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save-the-spiral · 4 years

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Wiztober Day Thirteen: Magical Romance

Welcome to day thirteen of wiztober2020! Spoilers up to Azteca. Content warnings for blood, war, post traumatic stress disorder, death, implied starvation, sickness, implied suicidal ideation, grief.

(link to prompt list)

Love drips from your lips as sweet as honey, as frequent as the blood you taste day after day, battle after battle. You are their Young Wizard. You fight every day and have never spent one moment truly learning in the academy you represent.

They stare at you when you’re in Wizard city. They see a hero. You are a hero. You’ve done so much, sacrificed everything for them, your childhood, your innocence, your health, your safety. Yet you do not fight for them. For all the students who you couldn’t name, for the teachers who have taught you spells and nothing more, for the Headmaster who smiles as you regale him with the worst things you have ever seen in your life.

You haven’t been fighting for the Spiral for a long, long time now.

You fight for the rest of your own life, now. You fight every day, to get out of bed, to eat food, to breathe, just for one more moment because that one moment promises a full life. It promises so much.

As the cold, empty nights of Marleybone chill your bones and you stare into the eyes of gaunt begging children while a museum curator demands you fix their gang problem. As the soft petals of cherry blossom trees flutter on the wind and you save a dying emperor and world from its insidious corruption.

These things remind you of the impermanence of life. Of how precious it is.

You bring your quest reward back and wander the alleys of Marleybone, giving out gold that you don’t need. You spend extra hours learning about the spirits in Mooshu.

In Dragonspyre, you are too angry to do anything but choke on the sulfurous air and keep running the path of vengeance on this dead hunk of rock they call a world. You internally question why a young savior was not sent to this doomed world, why it was left to fester until its corruption broke into war, and the war broke into apocalypse, and now you stare at murdered ghosts and tears evaporate in the heat before they fall, lava curdling with spilled blood.

There is nothing in Celestia you care for. Ruined worlds, ancient civilizations, it doesn’t matter. The cold water and dark grottoes are nothing, not when your skin still burns and throat still aches from breathing in ash. Worlds pass, people are saved, others are not, and you keep moving, following orders.

It isn’t until Azteca that you find hope again for a better world. Here things are different, but it is colorful. It is a place you could love and one you could live in once things are over and your quest is done. You could fight for a world like this. People here make beautiful things, and you stare up at the stars with a group of young people and they tell you of their constellations. Your gaze gravitates to the comet, the prophecised end of this world, and wonder if this is your Dragonspyre, but unlike some unknown failure, you could succeed and find a life here.

Your quest is never done. You cannot save everyone.

Even as you scream, as you plead to bring people to Ravenwood and to save as many artifacts as you can, to just let you help them, the ones who mentored you can only embrace you and sadly smile as they tell you this must have been fate.

You are a husk of yourself after that, left to recover as you become unresponsive, empty. Your throat carries the same raw ache after Dragonspyre, but now it is from screaming in your sleep, waking your dorm mates in the middle of the night as you thrash and say things in a language only you can speak in now.

No one in Wizard City knows the languages of Azteca. It’s the only one you manage to speak, on the days you can muster up words.

You understand Cyrus Drake, now. Your eyes are a haunted reflection of his, without the personal loss, just the loss of a world that was a home.

Secretly you resent him, hate him. You, with all of your anger and grief, would never allow yourself to become a teacher, to be in a position of authority. To potentially cause any more harm, especially to children.

Your dorm mates complain of you breaking mirrors as well as screaming in the night.

You get your own house, a gift. It is in the rebuilt and repopulated Unicorn Way, right by the park. The meadow is soft and smells sweet, and you spend your days unable to get out of bed, and your nights lying in the grass. You stare up at the sky and try to trace constellations that aren’t there, the ancient signs of Celestia, the ones you were told of in Azteca, but the stars aren’t there, and don’t line up right. You’ve never learned the constellations for Wizard City.

Magic pulses from you when you doze off, in soft dull colors of your magical schools, especially any astral schools you’ve picked up along the way. The dull grey-silver of moonlight, the twinkle of stardust, the flare of sun, it reflects on your eyes, luminous and refracting infinitely in the uneven surface of tears.

Everything is soft and quiet here, and it feels as if you could fall infinitely into the void of space, as if stuck to the ceiling above nothing. You stare and breathe and tears fall awkwardly to the sides of your face, pooling strangely in your ears or passing that and dripping off of your jaw.

Maybe you could still find a life. Your mind has always been split, categorizing things into before you came here, your simple life on Earth, then your quest, and then a big, empty void of ‘after’ that must come. For a moment, your ‘after’, the rest of your life, had been sitting on the steps of ancient pyramids and joking alongside young warriors and wizards in Azteca, eating fruits and learning the language and racing through the jungle.

Now, months of nothing after that, you wonder if you could muster up that hope again. Your heart aches with the thought of putting so much trust in a place again, or in a person.

But maybe you just couldn’t give that life after questing to a place, or an ideal. Maybe you had to keep it, selfishly, and look after yourself.

Morganthe was still out there, seeking to rewrite the Song of Creation and make the Spiral in her image.

You hadn’t been questing for the Spiral’s sake for a long time now.

But you wanted to live. To simply find somewhere soft and safe and warm forever, where you could be happy and never have the weight of a universe on your shoulders again. So you would have to take that happiness. You have gained nothing by waiting for an ‘after’ to come. You will fight. You will keep fighting until the war is over, and you will find a life worth fighting for after that.

For no one but yourself. And that is selfish, yes, but every love is. Every love is selfish because you secretly think there was no greater feat of love than Malistaire trying to change the laws of the Spiral to bring back one woman.

There is a you out there that you love. If time is a flat circle, than that you is you right now. You are the child, missing baby teeth and innocent. You are the soldier, obedient and bleeding and screaming. You are the after. You are the happiness that must come, what you deserve.

That, you think, you could love.

Tears still fall as you stare up at a sky you barely recognize, though the black lightens to indigo as the sun begins to rise. You gasp wetly when you breathe in, and a hand falls to your lips, a lazy brush of calloused palm that likely leaves you just as tear stained and wretched as before. You sit up, a sob caught in your chest next to a broken heart, and you sit at the base of the unicorn statue in the park.

A small declaration of love was made that night, and you sealed it by watching the sunrise and promising a life to yourself.

#wiztober2020 #wiztober #writing #wizard101 #wizzy101 #wiz101 #w101 #second person

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ncfan-1 · 5 years

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Gotham 05X01, ‘Year Zero’

[Tumblr is giving me issues regarding secure connections right now. I will let you know when I’m not having these issues anymore, but for right now, please direct any comments you have to the version of this post on my Dreamwidth account, or at least cross-post your comments to there. I have temporarily changed my settings to allow anyone to post comments, rather than just registered users.]

So, first episode of Season 5, which will most likely be the last season. The last time we were here, Gotham City underwent having its bridges blown up, which while a big problem, should not have been nearly as big a problem as the show made it out to be. Yeah, things are gonna be bad for the first couple of weeks, but if a proactive government takes charge, the city can get back on its feet eventually.

A bunch of criminals decided to carve up isolated, electricity-deprived, and largely depopulated Gotham City into their own personal fiefdoms for reasons that don’t make any sense upon slight scrutiny. Only with Oswald did this make sense, since Oswald has a strong emotional attachment to Gotham City, wouldn’t want to abandon it, and would want to establish his own rule to bring things under control (Things are probably fairly stable in his fiefdom. It’s the peace of the gun, obviously, but I assure you that the peace of the gun is worlds better than whatever the hell is going on in Jonathan’s neck of the woods.). With Barbara, it sort of makes sense, until you remember that this is a woman who likes her amenities like, oh, running water and air conditioning, and she wouldn’t want to be anywhere that doesn’t have these things. With the rest, they have no real attachment to this place and would definitely want to seek greener pastures. Especially Victor Fries, whose life literally depends on having working electricity, and who probably has his goons making constant runs looking for generators and ever-diminishing supplies of fuel for those generators.

Bruce Wayne decided that he could better serve Gotham City by trying to hunt down Jeremiah Valeska than, say, using his wealth and the clout of his family name to secure desperately needed resources for Gotham like getting the bridges repaired and repairing infrastructure enough to get the power turned back on.

I expect Season 5 to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions. I’m hoping that it will veer solidly into So Bad, It’s Good territory and stay there, though I’m not entirely optimistic. I just hope the apparent Jim x Babs tryst doesn’t happen in the first episode. I can’t handle that sort of brain-breaking badness in the first episode.

This? Is Gotham.

[CN/TW: Suicide, suicide ideation, suicide attempt]

- The recap automatically loses points with me by reminding me of Lee x Ed.

- No Man’s Land, Day 391. So, just to establish, this has been going on for over a year.

- We start with Ed, because of course he’s who everyone wants to see first. (Not.) Here’s someone else who really should have headed off seeking greener pastures first thing, because it’s not like he has an emotional attachment to the city.

- Seeing Oswald and Harvey was welcome, though. I love that Oswald has makeup staff, even in these dark times.

- Jim does not deserve the hero shot.

- Why is Ed teaming up with Jim, Harvey, and Oswald? Oswald, I can understand teaming up with the cops, because he’s all about order, but Ed knows no loyalty.

- And apparently Gotham is a full-blown warzone.

- We go back to Day 87, where Jim explains why people need to

- So Oswald repurposed a factory into a working manufacturer of ammunition. So someone’s gotten power up and running.

- And so has Barbara. And it turns out that her “No Men Allowed” policy isn’t nearly as strict as last season led us to believe. What a surprise. (The fact that she deals primarily in information does at least make sense for her character; she always makes the most sense to me as an information broker.)

- Where the fuck did Jonathan find an army of followers? Isn’t he a complete loner with no real charisma?

- This is the kind of situation where you bring in the national guard, not where you just declare the city off-limits and stick your head in the sand. Given how hawkish certain people in the highest level of government are, the men among these people would probably see advisement to stick their heads in the sand while criminal elements take over a city as an assault on their masculinity or something, given their personality types.

- Oh, god, poor Selina, they couldn’t even get her out of town. (At least Alfred seems to have stuck around to look after her while Bruce goes off on his revenge quests.) She looks so completely crushed by everything. She looks like she’s been crying off and on constantly for days; her eyes are so swollen. Poor kid.

- …Of course they couldn’t even go a full ten minutes before showing us the Greedy, Ungrateful Poor. Jesus.

- We find Ed sleeping on a rooftop couch, thoroughly disheveled. Apparently waking up somewhere with no idea how he got there has become a regular thing for him.

- More Bad Ed? Really? Can we just be done with this?

- Jim is right on the money when he says it’s easy for the government to ignore people suffering, though. They have a very easy time doing that.

- So Oswald wants a thousand pounds of steak from Babs in exchange for a thousand pounds of ammo. And Tabby is hung up on revenge for Butch (ugh) while Babs is actually thinking about needing to protect the women who come to her territory. What a surprise. (Well, Babs actually thinking about the need to protect people is a bit of a surprise. But Tabby not giving a damn about anyone but herself? That’s not a shock.)

- Jonathan’s… Yeah, this makes no sense. The fact that he was able to make himself into a power who could actually do anything in Gotham makes no sense. What would make more sense would be if he was (comparatively) small-fry who survived and made a name for himself by loaning out his services to the actual powers in the city.

- The power goes out at the hospital while Selina’s surgery is going on. Bad. The power comes back on, but there are people downstairs stealing the medicine. Worse.

- Jonathan confronts Jim. In a fight between these two, I’m always gonna be on Jonathan’s side, so… yeah, I kinda wanted to see him get dosed with fear toxin again. Not sorry.

- The Greedy, Ungrateful Poor are pissed that Scarecrow’s gang stole most of their food.

- As for the food situation: Bruce has a Plan. I really hope this plan actually works, and that it doesn’t backfire for grimdarkness.

- “After all the things I’ve done, what did me in was being your friend. I just wish Jeremiah killed me.” I’ll… leave this here. (I had suspected that Selina might be portrayed as suicidal. I’d hoped I’d be wrong.)

- And a nurse says Selina needs “the witch.” (Ivy, probably.)

- Oswald’s got a new leg brace, it looks like.

- Why is Oswald being portrayed like a Caligula knockoff (Or maybe a Nero knockoff, playing his fiddle—eating steak—while Rome burns)? This makes no sense. The man is practical enough to know that his workers need proper amounts of food in order to work.

- The dog’s named Edward. I don’t know whether or not to laugh.

- It’s so nice to have confirmation that Barbara will always be second-best in comparison with the man who threatened to rape her to Tabitha. And this after Barbara gave up godlike powers to save Tabitha’s life.

- The helicopter’s here. How much do you want to bet it’ll be shot down or hijacked?

- Shot down; wow, that took… all of five seconds. My bet right now is on Jeremiah as being responsible. He’s enough of a chaos agent to do something like that; Oswald or Barbara probably would have “confiscated” the contents instead.

- What’s Alfred’s game? (What’s Bruce’s game?)

- It was actually some two-bit thugs we’ve never heard of who shot down the helicopter. Of course.

- And Oswald has shown up to confiscate the contents of the helicopter. Only to be intercepted by Jim and his buddies.

- Or maybe it wasn’t the two-bit thugs, and maybe it was Jeremiah, after all.

- And someone with a bow and arrow is killing Oswald’s goons. It’s Tabitha. Of course.

- And Tabitha’s gun had bad bullets in it. And Oswald gets real revenge for his mother, and Barbara…

- Tragic Lesbians. Fuck you fuck you fuck you the first fucking episode fuck you fuck you fuck you

- Oswald has enough sense to run like hell once Barbara’s initial shock wears off.

- …Barbara was presumably there to try to talk Tabitha out of pursuing ruinous revenge. Jim? I really don’t want to see that hook up in the first episode, but could you at least pretend to be a decent human being and extend Barbara some sympathy?

(I suppose Bruce might extend her some sympathy, since he also has experience with the “watching people you love be murdered in front of you” thing. And because he puts more effort into being a decent person.)

- And poor Barbara gets shot while being a one-woman army.

- And Oswald, interestingly, doesn’t actually want to kill Barbara. Again, proving that he is not indiscriminately violent or vengeance-driven. And he doesn’t want to kill Jim either. Well, at least they remember part of Oswald’s personality.

- And Jim didn’t want to kill Oswald. Gobblepot revival?

- Please tell me they didn’t just leave Barbara unconscious and bleeding on the warehouse floor.

- Oh, look, it’s Ecco.

- There’s someone on the other side who got in contact with Jim to let him know there are people outside of Gotham who want to help. Meanwhile, Ecco has drawn a scary smile on the map. I am underwhelmed.

- Ed woke up in a dumpster this time. I laughed. Truly, a dumpster is his natural habitat.

- Barbara and Tabitha at the morgue. Excuse me, at Barbara’s club. Barbara’s ready to raise hell. She healed very quickly from that gunshot wound.

- Once Oswald’s calmed down a bit, he’ll probably decide he doesn’t want Jim dead after all.

- Selina’s looking at the scalpel. Selina, no. Her screams are heartbreaking. (Serious question, and I know this doesn’t always help—sometimes it just makes the suicide ideation worse—but is she on anti-depressants?)

- Please don’t start a round of applause for Jim Gordon.

- And a child has showed up wanting to talk to Jim. He walked all the way across town with this message: “They’re killing us.”

#ncfan watches Gotham #Tw suicide #Tw suicide ideation #Tw suicide attempt

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