#WHAM. consequences hit

[novantinuum]

when the blind reactors you watch are starting to get into the Nitty Gritty of plot and you are going to have to be Very Careful in your meta ramble comments from now on so as to not accidentally sway their thinking or Give Anything Away

#SoEverdream on patreon just finished s3 #and got to the 'rose shattered pink diamond' (*major irony Air Quotes*) ''reveal'' #we really in it now boys #jen rambles #man tho it's so funny at the end of s3 he was musing on if the reveal of what rose ''did'' would at all change steven's willingness to be #more offensive on the field in a situation of need and he was like... 'man part of me... actually really wants that and a part of me #Does Not because steven is a literal child and at the end of the day i want him to stay innocent' #and meanwhile in the back of my head i'm just #war flashbacks to 16 yr old steven Going On the Offensive and uh #it not ending well :') #which i still think... narratively- how it's presented- was kinda genius on a meta level #they play up that fight the whole episode... building up towards it with a whole anime-esque training montage #playing it up like some fuckin shounen shenanigans #for Many audience members i think they were like 'holy shit lets GOOOOOO fight fight fight' #but then like #WHAM. consequences hit #and it's not a fun little shounen fight scene anymore #and you realize that this is the worst possible thing that could've ever happened to steven- truly giving himself over to the offensive #like god damn holy SHIT i cannot wait for this reactor to eventually get there #bc his reaction to steven having to stab a sword clear through bismuth was VISCERAL #and i just KNOW it'll be the same at That Moment #and i CRAVE it #but i need to be patient ahahah #all in good time :)

[lacedinweb22]

Once Bitten, Twice Shy °❆˚₊⋆

Miguel O'Hara x reader Vampire Next Door ♱✮♱ Ch. 10 prev part here (New Year's/Christmas chapter inspired by lyrics from "Last Christmas" by Wham!)

nsfw 18+ (near end)

*̣̥☆·͙̥‧‧̩̥·‧•̥̩̥͙‧·‧̩̥❅‧̩̥·‧•̥̩̥͙‧·‧̩̥‧·͙̥̣☆*̣̥

Christmas creeped up on you this year. Between the weeks at your internship and avoiding Miguel, things have been all over the place, just when you thought things were starting to line up. 

So you were alone on Christmas and you’re alone on New Years Eve, both for the first time. You’ve got your headphones on, blasting, nostalgic Christmas music. 

Standing in the kitchen, you roll out cookie dough, finding yourself thinking about Miguel. Everything. From his annotations on your essays, to the blood on his bathroom floor. 

Once bitten, twice shy. 

Why can’t he confide in you? But blood isn't a simple secret, it’s bigger than you, you know that. 

Yesterday, you saw him coming up the stairs, one foot in the hallway, your own in your doorway. You look back, catch a glimpse of him down the hall; his hair is wet and messy from the snow, his cheeks pink from the cold. 

You hurry into your place before he sees you. He’s only left with the slam of your door. 

I keep my distance, but you still catch my eye. 

“I thought you liked me, now you won’t even talk to me.” 

Last week, he cornered you in the hallway. Your keys were deep in your bag.

“I’m busy, Mig. Been so busy.” Your cheeks feel hot, consequence of your lying. 

Your back is now against your door. He’s so close to you, looking down at you, head tilted. He looks beautiful… and threatening. But you’re stubborn and you don’t trust anyone anymore, especially not your blood-thirsty neighbor. 

“I mean I thought we were getting somewhere, Y/N.”

You did too.

“I did too. I just- I gotta go, Miguel. I’ll… talk to you later.” 

****

You sit on your fire escape, legs hanging down, headphones on your neck, still playing music. You watch the snow fall down, snowflakes swaying before gracefully adorning your coat. You lift your arm to look at the tiny, beautifully delicate shapes melting on you. 

You listen to the cars, the rumbling sky, the party music above you, the muffled voices. You’re okay being alone– 

“Hey,” 

“Jesus! What the fuck! Who— God, you scared me, asshole!” you throw a handful of snow that’s collected on your thighs at him. It pathetically hits his knees. 

It’s him, standing on his side of the fire escape in front of his window. He looks down at you, sympathetically. 

“What do you want? Why are you looking at me like that?” 

He straightens his face out. He looks straight forward, eyebrows furrowed, hands in his pockets. He looks stiff, cold like he was the first day.

“Figured you’d be home for Christmas.” 

“I am home.” You turn away, looking down at the alley below. 

“Home, home.”

“My mom was out of town. No point making the trip.” 

“Hm,” he drops down, legs hanging off the metal floor. He’s feet away, but it’s intimate; you’re both looking down at the alley, at the the busy street, city lights glowing on your faces, snow falling on the two of you. 

You turn to look at him. He’s not soft like he was a few weeks back, when you somehow unwrapped his outer layer. His mind is busy, somewhere else. You stop being angry with him for a second, you empathize. Maybe he has a job to do, and maybe you’re just not meant to know that part of him. Just let yourself enjoy what parts of himself he does want to share with you. 

“I got you something, Y/N,” he mutters, still looking straight forward. “Was gonna save it for when you weren’t so mad at me, but… Christmas was days ago.”

He pulls a box out of his right pocket. He reaches out, places it gently in your hand. It’s small, wrapped beautifully in blueprint scraps. The small tag reads, “For Y/N.” His handwriting is just like the annotations on your papers years ago. You smile down at it. 

“Why would you do this? I am still mad at you. And I didn’t get you anything.”

“I know. Jesus, just open it.”

It’s ear plugs. You laugh, then roll your eyes. 

You nudge him with your elbow. 

“Asshole. Is this you asking me to turn a blind eye?”

“Blind ear, actually.”

You glance up, unamused, which Miguel finds amusing. 

“But yes, exactly that.”

He nudges you, “Look under it.”

You lift the tab beneath the ear plugs. 

It’s a necklace. The charm is your initial in Old English font. 

“Let me help,” he suggests. You nod, still stunned from the gesture. He lifts his weight on his biceps, and sits closer to you. Music is still bleeding from the headphones around your neck. You place them beside you.

Tell me, baby, do you recognize me?

You look up at him. The crimson in his eyes highlighted by the city lights. You never know with him, you’re always searching for stable footing, for an understanding of why he acts the way he does, but despite all that, you feel like you know him. 

Well, it’s been a year, it doesn’t surprise me. 

Does he know you? The old you he shared a class with isn’t the person you are now.

And after all these years, will this new version of yourself be willing to let him know you, even if it means you’ll end up betrayed and hurt again?

Now I know what a fool I’ve been

You want to stay mad,

but he’s looking down at you like that, and you’re okay with getting hurt if it’s by him. He looks down at the box in your hands, and gently pulls the necklace out. 

He holds eye contact with you, as he puts his hands around your neck and clasps it under your hair, his eyes still on yours. 

You look down at the initial resting on your skin. 

You look back up.

“Merry Christmas, Y/N.”

“Merry Christmas, Miguel.”

He keeps one hand at your neck, his thumb softly stroking your jaw. 

But if you kiss me now, I know you’ll fool me again

He kisses you, his warm lips clinging to yours, warmth you appreciate as the snow shrouds you two. 

****

You’re sat on his couch. It’s 11 pm, one hour closer to the the new year.

He opens his window, looks outside at the snow, then turns back at you over his shoulder. A smile tugs at his lips.

You look down at the drink he’s made you. It’s sweet, like you asked. 

He hovers on the window frame, biceps flexed as his weight rests on them.

He turns around finally, facing you, his back against the window.

“Aren’t you gonna join me?”

He answers by slowly walking to the spot beside you. He sinks into it. 

He slides his fingers in between yours. Slowly, his warm, muscular hand eases into yours. It feels good. 

“You’re so confusing,” you sigh, throwing your head back, the alcohol taking over. “Sometimes, I swear I know you, then you do these, I don’t know, things and you completely throw me off and I don’t actually know who you are, or what you want, and there was a point where I thought I did.”

“Things,” he whispers to himself.

“The blood, Mig, my nightmares, your eyes– you’re different. I just want some answers–”

“And I’m sorry… I can’t…  give you all of the answers you’re looking for.”

“Why can’t you trust me?”

“Why can’t you just trust that I’m doing the right thing? That I’m doing what I have to, and trying to protect you all at the same time.”

You exhale. 

He throws his head back against the couch. He turns lazily to face you. 

You look back down at his hand in yours. 

“I’m trying to give you what I can. Could that be enough?” 

He says it lowly, squeezing your hand. Your fingers move against his, you turn your hands over so you’re on top, fingertips feeling his calloused palms. 

You feel his eyes on you, watching you feel his skin, attentively. 

He sighs. You turn, look up at him. His cheeks are pink. “The alcohol getting to you?” You whisper, leaning closer up to his lips. 

He nods, pulling his hand from out of your grasp and to the hair in your face. He brushes it back gently. 

Your face is flushed. You slowly lift your thigh across his lap, now stradling him. 

He rests his hands on your hips, heavy breathing against your neck as his hands explore the expanse between your thighs and hips. 

You find yourself moving against him slowly, craving pressure. 

He buries his face into your neck, pushing and pulling your hips gently against his. 

“We can’t keep doing this,” you break from his lips, hips unfaltering. 

“Doing what?” he speaks onto your lips, breathless, drunk from lust. 

“Avoiding each other when we’re sober, and making out when we’re drunk.” 

His lips are cold from the drink, you can taste the rum on him. You suck his bottom lip playfully, you feel him smile. 

“Last time, swear,” he smirks, before kissing you greedily.

✧❅✦

To be continued… ;)

NEXT PART here

This is my last post of 2023!!! WOwwww 2023 was so beautiful and enlightening, and I’ve learned so much about myself and my love for writing and it’s all been heavily inspired by Miguel and all of you beautiful people! You have no idea how grateful I am for all of your support and the growth I’ve been able to have on this platform omgggg <3 Thank you for being here udhffskfdkjsodsif I hope you all have a wonderful New Years full of love and good food. Take care of yourselves 

(´⌣`ʃƪ) ♥❅*°:⋆ₓₒ

#miguel o'hara x reader #spiderman2099 #miguel o'hara x y/n #miguel o'hara atsv #miguel o hara #spider verse #atsv x reader #miguel x reader #spiderman x y/n #spiderman x reader #atsv miguel #miguel o'hara #miguel ohara #miguel o'hara imagine #miguel ohara x reader #miguel o'hara scenarios #miguel ohara x y/n #miguel ohara x you #miguel o'hara fanfiction #vampire next door #miguel ohara imagine

[starry-blue-echoes]

honor bound idea I thought of in math class because Terminal Brainrot-

Caesar/Lisa Lisa institute a 'no eating people whilst with us' rule for Wham, which, fair. Pillarmen can go quite a long time between meals with zero consequence.

Except, he was already at the tail end of that timespan before he left, and he was rushing to get there and warn Joseph so he didn't eat on the way, and healing after the fight with Kars burned through most of his reserves, and the long hibernation previously meant his reserves of energy were unusually low to begin with.

Still, Wham is extremely disciplined and exceptionally healthy and strong. His healing factor won't work as well, that's all, which is an acceptable price to pay for this alliance.

Except he doesn't tell anyone about this

and then, having his healing severely handicapped without anyone being aware is a great setup for all sorts of other whump.

mostly thinking someone deals out a hit that should've been trivial (from other hamon warriors during training) or at worst painful but not serious (from ACDC during the fight, or Kars later on) except it's actually way more dangerous with his weakened healing factor.

y e s s s s S S S S S S S S S S S

Wammu just. Not even mentioning the possible issues the No Eating Rule could bring up. After all, he sees it as completely fair and understandable given the circumstances.

Eventually once the issue is explained and some trust has been gained they’ll probably start looking into possible alternatives, like some larger livestock and such

#sorry I don’t have much to add what you already gave was AMAZING #honor bound #jjba #jojo's bizarre adventure #battle tendency #jjba part 2 #jjba wamuu #wamuu #jjba caesar #caesar zeppeli #jjba lisa lisa #lisa lisa #jjba joseph #joseph joestar #jjba kars #kars #sb answers #dragoninthelabratory

[annonniiiiieeeee]

ok so like i was thinking about ninpos and i had a teensy weensy little thought

leos a medic

he has lives in his hands every day

what if his ninpo let him detect life

like ok random example the crew™️ is separated and it’s dark and they can’t see anything

leo uses his ninpo and like feels their heartbeat or somethin idk and wham bam bipity bow he found them

sorry if this made absolutely no sense i haven’t slept in 3 days

Oh I love this.

I don’t think he can do it now but later with training absolutely.

As of right now Leo’s nimpo has two abilities

Portals - these are his abilities in the show and the movie

Healing - this is limited. He can only heal recent injuries. The only reason he was able to bring Usagi back was because he got a power boost from his ancestors. When i5s just him he is sharing his energy with the person he is healing. This can be dangerous if he pushes to far or gives to much. We will see some of this later

I love that Leo was given powers that made him more of a support player in the show. It creates a great conflict for him. The personality he tries to show is face man who never loses. He wants to prove he is extraordinary because he sees his brothers that way and wants to be equal to them. But his powers are different from theirs.

Raph and Mikey’s powers are heavy hitters. Raph’s supersized fists and later ability to multiple allow him to hit his enemies hard. Mikey’s chains allow him to swing above his weight class. Pulling enemies in while stoping them from attacking.

Donnie originally relies on his tech, which is amazing. He built that! And it allows him to supper charge his swings with rockets. Later when he has his nimpo it is all offensive. He’s creating rockets, drills, weapons of all kinds.

Leo’s powers are not like that. Leo’s ability is to move people around. Can that be offensive? Absolutely but his powers put him in a support roll. He can set up Mikey, Raph and Donnie for those bigger hits. We see him doing this with Raph in the final fight against the Krang.

And this builds so much into Leo’s leadership roll. He’s not leading because he’s ‘the best’ or ‘the strongest’ but because he’s a strategist. He can look at the field, see what needs to be done and then move his teammates to the best positions to get their this in.

I wanted to build on this. I loved the medic Leo headcannon and dialed it as far as it could go. But his new ability also plays into his self-sacrificing nature, how far is he willing to push? How much is he willing to give for others? And we will see this play out.

I was planning on expanding the powers more. Maybe a charger? Ability where he spreads his powers over the field like he did in the fight against Hikiji to give others a power boost. When he did it in the fight against Hikiji it was power overspill from the ancestors and a sign of just how much energy Leo was pushing out. He didn’t mean to give everyone a power boost. I think if he worked on it he could do it again. It’s the most extreme version of his healing power and again will have major consequences for him when he uses it. (This is a we are losing and have no choice move)

I think your idea of him being able to search out heart beats is a great baby step to the charger ability. Something he will pick up as he trains. He has to be able to tell the difference between his teammates and his enemies when sharing energy and searching for their heartbeats is such a great way to do that. I love it.

I think the further away from them he is the harder it’s going to be on him to search for them. If they are lost in a cave or same building he can search relatively easily but at greater distances it puts a strain on his body.

We will see this a lot as the family extends their power. The high the level the higher the cost.

#asks #a world of samurais and ninjas #rise leo

[moongirlcleo]

Eijiro Kirishima x Reader

summary: Kirishima's gf who likes hitting Mineta, just think about it, anytime Mineta says something that shouldn't be even legal to say comes out of his mouth, she just has this warning aura over him, oh they are training partners? Wham. CW: lewd comments from the grapist, some intended violence, cussing A/N: lmao i hate mineta so I was all for this haha

It was incredible at how you managed to keep Minoru Mineta in his place. The little twerp always tried talking back and challenging your authority when you had to train with him, but you knew how to shut him up. It wasn’t the first time you did this, but this was one of the most fun.

You really enjoyed seeing Mineta put through a solid workout; you were pretty sure he liked getting punished too. However, the real fun came when you hit him hard enough that he couldn’t even talk. It was kind of funny how it happened almost every single time, and it seemed like there was no way for him to avoid it unless he actually stopped talking altogether. If you were to guess, you would probably say that your punishment always got his attention somehow. Or maybe he simply never saw it coming. But regardless, the result was the same: Mineta becoming totally quiet whenever you needed him to be.

Maybe it was because you were a natural born leader, or maybe it was because you were the strongest in your class. Either way, it was all you could do to not laugh aloud as you delivered another blow. He just kept swinging his arms around without any control whatsoever, only managing to push himself back. You couldn’t help but smirk a bit when you noticed how easily he gave up; that meant more punishment for him! And you weren’t about to let go until he begged for mercy, that much was certain.

At least you knew Mineta would eventually learn from his mistakes. He'd made too many lewd comments to all of the girls in your class, and you'd decided that enough was enough. They didn't need to deal with his inappropriate behavior. So now you're taking matters into your own hands, even if that meant physically punishing the bastard. As you continued mercilessly beating him down, you couldn't help but notice how sore he was getting from the hits. Mineta certainly didn't seem to have the stamina to take on this kind of abuse for very long...but that wouldn't stop you. You'll keep going until he broke and learned his lesson, just as he deserved.

From the training grounds sidelines, your red haired boyfriend watched along what you were doing. At first, Eijiro wasn't too fond of the idea, but after some coercion from you and Bakugo, he relented. Mineta did need to learn a lesson. The guy clearly thought that he could get away with anything, and everyone else had suffered greatly from his bullshit. Seeing that Mineta would be facing actual consequences finally gave Eijiro peace of mind, knowing that you weren't taking his threats lightly anymore.

Though there was one part of your boyfriend that didn't approve of your choice of partner for your lessons, that didn't stop him from standing by your side. Just remember that this isn't something you two should be proud of. Maybe someday you'll find a better method of teaching the boy a lesson, but for now this is just what you needed to make things right again.

Besides, he'd never admit it out loud, but there was something… hot about you absolutely demolishing the little grapist. It stirred something in him, something he'd need to think about. Later, though.

- ©2024 moongirlcleo do not repost, copy, translate, or modify

#mha #mha x reader #mha fanfiction #eijiro kirishima #moongirlcleo

[oh-for-fic-sake]

I Just Move Things

Whilst looking through luthors drives the league find a new metahuman who is to powerfull for her own good.

Masterlist

Warnings: swearing

A/n:So this is a new series of imagines with Justice league/ teen reader obviously no smut but fluff angst and everything in between i know that the pic is starlight but that’s there more for the eyes.

(not my gif/pic)

I Just Move Things

"Seriously this girl, shes incredible, Lex didn’t have much on her he only just got the footage a day or so before the whole supes vs bat thing but we are soo lucky she wasn't involved, if she uses her head she could probably wipe all of us out, we need to get here to join" Barry was giddy as he started gushing over the new mysterious metahuman who was a prime candidate for the justice league. Arthur sighed crossing his arms

"Oh really? I'm sorry but I don't see how that tiny thing could do much damage wheres her weapon?" He said unconvinced Bruce and Clark agreed somewhat looking at the photo victor had pulled up on the screen a girl who looked around sixteen sitting at a table outside a Starbucks reading a book, she looked like a typical teenager, no muscle definition to her small form, so obviously had no combat training she looked like a regular man could snap her in two, easy to over power. Victor sighed at them.

"Looks can be deceiving every thing you see in that photo is her weapon, the ground, the air, the glass in the window behind her even the chair she's sitting on she could use all of these to impale you if she wanted to ,its quite incredible watch her here look at this video." The clip was grainy showing the inside of a corner shop, she was standing by the counter blowing bubbles in her gum paying for a small bag of groceries when a man came in holding a gun screaming at the girl at the register who quickly turned around to the cash register fumbling trying to open the cash draw as he shouted pointing the gun at her making her scream and struggle even more. The teen in question moved only to be ordered to put both her hands on the counter, she did so but as soon as she did looked over her shoulder to the door blowing yet another bubble letting it pop she was very calm for a young girl who had a gun in her face she huffed took a deep breath you could see her eyes light up a little and the metal frame above the door caved in enough to hold it closed trapping them inside, neither of the others noticed to preoccupied quickly she slid a tin can into her hand and looked at the gun tilted her head to the side eyes flickering once again and the barrel caved in on itself looking like someone had pinched the end closing the hole completely making it useless, no bullets would be firing from the weapon the man when to scream confused but was struck in the temple by the can of beans dropping to the floor in a crumpled heap she kicked the gun away in case he got up. The cashier looked around crying in relief as she saw the thief had been knocked unconscious and with a quick look the metal frame quickly snapped back to its original state. She exchanged a few words with the girl who was now on the phone to the police nodding towards the security camera  the surprised she looked up you could see her curse as she looked into the lenses a grim expression eyes flashing and the video cut off, she had broke it trying to cover herself. Silence washed over the group as they came to terms with what they saw. Clark was the first to break it

"That was, different she helped tho that is a good thing she wants to do good. To protect people" Bruce spoke up next

"She didn't take chances, but that ability, what she can do its not something to take lightly, we don't know the extent of it can she do other things?" The question was directed at victor who had been scouring the cities surveillance for her.

"I've caught her a few times on cctv doing things, she practices at night around Gotham docks. And its amazing to watch, so far from what I can tell its molecular based, solids liquids and gases. I've seen her change the shape of containers, fix broken glass, she can't fly but seems she has just started to make invisible platforms to stand on and climb and when she fell she managed to make the ground sort of turn sand like to make her fall softer and she doesn't even seem to do it consciously it just sort of happens once she got up it settled like water becoming regular concrete again. Where ever she got the gift it hasn't been long, she is still trying to control them, small things are easier, like the gun and the door, but the first time she made the invisible stairs she got a nosebleed and passed out I lost her for a few weeks but when I found her again she did it again, must have practiced somewhere else as she only got a little nose bleed and didn't pass out just got dizzy" Diana sat there contemplating

"So basically this incredible power is wrapped up in a hormonal teenager  who doesn't know how to use it yet, she is still trying to figure out what she can and cant do? And no doubt soon will start testing her limits? Bruce we need to pull her in now we can't waste any time she could hurt herself or someone else" Barry nodded they all shared a look agreeing. Time to bring her in.

"Where is she?"

"She will be at the docks again tonight around nine o'clock, she has a pattern its like clock work, docks ,chemical factory and just recently started down under the main bridge towards Metropolis playing around with water". They nodded she seemed shy Clark showing up could scare her same with Diana, Barry wouldn't be a good idea he tended to fumble his words and Arthur was well Arthur. In the end it was decided Bruce would go do the talking, after all Gotham was his turf.

Well shit gonna be hard to explain this one.... you looked down sighing it was very typical tho well for you any way. You see you had a problem, or should you say gift, you could move things not just the whole abracadabra Matilda floating thing, you could move things on a molecular level..... like clay everything is clay. After practicing you now know that you can break down solids into teeny tiny grains like sand using it as sinking sand or putting it back together in a new shape and recently discovered you could pull all the teeny tiny molecules in the air together really tight it becomes an invisible force field type thingy like an instant piece of bullet proof glass, or like a platform to stand on . It was cool but difficult to control some things more then others, for instance solids where the molecules are pack tighter are easier to manipulate then water where they are all moving then air that was tricky they were fast and hard to control. And there was limitations you couldn't change anything living or growing, no plants, no animals and consequently no people. You cant heal people which you learned the hard way after cutting yourself for the sole purpose of sewing it back up nope didn't work and you wished you'd don't a shallower cut knowing it was going to leave a scar. Which sucks, but you can control the air in their lungs technically it wasn't apart of them. Loopholes, there is always a loophole. But you can fix things, like a crack phone screens burst pipes you just had to stretch things a bit or zip them up. Which brings us to this little mishap. How the fuck can you explain this, you had been trying to feel the air. You felt with your powers you liked to think of it as ripples you know like when you wave one hand under water you can feel the ripples hit the other? It was like that except you felt what the ripple hit. Kind of strange but that was the best you could come up with. So hear you was scratching your head looking at a half sunk boat, now you may be thinking boats sink all the time whats the problem?.... well normally boats sink in water not solid concrete, you had been trying to feel your ripples and pull the air below a small boat making it 'levitate' but lost your cool dropped the fucking thing panicked tried catching it and wham bam thank you ma'am boat is now half sticking out of the dock floor with a broken window. You looked up into the sky.

"Really? As if my life wasn't already a joke you gotta throw bad luck in the mix to?" You quickly closed your eyes willing the glass to reform feeling each the large pieces lift joining them selves back together slowly setting them back into the frame concentrating in 'zipping up' the seams at such a microscopic level no one would know any better. Once finished you opened your eyes, boat was still in the ground but the window was back in place. 'Yay go me' You smiled, you may not have achieved your goal of safely moving the boat but you did fix the window you broke. You sighed trying to pull the thing up again but stopped when you heard a large ominous crunching sound coming from the hull. You jumped growling pulling at you hair near your scalp.

"No no no no no this is not meant to happen just fucking move! Move up damn it!"

"Need some help?" You screamed jumping  turning around as the ground flicked up around your feet creating a small knee high spikes pointing between you and Batman?. You took a step back quickly stomping the small barrier away

"Err no no I err just out for a nice stroll haha." He hummed unconvinced looking at the boat sticking out of the ground you followed his gaze chuckling nervously scratching at your chin

".....that was like that when I got here....... I mean you see some weird shit in Gotham huh?" He looked back at you.

"I already know about your gift, you can't control it yet?" You gasped taking another step back

"Gift? What gift nope no sir-y no gifts round here."

"So I didn't just watch you drop a boat into concrete and fix the window on it?" You blinked slowly at him then heaved a heavy sigh stuffing your hand in your pockets.

"Y-you saw that? Shit I didn't mean to, I promise its just hard and i just want to stop doing things on accident....then other accidents happen a vicious cycle really" You said waving over the little accident. He nodded

"I believe you, but you were panicking, concentrate try making it sand again then harden from the bottom push up like layers like your filling in a hole go from the bottom up" you looked at him a little shocked but nodded looking at the boat feeling around beneath it with your 'ripples' making the concrete go lax hearing the hiss of it as it became loose grains before pushing up hardening thin layers from the bottom finally bringing it to the surface. You smiled happy at fixing your problem. He smirked seeing you giddy from your achievement.

"Wow thank you that helped a lot I would have been here all night before figuring that out." He nodded

"Your welcome, I'm glad I found you, we have been watching you for a while, we would like to talk to you"

"We?" You asked not really understanding

"The Justice league, you have a strong ability that we think would be useful and we wanted to see if we can help you control it we can give you training in combat weapons and hand to hand which ever you prefer." You looked at him jaw hanging open

"Your joking? You've gotta be, I just move things not really worthy of being up there with you guys,but I don't want to be used then thrown away but thanks for the help" you said turning to walk away he frowned

"We wont please you can trust us" he said reaching out quickly holding an arm dragging you back a little making you gasp and jump he then winced hissing as a thin spike quickly pierced the side of his hand that held you, you panicked.

"OH MY GOD! I'm sorry I didn't mean to! it just happens when I get scared or startled!" You quickly pushed the spike down grabbing his hand and twisting it with trembling hands hope he didn't beat the shit out of you, you'd basically just attacked him.

"Erm please stay still there are a few bits in there" you said before pulling at the little pieces of debris from the small puncture hole, when you react on instinct it doesn't end up as put together as when you actively control things hence little bits falling off and such.

"Your powers are strong I don't think your fully aware of what your capable of crushing a gun with a look is just the start, just give us a chance trust us"You let go of him hugging yourself taking a step back you felt bad you didn't mean you stood looking down waiting to see if he was angry, he seemed more sympathetic.

"Its not that I don't trust you, fuck how can I not I'm just....scared, you don't know the things I've done.....I could accidentally kill one of you then what? Be hunted down by you guys? I'm not indestructible I'm human and I haven't got control of it.... I don't even know what it is.....but its probably about time I found out I suppose I just simplify it so I don't you know....loose my nerve, bad things happen when that happens , its always frightened me... if-if I did come with you what do you guys get out of helping me? There’s always a price" he regarded you carefully he could see the fear the uncertainty in your voice it made you seem younger ,smaller lost he could tell you wanted to find somewhere to go, to find a home base and people who understood a bit like Barry in that sense he sighed smiling softly before speaking.

"Hopefully a team mate, one day someone will come and pick another fight and when they do we need to be ready, to have people we can call on to help, your strong a lot stronger then you realize this gift it-its probably made you one of the strongest metahumans on the planet,even superman was a little concerned of  encountering you that's why I'm here he chickened out." You giggled a little and he smiled relaxing, you were a good kid he could tell just scared and lost the league would be good for you give you direction.

"Really? I'm pretty sure I've got more reason to be wary of him" he smiled a little "The point is your strong and will only get stronger ,your still just learning about it we want help you, give you a safe place to learn how to control it, test your limits. Your a good kid I can see you want to help and we will give you the opportunities to do that." You nodded it did sound good, the chance to practice using this gift away from people, in a safe and controlled environment the only people around would be able to dodge and escape if things did go wrong you looked at your hands for a moment.

"...You'd really help me?"he nodded

"Not just you but we will also help protect those closest to you" you looked away

"Don’t have anyone." He stopped at that

"What? Your alone?" You shrugged nodding throwing your bag on your shoulder

"You mean family right? Don’t have one I told you bad things happen when I loose my control, I just have foster homes well had I left,better off on my own" you held his gaze you were testing him, letting him know exactly what you'd done with out saying the words guard up and waiting to see if he'd try to over power you or change his mind. He didn't know what to say to that, he could hear the others through the comms warning him to back off asking if he wanted back up, he ignored them you had killed them accidentally that much was clear. You had no one he couldn't imagine just what you had been through, but he also knew this was a test he had done it himself when he was younger, you were waiting to see if he would judge you or leave you here alone, the others wont understand that’s why they were panicking telling him to leave if he did  you'd never trust them again something none of them could risk, but it was also your way of trying to push them away. He shook his head coming closer slowing when your eyes began to glow and the floor rippled beneath his feet he raised his hands slowly the others were shouting down the line at him but you was getting defensive not readying for an attack.

"That’s why we want to help you, so nothing like that happens again I cant imagine what you've been through or what it was like but you don't have to be alone anymore or be scared" you believed him, something told you he understood pulling back from the concrete, he had plenty of time to attack you but didn't.

"And you wont be mad if I break something?" He shook his head releasing a breath he wasn't aware he was holding

"If you break something you can keep practicing until you fix it" you contemplated for a second.

"Okay then but just to see if I can fit in, don't let them make me jump.....I don't wanna shank them....you got off lightly it was aiming to go straight threw to your face... I sort of caught it a little" Bruce tensed but quickly controlled himself, the last thing you needed was to see he was slightly afraid of your gift it could feed your own fear.

"They already know, they've been watching in case they needed to help if things went bad its up to you" you gulped and nodded a little as he began walking away you hesitated looking the opposite way you could run, forget this whole meeting and leave, you sighed watching his back you had no doubt he was giving you the chance to leave you took a deep breath they could help and if it does become a con you would find a way to leave and disappear nodding you quickly jogged up behind him following him to the bat mobile he opened the back revealing two seats.

"This thing has extra seats?" He smirked down at you

"Well this one does some of the others don't." You tilted your head

"How many of them do you have?" He chuckled as you slid into the seat

"Quite a few buckle up and hold on" he said nodding the the strategically placed grab rails the shut the door a few seconds later you were moving. You shivered a little nervous you didn't think it was a bad thing to go and train somewhere more secure but one mistake and you could easily become an enemy and contrary to what they may believe you couldn't take any of them on you was still a human you still bled. You sighed leaning back a little resting your head on the seat behind you as he drove you god knows where.

#dc imagine #dc x reader #dc x you #dc x y/n #justice league #justice league x reader

[punkpoemprose]

December 2nd- Jumping for “Joy”sticks

Universe: 1980′s Arcade AU Rating: G (General, Fluff, Meetcute) Length: 4752 Words

A/N: I was not alive in the 80′s, I barely remember any of the 90′s, y’all can start picking on my era generalizations when I hit the 00′s. I had a lot of fun with this, I’m sorry for the pun title, it was all I had. Thanks for all the comments and tags on yesterday’s fic. Everyone’s engagement is what keeps me going!

Working as an arcade attendant wasn’t exactly Kristoff’s dream job, but college was pricey, he hated the idea of making his parents help him out, and the work wasn’t exactly difficult for the pay. It was relatively simple as his main duties were emptying coins out of the game machines, dumping them into the change machine, and keeping kids from climbing to jumping on the game cabinets or anything else. Once he got past the sound of kids screams and shouts mingling with Duran Duran and Wham!, the blinking lights, the smell of teens who needed a lecture about deodorant and hygiene, and the uncomfortable sensation of wiping down whatever sticky substance coated half the games it was actually a pretty cushy job.

Most days he spent more time sitting behind the front counter working on classwork and reading his textbooks than doing anything in his job description because it just wasn’t necessary. He had the good fortune to work mostly morning or afternoon into evening shifts on weekdays, so other than the occasional interruption of a truancy officer looking for a kid playing hooky from school there wasn’t much for him to bother with. When he didn’t have homework or classwork to keep himself preoccupied, he found himself, a tried and true introvert, bored enough to people watch. Mostly it was teens and tweens trying to beat each other’s scores on Pac-Man or Donkey Kong Jr., but every now and then there’s be someone a bit more interesting to watch. A father who would sometimes come in with his young son to play Burgertime, an older woman in her 50’s who liked to kick kids off the Tetris machine, and a small company of mall goths all made the grade for entertainment where his entertainment was concerned. There was one standout though, a young woman who would come alone on Wednesday nights.

Wednesday was the only day he worked where he was consistently scheduled to close. It was one of his few days without evening classes or labs and it was usually the quietest night of the week with kids on tight curfews for school and most everyone else just wanting to get home after a long day. The girl though, for some reason he still couldn’t glean, would come in exactly an hour before closing to play Ms. Pac-Man.

She always seemed a bit out of place despite appearing to be just a bit older than the high school kids who usually haunted the place, and being consequently, just a bit younger than he was. He thought that maybe she always stood out to him because of how she was dressed. Not many women spent much time in the arcade, much less alone, but of the small handful she was the only one who came in wearing L.L. Bean sweaters over a perfectly pressed white blouse with a similarly blindingly white skirt and tennis shoes. Her fire red hair was always held in place by a headband that matched her sweater, though he often noted that despite the clear effort put into her image, on a second glance her hair was a bit wild like she didn’t bother much with it.

              The overall impression he had of her was that she’d taken a wrong turn on her way to a nearby country club’s squash court. He really wasn’t even sure what squash was, but he thought that it was something like tennis and was generally the kind of sport rich girls would play. Pretty young women dressed as nicely as she did had to have hobbies he couldn’t understand. He supposed that it might be one of those biases he’d built since starting college that his Ma would chew him out over, and as it ended up whoever the redhead was, she was much more interested in getting a little yellow circle to eat round things than she was in hitting them with a racquet.

Every Wednesday evening like clockwork she’d come in at nine, give him a shy smile like she knew she didn’t belong there, and then would proceed to spend an hour and a pocketful of quarters on Ms. Pac-Man. She was quiet as she played, like she was afraid to make a sound, but sometimes when he’d switch off the music early and start turning machines off, he’d hear the “wokka-wokka” of her machine and the occasional almost inaudible huff when she lost followed shortly by the clink of another coin hitting the slot and dropping down into the coin box.

Their only real interaction beyond the shy smile she’d always give him on her way in and out was the brief exchange of him letting her know that he was getting ready to close up for the night. She’d always thank him quietly for letting her know, and he noticed how red she would get on the nights she apologized for staying so long. He’d been annoyed by that at first, the fact that she would come in not long before close and play right up until he was ready to lock up for the evening. He supposed that it was easy to lose track of time in the arcade if you weren’t always waiting for your shift to be over given the distinct lack of clocks in the space, but it was always bothersome to have to be  held up by a customer.

He remembered wanting to tell her the first few times she’d overstayed that she should check her fancy watch if she was going to wear it. It probably cost more than he made in a year, and yet despite the fact he was certain it kept time well, she always seemed to be surprised by the hour passing. However, the annoyance quickly passed when she would apologize for getting caught up and leave promptly after he let her know they were closing.

It was impossible for him to stay annoyed at her, despite his best efforts to not pay attention to anyone at his job more than strictly necessary, the red head with her love for Ms. Pac-Man often were the subject of his idle thoughts. She was polite and she was pretty, and he was a grumpy “old bastard”, but he was a man and he could appreciate polite and pretty when he hadn’t dated anyone in a very very long time.

In fact, he started to look forward to Wednesdays. Even knowing that her arrival would keep him from a early night, he felt strangely like she needed to be there. He didn’t know her, but there was something in her manner that told him that maybe this was where she came to breathe. He would never call himself on expert in communication or understanding others, but there was something about the shyness of her entrance and exit and the way she just relaxed when she played that made him glad she came, that the space was safe for her. She always looked so sad when she left.

It was a particularly slow day when he was informed by a coworker who had been on the shift before his that several machines were out of commission due to what they assumed to be a power surge. On the line of downed machines were Galaga, Frogger, a few other semi-popular games, and most unfortunately, both Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. He’d also been informed that the repair shop had been called, but there was no word on when, or if they would arrive before the end of the week let along the end of the day.

Kristoff knew that it shouldn’t bother him. They were just games after all, and he barely if ever played any of them himself. Kids would find something else to play and the cabinets would get fixed when they got fixed. He did care though, he spent his whole shift pacing behind the counter, watching the door, waiting for the phone to ring, and generally hoping that someone would come and fix something. He cared because it was Wednesday and she was going to be coming in to play Ms. Pac-Man and he, strange as it may be, liked her quiet company. He liked the idea that one of these days he might ask her for her name and maybe talk with her for a little while.

Hours passed, and he only gave up hope when he knew that it had to be past time for the repair shop to close. His anticipant pacing then turned to nervous heel rocking as the last few customers filtered out for the evening and the time of her arrival neared. He wondered what he should say to her when she walked in, or if he should say anything at all. She’d find out that the game was down either way, but he didn’t want her to go right after she found out either. Maybe, he thought, she might stay if he just said the right thing.

He held his breath when he heard the door open, and while he wasn’t exactly surprised when she walked through the door, he was thrown off to be greeted with, not her shy smile, but instead with her rushing past the counter, not looking his way at all. That, he decided, took the cake for the oddest part of an already strange day.

There was of course no obligation for her to interact with him, but there was something in the way that she rushed by that had him feeling uneasy. He really wasn’t a people person in any sense of the word. He preferred the company of family or his dog over any interaction with strangers, but he had an odd sense that even having not spoken to her much, she wasn’t a stranger.

“I’m sorry your game is down,” he said quickly before she got far enough away that he’d have to raise his voice to relay the information, “I’ve been waiting for the repair guy my whole shift but it looks like he couldn’t make it.”

She stopped dead in her tracks, and though she didn’t turn to him, he noticed her shoulders slump. He felt guilty despite it being out of his control. There was something about her that made him want to please her, and while he knew that his sisters would tease and tell him that it was just because she was pretty, he knew that there was more to it than that. She was nice, and despite his initial misgivings about her, she’d never given him any reason to believe that she was the kind of person who deserved karma had knocked out her favorite game and the best possible alternative at the same time.

“Oh,” she said, so softly he almost couldn’t hear it over the music.

It was a defeated sort of sound that made him wonder why she really came in to play the game every Wednesday. Maybe it was more than just a game or needing a break for her. She did always come in like clockwork after all.

“I…” he didn’t really know what to say. It wasn’t as if he were the one who broke the games or something, an apology didn’t really make sense, and he wasn’t sure why it meant so much to her in the first place.

“I just thought you should know, before you got over there and saw it.”

She sniffled and he froze on the spot. He wasn’t unused to seeing crying. Little kids threw temper tantrums when their parents made them leave, some kids cried in frustration when they couldn’t beat a level or a high score, but usually that was confined to people under the age of ten and there was someone else around to deal with it.

“Thanks for letting me know,” she choked out, and he could hear the tightness of her throat in the tone of her voice. She was crying. He couldn’t see it, but he wasn’t so dense that he couldn’t tell. He felt his face heat, not sure of what to do and feeling like every second that ticked past were an hour.

“Are you okay?”

It was all he could think to ask. It was obvious to him that she wasn’t, and in fact he figured that she probably wasn’t okay when she walked in and that it was the reason she hadn’t looked at him in the first place when it was so routine for her to do so.

“Not really, no.”

He walked around the counter slowly, his legs on autopilot. His mother would be proud, he thought absently as he walked over to her, she’d been training him to be a proper gentleman for years. It wasn’t her fault he was so inept with girls, she’d done her best, and his sisters had tried to help. He just considered himself mostly a lost cause.

“Do you, uh… want to talk about it?”

She turned to look at him and he could see for the first time how red her eyes were, how her usual put-togetherness was marred by her hair being even more wild than usual, by the wet splotch on her cuff where she’d been wiping her eyes.

He also noticed for the first time just how much smaller she was than him. He was a big guy, not excessively so, but still taller and bigger than most of the people he knew. He was miles taller than his parents and sisters, and while that had everything to do with adopted, it had taught him how to make himself small at times, when he was bandaging his littlest sister’s knee or when he needed to fit into the frame in family photos.

He put his hands into his pockets and slumped a bit, trying to keep his expression as neutral as possible even though his head was spinning with half-thoughts on how exactly he could even attempt to be helpful. The last thing she needed was for him to panic on her. He was sure that she was panicked enough for them both.

“I couldn’t… you don’t even…”

She was crying harder now, the words hardly coming out right as she tried to hold a conversation with him. He felt awful. He thought that maybe he should have just let her see the game was out of order and leave instead of making her talk about it. He wasn’t sure what he would have wanted if the roles were reversed. He wasn’t exactly a “talk about it” guy, and when he needed to talk something out, it was always to his dog. He kind of wished that Sven was with him, girls liked dogs, or at least his sisters did.

“You can, if you want.”

She shook her head but seemed to calm down a little bit, taking breaths slowly. He wasn’t sure whether or not she was going to tell him what was going on until she opened her mouth and started in telling her story, still tearful and hiccupping, but at least with the ability to get all the words out.

“It’s just… the straw that broke the camels back? That’s been every straw today. I failed an exam, my ex-boyfriend showed up at my dorm even though he’s not supposed to know where I live, my sister is out of the country on business and I feel so alone.”

He nodded as she talked, “And you just needed a break?”

The shy smile he was so used to appeared again, her lips turning up slightly, making him feel like he could really breathe for the first time since she walked through the door. He hadn’t really noticed how close together they’d become since he walked around the counter, but now that they were just a bit more than a foot apart, he was noticing other things about her that weren’t immediately evident from the distance. She had freckles.

He didn’t even know he liked freckles, he’d never thought about it, but there was a dusting on her nose and across her flushed cheeks and he realized that yes, he really did like them.

“Yeah. I just… I really need a break.”

He’d like to offer to listen some more, to do something else for her, but he wasn’t really sure where the line was when a stranger unloads their emotions on you. He didn’t want to push, but he also wanted to help. It was making his head spin, and all he could focus on was her eyes, and her freckles, and her mussed hair.

“Well I mean, I don’t really know you very well, but uh, you’re welcome to play something else, I guess Tetris isn’t really as fun as Ms. Pac-Man, but it’s kind of soothing. I’ll close up while you’re playing, I promise no one else is going to bother you today. I’m not really good company or anything, but I’ll hang around if you don’t want to be alone.”

It felt like a lot. He put the ball in her court, she could decide whether she wanted him around, or whether she wanted him to go sit behind the counter until she was done, but even the offer felt like an overstep.

“That would be nice Kristoff,” she said, her hiccupping had stopped, but there was an edge of uncertainty to her tone. “Maybe show me how to play?”

“I uh… didn’t think you knew my name.”

She flushed again, her face going even redder than it had when she was crying.

“It’s… uh… on your nametag.”

It was his turn to blush then. He felt like a bumbling idiot.

“Oh, yeah. It is, isn’t it.”

He could practically hear his sisters laughing at him, like they could telepathically tell he was being a disaster from miles away. He was sure that he’d never hear the end of it if they ever found out just how “smooth” he had been trying to talk to a pretty girl. He only had to hope that she wouldn’t ever tell them. The odds, he thought, were slim to none on that, but nothing was ever impossible.

“I’m Anna, by the way. I thought you should know, you know, with me sobbing in front of you and everything.”

He was glad she told him, he wasn’t sure if he should ask, and he wanted to know. He’d been wanting to know, because now he could tie all the thoughts, he’d been having in his head about her to a name, something solid.

Anna.

***

The only sound in the arcade was the Tetris theme music, the clicking of the mechanical buttons on the cabinet and the chatting of two new friends. Kristoff had been surprised by how quickly he’d warmed up to Anna and in return how quickly she seemed to warm up to him. He really wasn’t used to people wanting to hang around him for awfully long. He blamed it a bit on his gruffness, he knew that  he needed to relax a little more around others, but he always found it hard.

Anna made it easy.

She’d told him a lot about her, how she’d split up with a guy a few months ago for lying and cheating on her and how he kept trying to weasel his way back in, how she was trying to get her degree in art history so that she could run her family’s gallery, how her sister ran their family’s importing business and how it kept her away often enough that Anna often didn’t see her for months at a time. She’d told him that she was lonely, and that she came to the arcade because she hadn’t been allowed to go as a child, and now that her parents were passed she didn’t mind being a little disobedient because she knew they would forgive her.

He hadn’t said much about himself, except for when she asked. He told her how he was studying environmental science at community college. They didn’t go to the same school, she was a freshman at the university he was planning on transferring into after he finished his associates in a few months, and she told him how much she loved it there, encouraging him to follow through with his plans to transfer in. He’d told her how his family had adopted him because she asked whether he had any siblings, and it wasn’t exactly a secret. She hadn’t reacted like it was some kind of tragedy like other people sometimes did, which was a comfort to him because he believed that his parents adopting him was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He didn’t even remember his birthparents anyway.

“Oh my gosh, I think I’m beating you! Am I beating you! Oh crap, I shouldn’t have looked, now I messed up my lines.”

Kristoff couldn’t help but laugh. Anna had been the one to suggest they play two player mode on the game, and while Kristoff hadn’t really played it before other than a couple occasions on his lunchbreak on truly boring Monday shifts, he was doing a decent job of beating her at the game.

“I thought all your Ms. Pac-Man skills would have you in the lead,” he teased.

“Completely different set of skills,” she replied, “besides, I just played that one because it looked the easiest. Also, I like that it’s a romance. It’s cute.”

“A romance?” he asked with a laugh, watching as her blocks stacked up on the opposite side of the screen, almost to the top. He wasn’t intentionally trying to distract her; he was honestly curious. But that it meant he was going to win was just a bonus.

“Yeah it’s all about how they… oh damn it.”

He watched as her screen filled completely with blocks and the game informed him that he had, for the third time, won.

“Sorry,” he offered, “You were really close that time.”

She shrugged, gave him a look that was more mock annoyance than irritation, and then laughed. He laughed with her. He hadn’t had so much fun in a very long time, and he was dreading the fact that he could feel that it would be over soon.

“I wasn’t, but thanks for pretending,” she said, leaning over to bump him with her hip playfully, “You really cheered me up tonight. I owe you a lot.”

He opened his mouth to tell her that she didn’t owe him anything, and that he was happy he could help, but she put a hand up to stop him.

“No, really, I mean it. You were so nice to me tonight, and all the other nights. That’s why I kept coming back, even when you were miffed about me overstaying you were always nice about it and I just needed someone nice. I’m sorry I probably made you run late so many nights, but I guess I just needed the company, even if we didn’t talk. I owe you.”

He shook his head, “It wasn’t a big deal Anna. You were really polite and… I guess I started looking forward to you coming in. This is usually a pretty boring job and you were something different for me to think about. Not that I was… not that I was thinking about you all the time or anything, I just was wondering why you’d come in but…”

He wondered if he should just bend down and eat his shoe, speed up the process a little bit.

“You should have asked,” she said with a brighter version of the shy smile he’d come to expect from her, “I kept waiting for you to talk to me. I didn’t want to bug you at work, but I’ve been dying to talk to you for weeks now. I didn’t just keep coming back for the games you know?”

“You didn’t?”

“No,” she said, leaning into him again but this time less to bump him, and more to support her frame against his much larger one.

Kristoff could feel his pulse quicken. He wasn’t sure why, but his hand itched to reach out to hers. He hadn’t wanted to hold hands with a girl since middle school. He felt like he was thirteen again, awkward and just trying to figure out how to get a girl’s attention.

He already had it though, Anna was only focused on him and he could feel the weight of her gaze even though he wasn’t meeting it.

“I thought you were cute. I kept coming in hoping that maybe you’d talk to me and then maybe you know… if you weren’t seeing someone…”

“Oh.”

He didn’t know why he said that of all things. It was all he could think to say.

“Oh… are you? Seeing someone that is?”

She sounded a bit defeated, and as he felt her leaning away from his side, trying to step to the side, he panicked. He let his hand grab hers loosely, not letting her get too far away from his side unless she really wanted to as he turned to face her. Her freckled nose was illuminated blue by the light from the cabinet and her eyes held an uncertainty that he wanted to chase away.

“No, no I’m not. I just… I’m not used to anyone wanting to… I mean, no one’s ever been…”

“Well, if you want to… I mean, if you’re interested, because I do owe you after all… maybe we could catch a movie sometime, or we could grab dinner? My treat.”

He felt tongue tied, but he managed to nod his head at least. He wondered if she could tell how nervous he was. He was sure that she could because her smile and her eyes held an amusement that had quickly replaced her trepidation. Surely, he thought, she must realize that he had no idea what he was doing. But strangely she wasn’t rescinding her offer or leaving, just smiling at him warmly so he thought that it must count for something.

“How about Friday? I only have classes until noon so depending on your schedule we could grab dinner or coffee or something if dinner is too much?”

“Dinner would be fine,” he managed, “Or coffee if you prefer, I get done at three so if you want I can come pick you up after that… somewhere? It can be someplace neutral if you don’t want me to come to your dorm.”

She grinned, “Dinner then. We can work out the details later… Do you have a pen?”

He nodded, reaching into the pocket of the work vest he’d discarded to the side, and realizing in the same moment that he hadn’t yet let go of her hand.

When he slipped his fingers from between hers, someplace he hadn’t even noticed they’d slotted themselves, he felt a vague sense of loss. He tried not to hold onto it, thrilled by the prospect that soon he’d see her again. To that end he handed her the pen, and was surprised to feel her fingers wrap around his wrist.

They were cool from playing the game, and in stark contrast to his sweating palms. He opened his hand in response to the touch, which was evidently exactly what she wanted as she took the pen to his skin and quickly wrote her number.

“You can call anytime after four,” she said quietly, as if it were a secret even though no one else was there, “Or whenever and leave a message. Whatever works for you just…”

“Yeah?” he asked, his voice breathless even to his own ears.

“Don’t forget to call, okay?”

She handed him the pen, stood up on her tip toes, and pressed a kiss to his cheek. He didn’t have time to react before she was grabbing her purse from the foot of the cabinet and heading out the door. Left alone in the empty arcade, one game to switch off and a door to lock up, he let his fingers reach up to brush the place she’d just pecked. If it weren’t for the fact that he knew his imagination wasn’t nearly so creative, he could have believed he dreamed the whole thing.

He looked down at his palm and saw in black ink, perfectly printed, her number, her name, and a small heart.

Anna.

He had never been so grateful for a dead-end minimum wage job in his life.

#kristannaadvent2020 #kristanna #frozen fanfiction #1980's AU #Arcade AU #Meetcute #Fluff

[impulsivelycontentious]

No one reads this or connects it with my other online identities but since I've removed personals involvement from my other social media stuff, and I feel like bitching, I am jsut gonna go ahead and do it.

So I have brain damage. Yeaaaaars ago I threw up so hard I actually ripped open the inside of an artery in my neck, and it threw a clot, and that clot did some nasty shit on its way on through and out.

No doctor noticed for two weeks.

Everyone else did.

Good times.

Anyway.

So now I have a damaged brain. Brains don't grow back. Some areas can regenerate a few cells - notably the prefrontal lobe - but mostly brains fix themselves not by regenerating like skin does, but by rearranging the cells we have to fire to fancy new configurations.

This has been quite the ride. Because shit, it changes things.

I don't even know how much of my personality is consistent. No idea. Let alone everything else.

I have memory loss my nurologist won't akowledge because it falls short of dementia. That was the bar. "You don't have dementia, you know what year it is." Gee thanks there chief.

Anyway.

My brain wasn't too stable to begin with. I have always been prone to logic leaps that occur very quickly and not necessarily in ways other people would make them. My mind is jumbled and a little random and things collide all the time that probably shouldn't.

This has become much worse since the brain damage. See, my brain keeps wiring shit together. Shit it really shouldn't. It changes who I am, what I think, what I can think.

It's actually quite terrifying to realise you're a sack of geletine misfiring lighting at itself.

So anyway. To the point. Yes - I have one of those. Probably. It's somewhere in here.

Oh right, no, another detour. I'm autistic. "Oh yeah, they definatly didn't screen girls when I was a kid because how the fuck did they miss this otherwise" autistic.

Back to the point.

Recently I had this sensory processing ... Whatever the fuck that was. I call them.idssocistive episodes. I don't know how accurate that is. But my mind unhooks from my sensory data. Everything feels muted and unreal - sound, sight, touch, heat. Name it. It's wrong.

I hate these.

It gets particularly nasty because there are nurologicsl consequences. See, my concious mind ramps up it's interpretation of sensory data. It goes all in and leaves the rest of my existence stuffed in this tiny little box without enough space to do dick.

One effect of this is I suddenly become highly obsessive. I think it's a comfort mechanism, I require the same stimulus over and over again or to somehow mentally connect it to the same element. Of course, it could also jsut be that obsessive behaviour towards interests is part of who I am. I am autistic. I DEFIANTLY go all in when something fascinates me. But not... Not like this.

Do you have ANY IDEA how many times I watched starwars 8 in 72 hours? Any clue? Holy fricking ... Something. I watched it fast. I watched it slow. I watched it skipping ahead 10 seconds every 10 seconds. I dissected that thing in micrscopic detail.

It gets better. Because mere hours before I got hit with this episode... I was not a starwars fan.

Nope. I watched it. It was ok. I wasn't going out of my way for it.

And suddenly. Wham. Episode 8. All the time. I watched some 7 and 9 as well but it was like it was entierly because eit was connected to 8.

I cannot even.

And while this is happening, *I know*. I know. I really do. I know this isn't my normal behaviour. I know this isn't my wheelhouse. I know something is deeply, deeply wrong in my brain.

I think it might actually be an ok movie, honestly. But not THAT good. And now it's one of my favourite things. Forever. I have no idea if it's actually good. Did I not give eit a chance the first time? Is my obsessive brain simply emotionally hooked up how? Fuck, I don't know.

So that's why I'm posting today. On this day. May 4th.

I'm seeing a lot of star wars today and it's making my brain tickle with it's own ridiculousness.

Not the whole point though. Because it lasted 72 hours (I watched dit one more time after that and if wasn't near as intense).

But what happened AFTER my 72 hours as an obsessive raylo (oh yeah. I went there. I'm not even ashamed. I am also compeltely content with the end they got, because I do not see that shit working out).

Brains don't regrow. They rewire.

And suddenly, I'm drawing. Like... A lot. I filled pages of doodles. Sketches. I redrew a peice I'd been working on for about a month in a few hours and damnit, it was good. It's not professional quality but I'd never down anything that well before. This goes on for another day. And then I started a story, and I wrote 2000 words all at once.

I'm dyslexic. And words are severely impacted by my brain damage to the point it can cause me phsycial pain to force my thoughts in to words.

And here I am. Going nuts on my phone. The words just spilling out and again - damnit, it was good shit.

My brain was abstracting. Where the concious sort had been shunted, it wasn't directing the abstracting aspect of my mind.

And I was making cognative leaps. My brain was wiring itself together for creativity.

For another 24 hours.

And now, dear reader, we get to now.

I have written 200 words in the last 2 days. They feel wrong.

I started and stopped a dozen images. None of them feel right. And there are objective quality differences.

I can still draw a bit. If I'm not tired. I'm almost always tired - it's neural fatigue, it comes with surviving a brain damage.

I have somehow brain damaged my way in to better skills.

And it's... It's not a good feeling.

Doing it the first time and watching something take place in front of my eyes I don't recognise was like magic. It was euphoric. Amazing. Exciting.

Realising as time wears on that the ability to do this is intrinsically tied in to the way ones brain handles brain damage and sensory processing issues?

Not a great feeling cats. Not at all.

I find myself staring at a document willing words on tot he page that just aren't there anymore and feeling so frustrated I could scream.

Whose idea was this anyway? Why can't I keep my rewiring?

It's so hard dto explain the feeling of loss.

It's not me who did these things. A version of me, yes. But not the one we are keeping.

The one we keep struggles to hold a narrarive in her head and the narrator's tone took 3 rewritten to preserve for a single paragraph.

I don't want to stop. But how do I keep going? I'm not the author anymore and I've always struggled with adopting the tone of others.

So yeah. That's where I'm at. And I wanna talk about it. Because I don't want to be alone. But I can't escape the feeling I'm being dramatic. Terribly dramatic. And so talking about it is hard. How much is my own spin and perception and how much is real?

Did this really happen?

I think it did. But like every story I tell, I don't know. Memory loss. Cognetive issues.

I just wanna tell stories and draw. But the words hurt and the art makes me tired.

It's frustrating is all.

I hate being lighting geletine.

In case you're wondering what kind of cognative leap happened:

That one is april 4th.

And that one April 28th.

🤷‍♀️

Fucked if I know, really.

#brain damage #star wars #wtf was that #autism #writing #drawing #spd #art #experiances #ramblings #and why not #so tired #and now i have a headache #i have no idea why Im even writing this #weirdly obsessive brain #just brain stuff #neurology #neurodivergent #brain damage is fucked up #that time i was brain damaged and joined a fandom #its not a bad fandom. im just confused. #i dont get tags #lightning geletine #i miss me

[realelizajayne]

June 5, 2021 Chapter 41.28

It started off as a semi-normal day. I say semi-normal because I honestly wasn’t prepared for the sh#t show I created in my mind. I should have followed the “red flags” 🚩and stayed home. But I am generally someone who runs🏃‍♀️ straight towards them like a bull uncontrollably drawn to the movement of the cape as the matador whips it around. Most people think it’s the color red the bull is drawn to. However,🐂 bulls are actually color blind so they will charge at any color. What they are actually irritated by is the movement of the matador’s cape as he whips it around. Just like us humans it wouldn’t matter what the “flag” color is if we are not in the right state of mind at the time. Godspeed ahead we too like the bull will charge ahead at the matador not f#cking prepared for the consequence both good or bad. 😆

To be fair I was having a fairly rough morning to begin with but I won’t dive into that in this chapter 🙄 I most likely will need to save that for one of my books.📚 That will be a self-help book I can take my own advice on. 🤣 I have faced a lot of “triggers” over the past 2.5 years since my Dad has passed away 😭💔 and all have been difficult. Losing my Dad, my best friend, it was as if just overnight my life had changed. My routine is different…. just everything. Nothing can ever be the same, I can’t even describe how the wave 🌊 of emotions can come and go in a splint second both happy and sad. That’s just how grief is, it can f#cking hit you out of nowhere. What I didn’t think about was being at a wedding. 👰 I mean don’t get me wrong, what a beautiful celebration 🍾 it was, and I was happy to be included to be part of it. It is always so nice to see a couple in love making a commitment and celebrating it with family and friends. The ceremony itself if you pay close attention and even though we were outside in what felt like 100 degree temperature I paid close attention. I didn’t mind the heat too much. I love the summer. Anyway if you pay close attention as I did, it is a good reminder of why two crazy love birds 🐦 even get married and what love and commitment really means. It’s not all one-sided but certainly some days it feels that way depending on your circumstance. I know I’ve been there.😩

The wedding continues and then….well I think you can probably guess where I am going with this. Yep you guessed it, the Father ❤️ Daughter dance. I was not prepared for the flood of emotions 😭💔 that entered so quickly. It was as if I couldn’t breathe. LITERALLY. I mean F#CKING LITERALLY !?!!?! I was trying to hold back my tears. The song playing “Butterfly Kisses”. I thought to myself I don’t even like this song. What the f#ck is wrong with you ? Get your sh#t together !! Get a f#cking grip ! As I tried to manage the flood of emotions, and not begin to hysterically ugly crying in front of a bunch of people, mostly who I didn’t know 😅. I couldn’t even think, I said I’ve gotta get out of here. I felt like I was in a panic, I have never felt this way before in my life. It was like I was trapped in an elevator and it had no f#cking air on the brink of breaking off from its remaining cable. As I searched for a door to get outside the first one looked like an emergency 🆘 exit so I walked to the next one. I was sure I created a scene 😩 I finally made my way outside a breath of fresh air, and I could breathe. 100 degrees outside and humid and I could breathe more than I could in the A/C if that makes any sense to you great you can explain that sh#t to me. As I sat there collecting my thoughts 💭 I realized I’m still grieving. I felt crazy, I began thinking… What the f#ck is wrong with me😤 ? Why am I freaking out😣 ? Why am I not okay🤯 ? Why am I still sad 🥺? I let out a big sign as the tears continued to fall down my face, good thing this 🤣tomboy doesn’t wear makeup 💄I said to myself you know this sh#t you're a therapist you teach it all the time. Why are you losing your sh#t !??? We can know a lot of sh#t it’s really a matter of applying it. Picking up those 🛠tools from the tool box 🧰 and using them. A lot of people get the impression that a therapist doesn’t have issues. Well jokes on them WE ARE HUMAN TOO 😎 I am double whammed with my social media presence some think the same because of that, I never have financial issues, or grieves with people or life. HAHAHAHAHA well first of all that’s not realistic no matter who you are 🤡 but thanks for glamorizing my life 🥰

Well anyway I took a few deep breaths and realized I am that f#cking bull sitting here color blind to my 🤦🏼‍♀️ surroundings and charging at the matador for waving his cape. I began to challenge what I was thinking. Why was I being so hard on myself ? Why wasn’t it okay to be 😢 sad, who said that and why the f#ck do I care what they think ?!? NOTHING was wrong with me. I’m still healing and truth be told this will be most likely for the rest of my life. I’m going to be triggered by the matador when he waved his cape. There’s nothing wrong with allowing myself to feel, and cry. 😭I’M F#CKING GRIEVING😭 !!?!?? I had a real loss in my life that I will not get back. I am still figuring out how to live my life without the physical presence of my Dad. I’m allowed to be sad, angry and I am allowed to cry. All those things are perfectly normal. Maybe that’s not everyone’s reaction to grief and certainly it’s not been my reaction to every loss I’ve had prior but it is mine this time and it is okay. I should not have to feel bad for missing my Dad and wanting to remember him or for feeling disappointed that at Chapter 41.28 I am not married and if that day ever comes🙄 he won’t be there to walk me down the aisle or dance with me. The problem is as a society we force people to bottle them up ⬆️ because it makes “us” uncomfortable. Well too f#cking bad 😜 That’s where boundaries come into play 👊🏼 I can not heal if I am not allowed to feel and if I allow myself to be afraid of storming out of a wedding because someone is going to snicker or make comments (which no one did btw) or any other scenario that may happen in the future. The truth is I don’t owe anyone an explanation for needing to take care of myself in my healing process whether it’s grief you are going through or something else as long as it’s healthy, neither do you !?! No one will understand this journey 🚀but me so who better to know what road is to be traveled. Honestly I have no f#cking clue what direction I’m headed sh#t most days I don’t even know what road I’m on, I’m winging it. I do have goals, dreams and I aspire to grow and become a better person which is what I work towards daily 👉🏼 Personal Growth, so I can be a better version of the me that I was yesterday and to make my Daddy (and my Mama) proud ❤️ I believe that’s how we sort all that sh#t out by trial and error. Follow me on my journey, and if your traveling too maybe we can grow together 🤝 Eliza Jayne

#photography #wedding #dealing with grief #grief journal #griefandloss #griefcounseling #griefsucks #what is grief if not love persevering #writer #author #authencity #model #actorslife #daughter #father #father and daughter #photooftheday #portraiture

[ziracona]

If you had an animal companion and a superpower, what would it be?

Literal animal, or mythical? Because if fantasy, I want a dragon to befriend. Real is hard because I really like wolves, cats, dogs, horses, dolphins. Smart animals like corvids and elephants. I guess either a black cat or a wolf? Superpower would be metal bending like Magneto or Telekinesis ala-Phoenix—levetation, shields. If I got to pick I’d probably pick metalbending. Lots of powers like water-kinesis, time manipulation, healing, invulnerability, and teleportation are amazing, so is super strength and super agility—like the super strong super agile semi-indestructible thing Spider-Man has going is choice. And other things like manipulating emotions or being able to make money appear or time travel would be more powerful, but I think hella telikinesis and metalbending both hit the sweet spot of ‘Powerful enough I could make a real difference saving people as a vigilante’ but don’t hit ‘I am guilted into working every second of my life’ healing powers would, or ‘every choice I make beats vast moral consequences that are horrific’ like touching someone and killing them or emotion manipulation would. Runner up would be the ability to immediately learn any skill. Like boom, I can animate at a pro level. Wham, I can speak ancient Egyptian, whooop, I can do mma at a pro level. That one goes behind the others only bc I know this would be unfair to everyone who works hard as hell to get good, so it might be wrong of me to wish for that one. Damn I’d love the power to just like, touch a computer and create an animated film though. I could help so many friends get projects made, and myself. There’s a lot of powers I could get some real mileage out of if I thought about it.

#ask #anonymous #thanks for the ask!

[damien-ward]

Becoming a Ward III (Hallow’s End)

[Becoming a Ward I , Becoming a Ward II]

(Mood music) 

"AWWOOOO!" A howl came from the entrance of the Stormwind Orphanage as a costumed child came running down the ramp to meet Dardillien, who was waiting patiently. It was Jason, Dardillien had promised to take him trick or treating for Hallow's End. It was a beautiful night, and seeing all the jack o’lanterns and lit candles throughout the city really set the mood, it was a perfect time to go trick or treating.

The Gilnean laughed, "Wow, the costume fits you better than I thought it would. " Jason wore a Worgen costume that Dardillien had made for him, he went to Duskwood to hunt Worgs for their pelt to use to craft the costume. Main body was made from the fur of one Worg, and attached to the body was a hood made out of the fur from the Worg's head so that when worn it have Jason the ears to make him look like a Worgen. Then finally for the pants Dardillien had a pair of cotton pants made to look like they were torn from a transformation with more Worg fur for the bottom half of the legs.

"I know! I look like an actual Worgen! Like the ones I've seen walking around the city! I look so cool!" Jason beamed looking himself over, "Okay let's go! We need to get to all the inns before the night is up."

Right then the rambunctious child ran off into the direction of the Trade District to go to their first stop for candy. Dardillien did his best to keep up by jogging along, watching as Jason ran excitedly with his pumpkin bucket and occasionally howling. They finally reached the Gilded Rose Inn. The innkeeper greeted the little costumed Worgen and let him grab a handful of candy out of the giant Candy Bucket.

Jason thanked the woman and ran out of the inn to find their next location, “Hurry up, old man!” He jokingly called out behind him while Dardillien tried to keep up and not to run into those walking the streets. The two of them made their way through the whole city hitting up every inn they could find, and just as with the first one the eager boy would get his candy and run out in excitement to find the next stop. Several times along the way he would stop and scare people who were walking by before running off, leaving Dardillien to apologize, but he was just happy to see Jason getting into the spirit of the holiday and having fun.

Eventually they left the Golden Keg in the Dwarven Discrict, leaving only the inns in Old Town to get candy from, much to the Gilnean’s displeasure. He didn’t want Jason running off in Old Town at night. So as they made their way across the bridge and into the district heading to the Pig and Whistle Dardillien made sure to stay close... Something that became difficult once they entered the inn. The place was crowded with people eating, drinking, talking, and just hanging out after a long day of work. Jason easily maneuvered through the crowd to get to the Candy Bucket while Dardillien tried to politely push people out of the way to catch up only to prove pointless as Jason came running by to leave the inn.

“Jason wait!” Dardillien yelled over the noise of the inn to no avail as he watched the impatient child slip through the crowd to get outside. He quickly began pushing people aside to catch up, but Jason had already made it outside. Once he finally got outside he saw a man holding up Jason’s bucket of candy as the small boy tried to reach up to grab it.

“Give that back!” Jason yelled.

“No, this is the price for running into me and making me spill my mead you little idiot.” The large swayed and laughed as he looked to his friend standing next to him.

“Hey!” Dardillien stepped up scowling at the man, he was clearly intoxicated based on how much he swayed, hiccuped, and reeked of alcohol,  “Give him his candy back.”

“Is this little kid yours? He ran into me and made me spill my drink, all of it gone. Wasted. His candy is his payment.” The burly man looked at Jason who took a step back near Dardillien.

“Yes, he’s with me. And I will pay you for the drink just give him the candy back.”

“I don’t think so, this can be an important lesson to him. His actions have consequences.” He drunkenly wiggled a finger at him before laughing, “Maybe he will remember this and won’t be so stupid next time.”

Dardillien looked to the ground shaking his head and pursing his lips with a clenched fist, “No..” He muttered under his breath before grabbing the candy bowl with his left hand and then using all his Worgen strength to slug the man in the face with this his right. The drunken fool fell to the ground instantly, out cold. Dardillien then handed the bucket to Jason.

The drunken man’s companion looked at his friend’s unconscious body and back up at his assailant before stepping forward to take a swing. Dardillien dodged the attack and grabbed the man by the shirt slamming him against the wall. He then brought a knee up into the man’s torso, and finally a right hook into his jaw sending him to the ground as well.

Jason was silent for a moment before finally a big grin came across his face, “Whoa! That was awesome!”

“Come on, let’s go..” Dardillien responded with a sigh.

“Alright!” Jason jumped over and paused to turn around, he pulled out a piece of candy and dropped it on the unconscious man’s face, “Here you need this more than I do.” He let out a hearty laugh before running in front of Dardillien with a look of excitement on his face. “I can’t believe you just did that!”

“Yeah.. I shouldn’t have done that, I hope you know that?”

“Yeah, yeah. Violence is bad. But you were like POW!” Jason threw a punch out in front of him, “And then like HIYA!” He kicked his leg out in front of him. “It was so cool! Where did you learn to fight like that?”

“An old friend of mine taught me the basics on fighting a few years ago.”

“Can he teach me?” He responded quickly with a giant grin on his face, “Then that way no one will ever try to steal my candy again. If they do I will be like WHAM!” Again he threw a punch into the air. “And they will know not to mess with me anymore.”

Dardillien shook his head, “While I’m sure Garrett wouldn’t mind taking you under his wing, I don’t think you need to learn how to fight at ten years old. Maybe when you’re older. Come on, let’s get these last few inns and call it a night.”

“Fine...” Jason said with a hint of disappointment before perking up again, “Oh, can we go to Darkshire to get candy another day? I heard Duskwood is spooky!”

“I’ll think about it.” Dardillien answered looking down at Jason, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

#Hallow's End #Becoming a Ward #fc #likeness #World of Warcraft #Wyrmrest Accord #Jason

[blueink01]

Ch. 1: Berk

(Play Music while reading)

Hiccup’s Pov-

"This, is Berk. It's twelve days North of hopeless, and a few degrees South of freezing to death. It's located solidly on the meridian of misery."

"My village. In a word, sturdy. And it's been here for seven generations, but every single building is new."

"We have fishing, hunting, and a charming view of the sunsets. The only problems are the pests. You see, most places have mice or mosquitos. We have..."

Sheep graze peacefully on a hillside. Suddenly one is snatched by a dragon.

STOICK'S HOUSE-

A door is pulled open... as a Dragon swoops directly toward it, Blasting Fire. The door is Slammed. The fire shoots through the slats of wood, illuminating hiccup, a gangly teenage Viking.

" ...dragons."

He exits stoick's/his house. He reopens the sizzling door, as leaps off of the front porch. He weaves through the erupting mayhem as Vikings pour out of the buildings, ready for a fight.

"Dragon" More dragons swarm in, setting rooftops alight and hauling off sheep.

"Most people would leave. Not us. We're Vikings. We have stubbornness issues. Vikings sound the alarm. Viking men and women pour out into the streets, axes in hand."

On hiccup darting through alleys, staying under eaves, making his way through the battle.

"My name's Hiccup. Great name, I know. But it's not the worst. Parents believe a hideous name will frighten off gnomes and trolls. Like our charming Viking demeanor wouldn't do that."

Dragons sweep back and forth, dodging axes and blasting the Vikings who throw them. A burly warrior gets tossed in an explosion, knocking Hiccup to the ground.

VIKING: "(Fierce) Arggghhhhh! (cheery, insane) Mornin'!"

Hiccup gets to his feet and continues to rush past gigantic men and women.

"Meet the neighbors. Hoark the Haggard..."

Horak: "What are you doing out!?"

"... Burnthair the Broad..."

Burnthair: "Get inside!"

"... Phlegma the Fierce..."

Phlegma the Fierce. Viking: "Get back inside!"

Hiccup passes a silent ox of a viking, picking his ear.

Yep, just Ack. Stoik then showed up, the biggest Viking of all. He yanks Hiccup from the path of a strafing dragon and holds aloft to the crowd.

Stoik: "Hiccup!? (accusingly; to the crowd) What is he doing out again?!"

"(He looks at hiccup) What are you doing out?! Get inside!" The flames light up his scowling face and matted red beard. He sets Hiccup down and turns to the sky, searching.

"That's Stoick the Vast. Chief of the tribe. They say that when he was a baby he popped a dragon's head clean off of its shoulders. Do I believe it?" Stoick grabs a wooden cart and hurls it, knocking the strafing dragon out of the sky. "Yes I do".

An explosion forces Vikings to duck. Stoick stands firm, brushing flaming debris off of his shoulder.

Stoick: "(barking; to his men) What have we got?"

Viking #1: "Gronkles. Nadders. Zipplebacks. Oh, and Hoark saw a Monstrous Nightmare."

Stoick: "Any Night Furies?"

Viking #1: "None so far".

Stoick: "(RELIEVED) Good."

Viking: "Hoist the torches!" Massive flaming braziers are raised on poles, lighting up the night sky... and revealing swirling dragons of all types. Below, Hiccup crosses an open plaza and ducks into an open building with a tall chimney.

BLACKSMITH STALL-

He crosses behind a counter, where a peg-legged, one-armed hulk of a Blacksmith reshapes blades with a hammer and tongs appendage.

Gobbler: "Ah! Nice of you to join the party. I thought you'd been carried off. Hiccup dons a leather apron and starts to put away Gobber's scattered appendages.

"Who me? Nah, come on! I'm way too muscular for their taste. They wouldn't know what to do with all this." Hiccup strikes a bodybuilder pose.

Gobber: "They need toothpicks, don't they?" Hiccup gets to work, transferring bent and chipped weapons to the forge as Vikings crowd the counter for replacements.

"The meathead with attitude and interchangeable hands is Gobber. I've been his apprentice ever since I was little. Well...littler."

Stoick Pov-

"We move to the lower defenses. We'll counter-attack with the catapults."

"Dragon". Armed men rush past, flanking others who carry sheep to safety. Stoick follows up the rear as, overhead, a dragon strafes the rooftops with Napalm-like fire.

Back the Hiccup Pov-

"See? Old village. Lots and lots of new houses."

In response, the fire brigade charges through the plaza -- four Teens, tugging a large wooden cask on wheels. From it, they fill buckets of water to douse the flames. One among them is a cute, energetic Viking girl. Hiccup leans out of the stall to watch her.

"Oh and that's Fishlegs, Snotlout. The twins Ruffnut and Tuffnut. And..."

"(DREAMY) Astrid." A SLOW-MOTION explosion erupts behind her, framing her in a sexy ball of fire. The others join her, looking awesome and heroic.

"Their job is so much cooler." Hiccup tries to join them as they pass, but he's hooked by Gobber and hoisted back inside.

"Ah, come on. Let me out, please. I need to make my mark."

Gobber: "Oh, you've made plenty of marks. All in the wrong places."

"Please, two minutes. I'll kill a dragon. My life will get infinitely better. I might even get a date."

Gobber: "You can't lift a hammer. You can't swing an axe..." Gobber grabs a bola as he continues.

"... you can't even throw one of these." A Viking runs by and nabs it out of Gobber's hand, hurling it at a dive-bombing Gronkle. The bola binds its legs, sending it into a heavy crash.

"(Hiccup ready with the answer) Okay fine, but..." He rushes to the back corner of the stall and presents a bizarre, wheel barrow-like contraption

"... this will throw it for me." Hiccup OPENS the hinged lid of the device. An arm springs up, equipped with twin bows. They prematurely launch a bola, narrowly missing Gobber... and taking out a Viking at the counter.

Viking: "Arggh!"

Gobber: "See, now this right here is what I'm talking about."

"Mild calibration issue."

Gobber: "Hiccup. If you ever want to get out there to fight dragons, you need to stop all..." Gobber gestures in Hiccup's general direction.

Gobber: "... this."

"(Hiccup astonished) But... you just pointed to all of me."

Gobber: Yes! That's it! Stop being all of you.

"(Hiccup Threatening) Ohhhh..."

GOBBER:" (Mimicking) Ohhhhh, yes.

"You, sir, are playing a dangerous game. Keeping this much, raw...Vikingness contained. (Beat) There will be consequences!" Gobber tosses him a sword.

Gobber: "I'll take my chances. Sword. Sharpen. Now." Hiccup takes it begrudgingly and lobs it onto the grinding wheel. He stews... fantasizing...

"One day I'll get out there. Because killing a dragon is everything around here."

At the Lower Plains-

hiccup Continues. "Nadders land, gathering like seagulls around a seemingly vacant house."

"A Nadder head is sure to get me at least noticed." The Nadders clamber onto the building, tearing the roof and walls apart. Sheep pour out and Scatter. Elsewhere, hippo-like Gronckles pick drying racks clean of fish and fly off like loaded pelicans.

"Gronckles are tough. Taking down one of those would definitely get me a girlfriend." A stealthy, snake-like dragon head peeks over a rooftop, breathing gas into a chimney.

"A Zippelback? Exotic, exciting. Two heads, twice the status. A second head pokes through the door and lights it." KABLAM! The two heads fly through the explosion, their necks zipping together to reveal a single body. It flies past Stoick as he climbs to the top of a Catapult tower.

Catapult Operator: "They found the sheep!"

Stoick: "(Frustrated) Concentrate fire over the lower bank!

Catapult Operator: "Fire!" Boulders are catapulted at the corralling Nadders... Just as a huge red dragon whips past, spraying the base of the catapult with sticky fire.

"And then there's the Monstrous Nightmare. Only the best Vikings go after those. They have this nasty habit of setting themselves on fire." It emerges from the flames, climbing the catapult with a leering, toothy grin.

Stoick: "Reload! I'll take care of this." Stoick takes on the Nightmare, face to hammer.

Suddenly, a Loud ballistic moaning streaks overhead. The catapult crew ducks.

Back with hiccup at the blacksmith stall, who is looking up from his work, reacting to the same sound.

"But the ultimate prize is the dragon no one has ever seen. We call it the--"

Viking: "Night Fury! Get down!" Vikings everywhere take shelter. The moaning sound Builds.

The Monstrous Nightmare suddenly stops fighting and takes flight away from the Catapult. Stoick looks skyward.

Stoick: "JUMP!" KABOOM! The Catapult Explodes as though hit by an artillery shell... sending Stoick and the crew leaping for their lives.

"This thing never steals food, never shows itself, and..." The sound recedes, leaving the crippled catapult in flames.

"...never misses. (Beat) No one has ever killed a Night Fury. That's why I'm going to be the first." Gobber trades his hammer for an axe.

Gobber: Man the fort, Hiccup, they need me out there! Gobber pauses. Turns with a threatening glare.

Gobber: Stay. Put. There. You know what I mean." Gobber charges into the fray, Hollering.

A smirk crosses hiccup's face. Moments Later "WHAM!" Hiccup pushes his wheeled contraption through a wall of clustered Vikings. He weaves through the ongoing mayhem, as fast as his legs can carry him.

Viking #6: Hiccup, where are you going!

Viking #7: Come back here!

" I know. Be right back!"

On the Plain Below-

The Nadders have cornered the house-full of sheep. They close in, ready to spring upon them. Stoick suddenly appears, Hurling Fishing Nets over them. The surprised Nadders are caught. Stoick and his men rush in. A Nadder blasts a hole through its net. Stoick leaps onto it, clamping his thick arms around its head, forcing its jaws shut.

Stoick: Mind yourselves! The devils still have some juice in them.

On The Plain Above-

Hiccup reaches a cliff overlooking the smoking Catapult and drops the handles to the ground. He cranks several levers, unfolding and then cocking the bowed arms of his contraption. He drops a bola onto a chamber and then pivots the weapon on a gimbal head toward the dark sky. He listens, with his eye pressed to the scope, hand poised on the trigger. He hears the Night Fury approaching... and turns his aim to the defense tower.

"(hiccup to Himself) Come on. Give me something to shoot at, give me something to shoot at." It closes in for the final strike, completely camouflaged in the night. KABLAM! The tower topples. The blast of fire illuminates the dragon for a split second. Hiccup pulls the trigger. KERTHUNK! The flexed arms SNAP forward, springing the weapon off the ground. The bola disappears into the sky, followed by a WHACK and a SCREECH and a... (Faded scream) Ahhhh."

"Scream?" Hiccup ignore that sound.

"(surprised, then elated) Oh I hit it! Yes, I hit it! Did anybody see that?" Hiccup's victory is short-lived. A Monstrous Nightmare appears, slithering up over the lip of the cliff.

"Except for you."

With Stoick-

He was holding down the netted Nadders. He hears a familiar holler  and looks up to see... Hiccup running through the Plaza, Screaming, with the Nightmare fast on his heels.

Alarmed, Stoick abandons the Nadders and runs off.

Stoick: (to his men, re: the Nadders) "DO NOT let them escape!"

In the Plaza-

Vikings scatter as Hiccup dodges a near fatal blast. The Nightmare's sticky, Napalm-like fire splashes up onto buildings, setting them alight. Hiccup ducks behind the last standing brazier -- the only shelter available. The Nightmare blasts it, spraying fire all around him.

Hiccup peers around the smoldering post. No sign of the Nightmare. He turns back to find it leering at him, blocking his escape. It takes a deep breath. Hiccup is finished.

Suddenly, Stoick Leaps between them, tackling the Nightmare to the ground. They tumble and wrestle, resuming their earlier fight. The Nightmare tries to toast him, but only coughs up smoke.

Stoick: "You're all out." He smashes the Nightmare repeatedly in the face, driving it away. It takes to the air and disappears. Winded, Stoick turns to Hiccup.

Back to Hiccup's Pov-

"Oh, and there's one more thing you need to know...". The burnt brazier pole collapses, sending the massive iron basket crashing. It bounces down the hill, destroying as it goes and scattering the Vikings who were holding down the netted Nadders. The freed dragons escape... with several sheep in tow.

"Sorry, dad."

Village- Upper Plaza-

The escaped Nadders fly past with sheep in their clutches. The raid is over. The dragons have clearly won. The murmuring crowd eyes Stoick, awaiting his response.

"(SHEEPISH) Okay, but I hit a Night Fury." Stoick grabs Hiccup by the back scruff of his collar and hauls him away, fuming with embarrassment.

"It's not like the last few times, Dad. I mean I really actually hit it. You guys were busy and I had a very clear shot. It went down, just off Raven Point. Let's get a search party out there, before it--"

Stoick: "--STOP! Just....stop." He releases Hiccup. Everyone goes silent, staring expectantly.

Stoick continues "Every time you step outside, disaster follows. Can you not see that I have bigger problems? Winter's almost here and I have an entire village to feed!" Hiccup looks around. All eyes are upon him.

"Between you and me, the village could do with a little less feeding, don't ya think? "A few rotund Vikings stir self-consciously.

Stoick: "This isn't a joke, Hiccup! (EXASPERATED) Why can't you follow the simplest orders?"

"I can't stop myself. I see a dragon and I have to just... kill it, you know? It's who I am, Dad."

Stoick: You are many things, Hiccup. But a dragon killer is not one of them." Sting. Hiccup looks around to see many nods of agreement.

Stoick: "[Continues] Get back to the house." He looks at Gobber "Make sure he gets there. I have his mess to clean up." Stoick lumbers off in the opposite direction. Gobber leads Hiccup through the walk of shame. They pass the teen fire brigade as they snicker.

Tuffnut: "Quite the performance."

Snotloud: "I've never seen anyone mess up that badly. That helped!"

"Thank you, thank you. I was trying, so..." Hiccup avoids Astrid's glare and heads up toward a large house, standing prominently on the hill above the others.

"I really did hit one."

Gobber: "Sure, Hiccup."

"He never listens."

Gobber: "Well, it runs in the family."

"And when he does, it's always with this... disappointed scowl. Like someone skimped on the meat in his sandwich. (Mimicking Stoik) Excuse me, barmaid. I'm afraid you brought me the wrong offspring. I ordered an extra large boy with beefy arms. Extra guts and glory on the side. This here. This is a talking fish bone."

Gobber: "You're thinking about this all wrong. It's not so much what you look like. It's what's inside that he can't stand."

"Thank you, for summing that up." They reach the doorway.

Gobber: "Look, the point is, stop trying so hard to be something you're not." Hiccup SIGHS heavily.

"I just want to be one of you guys." Gobber eyes him sympathetically. Hiccup turns and goes through the front door. And straight out the back door. He hurries off into the woods, determined.

CHAPTER 2:⬇️

#Spotify #fanfic #httyd oc #lovable #complete #xreader

[theliterateape]

Hope Idiotic | Part V

By David Himmel

 Hope Idiotic is a serialized novel. Catch each new part every week on Monday and Thursday.

LOU HIT THE SAN FRANCISCO CITY LIMITS JUST AS NIGHT WAS COMING DOWN. He used the hostel book as promised to find a well-rated spot with a good view of the city. He’d never stayed in hostels before and was curious. He’d hoped to meet a few strangers he could make friends with for the night and explore the city with, but the place was pretty empty. It was too early in the summer for college students or Europeans to be backpacking their way through the country.

Lou was sent to a room with four bunk beds. Two bunks — top and bottom — were occupied with sleeping bags, clothes and shredded bags of potato chips. Lou claimed the top bunk closest to the door. He tossed his stuff onto the mattress and quickly returned to the front desk.

“Where’s the best place to go for a few drinks?” he asked the grimy grunge-brat wearing flannel and a Sonic Youth T-shirt. “Maybe a place with good live music.”  He was directed to a place called, Shattered Glass. He was able to walk there from the hostel, which sat at the top of a hill and owned a perfect view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Like every other place he had encountered in California so far, this bar was mostly empty. On the small stage at the back end of the joint, a weathered man, who looked like he may have been part of the West Coast punk movement in the 1970s, played a banged-up acoustic guitar and sang cover songs of everything from Iggy Pop to Lisa Loeb. Miller Lites were six bucks a bottle, but hell, that was San Francisco.

Lou tried to engage the bartender in some friendly conversation about the town, where to go, what to do and where the hell everyone was that night. But the bartender, a bored, sad-looking man of about thirty-five, wanted nothing to do with it. And after six bottles of beer and an hour of the aged, never-was rockstar, Lou paid his thirty-six-dollar tab and took off.

He wandered the streets searching for a little action, but found nothing worth getting into. So, he headed back up the hill to the hostel, where he figured he’d tuck himself in and wake up early. Get a head start on the day. Grab breakfast. Visit the bridge then continue north into Oregon.

When he left the hostel, he remembered leaving his room’s door open just as he’d found it. When he returned, it was closed. He put his ear to the door to inspect any potential sounds. When he didn’t hear anything, he slowly turned the handle and opened the door. It was pitch black in the windowless room. He pulled out his cell phone as he closed the door behind him. He flipped the phone open to light the few steps to his bunk. He climbed up and carefully took his shoes and socks off, then slid into his sleeping bag. Lou had a near-perfect internal clock and rarely used an alarm. As he closed his eyes, he said in a whisper, “Wake up at seven a.m. Wake up in seven hours.”

Just as he began to fall asleep, he was startled by noises coming from within the room. He hadn’t scanned the place with the light of his phone before going to bed; he had just assumed he was alone. The noises were coming from one of the bunks that earlier he’d seen loaded with someone’s belongings. His cell phone was resting on his chest, and for a moment, he considered flipping it open and seeing who or what was in the room with him.

Now he was going to bear witness to alien robot sex and perhaps become a post-coitus sacrifice. Fuck Michelle. Fuck hostels. Fuck robots. Fuck San Francisco.

There were rustling sounds and what he thought were voices being muffled by blankets and pillows. He heard music being played. Not songs: more like ring tones from a cell phone or video game soundtracks from a handheld game system. The bunk squeaked in rhythm as it tapped the cement wall. He looked over and saw blue and green and red lights glowing, flickering intermittently from under blankets. It was like robots having sex.

 Lou was scared. This sort of thing would never happen under the parking lot light of a hotel. Why did he make that promise to Michelle to stay in hostels? Why did he keep that promise? He had a perfectly workable system when on the road, and she fucked it all up with her law school arguments and girlfriend charm. Now he was going to bear witness to alien robot sex and perhaps become a post-coitus sacrifice. Fuck Michelle. Fuck hostels. Fuck robots. Fuck San Francisco.

He debated making an escape, but figured he couldn’t collect his stuff fast enough in the dark without disturbing the alien robots that would probably kill him. So he slouched down farther into his sleeping bag, pulled his pillow tightly over his head and the opening of the bag around the pillow so he was entirely encased and protected, like a caterpillar in a cocoon. He forced himself to think about anything else: Chicago; Michelle; his career in twenty years; Chuck; his house in Las Vegas; the family dog Max greeting him at his dad’s house; Crater Lake; the price of gas; his pending empty bank account; his résumé; where he would live… More and more, he was less afraid of the increasingly loud and strange sounds coming from the adjacent bunk, and starting to fear what was waiting for him outside of that dark hostel room.

Panic finally put him to sleep. And when his eyes popped open at 7 a.m., he was still stuffed down in his sleeping bag and drenched in sweat. Slowly, he peeked his head out of the bag, but couldn’t see a thing because even during the morning, the room allowed no light to come in. He didn’t hear anything, so he flipped his phone open and aimed it across the room. It didn’t illuminate much, but from what he could see, the coast was clear. He swung his legs over the edge of the bunk and hopped down. He reached the light switch and turned it on, ready for the alien robots to spring to life and attack him. But he was alone. No one, nothing, was in the room with him. The things he had seen on the bunks when he checked in were gone. Other than his own stuff and the beds, the room was bare.

He wondered if he had imagined the noises and lights. Was the anxiety of the move playing tricks with his brain? Was he going crazy, or were there really alien robots having sex a few feet from him last night? It didn’t matter. It was over. The day was anew.

He put on some fresh clothes, brushed his teeth in the communal bathroom, paid his bill and took off toward the Golden Gate Bridge. It was early and traffic was light. It was just Lou and a European couple on the pedestrian part of the bridge. He could tell they were European by the formfitting brightly colored jeans and vinyl windbreakers that looked like they were stolen off the set of a 1980s Wham! video. The air was cool and salty. There wasn’t much fog like expected, so he was able to grab a few good photos of the bridge and some grainy, but mostly decent, shots of the Alcatraz rock. The majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge was one thing. But what really grabbed his attention were the emergency telephone boxes secured to the bridge every couple of yards. They had signs above them that read:

CRISIS COUNSELING THERE IS HOPE MAKE THE CALL THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING OFF THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC.

He looked over the railing into the San Francisco Bay. He knew how it worked. A sad, troubled life. A moment of uncertainty — then certainty. A little leap. This was America’s hot spot for suicide aficionados. It was either the impact with the water or the greedy undertow of the bay that would kill a person. Lou wondered for a second what part would kill him. If it wasn’t the fall, could he survive? He was a strong swimmer. It was a rhetorical question; actually killing himself was not on his mind.

Still, he wondered about those emergency phones and about the operators on the other end of them. How many lives were saved by the telephone? How many operators heard last words? He considered picking one up and telling the operator that he would kill himself unless someone in Chicago would have a job waiting for him when he arrived in two weeks. But then he figured that probably wouldn’t work. No one would want to hire a demanding suicidal maniac.

He used his cell phone to call Michelle from the bridge. He hated the idea of bothering her at work, but she assured him that a phone call from him was never a bother but a blessing.

“Michelle Kaminski’s office,” her secretary said.

“May I please speak with Ms. Kaminski,” Lou asked.

“Ms. Kaminski is in a meeting at the moment. May I take a message for her?”

“Thank you. Please tell her that Lou Bergman called. She has my number.”

“Will she know what this is in reference to?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’ll have her return your call at her earliest convenience, Mr. Bergman. Have a wonderful day.”

He meandered along the bridge for a few more minutes until Michelle called back. “You called?” She did not sound happy.

“Hi, baby. That was a quick meeting.”

“It was three hours long — just finished.”

“Brutal. Guess where I am?”

“I don’t know… Moon Lake or wherever.”

“Moon Lake? You mean, Crater Lake. No. I’m standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. God, Michelle, you should see it. It’s beautiful.”

“I’d love to be there with you. But I have a job to do. I’d love to be able to take two weeks off to do whatever I wanted and go wherever I wanted, but I have responsibilities. People depend on me. I have billable hour quotas I need to hit. But you go ahead and enjoy the view from the bridge, Lou.”

“Whoa. I’m sorry that upset you. You sound busy. I’ll let you go.”

“I am busy, Lou. I’m always busy. This is my job. I think you need to hurry home.”

“I know, baby. I’m on my way to you. Just 12 more days. It’s nothing.”

“I mean it. This road trip, I get it. I know you like driving all over with no direction, like its your last hurrah or something, but you need to consider me, Lou.”

“I have direction. I know exactly where I’m going.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about me slipping away. You’re losing me.”

“What?”

“I know you’re moving here to finally start your life, but mine has been happening, and you can’t expect me to just wait around for you to show up whenever you please. It’s not fair to me. I love you, Lou. And I want to spend the rest of my life with you. But I can’t promise you I’ll be here when you finally show up. I hope I’ll still be waiting for you, but I don’t know. I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

What the hell just happened? She’s raving like a madwoman, he thought. He’d been through this with her before, however. In moments of personal stress, Michelle had a tendency to overreact and lash out at anyone within striking distance. There was one week during her freshman year in high school when her best friend Jen was too busy to hang out with her. As retaliation, during a soccer practice warm-up exercise, Michelle kicked a ball has hard as she possibly could at Jen, hitting her square in the gut, knocking her on her feet and forcing the air right out of her lungs. Jen had a soccer-ball–sized bruise for several days and was benched for that weekend’s game because of the injury.

When Michelle told this story in her maid-of-honor speech at Jen’s wedding, she didn’t understand why no one laughed at it. “Because it’s just mean,” Lou told her. But Michelle disagreed and stood by her case that Jen had it coming and that it was a funny story. Besides, they were still friends after all, she argued.

Maybe Michelle was freaking out on him because she’d just emerged from a painful three-hour meeting. She was just stressed at work and jealous that he was out having fun. Envy. That’s what it was. He wasn’t losing her. She was just kicking the soccer ball in his gut.

 ✶

HE DROVE INTO TOWN AND FOUND A PLACE TO GRAB A BAGEL AND COFFEE, and read one of the scummy alternative papers in the wire basket by the door. As he was biting into the bagel, he received a text from Michelle:

I’m sorry I barked at u. But hurry. I won’t wait forevr. Stop wasting ur life.

“I really don’t have time for this right now, Lou,” Michelle said when he again called her. He couldn’t let a text like that go without further explanation. Clearly, she was not just lashing out. She was giving him an ultimatum: Stop having fun or she was leaving.

“You’re not being fair,” he told her.

“No. You’re not being fair to me or your career. You know what the right thing to do is. So do it.”

He drove a little farther north but pulled into a gas station just before leaving the San Francisco limits. While the car fueled up, he called Chuck.

“She’s right. What am I doing out here? I’m wasting all of this money that I don’t really have, when I could be in Chicago looking for a job. And now what? Now she’s going to break up with me when I get there? All broke and unemployed but with some photos of the town where Hemingway shot himself? What the fuck am I doing?”

Chuck was at the hospital in Indiana where his mother was recovering from her second heart surgery. “First of all, calm down. Just breathe,” he told Lou. “She’s not going to break up with you. You’ll find a job. Just relax.”

“I can’t! I’m telling you, I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this. I’m freaking out. I swear there were robots fucking in my room last night. I gotta get to Chicago. I gotta get my life going. I know! I’ll call a shipping company, have them pick up my car from this gas station. I’ll call Southwest and get a plane ticket, and I can be home by tonight.”

“You’re fucking crazy,” Chuck said. “Now, shut up and listen to me. You’ll end up spending more money on shipping and flying than you will driving. If it’ll keep you from going insane, cancel the adventure. You can try it again another time. I’ll do it with you. So calm down, drive back into the city and find I-80. It starts there. Just take that straight across into Chicago. You’ll be there in three days.”

✶

WHEN LOU PULLED UP TO MICHELLE’S HIGH-RISE on Lake Shore Drive, he was covered in a layer of highway dust, beef jerky crumbs and sweat. His breath reeked of Red Bull, dehydrated meat and a tired piece of chewing gum. His hair was oily, but he thought it looked pretty good for having spent the last seven days windblown in the driver’s seat of his Volkswagen. If only it could look that good after a shower.

As he looked at himself in the rearview mirror, he closed his eyes and sighed. He told himself out loud, “All right, asshole. Don’t fuck anything up.”

When Michelle answered the door of her pricey northside one-bedroom apartment and saw Lou standing there, her face exploded into a smile. She grabbed his hand and pulled him inside, where she kissed him long and perfectly. Then she drew all the blinds down on the large windows that presented a picturesque Chicago — the peaks of downtown buildings, Belmont Harbor and Lake Michigan’s expanse out east, and the garden rooftops of Wrigleyville to the west. Again, their mouths met, and they fell into a rabidly intense lovemaking session.

“Welcome home,” Michelle said once she caught her breath, both of their naked bodies sweaty and shaking with pleasure.

“I can get used to this,” he said.

Part I Part II Part III Part IV 

#Hope Idiotic #Chicago Fiction #Las Vegas Fiction #Fiction #Novel #David Himmel Fiction #David Himmel Author #Bildungsroman #Dark Humor

[anupamasdiggs]

SV 1

Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is . . . without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.

Daniel Defoe, _The History of the Devil_

I

The Angel Gibreel

1

"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again . . ." Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.

"I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you," and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, "To the devil with your tunes," the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, "in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now."

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. "Ohé, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch." At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. "Hey, Spoono," Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, "Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. _Dharrraaammm!_ Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat."

Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time . . . the jumbo jet _Bostan_, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and premature sun burst into the powdery January air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea.

Who am I?

Who else is there?

The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr. Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. Also -- for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands' genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its everreasonable doubts -- mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mothertongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, _land_, _belonging_, _home_. Knocked a little silly by the blast, Gibreel and Saladin plummeted like bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork, and because Chamcha was going down head first, in the recommended position for babies entering the birth canal, he commenced to feel a low irritation at the other's refusal to fall in plain fashion. Saladin nosedived while Farishta embraced air, hugging it with his arms and legs, a flailing, overwrought actor without techniques of restraint. Below, cloud-covered, awaiting their entrance, the slow congealed currents of the English Sleeve, the appointed zone of their watery reincarnation.

"O, my shoes are Japanese," Gibreel sang, translating the old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, "These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart's Indian for all that." The clouds were bubbling up towards them, and perhaps it was on account of that great mystification of cumulus and cumulo-nimbus, the mighty rolling thunderheads standing like hammers in the dawn, or perhaps it was the singing (the one busy performing, the other booing the performance), or their blast--delirium that spared them full foreknowledge of the imminent . . . but for whatever reason, the two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their transmutation began.

Mutation?

Yessir, but not random. Up there in air-space, in that soft, imperceptible field which had been made possible by the century and which, thereafter, made the century possible, becoming one of its defining locations, the place of movement and of war, the planet-shrinker and power-vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic, -- because when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible -- wayupthere, at any rate, changes took place in delirious actors that would have gladdened the heart of old Mr. Lamarck: under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired.

What characteristics which? Slow down; you think Creation happens in a rush? So then, neither does revelation . . . take a look at the pair of them. Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew too close to the sun, is that it?

That's not it. Listen:

Mr. Saladin Chamcha, appalled by the noises emanating from Gibreel Farishta's mouth, fought back with verses of his own. What Farishta heard wafting across the improbable night sky was an old song, too, lyrics by Mr. James Thomson, seventeenhundred to seventeen-forty-eight. ". . . at Heaven's command," Chamcha carolled through lips turned jingoistically redwhiteblue by the cold, "arooooose from out the aaaazure main." Farishta, horrified, sang louder and louder of Japanese shoes, Russian hats, inviolately subcontinental hearts, but could not still Saladin's wild recital: "And guardian aaaaangels sung the strain."

Let's face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let's face this, too: they did.

Downdown they hurtled, and the winter cold frosting their eyelashes and threatening to freeze their hearts was on the point of waking them from their delirious daydream, they were about to become aware of the miracle of the singing, the rain of limbs and babies of which they were a part, and the terror of the destiny rushing at them from below, when they hit, were drenched and instantly iced by, the degree-zero boiling of the clouds.

They were in what appeared to be a long, vertical tunnel. Chamcha, prim, rigid, and still upside-down, saw Gibreel Farishta in his purple bush-shirt come swimming towards him across that cloud-walled funnel, and would have shouted, "Keep away, get away from me," except that something prevented him, the beginning of a little fluttery screamy thing in his intestines, so instead of uttering words of rejection he opened his arms and Farishta swam into them until they were embracing head-to-tail, and the force of their collision sent them tumbling end over end, performing their geminate cartwheels all the way down and along the hole that went to Wonderland; while pushing their way out of the white came a succession of cloudforms, ceaselessly metamorphosing, gods into bulls, women into spiders, men into wolves. Hybrid cloud-creatures pressed in upon them, gigantic flowers with human breasts dangling from fleshy stalks, winged cats, centaurs, and Chamcha in his semi-consciousness was seized by the notion that he, too, had acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid, as if he were growing into the person whose head nestled now between his legs and whose legs were wrapped around his long, patrician neck.

This person had, however, no time for such "high falutions"; was, indeed, incapable of faluting at all; having just seen, emerging from the swirl of cloud, the figure of a glamorous woman of a certain age, wearing a brocade sari in green and gold, with a diamond in her nose and lacquer defending her high-coiled hair against the pressure of the wind at these altitudes, as she sat, equably, upon a flying carpet. "Rekha Merchant," Gibreel greeted her. "You couldn't find your way to heaven or what?" Insensitive words to speak to a dead woman! But his concussed, plummeting condition may be offered in mitigation

. . . Chamcha, clutching his legs, made an uncomprehending query: "What the hell?"

"You don't see her?" Gibreel shouted. "You don't see her goddamn Bokhara rug?"

No, no, Gibbo, her voice whispered in his ears, don't expect him to confirm. I am strictly for your eyes only, maybe you are going crazy, what do you think, you namaqool, you piece of pig excrement, my love. With death comes honesty, my beloved, so I can call you by your true names.

Cloudy Rekha murmured sour nothings, but Gibreel cried again to Chamcha: "Spoono? You see her or you don't?"

Saladin Chamcha saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing. Gibreel faced her alone. "You shouldn't have done it," he admonished her. "No, sir. A sin. A suchmuch thing."

O, you can lecture me now, she laughed. You are the one with the high moral tone, that's a good one. It was you who left me, her voice reminded his ear, seeming to nibble at the lobe. It was you, O moon of my delight, who hid behind a cloud. And I in darkness, blinded, lost, for love.

He became afraid. "What do you want? No, don't tell, just go."

When you were sick I could not see you, in case of scandal, you knew I could not, that I stayed away for your sake, but afterwards you punished, you used it as your excuse to leave, your cloud to hide behind. That, and also her, the icewoman. Bastard. Now that I am dead I have forgotten how to forgive. I curse you, my Gibreel, may your life be hell. Hell, because that's where you sent me, damn you, where you came from, devil, where you're going, sucker, enjoy the bloody dip. Rekha's curse; and after that, verses in a language he did not understand, all harshnesses and sibilance, in which he thought he made out, but maybe not, the repeated name _Al-Lat_.

He clutched at Chamcha; they burst through the bottom of the clouds.

Speed, the sensation of speed, returned, whistling its fearful note. The roof of cloud fled upwards, the water-floor zoomed closer, their eyes opened. A scream, that same scream that had fluttered in his guts when Gibreel swam across the sky, burst from Chamcha's lips; a shaft of sunlight pierced his open mouth and set it free. But they had fallen through the transformations of the clouds, Chamcha and Farishta, and there was a fluidity, an indistinctness, at the edges of them, and as the sunlight hit Chamcha it released more than noise:

"Fly," Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. "Start flying, now." And added, without knowing its source, the second command: "And sing."

How does newness come into the world? How is it born?

Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?

How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?

Is birth always a fall?

Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

When Mr. Saladin Chamcha fell out of the clouds over the English Channel he felt his heart being gripped by a force so implacable that he understood it was impossible for him to die. Afterwards, when his feet were once more firmly planted on the ground, he would begin to doubt this, to ascribe the implausibilities of his transit to the scrambling of his perceptions by the blast, and to attribute his survival, his and Gibreel's, to blind, dumb luck. But at the time he had no doubt; what had taken him over was the will to live, unadulterated, irresistible, pure, and the first thing it did was to inform him that it wanted nothing to do with his pathetic personality, that half-reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices, it intended to bypass all that, and he found himself surrendering to it, yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in his own mind, in his own body, because it began in the very centre of his body and spread outwards, turning his blood to iron, changing his flesh to steel, except that it also felt like a fist that enveloped him from outside, holding him in a way that was both unbearably tight and intolerably gentle; until finally it had conquered him totally and could work his mouth, his fingers, whatever it chose, and once it was sure of its dominion it spread outward from his body and grabbed Gibreel Farishta by the balls.

"Fly," it commanded Gibreel. "Sing."

Chamcha held on to Gibreel while the other began, slowly at first and then with increasing rapidity and force, to flap his arms. Harder and harder he flapped, and as he flapped a song burst out of him, and like the song of the spectre of Rekha Merchant it was sung in a language he did not know to a tune he had never heard. Gibreel never repudiated the miracle; unlike Chamcha, who tried to reason it out of existence, he never stopped saying that the gazal had been celestial, that without the song the flapping would have been for nothing, and without the flapping it was a sure thing that they would have hit the waves like rocks or what and simply burst into pieces on making contact with the taut drum of the sea. Whereas instead they began to slow down. The more emphatically Gibreel flapped and sang, sang and flapped, the more pronounced the deceleration, until finally the two of them were floating down to the Channel like scraps of paper in a breeze.

They were the only survivors of the wreck, the only ones who fell from _Bostan_ and lived. They were found washed up on a beach. The more voluble of the two, the one in the purple shirt, swore in his wild ramblings that they had walked upon the water, that the waves had borne them gently in to shore; but the other, to whose head a soggy bowler hat clung as if by magic, denied this. "God, we were lucky," he said. "How lucky can you get?"

I know the truth, obviously. I watched the whole thing. As to omnipresence and -potence, I'm making no claims at present, but I can manage this much, I hope. Chamcha willed it and Farishta did what was willed.

Which was the miracle worker?

Of what type -- angelic, satanic -- was Farishta's song?

Who am I?

Let's put it this way: who has the best tunes?

These were the first words Gibreel Farishta said when he awoke on the snowbound English beach with the improbability of a starfish by his ear: "Born again, Spoono, you and me. Happy birthday, mister; happy birthday to you."

Whereupon Saladin Chamcha coughed, spluttered, opened his eyes, and, as befitted a new-born babe, burst into foolish tears.

2

Reincarnation was always a big topic with Gibreel, for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies, even before he "miraculously" defeated the Phantom Bug that everyone had begun to believe would terminate his contracts. So maybe someone should have been able to forecast, only nobody did, that when he was up and about again he would sotospeak succeed where the germs had failed and walk out of his old life forever within a week of his fortieth birthday, vanishing, poof!, like a trick, _into thin air_.

The first people to notice his absence were the four members of his film-studio wheelchair-team. Long before his illness he had formed the habit of being transported from set to set on the great D. W. Rama lot by this group of speedy, trusted athletes, because a man who makes up to eleven movies "sy-multaneous" needs to conserve his energies. Guided by a complex coding system of slashes, circles and dots which Gibreel remembered from his childhood among the fabled lunch-runners of Bombay (of which more later), the chair-men zoomed him from role to role, delivering him as punctually and unerringly as once his father had delivered lunch. And after each take Gibreel would skip back into the chair and be navigated at high speed towards the next set, to be re-costumed, made up and handed his lines. "A career in the Bombay talkies," he told his loyal crew, "is more like a wheelchair race with one-two pit stops along the route."

After the illness, the Ghostly Germ, the Mystery Malaise, the Bug, he had returned to work, easing himself in, only seven pictures at a time . . . and then, justlikethat, he wasn't there. The wheelchair stood empty among the silenced sound-stages; his absence revealed the tawdry shamming of the sets. Wheelchairmen, one to four, made excuses for the missing star when movie executives descended upon them in wrath: Ji, he must be sick, he has always been famous for his punctual, no, why to criticize, maharaj, great artists must from time to time be permitted their temperament, na, and for their protestations they became the first casualties of Farishta's unexplained hey-presto, being fired, four three two one, ekdumjaldi, ejected from studio gates so that a wheelchair lay abandoned and gathering dust beneath the painted coco-palms around a sawdust beach.

Where was Gibreel? Movie producers, left in seven lurches, panicked expensively. See, there, at the Willingdon Club golf links -- only nine holes nowadays, skyscrapers having sprouted out of the other nine like giant weeds, or, let's say, like tombstones marking the sites where the torn corpse of the old city lay -- there, right there, upper-echelon executives, missing the simplest putts; and, look above, tufts of anguished hair, torn from senior heads, wafting down from high-level windows. The agitation of the producers was easy to understand, because in those days of declining audiences and the creation of historical soap operas and contemporary crusading housewives by the television network, there was but a single name which, when set above a picture's title, could still offer a sure-fire, cent-per-cent guarantee of an Ultrahit, a Smashation, and the owner of said name had departed, up, down or sideways, but certainly and unarguably vamoosed . . .

All over the city, after telephones, motorcyclists, cops, frogmen and trawlers dragging the harbour for his body had laboured mightily but to no avail, epitaphs began to be spoken in memory of the darkened star. On one of Rama Studios' seven impotent stages, Miss Pimple Billimoria, the latest chilli-and-spices bombshell -- _she's no flibberti-gibberti mamzel!, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite_ -- clad in temple--dancer veiled undress and positioned beneath writhing cardboard representations of copulating Tantric figures from the Chandela period, -- and perceiving that her major scene was not to be, her big break lay in pieces -- offered up a spiteful farewell before an audience of sound recordists and electricians smoking their cynical beedis. Attended by a dumbly distressed ayah, all elbows, Pimple attempted scorn. "God, what a stroke of luck, for Pete's sake," she cried. "I mean today it was the love scene, chhi chhi, I was just dying inside, thinking how to go near to that fatmouth with his breath of rotting cockroach dung." Bell-heavy anklets jingled as she stamped. "Damn good for him the movies don't smell, or he wouldn't get one job as a leper even." Here Pimple's soliloquy climaxed in such a torrent of obscenities that the beedi-smokers sat up for the first time and commenced animatedly to compare Pimple's vocabulary with that of the infamous bandit queen Phoolan Devi whose oaths could melt rifle barrels and turn journalists' pencils to rubber in a trice.

Exit Pimple, weeping, censored, a scrap on a cutting-room floor. Rhinestones fell from her navel as she went, mirroring her tears. . . in the matter of Farishta's halitosis she was not, however, altogether wrong; if anything, she had a little understated the case. Gibreel's exhalations, those ochre clouds of sulphur and brimstone, had always given him -- when taken together with his pronounced widow's peak and crowblack hair -- an air more saturnine than haloed, in spite of his archangelic name. It was said after he disappeared that he ought to have been easy to find, all it took was a halfway decent nose . . . and one week after he took off, an exit more tragic than Pimple Billimoria's did much to intensify the devilish odour that was beginning to attach itself to that forsolong sweet-smelling name. You could .say that he had stepped out of the screen into the world, and in life, unlike the cinema, people know it if you stink.

_We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight. Goodbye_. The enigmatic note discovered by the police in Gibreel Farishta's penthouse, located on the top floor of the Everest Vilas skyscraper on Malabar Hill, the highest home in the highest building on the highest ground in the city, one of those double-vista apartments from which you could look this way across the evening necklace of Marine Drive or that way out to Scandal Point and the sea, permitted the newspaper headlines to prolong their cacophonies. FARISHTA DIVES UNDERGROUND, opined _Blitz_ in somewhat macabre fashion, while Busybee in _The Daily_ preferred GIBREEL FLIES coop. Many photographs were published of that fabled residence in which French interior decorators bearing letters of commendation from Reza Pahlevi for the work they had done at Persepolis had spent a million dollars recreating at this exalted altitude the effect of a Bedouin tent. Another illusion unmade by his absence; GIBREEL STRIKES CAMP, the headlines yelled, but had he gone up or down or sideways? No one knew. In that metropolis of tongues and whispers, not even the sharpest ears heard anything reliable. But Mrs. Rekha Merchant, reading all the papers, listening to all the radio broadcasts, staying glued to the Doordarshan TV programmes, gleaned something from Farishta's message, heard a note that eluded everyone else, and took her two daughters and one son for a walk on the roof of her high-rise home. Its name was Everest Vilas.

His neighbour; as a matter of fact, from the apartment directly beneath his own. His neighbour and his friend; why should I say any more? Of course the scandal-pointed malice-magazines of the city filled their columns with hint innuendo and nudge, but that's no reason for sinking to their level. Why tarnish her reputation now?

Who was she? Rich, certainly, but then Everest Vilas was not exactly a tenement in Kurla, eh? Married, yessir, thirteen years, with a husband big in ball-bearings. Independent, her carpet and antique showrooms thriving at their prime Colaba sites. She called her carpets _klims_ and _kleens_ and the ancient artefacts were _anti-queues_. Yes, and she was beautiful, beautiful in the hard, glossy manner of those rarefied occupants of the city's sky-homes, her bones skin posture all bearing witness to her long divorce from the impoverished, heavy, pullulating earth. Everyone agreed she had a strong personality, drank _like a fish_ from Lalique crystal and hung her hat _shameless_ on a Chola Natraj and knew what she wanted and how to get it, fast. The husband was a mouse with money and a good squash wrist. Rekha Merchant read Gibreel Farishta's farewell note in the newspapers, wrote a letter of her own, gathered her children, summoned the elevator, and rose heavenward (one storey) to meet her chosen fate.

"Many years ago," her letter read, "I married out of cowardice. Now, finally, I'm doing something brave." She left a newspaper on her bed with Gibreel's message circled in red and heavily underscored -- three harsh lines, one of them ripping the page in fury. So naturally the bitch-journals went to town and it was all LOVELY"S LOVELORN LEAP, and BROKEN-HEARTED BEAUTY TAKES LAST DIVE. But:

Perhaps she, too, had the rebirth bug, and Gibreel, not understanding the terrible power of metaphor, had recommended flight. _To be born again,first you have to_ and she was a creature of the sky, she drank Lalique champagne, she lived on Everest, and one of her fellow-Olympians had flown; and if he could, then she, too, could be winged, and rooted in dreams.

She didn't make it. The lala who was employed as gatekeeper of the Everest Vilas compound offered the world his blunt testimony. "I was walking, here here, in the compound only, when there came a thud, _tharaap_. I turned. It was the body of the oldest daughter. Her skull was completely crushed. I looked up and saw the boy falling, and after him the younger girl. What to say, they almost hit me where I stood. I put my hand on my mouth and came to them. The young girl was whining softly. Then I looked up a further time and the Begum was coming. Her sari was floating out like a big balloon and all her hair was loose. I took my eyes away from her because she was fallIng and it was not respectful to look up inside her clothes."

Rekha and her children fell from Everest; no survivors. The whispers blamed Gibreel. Let's leave it at that for the moment.

Oh: don't forget: he saw her after she died. He saw her several times. It was a long time before people understood how sick the great man was. Gibreel, the star. Gibreel, who vanquished the Nameless Ailment. Gibreel, who feared sleep.

After he departed the ubiquitous images of his face began to rot. On the gigantic, luridly coloured hoardings from which he had watched over the populace, his lazy eyelids started flaking and crumbling, drooping further and further until his irises looked like two moons sliced by clouds, or by the soft knives of his long lashes. Finally the eyelids fell off, giving a wild, bulging look to his painted eyes. Outside the picture palaces of Bombay, mammoth cardboard effigies of Gibreel were seen to decay and list. Dangling limply on their sustaining scaffolds, they lost arms, withered, snapped at the neck. His portraits on the covers of movie magazines acquired the pallor of death, a nullity about the eye, a hollowness. At last his images simply faded off the printed page, so that the shiny covers of _Celebrity_ and _Society_ and _Illustrated Weekly_ went blank at the bookstalls and their publishers fired the printers and blamed the quality of the ink. Even on the silver screen itself, high above his worshippers in the dark, that supposedly immortal physiognomy began to putrefy, blister and bleach; projectors jammed unaccountably every time he passed through the gate, his films ground to a halt, and the lamp-heat of the malfunctioning projectors burned his celluloid memory away: a star gone supernova, with the consuming fire spreading outwards, as was fitting, from his lips.

It was the death of God. Or something very like it; for had not that outsize face, suspended over its devotees in the artificial cinematic night, shone like that of some supernal Entity that had its being at least halfway between the mortal and the divine? More than halfway, many would have argued, for Gibreel had spent the greater part of his unique career incarnating, with absolute conviction, the countless deities of the subcontinent in the popular genre movies known as "theologicals". It was part of the magic of his persona that he succeeded in crossing religious boundaries without giving offence. Blue-skinned as Krishna he danced, flute in hand, amongst the beauteous gopis and their udder-heavy cows; with upturned palms, serene, he meditated (as Gautama) upon humanity's suffering beneath a studio-rickety bodhi-tree. On those infrequent occasions when he descended from the heavens he never went too far, playing, for example, both the Grand Mughal and his famously wily minister in the classic _Akbar and Birbal_. For over a decade and a half he had represented, to hundreds of millions of believers in that country in which, to this day, the human population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one, the most acceptable, and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme. For many of his fans, the boundary separating the performer and his roles had longago ceased to exist.

The fans, yes, and? How about Gibreel?

That face. In real life, reduced to life-size, set amongst ordinary mortals, it stood revealed as oddly un-starry. Those low-slung eyelids could give him an exhausted look. There was, too, something coarse about the nose, the mouth was too well fleshed to be strong, the ears were long-lobed like young, knurled jackfruit. The most profane of faces, the most sensual of faces. In which, of late, it had been possible to make out the seams mined by his recent, near-fatal illness. And yet, in spite of profanity and debilitation, this was a face inextricably mixed up with holiness, perfection, grace: God stuff. No accounting for tastes, that's all. At any rate, you'll agree that for such an actor (for any actor, maybe, even for Chamcha, but most of all for him) to have a bee in his bonnet about avatars, like much-metamorphosed Vishnu, was not so very surprising. Rebirth: that's God stuff, too.

Or, but, then again . . . not always. There are secular reincarnations, too. Gibreel Farishta had been born Ismail Najmuddin in Poona, British Poona at the empire's fag-end, long before the Pune of Rajneesh etc. (Pune, Vadodara, Mumbai; even towns can take stage names nowadays.) Ismail after the child involved in the sacrifice of Ibrahim, and Najmuddin, _star of the faith_; he'd given up quite a name when he took the angel's.

Afterwards, when the aircraft _Bostan_ was in the grip of the hijackers, and the passengers, fearing for their futures, were regressing into their pasts, Gibreel confided to Saladin Chamcha that his choice of pseudonym had been his way of making a homage to the memory of his dead mother, "my mummyji, Spoono, my one and only Mamo, because who else was it who started the whole angel business, her personal angel, she called me, _farishta_, because apparently I was too damn sweet, believe it or not, I was good as goddamn gold."

Poona couldn't hold him; he was taken in his infancy to the bitch-city, his first migration; his father got a job amongst the fleet-footed inspirers of future wheelchair quartets, the lunch-porters or dabbawallas of Bombay. And Ismail the farishta followed, at thirteen, in his father's footsteps.

Gibreel, captive aboard AI-420, sank into forgivable rhapsodies, fixing Chamcha with his glittering eye, explicating the mysteries of the runners' coding system, black swastika red circle yellow slash dot, running in his mind's eye the entire relay from home to office desk, that improbable system by which two thousand dabbawallas delivered, each day, over one hundred thousand lunch-pails, and on a bad day, Spoono, maybe fifteen got mislaid, we were illiterate, mostly, but the signs were our secret tongue.

_Bostan_ circled London, gunmen patrolling the gangways, and the lights in the passenger cabins had been switched off, but Gibreel's energy illuminated the gloom. On the grubby movie screen on which, earlier in the journey, the inflight inevitability of Walter Matthau had stumbled lugubriously into the aerial ubiquity of Goldie Hawn, there were shadows moving, projected by the nostalgia of the hostages, and the most sharply defined of them was this spindly adolescent, Ismail Najmuddin, mummy's angel in a Gandhi cap, running tiffins across the town. The young dabbawalla skipped nimbly through the shadow-crowd, because he was used to such conditions, think, Spoono, picture, thirty-forty tiffins in a long wooden tray on your head, and when the local train stops you have maybe one minute to push on or off, and then running in the streets, flat out, yaar, with the trucks buses scooters cycles and what-all, one-two, one-two, lunch, lunch, the dabbas must get through, and in the monsoon running down the railway line when the train broke down, or waist-deep in water in some flooded street, and there were gangs, Salad baba, truly, organized gangs of dabba-stealers, it's a hungry city, baby, what to tell you, but we could handle them, we were everywhere, knew everything, what thieves could escape our eyes and ears, we never went to any policia, we looked after our own.

At night father and son would return exhausted to their shack by the airport runway at Santacruz and when Ismail's mother saw him approaching, illuminated by the green red yellow of the departing jet-planes, she would say that simply to lay eyes on him made all her dreams come true, which was the first indication that there was something peculiar about Gibreel, because from the beginning, it seemed, he could fulfil people's most secret desires without having any idea of how he did it. His father Najmuddin Senior never seemed to mind that his wife had eyes only for her son, that the boy's feet received nightly pressings while the father's went unstroked. A son is a blessing and a blessing requires the gratitude of the blest.

Naima Najmuddin died. A bus hit her and that was that, Gibreel wasn't around to answer her prayers for life. Neither father nor son ever spoke of grief. Silently, as though it were customary and expected, they buried their sadness beneath extra work, engaging in an inarticulate contest, who could carry the most dabbas on his head, who could acquire the most new contracts per month, who could run faster, as though the greater labour would indicate the greater love. When he saw his father at night, the knotted veins bulging in his neck and at his temples, Ismail Najmuddin would understand how much the older man had resented him, and how important it was for the father to defeat the son and regain, thereby, his usurped primacy in the affections of his dead wife. Once he realized this, the youth eased off, but his father's zeal remained unrelenting, and pretty soon he was getting promotion, no longer a mere runner but one of the organizing muqaddams. When Gibreel was nineteen, Najmuddin Senior became a member of the lunch-runners' guild, the Bombay Tiffin Carriers' Association, and when Gibreel was twenty, his father was dead, stopped in his tracks by a stroke that almost blew him apart. "He just ran himself into the ground," said the guild's General Secretary, Babasaheb Mhatre himself. "That poor bastard, he just ran out of steam." But the orphan knew better. He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.

Babasaheb Mhatre sat in a blue office behind a green door above a labyrinthine bazaar, an awesome figure, buddha-fat, one of the great moving forces of the metropolis, possessing the occult gift of remaining absolutely still, never shifting from his room, and yet being everywhere important and meeting everyone who mattered in Bombay. The day after young Ismail's father ran across the border to see Naima, the Babasaheb summoned the young man into his presence. "So? Upset or what?" The reply, with downcast eyes: ji, thank you, Babaji, I am okay. "Shut your face," said Babasaheb Mhatre. "From today you live with me." Butbut, Babaji ... "But me no buts. Already I have informed my goodwife. I have spoken." Please excuse Babaji but how what why? "I have _spoken_."

Gibreel Farishta was never told why the Babasaheb had decided to take pity on him and pluck him from the futurelessness of the streets, but after a while he began to have an idea. Mrs. Mhatre was a thin woman, like a pencil beside the rubbery Babasaheb, but she was filled so full of mother-love that she should have been fat like a potato. When the Baba came home she put sweets into his mouth with her own hands, and at nights the newcomer to the household could hear the great General Secretary of the B T C A protesting, Let me go, wife, I can undress myself. At breakfast she spoon-fed Mhatre with large helpings of malt, and before he went to work she brushed his hair. They were a childless couple, and young Najmuddin understood that the Babasaheb wanted him to share the load. Oddly enough, however, the Begum did not treat the young man as a child. "You see, he is a grown fellow," she told her husband when poor Mhatre pleaded, "Give the boy the blasted spoon of malt." Yes, a grown fellow, "we must make a man of him, husband, no babying for him." "Then damn it to hell," the Babasaheb exploded, "why do you do it to me?" Mrs. Mhatre burst into tears. "But you are everything to me," she wept, "you are my father, my lover, my baby too. You are my lord and my suckling child. If I displease you then I have no life."

Babasaheb Mhatre, accepting defeat, swallowed the tablespoon of malt.

He was a kindly man, which he disguised with insults and noise. To console the orphaned youth he would speak to him, in the blue office, about the philosophy of rebirth, convincing him that his parents were already being scheduled for re-entry somewhere, unless of course their lives had been so holy that they had attained the final grace. So it was Mhatre who started Farishta off on the whole reincarnation business, and not just reincarnation. The Babasaheb was an amateur psychic, a tapper of table-legs and a bringer of spirits into glasses. "But I gave that up," he told his protégé, with many suitably melodramatic inflections, gestures, frowns, "after I got the fright of my bloody life."

Once (Mhatre recounted) the glass had been visited by the most co-operative of spirits, such a too-friendly fellow, see, so I thought to ask him some big questions. _Is there a God_, and that glass which had been running round like a mouse or so just stopped dead, middle of table, not a twitch, completely phutt, kaput. So, then, okay, I said, if you won't answer that try this one instead, and I came right out with it, _Is there a Devil_. After that the glass -- baprebap! -- began to shake -- catch your ears! -- slowslow at first, then faster--faster, like a jelly, until it jumped! -- ai-hai! -- up from the table, into the air, fell down on its side, and -- o-ho! -- into a thousand and one pieces, smashed. Believe don't believe, Babasaheb Mhatre told his charge, but thenandthere I learned my lesson: don't meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend.

This story had a profound effect on the consciousness of the young listener, because even before his mother's death he had become convinced of the existence of the supernatural world. Sometimes when he looked around him, especially in the afternoon heat when the air turned glutinous, the visible world, its features and inhabitants and things, seemed to be sticking up through the atmosphere like a profusion of hot icebergs, and he had the idea that everything continued down below the surface of the soupy air: people, motor-cars, dogs, movie billboards, trees, nine-tenths of their reality concealed from his eyes. He would blink, and the illusion would fade, but the sense of it never left him. He grew up believing in God, angels, demons, afreets, djinns, as matter-of-factly as if they were bullock-carts or lamp-posts, and it struck him as a failure in his own sight that he had never seen a ghost. He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of greentinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.

From his mother Naima Najmuddin he heard a great many stories of the Prophet, and if inaccuracies had crept into her versions he wasn't interested in knowing what they were. "What a man!" he thought. "What angel would not wish to speak to him?" Sometimes, though, he caught himself in the act of forming blasphemous thoughts, for example when without meaning to, as he drifted off to sleep in his cot at the Mhatre residence, his somnolent fancy began to compare his own condition with that of the Prophet at the time when, having been orphaned and short of funds, he made a great success of his job as the business manager of the wealthy widow Khadija, and ended up marrying her as well. As he slipped into sleep he saw himself sitting on a rose-strewn dais, simpering shyly beneath the sari-pallu which he had placed demurely over his face, while his new husband, Babasaheb Mhatre, reached lovingly towards him to remove the fabric, and gaze at his features in a mirror placed in his lap. This dream of marrying the Babasaheb brought him awake, flushing hotly for shame, and after that he began to worry about the impurity in his make-up that could create such terrible visions.

Mostly, however, his religious faith was a low-key thing, a part of him that required no more special attention than any other. When Babasaheb Mhatre took him into his home it confirmed to the young man that he was not alone in the world, that something was taking care of him, so he was not entirely surprised when the Babasaheb called him into the blue office on the morning of his twenty-first birthday and sacked him without even being prepared to listen to an appeal.

"You're fired," Mhatre emphasized, beaming. "Cashiered, had your chips. Dis-_miss_."

"But, uncle,"

"Shut your face."

Then the Babasaheb gave the orphan the greatest present of his life, informing him that a meeting had been arranged for him at the studios of the legendary film magnate Mr. D. W. Rama; an audition. "It is for appearance only," the Babasaheb said. "Rama is my good friend and we have discussed. A small part to begin, then it is up to you. Now get out of my sight and stop pulling such humble faces, it does not suit."

"But, uncle,"

"Boy like you is too damn goodlooking to carry tiffins on his head all his life. Get gone now, go, be a homosexual movie actor. I fired you five minutes back."

"But, uncle,"

"I have spoken. Thank your lucky stars."

He became Gibreel Farishta, but for four years he did not become a star, serving his apprenticeship in a succession of minor knockabout comic parts. He remained calm, unhurried, as though he could see the future, and his apparent lack of ambition made him something of an outsider in that most self-seeking of industries. He was thought to be stupid or arrogant or both. And throughout the four wilderness years he failed to kiss a single woman on the mouth.

On-screen, he played the fall guy, the idiot who loves the beauty and can't see that she wouldn't go for him in a thousand years, the funny uncle, the poor relation, the village idiot, the servant, the incompetent crook, none of them the type of part that ever rates a love scene. Women kicked him, slapped him, teased him, laughed at him, but never, on celluloid, looked at him or sang to him or danced around him with cinematic love in their eyes. Off-screen, he lived alone in two empty rooms near the studios and tried to imagine what women looked like without clothes on. To get his mind off the subject of love and desire, he studied, becoming an omnivorous autodidact, devouring the metamorphic myths of Greece and Rome, the avatars of Jupiter, the boy who became a flower, the spider-woman, Circe, everything; and the theosophy of Annie Besant, and unified field theory, and the incident of the Satanic verses in the early career of the Prophet, and the politics of Muhammad's harem after his return to Mecca in triumph; and the surrealism of the newspapers, in which butterflies could fly into young girls' mouths, asking to be consumed, and children were born with no faces, and young boys dreamed in impossible detail of earlier incarnations, for instance in a golden fortress filled with precious stones. He filled himself up with God knows what, but he could not deny, in the small hours of his insomniac nights, that he was full of something that had never been used, that he did not know how to begin to use, that is, love. In his dreams he was tormented by women of unbearable sweetness and beauty, so he preferred to stay awake and force himself to rehearse some part of his general knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of being endowed with a larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single person on earth to offer it to.

His big break arrived with the coming of the theological movies. Once the formula of making films based on the puranas, and adding the usual mixture of songs, dances, funny uncles etc., had paid off, every god in the pantheon got his or her chance to be a star. When D. W. Rama scheduled a production based on the story of Ganesh, none of the leading box-office names of the time were willing to spend an entire movie concealed inside an elephant's head. Gibreel jumped at the chance. That was his first hit, _Ganpati Baba_, and suddenly he was a superstar, but only with the trunk and ears on. After six movies playing the elephantheaded god he was permitted to remove the thick, pendulous, grey mask and put on, instead, a long, hairy tail, in order to play Hanuman the monkey king in a sequence of adventure movies that owed more to a certain cheap television series emanating from Hong Kong than it did to the Ramayana. This series proved so popular that monkey-tails became de rigueur for the city's young bucks at the kind of parties frequented by convent girls known as "firecrackers" because of their readiness to go off with a bang.

After Hanuman there was no stopping Gibreel, and his phenomenal success deepened his belief in a guardian angel. But it also led to a more regrettable development.

(I see that I must, after all, spill poor Rekha's beans.)

Even before he replaced false head with fake tail he had become irresistibly attractive to women. The seductions of his fame had grown so great that several of these young ladies asked him if he would keep the Ganesh-mask on while they made love, but he refused out of respect for the dignity of the god. Owing to the innocence of his upbringing he could not at that time differentiate between quantity and quality and accordingly felt the need to make up for lost time. He had so many sexual partners that it was not uncommon for him to forget their names even before they had left his room. Not only did he become a philanderer of the worst type, but he also learned the arts of dissimulation, because a man who plays gods must be above reproach. So skilfully did he conceal his life of scandal and debauch that his old patron, Babasaheb Mhatre, lying on his deathbed a decade after he sent a young dabbawalla out into the world of illusion, black-money and lust, begged him to get married to prove he was a man. "God-sake, mister," the Babasaheb pleaded, "when I told you back then to go and be a homo I never thought you would take me seriously, there is a limit to respecting one's elders, after all." Gibreel threw up his hands and swore that he was no such disgraceful thing, and that when the right girl came along he would of course undergo nuptials with a will. "What you waiting? Some goddess from heaven? Greta Garbo, Gracekali, who?" cried the old man, coughing blood, but Gibreel left him with the enigma of a smile that allowed him to die without having his mind set entirely at rest.

The avalanche of sex in which Gibreel Farishta was trapped managed to bury his greatest talent so deep that it might easily have been lost forever, his talent, that is, for loving genuinely, deeply and without holding back, the rare and delicate gift which he had never been able to employ. By the time of his illness he had all but forgotten the anguish he used to experience owing to his longing for love, which had twisted and turned in him like a sorcerer's knife. Now, at the end of each gymnastic night, he slept easily and long, as if he had never been plagued by dream-women, as if he had never hoped to lose his heart.

"Your trouble," Rekha Merchant told him when she materialized out of the clouds, "is everybody always forgave you, God knows why, you always got let off, you got away with murder. Nobody ever held you responsible for what you did." He couldn't argue. "God's gift," she screamed at him, "God knows where you thought you were from, jumped-up type from the gutter, God knows what diseases you brought."

But that was what women did, he thought in those days, they were the vessels into which he could pour himself, and when he moved on, they would understand that it was his nature, and forgive. And it was true that nobody blamed him for leaving, for his thousand and one pieces of thoughtlessness, how many abortions, Rekha demanded in the cloud-hole, how many broken hearts. In all those years he was the beneficiary of the infinite generosity of women, but he was its victim, too, because their forgiveness made possible the deepest and sweetest corruption of all, namely the idea that he was doing nothing wrong.

Rekha: she entered his life when he bought the penthouse at Everest Vilas and she offered, as a neighbour and businesswoman, to show him her carpets and antiques. Her husband was at a world-wide congress of ball-bearings manufacturers in Gothenburg, Sweden, and in his absence she invited Gibreel into her apartment of stone lattices from Jaisalmer and carved wooden handrails from Kcralan palaces and a stone Mughal chhatri or cupola turned into a whirlpool bath; while she poured him French champagne she leaned against marbled walls and felt the cool veins of the stone against her back. When he sipped the champagne she teased him, surely gods should not partake of alcohol, and he answered with a line he had once read in an interview with the Aga Khan, O, you know, this champagne is only for outward show, the moment it touches my lips it turns to water. After that it didn't take long for her to touch his lips and deliquesce into his arms. By the time her children returned from school with the ayah she was immaculately dressed and coiffed, and sat with him in the drawing-room, revealing the secrets of the carpet business, confessing that art silk stood for artificial not artistic, telling him not to be fooled by her brochure in which a rug was seductively described as being made of wool plucked from the throats of baby lambs, which means, you see, only _low-grade wool_, advertising, what to do, this is how it is.

He did not love her, was not faithful to her, forgot her birthdays, failed to return her phone calls, turned up when it was most inconvenient owing to the presence in her home of dinner guests from the world of the ball-bearing, and like everyone else she forgave him. But her forgiveness was not the silent, mousy let-off he got from the others. Rekha complained like crazy, she gave him hell, she bawled him out and cursed him for a useless lafanga and haramzada and salah and even, in extremis, for being guilty of the impossible feat of fucking the sister he did not have. She spared him nothing, accusing him of being a creature of surfaces, like a movie screen, and then she went ahead and forgave him anyway and allowed him to unhook her blouse. Gibreel could not resist the operatic forgiveness of Rekha Merchant, which was all the more moving on account of the flaw in her own position, her infidelity to the ball-bearing king, which Gibreel forbore to mention, taking his verbal beatings like a man. So that whereas the pardons he got from the rest of his women left him cold and he forgot them the moment they were uttered, he kept coming back to Rekha, so that she could abuse him and then console him as only she knew how.

Then he almost died.

He was filming at Kanya Kumari, standing on the very tip of Asia, taking part in a fight scene set at the point on Cape Comorin where it seems that three oceans are truly smashing into one another. Three sets of waves rolled in from the west east south and collided in a mighty clapping of watery hands just as Gibreel took a punch on the jaw, perfect timing, and he passed out on the spot, falling backwards into tri-oceanic spume. He did not get up.

To begin with everybody blamed the giant English stunt-man Eustace Brown, who had delivered the punch. He protested vehemently. Was he not the same fellow who had performed opposite Chief Minister N. T. Rama Rao in his many theological movie roles? Had he not perfected the art of making the old man look good in combat without hurting him? Had he ever complained that NTR never pulled his punches, so that he, Eustace, invariably ended up black and blue, having been beaten stupid by a little old guy whom he could've eaten for breakfast, on _toast_, and had he ever, even once, lost his temper? Well, then? How could anyone think he would hurt the immortal Gibreel? -- They fired him anyway and the police put him in the lock-up, just in case.

But it was not the punch that had flattened Gibreel. After the star had been flown into Bombay's Breach Candy Hospital in an Air Force jet made available for the purpose; after exhaustive tests had come up with almost nothing; and while he lay unconscious, dying, with a blood-count that had fallen from his normal fifteen to a murderous four point two, a hospital spokesman faced the national press on Breach Candy's wide white steps. "It is a freak mystery," he gave out. "Call it, if you so please, an act of God."

Gibreel Farishta had begun to haemorrhage all over his insides for no apparent reason, and was quite simply bleeding to death inside his skin. At the worst moment the blood began to seep out through his rectum and penis, and it seemed that at any moment it might burst torrentially through his nose and ears and out of the corners of his eyes. For seven days he bled, and received transfusions, and every clotting agent known to medical science, including a concentrated form of rat poison, and although the treatment resulted in a marginal improvement the doctors gave him up for lost.

The whole of India was at Gibreel's bedside. His condition was the lead item on every radio bulletin, it was the subject of hourly news-flashes on the national television network, and the crowd that gathered in Warden Road was so large that the police had to disperse it with lathi-charges and tear-gas, which they used even though every one of the half-million mourners was already tearful and wailing. The Prime Minister cancelled her appointments and flew to visit him. Her son the airline pilot sat in Farishta's bedroom, holding the actor's hand. A mood of apprehension settled over the nation, because if God had unleashed such an act of retribution against his most celebrated incarnation, what did he have in store for the rest of the country? If Gibreel died, could India be far behind? In the mosques and temples of the nation, packed congregations prayed, not only for the life of the dying actor, but for the future, for themselves.

Who did not visit Gibreel in hospital? Who never wrote, made no telephone call, despatched no flowers, sent in no tiffins of delicious home cooking? While many lovers shamelessly sent him get-well cards and lamb pasandas, who, loving him most of all, kept herself to herself, unsuspected by her ball--bearing of a husband? Rekha Merchant placed iron around her heart, and went through the motions of her daily life, playing with her children, chit-chatting with her husband, acting as his hostess when required, and never, not once, revealed the bleak devastation of her soul.

He recovered.

The recovery was as mysterious as the illness, and as rapid. It, too, was called (by hospital, journalists, friends) an act of the Supreme. A national holiday was declared; fireworks were set off up and down the land. But when Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed, and to a startling degree, because he had lost his faith.

On the day he was discharged from hospital he went under police escort through the immense crowd that had gathered to celebrate its own deliverance as well as his, climbed into his Mercedes and told the driver to give all the pursuing vehicles the slip, which took seven hours and fifty-one minutes, and by the end of the manoeuvre he had worked out what had to be done. He got out of the limousine at the Taj hotel and without looking left or right went directly into the great dining-room with its buffet table groaning under the weight of forbidden foods, and he loaded his plate with all of it, the pork sausages from Wiltshire and the cured York hams and the rashers of bacon from godknowswhere; with the gammon steaks of his unbelief and the pig's trotters of secularism; and then, standing there in the middle of the hall, while photographers popped up from nowhere, he began to eat as fast as possible, stuffing the dead pigs into his face so rapidly that bacon rashers hung out of the sides of his mouth.

During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not abandon me now after watching oven me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength to cure my ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to _thin air_, that there was nobody there at all, and then he felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face.

He looked up from his plate to find a woman watching him. Her hair was so fair that it was almost white, and her skin possessed the colour and translucency of mountain ice. She laughed at him and turned away.

"Don't you get it?" he shouted after her, spewing sausage fragments from the corners of his mouth. "No thunderbolt. That's the point."

She came back to stand in front of him. "You're alive," she told him. "You got your life back. _That's_ the point."

He told Rekha: the moment she turned around and started walking back I fell in love with her. Alleluia Cone, climber of mountains, vanquisher of Everest, blonde yahudan, ice queen. Her challenge, _change your life, or did you get it back for nothing_, I couldn't resist.

"You and your reincarnation junk," Rekha cajoled him. "Such a nonsense head. You come out of hospital, back through death's door, and it goes to your head, crazy boy, at once you must have some escapade thing, and there she is, hey presto, the blonde mame. Don't think I don't know what you're like, Gibbo, so what now, you want me to forgive you or what?"

No need, he said. He left Rekha's apartment (its mistress wept, face-down, on the floor); and never entered it again.

Three days after he met her with his mouth full of unclean meat Allie got into an aeroplane and left. Three days out of time behind a do-not-disturb sign, but in the end they agreed that the world was real, what was possible was possible and what was impossible was im--, brief encounter, ships that pass, love in a transit lounge. After she left, Gibreel rested, tried to shut his ears to her challenge, resolved to get his life back to normal. Just because he'd lost his belief it didn't mean he couldn't do his job, and in spite of the scandal of the ham-eating photographs, the first scandal ever to attach itself to his name, he signed movie contracts and went back to work.

And then, one morning, a wheelchair stood empty and he had gone. A bearded passenger, one Ismail Najmuddin, boarded Flight AI-420 to London. The 747 was named after one of the gardens of Paradise, not Gulistan but _Bostan_. "To be born again," Gibrecl Farishta said to Saladin Chamcha much later, "first you have to die. Me, I only half-expired, but I did it on two occasions, hospital and plane, so it adds up, it counts. And now, Spoono my friend, here I stand before you in Proper London, Vilayet, regenerated, a new man with a new life. Spoono, is this not a bloody fine thing?"

Why did he leave?

Because of her, the challenge of her, the newness, the fierceness of the two of them together, the inexorability of an impossible thing that was insisting on its right to become.

And, or, maybe: because after he ate the pigs the retribution began, a nocturnal retribution, a punishment of dreams.

3

Once the flight to London had taken off, thanks to his magic trick of crossing two pairs of fingers on each hand and rotating his thumbs, the narrow, fortyish fellow who sat in a non-smoking window seat watching the city of his birth fall away from him like old snakeskin allowed a relieved expression to pass briefly across his face. This face was handsome in a somewhat sour, patrician fashion, with long, thick, downturned lips like those of a disgusted turbot, and thin eyebrows arching sharply over eyes that watched the world with a kind of alert contempt. Mr. Saladin Chamcha had constructed this face with care -- it had taken him several years to get it just right -- and for many more years now he had thought of it simply as _his own_ -- indeed, he had forgotten what he had looked like before it. Furthermore, he had shaped himself a voice to go with the face, a voice whose languid, almost lazy vowels contrasted disconcertingly with the sawn--off abruptness of the consonants. The combination of face and voice was a potent one; but, during his recent visit to his home town, his first such visit in fifteen years (the exact period, I should observe, of Gibreel Farishta's film stardom), there had been strange and worrying developments. It was unfortunately the case that his voice (the first to go) and, subsequently, his face itself, had begun to let him down.

It started -- Chamcha, allowing fingers and thumbs to relax and hoping, in some embarrassment, that his last remaining superstition had gone unobserved by his fellow-passengers, closed his eyes and remembered with a delicate shudder of horror -- on his flight east some weeks ago. He had fallen into a torpid sleep, high above the desert sands of the Persian Gulf, and been visited in a dream by a bizarre stranger, a man with a glass skin, who rapped his knuckles mournfully against the thin, brittle membrane covering his entire body and begged Saladin to help him, to release him from the prison of his skin. Chamcha picked up a stone and began to batter at the glass. At once a latticework of blood oozed up through the cracked surface of the stranger's body, and when Chamcha tried to pick off the broken shards the other began to scream, because chunks of his flesh were coming away with the glass. At this point an air stewardess bent over the sleeping Chamcha and demanded, with the pitiless hospitality of her tribe: _Something to drink, sir? A drink?_, and Saladin, emerging from the dream, found his speech unaccountably metamorphosed into the Bombay lilt he had so diligently (and so long ago!) unmade. "Achha, means what?" he mumbled. "Alcoholic beverage or what?" And, when the stewardess reassured him, whatever you wish, sir, all beverages are gratis, he heard, once again, his traitor voice: "So, okay, bibi, give one whiskysoda only."

What a nasty surprise! He had come awake with a jolt, and sat stiffly in his chair, ignoring alcohol and peanuts. How had the past bubbled up, in transmogrified vowels and vocab? What next? Would he take to putting coconut-oil in his hair? Would he take to squeezing his nostrils between thumb and forefinger, blowing noisily and drawing forth a glutinous silver arc of muck? Would he become a devotee of professional wrestling? What further, diabolic humiliations were in store? He should have known it was a mistake to _go home_, after so long, how could it be other than a regression; it was an unnatural journey; a denial of time; a revolt against history; the whole thing was bound to be a disaster.

_I'm not myself_, he thought as a faint fluttering feeling began in the vicinity of his heart. But what does that mean, anyway, he added bitterly. After all, "les acteurs ne sont pas des gens", as the great ham Frederick had explained in _Les Enfants du Paradis_. Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

The seatbelt light came on, the captain's voice warned of air turbulence, they dropped in and out of air pockets. The desert lurched about beneath them and the migrant labourer who had boarded at Qatar clutched at his giant transistor radio and began to retch. Chamcha noticed that the man had not fastened his belt, and pulled himself together, bringing his voice back to its haughtiest English pitch. "Look here, why don't you. . ." he indicated, but the sick man, between bursts of heaving into the paper bag which Saladin had handed him just in time, shook his head, shrugged, replied: "Sahib, for what? If Allah wishes me to die, I shall die. If he does not, I shall not. Then of what use is the safety?"

Damn you, India, Saladin Chamcha cursed silently, sinking back into his seat. To hell with you, I escaped your clutches long ago, you won't get your hooks into me again, you cannot drag me back.

Once upon a time -- _it was and it was not so_, as the old stories used to say, _it happened and it never did_ -- maybe, then, or maybe not, a ten-year-old boy from Scandal Point in Bombay found a wallet lying in the Street outside his home. He was on the way home from school, having just descended from the school bus on which he had been obliged to sit squashed between the adhesive sweatiness of boys in shorts and be deafened by their noise, and because even in those days he was a person who recoiled from raucousness, jostling and the perspiration of strangers he was feeling faintly nauseated by the long, bumpy ride home. However, when he saw the black leather billfold lying at his feet, the nausea vanished, and he bent down excitedly and grabbed, -- opened, -- and found, to his delight, that it was full of cash, -- and not merely rupees, but real money, negotiable on black markets and international exchanges, -- pounds! Pounds sterling, from Proper London in the fabled country of Vilayet across the black water and far away. Dazzled by the thick wad of foreign currency, the boy raised his eyes to make sure he had not been observed, and for a moment it seemed to him that a rainbow had arched down to him from the heavens, a rainbow like an angel's breath, like an answered prayer, coming to an end in the very spot on which he stood. His fingers trembled as they reached into the wallet, towards the fabulous hoard.

"Give it." It seemed to him in later life that his father had been spying on him throughout his childhood, and even though Changez Chamchawala was a big man, a giant even, to say nothing of his wealth and public standing, he still always had the lightness of foot and also the inclination to sneak up behind his son and spoil whatever he was doing, whipping the young Salahuddin's bedsheet off at night to reveal the shameful penis in the clutching, red hand. And he could smell money from a hundred and one miles away, even through the stink of chemicals and fertilizer that always hung around him owing to his being the country's largest manufacturer of agricultural sprays and fluids and artificial dung. Changez Chamchawala, philanthropist, philanderer, living legend, leading light of the nationalist movement, sprang from the gateway of his home to pluck a bulging wallet from his son's frustrated hand. "Tch tch," he admonished, pocketing the pounds sterling, "you should not pick things up from the street. The ground is dirty, and money is dirtier, anyway."

On a shelf of Changez Chamchawala's teak-lined study, beside a ten-volume set of the Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights, which was being slowly devoured by mildew and bookworm owing to the deep-seated prejudice against books which led Changez to own thousands of the pernicious things in order to humiliate them by leaving them to rot unread, there stood a magic lamp, a brightly polished copper--and--brass avatar of Aladdin's very own genie-container: a lamp begging to be rubbed. But Changez neither rubbed it nor permitted it to be rubbed by, for example, his son. "One day," he assured the boy, "you'll have it for yourself. Then rub and rub as much as you like and see what doesn't come to you. Just now, but, it is mine." The promise of the magic lamp infected Master Salahuddin with the notion that one day his troubles would end and his innermost desires would be gratified, and all he had to do was wait it out; but then there was the incident of the wallet, when the magic of a rainbow had worked for him, not for his father but for him, and Changez Chamchawala had stolen the crock of gold. After that the son became convinced that his father would smother all his hopes unless he got away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and himself.

Salahuddin Chamchawala had understood by his thirteenth year that he was destined for that cool Vilayet full of the crisp promises of pounds sterling at which the magic billfold had hinted, and he grew increasingly impatient of that Bombay of dust, vulgarity, policemen in shorts, transvestites, movie fanzines, pavement sleepers and the rumoured singing whores of Grant Road who had begun as devotees of the Yellamma cult in Karnataka but ended up here as dancers in the more prosaic temples of the flesh. He was fed up of textile factories and local trains and all the confusion and superabundance of the place, and longed for that dream-Vilayet of poise and moderation that had come to obsess him by night and day. His favourite playground rhymes were those that yearned for foreign cities: kitchy--con kitchy-ki kitchy-con stanty-eye kitchy-ople kitchy-cople kitchyCon-stanti-nople. And his favourite game was the version ofgrandmother's footsteps in which, when he was it, he would turn his back on upcreeping playmates to gabble out, like a mantra, like a spell, the six letters of his dream--city, _ellowen deeowen_. In his secret heart, he crept silently up on London, letter by letter, just as his friends crept up to him. _Ellowen deeowen London_.

The mutation of Salahuddin Chamchawala into Saladin Chamcha began, it will be seen, in old Bombay, long before he got close enough to hear the lions of Trafalgar roar. When the England cricket team played India at the Brabourne Stadium, he prayed for an England victory, for the game's creators to defeat the local upstarts, for the proper order of things to be maintained. (But the games were invariably drawn, owing to the featherbed somnolence of the Brabourne Stadium wicket; the great issue, creator versus imitator, colonizer against colonized, had perforce to remain unresolved.)

In his thirteenth year he was old enough to play on the rocks at Scandal Point without having to be watched over by his ayah, Kasturba. And one day (it was so, it was not so), he strolled out of the house, that ample, crumbling, salt-caked building in the Parsi style, all columns and shutters and little balconies, and through the garden that was his father's pride and joy and which in a certain evening light could give the impression of being infinite (and which was also enigmatic, an unsolved riddle, because nobody, not his father, not the gardener, could tell him the names of most of the plants and trees), and out through the main gateway, a grandiose folly, a reproduction of the Roman triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, and across the wild insanity of the street, and over the sea wall, and so at last on to the broad expanse of shiny black rocks with their little shrimpy pools. Christian girls giggled in frocks, men with furled umbrellas stood silent and fixed upon the blue horizon. In a hollow of black stone Salahuddin saw a man in a dhoti bending over a pool. Their eyes met, and the man beckoned him with a single finger which he then laid across his lips. _Shh_, and the mystery of rock-pools drew the boy towards the stranger. He was a creature of bone. Spectacles framed in what might have been ivory. His finger curling, curling, like a baited hook, come. When Salahuddin came down the other grasped him, put a hand around his mouth and forced his young hand between old and fleshless legs, to feel the fleshbone there. The dhoti open to the winds. Salahuddin had never known how to fight; he did what he was forced to do, and then the other simply turned away from him and let him go.

After that Salahuddin never went to the rocks at Scandal Point; nor did he tell anyone what had happened, knowing the neurasthenic crises it would unleash in his mother and suspecting that his father would say it was his own fault. It seemed to him that everything loathsome, everything he had come to revile about his home town, had come together in the stranger's bony embrace, and now that he had escaped that evil skeleton he must also escape Bombay, or die. He began to concentrate fiercely upon this idea, to fix his will upon it at all times, eating shitting sleeping, convincing himself that he could make the miracle happen even without his father's lamp to help him out. He dreamed of flying out of his bedroom window to discover that there, below him, was -- not Bombay -- but Proper London itself, Bigben Nelsonscolumn Lordstavern Bloodytower Queen. But as he floated out over the great metropolis he felt himself beginning to lose height, and no matter how hard he struggled kicked swam-in-air he continued to spiral slowly downwards to earth, then faster, then faster still, until he was screaming headfirst down towards the city, Saintpauls, Puddinglane, Threadneedlestreet, zeroing in on London like a bomb.

o o o

[pebblerage]

The Creeper (Original Ditko Version)

Some old stuff I wrote back in the day.

Mental state: Completely sane, the insanity is only acting

Demon? Nope

Home turf: Gotham, later Boston

Eye color:  Eyes do not change upon becoming Creeper, thus they remain blue

Nicknames: The Macabre Manhunter

Back in the more simpler days there was no split personality when it came to The Creeper. It was only Jack Ryder who was playing insane to scare his opponents and that was that.

This version naturally uses the Showcase origin since this was before DC started to get all schitzo about it. Jack Ryder is a pretty determined, but still a normal man who got his powers from a good ol' super-serum. Jack probably was at his happiest in this era. He had a nice job (a ambiguous one but whatever). If it got too boring or if he just needed to go wild for a bit he was perfectly able to do so by hopping around as Creeper with little to no consequences.

I think this hit its peak in the World's Finest back-ups where he was almost more serious as Creeper then Jack as in his normal persona he loved to crack jokes and mess with his co-workers quite a bit, especially with Fran Daye.

Not that Creeper was all seriousness though.

He mainly works for WHAM-T.V, but later he goes to other workplaces like Cosmic Broadcasting for example. The job inconsistency is not much of an issue here, as it will at most make you wonder what kind of job "network security" is. I would say that it really starts during his back-up stories in Flash Comics when he moves to Boston.

Jack transforms into Creeper by pressing a tiny device implanted into his wrist by Dr. Yatz, something that continues all up to Creeper's more modern incarnation.

Or was it ON his wrist?

Original Creeper is one of the weaker versions when it comes to pretty much all of his abilities (or the lack of abilities). With power comes great insanity I guess.

This Creeper's main skills are very focused on movability/acrobatics/fighting like super-stamina, high jump, becoming a great acrobatic with some strength and a healing factor. This healing is notably slower compared to later versions however as it takes an hour or so for a bullet wound to heal, unlike later when that would have taken about a minute.

His strength ranges from being able to being able to yank up light poles from the ground:

To losing to Joker in a fist fight, which probably is his biggest job moment ever.

Joker gets it bad later though when Creeper's insanity surpasses his own in later comic, so theres that at least.

He lacked his iconic ear piercing laugh as he did not really get it until the 90s. If one compares original with his modern counterpart he also lacks a few other attributes like claws, fire immunity, pointy ears and of course, the split personality aspect.

All in all, the early days where pretty mellow time for Mr. Ryder: At least if he is compared to other heroes. Sure he accidentaly killed his former buddy/arch-enemy Proteus but he came back with no explanation so it was all well!

But the happy days will come to an end eventually. Soon his Creeper persona just seems to do things Ryder was not intending on doing, or even things he does not remember..

#DC Comics #The Creeper #Jack Ryder #Overanalysis #Old stuff

[arthurtristankingsmen]

@touchstonedreams 

continued from here:

Joni snatched frantically at the pocket knife as it came flying up, hearing another crack as she moved.

“Ok, ok, “ she squeaked, “Elbow not wrist, violin, hnnnnNNNN….” She worked at the tie, her heart racing, until the last bits of the silk shredded underneath the blade. She hastily snapped it shut with her thumb dropped it to the ground.

“ Safetyfirstright ahahaha…oh gosh. Oh gosh. Ohhhhh hecky, “ she whimpered, squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m not sure this is a great ideeEEEEEEEEE…”

She let go, shrieking at the top of her lungs and just as a thought passed through her mind that a hundred and twenty five pounds MIGHT be a little much for anyone to catch no matter how strong they were, her free-falling body smacked square into Arthur, hard but stopped! and for a moment her brain processed ok I’m ok? being held? GOSH HE’S STRONG how did I not squash him? Then there was a crack over head, something BIG and OBVIOUSLY heavy whammed into them both, she went flying and landed wrong, something went *pop* in her ankle and oh boy oh PAINpainpainpainpain….

“Take deep breaths, it’ll be okay, alright? I’ll definitely catch you.” He angled himself under the branch to catch her easily, if she fell straight down. It was a high drop and she was no sack of flower, but he knew the prosthetic could manage a lot of the weight (albeit with some minor consequences of a sore as hell shoulder later from the wrench the weight might cause). Aside from that, he was pretty strong from parkour and working in the shop (and other hobbies he didn’t really need to list to himself at that particular moment), and if he widened his stance and locked his knees a little more, strengthening his center of gravity, her fall would less likely knock him over too.

He found the best place beneath her as she sawed at the tie, and as she shrieked into her fall, he sucked in a breath and moved to catch her. He was definitely right about the jarring from the sudden sum-odd over a hundred pounds suddenly pulling on both arms, but the preparations he’d made before kept him standing, holding the girl in a bridal carry where she’d dropped into his arms.

A flash of relief hit him that she looked relatively unscathed, and his idea had panned out this time, and almost as if the thought itself was damning, the branch, springing back upwards from the sudden loss of the girl’s weight, cracked again. He had enough time to look up, see the limb moving faster than a branch should move towards them, and act. With a burst of adrenaline, Arthur threw the girl away from where the branch was coming down, the burst of energy giving her a fairly decent arc. 

He saw her hit the ground a few feet away with a loud yelp, and something heavy and hard crashed into him, knocking the wind out of him with a blossom of pain over his head. It wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever felt, that was for sure, but it was enough to knock him down, and he landed on his stomach in the grass, face half buried. 

It hurt bad enough he didn’t even respond to the sensation at first. And then a muffled, low groan escaped into the grass, vibrating the blades that tickled at his mouth and nose. “Fuuuckkk....”

#touchstonedreams #rping #rp art #ic #I moved it over so the big intro thing wouldn't be on top of the rps when i cut it i hope that's okay! #also #in this world it's yeet or be yeeted i guess #according to arthur #i had to doodle the thing #joni's pose was my favorite thing