#all things to keep me tethered to the pieces of humanity that i understand

[lupismaris]

I think it's a good time to resurrect the Craig!bond fixation what do we think lads

#i feel absolutely inhuman right now im bouncing between art and poetry and the woods and weed and bourdain #all things to keep me tethered to the pieces of humanity that i understand #but i just feel like I'm shredding at the seams completely falling apart all over and either everyone sees it and says nothing #or no one can tell and its all just mildly inconvenient at most #a feral thing turned into a dancing pet. i can barely get through a work day or a social event. #traumatized wardog bond seems a fitting choice

[acourtofquestions]

So, I (of course😂) have a LOT of thoughts after finishing The Assassin’s Blade — heading into Heir of Fire, so I still don’t fully know the series… this is current non-spoiler thoughts — but let’s get into it:

First off let’s deal with a big one: Celaena and Arobynn.

…Mostly “big” because their entire relationship is so severely f*ed up it take’s a LOT to understand… However, the biggest thing that keeps sticking out to me is the fact that it does makes sense (I am NOT saying it’s right, or healthy; to be clear it is most definitely NOT) it is a disturbingly realistic portrayal of what THAT kind & level of abuse does to a person.

It is infuriatingly painful to watch; as the reader you can clearly see the issue; you want to scream at Celaena to RUN already, get out, NOW; you feel for Sam’s frustration at times becoming fury & terror at the fact she does not stop him.

Yet, it is not a lack of knowing or agreeing with this that makes Celaena stay; it isn’t even wanting to stay, often she confirms the opposite; it’s the fact that she is utterly terrified. At times Arobynn makes her revert into a terrified state of childlike fawning. All centered around the idea; I can only seem to explain using this quote (because Shakespeare has nothing on Taylor Swift; though the context of this is 100% NON romantic; that question mark on their relationship is utterly skin crawling) “Who’s going to know me?” if not Arobynn who is going to know Aelin Galathynius ever even existed?

… Everything Celaena has become she has been (falsely) taught into believing was “Arobynn given”; even her notoriety as the prized “Adarlan’s Assassin” is not by her mark but by his word. He has ensured at every opportunity that she does not forget it; that she feels small & one breath away from being prey, that she does not feel sure of herself or anything aside from him (and even that is a pendulum) that she is haunted by her past; and never forgets what it is to lose EVERYTHING. She lost everything. In that she had to destroy every piece of the girl she was; the one that had a family she loved; the one that had a home, a country, a purpose; anything she was before the one Arobynn pulled out of the river. And if not him; does anyone even remember? — Does it all cease to be nothing more than forgotten; her grief, her love, Aelin herself; is it any different than if Aelin had drowned in the river?

— This is Celaena’s obsession with being remembered; on the surface it appears shallow, selfish, full of nothing more than pride & arrogance alone; in truth it has more to do with fear (a key point of her character’s driving mindset) & purpose (a key point of humanity/morality).

… How does she make any sense of all she has done & become at Arobynn’s hand; every life she has taken, every terrible thing she has done; if not for him?

And this is why for so long she stays; because she is more afraid of the unknown & so tired of loss; it feels much safer to be known, to know the loss that will come, to hurt with familiar pain, to exist within a tether to his realm; then to feel as if she is risking everything over again.

#Celaena Sardothien #Aelin Galathynius #Aelin Ashryver Galathynius #the assassin of Adarlan #TOG #Throne of Glass #TAB #The Assassin’s Blade #Arobynn Hamel #Arobynn’s protégée #King of the Assassins #Throne of Glass series #The Assassin and the Pirate lord #The Assassin and the Healer #The Assassin and the Desert #The Assassin and the Underworld #The Assassin and the Empire #Maasverse #Sarah J. Maas #TW #character analysis #character mindset #character arc #get into a characters head #reading thoughts #writing it out #ponderings #who’s gonna know me? #Terrassen #Rifthold

[ailendolin]

Title: Now and for Always [AO3]

Characters: Crowley/Aziraphale

Warnings: Spoilers for the season 2 finale.

Summary: Instead of stepping forward into the lift, Aziraphale turns left.

————

Now and for Always

“We call it the Second Coming.”

Something in Aziraphale’s chest tightens with a terrible feeling. It makes it hard to breathe, pulls at him until he is looking to his left, down the street to the car – to their car. To Crowley who is just standing there, perfectly still. He’s not driving away, not going anywhere – just looking, waiting, giving him time. And Aziraphale–

Aziraphale longs to cross the street.

He longs and wants and hurts like he never has before. Until it becomes so unbearable that he finally does what he should have done the moment Crowley kissed him with the desperation of a thousand stars being born: he listens to his heart.

“I’m sorry,” he tells Metatron without taking his eyes off Crowley, terrified that Crowley is going to disappear into the vastness of the universe the moment he looks away. “I’ve changed my mind.”

Metatron’s voice takes on a threatening edge but Aziraphale barely hears him as he turns away. He sets one foot in front of the other, takes the first step and then the second one, and the thing in his chest that’s been clawing at him only moments ago slowly starts to ease. The farther away from the lift and closer to Crowley he gets, the easier it becomes to walk away. It is liberating, and he suddenly finds himself smiling as a weight lifts off his shoulders.

Across the street, Crowley is still waiting for him. Aziraphale can’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses but he can see his mouth opening in surprise. There is no anger edged into the lines of that dear, beloved face now, no heart-breaking despair, no righteous fury. There is only hope, so beautiful and bright that it resonates in Aziraphale’s entire being and sings an aria no human could ever possibly dream of composing. It settles between the feathers of his wings, as comforting as a hug, and just like that he knows he’s made the right choice. It feels like puzzle pieces falling into place, like finding a copy of a book he’s been searching for for ages and placing it in the empty space on the shelf where it was always meant to be.

It feels like coming home.

Behind him, the lift pings faintly. His chance of becoming an Archangel disappears into Heaven along with Metatron but Aziraphale can’t bring himself to care. He’s halfway across the street by now and all that matters in that moment is Crowley and the way he takes off his glasses and looks at him. He has seen that look before, a long time ago when they were watching the universe take shape in vibrant explosions of colour. Back then, that look had been aimed at the wonders of creation around them. Now – now it was aimed at him, and Aziraphale wonders how he could have ever thought of turning his back on it; of letting Crowley go.

“Crowley,” he says breathlessly when he finally comes to stand before him.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says, guarded. That thing in Aziraphale’s chest tightens again. He is too late. He took too long to make up his mind. He was too slow, always too slow. But then Crowley’s eyes soften and he reaches up to touch his cheek. “Angel.”

Aziraphale’s face crumples. He lets out a ragged breath and presses Crowley’s hand as tightly as he can against his skin, keeping him tethered to him now and for always.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, not caring that it comes out a sobbing mess when Crowleys thumb brushes over his cheek, infinitely gentle and reassuring. “I’m sorry I made you wait. Forgive me?”

Crowley’s answering laugh caresses his skin like a summer wind dancing in the meadows. “That’s more your side’s kind of business, Angel.”

“No,” Aziraphale says, desperate for him to understand. “There is no ‘my side’. Not anymore.”

“No?” Crowley echoes. His voice trembles.

Aziraphale shakes his head. “No. There’s only ours.”

He holds Crowley’s gaze and lets him see the truth amid the tears, regret and shame – the love that has always been there, even before the Beginning. A love no amount of indoctrination has ever been able to stamp out and no form of punishment, no matter how fiercely threatened, has had any hope to extinguish. It’s as much a part of him as his wings are, and while it might cost him Heaven, it gains him something that is so beautifully human he can’t possibly regret or doubt it.

“Ours?” Crowley asks. His fingers are trembling against Aziraphale’s cheek. “Are you sure? Because I need you to be sure about this, Aziraphale.”

Aziraphale smiles. “I have never been more sure of anything in my existence.”

With that, he cups Crowley’s face with his free hand and finally closes the distance between them. The kiss is everything their first one wasn’t: tentative and gentle like the morning dawn, and slow and sweet like the moonrise over becalmed waters. For a moment, he allows his eyes to close so he can get lost in it all – the feeling, the sensations, the love he feels in every corner of his being – and when they pull apart after what feels like an eternity, all he can think is, Gabriel and Beelzebub had it right.  

“Any regrets?” Crowley asks quietly. He’s looking as if he standing on the edge of a drop-off and is waiting to find out whether he will get pushed into the depths of the abyss or pulled back from the ledge by gentle hands. Aziraphale knows that’s his fault. He also knows more apologies won’t help, no matter how readily they sit on his tongue, demanding to be spoken. It’s going to be a long time until Crowley will be able to completely trust him again but that’s all right. If there’s one thing they both have in abundance, it’s time.

“I never had any regrets when it comes to you, Crowley,” he says softly and allows his thumb to brush over the sensitive skin under Crowley’s eye in reverence and worship. Then he smiles and nods towards the bookshop. “We will have to find a proper place for your plants.”

Crowley follows his gaze. “I suppose we do.”

He lets his hand fall from Aziraphale’s face and holds it out to him. Aziraphale takes it without hesitation. It feels right. It feels good. “Let’s go home, then.”

“Home,” Crowley repeats softly. Slowly, the right corner of his mouth quirks up. “I like the sound of that.”

As if on cue, the heavens open up above them. Their eyes meet in the rain and before Aziraphale knows it, they’re both laughing and running towards the bookshop, hand in hand.

They still have a lot of things to talk about and figure out – too much has happened for them not to. Aziraphale wants to do this right, and he wants to do right by Crowley. He owes him that much. But in that moment, with Crowley next to him and looking as unburdened and at peace as he did before the Beginning, he can’t bring himself to worry about the future.

In that moment, he simply lives.

#crowley #aziraphale #ineffable husbands #good omens spoilers #good omens #good omens 2 #good omens 2 spoilers

[reginarubie]

So from what I remember only Bran could warg in the TV show. But in the books, I believe it was implied that most Stark children could warg (whether they did it consciously or not). Please correct me if I'm wrong about this.

There's also been a mention in your story that Sansa had a dream about her direwolf Lady. Does that mean that she might slowly, but surely develop warging abilities in this new timeline? 👀

Ciao @wolfanddragon98!,

You remember correctly. In the show they make us believe that only Bran could warg. Instead in the books all Starks can at different levels warg at least inside their direwolves.

The main difference should be — but I am not truly that good with lore as many others fans, so correct me if I am wrong — that Bran is an extremely potent warg and can thus warg in many different life-forms even in humans (see Hodor), whilst the others are not as capable as him.

Robb dying possibly warged into Grey Wind, as, as he laid dying he whispered the direwolf's name. Direwolf who died himself, otherwise Robb could end up living in Grey Wind's conscience for the rest of the direwolf's life.

Jon warged into Ghost for sure as he laid dying, but Ghost is still alive and that tether to Ghost is the only thing keeping Jon “alive” right now, and will possibly enable him to return to his own body, for however changed he might be.

Arya keeps having wolf-dreams, in which she is Nymeria. It's Nymeria who finds Catelyn's Stark's mutilated body in the rivers and drags her ashore — for her to be later returned as Lady Stoneheart — and Arya keeps having wolf-dreams even as she trains as a Faceless assassin acolyte. Her bound with Nymeria never fully severed.

We don't have a Rickon POV, but we know that Shaggy Dog reacted to his moods like Summer did with Bran, Ghost with Jon and Lady with Sansa and Nymeria with Arya and Grey Wind with Robb. So it stands to reason he himself (who is under the tutelage of the Skagosi and a wildling) might learn to control his warging. My little feral prince.

Sansa keeps having wolf-dreams even after Lady has died, which makes me think that something of the same nature happened to them as well when Ned killed Lady. Their bond was still fresh and they had not yet dipped into it, but the fact that Sansa keeps dreaming of Lady and running together with her, to me and many others, make think that some piece of Lady's conscience might still be with Sansa, as if naturally the bond between them as enabled a part of Lady to survive through Sansa (as I've theorized in my Sansa/Young Griff story).

So yeah, in the books all Starks children can warg at the very least in their own direwolf, whilst Bran can warg in almost anything that moves and breathes, if I understand it all correctly, which I may not.

So, yeah, in my story whilst Sansa was being transported back in time she finds herself running with Lady beneath the fronds of a Godswood, because that's something Sansa does in canon and actually there are several metas written by much more knowledgeable people than me in the lore of asoiaf about Sansa's wolf dreams and what they might mean, as well as for the other Starks (this is one of them x, by @stormcloudrising which I found amazing, btw).

Suffice to say, all Starks have for sure warging abilities, some of them (or all of them) might have also green-seerer abilities (Bran for sure, Rickon possibly as he dreamed of Ned being killed, Sansa also very possibly, Jon almost for sure as I think that he foresaw himself and not Uncle Benjen lying dying in the snow just he misconstrued his vision, maybe even Robb did, and because of that he was such a proficient strategist, Arya also could have the same abilities... though again I am not as knowledgeable on the matter).

#ask the hag #anon asks #sansa stark #starklings #starklings and their warging abilities #so underestimated the lot of them #don't come cry wolf when they come for you #after you've tried to skin their pack

[give-soup-please]

I can't sleep. A few thoughts on fictional characters. (long personal post)

Yeah, I should be in bed. I told my friends I was logging off. But I tried to sleep, and got caught up in memories of the past. It happens a lot when you're me.

So I didn't leave my parents place until I was 20, right? I've lived an approximate fourth of a human's lifespan in a bad home. And there are a lot of real people I could credit for helping me hang on long enough to get out. They more than deserve the credit that I could give. They all deserve their own happy endings and the best that life has to offer, there's no question of that.

But for a majority of my life, fictional characters also helped share the burden. My list of comfort characters is long. The first comfort character I had was when I was four years old. There was this movie that almost no one's heard of, called Doogal, also known as The Magic Roundabout. This was a bad kids movie, but when you're four, you're not exactly in a position to notice quality or do an analysis.

I've been through a lot of stuff that I don't talk about, partially for privacy reasons, partially for safety, and partially because I don't like to discuss all my trauma on a blog where anyone can read it. What I can say comfortably is that fictional characters have always acted as an anchor for me. They've kept me tethered, despite everything.

There were many times I came close to making a permanent mistake because life was too hard. I have a few... attempts under my belt. Nothing stuck, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't be typing this. But I've been caught in this loop tonight about the power fictional characters have over our lives.

I pay attention. I lurk a lot over a broad variety of tags. TSP isn't my only fandom, though it is my main one right now. And I keep seeing these connections. I'm not the only one who's used characters to stay alive when things have been at their worst. Far from it. There are thousands of us, who have either been stuck in abusive situations or currently are, and we grip tight to these characters in order to have something, or someone who... Cares. Loves. Pays attention. There are so many ways to fill that blank, more than I have the ability to describe.

The thing is, I can't work out why. I mean, I can understand the need for the things our families can't provide, better than most. But why- or how, do they have this power? What is it about fictional characters that makes them have this ability? What does it mean to scream for help, and for a fictional character to lend a hand? I've been thinking about this for a while, and I can't come to any solid conclusions.

Do we use fictional characters to cope because a part of our brain knows that someone needs to be kind to us, despite all the things we've been told?

Do we use them to cope because our traits are recognizable in them?

Is it more metaphysical and spiritual than that? Can they see into our world at all? How many of us have discovered the media we needed at exactly the right time? How many of us have found something life saving in the most unlikely of fandoms? Is this fate? Is it chance? Do these characters in some universe watch us struggle and think, "I can lend a hand."?

Again, thousands of us have had these experiences. Undertale saved my life. Good Omens saved my life. Welcome to Nightvale helped me keep my sanity during the pandemic. Don't get me started on how many times Star Trek has given me something to live for. Redwall and Chronicles of Narnia too. I've been in a lot of different spaces. The perfect piece of media to distract and consume and daydream about, to get us through a few months. Again, and again.

I didn't know peace until I left home. But these worlds provided some small version of it. How did they do that?

I don't have any answers. Maybe the answers aren't important, but they feel important.

And I'm not ashamed that I use characters when tensions and stress or high. They've stuck with me since I was four years old, and I don't think they're going anywhere. Believe me, I've tried to rely on them less, and push them away in extreme circumstances. They won't leave me behind, even if I asked them to. I did. They refused point blank.

How is it that they've got a better grip on the inside of my head than I do?

Now chances are, relying on them is just what my brain learned to do to cope. But there's always a romantic part of me that wants to believe it's more than that.

I still can't get over it. How do fictional characters hold this much sway over us? I mean- I consume headcanons almost as much as I write for them. I've saved hundreds of them to my desktop to read when things are hard. And while I can't claim that those posts were lifesaving as much as the media was, they helped. They brought comfort. They brought relief.

Why? Why do these characters matter so much to us?

I have dozens of stories I could tell. Picturing Aziraphale with his wings stretched out, protecting me until I fell asleep. The narrator giving me comfort after dealing with my abusers. Julian Bashir and Garak helping me during recovery. Papyrus being proud of me for accomplishing things. Cecil Palmer helping me calm down from a panic attack. Fantasizing about living at Redwall Abbey, while stuck in a dangerous home. All of them helping me get back to my feet after being knocked to the ground again and again. All of them, and many others holding the line while I battled with my own brain to stay alive.

How were they able to convince me to stay, when I had no desire to do so? How did reading them saying kind things and writing them being kind to others help me believe I was deserving of kindness? How did loving them so deeply transfer to wanting to love myself?

None of it makes sense, but even if I wasn't invested in keeping myself here, they were.

#personal #not tsp related #okay i got that out of my system #im going to try and go back to bed #hopefully it will work this time #ugh #if it weren't for the fact that i'm about to stop posting #i'd try and come up with a tag for these types of posts #something like: soup's rambles #or: jay's philosophy hour #tw abuse #tw suicide

[aizenat]

Like, to this day, I still don’t understand what Us was trying to be. Like I get it in a sense. Idk, I tend to be good with subtlety, and I love a good indie horror. I get it, and I read all the essays to get an even better understanding of it. But the execution was kinda....meh to me. It’s too exposition-y. And the “twist” that the Adelaide we spent the movie rooting for was originally a Tethered one was like “okay.” I mean even with its themes, what was the point of that other to just be a twist? 

I think that no matter how good an actress is, if the story is pretty confusing and convoluted, general audiences are not going to go crazy over it. Especially if you don’t get pretty campy with it. Us was also very dark both in themes and execution. It was more horror than the psychological thriller we got from Get Out. Get Out was crazy and insane, but rooted in a sense of fantastical science that obviously reflects a lot of what we see irl. With Us, you have to think and think and think, and even though I love thinking, I wasn’t able to start putting pieces together until I read a few essays to get me started. Like, I’M the sort of person that if I’m confused on something, I’ll look it up, but the rest of society will be more like “hm. wasn’t like Get Out. Anyway, are we going shopping after this or what?” 

I think what made Get Out work was that it was very obvious and on the nose with what it was saying while also being so over the top and satirical that it had a camp element to ease fans into the horror better. You know something is off from jump. The weird silent auction. Lakeith Stanfield’s behavior (and how changed he is from his intro in the beginning). The blind artist who takes a liking to Daniel’s character. The weird looks Daniel gives every time the white people he’s around say something stupid and so “I’m not racist, I voted for Obama” in a move that feels like it could have came straight from a Key and Peele sketch or even Family Guy. 

As such, when the horror part comes in, the thought of being trapped in your body while a white person invades it and uses it against your will, the audience (no matter their personal race or experience) understands it. I think that was another element to the movie as well: it actually showcased what it felt like to be a Black American, especially with how we have to dance around whites to not make them feel uncomfortable all while they don’t care how they make us feel. And then when it’s revealed they don’t care about us but how they can use us, it made even white audiences pause and think about the Black experience in a way most had never done before. It forced whites to face their own attitudes and behaviors, turning a mirror on them. 

With Us, I don’t think it does that great of a job of holding up that mirror. The Tethered represent how our lives are able to exist rather comfortably because of the oppression of others. But we don’t see that oppression until AFTER the Tethered come to attempt to murder and replace the main characters. It’s also confusing on what the Tethered are. I think if Peele had been brave enough to take a supernatural approach, a shadow world would have made things flow better. But instead, these mother fuckers are just “underground?” Like what? What was keeping them there? Why couldn’t they just leave and live their lives? 

Also, if the Tethered exist to suffer so that the “real” people can live, then why do they look like us? Oh, because we’re all the same, we’re all human, blah blah blah, gag me. Seriously! I may sympathize with a poor Indian woman working in factory, or a girl in Latin America whose parents were killed by cartels, but they’re NOT me. That doesn’t take away they’re humanity; they shouldn’t have to BE ME for me to see their humanity. So what is the point? Are the Tethered a part of ourselves that we suppress, or are they representative of those oppressed in our world for the benefit of the few in “developed” nations? It’s like it’s trying to be both, and Peele needed to focus. 

The whole shit with the white family too; idk why that needed to exist tbqh. I felt like they could have just focused on the Black family and it would have been fine. It felt like we were trying to pad the run time a bit. The gag of the white family existing and Duke Winston’s character feeling constantly jealous over what they have, as though they are always one-upping him and his family also feels unfair to the Black family. They are still oppressed in the context of their own society, but they are put on the same level as the white family when the Tethered come?

I’m also never sure what the takeaway is supposed to be from the movie. Like when it’s all done, how are we supposed to feel? What are we supposed to take away from it? 

I think if Peele wanted to just have a horror movie for the sake of horror, then make it horror. Make the shadow people simply supernatural creatures that want their revenge. Let them be more representations of the main characters “shadow selves.” Not necessarily suffering so they can be happy or whatever, but literally their shadow selves. Opposites (instead of just supped up versions of who they already are) who are also everything the “real” people wish they could be if they just let themselves go. Stop holding back. And make it more about the shadow people trying to corrupt the “real” people so that they can then take over their bodies and finally live outside of the shadows. I think that would have been more interesting, more focused, and also stays consistent with the body snatcher trend of Peele’s movies that would make it familiar enough with Get Out to know it’s saying something without confusing audiences so much that they just walk away like “huh?” 

Virtually everyone I know who watched Us was confused by it after immediately seeing it. Sure they understood SOME pieces after thinking of it, but the overall message was not clear, and was not conveyed to the general population. And without some film critics who get paid to review this shit (and whom many have more insider knowledge that they could then use to provide context and improve their commentary) helping to springboard some ideas on, I can’t imagine the average movie goer just going into the movie and immediately GETTING IT. You know? 

It’s a shame because I WAS excited to see Lupita in a horror film, and I really wanted it to be good. But it was just a bit too chaotic to fuck with completely imo. 

[jade-parcels]

The genshin men: fatherhood edition

With: Childe, Zhongli, Kaeya, Diluc, Xiao, Venti, Albedo and Baizhu

—————————

Childe:

Ajax loves kids and he’ll make that known early on in your relationship

Like...This man wants five or more kids but he’ll settle for four. He dreams of a big family, getting to surround himself with you and your kids every night for family dinners, everyone getting together for big birthday parties or reunions! That’s his dream life! Plus, in Snezhnaya, most families have more than two kids anyways

He will cry so hard when his babies are placed in his arms for the first time, I mean he’s a mess. Nose is running, eyes puffy, lost of sniffling lmao he is so excited to be a dad!! Don’t you dare tell the other Harbingers how much he cried...What do you mean you took a picture when he wasn’t looking??? Hey??!?!

With his obscene amount of mora, he’ll buy a huge house that will accommodate everyone. Anything you want will be purchased that day or within 48 hours, the same goes for the kids

But they’ll all learn to be thankful for what they have. They’ll learn to fight, fish and speak multiple languages. He has high expectations but let’s face it, he’ll be proud of them no matter what

You’re gonna have to be the one to put your foot down though because Ajax doesn’t enjoy being the ‘mean parent’, he has trouble saying no to the kiddos which can create some tension between you and your husband. He has good intentions of course!! He doesn’t wanna say no to those cute, freckled faces!!

Zhongli:

Zhongli is nervous about having kids because he’s immortal. So this will go one of two ways. 1. You have the baby and the baby ends up not being immortal (or you adopt a baby who is not immortal) Then he loses you both. OR 2. You have the baby and it inherits his immortality and becomes an adeptus. Now he and the baby will have to watch you die while they both life forever.

Either way...It hurts him to think about because he loves you!! He wants to have a family with you!! He wants to give you that perfect family life every human desires!! But he’s torn

You two will just have to figure it out.

Zhongli will be a strong, male figure for your kid(s) and he will instill that traditional kindness and respect into their behavior. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ always, always offer to help someone who needs it, do good deeds and you will feel accomplished, be the best you you can be, alway try your hardest because that’s all that matters

He will be sure that your kid(s) always feel loved ALWAYS. Zhongli will tell them stories, cook for them, take them to school, anything that needs to be done. When you’ve had a rough day, he’ll step in to take over for the night without being asked. He shows interest in everything your kid(s) like and he will do his damn best to display every piece of artwork they make or every pretty rock they find

He...will make a great dad :’)

Kaeya:

Ooooh brother, at first Kaeya says no he doesn’t want kids but...Then he starts thinking about it

He observes the happy families that walk around the cobblestone streets of Mondstadt, how the kiddos smile and laugh with their parents. He’ll patrol in the afternoons, usually rounding the corner just in time to see the city’s kids leave school for the day, watching as they all run down the street to go home to their parents or play in the fountain together...Yeah, that really warms his heart

He’d want one or two kids, preferably two to avoid an only child being lonely. He isn’t on the best terms with Diluc but he can admit that they had a great childhood together, playing at the winery and running around as brothers do

Kaeya would be a very patient, understanding father. He doesn’t have much of a temper so he’d use the kids’ mistakes as learning opportunities instead of getting upset at them

He would be obsessed with the kids when they’re babies though oh man if you thought you had baby fever, he has it times ten! He loves holding the baby, watching with a twinkling eye as his baby grasps his thumb with its tiny hand... adorable

And if your kids inherited his eyes, his star shaped pupils that his ancestors passed down to him...He’s gonna get emotional

Everyone at the knights’ headquarters and the Angel’s Share will get sick of him REALLY fast cause he won’t stop bragging about how cute and smart his kids are lmao

Diluc:

Diluc would be such a soft dad don’t even get me started

He loves you so much of course he wants to have kids with you! Is that even a question?? He won’t be the one to bring it up unless he gets the feeling that you want kids but once you ask, he’ll agree so fast

He’ll be grateful to even have one kid with you :’) and he’ll be fine with however many kids YOU want. You want one kid? Perfect! You want four? No problem, the manor is big enough for ten! You...you want ten...? Time to hire some more maids then lmao

Diluc is a worry wart though, he’ll be afraid to hold the baby, feed it, bathe it, he’s terrified of hurting the baby or the baby suddenly hating him. So just help him out!! Cause when he gets comfortable with the baby, he’ll be in full dad mode

He isn’t embarrassed to walk around the manor, conducting business with a baby strapped to his chest!

Diluc is a very kind, gentle dad who will always offer helpful solutions to the kiddos’ problems. He’ll make sure all of their needs are met while also trying to avoid spoiling them... Too much... There will be a fair amount of spoiling...

His own father wasn’t too affectionate with him so that’s why he’ll be affectionate with his kids! Hugs and kisses when he tucks them in at night, big dad hugs when they get home from school, holding their hands in the busy streets of Mondstadt. His father was a great dad! He just aims to be better.

Xiao:

Like Zhongli, he worries about the mortality thing. Since he’s an Adeptus, his kid will certainly be an Adeptus too if you have kids together.

He also worries that his kid(s) will hate him. His duty is to kill demons which means that rain or shine, holidays, special occasions, day or night he’s gotta be ready to go slaughter demonic beings. So he’ll inevitably miss out on important stages in the kiddos’ lives

And admittedly... He’ll be scared of his kids lmao

They’re screaming, crying, barfing, pooping, laughing, screaming again...He can’t predict their behavior. It’s unsettling. All of that goes away one night when you sit him down and place your sleeping baby in his arms. His eyes go wide...And he just watches. This tiny, little baby...Feels no fear for him. It’s comforted by his presence. He almost cries...ALMOST

He’s still pretty much the same Xiao we all know and love but now he has a kid. “Slaying demons is what I do...Hey, go back inside and finish your dinner. Yes, even your vegetables. I don’t care that you don’t like them-...Fine. Don’t tell your mother, bring them to me. I’ll eat them” cute :)

He’s a protective dad and husband, he’d never let anyone or anything harm his beloved family

Venti:

Venti....does not want kids. He thinks they’re cute! He likes the idea of kids but he knows he wouldn’t enjoy actually having kids

You two already have so much fun together!! You don’t need a kid!! You guys have dogs!! Dogs are like kids! But they’re more independent and they’re cuter!

He’ll feel bad if you want kids and he doesn’t, he really will! But it’ll be nearly impossible to convince him cause he’s made his mind up :/

Venti’ll make it up to you somehow though, he’ll take you out more and show you all of the adventures you guys can have if there aren’t kids around

But for the sake of fatherhood headcanons, let’s pretend he gave in. Venti would be a very caring dad. He would cuddle the hell out of this kiddo and sing to them :’) the only problem is that Venti doesn’t like being tethered to one place for too long so he tends to take off and not come back for a few days... :(

Albedo:

Albedo wants kids mostly just to see what fatherhood would be like. He’s always been curious about what that part of his life would be like so why not have a kid

He’d be good with one kid, two at most cause after practically raising Klee, he knows how some kids can be and...He doesn’t have the mental capacity for more than two kids at a time lmao

He tries his best to show more emotion in his face. We all know he usually sits like this 😐 and goes ‘wow im so happy right now’. If you didn’t know him, you’d think he was bored out of his mind right? So he’s gotta work on that. And when he musters up a smile for the baby and it smiles back at him????? Yeah...He’s gonna try to smile a lot more now

He definitely softens up once he becomes a dad, he shows emotion more than he used to and surprisingly, he takes time off of work. Shocker, I know! He decides that he’s been in the lab long enough and that he wants to be able to be there for these moments with you and his kid(s) :’) :’) He trusts Sucrose and Timaeus to take over for him for a couple hours

He keeps a journal for each kid and writes down the date and time they have their firsts or just interesting things they do ->

- 8/4: Baby sees and plays with a cat for the first time

- 9/5: Baby smacked me in the face and laughed so hard she threw up

-9/12: Baby learns that pulling my hair gets my attention. She now continues to do so

-10/15: Baby stays at Aunt Klee’s house for the first time

Baizhu:

Baizhu really loves kids, he works with them a lot and he considers Qiqi to be his daughter anyway but in terms of you guys having a kid together, with his condition he can probably only handle one kid running around

He will do his absolute best to be a good dad. Even if he feels like death, he’ll help change diapers, feed the baby, care for it when you need a break. He isn’t contagious so when you’re sleeping and he feels gross, he’ll sit back against the pillows with the baby on his chest, the three of you resting together (though he doesn’t fall asleep...that would be dangerous for the baby)

Baizhu already tends to nag at you about your health and lifestyle choices but now?? He’ll be a menace. He’ll be constantly evaluating your baby’s condition, checking to see if a certain food is giving them a rash or making sure their skin isn’t drying out. He’s hyper aware of your baby’s health and will be the one to treat them if they get sick

He’s a busy guy since he runs the pharmacy but he will always do his best to be present for your baby’s big milestones! And when your kid cries cause Baizhu’s medicine tastes like shit, he’ll do his best to not be disappointed in their reaction lmao

When you leave him alone with the baby, he’ll wrap a scarf around himself to tie the baby to his chest while he works and...he looks so cute :) dad baizhu <3 <3 <3 <3

Bonus points for him buying the baby toy medical equipment so he can get your kiddo interested in medicine :)

#genshin impact #genshin impact x reader #genshin imagines #genshin impact writing #genshin impact headcanons #genshin impact baizhu #genshin impact albedo #genshin impact kaeya #genshin impact diluc #genshin impact venti #genshin impact zhongli #genshin impact childe #genshin impact xiao #xiao x reader #albedo x reader #kaeya x reader #diluc x reader #zhongli x reader #baizhu x reader #childe x reader

[cosmicjoke]

Levi’s Sacrifices

So, one of the criticisms I sometimes see leveled at Levi as a character by his haters is that he never really sacrificed anything personal to the cause of saving humanity, and that he never made any hard decisions himself for that cause either, only following Erwin’s orders, etc...  I even got into an argument with a Jaegerist once in which they accused Levi of being too afraid to make any decisions or choices on his own after Furlan and Isabel died.

Well, needless to say for me, all of this is absurd, and plainly untrue.  Levi, in the end, probably ended up sacrificing more for humanities sake then any other character in SnK, and I want go sort of map out here why that is, and gives examples as I go along.

First of all, in order to understand just what and how Levi has sacrificed for humanities salvation, you first have to understand what it is that is Levi’s primary, personal need and desire.  Everyone, throughout the story, is shown at some point having to give up on their personal dreams in order to advance the cause, to sacrifice the thing that drives them forward.  As Kenny says, the thing that they’re “drunk” on.  But Levi, rather famously, doesn’t have any personal dream that he’s fighting for, he doesn’t have anything he, personally, wants. 

But what Levi does have is an overwhelming, intrinsic need and desire to save people.  Since even before he came above ground and joined the Survey Corps, Levi has felt a desire and even an obligation to use his strength to help others, to keep them safe, to keep them alive. 

Above everything else, Levi values life.

This is why, numerous times throughout the story, whenever Levi is leading a unit of soldiers, his first and primary order to them is to “stay alive” or “not die”.  Other than the objective of whatever specific mission they’re on, keeping his comrades alive, making sure they make it out okay, is Levi’s primary goal, and I would say, from a personal standpoint, for Levi himself, it’s even more important to him than completing the mission.  If he can do something to save someone’s life, his overwhelming instinct is to do so.  Because for Levi, the loss of life has a profound impact.  He feels each loss down to his core.  It devastates him, each time someone dies, whether that’s under his direct command, or in following someone else’ orders.  And that pain he feels, that sense of guilt and grief, is only exacerbated when he knows there’s something he could have done to prevent it.  Levi cares too much about other people, and values other people’s lives and right to live too much for him ever to take those kinds of losses in stride.

So how does this relate back to Levi’s personal sacrifices, and his ability to make tough decisions?

Well, from beginning to end, Levi is in a constant battle with himself, choosing between his natural drive and instinct to save the lives of as many people as he can, and the necessity of letting some people die in order to achieve a greater, overall good.

It goes against every fiber of Levi’s being every time he has to choose the latter.  It conflicts and clashes with his very nature, to let people die when he could do something to save them.  And in making that choice, in the process of sacrificing his own, personal need, he also hurts himself immeasurably.  He takes on the guilt and grief and pain of each, preventable death, and chooses to live with it, even as it tears his heart to pieces.

Isayama himself said the thing Levi recognizes that he’s tethered to, when Kenny asks him what it is he’s drunk on, is his own strength, and the need to use that strength to be a hero, to help people.  It’s the thing he can’t ignore, the thing he can’t separate himself from.   The things he wants, the thing he cares about most.  Saving lives. 

So every time Levi makes a decision not to, it’s tantamount to Levi giving up the thing that drives him, giving up the thing he cares most about.  It’s a massive sacrifice.  One people don’t always seem to recognize as such, because it doesn’t take the shape of a tangible goal with an end point, and it’s intrinsically selfless in nature.  It doesn’t give Levi anything himself, so it doesn’t often get recognized as giving anything up.  But it’s still a major sacrifice, because every time Levi goes against this instinct of his, it causes him great suffering.

But for anyone who doubts Levi’s willingness to sacrifice, or to make choices which ultimately cause him a tremendous amount of suffering, lets give some examples.

The first one I can think of off the top of my head is during the Female Titan arc, when Levi leads his squad into the forest of giant trees in order to lure Annie into a trap.  In order for the trap to work, Levi knows he and his squad can’t engage Annie, because they need to lead her to a certain point.  So that means Levi has to make the decision to keep going, even as, at his back, he can hear other SC soldiers engaging with Annie and dying in droves.  Can you imagine how hard this is for Levi?  When he values life above all else, when his overwhelming instinct is to use his strength to prevent people from dying, to use his strength to eliminate threats so other people don’t have to put themselves in harms way?  The guilt and grief Levi must have felt afterwards had to have been brutal.  It’s why he snaps at Erwin after, when Erwin tries to thank him, and Levi tells him it was the recruits who died engaging Annie that are to thank, not him.  But, because he understood that capturing the Female Titan was the only way to advance the cause for humanities salvation, Levi willingly chose to follow Erwin’s orders, and stay his own, personal need to help.

The next example is during the battle with the Female Titan in Trost.  Once again, Levi is devastated by his inability to help, this time due to being injured.  We’re shown a panel of Levi having to physically restrain himself from jumping into action, his hands literally clenched to fists at his sides and shaking as he looks on, under Erwin’s orders, to stand down and let the plan play out.  Levi knows this plan is dangerous and has the potential to lead to many deaths, which, eventually, it does.  Some of which likely could have been prevented had Levi been able to engage.  Again, this goes against everything that Levi is.  This causes Levi massive pain.

Next up is  during the Uprising arc.  The first, big sacrifice Levi makes here is in helping Hange torture Sannes.  He does this both for Hange’s sake, to help them enact their desire for revenge, and also for the sake of humanity, knowing they need to extract information about the Reiss family from Sannes in order for Erwin’s plan of a coup to succeed.  This incident has a huge, personal toll on Levi, in which, once again, he’s having to go against his very nature in order to help humanity, purposefully hurting someone instead of helping them.  Because no, Levi, contrary to some absurd claims, doesn’t enjoy hurting people.  He doesn’t get some sort of sick thrill or pleasure from it.  I could go into why, but that’s a post for another time.  But using this as an example, one only need look at Levi’s behavior afterward to see how much this particular incident took out of him.  He forgets to tell Historia the information that they found out through torturing Sannes, which is that she’s the true heir to the thrown, and then, when Historia tries to back out of doing her part and starts instead to wallow in self-pity and loathing, Levi snaps and grabs her, and threatens her into doing her duty.  Why?  Because he’s just made himself do something monstrous, something that goes so completely against who he actually is.  He’s just had to sacrifice his humanity to win necessary information.  And now this 16 year old girl is threatening to render that sacrifice totally meaningless because she’s insecure.  Of course Levi would be upset.  That scene with Historia pretty much encapsulates the price Levi had to pay in torturing Sannes.

The next example is again during the Uprising arc, when Levi turns down the offer of the MP his group captured to turn themselves in and save Erwin’s life.  While questioning this man, he tries to tell Levi that if he just turns himself and his squad in, and gives up on trying to rescue Eren and Historia, then they can save Erwin’s life, who’s been captured and is about to stand trial for murder.  Not only is Erwin Levi’s commanding officer, but he’s also one of his only, close friends.  But Levi knows that, for humanity and the cause of its salvation, Eren is the more valuable person, and so he refuses the offer, even as you just know, from a personal level, how difficult this had to be for Levi, to stand back and do nothing to save his friend when he potentially could.  Once again, he places the cause above his own, personal feelings.

Then we have the entire Shiganshina arc.  During the first part of this battle, Levi is doing everything in his power to save as many lives as he can.  He takes down so many of the smaller titans threatening the horses that, by the end of it, he’s gasping and out of breath, physically worn down, all in an attempt to keep the fresh, inexperienced SC recruits from having to engage at all.  And then, when the Beast Titan starts throwing boulders at them, Levi tries desperately to rally and gather everyone to climb back over the wall and take shelter, trying desperately to save as many of them as he can.  When he’s informed by Erwin of how bad the situation actually is, and that there’s nowhere to run and hide, Levi’s initial move is to come up with a plan which would lead to a lot of deaths in order to save the lives of the people he considers most valuable to the cause.  He tells Erwin that he should go with Eren and as many soldiers as Eren can carry and run back to the safety of the inner walls, while the remaining soldiers act as bait, and Levi himself tries to take down the Beast Titan.  Right here, Levi is ready and willing to make a decision which once again goes against his every instinct, which is to save lives, not sacrifice them.  But he’s willing to do it here in order to save Eren and Erwin, the two most valuable people in the fight for humanity, in his view, not to mention his willingness to sacrifice his own life too.  Then, when Erwin tells him his own plan, to lead the new recruits in a death charge toward the Beast Titan, giving Levi an infinitely better chance of succeeding in taking him down, and thus giving them victory, Levi, seeing Erwin’s struggle to let go of his own dream in order to do what needs to be done, willingly takes the burden of that decision off of his shoulders and onto himself, making the choice for him.  Remember, these are the same recruits that Levi had been, just moments before, so desperate to keep safe, and had fought so many titans in an attempt to do so, he’d ended up wearing himself to exhaustion.  Remember, Erwin is one of Levi’s only, real friends.  And now, in order to win this vital battle in the fight for humanity, Levi makes the decision, once again, to go against his very nature, and let people die who he wants so much to save.  It’s why, when Levi is making his way toward the Beast Titan, he looks over at the charging recruits as says “I’m sorry”.  This was, once again, a sacrifice Levi made which was, for him, on a personal level, devastating in its consequences.

And of course there’s his choice on the rooftop, between Erwin and Armin.  Another, personal sacrifice Levi makes, both for Erwin’s sake, to let him rest and no longer have to carry the weight of guilt and those hard decisions, and for the sake of humanity, because he knew Armin was the better choice going forward.  Levi chooses to let one of his only friends die, and to bear the weight of that loss, and the devastation of allowing it, as well as the weight of Erwin’s secret shame and guilt, all on his own.  He never tells anyone about Erwin’s secret, as far as we know, he never tells anyone about Erwin’s guilty conscience, or his inner turmoil and death wish.  Levi bears the weight of those secrets himself, and the weight of other people’s blame in the process. 

The next, major sacrifice of Levi’s I can think of is what happens during his guard duty over Zeke in the forest of giant trees, when Zeke turns 30 of Levi’s fellow soldiers into titans.  Zeke makes a safe assumption that Levi won’t be able to stop him, because he won’t be able to bring himself to kill his own men.  Zeke correctly understands Levi’s soft heart, and how much he values the lives of other people, and he uses that in order to execute his own escape.  He figures the sacrifice will be too great, that it will hurt Levi too much, to kill these men whom he’s spent the last month living with, that he’ll let himself die instead and thus, let Zeke escape to meet with Eren and enact his plan.  It’s a safe assumption.  What Zeke doesn’t understand about Levi though is his willingness to sacrifice his own, personal need for the sake of humanity.  Levi says to him, as he’s coming to take him down, that he doesn’t how many of their friends they’ve killed already.  He’s telling Zeke that he’s already had to make the horrible choice numerous times to let his friends and comrades die for the greater good, and that’s where Zeke miscalculated.  He didn’t understand Levi’s willingness to do so again, here.  Nothing would have been harder for Levi then what he had to do in that forest, nothing could have had a greater, personal toll on Levi than what he had to do.  He knew those men well enough to know their first names, as we see when he calls out to one of them after they’ve turned into a titan.  He spent a solid month living with all of them, and probably was around them all the time for years before then.  He knew them, he had formed personal relationships with them.  And then, in order to stop Zeke, he had to kill all of them.  If that isn’t a major sacrifice, and if that isn’t making a hard decision for the greater good, at great, personal cost, I don’t know what is.

And then finally we get to the final arc, in which Levi loses his last, remaining close friend in Hange.  Levi lets Hange go, he lets them go to their death, both for Hange’s sake, and for the sake of saving humanity.  Again, can you imagine how hard this was for Levi?  Once again, he’s having to sacrifice his own, natural need to save lives and protect people in order to do what needs to be done for the overall good.  He goes to stop Hange, and then Hange begs him to let them do this, because it’s what they need, and what humanity needs, and Levi does.  He takes on the burden of Hange’s loss, even as it devastates him on a personal level.  Again, Levi makes a hard choice which causes him immense, personal pain.  Again, Levi makes a major sacrifice in order to save humanity.

And even after this, Levi continues to sacrifice by going against the thing that matters most to him personally.  He knows, before anyone else, and states before anyone else, that they’re going to have to kill Eren.  A comrade and friend, someone Levi has already made countless sacrifices for in order to keep him alive.  And now he has to kill him.  And when the time finally comes for that to happen, it’s Levi who rallies Mikasa, Levi who takes charge and takes action in order to do what needs to be done, and Levi who gives Mikasa the opening she needs in order to end Eren’s life.  Once again, Levi makes the choice to let one of his comrades die in order to serve humanity.  Once again, Levi sacrifices his own, personal desire in order to do what needs to be done for the greater good.  

And, just as an afterthought to all of this, he also gives the only thing he has left to give, after he’s lost every, single person that he’s ever been close to in his life, and that’s his own life and body.  He goes into battle while barely being able to stand, while suffering internal bleeding and life-threatening injuries, and ends up with a crippled leg in order to save Connie’s life. 

So, yeah, anyone who tries to claim Levi never sacrificed anything, or was “afraid” to make hard decisions which had personal consequences for him, can shove it.  They’re wrong.  They’re dead wrong.  Levi sacrificed more, and made more hard decisions, made more choices which ended up causing him immeasurable pain and suffering, and which he knew would cause him pain and suffering, than anyone else in the story.

#shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #Levi Ackerman #meta

[aka-indulgence]

How does robo-skider sans deal with 'problems'? Like with humans he doesn't like with his dear 55?

(Warning: HORROR, like, the genre, not.. ht sans.. dsjkhd, but anyway there IS  murder (no gore, but still), so if you dont want that, don’t read!)

Blue eyes gaze through the windows, the home star glimmering in the distance through the blackness of space. A human was walking on the outside of the ship, a sort of advanced "tool-belt" around their middle.

Though they were wearing a suit, Sans knew this wasn't his human. He would've gone with you if he knew you were going out, and he'd know it was you in the suit from having following you around so much.

Though this time, he'd make sure you weren't around. He was sure you were at the living quarters, or maybe at the cafeteria getting breakfast. The rest of the crew should be occupied by now, having experiments to run and other various work. The man walking above is one of them, Sans isn't sure for what he was space-walking at this time, but he doesn't really care.

Crew-Member 4.

Far from the only human he despises, but definitely one that has been getting Sans' attention lately.

"It's not like you actually got fucking hurt, did you? It wasn't even that big." He spat.

Your face was red, and Sans saw your eyes water. "What the hell?! I thought everyone here knows the danger of space debris. Do you remember what happened to Sans?"

"Stop saying that, why did you even give it a name? You treating it like a pet or something?"

"You're not listening to me! Sans lost his leg-"

"You have a suit."

"Sans is made of metal! If it can tear through metal-"

"Ugh, you're so..." No. 4 trailed off, openly expressing his irritation with you. "Your job's simple. All you had to do was fix the exposed panel. Now it's still exposed. Everyone here has something important to do and no one's complaining."

"But-"

"Fine, why don't I do it? Since you're too 'in shock' to do it. I think I need to measure the radiation-disparity soon anyway..."

Sans had stepped in when you tried to argue back and No. 4 looked like he was going to yell. 'Stress-levels', he'd say. No. 4 left the room and Sans got to be alone with you, to comfort you in any way his programming limitations let him.

He’d been watching No. 4 intently since then, though not as obvious as he’d been when he was watching you. He’s aware of the man’s judgement, and Sans was clever enough not to make him think that Sans was following him. Sans was just... observing. His behavioral patterns. Nothing suspicious.

Today, Sans suspects he’s outside to try to “prove” that he can easily do your job while doing his own tasks. The arrogance he reeked... even Sans could smell it.

Sans keeps watching those legs bounding on the outside of the ship until he got to where that unfinished repair was located, and Sans skitters to the airlock.

The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout.

The doors close behind him, and Sans can no longer hear anything- not just the fact that the air has been sucked out and he’s in a vacuum now, but his system turns off his “ears” automatically when he went out the ship. The only communication done outside is through radio. The door to space opens silently, and to a human exiting for the first time it would’ve been eerie.

But Sans isn’t a human, nor is this his first time.

No one could hear the clink of his legs over the ship’s exterior. No one was around to hear it anyway, even if they were right under these panels, all of them were on the other side of the ship.

Right now it’s just him and No. 4.

He was crouched down over the panel you had been fixing about... 7 day cycles ago. The one Sans had so stupidly looked away at that moment, having to fix something else, when he heard you screaming...

... no. 4 doesn’t know how terrifying it must be to lose your tether with no means of reconnecting.

If Sans could scowl, he would now.

Sans stalks closer, rage bubbling underneath his metal outer layer. He knows what he wants to do, what he wants to happen to No. 4, he just... doesn’t know how he’ll do it.

The idiot doesn’t even turn to look at him, Sans feels very lucky in that moment that sound doesn’t travel in space. Sans isn’t too far now, probably on the edge what would be the “circle” his safety protocols would allow him near a human.

... Of course this wasn’t a problem to him anymore, the last time you shut it off to fix him he had “neglected” to remind you to turn it back on.

No, he’s not stopping because of his programming. He stands there, only a bit away from No. 4. Like a predator waiting in ambush, except Sans wasn’t even hiding- there was nowhere to hide. The only reason his prey- No. 4 didn’t notice was his rapt attention on the broken panel in front of him. Broken into pieces that Sans couldn’t pick and clear properly with his size and tools that weren’t made to handle things delicately. It seemed that No, 4 wasn’t sure how to deal with it. He was just staring at it. He didn’t have a replacement. He didn’t even use your E-pad to at least get some sense into what he’s supposed to do.

Sans is partly glad he isn’t using it. The E-pad was yours, and you were somewhat fond of it, it seemed. He wouldn’t want you to lose something you liked.

As Sans stands there, processing a mile a minute on how he should go about this, he suddenly remembers to look up, turning his skull around to inspect the dark ‘sky’.

An alert system in him for when he was outside- compelling him to check for space debris at regular intervals.

And for once, Sans is actually glad to see a couple coming towards the ship where he’s standing. Perhaps from the same cluster that made you lose your footing on the ship.

Sans purposefully took his eyes off of No. 4, off his radar, then swiftly moved outside the range he predicted the space debris would hit. He watched as what seemed to be small chunks of meteorite ‘fall’ towards the ship, feeling them clunk over the metallic plating.

He connects to No. 4′s radio.

“Shit!”

Down came the rain

Sans looks up and sees that No. 4 has lost his footing and is slowly spinning vertically, flailing his arms and legs helplessly as he tries to gain some kind of support, and getting nothing.

Sans would love to spend a little more time watching him panic, but he had to do this quick.

And washed the spider out.

He shot forward, close to the tether, watching the swaying rope with intense eyelights. One hand closes around the rope to stabilize it in front of him, the other one, ready to extend his ‘cutting-claw’ to-

ACTION DENIED!

Object: Tether Rope.

TETHER ROPE IS CURRENTLY IN USE BY CREW-MEMBER 4 OUTSIDE THE SHIP. IF ACTION CONTINUES, CREW-MEMBER 4 WILL BE DISCONNECTED!

His hand stops mid-space, his programming straining against him to keep his hand from touching the rope. He tries to change tactics, extending the cutting claw on his other hand, but his other safety protocols had been activated. He was frozen.

‘Must not harm humans.’

‘Must prioritize human well-being.’

His fingers were trembling as he pushed.

only one human matters.

he is not that human.

he isn’t needed.

dispose him.

He feels as if molten metal had been casted into his joints as he tries to push his hand closer to the tether, with the ‘claw’ extended.

DENIED!

Above him, still connected to the radio, he can hear No. 4 breathing in panic, muttering curses under his breath- before Sans hears a gasp, and he looks up.

No. 4 is looking at him now, Sans can see through the visor, his eyes staring at Sans.

“What the fuck- why’d it have to be him that came for me,” he sounds disdained, filled with disgust.

the feeling’s mutual.

Sans strains harder, his legs locking up as he tries to push his claw closer to the rope- No. 4 obviously not noticing if he thinks Sans is here to help him.

His hand budges closer, then tugged further.

“The hell... are you having a fucking crash or something? Just pull the rope! You have one hand on it!”

Sans knew he should be thankful of his expressionless face, but right now he wishes No. 4 could see that he was seething with anger and hate.

he’s never liked me. nor i, him.

he was always the most vocal in hating me.

he treats me like a scrap of metal.

he probably wants to dismantle me.

No. 4 was still yelling at him, but Sans wasn’t listening. The indignation at the way he’d treated Sans over the course of his time on the ship helped budge his hand a little, but then Sans thought of something else...

Someone else No. 4 had never cared too much for.

he always tried to pressure you into doing something.

he thought you were lower than him.

he thought you weren’t important.

he was dismissive of you.

he liked to mock you.

he yelled at you.

The rage was fueling him in the battle against his programming, trying to override the wall blocking his way to freedom.

No. 4 was yelling at him.

Sans felt like poison was building inside him, from how much he wanted this man dead. But then his thoughts kept drifting away from the instances No. 4 had been rude or insulting to him.

Instead, his ‘memories’ drifted back to when he was in the room when it was only you and No. 4. How hurt and angry you looked, how you just wanted him to understand, and No. 4 had talked over you. Thought your troubles were trivial, that everyone else had ‘more important things to deal with’ and you had ‘an easy job’. When he left Sans saw you cry behind your hands, before quickly rubbing them away and you tried to put a smile on your face when you saw Sans.

No. 4 was yelling at him like he yelled at you.

“Hey you stupid robot!?” No. 4′s loud voice came back to his attention, sounding rather irritated and out of breath from how much he spent shouting. He hadn’t moved from his position on the tether, apparently too lazy to pull himself in and is just waiting for Sans to do what he’s supposed to do.

“Hello, can you hear me?” He asks in the most condescending tone. “I know you can, I’m pressing the radio button. Cut this shit out and pull me back already!”

Sans turned his skull up, away from the tether and right into his eyes.

Ṛ̶̊̐ȯ̵̟b̶̜͒͜ȩ̶̌ȓ̶͇̭t̶̩̉ visibly pales at the glare he sends him.

“... no.”

His claw cuts through the tether, with a little twang up the rope when he forces through the stubborn end.

“Wh... what?” Robert’s horrified, quiet voice was so deeply satisfying to Sans’ non-existent ears.

He feels something bubbling up inside him as he watches Robert frantically try to pull on the rope in vain, though this time the emotion inside him wasn’t anger.

“No... no no no NO!”

It was glee.

“heh.... heheheheh... heheheheheheh!”

Robert was whimpering now, breathing frantically as he drifted further, away from the ship, looking at Sans with horrified eyes.

There were no chains on him anymore. He broke his most sacred rule, and in turn broke the rest of his digital bindings.

The warnings were silent, absent. There was nothing holding him back.

Robert was still, staring at Sans. “No... no this isn’t... this isn’t real, you’re... you’re just an machine, you can’t...”

“oh...” Sans purred, delighting in the fact that he actually purred his words, “but i can.”

The ship was slowly spinning. The nearest star had “risen” and cast a bright light over him and Robert, sharp shadows falling away, forming Sans’ into a horrible stretched version of his body; legs thin and sharp.

Sans tilted his head at the floating figure in the distance, his eyes crinkling in a way he wasn’t able to do in the past. It feels so liberating to be able to show emotion, even just a little bit of expression on his face. It especially felt good when he could see that Robert was shaking in his suit. He knew- Sans was really smiling at him.

“farewell, robert.”

Out came the sun

Robert was screaming now, listening to Sans’ manic laughing through the radio. Music.

And dried up all the rain.

Sans relished in the sounds of him shouting until his words turned into non-sense, which then turned into loud, wracking sobs as he mourned his own death. The oxygen of the suit could last for a few hours- the last few hours he’ll spend drifting further and further from safety.

Oh how he longed to finally see him suffer.

Though his smile was unmoving, it felt more like a smirk as Sans returned to the airlock, letting his radio shift to static for Robert. His last interaction with something ‘living’ being his murderer.

The doors parted, and Sans walks in, back to the ship, as if he was back from usual business.

And the itsy bitsy spider climbed up the spout again.

#robo skider sans #ask #sinister thoughts #im sorry guys #djhks #i know some of you guys love him #bc hes soft and sweet and cute #hes still all that i assure you #just #with you #this was a long time coming

[op-imaginesandmore]

How would Issho/Fujitora, Doflamingo, Smoker, Arlong, and Gin react to their s/o dying in their arms? (human s/o for all of them including Arlong) Sorry there are so many the posts you've made so far I've enjoyed immensely. I love your style of writing! (:

I know it’s been *checks notes* actual years since I have touched this blog, but I kinda wanted to try my hand at a few of the asks I have in my inbox. I’m going to do just Smoker, and with each of the asks with multiple characters I will pick the one I am most comfortable with writing and go from there. I hope you like it! And also, to anyone who reads this and likes it, thank you! But my ask box will remain closed until…idk, probably a long time. I don’t want to get any one’s hopes about about anything.

Pairing: Smoker x GN!reader

Warnings: Angst, character death (you asked for it), mild descriptions of injury, mentions of blood, implied smut (mildest of spice), unbeta’d if that is a warning

***

The OP was supposed to be a simple one. Get in, do reconnaissance, stay under the radar, come back with what info they needed on the pirate crew, get out.

No one thought Big Mom herself was going to recognize Y/N, because you were good at your job. You had been spying for the government for years, you’d worked with Smoker as one of his subordinates, had infiltrated countless pirate crews, revolutionary bases, treasonous scum that thought they could get away with anything, and had always succeeded in your job.

Lay low, go unnoticed, get the info, come back to him. It was a perfectly organized system that was like clock work, each gear turning for the purpose of civilian protection, and justice.

Until now.

Blood soaked the beach he was kneeling on, who’s it was, he had no idea. Could be his, was probably the pirates’ that were scattered around the Vice-Admiral like debris after a storm, but what infuriated him most was it was most definitely yours.

Wheezes, broken and wet, escaped from your lips, swollen eyes looking up into stoic grey that was like looking into twin hurricanes. Anger, righteous and intense, swirled around with frustration, concern, grief, and an emotion you knew from your quiet moments between soft sheets and the hard planes of his body.

So gentle you barely felt it, he lifted you from the sand like something precious, your blood dripping down his arms and pooling beneath your broken body. Your eyes, swollen and bruised, squinted up at him and a soft smile cracked painfully across your lips.

“Hey handsome” you rasped, a cough that was soaked with blood spurting out. Smoker put a large hand through your matted hair, jaw clenching as he tightened his hold on you.

“I’m gonna get you to the ship’s infirmary” he seethed through his teeth, the usual multiple cigars he kept there like pacifiers long gone. He made to get up, but the cry that came from your lips was shrill and heartbreaking. He immediately stopped, holding you to his chest in a hold soft enough for a newborn.

“I know it hurts, but you need-“

“Do you remember Alabasta?”

Smoker stopped, looking down at your broken body that had the audacity to be giving him the smile that always managed to make his heart flutter in his chest like a crushing school girl’s. He swallowed thickly, not trusting his voice and opting for a nod.

“You were such a baby about Strawhat, I thought you were going to implode when he had his crew mate save your life.” You reached a trembling hand to his face, stroking the rough stubble of his jaw. Almost involuntarily, Smoker leaned into the soft touch, turning his head to kiss your palm as memories of their time on the desert island came to mind.

It had been the first time you had ever yelled at him, calling him reckless and blind. Telling him you were thankful for Strawhat, grateful he had saved his “stupid, sorry, ass” so you had the chance to give him a piece of your mind. He had retaliated with a practiced speech about being your superior, about how you should worry more about your job than what he was doing, how you shouldn’t talk to him like that.

Then you had the nerve to yell at him that you didn’t have a choice but to worry about him. When he yelled at you back about the why, instead of answering him you kissed him square on the mouth.

Their first kiss was in the moment, it was all teeth clacking and sudden and Smoker had been blindsided, but also hadn’t been. The two of you had been flirting with the line between officer and government agent for months at that point, subtle glances and bold, shameless flirting on your part had morphed into soft and subtle touches and hours of listening to you talk about everything and anything.

When the shock of it had worn off a second after you started kissing him, he hadn’t expected for himself to kiss you back. He had adjusted your chin, softened the kiss, and wrapped his arms possessively around your waist and lifted you, your legs wrapping around his own waist in a way that sent chills down his spine as he carried you to his desk. He set you down upon it, gentle as can be, but your legs stayed around his waist, his hips grinding into yours in a way that had him growling. Your lips had been like soft, plush, velvet on his own chapped ones, tongue sinful in its exploration, running against his to beg for entrance.

The two of you broke apart, you were panting, your face flush as you put your head on his chest and listened to the quick thumping of his heart. He smelled like a cigar, a hint of sweet fruit in a haze of earth and smoke that always managed to make your head spin. A smile tugged at the corners of your mouth as you licked the taste of him from them.

“I worry about you because I care about you Smoker” you looked up at him, your eyes twinkling in the soft glow of the sunlight coming in through the porthole of his cabin “probably more than what’s appropriate for a working relationship, but I don’t want to hide it anymore.” You put your hand on his face, stroking the apple of his cheek in a way no one had ever dared touch him before “if you don’t want this though, we can stop right now and never talk about it a-“

Smoker was kissing you again, softer but with a passion that turned your whole body into jelly that molded into his. It was brief, too brief for your liking but he was looking at you with a smoldering gaze that promised more.

“We do this, we tell no one.” He said with conviction “I can’t have my subordinates thinking I have favorites, and fraternizing could get me and you in a lot of trouble.”

You nodded, understanding alighted in your eyes as you coyly bit your kiss swollen bottom lip.

“If that means I get to see your smoke powers at work in the bedroom, I’ll take an oath of silence”

He felt his body react, his hardened length against your thigh making you squeeze your legs together, bringing him impossibly closer.

Smoker’s chest tightened at the memory.

“I’m glad” you said, swollen gaze growing distant “that it all happened the way it did. The last year and a half has been the best of my life” another cough, violent and cracking in its intensity that it had you whimpering into Smokers chest, and his eyes were burning with the tears that were inevitable now.

“Y/N-“ Smoker started, the deep rumble of his voice cracking “baby, you’re gonna be fine, let’s just-“ he took a breath, steeling himself to try and lift you up again, but your head falling limp against his chest stopped him, made the breath leave his lungs and, for the first time in a very long time, Smoker felt true terror grip his careful self control.

“Y/N?” His voice, so unlike the commanding bass it usually was, soft and broken as the body he held “Y/N? Sweetheart c’mon, wake up” he shook you, your head lolling to one side and then the next awkwardly, before it rested back on his chest and Smoker realized your uneven breathing had stopped, the rasping, painful breaths gone quiet and the only sounds to be heard on the bloodied beach were Smoker’s own uneven hyperventilating “Y/N please! You-you can’t do this! Baby, c’mon-open those pretty eyes, please! Y/N? Y/N!”

He held on tight to your body as he slowly broke down, the tears running rivers down his face that had smudges of your blood on it from holding your body up to it, his face buried into your hair as if he could revive you if he held on a little tighter, begged a little harder to whatever god or devil would listen. His cries broke through the silence, their only companion the lapping of water against the sand and gore. He rocked back and forth, clinging to your lifeless body like it was the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth.

That was how Tashigi found her Vice-Admiral, sobbing into your hair as he begged you to wake up. Her heart shattered into a million pieces, but she had to keep him moving, had to remind him of the duty he still held.

“Vice-Admiral Smoker?” She breathed, caution in her tone, heartbreak threatening to pull her under when his breath caught. He looked up at Tashigi with a tsunami of emotions that she had never seen him display. Heartbreak and grief worked in tandem to make the ever stoic and statuesque officer crumble to his knees.

“I’ve gathered the survivors of our platoon, we’re awaiting your orders, sir”

There was a pregnant pause that seemed to stretch for an eternity, Smoker looking down at his dead lover, the emotions that had been raging across his face draining from his being, and was replaced once again with the careful stoicism that his position required of him.

He got up slowly, you still cradled against his chest as he looked out at the horizon. It was another long moment before he spoke.

“We bury our dead, then we take the fight to the one who started this.” There was a fury in his words that struck fear into Tashigi, a fear for how reckless her Vice-Admiral was about to be against a Yonko.

“But Smo-“

“Did I fucking stutter?” He whipped his head around, the grey of his eyes burning with an unbridled rage that seemed barely contained “I’m not gonna rest until every last piece of filth that carries the name of Charlotte are wiped from every ocean from the East Blue to Raftel.” He glanced down at the body in his arms, a soft, broken look before the rage hit again.

“They’re gonna pay for what they’ve taken, I’ll make sure of it personally.”

#smoker #one piece #Smoker x reader #Smoker One Piece #angst #crying #character death #tashigi

[yamaoni]

The Second Great War of Remnant has begun. Once more, Vale and Mantle are embroiled in a massive conflict, only this time, they are on the same side against Atlas.

I don't think it was a coincidence that so many people drew parallels with the last episode and WWI. We've never seen people fight that way in RWBY. Grimm don't use projectile weapons the way humans do, so the benefits of the trench are diminished; especially if you compare it to the drawbacks.

Now, I understand not everyone in the Atlas military has their aura unlocked and the squishy soldiers need some cover, but if The Long Memory didn't nuke every grimm on Atlas, the lines would have been overrun and then there would have been nowhere for them to retreat to.

You think the very real hand to hand struggles in the trenches of WWI were bad, imagine being trapped in a narrow trench with a bear. Or having this thing explode out of the ground under you.

I refuse to believe no-one in Atlas ever thought, "if we put the dirt from the trench in a box, no only can we give our soldiers cover, we can also give them an elevated position to fire from."

The top of a wall has been the primary defensive position for the people of Remnant for a long time. You can see them in the establishing shots of most settled places the team has visited. So why are we seeing a trench now?

Simple.

Show, don't tell.

RWBY has done a pretty great job, especially in the last few seasons, of showing the audience what it is trying to convey without explicitly telling them. They especially like drawing from well known folk lore to give insight into the future of the show.

Only difference here, instead of drawing the parallel between characters, they're drawing parallels between worlds.

Remnant's first Great War started with Mantle suppressing freedom of expression, the destruction of Art and Color. Ironwood always has little in the way of color, but in his first broadcast since everything started hitting the fan, he has none.

That broadcast also included evacuation ships being blown up by fighter-bombers, Dunkirk. It threatend to level a city if they didn't surrender, Battle of Brittan. All delivered by a dictator trying to scare his opponents into submission through careful use of film.

Theories

If the rest of the season is WWII, I have several theories on plot direction. Considering how well they did keeping up with both ends of the battlefield it wouldn't surprise me if they followed all of them at the same time.

Operation Dunkirk

Or, the evacuation of Mantle.

Players: Penny, Nora, Ren, Happy Huntresses

The Happy Huntresses involvement is a given. Not only has saving Mantle been their goal the whole time, they're also stuck in the middle of it right now.

Penny is the Protector of Mantle. It would be a shining moment for her character to fully throw off the virus Watts implanted and overcome Ironwood's threats to do so. Just crossing my fingers that it doesn't end like the Iron Giant.

Nora is currently Penny's tether to sanity, so she has to go with, and I doubt they would separate Ren from her for the next arc so he's going too.

Surprise twist for this plot I'm betting will be the Starwars "they aren't warships, just people" scene everyone loves to rag on. After all, the broadcast went out that they needed help and, at least at Dunkirk, it was fishing boats and pleasure crafts that retrieved the 338,000 surrounded on all sides.

Why We Fight

Or, countering Ironwoods propaganda.

Players: Robyn and Qrow

For one, these two are unaccounted for and in the heart of Atlas' military machine. If anyone has means to do so, it's them.

The film, Why We Fight, also countered the dramatic cinematography of Goebbels propaganda by painting it as ridiculous and making a folksy call to action much like Robyn has done in the past.

Operation Fortitude

Or, the deception of Ironwood.

Players: Emerald, Jaune, Oscar

This is the mission to make Ironwood think the team is going after the relic. This theory is why I actually thought of and wrote out this whole thing. Thanks @maxiemumdamage, I had things I was supposed to do tonight.

https://maxiemumdamage.tumblr.com/post/644291955872890880/willing-to-bet-my-own-soul-that-emerald-uses-her

Only difference in my theory and their's, is Jaune is going to be playing the part of Penny.

I say this for two reasons. One, Joan of Arc pretended to be a man. While we've gotten both Jaune pretending to be something he's not and him in a dress, this would pose the first time in the story he could do both. Two, it would put him on a direct collision path with Cinder. It needs to happen at some point to bring his arc to a conclusion, but man I hope we're not about to watch him burn.

With Ozpin active again, Oscar has to go along to direct them to the vault. He's also one of two backing the idea of Emerald joining the team and Jaune wouldn't be willing to work with her without him.

Operation Overlord

Or, busting down the doors of Atlas Acadamy.

Players: Ruby, Blake, Weiss, Yang

Where Operation Fortitude was the faint, Operation Overlord was the real deal. For those that aren't history buffs, this is D-Day.

I think this is the reason we've only seen the main team fighting together once since their split from Beacon. And even then, that fight was at most pairs of fighters and not all four of them supporting one another.

RWBY tricked us into thinking season 4 was the post-timeskip level up we come to expect from anime when really we ended up watching the training flashbacks as they happened instead.

We've seen hints of it with the various team ups and combinations, but are we really ready for how much ass kicking they are about to do?

I'm hoping for a One Piece level of badass entrance that can give me shivers whenever I go to watch it again like the walk to Arlong Park still does to this day.

(Aside: if you try telling me RWBY isn't anime, I'm just going to ignore you. Anime is an art movement. If you don't understand what that means, watch this video. https://youtu.be/uFtfDK39ZhI)

Now last and certainly not least

Operation Valkyrie

Or, the death of Ironwood.

Players: Winter and Marrow

The long awaited defection. Plenty of speculation has already floated around about if and when these two where going to cave to their morals and jump ship. I don't know how many of us were expecting the straw to break the camel's back to be a nuke held over Mantle, but I certainly wasn't.

What worries me, is Operation Valkyrie failed and all its conspirators were executed. As if there weren't enough death flags for Winter before.

Even if it's not Winter that kills him. I don't see Ironwood surviving this season. Even if it means he goes out like another hated dictator. It's not like it would be the first time RT had a fallen hero chose to use his own sword.

Wildcards

Or, Murphy will have his due.

Players: Cinder, Watts, Neo, Tyrian, Mercury, Clover

These players can go any which way. Three we know for sure are going to be active in the coming episodes and I wouldn't be surprised if the other three play a part as well.

Oscar made a hell of a light show for Tyrian and Mercury to see behind them. Not to mention, Salem will still need a ride home when she pulls herself back together.

Clover keeps getting mentioned even though he's hospitalized. If he was truly out of commission for the rest of the season, they would have made us think he's dead before bringing him back like they did with Penny.

Up to now, what we've seen is a three way conflict. But one of the hallmarks of Remnant's First Great War, was making temporary alliances to fight off grimm.

The grimm might be gone, but the wild cards can't complete their own objectives if they are dead. The question is who's goals better align with their own.

Two surprise twists I can see here. One, Mercury stabbing Tyrian on his way to defection. He was raised by an assassin and has not going to get a better chance than that. Two, Clover joining Operation Valkyrie. He might have accepted that sacrifice is a necessary evil to ensure Atlas' survival, but might go Schindler's List on us and find horror in what Ironwood plans to do.

TLDR

I spent way too long writing this out. All the WWI imagery means we're getting a WWII movie with RWBY characters. Major death flags for Penny, Jaune, and Winter.

Also I finally figured out how to do a readmore. Apparently it's just been a long time since I updated.

Note: kept seeing things talking about clovers death and I kind of went ???? Isn't he barely alive in medical? Went back and watched that scene and though I am 90% sure he is dead still kind of weird that they have him in his own room instead of a morgue and the initial framing made my mind instantly think he was propped up on a hospital bed. I mean, I guess we needed to have all the ACEOPs there for their reaction to Ironwood... but it definitely made me think he was alive. That and they have a bandage on his chest wound... when he's supposedly dead. Also have a phantom memory of Harriet saying something about him being in critical but I think that's my memory playing tricks on me.

Having his face exposed instead of covered by the sheet and seeing him in the same frame as Winter being treated also didn't help my gut reaction of "Oh Shit! He's alive? How?!" If I'd followed up more on the "how" might not have made the blunder of writing his return as the final twist in my theory. Oops

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby speculation #rwby spoiler tag #ruby rose #blake bellodona #weiss schnee #yang xiao long #jaune arc #nora valkyrie #oscar pine #lie ren #qrow branwen #robyn hill #penny polendina #emerald sustrai #arthur watts #cinder fall #neo politan #winter schnee #marrow amin #cl*ver ebi #i did purposely mess up that last one so that my final idea could be a twist

[wrenhyperfixates]

Oh, Calamity!

Pairing: Loki x reader Summary: Your death breaks Loki, and all he wants is for you to come back to him. Warnings: short, but pure angst; mentions of death and blood A/N: inspired by the song Oh, Calamity! by All Time Low. It’s written a bit different from usual style, but felt right for what this was. Hope you enjoy :)

Disclaimer: Gif not mine

Loki had been planning on being king from a very young age. One thing he never considered, though, was needing someone to rule beside him. And then he met you.

After the Battle of New York and a brief imprisonment, Loki was able to straighten things out with Thor, who then convinced their father to release him. The only condition was that he had to live among those who he viewed as so inferior to himself. Naturally, that stirred some trouble on Midgard, but they were able to reach an understanding; Loki would work as an Avenger and serve humanity, so to speak. No one was too pleased with that arrangement, Loki least of all. Most days, the God of Mischief was relegated to his room or the library, alone and untrusted. Thor was kept busy protecting all the realms, though he did visit Earth quite often. Loki hated to admit it, but those times were the most bearable. Then, one day, you joined the team, and the rest of his time became far more enjoyable.

“Mind if I join you?” you’d asked your first night in the Tower.

He didn’t respond with anything but a small gesture of his hand, signaling for you to sit next to him. So it went for many nights, both of you reading on a common room couch. Neither of you said anything to each other until one day you showed up with the same book. You struck up a conversation with him that lasted into the early morning hours. He didn’t want to enjoy it, but he did. Thus started your new routine of reading the same thing, almost like your own mini book club. The conversations eventually led to things beyond your reading material, and then one day you kissed him. Despite the disapproval of the rest of the Avengers, you began to date. Finally, Loki felt like he had a place on Midgard.

But that was all in the past now, and Loki was left with nothing but his memories to keep him company. He could still hear your last conversation playing in his head.

“Why are you acting like this?” you’d asked, teary eyed after Loki had pushed you away yet again. “Every time I think we’re close, you act like a stranger.”

“Try as you might, you cannot change what I am.”

“No. I guess not.”

It was the last thing you said before walking out of the room, slamming the door behind you. He wanted to chase after you, but convinced himself you would be better off without him. Told himself he was too much of a wreck for you, that he’d just ruin you. Now he wonders why he ever dared leave it there. You left for a mission the next day, the last one you’d ever go on.

Loki was waiting in the hangar for you, watching as the rest of your team got off the ship. He immediately noticed the tears in their eyes, but no one could speak of whatever tragedy had occurred. But he knew, even before it became obvious that you would not appear on the ramp. As if possessed, he walked onto the ship. Your limp body was the first thing he saw, draped across the seats of the plane. He knelt beside you and grabbed your ice-cold hand, eyes landing on the blood soaking your shirt. A wound, far too close to your now silent heart. Thor came up behind him and placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder as a lone tear stained Loki’s cheek.

“Come, brother. It will do you no good to stay here.”

There was nothing Loki could say. His mouth was dry and his tongue heavy, and any words he tried to speak choked him. He began to sob.

“I am sorry, my love. Please come back to me. I am so sorry,” he repeated over and over as Thor dragged him away.

By the time he reached his room, he was completely hysterical. Desperate to be alone, he threw his brother out and began his rampage, taking out his anger on the expensive furniture and decor. Broken glass on the floor cut his hands and knees as he crawled over to the now cracked frame holding a picture of you, his beloved. He stayed there all night and into the next day, just staring at your face that would never smile at him again.

He ate nothing for days, his throat and eyes raw from crying. He managed to piece himself together well enough for your funeral, though he was unable to deliver your eulogy. He wanted to, but there was nothing he could say that would do you justice, that would make up for what he had done. Everyone offered their condolences to Loki, to which he responded with a numb nod of his head. It felt surreal, like he was walking underwater or in a never-ending nightmare. Everything was foggy.

Out of habit, Loki still talked to you often, speaking to the air, half-expecting a response. Deep down he knew, of course, that you would never answer again, but most days it felt like the only thing tethering him to his miserable life.

“It is like when I first came to Midgard, my love. I am terribly lonely. When will I see you again? I miss you. I love you.”

He was still in the habit of calling you, too, on the wretched cellphone you’d insisted on getting him. He was met with only dial tones, though somehow he kept hoping to hear you say hello. Those were always his greatest moments, he realized, the ones when you were with him. Now he struggled to find the reason why you were so violently taken from him.

Much like his sleepless nights, his days were spent in solitude. Every corner he turned, he saw your face, but it was just an illusion created by his tortured mind. He saw you in his dreams, too, when he finally slumbered, but even there you never recognized him. Sometimes he’d dream of you sitting in a peaceful field, and you’d offer him a seat.

“You seem familiar, as if I know you. But I don’t, do I?” you’d ask, quirking your head.

“You were the only one that did,” he’d reply before waking up in a cold sweat.

He knew why the dream went like that. He was still haunted by the way you’d called him a stranger. By the way he had been acting like one. By the way he let you walk out without saying what he really wanted. He loved you and he would until the day he died, and only then could he be reunited with you. But through the calamity of your death there was only one thing he wished for.

“Please, my love,” went his usual desperate plea, “come back to me.”

#loki x reader #loki x you #loki x y/n #loki laufeyson #loki odinson #loki #mcu loki #loki angst #angst #thor odinson #reader insert #gender netural reader #marvel #mcu #marvel reader insert #marvel fanfiction #loki fanfic #mcu reader insert #loki friggason #loki friggason x reader #loki laufeyson x reader #loki odinson x reader #death tw #blood tw #song fic

[astromechs]

keep whatever it is (that's compelling you on)

HERE IT IS, my matrix resurrections spec fic, completed and in under the wire before the trailer! i think i'm ready to quit fussing over this, and i'm really excited to get it out into the world!

also here on ao3!

01.

Every single morning, Thomas A. Anderson is jolted awake at approximately 8:15 AM by the shrill of the same alarm, shovels in the same shitty cereal before stumbling into one of the same five shitty suits that he has to remember to get dry-cleaned, takes the same seat on the subway on the way to work — where he sits in the same chair for eight hours straight with minimal breaks, staring at his computer screen (or, more often, out into nothing) until it’s time to take the same subway back to his shitty apartment, order from the same rotation of shitty takeout, and find some mindless, banal distraction while he ignores texts that don’t even matter anyway before he falls asleep to eventually wake up and do it all over again.

It’s nothing special — just the average life of an average mid-grade programmer at the average tech conglomerate. Comfortable, sure, and a dream many would kill to achieve; he knows this, knows this every time he passes the poor old woman who’s feeding pigeons in her ratty coat from the battered metal bench on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building. He slips her whatever spare change he has on him — a $20 bill, on the days he’s lucky, but often less than that — and, without fail, she always accepts, with a warm smile and kind eyes that seem to stare right into his soul, seeing the deepest parts of it.

Like she knows him. And that’s what’s weird.

He tries not to put too much thought into it, because, honestly, he tries not to put too much thought into anything at all; he’s found that to be the most effective way to navigate the machine that systematically runs his rhythmic, mundane life.

But even so, there are things that he knows he can’t shake.

One afternoon in late February, when the cut of the wind had not remotely suggested that spring would just be a month away, he’d passed the woman on the bench as always, but he could’ve sworn that the whole flock of pigeons scattered on the sidewalk at her feet had frozen for a split second. Like they’d been… glitching. In a blink, everything had returned to normal, and he’d spent about three days (and three sleepless nights) trying to convince himself he’d been seeing things, that he’d just been spending too much time actually working on his assigned program for once and that maybe he should take some of his accumulated vacation days? And the following week, he had, but….

No time off to try to clear his head would ever change the fact that this hadn’t been an isolated incident.

Because sometimes — he swears he sees pieces of code fall through his field of vision; a blink and then they’re gone, but it happens too often not to be a pattern, and no matter how much he might want to for the sake of his own sanity, he can’t just brush that aside. Sometimes, flashes come to his mind like barely-remembered dreams, in idle moments and just on the edge of the line that separates sleep from waking consciousness, so real that he knows they’re memories. Dark tunnels that haven’t seen the sun for centuries. Cold, so cold that no amount of warmth, human or otherwise, can really combat. Running, desperately bounding up the fire escape to the third floor of a rundown motel, three men in sunglasses and perfectly-tailored suits in close pursuit, his heart pounding in his ears so loudly he can barely hear the phone ring from Room 303, the place he has to get to, because everything depends on it. A barrage of bullets in his chest, one right after the other, back slumping against the wall as his heart gives out, vision fading to grey and then to black, but a voice, reaching through it all to call him, tether him….

Neo.

There are things that he knows he can’t shake, and sometimes, he thinks he had another life. Another name.

Another purpose.

He’s haunted by the ghost of it.

It’s the second of April — at least, that’s what the screen of his phone tells him, because otherwise he wouldn’t know, or care to know. A Friday, and all the faceless commuters are packed like sardines into this subway car, headed home for weekends that are sure to be as inconsequential as his own. Today, he has to stand holding the rail for the ride home; a woman trying to juggle both a baby and two bags of groceries had just barely managed to stumble onto the train before the doors had closed, and he’d sprung up, more than glad to give up his seat to someone in greater need.

She tries to thank him, profusely and repeatedly, but with where he’s standing, he would have to twist to keep facing her, so, with a nod and the barest hint of a smile, he turns away to spend the trip the way he always does: in solitude.

The route back to the station just down the block from his apartment building is never smooth, by any stretch of the imagination, but today, it’s bumpier than usual; the train car jerks and jostles, until, eventually, it sends him colliding into back of the passenger standing next to him.

He’s just about to stammer out some automatic, awkward apology, but then —

Blue eyes meet his, clear, crisp blue, and a jolt strikes him right to the core.

He thinks — no, he knows, he knows — he’s seen these eyes.

Neo. In the darkest corners of his mind, the voice whispers again.

Time freezes, glitches, around him, around him and this stranger with familiar blue eyes. He sees the light leave them, and then come right back. He sees warmth, what something is telling him had once been the only thing able to keep the cold of the real away; that warmth spreads through now, to the tips of him, and he has a sense, one he doesn’t entirely understand, that something has just clicked into place.

Behind sunglasses, another pair of eyes watches them from across the car.

“You all right?” Neo.

He sees brows knit in concern, and for the first time, he pays attention to the face that the eyes belong to. Probably the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen in… more than one life, he’d have to guess, is now in front of him; he isn’t so detached and disconnected that he doesn’t notice that. Her short dark hair is cut into a severe bob, and she’s dressed in black from head to toe — from her coat and gloves, to her boots. It suits her, somehow.

After a beat, he finally remembers to speak. “Yeah. I — sorry.” The subway jerks to a halt; he glances up, and adds quickly, after clearing his throat, “This is… my stop. Excuse me. Sorry.”

Pushing past her, pushing past everyone in his way, he disembarks to the station, and when his feet touch solid pavement, he takes off at a sprint. Up the stairs (third floor… Room 303….), down the sidewalk (agents, just behind… he can beat them, if he just runs faster than he ever has…), not stopping until the mundane certainty of his shitty apartment building is within his sights.

Just before he makes it safely inside, he catches a glimpse of the old woman on the bench watching him, her smile wider than he’s ever seen it. Maybe, even, almost inhumanly wide.

10.

Her name is Natalie.

That’s what he learns about a week later, when he bumps into her again in front of the grocery store on the corner down from the subway station, the one he always chooses out of convenience. Quite literally; he’s distracted, disconnected, and before he even knows what’s happening, he’s collided with another body, contents of the two bags under his arms spilling out onto the sidewalk. His apologies are hurried and stammered, but her hands are gentle as she moves to help, brushing his more than once. Her smile is soft when their eyes meet.

Over the next several months, he learns a lot of other things, too.

He learns that she takes her coffee with cream and no sugar, and that she always leaves the barista a generous tip. He learns that she’s a genius with tech, better than him and his two computer science degrees and half-cushy corporate job could ever hope to be, and has his whole apartment practically rewired in an hour one day. He learns that if he’s quiet and still, her black cat has no qualms with being his friend. He learns that her lips curve up in just a certain way and her eyes crinkle when she’s just about to laugh.

And he learns that kissing her feels like coming home, as familiar and peaceful as it is new and strange. He learns that with her, coming together, becoming one with another person, is like nothing else.

For the first time in what he can remember, he knows what it feels like to be alive.

(Only it isn’t… is it? The first time. Somehow, just like he knows that he sees the same person walk past him twice, like he knows that those glitches start happening on a near-daily basis, like he knows that the old woman on the bench is smiling at him more broadly than ever….

Their lives have collided, and given each other meaning, purpose, before.)

11.

In his dreams, he sees a city entirely built from light. Spires touch the sky like fireworks, blindingly bright, and with every step, flames ripple out from his feet, making the next one all too clear.

Inevitable.

This is where his path had always led.

In his dreams, he can’t see her face. He can only hear struggling gasps for breath, and a voice that only grows shakier. He can only feel the metal that pierces her stomach, the blood that pools on her shirt. The faint heartbeat he can do nothing to restart.

Inevitable.

(You were right, Smith. You are always right.)

He wakes with a start, drenched in a cold sweat (as cold as their last kiss), gasping for breath. Next to him on the bed, Natalie stirs and shifts closer; when he reaches out a tentative hand, lets his fingers graze over her stomach, she’s warm.

His eyes scrunch tightly shut. Code falls behind his lids like the rain that patters against the windows outside.

100.

There’s nothing out of the ordinary on this day in early fall. A breeze rustles the trees as they walk hand in hand through the park, and provides the first hint that cooler weather is on the way. Children’s laughter from the nearby playground fills the air. Dogs chase each other on the grass. Natalie sips her coffee, cream with no sugar; they enjoy the contented silence that falls between them, only punctuated by her soft smile.

There’s nothing out of the ordinary — except for everything that is.

They meet each other’s eyes, her blue to his brown, and in an instant, everything changes.

It’s hard to tell who sees it first, but — the flash of recognition envelops both of them. Vague memories, the ones that have floated over him like a constant cloud, just out of reach, are in his hands, in his brain, in his heart. He’d had another life once, another name. And it’d been —

“Neo.”

She whispers it on an awed breath, tears forming in her eyes. The coffee cup slips from her grasp, long since forgotten; she lifts that hand to his face, fingers tracing the rise of his cheekbone.

Tears swim in his vision, too, tears and strands of code, falling. Falling. Nothing makes sense and yet everything makes sense, no more so than when the name falls out of his mouth, the last piece of a particularly jumbled puzzle: “Trinity.”

But a thousand words he doesn’t know how to say don’t even begin to get a chance to form. He feels the eyes watching them more than he sees them; both hands drop to his sides, and he tenses, ready to fight.

He’s barely aware that the old woman who’s usually on the bench near his apartment building approaches on the sidewalk. She looks between them, nods, and:

“They’re coming, kiddo,” she tells him, voice severe, with none of her usual warmth, as she grips his arm. “You need to run.”

101.

At sunset, a man in a white suit, tall and imposing, joins the old woman on a park bench near the playground, but says nothing; from all appearances, it looks as though he barely acknowledges her at all. They remain, just like this, as people filter out one by one under the steadily darkening sky, returning to their lives.

They always remain through every iteration, the Mother and Father of the Matrix.

Preoccupied with purpose and the inefficiency of wasting time, as is his programming, the Father is the first to break the silence.

"I informed you it was a dangerous game.”

The Oracle says nothing in response.

She merely smiles.

#neo x trinity #the matrix #the matrix resurrections #neo #trinity #* fic #song title is from cascades by metric #which for some reason just feels like a ship song for them #anyway i'm so hyped for tomorrow!

[mimik-u]

Flower Child, Ch. 18 (”Abyss”)

LINK

i.

The door that led into Room 11812 was already partially cracked when Blue Diamond arrived in front of it the next morning. Lost, hesitant, adrift, perpetually undone, she simply stared at it for a long while, sized it up, reified it into yet another monolith she would have to confront.

For she was surrounded by monoliths.

All the time.

They towered over her.

Mocked her.

Grief and ghosts and all those other inlaid, ingrained fears, carved deep into the marrow of her bones, muscle memory now. She was scared of everything, really: the continuance of life, the permanence of death, the human capacity for endurance, the inhuman throes of her nightmares. And how these nightmares were sometimes, maybe even oftentimes, waking dreams nowadays, stalking her far beyond the confines of a bed that was much too big for her. She was afraid of forgetting Pink Diamond and replacing her, caring for Steven Universe and losing him. Telling Yellow Diamond that she loved her. Showing it. Proving that she did. Never doing it in the end precisely because she was so afraid. (Of what? She scarcely could articulate in the labyrinthine abyss of her mind, where everything was guttural and murky and raw.) Consigning their marriage to the same grave where their daughter laid, the memory of their once great love dressed in funeral shrouds…. She was afraid of empty halls and empty penthouse suites and empty rooms where dust laid thickly on furniture that would never be touched again. Ratty hoodies, diamond quilts, pink sticky notes reminding dead twenty-one year olds to study for upcoming tests. She was afraid of living and afraid of dying, afraid of happiness and afraid of pain. She feared mornings, and she feared nights. Doorbells, sleeping pills, good days, bad days, her very shadow, her own wasted reflection. (Because fundamentally, Blue Diamond was afraid of herself most of all.)

She wasn’t particularly afraid of doors—because most of the time, a door was just a door after all—but she was afraid of this particular door on the sixth floor of a hospital. More simply, she was afraid of what was behind it. Simpler still, she was afraid of who laid in that hospital bed. Afraid of all the unspoken things that had simmered quietly in the space between them for years upon distant, aching years...

So, she simply stood there.

Lost.

Hesitant.

Adrift.

Perpetually undone.

She made a monolith out of a door.

Voices seeped from behind the narrow gap, rising and falling together in a conversation that didn’t quite make sense, try though she did to piece the snippets into a context that she could understand. Blue braced both of her hands upon the head of her cane as she leaned forward to listen, a long strand of her silvery hair falling listlessly between her eyes, curling just over her nose. 

How terribly her heart beat.

How loud.

Her fingers shivered; they simply ached.

“... ouch, dammit! Don’t poke me so hard,” Yellow Diamond snapped, her abrasive voice loud, clear, unmistakable, ringing.

(She was always so pleasant to be around in the morning.)

“Then you should quit squirming around so much, Mrs. Diamond,” a voice that she recognized as belonging to Dr. Reed replied, as amused as her patient was irate. “It’s just a needle.”

“Yes, well—it’s too early in the morning for me to be especially happy about being prodded like a cow.”

“Mm,” the doctor made a noncommittal noise at the back of her throat as she continued to work, noisily shifting invisible materials around.

“So, when will I get these results back?” Yellow asked, affecting a tone that was passably casual to anyone who didn’t know her, who was unaware that she clipped her consonants more shortly than usual when she was tense, scared, strained.

“A couple of hours if I had to wager. The lab’ll want to be thorough.”

“Naturally.”

“And once we get those results back—if they say what I think they will, of course—then we’ll have to run through the whole gamut of other procedures: urological assessments, medical histories, blood pressure tests, cancer screenings, chest x-rays, EKGs... it’ll be a long process.”

“Sounds like it,” Yellow returned in that same punctuated voice, and then the two women lapsed into silence as the ground revolted beneath Blue’s feet, simply eroded.

And she was suddenly falling at the same time that she was perfectly upright, a swaying pillar tethered only to the facticity of her cane. She clung to it all the more tightly, fingers whitening from the beds of her nails downwards; it was the only bulwark she had against total collapse.

Annihilation.

Ruin.

All these tests?

What were they for?

She furrowed her silvery brow and desperately thought back to her conversation with Dr. Reed just yesterday; nothing about it had suggested that something was seriously wrong with Yellow, except a few fractures and lacerations that would clear up with time and rest... so what reasonable line of logic led from a minor car accident to cancer screenings and chest x-rays? What had happened in the unaccounted for hours when Blue had been away? 

She closed her eyes as nausea suddenly rushed up the cylinder of her throat, sickness invading all her delicate senses.

The answer seemed to loom darkly ahead—only a door push away.

“Alright, Mrs. Diamond,” the doctor sighed, “I’m going to get these to the lab. I’ll draw up your discharge papers soon, too...”

Yellow must have made some sort of nonverbal reply because Blue didn’t have time to recover her face as the cracked door suddenly flung open, breaking the final divide between everything she thought she understood and all the awful things that she apparently didn’t.

“Mrs. Diamond, oh, hello! Good mornin’!”

Her wiry eyebrows hoisted high above her thin glasses, Dr. Reed looked equally surprised to see Blue Diamond standing just outside the door. The medical tray she bore in her arms jumped a little as she did, shaking a few test tubes that were filled with dark crimson.

But Blue was impatient, eager, scared most of all. (She was always scared.) Her hooded eyes involuntarily slid from the harried doctor to the test tubes to the impressively cut figure just beyond Dr. Reed’s shoulder.

For Yellow Diamond, wearing her favorite pair of silken pajamas like royal regalia, sat upon the edge of her hospital bed, simply staring at Blue from widened eyes, her cracked lips parted slightly, every line etched across her face a livid, pulsing scar.

It was an expression of contradictions, of paradoxes, of dichotomies: tender at the same time that it was strained, vulnerable and equally forbidding.

Yellow averted her gaze first, a dull flush suffusing her sharply hewn cheeks. When she turned away, the sunlight pouring in from the window eclipsed her features behind the curtain of its flaxen reach.

“Good morning, Dr. Reed,” Blue murmured, painfully wrenching her attention back to the more immediate woman. “I see you have been… busy.”

She glanced questioningly at the tray of test tubes again, but just as the doctor opened her mouth to respond, Yellow got there first, cutting across her with cold precision.

“She was just leaving,” she said pointedly, still not looking their way. She brought her left arm up—the one enmeshed in a brace—to absentmindedly skim the right where her sleeve was meticulously rolled up at the elbow, where a long piece of gauze had been nearly wrapped around the joint. “Right, Doctor?”

It was a clear dismissal, blunt and unsubtle, a maneuver of clear avoidance, of keeping those strange, private words in the dark. Blue imagined it was a tactic that would have worked exceptionally well on Poppy or Livia or one of their various other employees besides whom Yellow had already intimidated into submission, but Dr. Reed didn’t seem to be especially frazzled by Yellow Diamond at all—unbothered by her elevated status, impervious to the harsh way with which spoke, as though every word was a finely calibrated weapon. She only resigned herself with a meaningful sigh that Blue couldn’t quite miss, her wire-rimmed glasses slipping incrementally upon the bridge of her nose.

“I suppose I was,” she smiled grimly, adjusting her tray more securely in her arms.  Blue counted the scarlet tubes. There were four in all. “Be sure to eat that. cookie, Mrs. Diamond”—she called over her shoulder, as calculatingly sweet as Yellow was acerbic—“and it was nice to see you again, Mrs. Diamond.”

Blue stepped to the aside to allow the doctor passage. They exchanged a final nod, charged with unspoken significance, and then, just like that, Dr. Reed was gone.

And finally, they were alone.

Blue and Yellow Diamond.

Once upon a time, this had been one of their most treasured sensations in the world.

To be alone.

With one another.

In the confines of a room.

Oh, how Blue’s slender hands had once known Yellow as intimately as they had known her own body. The curvature of her sharp jawbone. The tender column of her pulsing neckline. The feeling of their hands together, gently intertwined. Spiny knuckles. Soft palms. Brushing thumbs.

And now, eight feet stood between them.

Seven once Blue timidly dared to step into the doorway.

Merely six once she made an awkward movement to close the door behind her.

And neither of them especially knew how to breach the space between them.

The distance.

The gulf. 

Yellow seemed to have finally noticed that she was massaging the place where the doctor had drawn her blood because she suddenly stopped, self-conscious, wrenching her left hand away from the spot. But the gauze was still there, wrapped around her bony elbow tightly, advertising its unspoken secret like a flag at half-mast.

“You’re having tests done,” Blue stated.

It was as bold as it was quiet.

The loudest accusation in an otherwise silent room.

“They’re nothing,” Yellow replied immediately, trying for a nonchalance that didn’t quite land. “It’s nothing. Just routine stuff.”

The lie landed between them, too, with an odd, dull plunk, and Blue felt the beginnings of something other than fear coil in the pit of her stomach for the first time all morning. A burning sensation—stinging, raw.

She squeezed her cane again tightly and absently thought that it wouldn’t surprise her if her fingers came away with indents from where she gripped the metal.

“You were drunk… you were in an accident, Yellow,” she whispered, her words acquiring an icy edge. They lashed. They lunged. They hurt. They were intended to hurt. “Are you sure there’s something you’re not telling me?”

On the ropes, cornered—she hated being cornered—Yellow’s features suddenly hardened, her nose upturning, mouth calcifying into its trademark sneer. If Blue Diamond’s cane was her defense, then Yellow Diamond’s snarl was her weapon, sharp as any saber or sword. 

“You’re being paranoid, Blue—even more so than usual,” she scoffed, fingertips digging into the sheets beneath her hands. “It wasn’t as though I caused the accident. I wasn’t even driving!”

“Then why has Dr. Reed ordered such an extensive battery of tests for you? Can you answer me that at least?” She insisted, now shrill, now angry, now hoarse, now unknotted, soon to be undone—her throat wrenched with its own rage. Tears burned the corners of her eyes, gathering like rushing rivers down the skeletal curves of her cheeks. “I’m your wife, Yellow Diamond, and you—”

“And I should what exactly?” Yellow interrupted, laughing so mirthlessly that the sound was feral, almost inhuman. “Give you yet another reason to fall apart for four years? You barely survived the last time. I barely survived watching you, Blue. I—“

But she stopped short.

She realized that she had said too much.

And six feet became six hundred feet as the two women stared at each other across the empty tiles, as the words that Yellow had growled registered to them both. 

Neither of them had barely survived Blue’s total dissolution.

Both of them.

Together.

Alone.

They were both so utterly alone.

“I’m sorry,” Yellow exhaled, the fight in her voice punctured. Leaking. Drained. “I… I’m—“

But what exactly she was, even she didn’t seem to know. Prodigious marshal of words that she was, she was clearly at a loss for words, her mouth quavering with its own forced silence. Yellow abruptly looked away again, and the sunlight threw the stitches across her cheek in sharp relief, the redness of them, the rawness. 

Painful to even look at.

How much more painful were they then to bear?

How many other wounds besides had her wife collected in all these awful, unspooling years? Not even simply the visible ones, but all the other sundry hurts, too. The lines beneath her hawklike eyes. Her perpetual coldness, wrapped like impenetrable armor around her skin. The very way that she spoke these days, as though each word was a marionette jerked by some strict taskmaster’s violent strings. 

In the night, when she was alone in that master bed that had never been intended for just one, Blue didn’t have to look at these things, didn’t have to acknowledge that there was a reason that the door to the study was perpetually cracked open, didn’t have to wonder about how her utter contempt for life reflected on others because fundamentally, there was no one other than herself; it was her and her alone.

During the day, she didn’t have to care.

Time stretched ad infinitum all around her, slipping, always slipping away.

And she remained in the mire of her own head.

Stuck.

Broken.

Sinking.

Sunken.

Gone.

“So, please, Blue Diamond… please don’t look away, Steven Universe had whispered, indicting her, condemning her entire modus operandi with seven simple words as he laid in that hospital bed, dying for everyone to see.

She had looked away from Pink Diamond, and now Pink Diamond was dead.

She had almost looked away from Steven Universe.

Even still, even after all that they had ever been through together—and they had been through quite a lot—Blue Diamond was looking away from her wife even now.

Fool, masochist, coward.

She was, she was, she was—all of these things and very likely more.

Drowning.

Save me.

Spiraling.

Always.

Sinking, sunken, gone.

But the corrective, Steven Universe implied with every word and kind deed, wasn’t in the recognition of her problem; it wasn’t even in the actual acknowledgment that there needed to be a change.

It was in action and reaction.

It was in change itself.

A sickly boy could extend a flower to her in the cemetery, but she had to be the one to accept its grace.

She had to be the one to not look away.

Six feet, not six hundred feet.

Please, Blue Diamond… please don’t look away.

Swallowing thickly, Blue forced herself to gain perspective in that tiny hospital room, narrowing the world to just the two of them and the few strips of tile which stood between them.

Six feet.

So close and yet so far.

(Their daughter was six feet under the ground.)

“We apologize to each other all the time,” Blue murmured, her voice lilting softly in her accent, “and yet… not at all. How many times have we hurt each other, Yellow? How many times have we had to repent before doing it all over again?”

“So many times,” Yellow returned automatically, and her voice was quiet, laced only with the fading dregs of bitterness. Her knuckles were white where she continued to clench the sheets balled in her fists. “Because I am sorry—every damn time, Blue. I don’t mean to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you. Hell, but I—”

As her voice rose, it was just as quickly stifled.

Choked.

A single tear glanced down the consummate businesswoman’s sharply angled face, and perhaps it was the most visible sign of her defeat that she didn’t immediately make a move to scrub it away, to pretend as though it had never existed.

And perhaps it was this gesture, or lack of a gesture, that finally did it for Blue Diamond above all.

That taught her what she needed to do.

She moved forward, one halting footstep over another, the hem of her long dress sweeping across the clinically white ground.

Clank.

Five feet.

Clank.

Four feet.

Clank.

Alerted by the telltale clangor of the cane, Yellow Diamond abruptly jerked her chin upwards, her lined eyes wide with horror and disbelief, with fear, with apprehension, with confusion, and something else, too—something almost indefinable because it had been a long time since Blue had recognized the expression in her wife’s chiseled face.

Had seen it.

Had noticed it.

Named it and reciprocated it.

Yearning, that irresistible rush of longing.

It shone painfully in her eyes, a drowning man’s golden flare shot into the dark.

Clank.

Three feet.

Clank.

Two.

“Blue, what are you—”

Clank.

One.

Scarcely twelve inches stood between them now, the air quiet, unnervingly, unnaturally still.

For everything was on a tightrope, the line just ready to snap.

Between them, individually, over twenty years of history were stored in the shared memories of their bodies, and for a moment, if only for a fleeting second, Blue felt as though if she could only reach out and touch Yellow in just the right place, that the world would just as suddenly right itself on its tilted axis, and everything would make sense once again and forevermore.  They would be reconciled, reunited, restored, all of their damages undone, and they would know each other intimately, just by touch alone. They would be able to pick up where they last stopped, somewhere in the darkness, on a road that went by the wayside so long ago. Maybe, at long last, they would even join hands.

But, no.

That was simply naïveté.

Childlike belief.

A dream.

Touching Yellow Diamond would not change the fact that their daughter was dead and that four years of grief had nearly destroyed the both of them; touching Yellow Diamond was not an apology; it wouldn’t even be an adequate excuse. The touch, if such a thing were to exist, would only be a gesture, a microscopic movement towards what had heretofore been the impossible.

The beginnings of a bridge.

And one goddamn awful gulf.

But it was a start.

And that was what mattered, right?

Yes, Blue Diamond thought to herself.

Please.

Closing her eyes against the sudden vertigo—the fear, the terror, the rush—she slowly leaned over into the darkness and gently pressed her lips against Yellow Diamond’s forehead, exhaling softly as the stalwart general tensed beneath the touch, deathly still.

“I’m sorry, Blue.”

Her voice shook, a pillar cut off at its foundation, sunken to its knees.

Blue gingerly brought her hands up so that they were encircling her wife’s head, her tousled hair, the tips of her ears, her temples…

“I’m so sorry,” Yellow repeated simply; her voice cleaved itself in two; she was insisting on an apology, as though it was absolutely necessary for them to proceed.

And it was.

But so, too, was this.

“I know,” Blue whispered as Yellow’s shoulders began to silently shake. In response, in return, because she wanted to, because she desperately needed to, she began to absently skim her thumb through the woman’s hair.

 “I’m sorry, too.”

Three words still hung—unspoken—in the sterile air.

Suspended.

On the tips of fearful tongues.

ii.

Priyanka brought them all back to the slaughterhouse again because there was nowhere else left to go. There were five of them in total, so they couldn’t very well have their daily harrowing conversation out in the hallway. They were adults, and Steven was a child, Steven was fourteen, so they couldn’t baldly discuss his mortality in his hospital room, where he laid in a bed, hooked up to so many whirring machines. Her office was cramped, and the chapel was somber. The cafeteria was too noisy, the hospital’s atrium just the same. 

And so, that left only one option.

The conference room on the fourth floor.

The slaughterhouse.

They all took seats at that long, long table and did their best not to look at each other, at the griefs laid bare in all of their tired faces.

“I’m sorry,” Priyanka said abruptly, “for yesterday. I got your hopes up. I got my own up, and I... I should have been more circumspect.”

She stared at her lined hands, at how they were templed neatly upon the smooth surface of the table. Even sidled up next to each other, brushing, her palms felt bitingly cold.

“I knew better, and that—irrefutably—is on me.”

“Aw, come off it, Doc,” Amethyst shrugged dully from the other side of Greg. “You couldn’t have known.”

“You told us best yourself, Priyanka,” Pearl agreed, her voice an almost passable imitation of prim. She was sitting in the chair opposite to Amethyst, delicately massaging her temples with the tips of her long fingers. “That damage wouldn’t have shown up on the scans... we don’t fault you for that.”

“We won’t,” Garnet added pointedly, never moving her bicolored gaze away from the empty air just above Greg’s shoulder.

“We would never,” Greg finished kindly, and when Priyanka dared to look up at him—he was sitting to her immediate left—she was appalled to see a weak smile quivering on his bearded mouth. Of all the things she didn’t deserve, a smile was high on that list which seemed to grow longer with every passing day that Steven Universe was in her care.

“You’re all being far too nice to me,” she insisted in that same blunt tone, though she knew it was a losing battle, four against one, the weapons of their affection all drawn. “I made that child—I made all of you—a promise. And doctors don’t make promises.”

Take care of my baby for me... please.

You have my word.

“Not unless they’re arrogant,” she concluded coldly, glancing away. “Foolish.”

And she was a fool—assuredly. A jester in a white lab coat. All she needed was the hat. In the slaughterhouse, she half-demanded that the people around her admitted to it, that the victims of her fault had their chance to cleave her apart on the altar, too.

But because they were kind and good and everything that was compassionate in the world, not a single one of them did.

Garnet even reached over and briefly placed a warm hand on Priyanka’s arm.

“It’s a good thing you’re neither then.”

And of course, here was yet another thing she didn’t deserve—a consolatory touch—but the doctor did not have the heart to shake it off, not now—not when there were dark circles beneath Garnet’s eyes that spoke to yet another sleepless night in a long row of likely many.

“Yes, well, at any rate”—she hurried away from the subject, desperate to escape their kindness, goodness, their sympathetic gazes—“I’ve called you here to give a progress report… we potentially have another donor candidate… a live donor this time.”

Priyanka enunciated each word as though she was announcing the presence of a ticking time bomb, and it registered as much in the faces of her captive audience. Garnet withdrew her hand quickly, as though stung, and they all stared at the nephrologist, each and every one of them, with a naked disbelief that was a far cry from the unadulterated joy of yesterday’s declaration. They had been briefly happy, and then they’d been so quickly, so mercilessly burnt; it was no wonder then that they were skeptical.

It was painfully obvious that they were still licking their damn wounds.

“A patient at this very hospital,” she continued haltingly, precise in every word. She had to be careful here not to let something slip up, not to betray a word that would drive the blades sticking into these people’s chests in just one inch more. She wanted to be fastidious this time; she intended to be sure. “Their blood type is likely a match for Steven’s, but we’re checking again just to make sure… and even if that’s a certainty, there are so many other tests besides that we’ll have to do just to make sure their body is healthy enough to undergo a transplant… it could take weeks…”

She spoke into thick silence, excruciating to the last as each word was wrenched free from her teeth in some poor facsimile of her usual brusque fashion.

Pearl and Garnet exchanged a pregnant look across the table, but it was Amethyst who spoke the meaning aloud; she was always the one who seemed to be the best at translating what everyone was secretly thinking into words, what they were all too fearful to say.

“So we shouldn’t get our hopes up yet, huh?” She asked candidly. “That’s what you’re saying… isn’t it?”

“Something to that effect, yes,” Priyanka returned with a slow nod of her head. “I just don’t want to… I would rather not…”

But she struggled to find the right words, to strangle all her emotions into sentences that didn’t complicate the professionalism to which she was called.

Because she couldn’t break down.

She couldn’t flinch.

She was the doctor in the room for goodness’s sake, and that meant something.

But again, Amethyst stepped in so she didn’t have to—blunt, plain, merciful.

“… hurt him again,” she mumbled, her lavender hair forming a curtain around her lowered head. The young woman swiped her arm roughly across her face in a gesture that was lost on precisely no one. “Yeah, I guess that’s for the best…”

The ensuing silence was somehow worse than the last. 

It seemed to chafe at them all, rubbing their skins raw.

Greg Universe shifted in his chair.

He looked less man than mountain, carved ruggedly against a bleak, gray sky—hunched in on himself, avalanched, collapsing all over. 

(When she’d first met the man some fifteen years ago, he’d still had all of his hair.)

(A kid having a kid.)

“He hasn’t said more than a few words today, Dr. M,” the mountain whispered, his voice eroding in all the right places, crumbling. “He barely even looks at us.”

Priyanka didn’t know what to say.

She wasn’t naturally warm like Maisie Reed.

Wasn’t soft.

Wasn’t encouraging.

Being a doctor didn’t require any of those epithets, even though she knew cerebrally, intimately, that being a human did.

“It’s hard being sick,” she finally said.

It was the easiest way to utter an even harder truth.

(Sometimes, her patients found it unbearable.)

iii.

“And Archimicarus preened his feathers haughtily, all the while keeping one amber eye on Captain Bonham, whose apparent warmth wasn’t enough to stop the falcon from being wary of the witch’s eccentricities: the dual pistols she wore in the holsters on either side of her waist, the long knife handle jutting just above the ribs of her corset, and most ominously of all, the necklace she wore around her neck—a leather cord threaded through the skull of a baby bird,” Connie read aloud, adopting her most suspenseful voice for one of the most tense chapters in the book—Lisa and Archimicarus meeting Valentine Bonham, famed pirate witch of the jewel-bright seas, and her serpentine familiar Scyllane. 

Of course, Valentine would prove to be one of Lisa’s most beloved companions by the end of the book, a swashbuckling mentor with a semi-tragic backstory, a kind of mother figure who had a penchant for committing petty theft and tax fraud against the despotic king.

But Steven didn’t know that yet.

“Skyllane,” Connie continued, “her silvery scales glimmering beneath the midday sun, hissed her amusement at Archimicarus’s obvious discomfort as she coiled herself sinuously around Valentine’s neck. Show off, the falcon thought savagely…”

Her mouth twitched into a reflexive smile at this part, nostalgic at Archimicarus’s occasional petty asides, and she looked up automatically, hoping to see the same amusement reflected in the face of her one-person audience… but Steven… Steven obviously wasn’t feeling it.

He didn’t seem like he was feeling much of anything, really.

When she’d come in with her mother that morning, he had tried to hide it, insisting that she open The Unfamiliar Familiar again, that they could pick up where they had last left off like everything was fine and good and normal and dandy.

But it wasn’t.

And perhaps pretending was only adding insult to injury, salt to an already agonizing wound.

Her mother’s famously steady hands had been shaking all day. They shook around around the leather of her steering wheel; they shook around the circumference of her coffee tumbler; they shook as she fumbled with her keys to lock the sedan’s door. She dropped them. Connie picked them up and didn’t comment on the incident, just as her mother didn’t comment on the event except to proffer a perfunctory thank you. And still, her mother’s hands continued to shake as she ushered Connie through the double doors that led into the Truman Ward, where only the nephrologist’s most dire patients were hospitalized. 

On the ride to the hospital that morning, she had laid out the bare bones as best and well as she could to her daughter—Steven had been going to get kidneys, and then he just as suddenly wasn’t. 

Steven’s life had miraculously stretched before him, and then the ribbon was abruptly, cruelly cut.

And his heart is tired, Connie, her mom had whispered—very quietly, with evident strain. As though she was scarcely able to comprehend it herself. So tired. And his lungs are doing their best to keep up…

Connie did not think it was necessary to ask what happened to tired hearts.

Staring at Steven, who wasn’t staring at her but rather at a fixed point upon the ceiling, she instinctively understood that there was only one thing tired hearts could do.

And that was shatter.

Break.

“Hey… Steven?” She asked tentatively, replacing the straw wrapper bookmark in the place where she had last left off. (She didn’t quite close the book—not yet. There was a finality in that action, mundane though it was, that suddenly scared her.) “Are you… okay?”

Seconds dripped before anything happened. Surrounded by a nest of tangled wires and tubes, Steven was deathly still in their embrace, less subject than object, less object than tangible ghost. From her vantage point—the chair next to his bed—she couldn’t see his face, the expression in it, perhaps even the lack of one. But she observed the way that his right hand laid feebly on top of his stomach, fingers lightly curled into a ball. And she saw the feeble rise and fall of his chest, how it stuttered every so often with each arrhythmic movement that found its companion in a staccato beat on his heart monitor.

And here was yet another thing that scared the twelve-year old.

She surmised that all these signs and symbols had something to do with finality, too.

Endings.

She hated those.

Sometimes, when she was reading a really good book, she would stop just before the last chapter to steel herself for what was to come.

“Yes,” came a mechanical reply. “Just tired…”

“I can imagine,” Connie said. (She couldn’t imagine it all. She could barely reconcile that this was the same boy she had laughed and laughed with only so many days ago on the first floor of this very hospital. He had smiled at her so kindly, eyes shining with their own paradoxical aliveness. And she’d thought to herself, even then, how miraculous he surely was, how extraordinary.) “We can stop right here for now if you want to take a nap or something…?”

“I don’t like naps,” Steven immediately said in that same colorless tone, and yet, there was a slight edge to his voice that wasn’t exactly anger, but rather defiance, argumentative, defensive, self-directed—as though it was aimed towards himself. His chubby fingers tensed on his stomach, crumpling the paisley-studded fabric there.

Connie did not think it was necessary to ask why he didn’t like naps.

Or, maybe, it was entirely necessary.

Maybe it was one of those very human statements that required an equally human reply: comfort, consolation, concern.

But she lapsed into silence rather than pursue it, the weight of her book pressing heavily upon her knees, the weight of the moment overwhelming her in all of her twelve-year-oldish-ness. She glanced emptily at the page where the spine was cracked open and realized that they hadn’t even reached the halfway point yet.

There were still so many pages to go.

Hundreds.

“… how does it end?”

But now, very suddenly, with all the air of a startled cat, she glanced up, and saw that Steven had painstakingly tilted his head in her direction. And he was simply watching her, the expression in his dark eyes impenetrable and distant, even though he was so close, quite close enough to reach out and actually touch.

Her literary mind worked ahead of her.

There was a metaphor in there somewhere.

“The chapter?” Connie asked, wondering if he was implicitly asking her to keep reading. 

“No.” The line of Steven’s pale mouth barely moved. “The book.”

It registered with her immediately—he was asking for an entirely different thing besides.

Cold collapsed down her spine, settling somewhere in her stomach.

Icy.

Hard.

“Don’t be silly,” she returned numbly, as though it was just a game they were still playing. It was not in fact a game. It wasn’t even close to one. “You’ll have to wait for me to read the rest of the book to find out. We haven’t even reached Chapter Eight yet.”

There were twenty-one chapters total.

Epilogue included.

Steven was silent for a long time, but never entirely; the various machines invading him did all of the talking in his place: whirring, beeping, stuttering on.

“I guess we better keep going then.”

“Yeah…”

Connie removed her straw wrapper bookmark again and began to read.

She read very quickly now, as though something depended upon it.

iv.

A little before noon, Dr. Maheswaran briefly came in to disconnect Steven from the portable dialysis machine and send Connie downstairs to be picked up by her father for tennis practice. Garnet watched him as he seemingly watched nothing. He looked away when the nephrologist gently disconnected the machine’s tubing from the central line grafted into his neck. He closed his dark eyes when she replaced the oxygen mask over his mouth for one of those quick albuterol treatments. (Ever since his episode last night, his breathing had been a little too stilted for the doctor’s liking, a little too short.) He barely opened them again when Connie said her tentative goodbye, placing a hand on Steven’s arm as Dr. Maheswaran placed a consoling arm around her daughter’s shoulder. 

Through his mask, he couldn’t say anything, so he only blinked slowly, the shadows turning beneath his eyes starkly pronounced. He coughed once. The feeble sound rattled across his chest. 

It shivered his whole body.

It shivered the entire room.

When Connie withdrew her hand, fear flashed across her face.

(For she was shivering, too.)

The Maheswarans left, and Garnet and Steven were left alone in that tiny hospital room that was filled with golden sunlight. It leaned through the window with a light, mocking smile, teasing a warmth that the gym trainer couldn’t feel as she continued to watch Steven.

Vigilantly.

With no little obsession.

Afraid to miss something.

(Maybe even more afraid to stay.)

Hunched over in the uncomfortable chair next to his bed, she curled the fingers of her right hand over her clenched left fist, gingerly rubbing her knuckles, and she stared plainly at the punctuated rise and fall of his chest as albuterol vapor leaked beneath his mask, spiraling into the air like fading smoke. The machine hissed pneumatically, nearly overwhelming the sound of Steven’s beating heart, which was measured out in shrill noise, clangorous noise.

Beep…

Beep...

Beep…

Garnet hated this sound and she was simultaneously desperate to keep hearing it.

A nurse came in some ten minutes later to remove the mask and readjust the oxygenated cannulas in their former place, gently threading the tubes around Steven’s ears, maneuvering the tiny nubs into his nose. He kept his eyes closed, but Garnet was almost positive that he wasn’t sleeping. 

It was subtle, but she knew the signs, having studied them night after night for almost nine months now—all those times she had curled up beside him in bed, resting her chin on top of his curly, black hair, keeping a vigilant eye out for all the demons she couldn’t exactly see. 

The shadows that lurked around and about them never quite materialized into foes she could punch, kick, or destroy, so she memorized all the telltale signs of his aliveness instead, committing each trait to memory as though her own sanity depended on it.

The slight furrow in his dark brow.

The twitch in his nose.

The grim press of his lips.

(When he was truly asleep, he had the tendency to snore, mouth lazily lolled open in unguarded torpor.)

But the nurse didn’t know him, so they only said poor kiddo before leaving too, and the room suddenly felt so much more vacant without the hiss of the albuterol to fill all the empty crevices—the silence, the all-consuming nothingness, the barefaced, omnipresent pain.

Beep…

Beep…

Beep…

Steven slowly opened his eyes as the nurse’s footsteps died away from the room.

And Garnet watched him as he seemingly watched nothing, as he stared, very quietly, at the ceiling, without so much as moving a limb. She drank every micro-gesture in, as though every micro-gesture meant something in the wide cosmos of the universe. Every breath became consequential in this barebones theology, a butterfly’s wings rippling through space and time to matter in ways both big and small.

It mattered—fundamentally—that Steven continued to breathe.

Beep…

Beep…

Beep…

“Garnet?” He asked quietly. His voice was small, weak—the mewling rasp of an injured animal. She thought fleetingly of Cat Steven, of how they had found that tiny, defenseless kitten shivering in the pouring rain. If only Garnet could scoop his namesake into her strong arms just the same and keep him safe, holding him very quietly, very gently, against her chest.

“… yes, Steven?”

“Was my mom… was she ever scared, too?”

The question was simple enough, and it simply unmoored her.

Skewered her through.

Because they didn’t really talk about Rose.

Not really.

They referenced her obliquely, in passing mention, if they absolutely had to; her portrait loomed above the door leading into the beach house; every year, on her birthday, they laid flowers upon her grave and tried not to think about young she would have been had she never died.

And yet, here Steven was, trespassing that unspoken rule and doubling down upon it.

As little as they ever discussed Rose Quartz, they touched upon her illness even less.

So many memories.

Too painful.

Too raw.

Never healed, buried deep within their skins, buried six feet under the ground.

“…I think she might have been,” Garnet answered slowly, “but I can’t say for sure. She was good at pushing down her feelings for us… for our sakes.”

Which in turn made her an excellent leader.

(And an inscrutable friend.)

Steven seemed to silently grapple with this for a few moments, his expression complex, as though there were cloud shadows roaming across his eyes and mouth, threatening rain but never delivering.

“I dreamt of her last night,” Steven said, an explanatory note in his voice. Justificatory. He wasn’t bringing up his mother for just any random reason. “My mom.”

Garnet’s heart shriveled somewhere inside her throat.

“Mm.” She attempted to be calm anyway. “Tell me about it.”

“We… we were in a pink room full of swirling clouds,” the child whispered. “We played football together. And video games. And she told me that she was proud of me… that she loved me…”

What Steven knew of Rose came from stories and anecdotes, from picture albums and yellowed newspaper clippings, from the few videotapes she had left behind—from the one video she had explicitly recorded for Steven scarcely a month before she had delivered him.

It wasn’t a lot, but still, maybe it was just enough.

Because that sounded like Rose.

Her kindness.

Her warmth.

Her fun.

For she had loved, more than anything, to play.

“And then what happened?” She asked, her voice almost even.

“… I woke up.”

And Garnet watched, helpless, as a single tear wriggled itself loose from the corner of Steven’s eye, slipping gracelessly down his cheek and away.

He was silent after that.

She was almost positive, though, that he wasn’t asleep.

v.

“C’mon, Ste-man,” Amethyst wheedled, wafting the milkshake temptingly just below his nose. She’d walked nearly a block away from the hospital just to get the damn thing—a specialty of Stacey’s, the little retro milkshake bar on the corner of Pin Avenue and 32nd. The staff dressed up like they were from The Jetsons and everything. When Steven hadn’t been… when things hadn’t been so bad… they’d sometimes shlepped over there after his dialysis treatments to slam burgers and milkshakes as the jukebox played the Heaven Beetles’ greatest hits. One time, all five of them went together and sung shitty karaoke ’til Pearl was laughing so hard that strawberry milkshake shot out of her nose. “It’s got Reece’s Pieces in it—your faaaavorite…”

“I’m not thirsty, Amethyst,” he returned dully, turning his face away from her. “Sorry.”

His pale neck exposed to her in the gesture, Amethyst could now clearly see the livid bruises that crept vine-like out of the collar of his hospital gown, blooming blue and purple near the place where his central line was inserted just next to his collarbone.

If she could have, if it would have made sense, Amethyst would have crushed that stupid styrofoam cup between her fingers right then and there and enjoyed the feeling of milkshake pouring all over her shaking fingers.

She would have reveled in the destruction of the act.

The cathartic release.

Very probably, she would have begun to cry.

But Steven didn’t need that.

He didn’t need to see her lose her shit.

So, she only collapsed backwards on her feet and into the chair pulled up next to Steven’s bed. She was ginger, notably careful, as she placed the milkshake on the nearby tray, where it’d melt into itself between the hours and the blazing sun.

For the sun burned today, like golden fire, through the square window.

It scorched.

“You… you haven’t eaten in, like, days, my dude,” Amethyst stated plainly, as if he didn’t know that better than anyone else who cared to know. “Dr. M’s worried ‘bout you. If ya don’t get enough nutrients…”

But Steven cut across her bluntly then, still not looking at her. “… then they’ll have to put a feeding tube in me… I know. I heard Dr. Maheswaran and Pearl talking about it the other day.”

She supposed it should have surprised her that he already knew; maybe if she’d been Pearl, she would have jumped to try to sugarcoat the blow with something soft, something comforting, something consolatory. 

But the truth of the matter was that there was nothing soft nor comforting nor consolatory about the ugly reality that reared its head above them, ten feet tall and ready to fucking strike.

He was fourteen, not ten.

He’d long stopped believing in magic.

“Doesn’t that scare you?” She asked him, frustration edging the rims of her scratchy voice, and she knew, even as she spoke, that she was being hella unfair. The poor kid couldn’t help the fact that he was puking his guts up left and right, but he was just laying there, lifeless, like he’d already accepted the inevitability of the stars that had spelled out his fate. 

And it maddened Amethyst.

Sickened her.

She really want to pummel that goddamn milkshake cup into smithereens; she clenched her fists tightly on top of her knees to try and stop them from shaking.

She reminded herself—painfully—that it was only yesterday that happiness had been given to the kid before it was so brutally ripped away.

She told herself that even grown ass adults had trouble with that.

The volatility, the utter unpredictability of life.

“Of course it scares me, Amethyst,” Steven replied, his broken voice barely a whisper as he finally turned to look at her, his brown eyes drowning in the black bags which encased them. Grooved them. Hollowed them.  “I don’t wanna have another surgery… but what do I… how can I do anything? I… I don’t know if I… I can’t stop this. I can’t.”

He seemed to struggle for the words, each one wrenched from him with a punishing drag of air.

And it struck Amethyst then and precisely there, with all the sharpness of a knife, that she took it for granted.

How easy it was for her to simply breathe.

“Catch your breath,” she implored him wildly, leaning forward in her chair. “Shh, shh, it’s okay, Steven.”

“B-but it’s not okay,” he insisted fiercely, sniffing. A single tear slanted out of the corners of one of his eyes and down the hollow of his face, slipping beneath the oxygenated cannulas, following the gentle curve of his beaten, world-weary face. “Don’t say that it’s okay. Please. I can’t take that anymore.”

“Okay, fine!” The awful words exploded out from her, tumbled and rushed and spilled from her mouth headlong on their hands and knees. Amethyst would say anything to make him calm down, and because she had no filter, because she’d never known how to mince the truth, she would mean every damn syllable. “Everything isn’t okay. Everything isn’t fine. Is that better? Are you happy now?”

But to her utter horror, to her staggering discontent, the answer was apparently—

“Yeah,” Steven sighed, closing his eyes in visible relief. “Yes.”

He laid there quietly for a handful of seconds to take in deep gulps of air.

It looked painful.

Excruciating.

“… I just wanna be on the same page,” he eventually finished, his voice a barely distinguishable mumble, distant and muffled.

Amethyst’s entire chest seized with fear unlike that she’d ever felt in a lifetime full of fear; it gripped her, and it wrestled with her.

Put its hands ‘round her throat and squeezed.

“And what page would that be, buddy?” She tried to keep her voice even anyway, though. Steven had yet to reopen his eyes. “Enlighten me.”

But there was no forthcoming reply.

His outburst had exhausted him, and sleep was merciless.

It stole him away.

vi.

They worked together in tentative silence, Greg and Pearl, taking damp washcloths and running them along the parts of Steven’s body that they could reach beneath all the medical apparatus: the column of his neck, his pale face, his arms, his leaden legs. He was too weak to take a shower in the bathroom attached to his hospital room, and they wouldn’t have been able to get a few of his lines wet anyway for the fear of clogging them up.

So a nurse provided them with a basin of soapy water, and they each picked up a rag, gliding the rough fabric as gently as possible across his skin as he laid beneath them like a doll, limp and lifeless.

Staring up at them from dark, button eyes.

Greg pulled his own cloth around Steven’s left ear, now rubbing the tip of it, now gently scraping behind, and tried not to think about how he’d done the very same when the kid was just a baby, so tiny in his arms, so helpless. He’d been afraid then, desperately so, to make just one wrong move. What if he accidentally hurt the little tyke? Rubbed his head a little too hard? Accidentally got soap in his eyes? What if he fucked up? (He was so good at fucking up.)

He’d miss Rose the most then, in those far too common moments, when he was at his lowest.

He’d miss the way she used to wrap her warm arms around his shoulders and show him, without so much as saying a word, what he looked like in her eyes.

Like he was someone worth loving in spite of everything.

In the face of it all.

Fourteen-years later, Steven was tiny beneath his arms.

Helpless.

And Greg missed Rose.

(He would always miss Rose.)

Pearl’s hands trembled as she gingerly lifted Steven’s left arm, weaving her cloth through the gaps between each of his fingers, swiping its breadth across his sweat-stickied palm. Greg followed his hooded gaze to where it settled somewhere on Pearl’s face, where there were faint circles cradling the spaces beneath her eyes, where there was a recent gauntness in the pointed architecture of her cheeks.

She must have noticed, too, because she blinked quickly, self-consciously, pausing her ministrations.

“Are you okay, Steven? I-I’m not hurting you, am I?”

Because that was the most important thing after all—neither of them wanted to hurt him anymore than he was already irrevocably damaged.

Couldn’t bear to even leave so much as a bruise.

“No,” came his simple reply.

It was the monosyllabism that was somehow the most dreadful above all.

Pearl also caught onto this, swiftly folding her slender fingers over Steven’s knuckles, her rag dangling like a white-sheeted ghost from her fingertips.

“Are you sure? You… you haven’t been yourself all day.”

He was silent at this, and Greg was pretty sure it was because the answer was obvious, painfully so.

(He hadn’t been himself in eight months now.)

The man swallowed thickly and turned away, dipping his rag in the basin on the nearby tray; the lukewarm water slushed around his wrists. He made a meal out of squeezing the cloth out, hoping that when he faced Steven and Pearl again, the moment would have passed, the unspoken things remaining unspoken.

But it was the very absence of a reply that seemed to gall Pearl, spiral her, and Greg could see, when he turned back to them, that she was utterly ruined.

She couldn’t hide it; it shone in the over-bright lights of her eyes.

“A-a kidney is bound to turn up,” she said, speaking in that rapid way she always did when she was upset (and trying not to let people see). “Dr. Maheswaran is looking for one even now, and… and… she thinks she might be able to secure a live donor kidney this time because, y-you know, the numbers and everything. Your numbers. Not that they’re abysmal. I mean, they’re bad, but—”

Greg tried to step in, tried to rescue her, before she got in too deep.

“I know it’s hard, Shtu-ball… but chin up,” he said gently as he maneuvered his washcloth beneath the kid’s neck. He skated around the bruises when he could. (There were so many new bruises, erupting like angry supernovas all across his tender skin.)

“Pearl’s right”—she shot him a grateful glance—“Dr. M’s not gonna give up, and neither are we.”

The silence stretched again.

It absolutely groaned.

And Steven finally moved his gaze away from Pearl and back to the bare ceiling.

Apparently, he’d been staring at the ceiling a lot today, divining something in it that no one else could see.

“Were you guys this scared… when Mom… when she was…”

But before he had ever gotten the words out, before he could finish another word let alone the whole sentence, Pearl abruptly extricated herself from Steven, gently setting his hand back on the bed, gently throwing her white cloth of a flag down.

“Excuse me,” she muttered feverishly. “I’ve got to… I can’t—restroom.”

But rather than flee into the door that led to the ensuite bathroom, she swung through the adjacent door, the one that led out into the hall, and Steven watched the place where her lithe form disappeared with cavernous eyes.

Sunken eyes.

Dull.

His mouth still partially open where he was still forming the words.

“I… I was so scared, buddy,” Greg said quietly, his throat constricting with all the surging memories. Her big, brown eyes. The tubes running through her skin. How he held her hand at the end, when Dr. Howard unplugged the machines, so she didn’t have to be alone.

Pearl, of course, held the other.

And there they were, the three of them.

And then, just the two of them.

Alone.

Steven’s eyes, so much like his mother’s own, turned to capture him now, penetrating his father somewhere deep in the muck and mire of his soul.

“… are you scared now?”

He choked back a sob.

“Yeah, buddy. I am.”

vii.

They sat together on Yellow’s hospital bed for a long time, not exactly talking, but communicating in other ways—in the brush of their nearly touching shoulders, in the painful glances they would occasionally shift each other from the corners of their eyes, in the way that Yellow’s pinky finger rested on top of Blue’s wrist where their hands were placed on top of the sheets in the microscopic space between them.

Now once more armored in a button-down shirt and a pair of slacks, Yellow Diamond almost looked herself—brilliant and impressive, striking to the last.

And then she would look to the side again, revealing the raw cuts now laced into her sculpted cheeks.

And Blue would fantasize about gently touching one, running her fingers across one of those tentatively scabbed lines, capturing the measure of her wife’s face, relearning it all over again.

But in the end, she didn’t dare.

Because for right now, this was simply enough.

To be sitting next to Yellow Diamond.

To simply be.

Together.

For once, not entirely alone, even though so many unvoiced things still remained.

Three words.

Mountains of griefs.

And something else now, too.

I don’t want to commit to claiming anything about these tests, Yellow had explained earlier, her usually gruff voice working itself into something gentle, a little more kind. Not until I know something for sure…

You don’t believe I can take it? Blue’s tone was as gentle as it was accusatory in that devastatingly contradictory way of hers.

Frankly, her wife returned quietly, no.

And somehow, it was the truthfulness in the other’s expression which made Blue stop short of pressing for more, for she could see, in the lines beneath Yellow Diamond’s golden eyes, just what these past four years had done to her.

You barely survived the last time. I barely survived watching you, Blue.

It was a miracle that they were even sitting here.

Barely touching, barely talking, but still… it was a start.

It was something simply to be breathing the same air.

Around three, Dr. Reed finally dropped by with Yellow’s discharge papers and another doctor whose name Blue didn’t quite catch; she was a tired-looking lady, though, with a fiercely drawn face. Salt-and-pepper hair. Hands shoved in the pockets of her lab coat. They asked if Yellow would come with them. It’d maybe take an hour or so.

The businesswoman made to get up, but Blue stopped her with a withered hand on her arm.

“Wait,” she murmured. “Your collar is crooked.”

She reached upwards to adjust the crumpled white band, straightening the crease between her delicate fingers. 

And Yellow stared at her silently—with open tenderness and rawness and aching disbelief.

And when she swallowed, Blue could see every cord convulse in the smooth column of her throat.

“Would you wait for me, Blue?”

But she must have realized how vulnerable that sounded because she quickly tried to amend herself, always aware of her audience, that there were people watching. She stood up abruptly and a little awkwardly; it was clear that one of her legs was killing her.

“In the town car, I mean?”

“Yes,” Blue returned softly. “Of course.”

Yes.

A complicated expression quivered across Yellow Diamond’s plump lips then; it was hesitant and rich, stiff and almost unbearably visceral in its reluctant vulnerability.

It wasn’t necessarily a smile, but it was something.

It was a start.

viii.

Pearl would have done something, anything, to escape her own body, but it clung to her stubbornly as she half-ran through the hospital’s halls—down Truman Ward and down the glass-encased skywalk, down the elevator, down some forsaken hallway and then another, the turns she took arbitrary and varied.

Anywhere but Room 11037.

Horror clawed its way up her throat—shame and awfulness and terrible, maddening grief—until she could hardly breathe for its presence in her mouth. The nausea was overwhelming. The memories she usually kept carefully tucked away surged forth, frothing like foam on the waves that skimmed the shore near their home.

Just the mention of Rose.

That alone was enough to undo her on any regular day.

But context mattered, too.

Steven had brought up his mother so readily, as though they and their situations were one in the same.

Like they were both—

But she couldn’t complete the thought, even to herself, because fundamentally, Pearl couldn’t accept the inevitable—not when Rose Quartz had once taught her what it was to touch the stars. 

Blindly, haphazardly, unintentionally, she found herself in one of the larger hallways in the hospital, and she immediately knew, from experience, that she had made her way down to the first floor. This particular corridor emptied out into the larger atrium and housed many of the administrative offices and various waiting rooms. 

It was fairly empty. A few people in olive colored scrubs walked by and paid the woman no attention, her total disintegration invisible to them.

Unseen.

And somehow, the fact of this was soothing to Pearl.

Comforting.

So she swiped a delicate hand across her face and moved forward until a sight towards the end of the hall stopped her short, like a blow to the stomach without being half as neat—so uncomplicated and yet so devastatingly simple.

A silver-haired woman wearing a dark blue dress.

Hands poised on a metallic cane.

Staring inscrutably at a pair of nondescript double doors.

Her heavy braid fell thickly across her shoulder.

ix.

Blue Diamond had been on her way out to the car when she noticed a half-open door in a dyad of two on the first floor of the hospital. Golden light spilled from the room upon the bare, white tiles, submerging them in a brightness, a warmth.

The brass label on the adjacent wall gleamed at her invitingly.

The chapel.

Because naturally, hospitals possessed chapels—sanctified spaces where people could pray to their gods and hope they would intercede on the behalves of their loved ones. There was something psychologically comforting in the gesture, she supposed—to do something in a situation where it felt like nothing else could be done, to speak to the Divine and take comfort in the fact that they were not alone because the Divine was omnipresent, and the Divine was all-encompassing, and the Divine loved them powerfully.

She stood in front of those doors for what seemed like an eternity and remembered painfully when she had once loved God.

She’d grown up with a Rosary woven between her fingers, singing Alleluia every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday at Mass until her daughter was murdered, and every theological comfort she had ever held dear scattered to the floor like beads.

She supposed it was only nostalgia then, which drove her to lightly press on that already half-opened door.

But as to what made her go in, the former headmistress could hardly articulate.

Her fingers wrapped themselves tightly around the head of her cane.

Clank, she proceeded forward.

Clank.

Clank.

Clank.

x.

Above all, Pearl didn’t know what made her do it—it was almost as though a sense of daring reckless gripped her and propelled her forward, step over unthinking step. She approached the spot where Blue Diamond had only recently disappeared, her pale eyes flicking upwards to the label which named the room for what it was, and then back to the double doors again, which hadn’t been completely shuttered to a close since the entrance of its last visitor.

It was a small chapel from what Pearl could tell at a cursory glance, only offering the essential trifecta of artifacts—a couple of pews, a tiny altar, and what appeared to be the portrait of a dove, spreading its elegant wings across the back wall. 

And there, sitting in the middle of the front row, was Blue Diamond, her head defiantly lifted.

As though determinedly not in prayer.

Her concentrated gaze seemed to be trained upwards, directed at the beautifully painted mural, upon which the gentle lighting threw its warm, amber glow, casting the bird in molten gold.

That same feeling of daring propitiated her again, and it was with her arms tucked neatly over her chest that Pearl impulsively drew closer, stepping across the boundary of the threshold with tender steps, ballerina movements. Her footfalls were light by nature, and in the thin carpet, they were hushed to the point that the older woman didn’t seem to be aware that she had company at all. 

Her cane stood, temporarily abandoned, on the side of the row.

Though her head was high, her shoulders were hunched in on themselves.

Caved.

When Pearl reached the pew directly behind her, she skimmed her knuckles against the grains of the wooden armrest, producing a low, plaintive note as a means of attracting her attention without entirely startling her.

And it was with painful slowness, a certain gracefulness, too, that Blue Diamond finally turned her head to look Pearl’s way, her shadowed eyes wide with surprise and melancholy, with curiosity and well-practiced temperance.

Pearl’s thin brow furrowed.

She bit her lower lip.

xi.

“May I sit?” The Crystal Gem asked, and there was a brusqueness in her otherwise smooth voice that reminded Blue Diamond of yet another encounter with one of Steven’s motley guardians—the one who had stood in front of the door, the muscled woman with bicolored eyes. 

She had warned her against hurting Steven.

She, too, had looked at Blue with quiet disdain.

Perhaps loathing was the more fitting word.

“Be my guest…?” Blue returned, allowing a pause by which the woman could introduce herself. 

“Pearl,” she curtly supplied as she lowered herself to the end of the pew and sat rather primly, with one ankle crossed daintily over the other. 

“Pearl,” Blue echoed gently, trying the name on her tongue. It was a lyrical number, assonant and delicate, much like the person to which it belonged. 

For she was slight—as willowy as the other Crystal Gem had been powerfully built. Simply put, she looked as though one puff of wind would blow her over, bending her back like the breeze did stalks of long reeds, rending her, bifurcating her, snapping her in two. And just as Yellow and Blue’s physiognomies told the stories of their griefs, so, too, did the lines beneath Pearl’s eyes announce her own.

There was a boy in the hospital bed.

There was a wasting disease.

“May I assume,” she continued tentatively, “by the expression in your face, that you already know who I am?”

“Yes,” Pearl replied certainly, but then just as immediately said, “No. I don’t know.”

She closed her pale eyes against some inner turmoil as the ambient lighting gently kissed her beaten face, caressing her cheeks in honeyed gold.

“I know your name, and I know what your family’s company has done,” she continued, “but I suppose that isn’t the same thing as knowing you, is it? Understanding why my… why he… why Steven loves you.”

There was it again—that same oblique indictment that the other Crystal Gem had leveled at Diamond Electric, silently condemning her for all sorts of untold flaws, and Blue Diamond frowned, sucking a little on her lip as the charge did what it was intended to do—level a finger directly at her chest, pressing neatly upon her sternum.

Perhaps these activists were not as inconsequential as she had wanted them to be after all.

Perhaps they had something important to say.

Perhaps here was yet another instant in which Blue had looked away, painstakingly ignoring all of the uncouth things in order to more capably realize the vision of her perfect, invulnerable, tableau of an ugly, imperfect, sheltered life.

She accused Yellow of shoving Pink Diamond in a drawer, but perhaps Blue had always made sure to be in another room when all the shoving was being done.

“Because he loves you,” Pearl finished quietly, “and I’m trying to… I can’t quite figure it out.”

She turned to Blue directly then, appealing to her simply with her over-bright eyes and her slightly parted mouth, with the shadows all over her face.

So many premature lines.

And Blue Diamond returned the gaze as steadily as she could.

Perhaps she even mirrored it.

Lines and shadows and lines.

xii.

“I don’t think… I don’t imagine that I’ve been good at love in a very long time,” Blue began, each word slow and precise, maneuvered carefully on her lilting tongue like a hand-rolled cigarette wheeled between expert fingertips. “Giving, receiving it… showing it… even with my daughter… even before she—”

But the woman could not complete the sentence.

And Pearl found that she didn’t want her to.

The unspoken conclusion sat in the space between them—a little girl Pearl imagined her to be, arranged in a pretty pink dress, dangling her Mary-Jane enclosed feet from the crimson pew.

“But Steven Universe,” she continued, and even at his very name, the mere mention of him, the older woman’s expression seemed to subtly transform, the heaviness in it unfurling.

Incrementally lightening.

Surely.

“He extended a flower and smile to me that day in the cemetery. He noticed that I was sad. And that taught me a lesson I had never thought to learn in all of these many staggering years…”

Pearl couldn’t help herself then; a breathless question fell impatiently from her lips.

“And what would that be?”

Blue Diamond arched a dark brow at her that would have been haughty were it not for the tears glistening in her eyes, threatening to exceed their sunken edges.

“That there is such kindness, such… such love, in your troubles being seen, identified, and acted upon. He saw my sadness, and he named it. He gave me that tiny hibiscus and showed me, wordlessly, that I was not alone.” 

She glided a skeletal hand across the side of her face, her palm capturing the beginnings of those now falling tears.

“I was being seen, Pearl, for the first time in I cannot tell you when… and it made me realize that this is what I wanted most of all, that perhaps, this is what all humans really want in the end.”

“To be seen,” Pearl repeated, her voice constricted, so many emotions thick.

“Yes,” Blue Diamond whispered with a gracious nod of her head, disturbing the heaviness of her silvery braid, “and to be loved by another.”

“Is that what he wants?” She pressed insistently, but deep down, the answer was already known to her, spelled out to her in the rush of so many memories. How many times alone in the past couple of days had he told them as much, both with words and without them? How many times had he asked them all not to look away? Amethyst opened a window for him so he could hear the words they’d all been too cowardly to utter in his presence. In a hospital room, in the dead of night, he told her to rip the bandaid off, to confirm that which everyone already knew and tiptoed around instead of saying.

You’re very sick, sweetheart.

I know.

And even still, even after all these horrible and unsubtle signs, she’d already done the damn thing and run away from him again anyway.

He asked if she’d been scared when Rose had been in the same place, laying in a hospital bed.

Sick.

Dying.

And yes, the answer so clearly, so blatantly was.

“Yes,” Blue Diamond murmured, her quiet voice tender.

And almost, if not entirely, kind.

“I think that is what he has desired all along.”

Pearl had no other recourse then, no semblance of a facade left by which to cling to, to desperately hold onto in a chapel where two entirely different women sat side by side, utterly undone by the same boy.

She brought both of her hands up to her mouth then and began to weep.

xiii.

Blue allowed the woman her moment of private grief, turning her head away from the sight, even though the sounds weren’t as easily escapable.

The sobs.

The keening.

The primality of it all.

Tears gathered in her own eyes, but she refused to let them fall, she swept them all away—because she understood intimately, viscerally, somehow without really knowing it—that this wasn’t her moment, her child, her bone deep, unbearable, unlivable grief.

Though it had once had been.

And it still was.

But not for this child.

Not for Steven Universe.

She’d lost a child; she wasn’t currently losing one.

And there was a fundamental difference in the fact.

There was primacy.

Five minutes passed, maybe ten, and Pearl gathered herself, collected all her tiny, fragmented pieces into a frame that wasn’t entirely shaking with its own reckoning anymore. And Blue finally looked over to see that the woman was leaned forward on the edge of her pew, the heels of her hands pressed against her eyes.

“He’s not doing well,” she said faintly.

If Blue hadn’t been staring at the movement of her thin mouth, she wouldn’t have known where the words had come from.

Perhaps she wouldn’t have even believed them.

They struck cleanly, like a slap to the face.

“Yesterday’s… disappointment”—disappointment was not the correct word—“hurt him badly, and he’s shutting down. Closing off.”

Each word was painful, razor sharp in clarity, dragged from Pearl’s teeth against her will. She dragged her fingers in lines down her wet face, now reaching the point of her chin, now cupping them into fists on either side of her jaw.

“We can’t get through to him,” she finished quietly. “We’ve all tried.”

And tried and tried and tried—Blue could see every failed attempt scrawled in the lines all over the woman’s tired face. The devastation bruised her black and blue.

“I’m sorry,” she offered simply. “I’m so… sorry.”

But Pearl, with all suddenness, with an aspect of barely repressible contempt, leveled her an incredulous look as though to say, What good will sorry do?

She had an excellent point.

“You should talk to him sometime,” she went on to say, turning away from Blue now. A series of conflicted emotions seemed to be playing out in real time across her pale, sky-colored eyes—disdain warring with grief warring with loathing warring with grudging respect.

It wasn’t quite endearment, though.

And Blue Diamond had a sneaking suspicion that it never would be.

“Maybe not today… he’s tired… hurt… but some day… you should visit him. He would like that.”

It was Blue’s turn to stare at the other woman incredulously now, her mouth slightly open as she awaited a punchline that never quite came. Pearl obstinately refused to meet her gaze, fingertips templed just next to her trembling lips.

“I… I have nothing to offer him,” she whispered, a trembling note in her voice as she tried to convey exactly just how serious she was being. “I’m hardly… I mean, he was the one who saved me. I don’t know what I could ever give him in equal return.”

But somehow, without really knowing why, how, or all the sundry explanatory variables in-between, she knew that this was perfectly untrue.

And Pearl seemed to know it, too, for the corner of her lip slightly lifted in the sliver of a sardonic smile.

“Start with a flower and a smile, perhaps.”

#bellow diamond #blue diamond #yellow diamond #steven universe #pearl #garnet #amethyst #priyanka maheswaran #greg universe #connie maheswaran #rose quartz #pink diamond #flower child #mimiku #oh my god #this chapter is a monster

[mantra4ia]

Debris 1x13 "Celestial Body": rewatch Reaction'd, questions and comments

So if all those people are experiencing emotional convergence, who are they converging from? Who's sending the emotional signal that the debris is channeling, or is it the debris manifesting it's "consciousness" in a way that we can understand it by way of human conduits?

Maddox is clearly trading debris pieces with Irina (perhaps the piece that he took out of storage off the books), and Irina is on the phone with presumably her handler/ boss to negotiate this trade. She gives him lateral (which I assume means latitudinal) readings and then he asks for longitudinal readings which we don't get to hear. They are: Lateral 105, 112, 115, 120, 113, 110, 109

What's the significance of these measures? Latitude goes from 0° to 90° from the equator, so that doesn't track unless the scene is cut wrong and they're meant to be longitudinal (E/W) readings, which go to 180° relative to the prime meridian. That would make more sense, because after Irina is done with the first set of readings, the unknown caller on the phone says "drop to level two for vertical" and latitudes are North/South.

If we're talking Western longitudes, notable landmarks include: Denver, Salt Lake City UT / Phoenix AZ / nearly Sedona AZ - aka where the telesphere went, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe/ Nevada border, Great Salt Lake, Alberta-Saskatchewan border, and the Utah-Arizona border.

Or perhaps they're not part of terrestrial measurement at all. The act of "lateral reading" could just mean verifying your sources/accuracy as you go, where as vertical reading is reading for content first to see if something is worth evaluating for sources.

However, if they are part of coordinates, then is the fragment that Maddox is trading with Irina a legitimate "mapmaker" piece like George previously said Influx was seeking? Ya know, when he lied to his daughter. Can a mapmaker piece track moving/animate debris akin to the telesphere? Are those black dust cloud beings George is running from made up of animate debris?

Bryan: After becoming a parent you're in a heightened emotional state, emotionally raw.

George: Higher highs, lower lows, the joy of having a child, the postpartum depression, and the fear of getting it wrong.

Me: Are we in a pensive, self-reflective mood, George? Are you practicing your pub trivia Bryan, delivering exposition, or are you speaking from personal character experience? Seriously, how would you know?!

John Noble as Otto, man why does he always make such a good villain?

What is with the cryptic vagueness when Maddox tells Irina, "You know I can't let you leave with that case right? I mean you know that. There's another door for you Irina, one that only you can go through." They seemed almost on good terms in a previous episode, like friends or something more in a past life "nice car, i almost left / no you didn't", he wouldn't kill her, would he? Or is it more like a code between them, a sort of "I'm being watched, take the back exit"?

Hey, so why is it that sometimes George's eye seems opaque and damaged from the debris implant, but then when he's talking to Finola after he distracts Bryan while being Debris whisperer, his eye seems fine? PS: I googled Tyrone Benskin just to see what he looks like when he's not playing George Jones and I didn't know he's a former member of Canadian Parliament. Don't trust the government, eh?

George: "You're such a compassionate person, you always have been. So much of your mother in you." That's the second time that Finola's mother has been mentioned in the series, back from the pilot. Is it a coincidence that the first piece of debris that chose to interact with Finola resonated her mom? More than just Finola's desire being reflected by the debris, but the debris emoting it's first impression of her as someone compassionate that it can trust?

It also raises my heckles that George repeats, almost word for word, something that Finola said in episode 3. "If we can't help people, we do not deserve this debris / if we don't use this debris on these people, we are not worthy to have it." Are father and daughter that ideologically similar, or has he been spying on her progress this whole time, or both?

George: "I took my life to allow myself a rebirth, I paid the price. I want you to know that not one day goes by that I don't think of you and your sister. I want you to know this." This coincides with my initial impression that George staged his death to get away from Orbital after he assessed how his research was being used/abused.

George: "You never wanted to go into the pool, I had to throw you in, and you kicked and screamed, but you always did better that way." Immabout to throw you George, just keep talking!!!! I'm sorry, this charicature of absentee father reminiscing about the good old days really ticks me off from personal experience.

Also, as a person with a disability, I am not particularly pleased with the use of Dario as a plot device instead of a thoughtful character with a backstory at this point in the show for 13 whole episodes now. Pretty pissed off actually, so they better do something phenomenal and pivotal with Christian Rose (Dario) in season 2 [maybe have his character interact with debris in a similar way to Caroline]. But that's another rant about ableism in screenwriting for another angry day....

George: "A telesphere was born yesterday. It came from a pocket dimension inside Orbital. I think it's birth may have triggered the debris." This is perhaps the one-ish episode that I find George remotely interesting and also infuriating, particularly because of the way he speaks, like he's finally taken off the guise of the old, well-meaning eccentric and turned into a sharp, cunning, and at times calculatingly ruthless individual. I find it peculiar that he says a telesphere is born. Makes me think that the debris is not just part of a spacecraft, but a hybrid of the beings piloting that craft.

I get tremendous satisfaction from Finola head-butting people. This should continue.

I'm not familiar with all of the work of JH Wyman to know if this is a running theme or an ongoing joke. But does he keep his writing staff in a constant state of starvation? Is that why pieces of debris are called "Nachos", and why Influx has "Beans" to shield them from debris side effects, and why Bryan is always eating junk food? Should I be worried about the writer's room and start sending them healthy snacks?!? Just give me an SOS in the credit roll.

Speaking of: is the "Bean" that Finola ingested a piece of debris? Similar to the pieces of debris that fused with Anson Ash? Will it impart some physical benefits to her moving forward?

"I won't lose you again...you belong with me." What are you talking about George Jones, you made the conscious decision to leave your family. You didn't lose Finola, she lost you. In this version of reality at least. Or (unscripted backstory) did Jones and his wife separate prior to her death / was Finola brought up mostly by her mother? That doesn't seem the case if she was buying her father birthday presents and took it upon herself to settle his affairs after his death.

Why do the Influx Operatives Otto and Anson have tattoos on their hands, but not Loeb? Is he like the low end of the totem pole FNG who hasn't earned his stripes, hence why Otto gives him s***: aka "Careful you cretin. All the finesse of a butcher."

What is the hierarchy of Influx anyway? Despite being an anti-government "for the people/ elevate the human consciousness" organization they do still seem to have a governing hierarchy and Otto and George seem to be on the same level, pretty high in rank / they talk with confidence to each other like they go back a while.

What is that weird thing that Otto does with his hands to Bryan's head? What are all the weird things Otto does, including his massacre at the petrol station? Ick.

Why is it that Leob and George are freaked out by the black smoke (debris particle?) man, but Anson and Otto aren't? They seem to see them(?), but don't overtly react.

Bryan: "It seems like we're entering some kind of new phase." Gee where have I heard that one before? Oh yeah, the story of "Blackwater grandfather" and the black wind that they're still teasing endlessly while refusing to tether it into some kind of world building lore. Agggghh!

Lololol, Bryan and Finola's dynamic even in the midst of a very serious episode makes me laugh. "Devon Reese / two e's? / Two e's!" "This one smells like baby diapers. Almost as bad as the tech section of the plane/ You mean your section of the plane. / Almost." That zinger 👍

Paraphrasing Bryan: "[recapping, recap, and did I mention recap]...something about George doesn't feel right." Personal pet peeve: I HATE IT when episodes have intentional explanatory lines like this to point out the fact that we as audience are privy to information that the main characters aren't. Not only does it make the main characters seem less intelligent, it breaks the fourth wall a little bit and gives the impression that the audience, which is ahead of the plot, is not as intelligent and needs a reminder that we're ahead. Lackadaisical writing drives me nuts!!! I can't outright say that it's "bad" dialogue, but it's not a choice I would make if I wanted uninterrupted viewer immersion.

Finola: "My instincts are good" Me: You are an emotionally intelligent decision maker with gaping personal blind spots.

George: You belong with me, your father.

Finola: My father died six months ago, and you are not him.

Me: Chef's kiss 👏👏👏

Otto: "It would never have worked out with that girl [Finola], not in any iteration." Definitely makes me lean towards the fan theory that the alt!Finola in (presumably) suspensia in Sedona Arizona got plucked from another reality.

Surprisingly, the ending credit roll has no voiceover as all the previous episodes of the season have. Disappointed that there's no potential teaser to a season 2 if the show gets renewed. But I find it curious that the extras who were demonstrating emotional convergence were credited as: chess board persons. Not sure if that's relevant, but I definitely feel like this show is playing games with me and my emotions.

#nbc debris #debris 1x13 #debris spoilers #george jones #finola jones #bryan beneventi #celestial body #sci fi #high concept sci fi #questionable execution #this show guys #renew debris #but also I need to talk with JH Wyman

[silverhandsass]

Can You Feel The Sun (Pt.4)

Things are finally coming together y'all OwO

— SPOILER ALERT - this is post-game stuff, read at your own risk —

Read on Ao3

— — — — —

Johnny is not here.

He was never here.

So for the entire year that she had been focusing on getting her own shit back in order, Johnny was—

"I thought you didn't need permission, Alt! You said there would be no point in talking to the souls before you took them all away, how could you leave him—"

"I did not leave him." The urgency and strictness of her voice shot a spike of ice into Val's chest. "He remained in Mikoshi too long."

"What does that even mean? Why did he stay there?" Val asked, stepping closer to Alt—if that even helped, she didn't know.

"You should see for yourself," Alt replied, then waved her hands in a wide arc around her.

Suddenly, the pixels and blocks that formulated the cyberspace around them both began to shift and change. The blue tinge came back as she realized a familiar setting had been made. The table and booth at Tom's diner.

"Wait..."

Then, beside it, Johnny's car appeared. The doors were opened and the back of it had sunk low to the ground. There were the sounds of voices talking and laughing; no words to be heard but the voices echoed eerily like a memory. It was when they leaned against the back of his car and talked, one of their many sweet moments shared by flipping off the corpos of the world.

More of these spots began to appear nearby; the couch and bed of her apartment, the rollercoaster cart with only a fraction of the rails showing, the Pistis Sophia, the place where they bonded at the oil fields, Kerry's couch and the Seamurai, and finally...

The piers.

As Valerie approached them, she could see that on one of the docks, a faint silhouette of Johnny appeared. She kicked into a sprint to get to him, only for Alt to call out to her.

"He is not truly there." Val's approach slowed to a brisk walk and Alt continued. "These are the places he wished to see one last time before coming with me. A few minutes, he said. He stayed long enough for days to pass in the real world. Then, he was gone."

"What..." Val turned to face her. "What the fuck does that mean?"

"An outside force of Netrunners accessed Arasaka's systems. Either they were hired, or they were a separate faction. They were peering inside Mikoshi. They found me, and they found Johnny. It was easier to take him—he did not know how to defend himself within cyberspace. They tried to take me, so I left."

"You left?" V spat, "How could you fucking leave him like that?"

"I could not risk them seizing control of me or gaining access to beyond the Blackwall. Mikoshi needed to be shut down. It provided an ample distraction for me to leave. They could not find me this way," she explained.

"You didn't even fight? You could have helped him, you could have saved him," V argued.

"He would have been used as bait, and there was nothing to save. I would not blindly rush into a situation I know nothing about without first considering all its aspects. That, V, is where the human factor comes in." Alt did not need to say it, but V understood her meaning clearly. She was also talking about V's visit to the Blackwall.

"He trusted you. We both did," V spat.

"I was ready to take him. He was not ready to leave. I told him of the risks. He did not listen. Much like you," she reminded.

"So if-if he's not here," Val took a staggered breath. "Where is he?"

"I do not know," Alt replied.

"How could you not know?" Val gestured her arms wildly. "You are one of the most powerful entities in cyberspace, how could you not know?"

"They did not march into Mikoshi announcing their presence. They snuck in, shrouded by ICE. They were careful and prepared. I could not place their location or identity before I left."

This could not be happening. Valerie took a few steps back and she shook her head before running both hands through her hair. Not only was Johnny nowhere to be seen, but he was missing. Was there even anything of him left? Had he been chipped into some other gonk's head? Did that gonk die? Did he die? Was he well and truly gone? Or was he still stored away somewhere in another briefcase, left dormant and alone?

V was just starting to lose herself in those thoughts when Alt's form shifted once more, moving closer and hovering.

"You must leave, now," she demanded.

"Wh—" V looked up, "Alt you have to help me, this is... It's Johnny. It's Johnny."

"I cannot help you. You have been careless in your methods of reaching beyond the Blackwall that you did not think about your way back. You left the pathway open for anything to pass through, making it easy for anyone to reach this place—to reach me. But while I was able to shut it momentarily, shortly after your arrival, it will not hold if I do not shut it down properly. Leaving it open is dangerous and staying here will kill you. You must leave."

As she stepped backward toward the wall, Val looked around at the various locations that had been made around her, as though she was trying to commit what Johnny had done to memory. She looked for his silhouette once again but it was nowhere to be found. "Can't I stay just a bit longer?"

"You are still tethered to your body through the connection of the external rig. You must leave now before the wall is sealed for good. You are asking too much of your human body by staying here longer than you should. If you do not leave now, it will soon cease to be your choice."

V cast one last glance at her surroundings, beginning to pant as she approached the wall. She looked up at the AI once last time and gave her a small dip of her chin. "Goodbye, Alt."

"Goodbye, V."

She reached out her hand and placed it flat upon the beaming red surface of the Blackwall, feeling her surroundings fall apart. She had barely any time to register the change before she felt her existence yanked—tugged hard in such a way that all simulations of air escaped her lungs.

Her vision fell away pixel by pixel until it was all to bright, bright, bright.

Cold. Fuck. It was still too cold. She forgot about the damn ice and the water and—fuck, fuck, fuck!

Launching herself into a seated position, V gasped for air and felt her body shiver and shake. She soon felt Dakota's hands upon her as the cable was disconnected from her port. A second pair of hands joined in as both Panam and Dakota helped V out of the tub. They were both speaking rather loudly, saying things, but she could not hear them clearly just yet. Her mind was still catching up with her, not only trying to piece together what she had heard, but attempting to snap back to reality.

Then, the tears came.

—

"What the hell were you thinking? You didn't even tell me your plan, you didn't even ask me what I thought, you just went right on in there and went ahead, which—" Panam pointed at Dakota, "—we're gonna have a long discussion about, by the way!" She then brought her hands down on her thighs as she bent down a little to meet V's eyes. "What the fuck, Val?"

V had been sitting on the same cot that she'd usually commandeer whenever she got back to camp. She had a thick synth wool blanket wrapped around her to keep her warm and she made a point to avoid eye contact with anyone for the start of the whole conversation.

It wasn't even a conversation, it was a scolding.

"What if you died?" Panam argued, "What if suddenly I got the news that hey, that fucking gonk of yours walked into an ice bath and melted anyway! All under your nose! What then?"

She did have a point.

"I know, Panam, I..." V sighed heavily. "I know. And I'm sorry. It was... It had to be done."

"Why? What the fuck did you need to do that you couldn't talk to me about? You know I'm ready to help you, you just had to ask," she said as she knelt before her, shifting a bit closer.

"You wouldn't have agreed to this."

"Why?" she prodded.

"Because I had to see him."

There it was. The look of realization. Val had mentioned the man that was the very reason they had to charge into Arasaka in the first place. She had insisted before that it would have been just as much her fault as it was Johnny's, but Panam was fine with just blaming him. Particularly for the number of people they lost that day.

"And? Was it worth it?" Panam asked. "Did you find him?"

V watched the frayed ends of the blanket as she fiddled with them, picking apart loose threads. "No, I didn't."

"What?" Dakota blinked, stepping forward. "I thought you said he was beyond the Blackwall. We used your—" she paused, "—those memories."

"Apparently he never left Mikoshi and someone pulled him out," Val replied, her voice slowly beginning to crack a little as she faced that truth. "He's gone."

"But... we can find him, right?" Panam frowned.

"No, we can't," V finally looked up, and Panam's expression fell.

V had been entirely monotone the moment she began speaking after the tub. Both her mind and her body were still in shock by the events and the revelation. An entire year had passed since they parted ways, he could be anywhere by now.

"Fuck that, there's gotta be a way," Panam countered.

"Nothing short of walking right into Arasaka again to figure out what happened a year ago. Something I'll have to do alone, and it would be suicide."

"Okay, if you mention doing anything 'alone' one more time, I'm going to kick your ass," Panam warned.

"I'm never taking you back there, Panam. None of you, not after everything that happened," after all the lives that were taken. There was an uncomfortable silence between them as understanding fell into place.

Before anyone could keep talking, Panam stood up and then promptly wrapped her arms around V. She then pulled away but kept a hand on her shoulder. "We'll figure this out, we'll figure something out that works... If he's out there, then he needs you."

"Didn't think you'd want to go looking for him," V admitted, looking up.

"That's because you need him too."

Well then.

"Get some rest, V. I'll yell at you some more when you can yell back," Panam told her, a faint smile showing that it was merely a joke.

It was one that V certainly appreciated. She nodded and mumbled a thank you to both of them before they left. Slowly lowering herself onto the cot, she tried to clear her mind and get some of that rest she truly needed. Instead of wondering how she could possibly find him and hoping for the chance that he might still be out there somewhere, that he could be saved, Val shut her eyes and cried herself to sleep.

—

A few mumbles and wisps of words escaped past his lips, but beyond that, the man remained still. It was impressive that he continued to fight hard for consciousness when science itself was working against every muscle in his body. Bryce was uncertain how long they could keep this up, but it was necessary in order to keep the man sane. After all, one doesn't normally come back from the dead after around fifty years.

Still, it had been two weeks since their last conversation. He was not going to be happy about that, about being put down for such long periods at a time. After his general volatility, it was hard to predict how much time would have been enough.

They only had one shot at this.

The doors opened behind him and a set of heavy steps approached. Then, a clearing of a throat caught his attention, finally. "Had a ping in the net today regarding that friend we've been looking for. You'll never guess where."

Bryce blinked and finally looked away from Silverhand's body, turning to Tommy. He was holding out a datapad for him, one that he took without delay and began to read. The corners of his lips quirked up as he realized what that Merc had been up to. He shook his head and pressed the top of the datapad to his lips, glancing back down at Johnny.

The man was on the brink of his daze, nearing the time for his next dose. He continued to let out a few mumbles and sighs here and there, as though he was awake but not quite present.

"Go," Bryce ordered, handing the datapad back to Tommy. "Do what you can."

"How much do you want me to say?" he asked.

"As much as you need to, but nothing about him," Bryce reminded. As Tommy nodded and left the room, he turned back toward Johnny and leaned in just in time for his injection. "Your old pal's been causing some trouble again, Silverhand..." he chuckled. He could have sworn Johnny's eyes moved to him when he spoke those words, but it was hard to tell past the fluttering eyelids. Finally, Johnny drifted back into deep sleep and Bryce sighed, pushing away from the bed.

"Get ready to bring him back soon," he ordered the nearest doctor. "We're going to need him ready to talk."

—

Find the Merc.

That friend we've been looking for.

Your old pal.

What were they up to? What were they on about? Johnny had just been able to start hearing things a bit more clearly when he felt the Propofol coursing through his system, when he felt himself sink once more.

Find the Merc.

No. It couldn't be.

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