s wanting to spice things up.
Can and will generate any tool he feels like to wreck you (surprisingly enough, he’ll ask first)
Boundaries really need to be set before anything happens. Otherwise he’ll just go until he feels like stopping. If you look on the brink of passing out, he’ll quit, but other than that nah.
VERY teasy, with a large handful of sarcasm and sass.
“Geez, you laugh really loud when I get ya here. Mind dialing it down? I don’t wanna go deaf before I’m 20 million.”
“Ha! You snort? I’ve gotta hear that again, c’mon!”
“You’re confusing. You say ‘no, go away,’ but you haven’t even tried escaping. I’m supposed to be the crazy one here; mind explaining?”
“Wow, this is driving you nuts, huh? We’re gonna match!”
Not super great at aftercare unless you ask. He can make any snack or drink you want by snapping, and he knows some great rom-coms to doze off to (don’t ask why unless you wanna go for round two).
#gravity falls tickle#ticklish!stan#ticklish!ford#ticklish!bill#sfw tickling community#tickle#gf tickle#sfw tickle headcanons#lee!ford#lee!stan#lee!bill#ler!ford#ler!stan#ler!bill#ticklish!stanford#ticklish!stanley#gravity falls#tickle thoughts
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i'm curious: since mav is bradley's legal guardian (permanent, I assume) does that mean he's probably on shore assignments (or top gun, i guess) for the majority of his naval career instead of what he does in the original canon (quits top gun, never goes back to teach after that first time, presumably is on deployment a lot before he gets in trouble for something and gets put in the test pilot program?) that's an interesting prospect to me since it seems similar to a lot of pre-tgm fic, where mav just... like, stayed at top gun after '86, and never left, but obvi in most of that, he didn't have a kid to take care of. i mean, things probably change a lot after bradley... maybe cuts ties in the 00s?? if the pulling papers things still happens, but with all the family support and no mention of carole ever explicitly telling mav in the beginning about not letting bradley fly, i'm also curious how that plays out too since it's also probably v canon-divergent. and also — how do u think ice's career trajectory goes? ive seen many takes on how he got to compacflt lol
Hey nonnie! Whew, buckle up, I have a lot of thoughts.
They're going to be at Top Gun for a while, but they won't be staying there. Ice will come back later on, but Mav will be doing other things. This is going to be long and rambly so if you want to read (and aren't bothered by vague spoilers) more under the cut!
With wars coming up they're going to be shifted around back to active duty flying, particularly in Desert Storm. Mav figures out a way to make it work but he refuses to let Ice go without him, and Bradley gets it because he's a military kid. They also aren't going to always be together; actually, they spend quite a few years apart, which is going to hurt my heart to write.
They try to stick to the West Coast. I don't know how much you know about the Navy, but the two main hubs are San Diego and Norfolk, Virginia. In real life they shifted Top Gun out to Fallon, Nevada, but since in the canon of the movie it's still in Fightertown it will be staying there. Most Naval Aviators on the west coast are actually stationed at Lemoore, a base in the middle of California which is a bit of a shithole if my cousin Jay is to be believed, lol, while the east coast aviator hub is Oceania, Virginia. Aviators go through cycles of on a ship, leaving a ship, and then into fleet replacement training to go back on a ship. As soon as my cousin the aviator gets a good night sleep I'm going to pick his brain more about it. If anyone reading this is an aviator or knows one hit me up! I adore my cousin but talking is not his superpower. I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.
Anyway to answer your question it's going to be a bit roundabout. IRL you have to have a plan for your dependents in case of deployment and Mav gets it figured out with Ice's help as for who will watch Bradley which will be a whole other can of worms but I don't think Mav or Ice are the type to watch their friends go off to war without them. I haven't fleshed it all the way out but Mav is going to CHOOSE the test pilot path, mostly because it keeps him close to Bradley, and he's going to be doing some special ops shit because in my brain that's literally the only reason the kids in the movie have no fucking clue who he is even though they've all been to Top Gun and walked past his picture EVERY DAY in the atrium, haha.
He's still Mav so yes he will still be pissing off Admirals.
As for Ice, I haven't figured out exactly how I want to get him there I'm still doing research. I do know that they have to command ships so at some point he'll get a carrier most likely because he's Ice and who the hell better to hand a carrier to, in my opinion. He leaves the sky fairly early in his career if you look at the whole span of it, partly because flying is something he loves but doesn't define him like it does for Mav, and this way he can keep Mav up there doing what he loves while he also gets to climb the ladder. It's a lot of politics which I hate so I'll be grumpy about having to research all that shit but I mean COME ON, it's Ice. Of course he gets a fucking Fleet. I also headcanon that the Joint Chiefs are beating his door down and he's just like that Obama eye meme saying THEN PERISH because he likes being able to go to the ocean to escape them.
Anyway back to the Navy, not sure if you or anyone who is into Top Gun knows this, but Ice is quite literally AS HIGH as you can go in the Navy. There hasn't been a Fleet Admiral (with the five stars) since Nimitz died in '66 and has only ever been held by four dudes: William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and William Halsey Jr. (names you may recognize if you know your WWII Naval history but I digress). So basically four-star Admiral is IT, like that is the top of the ladder, unless you get asked to join the Joint Chiefs of Staff and work directly with the president. Tom likes to be in charge of things so I think the Joint Chiefs would be hard for him - they have no direct control over the Navy at all and it's a desk job in Washington D.C.
Maybe one day he could become the Secretary of the Navy, but I don't know if I can see Tom doing that, tbh. They have to be 5 years removed from military service at minimum. So I dunno. Still up in the air as far as Tom! Right at this moment he's being an asshole on an aircraft carrier in 1987, so there's that.
#sassy answers asks#i'll ride au#vague spoilers under cut#it's just about where mav and ice's careers are headed#nothing super specific#and i haven't decided most of it yet anyway lol
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"Georgie, do you know you're a robot?" Alex says casually, but the way he's assessing George is anything but.
"Ha-ha." George says with a straight face. It's not like Alex to resort to the lowest common denominator jokes, George's heard it a thousand times, he's awkward, stilted, Pinocchio, robot. Alex usually aims deeper with his casual insults and leave George up at night discovering he has a new insecurity now. Once it was 'having a side profile that was in the reject pile for Roman coins.'
"No, really." The strangest thing is Alex sounds dead serious, no upturned quirk of his lips George knows is a giveaway when he's playing a joke. "Well. You have an override that deflects self actualisation. But robots aren't supposed to fall in love either, and you overrode that." Alex scrutinises him, voice calm.
"You're not being funny, Alex." George retorts, rubbing his palms against his thighs. It's weird, he can't see any of Alex's tells, as if overnight he became an excellent liar. What else has he lied about straightlaced like this, and George had no clue? He'd always prided himself on knowing Alex, better than anyone. It makes a panicky feeling bubble up, he doesn't like thinking of Alex intentionally being duplicitous; it's paranoid, it's unbecoming.
"Come on. Aren't there things that don't add up?" Alex urges gently, takes his hands, warm against his, which are slightly sweaty. He runs a thumb over George's pulse and George can feel it thudding. George looks up at Alex, confused why he's doing this. He's barely actually registered the consideration, too ridiculous to even think about, but rather why Alex is bringing it up. Is it his roundabout way of telling George he's robotic? They're going through the motions? He had thought things were going fine. Are they not adding up anymore?
It's a little bit insecure to say, 'are you breaking up with me?' at your boyfriend calling you a robot.
"Why are you saying that?" George asks, and it sounds more pathetic than he meant it. Would a robot be this emotional, Albon? A treacherous thought in his head betrays him, that of course he would be programmed to feel them.
"Nevermind." Alex sighs, looking disappointed. George hates disappointing Alex but he doesn't know -- should he have played along? Maybe Alex is bored of his robotic boyfriend who can't play along with a joke.
"I'm sorry." George blurts out.
Alex shakes his head, smiling now, squeezing George's hand one before letting go. "Got you. I'm sorry, it was a bad joke." His hands feel awfully cold now.
It's what George wanted to hear but now Alex sounds insincere, like he's trying to cover something up -- the Alex he knows how to read. Alex presses a kiss against his temple in apology, George's heart lurches the way it always does when Alex is this close to him.
"Seriously, don't even think about it."
George thinks about it.
He thinks about it a lot, at how honest Alex had looked in his assertions. He's in the bathroom, washing his face, Alex is in their bedroom putting something on the telly. His boyfriend. Why would Alex be dating a... not a real person, George wonders hysterically, staring at the mirror like his face holds the answers.
He frowns. If Alex was a robot, but he was still Alex, George would still be with him; no questions asked. They've already gone over the worm question, George would build a terrarium with plenty of enrichment.
Staring at his own reflection until his own face started looking strange to him. Too unnervingly blueish silver eyes, a chin that juts out too much, pores around his nose, patch of redness around his neck. All these little imperfections that pile on, why would someone create something and then give it flaws? That seemed antithetical. He sprayed water over his face -- doesn't short circuit like an iPhone charger because he's a real boy.
Things that don't add up... Alex had said. Everything added up, he had a pretty average childhood like everyone else, mum dad sister and a dog. University. Alex. Alex. Alex. It was all accounted for.
'Aren't supposed to fall in love either...'
George can't remember falling in love with Alex. He frowns. He has a million memories of him, all catalogued. From the smallest micro-expression change, to how his eyes light up when he sees a cat or how he groans before coming, shivering together when they got caught in the rain, their first real fight during a road trip and Alex's casual 'we'll wing it' and finding the motel they were supposed to stay at was booked finally getting to George's need for structure, apologies in the form of convenience store snacks and hooking up in Alex's shitty Toyota. All of those are real, tangible experiences. There is life before Alex but he doesn't put too much stock into it. There's life after Alex but George doesn't think about it, that's barely living.
There's a razor, beside all of Alex's hair dye products. George is relatively hairless, something Alex has harmlessly made fun of many times -- not being able to grow any facial hair. He's never dyed his hair either, in fact altering his appearance had never been something he'd considered, even as Alex went from red to blonde to brown; gorgeous in all. No tattoos, no piercings, not even a single scar from a scrappy childhood fight; completely unblemished, unchanged. Maybe it's arrogance, he knew he was perceived as handsome -- Alex certainly found him so, so why change what works already? He chalked it off to being conservative in his fashion sense, and risk averse to never offend anyone to get in a fight, rather than any conscious decision making to avoid it.
How's this for impulse decision making? George thinks, taking the razor and swiping his against dried cheek. He'd have a tiny scar, no more unblemished and perfect. A hysterical laugh bubbles in his chest if a copper asks what happened, Officer I gave myself an uppercut because my boyfriend played a cruel joke and I had to confirm my morality, no, please don't take him away.
He swipes it before he can think of why he shouldn't, a dozen reasons why forming an excel pros and cons list in his mind with the pros side blank. A frantic voice in his head saying he's being irrational, that nothing's going to come out of this and he's going to be feel real stupid. He's never hurt himself on purpose before. Alex is going to think he's such an idiot.
It stings.
George waits for the drop of blood.
Instead, he watches as his skin instantly heals itself where George had cut it, completely disappearing, leaving it smooth and unmarked.
"Bake-off's on, get in here already." Alex calls from their bedroom.
#galex#robot gr au#cw: self harm to confirm he's a real boy and not a bunch of wires#f1 rpf#my fics#this isn't Good but it came to me fully formed and I'm stuck in traffic#robot au
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Trigun Ultimate 2 (Part 4)
Will this volume ever end? Why do I have so much to say?
OOOOooOOooooh, it is woowootime. Nyehehehehehehe *continues to say even more about its favourite character!*
Chapter 6: A gathering of demons
Oh, I love how nightow portrays the vastness of the desert. How much is an ile? How big is this planet? Is it earthlike? With no oceans and all... are the cities splayed out? I am European and live in a big city conglomerate. In two hours, I can switch countries and visit like 20 different cities. This picture reminds me of the "Wild West". I remember American friends being shocked at how connected everything is and how we Europeans see distance. For them a 4-12 hour drive is totally normal and you are still in the same state. I can only imagine that No-Man's-Land is even worse than that.
But what does that entail? Is travel between cities something regular or something you only do if you try and get work or flee from something? There is the big trade between the cities, but those have to be the outliers. Sandstreamers being something like trains. I imagine that they are mostly used for commerce, then. Transporting people has to be a lesser side hustle.
But how long does the journey with a bus between the cities take? I'd say days with the thoughts I just had.
I leave the Wolfwood introduction panel out, because of the limitations for pictures, but damn, it is good. It also took me too long to realise that this was not fabricated, but that Wolfwood literally had a bike mishap. His whole interaction with Vash reads differently for me when I take this into consideration.
Three things. 1. what I like about Wolfwood’s design is that if you don’t take the tit window and the facial scruff into consideration, he is dressed like a typical Japanese salary man! A nobody, one of many. Black short hair with suit, he could be a 0815 background character/random casualty in nearly any anime/manga. But here, he falls out of the line. All in black in the desert heat, that is suicide! He is not dressed like the others in typical western clothes. He’s an outlier from the start but at the same time a very usual sight for us readers!
2. I love how silly and welcoming he is. He is just a very charming random dude. We next to never see him interact with random people after this, so we miss this side of him in the later volumes. But he easily fits in and connects, even as a weird outlier. He is an idiot, but an idiot with street smarts.
3. Maybe because I am not a native English speaker, but I stumbled more than once over the word “tradesman” as a colloquial term for assassin. Kinda a roundabout way to say, hey, if you’re interested in me, I may provide you with more information and maybe I have the kind of skill you’re looking for. Tradesman basically means person with a specific skill, so not elaborating on that, but letting people mock him always reads for me as Wolfwood playing with being caught/putting his “profession” down/offering work. That he has a good eye is shown on the next page with him immediately realising who Vash is (at least he know the bounty pics and knows how to look. Wolfwood is not faceblind!)
Without the context of Milly being especially perceptive, this always read for me as Vash being absolutely annoyed by Wolfwood and being distrusting, when in reality he seems to be already warming up to him. Like with us readers, Wolfwood has wormed himself into his heart already. Who could deny Wolfy?
“‘Bout time I left, anyway.” Rings differently when you know him more. Wolfwood is a person that has his foot already out of the door to be not a burden to anyone nice. And we learn that in his introduction.
Wolfwood looks so damn fucking young there. I always have big problems in discerning ages in Manga. But even with his scruff, Wolfwood looks barely out of his teens.
When I think about the different WooWoo-versions, I always deck '98 as the oldest in his mid to end thirties, Ultimate barely 20, Trimax 30 max and Stampede... Sorry, StampWolfwood, you are still in your teens for me. You are baby.
I always remembered Wolfwood as a liar by omission, but damn, he is doing everything but spelling stuff out. “Not exactly just that…” Damn, and he looks so pained. Vash surely zoomed in on it. I now believe, the only reason why we know stuff so late about Wolfwood is because Vash never asked or tried to pin Wolfwood down.
The following pages is Wolfwood sharing his money with the orphans and I love it. We get to know Wolfwood as a very perceptive, benevolent and honest guy, who seems to be desperately begging for people to see him, to ask more about him. As much as he is funny, we also see someone who sees himself as a burden and who is burdened by a big responsibility and who still shares and gives as much as he can. No wonder Vash smiled with such earnesty. Wolfwood is the personification of what makes him still have hope in humanity.
Chapter 7: The demon’s eye
You know him just for this little bus drive and you already trust him with that info, Vash. Wolfwood is part of the team now, wether they realised it or not. Like I said in the chapter before, the journey must take longer, so they may have had a few days to bond.
He knows what happened. We learn in the next chapter why Wolfwood is there. It is easy to put two and two together for him.
Or regrets that they have to part ways and Wolfwood has to go back to being the Punisher. He had a short dance with Lady Death and then a little vacation where he could be human.
As much as we learn that Wolfwood hates his predicament, it is his duty. There is a reason why he does what he does.
It is kinda sad that Wolfwood left immediately. Nightow, most likely, had other stuff planned, but the cancellation of the magazine kinda threw a wrench into it. I kinda like how '98 did it with Vash and Wolfwood having their own little adventure on the journey.
Funny observation. People are there, because there is gunshots. Not children’s laughs or anything, it is gunshots that show that people are there. What a shitty world they live in.
08: The fifth moon
Did Legato control the corpses? Or did he “take in” the survivors and used experiments on them? Nicholas knows his bounties. Without him, I wouldn't peg them as the Slavers.
First of all, the hint/info that Vash and Knifes are both not human. A man between a rock and a hard place. A well-prepared dead man, but a dead man either way.
Since we as a reader already have a bond with Wolfwood, he is our point of reference for a "normal" human reaction to the shit that goes down. Nightow regularly flashes back to Wolfwood's reaction to it all. Either so we don't forget that he is part of the EVUL or to bring down that point how fucked up Knives is (especially with the SA-symbolism). People with uteri will agree either way that the scene with the sister being that pregnant and Knives bursting out is… massive body horror.
At least both legs and one arm are smashed, pelvis most likely, too, his head is squished into his torso, neck broken? and I have no idea how else he is crumbled up. Paper doll Legato
Vash didn’t only shoot himself to regain control. He shot Knives, too! He shot Knives to get free, but it was already too late.
While someone else (I am sorry, I am bad with names D; If I find you again, I will link your post) has put it brilliantly how Knives taking control over Vash can be read as assault, there is something else I’d like to point out.
Knives is the only person in the whole story who has been able to take control from Vash. We have seen him fight so many people, like Neon, Monev and others, but Vash never was not in control. He put rules upon himself that constricted him, e.g. the pacifism, but those constrictions were by his own decision. Vash takes into consideration that he may die, but it is by his own free will and as we have seen, he is a bit suicidal. Likewike, Vash gives people all the agency, all his agency. He mostly reacts to their decisions towards him. Knives is the only person in the whole world who is able to take away Vash’s agency and he uses that power over him. Not going into powerscaling or such a thing, but it shows what a powerful player Knives is.
Again, Wolfwood is our focus point for human reaction. Dude is scared out of his mind and mixing both brothers. Messengers of God coming to cast down judgement on us? That would be Knives, not Vash. But he demands an answer from Vash, with whom he already formed a connection. Wolfwood may feel even somewhat betrayed, as hypocritical as that is.
#trigunbookclub#trigun bookclub#Trigun Ultimate 2.4#It is done#I am finally through with it#Also WooWoo#here to break my heart again
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In the Great Tumblr Bug Race, Kiyotaka would vote for worm, both because it's the underdog and he appreciates the efforts of worms the most, tilling the soil and making compost for our crops. Chihiro would vote for the caterpillar bc of the inherent transformation symbolism and it's green so it's like. a roundabout attempt at self-love. Mondo would vote for the snail bc he saw Turbo once.
I’ve never received a more correct ask in my life.
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Synthetic // Prologue
Viktor/Fem!Reader
Rating: Mature // 1.9K words // Angst, Brief suicidal thoughts
Viktor thought he knew was loneliness was. What loneliness felt like.
Viktor was wrong.
Prologue // Ch.1
---
Viktor thought he knew what loneliness was.
What loneliness felt like.
A deep, clawing, intimate feeling that wormed its way into your chest and made itself a home- nearly so close and dear that you weren’t lonely anymore, because the feeling would always be with you. Viktor remembered sitting on the sand of the pond, a ways away from the children his age screaming and jumping into the water. The youth were uncaring of the toxins, or the air, just that they were with each other and having fun. And Viktor was with them, at least, in his mind, as he sat leagues away, his homemade toy boat keeping him company. From here he could imagine himself among them as he tinkered, screwing in bolts and connecting wires as he bathed in their laughter. Sometimes, when he was feeling bold, he’d stare, brows turned up in wonder of what could’ve been. Once, one of the kids made eye contact with him, but just as he offered a tentative smile, they turned away, back to their friends, ignoring him entirely. He decided after that, for reasons unrelated, he would move down to the ravines.
And he was alone again.
Until he met the Scientist and Rio, in the dark, glowing caves that one wouldn’t’ve noticed unless you knew where they were. The flowers that shone like amethysts littering the cave, thriving in the less than ideal conditions. Viktor thought he found his place there. He wouldn’t need the children up top, who ignored him like he was lint on their shoes, when he had his mentor and something to care for. Willful ignorance, it was. He was so happy to be somewhere he was wanted, he ignored the signs. Ignored how Rio’s scales dulled, the animals movements slugging over time, the Scientist’s methods cruel in a way they weren’t before. But Viktor had to wake up eventually, and when he did, the loneliness returned, slinking back with him to his family home.
Then he began noticing the whispers of inventions and commotion and The Academy.
He decided he’d go, there must be people like him there, right? People who’d cure his loneliness, who’d extend a hand. His mother, whom he looked much too alike, stared at him as he tied his uniform tie. Something he’d scrounged and saved up for, and a small, innocuous bag filled with his meager belongings. He hadn’t officially enrolled in The Academy, they didn’t take people from the Undercity, but things like that hadn’t stopped him before. What did stop him, however, were his mothers words. They were melancholic, lonely, and Viktor flinched as she touched his cheek, wishing he hadn’t inflicted those emotions upon her.
“Moje hvězda, please,” she begged, and Viktor turned away from her eyes, deep and golden like his own, “be realistic.”
Viktor didn’t want to be realistic. Being realistic meant staying at home for the rest of his life, fixing machines or toys people brought to him, and dying young, without a friend or legacy to his name. So no, Viktor didn’t want to be realistic, and he kissed his mother goodbye, heading to the bridge and dawning a new day.
A new, boring, lonely day.
Even in his bright eyed and bushy tailed naivete, Viktor realized that none of the Academy students spoke like him. Their accents were refined, and they spoke in a roundabout way that confused him, a far-cry from his way of speaking, blunt and heavy, turning his o’s into u’s and his i’s into e’s. So he didn’t speak, or else he would be found out and perhaps imprisoned. Keeping his head down was easy, he’d done it all his life. Nothing had changed. But apparently not speaking to anyone, consistently turning in projects on time, and receiving near perfect scores was something that drew attention. People whispered in the hall as he passed by, Professors recommending him for internships he couldn’t accept, and life continued on. All of the attention finally came to a head, like a trolley careening to the side and hitting a building that represented Viktor’s life.
“My dear boy, What might your name be?”
Viktor looked down at Professor Heimerdinger, heart beating a mile a minute, before glancing at the room full of his “peers”. They’d know.
“...It’s Viktor, sir,”
And with those words he became an assistant.
Assistant to the Dean, but an assistant nonetheless. He was confined to a desk, looking over reports and squirreling away information of any new proposals he found interesting. No one to talk to except Heimerdinger and the few words between people asking for audiences. Doing little more than twiddling his thumbs and dreaming, he wished he had stayed home. Had been realistic.
Viktor could remember the best day of his life. The day Jayce Talis of House Talis, the inventors of the collapsible pocket wrench, got himself into some deep shit.
And it’s totally not like Viktor was being completely opportunistic about the whole thing, no, that’s not it at all- he saw someone in need, and so he helped them.
And he got his first friend out of it.
After establishing Hex Tech, it was as if Viktor was experiencing the world anew, a set of rose colored glasses blinding him as he used them to magnify his work. It was everything he had ever wanted. To create, and to share. Jayce understood him, and they grew with each other- becoming more successful than he could’ve ever dreamed. The loneliness Viktor had homed waved farewell, and Viktor had kicked it and slammed the door on its way out, wishing it good riddance. It didn’t matter to him that Heimerdinger objected to the advancements of man-handled magic, or that his old classmates wouldn’t dare look him in the eye, whispering of a “sump rat scampering its way into Piltover”. It didn’t matter that as the Hex Gates came to a finish, Jayce spent more time at parties than with Viktor in the lab, perfecting the last few details. Networking, after all, was important too, even when Jayce’s desk began collecting dust.
It didn’t matter, because Viktor was happy. He had his work, and a friend.
But as the days stretched on, and the lab grew colder, there came a knock on the door of Viktor’s heart, and the loneliness had returned for the winter. Maybe that’s why Viktor could feel himself deteriorating, his bones shifting and joints aching, because he had all he ever thought he could want, and it still wasn’t enough. Waking up in a hospital bed, and seeing Jayce next to him for the first time in days only made him bitter. And that bitterness grew until he let it out, screaming as the Hex Core pulsed through him, angry at his only friend finally showing him his true colors. That he thought the home Viktor loved was full of nothing more than criminals, incriminating him in the process. And perhaps Jayce was right. Because as Viktor sat on the tile ground of the lab, holding the cracked glasses of their own assistant and surrounded by her ashes, Viktor thought, maybe I should’ve been turned back at the barricade.
And the council knew.
Of course they knew.
The disgust on their faces as he stood oh so small in the Council Room was crystal clear. Their gazes of contempt hooked their claws into him, and ripped him from the inside out- only exacerbating the grief he felt, the crushing emotions that plagued him. Jayce stared at him, something dark and conflicted that made him truly feel alone. And he raised his hand. The spotlights blinded Viktor, and his future was ripped away, the same way he’d ripped away Miss Young’s.
“We, the Council, find Viktor guilty of involuntary manslaughter and illegal experimentation. Henceforth, he shall be stripped of his Academic honors, and his position as a Hex Tech partner. Extradition from Piltover shall commence tomorrow morning at the fifth hour.”
And the floor was falling from under him, his work, his life, his friendship, up in flames. The mass of his misgreviences like stones tied to his ankles as he was pulled deeper into the depths of the River Pilt, the acidic water choking him until he passed.
“I’m sorry,” He mouthed to Jayce, a tremble in his body, the ache of his leg.
“I know,” Jayce said, the last flicker of warmth dying in his eyes.
And he turned away.
Viktor thought he knew what loneliness was.
What loneliness felt like.
Sitting here, though, in his childhood home on Emberflit Alley, proved that he never knew what it truly entailed. It was awful to experience loneliness, but became tolerable over time because you never knew anything else. But Viktor knew now, what it felt like to not be lonely. To have someone to talk to at the very least. The house was empty, his mother having passed years ago, and Viktor swore he could see her ghost out the corner of his eye, resentful for being left in her final moments. He should’ve visited. She was lonely.
His childhood room was threadbare, and the only part left of it was a desk and his bed, one that was always too small for his willowing figure, but was all they could afford. The window of his room, though cracked and drafty, had an expansive view of the Undercity, and the shimmering lights flicker in his gaze, the life of the city only just waking as the moon took hold of the sky.
And Viktor, his bones heavy and conscious heavier, began to cry.
He’d become selfish, having a taste of what it felt like to be wanted, and became a monster who would do anything to keep a hold of it. He felt it that day in the hospital room, bitter, not only at Jayce for straying, but at the universe for giving him something he wanted so desperately before yanking the rug out from under him. He just needed to find a way to prolong his life- give him back what he deserved.
And he had- at the cost of another.
Miss Young had her life ripped from her, all due to Viktor carelessness, and he would never be able to give it back.
The days in the house on Emberflit Alley strung together, and Viktor couldn’t remember when one night ended and another morning started, just that he’d accomplished his goal of being alive to the detriment of his life. A goal he couldn’t even abandon, now that it had affected others.
The walls seemed to cave in on him some days, the stairs creaking with imaginary footsteps, and one sided conversations Viktor would have with himself just to fill the quiet. He was restless, collecting scraps from the junkyards and whatever people had thrown out to clutter his home, pictures of families that weren’t his, or records from artists he didn’t like. A chair that belonged to the old woman down the street who’d bake him cookies when he was young. A lamp from the shopkeep across the road that was moving away.
And he was still lonely.
Viktor kept his too small bed, and stuffed it with as many pillows and blankets that he could afford. And he kept his desk, even though it wobbled, because it was the last thing his father had built for him before he had passed. Sat upon the desk were sheets of paper. Blueprints. The graphite smudged and eraser worn from where the designs were worked and reworked night after night, when Viktor could feel the walls closing in on him. A vaguely human face looked back at Viktors tired eyes, the schematics labeled meticulously.
He couldn’t stand being lonely anymore.
#Viktor#Viktor Arcane#Viktor x reader#Viktor x you#Arcane#Arcane x reader#Arcane angst#angst#Arcane (2021)#my fics#Synthetic BasicHexTechML
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