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starpirateee · 1 month

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I saw a headcannon once that Curt and Owen both have very strong Texan and Cockney (London working class) accents respectively, but have to use toned-down generic American/British accents when on the job. Do you think you could write something of them drunk, injured, sleepy, or stressed (basically in a scenario where theyre not thinking too much about their accent) where it slips out, and either confuses or entertains the other? Thanks! (also i love your writing so much its insane :D)

I have bought into this headcanon before, both sides of it! Working class Owen is something that can be so personal, actually, and full on cowboy Curt is so goddamn fun! Certainly will be good respite from the last fic 👀

Curt was bleeding and barely capable of holding himself together. He'd forced himself to keep face, not looking down enough to be able to see it. It was bad enough that he could feel it, sticky and viscous against his hand. That alone was enough to make him feel nauseous, but he was a professional. He knew how to deal with wounds without feeling the need to pass out.

Owen did as he always did. For him, it was just another part of the job, be it his own blood or someone else's, it was all the same when it came down to it. He had been the one to patch Curt up often enough, it was practically routine. This instance was no different.

With Curt suitably positioned, leaning back against his hands, Owen found the kit he needed and got to work. Curt dug his hands into the sofa to avoid having any kind of reaction to the stitches.

"I think you're lucky..." Owen remarked, laying his hand either side of the wound. "A few inches further down and you could say goodbye to ever charming a lady to the bedroom again..."

Curt tried to huff a breath of laughter, but that did nothing for him except make everything hurt more. "Ugh, god, please don't try an' be funny, I can't handle it-!"

Owen knew that Curt had always had a certain lilt to his words, some kind of intonation lost to time, but he'd never quite heard it like that before. He said nothing, but thinking about it had made him falter. The needle slipped a little, and Curt cursed under his breath.

"Jeez, Owen, ya couldn't take it easy?" He hissed.

No, he hadn't been hearing things. Curt really had slipped into a far more prominent southern twang than was normally present in his voice. One that he never even thought he'd hear from him. "Of... Course, I'm sorry." However surprised he was by that, it didn't stop the task at hand, or the need to finish it before it became too hard to see through the blood that was pooling.

Curt raised an eyebrow. "What'cha lookin' at me like that for?"

"I knew you were a southerner, but I didn't know it was supposed to be that obvious..."

"Wha-? Oh, fuckin' hell." Disappointment and something close to annoyance lingered on his face. He sighed, brushing a hand through his hair. "Yeah, I grew up in Texas. I tell people Austin, but that's just cos it's easier than sayin' some nowhere town 'bout fifty miles out."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Huh?"

"You don't seem particularly happy about it."

"It's just, I spent weeks on tonin' this accent down so I wouldn't stand out so much when I was on the job, y'know? All that, then it just goes an' comes back when I'm not thinkin' 'bout it..."

Owen nodded, and pressed down a little harder to alleviate some of the sensation from the needle. "It's a stress response, reverting back to accents that don't take so much strain to uphold." He answered automatically, feeling Curt shift a little bit under his hand.

"Right. Yeah. Somethin' like that."

"You don't have to think about it at all— you presumably grew up sounding like that... So you're focusing on something like the pain of being shot, and suddenly-"

"I'm seventeen again, and I sure as hell sound it, too." This time, Curt did manage a chuckle that didn't seem to hurt so much. Maybe it was because Owen was almost done patching him up, and there was less cause for every alarm bell in his body to be blaring... "Yeah, that's pretty much spot on."

"Would it make you feel any better to know that I have exactly the same stress response?"

"I'm sorry, what now?"

Owen didn't elaborate. He worked on finishing up Curt's stitches, and then started cleaning the needle and packing up the kit. Completely baffled by not getting a response, Curt held up a hand to stop him before he could move away. "Woah, woah, hold on. You're tellin' me you don't sound like that either?"

"It seems we've both been lying about exactly the same thing." A soft smile crossed Owen's face, and he simply decided to discard the kit on the coffee table for the time being. He'd played right into Curt's curiosities there, he supposed, so he might as well play into them a little more...

"I wanna know now!" True to his person, Curt remained ever the curious one. He carefully replaced his shirt, and leaned forwards as much as the pain would allow. "What d'you sound like? Where are you from?"

Owen raised his hands. "Would you let me clean up before I told you that, please?"

Curt resigned with a nod, and followed Owen from the sofa with a glance as he wandered away to wash his hands of the blood that may have otherwise stained his fingertips. When he returned, he was waiting eagerly, intrigued to find out where Owen had come from and why it seemed both of them held sacred the exact same lie.

"I suppose I had the same problem as you," Owen started, as he took a seat next to Curt and shifted enough to look at him. "It was a matter of just... Wishing to be invisible among the men at the agency, and then it became something of a habit..."

"So, what about it, then? Where'd you grow up?"

"I grew up in Southwark. It's... Close enough to Peckham? You've been there."

He had. And he remembered how strong the accents were around there, too. To hear something like that coming from Owen would probably send him into shock, he supposed, especially since he was so used to what he was hearing now. He caught himself staring and shook his head. "No way..."

Owen took a breath. He had to think about dropping the accent he had now, it had become a subconscious effort to keep it up, and he hadn't actively heard his own, true voice in a long time.

"People don't— y'know— really ask for clarification when you tell 'em you're from London, so I tend not to bother givin' any better than that... Besides," he smiled, "I get foreigners thinkin' I'm right posh, and that's kinda fun, really."

Curt stared. He'd literally been gearing himself up for the sudden change, but hearing Owen sound so rough was not something he'd previously ever imagined. "Oh my god... You really never run outta ways to surprise me, huh?"

"Well, you asked..."

"Oh, and I'm not complainin'! 'S just unexpected when I've known you with that other voice for so long."

"I could say the same..."

"Why'd ya let people believe you're posh if you ain't?"

"... 'S easier. Most people just assume all of London is exactly the same, and who'm I to argue?" He leaned in a little, letting his gaze meet Curt's. "But, you wanna know the hardest part 'bout tryna keep that up?"

"Shoot."

"I used to swear like a sailor."

Curt laughed. When he realised Owen was being entirely serious, he laughed only harder. "Now that, I gotta hear!"

"Get me drunk enough, and you have yourself a deal."

#spies are forever #saf #curtwen #agent curt mega #owen carvour #void offering #star mail #tw blood #tw injury #nova's tags →#i've said it before and i'll say it again #working! class! owen! carvour!!!!#at this point i blatantly refuse to believe that hes actually posh #but again... thats the projection :)#let's get these idiots stressed and fuck around with their accents :)#btw southwark is 'suh-thuk'#don't ask... we have weird ways of pronouncing places that look like they should be pronounced completely differently

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starwrighter · 9 months

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I am not a baby!! (Yes you are,)

(Prompt) (Previous part) (Next) (Masterpost) (Ao3)

(Part four peoples!!!)

Either something went wrong with that transmission or he was going to be stuck on this planet for 99,999 hours. Both options didn't bode well for him but one was clearly better than the other.

Ancient's how long was 99,999 hours? With a number that big he was looking at spending around ten years waiting for a rescue team to show up and help them. If everyone wasn't dead by that point they'd probably have built a super cool society with Deepsea bases and nuclear power that they'd have to give up. In ten years he would've figured out what the heck was going on with him and brought them home himself. Though, ten years would give him an excuse for why he was still around the same age he was when he left. Wipe the PDA's data beyond recovery, blame the most annoying creature or plant as what shrank him, and refuse to elaborate any further.

A transmission error was more likely than his brilliant hypothetical scenario. When a spaceship as big as the aurora crashed there was bound to be some interference. Whether that interference be artificial or not was still unclear much to his dismay.

At least he had a scanner, that was a big step for him in his progression. A lot of the actually helpful blueprints were corrupted in the crash and supposedly the scanner could help recover them. Scanning fragments of salvaged tech would be the quickest way of recovery all things considered. Destroyed beacons, singed seaglides, and trashcans were scattered all throughout the shallows, pollution likely reaching farther than what he'd explored. With a crash, this big damage likely extended much farther than what was visible to him.

Not only did their ship crush who knows how many creatures and plants, the regular and radioactive pollution would screw over future generations of fish! It was the intergalactic equivalent of a catastrophic oil spill and he was an unwilling participant in it. Something deep inside him ached at the thought of him being a participant in a planet's destruction.

Chunks of broken spaceship were bad enough for the environment on its own. Batteries, trash, fuel, and hundreds of pounds of manmade resources that'd take hundreds if not thousands of years to decompose. Every scrap of metal, every piece of plastic trash no matter the size was something to poison, choke or kill the local wildlife. Sam would be furious, this wasn't a case of natural food shortages or extreme weather, this could very well be an extinction event! Nuclear power was the default for Alterra's larger ships, and if it wasn't already, the aurora was soon to start leaking radiation all over the place!

This was one of the few life-bearing planets humanity discovered! Hundreds upon hundreds of planets have been discovered within humanity's years of space exploration but life existing without human intervention was still rare. Metal, rock, and gas were what were all that were usually brought back in the beginning. As humanity's technology advanced, they went farther into space, with more habitable planets being discovered and an uptick in thriving alien life. There was always a continuous stream of new discoveries in their universe, alien floras and fauna being discovered as often as they went extinct. Even so, it'd be a cold day in hell before he shared responsibility for any aliens going extinct.

Genetic mutations, Birth defects, and massive amounts of death were the first things that came to mind when radiation was brought into the picture. Radiation was the biggest issue so far, the melted spaceship could be recycled, no matter what Alterra's stupid rules told him he could and couldn't do. Trusting a corporation to clean up their own messes was like asking a toddler to clean up their toys; it would only lead to a conniption fit and a half-assed job. It was unclear how long he was going to be here and if when he met up with the other survivors, the need for materials would only increase as time went on.

Scanning and salvaging would have to wait until the next morning. Darkness shrouded the ocean outside his life pod, making it twice as dangerous to be out there tearing wrecks apart. Bioluminescence wasn't a skill he could put on his resume just yet nor was any kind of night vision. It would be both dangerous and annoying to swim around aimlessly in the dark when he had a perfectly good life pod he could relax in.

Standing in the safety of his lifepod, Danny ran the scanner up and down his body, the tech lighting him up a brilliant blue.

"Performing self-scan. Vital signs follow continuous pattern; no adverse effects identified. Detecting tracing amounts of foreign bacteria. Continuing to monitor,"

The PDA chimed and if Danny were an actual infant like the stupid tablet insisted he was he wouldn't have understood a word of those sentences. But since he wasn't a baby he could properly understand that there were alien germs in his body that really shouldn't be there.

Yeah, That seemed like a problem but it wasn't the reason his powers were short-circuiting. Before they even entered the atmosphere his powers were going wonky. Everything felt the same as it did before he came in contact with this "Foreign bacteria" There were no physical symptoms to complain about so maybe it was just his PDA's way of warning him he was coming down with an alien cold?

Whatever it was, Danny bet fifty bucks the metal muncher was what gave it to him. The creature had a face that screamed "Hey! look at me, I have all the diseases!" Now he was no marine biologist but scrap metal and electrical wire didn't exactly seem like the healthiest snack to chew on. Although, with the resemblance it had to crocodiles back home, one could only wonder if it swallowed metal to help with digestion?

Jagged teeth like the ones on the metal muncher weren't exactly suitable for grinding up food. Finding out the Metal muncher's stomach was full of rocks would be the least surprising thing that's happened today. Metal salvage from the Aurora was way too big to work as a stomach stone so it was more likely the creature just liked chewing on metal. It seemed just as interested in the titanium deposits as it was with the salvage so maybe it was a natural way to file down or sharpen their teeth? Hopefully, the metal munchers were smart enough to avoid chewing on wires that were actively sparking.

Opening a note function on his PDA, Danny began scribbling down everything he'd learned from his encounter with the metal muncher. Easily distracted, aggressive, territorial? Deciding everything he’d seen today was their normal everyday behavior would be stupid. There were new variables in the creature’s environment that could impact its behavior. Continued observation would be helpful as would scanning the animal in the morning. If Danny was going to be stranded on an alien planet you bet your ass he’s going to be studying the local wildlife while he’s here.

“A proper sleep schedule is imperative to the physical and phycological development of young children, " A chime played on his PDA closing the notes app without any warning. A repetitive string of Z’s overtook his screen making it impossible for him to navigate through the applications. Cheeks burning Danny turned the thing off and on again stomping with a huff when the same thing happened when it booted up again.

Taking a deep breath Danny sulked over to the storage unit. It was the only flat surface in this Lifepod he could lay down on and one could only pray to the ancients that the lid wouldn’t cave underneath him. Sleeping on the floor was out of the question. biohazardous goo coated the floor, still liquid enough to slosh around with the erythematic motion of the sea. Naturally, due to preferences, Danny decided to curl up on a surface that didn't have his melted organs on it.

________

Slithering through a barren seabed that once flourished as well as one could in a dying ocean. Mourning the lives that were lost today, he'd failed all over again. His youngest had been the one to see the precursors building raise into the sky this time. A blast strong enough to shake the island that it was built on shot out into the sky. They'd expected something to crash into the water soon after but what they hadn't expected was the size of what hit the waters.

Miles of the seafloor was torn up, and thousands of animals were dead. Jason said it was ironic, even after the precursors wiped themselves out they still found ways to destroy the planet. Bruce thought it was just cruel. It was by sheer stroke of luck that none of his kids had been close to the reaper's breeding ground at the time of impact. All of them managed to remain relatively unharmed when flames and giant pieces of rubble fell from the sky.

Surviving reapers flocked to the sight of the impact, shielded, unseen through the cloud of upturned sand and rubble. It wasn't until they caught a reaper with a familiar-looking creature locked in its mandibles, red blood spilling into the waters as it once had a decade ago that they realized it was happening again.

Nearly all who they'd found near the impact site had been unresponsive, charred, or mangled with their organs strewn out through the sea. In the clutches of the predators now circling the site dying in their arms no matter how quickly or carefully they managed to pry them from the brutal maw of the reapers. Within minutes of the impact, they'd already had a death count in the dozens. It was horrific, little bodies so much like his and his children's more vulnerable forms, dulled claws of younglings that had not yet grown old enough to hunt for themselves. Worst of all was looking into their dying eyes and seeing the agony and confusion of a sentient creature facing a brutal death just as their lives had begun. But that was the death count before the others landed.

Eggs with metallic shells and odd patterning landed all throughout the crater some even landing in the cold darkness of the void where they couldn't be retrieved. Their landings had been much gentler than the initial impact. Immediately the little ones began crawling out of their shells, confused and scared, physically weak. It wasn't uncommon for the precursors to deform the unborn, kidnaping and experimenting on children who lived and died in agony. Malformities ran rampant in this batch of younglings. Instead of soft faces and the vibrant, expressive eyes, they'd come to associate with these children, there were pitch-black, featureless heads smoother than sandstone but solid as titanium. There were points when a child that looked perfectly healthy would go limp for seemingly no reason and never move again. A sped-up gestation period was known to cause problems, let alone a hatching that was induced by precursor technology. As much as it killed him to admit, these younglings, while more abundant were sicklier than the small batch of three that'd fallen years ago.

Most if not all the healthier young ones died from the elements before they could reach them. It was devastating for Dick to find the youngling he'd been guarding in his territory, covered in the luminescent cysts that foreshadowed a certain death. The children got scared when they tried to protect them and when these children got scared they had a tendency to die from it.

Every single death felt like a personal failure. It's like nothing they could do would ever stop the hurt that the precursors continued to cause a thousand years after their extinction.

"Hey... B?" Dick's voice echoed in his mind a reassuring reminder that his son was safe and close enough to contact them. However, the emotions that came in with his son's words were anything but reassuring. Stomach filling with dread he settled on the sea bed just preparing himself for devastating news.

"We've searched the entire crater- none of them survived," A wave of grief hit him like a tsunami when Dicks words sunk in.

"Not the entire crater, there's still the one that landed in the shallows," Tim chimed in.

"We watched that egg for three hours and nothing crawled out of it," Steph groaned and Bruce could almost hear the dramatic way his daughter threw herself into the sand.

"Plus it was smoking and smelled of rot," Duke added somberly, slowly gliding through the impact site by his side.

"Geez, none of them even survived long enough to start building this time!" Dick exclaimed a mournful edge to his usual cheerful tone.

"Tch, pitiful," Damian finally decided to chime in, disappointment clear in the juveniles voice

" Who's pitiful? The babies who died today or the precursors who set them up for death?" Jason questioned, a dangerous edge seeping into the bond.

"I think it's obvious who I was talking about Todd," Damian spat.

"Considering how obsessed you are with what the last group created no, it's not obvious demon spawn," Jason sneered.

"Guys!" Dick snapped. "Arguing with each other isn't help and it sure as the lava zone is hot isn't going to make you feel better for long," Murmurs of agreement rang throughout the bond.

" One of us should still keep an eye on the egg in the shallows," Bruce clutched a piece of metal in pitch-black claws, gills flaring as he swam underneath an egg floating upside-down on the ocean's surface. "Maybe they're just late bloomers?"

"...Maybe?"

"I guess it's possible,"

"Not likely,"

"Tch, if it's already rotten getting our hopes up is pointless," Damian added to the chorus of replies.

"Try saying that when we have new baby siblings swimming around," Dick beamed.

"I will not because it isn't going to happen," His youngest argued pointedly.

"Awwwww, someone's worried they won't be the guppy of the family anymore!" Dick cooed much to Damian's dismay and everyone else's entertainment.

"I am not!" Damian snapped his voice louder than Dick's despite him being the farthest from the impact zone. "If anything I'd be glad someone else would be the victim of you people's constant smothering!" Damian spat, his words lacking any true venom.

"Whatever you say kiddo,"

"Shut up Grayson!" Laughter rang out through the bond followed by teasing and cooing. A reminder that despite everything Bruce still had living children and he hoped it would stay that way long after he passed.

( @avelnfear @meira-3919 @thought-u-said-dragon-queen @hugsandchaos @blep-23 @zeldomnyo @bytheoldwillowtree @justwannabecat @shepherdsheart @starlightcat04 @stargazing-bookwyrm @pupstim )

#I always hated how we can't salvage all of the wrecks #I understand it in the “It's a video game you can't destroy the map” sense #but what do you mean we can't pick up the supply crates??#What do you mean we have to leave who knows how much plastic and man made materials in the ocean???#We can turn fish into fuel #Turn a battery a wiring kit and a single piece of titanium into something that can warp gravity #I refuse to believe recycling is where the line of possibility ends #dpxdc #DPXDC #dcxdp #I don't know who still want's to be tagged?#tw character death #minor character death #subnautica au

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