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imliketheiceifreeze · 1 year

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My Little Scientist- Chapter eight

Recombinant Miles Quaritch x OC

Authors note: so I've decided to change this story from a x reader to x named OC (Gaia) so I can flesh out the character a bit more, I didn't think I would write so many chapters when I started and just feel more comfortable writing OC's in longer stories, hope this is okay with everyone!

and thank you everyone so much for the support, your likes and comments mean so much, honestly writing is the only thing I really enjoy and it's so nice to know that other people enjoy reading what I've written, love you all and I hope you enjoy this next chapter xxx

3,044 words

Warnings: all the usual ones, Minors DNI

Chapter 9

Once Miles had returned to his room he was disappointed to be greeted with her absence, not even a note to sweeten the abandonment, only his wrinkled shirt laying haphazardly in the mess of sheets. He reached down to feel the material between his fingers, it still smelled of her, and it brought him back to how she looked with it draped over her naked body. He wondered why she'd decided to leave him in the dust, pretending it didn't leave a gaping hole in his chest.

Gaia, however, was preoccupied, thoughts of her impending relocation to a remote base making her head swim with anxiety. She had signed up for this all on her own and she was going to pull through, but at the same time she couldn't help but wonder if she'd gotten herself in too deep this time, not to mention the fact that she'd be separated from her whole lab team, and her one and only close friend, June. She knew she hadn't been as close as usual, considering the stressful events of the past few weeks, but that wasn't to say she didn't love her, and that dork Mike who was attached to her hip these days. Maybe she should go and talk to her, but somehow the distance had created an awkward tension between them both that she couldn't seem to break through.

"There's our Colonel's girl, how you doing sweetness?"

A soldier spoke up, loud enough to draw her out of her thoughts, and upon looking around she recognised it to be none other than Lyle Wainfleet.

"My name's not sweetness it's Gaia,"

she scoffed, speeding past the recombinant gym, cheeks flushed in embarrassment.

"Aww come on, don't be like that, we've all gotta live together pretty soon so we'd better get to know each other,"

he crossed her path to block her exit, leaning leisurely against the hallway wall as he looked her up and down in a judgemental fashion.

"Leave me alone Lyle,"

she growled, attempting to hide her shaking legs from the 10 ft tall alien as she held her ground.

"Stop harassing the girl dumbass,"

a female voice caught her attention, coming from the room beside her and turning her head she caught sight of a woman slouched against a bench press who she believed to be Z-dog.

"Oh come on, I was barely even talking. plus she's not scared of us like the others are you girlie? She's dating the Colonel after all."

"We're not dating,"

Gaia interjected, making the faces of the two soldiers faulter, before Lyle coughed out a laugh

"I'll make sure to tell him you said that... or you can tell him yourself if you like,"

mumbling the last part of the sentence, his eyes cast downwards like a scolded puppy as she felt a shadow engulfing her pint-sized body before the familiar voice hit her.

"Tell me what Gaia?"

Turning reluctantly to face him, she was forced to crane her neck uncomfortably to meet his eye, not liking the despondent expression she was met with, especially as she knew she'd been the one to cause it with her own self-centred fears.

"Well I mean, we're not dating are we?"

She knew this time she'd really done it, the way the anger and disbelief flashed across his face so readily, in a way she'd never seen the reserved man exhibit emotion before.

"Well, that's not exactly the view I got when I had my cock down your throat this morning doll, that just something you do for all the soldiers then?"

His words cut her to the core, especially being said in front of his squad, who's respect for her was barely holding on by a thread at best, and even though she knew he only said it because he was angry, and hurt, she couldn't find in herself to forgive him.

"You prick,"

she screeched, shoving his leg, unable to move it even an ich, despite leaning her whole body weight against him, refusing to meet the eyes of Lyle and Z-dog who she could already hear snickering in their corner whilst she was drowning in shame.

"What? we're not dating are we? Or you wanted me to act like your boyfriend all of a sudden?"

She felt so hurt by him, malice dripping from his every word as he flashed her a signature lopsided smile that didn't quite reach his eyes, looking down on her like he might tread on her if he had the chance.

"You know what, you're right, were not dating, so you can take this shit back, have fun exercising your right hand for the rest of your life. asshole."

She spat, snapping the dog tags off her neck to throw them unceremoniously at Mile's stomach. She wanted him to hurt just as bad as he'd made her, and she knew how to do it, taking in the pained look on his face for a split second before turning on her heel and marching off proudly, fighting the urge to flip them all off as the anger surged through her like lava in her veins, unstoppable and ready to destroy anything in its wake.

Miles bent down slowly to scoop the metal chain from the ground, keeping his eyes on her silhouette disappearing steadily from view, stuffing the tags into his back pocket, pretending not the feel the way they'd warmed from her skin, or the way his heart clenched when she threw them back at him. These days it felt like they always fought and he didn't understand why she kept pushing him away, keeping him at arms length and kicking back if he ever got too close.

"What the hell are you lot looking at, you not got anything better to do?"

He snarled suddenly directing his attention back to the crowd of troops that had gathered at the gym entrance, scattering as soon as his ferocious gaze settled on their spying faces. Maybe he should just let her go, she'd made it pretty clear she didn't feel as deeply for him as he did her. To think he was almost reckless enough to say he loved her, he wouldn't let himself get caught up in such trivial things again, he'd lost sight of the main objective, the reason he was even alive, to capture Jake Sully and put an end to the feud between Pandora and the RDA, for humanity.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The days dragged on and the mission drew closer, nonetheless, Gaia and Miles were still not on speaking terms, brushing past one another in the hallways like strangers, both too stubborn to admit how much they'd missed each other.

"Hey June, Mike,"

Gaia greeted her old friends with a warm smile, seated in the mess hall as always, this time with hands intertwined, June's head resting easily on his shoulder as her eyes met Gaia's.

"Gaia, how have you been babe, I feel like I haven't seen you in forever,"

she smiled softly back to her, making no move to remove herself from her lover.

"I know, it's been forever, I've just been so busy with the mission that I've been rushed off my feet,"

she attempted to laugh, feeling off put by the blatant displays of affection, bringing her thoughts back to the many soft touches and kisses she and Miles had shared.

"Yeah I heard about that, I can't believe you're actually going, do you think it'll be safe?"

She questioned more animatedly, propping her head up at last, to direct her focus away from Mike.

"Yeah, I'll be okay, I can look after myself,"

she smiled halfheartedly, twirling her thumbs as she looked down.

"Yeah and I'm sure Quaritch wouldn't let anything happen to you either,"

she grinned catishly, flashing a raised eyebrow at mike before looking back to her.

"I don't care what he does it's not my problem anymore,"

she grimaced, leaning her chin on her open palm, looking away wistfully as she pretended the revelation of their break up didn't sting.

"What? You guys broke up, you never said...guess that explains why you're here though,"

June chuckled, reaching over to give her shoulder a pat as she pouted like a child.

"We were never together, we just both know that now,"

she paused, locking eyes with June before she spoke again,

"I am sorry, for disappearing like that, I didn't mean to it's just..."

She nodded, the apology seeming to be what was needed to crack the icy demeanour she'd insisted on showing her these past few weeks.

"Aw it's okay Gai, I know, that man's enough to drive anyone insane, I don't know how you handled him for this long,"

she rubbed her arm in comfort, tilting her head to the side as she spoke.

"He can be pretty annoying can't he,"

Gaia grinned sincerely at last, finding solace in her understanding eyes.

"That's an understatement."

Mike appended with an honest laugh, her heart warming at their ability to re-welcome her into their lives despite her neglect to their friendship these past months.

"Thanks guys,"

she laughed along, trying to avoid looking over at the large blue figure that had entered the room moments ago, avoid watching the way he winked at the pretty cook that gave him an extra potato, avoid the way her cheeks glowed red and her eyes cast downwards with a small smile on her glossy lips.

"Just ignore him Gaia,"

June muttered, taking another mouthful of the dry potato and stew on her plate as her eyes stayed trained on the blue man, giving him a scowl whenever he looked her way. She couldn't stay and watch him flirt with someone else, it killed her to see how easily he'd moved on already when she was still in love with the stupid, arrogant man.

"You know, I'm not really hungry, I'm gonna head to bed early, go read a book or something,"

she shot out, rushing to her feet in spite of the noise of protest that left June's mouth, walking briskly with her head down so as not to meet the eyes of a certain Colonel as tears gathered at the corners of her own.

Miles was watching her though, even if she refused to look at him, he couldn't keep his eyes off of her. He wondered if she hated him for what he'd said, wanting nothing more than to follow her out of that room, yet knowing she had to be the one to come to him, he needed her forgiveness before he could go to her, and with the way he'd acted he doubted she'd be receptive, it was time for him to move on and forget about her.

"Colonel, just go and talk to her you two fight like children sometimes,"

Mansk piped up, earning a stone cold glare from his superior that had him dipping his head to stuff food into his mouth in silence.

"He's not wrong Colonel, everyone can see you've been in a foul mood since you both stopped speaking,"

Lyle was the only soldier with the balls to keep prodding the bear, being his corporal gave him a certain leeway that the others hadn't earned.

"You're both so stubborn"

Z-dog uttered under her breath, head in her palm as she observed her ruthless Colonel falling apart at the hands of one, singular, human woman.

"I'd implore you all to shut your pie holes before I make you regret it,"

He arched an eyebrow, sweeping a pair of yellow eyes across the table, watching his troops lower their heads in submission, silence falling over the group at his request, the sour taste left in their mouths not being from the RDA food for once.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lyle, Z-dog and Mansk were hanging out in their usual spot outside the base, having just finished another gruelling training session with the Colonel consisting of a 10 mile run along with sparring and strength tests that had them sweating like pigs.

"Lyle, Mansk, we've gotta do something man, I'm gonna die at this rate if Colonel doesn't lay off."

Lyle grunted as he took a swig from Mansk's bottle, eyes flashing to the brooding man as he considered their options.

"Well, what do you suggest Z?

he retorted incredulously.

"I think we should parent trap them or something, they've gotta talk out whatever's going on."

Z-dog rubbed her hands together like the villain of a movie, enjoying having something other than the upcoming mission to think about.

"Come off it, you saw their last fight, they'd kill each other,"

Lyle grimaced at the memory of their peaceful gym session being interrupted once again by the hotheaded blue man.

"Or fuck it out, hate sex is the best kind,"

Mansk quirked an eyebrow as if he were imagining the scenario, or more likely Gaia, still a little too fond of the woman in question.

"Of-course you'd say that,"

Lyle grinned, slapping his back, the water sloshing out of his open bottle with the force, a glare from Mansk being shot right back at him.

"It could work I guess,"

He finally agreed in the silence, it was the only idea they'd got and god damn he knew he'd expire too if he had to run another 10 miles tomorrow.

"I feel like a fucking spy, this is great, I'll take the girl, you lot get the Colonel,"

Z-dog grinned, swaying her hips as she pranced away with her sweat stained shirt slung over her shoulder, making the others groan in annoyance, knowing the Colonel would arguably be the hardest to convince considering nowadays he was such a tightly coiled spring, any minor inconvenience would set him off. Still it was for the good of the team, they needed their Colonel back and they supposed helping him with his terrible relationship skills would just be a bonus for him.

They wouldn't waste any time, they had to get it done tonight, which is why Lyle was now pulling an extra late night session at the gym, all in hopes of spotting the elusive Colonel Quaritch whilst Mansk waited on the sidelines for his queue. It didn't take long for the man to appear, his routines running like clockwork, when he moved immediately over to the treadmill to warm up, Lyle followed to take the machine beside him, striking up friendly conversation.

"Sir, don't usually get to catch a workout with you,"

he called out jovially, slapping the man's broad shoulder, not sparking any reaction from Miles who kept his eyes trained forward, speeding to a jog instead.

"What do you want Lyle?"

He could see through his bullshit immediately, used to the antics of a bunch of young soldiers cooped up on a base for months on end.

"Nothing Sir, I'm just happy to see you,"

he laughed in the silence as his Colonels face twitched in discomfort, knowing he preferred to be left alone at times like these, and he found it quite amusing to wind him up every now and again.

"Although, you might be interested to know Gaia was asking after you, said to tell you she'd be waiting for you in break room."

His ears twitched at the mention of her name, sparking his interest, especially at the thought of her waiting up for him after such a prolonged time apart.

"Don't bullshit me Lyle,"

he growled lowly, speeding up yet again to take his thoughts off of her, her soft golden hair and delicate frame, encasing a volatile soul.

"Oh, hey Mansk, fancy seeing you here,"

Lyle dropped in, not so subtly, watching the recombinant saunter over to the squat rack, not bothering to hide the fact that he had no interest in working, using it to lean against instead.

"Hey there, Lyle don't let me interrupt your interesting conversation,"

he grinned, sarcasm deeply embedded into his words.

"Well now you mention it Mansk, I was just talking about how Sunshine's all alone wating for the Colonel in the break room, you hear about that?"

He snickered, walking lazily on the treadmill, laying out the bait so conspicuously he wondered if the Colonel would stoop so low as to take it, though anything involving his precious scientist he knew he couldn't resist.

"Oh, Sunshine? Yeah I saw her, all on her own, might go keep her company actually, be a shame to let that opportunity go to waste."

His comment drew a whistle from Lyle's lips, stealing a glance at Quaritch who was gripping the bars of the machine so hard his knuckles had started to turn white, his jaw set and lips pursed, still refusing to acknowledge Mank's words.

"Well guess I'll get out of your hair, see you Colonel."

Mansk began to walk slowly for the door, surprised at Quaritch's lack retaliation, that was until he felt himself being ripped away from the exit by his arm, a large man striding in front of him wordlessly, leaving both Mansk and Lyle in stitches, even more so when they noticed he hadn't even bothered to shut off the treadmill in his haste, disappearing down the hall to find his Juliet at last.

They followed swiftly, knowing the jig wasn't up yet and the hardest part was still to come, it was difficult enough to swipe the keys for the room off Quaritch's desk, now they had to be quick enough to lock him in without being noticed by the hypervigilant man.

Luckily for them, once he set his eyes on Gaia, he appeared entranced, stepping into the room without a second thought, not caring to look behind him, that was until both he and Gaia heard the distinct click of a lock, whipping around in unison to see the devious faces of his troops peering back at them through the small pane of glass at the top of the door.

"Sorry sir this is for your own good!"

Lyle shouted through the fogged up window before running away like a coward when Miles marched up to to the locked entrance, attempting to wrench it open from the handle but instead managing to pull the whole thing off, forcing him to acknowledge that they were both stuck in there whether they liked it or not.

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pretchatta · 3 years

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REBELS APPRECIATION WEEK, DAY 6: FAVOURITE DYNAMIC

Hera Syndulla had known Kanan Jarrus for eleven years.

She’d first met him on Gorse. A drifter, a roughneck and a flirt, at first he didn't strike her as the right kind of person to join her cause. But after working with him to stop a moon from being destroyed she realised he was far more than that. When she left, he came with her.

They worked well together, especially once he cleaned up his act. Her work was much easier to achieve with an extra crewmember, not to mention the use she could put his other abilities to. As their team grew, he became the leader they all needed.

She didn’t fully appreciate the space he’d filled in her life until it became a gaping hole. When the Inquisitor took him prisoner, her ship felt empty, even with the rest of her family still safe and on board.

But then he came back.

She was determined never to let something like that happen again. Joining Phoenix Squadron brought new tensions, but they weathered them as a team, as they always did, and came out stronger on the other side. Unfortunately, the Empire was growing stronger too. More Inquisitors put increased pressure on her two Jedi, until finally, they took the decision she’d been afraid of. They left, even if it was unanimously agreed to be in everyone’s best interest.

Nothing was the same after Malachor.

But, as Kanan said to Ezra, he always came back.

Grand Admiral Thrawn posed a new threat, their biggest challenge yet. Evading his traps felt like delaying the inevitable, but they still managed to build their rebellion, and they still managed to help people. Even when star destroyers were battering their base on Atollon, Kanan insisted on leaving to warn Bendu.

But he came back. He came home.

Their missions often took them to different places. Mandalore, Jalindi, Lothal, Yavin. But their crew always regrouped. They always came together again. Not even her capture by the Empire could stop them from reuniting on Lothal.

Then the fuel pod exploded.

This time was different. She didn’t know how she was supposed to continue. Where would her strength come from? Where was her support? Who was there now, to pick her up from her lowest point?

She thought he’d…

He’d said he would…

Where was he?

Then, outside the Jedi Temple, she felt him. Just the lightest of touches, a hand on her shoulder, but it was enough. A reminder that she had everything she needed around her, in her crew and her rebellion and inside of herself. And he hadn’t broken his word.

He always came back.

And she always kept going.

(Bonus below the cut)

“Jacen?” Hera called from the cargo hold of the Ghost. “Jacen!”

The ship remained silent around her.

“Zeb? Alex? Anyone in?”

She started to get suspicious. Yes, she was a little early, but school was long since finished. Her son was supposed to be ready and waiting for her to pick him up.

“Jacen? It’s time for shockball practise!” she called again. She was on the brink of heading further into the Ghost to find out why they weren’t listening to her when her ears caught a noise from outside.

“And then what happened? Were there more bandits?”

“No, even worse – pirates!”

She recognised the two voices carrying into the ship immediately. The excited, high-pitched one was Jacen, and the deeper voice was in the middle of a story. She turned to face the pair of them as they came up the ramp, schooling her face into a stern look. It was spoiled slightly as she had to look up – Jacen was sitting on his storyteller’s shoulders.

“Where have you been? You were supposed to be back an hour ago,” she scolded. “Jacen has shockball practise now!”

“And we’re back in time for it! We just wanted to go for a walk, that’s all.”

“Yeah, ‘ma, there’s still time, I just wanted to hear the story!” Jacen piped from his lofty perch.

She could feel her expression softening. They had come back in time, and they both looked so happy, eyes sparkling with the joy of their shared adventure.

“Well, come on and get ready,” she relented, letting the smile take over her face as they came in for a hug.

She should have known better. After all, Kanan always came back.

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lilxberry · 3 years

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Preference: How You Met (Girls)

GIF PREFERENCES

INCLUDES:

Cassie

Jules

Maddy

Kat

Lexi

Rue

_______________

Cassie:

You met through Lexi

You had a project for school to work on with Lexi and she had suggested to go over to hers.

So, one afternoon after school, you headed over to her house with your textbooks in your bag ready. You stepped towards their front door and knocked.

The door soon opened and there she stood, looking at you quizzically as you gaped at her, suddenly losing your voice.

“Can I help you?”

“I-I uhm, yeah. Hi, I’m here to do a-uh-a project with Lexi.”

“Okaaaayyyyyy...” She drawled out her response as she side-stepped to allow you in. “She’s upstairs.”

You flashed her a goofy smile, eliciting a soft giggle from her. “T-thanks. I’ll uh-I’ll see you around?” It came out as more of a question, causing the girl to release another giggle.

“Sure.”

_______________

Jules:

You met through your parents

Both your dads’, David and Y/D/N, work together. David Vaughn was the new employee at your dads work place. They hit it off fairly quickly, becoming really good friends. Once they found out that their kids were the same age AND attend the same school, they agreed to having dinner one night.

There was a knock at the door, your mother shouted for your father to go answer. You quickly glance down at your outfit, ensuring nothing looks odd or out of place, then soon exited your room to head downstairs.

“Y/N! This is Mr. Vaughn and his daughter...I’m sorry sweetie, what was your name again?” Your mother spoke in a sweet tone.

“Jules.” She answered your mother, giving her a tight lipped smile, clearly uncomfortable in this situation.

“Jules,” your mother repeats softly, offering the girl a comforting smile, which seemed to have worked a little.

“Uh-hey, I’m Y/N.” You smile as you offer your hand to David, trying to be polite towards the guests within your home, although, all you’ve done is keep your eyes laid upon his daughter.

Jules seemed to return your lingering stare with multiple glance at you of her own.

Throughout dinner with the Vaughns, you and Jules let your gaze fall on to each other often through out the night, ignoring the adults' conversations. But alas, the night ended and Jules and her father had to head home.

“Hey, I’ll see you in school, yeah?” Jules asked hopefully, a smile playing at her lips, as you two stood by your front door.

“Uh-ye-yeah, definitely.” Y/N replied all to eagerly. Jules sent you a beaming smile and started walking backwards towards her dads car, giving you a small wave as she walked.

You sent her a smile of your own before closing the door and leaning your forehead against the wooden material.

_______________

Maddy:

You met in the cafeteria

You were enjoying your lunch in the cafeteria, midway into your sandwich, sat next to Ethan and Kat when music started to play. You looked at Kat with a confused expression as cheering erupted around you.

Then you noticed the cheerleaders gather at the bottom of the stairs, starting their routine. You placed your sandwich back down and turned your body, focusing your attention on solely on the girls in the blue and white cheer uniform.

She caught your eye almost instantly as you raked your eyes over the group of girls. The way her body moved as she preformed their choreography perfectly.

Her eyes shifted through the crowd, basking in their reaction to the show they were putting on when her eyes met yours. Those E/C irises.

She pursed her lips and pushed out her chest more. She wanted you to notice her and she knew she was doing a good job at keeping your attention at your eyes burnt holes into her figure.

_______________

As soon as their routine showcase finished, she headed straight towards you, inwardly smirking when she seen your reaction to her doing so.

Once she reached your table, she leant over into you, purposely brushing her chest up against your arm. She grabs your phone that was previously layed face down on the table and held it out for you.

You looks at her quizzically and she rolled her eyes. “Unlock it.”

You hesitantly retrieved your phone from her grasp and did as you were told. She quickly swiped the phone back into her possession, adding her number to your contacts then handing it back to you, its rightful owner. “Here. Call me.”

And with that, she walked away, leaving you dumb founded next to a snickering Kat and Ethan.

_______________

Kat:

You met online

You were scrolling through Facebook on your phone when suddenly, a familiar face showed up under your ‘suggested friends’.

You recognised her from around school. She usually hung around people like Perez, Howard and BB whilst you prefered to stick to yourself, occasionally opting to chat with Rue, Jules or the Mckay twins, Roy and Troy.

After a small debate with yourself, you decided to tap the ‘Add Friend’ button. Without any further thought on the matter, you locked your phone and continued watching the movie playing on your laptop in bed.

_______________

Not even 5 minutes later, you had a 2 notifications shine light up your phone screen.

‘Kat Hernandez has accepted your friend request’.

‘Message from Kat Hernandez’.

You unlocked your phone and click on her message.

‘Hey’

Almost too quickly, you typed out a reply.

‘Hey’

‘You go to East Highland, right?’

‘Yeah’

‘I thought I recognised you lmao’

Throughout the night, you talked to each other. You got to know each other with each question asked and learnt about each others humour as you shared memes between you. By 7am, you were both drifting into sleep as you talked.

‘It’s a good thing we don’t have school today x’

‘Too right. I wouldn’t know where tf I’m going lmao x’

‘lol. Ain’t you tired?? x’

‘A little, yeah but I don’t want to stop talking to you x’

‘I don’t wanna stop either but we can talk later after we’ve gotten some sleep?? If that’s ok with you?? x’

‘More than ok :) x’

‘Cool, talk later x’

‘Byeeeee x’

After that, you and Kat started to talk more during school and the rest is history.

_______________

Lexi:

You met in class

You walked into your communications class expecting to sit in your regular seat like usual. But upon further inspection, you realised some random asshat jacked your place.

Internally groaning, your eyes scanned the room for free seats. Then you noticed her.

You walked over to her and simply motioned towards the chair whilst gripping your back packs strap tighter. “You mind?”

She shook her head and smiled at you in response. You flung your bag off of your shoulder and placed in on to the floor near your feet as you sat down and leant back in the chair.

“I’m Lexi.”

“Hey. I’m Y/N.”

She giggled. “I know, you usually sit in the back.”

You nodded in acknowledgement, sending her a small smile. Before you could continue the conversation further, the teacher entered and class began.

_______________

“So, what if there were five birds in a row and I decided to shoot one. How many is there left?” The teacher asked. She said that using peoples answers to certain questions can help understand how ones’ mind works, hence the dumb-ass question.

“None, they would have all flown away.” You replied, casually leant back in your chair, arms folded over your chest, Lexi beside you watching, as is everyone else.

“The answer would be 4 if you look at it from a mathematical stand point, but I like the way you think none the less.”

Your eyes narrow slightly as a hint of mischief flashes across your face. You reapply a serious expression before stating “Miss, I have a question for you?”

The teacher smiled sweetly at her, leaning back on to her desk at the front of the class, hands clasped together in front of her. “Sure.”

“There’s three women sat at a bus stop eating ice cream. One’s licking, one’s biting and one’s sucking. Which is married?” Your mouth twists into a smirk as her face falls slightly and the other students in the class snicker.

Lexi seemed to find this amusing. Exactly what you wanted.

The teacher shifted slightly, fumbling with her fingers as she hesitantly answers. “The one sucking.”

“The answer would be the one wearing the wedding ring if you look at it from a logical stand point, but I like the way you think none the less, Miss.”

Laughter erupts from the students. “Alright, settle down. Another “question” from you, Y/LN/, and you can take yourself to Principal Hayes office.

You raise your hands in front of you, feigning surrender. From the corner of you eye, you see Lexi trying to contain her giggles and it makes you smile triumphantly.

Suddenly, something bumps your left knee, enticing you to look at Lexi. She slides over a bit of scrap paper she scrawled on towards you.

‘Wanna sit together at lunch?’

You nod in reply then turn your focus back to the teacher. In your peripheral vision, you see Lexi sporting a small smile and a light pink tinge on her cheeks.

_______________

Rue:

You met in rehab

“Marissa! Baby! What’s up with you today, beautiful.” The young rehab worker rolled her eyes at your routine flirtations.

You had just woken up to another day in the centre and your favourite pass time was to annoy any and all staff ‘cause, let’s face it, you’re an asshole.

“Good morning to you too, Y/N.”

“So, what’s on the agenda today?”

Before Marissa got the chance to dignify you with a response, the doors at the end of the hall swung open, drawing your attention to them, as they revealed the new girl in a maroon jacket walking beside Dr. Jowett.

“Who is that?” You asked slowly, not removing your eyes from the girl.

Marissa, yet again, rolled her eyes at your antics. “That’s Rue, she’s a new resident. And before you even try anything, you know any form of relationship past friends is against the rules.”

“Hey! Who said I was gonna try get in her pants? Is this the result of jealousy? Did I make you jealous, Mari?” You smirked as the young girl snorted whilst shaking her head.

“You wish, Y/L/N.”

“Oh, I definitely do.” You waggled your eyebrows towards her before leaving to sit in the communal room.

As you sat at the table, you noticed the doctor and, who you now know is called Rue, stop at the entrance of the room. You watched closely as she hesitantly walked into and across the room, opting to sit alone at one of the many tables.

After no debate needed, you got up from where you sat and walked confidently over and perched yourself into the chair beside her, resting your one foot on the table and an arm over the back of the chair.

“So, newbie, how you finding the mainland of sobriety?”

She shrugged in response whilst keeping her gaze trained on you.

“Don’t worry, you can say it sucks if you want, I won’t tell.” You winked at Rue and she allowed a small smile to appear on her face. “I’m Y/N, obviously the coolest person in this place.”

“I’m Rue.”

“Oh, I know.” You smirked as you drank in her expression. “I think we’re gonna get along just dandy, Rue.”

Her face flushes a light pink as her smile conveys a soft of sweetness, very different to Marissa. There may be rules against relationships in this place but...

When have you ever listened to what people tell you?

_______________

First preference AND piece of work on Euphoria

Two in one baby!!

I honestly had a bit too much fun with these, even if the end result is kinda shitty

Although, I like some of the scenarios so much, I’m thinking of doing longer fics like imagines or one shots extending from them like the rehab one for Rue

Anyways, I hope you enjoy. Like if ya do as it will help it reach more reader

As always, constructive criticism and requests are welcomes and greatly appreciated :D

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lanawinters-ily · 3 years

Text

In life & beyond

Mildred is constantly plagued with nightmares, & Gwendolyn knows just how to sooth her. What if the roles were reversed?

Pairing: Mildred Ratched x Gwendolyn Briggs

Word count: 1500

Warnings: nightmares, mention of death & funerals, slight mention of PTSD

Mildred had nightmares every night. Gwendolyn supposed this was to be expected, given the multitude of traumas the nurse had gone through in her life - from her childhood, her brother, the war; yet it still didn’t make each one any easier for the both of them. A little piece of Gwen’s heart seemed to break off each time she would wake to the sound of Mildred’s piercing screams & anxious cries, despair shuddering through her as she cradled her girlfriend; not just for the woman in her arms, but for the little girl who had such a merciless start in life. Gwendolyn would never admit to Mildred just how much of a toll these nights would take on her, she was meant to be the rock; if not then Mildred Ratched’s crumbling walls would simply disintegrate.

This night was a particularly bad one, Mildred had slipped into an unadulterated state of terror, not recognising where she was or who was by her. All Gwendolyn could do was rock her torture-plagued girlfriend in hopes that she would find a way out of her fog of trauma & back to their bedroom. The blonde shook with her own sobs at the impossibility of their situation, worry that she could ever be parted from Mildred taking over, as it seemed to almost every minute of the day. Her cancer diagnosis had been an explosive revelation, especially when both women had started their life together; dependency becoming a magnet in their relationship. They were pure soulmates that couldn’t bear to be parted. Threat of separation caused an ache in Gwen’s chest that was far more painful than any chemotherapy she could ever receive.

This hypothetical heartbreak raced through Gwendolyn’s mind long after Mildred had passed out from exhaustion in her embrace, never leaving even when she too succumbed to a fitful sleep...

- - - - -

Gwendolyn awoke in a strange looking field, surroundings blurry & disorientating. She blinked away the sleep-deprived mist from her eyes & looked around to try to gage her environment. There were a lot of stones, all uniform & in varying shades of grey & white, with messages & carvings into them. Gravestones. She was in the middle of a cemetery. Just as Gwen had identified this, a new sense swam into her view; voices coming near from a group of people all dressed in black, seemingly at a funeral.

As they approached close to where Gwendolyn was standing, she noticed there was one lone figure in front of the pack, with their head down & a black veil shrouding their face, reminiscent of the Grim Reaper in a way. Drawing her out of her fixation on this individual, the blonde notices a hole has appeared at her feet, with some sort of coffin in it. Gwendolyn now felt uncomfortable, not wanting to disturb the grief-stricken group, & there seemed to be a pit of unease in her stomach, growing by the second like a sinkhole.

This strange feeling only grew into a gaping ravine when she looked up as the veiled women removed her covering to wipe at her face, her hair appearing as a red shade. It was a colour that held such comfort for Gwendolyn after hours of stroking through Mildred’s coppery locks in a way that soothed both women, so the breath she had been holding in instinctual anxiety was released.

Her strange sense of calm was fleeting though, as the veil was pushed out of the way of the woman’s face, Gwen could see that it was in fact Mildred. This was not Gwendolyn’s girlfriend however, as her face was drained of all the colour & life that had been fed into her since they had met. The nurse was trembling with weak knees, tears creeping gently down her face as if they were afraid that one rapid movement would send the broken women into a violent outburst of grief. She looked like a little girl, as if the trauma from her past had finally caught up to her in the cruel race of Mildred Ratched’s life, pulling her back to a child-like state that she was never allowed to enter in early life.

Gwendolyn was dumbstruck for a second at the thought of her love in such agony, before launching towards the red-head in attempts to comfort & bring back her Mildred again. She took her girlfriend’s cold hands in her own, stroking them gently with soothing circles whilst whispering grounding words into her ear to bring Mildred back to her as she did often. There was something off this time though, as Mildred seemed to be quite aware of her surroundings, except for Gwendolyn in front of her. This was not a normal PTSD-fuelled flashback response, as Mildred just kept repeating “Gwen, oh Gwen” over & over, her sobs increasing by the minute as her gaze fixated on the hole in the ground. Gwendolyn felt as if Mildred was looking through her, as if she was transparent in a ghostly way & it sent a chill through her spine. Could her soulmate feel her there at all?

Curiosity now flooded through the blonde as she realised that she didn’t actually know why she was here, what was causing Mildred to drift away, & who’s funeral she had effectively gate-crashed. It seemed that as she was unsuccessfully comforting her girlfriend, a gravestone had appeared by the covered-up hole, enshrined in her favourite white freesias. Strange, she thought to herself in a pensive manner.

Suddenly, the discovery hit her as the blurred name on the stone came into focus, as if a blind person had been made to see for the first time ever. The grave read her name – Gwendolyn Briggs. The realisation crushed her like a tonne of bricks as she looked around, the blank faces around her morphing into her mother, her family, her friends. In a state of desperation, she waved her hand in front of Mildred’s tear-covered face, shouting “Millie, Millie, I’m here, I’m here! Please listen to me,” over & over until her lungs seemed to tighten unbearably, bags of oxygen shrinking inside of her until she couldn’t breathe. An invisible force seemed to tug Gwen down to the earth like a puppet on a string, down into the hole that had reopened, down into the coffin below the ground.

“No, no please Mildred, please; I’m not leaving you, please,” she shrieked & pleaded, but the earth would not obey her cries, & buried Gwendolyn deep under the grass until all the oxygen was stolen from her body.

- - - - -

“Gwen? Gwendolyn, can you hear me?”, echoed in the mind of the blonde as she shot up in her bed, breathing rapidly as the distant voice of her lost love replayed in her head, like a memory of a past life. Gwendolyn was in a delirious state as she searched her appearing surroundings once again desperately for answers, as the room revealed itself to her. It was their room in Mexico, bright sunlight peeking through closed shutters & waves crashing ever so lightly in the distance; familiarity grounding the woman back to her body as the numb feeling dissipated. There were arms around her, soft & warm, stroking her back in gentle motions, smooth & recognizable. A voice carefully broke through Gwen’s blurred consciousness: “Gwendolyn, it’s Mildred. Where are we?”. The simple question puzzled the woman as she muttered “Bedroom” in a plain, monosyllabic tone, but then the epiphany of the sentence broke her hazed trance.

“Mildred? Oh, Mildred”, Gwendolyn broke down into gasping cries as she threw herself into the chest of her love, panting from the force of her emotions. “Gwen, sweetheart. I need you to take a breath for me, can you do that? Nice & slow, well done my love,” Mildred praised as she placed her girlfriends trembling hand onto her steady chest to encourage Gwendolyn’s deep breaths, arms wrapped around her. Mildred was aghast by this outburst, clinging onto Gwen; the role reversal making anxiety churn into her own stomach as she rocked them both gently until Gwendolyn’s sobs had turned into occasional shudders.

“Millie?,” Gwendolyn questioned shakily as Mildred smiled at the utterance of the familiar name; “You know I’ll never leave you alone, right?”. The red-head frowned slightly at her lover’s insecure tone, but then quickly morphed into a reassured aura of contentment as she remembered the way they were both thriving in their united lives in Mexico.

“Oh my Gwen, I could never be parted from you. You are my rock, & I am yours, forever”. Gwendolyn looked up, peering into Mildred’s warm, chocolate eyes & a domestic calmness overtook her fearful frame of mind.

And so, they held each other’s hands & entered a peaceful slumber together, intertwined intimately, soulmates dancing upon a cloud of fulfilment. They belonged to each other now, in life & beyond.

Taglist: @ka-s @ninaahs @stayeviildarling @babypocahontas @lilypadscoven @winters-witch-bitch @basicasshole @bottom4delia @forevercountess @violentwavesofem0tion @sporadicsupercorpquotesmonger @liberosisaspire @mellowalieneggsknight @thecasualgeek1 @lucykilljoy

#mildolyn #mildred ratched #gwendolyn briggs #ratched #sarah paulson #cynthia nixon

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barbers-glimmerin-darlin · 3 years

Text

At The Touch Of Your Hand

Charlie Barber x (Female) Reader (Historical AU)

As a young woman whose entire life has already been mapped out for her, you believed there was very little to look forward to as you entered the ballroom. It was just another ball, during another season, with the same foppish men shallowly vying for attention. However things are bound to take a turn for the unexpected when Charles Barber makes his re-entrance to society after six years in obscurity.

Chapter 3

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2

Warnings: Period typical sexism, historical inaccuracies

Word count: 2.9k

“I’ll not be listening to any more of your incessant griping tonight Judith.” Your father’s voice was firm and unwavering, his distaste for his wife’s unending list of complaints evidently getting the better of him.

“You cannot possibly think him to be an agreeable man Edward! Not after he-”

“Enough Judith!”

Your mother’s mouth bubbled open and closed as if she were impersonating some incredibly affronted fish, it was very rare that father would plainly tell mama he had tired of listening to her whining. You swapped a furtive glance with Jemima, the tension spiking to a palpable degree, your mind instantly began scrambling to fill in the gaping hole left in your mothers remark.

After he what? What could he have done, this enigmatic man, whom you had never heard of before this night, to have warranted such obvious distaste from your mother? You could not help but feel that whatever it was should be much cause for concern, if it meant that your mother was unwilling to host him. Judith Bell would usually be seen falling over herself for the opportunity to have such a man welcomed to dinner, an impressive man, titled.

Before your racing mind had the chance to create a whole plethora of beastly scenarios to cast this man in, along came one of the very few things in the world that made you want to disable all intelligent brain function in your mind.

Hartley.

You regrettably saw him approach you over your father’s shoulder, straightening his gloves and smoothing his flaccid hair as he neared. Every last cell in your body heaved a long groan at the sight of him, so bland, so thoroughly unimpressive, truly he was an unremarkable sight to behold. In no time at all, he stood proudly before you.

“Miss Bell, I believe the first waltz is almost afoot.” He declared. You saw your mother’s previously enraged face fracture into an unbearably bright beam at his appearance, all distaste for Lord Barber’s presence seemingly forgotten.

You flashed a tight smile as he held out his gloved hand for you to take. You accepted, placing your hand in his with the lightest tough you could manage, as if placing your hand solidly within his pudgy one would solidify your future with him. Unfortunately you feared that there was very little you could do to escape that.

He led you briskly onto the dancefloor, amongst the sea of brightly coloured silk taffeta frocks, and then proceeded to draw you into a hold appropriate for a waltz. It was far too intimate for you, even though his hands were in no danger of straying, you would have much preferred a livelier jig that required much changing of partners.

As the rhythmic arrangement of the waltz began to fill the room, you willed your feet to move in a reasonably graceful fashion, it’s not that you were a bad dancer, you were just much better when paired with a partner you actually wanted to dance with. Robert was a long way from fitting that criteria.

You could not help but note the hotness of his hand upon your shoulder, and you guessed it would probably be sweaty if he were to take that glove off, you repressed a shudder at the thought of his slimy hand upon your skin. Sweaty hands were indicative of nerves, what on earth could he be nervous about? If he could not struggle his way through a meagre waltz without being overcome with nerves, what chance did he have of upholding one end of a fiery debate, or withstand a passionate feeling about anything?

You allowed your eyes and mind to wander as you twirled about the dancefloor, you spotted a few familiar faces in the crowd, many of your mother’s acquaintances gathered to watch their own daughters on the dancefloor, your mother was no exception. She watched you with beady eyes, looking for mistakes in your footing or your posture, clutching her dainty glass of sherry in her clawed fingers.

You were vaguely aware of Robert droning on about a business venture his father was allowing him to head, something pertaining a new weaving technique for linen, you really did not care to give much attention to it, you occasionally emitted a noise of agreement to create the illusion of engagement.

As you rounded the dancefloor once again, your eyes swept over a broad form that was becoming undeniably familiar all too quickly. Charles stood a little way back from the dancefloor, conversing with a stout man who you recognised as the host of the ball, Lord Harrington. Although upon closer inspection, you were forced to reconsider your observation that he was participating in conversation. It appeared that he was being talked at rather than talked to, his attention otherwise much diverted, much like yours. His glittering eyes were very much fixed on the couples dancing before him.

Unbeknownst to you, his eyes were not travelling aimlessly amongst the group of merry dancers, his gaze was solely tracking you. He watched as the buttery yellow light shimmered upon the lavender fabric of your gown, sparkled through your hair, and highlighted the barely exposed curve of your shoulders. He drank this in all without your knowledge, your attention far too occupied with ensuring Hartley did not step on your silk slippered feet. What an enchanting little creature he saw twirling before him.

“Did I see Lord Barber making conversation with your father earlier?” You were forced to tune back into Hartley’s voice as he spoke directly to you, stopping your eyes from repeatedly searching out the towering height of Barber,

“Yes, I believe he knows my father.” You replied flatly, not really eager to discuss the man with Robert. For reasons you couldn’t quite explain, Charles had begun to feel rather sacred to you.

“I’m interested in making his acquaintance myself while he’s in town, quite the recluse he’s been for the past five years or so from what I understand.” Robert remarked, this did admittedly capture your interest. Why would a man like him have hidden himself away from society, other than the obvious fact that it was a dreadful environment, it was practically created for powerful men like him.

“I confess I was unaware of his existence until tonight.” You offered blandly, while you were tempted to probe Hartley for more information, you found his predisposition for gossiping more repellent that intriguing.

“People don’t talk about him much anymore. Though what I have heard them say is undoubtedly interesting, I’m sure his reappearance tonight will be the talk of the town by tomorrow breakfast.” Robert’s sentence was punctuated by a ridiculously salacious chuckle at the end, which made you long to put more distance between your bodies.

“Undoubtedly, people do little else but talk the day after a ball.” You deadpanned, avoiding eye contact with his misty eyes.

“Although I dare say there ought to be rather a lot of talk of just how ravishing you look in this gown.” Your stomach dropped at his words, spoken in a voice that he had forced down into a lower octave. You flicked your eyes up to his, only to find him inconspicuously allowing himself a good look at your chest. You swallowed back the tart response that your brain formulated, much in favour of finishing the dance as quickly as possible. You settled on a lifeless little laugh.

As soon as the band began to cease their performance you delicately pushed yourself out of his hold, and lowered into a quick curtsy.

“Thank you for the dance Mr Hartley, it was quite… satisfactory.” And without waiting for his response you turned on your heel and began to hasten away, in search of Jemima. You were eager to tell her in agonising detail how utterly lecherous he had been. But you didn’t even make it off of the dancefloor before a broad chest blocked your path. Your eyes were obscured by a wall of icy blue and white, and you didn’t even really need to glance upwards to confirm the identity of the individual.

The scent of fresh mint and fragrant pine greeted your senses, cleansing them of the heavy musky smell, with an undercurrent of body odour that you had endured with Hartley moments before. You refrained from indulging in a deep inhale as you summoned the courage to raise your eyes towards his face.

Charles Barber’s smirking face.

“In a rush, Miss Bell?” He asked, his honeyed voice vibrated through the air, breathing against your ears like a summer wind. You momentarily forgot every word you had learned since infancy, and struggled for a response.

“No I- I mean yes I was just- I’m not in a rush per say I just-”

“Were making a fleeting exit from your partner over there?” He stopped your aimless flailing with his words, allowing his full lips to quirk even further into an amused smirk. You felt your cheeks warming rapidly.

“I was just in search of my sister.” You replied, unsure if it was proper to admit that you were, in fact, shamelessly fleeing Hartley.

“Well, by the looks of things, he will presently approach and ask you for another dance. Allow me to be so bold as to assume that you would like to avoid such an occurrence.” Charles remarked, quickly glancing over your head to where you assumed he could see Robert.

“I would be reluctant to dance with him again so soon.” You said quietly, unsure of his next assumption.

“Well in that case, would you do me the honour of the next dance, Miss Bell?” Your heart gave itself to flittering beats as you absorbed his words. You could hardly fathom the idea of sharing a dining table with him, and you were being offered a dance? The pristine white glove upon his expansive hand moved into your line of sight as he offered his hand to you. You could not help but raise your eyes to his, though you promptly wish you hadn’t when you were met with the scorching intensity of his gaze. It was fight or flight really.

“Yes my lord, I would be honoured.” You replied, placing your hand firmly in his.

The experience of being led into a dance by Charles Barber was worlds away from that of the artless movements of Hartley. You knew that much.

You stood facing each other, as part of a long line of men and women standing parallel to one another along the centre of the marble floor, you could not help but notice that he was the tallest in the line by a considerable amount. Your heart was racing as you heard the shaking violin strike up the opening measures of the dance. The line of ladies ducked into graceful curtsy, directed at the men before them, and then the dance fell into an elegant sequence of turns and fleeting touches of hands.

It was not two measures into the dance that Barber clearly felt that he was in rhythm enough to begin to talk to you as you moved around each other, and the other occupants of the dancefloor.

“Are you enjoying the evening?” He asked as you passed close by one another, his eyes firmly fixed upon yours, paying no mind to his feet or the people around him, though his body continued to move with a grace and ease you would have thought impossible for a man of his stature.

“Very much so, Lord and Lady Harrington do always host the most beautiful parties.” You replied politely, though it was untrue that your night had been pleasant up until this point, the unfamiliar feelings fluttering about your stomach presently were enough to erase all memory of the previous encounters from your mind.

“I agree with you wholeheartedly Miss, though I might add that I think Lord Harrington has very little to do with the festivities you see around you. I believe it is fair to say that Lady Harrington is the brains of the operation.” He concurred, his face breaking into a smile, one you might call mischievous if you were so inclined to such flirtatious words. You could not stifle the laugh that escaped at his remark towards the esteemed Lord Harrington.

“Are you well acquainted with the hosts, my lord?” You asked him, the smile laid upon your face beginning to ache slightly, though you could not for the life of you force it down. You gasped silently as your hands entwined, as he led you side by side down the line formed by the other couples, as part of your dance.

“Old friends of my late father’s.” He explained, looking sideways at you. His hand dwarfed yours, it warmed his glove in a way that was so different to the sticky heat of Hartley’s hand. You found yourself wishing that there were no gloves separating your hands from touching skin to skin. A tingling sensation began in the palm of your hand, still held in his, and worked its way to the tips of your fingers and up your arm. In that moment, you decided the touch of his hand was something quite inexplicably magical.

“And you, Lord Barber? Are you enjoying yourself?” You asked, longing to hear the velvet of his voice again. He smiled down at you warmly, sending the tingles from your hand all over your body.

“I am enjoying the evening far more than I anticipated, it has been pleasant to see old friends.” He started, his eyes moved swiftly once up and down the length of you, never hesitating anywhere for too long. As he met your eyes again, his smile curled into a smaller one, far more intimate, meant only for you. “It has been even lovelier making new acquaintances, which is not something I usually find myself able to say.” He tells you.

Your mind raced to stumble through the meanings in his well measured words. Did he mean meeting you? Part of you screamed that he must mean that, why else would he have bothered to make such a point of saying it to you? A larger part reasoned that he had undoubtedly met many new people tonight, and why in this vast room full of people would he single you out as a lovely new acquaintance?

All too soon it was time for your hands to part once again, you already missed his large warm palm and it hadn’t even left yours yet. As he opened his fingers to loosen his grasp on your hand, and pulled his palm away from yours, your eyes widened as you felt the tip of his middle finger trace a burning line across your palm as he slipped his hand away from yours. A shiver shot down the length of your spine at the sensation, which you had felt so keenly despite the presence of your silk glove.

Another glance towards his regal face showed you that his smile had faded, melted into a look of deep concentration. The chocolate of his eyes had darkened, the light sparkled in the depths of them. So many thoughts were rushing through them, but you couldn’t comprehend a single one of them, your own brain was still trying to make sense of the litany of feelings coursing through you from the mere brush of the tip of his finger along your palm.

It was a wonder you had managed to complete the dance without bumping into a single other occupant of the dancefloor, as you had quite forgotten that you were sharing the space with anyone else at all besides him. You could scarcely remember a time before you found yourself cradled in his gaze, you could not remember what your hand had felt like before it had been encased by his. It was only the end of the melody that brought the end of the dance to your awareness, you found yourself short of breath, though you were absolutely certain it had nothing to do with the steps of the dance.

You bowed to each other once again, as was customary, and then he went a step further by enclosing your hand in his. He lifted your slightly quaking hand up towards his face, and you held your breath as his warm lips pressed down gently upon your glove. Had you not have held your breath, you were quite certain he would have robbed you of it. The impression of his lips seemed to burn your knuckles in a delightful way, in a way that made you yearn to tear the white silk from your body and request that he press his lips to your bare skin. You couldn’t correct the way your own lips parted slightly, something which he seemed to note as his eyes roamed your face as he straightened back up to his full height, allowing your hand to fall back to your side.

“Thank you for the dance Miss Bell, it was quite… enchanting.” He spoke softly, caressing your face with his eyes for a moment longer before inclining his head, turning, and leaving the space, your eyes were stuck to his wide shoulders as he left. You were pulled out of your little world, where you and he were the only inhabitants, by Jemima’s voice suddenly at your ear.

“Just to warn you, sister dear, mama is quite enraged.”

Tags: @millenialcatlady @safarigirlsp @mariesackler @direnightshade @sacklerscumrag @stumbleonmywords @fizzywoohoo @hopeamarsu @roanniom @kylobien (Please let me know if you would like adding or removing!)

#Charlie Barber #Marriage Story #Charlie Barber x Reader #Historical AU #ATTOYH #ADCU #Adam Driver

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amphtaminedreams · 4 years

Text

J.K Rowling & The Echo Chamber of TERFs: Why Nobody Wants your Transphobic “Opinion”

TW// Discussion of Sexual Assault and Transphobia

SO...

I’ve seen the term “allyship fatigue” going round a lot lately on Twitter, since the issues of police brutality, institutional racism, and now transphobia have taken central stage.

And it’s weird. To be honest, hearing other white cis people calling themselves “allies” has always sounded kinda self-congratulatory. Taking this to the level of martyrdom that the phrase “allyship fatigue” evokes makes me want to heave. It’s shit that anyone even has to be saying Black Lives STILL Matter, but it does seem to unfortunately be the case that every time there is a highly publicised murder of a black individual by police, the explosion of us white people calling ourselves allies and retweeting and reblogging statements of solidarity only lasts so long before half revert back to being complacent with and uncritical of a world seeped with casual racism. Is that what “allyship fatigue” is? The excuse for that? Not only does the term take the focus off of the marginalised group the movement is centred around but it makes supporting equal rights sound like some kind of heroic burden we’ve chosen to take on rather than addressing a debt we owe and being not even good but just plain decent human beings. WE are not the ones shouldering the weight here, and if your mental health is suffering, that is not the fault of the people asking for their rights. Log off. We have the privilege to do that. It just doesn’t need to be a spectacle.

At the same time, this public onslaught of ignorance and hatred that the coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement has triggered (that let me again emphasise, black people have had to involuntarily be on the receiving end of their whole lives) and the frustration and anger that comes from seeing these absolute trash takes from people with no research into the subject who build their argument purely on “what about”isms is do-I-even-want-to-bring-children-into-this-fucking-world levels of miserable. In terms of earth beginning to look more and more like the prequel describing the events which lead up to a dystopian novel, the chaos of the last 4 weeks or so (2020 has not only shattered the illusion of time but also danced on the shards, I know) is the tip of the iceberg. I saw a thread about what’s going on in Yemen at the moment, which I had no idea about, and immediately felt consumed by guilt that I didn’t know. With the advent of social media, there’s been this sudden evolutionary shift where we’re almost required and expected to know about, have an opinion on, and be empathetic with every humanitarian crisis at once. I think young people feel this especially, which is why I say that sometimes it’s worth talking to an older person before you brush them off as a racist or a homophobe and see if they’re open to hearing different opinions-in general, I think we’re a generation that is used to being expected to consume a huge amount of information at once. They are not. For a lot (NOT all) of the older, middle-class, white population, ignorance isn’t a conscious choice, it is the natural way of life. The parameters of empathy until very recently have only had to extend just past your closest circle of friends to encompass people you “relate to”. That doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of caring about other things, and sometimes we owe them a chance to change their perspective first, if for no reason other than to advance the cause of, well, basic human rights for all.

So where does J.K Rowling come into all this? I hear you ask. Why doesn’t she just stop rambling? You potentially wonder. Well, I’m getting to it.

J.K Rowling isn’t an unconsciously ignorant people. She is what I would call consciously ignorant. And of all weeks to flaunt this ignorance, she chose a time when people are already drowning in a cesspit of hatred. The woman whose whole book series supposedly revolves around the battle between good and evil didn’t even try to drain the swamp. She instead added a bucket of her transphobic vitriol into it.

Let me preface this by saying that I wouldn’t wipe my arse with the Sun. What they did with the statement she made regarding her previous abusive relationship, seeking out said abusive partner for an interview and putting it on the front page with the headline “I slapped J.K”, whilst expected from the bunch of cretinous bottom feeders who work there, is disgusting. That being said, the pattern of behaviour J.K Rowling has exhibited since she first became an online presence is equally disgusting, and just because the Sun have been their usual shithead selves, doesn’t mean we should forget the issue at hand, that issue being her ongoing transphobia and erasure of trans women from women’s rights.

As I’m sure is the case for many people on Tumblr, J.K Rowling has always been such a huge inspiration for me, and Harry Potter was my entire childhood. My obsession with it continued until I was at least 16 and is what got me through the very shit years of being a teenager, and that will forever be the case. I’m not here to discuss the whole separation of the art from the artist thing because whilst I ordinarily don’t think that’s really possible, at this point the “Harry Potter universe” has become much bigger than J.K herself. I was so pleased to see Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint all affirm their support for trans rights-I was raised on the films up until the 4th one which I wasn’t old enough to see at the cinema, and the DVD was at the top of my Christmas list. They were always my Harry, Hermione and Ron. It was only between the fourth and fifth films that I started to read the books to fill that gaping in-between-movies hole, but as I grew up, I read them over and over and over again. Any of the subtext that people are talking about now in light of her antisemitism and transphobia went completely over my head, though who knows, whilst I can sit here and write that I’m certain I didn’t, maybe I did pick up some unconscious biases along the way? The art/artist discussion is a complex one and I don’t know if I’ll ever read the books again at this point.

There was absolutely no subtext, however, in the “think piece” on J.K’s website addressing the response to her transphobic tweets. There wasn’t all that much to unpack in the first tirade, they were quite openly dismissive-first that womanhood is defined by whether or not one experiences menstruation (I currently don’t due to health issues but I’m betting this wouldn’t make me any less woman in her eyes), and second, regurgitating an article which furthers the fallacy that trans women simply existing erases the existence of cisgender lesbian women. Rowling’s initial response to the backlash was to blame it on a glass of red wine, I think? Which is such a weird go-to excuse for celebrities because not once have I ever got drunk and completely changed my belief system. If you’re not transphobic sober, you don’t suddenly become transphobic drunk. What you are saying is that you’re not usually publicly transphobic (which isn’t even the case with Rowling because this is hardly her first flirtation with bigotry via social media) but that whoopsies! You drank some wine and suddenly thought it was acceptable!

Now what is her excuse for the formal response she wrote to the backlash, dripping with transphobic dog whistles and straight up misinformation (UPDATE: and as of yesterday, blocking Stephen King quite literally for replying to her with the tweet “trans women are women”, in case you thought that this whole thing was a case of her intentions being misconstrued)? Drunk tweets are one thing but if she managed to write a whole fucking essay whilst pissed I imagine there’s a lot of university students out there who’d pay her good money to learn that skill.

Here is the bottom line. TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. There is no discussion around that. And if you don’t understand why, at the very least, you can be respectful of the way a person chooses to identify, especially when that person is an already targeted minority.

Obviously, sex and gender are complex things. Based on the fact that we don’t walk around with our nether-regions out, we generally navigate our way through the world using our gender and the way we present our gender. Gender of course means many different things to many different people; some see it as a sliding scale kind of thing whereas some people can’t see themselves on the scale at all, and choose to use terms other than man or woman to express how they identify. But, whatever gender one chooses to identify as, we live in a modern world-with all the scientific advancements we’ve made and all that we now know about the brain, using what is between people’s legs to define them is an ignorant, outdated copout. You’ll find that a lot of transphobes can live in harmony with trans women who conform, who have classically feminine features, maybe facial feminisation surgery, trans women who keep quiet about how they’re seen by cis women and don’t kick up “too much of a fuss” (which is in itself still a perfectly valid, brave and understandable way to live your life after years of feeling like you don’t fit in btw). The trans women that Joanne and her friends take the most issue with is the ones who want to expand what womanhood means and stretch the boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable, destroying the confines of simplistic model that TERFs feel comfortable operating within. The ones who fight to be recognised as no “lesser” than cis women. Calling a person a TERF is quite literally just asserting that they are someone who wants to exclude trans women from their definition of womanhood, or in other words wants to cling to the old, obsolete model. If J.K Rowling cannot let the statement “trans women are women” go unchallenged (which we’ve seen from her response to Stephen King’s tweet she cannot), then she is by definition a TERF. It’s not a slur. It’s a descriptor indicating the movement she has chosen to associate herself with. Associating the descriptor of the position you so vehemently refuse to denounce in spite of all evidence and information offered to you with the concept of a “witch hunt” when trans women are ACTUALLY brutally murdered for an innate part of their identity is insulting, at the very least.

Let’s get this straight: despite transphobes trying to conflate sex with gender and arguing that sex is the only “real” identifier of the two, our existence on this planet and our perception of this world is a gendered experience. It is our brain, where the majority of researchers agree that gender lies, which decides and dictates not only who we are and how we feel but also how we interact with everyone around us. I don’t think it’s an outlandish statement to say that when it comes to who we are as people, that flesh machine protected by our skull is the key player. PSA for transphobes everywhere: when people say penises have a mind of their own, they are NOT talking literally. The more you know.

Gender is obviously a much newer concept than sex-it is both influenced by and interacts with every element of our lives. It’s also much more complex, in that there are still many gaps in our understanding. I assume these two factors combined with the familiarity of the (usually) binary model of biological sex are a part of why TERFS fundamentally reject the importance of gender in favour of the latter. Yes, most of the time, we feel our gender corresponds with our sex, but not always, and nor is there any concrete proof that this has to be the case. Most studies tend to agree that our brains start out as blank slates, that we grow into the gender we are assigned based on our bodies. In other words, our sex only defines our gender insofar as the historical assumption that they are the same thing, which in turn exposes us to certain cultural expectations. To any TERFs that have somehow ended up here-if you haven’t already, I suggest looking into the research of Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist whom has spent a large portion of her professional career analysing the data of sex differences in the brain. Whilst she originally set out to find some kind of consistent variance between the brains of the 2 prominent sexes to back up the idea that the brains of men and women are inherently different, she found nothing of significance-individual differences, yes, but no consistent similarities in the brains of one sex that were not present in the other. Once differences in brain size were accounted for, “well-known” sex differences in key structures disappeared-in terms of proportion, these structures take up the same amount of space in the brain regardless of sex. Her findings are best summed up by her response to the question: are there any significant differences in the brain based on sex alone? Her answer is no. To suggest otherwise is “neurofoolishness”. Not only does her research help put to bed the myth that our brains are sexed along with the rest of our bodies during development (this is now believed to happen separately, meaning the sex of our bodies and brains may not correspond), but also the idea propagated by the patriarchy for centuries that basically boils down to “boys will be boys”-a myth used to condone male sexual violence against women and even against each other on the basis that it is inherent and “can't be helped”. That they are just “built differently”. Maybe at one point in human evolution, men were conditioned to fight and women were conditioned to protect, but whilst the idea remains and continues to affect our societal structures (and thus said cultural expectations), we’ve moved on. I mean we evolved from fish for fuck’s sake but you don’t see us breathing underwater.

Gender identity is based on many things and admittedly we don’t fully have the complete picture yet. The effects that socialisation and gender norms in particular, as much as we don’t want them to exist, have on our brain are huge; there’s evidence that they can leave epigenetic marks, or in other words cause structural changes in the brain which drive biological functions and features as diverse as memory, development and disease susceptibility. Socialisation alters the way our individual brains develop as we grow up, and as much as I’d love to see gender norms disappear, they’ll probably be around for a long time to come, as will their ramifications. The gap between explaining how socialisation affects the brain of cisgender individuals compared to the brains of transgender or non-binary individuals is not yet totally clear, but as with every supposed cause and effect psychology tries to uncover, there are outliers and individual differences. No, brains are not inherently male or female at birth but they are all different, and can be affected by socialisation differently. In one particularly groundbreaking study conducted by Dick Swaab of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, postmortems of the brains of transgender women revealed that the structure of one of the areas in the brain most important to sexual behaviour more closely resembled the postmortem brains of cisgender women than those of cisgender men-it’s also important that these differences did not appear to be attributable to the influence of endogenous sex hormone fluctuations or hormone treatment in adulthood.

Maybe dysphoria is something that evolves organically and environmental factors don’t even come into it. Like I said, we don’t have the whole picture. What we DO know is that for some people, as soon as they become self-aware, that dysphoria is there, and the evidence for THAT, for there being common variations between the brains of cisgender individuals and transgender individuals, is overwhelming. You can be trapped in a body that does not correspond with how your brain functions, or how you wish to see yourself. Do individuals like J.K Rowling really believe it is ethical to reinforce the idea that we are defined by our sex and that our sex should decide the course of our lives, should decide how we are treated? That we should reduce people to genitals and chromosomes when our gender, the lens through which we see and interact with the world, could be completely different? Do they not see anything wrong with perpetuating the feelings of “otherness” and dysphoria in trans individuals that results from society’s refusal to see them as anything more than what body parts they have? In a collaboration between UCLA MA neuroscience student Jonathan Vanhoecke and Ivanka Savic at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the statistics collected pointed to what trans activists have always been trying to get at-the areas of the brain responsible for our sense of our identity showed far more neural activity in the brains of trans individuals when they were looking at depictions of their body that had been changed to match their gender identity than when this wasn’t the case; when they saw themselves with a body that corresponded with their gender identity, when they were “valid” by society’s definition, they felt more themselves. When J.K Rowling tells trans people that their “real identity” is the sex they were born with, she is denying them this right to be themselves and due to her large platform, encouraging others to do the same. YOU are doing that, J.K. And who knows why? Where does your transphobia come from? Peel back the bullshit layers of waffle about feeling silenced and threatened, which you know you are directing at the wrong group of people, and admit it’s for less noble reasons. Taking the time to unlearn the instinct embedded into your generation to see people according to the cultural status quo of biological determinism is effort, I know-but you wrote a 700+ page book. I’m sure you can manage it. Or is it an ego thing? You don’t want to admit that you may have been uneducated on gender and sex in the past, and now have to stick by your reductive position so your image as an “intellectual” isn’t compromised. I don’t know. Only you do. But your position is irresponsible and dangerous either way. You can make up bullshit reasons as to why the link between trans individuals and the incidence of suicide attempts and completions isn’t relevant or representative of the struggle that trans people face due to the hatred that people like you propagate but it is there, and you J.K Rowling, someone who has spoken in the past about the horror of depression, should know better. You should know better than to CLAIM you know better than the experienced researchers who have found the same pattern time and time again-that the likelihood of trans individuals committing suicide is significantly higher than that of cis people.

No, Rowling’s transphobia has never been as upfront as saying “I don’t believe transgender people exist” but she continues to imply that when she makes claims such as womanhood being defined by whether or not one experiences menstruation, and the completely subjective concept of whether an individual has faced sex-based violence from cisgender men. I’m sure she’d be out here taking chromosome proof cards like Oysters if it wasn’t for intersex individuals throwing her whole binary jam into a tailspin. Yep, there’s even suggestions that the binary biological model might not be so binary these days-just because two people have, say, XY chromosomes, does not mean that these chromosomes are genetically identical between individuals-the genes they carry can, and do, vary and so their actions and expressions of sex vary.

Ideally, what TERFs want to do with their language of “real womanhood” is create an exclusive club that trans women are left out of when they too suffer under the same patriarchal society that those who are born female do. Yes, they might not experience ALL the issues a person born with female genitalia do, but no two women’s life experiences are the same anyway. Trans women also have their own horrible experiences with the patriarchy, and are often victims of a specific kind of gendered violence that is purported by the idea of “real womanhood”. Don’t throw trans sisters under the bus because you’re angry about your experience as a woman on this planet-direct your anger at the fucking bus. Don’t claim that “many trans people regret their decision to transition” when the statistics overwhelmingly show that this is the EXACT FUCKING OPPOSITE of the truth (according to British charity organisation Mermaids, surgical regret is proportionately very low amongst gender affirmation outpatients and research suggesting otherwise has been broadly disproven) because you’ve spoken to a selective group of trans individuals probably handpicked by the TERFS you associate with to confirm their biases, and then have the nerve to claim that trans-activists live in echo chambers on top of that. Don’t use anecdotes and one-off incidences where “trans women” (I say trans women in quotation marks because we’re pretty much talking about a completely statistically insignificant group of perverted cis men who have, according to TERFs, somehow come to the conclusion that going through transition will make their already easy-to-get-away-with hobby of assaulting women even...easier to get away with?) have committed sexual crimes to demonise and paint as predatory group who are largely at risk and in 99.9% of situations, the ones being preyed on. It’s a point so disgusting that trans activists shouldn’t even have to respond to it, but the idea that an individual would go to the pains of legally changing their gender and potentially the hell of the harassment that trans people face, the multiple year long NHS waiting lists to see specialist doctors, just so that they can gain access to women only spaces is ridiculous. It’s worth noting here just how sinister you repeatedly bringing up this phantom threat of cis men becoming trans women in order to assault women in “women only” spaces is. The implication here is that they should use the toilet corresponding to the sex they were born as, right? Because it’s all about safety? Well, statistically speaking, far more trans women are abused whilst having to use men’s toilets than when they use women’s ones and the same goes for trans men, and yet you don’t mention it once. Your suggestion also puts people born female who identify as women but maybe do not dress or present in a typically feminine way at risk of being ostracised when THEY need to use the women’s bathroom. The idea that by ceasing to uphold values like yours we are putting women at risk is quite simply, unsubstantiated; the legislation to allow individuals to use the bathroom corresponding to whichever gender they legally identify as has been around since 2010 in the UK and yet we’ve yet to see the sudden spike in the number of women being assaulted in bathrooms you imply will exist if we create looser rules around gender identity and let people use whichever toilet they feel the need to. Similarly, in a study of US school districts, Media Matters found that 17 around the country with protections for trans people, which collectively cover more than 600,000 students, had no problems with harassment in bathrooms or locker rooms after implementing their policies. If cis men want to assault women, they will. They don’t need to pretend to be trans to do so. Don’t pretend to be speaking as a concerned ally of LGBTQ+ individuals when you’re ignoring the thoughts of the majority of individuals who come under that category.

(Just Some of the Trans Women Murdered for Being Trans Over the Last Couple of Years, L-R: Serena Valzquez, Riah Milton, Bee Love Slater, Naomi Hersi, Layla Pelaez, and Dominique Fells)

Trans women are not the threat here. Bigots like you are the threat. HOW DARE you use your platform to reinforce this rhetoric that gets trans people killed when there are so many much MUCH more important things going on right now. Two black trans women had been murdered just for being black trans women in the week you wrote your essay defending those initial tweets. This is an ongoing issue. As a cis woman, my opinion should read as sacred texts to you right, Joanne? Because I’ll say with my whole chest that I feel far more threatened by bigots like you who do not care for the harmful impact of their words than I do by trans women. I do not feel threatened by trans women AT ALL. And yeah, to me, unless they tell me otherwise that they like to go out their way to affirm their trans-ness (which I completely respect-it takes a lot of courage to be proud about your past in a world that condemns you for it), they’re just WOMEN like any other. Yes their experience of “womanhood” may be different to mine but no two individuals experiences are the same anyway and our gender related suffering has the same cause. As a rich, white, cis woman, it’s wild that you are painting yourself as the victim in this debate when trans people can face life in prison and in some places a death sentence for openly identifying with a gender different to their sex in a lot of countries. Nobody is saying that you can’t talk about cis women. Nobody is saying you can’t talk about lesbian issues either, though it’s a bit of a piss-take that you like to throw that whole trans women erase lesbian existence argument out there as a kind of trump card to say “look, I can’t be a transphobe, I’m an LGBTQ+ ally!”, an argument akin to the racist’s age old “I can’t be racist, I have black friends!”. You know from the responses you get to your transphobia that majority of the LGBTQ+ community are very much adamant that trans women are “real women” and that the same goes for trans men being “real men”, so don’t claim to speak for them. You cannot simultaneously care about LGBTQ+ rights and deny trans people their right to live as who they are, however veiled your sentiments around that may be. The whole gay rights movement of the 60s and 70s exist partially BECAUSE of black trans women such as Martha P Johnson if you didn’t know, and though it’s kinda common knowledge I’m doubting that you do because very little of what you tout is backed up by any kind of research. The articles you retweet, echoing the views of lesbians who also happen to be TERFs do not count-the idea that trans people existing simultaneously erases the existence of lesbians only applies to individuals such as yourself who don’t see trans women as women in the first place. That is the problem! Most people don’t have an issue with the fact that you may have a preference for certain genitalia, but I would argue that ignoring exceptional circumstances related to trauma or some other complex issue, relationships are supposed to be with the person as a whole, not their “organic” penis or vagina and it’s kind of insulting to anyone in a same sex relationship to reduce their bond to that.

Back to my point though, of course there are issues that cis women and lesbians face that need talking about, but trans people are affected by the same patriarchal system. You don’t need to go out of your way to mention that they’re not included in whichever given specific issue when there are also cis women who may not have experienced some of the things TERFs reference. You especially don’t need to act as if trans women are the reason we need to have these discussions in the first place. As I’ve said, as MANY women have said, repeatedly-they are NOT the threat here. It is disgusting to see someone I once had so much admiration for constantly punch down at a group that is already marginalised. It’s 2020, J.K, there’s so much info out there. YOU’RE A FULLY GROWN WOMAN. There’s no justification. We get it, you had a tomboy phase. You weren’t like “other girls”. You didn’t like living under a patriarchal system. So you think you understand the mindset of people who want to transition. You think you’re not doing anything wrong by helping to slow the advancement of trans rights because well, you turned out fine? But you clearly fundamentally misunderstand what being trans is. It’s not about your likes and dislikes and having issues with the experience of being a woman (god knows we all do but I doubt anyone truly thinks for one moment that being trans would be any easier), it’s about how you think and feel at your core. It’s such a complex issue, and all the majority of trans people are asking you to do is LISTEN to them. You may be determined to live in binaries, yet the bigger picture is always more complex and fluid and it’s ever-changing, so all we can do is keep an open mind and keep wanting to know more and gather more evidence. If you’re capable of the mental gymnastics required to retcon the piece of work you wrote in the 90s to make it seem as if you were “ahead of the diversity game”, to the extent that you are now claiming Voldermort’s snake has always actually been a Korean woman and see nothing wrong with that when paired with the fact that the only Asian character you originally included was called Cho Chang, then well…I’m sure you can put your ego aside and do the groundwork to understand what trans people are trying to tell you too. You inspired a lot of children and teenagers and even adults, and got them through some very difficult times, taught that the strength of one’s character matters far more than what anyone thinks of you. You claimed you wanted to stand up for the outcasts.

Well, stand up for the outcasts. Now’s a better time than any. And once again: TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN AND TRANS MEN ARE MEN. They shouldn’t have to hear anything else.

Lauren x

[DISCLAIMER: shitty collages are mine but the background is not, let me know if you are aware of the artist so I can credit!]

#transisbeautiful #trans pride #trans lives matter #blm #black lives matter #jk rowling #trans rights #gender identity #gender studies #trans women are women #politics #socialism #safe space #all are welcome

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eirabach · 4 years

Text

For @gumnut-logic 's FabFiveFeb Challenge

Prompt Two - Gordon

[Can't / No clothes]

Also inspired by Nutty's TAG ages meta, because it gave me *emotions*. I'm super sorry. Added Vance Joy because it’s Gordon.

---

Under the surface you don't know what you'll find,

Until it's your time.

---

The night that Jeff Tracy took humanity's first step on the surface of Mars, he had three little boys watching at home. Gordon, he liked to say, was born of the fall out. A child created in a whirlwind of press tours and ticker tape and eventually brought home to that quiet little homestead that would never be truly quiet or homely again.

By the time Gordon became a Tracy being a Tracy mattered. And sure money's great and influence is better, but Gordon's sixteen years old with sunlight in his hair and his eyes and his soul, and for him, for him the best part of being a Tracy is that no one ever tells you you can't.

Not that Gordon would listen if they did.

Because the other important thing to know about being a Tracy, is that Gordon isn't very good at it.

He's uninterested in physics or engineering or math. He has minimal desire to blow things up or shoot people or study space dust. He likes a party and he loves people, but he's miserable in a cummerbund and he kinda never understood capitalism.

When you're fourth, you gotta find your own way to be first. And all right Scott's a fighter pilot and John's a genius and Virgil's some sort of goddamn savant, but at least Alan can't even tie his shoelaces yet so Gordon's got one up on him. Gordon doesn't even wear shoes. Doesn't wear much of anything at all except teeny weeny trunks splattered red, white and blue.

Gordon won't be a hero, won't have a theory named after him, but what Gordon will have will be his.

Gordon's going for gold.

His muscles burn and his hair turns green and he sweats chlorine into his sheets every night, but that doesn't matter. Nothing matters but the next millisecond, the turn, the cleanness of his touch. He can't care about anything but his coach's thumb hovering over the stopwatch and the crest of his fly because it's coming. Gold. It's coming, and it's everything.

Everything.

---

Dad calls on Wednesdays at three. Alan calls at midnight just to hear him swear. He gets weekly updates on daring-do from Scott and a monthly serving of sarcasm and space babble from John.

Virgil calls because they tend to forget.

"You gonna come home, you think? Before?"

Virgil looks different, his floppy black hair cropped short, band shirts exchanged for some weird quasi military uniform. He's still watching Gordon shovel food down his throat with an expression of disgusted awe, though, so some things never change.

"Dunno." Gordon shrugs, mouth full. "Gotta keep training. Four months to go, can't lose form now."

"You should come, there's -- there's a lot changed around here," says Virgil, like that's a reason. Then, when Gordon just chews at him in reply, "Dad built you a pool."

And maybe that's a reason, after all.

Cause sure, his dad's never told him he can't, but Gordon's been gone a long time, and he's not sure he remembers the last time his dad told him he could.

---

Home's not the farm anymore, or the ranch, or the townhouse in Manhattan. Home is some island a billion miles from anywhere, where huge portraits of his older brothers stare expressionlessly down at him and his shoes squeak on the super shiny floor, humidity making his tracksuit stick to his back.

Gordon has only really spent a few weeks here, his training all taking place under the eagle eye of Uncle Sam and sponsored entirely by Old Glory, but he doesn't remember it like this.

The decor is still retro spy movie meets crazy billionaire with paranoia problems, and his bedroom is pretty much as he left it, but nothing else seems familiar at all. He'd left Tracy Two in a great cavernous hanger that would have been overkill even for one of dad's crazy projects, Kyrano had rushed him past huge shadowy behemoths that suggested, pretty damn strongly, that Jeff Tracy is in the midst of another too easily financed midlife crisis.

"Please tell me he isn't planning world domination," Gordon had only half joked as they’d emerged into the brightness of the villa proper. "He'd look awful in lycra."

Kyrano had glared at him, swirled back into the bowels of the island, and left him with Scott.

Scott is wearing lycra.

He's sitting behind their dad's desk, two high points of colour in his cheeks and his eyes bright with something Gordon can't name as he pours over datasets. All he's missing to complete the look is a fluffy white cat and a maniacal laugh.

"Hey. Hey." Nothing. Scott mutters to himself as he sweeps his fingers through warning signs. "Scotty, hey!"

Scott looks up. Blinks. Blinks again.

"Gordon?"

"The one and only."

Scott stands, still grossly tall, and moves to ruffle Gordon's hair. It's not as easy as it used to be, there's an actual lift of his hand, and Gordon can't help but feel satisfaction creep into his bones.

"You grew."

"Hear it happens."

"Got a girlfriend?"

"Got a pillow."

"Tragic."

"That's me." Gordon throws his arm across his eyes and flops backwards onto the sofa. "Sacrificing everything in pursuit of a noble goal. Hold tight, beautiful people. Only three more months and I'm yours."

He peeks out from behalf of his elbow to see Scott standing over him, arms folded, lips twisted into something a bit like a fond smile. A bit.

Something unpleasant settles in Gordon's stomach.

"What are you doing desk work for? I thought you were out there --" He gestures to the cloudless sky beyond the glass wall. "Y'know. Saving the world."

Scott opens his mouth, but then there's a chime from the desk and Alan hollering from the staircase and Grandma crushing him to her chest, and Gordon is left to wonder.

---

Scott isn't the only thing that's strange.

There's a fish tank in the corner, empty but for a little model sub from that docudrama he and John used to love to watch with Mom, but when he lays his hand on the glass it hums beneath his fingers and makes his teeth ache.

John's not here, replaced as resident super nerd by some guy they call Brains who makes John look dumb. Dad isn't there, either, but that's okay. Nor is Gordon, really.

He's lived apart from his family for the best part of two years, he shouldn't be surprised that they've changed. That's he's changed. But somehow, it doesn't feel like he has.

Alan's finally learned to tie his laces but still never bothers, Virgil's taken out his piercing, Grandma is being followed by a robot dog, but Gordon is still the same kid with the same dreams and he isn't sure what anybody else's dreams are anymore. Virgil's in a uniform and Scott's out of his and John is gone and Alan's looking at him like he knows stuff.

This is impossible, of course. Alan is an infant. This is the abiding certainty of Gordon's life and he intends to prove it this evening with three rubber spiders and a trapeze but whatever.

It's just that Gordon isn't quite sure where he fits, just like he doesn't know where to sit when holograms of the great and the good appear in his living room. Doesn't quite know what to make of the way their eyes skip over him to rest on Scott, or Virgil, and where the hell is John, anyway?

"Top secret," Alan says, all pre-teen smugness, "can't tell you."

"Dad'll be home soon," Virgil adds, ever the peacekeeper, "I'm sure he'll tell you everything."

Gordon's not so sure and Scott says nothing at all except a vehement 'no!' when Gordon dares to suggest going for a swim.

So much for the pool, then.

---

Night is falling and Gordon's already ready for bed when the roar of engines fills the air and the whole family dart for the window, faces pressed against the glass. Gordon hovers behind them, unsure of his place, until Scott grabs him bodily by the elbow and drags him downstairs to where the deck leads down to the pool.

"Come on! You got to see this!"

It's a thing to see, all right. The pool withdraws beneath the villa itself, leaving a great gaping hole in the earth into which a great silver plane descends, jets first. And Gordon remembers the TV-21 and his father's fascination with speed and grace and more speed -- it's the one thing they have in common after all -- but this, this is something else.

She disappears into the ground, and the pool sweeps over her, only the sway of the water left as evidence. Scott turns to him with an almost hysterical glee.

"Did you see that!?"

Gordon would have pointed out that he'd have to have been dead blind and comatose not to have seen it, but Scott's practically bouncing on his toes, his expression full of what Gordon recognises as real, true love.

"Isn't she beautiful? Come on, come on, Dad's gotta debrief and then --"

"Scott!" They both snap to attention, immediately turning to where their father stands, towering over both of them from the top of the stairs. "Debrief can wait. Let me see your brother."

Scott darts off, probably to hump the shiny thing, and Dad approaches Gordon, his eyes shining, dirt on his cheek.

"What do you think of her, son?"

"I think you've safely guaranteed Scotty won't be bringing you home any surprise grandbabies."

Dad snorts, clapping Gordon on the shoulder and turning him back toward the pool. They head out across the deck together, Gordon barefoot in only his sleep shorts, Jeff in a uniform like Scott's only gently singed.

"I've missed you. How's training?"

Gordon half shrugs. "Wet. Good. Pretty tiring."

Jeff looks him up and down with a critical eye "So I imagine. It looks good on you."

Gordon stretches and grins. "No more noodle arms, right?"

Jeff blinks, and for a moment Gordon almost thinks he sees something like sadness in his eyes, but it's soon gone and his dad's turning him to face the pool again.

"Will it do? I know it's not Olympic standard but we needed some room for the house and --"

"Dad," he says, because his dad is rambling and his dad never rambles. "Dad what's going on?"

Jeff looks down into the pool. The stars flicker into being in his reflection.

"Forest fire. Family home was cut off."

"Your rescue thing. You saved them."

Jeff looks at him, Gordon watches in the water as he schools his features, tightens his jaw. "This time.

"Scott and Virgil?"

"Are involved, yes."

"And John?"

Jeff looks up then, up to the darkening sky, and points. "We built a satellite. It monitors distress calls from all over the world - and beyond."

"Makes sense. Space case."

"Play to your strengths, isn't that what they say?"

"What about Alan?"

"Alan's eleven, Gordon. Even my insanity has its limits."

"And you built me a pool?"

"And I built you a pool. Is it -- " a breath where Gordon wouldn't expect to hear one "is it all right?"

"All right?" Gordon turns to him and grins. "It's perfect."

Because okay, so it's only a short course, and it occasionally has a supersonic plane blasting through it, but it's a pool and it's for him, and that's better than Scotty's super special plane.

His dad's clapping him on the back again and smiling and that's better than any top secret technology.

It makes a strange island full of strange things feel a little bit more like home.

Jeff's off again already though, gesturing to the round building above the villa and going on about blast radius and Gordon's content to just watch for a moment, to bask in that feeling for as long as it lasts. Then the subject changes.

"We'll be in Cape Town for the opening ceremony, of course, and I've made arrangements to ensure we can all make your races. I'm sure it won't shock you to hear Alan's made t shirts and John's bringing a banner. I hope it's safe for television."

His eyes snap to his dad's.

"John's coming?"

His dad's eyebrows twitch. "You think he'd miss it? Gordon, none of us will miss this. Not for the world. And as you now know, I mean that quite literally."

Gordon nods, mutely. There's a build up of something in his chest. Lactic acid squeezing his heart. His dad takes pity.

"What about September? Are you still planning on marine biology?"

Gordon scuffs at the tile with his bare heel. This is a conversation he's been avoiding for a long time, now. The after.

"Yeah. UCLA."

"California?"

Gordon shrugs.

"You don't seem keen? Sydney have an excellent program, do you --" Gordon feels more than hears the shudder in his dad's exhale. "No, no Jeff stop it. You tell me, Gordy. What do you want to do?"

Gordon's voice is never small, but it's as close as it's ever been. "Was thinking WASP."

Both of his dad's eyebrows disappear into his hairline. "The military? You?"

It's not an unexpected reaction. Gordon scoffs. "You wound me, Dad. Maybe I have hidden depths."

"I don't doubt that for a moment," his dad says, then he looks up, right up, to where the milky way swirls and John sits. “You’re not old enough.”

“Yeah, I know, I thought, college first - couple of years of credits and I can join as an officer.”

“You’re my son, you can join as whatever you damn well please.”

“Dad--”

"Sorry, sorry.” And his Dad’s looking into space and Gordon’s looking down at the water and it’s kinda always been like this, between them. Gordon suspects his dad hates it even more than he does.”You know I'll support you, if that's what you really want."

Gordon finally follows his gaze, imagines John in the vacuum of space, alone with his books and his stars. He wonders if Dad had had this conversation with him, before sending him up there. "That sounds kinda like a don't do it, Dad, I'm not gonna lie."

"Can I be honest?" Gordon nods, because saying no seems kinda harsh, but his heart is thundering faster than after a sprint. "Gordon, when I designed International Rescue, I designed it for you boys. A legacy, I suppose. I wanted --" he shakes his head. "I'm getting to be a selfish old man."

Gordon scowls. "You're the least selfish man I've ever met. Pretty sure those people whose lives you saved today would agree."

Jeff shakes his head.

"I want you to know," he says, "that there will always be a place for you, here, with us, if you want it. But only if you want it." A twitch of Jeff’s lips. “God knows, I could never make you anyway.”

"Thanks, Dad." Then, a wicked grin pulling at the corner of his mouth, "Race you?"

A splash, a shout, laughter rings out into the night and hell it's cheesy but it's true; for a moment Gordon kinda feels like he's already won.

---

The Olympics are due to start in June.

May, and his father dies.

Gordon flies home immediately, thirty thousand feet over Cape Town without even looking down.

He can't.

He has a place in a legacy.

---

#fabfivefeb #fabfivefeb2020 #thunderbirds are go #gordon tracy #jeff tracy #oh look its angsty #theres a wild shock #idek #there might be a part 2

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tangledstarlight · 4 years

Text

choices we make (they can define us)

SPOILERS for nemesis games and babylon's ashes. seven years after the ships vanished through the gate, filip makes a call that he should have a long time ago.

' He couldn’t change things with Marco. It was a ship that had long since sailed and vanished. But Naomi was still out there. If he wanted to, he could try to talk to her. To reach out and try to salvage the remains of a relationship they barely had to begin with. '

i just wanted a filip and naomi reunion moment in ab or pr or a whole novella i dont care so i made it myself ok. (first time i’ve done an expanse fic so like. be nice? ikd)

also on ao3

Filip.

His name had been Filip Inaros once upon a time. He had meant to be part of something big, something amazing, something history altering.

And then he hadn’t been.

He had met his mother. He had met the people his actions affected. He had seen the destruction and wreckage he had caused in a new light. He had let the little voice in the back of his mind to get a foothold and power through.

He had thrown away his gun, his terminal, his uniform. He had thrown away his name.

As far as anyone knew, Filip Inaros had vanished and died through the ring gates with the remnants of the Free Navy and Marco. In a way, he supposed it was true. If you wanted the solar system and its inhabitants to think you were dead, there wasn’t really a more spectacular way to do so.

He had been sitting in the waiting area of the workers union, his attention, like everyone else's, had been on the screens showing fifteen ships speeding for the ring gate and the certain destruction of the lone gun ship on the other side. Filip doubted anyone else in the room had known the true significance of Marco’s hatred for the Rocinante and her crew.

And then all fifteen ships had vanished. Between one blink and the next. There then gone.

Filip could still remember the silence that had fallen over the room, over the whole station. Everything that happened after that was a blur. He couldn’t remember getting his job assignment. Or when he moved into a tiny crappy hole in the worst part of the station. For long months he just went through the motions of living while his brain came to terms with the sudden gaping loss in his life, his heart.

He should have been on the ship. Should have been strapped into one of the crash couches next to Marco. Should have vanished into atoms along with the rest of them. Should have. Should have . Should have . On repeat in his brain.

News of the Rocinante making its way back to Sol for some big important meeting broke through the fog in his mind. Life was still going on. People were scrambling and trying to fix all the problems Marco and his Free Navy had left behind. It was the first time he remembers hating him, for caring more about them and ‘wrongs’ they had caused him instead of the Belt.

They were supposed to show the Inners their strength, to build a better future for all Belters, do something history altering. All Marco managed to do was destroy the Earth and leave everyone on the verge of collapse and death, at the mercy of the Inners. All because Naomi Nagata had walked away from him twice and never looked back. He wanted to hate her for it too, but he couldn’t find the hate for her anymore.

Where they should have been celebrating victory, freedom, only Filip stood. Doing what he could to help fix the station he had helped wreck on his fifteenth birthday.

Because Filip Inaros had been meant to be part of this something big, something amazing, something history altering. And it hadn’t happened. It was a dream lost to the void and it’s place taken by Filip Nagata who wanted to try and ease the guilt simmering in his chest, wanted to be no one important, wanted to live his life based on his own choices.

Working on environmental systems was something he knew how to do, knew how to fix and improve. It gave his life a sense of monotony and he couldn’t complain. It was what he had chosen to do. But when the announcements came through that the newly formed Transport Union was looking to hire on crew for some of its new ships, Filip felt a longing for ship life he hadn’t even known was there.

He wanted to be part of a crew again.

So he had signed up. No one had even looked at him twice when the name Filip Nagata was called and he found himself stretching out on his new bunk, smiling at the sounds of a ship around him.

He was pretty sure, if Marco was alive and could see him working for the union that had been James fucking Holden’s idea, he would have found himself in an airlock and a countdown to put on a vac suit. But Marco was gone – had been assumed dead for five years and counting – and the Belt had found its saviour in Michino Pa and a peace with the Inners even he couldn’t deny was beneficial to everyone.

They’d done everything Marco had promised, raised the Belt up from the ashes and gave them a voice. Made them strong and important in the new world order. Sometimes he wondered what Marco would think.

Alaya was born on Mars but had lived and worked on Ceres since she was fourteen and her family had relocated. She was part of the maintenance crew on the ship and they first met when Filip dropped noodles on her foot. She was sweet and funny, didn’t mind when he went quiet or that there were parts of his past he couldn’t talk about. She introduced him to new music and Martian shows he begrudgingly found funny, she was the first person he had been with for longer than a few nights before having to leave.

He was pretty sure he loved her.

So when the news came that her mother was dying and that she needed to come home, Filip went with her without a second thought.

Though the second thought came while they were in the middle of docking and he remembered Anderson Dawes banning him from Ceres for shooting a security officer and he wondered if anyone would recognise him despite the time that had passed and the change of his name.

Filip didn’t want his past to be revealed to Alaya because he was getting arrested or deported. The thought came that maybe it was time to tell her everything. Unburden his soul and hope she was there to catch him if he fell.

Seeing Alaya with her parents, the way they hugged each other, smiled and asked how she was, listened to her tell stories from the ship, it made Filip realise he had never really experienced it. The unconditional love of a family unit.

Because he had Marco by his side his whole life teaching him, helping him, preparing him for a life as a Belter in an self made army. He had spent his childhood on ships and surrounded by people who said they loved him and cared about him like family. But Marco had never sat down and listened to him talk the way he was seeing now. Never asked him what he wanted to do with his life. And he would never get the chance to change that now.

Because Naomi had left before he could really remember her, forced out by someone trying to make her someone she wasn’t. Forced to leave him behind because everyone said she was crazy for not wanting to kill Inners like a true Belter. And Filip was old enough now, had had enough time to think about the past to realise how much it had probably hurt her to leave him behind, how much strength it had probably taken to keep living after. He couldn’t hate her for it anymore. But he wasn’t sure if he was ready to wholly forgive her either.

He couldn’t change things with Marco. It was a ship that had long since sailed and vanished. But Naomi was still out there. If he wanted to, he could try to talk to her. To reach out and try to salvage the remains of a relationship they barely had to begin with.

The whole idea was terrifying.

He found a secluded corner and opened up a new comm and looked at himself in the little viewing window. His hair had grown longer after months on the ship and there were signs of patches of hair on his face from the beard he was attempting to grow. He wondered if she would recognise him. He found himself hoping she would. If he sent the message it would leave the choice up to her about what happened next.

Maybe she wouldn’t even care.

He needed to know if she cared.

“Naomi, it’s Filip. Thought I should tell you I never got on the Pella when he went after you. Know I should have sent this long time ago and but I–” he paused looking away from the terminal and tried to find the right words for what he wanted to say. Seven years of emotions wanting to spill out. “Didn’t know if you’d want to know. Didn’t know how to say it, yeah? Told me to find you if I wanted to die. Didn’t want to die, me, just wanted out. So got out. Spent a lot of time trying to figure out who I am in the last few years. Got people I care about, people who care about me. Want to be someone who helps fix things, not break them. And wanted you to know that I’m okay,” It seemed like an insignificant explanation but it was the best he could do. “That I’m living a life I like. Been thinking me, yeah? On Ceres for a while, lots of time to think about things. About the past. Me and you, if you wanted, still chance to get to know each other, yeah? Past is past but we still got chance for a future maybe.”

Filip looked at himself in the viewing window, trying to decide if there was anything else he wanted to say. He could still delete the message, push his terminal back in his pocket and pretend he’d never thought about it. But then he remembered watching Alaya and her mom just that morning as they drank coffee and talked quietly together about plans they might not get to have.

He pressed send and tried not to think about it for the rest of the day.

☆☆☆

Naomi.

The message came through while Naomi was alone on the ops deck and in the middle of checking through their inventory, flagging what they needed to get once they hit Ceres. She had been expecting a response from someone about discounted replacement parts so hit play without checking the recipient. Her heart stuttered a beat as Filips voice filled the silence.

“Naomi, it’s Filip. Thought I should tell you…” She stopped listening. Her heartbeat echoing in her ears as all she could do were stare at the screen, at her boy as he talked. Not dead. He wasn’t dead. Naomi wasn’t sure she was breathing. Wasn’t sure she knew how to breathe anymore.

She had left him twice, had lost him three times. She had mourned. Had been mourning since the day she first left Ceres. And had never thought she would hear his voice again, see his face. The message had stopped play, was frozen on the screen with Filip facing the camera but looking away, jaw clenched like he was struggling with something. Forcing a breath out through her mouth, Naomi counted to five slowly before she played the message again, prepared to hear his voice this time and listened to what he had to say.

She listened to it another five times and didn’t notice when she started crying. She didn’t hear Jim coming up in the lift until he was standing behind her.

“Shit is that–?” He didn’t finish the sentence as Naomi paused the message and turned around in her chair, using the chuffs of her coveralls to wipe at her cheeks.

“Filip. He’s not dead.” Those three words started repeating themselves in her head, bouncing around as she tried to believe them. He’s not dead. He’s not dead. He’s not dead. He’s not dead.

“Shit,” he said again as if it was the only thing thought in his head. She couldn’t blame him. Her thoughts weren’t any more coherent right now either. “Can I?” Jim gestured to the message, asking permission to hear it. Naomi played it again, listened to it for the sixth time. Listening to it with someone else made it feel more real, made her believe it wasn’t a dream.

The two of them sat in silence for long seconds after it finished both of them lost in their own thoughts and emotions.

“What are you going to do?” Jim asked his eyes on hers and a small smile on his lips. As if he already knew what she was going to do before she had even decided.

“He wants to get to know me. I–,” Naomi shook her head once and closed her eyes to order her thoughts, her emotions. There were too many to sort through, so she clung to the joy and relief and new found hope. She could worry about the rest later. Opening her eyes she let out a deep breath and turned to face Jim with a small smile of her own. She knew he would support her whatever her choice. “I need to reply. Tell him I want the chance too.”

“Okay. Want me to keep everyone out of here while you do it?”

“Gonna do it in our room. Quiter. Might take me a while.” She got up from her crash couch, stretching her arms above her head, paused to kiss Jim on the cheek once before heading towards the lift, already trying to work out what she was going to say. She stopped before she headed down, looking back to Jim as he watched her. “Can you tell the others, please?”

“Of course. I’ll be in the galley if you need me.” And she knew he meant it, if she needed him for anything he would be there. She loved him for it, even more for him knowing she needed to do this alone.

Alone in her and Jim's room, Naomi sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her terminal. Everything she wanted to say seemed insignificant, seemed too small, seemed too late for the situation they were in. But he had reached out to her, and Naomi wasn’t about to let him go again. Opening the message she let it play again, using the minutes to calm her racing heart and focus her thoughts. When the prompt to reply flashed, she hit it.

“Hello Filip. I– thank you doesn’t seem like the right thing to say, but it’s the only thing I can think of. Knowing that you’re not– knowing that you’re okay, it’s something I never thought I’d hear you say. I’m glad you’re okay. All I ever wanted was for you to be okay, to be happy, yeah?” She tried to smile, hoping it came across as genuine and not so grimaces as it did to her. “You have been part of my heart from the second you were born, I’ll take being part of your life in anyway you’ll let me. We’re docking on Ceres in a few weeks, if you want we could meet? Talk, dinner on me,” she shrugged with one hand, trying to nonchalance but failing and not caring. “Up to you. I'm glad you’re okay Filip, I hope you’re happy too.”

She didn’t stop to review it, knowing she would never be able to make it perfect the way she wanted it to be. There probably wasn’t a way to make it perfect, this wasn’t really something people did every day. She just hit send, watching as the file loaded and zipped off at lightspeed along with all the hope she didn’t know she still had.

The reply came two days later while she was in the galley with Bobbie as they stood around the coffee machine. It must have been obvious from the look on her face what it was.

“Want me to go?” She asked and it took Naomi a split second to decide she didn’t want to be alone this time.

“No, no it’s okay. Stay,” she looked up at her over the top of her terminal and Bobbie gave her a reassuring smile as Noami took a deep breath and hit play. She was ready for his voice this time, ready to see his face. It still felt like a punch to the gut though. It was a short message.

“Dinner sounds good. Things to talk about, no light delay make it easier, yeah?” There was a hint of a smile in his voice she thought, or maybe it was just wishful thinking. “Send details after you dock.” It seemed like that was all he had to say as he a small furrow appeared between his brows before it vanished and he spoke again. “I am happy. Glad you’re okay too.”

Naomi blew out a breath and closed her eyes. He wanted to meet, have dinner, talk. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to cry or shout with joy. Instead she let out a strangled sounding laugh.

“That’s good, right?” Bobbie asked and Naomi opened her eyes at the hint of concern she heard in the Martians voice.

“Yeah, no yeah this– shit this is good. I didn’t...I didn’t think he’d want to meet.” She accepted that her relationship with him would consist of short messages and that would be okay. Being able to see him in the flesh seemed unreal. Last time it hadn’t exactly ended well. Idly, Naomi wondered home many second chances she would get at this.

Bobbie squeezed her shoulder once and smiled.

“We’ll brainstorm some good places for you two to have an easy meeting. I don’t think any of our usual haunts are gonna cut it, karaoke and emotional reunions doesn’t seem like a good fit.”

Naomi laughed shaking her head a little but what Bobbie said worked to calm her thoughts down, easing her anxiety for a moment. She had just under two weeks to figure out a plan. She could do that.

☆☆☆

Filip.

Filip leaned against a wall opposite the entrance of Clock Work and tried to keep his fingers from tapping against his thighs as he waited. He’d already thought about turning back three times on his walk here and he was pretty close to making that four times. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe he didn’t need questions answered or a relationship with his estranged mother. He could push away from the wall and walk back to the hole him and Alaya were renting and knew she wouldn’t judge him for it. He balled his hands up into fists.

It wasn’t until the reply from Naomi came that Filip knew he needed to tell her about his past. It hadn’t been as bad as he’d expected. She had had a lot of questions. They’d both cried. She’d told him he was a good man. He didn’t think she was right about that. But she had convinced him that meeting Naomi would be a good thing for them both.

“You said it yourself, she wants to try. You’ve both got questions and only the two of you can answer them for each other. You go. You sit and you talk. If at the end you don’t want to see her again, you’ve gotta hope she’ll respect that. If you want to get to know her more then at least you’ve got a starting point.”

So he’d said yes. And then gotten a text message two days ago asking if he was free today during the second shift and could meet at Clock Work two levels up from the docks. He’d almost said no before he had agreed. He really hated waiting.

Ten minutes before agreed upon time Filip saw her come around the corner. Her hair was longer and the way she held herself seemed different from he remembered, though he guessed when you weren’t somewhere against your will it did change the way you walked. For a moment Filip considered – for the fifth time, but who was keeping count? – turning away. He still had time, she hadn't spotted him yet.

And then she did. She hesitated midstep, causing people to swerve around her with annoyed grunts but she didn’t seem to notice. She was just looking at him. Deep down Filip was pretty sure if he decided to turn away now she wouldn’t follow him. He pushed away from the wall and took a step towards her, towards the tiny restaurant she had picked and she followed him. Neither of them talked while they entered and picked a booth at the back, not that it mattered, the place was empty.

“Glad you came, wasn’t sure you would,” Naomi said and there was a small hesitant smile there. He was glad she was finding this as hard as he was, and didn’t miss the honesty in the statement.

“Thought about turning back couple of times.” If she could be honest, he could too.

The silence between them was awkward and tense with so many different emotions he didn’t know which they were meant to address first. Maybe there was too much past in their past to move on from. They each ordered without talking and Filip began scratching at a part of the table top that was peeling away. When Naomi broke the silence he startled.

“So do you live on Ceres or just visiting?” Present was the safe subject, he wondered if she was building up to talking about the past.

“Visiting. I–” he paused deciding if he wanted to talk about working for the Transport Union, about Alaya. It only took him a few seconds to decide he did. “After, lived on Callisto for a while, working on the environmental systems there, helped set up the new ones for the shipyard. Transport Union put out adverts for crew for some of their new ships, yeah? ‘Bout two years ago. I signed up. Work the Inners’ roots, don’t go through the rings. Met this girl. Alaya. Her– Her mom’s sick, she needed to come back home, I came with her.” He shrugged with his hands and dared a look at Naomi, to try and guess what she was thinking. He couldn’t decide what he saw on her face.

“Alaya. Wh-What’s she like?”

So Filip told her. About how they’d first met, about how she made him laugh, about how she was going to force him to visit Mars one day but that he was kind of excited about it. And he asked her questions too. About what she had been doing, what it was like going through the ring gates, visiting the new worlds. He didn’t mention Marco and she didn’t either. It went unsaid that in all her stories James Holden was present too, but that wasn’t a subject either of them were ready to touch yet.

They ate when their food came, keeping up their steady stream of easy conversation. He was smiling at her without thinking by the end of their meal and he found himself asking one of the questions that had always bugged him.

“Why him?”

She didn’t ask who he meant and she went quiet for a moment, frowning down at her bowl like she was thinking something through. When she blew out a breath and looked back up at him Filip knew he’d ended the time for pointless topics.

“After I left here the first time, ran away and signed up with the first long haul ship I could find, I shut myself down. Tried not to care about things like before. Promised myself I wouldn’t make the same mistakes twice, that I wouldn’t ever follow the fanatics or let people control me. Leaving you, broke something in me. Something I’ll never be able to fix. Didn’t leave looking to find someone new. Me and Jim,” she paused, and Filip watched a soft smile touch her lips as she shrugged at him, “Not something either of us was looking for or expecting. He’s...he’s there when I need him and knows when I need to be alone. He always respects my choices even if he doesn’t understand them. He doesn’t try to fix the broken things in me, doesn’t mind my past. He makes me laugh. He loves me and I love him. Can’t always choose who you love Filip, but I’d always choose him.”

Her hands were on the table, palms up and open. If he wanted to he could reach across and hold her hand, squeeze it and tell her he understood. Because, he did understand. Someone loving you despite your past was something he was just beginning to understand, he couldn’t hate her for finding that and not wanting to let it go.

He reached across and up his hand in hers. There was a split second where she didn’t react, frozen by the sudden contact, and then her fingers were wrapping around his and they were both squeezing a little too tight.

“Why did you decide to leave?”

Now it was her turn to ask a big question. His fault for starting the conversation down this road.

“Marco he–” Filip frowned a little not knowing why it was hard to talk about this with Naomi, “He said we were going to help the Belt. That everything about the Free Navy was to help the Belt to independence, to make it stronger. Kept said we were winning when we were just running away. And we were hurting the Belt too, yeah? Not helping. Reason Belters were dying. All he cared about was racing to the ring, to stop or kill you and Holden. Not about the Belt anymore. Nothing was his fault, all someone else's,” he stopped, trying to figure out where his thoughts were. He didn’t know how to explain it in a way that made sense.

“Wasn’t just one thing. Lots of little things, became big things. Way he treated me. Always a new plan pretending to be the original because the first one failed. Didn’t wanna be part of it anymore. You were right, yeah? Always got the right to walk away. So I did.”

“It must have been hard.”

Filip shrugged, he tried not to think about those first few days after he threw away his terminal, and had decided to leave everything behind. He wasn’t even sure he could remember what had happened, everything had been a haze back then. Tears pricked at his eyes and Filip used his free hand to wipe at them. He swallowed down the lump in his throat as Naomi squeezed his hand again.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you then. Here for you now though,” there was such kindness in her voice Filip couldn’t help but look at her or stop the smile.

“Okay.” He didn’t know what else to say. Didn’t seem to matter, she seemed to accept the answer for what it was. Clearing his throat once Filip slowly pulled his hand back, tried not to notice the frown he saw on her face. “Should be going. Said I’d help Alaya with something.”

“Right, of course,” she smiled at him and then shook her head when he reached out to pay his share of the tab. “Said I’d pay. Meal on me, remember? You can get it next time.” It was asking the question without even asking it. He was grateful she did and he wouldn’t be left wondering if maybe this was a one time thing.

“Yeah. There’s a place I know that does good kibble. Always got fresh spices,” he gave her a smile.

Saying goodbye brought back the air of awkwardness, though not as obvious as before. Neither of them seemed to know what to do with their hands, both knew they weren’t at a hugging stage but just parting without anything seemed wrong. Before he could decide if a handshake was worse then nothing Naomi grabbed his hand in both of hers and squeezed once, giving him a smile.

“Thank you. For all this. For reaching out. Kibble next time. Oyedeng, Filip. Stay safe, yeah?” She squeezed his hand again and then let go.

“Yeah. Bye, Naomi. See you again soon.” He didn’t wait to see if she watched him walk away, and he didn’t look around to watch her leave either. He just walked.

There was still a lot of pain and hurt between them, Filip didn’t know if they would ever be able to clear the air fully, but he was glad they had the chance to try now. He was glad to have a chance to get to know her. Would even – one day – be glad to know her new family. It was a long way off but knowing the choice was there meant everything.

#the expanse #Naomi Nagata #filip inaros #jim holden #naomi nagata x jim holden #marco inaros #im a big fan of filips character arch yknow and like. marco can rot in hell xoxox #rosie vs writing #also lmoa i defo just ramble for like 4k words idk why im like this #*fics

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fakeyellow · 5 years

Text

Based on a prompt asking for an insane Kamilah. The story’s structured so that the main events are revealed in a series of flashbacks told by Kamilah.

Since the First Vampire’s rise and fall 500 years ago, Kamilah Sayeed has moved into legend, a woman drenched in the blood of thousands.

Rosella has made it her mission to find out why.

Part 2. Part 3.

Rosella came to, feeling a dull, throbbing ache in the back of her head, and made to rub it when she found her hands cuffed to the chair. The memories flooded back into her mind at the feel of the cold iron and she quickly swivelled her head around to try to gain insight into where she was being held.

She was in an expansive chamber with no exit in sight, broken shards of glass littering the sides of the room. The room was like the ruins of a museum, empty exhibits everywhere where artefacts must once have been. This must have been where the Order of Dawn had kept the articles, trophies of their conquests and she couldn’t help but hiss in disgust.

And then Rosella heard the sound of doors being pushed open somewhere behind her and the clicking of heels against the marble floor.

Her heart sped erratically as she smelled the calming scent of lavender and Rosella finally laid eyes upon her captor.

Kamilah Sayeed.

The living legend was standing right in front of her, dressed in an impeccably tailored pantsuit that outlined every inch of her curves. In the light, her suit looked as if it were drenched in blood, and Rosella internally shuddered at the terrifyingly beautiful image. She was every bit the striking figure of legend and more.

Every newly Turned vampire learned about this woman as she was a vital part of vampire history and present, and was responsible for thousands of deaths. If the First Vampire had been a goddess, she was a Queen, who was perhaps even more feared than the former now that the First Vampire was long dead.

Her features were timeless, set in an immovable and beautiful face, and yet there was something more to her, something that hinted at the two thousand and five hundred years of life she had experienced.

But what surprised Rosella most was the lucid, brown depth of the woman’s eyes. They weren’t the bright red of vampires caught in the throes of bloodlust and they contained no hint of madness like the myths said. No, these were the eyes of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.

She noticed the daggers sheathed at the vampire’s hip and knew instantly that this was the pair of infamous daggers that had claimed the lives of countless lives. It was deceptively simple with only the barest of ornamentation on their pommels.

Nobody except the leader of her clan, who had once been a member of Clan Sayeed, knew how these daggers looked because the people who laid eyes on them did not last long enough to tell others. Seeing them was a death sentence but Rosella felt a surge of fearful triumph; she was here with Kamilah Sayeed (although there was no telling how much longer she’d be here alive).

Being captured by the legend herself had never been the plan, but now that she was in this position, Rosella realised this was the best chance she had of finding out the truth directly from the source.

She just needed to keep the world’s oldest living and most dangerous vampire interested enough in her to not kill her, at least until she was able to hear the truth. No big deal, she could do that… She hoped.

Rosella knew she’d have to speak first in order to pique the woman’s interest but the words spilled out of her naturally, “I don’t understand.”

The vampire stared at her silently, offering no signs that she had heard or was willing to entertain her, but Rosella continued anyway, unable to stop the words that had started flowing, the questions that had built up inside her ever since she had been Turned and learned of this woman.

“You’re Kamilah Sayeed. Everyone respected you, everyone knew how powerful you were, but you used that power in order to maintain peace. You committed... devastating atrocities against humans with Gaius but it seemed like you were at least atoning for them. You protected vampires and humans alike from the wrath of Gaius and then the First Vampire when she arose again and you helped defeat both of them. You single-handedly destroyed the Order of the Dawn… So why did you turn against us? Why do you hunt us? Are you so bloodthirsty that you need to resort to killing your own brethren?! Haven’t you spilled enough blood?!”

Rosella had tried to keep her emotions restrained; she knew throwing frenzied accusations at the woman would only serve to alienate her, which was the very opposite of what she wanted. But she couldn’t do it. Her voice rose in intensity with each word until she was feverishly yelling the last question at the woman, tears rolling down her cheeks. The faces of all the friends and family she had lost appeared in her mind like a never-ending movie, causing her heart to break all over again but she kept her eyes open and fixed on the unmoving woman.

There had been a flicker of amusement on Kamilah’s face at the beginning but her face had quickly smoothed over again. Kamilah easily met Rosella’s watery and yet determined gaze before frowning and looking away as if she had found something she didn’t like in Rosella’s eyes.

“Do you know who was with me the night the First Vampire rose again?”

The sudden question startled Rosella but she answered instinctively, listing off the names that had been taught to her and every other newly Turned vampire since the Great Battle, ““Adrian Raines, head of Clan Raines, Jax Matsuo, head of clan Matsuo, formerly the Clanless, and Lily Spencer, second in command of Clan Matsuo.”

A dark flash came over Kamilah’s face before she gave a bitter laugh.

“Nobody ever mentions her. She was the one person tying everything together and yet, it’s like she never existed.”

Rosella furrowed her brows in confusion; she knew she hadn’t missed anyone from her lessons, but she was wary of asking, not wanting to test Kamilah’s patience any more than she already had.

“Her name was Eden,” Kamilah said, her voice growing somehow soft, each syllable said with tender affection.

“She was the most remarkable person I’d met.”

—-

The fight hadn’t been going well. They had been too cornered, too outnumbered, too powerless against the First Son. Even if he hadn’t sustained himself with blood for thousands of years, he had the undiluted blood of the First flowing through him, and with his limitless forces of trained killers, there was no way they could leave with their lives intact.

Xenocrates hadn’t even made use of his skills yet; in an arrogant and yet not unfounded show of power, he stood in the center of the fighting, simply watching as his soldiers were replaced as quickly as they were killed.

Not even Adrian or Kamilah could keep this up infinitely.

With the Order’s weapons, there was no choice but to keep the fighting as close in proximity to the soldiers as possible. The three of them moved effortlessly through the crowds, their weapons making quick work of the humans even as their actions gradually slowed.

Eden was running around the chamber, knocking out soldiers with one of the Order’s weapons. Kamilah spared a split second to look towards Eden and found her using her weapon to knock down the arm of a soldier who had gotten too close to her. She felt a fierce sense of pride and relief, recognising Eden’s move as one she had taught her.

But this momentary lapse in focus cost Kamilah and she felt the tip of a crossbow drag down her forearm, opening an angry gash. The Egyptian woman let out a snarl, killing the attacker in a matter of seconds before stepping over the dead bodies she had accrued around her to attack the next soldier.

She could feel her body knitting itself back together but it was too slow, it made her too slow.

A UV bomb clipped her side and Kamilah faltered in her bloody stride. A quick scan of the chamber showed that Adrian and Jax were in similar states, their wounds too accumulated. And Eden. Kamilah locked eyes with Eden, seeing her own desperation mirrored.

Could this truly be it? Would this be where they met their end, unable to stop Gaius or Xenocrates?

She saw Eden’s face harden with resolve and Kamilah felt a terror greater than any she had felt during the night when Eden darted to the Tree. She made to go after her, noticing in her peripheral vision that Xenocrates was following suit, also having seen where she was headed.

“No, don’t-”

The warning died in her throat as Eden threw herself at the Tree, biting it with all her might, and a blinding light suddenly illuminated the room.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!” Xenocrates howled in fury.

The fighting momentarily halted, vampires and soldiers alike turned towards the figure who stepped out of the vortex of light.

“It’s been so long, my fallen prince.”

The body of the woman who spoke was at once Eden and yet not. Oppressing amounts of power rolled off her in waves and dripped from her unearthly voice. With a mere raise of her hand, blazing bolts of fire soared in the air before finding their mark in the chests of hundreds of soldiers, who promptly fell to the ground.

But her eyes, her blood-red eyes, were fixed solely on the cowering figure of Xenocrates, promising revenge on the one who had dared to imprison her. There were no pithy remarks, no clever insults thrown. Instead, in one last valiant attempt, he threw himself at her with a wordless cry.

Eden, no, Rheya thrust her hand into his chest and pulled it out, holding a throbbing heart. He fell to the ground in an unceremonious heap, a gaping hole in his chest through which large globules of fat and other organs could be seen glistening underneath the torn tatters of skin.

Rheya stared impassively at the still beating source of life before baring her fangless mouth and biting into it in one feral motion. Blood sputtered out of the flailing organ but she continued to steadily chew until its movements stopped and the heart fell apart into ashes.

It was only then that she turned towards the sole living survivors in the room, all of whom had remained frozen in horror at the unfolding scene.

“My children, you have nothing to fear from me,” she raised her arms as if to embrace them lovingly, but Xenocrate’s blood had painted deep rivulets of crimson down her chin and arms.

When the looks of distrust and fear did not disappear from their faces and they instead readied their weary bodies to attack, she looked disappointingly at the three of them.

“I-”

Her face suddenly twisted into a terrible grimace and she lurched forward, only just able to maintain her balance. As the three watched her in confusion, she hissed angrily to herself, “Do not fight the blood. Embrace it.”

And then whatever internal struggle she had been undergoing seemed to end and Rheya spared them not a single glance as she disappeared out of the chambers.

—-

Kamilah abruptly stopped, walking out of the room and leaving Rosella alone to think about this woman who had never once come up in her lessons.

Eden, the mortal Bloodkeeper who had, in an act of foolish bravery, become possessed by the First Vampire.

Kamilah talked about her as if she were speaking of a lover and she had not been quick enough in her exit for Rosella to not notice the yearnfullook on her face.

Rosella knew the First Vampire was long dead, killed in the Great Battle, but what had happened to Eden in the process?

She had a feeling that the answer to this question would explain Kamilah’s steep descent.

—-

A/N: Damn it. I’m literally about to start med school and here I am with an outline for a whole new story. Apologies for any errors; I’m going out with my classmates tonight but I really wanted to get this out first.

Insane Kamilah was asked for by @galaxyside-0 and I was also inspired by a post by @thefirstcourtesan about how she thinks MC will be possessed by Rheya when she drinks from the Tree.

In case it’s not clear, Rosella is an OC, a fairly new/young vampire. The events of BB2 happened around ~500 years ago and Eden is the MC. You’ll be learning along with Rosella about what happened to cause Kamilah to become the infamous legend she now is.

#i literally only get inspired when i'm busy or have things to do smh #kamilah sayeed #kamilah x mc #BloodBound #playchoices #My writing

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lioninsunheart · 5 years

Photo

Boxed in: the fragility of men~~

In her 2006 book Insecure at Last, Eve Ensler described meeting a soldier in Kosovo in the late 1990s who seemed both physically and mentally paralysed. His name was Agrim. “He looked at me, threw his arms around my neck, and started weeping,” she wrote. “No, it was more like wailing. I have never heard a sound like that. He would not let go. Then his weeping wailing began to build and release. It could not be controlled or stopped. It resounded through the neighbourhood. People from the village began to gather around. I held on to Agrim, but, honestly, I wanted him to stop. All these years I had told myself I wanted men to be vulnerable, to have their feelings, to cry. All of a sudden it felt like a lie. I did not want this man to be so destroyed, so out of control. I wanted him to have answers and be tough and know the way and make everything work out.” Ensler understood how part of her was terrified of men being lost, how she needed them to be tough and assured. She also understood how many years she’d been carrying men’s “invisible pain” in order not to see their weakness or shame. Holding Agrim in her arms, “this weeping liquid man” – as she described him – was her undoing, pulling her “out to sea in the wild waves of his crying”. “It was as if I were holding the secret story of men in my lap,” she wrote. “Centuries of male sorrow and loss, centuries of unexpressed worry and doubt, centuries of pain. I suddenly understood violence and war. I understood retaliation and revenge. I understood how deep the agony is and how its suppression has made men into other things. I understood that these tears falling down Agrim’s face would have become bullets in any other case, hardened drops of grief and rage directed toward a needed enemy. I saw how in fighting to live up to the tyranny of masculinity, men become driven to do anything to prove they are neither tender, nor weak, nor insecure. They are forced to cage and kill the feminine within their own beings and consequently the world.” This passage speaks to what it is in men that causes them to inflict such monumental hurt on women, other men, children and themselves. They are forced to cage and kill the feminine within their own beings and consequently the world. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst renowned for his theory of the collective unconscious, called this feminine within a man the anima – the “unconscious woman” that contains all the feminine personality qualities inside a man that can either be expressed, if allowed, or repressed and removed. These are the qualities of tenderness, compassion, vulnerability, friendship, relatedness, creativity, imagination and intuition. Conversely, he called the masculine within a woman the animus – the “unconscious man” that holds the archetypal masculine traits of courage, assertiveness, analytical thought, decisiveness and a drive for achievement. (The Chinese describe this polarity as yin and yang, the complementary female and male principles operating in nature.) In Jung’s world view, all of us carry these archetypal qualities inside us – feminine and masculine – but from childhood we create gender identities and roles, consciously or unconsciously, to conform with the often-crippling sexual stereotypes society imposes. Girls wear pink, and isn’t that a pretty dress? Boys wear blue and play with Lego and trucks, and aren’t you strong? Women are nurturers. Men are providers. Women are sensitive. Men are tough. We all know the drill; and we all know that identity politics today is, in part, a furious backlash to these oversimplified and limiting concepts. For men, these stereotypes are particularly destructive. “[We were taught] that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you [women] should just follow and just do what we say. That men are superior and women are inferior; that men are strong, that women are weak. That women are of less value, property of men, and objects, particularly sexual objects.”said Tony Porter. This “man box” contained all the ingredients for how men came to define their masculinity. Some of those ingredients, Porter said, were “absolutely wonderful”, others were so “twisted” that it required deconstructing and redefining the very concept of manhood. Boys are raised to bury their emotions. This fear of expressing emotion, of being seen as weak or feminine, has kept boys and men paralysed – just as Eve Ensler noted with her Balkan soldier, Agrim. They are held hostage inside the “man box”, from which there is often no escape. Perhaps as men we take our cues from our fathers. From the way they expressed – or failed to express – their emotions, weaknesses, vulnerabilities. Or the way they showed us – or failed to show us – their devotion “Role modelling is the way the human brain learns almost all complex behaviours, attitudes and skills, and so boys need to know good men close up. All of us are a bundle of the good people, male and female, we have known. But we have let that enrichment disappear on the male side, and many boys today have never seen what a good man looks like close up.” We know all manner of men – good men, dangerous men, corporate men, artistic men, alpha and beta men, terrifying and tender men, physical and bookish men, gregarious men, silent men, old-world men, New Age men, rescuers, narcissists, hopeless romantics, cynics … However, one of the common denominators, certainly throughout the Western world, is the correlation between the time a father spends with his children and a child’s sense of self-worth. “A father’s absence from his daughter’s life has been found in research to increase her chances of risky sexual behaviour, experiencing teen pregnancy, doing poorly in school. For sons, it prevents them from seeing the fullness of what it means to be a man. There is no access to the interior world of male feeling,” he says. “There’s been a vast improvement in this over the past 20 years because of how much time fathers are now devoting to their children. But generations of men have carried the legacy of this gaping hole.” “We’ve militarised men and commodified women for thousands of years,” Biddulph tells me. “War became one of the definers of masculinity and we’re still raising boys as soldiers of empire – which is why they don’t cry. Maybe the struggle between the sexes will never be put to rest. Maybe, in the unfathomable reaches of the male psyche, men have always been frightened of women – or at least frightened of the feminine qualities within themselves: those qualities that point inwards, to that place where our deepest feelings are lodged, but which centuries of masculine culture have repressed or removed. Perhaps, this is the place where violence against women begins: in the shutting-down of this inner world where relationships and connection truly reside, because the models we’ve been given for manhood fail to recognise a fundamental truth, which is that nothing meaningful in life ever happens without the ability to be vulnerable. ~Excerpts from Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing by David Leser

#masculinity #toxic masculinity #fragile masculinity #eve ensler #david leser

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outlikeflynn · 5 years

Note

Write me angst, bisch. I wanna suffer. /chinhands.

Fiiine. If it’s pain and suffering that you want…

***

It’s a tiny grave, all things considering, and Eugene is immediately disgusted by how insulting it is.

He doesn’t mean tiny from her hair, so much. It’s not like the seventy-odd foot of locks would cause the undertaker to provide a bigger plot for her (and he’s not naive enough to think they allowed her to keep them down there). It’s more of a symbolical thing, he guesses. Because a girl who was so damn full of life less than a week ago doesn’t deserve to be crammed into such a tiny plot of disturbed earth, today.

Eugene clenches his eyes shut as it bursts unbidden into his mind again. All that sunshine and wholeheartedness. All that eagerness. That boundless joy that she got from kicking over dandelions and swinging from treetops by the roots of her own hair…

And then that singing of hers, distant at first, and then louder. Strong and calm before cracking. Flesh that was hale and healthy, and somehow a little tanned considering her life as a prisoner, suddenly turning clammy and cold and pale. The roots of her gold hair fading, the colour leeching away as her voice became warbled and huskier. Rapunzel was a natural brunette, he recalled her showing him. Not like that - with that little lock behind her ear, and he wondered just how she’d manage to go her entire life without ever cutting it.

A day later and she was gone, so…

It wouldn’t have been a problem anyway, right? Because all that hair glowed and shone and kept her healthy and alive and safe. And then it wasn’t there anymore, and Eugene was sure that even as his own heart pumped harder and the taste of acidic copper left his mouth, her own pulse was growing so slow and still.

The old woman knew right away what was going on. Her mother, right…? What a witch. He had vaguely heard a frail old screaming and yelling and… Something. He didn’t know what happened to her. If there was justice in the world, she had a few moments to know exactly what was going on as she crumbled to dust.

If there was justice, the backstabbing thief would be dead and not the girl who lived exactly eighteen years and half a day.

The smell of some overly sweet plant assaults his nose. Saliva fills his mouth and his stomach churns. Eugene taps his lips, willing the nausea away. His diet has been mostly ale since he watched her face slacken and those massive eyes turn glassy. Since she crumpled like a doll on top of him and stopped moving all together.

At least alcohol had obliterated the memory of having to carry her over his shoulder as he slowly climbed down her tower, where Maximus had been faithfully waiting. It was just a blur, now. A buzz in the back of his skull, interrupted now and again with Hook Hand threatening to “wring his neck” if he didn’t do something-something.

No, he willed the sickness down, replacing it instead with his bitterness over how small and plain and unremarkable Blondie’s grave is. It needed to be bigger and grander. A proper tomb where she could rest in peace. Paintings nearby in tribute for the finest artist Corona never knew it had. Lanterns. Fucking lanterns tied to every bell and statue and tower.

No, no towers. Not even little sculpted ones.

A sob tears through him, and he hates what an ugly crying face he has, and he hates old witches and Stabbington’s, and he hates being alive while she is here in the cold, hard ground, and he hates what a horrible, twisted sense of justice the world had, where it allowed a filthy thief like himself to escape the noose so many times and then punish her for it instead.

“Hey? Y’wanna keep it down? Some of the dead are trying to sleep.”

Eugene hates old grave keepers who look like wrinkled old cypress stumps in baggy coats and moth-eaten hats, too. But he swallowed the biting response he had. Somehow he doesn’t think Blondie would appreciate him using that kind of language.

Oh, right. Blondie couldn’t appreciate anything, anymore.

“Sorry.” It comes without him even trying, and he’s sure he sounds weak in saying it, and he hates that, too.

He just plain doesn’t like the shuffle of feet and extra body so close to him all of a sudden, but there isn’t much he could do about that. Not while his legs refused to move just yet, or there was a very real threat of losing his liquid lunch. And Eugene didn’t care about vomiting, but he doesn’t think she’d appreciate him doing it all over her final resting place.

“You know our Mystery Girl, here?”

Eugene hates that she wasn’t even identified, even as he knew that of course her grave marker is absent. Because how could she possibly be known or recognised? No real family. No identification. Nothing to prove that she ever existed, except for a tower and the massive, gaping, wound-like hole in existence that she left since -

“For a day or two.”

Maybe the human body has this special magic, where it just carries on when everything else has gone and checked out. That would explain a lot of his adventures, really.

“Don’t suppose you know what to call her, do you?”

Blondie, he wants to say. Her name was Blondie, only it was an insult because she wasn’t blonde, she was pure fucking gold, and she painted and danced and read, and she had a pet frog who’s probably fretted to death without her, and-

“Rapunzel.”

Eugene fervently believes now in the magic of carrying on when everything else has given up. Even if he hears it in his own weary voice, he doesn’t quite believe that he has enough in him to carry on and say: “Her name was Rapunzel, and she was a darling young woman.”

Somehow he does, and he manages it without crying.

The old grave keeper nods and hums and does something that Eugene tries not to hate so much, because he’s sure he’s just trying to help out or something. Something old people do before mumbling about time healing wounds, or assuring little orphans that the right people will come along one day. But he’s not having any of it, because it’s complete and utter rot, and he doesn’t feel like having his feelings spared.

“… do I know you from somewhere…?”

Probably does, Eugene thinks. They’ve still got his picture plastered on every other tree and stump and boulder throughout Corona. They’re like paper snowflakes - no two noses on Flynn Rider’s wanted poster are alike.

“No.”

It’s tempting. It’s so tempting to run out of there. He’s spent a week as Eugene Fitzherbert and it sucked. He had a date and was then arrested. Sentenced to death. Launched through the air. And then died, but it didn’t stick, and instead Rapunzel crumpled on top of him.

Eugene is officially a loser, and he can leave him here in the old, forgotten cemetery and waltz out of Corona with that sparkling diamond tiara on his own brushed head of hair. And in mere weeks, Flynn Rider would retire somewhere warm and sunny, and make tropical drinks out of pineapples and coconuts and vodka. Mm. Piña coladas. How fruity!

His mouth goes dry and his blood turns cold, because he’s fairly sure that Blondie would’ve loved them, and he’s awash with a chilly sweat that makes him hate everything anew. He loathes how easily he could see himself stealing her away from that place and taking her into town for them. Detests how he could imagine her nose crinkling up as she swished it around in her mouth. Despises how she’d probably sway and giggle as she got tipsy, but it would be okay, because she’s in no danger of falling over because shoes are dumb, thank you very much.

“No, my name’s Eugene. Fitzherbert.” And Eugene Fitzherbert is a loser, who in a day and half, met the girl and loved the girl and lost the girl. But it’s more than Flynn Rider ever did, because she liked Eugene much more than Flynn. And deep down, he doesn’t believe for one second that he deserves to feel relaxed and content on a beach somewhere. Not while she’s going to be here, alone with the stones and the paupers.

At least Corona’s Boot Hill can see the lanterns when her birthday comes to visit again, next year. And it’s a revelation that makes his eyes squeeze shut, and his nose runs wet, his lungs burn, his legs slump and a fresh wave of wracking sobs shake through his chest, all over again.

Rapunzel wouldn’t want him to hate everything so much, and he’s too exhausted to try. And, yet…

#yamatodad #angst!#fucking angst and pain!#tw: death #and heartbreak #and all that stuff people somehow like #Answered #Story

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dj-yukio · 5 years

Text

Infection AU

In a summary of what happened, I got really inspired by @notelectrictiger12 ‘s demon Emma AU, which I would like to suggest a name change to Infection AU because demon Emma is kind of a mouthful to say, at least for me

Get it? Cause like, the demons are bacteria, and it’s like, slowly infecting her through entering her bloodstream- my point being, it sounds better and more awesome

This one is a pretty messy one cause my thoughts are just jumbled all together, and the most complete draft was the first one, which is all the way at the bottom just FYI if you decide to open it and read it

Draft 7

Lost Route

“Got it, Ray. I’ll get her back home. You can trust me.”

The words lingered on his tongue as he sprinted, knowing what he had to do. He had promised him. He had promised that girl with glasses-Gilda, was it?- that he would bring at least one back alive.

Well, he only had one with him at the moment, and he intended to bring her back home.

Keeping his footsteps light

Gah! There was so many-

“I’m sorry, everyone.”

Then, at the corner of his eye, he could have sworn he

———————

“You’re back!”

There were shouts of joy as Ray entered the bunker, before even more

Draft 6

Transformation Route

“Thank you. That was delightful. To you, for you, I have the utmost respect.”

Then she fell limp, unable to feel anything around her.

Only the desire to protect remained.

That, and a few bacteria that had entered through the holes he had pierced through her.

——————

It started with the small things.

“Hey, have you been getting enough sleep?”

Emma rubbed her eyes, turning to face him as she nodded. For some reason, her eyes had been ridiculously irritable for the past few days. No matter what she did, it would continuously force her to blink. It was no wonder Ray would think that she hadn’t been sleeping well.

Placing her hand over her eyes, she sighed. “Yeah... it’s just, my eyes are suddenly easily irritated all of a sudden. It’s like anything can set it off, even a little bit of dust.” She let her hands open up a little bit, only to immediately cover her eyes again as the dust flew into her eyes. “Ow! It hurts!”

Ray looked away, hand on his chin as he thought for a bit.

Then he snapped his fingers.

“I’ll see if I can borrow Nigel’s goggles.”

And for the most part, that was the end of it. The goggles did stop them from getting easily irritated, and life went back to normal for her mostly.

Or rather, that should have been the end of all of it.

——————

Usually, when one managed to get back a missing part of them, say for example an arm or a leg, from whatever means, it would be a reason to rejoice.

Finding that her ear had somehow grown back was anything but a reason to celebrate.

She slapped the left side of her face, frantically trying to get herself to wake up, grasping at the pinkish ear that had a skin colour slightly lighter than the rest of her. Hadn’t she left it there, in the burning farm, along with the tracker? How had it grown back? Was it even possible for a ear to grow back?

Emma didn’t know if she wanted to find the answer to that.

——————

Emma woke up with a start, a searing pain seemingly burning away at her mouth.

Draft 5

Alter Route

“Thank you. That was delightful. To you, for you, I have the utmost respect.”

Then she fell limp, unable to feel anything around her.

Only the desire to protect remained.

That, and a few bacteria that had entered through the holes he had pierced through her.

——————

Emma figured that she was dreaming when she saw it.

It was like looking in one of those rumoured fun house mirrors which twisted people’s perception of their bodies. Only, there was no way for a simple mirror to make her perceive what she saw before her.

Mirroring her in her actions, the creature swayed along with her as she leaned to the sides to see how the rest of it looked like. Clearly, it was a demon, with its long claws that replaced its fingers, strange feet, and its white mask that didn’t cover its mouth and eyes.

However, it didn’t seem to be responding to any sort of stimulus apart from doing a mirror image of whatever she was doing.

Hesitantly she brought her hand up, and as she did, so did it, and Emma forced herself to push forward such that she could touch its palm.

The instant the contact was made, its eyes shot open, making Emma fall backwards from the shock. It blinked, scrutinising her, and she was paralysed with fear. Its eyes flicked around, blinking a few times as if it was trying to get used to whatever lighting there was in the dark abyss that they were in.

Then it looked back at her, tilting its head as if considering her. “Nice to meet you.”

“Who are you?”

The demon rubbed her eyes, growling a bit.

“This has to be a dream.”

The demon grinned at her.

“Well, yeah it’s a dream, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

She slung an arm around her, the claws barely touching her skin.

“Come on, don’t you trust me? I’m you-“

“No.”

The demon stared at her before shrugging. “Well no matter.” The demon got up, and she could see black splotches across its arms before it pushed her. “You’ll see that you can

“Wait! Who are you?”

“Don’t you recognise me? I’m you. I’m going to be you.”

And then she woke up.

——————

Draft 4

Transformation/Alter Route

They were in the ruins, and she, along with the others had been looking for the eye of Cuvitidala when an arrow inscribed in the rocks caught her attention. Following it, she kneeled down to look closer at the ruins, intently looking for a sign when she spotted it.

Her surroundings changed, and a dragon flew beneath her, its eye looking straight at her, almost as if it could see through her.

Almost like it was passing judgement on her.

And then she fell.

Images surrounded her, and she gaped as she looked around, brief flashes of ancient civilisations of humans and demons shaking hands in the ruins, then another agreement formed after years of bloodshed after the initial promise. Was this what had happened with the previous promises? What was going on? Were those memories?

And if they were, that must mean that this must be-

“You’re seeing the past, yes.”

Then she landed, no longer falling as she fell forward from the sudden stop in momentum.

Turning behind to see where the voice had come from, Emma paused to process what she was seeing.

“Hmm... strange... a demon hiding in a human? No, that’s too outlandish.”

Emma stared at the demon, the single eyed dragon giving her a wary look as she did so. A demon hiding in a human? What did he mean? What was he? He looked like a demon, with his one eye on his face, but at the same time looked like a child, his hand that seemed to be holding a ball of light so characteristic of a human’s.

Then it clicked in her mind. No, no way. Was this...?

“Ah, I see,” his voice snapped her out of her thoughts, and she felt as if she had just been judged by him. “Yes, you’re of both. A hybrid, then. But you’re not complete yet, are you? That won’t do.”

The demon child looked thoughtful, and she took her a while to process his words, and she looked down at herself, trying to see what he meant. A hybrid? If anything, he was one. But no, she was a human. She had always been a human.

...Hadn’t she?

The memory of the falling plates and the missing cut came to mind, and she wondered if perhaps there was indeed something more to it. The speed and the healing, both were something she associated with demons.

But where would she have even

Then it clicked.

Lewis. The claws that had impaled through her. How fast she had recovered and regained her mobility. The plates. The cuts.

No. Way.

Had that momentary contact somehow managed to give her some of his abilities?

That couldn’t be right. There was no way.

“Hmm... it’s recent, but you deny...” He shook his head, almost as if he was disappointed with her. “Right now, you’re only seeing visions. You’ll need to find an entrance.”

It was then that she finally realised where she was, having been distracted from his initial statements. This place... must be the place of ‘day and night’ then! Which meant...

“Hey, wait! Are you-“

The dragon roared, interrupting her before he looked at her once more. “Only someone that fulfils the conditions can enter. But Cuvitidala seems to see that you have potential, since your ideals are strong and steadfast. You’ve figured it out by now, then, but you haven’t gotten the chance to embrace your true self.”

“What do you mean, embrace-“

“Embrace the truth and come, and then... We’ll have such fun!”

Draft 3

Transformation Route

First it was the dishes.

“AH! Watch out!”

Emma turned behind towards the noise just as Don tripped, the plates that were to be set for dinner falling out of his arms. Immediately, she could guess what had happened: he must have tripped when he realised that there were some of the younger kids in front of him.

Then her mind kicked itself, and she could see the plates slowly drop, almost close to the ground, where Don’s feet were. That was bad. And with the little ones were so near him, too, the plates were bound to cut them!

She had to do something-

And then, before she knew it, she had singlehandedly picked up all the plates, catching all of them before any of them could shatter.

Almost immediately, amazed shouts filled the room, some of their owners running over to her to tug on her shirt.

“Woah, Emma’s so fast!”

“That was so cool! How did you do that?”

“Emma’s so awesome!”

Don grinned at her, taking the plates from her hand so that she could reciprocate the hugs. “That was incredible, man! You just started grabbing the plates from thin air, and-and- it was just cool watching you get the dishes. Thanks!”

She blinked, still trying to process what she had done before nodding, giving him a small wave in return as she tried to understand how she had managed to sprint over to collect the falling plates.

After all, she had been at least 10 metres away from them, all the way at the other end of the room.

——————

Then it was the cut on her thumb.

Or rather, the lack of a cut on her thumb.

Only, there was no cut to tend to.

Not even a mark or scar remained on her skin, and the only sign that she hadn’t hallucinated getting the cut was the small drop of blood that sat there, having clotted for a while.

Had it really healed that quickly?

For the first time, she started to question if there was something else going on.

——————

Her suspicions were, unfortunately, soon confirmed.

Draft 2

Transformation/Alter Route

The second sign that something was off about her was how much faster her reaction time was.

(The first sign was what they all thought was a miracle, when she woke up much faster than anyone had expected after having been impaled, something that Sandy and Paula never got the luxury of having then.)

“AH! Watch out!”

She had to do something-

And then, before she knew it, she had singlehandedly picked up all the plates, catching all of them before any of them could shatter.

It was in a dark abyss that she first met it.

From what she could recall, the man had been carrying her home after they had finally defeated Lewis, and she could almost remember the loud thumps of his steps as he ran across the woods, trying to get them back to the bunker. He had even tried talking to her to stay awake, but at some point in their journey back, she deduced that she must have passed out from all the blood loss.

So when she saw the demon sitting before her calmly, she figured that it was a hallucination that her oxygen deprived subconscious had created.

It was unlike any kind of demon she had met before. The closest thing that she could place this creature in her mind as was that it was a humanoid demon, but even then, she wasn’t too sure that it would be an accurate description of it.

Its hair was orange and wild, the characteristic bone white mask shielding most of its face apart from its eyes and mouth. The toned hue of its skin reminded her of her own, but there were black splotches all over it as well. Where the hands and feet of a normal human would be, the skin just stopped, revealing the claws to be just elongated bones that were sharp and looked like it could pierce through anything. The creature easily towered over her, and she briefly thought of Lewis from its characteristics.

Then its eyes opened, and she gaped at its green eyes which looked around the abyss that they were in before looking down at her.

It was like looking at a distorted reflection of her in one of the aforementioned funhouse mirrors that she had read about in books talking about amusement parks.

The creature tilted its head at her, almost as if it was scrutinising her before smiling, revealing the rows of sharp teeth in her mouth.

“So it’s you.”

By no means did the smile seem to be malicious, but it still unnerved her, and she backed away from it by a bit, observing what it was doing.

“Who-who are you?”

“C’mon, what must I do to make you trust me?”

“Just another hallucination. Just ignore it Emma.”

She covered her ears, turning herself away from the hallucination. It was just a figment of her imagination, she told herself, and the more she ignored it, the faster it would go away. Definitely, she was just losing her mind at the moment, which was in no way a good thing, so the faster she could get out of this illusion the better it would be for everyone.

It was only after a moment of silence that she realised that it was too quiet, so she looked back, only to see the hybrid seemingly thinking hard while staring intensely at her.

Before she could even ask the human-demon hybrid snapped her claws, fangs showing as she grinned. “Ooh, I got an idea! I’ll give you a gift before you go!”

“A gift?”

The hybrid nodded, smiling at her as if it was a child that had just thought of something clever. “Yeah! No ill will, but it’ll take some time to arrive, so about... when we wake up.”

Initial Draft

Transformation Route

“Thank you. That was delightful. To you, for you, I have the utmost respect.”

Then she fell limp, unable to feel anything around her surroundings.

Only the desire to protect remained.

——————

At first, Emma didn’t think too much into the subtle hints.

It had been a few weeks since the harrowing trip to Goldy Pond. The wounds that had been inflicted upon her by Lewis quickly healed in a matter of weeks, and even before then, she could move around freely, no pain in her gut. She, everyone had thought it was a miracle that he hadn’t gotten her in other areas, perhaps even barely missing her vital organs, and all of them were overjoyed to find her alive and well.

None of them had picked up the fact that she had recovered incredibly fast, all of them attributing it to her determination and resilience. None of them realised that there was no hint of her even being injured in the first place, most likely overjoyed by the fact that she was able to move around with ease rather than how was she capable of mobility in the first place.

None of them questioned how Sandy and Paula were still lying in bed, still unconscious and unresponsive to the world, while she was awake, moving about freely as she roamed, with no pain causing any awkwardness in her movements.

Come to think of it, Emma wondered how she hadn’t realised that there was no disfigured mark, no scar that had remained on her stomach once she had removed the bandages while she was in the shower. Instead, the first thought that came to mind was how effective the medicine was, for her to have gotten away completely unscathed even though she had gotten the treatment later than them.

In fact, if it wasn’t for the two distinct holes in her clothes that had been patched up, sewn together with a string, she probably would have thought that it was all in her imagination, never thinking about how close she had come to death.

——————

Then the hints became as subtle as elephant stampeding into a crowded room.

She had felt a mild discomfort on the left side of her face, feeling as if there was something pressing against the hole that had been left after she had cut off her ear to get rid of the tracker. It was an annoyance, and her hearing seemed to be even more muffled than usual with the bandage, so she decided to go to the bathroom in the bunker to take care of that issue alone, not wanting any of her family to see what was left of her ear.

To say that she was shocked once she removed the bandage to rearrange it was a major understatement.

There, instead of a small bit of scarred skin that was left hanging on the hole that was her hearing, was a ear. A fully fledged ear, with slightly pinkish skin compared to her tanned skin that surrounded the ear.

It took her more than a while to process that what she was seeing was her ear, her own ear, that somehow grown back. The horror only became greater the more that she accepted that reality. Was that even possible, for ears to grow back? No, she reasoned, for if it was, she would have known from Ray.

So something else was at play here.

Why-How did she even get her ear back?

The battle between Lewis flashed past her mind, ending just as she had been impaled by his claws. That would certainly explain it, if somehow she had acquired his healing ability from the contact between his claw and her. That prospect made her smile as a part of her was excited to see that she didn’t have to worry much about getting physically injured, since this new found superpower would practically guarantee that she could fix herself. That was good. This meant that she could protect her family better. She would be able to take harder hits and bounce back faster, all without too much of a cost to herself such that they would be concerned about her well being.

Yet, another part of her was worried, and questions rushed through her mind. How would the other children take it? Should she even tell them? What if that wasn’t the only thing that she had gotten from him?

What if she turned into a cannibal, hungry for-

She stopped herself before she finished that question. The scissors was still in her hand, the one that hadn’t let go of the bandages to reach up to feel the smooth ear. What should she do?

What could she do?

Before she even knew it, the blades had reached up to the new ear, almost caressing it until she realised what she was doing. No. Any sign of blood, and they would immediately worry. Furthermore, she wouldn’t be doing anyone a favour if it turned out that this was a one time thing.

So she would have to hide it then, she decided, and the blade went to the bandages instead.

Don often teased her about how long she had spent in the bathroom, only to come out with an extra large amount of bandages stuck to the even part of her face, and she laughed along, not wishing for any of them to know the truth.

Besides, who knew? Perhaps that and his healing factor were the only things she got from her encounter with Lewis.

Or at least that was what she hoped. The infection continued to spread, integrating itself into the core of her cells.

——————

“Woah! How did you get so tall, Emma?”

The regeneration and healing ability were, unfortunately, not the only things that she had gotten from Lewis. Or at least, that was what she deduced once she realised how much taller she was compared to the older three, including Ray who she practically towered as he sat quietly on the chair, barely giving her a glance as he poured through the books.

She grinned at the little ones, picking them up with ease and almost lifted them to the roof of the bunker library. Then, with an absolutely serious voice, looked into their eyes before answering the question.

“Exercise, good eating habits,” she poked their tummies, earning a giggle from each one, “and genes. That’s why.”

Cries resounded.

“Aww, that’s no fair!”

“No fair! No fair! I wanna be tall like Emma!”

“So unfair!”

A chuckle broke through the grumbles of unfairness, and her small siblings gave way to let the man through as he looked up to her.

“You’re even taller than me now.” Lucas grinned before reaching up to pat her head. Then he sighed as he seemed to be making an imaginary line around his chest. “I still remember that you were this short when I met you.”

Yuugo made a line around his stomach instead. “Don’t you mean around here?”

“Hey! I wasn’t that short!”

The two adults looked at each other before snorting. “At least her energy made up for her height back then.”

“Yeah! I bet that she’s taller than the demons!” A small voice piped up, and suddenly he roared, pretending to scare of the imaginary demons.

They all laughed at that, and she held that moment close to her heart.

—————

She was frantic.

They had lost the base, Lucas and Yuugo were most likely dead, and now Dominic and Alicia were missing?

The sounds of gunshots being fired echoed through the forest, and her anxiety increased tenfold. Surely they hadn’t encountered a demon-

And there was Andrew who had ambushed them in the bunker, his face half blown off but still very, very much alive. Hadn’t there been an explosion earlier? The same one that killed Yuugo and Lucas? How was he alive?

Just what was he?!

“Fooound yoooou....Found the cattle......”

Her eyes widened in fear as she saw who he had in his grasp.

The gun was on Alicia’s temple.

He was going to shoot her.

He had already shot her family members.

Lucas and Yuugo has died, and he was still alive.

“WHO TOLDJA YOU COULD STAND?! ON YOUR KNEES!”

A sense of terror froze her in the spot as the man with a half melted face yelled. She couldn’t move, and stared blankly at them in shock before someone beside her tugged on her pants.

“Emma! Get down, otherwise he’s going to shoot Alicia and get everybody else!”

She could barely register the request, the words seemingly bouncing in her head. It was giving her a massive headache, the overwhelming sounds around her, an intense itching and burning feeling in her hands, the fear of being unable to save anyone.

Being incapable of saving anyone.

He was going to shoot Alicia and get everybody else.

Incapable of saving anyone.

He was going to kill her family?

Lucas and Yuugo had died, and here he was, almost like he was here to mock their deaths.

He-he-he-he-

She clutched at her head, the bandages on her right hand threatening to fall as she shook uncontrollably, but at the moment she couldn’t care less. Vaguely, she could tell that their enemy had stopped pointing their gun at Alicia, instead fixated at her. Good. That was good. Now he wouldn’t kill her.

Then a shot rang out and cries called out her name.

“Emma!”

It took her a while to process that he had shot her arm, only for the bullet to slowly be pushed out as the wound healed.

There was a brief silence from everyone, allowing her to think.

He had shot. He was planning to kill them.

She had to make sure that he never got to do that.

She had to protect them.

A searing pain burned away at her fingers, and before she knew it, she had appeared behind Andrew and Alicia, gently pushing Alicia out of his grasp before grabbing his neck with her claws.

“DON’T TOUCH HER”

With how much she towered over him, she lifted him with relative ease, making him choke before tossing him like a rag doll into the woods a good few metres away.

“Em...ma?”

The fear in her voice made her pause, before a grunt came in the direction that she had thrown him.

Just how was he still alive?!

She dashed over towards the noise, ignoring the calls behind her before finding the impossible man alive, still trying to get up after he had apparently broken one of his arms.

He should have been dead! He was going to come after them now! If he wouldn’t die from all that had been inflicted upon him, then she would just have to make sure that he died, and stayed dead.

And what was more, she could teach him a lesson about hurting her family.

No one was to lay a single finger upon her family.

She didn’t quite remember the rest of what happened, only noting the feeling of blacking out into someone’s arms.

——————

If calling her shocked after seeing that her ear had regenerated was an understatement, then calling her traumatised after finding out and realising that she had torn a living human apart until he was nothing but flesh and bone and organs was barely touching the tip of the iceberg on what she felt about what she had done.

Disgust. Remorse. Regret. Guilt. Anger. Shock. Fear.

The worse thing is that she couldn’t even see the damage that she had done, and most of the other features that she vaguely recalled the day before seemed to have vanished into think air, making the whole experience feel rather nightmarish rather than realistic.

She felt dead to her surroundings, unable to comprehend that she had basically murdered a human being. The bandages from her ear had been removed, and she gently pressed against the smooth skin with her bandaged hands, now completely wrapped in bandages that showed hints of red on its white surface.

She remembered when she had realised her ear had grown back.

Apparently her bones had elongated and pierced through her skin, resulting in the bloody claws that had gripped onto Andrew’s neck-

She buried her head in her knees, unable to continue looking at the bandages. It just served to remind her that she wasn’t human entirely.

Then she felt someone sit next to her.

Slowly, she turned towards the disturbance, only to see that it wasn’t just one person, but her whole family, both Grace Field and Goldy Pond, who was now surrounding her, sitting in a circle with her in it.

Weren’t they scared of her? Why were they-

Gilda reached forward, and she almost flinched, afraid of the physical contact before feeling her hand wipe away at her cheeks, something wet trailing off with that action. Ah, right, she had been crying as though she had been the one who died. That wasn’t right, and she knew it.

Then suddenly-

SLAP!

“Ow!” She cried out, rubbing against her cheek.

“So,” Gilda began, clearly barely restraining herself from delivering a second one, “what did we say about keeping things from us?”

“Eh? What?” Well this certainly wasn’t what she had expected in any way, but she barely had time to comprehend her question before Don waved his finger at her.

“Yeah, Emma! You made us really worried about you, especially when you ran off to get him.”

“I-“

“We’re soooorrryy! We just wanted to see if Lucas and Yuugo were alright, and-and- thank you!”

“But... I...”

Other shouts overpowered her, and soon she found hugs and condolences from all directions. It felt comforting, to know that they didn’t care.

But Ray’s statement stuck with her the most.

“And no matter what you are, you’re still Emma. You’re not gonna get rid of us that easy.”

Tears welled up in her eyes as she smiled before hugging them back.

Perhaps she had lost some of her humanity. Perhaps she wasn’t completely a human.

But at least she still had her family. She still

“Thanks, Lewis, for this.”

#the promised neverland #tpn emma #Infection au #my wips #hehe sorry sorry

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bearly-writing · 5 years

Note

I just read your self-surgery fic and it was everything I never knew i wanted! Soo good! I would love a continuation where we get to see the aftermath. Do you have any plans on writing that?

Sorry for the super late reply! Actually a few people asked for a continuation so I have written a little something. I’m much better at writing hurt than comfort so this probably has more angst and not enough comfort than people were hoping for, but hopefully you enjoy it anyway!

Take a Deep Breath - Chapter 2

Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender

Prompt: Self-Surgery, Chapter 2

Characters: Shiro, Coran, Keith, Lance, Hunk, Pidge, Allura

Warnings: Check the first part for other warnings, Eye Loss, Eye Trauma, Scars, Panic Attacks, Vomiting, Body Image Issues, PTSD

Read the first part here!

Read it on AO3 here!

***

Shiro wakes up choking.

There’s cool air against his skin. A rush of noise, like a breeze whipping past. Shiro opens his mouth to it and, for a moment, is surprised that he can. He can’t remember why he should be. He can’t remember where he is.

“Shiro!”

More than one pair of hands catch him as he falls. Strong arms wrap around him before he can land on his knees. For a wild, breathless moment, Shiro fights, unsure of where he is or who’s touching him. Afraid that the arms are going to constrict and cut off the air he just regained. Voices swirl around him but it’s difficult to make sense of them. He can’t breathe and he’s hurt and he needs to hold his throat open otherwise he’s going to die, only his non-prosthetic arm is trapped against his side by the broad plane of somebody’s chest, and he needs his Galra hand to make his captors back off.

“Shiro!”

No, that isn’t right. There’s no wound in his throat now. Air pumps in and out of his lungs as he pants a little desperately, and the arms around him aren’t tightening, aren’t crushing his ribs. They’re holding him up. And that’s Keith’s voice in his ear – Keith had been there…

Shiro blinks. Blinks again. Keith is here, leaning down towards him, face chalk-white beneath his mop of black hair. When Shiro drags his eyes over to him, his expression tightens, then abruptly smooths into a tentative smile.

“Hey Shiro, you back with us?” Then, when Shiro offers him a shaky nod: “How are you feeling?”

How is he feeling? Shiro takes stock of himself. He feels…as good as he ever does. Now that he’s no longer panicking, his ribs rise and fall smoothly. There’s no squeaky whistle as he struggles to drag in air, no choking pressure against his throat. Shiro tries a smile. There’s a strange, tight sensation, not unlike the way the scar on his nose tugs at his skin whenever he makes an expression that shifts it, but all of the muscles obey his command at least. He flexes his jaw next and marvels at the fact that it stretches without pain. That his bones are no longer shattered fragments in his face.

“Good,” he manages, and marvels again at the strength of his voice, rising unimpeded through his throat. “I’m good.” Keith’s smile widens, but the tightness doesn’t leave his eyes.

It had been bad – Shiro recognises that, in a distant sort of way. He knows how easily he could have lost the opportunity to stand here, in the med bay, totally healed. How easily he could have lost the opportunity to see the other paladins again. A shudder ripples through him. Feeling suddenly vulnerable in a way he definitely doesn’t like, Shiro tries to straighten. This time the arms around him do tighten – hard enough to force a huff of breath from Shiro, before they shift and a shoulder presses up under his arm instead. Hunk. It had been Hunk’s arms around him as he thrashed through his confusion, holding him up. There’s another little shudder, then, as Shiro realises how easily he could have hurt him - how much damage an errant flail of his arm could have caused.

“I’m fine Shiro,” Hunk murmurs, as if he can read his thoughts, cutting off the apology that Shiro was just about to voice. “You didn’t hurt me.”

But Shiro still grimaces, shifting away from Hunk’s touch. Hunk lets him go easily enough. “I could have.” It’s not a pleasant thought, but he can’t let himself get away with lapses like that and he can’t let the paladins get complacent either. All it would take is one good hit and then… Shiro can’t even finish the thought, stomach churning queasily.

When he turns to look at Hunk, that queasiness only intensifies. There’s a strange, distorted quality to the world, as if it’s stretching out of shape, as if everything is reeling past him too fast and yet, at the same time, much slower than it should be. For a long, frightening moment, the world goes dark, like a thin shroud has been pulled over his vision. Shiro blinks rapidly, but a dark smudge remains. The left side of his world obscured by a black hole. There’s no pain, but Shiro can feel the echo of it, the sharp, pulsing agony - just another bright spot in the mess of his caved in face. It had barely even registered then, but suddenly it’s all he can focus on. Vaguely, he’s aware of his breath hitching. Of someone’s hand light on his arm. His prosthetic lifts, moving almost independently of his mind, but someone catches his wrist, holding it still half-way to his face. Part of him wants to snap at them – to keep them safe from the danger – another part of him, small and vicious and usually buried, wants to light it up – to burn the hand circled loosely around his wrist, to stop them from touching him.

“Careful, Number One.” Coran’s voice filters through to him as if from very far away, and that’s vaguely familiar too: the Altean’s voice pulling him back into his body, whilst his mind tries hard to float away. “Don’t touch it.”

“What…?” The horrible, frightened rasp of his voice pulls him up short. But he can’t help asking: “My eye?”

Coran’s face is soft, creased with pity and something that has anxiety writhing through Shiro’s gut. Behind him, Lance looks even worse. The pained expression is ugly on his usually cheerful face.

“I’m sorry, Shiro.” And Shiro’s heart drops. His left hand, free from the loose grip of Coran’s fist, continues the prosthetic’s journey. Trembling fingers brush over the dark hole in his face. A ropy knot of scar tissue greets him, rough and strange beneath his fingers. As alien as the metal arm grafted to his shoulder, the unnatural flash of white in his bangs. The tremble shivers up his arm until his whole body is crawling beneath his bodysuit.

“The healing pods – they’re not perfect. They can’t replace something that’s already lost. Any more than it could replace your arm.” Coran tightens his grip on the prosthetic, as if to prove his point. With the dulled sensation, Shiro can barely feel it, but he jerks his arm anyway, suddenly uncomfortable with the restraint. The Altean lets him go. Watches him tuck the prosthetic close to his chest with dark eyes.

“It’s gone then?” He finally asks, and doesn’t know how he manages to force it past the lump in his throat. It might as well be crushed again for all that he can breathe through it. Shiro already knows, he already knows that it is, but the small nod Coran offers him is devastating all the same. He isn’t sure what noise squeezes itself out of him, but it draws the others towards him like a magnet, crowding too close.

A small arm snakes around his waist, then Pidge’s head is pressing against his stomach. “We can make you a new one,” she whispers, voice small and muffled against him. Because of course she does. “A robot one.” Shiro thinks she might be crying.

The sick, anxious feeling that’s been curling through Shiro’s gut flares into sudden life. They’re all too close. Pidge’s arm is tight as a vice.

Shiro turns as far away from them as he can manage and vomits all over the floor.

***

It’s not fair. Shiro allows himself the thought, alone in the bathroom, forcing himself to stare into his own eyes in the mirror. Or, he should say, eye in the mirror. Usually Shiro avoids looking at himself, if he can. There are no mirrors in his own bedroom, and bathroom trips are completed with long ago engrained military efficiency. He isn’t vain - never really cared about his appearance before, or now, even. But there’s something endlessly disconcerting about looking in the mirror and seeing someone you hardly recognise.

If he had thought the scar and the hair was bad, it’s nothing compared to the way he looks now.

The most obvious is the eye - or the lack of it. It’s a twisted knot of flesh and not-flesh, dark and unnatural in his face. Shiro can barely stand to look at it, and yet his gaze is drawn unerringly back to it whenever he tries to drag it away.

There are more scars too. A spiderweb of little white cracks across his jaw. Jagged marks branching away from the older, thicker scar on his nose. A thin, pink line across his throat that sends a little shiver of unease over his skin when he brushes fingers against it. Another time, he might have been more bothered by them. Now they’re utterly eclipsed.

He is glad though, that he couldn’t see himself when those wounds were fresh. He can’t imagine the mangled, bloody mess he must have been. Some of those scars must have been caused by bone, jutting through his skin, or gaping, open wounds. He can remember the pain - the pure, all encompassing agony and, as always, there’s a strange disconnect there. It’s difficult to reconcile the two experiences when his skin, though not smooth, is whole again, whilst the wound feels as though it happened only minutes ago.

He’ll have to talk to the others at some point. They shouldn’t have been subjected to that, and he can only imagine how they feel about it. But he can’t face them right now. Not yet. He needs another few moments to fall apart.

The stranger in the mirror stares back, unblinking, as Shiro unravels. One sunken grey eye flickering over him as he shakes and sweats and grips the sink so tightly that he’s afraid it’s going to crack beneath the pressure of his Galra hand. The missing eye is all he can see, a caved-out hole in his face. Shiro can imagine it sinking right through his flesh and out the other side. Imagines being able to see the back of the bathroom straight through his skull.

It’s not fair. The Galra have already taken so much from him. It’s not fair.

There’s a crack like a gunshot and Shiro falls, barely avoids smashing his face against the shattered remains of the sink as he drops to his knees. Or maybe he doesn’t, because the sound reverberates uncomfortably through his head, spikes of remembered pain lancing through his jaw, his nose, his throat, his eye. Maybe he tore all his wounds open again. Maybe Keith never arrived and he’s still lying on the hard metal of Black’s cockpit, gurgling out his last strained breaths.

Shiro fumbles at his neck. No blood. No fleshy wound slick with spit and bile. He presses at his jaw next and is relieved to find it firm beneath the pressure. Then, tentatively, he runs his fingers over the bridge of his nose. The thick skin of his scar is rough beneath them, but it’s still intact. It’s not just another hole in his face.

He can’t bring himself to touch any higher.

He tucks his arms around himself instead, and his hand finds the join between prosthetic and flesh. It’s just one more thing, he tells himself, just one more thing that’s different. And if his fingers dig in hard enough to hurt, that’s only because the skin there is so sensitive.

He’s dealt with this before. He’s dealt with the Galra hurting and changing and making him something he isn’t. He’s dealt with the pain and the taunts and the fact that no matter what he does he can never get what he lost back. And if it means he can never be a pilot again-

Shiro chokes, his grip on his arm going so tight that little sparks of colour burst across his vision.

He’ll never be a pilot again. Not with one eye.

We can make you a new one. A robot one. Maybe…

As soon as he thinks it his stomach turns. There’s a flash of purple. Remembered agony pulsing up his arm, worse than even his throbbing face. It won’t be like that. It won’t. Because it’ll be Pidge and Hunk and Coran - not Haggar, not the Galra.

Still.

He tries to imagine it - a cybernetic eye - but all he can picture is Sendak’s unnatural orange glare. His arm throbs. We’re connected, you and I.

No.

Shiro manages to get to the toilet before he vomits this time. There’s nothing left to bring up and his stomach clenches painfully around nothing as he spits bile and acid into the bowl.

“Shiro?”

He heaves again, gasping against the pain. There are tears on his face, damp against his cheeks, dripping over his chin. The acidic taste of bile in his mouth is too familiar.

“Shiro, we’re coming in.”

No. No, no, no. He doesn’t want anyone to see him like this, slumped over the toilet, sweaty and shivering, face a mess of tears and spit and bile. He’s supposed to be the leader. He’s the Black Paladin for God’s sake. Or, he was. Who knows what he is now?

“Oh, Shiro.” There’s a gentle hand on his back and Shiro shudders beneath the touch. More hands shift him upright and he sags against Allura’s shoulder as Coran holds him steady. “It’s OK, it’s OK, Shiro.”

It’s not OK. Shiro can’t stop the tears. Can’t stop the awful, ragged sobs bursting out of his throat. Allura slides her arms around him and he buries his face in the soft cloud of her hair and cries and tries desperately to breathe through his tears.

Eventually, Shiro cries himself out. He slumps bonelessly against Allura, too embarrassed to look up and meet her gaze. A hand strokes over his face, carefully avoiding the space where his eye should be and Shiro doesn’t even have the energy to flinch away from it.

Part of him cringes at this awful display of weakness. Another part of him, small and sick and tired, acknowledges that it doesn’t even matter - it doesn’t matter that he just fell apart in front of Allura and Coran, doesn’t matter that he just proved how weak he is in front of the only people who could strip the Black Paladin away from him - because he’s never going to be the Black Paladin again anyway. It’s a bitter thought, but then, Shiro has plenty to be bitter about. He allows himself that.

“That’s right Number One, get it all out.” Another hand on his back. Shiro doesn’t shake that one off either. “Everything feels better after a good cry.”

Shiro doesn’t actually feel much better, but he doesn’t argue. Just lets Allura stroke his face and run her fingers through his hair. Let’s Coran rub comforting circles between his shoulder blades. They sit in silence until Shiro’s shuddering breaths finally come under control and he starts to feel human again.

“The others-“ Allura starts and Shiro goes tense all over. It had been bad enough that Allura and Coran has seen him fall apart. The Paladins, they don’t need to see that - he doesn’t want them to see that.

“Don’t-“ A hitching breath. “Don’t let them see-“

“Not to worry Number One,” Coran interjects, before Shiro can choke out the rest of his sentence. “They’re not expecting to see you.”

That should be a relief, but something hot and guilty squirms in his stomach as Allura pushes his bangs out of his face with surprising tenderness and Shiro turns into her shoulder to avoid the sudden weight of her gaze. “They’d like to though. They love you, Shiro. They’re worried about you.”

Shiro takes a deep, shuddering breath. She’s right, he knows she’s right. The other Paladins deserve for him to face them. But he doesn’t want to.

“I’m sorry Princess.” He straightens up. Wipes a hand carefully over his face to get rid of the worst of the mess. “You’re right, I should talk to them.”

There’s hesitation in the brush of Allura’s hand. “You should,” she agrees, carefully. “But you don’t have to.”

Only, he does.

***

They’re in the rec room when he finally gathers the courage to go and find them. Pidge and Lance and Hunk huddled together on one of the low couches, Keith leaning against the wall opposite, arms crossed, mouth pressed into a thin line.

As soon as he steps into the room, they turn to him, their eyes zeroing straight towards him like he has a gravitational pull. Pidge jolts off of the couch, then hovers, wringing her hands.

“Shiro! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean-“

“It’s OK,” Shiro cuts her off before she can finish the thought. He definitely doesn’t want to hear her apologies - doesn’t deserve them. “Listen, we should talk. I need to - I need to say I’m so-“

“Don’t.” The venom in Keith’s voice surprises Shiro and he stutters into silence. “Don’t you dare say you’re sorry. Not for this.”

Keith pushes off the wall and stalks towards him. His face is pale, his mouth a dark slash across his chin. Shiro flinches away before he can stop himself, his hand shooting up to cover the horrible wound in his face. The feel of it under his palm makes his stomach turn. But he doesn’t let go, too self-conscious beneath the other Paladins’ stares.

Keith stops abruptly. There’s a horrible, sick expression on his face. Tension tightens the air between them. Then Keith unwinds something from between his hands and holds it out, offering it to Shiro with a humourless smile. It’s his bandana - the one he had worn when he had rescued Shiro from the Garrison.

“Thank you,” Shiro whispers, throat inordinately tight, taking it with his free hand. He has to turn away so the others won’t see the scar as he winds it over his head. It does make him feel a little better when he turns back around to face them, although the tense, sad expressions on their faces make his stomach clench. “I won’t apologise. But we should talk.”

Keith doesn’t say anything in return, but he nods. The others do too, although they look unhappy about it.

“It must have been difficult for you to see that,” Shiro starts, ignoring Lance’s spluttered, “Difficult for us?” bulldozing through it as quickly as possible. “I don’t want to…patronise you. But if you need to…talk about it. I’m here.” And Shiro’s used to taking an almost paternal role with the Paladins - ever since a young Keith, alone and scared and hurting, had caught his eye at the Garrison - but there’s something distinctly uncomfortable about asking them to open up about something so…personally traumatic.

“You -“ Unsurprisingly, it’s Lance who speaks up first. “We thought you were dead.” And his voice breaks on the word - a horrible, wet, hitching breath. Shiro can’t help wincing. “And your - your face. When we found out you were…conscious…” He cuts off with a choking sound.

Shiro fights the urge to close his eye. Hunk picks up from where Lance trailed off, his voice soft and pained. “It was awful. God, Shiro, it must have hurt.”

There’s no good answer to that - not a true one anyway. “I don’t remember much of it,” Shiro lies. And he’s studiously avoiding looking at any of them, but Keith is standing close enough that he can’t avoid seeing the way he tenses, clearly calling Shiro’s bluff.

“Shiro.” He can’t tell who the complaint comes from. There’s an odd rushing in his ears. The sound of his own pulse throbs through his head. Someone touches his arm, more than one someone, Shiro thinks through the fog. Strong arms slide around him and no. He can’t do this again. He can’t fall apart on them again. It had been bad enough the first time, when he had nearly hurt them, it had been bad enough with Allura and Coran.

At least his face is dry this time. Any tears he might have shed have already been purged. And it’s not bad, exactly, to have their arms around him. To feel Pidge’s head against his chest, Hunk’s own chest warm against his back.

“Be OK, Shiro,” someone whispers. “Please, be OK.”

And he will be. He has to.

#Voltron legendary defender #My writing #fanfiction #continuation #shiro #coran #keith #hunk #lance #pidge #allura #eye trauma tw #scars tw #panic attacks tw #vomiting tw #ptsd tw

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queenofmoons67 · 5 years

Text

nothing but ashes (blow them all away)

Summary: Eijun and Seidou's baseball team just want to have a nice trip to Tokyo. Unfortunately, that's apparently too much to ask for, and they find themselves caught up in a villain attack. Pre-Miyusawa.

Word Count: 5066

This is a sequel to "strike the match (let it all burn)" and part of my "We Are the Challengers (Plus Ultra!)" verse, but it can be read separately (though I do recommend reading STM first because this fic references it a lot and deals with the aftermath).

Links to both the Master List of this AU and to AO3 are in the notes.

Quirks to Know: Eijun (house cat and lion), Miyuki (quirkless), Jun (voice projection), Chris (analysis of weaknesses and strengths), Kawakami (raindrop fingers), Tanba (butterfly), Toujou (turns to rock), Kanemaru (turns to rubber)

I do not own Daiya no Ace, quirks or noumus, or the surprise cameo from Free! And as always, a big thanks to @bookdancerfics for being my beta. This fic wouldn’t be what it is now without you.

Eijun, he later admitted to himself, never expected to be in this scenario only a few weeks after a hostage situation. Tetsu had suggested a team trip—third years included—to take their minds off of what happened, and Tokyo was easily accessible. Kataoka-kantoku hadn’t taken long to approve and so off they went, Eijun and Harucchi stubbornly dragging a tired Furuya along.

“Heeey Seidou!” Jun bellowed once they arrived, hopping on a bench and ignoring the scandalized looks he received from passer-bys. “Time to split up! Everyone grab a partner and decide where to go! We’ll meet back here in—” He looked down at Tetsu, who held up two fingers. “—two hours! And don’t eat, cause we’re having a team meal! You will be held to your usual three bowls of rice!”

With that said, Jun jumped down. Eijun looked around to see everyone quickly splitting up. Harucchi waved goodbye as he was pulled by a suddenly awake Furuya towards a nearby park. Kanemaru, Toujou, Kawakami, Tanba, and Chris-senpai called for any others who wanted to visit a bookstore. Eijun fidgeted in place, unsure which group to join or where to go—

An arm wrapped around his shoulder, just shy of his neck.

“Yo,” Miyuki offered. Eijun felt his face flush, heat rising all the way up to his ears as his tail fur bristled.

“Hi?” he offered back, voice weak.

“Want to hit the road? Where do you want to go?” Miyuki peered down at him. Maybe it was the glasses blurring the image, but Eijun thought his catcher almost looked worried. He shook his head and took a second look. “No?” Miyuki asked, scandalised. Nope; not worried. Then Eijun realised what happened.

“No! I mean, sure. Uh—” Eijun cast a wild look around them. Restaurant, restaurant, comics, alley, sports store— “Sports store!”

Miyuki stared at him blankly.

“We’re here for a break and you want to go to a sports store?”

Eijun nodded furiously. Now that the idea was there, he actually wanted to anyway, so he might as well drag his catcher with him.

“Fine,” Miyuki sighed. “But thirty minutes max, ok?”

An hour later they were still in the store. Eijun had picked out a new pair of batting gloves and moved on to the bats themselves. Miyuki simply followed him around, offering a sarcastic comment every now and then. Eijun ignored him in favour of settling into a batting stance with a bat identical to Onii-san’s. When he looked up, though, Miyuki was staring past him out the glass store doors.

“Sawamura…” he said. “We need to take cover!” His voice rose in a shout at the end, panic threading through it. Eijun spun to look behind himself just in time to see a car collide with the doors, the resulting explosion of flames, gas, and glass knocking him backwards into Miyuki and further into the store. Thankfully they didn’t hit anything, but as Eijun got up, it was to stare at the gaping, flaming hole where the store front used to be.

Outside, a huge, hulking beast with exposed brains lumbered down the street to toss the next car. Eijun gaped at it. He hadn’t seen one in person, but he recognized it from the news in May.

“Sawamura, you must be the unluckiest person alive,” Miyuki groaned from behind him, “if you’re attracting beasts who’re all supposed to be dead.”

For once, Eijun didn’t have the words to respond. Other people were taking their chances with the flames to get out of the store. Another beast—a noumu, he remembered, is what heroes had called them—joined the first, and the crowd scattered, screaming.

“We have to help…”

“We have to what? Bakamura, are you crazy? We’re not heroes! I don’t even—” Miyuki broke off to mutter a curse. “Sawamura, I don’t even have a quirk.”

“And? Who says you need a quirk to save people?”

Miyuki stared at him like his head had suddenly turned into a pumpkin. “The world, Sawamura! The world! You got shot a few weeks ago because no one could do anything until Endeavor arrived! Because I couldn’t—”

A nearby explosion cut off the next words. It was just as well; despite the frequent accusals of being an idiot, Eijun understood perfectly well what his catcher said. He understood it just as well as he knew Miyuki would never have said it if this hadn’t happened.

“Text the team,” he said instead. “You’re the captain, Cap. Check up on everyone. I’m sure by this point they at least know something is happening, but it would make you feel better, right?”

Miyuki barked a sharp laugh and shook his head. Running a hand through his hair, he pulled out his phone.

“You’re unbelievable, you know that, Sawamura?”

Eijun grinned so hard his cheeks hurt. It distracted him from the way his tail twinged, as if a bullet had pierced it a second time.

Thankfully, it only took a few minutes for Tetsu to text back: Heroes setting up safe area in bullet train stop. Jun’s volunteered himself as an announcement system, so you’ll know when you’re close.

Eijun took a deep breath and mentally did a body check. Tail and claws out. Ears pricked to catch the slightest noise.

A rattle next to him made him turn. Miyuki met his eyes evenly.

“Quirkless, remember?”

“It’s a good idea,” he replied, and plunged through the dying flames of the doorway onto the street.

Miyuki armed with a baseball bat: Check.

With all the chaos on the street, it didn’t take them long to run into trouble. Or rather, neither of them could just run away when they saw a noumu stalking towards Kanemaru, Toujou, Kawakami, Tanba, and Chris-senpai. Toujou had taken up a stance in front of the others, skin hardened to rock, but they had nowhere to go with the beast’s focus completely on them. On instinct, Eijun looked to Miyuki. His catcher looked back and, perfectly silent, flashed him two pitch signs. Splitter. Cutter.

“You’re lucky I know Furuya’s signs, Miyuki Kazuya,” Eijun muttered. He waited a moment to watch as his catcher ran towards the beast, shouting insults and waving his bat around. Then, he followed him in from a slightly different direction, as silent as a cat stalking a mouse.

Eijun managed to catch the noumu from the side, raking his claws down and as deep as he dared while knowing this used to be an actual person.

The beast howled in pain and spun to face him. Eijun stared up at the face from his crouched position. He just had to wait long enough for—Miyuki swung his bat into the back of the head, just before the neck became open brain. The noumu stumbled forward, face contorting from pain to anger.

“Let’s go let’s go let’s go!” Miyuki shouted, dropping the bat in order to grab Eijun’s arm with one hand and Kawakami’s with the other. Their other teammates quickly fell in behind them as they ran.

Any other night, they would be able to hear the slap of sneakers against the concrete. Now, though, Eijun listened as the roars of the beast following them blended with an explosion in the distance. He flinched, the noise reminding him of the gunshot that scarred his tail. Something tightened painfully around his bicep in response. A glance revealed Miyuki’s fingers, white-knuckled and dragging him forward. Always forward. Whenever Eijun took a step back, his catcher was there to pull him forward again. This was no different.

“Let’s go!” he shouted, echoing Miyuki’s encouragement from before.

“We’re already going, Bakamura!” Kanemaru panted. Despite his protest, Eijun watched as the third baseman pulled ahead of him.

Miyuki laughed and began the team’s usual running count. Behind them, Chris-senpai choked on his own laugh and Tanba groaned.

The count drowned everything out as Eijun focused on nothing else, until a new voice filtered through.

“—safe area! If you can hear me, you are approaching a safe area! Please continue to the bullet train station!” The voice was rough and had obviously been talking nonstop for awhile, but it was still recognisable.

“We’re close!” Eijun cheered. “I can hear Spitz-senpai!”

Of course it was at that moment that Kawakami let out a yelp. Miyuki’s hand, still wrapped around Eijun’s arm, yanked him around and dragged him backwards for a moment before the catcher let go. Eijun stumbled, but eventually found his balance and looked up. The noumu’s giant paw grasped Kawakami around the middle, holding him in midair. Miyuki dangled a foot in the air, stubbornly keeping his hold on Kawakami’s arm even while he cursed out the beast.

Eijun lunged forward, meaning to latch onto either of his teammates and pull them to safety, but Chris-senpai lunged into his path.

“You can’t!”

“But they—” Eijun protested, voice dying in his throat as the catcher shook his head.

“Do you think I didn’t already use my quirk to analyse him? He has no weaknesses that mere high schoolers can exploit. You, Kanemaru, and Toujou need to get to the safe zone and send heroes to help. Do you understand?”

Eijun looked over Chris-senpai’s shoulder. Tanba had latched onto Miyuki, giving their catcher an anchor and a brace. Kawakami’s eyes had gone wide with fear, but a rainstorm fell from his fingers onto his captor’s fingers and made the grip slippery. At the rate they were going, they might get Kawakami out safely. They might be able to escape the beast, and hopefully meet up with heroes to escort them to the safe zone. Might.

Eijun looked down at his claws. Everyone had said he had the power to get into UA if he wanted. He’d chosen baseball instead, but he guessed it was time to figure out if everyone had been right.

“No, Chris-senpai,” he said. He stared up at his idol, meeting his gaze. Unfaltering. “I’m not trapped in a bathroom, and my wound has healed. You can’t protect me forever.”

“Shit, Sawamura,” Kanemaru breathed. Eijun didn’t turn to took at him, eyes focused on his old catcher.

“Eijun,” Chris-senpai began, then faltered. He took a deep breath, released it, and let him go. “You’re right. As much as I hate to admit it, you have the best quirk for combat out of us. We need you here.”

“That’s great!” Miyuki called. “But I don’t know if you’ve noticed, this isn’t the time for a heartfelt discussion!”

Chris-senpai turned, and Eijun finally looked past him. While they’d been talking, Toujou had turned to stone and wrapped his arms around Tanba. The extra weight had deterred the noumu a little, but each move of his arm tugged Kawakami a little more out of Miyuki’s grasp. The fact the three anchors also had to dodge the other arm didn’t help. Judging by the torn clothing and blood welling up from Miyuki and Tanba’s torso and shoulder, they hadn’t managed to escape them all, either.

“The weakest point is the arm holding Kawakami,” Chris-senpai murmured. Eijun beamed up at him, and his old catcher smiled down at him. “If you manage to get that hand to open, we can make another run for the safe zone.”

Eijun dashed towards the noumu, tail streaming out behind him. The wind whistled in his ears, and he made out the familiar sound of Kanemaru running. Knowing Chris-senpai, he’d probably sent the other first year to get a hero. He didn’t dare check though.

Last time, he’d caught the beast unaware from the side. This time, he was charging him head on. It would be more difficult: like climbing a moving tree with only a few branches. Except—

“Sawamura!” Toujou called. “Use us!”

“W—what he said!” Tanba stammered.

Miyuki said nothing, but from him, that said it all. With his teammates help, it would be more like scaling a small hill.

Unable to help himself, Eijun let out a roar of delight, sheathed his claws, and leapt into the air. His legs—strengthened both by his quirk, which made his body suited for jumping, and by Kataoka-kantoku’s training—carried him all the way up into a crouch on Toujou’s shoulders, hands braced on Tanba’s bald head. He gave it a quick rub for luck.

“O—oi!” the older pitcher stammered, and Eijun laughed.

“Sorry, Tanba-san! I couldn’t resis—!”

“Bakamura, the arm’s coming around again!” Miyuki snapped.

“Right!” Eijun shouted, and leapt into the air once more.

This time his leap carried him over Tanba’s head and onto his catcher’s back, though not for long. He crouched low and, just as the noumu’s arm entered his periphery vision, jumped off his teammates and onto the arm holding Kawakami. The other pitcher stared at him, wide-eyed, and Eijun spared a second to shoot him a grin. Then he focused on scoring his claws down the flesh before him, digging in deep. Last time, he’d tried not to cause too much damage. Now he didn’t care. Sooner or later, he’d either tear a tendon or cause enough pain that the noumu let his teammates go. Until then, he’d just keep—

“Eijun, duck!” someone called, and he found himself flying.

As he rotated in midair, the night sky turned into faces gaping up at him. And not just any faces, he realised dimly. His teammates. The noumu must have knocked him off his perch with the other arm, but with so much force he flew up instead of down. Not that it mattered, he noted as the faces grew bigger. He’d hit the ground eventually.

“Sawamura!” someone called, and his shoulder wrenched as his hand caught on something. “Come on, Sawamura,” the person groaned. “I can’t haul you up myself, I’m not that strong! No matter what you first years think!”

“Hah?” Eijun muttered, blinking. The pain, while not enough to indicate a break or dislocation, had still been enough to bring tears to his eyes. “I think you pulled my muscle…”

“Seidou luck,” someone groaned.

The first voice snapped, “Quiet, Tanba! A medic can easily heal it, and it’s not like it’s his throwing arm anyway.”

“Sawamura!” someone else called from above. “Sheath your claws!”

Finally, Eijun looked up. The first thing he saw was Kawakami’s face, hanging over a fist and staring down at him. The second was Miyuki’s fist bleeding everywhere.

“Gah!” he exclaimed. “What happened to you!”

“Never mind me,” Miyuki sighed. “Now come on! Chris-senpai is providing a great distraction right now, but sooner or later the noumu is gonna swing for you again! Can you climb?”

Instead of answering, Eijun braced himself on Tanba, reached up to grab his catcher and haul himself up, and froze when he noticed his claws. They were still out from shredding the noumu’s arm, but that meant—

His eyes zeroed in on his other hand, still clenched in his catcher’s. All the blood was—

“Don’t mind me, Sawamura,” Miyuki gritted out. “Get up here and free Kawakami, ok? Then you can sheath your claws.”

All the blood was from his claws, currently embedded in his catcher’s fist.

“Eijun!” Chris-senpai called. “Whenever I can stop running around would be great!”

But for once, Miyuki was right. This wasn’t the time to worry about pain. Hadn’t he thought something similar himself, just moments before?

“Don’t worry, Chris-senpai!” he shouted, and hauled himself up onto Miyuki’s back. “Kawakami will be free soon!”

In the end, Chris-senpai still had to run around for awhile as a distraction so Eijun wouldn’t be hit off again, but between Eijun’s claws and Kawakami’s rain, the pitcher was soon free. Miyuki snatched them both up off the ground, both hands once again pulling his pitchers along, while Tanba, Toujou, and Chris dashed along behind them.

“Where,” Tanba panted, “are the heroes?”

“You don’t think…” Toujou trailed off, worry clear in his voice.

Eijun shook his head emphatically and called, “No way! Kanee is definitely—”

A tree root shot past them, quickly followed by the pro-hero Kamui Woods. Two other people, obviously heroes by their costumes, but less well-known, ran behind him. One kept going, but the other reversed direction to run with them.

“Are you the group from Seidou?” he asked. “With Miyuki?”

“Yes,” their captain nodded. “Kanemaru found you?”

“Yes. I’m going to escort you to him now, ok?”

If Miyuki replied, Eijun didn’t hear him, as the beat of their sneakers against the concrete and the sounds of battle erupting behind them overcame everything else.

They met up with Kanemaru again at the safe zone. He let out a shout as soon as he saw them and ran to meet them, skidding to a halt just in time to avoid crashing into Toujou.

Jun spared them a wave and a wide-eyed worried stare from nearby, but didn’t let up on his broadcasting duties. There was a table full of water bottles in front of him that hadn’t been touched, either. Tetsu was supposedly in camp, but apparently other business had pulled him away from Jun.

“Tetsu’s gonna kill him,” Miyuki remarked wryly, and Eijun nodded, stomach twisting. Normally, such a comment would have him stifling laughter. But right now, with the city burning around them and stinking of copper, he couldn’t find it in himself.

“Hey,” he started. “Let’s—”

Someone grabbed his wrist.

Eijun stiffened and tried to pull away, but the grip was too strong.

“Oi,” Miyuki and Kanemaru snapped. “Let him go!”

The grip released suddenly, and Eijun found himself stumbling back with the lack of resistance. Arms came up around him to catch him. The tangy sweet scent of fear largely covered up the person’s usual smell, but under it all was well-worn leather, dirt, and miso. Miyuki.

Eijun froze in his catcher’s arms, who quickly put him on his feet.

“Are you ok?” Tanba asked.

Eijun looked up and nodded. Toujou, Kanemaru, Kawakami, and Tanba were all staring at him worriedly. Miyuki had taken a small step to the side, putting distance between them—though not too far—and glaring at the hero who had grabbed his hand. Chris-senpai had turned the tables on him, and Eijun figured that it had been him grabbing the hero that had gotten himself released.

“What do you want?” Chris-senpai asked. The hero raised his free hand, palm out.

“I thought I saw blood, that’s all. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have startled you like that.”

“Oh,” Eijun said, looking down at his own hand in surprise. He had sheathed his claws, but the blood from both Miyuki and the noumu had caked itself onto his fingers like a melting popsicle. Jolting at the reminder, he whirled on his catcher. “Miyuki! You need to see a doctor!”

The tanuki sighed and rolled his eyes. “So do you, Bakamura.”

“And Tanba,” Chris interjected.

“The blood is yours?” the hero asked.

“I accidentally clawed him after I got the noumu,” Eijun explained. The hero froze, and the pitcher frowned. “Is something wrong?”

“You used your quirk to hurt someone?”

“The noumu had Kawakami, I wasn’t about to just let him go.”

The hero nodded, but his eyes darted to the side. “Let’s get you three to a healer, and we’ll talk after, ok?”

“Ok…” Eijun replied. He had the feeling it wasn’t that simple. It was the same one he had had when he was little, and his grandfather started explaining lion traditions to him. Like something wasn’t right.

It was only as they were following the hero that Kanemaru hissed, "Oi, Bakamura! Why'd you tell him that?!"

"Ha— oh," Eijun faltered, almost falling as he missed a step. Kawakami grabbed his arm, and he smiled up at him. "Thanks, senpai!"

"Kanemaru, what do you mean?" Miyuki interjected. Steering the team back on the base path, as usual. Though in this case—

"Why do I feel like I did something irreparably wrong?"

"One, thank you for listening when I teach you vocab," Kanemaru began. "And two, I wish you did the same for Japanese law!" Glaring at Miyuki, he added, "And that you paid attention in class. Honestly, do you two just have baseball between your ears?"

Eijun blinked, then jolted. "Ah! You mean—"

"Here we are," the hero—who had been walking a bit ahead of them—interrupted. "Rin-san, they have three injured in their party." The last bit was directed at a red-haired male sitting in a pile of medical supplies. He smiled up at them as the hero left, flashing a neat row of shark teeth.

"Hello! I'm afraid I don't have a healing quirk, but I am quite skilled in first aid. One of my best friends drilled a lot of sports medicine into me." He beamed up at them, and Eijun just about collapsed on the spot.

"Rin-san," Miyuki began, jolting Eijun out of the smile-induced haze, "If you're not a doctor, EMT, or hero, why are you here?"

"Ah," the smile faded. "There was someone else, but they were moved to a nearby building with the seriously injured. Since it's gonna be awhile before the heroes can send someone else, I volunteered to to do triage. And speaking of triage," he beamed up at them again. Eijun beamed back, unable to help himself. The smile was contagious. "Who's injured?"

"This idiot," Eijun and Miyuki both spoke at the same time and pointed at the other.

“And Tanba,” Kawakami added.

“I accidentally clawed my catcher,” Eijun moaned. “Help him first, please!” He gave a short bow, hoping that would reinforce his request.

Except then Miyuki snapped, “I told you I’m fine! Besides, a torn muscle is more serious.”

Something twisted in Eijun’s stomach—something different than when his catcher had joked about Tetsu and Jun. It was partly warm and kind of flappy, like when Miyuki complimented his pitching. But the majority of it felt ugly. Like he was staring down the barrel of a gun, Furuya’s flames flickering in his line of sight.

“The noumu tore into your muscles, for all you know!” Eijun exploded. He jabbed a finger into his catcher’s chest, ignoring the way his own shoulder muscles twinged.

“Aw,” Miyuki mocked. “Are you worried for my abs, Sawamura?”

If this had been a just world, Eijun would have born with a heat vision quirk. As it was, he had to settle for quietly fuming and lashing his tail.

“How about this?” Rin-san interrupted. Eijun blinked, and realized that at some point the man had maneuvered himself in—between himself and Miyuki Kazuya. “Sawamura, was it? I’m afraid I can’t do much for a torn muscle, but please take one of the ice packs over there, wrap it in a towel, and apply it. I believe I also saw a shoulder brace you can put on to rest it until someone comes to heal it. As for you two,” he smiled at Miyuki and Tanba, and Eijun shivered. It didn’t seem as nice as before—almost threatening. “Please take off your shirts so I can properly assess and treat your injuries. We need to stop the bleeding, so I’ll be helping you both at the same time. Is that ok?”

“Yes sir,” Tanba muttered, and Miyuki nodded. Eijun plopped down by the ice packs.

“Who are you?” Kanemaru asked, awe clear in his voice. “Please teach me your ways, sensei!”

Rin-san laughed even as he sat down again and focused on gathering his supplies.

“I was the captain of my high school swim team, so I’m more than used to wrangling teenagers. And the shark quirk helps.” He flashed another smile, showing off his teeth. “But let’s focus on all of you, shall we?”

After they were all treated, they waved goodbye to Rin-san and left in search of Jun. He was right where they had left him—except this time, there was an empty water bottle and an angry Tetsu in front of him. Jun waved at them weakly, and their old captain marched over to them to talk.

“According to the guy in charge, the heroes are almost done wrangling up the noumus. He refused to say more, so I believe it is confidential. Though he did say he wanted to talk to you, Sawamura?”

At the questioning look from Tetsu, Eijun laughed weakly and rubbed the back of his head.

“Ahahaha, well, you see, we all may have forgotten about the whole quirk restriction business, and I may have seriously injured one of the noumus with my claws… completely unfair business, really, Miyuki Kazuya hit him with a baseball bat but he’s not going to get in trouble, is he?”

“I might have, but I wasn’t stupid enough to tell someone I did it, Bakamura,” Miyuki rolled his eyes.

Eijun’s cheeks burned.

“It’s not like any of you stopped me! Only Kanee said something, and that was after I’d already said it!”

“Someone’s coming this way,” Chris-senpai interjected. “He looks important.”

Tetsu turned to look and nodded. “That’s the guy in charge.”

They all watched as the hero stopped by Jun, who went quiet to listen. When he was finished, Jun slumped back in his chair, grabbed a water bottle, and started taking small sips. Then, the hero turned towards them.

“Which one of you is Sawamura Eijun?” he asked.

Eijun took a deep breath, straightened his shoulders, and gave a short bow. “I am, sir!”

The hero studied him for a moment, then nodded. “Considering the extenuating circumstances, and the fact that you aren’t a hero in training, we have decided to let you go with a warning. Don’t let it happen again, ok?”

“Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!”

“Do you all have a way home?”

Eijun faltered and turned to his captains. Tetsu and Miyuki exchanged a glance, and the former captain gestured the new one forward.

“No, sir. Three of us need to go to the hospital for healing anyway. But, we came to Tokyo as a much larger group. Is there anyway you can reunite us, sir?”

Eijun’s mouth dropped open. “You do know how to be polite, Miyuki Kazuya!” he exclaimed.

That provoked a hiss and slit eyes, and Eijun laughed. Teasing his catcher was familiar and, in a way, calming.

The hero glanced between the two of them, but apparently deciding to ignore the exchange, asked, “Do you know where they are?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve been in contact with them, and thankfully everyone has checked in. No one else was injured, but I would sincerely appreciate it if we could all go to the hospital as a group, sir.”

The hero nodded, looking thoughtful. “Well… let me see what I can do, ok?”

In the end, it took ten minutes of being at the hospital for them all to be healed. They’d have to take it easy for a few days, so that they didn’t undo the healer’s work, but compared to how long it would take without the quirk, that was nothing.

The hero in charge—Firebolt, he said his name was—came through as well. The rest of their teammates were picked up from safe zones all over Tokyo and delivered to the hospital. Suddenly, Eijun found himself, Miyuki, and Tanba surrounded.

“I can’t believe you let Sawamura get hurt,” Kuramochi complained to their captain.

Miyuki snorted. “I didn’t let Sawamura do anything. He gets injured all on his idiot lonesome.”

“You’re sure you’re fine, Eijun-kun?” Harucchi asked. He was bent close to Eijun’s shoulder, expecting the now non-existent swelling. Furuya stood next to both of them, feet apart and braced as a solid wall between the crowd and them.

“I’m fine,” he reassured them, grinning. “Rin-san took good care of me before we got here!”

“Rin-san?” Kuramochi asked, wiggling his eyebrows at Miyuki.

Eijun frowned, confused, but his catcher only snorted again. “Some guy with a shark quirk who was doing triage at the safe zone. Anyways, you should all be congratulating Bakamura on not getting arrested.”

“Arrested?” Onii-san asked. For once, he opened his eyes to stare at Eijun. He thought his pride member actually looked impressed. “What did you do, Sawamura?”

“He broke quirk regulations and got off with a warning, but that’s it, Ryou,” Chris-senpai laughed.

“Hmmm,” Onii-san hummed.

“Aniki,” Harucchi reproached.

Onii-san just closed his eyes again and chuckled.

Kataoka-kontoku and Takashima-sensei picked everyone up in one of Seidou’s buses, but it moved slowly through detours, safety checks, and the regular Tokyo traffic. It didn’t take long for everyone but Eijun and his coaches to fall asleep, the sound of snoring filling the bus. Eijun, though, sat quietly and wide awake in the middle of the backseat, sandwiched between Miyuki and Kuramochi.

His catcher had started the ride stubbornly sitting up, arms crossed, but at one point, his entire body had relaxed into sleep and slid down, head falling to the side. Eijun could feel the band of his glasses digging into his shoulder, and Miyuki’s knee heated his own where they pressed together.

On his other side, Kuramochi snored up a storm, and drool slipped down to pool on onii-san’s shoulder, where the cheetah’s head rested. Onii-san’s own head lay on Kuramochi’s. He had trusted Harucchi into Furuya’s care for the ride, and the two of them rested physically apart, but comfortable together, in the pair of seats before onii-san.

In front of them, Toujou had barricaded Kanee against the window and turned to stone. Not that Toujou was the only one being overprotective. Shirasu, upon finding out what Kawakami had gone through, mothered his friend into the seat two rows before the back. Chris-senpai, after checking with Eijun that he was fine with Miyuki and Kuramochi, had ushered Tanba into the row behind Kawakami and followed him in.

Tetsu, Jun, Kataoka-kontoku, and Takashima-sensei took the first four seats. Everyone else sat scattered in the other seats, pressed together and apart, drooling and snoring and sleeping.

The bus was loud and stank of dirty teenagers, and that had been enough to keep Eijun awake. But now… the cat yawned and allowed his tail to relax a little from where he had curled it tightly around his own waist. He pressed his ear into Miyuki’s hair, and the noise dimmed. It was a good angle for his neck, and the heat of being pressed between two bodies made him close his eyes. Just… for a minute… just…

When I first started writing this, my only thought was ‘what BNHA event can I plop Eijun and Seidou into,’ not ‘what BNHA event after September can I plop Eijun and Seidou into’. As a result, I wrote the first almost 5k with the event being the Hosu Incident. Which, y’know. Takes place in May. Which technically could have worked, but I have everyone working through emotional wounds less than a month old, and I didn’t want to change that. So instead, I’ve created an entirely new incident that’s similar to the Hosu one, but takes place months later, in order to keep both my own timeline, the DNA timeline, and the BNHA timeline intact.

Also, for some reason, all my long fics in this verse end with all of Seidou sleeping in a relative vicinity to one another. Oh well. No regrets on my end.

I hope you all enjoyed, and please let me know what you think!

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