#I wish them an easy enlistment and good experiences. they deserve the world! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kiruuuuu · 5 years

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Dearest @nutbrain, I wish you also a happy birthday and all the best 💗💗 Thank you for sharing and discussing ideas and for your neverending support and kind words. This is partly a birthday gift and partly a retaliation in our kindness war, and I do hope you like it :)

In this, Bandit asks a djinn-like Doc to help win a war. Or: a lot of things are impossible. No explicit ships but you can use your imagination! (Rating G, fantasy AU, ~13k words)

Doc is summoned to oppressive heat.

The ritual, as always, he could’ve done without – his essence is being compressed and forced into an imperfect, almost laughable body incapable of representing his true self, the process far from comfortable. Organs are rearranged, replaced, removed, limbs melt together to form two legs to stand on, two arms; fur regresses and makes place for naked skin and fabric materialises seemingly out of thin air to match his last excursion’s fashion: deep blue adorns him as a vest, puffy grey surrounds his lower half.

It’s disorienting but that’s nothing new: taking on the form of a human usually leaves him light-headed and struggling to compose himself for a few seconds. Their sense of balance is inferior, as is their method of communicating – if he’s honest, he finds most about them distasteful, from their thinking to their deeds and yet they happen to inhabit the sweetest space of all. Breathing clean, fresh air is pure bliss, as is feeling sand and dust between his toes, the gravity just right to allow for actual jumps even in this frail body. How he loves being here and how he despises having to deal with this race of selfish, bloodthirsty predators.

Once his eyes have adapted to the brightness assaulting him (and even this is ultimately better than any alternative, he enjoys the sun), he looks around curiously to face those who decided to call upon him.

He’s confronted with just one man.

Where’s the committee, where are the sacrificial offerings? Doc is used to lavish surroundings, the secluded wing of a cathedral, a peaceful clearing in a forest, next to a gentle stream inside a decorated cave – instead he finds himself in a nondescript landscape, dunes in the distance, no more than shrubs in view which suggests they’re high up North, near the sweltering deserts of death. He’s been summoned behind a tent like a secret lover, not like the deity as which he’s normally revered.

The more he lets his gaze wander, the more indignation rises: the summoning circle below his feet has been scratched into the dry, cracked ground instead of being carefully painted on by calligraphers, there seems to be no food ready for him whatsoever and on top of that, the man looks like a mercenary. A closer look prompts Doc to correct himself, no, not a mercenary, he’s wearing a crest of some kind with pride, though his dirt-coloured clothing is ripped, his sandals stained, his sword dull and his skin marred. It’s clear what he is, becomes even clearer when Doc takes notice of more and evermore tents behind him, catches sight of other men and women clad similarly to the one before him.

“I offer you my greetings”, comes only part of the usual phrases uttered whenever Doc or one of his brethren are dragged into this world, “it is the fifth year of the scorpion, following forty-six years of the snake following one hundred and twenty-six years of the fly. We are near the numeric ocean, two days’ journey east of the capital of Qina, formerly the province of -”

Doc nods and the man stops his history lesson. He now knows when and where they are, though there still is no indication as to why.

“They call me Bandit, it’s an honour.” Instead of a bow or a similarly respectful gesture, he receives nothing. “You may speak.”

“You don’t look Qinean”, Doc states sharply as soon as he feels some of the tingling around him dissipate. For right now, he’s at its mercy, unable to act or leave either way, so he makes his words count.

“That is correct, I’m Rangiin Kamaan. The highest general there is.”

“Why do you require my services?”

A shadow flits over the man’s face but his piercing gaze doesn’t lower. He’s a prideful one, if he dares to summon the likes of Doc without an appropriate welcome – prideful, foolish and arrogant. “We are losing a war”, he replies quietly.

“Isn’t that a shame.” It comes as no surprise. He might not have visited this part of the continent in decades, possibly centuries, and yet humans are the same everywhere, all of them open books with the same kind of boring story on display. Envy, ire, hurt, arrogance – it’s all the same, whether it’s a dispute between neighbours or a widespread conflict involving more than just two nations.

Bandit seems dissatisfied with his lack of compassion but forces an easy grin nonetheless. “I don’t like being on the loser’s side. So I thought I’d ask for help. You’re good with anatomy, isn’t that right? You know how to eviscerate someone? Make them die a slow, painful death? The most efficient kinds of poison?”

“You”, Doc spits back, hardly masking his disdain, “are a warmonger. I know your kind. Do you even know who stands before you?”

“Someone who is glad to be here.” They glare at each other, neither of them backing down. They’ve reached an impasse: Doc cannot exit this world of his own accord, not with the circle intact, and Bandit wants him to cooperate which he will refuse to do. “The knowledge of summoning you has been passed down in my family and with it, your earthly name. You are Doc, one of the ancient ones, able yet often unwilling to assist us.”

“My powers are of restoration”, Doc adds with venom, “not destruction. I refuse to utilise them according to the wishes of a murderer and furthermore, I have always refrained in changing the tide of battle as have most of my kin. If your army is losing, perhaps it would’ve been wise not to go to war in the first place.”

“We had no choice -”

“There is always a choice!” More glaring. Doc silently both commends the human for his bravery and condemns him for his insolence. If he knew exactly who Doc is, he must’ve been overconfident or desperate to call on him regardless – he’s known for upholding the balance others of his kind with inferior standing might upset, known for healing rather than harming. He is no help in a war, neither willing nor capable to lend assistance and therefore surmises this foreign army is on the brink of being eradicated. “Why do you wish to conquer land which isn’t yours? Why do you cause death?”

It’s meant rhetorically, in Doc’s experience there’s only one answer: power. Expansion of territory, pre-emptive strikes, tactical weakening of potential opponents. Whatever it is, wars are never started out of just reasons. Even so, what he expected to see on the man’s face was a sneer maybe, anger too, thought he’d be confronted with a defensive stance or a self-righteous smirk. Instead – there’s nothing. A careful stony façade pulled up to hide emotions, probably practised over the years. “We won’t come to an agreement like this”, he states very correctly. “Yet I can’t let you roam free without making sure you’re not going to join our enemies instead. You’re able to do that, right?”

Doc confirms wordlessly. Enlisting his services requires knowledge of his name and other details, a meticulously drawn summoning circle, strong willpower and constitution and a keen mind. Carrying the burden of being the anchor tying a being as powerful as Doc to this world is far from easy and negotiating terms with him usually demands either for a pure heart and earnest intentions – or hidden cunning. He’s been deceived in the past, involuntarily participated in horrendous acts which have long since been lost to time; in some cases, he helped humanity forget about his unintentional crimes. He has since become considerably more reluctant to act. But yes, compared to his weaker kindred spirits, he can exert his will much more freely, even act against his summoner’s wishes and orders, against their agreement. So Bandit is exercising necessary caution in not entering a verbal contract and therefore setting Doc free.

It’s possible that his family preserved the knowledge of just how much Doc relishes his stays in this world and he’s abusing it by allowing him to taste the sweet air, feel a soft breeze caress his temporary silhouette – dangling a carrot in front of him, in a way, until Doc gives in at least partially. He has a pronounced sense of honour. If he promises to stay and assess the situation, he’ll stay.

“How about this? It’s morning now. If I haven’t convinced you by sunset that we not only require but deserve your help, I will set you free.”

A cocky proposition. Also extremely improbable, given the lacklustre greeting Doc received as well as Bandit’s questionable status and rotten attitude. Nevertheless, he’s giving Doc an out, offering him to set foot into his world properly without tricking him. At least that’s what it looks like. “Those are your terms? As long as you do not expect me to interfere in any way, I am willing to grant you more time.”

Bandit pauses. He doesn’t strike Doc as the anxious type and yet he shifts his weight uneasily, his eyes flitting from object to object for a second. “Let’s say tonight for now.”

“Accepted”, Doc replies and watches as the half-hearted circle by his feet shifts, begins glowing in a rich orange and contracts, dragging the elaborate symbols with it towards the human shape in their midst, crawling up his bare soles, past his ankles and diving under his saroual. Though intangible by itself, the fizzing around him ceases and he can now be sure not to lose a few toes or possibly more if he takes a step forwards. It’s a little like surfacing after having been underwater: he inhales deeply, shakes out his limbs and inspects the cracks lining his skin. They’re vein-like, almost akin to a precious metal shimmering through and of a bright, warm colour; they keep him manifested in this plane of existence. Sometimes, they’re more prominent than his skin, brutish and ugly in their primitiveness, but now they’re thin and look almost elegant. It seems Bandit knows what he’s doing.

“I have something to show you before I answer your questions”, Bandit announces and turns towards the camp.

During the short walk, Doc sates his curiosity about the rest of the continent by allowing his companion to elaborate on the events shaping the past decades. Some empires have gained or lost land, kingdoms have emerged or fallen, but he’s pleased to hear that the people inhabiting the eastern part of the central mountain range cutting the continent in half are flourishing. He helped them gain independence from all surrounding nations by arguing that their rocky terrain has nothing of value to offer and that they’d be willing to trade for goods which they can produce more easily than anyone else due to experience – in the end, they were permitted to establish their own laws and customs based on what their members deemed sensible. Doc enjoyed aiding them, especially since they welcome curious guests, migrants or refugees with open arms and teach them to carry their own weight should they decide to stay.

Much to his surprise, Bandit speaks of them favourably instead of with sarcasm, so he inquires about his own nation. He has never heard of the name Rangiin Kamaan before. Formerly part of the once glorious empire of Qina which used to span almost the entire width of the continent, from one ocean to the other, it’s now independent, became one of Qina’s smaller neighbours. He never paid this region much heed as they generally followed whichever trend allowed them to survive at the time and involvement in any of the Great Wars was minimal. Bandit speaks with reverence of a kind ruler who inspires his people by practising what he preaches yet Doc doesn’t assume he’ll get to speak with him any time soon. Weak Kings like this one tend to either die early in war or avoid fighting altogether.

“I still do not understand”, he interrupts Bandit’s wordy speech. They’ve come to a stop beside a huge tent, the largest one Doc spotted during their trip. The camp itself is well-organised and kept neat, hardly any soldier is simply lounging around or even pausing to stare at him (which in itself is nothing short of a miracle – is this nation so accustomed to the likes of him?), their uniforms seem practical and the men and women determined. Iron discipline is indubitably a requirement yet Doc fails to spot any hint of dissatisfaction with their conditions. It seems they’re all convinced their cause is virtuous. “Qina by far exceeds your troop strength, has more allies and resources and, though not the force it once was, still possesses the strategical knowledge to easily outmanoeuvre you. What do you hope to gain by fighting?”

“See for yourself.” Bandit indicates the entrance next to them. “I won’t be following you but take your time, I’ll wait.”

Doc eyes him suspiciously yet can’t imagine a way how this mere human could trick him simply by entering a tent, so he obliges and steps through the protective flaps keeping some of the heat outside.

It’s a field hospital. This fact alone is hardly noteworthy but the size of it is unproportional to the amount of soldiers he’s seen so far – surely, if this many resources are necessary to patch up wounded troops, they’re better off giving up. Not only that, literally all the improvised beds are occupied with people who at first glance don’t display any injuries, few bandages visible, hardly any limbs missing. And yet they’re tormented by something, trembling and shivering, some of them curled up and moaning quietly, others passed out entirely. Helpers hurry from person to person in bustling activity and still, they seem unable to relieve whichever ailment plagues their brothers and sisters. All they offer is emotional support, some food and water, a soothing hand on heated or clammy skin.

The atmosphere is suffocating. It reeks of sweat and disease and the collective whimpers and groans make for a pitiful cacophony. All the impressions are strengthened by the stale air and assault Doc’s senses. He’s seen worse, walked among the plague-ridden and witnessed open mass graves, and yet the suffering here is sharp, tangible, spreads further in his lungs the longer he resides. An impulse takes hold of him, urges him to leave instead of investigating more closely but he squashes it before it grows irresistible. He knows he’s too kind. He knows he’s guilty of giving humanity the benefit of the doubt entirely too often, despite all.

Looking for answers, he steps up to the nearest helper, a tall, broad-shouldered man tending to a grim-looking muscular young woman whose clenched fists are shaking. “What is going on?”, he addresses both of them softly.

As soon as the man catches sight of him, he interrupts his whispering to bow in respect. “Great One, I offer you my greetings and joyous thanks to be graced with your -”

Doc holds up a hand to silence him. With Bandit readily answering his questions more like an equal than the puny creature he is, the otherwise so pleasant-sounding phrases have become hollow to his ears. He’s always enjoyed the awe he seemed to inspire, enjoyed the way humans cowered before him, asked for permission to speak, praised him and treated whatever he said as sacred. Right now, however, it feels oddly out of place after the light conversation earlier. He wonders whether this is the so-called vanity one of his kin once accused him of. “No more of this.”

“I apologise. In my experience, Bandit struggles a tad with common courtesy, so I thought you might appreciate an official greeting. My name is Monty, it’s an honour.”

The man’s smile is warm and youthful and Doc suddenly understands why he doesn’t mind the frankness and general nonchalance with which his presence is being met as much as he thought: it’s a good sign that he’s getting an authentic insight into these people’s lives instead of being shown a carefully staged play intended to sway him the desired way.

“If circumstances were different, you’d be offered a banquet to rival all you’ve had before but rations are tight enough already.” He turns back to the woman and massages her upper arm, loosening the tension in it a bit. “It’s going to start working soon, relax. You’ll be alright. Sleep will help. Will you allow the Great One to examine you? I assume that’s why you’re here?”

Blue eyes peer at him, similarly unwavering to Bandit’s – yet where the warlord’s gaze had been firm and at times even cold, this man’s is confident and calm. He seems pleasant to be around, much more composed than the other people flitting about the field hospital. Once the woman has affirmed her cooperation, Doc reaches out for her hand, gently uncurls her fingers and takes them between his – wounded, humans strike him as fragile and delicate, like a young animal which overestimated its abilities. He has mercy on the weak and injured, has always shown compassion for the unfortunate even if he likened it to nurturing a snake. By helping humanity, he probably aids it in harming itself further.

The almost golden cracks running over his skin brighten as soon as he heightens his senses but he pays no attention to the familiar sight, instead closing his eyes to see with his mind. A heartbeat overlays his and thumps until both have synchronised, his lungs fill with air at the same time the woman’s do, his sense of gravity flips, the temperature increases even more – and then he barely resists making a noise when they finally melt together.

The pain is blinding.

He’s trying not to upset her, so he keeps quiet and doesn’t cause her throat to produce sound without her approval, yet it gets more difficult with every passing second. He needs to be quick about it. Her organs are weakened, some of them not working as they should, her pulse is quickened, skin sensitive and sore, muscles only just shy of cramping, her head muddled – though this might be the aforementioned medicine – and above all is brilliant, cutting pain. Its origin, however, remains a mystery, no matter how much he searches. He calms her racing heart, removes the exhaustion holding her back, but it’s obvious he’s merely addressing symptoms and not the cause. There are no broken bones, no disease nesting in an unexpected part of her body, nothing he can pinpoint.

Nothing he can cure.

Puzzled, he does whatever he can for her and withdraws once she’s fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep. Separating their physical senses is uncomfortable as usual, like leaving a warm bath to throw himself into the icy white desert of the South. He’s sat down on the bed without realising and looks down on the tormented body, watches as a mere minute later, the tension returns.

He’s powerless. Utterly incapable of healing whatever is slowly eroding this human in front of him.

“Would you like something to drink?”

It’s the man again, someone so filled with a sense of duty that he left Doc by his patient’s side to help others in the meantime. Mutely, he nods, accepts the mug handed to him and shudders as he feels the liquid fill his mouth, slide down his throat, arrive in his stomach. Ingesting anything for the first time in this form is usually a joy but as refreshing as the water is, the shock dampens the experience. “What is this?”, he wants to know quietly, gesturing at the entirety of the tent. “How did it come to this?”

Monty deflates visibly and follows his gaze with a defeated sigh. “We call it the divine disease. A second visit at night would reveal why.”

Following his implicit instructions, Doc leans down, blocks out the sunlight with his hands and looks at the woman’s hand in his little bubble of darkness. Her veins are glowing.

The light they give off is faint and barely comparable to the one emanating from Doc yet it’s undoubtedly there, the shimmering turquoise unnatural and unexpected. He’s never seen anything like it before. It’s the same further up on her arm, seems to follow her bloodstream and yet he failed to detect any trace of its source. “This is impossible”, he blurts out before considering his remark – the last thing he needs is to cause a panic.

“Unfortunately, it isn’t.” Monty sounds as if this wasn’t the first time he’s had to convince someone.

“Tell me all you know.”

Another sigh. The woman between them twitches in her sleep, brows drawn together in agony. “It has several stages and begins with inexplicable pain. The initial location varies from person to person but over time, it affects the entire body, causing fatigue and severely inhibiting the afflicted, though the ultimate effects once again vary. One has gone blind, another developed a rash, there have been rotting limbs, muscle atrophy, tremors. The only common ground is the pale blue light, persistent aching and the fact that we don’t know how to cure it.”

Doc shoots up without a reply and approaches a different bed, this time with a whimpering, older man. His eyes widen once he catches sight of the orange markings denoting Doc as a higher being but doesn’t manage to utter a syllable as Doc forcibly fuses their sensations, barely avoiding throwing up in the process due to the suddenness of it. No, his powers are working the way he expects them to – he clearly is aware of all the differences between this body and the last one, instinctively repairs a few things here and there, closes a scratch on the man’s shin, rejuvenates his liver and tries to block out the omnipresent pain which presents a solid foundation to all other sensations. It’s the same as before, he finds nothing wrong except for everything being wrong somehow.

He’s frazzled, pulls back too fast and sways unsteadily until a hand rests on his shoulder. This can’t be. He’s never encountered anything like it. Just to make sure, he invades Monty as well, takes careful note of his regular heartbeat and breathing, apparently not at all perturbed by Doc’s behaviour. He’s in good shape, even better than the two soldiers, and yet Doc finds some things to improve, restores an awkwardly healed rib to its intended state, rids the man of all exhaustion and slight dizziness from spending all day in the stuffy tent, looks for any indication that his own abilities just aren’t the same as they used to be. But there’s nothing. No sign of the illness and therefore his powers are the same as always.

They’re both light-headed when he severs the connection abruptly and his tongue won’t obey him fully yet, causing him to slur his next words: “Is it contagious?”

To his credit, Monty remains by his side, doesn’t subconsciously distance himself from Doc despite the indubitably uncomfortable experience he must’ve just had. Doc shouldn’t be surprised, he’s noticed before that humans who devote their life to helping others tend to be much more agreeable. “Yes”, he responds after a short pause. “Though we don’t know how. Physical contact is necessary but not sufficient – I seem to be largely immune, for example. Some others are, too.”

Doc’s shock is still at the forefront of his mind. There hasn’t been an earthly ailment he wasn’t able to fix, some more easily than others, so this is inconceivable. He turns and marches out of the tent, feeling oddly sullied as if he had contracted the ‘divine disease’, as they called it, himself. A mockery, even an offence to all he stands for.

Bandit is yelling at a few young warriors when bright sunlight greets him again, but dismisses them immediately when he meets Doc’s dismayed gaze, turning towards him with a grim smile.

“Answers”, Doc demands with gritted teeth.

“I have but one to give.” He pauses momentarily and Doc almost grabs his neck to shake it out of him. “You wanted to know why we’re fighting Qina? Well.” Bandit’s expression hardens. “They have the cure.”

~*~

“This is preposterous”, Doc barks at the other man while walking back and forth, making no effort to conceal his indignation. “What you’re claiming is impossible.”

“And yet here we are.” Bandit inexplicably seems bored with their conversation, focusing more on sharpening his sword than on Doc’s words.

“None of us would ever go this far, no matter how much we’d believe to be in the right. You hear me? None. This must be a, I don’t know, a whim! Or an accident. Nature made an unfortunate mistake!”

“Nature has produced a variety of abominations of all kinds, I’ll give you that, but shouldn’t you be able to heal it in that case? You can take pain away, so why not this one?”

He’s fuming over Bandit’s accusations, can barely think straight. If he hadn’t seen, even felt the illness himself, he’d have silenced him on the spot, removed his tongue or his vocal chords, possibly made him die a slow and painful death for his open disrespect. As things stand, he experienced it himself, his curiosity urging him to find answers – but vehemently rejecting the one Bandit offered him. “Maybe my influence on this world has lessened. Maybe the passing of time weakened my powers to the point where I’m unable to adapt to this new malady. It might just be an odd coincidence.”

“It is not and you know it isn’t, I saw that look in your eye when you left the tent, you know it’s -”

“Do not dare to speak it one more time. I will wipe you off the face of this earth if you even imply it once more.”

Bandit drops his sword with a clatter, expression furious. “Threaten me all you want, it’s the most obvious explanation. This fucking disease which has caused so much suffering and death already, this plague which is killing the very people I have vowed to protect, is otherworldly and caused by a so-called ‘Great One’.”

Like a cornered animal, he lashes out without considering the consequences, and, like a rabid animal, he needs to be put down. Doc has come into contact with enough heresy committed by humans to know he’s not going to change his mind, but has never faced it quite as directly and bluntly as this. Blind rage seizes him, propels him forward and convinces him to try and touch Bandit anywhere so he can ravage his organs, eviscerate him from the inside out, find what’s most precious to him and gouge it out. His eyes maybe? His fingers?

The human displays an impressive reaction time, ducking away with a pale face full of terror, jumping aside yet not running away for some reason Doc can’t discern. He holds him in place with the sheer force of his will, feels an oddly triumphant excitement rise in him when Bandit realises he’s trapped standing up, incapable of moving his muscles. Doc approaches him, raises a hand and touches his temple, eager to maim and make this worm bleed, eager to -

“Wait.”

He pauses, unmoving. Bandit still looks terrified, eyelids fluttering and deathly pallid, but his eyes aren’t directed at Doc anymore. “I do not believe anything you have to say could change my mind”, Doc states loudly. Only now he realises that no one else is in sight, no wandering soldiers staring at them, no living creature visible except for Bandit and, behind Doc’s back, Monty. It says a lot about a leader when his own troops abandon him as easily as this.

“Please, show mercy. And let him explain. You’ve witnessed how my kinsmen suffer, and I don’t think you’ll give up on them so soon.”

Doc deliberates his words. He considers himself merciful, that much is true, and he wants to find a solution for this odd disease, though not for either of their sakes. Still, he removes his hold, takes a step back and watches as Bandit sags in relief. Of course he pretends not to have been affected as much as he was, waves Monty’s concerns aside but leans into his casual touch nonetheless when he checks up on him. His small smile is grateful and Doc doesn’t miss the way his gaze lingers when the tall man turns back to Doc.

“Maybe it’ll make you reconsider hearing that you’re not the first one he’s asked for help.”

“I imagine you’ve appealed to doctors all over the continent”, he responds with a shrug but is confused to receive a shake of the head.

“You’re the eighth”, Bandit admits. “I’ve summoned seven others before you.”

“That’s -” Impossible, he almost says once again. Wordlessly, Bandit lifts the hem of his top and reveals several scars on his abdomen which by themselves wouldn’t be remarkable if not for their blackened state; inflamed-looking tendrils crawling away from the wound, the dark colour sickening. Doc knows what kind of being leaves such marks. He knows because he’s inflicted them before.

“We acquired knowledge of eight of your kind, I summoned them to cure the disease or aid us in battle, and all of them refused. One of them left me this present. You’re the last one.”

Leaving aside the fact that Doc was convinced calling upon his kind several times in a row would lethally exhaust humans, this means that Bandit is currently managing to both recover from a wound like this and keep Doc anchored in this world. He must possess a greater strength and willpower than he was aware. Even so, this isn’t the time to marvel at an insignificant human’s abilities. “Why?”, he demands to know.

The two men glance at each other uncertainly. They’re familiar with each other, affectionate enough that Monty would step in and risk his life to possibly save Bandit’s, and Doc wonders whether it really was coincidence that he ended up talking to the taller one in the field hospital or whether it was carefully orchestrated. He does not see a way as to how it could be reliably achieved and therefore decides that Monty is simply someone with whom Bandit works together a lot and well. He certainly seems to cultivate close relations with the soldiers under his command, if his casual remarks to the people around him are anything to go by.

“Why did they refuse?”, he clarifies.

“I don’t know. One pretended to be bored, another claimed it was beneath her, and the most recent one said we weren’t in the right, the scales not tipped in our favour.”

“Is that so?” Doc’s eyes narrow. “Because assuming you speak the truth, there is no reason for either of them to ignore your plight. A small nation which will die a slow death seeking help from a much larger ally, being denied unjustly and then attempting to save itself warrants our meddling. Your continued existence doesn’t upset the status quo while your demise might have far-reaching consequences. None of us would decline.”

Bandit catches on first. “You’re calling us liars.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe my kind knew more than they let on. Explain to me once again why you believe that the Qinean empire possesses the remedy you seek.” Now that his immediate fury has calmed, Doc is determined to uncover the solution to this mystery. Even on the other side, he rarely communicates with his brethren but is steadfastly convinced they act the same way he does and fell sensible decisions when determining the fate of humanity as a whole. If they refrained from aiding Bandit’s people, they must have good reason to doubt his story.

“Publicly, they deny any connection to or even knowledge of the divine disease”, Monty speaks up. “Fact is that it broke out after a Qinean ambassador and his entourage visited our court. Furthermore, a servant witnessed the ambassador himself displaying the sickening glow, yet when he joined the court again a while later, it was gone. He must’ve gotten rid of it somehow.”

“Even the Queen herself paid a visit once the illness had spread and she showed no sign of worry about contracting it herself, nor did anyone with her”, Bandit supplies to a nodding Monty. “The last straw was a plea for help with further research which they denied outright under the excuse of lacking the necessary funds. We conduct regular trade with them, so it’d be in their interest to stop an epidemic – unless they already have the means to do so in their own country.”

Conjecture. Oh, how Doc despises the vagueness which encompasses this world sometimes. There are moments in which he enjoys its ambiguity, its resistance to be labelled one thing or another – almost all beings are at the very least twofold, never purely one thing or another: the sweetest honey can make him sick, and the annoying mosquito still fulfils a role in nature. He appreciates being challenged to fell the right decision, to weigh pros and cons and see which possesses more importance. But at times, he curses the fact that he majorly inhabits other worlds and therefore has to navigate the webs of lies and truths humans spin with their words. Taken at face value, he’s inclined to agree with Bandit’s interpretation of the facts, but how can he be certain of their accuracy?

“Our neighbours have reported similar inflictions. The only ones it doesn’t affect is Qina.” They seem to be sensing his hesitation yet none of what they say can sway him. Ideally, he’d need to talk to either someone unrelated or of relevance in Qina – but he knows that if he showed his face to the empire, stating that Bandit summoned him, it’ll look as if he’s taking their side, thusly prompting Qina to take similar drastic measures. He doesn’t want to provoke a great war so he’ll have to remain here.

“We’re currently on Qinean territory, correct?” They confirm with a nod, still looking unsure. “Is there a city nearby? Any place from where you could kidnap someone who can vouch for the other side of this conflict? I would like to speak with them without making my presence known.”

Oddly enough, Bandit looks to Monty for his opinion on the matter and the two of them converse quietly, gesticulating and decisively shaking their heads now and then. Doc is surprised at how casually they interact and how highly Bandit values his friend’s opinion but waits patiently until they’ve come to a consensus.

“There’s… a Qinean spy in our custody”, Bandit begins, looking slightly sheepish, “but we haven’t been able to extract anything from her. Maybe you can -”

“Take me to her.”

Being feared is normal. He’s always been feared one way or another, caused people to flinch away from him, leaving them tongue-tied, scared of saying the wrong thing. Over time, he got used to it and barely paid attention to whoever cowered before him, but here in this camp, surrounded by what likely are honest, hard-working, wronged people, it’s…

He doesn’t like it. His outburst was necessary and understandable, his self-defence justified. If Bandit’s accusation had been voiced not in private but so that the rest of the continent could’ve heard it, the damage to their reputation could’ve been disastrous. One of Doc’s kind, spreading disease without reason? Making it incurable? People would fear them too much to ever call on them again.

And still – watching these brave soldiers shrink away causes a bad taste in his mouth, which reminds him that he still hasn’t eaten anything yet. Despite their shocking lack of manners, he has to admit he’d feel guilty simply abandoning these people which is something he’ll have to monitor very carefully if he wants to remain unbiased.

Monty seems to be even more popular than Bandit, exchanging quick quips with passer-bys often accompanied by suspicious glances in Doc’s direction. He’s lost a lot of sympathy by attacking their leader and even more by endangering Monty. But he’s not here to develop any kind of attachment, so he ignores it. Eventually they stumble over a boy, hardly old enough to participate in a war, who’s obviously been crying but attempts to hide his tears nonetheless, and Monty promises to catch up with them later before he separates to talk to him.

“He has strange priorities”, Doc comments afterwards and earns a derisive scoff from his remaining companion.

“No, but you do. He puts others first, no matter what. You may have incredible power, but… that’s all which makes you ‘great’.”

Doc stops. There’s defiance showing in Bandit’s features, together with that same misplaced pride again he’s been displaying from the beginning. “You don’t think I’m going to help you. That’s why you feel secure enough in voicing your half-baked opinions.”

“Yeah. None of you have exactly filled me with confidence, you know.”

One of his eyebrows rises in disbelief. Bandit has – according to his own words – spoken with seven others of Doc’s kind so far on the same controversial topic and believes this to be representative of their ethical values. “This has always been the problem with you humans, you tend to think in extremes even if your world is so varied and rich and multi-faceted. You find it impossible to imagine someone might refuse their aid categorically at first but change their mind later, once sufficient information has surfaced. I might have formed a strong opinion on you yet that won’t influence my decision to either declare your cause just or unjust. That is what sets me apart from someone like you.”

“You know what, you’re really starting to piss me off with your fucking righteous attitude.” Bandit’s words are like venom which he spits gladly in Doc’s face. “Some might think you are, but you’re not a God, you’ve never been, so what gives you the right to act like you are? To decide on good people’s fate as if there was an objectively ‘correct’ solution when you’re just as fallible and closed-minded and biased as we are? You might have your own fucking ideals but don’t pretend they’re outright perfect by default.” He must’ve noticed the cold fury Doc is emanating at this point because he adds: “Go ahead, kill me if you want, hurt me, violence is the only argument you still have left.”

His bluntness is … troubling, to put it very mildly. He really does lack any kind of respect which does not help his case, no, it does not at all, and there’s an old, deep-seated voice in Doc whispering to him the same things coursing through his mind earlier. Honestly, the world would be a better place without someone as inconsiderate, as rude and derisive as Bandit, wouldn’t it? But, and this is strangely important, it’d end up proving him right. And that’s the last thing Doc wants to do. “I have half a mind to simply abandon you this instant”, he growls quietly, ignoring the worried glances they’re attracting. They don’t matter – none of these people do, in the grand scheme of things.

“Is that so?” His ugly grimace transforms into a sneer. “Wouldn’t that be the proof that you’re everything but unbiased?”

He -

Doc stares at him, thunderstruck.

He’s right.

Personal dislike must never triumph over his vocation to aid humanity as a whole. If Bandit’s nation really has been wronged, he simply can’t turn them down based on a reason as flimsy as this. But it can’t be, doesn’t Bandit’s arrogance justify his people’s demise? Does he not represent their ethical stance? Then again, who is he to determine the death of thousands, possibly more, just because they lack manners? Shouldn’t he instead show the world that his actions are justifiable regardless of his personal preference?

Frantically, he recalls former decisions, quickly tests them against this theory and tries to objectively judge whether he acted in humanity’s best interest – or out of self-interest. And even if it’s the former, would he recognise it?

“Come on. She’s right over there.”

Bandit’s softened voice snaps him out of his panicked thoughts and redirects his attention to the matter at hand. He can contemplate his words later, for now he has a spy to interrogate.

The woman is chained to a stake driven deep into the ground and looks as if this was all which keeps her from dismantling the entire camp by herself. Her glare is fierce and emphasised by the prominent scar adorning her face, yet her resolve wavers as soon as she notices Doc approaching. For a few seconds, she struggles with herself, probably overcome with contempt towards Bandit, but ends up slightly bowing to Doc nonetheless. A polite Qinean – in Doc’s experience a common sight.

“I greet you”, he addresses her in her mother tongue, causing her to sit up straight in awe.

“It is the greatest honour to be graced with your presence, Great One, and with deep respect I vow to be your servant. With eternal gratitude I trust that you will always act wisely and I plead for you to have mercy on us”, she instinctively replies in the same language, uttering the traditional greeting of her nation.

“Wait”, Bandit chimes in, audibly concerned, “she can speak my language, why don’t you -”

“You are being held against your will on the grounds of espionage on behalf of the Qinean empire. Is this true?”

Her eyes flit back and forth between them, calculating. Not even asking Bandit whether he speaks the notoriously difficult High Qinean is deliberate, he wants her to know that his trust in Bandit is shaky at best. “That is true”, she confirms and seems to enjoy the fact that her increasingly frustrated enemy won’t be able to listen in to their conversation.

“As for the allegations, are they true also? You act in the interest of your Queen? Tried to gather information about these troops?” She hesitates, glances at an upset Bandit once more. “If you are honest with me I will grant you the same favour.”

“Yes”, she states with a nod. So far so good.

“You know who I am and what I stand for.” Another curt nod. “Then you also know that as of yet, I am neither on your enemy’s side nor on yours, instead currently gathering information to decide how to act. It is important that you are as objective as possible as your account may turn the tide of this conflict one way or another.”

He allows for a few seconds so she can parse his words. It’s imperative she understands the gravity of the situation and simultaneously gets a chance to gather her thoughts.

“I remember your people as disciplined, honourable and well-educated but have no recollection of the Rangiin Kamaan. They strike me as very similar, from what I’ve seen.”

The woman’s face darkens. “A convincing show they must’ve put up for you. Compare it to a sinner who vows betterment behind sacred walls and relapses as soon as he’s left. Your imposing presence would inspire thieves and liars to put on their best behaviour.” She spits on the ground directly between Bandit’s feet, making him curse loudly and take a step forward. A single glance from Doc stops him, however, and convinces him to withdraw, grumbling, reconvening with the newly-arrived Monty to undoubtedly complain in hushed voices. Doc pays him no heed. “I’ve been their prisoner for a few days, and I’ve seen their real face. Hit me only where the bruises wouldn’t show, recently, before that they had no such qualms. My entire body must’ve been the colour of a rainbow.”

Concerning. Provided she speaks the truth, it’d subvert all that Doc has come to believe about the Rangiin Kamaan. “I have had similar suspicions”, he tells her calmly, “so it’s good to hear them confirmed. What can you tell me about the conflict between your nation and theirs?”

She shakes her head in regret. “It is messy and full of false accusations. They might’ve claimed it’s only them being affected by this odd illness – you have seen it yourself, correct? In truth, my motherland is ravaged by it as well, far worse than this. These snakes are trying to take advantage of our weakened state and attempt to rally our vassals and enemies alike to destroy what little is left of our empire.”

Once again, a direct contradiction of what he’s heard so far. The erasure of Qina would have unforeseen consequences and as oppressive and authoritarian the nation always has been, it is nonetheless the capital of all knowledge, has amassed countless books, scrolls and relics which, if lost, would set the entire continent back. If she’s speaking the truth, it’s in Doc’s interest to strike down this rebellion as swiftly as possible. “They claim you possess the cure to this disease.”

“They would. If we did, would an army of this size have been able to venture this far into our territory? No, we have just as fruitlessly attempted to heal our people and failed, just like them.”

“What of your ambassador? And your Queen?”

The spy once again sits up straighter at the mention of the Qinean matriarch. “I have heard the lies they spread. Ambassador Abyad has indeed been inflicted and suffers the consequences as we speak, he has not, as they claim, been cured. And our Mother took all the precautions necessary to ensure she wouldn’t suffer the same fate.”

“I see”, Doc responds, touches her temple and synchronises their senses.

Despite it being done without warning, he’d gathered the necessary focus pre-emptively and thus ensures smooth proceedings, a process much too quick for the woman to react. She’s in a state of extreme agitation, her heartbeat pounding and adrenalin coursing through her blood causing an almost painful alertness. Apart from her limbs complaining about too little movement, she’s in no pain and exhibits no sign of physical injury – broken and healed bones lie far in the past and other ailments are similarly unrelated. As soon as she understands what’s happening, she struggles against the intrusion, the first to do so this day. She must realise that her body is giving her away.

He never understood lying. Some people resort to it despite easily being disproved, they do it for sport or to feel a rush of power over being trusted blindly. It’s an ugly habit of humanity but one impossible to eradicate, Doc assumes, as it’s been around since the dawn of time. He hates it when humans lie to him implicitly, but hates it even more when they do so directly in his face.

With Bandit’s and Monty’s eyes in his back, he withdraws from the woman’s body and leaves her gasping for air. His hand travels down her jaw and forms a cup below it. “Give it to me voluntarily and I will have no need to take it with force. If you swallow it, I will make your insides squirm until I hold it in my hand.”

The Qinean glares up at him with an ironically betrayed expression, as if his deception had been in any way worse than hers. He had to pretend a more friendly disposition towards her to show she had indeed the chance to change his mind. No one is to blame for her failure other than herself.

After a few more moments, she procures a small vial from inside her cheek and drops it into Doc’s outstretched hand. With it intact, she can’t have been beaten – at least not in the face, it would’ve shattered. He wipes it off and inspects the liquid curiously, at first not understanding why it baffles him, but then it registers: it’s the same colour as the eerie glow the patients are emitting.

“Are you fucking done?”, Bandit snarls at him and is held back only by a calming hand on his midriff. “What is that?”

“You have to help my people”, the woman makes a desperate last attempt, her voice now pleading where before it’d been carefully even. “Please, I beg you. Help them. You might be the only one who can.”

Yet another reason for lying: despair. Doc is unsure of its source – the prisoner has been treated fairly as far as he can tell, and she must know he would never contribute to Qina’s downfall. Why is she discarding her pride now, after she failed to convince him?

“Let’s talk somewhere else”, he suggests. While they walk away, the prisoner’s sad wailing trails after him almost hauntingly.

“There are two options”, Doc announces once he and his two companions have reached a clearing of tents, the middle point of the camp bustling with activity and yet no one stops to eavesdrop. “Either this is poison which causes the cursed disease or it’s a cure. She might’ve carried it with her to afflict you, Bandit, as the highest in command, hoping you’d be unable to lead your troops into battle – or it was a precaution in case she contracted the illness herself and needed a remedy.” He hands the phial to a stunned-looking Bandit and expects him to pocket it immediately, yet instead he holds on to it, unsure what to do.

“But in either case it won’t harm anyone who’s afflicted?”, Monty clarifies and earns a nod. “So this can possibly cure a single person?”

“Yes. I can’t be absolutely sure but it is the most likely option.”

“What did the bitch tell you? Did she say anything about it?”

It seems Bandit is still hung up on the fact he couldn’t listen in to Doc’s conversation with the spy earlier. As typical as it is petty. “It is none of your concern.”

“Oh, but it damn well is. What if you made an agreement with her? What if you’re going to double-cross or abandon us, just like your other -” A hand on his wrist stops him in his tracks and Doc is once again grateful for Monty’s calming presence.

“Are you going to help us?”, the tall man wants to know and it’s not an accusation, not an ultimatum, merely an inquiry.

“I need time to think”, Doc replies simply. The accounts of no more than three people are insufficient but they grant him a foundation on which he can form his opinion, provide him with a good idea of what he can ask the other soldiers. If there are inconsistencies, asking a variety of people about the same story should unearth them.

“That is good enough for us.” When Bandit opens his mouth to protest, Monty turns to him with a gentle expression and reminds him: “Dom. We cannot expect him to trust us if we don’t show him the same courtesy. Let’s wait. Justice can’t be rushed.”

The warrior deflates visibly, slain by rationality and respect. “Yes. Alright. But here, you take it.” He thrusts the small container towards his companion, much to Doc’s shock. He does not keep it to himself?

Monty is caught just as off-guard as Doc. “What? No, you can hold on to it, I can’t decide what -”

“But your sister -”

“I won’t claim this privilege, don’t make me -”

“You have all the right to -”

“What about Blitz, he’s going to be invaluable in battle tomorrow -”

“Please, just take it.”

Doc perks up at this new information. “You are going to fight tomorrow?”

The two bickering men immediately cease their back and forth and turn to him. “We’re meeting the Queen’s legion tomorrow”, Bandit says quietly. “They’ve been gathering their troops and will meet us halfway to the capital. This is why I was unable to grant you more time than today. We’re all going to die soon.”

Now that he focuses his gaze, seeks out the signs, he realises they’ve been there all this time. The methodical behaviour inherent to all that the soldiers do, a grim determination lining their features, the odd kindness and forbearance accompanying those who have accepted that which they cannot change. These are people already lying in their graves, some of them going through practised motions with a blank expression, others seeking solace in mindless distractions, yet more seem to be set on making their last hours count. Doc stumbles over couples sharing secret, wistful smiles, friends reminiscing or playfully sparring, strangers opening up to each other.

They carry their doom with much more dignity than he would’ve guessed.

None of them blame him though he supposes their anger died down and gave way to resignation after his predecessors toured the camp more standoffishly than he did; it is a miracle that only Bandit carries an otherworldly scar like a battle wound. Their wariness hasn’t fully dissipated yet either, their trust still impeded which, if both Bandit and Monty really are as respected and loved as they seem to be, comes as no surprise. Regardless, they engage in conversations willingly, answer his questions with an open and authentic attitude he likes – and some of them even smuggle food into his pockets. There are dried dates, roasted nuts, even crumbly baked goods, and they’re a feast for his senses, explode into flavour on his tongue and make him curse whoever was responsible for putting this sweet nectar into this world specifically.

Most of them speak favourably of Bandit, hidden behind thinly-veiled insults lies a deep admiration and a loyalty only inspired by likewise devotion. They’re comfortable with him, are allowed to criticise and voice opinions, and even if he usually shoots them down mercilessly, he listens and considers them nonetheless. His style of leading an army is highly unconventional but he can demand discipline and absolute obedience if necessary.

Monty receives even more praise. It turns out he’s not even part of the medical personnel, yet his apparent immunity spurred him on to spend as much time alleviating symptoms as possible, bonding with the patients despite the position he holds – this part is emphasised wherever Doc goes. He supposes he’s Bandit’s second-in-command, a confidant and friend as much as a fellow warrior. It gives him faith.

Not all of it is rosy but with humanity’s past he didn’t expect it to be. Racist undertones, superiority complexes and bitterness leak through some of the more resentful comments and taint the milder ones. Even so, criticism towards their ruler is virtually non-existent and shut down quickly whenever it arises. Doc doesn’t ask any further, it’s obvious their King isn’t gracing him with his presence and so he wastes no thought on him.

The matter at hand remains … elusive. Its solution enigmatic, its cause a mystery. He’s at a loss because admitting Bandit might be right is overstepping a boundary Doc is not prepared to leave behind, especially not without any prior warning, no opportunity to confer with his brethren.

Sunset is fast approaching, the brilliant ball slipping over the horizon, threatening icy nights once the twilight has fully dispersed. Doc is perched on a stool someone gave up willingly, sits at the edge of the camp and gazes towards the source of dwindling warmth, towards where the Queen must be currently commanding her army to walk until their legs are sore.

“Do you get hungry?”

He breaks out of his half-meditation and finds himself facing Monty, holding two bowls and indubitably only just now questioning his own actions, judging by the slightly sheepish smile. “I don’t”, Doc replies evenly. “But this body does. I’m not sure how you humans manage.” Rarely does he share details as private as this, keeps his opinions largely to himself but finds that he lowers his guard around this particular human a little too easily. Under different circumstances, he’d watch his words more closely but either he’s going to aid these people or abandon them to certain death. In either case, they won’t be inclined to speak ill of him.

They eat in silence. Doc vaguely recalls previous meals and supposes the stew falls on the flavour-light side but as he only gets to eat every couple of decades, he relishes it nonetheless. He recognises coriander and savours every bite.

“How is it? Being here – compared to where you’re from?”

Very nearly his mouth releases the same platitudes so familiar to him that they’ve been etched into his tongue by now but something in Monty’s innocent curiosity quells the urge. Somehow, he deserves honesty and maybe it’s the compassion he shows all those around him, maybe his reluctance to accept the possible cure despite having a personal incentive to do so, maybe the fact that he convinced Bandit to trust Doc despite all. Whatever it is, it tips the scales in his favour and Doc knows at this moment that he’s going to assist the Rangiin Kamaan. “You have a name for the place where I usually reside. Hell.”

Monty halts but does not respond, merely waits for Doc to continue.

“This, in comparison, is a paradise. You take fresh air for granted, the force allowing you to walk the ground, all these things without which you never had to manage and thus you can never appreciate them the way we do. This is why we serve humanity. This is why we attempt to be agents of justice so that we may never side with a civilisation which could potentially perish. If we weren’t allowed this outlet, weren’t able to walk the earth now and then, we would cease to be. Our existence is so painful and so horrifying even to us that we desperately cling to the hope of being summoned here. It is our oath: by resolving conflicts we ensure humanity’s and therefore our own survival. It is why the mere thought of one of us sabotaging our collective future is abhorrent.”

Emotion colours his speech and he silently reprimands himself for it. Revealing this much, too, is forbidden, yet he felt the strange need of justifying his actions to this man. His bodily functions tell on him, let him know he’s upset even though he’s had half an eternity to come to terms with this fact. And still he harbours more anger than the soldiers awaiting their fate.

“I’m sorry”, Monty says and, oddly, Doc believes him. He’d like to provide more details because there are aspects he misses while he’s on this plane, but trusts that Monty understands. Nothing is ever black and white, is it?

“I’d like to talk to Bandit. I have reached a conclusion.”

To his credit, Monty doesn’t ask and simply points out the tent in question. “He’s given strict orders not to be bothered after sunset but I’m sure he’ll make an exception for you. Thank you for listening to us.”

Like Bandit, he seems to have accepted the possibility of Doc refusing their plea as fact and he doesn’t feel like correcting him, so he just hands him his empty bowl and gets up.

It’s going to be a tentative agreement, that much Doc has already worked out. For the moment he’ll do reconnaissance, buying time, assessing the situation after having talked with Qinean officials to decide on further proceedings. One step at a time, he’ll unravel this mess into its components with which he’ll deal one by one – it’s a cautious approach but one which will hopefully not end in bloodshed. He needs to decipher Qina’s motivation first and foremost.

Mulling over all the information available to him, he ignores the uneasy glances between the people outside their commander’s tent and enters without hesitation, not at all expecting to be confronted with something which makes him freeze, leaves him petrified, almost forces a noise of shock and dismay out of his throat. A cold sensation settles low in his stomach and spreads out to his limbs, takes hold of his tongue and prevents him from exclaiming, asking, accusing.

Bandit is his own source of light.

Here, in the semi-darkness of his hideout, the blue is crassly visible and almost turns the lithe man into a terrifying creature haunting a world where it has no right to be. It pulses softly in the same rhythm as his heart, covers his naked arms, feet and face in a glowing spiderweb of pure disease, his features faint against the prominent veins. He doesn’t seem human anymore, features contorted in a pitiful grimace as he sits on the floor, pressing palms against temples and breathing deeply, consciously. He is but a shadow of the prideful fool Doc met earlier this day.

As soon as he realises his solitude is interrupted, he jumps up onto trembling legs, eyes wide in shock. “You – you had until sunset”, he blurts out idiotically, as if this detail somehow invalidated the view in front of Doc.

It can’t be, and yet a sickening idea takes hold in his mind. “Why did you hide this from me?”, he wants to know, tone cold.

“No.” Bandit is shaking his head, apparently knows exactly what Doc is considering. “No, that isn’t it – I didn’t -”

“The only reason you’re doing everything you can to cure your people is because you selfishly want to cure yourself. If you weren’t afflicted, you’d act differently. Is all of this a ploy to save your own life? Have you deceived me this entire time?”

“Please. Please, don’t.” Even now with his legs nearly giving in, Bandit refuses to kneel before him. He might be begging for his life but this bit of pride will not die, no matter what. “That is not why. I kept it from you because you’d think exactly this. I didn’t want you to believe I’m only doing it for myself, I’m not, it’s -”

His voice dies in a pitiful croak when Doc grabs his jaw and uses his power to keep the man upright as well as rooted to the ground. This time, he won’t be able to evade him. “And I am supposed to believe this?”

Wide eyes are filled with fear and yet he pleads: “Kill me. Do it, it won’t prove me right, I promise – it’s – I’m a horrible human being and need to be erased from history, you need to kill me. But please, please promise me that you’ll save them. Don’t let this deter you, they deserve it. You know they do.”

Doc examines him, momentarily ignoring the sinking feeling of having been betrayed somehow. Slowly, he loosens his hold on the man until he slumps a little, fragile body shivering and teeth working to probably hold back undignified whimpers. It must’ve cost him immense willpower to suppress his symptoms all day, not let anyone see the condition he’s in, hide all this suffering from Doc and possibly his soldiers too. Even now, Bandit refuses to back away, lightly grabs Doc’s wrist to keep it in its place and stares him down in a mixture of defiance and genuine terror.

Maybe it really wasn’t deceit. Maybe him refusing to take the cure himself wasn’t a display for Doc’s benefit. Maybe he really does care about others more than himself, as showcased by him desperately trying to win one of Doc’s kind over.

And wait.

This is impossible.

This time, it actually is impossible, no human could ever carry the weight of Doc’s materialised form while simultaneously bearing the aftermath of an otherworldly scar as well as suffering from this divine disease – no one possesses the physical and mental strength necessary.

A vicious ache stabs through his head once he’s linked his consciousness to Bandit’s and he’s lost for a moment, disoriented despite being so familiar with human bodies. It’s as if there were several more limbs despite him knowing there aren’t, and yet there’s a phantom sensation of a much more expansive form, like a container which is larger on the inside. It’s bewildering and causes a painful throb under his scalp but it’s simultaneously familiar, strangely enough.

Even now, Bandit doesn’t struggle against him and instead allows him easy access to his body, yet the more Doc finds the more astonished he is. Internal organs show hardly any signs of age and are as invigorated as they would be had Doc rejuvenated them already – the omnipresent pain of the illness is prevalent but not nearly as prominent as in the other subjects Doc examined, instead it’s more an ebb and flow in the background, intensifying now and then but fading in between the spikes. As if something interfered with it.

He presses on: Bandit is distraught and his emotional state is mirrored in his body but parts of it are remarkably calm and merely trying to uphold the minimum; it takes him a moment to realise that resources are being allocated towards a very specific part in his midsection. There’s a tumour here, a growth of not insignificant size spanning the width of his belly on the inside – three, actually, and it doesn’t take Doc long to identify it as following the pattern of the ugly scars Bandit received from one of Doc’s kin. Normally, wounds like this heal extremely slowly, sometimes not even for a lifetime, but they cause no other side effect other than a persistent ache. He’s never felt or witnessed anything like this before.

Poking and prodding it reveals that it’s painless, merely causes discomfort where it presses against other organs. Is it possible that it counteracts the disease? Doc inspects the bloodstream, muscles, bones, anything he can find to either prove or disprove his theory but it seems he’ll have to rely on conjecture yet again. And then he delves into one of the non-existent limbs, body parts which should not be – under no circumstances should they belong to a human body, but they do.

It hits him out of nothing, a sudden realisation which he pushed aside out of pride, out of self-preservation instinct. …no, that is not why, and in this case it’s not righteous thinking which prevented this idea from springing up sooner. This revelation, too, is a sharp pang in his mind.

They’re left reeling once he’s severed their connection, hold on to each other like drunkards and gasp for air, hands clutching fabric, feet seeking balance, eyes unfocused. It takes them a long time to regain their composure and when they do, Bandit takes a step back, confused, embarrassed, hopeful.

“You didn’t kill me”, he states full of wonder.

“There was a human who studied us.” The non-sequitur startles Bandit into speechlessness. “He was as persistent as he was hungry for knowledge – he summoned us, one by one, travelled the continent until he had spoken with us all, even sought the help of minor beings. During his quest, he realised he gave up more and more of himself: every time he allowed one of us to walk the earth, a piece of him crumbled, irretrievable. But it wasn’t lost, instead our essence replaced it and imbued him with our nature. Once he realised what was happening, he couldn’t stop it.”

How could he have forgotten him? It’s the one black sheep, the one who doesn’t fit. Will never fit.

“He became one of us. He followed us down into our realm and felt what we feel, learnt what we know. He didn’t take it well. He attempted to convince all of us to tell the humans of him, to make them summon him to his original home so he could experience peace again, escape our reality – but he was rash, unjust, cruel. If he were allowed to roam free, he would tarnish our name; he was planning to sow discord among humanity so that our services – his services – would be required more often. We declined. We damned him to an eternal existence in our world.”

Bandit absent-mindedly runs his fingertips over glowing veins, brows drawn together. He understands. “So he’s the one who did this.” No gloating even though he’d been right. “Why didn’t you think of him earlier?”

“I believe our memories of him were sealed. You might find this hard to believe but there are beings of greater power than myself. The only possibility I see is that he found a way to escape. It explains the nature of the disease, the unnatural light, the seemingly random symptoms and its spread, and the fact that the cure seems to stem from the same source as the illness. It’s consistent with all that we know and the most likely explanation that he invaded this world and put a plan into motion to cause conflict rather than resolve it in the hopes of making us redundant and himself invaluable.”

The man before him is now pacing back and forth as if he hadn’t been in mortal danger mere minutes ago which only cements Doc’s theory. His resilience is extraordinary and only increasing. “How come the others refused their help then? If he’s a liability to you all, shouldn’t they interfere instead?”

“I can only guess as to their motives. They might’ve felt his presence and decided not to intervene.” As expected, Bandit’s expression darkens, so Doc adds: “We all have different control over the forces holding this world together and access to different layers, so while others of my kind might’ve immediately understood the situation, they’re unable to copy most of my skills. It is not impossible that they knew more than I did. As to your question – a fight between two of our kind can be devastating and cause irreparable damage to this world. They were likely scared of this possibility and thus preferred not to remain here. Additionally, the Qinean empire is worth conserving and more important than your nation in the grand scheme of things, making his transgression not as severe as if he’d tried to destroy them.”

Suddenly, he remembers the spy’s words: You have to help my people. You might be the only one who can. The situation might be more dire than he was aware – he can’t discard the possibility that the Qinean Queen is under the control of this defector, acts on his wishes and thus goes against the interests of her people. The prisoner might’ve realised someone far more powerful than any human is influencing her matriarch and that Doc can be her saviour, too.

“So”, Bandit speaks up abruptly, still fidgeting uncomfortably. He finds no solace in having been right, now that the consequences of this reality have sunken in. “Does this mean you’re going to help us?”

No more accusations, no more implied mistrust. He’s learned. “Yes”, Doc says simply. “I am equipped to negotiate, hopefully without antagonising him. And if it should come to it, I am also prepared to fight.” If it means peace in the future, he will take lives in the interest of both his and Bandit’s kind. He knows he can do it, knows he can walk the battlefield like an omen of death, slaying with a single thought and wiping out entire armies should the need arise. He hopes it won’t come to this – but if it does, he’s ready.

Bandit nods and, once it has fully registered, even graces him with a smile. “Took you long enough. Let’s go then, we need to talk -”

He was on his way out of his tent, past Doc, but is stopped by a hand on his torso. It slowly lifts the hem of his top to reveal almost vibrantly illuminated marks on his skin, three slashes frightening in bright daylight already and only more foreboding in half-darkness. “Do you not want to know what made me remember? What unsealed my hidden memories?”, Doc murmurs. This, he has to do. If he doesn’t, the collective repressed energy might tear Bandit in half eventually.

The man looks down at himself and rejects the thought, Doc can read it on his face. “No”, he says but in his heart, he knows the truth.

“You are going to share his fate. The repeated summoning, the disease born from unnatural sources, the injury caused by a being not from this world – it’s too much for your body to bear, so it’s adapting a new form which can carry this burden. You are going to become like me.”

“No, this isn’t – I didn’t want this. I don’t want this.” Once again, eyelids flutter, a lip quivers. “I don’t want to be like him. I don’t want to be stuck.”

“You won’t. This is where you two are different. You were ready to sacrifice your own life to save those of others. Your actions speak of more honour and compassion than he ever displayed in his life as a human. I will speak on your behalf and you will not be condemned to rot like him. But for that, you need to accept it. Allow it into your mind, into your body, just like you allowed me. It’s waiting.”

He takes Bandit’s hands and calms the staccato of his heart without probing too deep, keeps their link delicate – just enough to even their breaths, relax muscles, reduce faint aching. He wasn’t present when the traitor changed forms but somehow knows that Bandit possesses the strength to begin this journey right now. It might take months, even years to fully take hold but those he’ll spend in comfort. Under his gentle guidance, Bandit lets loose and concentrates, seeks out the source of the disease in him, feels for the remedial influence of the scars. Doc’s own arms are increasing in brightness, the orange cracks lighting up in resonance.

A shockwave emanates from Bandit, no more than a momentary gust of wind yet an exceedingly forceful one, causing loud clattering around them.

When they open their eyes again, the tent is gone – and so are all the others, flattened by the power of Bandit’s awakening, leaving behind an entire army of confused and vaguely frightened soldiers, most of them gathered around what would’ve been directly outside the tent. They must’ve been waiting to hear Doc’s final verdict.

They make for an intimidating picture as a large part of them is emitting an eerie glow, unlike Monty in their midst. He looks as if someone had slapped him.

Next to Doc, Bandit seems no different to the cocky and outwardly disillusioned man who greeted him this morning, but like an utterly different person to the broken one he discovered in the tent a while ago. That Bandit had been desperate, in pain, ashamed. This one is… confident.

“It’s going to be fine”, he assures Monty, sounding very sure of himself. “I promise. We’ll be fine.”

“I will do everything in my power to resolve this matter as peacefully as possible”, Doc adds. “I am at your service.”

It takes a few seconds. Then the cheering begins.

The jubilant atmosphere sparked by his statement is contagious and even Doc feels the corners of his mouth lift up. Monty sags in relief, exchanges a slightly questioning smile with Bandit but seems content with this promise for now. He can’t have known of Bandit’s illness, not with the way his eyes keep straying to his arms, and yet he holds back on reprimanding him for keeping it secret.

Even so, the celebratory mood remains hesitant, as if the men and women believed it too good to be true, but Doc has no doubts it’ll catch on once they’ve made progress. For now, one important matter at hand remains aside from teaching Bandit about what will happen to him, which changes to expect and how to contain his ever-growing power for now.

“I need to discuss strategy”, he announces loudly over the excited chatter and waits until it has died down to a reasonable level. “Take me to your King.”

Strangely enough, people tilt their heads in confusion, exchange glances, frown. Until one young woman slowly raises her arm and points. More follow, and in the end there’s a myriad of fingers all directed at a modestly smiling Monty.

Oh.

“You didn’t know?”, Bandit asks him, surprised.

More puzzle pieces fall into place retroactively. No wonder everyone spoke of him so favourably.

Thinking back to the way Monty so naturally tended to his suffering subjects, addressed their concerns directly despite his status, settles something in Doc. Knowing this, he’s suddenly very sure he will not regret aiding these people, come hell or high water.

#rainbow six siege #doc #bandit #montagne #fanfic #oneshot #there's a whooole lot more I could've shoved in but it was so long already #I hope it turned out okay!#fancy that two of the sweetest people I know share their birthday #with valentine's day no less

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little-dragon-stories · 5 years

Text

Before I leave Part 11

I want to be the one

A fake Text and scenarios serie featuring Kwon Jiyong himself.

After your sister died, you decided to move in Korea to get close to your niece and nephew. That’s where you meet Kwon Jiyong, get to work for him and start to believe hapiness is possible again…

Warning: Fluffy part.

W/C 1676

Two hours later, he gently knocked on the door but you couldn’t hear it as you were asleep on the bed on which you collapsed earlier, exhausted from crying.

Jiyong entered the room and found you there, in fetal position. He slowly sits up straight leaning against the pillows, making sure to move gently so you won’t wake up and he looked at you, vulnerable in your sleep.

He is wondering what happened to you? Why are you always so scare of being touched? Why is it so hard for you to trust him? To trust people? Why have you been with a man that never satisfy you in the bedroom. Why?

He knows now that you have been raped, you told him by accident already. He is wondering what he can do to help you heal. He sees you are fighting your demons, he knows that sometimes you even win against them. But not always…. there is still a part of you that is hurting and he want to be the one that changed that. He wants to be the one for you, the one who is gonna reconcilated you and your past, you and your body, you and your life.

In his mind, there is no doubt that he found the most perfect person for him, his better half. He has never felt so good around anybody before. He loves your sharp sense of humour. He loves how you laugh, how you smile. He loves the interactions you have with the staff at peace minus one. He loves to hide in the corner of the room and look at you as you are teaching them yoga, how your face looks so peaceful when you close your eyes to breathe, he loves how your eyes sparkles when you realise he is there. He loves how you hug him, your warm embrace every time you are together. How your body leans against his. He loves to smell your hair, when you don’t notice he is doing it. He loves that he can talk to you everytime he need it. He loves that you always accept his last minutes ramyun dates and how much you can eat without exploding. He loves that habit you both have, not to take a plate in front of you but picking food with your chopsticks directly from the pot. He loves how much you enjoyed every single thing he bought for you. He loves how you looked in that dress you will wear tomorrow night, his heartbeat stopped for a minute when he saw you coming out of the fitting room. He loved the fact that you didn’t want him to buy you anything, the fact you were so happy anyway. He loves that you are so direct, that you always share your opinion with him. He loves when you disagree with him, how you will gently put him in is place. He loves the color and the shape of your eyes, so different than his. He loves the fact that you have a thin but muscular body, shaped by yoga and all the exercices you are doing. He loves the curve of your hips and breast. He love the smell of your neck, when he lay his head on your shoulder. He loves the tone of your voice.

He loves you, all of you.

With you, he could always be himself, his true self. With you he can talk without being scared of judgement, he feels understood.

He was lost in his thoughts and he realizes you've woken up when he feels you getting up and sticking on him, your head on his chest, arms around his waist, your legs automatically wrapping together on the blanket.

«Hi sleepyhead» he said as you can hear the smile on his voice.

«Hi my baby dragon, I'm glad to realize that you did not run away».

«I will never run away from you, do you hear me? Never»

He begins to squirm and you can see that he is uncomfortable.

«Ji, what’s going on?»

«I will be honest with you, I don’t know where to place my hands! I don’t know where I can touch you so you won’t get scare».

You started to laughed.

«Jiyong oppa, it’s not the first time we hug each other, right? You can touch me anywhere you want except for my throat. That’s the only place I forbid you to touch me»

You took his left hand and placed it on your back.

«Ji, I am sorry I panicked. I just want you to know that I feel comfortable with you, that you didn’t do anything wrong. I am the crazy one here...»

He interrupted you…

«You are not crazy at all, don’t speak like that about you. You are just hurt but you will heal, I will help you to heal».

You lifted your head to look at him in his eyes, his beautiful and soft eyes.

«How?»

«How I am going to help you? Easy, by loving you. By showing you it doesn’t have to hurt. By giving you the confidence to try new experiences. I will show you that you deserve to be loved and that I love you. I will let you the time to trust me, I won’t push anything but I made a promise to myself as you were sleeping. I promised myself that before I leave for my enlistment, you will be able to fully trust me, you will be able to make love again and most of all, you will appreciate it. What am I saying, you will LOVE it. I won’t put pressure on you but I trust that together, we can achieve that. Because we will be together. And I love you.»

He loves you? He wants to make love to you? Was this a declaration of love?

You don’t know what to answer because you are not sure you understood correctly. Instead of saying anything, you just put your head on his stomach again, comfortably rubbing your nose on his shirt. Since you had given him permission to touch you anywhere he wants, he lets his left hand caress your back gently and with his right hand he draws small circles on the expose skin of your left shoulder. You do not remember being so close to someone physically and mentally, so comfortable. In his arms, there is no doubt, you feel secure. You feel confident, you feel loved.

The silence enveloping you was not unpleasant, you did not feel that you had to answer anything but you wanted to tell him anyway.

«Jiyong, I am not sure I understand what you said correctly»

He started to laugh and with is soft voice, he said

«My love, you are a brilliant one, I am sure you did. You don’t have to say anything back, I know you were in a relationship, a violent one a few days ago. I have all the time in the world and I am not going anywhere. You are stick with me».

You cannot promise him the moon but you can communicate to him how you feel, the emotions he makes you feel.

«Ji, I know one thing for sure. You are the person I wish I will be able to learn those things from».

These words means the world to him, he did not expect so much. He is very touched by your statement and tighten his hug.

As you were entwined in a cocoon of love and peace, somebody start banging on the door screaming:

«Kwon Jiyong, my cousin, come out of this room, don’t be shy. We want to meet your fiance»

Both of you burst out laughing at those words. You were not ready to leave those strong arms yet, you didn’t want to leave this peaceful moment but you had no choice so you get up, wear something warmer for the temperature to come and then happily joined his family for a wonderful dinner outside and an evening around a fire camp.

You met his cousins, you talked with his sister, his grandmothers. You had nice and long conversations with his cousins little kids. The night was absolutely wonderful but… even with his family, you could see Jiyong had a special role to play, a special place. There were always a certain distance between him and the rest of his family members that you could not explained by anything else than his celebrity. You could tell by the way they were looking at him, they respected and loved him but at the same time, the were intimidated by him. This observation makes you sad because you understand very well the feeling of being apart, how you feel when you're alone among the others. You feel like that all the time, lonely even when surrounded by your love ones. That loneliness that you shared together the first time you ever talked. You are sad for him, because you understand the immensity of his sadness. You only wish that for now on, he will never be alone again because he has you now, you have each others.

After Jiyoung announced that the two of you were going to sleep, Jiyong’s sister came close to you. To be honest, you have avoided the situations in which you could have been alone with her tonight because you were anxious she might be the one among the others to get to know the truth about your relationship but as she came close to you, you couldn’t run away and hide. She said gently:

«My dongseng has never been so happy in his life. I feel that with you, he is in peace. Welcome in our family y/n”

«Thank you for saying that oenni. I love your brother with all my heart and I hope I will make him happy»

You were scared that she might discovers the truth of your relationship as you were saying those words but strangely, you didn’t feel like you were lying.

#g dragon serie #g dragon scenario #gdragon x reader #g dragon #gdragon #gd and you #fake text gd #kwon jiyong fake text #kwon jiyong #kwon jiyong fluff #kwon jiyong angst #kwon leader #kwon jiyong serie

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some-cookie-crumbz · 5 years

Text

A Little Sweet Treat

A Little Sweet Treat Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender Pairing: Shiro/OC Summary: Super late, self-indulgent Valentine’s Day fic about my Galra OC, Adwru, developing a crush on Shiro and trying to find a way to make his interest known. I’m also dedicated this one to @kdxart because the developing of this ship was something she suggested and now I’m in deep. Standard Disclaimer: If you read and enjoy this, please give it a like/ reblog so I know if I should write more.

Human customs were certainly… Strange, to say the least.

Adwru hadn’t initially thought much of the Paladin’s home planet upon meeting them, as he already knew a little bit about it from what he’d heard from Keith. A primitive world with – judging by his first few encounters with the Paladins themselves – rather primitive denizens, who ran primarily on instinct with very little knowledge of the actual scope the universe beyond their familiar stars. They were noisy and ran their mouths like mad – especially the blue one – to the point he often wished his ears were less wide and tall and sensitive to sound. Sometimes, though, he found himself endeared by their giddy excitement about everything around them. They reminded him of himself when he’d been a young whelp, so long ago now, being taken on his first exploration of the dunes surrounding the ravine where his family’s den was homed. This led to a bit of curiosity, wondering what kind of society and environment could cultivate beings like these humans.

And, in the end, he found his questions being mostly answered by the Black Paladin, the most approachable of them all.

When Kolivan had opted to move Blade resources to focus on helping Team Voltron, Adwru himself had been skeptical about how it would all work out. The Blade wasn’t perceived in a particularly fond light by the parts of the universe that were aware of them, given whom it was primarily comprised of. He’d joined the Blade in hopes of doing good deeds and protecting or improving innocent lives, of proving that there were Galra whom were trying to stop Zarkon’s tyranny and disagreed with his cruelty. More times than not, though, their help was taken but then they themselves were scorned because of their heritage. It was disheartening, in a way. He certainly understood why those that they tried to help were distrustful of them, considering all they’d suffered, and he took more pride in knowing they were able give some kind of assistance. He didn’t need to be praised for what he did, but a part of him longed to at least not be called every derogatory insult possible upon giving assistance.

And then Takashi Shirogane happened.

Initially, their interactions were primarily simple business. He tended to speak with Shiro the most when relating to concerns including the Paladins, given he was the Paladin of the Black Lion and the leader. Queen Melenor and Coran were both clearly matured, responsible adults with loads of experience in regards to serving as delegates and warriors, and Coran’s son, Garrett, had inherited his father’s outgoing nature, which tended to draw people in to him. Even Princess Allura was a charismatic and considerate delegate, even if she didn’t show that side of herself to the Blade operatives very often. However, none of them were actively engaging in the physical side of the war, so Shiro was the one it made the most sense to speak with about such matters.

Additionally, he was the Paladin with the most experience in regards to working together in a setting such as this. The Green, Blue and Yellow Paladins were all there incredibly talented, but they were also much younger than most of the other instrumental players in the development of the growing resistance. The Green and Yellow Paladins were both highly intelligent with repairing or developing new technologies, and the Blue Paladin’s charisma and personality couldn’t be understated. They were doing a good job taking to their roles as Paladins, given the circumstances, but they were still rather immature and sometimes the gravity of what their titles actually meant.

It was admirable to see that one of the Paladin’s seemed to acknowledge the severity of the situation. Keith was the second most serious about his post, but even then, he’d noticed that sometimes Keith tended to act in a more kit-like fashion when interacting with the other three Paladins. It was admittedly kind of nice to see him cut loose and act a bit more in line with his age, even if it wasn’t the best of circumstances for it. Adwru knew that like in the Blade hadn’t always been easy for Keith, given he was a few years younger than both himself and Nihaar, who were the other two youngest members. So, he figured that the universe would be fine if he wanted to go gallivanting about to space malls or mosh-pitting at rock concerts.

This led to him interacting with Shiro even more and, from there, he noticed the strange way Shiro addressed the Blade and its dealings.

As the Coalition grew, Shiro took the time to praise and thank all their associates for their help; and, surprisingly, made sure to mention the Blade. After missions, he would make sure to thank any Blade members present for their assistance before concluding the debriefing. At public statements to planets they liberated, Shiro would take the time in his speeches to mention that they were only able to succeed as far as they did thanks to Blade intelligence. And, even still, he would always mention the Blade at meet-and-greet conventions where they were trying to enlist more planets into the Voltron Coalition. It seemed contradictory to their end goals in beginning the Coalition in the first place. Why admit to working with individuals with ties back to the very Empire you are trying to dismantle at recruitment meetings? It would only cause many of those planets you want in your alliance to become leery of your true intentions. It could make outsides uncertain of where Voltron’s loyalties lay, which would lead to lower recruitment numbers.

Somehow, though, they seemed significantly less effected than Adwru had anticipated. The Coalition continued to grow, despite the awareness of these planets that the Blade was involved in Voltron’s movements.

Then, his theory changed to one that he thought made a bit more sense. The Blade was one of the few allies Voltron had upon the new generation of Paladins stepping up and bringing hope back to the universe. It only made sense that, until they could grow their forces, they’d be sure to express their gratitude for the work they did. Once they had accumulated an impressive support system, though, the shows of gratitude continued. And Adwru, not one to accept being toyed with, had confronted the other on it.

"I'm… I’m sorry, but I don’t follow. Why would I lie about being grateful to what you and the other Blades do for us?” he asked, tone calm if not a bit confused. He’d been looking through a few battle simulations that Coran had suggested for their next training session on his tablet. While Adwru normally disliked pestering someone while they were working, this was the closest to down time as they’d most likely get for some time, and he had to take the chance.

"Because you have no other option but to do so. At least until your Coalition has grown large enough in size that you don’t need to, that is,” he scoffs, eyes narrowing slightly in growing frustration. He hadn’t anticipated the other to try and politely deflate the truth being let out.

"I think you’re overthinking it a bit. I make sure to thank you and the other Blade members for what you do to help us because you deserve it, and I always will. You all work so hard, risk so much, and ask for so little in return,"

"But we are Galra, the same as Zarkon and the rest of his Empire. We are the kin of those that have committed heinous acts to countless innocents for thousands of years,” he asserted firmly, brow kitting. The other looked up from the screen of his tablet, head tilting a bit, and blinked at him slowly. Adwru’s gaze briefly flittered over to the Galra prosthetic the human sported then looked back up, thinking that perhaps he could trigger the other to react more honestly if he struck the right nerve. “You should know quite well what Zarkon and his followers are willing to do to those in their clutches from your own experiences.”

Shiro tracked his gaze, the fist of his prosthetic clenching a bit. Adwru prepared himself for the other to explode, but he never did. The hand slowly unfurled and Shiro set his tablet aside to give him his full attention. "It wasn’t a Blade member that did this to me; it was one of the Galra that obeys Zarkon that did. It wouldn’t be fair of me to hold that against you or any other Blade when you’ve been trying to put a stop to things like this for years yourselves,” he pointed out. “I've never heard a Blade member try to justify Zarkon or the Empire's actions. I’ve never heard a Blade member try to make excuses or downplay the cruelty of Zarkon’s actions. None of you agree with what he does. I mean, you're all working actively to stop him! You're trying to right the wrongs of the Empire, Adwru, and you deserve to be thanked for that."

And Adwru didn’t know how to respond to that. And how should he, really? For someone to finally tell him that he was doing good, to reaffirm that he had made the right decision in joining the Blade of Marmora? With a quick, curt nod and mumbled, “thank you” he darted away. For the rest of the day, he had pondered over this and every other interaction he’d had with the human. Shiro was always so eager to offer assistance, to answer questions, as well as learn about the cultures and customs of those they were aligned with. For Adwru, whom had always been passionate about learning and growing better insight into those around him, there was something rather appealing about that.

Adwru had left briefly for a mission with the Blade to gather intel on the next planet they intended to liberate.

When he’d returned, late into what the Castle denizens had determined to be their equivalent of night time, he’d spotted Shiro settled in the lounge, a juice pouch in his hands, and his eyes cast to the floor. The look on his face was one that spoke of a forlorn exhaustion that he’d seen countless times before in the ones they saved from the Galra, as well as some of the older Blade members. He was still clad in his evening wear of some slack pants and a loose shirt, meaning he’d probably been stirred from his sleep by something; whether that something was a physical form or a dark, looming shadow, Adwru couldn’t say.

“Black Paladin?” He asked quietly. The other didn’t respond, though, so he stepped a little closer. “Shiro?”

The other visibly flinched and looked up at him, dark eyes flickering in anxiety and his prosthetic arm starting to spark with color. When he realized it was just Adwru, though, he visibly slumped. “Oh, Adwru, welcome back. How was the mission?” He asked, readjusting in his seat a bit. It didn’t hide the slight tremors, though.

“Good,” Adwru mused, ears tipping down slightly in concern. His gaze shifted down briefly to the small device the information as enclosed in.

The human’s eyes fell to the device and he moved to stand up. “Are those the files we needed? I’ll help you get it imported to the Castle Ship’s mainframe. I may not be as skilled as Pidge or Coran, but I can at least help with that much,” He offered.

A part of him wanted to insist that Shiro go back to bed, try to get some rest. He would need to be at his peak in order to assure that Voltron functioned properly, after all. But another part of him suspected that the other wouldn’t listen to him. He held up a hand and walked around, settling a comfortable distance away from Shiro on the couch. “There are things in this file that would be best to discuss with the team as a whole, actually. But, I’d like to talk to you about something else,”

This caused the other to blink in surprise, but he settled back against the cushions of the couch. “Of course. What’s on your mind?”

“I’d like to know more about the specifics of the assignment you were on before you were taken in by the Empire,” He said, carefully tucking the device into one of the pouches in his uniform. “I know your planet isn’t as advanced as some of the others we work with, but I’ve been led to believe that this Kerberos you were on is quite a ways off from your Earth, yes? It must have been an important mission.”

And, after a moment of pause, Shiro chuckled and took a sip from his pouch. “It was,” He mused before beginning to get into the logistics of it all.

This began a new routine between them. When Adwru was up late working on projects, as his people were typically of a nocturnal nature, Shiro would come and join him. As he worked, they would talk about this or that; normally Adwru asking questions about Earth technology and space exploration approaches. It didn’t start as something he asked out of genuine interest but more to offer a distraction, to help Shiro’s mind escape from the troubles rattling around in his head. His feelings changed, however, as he saw how excited and passionate the other became about his work back on Earth. The conversations always left him glowing, wearing a softer smile and the tension in his body relenting just a bit. Seeing this side of him and seeing how much he cared about the work he’d been doing before and how much he cared about his work as a Paladin now had left him with a strange feelings in his chest.

It grew, however, when Shiro began to express an interest in Adwru’s own history. He asked about what his home planet had been like, or when he started working with the Blade. And so Adwru had opened up and talked a little bit. He explained how his Mother was of a planet called Cenlonas, who specifically belonged to a race called the Fendosians. His Mama was a half-Galran Blade member whom had been sent to track down another Blade member that had gone traitor and tried to flee. His Mother and Mama worked together to find the traitor and execute them before they could potentially reach out to their allies within the Empire, and their relationship grew from there. He told Shiro about the time when, upon his second chance to leave the ravine for exploration, he stumbled into a large, prickly bush and ended up covered in small burrs. His Mama had spent the whole night helping him to pluck them from his coat.

The story caused a deep laugh, that rumbled all throughout his being, to escape Shiro, and Adwru’s ears perked up in delight at the sound.

He liked being able to offer Shiro a safe place to just be himself without worrying about the expectations of his title. And, he realized, something about seeing the man beneath the helmet left him feelings that he could only deem to be infatuation. This put him in a bit of an odd spot, though, because Earth being so far removed from the rest of the going-ons meant that very little was known about Earth courtship and customs. What, for example, would be seen as a gesture to show romantic interest?

Thankfully enough, the incredibly loud Blue Paladin offered him some insight when he started shouting about something called “Valentine’s Day”.

“What is this holiday about?” Romelle asked curiously when Lance suddenly proclaimed that it was coming up.

“Depends,” Pidge mused from her perch settled on the couch. She was skimming through some prisoner logs, most likely trying to snuff out any sign of her father or brother. “For younger kids, it’s a day to give little paper cards to all your classmates to pretend you’re all best friends and such. For teenagers, it’s a day where excessive, explicit PDA is seen as completely acceptable. For adults, it’s a day to get gifts for and from your partner, as well as some hot tail in some cases.”

Lance’s face screwed inward and he made a displeased noise. “Ugh, you’re making it so cynical,” He huffed, sticking his tongue out as if her words had left a foul taste in his mouth. “Valentine’s Day is a day for amore~! It’s a day in which lovers are allowed to openly express their feelings, to articulate just how deeply their feelings run~!” He proclaimed, gesturing dramatically, turning to drop on one knee and hold one hand out towards Allura, settled on the couch beside Pidge.

She blinked then giggled and rolled her eyes when he waggled his eyebrows at her playfully. “It certainly sounds interesting, when you put it that way,” She mused.

“So it’s only lovers and small children? If so, why would you want to celebrate it here? No one on the ship is dating,” Romelle pointed out.

“Well, no,” Lance said as he carefully stood back up, setting one hand on his hip. “See, it’s typically seen as a holiday for lovers, but it’s much more about love itself. The love between lovers, the love between friends, or a chance to expression that you are in love with someone.”

Adwru’s ears twitched and he glanced over briefly. He could do something for Shiro on Valentine’s Day to make his affections known, but how? He briefly entertained the idea to outright ask the Blue Paladin, but that seemed like a bad idea. For as tactical and clever he could be, he wasn’t exactly very skilled at keeping from gossiping. He would tell Romelle and Allura, who would then tell Coran and Garrett, who would then tell the remaining Paladins; including Shiro himself. Keith, despite being half-human himself, had limited knowledge of Earth traditions due to him being in the Blade for most of his years. Pidge seeming to have a rather cynical view of the holiday most likely wouldn’t be of much help.

But then there was Hunk, the Yellow Paladin, who was a bit nervous but also incredibly kind and smart and practical. He carefully slunk out of the commons area and headed off for the hanger, where he was certain the other was. Hunk was humming happily, bent over his work desk as he sketched out the drafts for a new shield device. They were trying to design shields akin to the particle barriers of the Lions and Castle Ship to give to allied forces, so that in the situation of a Galra attack, they’d be able to defend themselves until Voltron could swoop in and help them. “Excuse me, Yellow Paladin?” He asked calmly, peering over his shoulder.

The other let out a loud squawk and spun around to face him, flailing his bayard between his hands anxiously. He got a good grip on it but before he could shift it into its proper form, blinked and slumped back into his seat. “Dude, why do you Blade guys constantly sneak up on us like that? Can we, like, put bells on you guys while you’re in the Castle or something?” He whined with a small sigh, carefully setting his bayard back down and starting to turn around. “Also, if Pidge sent you to whine at me about how she wants to get to work, you can tell her that-!”

“What are the customs associated with your Valentine’s holiday?” Adwru cut in, paying no mind to the other’s prepared lecture about boundaries and patience.

He halted in turning back to his task to look at him inquisitively. “What?”

“The Blue Paladin was discussing your Valentine holiday. What, exactly, is anticipated for this holiday?”

“Well, I mean, it kinda depends,” He said as he spun around fully to face him. There was a glint in his dark brown eyes that implied he knew there was more than just casual interest behind the questions, but didn’t press it. “If you’re just giving to someone you’re friends with than normally small things like cards are typically the norm.”

“And if you mean to make a gesture of interest?”

“Like, you want to tell someone you like like them?”

“I… Believe so? Your terminology seems to be rather odd but I believe it is what I intend,” He stated. He carefully lifted his head and peered around, just to be safe, before squatting down so he was eye-level with young male. “I would like to offer a gift to Shiro as a sign of my interest in him. What is a good tactic to take in a situation such as this?”

The young man gawked at him for a moment before nodding slowly. “Okay… So, it really depends. Normally, you’ll want to make sure you pick something that’s, like, thoughtful, you know? Something that shows you’ve been paying attention to his interests and such,”

Adwru’s left ear twitched a bit and looked off to the side for a moment, his mind reeling through all the conversations they’d had. What stood out was one from a few quintants prior where a groggy Shiro, the two settled in the lounge, had lamented about some of the things he missed from Earth. “I have an idea. A snack that he may enjoy. But I will need the assistance of someone with a skilled palate to accomplish this,” He mused, pushing himself upright again.

“Are you thinking something Earth-based? Because, like, that might be a bit of a challenge. I mean, I’ve got a good idea of what goes good together, but I haven’t really tried to recreate anything Eart-centric,” Hunk said worriedly.

“I know a place where we can most likely find the materials needed. If you agree to go with me, taste-test to find things that have the right flavor, and help me get things figured out, I will serve as your bodyguard while we are there and purchase any additional goods you would like,” He vowed.

Hunk’s eye lit up and he nodded eagerly. “You give me the date and time and I’ll have Yellow ready to bail!”

It was difficult to get the okay to go from Shiro on the day of their intended escape. “I have a meeting to collect some intelligence gathered by a covert operative. Hunk has agreed to take me to the designated location,”

“Wouldn’t it be better to have Pidge or Keith take you? I mean, Green has the cloaking ability and all. Or, Red would be good since she’s the fastest Lion, and Keith would most likely be familiar with how Blade meetings go down,” Shiro pointed out.

Hunk looked a bit panicked, opening his mouth to most likely blurt out some kind of excuse, but Adwru cut in smoothly, “You’ve been implying you’d like the other Paladins to be a bit more hands-on, so I thought that it’d be good to allow someone other than Keith to accompany me. And, of all the Paladins, the Yellow Paladin seems to be the most outgoing and respectable. I thought he’d be the most logical option between himself, the Green Paladin, and the Blue Paladin.”

That had seemed to not only placate the leader, as he allowed them to leave, as well as endear him some to the Yellow Paladin. “Did you mean what you said? About me?” Hunk asked as they left the hanger.

“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t think it were true. I’m not fond of speaking just for the pleasure of hearing my own voice, you see,” He mused. Hunk had chuckled a bit at the answer and then focused on inputting the information he’d been giving.

The location was an intergalactic foods mart, where different vegetation from different worlds could be exchanged. It was located on a large asteroid just outside the orbit of the planet Hyna, and was one of the few locations in the Fefage galaxy that wasn’t Empire territory. The look on the young Paladin’s face reminded him of a pup getting their first bite of grilled turel meat. They wandered from booth to booth until they managed to find the things that Hunk felt would be most inclined to create the desired treat he had in mind.

When they returned to the Castle Ship, Shiro was in a meeting with Queen Melenor, Coran, and a few of the bigger names that had enlisted into the Coalition. While he was preoccupied, Hunk and Adwru got to work. Or, rather, Adwru insisted that he be the one to do the brunt of the work, as it was meant to be a gift from him. Hunk was patient as he helped walk him through, the two of them testing and experimenting to figure out the right consistency. It took them a little longer than intended, but they got it worked out.

The wrap job on the gift wasn’t the tidiest, with how the white bow on top was askew and uneven, but he supposed it was the best he could do. Gifts typically didn’t get wrapped in his culture, but Hunk had been adamant as he shoved the bow and glossy lavender paper into his hands. Adwru’s handwriting as he tried to use the English alphabet from Earth to spell out Shiro’s name looked more like a pup’s sand sketches than an actual word, but he supposed it was the best he could do with next to no experience. The packaging wouldn’t be important, he hoped, so long as the gift itself turned out to be a good choice. Hunk offered him a reassuring grin and thumbs-up before nudging him along his way.

He headed off down the hall, staying close to the wall, instincts kicking in at the prospect of his “mission”. He realized he should have asked more questions. How did the offering a gift work in human culture? The meeting had just ended as he rounded the corner, Shiro speaking quietly with Queen Melenor as they exited. It was the ruler who saw him first, noticing his tense posture and the object clutched in his grasp. A small smile turned up on her lips and she leaned over, saying something to Shiro before motioning Coran to herself and heading along. Shiro looked a bit bemused before he turned and spotted Adwru, seeming surprised. “Hello, Adwru,” He said, turning to fully face him.

“Hello,” He greeted back with a curt nod of his head. He carefully adjusted the gift in his hands before holding it into the open space between the two of them. “This is for you.”

Shiro blinked a bit in surprise. “Oh, thanks. What’s the occasion?” He asked, taking the gift and gently tugging at the bow.

“The Blue Paladin informed me that a holiday was approaching that is of significance to many humans. Valentine’s Day, he called it,” He explained, his eyes skirting from the human before him to his boots. The young man took in a small gasp, his cheeks turning a bit pink at his explanation. “The Yellow Paladin observed my efforts to assure the quality. I hope you enjoy.” He explained quickly, his stomach roiling uneasily.

“Adwru, um, Valentine’s Day… It’s, well, how do I say?” Shiro stammered out with a small nervous smile.

“The Blue Paladin explained what, exactly, this holiday meant. And that is specifically why I chose to offer you this gift now,” He said, forcing his tone to keep from warbling out of nervousness. Shiro’s eyes widened a bit, the flush lightening a bit, as his eyes tracked back down to the top of the gift in his hands. The look on his face was something soft and sentimental but also a bit contemplative. What was he thinking, he wondered? Was it possible that Shiro was interested in him in such a way as well?

And then, because he wasn’t sure what else to do once that thought hit him, he offered a quick nod before darting off to find himself a good place to hide. Maybe try and coerce Keith to join him for a small patrol of the galaxy they were in.

“Adwru, wait!” Shiro called, trying to catch his arm, but the other was around the corner before he could give proper chase. He frowned before looking back down at the gift in his hands, plucking the card off and looking at it. A small smile crept on his lips when he saw the attempt the other had made at using the English alphabet to write his name, finding it sweet how far he’d gone. He’d seen the written language of Adwru’s people before and surmised that he should offer to teach him how to write in Japanese. It’d most likely be much easier for him to learn, since the two styles were similar to one another.

He then carefully pulled apart the box and popped the top off, looking down at what rested inside with his head cocked. Inside, was a small cluster of what he assumed were some kind of fruit, but they were shaped something similar to the number 9 without the empty gap in the circular portion. They were a bright yellow color, with white stems and leaves at the very top. The lower half of it was covered in a turquoise colored sort of coating that gleamed almost like it was made of glass.

Were these some kind of trinket or decoration piece? Well, he figured, that didn’t make much sense. If he’d requested Hunk’s request in preparing this, it only made sense that it be some kind of snack. He plucked one out and gave it a small sniff. It had a pleasant, sweet smell to it. With a small shrug, he took a bite and his eyes widened at the incredible, sweet flavor followed by the smooth, slight bite in his mouth. He pulled it back and licked his lips, staring at the small fruit in his mouth in disbelief.

“I miss a lot of things about Earth, but you what I miss the most?” Shiro asked, staring from the ceiling of the lounge to look over at Adwru. The other had originally been working on decrypting some files on his holo-pad, but as they swapped stories he’d set it aside to award him his full attention. He always liked it when Adwru would become fully invested in what he had to say. It was always so cute how the other’s large, fox-like ears would twitch and dip in accordance to what Shiro said or how he said it.

“Other than not having to trapeze through space in a giant, psychic robotic Lion leading a team of adolescents?” He prompted back dryly, ears perked upright.

Shiro laughed and gave him a playful shove, recognizing the dry wit he’d learned Adwru leaned towards. “Okay, that,” He said before leaning back against the couch, “but I really miss strawberries.”

“Strawberries?” The other parroted curiously.

“Mmhm. They’re these sweet fruits that are just so good. Especially if you get them dipped in chocolate; dark chocolate, especially!” He explained excitedly.

“It certainly sounds like something interesting,” Adwru prompted. Shiro had rambled a few times about the different snacks and treats that could be found on Earth and, while Adwru’d never had a chance to try any of them, he was familiar with basic things like chocolate and candy bars.

“Oh, it’s amazing. I mean, dark chocolate makes everything better,” He continued, his sleepy mind falling into a prattle about dark chocolate and what else it paired with well.

Shiro smiled as he tossed the remaining bite into his mouth and closed his eyes in pure bliss. “I can’t believe he remembered that,” He said softly carefully putting the lid back on the box. He then headed off in the direction Adwru headed off on. He wanted to approach the subject of a potentially shared interest with him, and let him get a small taste of just how good these little treats were.

#crumbles grumbles #my fics #I'm not gonna tag this with characters or anything #Simply since I'm not sure how many people will be interested in these two dorks

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zionchronicleinfo · 3 years

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We Felicitate with Mr Victor Akan on The Occasion Of His BIRTHDAY!

No matter the circumstances we can't forget to Shout a very big Happy Birthday to you you Brother Victor because very soon you are going to say ' YES I DO' in the next 10 days.

Times may not be so good at the present but remember that life will not always be this way, go on and don’t quit,

another year has been added in your life, thank God for blessing you with a good life and being a father of someone.

You are +1 "YES", live it like you are the king of the world and don’t mind what others say, this days is just for you until after 14/3/ 2021 when your Thanksgiving service will be taking place.

As pizza delights every enzyme of the mouth, Dynamic young men are a delight to the soul of the woman, Enjoy and be glad.

On your Big Day as we wish you lots of joy, fun, happiness, love and all other stuff that doesn‘t cost a thing…

Respect elevates every man, but not every man deserves it. We want you to know that we love and respect you with every fiber of our being, because you deserve it.

It’s almost impossible that any man suits everything the woman asked for, but you broke that law and deem fit in getting ready to stand in the alter which you are going to say I do to be enlisted in to the University of no graduation with your marriagehood

On behalf of myself ZION Chronicle Media and the entire ZION Assembly. May the greatest pain you will ever feel come from eating too much and laughing too much, Hehehe. We want to wish you a prosperous and fulfilling year ahead, May your day be super bright and super special!

Life is easier now that you are still young. Be ready for the unpredictable life you will face as you grow, We know God will help you through.

Don’t let other people dictate what you should do. You can listen to pieces of advice and be wise with your choices.

Dear young man, you’ll meet many people along the way, each of them will bring something different along your journey, but Be wise in choosing friend and learn from the wise.

Look at all the things that put a smile on your face. Be inspired by them because you are also an inspiration to many even to your immediate family...

Your character will make you do great and be popular among many people. Stay that way young man.

There will be moments when you feel that the world isn’t on your side remember not to to despair because there are also good things that are meant for you, We know you’ll have a fantastic life.

May God always lead you to the right path. Also, may you have the wisdom to know the direction as you step out of your house. Life may be filled with difficult times but we know that you will overcome each hurdle you pass. Look ahead and be inspired by your dreams.

In life, we may not always get all the things we desire but there might be better things in stored for us. Just always look on the brightest side when things go awry.

When you need someone in tough times, we will be there just click on ZION Chronicle and we'll just be behind you.

You might get confused about your role in this world. Don’t worry, you’ll find your niche and you will be great.

There are moments when you’ll feel sad, bad and disappointed. Don’t worry because there would be more wonderful days in your life as your new age.

I know that each year bring different learnings and lessons. May you be wiser and better this year as you are preparing to say "YES, I DO"!,I pray that all you prayed for will turn into reality.

The world is so big. Be brave but be careful with your choices. Explore and experience new things.

Life is not that easy but we know you’ll overcome each trial that comes your way. Have a fantastic birthday, young man.

The best things in life will unfold slowly but surely. Wait for them expectantly while working hard.

You’re one of a kind. You will do well in this big chaotic world. Enjoy your birthday, young man don’t fail to look back to remind yourself how far you’ve become.

You’re a strong and wise young man so use these to be a great individual someday. As for now, just enjoy your special day.

Once again

Happiest birthday!

©Peter Peter

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sad-af1121 · 7 years

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Strangers In The Mind: Part 1

Summary: A cure has been found for Bucky and as he is going under treatment, he starts having bizarre dreams about you. He doesn’t know why or how. Never in his life has he actually met you but, he is determined to find you. (soulmate AU) Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader Word Count: 1370 Warnings: Angst, mentions of abuse/torturing, depressive thoughts? A/N: This is shorter than the next parts because it’s like a teaser/background. It is going to be angsty and I hope y’all enjoy. Silhouette by Aquilo is a great song for this fic. Feedback is welcomed 💜

Present

“Hey, stop looking so grim. You should be glad I’m here, mister.”

There you were looking radiant as ever. The wind blew through your hair, creating ripples of your scent to spread out in the open. His heart swells seeing the crinkles of your eyes, the brightness of your smile, and the love you held most emitting from you. Bucky could have sworn an angel came down to visit him every night whenever he tried to sleep.

But time was slipping through his fingers.

“I am, I am. It’s just that… I don’t understand why I see you here.” Bucky says while looking around the beautiful forestry surrounding the two of you. You both laid on the green grassy ground, on a mid-springs day as a soft breeze coursed through the air, making the plants dance. You giggled laying on your stomach, making sure your dress didn’t rise as you started kicking your legs back and forth.

“You’ll know soon, I promise.” You said, picking the petals off a white carnation flower. Bucky looked down at you, using his metal hand to prop up his head as he watched you destroy the delicate bloom.

“I love you, Y/N… always and forever” He says softly as he absorbs your beauty one last time before his time is up.

“I’ll see you next time, Buck.” You state, ignoring what Bucky said. A single tear ran down your pink cheek as you felt the disconnection from him. He was being pulled out of his dreaming state.

He was waking up.

“W-wait.” He hesitated as the sky became dark, consuming everything as it disappears into the dark void.

“Goodbye, James.” Your voice lingers on in a haunting whisper as you fade away.

Bucky awoke from yet another dream he couldn’t explain. He threw the covers off this body as he swung his legs over the edge, leaning his forearms on his thighs as he went over what happened.

A dream.

That’s all it was. Nothing more.

Every night you would show up in his dreams in a different setting, different appearance, and different state of mind. The amount of detail Bucky could see was astonishing. Every touch, scent, sound, and taste left a mark on his soul. The way your lips always stayed plush, your skin smooth like silk, your eyes bright as day and your voice calming, luring him to sleep like a lullaby. Just like his nightmares that would feel so real, so tempting that it would drag him down into the abyss of darkness, you were his light.

When Bucky was in Wakanda, T’Challa and many scientists were able to find a cure for Bucky’s brainwashing. It was a combination of using Wanda’s abilities and reversing the effects Hydra had forced upon him. Extracting every word from his mind wasn’t an easy task. It was as if it was stripping apart of Bucky from the inside.

Those words had become him.

The kind of screams that made your blood run cold like shards of glass piercing through flesh filled the room as scientists and Wanda tried getting rid of the words that have only done terrible things. Bucky’s eyes would become wide and glossed over as his desperate yet terrified screams left his body. Every time Wanda went inside his mind, a jolt of electricity shot through his entire core, hitting every nerve along its way as it runs up his spine into his brain. Imagine touching an outlet that shocks your finger for a second, leaving a sting behind, but for Bucky, it lasted for hours until Wanda detached the word from its source.

The blood from his face would drain, making him more zombie-like than he already was. His heart would thud so loud you could had felt its beat booming through your chest like a stereo. Indents in the shape of a crescent were left into the armrest of the chair Bucky sat in. He dug his nails into the material, bracing the amount of telepathic energy placed upon his mind. His body shook in fear and uncertainty, trembling as his body tried to recover from the procedure. He would stare into space, not knowing if the pain he was going through was worth it as nurses checked his vitals and his state.

He pondered if this was any different than his time in Hydra. He was being experimented on, always on surveillance, and lacking any sort of freedom. After the Accords, Steve wanted to make sure Bucky was well taken care of by T’Challa and his team. There was no other option for Bucky, so he spent about 5 years in Wakanda until Steve requested him back at the tower where his treatments would continue. But that was the least of Bucky’s worries.

It didn’t matter how much pain he had to endure for the poison Hydra had implanted in him to go away. He wanted them out for good. He yearned for peace.

An escape.

The first few days at the Tower were hard. Bucky would lay in bed at night, tears stinging his eyes as he thought back to his life, before enlisting. How he grew up with Steve, the love he carried for his ma and sisters, and the most upright respect he had for people who came his way. It wasn’t in his nature to be cruel. Not once did he bully a kid because they seemed weak, beat up a man for no reason or treating women like they were trash after he spent the night with them. It wasn’t him.

What did I do so bad in my life to deserve this?

Staring into the void, tears would run down the sides of his face as he laid there numb from his thoughts. Still a reminder of what the Winter Soldier has done, he remembers every face he killed, tortured, beaten, and brought fear upon. Never in his life did he expect it to turn out like this.

I’m a monster.

With time, Bucky would heal as his nightmares would decrease. They’ll never go away as his demons were still there, waiting for him at the gates of Hell that was his mind. They were ready to remind him what he really is and of his past. Each kill took a piece of his soul. He didn’t know what emotion was, being fried every couple hours whenever he remembered his true self, James Buchanan Barnes.

He knew the night terrors weren’t going to go away, but having less of them were better than having the constant fear of relapsing and going into Winter Soldier mode. He just wished he didn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night with his sheets drenched in his own sweat and his heart beating like a drum, loud and fast. Frantically moving around as his sheets would trap him, tangled and wrapped around his limbs like something never letting him go.

He’d look around the room, familiarizing himself that he is safe and isn’t under control. No more hiding in the darkness, in fear as the only type of people who surrounded him were the ones who cared most and the ones who just wanted to help.

But I don’t deserve them.

As time went on, Bucky could dream about things other than his time at Hydra or his fear that consumed him for most of his life. Strange dreams like memories played in his mind as he slept.

It was odd at first, seeing unfamiliar faces and places as he roamed around, basking in the moment. Bucky couldn’t think the of the last time he dreamt, or how his mind could imagine again. To his assumption, Hydra blocked the receptors in his brain that allowed him to do so.

However, he realized there was a woman in his dreams that would appear every single night.

He didn’t understand why he was seeing the same woman in his dreams, but he didn’t mind. She brought him peace as he left the real world and came into limbo. She was the anchor to his struggles and light to his darkness.

You.

TAGS: @thatawkwardtinyperson @jezzula @buckybarnesismypreciousplum @amrita31199 @papi-chulo-bucky @softwintersoldier @angryschnauzer @avengersandlovers @soldatbarnes @cumonbucky @badassbaker @finallybreathee @james-bionic-barnes @atari-writes

(permanent tag-list is open)

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky x reader #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes fic #bucky barnes angst #bucky barnes au

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woodworkingpastor · 5 years

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Into all the world... Matthew 28:16-20 Second Sunday of Easter April 28, 2019

Prayer of Invocation

We give you all thanks and praise, O God,

for you meet us in our doubts and fill us with life and peace.

You are the one who was and is and is to come—the beginning and the end—who breathed life into the earth and its creatures.

Our ancestors put their trust in you and celebrated your mighty acts of salvation.

You sent your child, Jesus, as a faithful witness to your goodness and love.

He was killed by the powerful, but you raised him, as the firstborn from the dead.

Appearing behind the locked doors of our fear he breathed Holy Spirit into us and commissioned us to carry his words of peace and mercy to the world.

Seated at your right hand as Leader and Savior, he frees us from sin and makes us a kingdom of priests to serve you forever.

We live in a day where culture can quickly be influenced by new concepts, behaviors, or phrases. Most of us remember how quickly phrases from the TV show Seinfeld worked their way from the show into common speech. Phrases like “yada yada yada,” “no soup for you,” and “not that there’s anything wrong with that” are still heard in common conversation, all courtesy of Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer.

With social media, memes became even more common, as catchy phrases can now be attached to a photo and transmitted quickly. Some of my favorites memes are those who show the results of an embarrassing mistake with the phrase, “You had one job.”

I hope you noticed the header above our order of worship this morning. It’s the Second Sunday of Easter. That’s an important designation to keep in mind, because the church has historically recognized holidays differently than our culture recognizes them. Our Hallmark culture puts all the emphasis on the days leading up to the holiday—so we get Christmas songs at Thanksgiving and chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps just past Valentine’s Day. But the church recognizes holidays after the actual day. Following that logic, the Great Commission is an Easter text; the resurrection of Jesus reminding us the church has one job: make disciples.

Making disciples was not so easily accomplished for the disciples and those who would follow them in those first years after the resurrection. The significant problem those Christians faced was that no one knew anything about what they were talking about. The Jesus movement portrayed in the book of Acts typically began with outreach in the Jewish community—where there was common spiritual ground—but quickly spread to non-Jewish persons, reaching all the way to Rome within a generation and a half of the resurrection.

The question these Christians wrestled with was “how do we make disciples?” Starting from scratch, the church had to work out things like how do we baptize? What is the proper way to celebrate the Lord’s Supper? How do we teach others to follow Jesus—to do the things that Jesus did?

It didn’t take long for those believers to write down an instruction manual in Christian discipleship. It’s called the Didache, meaning “The Teaching.” In it, the writers cover basic Christian ethics before moving on to give instructions on how to baptize (running water is preferred but pouring is acceptable if you don’t have access to a river); how to serve communion; how to pray; and how to fast. What I find absolutely fascinating is how it begins. Of all the points of Christian doctrine the authors might have chosen to emphasize by placing first in the text, they chose these words:

Two ways there are, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two ways. Now the way of life is this: first, love the God who made you; secondly, your neighbor as yourself: do not do to another what you do not wish to be done to yourself.

The writers then continue in a way that might lead us to believe that the first Christians were Church of the Brethren:

The lesson of these words is as follows: bless those that curse you, and pray for your enemies; besides, fast for those that persecute you. For what thanks do you deserve when you love those who love you…when anyone gives you a blow on the right cheek, turn to him the other as well, and be perfect…

They then move on to things to avoid: murder, violence, improper sexual relations, stealing, honest speech. Pretty much everything we might think to include on such a list.

It’s a fascinating read, for it solidly establishes that those who are Jesus’ disciples—that’s all of us—simply make different value judgments on who and what is valuable, and what things Christians can and cannot do because we have surrendered our lives to Jesus. Even though the document is well over 1800 years old, it has a contemporary feel because these Christian leaders were instructing their new members and their entire congregations on:

telling the truth

not seeking revenge when wronged

keeping sex within the boundaries of marriage

not being envious, not coveting what our neighbors have

seeking the best for those who make our lives difficult.

It describes these Christian qualities in the midst of a culture where doing things differently than these was normal and acceptable. It’s not just that these behaviors honor God and reflect our transformation; it’s that living this way was different. Being a disciple of Jesus was fundamentally different from the world around them.

This is something we need to realize today, because signs that our culture is rapidly moving away from anything that resembles Christianity are all around us. We recognize this, but we want to make sure we recognize the correct signs.

David Brooks wrote a very helpful opinion piece in a column entitled Five Lies our Culture Tells, published by the New York Times on April 15. He begins by observing the amount of despair that is all around us: college mental health facilities are swamped; suicide rates are spiking; opioid addiction is rampant; our political leaders tell lies daily and we shrug it off. His thesis is that our current distress is based on lies we tell ourselves about how to be happy: Lies like:

Career success is fulfilling. Work hard in school, get into a good college, make good grades, and find the career of your dreams.

I can make myself happy. Just win one more game; lose those 15 pounds; or be more faithful at church. Happiness is something to be gained with one more achievement or acquisition.

Life is an individual journey. Whoever dies with the most interesting experiences wins.

You have to find your own truth. Choose what values and traditions work for you and go with them. As long as no one is getting hurt, it’s ok.

Rich and successful people are worth more than poorer and less successful people. This one might just be a variation of the first one. The more you have, the happier you’ll be.

It would be easy to look at the despair around us and throw our hands up in frustration at the prospects of impacting the culture for Christ and the church. We might be sorely tempted to retreat into the safe walls of our congregation and focus on our own lives. Or we could remember something significant: today is the second Sunday of Easter; Jesus is raised from the dead and has commissioned us exactly for times like these. The fact that it might be more difficult to get people to take an honest look at Christianity these days does not excuse us from the fact that “we have one job: to make disciples.”

It might look like Matthew 28:19-20 is actually giving us four things to do: go, make disciples, baptize, and teach. It’s a bit clearer in the Greek: the primary verb in this sentence is make disciples. The other verbs, go, baptize, and teach all describe how we make disciples. And what is remarkable to me in the New Testament is how often disciples are made in living rooms. Not in church sanctuaries or even in Sunday School rooms—although the Spirit moves in those places, too. The disciple-making energy of New Testament churches was directed toward people gathered in homes, the exact places where people have traditionally formed deep relationships with one another, where traditions and rituals are passed down through the generations, and where people’s value is based on the fact that they are members of a valuable community, each one contributing to the strength of the entire group.

In other words, the church became the place where cultural lies like those David Brooks describes of our day were shown to be false through the manner of our living. It could do this because of one theological lie of our day of individualism. In the New Testament church, people are not called to become individual believers but are to be enlisted as disciples within the Christian community, whose reception of the Christian message in faith must be actualized in their lives.

The church has one job: make disciples. Taking this job seriously makes us realize that a faithful church is more focused on transformed lives, not Sunday morning attendance. So how do we get there? One way might be to figure out how to free people up to have more dinners with our neighbors. Spending more time at home gathered around the dining room table with our families and our friends, not having so many church activities and meetings that we’re always rushing back here after work for another meeting. We are surrounded by people who might not be interested in coming to church, but might be curious about someone who has found that joy is found in things like

long-standing deep friendships;

friends who love us enough to tell us when we’re acting like jerks—and whom we love enough to believe them when they say it;

satisfaction found in things other than our career, or our car, or our latest purchase or vacation;

I’ve met a lot of people who aren’t all that interested in church. But I’ve hardly met anyone who wouldn’t let me pray for them when things were going badly in their lives. That says something.

What can we do to meet more people like this? Brothers and sisters, we have one job!

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wishingfornever · 5 years

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11/18/17 – No Contact: State of Decay

Esther’s Nation will be destroyed today. Or tomorrow, I’m not sure. That’s sad, but it’s acceptable. Less of a spit in the face, you know? I made her flag. Glad she won’t be using it anymore.

Last night, I couldn’t sleep. I came up with a plan to target Dennis. He, in his foolhardiness, believes he has to froth and demand and yell in order to defend Esther. I know this because he got on Shane’s case for calling Esther a whore. Then Shane got on my case and claimed he didn’t, even though he just deleted the message.

What a dick. I know what I saw, I know how I felt when I saw him call Esther a whore. I remember because I felt the same when she called herself a whore. Whatever. Point is, if I wanted to get back at Dennis, I’d have to offend Esther in some way. That way, he’ll start frothing and will threaten me. In his anger, he’ll call me out in a sort of sense that says, “Fight me!” He’ll do this because he doesn’t think I’ll return but I plan to come back for my truck. Thus, I’ll accept the challenge and show up. I’ll bolster and taunt and he’ll cower inside, not really expecting to fight. I’ll show Adriana what he said and told her I accepted and that he picked a fight with me. The thing is, if he DOES fight he’ll have to invite me onto his property as well as agree to a fight. That’d be totally legal. Private property. That’s how boxing is still legal.

That said, I’m not expecting him to fight but I am expecting Adriana to yell at him. It’ll cause struggle and strife and would be enough to punish him. If he does decide to fight, then I get to slap him around. It’s a win win.

One problem is is that Esther would hate me for it. Worse yet, the only way I can see it coming to fruition is if I just let loose her secrets to her mother. That’d be the only way to target her right now. And I’m not entirely convinced I can do that to her just yet. An inability to commit… that’s my biggest problem.

Thing is, I considered doing something else. He was looking for a job, right? I mean, not anymore obviously, but he was. I was going to try to find out what job he had and then call and leave a horrible complaint that would lead to him getting fired! BAHAHAHAHA!!!

Problem is, that’s illegal. Not that I generally care about the law, but I’d rather not do something that would jeopardize myself. It’d be a great way, but it’s slanderous and would lead to a financial loss and I could get sued. Even if I’m sure he’d NEVER find out (which I’m sure he wouldn’t because nobody ever checks anonymous complaints) it’s still not a good idea. I’m angry, but I’m not going to break the law to have vengeance. Rather, I will dance near the edge but well within the confines of what is allowed. It’s worse that way for him because he’ll want to retaliate but he can’t. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I hate him again, but I don’t. I’m just… bitter. I demand justice in my divine pettiness. He has done a LOT of suspicious things and I never held him to it. I chose to let it go but he decides to block me again? Fuck. That. Shit. Hell, Esther deserves to get shit on as well. It’s coming back to me and I wasn’t that bad to her. Of course, I did do those things she’s claimed I’ve done but it wasn’t as frequent as it sounded to be. Not trying to justify anything, but I had entirely stopped before everything went down. And, of course, she put me through the wringer too. Keep in mind, before “The End” she and I were planning something. She’d come back just to see me. She said it’d help her. If I were as bad as I seemed, she wouldn’t have agreed to that. Or maybe she lied and said that to make me feel better. I don’t know. I trust her, though.

So… might be worth it. But I’m not angry enough to do that. I guess I’ll keep it, just in case something happens. I doubt it would, but who knows?

It occurred to me. I made a joke about giving Dennis a character and making that character have a tiny penis in one of my books. Why don’t I do that? That’s a good vengeance… my side of the truth, taken for all. Of course, my side will be the most honest truth. Not because it’s me but because I’ve acknowledged my shortcomings. I’ve confronted my wronghoods. It will be the most honest because I don’t care about my own image. It’ll have to be in that book idea I was flirting with. Basically a Jade Empire fan-fiction, but more lore I suppose. Fantasy China. I already have the names.

It’ll be perfect. There is no grander revenge than telling the world he has a tiny penis. And it’d be legal because it’s not him but inspired by him. Then again, imagery laws are a pain in the ass. I’ll have to look.

Eh… Looking back. I find it ironic. I’m still just so upset but a few weeks ago, I wasn’t. I was hurt. I said I was planning something but nothing ever came from it. I sent him an email, using one of the videos Esther made when she was here. Just a masturbation session, nothing important. I sent him an email wanting to make up. I offered the video despite him blocking me and I even told him a few things to help him out. Nothing much… I feel dumb now.

Ugh… I’m just… so disheartened right now. Time to immerse myself elsewhere. ><

Oh! They’re finally releasing a WWII Enfield Airsoft Rifle. That’s really great. Appropriate one too, not the earlier variant. I know, a bit random considering my angry rant but Youtube proposed a video demonstrating it. If you know me, I LOVE history and airsoft so historical airsoft rifles are perfect. I’m super stoked. It’s a good thing.

Anyways, Adela is asleep right now. I’m going to skin some carrots and eat them because I’m waiting for dinner. We’ll go shopping today or tomorrow. No more Hot Pockets. They’re… too easy. Too quick. By the time I eat one, I already want another. So, they’re not healthy. I was hoping they’d be a quick meal substitute but they’re not. I guess I’ll have to use the rod on myself and focus on getting food that requires SOME effort. Otherwise, what’s the point? I’ll just eat right through it.

I still have a couple onions and a tomato that I haven’t chopped up. I’ll do that later today. I wonder if I still have bread… Might make a breakfast sandwich for myself when I’m done with the onions and tomatoes. Or I could do something with the broccoli. You know, what I’ve been flirting with this entire time.

Nah, carrots for now. Broccoli tomorrow.

I spoke to Ariel. She hasn’t been eating lately, so I was making sure she was. She had McDonald’s which is weird because she isn’t usually into fast food. However, it’s still… edible, I guess. Don’t want her to starve, even if what she is eating is unhealthy as sin.

I want a burger right now.

Just finished the carrots. They were… meh. Ah, well. :/

I received some peculiar news. Very peculiar. I’ll keep it to myself for now, but science is ahead. The coming experiment will involve my lovely Ariel and her beliefs. There is a chance she could LITERALLY GET HURT but there is also a possibility that she won’t even find out and nothing wrong will happen to her. If this experiment requires her to suffer even a little bit like as menial as bumping her small toe on a coffee table, I’ll halt it. However, for the sake of science, if the way to do it can be done without any harm at all? Then it will be a go. ;)

Speaking of experiments, I decided something. I toyed with this idea before but I think since I’m losing weight, if I lose enough I’ll enlist. Probably Marines, not to prove myself but because their dress uniform is nice. That and their camo doesn’t look like barf.

The reason for this is so I can have some idea what I’m talking about when writing my country’s lore. Of course, I should probably also become a lawyer, a scientist, a pro athlete, and a doctor to cover all the other bases but that’s not the point. I have a relatively decent familiarity with the law. Could I be my own lawyer? No. Hell no. God no. I’ll need a lawyer, but I have a certain tact for laws. The rest, it will be fine because healthcare between countries tend to be relatively similar, the biggest concerns are often with how to receive the healthcare. Thus, mixed with science, I can imply that some medical experiments have been great success. Besides, setting up a scene for a doctor is easy. Esther got a set of scrubs for $20. Hell, I think I bought it for her.

One scene that’d be HARD to get would be a cooking scene. My country’s cuisine is that of fish and cheese. An islander diet, go figure for Psuedo-Cuba. A professional kitchen would have to be borrowed. With a medical thing, you can just set up drapes and make it look like an operating room easily and can hide a lot of the background with a light. A lot of cooking supplies in a photo shoot for cooking. -,-

I think science and military would be the most expensive shots to get. But I’m not just doing photos, I’m also writing a bunch of lore. I’ve been looking a lot into Elon Musk’s progress into science. That’s going to be a lot. Desalination plants in my country have to be a thing. Defintiely need those.

I’m hungry. Dumb carrots. -,-

I did it again. Adela and I went out for dinner. I had chicken. GRAAAAAAAAAAH!!! I had to, I was talking to Ariel about that sandwich and how good it was. It was just as good as ever. I wish to make a sandwich as good as that on my own time. What’s their secret?

Chicken and bacon. Stupid vegetarianism. :c

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OF HOW MANY literary journalists can we say that one of the defining intellectual publications of the second half of the 20th century grew out of a piece of that journalist’s occasional criticism? Probably not many, and yet that’s exactly what Elizabeth Hardwick achieved with her 1959 Harper’s Magazine essay “The Decline of Book Reviewing.” Four years after the essay appeared, the editor who had commissioned it — Robert B. Silvers, who died earlier this year — went on to found, with Barbara Epstein, The New York Review of Books, enlisting the support of A. Whitney Ellsworth, Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell — and Elizabeth Hardwick, whose essay Silvers always pointed to as the earliest source of inspiration. “That essay is crucial,” he told New York magazine on the occasion of the Review’s 50th anniversary in 2013.

“The Decline of Book Reviewing,” included here in a long-overdue collection of Hardwick’s essays (selected by the novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney and published by NYRB Classics), is a powerful and persuasive broadside against the “sweet, bland commendations” that were all too common in the book pages of daily newspapers in Hardwick’s time — and, one is a little embarrassed to admit, are still too common in the twittering society of mutual admiration that is our literary culture today. In a famous passage, Hardwick berated The New York Times for the “flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity — the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself,” that too often characterized its literary coverage. She viewed the Times as a kind of bloated provincial rag — a judgment that surely must have ruffled a few metropolitan furs over at the Gray Lady. Yet Hardwick, despite her polemical tone, was being more than just polemical: she was being hostile in the defense of a value. (She did not generally traffic in gratuitous hatchet jobs or cultural postmortems.) She took books — literature — seriously, and could not suffer the sight of alleged newspapers of record treating something so important so blandly:

[T]he drama of the book world is being slowly, painlessly killed. Everything is somehow alike, whether it be a routine work of history by a respectable academic, a group of platitudes from the Pentagon, a volume of verse, a work of radical ideas, a work of conservative ideas. Simple “coverage” seems to have won out over the drama of opinion; “readability,” a cozy little word, has taken the place of the old-fashioned requirement of a good, clear prose style, which is something else. All differences of excellence, of position, of form are blurred by the slumberous acceptance. The blur eases good and bad alike, the conventional and the odd, so that it finally appears that the author like the reviewer really does not have a position.

Hardwick was in her early 40s when she wrote “The Decline of Book Reviewing.” The last essay included here in The Collected Essays, an appreciation of Nathanael West, appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2003, when Hardwick was 87. In the intervening four decades she not only managed to live up to her own exacting standards (the dull thought, the tired phrase, may knock but never enter), but she also grew to become one of the 20th century’s towering writer-critics, deserving of a seat at the table of Virginia Woolf and V. S. Pritchett. Like them, she approached criticism artistically, metaphorically. George Eliot, she writes in one of the essays collected here, was “melancholy, headachey, with a slow, disciplined, hard-won, aching genius that bore down upon her with a wondrous and exhausting force, like a great love affair in middle age”; William James and his siblings, in their childhood, were “packed and unpacked, settled and unsettled, like a band of high livers fleeing creditors”; the Jewish businessman Simon Rosedale, in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), is “weighted down, as if by an overcoat in summer, with a thickness of objectionable moral and physical attributes.”

On every page of this book you will be reminded that Elizabeth Hardwick was not simply a great critic but a great writer. This distinction matters. Hardwick’s essays are always sticking their neck out; their aphoristic grace and easy impressionism are a way of speaking to their subjects in their own language, without deafening them with comprehension and analysis. For instance, in the great essay on Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) — is there, indeed, a greater essay on this story? — Hardwick is not, in the scholarly or theoretical manner, trying to solve the enigma of Bartleby’s resignation; she eschews this temptation, and even gently reprimands Melville for, in the story’s final sentence, inviting it. Instead, she follows Bartleby’s language — his style — and offers up her own in comparison:

Bartleby’s language reveals the all of him, but what is revealed? Character? Bartleby is not a character in the manner of the usual, imaginative, fictional construction. And he is not a character as we know them in life, with their bundling bustle of details, their suits and ties and felt hats, their love affairs surreptitious or binding, family albums, psychological justifications dragging like a little wagon along the highway of experience. We might say he is a destiny, without interruptions, revisions, second chances. But what is a destiny that is not endured by a “character”? Bartleby has no plot in his present existence, and we would not wish to imagine subplots for his already lived years. He is indeed only words, wonderful words, and very few of them. One might for a moment sink into the abyss and imagine that instead of prefer not he had said, “I don’t want to” or “I don’t feel like it.” No, it is unthinkable, a vulgarization, adding truculence, idleness, foolishness, adding indeed “character” and altering a sublimity of definition.

I find this passage astonishing. Notice how quickly Hardwick is tempted into literary detail (“suits and ties and felt hats” [my emphasis]) and metaphor (“a little wagon along the highway of experience”), and then, tellingly, how she encourages us to view Bartleby from the perspective of his creator, Melville, by entertaining poor alternatives to his famous utterance. She is writing as a creator herself, sharing in the language of literary creation, and all the while still managing to perform the task of the critic. No comprehensive analysis of “Bartleby” that I’ve ever read is as suggestive — perhaps because Hardwick, in the end, dares to be just that: suggestive, as opposed to conclusive; aphoristic, as opposed to comprehensive; metaphorical, as opposed to merely critical.

Born in 1916 in Lexington, Kentucky — a place she wasn’t sorry to be from, she said, “so long as I didn’t have to stay there forever” — Elizabeth Hardwick moved to New York City in 1939 to study English at Columbia University. She published her first novel, The Ghostly Lover, in 1945 and shortly afterward was enlisted by Philip Rahv to pen book reviews for Partisan Review, where she quickly gained a reputation for her acerbic, cutting style. (When Rahv asked Hardwick what she thought of Diana Trilling, The Nation’s book critic, Hardwick quipped: “Not much.”)

In 1949 she married the poet Robert Lowell, a decision that would shape her life for decades to come. They were engaged while Lowell, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was recuperating from electric shock treatment in a hospital north of Boston. Hardwick was warned against the union by the poet-critic Allen Tate, who described Lowell’s mental state at the time as being “very nearly psychotic.” Shortly before the engagement he even went so far as to call Lowell “dangerous,” claiming there were “definite homicidal implications in his world, particularly toward women and children.” Lowell’s Boston Brahmin father was no fan of the engagement either. “I do feel,” he wrote to his afflicted son, “that both you and she, should clearly understand, that if she does marry you, that she is responsible for you.”

But even these warnings could not have prepared Hardwick for the mental breakdowns and momentary break-ups, the impulsive infidelities and public indiscretions she would suffer through for the next 20-odd years. “I have sat and listened to too many / words of the collaborating muse,” Lowell self-incriminatingly wrote, “and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, / not avoiding injury to others, / not avoiding injury to myself.” Their turbulent marriage finally ended in 1970 when Lowell left the United States for England to live with Lady Caroline Blackwood, whom he married in 1972. For Hardwick, however, worse was yet to come: Lowell famously made public art of their marital difficulties and divorce; in the poetry collections For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, both of them published in 1973, he quoted from Hardwick’s personal letters to him, a trespass his friend Elizabeth Bishop scolded him for in a stinging letter: “It is not being ‘gentle’ to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way,” she wrote, “it’s cruel.”

Though she suffered greatly, Hardwick maintained that marrying Lowell was one of the best things that had ever happened to her. She called him an “extraordinarily original and brilliant and amazing presence, quite beyond any other I have known.” Speaking to Darryl Pinckney in 1985, she said that Lowell, for all his flaws, was at least encouraging of his wife’s intellectual pursuits:

He liked women writers and I don’t think he ever had a true interest in a woman who wasn’t a writer — an odd turn-on indeed and one I’ve noticed not greatly shared. Women writers don’t tend to be passive vessels or wives, saying, “Oh, that’s good, dear.”

Women writers — and women in literature more generally — were the focus of Hardwick’s most influential collection of essays, Seduction and Betrayal, published in 1974. (Regrettably, and a little ill-advisedly, it is not included in The Collected Essays; it was reissued separately, in 2001, also by NYRB Classics.) These stirring, evocative portraits — of the Brontë sisters, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, and others — have sometimes been viewed as a veiled response to Lowell’s betrayal, though this notion seems reductive, as if Hardwick needed Lowell to betray her in order to challenge perceived truths about literary history. Seduction and Betrayal was a challenge to precisely such notions: the romantic view that women writers are either victims or heroines (or both). “Toward the achievements of women,” Hardwick had written in an earlier essay, “I find my own attitudes extremely complicated by all sorts of vague emotions.” These attitudes and emotions were to the benefit of her readers, for if they were not complicated they would not interest us, at least not from a literary perspective. As Hilton Als has beautifully put it, the human impulse in Hardwick’s writing always outweighed the abstract.

Though Hardwick achieved her greatest success in 1979 with Sleepless Nights, a much-admired collage-like quasi-novel, the compressed density of her style was always more suited to literary essay, which may be why it was the genre she remained most faithful to. In sheer size alone, The Collected Essays, which spans six decades and 600 pages, is a testament to the happy union between author and form. Hardwick could quite simply squeeze more into a sentence than most writers could an entire paragraph. Reviewing a new biography of Ernest Hemingway, she writes of the literary biographical genre that “in a hoarding spirit it has an awesome regard for the penny as well as the dollar.” William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), was guilty of “running on both teams — here he is the cleverest skeptic and there the wildest man in a state of religious enthusiasm.” And, in an essay on Simone Weil, we are told: “the present fashion of biography, with the scrupulous accounting of time, makes a long life of a short one.”

There is a danger for the reviewer, when describing Hardwick’s essays, of becoming a mere anthologizer, a dazed and dazzled collector of writerly gems. This is partly because Hardwick herself was a serial jeweler: “I like the offhand flashes, the absence of the lumber in the usual prose,” she once said. But now and again, the writing becomes all flash and no lumber — her style, so hypnotically idiosyncratic, can veer off into eccentricity and become difficult to follow, as demonstrated by her tendency to write sentences that are hardly sentences at all but dashed-off story outlines. From a single essay: “The overwhelming scene, the tremendous importance of the union and its dismaying, squalid complications of feeling, Yasnaya Polyana, the children, the novels, the opinions”; “Every quarrel, every remorse, moments of calm and hope and memory. Diaries, rightly called voluminous, letters, great in number, sent back and forth”; “Lady Byron’s industry produced only one genuine product: the hoard of dissension, the swollen archives, the blurred messages of the letters, the unbalancing record of meetings, the confidences, the statements drawn up”; and so on. It’s like reading literary criticism written by Augie March.

Still, these are minor complaints — the unavoidable thumbprints of such playful, busy hands. For whether she is reporting from the front lines of the Civil Rights movement or tracing the contours of Robert Frost’s reputation, Hardwick revels in her subject matter. Everything in these essays, be it real or fictional, comes alive to Hardwick’s touch. And how funny she is! In Marge Piercy’s novel Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1970), “the girls are constantly available and practical — I’m afraid rather like a jar of peanut butter waiting for a thumb.” William James (again) was guilty at times of being “a sort of Californian; he loves the new and unhistorical and cannot resist the shadiest of claims.” And Peter Conrad’s Imagining America (1980) is described as “a text that bristles like the quills on a pestered porcupine.”

If Hardwick’s achievement as an essayist has been left to cool somewhat in the collective shadow of her more illustrious contemporaries, The Collected Essays is a much-needed bringer of heat. For Hardwick was mercilessly free of the many occasional sins of her time: she had none of Susan Sontag’s modish, Francophile theorizing, none of Norman Mailer’s wounded egoism, but neither did she succumb to the breezy generalities of Alfred Kazin. She was, on the contrary, George Orwell–like in her good judgment and common sense, admirably demonstrated in this collection by the moral beauty of her essays on the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Because she outlived them all, the last third or so of The Collected Essays revisits many of those fellow writers who belonged, like Hardwick, to the intellectually gilded age in American letters that spanned the second half of the 20th century (an age that might be said to have ended, earlier this year, with the death of Bob Silvers). Hardwick knew and befriended the likes of Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, and Philip Rahv, not to mention European exiles like Hannah Arendt and Nicola Chiaromonte. In the last half of this collection, then, we learn that an “evening at the Rahvs’ was to enter a ring of bullies, each one bullying the other”; that Edmund Wilson gave the impression of “a cheerful, corpulent, chuckling gentleman, well-dressed in brown suits and double martinis”; that Hannah Arendt, in her apartment on Riverside Drive, served “cakes and chocolates and nuts bought in abundance at the bakeries on Broadway.”

Yet such anecdotes are kept mostly in the margins; Hardwick always stopped short of outright memoirism. Despite her strong voice and presence on the page, the impression she leaves is one of humility. She was not a romantic of the self; living with Robert Lowell and witnessing the self-destruction of so many of her contemporaries (Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman) probably inoculated her against the myths of the mad genius. Thus what she admired in the Brontë sisters was not the romantic notion of them having managed to write any novels at all but rather “the practical, industrious, ambitious cast of mind too little stressed. Necessity, dependence, discipline drove them hard; being a writer was a way of living, surviving, literally keeping alive.” Similarly, she was impressed by Zelda Fitzgerald’s “fantastic energy — not energy of a frantic, chaotic, sick sort, but that of steady application, formed and sustained by a belief in the worth of work and the value of each solitary self.”

In Sleepless Nights, the narrator writes of her mother’s child-rearing (she gave birth to nine children): “It was what she was always doing, and in the end what she had done.” In a similar vein, The Collected Essays are a tribute to Hardwick’s ceaseless activity as a literary essayist, as a critic and a reader — proof, indeed, that being a writer is a way of living.

Morten Høi Jensen is the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen (Yale University Press, 2017).

The post Flash and Lumber: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Essays appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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