#in the white rabbit event he literally SCARES CHILDREN

[wiltingofthewhitelily]

{Hetalia Platonic Ships Week 2021} Day 1: First Meeting - Poland & Hungary

A/N: Submission #1 for @hetaliaplatonicshipsweek! Tysm for hosting this event, I’m very excited to participate in this as well!

First up is Poland and Hungary, bc can we all just agree that they're literally friendship goals?? And aaaaa I loved writing this one honestly, I've been wanting to write a story about a young Poland so this was my opportunity.

Also, just a fyi, I did absolutely no research for this, to be completely honest, so sorry for any possible inaccuracies as, of course, this fic takes place a long time ago.

Hope you guys enjoy!

»»————-　➴　————-««

A small blond boy—who would grow up to represent the nation of Poland—sat on the grassy ground, knees up close to his chest. He used a thin stick he'd picked up to make carvings in the dirt before him that resembled little drawings. He was playing by himself, but that didn't bother him one bit; in fact, he actually preferred to play by himself—it was better than playing with the human children nearby, who, more often than not, were mean to him.

It sometimes made Poland feel a little bad that he was always left by himself, but it wasn't like he was completely alone. There were bugs and chipmunks and squirrels and rabbits (and even the occasional horse, which excited him most of all) all around him—they kept him company. The rabbits were usually the nicest to him; they were so soft and cuddly, and friendly once you got to know them. Just as Poland had thought of that, a brown rabbit with white spots came over to nibble on his arm. He chuckled a little, dropping his stick in the process. "That tickles," he whispered to the animal, with his chuckles eventually erupting into giggles.

He was doing just fine until suddenly, he heard the sound of leaves and grass crumpling under feet—human feet, for sure. Poland looked up—but his heart stopped when he saw an unfamiliar face in the distance. A stranger. He hated strangers. His face froze and he quietly got up, running behind a bush with the rabbit, who was seemingly alarmed at this too and chasing after him. He poked his head out just enough to look at the stranger. They had long-ish, wild brown hair with a mud-stained outfit—they were a bigger, stronger boy. Or were they a boy? Poland cocked his head to the side in thought. He couldn't quite tell.

In mid-thought, he didn't hear the person walk up to him, which was why he was more than a little surprised when they tapped him on the head, roughly. Poland looked up and immediately froze—it was the stranger. "Hey!" they said. Their voice was rugged, though with childish undertones; it was as if they were purposefully trying to make their voice deeper. "What are you doing here?"

Poland was left completely tongue-tied at that; he kept his mouth shut and looked down in his lap, not wanting to make eye contact with this strange person. "Can you talk?" the boy (?) asked bluntly, still intensely staring at the Pole, despite his obvious discomfort. 

When no response was given to the stranger, they just grabbed Poland by the sleeve of the pretty outfit he had on and dragged him out of the bush. This scared Poland enough to make him squeak out a small, "Hey!—"

The stranger, surprised, dropped Poland once they'd heard him make the noise. "So you can talk!" they declared.

Poland, ignoring that, got up. He put his finger up to his mouth nervously and looked down at his feet. Soon, though, he was forced to look up at the stranger as they stood close up to him, face to face, towering over him. They put their hands on their hips, studying him, before asking (bluntly yet again), "Are you a girl or a boy?"

Poland looked down again, now chewing on his fingernail rapidly with nerves. "I-I'm a boy," he whispered, very quietly.

The kid cocked their head to the side. "You don't look like one..."

Poland didn't know how to respond to that, so he just kept his head down, silently wishing the stranger would stop staring at him so intently.

Soon, the kid huffed and puffed out their chest. "Well, I am the strongest, manliest boy you'll ever meet!" As if to prove this, the boy lifted up one of his sleeves and flexed his muscles (which were a considerable size, at least for his age). "C'mon, let's wrestle together!" he exclaimed suddenly, pulling his sleeve back down. "I wanna show you how strong I am!"

Poland's eyes widened at the mention of wrestling. "N-No—"

"Oh, c'mon, it'll be fun! I won't hurt you," he promised.

Poland paused for a few moments, thinking. He didn't want to further ruin the outfit he had on. Plus, he couldn't remember the last time he really wrestled with somebody, so—

He was interrupted from his train of thought by the boy pulling him to the ground and pinning him there. "Wrestle time!" he declared, hooting and chuckling.

Shocked at this and a bit scared, Poland began to wail. "Ow! That hurts!" However, the boy didn't stop and began to cackle. Poland tried to get away, desperately. "N-No! I don't wanna wrestle!"

"Well, that's what we're doing!" One thing was for sure, it wasn't a fair match by any means—the boy was several inches taller than Poland, and was at least ten to twenty pounds heavier than him too. He was strong, though Poland didn't want him to prove it any further. He started to cry.

Eventually, the boy pulled off just enough for Poland to run away from him, his face hot and covered in tears, his limbs aching from where the older kid had pulled and grabbed and twisted. He ran into the meadows, his safe haven for when he was upset. He hid away in the pretty purple and yellow flowers and the tall grass, curling his knees up to his chest as he sat down. He sniffled away tears, rubbing at his reddened eyes.

He sat like that for a few moments before feeling a tap on his shoulder. Poland turned around—it was the boy, his face looking a bit solemn, his hands behind his back.

Poland let out a large sniffle and rubbed at his nose. "Wh-What do you want?" he asked bitterly, glaring at the boy.

The boy held his hands out—it was some pretty flowers from the meadows. "I picked you some flowers," he said, his foot gently kicking at the dirt below him, "as an apology. I'm sorry for hurting you."

Poland looked at the boy, then at the flowers. He let out a small grin and took them. "Thank you," he told the older boy, his smile growing a bit wider too.

The boy nodded, putting his hands behind his back again. "Say, I didn't even tell you my name, did I? Well, I'm the great, totally amazing Hungary!" he declared with triumph.

Poland giggled a little. "I'm Poland."

Hungary cocked a brow, cracking a small smile. "Just Poland...?"

Poland giggled again, louder this time. "Just Poland."

"Well, just Poland, do you want me to walk you back home?" Hungary asked. He held out his hand for Poland to hold.

He looked at it for a moment, before smiling again. "Yeah." He held onto Hungary's hand, which was rough and calloused as opposed to his own peachy, smooth one.

The two newfound friends walked together into the sunset, holding hands and laughing—just the first of many, many times they would do so.

#hetalia #hetaliaplatonicshipsweek #hetalia event #hetalia fanfiction #fanfiction #aph poland #hws poland #aph hungary #hws hungary

[intothewickedwood]

Once Upon A Time Rewatch: 5x12 Souls of the Departed

Currently reading (well, listening) to The School for Good and Evil Series. It’s so good! It’s basically Wicked the Musical and has a fairy tale element like OUAT. Can’t recommend enough!

I had the weirdest dream last night that Ouat’s Gothel was hiding behind my bed at my old house trying to scare me. She stayed up all night with some blankets, waiting to pounce. Also, she was naked. Jesus Christ, wtf is wrong with my dreams?! I do not see Gothel in that way at all!! I was so freaking disturbed! @fairytalepsuedonym​ this is all your fault for putting that dirty hippie witch bitch on my mind lol xD! /jk

Also guys, we’re getting Disney+ today. I’m so excited! Let me know if anyone has any recommendations.

And you know what I just thought of? It looked like they were implying that Merida and Lord Macintosh were gonna be a thing (possibly? I think it’s up for interpretation) but he outright shot an arrow at one of her brothers and wanted the others dead too. Merida would never! Her brothers mean too much to her to forgive such a thing. Also, she gives me gay vibes. I don’t make the rules. Alistair makes all the rules. 

Back to the rewatch.

Oh yeah! This is the 100th episode! The compilation for 100 episodes was so freaking epic!

Neal! Is that really him though?

She’s staring at his lips lol!

Omg! Emma would have come back for Neal if she could. That means she believes they were true love, and she could have split her heart with him, right?

So, he appeared to her? 

Omg! The way Emma is stroking his face and is staring at him, you’d never know she was working on saving her boyfriend lol.

You know what would have been so much better? If the underworld was perpetually dark and foggy (within reason) like the sims 4 Forgotten Hollow. That would have looked so much cooler!

Here comes the red filter. As a gifmaker and even as a viewer I wanna scream every time I see it but at least it’s not the Dark Swan arc.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: they should have let Regina’s and maybe even Rumple’s victims confront them! That would have been interesting to watch play out. I know we got Regina’s dad and Peter Pan but give me a family of Regina’s slaughtered villagers. What would their reaction be to seeing her?

Eww. I hate the way she dips her finger in that pie.

Guys. It doesn’t matter that you have Regina surrounded, she has pyrokinesis and telekinesis! Y’all are screwed! She blew the flames out? She had the advantage! I’m glad she didn’t hurt them of course, but as someone writing a book that consists of characters with magic abilities, you’ve gotta know when a powerful character has the advantage and when to use it. Where was Snow dodging a fireball as one of her arrows flies at Regina and it pauses in mid air only to sore back at Snowing and their friends, but they manage to outsmart her somehow? 

Woah. This is the boldest Henry Sr. has ever been. He’s really trying to help Regina out here. 

Cora!! My love!! I missed you!!

I love the Blind Witch. Does she have a name? I enjoyed her in ‘Regina Rising.’ I remember she’s quite a bit older than Regina

The Blind Witch: “What can I get you? Do you like gingerbread or children?” Omg Snow’s like “what the actual f**k??”

James, why are you like this?? Get off her, dude.

Those key rings are cool.

Why the hell didn’t Emma just tell Henry she saw his dad? I can think of absolutely no reason why she would keep that from him.

Lately all Robin has done is make random comments pointing out the obvious. “It’s uncanny. It’s so similar yet so off.” Yes, Robin we established that 9 minutes ago. His next line will be, “Goodness, is that a tree over there?” or “Regina, you were the Evil Queen”, mark my words. Where has his personality gone? I was never a big fan but at least he was kinda arrogant and cheeky before, at least in season 2 and 3. Now he’s just a dude that points on the ground and tells you there’s a stone. And they have the chemistry of a banana and a cheese cracker.

“Her puny army of sweaty little child beasts.”

Are those black roses? 

I may be wrong but wasn’t Cora trying to get Regina to stop hunting Snow White and find true love instead in 4x20 or am I making things up? And I wonder if this is before or after she appeared in 4x20. 

I just love Cora so much.

Is that how she got to the EF in 4x20? Through a looking glass?

The fact that she could so easily cross realms suggests that she willingly gave Regina her space. Which is something! But it feels like she’d have ulterior motives for that. Also Jefferson and Rumple would be screaming if they knew it was that easy to cross realms.

Regina: “are you threatening me?” Cora: “No. Of course not, never.” But you literally are though.

Peter Pan! He was under-utilised this season. Come on! They could have done so much with him! I’m glad at least Cora and Cruella got decent screen time.

Imagine watching OUAT for the first time with this episode and you see this full-grown man refer to a teenage boy as is father. I would be so confused lol.

I wonder if Rumple / Rumple’s father hail from Dunbroch originally. You know, with the Scottish accent. I’m kinda thinking about headcanoning that now. At least, I think Malcolm had a Scottish accent?

That got me! I forgot Cora had glamoured into Henry Sr.! I thought Cora had shapeshifted into Snow to trick Henry.

Oh, so Henry Sr. contacting her was the reason Cora could walk through the looking glass. If only someone had contacted Jefferson. And I’ve just remembered that in 4x20, she said a white rabbit brought her to the EF.

Killian looks creepy as hell here!

Lol Cora, you let Henry wrap the heart? What did you expect to happen!

Why did Regina need Snow’s heart to kill her? She could have easily killed her without even touching her. 

What the hell does Snow think is in there? She looks terrified.

Archie, wtf were you doing between Snow’s titties?! And what were you doing with a match? Gonna set some titties on fire xD? I bet she could never look at him the same again. 

He doesn’t want Regina to kill Snow because he thinks it will make her dark forever? What about all the other people she’s killed?! That makes no sense!

Okay, given that Grace didn’t seem to physically age much between the flashbacks in 1x17 and the present day in 1x17, this probably happened after the flashback’s events in 4x20. 

According to wiki, Regina’s birthday is February 1st. I’m only learning this now.

I’ve never seen Henry Sr. so bold and Adam end to help Regina.

Okay, so Regina shrunk Henry with her magic but she needed a mushroom to return him to his normal size?

Don’t lock him in that box omg!!

Cora: “when are you gonna get it in that thick head...” she’s so casually abusive.

Random thought but why is Henry’s surname Mills? It just seems like it’d be Cora’s surname. Maybe he took hers on but that seems strange for a Prince to do.

Cora, don’t!

Henry’s alright!

Aww. Henry got to meet his 3rd Grandpa! He’s so happy she named him after him. 

I’m tearing up.

“Remember who you are, Regina.”

Henry, honey, you need to go home.

Is that Persephone?

Oh my God! I’m so excited for the Cora and Zelena stuff!! By far my favourite thing of the season! To hear Cora say Zelena’s name- the fact she knows her name- I’d waited for so long for this! It left open so many questions!

And Hades infuriated with Cora on the love of his life Zelena’s behalf!! He loved her so much and would do anything for her. I don’t ship it as much as I initially did because of how it ended but that man freaking loved and cherished Zelena. He wanted everything for her. She desperately needed that and it was an emotional experience to see her get it.

That’s like her worst nightmare, being a peasant again. 

I can’t with the flame hair.

I forgot this episode was pretty good. I didn’t remember liking it but Cora saved it for me. I forgot she was in it because I have probably watch season 5 the least as I try to avoid it lol. 

#ouat #once upon a time #regina mills #the evil queen #cora mills #ouat rewatch #ouat rewatch 2019

[evendeadlmthehero]

The Keepers (1/10): “Trick or Treat”

Bucky Barnes x Reader

Based on after the events of Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: FFH

Summary: The Keepers, they call themselves. Little children know them as Santa, The Easter Bunny, Leprechaun, Jack O’ Latern and you. You’re Valentine Cupid; a seducing-angel who’s good with arrows. The Keepers have been a secret for centuries, but when one member goes rogue, this forces The Keepers out of hiding and needing the help of The Avengers.

Warnings: swearing, brief mention of suicide from a family member

‘The Keepers’ Masterlist

You hummed to yourself as music played faintly against the pristine white walls of the kitchen. Your foot slowly tapped to the rhythm of the bass, your hand gently moving the strand of hair that had befallen against your face.

Today was Halloween, meaning tomorrow was Thanksgivings day. Although there was no Keeper for Thanksgivings day, as it was created by humans rather than an ancient beings, you still wanted to celebrate it with your fellow members.

So you marinaded a turkey with exotic spices before placing it in the fridge as the song ended. You smiled to yourself, wiping the sweat off your brow before checking the time.

6:42pm, the clock had read. In ten minutes, it was sundown. This had also meant Jacko would have to leave the house and come back when the clock strikes twelve.

“Time to scare some children,” you heard Jacko speak as he entered the kitchen, buttoning up his black shirt. Yes, it was Jacko Latern himself, the Keeper of Halloween and mischief. The once man probably had it the secound worse out of all of you guys.

See, Jacko was a simple man before. He was a French farmer in the 1370’s. He had died from the Black Plague at the age of 32. When he had woken up, it had came to a shock that his whole craniofacial area was a pumpkin head rather than a human one. It had taken him a while to finally accept that he will never have his human face again. You had seen photos when he was still a human, and no one could deny his irresistible boyish looks.

The person who had it the worst out of all of you, even Jacko? Osterhase Spring. Also known as the Easter Bunny. He was also a simple man, living in the poor outskirts of New York when the Great Depression hit during the 1930’s. His daughter had then fallen terribly ill so Osterhase was forced to steal medicine, but was caught in the process.

This had costed him his life. And when he had woken up? He was a two-foot tall bunny. In normal circumstances, this would have been hilarious. But his daughter had died from the illness causing his wife to take her life. The poor women thought that not only her child was dead, but so was her husband. Not knowing her husband was a full, grown rabbit, too afraid and embarrassed to show his face to his own wife.

See, none of you guys chose to be here. All of you would give anything to go back to the previous lives you lived. The one where you worked a $10 an hour job and came back to your lover waiting for you at home. But it was fate. Fate had brought you guys together. The Keepers were a family that looked out for one another. It was a family you never asked for but was glad you had.

“Easy there big boy,” you spoke with your velvety voice. You were the artist of seduction and love, of course you had an alluring presence. “You can’t just scare them. You have to give candy as well.”

“You’re always the sweet one, aren’t you Valentine?” Jacko smirked at you, his carved eyes lighting up with flames. You were always fascinated by his facial structure. How fate had given him such a detailed carved pumpkin head that was lit up with fire. It was almost poetic, really. “But then again, what did I accept from the most gorgeous women alive?”

“Stop your flirting Jacko,” you heard a gruff voice speak. Nicholas Santa entered the the kitchen, a sour and tired look in his face. This wasn’t something new. This man had been alive since light first touched the earth. He was grumpy the day he realised he was the only original keeper left. “Keepers aren’t allowed to date one another.”

“Relax Christmas,” Jacko scoffed as you awkwardly walked around them to place the spices back into the cabinets. “It’s harmless flirting. We don’t see each other like that.”

“Awe Jacko, you really broke my heart,” you looked back at him with a pout, closing the door of the cabinet. “Am I really not pretty enough for you?”

Nicholas scoffed, grabbing milk before leaving the kitchen. You laughed at the old man and his tendencies of taking jokes way too seriously. Out of all the people here, Nicholas probably was most reserved one. He didn’t get today’s customs and norms. He didn’t want to. He was still an oldie by heart.

“Well,” Jacko spoke, walking over to you before placing a kiss on your cheek. He gave you one last final look before walking backwards slowly. “It’s time for Halloween to begin. I have a feeling this is will be the greatest holiday yet.”

“That’s what you always say!” You yelled back at him as his figure started walking towards the door. “But Valentine’s Day will always be the best holiday!”

“You guys both know it’s Easter, right?” Osterhase spoke as he walked into the living room, jumping on the couch. He grabbed the remote before turning on the TV. “Kids love their chocolate eggs.”

Jacko shook his head before opening the door of the house and leaving. You walked over to the couch, stealing the remote off of Osterhase. “Hey! I was watching Grey’s Anatomy!”

“That’s boring,” you replied back, changing the channel before it landed on the news. You were going to switch channels until you realised who it was on the news.

“Many of you have been asking for months now about the status of the Avengers. I am here today to introduce the members,” a dark-skinned male had spoke into the mic. “First member is of course myself, Sam Wilson. We also have Wanda Maximoff, James Rhoudes and Bruce Banner.”

You bit the inside of your cheek as you saw Bruce Banner stand behind Sam with the other Avengers on-screen. You disliked the Avengers, especially Bruce Banner. Osterhase felt your anger and grabbed your hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Hey, it’s okay.”

You heard a ringing in your ear as you quickly ran. To where, you do not know. All you knew is that Earth was under attack and you needed to get out of the centre of New York City before these aliens could kill you.

You cried as you heard a loud shuttle above you, as you collapsed on the ground, letting out a scream. You were desperate to leave. You just wanted to go home. Home to your fiancé. You look up to see that it was Iron Man who had flown above you. This had gave you the hope that the Avengers were here to rescue you.

They were here to rescue you, right?

You heard footsteps near you, making you look to your left. Aliens had growled at you, pointing their weapons at you. This was it, you had thought. This was how you died. You closed your eyes, accepting your fate until you saw a green giant scream as he grabbed them and chucked them against the wall.

It was the Hulk. He had saved your life. At least, in that moment, that’s what you had thought. You had thought that the Hulk understood right from wrong, evil from good. But it turns out the monster was filled with rage, rage that cannot be tamed. Rage that had caused blindness to the eyes. The Hulk was never a hero. The Hulk was anger.

He turned around and looked at you. You had wanted to thank him. But the Hulk let out a blood curdling roar before chucking a car your way.

It happened in slow motion. You felt all the bones within you break, one by one, splinter by splinter, before you were nothing but a number on the death toll. ‘The Battle of New York’, they had called it. ‘The Avengers’ they had called them. And you? You were death number 53 out of 74. Only a hashtag on twitter for 23 days.

Your eyes had fluttered open as you took in your surroundings. You were in a little cottage home, a blanket wrapped around you. Four men surrounded you, faces grim as they had to tell you the worse news of your life. That you had died and now must claim the mantle of Cupid. That you must learn the arts of seduction and precision with arrows. That you had to leave everything behind, including the love of your life.

“Now I will introduce new members,” Sam continued to speak as you ignored Osterhase and continued watching the screen. “Here we have Peter Parker, Ant-Man, The Wasp, Queen Valkeryie, Black Panther, Carol Danvers, Dr Strange and Bucky Barnes. We will be opening a new building in San Fransisco that will generate 5,000 new jobs and decrease traffic by approximately-“

You changed the channel until you reached some random reality show. You placed the remote down as you crossed your arms together out of frustration. You didn’t get it. How the Avengers could kill so many and still be celebrated. Still be able to have their own building worth billions of dollars. How their salaries come from the pockets of taxpayers. “Hey Valentine? Are you okay?”

You nod your head yes, your tongue against your cheek. You were snapped out of your thoughts as Saint Patrick walked in with a smile on his face. “Anyone wanna play UNO?”

“Fuck off,” Osterhase spoke, grabbing the remote back to change the channel to Grey’s Anatomy again. “You always cheat.”

“I do not!” Saint spoke, his hand against his chest as if he had been offended.

“Ah yeah you do,” You spoke back, making Saint let out a scoff. “Your powers are literally to increase your odds at things going your way. You’re literally the embodiment of luck.”

“That isn’t cheating!” Saint argued back, but his small stature had not aided him in anyway. He then sighed, throwing the packet on the table. “Fine, I just wanted to spend some time with you guys.”

You watched the Leprechaun walk away, a pang of guilt consuming your body. You let out a sigh, grabbing the packed of UNO cards before chucking it on his head. You were the god of precision, of course it landed directly on his head. “C’mon Lannister, go deal the cards.”

Saint smiled excitedly, running over to deal the cards. Osterhase let out a sigh, tired of being interrupted from Grey’s Anatomy but happy to be apart of this social bonding despite not showing it. Saint dealed the cards to everyone, making sure everyone got the same number of cards before placing all the rest down.

You guys played for hours. Of course, Saint had won them all. You tried not to bring up how his powers were cheating, just happy to see him get excited and to get some family quality time with you and Osterhase. At some point, Nicholas Santa had come down to see what the fuss and yelling was about.

Only to come down to see you guys laughing and playing games. It brought a smile to the old man’s face, reminding him of the first group of Keepers. He wish he could have joined you guys, but he didn’t have it within him to suck up his pride and join in. So he left.

“Okay I think that’s enough for today,” you laughed, shaking your head as Saint had won once again. “You’re obviously the King of Uno.”

“And cheating,” Osterhase replied back, his ears falling down in dissapointment as he always came last.

“I think next game you have a chance to win,” Saint suggested, trying to lure you into another game. Osterhase scoffed, chucking the cards at Saint’s face, making you laugh. You eyes unintentionally made their way to the clock, filling with confusion when you realised that it was late and Jacko still wasn’t here.

“Guys, it’s 2AM and Jacko’s still not here,” you told them, your heart dropping to your stomach. You were worried. The person who were closest to still wasn’t home, leaving you feeling queasy. “Maybe we should look for him?”

“Awe c’mon Valentine, you know Jacko,” Osterhase spoke, leaning back on the sofa as he put one leg on top of the other. “He’s probably just showing off the little fucker.”

Osterhase then got off from the sofa and yawned. “Alright kids, I’m off to bed.”

You nodded at him, watching his retreating figure. You felt a hand grab yours as your eyes met the green one’s of a certain leprechaun. “Hey Val, maybe you should get some rest. Osterhase is right, Jacko is probably trying to make this Halloween the best holiday of the year.”

You nodded him, giving him the best smile you could muster. He smiled back, before getting up to head back to bed as well. Your smile faltered as you looked back at the time, realising how late it was. You had a bad feeling and you could tell that something wasn’t right.

So you stayed up. You stayed up all night trying to wait for Jacko to show up. 3AM, 4AM and 5AM passed, and there was still no signs of him. Your eyes were desperate to shut, but it couldn’t outweigh your desperation to ensure Jacko had made it back on time.

The sun had begun to rise, and still no sign of the pumpkin carved faced. The hope that Osterhase and Saint had enstalled onto you had begun to dim down until it was nothing but a flicker every now and then. You watched outside the window, seeing the clouds pass by slowly until they went out of your line of vision.

You heard a small bang before quiet footsteps. Out of fear, you grew your wings that hid inside your back. They were around 3 meters wide each and were covered with white feathers. Your normal clothing was also replaced with body armour, which was a white, short-gladiator-like dress. Your hair also self-braided in a way that Daenerys Targaryen herself would be jealous of.

You then pulled out the arrow and quickly pointed it towards the source of the sound. You let out a sigh when you realised it was just Saint standing there, his hands up in surrender. “You scared the hell out of me Irish.”

“I just wanted to check up on you, didn’t realise you’d armour up and try to shoot me,” Saint spoke as he watched your wings motion back inside your back and your normal clothes adorned your body once again. “And plus, lets be real. Your the best aimer in the world. But with my luck, you would’ve missed.”

“I never miss,” you spoke back as your hair fell perfectly against your face after de-suiting. You then sighed, falling back against the sofa. “You lied.”

“About what?”

“Jacko never came back,” you whispered as you felt tears well up in your eyes. They didn’t fall though. You didn’t want them to. “You said he would.”

“Valentine I-“ Saint started before he stopped himself, his eyes stopping at Osterhase and Nicholas figures. Osterhase looked disappointed whereas Nicholas was shocked as this was the first time he was hearing of Jacko’s disappearance.

It was a day of mourning. Because it was the day you lost a member. A member who did not die, because if he did there would be a new Halloween keeper, but rather just left. He left you guys without a word.

He left you without a word

1 Month and 10 Days Later

Bucky felt his phone buzz under his pillow. Groaning, the soldier pressed the power button twice to decline the call. Not even five secounds later, the phone started buzzing again. This time, Bucky picked up his phone and chucked it far away from him so that the buzzing did not disturb his sleep.

“Incoming call from Sam Wilson,” F.R.I.D.A.Y spoke, making Bucky groan once again, chucking the pillow at the wall. He was trying to get F.R.I.D.A.Y to stop talking so he could get some shut eye, obviously forgetting that F.R.I.D.A.Y is an inanimate object who cannot be hit with a pillow.

“Decline!”

“I’m afraid this is urgent Mr Barnes,” Bucky let out a sigh, brushing his now short hair back as he rubbed his eye. He was frustrated that he was deprived of sleep.

“Tin man you have 5 minutes to suit up!” Sam yelled into the phone. This had awoken Bucky, as Sam’s voice was laced with urgency. “It’s a possible Level 7 threat.”

At this news, Bucky quickly suited up. For a while now, Bucky had been dealing with Level 3-5, nothing major. Drug cartels, human trafficking and the threat of a new emergence of a disease from some wacko with an IQ of 250, is what Bucky had dealt with.

But level 7? Level 7 is a worldwide threat. The ‘world is at stake’ threat. It deals with crazy aliens from outer space, gods who think they should rule earth and robots who believe in the extinction of mankind.

Bucky quickly ran out of his room in the new San Fransisco Avenger’s tower and bolted towards the office where they usually talk battle strategies and threats. When Bucky had finally made it, Wanda, Bruce, Sam and Peter were already there.

“Now that Bucky is here, let us begin,” Sam spoke with the leadership quality that had been bestowed to him when Steve had given him the shield. “Just a minute ago, our radars detected strange weather patterns, high energy readings and a great deal of movement from civilians. Bruce and I then proceeded to look at what’s going on with satellite images.”

Live footage started playing. Bucky squinted as he saw a man in a pumpkin head, fighting with a 2-foot rabbit, an old man in a red suit, a very short man in green clothing and women in a short white dress who had wings attached to her back.

“Who are they?” Wanda spoke confusedly as she watched on. The pumpkin-headed man was shooting flames at the four individuals as civilians were desperately running away, looking for shelter.

“We don’t know,” Bruce spoke, folding his arms up. “But we shouldn’t take chances. We have a quinjet set up outside to take us to New York. We will have to arrest them and take them into questioning. Be prepared. We don’t know them. They could have powers beyond belief. We are going in blind.”

“Wait a minute,” Peter spoke, his eyes widening in realisation. “Don’t you guys get it!”

“Get what?” Sam spoke, looking at the screen to the five individuals. The women with the arrow flew up, flinging an arrow towards the pumpkin man who just used his fire to disintegrate the incoming threat.

“The old man! In a red suit! Who’s making snow!” Peter yelled, getting up from his seat. “That’s Santa! And the two-foot rabbit is the Easter bunny! Guys, everyone in this video is part of some holiday.”

“Peter you are way too imaginative for your own good,” Sam spoke, making Peter slowly back down to his seat. Sam looked back at the screen at the old man with the red suit. “You’re trying to tell me this man goes around the whole world once a year while fighting a pumpkin for the rest of the 364 days he has off?”

“I don’t know Sam, the kid’s onto something,” Wanda spoke to Sam. “I mean, aliens flying in from outer space? Magical stones? Greek gods our mothers used to read to us when we were kids? Is it hard to believe that the tales of Santa and the Easter Bunny didn’t have some truth behind it?”

Bucky’s eyes fell back onto the screen when your face had popped up. He watched as you flew and landed gracefully on two feet before trying to successfully land an arrow on the man attacking you.

His mind was on a whirlpool as he couldn’t decipher how one can be this beautiful, this elegant. You were a beauty beyond compare and your face was one that Bucky will remember for the rest of his life.

“Cupid,” Bucky whispered to himself, making all the Avengers turn towards him. He shook his head, before looking at Sam. “She’s Cupid. She’s got the blonde hair and Roman clothing. She’s got wings and her choice of weaponary are arrows-“

“And she’s hot!” Peter chimes in, but instantly quitened down as everyone started at him. His face went red as he looked down at his hands. “Sorry. Continue Mr Barnes.”

“When she shoots her arrows and it lands on the dude shooting fire, it doesn’t kill him or even cause him pain for that matter. But it does make him less inclined to kill her. And what is a Cupid’s known activity? To shoot people with arrows and trigger attraction between people,” Bucky finished before looking back at the screen. “Peter, as annoying he is, might be right about this.”

“Well whoever they are we have to arrest them,” Sam spoke, grabbing the remote to turn off the screen. “So we’re leaving now. Wanda, you’re going up against Pumpkin head and Santa Clause. Peter, you’re going up against the large rabbit and Bucky you’ll go after Miss Universe while I go take on the Mr Cabbage patch kid. Bruce, you come in if things go out of hand.”

Bruce nodded before all of the Avengers stood up, ready to leave to room and fight a battle in New York. Bucky remained in his seat, smiling at Sam. Sam looked at him confusedly as all the Avengers left the room but him. “Why are you smiling at me like that?”

“Oh nothing,” Bucky teased, getting up from his seat before giving Sam a light punch on the arm. “Great job today Captain America.”

Sam smiled to himself as Bucky had left the room. He had a serious weight on his shoulder after being given the Mantle from Steve himself. He had faced a lot of criticism and racism from the public and the higher rank officials. But one things for sure. Sam was glad he had Bucky through all of it.

He was just hoping this mission goes smoothly and he doesn’t fail. That the Avenger’s don’t fail.

TAGLIST (CLOSED)

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#bucky barnes #bucky barnes x y/n #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes imagine #mcu #mcu imagine #avengers #avengers x reader #marvel #steve rogers #steve rogers x reader #loki #loki x reader #peter parker #peter parker x reader #captain america #captain america x reader #thor #thor x reader #sebastian stan #sebastian stan x you #sebastian stan x reader #winter soldier #winter soldier x reader #wanda maximoff #bruce banner #avengers endgame #imagine #tom holland

[hottestthingalive]

Bluebells (1)

Chapter 1: Seeds

AO3 Link here. 

Chapter 2 here, finally!

Notes: So, to those of you who saw this post about my WIPs which mentioned this having background Roceit and Intruality in later chapters of this story?

...I accidentally became way too invested in the idea of Virgil making fun of Patton’s new boyfriend being called Prince. So you get that now. 

The name of the chapters comes from an interesting fact I learned about bluebell flowers while researching this story: they take at least five years to grow from a seed into a bulb, which they have to be before they flower. The first chapter takes place six or seven years before the events of the main story, so I found it very appropriate. This story should only be three or four chapters long, but who knows -- I have lots of ideas for these boys.

Plot: Logan encounters a strange boy in the woods. His name is Anxiety, and he's hiding in the flowers.

Relationships: budding romance analogical, hinted dukeceit, royality in later chapters, remile in later chapters, platonic DRLAMP

Tw: Cursing, faeries, mention of death, mention of kidnapping, dead parents. (If I missed anything, let me know!)

---

He didn’t understand, and it bothered him to no end. 

Logan first saw the human in May, when the sun stayed long and the moon appeared less. The flowers had started to bloom, the trees green and vibrant, with alternating days of hot sun or torrents of rain. 

The faerie quite liked May. He preferred winter, of course, being Unseelie, but some nights in the spring he could look up at the sky and see every single star, and stars fascinated him to no end. Besides, there was no one telling him to do his job in the warm months (for there was no snow or cold, blustery winds in the time of the Seelie), and without the pestering to summon winter he could be alone. Logan enjoyed his solitude.

That is, he had, until the human child had stumbled into a flowered field in the small section of the forest the Unseelie had managed to mark off for himself. 

The boy (or at least Logan guessed he was a boy; he had never been good with human age or gender. Fey just were, and though Logan had known he was male early on, many didn’t care about such things. It was such a human concept, after all) was carrying a black book in one hand, a knapsack slung over one shoulder. He sat down in the field, and suddenly he was gone, hidden in the bluebells. 

The fey squinted, trying to see the strange mortal in the flowers, but the boy had achieved almost perfect camouflage. 

Logan had never seen him before, not in the forest. Humans rarely dared tread in the woods, for fear of its elven inhabitants. This one was an anomaly, and it was positively fascinating. Especially one so young -- he appeared to be less than Logan’s own age, making him maybe seven or eight. 

This went on for some time. The strange male would appear in the field, plop down among the bluebells, and stay there for some time, while Logan watched from the branches of the trees. When he finally left, Logan would check the place where he sat, searching for a sign as to how this mortal could hide so thoroughly. 

It was on the seventh appearance of the sun that he found something strange: a piece of white parchment, with a sketch of the forest. The detail was quite good for the hand of a child, Logan had to admit, but it wasn’t the quality of the drawing that bothered him. It was the face in one of the trees, undoubtedly his own, with a line of scribbled human glyphs scrawled beside it. They took but a second to translate. 

Just come say hi. 

How had the mortal seen him? It was undoubtedly dangerous, Logan’s instincts told him. Best to abandon the area, warn his court, and allow the Seelie to deal with the small human intruding in the fey woods. Nevermind that the spring and summer fey were notoriously thoughtless, and might kidnap the child. Nevermind that they would likely forget that humans did not live as long as fey, despite (in their early years, at least) growing at the same rate. Nevermind that, eventually, after often forgetting to provide food or care for their pet human, they would throw him out for aging, or keep him till he died. 

No, Logan was to disregard all of that. 

The next day, Logan found himself creeping through the field, inching his way towards the bluebell patch. The faerie found his pride in his magic: he was quite good at it, and so he expertly used the flora to mask his presence. There was no possible way he could be noticed. 

“Hi,” the boy said, looking up and straight into Logan’s eyes. The human’s own irises were green, a deeper green than he would normally expect from a mortal, the color of grass and oak leaves. “Finally! I thought you would never talk to me.”

Well. That wasn’t right. 

“How did you spot me?” he demanded, dumbfounded. He found himself adjusting his black shirt subconsciously, in a state of mild shock. 

“It’s a secret,” the child grinned. “What’s your name?”

How rude, Logan thought.

I shall never speak to him again, the rational part of his brain decided. He probably has magic, and is a danger to me and all others of my kind.

But he’s fascinating, said the uncontrollable, irrational, annoying part of his brain that was always championing silly matters like friendship and personal interests over actually doing his duty, which would logically be to report this at once. And I do occasionally get lonely…

“You may call me Logic,” he heard, realizing a second late that the words had come from his own mouth. “Which is an alias, of course, but it is the only name you shall get.” Logan had gone by the name for years, choosing it just as every other child did, in this world where true names had power. 

“I figured,” the mortal smiled, with his green eyes crinkled and the absence of one of his front teeth distinct. “I’m Anxiety.”

“Why choose ‘Anxiety’?” Logan asks, years later. He receives that same smile, although the adult tooth has long since grown in. 

“Why’d you choose Logic?” the male in front of him asks in turn, and Logan responds by blinking. 

“I don’t believe I know,” he replies. 

“Exactly,” his compatriot shrugs. “It just felt right.” 

“Are you a witch?” he queried weeks later, sitting cross-legged besides Anxiety and holding a book in his hands. 

“A witch?” Anxiety repeated, looking up from his sketchbook. 

“Bluebells are sometimes called harebells, especially in Scotland,” he said, “because witches are supposed to turn into rabbits to hide in the flowers. It is almost impossible to spot you without knowing if you are here; maybe you’re a witch.”

“Last I checked, I can’t turn into a rabbit,” the boy laughed. “Maybe I summoned you, though, by ringing the bluebells.”

“They are not literal bells, Anxiety.”

“My dad used to tell me that if you rang bluebells, faeries would come,” he shrugged. “But if a human hears a bluebell ring, that means someone dear to them will die.”

“You humans have such morbid myths,” he told his mortal companion, looking at the flowers. “A bluebell cannot make a sound, anyways, so if one hears something it would be purely coincidental.” 

“It’s fun to think about though,” said the human beside him, and Logan looked over at Anxiety, who was sprawled on the grass, staring at the clouds in the blue sky. “Hey, that one looks like a cat eating pasta out of a bucket.”

He looked at the cloud in question, and had to admit it did appear so, as odd the image was. “Why do you humans engage in these flights of fantasy?” Logan asked, despite himself. 

“Coping mechanism, probably,” he replied, with the air of a child that, despite their age, knows enough about the world to call themself Anxiety. “Don’t you?”

“The Seelie, perhaps,” Logan sniffed, “but my court is far more realistic in our views than those sparkly fools.”

“Fair enough,” laughed the mortal. 

Logan soon found himself spending the spring and summer with the boy called Anxiety, sitting in the field. Anxiety brought him books written by humans when Logan got bored of fey texts, and in turn, the faerie deigned to ‘show off’ a bit, demonstrating his magic one day by summoning shadows and a storm. He couldn’t deny the fact that he had been quite happy to see Anxiety wasn’t scared at all, instead laughing as the rain fell around them and Logan scrambled to save their things because “We must save the books, Anxiety!” Once everything was stashed in a hollow tree, however, he managed to get a good look at the boy he had started to think of as a friend, and a laugh was shocked out of him. Anxiety’s bangs were plastered to his face, covering his eyes. 

“You look as though a mop has adhered itself to your skull,” Logan informed him, unable to hide his smile. 

“What’s that weird thing you’re doing with your face? Are you okay?” Anxiety asked, sarcasm negated by his own grin. Logan rolled his eyes. He knew he did not smile often, but still -- those levels of cheek were unwarranted. 

He learned Anxiety was ten, older than he would have guessed, and only a month younger than Logan himself. That he loved poetry and sewing and art but didn’t think he was really good at any of them, and would be mocked for these interests. That his parents had died when he was quite young, and he now lived with his elderly grandmother, who let him run off anywhere as long as he was in his bed the next morning. She had homeschooled him for his early years, and would only send him to an official establishment next fall, which told Logan why Anxiety wasn’t with his fellow human children in their brick school during the spring. It also explained why he’d been allowed to enter the fey woods at all, what with the healthy fear the locals had developed of the place. 

In turn, ‘Logic’ had revealed his love for the stars, (which led to Anxiety sneaking out one night to stargaze with him in the bluebell field), how he’d kept a lizard as a pet one summer, but released it at the end because a cold-blooded creature likely wouldn’t survive the winter months, and how he reported directly to the Unseelie ruler, because all fey had a job, young or old. “It’s just the way it is,” he explained. “I have responsibilities to my court, as do all fey children.”

“Bit like child labour, though,” Anxiety pointed out. 

“For humans, maybe,” he conceded, “but we mentally develop much faster.”

“But you live longer, so shouldn’t you get to embrace your childhood before your infinite adulthood?” reasoned the other, watching the ladybug that was clinging to his sleeve. 

“Not infinite,” Logan replied, and Anxiety raised his head in interest. “We live a very long time, to be sure, but all fey die eventually. When we run out of magic, we age and perish.” 

His friend considered that -- and Logan considered the human boy his friend, now. That notion had snuck up on him, it seemed, surreptitiously changing his label of ‘acquaintance’ to one of friendship. 

He didn’t really mind.

Fall came in colored leaves and bursts of chilly wind, of flowers wilting and apples ripening in the trees. Logan attended the passing of the seasons, or the transfer of control, from the Seelie Court to that of the Unseelie at the equinox. It was in the deepest part of the forest, the part that joined the realm of the fey to the human world. 

Logan wasn’t entirely happy about their regained dominion. He should have been, he knew: logic dictated it! With winter, his powers increased, and he gained structure and work he loved. Why would he not be glad?

Well, remarked the treacherous little voice in his head, we can’t spend time with Anxiety in the winter, now can we? 

It was true, he mused as the crown of the fey on the podium shed its vibrant flowers and its green leaves turned red, orange, yellow, and brown. He’d be very busy, for one. Talyn, leader of the Unseelie, had promised him greater responsibility this year. And besides…

The woods were dangerous enough when the Seelie ruled. But Logan’s court had a tendency to be vicious, and they did not attempt to hide their darkness like their flowery counterparts. 

Were Anxiety to be discovered in faerie woods in winter… 

He didn’t want to think about it. 

“Logic!” called a familiar voice, and he turned to see two identical faces waving to him. 

“Prince, Duke,” he nodded. “I trust you are well?”

“Oh, Lolo, don’t be so formal with us,” Prince grinned, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “We’re friends, after all!”

“Or are we making you nervous?” smirked Duke. “No, something else is! You’ve got a secret, don’tcha?”

Logan’s lips thinned. He’d forgotten how alarmingly perceptive the Unseelie half of the brothers could be.

Prince and Duke were oddities among the fey, the children of parents from both courts. Prince was Seelie, Duke Unseelie, but they had remained close even when the courts did their best to seperate them. Now, they had achieved a sort of notoriety. Joan, leader of the Seelie court, was said to be molding Prince for his own role, and Talyn had already offered for the Duke to study under them. He had rejected the offer, saying that he didn’t want the vulnerability of fey leadership, and a faerie called Deceit had been selected instead.

Secretly, Logan suspected Duke’s reservations had less to do with every faerie in both courts knowing his true name (which was a requirement for Talyn and Joan, just as it had been for all fey leaders before them) and more to do with the restrictions being trained by Talyn would put on him. He loved his chaos, after all. 

“I don’t see what my personal affairs have to do with you,” he said, rather coldly. “No offense meant, of course.”

“Oh, Logic, you break our hearts!” Prince cried dramatically, clutching his chest. “How could you say such things to your bestest and oldest friends?”

“Advice’s by far the best of my friends.”

“Oldest friends!” Duke countered.

“I have known Deceit for far longer than either of you.”

Duke colored at the name (could he be any more obvious with his little crush?) and Prince exclaimed, “Friends!”

“...Dubious,” Logan said, turning back towards the proceedings. 

“C’mon, Logie, we both know you’re bored out of your mind having to watch this mind-numbing shit,” Duke told him, grinning. He was missing three teeth. Fey aren’t supposed to lose teeth, the tiny part of his mind that hadn’t given up yet pointed out. “Let’s leave, and then you can tell us all about your little secret.”

“I will not be telling you anything,” he sighed.

But he ought to. He knew that. It was why he had been avoiding Advice lately, who had gotten a little too good at reading people after beginning his job as a healer. It was why after the meeting Logan threw himself into his work, so as not to cause any issues, any reasons for his court to keep an eye on him. It was why he began following Anxiety when the human boy left the forest each day, making sure he couldn’t be taken on his way home. 

Winter came and Logan began to change, as the power of his people’s season grew within him. His features, already pronounced, became sharper, hair longer (more wild, Anxiety said, as he attempted to braid the dark locks), ears, nails, and teeth more pointed. He changed his clothes for winter, of course, wearing a night-blue cloak lined with rabbit fur over his usual dark attire, and grudgingly trading bare feet for boots. Anxiety laughed at him a fair bit, for that (“What’s your problem with shoes?” he had cackled, as Logan sulked besides him) but after he had to switch his sweatshirts for a heavy black parka, the human joined the fey in petulant anger. 

One day, Anxiety asked why fey changed appearances in the winter, gingerly examining Logan’s sharp nails, which bore an uncanny resemblance to claws. Logan replied that they didn’t -- they changed for summer, or Unseelie did at least. His winter form was his true one; the one the human had first encountered was a disguise of sorts, a way to blend in among the Seelie, a defensive relic from when the two breeds of faerie were at war. 

He was afraid, then, looking at Anxiety, that he would flee. Unseelie were always the evil fey in human stories, not the playful tricksters but the monsters in the dark, and this human seemed to know every story, reciting them from memory to Logan as they lay in the field, watching clouds in the sky.

But Anxiety simply hummed quietly, looking up into Logan’s eyes. “Those don’t change,” he said, motioning to them. “Must be pretty easy for the Seelie to recognize, huh?”

“Why would my eyes be easy to recognize?” he asked, blinking. 

“They’re beautiful,” the human shrugged, far too casual, and returned to his study of Logan’s nails. “Hey, maybe I could paint your nails. My friend Morality’s been teaching me how.” 

(And if the tips of the faerie’s pointed ears turned red, his cheeks dusted with a similar colour, Anxiety was kind enough not to mention it.)

He knew it was dangerous, still meeting the human, but Logan still found himself entering the clearing each day, even though the bluebells had all wilted by August and the other flowers followed quickly, even as the grass turned brown. Sometimes, Logan told himself that it was because he wanted to learn from Anxiety, or because he wanted to interact with someone his age, or because he was simply ingrained in his habits. Always a new excuse. Nevermind that the information the human could teach him was nothing compared to his own vast reservoirs of knowledge, that Deceit, Prince, Advice and Duke were all his own age, and two were even of Logan’s court, that he was a faerie, and the fey did not do routines, as creatures of the wild. 

The truth was, he found a certain amount of joy in meeting with someone who seemed to understand Logan’s reluctance to conform to the standards of his court, who was kind and laughed easily and shared stories and secrets and songs without any cost. The truth was that he was just a bit selfish. 

Logan’s selfishness would come back to bite him.

It was fall on the cusp of winter when it happened, a crisp afternoon in early November, and a Wednesday. This meant that Anxiety could only come later in the day, and carted along a backpack holding papers and books and math. As far as Logan could tell, math was a game with numbers with many nuanced rules, that he rather liked and Anxiety hated.

To make sure that the human managed to reach the clearing safely, Logan had begun to meet him on the path that was Anxiety’s way through the forest, using his magic to mask the two of them from the Unseelie patrolling the woods. Anxiety found it funny (he didn’t seem to quite understand the true danger the forest posed him) but a bit irritating, so Logan grudgingly met him halfway down the path instead of at the line of trees that seperated the forest and the town. 

So he sat in the woods, that Wednesday, high up in the branches, and waited, lost in thought. It had been several months since they’d met in the beginning of May, spending time together almost every day. He had expected the human to have run away in fear by now, to have stopped coming into the forest, to have been scared off by the magic or the changing of shapes or simply by the power Logan held. But the aptly named Anxiety (he was scared of so many things, of sharks and snakes and clowns and drowning and dying and blood) wasn’t afraid of Logan at all, it seemed. 

It was nice, not being feared -- even among his own people, he was treated with a healthy amount of caution. Faeries did not trust. They found security in favors, in debts, and even family, like Prince and Duke, eyed each other with suspicion. But the human boy believed so easily, never asking for a favor or a name, giving and never asking for anything in return. It did not match with what Logan knew, of humans or of fey. 

...Anxiety was late. 

He held out for two minutes longer, before he finally stood and darted through the branches, feet finding footholds that should not have held them, moving through the air and ignoring the fact that occasionally he never touched the branches at all. Such was being a faerie. 

Later, he would think back on the moment and thank the forest he had been so lucky. If he had waited a minute longer, had decided to run along the ground instead of in the trees, if he had listened to Anxiety when he rolled his eyes the day before and said “I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me,” when Logan had told him to be careful… 

Logan found his human (sometime in the past months, the human boy had become his. When, he didn’t know, but it had happened so easily, Anxiety sliding into his life with his drawings and poetry and laughter and settling in like he had always belonged. If he believed in things like that, Logan would think it was fate.) standing frozen in the dirt path, eyes glazed and unfocused, books spread around him and backpack lying in the dirt. Unseelie had swarmed him, two of them examining the human in their midst as one -- Deceit, Logan realized in shock -- worked his magic to keep him in a docile trance. 

“Why did he come here?” another faerie asked, one Logan vaguely recognized. From his recollection, he was named Raven. The third he had never met, and seemed a fair bit older than the other two and Logan himself -- Deceit, Raven, and Logan were all young fey, Raven the oldest at maybe fourteen and Deceit almost the same age as Logan himself. This faerie, however, despite appearing to be in their early twenties, had an air of age, and he would guess the mystery individual to be in their hundreds. 

“It doesn’t matter,” the older Unseelie smiled, a grin appearing on their face. “It’s just a human boy. Kill it or take it.”

“He -- He’s our age, Lady Belladonna,” protested Deceit, his brow furrowing. “A child. Shouldn’t we just send him away?”

“Oh, not he,” the apparently female faerie snarled, reaching out to grip Anxiety’s blank face in dark nails. “Humans… humans are beasts. And they call us creatures of the dark! It has no more rights than an animal, age or not. Maturity has never affected the ways of the fey.” 

“But Lady--” Raven protested, looking as disturbed as Deceit, but he never got the chance to finish his sentence. Logan had heard enough. 

Lady Belladonna, whoever she was, had been correct. Maturity had very little to do with fey; age meant time, and a faerie scorned time, even physically. So Logan, young as he was at barely eleven winters (Logan had turned eleven just a few days ago -- Anxiety had given him some of the mechanical pencils he had liked, as well as a decorated case. He had said it was a ‘birthday gift’.), had power, power enough to reach out to the minds of the three fey and push them into sleep. 

He’d always been good at manipulating the brain -- better than even Deceit or Advice. 

The three Unseelie crumpled to the ground, eyes shutting even as they tried to resist, pushing back against his influence. The clearing soon quieted, silent but for the sound of quiet breathing and the wind in the trees.

Logan knew he had succeeded when Anxiety blinked and the haze over his eyes disappeared, Deceit’s control gone. The human gasped, stumbling backwards, and at that moment Logan finally emerged from the branches to pick up the backpack and the books, nodding in greeting.

“Logic?” Anxiety asked, sounding small, staring at the fey slumped around him. “What -- what happened? Are they…”

“Merely sleeping,” he replied, motioning to the rise and fall of Raven’s chest. “They will be alright.” His face hardens. “They deserved worse. What do you remember?”

“All of it, I think. They surprised me, and that one that looks like a snake did something -- I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t scream.” He hesitated, staring at the female faerie. “She wanted to kill me?”

“Or take you to our realm,” Logan said, straightening, Anxiety’s backpack in one hand and his books in the other. “Here. I need to make sure they don’t remember this encounter.”

The human took his belongings, watching as Logan crouched by the sleeping fey, touching his fingers to their temples. It took only a few seconds to alter their memories, to make them believe their enchanted sleep to be the result of a backfired spell by the Lady. (He takes special pleasure in placing the blame on her.)

He altered first the memories of Raven, then Belladonna, and then he reached for Deceit.

A yellow-gloved hand reached up to grasp Logan’s wrist. 

“Logic!” Anxiety exclaimed, a fearful squeak, rushing forwards, but Deceit spoke before he could aid him.

“Thank you,” the young Unseelie whispered, eyes forcing themselves open. 

“What?” Logan asked, unable to keep the shock from his voice. Deceit was one of the few faeries that could lie without repercussions, but the thanks seemed genuine. Whether he had become far better at lying than Logan had thought, or… 

“She would have murdered him,” Deceit laughed, a harsh sound. “Probably would have made me do it, a test for Talyn’s protégé. I definitely would have been able to casually murder a kid my age.” Sarcasm practically dripped from his words, before his tone softened. “So, thank you, Logic.”

“You released Anxiety from the spell, didn’t you?” he realized, blinking down at the barely-conscious faerie. “You’re going to get yourself killed, Deceit.”

“Wipe my memories,” he shrugged. “I’ll be fine. But be careful, okay? Belladonna isn’t alone in her views. There’s fey from both courts that are now advocating for violence against humans. Your boyfriend will need to be cautious.”

“He’s not my -- we aren’t -- we are far too young to be courting!” Logan protested, knowing full well his face was as bright as a rose, ears burning. Anxiety was in much the same state, although Deceit simply rolled his eyes.

“Of course you are,” the faerie sighed. “Just… keep an eye out, Logic. This forest has gotten dangerous, as of late.”

His eyes fluttered shut. A few seconds later, his breathing evened. Logan was rather impressed -- Deceit’d held out against the spell for far longer than he would have expected anyone to be able to. Luckily, the strange resistance didn’t carry over when he moved to alter his memories, and soon he stood to face Anxiety. 

“It… It would be understandable if you decided to terminate our friendship,” he finally muttered, unable to meet the human’s green eyes. “You have now seen the truth of my people. We are vicious, and killers, and-”

“And you rescued me,” said Anxiety, voice startlingly calm. “And that other faerie -- Deceit, right? -- he didn’t want to hurt me either. I don’t think you’re vicious, or a killer.”

“Anxiety, you’ll be in danger if you continue visiting me. You could lose your life!” Logan exclaimed, motioning to the fallen faeries around him for emphasis, because the stupid human didn’t understand, didn’t get that he might die or worse!

“That was always going to be true, dummy. We’re in a faerie forest. I’m a human,” Anxiety deadpanned. “C’mon.”

They walked through the woods to the clearing in silence, Logan working his magic to render them invisible to prying eyes, Anxiety staring at the dirt under his sneakers. The forest was still, for once.

The two arrived in their typical spot, standing near where they knew the bluebells would grow again in spring, hearing dead grass crinkle underneath their feet. The human set down his belongings, and hesitated, suddenly still.

“Are you alright?” Logan asked, glancing over. Anxiety was staring at the ground again, arms wrapped around himself in a sort of makeshift hug, bangs covering his eyes. 

“I… You saved my life, Logic,” the other said, voice choked, and there were glistening tears streaming down his pale cheeks. “I would have died.”

Logan had never been good at feelings. He’d be the first to admit so -- they were Prince or Advice’s department. Still, he found himself moving forwards, pulling Anxiety into a hug, ignoring the tears wetting his cloak as he did his best to replicate what he’d seen Advice do for distressed fey. 

“I don’t want to die,” he heard, whispered into his shoulder. “I don’t want to die, L.”

“I won’t let you,” promised Logan, and heard from his own mouth, before he could even think about saying it, “I’ll protect your life with mine, if it comes to that.”

Anxiety let out a laugh at that, his grip tightening. “Well, that’s not very fair. You’re not allowed to die either, okay? I’ll protect you too.”

Logan had a response on the tip of his tongue (“You’re a human, how would you preserve my lifespan in any way?”) but a searing pain through his left eye interrupted him, and nothing more than a gasp of agony escaped the faerie. They seperated, Anxiety clutching the right side of his face. 

The feeling disappeared as quickly as it had manifested, and Logan immediately looked up, searching for their attacker, and instead found the human’s previously green eyes. 

The right one was a bright, shining purple. 

Anxiety’s mouth was open wide. “Logic, your eye--” he began, before reaching into his bag and fumbling for his communicator square. (Phone, he called it. Logan did not quite understand, but avoided touching it anyways -- it appeared to be made of metal, and he would not risk contact with iron.) He turned it on, before switching to a screen that reflected both of their faces. 

Logan had only ever looked at his reflection to ensure his presentability. He knew his eyes were different from those of humans, of course; Anxiety’s had circles of green around a black center, set on a white background, but Logan did not have those divisions. Color spread across the whole surface, lacking in whites, pupil, and iris. “Your eyes look like the night sky,” Anxiety had told him once, and he supposed the human was correct -- normally, they were a dark purplish blue color, with pinpricks of pale light across the surface. Still, he hadn’t understood why Anxiety had seemed so fascinated. (“Is it accurate?” the human had questioned. “Is the placement of the stars right?” Logan had eventually flushed red as the other tried to find constellations in his eyes, Anxiety had noticed and retreated, and that had been the end of that. He’d never brought it up again.)

But now his left eye was crossed with a pattern of greenish blue, like the aurora borealis in the Unseelie realm that his parents had taken him to see when he was very small, vibrant against the indigo background.

“What happened?” Anxiety asked, staring at himself on the screen of the phone, reaching up as if to touch the purple ring, ensuring it was truly there. “How -- why -- what happened?”

“I don’t know,” Logan said slowly, staring at his newly heterochromatic eyes. 

Perhaps this is the price of befriending and saving a human, he thought to himself, meeting Anxiety’s panicked eyes with his own. Perhaps it is a curse, or a punishment from the gods. A physical marking of my shame, of forgetting to take a name, a favor, a price, as is my nature. 

“It’s okay,” Anxiety said, reaching out to take Logan’s hand and squeezing it gently. “It’s okay, L. We’ll figure it out. Besides, it looks cool as heck, right?”

“...That it does,” he nodded after a beat, returning the gesture, a wan smile stretching his lips despite the situation.

“Let’s… Let’s not worry about it for now,” suggested the human. “We’ve got better things to do, right?”

“Definitely. We had best get started on that math homework.”

Anxiety let out a laugh at that. “Ew. How about we just cloudwatch for now?”

They sat in the empty field, where their flowers would grow again come spring, and watched white fluff form in the blue sky through mismatched eyes. He glanced over at Anxiety, who smiled and reached out with his hand. The faerie took it. 

If this new coloring is a curse, it’s worth it, decided Logan, flashing a smile at his boy of the bluebells before returning his gaze to the sky. 

At first, the change took getting used to. Fey whispered Logan had made a deal with the forest, had become vain and done it cosmetically, had been cursed. Humans said much the same about Anxiety. As time passed, however, and the colors didn’t change, those inside and outside the forest learned to accept the change. No one questioned it anymore, and eventually the two learned to forget the day in the clearing, to pass it off as a spell gone wrong in Logan’s case and an eye injury in Anxiety’s.

Neither of them found an explanation for it either, but it soon became apparent they didn’t need to. They had each other.

That was what mattered.

#analogical #ts virgil #ts logan #virgil sanders #logan sanders #implied dukeceit #sanders sides #ts roman #roman sanders #princey #ts remus #remus sanders #janus sanders #ts deceit #ts patton #patton sanders #fae #fae au #fey #seelie #unseelie #faerie au #tw cursing #tw mentions of death #tw mentions of kidnapping #bluebells

[ohmygillygoshoppler]

oh my goodness, all this headcannon foolishness cannot be acceptable, I am such trash, but I cannot help myself..

Must.. share... with... the ... w o r l d 

Karma wheeled her sheet-covered project through the streets of the White City, Azreal and her big brother Lazarus, or Loki, tagging along side her. Loki was helping the little trickster get her project from her garage at her home all the way to the auditorium at the finishing school without magic. Teleporting the machine there may have caused the mechanics to bug out. Karma wanted this robot to be prefect, absolutely no bugs or kinks. She had been working on this model now for almost two whole years, and she was more than excited to show it off at the assembly this evening.

Azreal was elated to see his student so excited. She was in such a rush to get things going, getting her into bed after cake was almost a fight.

She had told the angel that she hadn't slept much last night after their conversation. It may have been Azreal's promise to help her debut the robot by acting as her volunteer for the presentation. He was wary of that request at first, but after the young nephilim walked through the procedure and how her machine worked, the angel came to it all unafraid.

"So what's under the sheet, Rabbit?" Loki asked as he pulled the cart uphill on the bridge they were crossing.

"No peeking! It's a surprise! It's my prototype for my Robotics final! The one I've been working on~ The one that all the Professors and teachers from Immundii will be seeing! And once they see how incredible my invention is, they’ll be foolish not to let me in!" she teased, winking back over her shoulder at the archangel , who in turn offered a thumbs up.

"Oooh, I got'cha now! Can hardly wait to see it; Naz can't either." Loki playfully retorted as he tugged the cart on ahead.

From behind the cart, Karma held up the white sheets so it wouldn’t drag. "Nazareth's here?" she inquired. "Is Dad coming, too?"

"Said so. Might show up in time to see your presentation."

At that, the little girl stopped in her tracks and snatched up Azreal's robes. She was making a sound that was something like a scared pterodactyl and a screaming deer and dancing in place. A bright gold illuminated from underneath her shirt, and the tiny gems on her face twinkled ever bright as well. "Ohmigoshdidyouhearthataz? Dad's coming! That means he might bring the others!"

Gracefully enough, the scholar swept the excitable youth aside and proceeded to follow her brother. She trailed along quick enough, but now rambled on about how happy she was War was showing up-

Been a while since he'd seen Karma so stoked to see her father. It must have been a year or so since the last time they spoke together in person, she's been calling him most of the time now. It was sweet to see how giddy she was when she talked about how she would impress her father, how she couldn't wait to see the look on his face when she won. She was way too confident for her own good, but it was still adorable nonetheless.

Loki had said something about her over confidence right after Azreal reflected on it. Huh. The little trickster insisted she was only so sure of herself because all of the other children had asked her for help on their projects, and none of them were as impressive as hers. "Simple drones," she called them.

Azreal had to roll his eyes. Sometimes, she wasn't just confident or conceited, she was downright arrogant.

No point in chastising her about it, though. There's nothing she can possibly do to help it.

The trio eventually made it to the gates of the school establishment, and now had to make the lengthy walk all the way to the opposite side of the grounds to the auditorium. Luckily, it would only take an hour or so to get there. Azreal found himself in good company for conversation. Karma and Loki loved to talk to each other, and they included the archangel in their little chats and small talk. They really liked to tell jokes, which was interesting in it's own right.

I mean, how do you watch two out of three nephilim kids just joking around with each other in the streets anymore? You don't Azreal, you don't.

Karma started getting more and more itchy as they all arrived at the auditorium, walking in through the enormous amber double-doors that let into the gigantic anteroom. Everything was set just so about two or three hundred people would fit, since the science academia in heaven still wasn’t a popular one. 

Azreal watched as  Loki let Karma take over the cart and sent her off to her spot to set up. A classmate, Matariel, approached her, they hugged, and Karma started signing to him about her presentation. The little girl grabbed her cart and began wheeling it back into the left way, to be brought up onto the stage.

The archangel was greeted by the parents and teachers of their students, and he himself got caught up in the gist of the academic affair, talking to colleges, students, and peers alike. He even got a chance to see some of the other student’s submissions and projects! He kind of missed this, when he thought about it.

Azreal's attention was stolen away when a loud commotion came from the entrance of the establishment behind them; a party of nephilim and a few of their children all arriving at once. What was once an omen of unfortunate circumstances was now like the event of century. All of the sudden... Nazareth walked silently alongside his father, nearly identical to the Horseman save for the short, curly platinum hair, and form fitting angelic armory.

Death's son, Antonio towered above almost everyone. His twin sister, Maria was nowhere to be seen. Shame. The young man with the skeleton grin quickly diverged from his morose little pod to mingle and fool around with Karma's sheet, which wasn't the wisest idea. Toni liked to poke around and pester his cousin at times. Such as trying to get a peek at her veiled masterpiece.

Pele, the collective and eldest nephilim child, followed Antonio in suit, wanting to investigate the work of engineering her cousin had been working on. They were all shooed off in a matter of seconds, as was a great many other students that had gathered around Karma's setup. Everyone was asked to take their seats and a few of the other participants began hastily rehearsing for their presentations.

Azreal waved at Karma as he took his heat beside Loki and his father. She waved back, blowing her dad a kiss, straightening her bowtie and fussing over her hair. She was seventh in line to present her project to the judges, all of them being the science teachers she saught to impress so.

Azreal himself taught exclusively at the Argent Spire, so he hardly knew any of the faces up on the stage. They announced the Students by name and by class, and announced that the winning project would be awarded a scholarship to Immundii, which Karma had already declined, saying that she wouldn't need the scholarship if she won, since Azreal paid all her tuition for her, so she could just give it to someone else.

The first six children to present their projects were all as Karma had said before; simple drones, at best. Well constructed, but feeble at best. A whether balloon, an alarm, some kid with a literal drone, and then it was the Rabbit's turn. The woman at the center of the judges table proceeded to announce Karma as top of her class, and went on to brag about how quickly she passed all of her entries with perfect scores. The whole time, Karma was signing to her at her in the crowd. Azreal watched their interactions, thanking the Creator he had taught War Celestial Sign Language.

“Now, presenting a work two whole years in the making, Karmarae and her Mystery Invention-” Her teacher, a tall dark and thin angel, of whom was Karma’s current teacher.

"Thank you, Miss Haniel. Now, Id' like to start my presentation by stating that this entry is not solely for the purpose of winning the prize scholarship, I built this machine for the representatives at Immundii , and I was hoping that they would consider my submission for later use." her eyes met with Azreal's, and she shot him a wink. "Now, I'd like to start with a question to the audience; How many of you in here are in the clericy, show of hands, other than you, Az," She pointed with a giggle.

Not many hands flew up, save for the few teachers and staff in the audience.

"Okay," The trickster sucked in a hiss through her teeth and kicked her foot. "Any healers in here? Anyone?  S’there a doctor in the house?" No show of hands.

"Name one bone. One. In the whole body, just one."

She had the audience laughing. That was a good sign. She liked making people laugh, and being center of attention.

"Thank you, Heaven, for making my presentation a lot more convincing! Now, you can understand why we have so little healers running around, since the Hellguard are still on Earth, and the White Army is still setting up civilization on Rurus, our doctors have been few and far between. Not a whole lot of angels make it into the field of study, either. Most of y'all are fighters. Now, there's no shame in that, but your society has needs like any other, right? Angels still get sick and hurt, and y'all still have to go to the doctor, but that's become a much more difficult task than once it was."

"That's where I come in. I've thought about this problem for a while now, and decided that Heaven needed something to help them out. I've made a promise to build things that make everyone's lives better, and I haven't forgotten that are people in Heaven, and many more in other places, that are in need of some type of archetypal healing facilities. I know a boy in my class, here in the White City, whose been waiting on a hearing aid for the past three years now. In angels times, that's like-" she stopped mid-statement to start counting her fingers. She repeated both hands twice before finishing off with, "way too long to be waiting for a hearing aid."

Some angels in the audience laughed as Karma then bent over and picked up one end of her sheet, peeking over her shoulder and disappearing behind the obscured object. "I might not have built an impressive sentinel, or a whether balloon, but I have built a lady who is willing and able to help Heaven in a different way; Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to-" She then tugged on the sheet and waved the entire thing aside as dramatically as she could. "-Darci; Artificial Intelligence Healer Extrordinare!"

Both Azreal and her family could see the moment Karma stole the show. She threw a finger out at the audience and laughed, that boisterous laugh of hers,the robot unveiled, stood on the raised platform at about six feet tall. She was tall, lanky, all held upright by a lone "leg" and a hard light pendulesque, which gave the illusion the robot was floating. She looked like a raised mannequin, with only a white torso, Head, and arms.Above her head was what looked like a mock halo, and the robot sported wing-like appendages. Her eyes glowed a bright blue of celestial energy, and that blue light could be seen running from her eyes to the inky black metal of her legs. Darci stood with her hands clasped before her, standing straight as a board while Karma activated the wards.

"Say hello to everyone, Darci!" Karma ordered, looking back at the crowd.

The robot blinked once, then raised a spindly arm, waving rigidly and bowing a bit. "Hello. I’m Darci, happy to help."

Surprised and pleased applause rang up from below, even the elder Horsemen were impressed with the automaton; Azreal could hear the oohs and aahs of the people closest to him. War and Death remarked on how well constructed the automaton was. Fury remarked on how cute she thought the robot was, to which Strife interjected that he thought the robot was creepy. He was abruptly silenced.

Karma beamed with pride, she was almost glowing with it. "Now, I bet you're all wondering what it is exactly that Darci does. Well, like I said, she's an AI, or Artificial Intelligence, so I've given Darci the capability to learn and adapt to new patients and environments. She can learn new spells to heal, new recipes to make medicines, and she can even remember patients and injuries for about 100 years. And that's not all, I also gave her a personality! I programmed her to be compassionate, caring, punctual, and have empathy for her patients. I designed her AI to be more matronly, so as to be a better fit for the healing and recovering field. Not only is she capable of helping on the hospitals, but she can be kept close to home for people who are disabled or sick."

"Azreal," she called, making the scholar stifle a smile. "Come on up here. I wanna give 'em all a sneak peek as to how she works."

At that, the audience went silent. There were a few hushed murmurs, some concerned stares here and there, but the Angel of Death gladly rose and proceeded to the stage. Some of the children on the stage gave him worried glances, some shook their heads. One boy covered his eyes.

They remembered the last robot... Cursor was a handful, but Tetris was a disaster...

Loki snatched his robes as he passed. "Careful. Keep your eyes shut in case something blows."

Azreal chuckled to himself. He had a feeling he was in good hands. Besides, he had helped Karma prepare the other night, and knew that everything worked out perfectly, even the deactivation afterwards was pain-free. No smoke, no fire, or short-circuiting, nothing buggy about Darci's movements and nothing erratic about her behavior.

"I am going to demonstrate Darci's prowess on my good friend, Azreal, but for those nay-sayers down there, don't worry, he'll be fine. Darci's a doctor."

Angels started laughing again as Azreal ascended onto the stage and took the chair handed to him by the other participants. He sat in the dead center of the stage and gave Karma his arm.

"Now," Rabbit started, rolling up the scholar's sleeve. "Darci was built for a wide range of medicinal purposes, ranging from first aid, surgery, reconstruction, and after care. I wanted her to be able to do everything a regular Healer does, but just as good, if not, better."

Karma reached over and took hold of Darci's metal fingers. She placed them on Azreal's forearm and started again. "Darci, is Azreal feeling well, today?" She asked in a loud voice.

Again, blue eyes blinked, a shiny white head cocking to one side slightly. Azreal felt a tinge of heat on his forearm. The blue light on Darci's fingers left little blue aftermarks on the archangel's skin as the robot's fingertips pulled away with a satisfied sound. "Azreal's vitals are stable and healthy. His heart rate is a steady one-hundred two beats per minute. Ozone levels in his blood are low. The angel is also emitting strong signals of happiness and relaxation."Darci's replied in a soft voice.

"Are you happy and relaxed, Az?" the trickster leaned in close.

"Oh, most definitely." the elder nodded and grinned. "By the way, I like Darci's default voice."

Karma blinked. "Really? I was thinking of changing it!"

Over the bought of laughter that ensued, Antonio called over them all, "Don't do it!~"

Karma gave Azreal back his arm and took Darci's other hand, rotating the robot around. "Darci is powered by a Hard Light Ward, so she can always be recharged in a matter of minutes! She's skinny, so she won't take up a whole lot of room, she's relatively quiet, and so far, I haven't encountered any bugs or kinks in her programming." She then turned her attentions back toward the judges at the table, smiling that award-winning grin of hers. "Heaven has been lacking something for a while, and I think I've found a new means of providing it. Darci would love to help out, too. That's what I made her for: saving lives. She can help others too! Angels, demons, humans, even nephilim! So, if you're interested, I'd like to make it so more models of this automaton can be made available for others. People who might need her."

She concluded her presentation with a thank you, from both her and Darci, followed by a cute curtsy. Karma had charisma, and she was milking it today, so It seemed. She received a great deal of applause, as was to be expected. She swelled with pride, waving over at her family once again. Azreal watched her for a moment as he retreated the stage, stepping over to the table of judges. There was no way he'd be hearing the end of this.

It quickly dawned on the scholar that he Might have to move back into his old home in Silverwall if Karma was actually thinking of going to the college at Immudii. Would she? Oh come now, this is Karma you're talking about... Of course she wanted to apply her intellect to something more fit to her skill.

Azreal thought long and hard about that as he descended with Karma and Darci. How much longer was she looking to be away from her fellow nephilim? Was she going to end up like Loki and disappear for ages at a time? Would she end up cooping herself up in that laboratory forever?

"-And since I'm declining the scholarship, that means I still have to go to Immundii and get in the old fashioned way, right?" Karma had been speaking to him this entire time, but he had been elsewhere.

"Hmm?"

"Azreal? Hey, come on, Az. I'm talkin' to ya."

A sigh. "Yes, dear..."

#darksiders #azreal #oc #karma #robots #war #death #strife #fury #fanfic

[bluegrowlmon]

Armageddon Blues

My final short story for creative writing class!

 Wherein a musician at the end of her rope tries one last-ditch effort to save her skin.

Rainey had been playing the old guitar for over three hours and her fingers felt like they were seconds away from shriveling up and falling to the sandy floor of the abandoned chapel. This was the longest she’d ever played without stopping. Even with her new, ill-gotten skills, fatigue was starting to creep into her peripheral vision. But she kept playing from her seat in the third pew from the front of the church, the one that looked the least likely to collapse into a pile of thirsty splinters the minute she sat down on it. The quick, mournful notes fluttered through the cracks in the dilapidated ceiling and spiraled into the desert sky above. The was no time for breaks – according to Rainey’s cracked phone screen she’d started playing around 8:30. There wasn’t much time left till midnight, and she’d be literally and figuratively damned if she didn’t give it her all while she still could.

The setup was right, as far as the books she’d checked at the public and college libraries and days of Internet searches at told her. The altar at the front of the chapel had been painted and decorated in countless interesting lines and hoops of symbols, and candles and incense were burning, though that wasn’t enough to beat back the chill of night, which seemed to emanate from the building itself. One might even call the scene a desecration, if anyone still used the one room church.

Maybe it as the song choice that was making this take so long. Rainey had started out playing fragments of music she’d found in the pdf documents online, but maybe an hour into the attempted ceremony her fingers slipped of their own accord into the familiar renditions of song sets, though so hurried and scared she hardly recognized them. By the time she noticed, she was halfway through a 5th play through of Crossroad Blues.

Some invisible pressure buried its claws between her shoulder blades, piercing the parched skin. She looked up, fingers still dancing pleadingly across the guitar strings. There was a lioness lying across the altar. She stared down at Rainey with an air of feline, haughty displeasure.

Rainey finally stopped playing. The chapel fell dead silent, except for the low howling of the wind outside, and the soft sounds of her own breathing, sudden noise of heart beating in her ears. The lioness was huge, though if she was huge for a lion Rainey didn’t know. Maybe it was normal for lions to look like they could your whole head in their mouth with plenty of room leftover to spare. Rainey set her guitar in the seat beside her and moved to the center aisle. The big cat’s amber eyes followed her, but the rest of it stayed still as a statue.

She stood, almost shaking in dirty shoes, pants torn around the hem and a touristy t-shirt that she’d been proud of before but now seemed grossly inadequate for the event at hand. The lioness was looking more impatient by the second. Or, Rainey assumed it was impatience. She’d never had any cats, never been room for them when she lived with her mother the first ten years of her life or in the foster homes and beat down apartments she’d lived in for the next thirteen. She always heard that they liked respect. Didn’t most things? She bowed from the waist

“What the hell do you want.” Sekhmet said flatly. Rainey assumed she was Sekhmet at least, unless the ritual went really pear shaped and she accidentally summoned an entirely unrelated lion goddess.

They were off to a bad start. Still, she’d talked her way into the good graces of angrier people before. Though no one with such sharp teeth.

Rainey straightened from her bow, staring into the lioness’s eyes and not at its mouth, half open in a grimace. “I’ve heard and read stories about you, your beauty, your military prowess, your strength-“

“Flattery?” She said. Or, growled, rather. The lioness’s voice was in her head, but the big cat’s mouth hadn’t moved. “You pester me for hours on end with that noise just for flattery?!”

The lioness snarled so loudly that it shook sand from the ceiling. Rainey flinched back and her hand flew to the threadbare rabbit’s foot chained to her belt. She bit back the reflexive need to argue that her music was not noise.  The candles on the alter were stumps now, burning their last, and midnight stars were shining trough polluted haze of the sky.

“I need to make a deal,” Rainey said.

“No.”

“You’re not even going to hear me out?”

“No,” The cat repeated, “And I’m doing you a favor by not striking you down right now.” She jumped down to the floor, and was definitely not normal lion sized. Sweat started to bead on the back of Rainey’s neck. The broken chapel was growing uncomfortably warm, as if the lioness was radiating something stronger and more efficient than heat that was warming the air. “Why did you even call me? Don’t you have your own gods to help you?” She asked.

“We’re not exactly on speaking terms at the moment.” Commune with the wrong gods once or twice or ten times and suddenly you can’t even go into a church without braking out in hives. It was downright rude. That she found a place of worship that didn’t cause an allergic reaction made her hope this could go off without a hitch, but no such luck it was seeming. (If her mother was still around, she would have blamed it on Rainey never liking to eat black eyed peas on New Year Days. She hated the cloying way they sat on her tongue after she ate them, always skipped over them for pork. She’d doubled down on eating black eyed peas after was in hospital, in hopes that they’d give her luck when she needed it most. They didn’t.)

Sekhmet yawned, flashing canine teeth twice the length of Rainey’s middle fingers. “Unfortunate. But not my problem.”

Now of all times Rainey’s stomach decided to growl, sending a stab of futile hunger through her. She hadn’t eaten before the ceremony, hadn’t eaten the whole day in fact. Food was scarcer than usual in the dry desert that used to be Georgia, and she hadn’t had time to buy or barter for anything. She pushed it to the back of her mind. “You stand to benefit though, more than me even!” She had almost no time left, time to sell it. “No one really worships you now, right? Or at least a lot less people than there used to be. But I can change that before it’s all over.”

The lioness was silent, but she gave Rainey the most skeptical look she’d ever seen from anyone, human, animal, or deity.

“When I play and sing, people listen.” She picked up her guitar for emphasis and strummed a few chords. “I start writing and singing about you, other people start talking, the word spreads. Next thing you know you’re the god on everybody’s minds and lips before we all go under. That’s got to count for something, right?”

She knew it counted for something because Sekhmet’s ears pricked up in interest. She leaned forward and took a whiff of air from Rainey’s direction. “These abilities are from –“

Damn it, she didn’t have time to explain. “Another deal yes, now do you want in or not?” The candles were burning lower and lower, and even as she stared pleadingly at them they snuffed out altogether. The lioness’s soft glow was the only source of light in the chapel.

“It would be in very poor taste if she did agree,” A lilting baritone voice behind her said. Mostly on instinct, she moved closer to Sekhmet and the light and farther from the chapel entrance as goose bumps broke out on her arms.

The first time she met him, at a crossroads on the night of her 18th birthday, he bore more than a passing resemblance to a picture a classmate in third grade had shown her. It was a picture of the classmate’s father, a young heroic looking man in a warm looking jacket, with broad shoulders, dark round aviator glasses, and a crooked nose. Rainey had no pictures or stories of her father, so she imagined her own father to look like him, tall and strong and kind, and once he’d come back he’d pick her and Mamma up in his arms and everything would be okay.

She kept her guard up during the subsequent guitar lessons after their first meeting. She knew what she was getting into, who she was making a deal with. But the entire time he was endlessly, almost unnaturally, kind and patient and welcoming. The thought that maybe he wasn’t so bad seeped into cracks in her defenses like mold. Maybe it would be a good thing, to trade away her soul. The first time she caught herself thinking that, when she was warming up before a show in South Carolina, she ran to the bathroom and retched.

Even when he was only backlit by the weak light outside, Rainey could tell he looked completely different from the last time she’d seen him, both in his physical structure and posture; there was no trace of the paternal airs he’d put on before. He was white now, with thin blond hair and heterochromatic eyes that shone unnaturally in the dark. His suit, business suit instead of an aviator jacket, was untouched by the sand and ground fish bones that blew around outside and soaked into the wood of the chapel and into Rainey’s clothes. A Doberman Pinscher sat at his heels, with cropped knifelike ears and red eyes. It liked its lips, tongue tracing over un-canine, needle-like fangs.

“Long time no see.” Rainey’s voice was almost unintelligibly raspy. Some people, her late mother included, would say she should be all too familiar with this type of predicament. It was a feeling familiar to children when they break an object their parents put on a high shelf and told them not to touch, familiar to students when a test is placed in front of them and they realize they have not studied enough by far, a feeling familiar to an adult who does a double take on when that bill is actually due. It is a feeling and knowledge, deep in your bones, that you are completely screwed. “How’ve you been, Lucifer?”

He smiled, and it did not reach his strange eyes. “I’ve been busy. These are the end times, and people are much more willing to bargain. I can be in multiple places at once and even I’m getting tied of collecting all these payments.” He nodded to Sekhmet in acknowledgement, and the goddess did not indicate that she noticed him at all.

He walked forward like he owned the place, the dog following silently at his heels. “I wanted to follow up on this personally. I haven’t gotten to do a musical deal in a long time.”

Rainey tried to speak. “I-I don’t – “

“Hey now, no getting out of this. I gave you talents with the guitar and five good, fortunate years. Now it’s your turn to pay up.”

“Good? I spent half of it couch surfing and running from cops.”

“You were alive. I call that fortunate.”

In her defense it seemed like a good idea at the time. It’d been her dream as far back as she could remember, and the thought that she could use it to get money and food made it all the better. And it wasn’t like she was using her soul at the time. As things turned out, musical talent, magically inspired or not, was not as reliable as she thought it would be. When it came down to it being a thief often paid better than being a musician.)

Frustration was enough of a kick to ground her, and her words came out clear this time. “I’m not going with you.”

He stopped walking. He didn’t say anything, and his face didn’t change, but the bone-dry air in the chapel did. An almost electrocuting pressure forced the air from the room and Rainey was rooted in place and almost crushed by it. It was magic, or maybe the pure essence of power. It surrounded him like cologne before, though then it was just like a small well of charisma or fate, nothing compared to now.

Just as quickly as it flared up, the wall of force settled, and it was easier to think and more again without overwhelming fear. Sekhmet once again showed no reaction to anything going on before her, and had actual sat down and started to groom herself in Rainey’s peripheral vision. SO this summoning was a bust. Maybe if Rainey’d tried to summon a fallen angel, the rivalry might have been enough for them to take her in.

Lucifer straightened the already prefect edges of his suit. “But, very well. We can have a trial by music if it’ll stop you from making so much noise about it.” He cast a pitying glance at Rainey’s guitar, still half hiding on one of the old church pews. “Thought you’ll need an actual instrument to play with.”

“Hey, don’t you say shit about my guitar!” She yelled it without a second thought, and then desperately tried to backtrack. “Um. What do you even need my soul for, anyway? Maybe I can swap it our for something else, something better. I’ve gotten pretty good at swiping stuff, no thanks to you.”

Agitation was finally beginning to crack his cool. “What I need your soul for is my own business. But if you wish to get out of this, fine. I’ll give you a choice.”

He grinned, and this time it did reach his eyes, and Rainey realized she was probably worse off than she was before.

“You can keep your soul,” he said, “if you give me one in return, to take your place. Name anyone you’ve met in your life, alive or dead, and their soul will be mine. You’ll walk free.”

The dog’s stare bored into Rainey, and Sekhmet had closed her eyes and put her head on her paws, and by all appearances had gone to sleep.

Rainey stroked the coarse fur on her rabbit’s foot, and that centered her somewhat. It didn’t calm her. Nothing could calm her down, not with this. It would condemn someone to death, no, to something worse than death. Was that worth a continued life in a rotten, dying world? No matter what happened Rainey would not get to live out a natural lifespan.

Even as she wrestled with whether she was capable of doing something like that, her mind was already flying through the list of people she knew, people who could possible deserve this. Her absent father? That guy she passed on the street once who yanked on his dogs leash? She starting cataloging the long list of dead people she knew when the image of her mother came to mind. She looked stern and disappointed, like when Rainey had broke a neighbor’s toy when she was a kid and hid it from them for a week rather than admit what happened.

Rainey’s voice rang out clear as a song. “I wont trade anyone. You offered trial by music before, right? Lets go with that.”

Instead of summoning a new guitar, or a band of demons of anything, the king of demons yawned, or pretended to at least.

“I just wanted to see what you would choose,” He said. “Time is short and I’m not going to waste it on concerts.” He flicked his fingers towards her. “Go on.”

The Doberman’s lips pulled back, unveiling an impossible amount of bone yellow teeth, and it sprang into the air. It expanded in flight, folding outwards and upwards until it was more force of malice than any kind of mortal being.

Rainey only had time for fragments of thought, those mainly being: “Oh shit –“, “You bait-and-switch motherfucker –“, and “Will I have hands and fingers in Hell – ?”

But the pain and oblivion she’d been bracing for never came. The shadow halted in midflight frozen by tangible light, something like a solid sunbeam. It was hurled back and away from Rainey and landed hard, wiping out a row of pews in the back of the chapel, sending plumes of dust and wood splinters into the air. It did not rise.

Rainey and Lucifer as one took in the destruction, then turned around to see to where the hit had come from.

Sekhmet was awake now, which was much less surprising than that she wasn’t a lion anymore. She was tall, muscular human with dark skin clothed in faded cargo pants and a white t-shirt. The goddess moved to end of aisle, placing herself between Lucifer and Rainey. “She is sworn to me now.”

Rainey didn’t dare breathe.

“This guitarist has agreed to sing for me and serve me, in exchange for my protection. You did agree, didn’t you?” She asked Rainey without turning her head.

Rainey nodded so hard she might have sprained her neck. “Oh yes yep absolutely.”

The Fallen angel tried to paste on a smile. Behind him, demon coalesced back into a dog shape like a snail l retreating into its shell, and tried to lift itself out of the broken wood planks. The intangible paralyzing force rushed back into the chapel l, soaking air like ions before a thunderstorm. But it didn’t freeze Rainey in place like it did before. “Is she really worth all this?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But she belongs with me now, end of story.”

His eyes flushed solid red and Rainey could swear they were physically burning her. “Giver her to me.”

“No.”

The edges of her vision were tinting gold and the chapel interior was almost scorching. She quickly realized she might get caught up in a fistfight between divinities. Maybe she could sneak out the back unnoticed.

The fallen angel backed down first, the nebulous aura around him subsiding, and he sniffed and looked at Rainey like she were something smeared on the bottom of a designer shoe. “Fine. You can have her for now.”

And just like that he and the dog were gone, as instantaneous as flipping a light switch.

Rainey was lightheaded, both from her sudden reprove and dehydration, probably. She tried to bow to Sekhmet and almost fell over. “Thank you, so much.”

She lifted her head to see Sekhmet smiling in a not-particularly-pleasant way. They were smaller but she still had lion teeth. “Don’t thank me yet,” she said. “You’ve still got a lot of work to do for me. It’s best for you to focus on the task at hand.”

“Right.” But even now she didn’t know when to let things go. “But what made you want to help me?”

Sekhmet blinked up at her, not down, and she was a lioness again. Rainey wasn’t sure how she missed that. “My reasons are my own,” the goddess said, and Rainey wondered if all divinities were this frustratingly evasive, or these two were just the exception.

She stalked toward the chapel exits, door hanging broken on one hinge, and Rainey followed like a magnet pulled her, across the floor and out the door. “I’ll give you one, however; he lied to you. Your power does not come from him.”

“Wait, what?”

but she was watching the stars, apparently done with the conversation. The night air was mitigated by Sekhmet’s warmth. By now Rainey was realizing it wasn’t just literally heat, though that was also very nice – it was determination and daring and pure distilled vitality, and she basked in it as she watched the dark sky alongside her new patron.

The moment was unceremoniously shattered when Sekhmet let out an eardrum-shattering roar that Rainey felt rattle through her chest and bones. Her hands flew to her ears. They were ringing so much afterward she barely heard herself tell Sekhmet to give her a little warning the next time she did that, would you?

“I called an escort for you,” Sekhmet said. “They’ll stay with you tonight, then walk with you through the desert back to humanity tomorrow. Once you’re fed and watered we can discuss the contract further. Goodbye for now, Rainey.”

She picked up most of that though her still ringing ears. She wanted to keep pressing and ask what Sekhmet meant about her power, but the goddess was gone, with not a trace to show she was ever there or that the entire debacle hadn’t been a product of Rainey’s overstressed malnourished imagination.

She almost turned back inside when shaped began to materialize in the night, blurs more blue than black with faint traces of yellow around the edges. She stayed, and watched, because she doubted that her night could get any stranger or more dangerous by this point.

The shapes grew and sharpened, distinguishing themselves from one blurry mass, until five lionesses stood before Rainey. They were large, though not so large as Sekhmet had been, and were indigo like the night with golden eyes and speckles of flashing gold along their feet, backs, and flanks like stars. The one in the center of the formation held a bottle of water delicately in its teeth, and the lioness to its left held a bag of what looked like food.

She didn’t know what they were waiting for. “Um. Hello?”

That seemed to be the right cue. One by one the pride wound their way around Rainey, winding past her legs and waist and brushing her with their heads like giant housecats, and each time they nearly bowled her over into the sand.

The odd precession returned to the chapel, where the guitarist settled into a makeshift bed of magical big cats. It was wonderfully warm, if a bit pungent. She downed the water and practically inhaled what turned out to be beef jerky. After eating she played Wandering Blues on a her guitar, which had miraculously escaped any damage in the near-altercation between Sekhmet and Lucifer, and tried to ignore the sensation that something was watching her from above, or maybe below. When she finished the song, she put the guitar as outside the circle of lions as she could, and one of them, the one that’d given her the beef jerky that shed been calling Leona, licked at Rainey’s arm almost painfully with a huge sandpaper tongue. Rainey scratched the top of her head in return. “At least somebody knows how to be an appreciative audience.”

#my writing #please feel free to message me like longer thoughts and critiques #or even if i dont i hope you enjoy it #it needs like a lot of work but im just glad i got it done in the time i had

[chicgeekgirl89]

We’re All Right

A/N: So, I don't have any children, but writing this story felt like giving birth. Holy cow. It took waaaay longer than I thought and every time I thought I was done I went back and changed something MAJOR which took a zillion hours to work in. It was frustrating and annoying and I am SUPER pleased with how it turned out. It kind of went to a different place than I anticipated and I think it worked out for the best. Post “Payback.”

Get to her.

The words had been burning inside him all day but now they roared in his ears so loudly he couldn’t hear anything else. Nothing, until she screamed his name.

 He burst through the door and his eyes found her face, saw the blade pressed against her throat. He was barely aware of his finger hitting the trigger and then he was on his knees, ripping away her bindings and all he could focus on was if she was okay. Was she okay?

Yes. She was. She was all right. She had bitten her tongue, literally, not figuratively. Ferris, or as Deeks would refer to him from now on, ‘that asshole’, had definitely gotten an earful from her at some point during her captivity, of that he was certain.

He heard Callen come through the doorway, saw the uncertainty, the vulnerability in his partner’s eyes. She didn’t want them to see her like this, strapped to a wheelchair, at the mercy of someone else. It was not the ‘first day back’ impression she wanted to leave the team with. It wasn’t the comeback she deserved.

So he rescued her for the second time that day, in the best way he knew how, with his glib tongue. He didn’t even wait to see if Callen and Sam heeded his instructions to leave them alone, he just pulled her into his arms and it was like the world came crashing back into focus.

He breathed. She breathed. They were all right.

“You’re sure he didn’t hurt you?” Deeks finally asked when he managed to pull himself away, his eyes traveling her frame, looking for any sign of trauma.

“A few bumps and bruises. I had him on the ropes an hour ago but then his friends showed up,” she told him, rubbing at the red marks on her wrist where she’d been tied to the chair.

“Those damn spooks multiply like rabbits,” he muttered, finally looking at Ferris’ crumpled form. “What’d you get him with?”

“Box cutter.”

He shook his head. “That’s my girl.”

“It was a lot less than he deserved for threatening to cut my leg off.”

She said them casually but the words were nearly his undoing. His eyes slid shut and the breath left his lungs. After all she’d been through, to have that be Ferris’ parting shot…”I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely. “I should have been here.”

“I’m okay,” she told him. “Deeks, look at me. I’m all right. He didn’t do it. We didn’t let him. We made it. We’re all right.”

He inhaled. She was so much braver than he was. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

He helped her to her feet and then frowned.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Not close enough.” He lifted her off the floor, cradling her into his chest.

“Deeks!” she laughed as he maneuvered them through the house around dead bodies and debris. “I can walk! I’m fine.”

“I know. But I like having you this close.”

She continued to protest as they walked out the door, but he could tell from the way her fingers toyed with the curls at the nape of his neck that she was perfectly happy and comfortable with her position in his arms.

He settled her into the passenger seat and grabbed a handful of napkins, dousing them with water from a half filled bottle before he got behind the wheel. “Here,” he leaned over and gently wiped away the blood that covered his partner’s chin. “You want some ice for your tongue?”

“When we get home.” She frowned and reached for his hand. “Babe, what happened?”

He hadn’t noticed the bruising on his knuckles, hadn’t even felt it until now. “Oh, I uh, I may have hit Sabatino.”

“May have?”

“You were missing. What was I supposed to do? Wine and dine him until he gave it up?”

“Sounds like you all had fun while I was gone. What else happened?”

“I threw a chair,” he said guiltily. As his mind flicked through the events of the hours she’d been missing it barely felt real, almost like he’d been someone else. The rest of the world had ceased to exist in a way he’d only experienced once before, when she’d been missing halfway across the globe. He’d been completely absorbed in finding her and now that he looked back on his actions he could see they’d been erratic and uncontrolled. But he couldn’t honestly say he regretted any of them.

“Baby!”

“Actually it was two chairs. And I told Hetty if anything happened to you it would be on her.”

He watched his partner’s jaw drop. “Let’s be honest, she’s had that one coming since she sent you to Afghanistan.”

He didn’t feel bad about it. Not after all the ways Hetty had screwed them over the years. They’d all looked the other way one too many times and he was done. The cost was too high.

“I’m so sorry,” Kensi said.

“You’re sorry? I’m sorry. I’m the one who let that asshole kidnap you. If I had been there—“

“No,” Kensi told him firmly, “you are not blaming yourself for this. We have to stop doing that and put the blame where it really belongs.”

Deeks raised his eyebrows. “Kens…”

“It’ll be good for us. I’ll start,” Kensi thought for a moment, “I personally would like to blame the Syrian insurgents who dropped a helicopter on my leg. Because if they hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have met Ferris in rehab. See? Easy.”

“I can blame anyone I want?” Deeks asked.

“As long as it’s not you or me.”

“Okay, then I would like to blame Hetty for sending you to Afghanistan in the first place. Because if she hadn’t done that, then you wouldn’t have been kidnapped the first time or the second time.”

“Wow, you really do have some pent up anger about that huh?”

His eyes narrowed. “You have no idea.”

“Fine, helicopters and Hetty. That works for me.”

“Helicopters and Hetty,” he echoed quietly. It sat well with him. Finding a place to send the blame shifted some of the weight on his shoulders.

“So,” she looked up at him coyly, the mood in the car going to a lighter, happier place. “I bet you were pretty sexy throwing those chairs.”

“Maybe a little sexy. You would have to ask Callen and Sam. Ooh,” he winced. “Actually I wouldn’t ask Callen anything right now.”

“What’s wrong with Callen?”

“Joelle.”

“Joelle?”

“She’s CIA. Hetty knew.”

“Damn it!” Kensi cried. “I finally get back in the game and I still miss out on everything!”

“You didn’t miss out. You got to take a box cutter to Ferris, which I imagine was pretty therapeutic since beating up bad guys is a hobby for you. You slipped me that earwig while I was in jail, which by the way was very, very hot and slightly disgusting and which we will talk about later.”

“But I was unconscious half the time. Why did you let Ferris kidnap me?” she whined.

“I thought you said it wasn’t my fault!”

“It’s not!” she huffed. “I’m just mad I missed all the fun. God, poor Callen.”

“Yeah, worst break-up ever.”

“Comfortable?” Deeks asked.

“Mmhmmm….”

Her legs lay across his lap, her fingers entwined with his, her back pressed against him. They’d been sitting one the couch for an hour and she kept finding new ways to mold her body even closer to his. It didn’t matter that he could barely breathe or that his arm had fallen asleep ten minutes ago. After a day like today there was no such thing as being too close.

“So, I think we need some new rules,” he told her.

“Okay.”

“No more helicopters.”

“Reasonable.”

“No more new friends. We’re good with the ones we have.”

One eye cracked open. “Really?”

“No more Hetty. Just a blanket ban on anything related to tea or classic Hollywood movies or withholding information vital to the safety and sanity of everyone on the team.”

“Deeks,” she chuckled.

“You’re laughing, but I’m serious,” he persisted. “Let’s get you a bubble to live in or, better yet, let’s just go. Let’s go lie on a deserted island beach somewhere and leave all this behind.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d suggested it and every time the thought came to him he wanted it more. It didn’t even have to be a beach. A mountain or a cave would work, just as long as he had the assurance that she was safe, that they were together, and the world was okay.

 “Deeks…we can’t do that.”

“Why not?” he said, some of his anxiety slipping in through the levity.

“Because you would hate it. I would hate it. We would drive each other crazy.  And the team needs us. I know today sucked, that the last eight months have sucked, but we can’t just leave.”

He went silent. She turned to look at him, concern in her eyes. “Deeks?”

“I went crazy without you today. Ever since Syria, it’s like I can never really rest. I’m scared of losing you every second. I thought it would be better now that you’re home and things are better, but it’s not. And then Ferris took you because I wasn’t there. You were abducted because of my choices. If I hadn’t done what I did to Boyle, or if I’d come clean to Whiting months ago, I wouldn’t have been in that cell when you were taken.”

The words bubbled out before he could stop them. He’d kept his pain private for so long, but the day had worn down his defenses. He felt raw and exposed and guilty that he’d let his feelings escape.

“I didn’t know,” Kensi looked stunned. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been so afraid?”

“You had enough going on. I didn’t want to add one more thing.” He took a shaky breath, trying to steady himself. He wanted to be a rock for her and tonight he was failing. Just like he’d failed to protect her from Ferris. Just liked he’d failed to protect her from a crashing helicopter.

“Baby,” her face was so full of love and worry, “tell me now.”

It came pouring out. The ache that had lived inside him for months, the terror that gripped him every day. That it was agony to be away from her even as he tried to give her the space she needed to heal. He’d been shouldering his own burden along with hers and the weight was slowly crushing him to death. “I’m so sorry,” he finally told her, his eyes wet with tears. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry that I didn’t stop this from happening to you.”

“Deeks, this wasn’t your fault. None of it. Everything that happened was because of Hetty’s master plan. She would have found some way to take you out of the picture. Helicopters and Hetty remember?”

“Okay, fine, maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t change the fact that I wasn’t there today. The thought of you with that psychopath, alone and scared…”

“I wasn’t scared.”

He met her eyes, surprised at the strength and calm he found there. “What?”

“I wasn’t scared of Ferris. I mean, I was a little freaked out when he started trying to take a saw to my leg. But, I wasn’t scared. All this time in rehab, I’ve been afraid I wouldn’t be able to come back, that I wouldn’t be good enough anymore. But as soon as Ferris put me in that chair…I knew I was going to be strong enough. Honestly, you guys showed up too early. Another fifteen minutes and I would have had him.”

“Really?” he asked incredulously.

She smiled at him and suddenly there she was. His Kensi, looking at him for the first time in months. “Really. I’m back, Deeks.”

He kissed her, his fingers tangling in her hair, even as he felt tears stinging his eyes. He hadn’t known if he would ever see her again, the Kensi he’d fallen in love with, but here she was, as if she’d never been gone. It was as if the sun had finally emerged after months of darkness.

“Okay,” she pulled away and reached for his hands, gripping them firmly. “Enough. We’re done with this. Done with keeping things from each other so nobody gets hurt, done with struggling, done with being afraid. I can’t do it anymore and neither can you.”

She’d surprised him again. “What uh, what do you want to do?” he asked in confusion.

“Let’s just…be all right. Let’s move on and leave all the helicopters and hospitals and double agents behind us. No matter what else is happening with the team or with Hetty, let’s just decide that we’re all right.”

The relief that swept over him was staggering. He felt free, like he could truly breathe for the first time in months. She was back. He was back. They were back. As awful as today had been, it had become the final push they needed to put their lives back in motion.

“We’re all right,” he spoke the words, believed them, a grin spreading across his face as she smiled back at him.

The nightmare was finally over.

#NCIS LA #NCIS Los Angeles #Densi #Marty Deeks #Kensi Blye #Payback #We're All Right #Fanfic #Writing #Belly of the Beast #Densi Fanfic #Fanfiction #So much work #This one about did me in #Yikes #Season 8 #Helicopters and Hetty

[iftekharsanom]

Top 10 Animation Movies You should Watch

Moving a piece of paper to (the old way) or ink with billions of pixels (the new one) has made some of the greatest films of all time. Of the Persepolis Giant Iron,  critics had Selected top 10 movie of time ,here the movies are....

1.Waltz With Bashir

This extraordinary and extraordinary Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman Animation is the story of dm era, he sees as amnesia and his nation in Sabra Shatila dying during the Lebanese civil war. The title "Bashir" is the internationally admired Phalangist leader Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, who was involved in Einem complicated diplomatic and strategic dance of Israel with protested in 1982 in the country Israeli calf raids instructed Syrians die will contribute to encourage and PLO die, Assassinated Gemayel's dignity of pro-Syria three months after the Israeli invasion forces, was, but for the killing of Palestinians die unduly assigned. Were killed in the mysterious atmosphere of fear, anger and revenge, half Israeli troops in the stockpile districts and Sabra Shatila in Beirut near the terrible reprisals slaughter Christian militias in Lebanon the ease of dying civilians counted to 3,500 Palestinian. Israel declared to give Bad power not directly guilty; Kahan Commission accepted the blame or partially indirect Its; PLACES matrices and by Folman, because dying is historical fact is never completely resolved in collective consciousness information or the nation absorbed threatens Worden and always dying SURFACE to break the Save. Obviously, he chose to die from funds for animated film, digital video-derived live rotoscopy techniques like Bob Sabiston. It is and hyperreal, unreal at the same time: Strange landscape in a reality dying of dreams Between two and three dimensions something is. Flit surfaces and airplanes and die harder with hit, sharper colors and brighter than reality. It seems a long hallucination, SO and perfectly recovered to the memories of Folman's trauma. This is his journey through acid storage, die Apocalypse and He could have even created by Israel. It begins with themselves as directors of the self show: middle-aged, a beer having a man with military service in IT did Israel Defense Force. Friend says IHM be it through a dream of repeating persecuted harassed himself by wild dogs and says he thinks he deal with DM slightly in the 1982 Lebanon war. The director noting that there is much of the memory purveyors of their own participation at these events removes hat. Everything is blurred. It begins with the appearance of the director as herself, in middle age, have a beer with a man who has made the Defense Force with him the military service in Israel. His friend tells him that he is plagued by a recurring dream of being pursued by wild dogs and says he thinks there is something to do with the 1982 war in Lebanon. The director notes that he has far from his memory of his own participation in these events. Everything is blurred. Thus, he begins to seek out his former companions, to ask them what they remember, and therefore the animation takes a bit of oral history and psychoanalysis, and personal drama. They say strange and scary consequences on the screen type: sometimes it is not clear if these episodes were real, or if he dreams are traumatized, but tell the dreamer something important. However, the director does not know what he remembers, Sabra and Shatila or even if he really exists. As they move to their investigation moves closer to the truth, and the experience is always painful and confusing. Waltz with Bashir appeared in 2008, seven years after Richard Linklater's Waking Life, which uses a similar technical animation; It came to spread or not popularized, as it had become "handmade" by Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki Pixar and DreamWorks style in his golden decade of digital animation and not a personal signature like the work. But it's distinctive and compelling - and fits just one movie.

2. Fantasia

The popular view of Walt Disney is that it is a pragmatic war; Even die youngest quasi-biopic Saving Mr. Banks, the company's own sieving was published, showing the legend of pre-printed animation autographs to distribute the theme park. But the peak seamers popularity Set the Disney of the abstract films of New Zealand artist Len Lye inspired a great art concert film recognize dying Silly Symphonies thirty years of the series have come to a place to do the dignity where "rule implanted imagination." He knew how to risk dangers he nahm, told the New York Times, "not if someone does, new things to break have movies would not be where today is an idiot ... to be someone's Hat." Even with today's 1940's fantasy features is a remarkable company, the music of Bach, Tchaikovsky, Schubert and Beethoven with hand-drawn animation, calves teams of 700 people mixing, an innovative sound system to die for - Fanta who would Die Illusion A whole orchestra in the film, But Disney's war plan, not that the music die images accompany, but are invited instead, perhaps die most extraordinary sequence of the film to make the soundtrack - literally magnetic stripe on the white A separate film Receives surreal reacts Various instruments. From this stage of the approach move made in the studio marketer, RKO, nervous as the Disney way the movie in which Roadshow die calm days released, from city to city to move, proved to be an expensive mistake. Disney's regular fans did not die to get narrative, expert and classical music in the hated its literal. However, on time it is time for Disney to decline; Once known as your failure, now is your high watermark. In fact, his most famous section of the wizard's Mickey Mouse is not only a great work of art of the twentieth century is populist but also die apotheosis of thinking calves Creator Who would have waited to die that Uncle Walt Goethe brought masses?

3. Up

The economy, grace and order protection "Married Life" can be up to four minutes early in the film, it is one of the best performances of the animation. At the height of their flawless strips in the mid-Pixar 00s they ventured with the delicate, energetic and wildly uncontested adventure of Carl Fredricksen and Russell, alongside South American Explorers remain unusual. Up is dumber and more committed, showing that some other great animated films, but with the famous and rigorous narration of Pixar along with an animation indicates that it brings everything - from perfectly caricatured dramatic humans - to life roaring. Up is a story that could not exist outside of the animation, show with a flight of the house and talking dogs, but also the moments more realistic the value of the medium; Carl tired of moving through his house chia, vivid colors, thrown to the ground, balloons, the cliffs of South America were twisted and pulled wild. The film follows a tense border between fantasy and reality, so that the pilot dogs are as important and real as Carl's hunting pain. The emotional climax comes when the house is perched on top of Paradise Falls - the victims and joys of marriage and truly literal age powerful. The animation is made for kids in Hollywood still almost exclusively, which means that most of the big screen cartoons have similar soporific problems of self-acceptance and triumph. By doing well, but slips into deep rich editions since its inception, both an exploration of life's deceptions and regrets majestic Paradise Falls.

4. Spirited Away

The Japanese animation Hayao Miyazaki has to scare the leadership of Lewis Carroll to the gods of this rite rite of passage on the adventures of a girl in a bathhouse. For a moment, Chihiro 10 years is charged in the back seat, to be stuck on the way to a new home. The following, obviously, her parents are pig, she forgot her name and asked for a scrub "stinking spirit", who reserved an appointment. Sitting somewhere in front of a dragon and a witch. In a perfect world, children would be more movies like Chihiro's Voyage, which has a kind of dream logic, shake up an extravagant universe, but runs its own rules. Most filmmakers install their player as fixed notions of good and evil to sustain. Miyazaki, but sends jumped like troublesome and scary pinballs, so that the dead "faceless" Flowers on a carnivore all that consume. Spirited has the same list and volatile pace. It's a magic spell, a trap, a disaster for a happy ending.

5. chicken Run

Why did British artists cross the street? An agreement with signature Steven Spielberg. Has Aardman Animation, the claymation studio before "stop-motion" Bristol, an offer similar to Disney's few years rejected Spielberg's DreamWorks has occurred. "It used to be that the best we could hope for summit of our ambitions was to do something like Wombles or Paddington Bear," Peter Lord said, the first feature film by Aardman, Chicken Run with Nick Park Co-Regie. The Aardman / Dreamworks wedding after disappointing returns further dissolved the Flushed Away co-operation and The Rabbit's Curse. But Chicken Run, the first outside of the cooperative, was a success. At the same time, computer animation, smooth and thick, threatened obsolete, making old techniques, this film was boldly against the grain to the whole world, as if everything was done in someone's yard. It is essentially a film Pow chickens, rather brave British soldiers, rubber tips instead of hard top board. There is the efforts of Ginger (voice of Julia Sawalha) and her fellow chicken trail of Tweedy Chicken Farm - a fight that a boost from the arrival of Rocky the rooster (Mel Gibson) is replaced, the fled the circus and is recruited chickens To teach express Even in their most ambitious sequences as involved a scary machine to make cake, in which chickens are allowed to fall just emerge ready for the supermarket shelves, at the other end, Hand has the image of the earth made after the first Aardman shorts. You can feel the care that has gone into it. More than that, in practice, you can see fingerprints.

6.Persepolis

The German-Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi co-wrote and the film adaptation of his own co-director Persepolis, based on his memories of growing up during the 1979 revolution. His youngest colleague on the screen, Marji is a brave, rebellious sprite, Who adores Bruce Lee, the breeze with God and shoot prophet believed. His family includes the overthrow of the Shah's regime, but Marji acknowledges that Iran does not change for the better. By offering Hope and Glory John Boorman, the ultimate vision of life during the war, Persepolis honor the small concerns of its protagonists. Even with the escalation of the Iran-Iraq war and missiles to destroy the environment, Marji's main concern is to win a game of "My uncle was in prison when his father already" or a copy of Iron Maiden's new album score. Persepolis has a light touch on weight issues, while the designs accurately capture Marji's confusion in his rapidly changing world. If you made your uncle in a Dissident visit to the cellar Gothic cellar charcoal stained, soft and clear lines of his own body to make it look as if he had diverted a strange comic. At school, scarves and veils transform Marji and his companions into the rows of Russian dolls, peering shyly at shoulders from behind. The visual contact of the image is wonderfully refreshing. Lines or blocks of darkness veiled with white details (such as gas masks with silhouettes with two moon-circles for the eyes) diffracted simple blacks, are simple and poetic. Satrapi and co-director Vincent Paronnaud, do a little more: snow spots in a landscape soot Tehran show noted that it is not necessary to conjure David Lean an impressive sense of place. It is very gratifying also learn about using a top-level, monochromatic, almost minimalist animation describing a theme as chaotic as modern Iran.

7. Yellow Submarine 

Yellow Submarine the fourth Beatles movie in the space of four years and was in the summer of 1968, two years after the band stopped touring in a shower of gelatinous babies released. No, Not Only Physically: In light of the band's growing contempt for its advertising machine, this ambitious animated film is based not only on the hypothesis of the three previous Fab Four films, in which it interpreted versions of themselves as characters , They take the logical extreme inside, even voice. After their seminal album Sgt Pepper and Monkees pretty well surreal prevent to head for several months, they somehow managed the Beatles psychedelic aspects of the movie about the general public to pass. In fact, the film was quickly accepted by children who responded by Lee Minoff's script simplicity, which appears in the extraordinarily rich face that later claimed that his only influential pieces of songs were repeated Yellow Submarine and a date with Paul McCartney, Moptop voiced the Hope that the movie would contain "a monster". Pitiendo attacking the band against the killer music aversion to the Blue Meanies, the Pepperland and leaving frozen there in a state of limbo, the film was directed by the producers of Canadian experimental animation George Dunning with a budget of only 1 million dollars. Dunning's masterpiece was installed in the illustrator and art director Czech Republic and Germany Heinz Edelmann and the noble artistic creations that remain in the head, especially the sequence of Eleanor Rigby with its bombed streets of Liverpool and the brain Abstract Landscapes Lucy In the sky with diamonds. That says a lot about the band's careful treatment of their own image Yellow Submarine is still their favorite of their three feature films for United Artists. But perhaps it says more than the following year Let - the only movie of the "real" Beatles to catch on the verge of collapse - is not currently available on DVD. 8. The Iron Giant

If the new Star Wars movies were announced, there was a brief glow of feelings when Brad Bird's name was discussed. It is not hard to see why. While Mission: Impossible IV and The Incredibles showed that the bird style could bring in 1999 giant kinetic pieces also showed that what is missing for over 30 years of Star Wars: Colossal Heart. A loose remake of Ted Hughes's tremendously sad modern fairy tale Iron Man, The Iron Giant failed in publication. This is, of course, absurd. The movie has been called one of the best animation such as Disney, and the review is difficult to argue. Hogarth, a young boy discovers a huge metal robot that fell out of space, erased his memory. Hogarth teaches exclusively an ideology of the childhood world and the open eyes. The giant learns about good and evil, about death. It is a kind of local popular hero, but it falls against the military. At the end of the movie, after bird has the broadest courage Hughes and pacifism forced through their own retro-futuristic prism themes, has the heart strings drawn and tears were unsuccessfully caught. A hidden treasure in every respect, the huge iron was perhaps a little ahead of its time. Five years after its introduction, Vogel had made cornered to the power Pixar's Incredibles; An impressive film that shares many of the key messages of the huge iron. If I had suffered a few years and given complete CGI treatment, there is no doubt that the giant would have conquered all who have been in their way

9. Grave Of The Fireflies

Animation in Japan because they used an adult and raised status as in other parts of the world to some extent with the dark dare to employ as Disney-Pixar play themes: politics, metaphysics and of course the event in the Japanese history of XX century definition - nuclear annihilation. While the supernatural, the end of the days of Akira millenarianism (1988) was crazy a little crazy immediately 200,000 inhabitants of two bombs, Isao Takahata grave response to losing fireflies - published the same year as Akira - is another question: the human response Affected in how the war two normal children. The mission of the young Seita to her younger sister Setsuko worrying about a former bomb shelter after her parents are killed is irresponsible and proud - you can not stop yelling "for your bad aunt to come back!" While frogs think of eating to stay alive, but it is a kind of real heroism, the film is not reflected in the actions of selfish adults. See Seita Setusko and, as the rest of the country to normal slowed back; But his adventures of Robinson Crusoe, despite being condemned, have a merry purity condemned the hypocritical status quo. Although the animation of Studio Ghibli, a bit can be dated now, and this shows how you can draw what it would cost to capture on the camera: worm drop from burn victims, yes, but also the physical details of a girl's life - Oscillating bravely to face from side to side with the separation from the side of his mother, holding the remaining three drops eat only fragments of sticky fruit. There is a pathos that an actor four years could never convey. Do not think that a movie about child hunger was so edifying, or so beautiful.

10. The Tale Of The Fox

The Mutt Fox does a number of tricks hidden in his neighbors of the gullible animal kingdom with a frightened rabbit and a wolf. . The king of the animals, a lion, subpoena charges face, but the fox is any trick, including the king himself, when Ladislas Starevich this story told in the 1930s, was by no means new: the versions of the story of Reynard in the Europe was for most of a millennium in circulation, but the funds were to say, from scratch. Animation for 18 months 1929-1930 (and released after a long delay in 1937 in Nazi Berlin), the film Starevich seductive is often cited as one of the first animated films of all time; It is certainly one of the first properties made up of stop-motion animation. What is surprising is, eight decades later, how demanding it is. In 1930, 20 years of stop-motion tapes had conductive Starevich - began short films with dead bugs to make what is now Lithuania; After the October Revolution, he emigrated to France and then to the sixties to make films there. The fox is a testament to his abilities as an artist: the humanized form (an unspeakable badger Baron, cat courtesan Queen eyes) is remarkably expressive and film to make inventions. In the process of fooling the poor old wolf, née Gourmand evokes a vision of the sky, the imaginative flights of Georges Méliès (whose studio neglected in Paris Starevich used after arriving in France) recalls. There are extended dream sequences and in their heyday, when the king was angry at a total military action, extended high Burrow many roles and resonant strains comic siege involved. It's hard to imagine that Wes Anderson, in preparation for the Fantastic Mr. Fox, did not see the film Starevich with a watchful eye, and pick up a trick or two in the process.

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