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herald-divine-hell · 3 years

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Could you do this prompt:

“ it's just... i'm worried, about kissing you. “ “ why? “ “ i just... i don't want you to be disappointed. “

For Alexandra? I imagine it'd be towards a crush or, at the most, at an s/o at the start of the relationship. Regardless, someone she already has some serious feelings for, even if it's not love. Yet.~

Sorry for the long wait! I hope this is good! This is dedicated to my lovely friend @yourfriendlyneighborhoodmeme. Happy birthday you lovely piece of shit!

This is pre-Inquisition, during the Mage Rebellion.

Worry was something you never associated with Alexandra. Charm and summer, and fire and anger. The anger was always there, blazing within those golden-flamed green eyes—dawn spilling light upon an emerald sea. Anger and sadness and shame, tangling sickly with her charm; and when that failed, flaring cheeks and soft murmurs. Never worried, though. Something hard and wicked twisted in your stomach, churning so wildly like a boat in a storm at sea.

But it was there, almost fleeting for a moment, strengthening at another. Most often it happened when she stared at your eyes—truly stared, rather than glance at either the top of your head or something else entirely. The joy within dimmed, and the little smile she would have or the hard grimace that seemed to accompany her outside of your presence would falter for a moment. The worry always mangled with the flame in her eyes, that heated passion that brought awe and strength to men and women, and dimmed it; and yet the darkness was still there. An older darkness, pained and cold, always hiding within the very edges of her eyes, away from the flame. And yet it strengthened, as that fire dimmed. You could not read her thoughts, but you saw memories flow across her eyes, dazing her vision.

Your hand found hers before you could even stop yourself. Fingers wrapping around the length of her pale hand, squeezing the sides gently. That took her out of her thoughts, jumping a little, and her cheeks flared, even as she smiled faintly. An embarrassed Alexandra was something you could deal with, you thought with a smile.

“Was the food good?” she asked, her voice coming in a soft and tiny whisper. Her dark hair fell in soft curls at her shoulders, framing her thin face, with its wide jaw, narrowed chin, and gaunt features. You tried not to think about where that gautness had come from, and why it was still prevalent, or what it could mean in the future. None of that you wanted to think about, but it still surfaced, bubbling up without any regards to your desire. You tried to push it down with a hard push, focusing on stroking her palm with your thumb. It helped, in a manner of speaking.

“Yes,” you replied, a grin breaking upon your face, and your eyes narrowing. “But I’m more glad you ate.”

That got you a chuckle, and pleasure burst in your heart at the sound. “That you did.”

Silence descended between you, your thumb never ceasing in its drawing of circles against Alexandra’s palm. A candle burned at the center of the wooden table at where you and Alexandra sat, throwing orange light upon the wooden lengths of walls, and glinting off the silver empty tankards. Tucked in the corner of the tavern, no one was able to see either of you. Alexandra had probably picked it out for just that, knowing her. The sight of a mage from the rebellion openly sitting at a tavern would warrant confrontation. Plus, you liked the seclusion of it.

Suddenly, Alexandra said, “I got you a present.”

The words bled out before you could stop yourself. “Oh? Is it a kiss?” You wanted to slam your head against the wall just as you uttered it. But you just keep your gaze upon her, even as your cheeks redden and sweat gather at the back of your neck, heart squeezing up and stomach churning this way and that.

“I...you...I mean, if you want that, I could…fuck me.” Somewhat pleasantly, you watched as Alexandra’s face grew red as the fire-lit candle, riding up from her neck, to her cheeks, and swarming across her forehead. Idly, you began to count the freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose and over her high-perched cheekbones. Most likely trying to ignore your own embarrassment.

Shifting a little in your chair, you said, “And if I did want you to?”

The worry fanned out in her eyes, shadows and smoke thickening as tendrils as it swallowed that lovely fire you so adored. “I will...it’s just...” She swallowed, eyes darting away from your gaze, as if in shame. Alexandra’s words came out little more than a murmur, so faint that you could barely catch it. “I’m just worried about kissing you.”

Your heart ached at that, as if it was being tarnished and left to tethers. You have seen Alexandra sad, seen her when her anger builded so bright and strong, and seen her joyful and laughing until she could not breathe and snorts erupted; you have seen all of that, and more. But the worry was something unfamiliar, foriegn, and strange. It took immense effort not to jump from your chair and crash a long and tight hug around the woman. You instead squeezed her hand harder.

“Why?” you asked, guilt building in your chest. Was there something wrong with you? Was she afraid that the rebellion would move on from your village and such your budding relationship would be cut short? You decided well before that you would not be leaving her, not staying restrained in this small, quaint, and boring town where everyday was the same mundane as the last. No, you were going with her, and that was final.

What she said hit you harder than when Alexandra had first smiled at you. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

She rushed it out so quickly, you barely caught that, as well. But as you processed it, you could not help from chuckling and raising an eyebrow. “Really? That’s what you’re worried about? That you won’t be a great kisser.”

Cheeks reddening even more, Alexandra nodded, though she did narrow in a way that meant she thought she was being made fun of. Squeezing her hand again relented the stare, albeit slightly.

Giggling softly, you rested your forearms on the table, pushed the candle away from the center, and leaned forward. “Well, I don’t care—not one bit. Plus,” you said, winking at her in an obvious show, “you’re always been a fast learner, I heard.” Lowering your voice into a faint whisper, you murmured softly, “You can never disappoint me, Alexandra Trevelyan.”

That got a smile on her lips; the softest curling at the corner of her lips. And within her eyes, in those eyes you could fall into for thousands of years, drifting upon those waves, warmed by the sun, the worries flashed out, as if it was snapped at by a whip of flame. Hesitantly, Alexandra leaned forward, cupping your cheek with one hand, brushing her thumb softly over your skin. Her eyes searched, gazing long within your gaze, glancing down at your lips, while wetting her own, and drawing it in with a nibble of her teeth. “May I kiss you, ma amour?”

Your breath was stolen in that soft whisper, and you had to fight through a clogged, dried throat to speak. “Yes, please.”

At first, it was a mere brush of one another's lips, and Alexandra hovered over yours, as if calculating what would be the best option to go about this. You were about to snap at her and tell her to hurry up, or grasp the back of her head and press your lips fully against hers. You were about to, but cannot—not when Alexandra’s lips returned, more heated and fiery as before, stealing your breath once again. Her hand slipped to the small of your neck, drawing you in as her lips melded against yours, pressing here and there, tilting every so often her head. She obviously did not know what exactly she was doing, going off instinct. But as were you. And you found you quite enjoyed the plushness of her lips, the eagerness that Alexandra seemed to be fueled upon. It was overwhelming, and any thoughts you might have, any quip or jab, bled away against her lips.

When Alexandra pulled away, it took a few moments before you opened your eyes again. Words failed to come out as you opened your lips, your mind mushy and foggy, as if a mist had fallen and shrouded it beyond a sea of grey. “That was...fuck, that was great. You’re fucking great,” murmured Alexandra, her cheeks red and her eyes darken. “Was it great?” There was a slight raised pitch to her voice.

You could only really nod. “Yeah...it was.” Maker, your cheeks felt as if they were as hot as the candle.

“Can...can I kiss you again?”

“Yes.” Grappling with your thoughts was a hard effort, but you found a semblance of your old self within. “What about my gift?”

Alexandra giggled as she drew you back by your neck. “We’ll get to that when we get to that, no? After one more kiss...or three.”

You could only remember that flash of a smirk on her lips, the one you so adored and so hated, and the flaring golden fire twining through that sea of emerald green within her eyes; and your gift was soon forgotten. To you, Alexandra brought something better than any material thing. She let you slip into her heart, and rest there for a little while, handling her trust, her pain, and her love with such care—to you, that was the greatest birthday gift you could ever ask for.

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agentrouka-blog · 4 years

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@ ygritte hate post. In broad strokes, we agree Jon and Sansa are on parallel journeys, there is also plenty of parallels between Hound's sexual assault night with Jon and Ygritte (steel kiss, hand on face, and so on). (1/3)

Then Jon gets into it at the water pool, that is his "unkiss", no doubt. Notice though, the details about him getting riled up by sex red hair, she saying she is half-fish, debating fucking your own sister. I'm forgetting stuff of course. I'm sure that chapter is rife with that. (2/3)

Jonsa fans have speculated over Unkiss being a cover for another kiss (always with the cousins, the blood and fire cloak, and so forth). It could be that cave means much the same for him. Like said they are on parallel journeys and there's all those throwbacks to each other. (3/3)

So like Sansa, Jon is repressing something there. Something that happened in the winterfell pools. Bran remembers bathing with his sisters, but unlike Bran (who did saw OSHA getting out of one in that segment), Jon saw something that was a revelation. Like Florian when he saw Jonquil bathing with her sisters. Something red and then wanted to kiss, not downstairs but upstairs. Maybe he did... and maybe Ned caught him at it, because he later dreams of being caught there being innapropriate. (4/3)

In the dream he screams he will never father a abstard, he hates being one for they are lustful creatures born of lust and lies. Like lusting after their sisters. Its not like he is a Targaryen! Distraught, Jon decides to prove his nature wrong. He is not a deviant because he is a bastard lusting after his sister! So he decides to go to the Nights Watch, where he'll be chaste ever. Maybe. Kind of creepy but funny. It all comes together too, all those tidbits that are otherwise scattered. (5/3)

PS: Six maidens in the pool... Six Stark children. Not seven for once either way. And so Jon says in the show "we should have never left Winterfell" because it echoes the We shouldn't have left the cave. And Jon says they'll go back and Yggrite yaps You Know Nothing, but he was right. Jon will go back with the real redhead Sansa, back to Winterfell real pools. (6/3)

Thank you!! This ask really sent my brain whirring.

I already like the idea of the Unkiss drawing from a repressed memory, but I hadn’t noticed how the Ygritte memory-edit might interlock with that.

We have this confirmation that they were fairly natural and relaxed about nudity among children:

"Might be there isn't." She grinned. "What are you staring at, boy? Never seen a woman before?"

"I have so." Bran had bathed with his sisters hundreds of times and he'd seen serving women in the hot pools too. Osha looked different, though, hard and sharp instead of soft and curvy. Her legs were all sinew, her breasts flat as two empty purses. "You've got a lot of scars." (ACOK, Bran II)

Hundreds of times. We know Sansa associated hot water in a bath with Winterfell.

The hot water made her think of Winterfell, and she took strength from that. She had not washed since the day her father died, and she was startled at how filthy the water became. (AGOT, Sansa VI)

So does Jon:

It was short walk to the bathhouse, where he took a cold plunge to wash the sweat off and soaked in a hot stone tub. The warmth took some of the ache from his muscles and made him think of Winterfell's muddy pools, steaming and bubbling in the godswood. Winterfell, he thought. (ASOS, Jon XII)

Then we have the image of the Water Gardens.

It was Daenerys who filled the gardens with laughing children. Her own children at the start, but later the sons and daughters of lords and landed knights were brought in to be companions to the boys and girls of princely blood. And one summer's day when it was scorching hot, she took pity on the children of her grooms and cooks and serving men and invited them to use the pools and fountains too, a tradition that has endured till this day." (…)

As the children splashed in the pools, Daenerys watched from amongst the orange trees, and a realization came to her. She could not tell the highborn from the low. Naked, they were only children. All innocent, all vulnerable, all deserving of long life, love, protection.

(ADWD, The Watcher)

And we know that the children of all ranks played together in the godswood, too.

He had watched wistfully while the Walders contested with Turnip the cook's boy and Joseth's girls Bandy and Shyra. The Walders had decreed that Bran should be the judge and decide whether or not people had said "Mayhaps," but as soon as they started playing they forgot all about him.

The shouts and splashes soon drew others: Palla the kennel girl, Cayn's boy Calon, TomToo whose father Fat Tom had died with Bran's father at King's Landing. Before very long, every one of them was soaked and muddy. Palla was brown from head to heel, with moss in her hair, breathless from laughter. Bran had not heard so much laughing since the night the bloody raven came. (ACOK, Bran I)

It’s fair to conclude that the Jon and the Starklings may indeed have not just played but also bathed together in the godswood.

There is an interesting association with Maidenpool, which is tied to the romance of Florian and Jonquil.

At Maidenpool, Lord Mooton's red salmon still flew above the castle on its hill, but the town walls were deserted, the gates smashed, half the homes and shops burned or plundered. They saw nothing living but a few feral dogs that went slinking away at the sound of their approach. The pool from which the town took its name, where legend said that Florian the Fool had first glimpsed Jonquil bathing with her sisters, was so choked with rotting corpses that the water had turned into a murky grey-green soup.

Jaime took one look and burst into song. "Six maids there were in a spring-fed pool . . ."

"What are you doing?" Brienne demanded.

"Singing. 'Six Maids in a Pool,' I'm sure you've heard it. And shy little maids they were, too. Rather like you. Though somewhat prettier, I'll warrant."

(ASOS, Jaime III)

Jonquil bathed with ther sisters, when Florian first glimpsed her.

The pool becomes filthy and spoiled. Like Sansa’s bathwater, but also like the muddy Winterfell pools. Choked with corpses?

When the dreams took him, he found himself back home once more, splashing in the hot pools beneath a huge white weirwood that had his father's face. Ygritte was with him, laughing at him, shedding her skins till she was naked as her name day, trying to kiss him, but he couldn't, not with his father watching. He was the blood of Winterfell, a man of the Night's Watch. I will not father a bastard, he told her. I will not. I will not. "You know nothing, Jon Snow," she whispered, her skin dissolving in the hot water, the flesh beneath sloughing off her bones until only skull and skeleton remained, and the pool bubbled thick and red. (ASOS, Jon VI)

The memory edit and the switch toward “love” in the cave is mirrored in this rather defiant dream, that recalls the pools at home, his father’s watching face, but also the laughter at home in the godswood. A pool in a sacred place spoiled with death.

A memory spoiled by trauma.

Dany, who I would argue is a character strongly foreshadowed in Ygritte, has her own association with sacred pools.

They rode to the lake the Dothraki called the Womb of the World, surrounded by a fringe of reeds, its water still and calm. A thousand thousand years ago, Jhiqui told her, the first man had emerged from its depths, riding upon the back of the first horse.

The procession waited on the grassy shore as Dany stripped and let her soiled clothing fall to the ground. Naked, she stepped gingerly into the water. Irri said the lake had no bottom, but Dany felt soft mud squishing between her toes as she pushed through the tall reeds. The moon floated on the still black waters, shattering and re-forming as her ripples washed over it. Goose pimples rose on her pale skin as the coldness crept up her thighs and kissed her lower lips. The stallion's blood had dried on her hands and around her mouth. Dany cupped her fingers and lifted the sacred waters over her head, cleansing herself and the child inside her while the khal and the others looked on. (AGOT, Daenerys V)

This recalls Ygritte in the pools and Sansa in her filthy bath. But the presence of the blood of a horse slaughtered for her to eat its heart, the presence of the Stallion that Mounts the World, the prophecy and the things we know comes after... all that is ominous and the kiss of the cold is unlikely to be tender.

"When you find yourself in bed with an ugly woman, the best thing to do is close your eyes and get on with it," he declared. "Waiting won't make the maid any prettier. Kiss her and be done with it."

"Kiss her?" Ser Barristan repeated, aghast.

"A steel kiss," said Littlefinger. (AGOT, Eddard VIII)

or..

But the Dornishman's blade had a song of its own,

and a bite sharp and cold as a leech. (ASOS, Jon I)

or...

Then the steel was at her throat, and its bite was red and cold. (ASOS, Catelyn VII)

The layers in this…

Anyway, there’s foreshadowing to Dany in the Ygritte mess, but it’s not exactly happy, while the Sansa connections in there tend to be positive. Sweet and foul all mixed up.

Sansa “remembering” the Unkiss in relation to kissing children (Margaery’s Girls, Sweetrobin) and with “awful” memories (Myranda’s wedding night) has that same air of mixing something rotten with something that had been perhaps sweet but confusing. I.e. covering a traumatic event with something else.

Then there’s another interesting association with the incest peach.

As she sat in the common room in her stupid girl clothes, Arya remembered what Syrio Forel had told her, the trick of looking and seeing what was there. When she looked, she saw more serving wenches than any inn could want, and most of them young and comely. And come evenfall, lots of men started coming and going at the Peach. They did not linger long in the common room, not even when Tom took out his woodharp and began to sing "Six Maids in a Pool." The wooden steps were old and steep, and creaked something fierce whenever one of the men took a girl upstairs. "I bet this is a brothel," she whispered to Gendry.

(ASOS, Arya V)

Right after this they meet Gendry’s half-sister Bella, a “peach” at the Peach.

“I’m named Bella,” the girl told Gendry. “For the battle. I bet I could ring your bell, too. You want to?”

“No,” he said gruffly.

“I bet you do.” She ran a hand along his arm. “I don’t cost nothing to friends of Thoros and the lightning lord.”

“No, I said.” Gendry rose abruptly and stalked away from the table out into the night.

Bella turned to Arya. “Don’t he like girls?”

While the bell recalls Dany, we should remember that

Sansa plays “the high harp and the bells” (AGOT, Arya I)

“Bella” translates to Beauty

this scene is an unsubtle shout-out to Jon stalking out of the welcoming feast after Benjen teased him about fathering bastards and knowing a woman. After calling Sansa radiant. (AGOT, Jon I)

So the Dany hints are joined by the Sansa hints. The Dany hints are negative (bells = battle), the Sansa ones positive (bells = music). Why are the Sansa hints there at all?

Before anyone goes “Jonrya!”, remember:

For half a heartbeat she forgot who she was supposed to be. She wasn't any peach, but she couldn't be Arya Stark either, not here with some smelly drunk she did not know. "I'm . . ."

"She's my sister." Gendry put a heavy hand on the old man's shoulder, and squeezed. "Leave her be." (ASOS, Arya V)

Arya is not a peach, she is a sister. Little sister.

And there’s this:

He liked the deep, sweet ache it left in the muscles afterward. He liked the way the air tasted way up high, sweet and cold as a winter peach. He liked the birds: the crows in the broken tower, the tiny little sparrows that nested in cracks between the stones, the ancient owl that slept in the dusty loft above the old armory. Bran knew them all. (AGOT, Bran II)

Jon only tastes the cold when silver-haired Val tastes sweetness in the air, but way up high the winter peach makes the air taste sweet, too.

"Sweet smells are sometimes used to cover foul ones." (ACOK, Daenerys II)

But foul smells might cover sweet ones, too. The Unkiss covers a bitter trauma, but perhaps it was drawn from a more innocent kiss in the past.

The naked red-haired girl by the water might trigger a rewrite of Jon’s perception of Ygritte, but it might draw that from a different kind of confusion, surrounding the same memories that feed Sansa’s editing.

The godswood is certainly a stage for kissing:

As she stood there, all the memories came flooding back to her. Her father had taught her to ride amongst these trees, and that was the elm that Edmure had fallen from when he broke his arm, and over there, beneath that bower, she and Lysa had played at kissing with Petyr.

She had not thought of that in years. How young they all had been — she no older than Sansa, Lysa younger than Arya, and Petyr younger still, yet eager. The girls had traded him between them, serious and giggling by turns. (…)

Robb got to his feet slowly and sheathed his sword, and Catelyn found herself wondering whether her son had ever kissed a girl in the godswood. Surely he must have. (AGOT, Catelyn XI)

Memories that flood back, young children, innocent games that have consequences much later on, a specific Connection drawn to the Starklings and the Winterfell godswood.

More kissing:

"I won't! I saw you kissing in the snow. She's just like her mother. Catelyn kissed you in the godswood, but she never meant it, she never wanted you. (ASOS, Sansa VII)

and yet more...

Theon Greyjoy was no stranger to this godswood. He had played here as a boy, skipping stones across the cold black pool beneath the weirwood, hiding his treasures in the bole of an ancient oak, stalking squirrels with a bow he made himself. Later, older, he had soaked his bruises in the hot springs after many a session in the yard with Robb and Jory and Jon Snow. In amongst these chestnuts and elms and soldier pines he had found secret places where he could hide when he wanted to be alone. The first time he had ever kissed a girl had been here. Later, a different girl had made a man of him upon a ragged quilt in the shade of that tall grey-green sentinel. (ADWD, The Prince of Winterfell)

Starklings, kissing and the hot springs all in a paragraph.

I would say there is material here. If GRRM wants to write about Sansa and Jon sharing a memory that involves the hot springs, kissing and references to Florian and Jonquil, he will have planted the hints. It would certainly be a bit poetic if both of them used the same memory soup to create their trauma responses.

Before anyone tries to accuse me of hypocrisy when it comes to age gaps, abuse etc. I do not think this was a case of Jon perving on his young sister. Cat was 12 when she played kissing games with a much younger Petyr and Lysa, and I don’t think we are supposed to consider this a threesome. It’s child’s play. That’s my angle here.

#jon snow #sansa stark #unkiss #anti-ygritte #kissing games #hot springs #pre-canon jonsa #mismemory #jonsa #asoiaf

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eltanin-malfoy · 5 years

Text

Life Kills (Kill Or Be Killed I)

pairing : draco/fem-collegestudent!y/n (not that romantic.. or platonic)

word count : 3.4k!

warnings : smoking, swearing, mentions of murder/violence/poisoning, angst!!!!

a/n : this is set in an original modern non-magic AU, and the story is based off of (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT, DO NOT CHECK OUT THE PROMPT UNLESS YOU WANT TO SPOIL THE REST OF THE STORY lol) this prompt on @writing-prompt-s. there is no real romance between draco and y/n in this chapter, and i’m not exactly sure there will be. the premise of this story kind of makes that a little crazy. for now, it’s pretty much just animosity. there is the slightest possibility of this turning into a slow burn fic.. so hold on, i guess. this is definitely not your typical x reader. at all. i would appreciate any and all feedback from you guys! requests are open as well :) also i hate smoking irl but it just fit here, sorry.

Chapter 1 : Life Kills

Smoke.

That beloved scent filled Draco’s lungs as he took a drag from the wrinkled brown stick in his hand, his steely eyes shutting as its end glowed red. He held it away for a few seconds as he exhaled, white clouds slipping out of his lips into the cold air in front of him. His eyes followed his own exhalation into the sky, his fingers fidgeting with the green lighter he’d used to ignite his toxic addiction with.

He grinned, then brought the cigarette to his lips for another puff, then another, then another, till slowly, the tube of tar was finally used up. He folded up what was left of his papery weapon with his thin fingers and finally tossed it to the ground. He reached into his pocket for his pack, searching for even more release.

He lifted his gaze to the scene in front of him, the concrete jungle that was Bond Street. The expensive logos were practically calling out his name. It’s just my fucking luck, isn’t it? He scowled at the crowds gathered around the area. My lovely parents just had to go get themselves arrested and leave me all by myself. He instinctively grit his teeth as memories of his awful father fluttered through his brain. At least I don’t have to associate with that.. that.. tyrant anymore.

“Draco? Two minutes left in your break, son.”

The pale blonde rolled his eyes as he stared out front, but looked back and flashed his elderly boss a (fake) smile. She nodded and stepped back inside, arms crossed around her portly frame as she shivered.

It had only been a few months since his parents had been arrested by the government after being convicted of illegally possessing and smuggling famed works of art, literature and the like. When the authorities first began their investigation, Lucius had said that it would all work itself out, even though the police’s suspicions were absolutely correct. He had connections everywhere, after all. But, alas! A search warrant had made its way to Malfoy Manor before his parents had the opportunity to sweep everything under the rug, and.. even their very expensive defence lawyer wasn’t able to hide the fact that they were caught red handed.

This had led to a crapload of problems in Draco’s own life. To begin with, he wouldn’t be able to see his mother for at least another decade. His parents’ fortune (and his trust fund, of course!) was seized by the government, leaving him absolutely broke, and forced to drop out in the second year of his Chemistry degree at the very prestigious Oxford University. He’d tried hard to find some kind of a placement in any of his parents’ friends’ companies, but no, they’d decided to stop associating with any member of the Malfoy clan. So, he managed what he could and left his old grand life in Wiltshire for some kind of meagre lifestyle in London. Working as a cashier at Tesco probably wasn’t the worst thing he could be doing.. It was minimum wage, but, it wasn’t hard. Didn’t require much energy.

Draco, for one, had never understood his parents’ motivation to undertake that.. that.. stupidity.

His parents’ family fortune had had practically no purpose in the first place. There wasn’t a glint of compassion in his father’s heart, and all he wanted to use it for was to satisfy his own wants. Illegally purchasing stolen historical artifacts? Of course. Selling them off to others for even greater profits? Sure! But giving a beggar even a single pound? Absolutely not. This total greed and attitude of disgust his father had had used to interest him when he was younger, back in secondary school. He’d made a habit of showing off his wealth and talking down to those who didn’t have much in comparison. But as he grew up.. he’d realised how awful it was.

Especially now that he was only twenty, absolutely alone and having to live off of four hundred pounds a week. It seemed like a lot, at first, but once you factored in rent, food and basic needs, he was barely left with a handful to work with. His heart practically broke every time he caught sight of a homeless person and somehow, so different to his former self, he’d find himself searching in his wallet for spare notes to hand them.

He quickly opened up the pack of cigarettes and pulled out one to satiate himself, stress bubbling up in his veins. He shoved the box almost haphazardly back into the pocket of his coat, then held it to his lips and flicked his lighter, the brilliant orange flame lighting the tip of the cigarette. He took a drag and looked around again, slowly turning to walk back to his place of work. He took a few deep puffs and was just about to trash it when he heard.. what sounded like a struggle?

He headed down the alleyway, to a bit of a darker turn, instinctively slicking back his platinum blonde hair. He finally got a glimpse of what was happening. There was a girl, probably around the same age as him, having a dynamic disagreement with a.. homeless old person? His protective instincts kicked into gear as he saw her swatting at him with the umbrella in her hand, yelling at him for what sounded like.. attempting to trip her?

The old man was shielding himself with a blanket, his arms over his head as he called for help. Draco, feeling almost like his saviour, pushed the girl away, which, he realised was not the best move with his tall figure, made her fall to the ground with a loud squeal. The old man set the blanket down and looked up at the lack of commotion, then gave the lanky blonde a smile. He even mouthed a soft ‘thank you’ and Draco waved his hand, reassuring him that it was no big deal. He took a deep breath, about to turn on his heel to leave, but found himself scowling down at the girl, who was slowly getting up again.

“Why did you do that?” She panted, her hair messy as she got back onto her feet. She wasn’t exactly well built herself, her face was a bit pale and there were hints of shadows under her eyes as she glared up at him. She dusted herself off and placed her hand on her denim-covered knee, wincing the slightest bit. She quickly rose up again and brought her hands to her hips. “Don’t need to look at me like that.” She clenched her jaw and Draco realised that he’d been silent all this while.

“Don’t need.. idiots like you treating helpless people the way you did. Fucking awful, that was.” He looked her over quickly, his gaze pausing at the straps of the backpack on her shoulders. “You.. you students think you can just get away with anything, don’t you?” He found himself getting a bit more heated, his cheeks slowly beginning to turn purple.

She opened her mouth to speak, but Draco rolled his eyes and finally turned to leave, walking back down the alleyway without a word. “Well, we don’t need pricks like you defending these oh so helpless people when they try to steal something from someone.” She called out after him and he stopped, staring to the front, before looking over his shoulder. Instead of locking eyes with her, he saw the same homeless man, staring into space as he huddled up with that blanket. Draco felt the slightest pang of guilt in his gut, but ignored it and continued, still choosing to believe that she was just.. an embodiment of his own father.

Nasty and entitled. He thought to himself as he slipped off his coat, setting it on a rack in the Employee’s Only room. Bet she hasn’t known any real problems in her life. Bet she’s not even a fucking good student. He felt his rage boiling up within him again, but stared at himself in the small mirror by the door. He placed his hands on his reddened cheeks and forced himself to calm down, taking deep breaths and reassuring himself of his own ability. Looking very flustered wasn’t exactly ideal for a cashier in a supermarket, after all.

***

Draco ran the carton of milk over the scanner. Beep. He passed it over to the red haired boy to the side of him, who began to stuff it into a plastic bag. He tried his best not to glance at his customer, but his curiosity bested him and he reluctantly flashed the dark middle aged man a smile. He shook it off and stared at the monitor in front of him. “That’ll be ninety four pounds and thirty pence, sir.” He looked over at the man as he pulled out his wallet and ruffled through it to hand him a few notes, along with a few coins.

“Oh, and I found this in the Car Care aisle.” He pulled out yet another wallet from his pocket, a black, leather one… just like Draco’s father’s.. He let out a sharp exhale and gently took it from him, setting it on the counter. “Thank you, sir. We’ll announce that it’s missing right away.”

The boy then stuffed the notes into the drawer of the cashier, pulling out the one and returning it to the man. “Here’s your change! Thank you for shopping at Tesco, have a nice day!” He forced the words out of his mouth, his voice dry. He could act well, back in the day, but now, he wasn’t exactly willing to try. The ginger opened his mouth to speak. “Hope to see you again, sir, thanks for returning the wallet you found!” A bright smile on his stupid face. Ugh! Always got to suck up to them, doesn’t he? Draco grit his teeth as he shut the register, looking up to see that there was no more customers queuing at the counter.

He opened up the wallet and looked it over, then noticed the name on a credit card in one of the sleeves to the front. There were a couple of ID cards in the others, but.. he couldn’t exactly be bothered. He leaned down and pulled out the small microphone wired to the counter, thought his announcement up, pressed the button besides it and opened his mouth to speak.

“A black leather wallet belonging to a Y/N Y/L/N was just found in the Car Care aisle. Kindly approach counter number 4 for more details, please.” He called out, almost monotonously, closing the wallet up and setting it away. He turned it off and set it away. He looked over at the wallet again and goddamn Lucius’ face flashed in his mind again.

“Can’t seem to learn to act a little nicer, can you, Draco?” Draco lifted his gaze to look over at him, eyes flitting down to the name tag by his collar. Ron… what a bloke to be forced to spend these hours with.. Draco furrowed his brows and just shook his head. “No, I can’t. And that’s the way it’ll be. I’m saying what I have to say, and I shouldn’t be judged for not feeling like a chirpy little bird all the time.” “Okay.. whatever.” Ron rolled his eyes and fiddled around with the bags attached to the hooks by the counter, then looked around. “Not a very busy day today, is it?”

Draco looked down as his eyes widened, somehow Ron had mastered getting on his nerves. “No, it’s not. Not a lot of people out this late at night on a Sunday, Ron.” He looked over at the digital clock by the exit of the store, tilting his head and rolling his shoulders lightly. ‘10:47’ The clock read. Less than a quarter of an hour until my shift ends and I can get out of this shithole. He stared into space as he bit down on his lip, grateful that Ron had finally decided to remain silent. It wasn’t too chilly inside, but it was unbearable for every other reason. This forced happiness with every single customer, the annoying radio somehow constantly playing only the songs he seemed to hate, his annoying bag packer.. maybe retail really wasn’t for him. He shook his head and fiddled with the edge of his blue uniform shirt, staring at the clock and waiting for time to pass.

Easy money, isn’t it? He continued to think to himself. Have to press a couple of buttons, say a couple of words, stay in my place, everything works out. He took a deep breath. Good cover too. No one’s too careful with managing who does the shifts either.. Great alibi, Draco. Could just lie and write my name up in the lists.. No one even cares. A small smile grew on his face. No one would even know if it was me.. Not one. Murder isn’t that hard when you’ve got control of the inventory as well. Change a couple numbers, bag a couple of items and take them out with you through the employee’s exit, no one would even know a thing.

After having to leave university, Draco had grown very, very confused as to what direction to steer his life in. Money wasn’t exactly what he was after.. and it seemed like any past hopes of his of being a research scientist were pointless without some kind of a degree. Chemistry had been his subject of choice, much to his father’s great disdain. He was fine with Draco not even going into tertiary education at all, he had the family business going for him, didn’t he? If you could call it that, then yes. But.. it wasn’t for him. Smuggling wasn’t what interested him, really. It was murder, now.

Draco had liked reading about true crime since he was a child. The horrors, the mysteries and everything else had fascinated him to no end. He thought it had just been some kind of juvenile interest of his, some way to satisfy his curiosity. He could never have seen himself attempting any of that. But that was until he was forced out of his lush lifestyle, this whole change had not only upped his anger and generosity towards the rich and the poor, respectively, but also his desire to get rid of the stress inside of him. Nicotine had soon become his drug of choice but..

He craved something more.

Roland Hoyt… oh boy.. That was the one serial killer Draco had truly been fascinated by. That absolute genius had managed to kill eight people in an old English town with the use of chemicals. It was some mixture of cyanide and barbiturates that he had managed to feed to most of his victims which lead to their death, but what had truly drawn Draco in was the few cases in which Hoyt managed to use his own version of the famed lethal injection. It was beyond wicked, truly. Draco felt like it would be one hell of an insane mission, had felt crooked to the bone even thinking about doing it, but truly, there was no better way to get out his frustration than to just.. do the same. He couldn’t exactly afford any kind of games, or gym membership or as such any longer. And even his most recent ex, Pansy, had seemed to lose any interest in him once he lost his fortune. Talking to girls wasn’t exactly his forte to begin with, anyways.

He just wanted to try it, really. Out of curiosity. Just someone who no one would miss, would even know they were missing. He knew it was absolutely awful of him to even try.. But he’d studied up enough to know how to get away with it, and try he very well would. Or at least try to try, right?

He was snapped out of his thoughts with a nudge to the shoulder from his accompanying bag packer. His head shot up and looked over at him. “What is it, Weasley?” Ron pointed over at the other side of the counter where a new customer was stood.

“Not you again..”

Draco suddenly froze, instantly recognising that voice. He looked up hesitantly and locked eyes with her. It’s that bitch from earlier! Should bar her from coming in here, really! He grit his teeth and pursed his lips slightly, but soon opened his mouth to speak. “Good evening, miss.” His tone seemed a bit cheery, but was obviously rich in sarcasm. “The wallet’s mine.. “ He almost snarled at this, but placed the wallet on the counter. “Are you sure? Or are you just trying to..? You really Y/N Y/L/N?”

She rolled her eyes and took the wallet, opening it up delicately. “Do you really think I’d steal a wallet? You shouldn’t be allowed to work here, honestly.” She pushed a single bottle of antifreeze forwards, fiddling with the ends of her hair. Draco quickly sized her up as she moved forward. The backpack was gone, replaced by a small satchel bag over her shoulder. She seemed to have changed as well, while he couldn’t remember what kind of shirt she was wearing, the jeans she had on were replaced by some shorts.. and what seemed like a small plaster over her knee. He took the bottle of antifreeze and brought it up to the scanner.

“Well, good thing I have a kind manager, then.” He rolled his eyes as the machine beeped, passing the bottle along to Ron, who almost dropped it at first. Draco looked over at him and his eyes were practically stuck on the girl as she glared at Draco. She suddenly looked over at Ron as well, launching into another attack. “Has Tesco seriously started employing assholes who push customers around when no one else is looking?” She bit down on her lip, awaiting some kind of a response.

“Well-well..” Ron stuttered out and Draco couldn’t help but cringe for him, pressing a few buttons on the register. “He’s just the one.. Really. The rest of us are.. not bad.” The girl seems unsatisfied with this response, but continued to look at him, studying his reaction. “So.. you’re not bad then?” She asked, eyeing the redhead quizzically now. “I can be great for a pretty girl like-” “That’ll be seven pounds.” Draco looked over at Ron to see him staring back disapprovingly, arms crossed over his chest. He could feel the slight snarl growing on his face, but snapped out of it, knowing he couldn’t have this girl actually complain about him to his superiors. “Paying by card?” He flipped a card reader over to her, then pressed a few buttons on his own register. She nodded and fit it into the slot, waiting patiently as it flashed an ‘Approved’ sign. “There..”

Draco rolled his eyes yet again, reaching over to grasp the receipt that had just finished printing out. “Miss, you need to sign and write down your contact number here. Just for verification purposes.” He placed a pen right next to it and took a slight step back, studying her for a second. She seems.. easy? A bit violent.. But easily taken care of. Fell like a twig. He shook the thought from his head for a second, looking down as she finished up.

Almost unpredictably, she looked up and flashed Ron a smile, whose ears immediately flushed pink. Sure enough, the signatures matched and he handed her her bag, after which, she soon stepped out. “What the hell was that, Ron?” Ron just shook his head and looked over at her, before glancing back at the Employees Only room.

Y/N Y/L/N. He thought. How convenient. He looked over at the girl exiting, making a mental note. He quickly closed up the register and placed a ‘Next Counter Please’ sign for the next employee to take off. Ron had already cleaned up his area and had started heading back to the Employees Only room, probably to change.

Y/N. Draco finished up and put his hands in his pockets, heading back himself as he noticed a few other employees shuffling over. Physically, she’s an ordinary female, but mentally, just as spoilt and awful as Father.

Think I’ve found myself a first victim, haven’t I?

Chapter 2

#draco x reader #draco malfoy #draco malfoy x reader #draco #hp au #draco imagine #draco malfoy imagine #hp imagine #angst #murder

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rottingfruitt · 5 years

Text

what was she meant to do? part 2: it’s no big surprise you turned out this way

alternative chapter title: ryan instantly ran out of ideas for six lyrics as chapter titles and came dangerously close to calling this chapter “jane be like: *teen beach movie voice* what’s going on? this can’t be happening!” so we’re using random song lyrics now. anyways

chapter 2: in which anne gets diagnosed, jane is yet again a mom, and anne has a pez dispenser (AO3 link) (Part 1)

Jane sat in the psychologist’s waiting room, anxiously tapping her foot. The doctor had been with Anne for quite some time, nearing 45 minutes now, and it was impossible for Jane not to worry. The process has started with Jane calling the doctor with her fears, the doctor meeting with both Jane and Anne for a brief evaluation, and now Anne was in the process of speaking to who Jane was informed would be the final step of the whole ordeal.

The past couple weeks nearly had Jane going grey from stress. She wasn’t exactly familiar with this sort of thing, although to be fair, the entirety of her first life had been spent during a time where a woman whose behavior was thought to be too out of the ordinary was accused of witchcraft.

It started with their general practitioner, who clearly sensed that something was amiss enough to warrant a brief visit with a speech therapist. Then those results were turned over to a neurologist who met with Anne a few times, and now they were at the psychology office, where the final diagnosis would be reached. Jane’s mind was cooking up every bad outcome in the book, and each scenario seemed to end with a lobotomy, for some reason. For example, what if Anne-

Jane was shocked out of her thoughts by a “Ms. Seymour?” She nearly jumped from her seat, looking to the source of the voice, which revealed itself to be the psychologist in question.

“Ms. Seymour, we’re ready for you now,” said the doctor, flashing an unreadable smile that did nothing to soothe Jane’s nerves. She followed him to his office, where Anne was seated in a small chair in front of a large wooden desk, fumbling with a Rubix cube. She grinned when Jane walked in, flashing her a peace sign and setting the Rubix cube down - completely solved, Jane noticed.

The doctor gestured to the chair next to Anne, and Jane took a seat, while the doctor sat on the other side of the desk and leaned forward, folding his hands.

“Well, Ms. Seymour, Anne.” The doctor began. “I have to say, this case was certainly interesting.”

Jane’s eyes widened. “Interesting? How? What’s wrong? I don’t-”

The doctor held out his hand, chuckling. “Ms. Seymour, please, it’s nothing to worry about. It’s just unusual that something like this goes so long without being diagnosed.”

“Something like what?” Jane leaned forward, growing irritated with the doctor for dragging this out for so long.

“Well, autism.”

Jane sat back in her chair, digesting this. Autism. She’d heard the word before, of course, but had to admit that she had only ever associated it with children. She noticed both Anne and the doctor’s eyes on her, and blushed, clearing her throat.

“Autism. So, you mean…” She trailed off, at a loss for words. The doctor recognized this, and jumped in.

“Well, the official diagnosis is Asperger’s Syndrome. Essentially, on the autism spectrum, it would be considered ‘high functioning.’ It’s characterized by difficulties in social interaction, nonverbal communication, and restricted or repetitive patterns and interests.”

As the doctor went on about what he had observed in her to Jane, Anne tuned him out and let her mind wander.

She tried to formalize how she was feeling about all of this. The doctor had told her that she was a bit different than other people. Well, duh, she thought, she had eleven fingers for god’s sake. But then he’d explained that it was something in her brain that was wired differently than what was the norm. He said it was something that made her think and act differently than other people, and that what she’d explained about feeling like the odd one out was expected of someone with this condition, especially in a house of five other people. She’d asked if this was the answer to why she was such a ‘half-witted muppet,’ as Aragon had described her when Anne tripped over her shoelace and brought down a display of mannequins in a store the week prior, but the doctor had only chuckled at that, so Anne was still pondering that one.

All in all, Anne wasn’t too worried. The doctor had finished their appointment by assuring her that she had nothing to worry about or to be ashamed of, and seeing as he was the one with the PhD, Anne was satisfied.

She was pulled out of her thoughts by Jane’s hand settling on her shoulder, making Anne jump in her chair.

“Here,” the doctor was saying. “I suggest taking time to look through this with your family, and you of course have my number if you have any questions.”

He handed Jane a thick packet of paper, with the words “AUTISM IN ADULTS” emblazoned on the front in large, bold, letters.

Jane thanked him and rose from her chair, Anne following suit. The pair exchanged a few parting words with the doctor, and they were out the door.

On the ride home, Jane was walking on eggshells trying to talk to Anne about the news.

“You’re sure you’re okay, sweetie? It’s perfectly understandable if this is hard to wrap your head around, it’s pretty big news.”

Anne shrugged, popping a candy out of a Spider-Man Pez Dispenser.

“I’m fine. Everything made sense, and he said there wasn’t anything to worry about. Can we get Slurpees?”

Jane couldn’t help but chuckle, brought back down closer to earth by Anne’s incredibly on-brand response.

“Yeah, yeah, of course we can. But, just remember, if you ever need to talk about anything, we’re here for you, okay? All of us.”

Anne didn’t take her eyes off the road ahead, but a large grin spread across her face. “I know, Jane. Thank you.”

—-

That evening, Jane, Parr, and Aragon had taken up residence in Parr’s study, pouring over the booklet Jane had been given from the psychiatrist, as well as a few books and websites they’d dug up.

“...one sided, long winded speech about a favourite topic...intense and passionate focus on one or two interests, hyperfixation…that’s definitely Anne.” Parr sighed, reading from her computer. “I mean, she’s probably more obsessed with frogs and salamanders than most herpetologists,” she snorted. “Remember one of our first group interviews? The second Anne mentioned her tadpole pool it took Aragon dragging her out by her ear AND the promise of waffles to get her out of there.”

Aragon chuckled at the memory, turning a page in the pamphlet. “And what about this? ‘A clumsy, awkward gait or walk.’ I mean, that’s just textbook Anne, isn’t it? Or ‘failure to respect interpersonal boundaries.’ I’d say that Anne’s got herself wrapped around someone at least ninety percent of the time.”

Jane let out a sigh, rubbing her tired eyes. “I do have to admit, it really does make sense. And I know that she can be helped by us, and her therapist, I just really hope that she isn’t taking it to hard, you know? She can be really sensitive sometimes.”

—-

“Yeah, I thought he said ‘ass burgers’ at first, so I was super confused.”

Katherine let out a snort at this, shaking her head. “Of course that’s what you thought.”

The cousins were sitting on the floor of Anne’s room, their legs tangled together, watching as Anne’s lizard, Lee, crawled around the floor eating crickets that Anne tossed for him.

“I mean, it’s reassuring in a way.” Anne said, grinning as Lee ate a cricket in one bite. “I thought I was just, like, super annoying.”

Katherine shrugged. “Sure that’s what Aragon thought too.” She giggled, leaning on Anne’s shoulder. “Well, I’m just glad you’re okay. We were all pretty worried, y’know?”

Anne nodded, not taking her eyes off the lizard. “I know. That’s what Jane said. And nothing’s different, really, I’m still the same person. Except, like, now I gotta take Risperdal for it.” She paused, growing uncomfortable with the topic. “Um, so do you wanna see how the tadpoles are doing?”

Katherine shot up from her seat on the floor like a firecracker, grinning ear to ear. “Are you kidding? Hell yeah!”

Anne’s face morphed to a grin to match her cousin’s, and she stood, took Katherine by the hand, and brought her to a tank across the room.

“Look! Bartholemew and Duck have hind legs now, see?”

Katherine raised her eyebrows. “Duck? You named a frog Duck?”

“Yeah, I did. This one here.” Anne pointed, her grin growing even larger.

“Why’d you name a frog Duck?”

Anne looked up, furrowing her brow. “Because.” She said simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. She turned back to the tank, pointing at the others.

“I think I’ll name this one Spotty, ‘cause of the spots. This one’s Rachel, because the lady working at Starbucks the other day was named Rachel, and she had nice hair. Not sure about the other two, yet, they’re still a bit young to be distinguishable from each other. Oh, and look here…”

She trailed off into a mile-a-minute ramble, much too fast for Katherine to keep up with, though she’d never admit it. She watched Anne grow even more excited as she talked, beaming the whole time. She was almost kicking herself for thinking that Anne wouldn’t be able to handle whatever the universe - or in this case, the psychiatrist - threw at her. Anne was brave. She’d be okay. Nothing bad was gonna happen to her cousin, it couldn’t.

#omg is that a cliffhanger #no its not chapter 3 is already out #lmao #six the musical #six the musical fanfic #catherine of aragon #anne boleyn #jane seymour #anna of cleves #katherine howard #catherine parr

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sweetiepie08 · 6 years

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Bedtime Story (Chap 4)

Coco Princess Bride AU

Hector’s not sure how he, of all people, managed to have a daughter who didn’t see the value in love stories. Being the romantic sap he is, he reads her one of his favorites before bed. He hopes the story will show her the power of all types of love and it’ll become of her her favorites too.

Chapter 1. Chapter 2. Chapter 3. Chapter 4. Chapter 5.

Ernesto and his entourage rode to the location his lookouts gave him. They said they spotted Héctor being dragged along by another man. They were confronted by a masked woman, presumably a pirate. After a wager involving poison, the man collapsed to the ground and the woman intercepted Héctor, dragging him away herself.

They came to the place where Héctor was last spotted. There, they found one canteen and the man still lying on the ground. Ernesto dismounted his horse and approached the kidnapper. He recognized the man as a diplomat from Santa Anthony. So, they were behind this. His blood rushed with cold fury and he kicked the man in the side. Death came too easily to him.

To his shock, the man on the ground started coughing. “He’s alive,” he shouted. His associate also climbed down from her horse and joined him in looming over the criminal.

The man slowly sat up and opened his eyes. When he saw whose presence he was in, he scrambled to his knees. “Prince Ernesto. I’m sorry to have met you like this. I didn’t expect-”

“Calm yourself, señor,” Ernesto said, putting on his most princely voice. “No need to be frightened. I am out looking for my companion. I received a horrible note saying he’d been abducted and a lookout spotted him here. Have you seen anything strange?”

“Yes, yes, I saw him. He was with the pirate Valentina Rodriguez. I’m sure of it. I tried to interfere but she was too quick for me.”

“Really?” Ernesto’s appreciative smile had a hard edge which was hard to ignore. “Did you see which way they went?”

“No, she knocked me out before they took off,” The old man answered.

Ernesto smirked and rubbed his chin in faux contemplation. “It’s interesting. My lookout reported that she intercepted him from you.”

“No, that’s not true,” the old man panicked. “Héctor’s been my friend for years. I would never truly hurt him.”

“Truly?” Ernesto pressed. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing, I…”

“Did you threaten him?”

“No, I-I…”

“And what exactly is a Santa Anthony diplomat doing on my hunting grounds?”

The man looked like he was about to collapse. “Please, Prince Ernesto,” he begged. “My duty is to maintain peace between our two kingdoms. I would never jeopardize that peace. I…”

Ernesto chuckled and guided the old man to his feet. “It’s alright. If you want to prove your dedication, you can run a message for me. If memory serves, you are very familiar with that sort of task.”

The man was still shaking, but the fear was starting to leave his eyes. “Yes, Prince Ernesto.”

“I have a lookout stationed east of here,” Ernesto said, pointing into the distance. “Run to them and tell them to be on the watch for the pirate Valentine Rodriguez with the kidnapped Lord Héctor.”

“I will. Right away.”

The man took off without hesitation, the fool. Ernesto whistled for his squire who brought him his bow and a quiver of arrows.

“My prince,” his associate called from where she knelt in the grass. “There are tracks here. They lead this way.”

“Gracias Doña,” He said, lining up his shot. “We will follow them as soon as I am finished here.”

He watched as the old man ran into the distance. Once the man was far enough away that he might be starting to hope, Ernesto released his bow string. The arrow flew through the air and lodged itself in the old man’s back. He fell to the ground. Satisfied, Ernesto handed his quiver and bow back to his squire and mounted his horse.

The man was a fool to think he’d get away with it, to think his crime would go unpunished. He signed his death warrant the moment he touched the royal companion. Lord Héctor was a steward of the Prince. He belonged to Ernesto. And Ernesto did not let anyone take what was his.

[-]

The hours ceased to exist for Héctor and Imelda and they lost themselves in each other’s arms. They spent many long years apart and had to make up for lost time. Their moment was interrupted, however, when they heard hoof beats thundering above…

[-]

“Ew, Papa…”

“What?” Héctor asked, lowering the book.

“Were they kissing for that long?” Coco stuck her tongue out to properly express her disgust.

“Well, I’m sure it wasn’t that long.”

“Do you kiss Mama for that long?”

Héctor felt the heat rising in his cheeks and dove his nose back into the book. “Let’s just get back to the story.”

[- Story Time-]

“No, Ernesto,” Lord Héctor breathed as he looked up at the hunting party at the top on the ravine. “He’ll have you killed if he finds you.”

Imelda sat up and raised an eyebrow. “Can’t you just tell him I’m not the one who kidnapped you?”

Héctor crawled up against the side of the ravine for a closer look. “No, Ernesto has his arrows with him. If he suspects you, he’ll shoot you before I have the chance to explain.” He slid back down to the bottom and helped Imelda up. “We can’t let him catch up to us.”

“Then let’s go. This way.” Imelda took him by the hand and pulled him toward a thicket of trees west of the ravine.

“Through the geyser swamp?” Héctor gasped, scrambling to keep pace. “It’s impossible to survive in there.”

“Nonsense. Just because no one’s survived yet doesn’t mean no one can.”

[-]

“So, I realize this might be an odd time to ask this,” Héctor said, jumping out of the way of an erupting geyser, “but what exactly happened to you?”

“What do you mean?” Imelda asked, cutting down some vines with her sword.

“Last anyone heard, your ship was attacked by Valentina Rodriguez, but now you are Valentina Rodriguez. Does your family know you’re alive?”

“They do,” she answered. “I sent them a letter as soon as I could telling them I was fine and I’d found a lucrative job. I wrote them as often as I could,” she threw a sharp glare over her shoulder, “which is more than I can say for you. That’s how I knew you left them.”

Héctor’s insides went cold. She still thought he abandoned them? “I had no choice.”

“You could have at least wrote to them,” Imelda countered, a hard edge on her voice. “Just a letter or two wouldn’t have hurt.”

You have no idea… “I kept in touch at the beginning. I sent them at least one letter a week. But then Ernesto made me royal companion. He noticed that I still wrote to them and he knew they helped me hide from him. He started making comments about how old they were getting and how I shouldn’t be surprised if they died soon.” He shivered as he remembered the smirk that accompanied these suggestions. “I had to cut off all contact. I wanted to write one last time to explain, but I knew Ernesto had spies reading my letters. I’m sorry. I never wanted to do it.”

Imelda glanced back at him again, her face softening. “Well, at least you had noble intentions,” she sighed, before silently continuing to hack away at the brush.

Héctor couldn’t help but notice she never offered an explanation to him. “Imelda…” He grabbed her hand and took her in his arms. “Everyone thought you were dead. I was heartbroken. I thought I’d never love again. But here you are. Just talking to you right now is a miracle. Please tell me how this is possible.”

She smiled at him the way she did the last time he held her like this. For a moment, they were kids again, discovering love in the grassy hills of the town they grew up in. A geyser erupted behind them, causing them both to jump closer together.

Imelda laughed and turned to continue their trek through the swamp, this time keeping one hand in his. “I didn’t lie before,” she explained. “My ship was attacked and I did tell Valentina Rodriguez that I had no intention of dying before I earned my fortune. She told me I had enough spirit to be a pirate and she invited me to join her crew. Over the next few years, we sort of became friends. She’d often take me aside and teach me about the finer points of leadership.”

Another geyser interrupted them, temporarily splitting their hands apart. When it settled, they reconnected and she continued her story.

“One day, she invited me to have dinner with her in her galley. There she told me she wasn’t the original Valentina Rodriguez. Her name was Juanita. She’d inherited the title from the last Rodriguez who was now retired on an island, rich enough to never have to work another day in her life. Apparently there’s a while line of Rodriguezes and she’d chosen me to be her successor. With a legendary name like Rodriguez, she said, you hardly have to do much. Crews will see you coming and abandon ship out of fear of the reputation. After that, all you have to do is board and take the cargo. It’s the legend that holds all the power.

“She and the whole crew would retire and I would take over as captain. We ported at a known pirate den. The crew took their shares and went on their way and she helped me hire a new crew. She pretended to be my first mate and called me Rodriguez. She coached me for a few weeks through captaining the ship, then took her share and retired as well. I’ve been Valentina Rodriguez ever since.”

“So you’ve been murdering and pillaging all this time?” Héctor asked, breaking his hand away.

“No, no murdering or pillaging, though there was thievery,” she admitted. “You see, if Valentina Rodriguez really left no survivors, there’d be no legends. No one would know the name. Maybe the original really did earn her reputation, but not the crew I was on and definitely not on my crew. Most just abandon ship when they see my sails, but the ones that don’t surrender on the spot. Everyone thinks they’re the one lucky ship that was spared. That how much power the name holds. Just put out enough stories about ships you’ve burned and the legend will survive.”

“What do you plan to do now?”

“Recently, I’ve acquired enough wealth for my crew to retire as well. I’ll appoint a new Valentina Rodriguez, then I’ll return to my family. We’ll retire to a beautiful island,” She turned back to Héctor with a mischievous smile and pulled him close, “and you will come with us.”

“Me?” He said, stepping away. “Imelda I can’t.”

Her face hardened into stone. “If Ernesto’s really as bad as you say he is, then you’re not safe here,”

“It’s not that simple. I can’t just leave the Southlands without a leader.”

“So, you plan to go back alone?” Her shoulders drooped and she scowled as she turned away and began half-heartedly cutting through the vines. “Just they said…”

“What do you mean?”

“The Lord of the Southlands would never take a shoemaker’s daughter for his bride.” Her voice sounded automatic, rehearsed, like she was parroting someone else’s words.

“What?” Héctor rushed to her and gathered her in his arms again. “Imelda, I always knew I’d have to go back someday and take my parent’s place ruling the Southlands, but I always intended to ask you to come with me.”

“I’m not nobility,” she stated, matter-of-fact.

Héctor laughed and shook his head. “So what? I don’t care about titles. I care about you. I can’t imagine loving anyone else.”

Imelda’s eyes glistened as she searched his face, looking for any hint of insincerity, but there was none to be found. She leapt up and kissed him. Another geyser went off somewhere in the swamp. They barely registered it.

Imelda pulled away, a smile still on her lips, but Héctor could see the wheels turning in her mind. Her face suddenly fell and she broke away from him. “Does that even matter now?” She asked. “How can we be together if you belong to Ernesto?”

Héctor rubbed his eyes and wracked his brain for an answer. Ernesto… Somehow, he’d forgotten. Even if they managed to slip past Ernesto’s hunting party, he’d still need to explain why he was suddenly with this strange pirate woman. They couldn’t elope. Ernesto would take that as an insult. He couldn’t tell Ernesto the truth either. Imelda was a legendary pirate now. Ernesto would have not trouble finding cause to arrest her. But, if she were still just a shoemaker…

“We’ll take your boat back to the Southlands,” he said finally. “I’ll go back to my estate and send a letter to Ernesto explaining that a mysterious woman rescued me and returned me home. You take your ship and finish getting your pirate affairs in order, then come back to me. Ernesto knows I have to marry eventually, and I’ve told him about my lost love. When you return, we’ll say you weren’t dead after all, just shipwrecked and you were finally able to make it home. You and I will marry and we can move your whole family to the estate.”

“What about Ernesto’s jealousy?” she countered. “He’s famous for it, even across the sea.”

“There’s nothing that says the royal companion can’t get married. Ernesto will have no choice but to accept it.” It was perfect, really. As Lord of the Southlands, getting married was expected of him and it was expected of Ernesto to congratulate him.

Imelda still looked skeptical, but accepted his answer with a nod. “Alright, I’ll trust you on this one, but I’ve heard things about Ernesto and if he ever tries to hurt you…”

“You’ll just have to rescue me again, won’t you?” Héctor flashed her a cheeky grin.

Imelda smirked and playfully nudged him with her elbow. “Let’s try not to make a habit of it. We’re not even finished with this rescue yet. Though it does look like we’re almost out of the Geyser Swamp.” She gestured with her sword toward a break in the trees up ahead.

“Wait!” Héctor grabbed her arm and pulled her back.

“What’s wrong?”

“What about the COUSes? They’re said to guard the exit.”

“Chihuahuas of unusual size? I don’t think they exist.”

A yapping ball of fur leapt out of the bushes and pounced on Imelda, knocking her to the ground. It snapped at her as she tried to push it away. Héctor grabbed it by the tail and dragged it away. It turned on him and tried to bite at his ankles. He picked up a branch and swung at it, but even a knock to the head didn’t seem to deter it.

Jaws wide open, it made a lunge for his knee. Suddenly, it was jerked back as Imelda grabbed its hind legs and swung it into a tree. It hit the trunk and fell to the ground. It lay stunned as they backed away, Imelda’s sword raised. After a few seconds, it regained consciousness and shook off its shock. It leapt for them, but got caught up in the scalding hot water of an erupting geyser.

When the water receded, the creature lay crying and twitching on the ground. When she was sure it was no longer a threat, Imelda slowly approached it and plunged her sword into the poor thing’s heart, putting it out of its misery.

[-]

“Papa?”

“Yes, Coco?”

“You know the Chihuahuas that live next door?” she asked, squeezing her Chewbacca plushie tight. “How big are they going to get?”

Héctor lifted the book to hide his laughter. “Don’t worry, Coco. I think they’re full grown.” She had a point, though. Those little ankle biters were filled with more rage than their bodies could handle. If they were any bigger, they’d be more terrifying that an angry Rottweiler.

“Okay, can we get back to the story now?”

[-]

With the beast vanquished, Imelda and Héctor were able to exit the geyser swamp. They thought they’d cleared their last obstacle, but as soon as they stepped through the trees, they found themselves surrounded by Ernesto’s soldiers, with the Prince himself at the head. “Surrender,” he demanded.

“You mean you wish to surrender to me?” Imelda sniped. “Very well, I accept.”

“You’re in no position to play games,” Ernesto said with a sneer. “You’ve kidnapped my royal companion. If you don’t surrender him, you will die here and now.”

“You’ll have to catch us first,” Imelda countered. “We survived the geyser swamp. We can hide comfortably in there, so if you think you’re brave enough to follow us in…”

“I’ll give you one more chance to surrender peacefully.”

“Not happening.”

Héctor heard some rustling behind them. He turned to see two crossbowmen hiding behind the trees with their weapons aimed at Imelda’s back.

“I won’t ask again! Surrender!”

“Never!”

“Stop!”

Héctor leapt onto Imelda’s back, sending them both to the ground. He made sure to shield every inch of her body with his. A few feet away, a crossbow bolt embedded itself in the dirt.

“Héctor, what-” Imelda grumbled, trying to buck him off of her.

Héctor shushed her and lifted his head to face Ernesto. “Don’t hurt her.”

“What? She kidnapped you.”

“No, she rescued me,” Héctor answered. “Do you remember when I told you about my lover who I thought was dead? This is her. After her ship was attacked, she became a sailor to survive. Promise not to hurt her and let her return to her ship, and I will go back with you.”

“Very well,” Ernesto said in his most stately voice. “You have my word.”

Héctor got off of Imelda and helped her to her feet.

“What are you doing?” she hissed. “Can we still be together now that he knows who I am?”

“I don’t know.” He reached out and tucked a loose hair behind her ear. “But I love you more than anything in this world. I thought you were dead once and it almost destroyed me. I can’t let anything happen to you. I don’t think I could survive that a second time.”

“Héctor…” Her eyes glistened again.

He gently placed his thumb on her chin and kissed her one last time. They were interrupted by Ernesto loudly clearing his throat.

“Are you coming?” he demanded.

“This isn’t the end,” Imelda said, turning Héctor’s face back to her. “I’ll come back for you again. I promise.”

Their fingers lingered on each other as they separated. A soldier handed a horses’ reigns to Héctor. He mounted it and joined Ernesto’s hunting party.

“Doña,” Ernesto called to his associate. “Make sure our friend is taken care of.” He lead the party away, Héctor taking one last glance at Imelda before riding off.

Imelda was left behind with Doña and three other soldiers. “I’m perfectly capable of making it back to my ship without an escort, thank you.”

Doña laughed and her lips curled into a sinister smile. “Don’t worry. We’re not escorts.”

The soldiers closed in on her, cutting of her escape route. She looked up at Doña and scrutinized her face. “Has anyone ever told you, you look like a Chihuahua?” she asked with a smirk. “I may know someone who’s looking for you.”

Before she could get a reply, a soldier clubbed her on the back of the head and everything went black.

#coco #coco pixar #coco fanfiction #coco fanart #hector rivera #imelda rivera #hector x imelda #imector #ernesto de la cruz #miguel rivera #dante coco #princess bride au

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attract-mode-collective · 6 years

Video

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Exactly 79 Photos & Videos Concerning The Game Boy (plus other handhelds)

So... hope you’ve all been following me on Twitter, which is more or less the unofficial new home for Attract Mode. Mostly cuz Tumblr’s days are, alas, numbers, plus I haven’t warmed up to Medium as much as I had hoped to. Though I’ve actually spent the past two months republishing every single post that contains mainline Game Culture Snapshots, so it has remained somewhat useful at least.

Now, for a while there, I had been compiling every single thing tweeted. But because I’m now so damn active on that end… plus I’m busier than ever with other projects… I’m way behind with those digest posts, and the very idea of playing catch up legit gives me anxiety. Yet I have been sharing lots of cool things, which all deserve to be in the blog proper… and because a lot of them are specific to the Game Boy, I figure, why not just focus on that?

Like the above, which is a technique for producing full color photographs via the Game Boy Camera, and yet another thing that I can’t believe hasn’t made the rounds!

Sticking with Game Boy photography, here have a pair of mods that will greatly enhance picture quality. The first involves mounting SLR lens onto a Game Boy Camera (via ekeler.com)...

And the second has one shoving a Game Boy Camera into a SLR itself (via @MaxKriegerVG)...

As someone who was into video games as a kid, and also interested in photography, the Game Boy Camera was the first camera I was able to call my own. Am pretty sure this was the case for others as well?

I also remember seeing this ad in Nickelodeon Magazine (which I would eventually writer for, not too long later) and being absolutely gob smacked (via nintendroid.org)…

Though as much I loved Nintendo brand of FUNtography, I would quickly discover… as did everyone else I also assume… that taking pictures is serious business (via @PolandNintendo)…

Not only did I have a Game Boy Color, but I also had the Game Boy Printer (I still own both, for the record). Unfortunately my snapshots from Link’s Awakening have long since faded, but as with many things, you can find copies online (via gameandgraphics.com)…

Speaking of the world of print, coming soon is a handy guide to Nintendo handy game machine (via miki800.com)…

That one magazine ad featuring Princess Peach catch your eye as well? Well here’s a much better look at it (via suppermariobroth)…

I love handheld gadgets of all kinds, yet some of the popular ones confuse me. Like Hudson’s Shooting Watch; it makes no sense to have a gadget that can detect button presses without a game attached. Guess I’m not alone (via instagram.com/kazzycom)…

A realization I made while sifting through Game Boy related content is how popular the color yellow is with many. Cuz Pokemon? Anyhow, the final post from a blog that specializes in gorgeous photographs of gorgeous hardware, which I just brought up again very recently (via hard-aware)…

How your parents used to trade Pokemans online (via melonjaywalk)…

And no, Game Boys weren't the only things that one could connect to keitais ya know. And yes, Game Boys aren’t the only portables I’ll be showcasing (via anthony10000000)…

I own quite a few VMUs and am always looking to expand my collection… but nothing yellow, sorry. Instead, I want the one covered with dolphins (via anthony10000000)…

So my new favorites artist is Eri Kitamura, and not just cuz she makes pretty looking Game Boys…

She also makes pretty looking girls playing Game Boys (well, this one is technically listening to music)…

Was originally going to post the first thing from Eri that caught my eye, which is a Game Boy with a girl on it, but instead here’s a Game Boy with a girl on it playing a Game Boy…

Time for two more videos from the same individual responsible with the process for producing color photographs at the very top. And it’s what everyone has been waiting… specifically the backlit Game Boy Color mod everyone has been waiting for.

The process is detailed in this two-part video, and here’s the first one (it’s about 50 minutes long cuz spoilers: this shit ain’t easy)…

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And here’s part two, which is ONLY 40-ish minutes long…

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The author of the videos actually has a store, so if the process seems a bit too daunting, you can purchase a pre-modded unit for $250. Actually, this one is $260, cuz of the dual shells. Quite the price tag, yet somehow totally worth it (via instagram.com/esotericmods)…

Now might be a good time to mention how… remember that GBA with the GameCube finish from eBay a few months back? Well, I decided to get the one that resembles a Super Famicom, something I’ve been lusting over for years.

Well, here’s what the aforementioned seller had in his listing…

And this is what I got instead…

Yeah, that green shoulder button is not the right shade. After some complaining, I got the seller to admit that the one in the picture was hand painted; he didn’t know where it get ones that it’s exact color as on a Super Fami controller.

He also had a no refund policy, yet I bitched & moaned enough to warrant an exchange, for another Cube-esque model, one sans the stick. Cuz it’s comparatively boring to look at, here’s a version with the stick…

Again, mine just has the standard d-pad. As for my replacement… the colors of the A & B buttons are not an exact match, once again. But it’s close enough (am mostly just sick of dealing with that guy, aka johnnys_merchandise, whom you should all avoid btw), plus I have started to scour AliExpress for replacements.

BTW, my failure to obtain a modded handheld that channels another form of hardware has me wondering if I should go for something completely different instead (via instagram.com/wakuwakuisland)…

Up in the mountains, flower bloom amongst Game Boys & Game Boy Colors, whereas deep in the forest, you’ll find mushrooms and Game Boy Advances (via pxchinko)…

Some say memories are fuzzy, though for others, they're leafy (via lyosphe)…

I’ve looked all over for tinycartridge's original post, but no luck, so you can all instead have my personal copy of the earthy wallpaper that was shared years ago (and which I still to this very day)...

The Game Boy Micro, DS, and DS Lite are like family, and like siblings, there can the occasional squabble (via benkyo-es)…

@frankcifaldi: When I met this guy in 2003 and he told me he was going to make an extensive fan site about the Supervision, a Taiwanese Game Boy knockoff, I was like "sure dude." 15 years later he actually launched the thing??

Meanwhile, the Game & Watch Perfect Catalogue just came out, with the full low down on all 59 models. BTW, had no idea there were 59 in total until @ionadisco mentioned it…

How Game & Watches were sold in America; I fondly recalls this ad in-between the pages of Amazing/Spectacular/Web of Spider-Man (via suppermariobroth)…

And how Game Boys were sold in Japan, one day one apparently, which would explain this salesperson’s rather perplexed demeanor (via flashbak.com)…

Silly as it sounds, and as silly as he looks, the US version of Firebrand is nonetheless a warm & welcoming face from my childhood (via nintendometro)...

Mario dropping a knowledge bomb (via suppermariobroth)…

Here’s Peach seemingly kicking Toad’s ass in Super Mario Bros Deluxe, which I’ve been meaning to tweet for a while now, but now seems like the right time & place for obvious reasons (via nintendometro)…

A cute comic about someone finally beating a game after ten years, or at least I believe that's the case (you know, language barrier and all; via @desune593)

Sailor Moon seems to enjoy handheld gaming more so than in the arcades (via uglygreenjacket)…

It saddens me that ravages of time is robbing me of my precious memories, including the names of 90s anime, hence why I had to ask on Twitter who exactly is this (answer was Tenchi Muyo; via shxtfased)...

It’s SethEverman, just playing some pokemon blue…

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Speaking of music, it again saddens me that I wasn’t about to make the trip to Japan to catch chiptunes at Square Sounds, and various associated venues. At least @bit_shifter_ took this great snapshot of Glomag at Cyberpunks Osaka…

Meanwhile, here in NYC, we actually still have record stores. And you can grab Josh’s latest release, his first in 12 years(!) at Rough Trade (via bit-shifter)…

Though back to Japan; attended Square Sounds would have also afforded me the chance to check out Tokyo Game Show, where I could have gotten that VMU shaped USB drive that was being sold at the Sega booth (via miki800)…

A few weeks before TGS, there was an earthquake in Japan, in northern island Hokkaido. Many were left without power, but one person was able to keep up with the news, thanks to an old DS peripheral that basically provides bunny ears (via kotaku.com)…

On a semi-related note, here’s someone watching old ECW VHS tapes on their Game Gear (via heavyelectricity)…

Sorry, but the only other thing I have that’s related to Sega’s Master System on the go is this gif from a pizza ranch salad dressing (yikes) commercial, which was cross-promoting Sonic Chaos (via sonicthehedgeblog)...

I have no idea why I'm so amused by this Getty Image of a Neo Geo Pocket that was confiscated at summer camp. Or perhaps no explanation is needed? (via hellomrkearns)…

Speaking of the Great Outdoors, here’s my buddy Steve enjoying some Mario Kart 8 in the middle of a forest (via instagram.com/vitaminsteve)…

And speaking of Mario Kart on the Switch, Bowser seems like a pretty cool dood to have a car trip (via suppermariobroth)…

The Switch is so beloved that people are doing fan art, not for any particular game but the simple the act of playing with it (via annazees)…

Granted, one of the best things about the Switch is all the different ways in which one can play (via kanekoshake)…

If you enjoy your Switch on the go and are looking for a way to store games… and are a diehard Breath of the Wild fan as well… plus if you have access to a 3D printer (via miki800.com)…

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It’s a tribute to Star Wars… games… all of them… featuring Princess Leia focused on her DMG (via deviantart.com/robduenas)...

BTW, do you still have your Game Boy? If not, here ya go (via anthony10000000)…

When the realization hits that your Game Boy Color library is incomplete (via @Bootleg_Stuff)…

Back to my buddy Steve, who visited the Primark at the Staten Island mall and took pics of the game related apparel that, sadly, were no longer in stock by the time I was able to swing by. With the one thing I really wanted being this shirt…

This pair of Super Mario Land X Air Jordans is only $1,350.00 (via miki800.com)…

I’m sure you’ve seen him already, but for the sake of completion, here’s that grandpa from who rigged this bike with 11 phones to become a Pokemon Go master (via bbc.com)…

Yet another sign of our times, literally (via fuckdragonballz)…

This image features a PSP and a MacBook, both of which are from the mid-2000s, yet feels very late 1990s/early 2000s. Why? Those USB cables (via jcgraphix)…

And last but not least, here’s Paris Hilton with her DS in 2005 (via @ParisHilton)…

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brittysaucefanfic · 6 years

Text

Brand New Blue

Part 35

(First)(Previous)(Next) (AO3)

Lance’s dream started in darkness.

Just a black hole swallowing him up as he floated aimlessly. It was so dark, he couldn’t even see his own body. He could feel himself move as he shifted. Felt his arm lift to brush against his face. Felt tears against the fingertips of his hand, and something dripping from his other hand. Lance felt when he blinked, as if in slow motion, but there was no change in vision. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbing, and ignoring the feeling of the same almost sludge like liquid smearing all over his face.

When he opened his eyes again he could see his hands.

Horror rose in his chest as he recognized the blue liquid falling slowly from his hands. His wrists had a pair of chains that looked suspiciously Galran in nature. Lance looked up at the sound of a broken whimper and his vision blacked out again. The only thing he could see was a pair of teary eyes. They held no whites, no pupil, just a pure blue color.

The color of his lion, of his very own eyes, the color of the sludge dripping from his fingers.

They grew from tiny little eyes, and grew and grew until Lance was nothing but an ant beneath their glare. A voice echoed in his ears, low and haunting and achingly familiar. A voice that haunted his nightmares, a voice he’s run away from ever since he escaped the arena.

Your fault, it says. If you had only done as I demanded, then this wouldn’t have happened. It repeats what is says in varying tones. Some echo, as if Lance was underneath the waves on Varadero beach. Blurred and distorted. Others are mocking, like it was laughing at Lance’s pain.

He wanted to get free. He needed to wake up.

Wake up, Lance yells at himself. Wake up you idiot!

Lance looks down, looking at his chains again to not have to look into those horrible eyes. Horrible, sorrowful eyes. The chain, actual physical chains, is long and loose. The slack pools into two stacks of chain, his right one bigger as both chains trail to the right of Lance and behind him. They were unraveling, pulling behind him. It took him a second too late to realize that they were about to yank him off his feet.

They only took him through the air for a millisecond, before he crashed into the wall, back first. It knocked the breath out of him, and he jerked forward in wheeze. His hands, chained above him, refused to allow him proper room to curl in on himself like his natural instincts demanded.

A clawed purple hand- slim, strong, and in a crooked sense, feminine- gripped his cheeks hard, digging into his skin and yanking his head up. He met glowing yellow eyes, and a pointed purple face shrouded beneath a hood.

You will obey, the witch said. Obey me paladin.

No! Lance yells to himself and forces himself to wake up with a gasp.

~~~

Lance launches upright with a desperate gasp.

He’s in bed, tangled among his sheets and sweaty. He pushes his hand through his hair, pushing the short strands out of his face. They were starting to get a little long again. He sucked in a breath, trying to slow his rapid breathing before he starts hyperventilating.

He’s successful, and he calms down enough to stumble out of bed and to the bathroom. The first thing he does is empty his stomach, which wasn’t all that full in the first place. Last night he got a taste of his own medicine at dinner. He had shown up for dinner, hoping to talk to Hunk, but he had never shown.

The others did, and thankfully they didn’t ice him out. But Lance knew they knew a little something about the conversation he had with Hunk. If he knew his friends as well as he thought he did, it was probably Pidge who convinced the others to spy on them.

Wouldn’t surprise him.

Lance washed his mouth out before stumbling back into his room, legs shaky and unstable. One hand, his right one, was pressed into the door frame to hold him upright. He curled in on himself again, bending almost in half as he struggled to get himself together.

Maybe Hunk was right.

The dreams have been so bad lately, keeping him up at all hours of the night. He tries to stare at the stars and planets in the distance to calm down, like when he was a kid, but it doesn't work. Never works. Lance just associates the stars with suffering now.

And that killed him, alright? It killed him to know that one of the few things he would always have as a constant in his life is now blackened with pain. Once upon a time, when he looked at the stars and planets, all he saw was new possibilities.

Girl or guy reject or dump him particularly harsh? The stars gave him faith he would find someone to love. A person drags him through the mud for his sexuality? Hope that times will change. The day his abuelito passed away? knowledge that he was in a better place among the stars.

They've always comforted him, until they only spelled out misery and pain.

And his eye doesn't help. The Galra eye that is. It's like Lance lost all control over that mental click that switches from Galra to human mode. Not often does it happen, but when he's stressed out, it's like an involuntary spasm.

On, off. Human, Galra. Back and forth.

And Hunk. Can't forget about the giant hunky Hunk.

Lance prides himself in being able to read people. Aliens, humans, machines, beasts, half beast robots of Galra creation. It's just an intuitive thing. Something he's positive he inherited from his mother.

So the stressed out tone when Hunk said he knew, and he heard? Well it doesn't take a genius to guess exactly how much. And the way Hunk talked about it. As if he knew they were being spied on, and tried to give Lance as much privacy as possible.

Hunk was good at reading people too.

So he probably understood why Lance couldn't say the goddamned words out loud. The trauma, the memories. It's all still too fresh in his mind. Present. Past. Lance can't distinguish them anymore. He can't pick apart the knot of thread to tell which was this recent encounter, and which one was a year or so ago.

Especially after Hunk and Keith got free.

Then things really got bad, and Lance was lost. He had to push his mind into a cage and wait out the hurricane. He's still feeling the aftereffects of the storm, pressing deeply on his mind. The high winds of what if. The down pouring rain of locked away memories breaking free. The torrent waves of the new experiences rocking his boat to make him drown.

Lance was no stranger to suffering.

When he was maybe ten years old, his best friend died in the ocean they so loved. An underwater current wrenched him away in a second, and his tiny body was found three miles downstream.

When he was fourteen, his older sister tried to commit suicide, all because someone at school started a rumor that labeled her as a whore. She's still recovering in rehab, in and out over the past couple of years.

When Lance was seventeen he followed in her footsteps. It was thankfully unsuccessful, and he didn't need a hospital. In fact most of his family don't even know, only his mom and eldest brother. Lance made them promise not to send him away, and their family friend, a doctor, diagnosed Lance with depression.

It wasn't too bad, definitely livable, and it only flared up every now and again. Never enough to warrant even a thought of suicide again, but enough to make him hollow inside. He was lucky, most didn't get the kind of second chances Lance did.

So yeah. He knew suffering. Knew it like an old friend. He was no stranger to pain and heartache. But Hunk? That was a different story. Of course, Lance was positive Hunk had his own problems, his own tragedies. Everyone does. But you wouldn't tell with Hunk.

He radiated warmth like the sun, kind and protective and life giving. The kind of suffering Hunk was exposed to, even if not his own, would be a game changer for anyone. Hunk was just in pain right now, Lance knew. He was hurting because Lance was, and it warmed him.

Made the hurt fade a little in his chest, knowing Hunk was so fond of him that he was in this pain while Lance worked through his suffering alone. Lance was never positive where he stood with the team. Yeah, they've all bonded a lot ever since they met. But he wasn't positive he was really apart of the Voltron family until now. Until Hunk showed how much he cared for Lance.

So maybe Hunk was right.

Maybe he should talk to someone. Maybe Lance should march his happy ass down to the bridge, call them to join him in the lounge and just spill his guts like he was dying. Maybe he should tell them, at least to get it off his chest. Out of his head.

The things he went through were of the worst kind of suffering. The kind that rips someone apart from the inside out. The kind that makes the skin a person wears feel foreign or tainted. The kind that brought thoughts of the pills Lance once took a little too much of. And the kind that put a blade to his sister's wrist, to create red flowers in the bathtub.

He shouldn't have to suffer alone. He doesn't have to suffer alone. These people, these amazing, talented people. They could help Lance get through this. It isn't like when he escaped the arena.

It isn't him locking himself in the room with his head in his hands and tears on his face and a scream dying on his lips. It isn't those cells he called home for months. It isn't prison.

This was his friends, his Found Family.

Mama once told him something that seemed so insignificant at the time. Said off handedly, like a passing thought, with no rhyme or reason.

She told him, there are three types of family every person has. No two types are the same for any person, and no two people's are alike. She said, the first family is the family you are born into. The people you call blood, who share your DNA in some way or another.

Not every Born Family are good families. Some are cruel, and some are absent. Some abandon, and some are killed. But no matter what, they are still your first family. You don't have to love them, you don't even have to like them. But facts are facts honey.

She said, then there are your Found Family. Some are small, and some are big, and some may never be found. But they are still there. These are the people you love, the ones that aren't related by blood or marriage.

They are friends, neighbors, teachers and even animals. These are the people you choose to have around you, that you would ride and die and kill for.

And she said, usually with a wave of a hand vaguely, then there are the Made Family. This one is simple honey. They are the family you create. Your loving spouse, your children and your grandchildren. Nieces, nephews, sons, daughters. More often than not they are blood, and you become their Born Family. But some aren't related in the slightest.

Mama meant adopted children and the like, though she never elaborated. Lance never asked.

So these people, these amazing people he surrounded himself with daily, were Lance's Found Family. They don't know it, or he doesn't think they do. And they might not reciprocate, but like Mama said, facts are facts.

It was wrong of Lance to push his Found Family away.

So when the time was right, and things slow down, and maybe after Lance gets some well deserved rest, he'll talk. He'll sit them all down at the table. They'll listen, ask questions, and accept if Lance can't answer. He'll throw some lame pick up lines at Allura, Shiro, Hunk, Keith, Pidge or Coran. They'll change the subject when it gets too much and set it aside for later.

So yeah, maybe Hunk was right.

But Lance wanted to wait until he was ready before he tried to talk to them about what happened. He didn't want to subside into a panic attack mid talk, that's for sure.

For now though, he had some training to catch up on.

******

(First)(Previous)(Next) (AO3)

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shenanigans-and-imagines · 7 years

Text

Ride On: Part 1

Not my Gif

Requested on Archive of Our Own by Maria_and_Aguilars_Codex_1492

Prompt: Reader, Red Harvest, and Billy Rocks all end up meeting through Mrs.Cullen's quest for revenge, and along the way they become close. (Romantic/Platonic, you decide where to go)

Red Harvest x Reader, Billy Rocks x Reader (Friendship), Female Reader

A/N: Just fair warning to everyone I don’t have a set release schedule for this one. I still have request to go through, Mag7 Week coming up, as well as school so please bare with me.

Word Count: 1.3 K

Sam, Goodnight, Billy, Faraday, Vasquez, Mrs. Cullen, and Teddy Q., rode their horses away from the small outpost where they had hoped to recruit Jack Horne. Granted, they had found the man, in a rather unorthodox sense, but it was clear he wouldn’t be joining them on their mission.

Sam led the procession, thinking hard about what to do next. They still have five men, but even with the farmers of Rose Creek possibly coming to their aid, they were still out gunned. He wracked his brain for another name who could possibly help them.

“Don’t think so hard, you’ll pull a muscle,” Goodnight said, riding up alongside him.

Sam gave a quick smile in acknowledgement.

“Just working out the odds,” Sam said. “It’s not looking all that promising.”

“I might have a way of getting them a little better.”

Sam turned to his friend with a surprised look.

“Been talking to Billy,” Goodnight continued. “Heard, Y/F/N Y/L/N has been seen around here.”

Sam paused a moment as he tried to place the name to a face, but came up empty. He did recall the name being mentioned a few times, usually followed by some variation of “gunslinger” and “god damn bitch”.

“Heard the name,” Sam said. “You meet her?”

“Challenged Billy to an alley a few years back,” Goodnight said, giving a faint smile at the memory. “Insisted on doing it for real, but not to the death. Said something along the lines of “wounds are more honest then eyes”, anyway. Billy got her in the arm and she got him in the shoulder for good measure. Everyone called it a draw, but she insisted Billy won on account he brought a knife to a gun fight.”

Sam raised an eyebrow, glancing back at the man in question behind them.

“He isn’t sore about it, is he?”

Goodnight shook his head.

“Nah, both were good sports. I even offered her to join us, but she said she liked working on her own.”

Sam nodded, thinking over the image Goodnight was painting in his mind. Obvious recklessness or not, clearly Goodnight was impressed with her fighting and they needed all the help they could get.

“Reliable?” he asked.

“She’ll finish any job she’s hired to,” Goodnight said. “And apparently, she’s broke.”

Sam gave a small smile.

“Well, let’s go pay her a visit.”

You felt the sweat seep down your back as you shoveled the used hay and manure into an empty wheel barrel.

You had been in less dignified positions, but you were struggling to remember when. The farmer who owned the place offered you food and a place to sleep so long as you cleaned out his stables. You couldn’t exactly say no, and it certainly could have been worse. Of course, that didn’t stop the smell from getting to you.

You were coming onto the last stall when you heard the sound of the barn doors open, followed by three sets of footsteps. Your back stiffened as you ever so carefully glanced at your gun belt handing off the pen wall.

“Y/F/N Y/L/N, as I live and breathe. What is a city slicker like you doing in a place like this?”

You the tension in your back instantly relaxed as you turned toward the voice.

“Goodnight Robicheaux,” you greeted. “You know me, I only call for the finest of establishments.”

He laughed at that and you couldn’t help a smile from spreading across your face.

To your surprise Billy was nowhere in sight. Instead, there were two others with him that you didn’t recognize; a tall black man and a red-haired woman.

“Where’s Billy,” you asked, before getting back to work.

“He’s with our other associates,” Goodnight said. “In the meantime, Y/F/N this is Mrs. Emma Cullen and Mr. Sam Chisolm, duly sword warrant officer of Wichita, Kansas, Nebraska and seven other states. Mrs. Cullen, Sam, this is Y/F/N Y/L/N.”

“Howdy,” you said, shooting questioning eye to Chisolm. “Is there any reason you felt the need to bring in a warrant officer?”

Chisolm gave you an odd look half way between serious and joking.

“You do something I should be arresting you for,” he asked.

You shook your head.

“Besides being broke not much,” you said. “Don’t tell me that’s against the law now.”

“Not that I know of,” he said. “That’s actually what we came to talk to you about. We got a job for you, if you’re interested. Chasing off a man name of Bartholomew Bogue out of a town call Rose Creek.”

You paused, shovel mid-air at the name.

“Heard of him?” Sam asked.

“Don’t know anyone around here who hasn’t,” you said, dumping the contents into the barrel. “Any particular reason you feel the need to drive him off.”

“He killed my husband,” Mrs. Cullen said, “killed several others and won’t stop there unless we give up our homes.”

You stopped your work to look her over carefully. You noted the fresh grief in her eyes, and the fire that you recognized as the need for revenge. She was driven, you’d give her that.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” you said. “How many men?”

“Five so far,” Sam said, “unless you join.”

You stared at him in momentary disbelief.

“Five?” you repeated. “Does that include her?”

You made a vague gesture towards Mrs. Cullen which she did not take lightly.

“No,” she said sternly, “but I still aim to fight.”

You let out a dry laugh, shaking your head.

“I admire your grit, but if all you wanted was for me to pull out my gun and shoot myself, you coulda just asked.”

You turned away from the group and began to shovel once more as a symbolic end to your conversation.

“Oh c’mon cher, you’ve beaten worse odds,” Goodnight said. “Like that skirmish in Tombstone.”

“Well, they paid me $600 for that one,” you said not bothering to look up.

“What about that business over the border?”

“Paid me $800 for that one.”

“You cost a lot,” Mrs. Cullen said bitterly.

“Yeah,” you said, taking a pause as you turned to look at them. “That’s right I cost a lot.”

You went back to work, hoping that maybe this time they would understand you weren’t interested.

“They pay is $20,” Sam said.

You stopped again, looking at all of them in stunned silence. This entire endeavor was getting more and more ridiculous every time someone opened their mouth. You looked to Goodnight, as a silent hope that maybe somebody was pulling your leg. Goodnight looked right back, giving a subtle shrug of the shoulders. They were being completely serious.

Sam didn’t give you a chance to respond as he turned to walk away, followed Goodnight, and Mrs. Cullen followed.

You let them go, shaking your head before looking back at the stall, but you hesitated. You looked over the hay, and the shit, and remembered the sick feeling in your stomach from not having eaten in about two days. You thought about the odds of six men against an army and a rush of excitement went through you.

You turned to their retreating backs.

“$20?”

They all paused at looked at you expectantly.

“Right now, that’s a lot,” you said, throwing down you shovel.

Mrs. Cullen looked surprised at your answer.

“You’ll come?”

“Room and board included?” you asked, placing on your gun belt.

She gave a confirming nod.

“Then yeah. Shootin’ folks that are asking for it is better than shoveling shit anyway. And besides, Billy and I need a rematch.”

You caught Sam giving Goodnight a questioning glance. If his face was any indication, he was starting to have second thoughts on having you along. Goodnight waved him down, but you had a feeling Goodnight was going to be your unofficial handler for this little expedition.

Soon enough your horse saddled and ready to go after some quick negotiations with the farmer about your breakfast. You were probably going to regret this, but as you left the small farm behind, you realized you didn’t care. The familiar thrill settled in as you rode on, filling you with a sense of purpose you hadn’t felt in months. Trouble was coming your way, and Lord, how you had missed it.

#red harvest x reader #red harvest #the magnificent seven #the magnificent 7 #magnificent seven #magnificent 7 #mag7 #mag 7 #red harvest imagines #red harvest imagine #mag 7 imagine #mag 7 imagines #mag7 imagines #mag7 imagine #female reader

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namariea · 7 years

Text

061

Subject No. 061 / Male / Age Unknown / Aptitude: Pyrokinesis

This was all that was presented to you regarding the incapacitated man.

Words: 3.2 k

Genre: Angst

Notes: Lucky One!AU, mention of blood, torture

“I can’t feel my body.”

Slowly, your eyes lifted from their position on the tray over to the source of the voice. Unperturbed by the disruption, your gaze reverted to its original place as you silently continued your task, not before your voice cut though the silence with an air of indifference.

“Considering you were administered enough sedatives to kill a bear, one would hope so.”

From your peripheral, you could see dark eyebrows furrowing and mouth settling into a line of displeasure. Noticing your indifference, you heard an loud sigh and the heavy stare that was once situated on your face was directed to the ceiling.

You almost let out a sigh of your own, resisting the urge to look at the body that was currently lying on the bed before you.

Horrified shock did not even begin to cover the emotions that had flooded over you the moment you saw nine bodies handcuffed to beds, each bloodied and bruised. You could not help the feeling of dread and foreboding that arose within you at the sight, a feeling which was warranted considering you were in the deepest levels of a research facility specialized in biological warfare.

Not much was disclosed to you once you were made aware of your new assignment - simply that it was of highest priority and should be handled with extreme caution and prejudice. A task easier said than done, you had thought to yourself grimly. While you had long since accepted the impartial nature associated to science, unlike most of your colleagues, you still had an ethical framework to your research, and experimenting on human beings was definitely past that line.

Aliens was their official designation, one that your superiors made sure to drill into everyone’s brain. At first, you thought they were trying to downplay what was actually happening, as if addressing them as anything other than human would make the process any easier. It disgusted you and filled you with an injustice that made you almost protest.

Almost.

That was what you thought, before you saw one of them literally teleport to the other side of the room in an act of desperate escape.

That one has not been woken up in months.

Since then, you had taken to coolly carrying out your tasks, though the curiosity did not leave you. It was apparent that these…beings had high levels of intelligence, coupled with their outward appearance and ability to converse in the common tongue; it was often hard to remember that they were in fact not human. You had once wondered if they were doing this on purpose, if the exterior was only a glamour to blend seamlessly in with society, hiding some ungodly form underneath. This thought diminished after the first week, as you took note of their humanoid faces lay unchanged, conscious or unconscious, despite the strenuous experimentation.

Initial extractions were done to determine whether something could be extrapolated from their DNA, and once it was found that their genetics were on par with a typical human, the idea for cloning was thrown out. Since then extractions were done for the purpose of determining whether the source of their supernatural powers lay elsewhere.

Glancing at the clipboard beside the tray you took in the concise report the handler before you had left.

Subject No. 061 / Male / Age Unknown / Aptitude: Pyrokinesis

This was all that was presented to you regarding the incapacitated man.

To your knowledge, most of the others were described much in the same way, nameless beings only identified by a random number and their capability. You were not present when they determined exactly what skill set each of them had, and frankly, you were glad you were not; most of those examiners still have not made it out of intensive care.

Eyes wandering back to the man, his own eyes now closed. Liberated from his probing stare, you allowed yourself an assessment of your own. Fair in complexion and dressed in white much like the sterile surroundings, you lingered on the hair adorning his head, bright and stark against the monotone environment. Splayed out on the pillow it had both the colour and semblance of the fire you knew he was capable of producing.

Even after weeks of evaluation, you still could not shake off the unnerving feeling of being in his presence. You were never social in your visits, choosing to keep them brief and impersonal. Despite what reservations you had given their physical appearances, the likelihood of so many individuals coming into possession of such specialized abilities dismissed the notion of some freak genetic mutation. It was more than apparent that they definitely were not from this world, and should be treated as such.

Enemies of the state. Foreign invaders. Aliens.

Even still…in the time that has passed, you could not completely convince yourself that what was happening was not inherently wrong, that what you and everyone else were doing to them was wrong. How much time has passed, how many countless hours have been spent analyzing, all coming back inconclusive. You would hear them. The screams of anger and pain coming from each of their isolated rooms. You were not ignorant of the company’s methods of interrogation, and the thought of the unrelenting torture made your blood run cold.

They were more resilient than you had given them credit for, and you could not stop the small frown that appeared on your face. Their bodies were highly effective in resisting modern anesthesia, and inhuman doses were administered relentlessly. Usually they were kept in a muddled state; however, there were times, much like now, where they are almost coherent. The thought made you faintly wonder if you should increase his dosage. In your experience, he had not acted violently towards you, usually showing the same indifference you show him; regardless, you did not want to risk having him try anything.

Shaking your head lightly, having realized that you have spent far too long already in the room; you deftly picked up the syringe off of the tray and made your way around to his exposed arm. Chastening yourself for letting your mind wander unnecessarily, you clinically swabbed at the crook of his elbow and inserted the needle into the presented vein, drawing up blood. Once you were done you pressed a cotton ball in place to stop the bleeding, capping and placing the syringe back on the tray. Releasing the cotton ball almost instantly, you ensured that the bleeding had indeed stopped, bluntly being reminded of their regenerative capabilities. Nevertheless, you lightly swiped at the area to clean it up and as you lifted your gaze, you were met with a pair of dark orbs peering at you expressionlessly.

Holding his gaze for a few moments, and saw a flicker of curiosity flashed in his eyes before you broke contact. Steeling yourself, not knowing where this sudden carelessness was coming from, you swiftly turned around, soundlessly taking the tray and leaving without a glance back to the eyes that were now intently following your retreating form.

A tired sigh escaped your lips as you stared at the screen before you. Once again, the tests came back and left you with more questions than what you sent them off with. Placing your head in your hands, you let your eyes close and took some deep, shaking breaths.

Progression with the subjects were not getting anywhere and you knew the other researchers were slowly drawing the same conclusion. While you have resigned to this fact, it was apparent that the Company was not going to let it go – more often than ever before you were taken from your research by agonized screams.

The interrogations were almost as fruitless as the analytical research, however, rather than giving up on the torture it would seem as though they were simply ramping up. So much so that when you would enter the room for extractions, you would be met with a sight so gruesome and vile that you almost forgot you were a scientist and not a nurse.

Your mind takes you back to the first memory of entering the room labeled “061” and overcome by the coppery smell of blood.

Hand still firmly grasping the handle, it suddenly became the only thing preventing you from collapsing on the floor as your knees buckled and your eyes widened in horror.

There was just so much blood that should most definitely be inside the body and not outside of it, it was incomprehensible how they were still alive, regenerative abilities or not.

All but throwing the tray containing vials and syringes you brought with you on a nearby table, you quickly crossed to the other side of the room to the storage cabinet. Pulling out towels, bandages, and all the sedatives you could find you found yourself bent over the battered body, desperately trying to locate just where the blood was coming from.

Faced clenched in pain and breath labored, it did not seem like he registered your presence, even after your frantic rummaging. You quickly administered a hefty dose of sedatives before you began working on the wounds. His entire body was littered with lacerations and punctures and you felt your hands begin to shake as nervous tremors raked through you.

“What have they done to you.” Your voice was a shuddered whisper as you cleaned around a large gash on his side. It was not a question, knowing very well the kinds of ways these wounds could have been produced, but you could not bring yourself to believe it.

Regardless of the fact that they are more capable than a normal human is, they still looked human and seeing this level of mutilation made bile rise up your throat.

This was so so wrong.

Closing your eyes and shutting out the sight before you, you took slow, measured breaths to regain your composure. Being borderline hysterical was not going to help anyone right now. And this man before you needed all the help he could get.

Once you opened your eyes you took notice of how his chest was no longer heaving sporadically and had resumed an almost normal rhythm. Dragging your eyes upwards, you were once again met with those dark irises, clouded by indescribable pain but also had a hint of apprehension.

Throwing out your philosophy of being aloof, you offered a weak smile in what you hoped conveyed some measure of reassurance to the man. It was nearly impossible to think of him as anything but human as he was lying there, looking like a wounded soldier taken from the battlefield. The humanity in your being surged at the likeliness to your own kin and you could not just sit there passively.

Returning to your work, you continued to meticulously clean the blood, putting all your energy into removing as much red as you could. Your hands regained their steadiness as you moved with purpose, cleaning and bandaging the larger wounds. For the most part, he was silent while you worked, with only a sharp intake of breath when you got to close to the fresh edges or tugged on the raw skin. As you got to his face, you frowned critically at a particularly nasty tear by his hairline, the blood making it almost indiscernible as to where it ended and his hair began.

You were acutely aware of his stare but paid it no mind, instead focusing on your task. Following the trail of blood downward, you ended up looking at him pointedly. Keeping your face neutral, you raised an eyebrow at his questioning stare.

“Close your eyes, please, I need to clean off the blood.”

A few more moments of contemplative silence later, his eyelids slowly slid closed. You were light with cleaning around his eyes and once you were done, they opened again, resuming their silent scrutiny.

Stepping back slightly you assessed your patchwork, nodding stiffly. The more serious injuries had been dressed and the only traces of blood left were the stained clothes that clung to his body. Not wanting to aggravate the wounds anymore you noted he would just have to wait in those clothes until he has healed. Not that he will be moving much with the sedatives, anyways.

“Thank you.”

The voice, deep and rasping, caused your eyes to snap to his face. His face was blank and you stared back in kind. Wordlessly you nodded and instantly felt the tenseness in your body lessen as if a huge weight was taken off of your shoulders.

All of a sudden you felt so tired, mentally drained and wanted nothing more than to rub your temples. Well, there goes the adrenaline, you thought bleakly. With a newfound exhaustion, you swept your eyes over his form one last time in search for any missed wounds. Finding none, you took a step back from the bed and turned, heavy steps making their way towards the door.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Turning slightly, you saw him looking at the tray and its scattered contents on the table. Your eyes stared at the tray for a long moment, before you caught his eyes again.

“I think you’ve been stabbed by enough today, wouldn’t you agree?”

Without waiting for his reply, you opened the door and walked out, letting it swing closed behind you, a low chuckle reaching your ears as it did.

After you had returned to your station, a raging feeling of injustice filled you, and this time you could not hold yourself from saying something. Under the guise of contaminating samples and further complicating any actual research, somehow someone listened to your reason. However, while the presence of blood was significantly reduced, the incidence of bruises and broken bones in the proceeding weeks quickly took its place.

You did not know which evil you would rather.

A light shake on your shoulder took you from your thoughts, raising your head you saw one of your co-workers looking at you apologetically.

“Hey, sorry but you’re needed in the main office, they said it was urgent.” You let out a small smile along with a word of thanks, getting up from your desk and making your way out of the lab.

It was not long after that you were swiftly opening a familiar door, tray in hand, blank eyes meeting mildly startled ones.

You will admit to yourself that after the exchange your attitude towards the red-headed man had changed, even if only slightly. You would not consider your attitude warm, but it was a measure more considerate than it had been. If he was awake when you walked in, you would offer him a slight nod before you began, and he would do the same once you were done.

Despite your best efforts, the image of him torn and bloodied had plagued your mind, coming back in full force when you closed your eyes at night, leaving terrors in its wake. Since then, whenever a muffled scream floated down the halls you would visibly flinch, knowing to what extent the damage being caused was. You were not involved in handling the others, they had their own specialized teams for that, but you could only imagine the other eight received the same treatment.

What disturbed you most was that what you had done was beyond the expectation of your position; you did it out of personal obligation, not necessity. You wondered if the others also had someone do what you had done for the redhead, however, your gut told you the answer was probably not.

Straightening your back, squaring your shoulders, you steeled yourself as you walked purposefully into the room, mind still fresh with what was said in the meeting.

Setting the tray next to the bed you quickly picked up one of the vials and hastily set work on prepping the syringe.

The cautious eyes watching you suddenly became apprehensive, as you wasted no time in emptying the vial and roughly injected the contents into his arm, noticing his grimace at your recklessness. If it were not for the complete silence in the room, you were certain he would not have caught the words flying out your mouth, low and rushed.

“This will counteract the effects of the sedatives, it’s not a lot, but it should be enough for you to regain minimal motor function” the implications of what you were saying hung heavily in the air, and you saw his eyes widen in disbelief.

You leaned in close, face inches from his.

“I don’t have much time, but you must listen to what I tell you very carefully.”

“Guards will be here any moment to transfer you; you will be put in a room with your…friends. Do not do anything until they have transferred you and then use these…” You tucked more vials and wrapped syringes by his side, hiding it with his shirt “…for the others in the room with you.”

You heard distant voices from down the hall, cursing, you felt your hands begin to sweat.

“Once you’re together, down the hall on the left will be a door which will lead to the emergency lift, take that to the surface, if you’re fast enough you will make it out before reinforcements arrive.”

Looking over your shoulder as the voices got louder; you reached back to grab the tray, straightening and preparing to leave before you were caught.

Before you can turn, a hand shoots out and grabs your wrist, the rattling of handcuffs loud at the quick movement.

You stared in shock at the hand, not believing how it was possible for him to be moving already.

“Why are you doing this now? What changed?”

The urgency of the questions thrown at you caught you off guard, pulling yourself from his grip you answered just as urgently.

“All of this is wrong, it was wrong from the moment you were brought here” You shook your head incredulously “But I have the chance to make it right now, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

“What’s your name?”

You let out a humorless laugh as you reached the door, eyes not leaving the man.

“My name… in all fairness I also do not know yours-“

“-Chanyeol”

“Chanyeol.” Letting the sound of it linger briefly, you continued “to be completely honest with you..” Your face turned serious “…I hope for both of our sakes we never have to meet again. Knowing my name will only be a reminder of this place.”

“You better survive this, Chanyeol.”

The sirens were deafening as they echoed throughout the facility, the sounds of frantic yelling and gunfire resonated throughout the halls.

You sat numbly in the lab as your coworkers cowered around you.

The facility was in emergency lockdown.

They didn’t make it to the surface in time.

As the ground shook from another explosion, you felt a melancholic smile make its way onto your face.

Though they did not make it in time, you had no doubts that they would make it to the surface.

#muse: chanyeol #length: oneshot #chanyeol imagine #chanyeol fanfic #exo #exo imagine #exo fanfiction #exo scenarios #chanyeol scenario

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awed-frog · 7 years

Text

The Memory Remains/Carthago Delenda

On the whole, I think I really liked this episode? It certainly felt very old school, in the best possible sense. There were a couple of moments I was actually worried, and considering that I know perfectly well both Sam and Dean will always be fine, that’s quite something.

I sort of liked the mythology, and I liked the class thing, and as for Dean hooking up with a waitress - look, first - this is the writer who practically wrote Dean as bi in Beyond the Mat, his only other Supernatural episode. I know they didn’t quite go there, but by paralleling a young Sam jerking off to some picture of Rio (sorry to be coarse, but that’s exactly what it was and it was confirmed both by dialogue and by Sam’s embarrassed stammering) with Dean’s obsession for Gunnar, well, kudos for the effort. And Jensen, of course, went with it, like he always does, and made the whole thing very obvious. So there’s that, and second - this is what Dean does. He’s a kisser and a hugger and all about touching and be touched, and sex with strangers was the only thing that, growing up, gave him that physical intimacy he craved and nobody else was capable to share with him. We know Mary was dead, of course, and John was not the hugging type, and Sam - my headcanon (which I use liberally in my fics, and sue me) is that he was an expansive child and Dean secretly loved it, but at some point John told both of them to just cut it out already, ‘cause you’re too old for this shit now. So that was that, and from then on, touch that actually matters has been in short supply for Dean - and, unlike Sam, whom I read as more reserved, Dean craves to be touched and held. It’s just who he is. So, whatever - he’s worried sick about Cas, and that’s not going anywhere anytime soon, and there’s a million other things going through his head and now that stupid sheriff’s brought half of them up again by talking about a kid who grew up with an abusive father as though that’s nothing and what can you do (I actually went back and looked three times at that scene, at how the sheriff says, “Guess who gets to take care of him?” because something was bugging me and yeah, there it was - Sam visibly makes an effort to react to the conversation because it’s what’s expected from him, but Dean just looks up - up and to the left, that is, which is what happens when you remember past experiences; and I don’t want this person who reads a lot into every detail, but these are basic biology things an actor would do without even realizing, and also it’s beyond canon, by this point, that Dean took care of John more than once, because that’s what happens when you’ve got an alcoholic parent) - and, sorry, here’s the end of the sentence - it looks perfectly reasonable to me that Dean would want some comfort, and I do believe he slept with that woman and that it was great and that it cheered him up a bit in some bittersweet way and what can you do?

Honestly, all that I’m upset about is that the straight stuff is always out in the open and for the queer one you need to stop your video and squint at the scene and the paintings and the colours and yeah, that BS smack on Dean and the waitress could be nothing -

(Also, that girl is not his type at all. She was just there, and she liked him, and, as he’s told us himself, he likes waitresses because they smell like food and it’s not easy to get them - if that doesn’t sound like comfort and a need for validation to you, I don’t know what does.)

Moving away from Destiel-related content, I really liked how seamlessly the different parts of the episode moved into one another. From that woman reading the text of the Fourth Amendment on the radio at the very beginning (the one which makes it illegal to search a house without a warrant or probable cause, that is), to Ketch and his men walking around in Sam and Dean’s lives as they themselves are in the outside world, living them - that was very well done.

Also well done: the whole social commentary on class and money.

Industrial benefactors are sometimes seen as a good thing, because they normally provide houses for their workers and schools for their workers’ kids and therefore create and enrich a whole community, but personally I’ve always hated the concept (which is not as outdated as one would expect, and ew) and I was happy to see our writer didn’t give them an inch. Yes, sure, the town did prosper, but that factory was creepy and unpleasant in itself (even if you eat meat, you gotta admit that the meat industry and meat factories are about as bleak and morally ambiguous as you can get) and, more importantly, it was only held together by human sacrifice. The idea that it could, in fact, be considered acceptable to lose a kid every year so that the rest of the village can get by was never even suggested, and thank God. Instead, the whole episode read like some old-fashioned Quaker or Socialist leaflet: money corrupts (look at our first victim, lured to his death by a backpack full of dollar bills), creates division and resentment (the tale of the two brothers may have read like a bad Dynasty episode, but these things happen every day), generally comes from blood (the entire god story and the sacrifices) and it’s always better to be honest and poor than rich and tainted (I really liked the sheriff, poor guy).

As for the lore itself - I’m slightly less happy with it, mostly because I would expect both Sam and Dean to know perfectly well what a satyr is (and no, they don’t eat human flesh - those were the women who danced with Dionysos, totally different stuff) and because Moloch has been maligned plenty enough, but I did appreciate the casual horror of it all - a starved and tortured god locked in your cellar, people dressing as animals to capture an unwilling sacrifice - very gothic and compelling.

Since we’re now talking about pagan stuff, maybe Sam and Dean’s discussion about their legacy and mortality made sense, but it was still hard to watch. What happened to the wary hope of S11? To the idea it’s not too late to find a partner, perhaps even to have kids? With that mournful discussion and by carving their initials in the Bunker’s table, Sam and Dean have somehow closed the circle. Their story, this is what they seem to think, is not going anywhere, is not leaving any memory behind. The thing was so sweet and sad, I’m actually comforted by the fact this is not the last season, because there it was - the perfect foundation to end this story in a burst of flames. The reminder to their childhood, the belated acknowledgement that it wasn’t, in the end, as bad as it could have been (“Next time you hear me say that our family is messed up, remind me that we could be psycho goat people,” Dean says, and man, now I can’t wait for that confrontation with Mary we know is coming), the quiet acceptance about their importance in history (non-existent), in people’s lives (often significant) and in their own consciences (“We left the world better than we found it, you know.”) - the knowledge that one day they’ll both die, and they’ll be forgotten, and someone else will live in the Bunker, fight on - it was heartbreaking, but also - also, after all these years of anger and torment and hurt, it looks like Sam and Dean are very close to being okay with everything - their family, their jobs, their place in the world, and even each other - and that’s -

- yeah.

We'll eventually fade away, too.

Just in case someone is wondering: Moloch was the god of Carthage, a city which used to be roughly where Tunis is now. At one point, it was Rome’s main rival - mostly because Carthaginians were better educated and smarter and had a longer and richer civilisation behind them - so Rome started a brutal campaign against them which included a few wars and also liberal amounts of bullshit propaganda. What Moloch is generally associated with is child sacrifice, which ties in nicely with our two victims in The Memory Remains, and I’m not saying that never happened at all, but still - it’s very likely it didn’t happen with the alarming frequency described by some of the more vitriolic Roman politicians. Plus, you know - human sacrifice is a thing in every culture, and it makes perfect sense. A human life, and especially a child’s life, is the most precious thing a community has to offer, right up there with other very precious things, like a good stallion or a fertile bull, so when things start to go really bad, you have up up the ante a bit. Gods are not stupid, and no god is going to show up and save your stupid city in exchange for a loaf of bread and two rabbits. That’s just the way it goes, and everyone knows it. Even the Romans used to perform human sacrifices in times of trouble, so they can just shut it (as you can see, since I’m an archaeologist I’m approaching history in a calm, academic fashion, without taking sides, because that would be both unprofessional and pointless).

Oh, and this is a statue of Moloch which was created for some movie and ended up in someone’s garden in New Jersey, because why not.

Random thoughts:

I so wish this was on HBO, because Jesus, stoned!Dean must be quite something and that’s clearly something he does, or used to do, a lot and uuugh, where’s my spinoff on those four years he spent without Sam?

Ketch is definitely coded as bisexual - what kind of man notices another man’s hair or clothes? - but at the moment I’m more interested in him stealing Mary’s picture and what he thinks about it.

Which Stark was Sam supposed to be? Who would appeal to him the most? Since Dean was Oberyn, I’m guessing we’re not looking for Tony, but for a random member of the Stark family - Ned, perhaps? Or Bran?

As for Dean picking Oberyn, lol. Bisexual guy who gets into fights to protect his family and is in love with an unpredictable ‘I’m as strong as you and can look after myself, thank you very much’ partner - it’s okay, sweetie, we’ve got you.

If this isn’t going anywhere, Wanek needs to take a chill pill - look at the ships and the puppies and the trench coats and oh my God, that BS sign - what the hell, man?

#spn 12x18 #the memory remains #spn meta #destiel #spn and class #moloch #carthage #well #that was quite something #this is going to end so very badly #better stock up on the kleenex #just #please don't kill too many people #and not crowley #and leave the bunker the hell alone #(but yeah)#(that bunker is DOOMED)#(everything is DOOMED)#(*is consumed by flames*)

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persuadedproject-blog · 7 years

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Chapter 8

Wentworth was coming to see Virginia as a home. The Admiral’s research in Norfolk expanded as he discovered a system riddled with problems, so the Crofts rented a small house in the heart of Uppercross (just across from the gazebo). The Admiral, brotherly and welcoming as always, insisted that Wentworth should stay with them, as long as he liked or maybe longer. Although the initial plan had been for Wentworth to spend a couple of days with the Crofts and then head up north to visit with Eduard and his new wife, the charms of Uppercross held him in place. Besides the butter-slathered southern cuisine, the whole town practically embraced him. The old were hospitable, the young were enjoyable, and Wentworth had found in the town a worthy enough reason to put of his trip north to Eduard’s.

As important as getting to know a new sister-in-law is, when a person is being flattered by an entire town, new priorities sidle into place. He was at the Musgrove’s Great House almost every day. It was impossible to tell who was more enthusiastic about the arrangement - the Musgroves to invite him, or Wentworth to be invited. Mrs. Musgrove was convinced that he as a single man must be incapable of fixing himself a decent meal when the Crofts were out and about, so with every visit she stuffed him full and sent him home with a plate of leftovers. Ever since she had earned her eternal seal of approval by playing with Oscar (he even got a happy yap from the rotund canine), the plate was joined by some form of baked goods.

All of the Musgrove’s thoughts towards Wentworth were total and unwavering admiration; a fact made abundantly clear to Cap and to everyone looking on. This had just been established when Chuck Hayter, Hazel’s insignificant other, came to town to interview for a position as an associate veterinarian. He was confused to find out that distance had made the heart grow apathetic, even to the point of eyeing greener pastures. The poor guy had reason to regret leaving his relationship undefined and nebulous, particularly once he saw Hazel’s altered state of mind and - even worse - the handsome, job-having Frederick Wentworth. The loose state of affairs that had appeared to offer him freedom one minute was exactly what threatened his happiness the next (ah, commitment, you sneaky thing). The Musgrove parents liked CHuck well enough. He wasn’t brilliant in any way - he was medium height, medium build, medium talent, had a bit of ambition, and an alright but far from dazzling sense of humor. But he was a decent person, with a work ethic that put him through veterinary school on a combination of scholarships and gas station jobs. If Hazel liked him, that was enough for all of them. And she had genuinely thought she liked him - until Wentworth turned up. From that time on, Chuck was like a somewhat bland distant memory she texted once in a while, until said memory reappeared in her hometown.

Which of the two Musgrove girls Cap prefered was still a mystery, despite Anne’s observational skills. Hazel was probably prettier (in a curly hair, effortless cut off jeans kind of way), but Louise had more nerve and a bigger personality. She did not know what he would find more attractive now, a more easygoing or proactive girl. Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove had taken a hands-off approach when it came to their girl’s romantic life (either because they trusted their daughter’s judgement or had a misplaced trust in the young men they befriended), so the topic was not discussed in the Great House. It was of great interest at the junior Musgrove’s house, far more than the real headlines that it was Anne’s business to read. Cap had been in town for all of a week and a half, and Chuck for a day, when Anne began to be subjected to a nightly debate. After the boys went to bed, and before the older people scattered to their own interests, they would gather around the island in the kitchen to keep asking the same questions and making the same points. Every move Wentworth made was scrutinized, every blink, laugh, and look was somehow a sure sign he was going to ask out one girl or the other These debates were accompanied by ice cream (chocolate for Anne, banana pudding for Charles, and mango sorbet for Mary, who was trying to avoid dairy), but Anne found it difficult to swallow with the lump in her throat. Charles’ money was on Louise, but Mary was convinced he was after Hazel. Both agreed that he would be a great husband to either one. To the readers who are surprised that marriage was coming up this early in the non-relationship I would say that, unless they are part of an impossibly progressive society, a couple is immediately assessed for long-term endurance. Charles claimed he had,

“Never met a more good-natured man in my life, and from what I have heard him say the government is paying him well for his work. I’m sure he’s only on the way to more recognition and higher positions. He’d be a catch for either one of them.”

“He might could even run for Senate, plenty of ambassadors have done that. It would be a nice thing for Hazel, although she would enjoy lording it over me. Senator and Mrs. Wentworth! It doesn’t sound too shabby. Of course, he has no real Washington or political background, and I never know what to do with those farmer-turned-politician types.”

“Like George Washington?” Anne asked dryly. She normally would have let Mary go on, but having to discuss the marriage of your soulmate can make you say and feel and do things that are out of the ordinary.

It fit Mary’s state of mind to see Wentworth pursue Hazel, because that put an end to Chuck’s pretentious aspirations of being with her. She had decidedly looked down on him from the first time he came home with Hazel in his beat up sneakers, West Virginia accent, and wait staff job. He had taken two extra years to finish vet school due to a lack of funding, and even then he only managed to finish thanks to a loan from a kind friend.

“After growing up in that house on the hill, with her father’s business and everything, I just don’t think they would be right for each other. She would be throwing herself away for a life of budgeting and part time jobs and...and I just don’t think a girl should make a life choice that will be a disappointment or inconvenience to the majority of her family. It would be giving the needy a connection to people who aren’t used to them.” Her husband could not agree with her - besides generally liking Chuck, he had had a helping hand himself to get the job he was in.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded. “Needy is not the word I would choose, try hard working maybe. He has a good shot at taking over the vet office here, a job his is perfect for by the way, and in a couple of years he can pay off that loan if he’s smart. He has more experience with farm animals too, which would be an asset to the whole county. Hazel could do much worse than Chuck, and if she ends up with him, and Louise gets Wentworth, I would be totally satisfied.” He then scooped up his bowl and went to eat his ice cream in peace, in front of a baseball game. As soon as he was safely out of earshot, Mary turned to Anne and said,

“He can say what he wants to, but I think it would be awful if Hazel married Chuck Hayter. Bad for her, and worse for me - so we can only hope that Wentworth puts any thought of him right out of her head. I think he has already, she hardly noticed Chuck last night at the pool. I wish you had been there to see it, she trailed Wentworth around the pool, splashing and trying not to get her hair wet. As for Wentworth liking Louise, I think it is complete and utter guesswork. He definitely likes Hazel.” After a brief pause for reflection, she fumed, “But Charles is so sure! I wish you had been there, because you could’ve decided it finally. I am sure you would have taken my side, unless you were just determined to contradict me.”

A cookout at the Musgrove’s was the next opportunity when Anne was supposed to observe the romantic rectangle, but the combined excuse of a raging headache and CJ’s shoulder feeling a bit sore was mercifully enough for her to stay home. The overall motivation was to avoid Cap and the maelstrom of emotions that surrounded him, but dodging the job of referee was an added bonus to her quiet, documentary-watching evening. Her conjectures on his feelings were without definite results, she thought the more important issue was that he make up his mind quickly, before either one of the girls got their hearts attached enough to be broken. Both of them were good-natured and had kind streaks, and she had to admit either of them would be an affectionate, warm partner. Where Chuck Hayter was concerned, she was by nature embarrassed by association when she saw girls flitting from guy to guy, or treating a relationship (undefined or not) frivolously. As if Anne did not have enough embarrassment or awkwardness on her plate, her sympathetic heart took on the cringing the whole situation warranted and she understood the bruising that flirtatious thrashing about could bring to both people. If Hazel was confused about her feelings for either man, Anne thought it would be best for her to get them sorted out in short order.

Chuck had seen enough to be uncomfortable about his relationship status. Hazel had liked him for long enough, and he had been gone for a short enough time that he was sure it could not be totally over. He was perturbed at the rapid change that had probably been inspired by a mysterious but friendly stranger. The last time they had parted ways, it seemed like the thing she wanted most was to see him brought on by the local vet, Doc Shirley, who had been caring for the community’s pets for forty years now, but who was looking to train a replacement. It would be a good deal for both of them, and Hazel and her whole family had been awaiting his interview with suspense. At least, Hazel had seemed to be elated at the thought of Chuck having a local practice, but after just two weeks the wind had gone out of her sails. Even Louise could not listen to him long enough to hear how the interview had gone, because she kept flitting back and forth to the window to keep a lookout for Wentworth. Hazel could only at her least distracted give him divided attention. She seemed to have forgotten there were any other qualified candidates, or real interview.

“Well, of course I’m glad - but I always knew you would get it. Dr. Shirley needs someone to take over, and he practically told you you had the job - is that him coming up the driveway, Louise?”

The next morning, after her observational skills had been desired, Anne found herself in the company of the unavoidable. He appeared out of thin air in the living room, where Anne was trying to work and keep an eye on CJ (the miniature Charles had decided to use his aching shoulder to transform once again into a saddened invalid). Wentworth was just as surprised as she was. She was so surprised she started to stand up, then squat back down, then stand up again, all while mentally cursing the fact that they lived in the South, where no one locked the front door. Startled out of his normal suave, he said a little too loudly,

“I thought Hazel and Louise would be here - Mrs. Musgrove told me they were with Mary.”

“They are all upstairs, the girls are helping Mary pick out paint colors for the office, I’m sure they’ll be down in a minute,” Anne responded in one uncomfortable run-on rush. If she had not been in the middle of trying to diagnose CJ’s possible fever, she would have left the room to spare both him and herself. He graciously pretended to be fascinated with the view of Mary’s back yard at the window. Pine trees have never before merited the kind of attention he gave them.

“I hope CJ is feeling better,” was all he said over his shoulder, and then he wisely stuck to the pine trees. She stayed, sitting cross-legged on the ground while CJ explained his symptoms. The screen door creaked, signaling the entrance of another person (what a relief! thank goodness the door was unlocked). Anne looked over, hoping to see Charles, but finding Chuck instead. Alas, she had looked for her reprieve too early. Chuck was about as pleased to see Wentworth as he had been to find Anne. This time, Anne did not try to get up, but she did offer Chuck a seat. His hands stuck in his pockets, Chuck said,

“No thanks, I actually came to check on the goldfish?” Goldilocks was the children’s only pet due to Mary’s concern for her allergies, and she was much-beloved. Swimming had become a droopy activity recently, so Anne was glad she was getting some attention, even if the timing was not the best. Cap was finally lured away from his window, and tried to strike up a conversation with Chuck, who promptly wet-blanketed all conversation starters, and set himself to intently watching the fish.

Another minute brought another (smaller) addition. Walter, a stout little guy with a fearless nature, whirled into the room. He made a beeline to the couch, to stake his claim on anything good or interesting there. He found nothing sweet or processed to eat, so he started to look for a playmate. Anne would not let him tease his sick brother, so he fastened himself to her, climbing on her back and hanging on for dear life. All her attention was on CJ, so she had a difficult time shaking him off. Once she tried, it became a game to him, and he hung on with all his might.

“Walter, get down!” she commanded to no avail. “You stinker! Get down!” Walter found this hilarious, giggling and imitating Anne.

“Stinker! Get down!” he shrieked gleefully.

“Let her go now, Walter,” Chuck joined her entreaties employing the same tone he used on stubborn cows. “Come on, you can help me fix Goldilocks.” The little parasite only tightened his grip, but in an instant, Anne found herself released from his sturdy hands. Walter had been resolutely taken away to examine the fish before Anne realized it was Cap that had done it. After figuring that out, she was speechless, at first out of surprise, then because it would have been awkward to say anything after the time had passed. All she could do was keep paying attention to CJ while her feelings ran wild and shrieking around her head. It was so nice of him to step in to help her, but his complete silence during the act and the racket he and Walter were now making together made her completely sure that he was avoiding her thanks. Talking to her was clearly the last thing on Wentworth’s list of things to do, right under ‘kiss a Wookie’ and ‘burn my record collection’. These contradictions made for a confusing, painful bout with her own thoughts, which she could not really address until Mary and company finally came down.

Anne transferred the care of her patient and slipped upstairs. She could not stay. It might have been an opportunity to watch the four in all their sparks and jealousy, but she couldn’t stay for one second of it. It was abundantly clear Chuck had no desire to be friendly to Wentworth. It was almost funny how determined he was not to be impressed with him. But poor Chuck’s feelings, or anyone else's for that matter, were uninteresting to her until she could get a grip on her own. She was ashamed of herself and felt ridiculous at once again letting something so miniscule get under her skin. But, humiliating as it may be, she had to spend the rest of the morning in a quiet place, carefully directing her own thoughts until she recovered a more peaceful frame of mind.

Chapter 9: http://bit.ly/2uDSGyb

#persuadedproject #jane austen #persuasion

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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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The Shareware Scene, Part 5: Narratives of DOOM

Let me begin today by restating the obvious: DOOM was very, very popular, probably the most popular computer game to date.

That “probably” has to stand there because DOOM‘s unusual distribution model makes quantifying its popularity frustratingly difficult. It’s been estimated that id sold 2 to 3 million copies of the shareware episodes of the original DOOM. The boxed-retail-only DOOM II may have sold a similar quantity; it reportedly became the third best-selling boxed computer game of the 1990s. But these numbers, impressive as they are in their own right, leave out not only the ever-present reality of piracy but also the free episode of DOOM, which was packaged and distributed in such an unprecedented variety of ways all over the world. Players of it likely numbered well into the eight digits.

Yet if the precise numbers associated with the game’s success are slippery, the cultural impact of the game is easier to get a grip on. The release of DOOM marks the biggest single sea change in the history of computer gaming. It didn’t change gaming instantly, mind you — a contemporaneous observer could be forgiven for assuming it was still largely business as usual a year or even two years after DOOM‘s release — but it did change it forever.

I should admit here and now that I’m not entirely comfortable with the changes DOOM brought to gaming. In fact, for a long time, when I was asked when I thought I might bring this historical project to a conclusion, I pointed to the arrival of DOOM as perhaps the most logical place to hang it up. I trust that most of you will be pleased to hear that I no longer feel so inclined, but I do recognize that my feelings about DOOM are, at best, conflicted. I can’t help but see it as at least partially responsible for a certain coarsening in the culture of gaming that followed it. I can muster respect for the id boys’ accomplishment, but no love. Hopefully the former will be enough to give the game its due.

As the title of this article alludes, there are many possible narratives to spin about DOOM‘s impact. Sometimes the threads are contradictory — sometimes even self-contradictory. Nevertheless, let’s take this opportunity to follow a few of them to wherever they lead us as we wrap up this series on the shareware movement and the monster it spawned.

3D 4EVA!

The least controversial, most incontrovertible aspect of DOOM‘s impact is its influence on the technology of games. It was nothing less than the coming-out party for 3D graphics as a near-universal tool — this despite the fact that 3D graphics had been around in some genres, most notably vehicular simulations, almost as long as microcomputer games themselves had been around, and despite the fact that DOOM itself was far from a complete implementation of a 3D environment. (John Carmack wouldn’t get all the way to that goal until 1996’s Quake, the id boys’ anointed successor to DOOM.) As we’ve seen already, Blue Sky Productions’s Ultima Underworld actually offered the complete 3D implementation which DOOM lacked twenty months before the latter’s arrival.

But as I also noted earlier, Ultima Underworld was complex, a little esoteric, hard to come to terms with at first sight. DOOM, on the other hand, took what the id boys had started with Wolfenstein 3D, added just enough additional complexity to make it into a more satisfying game over the long haul, topped it off with superb level design that took full advantage of all the new affordances, and rammed it down the throat of the gaming mainstream with all the force of one of its coveted rocket launchers. The industry never looked back. By the end of the decade, it would be hard to find a big boxed game that didn’t use 3D graphics.

Many if not all of these applications of 3D were more than warranted: the simple fact is that 3D lets you do things in games that aren’t possible any other way. Other forms of graphics consist at bottom of fixed, discrete patterns of colored pixels. These patterns can be moved about the screen — think of the sprites in a classic 2D videogame, such as Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. or id’s Commander Keen — but their forms cannot be altered with any great degree of flexibility. And this in turn limits the degree to which the world of a game can become an embodied, living place of emergent interactions; it does no good to simulate something in the world model if you can’t represent it on the player’s screen.

3D graphics, on the other hand, are stored not as pixels but as a sort of architectural plan of an imaginary 3D space, expressed in the language of mathematics. The computer then extrapolates from said plan to render the individual pixels on the fly in response to the player’s actions. In other words, the world and the representation of the world are stored as one in the computer’s memory. This means that things can happen there which no artist ever anticipated. 3D allowed game makers to move beyond hand-crafted fictions and set-piece puzzles to begin building virtual realities in earnest. Not for nothing did many people refer to DOOM-like games in the time before the term “first-person shooter” was invented as “virtual-reality games.”

Ironically, others showed more interest than the id boys themselves in probing the frontiers of formal possibility thus opened. While id continued to focus purely on ballistics and virtual violence in their extended series of Quake games after making DOOM, Looking Glass Technologies — the studio which had previously been known as Blue Sky Productions — worked many of the innovations of Ultima Underworld and DOOM alike into more complex virtual worlds in games like System Shock and Thief. Nevertheless, DOOM was the proof of concept, the game which demonstrated indubitably to everyone that 3D graphics could provide amazing experiences which weren’t possible any other way.

From the standpoint of the people making the games, 3D graphics had another massive advantage: they were also cheaper than the alternative. When DOOM first appeared in December of 1993, the industry was facing a budgetary catch-22 with no obvious solution. Hiring armies of artists to hand-paint every screen in a game was expensive; renting or building a sound stage, then hiring directors and camera people and dozens of actors to provide hours of full-motion-video footage was even more so. Players expected ever bigger, richer, longer games, which was intensely problematic when every single element in their worlds had to be drawn or filmed by hand. Sales were increasing at a steady clip by 1993, but they weren’t increasing quickly enough to offset the spiraling costs of production. Even major publishers like Sierra were beginning to post ugly losses on their bottom lines despite their increasing gross revenues.

3D graphics had the potential to fix all that, practically at a stroke. A 3D world is, almost by definition, a collection of interchangeable parts. Consider a simple item of furniture, like, say, a desk. In a 2D world, every desk must be laboriously hand-drawn by an artist in the same way that a traditional carpenter planes and joins the wood for such a thing in a workshop. But in a 3D world, the data constituting the basic form of “desk” can be inserted in a matter of seconds; desks can now make their way into games with the same alacrity with which they roll off of an IKEA production line. But you say that you don’t want every desk in your world to look exactly the same? Very well; it takes just a few keystrokes to change the color or wood grain or even the size of your desk, or to add or take away a drawer. We can arrive at endless individual implementations of “desk” from our Platonic ideal with surprising speed. Small wonder that, when the established industry was done marveling at DOOM‘s achievements in terms of gameplay, the thing they kept coming back to over and over was its astronomical profit margins. 3D graphics provided a way to make games make money again.

So, 3D offered worlds with vastly more emergent potential, made at a greatly reduced cost. There had to be a catch, right?

Alas, there was indeed. In many contexts, 3D graphics were right on the edge of what a typical computer could do at all in the mid-1990s, much less do with any sort of aesthetic appeal. Gamers would have to accept jagged edges, tearing textures, and a generalized visual crudity in 3D games for quite some time to come. A freeze-frame visual comparison with the games the industry had been making immediately before the 3D revolution did the new ones no favors: the games coming out of studios like Sierra and LucasArts had become genuinely beautiful by the early 1990s, thanks to those companies’ rooms full of dedicated pixel artists. It would take a considerable amount of time before 3D games would look anywhere near this nice. One can certainly argue that 3D was in some fairly fundamental sense necessary for the continuing evolution of game design, that this period of ugliness was one that the industry simply needed to plow through in order to emerge on the other side with a whole new universe of visual and emergent possibility to hand. Still, people mired in the middle of it could be forgiven for asking whether, from the evidence of screenshots alone, gaming technology wasn’t regressing rather than progressing.

But be that as it may, the 3D revolution ushered in by DOOM was here to stay. People would just have to get used to the visual crudity for the time being, and trust that eventually things would start to look better again.

Playing to the Base

There’s an eternal question in political and commercial marketing alike: do you play to the base, or do you try to reach out to a broader spectrum of people? The former may be safer, but raises the question of how many more followers you can collect from the same narrow slice of the population; the latter tempts you with the prospect of countless virgin souls waiting to embrace you, but is far riskier, with immense potential to backfire spectacularly if you don’t get the message and tone just right. This was the dichotomy confronting the boxed-games industry in the early 1990s.

By 1993, the conventional wisdom inside the industry had settled on the belief that outreach was the way forward. This dream of reaching a broader swath of people, of becoming as commonplace in living rooms as prime-time dramas and sitcoms, was inextricably bound up with the technology of CD-ROM, what with its potential to put footage of real human actors into games alongside spoken dialog and orchestral soundtracks. “What we think of today as a computer or a videogame system,” wrote Ken Williams of Sierra that year, “will someday assume a much broader role in our homes. I foresee a day when there is one home-entertainment device which combines the functions of a CD-audio player, VCR, videogame system, and computer.”

And then along came DOOM with its stereotypically adolescent-male orientation, along with sales numbers that threatened to turn the conventional wisdom about how well the industry could continue to feed off the same old demographic on its head. About six months after DOOM‘s release, when the powers that were were just beginning to grapple with its success and what it meant to each and every one of them, Alexander Antoniades, a founding editor of the new Game Developer magazine, more fully articulated the dream of outreach, as well as some of the doubts that were already beginning to plague it.

The potential of CD-ROM is tremendous because it is viewed as a superset not [a] subset of the existing computer-games industry. Everyone’s hoping that non-technical people who would never buy an Ultima, flight simulator, or DOOM will be willing to buy a CD-ROM game designed to appeal to a wider audience — changing the computer into [an] interactive VCR. If these technical neophytes’ first experience is a bad one, for $60 a disc, they’re not going to continue making the same mistake.

It will be this next year, as these consumers make their first CD-ROM purchases, that will determine the shape of the industry. If CD-ROM games are able to vary more in subject matter than traditional computer games, retain their platform independence, and capture new demographics, they will attain the status of a new platform [in themselves]. If not, they will just be another means to get product to market and will be just another label on the side of a box.

The next couple of years did indeed become a de-facto contest between these two ideas of gaming’s future. At first, the outreach camp could point to some notable successes on a scale similar to that of DOOM: The 7th Guest sold over 2 million copies, Myst sold an extraordinary 6 million or more. Yet the reality slowly dawned that most of those outside the traditional gaming demographic who purchased those games regarded them as little more than curiosities; most evidence would seem to indicate that they were never seriously played to a degree commensurate with their sales. Meanwhile the many similar titles which the industry rushed out in the wake of these success stories almost invariably became commercial disappointments.

The problems inherent in these multimedia-heavy “interactive movies” weren’t hard to see even at the time. In the same piece from which I quoted above, Alexander Antoniades noted that too many CD-ROM productions were “the equivalent of Pong games with captured video images of professional tennis players and CD-quality sounds of bouncing balls.” For various reasons — the limitations inherent in mixing and matching canned video clips; the core limitations of the software and hardware technology; perhaps simply a failure of imagination — the makers of too many of these extravaganzas never devised new modes of gameplay to complement their new modes of presentation. Instead they seemed to believe that the latter alone ought to be enough. Too often, these games fell back on rote set-piece puzzle-solving — an inherently niche activity even if done more creatively than we often saw in these games — for lack of any better ideas for making the “interactive” in interactive movies a reality. The proverbial everyday person firing up the computer-cum-stereo-cum-VCR at the end of a long workday wasn’t going to do so in order to watch a badly acted movie gated with frustrating logic puzzles.

While the multimedia came first with these productions, games of the DOOM school flipped that script. As the years went on and they too started to ship on the now-ubiquitous medium of CD-ROM, they too picked up cut scenes and spoken dialog, but they never suffered the identity crisis of their rivals; they knew that they were games first and foremost, and knew exactly what forms their interactivity should take. And most importantly from the point of view of the industry, these games sold. Post-1996 or so, high-concept interactive movies were out, as was most serious talk of outreach to new demographics. Visceral 3D action games were in, along with a doubling-down on the base.

To blame the industry’s retrenchment — its return to the demographically tried-and-true — entirely on DOOM is a stretch. Yet DOOM was a hugely important factor, standing as it did as a living proof of just how well the traditional core values of gaming could pay. The popularity of DOOM, combined with the exercise in diminishing commercial returns that interactive movies became, did much to push the industry down the path of retrenchment.

The minor tragedy in all this was not so much the end of interactive movies, given what intensely problematic endeavors they so clearly were, but rather that the latest games’ vision proved to be so circumscribed in terms of fiction, theme, and mechanics alike. By late in the decade, they had brought the boxed industry to a place of dismaying homogeneity; the values of the id boys had become the values of computer gaming writ large. Game fictions almost universally drew from the same shallow well of sci-fi action flicks and Dungeons & Dragons, with perhaps an occasional detour into military simulation. A shocking percentage of the new games being released fell into one of just two narrow gameplay genres: the first-person shooter and the real-time-strategy game.

These fictional and ludic genres are not, I hasten to note, illegitimate in themselves; I’ve enjoyed plenty of games in all of them. But one craves a little diversity, a more vibrant set of possibilities to choose from when wandering into one’s local software store. It would take a new outsider movement coupled with the rise of convenient digital distribution in the new millennium to finally make good on that early-1990s dream of making games for everyone. (How fitting that shaking loose the stranglehold of DOOM‘s progeny would require the exploitation of another alternative form of distribution, just as the id boys exploited the shareware model…)

The Murder Simulator

DOOM was mentioned occasionally in a vaguely disapproving way by mainstream media outlets immediately after its release, but largely escaped the ire of the politicians who were going after games like Night Trap and Mortal Kombat at the time; this was probably because its status as a computer rather than a console game led to its being played in bedrooms rather than living rooms, free from the prying eyes of concerned adults. It didn’t become the subject of a full-blown moral panic until weirdly late in its history.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, a pair of students at Columbine High School in the Colorado town of the same name, walked into their school armed to the teeth with knives, explosives, and automatic weapons. They proceeded to kill 13 students and teachers and to injure 24 more before turning their guns on themselves. The day after the massacre, an Internet gaming news site called Blue’s News posted a message that “several readers have written in reporting having seen televised news reports showing the DOOM logo on something visible through clear bags containing materials said to be related to the suspected shooters. There is no word yet of what connection anyone is drawing between these materials and this case.” The word would come soon enough.

It turned out that Harris and Klebold had been great devotees of the game, not only as players but as creators of their own levels. “It’s going to be just like DOOM,” wrote Harris in his diary just before the massacre. “I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy. I will force myself to believe that everyone is just a monster from DOOM.” He chose his prize shotgun because it looked like one found in the game. On the surveillance tapes that recorded the horror in real time, the weapons-festooned boys pranced and preened as if they were consciously imitating the game they loved so much. Weapons experts noted that they seemed to have adopted their approach to shooting from what worked in DOOM. (In this case, of course, that was a wonderful thing, in that it kept them from killing anywhere close to the number of people they might otherwise have with the armaments at their disposal.)

There followed a storm of controversy over videogame content, with DOOM and the genre it had spawned squarely at its center. Journalists turned their attention to the FPS subculture for the first time, and discovered that more recent games like Duke Nukem 3D — the Columbine shooters’ other favorite game, a creation of Scott Miller’s old Apogee Software, now trading under the name of 3D Realms — made DOOM‘s blood and gore look downright tame. Senator Joseph Lieberman, a longstanding critic of videogames, beat the drum for legislation, and the name of DOOM even crossed the lips of President Bill Clinton. “My hope,” he said, “[is] to persuade the nation’s top cultural producers to call a cease-fire in the virtual arms race, to stop the release of ultra-violent videogames such as DOOM. Several of the school gunmen murderously mimicked [it] down to the choice of weapons and apparel.”

When one digs into the subject, one can’t help but note how the early life stories of John Carmack and John Romero bear some eerie similarities with those of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The two Johns as well were angry kids who found it hard to fit in with their peers, who engaged in petty crime and found solace in action movies, heavy-metal music, and computer games. Indeed, a big part of the appeal of DOOM for its most committed fans was the sense that it had been made by people just like them, people who were coming from the same place. What caused Harris and Klebold, alone among the millions like them, to exorcise their anger and aggression in such a horrifying way? It’s a question that we can’t begin to answer. We can only say that, unfair though it may be, perceptions of DOOM outside the insular subculture of FPS fandom must always bear the taint of its connection with a mass murder.

And yet the public controversy over DOOM and its progeny resulted in little concrete change in the end. Lieberman’s proposed legislation died on the vine after the industry fecklessly promised to do a better job with content warnings, and the newspaper pundits moved on to other outrages. Forget talk of free speech; there was too much money in these types of games for them to go away. Just ten months after Columbine, Activision released Soldier of Fortune, which made a selling point of dismembered bodies and screams of pain so realistic that one reviewer claimed they left his dog a nervous wreck cowering in a corner. After the requisite wave of condemnation, the mainstream media forgot about it too.

Violence in games didn’t begin with DOOM or even Wolfenstein 3D, but it was certainly amplified and glorified by those games and the subculture they wrought. While a player may very well run up a huge body count in, say, a classic arcade game or an old-school CRPG, the violence there is so abstract as to be little more than a game mechanic. But in DOOM — and even more so in the game that followed it — experiential violence is a core part of the appeal. One revels in killing not just because of the new high score or character experience level one gets out of it, but for the thrill of killing itself, as depicted in such a visceral, embodied way. This does strike me as a fundamental qualitative shift from most of the games that came before.

Yet it’s very difficult to have a reasonable discussion on said violence’s implications, simply because opinions have become so hardened on the subject. To express concern on any level is to invite association with the likes of Joe Lieberman, a politician with a knack for choosing the most reactionary, least informed position on every single issue, who apparently was never fortunate enough to have a social-science professor drill the fact that correlation isn’t causation into his head.

Make no mistake: the gamers who scoff at the politicians’ hand-wringing have a point. Harris and Klebold probably were drawn to games like DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D because they already had violent fantasies, rather than having said fantasies inculcated by the games they happened to play. In a best-case scenario, we can even imagine other potential mass murderers channeling their aggression into a game rather than taking it out on real people, in much the same way that easy access to pornography may be a cause of the dramatic decline in incidents of rape and sexual violence in most Western countries since the rise of the World Wide Web.

That said, I for one am also willing to entertain the notion that spending hours every day killing things in the most brutal, visceral manner imaginable inside an embodied virtual space may have some negative effects on some personalities. Something John Carmack said about the subject in a fairly recent interview strikes me as alarmingly fallacious:

In later games and later times, when games [came complete with] moral ambiguity or actual negativity about what you’re doing, I always felt good about the decision that in DOOM, you’re fighting demons. There’s no gray area here. It is black and white. You’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys, and everything that you’re doing to them is fully deserved.

In reality, though, the danger which games like DOOM may present, especially in the dismayingly polarized societies many of us live in in our current troubled times, is not that they ask us to revel in our moral ambiguity, much less our pure evil. It’s rather the way they’re able to convince us that the Others whom we’re killing “fully deserve” the violence we visit upon them because “they’re the bad guys.” (Recall those chilling words from Eric Harris’s diary, about convincing himself that his teachers and classmates are really just monsters…) This tendency is arguably less insidious when the bad guys in question are ridiculously over-the-top demons from Hell than when they’re soldiers who just happen to be wearing a different uniform, one which they may quite possibly have had no other choice but to don. Nevertheless, DOOM started something which games like the interminable Call of Duty franchise were only too happy to run with.

I personally would like to see less violence rather than more in games, all things being equal, and would like to see more games about building things up rather than tearing them down, fun though the latter can be on occasion. It strikes me that the disturbing association of some strands of gamer culture with some of the more hateful political movements of our times may not be entirely accidental, and that some of the root causes may stretch all the way back to DOOM — which is not to say that it’s wrong for any given individual to play DOOM or even Call of Duty. It’s only to say that the likes of GamersGate may be yet another weirdly attenuated part of DOOM‘s endlessly multi-faceted legacy.

Creative Destruction?

In other ways, though, the DOOM community actually was — and is — a community of creation rather than destruction. (I did say these narratives of DOOM wouldn’t be cut-and-dried, didn’t I?)

John Carmack, by his own account alone among the id boys, was inspired rather than dismayed by the modding scene that sprang up around Wolfenstein 3D — so much so that, rather than taking steps to make such things more difficult in DOOM, he did just the opposite: he separated the level data from the game engine much more completely than had been the case with Wolfenstein 3D, thus making it possible to distribute new DOOM levels completely legally, and released documentation of the WAD format in which the levels were stored on the same day that id released the game itself.

The origins of his generosity hearken back once again to this idea that the people who made DOOM weren’t so very different from the people who played it. One of Carmack’s formative experiences as a hacker was his exploration of Ultima II on his first Apple II. Carmack:

To go ahead and hack things to turn trees into chests or modify my gold or whatever… I loved that. The ability to go several steps further and release actual source code, make it easy to modify things, to let future generations get what I wished I had had a decade earlier—I think that’s been a really good thing. To this day I run into people all the time that say, whether it was Doom, or maybe even more so Quake later on, that that openness and that ability to get into the guts of things was what got them into the industry or into technology. A lot of people who are really significant people in significant places still have good things to say about that.

Carmack speaks of “a decade-long fight inside id about how open we should be with the technology and the modifiability.” The others questioned this commitment to what Carmack called “open gaming” more skeptically than ever when some companies started scooping up some of the thousands of fan-made levels, plopping them onto CDs, and selling them without paying a cent to id. But in the long run, the commitment to openness kept DOOM alive; rather than a mere computer game, it became a veritable cottage industry of its own. Plenty of people played literally nothing else for months or even years at a stretch.

The debate inside id raged more than ever in 1997, when Carmack insisted on releasing the complete original source code to DOOM. (He had done the same for the Wolfenstein 3D code two years before.) As he alludes above, the DOOM code became a touchstone for an up-and-coming generation of game programmers, even as many future game designers cut their teeth and made early names for themselves by creating custom levels to run within the engine. And, inevitably, the release of the source code led to a flurry of ports to every imaginable platform: “Everything that has a 32-bit [or better] processor has had DOOM run on it,” says Carmack with justifiable pride. Today you can play DOOM on digital cameras, printers, and even thermostats, and do so if you like in hobbyist-created levels that coax the engine into entirely new modes of play that the id boys never even began to conceive of.

This narrative of DOOM bears a distinct similarity to that of another community of creation with which I happen to be much better acquainted: the post-Infocom interactive-fiction community that arose at about the same time that the original DOOM was taking the world by storm. Like the DOOM people, the interactive-fiction people built upon a beloved company’s well-nigh timeless software engineering; like them, they eventually stretched that engine in all sorts of unanticipated directions, and are still doing it to this day. A comparison between the cerebral text adventures of Infocom and the frenetic shooters of id might seem incongruous at first blush, but there you are. Long may their separate communities of love and craft continue to thrive.

As you have doubtless gathered by now, the legacy of DOOM is a complicated one that’s almost uniquely resistant to simplification. Every statement has a qualifier; every yang has a yin. This can be frustrating for a writer; it’s in the nature of us as a breed to want straightforward causes and effects. The desire for them may lead one to make trends that were obscure at best to the people living through them seem more obvious than they really were. Therefore allow me to reiterate that the new gaming order which DOOM created wouldn’t become undeniable to everyone until fully three or four years after its release. A reader recently emailed me the argument that 1996 was actually the best year ever for adventure games, the genre which, according to some oversimplified histories, DOOM and games like it killed at a stroke — and darned if he didn’t make a pretty good case for it.

So, while I’m afraid I’ll never be much of a gibber and/or fragger, we should continue to have much to talk about. Onward, then, into the new order. I dare say that from the perspective of the boots on the ground it will continue to look much like the old one for quite some time to come. And after that? Well, we’ll take it as it comes. I won’t be mooting any more stopping dates.

(Sources: the books The Complete Wargames Handbook (2000 edition) by James F. Dunnigan, Masters of Doom by David Kushner, Game Engine Black Book: DOOM by Fabien Sanglard, Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke, and Columbine by Dave Cullen; Retro Gamer 75; Game Developer of June 1994; Chris Kohler’s interview with John Carmack for Wired. And a special thanks to Alex Sarosi, a.k.a. Lt. Nitpicker, for his valuable email correspondence on the legacy of DOOM, as well as to Josh Martin for pointing out in a timely comment to the last article the delightful fact that DOOM can now be run on a thermostat.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-shareware-scene-part-5-narratives-of-doom/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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