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#Cooper is actually more likely to take the bug outside than kill it
vergess · 1 year
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meanwhile in gen 9 (spoilers i guess) the restaurants outright use pokemon names in ingredients and the food you can buy at restaurants. i personally always used kind of a hierarchy of sapience. like for example, gardevoir and alakazam, thats a straight up person and its bullshit to me that in universe they are still legally considered not people (i touch on this theme with poppy and her team a lot actually) but then things like growlithe are like. LESS sapient than psychic humanoids but still above irl dogs. if that makes sense. poppy's liepard and mandibuzz run on human toddler logic and can't read/write, her dusknoir and mismagius (oh yeah btw i evolved her team finally lmao) are literate but mismagius can't really write because no arms and act more like naughty teenagers because ghost type. noir, her gardevoir, is legitimately basically another human to poppy and is treated as such (not by society though, which noir loathes) and her musharna sort of straddles the line between human and animal in that she is literate but can't actually write because no arms but also has animal tendencies like wallowing in mud. (but if you call her on it she will vehemently insist that if humans can have mud baths and its fine, why does that make her just an animal??? smh) there are definitely pokemon i would not have pass the harkness test - mandibuzz, liepard etc. but fuckin. im sorry but alakazam passes the goddamn harkness test. even without the humans are also pokemon angle, alakazam can crush you like a bug. i feel like outside of some REALLY GRIMDARK TAKES you would fucking KNOW if an alakazam was like "hey fuck off."
TBH, given how many psychic and ghost types either used to be human or are smarter than humans, or actively hunt and kill humans using their intelligence, I feel like it should be more widely acknowledged by the intelligence-obsessed moralists that humans aren't even "as people" as, like, MewTwo. They aren't the fastest, smartest, most co-operative, or anything else. They may not even be the dominant species.
They're the best tool-builders, and as such they're the best "organizers" for inter-species cooperation, but that's it.
Pokemon clearly work with humans for their mutual benefit, as peers.
And just like pokemon eat other pokemon (and fuck other pokemon), so too does it only make sense that humans would also eat other pokemon.
Like, yeah, one can probably debate the relative capacity of a Shedinja to engage with human morality and communicate in a human comprehensible way.
But you can't debate the fact that it is a humanophagic predator that regularly tricks its human prey.
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strafethesesinners · 3 years
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@unleashedart and I made this cute ship fact sheet for Cooper and his OC Ryan. This is the template we used. Leashie also did the portraits. We love our boys 🥰. Bonus version with their faceclaims underneath because we also liked that one. Shoutout to @paladinthrockmorton for inspiring us.
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Touch it for Real, Part 3
Genre: Humor / Fluff / Eventual Smut
Warnings: OMG they were roommates / slice of life / slow burn / mutual pining / crude humor / cursing / virgin!baek / enemies to lovers / bug gets meta
Characters: Baekhyun X You/Female Reader
Description: You teach Baekhyun how to date. (Basically the Get You Alone M/V)
Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4
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Mia.
Mia, Mia, Mia. 
Oh she was lovely. You’d been chatting with her on Baekhyun’s phone for the better part of an hour and for a moment you forgot all about the man who now laid with his head on the other end of the sofa with his feet stretched over your lap and a phone held up to his face.
He was scrolling through something, giggling and typing. 
The phone you had down in your lap vibrated with another incoming message. 
Laughing emojis, a row of them. She was sharp. Wit and charm came through in her messages and you found yourself responding with an equally long string of laughing faces. The ones with tears leaking out their eyes. She felt so damn familiar and comfortable the moment you got past the awkward introductions and you really started talking to her; the jokes were easy and the topics were something you knew enough about to fake your way though thanks to Baekhyun’s many passions and his absolute inability to shut up about them. He’d held you hostage with so many video games and anime episodes, you knew exactly what she was talking about now. You felt like a complete pseudo pro. A well-read scammer. A faker but a weirdly genuine one. 
You went back to her profile and dragged each of her pictures across the screen with the tip of your finger, switching between them all. She was pretty. She was smart. She was interesting to talk to. She was perfect. Just perfect. A steady warmth had seeped into your chest as you looked at her. It was welcome and actually felt nice at first; if not a little bit unexpected. But the longer you looked at her smile, the more intrusive that warmth felt. After too long, it was sticky and almost too warm. You struggled to breathe deeply. You were breathing normally, there was absolute nothing off about your breathing, but each breath you took suddenly failed to satiate. Why were your lungs suddenly missing oxygen? They were misbehaving without any reason to. You closed out her pictures and returned to the chat window. 
She was asking about the latest episode of an anime. Something that was in its final season. Something you were sure Baekhyun would also be watching soon if he hadn’t seen it already. You could feel her excitement in her words. Something epic must have happened.
“Baek did you watch Attack on Colossatron last night — the latest episode?”
“Not yet—no spoilers, I’ll kill you.” His response was quick and you responded in a similar fashion in text to Mia; without the death threats. You weren’t quite that comfortable with her yet. 
Baekhyun shifted and moved a foot behind you, digging it under your butt into the gap of the couch cushion. You ignored the intrusion because you were talking to Mia. His soon to be brand new girlfriend by the looks of the conversation. You caught what you were certain was subtle flirting just below the contexts. Then outright flirting. She was sending you a picture from the dating profile you’d set up for Baekhyun. She had to have saved the picture to send it. It would now be saved on the camera roll of her phone where she would likely look at it again and again, admiring how good Baekhyun looked in it. 
She was commenting on how unexpectedly handsome you were and how most of the men who shared interests with her did not look like you. 
She was asking for a picture of you—err, of Baekhyun. She was having trouble believing such an attractive man like you was real and she actually used the word catfishing, careful to insist that she wasn't accusing you of anything; just that she was sure you looked just like some celebrity she saw on twitter and one couldn’t be too careful. 
But you were quick to cooperate and to agree with her need for assuredness. As a woman, yourself, you understood her suspicions instantly.  Yes, Baekhyun did look shockingly attractive in the profile pictures you posted of him. You could see how someone might doubt that he was real and he lived only 5 miles away and was now sweeping her off her feet with his engaging conversations and hilarious jokes. You’d be sure and make him thank you well for this later. 
The pictures of him were surprising, even to you, and you lived with the guy. You saw him every single day. Yet something about seeing him in these pictures, dressed in that black button up shirt and jeans and looking at the camera with a breathtaking natural smile; one he gave you so easily that night when you told him just how good he looked all dressed up. 
“Peanut, look at you! You look so fancy.” 
“Wow, I cant believe how handsome you are.” 
It only took a couple of sincere compliments for the man to unfold before you and the results on camera pulled you into an uncomfortable and unwelcome thoughtfulness when you looked at them alone later. Of course you knew he was handsome. You just hadn’t been prepared for how very attractive he would look on camera. 
You got all his best angles and the man had taken you off guard when you’d bravely asked him to give you a sexy look. 
It happened just at the end of your little makeshift photo-shoot. You were both a little tired, you could tell with the way he slowed down with his talking and his movements. You could always tell when Baekhyun was tired. Sometimes before even he knew it. 
The sun had gone down and you’d pulled him from your room into the living room where the lights from the city shone through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, creating a soft glow on his face. The moon was full outside. It was a chilly winter night and snowflakes drifted down to the street below. You were feeling perhaps a bit romantic. Perhaps you were a little bit grateful to be inside and warm and spending your time capturing the pretty face of your annoying best friend. 
You’d gotten a bit bold with the pictures and he’d been behaving so well, not even complaining when you asked him to lay down on the floor so you could capture the beautiful city-scape in the background of the shot. He’d gone still while you set up; moving furniture and turning on a lamp in the corner for more lighting on his features — you wondered briefly if maybe he had fallen asleep. 
You laid down beside him holding your camera up in the right spot to get something nice. His eyes had closed up and his breathing was even and slow and when you’d softly called his name with your camera acting as a barrier in between your faces, you’d expected it to act as more of a buffer than it did. 
“Baekhyun?”
When he heard you call him, his eyes opened and he turned his head toward the sound of your voice; the shift in his eyes was stark and breathtaking and he blinked them closed and then very slowly he opened his eyes again for you. 
“Hmm?” His lips stayed closed when he hummed a response.
What exactly were you going for here? The mood was set. The lighting and the scenery were in place. Hell, even the position of him was set —him laying beside you on the floor in the middle of the night like this when everyone knew it was much too late to be entertaining any of this nonsense. The longer you looked at him the more shades of pink you saw in his cheeks. The pinkness matched his lips and the lighting made every bit of warm flush on his face tell such a romantic story. He looked so very warm and inviting. 
You took a shot and you said it. If the picture came out well, that would be rewarding enough. 
But, you didn't actually expect a real sexy look. Not really. You’d expected something silly, or something goofy or something with an awkward smile. Maybe it was the nighttime, or the way he unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt and just let it hang open with the clear smoothness of his chest visible, but when he pulled his chin down and ran a hand through his styled hair, bringing it down just a little bit; giving it a messy and tousled look, you had to grip the camera tighter to keep from doing something dumb like accidentally dropping it. You could not understand the flash of nervousness you felt run through you. 
He lifted a single eyebrow. You had called him and it was clear from the inactivity in the camera that you weren’t taking any pictures of him. 
“Hmm?” He repeated the hum that came from the back of his throat. His eyebrow danced and it was the only movement on his face.
You inhaled a breath and you did it.
“You look incredibly sexy right now.” 
Despite the camera, despite the props you’d placed around him just so, his eyes seemed to seek out yours with purpose; one hand on the floor was within touching distance and the other hand rested over his forehead from when he’d ran it through his hair, the tips of his fingers landed over one of his eyes and it was so perfect. You felt goosebumps all over your skin.  
The moment his eyes locked into yours you gripped the camera as if your life depended on it. When his lips slowly parted with a gentle exhale and the tip of his tongue appeared between his parted lips and slowly touched against the corner of his bottom lip a surge of heat rose up the back of your throat. 
“I do?” He said with his eyes on yours as if he was looking directly at you; as if the camera did not even exist. 
You hit the button and you heard the shutter click. 
You allowed yourself a moment to look at the picture Mia had sent you. Only a moment though because she was talking again. She was instructing you to send a new picture right now, with your left hand holding your right earlobe. It was the kind of specific sort of picture that would prove that you really did exist. 
“Peanut,” you reached down and tapped his leg three times quickly, “Peanut, our new girlfriend wants a picture of you right now with your,” you held up your hands in front of your face, figuring out which was the left one, “left hand holding your right earlobe.” You held up your left hand for him to see and he pulled the phone down from his face to look at you. After a second his opposite hand was raised and he gripped his earlobe with his fingertips. 
“Is that your left hand?” You raised your left hand higher and lifted your eyebrows as you shook your head once. You felt a sense of urgency in getting this picture to Mia as fast as possible to calm her doubts. 
“It’s my left. My left is your right, stupid. Why do I have to do this?” 
You snapped the picture close enough that it would look like a selfie and sent the image to Mia. She was satisfied enough to send an emoji with heart eyes and you could feel victory at your fingertips. You could hardly believe this was working. 
“She thought you weren’t real.” You said in between messages and Baekhyun’s leg was shaking behind your back. He’d been sitting still for too long here and the nervous energy was building, you could feel it trying to escape from his limbs. He probably needed to go for a run or something or you were in for a long and noisy night of singing or dancing or whatever other shenanigans he thought you needed to suffer though. He hummed a non-response to your answer, clearly so distracted by what was happening on his screen that he couldn’t be bothered to give you any more of his attention right now. 
Baekhyun was not so quietly giggling under his breath and you looked up caught by that very particular sound of it. Something felt familiar in the sound of that giggle; more, the intentions behind it. The particular sneakiness of it maybe made you look up and it took you another second of listening to the way he stifled himself, tried to control the sounds of his laughter before a realization dawned and recognition struck you on the head. 
Baekhyun couldn’t have been giggling, laughing, texting, having a grand ol’ time on his phone because you had his phone in your hands. You had been talking to Mia for a whole damn hour, who in the hell was Baekhyun talking to and was that your phone he was using? 
“Baekhyun who are you talking to on my phone?”
His stomach bounced with stifled laugher below his shirt and he was typing again. His eyes secured on the screen of your phone and not at all looking at you. 
“Baek, who is that. What are you doing?” It wasn’t that you didn't trust him with your private conversations. He knew more about you than probably any other human being on the planet. It wasn't the problem with him knowing it. The problem was with that laughter. The problem was with what Byun Baekhyun might do with all of the things he knew about you and with whoever the hell had the misfortune of texting you at the exact moment when he had your phone.
“Ben,” Baekhyun said after a long pause and you searched through your recent memory for a person who had that name. You’d matched with some guys last week but you were certain there was no one with that name. 
“Ben? Who the hell is Ben? I don't know a Ben” You were leaning now and Baekhyun bent his legs up as soon as you moved, blocking your lean with his knobby knees. You leaned on the other side of them and he moved them to block again. 
The maneuver brought out the panic in you. He was blocking you from your own phone. He was up to something and he was now blocking you from reaching for your phone and you had just nearly murdered him in the kitchen over cheese, did he really want to do this again? 
“Give me my phone. Baek, who the shit is Ben?”
“I don't know. Some guy named Ben. Said he was some lady’s nephew or cousin or something. He knew your number and he knew your name, and wow he is—”
Oh god. Your co-worker Susie had done it. The son-of-a-bitch had actually given your phone number out this time even though you had successfully, you’d thought, dodged their high pressure tactics to set you up with some eligible bachelor who would probably be 10 years too old for you, balding, with bad teeth, or bad habits, or would be obsessed with his car or his muscles or some sports team and you’d have to make nice small talk with someone who’s interests, frankly, bored you to death until you could politely let the man down. 
And now, what was Baekhyun telling him? What kinds of horrific lies was this little gremlin giggling about over there. You tilted and reached for him again and he moved his knees again. 
“Bug, how- how do you spell hemorrhoids? Hem—hem—er—roids, no that’s not right. Let me look it up. It’s important that I represent you well. A strong, intelligent woman who can talk about her hemorrhoids.” 
You leaped then, over the stupid knees you flew and you landed hard — seated across his belly and the pained grunt he let out was satisfying to hear. He doubled up in pain while simultaneously shoving your phone underneath himself into the softness of the couch cushions and you watched it disappear somewhere below his butt where he assumed you would not dare to reach. 
“Baekhyun,” you said in as calm a voice as you could pry from your lips. Your teeth gritted together as you spoke and much of the sweetness was lost in the delivery.
Your hands were feeling the softness of the cushions that he laid on. You followed an arm that went down and disappeared behind his back and your fingers traveled to the end where you felt no phone at all, only his empty hand that you pulled up. You did the same on the other side, moving to the other hand and bringing it back empty too. On his face he wore a smug, self-satisfied smile. 
“Peanut,” your next attempt at a compromise pulled his name out in a sweeter tone and his lips turned up into a mischievous grin with teeth bared and all. To your own ears though, you really laid it on thick. This was your darling Peanut. You let your whine come through and you pulled your lips into a pouty frown.
“Bug,” he said, mimicking your overly saccharine tone with a tiny lift of an eyebrow on his face and a fake frown that didn’t touch the rabid joy in his eyes.
“Give me back my phone,” you said and your hands dug into his ribs hard as he reached for your wrists and quickly grabbed to hold you still with both of his free hands before you could do any actual damage to him. 
You struggled against his strong hands, reaching with out-stretched fingers despite his hold on you for a few more tickles before he tightened the grip and you could not connect any more attacks. 
“Give me back my phone,” he giggled back, again mocking your ineffective attempts to overpower him. You simply couldn’t do it. He was much stronger than you were.  
The childishness of this brat! You closed your eyes up tight as you forced yourself to take a deep calming breath. You could feel close to the edge again. Close to losing control. How many murder attempts did you need to commit today? Maybe you needed to enroll in anger management classes. You tried to count to ten again but gave up halfway through to threaten him again. 
“I’m going to get mad, give me my phone.” The friendly tone you had forced was gone and you could hear the actual anger in your voice now. Any reasonable person would concede. Any normal human adult would laugh it off playfully, say ‘okay, okay, I was only kidding’ and hand the thing over. A normal person would even apologize for taking it in the first place. 
Baekhyun was not a normal person.
“Ohhh, I’m going to get mad,” you heard him say in that same mocking voice and no amount of calming breaths could touch it. You could count to ten thousand and still want to destroy him. You squirmed all over and pulled at your wrists that he held in his grip and his hold tightened the more you moved until you could only lean, you could only fight back with one thing. The more you fought him, the tighter his muscles constricted and it became evident that you simply could not win this way. Your hands were useless to you. Only your head was free. You’d have to use it to your advantage, but how? 
You could headbutt him; break his nose. Break your head. Make both of you take a trip to the hospital during a global pandemic. Catch the dreaded disease. Lose your sense of taste and smell and potentially infect someone vulnerable that you loved. 
He was like a cat. Only interested in playing with something until it was dead and then losing interest after he couldn’t torture it anymore. You couldn't simply play dead. He had you trapped and you needed that phone back. 
You could bite him. Break the skin. Mean business for real. Make him bleed and make him cry. Make him pay for all of it. Give him a nasty scar on his hand, or on his neck or on his chest, maybe rip off his earlobe like Tyson did to Holyfield. Send him to the hospital during a global pandemic. Go to prison for assault charges. Get a nasty infection from a prison tattoo. Die.
Your struggle for a plan made you go physically still and you looked at his face; into his eyes and in those eyes sat all the usual bullshit and toddler behavior that you usually saw when he had latched on to something to tease you with, something he could play with and have fun with at your expense. Something he could exploit. 
You could use your mouth. 
You could use your lips.
You could use your tongue. 
What is this? Some sort of trashy rom-com? Would you really stoop so low, so early in the story? Kiss him to distract him, become a walking, talking, kissing cliché and an unoriginal failure of a human being? Get scolded and told to leave his home. Become homeless during a global pandemic. Without high speed internet access, lose your easy breezy data entry job. Get hungry and get cold. Possibly end up selling a kidney on the black market to make ends meet. Get a nasty infection from the shady surgery. Die. 
No. This wasn’t a cheesy romance story. This was your life. You’d have to live with the consequences of your choices and there was no way you would steal his first kiss just to get petty revenge.
This wasn’t enemies-to-lovers, this a violent revenge plot and you were pissed off god-dammit. How dare this idiot get you into such a compromising, such an undignified, such a frustratingly suggestive position and hold you captive like this. 
How dare he still be smiling through your entire inner monologue?
Didn't he know anything at all about women and the powers they possessed in their bodies? 
He flinched visibly when you dropped down; lowered your chest to his chest and you were face to face with the man. Your quick movement startled him and he loosened the grip around your wrists enough for you to rotate them before he tightened his hold again and watched you with wide eyes. That grin finally, finally fell from his mouth. His lips sat down-turned and pink. He’d gone positively pink with your quick movement. Your plan to move into him instead of struggling to get away clearly startled him. You felt the advantage at once. 
When you moved again it was only your eyeballs and it was to look pointedly at his lips before you pulled your eyes back up to look into his eyes. The slow movement made a bold statement, even to someone as clueless as he was. You were on top of him. He could most definitely feel the entirety of your weight on his body and your breasts were flush against his chest. And now, you had just looked down at his pink lips. 
Whatever steady and in-control breathing he had, stuttered and his body below yours went rigid with his eyes wide; obviously unsure of what you were about to do and much too on edge to take his eyes off of you. 
What became clear as you stared at his flushed face up close was that he had not thought this far ahead in his plan.
He probably didn't even have one to begin with. 
You moved closer to him and his hands released their hold on you again. You heard a gasp for air when his hand let go. You weren’t convinced he let go on purpose. There seemed to be a disconnected look inside his eyes right now. 
Instead of going straight for his earlobe and squeezing the shit out of it to teach him a lesson, you kept this going. You could not help it. You felt drunk on your own power and you didn't actually want to hurt him. You just wanted the damn phone so you could see what damage he had already done and begin cleaning up the messes. 
He swallowed and his lips opened to speak.
“W-What are you doing?” 
Nervous and trembling and uncertain; oh he was all of the above. Your free hand was moving now, traveling down the length of his arm to his flank when he moved again, this move felt much more frantic than the last. He grabbed your wrist more gently than before when you got close enough to touch him and he pulled your hand back. A feeble attempt it seemed, made by a man who had just come to his senses again after being in a daze. 
You leaned in. “Peanut,” you said directly into the space below his ear. You could smell him here. He smelled nice. Clean, and vaguely familiar. You remembered your shampoo that he still had and made a mental note to get it back from him. The scent of it on him was different than on you. The breath you took at his neck definitely smelled different. 
He was frozen stiff and when you pulled up to look at his face, his eyes were closed. He swallowed again and you reveled in the realization that you had not heard a single peep out of him since you began your counter-attack. Not a giggle, not a mocking laugh. Not a silly impression of what your voice sounded like to him. He was as quiet as a mouse. It paid to be pro-active. You felt free, as if you’d just been armed with some new very effective weapon that you had no idea would work so well. 
He had your hand again and was pulling — keeping you from reaching below his body to reach where you were certain your phone was stashed. Right here below his left butt cheek. Maybe even inside his back pocket. Either way it was there and you were centimeters away from it. 
So you went in again. This time it was a whisper. This time you went too far. You felt the softness of his neck brush against your bottom lip.
“Give it to me, while I am still being nice.” 
It was the exhale from your lips after you spoke that seemed to do it. The puff of air from your parted lips that drifted over his ear and warmed his neck, you felt him squirm below you and his hands moved releasing you all over and all at once. 
He was going now. He was leaving. You felt it happening below you. 
It was a tactic you’d used before when he tried to grab a hold of you and throw you onto your bed, or when he tried to wrestle something away from you in the kitchen. 
He went boneless. When you did it he would shout and laugh and lose his grip on you and you’d use the distraction to drop to the floor and roll out of his grip in one motion. It was much more difficult for him to do right now, being directly under you on the couch like this, but somehow he was vanishing fast. 
He moved so quickly it was like he melted from beneath you and he was pushing you off at the same time as he rolled, simply rolled from the sofa down onto the floor below in a single motion of retreat. 
You know that was where he went because you heard the rough thump of his body hitting the floor hard and you heard the grunt as he vocalized the pain of gravity having it’s final say. You were pushed with a force that made you roll onto your butt and below your legs you felt the rectangle of plastic and glass of your cell phone. 
He was moving fast. But he was also talking as he did it. 
“You are mean,” was what he said and he was halfway through the living room by the time you registered his complaint. 
Something about his fit irked you though. Was it such a big deal — so out of the question? Did he hate the idea of you kissing him, even if on accident that he had to overreact like this. 
“Oh settle down, It’s not like I was going to actually kiss you, Baekhyun.”
You’d expected to hear his bedroom door slam shut but he’d stopped with his hand on his door and turned his face in your direction. His expression was odd. 
Baekhyun was rarely upset with you, so you had very little experience with what he looked like when he was. He had been upset with others around you, but it wasn’t ever directed at you.
“I know you weren’t.” 
You could see it from where you sat and it made you stand up. Wait, was he really upset? At you? Because you pretended like you were going to steal his first kiss? Because you took something so precious to him and weaponized it against him? 
He was breathing hard and you took a step in his direction. 
“Baek, I was just—” 
“—trying to get your phone, I know.” His voice was cold and his words were short.
You suddenly felt like absolute shit. It moved fast and it overwhelmed you. You’d made a mistake and Baekhyun was upset at you. You’d acted carelessly and thoughtlessly and you’d hurt him. 
“We...we were playing around, I was just playing around, I didn’t mean it, Peanut. I’m sorry.” You could not help the thickness in your voice. You could not help how your voice cracked as you spoke up quickly, needing to get the apology out into the air before he could misunderstand any further. 
Before he could wake up and realize how low of a person you could be when you really set your mind to it. Before he could understand that maybe you didn't deserve so many chances to get your life together and get a better job, or be a better roommate, or make more money and pay more rent, or delete your facebook, or create better passwords. 
You realized you were crying when the wetness dripped down your chin and landed on your arm and as soon as you noticed you lifted both of your hands up to cover your face — before he saw, before he noticed or heard. You held your breath to keep from hiccupping or making any sort of sound at all and you closed your eyes and tried to stop the quiet gasps. 
You succeeded for the most part. 
It was the smell of him though. You did not notice that he moved, but you smelled him again, only this time it came with a warmth that enveloped you where you stood.  
“I’m not mad at you,” he whispered over your head and you inhaled through the snot that filled your nose, unable to get any air through. You gasped through your mouth instead and hiccupped through the breath. 
“You seemed mad at me,” you said into his shirt, the same shirt you’d cried into hours ago. This shirt would have so much of your messes on it by the end of the day. What in the world had gotten into you today? Maybe you were going to start your period soon. This was getting ridiculous. 
His hands rubbed slow and steady circles over your back and until the gasping stopped enough for you to lift your head and look into his face. 
“I’m not,” he said with more conviction the second time and you almost believed it. Had it not been for the strange way his eyes dropped yours so easily you would have. 
You didn't say that though. 
His lips parted once and his eyes grasped yours in that flimsy way again and his lips closed up again as he swallowed it away and didn’t say what he was about to say. 
You shook your head. He had to tell you. Whatever it was, you could work on it, do some self reflecting, or read some self help books. 
“What is it? Tell me.” Your insistence was desperate and his damn eyes refused to stick. It was making you crazy the more you noticed it. 
His mouth opened again and this time he inhaled deep enough to speak for hours and hours. 
“Peanut, what?” 
“Don't—” he began and you closed your mouth and looked into his face, dipping to catch them when his eyes dropped again and again. He noticed the dance you did and you saw the light dance inside his eyes. 
“Don't what? I’ll do it. Or I won’t do it. Whatever, just tell me.” If there was one thing you were good at, it was talking to this man. You could always pull it out. Whatever he had been sitting on, keeping from you, whatever he had deep down inside that was begging to be let out. You could talk to him. He could talk to you. It’s as part of the magic you shared with him. 
“Peanut,” you said again, refusing to let him close up again, refusing to let this go. He had to say his piece for the upset to move behind you both, so you could get past it. 
“Don't use your beauty as a weapon against me.” 
As soon as the words left so did his eyes, but that did not matter because you could not look into his face anymore after he said it either. 
Your…beauty?
Baekhyun didn’t look at you and see beauty. Impossible. You were a mess. Some days you showered. Some days you did your hair. These two events rarely happened on the same day. 
Outside you could pull off some-what put-together and even downright attractive when you wore the miracle bust enhancing bra you bought off some shady website he definitely told you not to enter any credit card info into, but inside you felt like a circus clown wearing a respectable young woman suit. Every day you worked to stuff the oversized shoes into your feet and struggled to zip them up. Every day you painted over your honking red nose with concealer in the hopes that it wouldn’t rain today and give you away. 
“It’s really shitty and really unfair to do to me.” He kept talking and you felt like maybe the ceiling had caved in on you. “I know who I am. I know my place and I know what league I am in.”
He said the word league with a whisper and you stared at his mouth as he spoke such nonsense words you hardly had any thoughts that made any sense inside of your own head. 
League? He was such an amazing person, but league? You’d heard some serious bullshit come out of his mouth in the past, but this? Seriously? 
He was a genius. He was beautiful inside and out and he was such a good person, a good person to you, a good person to his grandmother, a good person to his online friends. He was so good at whatever he wanted to do and he was really fucking sweet when he wasn’t being ridiculous. And even when he was being ridiculous it was so funny you usually didn't mind the ear deafening noise involved. He was a great dancer and an even better singer and he had so much to offer. 
He was shy. He was terribly embarrassed and debilitatingly nervous at the mere idea of talking to any other girl that wasn’t you and he took a whole lot of warming up to until he opened up to you even, but when he finally did, after tiptoeing around him for 4 months after you’d moved in and he finally grabbed a bowl of popcorn and sat beside you on the couch to watch lifetime movies with you, making fun of the writing and the acting the entire time until he was making fun of you for crying at the happy ending. 
He was reliable too. He refused to even entertain the idea of you moving out just because you could no longer afford the previously agreed upon rent after you lost your job. He searched for something to hold you over until you could get back on your feet and while the data entry thing was mind numbing, it was genuinely saving your life most days. You could at least pay your bills. You could at least force him to accept the much lower rent you started paying him again after you got your first paycheck. 
Oh god. League? 
You could feel it building again. The burning in your eyes peaked and you felt your face frowning down dramatically and the tears were flowing more freely than before. 
“You’re such an idiot.” You cried openly and his face changed at once into one of extreme concern. His hands waved over you uselessly, occasionally connecting to pat over your back in some attempt to stop this. 
“You are such a catch, you stupid idiot!” You were wailing very loudly. You could not help it. He was such an idiot. And he was such a catch. 
“Oh my god, are you yelling at me right now? After everything you’ve done to me today, now you are yelling at me and calling me names. Great. Just Great. Here, my face doesn’t hurt, why don't you punch me in the face too.” 
The sarcasm made you half laugh half choke in the middle of a particularly strong sob and you coughed with your mouth open to be able to breathe. Your nose was still useless. 
“Jesus,” he said to himself, “my mouth was open.” 
You were being steered. Your eyes were still closed and you were pushed now. You didn't really want to move but your stubborn legs saved you by taking a step instead of letting you fall flat on your face. You opened your eyes when you felt a fresh cold breeze against the wet surface of your cheeks and you saw in front of you the contents of the freezer. 
There were some frozen veggies. Some ice in a bin. Something meat-like in a freezer bag. And about six different boxes of various ice creams. Most of them chocolate. 
“Get one,” he said and his hand was pushing your elbow up and steering your hand toward the open box of chocolate popsicles. 
You grabbed with your open hand and he pulled your elbow back like you were a claw machine and he was working the lever. 
You grasped the popsicle between both of your hands with a small smile building against your will. 
“Eat it,” he said from behind your head and you were already ripping at the plastic wrapper. You didn’t even have a chance to throw away the wrapper when his hand was pushing at your elbow again. It bent upward and the chocolate plopped right into your open mouth. 
“Bite,” he said. 
You bit. He didn't have to tell you to chew and swallow. You knew how to do the rest. 
After the ice cream you were seated on the sofa next to him and he pulled out a portable game system to keep him entertained while he pressed play on the movie he’d put on the big tv on the wall. 
It was Bridget Jones's Diary. You had seen it enough times to know the entire movie by heart and still, still you laughed at every joke, swooned at every steamy look, and squealed like a piglet at every kiss scene. It literally did not get old. You could fall asleep and wake up watching this movie for the rest of your life and be as happy as ever. 
After he’d felt you’d been babied enough for him to trust you not to dissolve into a fit of disaster without him, he left you alone to finish your movie. He said something about a bug he was working on fixing and you could hear him working from behind his closed door in his room. 
He had been quiet as he worked. He usually was, save for the occasional song he sang along to, or work sounding phone call he took. 
The credits were rolling on your happy ending and you could feel the beginnings of the first few period cramps twinging inside of your abdomen. 
Everything made sense now, as it usually did whenever your period began. 
You’d just stood to head toward the kitchen for some pain medicine when Baekhyun’s bedroom door was abruptly pulled open.  
He bolted through the doorway and his phone was in his hands, his eyes were wide. Panic was written all over his face as he searched the room for you and finally made eye contact with you in the kitchen. 
You had a bottle of pain reliever in one hand and another popsicle in your other and you were trying to figure out the logistics of getting the bottle of medicine open without having to put the sticky melty treat down anywhere and things weren’t going so well. Things were getting drippy. 
Baekhyun arrived then and you beamed a wide and genuinely happy to see him smile. He would help you. He would open the pills. He would stuff you full of them to stop the pain. 
At this point you didn't even care how many. You’d take however many the Gods decided to shake free from their plastic prison. 
“Help,” he said, walking by the medicine you held out to him with his phone displayed in his hands. “Help me, she...our girlfriend, Maya, she—”
You gasped at his mispronunciation and you lifted your popsicle hand toward his face as you made the sounds with your mouth, “Mia. Like Mee-uh.”
“Mia, Maya, Moira, She is — she is talking to me.” His eyes were wide and they were crazed. 
“She’s saying things and she’s really fucking smart and clever and she’s saying things to me, Bug. She’s, oh god, -the fuck didn't you tell me she was cute. Fuck. You have to help me. She thinks I’m cute too. Oh God. What do I do? What’s next?”
He was breathless when he was done and both of your hands were still full. Your popsicle was beginning to drip down your wrist. You would have to clean it up before you got ants. You still had some medicine to take too. 
He was pacing. He thought she was cute too, it wasn’t just you who thought so. He said it himself. Although he reacted this way with nearly every girl you had seen him interact with. Hell, just last week he made you answer the door for the delivery chicken because the girl was cute and he wasn’t about to scribble his signature all over her hand by accident. 
“Baekhyun, I already laid the groundwork for you.” Maybe the day was finally catching up to you but you felt suddenly very tired and in no mood to play make-believe with him right now. 
“What does that mean?” His face betrayed his utter cluelessness and you sighed deeply, feeling much of the same melancholy mood return to you despite the chocolate and your favorite movie still fresh on your tongue. “What does that mean? I don't know what to do. You were going to help me.” 
He was right. You shouldn’t just abandon a friend in need like you’d abandoned the popsicle in the trash can just now. 
“You have a new episode of your show to watch. She also likes that show. Why don't you stream it together?” 
His eyes lit up and his smile was wide and beautiful. Then he was spinning on his heels without even so much as a glance back. He typed into his phone and had nearly reached the door of his bedroom without even acknowledging your help when at the last minute you caught the look he shot you. It was a bright smile. He was excited and his smile reached his eyes. 
“She said yes,” he said, “thanks, Bug.”
His door closed and you reached for the bottle of pills. Grabbing just two today, you downed them quickly and retreated to your room with a gloomy, lonely, little storm cloud floating stubbornly over your head. 
Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4
Tag list: @j-pping @blahblahblah-boo @his-mochi-cheeks @amyeonzing@littleflowercrown13 @baekinmylife @insta1010 @nana-banana @f4ncyvelvet@bbhbeth  @totallynerdstuff​​  @byunbabybaek​​  @beg0neth0t420
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boop-le-snoot · 3 years
Text
SPELLBOUND I dr strange
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Dr Stephen Strange x punk!f!reader
[no y/n, no "you", no name, no reader description - piercings & alternative style of clothing mentioned, race/age/body type neutral, she/her pronouns]
please let me know if you want to be added to my dr. strange taglist!
Joining the "meet-ugly" series, we've got Reader graffiti-ing (for a good cause!) the Sanctum on a cold, rainy night. Stephen is pissed but then sympathetic. Snark all around and then you get laid. That's it that's the story. Word count ~6.6k. Explicit smut, light magical bondage, dom!Strange. Fic soundtrack - Siouxie and the Banshees - Spellbound.
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On a terrible, horrible, no-good, cold, rainy and windy November day, Sorcerer Supreme Stephen Strange was feeling - surprisingly well, considering... Considering his workload and the ragtag team of buffoons he was forced to cooperate with. Something something, damage minimisation and faster response time. It wasn't like Stephen actually listened to Rogers' monotonous monologues. Stephen only agreed to accompany the Avengers on missions because Wong had started ignoring his calls for back-up.
A relaxing evening with a book or two, topped off with a cup of the best Ceylon tea and a cozy atmosphere brightened up by happily dancing flames in the fireplace. The tension seemed to melt off the sorcerer like last springtime ice; his shoulders sagged and the persistent frown smoothed his usually disgruntled expression into something neutral, if not outright peaceful.
Wong had left the sorcerer to enjoy some alone time by himself, having had a strong feeling that very evening was bound to be one of the rare, calm ones, not an interdimensional threat in sight.
By the time midnight rolled in, sleep wasn't on Stephen's mind, the book he was reading had consumed his mind and pulled him inside of it. The exact moment the defense wards around the Sanctum had begun to signal distress to the Sorcerer Supreme escaped him; he attributed the sudden flux of anxiety for excitement from discovering the ins and outs of a new spell.
After some moments passed with Stephen still engrossed, the Sanctum itself had started bugging it's defender. With a shout of surprise, Strange jumped up in the air, book flying, landing on the couch as the man rubbed his arm where concentrated magic of the ancient house had stung him. Taking long, irritated strides, not bothering to put on any additional clothing layers, Strange stormed off towards the main entrance, muttering to himself, "One evening... Just one evening in peace..." Adding a few choice expletives as the door flung open on it's own.
Strange had cast a spell on his way outside, prepared to surprise the intruder but the magic flickered as he spotted a small figure, dressed in all black, holding something shiny to the outer wall of the building. The person appeared oblivious to his appearance, hood drawn over the face tightly. They were shivering every time the wind howled along the street but didn't relent in their mischief: the shiny object in their hand left a neon red trail, reflecting just enough to make out separate letters under the dim light of a nearby streetlight..
"What. Are. You. Doing?" Stephen knew his voice could be... Intimidating. He spoke louder than necessary for exactly that reason: he wasn't about to magically attack some kid, he'd much rather scare the little brat shitless.
To his surprise, the hooded head turned almost mockingly slow, revealing only what could be called as a bad case of racoon eyes on a feminine face. The bottom half of the face was partially hidden by a black-and-white checkered scarf but even with it, Stephen had no trouble seeing the various metallic piercings that decorated the woman's face. It was an adult woman, he was sure of that - the eyes staring fiercely back at him were too standoffish to belong to a punk kid. "Spray-painting your house, dumbass," The voice confirmed Stephen's theories: even carried away by the howling wind, it carried enough venom in it to kill a snake.
"No, you aren't," With the newfound revelation, Strange had no qualms quickly casting a spell to tie the little vandal's hands together with a rope of concentrated magic. "I'm calling the cops," He announced making a beeline for the phone he had left in the Sanctum's living room.
In his blind annoyance, the sorcerer had forgotten that the spell he had cast essentially forbade the victim from being further than ten feet away from the caster; loud cursing followed his footsteps as the vandal was forcibly dragged into the house behind the sorcerer, none too gently either, as Stephen's ruined mood made his strides that much longer and quicker.
Abruptly, the man stopped, turning around and suddenly recieving a chestful of petty criminal; a collective oof was overshadowed by the Sanctum's doors loudly banging shut as if the house itself didn't want to let outside any more warmth than strictly necessary. Two round, shining eyes stared upwards at the tall sorcerer, growing increasingly concerned.
He blinked a few times, arm still awkwardly outstretched to prevent the woman from toppling over both of them. She backed away slowly, eyeing him with wariness. "Look, I'm sorry, okay? I thought this building was abandoned," She spoke slowly as if not to startle him. "And I know you're one of the good guys, I saw you on the news, but can I just go?"
One, her tone was growing increasingly panicked, raising in pitch, eyes darting across the room and to the magic binding her wrists. Two, Stephen felt his face heat up the second he realised the... Inconvenient situation. He had forcefully dragged a woman into his house with her wrists bound and slammed the door shut behind her.
"I'm... Sorry," He mumbled, feeling tongue-tied, all too aware of the sudden influx of blood rushing to his cheeks. "I didn't mean to... Frighten you," He spoke after clearing his throat and raising his hands in surrender. The binds around her wrists fell with the gesture and the woman immediately began rubbing her wrists with stiff fingers. "Do you, um, need help getting home?" Unused to finding himself in such an awkward situation, Stephen looked anywhere but the woman herself.
"No," She replied firmly, just as a particularly strong gust of wind rattled and banged the wooden blinds outside one of the windows. The woman jumped slightly, her breath loudly stuttering in the quiet hallway. "Man, how do you even live here? It's fucking creepy," She more muttered to herself rather than addressed him, but Stephen heard it nonetheless.
"It takes some getting used to," He replied honestly, eager to dissipate the alarmed awkwardness. His brain wasn't being helpful at all: the sorcerer was torn between offering the woman a place to warm up - she was shivering, dripping icy rainwater right on the hardwood floors - and simply conjuring a portal to transport her right into the closest subway station.
"I bet," She snorted almost mockingly. "I've been in a lot of old abandoned buildings and this is by far the weirdest one even if it's not really abandoned," The woman appeared to feel equally awkward now that they've had established Stephen wasn't a threat. She hid her shaking hands in the sleeves of her oversized bomber jacket, standing almost perfectly still, a chameleon to the twilight of the hallway in her dark clothes.
"This place is saturated with magic which could be unsettling to a person who hasn't been around it much," Stephen found himself explaining the phenomenon, much like his teachers in Kamar-Taj had told it to him. "Would you like to dry off at least?" He shot her a quick look; the woman certainly didn't look or feel like a magical threat.
She fiddled with the sleeves, looking torn between fear and curiosity; it was clear that the woman was intrigued by magic and her eyes, while partially hidden by make-up and the hood of her sweatshirt, were bright and clever. "Um, you're not gonna violently murder and eat me, right?" She asked timidly, but her mind was obviously already made up.
"I eat little girls for dinner," Stephen gave into the urge to roll his eyes, turning around and motioning her to follow him. The t-shirt he was wearing didn't do much for protecting him from the pouring rain and gushing wind outside and the five minutes he'd spent outside of the house made him crave the warmth of the fireplace.
"I'm bitter, you'll choke," She replied petulantly without missing a beat but obediently followed him into the room, leaving wet footprints on the floor.
The living room greeted them with a brightly crackling fire, a gust of warmth surrounding the couch and the immediate space around it. The woman didn't attempt touching the various magical knick-knacks placed haphazardly throughout the room, only stared at everything with eyes as wide as saucers. The childlike wonder was endearing to see, the sorcerer had to begrudgingly admit to himself.
"I suggest you place your shoes and jacket closer to the fire for them to dry faster," Stephen finally interrupted her mute staring contest with one of the magic objects hanging on the far wall. It was a battleaxe of Asgardian origin and Stephen felt slightly uncomfortable with the interested way the woman was eyeing the weapon.
"Interesting collection you have there, count Dracula," Round eyes met his own, the owner slowly unzipping and stripping off the outer layers of her clothing. Under the spacious jacket was a no less baggy hoodie and a pair of black, tight-fitting pants. The woman's neck was adorned by a variety of silver chains and a choker with spikes at least half an inch long; the tips of her shaky fingers were painted black.
The jacket was placed on a chair closest to the fireplace. Her shoes went next - massive, black platformed monstrosities - and she immediately became that much smaller, losing a good inch or two of height. Her hood fell, revealing a messy bed head and the black color smeared under her eyes, proving she'd spent a good few hours outside in the pouring rain.
"Aren't you a little too old for this?" Stephen retorted back, vaguely gesturing at the style of her clothing. He wasn't very happy about being snarked at in his own damn house.
The woman chuckled good-naturedly, guardedness paving way to genuine amusement. "I could say the same about you. Don't you all graduate Hogwarts at seventeen?"
Despite himself, the corners of Stephen's mouth lifted upwards. The tone of her voice was teasing, nothing like Stark's poisonous mockery of Stephen's skills. "I guess that makes us even," Strange invitingly gestured to the loveseat opposite his couch, picking up a fleece blanket to give to the shivering woman. "Would you like a cup of tea?"
A shy smile stretched her lips as she ducked her head in a nod, gratefully palming the blanket and immediately curling under it into a snug ball in a corner of the loveseat. The woman looked so cozy, Stephen's mood raised by a smidgen seeing the satisfied sigh that left her mouth as the temperature around her climbed. He might have changed careers but the doctor in him would always be satisfied with a content and healthy patient.
Returning with a steaming hot mug of herbal liquid, Strange found the woman poking away at her phone, concentrated and unaware of her surroundings. He cleared his throat and she lifted her eyes, skimming briefly over his shaking hands to settle on his face, the look not long enough to be considered rude but not brief for him to ignore it completely.
"Thank you," Her voice was quiet as she accepted the tea, gently blowing into the mug. He didn't think twice before promptly shoving his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and that gave him away: the woman's voice had reacquired the teasing tones as she very obviously attempted to distract him: "I'm surprised that Muggle technology works here."
"We have wi-fi," He snorted, secretly grateful for the distraction. "I can't help but wonder what prompted you to pursue your... Artistic endeavours... On my house," Strange rumbled lowly, allowing himself the curiosity. In all his years of living there, not one single person attempted a petty crime on the property.
The woman's face darkened, eyes suddenly boring into the fire, rivaling it's intensity. "The building opposite you? There's a small newspaper, yellow press, gossip column type of shithole," The venom in her voice was sudden and surprising, startling Stephen into paying attention. "For the past few weeks they've been backing up a company that dumps toxic waste right into the North River. It's been making local strays sick," The more she spoke, the higher Stephen's eyebrows rose. "Now even reputable sources are citing that piece of journalistic toilet paper and mayor is now 'reconsidering'," The last word was enunciated particularly poisonously, "The investigation launched into the company. We've been handing out leaflets and my friend acquired information that there is going to be a live TV stream in front of the building. I was hoping the cameras would capture the message," She finished in one breath, a ball of shivering punk. It was unclear if the woman was still cold or the shivers came from the anger inside of her. It was obvious she was passionate about the subject.
The concern quickly grew into confusion, the sorcerer finally settling on fond amusement. "And how would graffiti help to convey your message?" He couldn't help but question the actions of the woman.
"It's punk, writing "you're killing innocents" in red paint. People notice loud statements like that," She replied confidently, a stubborn tilt to her chin. "Animals feel pain too." She added, seeing the sorcerer's sceptical face.
Well, he couldn't exactly disagree. In theory, she was right in both of her statements. Only people more often than not chose to turn a blind eye to things that didn't inconvenience them directly. There were more efficient ways to raise awareness than vandalizing property. He told her that much, expecting a scoff and an eyeroll in return.
"Yeah, and we've already sent out dozens of letters and petitions to the mayor," The eyeroll came, but not for the reason he thought it would. "This is literally, like, the last resort before I go down there and burn their fucking warehouse down. I know the people who are forced to put down the suffering animals, and honestly, I'm this much away from willing to become a felon if that means it stops all of that bullshit," She wildly gestured with her free hand, bracelets and chains rattling with the force of her movement. "Judging by your sunny attitude you're either a lawyer or a doctor, so you must know how it is to see misdeeds being done and feeling utterly helpless," The once-over she gave him - the sorcerer didn't miss it, surprised at the woman's perceptiveness.
"I see," He nodded, more to himself. "And yes, I used to be a doctor," The words, speaking in past tense, didn't come easy to him even after all this time. He mourned the loss of his motor skills, the loss of his career and a painless existence.
"So you must know how it is, to have to choose between your own comfort and the well-being of others," She remarked conversationally. "With that superhero side-gig you've got going on." Apparently, her perceptiveness was just that good. The woman didn't question the past tense of his career, didn't ask bothersome questions - obviously, she put two and two together. What kind of doctor had malfunctioning hands?
"Unfortunately, I do," Stephen nodded kindly, sipping his own cup of tepid tea. "I have to admit, I am surprised," The sorcerer was willing to throw a bone to the strange woman: she was nothing if not kind and polite even after thinking he was abducting her for illicit actions. "You are very perceptive."
The laugh that resonated in the wide room was melodic, playful. "Yeah, I get that a lot. Usually people can't see past my choice of clothing, thinking that I'm some stupid druggie or whatnot," With a wave of her hand, the woman expressed a great deal of irritation. "To be honest, the more people like me I meet, the more disappointed I am in what society considers normal. Every day I lean closer and closer to anarchy..." The last part of the sentence was said almost dreamily.
The sorcerer found himself smiling genuinely, not at all in disagreement with the woman's words. He'd himself once been a member of a social circle his newfound acquaintance would probably enjoy tarnishing; the subsequent accident and injury had shown him the less pleasant side of that part of humanity. As a disabled person, life wasn't even half as good - pity and mockery followed him for months on end, making recovery seem as unreachable as the horizon. Still, the opportunity to tease the little punk was not to be wasted: "You're going to argue ethics with an ageless sorcerer?" Technically, he didn't lie. If he wanted to, he could stop his aging process at any time, just like his old mentor had done.
Her eyebrows rose, eyes sliding over his reclined body with a comically slow speed. It was like her stare left a lingering sensation. "Looking not half bad for your age, mister magician," The little smirk looked positively mischievous on her face, making the woman appear akin to a pixie up to no good.
It wasn't as if Stephen didn't know he was considered attractive. After the accident, it was simply hard to see himself that way, shaking, clumsy hands and all. Yet the temptation was too strong; he gave into the harmless flirt with practiced ease. "Magic," He snorted, making little sparks burst from his hands in an array of colorful dots.
The woman's bottom lip disappeared behind a row of white teeth. "I have quite a lot of inappropriate comments and questions right now," The tone of her voice was once again back to it's default: teasing and defiant, like the energy that surrounded her. "How about you tell me about that mighty axe on your wall? Did you borrow it from Thor to frighten intruders?"
The confession raised a laugh from the sorcerer, the subsequent question throwing the man into a hearty full-belly cackle. The notion of borrowing a weapon from the hot-headed god was an absurd one on it's own; just as if not less likely was the idea of having magical artifacts scattered around the Sanctum for the sole purpose of spooking someone. He told the woman that much, explaining the importance of conservation of magical artifacts and unavailability of them to the general human populace.
Curious as a child, the woman prodded him for an interesting story; feeling jovial, Stephen obliged, finding himself surprisingly invested in the storytelling process as she looked up at his pacing form in utter captivation. If only all the apprentices he'd had to teach would have been half as open and interested in his teachings, he found himself thinking as he paused for the woman to gather her wits. There had been a time when he felt the same way, going first time into a new dimension, setting foot into a different plane of existence, but those feelings had dulled under the burden of protecting their current reality.
Hostile cross-dimensional entities weren't willing to give sorcerers weekends off. There wasn't any time to explore places that weren't necessary. He told the woman that much, finally settling down beside her, elbows on his knees and face warming up in the heat of the burning fireplace.
"Respectfully, that's bullshit," She huffed, untangling herself from the cocoon of blankets to place her empty mug on a nearby table. "If you had a doctor's license, you should know about professional burnout," The slightly whiny, chastising tone surprised Stephen. He didn't expect kindness from a stranger, and when he got it, he was clueless as how to act. "Even Iron Man and Captain America take vacations," She drove her point home, sitting down next to him. "I respect you and what you do for us simple folks but you gotta take care of yourself, too. An eternity living like that sounds awfully long."
"It is," He replied thoughtlessly, having came to the same conclusion ages ago. Having nothing more to add, nothing more to defend his lifestyle with, Strange and the woman settled into a thoughtful silence, each of them musing to themselves. The wind and rain outside howled, banging against the window with fury, little white droplets of hail banging against the glass. Getting the woman home in this weather, in the dead of the night wasn't an option anymore - they had spent a considerable amount of time talking and the darkness outside the window had only deepened. Stephen had lived in NYC long enough to know it wasn't safe even without magical threats. "I should prepare you a room. I cannot let you get home on your own in this time and weather," He looked to the side, finding the woman much closer to himself than expected. Under the smeared make-up and behind the baggy, unusual clothes, she was pleasant to the eye.
A friendly face, clever eyes, smile lines around her mouth. Hair that got into her face; she blew a strand away. "No offense, but I think your house is haunted. I don't think I'll be able to fall asleep."
"I thought you were a punk?" His lips involuntarily curved into a grin once again. Stephen was a smart-ass, he couldn't help it.
"Hey!" She exclaimed, offended, poking him in the bicep with a single finger. "Rude and mean wizard," She scoffed childishly, only succeeding in making Stephen laugh.
"I've been told so by multiple people," He replied without a hitch.
"How unfortunate," The woman levelled him with an unimpressed stare; her eyes, however, were smiling. The banter came to her as naturally as it did to him. "Then prepare to hear heavy metal because that's what I'm blasting to scare off the demons."
"Pfft," He scoffed, giving into the game. "I'll just turn off the heating in your room." Stephen retaliated against the woman.
It was her turn to roll her eyes. Something similar to a puppy's stare was directed at him after that - an absolutely unfair advantage, if someone would have asked him - not at all out of place on the woman's pixie-like features. "I'll find your room and stick my cold feet right under your blanket," She narrowed her eyes, pursing her lips and clenching her little fists.
Strange gasped, clutching his heart with a shaking hand. His whole body vibrated with barely contained laughter. "I'll portal-dump you in the Arctic if you do that," The dam broke: he started laughing at the woman who looked like a disgruntled, spooked bird, all ruffled, red-nosed and indignant.
"If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me," She mumbled in-between snorts of laughter. "That is the punk way."
Their joy bloomed in the shared space, amplified by the small distance between their bodies; knees almost touching and faces so close they could smell the other's perfume.
"By the punk way you mean doing stupid and reckless things?" The man asked her once their laughter died down; a single eyebrow raised, cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass and strands of silver at his temples glimmering in the warm firelight.
She couldn't tear her eyes away... And she didn't want to. "Yeah," She mumbled, acutely aware of the way she was ogling the man and having no power to stop it either. "That's the case..." Her eyes briefly skimmed down to his mouth, lingering for a second, causing her to wet her lips own in reflex.
"I must admit I've been accused of the same thing on several occasions," His gravely whisper settled somewhere deep in the woman's chest. "Does that make me one of your people?"
Words lost their meaning; useless, meaningless chatter, merely background noise for feelings running on borrowed time and secretive glances. Two people meeting in the least likely of circumstances, finding a common ground big enough to stand on their own two feet and light a fire.
Few years ago, Stephen Strange would have laughed at anybody who would have told him it was fate. These days, however, he knew, the universe worked in mysterious ways and he was smart enough to take the offering when it was brought to his doorstep on a silver platter.
Slowly and timidly, giving the woman a chance to withdraw, he brought his lips to her mouth, outstretching a gentle hand to place on the side of her face. The taste in his mouth was foreign, in the sense of a new discovery. She didn't resist his exploration, gently parting her lips and allowing his tongue to probe inside, meeting him in the same curious, unrushed way.
With stuttering breath, she grasped his bicep to steady herself in the wake of the tension that his kiss had brought between them. The sparks that started amid their chatter blossomed into embers; steady in their growing heat and hunger for more. The woman's hot mouth devoured Stephen, passion consuming them, awakening the primal territories of his brain he'd thought he'd forgotten existed.
One kiss was all it took for his trousers to feel uncomfortably tight; it felt like ages since he'd let desire consume him and steer his actions. His hand, shaky as it was, slid down her neck, memorising the gentle arch of it, to pull at the hem of her hoodie. Both of them gulped for breath in the seconds that the hoodie took to be flung over her head somewhere into the depths of the living room.
Two pairs of shining eyes met at the same moment, wordlessly begging for permission to continue. The cool air left a wake of gooseflesh in its wake, fine hairs standing up on the woman's arms, but her skin burned under Stephen's palms. Neither knew who ducked in for another kiss first; their lips met once again in a rush.
The woman's cool hands slid under his shirt shamelessly and the sorcerer shivered: not out of cold, he was hungry for the contact. He ached to feel the sweetness of a lover's touch. It had been too long. The woman matched his desire in that shameless, bold way by tugging on his clothes.
It was a question of time rather than effort for they seemed to be unable to break their kiss even for a second, getting tangled in the cotton of his shirt and the sleeves of his sweatshirt. The fumbling brought a smile to her lips, another mischievous teasing giggle dampened by the clothes going over his head. "The ghosts won't come to interrupt us, will they?" She asked breathily.
"No, but a... Colllegaue might," Stephen belatedly remembered of Wong's existence and his pesky habit of portaling right into the house. Throwing his own clothes somewhere in the vicinity of her hoodie, the sorcerer quickly conjured a portal to his bedroom, taking hold of the startled woman before she had the chance to utter a sound.
Being Sorcerer Supreme had its own privileges, including but not limited to a full master bedroom and a king size bed. Stephen's greater height certainly had made it useful; now, the man towered over the woman, pale chest on display and bright blue eyes sparkling in amusement as she attempted to gather her wits after the rapid relocation.
It proved to be harder that it seemed. Her eyes, curious and bright, traveled over his chest. Her hands trembled when she placed them over his pecs before gliding them down to his toned stomach, light and slow, like a feather. The woman was fascinated.
Stephen was torn between shyness and cockiness; the lack of recent experiences made his touch timid when he brushe stray hairs behind her ear. Watching the woman stand up on her tippy toes to kiss him was amusing. He allowed himself to lean into the kiss, adjusting a firmer grip on the sides of her face.
The bravery both of them seemed to need so desperately, they inhaled, the kiss once again growing in intensity. His arousal pressed insistently against her stomach, the feeling of hard flesh making her gasp. It twitched in response, Stephen's mind clouding with titillation and anticipation.
One hand wormed it's way into the man's hair, giving it a bossy tug, and he groaned lowly into the kiss. That made the woman smile, their teeth clashing briefly, before she pulled away. "You're too damn tall," She exclaimed and all Stephen could see were her red, kiss-flushed lips. "Have you considered donating a few inches to those in need? For example, me?" Her giggle was throaty.
One hand firmly planted on his chest, she used the other to promptly unbutton and unzip her belt and pants, various metals clanking as she did so. The noise pulled Stephen out of the lust-induced stupor. "I can spare more than a few inches," He cocked his eyebrow, snarking back almost reflexively. His arousal was obvious and not meager by any means.
"Dork," The woman replied, giving him an appreciative once-over.
The grin that spread on his face was somewhere between feral and teasing as he advanced onto her, bodily pushing her onto the spacious bed and draping himself over the woman's flushed body, nipping at her neck the moment a soft 'oof' escaped her at the sudden change of position. Not even minutes in and her face already adopted a blissed-out look, eyelashes fluttering and hips involuntarily looking for friction.
Stephen grazed the tender flesh of her collarbone with his teeth and she hissed, exhaled through her teeth with a barely audible moan. The sorcerer didn't bother hiding his grin. "Not so feisty now, are we?" He rumbled straight into her ear.
The shudder that went through her was more intense this time, chest pushing outward, desperate for more skin-on-skin contact. Stephen peeled the cup of her simple black bra with his teeth leaving a trail of pink-red marks in the wake, catching her nipple between his teeth and lavishing it with attention.
The harder he sucked the more she whined; one of his hands landed on her shoulder, pushing on it to hold the squirming woman steady. He was rewarded with a moan, pitched and long. The very same hand closed in around her throat, gently but firmly applying the exact amount of pressure needed to make her arch into his touch like an excited housecat.
"Be still, darling," Stephen's voice had dropped, low and raspy, bordering on a growl. The woman's own noises were delicious and he couldn't help but rut into her stomach, seeking friction, his own need beginning to burn impatiently.
"I literally can't, you're driving me fuckin' crazy," The woman stuttered out, fingers digging into his skin. She had no qualms about making him know exactly how much was she enjoying his ministrations and Stephen would be a rotten liar if he said it didn't give him a boost of confidence.
"I'll just have to restrain you, then," It was a joke more than anything but with the way she shivered, a full-bodied shake that had him involuntarily pressing his hips into her, there wasn't a chance he'd waste it.
Gathering his wits, Stephen's tongue peeked out in concentration as his hands produced a single, thick strand of magic. Glowing golden and orange, it bound the woman's wrists to the intricately carved headboard, loose enough for her to be able to bail those little hands into fists and move around a teensy bit.
Round and wide eyes stared upwards at Stephen, the woman's mouth hanging slightly open on a flushed face. "Jesus fuckin' Christ," The words were not audible; he made them out with his eyes as they were involuntarily drawn to her lips.
Stephen did not find it in himself to resist. "Not Jesus, just me," He smirked, claiming the woman in a bruising kiss, groaning when the woman bit into his bottom lip in retaliation against his smugness. He tugged off the remainder of her clothing, sitting back to observe the curves of her body, the way meager light of his bedroom played with the shadows in the arches of her limbs.
Following the smooth skin on her belly, Stephen's fingers dipped between her legs, stroking right into the dampness of where she was most sensitive. A choked up 'oh' was the only noise she produced, straining against his magic as she attempted to follow the movements of his hands with her hips. And she won the race fair and square - who was he to deny her such a simple pleasure?
Perhaps, he wasn't as precise or as skilled as he used to be before the accident, however the woman had no reservations, no complaints whatsoever, mewling each time his thumb brushed the sensitive bundle of flesh, fluttering her eyelashes so prettily. The hum Stephen made was contemplative: withdrawing his fingers produced a disappointed moan that quickly turned into a lewd noise when he popped his thumb into his mouth, tasting her arousal.
Delectable. "You're so sweet," He cooed, almost mockingly. She was getting desperate. "A little sharp but so fitting." With that, he used her lust-drunk state to rid himself of his clothes, leaning in to give a single broad lick to the length of her sex. She didn't disappoint, moaning loudly and wantonly, and he immediately withdrew, once again draping himself over her to share the taste of the woman with herself.
The intent wasn't to tease, not by any means. His erection glided easily between her lower lips thanks to the moisture, and he palmed it, putting pressure onto her clit with the head of his cock, brushing up and down with intent.
"Nghh, oh God," Was her eloquent response. The breathless, heated whisper went straight to his cock, making it twitch.
Stephen was getting impatient. The woman, too, was beginning to show signs of frustration. The veins on her arms stood out more than even when she fitfully strained against her restraints. The spell was a simple, even feeble thing, but with the force of his arousal feeding it with burning energy that was almost angry; it was as unlikely that she'd break it as it would be for the sorcerer himself to find the strength to stop himself from dipping the tip of his cock into the welcoming heat of her entrance.
"Take it," He ordered huskily , breathing heavily into her ear. The first few inches of Stephen's shaft were met with slight resistance but he took care to advance slowly, savouring the moment himself. She felt like Valhalla wrapped around him, all sweet, pulsating heat.
"Please," She whispered, ending the word with a broken noise, tilting her hips to speed up the process as more and more of his cock filled up the aching need. "Fuck, give me everything, give me all of it," One of her legs wrapped around his hips, pulling him into her.
The moment he bottomed out, it felt like stars had detonated behind his eyelids. The smell of her, iron, fresh cotton and rainwater, filled out his senses; an array of gasps into the crook of his neck and blood rushing to his ears. It was a a beautiful cacophony of lust that culminated where their bodies were joined. Push and pull, he gave an attempt at making shallow thrusts with his hips, encouraged by the sudden arch of her body.
She was at the sorcerer's mercy. "Tell me," He demanded. "Tell me how it feels," Suddenly, he wanted to hear, he wanted to know.
"Fuck," She mumbled and he thrust harder, eager to hear and swallow more of those delicious sounds. "It feels... Fuck, it feels... So deep..." Coherence had left out the window as she struggled to describe the feeling of being stretched out and stuffed full. Long and thick, Stephen's cock was a blessing of it's own, with negative side effects being a temporary loss of speech and train of thought. "Please don't stop, Stephen, don't..."
He worked harder, leaning into it as sweet sweat dripped from his forehead. Bracing himself on his forearms, trapping the panting woman against himself, the room filled with the sound of heated flesh slapping against flesh, squelching noises adding into the discord. Like fuel to the fire, the growling that started somewhere in the back of his throat enticed more and more broken whimpers.
The woman began fluttering around him, telltale signs of her upcoming culmination. Stephen had to grit his teeth - his own abs instinctively tightened in response, body eagerly awaiting the grip of her walls to take the sensations around his cock to new heights. "Hold it," He ordered hoarsely, wanting to prolong the ecstasy of it all.
"I can't, please, I can't, I'm so close," She moaned, wrapping her lips around the skin of his neck in an attempt to distract herself. The added sensations only made Stephen growl again, patience snapping with the force of a live wire, hips picking up a rhythmic tempo.
The sorcerer's fingers harshly tore the ropes of magic, freeing the woman from her bonds in a single second, giving her a brief moment to stretch her arms before the man once again gathered her in his arms. Compliant and lax, the woman's chest was flush to Stephen's, nipples brushing against his defined chest with each consequential thrust.
He was everywhere. He was so much larger, taller and broader than her, muscle and feral growls, shaking her to the core with each motion of his hips. She all but disappeared under him, pinned by him, his arms having slid under her back to pull her onto his cock like a ragdoll. Even as her eyes slid shut, all the woman could see, hear and sense was Stephen's burning body atop her own.
The coil in her belly grew tighter with each second.
"Look at me," Stephen ordered loudly and harshly, feeling the scales of his pleasure tip dangerously into non-return territory. He wanted to see her as she lost herself in bliss.
Unseeing eyes flew open. Round and wet, she was looking at him like a deer in headlights, the plush of her mouth wet, beads of sweat dripping down her temple. "Fuck me, oh God, I need to come," Once more, Stephen saw the words rather than heard.
Her mouth, a little weak, was what did it for him; with a primal growl fresh in his mouth, he uttered a single, "Come. Now," Finding it impossible to resist claiming her mouth for the final time.
The woman's body tensed, heels digging painfully into the small of his back as he swallowed the scream that her orgasm tore out of her throat. The soft flesh of her thighs shook. Buried inside of her to the hilt, Stephen let loose his own self-control, cock throbbing, as he emptied every bit of his seed into the deepest parts of her snug cunt. His vision briefly turned white-hot, emptying his mind of anything but the immediate space and time, the bliss overtaking him like a tsunami.
It seemed to go on forever. It seemed to last only a second.
Their mouths moved weakly against each other. In some areas, skin was broken, and it smarted, weaving a trail of bittersweet aches in the wake of their passion. Stephen couldn't manufacture the place where he could simply Be but in the moment, nothing mattered at all, just the tide of her breathing growing steady after having reached the so-needed release.
The woman kept melting under him. Eventually he had to move, soft flesh slipping from within her, invoking a soft gasp at the loss of their combined state of being. A kitten-like, disappointed mewl followed, the woman immediately draping her body to his side.
Stephen chuckled into the dim quiet of his room, a raspy, breathless and meaningless little noise.
"We'll think tomorrow, for now, just feel," She mumbled already half-asleep, and he would be damned if that didn't sound like poetry to him.
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Stephen Strange taglist: @mostly-marvel-musings @lonesomewritings @bethanyzed @persephonehemingway @the-gayyy-bible @sapphicnoodle69 @letsby
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Text
The Experts
The second story of this story-line.  Another caveat of the request was to have the Imperials and Dr. Strange here, so here they are.  I have decided to name the planet ‘Polaris C,’ so as to give it some sort of name.  Enjoy Dr. Stephen Strange, Lord Inquisitor Hector Rex, and the Grey Knights meeting the Scoundrels.  As usual, I own no one here except Drake.  
“It is the duty of the Sorcerer Supreme to defend Earth and humanity against all magical and extra-dimensional threats.” -Dr. Stephen Strange
“I am the hammer, the right hand of the Emperor, the instrument of His will, the gauntlet about His fist, the tip of His spear, the edge of His sword!”  -Motto of the Grey Knights
When Doctor Stephen Strange had received a message from Peter Quill, he had almost laughed aloud.  Quill.  Peter Quill, in his opinion, was not only an idiot but a slight egotist.  He had almost laughed.  Almost.  If the message was not a missive asking for help.  His help, specifically.  Strange knew that if Quill, of all people, was begging for his help, then things were very serious.  So with slight misgiving (he didn’t quite know what he was getting himself into), Strange’s cloak had affixed itself to his shoulders and he had opened a portal to the bizarre planet Quill described in the message.  
He almost wished he didn’t come.  The planet itself was filled with strange red mist from an unknown source.  Not a problem, though.  His magic could easily take care of that.  It was the commotion.  People and aliens of all sorts, from all different places, were running about up to god only knew what.  A huge, bipedal metal robot (at least he thought it was a robot) trudged around, seemingly scanning a collection of long abandoned black buildings in the distance.  Soldiers of various sorts, all dressed differently, many of species he did not recognize, ran around doing things he couldn’t even guess at.  
To his left, greatcoat swirling ominously in the mist, lenses of his mask blending in with the background, was Peter Quill.  As soon as Quill saw the sorcerer, he ran up to him, almost hugging him before Strange stopped him.  
“Oh thank god you’re here!” almost shouted Quill.  “I don’t know what the hell’s happening and neither do we and neither to the GA and Cooper is trying to scan the structures to see what’s happening and he’s the only one who’s actually helping and Cain called the Imperial Inquisition who are arguing with the aliens and this reminds me way too much of when my father possessed me so can you help?”  Strange’s mouth worked spasmodically for a moment at Quill’s rant.  Quill almost hugged him and was now begging for his help.  This was a serious situation, then.  Strange held up his gloved hands.  
“Calm.  Down.”  Quill took a few deep breaths.  
“Okay.  Okay.  I’m calm.”  
“Good.  Now, take me to them,” commanded Strange.  Quill gave a nod and beckoned Strange forward.  The swirling mist parted to reveal a series of tents, the sort that he recognized from disasters he’d seen on the news.  Cold and clinical.  They ducked underneath a flap and passed swiftly through an airlock before getting into the main area of the largest tent.  It was much bigger than Strange thought it would be.  Various humans, all wearing whatever armor they had on at the time of the event, lay on cots lining the walls.  All of them were out cold.  
It was not the people on the cots, though, that caught Strange’s attention.  An imposing blond haired woman stood in the middle of it, bickering with two aliens: a small, bug-like creature and an eight foot tall, four armed, blue carapaced alien.  The woman wore a tight black bodysuit, and was currently glaring daggers at the black, bug-like alien.  The four armed one stood behind the bug, both pairs of arms crossed in a gesture that was remarkably human.  
“You can’t tell us what to do!” shouted the shorter insectoid.  “We rule this galaxy, and we will do this our way.”  The blond haired woman sneered at the two aliens.
“Chairwoman.”  The word was imbued with so much venom that it made Strange look up sharply from where he was studying one of the unconscious forms.  “You have no idea what any of this does, not to mention that-”  She was cut off by the beeping of her comms device.  She held a finger to her ear, and paused to listen to what was being said on the other side.  “Understood,” she replied.  She turned back to the chairwoman.  “Well then.  Do it your way.  Xenos no longer has authority here.  Take up the matter with Malleus.”  She spun on her heel and strode out of the tent.  On her way out, she almost slammed into a brown haired man wearing high boots and a leather jacket.  He sharply avoided her, then gave her a glare as she walked out.  Following him was an utterly massive individual in heavy green armor.  Super soldier, though Strange.  He’d bet his life on it.
“Well, looks like that’s all done now,” said the newcomer.  He walked over to Strange and held out his hand.  “Han Solo.  You must be the expert that Quill called in.”  
“Indeed I am,” replied Strange, still puzzled of what precisely was transpiring here.  
“Master Chief John-117,” replied the green armored man with about as much emotion as a bag of rocks.
“Good to know we have a true expert on hand,” said the strange, bug-like alien as she walked over.  “Hopefully you will be more agreeable.  I am the Chairwoman of the Galactic Assembly,” she announced.  
“Doctor Stephen Strange,” replied Strange politely.  “And I am here to help.”  The large, blue carpaced alien introduced herself as Sunny, chief weapons officer of the Omen.  With introductions out of the way, Strange approached the cots of the unconscious humans.  “Now, what precisely happened here?” he asked.
“We were inside one of the larger buildings in the middle of the abandoned city over there,” said Sunny, pointing to a direction outside the tent.  “We went through it… seemed like some sort of weird laboratory.  There was some sort of main central room.  The room had blast doors; big ones to keep something out.  They were open though.  There was some sort of glowing white orb on a central pedestal.  When Wilson, one of the scientists,” she pointed out Wilson, lying unconscious on another cot, “Touched it, it emitted a blast of white energy.  It knocked out all of the humans.  No aliens were harmed, and, oddly, the humans from one particular galaxy were not affected.  They all seem to have some sort of glowing white light around their eye areas, and Adam muttered ‘Deus’ under his breath while still unconscious.”  Strange didn’t know who Adam was, but this sounded… serious.  And weird.  Weirdly serious?  No.  Perhaps seriously weird?  Stop getting off track, Stephen.  
“Okay.  It is good you called me,” said Strange.  He paused for a moment, considering what he should do next.  “Can you take me to the orb?” he asked.  The chairwoman opened her mouth to speak, but was cut off by the tramping of boot soles on the tent’s artificial ground.  A double file of soldiers came into the tent, along with three hooded, red robed individuals.  
“Scions,” hissed Sunny.  The soldiers all wore heavy black armor, and carried blocky rifles, at the moment pointed downward, but ready to fire.  The red robed individuals hugged the shadows, their cowls concealing their faces.  All of the newcomers had the same symbol emblazoned on their clothing: a stylized “I” with a human skull in the center.  Sigil of the Imperial Inquisition.  
“What is the meaning of this?” roared the chairwoman.  For a bug, she had a pretty impressive voice.  
“This planet is now interdicted,” replied one of the Scions.  Strange glowered at him.  If looks could kill, the chairwoman’s would have reduced the man to cinders at this point.  
“Under whose authority?” she snapped.  The arguing figures all turned around as massive footsteps sounded behind them.
“Mine.”  A huge man tore his way through the airlock of the tent.  Long grey hair was thrown uncaringly across his head, and a red cloak across his shoulders.  Ornate power armor, fitted to his large frame, glowed a dull silver in the weak light.  He was utterly massive, coming to reach the height of the Master Chief.  A beautifully crafted sword rested on his hip, and a bronze breathing mask covered his lower face.  However, it was not at this man that Strange’s eyes turned to.  It was the group of individuals that followed him.  If the man in front was a giant among men, the coterie that followed him were gods among giants.  They stood eye to eye with Sunny, towing a full foot above the Chief and grey haired man.  Each of the five wore silvery grey power armor, covered with strange runes, inscriptions, and seals.  Huge, twin barreled cannons were attached to their left arms, and in their right they all held halberds, suitably sized for their massive frames.  They stared at Strange and the group clustered around him from behind silver helmets.  Vision slits, glowing white-blue, seemed to peer into their very souls. 
With a start and a huge sense of foreboding, Strange realized what they were.  The size of genetically engineered soldiers, the strange runes and seals on their armor, the magic resonance of the ammunition in their guns and the power whispering through their halberds, all augmented by the fact that each of the silver warriors was a sorcerer of fearsome potency spoke of one thing.  These individuals were created and trained for one purpose, and one purpose only: slaying demons.  
If Strange could take a human being and make them into a weapon perfect for destroying the extra-dimensional beings that some called demons, he would have a result very similar to these silent, silver soldiers.  He could already feel the icy trickle of sweat as it made his way down his back.  This was not good.  Things had gotten a lot more serious.  
“Who are you?” half-whispered the GA chairwoman.  The sheer presence these newcomers had put Strange and everyone else in the room on edge.  
“I am Lord Inquisitor Hector Rex of the Ordo Malleus of the Holy Ordos of His Divine Majesty’s Most Holy Inquisition,” replied the grey haired man.  Well, this guy’s very dramatic and, apparently, very holy, was Strange’s first thought.  “We are here to investigate the possession of these individuals,” went on Rex.  
“As am I,” cut in Strange.  He was the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth, dammit, and he would not be intimidated by the likes of these men.  He could sense the Inquisitor, too, was a sorcerer, and a damn good one at that.  “Doctor Stephen Strange.”  Being polite couldn’t hurt, could it?  The Inquisitor gave no response as the lead silver giant stepped forward.  Strange and the various aliens winced as the temperature in the room dropped noticeably.  The giant warrior held out a hand and touched Strange’s forehead with his fingers; not too gentle, not too rough, it simply just was.  Strage felt the man peering into his very soul, but remained silent and still.  He had a feeling the giants would respect that more than any protests he could muster.  
“This one is pure of soul and strong of mind,” announced the warrior.  His deep bass voice rumbled and reverberated through the tent.  Strange found it disquieting.  The man introduced as John-117 had a flat, but normal human voice.  All the super soldiers he’d met in his home galaxy all had relatively normal voices.  It appeared that this one was so heavily augmented his voice was stronger and went much deeper than a usual human.  How intriguing.  
“Very well, then,” replied Rex.  “You.”  He pointed at Strange.  “Come with us.  Everyone else, stay here.  No one leaves.”  On that ominous note, Rex spun, and with a swirl of his cloak, walked out the door, followed by the giant warriors and Strange.  
Elsewhere
“Ah, shit,” swore Thomas Drake.  He looked around him.  Groups of his armsmen, GA marines, and redshirts stood up, confused.  Shepard, Kirk, and Vir brushed themselves off and stared.  
“Where the hell are we?” asked Shepard.  “And where the hell is everyone else?”  They stood in an open, endless expanse of white.  The ground was pure white, the sky… or whatever was located above them pure white.  It was like being inside a sterile room.  Or an insane asylum.  
“Don’t know,” replied Vir.  “Wilson touched that orb-thingy and now here we are.”
“Where is here, exactly?” asked Kirk.
“An excellent question,” replied another voice.  The Scoundrels whirled around to face a man, ethereally floating in the non-existent air.  The figure was a human man, obviously so.  However, something seemed… off about him.  There was, of course, the fact that he was in this strange realm, and that he was floating several feet off the ground.  His face…  Well, his face was the strangest part.  It looked a perfect blend between every human variation: the eyes, the coloring, the hair, all of it.  A perfect blend of every human to ever exist.  How is that possible…?
“What are you?” asked Drake.  His hand went for his sidearm, only to find it wasn’t there.  The ethereal being chuckled.  
“I’m known by a lot of names.  You can call me Adam… Adham, and variation of the name, really.  You can call me the First, or you can call me Deus.  Your choice, really.”  
“Deus…” muttered Vir.
“Great.  Why are we here?” asked Shepard, cutting straight to the point.  
“Quite simple.  You are now imbued with my power.  The power of what you may call a god.  There are things out there that would see you corrupted, and we can’t let that happen.”  
“Good luck trying to corrupt us,” said Shepard.  The being frowned.  
“Many more powerful than you have been.  Many.  It is simply a failsafe.  Through this, you gain a portion of the power of the combined gods of humanity throughout our realms.  While you can’t do any sort of god-like things; you’ll be the same as before except in one regard.  You are all now utterly immune to any sort of corrupting influences.  No one can hijack your brains.”  
“Great,” said Vir bluntly.  “Now what?”  Deus smiled.  
“Well, unfortunately, you can’t remember this conversation.” 
“Why not?” snapped an indignant Drake.  
“Two reasons: it’s best if you don’t, and there is a small chance that if these memories remain, you might go slightly insane.  Slightly.  Still don’t want to risk it.  However, there is one other thing that I can do safely.  I have a favor to ask you.  There are artifacts hidden in several locations around my galaxy.  They carry a taint.  There is one on each of the places that this planet reaches out to.  You can figure it out from there.  I want those artifacts destroyed.”  
“Okay.  Can you send us back to... wherever we are supposed to be?” asked Kirk.  
“Yes,” nodded Deus.  He snapped his fingers.
On Polaris C
“This is the chamber,” came the reverberating voice of one of the massive, silver armored warriors.  Strange had learned they were called the Grey Knights.  They didn’t tell him anything else.  Lord Hector strode forward to the white orb on the central pedestal.  
“It doesn’t look like any… Chaotic artifact,” he murmured.  “Hmmm.”  At that moment, the orb, which had been glowing brightly, suddenly went dark. 
“What was that?’ asked Strange.  
--------------------------------------------------------------
Drake’s head shot up so quickly it smashed into a medical orderly who had been tending to him.  With a cry of pain, he went back down into the cot, only to miss with one hand, lose his balance, and fall on the floor.  Over his muttered curses and the orderly’s apologies, the rest of the unconscious humans woke.  Sunny rushed over to Vir’s side.
“Adam!  What happened?” she asked.  Vir rubbed his head.
“Don’t know,” he said.  “There was the orb, then Wilson touched it, then we got knocked out.”  He looked up, seeing the Scions guarding them in a strange tent.  “What the hell happened?” he asked, slightly miffed.  At that moment, the flap leading to the airlock parted, revealing Dr. Strange, Lord Rex, and the Grey Knights.
“That is precisely what I am wondering, Admiral,” said Rex.  He came forward, and held out a hand, touching Vir’s forehead.  The temperature of the room dropped, and Vir felt the uncomfortable sensation of the grey haired man staring into his soul.  Rex dropped his hand and turned to the Grey Knights.  The temperature returned to normal.  “He appears… untainted.  Normal.”  A pair of inky brown eyes stared down at the waking humans.  “However, we must be sure.  Our testing shall be… rigorous.”
There we have it.  Now, unfortunately, you ought to know that the Grey Knights have a scorched earth policy.  They fight daemons, and daemons corrupt.  Therefore, anyone who is near them is at risk.  Also, they are a secret organization, and if anyone is left alive to know about them, Chaos could use it against them.  They have been ordered to not harm the Scoundrels themselves, as they believe they are vital to some future events.  They won’t harm Strange, as they see him as a protector of his realm, much like them.  The GA people though...  Tell me what you think should happen, and if you like this story line.  If you have any comments, questions, requests, criticisms, or concerns, tell me!  
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onecanonlife · 3 years
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careful son (you got dreamer's plans)
Wilbur gasps back to life with mud between his fingers and rain in his eyes.
Wilbur was dead. Now, he is not. He can't say that he's particularly happy about it.
Unfortunately, the server is still as tumultuous as ever, even with Dream locked away, so it seems that his involvement in things isn't a matter of if, but when.
(Alternatively: the prodigal son returns, and a broken family finally begins to heal. If, that is, the egg doesn't get them all killed first.)
Chapter Word Count: 6,284
Chapter Warnings: swearing, panic attack, vomiting, past mind manipulation, discussion of s.uicidal thoughts/behaviors
Chapter Summary: Wilbur has a couple of tough conversations, and he and Schlatt discover something interesting.
(masterlist w/ ao3 links)
(first chapter) (previous chapter) (next chapter)
Chapter Eight: but it gets hard to stand (i)
He is floating at the bottom of the ocean. It is dim and peaceful, and there is dappled light all around, shifting with the waters. He breathes, and fluid fills his lungs, but it moves as easily as if he were inhaling air. His hair floats in front of his face, gleaming white in the glints of sunlight. That should be strange, perhaps, but he feels so very calm. Nothing can reach him here. No care, no hurts. The water is holding him, and he is at rest.
But he is drifting upward.
The surface is approaching. The dimness recedes. There is light overhead, bright and warm, and he is moving toward it swiftly. Still, there is no cause for concern. He watches languidly, content to let it happen.
Is there a reason to fight it?
Surely not.
The waves break around him. He breathes in air. The sun is on his face.
He wakes up.
He lays there, still and quiet for a few moments before he musters the will to move. His breathing seems loud to his own ears, the only sound that he can make out. The roof above him is not one that is familiar—so, not Tommy’s house, then, and he wonders why that is. His mind is blank, and he’s sure there’s something he’s forgetting.
He rolls over and props himself up on his elbow. The lighting is dim, the torches flickering, the bare minimum placed to avoid mobs spawning inside. He’s lying on a cot near the wall, and from his vantage, he can see an area with pews and a dull golden bell, and a towering pillar of water in the center of the space he’s in. Recognition sparks after a few seconds; he’s only been inside a few times, but he knows Church Prime when he sees it.
There is no one else here. He is alone. Is there a reason for that?
He stands on shaky legs and immediately regrets it as his head spins and pounds, like the worst hangover of his life. Drinking would explain the memory issue, but he’s staying with Tommy, so that doesn’t sound like something he would do. Even when he does indulge, he almost never drinks to the point of blacking out. So that doesn’t make sense, but he’s at a loss otherwise. He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth, and as soon as he thinks he can move without toppling over, he makes his way over to the center of the room, tottering unsteadily.
From here, he can see the front door. Outside, it is night, the Prime Path illuminated in the darkness. Something about that is off, he thinks—wasn’t it morning, the last thing he remembers?
The last thing he remembers—
He frowns, turning to the water, and absently, he runs his fingers through it. Cool and wet and gentle to the touch, and he remembers
(people around him people shouting and he can barely breathe and nausea rolls over him and his head is killing him and his mind is full of a red haze and he wants to go he wants to go but they’re not letting him and there’s water poured on him and forced down his throat and he nearly chokes but finally there is some kind of relief and it all falls away)
He freezes. Withdraws his hand from the water slowly, as if he’s stuck his hand into a mass of thorns and has to pull back out without being pricked.
The Egg. They went to see the Egg.
And the Egg
(oh Prime what did you do)
reached inside of him and picked through his mind and his memories, offering him what he thought he wanted most
(took you and hollowed you out and tried to take the parts that might be redeemable and replace them with itself and make you its creature completely and utterly)
and he let it, let it inside with barely a fight, and he almost hurt Tommy. He almost killed Tommy.
He almost killed Tommy.
A breathy whine escapes him, and he slaps his hand over his mouth as he doubles over, resisting the urge to dry heave. He almost hurt Tommy, almost killed Tommy, and all because he allowed a fucking Egg to whisper to him, because he allowed himself to be taken in and taken over, and he’s lucky, really, that he was able to snap out of it. It’s horrifying to think about, that he might have killed Tommy at the Egg’s direction, killed Tommy and felt triumph over it.
It was in his head.
He loses the battle against his nausea. His knees hit the floor, and he is wracked with dry heaving. There’s nothing in his stomach to come up. It just hurts. His breath hitches, air coming in fits and bursts, and whimpers and moans escape his throat at quick intervals, noises that are wounded and animalistic, but he doesn’t think he could hold them back if he tried. He’s crying, too, but that’s a given. There’s no one here to see, at least. No one here to see his shame, his weakness.
The Egg whispered to him of fire, and he wanted it. The Egg whispered to him of fire, and that’s all it needed to do before he embraced it with open arms.
The Egg whispered to him of rest, and he did it again. And Tommy was there. Tommy was there for all of it, and now Tommy knows that it’s all a front, a lie, a sham, and the miserable creature that got shoved back into this body is nothing like the older brother he wanted, nothing like the older brother he deserves. Scratch the paint off, and what is there but wreckage?
He hunches over, wraps his arms around himself. Tries to breathe. It’s difficult. He wonders if he should bother.
“God, there you are,” someone says, and—not someone. Schlatt. It’s impossible to mistake that voice for anyone else. Which is good, because Wilbur is not currently about to look up. He can’t even manage to get his lungs to cooperate, much less the rest of him. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I never took you for a pious man, Wilbur. Wilbur?” The voice changes, becoming more cautious, and then: “Shit, Wilbur.”
There is no noise to warn him of his approach. Schlatt moves soundlessly, now. But there is a blur of motion just in front of him, and blue enters his field of vision. A wave of calm washes over him at the sight of the color, but not enough. Not nearly enough. He can’t breathe, and he’s not certain that he wants to try.
“Alright, come on,” Schlatt says. “You know the drill, follow my breathing.” And he breathes in and out, very loudly, very purposefully. Out of habit, Wilbur attempts to follow, but he can’t manage it, his chest collapsing in on itself, his breath stuttering and gasping. “Okay, that’s okay, let’s do it again. You know how to do this, Wilbur, you’ve done it before. God, you shouldn’t have to rely on a fucking ghost to tell you how to breathe. That’s just pathetic. You can do it, come on.”
He almost laughs at that. Would, if he had the breath for it. He doesn’t think he’s ever found Schlatt’s vitriol more comforting. And all the while, Schlatt keeps up the pattern, his chest rising and falling with air that he doesn’t need to take in, and slowly, Wilbur manages to fall in time with him.
(they’ve done this before, once upon a time, back before everything, before this server, back when they were young and stupid and the best of friends, and Schlatt always relied on him to get him home after having a few too many and he always relied on Schlatt to calm the hornet’s nest that his mind became, sometimes, when all the world seemed to shrink around him, boxing him in and silencing his voice. they knew each other so well, then, trusted each other despite the warning signs)
“You good?” Schlatt asks. He’s so far from good that the question is ridiculous, but he nods. “Great. You look like shit.”
He does manage a laugh, then, short and bitter. “I feel a bit shit,” he concedes. “Is it that obvious?”
“I mean, I didn’t want to say anything,” Schlatt says. “But I feel like it’s my solemn duty to inform you that you look fucked up. I can’t leave you alone for two minutes, can I?”
“Been a bit longer than that, I think,” he says. “Where did you go, after the prison?”
“Well, you remember how Dream was being a fucking creepy asshole, right?” Schlatt says dryly. “Yeah, that had me freaked. It felt like—I don’t know, he was looking right at me, and it felt like I’d been dunked in a fucking, a fucking oil slick or something, like I could literally feel his eyes on me and his fucking—his murder vibes or some shit, I don’t know.” His form flickers around the edges, his face pulling into a grimace. “So yeah, I dipped. Went to go get something to drink, except I remembered that I can’t fucking do that, so I fucked around for a little while. Saw the crater, did all the tourist shit. Saw Quackity, actually, did you know he’s got, like, fiances now or something? No clue how he managed that. But then I decided to come bug you some more, except you weren’t at Tommy’s or literally anywhere else, and everyone I ran into looked grim as hell. I half-expected to find out that you’d managed to die again or something, or that you’d blown up someone else’s city. But here you are.”
He raises an expectant eyebrow at the end of that speech, not out of breath at all, the bastard.
(he always did like the sound of his own voice. it must be difficult for him to be silenced, for him to be able to stand in the middle of a crowd and have no one know that he’s there at all)
(at the heart of him, there is a part of Schlatt that just wants to be noticed, just wants to be paid attention to. Wilbur knows because they are the same)
Wilbur mulls that over in his mind, and gets stuck on the last part.
He bursts into laughter. He can’t help it. And it’s not very nice laughter, either, probably lands somewhere on the wrong side of deranged, but he can’t stop.
“What’s so funny?” Schlatt demands. “God, you’re such an asshole, I’m trying to have a conversation and you’re—you’re crying again, could you cut that out?”
Schlatt is beginning to sound genuinely alarmed, so Wilbur supposes he should make an effort. He gets a handle on the laughter and reaches up to touch his face, giggles still escaping him every few seconds. His cheeks are wet again, his vision blurring.
“Do you know about the Egg?” he asks.
“The—is that a code for something? What fucking Egg?”
“There’s an Egg underneath BadBoyHalo’s house,” he says. “It’s what’s spreading those red vines across the server. And if you go down there and see it, it talks to you and offers you things and gets in your head to try to override your free will.” He smiles. “I don’t recommend it.”
Schlatt is silent for a long moment, just staring, eyebrows so high that they look like they’re trying to escape his forehead.
“You’re not high, are you?” he eventually asks.
“It offered me destruction, Schlatt,” he says. “Fire and blood. And then it tried to get me to kill Tommy, and I almost did, but I didn’t, and then we tried to leave, and it offered me rest.” He smiles wider. “Rest, Schlatt. I wanted it so bad. I don’t remember how we got out of there. I didn’t want to leave.” He smiles wider still, and then something breaks, and he buries his face in his hands. “I wanted it so fucking bad, I wanted to rest, I still want it, but it was in my fucking head and fucking with my brain and I can’t—” He makes a low noise, pressing his hands harder against his skin, as if that will do anything at all.
“Jesus,” Schlatt mutters. “That’s—that’s fucked up. I don’t know what else you want me to say.”
“I don’t want you to say anything,” he mutters. “I don’t want me to say anything. I don’t want to be here. I fucking—I hurt Tommy, after I said that I wouldn’t. I hurt him. I hurt him.” He lowers his hands a bit, peering up at Schlatt, who looks very discomfited.
“Don’t start crying again,” Schlatt says, “please, I’m not equipped for that. This is—” He cuts off, scrubbing a hand down his face. “Jesus, Wilbur. The kid’s still alive, right?”
“Of course he is,” he snaps.
“Then talk it out or some shit, I don’t know. That kid thinks the world of you, man. No idea why, but there’s no accounting for taste. Just talk about it.” He shudders. “I don’t know why you’re asking me. You think I know shit about healthy relationships?”
“I woke up alone,” he says. “There was nobody here. I don’t know where anybody is, or if anyone’s hurt, or—I don’t remember how we got out, so what if something happened? What if it got me to do something and I don’t remember it?”
Schlatt is looking more and more out of his depth. Under any other circumstances, it would be funny to see him squirm, but there is no enjoyment in this. Wilbur wants
(Phil)
someone, anyone to tell him what to do here, to tell him how to make this right, but there’s no one but Schlatt, and it wouldn’t be fair to expect something like this of him, even if he thought he could.
“I’m sure they’re all fine,” Schlatt says. “Probably stepped out to take a piss somewhere.”
He draws in a shuddering breath. Maybe. Maybe. That doesn’t feel right, but maybe. He’s still shaking, and though he wills himself to stop, it makes no difference. He feels weak, feels pathetic, feels like the worst kind of traitor, to himself and to everyone around him, and the worst part of all of this is that he doesn’t know how much was the Egg and how much was him. Because to be sure, he could feel it influencing him. It’s easy to pick out in retrospect, the way it wormed its way through his thoughts, twisting him all around, and thinking about it now makes him nauseous again.
But in the end, it only brought out what was already lurking under the surface. What he’d been well and determined to push down, to ignore.
(and in some cases, not even that. a mask only goes so far, only serves so many people, and it takes a long time before the wearer can forget what lies beneath)
It is instinct, really, that has him reaching out, seeking physical contact. He’s always liked using touch to ground himself, to reassure himself
(Phil’s wings wrap around him and they feel warm feel like safety feel like home feel like he is protected and he is not alone if only for a moment if only for a moment he wishes that it could have been different could have been not like this but his course is set his ending penned and all that’s left to do is sign)
that he is real, that he is alive. His hand goes straight through, of course, and electric frisson runs up his arm. Schlatt makes an irritated sound, but puts up with the attempt, and Wilbur blindly tries again, even though he knows it will be futile. He wants something to hold, and in the absence of anyone else, Schlatt will do, but Schlatt will not actually do because he is dead and a ghost and Wilbur is alive and not a ghost, so he is left clutching at what might as well be empty air and wishing desperately for a connection.
He just wants—
(they are the same, they two, linked in life and linked in death and now in)
Something shifts. Undefinable, but undeniable. There is a sudden stinging in his chest.
His fingers curl around Schlatt’s arm.
They both freeze.
“What the fuck,” Schlatt whispers.
Experimentally, he tightens his grip. The fabric under his fingertips is solid, a bit scratchy. There is a strange lack of body heat, but Schlatt is as tangible as he is.
What.
Schlatt’s hand shoots out suddenly, landing on his shoulder. The weight is present and real, and he meets Schlatt’s eyes.
“What the fuck?” Schlatt repeats, louder this time. “What the—how are you doing that?”
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know, except that his chest hurts, right where his scar is, and if he focuses, he can sense what almost feels like—a tether, perhaps, though he’s not sure that’s the right word. Some kind of connection, some kind of tie between them, and it’s as if energy is flowing down it, from him to Schlatt, and actually, wow his chest hurts.
It’s not as if energy is flowing down it. Energy is flowing down it. He’s getting tired. Too quickly for it to be natural.
(he didn’t think to check, didn’t think to wonder, but if Schlatt was brought back by the same power that ripped him back to life, why is Schlatt still dead, dead and a ghost, when he is alive and not?)
“I don’t know,” he stutters, “I don’t know how I—”
It’s new, and a bit frightening, and somehow, the fear gets in the way. The tether snaps, vanishing just as soon as it was formed. He lurches forward, surprised by the sudden loss of contact, and Schlatt’s hand swipes through his chest. Schlatt curses, eyes wide and wild and—not quite scared. Not quite scared, but perhaps something approaching it.
“Do that again,” he demands. “Fuck, do that again, you—”
“I don’t know how I did it in the first place,” he protests. “I can’t just—”
And then stops. Outside, there are voices. Distant, but getting closer.
Schlatt takes a long look at him, and he doesn’t know what kind of expression he’s making, but Schlatt spits out a string of curses and stands, stomping off further into the church. It would have more of an impact, he thinks, if his feet actually made a noise when they hit the ground. He thinks that perhaps they would have, half a minute ago, and he thinks Schlatt thinks so, too, judging by the glare he shoots back at him.
He stands, feeling far more exhausted than he did only moments ago. And that is saying something.
“—not a choice, you get that, right?” Tommy is saying. He and Tubbo enter the church side by side. They both look—terrible is a word for it, certainly. The bags under their eyes are dark and thick, their hair sticking out every which way.
(this is your fault definitely your fault you failed them and you know it)
“We can’t just—” Tommy continues, and stops abruptly as he sees Wilbur standing there.
For a long moment, there is silence. No one speaks. No one moves. Wilbur traces over Tommy’s face, and he can’t even begin to interpret the emotions there, and that hurts, hurts worse than the fading ache in his chest, because he should be able to read his brother. Should be able to know him. Right now, he feels a bit like he’s looking into the face of a stranger, a stranger of his own making, and he doesn’t know how to fix this, doesn’t know if he can.
(the words still ring out in his head: I lied I lied I lied)
“You’re up,” Tubbo says, his voice carefully regulated. Tommy says nothing.
“Yeah,” he says. “I—you two, I am so—”
“Don’t apologize,” Tommy snaps. “Don’t—I’ve told you, I have had it up to here with you and your shitty apologies. Don’t do that. I don’t want to hear it.”
Wilbur opens his mouth, and then closes it again.
Because that is the thing: he has nothing else to offer. Apologies are all he can give, because at least he means them. Promises, he can make, but he breaks them just as easily. If there is some action he can perform, he doesn’t know it. And it’s too little, too late, too late to mend the damage he has caused, and it weighs so little against the side of the scale that holds all of his sins, but it is all he has. All he has, and if Tommy won’t accept it, he doesn’t know what else to do.
“Okay,” he whispers, and silence falls again. The water gurgles softly at his back.
“Okay then,” Tubbo finally says, “okay,” and it’s in a tone of voice that is tired and exasperated and worried all at once, a tone of voice that implies fine, I’ll do it myself if you two are going to be stupid, and it’s a tone that Wilbur has heard before but never like this, to this degree, and it sounds a bit like Phil, really, when he thinks about it. “Okay, so are we going to talk about what that was, then? I feel like we should. But I guess we don’t have to if you’re not up to it, Wilbur.”
“Fuck that,” Tommy says. “No, fuck that, he’s talking. You’re talking, you shit.” He stabs a finger toward Wilbur.
“Yeah,” he says quietly, “yeah, I owe it to you. I’ll—” And then he has to stop talking, because he suddenly gets very dizzy, the room tilting on its axis. He blinks, and then he is sitting on the floor, Tommy on one side of him and Tubbo on the other, Tommy all but yelling in his ear.
“—the fuck are you standing up for, you shithead? Prime, you’re so stupid, do you know that? Do you know that you’re stupid?”
He keeps going, and Wilbur opens his mouth to apologize, only to shut it again, because Tommy doesn’t want apologies, does he? So he says nothing at all, and Tommy falls quiet, and the damn silence is overwhelming, overpowering, an unbridgeable gap between them.
And then—
“Wilbur,” Tommy says. Just that. Just Wilbur. Somehow, it manages to carry a wealth of connotations, manages to say why did you do that and why have you been lying to me and a dozen other things all at once.
And Wilbur doesn’t have a good answer.
“What happened in there, Wilbur?” Tubbo asks, and he supposes he should be glad that they’re willing to sit by him, that they’re not flinching away despite everything, that they’re sticking close. He wouldn’t blame them if they wanted to run and never look back. Some of that wariness has returned to Tubbo’s eyes, and he thinks he can see some of it reflected in Tommy’s, but they’re both still here, so perhaps that counts for something.
Little though he deserves it.
“Tommy, you didn’t hear it, right?” he checks, voice almost a whisper, and Tommy mutely shakes his head. “But you did, Tubbo. What did it say to you?” The words come out slow, reluctant, clumsy.
“A lot of things,” Tubbo says. “Some stuff about power. Mostly the power to protect myself. But I’ve got that already, so I didn’t feel too keen on listening to a breakfast food. And then it started insulting me. It was really mean, actually. Didn’t make me feel great. I could feel it, kind of, in my head. I think that’s how it hurt my feelings so much.”
He closes his eyes. Nods.
“It was in my head, too,” he says. “It—I’m not any better than I was, really. I’ve been lying to you. I want to be. Prime knows I want to be. I’ve—I’ve been trying.” Embarrassingly, his voice cracks. “I swear, I have. I don’t want to be the person I turned into. But that person’s still there, is the thing. I could be him so easily, if I let myself. And even maybe if I don’t. Once I start sliding, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop.” He passes one hand over his face, and then keeps it over his eyes, shielding himself from their judgment. He doesn’t want to see their reactions to this. “The Egg—it shoved its way in and brought all of that out. I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want to stop it.”
(he was a child born of music and summer breezes, once, laughter and quicksilver charm. that went into the fire, burnt to ash, and the thing that came out was a child of the flames, flickering, dancing, and a bloodsoaked smile, and he got so tired of being that so very quickly and the sword was a relief in every sense of the word because finally the fire was put out, doused by cold, gleaming diamond, gentle blue, and his father’s tears landed on his face and he could feel them, finally, after so long burning)
(but he is born again and the fire leaps high and he can only keep it banked for so long)
“You did stop it, though,” Tubbo says. “You snapped out of it. It wanted you to hurt Tommy and you didn’t.”
“Barely,” he murmurs. “I—I swore to myself that I wouldn’t hurt you again. I swore, but I failed, and I—” No apologies. Tommy doesn’t want apologies. “Fuck.”
He keeps his hand pressed over his eyes. The darkness is calming, just a bit.
(it’s a place to hide, the coward that he is, and he is the pied piper leading the children and running away before he can face consequences because that’s all he knows how to do)
And then, Tommy yanks his arm down. He flinches at the sharp motion, at the sudden pressure on his skin, even as he leans in to the contact.
“Wilbur,” Tommy says, low and serious and more than a little angry. It’s not his usual fury, not his loud explosiveness. This is a simmering, slow, pointed anger, almost frightening in its intensity. “You listen to me, and you listen to me right now. You didn’t—you need to stop going on about failing, alright? Because you didn’t. The Egg wanted you to hurt me, and yeah it was terrifying and definitely not okay, but you didn’t. You did stop yourself. You gave the Egg what for. And I—” He breaks off, scowling. “I’m not gonna be able to say this right. But I know, okay? I’ve always known. I know that that you is there, I’m not stupid. I saw it in the prison. And sure, it’s actively scary, but I can see it, yeah? The way you’ve been trying? I know that you don’t want—and I don’t want—it’s not even that you, not really, because that you didn’t care, okay? I saw it, I lived it, I know what you’re like, and the you back then got too tired to try, not like you’re trying now. Do you—do you understand what I’m saying, Wilbur?”
(the you back then was exhausted and sick and spiraling and broken from the stress of presidency and then exile and all you ever really wanted was to make something good and to have it ripped from you was more than you could bear and you were just so tired by the end and you are tired, so very tired now)
He stares. “I—think? But—”
“No, no, no buts, I’m not fucking done. So maybe the Egg got in your head and fucked you up a bit. It sucked and it was scary, but you stopped yourself, and if it happens again, you’ve got us, okay? It’ll be fine as long as you let us help you.” Tommy sucks in a deep breath. “That’s not what I’m upset about. I mean, I am fucking upset about it, but that’s not what I’m most upset about.”
“Then what are you most upset about?” he asks, thoroughly bewildered by now. He understands what Tommy is trying to say, but not his logic, not his apparent willingness to continue to trust him. He should know better than that,
(because how many times did he hurt him in that dark ravine, how many times did he manipulate him, how many times did he snap)
should know better than to place faith in him now that he knows him for what he is, what he continues to be. And he doesn’t understand why this is, apparently, not the thing that he’s most worked up over.
Tommy doesn’t answer right away.
“The fact that you have to ask,” he says, “the fact that you have to ask, now that is fucking terrible.”
Wilbur glances at Tubbo, hoping for clarification. But Tubbo just stares back, the corners of his eyes pinched. He wishes he had an excuse to turn around; he wants to see if Schlatt is still here.
“Wilbur,” Tommy says, and Wilbur looks back at him, because it is Tommy’s voice that cracks now and Wilbur feels a thread of alarm run through him, “you said—you said it would give you rest.”
The words hang in the air, unchallenged, unanswered.
“You kept fighting us,” Tubbo says quietly. “All the way until we got you up here to the holy water. We were lucky that Puffy got there to help. I’m not sure we would’ve been able to do it without her. And you were—you got really sick, but you were still fighting us, and then you went to sleep for a day and a half.”
He jerks at that, and glances outside. “A day and a half?” he repeats, somewhat numbly.
“The whole thing happened yesterday,” Tubbo says. “You slept all the rest of that day, and all of today, too. We were scared you weren’t going to wake up.”
“Speak for yourself,” Tommy mutters. “But you would’ve liked that, wouldn’t you? If you hadn’t woken up.”
He meets Tommy’s glare. It’s an accusation, nothing more and nothing less. Tommy is angry. He deserves to be.
There is a lie on his tongue. But it would be fruitless now.
“Maybe,” he says, and feels both their gazes on his face, and amends that to, “Yes.”
He doesn’t know what else to say. There should be no more lies. But he doesn’t know how to explain himself, doesn’t know how to explain the weariness that weighs down his bones and the way he struggles to function and the way he can’t stop remembering what it was like in those final days, what it was like to know that his story was coming to a close and he was the villain and he was fine with it, because even if the ending would not be a good one, at least it would be an ending. He doesn’t know how to explain that he never intended to survive the rebellion, that one way or another, he sought his own destruction, and that death was rest and peace but no true healing. He doesn’t know how to explain that he’s regained perspective and the capacity to regret and the desire to never, ever hurt them like he once did, but not any will to live for himself. Not any desire to stay in this world that has taken and taken and taken and put his pieces back together all wrong.
He doesn’t know how to explain any of it. And even if he did, he wouldn’t. They don’t deserve to have to deal with that.
(they are children, still, despite your best efforts, too old for their age, but they should not have to carry the burdens of their elders on their backs any longer)
“Oh,” Tubbo says, small and quiet.
“Why,” Tommy says.
He closes his eyes.
“Do I really have to explain it?” he asks.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Tommy says, “I want to know why you didn’t tell us.”
He opens his eyes. Tommy is glaring at him, but it’s not quite anger anymore; it’s desperation, and fear, and worst of all, a terrible, horrible understanding,
(there is a boy with blue eyes gone grey and the boy stares into lava and Ghostbur isn’t sure that any amount of blue will make this better but it’s all he has, is all he can offer, and he allows the worst implications to flutter out of his brain like butterflies in favor of good cheer because it’s the only thing he can do to help and no one wants him to be the way that he was, so this has to be better, better to be a fool than a monster so a fool is what he shall be)
and he wishes it weren’t there. Wishes he didn’t know exactly why it is.
(he should have killed the green bastard then and there and hang what Tommy wanted, they all would have slept the better for it)
“It’s not your cross to bear,” he says. “It’s mine. It’s my own fault, and you shouldn’t have to deal with it.”
“So you thought lying to our faces was better?” Tommy demands. “You thought you could slap a smile on and it’d all turn out okay? That’s not how it works, Wilbur. I know that.”
Tubbo makes a noise, wounded.
“But really, you didn’t think it was something we’d want to know? That you still have a fucking death wish? What were we supposed to do, play around at being a happy family until you just up and died again one day? Because the last time you didn’t tell us something like this went so very well?” There is a flush spreading across Tommy’s cheeks. “I’m sick of people lying to me, Wilbur. I’m sick of you lying to me. How the fuck are we supposed to help you if you don’t tell us that you need help?”
He finds himself at a loss for words.
(he hasn’t been thinking about it in those terms. hasn’t been thinking about himself as someone who needs help, someone who deserves help. he is fire and he is ash and he is a spectre given physical form and he still doesn’t know what his purpose is, doesn’t know who brought him here and for what, so he has set himself to righting the wrongs he committed against his brother, but he hardly needs to take care of himself to do that, does he?)
(does he need help?)
(you made an ending but the story went on and you are back in it now, and who is to say there is no different path, no good road to set your dust-weary foot upon, and the sun shines regardless of what you do and indeed who is to say there will not be such endings?)
“I don’t want you to die, Wilbur,” Tommy says. “I can’t fucking do that again. You can’t leave, alright?”
“It’s okay if you don’t want to be here right now,” Tubbo puts in, still subdued. “We can help you learn how again. You’ve just got to give us the chance.”
It’s that that does it. Said so innocently, so determinedly, as if it’s that simple, as if there isn’t a thing with teeth and claws lurking below his skin, ready to lash out at anyone and anything, himself included. And he doesn’t understand it, not really, doesn’t understand why these two are so willing to help him after everything he’s put them through, doesn’t understand how they could think him worthy of it.
“Oh,” he chokes out, and distantly thinks that he is really crying too much today.
“Aw, jeez,” Tommy says. “Oh no, don’t—don’t cry, big man, come on. We don’t need to do that.”
Maybe. But on the other hand, maybe he does, and Tommy is very close, he suddenly realizes, and Tubbo, too, both of them close enough to pull into a hug, as long as they don’t object, so that’s what he does.
And they don’t object.
He should not, perhaps, be clinging to them as hard as he is. But they don’t tell him to stop, so he doesn’t.
For a while, they sit there, and he hugs them and they bury themselves into his side, and it’s almost like being back at home again, like Techno will come marching out of the woods with his sword mounted over his shoulder and Phil will call them in for dinner any moment, and in a few minutes he’ll get a message from Schlatt on his comm inviting him in on his latest business venture that is actually a thin veneer for a scam, like always.
He glances up, and Schlatt is nearer, in his field of vision, considering them with a raised eyebrow but a thankful lack of mockery. He rolls his eyes when he sees him looking, but from Schlatt, that’s practically a ringing endorsement.
He should probably say something about Schlatt’s presence at some point. No more lies.
In a minute, perhaps. For now, he holds his brothers tight and tries to let himself believe that everything is going to be alright.
(easier said than done)
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agent-jones · 4 years
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In Defence of Gwendolyn Elizabeth Cooper
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Okay, I want to start this out with a few DISCLAIMERS. First, this is probably going to be a long post, so buckle in. Second, I just want to say upfront that I DO NOT CONDONE the mistakes Gwen has made. Defending and understanding her are far different from actually condoning what she’s done and I figured I would put that blanket statement right here at the top. I know she did Bad Things. This isn’t to excuse that, it’s to explain, maybe, why she did what she did and perhaps people can gain a new perspective on Gwen Cooper in the process.
Okay. Leggo.
I asked for people to send their reasonings for not liking Gwen and I did get a few responses, so THANK YOU to those who messaged me! Everyone was very polite about it and I’m very grateful for that. The overwhelming reason people seem to hate Gwen is how she acted in regards to her relationship with RHYS. There is a lot to unpack there so I’m going to put all of the Rhys stuff in one section, and then move on to the other reasons I’ve seen about the fandom.
Rhys
Cheating on Rhys with Owen.
The thing about Torchwood is that they deal with the shittiest parts of the Universe. Suzie was right about that. Gwen came in not really knowing what she was getting herself into. Suddenly, she’s thrown into this chaotic, messy environment where she’s almost killed on basically a daily basis and she comes home from work and she can’t talk about it. She has to pretend to Rhys that she spent the day pushing paperwork, when actually the deadliest alien in the Universe tried to cut her head open with scary conversion tools and a member of their team ended up being the reason for it. She deals with trauma on a daily basis and the one person she should be able to talk to, who should be able to hold her and let her fall apart to him, isn’t allowed to know. Of course she feels isolated, wouldn’t you? Our partners are supposed to be the people we go to for support and help, but she literally cannot tell him a single thing about her life anymore. But she gets home and she has to it there and think about everything that scares her and all of the horrible things she sees, the death and destruction and tragedy, and she can’t say a single thing about it.
So, of course the idea of being with someone she can talk to is tempting, being with someone who shares her experiences and can truly empathise with her fears and help her through this new, and tragedy-filled, way of life. Why wouldn’t she want that? Owen offers it. Owen. Who knows she has a boyfriend, who literally says “I torture people in happy relationships,” comes to her and says “you can share these things with me.” And lost and unable to talk to anyone else but him, she gives into the temptation. Because, maybe this is better for her than having a partner who can’t be allowed to know the new Gwen Cooper: Torchwood Operative. Maybe she can finally have someone who will hold her and help her through things she can’t share with her boyfriend.
Flirting with/“Throwing herself at” Jack
Not going to lie, this one really bugs me when I see it. Why? Because Jack Harkness instigates pretty much every flirtation they have. The gun range scene: Jack sensually moving against her body to “show her the proper way to shoot.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: that cellar scene, where he caresses her arm and gives her this line about coming back for her [ after he had just said the same thing to Ianto so ]. Her wedding: the nostrovite was the one to lean in to kiss Gwen, the one to say “sometimes you meet someone who knocks your world off--” whatever the wording is. That nostrovite, using Jack, knew that he flirts with her like that, for it was the one making all of the moves. 
Jack is this enigmatic, BEAUTIFUL man who swoops into the life of Gwen Cooper, shows her that the Universe is bigger than anyone could imagine, and flirts with her, looks at her like she’s the most special human being on Earth. It’s no surprise she got a crush. It happens. But never, does she throw herself at him, in fact he always seems to be the one trying to do something, even though he also knows she has a boyfriend and consistently reminds her to keep hold of that life. Yes, she kissed him in Day One. But you know who else kissed Jack Harkness even though she had a boyfriend? Martha Jones. People make mistakes. It was the heat of the moment where Jack saved this girl that Gwen cared for and was so scared was going to die, she saw Jack act gentle and kind and yes, she made a mistake. But, it happens.
If you’re going to crucify Gwen for making very human mistakes such as this, it’s unfair to crucify her and not the men who played just as big of a role in it. They’re in no way innocent and to turn Gwen into this horrid, cheating slut and not condemn the men for knowingly throwing themselves at her despite her relationship status is really, quite frankly, sexist and a double-standard. 
Drugging Rhys
A horrible decision. Wrong. Yes, she did something incredibly invasive and absolutely not okay. She did it because she was spiraling. The thing with Owen had ended and I truly believed Gwen realised that she needed and loved Rhys, that he was the man for her and she needed to hold onto that. But, she was still holding back secrets, there were still things she couldn’t tell him. She was feeling guilty and wanted to tell Rhys the truth. But, if he left her because of it? That’s it. She loses her life outside of Torchwood, she loses the one thing keeping her grounded on Earth as the Universe tears into her at work. Of course she’s terrified and yes, it made her do something incredibly not okay. She took away Rhys’s ability to choose for himself.
She shows remorse for this, obviously, when she refuses to retcon Rhys at the end of Meat. She won’t do that to him again, won’t take away his right to know what he knows. And then again at their wedding. Jack offers them both retcon and Gwen says no, no secrets anymore. In that moment, Rhys’s face almost seemed disappointed that they weren’t going to forget that hellish day, that maybe he wanted to remember it in a way that didn’t involve aliens and their families almost being torn to shreds. But, Gwen has learned from her mistake. She won’t do it again.
Also. Gwen is not the only team member who has done something like that, in fact they all have:
Owen: took away the agency of two people by spraying them with a perfume that made them want to have sex with him. Two people who didn’t want to before they were drugged. That is date r*** and it is very bad. But, Owen is forgiven by the fandom for it. He’s loved and not bashed.
Jack: literally retcons anyone who talks to him for too long.
Tosh: dug around in the inner-most private thoughts of the people around her, invaded the deepest crevices of their minds and peered in on their secrets. This is absolutely not okay.
Ianto: clearly took advantage of and manipulated Jack in order to save Lisa. Got two innocent people killed, nearly got the entire team killed, and then allowed Jack to be given to slave traders and killed, before changing his mind and rescuing him. These are really horrible things, and yet he is the fan favourite. 
Gwen has done no more wrong than the rest of the team. This is the point of Torchwood: flawed human beings doing what they can to save the world and that “flawed” descriptor is for Gwen too. 
“She’s a Bitch”
Oh I’ve heard this one a few times and it always confuses me. She’s a bitch? When? When was Gwen ever mean to anyone? 
When she thought the thing about Tosh’s boots over jeans look being out of fashion? First, it was her private thought that Tosh had no business listening to. Second, it wasn’t thought in a mean-spirited way, she was simply making a fashion observation. We all do it. It does make us bitches to point out when things have gone out of fashion. Tosh was more of a bitch to Gwen when she found out about her and Owen in Countrycide “didn’t take you long to get your feet under the table.” That’s a bitchy and petty thing to say, but no one is calling Tosh a bitch.
Is she ever a bitch to Rhys? Not that I remember [ of course beyond the everything up there ]. But, there are moments where Rhys is a total ASS to her. Her new boss runs up to her saying there’s an emergency and that she’s needed, what does Rhys do? He screams at her “SIT THE FUCK DOWN, GWEN”  in front of her boss. That is not an okay thing to do, ever. Then, there’s the moment in Adrift when he says something like “sometimes I really hate you, Gwen.” He says this to his wife because she’s going through something very hard on her that is making her question the Universe and because it’s swaying her decision on if she wants to bring kids into the world, he says he hates her. At this point, he knows what she sees, knows what she goes through on a daily basis and doesn’t bother to take into consideration that she’s stressed and traumatised when trying to get her to make huge life decisions.
Gwen has emotions, but she’s never flat out mean to people, but there have been times where others have been cruel to her, and they aren’t hated for it.
“What she said at the end of Meat was uncalled for”
This is what she says:
GWEN: But none of you have any partners outside of this. JACK: But we understand how you feel. GWEN: No, you don't. No, you don't, Jack. You all think it's cold and lonely out there. But it isn't for me because I have him. 
She isn’t wrong. She doesn’t say anything cruel about the team. She points out the fact that they can’t understand what it’s like to have to hide her ENTIRE life from her partner. Jack and Ianto have a relationship, they’re partners yes, but they can actually talk about how hard the job is, they can talk about Torchwood and the shit they see and how it affects them. Is it so wrong for Gwen to say they can’t understand how she feels that she can’t? The entire team apart from her have been so entwined with Torchwood for so long that they don’t have lives outside of it, and that’s what she’s saying and she’s not wrong. Why hate her for pointing out the truth because she wants to be able to talk to the person she loves about the harder parts of her life?
“She acts superior to the team”
This one I see a lot. That people seem to think she somehow acts like she’s better than them, that she acts righteous somehow. But, that’s not what she’s doing. I’ve made a post about this before, but I’ll sum it up here. Jack hired Gwen because he needed someone with a new perspective, someone who could see how what they do affects civilians and help them use that to work better. He brought her in to remind them that they need to do better by the people of Cardiff. 
And that’s what she does,
She calls them out for being callous about Carys because that’s what Jack hired her for. The girl was dying and to her, it seemed like they didn’t care and so she spoke up, like Jack had asked her to do. She realises that she’s wrong in a way and she adjusts how she goes about it. Jack consistently reminds her why she was brought on, to call them out when they needed it and to remind them that there are human beings that are affected by what they do and they should care. And then when she does that, the fandom hates her for it. Don’t hate her for doing the job she was brought in to do.
Her Miracle Day speech
The Gwen in Miracle Day is not the same Gwen who peered over that parking garage barrier to spy on Torchwood. She saw the worst of the Universe, she watched as so many people died around her. Her friends all died horrific deaths. She was yanked by Jack into this whirlwind of a life, into the chaos and destruction that was Torchwood-- and then he left her. 
GWEN: Are you ever coming back, Jack? JACK: What for? GWEN: Me. 
He says nothing and leaves anyway. She begged her best friend to not leave her, after the last of her friends was killed, and he basically said she wasn’t worth staying for. How could she not be broken after that? As two people very close to me have said [ credit to @cxptained​ and @agent-sato​ ]: everyone else on the team was brought into Torchwood already broken, Torchwood took them in and put them back together again. Gwen came into Torchwood whole. She had a life and was happy. She lived, but she was SHATTERED. Torchwood took her and broke her. 
So yes, she says something that is horrible. She says that when everyone else died and she survived, she felt better than them. But sometimes we have thoughts that we don’t control, we have thoughts that we know are wrong. She knows it’s wrong. Eve’s acting? You can tell that she had those thoughts and that she felt horrible for having them.
Not to mention, she says this as she’s trying to get her baby daughter back from strangers who have kidnapped her. She’s desperate and terrified and angry and her daughter is in danger. Her mental space is horrible right now. She was abandoned by Jack, broken by Torchwood and when he appears again and she’s dragged back in? Her daughter is put in danger. But she also missed Torchwood and Jack. She’s terrified and lost and conflicted and she said something bad. But she knows she is wrong.
And So...
Gwen Cooper is a human being. She is a character in a show where ALL of the main characters are written to be flawed and complicated and to make mistakes while saving the world. She was put through so much and it seems as though she’s blamed for the fact that it changed her and led her to making decisions she may not have made had Torchwood not dragged her in.
She deserves more than how she’s treated by the fans.
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guigz1-coldwar · 2 years
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'The only way': New chapter for "Redemption in a Spirit in a Cold War" is out!
"The only way"
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"We're going to get out of here, I'm promising you that, that's our hope!"
Chapter Summary: Park & Portnova are still trying to find the location of Yirina & Zasha before an unorthodox way is taken while on their side, Yirina & Zasha tries to give themselves hope...
Link of the Picrew here!
To read it on AO3, click here!
Words : +3000
Taglist : @snowgoldwaylon , @clxudtea , @efingart
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Century House
In the afternoon
It was stressing, the more time was passing, the more Park was actually panicking that she will never found Yirina & Zasha back and she was fearing the worst since the last time that she was captured with Yirina at the Yamantau, the Collective knew that Yirina willingly helped the West even after she learned of the brainwashing and it was sure that their escape put a big target on the back of their head, Yirina been the number one priority to capture or worst...kill at the moment and that fear was overwhelming Park during her work to find something in what was recovered in Peter's apartment, they were a lot but a little that could really help.
She couldn't talk freely to Portnova since that their offices were rigged with CIA bugs all around and even if they could say that, what if the CIA was having their own plans on Yirina and took her before she could with the MI6 & the SAS. Adding to that a race against time with the CIA wasn't really going to help Park to destress more. Her desk was almost filled up with the files, reports, everything that Peter investigates on but it was mainly things that were explaining that wasn't helping to know where Yirina & Zasha could be located...and now, Park needed only one thing: a moment to chill out...and her office isn't the place for that.
Her eyes crossed around the room, sadness been felt when they were looking at Yirina's desk, seeing it empty before they arrive at one thing that Park took with her before going to work: Yirina's diary. If she wanted to get some hope & a bit of a smile, maybe she could try to see clearly & closely what was written in it. So, she got up from her chair, took the diary in her hands before she goes out of her office, walking towards the elevator to reach the underground parking, the only safe place in the building that isn't listened to by the CIA and it was also good that this place wasn't very frequented during these hours.
Park installed herself in the same car that she & Yirina always used when they came back in London, let the radio off for some calm before she starts to read the first pages of the diary, her eyes getting filled with emotions at seeing the handwriting, the drawings that Yirina made in those pages to remember the most important, even Park got her own drawing and she was finding it very beautiful. She continued to read it slowly, discovering from up close what was Yirina's life before everything...
"Why...why did I do this?" She muttered to herself as she was continuing to read the written memories, she was feeling guilty again. "I was stupid, you didn't deserve this, Yiri," She added, looking at a page that was referring to the event that changed everything...Trabzon. "I shouldn't have done this," She whispered, her head going up to look outside and seeing from afar, Portnova going out of the elevator, causing her to close the diary and to get out of the car as Portnova was arriving.
"Park," Portnova spoke up, walking towards the car as Park leaned on the side of it. "I saw you leave your office earlier, you're okay?" She demanded, finally making a stop at least 2 meters from Park.
"Needed some calm," It's what Park could reply to Portnova, her eyes looking over the closed diary between her hands. "And it's only here that I could have a breath without been stressed," She added.
"What's this?" Portnova asked, pointing at the diary.
"It's her diary," Park responded, putting her head up to look at Portnova in the eyes. "I took it before we left for here, might think that it could help me...a bit of hope, you know," She revealed before she starts to offer the diary to her friend. "You want to look at it?" She questioned her.
"I don't know," Portnova mumbled, a bit worried that this diary wasn't something to look at her before she resigned herself. "Yeah, I maybe should," She confided, taking the diary into her own hands as Park crossed her arms, her blue eyes impossible to remove from the diary.
"It's a lot if you want to know," Park commented in a low voice as Portnova just opened the diary at its first page.
"It's like everything she could recover since she got..." Park slightly nodded before Portnova could finish her question as she was starting to read the pages she was seeing at a faster pace than Park did. "Wow, it's...it's...astonishing to see that," Portnova was a little speechless to see the diary, memories that she wasn't remembering coming back when her own name was mentioned on the pages.
"Me too," Park snorted, taking a quick deep breath. "I was amazed when she showed me this for the first time," She told her with a little smile, thinking about that moment back into that old CIA safe house.
"How long it was?" Portnova asked by curiosity.
"It was...4 months ago, a few days after she awake from her coma," Park responded as Portnova was resuming the reading.
"She's recovered a lot, always been..." Portnova was going to continue until she stops herself to talk like that, her eyes seemingly focused on a detail that was written on the page she was seeing. "Didn't know that...she wrote down a phone number," She declared, suddenly getting Park's attention high to cause her to get next to Portnova.
"Let me see that," She demanded, arriving near her friend to check the page where that phone number was, her thoughts slowly gathering to know who could be using that number.
"Any ideas?" Portnova muttered, looking at a thinking Park.
"Freya Helvig," Park could only think about that name at the moment, seeing that this page was written when she & Yirina were in the US at the New Orleans...she remembers well of that moment, Yirina coming back all dizzy after she tried to call Freya. "That's her phone number," She said, Portnova letting her get the diary back in her hands.
"How's that?" Portnova was a bit confused to see that number & Park like that.
"Yirina said that she was able to know that from a Perseus agent in the New Orleans," Park explained, checking the number before she looks around the parking, thinking of something. "It might be our only way," She thought in a low voice before she turn her head around to look at Portnova. "We need to call that number, we could force Freya to cooperate with us,"
"I'm not sure..."
"Portnova, we need to find them, that's our only chance even if that chance is on the other side," Park proclaimed, cutting Portnova in her words as she was looking back at the elevator. "Let's go to a public phone booth to make that call, follow me," She then ordered in a clear voice, starting to walk into the elevator direction, soon followed by Portnova.
Yeah, it was unorthodox as Portnova was saying and even Park was thinking the same way but it was maybe their only way to find their respective lovers again alive and it was sure that the two will certainly force Freya to give up where are the two even after what happened. Instead of going directly outside, the two went back to their offices to grab something to write on & a pen before actually going outside Century House, willing to make that call very fast.
The two went to the nearest red phone booth that was close to the MI6 and the two took directly their roles once arrived at it: Portnova was keeping an eye around while Park was the one making the call to Freya, the stress surely going up inside Park that was thinking about what could happen in that phone call: will Freya help them? Is someone is going to answer that phone call? Is this number still existing? They needed to try and they will do this...it's their only way...
"Come on, answer," Park stressed out after she composed the number, hearing the first beep in her ear from the phone, looking at Portnova that was guarding the phone booth, and then...
"Sonya Kuzmin's speaking," A voice that Park didn't expect to hear came through the phone.
"Sonya?" Park only mutters at this, sounding a bit confused to hear that voice instead of Freya's one.
"Who is this?" Sonya demanded, also confused to been addressed like that.
"It's...it's Helen Park...from the MI6," Park decided to confess directly instead of faking up to be a Perseus agent, that wasn't going to work and what she could hear was the noises of surprise through the phone.
"What...what's the fuck? How did you get this number?" Sonya asked in a surprised voice, sounding a little angry & mostly astonished.
"I thought it was...Freya's number," Park told them in a low voice.
"It is but she isn't here at the moment so..." Sonya explained before they stops themselves in their voice. "You didn't answer my question, how did you get this number?" She asked again, sounding assertive.
"I got it from...it's Yirina who got it," Park responded, her tone unsure of telling Yirina's name to them. "Yirina Grigoriev, she wrote it down in her diary,"
"Grigoriev?" Sonya whispered. "Her? But why...why are you calling me?"
"Listen, Sonya, do you know where they are?" Park demanded, going into the subject of this conversation.
"How the fuck I know? I didn't hear anything since most times except that MI6 raid on a hideout in London yesterday," Sonya complained, their voice taking a tone that was not understanding the reason for the call.
"Yirina & Zasha got captured!" Park spoke up, raising a bit her voice through the phone as Portnova slightly looks at her, having heard her voice going up. "Said that Stone captured them,"
"Captured? But...that's weird..." Sonya's voice was like thinking as if something was wrong and Park could identify it. "We didn't hear anything from our agents in London saying that they got someone,"
"So even you don't know that Yirina & Zasha got captured?" Park presumed.
"I didn't know," Sonya replied instantly, not relieving Park at all to learn that. "But...knowing who are over there, I might think that the two will survive any longer," They thought with a clear voice before a deep breath is taken. "Okay...you have something to write on?"
"What are you doing?" Park demanded even if she was taking off the piece of paper along with the pen, ready to write down the important things.
"I'm giving you...the only Perseus safehouse remaining in London but nothing else," Sonya answered before they starts to tell Park what she wanted to hear since the moment she learned with Portnova that their lovers were captured, writing down the location of that place. "Listen, I may help you but that doesn't mean that you can call me every day,"
"Thank you, Sonya," Park told them with a relieved voice.
"Don't thank me, it's the only way for me," Sonya proclaimed before the sound of a door was heard. "I've gotta go, goodbye," They added before the phone suddenly hang out, not leaving to Park the opportunity to say her goodbye to Sonya as she was looking down at what she wrote, the safe house that Yirina & Zasha were and it only took her five seconds before she decides to make another call...sounding very relieved to finally know the truth...
"Price, it's Helen, we know where they are, find us at the underground parking!"
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Somewhere
At the same time
I couldn't know what happened at the moment when I closes my eyes, trying to figure it out inside of my head as I thought that I passed out in front of everyone including Zasha and I don't know how much time passed before I could finally open my eyes, finding that my vision was at first all blurred when my eyelashes open up as if I needed some glasses but the most troubling was that I could only see from my right eye, the other...been covered with those bandages around my head and slightly stinging me a little bit.
When my right eye could recover its normal vision, I was able to see that I was still in that cell, laid down on the ground as I was facing one of the brick walls, my hands having served as a sort of pillow for the left side of my head before I decide to slowly get my back against the wall, finally able to move my body without having it hurting me, my eye crossing around the room as I could see Zasha who was in the same position as me at least 2 meters from me, their back on another wall.
"Zed," I spoke up, my voice finding back its former tone unlike maybe hours ago, to call them out as their head was looking down. "Zasha!" I repeated again, a little bit louder.
"What, what?" They almost jump scared from their spot at hearing me, raising their head in a fast move before their eyes went on me. "Yirina?" They muttered, eyes going wide on their side. "You...you awake, you awake!" They exclaimed, sounding happy to see me finally up
"I...what happened?" I demanded, still trying to know what happened.
"Shit, you...you passed out in front of everyone," They replied, their voice going back into a normal tone, their left hand going behind their head to scratch it. "You lost consciousness and you convulsed, they managed to control it before they left us...it was like...hours ago," They added, giving some details about it.
"They? Like...the four of them?" I questioned them but they shook their head at me.
"It was mostly Lukas & Beck doing it with me trying to assist while the two other...they left at the moment you passed out," They answered, putting their hands back on their lap in front of them "Those...Bellamy &...Sarah...didn't have any compassion for you," They proclaimed, their voice breaking down at saying Sarah's name. "Fuck, Sarah...I...she's with them,"
"She's Stone sister, been fooled us to think that Harry Stone was still alive...to get us, me & you," I revealed but it wasn't looking like the first time that Zasha learned about it, just by looking on their face. "She...did she..."
"Yes...she did," They muttered, still looking down away from me. "Hours ago,"
"Damn it," I cursed, turning my head away from them to look at my own hands, a bit hurting to have them getting used as a pillow. "My eye..." I then took consciousness of that situation after checking them, my left hand slowly moving to touch the left side of my head, only feeling the bandages that were going around my head to cover up my left eye.
"Beck said that they injected you with something in the eyesocket and that it got infected," Zasha told me, finally looking towards me, a face of sadness on them. "How does it feel?" They demanded, pointing out at my eye.
"It stings," I responded in a low voice
"You want me to take a look at it?" Zasha proposed but I shook my head to this idea, not wanting them to what was under that bandage. "You're sure?" They insisted, starting to move slowly from their spot to reach me.
"I..." I tried to say as they were slowly going to me before I resigns myself to let them do what they wanted to do. "Fine, do it," I told them, trying to stay positive in my voice before Zasha starts to unwrap in slow motion, the bandages around my face after they arrived in front of me.
I was panicking on the inside at seeing their reaction as they were removing the bandages, feeling my left eye getting away from that little darkness before the bandages were all removed off me...and then, I could see Zasha's face going into a scared mood at seeing my left eye...that's eye vision was like blurred at the maximum, my right one staying perfect and inside of me, I was confused about what to do and what to say at this...my eyes weren't having the same vision...
"Fuck..." Zasha whispered, their eyes focused on my left one that was still stinging
"What?" I could mutter at that reaction from them, fearing the worst just by seeing them like that.
"Your left eye is no longer in the same color shape as your right eye," They declared, their eyes drifting between my two eyes, a sort of examination from them. "It's like more a light blue...and sort of going white," They added.
"My vision at my left is all blurred," I told them with a sad voice before I look down, away from them. "As if I wasn't fucked up already," I cursed at myself, just to think of it. "I got brainwashed, left for dead, and now, I'm going to lose my vision on one eye," I mumbled before taking a breath. "I'm a fucking mess,"
"You're not, Yirina," Zasha protested at my remark, shaking their head at this. "You're strong and you know it," They added as they decides to move next to me to my right closely, us looking right in front of us. "We've been through a lot in the past and maybe a lot in the future but we both know that we'll do our best to get it done...we just need some hope," They confessed in a sadder voice at me. "Yiri...Beans...it's hard," They snorted, seeing on their face the first tears coming out of their eyes.
"Zed, don't cry, please," I said to them in a low voice, seeing them cleaning up the falling tears with their hand. "We're going to do this, our hope is coming," I proclaimed before I decides to get my right arm behind their neck, to give them at least some comfort at this hard moment happening...
"We're going to get out of here, I'm promising you that, that's our hope!"
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dangan-meme-palace · 3 years
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I realy like your analysis on the kaito-maki-shuichi relationship. So i was wondering who in your opinion has the best relationship dynamic within the cast?
Aaaa thanks! I'm more or less pleased with how it came out :D probably could be shorter though haha
-tech
As for the best dynamic... hmm.
Judging based on what I mentioned in the previous post about strengths being highlighted and weaknesses being dealt with in one way or another and believable emotional bonds that help each other, I'd have to say...
Kokichi and Gonta
For sure, it's gotta be them.
Narratively:
They are canonly a dynamic duo, working together and using their different strengths to help one another in areas the other is lacking in. It feels like they can both truly shine when they cooperate, and that's exactly how it should be.
It's very nice to see them work together because they both bring something different to the table that truly helps the other, and not always in ways you would expect at first glance. The brain and brawn thing is expected, but the extent to which they compliment each other is unparalleled by any other dynamic in the game.
Kokichi -> Gonta
Admittedly, Kokichi does less for Gonta narratively than Gonta does for Kokichi, but to be fair I would expect someone like Kokichi to be the one others help shine, not the other way around. Kokichi, as the Ultimate Leader, is more like the protagonist while Gonta is the supporting character.
For the most part though, Kokichi's narrative role relating to Gonta is to show us that Gonta isn't the happy-go-lucky himbo the rest of the cast thinks he is, allowing us to see that Gonta has depth, specifically that Gonta's morals are definitely different than what one would normally expect from someone with his personality.
The rest is something that relates more to their emotional bond, but for now I'll just say that Kokichi allows us to see Gonta's insecurities, flaws, and dedication to his friends (both the cast and Kokichi) and this improves Gonta's character immensely.
Gonta -> Kokichi
Gonta, as a character, shows us just how human Kokichi can be, especially during chapter 4 but also in little moments throughout the game as well. Whether it be lashing out at the others, being soft (like, so, so soft) with Gonta, his cooperation skills, or the depths of his sadness and loyalty, Gonta drags these reactions out of Kokichi one by one like it's his job, which it is! Narratively, Gonta's job is to allow us to see glimpses of what goes on in Kokichi's heart, something incredibly rare and precious to me.
Gonta also really allows Kokichi's ability to strategize and lead people to shine. Like, really shine. Chapter 4 was the best showcase of Kokichi's talent of leading people, but that's because he had Gonta following him. Any captain needs a crew and any Ultimate Leader needs helpful and supportive followers that believe in him. This goes alongside Kokichi's major weakness throughout the game.
Kokichi's biggest weakness is that he's placed himself into an antagonistic position. Seems smart, until you realize that hes the Ultimate Leader and he just alienated himself from literally everyone, losing any potential bonds/followers he could have made. He shot himself in the foot by forsaking some leadership options when he's the Ultimate Leader. It's the thing he's best at, but he put limits on himself anyway to protect everyone from Monokuma's attempts to break them apart.
He can still get the group to do what he wants, but it takes a considerable amount of effort on his behalf in order to do so. Gonta makes up for that by being the follower that Kokichi desperately needs. Gonta believes in Kokichi enough to go along with both of his plans, to the extent that he still goes along with them even they involve kidnapping and killing the other characters.
There's also the fact that Gonta's dedication to the others might've helped Kokichi decide to keep helping everyone, but I'll get more into that in a bit.
Emotionally:
This dynamic also makes a lot of sense from an emotional perspective. You can actually see why these two outcast characters would want to come together and hang out with each other, and why they view the other so positively: they are each other's ideals.
Kokichi -> Gonta
When Gonta needed a friend and someone to take him seriously/not dismiss him, Kokichi was there to hang out with him, seriously listen to him, and explain things to him that he didn't get the first time. Where the other kids were scared of him due to his size and talent, Kokichi had the confidence to ignore Gonta's natural intimidation and the kindness to hang out with Gonta, despite being so scared of bugs he literally foams at the mouth when they touch him.
Kokichi still regarded Gonta as a friend after that incident though, when most people (justifiably) would've held a grudge and cut him off. Gonta has some very obvious rage issues and reacts pretty impulsively to the things that upset him, but Kokichi is very patient with others, and almost forgiving to a fault at times, so he's willing to stick with Gonta and try and work through their problems instead of abandoning him. This would no doubt be something that Gonta desperately wanted from a friend, seeing as he's very self conscious about appearing as scary.
He loyally sticks by Gonta and readily offers advice, support, explanations, patience, etc... I mean the list goes on. I really do think that his relationship with Gonta is a showcase of how Kokichi would act around someone he really likes, like I'm talking about this being the basis for how I think Kokichi would act around DICE levels of emotional intimacy. I think this is Kokichi at his best, friendship wise. Especially because even during events that take place outside of the main story we never see Kokichi act this way around anyone else, even with the people I would also consider to be his friends (mainly Miu, but also sorta with Kiibo as well.)
They didn't know each other for long, but if you really look at it, it's plain to see that Kokichi really valued Gonta as a friend. I mean, I dont think someone who yells about wanting to live during his FTEs with Kaede would willingly offer to give his life for (no discernable goal) for just anyone y'know? Plus, throughout the game, he uses some of his friendliest and softest sprites during his conversations with Gonta. Even visually you can see their bond.
It's a very subtle relationship when compared to some of the more overt pairs throughout the game (aside from some key moments in chapter 4) but it's there, and honestly I can think of very few characters that share this close of a bond in the whole series game.
They actually kinda seem similar to Aoi and Sakura in a way, but somehow they compliment each other more... damn.
Gonta -> Kokichi
Likewise, Gonta also became Kokichi's friend and didn't seem to mind the lying at all, something that means a lot to Kokichi based on his Harmonious Heart Events, because it means that Gonta doesn't want to be friends with someone different, he wants Kokichi, lies and all. This is Kokichi's #1 wish.
I think that meant more to Kokichi than anything else, because this is his way of life. He leads with lies, he plays with lies, and he protects himself with lies too. He wants to keep lying and Gonta not being bothered by that is literally the exact thing that Kokichi yearns for in the best ending for his HHE.
Gonta also caught on to the times that Kokichi was extending olive branches and accepted him. It's subtle, but Kokichi did try and befriend people as long as he could do it without having to change himself and Gonta was one of the people that responded to that positively. Gonta readily befriended Kokichi, probably understanding first-hand what it's like to be an outcast because of misunderstandings and personality traits.
This is why Gonta's death (especially since Kokichi felt like he was fully responsible for it, despite what Gonta said) was so traumatic for Kokichi and why he reacts so negatively to it, he lost someone he never thought he would ever meet in the first place. More than a few of his dialogue lines have him imply that he's used to being hated for how he chooses to live his life and that he expects this kind of treatment from people, so finally finding someone who won't hate him for that and then losing that friend so quickly with his own plan had to have hurt immensely.
Going off that, Gonta is the one to convince Kokichi to remain friends with everyone and try his best for them despite how they treat him, and he also desperately begs for the others to do the same thing for Kokichi. He knew he was leaving Kokichi alone, and he wanted to try and protect him.
While the other members of the cast don't seem to remember this or care much about it after the whole "I'm the mastermind" bit, we do see Kokichi trying to protect the group after chapter 4 by trying getting rid of the motive to leave (therefore "ending" the killing game by making sure no one plays it) and by trying to remove Kaito, who has shown himself to be a harmful influence.
I think Gonta's words really got through to Kokichi, and while it did unfortunately lead to Kokichi dying for everyone's sake, Kokichi might not have tried to save everyone if it hadn't been for Gonta's last wishes. Why would Kokichi want to help people that actively hate him and bully him if not for the pleading of his greatest friend in the game telling him to keep protecting them.
In a sense, Kokichi during chapter 5 fulfills Gonta's original wish to be useful and protect everyone even at the cost of himself, with Kokichi doing exactly that.
Interested?
If you asked me for moments that I feel showcase their bond nicely so you can get a feel of it for yourself, I'd point you towards the dialogue they share during the 4th trial investigation and their meeting before the Insect Meet and Greet was very nice (you'll have to read between the lines for the former though!) If you want to see what I'm talking about, I would definitely recommend rewatching those. The moments prior to Gonta's execution are also always a good look at how much they meant to each other.
If you're really interested, I'd also recommend watching through their bonus content (LHEs, FTEs, HHEs, etc) and thinking about how their desires are reflected in each other, it's interesting to think about at the very least.
TL;DR?
Overall, they have an amazing, yet unsung, dynamic between the two of them and I would like to see more people recognize it. It's very brief and doesn't have a lot of story time, but it feels more meaningful than any of the "main" dynamics in the game with 10x the screentime. It has substance to it. It's satisfying and gratifying to watch.
It also makes fucking sense, unlike a particular dynamic that takes up a majority of the fucking story for nOTHING–
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aellynera · 4 years
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Itsy Bitsy Spiders (HCs)
OKAY LOOK GUYS. This is not my fault. This is all because of @rosemarysbaby13​ and a running conversation we’ve had about spiders and how we need Llewyn to come deal with them, because he would totally be about getting rid of spiders for you. Aaaaaaand then it became 2am and I don’t know but I just had to write some HCs about how our Oscars would handle dealing with spiders (both if you asked them to deal with it for you, and just spiders in general) and...
Warnings: There is (a very little) bit of language under the cut, but that’s it. Oh, and spiders.
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Llewyn Davis would 100% deal with the spider for you. The spider clearly didn’t care that much about its existence if it had the audacity to invade your personal space without asking permission, and Llewyn is not okay with that. He just wants to cuddle with you and that spider is curbing his flow. Now if the spider dared to crawl on him, he has no problem begging you to get it off him and throw it out the window. That spider can take its chances on the damn fire escape, that piece of shit.
Nathan Bateman sees the spider as a literal bug, even though he knows they are not actually bugs. They are arthropods (class Araneae) but they are eight-legged hellions that could potentially actually be dangerous to not only him but also to his laboratory so he gets immense satisfaction from smashing the hell out of them. They are errors in the code.
Mikael Boghosian would catch and release the spider. He took an oath to do no harm, and that extends to the non-human world as well. In fact, this is an issue often enough that he has a small glass and piece of cardboard specifically set aside in order to trap the invaders and set them free (never mind that he’s likely caught and released the same spider on your behalf at least twenty times; he will do whatever you need or ask of him.)
Michael Perry would get rid of the spider out of necessity, because they’re kinda gross and he doesn’t really like things with so many legs (two human legs or four canine or feline legs are just fine) but would also feel bad if one got smooshed under his cowboy boots. It’s not his fault, they should know better than to challenge the Texas Tush Push.
Orestes would begrudgingly handle spider disposal. It’s not that he likes them (not really) but he doesn’t particularly dislike them either (they are a part of the natural world, after all.) But if they bothered you that much, he would deal with it. And he would do it while telling you all about how important they are to how the world connects and works together. Who knows the effect that killing a spider in Alexandria could have on the farthest reaches of the empire?
Cecil doesn’t actually care one way or the other about the spider, but he does have an issue if it touches his skin and especially if it crawls anywhere near his neck. And all bets are off if the fucker comes near his beer and climbs onto the bottle. He’s fairly certain he could hit the bottle with a shot from halfway across the room with pinpoint accuracy, and he will apologize profusely to you if he misses and has to buy you a new dining room table. And he’d still feel bad about killing the spider.
Poe Dameron finds this to be a complicated question/request. How big is the spider? How many legs does it have? It’s alien, after all…some spiders are definitely more terrifying than others and you screaming “KILL IT” at him just isn’t specific enough. So he quickly snaps a holo of it and then asks BB-8 to run an analysis. Once the actual make and model of this alien invader has been determined, Poe considers asking you to handle it yourself - he knows you’re totally capable of dealing with alien spiders. But in the end, of course he would take care of it for you. By asking BB-8 to burn it with his lighter.
Reeves would either get rid of the spider, or catch it and throw it outside, whichever. Whatever you wanted, really. It’s just a spider, they never bothered him, so he doesn’t mind either way really. He does find it incredibly cute that you end up shrieking and jumping up on one of the kitchen chairs, laughing as he points out that it’s just a little spider, not a mouse. Then he writes a song about it.
Santiago Garcia is too busy running around the jungles of Colombia and trying to not get eaten by spiders of his own. But if he were home, he would absolutely take care of that spider for you. This is not even a question. Spider survival is a mission.
Bud Cooper would definitely get rid of the spider, but he would take it outside first before dealing with it. It was not invited into the house, it is not a welcome guest, and smashing it wherever it was found could potentially ruin the furniture or possibly hurt you, if it was crawling on you. So out it goes, and then it dies. And the next day when he gets to the office, he starts researching instances of spider infestations in your neighborhood and nearby parcels of land on the off-chance that this could radically affect your property values.
Blue Jones would catch the spider and then keep it as a pet. You don’t even know what to say to him other than...you really don’t know what to say. He tells you that he just feels like it suits him, and the next thing you know he’s named it “Baby” (because that’s not weird or anything) and is making a home for it on the corner of his desk. Vera is in the corner of the office, pinching the bridge of her nose as you shout at him that it’s not a tarantula and not something you keep as a pet and he just shrugs and continues on his merry way. From that day forward, none of the other girls understand why you call him Brown Recluse (and you’re certainly not going to explain it) but at least he got the damn thing off you. Maybe if you’re lucky, it will bite him. Karma is a bitch.
Lucien despises spiders. Not to the point that he won’t handle them himself if he has to, but it’s much more preferable if Gabriel is available to deal with such matters. And anyway, if he has to do it himself, he had an extra pair of gloves and he has somewhat accidentally discovered the best lure for most spiders is a jelly donut. And he’s fairly sure he’s doused most of them in the gasoline anyway.
Basil Stitt doesn’t even know how the spider got into his apartment in the first place. That must be one crafty little fucker to get past his set of defenses. Oh, shit, maybe it was when he had the pizzas delivered. Oh well. Whatever, it’s here now, and he’s definitely going to make it go away. He decided to call it Jason (there was no way that thing was also going to be called Basil, why did everything want to use his name anyway?) And Jason is going down. Just as soon as he manages to pry that big ass kitchen knife out of his desk.
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Whumptober 2020 Day 10 - They Look So Pretty When They Bleed - Blood Loss
Fandom: Silent Hill
Characters: Valtiel, Cheryl (Heather) Mason, Cybil Bennett (mentioned)
Content Warnings: Blood, loss of limbs, broken bones, body horror, religious and cult themes
Word Count: 3,057 (Sorry about the length, it took a while for me to get to a place that felt good to stop at!)
Side note: Heather is referred to as Cheryl in this bit because this takes place after the events of SH3, after which Heather decided to start going by her original name, Cheryl.
I...I must return to her…
Rain poured from a blackened sky as a pale figure lingered in the open doorway of a timeworn church. Shaking, bloodied hands clutched at the rotted wood of the doorframe, seeking support for the weary body they belonged to. Within the church, a thick trail of fresh blood snaked across the floor, leading from a large pool in the center of the chapel, to the figure itself.
Valtiel’s grip on the doorframe tightened as his legs grew weaker. Through narrowed vision, he gazed upon the Otherworld town before him. It would be a long walk from here...that is, if he could even continue to stand up. A long walk, or an even longer crawl. He didn’t think he’d make it far if he were to crawl. The aching from the stumps of snapped-off bone that had once been his wings had rendered his arms all but useless. It took much of his remaining strength to keep his grip on the doorframe. The thought of crawling along on his stomach was out of the question--his chest felt as though it had been filled with shards of glass, and even breathing aggravated the injury.
Thus he was left with one option. It was a great risk, one that would require every ounce of strength left in his body, and his full, unbroken concentration. It was something he’d hardly ever done before. He’d always preferred to walk or fly in order to get around, but now...well, both of those things were out of the question. Valtiel bowed his head, and in his mind’s eye, pictured the face of the girl he’d watched over since the day of her birth.
Mother...Take me...to the Mother…
The view of the town from the Otherworld faded, as did the wooden doorframe he’d been clinging desperately to. He stumbled and fell forward--onto soft carpeted flooring. It would have been a comfort had it not painfully readjusted his shattered rib cage. His vision remained narrow, but even from a heap on the floor, he could see her.
Cheryl was staring at him in bewildered horror. She blinked a few times, her mouth agape...before at last standing up from her seat before a wooden desk and stepping behind the chair. “What...the...fuck…” She muttered.
Valtiel reached towards her, but his hand soon dropped to the floor. Following the jump, all of the strength had been sapped from his body. He was only vaguely aware that he was bleeding before her--sullying the holy ground she walked upon with his filth. Alas, it couldn't be helped. With luck, she would forgive him.
He was tired...so very tired. Surely it was safe to rest here for a moment...
. . .
"What the fuck are you?!" Cheryl cried, standing behind her chair as though it would protect her from the strange monster that had spontaneously appeared on her bedroom floor. She thought to run to her closet and retrieve one of the many weapons she'd brought home from Silent Hill.
But something kept her from doing just that. It wouldn't have taken a doctor to see that the monster before her was severely wounded.It was bleeding all over her carpet, after all--Bleeding like a damned stuck pig, in fact. And was that...bone sticking out from its bloodied back?!
Christ. I don't think this was my doing. Even God didn't look this bad when I was done with Her. Cheryl mused to herself. Does that mean there's some way stronger monster outside? Did this...thing crawl in here to try and hide from it?
Come to think of it...just what the hell is this thing, anyway? Cheryl leaned closer against her better judgement to try and inspect the creature further. After a moment or so of gazing upon its disgusting, pallid flesh, she remembered something she'd seen in Silent Hill...in fact, a few different things.
This thing was in the elevator at the mall...and in that locker...and behind that ladder...and hanging between those two dead bodies...and in that crawlspace in the church…and…
It's the thing that killed Claudia.
Cheryl could recall a painting she'd seen in the church. An image she'd tried to put aside, given its disturbing appearance. The painting of a twisted, vaguely human-shaped being, with a featureless face and a pair of lips on the side of its skull. A painting labeled as depicting the "Attendant of God", an angel named Valtiel. The bit of scripture beside the grotesque image had explained that Valtiel had been created by God Herself to serve Her and carry out Her will, and that when it was time for Her to be reborn, the angel Valtiel would serve as protector and midwife to the Mother of God.
The thought that this...thing had been following her for heaven-knows-how-long--stalking her, waiting for her to birth the Order's patron deity--It sent a cold chill down Cheryl's spine. She was almost happy to see it suffering, and debated whether or not to finish it off.
Wait...something's missing. That freaky painting...Where are its wings? She could swear the painting had depicted the creature with an oddly beautiful pair of black-feathered wings. She'd almost forgotten this feature, considering that she hadn't seen them on the creature during any of her previous encounters with it. But her eyes were once again drawn to the bones protruding from the creature's back. It all seemed to make sense now--something had torn its wings clean off, and it had sought protection from further harm by seeking out the only human it trusted.
Her gaze softened a bit when she looked at the creature now, for she had realized something else. …I'm sure the Order fucking hates me for killing their God. I saw what you did to Claudia. What stopped you from doing that to me?
...Same reason crocodiles don't eat those little bug-pecking birds that clean their teeth, I'll bet. You still need me. But why? I literally killed your God! I've thrown the world's biggest wrench into the Order's plans, and that wasn't enough for you to kill me?!
...Maybe...maybe I can trust you, then.
Cheryl thought over the idea, weighing what terrible consequences might result from her helping a seemingly rogue, former enforcer of the Order.
...Fuck it. I've killed so many of their monsters...I think I know all their tricks by now. And if this thing's still willing to trust me after what I did...I might as well return the favor.
Cheryl knelt down to the creature's level, and cautiously placed one hand under its chin. She wasn't sure if it even had eyes, but it seemed like it had been looking at her earlier. The creature groaned, but remained still. Cheryl heaved a sigh. "If you use this to try and make me birth your God again, I won't hesitate to finish you off. Understand?" She whispered sternly to the creature.
. . . 
The Mother's words roused Valtiel from his brief spell of unconsciousness. Yes, he understood what she meant. He was quite accustomed to threats of punishment for disobedience. Though it had been quite some time since he had spoken the tongues of the common man, he parted his lips and managed a single "Yes."
The Mother recoiled in horror once more. "Fucking hell...you can actually talk?!" She muttered in disbelief. "...I was just expecting a nod." She sighed. "Well...here goes nothing."
Cheryl reached beneath his body with both hands, and hooked them beneath his armpits. With great effort, she attempted to pull him to his feet. After several attempts that left the both of them exhausted, Valtiel realized that he would have to assist her, despite the exhaustion he felt. When Cheryl tried to lift him again--following a handful of muttered expletives--Valtiel strained to move his legs, and with every remaining shred of energy in his body, he pushed against the floor. Eventually, with his cooperation, Cheryl managed to lift him to his feet.
"Okay. That was--" Cheryl let out a cry of surprise and frantically tried to brace herself against her bed when Valtiel suddenly collapsed onto her. She managed to keep the both of them upright, and after catching her breath, she began dragging him to the side of her bed. Luckily, they weren't far from it. She soon reached the side of her bed, and pushed the creature onto it as gently as she could manage, which unfortunately still coaxed a quiet moan from its misplaced lips.
"Sorry." Cheryl muttered, wiping sweat from her brow and scowling when she realized she'd also smeared it with his blood. Whatever, I can wipe that off later. She thought to herself. She thought to adjust the creature to a more comfortable position, but realized she'd nearly forgotten that it was still actively bleeding. Of course, blood loss took priority over any other injury, so she wasted no further time in gathering supplies.
"I'll be back soon." She said to the creature, though she found the idea of trying to reassure a monster rather strange. "Just...stay there. Don't move." Without another word, she left the room and made her way towards the second floor bathroom. She could only hope they had enough gauze.
Valtiel whined as she left, reaching towards her with one feeble hand, but he could not reach her without leaving the bed, and it was doubtless that he didn't have the strength left to follow her. So he let his weary limb collapse onto the bed, and watched through vision blurred with delirium as his idol left him. Now that he was awake, and after all the effort it had taken to move to the bed, the pain of his wounds was unbearable. It wasn't in his nature to act so pathetic, but it also wasn't in his nature to feel pain. It was something practically alien to him. Divine beings were meant to be higher than mortals, and therefore knew of and felt hardly anything mortals were accustomed to. There had always been threats to cut his ties to the divine, but not until today had they been followed through. In the back of his mind, Valtiel began to fear the prospect of becoming fully mortal. If this inescapable agony was just part of the mortal experience, what else did such a fate have in store for him?!
He found himself unable to silence his impulsive whines and moans. Such noises did nothing to relieve the pain, but he had seemingly lost control of his vocal chords, and to restrain a cry served only to exacerbate the pain in his chest. The steady stream of blood that had been spurting from his crudely amputated wings had slowed to a trickle--a small act of mercy he was grateful for. Still, it hadn't completely stopped, and he felt as though it wouldn't until every drop of life left in his broken body had seeped into the Mother's bedsheets.
He could just barely hear her somewhere down the hall. She sounded as though she were searching for something. She had mentioned that she would return soon. But...what was she searching for in that room? Surely if she were truly divine, she could heal him with only a touch.
No...no, of course not. She was still divine, he had no doubt of that. But her power had certainly grown weaker over the years. As it was, she didn't appear to be capable of any divine feats at all. But that didn't matter now. She was still worthy of his worship, and always would be. And he would accept whatever she planned on doing to help him in this time of dire need with the utmost gratitude an angel could bestow. ...But if she didn't do something soon, he feared he might not be able to stay long enough to thank her.
Answering his prayers, Cheryl returned to the room carrying a small red box in her hands. On its side was a small cross. Valtiel wondered if it was some manner of holy artifact, though he'd never seen one like it before. The Order didn't really use crosses in its holy symbolism...that was Christianity. Admittedly, there was some small overlap between the two religions, but that hardly mattered now.
Cheryl walked around to the opposite side of the bed, until she was facing the angel's back and completely hidden from his limited field of vision. He began to crane his neck backwards in an attempt to see her, but Cheryl seemed to react poorly to this, and so as not to offend her, he returned his head to its original position.
“Okay...I’ve got a grotesque monster that calls itself an angel in my bedroom...” Cheryl muttered to herself. She opened the First Aid kit she'd found in the bathroom, and rummaged for a bit before finding a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a roll of gauze. She looked at the angel's back again, and cursed softly. Whatever he was, he needed a surgeon, not a First Aid kit. But Cheryl knew taking him to a professional would be impossible. She didn't dare move him now, and he wasn't exactly human, or any other creature that could be easily explained to a doctor or vet. Honestly, she wasn't certain if others could even see him. A part of her still thought she might be hallucinating this whole thing.
"Hold still." She commanded him. "This is probably gonna hurt like hell." She poured a few drops of alcohol onto a scrap of gauze, and gingerly pressed it to the first of the wounds. At once, Valtiel whined sharply and thrashed weakly. He repeated this as Cheryl moved to the other wound, though he thrashed less and less as time dragged on, until he simply lay there, breathing raggedly, as she moved to wrapping a thick layer of gauze around his upper back. He whined whenever she would touch the stumps of bone that remained of his wings, and wheezed when she pulled the gauze tight.
"Sorry…" She apologized to him reflexively, applying a few more layers until she was satisfied that she'd made enough pressure for his wounds to stop bleeding. "Had to be done." She gazed down at her hands...they were completely covered in the creature's blood. How the hell am I supposed to explain this to Mom?! It occurred to her that blood was about the toughest natural substance to wash out of fabric. And here her guardian angel had spilled his all over the damn place!
Honestly, she was surprised he hadn't bled to death yet, let alone that he was still lucid enough to react when she touched him. But Cheryl decided that there was nothing she could do now about the mess, and so when her mother found the gruesome scene in her bedroom, she would simply come clean and tell her the full truth of the matter. Her mother had been to Silent Hill before Cheryl was born...or rather, when Cheryl was still her...earlier incarnation. She doubted she'd ever fully understand how a person could have been not one, but two people simultaneously before their own birth. But Cheryl felt certain that her mother would at least know what her new guest was.
Valtiel seemed to have calmed down since Cheryl had finished her attempt at patching him up. Though he still appeared to be in quite a bit of pain, he'd at least stopped moving and had fallen silent. Though...Cheryl wasn't so certain of whether or not that was a good thing. "Does that...feel any better?" She asked him, albeit hesitant to hear him speak again. Thankfully, he only shook his head.
"...I have an idea. Don't move. I won't be long." She said softly to him, before leaving the room again and heading for the bathroom. First, she turned the faucet on and thoroughly washed her hands. Sure, maybe blood of the divine had positive qualities, but she still didn't want it all over her hands. After that was done, she opened the mirror cabinet and retrieved a small white bottle. Granted, her guest wasn't human, and she had no way of knowing how medicine developed for humans would affect him...but she didn't feel right just letting him suffer. So she took the bottle of over-the-counter painkillers back to her bedroom.
She stopped at the side of the bed facing him directly this time, and reached over to her nightstand to grab a bottle of water. She shook the bottle of pills once to get the weary creature's attention. "You're probably not used to doing this...but with any luck, it'll help you." She unscrewed the cap and took out two small pills. “Here, just open your mouth, and swallow these.” She held the pills in her hand near the strange mouth on the side of Valtiel’s head. He didn’t respond. Really, he almost seemed confused by her directions.
“What, do you not know how to swallow things?” Cheryl sighed. “Who am I kidding? Of course you don’t. You’re some weird otherworldly monster, of course you don’t understand the concept of eating.” She took the bottle of water from her nightstand. “Here, do like I do.” She took a few sips of the water in an attempt to show the strange creature how swallowing works. “Think you can do that?” She held the pills out to him again, as well as the bottle of water.
Valtiel snatched the two pills from her hand using a long, thin tongue that snaked out from his misplaced lips. Cheryl jumped back in surprise, but watched as the tongue brought the pills into his mouth, and after a moment, or so, he appeared to swallow them. Cheryl sighed, relieved that he’d finally figured it out. “There you go, weirdo. Hope that helps.” She took one corner of the topmost sheet on her bed, and draped it over the angel’s body. “Just stay here and rest, okay? Please don’t try to follow me around.”
The angel nodded wearily, and soon, Cheryl heard him breathing slowly and softly, as though asleep. She took this opportunity to start attempting to clean the room, albeit while trying to make as little noise as possible. With how much effort it had taken to get him to fall asleep the first time, she didn’t want to wake him again any time soon.
Mom is really gonna freak.
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mirazilla · 4 years
Text
So a complete chat blanc theory~~
Damn, I’m pretty sure chat actually did murder everyone. —or maybe he froze them or smth?? cuz he and the whole destroyed Paris has a very blue hue— Since this is a kids show I doubt anyone will die, but maaaaybe he did kill them all with cataclysm, cuz we’ve seen volpinas illusion do just that before in catalyst.
Ok, just from the trailer, he looks like a rogue Akuma, the most dangerous kind. How did this happen? Now let me explain...
Let’s start from the beginning, after sadly returning to his room from winning what seems a tournament of sorts ( he has a medal) which probably his father missed, he sees ladybug leave a love letter from marinette on his bed (pray god he connects the dots and finds out ladybugs identity).
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So he calls her to invite her to his house, —marinette has an umbrella maybe it’s the same one he gave her on origins?—then tells her about his discovery and his acceptance of her love. Marinette is obviously distressed, she wanted Adrien to love marinette not ladybug!!
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So after running from the situation hawkmoth tries to akumatize her. Smth that i thought was weird is adrien transforming into chat for everyone to see. Like, I know marinette is his friend and all, but to risk it all for a regular person to not be akumatized?? He must know she’s ladybug, because if ladybug gets akumatized, it’s game over. (well now that I think of it, if either of them get akumatized is game over,heh)
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After saving marinette from a possible akumatization he’s outed as chat noir. Gorilla is in the background so he obvs takes chat into the house and tells Gabriel. Gabriel then takes chat where he keeps Emile, transforms into hawkmoth and then tells him how to get his mom back with the help of the cat and bug miraculous. (They probably kick marinette out of the house and close the doors on her nose, so she can’t intervene)
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Hawkmoth offers to akumatize him to give him strength to take down ladybug, but after his doing this, chat will most likely go insane and on a killing spree, cuz akumatization enhances negative emotions and he has plenty of that.
Now there’s two ways this can go
He kills hawkmoth OR he takes hawkmoths miraculous instead cuz he doesn’t want to be controlled by anyone, least of all people his father, the very man who controls every single aspect of his life but seems to be ever absent from it and thus this is where the medal from earlier comes to play, he still feels salty about his father not giving a shit about him winning his tournament/ not being there, so boom extra motivation.
Now either way, he goes outside and finds marinette. Tells her he beated hawkmoth (maybe showing her his miraculous) and asks for her miraculous to bring his mom back, she freaks out and transforms. They battle for a while, destroying all of paris in the way, but he ends up overpowering her so she detransforms into marinette and after not giving up her miraculous he kills her with his cataclysm snapping fingers shooting gun thingy. Destroying her miraculous while doing so and accidentally ruining his plan on getting his mom back.
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So after destroying everything, he just waits,,, for someone to reach out to him?? Plagg?? His father? Anyone? He just seems so dang lonely.
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So now with the solution:
Bunnix goes back in time to get past ladybug to help—I’m pretty sure that this is like a tradition for all the bunnixes in time, like the bunnix before the actual one did it, the one before her did it, and so on on so forth—. ( to clarify which past ladybug, probably the one before she leaves that dang note on adriens bed, maybe she’s writing it or smth)
Note how she has ladybugs head on a pot to cover her eyes. Maybe time traveling can be mind blowing for anyone other than the rabbit miraculous holder or Bunnix didn’t want her to see the level of destruction chat blanc has made and to make her become overwhelmed by it.
Also she’s gone in the little fight chat and ladybug have so she doesn’t want to/can’t interfere more than she already has or maybe the bunnix from the future told her it must be this way or smth?? Time travel is confusing... ( or chat killed her too, who knows)
Anyway, Chat blanc looks very excited and happy to see her, almost as if it’s been a long time since he last saw her — we don’t know how long this kitty has been waiting all alone in this apocalyptic world— and this clearly is the first time this ladybug sees him.
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He reaches out to her and tries to make her cooperate into giving him her miraculous the pacifist way, ( look how surprised she is when he grabs her ears, he’s also super close to her, so they where talking, maybe she was trying to talk some sense to him or smth) but after her refusal he just tries to snatch them from her. This time he will be more careful and will try not to kill her, so we can get a “nerfed” chat blanc instead of the killing mode one.
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Either ladybug wins this time ( there’s a theory on how that goes out at the end of this one✨✨) OR, she looses again and has to retreat.
Now for the spicy bit of my theory I’m basing this whole thing in this old spoiler pic of ladybug in Gabriel’s secret basement. (I know all of paris is flooded but this seems like a bunker of sorts?? Idk)
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In their fight, chat blanc spilled the beans and said smth about gabriel, his father, being hawkmoth. So after this big ass reveal, she’s overpowered by him. Barely manages to escape and without anyone to go to, she decides to go to the agreste manor. (The lucky charm she summons during the fight can be a butterfly) talks to the now detransformed hawkmoth and they team up to defeat chat blanc. This can go three ways
1. Gabriel uses the peacock miraculous and creates a sentimonster out of his or ladybugs grief to beat chat blanc. (this one is unlikely, cuz we haven’t seen any designs of peacock Gabriel before, while we’ve seen designs for everyone else, mister bug, lady noir, turtle master fu, etc.)
2. he gives her advice on how to get better at fighting or use her miraculous better, idk.
3. And the evil one: Ladybug takes Emilie and Gabriel ( he helps her to come up with this idea) and lures chat out. She gives him an ultimatum, destroy your Akuma ( most probably it’s in the ring which already makes it difficult for ladybug to win without his cooperation) or she drops his family ( maybe she has them hanging from her yo-yo or smth, god damn this got dark). Chat cooperates and destroys his ring —I don’t think taking out his ring will affect his transformation— she casts the miraculous ladybug, bunnix returns from the dead and takes her back to her time. ( lets hope that this miraculous ladybug erases everyone memories or maybe one of bunnixes powers does. I mean, she has the power to time travel, she must have some cool memory erasing thingy from when she fucks up or smth idk. She erases ladybugs memories, tells her to not write that dang love letter and disappears)
✨✨NOW for the option where ladybug defeats chat on that buildings roof top.
Ladybug manages to snatch chats ring from him, but this doesn’t have any effect on him whatsoever and she can’t transform herself into lady noir to destroy it cuz it’s basically impossible and besides the ring is the home of an Akuma so it will behave as a regular ring so no plagg either.
We have another two way situation:
1. she tricks chat blanc into destroying it somehow, fixes everything with the miraculous ladybug, bunnix takes her back before she can see anything else, the end. (most likely outcome tbh, cuz in this version she never figures his identity but she’s left with the knowledge of the dangers of having chat akumatized, which is neat)
2. she flees to the agreste manor and Gabriel helps her purify the ring without breaking it (the dude knows his stuff about the miraculous so it’s possible)
Either way, since bunnix and time travel is also involved, no one will remember shit from this.... like, marinette is with her hair down in this episode and in loveeater (the season finale) adrien emphasizes how he’s never seen her like that sooo, this episode won’t even happen, it will have have absolute zero consequences in the plot and will most likely go insane because of it, so we are in for a ride.
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YES YOU HAVE BUT YOU DONT REMEMBER/ IT NEVER HAPPENED.
Damn that was a long rant... it has many holes but hey, I had fun.
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avengerscompound · 4 years
Text
The Tower: The Queen of Asgard, 3
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The Tower: The Queen of Asgard An Avengers Fanfic
Series Masterlist PREVIOUS //
Pairing:  Avengers x OFC, Bruce Banner x Bucky Barnes x Clint Barton x Wanda Maximoff x Steve Rogers x Natasha Romanoff x Tony Stark x Thor x Sam Wilson x OFC (Elly Cooper)
Word Count: 1861
Warnings: None this chapter
Synopsis: The twins are now three and while the Avengers know that Clint and Thor are the biological father’s none of them know or care which blond, blue-eyed baby is related to which man.  When Riley gets the power to control wind and it becomes evident that she is the heir to the Asgardian throne, Elly, Steve, Thor, and Tony take the twins to Asgard to train her.
Not every Asgardian is happy with their king’s choice of consort, nor the impurity of the heir’s blood.  While others expect Thor to make things more official.  What’s clear is, the role of Queen of Asgard is not easily filled.
Author’s Note: Written with my very own Clint Barton @fanficwriter013​
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Chapter 3 - The Hair Cut
That night we all gathered together for a family meal.  Wanda and I had cooked.  She took the lead so there were a lot of Sokovian and Romany dishes, as well as some very American sides like Mac and Cheese just in case the kids were being fussy.
Thor sat with Riley in his lap as Steve put Pietro in his highchair.  “This is Riley’s highchair,”  Steve said indicating to the other chair.  “If you don’t want her wiping her sticky fingers on you while you eat.”
“Am I not meant to be a napkin?”  Thor joked.
Steve chuckled.  “You can be if you like.  But there are other options.”
“I’m sure she will love using you as a napkin.”  I teased.
“I would assume so,”  Thor said as Riley buried her face into his neck and started kicking her legs.
Wanda and I put a variety of foods into the kid’s bowls and then sat and began helping ourselves.
“Now, Natasha,”  I said when everyone had started eating.  “There’s something you need to come to terms with.”
“What’d I do?”  She asked.
“Well, see... here's the thing,”  I said, putting my fork down and looking at her.  “Out here at the compound, we can go outside with the kids and play or do whatever and we're left alone because the worst case it’s just agents around, but generally the house is isolated.  If we go back to the tower, the only way the kids can get to play outside is to go to the park, which means…”
“No,”  Nat said, firmly.  “Nope.  No.  Nuh-uh.”
“They have to be able to go outside and play, Nat,”  Sam said.
“No.”  She repeated, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Nat, they have to.  Taking out the psychological need children have to do that.  They need vitamin d to live.”  I said.
“They can play on the roof,”  Natasha said.  “You said you could make a garden for them to play in, right, Tony?”
“Yeah.  I can do that, but Nat, you can’t …”  Tony started.
“Three years!”  Natasha almost shouted.  “I have saved them from those monsters for three years!”
“I know you have, Natasha,”  I said.  “You've done a great job.  But every year you do it their world becomes smaller.  They can't just exist in a bubble where there are no other parts of the world.  They should be able to go to the beach or Disney or the park with their dog.  The longer we keep them from that the less chance they have of actually being normal kids who can interact with society.  They will grow to resent us for what we kept from them.  I know it sucks... but we have to figure out a way we can navigate in the actual world that negates the damage.”
Natasha scowled and muttered something in Russian as Clint rubbed her back.  She let out a breath and gave a slight nod.  “They need to respect their boundaries, or so help me…”
“Luckily we have someone here who grew up with it and might have some ideas,”  Steve said.
“We could take out restraining orders.  Happy was always pretty good at keeping them out of shot of me.  I’ll talk to him.  Maybe they can have a team that just stays out of sight and sweeps around.”  Tony said.
“That’s a start,”  Steve said.  “We’ll work this out, Natasha, but El is right, as much as we want to protect them, they can’t live in a bubble.”
“I want to keep them in a bubble,”  Natasha muttered.  “I mean it though, I’ll kill them if they get too close to my babies.”
“Mama!”  Pietro scolded, scrunching up his nose.  “Don’t be naughty.”
Natasha laughed so hard she snorted.  “Sorry, bud.”
“Nat snorted.” I giggled.
“El, don’t make me get in trouble with my son again.”  She warned.
“What?  It was cute.”
She eyed me but didn’t say anything and I smirked at her as I took a mouthful of my food.
“I may require some assistance here,”  Thor said.
We all looked over to him to see Riley’s hand stuck to the side of his head.  She looked distressed as Thor held her hand in place so she didn’t yank his hair out.
“Oh, damn,”  Clint said getting up and coming over to him and slowly trying to get Riley’s hand free.  “Okay, get me the vinegar.”
I got up and rushed to the kitchen, bringing back apple cider vinegar.  “Okay, bug, don’t move,”  Clint said as he began to work the vinegar into Thor’s hair and untangle Riley’s hands from it.
“Daddy!”  Riley whined as she tugged on Thor’s hair.
“Jelly Bean, your hand is literally attached to someone else right now,”  Clint said.  “You know how you complain when daddy brushes your hair too hard and it rips the knots out?  That’s what you’re doing to Daddy Thor right now.”
“Sorry, daddy.”  She said, starting to cry.
“It’s okay, princess.  I’m not angry.”  Thor said.
“I stuck.”  She said, fat tears running down her cheeks.
“I know,”  Thor said.  “Daddy Clint is going to get you out.”
“You kids need to use your forks when you eat,”  Steve said.
“Yeah, that’s the difference between babies and big kids,”  Natasha added.
“‘M a big girl.”  Riley sobbed as Pietro picked up his fork and awkwardly started to shovel Mac and Cheese into his mouth, more spilling down his front than getting in his mouth.
Clint managed to work Riley’s hand free and she stopped crying and looked up at him  “Fank you, daddy.”  She said, opening and closing her hand.
“You're welcome, sweetheart,”  Clint said wiping her hands clean.  “Now we’re going to use our fork and after dinner, you and your brother are going to have a bath.”
“Baff!”  Riley said excitedly.
“No, Baff, daddy,”  Pietro whined.
“Thor, we’re going to need to put coconut oil in your hair to untangle it properly.   Maybe a hair mask.  I can help you with that after dinner if you like.”  Clint said.
“I would appreciate that,”  Thor said.
We all finished up eating and Wanda and Sam took the kids for their bath while Clint and I took Thor to fix his hair.
“Take a seat on the edge of the tub,”  Clint said.  “Gotta rinse it out first if I’m gonna try and save it.”
Thor took his shirt off and sat down on the rim of the tub.  Clint began to fiddle with the water and started to rinse Thor’s hair.  “El, can you pass me the wide-toothed comb.”
I handed it over and he carefully began to pick out the knots with it.  “This is going to be some feat.  I hope you’re feeling patient, Thor.”  Clint said.
“You could just shave it.”  I joked.
“Yeah, that would definitely be easier.”  Clint chuckled, as he very patiently worked on Clint’s hair.
“Perhaps that would be best,”  Thor said.  “She was very upset at being stuck.  I do not like that I upset her like that.”
“You’re sure?”  I asked.
“Yes.  I’m sure.”  Thor said.
“Oh, god,”  I said, going to grab the clippers.  “I can’t believe we’re about to shave off the mighty Thor’s beautiful tresses.”
Clint began prepping the clippers while I plugged them in.  “Why are you more upset than Thor?”
I shrugged.  “I’m a dramatic bitch?”
“Okay, well. Don't scream.”  Clint said.  He turned the clippers on and ran them through Thor’s hair.
“Oh my god,”  I said as I watched.  “Don’t make him bald.”
“Don't worry, it'll look good,”  Clint said as he worked.
I watched on as Thor’s hair got shorter and shorter, his blond locks collecting on the floor around him.  I swept up as Clint went and soon it began to look more like a hair cut.  Quite like Clint’s actually.  Short, back and sides, a little more length to the top.  Clint pulled back and looked over his work.  “It’s still gonna need a treatment.”  He said.
“Coconut oil?”  I asked.
Clint nodded and grabbed a brush to sweep away the stray strands and I got the coconut oil and began to work it into Thor’s hair and scalp.
Thor looked up at me and hummed.  “Thank you both.”
“You're welcome.  Sorry about ol' sticky hands.”  I said.
He put his hand on my hips and smiled softly.  “I was warned.”
“Well, this is extreme,”  I said.  “He’s done a good job though.  Steve might say you copied him.”
Thor chuckled.  “It was getting a bit much anyway.  With all my duties I barely had time to take care of it properly.”
“Really?”  I asked, spiking it up at the top.  “But don’t you have people for that.  You had all the braids and everything.”
“I know, but… I have been growing less comfortable with asking for that level of treatment.  I know my people don’t mind but I always feel more relaxed here, when I lack all the privileges that come with the crown.”
“You feel guilty don’t you?”  I asked.  “About not being able to be here?”
“Very much.”  He agreed.
“You’re doing your best.  You’re allowed to put them down when you’re here.”  I said.  “This isn’t ideal, I know.  It wasn’t planned either and you are the king whether that’s what you want or not.”
“They don't want to be put down,”  Thor said, sounding guilty.  “They climb me.”
“I know.  They are really, really excited to see you.  And you're very strong and they like that you just put up with it.”  I said, taking a seat beside him.  “But... being a parent is more than that.  What you're being is a fun uncle.  Which... is Loki's job I guess?  You can be firm with them about boundaries.  And you should be.  That's what being a parent is.”
“I miss them when I am away.  I want to make it count.”  He said, frowning.
“They love you.  We all do.”  I said, rubbing his thigh.  “Are you seeing anyone?  Else I mean.”
“I’m supposed to.”  He said.  “But no.  Nothing else feels right outside of this.”
I rubbed his leg.  “This will always be here.”
“You can probably rinse that out now,”  Clint said sweeping the last of the hair into the trash.
I grabbed the showerhead and rinsed the oil out of his hair.  When he was done I switched it off.  “You want to check the damage?”  Clint asked.
“Please.”  Thor agreed, getting up and looking in the mirror.  “It looks good.  You are good at this.”
Clint blushed a little.  “Thanks.”
Thor pulled Clint up against him.  “No, thank you.”
Clint grinned and leaned up and kissed Thor.  Thor pulled him closer and kissed him hungrily.  Clint hummed and submitted to him, almost melting in the larger man’s embrace.  Thor pulled back and looked down at Clint, he caressed his jaw gently.  “I have missed you, little bird.”
“I missed you too,”  Clint said.
“Shall we go find the others?  Have a little fun?”  Thor suggested.
I smiled and came over and kissed his shoulder.  “I think that’s a very good idea.”
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// NEXT
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patrickstargang · 4 years
Text
The Firelord’s Promise (Kyoshi fic)
Chapter 1: Nomad’s Land
Chapter 2: A Bureaucrat’s Word
Chapter 3: Throw Away Your Honor, Rally In The Streets
Chapter 4: Unfortunate Truths
Chapter 5: A Change For The Better
Chapter 6: The Roles We’re Given
Chapter 7: To Save A Life
Final Chapter: I’ll Always Be With You
Dusk began to creep over the horizon of the Fire Nation royal palace. It was only a few hours before Zoryu would make his public address, putting a cap on the whole Saowan clan situation. He was dreading every minute that passed.
His office space looked much different than most of the other rooms in the palace, rather than the bright reds of the other interiors the office resembled burgundy. In contrast to the rest of the palace, it was much more professional than regal. He was hunched over an old wooden desk, finishing the last few points of his speech.
But while he was in deep concentration, the voice of a guard broke the silence.
“Firelord Zoryu…..” His voice was shaking slightly. Zoryu didn’t look up from his paper.
“Yes, what is it?”
“Sir, you…… um, have a visitor.”
The confusion was apparent in Zoryu’s eyes. “Who could possibly be visiting me right before an important spe-”
He looked up to find Kyoshi standing right next to the guard. Zoryu froze in place, this was the last person he wanted to see right now.
Kyoshi stood with reservation, back in the daofei makeup. She bowed her head slightly, trying to make an attempt at a formal greeting as the guard made his exit. “Its good to see you again, Firelord Zoryu.”
Zoryu strained his face, a combination of anger and fear. “What do you want? Plan on finishing the job you gave to your little assassin?”
Kyoshi stared at Zoryu blankly. His tone was much more combative than she had ever heard from him. “No need to be hasty, actually I’ve come to meet up with him.”
Right as she was done talking, Lao Ge suddenly dropped from the ceiling. It made Zoryu jump in fear, leaving an expression that would have been the last face you would envision when thinking about the Firelord himself.
Lao Ge smiled in amusement before returning to Kyoshi’s side. Zoryu attempted to collect himself after such a sudden scare.
Zoryu pointed at Lao Ge. “How long have you been in here?!”
The old man shrugged nonchalantly, looking around the room. “Long enough.”
“But that's not the only reason I’m here. I’m here to make sure you’ve kept to our agreement.”
Zoryu grimaced, he didn’t need to be reminded but he could still anticipate the blow to his honor after the nobles hear his address. He angrily grabbed his written speech and handed it to Kyoshi.
“You can look all through it, I’ve kept my promise. Are you happy now?”
Kyoshi meticulously looked at every sentence, making sure there wasn’t some possible ambiguity in what his intentions were. Everything was there, the Saowan members not affiliated with Chaejin or Huazo would be released while Chaejin and Huazo would be under tight security. It was all there.
“Well, it seems your right. You’ve kept your promise…..but I’m going to need some adjustments.”
Zoryu leaned his head to the side. “What do you mean by that?”
“I want you to free all of the protesters you’ve imprisoned as well.”
Zoryu felt his stomach sink, he had not anticipated this request. It was another addition to the list of the reasons the Avatar didn’t trust him.
“You didn’t think I wouldn’t find out, did you?” There was a noticeable disdain in her voice, despite the fact she was still speaking calmly. It left an unbearable silence, that question still up in the air.
“Fine. I’ll add it in. This whole thing is already a bit of a reach but if it gets you off my back I’ll make it happen.”
Kyoshi returned the speech as he prepared to revise it. She was surprised at how easy this negotiation was going, but then she remembered this was Zoryu she was talking to. Before he tried acting like a “proper” Firelord, he was a bit of a pushover. Well, at least he was a pushover in person.
Kyoshi slightly raised a hand, prompting Zoryu to stop before he started writing again. “There was one last thing I wanted to make sure of…..”
Zoryu leaned in on his desk with a hand holding his face up in exhaustion and annoyance.
“That man you brought in to take Yun’s place, the man who was supposed to be executed. Where is he?”
Zoryu sighed for a moment before speaking.
“I released him last night, he should be back home by now. His family lives by some of the huts outside the city walls if you want to find him.”
“And….”
Zoryu’s face tightened. “And I relinquished his debts. Again, I did everything you asked me to do.”
“Yes, and it only took you weeks to finally get around to it,” Kyoshi had to try to not blatantly insult Zoryu, but sometimes it was hard to do. “But all that matters now is that it's done.”
Kyoshi didn’t bother to make any semblance of a formal leave, as she started making her way out the door. Then suddenly Zoryu stood up.
“Wait, Kyoshi…”
Kyoshi stopped in her tracks and turned around to face the young Firelord.
“There's something I need to know. The message you gave me, or rather your assassin gave me. You said that if I didn’t meet your demands….you’d have me killed. Did you mean it?”
Another unbearable silence. Kyoshi sighed deeply. It was still a question that bugged her before she even arrived at the palace. But another thought came into her head. An idea that came to her after everything she saw. What she was going to say wasn’t the truth, since the plan really was to kill him if he didn’t comply. But she decided this was a good opportunity to send the right message.
“No. I wouldn’t have. Not because I couldn’t get rid of you. If that was the case I could have done that a long time ago, but all that would do is give Chaejin a chance at the throne, and we both know that wouldn’t solve anything.
“It was just an empty threat to get you to cooperate. But more than that, I don’t even need to kill you. Most of your people believe the Saowan clan’s arrest was justified, but I’ve seen enough to convince them otherwise. If they really knew what you did, bringing in an innocent man to take Yun’s execution, blaming the Saowan with no evidence, and using that to keep your power, the nobles wouldn’t even need to disgrace you. Because the people would have done it before they could. They may not listen to me, but I’m certain they’d listen to Yangchen.”
Zoryu’s eyes widened as he stood up. “You wouldn’t dare!”
Kyoshi showed no change in expression, she wasn’t the same person she was when they last met. She wasn’t trying to pretend she was some imposing force of authority, because now she really was. All she responded with was silence.
Zoryu slowly sat back down, the anger he felt dissipated as he began to feel how powerless he really was.
“I don’t know what you think of yourself now, as a leader, but before that, I saw someone who wanted peace for their nation. Someone who wanted peace for their people. But I misjudged you. All you really wanted was an easy peace, one that didn’t require you to make any tough decisions. And look where that's gotten us.”
Zoryu had forgotten the days before the incident with Yun. He forgot about the worry that he had for the crops and the welfare of his people. Now he had bogged himself down a hole trying to settle this Saowan issue that he created for himself. All he could feel was bitter, having to become someone he never wanted to be.
“You may think the people deserve to respect you, now that you're trying to act like a real Firelord, whatever that is. But trust me, you should be the one respecting the people. You're nothing without them.”
Zoryu leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t being threatened, he knew that, but it still felt like he was. If it was any other Firelord they would have banished her for the audacity of speaking in that way. But she held the power now, not just that but the truth. All Zoryu could do was laugh.
“Well, it looks like you’ve really embraced being the Avatar, huh.”
Kyoshi still kept her composed, disdainful stare. “And it looks like you're really taking after your father.”
With that, Kyoshi saw herself out. Lao Ge gave a joking bow to Zoryu as he left along with her. As they opened the door, they looked down a long hallway draped with red Fire Nation banners. But at the end of the hall, Kyoshi noticed a familiar face pointing in their direction.
“YOU!!!” It was about as appropriate a greeting from Jiran as Kyoshi could anticipate.
Jiran called out to the room behind Kyoshi. “Don’t worry Firelord, I’ll take care of this treasonous Avatar.”
Zoryu weakly called out from his office. “Please don’t.”
The command didn’t stop Jiran from getting into his fighting stance, with more assurance and cockiness than their last encounter. “Your little girlfriend isn’t here to help you now. I’m going to enjoy wiping the floor with you!”
He then made his advance towards Kyoshi and Lao Ge. The only time she lost part of her composure was right then, pinching the bridge of her nose and letting out a short frustrated sigh. Without a second thought, Kyoshi raised a fist up, creating a pillar that came up from below Jiran. It flung him straight up into the air, hitting the ceiling and coming right back down to the floor.
Kyoshi and Lao Ge continued their way down the hall, passing by Jiran’s unconscious body. He wasn’t dead but he probably broke a few ribs. And another tooth.
With time they made their way out of the palace gates, heading back into the city. After they were far away enough from the guards, Kyoshi let out a long exhale. It felt like she was keeping in any anxiety she had for the entire time she was in there. She turned to Lao Ge as they were walking down the steps to the palace.
“So, how did I do?”
The old man gave her a mischievous smile. “A truly fine performance, more than worthy of the Flying Opera Company.”
She laughed, it was probably the first time Lao Ge made her laugh. It was another new experience.
“Well, I’m just glad that's all over now,” Kyoshi’s eyes began to wander back to the city, focusing on the outside of the walls and the rays of the setting sun. “But there's still one more loose end I need to deal with.”
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Dollmaker: Sano Kojima
Hello there!  I got a request to talk a little bit more about Sano and Akira from the unfinished Dollmaker game build by Runawayoutlaw.  This build was only released on Patreon.  I only touched on them briefly before, so this time I figure I’ll just dedicate a post to each.
I’ll do my best to provide an accurate depiction of how Sano was presented in the game and then go into some speculations.
[Full spoilers ahead for Dollmaker]
Before I start, just a friendly reminder that this game is unfinished for the most part.  There’s a few segments and paths I would say are “complete,” but it’s quite obvious that much more was meant to be added.  If this game were to ever be revisited, it’s likely the setting and characters would all have to be revamped to fit into the Rockland universe.  As it stands, it’s best to say this game is both independent from the BTD universe as well as the Rockland universe.
Another thing I should note, is that sadly it doesn’t appear that Sano’s paths are all in the game. There’s literally only two endings you get for him (plus a secret ending), and they’re both death.  Or at least…one is death, the other is just stated as a “Bad End” but doesn’t specify if or how you’ve died.  
At one point, you got to go into Sano’s room and have a look around, but couldn’t progress beyond that. Not even to leave the room.  It’s either a bug or the paths weren’t put in following that point.  Other parts would kind of put you into a “loop” of sorts before you either died or ended up in Akira’s clutches (we’ll get to him in his own post, don’t you worry). With that said, I’ll do my best to try to paint an accurate image of Dollmaker Sano.
In Game
The game introduces a setting with the MC studying as a medical student with a particular focus in demons (though they’ve yet had the chance to actually practice their skills on any demons it seems).  Apparently, an “interspecies act” has been implemented fairly recently.  It’s common knowledge in this world about the existence of demons and there is active cohabitation.  There’s a lecture/presentation occurring that day emphasizing this.  One of the speakers is none other than Sano Kojima.  He’s not only a surgeon in this, but also apparently an ambassador for the interspecies movement.  
MC catches his eye and you have a little chat with him afterwards, leading to Sano inviting you to come have an in-depth discussion with him sometime about their line of work. The MC can choose to either go with him then or say they’ll think about it.  Either way it doesn’t matter because the friendly professional sticks you with a needle when your back is turned.  When the MC wakes up, Sano makes it clear right from the start what his objective is: to turn the MC into a living doll.
What’s there to say about Sano?  If someone has ever played the original Boyfriend to Death game where Sano was first introduced, I can tell you he’s very similar in a lot of ways.  He’s a very calm individual who prefers an MC who is more cooperative.  He’ll kill the MC if they start thrashing about in an attempt to escape.  If you keep struggling, he has no qualms putting you down.  One thing different is the way he does that is by biting your neck, likely injecting fatal poison.
Ah yes!  Like in BTD, Sano is still a naga in this game.  Or at least, half naga.  He does say he’s a child of interspecies relations.  You don’t get to see his naga form here though.  The bite is as far as we get.  I can’t recall if he ever bit you in BTD, so I can’t say if his willingness to use his fangs is something new.  One thing in Dollmaker he mentions is that he doesn’t feel brave enough to show people his naga form.  He has a painting in his room of a female naga he admired/respected.  It’s possible he’s a little self-conscious about his naga side, but not completely.  Sano can also use magic in Dollmaker as well, usually associated with fire it seems. Whether this is associated directly with his naga side or the result of outside training, I’m not sure.  We don’t witness him using a lot of magic here other than the initial binding spell that not only guarantees the MC can’t kill Sano (or else they die too), but they also can’t leave the house.  The MC can travel anywhere WITHIN the house though.
Speaking of which, Sano I’d say is a little more courteous this time around.  In the previous game, he was literally using the MC as a guinea pig for cruel experiments to satisfy his intellectual curiosity with medicine. He even showed a few signs of sadism there (though as much as some of the other characters).  This time around, such experimentation is extremely toned down. After all, his goal is to make you “his,” by turning you into a living doll.  For those curious, there’s no good hints as to whether his desire to turn you into a doll is to satisfy romantic or sexual needs, or because he quite literally wants a doll/toy.  We don’t really get that far down the line to learn where this desire to turn someone into a doll stems from.  He’s done some practice though, specifying there’s a difference between turning a demon into a doll, and turning a human into one.  Apparently though, he says not everyone can be turned into a doll.  
We do know he lives with at least one successful transformation of his: Annabelle. Annabelle for the most part seems perfectly content with her doll appendages, and I believe even feels she’s superior to the MC because of them.  Both Sano and her seem to view it as a form of perfection reached. Annabelle would likely be the key here as to what kind of relationship Sano has with his “dolls.”  Annabelle does feel offended and perhaps jealous by the MC’s presence.  It’s possible Sano treated Annabelle well and now she feels as if she’s being replaced.
Sano still has his signature centipedes in this game as well, though just as a small discussion point this time.  They don’t crawl into the MC’s brain this time around, but if you smash them you get a “Bad End.”  This ending I couldn’t tell how you died, but there’s a good chance Sano wasn’t happy with you.  Does Sano do any experimentation with the MC?  Very minimal.  He injects you with something that makes the character sick, though I think the purpose of this is for Sano to observe your reactions and see if your body is suitable for the change into a living doll.  There’s no real extreme sadism I’d say from Sano in Dollmaker, other than an occasional devious smirk here and there.  It’s far less apparent though than it was in BTD.  Like I said, you get free reign of the house in this game, and as long as you’re not trying to escape, Sano’s pretty polite to you and makes normal small talk.  He’s not trying to outright scare you and he still places his medical duties as priority when he’s called out for work.
We don’t get to see a lot of direct interactions between Sano and Akira here, but they seem to be on good terms as brothers.  However, I should note that Sano will surprisingly relinquish his claims to the MC if Akira starts to show interest in them.  I think this is more so because Sano is aware of Akira’s more clingy and violent tendencies, rather than being a good brother who doesn’t want to get in the way of Akira’s romance.  There’s a part where Akira is being rough with the MC and Sano goes to knock on the door. Akira makes the MC tell Sano that “they’re Akira’s now” and Sano just stutters “Okay” and walks away.  It’s interesting because in BTD, Akira could like the MC but wouldn’t go against Sano to let them out.  Sano was the one in charge.  In Dollmaker though?  If Akira wants something, Sano will quickly step out of the way to avoid escalating things. For the record, that’s likely not a bad idea.
Last little fun piece of trivia I believe I stumbled upon as a little secret.  At night you can go in one of the rooms and actually catch Cain Zeitgeist pleasuring Sano.  There was no CG or sprites popping up for this scene though, which I seriously wanted here, haha.  Apparently Sano and Cain do have a close relationship in Dollmaker, but you don’t learn too much about it.  It definitely sounds like Cain takes the lead though here.  Oh, but despite this treat for the viewer, it doesn’t end well for the MC. Cain catches you spying on them and calls you by your name even.  So he knows you already, either because Sano said something, or it’s possible Cain spies on Sano.  I actually wouldn’t be surprised if Cain popped over because he was a little jealous of Sano finding a new plaything (just based on the dialogue).  That’s still speculation though.  But Cain doesn’t really take kindly to your peeping, so he promptly kills you.  That’s how you get the “Don’t Interrupt” ending.
Free Talk
Whether it was bugs preventing me from progressing more or certain dialogue paths hadn’t been put into the game yet, it’s obvious the unfinished build of Dollmaker doesn’t let you see the full story of your relationship with Sano.  I’m positive there was going to be at least one ending where he successfully turns you into a doll, but we’ll never know what other kinds of endings we could have gotten.  Is it possible for him to let you go?  Can you become lovers?  Will he only love you if you become his doll, or can you remain human?  Does he try to slowly warm you up to the idea of becoming a doll?  Or does he attempt to force you to go through with the transformation regardless of if the MC is close to Sano or not?
Other things to consider are what IS the nature of his relationship with Annabelle?  Is the MC here to replace her and does Sano no longer have feelings for Annabelle?  Did he ever have special feelings for her before?  It’s certainly a curious thing when you have a person already so devoted to you that they’d give up their human arms and legs forever.  Why does Sano feel like he needs another doll?  Is the doll obsession part of some deeper insecurity of his?  Is he truly a cold person that gets tired of his “things” eventually and needs to replace them later?  Was he expecting Annabelle and the MC to cohabit the house peacefully?
There were other things we didn’t get to see, like more of Sano’s interactions with other characters like Akira or Cain.  There was even a random npc named Mio I think? She just pops up randomly for a few seconds and we don’t get to see much else of her, but Sano knew her.  Although it is possible based on what I saw that Sano tends to be a pretty busy character that naturally wouldn’t interact as much with the other residents and visitors.  He also tended to just let others do as they please.  Even the MC to an extent.  That kind of makes it more interesting how a semi-aloof (he’s not unfriendly here) character like Sano has this need to take demons or humans and turn them into something of his own.  It’s possible he doesn’t feel like he connects with the rest of humanity on a normal level.  That seems to be a fair statement.  But he still has a desire for some form of companionship.  His IDEAL being though (aka, living doll) is definitely not the status quo though.
I’m so sorry there isn’t much more I can give than this, but I think I did the best with what we had. I don’t think this exact version of Sano will ever pop up again in the Rockland universe.  As I’ve said before, the way the Rockland universe is being set up I believe already contradicts some elements set up in Dollmaker.  Who knows what will become of Sano in the future.  I think if the character is ever revisited for a third time, there’s still going to be some core similarities with his personality. He always seems to be in the medical profession and tends to be a calmer, more serious character.  His backstory I’m sure would get revamped once again.  But who knows, maybe he’ll once again have his doll obsession.  Only time will tell.
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purplesurveys · 3 years
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[found at: --rainboweyes--]
When was the last time you did clay work/pottery? The one time I did pottery was I thinkkkkk during our trip to Vigan? Somewhere up north, anyway. That was around 3 or 4 years ago.
Do you like art, hate it or just not mind it? I love looking at art and can be in museums all day long; but I hate analyzing it and having to read into metaphors or symbolisms. I just appreciate the brush strokes, the colors used...basically the skills and hard work that went into the artwork.
If you had to choose would you prefer dull pain for 12 hours or sharp for 2? Sharp for two, plz. I have had dull headaches all week that have lasted into the night and I absolutely hate it.
Koala or Kangaroo? I like either.
Do you know the words to the national anthem of your country? Of course.
Is your country ruled by a president, prime minister, queen or other? President. Our current one’s an incompetent one, but yeah a president I guess.
Does blue occur in your national flag? Yes. We place the blue section on top when the country’s at peace, and we flip it to the bottom side if we’re otherwise at war - fortunately I’ve never seen the red be put on top throughout my lifetime so far.
Talking of flags. Do you like football/soccer? I’ve personally never seen the appeal of either, but that’s just me.
If yes, do you play and what position? If not, leave blank.
Would you rather be a Model, Famous Scientist, Singer or Chef? I’d like to be a scientist, just not a famous one. Like can I just be lowkey smart? Lmao
Would you rather be a pilot, crime scene investigator or estate agent? Pilot. That would have been so rad. I have a friend who flies nearly every week and his photos always look awesome. Maybe I’ll take lessons one day.
Does making others happy really make you feel happy? It’s my main way of keeping happy.
What color literally doesn't appear in your wardrobe at all? Purple. Never looked good on me. I wanna add orange since I dislike the color as well, but I remember the orange top I have that I never got around to throwing out. I’m pretty sure I also don’t own any brown.
Do you actually read the answers others give to your surveys [I do]? Yes. Sometimes I’ll be gone for several days and there’ll be so many new survey entries that I can’t always read everyone’s answers, but for the most part I do try to take a look at the ones I see.
Did you ever swear at a teacher in school? Why? I’ve sworn at them behind their backs, but that’s it.
Have you ever pricked your finger on Holly or another 'sharp' plant? I’ve definitely been a victim of thorns before.
Speaking of Holly, do you adore Christmas or does it bug you? It makes me lonely for the most part. But I was happy this year because my dad was home, and both sides of my family managed to make get-togethers work while still following protocol.
Have you ever wrote your own short story? I tried writing fanfiction when I first discovered them, but that was when I learned I was unbelievably terrible with fictional work. My career as a budding author did not last any longer than two weeks, lmao.
What about a novel? Or perhaps you started and couldn't finish? Nope. I believe I tried this as well, but I just didn’t have both the creativity and commitment for it.
Either of the above, if this was the case, place short synopsis here: Couples I shipped and that is cringey enough so that is all you need to know.
Do you prefer SciFi/Fantasy/Action/Horror or Rom/Com/RealLife? When it comes to fanfiction still? Or just in general? I like stories that are most likely to happen in real life, so I enjoy dramas the most. Romcoms are also cute and they’re what I turn to whenever I need to de-stress. I do like horror as well but my interest has waned a bit through the years; sci-fi is a hit or miss for me; I don’t hold any interest for either fantasy or action.
What do you have a lot of faith in [note: can be anything]? It’s hard to hold a lot of that these days.
Think of a material thing you want. Name it here (material, made or bought] Right now I want a projector. I keep YouTube videos playing on my phone throughout my shift to serve as background noise, but I wish I had a bigger screen :( I have a blank wall in my room so a projector would be perfect rn.
Would $100/$60 be enough for this item? I can definitely find a projector in that price range on Shopee, lol.
How about $1000/$600? That’s more than enough and can get me a high-end projector at this point.
Would you rather have a big house, a lot of kids or a high flying job? The last one is a priority for me now.
Have you ever been to a creepy/haunted/abandoned place? I’ve been to many places rumored to be haunted, like particular spots in my high school.
What did it look like and what were the circumstances? Idk the so-called haunted areas in my school were all everyday spots, like certain washrooms and the penthouse in the high school building. An outsider probably wouldn’t suspect they were haunted unless someone else told them.
It’s nearing 10:30 PM and it’s pitch-black in my room, so I’d rather not explain the stories behind the ~haunted spots LOL
What's your favorite dip? Depends on what food I’m dipping? There are so many kinds of dips, dude.
Chocolate Cookies or Fudge Brownies? Just chocolate cookies? As in double chocolate, not chocolate chip? I never liked that flavor. I’m going with fudge brownies.
I give you a little baby puppy. What do you name him? It will depend on their personality. Cooper was a smartass from the get-go so we named him after Sheldon Cooper.
Is crime a big problem in your area? Not in my city, fortunately. But my country generally doesn’t have a good rep when it comes to crime. I always hear of unjust killings every week, if not every day.
What's your town/city most well known for? Being on a mountain, a famous biking spot, a famous climbing spot, the view of the metro it gives at night.
Do you know a Jack? What's he like? I don’t think so. No one is coming to mind.
How about a Lisa? What's she like? Our neighbor from my childhood home is a Lisa. I have not seen her since I was like 10, so I have no clue how she’s doing these days.
Are most your friends older, younger or the same age as you? Same age, since most of my friends are the people I went to high school/college with.
Do you subconsciously hang out with those with the same star sign as you or as each other, perhaps due to certain personality traits? Think about it: Astrology makes me cringe.
Name 5 objects that you don't have but would like right now? A 2021 planner, scented candles, Ivy Park merch, a massage pillow, skincare products.
When you have children, would you like twins? Probably not.
Do you know any twins? If so, what are they called? Yeah I was classmates with a pair in an English elective I had in college. We ended up being friends that semester, but we don’t interact much anymore. I’m not giving away their names, but I’m sad that I was never able to tell them apart :/
If you were given the choice to choose your child’s gender, would you? Absolutely yeah, if it were possible. I’d preferably have all girls.
What instrument would you love to learn how to play? The piano.
Does the sound of knocking/tapping startle you? If it comes out as a loud thud, yeah. It’s more likely to irritate me, though.
What's the scariest story/urban legend/creepypasta etc you heard? Skipping this as it’s nearing 10:45 PM and I don’t need any images to come to mind right now lol
Do you miss someone currently? Always.
When was the last time you were in hospital? What for [if comfy saying]? Needed to get a urine and blood test to check my platelet count, because my parents and I thought I had dengue.
When was the last time you went to the dentist? December 2019 when I needed a pesky toothache dealt with ASAP, and when my dentist discovered a decayed tooth that needed to be removed.
Do you get along well with your family doctor/your doctor? We don’t have a family doctor. I only go to the doctor when I’m sick, and we go to different ones every time haha.
What personality trait does nearly everyone in your family seem to have? Everyone hides their emotions, to a point that it’s unhealthy. No one just wants to address the elephant in the room, which is precisely a part of the problem. I’m 100% certain we are all suffering and fighting our own battles quietly.
The survey’s ended. I hope you enjoyed it. :) This was a pleasant one to take :)
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