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vagrantblvrd · 3 years

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anakin doesn't fall to the dark side - meet the parents dinluke?

Yesssss.

Because all the AUs where Skywalker family drama is due to Anakin causing a diplomatic incident at a Fancy Dinner when he accidentally mortally offends someone who asks his opinion about sand, and not you know, the whole Darth Vader thing.

Also, the Jedi Order looking long and hard about that stance on attachment and other things because wow, okay, wow.

(But also, I must Drama a teensy bit, because yes.)

Obi-Wan enjoying the grandparent benefit of getting the joy of having Luke and Leia? But also watching Anakin deal with these little terrors of his and feels it’s payback for what he went through with just one of Anakin.

Leia who may have followed Padme into politics but everyone knows she takes after Anakin in temperament. Luke’s the one to follow Anakin in becoming a Jedi, but he’s more like his mother in temperament.

Ahsoka adores the twins, and is in fact one of their favorite partners in crime, and Anakin is like, pls, pls, stop turning my children against me,pls.

Also? Padme is kind of the worst because she’s taught them everything she knows about political maneuvering and the whatnot.

Anakin is convinced they’ll have the entire galaxy on its knees before them one day soon.

Anyway.

Luke who goes gallivanting about for reasons and after one gallivanting about trip he comes back all :DDDDDDDDDDDDD and *___________________________* and Anakin has no idea what happened other than Luke’s X-wing being shot down and him being stranded on some backwater planet somewhere for ages before the search party found him?

But when they found him he was just. Like That, and also holding this little metal ball in his hand, rolling it back and forth like it was a calming thing, little smile on his face.

Also, he went to Coruscant to speak to Yoda and only the two of them know what was said? But Yoda’s been even more insufferable than usual, livelier? Something.

(It’s a Thing known among Jedi that Master Yoda was changed when a youngling went missing years ago, kidnapped or something. Some say Yoda feels it was his fault, that the guilt still weighs heavy on him, but it’s hearsay and rumor.)

Anyway.

A few months after Luke’s rescue from that backwater planet Luke goes and gets in trouble. (He doesn’t know if the fact Leia is with him makes the whole thing better or worse? Between the two of them there’s hardly need for a rescue at all, but also the thing where they might finally take over the galaxy if left to their own devices so.)

Rescuing his kid(s).

Again.

Obi-Wan is suitably worried, but also amused as hell and really, Obi-Wan, Anakin was never that bad. Was he? Obi-Wan? Are you choking? You don’t sound well.)

Anakin and the others headed off to rescue Luke, and it turns into them going from place to place, chasing rumors and gossip and one one of these planets they run into this Mandalorian.

Flys an old gunship that looks like it’s on its last legs and wears beskar and also -

“Oh my,” Obi-Wan says, when they see the kid riding along in a bag the Mandalorian carries.

Anakin thinks it’s just the thing where the kid is clearly one of Yoda’s species, but Obi-Wan’s reaction is a little too much for somthing so simple, obvious.

Anyway, the Mandalorian tells them he can help them find Luke and Leia, and at first Anakin isn’t that thrilled about adding him to the rescue party?

But then the kid pulls out this little...trinket, charm, something Anakin and Padme gifted Luke as a child that he carries - carried - around as a good luck token, or at least that’s what he always says. (Ducks his head, sheepish little smile and Anakin and Padme like, aw, our kid is a dork like us,)

Point is, Anakins recognizes it, and the comes in like, my dude, connect the fucking dots, you’re killing me.

Which is how Anakin meets Luke’s ~sekrit boyfriend and his kid.

(Only not so much ~sekrit as Luke had plans to introduce Din to his parents and such, but the whole surprise!Dangerous Adventure thing happened first.)

Anakin being like >:( because protective parent and all?

But as they search for clues as to Luke and Leia’s whereabouts he gets to see just how concerned for Luke Din is, and how much he loves his tiny green gremlin kid, and Din’s overall skill and competence? Also, though, also. He’s smart, not just a blunt weapon, and he’s like oh, no, because he knows his son? But it’s not a bad feeling when he thinks it, just.

A little sad, wistful, what with Luke not being a kid anymore - he’s known that for a while now, but this cements the reality and all.

It’s not the surprise he thought it was when Anakin realizes he likes Din as a person, although it’s not like he’s going to say it, you know?

(I mean, he does because he’s not a complete bastard, but that’s not the point.)

They catch a break, catch up to Luke and Leia and Anakin discovers he really, really likes the way Din just absolutely destroys any baddies stupid enough to get between him and Luke, matches Anakin’s protectiveness and he’s like -

“Hey, once this is over we’re going to talk.” Smiles with perhaps too many teeth showing at Din’s confusion. “About you and my kid.

He can’t see Din’s reaction to that, because armor? But he feels this flare of !!! through the Force before it gets shoved aside in favor or getting to Luke, panic later?

And then!

Dramatic rescues and Anakin and Din decimating the baddies by themselves - Obi-Wan’s dealing with things like anti-air batteries and shield generators. Ahsoka’s making sure no one sneaks up behind Anakin and Din, but she honestly doesn’t have much to do in that regard.

And then!

Anakin is like, aw, man, I’m right here, when there’s the moment Luke and Din are ~reunited and Din is like, gos so, so still and Luke’s the one to press his forehead against Din’s because hey, hey, hes fine, he’s right here, and also hi, i missed you with them being separated even before Luke and Leia’s latest Adventure.

Still, Anakin lets them have their moment and goes to check on Leia, who gives them a look like took your time, didn’t you? But there’s relief in her eyes and she doesn’t say anything as he wraps her in a hug, calls her the nickname he gave her when she was kid and she laughs because it’s a dumb nickname dad, but it’s kind of their joke, and anyway, she had everything in hand, didn’t she? He’s just here for the cleanup.

And then! Some more!

It turns out Luke and Leia got wrapped up in some conspiracy nonsense, Palpatine’s followers who have been hiding in the shadows all this time and opportunity for revenge against the ~great Anakin SKywaler by targeting his kids.

Only the baddies miscalculated because they went after his and Padme’s kids, and everyone knows they’re complete terrors, you know? The worst.

After everything’s dealt with and they head home, Anakin is almost as amused as Leia and Obi-Wan at the way Din is all but glued to Luke’s side, that tiny green gremlin kid of his just as bad.

Anakin’s heart grows three sizes when he watches the Very Solemn exchange of the little metal ball Luke brought back with him that one time and the trinket/chram/good luck token Grogu’s been holding on to.

Valuable treasures trusted on one another’s safekeeping until they saw one another again, and Din is like. Freaking hearteyes over the two of them, because his family, and Anakin just sighs

Obi-Wan totally not laughing at him now that Anakin has no right to play the overprotetcive, disapproving father card on Din after everything he’s seen of the man and how he feels about Luke.

“Disappointed?” Obi-Wan asks, and he’s smirking as he does.

Anakin doesn’t bother with an answer because Obi-Wan knows the answer.

Something along the lines of no, and you know better, Obi-Wan, with a oh, Padme’s going to love him,because of course she is. He makes her son very, very happy, after all.

(Best, best thing, however, is Padme meeting Din, when they arrive home. Din nervous and worried because Luke’s told him about his mother, how terrifying she can be, a force of nature, and clear he adores her.

And Padme looking between Din and his son holding Grogu with this radiant smile. So in love, and easy enough to see his love returned, and everything she could have asked for for her son.)

#star wars nonsense #dinluke #anon #not!fic prompts #prompt fills #technically not a fic #vagrant fic #long post #Anonymous

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teshamerkel · 3 years

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Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Seekers of Soul

Chapter 16 (18 Pages)

<< First | < Previous | Next >

Nia spends time with Xander’s team, learning more about aura in the process.

Nia yawns, finally giving up on her book for today and slipping a furret bookmark that Maggie had given her between the pages. No matter how hard Nia tries to focus on the words about different types of Pokémon evolution, the sentences are starting to blur and jumble before her eyes, so she figures it’s time to give it a rest.

She looks up at the two Pokemon lying a few feet away on a mossy rug, comfortably sprawled out in Xander’s team quarters. The luxio and his wartortle partner are playing some sort of game with dice-like stones. Felix is clearly losing, his fluffy ears twitching as he grumbles under his breath. Xander’s cat-like face is smug with victory, his tail flicking side to side with lazy patience.

Avery is sitting at Nia’s side, the two of them relaxing back against the wooden wall on a bed of straw and moss. Nia doesn’t want to disrupt the kirlia’s concentration as they focus on their own book, but the atmosphere is so peaceful and relaxed, bathed in the warm evening sunlight coming through the lattice window, and she can’t help but feel comfortable enough to speak up.

“Can I ask you guys something?”

All three Pokemon look up, faces open and curious.

“‘Course,” Felix says.

Nia smiles, a little embarrassed. “I know your team is just as busy as ours, if not more so. How are you not, like...exhausted? Literally all the time?”

Xander looks back to the game, laughter in his voice as he responds, “Oh trust me, we are. It used to be worse, before we got used to the job and the demanding work hours.”

“Naps help a lot, when you can manage ‘em,” Felix adds, frowning as he rolls the dice. He’s had horrible luck this whole game. At least, that’s what he’s been saying. Nia still hasn’t quite picked up the rules from watching. “You feeling worn down?”

Nia leans back against the wood of the tree. The bark making up the architecture of the tree is smooth, and thanks to her fur it isn’t even uncomfortable to lean against. She closes her eyes and hums.

“Yeah, I guess. I know I’ve been here a few weeks, but I think I’m just not used to everything yet.”

“I’ll never get used to waking up so early,” Felix grumbles. “Mornings are suffering.”

Nia laughs. “Actually, that part’s not too bad. It’s more the battling, I think. And just...I dunno, emotional stuff.”

“Mental exhaustion can take a big toll,” Avery says at her side, voice soft. They close their own book to turn their full attention to the conversation.

“I’d be exhausted too if I had Tobias for a partner,” Felix says. He’s clearly teasing, but Nia knows that on some level the wartortle actually means it. “I don’t know how you put up with him every day, Nia.”

Nia’s torn between a laugh and the urge to roll her eyes. She settles on a light tone to match the wartortle’s. “Come on, I told you we worked everything out the other day. He’s trying harder to be nice.”

Felix and Xander both make a doubtful noise.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Xander says.

“Well, I think it’s great that Tobias is trying to grow,” Avery says, giving Nia a soft smile.

Nia smiles back and leans forward to watch the boys’ game again, cupping her chin in her hands.

“He’s been really patient with all of my questions since we talked,” Nia says, feeling like she should defend her partner somehow. It’s clear that he’s been trying hard to reign in his temper and be more considerate the last few days, even if he still struggles with it. “When we cleaned out the guild’s food storage this morning, he didn’t even snap at me when I bumped into some shelves and buried us in rice.”

Xander snorts. “That’s called being a decent Pokémon, Nia. Don’t give him too much credit.”

“I’m not! I’m just saying he’s doing better, y’know?”

Felix gives Nia a grin, tilting his head in consideration. “You’re too sweet, ya know that?”

Nia doesn’t know what to say to that, so she blushes under her fur and makes a show of moving her book to her side with a quiet word of thanks.

“Yo! I’m back. Did Felix get whooped yet?”

Nia jumps and looks up to see that Kry has returned from her trip to the cafeteria to find a snack. The dinosaur-like pokemon is munching on an apple as she plops down next to Felix and Xander.

“Hey, I could still win,” Felix protests.

“Ha! Yeah, and bagon can fly.”

“You do know they can fly when they evolve, right?”

“Not anymore, genius! No evolution, no wings!”

Felix deflates and grumbles to himself as he goes back to the game. Nia tilts her head and leans closer to Avery.

“S-Sorry. Uh, what kind of Pokémon is Kry again?”

“A fraxure. Dragon type, middle evolution like the rest of us.”

Nia nods. Right. Fraxure. It certainly looks like the aggressive Pokémon could live up to her name and fracture some bones, from the brief interactions Nia’s seen. Kry’s a bit...rough around the edges. But it’s clear she fits right in with the rest of Xander’s team. Somehow.

“What have you been reading, if you don’t mind me asking?” Avery asks, polite as ever.

Nia shakes herself out of her thoughts. “No, of course I don’t mind!” She holds up the book. “It’s about different kinds of evolution? I still don’t exactly, uh. Get it. As a process. But it’s fascinating to learn about all the different ways it’s triggered.”

Avery tilts their head, looking at Nia with thoughtful consideration. “You don’t understand evolution?”

Nia’s ears flatten. “W-Well, uh, no, but—“

“Does evolution not happen to humans?”

It’s clear that Avery isn’t judging Nia’s confusion, just curious in return. Still, Nia is thankful that they keep their voice hushed.

“N-No, definitely not,” Nia says. “At least, not in the same way? I think? When Pokémon evolve, they change...suddenly, right? Like, Xander used to look like Luca and then he suddenly turned into a luxio?”

Avery hums. “More or less, yes.”

“Is...Is that...how Pokémon grow up, uh...physically? By evolving?”

The kirlia shakes their head, eyes softening into something almost sad. “No. If that were the case we’d all be in danger of dying out, with how Pokemon can no longer evolve. Don’t worry, you’re an adult by Pokémon standards, even as a riolu.”

Nia relaxes at the confirmation. With the way everyone has been treating her, she was pretty sure they’d been seeing her as the adult she felt she was in the human world, but it’s still nice to know for sure.

“Pokemon can stay unevolved forever,” Avery goes on. “They’ll grow larger than a child Pokémon of the same species, though, and physically mature. Their...statures would simply be smaller than if they evolved. Weaker.”

Nia nods. That...makes some sense, in a way. Even with humans, there were grown women who ended up much shorter than some teenage boys. Different statures among the same species.

“Humans don’t ever...change so radically. So suddenly. At least not naturally.”

Avery turns curious eyes onto Nia, so the riolu continues.

“We start out tiny, and then just grow gradually until we reach adulthood. We can change parts of ourselves, of course—darken our skin, cut our hair, change our clothes or our entire style. But...that’s not what evolution is for, right? Aesthetics, individuality? Comfort?”

The kirlia hums. “No. Evolution is typically for...strength, I suppose. Increased speed, strength, defense, sheer size.”

“So for battling?” Nia asks, confusion edging into her voice. She knew that Pokémon were more biologically geared towards fighting, with their toughened defense and incredible healing capabilities, but she also knows that most Pokémon don’t seem to prefer fighting aside from playful battles. At least, not anymore. Now they’re bakers, florists, carvers and artisans. A society.

Maybe Avery understands what Nia’s getting at, because the kirlia looks thoughtful. “There’s a reason so many Pokémon evolve through battling experience and so few from exposure to stones, or travel. Most Pokémon evolve by training themselves and growing stronger. Legends say that Pokémon used to be more...primitive. Less civilized. I believe it used to be less about strength and more about survival.”

Nia watches as Felix tries to creep his hand over the dice to cheat a turn of the stones. Xander, discussing strategies in-depth with Kry, doesn’t even look before batting the turtle’s hand away with a paw. Felix yelps, and Nia giggles.

“Maybe that’s why evolution stopped working?” Nia suggests. “Maybe Pokémon have just...evolved to the point that strength evolution isn’t necessary anymore. You’re a society now, after all. You didn’t need to be physically strong to have a lot of power or be successful in the human world. We have systems, laws, protectors. Technology and weapons. Maybe you’ve just reached a point in society where that changed enough for you guys, too.”

Avery suddenly laughs, tinkling and light. Nia isn’t sure whether to feel happy at the sound or embarrassed that she’d apparently said something stupid. She settles for staring at the kirlia with wide eyes and heated fur.

“Apologies,” Avery says, meeting Nia’s eyes, ruby to ruby. “It wasn’t a stupid thought at all. Fascinating, actually. I was just...struck. By finding such a kindred spirit in you. Xander’s the only one who even tries to humor my philosophical ramblings.”

Nia feels herself relax, and laughs as well. “Two curious souls, huh?”

Avery just smiles, warm and soft.

“What’re you two nerds laughing about?” Kry asks.

Nia looks up to see the other three Pokémon staring at them.

Avery waves their hand in a dismissive motion. “My usual ramblings, Kry. Don’t mind us.”

“Talking about evolution!” Nia adds.

At that, Xander and Felix go back to their game with amused smirks. Kry, however, rolls her eyes. “Why? We can’t evolve anyways.”

“But maybe it could be fixed?” Nia suggests. When Kry turns a doubtful look on her, the riolu shrinks back. “I-I mean, maybe not, but...”

“No harm in discussing it, right?” Avery says.

Kry snorts and goes back to the game. “Guess not.”

Nia relaxes. She knows there’s no reason for Kry to put her on edge, but she just has such a...strong personality. Nia’s become more used to Tobias’ sharp attitude, but Kry? Not so much.

“Would you evolve? If you could?”

Nia blinks and turns to Avery at the unexpected question. “W-What?”

"Would you like to evolve if it were possible?” Avery repeats. Maybe this is a normal question for most Pokémon. Or for their teammates and friends, at least.

“U-Um. I don’t know? Maybe?” Nia flicks her tail into her lap, trying to sound confident. “I mean, it doesn’t really matter much to me, since I’m going back to the human world as soon as I can find a way to return, s-so...”

Avery doesn’t respond aside from a soft sound that Nia can’t quite decipher. She’s too afraid to look at the kirlia’s expression, too scared of seeing the pity or doubt she might find there, so she deflects. “Besides, to evolve I’d have to form an affection, um...”

“Bond?”

“Yeah! An affection bond with someone. And from what I’ve read, that doesn’t seem to mean just a casual friendship.”

Avery nods, eyeing their teammates. “Correct. An affection bond that can lead to evolution only occurs between Pokemon who trust each other with anything. Who see each other as they truly are and would likely die for each other.”

Nia flicks her ear, nervously. “Th-That’s a bit, uh. Extreme.”

Avery laughs lightly under their breath. “Indeed. It’s simply how we tend to describe it. It’s...the deepest form of love, whether platonic or romantic.”

Nia nods, shifting uncomfortably. “Yeah, so...I mean, don’t get me wrong! I’m really glad I met you guys and Andyn’s group and Maggie and, uh, even Tobias, in a weird way. But...”

“You don’t think you’ll ever have that sort of bond with us,” Avery guesses.

Nia flinches. The psychic type’s words aren’t cold or insulted, but it still sounds...harsh.

“Yeah, I guess,” Nia rasps, pulling her knees up to her chest. “It’s just...I’m planning on leaving, you know? I don’t wanna get too close to anyone just to leave us both heartbroken when I go.”

Avery doesn’t answer, but the silence doesn’t feel heavy. Still, Nia rests her chin on her hands, sighing. She wants to go home, nice as it is here, but she still feels bad just leaving these people behind after their kindness.

She’ll miss them.

Maybe Avery picks up on Nia’s mood change, because they turn to the riolu with an encouraging smile. “Xander mentioned that you can read the aura of other Pokemon now. Would you like to try it on me, if it’s not too much strain?”

Nia recognizes the distraction technique, but can’t help feeling grateful for it. She lifts her head, blinking. “R-Really?”

“I’m a psychic type. I know how exciting it is to try out a new mental technique with someone willing.”

Nia straightens up and turns to the kirlia, feeling a smile edge at her lips. It’s not every day she gets to test her aura abilities on someone new! So far she’s only felt Val and Maggie’s auras, and Amani’s blossoming pink during a different training session. “O-Okay. You know it’s pretty, uh…personal, though, right? Like, I’m kind looking at your soul, I think?”

Avery nods with a smile. “I’m aware.”

“J-Just let me know if you want me to stop, okay? I’ll need your hand, though.”

Avery offers a delicate hand.

Nia takes it and closes her eyes, summoning her aura (it gets easier every time she does it!), pouring it down her arm and into her hand, brushing it against the kirlia’s skin to find their aura. When Avery’s silhouette sparks to life behind Nia’s eyes, she laughs. Even without looking deeper towards the core of Avery’s aura, Nia can feel the prickle of their curiosity.

“Your aura’s blue like mine!” Nia explains.

The kirlia laughs too, quietly. “Kindred spirits indeed.”

Nia nods. “Your aura is more of a...purpley-blue, though. Deeper. Kind of indigo.” It feels...serene. Filled with a boundless curiosity and something deeply wise. It’s a dusk sky just as stars begin to shine, a calm evening full of possibilities. It’s actually a little difficult to put her finger on, to interpret the color into a personality, more difficult than it has been so far. Before Nia can go on, Felix’s hushed voice breaks through her concentration.

“That’s so cool!”

Nia jumps, yanking her hand back as the tear drops at her head drop lightly to the collar of fur around her neck. Nia turns to find Xander, Felix, and even Kry sitting close to her and Avery and watching the whole ordeal with fascination.

“Ooh! Can you do me next?” Felix asks excitedly, scooting closer as if she won’t see him there, practically bouncing in his seat.

Xander gives Felix a reprimanding look. “Dude, chill, she might need to rest or something. You know how Avery gets when they’re overworked.”

Before Felix can deflate under the scolding, Nia smiles. “N-No, I can do it, don’t worry. Just give me a second. I’m still learning so it kind of wipes me out, but that’s why I need to practice. You don’t mind me reading your aura? It’s kind of, um. Personal.”

Felix grins at her with shining eyes. “Nah, I don’t mind if it’s not too exhausting for you.”

Nia exchanges an amused look with Avery, then turns her body to Felix. She closes her eyes, holds out her hand for him to take, and then repeats the process of finding her aura, and sending it to where she’s touching the wartortle’s skin.

Felix’s aura flares to life behind Nia’s eyes, and she feels her face drop slack in surprise as the color registers. “Oh. Felix, you’re green.”

The turtle sounds as surprised as his aura feels, the green energy jumping in intensity. “Really?”

“Yeah. Like...a calm, leafy sort of green.” Not calm in the typical sense because the wartortle is certainly not that, but…flexible, she supposes. Purposefully not anxious. Like the changing seasons and the trees that follow them, very go-with-the-flow and easygoing. As unexpectedly sturdy as an oak tree, too. Comforting. It does make sense for the wartortle, in a way, but she has to admit she’s surprised by how deep into his very being his instincts to comfort amuse stabilize go. Oh, he is a very kind soul. A very open, alive soul.

Kry snorts. “Calm. Sure. Clearly you’ve never seen him after being rejected by someone.”

“Hey!” Felix says, indignant.

Nia’s concentration is broken again, and Felix’s hand is yanked away. She blinks back into reality only to sees Kry and Felix play wrestling. Xander rolls his eyes at them, but then looks back at Nia, ears swiveling forward and his brow furrowing with concern. “You okay?”

Oh, she’s breathing harder as her powers take a toll on her. But she doesn’t feel nauseous yet, which must mean she’s getting better! She gives Xander a smile. “I’m fine. This is already leagues better than I was a few days ago! Want me to check your aura, too?”

Xander blinks, exchanging a glance with Avery. Just as Nia’s about to reassure him he doesn’t have to agree, he nods. “You sure you’re okay? I don’t want you to push yourself too hard.”

For a moment, Nia’s thrown by the obvious concern in the luxio’s voice, and her heart squeezes with something fond—

(She said she wasn’t going to make strong friendships here, she can’t, she’s leaving, but—)

—but then she just laughs it off, shaking her head. “N-No, I’m fine. Really.”

Xander looks at her face a moment longer, as if he’s worried she’s lying to him and about to pass out. But then he nods and lifts a paw for her to take.

Nia smiles and closes her eyes, curious despite herself. She’s only known Xander for a couple of weeks, but the more auras that Nia reads the more interesting they become, the more exciting it is to reconcile them with a person’s outward personality. So she reaches out eagerly with her aura, ignoring the strain that she’d just reassured she wasn’t feeling, and nearly recoils in surprise when Xander’s silhouette lights up in a very distinct color. It’s not a deep, protective blue, as she would have guessed, or really any color that she would have predicted.

It’s bright red.

Red, like blood pulsing from a wound, but it doesn’t bring to mind pain or aggression. It’s the blood of a beating heart, it’s the red of passion and emotion, almost too bright in its intensity, almost volatile, and oh, she never would have guessed that this was such an integral part of cool and collected Xander, that he would feel emotions so strongly they hurt. His aura is the blood of a fierce battle, of a pulse pounding away to act, to protect. It’s the red of a heart willing to bleed out before losing those close to him.

A surge of what Nia now recognizes as concern flows through his aura and slams into her like a tidal wave. Nia feels herself physically knocked back from the strength of it, pulling her hands away to catch herself. She snaps back to reality, breathing hard and loud in the quiet of the room, her heart pounding.

Xander is watching her with wide eyes, one paw lifted as if he’d reached out to help but then feared making things worse. Avery is watching her too. The sounds of Kry and Felix’s tussling have stopped.

“Nia? Are you all right?” Avery finally asks, voice soft and level.

Nia swallows hard, her own heart just starting to slow from the overwhelming intensity of Xander’s aura. She looks at the luxio again, and that’s what finally prompts her to pant, “I-I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” Xander asks. “I didn’t hurt you?”

“Y-Yeah, no, sorry, that was just, uh. Unexpected? You’re red, by the way.” Just saying Xander’s aura is red is the understatement of the century, but how is she supposed to explain what she just felt?

“Red?” Xander echoes, his stiff posture finally starting to relax again. Kry and Felix move closer to listen.

Avery hums. “Interesting. And that means?”

Nia fiddles with the collar of fur around her neck, gaze flicking up to the sun-washed ceiling as she thinks. “W-Well...I’m not sure how good I am at explaining it...”

“Wait, but you said green meant calm, right?” Felix asks. “Isn’t there like...a color cheat sheet or something? Like a list of what each color means?”

“Your green is calm,” Nia corrects. “The colors sort of tell me about someone’s personality and who they are, but I don’t think there’s like...a strict color-code?”

Nia looks to Avery for help, but the kirlia only offers a sympathetic shrug. Oh. Apparently their psychic powers don’t work the same way.

“U-Um. Okay. So for example, my aura is sort of a turquoise blue, but Avery’s is more purple, like a royal blue or indigo. Their aura feels...calmer than mine does, I guess? And Felix, yours is green because you’re so adaptable, like the trees. Very go-with-the-flow, but still sturdy and reliable. Someone else’s aura might be green too but feel super different to me.”

There’s a moment of quiet as they all digest that information, and Nia cringes. “...At least, I think that’s how it works.”

“So what did my aura feel like?” Xander finally asks. “Mine seemed to…affect you differently than the others’ did.”

Nia hesitates, still fiddling with her fur. How does she describe this? “Yours is red, but it’s red like…passion, I guess would be the word. It’s just really emotional? Kind of intense, actually. I’ve never felt someone’s emotions as strongly as I did yours. They kind of swept me away and knocked me right out of my aura state.”

When Nia looks away from the ceiling to gauge the others’ reaction to that, her stomach drops. Xander is staring at her in something close to horror, his fur lifting like a startled cat. She catches Felix shooting Xander a worried look. Wait, what…what happened? She just described his aura to him. Why does he look so upset?

Before the silence can grow too tense, Kry snorts and crosses her arms, apparently tone-deaf to the sudden shift of the room’s mood. “That’s a load of crap. Xander’s the most level-headed one here. Do mine next.”

Nia opens her mouth to say no, watching Xander back away with a gaze like he isn’t totally here. Avery and Felix exchange a concerned look before the kirlia moves to follow the luxio, approaching him with soft words and a hand soothing the spiked fur along his spine.

“Well?” Kry grunts, shifting to cut into Nia’s line of sight.

“W-Wait, Xander—”

“You admittin’ you were wrong?” Kry says, almost like a challenge. “Too afraid to read mine?”

Nia focuses on the fraxure, huffing in irritation. She just upset Xander—and something in her recoils at that thought, already flooded with guilt—and Kry hasn’t even noticed? Fine, if reading Kry’s aura will get her to shut up and move so Nia can check on Xander, she’ll do it. Nia closes her eyes and touches Kry’s open palm. She shoots her aura down her arm and into her paw almost angrily, and Kry’s energy flares to life. Once again, the color that she finds there isn’t quite what she’s expecting.

“You’re…gold,” Nia says. It’s the gold shine of priceless treasure, something proud and hard-fought. But it’s also the gold of armor, of a shield, determined and immovable. Protective. She feels the fraxure’s emotions shift too rapidly for her to catch, but she doesn’t really care too much anyways, with what’s happening to Xander three feet away. Nia pulls back and opens her eyes, meeting Kry’s hard stare with her own.

“So what’s gold mean?”

Nia frowns. “It feels...determined. Proud, I guess. I dunno, I’m not very good at this yet.” Nia’s attention is elsewhere, and she leans past the dinosaur to see Xander, only to find that Xander and Avery have disappeared from the room entirely. Felix meets her panicked gaze with a sad, soothing smile.

“Sorry, Nia, Xander just…had to get some air. Don’t worry, he’ll be fine.”

“Wait, what…what happened?” Nia rasps. “Is Xander okay? He looked...”

Felix and Kry exchange a meaningful look. The wartortle nods, and Kry moves to start cleaning up the game abandoned on the rug a few feet away, completely silent. It’s such a shift from her aggressive prodding moments before that Nia wonders if the fraxure wasn’t as oblivious to Xander’s sudden emotional turn as she thought.

Was Kry distracting her?

“Nia,” Felix says, catching her attention again. He gives her a small smile. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Just…accidentally brought up some unhappy memories for Xander.”

Nia wilts, her heart sinking in her chest. She really likes Xander—she didn’t mean to upset him! Why would learning about his aura have upset him so much? Is this what Val was warning her about, about using her powers responsibly? But she didn’t do it without asking. He wanted to know! Should she have not told him what she saw? But then she would have had to lie to him!

“I didn’t mean to upset him,” Nia whimpers.

Felix’s expression softens. “I know you didn’t. And he does too, don’t worry. But maybe for tonight you should head back to Maggie’s. C’mon, I’ll walk with you.”

Nia opens her mouth to protest—she doesn’t want to just leave without talking to Xander or at least apologizing to him! But Felix is already at the doorway to the hall, beckoning her with a twitch of his fluffy tail. He doesn’t seem angry with her, but it’s clear that he’s nudging her to leave for today. Feeling upset and a lot less proud of her aura abilities, Nia grabs her book and follows him out the door, shuffling up the guild’s stairs and hoping Maggie doesn’t ask her what’s wrong.

#pmd #pokemon mystery dungeon #wartortle #fraxure #luxio #pokemon #pmd seekers of soul #riolu #kirlia #tesha draws #tesha writes

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bedlamsbard · 3 years

Text

Part 11 of the other side AU concept, the first epilogue sequence! There should be one more epilogue scene after this, maybe two because despite its length this is still technically concept writing and I’m going as long as I still amuse myself.

Previous: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

About 6.7K below the break.

***

Later

The Chimaera had struck the planet point-first and then broken in half, the impact of its crash leaving a kilometers-wide crater surrounding its corpse. The bow was still embedded upright in the crater, leaving the serpentine symbols on the star destroyer’s underside clearly visible at this distance. The remainder of the ship had fallen flat, creating a second, smaller crater where it had broken off. Carbon-scoring and other damage darkened the usually pristine white hull of the star destroyer; there were patches of differently-colored plating that marked where repairs had been done over the years, probably where the ship had been damaged during the purrgil assault over Lothal.

“How long do you think it’s been here?” Sabine asked, flipping down the rangefinder on her helmet for a closer look.

Hera raised her macrobinoculars and studied the ship’s hull. “A few years, at least?” she guessed. “Look at that – are those plants?”

The magnification revealed that much of what she had taken for carbon-scoring was plant matter instead, greenish vines crawling over the massive ship’s hull, moss spreading out in clumps as large as an X-wing. Hera turned her gaze downwards, where a riot of greenery had sprung up across the surface of the crater. The Chimaera’s initial crash would have killed off all the plant life in the crater; the ship had been here long enough for the jungle to return.

Hera lowered the macrobinoculars and turned to Kanan, who was standing beside her with his arms crossed over his chest, his face fixed in a frown. “Is there anyone alive down there?”

He started to answer, then hesitated. After a moment, he said, “There’s a lot of life down there. I’m not sure if any of it is sentient.”

Sabine pushed her rangefinder upright again and rolled her shoulders back. “We need to get into those computers.”

Hera gauged the distance between their current position and the wreckage of the Chimaera, considered the sharpness of the drop at the crater’s edge, and said, “We’ll fly in – land in one of the docking bays if we can, outside if we can’t.”

She pulled at the high collar of her shirt as the three of them turned back to the Ghost, parked half a kilometer away in a slight dip where it was impossible to see from the edge of the crater. The combination of heat and humidity made the air sticky and cloying, and the jungle all around them gave her the distinct impression of being watched. She could tell from both Kanan’s and Sabine’s posture that they felt the same. Vegetation ran riot all around them, abrasive and alien to her desert-bred eyes; something about the heavy vegetal smell of the planet made her feel like she was constantly about to sneeze.

Zeb was waiting at the foot of the Ghost’s ramp when they returned to the ship. He turned sharply at their approach, bo-rifle raised, then lowered it when he recognized them. “This place gives me the creeps,” he said. “Anything?”

“We’ll have to check it out in person, but it looks like it’s been there a while,” Hera said, finally giving into her urge to sneeze, which she did three times in quick succession. She wiped the back of her hand under her streaming nose and promised herself she would take some allergy tablets before she went outside again.

Zeb waited to follow them into the ship until they were all inside, then walked backwards up the ramp, his gaze still fixed on the jungle. He didn’t relax until the ramp was up and locked again, shaking himself all over until his fur stood up.

Hera found the allergy tablets in her cabin and took them with a glass of water, then went up to the cockpit to join her crew. Sabine had abandoned her helmet on her chair and was frowning at the sensor station, Chopper plugged in beside her. “Life signs are all over the place. So’s atmo – I didn’t realize it before because I was just checking for breathable air.”

“What do you mean?” Hera stopped to look over her shoulder.

Sabine pointed at the screens. “Here are the oxygen levels when we got here and what they are now. See? They’re down – just a fraction of a percentage, but it hasn’t been more than an hour; they should be stable. I think there are some other trace elements that are fluctuating too, but I’d have to run specialized scans – the sensors don’t track those automatically.”

“What do you think?”

Sabine shrugged. “It could be nothing – we’re well off the star charts. This could be normal for this planet.”

“Keep tracking it,” Hera said, sneezed again, and went up to the pilot’s chair.

Kanan was slouched in the co-pilot’s seat, frowning through the viewport. He turned his head as she sat down, his scarred eyes narrowed in concentration.

“What do you sense?” Hera asked him. “Anything?”

“I don’t know. There’s something out there, but it’s not anything like I’ve ever felt before. It’s clouding everything else.” He frowned briefly. “It isn’t the dark side, for what that’s worth.”

“That’s good, right?” Zeb said, coming in and dropping into his seat.

“Maybe.” Kanan settle more comfortably back in his chair as Hera started pre-flight checks, the Ghost’s engines rumbling to life beneath her feet. His hands moved smoothly over the control boards in front of him, even though his unseeing gaze never moved from the viewport in front of him. “The dark side’s not the only dangerous thing out there.”

Sabine returned to her chair, still frowning over the sensor readings. “Chop, keep an eye on those?” she said; he made a noise of agreement. “It could be terraforming,” she told them doubtfully. “I wish we were getting clearer life signs readings – there’s no standard baseline for this world to filter out animal life.”

“We didn’t spot any ships on our approach,” Hera said.

“We might not have if they were on the other side of the planet or are some kind of vessel our sensors aren’t calibrated for,” Sabine said, looking unhappy.

“You’re a pessimist,” Zeb told her.

“No, I’m paranoid, there’s a difference. And something brought the Chimaera down.”

There was nothing Zeb could say to that.

Hera took the Ghost up gently, fighting back the feeling that the jungle plants were trying to keep the vessel moored to the planet’s surface. Her sensors didn’t show any kind of drag, so it had to be her imagination. Once they were over the jungle, she flew low across the top of the tree canopy until they reached the crater, where she did a slow loop around the remains of the Chimaera. Up close the riot of encroaching vegetation was even more obvious, green and orange moss spreading across the ship’s cracked and pitted hull, massive vines outlining each durasteel plate, already beginning to tear some of them loose – some kind of fungi even seemed to be eating through the metal. The idea of landing the Ghost anywhere near that vegetation made Hera’s lekku twitch.

She circled the Chimaera again, her gaze fixed on the shattered star destroyer’s hull. “There,” she said eventually. “The docking bay doors are open. I’m going to land inside.”

“Is that smart?” Sabine wondered, then leaned forward over Hera’s shoulder to get a better look at the starfighter-sized mushrooms growing through the nearest shattered hull plate and said, “Okay, I take it back. That stuff could be inside, though.”

“I don’t want to leave the Ghost in the open, either,” Hera said. Even with the vegetation that had grown up since the Chimaera’s crash, there was still vanishingly little cover – enough to hide a person, but not the Ghost.

She brought the Ghost down, slanting the ship to match up with the uneven angle of the open port docking bay. With the sun at its current angle, the upright bow cast the fallen half of the ship into shadow. Something about that made her skin prickle. As they passed it, she saw that the huge vines tracing their way up the underside of the bow outlined the nicked and damaged serpents’ heads on the ventral hull, cut off at the neck where the rest of the ship had broken away. At least the bridge was on the fallen portion of the ship, so with any luck they wouldn’t have to explore the bow.

There were no whole ships in the docking bay, though the wreckage of several TIEs was strewn across the deck, and one TIE Interceptor had been smashed against the far wall. There were no Lambda shuttles and the wreckage didn’t account for the number of TIE fighters that the Chimaera should have carried in one docking bay. The doors leading to the corridor outside the bay had been jammed open, with only darkness beyond – not even the emergency lights were lit. Not that Hera had expected them after all this time. Plant life had already crept in through the open bay doors, but didn’t seem to have spread far beyond them.

She set the Ghost down in the largest clear patch of floor she could find, crunching a TIE fighter’s solar panels under her landing struts. As Hera shut the engines down, she glanced up to see that the front of the docking bay control tower was crumpled as if something had struck it, the windows shattered – black pits that stared sightlessly back at them. She shuddered and turned her seat around to face the cockpit.

“Sabine, Zeb, take Chopper and go up to the bridge. Hopefully the Imperials didn’t have a chance to wipe their computers before they evacuated. I want to know where they were before they got here, who attacked them, and how long ago it happened – and anything else that looks useful.”

Both Sabine and Zeb nodded, and Chopper made an affirmative noise.

“Kanan and I will find Thrawn’s office,” she went on. “Stay in contact, and don’t go anywhere alone. We still don’t know what happened here.”

They all nodded.

“No one’s staying with the Ghost?” Zeb asked, frowning. “Is that smart?”

Hera sighed, deeply relieved that she and Kanan had decided to leave Jacen on Ryloth with her father rather than bring him with them. “Probably not, but there aren’t that many of us as it is. I’d rather not split us up anymore. The Ghost will be code-locked, anyway, so anyone trying to steal it will have to work for it.”

It wasn’t thieves she was worried about, though, she thought a few minutes later as they left the ship. There was a massive vine laying across the deck nearby, as thick around as her upper body; this close she could see spines digging into the durasteel plating of the deck. When Sabine walked over to inspect it, the deck made an odd squishing sound and she skipped back, startled. Chopper let out a squawk of dismay and huddled close to Hera’s legs.

She patted his dome reassuringly. “Don’t worry, we won’t be here long enough for that. Stay with Sabine and Zeb.”

He grumbled, but after another reassuring pat rolled away from her and over to Sabine and Zeb. As the three of them started towards the yawning mouth of the open hatchway, Hera moved to Kanan’s side. He was standing near the vine, frowning at it.

“Is it…sentient?” Hera asked him, not certain what might have spurred that particular expression. There were a few sentient plants in the galaxy, but they were a rarity.

He shook his head. “No, but there’s something…odd. I’m not sure what it is.” He shook himself all over like a nervous Loth-wolf and turned to join her, taking his lightsaber off his belt as he did so.

Hera drew her blaster and took out her glowrod. While she didn’t strictly need it to see in the dark, Twi’lek night vision had evolved for use in the caves under Ryloth’s surface and didn’t work quite as well in an all-metal starship. She was glad for the light as they made their way through the cave-like maze of the star destroyer’s corridors.

She had been on enough star destroyers to know exactly where she was going and how to get there, but more than once she and Kanan had to backtrack and find a different route. Hera had been over on the Lusankya, one of the Rebel Alliance’s captured star destroyers, shortly before the Ghost had left for the Unknown Regions, so her memory was fairly recent, but the damage the Chimaera had taken either in the crash or the fight that had led to it turned the ship into a labyrinth. Hera just hoped it wasn’t the kind of labyrinth with a monster lurking at the center of it.

There were no bodies that they saw, but there was evidence of hard fighting everywhere. Whatever had happened to the Chimaera had at least partially occurred on the ship itself – Hera spotted carbon-scoring on the walls and floor, as well as the unmistakable wreckage left behind by grenade detonations. The source of some of the damage she was a mystery to her, though – places that looked like acid had eaten through the walls and floor, patches of strange mold and fungi that couldn’t have yet made its way through the starship’s thick hull. Some corridors had collapsed completely, probably when the ship had broken up. The whole ship felt haunted in its emptiness, the echoing silence only broken by the distant drip…drip… of water or some other liquid. She and Kanan had to walk braced at odd angles where floors had buckled or broken up entirely.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Hera murmured, shining her glowrod over some kind of pulsing orange fungus that covered most of the floor in front of her. There was enough clear deck that they could have edged around it, but something about the idea made her lekku twitch uneasily. She didn’t want to get near it.

Kanan studied the fungus with one hand outstretched, his frown deepening, then nodded in agreement. “Let’s find another way.”

Hera sighed in equal parts resignation and relief as they turned around. The lack of bodies should have been a relief, but she found it just as disquieting as the rest of the ship. The Imperials might have buried their dead before evacuating the ship, she supposed, but she had assumed they had left before it had crashed. Maybe not.

Her comlink beeped. Hera took it off her belt and said, “Spectre Two here.”

“Spectre Five checking in,” Sabine’s voice said, crackling a little – that was odd, there shouldn’t have been any interference on the ship itself, since there wasn’t that much physical distance separating them. “We think we’re about halfway there; we have to keep doubling back and finding another way around.”

Kanan leaned over Hera’s shoulder and said, “Us too. Have you found anything interesting yet?”

“Yeah, if you see any mushrooms, don’t step on them,” Zeb said. “They explode.”

“Are you all right?” Hera demanded, alarmed.

“Tested it with some scrap,” Zeb said. “This place is –” He hesitated, probably searching for a word in Basic, then gave up and said, “– what we’d call tsaeanla back home. Cursed, maybe.”

Hera chewed on her lower lip, but couldn’t argue with that. “Well, we’re not staying once we’ve gotten what we came for. Spectre Two out.”

It still gave her a minor shock to say that; she had gone by other call signs for most of the war.

She replaced her comlink back on her belt and began the painstaking work of backtracking their progress until they could find another corridor that paralleled the one with the orange fungus. Except for some buckling along the walls, this one seemed almost untouched and they were able to proceed without difficulty until they hit the next bank of turbolifts. Kanan pried open the doors and grimaced at the shaft. “Up or down?” he asked her.

“Up. Six levels.” Hera stepped up beside him and shone her glowrod up the shaft, searching for the lift car in car in case it was blocking their passage. “We should be able to climb this.”

“I’ve got a better idea.”

Hera flicked a bemused look at him. “Oh? What’s that?” She caught her breath in surprise as he moved his hand and she felt herself leave the floor. He kept her there, hovering only a centimeter above the deck, until she said, “All right.”

“Tell me when to stop.”

Hera angled her glowrod upwards, never releasing her grip on her blaster, as Kanan drew her through the entrance to the turbolift and then pressed her upwards. She was careful not to look down or consider the fact that she was hanging in mid-air.

“Here,” she said eventually. “Put me about a meter forwards.”

He did so, and Hera reached out to grab the edge of the doorframe, digging her feet onto the tiny lip that protruded out from the doors. “I’ve got it,” she called down. “Go ahead and come up.”

She didn’t look back, but she heard a series of soft metallic thuds as Kanan followed her, leaping from side to side of the shaft with only a fraction of a second between touching the wall and pushing off again. He was beside her less than a minute later, bracing himself with one hand against the doorframe as he extended his other hand. The doors slid open with a faint protesting creak; Hera resisted the urge to step forwards immediately and shone her glowrod down the corridor instead.

There was a thick, vegetal smell in the air, but no sign of vegetation. She stepped cautiously out of the elevator shaft. Her glowrod picked up reflected flashes of illumination from the shattered corridor lighting as she made her way forwards, pausing occasionally to shine her glowrod into the dark caverns of chambers with open doors. Thrawn’s office wasn’t one of them, Hera found, sighing in frustration when they stopped in front of the closed door.

“I should have brought Chopper,” she muttered, starting to reach for the slicing tools inside her jacket.

Kanan flashed a grin at her. “I’ve got it.” He held his hand out over the door control panel; there was a click as the lock disengaged. He moved his hand slightly, and the door slid open.

Hera stepped cautiously into the short corridor beyond. It was obvious that Thrawn had kept it lined with pieces of his art collection; ceramic crunched under her boots, and she turned her glowrod downwards to see the shattered pieces of something broken beyond recognition. Plinths, probably normally bolted to the floor, had been thrown wildly about, with most of their displays destroyed. She and Kanan picked their way through the ruin of what had presumably once been an impressive display, though the only complete piece was a painted clone trooper helmet which hadn’t even been dented by the disturbance. She looked back to see Kanan pick it up, frown at it, then set it carefully down, right side up.

The control for the door to his main office wasn’t working either, but Kanan was able to open it with another wave of his hand. Further destruction greeted her as she stepped in. More of Thrawn’s collection was – or had been, rather – on display here; it hadn’t survived the crash. That must have annoyed Thrawn, Hera thought with grim satisfaction, assuming that the Chiss grand admiral was still among the living.

She and Kanan picked their way through the wreckage of the room. Kanan paused to pick something up; when Hera turned to see what had made him stop, she saw him holding a Jedi Temple Guard’s mask between his hands. Hera hesitated, uneasy about the thing; when Kanan felt her looking at him he raised his head. He bit his lip, then shrugged, hooking it to the back of his belt.

Hera turned back to the desk. She couldn’t grudge Kanan his desire to take something that belonged to the Jedi out of this tomb; she would have done the same if there had been anything from Ryloth in here. She just wished it hadn’t been that.

As she knelt behind Thrawn’s desk and reached for the emergency power restart, Kanan took his comlink off his belt and said quietly, “Spectre One to Spectres Four and Five. No, Spectre Three, I didn’t forget you,” he added in response to a flurry of aggravated beeping that made Hera smile. “We’re at Thrawn’s office.”

“We’re about to start the ascent to the bridge,” Sabine said. “It shouldn’t take too long, unless the turbolift is stuck in the shaft somewhere up here. We’ll check in when we reach out.”

“Acknowledged. Spectre One out.” Kanan put his comlink away and came over to join Hera behind the desk.

To Hera’s disgust, the emergency power restart had no effect; it had been completely drained, which Hera supposed she should have expected given the lack of power elsewhere in the ship. She and Kanan cobbled together a battery with the power cells from his blaster and Hera’s comlink, which got the desk to boot up with frustrating sluggishness. Trying to view anything would undoubtedly end in immediately draining the power, so Hera slid the first of her data cards in and set it to copy, then got up to explore the suite in case there was anything useful they could just grab.

Probably under normal circumstances Thrawn kept his living space immaculate; as it was, it looked like the crash had thrown it wildly askew. Every step Hera made crunched as she trod broken ceramic, glass, crystal, and wood under her boots.

“What a mess,” Kanan said, low-voiced. He ran one hand along the wall, his brows narrowed in concentration.

The desk beeped sluggishly and Hera went back to swap out the full data card for an empty one. As she was kneeling behind it, she heard Kanan’s comlink beep in the other room and his response of, “Go for Spectre One.”

Debris crunched beneath his boots as he came back into the office, crouching down beside Hera so that she could listen.

“We’re at the bridge,” Sabine’s voice said, crackling a little but otherwise clear. “There’s no power up here, but Chopper and I managed to jumpstart some of the computers. Logs are encrypted; I can decrypt them back on the Ghost, so we’re copying them over. It’s an older encryption so I don’t have the key on me.”

“No power here either,” Hera said. “We’re doing the same. I hope Thrawn wrote his logs in Basic,” she added, wincing at the thought. She wasn’t actually certain what his native language was.

There was a long moment of silence, then Sabine said, “Hera, we know when the ship crashed.”

“Yes?” Hera said pointedly when she didn’t go on.

Sabine took a deep breath. “Three days ago.”

“What?” Kanan said.

“The Chimaera crashed three days ago. Not three months, not three years, three days ago.”

All those plants.

“Get out of there,” Hera said flatly. “Get the logs and get out. We’ll meet you back at the Ghost.”

“Acknowledged. Spectre Five out.”

Kanan replaced his comlink on his belt, his expression grim as he considered the desk in front of them. Hera glanced at it, willing the files transmit more quickly, then looked back at him.

“Talk to me,” she said quietly. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I have a bad feeling about this,” Kanan said, his voice equally soft. Suddenly the waiting darkness outside their tiny circle of light beyond the desk, never friendly, seemed hostile, as if home to every childhood nightmare Hera had ever known.

“Three days isn’t long,” Hera whispered. She didn’t want to raise her voice; there hadn’t been any evidence of animal or sentient life on the Chimaera so far, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any at all. “Unless they’ve taken major losses over the past six years, they can’t evacuate an entire ship’s crew – star destroyers don’t carry enough hyperspace-capable vessels for that. They’re still here.”

Kanan ran his fingers along the back of the desk, frowning, then shook his head.

“You don’t think they’re here?” Hera asked, not sure how to interpret his expression. She couldn’t shake the feeling that seven years ago she would have known exactly what was going through his head without having to ask, but six months after his return they were still relearning each other.

“I didn’t say that,” he murmured back. “I think there’s something going on here that neither of us can see yet.”

“I don’t need the Force to know that,” Hera said. The desk beeped again, the tone falling off and suggesting that their jury-rigged power source had come to the end of its life. Hera hit it with the palm of her hand until it reluctantly gave up the data card and wondered if it was worth sacrificing the power cell in her blaster or Kanan’s lightsaber to make certain that everything had been copied over. She was fairly certain that all of her files would have fit on one data card with room left over; she just hoped that she had gotten Thrawn’s files and not copies of his art collection.

She tucked the data cards into her pocket, pulled the used power cells from the desk so that she could recharge them on the Ghost, and used the desk to lever herself to her feet. Kanan followed with his usual careless grace, rolling his shoulders back so that his spine popped. Hera flicked a glance at him, bemused.

They searched the rest of Thrawn’s suite quickly, but without much success. Kanan eventually dug out a handful of data cards from behind a panel in the small cabin and passed them to Hera to put with the others, then stood scowling at the shattered remains of something that Hera assumed at once been another Jedi artifact.

She put her hand on his arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

He nodded, his expression still distressed.

They left Thrawn’s suite behind and went back down the corridor to the turbolift shaft. Hera braced her hands on either side of the doorframe and peered down its dark length dubiously. Her glowrod didn’t penetrate very far down. “I should have brought a rope,” she said to Kanan, leaning back. “How should we do this?”

He considered the shaft with one hand outstretched. “I can send you down first the way you came up, or we can go together,” he said, arching an eyebrow at her. “I won’t drop you,” he added when Hera hesitated, trying to figure out what he meant by “together.”

“I didn’t say you would,” Hera said dryly, clipping her glowrod to the front of her vest. “Together, then.”

He wrapped an arm around her waist as Hera put her arms around his neck, kissing him quickly. She didn’t bother to ask if he knew where to stop; she trusted him. She still caught her breath as he stepped into the turbolift shaft and dropped, the glowrod illuminated metal walls streaking past them.

They didn’t fall for more than a few seconds. Kanan did something that she couldn’t see and they tumbled out onto the floor of another dark corridor, something crunching unpleasantly under Hera’s shoulder – he hadn’t quite gotten the angle of their exit right. For a horrible moment she thought the crunching sound had been her shoulder, then she put her hand out and felt shattered metal beneath her gloved palm.

“Is this the floor we started from?” she said, surprised. She shone her glowrod down its length and revised her question. “This isn’t where we started from.”

“There’s something down here,” Kanan said, offering her a hand up. “I didn’t sense it before.”

“Something alive?” Hera asked, starting to reach for her blaster.

He hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

Hera drew her blaster.

She covered Kanan as he made his way down the corridor, stopping briefly to lay his hands on each closed door in search of whatever had called him here. There seemed to be none of the mysterious plant life down here; given its ubiquity elsewhere in the ship, its absence made Hera more nervous than its presence would have. She judged them to have gone several levels down past the hangar, which meant that they would presumably have to go back up to return when Kanan was finished.

“Here,” Kanan said eventually. He was at the very end of the corridor, his hands pressed to the double doors there. Hera calculated their passage and realized that they were below the hangar bay – maybe immediately below it, in fact, as some star destroyers had large chambers where ships, AT-ATs or AT-STs, or other vehicles could be kept while in transit.

He stepped back and gestured at the doors; when nothing happened, he sighed and took his lightsaber off his belt. He ignited it in a flare of blue plasma and drove it into the doors, cutting an opening with obvious effort; Hera guessed the doors were blast-shielded.

“Is it Ezra?” she had to ask him.

He paused halfway through the circle and thought about it, overheated metal beginning to melt and drip down the doors where the lightsaber had stopped. “No,” he said finally, starting to cut again. “There’s a trace of his presence here, but it’s not him, just something he did – I’m not sure what or when.”

It took him another minute to finish cutting, then he raised a hand and lifted the circle out of the way, drawing it out into the hallway to rest against the wall. Hera moved to shine her glowrod into the opening before either of them entered, but Kanan didn’t wait for her, just climbed through with a muttered curse as the back of his hand brushed the still-hot sheared away metal.

Hera swore under her breath and followed him. Kanan’s self-preservation instincts were usually good enough to keep him from walking face first into trouble, but Hera had fairly good memories of when those instincts had failed spectacularly, including the fatal occasion.

She climbed through after Kanan and almost walked directly into Kanan’s back.

He was standing stock-still, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, his white eyes open and fixed on the object in the center of the room. Hera stepped up beside him and shone her light over it, trying to make sense of what it was she was looking at. At first it seemed to be nothing more than a tumble of stone, then as she continued to study it, it slowly resolved itself into half-familiar shapes.

“That’s – that’s from Lothal,” she said hesitantly, trying to decide why anyone would remove one of Lothal’s stone megaliths to a spaceship. It seemed like a strange choice even for someone as odd as Grand Admiral Thrawn.

“Yes.” Kanan’s voice was tight with the kind of barely-controlled fury Hera had only heard from him a handful of times. He took a breath, held it for a seven-count, let it out slowly, then repeated the process. When Hera put a hand on his arm she found that he was trembling, though it was slowing as he calmed himself down.

The longer she looked at the stones, the less certain she was that it was a megalith, though the color of the rock was distinctive of Lothal. Most of it must have been affixed to the floor; while there were broken stones strewn across the floor from the crash, the bulk of it remained at the center of the room. Hera took a step towards it, curious, before Kanan put his hand out and caught her elbow. “Don’t go near it,” he said, his voice low. He was so upset that he had lapsed back into his seldom-used Coruscanti accent, so upper-class that it made Hera’s back teeth ache just to listen to it. He took another breath; when he spoke again, his accent was his usual Outer Rim drawl. “Stay here.”

“What is it?”

Kanan didn’t respond, just released her and walked toward the megalith. Hera started to follow him anyway, then hesitated and stayed where she was; Kanan didn’t give her orders often or without good reason. Instead she played her light over the stones as Kanan walked up to it, forcing herself to relax so that her mind could make sense of the pattern that her eyes suggested was there.

As Kanan walked around it and then vanished from sight, Hera realized that it wasn’t a megalith at all: it was, or had been, a building. “It’s from the Jedi temple on Lothal,” she said, pitching her voice to carry and wincing at the way it echoed off the room’s high ceiling. “Parts of it had been cut away and removed when we saw it – it must have been destroyed in the crash.”

“No.” Kanan’s voice sounded as if he was speaking from the bottom of a deep well, further away than it should have been. It also echoed oddly in a way that hers had not; Hera took a reflexive step forwards, wanting to reassure herself of his presence, before she forced herself to stop again. If he could hear her and speak to her, then he was still here. “No, Ezra did this. The stones still resonate with his power. Not recently, but – he did it. There’s someone else here, too, a – a stain, a dark side stain, from about the same time. I don’t recognize the signature. I think this is, was, the temple door.”

Hera had told him what had happened to the temple on Lothal, as best as she understood it. Her memory of the event seemed to be strangely blurred, as if it had happened to someone other than her or as if it was something that she had seen through flawed glass. She suspected that her mind simply wasn’t equipped to handle what had happened, non-Force-user that she was.

“Why would Thrawn bring it here?” Hera asked him.

“I’ve no idea. There’s power in it, but it’s – it’s unanchored. It should be on Lothal, drawing from the vergence there; that’s what it was made for. What’s in it now is –” He hesitated. “– quiescent, maybe. Resting. I could probably tap it if I had to, but I don’t know what would happen.” He emerged from the opposite side of the tumble of shattered stone and Hera let her breath out in relief, then caught it again as Kanan pressed his hands to a chunk of it nearly as tall as himself. Faded painted lines glinted in the light of her glowrod. “This isn’t like the temple back on Coruscant where I was raised. This temple was older, from a long, long time ago, when the Order was different.” He pulled his hands away, shuddering slightly. “When the galaxy was different. And I don’t know what this would do when it can’t draw from the vergence on Lothal anymore.”

He wiped his palms against the sides of his trousers, his expression uneasy as he came back to Hera. She put her hand out to touch his sleeve, reassuring herself that he was there and real, because she still remembered Ezra vanishing into solid stone all those years ago.

“I’m here,” he murmured. “But I don’t like that this is.” He leaned down, frowning, and scooped up a piece of broken stone not much bigger than his thumbnail. He weighed it briefly in his palm, then slipped it into one of his belt pouches. Hera shivered, wishing he hadn’t done that.

“We’d better get back to the Ghost,” she said. She turned her glowrod upwards, considering the ceiling. “We’re just beneath the hangar, I think. That’s probably how they transported that – the temple pieces in.”

Kanan nodded absently, turning his attention upwards as well. “You know star destroyers better than I do,” he said. “Can we get up there without having to cut through the ceiling? I don’t want to give the plants a straight shot at the temple.” He frowned at the ruins. “Though I’m not sure that they could do anything to it.”

Hera bit her lip, thinking; it had been a long time since she had been in this particular section of a star destroyer. “There should be a turbolift directly up to the hangar either in this room or just outside it,” she said finally. “Inside on the later star destroyers, outside on the older ones. I don’t know which the Chimaera is.”

Kanan was already turning, one hand held out as he searched for it in the Force, then he gestured her back towards the door. Once they were back out in the corridor, he replaced the circle of durasteel he had cut from the doors, then they backtracked until they found the turbolift he had sensed. Unlike the shaft they had used before, this one only reached up to the hangar; it was used for rapid transit between the hangar and whatever cargo was being stored in the big chamber beneath it. The turbolift car was there, which mean that Kanan had to cut through its ceiling with his lightsaber until they could climb up on top of it. After that their transit upwards was fairly rapid, and they emerged from the hangar turbolift shaft just in time to nearly get shot by Sabine and Zeb.

“You almost gave me a heart attack,” Zeb said, lowering his bo-rifle. “What were you doing down there?”

“Thrawn has a piece of the Jedi temple from Lothal down there,” Hera explained, a little breathless.

“What?” Sabine demanded, appalled. “He what?”

Hera looked around as they crossed the hangar deck back towards the Ghost. Sabine and Zeb had been here long enough that they had had time to unlock the Ghost; the ramp was down and Chopper was perched on top of it, his photoreceptors fixed on the nearest vine. Hera frowned at it. It had definitely grown and was now no more than a few meters from the Ghost.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Let’s find somewhere else to set down – I don’t want to stay here longer than we have to.”

Zeb nodded fervently. Sabine said, “I took samples of some of those plants, but I’m not a xenobotanist or a biologist. I can run some tests –”

“Let’s worry about that later,” Hera said, herding them all back onto the ship. She looked back over her shoulder as she came up one short; Kanan was standing by the vine and frowning down at it. “Love?”

“I’m coming.” He turned away from the vine and followed her up into the Ghost. A few minutes later Hera was in the pilot’s seat, lifting the ship up from the hangar floor and leaving the fallen Chimaera behind with relief. For lack of any better options, she took them back to the jungle, settling the Ghost in the same clearing she had docked in before.

“It will take me a while to decrypt the ship’s logs,” Sabine said as Hera and Kanan turned their chairs around to face her. “It’s an older encryption; we have the key. It’s just a lot of data.” She tapped a control on her gauntlet and a hologram sprang up in the space over it. “This wasn’t encrypted, though.”

Hera read the neat lines of script that appeared under the date three days previous. Captain Gilad Pellaeon gives order to abandon ISD Chimaera. 69.93/98.71.

“What are the numbers?”

“Imperial code,” Sabine said. “Every stormtrooper, ISB agent, sailor, and moff knows it, or at least they’re supposed to. It’s not used often, though. It means that the survivors are on-planet and these are the rendezvous coordinates – they’re standard, they’re designed to work for any planet or moon as long as it doesn’t have major irregularities, so it doesn’t matter what world it is.”

“Why Pellaeon and not Thrawn?” Kanan asked.

Sabine shrugged. “Maybe we got lucky and Thrawn’s dead. Technically the Chimaera’s Pellaeon’s command, not Thrawn’s, so it could just be that.” She rubbed her hands together, making the image waver in mid-air. “But if it’s only been three days, then they’ll still be there. That will give us some answers.”

#cut scenes and concept writing #other side au tag #as always comments are appreciated

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ladyy-grimm · 4 years

Text

~Corvid Bride~

Dire Crowley x F reader

*In inspiration of the Ghost Marriage event - as well as watching one too many dramas - I present whatever AU this is.

“I’m sorry dear, I’m so, so sorry...” Is the only words your mother gave you. Her voice strained and hoarse.

The day, which was as gloomy as a funeral - was your wedding day.

The hushed murmurs of your friends and neighbors were your accompaniment, instead of celebratory music as you made your way towards a lone black carriage.

“So, she’s to be the bride?”

“Poor thing, she’s so young...”

“Thers’s nothing that can be done...If we don’t offer someone then, then we will starve. All of us..”

“We have to calm him...”

By whatever good grace yet remained in the world did you find yourself in the carriage with what remained of your closest friends. One of them adjusting your white veil, giving you the pitiful excuse of remaining hidden for your “groom”. They couldn’t bring themselves to look at you, not with what awaited you at the end of the carriage ride.

“Please don’t hate us.” One of them finally dared to speak. Yet somehow it made the small space quieter as they spoke. “We didn’t want this to happen...None of us. But, I’m glad you are going.”

“We’re very grateful to you.” Another spoke up.

“We can now all live because of you.”

You wanted to scream.

How dare they. How dare they try and make you feel better. They were just glad it was you and not them. That it was not their daughter. It wasn’t their fault you were unlucky, there needed to be a sacrifice anyway. It may have been an old fairytale, but they didn’t care so long as the crops and animals were blessed back to what they once were. As long as it wasn’t them, it didn’t matter.

Despite all that, your lips remained shut. As you arrived at your destination did you remember as to why you should remain so. The wind was still, despite being so high up into the mountains. The horses nervously whinnied behind you, your heels crunching under the stone as you made your way towards the cliffs end. Your bridesmaids giving you a wide berth as you made your way towards a large iron birdcage, alongside an old iron crank.

There were no final goodbyes nor tears as you made your way inside. Your veil and gown semi spilling out as you were lowered to the blanket of fog below. The air grew colder, your breath began to appear as from above you could hear your wedding party scrambling to leave. Leave behind all memory and with time - all traces of you. In resignation did you sit down, not even a bubble of a sob surfaced to your throat.

What point would tears give you? It didn’t help Lettie; as she was torn away from her widowed mother and not given a chance to be a proper bride. Or how about Amilie whom had tried to run away with her lover, condemning them both.

‘At least they died together.’ You couldn’t help but muse. You? You had no one besides your family back home, if you could even call it that anymore. They were just as part of this as any other. Yet any hatred you wanted to direct was cut short as you shivered. The cold had begun to set in.

Halfhazardly you wrapped your wedding gown around you as best as you could, aiding you a little. The birdcage swinging back and forth at your movements, causing slight nausea to set in. Repeatedly like a prayer did you tell yourself not to look down, though even if you did not but fog would greet you. How you wish it had deigned to surround you as well, that way you wouldn’t have had to see the other birdcages littered around you. All human sized, rusted, frosted, some even broken while others still housed their “residents”.

You didn’t consider yourself fortunate in the least at seeing the skeletal remains. A corpse should be best left alone after all, at least that is what you wished for yourself.

Would you freeze to death first? Or maybe you would attempt one last daring escape and fall to your death? Which was quicker? Or perhaps, you would wait for him? Whatever it was your village gave offerings to for a plentiful harvest, that had suddenly decided to stop granting such a boon. Devil? Fae? It didn’t matter so long as there was food at the table and all was well.

But obviously, not anymore. Not for a long, long time now.

“Having fun? Thinking of your final moments?”

You would have fallen to your death had the bars of the cage not been small enough, as you jumped in shock at the sudden voice. Wildly did you look around, seeing no one - except of course for one lone crow at the opposite side of you. It cocked its head, curious at you as it sat between the bars.

“You haven’t lost your mind yet.” It stated as to what you were thinking, its beak curving into the hints of a grin.

“I wish I was.” You blurted in response, earning you a cawing of sudden laughter.

“Ooh, decided to give a clever one away did they? That’s a pity for the arts.” The crow continued to laugh.

The statement was enough for a small smile to tug at your lips, only a small one though as your mind had caught up to what was currently happening. “I’m sorry, you are -“

“Hmm? Wish to know my name? I’ll give you mine if you give me yours.” Here the crow extended a wing, as if it were extending a hand.

Such an action caused your mind to reel. Memories of your grandmother teaching you the way of fairytales rushing to mind. The cold caused your voice - now laced with caution - to crack out your lie. “Y-You may call me Ainsel.”

The crow, appeared to grin more and his eyes to turn from a shiny black, like twin pebbles. To glowing moons. “Ah, you are indeed a clever one.”

With that there was suddenly a large puff of smoke, and there at the other end of your already small cage appeared a man. He was draped in a dark coat with a cut to resemble wings, and obscuring his face was a long beaked mask that only shown his glowing pupils. The birdcage was too small for him to stand fully, but he had no need to as with a flourish did he remove his top hat and bowed at his waist to you. His eyes glowing in delight as they looked towards you.

Instinctually, hurriedly did you try to stand. Only realizing that you had wrapped your wedding gown around you for warmth too tightly. This caused the man to laugh.

“‘Tis alright, I’d much rather have you remain sitting as to what we are to discuss little bird.” With that he knelt before you, being mindful of your gown and giving you plenty of room to breath. You did just meet after all. “Now, I’m sure you have already figured out who I am and what I do. So, let us cut the chase and have me ask you; What would you like to do now?”

“What?” You couldn’t help but ask.

“Hmm? Did you simply think I just fly in here and gobble you ‘brides’ up?” He chuckled at his own dark humor. “I’m kind enough to give you brides a choice, when you were given none.”

His words gave you pause, so he continued. “You can choose to try and get back up towards the cliffs. Some have made it and have lived to see their childrens children. Others, falling to a death of their own will. Others, I will say have chosen to remain in this final resting place - whilst I - well, can’t refuse what whatever God has left before me now can I? Or if you prefer I could give your corpse to those animals as a “blessing” if that is what you wish.”

The information given both baffled yet made complete sense. As was the won’t of the lands of Twisted Wonderland. With a jolt did you suddenly recoil back. He had outstretched a claw ringed hand towards you.

“I’d very much like to give you more time to ponder your choice but, it grows darker by the moment and colder as well.”

How right he was. Your teeth were now chattering without you realizing. It wasn’t much of a choice you had to admit, but it was a choice nonetheless. More than you had been given, and there was only one that you had in mind.

“Your name...” You mumbled, lips beginning to freeze.

He cocked his head to the side.

“I’d, I’d like to know my husbands name....”

He smiled, gently taking your hand in his as he drew you towards him. Weakly did you stumble into his embrace, your legs having become numb as the iron floor had frosted and your gown as well. Yet you had no need to walk a he opted to carry you as any bride wished to be. He was pleasantly warm, his overcoat framing even you a bit. As if it were a large pair of wings.

“Dire Crowley.”

You smiled, thinking of how your name matched with his. It had a nice ring to it.

In the days to come the people of your village would be back to the cliff side to check on you. They would find your almost empty birdcage, and be filled with fear immediately. The bars remained intact. Your corpse did not hang, nor had it been coated in frost or even be eaten by the wildlife that could reach you. Nay, all that remained was your bouquet as fresh as the day your mother had picked it.

Far, far away you would be found laughing happily alongside your husband. Eccentric and troublesome as he was, he had given you the choice that only ever mattered. That choice was to live, and having him at your side was a pleasant bonus.

#twisted wonderland #dire crowley #twisted wonderland dire crowley #dire crowley x reader #dire crowley x f reader #it is 1:30 am #i am going to bed

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downwiththeficness · 3 years

Text

In the Bond-Chapter 19

Summary: Lilah often wished she’d never said yes to working with the Gecko brothers—usually while dodging gunfire. At no time was she regretting that decision more than when she’s hanging upside down from the ceiling, staring down a group of hungry culebras and one (1) extremely powerful sun god.

Word Count: ~6,300

Warnings: Smut

A/N: This is an AU of my Story In the Blood, which can be read here. Basically, this fic explores what would have happened if Lilah had met up with Geckos before she met Brasa.

Taglist: @symbiont13

Start from the beginning Previous Chapter Next Chapter

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She’d made the call not really knowing how it was going to go. Lilah had an address, a plane, a packed weekender bag, and not much else. Sitting at the airport bar was the extent of her plan. She tipped back the last of her beer, eyeing the mirror that reflected the entrance.

Kate was early. Lilah checked the digital clock next to the wall of liquor. She’d asked her to be there at one. It was barely twelve thirty. There was something to be said for punctuality, a quality she had found strangely lacking in most criminals—go figure. Lilah signaled for another round, two fingers in the air, her free hand gesturing at the approaching woman.

Dressed in a long sleeved shirt and jeans, her hair tumbling in soft waves around her face, Kate looked barely old enough to even be in the bar. Lilah supposed that was true, though she’d never bothered to ask Kate’s age. She fixed the bartender with a soft, sweet smile and didn’t even get carded.

Sliding onto the stool next to her, Kate rested both arms on the bar top, “He doesn’t know I’m here, by the way.”

There was no need to expound on who Kate meant. Lilah doubted that Seth could have stopped Kate, even if he wanted to. And yet, a small part of her appreciated the discretion. An angry, possibly vengeful, Seth was one variable she didn’t have the energy to contend with on this particular trip. And still, it chafed that he hadn’t reached out. Lilah hadn’t received a single text message or call. It hurt her more than she cared to admit.

Not bothering to spare Kate a glance, Lilah shrugged, “Wouldn’t matter if he did.”

“It might.”

“Doubtful.”

Lilah knew she sounded petulant, but she couldn’t quite make herself care. She sipped at the too expensive beer and leaned lazily back in her seat. Kate fiddled with the bottle, thumb rubbing at the label.

“So, Iceland?”

Smiling, Lilah nodded, “Reykjavik, actually. There’s a huge church there, and the knife is in, like, a reliquary.”

She’d had to look up the definition of reliquary when Brasa told her about it, tablet in hand, finger swiping from one picture to the next. When Lilah had commented that they were lucky it was in a church and not in another private collection, he’d sighed and said he’d rather deal with the private collector. The capital “C”, Church, could be a harrowing enemy.

Lilah disagreed. A church of this size and age was unlikely to have up to date security systems. And, to be fair, a lot of churches were underfunded, which left little to know staff to wander the halls in search of delinquent women looking to pocket ancient relics.

“Uh huh,” Kate drawled, taking a swig, “How do you expect us to get in?”

Lilah shrugged, “I hadn’t gotten quite that far.”

“Uh huh,” then, “How far have you gotten?”

Hands giving a sweep around her, Lilah pronounced, “This is about it.”

“Uh huh.”

With an expression that was nearly a glare, Lilah groaned, “Stop saying that.”

Kate shrugged, “Its just that you usually have a plan. Way before we get to the airport.”

She was right, Lilah usually had a solid plan before they even left for the job, before they even bought the plane tickets or booked the motel. She didn’t like being rushed, but the reality was that they needed to get the job done and get back as fast as humanly possible. For this job, Lilah was willing to wing it just a little.

“I know,” Lilah sighed, taking a deep pull, “This was sort of last minute. There was...an attack.”

She didn’t think it would be wise to hide what had happened from Kate. Context and background information usually sat well with her. Like Lilah, Kate liked to know what, exactly, she was dealing with. And, there was part of her that just needed to tell someone.

Beside her, Kate stiffened, “What kind of attack?”

“Benny tried to open the portal,” Lilah explained, waving away the bartender’s offer of another round. While they waited for the check, she continued, “A lot of the people he was with died. Some of them were injured—horrifically. The knife is all we need to close the portal for good.”

That, and a shit ton of Brasa’s blood. He’d told her over and over again that he’d put in safety measures, that there was nothing to worry about. Lilah was dubious, at best.

Nodding, Kate slipped off the stool and looked at Lilah expectantly, “When’s the flight?”

Lilah glanced again at the clock, “About an hour from now.”

Kate frowned, “We’re not going to get through security in that time. Why didn’t you tell me to be here sooner?”

Smiling coyly, Lilah lifted a shoulder, “Probably because we’re flying private. We’ve got plenty of time.”

Head cocking to the side, Kate regarded her closely, her mouth parted in something near enough to a smile, “I guess you’d better show me your plane.”

Leaning down, Lilah grabbed her weekender and slung it over her shoulder, “Boarding is that way.”

The plane was exactly as she remembered it, right down to the stewardess offering them a glass of champagne for the flight. Lilah settled into the plush seat and sent off a text to Brasa to let him know they were on the tarmac.

When she looked up from her phone, she noticed Kate tossing hers back into her bag, likely doing the same thing.

“So, you do any research on this church?”

Lilah’s head ticked to the side, “A little. Its huge. Big ol’ pipe organ that’s pretty famous.”

Kate sipped her champagne, “You read that off Wikipedia?”

That was exactly what she’d done, right after Brasa spelled out the name for her.

Laughing, Lilah confirmed, “Pretty much.”

“You got a way in?”

“There’s services a couple days a week,” Lilah said, resting her head in her palm, “I figure, we go in with the church crowd, sneak away, hit up the reliquary, walk out with the church crowd.”

Kate blinked, “You said its a big church. Do you know your way around?”

“Javier got me some maps,” then, “I told Brasa we’d have a seventy two hour turnaround.”

Brows coming together, Kate shook her head, “It might not be that simple.”

“You and the boys do it all the time.”

Lilah and the boys had done it many times over.

“Yeah,” Kate shot back, “In banks, in museums, jacking cars. We’re stealing from a church.”

Lilah rolled her eyes, “What’s the difference?”

Her expression closed tightly, and Kate took a beat too long to respond, “Its the church. Its...God.”

Ah. Touchy subject.

Taking a deep breath, Lilah chose her words carefully, “Technically, they stole it first. The knife is Xibalban, it belongs to Brasa’s people. We’re not stealing it. We’re just..playing a bit of Robin Hood.”

Kate glared at her, “You can’t be Robin Hood when you’re sitting on a private jet, Lilah.”

That was fair.

“Point. Then, we’re reverse Indiana Jones-ing it.”

Laughing, Kate shook her head again, “I don’t think that fits, either.”

“Well, we can’t all be Richie with the pop culture references, can we?” Lilah retorted, half amused, half annoyed.

“No,” Kate murmured, “He really does have a connection for everything.”

“Oh, my god, he does,” Lilah agreed, one hand covering her eyes, “The first day I met him, he called me Scully. And then he proceeded to show me that there are, in fact, things that go bump in the night.”

He’d actually flashed his fangs at her, his eyes glowing behind his glasses. Lilah had scrambled back from him, too scared to even scream. It had been Seth that had calmed her down, had told her what they were doing, what their mission was. It had been Seth that set her on the path she was on now.

“That sounds like Richie,” Kate said with a small smile, “He likes to go ahead and rip the band aid off.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

It had taken about two days before Lilah could bring herself to sit within ten feet of Richie, and even longer before they had a conversation over three sentences long. Once she’d gotten over the initial shock, Lilah had grown to really like Richie. Despite the constant one upping and the long tangential digressions on canon, he could be sweet. He could also rip a person in half. Pros and cons being what they were, Lilah had eventually put him on the (extremely) short list of her friends.

They stopped for fuel in New York, and then they were taking the last leg of the trip. Landing went smoothly, and a car was waiting to take them to the hotel Brasa had booked. It hadn’t occurred to Lilah to ask him to book something low key and under the radar. When they pulled up to a swanky awning with gilt embellishments, she cringed internally.

Lilah appreciated a good hotel like most any other person. When she was on a job, though, it was always better to stay at a highway motel. Less surveillance, and if the police showed up, there were usually more concerned about the drugs in the room three doors down than a single woman drawing as little attention as possible. This was...ostentacious.

“I bet the beds in there are phenomenal,” Kate said as she walked ahead.

As she took in the extravagant lobby, Lilah couldn’t help but agree, but they would pale in comparison to the bed she shared with Brasa. Nothing could or would match those mattresses—which she still hadn’t asked Javier about. She resisted the urge to check her phone for the thousandth time, looking for a message from Brasa. He’d been busy dealing with the wounded, dealing with increasing calls for violence, dealing with all the things that came with governing a growing mass of people. She didn’t want to add to that.

As Kate predicted, the beds were pretty fucking good. Soft as clouds. Silky sheets. Very nice, but empty. Lilah would have slept on a futon to have Brasa here with her. She missed his presence, missed his touch. Since she’d left Jackknife Jed’s, Lilah hadn’t spent more than a few hours without him.

Spoiled. Lilah was fucking spoiled, now.

Shaking herself from her thoughts, Lilah focused on unpacking her pajamas for the night. First thing in the morning, they would scout the church, find their entrance and their exit. Maybe come up with a few back up plans. She was pretty sure that the base plan she’d spouted off on the plane was their best option. But, she liked to have some alternatives.

As she crawled into bed, Lilah reached out and touched the bond. He was tired, she could tell. Gently, she suggested that he sleep. Lilah was met with a wall of stubborn willpower that had her physically rolling her eyes. Turning to her side, she reached up and turned off the bedside light. If he wasn’t going to get some rest, she definitely would.

Lilah slept hard. It was the kind of sleep that could make someone wake up and not know what year it was, the kind of sleep that stole the freshness of the morning. On her back, hands near her face, she blinked up at the ceiling as she tried to get her bearings in the unfamiliar room.

The shower was on, water sloshing.

Kate.

Her bed was warm—hot, even. There was a weight on her legs and hips, hidden by the comforter. She shifted, surprised when the weight moved with her. It continued to move even when she’d settled, enveloping her from belly to knees.

Hands. There were hands trailing up her sides, sliding underneath her pajama top. She sucked in a breath, releasing it forcefully when they cupped her breasts, thumbs circling her nipples. The comforter shifted, rolling in a singular wave upwards until the fabric parted to reveal dark hair and brown skin.

Brasa.

He smiled at her as he climbed her body, his eyes reflecting darkly in the low ambient light of the room. She smiled back, hands resting on his shoulders as he settled over her.

“Hi,” she said lowly.

He echoed her, leaning down to kiss her sternum. His mouth was warm, his hands massaging along her waist and down over her hips. He nuzzled her skin, rubbing his cheek against her neck and collarbone.

Lilah relaxed into the pillows, let him do as he liked. Her fuzzy mind reveled in the feel of him, his tongue tracing patterns ahead of his fingers. He pushed her shirt up and over her breasts, palms cupping them together. When he drew a nipple into his mouth, her body arched up, knees clutching at his sides.

Her thighs rubbed sensuously against bare skin. She bit her lip as she realized that he was very clearly naked, and very clearly aroused.

The shower cut off, drawing her attention. She tensed beneath him, turning her head to look towards the closed bathroom door.

Undeterred, Brasa pulled at her top, trying to get her arms through it. Lilah pushed at his shoulders, jerking her head towards the bathroom.

“Kate is literally going to walk out any second.”

His jaw clenched unhappily, but he let go of her top. Lilah pulled it down over her chest with one hand, the other reaching up to touch his cheek.

“I’ll be home soon.”

Lips pouting, he nodded. In between one blink and the next he was gone, though Lilah was left with the distinct feeling of his mouth pressed firmly to hers.

She was right, though. The door to the bathroom opened and Kate wandered through it, towel drying her hair. Lilah sat up and flicked on the bedside light, rubbing at her eyes.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Lilah waved her off, “I needed to get up, anyways. You take all the hot water?”

Kate smirked, “For the price of these rooms, it should take at least three days to run out of hot water.”

“You can thank your resident sun god for that,” Lilah drawled as she rose from the bed, picking up her clothes for the day from where she’d set them the night before.

“You think he takes tithes?”

There was a strange kind of sarcasm in those words. No bite. Just barely touched with the dark amusement that came with doing the things that they’d had to do in the last year and a half. It peeked out periodically from behind all their lips, cut through tension, acknowledging the oddity that was their lives.

Lilah shrugged, “I can ask him next time we’re in the temple.”

Kate paused from where she was combing through her dark locks, “He has a temple?”

“Yeah,” Lilah answered from the bathroom door, “I mean that literally.”

“Weird.”

“You have no idea.”

After showering and getting ready for the day, they headed out into the city. Lilah managed to Google Translate her way through ordering the pair of them a coffee that they drank while they walked. The church was pretty big. Scoping out the entrances and exits took most of the morning. By the time the noon services started up, Lilah’s legs were demanding a break.

The pews were filled with churchgoers as they took a spot near the back of the sanctuary. Lilah spent about ten minutes distracted by the artwork and the architecture before she realized that Kate was softly crying.

“What’s wrong?”

Sniffing, Kate shook her head, “I haven’t, you know, been in a church in a long time.”

“Oh.”

Lilah was not good with soothing crying people. She looked awkwardly around, grateful that most people were focused on the sermon ahead of them and not the weird American girls behind.

“You know my dad was a preacher, right?”

“I,” Lilah whispered, “Did not know that.”

To be fair, not a one of their crew delved too deeply into each other’s backgrounds. That was the trade off: they worked together as a team to hunt down rogue culebras, might even share a few stories of their more notorious exploits—no digging into old wounds.

“He was.”

“Oh.”

“After my mom died, he kind of...lost God. He drank a lot, and I had to take care of my brother and me.”

“That must have been hard.”

“Yeah,” Kate said, her voice cracking, “And then all of this shit with Richie and Seth started happening. And then Amaru. I thought I’d never feel right in church again.”

“Oh.”

Kate cut her a look, “Stop saying that.”

“Sorry,” Lilah said on reflex. “I don’t know what else to say.”

Shaking her head, Kate lifted a shoulder weakly, “Nothing to say, really.” Then, “I miss it. Miss the ritual of it—praise and worship, sermon, invitation, closing. You know exactly what to expect.”

Ah. Lilah lifted her toes in her winter boots, knowing what Kate meant, and not knowing how best to respond. She sat next to the woman throughout the sermon, not a word of it in English. Then, when the nonverbal cue for prayer sank into the crowd, she tapped Kate’s arm and jerked her head to the side.

“Now?” Kate asked.

Lilah smirked, “Why not?”

While the congregation’s heads were bowed, giving them an opening. while all eyes were closed and no one was looking about, Lilah and Kate disappeared into a back hallway and towards a series of meeting rooms. Lots of unlocked doors. They moved through the halls, ducking into a bathroom when steps sounded a little too close.

Eventually, they found the pastor’s chambers. Lilah was pretty fucking shocked when Kate pulled out Seth’s lock pick set and went to work. Impressed, she leaned against the wall opposite the door, keeping watch while the other woman worked.

It took several tries and one foul oath, but Kate got the door open. They slipped inside, and Lilah tapped her phone to pull up the picture Brasa had sent her. She showed it to Kate, her eyes scanning the shelves.

And there it was. Sitting unceremoniously on a low shelf, holding up a set of biblical commentaries. Lilah paused, thinking that this was deceptively easy. Gilt in gold, the reliquary was formed in Gothic angles and sharp spires. Serving as a stand for the knife, one could be forgiven for almost missing its significance.

With care, Lilah checked it for a pressure switch, then pulled the knife from the stand. As she stood, she held it out for Kate’s inspection.

She looked at it, looked at Lilah, and shrugged, “I guess that’s it.”

“I guess,” Lilah muttered, slipping it into her bag.

They tip toed back into the sanctuary, right as the invitation started. People were walking forward, taking the hands of church elders, making commitments to God. Lilah sat in the pew with her pilfered relic, feeling as if the room had tilted ever so slightly to the left. As soon as was socially acceptable, she rose and headed out towards the street.

On the walk back to the hotel, the sun beginning its descent towards the horizon, Lilah shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat, “You know, when I think of all the jobs we’ve pulled, this one was surprisingly anticlimactic.”

Kate nodded, pushing her hair out of her face, “After the year I’ve had, I could use a little anti-climactic.”

Lilah had to agree. After one too many high intensity situations, the ease of this theft was so very welcome. And strange.

When they reached the hotel, they took advantage of the little restaurant at the back of the building. Lilah ordered a nice wine and a pasta with a heavy cream sauce. Though it smelled amazing, she found that she could only pick at it, full after just a few bites. She wasn’t surprised. The adrenaline of having taken something that didn’t belong to her often suppressed her appetite.

Despite only eating a small portion from her plate, Lilah tipped the wait staff well. The meal was delicious, even if she wasn’t in the mood to eat. No need to take it out on anyone else.

When they returned to their room, Kate flung herself haphazardly on the bed, her boots hanging off the end. She flicked on the TV, saying, “You want to tell me about this knife ritual thing?”

Lilah opened her mouth to speak, and found that she didn’t have words. Brasa had been remarkably reticent to give her details about what they needed to do to close the portal.

“I honestly don’t know,” she answered, finally, “We use the staff, the cup, the knife, and some of Brasa’s blood—that’s as far as I’ve gotten.”

Lifting a brow, Kate regarded her steadily, “No magic incantation?”

Huffing, Lilah rolled her eyes, “I mean, probably. There’s always some sort of magic rhyme to shout into the abyss, right?”

“For sure.”

With Kate momentarily distracted by the television, Lilah pulled her phone out and tapped out a text.

L: Got it.

She set the phone down, intending to get comfortable on the bed. No sooner had she sat down to remove her boots did it vibrate twice, indicating a text. Lilah picked it up, tapping on the screen.

B: Excellent. ETA?

Smirking, Lilah pulled up the keyboard.

L: Tomorrow, late. Midnight, maybe?

His response was almost immediate.

B: You plan to leave in the afternoon?

L: Depends on when Kate wakes up.

There was no immediate answer, and Lilah set the phone aside. She tugged off her boots and socks, leaning back into the pillows.

“Have you noticed,” Kate started, her voice cutting through the noise of the television, “Changes?”

Lilah cast her a look of confusion, her brows coming together.

“Since you and Brasa got together. Like, physically?”

Thinking about it, Lilah pursed her lips, “I don’t think so?”

The sentence came out more like a question because she honestly didn’t really know. With everything that had been going on outside of her, it hadn’t occurred to Lilah to look inwardly.

“I mean,” Kate continued, one hand rotating, her palm pointed towards the ceiling, “Obviously, you know about the immortality.”

Lilah nodded, though the concept had been purposely set aside so that she could deal with the more pressing matters of the bond and her growing relationship. She figured that she had plenty of time to deal with it later.

With a ‘tsk’, Kate reached over and grabbed the remote. She shut off the TV and threw the control down. Then, she scooted over to the edge of the bed and pulled her legs up and underneath her.

“I knew it would be different...after. I knew things would change—more than they already had.”

Lilah nodded. Different was all that Lilah had known for so long that it had made the complete circle all the way around to perfectly normal. Looking into Kate’s face, though, Lilah could tell that their unique circumstances, the odd path of their lives, wasn’t all that the other woman meant.

Kate tucked her hair behind her ear, “I haven’t slept in two weeks.”

Spluttering, Lilah’s brows rose in surprise, one hand covering her mouth.

“I mean,” Kate continued, leaning forward in concern, “not really. Not like I used to.”

Hands up in question, Lilah asked, “What the fuck does that mean?”

Kate sat back, her shoulders dropping, “I,” she stopped and shook her head, “I sleep maybe a few hours a night, wake up, stay awake for a few hours, and then sleep another hour. That’s it.”

Looking around the room, Lilah found herself once again trying to find words of comfort. She was not good at this.

“That must suck.”

Kate, thankfully, laughed, “It does. I tried everything. Sleeping pills, weed, hot baths, I ordered a special tea from the internet. Do not recommend, by the way.”

Mouth in half a smile, Lilah rolled her neck, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“And that’s not all of it,” Kate went on, “I don’t get hungry, not really. I eat. I can eat. But, if I don’t think about it, I won’t.” She fixed Lilah with a hopeful look, “Is it like that with you?”

It took Lilah a moment to think of her answer, “No.”

All the air went out of Kate. She picked at the bedspread, “Oh.”

“Its still new,” Lilah said quickly, unable to take Kate’s down expression. “I’m just now learning how to use the bond.” Her eyes turned to the ceiling, “For the first, like, six months I didn’t even acknowledge that it existed, let alone participate.”

Kate huffed, “Oh, Richie wasn’t about to let that happen. He said he’d spent enough time knowing and not acting.”

Lilah frowned, “What does that mean?”

Expression indulgent, Kate said, “They know it immediately. They know it.”

Brasa had known, had said as much in the first minute of conversation. Lilah had been too intent on getting away to ask questions. Now, she wished she had. The book on bonds had been helpful for troubleshooting and basic knowledge. The way in which bonds worked, how they changed the bonded, was vague, at best.

“Does…” Kate trailed off, her eyes looking away, pink tinting her cheeks, “Does he, you know, feed you?”

She blinked, “I mean, yeah. Usually after he takes it from me.”

Nodding, Kate’s gaze seemed to lose focus, “For the first two months, Richie would insist on it, every day. He said that it would make me stronger.”

“Brasa said that same thing.”

Another nod, “I do feel stronger. There are mornings where I wake up and I feel like I could run a hundred miles.”

Lilah barked out a laugh, “Maybe I need to insist a bit. Get me some of that energy. With everything that has been going on, I’m constantly tired.”

The treaty, the bond, Seth, Benny, learning a her new role, the injured, all of it was building up into one big ball of awful. Lilah had to constantly remind herself that, as stressed as she was, her bondmate was likely infinitely more frustrated and exhausted. The thought made her reach out for him. He felt stable, but his side of the bond was pulled somewhat shut. Open enough that she could tell he was physically well, but closed to any detail as to his feelings. Lilah pulled back as gently as she could, not wanting to disturb his privacy.

They watched a few more episodes of really bad reality television while Lilah double checked their flight itinerary. She’d gotten a confirmation email to her inbox for a car service after lunch. Everything just sort of fell right into place. They’d gotten what they’d come there for, their exit was prepped, all they had to do was pack up and get in the car.

Lilah stared at the ceiling, half listening to the reunion episode of the show. Over the din of yelling voices and accusations, she began to feel...a little bit useless. The planning, the coordinating, the logistics of every job she’d ever done had been something she’d taken care of personally. In this case, all she’d had to manage was getting a partner that, in the end of it all, the job hadn’t required. And then, everything had gone so god damned smooth that is made Lilah suspicious.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Kate pushing from the bed and tugging on her boots, “I’m going to go to the evening service. You want to come?”

Eyes narrow, Lilah asked, “To the church we just robbed?”

“Yeah.”

“No thanks.”

Kate shrugged and grabbed her coat, slipping the hotel key into her back pocket, “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“Have fun,” Lilah deadpanned, shaking her head.

She watched as Kate gave her a little wave and headed out, the door closing softly behind her. The room settled into relative silence, only the drone of the TV to keep her company. Rubbing at her eyes, Lilah rolled from the bed and grabbed her pajamas.

The shower was perfunctory, going through the motions to get the grime of the day off her skin. She toweled off and pulled on her clothes. Dirty laundry in hand, Lilah stepped out of the steam filled bathroom. She tossed her used clothes into her bag and stood near her bed, staring at nothing.

Annoyed with the newest episode of the show, Lilah grabbed the remote from Kate’s bed and shut it off, leaving the room completely silent. She continued to stand there, looking at nothing. Lilah stood there long enough for the heat to kick on, startling her. She glared at it and rolled her eyes, catching her reflection in the mirror.

There were smudges from the last of the day’s makeup underneath her eyes, but the shadows weren’t there. She leaned in, noting that the usual breakout along her chin had cleared up, the skin smooth. The whites of her eyes were stark and clear against her irises. Maybe there had been changes. Maybe Lilah had been too distracted to notice.

Her hair was still a bit thin along her temples, the permanent line between her brows still there from near constant frowning at a computer screen. The scar from when she’d fallen and cracked her chin open in that bathtub at age five remained, a thin line just beneath her bottom lip.

Maybe not too many changes.

The air in the room rippled. Gasping, Lilah braced herself with her hands out. Stillness. Feeling the air stutter in and out of her lungs, she glanced around, looking for danger. When nothing but the sound of the heater kicking off met her expectant gaze, she dropped her hands.

Another ripple, this time with the accompanying scent of coffee and caramel.

“Brasa?” she called out to the empty room.

Ripple.

“I am here, querida.”

Lilah spun in place, an aborted shout stuck to the back of her throat. She clocked the broad shoulders, the warm brown eyes, and sighed.

“I think I’ve asked you not to scare me like that.”

Ticking his head to the side, he offered her an unrepentant smile, “But then I wouldn’t get to hear your heart beat so beautifully in excitement.”

“There are other ways to achieve that, you know,” she said ruefully, one hand coming to rest where her heart was, indeed, beating a pounding rhythm.

Brows quirking, Brasa gathered her to his body, arms folding around her waist, “You have a point.”

“Of course I do,” she retorted, rising on her toes to kiss him briefly, “What brings you here?”

He pressed his forehead into the skin of her neck, breathing deep, “I missed you.”

Arms draped over his shoulders, Lilah laughed softly, “Its only been a day. We’ve been apart for much longer.”

Letting out a long breath, Brasa said, “I disliked it then as much then as I do now.”

Lilah tightened her grip on him, swaying a bit, “I’ll be home tomorrow.”

“Too long,” he groused with a shake of his head.

She pulled back, cupping his jaw with both hands, “Its faster than I anticipated. I could be gone another whole day.”

The hands on the small of her back clenched, and Lilah heard the fabric of her t shirt tear. Gasping in shock, she twisted her body and found that he ripped the shirt up to about the middle of her back.

Saying his name in censure, Lilah stepped back, holding the shirt away from her body and assessing the damage in the mirror. There was no saving that shirt, not without a sewing machine that she not only didn’t have, but definitely didn’t know how to use.

Firm hands turned her so that he could look at it, and Lilah caught the banked pride in his expression as he tugged, “Oops.”

“Oops?” Her voice was high and incredulous, “That’s all you have to say? ‘Oops’?”

He shrugged, his palms following the line of her spine until the fabric bunched around his wrists, “Perhaps it is an improvement.” When she fixed him with a doubtful look, he went on, “Perhaps I can make it up to you.”

Her brows lifted in interest, but she said nothing. He took that as a ‘yes’, his hands slowly rounding her waist to rest below her breasts. Watching in the mirror as his hands encircled them, gently rolling her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers.

Humming against her skin, Brasa played with her lazily, the distinct lack of urgency lulling her into a low simmering arousal. Lilah leaned into him, her hands resting on the dresser to keep her balance. In the mirror, her reflection undulated. The long line of her throat exposed as she tipped her head back against his shoulder.

“Beautiful,” he groaned, teeth catching her ear.

Lilah focused on his face in the mirror, watched as his eyes devoured her image. His hand rucked up her shirt, squeezing her breasts together, their touch no longer teasing.

Mouth laying sloppy kisses wherever he could reach, Brasa leaned his weight into her. He pinned her to the dresser, shifting her to the side when one of the pulls dug into her belly. Lilah arched back, catching his mouth, the angle too acute for her to get anything more than the barest of kisses.

She whined, tugging on his arms so that he would let her turn around. He held her still, and she could feel the shape his mouth against her skin, spreading into a wide smile.

“Did you need something?”

Lilah grit her teeth against the honey of his words, the way they melted over her, the cajoling tone peeking out from underneath. After so long where he’d given in to her easily, after he’d offered no quarter in the building of her pleasure, the teasing chafed.

She writhed, shimmying her hips against the erection behind her, trying to get him to break. He took it, took every bit of her want, absorbing it so that she only got the tiniest ricochet in return. It left her wanting with such force that she could keep the needy moans inside.

It might have been his name she was chanting, might also have any one of the nonsense syllables that he had been known to pull out of her. All Lilah knew was that her core was clenching down on nothing when it could be fluttering around his hands, or better yet his cock.

Brasa repeated his question, his voice dropping down into his chest so that it came out in a harsh rasp. Lilah nodded, biting her lip. Through the bond, she felt his pleasure, felt how satisfied he was to watch her fall apart in his hands.

Teasing fingertips traced the waistband of her shorts, dipping just below, “Is this it?”

Again, she nodded, her eyes squeezing shut as he pushed down past the elastic to rest all four fingers against her mound. She widened her stance and rocked forward into them, getting a little bit of needed friction.

“Fucking wet,” he groaned, one arm wrapping around her middle and pulling her up and into his body, “You’re ready for me?”

For the third time, she nodded, relieved when he pulled down her shorts just below the crease of her ass, his other hand pressing her forward so that she was leaned over the top of the dresser. She heard the sound of shifting fabric, and then he was pressed against her opening.

With the taut band of her shorts cutting into the meat of her thighs, Lilah could only drop her forehead to the dresser as he pushed steadily forward. He was careful with the initial thrust, hands massaging.

“Good?” she heard from over the pounding of her ears.

Rising, Lilah rotated her hips, seating him deeper and relishing his sharp inhale, “Very good.”

One hand grabbed her chin, turning her head so that he could kiss her, his tongue dipping inside. He kissed her like that as he pumped slowly inside, taking up once more his unhurried pace. Lilah swallowed around a dry throat, her hands closing into little fists.

“More,” she cried out, hoping to coax him into a faster, harder pace.

He chuckled. And though his pace remained the same, the intensity kicked up a notch. He buried his cock inside her all the way each time, the intermittent sound of skin slapping against skin overtaking the silence of the room. Slow. Deep. Unhurried. Brasa fucked her as if he had all the time in the world, as if he wasn’t at all concerned about coming.

It built inside her in intervals that were so small Lilah barely noticed them until it was too late, until her pussy was contracting around him in dizzy pleasure. Brasa snarled, his hips grinding against her ass, one hand holding her steady as he arched over her body.

Lilah relaxed her upper body against the dresser, blinking slowly as Brasa grabbed her hips and pulled them back hard. The air was punched from her as he did it again. And again. He got another five or six good thrusts in before he hissed and she felt him pulse.

When it was over, Brasa pulled out and adjusted her short before doing the same with his down pants. He wrapped his arms around her and walked her back to the bed. Lilah went, reaching back to ruffled his curls.

She hummed as he helped her to lay down, his big body molding to her side, “That was nice.”

He pet her hair, “I’ll do it again when you get back.”

“Promise?”

#from dusk til dawn #from dusk til dawn: the series #Brasa #In the Bond

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mage-cat · 4 years

Text

First Steps Home - Plan? What Plan?

The Rebellion sends a team to rescue Glimmer only for the team to discover that they are now part of an escape plan already in motion.

Part 2 of the Mending Bridges series. Start from the beginning here.

Story under the cut. ~1900 words. Link to AO3 through here.

Mara’s ship wasn’t designed to carry a large crew. That meant to when the Rebellion went to rescue Glimmer, it had to be a bare-bones strike team. Bow and Entrapta were the only ones who had any confidence with new tech on the fly, something Prime’s ship was sure to have in abundance, and Adora would be there to lead them.

Bow, who had taken up piloting duties, had been waiting for Adora to let him in on the details of the plan, figuring that something in Adora’s training--either with the Horde or Light Hope--had given her insight into what they needed to do to at least begin the rescue. He began to feel uneasy as the ship announced that they had left Etheria’s atmosphere and he still had no idea what the next step would be after finding Horde Prime’s ship.

“Um, Adora? How does a spaceship sneak up on another spaceship?”

“How much different can it be to little boat sneaking up on a big boat?”

Bow gestured at a relevant display. “We’re using tech to find Horde Prime’s ship. Isn’t it likely that he has tech that can see us the same way?”

A voice came from somewhere embedded in the ship’s controls. “Message incoming. Would you care to answer?”

Adora froze for a moment before responding, “I guess, yes.”

The ship’s largest screen was filled with a pale face, the eyes green from edge to edge. “You must be the delegation we were told to expect. Please, proceed to the docking bay. We will inform Queen Glimmer to meet you. Please, leave all weapons on your ship.” The voice was bland and clearly assumed there could be no other explanation for who they were as the face disappeared from the screen as soon as the last word was uttered.

“Was that Hordak?” Bow asked.

“No,” said Entrapta with certainty. “Hordak’s a clone, but one Horde Prime considered... nonstandard. At a guess, I would say that was an example of a more typical result of the cloning process.”

“I wonder how many of those Prime keeps around,” Adora said.

The com screen began to display a map directing their ship to the mentioned docking bay. As they flew closer, the view of the ever-growing ship began to be overwhelming. Only in space could something be so big and still move.

“I don’t like the idea of leaving our weapons behind,” Bow said.

“They said Glimmer would be there to meet us,” Adora replied. “I’m hoping our luck improves and we’ll be able to just grab her and leave.”

“I don’t think the odds of that are very good,” said Entrapta.

---

Whatever hope they had of the mission being simple died when they saw exactly who was meeting them when they got off the ship. Glimmer was there, and she was standing, back straight in her most regal posture, at Horde Prime’s right hand.

He addressed her while never looking away from the new arrivals. “Queen Glimmer, would you inform me of who I will be dealing with?”

Glimmer’s voice was nearly as bland as the earlier clone’s had been as she said, “Horde Prime, these are Adora, She-Ra of Etheria and Administrator of the technical systems that run throughout the planet, Bow of the Makers’ Guild, and Entrapta of Dryl, two the Etheria’s brightest technical minds. Entrapta is also the eldest of the Etherian royals whose realms have had dealings with the Horde. All of them have held leadership positions equal to my own in the Rebellion.”

He focused on the purple-haired woman. “Would this be the same Entrapta that my wayward clone was so intrigued by?”

“Yes, Horde Prime, the same,” Glimmer answered. Adora motioned towards the ship. Glimmer gave a tiny shake of her head and spoke again. “Sire, I would not presume to tell you what to do, but I will vouch for Entrapta’s good behavior while she is here and advise you that treating her differently from the rest of the delegation might prolong the process they are here for. Might I take them to my quarters for a briefing before we discuss negotiations?”

“You may.”

Glimmer approached the three and held her arms out in front of her. “I suggest we go the quick way.” They all knew what that was a cue for.

---

One teleport later Glimmer’s face broke into a grin. “How was my performance?”

Bow hugged her. “Unnerving!”

“I’ve been getting tutoring in placating megalomaniacs.” After returning the hug for a moment, she stepped back. “He thinks you’re here to negotiate surrender by the way.”

Before any of them could properly react to that, a delighted version of Hordak’s voice came from a gray blur descending from somewhere near the ceiling. “Entrapta!”

“Imp!” Entrapta cried as she caught the creature.

He opened his mouth, releasing a gentle female voice. “You’re safe here.” The voice twisted into sarcasm, causing the faces of the three to shift in recognition. “Prime’s been magnanimous and promised us our privacy”

“Hey, Adora.” The same voice came from a previously unnoticed corner of the room, now attached to its original source. “Bow.” Catra hesitated. “Entrapta.”

Adora began to launch herself at her, but Glimmer’s arm across her chest brought her up short.

“Stop. We would all be dead right now if it wasn’t for Catra.”

“You trust people too easily when you think they’re useful.”

“I trust my truth spells.”

“After everything she’s done?”

“She can help get my mother back. The way things went down with the portal, she knows things no one else does.” Glimmer paused as if considering if she should say the next thing. “While under the truth spell, she also said my dad’s alive.”

Bow and Adora exchanged a meaningful look, and he said, “He was on Beast Island. He’s holding down the fort at Bright Moon now. He and Shadow Weaver have a history, so he’s confined her to her room unless she’s being supervised by at least one person capable of magic.”

“Thank goodness. It saves me the trouble.”

Adora’s face hardened again. “I thought you were enjoying being Shadow Weaver’s new favorite.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten so cozy with her if, instead of vaguely talking about how evil she was, you had given me some concrete examples. You know, like the fact that she had tortured children in front of you!”

“She had tortured you!”

“She didn’t do it for over a decade starting from when I was six!”

“Sparkles,” Catra broke in. “I appreciate what you’re doing, but is this the time?”

Glimmer took a steadying breath. “No, it’s not.” She turned to face Catra properly. “Think we can get the plan to work now?”

“Best chance we’re ever going to get. Entrapta, I am so glad you are alive.”

Entrapta clutched Imp closer. “No thanks to you.”

Catra bit her lip. “I thought you were turning into my enemy, and I panicked. Only an idiot would underestimate you and the damage you could do to someone if you thought you had to. I’m sorry. It would have been smarter for me to try to stay on your good side. I want to hear your theories on some things.”

Her grip on Imp relaxed a fraction. “Your potential data on the portal tech is intriguing...”

“Portal later. I promise. We need your theories on something more pressing.” Catra held out her hand, and a glowing amber orb the size of her fist began to hover above it. “How am I suddenly doing this? Could the Heart be drawing energy from more than just the planet? Could it be pulling magic from the people?”

Entrapta leaned toward the light. “Fascinating. That would explain the metric I couldn’t make sense of.” She looked up at Catra’s face “On Beast Island, there was a First Ones database, including a bunch of profiles for potential colonist species. Biological requirements, potential for dissent against imperial rule if allowed to remain on their home planets, and this one calculation that could have been how effectively they could power the Heart.”

“We know releasing all of the Heart’s energy the way it was designed would be bad, but could we return that energy back to the people?”

“I would have to take a closer look at the Heart, or at least its schematics.”

“Wait,” Adora said. “The Heart is doing what?”

Catra turned to her, the sphere of light disappearing.“Short version. Best that we can tell? Magic should be way more common in the Etherian population than it is. Anyone on the surface gets drained of their power the same way the magic of the planet itself gets collected.”

Glimmer continued. “That’s probably why Mystacor is airborne. The Princesses still have some of our magic because we are connected to the Heart through the Runestones.”

“Just some of your magic?” Entrapta asked.

“Oh yeah.” Glimmer moved her cape to one side. Her wings--which, like Queen Angella’s, were always more like solid energy that matter--still didn’t match the majestic sweep of her mother’s, but she wouldn’t be readily hiding them under a shirt again either. “I have definitely been running at a lower charge than I should have been.”

Catra spoke again. “Alright. We have a plan of action once we get back to the planet. Now to get out of here and over there.”

“Right,” said Glimmer. “Bow, Entrapta, Catra will lead you to do some industrial sabotage and, if we’re lucky, a little theft. Adora, you and I are going to go hit some things very hard. We can talk on the way.”

“Why can’t we just teleport to the ship and leave?” Adora asked.

Catra answered, “We try that and Prime will just use his transporter tech to beam us back here, and he won’t be near as polite afterwards. Hence the sabotage.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t trust any authority higher than my own, and Horde Prime thinks he is the highest authority in the universe.”

“Makes sense to me,” said Entrapta.

Adora glared at the person she had once called her best friend. “I’ll be watching you.”

“Not until Sparkles takes you to the rendezvous point.”

As the shimmer of Glimmer and Adora teleporting away faded, Catra turned to her new teammates. “Alright, first step is to see if we can steal ourselves a clone. Hordak thought conquering a planet would impress Horde Prime, but the only thing Prime is ever impressed with is himself. He doesn’t like his clones being people. As soon as we were on the ship he put Hordak under… I don’t think it was a mindwipe. I think it was a personality suppressor or something. If anyone can wake him up,” she pulled something out of a pocket and pressed it into Entrapta’s hand, “it’s you.” It was the crystal Entrapta had used to power the armor she had made for Hordak. “He was really broken up about it when he thought you had betrayed him. When he found out I had lied about that, he tried very hard to kill me for it. I may not understand what you two have going on, but I understand that it’s important to you two.”

Bow said, “So step one of your plan is...”

The look on Catra’s face said she couldn’t quite believe what she was about to say either. “To save Hordak.”

Next Chapter: Saving Who? >

#she ra #fanfiction #glimmer #catra #adora #bow #entrapta #cat writes

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soundwavereporting · 4 years

Text

title: the moth and the robot

fandom(s): Transformers IDW1, Godzilla Heisei series

characters: Cosmos (the robot), Mothra (the moth)

summary: set directly after the 1992 Godzilla vs Mothra movie. Intent on keeping her promise, Mothra heads to space to stop a planet-destroying comet.

notes: totally unbeta’d, feedback is always appreciated.

Yesterday, she had made her first friend in half a century.

Today, that friend was dead. Alone, she hurtled through space, lacking even the fairies. They had been left on her island to guard her egg--at some point between the airfield and now, she had resigned herself to the notion that she was destined to be alone.

Which was fine.

It wasn’t like she was lonely; the fairies were good company when they were around. Once he had seen the sense in working together, even Battra had accepted her offer of a tentative alliance to defeat a stronger enemy. Privately, she wondered if he had been lonelier than her, truly lacking any kin besides the planet itself. She wondered if anyone would have ever been able to understand him.

So, she was happy enough being alone.

Battra had not told her the exact location of the Gorath comet. He had not lived long enough to know how to navigate the stars and currents the way she had, but she could feel its presence, tingling in the back of her mind like a headache. And she could hear something else; a soft static just behind her eyes.

She suspected it was nothing more than a satellite. The humans had started sending them up into space some time ago, though she had not thought they would be so far from the earth. She made a mental note to ask her fairies to ask the humans about the satellites once she got back.

Ah.

There—slightly larger than she had expected, green and round—was the satellite. Mothra tucked in her wings as she approached, landing softly on the satellite. It smelled like alien metal. Beneath its core components, she could feel its circuitry humming, felt the engine pulse under her feet.

The satellite made an offended sputter. It jerked away from her, metamorphosing in a whirl of green and white and silver, until it had evolved completely, becoming a strange, two-legged creature with a blue eye screen that matched her own eyes, gawking up at her.

It chirped and chattered angrily. Mothra frowned, straining her ears as she tried to make sense of the little alien’s language. It was a little alien, wasn’t it? Surely the humans were not so advanced that they had learned to design mechanical beings such as this—surely they had some generations to learn and grow before repeating the mistakes of the Elias. If the humans could make little robots intelligent enough to travel so far, to chirp angrily at her, surely their technology was not so far from reaching the point where they would desire to control the earth’s climate.

Perhaps, Mothra realized despairingly, her friend had not been wrong to act so quickly.

“—¸.•..>?” The alien gestured to her with one hand, then to the vast expanse of space around them all.

Mothra blinked. It hadn’t run, nor had it tried to attack her.

She backed up, far enough to easily dodge the alien if needed, close enough that she didn’t think the little alien would think too badly of her.

“Mothra,” she said. “My name is Mothra.”

“Mothra!” The robot tapped his chest. “Thank Primus the translator picked up your language. You understand me?”

Mothra’s eyes had gone wide in awe. Fascinating. The alien—now, she was sure it was an alien—could understand her! “I understand you.”

The robot’s eye screen flashed. “Hi, uh, Mothra. I’m Cosmos.”

Mothra’s antennae twitched. An appropriate name. Were his species named after their functions? Mothra supposed she had named herself. Or perhaps the Elias had. It had been so long, she could no longer remember.

“It’s nice to meet you, Cosmos,” Mothra said. Now that she was paying closer attention, she could hear it: what she had believed to be the satellites’ circuitry humming was Cosmos’s voice, quiet and constant against the silence of space. “I believed I was alone.”

“Oh!” Cosmos tilted his head, eyes watching Mothra with an expression she wanted to label as curious. “I’m usually by myself out here. I mean, not totally alone, but, you know: lonely.”

Curious, Mothra tapped Cosmos’s arm with one leg. She could practically taste it, sharp and sour at the back of her throat. Wishing desperately for something out of reach.

She wondered if Cosmos could sense her loneliness.

“So.”

They had been floating in silence for perhaps a minute. Mothra was used to the silence, but apparently, Cosmos was not.

“I’ve never seen a ‘Mothra’ before,” Cosmos asked. “Are you just…out here for fun? For recon?”

“I made a promise,” Mothra said. “To a friend. There’s a comet—an asteroid, I think—that’s going to hit the planet we live on. I promised I would stop it.”

Cosmos nodded. “I’ve surveyed this quadrant for the last cycle looking for artificial weaponry, but I did collect data on a medium-sized comet that’s scheduled to enter the SOL-84 system within the next half-cycle.”

Cosmos pointed somewhere to his right. “I guess I can’t upload the exact coordinates into your processor, can I?”

“No.” Mothra blinked. “But I can sense its presence, just as I heard you.”

“Huh.” Cosmos dropped his hand and crossed his arms, looking away from Mothra. Then: “D’you need…help, stopping it?”

She hadn’t even considered asking. Surely Cosmos had his own missions to complete, his own promises to uphold, but if he was offering…

“Alright,” Mothra said. After all, Battra hadn’t told her how he planned to stop the thing. “Thank you.”

“I’m technically not supposed to have this,” Cosmos was saying. “But my boss, uh, well, I’m not sure where he got it, or who developed it, but it works!”

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

Cosmos shrugged. “It’ll get the job done. We haven’t been able to study black holes in too much detail, but I think it’s safe to say that your comet won’t cause you any more trouble. Press the big button. Second from the left.”

Mothra tapped the button. It flashed yellow and she looked up, studying the deactivated sensor net.

She and Cosmos had spent the better part of a day planting tiny metal circles the size of Cosmos’s hand around an asteroid belt. According to Cosmos, once the comet entered the sensor’s range, a highly experimental (yet safe) black hole would be created. Once it had consumed the Gorath comet, Cosmos would activate another highly experimental (yet safe) device to render the black hole harmless.

Mother knew little of human (or robot) technology, and all of the more technical words Cosmos had used to explain had failed to translate into her language. From what little she understood, Cosmos planned to disrupt the inner workings of the black hole, destabilizing something in its orbit in order to dissipate its energy.

“After this,” Cosmos said, “Are you going back to earth?”

Thoughtfully, Mothra tapped her fingers against the metal controls. She hadn’t considered going anywhere but Earth, but the robot’s tone made it seem like there was another option. She could stay with him, perhaps. For a time. Yet, the seal she had placed on Godzilla would not last for long. She had a year—perhaps two—before he awakened. And when he did, Mothra was unsure if she would be able to stop him by herself.

“Yes.” Mothra turned to look at Cosmos. She couldn’t tell what the robot was thinking—without spending more time around him, it was nearly impossible to pick up any but the most urgent of his thoughts. Nor could she understand his body language: he had no discernible eyes, simply that shining blue plate of on his head. He didn’t even have wings. The robot watched impassively as she found her voice, and spoke:

“I am sworn to protect my planet,” Mothra said. “And I must return. However, I would welcome the help if you wanted to come with me.”

Cosmos had been slouching on an asteroid, but as she spoke, he straightened, as though he were startled.

“You’d want—you just met me!” Cosmos said. “What if I were a Decep—a bad guy, out to destroy your organic species?”

“There’s only one of me,” Mothra said, ignoring Cosmos’s half-uttered apology. “Besides, if you wanted to kill me, surely you would have done so already?”

“I guess.” Cosmos shrugged. “I mean, I’d love to. It sounds much nicer than staying in space all the time. Are there other people where you live?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.” Cosmos checked one of the screens on his wrist and turned in the direction of the comet’s approach. “And you were the only person they sent to stop this thing?”

“I was the only one who could do it.” Mothra frowned. “The only one alive, at least.”

Which was true. Though he could fly far faster than her, she doubted even Rodan would have the strength to travel this far with no air. Plus, if Rodan died in this airless, frigid place, he would never come back. Mothra would.

“Oh.” Cosmos looked back at her. “I know what you mean. I’ve been one of the few spacefaring bots who survived this long into the war, so I’m always posted out here. I mean, not here, specifically. Wherever Prowl or Skids need me.”

“What strange names you robots have.”

Cosmos snorted. “You’re literally a giant moth.”

“Fair point.” Just a few hours ago, it had been little more than annoyance—helpful, even, as she navigated the stars—but now, pressure in her head was reaching a crescendo. If the comet did not enter the asteroid belt soon, she would need to retreat before it got any more painful.

“Will you be alright?” Cosmos asked abruptly. “Going back to the earth alone?”

Mothra was quiet as she considered his words, scratching at the scales on her neck as she thought. She hadn’t taken the time to properly clean herself after the fight, and her fluff was still covered in the ash and debris of Godzilla’s radioactive breath. At least she hadn’t gotten any blood on her, Mothra thought morbidly.

Yes, she had realized in the last few hours: she was lonely, had been lonely for some time, and acquiring and losing a friend in the span of a few minutes had only forced her to realize that. Had that been why she had asked Cosmos to return to earth with her?

“I—“ The pressure in her head spiked, and Mothra looked up to see the comet, once little more than a speck on the horizon, now looming above them. “I think we’d better move back.”

“Agreed.”

Together, they flew to the furthest tip of the asteroids, as far from the comet as they could get before Cosmos lost the signal.

“You ready?”

Mothra nodded.

Cosmos pressed the button.

The light was strong enough that Mothra had to look away, and the blast that followed had her huddling beside Cosmos as rock and ash pelted their bodies.

It hadn't made a sound.

When Mothra looked up, there was no sign of the comet—hardly any sign of the asteroids themselves. What little remained floated aimlessly; some of the rocks had been split open, revealing shimmering crystals and dark obsidian. It was a beautiful sight, and Mothra wished Battra was here to see it.

“Thank you,” Mothra said. “I don’t know how I would have done it on my own.”

“Hey, anytime.”

Mothra imagined Cosmos was smiling. He had to have a mouth, didn’t he?

“You know,” Cosmos said. “I know you’ve gotta go, but if you’re ever in the quadrant…”

Mothra moved to bump her head against Cosmos’s forehead. Among her species, it would be considered a fond gesture—one of respect and solidarity. But Cosmos leapt back, emitting a harsh, staticky yelp.

“Sorry!”

“Oh! No, no, it’s okay.” Cosmos hesitated, then patted Mothra’s forehead awkwardly. “Caught me by surprise is all.”

Collecting the equipment took far less time than setting it up. In no time at all, Cosmos had transformed back into his strange, circular form, and Mothra had reoriented herself to face Earth.

“Thank you,” Mothra said, again. “I do hope we will meet again one day.”

“Me too.”

#someone: but [soundwavereporting] are you implying tarantulas was accidentally responsible for creating space godzilla?#me: p e r h a p s #transformers #godzilla #mothra #cosmos #kaiju #maccadam #idw

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fountainpenguin · 4 years

Note

Have you talked about how fairies anti fairies and pixies dress? What is their normal wear like? Comfort wear? Formal wear? Thx

Yes, that’s something I thought about a lot, actually! There are a lot of little details I had to consider, like why an ectothermic population living in a cold cloud world would wear short sleeves (Answer: Fashion trend when the Fairies who lived in warm parts of Earth fled to the cloudlands to escape humans).

When I write, I try to keep track of who is wearing what, if that clothing affects their wings or floating ability, and whether that outfit works in this location (I have some notes about which areas have snow and which ones are warm). H.P. has a mortal fear of being smothered to death like a queen bee when he stops being “useful,” so from Act 3 of Origin on he starts taking off his shirt more so he won’t overheat. I have to strike that balance between not freezing to death and not roasting. Clothing is hard for bug people.

Anyway, here are my notes on Fae clothing (taken from the species refs on the new sideblog):

Fae Clothing

FAIRIES

Fairy clothing is simpler and more colorful than Anti-Fairy and Pixie clothing. Color is the main aspect prized in Fairy clothing, to the point that clothing stores are organized by color rather than style or size. Black pants and black shoes are the usual standard.

Cotton is not common due to the difficulty of growing it in the cloudlands; wool and silk are easily obtainable. Someone who wears cotton clothing paid handsomely for those. Bovine are too valuable to turn into leather clothing, and furs are uncommon due to Fairy World’s attachment to animals.

Most Fairies wear simple but colorful underwear (though white is also a common choice). Most Fairies do not wear undershirts along with their lower underwear since undershirts are considered an Anti-Fairy custom. Chemise undergarments are common choices for both drakes and damsels.

ANTI-FAIRIES

Blue and black clothing is standard; if any other colors are worn, they’re the colors of the zodiac one was born beneath. Wearing another zodiac color (except for certain ceremonies) will turn heads. It’s also uncommon to see Anti-Fairies in shorts.Wearing visible jewelry is uncommon among those who aren’t aristocrats, creche fathers, or colony queens / kings.

Anti-Fairies often dress in three layers of clothes: undergarments that consist of both a top and bottom piece, then a shirt that is lightweight but long-sleeved, and finally something warmer on top. Anti-Fairy World is extremely cold, so warm clothing is important. However, an Anti-Fairy who overheats will become sick. Dressing in multiple layers when they go out allows them more control over their body temperature. Most Anti-Fairies wear warm wool in the day (moving around alone) and breathable silk at night (roosting in a group). Furs are more commonly worn by Anti-Fairies than Fairies. Leather clothes are uncommon.

Anti-Fairy clothing is more elaborate but duller colored than Fairy clothing. Style is the main aspect prized in Anti-Fairy clothing. Shoes are designed to be kicked off easily so Anti-Fairies can roost (Anti-Fairies also tend to lose their shoes while flying if they aren’t careful). Dark colors like black and blue make hunting and stalking easier.

Most damsels wear undershirts along with some style of bloomers or knickerbockers. Drakes normally wear single-piece, full-body undergarments that have separate legs and reach the knees.It’s highly encouraged (and usually assumed) that the color of your undergarments matches the year you were born in the Fae zodiac. It isn’t law, but it’s useful since most Anti-Fairies are Zodii and prefer to pair with those who were born in years that are lucky matches for them, and avoid those born in years said to be unlucky.

In the recent Frayed Knots chapter, “Deep,” Anti-Cosmo was upset that the cherubs provided him with Fairy undergarments, not Anti-Fairy ones.

PIXIES

Pixie suits are made of linen and fine, lightweight wool. Cotton is rare and very expensive in the cloudlands, so pixies are much more likely to own cotton clothing than Fairies or Anti-Fairies are. Silk is practically nonexistent in Pixie World; silk has special connotations with intimacy when it comes to preening and is worn ceremonially if at all.

I did some research on suit types and specifically, H.P. wears a 4x2 double-breasted, single-vent suit. The standard for all other pixies is a two-button, single-breasted, single-vent suit. If I remember my terminology correctly, this is the “American cut.” I set Pixie World above Kansas, so that seemed fitting.

That’s normal wear. You also asked about comfort wear and formal wear. Fairy culture encourages you to be comfortable with yourself, and that’s the cultural norm. If you show up to a job interview in pajamas, that’s completely acceptable and no one will be surprised unless you LOOK like you’re uncomfortable. So all Fairy clothing is comfort wear, I guess.

Unlike Anti-Fairy culture, Fairy culture doesn’t gender clothing, so you see drakes and damsels in either suits or dresses. In the next Origin chapter, H.P. takes High Count Anti-Bryndin to a special party (Samhain) as his Plus One. The dress code there? Absolutely everyone in elaborate dresses. No exceptions. Somewhere in my drafts I have a scene where H.P. wears a skirt to an Italian restaurant he knows Big Daddy is going to be at because he’s lording money and success over his head, but I can’t remember if I scrapped it.

So there’s a belief that skirts and dresses are fancy, but suits and ties are equally fancy. Wear what you prefer. Fairy culture prizes comfort.

H.P.’s casual wear would be his Pixie Holotype shirt (HERE / HERE). Sometimes he wears it as pajamas, although the traditional Pixie pajama color is mint green. H.P. likes the feel of silk, but in Pixie culture it’s ceremonial so he doesn’t wear it much. I sketched him in his ceremonial preening robes HERE.

Anti-Fairies are either pomp and circumstance or living in rags with little in-between. Fairies have robes (like preening robes) in their culture while Anti-Fairies don’t. One thing I have to think about when designing Anti-Fairy clothing is what the purpose of the clothing is. Their stage clothing is elaborate because it’s for display only; this is their one time to wear fancy things. I have to take time of day and surroundings into account if I want to write an Anti-Fairy wearing a dress because they roost upside-down. You don’t want ribbons and ruffles flapping in your face.

Anti-Cosmo actually tries to reject Anti-Wanda’s advances in “No Absolutes” because he wasn’t expecting her home early. He doesn’t want to change out of his favorite nightgown so he can roost with her. She points out it can’t flop in his face if he just gets naked and he doesn’t know what to say to that.

#asks #Anon #Bat cube and associates #FAIRIES!#Long post #We're Pixies!#Pious gold and white bird people yep #Origin of the Pixies #Frayed Knots #No Absolutes #The bat with the hat #The best bat queen #I'm wasp dad trash

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everlarkficexchange · 5 years

Text

The Raven and The Gods

Written by: @alliswell21

Prompt 46: Peeta, the Greek god Apollo, hears the most beautiful voice at his temple so he comes down to earth to find this beautiful maiden. Follows how this god falls in love with a mortal and withstand the trials the other gods put them through. [submitted by @animekpopxx]

RATING: General (for the foreseeable future)

TAGS: Greek Mythology AU; Supernatural AU; Apollo!Peeta.

Author’s note: So this piece is only an introduction of sorts at less than 2500 words. I hope to write the rest in the next few weeks.

In mythology Apollo is a very busy god. He oversees many aspects of human lives, has many attributes, and has a complexed personality in my opinion. Apollo is one of my favorite Olympians and I’ve always wanted to write something based on him, I just hope this one turns out ok.

KPKPKPKPK

The god of light pulled to a stop in the pristine marble streets of Olympus; his duty to bring the sun to the world finished and weary from his ventures, Apollo dismounted his golden chariot, and allowed the noble Pegasi pulling his transport some rest.

“Tired my friends?” He asked the two winged horses patting their necks affectionately as the animals nuzzled their master’s arm.

“Me too.” Apollo smiled softly, then added, “I do not believe ambrosia and nectar will be enough to cure this lethargy that’s taken over me. I am certain it is time I should look at the gathering in my Temple at Delphi, let the restaurative praises of the mortals heal me instead. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed the worship of mankind.”

In a moment, the Pegasi scampered off to feed on Olympian grasses, and the god of light walked to the edge of the Eternal City, where the view of the mortal world shifted under the waning morning. Apollo adjusted his sight, like binoculars focusing on a specific point in the distance. His temple at Delphi rushed at him while the rest of the world resided.

“Splendid!” Apollo exclaimed when a group of mortals filed through the open doors of the temple.

The crowd was thick and full, milling about the open space, squeezing by columns and statues depicting a young, beardless youth, viril and strong, showing a variety of Apollo’s many attributes. Half a dozen braziers stood flaming in front of each statue, waiting for people who brought fresh fruit, cereals, laurel wreaths, and even the small sacrificial pray, to burn their offerings to their god. Prayers accompanied the offerings as they fell into the fire, and somewhere in the room a musician played the lyre in a echoing corner.

Apollo closed his bright blue eyes and took a deep, deep breath. The fragrant odor of the burnt tribute invaded his nostrils and filled his chest, cleansing his aura and renewing his depleted strength with his next exhale. An electric wave crackled around him as the sacrificial smokes ascended coiling rhythmically towards Olympus and the god himself. Every muscle in his body tightened and relaxed in quick succession, giving him another inch or so of mass and strength. His golden hair glistened anew in the glare of the sun while he flexed his fingers, craving the feel of his lyre strings under them.

Just as he was about to summon the lyre to play along the musician in his shrine, the most beautiful voice he’d heard in millennia cut through the other prayers, the crackling of the consuming fire of offerings, and music previously filling Apollo’s ears.

It was only a short worship song— one verse sang twice and not a whole stanza at that— but what beautiful voice it was!

Being the god of music, Apollo’s ears perked up and waited for the rest of the rendition, but nothing else came for two long beats of the heart, and then, the song picked up again, less timid than the first try and even an octave higher.

Apollo leaned forward on the rail-less edge of his sky high home, and his eyes searched the congregation like hawks seeking prey, but the crowd had thickened out if possible. People pressed against each other, trying to get to the specific braziers they sought out, meanwhile the singing kept gaining strength, and he realized the one he was focused on was merely joining in another two voices that sounded less captivating, but still very charming all the same.

“Three women,” he gasped, “three women singing, where are they?” But there were hundreds of women singing in various size groups all over the temple.

With a growl, the god took a step backwards and pushed off the edge of Olympus with the tip of his toes, lunging himself straight down to Earth like a meteor. His arms flushed at his sides at first, suddenly opened at shoulder level and tucking his head down, his whole body shimmered, shrinking and morphing while feathers black as night on a moonless sky replaced sun-kissed, fair skin.

Apollo swooped inside the temple and flew close to the ceiling, cocking his head here and there, scanning the crowd with tiny black eyes that could still bring into focus a specific section at a time. His bird ears perked up when again the sweet voice he sought lifted above the rest of the singers, and he realized it came from the direction reserved for the healers who worshiped him.

The bird god flew overhead in a circle, enough times he got the unwanted attention of a priest who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“Look!” The priest cried out disrupting the prayers and songs of the other mortals, making Apollo glare in annoyance. “A raven! In the temple!”

“Is it the wrath of Apollo upon us?” Asked a woman trembling from head to toe.

The fear picked up like wildfire among the mortals, cowering and accusing one another of imaginary transgressions against their god.

Knowing keeping his current appearance would hinder his search, Apollo turned the plumage on his body to white, causing the crowd to sigh in relief at the sight of the bird’s new plumage. He flew out a small window at the side of the temple on the opposite wall just as quickly as he’d come in.

Mortals have the habit of taking omens way too close to heart. Apollo should have known better than to use the form of a creature he’d— for all intents— had cursed by turning its feathers the color of soot, but then again, the raven was his bird, he should be able to use it in whatever circumstance he seemed fit. Instead, he was forced to take on a human form.

The luminescence of his divine skin muted to a dull glow that simply disappeared the more man-like he appeared. His eyes also lost the light of the sun that filled them, and turned into a bright, cheerful blue. His hair went from golden like the rays of the sun to ashy blond and curly at the ends. He debated whether to grow a beard or stay clean faced as he naturally was… he opted for the latter. Then, he looked down at his robes, still too magnificent to be worn amongst the mortals and remaining incognito. A quick wave of his hand left him wearing a cream color chiton, with a brown chlamys fastened at the shoulder with a small wooden lyre broach. Simple sandals kept his feet properly protected. He could be a traveling peasant and nobody would look at him twice.

Apollo marched into his temple with a single task in mind: Find the singing woman. He made his way through the crowd still gawking at the ceiling of the temple where the raven had been flying not a minute earlier, others had fallen to their knees with renewed fervor after witnessing how the bird went from bad to good omen with the change of plumage.

The priest was still standing in the middle of the temple, flapping his arms over his head, chanting loudly some nonsense about Apollo’s power and wisdom. The god made a beeline to the old man, knowing he had to snap him out of the trance so the songs and prayers could resume and he could get back to his search.

“What an amazing miracle to behold.” Apollo said into the priest’s ear, “The sun is bright, the wind is sweet, call to the lyres, our Lord to please. Music and song is what the gods want, ring out your voices, let your poems fall free.”

As if hypnotized, the priest stood stock still, his eyes turned glassy, but then he started calling for lyres to carry out a tune, and singers to belt out their praises loudly. His job done, Apollo melted back into the crowd.

The god of music stuck his arm out and his lyre appeared in his hand out of thin air. It was of course disguised as a common instrument to match its master’s appearance, but it was still the most celestial sound in the place. Soon the voices of the mortals filled the god’s ears and he had to close his eyes to take in all the influx of strength and new life pouring into him. And suddenly, the voice he had momentarily forgotten, hit his senses awake.

“She’s there!” The god looked to his left, and his feet lead him without stopping. People cleared a path for him with a wave of his fingers until he found himself in the middle of the cluster of healers that followed his cult as patron of medicine and healing.

Three women holding each other called his attention. One was a downtrodden looking woman who still possessed a certain beauty to herself; the other two were younger, a nervous looking maiden with long, braided hair as dark as Apollo’s ravens and eyes as bright as the full moon; the last one, not much older than a child, blonde and fair as the older woman, with features that resembled both of her companions. The god deduced the three women were kin to one another, and simply inched closer to them, to see if he had found his mystery singer.

He played his lyre an approached the singing trio, convinced it was the source of the voice he craved. The ladies sang to his tune as if under a spell. Apollo saw two of The Muses— Euterpe, goddess of song and lyric poetry; and Polyhymnia, goddess of hymns— come to dance around the mortal women, and smiled at them gratefully, knowing full well they came to help him draw out the singing for as long as the mortals could stand it.

Normally, mortals can’t see The Muses. They can only feel their presence and respond to their inspirational nudgings, but the gray eyes of the eldest girl fixed on Euterpe. Startled by the apparition, her eyes widened in fear and apprehension. The maiden wrapped her arms around the younger girl’s lithe body and pulled her closer to her chest. A moment later, and without taking her gaze from the goddess, the mortal maid had taken a protective stance shielding the youngster behind her own slim frame.

The action peaked Apollo’s curiosity.

Apollo dismiss his goddesses, grateful for their help, he lifted the mist blinding the mortals to the presence of the deities, and free them from the trance The Muses had put on all the followers of their leader gathered in the temple.

Apollo’s fingers rang out a few more notes on his lyre, and then stopped playing his enchanted music. As if by magic, The Muses disappeared, leaving the mortals confused for a short moment. But humans are forgetful, fickle creatures, all bewilderment wiped off their minds almost immediately.

Apollo watched the women closely. The older girl released her grip on the youngest, who beamed up a smile as breathtaking as it was sweet.

“That was amazing, Katniss! Thank you for helping me sing today. I’m sure our songs brought the blessing of the dove to the temple today. I’ve never seen anything alike before.”

Apollo snorted. Mortals always saw only what they could explain. They witnessed a raven turn it’s feathers white above their heads, and quickly pronounced it a dove instead.

The older girl’s facial muscles twitched, her lips pursed for a second but then she schooled her expression into a slight smile. “Maybe it was, little duck. Maybe the gods know it is your thirteenth birthday and sent a blessing just for you. I hardly had anything to do with it.”

“Oh, that’s not true!” The girl whispered, blushing before tackling the maiden with a hug. “You have the most amazing voice. And the blessing was for everyone who saw the dove, not just me. Right, Mama?” The girl turned to the woman who’s soft blue eyes watched the exchange as if afraid to be shooed away.

“It’s, true. Katniss has the sweetest voice ever. And the blessing is a welcome and most needed sign from our lord, Apollo.”

“Thank you, mother.” Said the older girl less warmly than how she spoke to the youngster. “I’m sure Apollo enjoyed all the other offerings we brought for him.”

“Sure he did!” Exclaimed the younger sister. “Lord Apollo is the wisest, strongest and most approachable of all the gods in Olympus.”

“Shush, Prim!” Chided the big sister, nervous eyes flitting everywhere at once. “We must never compare deities as such. All gods are great in their own rights and none is highest than Zeus himself. All gods are powerful and amazing.”

“You don’t sound very convinced.” Said Apollo immediately regretting his faux pas as the raven-haired maid’s blood drain from her thin face. “I apologize for intruding. It is not my place.”

“It is not!” The maiden scowled mightily. “It will do you well to stick to playing your lyre, minstrel!”

Apollo felt his heart swell.

It was a well known fact, Apollo, for all his might and attributes, obsessing over hard-to-get romantic interests was his weakness.

“Minstrel you call me, like it is a disease.” Said the god smirking, “But our Lord Apollo finds the musicians to be bearers of gifts, like joy and beauty.”

The maiden rolled her eyes. “Of course Apollo would.” She muttered under her breath.

“Katniss, remember where you are!” Hissed her mother behind a fan, tired blue eyes nervously shifting around.

Katniss feigned a smile. “Lord Apollo is most gracious unto us. Alas, I am not of his service.” She looked at her family warily, “Mother, Primrose, if you are think that you’ve satisfied Apollo with out offerings, I believe it is time to seek the the priest to bring forth Prim’s name to be considered to start the healer training now that she’s thirteen.”

“Allow me to escort you, my lady. I’m sure god Apollo is eager to bless his new healer in the making!” The god smiled at Primrose, whose cheeks turn a sweet pink.

“That will not be necessary, minstrel. We can find the priest on our own just fine.”

“Peeta, my lady, the name is Peeta Mellark, at your services,” said Apollo at once and without putting too much thought into it, took the maiden’s hand to kiss it.

As soon as his skin made contact with hers, a series of pictures played in the god’s mind’s eye.

The air thicken, a mystical aura descended into the temple. The priestess Pythia who sat alone in her tripod stool in the Oracle’s chamber rose her eyes from the basin full of water and laurel leaves, the spirit of the Python hissing in her veins.

Pythia rose from her perch and marched into the public side of the temple, causing an uproar, the high priest rushed to the Oracle, frightened by her presence on a day she was not meant to be consulted, but before the man could inquire what had moved her to the crowd, she spoke, facing in the general direction of the healers section.

“I am Pythia, Oracle of Delphi, servant of Apollo, hear my voice and heed my warning.”

The Oracle walked to the cluster of healers with eyes shining and hair flowing. Her white chiton covered her thighs and her feet were bare. She made no sound as she walked a straight line almost in front of Apollo, butat the last second, the woman turned her face to a trembling Katniss.

“You who fear great losses, will be overcome by hope.

Don’t let the emotions fool you, don’t run away from fear. Embrace your weakness, let go of sorrow. Welcome freedom and hold fast to the rising sun, the dandelion in the spring, the promise of a better dawn. Don’t be fooled by the arrow and the storm. Time is upon you, and the trials ahead will rival the heroes quests. Hold fast to the dandelion in the spring.”

Pythia stumbled backwards, and Apollo caught her in his arms gently, turning her over to the priests to look after her. When Apollo looked back, the three women were gone.

#Springtime Edition 2019 #submission #alliswell21 #animekpopxx #prompt 46

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grr-it · 5 years

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maybe kind of bitter in spite of the sunshine

Summary: “Scary,” his boss, the ANBU commander Whale, remarks. “A few months of training and she can give Hound a run for his money.”

(the ao3 version.)

Recruit Number Eight descends on her sparring partners with her fist cocked back, chakra coating her knuckles, enforcing her strength. They dodge – and she redirects the punch towards the ground, sending chipped pieces of boulder flying, the earth rippling around her.

She doesn't falter, doesn't fold away under the volley of kicks and jabs and grappling hooks hurled at her. Her strength lies in her augmented muscles – but one hit even without her chakra in just the right spot is enough to set your world spinning. Tapped as a paper ninja in the Academy, she twisted around those expectations and thrived, sharp-minded enough to know that her speed must carry her like wings.

Now, Number Eight spreads her hands and releases the weights she has been supplied with by Konoha's resident Taijutsu expert. They drop craters into the ground and the newbies hesitate just a moment too long before remembering themselves. But she has already blurred forward, just a hint too fast for the human eye to register, a shape you know better than to cross.

One breath later the other three recruits lie panting heavily in the dirt, not even close to a match for Number Eight, even in a free-for-all.

Number Eight aced all of their written assignments. If he didn't know better, Sparrow would think there was a Nara lurking under that blank mask.

“Scary,” his boss, the ANBU commander Whale, remarks. “A few months of training and she can give Hound a run for his money.”

“She already did. Why, you ask? Because he never bothered with her until she'd already outgrown his silly notions by far.”

Whale clicks his tongue in disapproval, and Sparrow knows they are, as ever so often, of the same opinion. What a waste.

Fish leads the recruits deep into headquarters, a maze of floors and hidden passageways that is meant to be intimidating and off-putting. The candidates have been thoroughly screened, but they won't know their way around for a few more months. Some parts of the building even Fish hasn't seen yet, and she's been ANBU for four years now, outliving most, if not all of her peers. She suspects Lion is still alive, but then again, she never told her her real name, so it's not like she can check.

It's a dangerous job, and missions only get harder and riskier. They are the village's elite. The assassins, the infiltrators, the hunters. The unseen and the dependable.

Death rates are high. If you want to survive you have to be damn good.

She opens a door and leads the five people who made it into a spare room that's used for all sorts of semi-official – nothing ever really is official in ANBU – meetings.

There are already three masks laid ready at the desk, and Fish twitches an imperceptible greeting to the hidden ANBU who selected them. It's her captain Sparrow and she gets the feeling he's laughing at her. Then she turns around to face her charges.

“These past three weeks you've just been numbers. You will put them down and accept your new names. Welcome to ANBU.” Her lips curl into a sardonic smile, but it's not like anyone can see below her mask. “Try not to die.”

The three recruits visibly tense, and Fish reaches for the intricately crafted masks. And, as always, they look menacing regardless of which animal they represent.

“Number one,” she says, and a long-limbed person with copper hair steps forward to receive their mask. It's a wasp.

“Number six,” she reads neutrally, and an alert man almost snatches the mask out of her hand before she can get a good look at it.

And, finally, “Number eight.” Haruno Sakura, the pink-haired prodigy is bound to be recognized anywhere on sight, and Fish almost barks out a laugh at the sheep mask she's being handed. It couldn't be further from the truth, but then again, that's rather the point.

She'll have to nudge Sheep in the direction of black hair dye at some point.

“Wasp, Salamander, Sheep. You will be escorted to the barracks by your new respective captains, where you will change into full gear and meet your team later. They will teach you all you have to know.”

Owl almost doubles back upon seeing who Sheep is, and if that's not a laughable mask. They'd really like to see just who came up with it, because it's damn hilarious. They're getting Haruno fucking Sakura in a sheep's pelt, and oh, the team will just love this.

Not only are medics goddamn rare to come by, they cover all of their asses and bring their teammates back alive. Owl's only been on a team with a medic once, and it wasn't a combat medic, but still an absolute fucking luxury.

And Haruno? She's fucking terrifying in more ways than one, and they can't wait to see how they can help her grow. With a Genin team like hers she probably doesn't know subtlety if it hits her in the face, but if she hadn't been thought capable of adapting and rocking ANBU without any recognition for her skills whatsoever, then she wouldn't have been recruited, let alone assigned to an assassination squad.

She pads after them like an obedient little lamb, and it's comical. They turn their back as a sign of trust, not as an insult. Oh, the sheep could crush them under her boot if she wanted to, a raw ferocity to her that's hard to counter, even harder if you specialise in silent assassination.

Sheep is now part of their team though, and Owl's just glad she hasn't been taught any of Boar's instant-death techniques yet. Those make even Owl shudder, and they had their first cold-blooded kill at thirteen.

Sheep follows her new captain Owl with mixed feelings. ANBU is a big step up from trailing after the remnants of Team Seven. She'd been at a standstill until she'd gathered her courage and stopped hoping Kakashi-sensei would remember her. She'd marched straight to the Hokage, the only strong kunoichi she knew anything about, demanding to be taught something, anything.

By some miracle, Tsunade had looked at her and seen more than a weak little girl who's mistaken a door somewhere and stumbled into her office.

Then she received a summons.

But Tsunade-shishou hadn't made the offer, didn't even recommend her. It came from the organization itself, and it's a great honour that the no-name civilian-born Sakura was approached in the first place.

She accepted readily, not expecting anything out of it, but she felt like she needed a break from the hospital, and this seemed like a good way to do something else for a while.

Two years ago she was barely more useful than a civilian. Then she got her hands bloody with a chip the size of a mountain on her back, trying to save patient after patient sent into her white room. Some of them would jerk awake again and others were laid to rest quickly and quietly.

Perspective shifts a lot to your mind.

Now she's fifteen, ANBU Sheep with shocking pink hair and a tattoo on her arm, and she wonders if she's going to be sent after Sasuke to kill him. She's not sure if she'd still mind.

Owl drops into a clearing and Sheep follows, teeth bared like fangs.

They'd see.

Meek Sakura, forgotten Sakura. She'd twist her spite like a kunai to the guts and she'd make it her own.

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comicgeekscomicgeek · 4 years

Text

Their Hero Academia – Chapter 37: The Sports Festival Part 10: FINAL ROUND!

Presenting the next raw and unedited chapter of my on-going, next-gen, My Hero Academia fic, Their Hero Academia!

Earlier chapters can be found here

“And now we come down to the Final Four!” came the voice of Present Mic. “Let’s take a minute to recap our finalists!”

“Do you really think people’s attention spans are that short?”

“Were you saying something, Eraser?”

“…Never mind, just continue.”

“Right on! First up, we have Koharu Kocho from General Studies! This moth-maiden’s made it past some pretty challenging competition, but shown us to never count General Studies out! Then we have Mika Mineta from the Hero Course! She got past her first match with a smart mouth, but showed us she also has sharp skills in her second round! After that, we have Isamu Haimawari from the Hero Course, Class 1-A’s only non-legacy! With high speed and a surprise secret attack, he’s raced past some challenging competition! And finally, Toshinori Midoriya, who took us all by surprise with a massive gravity-powered Smash that would do his dear old granddad proud!”

Mic continued, “And now, for the final match roll-out! First up, Kocho will face Mineta! Then, we’ll get to see Haimawari fight Midoriya! The winners of those two matches will then face off in the Final Round! It’s still anyone’s match!”

“I just want to reiterate that anyone breaking their bones or using this for dramatic pronouncements will be expelled.”

“Thank you for that, Eraser! Now let’s get to it!”

The Final Four of the Sports Festival. Koharu hadn’t believed it when she’d made the Top Eight; now she really didn’t believe it. If her heart bet any faster, she was pretty sure it was going to come pounding out of her chest.

She wanted to tell herself that she didn’t have to do better than this. That she’d already done better than almost all of the General Studies students who’d participated in the Sports Festival before her (Almost all. There was the Festival about six years ago where a General Studies student had actually taken first place, but that had been because their Quirk had been a particularly strong form of invulnerability and they’d just outlasted all the competition. She heard they were working in nuclear clean-up these days.). She wanted to tell herself that she’d already raised the bar for what a General Studies kid could do by a large amount.

Yes, she wanted to tell herself that. But some other part of her mind told her that it still didn’t matter. That she’d missed her chance when she’d failed the Entrance Exam and that nothing she did was ever going to make up for that. That she might have a useful Quirk, but she was never going to be a Hero.

It was really hard not to listen to that part of her brain.

Across from her, Mika Mineta was taking her place on the other side of the ring. The hooved and horned girl was known even to the General Studies classes and not much of it was flattering. After seeing her first match, it was easy to see why. But she’d also demonstrated some real skill in her second match. Koharu was going to have to be careful if she was going to win this.

Hawkeye pointed a finger at Mineta as she entered the ring. “If you speak right now, I will disqualify you. Understood?” Mineta only nodded in response.

The sharp-shooting teacher looked over both of them, then nodded. “Let’s keep it clean, ladies. FIGHT!”

Koharu flapped her wings hard, desperate to gain some air as quickly as possible. Mineta was dangerous at both close and long range, which meant staying mobile was most important than anything else. As she climbed skyward, Mineta lowered her head slightly.

Plop! Plop!

From the girl’s horns, a pair of purple balls fired out, starting small, but growing in size until they were about as big as softballs, flying through the air toward her. Koharu twisted in the air, letting the balls go flying past her.

“What?” Mineta asked. “You don’t want to touch my balls?”

Well, the rumors about the girl were certainly proving themselves to be true. Who even said things like that?!

Mineta lowered her head again and Koharu took in a deep breath, then fired a sticky blob of her String-Shot. It met Mineta’s balls in mid-air, smacking them out of the air and sending them falling back to the ground where the combined sticky attacks hit the ground with a wet sound that even Koharu found more than a little disgusting.

“Okay,” Mineta said, stomping a hoof. “Guess I’ll just have to make you come down!” She lowered her head again, filling the air with those purple balls.

Koharu was forced into an aerial dance, dodging the sticky projectiles as quickly as she could. It wasn’t enough to keep them from hitting her body, she had to make sure they didn’t hit her wings either. With her wingspan… she was a big target. She returned fire as best she could, spraying her String-Shot, but Mineta was at least as mobile on the ground as she was in the air. One thing was for sure though, they were leaving the ring a mess.

She shouldn’t have been surprised. Mineta might have been a loon, but she did have an effective Quirk.

Koharu folded her wings for a second, letting herself drop, then opened them again, catching the air. The balls fired by Mineta sailed over her head harmlessly. Koharu flapped her wings hard and unleashed her Scales. Orange powder filled the air, her Sleep Powder. Her Paralytic Powder might have been good here too, but she’d used that more during Quirkball. Too much of any one of her Scales would render her unable to fly and she still potentially had another fights to fight. She might be able to pull off a couple other Powders too, if she had to…

Mineta sucked in a breath before the Sleep Powder reached her, then fired a pair of sticky balls straight up into the air. They fell back quickly and she caught them in her hands, before throwing them in front of her. They stuck to the ground with a rubbery sound and she ran to them, bouncing off them and up into the air.

Okay, she really hadn’t been expecting that, even with having seen the same trick in Mineta’s fight against Dashi.

Koharu tried to flap out of the way, but Mineta sailed through the air and grabbed her around the middle. Instantly, Koharu began losing altitude. She’d been able to fly somewhat with Ojiro wrapped around her, but with those hooves and those horns, Mineta was a lot heavier than the invisible girl had been.

“Let me go!” she cried out, pounding her fists on Mineta’s back and head. The girl’s skull was harder than she’d expected, but it probably to be, to support those horns.

“Aw, babe, we can just cuddle!” Mineta taunted back. As Koharu struggled against her, flapping hard continuing to pound on the girl, Mineta reared her head back and fired a volley of sticky balls straight up into the air again. “Fine! Let’s see how you like this… PURPLE RAIN!”

Struggling to keep in the air as it was, Koharu could barely manage to look up and see them falling back down. One of them stuck to her back, but the rest of them stuck to her wings, three on her left side, two on her right. And one right where her upper and lower right wings met, sticking them together, another on the tip of her left wing. Combined with the weight of the balls themselves…

Mineta released her, landing in a three-point landing and quickly backing away. Koharu struggled to stay airborne, but she simply couldn’t. She fell, managing to stay upright, but her wings dropped under the weight of the balls, touching the ground. Touching it… right where the ball on the tip of her left wing was. She tried to flap it, but found her wing stuck firmly to the ground, pinned by the ball. She could barely lift her other.

The horned girl was circling her, looking for another opening.

Maybe she could still get Mineta with her String-Shot? One good spray, take her down? No. Too risky. It was all too risky right now. Real, true, fear started to grip her heart, and she felt herself shaking. Koharu held up her hands in defeat.

“Stop!” she yelled. “Stop, stop! I give up! I can’t… I can’t risk tearing my wings!” She wanted to cry. She’d made it this far and now she was blowing it all, just because she was scared. But she’d never really hurt her wings before. They’d gotten a little bruised, a little bent, but she’d managed to never tear them before, didn’t know what would happen if she did.

For her own safety, she had to give up.

“Kocho has yieled!” Hawkeye announced. “Mineta wins!”

Koharu let out a small sigh, clenching her hands into fists. She’d failed.

“And that’s it for this match, folks! It’s a new record for General Studies! This was one for the history books!”

***

Toshi honestly hadn’t thought about making it this far. While he gone’d in with no intention of costing on his dad’s reputation or giving it anything less than his all, placing really hadn’t been that important to him. He’d much more concerned about giving his classmates the chance to shine. Especially people like Haimawari, who didn’t have any legacies to draw on or connections in the Hero community, or people whose parents were lower ranked Heroes, like Koda or Sato. They were his friends, his classmates, and his family. He’d decided way back at the start of the year he’d do whatever he could to help them succeed, even before they’d elected him Class Rep.

He was impressed by Haimawari’s performance, really. He knew his friend had a lot of potential, but even he hadn’t been expecting him to do as well as he had. And he definitely hadn’t expected the long-range applications of his Quirk.

Now though, with first place in both of their grasps, he needed to give it his all and focus on himself. He wanted to do his best. That didn’t necessarily mean winning… but it did mean he had to give it everything he had. No half-measures.

Thinking of himself first didn’t come easy to Toshi. He’d always had a big heart, always tried to look out for everyone else. But if ever it was any time to do so, it was now.

“And here it is, Sports Fans! Toshinori Midoriya versus Isamu Haimawari! THE legacy to beat against the great unknown!”

“You know as well as I do where you come from doesn’t matter as much as what you do.”

“Yeah, but fans eat up the hype!”

As Toshi and Haimawari stepped into the ring, Hawkeye gave each of them a glance. “Try not to destroy the ring this time, Midoriya,” she said sharply.

Toshi gave her a sheepish grin. “Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m… I’m not gonna hesitate, Midoriya!” Haimawari said. “Got to give this my all!”

Toshi grinned. “So do I!” No animosity, just both of them doing their best. He might have only known Haimawari a few weeks now, but he was as good a friend as he’d ever had.

Satisfied with that, Hawkeye gave them both one last look. “Good luck to you both. FIGHT!”

Haimawari launched himself forward on all fours at high speed, nearly matching the Twins for acceleration. Toshi had just enough time to leap over him with one of his gravityless jumps, making sure he was high enough to avoid the reach of Haimawari’s long arms. He landed lightly on his feet, spinning around immediately. It was still a little too late though, Haimawari had spun around in place once Toshi had gone over him and accelerated again. It was too fast for Toshi, who managed only a slight sidestep, and Haimawari’s high speed charge slammed into him off center, knocking him back.

Haimawari spun around near the edge of the ring, coming at him again. Jumping over him… wasn’t going to work. Unlike Sora, his turning radius was a lot tighter. It didn’t give Toshi anywhere near enough time to get his own Quirk in line when it happened. But…

Toshi brought his right leg up and then back down quickly, increasing his gravity five times over when he did. The ground cracked under the impact, radiating out in a line from his foot. Haimawari was forced to swerve around it, giving Toshi time to take a quick step back and then launch himself forward. Toshi increased his gravity at the last moment, dealing him a glancing blow than sent him skidding away and knocking him out of his slide.

Haimawari scrambled to his feet, then pointed with his right arm, palm out. He fired off more of those blue-white energy bolts (That was so cool! How was he doing that? Had to be something with hos his repulsion field work…?), but Toshi was already moving and the blasts trailed behind him. Toshi canceled the majority of his gravity and took a leap towards Haimawari, but his friend was quick, stepping backwards while reaching out with one of his long arms. His hand slapped against Toshi’s chest and he unleashed a pulse of energy that made him feel like he’d been kicked hard, shooting him up into the air.

At the apex of the arc, Toshi increased his gravity enough to overcome his momentum, dropping straight back down to the ring in a three-point landing. The ground underneath him cracked, but not enough to disrupt the rest of the ring. Haimawari was already pressing his attack, firing more energy pulses. Toshi had to scramble to get out of the way, but Haimawari’s aim was getting worse. Like Toshi, he had to be getting tired. They’d both had a long day of rough battles.

Toshi took a low-gravity leap again, just a short one, carrying him over the distance between himself and Haimawari. Quickly, he shifted into triple-gravity, throwing punches as fast as he could move. Haimawari dodged, side to side, avoiding his slightly slow, but powerful blows. It looked like those lessons he’d been giving him had been paying off!

Haimawari peppered Toshi’s body with blows of his own, faster, but not nearly as strong. Each blow, he tried unleashing a burst of power, and Toshi winced against the impact. He was going to be sore and bruised, that was for sure. But with his gravity up, the repulsion blasts couldn’t knock him off his feet.

Seeing that this wasn’t working, Haimawari tried to step away, dropping back down into a crouch to start sliding again. He raced to the right, starting to circle around. But this time, Toshi was ready, anticipating where he’d go, using another gravity jump to put himself right in his path. Upping his gravity as soon as he landed, Haimawari slammed into him, but Toshi held his ground and Haimawari bounced off, stunned. One good blow would be enough to knock him out.

Toshi closed the gap between them, readying a gravity powered punch…

Haimawari’s hands snapped up and he unleashed blast after blast, hammering into Toshi’s chest. They were low powered shots, stinging more than they hurt, especially against his increased durability. But they made advancing almost impossible.

Suddenly, Haimawari dropped his hands, firing a single, powerful blast at the ground beneath Toshi’s feet. The blue-white bolt practically exploded shattering the ground and knocking him off his feet, breaking his concentration. Haimawari moved after that, hitting a high speed slide that enabled him to slam into Toshi before he even hit the ground. One arm wrapped around Toshi, he kept going, pushing Toshi along. He tried to pump up his gravity, but Haimawari just applied more thrust, barely slowing down. His repulsion force was way different than Sora’s Jetpack, taking the extra weight a lot more easily.

Haimawari braked as they neared the edge of the ring and Toshi kept going on pure momentum. Increasing his gravity, he dug his fingers into the ground, barely stopping himself. He staggered back to his feet…

And then Haimawari hit him with one last blast, dead on. It hit him dead center and knocked him off his feet and out of the ring.

He bounced once, twice, three times, then landed. Back on his feet in an instant, let out a cheer. “That was awesome!” Who’d known Haimawari could do that?

“Midoriya is out of bounds!” Hawkeye yelled. “Haimawari wins!”

Then the reality of what had happened had sunk in. He’d lost. He… didn’t know what to think about that. He’d been going all out, as best as he could, and still lost. He’d made it pretty far though, better than Dad had his first time out. That was something. And he’d helped get a lot of his friends pretty far too.

Maybe that was enough?

“Now that was one heck of a match! I was on the edge of my seat the whole time! But now, Sports Fans, it’s time for the Final Round! Be back in five minutes for the Fight for First Place!”

***

“And here it is, folks! The Final Round! Will it be Mika Mineta or Isamu Haimawari? Who’s it gonna be!?”

The burn-coma theory was really starting to look pretty good right about now. Because that was the only logical explanation for how he’d managed to get to the last round of the Sports Festival. It also provided as good an explanation for how the victories that had propelled him here had been against Izumi and Toshi. It was his unconscious mind working something out.

What that said about the fact that this fight was against Mineta, Isamu wasn’t really sure. He hadn’t had long to strategize for fighting her, but after watching her other fights, he’d come up with the basics. He just had to not get hit, that was all, and watch where he was going if she tried putting some of them in his path. She was strong and had a kick like a mule, but he was fast and capable of fighting at a distance if he had to. He may have blown the surprise of his new technique, but at least he had a new technique to use. None of his classmates had seen him use it before his fight with Izumi; even having used it against Toshi, that still gave him the advantage.

He’d been pretty sure he was never going to crack the top sixteen, let alone the Final Four, and he definitely never expected to be competing for first place. Even if he got knocked out now, that was something to be proud of. Deku himself didn’t even make it this far his first Sports Festival.

From across the ring, Mineta blew him a kiss. He tried not to flinch.

Hawkeye fixed Mineta with a glare, but didn’t say anything. A small blessing, at least. He couldn’t let her get inside his head.

“You both ready?” Hawkeye asked. Isamu gave her a thumbs up and a nod. After confirming Mineta’s agreement, she stepped out of the ring. “Then… FIGHT!”

“Tell you what, Haimawari,” Mineta shouted. “When you lose, I’ll let you touch my boobs to make up for it, okay?”

Behind the bandanna covering the lower half of his face and the goggles covering his eyes, Isamu felt himself go red. Just ignore her. He had to just ignore her. She was trying to mess with his mind, throw him off.

Isamu didn’t wait for her to speak again, instead making the first move. He pointed his right palm at Mineta and unleased a volley of low power shots. Probably not more than enough than to knock a can over, but she didn’t know that. None of them hit her anyway; she dodged out of the way easily.

With Mineta on the move, it was time to get moving himself. Isamu got his hands on the ground and fired up his Quirk, sliding along the edge of the ring. Mineta had stopped running by this point and laid down a volley of balls right in his path. He took in a sharp breath and unleashed a small pulse from his hands and feet, lifting him up and over them, while his momentum still carried him forward.

“Is there anything you can’t do with those hands?” Mineta asked, firing off another volley of balls. Isamu shot sideways, directly to the right, narrowly avoiding them. He was grateful most of his shorts were landing outside the ring. The more that stuck to the inside of it, the less space he’d have to slide around.

He gave himself an extra burst of thrust, racing towards Mineta, then turned at the last second, stretching his legs out to full extension. Her reaction time was good though and she jumped over his legs as they passed, then struck out with a kick when she landed. He had just enough time to jerk his head out of the way, her leg sailing by the space his head had been occupying. He didn’t even want to think about how much that would have hurt.

His hand shot out and touched her leg, applying his adhesive force to it.

“Hey, that kinda tingles!” Mineta said, trying to keep her balance. “I like it!”

Keeping the adhesive force going in his left hand, he applied thrust out his other hands, sending him sliding back, dragging Mineta along with him. He spun, straightened out, but kept his grip on her. Able to drive forward now, he continued to drag her along. He just had to make it to the edge of the ring and he could throw her out…

“Okay,” Mineta said, “this has gotta stop! I’m gonna hurl!” He couldn’t spare the moment to look over his shoulder—maintaining two different outputs for his energy was taking up a lot of concentrating—and couldn’t see what she was doing, but the slight plop sound of her using her Quirk told him it wasn’t good. A half dozen purple balls sailed past him, hitting the ground in front of him. He was forced to swerve and that sudden directional shift cost him his “grip” on Mineta, letting her bounce a couple times on the ground but roll to a stop. Narrowly avoiding the balls, he swerved again, bringing himself back to facing her.

Keeping his left hand on the ground as he slid around, he brought his right hand up and took aim at one of the balls on the ground between him and Mineta. Concentrating on drawing up his energy, he pushed out another blast. It struck the purple sphere head on and the ball exploded in a shower of purple gunk. It splattered all over Mineta, covering her face and eyes.

“Eyuck!” Mineta yelled, wiping the gunk away from her face with her hands. “Really? Didn’t know you liked to play dirty!”

Isamu used this time to rush forward, slamming into her at high speed. The impact knocked her back and down, but as he tried to press his attack, she drew back her legs and then unleashed a powerful double kick. Her hooves struck him hard in the shoulders, throwing him back as well, wincing in pain. Mineta had a kick like a mule, that was for sure!

And then Mineta was back on her hooves. She pressed her attack, firing another pair of balls while he was knocked down. Protectively, he threw up a hand.

WHUMP!

One of the balls missed, but the other hit his hand with a thick, wet sound. No, not his hand, he’d activated his repulsion field! The ball was adhering to that, the attraction field he used to cling to surfaces, not his hand! Behind his bandanna, Isamu broke into a grin. He pointed the ball and unleashed the repulsion part of his Quirk.

Ka-POW!

Boosted by his Quirk, the ball rocketed away from him at high speed. Mineta, too surprised by this sudden shift (especially after how the same trick had pretty much taken Dashi out of the fight) to move, got struck head on. The ball bounced off her head with a rubbery sound, but the impact was strong enough to knock her flat on her back.

Isamu sprang back up to a crouch and rocketed forward. He had scant seconds before Mineta was up. He closed the gap between them just as she was pulling herself up, slapped his hand against her… against her… against her… chest and unleashed another repulsive charge. The force it shoved her back like a shot and out of the ring!

She didn’t look particular put out by any of it, landing on her rear. “And here I thought you didn’t like me! she called out. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Kana! It can just stay out little secret!”

She was going to be the death of him!

“Mineta is out of bounds!” Hawkeye announced. “Haimawari wins!”

So… he’d won.

He’d won the Sports Festival.

Him. The son of a couple long-retired vigilantes against a bunch of children of Pro-Heroes. The crowd was cheering, cheering for him. It was almost deafening.

If this was a coma, he hoped he’d never wake up.

“HAIMAWARI WINS! HAIMAWARI WINS! THAT’S GAME, EVERYBODY! FROM UNKNOWN TO FIRST PLACE! LET’S GIVE HIM A BIG HAND!”

“…I have to admit, I did not see any of this coming.”

“Did you just admit you didn’t know something?”

“Don’t get used to it.”

#my hero academia #their hero academia #fan fiction #fan fic #my writing #isamu haimawari #toshi midoriya

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morallydraconequus · 5 years

Text

Gordon in Wonderland, Ch 3: A familiar face at a Caucus race.

Gordon remembered that one time Thomas wanted to fly. Well, Gordon could clearly state that he hated his experience of flying, and flying in general.

“I have no idea how Harold can get used to this. I'd rather be stuck on rails than this horrid flying.”

The cloud was getting bigger and turning into a dark grey tone. The tiny blue engine - Gordon would prefer big instead of tiny but it didn't seem appropriate in this situation - felt a drop of rain on his face. In fact, his body felt like he was soaked in water.

“If the steam is water that is evaporated, it'll be light enough to form a cloud. If the cloud becomes heavy so will the steam and soon, it’ll turn back into water. Which will mean it will rain soon… and I'll fall along with the rain!”

As he deduced, Gordon began to drop down.

Unlike the hole, Gordon could tell that it wouldn't be such a long fall... but a much harder landing.

Instead of cold, hard earth that would shatter Gordon into pieces - do note that Gordon’s imagination had got the better of him - he landed on fluffy pile of feathers. The pile was actually a bird, however Gordon wasn’t even sure what species it was.

The bird squawked in surprise, causing Gordon to fall onto the ground. Luckily, he landed perfectly on his wheels but Gordon couldn't say that he’d felt any pain. The bird wasn’t as lucky. Distracted, it crashed - not very gracefully - on to the ground. Having realised that he didn’t rely on tracks at the moment, Gordon chuffed up to the animal. His friends barely see Gordon’s sympathetic side, but those feelings did exist in Gordon.

“Are you alright?” he asked, hoping for any sign of life. He would feel very guilty if there were none, but it wasn’t entirely his fault.

“I was, until you crashed into me!” snapped the bird as it struggled to retain its posture. It appeared to be an eagle with navy and indigo feathers but the voice - particularly his accent - made it very easy for Gordon to identify.

“Vinnie?!” gasped Gordon. The eagle was indeed some version of the North-American engine from the Great Railway Show. He wasn’t too familiar with Vinnie, but he had heard enough from the other engines. Specifically Thomas and Phillip, who weren’t too fond of the bully.

The rude bird only responded with a wary eye, staring at Gordon.

“What are you?” demanded Vinnie. If he had asked ‘Who are you?’ instead of ‘What are you?’, Gordon wouldn’t be so offended. “What am I? Pardon me, but would you like it if I asked the same question in that tone? I would’ve said that you’re a brainless buffalo with those manners!”

“How dare you call me a brainless buffalo, you insect!” growled Vinnie - though Gordon wasn’t sure how birds could growl. The eagle’s shadow surrounded the tiny engine as Vinnie prepared to attack. “You’ll pay for that.”

Before Gordon could move, Vinnie was suddenly smacked away to the side, causing another embarrassing fall.

“Vinnie! How many times do I have to tell you to be nice?”

The creature that saved Gordon was an magenta elephant with floral decorations, which reminded him of another engine from the Great Railway Show.

“Ashima?”

The elephant smiled gently at Gordon, as if to calm down a frightened and shy animal. Gordon was more confused than frightened.

“Well, what’s your name little one?” Ashima asked politely. However, Gordon didn’t like being labeled ‘little’.

“My name is Gordon. And if you wish to know what I am, I’m a steam engine.” Gordon explained, so that there was no misunderstanding.

“A steam engine?” asked Vinnie, who was recovering from a hard fall, “You looked like a funny caterpillar to me. Why are you so small? And how did you hit me in the sky?”

Vinnie was going to make a further remark, but he saw Ashima raised her trunk as if she warning the bird to choose his words carefully, and he was wise enough to not say anymore.

“I’m actually very big in my real size,” explained Gordon, “Apparently, I shrink or grow depending on how much water I have in my boiler. And right now, my boiler is empty.”

“Ah, then I can help.” Ashima placed her trunk in a nearby lake to suck up the water. She then withdrew it and sprayed Gordon with water, being careful not to make the tiny engine fly away with too much force.

Gordon did not appreciate how his boiler had been filled, but grateful for the kind action; he remained silent.

Gordon’s boiler wasn’t very full, but he grew until he was half of Ashima’s height. He decided that his current size would have to do for now, but was glad that he was bigger than Vinnie. At least he could have some dignity. The eagle was not intimidated whatsoever.

“Well, we better hurry to the meeting.” said Ashima. “We’re not bringing him along, are we?” grumpily asked Vinnie. Gordon did not like that he was referred in such a grim tone.

“We might as well Vinnie. Flying Dodo might want to meet Gordon.” reasoned Ashima.

“Who?”

“Some flightless bird who’s somehow in charge of our meetings,” explained Vinnie, “If they had to pick a leader they should’ve chose me.”

‘I can see why they didn’t.’ thought Gordon. “If he can’t fly, why is he called ‘Flying Dodo’?”

“He’s actually very fast, surprisingly. He believes that he flies because of the wind rushing through his feathers, thus, he won’t respond to any other name except ‘Flying Dodo’.” Ashima answered.

When the three arrived to the supposed meeting, there were a number of animals who resembled competitors from the Great Railway Show.

Axel of Belgium was a lion with black fur and a red mane with yellow streaks.

Carlos of Mexico was a silver and black hawk.

Etienne appeared to be a blue rooster with a white and red crest.

Frieda, like Vinnie, was an eagle except that she had blue feathers that have a yellow tip at the ends.

Beside Frieda was a small green wolf, Gordon assumed that the wolf was Gina.

A huge, bulky bear with red and blue fur with white stripes seemed similar to the Russian engine, Ivan.

A peacock with blue feathers and white, orange and green tail was wearing a crown identical to Rajiv’s.

Raul of Brazil seemed to be another big cat - probably a Jaguar - with yellow, green and blue fur. The fur colour made it hard for Gordon to tell what exactly Raul was.

The Australian engine, Shane, was a gold and green emu - though Gordon expected him to be a kangaroo.

Yong Bao clearly stood out the most, he was a Chinese dragon with scales matching the colours of his paintwork.

A silver kestrel - who Gordon recognised as his cousin, Spencer - glared at him.

“Ashima, Vinnie, what have you brought here?” Spencer questioned with distaste. Gordon was not happy being referred as ‘what’ rather than ‘who’ again.

“I’m-” “I do not recall asking you to speak!” interrupted Spencer. He was as rude and pompous as Vinnie! Gordon wondered if the other engines saw Gordon as the screechy silver bird.

“Ignore Spencer, he always acts as if he’s in charge without Flying Dodo around,” pardoned Ashima, “He is a steam engine named Gordon. He changes size depending on how much water he has consumed. Vinnie and I found him while we were on our way here.”

“Though I suggested we abandoned him first.” muttered Vinnie. This did not escape Ashima’s ears.

“After I stopped you from attacking poor Gordon! He ran out of water and you tried to attack him whilst he was so small!”

This caused a commotion amongst the herd.

“Silence! What is all the fuss about?”

They all went silent as a new creature joins them. Gordon knew that voice immediately. “It can’t be him.”

The creature is revealed to be a vermillion dodo who strode in with such confidence that even Spencer and Vinnie had shut their beaks.

“Flying Scotsman?!” exclaimed Gordon. The dodo chuckled at Gordon’s shocked expression. “Flying ‘Dodo’, dear lad. A pleasure to meet you, little Gordon.”

Gordon was aware that the water in his boiler diminished by quite a lot, to the point he had shrunk down to be three quarters of Flying Dodo’s height. It had either been a long journey, or the water evaporated faster than usual.

“Excuse me, but I do not take being called ‘little’ very kindly.” “My apologies! And what’s this about Vinnie trying to attack our innocent friend?”

Vinnie straightened up. “He fell from the sky and the vile little thing crashed into me!”

“It was by accident! If I had control of my landing, I wouldn’t have crashed into you at all.” rebutted Gordon.

“He’s anything but innocent! He called me ‘bird-brain’! He’s guilty!” Vinnie claimed.

The members who had wings gasped at the word, ‘bird-brain’. Gordon was very certain he said ‘brainless buffalo’ instead.

“If anyone’s guilty, it’s you for attacking another animal,” scoffed Flying Dodo, Gordon decided to let the fact that he was not an animal to slide, “I made this very clear every meeting. ‘All animals are equal. All animals are our friends and allies. No animal should harm another on purpose.’”

“But let’s not forget that ‘Bird-brain’ is a very awful insult to those who have wings.” reminded Frieda. “Almost like a crime.” said Shane. “It is crime!” cried Rajiv. “A crime indeed!” added Carlos. “Hear, hear!” agreed Etienne.

‘The nerve of him!’ thought Gordon as he saw a hidden smile on Vinnie. ‘He’s trying to frame me for a crime I didn’t commit!’

“Is this true, Gordon?” queried the dodo, “If it is, I’m afraid we will have to punish those who commit crimes.”

“Actually, he didn’t,” interrupted Ashima, “Mind you that I have very good hearing and Gordon did not insult Vinnie with that horrid slur. But I did hear him say a ‘brainless bull’.”

“I think we could let that slide,” said Ivan. “Bulls aren’t very bright so that statement is true.”

“And by the looks of this, said statement was used as a line of defence.” spoke Axle.

“Which justifies the statement.” included Yong Bao.

“But Vinnie’s charges shouldn’t be dismissed.” uttered Raul.

“Time to announce the verdict, Flying Dodo.” responded Gina.

“Well then, by this testimony of Ashima the elephant, I announce Gordon the steam engine innocent and our new comrade. Vinnie the bald eagle, however, is found guilty of attacking another creature on purpose.” concluded Flying Dodo.

Spencer swooped in front of Flying Dodo and landed on Gordon’s funnel, much to his disdain.

“If I may Flying Dodo,” spoke the kestrel, “I’m afraid that Vinnie has some anger issues, thus he wasn’t in his right mind. The proper solution is to help him control his temper and in order to do that, you need to pardon him first.”

“It seems that you’re right,” agreed Flying Dodo, “By this testimony of Spencer the kestrel, Vinnie the bald eagle is pardoned.”

The rest rolled their eyes and sighed as if this had happened frequently. Gordon could see that Vinnie and Spencer were partners in crime, easily fooling the dodo who wasn’t a smart creature.

“Well, that’s settled. Back to the agenda-” Gordon blew his whistle, frightening Spencer as he cried in shock and fluttered off Gordon’s funnel. “Whoops! Forgot you were sitting there, Spencer.” Everyone but Vinnie and Spencer laughed at the embarrassed silver kestrel who haughtily walked on the ground. “Forgotten, my tail feathers.” Spencer mumbled angrily.

“Anyways, time to make a note of those who aren’t present today,” said Flying Dodo,

“Shankar the tiger.” “He sends his apologies but he has to help take care of the cubs with Noor Jehan.” replied Rajiv.

“Tamika the Koala.” “She’s had a rough day so I decided to let her sleep in. She’s nocturnal after all.” spoke Shane. “Aubrey and Aiden the wallabies and Isla the cockatoo couldn’t make either.”

“Hong Mei the Ibis.” “Hong Mei, Lei the crane, An An and Yin-Long the pandas were slowed down by a recent storm. They send their regards.” reported Yong Bao.

“And I of course have come in the place of Beau the Bison.” said Vinnie.

“The last animal who isn’t present is Hiro the pheasant.” “We haven’t heard anything from him,” answered Ashima.

“He’s probably hanging around with that old barn owl in the forest,” muttered Spencer, “This owl himself prefers to not come at all. Vinnie and I barely got his name because of his silly mind games and riddles, only Hiro was able to coax him out. Though we almost never see him outside of the forest.”

“Very well,” continued the dodo, “This weather has been very odd lately, it has rained longer than usual and we’re all still dripping with water.”

Gordon knew that the ‘odd weather’ was from his own doing but remained quiet.

“We’ll have to come up with something to dry ourselves. And no Rajiv, you won’t be reciting that long poem about the crown on your head for us to hear until we’re dry. We all know how you found it.”

The peacock slumped sadly.

“How did he find that crown?” Gordon whispered to Ashima. “He got caught by some thieves but escaped with the crown and he calls that poem ‘The Grand and Wide Tale’ which was named after his own tail.”

“I’ve got it!” announced Flying Dodo, “We’ll have a caucus race! This will definitely help us dry ourselves. And there will be a prize for the winner!”

The interests of the herd had perked up, especially Gordon. In no time at all, everyone was waiting behind the line until the caucus race started. Though, Gordon had no idea what the dodo meant by a ‘caucus’ race. Gordon heard the word once when he overheard a conversation about politics once but what did it have to do with races, he wondered.

Thankfully, Ashima filled more water into his boiler so that he was big enough to race, slightly smaller than his original height but it would have to do. Racing was a part of Gordon’s interests, he did admit that he liked to show off once in a while. Obviously, Spencer and Vinnie would be trying to beat Gordon at his own game, as he could tell from the glares they shot him.

“Ready, set, go!” cried Flying Dodo. On cue, Gordon chuffed as fast as he can, building up on speed. He was half-way to the finish line and didn’t see any other racers come past him.

“This is such an easy race!” Gordon muttered under his breath. But then he saw the progress of the others.

Some were jogging, a few were simply prancing about while chatting and the rest hadn’t even crossed the line yet! They were all going at whatever pace and went whenever they fancied, as if they didn’t care much about getting first place. Flying Dodo was riding upon Ashima’s back and she didn’t even mind. “The wind is flowing through my feathers,” he spoke to Ashima, “I’m flying!” “Yes you are, I can easily see that.” agreed Ashima, who was too kind to point out the truth.

“What on earth…” Gordon was stunned at the sight and slowed down due to the lack of competition in this race. “Maybe this is what he meant by a ‘caucus’ race.” The engine mumbled.

Taking Gordon by surprise, a blur of blue and silver rushed passed him. “See you at the finish line, insect.” mocked Vinnie while Spencer chortled like an entitled, wealthy snob. Gordon had seen many ‘snobs’ in his younger years, ignoring the fact that he used to act like one when he was much younger.

Vinnie’s insult brought Gordon’s attention to his own size, he was shrinking so much. “I must have used a lot of water! I can’t let them win but refilling my boiler will take too much time. When my water runs out, I’ll be too slow!” Coincidentally, Ashima and Flying Dodo were by Gordon’s side, aware of his dilemma. “You can always catch a ride with us.” suggested Ashima. “A wonderful idea! Climb aboard Gordon! You can fly with me!” added Flying Dodo.

Gordon had concocted a plan to beat the two birds at their own game.

“Fly… Ashima, grab me with your trunk and throw me towards the finish line as far and as hard as you can.”

The pink elephant was puzzled but complied. “Are you sure about this? You might get hurt.” “I can take it. I have my safety valve on.” Gordon reassured, knowing that neither of them knew what a safety valve was really for.

“If he has a safety thingy, I’ll allow it.” announced the dodo.

Ashima swung her trunk back and forth to create momentum. With an underarm, or rather undertrunk throw, Gordon was launched high up in the air but not too high. As he zoomed past Spencer and Vinnie, they both lost their coordination for a bit from shock. “Flying steam-engine, coming through!” he shouted with a smile. The two birds flew faster with determination to defeat the engine at the race. “I’m not losing to you a second time, insect.” grumbled Vinnie.

Gordon lost his smug grin as he forgot one part of the plan, the landing. As his body was directed towards the finish line and the ground, Gordon began to regretted his decision and closed his eyes for certain impact. He would for sure shatter in shards like he thought before, or even dig into the earth and be stuck there for the rest of his life! Again, the engine in peril exaggerated his thoughts of his demise.

Spencer flew closer to the ground in hopes of crossing the line first. “I’ll show that shrinking engine-thing who’s better.” he vowed.

“I, Gordon the not-so-big-at-the-moment engine, will leave my express to-” Gordon’s rushed will was interrupted by another familiar landing on feathers. He bounced off and made it across the line safely. The bird that he landed on this time was Spencer, who had unfortunately tumbled the rest of the way after Gordon, followed by Vinnie and the rest of the animals.

They were all waiting for Flying Dodo to announce the winner and the promised prize, especially Gordon who had won first place despite Spencer was moaning how he crossed it first until Gordon made him face-plant.

“I now declare that the winner is…” Flying Dodo made a dramatic pause to the surprise of no one.

“Everyone!”

“What?!” exclaimed Gordon and Spencer in sync. “Everyone’s a winner in their own way.” explained the dodo. The rest aside from Vinnie and Spencer agreed with smiles and congratulating each other. Gordon joined in reluctantly.

“So I literally threw myself to cross the line first for nothing.” “Technically Ashima threw you but it wasn’t for nothing,” Flying Dodo grinned as if he had another position to give, “Since you came first, you can give out the prizes!”

Spencer smirked at Gordon’s nervous expression. “Good luck with that.”

After a minute of mumbling and thinking, Gordon finally spoke.

“As the one who has no gifts or trinkets to give away, I have something better for your rewards. I will grant each of you a title to your name.”

“What good are those titles? What’s wrong with our names?” rudely asked a disappointed Vinnie.

“Having a little object would probably rot or rust away, a title lasts forever.” answered Gordon, satisfied as the rest of the animals agreed with him.

“Ashima, I grant thee the title of ‘Ashima the Kind and Helpful’.”

“Axel, I grant thee the title of ‘Axel the Calmly-Collected’.”

“Carlos, I grant thee the title of ‘Carlos the Happy-Hearted’.”

“Etienne, I grant thee the title of ‘Etienne the Polite and Mature’.”

“Frieda, I grant thee the title of ‘Frieda the Confidently-Strong’.”

“Gina, I grant thee the title of ‘Gina the Sweetly-Swift’.”

“Ivan, I grant thee the title of ‘Ivan the Comedic and Friendly’.”

“Rajiv, I grant thee the title of ‘Rajiv the Beautifully-Caring’.”

“Raul, I grant thee the title of ‘Raul the Spiritedly-Eager’.”

“Shane, I grant thee the title of ‘Shane the Devoted and Carefree’.”

“Yong Bao, I grant thee the title of “Yong Bao the Faithfully-Inspiring’.”

Honestly, Gordon mimicked how the Queen would give someone knighthood, thus he used ‘thee’ instead of ‘you’. He also created the titles based on what he knew about them from the Great Railway Show. He hesitated at giving Spencer and Vinnie’s title, unsure what to give them without offending them in any way.

“Spencer… I grant thee the title of ‘Spencer the Proudly-Egotistic’. Egotistic is a special word for very confident.” Spencer didn’t seem to be offended at all and accepted it. Thankfully for Gordon, Spencer bought into his definition of ‘egotistic’.

“And Vinnie… I grant thee the title of ‘Vinnie the Competitively-Speedy’.”

Vinnie had also accepted his title, but Gordon glimpsed a small smile on his face. Evidently, Vinnie would not have fallen for such a trick.

“What title should I have?” asked Flying Dodo. “I do like my title now.”

“What about we just add something to it?” suggested Gordon, “How about…”

Gordon thought about his own brother, “ ‘Flying Dodo the Grandly-Optimistic Leader’?”

“I like that title very much!” agreed the dodo.

“Flying Dodo, I grant thee the title of ‘Flying Dodo the Grandly-Optimistic Leader’.”

“What title should Gordon have?” Ashima (the Kind and Helpful) wondered. “We’ll give him his title.” Shane (the Devoted and Carefree) proposed.

All the animals, excluding Spencer (the Proudly-Egotistic) and Vinnie (the Competitively-Speedy) who both just remained silent, cheered in agreement.

They all huddled up to discuss the title for Gordon. When they dispersed, Flying Dodo (the Grandly-Optimistic Leader) puffed his feathers with pride.

“Gordon, we, the animals of this meeting grant thee the title, ‘Gordon the Greatly-Wonderful Steam-Engine’!”

After hearing his title, Gordon felt a spark of a rare emotion. He didn’t recall the emotion’s name, but he liked it. He felt thankful. He felt like his fictional heart - fictional because engines don’t have physical hearts - had warmed up.

“My, thank you.” Gordon was basically speechless.

“You’re welcome.” Frieda (the Confidently-Strong) replied.

“I think I can declare this meeting dismissed.” Flying Dodo (the Grandly-Optimistic Leader) announced.

Gordon then remembered why he was caught in this mess.

“Excuse me, Ashima. Do you know Per- I mean, a rabbit?” Gordon stopped himself from saying ‘Percy’ in case that wasn’t his name in this world, or the name of someone else Ashima knows.

“A rabbit? I know a lot of rabbits, but none of them come to the meetings. Could you be more specific.”

“Well, he’s not completely a rabbit. He’s an engine like me but a bit shorter and he lacks a tender. He’s green but was more gold and red the last I saw him and had ears and a tail of a rabbit. He moves quite quickly.”

“Strange… I did see a green creature rushing towards that way when I went to the meeting. Perhaps that’s the ‘rabbit’ you seek.” Ashima answered, pointing her trunk to a path that disappeared into a forest.

Before Gordon left, Ashima filled his boiler until he was about his normal size, slightly bigger to be exact.

“Thank you Ashima. Goodbye!” “Farewell Gordon! Good luck!” Ashima called after Gordon chuffed his way into the forest, following the dirt path beneath him.

Authors note:

The caucus race isn’t really highlighted in the Disney film, however, I couldn’t leave behind the concept of a race where everyone went at whatever speed and whenever they like.

Thanks for @mystarsignisno for editing this chapter!

#Gordon in Wonderland #ttte gordon #ttte #gordon the big engine #alice in wonderland parody

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kallura-icedcoffee · 6 years

Text

golden hour: fairy

A/N: The Zelda: Ocarina of Time AU no one asked for, but literally the first thing that popped in my head when I saw "fairy au"

HEY LISTEN!

This was easier when she was just an irritating ball of light

“Hey listen!” the little orb of pink light with wings squeals as it hovers around his head.

“Uh can I listen later? I’m kinda busy at the moment!” Keith yells before ducking and diving out of the way of the giant moblin’s swinging club.

“But I can help!” The fairy flutters wildly. “I know its weakness!”

“And you’re just now telling me?!”

The club connects on the next swing and Keith goes flying. He rolls to a stop and gasps for air as the pain kicks in, his quiver and bow digging into his back. He rolls over with a groan and begins to crawl to his sword and shield as the moblin approaches.

“Well you didn’t ask before!” It bobs up and down.

“I have to ask?!” He roars as the creature grabs him by the ankle before he can reach his weapons and drags him prior to chucking him across the Sacred Forest meadow. He hits a tree and slumps down.

“You said before that I talk too much and not to, and I quote, open my big yap unless you ask for my opinion!”

“Goddamnit Allura!” He wearily drags himself to his feet.

“Please don’t swear at me!”

The moblin charges at him and he tucks and rolls between its legs before it can grab him.

“His back! His back! Shoot him in the back!” she screams.

Keith pulls out an arrow and loads the bow. It takes but a second for him to aim before he sends it flying right into the moblin’s spine. The monster’s body seizes up, it staggers. Keith has another arrow ready and buries it in the back of its head. It lets out a low groan before sinking to its knees and falling over dead with booming thud.

“You did it Keith!” Allura swirls around him happily, a trail of sparkles following after her.

“Yeah…”

He teeters back and forth, the severity of his injuries finally kicking in. He smirks before promptly passing out.

“Oh no! By the great goddess Hylia please be all right!” Allura frantically zooms around him, bouncing against his body.

Her movements become erratic. She’s pretty tapped and doesn’t have enough magic to fully heal him. She needs a recharge and so does he and luckily she just happens to know where the nearest fairy fountain is, but…how to get him there.

“…Shit” she hisses.

She knows what she needs to do, she just doesn’t want to do it. It’s too risky but so is leaving him here while she goes ahead alone. She’s already imagining the worst of the worst. Her precious unconscious Hero of Time getting gobbled up by wolfos or dragged away to the afterlife by a ghostly poe.

She looks around. Other than the giant moblin corpse they’re alone in the wood and there’s still daylight so they’re relatively safe. The halo of pink light around her intensifies, the sparkles get significantly more sparkly, the orb grows and grows and soon her feet touch the ground.

Moments later she hoists him up, tosses his arm over her shoulder, wraps her arm around his waist and drags him through the forest.

“Why are Hylians so damn heavy?” Allura whines as she strains and huffs and grunts, blowing the stray strands of white hair from her face.

When she thinks she can’t drag him any further she’s at the secret entrance, an unassuming rock face covered in vines and she walks right through it as if it was nothing. She nearly tumbles down the small set of stairs due to the extra weight she’s carrying that she barely has control of and when she gets to the bottom she drops him. His body crumples on a marble floor like a rag doll.

“Din give me strength” Allura catches her breath before bending over and wrapping her hands around his wrists.

She pulls him the rest of the way to the shallow glowing pool at the center of a room filled with candles and pillars and statues of the great fairies. She drags him into the cool refreshing healing water and plops down once they’re both completely in the middle. After letting out an exhausted moan, she faints from fatigue.

When Keith comes to, he bolts up with a start. Other than the annoyance of sitting in a dripping wet tunic, he’s never felt better in his entire life. He surveys the room unsure of where he is. Between the design of the place and the faint sound of harps he wonders if he’s dead and this is some kind of heaven. He looks over to see a woman next to him unconscious but luckily face up in the water.

He’s taken aback by her beauty. She wears a pink bra like top with matching sash skirt. Ornate cuffs cover her wrists and ankles. Her pointed ears have him thinking she’s Hylian but then the pink markings on her cheeks and elsewhere on her body…and the shimmery dragonfly-like wings…

He crawls over and scoops her up in his arms and brushes her wet hair from her face.

“Miss? Miss are you ok?”

At first she’s unresponsive.

“Miss?”

He shakes her a bit and she stirs, whimpers. Her eyes slowly open and she looks up at him with the clearest blue eyes.

“K-Keith?” Her hand comes up to gently caress his cheek.

“How do you know my name?”

“How could I not know it?” she asks groggily. She seems very out of it.

“Miss-”

“Why are you being so formal all of the sudden? Figures I have to save your life to get you to finally act like a gentleman. And to think you were telling me to shut up earlier.”

“Wait what are you…”

The gears turn. The puzzle pieces click together. That familiar voice.

He screams and drops her.

“Ow!” She yelps as her head dunks into shallow water and hits the bottom, splashing everywhere.

Keith quickly attempts to rectify his actions and yanks her upright as she coughs and gasps for air.

“Keith!” Allura wails.

“Sorry sorry, don’t cry Lu!”

He tries to touch her and she slaps his hand away.

“I’m sorry I was just caught off guard! I didn’t realize it was you!”

“Isn’t it obvious!”

“Uh…no? It’s not like you ever mentioned you could look like this. In fact when were you planning on telling me you could look like this?”

“The subject never came up.” She shrugs innocently.

Keith pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Allura…” he uses his serious tone.

Allura rubs the back of her head with a guilty expression.

“I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it! When people realize this is our true form it gets complicated. I didn’t want it to get in the way of protecting you…and when I’m small you don’t have to worry about protecting me.”

She pouts. Keith smiles and strokes the top of her soaked head.

“I’ll always worry about protecting you, even when you’re tiny.”

She grins back and leans into his touch.

“Really?”

“Really” he replies softly.

She was right though. Now that Keith knew what she really looked like it was going to get significantly more complicated. It was going to be hard to tell her to stop interrupting him with useless facts at the most inappropriate times if she was going to be looking at him with those eyes while doing it. And that smile. And those legs that went on for days.

He clears his throat and shakes his head hoping that will clear his thoughts.

“So what now?” He climbs to his feet and holds out his hand.

“Perhaps we could lay low and relax for a while?” She takes it and lets him help her up.

“Or we could check out a dungeon.”

“Or we could take a nap.”

“Or explore a cave for rupees.”

“Or get a snack?”

“Or take on a giant skull-”

“Keith!” She whimpers and grabs his arm. “I just got you healed, can you not?”

He laughs and drags her up the steps toward the entrance back into the forest.

“You knew what you signed up for when you agreed to be my companion.”

Allura’s lips pursed.

“You have my blessing to go lead a far less exciting existence” he adds.

“No” she grumbles and holds onto him tight.

He looks back at her with a sincere smile.

“Thanks for saving me by the way.”

“You’re welcome. Hey now that we’re the same size does this mean you’ll start listening to me more?” She perks up.

He chuckles and boops her nose with his finger.

“Don’t count on it.”

AO3 LINK

#kallura #kalluramonth2018 #ficsbyKIC

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kitty35 · 6 years

Text

Han Jisung x reader - Hero AU - part 1/3

Warnings - Nothing? Maybe a curs word or two?

Genera - Fluff and Angst

Summary - You had a great life, nothing to complain about. Everyday you saved your city with your partner and best friend, Ebba. But when you save someone from dying, a lot of shit changes. Who knows if this is the end of your career or the begining of something else

I stopped my chase, having lost the person I was trying to catch. Looking around, I listened for a sound, searched for a movement, anything to give me any kind of hint on where he went. Soon, a quiet laugh was heard to my right and I took off. The road broke in my trail as I ran as fast as I could. Soon enough my feet weren’t even on the ground and I was flying, trying to doge all the cars and not create anymore mess then what was already created. Eventually I saw him. I could almost reach his foot. We both took multiple turns as I began to catch up with him. A building seemed to come out of no where and he took a sharp turn up. He seemed to be holding someone and I paused on the ground, creating a dent in the concrete from the sudden stop. “Someone!! Help!” The guy he was holding screamed. Once he got to the top of the building, he dropped the other guy. My eyes widened as I flew up and caught him. I continued my chase with the guy in my arms, not risking loosing him again. “PUT ME DOWN!” The guy yelled in my ear. “Sorry, I can’t loose him again.” I said loud enough so he could hear past the wind. Looking down I noticed he was really cute and looked around my age, maybe a little older. He reminded me of a squirrel. He had a cute face and sweet brown eyes that widened. “Watch out!” He yelled. Looking up, I saw a building quickly growing closer. At the last second, I drew up and sat the guy on the building top. “Stay here for a second.” I then flew up and looked for the guy I was chasing but I couldn’t find him. “Damn it.” Before I could fly back down to the cute guy, something hit me. A second one soon followed, but this time I saw it was my partner, and best friend, Ebba. Her long curly black hair was messed up and she looked out of breath as she stopped next to me. Her mask was a black lace one that covered most of her facial features. “You got him?” I asked. She nodded and took off again. Going down to the guy, I tried to catch his attention since he was facing the other way. “Hey.” I said and he jumped then looked at me. “Hi.” “Do you need my help down or can you fly there?” I asked, joking since I knew he couldn’t fly. “I’ll need your help.” He slightly chuckled. “But I want to get to know you before I never see you again.” “Oh?” I asked, fixing my white lace mask that matched Ebba’s. “And what do you want to know?” “Who are you under the mask?” He stepped a little closer. The question made me laugh. “If you’re expecting someone extravagant, then your mistaken. I’m just some 15 year old who loves art and helping other people. I go to the same school that you probably do, the one everyone here goes to. Pretty lame.” I almost laughed at how pathetic my life is. “I’m sure you aren’t lame.” I walked towards the edge of the building and looked at the city lights that began to come on as the sun set. “Yeah, well you’re mistaken. My life, once the mask is put down, is extremely boring and lame. I live with my partner and we don’t do anything other than this outside of school. Even if you saw me in the halls, you wouldn’t recognize me. I’m a totally different person when I’m myself.” Why am I telling him all this? He’s a total stranger. I looked down at my outfit. I wore a dark (f/c) spandex outfit that looked almost like a one piece swimsuit. It showed off my natural features and the top was lined with gold as well as around the leg holes. My shoes were matching skin tight heel boots that went up to my thighs. Kinda’ like Storms outfit from Marvel, just without the cape. It was the complete opposite of what I wear during school, which was a baggy, two sizes too big, hoodie and skinny jeans with whatever shoes I grabbed that morning. My hair was normally pulled up while when I was out now, gets left down. “Well if you’re anything like you are right now, then I really want to know the you behind the mask.” He said, right behind me. “I’m sure you do, everyone does.” I laughed, turning to smile sadly at him. He looked surprised to see this weaker version of me. “Well I should let you go on your way with whatever you were doing.” With that, I grabbed him and jumped off the building edge. He gripped onto my waist and flinched when I did, but other than that he seemed relaxed. Once I set him down I turned to fly away, but he stopped me. “Will I ever see you again?” “I’m sure you will.” “I’m Han Jisung by the way.” “It was nice to meet you, Jisung.” I said and gave his cheek a quick kiss then left. As I was flying away, Ebba came up next to me. “OOOoooo~ My little (y/n) has a crush!” She said. “I don’t have a crush on him, and I’m older than you.” I playfully glared at her. “By a month.” “And a day.” I added. “Whatever. Are you going to talk to him tomorrow?” “Probably not. I most likely don’t even see him on the campus.” “Okay. Race home?” Ebba suggested. “I would love to, but we need to clean up this town.” She nodded and we both went to get the stuff to repair the town. “Did you catch him by any chance?” I asked. She slightly laughed. “Ebba.” I looked at her with ‘that’ look. “I did, trust me. It’s just we need to re-build a park as well as repairs on buildings.” “Ebba!” I whined, “You know we have school tomorrow.” “I’m sorry!” She said, we both knew we would probably sleep through our classes come tomorrow. With that thought, we got to work. Going as fast as we could, which was really fast, we fixed what was broken and made it home around 2am.

“Miss. (L/N)!” The teacher practically yelled, slamming a ruler down on my desk, stunning me awake. My head flung up as my glasses slid down my face. I made sure my hood was up so some of my beat up features weren’t seen. I probably looked to be a mess. “Do you mind telling us why you were sleeping in my class, again.” She all but spat out. “I’m sorry ma’am. The lights were off and I was up all night working on a project for a different class.” I mumbled, hoping she would buy it. “Why can’t you be more like Shadow or Light? These two spend all day saving our city from everything and on top of that, they help clean up afterwards.” As she spoke, she pointed to a picture of me and Ebba that was projected on the board. I looked at the same suit that I was currently wearing under my hoodie, only in the picture, the leather was new and not beat up from yesterday. Running into buildings sure took a lot out of a girl and her outfit. “I’m sorry I can’t fly ma’am.” I mumbled, but she heard me. The class snickered at my comment. “I don’t need your back sass Miss. (L/N)!” She snapped and I just lowered my head, not wanting to deal with her. “Yes ma’am, sorry.” I said, wanting nothing more then to tell her, and the whole class that I was Shadow. I knew I couldn’t though. I wanted to live a semi normal life. A laugh above the rest of them caught my attention and made me look at the person. There, sitting in the back of the classroom, was Jisung. The same one I just saved from falling to his death yesterday. “Okay class, we will be working in pairs for your upcoming project.” The class cheered, minus me. “But! I will assign your partners.” With that, everyone groaned. Before she could call out who was working together, the lunch bell rang. Everyone filled out of the class but I stayed behind for a second. Once everyone was gone, I went up to the teacher. “Um, Ms. Park, I was wondering if I could work with Han Jisung?” “Why should I let you? You always fall asleep in this class and I don’t appreciate your sassy comments.” She slightly glared. “I know and I’m very sorry about them. But I have managed an A in this class all year. I thought that working with him would help me stay awake in this class since he is a friend of mine. Instead of working with some stranger I don’t care about and falling asleep on them, leaving them to do everything alone, of course.” She paused, looking at me then looking away. “I’ll think about it.” She said then I smiled and left. “Thank you ma’am! See you after lunch!” I said then left. Lunch was uneventful since I sat in the library to do some art work. After lunch, I went back to english and got paired with Jisung for finals. He looked towards me as I looked back at him. Our eyes meet and I blushed, turning quickly away. ‘She seems familiar’ He thought before Felix punched him for ignoring him. Jisung looked at his friend.

Jisung’s P.O.V.

“What?” “Dude, I’m telling you.” He said in his thick accent, “She totally wanted me. She could practically see past my mask and into my soul.” “I call bullshit.” “What happened with you and shadow?” He asked. I looked at him. “What do you mean?” “I mean, do you know who she is?” He asked quietly. All I did was shake my head ‘no’. “Not yet.” I looked at my partner who was now drawing in a sketchbook, her hood was up but from my angle I could see her glassed and happy eyes that had bags under them. The bell rang and I watched her leave. Watched as a person tripped in front of her. And watched how she helped him up and hand him his books before he scurried off, probably scared to even have her look at him. A thought crossed my mind. ‘I’m just some 15 year old who loves art and helping other people’ Shadows words circled my brain as Felix and I went to our next class that we had together. ‘I don’t know her yet, but I have a feeling I’ll know pretty soon.’ I thought as I sat down and talked with the younger boy and some of our other friends.

Your P.O.V.

The final bell rang and I went to my lockers. Once everything was put away, I went to meet Ebba where we normally meet. I stood next to my black RX8 with gull wing doors. Ebba normally wasn’t slow and got there before me but today was taking her a while. “Hey.” A deep voice said behind me. Turning, I saw Jisung. “Oh, hi?” I said, a little confused to why a popular kid was talking to me. “I’m your english partner.” He reminded me. “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” I sheepishly laughed, fixing my sunglasses and making sure they covered my bags. “Are you free later so we can start it?” He asked. I paused, I never know when something would attack our cite. It was a big city too, so I honestly didn’t know if I was free or not. “Um, I guess.” I mumbled. “Great!” He said and handed my a piece of paper with his number. “Text me your address when you’re ready for me to go over.” He paused, “I like your car by the way.” “Oh thanks. It was my brothers before he left to join the air force.” “Cool, so your whole family likes saving people?” He asked, catching me off guard. “Saving people?” I laughed. “The most ‘saving’ I do is saving my grades at the end of the quarter.” He laughed with me. Maybe he was just joking about that whole saving people thing. He couldn’t know about me…right? “Boo!” Ebba’s voice yelled in my ear, scaring me half to death. A squeak fell from my lips instead of a scream and Jisung found it the cutest thing he’s ever heard. “Hey random strander that’s popular. It’s time for us to leave. We have something important to do tonight.” She said and got into the car. “Something important? Didn’t you just say you were free?” Jisung asked. Damn it Ebba… “No, I am free. Ebba has something important and I drive her around so she just needs me for like 20 minutes.” I tried to clear up but I accidentally stuttered over a word or two. My face was probably bright red from embarrassment. Jisung also found that cute. Damn it, he was falling fast and hard for you. “I’ll text you later!” I rushed out then got in my car and closed the door. Jisung laughed at me then waved and left. “You sooooo have a crush.” Ebba said. Rolling my eyes, I backed out of the school parking lot and drove us home. Once we got there, Ebba told me to change out of the leather suit and also to giver her the spandex one so she could start fixing them. “I’ll give you the leather one. I might need the spandex one, just incase something happens.” I said from the other room. I changed out of the costume I wore today and gave it to her. The only reason I wear it all the time is because Ebba does too. She says that it’s better to be safe than sorry, and she’s been right at times. We’ve had to leave school before, not often but it’s happened before. I pulled out my phone and texted Jisung. ‘Hey, you can come over when ever.’ -(Y/n) ‘I live in (fancy hotel) down town, room 348.’ -(Y/n) ‘Oh, this is (Y/n) by the way.’ -(Y/n) ‘cool, I’ll be there in 10 minutes’ -Jisung “Ebba, Jisung is on his way over. He thinks you’ll be out, so can you handle everything tonight?” I called through the house. “Yeah, I got you covered!” She called back.

#romance #stray kids #han jisung #han jisung x reader #super hero #xreader #fluffy #fluff #stray kids reactions #fanfiction #agnst

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elementsofemotion · 3 years

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Chapter 1: The Forest Prince

Birds chirped in greeting to the morning sun as it lazily climbed its way up into the eastern sky, it's brilliant rays peeking through the tall oaks and only coming to a stop when its light was scattered about the forest floor.

Deep within the forest, at its very center and towering above the rest, stood the Great Tree, home of the Nature Goddess. The forest was her kingdom, and she loved it as much as it loved her. Though the tree was mostly hollowed out as living quarters, it still lived and flourished beautifully thanks to the Goddess’ power. It was the landmark of the Eternal Forest.

It was at the top of this landmark that a tiny nature sprite flew out from the leaves. Sprites were a common resident of the Eternal Forest, along with the other realms, as helpers of mana regulation. Their bodies were almost humanoid, though more rounded and undefined with nubby, slender legs and tiny hands. Their faces were almost reptile like, also rounded and with soft features that made their large eyes stand out. The humans often called them fairies, though it wasn’t a term the sprites were fond of.

The nature sprite’s translucent wings were multiple shades of orange and pink, arranged in a pattern reminiscent of a monarch butterfly. His skin was a deep emerald green, with darker green markings adorning his arms, legs, and nubs that continued into the antennae on the top of his head. His tail was long and slender, with leaf-like extremities that eventually ended into a pink lily.

The sprite paused in midair, quickly taking in his surroundings before quickly dropping down to the forest floor, like a falcon diving down onto its prey.

Down among the tangled roots of the great oak was the person he was looking for. The boy was considered extremely young for a spirit, only existing in the world for a mere 120 or so years, as opposed to those who had lived for millenia. On the outskirts of the long reaching roots, his home was in a shallow burrow. Moss and giant flowers gave him excellent bedding to sleep on, with the roots above him providing adequate protection from the elements.

The boy slept soundly, curled up into a tight ball in the center of a particularly large flower. Though he was down below the roots, light still reached him in plentiful amounts, dotting the area around him with the warm, yellow sunshine. Six magnificent wings- black with white tips on the right side, white with black on the left- covered him like a blanket, protecting him in a warm shell from the outside world. His feathers shifted ever so slightly with each breath.

He had messy, rosey-brown hair with a small, nubby set of black horns sprouting up from it. Black and silver Headphones covered his ears, the band carefully pushed behind his horns in an attempt to make it stay in place. He wore an unusual looking army green jacket with white fur trim, over-sized for his small frame. His undershirt was white, and black ripped-up pants were tucked into black and white converse boots. As if to match his horns, a devil-like tail was curled up around him as he rested.

The sprite landed hard on top of the boy’s folded wings with little regard to his feathers. He didn’t stir even as the sprite began to jump up and down, his weight barely noticeable.

“Caelian!” He called, sliding down the boy’s wings and landing down on the floor near his head. “Caelian! Wake up! Come on, you lazy bird!”

Caelian’s wings shuddered, before they slowly opened up around him, revealing the small boy they were protecting. He blinked his azure blue eyes groggily, not bothering to stifle his yawn as his wings neatly folded against his back and he lifted his head.

“What is it, Nathaniel?” He asked, his usually soft voice slightly hoarse from sleep.

The Sprite flitted up from the root he was standing on to the top of Caelian’s head, plopping down into a sitting position in one swift motion.

“Gaia wants to see you!”

“Oh, really?” He let out another yawn. “That’s all?”

“Yeah, she- HEY,” Nathaniel let out a shriek as Calian plopped his head back into the soft patch of moss he had been using as a pillow, causing the sprite to roll off into the roots. He let out puffs of annoyance as he climbed back up, dramatically slapping his tiny hands on top of the large root as he pulled himself up without his wings for assistance.

“Okay wise guy, no. You’ve had ENOUGH sleep, it’s time to WAKE. UP,” He emphasized the last two words as he pushed against Caelian’s face, earning little reaction.

“It’s warm out- and I’m tired- Let me sleep, Gaia won’t mind.”

“Oh yes, I’m sure Gaia will appreciate her disciple not taking his job seriously. Not like she needs anyone to help monitor the barrier and take care of the forest denizens.”

Caelian cracked open an eye.

“Poor Gaia, having someone so young and lazy as a disciple. Surely, her work is cut out for her,” Nathaniel sighed dramatically as he turned away from Caelian, shrugging his hands and shoulders. “So busy regulating the forest’s mana, y’know, so the realm doesn’t fall apart- but I suppose she’ll just have to somehow deal with everything herself since her disciple can’t even do his job. I mean, for anyone else it would be a great honor to serve as the right hand to one of the Gods, but hey, if you’re tired, go back to dreamland.”

Caelian had fully opened his eyes while Nathaniel spoke, giving the sprite a very blank look. Beside him, a soft green light began to dimly glow, growing in intensity over the span of several seconds. A moment later, a lantern materialized, the intense light quickly pulled into a sphere that floated inside of the lightly tinted glass. Vines and flowers sprung to life, twisting and turning around the lantern’s exterior as they appeared from seemingly nowhere. Finally, the light inside of the lantern dimmed again, leaving it enveloped in a sparkling green aura.

Caelian pushed himself up into a sitting position. He gave himself a light shake, stretching out his wings slightly and ruffling his feathers.

“I do take it seriously,” he said. “It is an honor to serve Gaia.”

“Then up!” Nathaniel huffed. “Up, up, up!”

He didn’t wait for Nathaniel as he climbed up and out of the tangled roots, though the sprite hardly needed him to wait, as he quickly flitted up through the roots much faster than he ever could. Nathaniel waited, hovering patiently in the air as Caelian climbed out into the beams of sunlight. He momentarily squinted against the increased amount of light, before stretching out his wings to their full length, unable to do so back in the confined space.

“Great! Let’s go!” Nathaniel darted upwards towards the hollow he had descended out of, only to pause a moment later and look back down at Caelian, who hadn’t moved. He wore a blank expression on his face as Nathaniel smugly called down to him.

“Come on! Make your wings useful for something!”

“You know I can’t, Nath,” Caelian said as the sprite zipped back down, stopping a foot in front of his face.

“Man,” Nathaniel stuck out his tongue. “Six wings and you can’t even fly. What's the point of having them? Can’t you just learn already?”

“I’ve tried, it doesn’t work.”

“Oh come on! I can fly with just two wings! Six wings has to be like, super easy!”

“I can’t, Nath,” Caelian repeated.

“Sure you can! Just flap them a few times and fwoosh, you’re flying!”

Nathaniel hung in the air, his arms raised up in exaggeration as Caelian stared quietly at him. After a few moments of silence Nathaniel sighed, mimicking a sitting position in the air as he rested his elbow on his knee and his chin on his hand. “Man, teasing you is no fun. You never get riled up.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” He asked.

“It's no fun,” Nathaniel sighed. “You’re so boring when you have Nyxidae out. Whatever, let's go the long way.”

Caelian glanced over to the green lantern that hung in the air beside him as Nathaniel flew away. Nyxidae was the name of the elemental within the lantern: The green light that hummed softly within the glass. The elemental was also what would influence his current personality and emotions.

He set off to follow Nathaniel to the base of the giant tree. Surrounding it, blending into the wood seamlessly as if naturally formed, was a staircase that twisted around the entire circumference of the trunk, leading all the way up to the top. It was quite the trek, and one Caelian was familiar with.

Nathaniel waited as Caelian took the first few steps up the stairs, before flying off far ahead of him, only to stop and wait again for the boy to catch up.

Caelian still vividly remembered when he was younger and unable to feel anything. It was assumed he was born without any sort of emotion, if such a thing were even possible. It wasn’t for certain if he was born that way or if something else had occurred to cause the loss of emotion, as he really had no memory of his early childhood. It wasn’t until Gaia found him wandering lost in the forest and took him under her wing that he received a gift of four elementals that allowed him to finally experience emotion. To feel something. To finally experience being alive.

Back when he felt nothing, he never could understand that he was missing something the others had. The smiling, laughing- He couldn’t understand what made people do such strange things. Until Reimos, his Fire Elemental, showed him that same feeling of happiness. It was then he understood. Gaia had given him what was possibly the greatest gifts he could have ever asked for, and he hoped to never have to revert into the lifeless, blank slate he used to be.

Nyxidae was the name of his Nature Elemental. The feelings she embodied were things such as Tranquility, Hope, and Peace. She also enabled him to feel a strong sense of duty for his position as Gaia’s disciple.

It was a while later that Caelian finally reached the top of the winding stairs. At some point during the trek, Nathaniel had gotten tired and decided to take a rest on top of his head. The staircase ended into the treetop, where a large platform was laid out underneath the canopy of leaves. Woven branches made a solid footing for Caelian to step onto. In the center of the canopy sat Gaia, a being several times larger than Caelian or any other person.

Her long brown hair flowed gently down along her body, brushing against her glowing tanned skin that had flowing vines and leaves growing along it. Beautiful white wings sprouted from her back, gently fanning themselves in the air. Atop her head two magnificent antlers rose, their bases hidden by the flowers weaved into her hair.

She appeared to be resting against an enormous ball of moss, her eyes closed and her breathing light. It wasn’t until Caelian stepped closer to her that she slowly opened her eyes with a smile.

“Good morning, Caelian” Her voice reverberated throughout the room. It was a soft, soothing voice that gave the feeling of safety and comfort, like a gentle breeze among the leaves.

In response, Caelian quickly dropped into a deep bow, causing Nathaniel to let out a squeak and grab onto his horns to prevent himself from falling off.

“Good morning, Gaia.”

He remained bowed until he glanced up at the sound of Gaia setting her hand down in front of him, her palm facing upward.

“Come, now. I’ve told you that you don’t need to be so formal with me.”

Caelian gave her an unsure look as he straightened back up, Nathaniel letting out a sigh of relief before quickly removing himself from Caelian’s head and flitting off somewhere out of sight.

“Come. It’s fine.”

Caelian gently clambered up onto her hand, fitting neatly into her palm. He sat with his hands resting in front of him, steadying himself as Gaia slowly raised her hand up, stopping when Caelian was close to her freckled face. Her sky blue eyes gazed at him lovingly as she lifted her other hand, using a single finger to gently stroke the top of his head.

“There you are,” She hummed as Caelian leaned into the finger that was now gently stroking the side of his face. “Are you only allowing Nyxidae out? You should just be yourself, Caelian. Don’t worry about appearing diligent in front of me.”

With that, three more lights began to shine around Caelian, before growing in intensity and materializing into lanterns, just as his first one had. Blue, Red, and Yellow colored elementals- Water, Fire and Celestial-were added alongside his green nature sprite, each with their own unique aura and decorations.

“There, isn’t that much better?” She laughed as Caelian was now making a sound reminiscent of a purr as he pushed himself into the fingers that were stroking him. His tail wagged excitedly behind him, and the feathers on his wings were puffed up to look twice their size.

“My silly little sprout, you don’t need to force yourself to one elemental at a time. They're designed to all work in tandem with each other.”

“I want to be a good disciple,” Caelian said, his cheek pressed against Gaia’s fingertip. “Only Nyxidae really helps with that.”

“You are a good Disciple, Caelian,” Gaia smiled. “Besides that, you’re my darling little sprout, and I’d never wish for you to limit your emotions like that. Now, tell me, what have you been up to since I last asked for you?”

“Um, I’ve been checking the borders of the realm every day like you’ve asked me to,” Caelian said as he placed his hands against Gaia’s thumb. “Your barrier still feels strong- nothing should be able to get in and… So… Um- What are we keeping out, again?”

“There’s just been some rumors floating around and I want to take precaution. It’s nothing for you to worry about, dear.”

“Yeah, but...”

Gaia stroked Caelian’s head again. “What about the forest? Everything seems normal?” She asked, trying to steer the conversation away from the barrier.

“Oh! Yeah, everything seems fine… I played with some deer the other day!”

“Oh?” Gaia grinned. “Did you, now? What did you play?”

“The headbutt game!”

“I see, is that what the cut on your cheek is from?” She mused, gently rubbing his cheek with her pinky finger. “Well, did you win?”

“Nope!”

Gaia laughed. “Perhaps next time, then. But please be careful, I don’t want you to get too hurt.”

“It’s okay, the deer are nice! They wouldn’t hurt me.”

“I’m sure they wouldn’t,” She smiled. “Now, what about the forest denizens? Have they had any problems recently?”

Gaia’s expression fell into a soft frown as Caelian grew quiet and looked away from her.

“Caelian...”

“I don’t like talking to them.” He said.

“I understand, Caelian. But as my disciple, it’s part of your job to assist them with any problems they can’t handle by themselves.”

“But they never even tell me if they need help with anything. I don’t see the point. Nathaniel always asks me if I feel upset when they call me things, but… Hey, Gaia, what does that mean? To be upset?”

Gaia gently stroked Caelian’s head and let out a soft sigh. “Oh, Caelian… it’s better if you don’t feel that way. Just think of it as… not liking something.”

“But isn’t it strange?” Caelian frowned. “I thought you granted me the ability to feel all of the emotions?”

“There’s some I’m not able to give you. But they’re all negative emotions, so perhaps it's for the better.”

“But… How can some emotions be bad? Emotions are linked to the elements, so… are… are there bad spirits as well?”

“I’ll explain it all to you someday, my little sprout,” Gaia said softly. “For now, I want you to go to the town and try talking to the villagers. Can you do that for me, please?”

“Yeah.. I can try,” Caelian said as Gaia lowered her hand back to the ground.

“Don’t be afraid to put your foot down if they disrespect you, Caelian,” Gaia said in a gentle voice as Caelian climbed out of her hand. “I understand you’ve ended up caught up in the middle of the dispute of who they think I should have chosen. But the decision was mine and mine alone, and I have chosen you to be my disciple.”

“Why did you choose me, anyways?” Caelian asked as he stared up at her. “Everyone says I’m… unqualified.”

Gaia slowly lowered her head down to Caelian’s level, resting her chin on her hands as her eyes met his.

“It’s true that you’re young, Caelian. I don’t doubt there are others that feel they would have been more qualified for the position. However,” She lifted her head enough to release one hand, using it to gently stroke the top of Caelian’s head with a fingertip. “I sense great things from you. I firmly believe you’ll grow into something amazing.”

Caelian seemed pleased with this answer, letting out a purr as his feathers ruffled up.

“Now, go ahead and run along,” Gaia urged with a smile. “Come back and see me when you’ve finished checking in on them.”

“Okay!” Caelian said before turning and running back across the root platform and towards the shining light of the sun.

Nathaniel, who had been waiting for Caelian outside, turned to see him just as he exited the canopy.

“Oh good, there you are. Did Gaia- Hey- Hey Cae- CAELIAN WAIT PLEASE NO NOT TODAY DON’T-”

Nathaniel’s screaming was ignored as Caelian kept running to the edge of the platform and jumped off, doing a forward flip as he tumbled out of view.

He grinned as the wind ripped past him, tussling his hair and making the tail of his coat flap violently. His wings remained firmly pinned against his back, his feathers ruffling fiercely from the wind. The wind urged them to open, to catch the wing between his feathers and soar. But he knew better.

He took a moment to admire the forest during his long fall, since it was only from high up in the sky that you could really take in the vastness of the forest. As he grew closer to the ground, he turned himself so that he was facing upright with his legs neatly tucked underneath him.

The blue lantern’s light that followed behind began to grow in intensity until water shot out of the lantern, spiraling and wrapping itself around Caelian. It formed a sphere around him, encapsulating him in a giant bubble.

As it hit the ground, the water rippled heavily as it absorbed the shock of the fall and bounced back up into the air a few feet. Caelian was thrown around inside for a bit as the bubble continued to bounce from the kinetic energy, before finally settling into a soft roll along the ground.

The bubble of water burst just as Nathaniel made his way down to where Caelian was sitting, sighing as he looked at the now drenched boy.

“Seriously?” He asked.

“It’s quicker,” Caelian said nonchalantly as he stood up, shaking some of the water from his clothing.

“Thanks, Iaestia.”

The blue lantern, whose light had now dimmed back to normal, made a satisfying chiming noise as it circled around Caelian.

“You’re going to get hurt one of these days,” Nathaniel sighed. “It’s good that you trust in your elementals to protect you, but… Jeez, I never realized how terrifying someone that doesn’t experience fear can be.”

Caelian shrugged. “I still don’t know what you mean by that.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Nathaniel grumbled as he landed on the ground, folding his arms as he glowered up at Caelian. “You don’t feel afraid so you don’t stop and think about the possible consequences of your actions.”

When Caelian only gave him a confused look, Nathaniel let out another sigh. “Well, whatever. Gaia asked you to go to the village, right?”

“Yeah… You’ll come with me, right?”

“Of course,” Nathaniel huffed. “Someone needs to be there to get angry when they all start being assholes to you.”

Caelian tapped his fingertips together as Nathaniel darted back up into the air. “It feels weird, though- I know they’re being rude and not saying nice things to me, but… I don’t really feel anything from it.”

“I mean, it doesn’t make you feel good , does it?”

Caelian paused before slowly shaking his head. “No… I don’t feel happy from it… or comforted, or anything else… The only thing I really feel is when the children throw rocks at me. It uh, hurts... in a physical sense, I mean.”

“Don’t worry, if we see those brats again I’m sending a blast of nature magic their way, kids or not.”

“Don’t hurt them, Nathaniel,” Caelian frowned. “They’re just kids.”

“Kids that throw rocks,” Nathaniel snorted. “Whatever, fine. Let’s just get going.”

Nathaniel flew ahead again, albeit this time at a much slower pace. Caelian took a moment to try and shake more of the water off, before following Nathaniel off into the overgrown forest.

#EOE #elements of emotion #web novel #fantasy #chapter 1

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