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abeautifulblog · 2 years

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Season 2: WE FIXED IT!!

So coffee_mage and I were commiserating about the witcher season two, and we got to brainstorming about how it could have been improved (that wasn’t just “throw the whole damn thing out and start over,” which, I’ll be honest, was my recommendation).

Here’s what we came up with. ✌

—

First off, they needed an establishing shot of Geralt and Ciri's relationship—you can't just pick up ~some days~ later, I want to see the first real conversation they had together. Set the stage, show us where we're starting from. As I am always harping on when I’m beta-reading for people: show the establishing shot, before you show how it changes.

So they're spending one last night at the farmer's cottage before they set out in the morning. Ciri is sleeping in the house, Geralt bedding down in the barn, but she sneaks out to see him—curiosity, or because she's afraid he'll disappear like everyone else in her life—and finds him futzing around with the wound on his leg. She offers to give him a hand, maybe she used to help with her grandmother's injuries after battles sometimes (because ffs let's not forget how recent that loss was, let Ciri grieve), and they have a slightly stilted conversation about how he came to be her witcher-of-surprise. He explains why he didn't come for her sooner (that there's no place in a witcher's life for a child), but in such a way that accidentally underscores the fact that he did not ask for a child. This is something that will crop up again later, that they'll have to address: Ciri's insecurities that he didn’t want her, doesn't want to be saddled with her.

I know I'm asking a lot from hcav's acting, but it should be clear to the audience that Geralt is feeling wildly out of his depth here, daunted by the prospect of being the caretaker for a traumatized teenager. He does not feel equipped to be any sort of replacement for the family she's lost, but he nonetheless pledges, stiff but earnest, that he will do everything in his power to keep her safe. That much, he can do.

(And for the love of god, fix his fucking contacts, what is even WITH them this season??)

They can keep the storyline with tusk-guy, but cut all the stupid beauty-and-the-beast shit and make the message and the questions it raises clearer. What is it that makes him a monster? The fact that he's got tusks, or how he raped a woman, or how he now turns a blind eye to his girlfriend slaughtering whole villages? Who's the worse monster, the human who chooses to do evil things, or the creature that merely acts according to its nature?

I'm fine with Ciri being cautious of telling Geralt about her powers—he's a monster-hunter, after all, what if he decides she's a monster that needs killing? (Her powers have killed people, albeit by accident. They should lean into that when she meets the bruxa, that Ciri has killed people too.) It needs to be a character-making moment when she decides that she can trust him with her secret. (Rather than an offhand “oh yeah btw I knew about your mother's power, figured you've got it too.”) At the end of episode one, after Geralt has demonstrated (like he did repeatedly in the first season) that he doesn't kill things simply for being different, is when she tells him, and receives his continued support, and they are a step closer than they were before.

We can keep the awkward chats as they travel, just give Ciri some lines here that actually make sense for a thirteen year old girl who’s just lost her whole everything. Have her angry and raw. Have her questioning why this taciturn asshole is bothering to keep her safe, when he didn’t want her in the first place and barely even talks to her. Let her feel her pain and tell Geralt everything she left behind, everything she misses, every single thing that she—an actual human child—can’t help blaming the nearest target for losing. Keep Geralt out of his depth, have him not even look at her as she talks. When they’re stationary, he’s fiddling with his knife and bits of wood.

Finally (a couple episodes in), she has had enough and she yells at him about it, that he’s terrible at keeping her safe and he doesn’t give a fuck about her so why not leave her to die in the woods and do everyone a favor. He stands. He collects something out of his bag. He says, “Follow me.” There’s a tree nearby, something in a shape that echoes the tree of medallions. He holds up a small, carved object on a bit of string. He hangs it on the tree and tells her about the tree of medallions in Kaer Morhen; how there’s nothing that can bring back the dead, all you can do is remember them. (Witchers, it should be noted, know all about having to grieve someone in the absence of a body to bury.)

We can have him genuinely believe Yen’s dead at this point and he tilts the object he’s hung on the tree to show Ciri and says a few words about who Yen was. Then he hands Ciri a small lion on a string and says, “This is for Calanthe,” and then some others for Eist, for Mousesack, for anyone else, and they have a funeral ritual for Ciri’s people. There’s some closure for her grief, and she realizes that even if Geralt doesn’t show it the way she expects, he does care.

(Basically, the scene from the show with Nenneke when they’re talking about Ciri’s losses—that needed to be a bonding moment between Ciri and Geralt instead, and needed to happen way earlier.

If they go to Nenneke’s temple, it can be a brief respite as they’re fleeing to Kaer Morhen, and Nenneke would be a good option for someone who can tell Geralt, She needs more than a protector; she needs you to be a father.)

—

Cut the whole damn Baba Yaga storyline. It makes for exceptionally muddy stakes, as the ~vision quest~ thing makes it hard to tell what's actually going on and what was merely Symbolic. We don't need it, Nilfgaard (or the Wild Hunt) is a perfectly adequate threat on their own.

—

Move Kaer Morhen to the latter half of the season, and make the first four or five episodes about Geralt and Ciri trying to get there. Geralt can do some monsters-of-the-week for cash, they can dodge Nilfgaard and whoever else, and it gives them something to DO while they're learning to navigate that relationship. (You could even keep the “Ciri is a magnet for monsters” plotline if you really wanted, though I would expect it to be explained better, or change it to be the vanguard of the Wild Hunt—something which Geralt pegs immediately (and communicates to the audience) as fuckin’ weird.)

Kaer Morhen is supposed to be a sanctuary—let that be the goal they spend four episodes fighting tooth-and-nail to reach. Let it be a godsdamned relief when they finally get there and Geralt can fall, exhausted, into his fellow witchers' arms.

—

Meanwhile, Yennefer doesn't wind up hanging out with Fringilla, because that was a plot point that went absolutely nowhere. Instead, Tissaia finds her on the battlefield, and after a heartstopping moment in which she thinks Yennefer is dead, falls to her knees with relief.

Yennefer wakes up in bed in Aretuza, Tissaia gives her a recap of whatever's necessary, and that’s when Yennefer discovers that she's lost her magic.

Seriously, that development needed a scene of its own—the shock, the horror, the grief, the betrayal in realizing she's lost the thing that she'd staked her entire identity on. And there are a few different places you could go with Tissaia's reaction to it (“You're more than your magic” and “Don't worry, I'm sure it will come back to you” are very different messages), but both of them realize that Yennefer has to keep this a secret, because showing weakness in Aretuza/Ban Ard is painting a fucking target on yourself.

[ETA: What if the djinn wish was the only reason why Yennefer hadn’t died at Sodden? That the explosion of her power, by rights, should have killed her, and nobody at Aretuza can figure out how she survived that. Maybe Yennefer suspects the reason, or maybe it’s a mystery at this point, but that’s why Stregobor is curious and fixated on her.]

Cahir is not a POW, because that was also an incredibly stupid plot point. He's in Cintra being an adversarial colleague to Fringilla, challenging her decisions (re: the elves) and her deepening bond with Francesca that's threatening her loyalty to the White Flame.

(The show needs to make up its mind about whether Nilfgaard is evil or not—in season one they were basically the Borg, which is hard to walk back, so Fringilla's arc would be more satisfying if it ended with her loyalty to Francesca & the elves trumping her loyalty to Nilfgaard, and the two of them breaking away at the end of the season. Apart from the ending, I’d leave the Fringilla/Francesca arc mostly untouched; I can take or leave Francesca’s pregnancy, but none of that bullshit with the baby getting murdered and then her going evil. Our lesbians will live happily ever after and be a joint political force to be reckoned with in season three.)

If this season is going to feature a de-powered Yen, then her arc has to be about learning to find value in herself beyond her magic—and it’s rough going at first. Show us her frustration as she tries and tries to get it back and can't, show those stages of grief. (Instead of wandering aimlessly around Aretuza having pointless conversations.) Magic is, recall, what she gave up everything for—and now she still doesn't have her fertility, and doesn't even have the thing she sacrificed it for, the thing that was supposed to make that loss worth it.

Show her standing on the battlements of Aretuza looking at the ocean far below with the clear implication that she's thinking about jumping, and that's where Tissaia finds her and they have their impassioned, heartbreaking conversation about what future Yennefer has now, instead of coming out of nowhere with weird distracting lightning going on in the background. Show Tissaia being understatedly terrified that Yennefer is going to do it, and that this time she won't be able to save her.

...And then Stregobor finds out that Yennefer's lost her powers, which—hoo boy, yeah girl, time to get out of town. That would be enough of a real-and-present threat to put her in hiding and on the run, when there's a creepy fucker who wants to vivisect her and she doesn't even have her powers to defend herself. Maybe Istredd helps her get out—not that she necessarily needs his help, but to underscore that she has people who care about her, who want to help her. Not to rekindle that old flame, but to affirm that they are and always will be important to each other.

Not sure what Istredd would be doing in this version, without the monsters subplot. Maybe staying at Ban Ard to keep an inside eye on whatever fresh fuckery Stregobor is up to.

(Oh yeah, and the whole “FiRe MaGiC Is fOrBiddEn!!” thing? Since fucking when? Ditch it.)

—

Jaskier is still fighting the good fight with his elven underground railroad—not sure Yennefer would be trying to go to Nilfgaardian-occupied Cintra, but she needs to get somewhere, so their reunion happens the same as it does in the show. That part was excellent, it can stay.

(ETA: Jaskier would have realized immediately that something was amiss, re: Yennefer’s magic -- because if she shouldn’t need his help, she should be able to portal herself wherever she wants to go.)

Except that when Yennefer is about to leave with the other refugees, and she and Jaskier are saying their goodbyes, she changes her mind—she decides that she wants to stay and help him with the elves. I'm thinking of this excellent post, and what it means that Jaskier—who has no powers, never has—is nonetheless making a difference. He's proving that you don't need magic to accomplish something worthwhile, just the will to act. This is when Yen stops running and starts doing, she finds a cause worth fighting for and finds that she’s good at more than magic. (Remember the part in the show where she saw a guy being beaten to shit and just walked on by? Let her resolve to not do that again.)

As coffee_mage put it: “Jaskier is meant to inspire feelings in people. He's a bard. Let him inspire Yen.”

(Also, make Dara more involved with the refugee effort. Either he’s a key figure in helping Jaskier, or at the very least, he showed up for passage to Cintra with half a dozen orphans in tow. Dara demonstrably has both the ability and the willingness to take care of people who are not equipped to take care of themselves.)

Jaskier and Yen get a few scenes of shenanigans while they work together -- the two of them being fake-married is a stroke of genius, so let’s say Jaskier’s bar gets raided by city guards (ACGAB) who know he’s up to something. They can’t find anything to pin on him, so they take him in under some flimsy liquor-license pretext or whatever, and then Yennefer is the one who has to bust him out with her wits. I want to see Yennefer being clever, because that is so much more interesting than her being magically overclocked.

(Mostly I just want a way to keep the Whoreson Prison Blues song. XD)

ETA: Also a quiet scene of them drinking in the empty bar after hours, when they can have another conversation where they let themselves be vulnerable. The topic of Geralt comes up again, and they both confess to having been jealous of each other the past, for what the other was to Geralt. Potentially interesting to raise the question “Would you go back to him, if he asked?” -- and they can say what they will, but the truth for both of them is “I want to believe I wouldn’t, but I probably would.”

And then I need to send Jaskier off alone, so maybe he gets a job from Dijkstra (or maybe it’s a trap) and Yen offers to take over running the operation for him. Can use this space to explore Yen's bi-racial heritage—how she's elven enough to be persecuted for it, but not enough elven to be accepted by the elves as one of their own. (Dara would be a good partner for those conversations.) That was an excellent concept they brought up in the show, but then didn't do any follow-through on.

And that's how Yennefer is reunited with Geralt—that he and Ciri have found themselves stuck behind a blockade, or in a city under lockdown, and need help getting out to continue their journey to Kaer Morhen. Could raise the stakes by making Geralt get injured in some contract or other--

[ETA: Actually, if they insist on killing Roach, this is the place to do it. They get attacked by a monster while they’re traveling up the coast toward Oxenfurt, Roach goes over the edge of a coastal cliff and Ciri very goddamn nearly goes with her. Geralt manages to hack a fatal chunk off the monster and grab her in the very nick of time, but it’s the closest near-miss they’ve had yet, and it scares the shit out of both of them. This is the first time they hug, when they’re clinging to each other after Ciri’s safe.

But that also means that in addition to the grief and trauma of losing Roach and Ciri nearly dying, they have lost all their supplies. They have no food, no water, no money, nothing to sleep on or keep them warm at night, and they are dragging themselves northward on foot.]

--and so Geralt is a sorry-fucking-sight when he and his bedraggled child show up to beg for help, and he finds himself suddenly face to face with Yen. (Who in this version, he had believed was dead right up until he sees her with his own two eyes.) It gives them that delicious tension of “this is the wrong time to air our dirty laundry” as they try to interact like normal people in front of Ciri and the other refugees, and then later that night Geralt manages to catch her for a private conversation in the empty tavern or whatever.

NO MAKING OUT.

They have an emotionally charged conversation, and he can stare at her longingly through the whole thing, but even though she is conflicted about her feelings for him, she's not about to fall straight back into his arms. They talk about the wish. (No apology yet; that’s for later. Here, Geralt just tries to explain what he did and why, because, OH RIGHT, the netflix show never actually told us what exactly the wish was! 🙃) They talk about Geralt's relationship with Ciri. Geralt asks Yen to join them in Kaer Morhen, ~because Ciri needs training.~ (Not a lie, but obvs not his only motivation for wanting her to come.) Yennefer says she'll think about it; she has obligations where she is now. The conversation ends with him reiterating, You're important to me, in an echo of season one; she admits that in spite of everything, he's important to her too, and they part on slightly steadier terms than they met, with hope for a future.

If Ciri is going to ask about that relationship, she should ask Geralt, not Yen, make him talk about feelings—and make his answer be something better than “Longing, regret, hope, and fear,” jfc, straight people, are you okay?? That is about THE most toxic comp-het definition of love I’ve ever goddamned heard. Maybe something like -- how he admires her and how she makes him want to be a better man than he was before?

(ETA: Yen & Ciri should also have a conversation before she and Geralt set off again -- any number of options for what they’d talk about, but something to lay the groundwork for them meeting again in the future and Yen being a positive influence in her life. On Yen’s side, it makes the concept of ~Geralt’s child surprise~ more real -- that Ciri is a real person, a child who is strong and vulnerable, fierce and scared, whom Yennefer’s heart is already reaching out toward even after one brief meeting.)

---

Not sure what Triss’s role in this should be—would depend on what the plot for season three is, to set her up doing something future-relevant—but what her plot should not be is “trying to mack on her best friend’s man.”

And what is with the “boar” that Geralt had slung over his shoulders? I have never seen such fake obviously taxidermied shit in my life. This is what a boar looks like:

—

As for the Geralt & Jaskier reunion, the stakes need to be raised on that—Geralt pulling him out of the drunk tank is not exactly a thrilling, death-defying rescue. It would not have been enough to make Geralt overcome whatever block has been keeping him away from Jaskier up til this point.

(I also agree with people who’ve commented that Geralt needs to hear that fucking breakup song—though if he did, that could potentially cement his conviction that Jaskier wants nothing to do with him and he should stay away, until Jaskier’s in trouble and he doesn’t have a choice.)

And as much as I adore the scene where Yen rescues Jaskier from Rience (seriously, it was fucking amazing)—thematically and narratively, it needs to be Geralt who rescues Jaskier from the torture he's enduring for Geralt's sake. Geralt needs to be confronted with what Jaskier has suffered on his behalf, and forced to recognize the depth of Jaskier's dedication and loyalty.

(Maybe Rience tracks Geralt & Ciri as far as Yen’s refugee station, she defends herself and the refugees and sends him packing with the flaming-alcohol-in-the-face thing, and that’s when he decides to go after Jaskier, the softer target, instead. Rience & Lydia are boring as fuck, so just toss any semblance of a personality for him out the window and play him like the terminator—a menacing and unstoppable force of nature, someone you can’t fight, only run from.)

So Rience or Nilfgaard catches Jaskier when he's off running errands for Dijkstra. Initially they're torturing him for information about where Geralt and Ciri are; after they're satisfied that he's telling the truth about not knowing anything, they decide he'll be bait instead. I want to see Jaskier screaming YOU'RE WASTING YOUR TIME, HE IS NOT GOING TO COME FOR ME—

And then he does, and after he gets Jaskier to safety they have an actual fucking conversation while Geralt guiltily bandages the injuries Jaskier sustained on his behalf. Let Jaskier say his piece, make Geralt hear him out. Geralt gives a real fucking apology, in which he recognizes how he did wrong. He asks Jaskier to come to Kaer Morhen too, again with the “Ciri needs—” excuse, but Jaskier refuses to go… until Geralt finally makes himself confess that he wants Jaskier there. Callback to the “I need no one” conversation from season one, and maybe Geralt acknowledges now that he does need people, or maybe it’s that he doesn't have to need Jaskier to want him there.

And now Jaskier says yes to going with them to KM; if they need something to keep them busy for a bit, maybe he still has a loose end to tie up with the Dijkstra errand before they can leave.

---

Fringilla gets to murder Cahir at the end. As a treat. I love-love-love the subplot where the Nilfgaardian generals in Cintra are getting increasingly uneasy about the hundreds and thousands of elves flocking to the city, who are all fervently loyal... to Fringilla. She had told the generals that she’d be delivering the elves to the White Flame’s cause, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that their loyalty is to her and Francesca, not Nilfgaard.

So, a scene where Cahir is frothing at Fringilla about how she needs to ~recognize her priorities~ and ~choose which side she’s on~ and--

And then he cuts off with a startled little wheeze mid-sentence. Chokes a bit. The camera pans down to show him pressing a hand to stem the blood coming from his stomach, and the knife in Fringilla’s hand. She smiles at him, and says, You’re right. And I’ve chosen my side. (:

The elves they’ve been training step out of the shadows and ambush the Nilfgaardian soldiers in the room. Fringilla takes Francesca’s hand and leads her up to the convenient dais where there are two chairs waiting, and they take their seats side by side. Pan out to an exterior shot of the palace, where elven banners are being rolled out on top of the Nilfgaardian banners. Very Cinematic. Very Drama. 👌

(LOOK, A GAY CAN DREAM, RIGHT? >:[)

(This would require coming up with a solid explanation for how the new elven city-state of Xin’trea could reasonably expect to survive with the racist North on one side and a vengeful Nilfgaard on the other, but I’m sure I could hand-wave some protective magical technobabble.)

---

KAER MORHEN

Okay, biggest change is that the witchers are not raging bags of dicks. If there’s foreshadowing about who’s going to die (if he must), it’s because Eskel is TOO PERFECT FOR THIS WORLD; TOO PURE. He is polite and chivalrous like he is in the books, since he is compensating for his scarring that is more severe than “pillow creases on my cheek.” He's also played by an older actor, someone on par with hcav, and they treat each other with nothing but warmth and affection. The witchers don't exactly know what to do with Ciri, but no one is malicious, even though Eskel and/or Geralt still have to step in sometimes and smack them down when their laddishness gets excessive for a teenage princess.

Lambert is a prickly asshole rather than a fucking sociopath. He is, canonically, the angriest of the Wolves, on account of being the one who understands most clearly that what was done to them as children was fucked up. (“Your anger is the part of you that loves you” etc.) He's not angry at Ciri, he's angry at Geralt for dragging a child to Kaer Morhen, because it looks an awful lot like Geralt's trying to start up that cycle of abuse yet again, the cycle he’d thought was finally over with the sacking.

In Kaer Morhen, Ciri is exploring the keep and discovers the house-of-horrors laboratory in which the trial of the grasses used to be conducted. Vesemir finds her there and tells her about it; she gains a better understanding of the inter-generational trauma of witchers, and in doing so, comes to understand Geralt better, and why he is so adamantly opposed to the idea of her undergoing the trials and becoming a full witcher. The horror of the trials needs to be revealed before the concept of Ciri undergoing them is even on the table. They should be part of establishing WHY Geralt is so taciturn and grumpy and emo. We need Ciri to actually understand some of Geralt’s shit at this point; he showed he has feelings with the carved things on the tree. We need her to see why they’re boxed away.

The Kaer Morhen sequence should be doubling down on the idea of Ciri being the generation that finally breaks that cycle—that the witchers are having to learn how to impart those skills and that knowledge without the abuse that accompanied their own upbringing and education. It is about hard men learning to be gentler, choosing to be gentler.

Show Ciri becoming empowered by her training, finally shaking off the sense of helplessness that's plagued her for the better part of two seasons. Show Proud Dad Geralt being supportive when she succeeds at something.

Yen gets the last of the elves out of Oxenfurt and then joins them in Kaer Morhen and begins the process of teaching Ciri about her magic, and the two of them start bonding. Her friendship with Jaskier continues to be a delight, much to Geralt's alarm and chagrin. Show Jaskier bonding with Ciri too—the only link left to her courtly past, the only person who understands both the world she came from and the world she's in now.

Ciri is many things—witcher-trainee, sorceress, princess—and the different adults in her life help her balance and cultivate those different aspects of herself.

Yen and Geralt finally have their conversation about how Geralt wronged her. By this point, Geralt understands just how deep a betrayal it was to steal that choice from her, and is able to make a meaningful apology, not make justifications. Yennefer maybe tells Geralt that she forgives him, but she is not going to get together with him again until the djinn wish has been broken—not until she can know for sure whether these feelings are her own, or being forced on her. UST & yearning out the wazoo, all the more potent because they're not acting on it.

Haven’t decided when/how Yen should get her magic back—since that is, in essence, a disability narrative and ought to be handled as such, a ~magic fix~ seems to be in poor taste. I’m inclined to treat it like someone re-learning how to walk after an accident—that progress is made slowly and through hard work, and by her commitment to recovery. That she’s recovering her magic, but it doesn’t feel like her magic anymore—it requires a different kind of focus, and developing new habits. It’s not a matter of “getting it back,” it’s learning an entirely new set of mental muscles.

—

Kaer Morhen is legitimately a sanctuary... until it's not. In the final episode, Nilfgaard or whoever the Big Bad is attacks Kaer Morhen—and the assault is repelled, but Eskel dies defending Ciri. He gets a send-off that actually feels like a meaningful loss, and then they have to leave Kaer Morhen because it's no longer safe there, and that is the launching point for season three.

—

Anyway, #petition for gremble & coffee_mage to script-doctor season three. 😑

#witcher shit #twn season 2 #twn spoilers #twn critical

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stormxpadme · 2 years

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I can’t even begin to describe how livid the growing technical quality demands on the internet, and also, on a smaller scale on TV and in the movie business, make me.

Like. A generously sized TV is nice. I have one myself. For people with disabilities, they’re even more necessary. Personally, as someone who grew up with 6 TV channels and video recorders, I wouldn’t need HD in my life, but I get that some people enjoy it, and it can be nice for documentations and shit. What I don’t need to see is the newest background noise-serving trash TV episode so large, I can tell what the host had for dinner by the color of their teeth, or a stubble on Orlando Bloom’s chin when he’s supposed to play an elf with a hairless body.

Bby I love you but you need to shave.

All that remastering especially of old source material doesn’t make anything better most of the time. It just makes it clearer. And that’s not a good thing. A part of suspension of disbelief relies heavily on effects. When you take away that very disguise tool or, on the same account, desaturate the whole damn movie because somehow that’s suppose to be edgier, the whole thing doesn’t get prettier. It gets sober and stale, and it’s fucking frustrating. Stop destroying fictional magic with technical means FFS.

And coming from the same space is that ridiculous demand for online material to fulfill higher and higher size standards because everyone in this damn industry has a fucking obsession with size. YouTube wasn’t originally fucking meant for home cinema ffs. It was meant for small videos that you didn’t need the fucking computer of the Enterprise for to render them. Now, I wouldn’t complain if those requirements apply only to newly uploaded source material. But they silently increased those requirements bit by bit over the years for everything they are already hosting. And now videos that I made 15 years ago from ripped Blurays, the quality of which was just fine (which you can even still see in the thumbnails), and I rendered and uploaded them at the back then required size, look like I took them with a goddamn 60s polaroid camera and left them lying in the sunlight for 48 hours. You need to resize the player manually to mini format to even make out anything at all.

Like, what the fuck. Look at those thumbnails.

And that’s what happens when you play the video, no matter how with which player.

And there’s nothing I can fuckin change about it, because due to a PC crash long ago, I don’t have the source snippets any longer which you need for Sony Vegas. And I’m not the only victim here. Music clips from 20 years ago look like they’re 80 years old because they were uploaded before Youtube decided, every clip on their fucking hellsite needs to be resized to IMAX standards. FFS what is wrong with these people? Those fanvideos were a shitton of work, and now I can’t even properly show them anymore because they look like crap.

I’m just tired.

#personal #editing #x men #everything after x2 didn't happen sue me #youtube #fanfiction #stormys fanfics #this has been a problem for a while #but showing some clips to my dear effervescentdragon a few days ago #i damn near fell of my chair #they did another resize fuckup 2019 or so #and now i might as well delete that whole fuckin channel #watch me never buy that damn LOTR 4 k edition #i saw enough screenshots to want to scream #xmenart #x men original timeline movies

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belladxne · 4 years

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i will see you where the shadow ends | chapter 2

[see notes for ao3 and ff links]

part of the put your faith in the light that you cannot see series AU: Breath of the Wild pairing: KiriBaku word count: 5,548

chapter 2: there’s a stirring in this head of mine (i can’t find the things i’d known)

Inko, Eijiro is not at all surprised to discover, is a very kind old woman. She tells him a little about the Great Plateau—about how it’s said to be the birthplace of Hyrule, about the nearby ruins of a once-significant temple left abandoned after the decline of the kingdom one hundred years before, about how she’d been living here some fifty years and hasn’t had a visitor in decades. He’s suddenly very glad he did decide to talk with her.

He doesn’t know how to even begin to explain his situation when she asks, mostly because he doesn’t know anything about it himself, but she doesn’t pry further. She warns him of monsters in the area, and offers him her torch to use as a weapon should he run across any.

And when they’re done talking, she gives him directions to her home, and asks—well, insists, really, that he join her for lunch, so long as he hunts around for some of their meal himself and helps her cook. Eijiro’s—well, he’s very anxious to get going and figure out just what it is the voice needs him to do, but he has no idea how to do that, and no idea how to even start to figure it out, so he can’t find a good reason to turn her down.

Also… a home-cooked meal sounds really good and the mysteriously disappeared voice isn’t berating him or anything for so much as considering it, so he doesn’t really want to turn her down. The matter settled, Inko shifts, brushes herself off, and reaches a hand out to him imploringly.

“Be a dear and help me up, won’t you?” she asks, voice tinged with humor. “These old bones just aren’t as sprightly as they used to be, I’m afraid.”

Eijiro’s already reaching to help before she even finishes speaking, smiling brightly as he chirps, “Of course!”

He was right when he thought of her as a little old lady before. She’s not quite a foot shorter than him, but Eijiro still towers over her just a little when he gently pulls her to her feet, and he flashes a huge, sharp-toothed grin when the portly woman grants him a grateful look and thanks him, before turning and gathering her walking stick.

“Glad to help!” He beams—before gasping suddenly. “Your cloak!”

She pauses in her steps, looking down at it as though she expects to find a tear, or a stain. “Hm?”

“It’s—that’s the Sheikah symbol on the back,” he says, bouncing on his feet with excitement because—because—he might be actually getting somewhere, finally!

“Oh!” Understanding crosses her face, and Inko nods. “So it is.”

“So—so if you’re a Sheikah—you have to know something about the cave I just came out of! It was—I don’t know, these two weird sealed rooms, with smooth stone walls that had glowing constellations on them? I was in some, uh, tub of weird blue liquid? The door to get out—the big, main door—it had the Sheikah symbol on it.”

He hadn’t really thought about how batshit the stuff he was saying was, until he sees how high the eyebrows on her face have lifted. But—but if she’s Sheikah, she has to know something. Doesn’t she? Even if this is crazy, she should be able to tell him something.

He knows the desperation is showing on his face, but he can’t help it. If she can tell him anything at all about the strange place he woke up, then maybe it’ll give him some hint of where he needs to go. He has to find the voice—has to help him with—with—he doesn’t even know what, and that’s the whole problem.

“Well, that’s...” Inko flounders, and Eijiro can already tell from the way her brows draw together and the lines on her face deepen in thought that he’s not going to get what he wants out of this conversation. Please, he wants to beg—her, or the Goddesses, or someone. But he doesn’t know what good it would do, and Inko keeps speaking, “quite the story.”

He must look truly pathetic in his disappointment, because it’s unimaginable how thoroughly sympathetic and rueful her own expression grows in response. It almost kinda makes him feel worse, knowing that he must look that pitiful about it.

“I’m sorry, Eijiro,” she says, finally, once she seems to have processed the—well, the mess of a recounting he’d given her. “I spent most of my life with the Sheikah, but I don’t even come close to knowing all their secrets. A lot of it’s beyond me, to be honest—and that’s just counting the things the Sheikah themselves remember.” She shrugs gently, hands spreading out before her in apology. “It sounds like you’re talking about one of many, many ancient structures the Sheikah built ten thousand years ago—and even the Sheikah have forgotten much of their history and workings. An effort was made a hundred years ago to unearth them and study them, but—well… with the fall of the kingdom, not enough progress was made. I doubt there’s a soul alive who can fully explain what you just described to me.”

Eijiro’s shoulders slump, and he sighs. “But… you can’t tell me anything?”

Again, the compassion and remorse overtake her expression. “Why don’t you get to work on finding something for us to eat, and we’ll brainstorm over lunch? I won’t be able to tell you much, but it’ll be easier for us both to figure out on full stomachs after a warm meal, I think.”

It doesn’t occur to him until after he’s sullenly agreed, set off, and faced up against no less than four bokoblins—weak ones, which gave him a lot more trouble than he thinks they should have—that Inko didn’t even really question that he’d said he’d woken up in the strange basin of glowing blue water, or ask him how he’d gotten there at all.

Not that he’d have been able to answer, but it strikes him as just a little odd. Or a lot odd.

He’ll go with a lot.

It’s when he’s scaling a large rock jutting out of the middle of a field near Inko’s house to gather some rushrooms from the cracks in the stone that he hears it—or, well, almost hears it. He kind of misses it, at first, though he tilts his head when there’s just—almost—something. He assumes he’s imagining it, because it’s so barely-there, but as he moves to tuck the rushrooms in his pocket it’s a little stronger, a little more pressing, and it has the indescribable feeling of the voice.

He startles, so excited to hear from him again that he loses his grip on the stone, and it’s all he can do to keep from dropping the rushrooms as he slides and skids his way some fifteen feet down the rock face. His feet hit the earth at the base of the surface with a heavy thump, but he manages not to stumble or keel over.

Eijiro…

The voice is muted and distant somehow, but he hears it this time, head jerking around wildly even though he knows at this point he’s not going to find its source. It’s just instinct, to look for him.

Eijiro, the voice persists, and this time it’s actually distinct, only growing clearer and more solidly present the longer he speaks, Don’t just ignore that Sheikah Slate I left you. There’s a point marked on the map. Go there.

Eijiro doesn’t know the voice can see him, but he thinks he can. The comments he’d gotten earlier make the most sense if the voice was watching somehow. So he nods, tucking the rushrooms he’d grabbed into his pocket and reaching for the Sheikah Slate with the same hand. He winces expectantly when he glances towards his free hand, the one he’d scrabbled against the stone surface for purchase when he’d begun to slip, expecting to discover his fingers scraped raw, but—

—he blinks when his eyes find that his hand’s not really much of a hand, at the moment; the skin replaced by vivid crimson scales, fingers and nails sharpened to something more like talons, making his hand look something more like a claw. Like a dragon claw.

He can do that. He can do that! He hasn’t thought about it once, since waking—hadn’t once bothered to ponder what his sharp, fang-like teeth meant, mostly because it was so normal to him, so straightforward. Of course he’s dragonblooded—it’s not something he’s remembering, but more something he’d known the whole time and just hadn’t thought about.

When he pulls his hand away from the stone, his dragonscales and claws soften and mold back into regular skin exactly the way he’s used to as he reaches a finger to navigate the screen of the Sheikah Slate. A map, this thing has a map somehow… and he finds it, after just a moment—though, uh, map seems like maybe an overstatement.

It’s just a blank blue screen, dark and not at all very informative. The only distinctive features are a few lighter blue lines that seem to section off huge chunks of land and three symbols sort of near to each other in the middle: an odd blue emblem, a flashing yellow circle, and below them a yellow triangular arrow—which he figures out must mark his position on the map when he turns the slate, and the arrow rotates with him.

That… that’s crazy, he thinks; sure, you can mark your current position on a map, but to have that mark move with you? And even keep track of the way you’re facing on the map? He doesn’t know if this is magic or some other means, but he still thinks it’s crazy. And cool as all hell.

Based on his own orientation, he thinks the blue marking must be the odd cavern he’d come from. When he moves his finger over it, words appear on the surface of the map—it says Shrine of Resurrection in text of the same bright blue, and below that, in smaller text, Travel. He stares. What does that mean? What does that mean—resurrection?

It gives him an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. Why in the hell is he popping out of weird tubs of glowing stuff in a shrine of resurrection with no idea who he is or how he got there? Is he a dead guy? Oh, gods, is he a ghost? What the hell is going on?

Oi, oi. The voice gets his attention, snapping him out of his thoughts as they spiral further into conspiracy theorizing, but this time the voice doesn’t ease any of his anxiety as he tears his gaze from the—the shrine on the map. You’re wasting daylight, asshole. Get moving.

Again, he finds himself pouting. “Has anyone ever told you you’re pretty grumpy?”

The voice doesn’t dignify that with a response, so he sighs, eyes once more drawn to the bright blue text, and with a swallow he tears his eyes away instead towards the flashing yellow circle. Even without process of elimination, that’s obviously the point the voice was talking about.

Clipping the Sheikah Slate back onto his belt, Eijiro reaches down to his feet where he’d left his satchel—it was easier to climb without it—and pulls it over his shoulder, numb and distracted. He moves the rushrooms from his pocket to the bag, and then sets off. Even with his mind muddled and desperate for answers, it doesn’t occur to him to ignore what the voice said. He just—just knows it. If the voice wants him to do something, he has a good reason.

There are quite a few bokoblins between him and the mark on the map—most of them scattered in the field directly around his destination. It’s taxing, fighting them all, but the rhythm of combat settles him somewhat. It’s mindless and familiar, and shifts his thinking to action. There isn’t time to get existential when he’s got to keep track of enemies’ positions, the pattern of their strikes, his own dodges and attempts to get past their guards.

So he’s a lot more grounded by the time he’s slinging a boko bow over his back, one that he’s just pilfered from one of the last few monsters guarding this spot. He pulls out the Sheikah Slate to double check, but…

But he’s here. He’s here, and it’s... just a pile of rocks. The voice had... sent him to a stack of boulders?

Why?

He does see something, though, now that he narrows his eyes at the gap in between the boulders—a hint of stone that looks different. Looks like the same smooth, tan material he’d seen some of in the dark interior of the… the Shrine of Resurrection. Immediately more alert, he jogs closer.

He realizes quickly that there’s more space than he thought under the huge slabs of stone—that the rocks are covering and held up by another structure, the tan stone he’d seen forming pillars of some sort, maybe? There’s a ridge, like a low half-wall, made of the same stuff, and when he gets under the overhang of rock that darkens it all, he sees that the floor of this area is the same black stone from inside the shrine, and in the center of it all—another pedestal.

Clambering over the low ridge ringing the structure, he all but runs to the pedestal, in a hurry to inspect it. Unlike the ones in the shrine, it’s not lit up—not until he gets closer, and it starts giving a dull, slowly-pulsing orange glow. Just like the first pedestal in the shrine, this one has a rectangular indent, just the right shape for the slate. As soon as he closes the last two steps, the uncanny feminine voice from the shrine sounds.

“Place the Sheikah Slate into the pedestal.”

He examines it a moment—both the rectangular depression, and the little clamp that sticks out from the bottom of it. He tries to remember how the first pedestal had offered the slate to him. The eye had been facing towards him, and the handle up, he recalls, so he pulls the slate from his waist and fits it into the clasp the same way.

The clamp smoothly rotates the slate so that the screen is facing him and then lays it into the indent, before the whole thing glows brighter. A blue Sheikah eye lights up on the screen as he leans closer to watch, eyes wide in fascination, and then the inhuman voice chimes, “Sheikah Tower activated. Please watch for falling rocks.”

Just as he starts to wonder what any of that means, he hears an odd whooshing noise above his head, and suddenly—there’s an earth-shaking rumble below him, so intense he struggles to keep his feet under him. Struggles, right up until he doesn’t, because with one more immense shake he’s knocked to the ground hard enough to smack his head against the stone, and then there’s a swooping in his gut as he feels himself being lifted, and fast.

It’s fast enough to shatter all the stone that had formed around and leaned against this structure, sending it all flying as the whole thing jerks into the air, and Eijiro has his eyes squeezed shut through most of it, groaning from the bump that’s surely forming on the back of his head.

By the time he does open his eyes again, he’s shockingly out in the open, surrounded by bright blue sky on all sides, and the structure—oh, the tower, that’s what it had meant when it said Sheikah Tower activated—is still somehow rising. Its ascent has smoothened out and slowed somewhat, but the deceleration sends his stomach swooping in a different way, now. Not for the first time in this past hour, he finds himself thinking, What in the actual, ever-loving fuck is going on?

The tower settles at its full height, after a few moments, and some—he doesn’t even know, antennas?—lift themselves up at the top of the structure, before a line of blue light shoots up the center of the tower and mists off of it for a moment. Dazed and baffled, he slowly and admittedly ungracefully climbs his way to his feet, looking around him in—

Well, in awe.

That may have been crazy, and absurd, and absolutely unpredictable, but—the wind whips his hair around his face and the world opens up around him and if he felt like he could see most of Hyrule from the cliff outside the Shrine of Resurrection, it was nothing compared to this. And—his eyes widen in surprise, as he realizes that there are now more of those towers out there that he can see—that must have all pushed themselves up out of the earth with the one he stands on now.

“Distilling local information.”

Eijiro’s focus is pulled back towards the plinth where the Sheikah Slate still rests, and as he watches, an odd black stone that hangs suspended above it lights up blue with the Sheikah symbol and several lines of glowing Sheikah text slowly sliding down its surface, towards a curved point directly above his slate, where… it seems to turn into a gathering of blue liquid? Maybe the same stuff from the shrine?

The same musical, repeated beeping tone from when his slate ‘authenticated’ sounds, and as he watches, a large droplet forms slowly before it finally drips off, splattering onto the screen of his slate with a loud plink!

Most of it seems to somehow absorb into the smooth surface of the screen, but some mists off in odd, glowing blue tendrils that Eijiro flinches away from, half afraid they were about to splash into his eyes. The slate chimes and lights up blue for a moment, and as he leans closer again, the map appears—and fills in, all of a sudden! Where before there was a single dark, lined-in area with no features, now the center of the map is colored in shades of brown and blue, and he can make out trees and structures and lines of elevation and bodies of water.

It’s an actual map, now, one that makes sense to read and actually maps his surroundings—though he realizes all of the other outlined chunks of the map still remain dark. Still, it’s something, and he eyes it curiously.

“Regional map extracted,” the odd, high-pitched voice says, and then the center of the pedestal is familiarly rotating and lifting, and the Sheikah Slate is once again being lifted out of the depression it had rested in and presented to him. Still amazed, he plucks it out of its clasp and moves once again to hook it to his belt, before turning away.

He doesn’t get far—not even far enough to start wondering how in the hell he’s going to get down from here—when the faint, barely discernible tones of the voice are back, and this time the unknown man’s voice is accompanied by an odd, mystical humming in the distance.

Remember… the voice says, muffled, but this time when Eijiro whips his head around, towards the sound of the rumbling hum, he does see a sign of the voice—that same explosion of golden light from before. Only this time, it has a source: the room at the heart of the castle in the distance—of Hyrule Castle.

You have to try to remember.

As he stares, fully turning to face towards the source of the light and the voice, Eijiro’s enraptured and relieved, to finally know where it’s coming from; where he has to go to find him. He can’t help but run to the edge of the platform, though the distance it closes isn’t much.

You’ve been asleep, Eijiro. For—fuck, for a hundred years now.

He freezes in his tracks at that, bug-eyed and caught completely off-guard. He doesn’t even have time to process, before there’s another heavy rumbling at his feet, forcing him to scramble for solid footing as the earth shakes.

The monster, here— the voice presses on, not deterred by the trembling of the entire world around him, —when this shithead’s back at full strength, it’s going to destroy everything. Everything, Eijiro.

Eijiro watches in horror as, while the voice speaks, a sickly-looking black mist begins rising and swirling around Hyrule Castle. Though it’s obviously some kind of odd smoke, or gas, it just—just looks somehow oily and slimy. It’s disgusting to behold as some shape seems to form out of it—a horrifying murky face that trails more of the smoke behind itself as it begins to circle the castle. An enraged roar so loud it carries all the way across Hyrule Fields to where Eijiro stands emits from it, and the voice raises its volume in irritation to be heard over it.

So I’m waiting. You don’t have a lot of time to help me stop this. So—so hurry the fuck up.

Both the light and the grimy mist seem to flair and swell and then—Eijiro gasps, as all at once both seem to be swallowed up into the heart of the castle again. It… it looks like one smothered the other, but he can’t tell which. All he knows is he can’t leave the voice alone with—with whatever the hell that creature was. He can’t.

The voice didn’t—wouldn’t say as much earlier, but he needs Eijiro. And Eijiro’s not going to let him down.

The climb down from the tower is an ordeal.

It’s the first time he’s really, very certain that something is wrong. He remembers the short climb, only ten feet or so, to get out of the Shrine of Resurrection, and how it had left him a little winded. Somehow he knows that it should have been easier—that he’s able, or should be able, to climb heights more effortlessly.

He shouldn’t, at least, have to deal with his arms aching and shaking, fingers stiff and sore, before he’s even a quarter of the way down the tower. After that, he has to start alternating between trying to climb down the oddly-latticed bars of tan stone, and just letting go to drop down to the rest platforms littered every twenty or so feet down the sides. It’s an attempt to spare his knees from the impact and his muscles from the strain in equal measure, and it helps, somewhat.

The voice—he’d said Eijiro had slept for… for one hundred years. Had slept, for that long. Is that why he feels so weak?

He’s unsettled and unsteady in more ways than one by the time that his feet touch down on solid ground, and he startles slightly when he hears Inko’s voice calling for him. Sagging a little against the side of the tower, he blinks and looks up at her as she approaches. She’s moving faster than he would have expected, honestly.

“Well, now,” she says, once she’s close enough that her voice carries without shouting. “This is certainly something, isn’t it?” She cranes her head back with apparent awe, before once again looking to him shrewdly. “If you were up there, you must have seen that this wasn’t the only one of these odd towers to erupt. They’re just about everywhere you look, it seems. Like something very old deep below the earth has woken up...”

There’s wonder in her tone, and then her eyes flick down to the slate at his hip, then back towards the shrine he’d emerged from, before she asks, “Did you have something to do with this?”

“Um...” Gods, he hopes she doesn’t expect him to explain it, because he doesn’t understand any of what just happened. Certainly not enough to put it into words. At a loss, all he really manages in answer is a nod. She lets out a hum, thoughtful and considering.

“If you don’t mind me prying,” she starts, and Eijiro winces, unsure how to express any part at all of that process, or gods-forbid how it worked, but instead she asks, “Did anything strange happen while you were on top of the tower?”

Oh, boy. Where to begin. He pushes off from the tower, having caught his breath, and scratches self-consciously at the back of his head. How do you tell the sweet old lady, who invited you into her home for lunch, that you’re hearing things?

“Uh, I kinda… I heard a voice?”

Instead of looking at him dubiously, or like he was some kind of weirdo, her eyes light up in interest. “Is that so! A voice, hm… Did you recognize this voice?”

Eijiro falters again, at that. Does he recognize the voice? He doesn’t… sound familiar, or at least, Eijiro’s not sure if he sounds familiar, but… he trusts the voice completely, and finds himself calming whenever he hears him. He can even read the voice, all of the tics and underlying tones—would he be able to do that, if he doesn’t know the voice?

But as hard as he tries to place the voice in his memories, it all comes up as blank as most other things. He can’t remember.

“No, I, ah… I don’t think so?” he answers, wishing he could be sure of the response. He didn’t recognize the voice, but… should he have?

For a brief second he thinks he sees a flash of disappointment cross Inko’s face, but it’s gone so fast he’s not sure he didn’t make it up, replaced with a thoughtful look. “Hm, that’s too bad.”

Before he can form a response, she turns away, slightly, gazing off towards the direction of Hyrule Castle in the distance, and seemingly changing the subject. Though—admittedly, it is still pretty relevant, considering what the voice told him up there.

“If you were that high up,” she starts, nose just slightly crinkling in distaste as she regards the castle, “You must have noticed all that awful mess surrounding the castle. That, young man, is what we all know as the Calamity, All For One.”

He turns to look at her, before facing the castle, eyes wide. The name is familiar; there had been legends—a horrible entity that sought only complete control and destruction of Hyrule. It was only a legend, but… it was said that it was supposed to be coming back. He inhales sharply, realization overtaking him.

One hundred years, the voice had told him. During which, the Calamity had come back, it seemed.

“One hundred years ago, that horrible thing brought the entire kingdom of Hyrule to ruin,” she continues, oblivious to his own dawning horror and understanding. “It appeared right out of the blue, when no one could have expected, and it tore through everything in its way. Many… many, innocent lives were lost, back then. Too many.”

Her voice is soft, and impossibly sad. She doesn’t look quite close to a hundred, herself—not old enough to have lived through it, but she talks as though it were a personal ache. Sheikah could be old enough to have seen it, but she’d said she’d only spent time among the Sheikah, not that she was one.

He looks over to see tears pouring freely down her face, and oh, no—he’s always been an empathetic crier, and he feels his own eyes start stinging in response as he quickly pulls his gaze away to stare at the ruins of the castle again.

“Sorry, forgive me,” she mumbles as he sees her wipe at her eyes in his periphery, and he can only shake his head at the notion that she has anything to apologize for, before she presses on again, “For a century now, the heart of Hyrule itself, the castle, has somehow been able to contain that evil. But only barely. You can see it, how it festers in there, building up strength to break free and loose itself on the land once more. From the looks of it, that won’t be long at all.”

She sounds scared—terrified, at the prospect, and he doesn’t blame her one bit. It’s… what she’s describing, what the voice described, it can’t happen.

Sniffling, Inko wipes again at her eyes, before turning to him. She looks… so, so sad, but for him, somehow. “If you’ll forgive me prying again… be honest with me, Eijiro. You plan to go to the castle, don’t you?”

He blinks, surprised that she somehow read him. It’s that motherly thing she has going on, it has to be; moms know everything. He doesn’t get it. So he takes a shaky breath, eyes still watering profusely in response to hers, to steady himself for the obvious answer.

“I do.”

He has to. The voice is there. And someone—someone has to stop that monster, before it can cause any more catastrophes.

She huffs out a somber little laugh. “I knew that would be your answer.” She turns forward again, this time not looking to the castle, but to the edge of the plateau, where it drops off into an abrupt cliff. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, dear, but this plateau is very isolated. We’re surrounded on all sides by steep cliffs and drop-offs, and the walls that line the plateau are ancient and crumbling. They’d break apart beneath your feet if you tried to climb down them, and you’d tumble to certain death. The path to come in and out got caved in decades ago, and filled up with rainwater. I’m afraid there’s no safe way down from the plateau. There hasn’t been for a very long time.”

What? But—but—that can’t be true! The voice needs him, and she—she’d even seemed to accept that Eijiro was going. If there’s no way, then…

“So, we’ll just have to figure out a new way down, I suppose,” she continues, with a mournful-sounding sigh, and he looks back to her with desperate hope. “Which sounds like another matter to think on over lunch.”

It sounds definite, and he feels gratitude fill him as he grants her a watery smile. Boy, he’s had a full and emotionally taxing day, and he hasn’t even been awake for a full hour and a half. She reaches out to him then, to pat him reassuringly on the arm.

“In the meantime, though, there’s something I think I ought to show you. Come here.”

With that, she turns away, starting to walk up an incline to their left, to give them a better view in the direction she indicates. He follows curiously, and they both seem to take the time to compose themselves. When they do clear the top of it, she points with the hand that holds her walking stick off towards another structure—a bizarrely-shaped, large lump of a thing that’s clearly made from the same smooth, black and tan stones that make up the rest of Sheikah buildings. And most of it is glowing, orange.

“You see that funny structure there?” she asks, turning to make sure his gaze is focused in the right direction. “It wasn’t glowing before. It didn’t light up until the exact same moment you sent that tower shooting up into the sky. There’s an awful lot of those shrines around Hyrule, but none of them have glowed for as long as I lived—they’ve been dead as a doornail, and no one could get into them. Certainly not for lack of trying. I think whatever you did with that tower woke them up, and it might just be possible to get inside now.”

She turns to look at him, expression encouraging. “I was just thinking, if that voice you talked about spoke to you because you found that tower, maybe it would want you to enter these shrines, as well, since they seem to be connected.”

Eijiro almost jumps for joy—he’d been thinking exactly the same thing! Every time the voice spoke to him, it was either because he’d just used some Sheikah technology, or because he was telling Eijiro to use some Sheikah technology. Maybe—maybe whatever was in these shrines would help him figure out a way off of this plateau? Or at least give him more information on the shrine he’d come from.

“Inko, I think you’re right!” he gushes, excited, and he’s already taking his first, eager step in that direction. “He probably would, I have to—”

He’s stopped by a hand on his arm as she scolds him, tone amused, “Ah, ah, ah! You’re not charging off to that shrine right this second, young man. You’re starving, and I know you haven’t had anything but that baked apple and whatever you could find to snack on around here. You’ll go to that shrine later, after we’ve gotten a hot meal in your belly.”

“But...” It’s so close, and he’s so glad to have some real idea of a next step! But she tugs gently on his arm, pulling him in the direction of her home, and once again Eijiro finds himself cursed by the burden of being unable to say no to a kind old woman.

He’s all but vibrating with eagerness to get to that shrine, to figure out what’s inside, but… but it’s like she said. Later.

Besides… now that she’s mentioned it—(his stomach releases a roaringly loud grumble to assert its own take on the matter)—gods, he is starving.

#kiribaku #bakushima #krbk #bkshm #kirishima eijirou #bakugou katsuki #kirishima eijiro #bakugo katsuki #bnha #mha #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #fic #fanfic #fanfiction

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ladylynse · 4 years

Text

Forewarning: All Dipper knew was that there was something buried in some special thermos behind the shack; all Danny knew was that he had no idea how he’d gotten here. Inspired by this artwork by @hashtag-art and begun for @bibliophilea

Happy New Year, everyone!

Chapter 2 [FF | AO3]

-|-

Danny knew magic when he felt it.

Well.

He could recognize it, anyway. Usually. Unless the magic came with a memory wipe. Between Desiree, Dora’s amulet, Circus Gothica, the Reality Gauntlet, and everything else, he was getting pretty good at picking out it or its effects.

That’s why he knew it was magic that held him in this stupid circle.

It was also why he wasn’t wholly sure he could just burn through a part of the chalk drawing with an ectoblast without bad consequences.

And just about when he was ready to risk those consequences (because he did not want to know what an attempted exorcism would do to him), he found himself with the unfortunately familiar weight of a clockwork medallion around his neck.

Clockwork floated on the edge of the circle, not far from the two kids who had released Danny and then trapped him here. Clearly, whatever bound Danny wasn’t strong enough to bind him. Not that Danny really expected it would be, with Clockwork being who he was and the kids possibly targeting Danny after seeing him earlier. But if Clockwork was here now—

“You are where you need to be,” Clockwork said as Danny opened his mouth.

Danny frowned. “Yeah? Why can’t I call Jazz’s cell? Where am I? When am I?”

Danny didn’t really expect Clockwork to give him a straight answer—it was Clockwork, after all—but the ghost shifted to that of a child and replied, “Welcome to 2012.”

Ice filled his chest. 2012? 2012? He’d been stuck in a thermos for five years? No wonder his call to Jazz hadn’t gone through! She’d be in college now, maybe through college by now, or trying to get a masters degree, or a PhD, or—

Or she might not be.

No. He wasn’t going to jump to that conclusion, wasn’t going to assume this was like last time, not when this was all he had to go on, not even when Clockwork was the reason he was here. Clockwork, who wasn’t supposed to interfere. Clockwork, who refused to interfere more often than not. Clockwork, who saw it all from above and had very clearly forgotten what it was like to be part of the parade, if he’d ever even known that.

“Are you serious?” Anger was safer than panic, and he had good reason to be angry. Clockwork had never talked to him about this, whatever this was. Not like the last time he’d sent Danny to the future. “My family probably thinks I’m dead!”

“Technically speaking, you are.”

Danny hissed through his teeth. “No. You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to rip me out of my life and shove me in a thermos and stick me somewhere on the other side of the country. You can’t just put me wherever you think I need to be! I just lost five years of my life thanks to you!”

“You’ve been held in stasis for over thirty,” Clockwork said mildly as his form changed again. “You’ll be returned to your own time before your friends and family realize you’ve taken a detour.”

A detour? That’s what he was calling this?

“This isn’t a detour! Just because you can put me back where I came from, doesn’t mean I haven’t still lost that time. And what do you mean, thirty years?”

Clockwork’s expression didn’t change even as his face shifted, growing younger again. He didn’t deign to argue with Danny, instead saying, “The tapestry of time is scarred here. Further interference is…discouraged.”

Danny crossed his arms. “What the heck do you call this, then?”

“A correction.”

“Why do I have to be the one to fix it? It’s not like the Observants don’t know to watch me. If they think I’m meddling in the timestream again—” Danny broke off. “Wait, what do you mean further interference? What did you do here before?”

That earned him the barest shadow of exasperation crossing Clockwork’s face. “The interference was not mine.”

“Until now.”

That might be a slight thinning of the lips. It was probably as much as he was going to get from Clockwork, anyway. “Seeking to repair what others have damaged before reality becomes unstable is hardly unwarranted interference.”

“So a stitch in time saves nine? Wow, I did not realize that expression could be applied literally with time travel. But that still doesn’t explain why me.” Clockwork said nothing, and a horrible thought occurred to Danny. “Except. Wait. You said thirty years. I…. You’re trying to interfere without the Observants knowing, aren’t you?” He pulled a face. “Why thirty years?”

“That was the point of least interference, when your placement would have the smallest effect.”

“So how come I don’t remember anything?” He tried not to let it show how much that bothered him, but it did. He wasn’t sure what he’d been doing before this. Hanging out with Sam and Tuck? Fighting? School? Homework? Nothing seemed clearer than the rest.

He couldn’t remember if he’d been in the Ghost Zone, but he definitely didn’t remember seeing Clockwork.

Still, he hadn’t come out of the thermos wearing one of Clockwork’s medallions, so it’s not like Clockwork just ambushed him, sucked him into a thermos, and dropped him here. And…it must still have been Clockwork, right? Because point of least interference was still interference, and thirty years was definitely time travel when it was thirty years in the past. Or twenty-five and— Whatever. This had to be Clockwork. That had to be why he was here now. Not whoever else was messing around with time.

“You’ve seen the dangers of an uncontained future,” Clockwork said, and it took Danny a second to realize he was ignoring Danny’s question instead of answering it. “Similar destruction is almost certain here. If they stay on this road, they will find themselves on a path from which they cannot turn away. You must warn them.”

“How is that my job?” Danny wanted to ask why Clockwork didn’t just warn them himself, but of course that would be interfering. As if this weren’t already blatant interference. “Why can’t someone else do it? Anyone else? I don’t even know these guys.”

“Perhaps not yet,” said Clockwork as his form shifted again, “but you know the dangers they face. They wish to pierce the fabric between dimensions, between realities, and will release more than they realize if they succeed.”

Danny scrunched up his face. Too bad he couldn’t just straight up tell these guys not to mess with interdimensional portals, but Clockwork wouldn’t be happy with him spelling out the future like that. Even if he did, Mabel and Dipper wouldn’t believe him when he had no other details than that. They’d just think he’d spied on them. Telling them would probably make them more likely to keep doing everything they were doing. “Let me guess: containment of whatever they let out isn’t gonna be simple?”

Clockwork didn’t answer, but Danny supposed he didn’t really need an answer. Clockwork wouldn’t have said anything about it if it was easy. And Danny wouldn’t have been dragged out here to interfere if these people weren’t playing with fire. Or rather, interdimensional portals.

“There’s, um, a path where they win, right, when they don’t listen to me and do this anyway? Because that’s going to happen. Nothing I say is going to make these two trust me.”

“You must warn them,” Clockwork repeated.

Danny didn’t know if that was a yes, but it hadn’t been a no, so he counted it as a win. This was Clockwork, after all. Danny knew there were lines, and he knew he’d crossed those lines, but he wasn’t entirely sure where those lines were—and which ones Clockwork was happy to ignore. More than the Observants were happy with, sure, but beyond that….

“Can I go home after this?”

No immediate answer. Bad sign. Very bad. There shouldn’t be any reason Clockwork wouldn’t just say yes if all he had to do was give these guys a warning they probably wouldn’t listen to. If nothing else, Clockwork would know it would be a way to make Danny immediately play nice and do what he was told. So for him to say nothing….

That meant Danny was supposed to do something else, something Clockwork figured he’d do if left to his own devices. Something Clockwork didn’t think was worth telling Danny, or maybe that he didn’t think Danny would actually do if he were told about it, or—

“I do get to go home after all this, right? There’s not some other detour you expect me to make first? I just need to warn them not to do whatever they’re thinking about doing, and then it’s over, and we’re done, and I can go back to Amity Park the same day I left it?” Because that was part of the problem. He couldn’t just go home from here because it wouldn’t be the home he knew. And even if next to nothing had changed (unlikely; his parents were inventors, after all), he couldn’t risk being caught (especially if his parents had five years worth of ghost tech he’d never seen before). That would require too much explaining.

Unless they already knew everything, in which case it would take less.

Or next to no time at all, if they didn’t take it well and he had to—

But he didn’t want to think about that possibility. He much preferred thinking that Jazz was right, that they would accept him, even if it took a little while for them to get used to the idea or even if they asked him a bunch of rather intrusive questions. And, right now, he much preferred not knowing, just in case the little voice in the back of his mind was right and ignorance was bliss. And—

“Why…why am I really here, Clockwork?” His voice came out as a whisper, drained of anger and instead tinged with desperation. What was he missing? Surely Clockwork wasn’t just being cagey because he didn’t know. Or maybe…maybe he didn’t want Danny to get involved in whatever the kids were doing? Or maybe he did, and just couldn’t risk saying it without the Observants noticing what he was doing?

“Warn them about this path,” Clockwork said gently, “and your own will become clearer.”

Danny hated that answer. It told him nothing. It guaranteed nothing. It was too vague when things mattered this much.

But he also had a better idea of when he could push Clockwork, when begging or wheedling for favours would work, and this wasn’t one of those times.

Danny sighed, settling down in the middle of the circle and holding his head in his hands.

Clockwork was probably being as helpful as he could, even if there was a chance a part of him was also being lowkey as spiteful as he could after Danny’s last time travelling fiasco. Danny kind of owed him for that. There had probably been some pushback from the Observants, and Clockwork must have borne the brunt of that because Danny had never faced any consequences once the timeline was back on track. And this…. It should be simple enough. There were worse ways to repay a favour.

But still.

A little warning would’ve been nice.

-|-

Dipper didn’t know what had happened. He wasn’t going to trust the phantom—if it even was a phantom, since for all he knew, it was just a different sort of ghost trying to trick them into thinking it was a phantom by calling itself one. At least, it wasn’t living up to the whole ‘phantoms cause pain to those who summon them’ bit in the journal. Not that he was complaining. It would just be nice to know what he was dealing with for once.

Maybe the pain part didn’t come until the phantom escaped the summoning circle?

“What….” Mabel hesitated and looked at him, but he didn’t know if asking questions would make things worse. She plowed on when he didn’t stop her, asking, “What are you talking about?”

“If you stay on this road,” Phantom repeated, “you’ll find yourself on a path you can’t turn away from. That’s it. That’s the message. I’m apparently a messenger now. Don’t shoot me.”

“Who are you supposed to be a messenger for?” Dipper asked. The strain of keeping Phantom contained was worth it to get some answers. The journal…. He couldn’t figure out why Phantom’s section in the journal had been coded differently, and he would rather find out as much as he could.

“That’s…not really important.”

Assuming Phantom would be helpful. Dipper should’ve known better than to hope he’d be forthcoming about everything. “How is that not important?” he demanded. The author of the journals—

“You won’t know who it is anyway. He’s, uh, not supposed to interfere as often as he does.”

Interfere? What was that supposed to mean? Interfere with what?

“Try us,” Mabel said, crossing her arms. “We’ve had an interesting summer so far.”

Understatement. And maybe a bit more information than Dipper would’ve liked to give away, even if it was completely vague.

“Fine.” Phantom looked defiant now. “His name is Clockwork. Happy now?”

No. He’d never heard of Clockwork. Dipper had no idea who he was supposed to be. Or, more accurately, what.

“Why’s he sending us messages? And through you?”

Phantom rolled his eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just really unlucky. And maybe because he thinks you’ll listen? Clockwork’s not the most helpful guy out there. I’m surprised he interfered at all. I’m surprised I got dragged into this.” He said this last part with a sneer, looking to Dipper and Mabel’s right.

Dipper didn’t need to look to confirm that there was nothing there—nothing visible, anyway—but he did anyway.

The apparent absence of something did nothing to reassure him.

Phantom sighed, his annoyance draining away. “Okay, look, I’ll be straight with you. I don’t know why I got drafted to play messenger boy, but it’s probably because I owe him a favour, and he’s not supposed to be doing this kind of thing. Interfere, I mean. Which means that if he is, it’s big and you should listen to me. So stop whatever you’re doing. Drop it. Walk away. Your future selves would thank you for it if they had the chance. It’s probably a lot of pain and suffering or it wouldn’t be on Clockwork’s radar.”

“Pain and suffering, huh?” Mabel echoed, glancing at Dipper. He knew how she felt; he hadn’t expected Phantom to warn them of the pain he was going to bring in an attempt to trick them into releasing him, but it just meant they needed to be on their guard. If they hadn’t had the journal, they might have fallen for it.

Phantom nodded, not noticing or not caring how uncomfortable they were. “Clockwork wouldn’t interfere for something small. He thinks other people are messing around, though—I don’t think just you guys? I mean, not you you, you’re too young, and if this started thirty years ago or something, it couldn’t be you…unless you’re time travellers?”

“Did you want us to be?” Mabel said slowly.

Phantom blinked. “What? No!”

“Then we aren’t,” she said, and Dipper glared at her and kicked at her leg. He couldn’t really put any strength behind it, and she’d probably been half expecting it, since she didn’t flinch. Phantom might not have noticed the movement, though. Or the glare. If he did, he didn’t react to it.

“Time travel is impossible,” Dipper said pointedly, switching his gaze back to Phantom.

Phantom just stared at him. “I’m a ghost, you’re keeping me trapped inside a magic circle, and you draw the line at time travel?”

Dipper nodded. “It’s not possible. You can’t go faster than the speed of light.” He wasn’t a great liar—Mabel was definitely better, and she wasn’t particularly good, either—but he wasn’t about to tell Phantom that they knew time travel was possible. Or that they had time travelled and run into another time traveller. Phantom might tell them more if he thought they were ignorant of that.

“You’re using magic. And talking to a ghost. What part of that do most people consider possible?”

“Actually—” Mabel started.

“Forget I asked,” Phantom interrupted. “My point is, if you don’t believe in time travel, you should, and if you don’t believe in interdimensional travel, you should, because something along those lines is in your future if you don’t stop all this. Which you should.”

“Because you said so?” Mabel asked, and Dipper kicked her again, this time less subtly. He didn’t care if Phantom noticed that one.

Phantom snorted. “Because whatever it is is bad enough that it merits forewarning. Courtesy of Clockwork. Even if he doesn’t want to admit it.”

“Bit of a circular argument,” Dipper muttered, not quite quietly enough that they wouldn’t hear him.

Phantom groaned. “Fine, ignore me. Just let me go.”

“No. I’m not going to let you hurt anyone.”

“Who said I was going to hurt anyone?” Phantom spluttered. “I’m not! Seriously, I’m just the messenger here.”

“Yeah, that’s what you’d say if you were planning on hurting someone and wanted to trick us into letting you out.”

He caught Mabel’s eye again and saw the trace of worry on her features. She knew he was bluffing. She knew he couldn’t do this forever, that his strength would give out and the magic within the circle would fade. The symbols could only hold power for so long. With Phantom being as strong as he was—or Dipper being as weak as he was; whichever was the main reason behind why it had taken so long for the spell to work in the first place, though it might be both considering he was still fairly new to magic—Dipper wasn’t sure they had much longer.

Judging by the increasingly frustrated look on Phantom’s face, though, he didn’t know that. Which at least meant the magic wasn’t noticeably weakening yet. It would buy them a little time, but—

“If you insist you’re not going to hurt anyone,” Mabel said, “then you don’t need to keep secrets from us. Keep talking, and then we’ll let you go.”

That was one way of putting it. If the spell was going to collapse on him anyway, at least they might be able to get something out of Phantom. Not that they’d know if it was truth or lies, but at least it would be a starting point. And that would be better than nothing.

Phantom threw up his hands. “I gave you guys the message already!”

“No, she’s right,” Dipper said. Mabel smiled at his words as if she hadn’t expected him to approve. “You’ve hardly told us anything. What do you know about the author of the journals?”

Phantom looked confused. Dipper didn’t think it was feigned, either. “What journals?” He looked at the open book and added, “So that’s not a magic book? Or is it just a journal full of spells that you’re not calling a magic book?”

“It’s a resource, not a book on magic.” Not alone, anyway. But if Phantom didn’t recognize it or know anything about it, he wouldn’t be able to help Dipper figure this out. And it meant if this Clockwork person had written the journals, Phantom didn’t know about it. Dipper flipped the book cover up just enough to show the symbol on the front with the three emblazoned on it, but Phantom just shrugged. Either he was a really good actor or he genuinely didn’t know anything.

Which was funny, considering he was in it.

Mabel clearly had the same suspicions, since she said, “You have to know something. The author of the journals is the reason we found you.”

Phantom frowned and flicked his eyes to the still-empty spot beside them. Dipper couldn’t quite suppress a shiver. After a few long seconds, Phantom admitted, “I don’t remember how I got here. I’m not lying, okay? I really don’t know. And it’s bugging me. That’s why I wanted to know if you knew Vlad. This is the kind of thing he’d do to me. And then Clockwork….” He trailed off. “He won’t tell me my own future or anything else about yours. But if you’re trying to find out more about whoever wrote that journal, and if they wrote me into it, well, that’s probably what Clockwork’s warning was about.”

“The author hasn’t been wrong about anything that’s turned up before,” Dipper said.

Phantom crossed his arms. “Well, from the way you two are looking at me, he’s wrong about me. It’s not like I’m going to snap and kill everyone. Seriously, let me go, I’ll be gone, and everything will be back to normal.”

He’d been forced to summon the phantom, and now it was trying to trying to trick him into releasing it.

Of course, if they didn’t do something soon, it would get free anyway.

“How did you….” Mabel broke off, bit her lip, and looked at Dipper. Then, turning back to Phantom, “Danny. The boy who was in here earlier. What about him?”

Phantom swallowed. “His name is Danny Fenton.”

Dipper didn’t say anything, and Mabel knew to hold her tongue, too. Phantom squirmed, one hand reaching up the rub the back of his neck. They waited, but he didn’t volunteer any other information.

Dipper sucked in a breath, deep and long, and let it out slowly. He didn’t know how much longer he could do this. He clenched his hands into fists, afraid that if he didn’t, it would be too easy for Phantom to see him shaking. “And?” It came out as a growl, and Phantom flinched.

“And he’s a friend.”

That was a lie. It had to be. Dipper looked at Mabel and saw that she didn’t believe Phantom either. But Phantom had straightened up, and though Dipper couldn’t see it, he could feel Phantom reaching one hand behind him to prod the boundaries of the circle. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but trying to hold the spell together was becoming more and more like trying to hold water cupped in his fingers. It was draining fast now, and—

“Look, just stop this business with the journals and finding whoever wrote them,” Phantom said. “What’s coming if you keep going the way you’re going isn’t good. It’ll be like…like you’ve opened Pandora’s box. The one from the myth, not her actual box, although that, too, if it’s on the wrong setting….” He trailed off. “Please?”

“We can’t,” Dipper said, hoping it would get Phantom to argue with him. But his voice was shaky now, and he couldn’t—

The spell dissipated, and Phantom smiled before vanishing.

-|-

“Is he gone?” Mabel asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Dipper admitted. He leaned back against his bed and closed his eyes. “Probably not, if the journal is right about phantoms.”

“What if that’s not what he is?” Pain and suffering might be in their future, but it hadn’t started immediately. What would Phantom gain from waiting? He already knew they expected it, and he had to know Dipper was weaker now than he would be in the future. Sure, he didn’t know she wouldn’t be able to exorcise him, or at least that she’d never tried doing that to a ghost before, but it shouldn’t stop him from jumping on an opportunity to strike while they were down.

“I don’t know.”

Mabel tried to swallow down her fear at Dipper’s repetition. The cryptic message about Phantom had been coded differently than anything else in the journal, and it hadn’t even been near the pages on ghosts and exorcisms. Maybe he really wasn’t a phantom like he pretended. Maybe the author hadn’t even known what he was. Maybe that’s why the author had never specified what was in the thermos that Dipper had found.

There’s something stuck in some special thermos buried behind the shack….

She wished Dipper had had a chance to examine the thermos before Phantom had taken it.

“What about his warning?”

That prompted Dipper to open his eyes. “We can’t stop. He’s not really here just to warn us. We wouldn’t have found him where we did, the way we did, if he’s telling the truth about everything.”

Mabel said what Dipper didn’t: “And that doesn’t explain Danny.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

Dipper must have no idea what did, no real idea that he didn’t think was too much of a stretch, or he’d have said it.

“So we don’t listen to him?”

“He hasn’t really given us any reason to trust him.”

“Yeah,” Mabel said quietly, “that’s what I thought.” But she couldn’t get Phantom’s abrupt change out of her head, the way he’d been pleading with them to let him out before breaking off mid word and moving faster than she’d been able to see. He’d…changed. In a split second. Still asking them to let him go but with less desperation than before.

He’d claimed that he didn’t know more than what he’d told them, but she didn’t believe that any more than she believed that Danny Fenton, whoever he was, was just some friend. As if they couldn’t see the similarities. As if they had never been tricked before by someone pretending to be someone—something—they’re not.

Even if Danny Fenton and Danny Phantom weren’t the same person—ghost, creature, whatever—they had to be connected. Why would Danny Fenton have come here? To scout out the territory? To try to find Phantom, if Phantom hadn’t sent him? But then there had been the phone call to his sister, before he ran out….

“He talked about other dimensions,” Mabel said slowly. “Do you think he’s from a different dimension?”

Dipper didn’t answer, instead pulling the journal towards him and flipping through it.

“Do you think it was the author of the journals who wrote that note about him? Or do you think it was someone else?”

More silence. Mabel didn’t like that. She much preferred Dipper to talk her ear off with explanations or theories, at least when she had none of her own. She’d rather ignore his ramblings than not have them when they needed them.

“Is this a trap?”

“I hope not,” Dipper finally said, settling on a page in the journal and showing it to her, “but we better be ready for when he comes back in case it is.”

(next)

#danny phantom #gravity falls #phantom falls #danny fenton #mabel pines #dipper pines #clockwork #fanfiction #crossover #dp fanfiction #gf fanfiction #my writing #ladylynse #snippets #gf snippet #dp snippet

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silver-wield · 4 years

Note

Hi this is not Cloti related but do you have an analysis on Cloud's relationship with Jessie? Particularly during chapter 4 after the bike mini-game? Cloud looks worried

Sorry this took a while, Nonny, I get a bit done in from life lol

So Cloud and Jessie, the girl who absolutely has no issue throwing herself at our boi. It's pretty good for him because at least he gets used to girls being all over him and helps him make his mind up just who he wants to show attention to #cough# Tifa #cough#

Ok, spoiler warning for ppl who haven’t played – do I still need to do this? Eh ok, (I tag FF7R spoilers as final fantasy 7 remake spoilers) and it’s gonna be smol.

Also, this is one person’s interpretation of the scene, so if you disagree that’s cool and we’ll agree to disagree.

You’re also gonna have to excuse the janky quality on some of the screens, I’m grabbing them from Youtube and it’s frustrating af trying to get the exact moment I want.

Please check my master post to see if I've already covered your question, thanx

Let's mosey!

Recap time!

Chapter four and our reluctant hero has been roped into help the avalanche trio go topside. Problem is they missed the last train and have to take their bikes instead. Cue a few problems with security and a meeting with the master of extra, Roche. Once that's out of the way, Jessie rewards Cloud depending on your expertise.

This scene has 3 optional endings.

Quick aside, I find it hilarious that Cloud literally tells Jessie to shut up and get off the bike when she starts annoying him during the minigame.

Ok, ending one. The bad ending where Jessie's beyond disappointed with you. These are hard to pick apart because a lot of Cloud's attention is on the road, so the usual microexpressions are even harder to catch.

But look what I caught anyway! Check that brow quirking like “excuse you?” and it's accurate because he says he's a great driver in the next moment. I really love going over these scenes and spotting all these because they build such a clearer picture of Cloud is as a person. And clearly boi doesn't like his driving ability being questioned, especially seeing how Jessie didn't do squat to help him, aside from being annoying lol

Well, Cloud does seem a bit worried here if the frown is anything to go by. I'm guessing it's because this is the bad ending and as much as he's not into Jessie, he doesn't like people having a bad impression of him. He doesn't like the idea that he's not thought of as the big badass capable merc in all ways, so this could well be hints of that self-doubt coming through.

Although, after watching the other two endings, this is the only time we see this typical cycle of expressions he does before concluding something. This is what I like to call a real!Cloud inner debate. Cloud often goes through a lot of quick expressions or his eyes dart around. Since they can’t do that here, we get the former. Judging from the frown at the end, he’s not impressed with his own performance and likely berating himself for not being good enough. Again. Someone call a therapist for Cloud, plz.

And moving onto the second ending, which you get if you did ok on the minigame. These are making me wonder which one's canon. I don't think it's the kiss and actually, it may well be the bad one since that's where we get the most facial expression and close ups from Cloud compared to the others where we see the back of his head or a mid range view.

For this scene we only get one close up of Cloud's face and it's pretty much SOLDIER!Cloud and then the next time he speaks you can't even see his face. This is the kind of thing that hints to me which optional scene is the one we're supposed to be getting for Cloud's narrative story (and that I actually forgot about for my playthrough as Cloud lol I got the middle one because I kinda suck at fighting Roche, but I try).

Yeah, so a lot of sighing from Cloud at Jessie, the annoyed kind. I mean, we know she kinda irritates him, but he likes her too, just not in a romantic way. You also don't see his reaction to her “I might be falling after all” line and only hear him say “hmm?” Then when his face is next in frame it's full on SOLDIER, so there's really nothing to pick apart.

And now the good ending where you get a kiss from Jessie! Ooh lala!!

CLOUD'S FACE HERE! OMG I'M DYING! He's such a boi in a man sometimes! Adorable af! Definitely never even had a kiss on the cheek before in his life and look at the ott reaction to it!

WAIT! Wait! I've seen that face before somewhere!

YES OMG I'M DYING! It's the same reaction as the one to Aerith's best dress! OMG!

I'm sorry, I genuinely need a minute....

Ok, so...looool ok....I can be sensible here....maybe loool erm, the unrealistic expression on Cloud's face shows that it's unlikely this is the outcome that happened. But, on the other hand if the red dress happened then so did this kiss, so choose your poison lol

omg I love the devs for this! I really do! This is hilarious! I can’t even look at these two pics without laughing!

Ok, sensible. Kinda.

And last one where Cloud looks grim af as usual, but with a hint of “what do I do about this?” because Jessie kissed him and he's not interested and he has no clue what to do with women and likely wants to reject her, but still doesn't know what to do with women, so you can see the dilemma he's in lol

It doesn't help when Jessie tries calling him out on it and he has this tiny frown in response. His attention is split between trying to talk to her and driving, so it's no wonder he's not that talkative and abrupt. If I wanted to speculate I'd say if he actually had an interest in her as more than friends he'd have tried harder. He had his little chat with Marle already, so he's not opposed to putting himself out if he wants to. He doesn't here, but he's still trying to concentrate, so that could explain the lack of attention, but still, Jessie kissed him and he got scowly.

Conclusion.

Well, I for one didn't remember there were 3 of these endings – each with their own remix of Jessie's theme, just like another 3 optional scenes with a remixed theme lol the parallels are killing me!

The music for each should also hint at which one is the narrative canon – I'm useless with music analysis so bear with me. The first one does sound like it fits with the other girls' themes, so very simple, easy to listen to in the background and memorable in its way. The second is louder and has more techno notes in, making it seem less like a background piece and more in your face. The last one has vocalists and is a full on pop song! No way is that right lol

For two of the three of these we don't really get much in the way of Cloud's face. It could be put down to him driving, but we get a couple of very good close ups on the bad one with varied expressions, one of which definitely goes towards his personal motivation to be thought of as a hero. Having people point out his faults would cause that kind of reaction.

The second result really doesn't have much in the way of facial expression and Cloud's voice is brisk because he's driving, so I can't really say much about it one way or the other. It’s the one I get the most when I’m playing and it’s kinda blah. Like your standard minigame pass screen. That probably didn’t help.

The last one is hilarious! That's such an exaggerated expression! Do people really believe Cloud pulls that kind of pikachu face on the regular?! I legit needed to stop because I couldn't stop laughing! That's not Cloud or real!Cloud, that's just bloody funny! Also, Cloud doesn't seem too impressed by the result if that last minute frown is any indication. He doesn't want Jessie kissing him, even though it's probably the first time any girl has kissed him – poor sweet summer child lol

If I had to make a guess at the narrative canon I'd say number one, because we know for a fact that Cloud hasn't been driving for years. Boi gets motion sickness ffs! And when did he ever drive a motorcycle? I'd definitely buy that being one of the first times he's ever driven, which would explain why he did so poorly and why he has multiple varied expressions in that result.

#final fantasy 7 remake spoilers #final fantasy 7 remake analysis #Clessie #Cloud strife #Jessie raspberry #Chapter 4 bike analysis #omg that face tho #I died

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smilingperformer · 4 years

Text

I’ve noticed one characteristic about pokeani fandom, especially on twitter. Gonna discuss under the cut.

When they make a theory, they stick to it to the end even when evidence starts pointing elsewhere.

For example, tomorrow’s episode’s culprit. So many people STILL believe it to be Morpeko due to the preview we got after NS020 aired, but ever since we got Pokefan scans for the episodes NS025 onwards, it became CLEAR that Morpeko was gonna appear AFTER NS025 episode mark, not before. So the culprit for tomorrow can’t be Morpeko. I originally suspected Munchlax/Gonbe due to it appearing in scans related to NS021, NS022, NS023 and NS024 episodes, but I think it could also be Gou’s Skwoket (I forgot the japanese name for the squirrel). Either way, evidence points at it not being Morpeko and still the fandom sticks to that theory lol.

The same happened with Nagisa, people stuck to the belief that Satoshi would get an Eevee because of one poster. Soon after that, it became clear nothing else pointed towards it. I even made a post about the reasons and ffs lol People still call it bait when it really wasn’t, people just overread the poster. Sigh. Only bait that I totally agree on is NS009′s poster, that was huge fricking bait if any.

Don’t get me started on the reboot theory, that seems to have died down finally thou :)) Or the fact that people still think Koharu and Gou met Satoshi during childhood. They never did. That was a theory that got busted by clearer summaries of the first episode already. But I already did an own post on that.

I’m pretty sure speculation isn’t supposed to be the way where you stick to your theory even when evidence starts to point elsewhere. It’s kinda silly to ignore evidence. Why do people do this I wonder? I don’t mean to start anything with this, but I truly wonder why people tend to behave like this with theories that have already been busted by evidence? :o

Ofc, I don’t mean the whole fandom in any part of this post. But so many people I see do this. And shit on episodes without understanding context fully, gosh do I not like it lol.

#pokemon #pokeani #pokemon ns #pokemon sumo #discussions #pokeani 2019 #I'm just confused I'm easily confused guys

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theawkwardanglophile · 4 years

Text

Her Better Life

I wrote a Single Parents fic! This story just perfectly came to me after the season finale. This is 100% Will x Angie.

Read on AO3 here.

Read on FF here.

Will turned the key to his front door, feeling like weights were attached to his every limb. Whether the sensation was from sleeping on the floor, his hangover from this morning, or having to say goodbye to his best friend, he couldn't say. Actually, he could. The goodbye was tearing him apart. Could he even still classify her as his best friend anymore? She was so much more than that.

The silence of the house devilishly greeted him in an explosion, sending emotional shrapnel to every nook and cranny of Will's heart. It finally hit him just how lonely he was going to be this summer. Stupid Lance Bass Space Camp taking his daughter away. Stupid Derek and his stupid turtle taking the woman he'd fallen for away.

Oh sure, he'd have the guys around, and Poppy, but it wasn't nearly the same. When Sophie, Angie, and Graham were here together, the house felt alive, buzzing with energy and contentment. While Sophie was, of course, the most important person in his life, somehow the four of them had become this quirky, thriving familial unit, one that meant the world to him. He loved Graham like his own, and Angie, well, he would do anything for her to be happy.

Even step aside and let her have a shot with Derek.

He collapsed on the couch, trying to figure out how to keep from spiraling. While he would try his best to prevent it, he knew he was going to end up spending most nights this summer binging way too much TV, eating way too much junk food, sending way too many texts checking up on everyone.

And thinking of Angie way too much.

In fact, he almost swore he could hear her voice now, faint and distant. He laughed. "Oh no, I'm already going crazy," he muttered to himself.

A series of thumps coming from outside got his attention, though. Maybe he wasn't going crazy at all. Something was happening outside his house.

Having made a beeline for the door, he opened it to find Angie standing there holding a trash bag, a pile of boxes and bags behind her. Derek was backing out of his driveway. When Will made eye contact, Derek gave him a knowing nod and drove off.

The sight of Angie here, fully present and real, took his breath away, considering he didn't expect to see her again for weeks. But she's really here! Why is she here?

"Angie? What's going on?"

She looked nervous, her eyes larger than ever. Scooting past him, she purposefully strode inside, reached inside the trash bag, and pulled out a candle, one he recognized from last night during their "candle jazz" sesh as they had dubbed it. That much he did remember.

"Will, I…look, I remembered what happened last night, and…but even though I wasn't sure if you meant…it's like scary...why would you even want…but maybe we should try to—"

Will placed his hands on her shoulders to still her, unsure if he'd ever seen her quite so unhinged. "No offense, but you are making zero sense right now. You can talk to me, Angie. Please, whatever it is, just tell me."

She looked up at him, her eyes boring into his. He watched as her gaze turned resolute, and she nodded, as if to reassure herself she was doing the right thing.

"I think I'm in love with you, too."

He released her in shock, stumbling backward a bit as his reality shifted on its axis. "Wait, what? You're…you're what? Wait, too? What do you mean, 'too'?"

"Will, I heard you last night. You said it when we were going to sleep. You think you're in love with me," Angie answered in a quiet voice.

"I did what?" He still hadn't been able to piece together the events of last night, not completely anyway, but he certainly didn't expect something like this. He had just casually admitted his feelings without a second thought?

She brought the candle right under his nose. "Does this help any?"

He took a deep whiff and was almost instantly transported back to Angie's living room. Every piece of missing memories started to come back. The way she cuddled into the crook of his neck, the softness of her in his arms, and sure enough, his words to her, those words that had spilled out in the comfort of cushions and candles. Even though he'd nearly succumbed to sleep in the moment he had told her, the memory couldn't be any clearer in his mind.

"Wow, yeah, it does help. I…I…um, ok. But we were drunk."

"So you didn't mean it?"

"Yes, I mean, no! That's a strangely worded question, ma'am!" He felt as if he was coming undone, needing a moment to just process.

"It is not!"

"Yes, it is!"

"Dude, can you just give me an answer?"

He couldn't fight his heart anymore. He wanted to tell her everything he was feeling, but it was scary when he wasn't sure how she would…wait a minute.

She'd said it back.

"We're not drunk now," he reasoned with himself.

Angie looked confused. "Ok?"

"And you're saying it back to me. You're in love with me, too."

A smile started to build on Angie's face. "Yeah. Soooo, are you? Really?"

Her confirmation was perhaps the single greatest thing he'd ever heard; with the exception of "you're going to be a father". He exhaled with relief, his limbs no longer feeling heavy. He honestly felt like he could fly.

"Yes. So much."

His grin matched the one now on her face until he remembered his conversation with Derek, and how confused she'd seemed before this afternoon. "But I don't want to be the reason Graham misses his chance to have a complete family. Are you really sure this is what you want?"

Angie sighed. "I guess I deserve that. Things have been complicated with us lately. Yes, I'm sure. Will, you're more family to Graham than Derek has ever been."

She began to pace around the room, gathering her thoughts. "I had some time to think in the car coming back here. When I remembered what you said, I had to rethink everything. I had just wanted to go to Barstow with no consequences and not have to think, not figure out my future, or my…feelings," she grimaced, and Will couldn't help but smile at her. Typical Angie.

"But I couldn't do that. All those memories on that slideshow just kept playing in my head. Derek and I…we just wouldn't work together. He's never even seen Joust. He doesn't get me the way you do. Nobody has. Some of the best times I've ever had have been with you, Will. I started to wonder what Derek and I would even do in Barstow, what we would talk about. I came up with nothing. I think I'm finally starting to see him for who he really is, just Graham's really hot dad."

Angie's eyes bugged out. "Sorry, force of habit. Forgot my audience for a second."

"I'll let it slide this one time," Will said with a dramatic sigh for effect.

She moved a little closer to where he'd been standing. "His hotness doesn't mean anything, though. He's not who I need to be with, who I want to be with."

Man, could he get used to this Angie, the Angie who actually shared her feelings.

"Is he ok?" Will couldn't help but ask, remembering Derek's resigned expression as he drove away. He couldn't help but feel a little compassion for the guy.

"Yeah, he's alright. He understands. Apparently he could tell my heart wasn't in it. He's still going to be there for Graham, though, and I want him to be. Graham so deserves that."

Will nodded.

"Geez, that's so you, Will, to be concerned about the 'other guy'." Angie looked at him with nothing but tenderness.

"Well, I know what it feels like to lose you," he admitted.

She moved the rest of the way toward him then and placed her hands on his chest. "Not anymore. I'm not running anymore. I'm here."

He wasted no time in reaching up to gather her hands in his. Just that simple touch was overwhelming, and he could tell she was reacting the same way. Her breathing was heavy, and he listened, relishing in the fact that the deafening silence from before had been shattered.

"I just can't believe you came back to me," he said, his voice breaking.

Angie smiled and shook her head. "What am I going to do with you, you big pile of mush?"

Will laughed, feeling lighter. "Shut up."

"You shut up…and kiss me."

His right hand moved to her cheek, and she leaned in as he caressed it. It was a heady feeling finally being able to touch her like this. He leaned forward to gently brush her lips with his, testing the waters. After all, he was kissing his best friend. There was no going back after this. But the spark that ignited caused him to press in further, deepening the kiss as her arms wrapped around his neck. His hands slowly moved down her back to her waist, pulling her closer, needing to feel her secure against him. He could hear a line from the song 100 Years start to play in his head.

She feels better than ever

And we're on fire

When they eventually pulled apart, for need of oxygen rather than want, he leaned his forehead against hers.

"We should've tried that a long time ago," Angie said.

A chuckle escaped Will. "Absolutely."

"Hey, Will?"

"Hey, Angie?"

"What exactly were you going to tell me at the end of the slideshow?"

"Hmmm, I'm not sure if you can handle the mush."

It was Angie's turn to laugh. "I can, I promise."

He linked their hands together. "Well, I was going to say you've been the best friend I've ever had, and everything we've been through has led us to this moment. I need you to know that I've fallen in love with you. I know it's not the best timing, and I'm risking losing your friendship, but I need you to know. You make me laugh. You're the most fun person I know. You're an incredible mom. You're beautiful. I fully came alive when I met you, Angie. And even if you don't feel the same, I have no regrets."

He could see tears in her eyes as he finished speaking, a sight he rarely saw. She looked away but he tugged on her chin to turn her face back to him. His thumb caught a tear that began to roll and he wiped it away.

She gave him a quick kiss. "Well, mister, lucky for you, I do feel the same."

Will grinned at her.

"Now, not to change the subject, but do you mind helping me lug my stuff back to my place before it gets stolen?"

"Right, your stuff!" Will quickly opened the door to check if it was still there, and it was. Perhaps it was smart of her to pack everything in trash bags after all.

"Just out of curiosity, why didn't you have Derek drop you off there?"

"I wanted to see you first."

"Awww."

"Come on, Will. You can help me kick the subletters out."

An idea was taking root in his mind, an idea he really probably should not be thinking at all. It was insane. But yet, the more it took shape, the more it felt absolutely right.

"Or," he began, "You could just, I don't know, stay here for the summer?"

"What?"

"I know. I know it sounds crazy. But you were going to live with Derek for the summer. You're over here all the time anyway. You could keep the subletters, and make some money while you look for a new job."

Angie stayed quiet, thinking it over.

"It's not conventional at all, but that's never really been us. We haven't even been on a date yet, and I'm already asking you to move in with me, albeit temporarily."

She smirked. "A whole summer of just us and no kids? This could be dangerous."

"Is that a yes?"

"Yeah, let's give it a try."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure, Will. It feels like home here. We'll be fine."

He threw his arms around her, lifting her off the ground. She squealed and laughed in delight.

Setting her back down, he said, "And do me a favor? Keep your gross candles at your house." He picked up the snowman candle again. "Except for this one."

"Deal."

"And Ange?"

"Yeah?"

"Welcome home."

Will pulled her in to kiss her once more. Her better life, their better life, was finally ready to be explored.

#single parents #will x angie #angie x will #angill #will cooper #angie d'amato #my fanfiction #fanfic #fanfiction #single parents abc #renew single parents

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404fmdminjung · 4 years

Text

lyrical and composition verification for holo

summary: she plays the dusty keyboard for the first time in years, and comes out of a song that becomes a pseudo-‘fuck you’ to gold star. yet, it’s still something she can’t sing to herself as she doesn’t fully believe the words herself. but she has someone in mind, specifically — @fmdjiah warnings: alcohol tw, and i don’t even know if this is too ‘technical’ to be a composition but w/e going with it wc: 1710

summer in seoul — she can look out the windows, see how the sun kisses the silhouette of buildings that kiss the fronts in muted pinks. somewhere around the world, it’s midnight where the moon shines and invites another drink into warming her body. minjung takes herself to that place, indulgence in drinks that leave her head bobbing through the air — because it’s midnight somewhere.

tonight, she feels a little out of place — the grip of the paintbrush doesn’t feel like home, not inviting as it once was a month ago. she could pin point mistakes to a schedule ablaze with musical promotions that have too many cameras and little cheer. a career that seems to plummet itself to the grave she’s dug. or just maybe, it’s the effect of coaxed beliefs that she swallows — the idea that being alone is something that feels like home. but she knows in reality, home isn’t alone, nor is the idea of solitude where the grapevines of bordeaux the solution to anything other than blurred mistakes and burning lines of regret.

she thinks it’s hapless — lost in the monotony of self-destruction. but she doesn’t bother to trigger a change in one way or another. instead, comes a wave of burgundy stained lips, legs crossed with a blank stare to the buildings that now melt to the baby blue wash of the arising moon. she blinks, displaced thoughts — a tilt in her head, and now the view of a lonely keyboard in a corner sits. and for the first time, the glass slips out of her fragile palms as her feet glide over towards the lonelier looking set of keys.

there’s a notebook on the side, a 500 won pen she’s picked up from the corner bookstore. a memory that precedes the first time she’s ever written for herself — a thought that pulls the edges of her lips into a smirk, or maybe it’s just the effect of the alcohol. but she picks up the pen, spreading open the canvas of blank paper to write down something filter-free, the first pick into her mind.

‘is it really that hard to be alone to be completely still? with people, or by myself i think i’m always lonely.’

it’s funny to think that the words of honesty come to reveal themselves earlier on — the feeling of loneliness masking her, covering her whole. she asks herself this question at three points in the day. the morning when she wakes up in a lonely bed, filled with the slivers of sunlight that peek through her curtain. in the middle, when she’s surrounded by a bustling staff and giddy members — drowning in the chatter that mangles itself into white noise. and the end of the day — when the end ends with the clinks of a bottle against a sole wine glass in the middle of her apartment.

and she believes the only words anyone wants to hear at that point — one day it will stop.

the words press themselves hard against the paper, or perhaps it’s her own will to believe the words now physically represented by the force of the pen on paper. she could tell herself a million and one things, never once to believe or swallow the truth of the statements. an age half of fifty, yet will all the time passed — she can’t necessarily bring herself to face the reflection of the words. so, she continues on with the theme that circles around her mind.

‘isn’t everything supposed to be as easy as you think and say? even sitting in the sun and breathing doesn’t seem to help.’

it strikes an uncanny belief in her head — the ideation that taking in the simple pleasures day to day comes as an easy feat. in theory, the great minds and her heart could tell her, lecture her into believing each day will become easier. yet, nothing ever comes as easy as the simple calculations that words simplify actions to. and she thinks to herself again, that believing the words ‘one day it will stop.’

it’s not love that makes her feel like this, no. it’s not the cracks of past lovers digging their claws deep in unpolished wounds exacerbating every clean cut image. it’s the idea of comparisons, the unnerved inability to satiate the money hungry woes of chart toppers and idealized ‘popularity’ that ranks high in the charts.

it’s the flood of netizens that use their words like weapons, piercing deep into the tracks that engulfed her heart and soul. ‘a flop’ ‘a shit lead vocal.’ — she nods, laughs. howls underneath the images of how many people love to pick and piece apart her name inside the industry.

‘and i’m gonna stop crying, stop feeling, stop thinking about you. i’m gonna stop crying, and start putting myself first.’

she’s never given a second thought of keeping herself first — always on the verge of terror staged destruction wrecking havoc on those around her, leaving her trapped inside the devastation. it’s the need to rub salt on open wounds, make it hurt where it already aches. make it stand on the edge of a walking time bomb. and maybe, it’s the reason why gold star sees her as the standard doormat of a failed science experiment. a toy they hold high over her heads, the rationale for every step they push her towards.

‘her vs. me, me vs. her — what’s important to see who’s better? after i suffered a lot, i’m starting to get it. but i’m too important to myself to sit still and worry. take a look inside without a cover, you’re fine the way you are.’

it sounds cliche to write the words — she doesn’t believe it, no. but she wishes she could. because deep down seo minjung knows who the soul residing in her body is — a fragmented girl, afraid of the world. masking away anyone that approaches in fear that they’ll flee first. comparisons, one after another — one that pinpoints her to nothing. it doesn’t matter to her — it’s shit. the comparisons are shit. there’s nothing that aches more than suffering with the constant bereavement of being a second-hand choice or a second-staged puppet for someone else.

—

it’s a funny image to see herself next to a muted keyboard — a makeshift desk for her words. but as on cue, the striking mirror image of herself juxtaposed into the ink pressed hard against the paper goes too much, and her body flees. retreats to the keys — button pressed on and the low start of the keyboard.

she’s six when she’s introduced to the ivory whites and blacks, centered in the steinway and sons grand piano in her house — the second house in boston. the theory of progression of chords — three in a row, not at the same time. back straight, both feet pressed to the bottom. tiny fingers barely stretched across a sixth, and now she’s twenty five, surpassing an octave and barely reaching a tenth across the keys.

but despite the memories that flood of youthful hourly lessons four times a week, comes the ringing idea of the words that blare from the notepad in the corner of her eyes. if words had melodies, these words might have been a steady legato on the second octave. a chord progression, strictly arpeggio — her old piano teacher would’ve proud that she’d held onto these facts as a keepsake.

she doesn’t want to keep it major because she’s learned that the happiest of classical songs present in major keys — the somber melodies of majority of beethoven and liszt contain themselves in minor. a first few seconds, and the emotional bang hits front and center into the ears.

she hums to herself the first few words of being alone — a longing pull, a drag. a simple chord, not spanning an octave. her favorite chord, an f minor and a progression into d. it sounds lonely, it sounds sad. it sounds like her — she keeps it mezzo-piano, jots that down before the thought slips past. her voice sings the words, a few octaves too low for her range. yet, she forces it through with the gentle lilt of the chord, and then back down to the switch to d minor

it continues, and she drawls the keys to the words that read themselves out from the corner of her eyes. years of an untouched piano, and muscle memory comes back to haunt her — in a good way, this time. automated movements, a pendulum movement of something slow-paced and soft.

but she thinks that the dreary pace of slow stretches of chords become boring for a song about enlightenment, and seo minjung is no little bitch to stay still and complacent. no. she wants the words to hit in the middle just as the realizations barged through her the second they scrawled themselves on paper. the crescendo comes, and she wants it to go full force, loud — ff, she makes note of that. arpeggio no longer cuts it, and her fingers press against the keys — three notes, one time. a solid chord, staccatos released.

she wants to shift it to major, an ode to her ‘fuck you’ song. but the stark contrast from major to minor is an artwork that she leaves to the masterminds of the past.

she keeps it in the minor, two octaves higher — sounds have a tendency to have a ‘coming of age’ thought when it becomes brighter and clearer. but comes the thought to switch from a harmonic interval to a chord, a back-and-forth wobble of uncertainty posing across the keys.

in her mind, she’s mozart inside the familial archways of classical musicians. except, she’s playing a reemergence in an a song she can’t pigeon hole into any niche. it’s not an experimental sound, nor is it anything that she sings herself outside of the privacy of her walls — it’s something still -ing in the process.

—

it’s not a song she wants to wallow in silence or submerge inside the privacy of her notebook. it’s a song she wants sung, blared — even if it doesn’t stem from her feeble voice. she imagines the voice to stem from a gritty voice that can bleed emotion. someone who doesn’t crumble with the words said because she knows if she’d ever sing it, she’d fall to the ground and grace the world with pictures of tear stained eyes and a breach into the facade she’s created.

and she’s aware — she’s a coward. hiding behind someone else’s voice for words she can’t face head-on.

so, the last thing she scribbles down is the one voice that comes to her mind — ‘jiah from bee’. hopes and wishes for the sole voice to be the only voice to sing the song written and crafted from her heart.

#fmdverification #으악→극한직업 #me: i hate having pending verifications to do so i do it asap

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lockdownuk · 4 years

Text

Lockdown Diary Part 6

A personal account during the lockdown in the UK due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

23/03/2020 8:30pm Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister, gives a live address to the nation to, effectively, put the country on lockdown to stem the spread of the deadly coronavirus strain, Covid-19.

Many of us have been self-isolating for days but this latest development within the UK in reaction to the pandemic feels very serious and very scary. I decided to keep a simple diary and where better but online.

Day 151: Great hour or so last night around Foggy’s. When I got home I watched World War Z and some stand up by Nate Bargatze and drank and smoked loads. Today, I got up just before 2pm and felt soooo unmotivated. I was going to have a day of doing fuck all but had a change of heart around 7pm so did my stair climb then walked for over an hour (7km) and got home at 9:30pm!

Day 152: Typing on day 153. I popped up and saw Foggy last night. One of the reasons was I wanted to take him a beer to say thanks for looking over my mitigation statement for my impending court hearing for speeding. He liked what i wrote but has given me some key amendments. Basically free solictor advice and I am very grateful. While there he hit me with the news that Ham’s sister, Preeya, has died (last Friday 14th August) from Covid 19. To say i was gobsmacked is an understatement. She was 49. The family could only talk to her over a loud speaker and had to say good bye that way as her life support was swithced off. Fucking hell, it’s terrible. And, what makes it worse, is how complacent I have become about the disease while it’s causing so much tragedy. As I said to Foggy, it’s important to renew our efforts in combatting this disease so that Preeya’s death at least means we learn. I also feel guilty for not realising that many people have passed like this - just because I (sort of) knew Preeya doesn’t mean I shouldn’t feel any less sorry for the dozens of people dying and many more affected everyday. My emotions are in turmoil and yet I’m not directly affected.

Day 153: Typing this on day 154. Gone midday before I woke up. Beers in the evening and watched Den of Thieves. Great film.

Day 154: Woke up at 2:37 pm FFS. Just done a walk and I feel like shit (booze induced).

Day 155: Went to bed at about 4am yesterday but was up at 10am today so, usual Monday correction of sleep patterns. Two long walks today plus a little housekeeping on photos, sharing to the Oundle chatter group, so, quite constructive. Hoir chat with dad plus a chat with a recruitment agemt about a helpdesk manager role in Peterborough.

Day 156: Typing on Day 157. I saw Karen sitting with TTP (and two others I couldn’t make out) at the T&K on my second walk. Why does that piss me off so much? I am being like Jack in Midnight Run. I need to let go.

I am also getting wound up with Tumblr - I can only make entries on this diary blog on the PC - when I try on the Android or Apple apps, they pop up with ‘post too long’. Trying getting info from Tumblr’s online help on that though - fucking not happening. I think I might move this to a Google Blog...it’s not like anyone else reads it. I’m not sure I’d want that - it’s far more a private diary now rather than the cute ‘blog’ idea it started out as. It is now a disciplinary exercise more than anything.

Day 158: Feeling less sorry for myself now. It’s 10pm and I am having a midweek beer as I wait for tea to cook.

Day 159: Decided I will split this diary into 30 day sections to appease Tumblr. My second walk today was at 8pm ‘cos it was pissing down from about 4pm ‘til 7:30pm...very dark and so wet. Home by 9.15pm.

Day 160: I went shopping in Corby (Tesco and Asda) - I only really went so I could get blue eggs. £75 on booze! I was going up to Fog’s tonight but at around 6pm it started to piss down. So, I shall drink at home. It’s 9.15pm, I think it’s going to get messy.

Day 161: Not sure when I wnet to bed last night but I didn’t get up until 2pm. Nice long walk (9km) in the rain!

Banners and Sam G went to London to have a few with Andy P. I’m a little flabbergasted, it’s like there’s no Covid19 all a sudden.

Day 162: Bank holiday Sunday so I am having a beer or two. Tea’s cooking, gonna watch The Accountant on BBC1 at 10.30pm. Today I got up at 1.55pm and managed to have a shower and be downstairs to see the start of the Belgian GP. Hamilton won, pretty easily. I then did my stair climb and a 9.8km (6 mile) walk.

Last night I watched a rather quirky, entertaining comic horror film called Ready or Not and then Ricky Gervais - Fame. That’s the tour I saw him live after seeing Henman’s final tennis match at the Davis Cup at Wimbledon. Bloody funny - the recording could even be the show Karen and I were at. Bed at around 5am, hence not egtting up ‘til way past midday!

Day 163: Bank Holiday Monday, just like a Sunday. I am making this entry on my phone as I'm now able to due to breaking up the diary blog into 30 day sections.

Molly's Game, a film I've tried to rewatch several times but it's never been free, is on BBC2 tonight. I'm recording it right now but actually watching Seinfeld from the start on All4. The first couple of episodes are a bit ropey if truth be told. Luckily, I know it improves.

Day 164: Managed to get hold of Michelle via her daughter Daisy to place a nice big order for C. Just as well ‘cos Tim’s ignoring me!

Rang and spoke with Barry Haddon today to check he’s OK.

Day 165: Picked up C from Michelle’s in Yarwell. While there I was mauled by her over friendly Staffordshirebull terrier getting bit on the thigh. Twice in six months I’ve been bitten by dogs.

Karen WhatsApp’d to see if I’d seen Miley Cyrus on the Live Lounge!

Day 166: Forgot to say that yesterday, I also bumped into and chatted with Pete Gilder. We mainly talked about (getting caught) speeding.

Today I did over 22k steps and I am fucked.

I replied to an email from Shirley at work HR. After the furloughed staff call on Thursday, which I didn’t attend, they want us to cash in some (more) hoilday, which is fine by me, but I have also asked if we are any clearer as to what happens on 1st October, when the rentention scheme ends. I await her reply.

Day 167: Another 20k stpes today. Just 24k needed to have completed 1m steps since the start of July.

It’s Friday, about 9.45pm. I’m going to watch Molly’s Game and have a few beers.

Day 168: Got up at just before 2pm. It’s now 10.15pm and I am just having my first beer, Today was a lazyish day, completed 12k steps.

Day 169: Completed the 1m steps with 24 days to spare. Woohoo. Now, I am unsure whether to reduce the walking I have got so used to doing? I think I might keep up an average of 11k steps a day which is all I would have needed to accomplish to reack 1m in 3 months.

I’m pleased I did it today since I :went to bed a nearly 5am this morning!

Day 170: Actually typing this on day 171. Feels weird having done the 1m steps, almost like I’ve nothing to do. However, I am of course going to keep walking but not quite as hard/much. I did feel liek I was walking myself into the ground all in the name of finishiong the task ASAP. So, today I only had one walk, did 11,5k.

Yesterday’s Italian GP was a cracker. Hamilton had a penalty and ikt ended up with Gasly winning. Full of incident including a red flag so the race ‘restarted’.

I completely forgot ot make this entry on the correct day?

Day 171: I have decided to press on with the walking - not quite so urgently as before - to see what I can achieve steps-wise in 3 months. So, today, an unusually hot day for September, I did 18k steps plus cleaned the bathroom, hoovered my room and stairs and hallway. I am fucked!

Today I have bought a set of smart scales and a new pair of Skechers. The Skechers were almost free (£69 reduced to £30ish which I had in Paypal) and the scales were £20. Still, I shouldn’t. I don’t know what will happen at the end of October when the CJRS ends plus I don’t know what punsihment will be dished out, any day now, for the speeding offence! Fuck it!

Day 172: An eventful day. Boris has restricted gatherings to no more than 6 people and will use ‘Covid Marshalls’ to police this. It’s causing a stir amongst the online community. I have set up accounts with Gurushots and Picfair to showcase my snaps. The latter offers the opportunity to sell them. I watched Anchorman 2. It was pretty good. I also postd on the Oundle chatter group about walking in front of a car the other day - the driver, a yound lady, was enchanting the way she just smiled and let me pass - I used it as an opportunity to ask about George Higgins saving a child from near death at the hands of a lorry, the post about which has disappeared.

Day 173: Lots have seen my post re: my car incident but the bait hasn’t been taken.

Sarah Haines made a nice comment about my photo posts on the Oundle Chatter group also saying that she doesn’t know me but, it turns out she does. She is James Watson’s ex from when I first moved to Oundle so we caught up on Messenger.

Rachel Harris posted a meme slating Boris about the fact we were all encouraged to go out and about (inclding the Eat Out to Help Out scheme) and now we are being sent back to ‘our room’. Some of the comments continue to slate the government. I couldn’t resist commenting that, had the royal ‘we’ maintined social distancing and remembered there’s a fucking pandemic, perhaps we might not be under impending severe lockdown, as it now looks like. I also mentioned photos I have seen (one posted by Rach herslf) whereby you could be mistaken for thinking that there isn’t a pandemic. I have finished the comment with a line about we can only blame ourselves, not the hapless government! I wonder what reaction that will get!

Day 174: Scales were delivered today. If they are accurate I am a little over 11 stones, from 12st 7lbs before lockdown. Can’t quite believe it. I have a yearly diabetic review with Lynne in October so i can check then. If the scales are wrong, I’ll be livid on 2 scores!

Friday night beers as I type. Been looking forward to them since last Saturday!

Day 175: I do not trust the new scales. I get a different reading each time I step on them and by 10-12 lbs. Fucking things. Boots arrived today - they’re going back as well. Footy season started today. Posh lost away to Acrrington Stanley. “Who are they?”

Day 176: The GP was reflagged again today (a new track at Tuscany. A red flag two races on the trot is most unusual. Hamilton won.

Day 177: I managed to get the scales working. I’m pretty much the same weight I was prior to ld (about 12.5 st). This leads me to believe that if I wasn’t doing all the walking I am, I would be as fat as a fucking house. On that note, Google Fit is playing up. It loses the step and heart point count for each walk (although the workouts retain the route map info) Wtf?

I think K and TTP might be a thing from a post I saw on FB whereby some chap (who I don’t know) commented on TTP’s post that it was nice to see him and K. Kinda gutted if it is true but I shouldn’t be. That’s all I will say on here.

Day 178: Jim contacted me today to let me know he’s leaving RCI. He was quite secretive about why and what’s going on but, there it is. He went on to say that HR will be contacting me shortly to call me back from furlough. Sueanne is taking over as team leader but that’s temporary. and that they will most likely promote from within. I struggling to think what it would be like if Mark was boss! The way RCI are and how disjointed it is with Jim as boss, I shan’t take it as read until HR do contact me. Also, I dunno how I feel about it...I have got so used to not working. But, and it’s a big but, I doubt I’ll have a job after the retention scheme finishes so, if this does pan out, it’s good. I’ll be back to job hunting while in a job, as per before the pandemic.

Also, I received an email letting me know the punishment for my speeding offence was 6 points and a £233 fine, plus costs (£90) and victim support (£34), £357 in total. More than I expected. But, no ban, so I’ll suck it up.

Day 179: Having midweek beers. I'm in that sort of mood.

Day 180: I WhatsApp’d Jim to let him know HR haven’t contacted me. His garbled response went from telling to give them a shout and let them know he is leaving, to which I asked ‘don’t they know?’, he then said hold fire (on Sueanne’s instruction) and she has said for me to sit tight and then, finally, that HR will contact me! Fuck knows what’s going on! I had a diabetic review with Lynne today. When you go to the surgery you have to let in, which I was by Keren. It was nice to see and chat with her. She is back with Ronnie which was news to me. Then Lynne came and got me. It was nice to see and chat with her also. She weighed me and I’m 12st 3lb. Apparently in Jan last year I was over 13st!

#diary #Tumblr diary #lockdown #covid19 #lockdownuk

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sunset-wishes-upon-hill · 4 years

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Scandal chapter 8 Sneak peak

Scandal: FF I Wattpad

“Are you-were your family one of them toff?!” Clare asked on a certain hours of early evening with a hand perched up on her hips and daunting realisation dawning on her face, gasping. Clare hated how messy Julia was, often leaving clothes strewn over the floor until Clare made her pick them back up.

Julia would make a horrible maid; unable to hand wash or mend clothing or iron them, she didn’t know how to light a fireplace and was clueless on house cleaning, implying she had someone to do them for her.

“The fuck?!” Julia exclaimed in shock, eyes widened. If her more than unladylike, crass language weren’t the clearest sign that she was anything but a refined, cultured female from a respectable family background; surely the fact that she was eating a greasy steak and ale pie with her hand whilst slouched on an uncomfortable wooden chair, dress button partially undone to free her bulging stomach to satisfy her gluttony and long hems of her dress wantonly rode up to her thighs, airing out her most private area can’t be any clearer sight of proof.

“Clare, I understand your hormones are all wacked up from getting pregnant by that dick too small to be acting so big but this is just crossing the line!” Julia explained exasperatedly and outwardly offended by the accusation, “In what way do I look like them posh people worrying about what jewels to wear for the next couple of hours?!”

“How about the fact that you use words I can’t understand sometimes? It’s a rich people thing isn’t it? And you hair! Pink! It’s pink!”

Um it’s called 21st century lingo? “I’m from America, remember?” Julia quickly learnt that any bizarre, socially offensive behaviours – intentional or not could be downplayed if one were said to be from America; it meant those more concerned with rigid etiquette and social conventions were more willing and allowing to overlook them as archetypal American perceived as loud, impolite and crass, or just plain annoying.

Clare’s countenance pinched into a stern disapproval, “That excuse won’t work – you’ve been using it too much for it to work on me!” Clare then added the ultimate marker that set apart the social classes, “You can read and write and you are clearly educated.”

Julia hadn’t realise how prevalent illiteracy was amongst the common people; the first time she realised Clare couldn’t read or write was when she had offhandedly asked Clare to write down grocery list for that day and Clare shamefully admitting she couldn’t. When asked how she had been reading and sending letters, she found out that Clare had been asking the older lady next door to read out and write on behalf of her. From then on, every evening after dinner, Julia had been teaching her how to write and read.

“You know, you’ve become very emotional in the past week and you need to chill.”

“You buy expensive foods without any worry.”

Oh here we go again.

“I like food. I live to eat.”

“You spent four shillings* in a week on just desserts!”

Like I know how much a shilling is worth! “..Is that too much?” Julia approached wearily before quickly accepting that yes it was the amount she was spending on cakes and ice was just too excessive by the stunned expression on Clare’s face.

“You buy lavish soaps and bathe three times a day. You think a pound is cheap,”

Julia had been shocked to learn that in common homes, there were no such thing as separate, private bathroom; zinc tub was stored in the pantry, only taken out when one had to bathe which was done in the kitchen by the hearth and the privies were outside the back of the house. Living in one of thoroughly respectable, if not fashionable, neighbourhood, meant they were privileged to have indoor plumbing and separate room for personal cleanliness. This had truly realised how little she appreciated and undeserving of comfort modern technology afforded her.

Clare continued on, listing out all questions she had in mind, “You spend money as though you’ve no concept of it.”

Because I don’t. Julia still had considerable amount left after she set aside their rent, bills, food, clothing, medical expenses and transportation. Just a few days ago, she had received an envelope containing five pound note, though there was no letter or names of the sender it could have only be from one person.

Five pound in modern London wouldn’t even have brought her the cheapest drink on rooftop cocktails; it wouldn’t even be enough for one day travel throughout the zone 1-6; although it could have brought her some quality foods from LIDL/ALDI*. But five pound in Victorian England was not only enough to cover month expenditure with plenty left for pleasure but it was worth Clare’s quarter of annual income as a maid in the college.

Why you so expensive 21st century London? She wanted to ask.

#scandal story #scandal sneak peek #kuroshitsuji fanfiction

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lovelylogans · 5 years

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dream of a love that even time will lie down and be still for

“You ever put your arms out and spin really, really fast? Well, that's what love is like. It makes your heart race. It turns the world upside down. But if you're not careful, if you don't keep your eyes on something still, you can lose your balance. You can't see what's happening to the people around you. You can't see that you're about to fall.” —Practical Magic

ao3 | read the prequel | coffee?

warnings: food mentions, dreams/nightmares, fake proposal, emotional hurt that could be read as similar to a panic attack, arguing

pairings: polyamlamp (virgil/logan/roman/patton)

words: 15,826

notes: surprise! I said i wanted to come back to this verse, and valentine’s day seemed like a great time!

The first time someone talks about marriage, it’s a joke.

It’s within a week of Virgil coming back to school after all his roommates (boyfriends, boyfriends, right, they’re his boyfriends) have found out that his collection of plants and tarot cards aren’t just for aesthetic, after all.

(“It was a reasonable assumption to make!” Roman huffs after he admits that’s what he thought was the case, and Virgil kind of wants to kiss him because he’s so indignant about it, and then he remembers that’s a thing he can do now, and their time is limited, so why not?)

“So,” Logan says thoughtfully, from the table, where he’s keeping notes on everything Virgil’s been saying about the curse, because he has taken it upon himself to investigate anything and everything magic. So Virgil gets asked a lot of specific questions that he gets to answer with I dunno, it’s just a thing, that’s just what the leaves mean, and okay I feel I should also mention that my great-great-uncle Percival was also well-known for using his powers to find increasingly creative ways to get wasted during prohibition, which, first of all, I should probably incorporate into my business since we’re on a college campus, but second and more importantly his word probably isn’t the most trustworthy?

“Does the curse always kick in after they have children, or is there note of another milestone that can incite it?”

Virgil frowns from where he’s lying on the couch. “Milestone?”

Logan waves his right hand absently, still scrawling notes with his left. “You know. Would it become more likely if we bought a house together, or listed each other as emergency contacts, or if we got married?”

Virgil coughs, sitting up ramrod straight, feeling his cheeks flush. “Um.”

Logan’s cheeks are just slightly blotchy red, a sign that he’s equally as flustered.

“I mean,” he says. “I mean—hypothetically, if we were to—do that. At some point.”

“Well, I,” Virgil says. “I mean. I—I?”

“Well, I suppose part of the question is the legality of marriage, since polyamorous marriage isn’t legal here, but that’s a question too,” Logan says thoughtfully. “Is it a question of the legal ties of marriage, or the emotional commitment of it?”

He looks at Virgil, as if he has an answer to that, and as if his brain isn’t still stuck on hypothetically, if we were to do that at some point.

“But I suppose emotionally, prior to marriage, they tend to feel just as committed, it’s a question of having that connection recognized by law. I suppose. I’ve never really thought about it. I’d assume Patton or Roman has, one moment—”

Virgil’s brain comes back online by the time Logan’s been typing on his phone.

“Wait. Wait, you cannot send them a text about marriage without any context, Logan!”

There’s the sound of a sent message, and Logan looks up from his phone.

“Oops?”

Virgil digs out his phone, and reads the message sent to the groupchat, freshly titled boyz 2 boyfrenzzz, which he is about 95% sure Roman spelled like that to annoy Logan.

What are your opinions on marriage?

Virgil is hastily typing in terms of like emotional significance in comparison to legal stuff, or something??? he was rambling i’m so sorry oh my god by the time the groupchat dings. He’s too late and he needs to bury himself immediately.

if you’re proposing you need to treat me to like 100x more flowers and dinners and romantic outings than you have been doing lately fyi step it up ffs i want to be WOOED, Roman has sent, and also we have been together for like maybe a month???

Patton’s response comes basically immediately after. All for it!! But also we need to figure out like so much planning. Oh my god Logan would be the best wedding planner ever oh my god loGAN you should become a wedding planner!

“I did not anticipate this line of conversation,” Logan commented.

Virgil’s phone buzzes. Virgil lifts his face from where he’s mashing it into the couch cushions to read the latest of this train wreck.

I am getting my doctorate and becoming a professor, most likely, Logan’s text reads.

LOGAN HAS NOT CLARIFIED THAT HE MEANT THIS IN THE CONTEXT OF EMOTIONAL CONNECTION VS LEGAL RECOGNITION AND IF IT WOULD AFFECT THE CURSE, Virgil sends at last, all-caps.

yeah okay but like we’re agreed that if/most likely WHEN we get married logan and i are planning it right, Roman sends, after a few moments pause.

I have so many siblings that could be ring bearers/flower girls we have that under control, Patton sends, and then, OH MY GOD CAKE TASTINGS WE GET TO ALL GO ON CAKE TASTINGS CAN WE HAVE ONE OF THOSE WEDDING DESSERT BARS SO WE CAN GO ON COOKIE TASTINGS TOO??!?!?!?

"I see what you mean,” Logan says. “I probably could have phrased that to be clearer.”

“Oh, you think?”

The second time marriage is mentioned, it’s in the aftermath of a fight.

(Looking back, the first year of their relationship, it’s like their handing off a baton of various troubles: Virgil terrified of getting committed because of the curse, Logan not wanting to get committed because he’s terrified of commitment and also of emotions, Roman full of doubting himself and trying to push them away, and Patton full of sadness and trying to hide it all. There’s a lot of fights during that first year.)

He can’t even remember what that particular fight’s about, when he looks back on it. It’s a fight that ensues near the first wave of tests, the weather clinging to the last bits of summer. The fight itself is really only memorable for one reason.

Well. Two reasons.

Logan’s snarling at Roman, and Roman’s bristling in kind, Patton fidgeting nervously, eyes darting between them, mouth opening and snapping shut like he can’t think of something to say, when it happens.

He can’t even tell where it comes from, at first, crashing into him like a wave trying to sink a ship and Virgil tries to breathe over the anger-concern-fear-hurt that’s slamming straight into him, and he looks at Patton, because he feels from Patton the most but then Logan’s mouth twists into a sneer and there’s a stab of hurt-derision-smug-guilt?, all conflicting and slamming into each other, and oh, oh no.

He’s never—he hasn’t tapped into more than one person at a time, ever, ever, and not now, not when—

Virgil tries to suck in a breath, and another, but he can’t—he can’t breathe past the tightness in his throat the nails biting into in his hands the shaking of someone the panic the twisting in his stomach the the the—

“Virgil?” Patton says, soft, cutting through the vertigo like a scream through silence, and Virgil manages a wild gasp, screwing his eyes shut—confusion-pause-wait?-concern momentarily pausing that misery-anger-frustration, and he can’t—he can’t—

“I need to leave,” someone chokes out, because that is certain, that is clear, the someone has to leave right now, before the magic screams out to defend against something that it’s bringing on himself and if it does anything to them he can’t do anything to them he can’t hurt them he can’t let himself hurt them he can’t—

“Virgil,” Logan—or is it Roman? or Patton? or himself? They’re all mashed in together and he can’t distinguish between any of them, not even himself, he just knows he has the body that needs to go—

“Virgil, hey—“ one of them, a step closer to the body, yes, Virgil, he is Virgil, and he throws his hands in front of the body, because that’s worse, that’s the concern-help-anxiety seeping in deeper stronger more—

“Stop,” Virgil shrieks, or maybe he squeaks it, he just knows it forces its way out of him— “Stop, stop, stop, please, I can’t, I just need—I need to go, I need space, I—“

Virgil’s hand lands on something, a doorknob, thank God, thank God, and he manages to pry it open, stumbling away with a gasp, and he falls to his knees—

—in grass, not on the concrete, and he’s gone.

It’s quiet. It’s stopped.

How could it have stopped? It was so much, all at once, it was so much, and now Virgil is here, away, chest feeling so hollow and achy that it might collapse in on itself, ribs no longer a cage but more like they’re about to crumble into ruins, and he’s so...

How did that even happen?

Virgil swallows, hard. Because yes, he is Virgil, he is Virgil, how had it swept over him so fast, so overwhelming, and how could it just have stopped?

Except things haven’t stopped. Not really. The buzzing of cicadas are too noisy in his ears, like they’ve burrowed in and made a home there, and the air is so humid and hot that he might drown without a drop of water in his lungs, and the dew is soaking through his jeans and maybe through his skin all the way to his bones, and everything is so much again, that moment of quiet gone, swept away, but he’s alone, he’s alone, how is he still feeling so much when he’s alone—?

Grass and air and trees, and he is feeling it, he is feeling everything, and no, no, no, he’s alone, it’s supposed to have stopped, why hasn’t it stopped, he needs it to stop, he just needs everything to stop—

He can feel every bug, every squirrel and mole and bird, every leaf on every branch on every tree, and it’s too much, he’s spreading too thin, he needs an anchor, he needs something to pull him back into himself, and he buries his fingers into the dirt, and now he can hear himself, letting out sobbing, gasping breaths, and feel the wetness on his cheeks, and yes, this is him, this is him, he’s coming back. He’s trying to come back.

Virgil tries to breathe, digging his fingers into the earth, again and again and again, feeling the dewy grass itch against his hands, the dirt dig underneath his fingers, and tries to—to secure himself, and he needs—he needs—

“Virge?”

“Stop,” Virgil chokes out, because now he can feel him too, the blister on his heel and the ache in his neck that isn’t his, not his, it’s Patton’s, and he needs to stay in himself and not start feeling everything else again. Patton stops exactly where he is as Virgil squeezes his eyes shut and tries to breathe.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, I’m—”

“No, hey, it’s okay. It’s okay. I’m gonna sit down right over here, is that okay?”

Virgil swallows. “Okay,” he croaks, digs his fingers in deeper, feels the dirt give way and cling, tries to breathe as he focuses on himself, himself only.

His ripped jeans, his hoodie, his boots. The tears on his cheeks and the way his breath is uneven and hitching. The tension of his arms, the way his hands are twisting grabbing digging deeper all the time, the dirt lodged solidly under his nails.

He can’t feel a blister anymore. His neck feels like it always does. He can’t feel Patton’s body-echoes anymore.

Virgil breathes, in, and out, and repeats, “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Patton repeats, and Virgil opens his eyes—Patton is sitting criss-cross apple-sauce, fifteen feet away from him, hands folded in his lap, leaning forward and staring at him in a way that zings earnest and concern straight into his chest so strongly and dizzyingly he has to close his eyes again, almost queasy with it.

"Is there any way I can help?” Patton asks.

“Just—stay over there,” Virgil says. “I—sorry. Sorry, most of my knowledge of this stuff comes from Gillian, it’s kinda rare for me, so—”

“Gillian?”

Oh. Right.

“Um, confession,” Virgil says. “Sometimes, I can...” Virgil wrinkles his nose, tries to put it into words for the first time. “I mean, it’s not all the time, I just think it’s when it’s really strong and it’s really only with you, mostly, I’ve never had it happen with Logan, and Roman only a couple times, but I—I got hit by all three of you at once and I needed to get out before it turned... bad.”

“Hit with what?” Patton says, confusion arcing through the air, and Virgil has to dig his fingers into the dirt again, trying to scratch deeper.

“It’s... a kind of feedback loop?” Virgil tries, eyes still shut. “I don’t really know how to explain it, but sometimes, if you... okay. You know how when you came in for your first reading, I gave you a hug, and you asked me how I knew you needed it?”

“Yes.”

“When you’re feeling something really... strongly,” Virgil says, hesitates, and plows ahead. “Sometimes... sometimes it hits me too.”

A pause. Then: “Oh,” Patton says, voice sounding funny. “So the hug... you could feel that I was... sad.”

“Felt you when Logan and Roman went out a date, too. Other times. I don’t know how, it’s not consistent, I can’t really control it.”

“Oh,” Patton repeated. “So when we all got into a fight...”

“I could feel you getting upset. Yes.”

“And... and Roman and Logan too?”

“Yeah.” Virgil croaks. “I kind of... freaked out. Panicked. I didn’t want to lash out.”

“We were all kind of lashing out, I don’t think—”

Virgil smiles bitterly, keeps his eyes shut. “If a Fae lashes out, it can mean a lot worse than shouting at you, Patton.”

“...oh,” Patton says, soft, uncertain.

“I haven’t since I was a kid, but it did result in a guy needing to be loaded into an ambulance,” Virgil says. “Or—the cats hurt him bad enough for him to be loaded into an ambulance, I guess, but that was because of me. Or the time I nearly blew up the library. So. Yeah.”

“Are you feeling what I’m feeling right now?”

“No,” Virgil says. “As long as I keep my eyes shut and we’re this far apart. I’ll calm down in a little bit, thanks for checking on me—”

“I’m not leaving, unless it hurts you,” Patton says, stubborn, and Virgil takes a breath in and out.

“Will it?” Patton says.

Virgil considers lying, telling him yes it does and he needs to be alone, but. He doesn’t actually want Patton to go, not when he’s trying to anchor himself, so he shakes his head.

“Okay, then,” Patton says, and he hear-feels the susuruss of the blades of grass shifting when Patton does. “I’m staying.”

Virgil bows his head, and opens them again cautiously, staring only at the ground.

Yes. That’s okay. This is okay. He can do this.

He ensues with the methods he’s memorized: counting his breaths, and the blades of grass, and wiggling his fingers and toes, trying to think of a plant that starts with each letter of the alphabet, tracking back and starting over again when he makes it through the whole thing.

“Okay,” Virgil says. “You can... you can come closer, but don’t touch me, if that’s okay?”

“Of course that’s okay,” Patton says, firmly, and slowly scoots himself closer, until they’re close enough that Virgil could reach out and touch him if he wanted to.

Virgil looks at him, and breathes a little sigh of relief that he can only feel a sense of exhaustion: his own, entirely, and no one else’s.

“Are you all good?” Patton asks, and Virgil nods, carefully withdrawing his fingers from the dirt.

“Does that happen a lot?” Patton says. “Your magic kind of... overwhelming you like that.”

“Sometimes,” Virgil admits. “It’s like I just... I dunno, actually. I don’t really know sometimes if it’s my magic or my emotions messing me up, because sometimes they feel so close I can’t tell them apart.”

“So it feels like emotions? Doing magic?”

Virgil grimaces. “Not exactly,” he says. “I... I don’t really know how to describe it, I guess. I don’t know what’s a normal-person thing versus a Fae thing, because I’ve never been without it.”

“That makes sense,” Patton admits. “I just... I dunno, I guess I wanna know how to help?”

Virgil blinks at him. “How to...?”

“Help,” Patton repeats. “I mean, it looked really overwhelming, it clearly took a lot out of you, it freaked you out, and I just want to be sure we don’t do that if we can’t help it.”

Virgil stares at him. How to help. Something that’s almost entirely Virgil’s fault, and Patton wants to help, because... because it made Virgil upset?

But that’s Patton all the time, isn’t it? He wants to help everyone, all the time. Because he’s sweet, and soft, and gentle, and kind, despite bad things happening, like his mom dying and his catastrophic breakup and—

Virgil swallows, and has to close his eyes again.

And Virgil. Virgil being a bad thing that’s happened to him. Will happen to him.

“I’m sorry,” Virgil says, and his voice cracks. “I’m sorry, Patton, I’m—”

“Hey, hey, honey, you don’t have anything—”

“Yes, I have,” Virgil rasps, pushing his fists into his eyes to stop himself from crying. “Or I will, and—you—you deserve more than that. All three of you.”

“Sweetheart,” Patton says, and feels the air move, like Patton’s stretched out a hand to touch him, and he tenses and looks up in enough to see Patton drawing his hands back into his lap, looking like he did not want to be doing that, but—

“You’re so,” Virgil says, and gulps, waving to the hands he’d drawn back, “good, and I’m not, and—”

“That’s not true,” Patton says, and Virgil lets out a snort without meaning to.

“Hey,” Patton says, and repeats firmly, “That’s not true. You’re good, V, okay?”

“Which part,” Virgil says dryly. “The part that lashes out and hurts someone whenever I freak out, or the part that’s gonna kill you one day? The part where I’m never gonna be able to get you that white picket fence and big happy family you’ve wanted since you were a kid? The part where I can’t give you a... a happy wedding and a big reception, with a cake-and-cookies bar.”

“All of them,” Patton says. “And—hey, we don’t know it’s gonna happen to us, remember? No gay Faes, you said so.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t—”

“Virge,” Patton says, patient, and Virgil shuts up.

“I love you,” Patton says, and it steals Virgil’s breath away.

It’s not the first time he’s said it. But it’s still new enough that it stuns him a little, every time—he’s not sure if that will ever stop.

“I love you,” Patton repeats. “I love that we’re gonna live together some day, and I’m gonna have three boyfriends to cuddle on and spoil. I love that I’m gonna be able to hang out with kids as my job one day. I love that you know when I need an extra hug without even asking me, and I love that your magic helps out so much. And I love that you’re probably gonna get me a cake-and-cookies dessert bar one day, ring or no ring. Everyone’s got their things they’re working on—everyone, me and Logan and Roman too—and everything has things that they don’t really like about themselves. And I mean, really. Who ends up with the life they imagined? No one, that’s who.”

Virgil’s about to say something along the lines of yeah, okay, but the curse, and Patton must read it on his face.

“No gay Faes,” he repeats. “No poly Faes, either. And, I mean. Anyone could die and cut a relationship short. Anyone.”

“It’s not usually one of the people’s faults, though.”

“It wouldn’t be your fault,” Patton says. “You just told me that you can’t control magic. Plus, I mean, someone cursed your great-great-whatever-grandma, it’s not your fault that you were born.”

Virgil laughs. It’s a wet, desperate outburst of a laugh that sounds more like a sob, but it’s a laugh, nonetheless.

“Can I,” Patton says, lifting a hand, and Virgil nods.

Patton, carefully, soft, puts his hand against Virgil’s cheek, uses his thumb to wipe away his tears, and—oh.

It’s not an overwhelming, crushing wave, like before. It’s gentle, like the lapping of water at his feet when he’s standing on the shore. It’s calm-patience-concern...

Love.

“Oh,” Patton says, eyes wide, and “Oh. I can feel you feeling that.”

“Shit, really,” Virgil says, about to jerk his face away.

“No, it’s—it’s—oh, Virgil, honey, I’m so sorry we made you feel like that,” Patton says, eyes going a little distant. “And I’m really—“

happy-glad-relieved

“—that I’m making you feel better,” Patton continues, and Virgil takes hold of his wrist curious-happy-awe and removes Patton’s hand from his face.

“I don’t want to catch you in a feedback loop or something if I start feeling bad again,” Virgil says, by way of explanation.

Patton nods, but he looks a little regretful, flexing his hand in his lap.

“You really feel that way about me?”

Virgil rolls his eyes, but he couldn’t help but smirk. “What, you thought this whole boyfriend thing was just a joke?”

“Well, it’s just—nice,” Patton says. “To know for sure.”

Virgil licks his lips, and says, “It was nice for me too.”

“I’d be kissing you on the cheek right now,” Patton says. “And also, I love you.”

“I love you too,” Virgil says, and it gets a bit easier to say that every time.

Patton’s smile whenever he does certainly doesn’t hurt.

Eventually, they get up, and walk back to an apartment, walking in to find it fully cleaned, and his other two boyfriends shuffling around sheepishly.

“Sorry,” they say, simultaneously.

“What happened?” Logan adds, because of course he does.

“Magic thing,” Virgil says. “Um, surprise, I tuned into all your emotions at once, and also we owe Patton a massive dessert bar of cake and cookies.”

Patton flushes as Roman and Logan simultaneously ask, “What?”

The third time, it’s a scam.

Logan’s out of town for a very important conference that they’re all very proud of him for, and Patton’s out of town for Pris and Poppy’s birthday, so Roman and Virgil are sulking in the apartment.

Or, that’s what Virgil thinks will happen.

i’m taking you on a fancy date and we’re sending selfies of us looking HAWT to patton and logan so they have something to pine over tonight Roman sends when Virgil’s in the middle of class. He sneaks his phone onto his lap, and manages to text Roman back while the professor is scrawling notes on the board.

a fancy date?

reservations are all set, Roman sends, along with a screenshot, and Virgil’s eyebrows shoot up.

It’s at a fancy restaurant Virgil’s only ever seen while driving by, and heard in the context of my grandparents came to town for graduation: a fancy-fancy place.

big spender, Virgil sends back, because—wow.

i have a plan and everything, Roman sends back, and i know you hate surprises but part of it’s gotta be a surprise okay? part of the plan kinda depends on you being surprised so

Virgil swallows. okay, he writes, then any requests on what i wear? or recommendations you know full well i’m useless

purple blazer, black tie, i’ll lay it all out for you, Roman sends back, then, pay attention to class we all gotta get those diplomas

Virgil smiles and puts his phone away.

When he gets home, the water is running. He bends to scratch Crow under the chin in the way she likes, before he straightens up. He puts his own surprise in the kitchen. The water shuts off once he does.

“I’m home,” he calls.

“Finally!”

Roman emerges from the bedroom, a hand on the doorframe, the other holding the towel around his waist, and Virgil’s mouth goes dry.

Listen. He’s seen Roman shirtless before. They live together, they’ve been boyfriends for two years, he was shirtless the first time they met, face-to-face.

But a man can only hold up against so much, you know? Especially when his wet hair is curling on his forehead, and his eyelashes look even darker all clumped together and beaded with droplets, and his face is all pink from the heat of the shower, and there’s still water droplets clinging to his neck, falling down his arms and his chest and—

Wow. He’s so, so gay.

“Hey,” Virgil says, and Roman smirks, before pulling him in by the lapels of his hoodie.

Kissing. Kissing is also fantastic, all close and nipping teeth and the gentle, barely-there teasing of a tongue, and when Roman draws back, Virgil can’t help but follow, chasing Roman’s lips, and he only opens his eyes when Roman giggles.

“You gotta shower,” he says, leans in to press a quick peck to Virgil’s cheek. “And also don’t mess up my hair, I literally just got out of the shower.”

“How would I ever tell,” Virgil says dryly, tapping a foot at the (admittedly tiny) puddle pooling at Roman’s feet. “And I mean... at least I’m not messing your hair after you style it.”

“If you do I will kill you,” Roman says brightly. “I have this scheduled, so. Get in the shower for about fifteen minutes, I’ll do my hair while you’re in there, and I’ll do yours when you get out.”

“And then?”

“And then we’ll get dressed, and I prep you on the surprise but I don’t spoil the surprise on the drive to the restaurant, and then...”

“And then?” Virgil prompts when he trails off.

Roman grins, and purrs, “It depends on how good you are.” He pushes Virgil gently towards the bathroom.

“Shower.”

“Your highness,” Virgil says, with a bow, and Roman’s laugh is barely cut off by Virgil shutting the door.

“I have a surprise for you in the kitchen,” he shouts through the door, before he turns on the water, drowning out whatever Roman might say next.

When he exits (wearing a robe, because Roman is the one between them more comfortable with walking around shirtless) Roman is partially dressed in the kitchen, wearing his slacks and a tank-top. He’s smiling fondly at the bouquet Virgil got for him, the bouquet he’s stuck into a water vase. He’s carefully cradling a red rose in his hand. He turns to Virgil, smiling. He moves to cup Virgil’s cheek, and Virgil catches his wrist, flips his hand so he can press a kiss to his palm, press his hand against his chest, a practiced motion.

“Tell me?”

Virgil draws closer, moves Roman’s hand to touch the rose again. “Red rose is true love,” he says, “and yellow is friendship, but together they’re excitement.”

“This one?” Roman asks, guiding their hands a spidery white flower.

“Angrec,” he says, and grins. “Royalty.”

Roman snorts, jostles him a little. Virgil is sure Logan would be groaning, if he was here. Patton would probably be delighted.

It goes on like that: Roman carefully touching a flower petal, and Virgil explaining each (anthurium for happiness, aster for trust, yellow and red chrysanthemums for precious one and I love respectively, hibiscus for beauty, heliotrope and lavender for devotion.)

It’s a familiar routine, though, for Roman especially. Virgil’s bouquets aren’t traditionally pretty, or cohesive, but he picks each flower for their meanings. Roman has, quite literally, at least acted like he’s swooning into Virgil’s arms any time Virgil gets him one, so.

“Okay, okay,” Roman says, shaking himself, and kisses Virgil on the cheek. “Thank you for the bouquet, but it’s hair time, c’mon, we gotta get pretty.”

“Time for me to get pretty, maybe,” Virgil mutters, and then immediately ducks his head. It takes Roman a second to get it, but then he smiles, pleased and a little embarrassed, so Virgil takes that as a victory.

“Okay, ready?” Virgil calls.

“Hang on,” Roman calls back, and Virgil rolls his eyes, reaching to straighten his tie, again, because it seems like his tie gets crooked if he as much as blinks.

“Okay, now I’m ready for my dramatic entrance,” Roman shouts, and Virgil fiddles with his tie before he drops his hands to his side.

“Come out, then,” Virgil says.

“I did that when I was thirteen,” Roman says, and then he opens the door, and then Virgil’s brain stops.

Just for a moment. Just enough time for Virgil’s brain to go quiet in awe before he can actually start thinking again.

"You look beautiful,” Virgil says, hushed, and Roman’s cheeks turn a shade of red lighter than his burgundy suit-and-vest.

“Well, shucks,” Roman says, before crossing the room. “You ain’t half bad yourself.”

Virgil snorts, and tilts up his chin a little as Roman takes a hold of his tie.

“How is it that you can never straighten your tie?”

“How dare you assume any part of me is straight,” Virgil says, a stolen joke (he forgets from who), and Roman laughs, before neatly untying and retying Virgil’s tie with neat, practiced motions, tucking it back under Virgil’s purple blazer.

“You look very handsome too, by the way,” Roman adds, sweeping his hands along Virgil’s shoulders, wiping off some kind of imaginary debris, tugging at his black lapels, and smiles at him, just the slightest curve of his lip. “I have to come up with more excuses to get you all in fancy-wear, I really do.”

Virgil tilts his head, and says, “Are you wearing makeup?”

“Mhm,” Roman says. “Not much—well, probably a lot by your standards, but. Concealer, foundation, brows. Bit of contour, too, but subtler than what I’d do onstage.”

“Lipstick?”

Roman grins. “Just chapstick, but I could if you want. I bet I have a color that matches the suit.”

“I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to mess anything up,” Virgil clarifies, though he does file that particular mental image away.

Roman puckers his lips in response, and Virgil presses his lips against his: simple, chaste. It’s Roman, after all, for all he’s dressed in finery and looking like he’s stepped right off the pages of some kind of fashion magazine.

“Okay,” Roman says, “We take thirty selfies and send them to Logan and Patton, and we get going so I can warn you—”

“—without spoiling the surprise and knowing full well I don’t like surprises, right,” Virgil says. “And just thirty?”

“Oh, if you don’t think I’m flagging down some poor waiter to take thirty million candid pictures, you really don’t know me as well as I thought,” Roman says cheerfully, then, “Smile!”

Virgil scowls at Roman’s phone, just to be contrary, and is rewarded by Roman laughing at him. They take selfies of Virgil kissing Roman’s cheek, and Roman kissing Virgil’s cheek, and one of them kissing, and others that are just them smiling side by side, and one silly one, because Patton would have insisted on it, if he was with them.

Eventually, though, Roman slides into the driver’s seat, and Virgil in the passenger’s, and Roman starts talking once they get onto the street and start driving.

“Okay, so,” he says bluntly. “I am going to pull a stunt. This stunt will likely involve people watching us. I am kind of counting on people watching us.”

Virgil winces.

“However,” Roman says. “During this stunt, I’m gonna say a lot of stuff, and none of that will be a lie, okay? None of it. It’s all true. You can just sit there and say one little thing, and if my sources are correct, it will show you the basis of why I chose to go on a date here.”

“...sources.”

“Mhm,” Roman says. “Anyway. To summarize. I will be pulling a stunt, that stunt will involve me talking, and I won’t lie to you at all. You say one little thing at the end. I also realize that this stunt could be construed as being really insensitive, on my part, but I am trying to walk the line of not spoiling it and communicating with you beforehand, so.”

Virgil grins. “Patton would be so proud of you.”

“Oh, yeah, and I’d recommend we don’t tell Patton about this stunt,” Roman says hastily. “However, I did run it by Logan, and he thinks it’s a good idea as long as I prefaced it with, one, I’m not gonna lie to you, and two, I know that some of the things I will do slash say will freak you out and I’m apologizing preemptively, and three, benefits that are also part of the surprise, so.”

Virgil relaxes. “You should have opened with that, you know I trust Logan’s judgment way more than yours.”

“Fuck you,” Roman says mildly, “my judgment is fantastic.”

“You climbed up the side of my house once,” Virgil says. “You literally climbed a tower.”

“Yeah, but, look at where we are now,” Roman argues. “Two years later, about to graduate in three months—“

Virgil groans.

“—two years of boyfriendship in, c’mon, climbing your literal tower of isolation was a great move.”

“Okay, but consider this,” Virgil says. “You climbed a tower without safety measures.”

Roman, without taking his eyes off the road, flicks Virgil’s ear. Virgil vows to himself to pay him back, when paying him back would not result in Roman running them off the road from all the shrieking and slap-fighting that would surely ensue, because in some ways, Virgil and Roman were still twelve like they were when they first met.

He does after they pull up to the restaurant and gives their keys to the valet (There’s a valet at this place, okay, to a guy whose experience with restaurants is “fast food and diners” this is kind of a lot.) Virgil reaches over to pinch Roman’s earlobe and scuttles out of arm’s reach, snickering at the outraged look on his face.

Payback, Virgil mouths, and Roman rolls his eyes but proffers his elbow. Virgil, approaching hesitantly, takes it.

Roman does stamp on his foot by the time the approach the front desk, though, and the chirpy little “oopsie!” means that this is not over.

“Reservation for Prince,” Roman tells the hostess, who runs her finger down the list and smiles.

“A booth in the back is still okay?”

Virgil tries not to smile when Roman nods, because Roman would probably like to get a table where he could see the room, and the room could see him, and a view of outside would be a bonus. A booth in the back meant that they could see the room, but the room wouldn’t be able to readily see them: the way Virgil liked it.

“Please,” Roman says, and the hostess picks up two menus and leads them to the back of the room.

The restaurant’s dimly lit, which Virgil really thought was just a stereotype before walking into this place. The tables are covered with white cloth, and there’s someone playing classy acoustic guitar in a corner, almost drowned out by the murmuring din of the other diners.

“I’d pull out your chair, but, ya know,” Roman says, gesturing. Virgil slides into the booth’s side that allows him to have his back to the wall, and Roman takes the seat that allows him to see people in the framed mirror near their table.

Virgil kicks Roman in the shin as soon as they sit down.

“Hey!”

“Oopsie,” Virgil says innocently. Roman’s eyes narrow, and Virgil hides his smile behind the menu, and then has a minor stroke when he looks at the wine list.

“Roman,” he begins.

“Breathe,” Roman says, firm. “I’m handling it. It’s fine, it’s covered.”

“Roman, there is Dom Pérignon for over a thousand dollars on this menu like that’s a common thing people order here.”

“Virgil,” Roman says patiently, “Are you gonna order a bottle of Dom Pérignon?”

Virgil chokes out, “No.”

“So it’s fine,” Roman says, and adds, “Trust me.”

Virgil hesitates, and sighs, shoulders slumping. “You’re sure,” he checks.

“I’m sure,” Roman says, and reaches over to squeeze his hand. “Tell me about your day?”

Virgil relents.

That’s how it goes, debating the pros and cons of each dish in between chatting about their days. Roman regales him with the latest tale in the saga of The Cocky Freshman, who is a slightly hilarious parallel to how Virgil used to think Roman was as a person during their freshman year, except as an actual person. Roman becomes offended whenever Virgil points this out, and Virgil hastens to assure him he doesn’t still think that, but—

“Hello, gentlemen, and welcome. Can I get you started with anything other than water this evening?”

Virgil cuts off his laughing, pressing his lips together, and Roman arches a brow at him. “Wine?”

“You know more than me,” Virgil says, which is true, but Virgil would also be the exact kind of idiot to accidentally blurt out that he wanted three bottles of Dom Pérignon, so.

Roman nods and asks for a sample of some wine that sounds French and fancy, because that is apparently a thing you can do in restaurants when ordering French and fancy wine. They do the obligatory show-the-ID’s thing, which is still kinda new to Virgil, and the waitress sweeps away as silently as she’d approached.

“Okay, so, I’m gonna get the... um, chicken cordon bleu, what have you decided on?” Roman asks, and Virgil looks at the menu.

“The cavatelli, I think?”

Roman scans the description, and snorts. “You want the rich people mac-and-cheese?”

“You say that is if you’re not about to order the rich person equivalent of stuffed chicken nuggets,” Virgil says archly.

Roman purses his lips, and admits, “Point.”

They try the fancy French wine—it is very good, Roman’s good taste prevails, as usual—and end up ordering it, and their dishes, too.

They spend the wait texting Logan about the fancy restaurant, and fielding Patton’s texts about the birthday party he’s supervising for his Dad, which includes many delightful photos of Patton in a onesie, makeup, a facemask, and with his nails being painted, in various combinations.

When the food comes, they are too busy eating and saying “I would sell all of the organs I don’t need for survival to get this daily” in as many creative ways they can.

Like. Genuinely, all mac and cheese might be ruined for him after this, which is saying something.

Once Virgil’s ensuring he’s gotten every last noodle, he looks up at Roman, grinning.

“I don’t even care about the stunt, this was too goddamn good,” Virgil says happily.

“Good, because I’m about to do it,” Roman says.

“Wha—?”

Roman slides out of the booth, and gets down on one knee.

“Virgil,” he begins. “We started talking when we were twelve, and one of the first things you told me was that men are idiots.”

Virgil laughs at the old joke, more out of habit than anything, because he’s too busy attempting to get through the shock, staring at the tiny velvet box in Roman’s hands.

“When you stopped, I was so upset I cried myself to sleep for about a week, and I was sad about it for a lot longer,” Roman says, eyes wide and earnest and fixed on him. “I still hate your awful great-aunt, by the way.”

Virgil can’t help the near-hysterical giggle that escapes him, because Roman is on one knee with a ringbox right now.

“But when I realized you were right in front of me, the whole time, and even then we were still antagonizing each other, and I couldn’t describe the emotions I felt that day if you paid me. When I realized that you were here all along. It’s the best surprise I’ve ever had in my life.”

“Me too,” Virgil manages, because: yes. Yes, that day was one of the rare times when a surprise was good.

“And then you keep on surprising me, every single day.” Roman laughs, a wild thing. “And you keep on making fun of me. Every single day.”

“And you keep on making fun of me,” Virgil says through numb lips. “Every single goddamn day.”

“I want us to keep doing that,” Roman says, beaming. “I want us to keep... to keep making fun of each other. And you make an idiot out of me, every single day, because you were right. Men really are idiots. I love you, Virgil Owens Fae. Would you do me the honor of spending the rest of our lives together?”

Virgil doesn’t even have to think before the answer.

“Yes,” Virgil says, and laughs. “Yes, Roman. Yes.”

Roman beams, then, surging to an awkward half-crouch to kiss him, and there was a smattering of “awws” and polite applause.

Oh. People had been watching them?

“The ring, babe,” Roman says, amused, and Virgil says “oh!” and sticks out his hand. Roman slides the ring on, and leans in to whisper in his ear.

“Thanks for cooperating with the stunt.”

Oh. Right. It was a stunt. A stunt Roman had promised he wouldn’t lie in, and that Virgil would have to say one little thing at the end, and—

Wait. It was a stunt.

What the hell does that say about me that I thought Roman was really proposing and I said yes? Virgil thinks wildly, thumbing the ring—and where did Roman even get a ring?!

“No lies,” Virgil checks, and Roman, looking nervous, slides back into his seat, reaches over and squeezes his hand.

“No lies,” he agrees, the barest whisper. “You’ll notice I didn’t say marry me.”

Virgil licks his lips, and whispers back, “I wasn’t lying either.”

Roman’s lips part into a surprised little o, but they can’t talk anymore, because someone in a suit has stopped in front of their table.

“Gentlemen, may I be the first to offer congratulations?”

“You may,” Roman says, beam back in place—yes, just the little look in his eyes that makes it clear he’s acting right now.

“On behalf of all of us, we’d like to bring you some champagne. Your meal will be free of charge, by way of congratulations,” the manager says, turning to Virgil with a benevolent smile, and Roman winks conspiratorially behind his back. Virgil has to press his lips together to keep from laughing.

“Well, that’s so nice of you,” Virgil manages to say. “Thanks so much.”

“May I bring a dessert menu?”

Roman and Virgil exchange a glance.

“We’re celebrating,” Roman says decisively. “Yes, please.”

“You absolute scam artist,” Virgil accuses, as soon as they get out of the car, safely back home, and Roman smiles as he shuts the car door behind him.

“You’re not mad?”

“No, I get why Logan said there would be benefits, now,” Virgil says, “and why we shouldn’t tell Patton.”

“Yeah, he’d probably disapprove,” Roman agrees, skipping in front so he could open the front door for Virgil. “But. Seriously. Not mad, not upset, not anything?”

“No, why would I be upset?” Virgil says, and Roman looks over at him with a little frown, catching Virgil’s hand in his, tugging him inside and shutting the door behind him.

“I know even talking about commitment freaks you out,” Roman says. “You know, with the curse and all.”

Virgil’s brain shuts off for the third time that night.

“Oh,” he hears his voice say.

“Shit, I said something, didn’t I?” Roman says. “I’m sorry, I know it was sketchy, and I know you hate public things, and—”

“No,” Virgil says, and then squeezes Roman’s hand to the point of it almost being painful. “No. Roman. I didn’t think of the curse at all.”

“I,” Roman says, and frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Virgil says, hearing his voice get a little hysterical, “I didn’t think of the curse. At all. It’s like I forgot about it. Like I didn’t even know it existed. Like I forgot magic existed.”

He must be looking panicked, because Roman guides him to the couch, takes both Virgil’s hands in his.

“Okay, but. But that might be a good thing, right?”

“Roman, I forgot,” Virgil chokes out. “I forgot that you said it was a stunt, I forgot about the curse, I—”

“Wait, you forgot it was a stunt?” Roman says, looking a little dumbstruck himself.

“—Roman, I didn’t even think about what that might—”

“Virgil, can we go back to the part where you forgot it was a stunt, and you said yes?!”

Virgil blinks at him, entirely thrown off. “You... you said it wasn’t a lie.”

“It wasn’t, it wasn’t,” Roman says, quick and reassuring.

“Okay, yeah, like I said, me either.”

“But. I mean.” Roman licks his lips, and says in a small voice, “You’d really marry me if we could?”

Oh.

“Roman,” Virgil says. “Has the whole ‘true love’ thing really gone over your head? You’re the one who likes all those fairy tales.”

“Okay, first of all, you love Disney too, do not even try to deny it, it’s how we became friends,” Roman says, “secondly, I just—I dunno. We’re all freaked out by commitment, and we haven’t even graduated college yet, I just. I dunno. You really... you would?”

Virgil bites his lip, and he nods, sweeping his thumbs over Roman’s knuckles.

“I love you,” Virgil says simply, and adds, “Idiot.”

Roman’s lips twitch up, and then he says, “Since it was a fake proposal, and all? Maybe that’s why your brain didn’t freak out. Because you were kinda shocked by that being the stunt, but you remembered everything I said about it beforehand.”

“Yeah,” Virgil says, seizing on that explanation. “Yeah, that’s... that’s probably it.”

“Okay,” Roman says. “Mutual freakouts all talked out?”

“Or at least surpressed for another day.”

“Yeah, okay, that’s more like it. Wanna distract ourselves by making out?”

“Yeah,” Virgil echoes, grinning, “okay.”

The fourth time, it is after Virgil fucks up very, very badly.

Dreams are supposed to be Fae domain. Virgil’s had a few potentially prophetic dreams in his time, but they’re rare and tend to be insignificant for him. (for instance, his first was at ten and cautioning him that Auntie Cora was changing the diner menu, which she’d already told him about that day, so.)

His dad’s domain was the future.

He read leaves easily, he had the vague prophetic dreams, he even dreamwalked, if Virgil’s memories are actually reliable. He’d prophesize.

It only stings a little that he’s never really been able to do that, connect some of his ability to his dad’s; the closest he can get are tarot and leaves, and even then, Virgil’s focus tends to be on the present, the past, big future events.

It stings more now that it’s the eighteenth anniversary of his death; that Virgil is close to getting older than his father ever was with each and every year.

It’s not like he means to fuck up. He’s done something along these lines a million times: dig in the grimoires for a recipe, check it thrice, put it into action, whether it was a spell or a potion or a ritual.

He still doesn’t know where he went wrong, and he’s not technically the best person to tell the story, since he was asleep the whole time: he’ll give that to someone else.

The brain is a fascinating thing to study. There’s so much unknown about something that runs so much of their lives. The science behind gut feelings and intuition specifically; that there is something scientifically viable about “good vibes” and “bad vibes,” your brain picking up on patterns and chemical signals too quick to consciously comprehend.

Logan’s gut starts to clench as soon as he approaches the house and he sees Crow in the windows, clawing at the curtains.

It’s unlike her. She’s a remarkably well-behaved cat. So he hastens to the door and opens it.

That’s when the sound hits him, like a wave—the cats, all the cats in the house, all yowling, as if they’re screaming at him, screaming for him. Logan hastily shuts the door behind him.

“Virgil?” Logan shouts over the noise. “Virgil, your cats are menaces, we’re going to get a noise complaint.”

No response. Why wouldn’t he respond? What would put the cats in such a state?

He doesn’t have time to think of that, though, as Crow rushes at him in a streak of black, and comes to a stop, tail lashing, before she moves, turning to check that he’s following.

Logan does, and at first, he almost laughs, he isn’t sure what’s wrong. It’s just Virgil, napping on the couch. At first glance, it’s fine. Almost normal.

Almost.

The room smells strongly of sage and something else, something strong—gasoline, or hairspray, or something similarly chemical and overpowering. Virgil’s laying in a way that must crick his neck, though. He’s on his back, head resting uncomfortably upright on the arm of the couch, with no pillows to support. One of his arms dangles off the edge of the couch, the other hand resting on his stomach.

The arm dangling off the couch has blood on it. Logan hastens forward, takes his arm, turns to inspect it as Crow leaps up onto Virgil’s chest, kneading anxiously.

There’s clawmarks. Clawed deep enough for him to have been bleeding sluggishly, the lines of blood going down his arm uninterrupted and gone dry—and there’s a corresponding rusty color on one of Crow’s paws.

There’s that, too. The cats yowling, Crow jumping on his chest, Crow clawing his arm, Logan shouting for him, Logan taking his arm—that would wake Virgil up. He isn’t exactly a deep sleeper, though he does take naps sporadically, it’s to make up for his troubled sleep.

“Virgil,” Logan tries. No response.

“Virgil. Wake up.” He nudges Virgil’s shoulder a little—only Virgil just shifts when he does, and still he lies there, still, unresponsive.

Logan tries to swallow. “Virgil,” he says, louder, and grabs both of his shoulders, shaking him harder. “Virgil. Wake up.”

Virgil moves when he shakes him, and when Logan lets go, he just... flops back. Like he’s...

“Virgil,” Logan repeats, voice shaking, and puts one hand under his nose, the other finding his pulse on his neck.

Yes. Yes, there it is—pulse a bit slow, but he’s breathing, so he’s not that horribly off, it just seems like he’s asleep, except...

Except there’s a glass bottle on the ground, a direct trajectory, as if Virgil had dropped it in his sleep. Logan frowns, and picks it up—there’s a little liquid left, at the bottom when he picks it upright, and he wafts the scent toward himself cautiously (he remembers his lab etiquette, thank you.)

Yes. The scent—sage and... something. Logan gags, holding the bottle away from him, and stoppers the bottle cautiously, setting it aside.

"Virgil,” he repeats, and tries shaking him, one last time. It doesn’t work. Logan swallows, and reaches over to peel an eyelid open—his pupil doesn’t constrict or dilate, not even when he tries shining his phone’s flashlight into his eye.

Logan tries to swallow, and tries to swallow again.

“Virgil,” he croaks.

(His heart is beating, Logan tells himself. His heart is beating. He’s breathing.)

He’s unlocking his phone and calling before he can even think.

“Heyo, braniac, I knew you couldn’t keep away from my dulcet—“

“Roman,” Logan bursts out, and he distantly notices how he sounds like he’s on the edge of tears, “Roman, something’s wrong, you have to come home, something’s—”

“Whoa whoa whoa, hey, what’s wrong? What do you mean?”

Logan tries to swallow, tries again.

“Logan, baby, breathe. What’s wrong?”

“I,” Logan begins, but it sticks in his throat, and he has to force the words through. “I found Virgil on the couch, and he’s—he’s breathing, but he’s not waking up, Roman, no matter what I try, he isn’t—he isn’t waking up, he’s just—”

Roman swears; it’s quiet, low, almost like he’s saying a prayer in church.

“I think it’s a potion,” Logan says, pressing a little too hard against Virgil’s pulse point, because his heart’s beating, so that must mean he’ll be okay, “There was a potion bottle on the ground, like he dropped it or something—”

“Well, hey,” Roman says. “Maybe it’s—maybe it’s just a really deep sleep potion or something. Like a superpowered nap.”

Logan tries to breathe. “Yeah,” he says, but it sounds wrong, leaving his mouth, sounds wrong having heard all the cats, seen Crow so distressed. “Yeah, maybe, but I—can you—?”

“Hey, I’m already moving to ditch work, don’t even ask,” Roman says firmly. “I’ll pick up Patton too, okay?”

Logan can breathe a little easier, then. Not like normal, but a bit easier.

“I—yes. Yes, please. Do that.”

“Okay. I’ll call him too.”

“Okay,” Logan manages to say. “I—okay. I’ll.. I’ll—”

“Lo?”

“Yes?”

“If it’s a magic thing, maybe call Cora so she can get a hold of Dee?”

Oh. Of course. Of course he should call and try to get in touch with the person who would know about it.

“Right,” he says through numb lips. “Right, of course, I’ll call Cora.”

“Okay. Hey, I love you, okay? We’ll be home as soon as we can. He’ll be okay.”

Logan swallows, brushes a hand up Virgil’s neck, to tilt his too-pale face toward him. “Yeah.”

“Okay. I love you.”

“Yeah, I—I love you too,” Logan croaks, and hangs up, only to dial again.

“Auntie Cora’s diner, how can I—?”

“Cora,” Logan says. “I’m so sorry to cut over you, but do you have Dee’s number, I’m afraid it’s urgent. Does he have a phone?”

“Logan?” Cora asks, and she sounds confused, but he can’t—

“Does he have a phone?” Logan repeats, desperation edging his voice. “I need—I need to—”

“I—hon, he doesn’t have a phone, but he’s here havin’ lunch if you—is everything okay?”

“I think Virgil’s taken some kind of potion,” Logan says, “and he’s not waking up, and I don’t—he isn’t waking up, Cora, he’s breathing but he’s not—”

“I’m getting him,” Cora says. “I’m getting him, just—just one second, okay?”

“Okay,” Logan repeats, moves to grip at Virgil’s wrist to feel at his pulse again.

It must be less than thirty seconds but it feels like forever before Virgil’s Uncle—Dee, right—says, “Logan.”

“I think Virgil took some kind of potion,” Logan says. “I—his heart is beating and he’s breathing, a bit slow, but he—he isn’t waking up, Crow clawed him and she seems anxious and the cats were just howling and I tried shaking him and shining a light in his eyes but he’s not waking up, he’s not—”

“Speed up,” Dee snaps, and Logan shuts up. That means either slow down or shut up, he thinks, maybe, Virgil’s usually the one who translates—

“The potion?”

“I—there’s a bit left in the bottle,” Logan says, forcing himself to speak evenly. “It’s black—no, wait, really dark green. It smells like sage and something really... chemical, I suppose? Like gasoline or hairspray or something similar.”

“Recipe?”

“I haven’t looked around yet.” Logan says, barely biting back his your nephew looking lifeless has taken most of my attention.

“Don’t try to find that, as slowly as you can,” Virgil’s Uncle says. “Do you know the time he wouldn’t have drunk it?”

“I—no, Virgil’s usually alone in the mornings,” Logan says, standing. Virgil usually makes potions in one of the spare rooms or in the kitchen. He carefully moves Virgil’s dangling hand to his chest, though—if it’s been dangling like that for hours, he must have lost feeling in it, by now.

“Enough time for Crow to have clawed him and for him to have bled and stopped bleeding, enough time for blood to dry. No more than six hours ago, I don’t think, that’s when I left, he was sleeping then. Normally, I mean.”

He crosses to the kitchen, and yes, there, not cleaned up, which was unlike Virgil—a cutting board and a pile of finely cut herbs, some residue still stuck to the knife, a grimoire left open on the counter. Logan squints—it’s an older one, in odd calligraphy, with faded ink and strange spellings.

And when he takes a moment to mentally translate, Logan frowns.

“Why would Virgil want a potion to increase chances of prophetic dreaming?” He asks, more to himself than anyone else, and Virgil’s Uncle makes a noise like he’s been punched.

Logan picks up the grimoire and scans the list of ingredients for anything that would make that awful chemical smell, but nothing out of the ordinary—sage, a lot of it, mugwort, xhosa dream root, blue lotus—some things not grown in the house or the garden, Logan’s fairly sure, but nothing outrageous. Logan flips it to see the cover, the spine, where some kind of marking would usually be, but. Nothing.

“This is one of the older grimoires,” Logan continues, frowning. “I’m not sure which, it’s not marked, but—”

“If it’s not marked, it’s not Maria’s,” Virgil’s Uncle says, a little hollowly. “Are you certain it’s not marked?”

Logan checks the cover, outside and in, the spine, the first few pages.

“Nothing.”

Dee curses at length, and then—

“Hi, Logan, it’s Cora—stop swearing in my diner, Dee Fae, you are not too old to stop me from hauling you out by your ear—I figured I ought to translate. He wants you to bring Virgil, and the grimoire, and as much as the potion as you can to him. Right now.”

Something in Logan’s stomach turns icy.

“Does he think—is it—did something go very wrong?” He forces out through numb lips.

“He thinks he should be able to reverse it,” she says, neatly side-stepping the question. “Are you home alone?”

Logan swallows, shoves his hair out of his face. “Roman and Patton are on their way home.”

“As soon as they get there, you come to Ligerion.”

“Is he—is he gonna be okay?” Logan asks, fingers tightening on the page, before he forces himself to let go before he tears it.

A pause.

“Dee’ll get him back to normal, honey,” she says. “Go get together what you’ll need for an overnight bag, I’ll see you soon, okay?”

Logan swallows. That pause was too long for comfort. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll—I’ll call. When we’re on the way.”

“Keep an eye on our boy, all right?” She says.

“I will, I promise,” he says, and hangs up, goes back into the living room, clutching the grimoire to his chest before sitting at the couch again.

“Hey,” Logan says, reaches out to touch Virgil’s face. Hearing is a strong sense for—for people sleeping. (Coma victims, too, but this wasn’t—this wasn’t a coma. Was it?)

“If you wake up and we’re halfway to Ligerion, I’m going to be so angry with you,” Logan says, as if if Virgil sprung awake right now Logan wouldn’t nearly collapse in relief. "And you’d have to be the one who’d call to explain to Cora and your Uncle that you’re actually okay. I don’t like talking to your Uncle, you know that.”

He sets aside the grimoire then and folds up one of Virgil’s hands in both of his, squeezing tight.

“And you have to come up with an explanation if the neighbors complain about the cats being so loud,” he adds. Crow lets out a dissenting hiss—Logan had nearly forgotten about her.

He glances around—actually, there is a slightly absurd number of cats in his living room right now, staring fixedly at Virgil, and thereby at him. How had he not noticed all the cats?

“Sorry,” he adds, awkwardly. He has no idea if they understand him the way they understand Virgil.

He looks back at Virgil’s face, rubs his thumb along Virgil’s knuckles.

“I wouldn’t be mad, really,” Logan feels the urge to clarify. “I’d be very happy if you woke up, actually. Told me I was worrying too much and that’s your job, how dare I step on your toes, or something. How dare I call everyone, don’t I know that’s embarrassing, and that you’re fine, get off your back, who am I, Patton?”

Another pause. Virgil’s face is still as ever.

“You need to tell me why you focused on prophetic dreams, when you wake up,” he adds. “I can’t remember if you’ve ever mentioned it before. You usually tell me when you’re going to try something different. It doesn’t seem like something you’d be interested in.”

On and on he talks, and on and on, Virgil doesn’t respond.

There’s a woman behind the soda bar that Virgil only distantly recognizes.

He can only distantly recognize that he’s at the soda counter, too—it seems much taller than usual, but he doesn’t really care about that right now, too busy staring at the woman’s back.

There’s the distant rumble of noise, like someone’s got the radio turned onto a talk show, except Cora hates radio talk shows, said if she wanted to listen to someone ramble about music or politics she’d ask the nearest customer, thanks very much. It keeps fading in and out like a radio, anyway, snatches of words that Virgil can’t quite catch. The woman’s voice is much clearer.

She’s murmuring to herself—the way Cora does whenever she’s making sure an order is all right on the plate before they go out to the tables—and she turns, then, smiling.

He recognizes that face. He recognizes that outfit, even—he’s only ever seen her like this in photo albums, though.

“Mama,” Virgil says, and his voice sounds high-pitched, even to his own ears.

She leans to smile at him, pinches his cheek gently in her hands.

“Virgil, baby, I know you’re sleepy,” she says, braids swinging. Another plate appears on the counter behind her. “But I want you to listen, okay? And remember.”

Virgil knows this. “I did, Mom,” he says. “I did. You told me—”

“When I was a little younger than you are now—“

“Your parents died,” Virgil continues, voice the barest whisper. He could recite this in his sleep. Another plate appears.

She continues like he hasn’t even talked. Another plate appears.“And I moved to Loch Ligerion to live with my Auntie Cora and my Uncle Virgil.”

Another plate appears.

“Mom? Mom, you told me this. You told me this before bed the night before you died.”

“Yes, exactly like you,” she says. Another plate appears. “We named you after him.”

“Mom,” Virgil tries to shout, but no matter how loud he yells, how many things he throws, how much he moves his stubby, tiny legs, she doesn’t look away from the counter where he’d been sitting, smiling and smiling and smiling even as the plates behind her stacked so high they started toppling, ceramic shattering on the ground, except for when it starts to splash into the dark, black water sinking into the restaurant.

She doesn’t stop talking even when Virgil has to swim to the counter to stand—she doesn’t stop talking when her face is swallowed up by the water—she doesn’t stop talking—

“—that time, you know, back when we were in the dorms and it smelled so awful we had to crack the windows for three days, even though there was a snowstorm? Looking back, I don’t see why you didn’t just curse him right then and there, it’d have saved us trouble, down the line—”

“Logan, hey, we’re home,” Roman calls, as Patton drops their bags and starts moving forward immediately.

“Living room,” his voice floats, and he and Patton exchange a glance before entering the living room before coming to a dead stop.

“Whoa,” Patton says faintly.

Whoa is right. There are more cats congregated within this room than he’s ever seen in one room before, maybe even including pet stores and adoption sites. Logan pushes his glasses up with one hand, doesn’t let go of Virgil’s hand, tries to smile.

“Hey,” Logan says, voice tight.

Roman’s already crossing the room to pull Logan into an awkward hug—he’s hunched over him, and Logan hasn’t gotten up from where he’s perched on the edge of the couch, only hugging him with one arm, the other hand still holding Virgil’s.

“Not stirring at all, huh?” Roman asks.

Logan says, “Virgil’s Uncle wants us to bring him down to Ligerion.”

Oh. Oh, shit, it’s bad, then.

“I—I should have packed a bag,” Logan says, “I should have packed before you came home—”

“No, it’s okay,” Patton says quickly, “I got everything, don’t you worry. Bags’re still in the closet, right?”

“Should be,” Logan says, and Patton rushes up the stairs.

"Should we move him into the car, do you think?” Roman asks.

“I—yes, probably,” Logan says. “Do you need a hand, or—?”

“No, I think I got him,” Roman says, “Just—grab the...” he gestures vaguely to the grimoire and potion bottle on the table.

“Right,” Logan says, and moves to get Crow off Virgil’s chest. Crow digs her claws into Virgil, and crouches, hissing, ears flattened, and Logan snatches his hands away, as if she was about to claw him.

“Crow,” Roman says. “Crow, I’m about to move Virgil, if you could get off? And keep an eye on him while we’re getting everything packed up.”

Crow hesitates, considering, before she leaps to the ground.

“Thank you,” he tells her, because it can’t hurt to be polite. Logan moves off the edge of the couch, and Roman bends, carefully worming his arms under the crook of Virgil’s knees and bracing along his shoulders, before he lifts with his legs, not his back, because the last thing they needed was for Roman to throw out his back right now.

Virgil’s a bit heavy, and his head lolls back when Roman lifts him all the way, and Roman’s stomach churns to see it. He shuffles his grip a little, just to be sure he doesn’t drop him.

“It’s a shame he’s not awake,” Roman jokes weakly, “However, I will make fun of him until the end of time that I had to do this, regardless.”

Logan laughs, equally weakly, and Patton clatters down the stairs, holding three duffle bags that looked like they were stuffed full of the first clothes that he laid eyes on.

“Ready to go?” Patton says, and Logan nods, careful to grab the potion bottle and the grimoire, and moves to the front of their strange procession: Logan, Roman carrying an unconscious Virgil, a cat, and Patton weighted down with bags.

Logan opens the front door, and Roman has to squeeze them through sideways to make sure he doesn’t bump Virgil’s head on a doorframe, and Logan opens the door to the backseat, where Roman manages to get him in, lying mostly horizontally, as Patton puts the duffles in the trunk.

Logan reaches for the keys Patton is holding, and Patton snatches them away, frowning.

“What are you doing?”

“I can drive,” Logan says, a stubborn set to his mouth.

“You’re panicking and I need you to navigate, so no, you’re not,” Patton says stubbornly.

“Patton, I’m—”

“We don’t have time to argue about you denying that you’re feeling emotions right now, and we can trade off,” Patton says bluntly. “I’ll take first shift. I have the most experience with, one, driving while emotionally freaking out, two, looking into the backseat while driving, and three, I’m driving. The longer we argue, the longer Virgil has to wait. Clear?”

Patton doesn’t get bossy very often, but when he does, it works. Roman and Logan exchange a glance, before they get into the car.

They manage to buckle Virgil in the middle, but he mostly just lays across them—head in Roman’s lap, legs curled up in Logan’s—as Patton reaches back absently and drives one-handed, the other holding one of Virgil’s hands. Crow claims the place where Virgil’s feet would normally go, staring up at him intently.

Logan starts messing with his phone as soon as they hit the highway.

“Cora? Yes, it’s Logan... yes, we’re on the highway, we’ll be swapping off drivers as we go... No, there’s been no change... yes, me too... I will... All right. See you soon.”

More fussing, and then: music.

Logan sets his phone in a cupholder, so the sound radiates better, a stubborn set to his jaw. It’s a song that’s more suited to Virgil than Logan—drums and guitar and emo lyrics.

“People absorb sound in their sleep,” he says, stiff. “You’ve seen it on TV.”

“You mean like how doctors tell people to talk to coma victims?” Roman says, and immediately wants to go back in time to punch himself at the way Logan goes even stiffer.

“Yes,” he says, quiet. “Same concept.”

Roman reaches over, squeezes his shoulder, mouths sorry when he looks at him. Logan sighs, squeezes his hand.

“That’s a smart idea, Lo,” Patton says from the front. “Was that why you were talking to him when we came in?”

“Yes,” Logan says. “I thought maybe—I don’t know, that it would help,” he admits, cheeks going red.

“It’s a good idea,” Roman reaffirms. “He always listens to music on long car rides, he’d like this.”

“He always listens to music, period,” Patton says fondly. “Sometimes I wonder if his headphones are surgically attached.”

Roman snorts, cards his fingers through Virgil’s hair, brushes against the shell of his ear. “I can’t believe you’ve managed to con us into listening to your emo music the whole car ride and you’re not even awake to be obnoxious about it,” Roman tells him. “The audacity.”

“Audio-city,” Patton suggests, and Roman laughs as Logan groans.

That’s how the car ride passes; they pull over twice, to swap in Roman to drive, and then Logan, but for the most part, they let Virgil’s music play, never skipping a song, and make little comments like oh I remember I walked him on him singing this song once while he was doing dishes and he wouldn’t look at me the rest of the day, he was so shy back then, or I made him dance with me to this one once, I bet I still remember the choreography, letting the conversation carry and stretch over the tension filling the car.

Crow moves around a lot; from the space where Virgil’s feet should be, to just close enough that she’d be in his arms, in the space behind his knees, even puts her head on his cheek, at one point. Roman reaches out to pet her a little, sometimes; it’s nice to know that she was looking out for him while they were away, that she loves him as much as he loves her.

Those comments happen less and less the closer they get to Ligerion; they don’t say anything at all by the time Logan pulls off the highway exit and starts the meandering path to House Fae, which is over exceedingly bumpy dirt roads. No matter how badly Virgil jostles, he doesn’t react, and it—

It’s not. A great feeling, being the one to help hold him still as Patton makes sure his head doesn’t hit anything. Because Virgil’s usually such a light sleeper, he’s been known to wake up if Roman’s too noisy getting up to get water in the middle of the night, and—

“Here,” Logan says tersely, and at last reaches to shut off the music, turning back to face them. “Do you need help getting him out?”

“I think we can manage it,” Patton says. “Roman, I think—should we carry him together, arms-over-shoulders?”

“Yeah,” Roman says. “Yeah, okay, I’ll—I’ll slide out and come back around and we can get him out together, with Logan as backup to make sure we don’t drop him?”

“Gotcha,” Logan says.

It’s a bit of a production, but once they slide him out of the car and onto the ground, it’s manageable. Once they stand with his arms around their shoulders, Roman and Patton both wrapping an arm around his waist, the door flies open.

“Get out,” Virgil’s Uncle snaps, from where he’s beckoning them rapidly to the front door, and Logan dives back into the car to grab the grimoire and the potion as Roman and Patton shuffle Virgil forward, Virgil’s head lolling and bare feet dragging on the ground.

Cora’s waiting inside, and she says “Boys” and gestures them to a fold-out couch that’s already been made up.

“Patton, his head,” Roman says, and they slowly guide him to sitting, Patton taking the brunt of his upper body weight as Roman carefully swings his feet so they’re on the bed, Patton adjusting him so he’s laying down with his head on the pillow.

Crow leaps up immediately to curl onto the space of the pillow unoccupied by Virgil’s head, and Cora almost smiles when she sees her, settling a blanket on top of Virgil.

“You had a stowaway, hm?”

“She’s been looking after him all day,” Roman says, turns Virgil’s arm and frowns at the dried blood—he’d noticed it but they hadn’t had any time to clean his arm up. “Tried waking him up, too.”

Cora makes a soft noise, but it’s interrupted by Dee carrying an armful of magic supplies into the room, dumping them unceremoniously on the coffee table.

“Potion,” he snaps at Logan, who hastily hands over the bottle.

Roman doesn’t pay attention to what he does next—Cora’s taken a seat on the bed, taking Virgil’s hand and stretching his arm out, dabbing it softly with a wet wipe she’s taken out of her purse.

Roman takes his other hand, pushes it against Roman’s cheek, before he kisses his palm, then holds Virgil’s hand to his chest, wrapped up in both of Roman’s hands.

The first time Virgil had done that, very early in their relationship, he’d blushed such a cute shade of pink when Roman reached over to cup his cheek. Taken Roman’s hand in his, kissed his palm, then pressed Roman’s hand against his chest. He’d done it more and more, with more and more confidence each time, and Roman was so, so proud of him every single time.

You gotta wake up, Roman thinks. You gotta get up so I can see you do that without doubting yourself even a hundredth of a percent one day.

“What are you doing?” Logan rasps, and Roman turns, just enough, to see Dee carefully dipping a paintbrush into a test tube, which—okay, Roman had no idea what was going on, but that was par for the course for magic—and carefully paint in broad swaths across a piece of parchment.

“It won’t tell me the ingredients, to see if something got in there that shouldn’t have,” Dee says. “Maria’s recipes were notoriously stable.”

Roman watches as the broad paint strokes coalesce into words, shiny, inky bits of script, and he watched as Virgil’s Uncle traces a finger down each list, comparing each.

Patton sits next to Logan, wraps an arm around his shoulders and pulls him closer into his side, and Logan doesn’t protest, moves when Patton moves him.

“Do they match?”

“No,” Dee says. “Not perfectly.”

“Perfectly, then,” Cora checks. “So we know that’s not the cause, at least.”

Dee scowls, and buries himself in the nearest grimoire. Roman resigns himself to a long night of trading off holding Virgil’s hands, of worry and coffee and hunting for a solution.

For now, though, he’ll keep holding Virgil’s hand. Just until Logan or Patton wants to take over.

The loch is black and dark and deep.

Virgil knows all the legends. Of course he does, he's a Fae. He knows all the legends about magic in Loch Ligerion because he's part of the source of all the magic in Loch Ligerion. But no one ever really goes into the lake. No one ever swims there. Not even Faes, reckless and daring and wild as they are. Maybe it's something to do with the water, so dark, so unnaturally dark. Or how cold it is, even in the middle of a heatwave. But there have always been myths surrounding the loch, and even Virgil can't help but feel wary of it. Magic knows magic, after all.

And the only things that have ever been found swimming in that lake are corpses.

"But it looks so nice," someone says. They sound like they're frowning. "And it's so hot out."

Yes. Yes, it is hot out. Virgil hadn't even noticed until they said something, but now it's all he can notice: the sweltering heat, the sweat on his brow, how very parched his throat is, and how deep and inviting the water looks. Even if it might be a darker magic than even a Fae would mess with.

"We can go home," Virgil says, and he can't turn his head to see who's with him. "I should go home."

"Do you know the way?" the voice says.

“Of course I know the way,” Virgil says.

“Are you sure?” The voice laughs, and Virgil looks across the loch.

His house is there. Except his house is a mile from the loch. It shouldn’t be there. Here. He shouldn’t be here.

“Oh, Virgil, I know you shouldn’t be here,” a voice purrs, deeper and deeper with each second. “Don’t you?”

Yes. Yes, he knows.

Doesn’t he?

“It didn’t stop you, did it? Not from fooling with magic.”

“I always fool with magic,” Virgil says, and his voice sounds distant, even to his own ears. “I’m a Fae, that’s what we do.”

It’s hot. It’s so, so hot. Virgil feels like he’s about to melt into a puddle.

“Perhaps you’ve fiddled with it too far,” the voice muses. “Now. Do you want to go home or not?”

Yes. Yes, he wants to go home. But not through the loch. Not there. He can’t go through the loch. He can walk—

“Oh, can you?”

Virgil can’t walk. He can’t move, he can’t move, he can’t move—

He can only jump into the water. He knows it before he even has to try.

“Go on, Virgil,” the voice laughs, and it’s so deep and loud that it sends the leaves shaking and falling from the trees, even though they’re green and fresh as they could be, and they sink down below the black water, stems bobbing up blackened and crumbling to ash on the surface, “go on. Try and go home.”

“How long has it been since you slept?” Patton asks Logan, rubbing his shoulder, ignoring the stinging in his own eyes.

Logan’s lips go thin and stubborn.

“He’s been asleep for four days,” Logan says tightly.

“It won’t help him if you collapse,” Patton says sharply. “Even Dee’s taken a break, at this point. You can’t keep researching when you have to drink coffee every twenty minutes just to stay upright.”

Logan bites his lip, hard. Patton wants to free it.

“Please,” Patton says. “Please, just for an hour or two. You’ll be able to think so much clearer once you do.”

“That...”

“Makes sense, because I’m right,” Patton says. “It won’t do us any good if you manage to stay up so late you put yourself into a—” Patton cuts himself off. Logan shudders.

“If you stay up so late I put myself into a coma too, you meant.”

“Logan,” Patton begins, but Logan closes his eyes.

“You’re right,” he says. “You’re right. Okay. I’ll take a nap.”

Patton lets out a soft sigh of relief, and leans in to kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you,” he says fervently. “Roman’s there, too. I’ll do grimoire patrol, if it makes you feel any better.”

“It does,” he says wearily. “I—you’ll wake me up? If anything happens?”

“Of course I will,” Patton says softly. “C’mon, I just took your pajamas out of the dryer.”

Patton guides him through it, Logan stumbling with exhaustion—Patton wonders briefly if he’d waited longer, if he’d have found Logan collapsed over a grimoire when he went to get him for dinner—and then into Virgil’s bedroom.

Roman’s already curled up on Virgil’s right side, sleeping peacefully, head pillowed on his chest. Crow’s curled up at their feet. Virgil’s since been changed into pajamas—a short sleeved shirt, comfy pants—and tucked into his own bed.

They figured yesterday morning that he’d be more comfortable that way.

Logan gets under the covers on his left side, curls shyly around Virgil so that he’s holding Roman’s wrist; Roman snuffles in his sleep.

“Okay,” Patton says. “Sleep well.”

“I’m hoping Virgil doesn’t for much longer,” Logan murmurs, and Patton swallows, tries for a smile.

“Me too,” he says, and turns the lights back off.

He closes the door behind him, and presses his back against it, sinking to the ground.

He hates it. He hates this, he hates it, he hates it. He hates seeing Logan drawn so tight and stressed, he hates seeing Roman feeling like he’s useless, he hates seeing Virgil lying so pale and still.

Patton wonders if it’s possible to go back in time to flying tackle Maria before she ever wrote down that stupid, stupid recipe. It seems like one of the only solutions they haven’t thought of yet.

They’d tried what felt like everything. They tried the true love’s kiss cliche, Dee had tried reverse-engineering the potion, he’d tried every quick-fix wake-up spell, potion, and ritual he could. So now they were combing through Virgil’s family’s extensive library and hoping, praying, that they found something that would work.

At this point, Patton felt like they were hauling every book that even had the word “sleep” in it in front of Virgil’s Uncle. Speaking of—

Patton sighs, and trods toward the library.

He goes back through the stack of books Logan had left behind—even if he’d gone through them, he was so close to passing out that Patton wouldn’t be surprised if he missed something—and tugs the top one off the stack.

He also hates reading these. They’re all in this tiny copperplate cursive, and a lot of Virgil’s relatives had really bad handwriting, and also some of the spells and potions they’ve written down make Patton really uncomfortable about the implications (like, who even needs a spell for depleting the city’s food supplies??? who even does that?)

He’s gone through three when he hears footsteps, and he turns to face the door.

Roman’s in the same clothes he’s been in for two days, and he plods over to the table, sitting down and picking up a grimoire at random.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Roman says. “You finally talked Logan into a nap, hm?”

“I think he just needed to be steered toward a horizontal surface,” Patton says.

“I’m not gonna have to talk you into that too, am I?” Roman says, and Patton tries for a smile.

It falls flat, judging by the look on Roman’s face.

“We’ll find it soon,” Roman says, squeezing Patton’s wrist. “He’ll wake up.”

Patton takes in a deep breath. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, he will.”

Cora brings them their meals.

She’s mostly abandoned the diner, only goes there to get the food, but Patton walks with her, sometimes. Partially because she might need a hand carrying everything, and partially because watching Virgil lie there, in white, so still, creates uncomfortable echoes in his head of when he was thirteen and his mother had lost all her hair and he’d had to watch her sleep the days away, too.

He’s doing that for dinner today.

The path from the house to Cora’s is well-worn—Patton can’t help but think of Virgil, ages six to sixteen, walking this path practically every day.

“How’s he been?” Cora asks, and Patton shrugs.

“The same,” he says, quiet.

Cora sighs, a heavy thing, and for a second she looks as old as he is. “My idiot nephew,” she murmurs. “It’s all that Fae blood, believe you me.”

Patton tries for a smile, and says, “Dee would probably get offended.”

Cora tries for a laugh. “He’d know I’m right.”

The days have been full of a lot of that: trying to carry on conversation as normal, as if the person that bound them all wasn’t in a coma with no plan on how to get him out of it.

She walks into the diner. It’s after the dinner rush, so there’s only a few stragglers and the teenage part-timers who wait tables. Patton helps pick out entrees and does the prep work she tells him to do. Chopping vegetables and boiling water is almost comfortingly familiar—if they were at home, Patton would probably be making all four of them dinner, Patton and Roman talking about work, Logan grousing about classes, Virgil plotting aloud about the clients he’d have that night.

But now he’s just trying to force small-talk with Virgil’s great-aunt, and the amount of people who should be eating is all wrong, and it’s only as comforting as long as it lasts and if he doesn’t think of anything else.

Historically, Patton’s never been very good at that.

Patton plates up pasta in the to-go containers, and Cora loads it into bags, giving Patton more bags, because Patton had been having fits of chivalry whenever she tried to take more things than him.

They walk back in silence. That’s the norm.

They all eat in silence, buried in grimoires. That’s the norm, too.

Eventually, they relocate to Virgil’s room—Dee and Logan tote piles of grimoires, Roman and Cora fuss with Virgil’s hair and wipe any sweat off his brow, and Patton...

Patton frets.

He guesses that’s normal enough.

There’s a light on in the kitchen. Because that’s where Virgil is—the kitchen of House Fae Loch Ligerion. With the same familiar potted plants strewn across every available surface, or dangling from the ceiling. The sun’s shining gently through the window. Not yet sunset, which means the time for clients isn’t quite there yet. But soon.

“Did you ever grow out of hating tea?”

Virgil blinks, and looks over. “You know I have, Uncle,” he begins, except he turns around and there’s no scales or scar on his face.

“Dad,” Virgil chokes out.

His father smiles. Virgil’s seen that in both pictures of him and pictures of himself. “I think you know I’m a dream.”

He does.

“Question still stands, though,” his dad says. “The only limit is your imagination here.”

“One of Cora’s butterscotch milkshakes,” Virgil says, and his father laughs.

“She always had those butterscotch candies when I was a kid, too,” his father says fondly, and a frosty glass is set before him, his father cradling a cup of tea for himself. “Good to know you’ve inherited your mother’s sweet tooth.”

Virgil licks his lips, and asks at last, “Why was she in the diner? In that first dream, I mean.”

He’s had so many dreams he can hardly keep track of them all. The diner isn’t the only one she’s appeared in, but it has been the most upsetting. The black water of the loch keeps chasing him, and he’s afraid that it’ll rise up past his neck in the next one. Swallow him down.

“Nightmares are much scarier when you think you’re seeing the future,” his father says. “I would know.”

“Did you have them often?”

“Sometimes,” he says, a frustratingly vague answer. Then, “Why did you drink that potion, Virgil?”

Virgil hesitates, and says, “I’m twenty-three, now. It’s been eighteen years since you died. In two I’ll have lived for about four times as many years as I ever knew you. In three I’ll outlive you.”

“Yes,” his father says, “but why did you drink it?”

“You saw the future a lot. Didn’t you? That was your gift.”

“It was, but that’s not why you drank it.” He holds up a hand to forestall Virgil’s arguments. “It might be part of it, but I think you know there’s more to it than that.”

There’s a knock at the door.

“Come in, Vi, we have to talk our son through a crisis,” his father calls, and his mother sweeps through the door, smiling and pouring herself a mug of something—hot chocolate, maybe?—before sitting beside his father.

They’re young. They’re so, so young.

“You’re not old enough for it to be a midlife crisis, yet,” Mom scolds.

“Logan calls it an ongoing quarter-life crises,” Virgil says, and both his parents laugh.

“Those boys of yours,” his father comments.

“I love them.”

“We know, baby,” his mother says.

“Am I going to be able to go back?”

“Yes,” his father says. “Not yet. But soon.”

Yes meant he’d see them. That’s good enough for Virgil.

“You have to answer the question first,” his mother says. “Why did you drink it?”

Virgil takes a sip of the butterscotch milkshake, holds it in his mouth before he swallows it down. It tastes more like snow than candy.

"I’ve never been able to see the future very clearly,” Virgil says slowly. “I... I don’t know. I was missing you. I wanted to see—”

“See what?”

Virgil worries his lip between his teeth, and says, “I’m terrified of beetles, did you know that?”

They both incline their heads. Right. They’re dreams. His dreams, at that.

“I don’t want to hear that clicking ever again,” Virgil says. “I—I don’t know. I wanted to see if they’re right, if we broke the curse.”

“And if you did?” his mother says. “What would you want to see then?”

Virgil hesitates. He knows what he wants.

“I just want them,” Virgil says. “I want... I want them. Patton and Logan and Roman. However they’d have me, for as long as they’d have me.”

His parents smile.

“And if they asked you? How you wanted to have them,” his mother prompts.

Virgil takes another sip. It’s sweeter, now.

“When Roman ran that scam,” Virgil says. “I said yes.”

Even softer, he says, “I’d say yes to all of them.”

The sun is setting. People will wander up the bluestone path any time now.

His father says, “Cora knows the story, it was her place. Did she ever tell you that your mother fake-proposed to me in a restaurant, too?”

Virgil blinks, once, twice. He’d recognize that ceiling anywhere.

He’s back in Loch Ligerion. He’s back in his room at Loch Ligerion.

His mouth also tastes terrible, just as a sidenote. Like, genuinely, so bad. He’s going to have to brush his teeth like five times. His room smells like Cora’s veggie pasta.

“Oh my God,” someone says, and Virgil turns his head, squinting in the light.

“Auntie?”

“Oh, my God,” Roman joins in, and then there’s a cacophony of sound—oh my God and you’re awake and this isn’t a relief at all and VirgilVirgilVirgilVirgil—

“I—what?” Virgil says, pushing himself up onto his elbow and rubbing his eye. “How long was I out?”

“Four days,” Patton says, and his green eyes are shiny with tears, and oh no, he’s—

Wait.

“Four days?!” Virgil demands. “Like. Ninety-six hours, four days?!”

“You idiot,” Crow hisses.

“Well, we don’t know precise timing, since you were alone when you took the potion,” Logan says, and Virgil pushes himself up so he can see Uncle, who’s hovering behind Auntie.

“Wasn’t the potion just supposed to help with dreaming, not knock me into a coma?!”

“No, you’re entirely wrong,” Uncle says, and Virgil tries to sit up and has to fall back against his elbows again, head swimming, vision blacked out.

“Whoa.”

“Take it slow,” Logan cautions, “the blood rush is probably going to be something else—“

“Oh, Virgil, you must be hungry—“

“—shouldn’t sit up so quickly—“

“—so happy you’re up, oh my God—“

“—should have been true love’s kiss, you know that right—?”

“—have not been worried at all about your general welfare—“

Virgil looks at his Auntie, his Uncle, his three boyfriends, all shouting over each other.

He loves them. He loves them all so much.

And, you know what? He’s okay with how much he loves his boyfriends. How much he wants them to be his and him to be theirs, for as long as possible.

Virgil wonders again where Roman laid hands on a ring at such short notice.

He loses track of how much he thinks about marriage, after that.

When he was little, he’d never really understood why his family had invited them to weddings, or come to Ligerion to get married themselves. The curse was a bedtime story, the monster in the far future, the only conceivable monster that their magic would never be able to fight off, why would they allow themselves to get close like that?

He gets that now. He gets it. He gets it when Logan buries himself in a corner to read a new book, and gets so deeply entrenched in the plot in the characters, from New York Times bestsellers to discount mystery books bought by the stack, because every book is Logan’s favorite book. He gets it when he goes to pick Patton up from work and sees him on the playground, bandaging some poor kid’s scraped knee and obligingly dropping a kiss onto it when they ask and being tugged around by little kids shouting Mister Pat Mister Pat Mister Pat! and him following after, trying to pay attention to each and every kid. He gets it when Roman’s scrawling all over his script pages in a color-coded system so contrived that even Roman didn’t really get it, but was too stubborn to really stop doing it.

He gets the idea of wanting to spend his life with someone else—three very specific someone elses, really.

He buys the rings two weeks after the return from Loch Ligerion, after he’d researched marriage alternatives for poly relationships. He hopes Roman and Logan are still up for planning something wedding-like; a statement of vows seems like it could warrant an occasion for a massive dessert bar, didn’t it? Knowing them, it would take months.

But that’s okay. They have nothing but time.

#my post #text #lfl #my fic #my fanfic #sanders sides fanfic #sanders sides fic

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iwriteficsandmore · 5 years

Text

At long last

I promised it would come. And I finally had the time to finish it. The first chapter to what will eventually be my hawks x oc fic, which I’m tentatively titling “Interview with a Winged Hero”. It might seem long compared to what I usually write here, but that’s my usual length for chapters most of the time. So, here it is. Really sorry about the grammatical errors and everything, especially if it’s disrupting. It’s almost midnight and I needa get up in five hours for school, but wanted to post this before anything else.

Thing is though that it’s about 26 pages long. Can’t really post that here without making a mess.

So here’s where they’re posted on FF and AO3.

I’d really ‘preciate some input on how it’s looking :) I’m hoping to edit it in the future (if not fully on rewrite it) and get on writing the ch2 when I get time. But enough of that. I’m sure you guys need some convincing to click those, so have a little preview under the cut ♥

|Five years ago—Tokyo|

The blinding blue light of her computer screen reflected at her from the glass of red rimmed glasses, tiring her sight and making Miryoku reach underneath them to rub at her tired eyes.

Fourteen straight hours of researching online about the up and coming 'Winged Hero' and the next eight writing up a rough draft of the article snatched most of her day up without her noticing. She had gotten too into this without meaning to. Much like everything else that caught her attention, it absorbed her and blinded her to her surroundings. Even gramps knew not to bother her when she was like that and had only left her some taiyaki for her to snack on when she waved off going downstairs to properly eat dinner.

But even that small period of starvation proved useless when she had spent the last couple of hours stuck while writing. For as inspired as she had been, it proved harder the further she wrote into it. Each time she reread what she had, it only made it all the clearer how superficial it all sounded. It hadn't bothered her too much at first. It was just some lousy contest that she was writing this for after all. But she couldn't help it. No matter what it was for, this was still something she wrote. It was a piece she put heart and time into. It was something that interested her for once. And because of that, it was easily becoming a work of pride for her. As such, just any half-assed written paper wouldn't do. If she was going to do this, she was going to do it the right way.

That 'right way' though continued to elude her way into the early hours of working.

Now at 3:54 in the morning, her stomach rumbled in blatant criticism of her poor health decisions. She was dying of hunger which only added to her already carved in frustration. And surely gramps had only bought the taiyaki for dinner like he always did when she left him to fend for himself where food was concerned. There wasn't anything in the fridge either since she hadn't gone grocery shopping with how engrossed she'd become working on the dumb article. How is he still alive after living like for all these years? Resigning with a hefty groan, Miryoku leaned back in her chair to stare at the dark ceiling of her room for a minute.

"Guess konbini bento it is."

Jumping out of her chair, Miryoku snatched a spare jacket from the floor along with her wallet and quietly sprinted down the stairs of their home, making extra sure that her grandfather was asleep before shoving her shoes on and walking out the front door. Sprinting halfway there, Miryoku felt her chest burn as the icy, winter air entered her lungs finally making her continue in a brisk walk instead. Donning her jacket and pulling the hood over her hair, she adjusted her glasses that had slipped down her nose and stared up and head through the empty streets of her neighborhood.

So quiet and peaceful. Despite being a short distance from the apex of Tokyo, where her gramps lived was part of the more dilapidated part of town. More seniors lived around these parts than anything and though it had great dining options, they weren't places that meritted going without company. Which is why she thanked her lucky stars that a konbini was within fair walking distance from their house.

Miryoku didn't take long to pick out her bento and a few choice items before heading out with a hefty bag full of snacks in hand. It was while mindlessly walking ahead while struggling to put her wallet away in her back pocket that a chill ran down her spine a moment before a large hand snagged said item from her grasp.

"Hey!"

The thief didn't spare her a glance as he ran off at full speed. It took a moment of grounding herself before Miryoku sprinted after him too with her bag hanging behind her. "Get back here, you bastard!"

But keeping him in sight proved harder than she thought though with how badly in shape she was. Soon, Miryoku noticed him getting further and further away and when she thought she'd definitely lose him, she took a last ditch effort to stop him. Grabbing the bag full of snacks in both hands, Miryoku sprinted with all she had before hauling the bag and everything in it right at the thief's back. True to its aim, the heavy bag struck him and made him lose momentum but didn't make him stop.

No!

But just as she thought he'd surely get away, small flashes of red darted past the corner of her vision, the light from the streetlights making their color all the more vibrant as they caught the thief's clothes and shoved him to the ground with unbelievable strength, effectively pinning him in the street for good measure.

Miryoku stopped in her tracks, breathing heavy and shallow as she adjusted her glasses again to get a better look of what'd happened. Half her groceries were scattered on the floor, and not far from the thief her wallet itself, but what caught her attention most were the large crimson feathers that pierced through the man's clothes and deep into the asphalt street.

"Sorry 'bout that!" The carefree tone that floated above her made her turn skyward just in time to see a blur of red fall a few feet from her. Miryoku covered her face from the rush of air that fell on her and blinked at the large, crimson wings that unfurled before her as the owner turned to face her.

Amber eyes stared back at her and a satisfied smile spread across the face of the man she had spent the whole day learning about.

"Oh, here," Hawks said, sprinted up to her wallet that was the nearest thing to him and passing it on to her. "Gotta say, you're lucky I heard ya when I did otherwise there'd go your money. Nice hit, by the way, though your groceries might've suffered some casualties."

Miryoku blinked in utter disbelief as the man bend over to readily pick up the snacks that had stumbled out of the plastic bag when she threw it. Seeing him do this snapped her out of her stupor but just when she was going to help him pick the rest off the streets, she got caught off guard by the flurry of red feathers that effortlessly went about picking up the rest. In a matter of minutes, Hawks approached her with an open bag as his feather deposited the items they retrieved and passed on the full bag back to her with a grin on his face.

"Here ya go."

Carefully, she took it in her hands, thanking him under her breath and watched him from a few feet away as he dealt with the thief. Curious and without knowing, Miryoku mindlessly followed him back to the konbini where he and the cashier took care of calling the police. She honestly didn't know why she stayed behind and waited with them for the authorities to arrive but when they did and she gave her statement about what happened, Miryoku finally decided to head back home when she found him busy talking to the police. A small part of her had wanted to talk to him if even for a few minutes. Just a few words to help her out of her writer's block. But that was too much too hope for. Even she knew that. And even if the opportunity had risen, Miryoku would've no doubt spoiled it somehow with her more than lacking social skills.

Decidedly leaving the konbini behind, she stared down at her feet as she walked through the empty streets. Her mind reeled with what had just happened despite the quietness that surrounded her. The blur of red that flashed right before her eyes—it reminded her of lightning, but faster. Much, much faster.

Too fast.

"Miss, dontcha think it's unsafe to walk by yourself about what just happened to ya?"

Vibrant red blocked her vision for a moment before amber eyes met with hers. Miryoku yelped out and held a hand to her chest from the heart attack that the winged man gave her by appearing out of the blue in front of her. Mumbling under her breath, she kept looking back and forth from where she'd left the konbini behind and him questioning from where the hell he'd come from.

A bubbly chuckle came out of him as he landed before her, his huge wings tucking themselves behind him as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Leaning on one leg, he tilted his head and grinned, "Sorry 'bout that."

"It's alright," she said. Looking back once more, she stared back at him confused. "Not to be rude but what are you doing here?"

"Oh, right!" The feathers on his wings rustled when he perked up, startling Miryoku a little from the sudden movement. "I came here 'cause I thought you'd want a ride home with the police after what happened."

"I don't need it," she quickly retorted.

"Ya just got mugged though."

"And I'm fine." Miryoku couldn't help being miffed at his insinuation. "I thank you for helping me back there but I'm not that helpless. So thanks, but no thanks about the ride. Besides, my house is pretty close by. I'll be fine getting back by myself."

Hawks' brow furrowed and his nose scrunched up as he frowned. Seemingly at odds with himself, he rubbed the back of his back for a moment before his eyes widened in realization and he smiled that goofy grin back at her again.

"Then let me walk ya back!"

"No thank you."

Not waiting for his answer, Miryoku sidestepped him and walked off on her own. That didn't last for long before she heard the soft flapping of wings following behind her. Glancing over her shoulder, she glared back at Hawks who stopped dead in his tracks, hovering a few inches off the floor as he followed behind her with a nervous grin.

"Ya don't have to give me that look."

A small tick grew on her jaw. "I already said no thanks." She gave him her back and kept walking ahead despite still hearing the soft beating of his wings as he flew behind her, "And besides, don't you have a mugger to report?"

"The cops took care of him, so my job's done where that's concerned."

"Then you should head home yourself. It's quite late to be out and about."

"I could say the same about ya, missy."

"Yeah, well…" When she couldn't come up with anything, heat rushed up her neck and to her ears. "I seriously don't need you to accompany me to my house."

"What kind of hero would I be if I didn't escort a lady like yourself?"

"One with too much time on his hands, that's for sure," she mumbled under her breath.

"Ha!" Hawks laughed finally flying beside her, his lower feathers brushing carelessly against her arm. "You couldn't be more wrong, missy."

"You really don't know when to be quiet, do you?"

"It's a gift," he coyly replied.

Miryoku couldn't help but sigh in frustration. Who in their right mind would've thought the youngest hero with an agency of his own, a prodigy of his generation, would be such a handful to deal with?

Thankfully, her house was only a short walk back and Hawks landed just at the foot of the few steps that led up to the front door of her house. Miryoku stepped back and nodded to it as she climbed the last step up, hand already on the doorknob.

"See? Not that far."

He scoffed but that grin never left his face. "It's hard for ya to say 'thanks,' isn't it?"

"No, I do," she rectified, more than peeved about that comment. "I said it before. I also said that walking me back wasn't needed. Quite a waste of your time if you ask me."

"Eh, that's kinda subjective if ya ask me." Hawks shrugged his shoulders before flapping his wings to get a good few feet off the floor. "Well, have a goodnight, missy." He saluted her with a couple of his fingers, "Be careful on your next late night stroll!"

Miryoku was about to retort at the cheeky remark but before she could, that heap of red dashed out of sight leaving nothing but the faint blur of crimson in her vision. She shook her head as she went inside and quietly headed to her room with all her food. Sitting back behind her computer, Miryoku stared at the screen where her article laid open and half written. But despite wanting to focus, she found herself thinking over and over about their small conversation in those few minutes of a stroll.

She leaned forward to cradle her chin in her hands and reread her article, his words replaying in her head as she concocted an image of the young hero.

Brash. Reckless. Chirpy.

Precocious sounds better.

"...the precocious man…"

She twirled the pocky stick in her mouth with her tongue and stopped at the sound of what she'd mindlessly spoken. Letting it sink and liking the sound of that, she bit down on the treat and stretched back before going back to typing furiously at her keyboard.

#bnha hawks #hawks #bnha #bnha fanfiction #bnha oneshot #technically speaking #a very long oneshot #boku no hero academia #bnha oc #fanfic #hawks x oc #fanfiction

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redorblue · 5 years

Text

Tiamat’s Wrath, by James S.A. Corey

It’s been a while since I finished, and I’m still A MESS (and, apparently, not the only one). So this is not going to be coherent in any way, just me rambling about what stood out to me in those 541 pages of pure stress.

I’m tagging it as spoilery, but still: CAREFUL, SPOILERS! (also, long)

Alright. No way around that: the first sentence messed me up badly. I’m pretty sure that’s never happened to me, having a character die on me in the very first sentence of a book (not even the first chapter! The prologue, ffs!). And technically not even that, she’s been dead for a while, I just learned about it now. The thing is, I expected something like this to happen at some point, I was already dead scared for her in Persepolis Rising once it had sunk in that we’d just done a time jump of several decades, but I thought we’d get her death on screen, if only because she’s been such an influential character over the last seven books. It feels odd to just have her gone, without drama and fanfare. My guess is that, besides being really old at this point, she also didn’t have much energy left because of her failure to protect Sol system against the Laconians and the feeling of powerlessness and inevitability that came with Laconian rule. With the political center of the galaxy moving to Laconia, she probably lost most of her influence, and I think that takes a heavy toll on a born politician and decades-long power broker such as Chrisjen Avasarala. So it makes sense that she’d just... die (and it certainly sets the tone for the rest of this bloodbath of a novel).

Once I got over the initial shock, I also came to appreciate the way her death (or rather, her being dead) is written. I liked that we got a tiny peek into her relationship with her granddaughter that doesn’t sentimentalize her, but gives an interesting inside view into her worldview. The quote on her tomb broke my heart:

“If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too.”

I loved every single word of the tiny snippets of information we got about her relationship with Arjun back in book 5 (or 6?), when it became ever clearer that he’d just disappeared, never to be found again, like millions of others on Earth. So to see that she still misses him, and that the fact that she never even found his body still haunts her... It breaks my heart, but it’s also really sweet. It says a lot about her personality (determination was her second name) and it shows this soft side of her that nobody around her ever got to see. But even though she mostly came of as mean and ruthless to other people, it’s nice to see that she had a positive impact on their lives (and that it’s acknowledged!). It so often happens that once a character is dead, they’re never mentioned again, and certainly never mourned. I appreciate it a lot that this didn’t happen here, that it’s pointed out several times how even in death she’s helping the other characters deal with their situation, especially in the few Holden POV chapters. I’m really grateful that her memory is being honored, especially since it’s honored by characters imagining her bossing them around, which I’m pretty sure she would have liked.

Second, I like the view on humanity that’s presented here, in the series in general but especially explicitly in this book. I’d argue that it’s actually quite positive, despite all the power-hungry,conscience-proof narcissists like Duarte and Inaros and Errinwright and Mao and Cortázar and... Yes, they exist and they naturally have a lot of tools to screw things up, which is only realistic, but they’re presented as outliers. The rest of humanity is messy, and unruly, and sometimes has an impressive ability to ignore paradoxes, but it is also capable of empathy and mercy, and most people can find the strength to stand up for what’s right when it matters. I think the best summary of this philosophy is found in a monologue from Emma:

“Easy to make rules. [...] Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they’d work perfectly if it were only a different species. [...] I’ll die for that. [...] I’ll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy.”

What she’s saying is that our general aversion to rules gets us into a lot of trouble, but it also gives us flexibility, and therefore the capacity for mercy even if we’re perfectly certain that a person screwed up. She’s also saying that it’s important to stand up for that, to not just care about one’s own tiny bubble and put every terrible thing that happens down to “guess they had it coming”. Because it’s not as easy as that.

I also love this quote because it’s one of the strongest statements of what’s actually wrong with Laconia. Several characters, in this book and the last, point out that it’s really hard sometimes to not loose track of why Laconia’s version of authoritarian rule is actually terrible, and I gotta admit that I agree. Sometimes, on paper, the whole organising principle just seems so... sensible. There aren’t any graphic descriptions of bloody massacres like when Eros got infected with the protomolecule or when Inaros dropped the asteroids on Earth. Even the actions that are clearly atrocious, like Trejo destroying Pallas or the protomolecule “production” in the pens, are described in a way that feels very surgical, almost hygienic, so that you loose sight of what’s actually happening. I’m pretty sure that that’s deliberate, that the authors want their audience to slip into this mindset of “are they really that bad?” every now and then in order to make the audience see that authoritarian regimes aren’t only bad when they have obvious bloodstains on their hands. They’re actually bad all the time, and even more dangerous when they’re not that obvious. When the arbitrariness that most of us associate with dictators is replaced by a set of rules so strict that you gotta slip up some time, and once you do there’s no fixing your mistake. Plus, the absolute confidence (read: hubris) in their own decisions that often comes with this specific kind of dictator makes them immune to any kind of outside opinion, which, as this book clearly demonstrates, leads to some astonishingly short-sighted decisions and a whole lot of very dangerous complications. So all in all, I think this book does a pretty good job at exposing the nature of authoritarian regimes, from the system of distributed (read: lack of) responsibility that comes with a strict chain of command and their complete lack of accountability or checking for logical errors, to the treacherous allure that some of them might have.

Third, I love the way the romantic relationships are written. I’m usually not a big fan of romance because I think in most cases the romance is more a necessity that comes with the medium than an actual gain for the plot, but I love these. Probably because at this point, all the romantic relationships have been an established fact in the couple’s lives for a few decades now, and they give me this feeling of being... settled, in all the best ways. It can be exciting to watch a new relationship being formed, and I love slow burns to death, but once the new couple gets together my excitement normally fades away pretty quickly. Apparently there’s only a limited number of ways to introduce conflict in such a situation (and no, it can’t come from the outside and the rest of the plot for... reasons), and usually the new couple is way too busy with sudden attacks of irrational jealousy, a dark secret in the past, the do-they-really-love-me-agony etc. for me to enjoy this relationship that I’ve been rooting for for so long. Especially since it’s usually a problem that the couple could solve by having a long and honest conversation, but for REASONS that’s not an option and... I digress. So I like established relationships because they generally don’t come with that particular brand of drama, which means that there’s space to actually focus on the couple itself or on (gasp) the plot. This whole series does that pretty well - I already mentioned that I adore Chrisjen and Arjun as a couple - and in this book there is a lot of it. Naomi and Holden, obviously, and Elvi and Fayez, and for me also Drummer and Saba, although he doesn’t show up on stage at all and she does so only briefly, so in their case it’s more of an aftereffect of Persepolis Rising that’s exacerbated by him dying.

I don’t know how to put this into words exactly, but I love that these relationships are so stable (and by that I don’t mean boring). The fact that it has been an important part of the characters’ lives for so long doesn’t mean that they don’t express their love anymore, that they don’t think about each other with affection, that they don’t worry about the other or miss them. There’s lots and lots of fluff, if you want to put it that way. But most of all, they provide what a committed relationship is actually supposed to provide: an anchor, a sense of belonging, stability, mutual understanding, acceptance... without taking away the characters’ agency, identity or personal freedom. It’s most visible in Elvi and Fayez, where Elvi is the one with the important job, the long hours and high security clearance, and Fayez just supports her through all of the awfulness. He doesn’t pry, he doesn’t pick a fight with her for never being home, and he doesn’t reproach her for not eloping with him in the end because he can see that this is important for her. And while we don’t get his POV, I’m pretty sure that he’s not just swallowing his anger or feeling unfulfilled in his clearly supporting role - he just has his priorities straight, and No. 1 on that list is Elvi. Which is what a healthy relationship should look like.

And I think the same goes for Naomi and Holden. As painful as it was to watch her mourn him over almost one and a half books, I think it might be good for their relationship. He’s always been the one in the spotlight, not because he wanted it so badly but because he’s naturally good at it, and she was the one in the shadows (of her own volition, I need to add). I think that the events of this book, with her rising to the very top of the resistance movement and putting her logistical brilliance to work, will add a whole new layer to their dynamic. She’s now finally in a position where she might be able to prevent at least some of these situations that trigger his instinct of running head first into danger for the good of others. I don’t think she’d try to pull rank on him, but she has a bit more control over circumstances now so that she’d at least be able to do the whole rushing into danger thing together, and it puts them on more equal footing, hierarchically speaking. That’s never been an issue in their relationship per se, but it has been a factor in the way they interact with others both as a couple and as individuals. He often deferred or at least conferred with her, but Holden was the one other people addressed first, and that’s going to be different in the next book.

In the same vein, this book also made my shipper heart both glad and utterly devastated at the same time because there’s so much Alex-Bobbie-content. I’m not sure if you can actually call it shipping - I never wanted them to be an item romantically, but I think they’re one of the best examples of a queerplatonic relationship that’s out there. It’s canon that they never slept together, probably never even kissed, and it’s still made abundantly clear that they’re each other’s person. Alex stating that he intents to grow old with Bobbie (I think that was book 7? I’m not crying you’re crying); Bobbie worrying all the time about Alex’ safety and that he feels like he’s missing out on things like being with his son because he’s out fighting Laconia with her; the fact that he’s the only one who can get to her when she would have punched anybody else - I don’t know, they do more for me than any of the romantic couples, and I already said how much I love those. Bobbie and Alex share all of the positive traits that the romantic relationships have, but their bond is presented in a much less conventional format. It says that relationships not based on romance and/or sex can be just as lasting, committed and loving as romantic relationships, and I need to hear that more often.

Which, of course, made it all the more devastating when Bobbie died. It made sense for the narrative - with Clarissa dying at the end of Persepolis Rising, and Bobbie now, we’re down to the original Roci crew, and it solves the captaincy confusion that was part of the problem in Persepolis Rising. And I guess it also made sense for her character in that it’s a fitting death for her - it shows off all of her best personality traits from her loyalty to her crew and her convictions to her military genius, and it’s just generally badass. It still makes me very sad, though, because it’s the end of this beautiful bond that my ace ass needed, and watching Alex grieve is heartbreaking. I love Alex to pieces, he has such a caring soul, and those scenes after the battle against the Tempest where he’s working himself half to death over his grief and guilt while knowing perfectly well that he’d have killed the entire crew by trying to save her - those were absolutely awful. But as much as my heart bleeds for him, Bobbie dying also brought me one of my favourite moments for him as a character and for Naomi and Alex as a family, namely when he returns to the Roci and talks to Naomi about what it’s like to have lost Bobbie. It goes like this:

“[Naomi] ‘I am so sorry about Bobbie. I cried for a whole day.’ Alex looked down and away. His smile shifted invisibly into a mask of itself. ‘I still do sometimes. It’ll take me by surprise and it’s like it’s happening again, for the first time,’ he said. ‘Thinking about Jim does that to me.’

This direct comparison between Naomi losing her lover and Alex losing Bobbie is, to me, the ultimate confirmation that their relationship was just as loving and committed as the main romance of the series. Plus, Alex freely admits that he cries a lot, which is, of course, a normal reaction, but also such a good example of a healthy kind of masculinity that he shares with Fayez, for example. Their partners taking point is not presented as a sign of them being incompetent, unimportant or “emasculated” because it doesn’t take away from their personality in any way. It just shows that they have different, equally admirable strengths that form part of their personality - not their gender identity.

#the expanse #tiamats wrath #tiamats wrath spoilers #naomi nagata #alex kamal #james holden #chrisjen avasarala #elvi okoye #books #2019

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ladylynse · 5 years

Text

Whirlwind: Jake should be used to ominous predictions by now. Randy should know better than to blindly follow McFist. Adrien should think twice before sneaking away. And Danny should’ve expected something like this when he got that phone call. (Secret Quartet crossover)

Part 6 [FF | AO3] - for the :D Anon, who very kindly donated to my ko-fi.

(Part 5 | Timeline post)

-|-

6:46 PM

“My name’s Phantom,” Danny said once they were inside. The fire and subsequent soaking had not been kind to any electronics in this place, so he didn’t mind talking plainly. No one was going to follow them inside without them noticing, especially not with the dragon basically guarding the entrance, and it wasn’t like any cameras were going to be functioning right now. “I’m friends with the Am Drag.” He’d avoided flying or any other obvious uses of his powers while they were out in the open. No need to parade his secret (or rather, the fact that ghosts are real) around to the public, after all; this was going to be enough of a mess for Jake to deal with without that.

The dragon hadn’t exactly been inconspicuous.

“Why the cheese are we in here instead of fighting out there?” the Ninja asked, flinging an arm behind him. “The Am Drag might be a friendly dragon, but that one isn’t!”

Danny sighed. “Look, um, there’s something you need to know about dragons. Hopefully I’m not violating some super secret code thing by telling you this, but they can take a human form. I mean, they have a human form, not just a dragon form. Which is probably the only reason they still exist and aren’t, y’know, just a myth.”

Danny couldn’t see much more than the Ninja’s eyes, but they didn’t look impressed. “Okay, so the lady I saw turn into a dragon is a dragon, and she just snapped?”

“Not…exactly.”

The Ninja rolled his eyes. “So what, exactly? Do you even know?”

“I think so.”

“That’s encouraging.”

Danny frowned at the Ninja’s sarcastic tone. “This is a big mess, okay? The magical world is supposed to be kept secret. So that dragon? Not easy to explain away!”

“Magic’s not secret,” the Ninja said incredulously. “It’s just…. It’s just magic. I mean, the people in my town don’t know there’s a sorcerer trapped beneath it, but they aren’t total shoobs. They know it’s not normal for people to regularly turn into monsters. But they just kind of…accept it, you know? Because I’m around to protect them. Or at least I’m supposed to be. But it’s not like they think it’s all some kind of new technology. People have been getting stanked in Norrisville for centuries.”

Danny blinked. He wondered if Jake knew any of that. He still wasn’t really clear on how the whole ‘American Dragon’ thing worked, and he had enough trouble keeping Amity Park safe, let alone feeling responsible for an entire country. Maybe there were different magical creatures who monitored smaller regions—individual states if not counties—who were then expected to report back to Jake when something was amiss. That would make more sense. Gramps was probably fielding all that stuff for him right now, while he was still in school….

“Hello, Earth to Phantom.” The Ninja was waving a hand in front of his face. “Is it normal for you to space out like that?”

“Shut up,” Danny scowled. “I was just thinking.”

“About how to get us out of this honkin’ mess?”

“About how it started,” Danny said, though that wasn’t strictly true; he’d been thinking about that earlier, though, so he figured it still counted. “The woman you saw. I think…. If it’s who I think it is, her name is Susan. She’s nice, normally—”

“When she’s not flaming people?”

“When she’s not corrupted. Did you see any butterflies?”

“That’s what does it?” The Ninja didn’t wait for Danny’s nod of confirmation. “Yeah. It’s, um, not the first one I’ve seen today, either. The first lady didn’t go all dragon-y. More…weird fashion sense, with this pen that could create invisible walls and trap you while she criticized you. That was her thing. She was a critic. The Critic. Chat Noir helped me defeat her. You know him? He distracted her while I got her pen.”

“I…know of him,” Danny hedged.

“He’s a good guy,” the Ninja said, confirming what Danny had suspected since his fight. “These corrupted people? They’re after him in particular. And, like, other stuff, but definitely something he has.”

“His ring. A Miraculous.”

“So you know this already?”

“I don’t think I have it all straight.” Danny bit his lip. He and Jake couldn’t do this alone, and he might’ve accidentally burned his bridge with Chat Noir. He might not be willing to help them. The Ninja, on the other hand, probably still would. At least, he hadn’t given Danny any reason to think he wouldn’t. “I know…. I know we have to beware of the butterflies.”

The Ninja nodded. “Sounds like. They’re probably connected to this Hawk Moth guy. Or girl. I dunno. I just heard the name. Susan or whoever you said she was was talking to them.”

“You saw him? Them?”

The Ninja shook his head. “No, I just heard half a phone conversation, except without phones being involved. Thing is, this guy’s MO is super familiar to me. I think they might’ve teamed up with someone I know. The Sorceress.”

Danny could not recall anything in the vague prophecies Jake had repeated to him that might allude to a sorceress. “Are you sure?”

“Well, not exactly, but from what I’ve seen? Definitely a possibility. Just because I trapped her in the Land of Shadows, doesn’t mean she didn’t find another way out. Again. And she might be trying to gather her power before attacking Norrisville.”

“She’s the one you were worried about, then.” He figured he could grill the Ninja on this whole ‘Land of Shadows’ thing later—when the Sorceress turned up, if she did, or when this mess was over, if she wasn’t involved.

The Ninja shrugged. “Yeah. Worrying about her is practically a requirement. And if she’s not involved, good, but she might be the reason this Hawk Moth person can do whatever it is with the butterflies. It’s basically stanking people.”

Danny didn’t need to know what stanking was to guess what it meant. “I think Hawk Moth is using the Brooch of Metamorphosis to change people. That’s what gives them their power. We were told we had to beware the butterflies. It’s the Butterfly Brooch.”

“The what?” The Ninja stared at him. “And what do you mean, you were told to beware the butterflies? Who told you?”

“Um. Would you believe me if I said oracles? The Am Drag has friends.”

“Wait, there’s a honkin’ prophecy?”

Danny sighed and recounted everything the oracle twins had told Jake—about him having friends to help him fight off the attacks, how they’d be facing threats they hadn’t dealt with before, and how they needed to beware of the butterflies.

The Ninja looked torn between incredulous and impressed. “That’s a lot clearer than anything I’m ever told,” he complained. “All I got was that to cleanse the soul, one must first clear the mind.”

“That’s…not straightforward?”

“No! It doesn’t tell me how to deal with the Sorceress!”

“But that’s my point. Maybe it’s not the Sorceress. Maybe it’s just this Hawk Moth. I know Jake’s dealt with magic users before. He might’ve run into her, or at least someone like her, so she wouldn’t exactly be a new threat, or a new kind of monster, or whatever.”

“Who’s Jake?”

Oh, crud.

Danny knew there were a lot of secrets Jake was tasked with keeping surrounding the magical world. He’d even kept Danny’s, once he’d learned it, from his family and friends. But if the Ninja had dealt with a sorceress and a sorcerer on what sounded like a fairly regular basis, maybe that counted as already knowing about the magical world. And maybe, if he used that as a technicality, Danny could fill in the Ninja without getting into more trouble. (He’d never asked Jake how much trouble he’d caused last time. He…hadn’t really wanted to.)

Besides, it would be a lot easier to get through this if they could use their real names, too.

And there had been that thing in the prophecies about getting help from friends.

And the Ninja had been trying to help.

“Jake’s the American Dragon,” Danny said. “Susan’s his mom. She just…shouldn’t have dragon powers. Normally. It skipped her generation.”

“Wait, what?”

“And I’m…not just a ghost.”

“You’re supposed to be a ghost?”

“I go by Phantom! How did you not figure that out? You call yourself the Ninja.”

“Yeah, because I’m actually a ninja. But Phantom could’ve just been a cool nickname. It’s not like you….” the Ninja trailed off, probably because Danny had crossed his legs and started hovering before holding up his hands and turning them invisible.

“Ghost,” he repeated, dropping back down the floor. “But also…not.” He changed back, watching the Ninja’s eyes widen even farther. “I’m Danny.” In for a penny, in for a pound. “Danny Fenton.” He stuck out his hand. It felt a little formal, but it would confirm that he was flesh and blood, which would be kinda important after insisting that he was a ghost.

The Ninja reached up to pull off his mask, and there was a flash of red and a flourish of cloth, and then a purple-haired teen grinned at Danny and gave his hand a quick shake. “Randy Cunningham. This is so bruce. I can’t believe you’re a real live ghost. I mean, I get to meet a dragon and a ghost in one day? This is the cheese. Howard is never going to believe me.”

“Don’t tell him,” Danny said quickly. This Howard obviously wasn’t here, but the fewer people who knew the details, the better. “People really aren’t supposed to know, and it’s bad if this gets out.”

“You have people like McFist after you, too?”

Danny had no idea who McFist was, either, but he nodded. “Yeah, we all do.” He hated to admit how wrong they’d gotten this, but— “This Hawk Moth person is probably after Chat Noir, and—”

“I don’t think Hawky knew Chat Noir was here,” interrupted Randy. “The critic lady was surprised to see him, and she said something about him being in a foreign country. And she wouldn’t know that, so Hawk Moth must’ve told her. Through their mind meld or however that works.”

Danny pulled a face. “Great.” To think Jake had thought Chat Noir might be working with Hawk Moth. They’d really messed this up. “I’m going to call Jake and catch him up. You…keep an eye out for Chat Noir. I don’t think we need to worry about Susan until she makes a move.”

“You still want to call the evil dragon lady Susan?”

“She’s not evil. She’s corrupted. And…I don’t know what else to call her. It’s not like she’s told us. But just…don’t use her name unless you’re talking to me or Jake and no one else can hear you.”

Randy frowned. “You said Jake’s her son, right?”

“Yeah?” Danny hoped Randy wasn’t about to ask for clarification on how dragon genetics worked, since he had absolutely no idea beyond the whole ‘skipped a generation’ thing. He couldn’t even explain his own genetics.

“He’s the shoob who’s responsible for all this.” Randy waved a hand around at the destruction. “I saw him and his mom. They looked like prime targets for the Sorceress. That’s why I saw what happened to her. I was keeping an eye out because I thought she was gonna get stanked.”

“So you know what Jake looks like in his human form.” That would make things easier. “Great.” Danny dug a couple of Fenton Phones out of his pocket and handed them to Randy. “Here, keep these on you. One’s for Jake; the other’s in case you see Chat Noir before I do. I wanna loop him in. And, um, apologize.”

“Apologize?” Randy echoed, but he was already shoving the Fenton Phones into his pocket. “For what? And why do you have spares? Did you invent these things?”

“My parents did.” He wasn’t going to go into the whole ghost hunter thing; it wasn’t important right now. “And, yeah, they’re useful, but they’re not always the most durable, so I’ve got spares. Just…a limited number, so try not to break or lose too many. I don’t exactly live around the corner.”

Thankfully, Randy didn’t press him on the whole ‘apology’ thing. Or maybe he’d already forgotten about it. “So what’s the plan? I’m still going to keep my eyes peeled for signs that this is the Sorceress, just in case, but I can’t fight that dragon by myself.”

“I don’t think you need to. Remember how I said she was testing you?” At Randy’s nod, Danny continued, “Well, now she knows you can do whatever you did to try to fight her. Which means she’ll be that much harder for you to surprise. And if you’re right about the weird mind meld thing, Hawk Moth will know, too.”

“So?”

“So that’s bad. Because Jake thinks they’re after something. Something besides Chat Noir’s Miraculous, apparently, if they weren’t expecting him. Look, Jake’s family…. They have a shop full of magical artefacts and stuff like that. So he’s probably not wrong about Hawk Moth’s motives. I mean, half the ghosts I fight want to take over this realm, so bad guys being obsessed with power isn’t exactly rare.”

“You’re a ghost and you fight other ghosts? What, do you live in the most haunted town in America or something?”

Danny rolled his eyes. “Safe bet that I do, yeah.” He held out his cell phone. “New plan—”

“Wait, what was the old plan?”

“—you call Jake and tell him about Chat Noir and Hawk Moth and what you saw happen and everything else. He’ll fill you in on whatever else you need to know. I’m going to do some recon.” When Randy took his phone, Danny changed back. “The fewer people who see what we’re doing, the better.” He tapped his Fenton Phone, adding, “Shout if you get into trouble,” before turning invisible.

He wasn’t sure if Susan had the same dragon abilities as Jake, so he wasn’t sure if she’d still be able to see him, but he knew he wouldn’t be easy to spot this way.

And whether they were fighting a magic user or a Miraculous user or both, he didn’t want to make this easy on them.

XXX

6:54 PM

Jake went ahead to do a quick scout to assess the situation so he could tell the others what they were flying into.

Trouble was, he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

Most of the crowd was still there, grumbling and wet and talking amongst themselves or on the phone, and he could see TV crews and paramedics and other people like that, but no ninja.

And, more importantly, no dragon.

He flattened his wings to his sides and dove into an alley, pulling up at the last moment and startling a leprechaun who looked like he’d been on his way to the stock exchange. Mumbling his apologies as the leprechaun muttered curses and picked up the fallen gold pieces, Jake let fire burn away his dragon form and peeked carefully out of the alleyway.

Predictably, the view wasn’t any better down here than it had been from above. But as he walked closer to the crowd and could pick up more of the scattered conversations, he knew there had been no miraculous fix, no magic that had caused everyone to forget what they’d seen. They all knew very well what they’d seen: a ninja fighting a dragon. Thankfully, the conversation tended to be more along the lines of how such a stunt had been pulled off than the fact that it was real.

“I don’t care how you do it, Viceroy! I want a Robo-Dragon! If this Ninja is anything like our Ninja, your next WND won’t be a failure!”

Well, most of it, anyway.

Jake tried to get a good look at the speaker without making it too obvious that he was looking. He didn’t know what a WND was supposed to be, but while robot dragons and ninjas weren’t exactly magical, there might be some overlap of relevant interests. And he did not want Rotwood to make friends with someone who could provide him with new technology to capture proof of magical creatures. Especially someone with enough resources to both attend this spectacularly expensive gala and just demand that a robot dragon be built, with no doubt in his voice that it would happen.

“Hanni, honey, you promised you wouldn’t work while we were on this trip,” the woman next to the man said. There was a steel edge in her voice that even Jake could recognize, and the man blanched.

“You can have another week of vacation if it’s done by the time I get back! Just get to work!” he yelled, and then he hung up and turned to the woman that was probably his wife. Jake realized with a start that he had a robotic arm and quickly looked away, not wanting to be caught staring. He was pretty sure the prosthetic had had a brain in it. With eyes. That was…messed up.

Even by his standards.

“You can buy a second dress,” the man offered.

“I don’t want a second dress. If I decide I do, I’ll buy it anyway. What I want is for you to do what you promised. The Ninja’s back in Norrisville; can’t we enjoy our vacation here?”

“Of course, sugar plum,” the man answered quickly. Jake wasn’t sure he believed him—and he rather doubted the woman would—but he couldn’t afford to eavesdrop much longer. He didn’t need anyone recognizing him from earlier, especially when he hadn’t even been thinking long enough to put on a different jacket. He was lucky he was dry; that might be his saving grace, since everyone else who’d been caught inside was still dripping or at least distinctly damp.

He would probably have to figure out where Norrisville was, though, and bring it up with Gramps. It sounded like another place they’d need to keep an eye on. Ninjas and robots didn’t scream magic, but it was…weird. And any place that was weird enough had magic somewhere, even if it was buried deep.

“I’ll see if there’s any word from the organizers,” the man said. “See if they’re setting up another venue or what the plan is, now that the dragon’s dealt with.”

He didn’t say it like the dragon was something that surprised him.

Okay, Jake was definitely going to have to check out this Norrisville place when this mess was over.

He waited a moment longer, hoping the man would say how the dragon had been dealt with, but he didn’t, mostly likely because his wife had been beside him the entire time and knew the answer. Jake wished he could ask, but that would mean drawing attention to himself. He moved on instead, avoiding the various TV crews and the police and grateful that he couldn’t spot Rotwood.

Trixie and Spud were on the case, but Rotwood would try to get around them. Not that there was anything he could do if the dragon was gone. Well, not anything beyond talking to a news station and insisting that, now that everyone else had seen the dragon, it was proof that he hadn’t been making anything up. Proof that the magical world did exist, that his studies weren’t theoretical, that—

Jake’s phone started to ring, and he answered immediately. “Yo, Danny, what happened to the dragon?”

“What do you mean what happened to the dragon?” It wasn’t Danny’s voice. It was the Ninja’s. Oops. “Can’t you see her? Isn’t she there? Or aren’t you here?” While Jake tried to figure out how to answer that without giving everything away, the Ninja added, “I’m Randy, by the way. Danny filled me in.”

Aw, man, why did Danny keep doing this to him?

Well, at least if Randy ran around dressed as a Ninja, he might already know about the magical world and get a pass. Hopefully Fu or Gramps would be able to come up with a good reason to let him keep whatever magical artefacts he had his hands on. They’d gotten the Dragon Council off Jake’s back about this secrecy before, at least when he could vouch for the people who had found out about it.

“Whaddaya know?”

Randy caught Jake up on his conversation with Danny and everything else he seemed to figure Jake had missed and needed to know. Jake wove through the crowd, trying not to give away much of anything in case someone happened to be listening to his side of the conversation, and tried to figure out if he could get into the building without being seen. He had his doubts. Why hadn’t Danny come to grab him instead of going off to do reconnaissance on his own? That would have been so much easier.

But Danny wasn’t terribly used to help, aside from whatever his sister and friends could give from the ground, and something like scouting would have always fallen to him—at least when he needed to fly to get the best view of things.

“Meet me outside,” Jake finally said. They might as well have the rest of this conversation face to face. He wanted Randy to be wrong, for this dragon lady to be someone other than his mother, but he had a picture of her on his phone. It would be an easy enough thing to verify. And then he’d know to warn the others. Especially Haley. He hadn’t given her too many details when he’d called her, figuring the fact that he was calling her to begin with would be enough for her to understand that this wasn’t some practice drill, but now that he knew it was their mom…. “I’ll wait on the corner across the street.” He didn’t need to give a description, not if Randy really did know who he was.

He just…. If Chat Noir really wasn’t their enemy, how were they going to figure out who was? It wasn’t like cat boy would be in the mood to tell them now. He might just attack them on sight, and Jake wouldn’t be able to blame him for that. He kinda doubted Randy would be able to act as much of a buffer, either.

He'd messed up.

You’ll have friends to help you out, Kara had said, but why couldn’t Sara have warned him that he’d make a powerful enemy if he didn’t think things through?

Well, Jake knew the answer to that, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

Sometimes, it would be a lot easier if he didn’t know anything about the future.

XXX

6:48 PM

Adrien didn’t have a clear view of the dragon. Getting to where he’d needed to go had taken longer than he’d hoped—he wasn’t convinced he was that much faster in Paris only because he knew his way around; these buildings weren’t what he was used to, either—and now that he was closer….

Now that he was closer, he couldn’t even see the dragon anymore. He’d had a glimpse of a shimmering purple-pink wing a few long seconds ago, enough to tell him that it wasn’t the same dragon he’d seen earlier, and then it had gone behind a building. By the time he’d gotten onto the rooftop of said building, the dragon was gone.

He spent more precious time scanning the skies for a departing akuma, just in case the Ninja had gotten here ahead of him again and figured out where the akuma was hiding, but there was nothing.

There were, however, television crews on the ground, and no longer just the ones who’d been sent to cover the gala. He’d taken enough of a risk showing his face earlier; how many times could he potentially be caught on tape before footage of Chat Noir in New York City turned up on the internet in a spot where Alya could find it? Sure, she wouldn’t necessarily connect the fact that Adrien Agreste and Chat Noir were in the NYC at the same time, not with any seriousness, but….

He couldn’t afford to risk it.

Of course, he couldn’t afford to let Hawk Moth get away with whatever he was trying to do, either.

If Alya figured it out, if her accusations of him being Chat Noir went beyond a joke she sent to Nino, then he’d…. He’d have to give up being Chat Noir. Give up Plagg, give up spending so much time with Ladybug, give up the freedom wearing the mask gave him.

But he wouldn’t deserve to be Chat Noir if he didn’t act now, all because he was too selfish to risk losing everything.

Still, that didn’t mean he shouldn’t be careful. The hooded sweater he’d bought wouldn’t do much to conceal his identity, but he’d be less conspicuous wearing that—even with the hood up, even in a crowd like the one below—than he would be as Chat Noir or Adrien Agreste. He should be able to pass as a curious bystander. Hopefully.

The alley below was empty, so Adrien extended his staff and then let it slowly collapse, bringing him back to ground level as quickly and quietly as possible. He ducked behind a dumpster before whispering for Plagg to pull his claws in, and he tugged the hood as far down over his eyes as it would go before straightening up.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Plagg whispered to him as he settled next to Adrien’s neck, hiding himself in the shadow of the hood. “I can smell the magic from here.”

“It’s just Hawk Moth,” Adrien murmured back. “You saw the Critic earlier.”

“This isn’t the same. It’s not the same as that ghost kid, either. Or the Ninja. They all smell different.”

That was enough to give Adrien pause. “Hawk Moth didn’t send Phantom? Why didn’t you tell me that on the roof? Or in the mall?”

“There were more important matters to discuss.”

“Like what?”

“Like getting me my camembert.”

Adrien rolled his eyes, even though he knew Plagg wouldn’t be able to see the movement. “I gave you the last of what I had with me.” He’d eventually decided to go back and ask the concierge at the hotel where would be the best place to go to get some more, and the man had graciously offered to order some in for him and have it sent up to the suite. Sure, the Critic had attacked before Adrien had had a chance to rest, and then Phantom had attacked him, and now this dragon had turned up, but…. But even if the cheese wasn’t there when Adrien went looking for it, Plagg would at least be able to eat something.

He might not be able to get back out into the fray as quickly as he’d like the next time he transformed and used Cataclysm, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d had to duck out in the middle of a fight to feed Plagg.

Even if it would be the first time doing so without Ladybug around to cover for him.

If the Ninja was still around, whoever he was, maybe he’d be willing to step in again.

Adrien would certainly need help cleaning up this mess and the one ahead, whenever Hawk Moth decided to activate the Critic’s akuma.

Granted, he hadn’t seen any statues of the Critic about, not like they had with Stoneheart. Maybe the akuma hadn’t proliferated yet? Or maybe the dormant akuma had taken on a different form?

Or maybe Hawk Moth had found a better target and recalled the Critic’s akuma before it had multiplied. Adrien only hoped he could be so lucky. But if this dragon wasn’t someone who’d been akumatized by Hawk Moth…. “Plagg,” Adrien said, overriding the kwami’s complaints, “if this isn’t Hawk Moth’s doing, whose is it?”

The kindly old man in the electronics store in Chinatown had reminded him more of Master Fu than anyone else, and the teenager hadn’t exactly struck him as evil, either. He’d been helpful, if a bit preoccupied, and if Plagg hadn’t warned him to leave—

“It’s an old magic you don’t want to get mixed up in.” Plagg paused, but he must have known that wasn’t enough. “Dragons are real,” he finally said, “and I can smell their magic at work here. It’s very distinctive—a little similar to Longg’s, but sharper—and if you have any doubt, the fact that you’ve seen two dragons should put that to rest.”

Adrien didn’t know who Longg was. He didn’t ask, figuring Plagg would tell him if he could, at least if he figured it was important. Of course, Plagg’s idea of what was important could be fairly skewed, but Adrien had learned to live with that. “What about Phantom? Or the Ninja?”

“Phantom’s a ghost.” Something in Plagg’s tone made Adrien’s spine crawl, but maybe that was because he’d seen firsthand how dangerous Phantom could be. And to find out he wasn’t even alive…. How could Adrien hope to stop him, if it came to that? If he decided he wanted the Miraculous— “The Ninja’s magic is more recent, relatively speaking. This millennium, anyway; not like the dragons. He doesn’t have a Miraculous, but he’s got at least one magical artefact helping him out.”

“And at least he’s an ally,” Adrien murmured. “He only ever tried to fight the Critic, not me, even after she mentioned the Miraculous.” But he was an ally Adrien might never see again. Whatever he’d said earlier, he wasn’t really a partner, not like Ladybug. He might have just been passing by, in the right spot at the right time, and come to help because he was a hero.

He could just as easily be gone, leaving Adrien to deal with this mess by himself.

Between Hawk Moth, the ghost, the dragons, and the fact that Nathalie and the Gorilla were surely looking for him by now….

“We need to figure this out fast,” Adrien said. “I don’t know how much time we have.”

“Not enough,” Plagg murmured. Adrien might not have heard it ordinarily, soft-spoken as it was, but with Plagg right under his ear, he heard it this time.

He hoped Plagg was wrong, and not just about how much time they had, but he couldn’t afford to take any chances.

Taking a steadying breath, Adrien left the safety of the alley and went in search of the dragon.

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#secret quartet #danny phantom #rc9gn #miraculous ladybug #adjl #crossover #fanfiction #sq fanfiction #my writing #ladylynse #snippets #crossover snippet #dp snippet #rc9gn snippet #ml snippet #adjl snippet #thanks again :D Anon!

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