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inevitably-johnlocked · 1 year

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Hey All! This week is a continuation of the ask I got last week for Anxious Sherlock! Here are the longer fics for those of you that prefer that!

I still have EVEN MORE on an unsorted list, so I’ll have a part three for the next time someone asks for some more hahaha.

Hope you enjoy this list in the meantime!

ANXIOUS / WORRIED SHERLOCK Pt. 2 - Over 20K

See also:

Anxious / Worried Sherlock Pt 1 (Under 20K w.)

John’s Away (and Sherlock’s Not Okay)

Out of the Woods by SilentAuror (E, 20,471 w., 1 Ch. || Post S4, Romance, Slow Burn, Flirting, Drunk Sex, Practical Jokes, POV Sherlock, Bottomlock, Possessive John, Pining Sherlock, Frustrated Wanking, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Blow Jobs, First Kiss/Time, Virgin Sherlock, Love Confessions, Soft Sherlock, Dancing, Bum Appreciation, Hanging out with the Yard) – Sherlock is fairly certain that John has taken to flirting with him of late, but can't be entirely certain of it. At least, not until a case takes them into a forest, along with Lestrade's team and something happens that will change everything about their lives...

The dying Doctor by marylouleach (T, 21,168 w., 11 Ch. || Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, John Whump) – Doctor Watson is gunned down in a dark alley after work, Sherlock wont rest until he finds the man responsible. Guilt riddles him when he realizes he could have prevented this.

How To Unfold a Heart by elwinglyre (E, 25,477 w., 7 Ch. || Post S4 Fix It, BAMF John, Mentioned Eurus, POV First Person Sherlock, Case Fic, Fluff, Slow Burn Topping from the Bottom, 3 Yr Old Rosie, Introspection, Sexual Fantasies, John Worship, Ogling, Hand Holding, Kidnapping, Domesticity, Sherlock Whump, First Kiss/Time, Doctor John, Caring John, Soft Sherlock, Sensuality, Touching, Crying, Love Confessions, Anxious Sherlock, Rimming, Toplock, Fingering, Bossy Bottom John) – To Sherlock’s dismay, John’s return to Baker Street with Rosie is only temporary. Sherlock’s daily visits to Regent Park with John and Rosie illuminate his lost childhood memories and missed opportunities. But with each trip to the park, Sherlock also feels a growing sense of hope. That is until the past horrors return unexpectedly in a cryptic note folded in the shape of a heart. To decipher the message, Sherlock must uncover the nature of the hearts around him, including his own.

Domestic Matters by ohlooktheresabee (M, 29,404 w., 6 Ch. || Fantasy AU || First Meetings, Developing Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Domestic Fluff, BAMF Sherlock, BAMF John, Idiots in Love, Misunderstandings, Supernatural Elements, Implied / Referenced Child Abuse, Elf Sherlock, Human/Elf Politics, Emotional Abuse, Possessive Sherlock, Anxious Sherlock, Buddy Greg) – All flatmates need to work out domestic matters between them - who does the dishes, who takes out the rubbish, how often does the carpet need to be vacuumed - these are part and parcel of sharing a living space together. However, when you’re an elf and your flatmate is going to be a human you just met, this rather complicates things…Very loosely inspired by 'The Elves and The Shoemaker' by The Brothers Grimm.

The Wisteria Tree by SilentAuror (E, 29,773 w., 1 Ch. || Post-S3, Emotional Love Making, Amnesia/Memory Loss, Sherlock Loves John So Much, Sherlock POV, Romance, Angst with Happy Ending, First Times, Hurt/Comfort, Est. Rel., Retirement) – Sherlock wakes up from a month-long coma only to discover that he has no memory of the previous six years to his own shock as well as John's...

M Is For Moriarty by ElvendorkInfinity (T, 29,882 w., 12 Ch. || Suspense, Mystery, Case Fic, Worried Sherlock, No Slash, Whump) – A figure at the end of the hospital bed; a needle in the dark...Moriarty has John, and Sherlock must follow the paper trail through London to find him before time runs out. Sequel to BANG.

A Home for Us by sussexbound (M, 30,581 w., 12 Ch. || Scars, Bedsharing, Grief, Doctor John, Hurt/Comfort, Post-TRF, Implied/Referenced Torture, Sherlock POV, Pining Sherlock, Suicidal Ideation, Heavy Emotions, Clingy Sherlock, Hallucinations, Disassociation, Emotional Turmoil) – He has been on the road for two years, and he is exhausted. He’s almost accepted that he will never see London (John) again—almost. But then there are nights like tonight, where he is weak, and all he can think of is the warmth of the flat they once shared, the crackle of the fire in the hearth, the teasing smile playing at the corner of John’s lips, the boxes of half-eaten Chinese takeaway balanced precariously in their laps. He aches at the memory of it, at the realisation that it is something he may never experience again.

carrying up his morning tea by darcylindbergh (E, 34,504 w., 5 Ch. || Post S3, Minor Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Wakes/Funerals, Estranged John, Pining Sherlock, Depression/Insecurity, Slow Burn, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Chronic Pain/Injury, Reconciliation, Awkwardness, Loneliness, Scars, Angst With Happy Ending) – His fingers tremble as he dials and he can’t force them steady. Familiar number, even though he hasn’t used it in two years. He isn’t even sure he should be calling it now, but she’d asked. She’d made him promise.

Nothing to Make a Song About by emmagrant01 (E, 36,833 w., 10 Ch. || Post-TRF, First Time, Reunion, Jealous John, Pining Sherlock, Romance, Angst with Happy Ending, Sherlock Has a Boyfriend) – When Sherlock returned from his faked death, John could not forgive him for the deception and broke off their friendship. Ten years later, John returns to London in search of yet another new beginning. Sherlock, not surprisingly, is waiting.

Set in Stone by SilentAuror (E, 39,309 w., 1 Ch. || Romance, Wedding, Therapy, Fluff and Angst) – Sherlock and John are back from Ravine Valley and planning their wedding. However, as they move past the trial of the human traffickers, Sherlock can't help but wonder if he's imagining that John is becoming a little distant. Surely he isn't getting cold feet about the wedding... Part 2 of The Ravine Valley series

A Week is Just Seven Days Isn't It? by scifigrl47 (T, 39,906 w., 4 Ch. || Humour, Friendship/Bromance, Stroppy/Bored Sherlock, Undercover/Army John, Texting, Pining-ish Sherlock, John Whump) – When John heads overseas for a week, Sherlock's forced to fend for himself. It goes about as well as anyone could have anticipated. Which is to say, very, very poorly. Don't worry, things'll be fine in just seven days.

(Never) Turn Your Back to the Sea by DiscordantWords (M, 39,968 w., 7 Ch. || Post S4 Fix It || Grief / Mourning, Victor Trevor, Friendship, Sherlock is Not Okay, Nightmares/Flashbacks/Panic Attacks, Parentlock, Pining Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, John Comes Home) – Baker Street is very much the same. Only different. And Sherlock is just trying not to drown.

Impossible to Feign by achray (M, 49,204 w., 12 Ch. || TRF Rewrite / Reverse Reichenbach, Suicidal Ideations / Discussions, Drug Use/Abuse, Mutual Pining, Friends With Benefits, John Accepts his Sexuality, Anxious Sherlock, Meddling Mycroft, Depression, Hallucinations, Secret Agent John, BAMF John, Reunion, Make-Up Sex, Ambiguous Ending) – Sherlock leant forward, his long fingers curving round to grip John’s.“I won’t let him win,” he said, eyes hard. “I will do whatever it takes to get you out.”

Anchor Point by trickybonmot (E, 49,856 w., 80 Ch. || Truman Show AU || Psychological Drama, Suspense, Slow Burn, Dark Characters / Fic, Alternating First/Third Person, Protective John, Anxious/Worried Sherlock, Tender Moments, Love Confessions, Hand/Blow Jobs, Cuddling, Jealous John, First Kiss/Time) – The world tunes in nightly for Sherlock, the ultimate in reality TV: Sherlock Holmes, a real person with a legendary name, unknowingly lives out his life in a staged setting contrived by his brother. Things get complicated when a retired army doctor joins the show to play the part of Sherlock's closest friend. This fic borrows its concept from the 1998 film, the Truman Show. However, you don't need to have any knowledge of the movie to enjoy this story.

A Hundred Crimson Sols by elldotsee (E, 55,536 w., 16 Ch. || Astronauts AU || Mars Exploration / Space Travel, Slow Burn, Shy Sherlock, Scientist Sherlock / Biomed Engineer John, Alternating POV, Mutual Pining, UST, Angst with Happy Ending, Domestic Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Injuries, Suicidal Ideation, Zero-G Sex) – Will Holmes is a chemical researcher recognized widely for his contributions to the new Mars exploration program. Thanks to his ground-breaking developments, the IMMC (International Mars Mission Corporation) is one step closer to Martian colonization. Will and his team of scientists are headed out on the first of three manned missions before the first group of settlers arrive. Three days before launch, one of the crew has to be replaced. Will panics because...new people. The replacement is of course one John Watson, biomedical engineer and space hottie who was pretty sure he had retired from actual space exploration and was now content to work in the nice, quiet research lab. Can the crew survive this TOTALLY ROUTINE trip? Will they be able to endure each other for the looooooong trip in close quarters? Gonna be a wild ride... prepare for blast off. Part 1 of SpaceBois go to Space

Lunar Landscapes by J_Baillier (M, 57,046 w., 21 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || S3/TAB Fix-It, Slow Burn Angst, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Confessions, Drugs, Pain, Medical, Injury, Sherlock Whump, Mental Health Issues, Panic Attacks, Romance, Secrets, Tragedy, Trauma, BAMF John, Doctor!John, Drug Addict Sherlock, Injured Sherlock, Grieving John, Idiots In Love, Protective John, POV John Watson, PTSD Sherlock, Sherlock is a Mess, Medical Realism) – An accident forces John to face the fact that Sherlock's downward spiral had started long before his flight to exile even left the tarmac.

Hell Sent, Heaven Bound by ConsultingHound (M, 64,381 w, 16 Ch. || Angels / Demons AU || Fallen Angel Sherlock / Angel Cop John, Alternate First Meeting, Slow Burn, Case Fic, John & Lestrade are Friends Before Sherlock, BAMF John, Mind Palace John, Friends to Lovers, John in Denial, Sherlock Picks Out John’s Clothing, Clubbing / Dancing, Mildly Jealous John, Awkwardness, Kidnapping, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Sacrifice, Worried / Anxious Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, Immortal to Mortal) – Ex-War healer and current angelic guard John Watson is not having the best day. He overslept, he’s underpaid, and now there’s someone tagging the Council’s building walls. However things may be about to get interesting: there’s an unusual stranger hanging around (the definition of tall, dark, and handsome), a literal underground cult is brewing, and rumblings are coming from hell. Can he keep his neighbourhood safe, how and why is he being connected to all this, and who the hell is Sherlock Holmes?

You Have Drawn Red From My Hands by J_Baillier (T, 67,085 w., 17 Ch. || Three Garridebs, Heavy John Whump, Hurt / Comfort, Pining, Heavy Angst, Case Fic/Adventure, Slow Burn, Sick Fic, Injury, Guilt & Depression, Just Talk Already Please, Medical Realism, PTSD) – John getting injured leads Sherlock on a path of guilt and revelations.

Just To Hold You Close by sussexbound (E, 70,841 w., 18 Ch. || Alternate First Meeting, Sherlock POV, ASD Sherlock, PTSD John, Demisexual Sherlock, Bisexual John, Cuddling/Snuggling, Platonic Cuddling, Enthusiastic Consent, Bed Sharing, Love Confessions, First Kiss/Time, Sexual Tension, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Cuddle Negotiations, For a Case Until It Isn’t, Hair Petting, Sexual Negotiation, Anxiety, Trust Issues, Slow Burn, Panic Attacks, Frottage, Hand/Blow Jobs, Referenced Self Harm / Abuse / Suicidal Ideation, First Kiss/Time, Anal) – When a woman is murdered and the last person to see her alive is recently invalided army vet turned reluctant (and prickly) professional cuddler, John Watson, Sherlock Holmes is pulled into a world of intimacy and intrigue he never could have imagined. John is a conundrum and mystery: frank yet reserved, tender yet angry, open yet afraid. Sherlock is instantly drawn into his orbit, and begins to feel and desire things he never has before.

Gold Rush by ShirleyCarlton (E, 71,783 w., 17 Ch. || Post S3 / No Mary, Friends to Lovers, Mentions of Past Sexual Abuse, First Kiss, Case Fic, Slow Burn, Alternating POV, Switchlock, Angst with Happy Ending, Marriage Proposal, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Abduction, Anxious/Insecure Sherlock, Miscommunication, Emotional Lovemaking) – John has divorced Mary and pops round to 221B one evening to find Sherlock in the middle of a case. As Sherlock tries to find the identity of a young woman’s stalker, John realises he can no longer deny his feelings for Sherlock – which then, to their befuddlement, turn out to be mutual. Shy kisses and tentative embraces ensue. But will Sherlock be able to cast off a shadow from his past that he thinks might prevent John from wanting to stay?

The Vapor Variant by 88thParallel (CanadaHolm) (M, 72,684 w., 18 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Post-THoB, John Whump, Protective Sherlock, Guilty Sherlock, Anxious/Worried Sherlock, Virgin Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD John, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Suspense, Virus, Sick Fic, Big Brother Mycroft) – They stood face to face in the middle of a clearing. The dim light of the moon barely allowed Sherlock to see the glassy terror in John’s eyes and the sweat that glistened off his forehead. His nose was bleeding again, blood dripping in a slow stream from his right nostril. They were both gasping for air, John’s eyes locked on Sherlock’s. There was no recognition there, just wild animal fear. Time stood still for an eternal few seconds, and Sherlock took a shaky breath. “John—”Spell broken, John spun and bolted back into the woods. Still heaving for air, Sherlock took off after him.

Repairing the Broken Things by BakerTumblings (M, 75,252 w., 15 Ch. || S4 Compliant, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Trauma, Hospitals, Big Brother Mycroft, Misunderstandings, Realizations, Severe Accident, John Whump, Pneumonia, Medical Procedures, Bed Sharing, First Time, Healing, Happy Ending) – "I'm calling today to notify you that there's been an accident."

Thermocline by J_Baillier (M, 83,557 w., 14 Ch. || Scuba Diving AU || Adventure, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Marine Archaeology, Asexual Sherlock, Horny John, Relationship Drama, Technical/Scuba/Wreck Diving, Slow Burn, Underwater / Medical Peril, Doctor John, Hurt Sherlock, Anxious Sherlock, John POV, Protective John, Body Appreciation) – John "Five Oceans" Watson — technical dive instructor, dive accident analyst and weapon of mass seduction — meets recluse professor of maritime archaeology Holmes. As they head out to a remote archipelago off the coast of Guatemala to study and film its shipwrecks for a documentary, will sparks fly or fizzle out?

Swallow the Night by ArwaMachine (E, 87,873 w., 15 Ch. || TSo3/Stag Night Fix It, TAB/S4 Divergence, Toplock, Mutual Pining, PWP, Drunk / Public Sex, Anal Fingering/Sex, Alcohol-Induced Amnesia, Everyone Knows Except Them, Emotional Love Confession, Demisexual Sherlock, Internalized Homophobia [John], Parentlock with Rosie, First Kiss, Drug Relapse, Infidelity, Texting, Masturbation, Oblivious John, Emotional Love Making, Angst with Happy Ending, Dreams and Nightmares) – “Do you know how long,” John panted, his cheek scraping against the wall, looking back at Sherlock through half-closed eyes, “I’ve wanted this?” Sherlock pressed himself against John’s back, biting at John’s ear. “Not nearly as long as I have,” he whispered.

Kintsukuroi by sussexbound (E, 91,823 w., 20 Ch. || S4 Compliant / Post-TLD, Grief / Mourning, PTSD, Internalized Homophobia, Therapy, Past Abuse, Alcohol Abuse, Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Depression, Anxiety, Bed Sharing, Love Confessions, Cuddling, Suicidal Ideation, Masturbation, Minor Character Death, Sexting, Frottage, Inexperienced Sherlock, Rimming / Anal / BJ’s, Emotional Turmoil, Finding Each Other) – “I love you.” Sherlock sees the words hit John with almost physical force. He reels back a little, jaw twitching and eyes filling. “I love you,” he repeats, a little softer, a little more gentle, as earnest as he possibly can. Because they’ve been teetering on the brink of this thing for years, and it had become painfully obvious over the last few months that they were at a tipping point. This had to happen. Now it has. Now they can see where they end up. The tears in John’s eyes spill over, and he wipes at them angrily. “Do you even know what that means?”

Northwest Passage by Kryptaria (E, 95,157 w., 27 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Canadian AU || BAMF!John, Canadian John, PTSD, Anal / Oral Sex, Rimming, Emotional Hurt / Comfort, Drug Rehab, Falling in Love, Pining Sherlock, Love Confessions, Sherlock’s Violin, Panic Attacks, Switching, Anxious / Protective Sherlock, Hugs for Comfort, Suicide Mentions, Healing Each Other) – Seven years ago, Captain John Watson of the Canadian Forces Medical Service withdrew from society, seeking a simple, isolated life in the distant northern wilderness of Canada. Though he survives from one day to the next, he doesn't truly live until someone from his dark past calls in a favor and turns his world upside-down with the introduction of Sherlock Holmes." Part 1 of Tales from the Northwest

The Wedding Garments by cwb (E, 105,390 w., 36 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Alternate Future AU || Alternate First Meeting, Dating / Arranged Marriages, Romance, First Kiss/Time, Heavy Petting, Cuddles, POV Sherlock, Virgin Sherlock, Idiots in Love, Slow Burn / Falling in Love / Dev. Rel., Nervous/Anxious Sherlock, Jealous/Cranky Sherlock, Hiking, Vacation Homes / Honeymoon, Sherlock’s Family, Horny John/Sherlock, Patient John, Massages, Hand Jobs, Assassination Plots, Oral Sex, Case Fic, Emotional Love Making, Bath Time Fun) – This is the story of a young consulting detective who wants nothing to do with marriage and an army doctor who wants to find true love. It's 2020 post-Brexit England and the British government is encouraging arranged marriages. Candidates meet through state-run agencies and date in hopes of finding love (and tax benefits). Sherlock doesn't need or want a spouse, at least not until John Watson shows up. Hesitant to give in to his more carnal urges because of the way they derail his mind, how will Sherlock progress toward the more intimate aspects of a relationship? The answer lies in a very special wedding gift.

Drawn to Stars by Silvergirl (E, 109,272 w., 60 Ch. || S4 Compliant to TLD / TFP Doesn’t Exist, Sherlock’s Italian Adventure, Sherlock/OC and Johnlock, Jealous John, Mutual Pining, Misunderstandings, First Kiss/Time, Idiots in Love, 3 Part Story, Slow Burn, Inexperienced Sherlock, Bottom Sherlock, Introspection, Alternating First and Third Person POV, Separation and Reconciliation, Emotional Love Making, Love Confessions via Letters, Angst with Happy Ending) – After the Culverton Smith case Sherlock is clean, working, and looking for a romantic partner—since John has told him that’s what he needs. Shame John didn’t mention he was interested in that role himself, before Sherlock went off to Rome with a gorgeous Italian copper to try to fall in love and become a complete human being. Part 1 of the Drawn to Stars series

The Bang and the Clatter by earlgreytea68 (M, 137,049 w., 37 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Baseball AU || Slow Burn / Developing Relationship, Possessive/Obsessive Sherlock, Jealous Sherlock, Mutual Pining, Body Appreciation, Depression, Closeted Sexuality, Family, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Ogling Each Other, Anxious Sherlock, Panic Attack, Drunkenness, Talk of Forever, Big Feelings™) – Sherlock Holmes is a pitcher and John Watson is a catcher. No, no, no, it's a baseball AU. Part 1 of Baseball

The Adventure of the Silver Scars by tangledblue (NR [M], 142,458 w., 41 Ch. || S3 Fix-It, Post-HLV/ Post-TAB / Canon Compliant, Case Fic, No Baby, Angst, Humour, UST, Slow Burn, Angry John, Reconciliation, Not Nice Mary / Leaving Mary, Dependent Sherlock, Pining Sherlock, Caretaker John, Fist Fights, It’s An Experiment, Virgin Sherlock, Dancing, Drugging, John Whump, Pet Names, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Scars) – It’s been thirteen months since Mary shot Sherlock and John finds he’s still pissed off about it. Sherlock had thought everything was settled: John and Mary, domestic bliss. But when John turns up at Baker Street with suitcases, the world’s only consulting detective might not be prepared for the consequences. A new case. Some old scores to settle. Certain danger. Concertos, waltzes, and whisky.

Against the Rest of the World by SilentAuror (E, 151,714 w., 20 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Post-TRF, Hiatus Fic, POV First Person Sherlock, Present Tense, First Kiss/Time, Big Brother Mycroft, Escaping from Capture, Soft Sherlock, Toplock, Insecurity, Infidelity, Travelling, Introspection, Pining Sherlock, Depression, Fantasies, Yearning for the Past, PTSD Sherlock, Suicidal Ideation) – Sherlock has been away from London for nine hundred and twelve days and counting, and has no idea what sort of reception to expect when he finally returns.

Unkissed Series by 221b_hound (T to E, 184,100 w. across 45 works || Established Relationship, Ace Sherlock) – Sherlock returned from the dead a year ago. John returned to Baker Street six months ago. They've been in a couple since then. or at least, not NOT a couple. For two smart men, they sure can be dumb. Luckily, an art thief tries to drown Sherlock, Sherlock has a fever dream and things are about to change.

Proving A Point by elldotsee & J_Baillier (E, 186,270 w., 28 Ch. || Me Before You Fusion || Medical Realism, Insecure John, Depression, Romance, Angst, POV John, Sherlock Whump, Serious Illness, Doctor John, Injury Recovery, Assisted Suicide, Sherlock’s Violin, Awkward Sexual Situations, Alcoholism, Drugs, Idiots in Love, Slow Burn, Body Image, Friends to Lovers, Hurt / Comfort, Pain, Big Brother Mycroft, Intimacy, Anxiety, PTSD, Family Issues, Psychological Trauma, John Whump, Case Fics, Loneliness, Pain) – Invalided home from Afghanistan, running out of funds and convinced that his surgical career is over, John Watson accepts a mysterious job offer to provide care and companionship for a disabled person. Little does he know how much hangs in the balance of his performance as he settles into his new life at Musgrave Court.

#steph replies #johnlock fic recs #my fic recs #anxious sherlock #worried sherlock #insecure sherlock

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hellhoundlair · 10 months

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could we have some more thoughts on ruby posessing deans body post-s3?

how would dean react when he returned?

thank you for asking, my lovely little anon. i totally forgot i had mentioned this a while back and being reminded of it has made me go holy shit.... my mind.....

(putting a cut here because i wrote a lot)

i think it all would have started very shortly after dean died. the entire foundation of sam and rubys relationship at this point has been that sam has reluctantly agreed to be rubys ally for the sake of saving dean. ruby KNOWS how far sam is willing to go for him and is already using that to manipulate sam from the moment they meet. she knows. like she knows knows. maybe just from being around him or from stalking him or from a hearing it from a little birdie whos been in sams head before. but she knows.

I dont know how long the gap between ruby being possessed by lilith and ruby coming back would be, id imagine a few days, giving sam time to grieve dean or at least to accept the fact that hes dead before ruby shows up in a brand new (or all to familiar) body.

i wont pretend to understand how possession works, especially when its happening to a dead character. i dont think the writers knew either so itd be safe to make up my own rules about it. but its deans body. polished and buffed with not a scratch on him.

sams reaction would be similar to the one we see in the show. hed think dean was undead (technically right) and try to kill ruby before she can get a word out.

and ruby would explain it to sam like hes an idiot, like the reason behind her possessing dean is a no brainer. shes keeping deans body warm for when they get him back. otherwise who knows what will get to him first? this isnt possessing someone and controlling their body against their will. this is a favor. and sam will feel stupid and concede that shes right even if hes uncomfortable with the idea.

it starts immediately. sam treating ruby like she really is dean. without even thinking about it sams already agreed to work together with ruby in bringing dean back and theyre running off together without a word into an all too familiar routine - the only difference being that sam sits in the drivers seat now, and even that is back to normal after sam gets injured on the job and ruby drives them both to safety, a hand clutching sams bleeding shoulder and telling him hes gonna be alright and theyre gonna get back and patch him up and he'll be good as new. and its all too achingly familiar that sams holding her hand on top of his wound and letting himself fall asleep, putting trust in her that he would only ever put in dean.

its the same, but its not. ruby for the most part leans into the dean-isms, but jolts sam back to reality sometimes when she lets her eyes linger while sams just out of the shower bent over looking through his duffle for clean clothes, when shes giving him a hungry look that sams only ever seen dean direct at girls in bars that makes sams stomach flutter. when ruby moves in for the kill it takes suprisingly little convincing to get sam okay with the idea. like hes been waiting to just be told that its okay to want it this entire time.

before they know it deans back (despite bringing dean back being against rubys plans) and in his own body (she has to keep her promises) and ruby has plucked the body of a legally dead jane doe to parade around in. and its. different. dean takes sams new affinity for physical contact as a reaction to finally having dean back, that he needs to feel that deans really there to believe it, but its a lot. a lot more than hes used to from sam.

he doesnt know. not for a while. he wouldnt think to suspect it. until eventually the truth comes out and deans fucking pissed that no one thought to tell him a fucking demon was piloting around his body for a few months, but he doesnt understand the level of reaction that sam gives. how guilty sam feels. until the guilt and the touching and ruby acting like sams jealous ex starts coming together in deans mind.

even if dean has feelings for sam or wouldve done the exact same if he was in sams position, i think it would still feel like a violation. sam took something that dean didnt give and for dean to realise that right after coming out of hell by the only person in the world he would trust not to violate him that way? itd be a lot to deal with. he'd push down his panic over it and laugh about it and make fun of sam for it and stop the conversation when sam sees straight through him and tries to have a genuine heart to heart about it because dean cant fucking handle the thought of having to talk about the repeated brutal rape and torture sessions he both endured and enacted in hell, or to console sam over it when he might fucking snap and beat him with a crowbar if he has to see sam acting like a kicked dog when hes the one who raped him.

it'd take a lot for them to work through. it wouldnt be sunshine and rainbows while they kiss and both declare their love for each other. dean doesnt talk about hell but they both know the memories consume him, a newfound violence in the way he kills, the effective coldness in the way he tortures and interrogates. the distance in his eyes when sam tries to talk to him when hes in that mindspace. thered be a lot of acting like they used to, then eventually dean snapping either because hes frustrated with feeling like he has to act like things are normal and that hes okay with what sam did, or frustrated that things do feel normal and that he still feels safe around sam.

they fight. its bad. not in a property damage way but in an emotions way because it all comes out. and then they slowly and gently work through it one step at a time.

#you KNOW sam is sobbing out deans name in the middle of plowing ruby and hes aware hes doing it too but rubys running her fingers through #sams hair and calling him sammy and telling him its okay to want it its okay say it again its okay #rape mention #ww #thank you for the ask mmmmwah <3 #my mind #i think when i initially had this idea i was thinking of more of ruby using dean to ecourage sam to go into kore of a boyking direction #but i forgor and i already wrote this reponse instead. so. sorry.#just imagine this but with ruby using dean to kiss sams neck and massage his muscles while encouraging sam to do evil shit #also the added everything-ness of ruby!dean feeding sam her blood.#the completeness sam would feel in swallowing dean down like he was always meant to reside inside of him.#yaaay🌈😃

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heliianth · 11 months

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here’s another ask for you: talk abt whatever you want!!!

WAUGH thank u for a new one!!!!! ilysm!!!!!

rambling abt sonic and character foils and the IDW comics below the cut this is aimless enough for me to want it be an opt-in experience LOL

i was gonna talk abt this last night but it was 11 AnyWay. i saw a criticism of the IDW comics on reddit a long time ago and its got me thinking recently. someone said they didn't quite enjoy the way the comic was tackling sonic as a character not because of the inconsistencies in his pre-established beliefs (which are present) per se but because IDW keeps challenging them in ways that don't feel, from what i remember the comment saying, "good-spirited"? i hadnt heard that critique before so it was unique enough to catch my interest but not actually think much until now. but theres a reason for that hold on ok

so. to preface this whole thing. some of the most beloved stories in the series are ones that Do challenge sonic's beliefs. thats the reason why, when the series wants to tackle more mature content, they make foil characters. sa2 which reddit largely considers as having the best story has foil characters everywhere but specifically it spends a lot of energy on it's themes of identity and growth by making sonic and shadow clash not just physically but ideologically. that talk they have after final rush/chase basically spells it out and its framed as shadow hearing sonic out and then dismissing him ("what are you/i'm me/i see, well, i'm gonna beat your ass" <- basically). and then later on sonic's viewpoint is reinforced when shadow (airquotes) dies, but not before sonic himself is visibly impacted in the credits sequence. that whole story right there was, at least thematically, one about sonic having his beliefs challenged. SatBK does this as well, a game which is applauded within the general community as having the most accurate sonic characterization. stories that do adjacent things, like the OVA, s3&k, sa1, where character foils are a prominent part of the theming (though maybe not presented in a way where sonic himself necessarily feels ideologically Challenged), are often very popular as well

the time i saw the criticism was about when the surge saga was coming to an end, but i was new at that point so i really dismissed the whole discussion. sonics allowed to be challenged, thats what happens when you have a static character as a protagonist. but now that ive reread IDW a few times and have identified some of my own issues with the run so far i've been thinking about that reddit comment more often. why is the way IDW challenges sonic so different from the way stories like SatBK or sa2 challenge him? why is one intriguing and the other not "good-spirited?" nowadays i think the issue is less with tone or intent like the wording of the original comment implies, but the conclusion of those stories. all of those previous examples i gave culimate in sonic succeeding, yes bc hes the title character, but moreso bc hes the vehicle through which the themes of the series are delivered. SatBK wasn't going to have merlina win because the story was trying to tell the audience that life is only worth living when its finite. sa2 killed off shadow because it was about how being unable to move on eats someone from the inside out. these are broad overarching themes that are present in the whole series and its generally agreed that sonic at his best is representative of those themes, which is why hes static

but IDW kind of has a messy history with conclusions. or, at least, conclusions that feel like they are trying to Say something in the way i've been talking about. after everything is done and the threat of the week is defeated, it all kind of returns back to a status quo, which im very sure is not the fault of the writers. long-running series are supposed to have a status quo that keeps stuff the same so that new audiences wont be alienated by huge character histories and lore timelines and things to catch up on (The Most Intimidating thing abt like archie for example). its partially why u see almost no fleshed out arcs that span multiple games after 06 (man the word partially is doing some legwork there but if i talked abt why sonic games changed so drastically after the mid 2000's i would be here all fucking day). and there are conversations to be held about that status quo and its place in the games and whether its beneficial or not but imo when talking about IDW, a comic which is supposed to have continuity, it kind of obliterates the potential of having meaningful conclusions and the themes that come along with them. because IDW always approaches "sonic feels ideoloically challenged" and it never goes beyond it. it nudges and hints at criticism of IDW sonic's beliefs, actions, and philosophy, but it doesn't do anything with it. the status quo says sonic can't change that much, which is good when the conclusion of stories have themes that prove he's already got it figured out, and bad when there's a big gaping question mark where a lesson should be. the surge saga i think is the glaring example of this precisely because its so conclusionless (theres also how sonic himself engages with her but thats a convo for another day).

so when that redditor said they thought the surge saga lacked a "good-spiritedness" that stories with a similar concept like SatBK or sa2 had i think they were picking up the vibes of the story being kind of... pointless at least in terms of themes and actual impact on the characters, rather than a lack of earnestness, a tone blunder, or strange intent on the part of the writers

im really curious how the urban warfare saga is resolved now precisely bc this lack of meaningful conclusion problem is so prevalent . depending on how passionate i am i may make a more formal analysis post abt it or something, but probably not considering i read IDW very very casually . which feels like a contradiction after writing all this but . yanno

#heliianswers #yes i treat long text posts on tumblr like essays where only the ones with theses and structure im proud of deserve-#-to come out from under the readmore button. what of it #heliichats #sth

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inklingofadream · 3 years

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random list of tma plotbunnies

not counting prompts in my inbox im hoping getting these out will let me focus on those

come talk to me if u think any of these sound neat and maybe they’ll move up my writing list

also adding a readmore bc this is Too Long crol

the autopsy of jon sims, and its absolutely powerful whump potential

Leverage crossover where the Leverage crew bump into Jon in like a bar or sth around S2/S3 and Fix Everything. Jonahlias never sees them coming. Parker and Sophie hardcore ship jonmartin

hannibal fusion where hannibal has his own mixed together version of smirke’s 14 that starts focused on a mix of hunt and flesh (bc i couldnt decide what hanni would be an avatar of) and expands bc neither he nor i could decide what power will is on his way to mostly-obliviously becoming an avatar of. there are extensive notes in my idea book of which characters are avatars and of what

some of hannibal’s various Weird Art Objects are artifacts... but who knows which ones! :3

hannibal fusion 2: electric boogaloo: this one’s called “caveat lector” (ba dum tsh) and will accidentally uses a Leitner to summon up hannibal/hannibal gives him the leitner and it summons the ravenstag, inducting will into the Fear Nonsense

elias sends daisy after jon in america- maybe bc trevor and julia find him with gerry’s page and it starts to look like he won’t be getting out of this one- and then they have Terrible American Road Trip Bonding adventures.

alternate edition: time travel daisy just decides on her own to Show Up and duel trevor and julia to the death for archivist custody. and then they have a Terrible Road Trip

various daisy kidnapping jon agenda variations

teen jon gets kidnapped by newly sectioned daisy

we start at the start and jon has to adjust to his new situation, ft jon growing up and eventually becoming the archivist, + daisy having a Whole Breakdown over not knowing what she’s doing/how to protect him approx. once a month

we start at jon getting hired at the institute- jonah pov of how Absolutely Terrified jon is of every eventuality, bc on the one hand he’s afraid of daisy one day killing him but on the other he’s afraid of being taken away from daisy and never seeing her again

jon’s assistants and their very funny ‘what if our boss is actually a missing person’ game. until they clue martin in, then Worms happen, then jon invites him to stay in his and daisy’s guest room and martin notices jon’s room has a deadbolt that locks from the outside and Maybe It’s Not So Funny Anymore

Daisy kidnaps both teen jon and teen basira, and they trauma bond to become Terrible Siblings

using the same “jon loses his personality and independence to the Archive, everyone but daisy beefs it” eyepocalypse concept as the daisy time travels and jon suffers au, daisy activates her Time Travel Goober while holding onto Archive!Jon bc she kinda thinks it’ll kill them both? and at least he wont be suffering anymore. But instead she ends up in the past, and 8 yo jon has most of the power of the Archive but none of the memories, and she steals him and eventually ends up in an eldritch custody battle with elias

Daisy time travels to when jon’s 8, but instead of ending up in the past as her adult self she’s in her 13 yo body and ends up creating a gang of Terrible Feral Children led by her and Gerry, eventually including the rest of the cast

daisy kidnaps researcher jon, who has no idea whats happening rip jon. possibly also ft. kidnapped basira and martin, and the 3 kidnappees debating whether daisy is actually lowkey trying to matchmake the boys

I have vague notes somewhere for 2 Sasha Lives aus focused on Sasha/Basira and a Sasha/wtgirlfriends polycule, respectively

daisy time travels and jon suffers au side stories:

jonah pov of not having Any Idea what’s going on and then he gets murdered

Martin POV of the last chunk of lflbwtf plus some, for the Soft Romance

QPR jondaisy where daisy joins them on the scottish honeymoon and none of the locals know what to make of them. possibly goes on long enough that jmart have a kid with daisy (and maybe eventually basira) as the Weird Live In Aunt (and nothing bad ever happens again)

umbrella academy fusion where all the hargreeves sibs are agnes-style kid avatars of different fears,, i think i had allison as web, ben as vast, klaus as end... vanya as extinction? i dont think i decided on anything for Five or luthor, reginald might’ve been a jonah style eye guy

epistolary fic of all the emails the various eye temples send each other, ft. the pu song ling research center’s take on jon after his visit and lots of academic jockeying with extra eldritch flavor

What If Tim And Annabelle Fell In Love, Actually?

Jon ends up on Salesa’s crew instead of with the Institute, Martin’s crew on the Tundra, they fall in love

Daisy and Martin as avatars of anything but the hunt and eye and also they’re bffs and daisy wingmans martin trying to pick up the new archivist

“think of my head on your chest” (from “tim mcgraw” by taylor swift lol) would make a bangin title for a jonmartin one shot

something with the magnets + cassette tapes = amnesia!jon concept

there’s more than this but like. this post is ungodly long. again, if any of these sound sexy to you come to my inbox and talk abt them to drastically up the odds they get written

#tma #the magnus archvies #leverage #tua #hannibal #writing #ink writing #my fic #mine #insp #theres a lotta rarepair hell in here lol #daisy kidnapping jon agenda #crossovers

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norgestan · 4 years

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yeah i agree with some stuff i dont know because in one side they are extra clips so im not really worry about it i mean at the end of the day if it wasnt for the angels who post them we wouldn't be seeing them, but i agree i dont want this to take over amira clips i feel it wont tho, but the amira nora friendship i think its meant to happend because they are similar in the alcohol and party stuff, i dont know i guess the easy way is to send him to london, i dont know how to explain is the+

fandom my 'problem' i know i could easily dont read it but its all the tag of twitter all the comments in instagram all about joana and i love her and i agree i want her clips too, i dont know this clips are good in one hand because they are extra also amira is getting what it seem the season with longest episodes, but when it become a drama in the fandom i dont like it, i wish they had joana clips in cris season but well idk i trust the writters but im not enjoying the fandom experience sm

sigh i wish i could know which way they’re heading with these clips? not having idea really doesn’t help (although i don’t think that knowing how the clip stuff works will make people calm anyways... we still have to deal with people mass spamming so joana gets her season when as early as s2 they said that they weren’t planning on it). the worst thing is that eskam is one of the less people-pleasing, fan-catering remakes, and people are used to remakes maximizing the screen time of their most beloved characters (usually the evaks, jonases and williams) to make everybody happy.

on the other hand i just... don’t like that how i’m seeing it, everything about nora’s subplot will be about tying everything up regarding norandro. i personally would love if their relationship had been more like, let me do my thing and you do yours and somewhere, sometime we’ll find each other again. and it’s not like i hate that alejandro came back but if they’re starting with so many problems (and i’m totally okay with it, relationships between teenagers are messy yadda yadda), it means that the season will have to follow on their relationship until the end of the show and i don’t know how much screentime it will take. so far, nora hasn’t shown any kind of special empathy towards amira, and you can see that by looking at both of them in the first clip of the season and then the party clip: while amira looks/feels uncomfortable and out of place, nora has no problem with their friends smoking blunts on her face or them drinking until they pass out. i think they’ve missed their opportunity of them bonding over this stuff, so i hope that they bond over a shared perspective of the world or their morality/feminism, anything that is meaningful outside of nora’s relationships. because this choice of amira and nora becoming closer right now, just as alejandro is back on her life, doesn’t look so good to me.

also... this is probably the thing that you want to hear the least, but if you’re not enjoying the fandom experience, then it’s best to step out a bit and just watch the clips and not see anything else. i know it was extremely infuriating during s3 - even here on tumblr, but little by little those people started leaving and the fandom because muuuuch more bearable. i’m guessing that a similar thing will happen in this season, so maybe by episode 6 or something things would be a lot better. try to evade those spaces and just make a group chat with the people you want to share thoughts with! if anything, just block/mute as you wish. it’s literally the best thing that you could do if you want to have a nice experience in any fandom.

#skam españa #answered

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gra-sonas · 4 years

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Well, Jeannie pretty much confirmed Malex wont be happening until season 3 (if the writers decide to go that way). I knew the news of season 3 so early on in the season 2 filming would be a curse for Malex this season.

Yeah, I never expected them to get back together this season, but I had still hopes that their respective other relationships would be over by the end of S2. Looks like either one or even both will be dragged out into S3 tho. Not the confirmation I was hoping for...

Well, at least now I know I won’t be watching S2 at all.

#longest hiatus ever #day 362 #i'm not surprised but still disappointed #i was still hoping i might be able to catch up on s2 at some point #looks like that's not gonna happen #rnm speculation #rnm spoilers #nonnie asks

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tenspontaneite · 4 years

Text

Peace Is A Journey (Chapter 11/?)

In which Claudia and Soren contemplate weather, General Amaya becomes a folk hero, and Callum tries to wrap his head around the proceedings of a very eventful day.

(Chapter length: ~14k. Ao3 link)

Chapter warnings: Progression of permanent damage to a limb.

Spoilers for some s3 information pertaining to the Dragonguard and implications about Zym’s egg.

---

Something hit him on the cheek, not far from his eye; Soren flinched, and raised a hand to feel it. A droplet of water, trailing down his skin.

He looked up at the sky, stilling his horse, and received three more raindrops to the face. “Well, isn’t that just great.” He said, sourly, as Claudia stopped as well, her horse settling alongside his.

She followed his gaze, stared upwards, and took a raindrop directly to the eye. She made a surprised and vaguely alarmed snorting noise, rubbing at the eye in question, and grimaced a little. “….yyyeaaah,” She sighed, drawing the word out until it was heavy with resignation. “That’s a problem.”

“That’s rain.” Soren said, after stopping to whistle sharply to command the dogs ahead to stop.

Claudia sighed. “Yep.”

“That’s definitely rain.”

“I noticed, Soren.”

He glared at her. “We’re going to lose the trail.” He emphasised, as if holding her personally responsible for the unfortunate weather. He was kind of tempted to, honestly. Surely there was some sort of creepy dark magic thing she could do to mess with the weather?

She pursed her lips, and for whatever reason, looked up beyond the treeline to the looming silhouettes of the mountains. “Probably.” She admitted. “But for now, let’s follow it for as long as we can, until the dogs lose the trail.”

“And then what?” He demanded, restraining the urge to cross his arms if only because he needed at least one hand on the reins.

“And then, we go for plan B.” She said, eyes still fixed on the mountains. One of her hands fluttered over to rest on her satchel of magic-things, almost unthinkingly. “…There’s a town near here, I think. As long as the trail doesn’t go the completely wrong way, we can stop by and pick up some supplies. We’ll definitely need it.”

Soren frowned at her. “That really doesn’t sound like anything good.”

Claudia made a dismissive sort of pssh noise, and then spurred her horse back into a walk. “It’s nothing you’ll hate, don’t worry.”

“That’s really not-“

“Just move, Soren, until the rain completely wrecks the scent trail. Then we’ll talk about mountain-climbing.”

He blinked. Oh, right, she’d mentioned that before, hadn’t she? He shrugged, and whistled for the dogs again. Well trained and eager, they approached with tails wagging to weave between his and Claudia’s horses, eyes bright and intelligent. He smiled at them, and issued commands with a few more well-placed whistles, regretting that he was too high up on his horse to pat them. They responded quickly to the command and went on ahead to keep tracking, like the good dogs they were.

Following a trail for days on end was incredibly boring, but the dogs were definitely a bright spot. Being a Crownguard didn’t usually leave all that much time to spend with any animals other than horses, and it was usually someone else who took care of the horses at the end of the day. Not on this trip, though. He’d been brushing down and tending to both of their horses for the days of their pursuit so far, which he had found was just the thing to do to take his mind off…other things. Things Dad said he needed to do, which Soren really didn’t know if he could follow through on.

With a twinge of regret – for a second, Soren hoped they’d lose the trail. The rain was almost a relief, because…well, he couldn’t be blamed for what nature did, right? If they lost the trail because of rain, and couldn’t catch up to the princes…well, dad couldn’t really hold that against him, right? …Right?

…But Claudia had her dark magic things, so…the trail wouldn’t stay lost. He wasn’t sure whether to consider that a good thing or a bad thing. He didn’t want to disappoint Dad. But…

Soren thought of doing the right thing, and looked ahead, brow furrowed. The dogs were barking and sniffing, looking up to wait for the horses to catch up to them before running on again. Their mouths were open with tongues lolling around their doggy grins, utterly full of enthusiasm and cheer for the tasks ahead of them, and that did make him feel a little better.

The journey mostly sucked, and so did thinking, but at least the dogs were good.

---

The consecration was not well-attended. How could it be, when Amaya had announced her intentions to Opeli mere hours before? Gren was there, of course, though he wouldn’t be translating for her vows – they were for Amaya and Lady Justice alone, or so said the Priestess of Paragons. And what the Priestess of Paragons said, apparently, was how things would be.

Despite the short notice, there was still something of an audience, including a number of her unit. As soon as the word had spread, as it was wont to in a city full of gossiping guards with nothing better to do, she’d accumulated an entourage of soldiers who all of a sudden needed far more input and confirmation from her than usual, all full of a barely-restrained curiosity and eagerness that they probably thought they were successfully hiding. In the end she rolled her eyes, announced the time of the ceremony, and gave leave for anyone not on duty to attend.

Viren had come, too, though Paragons only knew how he’d heard. None of the other Councillors had heard, or they’d not have missed it for the world – even if they didn’t actually care about Lady Justice one way or another, something like the consecration of a new Justiciar was significant enough that they’d probably get a lot of mileage out of it at diplomatic meetings. It probably made good political conversation material…and Paragons wept, Amaya was glad that her job involved more battle and military tactics than political intrigue.

Or, well, it had. This consecration did, more or less, represent her taking something of a leave from her official duties as a general.

In any case, Viren had found his way to the Hall of Paragons for the event, which somehow didn’t surprise her in the least. He always did seem to find a way to know of everything significant that happened within the city limits. The man had seated himself in a row behind all of the soldiers who’d arrived first, calm and cool and collected as always, and she wondered, briefly, if it rankled him to sit behind people so much lower in status than himself.

“General Amaya.” Opeli murmured to her, turning to allow her to see the words. The two of them, plus the attendants, lingered in the archway that opened from the antechamber to the main hall. “Are you ready?”

Amaya shot her a look. If she thought the Priestess would understand it, she might have said, “If I wasn’t, after all this fussing over the ceremonial articles, I’d be very concerned.” Instead, she allowed the ascension of her eyebrow to do the talking, and watched the greatest religious authority in Katolis restraining a laugh.

The amusement reached Opeli’s lips, regardless, her smile slanting upwards at the edges. “Come.” She said, and beckoned her forwards. Amaya inclined her head, and moved into the light.

She wore her armour and her shield, of course, but the ceremonial adornments as well. The sword was her own, though it had been polished to a gleam, and was now carried at her side by an attendant robed fully in white, the metal shining from a cloak of navy velvet. Had she not needed her hands to make the vows, she might have carried the golden scales; instead, she was draped in a shimmering banner, royal-blue embroidered with gleaming gold, the symbol of those same scales shining in the candle-flames. Carefully, another attendant arranged the banner over her shoulder as she stopped at the podium and fell to one knee before Opeli.

The congregation was arrayed in the Hall, and rustled in a thousand metallic murmurs of armour-plating as she settled. One attendant righted the banner, the other offered her the sword; solemnly, Amaya settled it on the stone at her feet.

For a moment, she looked out at the hall – at the congregation – and felt the gravity of the moment settle on her shoulders with a hint of religious awe. She’d never been much for Paragon worship, herself, and thought that most of the commonfolk most besotted with it seemed to miss the point of the faith entirely. But, even so…the sight of the long hall lined with grand statues was undeniably impressive. Something about the whole picture of the place – morning light filtering through the mural-windows of coloured glass in the stone-hewn walls, ceremonial flames and candles lit along every foot of stone, the hushed and reverent quiet – it had a potent atmosphere. Potent enough to move even her.

The hall had been draped in Justice’s colours for the consecration. Blue and gold; almost the same shades that Amaya had been wearing already for years. If she were a more superstitious woman, she’d almost think it fateful. Instead, she turned the thought aside, and returned her attention to the Priestess of Paragons.

The attendants receded; Opeli turned to address the congregation.

Protocol dictated that Amaya ought to keep her eyes fixed on the sword at her feet. But at this angle, she had little hope of seeing anything that Opeli said, so she glanced up through her eyelashes, every so often, to see Gren signing subtly along. She caught snatches of the grandiosity, phrases like ‘pledges herself to the service of Justice’, and ‘as the sword is to represent the swiftness and the sharpness of a fitting verdict’, and Amaya assumed the symbology of the other two articles was discussed as well, but she didn’t manage to catch that.

In the end, Opeli turned back to her, and took a strip of white fabric in her hands. That was the signal she’d been waiting on: Amaya looked up, and watched her implacably as she spoke.

“You are Amaya, called the Shield, who come here today to be consecrated in the name of Lady Justice, that you might act with Her will, and speak Her truths, and mete out Her sacred justice where you find it is needed.”

Amaya’s part in this was, for the most part, marvellously redundant. It felt more sacrilegious than usual, to sit here at the podium and think the trappings of ceremony pointless, but her opinion remained: her vows seemed largely redundant when Opeli was saying it all anyway. All she did was repeat the Priestess’ words back at her, fingers careful, signing “I am Amaya, called the Shield, and I come here to be consecrated in the name of Lady Justice. I will act with her will, and speak her truths, and mete out her sacred justice where I find it needed.”

Opeli nodded, satisfied, as if she’d understood a word of it. Amaya could have been saying ‘I intend to prance around farmsteads waving this banner and clanging loudly on my shield to wake the goats’, for all she’d know.

Well. She thought Opeli did have a basic vocabulary of sign, but…even so. She could hardly be understanding enough to ensure the vows were valid. It was a matter of trust, she supposed. And, really, if Opeli couldn’t trust the person she was consecrating to take it seriously, she probably shouldn’t be consecrating them in the first place.

“I call on you to administer justice swiftly, when it must be done, and to neither flinch nor hesitate in your duty.” Opeli said, to evoke the Sword. “I call on you to weigh the crimes and the harm that a person may wreak against their character, their circumstance, and aught else that may drive them.” The Scales. “I call on you to blind yourself to that which drives you, and that which you think, and that which you have been raised to know, that you might judge as does Lady Justice: without bias, without discrimination, and without any sour influence that might cloud your sacred judgement.” The Blindfold, the representation of which was still held in Opeli’s hands.

Traditionally, Amaya knew, the blindfold would have already been tied around her eyes. But then she wouldn’t know when she was being spoken to, or when she was meant to speak herself. She had an inkling that she was probably the first deaf Justiciar yet. Certainly there had been amputee Justiciars – at least one, since every self-respecting child in the Pentarchy had been raised with the stories of Old Heartwood and his outlandish Xadian prosthetic – but if there’d been others who were deaf, she’d not heard of them.

Opeli had apologised to her, beforehand. Said she’d normally have devised a full alternative ceremony that accommodated her deafness, but that it was a little short notice. Apparently, given the symbolism writ in every detail of the consecration, there had to be careful and lengthy thought given to the crafting of a variant ceremony, and since Amaya had to leave more or less the instant this was done….well, there just wasn’t time. It wasn’t ideal, but it was enough for her. Tailored ceremony or not, she’d become a Justiciar today.

Amaya recalled, at once, just how many historical Justiciars were folk heroes, and had to restrain a grimace. If there was any Justice in the world, she’d never suffer such a fate.

Amaya snapped herself back to attention at the indicative tap of Opeli’s finger, her signal to speak, and spared a moment to be glad she’d practiced this a few times to memorise it. Carefully, she shaped her fingers and prepared to repeat the Priestess’ whole spiel back at her…and paused, just for a second, to run her mind over her reservations. As much as she’d never been much of a good religious woman, Justiciars were important. They were sacred. The respect was ingrained into her bones, part of a cultural and moral heritage that went deeper than religion alone could signify. Amaya could not, in good conscience, speak these final vows if she didn’t mean it.

So maybe, no matter how she liked to mock a lengthy and contrived ceremony, there was some point to it after all.

The swift administration of justice wouldn’t be a problem; Amaya had ever been talented with a broadsword. The weighing of harm…that was harder. That was the sort of thing the law officials were meant to train for – the sort of thing Justiciars were meant to train for. She had a better awareness of the Law than most every other soldier in the Pentarchy, due to her rank and familial connections, but even so…she still doubted, very much, that it was a good enough substitute for the decades of cross-discipline training a Justiciar-aspirant usually undertook before they were consecrated.

Still, she could mostly accept that Opeli knew better than she did. Opeli was devout. She believed in the Paragons, in the original teachings of Paragonism – that it was the duty of every living person to embody the best of themselves, and be truest to their greatest virtues, and act as if they themselves had a Paragon within them, waiting to be named. Opeli believed in the concept of Justiciars – believed that Amaya could and should open herself up to become a true vessel of virtue, and act in the world as an extension of Justice herself. And if Opeli believed so strongly, who was Amaya to question it?

Except she had to. Because how could she ever think herself capable of the Blindfold?

She was hunting an elf that might, or might not, have killed her nephews. Her boys. Sarai’s sons. How could she possibly approach objectivity in a matter so horrifically, viciously personal? She thought she’d be hard-pressed not to cleave the assassin in two the moment she saw her, no matter her guilt, no matter the weighing of the harm. How could she possibly stay her blade from a creature like that?

…Opeli trusted her as a Justiciar, which Amaya thought she had good reason to doubt. Opeli did not know her all that well, after all.

But Gren had faith in her, too, and that meant a great deal more.

She exhaled, and raised her hands to speak the vows.

She swore to wield the Sword. She swore to use the Scales as she ought. She swore, albeit falteringly, to wear the Blindfold.

Opeli reached out then and tied the ridiculous symbolic strip of fabric around her eyes. From then on, Amaya had only her expectations and her remaining senses to go on. Her heartbeat resounded steadily beneath her skin eight times before Opeli’s fingers touched her brow, cool with the wet ashes she painted there. The symbol of the Scales. She withdrew, and then for a while, there was little to go on.

She had an idea of what Opeli was saying, of course, and Gren would retell it for her later. The Priestess of Paragons accepted her vows, and declared her Justiciar until such a time as she abdicated or until she died. She was ostensibly informed that, should she ever break her sacred oaths, the title and the honour would be stripped from her, and she would never again be welcome in a house of Paragons, nor be permitted to speak in a court of law, nor have the right to sit in authority over any other soul than her own; she would be named across the kingdoms as a barren thing, honourless and forsworn, to wander in the empty and cursed and soulless way that all oathbreakers must do.

Which, she supposed, gave her some extra incentive to not lose her mind at the first glimpse of an elven murderess. There were stories about oathbreakers, too – and none of them good.

The blindfold was lifted from her eyes, all the candle-flame of the hall blurring back into view. Opeli smiled, and looped the thing twice around the hand that held the sword. “Rise, Justiciar, and go forth.” She said, and stepped back, clasping a hand to her chest: respect of the Priestess of Paragons to an agent of the divine. Behind her, the congregation rose, and did likewise, heads bowed. If Amaya were the type to be easily embarrassed, it might have been mortifying. Instead, she only bowed her head in turn, and took the holy articles with her as she left, striding down the Hall.

Behind her, Gren and a few of her Battalion peeled off from the congregation, and followed. Gren caught up with her not long before they reached the doors, but didn’t speak until they were outside, stepping out of the side of the Valley that the Hall of Paragons had been excavated from.

She eyed the other end of the Valley, briefly, where her sister’s grave presided. But there was no time for that, and she turned to stride the other way.

“Congratulations.” Gren said to her, with his hands, as they walked. “How do you feel?”

She considered it. “Tired and ready to get moving.” She decided, after a moment, and rolled her eyes at the way his face fell. “I also have an uncomfortable feeling that this is going to get a song written about me.”

“Another one, you mean?” Gren inquired, with a very specific sort of innocent expression that meant he was teasing her. “Didn’t the one near the border praise you as being an embodiment of Valor?”

She made a rude gesture at him. “Seems like I can’t go a year without tripping over a Paragon these days.” She said, though it felt a little sacrilegious to say it while still wearing the ceremonial pieces. “Someone will be trying to consign me to Mercy next, I’m sure.”

Gren’s lips pursed as he thought. His hands moved the next moment, saying “Fortitude, I’d think. I’ve already heard people muttering about that on the long marches.”

She sighed. “Of course.” She made sure to sign it with all the weary emphasis she could, because really. “Better than Mercy, at any rate.”

He offered a very pointed look at the Blindfold still looped around her arm, but said nothing. Still, the lack of comment felt cheeky, in that very characteristically Gren way, where he’d never so much as think of saying anything impolite, but the implication…

Amaya shook her head at him, just a little fondly, and gestured for them to hurry up. If they were going to get moving this afternoon, it had to be soon.

---

After what had happened – what Ezran had done – it felt utterly bizarre to set out walking again.

It was so…normal. Routine. They fell into the familiar rhythm of traversing unpleasantly steep slopes, and the increasingly-familiar menial vagaries of travel. Callum’s shoulder grew sore again from the strap digging into it, the items in his pack conspired to dig into his spine in the most uncomfortable ways possible, and his legs resumed their perpetual complaints of ill-treatment. It was unspeakably weird to keep climbing and keep walking as though everything was normal, as though nothing had changed, when – less than an hour ago – his little brother and an unhatched dragon had worked a miracle.

He kept looking at Rayla, and her hand, not quite able to make himself believe in what had actually happened. It was so…surreal. This morning he’d woken from nightmares, not long after that he’d been fighting off panic with what seemed like every breath, and now…

Now, they were…walking.

The bewilderment of it hadn’t quite worn off. Neither had the part of him that was coiled and anxious, waiting for disaster to strike, waiting for time to run out. He could still feel the tension of it in the pit of his gut, though so much lighter than it had been before. He kept waiting for something to go wrong. For something to change. But…

Despite everything, against all odds…it had happened. A miracle.

That thought, whenever it arose, made him stare back at his brother again, as if seeing him for the first time. It was just…Ezran. His little brother. A weird kid, true, but – who could have predicted he’d pull something like that out of nowhere? Except, he supposed, it wasn’t exactly out of nowhere, he’d seen the way he’d behaved with that egg, after all.

It seemed that no matter what he looked at, he was doomed to bewilderment. There was Rayla and her miraculously-probably-saved-hand, there was Ezran and his improbable dragon-channelling talent, there was the increasingly stark and mountainous terrain that he had ascended himself, so far away from home…

It was all so bizarre he pinched himself once or twice along the way, just to make sure it wasn’t all some crazy dream. And even that couldn’t dispel the surreality of everything.

Part of him kept wanting to stop and have another hysterical moment or ten to try to come to terms with everything that happened, but Rayla was still walking and Ezran was still walking so that meant he was walking as well, even though everything was crazy and he had no idea what was going on anymore-

“Stop that.” Rayla told him, abruptly, the words such a shock in the midst of his preoccupation that he stopped and nearly tripped over a rock. Ez stopped as well, and tilted his head in their direction, curious.

“…Er, what?” He managed, after a second.

She shrugged, reaching into her pocket to extract a piece of willow bark she’d stashed there. “Whatever you’re worrying about.” She elaborated, and popped it into her mouth. “I can practically see your thoughts getting all tangled up in there.” As she said the last word, she leaned in and tapped him on the forehead, a smile pulling at her lips as she drew away again. He intended to roll his eyes at her, but what actually happened was that he started staring and couldn’t quite stop until she made a face at him. “What?” She demanded, arms folding. His eyes, almost on reflex, followed the motion of her hand.

“Aren’t you worrying? About…anything?” He found himself asking, a little bemused. With all that had happened – how could she not be worrying about something?

“Like what?” Ezran asked, in her place, with a guileless frown. Rayla looked a little more understanding as she inspected him, but…yeah, neither of them seemed to be fretting like he was.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Callum started, a little sarcastic, waving his hand as though confused before gesturing it emphatically at Rayla’s, still dark, still bound. “That, maybe?”

Rayla seemed vaguely sympathetic at that, but…not worried. Ezran, on the other hand, just kept frowning. “But we loosened it.” He insisted, setting Bait down at his side as if he felt the need to have his hands free for the conversation. “Her hand’s gonna be fine now.”

“Is it, though?” Callum demanded, and then – then, perhaps unsurprisingly, all the worries that had been chasing themselves in his head came spilling out. “Are you sure about that? Because it looks to me like it’s still hurting her, and – don’t you remember what the Healer said? Taking the binding off might make some horrible….body-shock-thing happen!”

She grimaced at that, but hadn’t managed to open her mouth to say anything before Ez got his reply off. “But we didn’t take it off.” He pointed out, firmly, as though he thought Callum were perhaps missing something abundantly obvious that needed pointing out. “We just loosened it, like the Healer said. So she should be fine.”

“’She’ is standing right here.” Rayla said, dryly, hands going to her hips. She raised an eyebrow at them as they turned to look at her again.

“…Sorry.” He offered, after a moment. “But even if the binding just loosened – it was still by kind of a lot, right? What if it does…” He waved his hands sharply, frustrated at the lack of good terminology. Increasingly, he couldn’t stop remembering the Healer’s warnings about the dangers of reviving a near-dead limb; how the experience could shock the body, and poison it, and strike at the heart to still it. He hoped that, given the binding had only been loosened and not outright removed, it wouldn’t get that bad. The Healer had advised they impose their own looser binding if they managed to remove the first, and…well, that was essentially what had ended up happening, so…it should be fine, right?

But what if it wasn’t fine?

“…Poison my blood?” She suggested, after a moment, moving her bound hand to look at it herself. She flexed the fingers with a slight grimace.

“I guess?” He sighed, and followed her eyes to it. She’d put on a jacket about an hour ago, evidently starting to feel the chill of their surroundings, which obscured even the bandages over the binding. “I mean…does it feel any different? Better? Worse? I can tell it’s still hurting you.”

“Was it the willow bark that gave it away?” Rayla said, still dry, but eyes remaining on her hand. After a moment, she shrugged, and answered “It still hurts, I suppose, but in a different way. Feels more like pins-and-needles now. Before it was just kinda….numb, and aching.”

Ezran winced in sympathy. “I hate pins-and-needles.” He expressed, expression going pensive. “One time me and Bait were waiting in the grate behind the baker’s kitchen for hours, because we timed it wrong and there were a load of people there, and by the time we got out there were no jelly tarts left and my feet were completely numb. All the prickling was horrible.”

Her lips quirked upwards, clearly amused. “Think that, but maybe ten times worse.” Rayla advised, and his brother shuddered.

Callum didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the story, being more focused on her hand. “Does your pulse feel normal?” He asked, and in an unthinking gesture, reached out to check for himself. She looked momentarily startled as his fingers settled on her skin, but held the hand out for him anyway.

“How should I know?” She asked, sounding a little exasperated as he pushed her sleeve back to investigate the binding, hesitating at the bandage. In the end, he’d grown familiar enough with where to look for her pulse that he just felt for it through the bandaging, and…well, it felt normal enough? Not too fast, not too slow, not weak or jittery or anything…

“….I think it seems okay for now.” He decreed, almost reluctantly, and stepped back again. “But you should tell me if anything changes, alright?”

She rolled her eyes. “You worrywart. I’ll be fine.” She pronounced him, with an oddly fond smile, and then walked off up along the path again without so much as a by-your-leave.

Callum sighed, patted Ez on the shoulder, and followed after her.

---

The walking today was depressingly steep. It was almost entirely uphill, and the ongoing ascent was starting to wear strangely at the heels of his feet. They were growing sore, in a sort of abrasive way that he thought heralded blisters. His boots were broken-in enough by now that it had been a long time since he had any blisters, but apparently, enough mountain-hiking was perfectly capable of changing that. He wondered, uneasily, if he’d need to start padding his heels to stop them blistering too badly. It wasn’t as though he’d be able to stop climbing mountains any time soon, after all.

Rayla did not find a campsite she liked in the next hour, so he just…walked, and watched, and reflected on how much a single day could change everything.

Only a few hours ago, he’d been crying with relief. They’d all cried and laughed and shook like leaves from the awful, wonderful, horrible catharsis of what had happened. He still felt a little fragile – strange and tremulous, like his emotions weren’t quite up to any more hits or surprises, and he might have a breakdown at the first hint of trouble. It was unpleasantly exhausting, how wrung-out the experience had left him, as though all the mounting stress and dread he’d been cultivating had torn its way straight out of his gut, leaving the space behind empty and terribly raw.

He’d never imagined that something so fortunate – so miraculous – could leave him feeling so drained.

And, despite that, despite what had happened, despite everything…they were just…walking.

It wasn’t like they could stop, what with how far they had to go, and the lack of a suitable campsite, and the risk of ambush that Rayla insisted existed. According to her, those hunters they’d tied up ought to be able to get free and get to Verdorn within the day, and then they could mount some sort of pursuit force. So there was definite pressure to keep moving, but…still. It hadn’t stopped feeling strange.

Rayla chewed willow-bark more or less continually as they walked, and carefully pressed at her still-bound hand even though it made her grimace awfully. She avoided the raw bandaged area around the bind, but…even with the thing loosened, it obviously wasn’t going to be an instant fix. Her skin still looked dark, albeit not quite as much so, and she was obviously still in pain. Evidently though, it was better enough that the jacket she’d put on earlier wasn’t bothering her too much.

It was strange to see her in a jacket basically identical to his. Strange enough to distract him from worrying for a good few minutes, but certainly no longer.

He stewed over his concerns in silence, unable to stop and yet not wanting to bother her too often with queries about her health. In time, though, with something approaching mercy, the actual walking became tricky enough that it commanded a lot of his attention, and he couldn’t afford to dwell too much. The way ahead became more and more precipitously steep, and much more rocky; the incline seemed to be too much for most trees, and all at once the forest thinned noticeably. The trees that remained were pale shadows of the vast things in the forest below, with thin trunks and comparatively short statures…but, evidently, very stubborn roots. Some of them clung to the cliff-edges at frankly alarming angles, looking like they’d fall off at any moment.

They kicked up clouds of stone-chips as they walked, sending tiny dusty avalanches clattering down-slope. Without the thick carpet of years’ worth of pine needles, the ground was silt and gravel, and dangerously loose. He slipped a few times before he got the hang of looking for firmer, rockier foot-holds, and several times had to clamber up the steeper areas with his hands holding onto the rock for support. Ezran, with his smaller stature, needed help up the steeper sections frequently – and he’d had to hand Bait over to Callum entirely. The glow-toad was riding haphazardly stuffed into the top of Callum’s backpack, because there was no room for him in Ezran’s.

Rayla called for a break after one particularly unpleasant stretch that was basically rock-climbing rather than walking, and they collapsed gladly against some nearby boulders.

“Is it going to be this steep all the way up?” Ezran asked, a little plaintively, as he caught his breath. He seemed to be holding up better under the strain of the climb than Callum, because Callum couldn’t quite conceive of the idea of talking yet. He was too busy with things like breathing, and contemplating how unnaturally comfortable boulders became when one was exhausted enough.

Rayla, who had crouched near them but not deigned to sit down, peered up the slope and shrugged. “Hard to say. I’ve not gone through these mountains before.” She said, grimacing as she pressed her fingers into the palm of her hand, the skin going white in their wake. “But…probably, yep.”

Ezran groaned, and Callum would have done the same, had Rayla’s hand not distracted him. He blinked at her, decided it had probably been long enough since the last time he asked, and after a few seconds mustered the energy to ask “How’s your hand doing?”

She glanced over at him, then back down at her hand. She grimaced a little, then rolled the sleeve of her jacket up to show him her arm. He made a dismayed sound at the same time she exhaled, leaning forwards as she said “Well, my whole arm is sore now.” She made a face at the arm in question, and he could see why. “I didn’t expect to be able to see it though.”

There were raised pink lines along her skin, taking routes that looked like the pathways of veins. Pathways of inflammation, travelling with her blood. “Why didn’t you say something?” he asked, dismayed, and touched his fingertips to the skin to gauge the temperature. Was it warmer than it ought to be? He couldn’t tell.

“It’s not exactly agonising, Callum.” Rayla told him, dryly. “It’s just a little sore, like I worked the muscles too hard. Anyway, I’m assuming it’s normal.”

“Normal.” Callum repeated, deeply sceptical.

“As normal as something like this gets. Lots of nasty in this hand, right? And now it’s…circulating.” She shrugged, as though unbothered, but he thought he could see the hint of tension around her eyes.

“Isn’t that bad?” Ez asked, anxiously, as he shuffled over to look. “Didn’t the Healer say that that’s super risky?”

“From what I eavesdropped on, she thought it would help if it’s done slow and careful. And my hand’s still bound, so…probably counts.” She shrugged, trying for nonchalance, but he could see the tightness around her eyes. She was worried, too.

He inspected her, attempting not to be too outwardly anxious, and then reached out to take her healthy hand before he’d quite thought it through. He settled his fingers over her pulse to feel it, and asked “Does your pulse feel weird? Do you have any…I dunno, weird aches that aren’t in your arm?” Her pulse…well, he wasn’t exactly an experienced and knowledgeable pulse-taker, but he thought it felt a bit strange. Too fast, too light, and jittery. Oddly irregular.

She grimaced, and he saw a little of her fear slip through into her expression. “…Does feel a bit weird.” She admitted, quietly. “Hard to describe, though. Jumpy, maybe?” She shrugged, plainly uneasy. “So far it’s only my arm that hurts, though.”

Callum clamped down on his anxiety as best he could, holding silent for several seconds, and then released her wrist. “If your heartbeat feels off, I think you need to be careful to take it easy.” He said, eventually. “Don’t let yourself get too out of breath. Take lots of breaks.”

“…Sure.” She said, unconvincingly, and he glared at her. Crossed his arms, even.

“I know you don’t want to waste time.” He told her, with a little asperity. “But if you push yourself too hard while you’re sick and you have a heart attack – I don’t know about you, but I don’t know the heart-starting spell.”

She straightened a little at that, and while she did glare back at him a little, he thought something in his words had struck her. “…I did sort of guess that, Callum.” She said, dryly, and rotated her dark wrist a few times, careful.

He did not unfold his arms, and stared at her expectantly. “So….?”

She rolled her eyes, and pushed away from the rock she was leaning against. “Ugh. Fine. I’ll go easier on myself. Happy?”

“Ecstatic.” He answered, in tones just as dry as hers. She rolled her eyes again, standing with enough abruptness that it seemed a dismissal.

“Good.” She said, hefting her bags. “Because it’s time to keep going. Still a long way to go today.”

“You’re not exactly filling me with confidence, here.” He complained, hauling himself upwards with considerable effort. His every muscle protested the move – and so did Bait, who apparently wasn’t impressed with the sudden jostling.

“I’ll be fine, Callum.” Rayla insisted, and then stubbornly walked off back up the mountain again. Evidently, that was the end of that. He stared after her, unimpressed and worried at the same time, and huffed with the annoyance of trying to care for the health of someone so unnecessarily stubborn about it. You’d think an elf assassin who knew all the stuff she knew would be a little more practical about her own health, but, apparently…not so much.

He sighed, and held out a hand to his brother. “C’mon, Ez. Seems like we’re moving again.” He said this last part more loudly, and pointedly – a deliberate prod against the elf he knew could hear him perfectly well.

Ezran looked between him and Rayla with a vaguely wide-eyed expression somewhere between interest and concern. Then he shrugged, accepted Callum’s offered hand, and got to his feet. “I guess we just have to keep an eye on her.” He said, apparently unconcerned about being overheard. “So she doesn’t work herself too hard.”

A little playfully, Callum shook his brother’s hand on that before he released it, eliciting a giggle. “Sounds good to me.” He agreed. “Now, let’s get moving, before she leaves us behind.”

He wasn’t sure if the huff he heard was Rayla or the wind, but he was putting his money on the former.

Their resumed climb took them further and further into the thin cold air of the mountain, with trees becoming so sparse that there was little to no cover from the gusty mountainside conditions at all. In the morning, when they began walking and left the tied-up hunters behind them, Ezran had been delighted by the white puffs his breath made in the cold air, and had stomped around puffing in imitation of dragons, bringing a smile even to the then-despairing Rayla. He’d since obviously lost the novelty of it, but now…now it was windy enough that the gusts blew back the haze of their breath in their faces, trails of white vapour spilling out around their cheeks.

He wasn’t sure if windiness was just characteristic of mountains, or if this was worse than normal. Either way, it was getting unpleasant. In the end, he just tucked the tail of his scarf in so it wouldn’t flap around quite as insistently, and carried on.

If Rayla took things any easier, he couldn’t see any obvious signs of it. But, in unspoken alliance, he and Ezran conspired to be conspicuously and insistently exhausted after every particularly steep stretch of climbing, collapsing where they stood and calling for a breather and a drink from the waterskins. If the way Rayla eyed them was any indication, she was more than aware of the subterfuge, but she didn’t outright speak against them. She only sighed, very put-upon, and prevailed upon her own use of the waterskin before ushering them onwards.

Mid-afternoon, they started to see snow on the ground.

“Told you.” Rayla said, a little cynically, as Ezran bent to examine the scattered frosty patches of it. “Give it another day and we’ll be hip-deep in it.”

“Hip-deep?” Callum repeated, sceptically, while Ez picked up the evidently very icy bit of snow. It looked like it had melted from the gentle powder he was accustomed to, and then probably frozen again, forming larger icy clusters that crackled under his brother’s fingers in a weak echo of broken glass.

Her lips twitched. “Well. Shin-deep, maybe.” She admitted, and looked up at the sky. “’Course, all it would take is a decent snowstorm, and then we could be hip-deep in snow.”

“That must be a pain to walk in.” Ezran said, thoughtfully, as he looked up at her. “You could have some great snowball fights, though! And then maybe once we’re going back down a mountain, we could just sled instead. It would be way faster.”

“Sorry to say it, bud, but I’m pretty sure Rayla didn’t bring a sled from the Lodge.” He said, amused, and then followed Rayla’s gaze to the thickly-clouded sky. As if responding to his attention, a particularly stiff breeze puffed down his collar, and he shivered, tightening his scarf against the wind. “I guess it’s going to be colder from here on.”

“It won’t be so bad as long as we’re walking.” Rayla claimed, and hefted her backpack; the usual signal that they were about to start moving again. “And when we’re not moving, we’ll have a campfire, so…” She shrugged, and without further word, resumed her pace up the slope.

Callum and his legs took comfort in the knowledge that they’d almost certainly start looking for somewhere to camp soon, and followed her up.

They walked another good half-hour in the increasingly-moody winds before the ground evened out a bit, still sloping upwards, but much more gently. The trees apparently approved of this milder incline, and they found themselves travelling through a spindly pine-forest full of windswept branches; it was apparently windy enough frequently enough that the trees were all growing slanted westwards, apparently from the buffeting of the same powerful easterly wind currently blowing in his ears.

Eventually, they came to a loosely-forested cliffside where the rockiness of the terrain had denuded most of it of foliage. It sloped gently downwards towards the face of the cliff, at enough of an angle that he’d be worried about losing the egg over it if it fell out – it’d probably roll straight down and off the cliff. He winced at the intrusion of the thought, even as he looked to Rayla, perplexed at why they’d stopped. She was staring at the rocky expanse as if its modest dusting of frost and snow were particularly vexing, or particularly noteworthy.

“…We should probably camp here.” She said, with noticeable distaste.

He blinked, then stared back at the cliffside. “What, really? But it’s…” He searched for a word.

“Windy.” Ezran supplied, from beside him, his hair looking vaguely windblown in the same way as the trees. “And right next to a cliff.”

“Right next to a cliff is defensible.” Rayla informed them, though she did not look pleased. “Means if someone wants to ambush us they don’t have as many places to do it from. Anyway,” She gestured at the nearby trees. “This’ll be the easiest firewood around. If we keep climbing it’ll get steep again, and we won’t have much to pick from.” She frowned, ears drooping a little. “Just….don’t lose anything off the cliff-edge. Especially yourselves.”

Callum recalled the thought he’d had, and shuddered. “…Be careful with the egg.” He advised his brother, who practically recoiled at the words, flinching as if struck in the face.

“…I will.” He said, wide-eyed, with another glance towards the cliff.

Tentatively, Callum approached it, and peered over the edge. It was…a long way down. Not as far as he’d expected, maybe, and it wasn’t an entirely sheer drop – it was more like a near-vertical slope than an outright drop-off – but he didn’t expect the fall would be that much more gentle for it. There were trees at the bottom, and a little further along, a wide river. Beyond that there was another cliff face, rising up to join with the mountain behind it. He thought he could see a silver glimmer of water somewhere between the trees at the bottom. “…I think this is the gorge.” He said, after a moment. “You know, the river valley between Dorel and Farel. That the people of Verdorn use.”

“Makes sense.” Rayla said, setting down her bags against a snow-dusted rock. “Bit worrying, though. I hope no one spots the campfire.”

“If they do…” He frowned, paused, and thought through it. “Well, if they do, won’t they only be able to see it from Verdorn? Or the other mountain? So it probably won’t matter. It’d take them ages to get here from there.”

“Hopefully.” She sighed, and unzipped the tent pack. The wind billowed into it, puffing out the sides of the leather with a rhythmic sort of thwip sound. “Okay. This is going to be a pain.”

Ezran looked between her and the tent, quizzically. “…How come?” He asked, trotting over to put his bag (very carefully) down beside hers.

“Because of your hand?” Callum guessed, after a second.

“Me and Callum can put it up, like yesterday.” Ez added, expression bright, and she snorted.

“No, it’s not that.” She said, lips twitching. “Though my hand – and arm – being a pain…that’s not going to help. No, it’s the wind.” She waved her hand towards the spindly, wind-swept trees, as if to indicate the very pronounced gusts still buffeting them from that direction. “We’re all going to need to do this, or the tent will blow off the mountain.”

“…Oh.” Ezran considered this for a second. “I guess we’re using all the tent pegs today, right?”

“You bet.” Rayla agreed, and carefully extracted the outer-tent, promptly stamping her foot down on it to pin it to the ground. It was already ruffling and blustering along the ground, even rolled and folded and barely able to catch the wind at all. “Get the poles ready, will you? And maybe tie yourselves together with rope or something. Make it easier to catch each other if we go off the cliff.”

“Isn’t that a bit much?” Callum asked, sceptically, as he swung his bag around. Despite his words, he went rummaging for his rope coil, even as Ezran extracted one of the poles and began to assemble it.

Rayla raised an eyebrow at him. “Would you prefer to take a little tumble off the cliff, Callum?” She inquired, sardonic, and he huffed.

“…No, thank you.”

She nodded. “Then let’s just be careful.”

Ezran clicked the tent pole into place and reached for another. “Better safe than sorry.” He said, sagely, as Callum tied the rope uncertainly around his middle. Watching him, Rayla rolled her eyes, and shuffled over to take the rope from him.

“You need to learn to tie better knots.” She informed him, unceremoniously unravelling his apparently-inadequate attempt. She then proceeded to loop more rope around his middle, running it in and around in a looping knot that was considerably distinct from his own.

His eyes moved between her and her hands. He’d never really considered that there might be a lot of ways to tie a rope around someone, or that one would be better than another. He watched her setting both hands to the task, and wondered if it was hurting her. “…Well, I’ll practice that one later?” he offered, watching her progress with an eye for memorising it. She stepped back and pulled the length of rope with her, stamping down on the outer-tent that had begun to flutter rebelliously about in her absence.

“You do that.” She said, and approached Ezran. “Here, Ez. Don’t mind me, I’ll just tie you in.”

“Sure.” He said, agreeably, already at work on the third tent-pole.

In short order they were all tied together and had the tent-poles assembled and ready to apply to the tent. Callum still considered the rope to be flagrant overkill – sure, it was windy, but not that windy. It wasn’t like it was a struggle to stand upright or anything, so it wouldn’t be that bad, surely? So, when Rayla called for him to get a good grip on the tent with her while Ezran would have the duty of putting the poles in, he was perhaps not taking it all that seriously. He held on as directed, of course, and Rayla unfolded the tent fabric, and Ezran stood by with a tent-pole at the ready-

And then the wind billowed into the tent as if into a sail, and suddenly, he was struggling to stay on his feet.

“Holy-“ he yelped, as Rayla grimly dug her heels in and yanked back on the tent as it filled with air, puffing out as if fully-boned with the tent-poles and making a valiant attempt to wrest itself from their hands. The sound of the air rushing into it was a loud and enthusiastic whomp, and thereafter it billowed and flapped and rattled as it pulled at them, the force of the wind throughout it alarmingly strong. “This is crazy!”

“Told you!” Rayla called to him, wrestling the tent to the ground. It puffed around her, flapping rebelliously, and a sudden wind-gust nearly tore it from his hands. With a noise that was almost a snarl, Rayla hooked herself into the ground of the cliffside with her blade, wrapping a storm-line around her arm. “Ezran!” She reminded, a moment later, and his brother snapped from his stunned daze.

“Right!” Was all Ez had to say, as he attempted to flatten down a section of tent enough to get the pole into it.

He’d managed to get two poles in and had started on the third when the wind shrieked in from the east, blasting into the tent and yanking Callum along with it – with enough force that it sent him sprawling against the ground, the thick fabric ripped from his hands. His teeth clacked together around the shape of a yell as he hit the ground, with a pinch of pain at the edge of his tongue. He lay there, utterly dazed, for a timeless second filled with thoughts of sails catching the wind and the tent becoming a vast kite to carry them all away…

“Callum!” Rayla shouted, and when he looked over she was busy battling the tent to the ground with nothing but her hook and the storm-lines as leverage. Even so, she managed to spare enough attention to look over at him with urgent concern.

Ezran stood, craning his head to look past the flapping tent to see him. “Are you okay?” He called, anxiously, the third tent pole braced between his hands.

His mouth tasted like blood, and there were sharp scraping pains along the skin on various parts of his hands and arms, but…. “I’m fine.” He called back, a little hoarsely, and scrambled to his feet, head still wiped oddly blank by the shock of the impact. “I’ll just-“ He grabbed at a roiling corner of the tent-fabric and emulated Rayla, unspooling one of the tied storm-lines and looping it around his arm. It definitely made it easier to get a grip on the thing, but keeping himself upright was hard. And now that there were two poles in the tent, the damned things were nearly poking his eyes out every other second. “Just, get the poles in already!”

“I’m trying!” Ezran said, plainly agitated, as he tried to grasp at the relevant bit of tent for long enough to stick a pole in it. “Can you – hold this part down, or something? It’s really hard to get at it!”

Rayla responded to his request by practically throwing herself over the tent and tackling the piece in question to the ground. Amazingly, it was so full of the prevailing wind that it actually bucked and roiled underneath her. It was utterly ridiculous. Why did no one ever mention that tents could turn into stupidly deadly wind-socks under the right conditions?

The effort was enough, apparently; Ezran pushed the segmented metal pole into its tube and in that fashion the three of them worked, pinning the tent down in the right places for the last pole to be applied. Rayla then determinedly oriented the tent-door away from the wind, and then rooted herself and the storm-lines to the ground while Callum and Ezran made several desperate and largely unsuccessful attempts to pitch the stupid thing.

It took enough tries that his fingertips were sore with the effort of trying to pull the ends of the tent-poles into their proper places, but – they managed it eventually, and then Rayla was rotating the tent-door into a more favourable position while Ezran scrambled for the tent pegs, and they were basically done. They whacked in the pegs into the hooks on the tent proper – all twelve – and then laid out the storm-lines around the tent and secured those down too. Rayla enlisted the end of a blade as a hammer to knock the pegs solidly into the hard ground, while Callum and Ezran prevailed upon the use of large rocks for the same purpose.

“Ugh. Stupid wind.” Rayla muttered darkly, when they were done, and beholding the sight of their securely tied-down tent with exhausted eyes and aching bodies. “I hate putting up tents in bad wind.”

“….You’ve done it before?” Callum managed to ask, after several seconds of attempting to muster the energy. He looked at his hands and found the fingertips red and raw. He could feel scrapes along his arms and elbows from the fall, which his jacket hadn’t managed to protect him from. The fabric looked a little frayed from it, too.

The tent still flapped in the wind, but…ineffectually. Like a fish pinned on a knife. The sides fluttered noisily in the wind and the storm-lines quivered, but they’d done a solid job of it. That tent was not moving. Even so, Rayla seemed to find it a good idea to move around its perimeter, covering the heads of the tent-pegs with piled rocks. “A few times.” She answered, after a moment. “’Course, I had a whole team helping with holding the tents down then. Made it a lot easier.”

He nodded, a little numbly, and raised an aching hand to rub at his ears. The wind had been blowing in them for hours now, and combined with the fall, they were really aching, in a cold-feeling pain that was steadily spreading to the rest of his head. “…Inner-tent?” he questioned, flapping a hand a little ineffectually at the tent-pack, open and fluttering ominously in the ongoing gusts.

“Inner-tent,” Rayla agreed, and the three of them wrestled that part into the tent’s interior. This, at least, they could keep folded until they were inside, and out of the worst of the wind.

Setting up camp that afternoon continued to prove an exercise in problem-solving, when the wind promptly extinguished their first three attempts at a campfire and nearly set fire to the tent on the fourth. Eventually they moved it to a spot uncomfortably close to one of the trees, risking setting fire to that for the chance of some meagre shelter. It worked, finally, and Rayla set them to work melting snow to replenish their waterskins.

“Easier than looking for a water source.” She said, shrugging, pulling on some gloves to go scoop up more snow. “That’s one good thing about snow and ice, I suppose. If we’re unlucky, the nearest stream could be a good hour away, so….” She dumped the latest handful of icy snow into the pot and then waved towards it, demonstratively. The little-finger glove flapped around with the movement, plainly empty.

“Huh.” Callum said, committing the detail to his growing knowledge on journeying, and went to aid in the snow-gathering efforts.

The downside of having the campfire upwind of the camp meant that a large part of the campsite couldn’t really be traversed unless he wanted a lungful of smoke, which was yet another lesson he hadn’t really asked for and certainly hadn’t enjoyed, but it was probably helpful knowledge. Somehow. Once most of the camp-stuff was attended to, though, Callum started giving Rayla’s hand some pointed and meaningful looks until she rolled her eyes and came over to let him inspect it.

She rolled the jacket sleeve up again, and then he had a pretty good amount of arm to inspect for anomalous swelling. He eyed the places where, earlier, there’d been raised red lines along the veins and noted “I think your whole arm has just swollen up a bit, now.” Gently, he poked it. “Does that hurt?”

She grimaced, but shook her head. “Not when you put pressure on it? Not like a bruise.” She offered. “But it sort of…aches. Kinda. On its own. A bit like an overworked muscle.”

Callum’s own overworked muscles took that moment to remind him of how sore they were, and he shuffled his crossed legs uncomfortably. He shifted his hands more gently down the affected arm to where the binding still sat, albeit blessedly looser. “How’s the hand feel?” He asked, after a moment, reaching to the side to pull his medical supplies over, complete with the boiled bandages. “Any better?”

“Bit less painful.” She said, after a moment of consideration. “Still really bad around the binding…but not much helping that, what with the open sores and all.”

Ez side-eyed her then, glancing down at his bag and then back at her hand. “…Does the binding still feel loose?” He asked, after a moment. “I’m pretty sure me and Zym can do our thing again, but…I don’t really know how it’s gonna work. If your assassiny-ribbon is going to get tighter again or not.”

She was silent for several seconds, eyes straying back to the bandage obscuring the binding. “I can’t really tell.” She said, eventually. “Directly around the binding is mostly just…well, you know.” By ‘you know’, he assumed she meant ‘so sore and wrecked I can’t actually feel much from it except pain’. Like, he knew she wouldn’t actually say that, but the meaning seemed relatively clear.

“If it’s still doing the pins-and-needles, it’s probably still looser. Maybe?” Callum reasoned, fingers hovering over the knots on the bandages. Considering he’d only changed them a few hours ago, it seemed maybe too early to do it again, but… “And I think you’ve got a little bit of colour back in your hand. And definitely your wrist.” He touched his fingertips to the skin. It still felt cold; if there’d been much change there, he couldn’t really feel it yet. For a second, he near-reflexively went to look for her pulse – but on this hand, that was solidly obscured by bandage.

He set her hand down and went for the other one instead, pressing fingers over the radial artery. She looked down at it, then up at him, and asked “How is it?”

“Better than earlier.” He said, with some relief. “Your arm might be all swollen but at least your heartbeat feels less…weird.”

However unconcerned she tried to pretend to seem, he could see that that relieved her. “Well, thank the stars for that.” She sighed, then shifted back, retrieving her arm from his grasp. She stood and shuffled over to rummage in the bags, pulling out several containers still packed with goose meat. “Let’s get dinner out of the way now, and then we can actually rest a little.” She sounded almost wistful at that. He could sympathise entirely – even their downtime, lately, had been rather fraught.

“Sounds good.” Callum said, thinking briefly of his sketchbook, and the nascent sketch of Verdorn sprawling across a page. He thought, too, of the neglected sketch of Rayla’s hand, symbolic of the dread that had been gripping him so strongly the last few days. He wondered what it would be like, to look at it now.

“Are we going to heat it up?” Ez wondered, as Rayla unpacked their provisions. “Or just eat it cold again?”

Rayla shrugged. “Whatever you prefer, I suppose.” She said. “Though it is harder to heat up leftovers with the sort of equipment we have. If we boil it it’ll lose flavour, and it’s tricky to pike cooked meat sometimes.”

“I’ll just have mine cold.” Callum said, abruptly really feeling his exhaustion, and accepted a jar from Rayla with a sigh. “I don’t really want to wait.”

Ezran considered that. “I’ll do the same, then.” He decided, and took his own jar, making a slight face at it. Bait, sensing the entrance of food into the proceedings, immediately perked up from where he’d been sitting near the fire, and hopped up to Ezran with a demanding croak. Ez looked down at him, a smile chasing its way onto his face, and proffered a chunk of cooked meat at the toad. “I know it’s not exactly your usual,” He said, to the toad, as he knelt down to bring his hand closer. “But you’re okay with that, right?”

Callum, watching, noted that Ezran nodded as if in response to something before Bait shot out his tongue to accept the offering. It made him feel distinctly weird, in an on-the-edge-of-realising-something sort of way. He recalled the way Ezran had been talking to the egg, and uneasily considered that…well, Bait was a magical creature too. Did Ezran’s talent extend beyond talking to unhatched dragons?

…And, if it did, how far did it go?

…Could Ez really talk to animals, like he’d been saying for so long? …But then, if he could, why would he have got it wrong when Callum asked him to prove it?

He shifted uneasily for a while before he finally elected to just ask. “…So, Ez,” He said, slowly, in apparently a strange enough tone that his brother looked up warily. “This whole…talking to the dragon egg thing. Is that…” he hesitated. “Where did that come from? How long – I mean, was it something you realised you could do straight away, or…” He trailed off, not wanting to quite come out and say ‘have you been telling the truth this whole time?’

Ezran stilled, for a second, and then abruptly looked mulish. His shoulders hunched a little and he looked away. “It’s not exactly a new thing, you know.” He muttered, setting the jar down to fold his arms. “I’ve been talking to Bait for years. It’s not my fault you never believed me until it was a dragon I was talking to.”

His hands fluttered up in a sort of unhappy defensive motion, and his stomach twisted. It was a fairly bald confirmation of his uneasy suspicions, and…and he wasn’t really sure how to respond to it. Even with the evidence in front of him, and with what Ezran had managed with Rayla’s binding….somehow, it was still hard to wrap his head around the idea of this being true, too. He’d thought Ezran a liar on this for years, after all. For several seconds he struggled to find something to say, until Rayla took the matter out of his hands.

“Hold on,” She said, straightening, and looking between them with a raised eyebrow. “What are you on about, Ez? You can talk to Bait too?” Then, at Callum: “And you knew about this?”

“Not just Bait.” Ezran refuted, before Callum could speak. “It’s just animals. All animals. I’ve been able to understand them for most of my life, and been able to make them understand me for years – and I tried to tell Callum about it but he never believed me.” A hint of his temper leaked into those last words, the line between his furrowed brows deepening.

Rayla’s eyes slid to Callum then, expectantly, as if waiting for an explanation. His shoulders hunched and he hastened to say “But…Ez, if you really could understand animals, how come you got it wrong that time I asked you to prove it? Why would you have been wrong?”

“Because raccoons are huge liars, Callum.” Ezran said, impatiently, with a light scowl furrowing his brow. “I told you that, too. I didn’t know it back then, but raccoons are always playing tricks and they’ll never tell you the truth if they can get away with tricking you – and I wasn’t good enough to tell when they were lying back then, either, so…” He shrugged, and made a sort of there-you-go gesture with his hand.

“…So, they told you there was a treasure behind the waterfall when there wasn’t, and I ended up getting soaked for nothing?” Callum supplied, and his brother nodded. He looked away, frowning lightly, and….yeah, he thought he remembered that. Ezran trying to tell him about the alleged dishonesty of raccoons. After the waterfall incident, it had seemed a pretty blatant lie, and he hadn’t even considered the idea that it might be true. And then after that he’d got pretty used to dismissing Ezran’s subsequent claims to animal-talking as play-pretend kid stuff.

“Yeah, pretty much.” He agreed, expression a little less ornery now. Perhaps because Callum was listening to him without immediately denying everything? “So after that you just…wouldn’t believe me, because I’d been wrong, so I gave up on trying.” Carefully, his fingers drifted to his bag, and the egg within. “But…then me and Zym knew we were Rayla’s last hope. So we had to try.” A little solemn, he slipped the bag open enough to put his hands in, fingers settling over the egg. His eyes closed, just briefly, and Callum experienced a little rush of vertigo at knowing that his brother was communicating with a baby dragon right now.

“…I’m glad you did.” Rayla said, eventually, her fingers hovering over her left wrist, and the binding there. “I’d…well, I never really had much hope about it all even to begin with, but I was pretty ready to give up.” She reached out, and settled her hand on his shoulder. “Thank you, Ezran.”

He looked up at her over his shoulder with a small, shy smile. “…Well, it’s not like I did all the work.” He said, posture unfurling a little at her praise. “But, um, you’re welcome. I’m really glad we could help.”

Rayla blinked at him for a second, then slowly reached out with her bound hand to touch her fingertips to the eggshell. The motion was…careful, and tentative. Almost reverent. “Thank you, Azymondias.” She murmured to the egg, and Ezran smiled more widely beside her.

“He’s happy he could help, too.” He said, contentedly. “He’s still pretty tired now. But I think maybe we can try to work on your binding again tomorrow.”

Her lips twitched into a smile of her own. “I’ll look forward to it.” She said, and withdrew, leaning back from Ezran and the egg for a second, regarding them with a strange expression. “You’re a talented kid, Ezran.” She expressed after a second. “I’ve never even heard of someone being able to talk to animals before. Not even the greatest elven mages.”

Callum looked between his brother, who seemed very pleased at that statement, and Rayla, who had professed to his brother’s ability being something unheard of even in Xadia. He shook his head, disbelievingly, and said “It’s…it’s crazy, Ez, that you were walking around with this amazing weird power all this time and I didn’t even know.”

Ezran looked over at him, and his expression closed off again, just a little. “Only because you weren’t listening when I told you.” He reminded, mutinously.

Callum sighed, raising a hand to rub at the back of his neck, and nodded. “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry, Ez. I should have believed you…or at least tried to listen.” He set his face in the most earnest contrition he could, because, well…he did always try to own up to his mistakes, when he made them.

His brother inspected him, as if for signs of any duplicity, then relaxed again. “Well, you’re listening now.” He said, with a note of satisfaction. “And I accept your apology. I guess now you just need to make all the buttheadedness up to me.” There was a glint in his eyes, and Callum knew exactly what it heralded. He slumped, resigned, and considered how much his legs would protest to the Jerkface dance after so much uphill walking.

In the next second, though, he received some unexpected salvation. “Something I don’t understand, Ez,” Rayla said, diverting his brother’s attention back to her. “How does talking to animals mean you can talk to a dragon? Dragons aren’t animals, they’re people. So is it really talking, or…”

“It’s not really talking.” Ezran admitted, after a moment. “Animals don’t really have language like we do. I mean, some of them have noises they make to warn each other if there’s trouble, and sometimes they have enough of those that it’s kinda like they have words, but…animals don’t talk like people do, so…what I do, it’s kind of more like…” His words slowed, as if he were testing them one-by-one. “Like, understanding. And making them understand me.”

Callum made an interested noise. “So, kind of….more like some sort of magical empathy thing than talking?”

“I guess?” Ezran offered, shrugging. “I don’t really think about how it works. I just do it. And besides, it’s kind of more like talking with Zym, anyway.”

Callum looked over at Rayla and shared an interested glance with her. A moment later, she ventured, “Because he’s…smarter? Not an animal?”

“I don’t think so. Otherwise I’d find it easier to understand people, not harder.” Ezran said, a little automatically, and then abruptly looked over at them in alarm, as if he’d said something he hadn’t intended. “Uhh…”

“…Ezran, um.” Callum said, after a moment of looking at his brother’s decidedly shifty expression. That was a ‘caught stealing jelly-tarts’ face if he ever saw one. “I really need you to be honest with me here. Can you read minds?” The tone was joking, but…he was kind of serious too. ‘Harder’ to understand people? That definitely seemed like an implication that he could ‘understand’ them. What did that mean? Could he ‘hear’ thoughts? Pick up on feelings? And what would ‘making them understand’ constitute with a person, anyway?

“Of course I can’t read minds!” Ezran said, indignantly, which made him relax a little. At least until he followed it up with “Well, not really.”

Somewhat at a loss for words, Callum looked at Rayla again. Her eyebrows were very, very high as she stared at his brother. “…Care to elaborate, Ez?” She asked, dryly, and he squirmed.

“It’s not mind-reading.” Ezran insisted. “Really. What I have with Zym is – different. I can’t only understand how he’s feeling, we can talk with words – no one else is like that. You two, and other people – it’s so much harder to get anything from you than the animals.”

“…But, you can get something?” Callum prompted, when his brother went quiet.

Ezran looked away, furtive, and slid his fingers over azure eggshell. “Feelings, mostly.” He admitted, shrugging. “It’s easier when I’m touching someone. It was always like that. At first I could only understand animals if I was touching them, too. I’m better now, though.” He glanced up at Callum, and his shoulders hunched a little. He seemed bizarrely worried, and…Callum couldn’t really figure out why. What reaction was he anticipating, with the way he was watching like that?

Tentatively, Callum reached out, and laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder. Bemusedly, he noted that the contact – according to him – might be conveying some of his emotional state across. What was he projecting, then? Confusion? Concern? “So, if you’re a super-special magical empathy-mage now,” He started, intentionally teasing, intentionally warm. “Can you tell me what I’m feeling?”

Ezran eyed him warily. “…Kind of confused, and…worried about me?” His face screwed up. “What are you worried for?”

“I’m your big brother. It’s my job to worry about you.” Callum claimed, staunchly, and managed to prompt a smile. “Aunt Amaya said.” Mom, too, when she’d been alive. But bringing that up wouldn’t do anything except make everyone sad.

…Then he recalled that Ezran probably had access to that quick flash of grief, if he was sensitive enough to catch that sort of thing, and felt a little weird about it.

His brother dipped his head at him, subdued, in a sort of half-nod. “See, that’s…that there.” He said, abruptly. “People don’t like it when you know too much about them, or how they’re feeling. It makes them feel…I dunno. They don’t like it.” His eyes slid to Callum’s, with a kind of caution he hated to see. “…You don’t like it, either.”

“…That’s what you’re worried about?” Callum said, after a moment, and then very deliberately reached down to clasp his brother’s hand, just over the eggshell. “Ezran, you’ve always been weirdly insightful about people’s moods. Sure, that can be a bit of a pain sometimes, when I don’t want to talk about my feelings or whatever, but it’s not like – not like it’s actually a problem. I really don’t care if your….emotional insight is more of a magical thing than I thought it was. It doesn’t change anything.”

Ezran blinked at him, looking down at their hands, and frowned. “But you felt weird about it.” He insisted. “Just now. Kind of weird and uncomfortable?”

“I’d feel the same way if someone pointed out how I was feeling just by looking at my face, you know.” He pointed out, pragmatically. “People pointing out your feelings is uncomfortable, a lot of the time. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. And you’re my brother. If anyone gets to have super-special insight into my feelings, of course it’s going to be you.”

Ez studied him for several long moments, and Callum wondered if he was doing his empathy-thing even now, to feel whether he was being genuine or not. Then he sighed, shoulders slumping in what definitely seemed like relief. “…Thanks, Callum.” He said, quiet. “I guess I was kind of worried about what you’d think.” He paused, and looked up. “…Rayla?” He said, tentative. “What about you?”

It was then that Callum realised how quiet she’d been, watching them talk, watching them interact. She was still sitting a short distance away, just around the fire, and her expression was a little inscrutable. “…It’s really not mind-reading?” She asked, after a moment. “You can’t tell what we’re thinking?”

Ezran shook his head. “Aside from with Zym? No, I’ve never had anything like that before.”

Rayla considered that, then nodded. “Okay, that was my main worry. I’m not going to lie – it is a little bit uncomfortable, Ez, but…I don’t mind too much, as long as you’re careful with it.”

He tensed a little, perceptible to Callum through their joined hands. “…Like how?” He ventured, oddly timid.

“If you can tell what people are feeling – you can learn things that they…might want to keep hidden. Or don’t want to talk about.” She said, after a pause for thought. “So I think you need to be very careful about what you say about the things you learn, and…be respectful, I suppose. Feelings are…personal. And private. You need to make sure to know when it’s appropriate to talk about the things you pick up.”

Ez went a little more tense and a little more drawn-in as she spoke, but…not especially upset. Just…resigned. He nodded. “Yeah, I know. A lot of people just really don’t want other people knowing how they feel. Especially when it’s something that’s important, or secret.” He hesitated. “…I’m pretty used to knowing when to say something or not, by now. And I don’t spread around secret-feelings unless it’s really important.”

Rayla pursued her lips, thoughtful. The line of her brow made her look a little troubled. “You’re a good kid, Ez.” She settled on, eventually. “I suppose if I had to pick someone to have magical insight into my feelings, you’d be a good choice.” She hesitated, and then shuffled over to pat him on the shoulder, as much a reassuring gesture as it was a sign of trust.

He looked up at her, eyes wide and grateful and vulnerable all at once. “I know you don’t like other people to know what you’re feeling. You’re a really private person. I know.” He said, the words coming in a quick and sudden rush. “I’ll be careful, I promise. You can trust me.”

She looked at him, and her expression loosened a little. She moved her hand and laid it over Callum and Ezran’s, still joined over the egg. “I know.” Tentatively, her lips settled into a soft half-smile. She withdrew her hand, then, and sat back.

Callum looked between them, oddly touched by…by the open exchange of concerns? Reassurance? The obvious trust that Rayla had put in his brother? All of those, maybe. In any case, his chest practically ached with fondness for both of them. And wasn’t it crazy, that Ezran could probably feel that?

As if reading the thought – which he apparently couldn’t – Ezran looked up at Callum and smiled. Then he looked down at the egg again, as if distracted by…something it’d said? Something Azymondias had said?

“What makes him so different?” Callum wondered, aloud, as he allowed his hand to drop from the egg. “How come you can talk with him so much more clearly?”

“…I really don’t know?” Ez said, shrugging. “I…it’s weird. He just feels different. Like – the feeling of him, his mind and emotions? It just…fits. It’s easier to reach out to him. And he’s learning to kind of…almost reach back, sort of. Even though it’s hard for him.”

“I never thought dragons would be…awake and aware, even inside the egg.” Rayla offered, expression a little strange.

“Not awake. Not really.” Ezran shook his head. “It really is like he’s asleep and dreaming, and just…when we talk, it brings him closer up to the surface. But he knows me.” A smile flickered across his face. “And he knows you guys, too, from the sounds of your voices, and – Rayla, from the feeling of your magic. So yeah, I guess he’s pretty aware, for an unborn baby.”

Rayla seemed briefly nonplussed, perhaps at the implication that the Dragon Prince might recognise her, whenever he got around to hatching. And…wasn’t that a thought? “How long do dragons stay in eggs before they hatch, anyway?” Callum asked, leaning forwards to inspect the shimmering surface of the shell.

Ez made a complicated series of faces, then, like he’d just seen something profoundly baffling. “Uhh….” He frowned at the egg. “Good question, I think. Zym thinks he’s ready to hatch now. But there’s something he needs before he can, and he doesn’t know what it is, or how to get it, except that there needs to be a lot of magic.”

“I doubt it’ll come up.” Rayla said, with a quick glance at the shell. “That egg is years old by now – I’m not sure how old, but my parents left to be his Dragonguard a long time ago.” A shadow passed over her face, but she didn’t comment any further on that matter. Instead, she cleared her throat, and concluded “If it were that easy to hatch Storm dragons, he’d be a dragonling right now instead of an egg.”

“…Probably for the best.” Callum decided, tactfully refraining from asking exactly how young Rayla had been when her parents left. “If it’s this much work to keep us fed and travelling, we don’t really need to be feeding an entire baby dragon too.”

“Fair point.” Rayla agreed, and stood. “Well, you two watch the pot and the egg and do…whatever. I’m going to go get more wood.”

Callum suspected, looking at her, that her objective was less to get firewood and more to walk around a bit, and perhaps get some breathing room from all the somewhat-difficult conversations they’d been having. But still, he could appreciate that. He nodded. She promptly sped off into the windblown treeline, leaving him and Ezran and Bait sitting there with a dragon egg, a bubbling pot, and several jars of food.

He sat silently staring at the fire, oddly uncertain of what to do in the quiet, and exhaled a very long and tired breath. Beside him, Ezran nodded understandingly.

“Long day, huh?” he commented, sympathetic, with his hands still on the egg of the dragon he apparently had some sort of magical connection with.

Callum considered the early awakening, the mounting despair over Rayla’s hand, the unexpected arrival of those human hunters, the whole exhausting event of what Ezran and the Dragon Prince had done with the binding, the several hours of uphill walking, and the incredible effort it had been to get the tent up in the wind. And that wasn’t even considering the difficult talks on the subject of Ezran’s abilities and the associated privacy concerns…

“Really long day.” He agreed, with feeling, and looked up at the sky.

Despite everything, despite everything that had happened….it was barely past late-afternoon. The sun was low enough for it to be evening, but…only just.

Abruptly, he considered that he’d need to change Rayla’s bandages and get her to do her hand massage before they slept, so really, the day still had a way further to go. He sighed again, this time with heartfelt exhaustion, and slumped backwards to the loose rocky ground. It should have been hideously uncomfortable, but he was too tired to care.

“Callum?” Ezran asked, alarmed, head shooting up to look over at him. “Are you okay?”

“….I’m fine.” He said, weakly, from the ground. “I’m just gonna…lay here a while, okay? It’s been a crazy day.”

Ezran considered that for a moment. “I think I’ll join you.” He decided, and flopped back beside him, egg held securely in his arms.

Callum huffed, lips quirking in a smile, and let his head fall back. “We can just watch the clouds for a bit, I guess.” He said, and that was exactly what they did.

He was so very, very ready for this day to be over.

---

End chapter.

S3 notes: If you’re not a new reader, be aware that I’ve gone back and made edits to chapters 1-10 to accommodate new s3 context and information, but only on ao3. Tumblr editions remain unedited. Nothing really needed any major changes, but the stuff’s in there. There are edit notes at the beginning of every chapter on ao3.

Notes: In a fairly sudden decision made today, 30/11/19, I cut this chapter in half. The second half will be finished and posted as chapter 12 instead, and all my future chapters have been renumbered. This is because even I was getting sick of how long my chapters were getting, and my desire to avoid obscenely high chapter counts was not compelling enough to stop me from cutting it. Otherwise I think this chapter would have ended up being about 23-25k, and no one wants that.

From now on, I’ll be making an effort to keep chapters under 15k unless there’s compelling reasons not to, such as it being an important chapter with important emotional and narrative flow.

Next chapter is currently like 9k now, and I expect it to maybe conclude at around 10-12k. Lots of Corvus in that one.

Story notes:

Timeline: This chapter takes place on 19.05, day 9. Kids have camped at an altitude of 1500m, and have ascended maybe 250-300m in the day.

Quite early in the morning, Soren and Claudia contemplate weather. This occurs more-or-less concurrently with Callum and Rayla tying up the hunters last chapter. Early afternoon, the Zym-Ez Machina happens, and after that they’re travelling. It’s been an eventful day. Not much later in the afternoon, Amaya is consecrated as a Justiciar.

Camping note: The windy campsite experience is one of my own. Except in my case, it took ten people to hold the tent down while other people put the poles in and pitched it, not two. Same tent size as the kids have, pretty much, and it took ten people to stop the wind from flinging it and us off the mountain. So…I’m making gratuitous allowances for Rayla’s strength.

Camping on a slope? Also personal experience – though in my case it wasn’t the same campsite as the Windy Place. One of my group lost her bowl over the cliff, and someone else had to tackle her backpack when it started rolling downhill towards the edge. Considering we were all carrying group gear – losing that backpack would have been dire. See more slope-camping difficulties next chapter.

Medical note: Thanks to the Zym Ez Machina, Rayla’s binding has been loosened somewhat. Now it’s about as tight as it was a day or two past the ritual. This is allowing her to reperfuse to an extent – there’s enough leeway for blood to circulate into the hand and start oxygenating it properly again. This also carries the toxic waste products left by dead or deoxygenated cells into the rest of the body, causing inflammation and tissue death and mild systemic shock. As I have stated before, I’ve decided that elves are less susceptible to reperfusion injury than humans, so this will not approach life-threatening levels for Rayla. It will, however, be pretty unpleasant, and exacerbate the severity of her permanent damage. In this chapter, the first signs of systemic shock start to set in, and then the elfy biological mechanisms she had kicked in and stopped the worst effects.

On Zym’s egg: From s3, a lot of people seem to assume that Zym’s egg was laid on the day Avizandum died. I disagree. I’m pretty sure it was supposed to be Zym’s hatchday, and Zubeia was off catching a storm or something that she could bring back and hatch him with. Some reasons: if it was the day he was laid, Zubeia would have been there, because she’d be laying the egg, and I doubt she’d have gone flying off immediately afterwards. Rayla’s parents left to join the Dragonguard when she was a kid, years ago – I can see the Dragonguard being formed in advance of the egg being laid, but not that far in advance. And lastly, Viren seems to know about the egg’s existence already – his realisation of why Avizandum was there was much more ‘oh this makes sense now’ than ‘what if….the dragon king has an egg…what a horrible thought’. He certainly knows that Avizandum has a mate. So I maintain that Zym’s egg is years old, and he’s been maturing inside it for a long time as his parents wait for the right conditions to hatch him.

That's all for now. Expect another update within the next few days!

#tdp #rayllum #tdp fanfic #tdp rayla #tdp callum #tdp ezran #piaj #piaj chapters

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foxymuses · 4 years

Note

do it! share the spn opinions!

aight, but i aint gonna go super into detail here, okay, and i’m putting it under a cut just so people who don’t want to SEE THE SALT can avoid it, so this is your LAST WARNING don’t read further if you’re easily offended/have strong feelings about spn. also, i say it several times, but it should be enforced here that just because i dislike a character on the show does not mean i dislike someone’s portrayal. oftentimes, the tumblr rp world writes characters better than shows do and it redeems these characters in my eyes, so. keep that in mind

i can’t stand sam at all. i think he’s a whiny bitch baby and he gets far too much love in the show. i prefer the later seasons when dean becomes the plot focus. this isn’t because i like dean better (but i do), it’s honestly just so... like sam’s writing is so off putting and it grinds me. i usually skip episodes that are sam focused, and i very much can’t stand most of s3 and s4. i also don’t like soulless sam at all *** i usually adore sam rpers. this isn’t to say i hate the character. i hate the way he’s written in the show, but how tumblr people write him is the Right way and i love them for it

i Strongly Disliked s6 and s12. i can’t even tell you what happened in these seasons aside from a vague recollection. s8 is also a bit of a fog, but that’s mostly because s9 is when i started watching the show on tv so i sort of skipped through s8 to be ready for the premiere.

i will forever be salty that they did dean dirty at the end of s5. having him go to say yes then essentially being all ‘jk sam asked me not to so i wont’ will forever irritate me. like. they were all ‘no dean, you can’t say yes to michael’ and ready to lock him up for it, but then literally like an episode later were like ‘nah it’s cool if sam says yes though, whatever’

sort of following that, i really hate that sam is oftentimes implied to be the ‘stronger’ or ‘nicer’ brother. i think he’s a huge hypocrite and like. he causes so many problems, and he’s so mean to dean a lot of the time? but dean would do anything for him? that’s annoying

i did not like mary being brought back at all. that was random and made super little sense to the overall plot, and i did not like how she was written

i also don’t like jack. he seemed a kind of... mmm there’s a word for it. but like the writers seemed to just throw him in for the sake of a plot line, and he’s annoying and i don’t like how OP he is. again, most jack writers are better, but within the show realm, he annoys me to no end, as does the immediate like... love for him that everyone but dean has, and the pushy insistence that everyone shoves at dean to like jack as if he’s not the spawn of the devil

i dont even think this is controversial, but how they handled demon dean was Disappointing, and great part of the reason i stopped watching in s10 and didn’t catch up until i learned dean got possessed by michael FINALLY. but that disappointed me too, so. here we are, living on my blog with my own rules about the possessions and shit

can we talk about how dean’s ptsd is never addressed at all.

uh, john was an abusive asshole. no forgiveness here. there’s no excuses ‘he was a drunk, he missed his wife, he wanted dean to survive’ no, he was an abusive asshole that royally fucked dean up for good, and i will have none of the john apologist bullshit here, thanks. bobby was more a father to dean than john ever would’ve been

don’t really care for the claire arc all that much. i like her with jody, and i like jody’s little family with alex too, but the arc for claire is just.. really odd

donna is incredibly annoying. i’ll keep saying it, but tumblr writers do her so much better. show donna just. ugh.

i wrote a post about it once, but the episode i Hate the most is on the head of a pin, and i won’t super go into detail, but that whole episode is s shit show and i Do Not acknowledge it happened, thanks

I THINK THERE’S MORE BUT I’M BLANKING

the samulet and handprint both still exist, thanks. there’s a post about it somewhere on one of my blogs that i should bring out again

can we stop treating dean as either an angry fisticuffs player or an overall childish goofball? he has more to him than that

i’m still bitter over the ruby arc, honestly. it annoyed me in all the wrong ways. we can just assume that i’m fine with ruby writers at this point, nothing i say in this list pertains to writers on tumblr, just the show

the god is chuck thing is fine, but the whole direction the show took with it after amara is just fucking bananas. i mean sure, what else could they end on other than a fight against god, but still. fucking bananas. lets go back to the days of ‘maybe chuck is god’ in like s5, yknow?

um can dean and cas just kiss now? or how about like several seasons ago, but starting in like s11, even though i adore cas a lot, he started to get a little irritating. again, show writing, not tumblr writing. but he kinda started to become like... high and mighty and it does not mesh well with things, i think

ben is dean’s son, i dont care what you say.

um im trying to go through the seasons in my head to remember things that annoy me and are controversial, and aren’t just things that spn needs to fix, like andy’s death (still bitter)

what was that crowley and blood addiction shit that happened in like s10 or something? what was that supposed to be? was that supposed to mean something i am so confused

um are the ghostfacers even still alive, like this isn’t salt, i’m just genuinely concerned because if they are, why aren’t they in more episodes please

yo, maybe because i write pride and chronos and whatever, but the treatment of non-chrisitan deities is absolute Shit, thanks. like i get that the show is going for the christian religion is the Main thing, because most people get it, but like. as someone genuinely interested in religion, the utter disdain for other religious entities or even the idea that all demons are bad demons simply because demons is ridiculous. show some love to other entities. like for fuck’s sake, you can’t just kill the god of time? what the fuck? some of these gods were around long before any recorded history of the christian god, so i guarantee you at least half of them could kick god’s butt and call it a day.

s9 mark of cain dean was the best, that’s the end of that argument

wtf with the gabe storyline what even, gabe deserved better

imma go so far as to say lucifer did too, that was a bunch of nonsense. all of it that happened after s5, it’s all bullshit

actually the only angel that deserved what they god was metatron, thanks, the asshole.

also can we talk about death, like. dont get me wrong billie is cool, but i want my original pizza-loving death back please, he and dean had a cool thing going on. also tessa, can we bring back tessa

honestly rowena annoyed me in the beginning. she grew on me, but i feel like a lot of her character was forced.

the dean and pie thing has gone a little too far at this point

*claps* i *claps* don’t *claps* like *claps* sam! literally half the things in this post are me dancing around this idea, but most of my salt for the show stems from my dislike of him.

idek the general opinion on this, but i did Not like the crazy cas & meg situation. like all of that. it was weird. i mean i didn’t even really like meg, to be honest. but that whole arc was fucking weird, and that relationship (one kiss?) felt super forced.

actually can we stop having cas just. fucking switch personalities all the time? s4 cas was the best.

dean does Not put sam above everyone else. he will try to save sam, yes, but sam is not the most important person to dean, and dean will not choose sam above cas or bobby or charlie or jody or literally anyone.

IM RUNNING OUT OF THOUGHTS BUT I KNOW I HAVE MORE so. we’ll come back to this.

#;;fox answers #oops spilled the salt #i don't apologize for anything #Anonymous #delivered

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seddm · 5 years

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I don't want to rain on your party, but how do you know Beach Day wont end up like Lake House Fever? That episode had the biggest Tomstar breakup potential than any other!

You’re not wrong, but there’s an extremely important distinction to make: all the predictions “Tomstar is going to end in Lake House Fever” revolved around believing that the events of the S3 finale deeply affected the characters. Sadly, that wasn’t the case: all the themes present in Divide and Conquer - Tom being at his best when just a friend not weighed down by forcing himself to be in a relationship with Star, Marco fundamental for Star and being her companion always at her side - kept being true during S4, with episodes making them more clear than ever in direct ways (A Boy and His DC-700XE in the former case, The Knight Shift in the latter). But two main narrative decisions prevented things from change early into S4 as I expected: the teens being IDIOTS who need to be directly slapped in the face by a lesson or a reality multiple times to learn it (so the super emotive but also high tension events from the S3 finale and Booth Buddies weren’t enough), and the show wanting to erase any potential negative feeling associated both to Star and Marco loving each other, and to Star and Tom potentially breaking up without fully understanding why that happened.

And those, as infuriating as they were (since everything got majorly delayed), aren’t bad decisions at all per se, allowing Star and Marco’s love to eventually bloom in a much more taint-free context and for Tom to immediately be the best himself he can be. All of this meant that everything up to Curse of the Blood Moon could have just been a way to bridge the “shipping and feelings” from S3 to S4, with no real chance for major changes, and only after THAT the new arc could begin. And we soon enough got Marco taking an extremely important decision about his life which ripples on his relationship with Star and affected the one with Kelly as well, Star sounding wistful and pensive over past feelings of love, and Tom getting multiple life lessons that strongly relates to his relationship with Star. And now we are on the brink of a passage from an old status quo to a new one: Star is done with helping Eclipsa, and as she said herself she now wants to “move on” and experience being a normal teen again.

S4A ended, the mid season finale fixed a number of things allowing for Star to take some time for herself without feeling like she’s missing important stuff out until the final stretch of the story, the climax of the plot, begins.This is why I think the current situation is completely different from the one from Lake House Fever. At the time most thought that a break up was imminent based on events from the previous season, but they evidently wanted to keep things and arcs more compartmentalized. Now this compartmentalization is NOT an issue anymore, if anything it’s a weapon that allows us to say this this is the perfect moment for these things to change, because everything has been set up and in 4 episodes plot is going to enter its finale phase, meaning there won’t be time to focus big time on relationships and love until the very end.

Obviously we are still missing the synopses for episode 17 and 18, so there are 8 segments that could potentially feature the Tomstar break up and initiate something for Marco (we even know for sure that Sad Teen Hotline is going to involve Tom, Star and Marco, at least to an extent), and I can’t be completely sure that Doop-Doop is going to be IT, but it does certainly feel like it’d be the most natural course of actions, especially given Tom’s line about going on a trip.

It sounded like a very direct set up, both thematically and practically connected to Star mentioning that she wants to move on, and the synopsis for Doop-Doop makes it sound it’d be the PERFECT episode to address all of this:

Star attempts to figure out what to do with her life after she is not responsible for Mewni any longer.

#seddm answers #svtfoe spoilers #svtfoe #starco #star vs the forces of evil #Anonymous

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formerlyrunephoenix6769 · 5 years

Text

Catra: Journey to Redemption.

(Long post and spoilers for Season 1 SPOP)

In the run up to the release of ‘She-Ra: Princesses of Power.’ season 2 on April 26th 2019, I have been seeing lots of posts about our resident, ‘misguided; villain and all around badass who knows damn well how to rock a suit.

Yes, of course, I am talking about Catra!

The nature of the posts I have been seeing have all had a similar vein or sentiment.

“Give Catra her redemption arc.” or “Start Catra’s redemption arc.”

I am just as hopeful as the the next person for Catra to have a redemption arc, if that is in fact what Noelle Stevenson and the rest of the team have planned for the character. But one thing I will say, is ‘patience’ and a small warning to be prepared,

Catra is going to get much worse before she can even begin to get better!

Catra could not possibly even begin to start on a path of redemption by the end of S2 because at the end of S1, she hasnt even begun to explore the full depths of her villainy. (Being we dont know exactly how many seasons are planned, or what the overall narrative end goal is when it comes to the final conflict and Good triumphing over Evil, much of this is speculative.

We can however use Avatar Last Airbender and the industry standard of best Redemption Arc ever, in all mediums, Zuko, and their timeline, which I think Noelle Stevenson said in an interview that if a redemption arc was to occur, that they would like to do something that could stand next to Zuko’s redemption arc.

I will also be using Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, and his hero’s journey map as a resource but try implement it for villains)

If you would like to take a look at my thoughts on redemption arcs in general the feel free to check out the link below.

https://formerlyrunephoenix6769.tumblr.com/post/182640410231/are-all-villains-redeemable

I’ll be covering similar sentiments here.

Ok first.

TIMELINE:.

ATLAB is only 3 BOOKs long, however the number of episodes, 61 over all, containing 20 minimum in each Book is far more than SPOP’s standard 13, meaning that technically Zuko’s redemption arc played out over just under 6 SPOP seasons, meaning that Zuko’s penultimate episodes, detrimental to his redemption arc, ‘Blue Spirit’ episode 13 in Book 1 and ‘Zuko Alone’ Episode 7 of Book 2, didnt technically take place until till the end of season 1 and half way through season 3 ... going off an SPOP standard time.

Meaning there was over a season and a half between Zuko doing something right for the wrong reasons and also then moving off to really begin the start of his redemption arc in earnest, which he continues to struggle with right the way into Book 3 ( season 5/6)

The difference here, I would also like to point out is that Zuko at the very beginning of ATLAB is already technically way ahead of Catra due to him being physically away from his ‘abuser’ and direct control of the life long indoctrination. He also has one up on Catra at this point as he has a ‘Mentor/Guide’ helping to facilitate the transition and help him see the error of his ways.

Technically, this puts Zuko’s character development on the road to redemption (OTRTR) at least ONE season ahead of Catra. Meaning that his moment of ‘doing something right for the wrong reasons’ in ‘Zuko Alone.’ does not take place until at least the end of season 2, SPOP standard time!

In other words...

It's going to take some time for a pussy riot to manifest.

Taking this into account.

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES.

We can not continue without addressing the fact that there are many similarities and differences between the supposed ‘villains’.

Both were the Scape Goat to a favoured Golden Child yet their interactions with the ‘Gold Child’ are vastly different.

For Zuko, Azula was an antagonist. For Catra, Adora was an ally.

Both suffered abuse from their primary caregiver, both were belittled and chastised for supposedly being ‘lesser’. However the fundamental difference is their reactions, Zuko continued to attempt to receive his Father’s favour, whilst Catra, on the surface didn't care, resulting in acting rebelliously.

Both have issues surrounding self worth and how they express it is vastly different.

Zuko is hugely unaware of his ‘Empire’s’ indoctrination and the imperialistic rule, believing the propaganda he was raised with.

Whilst Catra is fully aware of the Horde and its intentions.

And I think this is worthy of note!

Their ‘villainy’ and motivations are seated in entirely different places.

Zuko starts out wishing to ‘reclaim his honour’, prove his worth in his father’s eyes, and reclaim his birthright as the heir to the Fire Nation throne, in the words of his sister,

It is only as he travels over the next SPOP SDT, 4 seasons that he realises his true purpose.

Catra, is aware the Horde is evil, is given an opportunity to leave, but chooses not to, instead she willingly sets herself on a dark path to gain power and prove her self worth to everyone around her, esp her abuser, step mom of the year, Shadow Weaver,

Thus setting up the whole shenanigans of SPOP season 1.

CONFLICT.

As I covered in my previous post in the link above, a redemption arc cannot occur without showing that the ‘villain’ is conflicted.

A redemption should be a slow burn, from starting point of why/how they are villains, also showing the seeds of discontent, inner conflict, conflict of their actions, conflict of their ideals, whether indoctrinated/learned/or their own misguided musings, then later a larger amount of focus should be placed on how they have overcome that villainy and change of perspective culminating with coming full circle.

What makes Zuko’s particular redemption arc so good is the work that goes into showing this. The time, the attention to detail, not being shied away from by the writers, that intentionally trickles down and infuses with the character’s essence of being.

Yes, Catra is conflicted about her relationship with Adora and what Adora means to her.

This conflict about her and Adora’s relationship was partially resolved with Catra taking Adora’s motivations the wrong way, due to her own issues surrounding her self worth.

This ‘resolution’ only serves to push Catra further down the a dark path.

But we have yet to see Catra conflicted about her actions and dont expect to see that happen until after we see her fully embrace her villainy, which by the end of S1, she was nowhere near close to doing. (See Triggers and Turning points)

Meaning that “Catra Alone” might not even occur until midway S3 and actual beginnings of feeling conflicted about her actions, until S4.

TRIGGER A TURNING POINT.

So we have discussed conflict. Conflict about ones actions can come about in many different forms, but it must be triggered by something that is enough to shake the core foundations of a villains motivations.

In order for it to be believable and carry weight, a villain cannot suddenly overnight go,

And the protagonists accept it at face value, as the audience wont.

A redemption should be a slow burn, from starting point of why/how they are villains and most importantly, focus on how they have struggled to overcome that villainy and change their perspective.

The link below is to a previous post, with an avenue of thought of what could trigger Catra on ONRTR.

https://formerlyrunephoenix6769.tumblr.com/post/182601000156/catra-could-she-be-a-lost-princess-and-if-so

Another avenue of thought is that Adora is gravely injured. I am not normally one for such an easy and over done trope but in this instance it is highly possible, because as it stands now, Catra has never nastily physically injured Adora, only She-Ra!

(When she raked her darn claws down She-Ra’s back. Showing that Catra see’s a difference between to two personalities and isn't as of yet willing to cross that line... Maybe crossing that line will be a stepping stone to embracing her chosen darker path?)

In fact, Catra has gone out of her way to avoid just that, much preferring to go after Adora emotionally.

FALLING INTO OLD PATTERNS:

Even after ‘Zuko Alone’ and the Ba Sing Say arc, Zuko begins on a false start redemption by bonding with Katara but by the next episode falls back into old patterns by choosing to side with Azula as the ties that bind and the potential to reclaim his birthright is too hard to ignore.

Which is totally normal for a teenager.

This adds so much depth to his inner conflict, a catalyst that later cements his realisation at his true purpose, ushering him through the gates of his redemption arc, towards trying to make amends with the protagonists before they can accept him.

Catra strikes me as someone who will never be wholly ‘good’, in the sense of the word when it is applied to Bow, Glimmer or Adora, but rather someone who will make super dark comments and morally grey suggestions of how to deal with an issue, which is what we have been shown of her from the very beginning.

It is hard to say is Catra will ever have this step in a redemption arc due to her already morally grey nature, this could very well be skipped over entirely.

Narratively speaking and characterization wise, this particular part of an arc could present itself not as a ‘false start’ but could come from ‘Subterfuge and infiltration’ , whereby Catra pretends to come to their side only for her to betray them later, for her own ends.

OR,

We could very well have a ‘false start’, where she is trapped with any of the protagonists and they need to work together to escape, similar to the aptly named ATLAB ep 40 ‘The Crossroads of Destiny’ and SPOPS s1e9 ‘Promise’, which would be a nice mirror, from a narrative standpoint, only for her to run off and return to the Horde once free.

Again note, that this false start occured for Zuko the very end of S3 SPOP SDT.

CONCLUSIONS.

Before Catra’s Redemption arc can come to fruition , we need her to go on her journey. Something akin to this, but for villains.

On this map, if Resurrection is Catra being genuinely accepted by the protagonists as being changed and truly on their side. I would see Catra as in between Meeting of Mentor (Hordak) and Crossing the Threshold into full blown villany

So, we need to see her,

1) Become a true villain.

2) 1st Trigger.

3) baby Conflict

4)False start, falling into old patterns

5) 2nd Trigger

6)Conflict and Realisation/ (Seizing the Treasure)

7) Through the Gates

8) Trial of Proof.

9) Acceptance/Resurrection.

We could be waiting for some time for a Catra redemption arc to kick in, and please dont be disappointed or frothing at the mouth if we dont see it starting in Season 2... No matter how much you want it out of the way so that ‘other’ things can occur..

Please keep in mind..

A good Redemption Arc has to be earned! And doing it well takes time!

MEANWHILE ...

There is ALL OF THIS....

I dont even know where to begin starting to unwrap all this tension and awkwardness.,

Think I’m going to leave that for a an entirely different post.

#spop #redemption arc analysis #character analysis #avatar last airbender #catadora #catra #adora #glimmer #bow #zuko #atlab #prince zuko #catra redemption arc #formerlyrunephoenix spop analysis #long post

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mittensmorgul · 5 years

Text

Today’s entire TNT loop in one post, because I’m tired and there’s only three episodes:

3.14, Long Distance Call. This is what happens when you mess with the phone company, dillweed!

I've written a bunch in the past about how this episode relates to communication and keeping secrets, which is still relevant:

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/159234156395/314-lies-and-secrets-and-its-deans-turn-to

and

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/171381786235/not-meta-just-interesting-im-rewatching-314

But because the voice on the phone when Dean starts getting Calls From The Beyond (which aren't from the beyond but a manipulation by a creature who wants to lure Dean in to eat his soul) is John, providing words of comfort, encouragement, and instruction to Dean at a time where he feels like he's running out of time and options, Dean is led down a completely wrong path. "John" tells him he can get out of his deal and save himself from Hell by trapping a specific demon, but of course it's just the crocatta luring him to his death (but of course Dean figures that out before that can happen).

But Sam, meanwhile, THINKS he's told Dean what the monster actually is, but that information never reached Dean, leaving him confronting the crocatta by himself... RIP Stewie. Sam calls Dean and gets his voicemail (This is Herman Munster, leave a message), but his whole previous call with Dean wasn't even really a call with Dean...

SAM: What are you doing? CLARK: I'm killing your brother. Or maybe I'm killing another guy. We'll just have to see how it goes.

and most terrifying:

CLARK: Well once I made you two as hunters, it was easy. I found Dean's number, then your number, then your father's numbers. Then emails, voicemails, everything. You see, people think that stuff just gets erased, but it doesn't. You'd be surprised how much of yourself is just floating out there, waiting to be plucked. SAM: Dean's not going to fall for this. He's not going to kill that guy. CLARK: Then the guy kills him.

The crocatta was a monster who preyed on human communication, twisting words to his own benefit and manipulating people into believing what he needed to lure them to him. He had Dean convinced killing this innocent man would save him from Hell, but the other man was convinced that Dean was the man who'd killed his own daughter. It was all a distraction to keep Dean from learning what was really going on-- that Sam had effectively figured out what the monster was, and that it was the monster luring Sam to his lair, using Stewie as bait.

At the end of the story, everyone lost. Dean lost hope that they'd find a way to save him from Hell. Which drives Sam to pull a bit of a manipulation of his own...

in 3.15, Time Is On My Side.

This is Sam's last stand, his last hope to save Dean. Not by defeating the demon that holds his contract, but by gaming the system. His logic-- if Dean's can't die, he can't go to Hell. But the way Sam wants to make Dean immortal is... horrific at best. And something tells me the hellhounds wouldn't care if someone scienced their physical body into effective immortality, and would've collected Dean's soul anyway. But Sam needed to believe in something, as is his wont. When he loses hope, he loses it hard. Look at mid s13 for a reminder of that, specifically in an episode with a heavy thematic and tonal comparison to this one-- 13.11 Breakdown.

Meanwhile, Dean goes in a different direction, getting a lead on Bela and hoping to get the Colt back:

DEAN: You're not helping! You forget that if I welch on this deal, you die. Guess what, living forever is welching. SAM: Fine! Then, whatever the magic pill is, I'll take it too! DEAN: Oh, what is this? Sid and Nancy? No. It's just like Bobby's been saying. We kill the demon who owns the contract and this whole damn thing wipes clean. That's our best shot. SAM: Even if you had the Colt, Dean, who are you gonna shoot? We have no idea who holds the ticket. DEAN: Well, I'll shoot the hellhounds then before they slash me up. Now, you coming or not?

Sam decided... not. He stayed to try and figure out Benton's immortality formula. He does find it, but Dean doesn't want to live like that:

SAM: Dean, don't you want to live? DEAN: What he is isn't living. Look, this is simple. SAM: Simple? DEAN: To me it is, okay. Black or white; human, not human. (DEAN walks back to stand in front of DOC BENTON) See, what the Doc is is a freakin' monster. I can't do it. I would rather go to hell.

Well, heck, we know Dean doesn't really see anything as "black and white," and the real issue isn't "human or not human" anymore. But he does have a line he will not cross, and whatever Benton is is way too far across that line for Dean. And thank heck... Preserving life at all costs that way? At the cost of his own essential humanity? Yeah, that's horrific.

We meet Rufus, who eventually does provide Dean the lead to find Bela, but he also echoes Dean's attitude we've seen over and over again:

RUFUS: I know ain't no peashooter gonna save you. DEAN: What makes you so sure? RUFUS: Cause that's the job, kid. Even if you manage to scrape out of this one, there's just gonna be something else down the road. Folks like us...there ain't no happy ending. We all got it coming. DEAN: Well, ain't you a bucket of sunshine? RUFUS: I'm what you've got to look forward to if you survive. (Smirking and raising his glass again) But you won't.

Survive this round, just wait for the next one, because there's always a next one... Thanks, Rufus!

But of course Bela doesn't have the Colt anymore. Dean does learn that she sold her soul and her deal is about to come due. She's in the same boat he's been in all along...

DEAN: Is that why you stole the Colt, huh? Try to wiggle out of your deal, our gun for your soul? BELA: Yes. DEAN: But stealing the Colt wasn't quite enough, I'm guessing. BELA: They changed the deal. They wanted me to kill Sam. DEAN: Really! Wow, demons untrustworthy. Shocker.

Because no matter what, the demons were NEVER going to let Dean out of his deal. No matter how many demons they killed, no matter who they bargained with, no matter what, they needed him to die and go to Hell to fulfil their prophecy and break the first seal on the Apocalypse. And that's what s3 boiled down to in the end...

This was the long con that s4 would do to freaking perfection, but s3, with all it's structural deficiencies for having been 6 episodes shortened because of the writer's strike, manages the same...

So that brings us to 3.16, No Rest for the Wicked.

The one where they think they finally gained the upper hand on catching the Big Bad Demon who holds Dean's contract, and don't yet know the entire setup was a trap laid just for them. The fact the payoff on this information doesn't come until the end of s4, with other little hints along the way-- like Dean learning what Sam's been up to while he was in Hell, like learning about angels and the breaking seals of the apocalypse, like being given the runaround as heaven and hell both use Sam's desire to get revenge on Lilith for perceived wrongs against them and is willing to turn himself into a monster to achieve that end... when all along it was exactly what the angels and demons both wanted them to do...

S4 will become the template for Cosmic Manipulation of the Winchesters as part of the Grand Story of the Universe. But all the seeds for it were already planted in s3.

Well, except for Cas. He's the wild card, and isn't that the wildest thing ever?

I wonder how Chuck accounted for him? Bring on Team Free Will, breaking Chuck's story again and again until they'll finally force him to drop the curtain in 14.20...

ETA, because I always do this... I’ve written some about Ruby’s manipulation before, like in this post from May 2018, after the s13 finale aired:

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/174230167715/since-your-anons-are-on-the-subject-there-is

SAM: And you decided to tell me this just now? RUBY: Um... demon. Manipulative's kinda in the job description. Fact is, is that you would have never considered it. Not until you were – SAM: Desperate enough?

and when Sam has doubts, and he’s so close to wanting to trust Ruby out of desperation?

DEAN: Don't you see a pattern here? Dad's deal, my deal, now this? I mean every time one of us is – is – is up the creek the other is begging to sell their soul. That's all this is, man. Ruby's just jerking your chain down the road. You know what it's paved with and you know where it's going.

And yep, that’s exactly it. The Winchester Family Sacrifice-Go-Round. All in the name of keeping Chuck entertained.

ETA FOR THE SECOND TIME: Lilith. Pretending to be a seriously twisted little girl, controlling this entire family for her own horrific idea of “fun.” Kinda similar to Chuck’s own MO, always playing a persona-- Chuck the trashy novel author, Chuck the prophet of the lord who doesn’t want to be, Chuck the super cute guy who was delightfully enamored by humanity enough to want to be human himself, at least for a little while... But all of it is part of his own incredibly long game, thinking he’s got the Winchesters exactly where he wants them, being on the scene to watch his plan play out, only for it to all go sideways.

ugh and yet another ETA: Dean, only when he is very close to death, a side effect of that is that he can literally see things he wasn’t able to before:

DEAN: I could see its face. Its real face under that one. SAM: So what, now you're seeing demons? DEAN: I've seen all kinds of things lately but... nothing like this. BOBBY: Actually it's not all that crazy. DEAN: How's it not that crazy? BOBBY: Well you've got, just over five hours to go? You're piercing the veil, Dean. You're glimpsing the B side. DEAN: A little less new age-y please. BOBBY: You're almost hell's bitch. So, you can see hell's other bitches.

What a strange way to finally see through the illusions to the truth, you know? Dean got all the way through Chuck’s endless parade of misery in s14-- losing hope against Michael only to lose hope for Jack, and himself-- to that final moment where he was able to glimpse the B side, as it were.

ugh again... this is what I get for posting stuff before the episode is over...

How close to killing an innocent little girl did Sam come here? While her own mother begged him to do it, because as far as they knew, the girl was still possessed. But Dean saw the truth, the demon was gone.

Sam’s ready to do whatever “Ruby” wants him to to save Dean, but it’s already too late. Ruby isn’t even Ruby anymore. Dean hadn’t noticed the switch until it was too late, again. Always too late. All part of the long manipulation.

#spn 3.14 #spn 3.15 #spn 3.16 #s14 hellatus rewatch #spiders georg of the tnt loop #it's spirals all the way down #that's what free will is #spn 4.22 #for the reference #spn 14.20

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inevitably-johnlocked · 5 years

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Do you know any fics that have the angstiest angst to have ever angsted BUT a good ending (I don't think I can handle anything worse than a good one) You're lovely, by the way 😊💙

Anonymous said to inevitably-johnlocked: Hey boo, Do you have any recommendations for angst with a happy ending?? Thank you ! - 🤠

Hi Lovelies!!

Aww, thanks for your lovely comment, Nonny One!! Yeah, I love dying but then being happy at the end, and I can assure you I definitely have some fics for ya both!! I’ll use this opportunity to update one of my old related lists, then, since Nonny Two specifically asked for them!! I’ve a lot of new ones to add to it, anyway!

ANGST WITH HAPPY ENDING Pt. 2