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mad-who-ra · 2 years

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Dagger and Arrows (15)

So before you read this chapter, I want you all to take a moment and remember that you love me. Yes, you do. And if you kill me right now, who will write the last part and possibly an epilogue, right? Right.

Also read this

Ram x Wife!Reader

Word count : 1023

Y/N faded in and out of consciousness. Her eyes drooped and if she thought fevered state was confusing, this was even worse. She had no knowledge of day or night. All she knew was pain and screams. She did not know which ones were hers and which were his. She guessed they were mostly hers. Because when she opened her eyes this time, her whole body ached and burned. Her hands were tied above her with metal chains. But Bheem was free and that is all that mattered. She knew it won’t be long before she looses consciousness again, maybe a day or two before she never opens her eyes again. But as long as she was breathing, she would be satisfied that they had freed Bheem. This was the death she had always envisioned for herself. A death for a cause. For her loved ones and for her country. And if the goddess had granted it to her, she was not an ingrate who would complain about it.

She lightly swung her body, looking for some kind of movement. The chains rattled along with her.

“Y/N?” She heard Ram’s voice above the chains. It seemed to come from a far distance even when she knew he was in the cell right beside hers.

“Are you awake?” He asked.

She tried to focus on him. On his voice. On his question. When she registered it, it was whole another struggle to get a voice out of her own throat. It was dry and scratchy. She had exhausted herself by screaming. She opened her mouth but nothing came out the first few times. She sighed, closing her eyes. After another two attempts, she could get out a strained whimper.

“I am so sorry.” He whispered.

She wanted to tell him there was nothing to be sorry for. She wanted to tell him that she was okay. To not give up for her sake. They both were miserable. They were tortured. She was tortured more physically than him. Mostly because he was physically way stronger than her and Scott had realised the only way to torture Ram was through her. He could hear her screams. Her cries and couldn’t do anything. And Ram hated the fact that it worked so efficiently. He could go through any kind of physical torture, but hearing his wife scream across the wall of his cell, not being able to see what was happening, made his imagination run wild. He had nightmares whenever he closed his eyes. He imagined it to be the worst. He did not know how much longer she could go on like this. The execution was two days away. And yes, they both knew they were going to die. But he wanted to see her one last time. He did not want her to leave him before it was-

He shook his head. It was an utterly selfish thing to think about. Wanting someone, his loved one to keep breathing just so he could see her once. The whole situation was so messed up. He had failed his father. He had failed his villagers. He had failed Seetha, Bheem, his whole family, his country. And now he was failing his wife.

But when Scott and Edward showed up, taunting him, there was no way in hell he was going to accept defeat. No matter what, he knew Y/N would not want him to accept that they were winning. Give them the satisfaction of knowing that they had broken him completely. So he put on a brave face. He told them that he was going to keep moving towards his goals, no matter what, even when he knew what the consequences were going to be. Because this was the path they had chosen. If they were going to die, they were going to die with their heads held high.

And as expected, he heard her scream just a moment later. Scott and Edward stood there, watching him. It was a struggle to not let fear appear on his face. He masked it well with anger. He did not flinch everything she cried. He stood strong, strong enough for the both of them. He stood there, knowing that she never once begged for them to stop. She never once asked for mercy. And so, he was going to stand his ground with borrowed courage. When the screaming stopped and all he could hear was the rattling of chains, he waited for Scott to speak. A guard whispered something to him and he scoffed.

“If the bitch is dead, find other ways to torture him.” He spat, looking at Ram, “break his legs and throw him in the solitary cell.”

Ram’s heart dropped. Scott’s words kept echoing in his head. Dead. He said she was dead. Gone. His wife who did not think twice before putting her life on the line for her people. Who loved so fiercely and killed without hesitation. His wife whom he had gotten only a few months with, because he was an idiot who wasted the time. He remembered the last time they were together before all of this. Before he went ahead and ruined everything. Before he arrested Bheem. How Y/N lied on the floor near the window when he came home. How she looked like a goddess in the moonlight. How he could not stop himself from just lying down beside her. How in that silence he was the happiest that he had been in a long time. And now she was gone. He did not want to be left alone behind. And now he was. He hated himself for being so selfish. But he could not even grieve.

It took everything in him to not scream in agony. He grasped the chains locked around his wrists. Fury clouded his eyes. Even when they opened the cell door and stalked in with weapons, he kept glaring daggers at Scott. His each scream was a promise of Scott’s death. He was going to burn down the palace. And he won’t stop until the whole place had crumbled to ashes.

Remember, you love me. And you want the last part. So, keep your daggers away.

@juhiiiiii @manwalaage @maraudersbitchesassemble @gauri-vishalakshi @lil-stark @rambheem-is-real @seherie @how-is-it-in-london @itsfookingloosah @ma-douce-souffrance @irisesforyoureyes @cainiyor @zaddylokiandthorsimp @bromance-minus-the-b @kafkaesquebestie @hissterical-nyaan @ramayantika @reallythoughtfulwizard @phoenix666stuff @iam-siriuslysher-lokid @obsessedtoafault @budugu @chaanv @nerdreader @kalavathiii @hxnky-pxnky @shawty-writes-a-little @azraelcruor @rambheemisgoated @aasthuu @vidhurvrika @jeonmahi1864 @jjwolfesworld @yehsahihai @voidsteffy @lite-teesko

@dumdaradumdaradum @eloquentree @herefornamu @shreyalokesh @rishi-sita @sukitaee @mathy-u @army24--7 @floating-mushroom @nyotamalfoy @saanjh-sakhi @sabi5 @theclumsypanda

#rrr #ram x wife!reader #dagger and arrows

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m0on-shro0m · 1 year

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Before you read, this isn’t mentioning the content creators, but, their characters with the Life Series. It's just my way of viewing these two from a lore perspective. I also may have forgotten moments or partial events that have happened within the series, since I haven’t watched every single pov in the series and neither did I rewatch a whole lot of the events. This is open for shipping or non-shipping so go wild, but please be respectful.

Within Limited Life, it’s known that the members remember their past lives and most of them have moved on from the past seasons, since none of them are actually holding grudges against each other, or at least not constantly reminding or thinking of the past seasons, meaning they are moving on. Everyone but Martyn and Scott. Well there’s Scar but this isn’t about him, it’s about the Mean Gills.

Starting with Scott, which I will say first that I haven’t watched all of his POVS through the series but watched so far of his Limited life, so this will be half assumptions and from what I’ve seen and heard. Anyways ever since the marriage of Flower Husbands were separated by Jimmy’s first death of the series, which had been during the battle of the Red War. Scott had watched his flower husband die on the battlefield and that will always stick with someone when their lover has died under their gaze in battle. Scott has made his efforts to get revenge which I’m not sure he achieved but I believe he has.

From then on, Scott made it out of his way to hint at Flower Husbands into Last Life, which was the gift of a poppy right in the beginning, for Jimmy. After that I believe he also gave another gift which was the Pufferfish of Peace, but please correct me if I’m wrong since I’ve only seen Jimmy’s pov. Words from a Scott Enjoyer, it was mentioned that Scott and Jimmy weren’t gonna partner up together yet, neither Scott or Jimmy try to attack each other during that season which pretty much proves my point on Scott still might hungover 3rd Life.

In Double Life,I really don’t know much from Scott’s pov on this season other than Martyn’s and Jimmy’s take on the whole situation. I would assume that Scott, as he teased and dubbed heads with the Ranchers, is jealous because he has to deal with Pearl and see that his Flower Husband is happily with somebody else. I don't think I’d be surprised they made that ranch that was supposed to split soulmates apart out of spite of the Ranchers just from Jimmy’s pov and what I’ve read from or just come up with to explain.

Limited Life has probably been the season where Scott is now more vivid on the whole Flower Husbands ordeal, as you can see in the beginning of the first session, being Episode 1, Scott comes over to Jimmy and handing him another bucket of the pufferfish of peace; Jimmy taking said gift and storing it in his chest and never spoke of again until Jimmy hangs it up in the Grain house bakery. Episode 4, Scott comes by again to see what Jimmy’s up to after the fact he had just been during the hunt of the green lives as he is one of the last ones. Jimmy starts to ask for Scott’s time politely and beg but when Scott offers for Jimmy to kill Tango and for him to be spared into being the last green, he gives him his own time. This leads to Jimmy going back on his words and threatening Scott to leave, where Scott backs off and tries to say “I Love You” while leaving. Jimmy doesn’t respond and only goes further on the threat.

Because of Scott and his hints and gifts from 3rd Life, it really got me thinking that maybe he is stuck in the past, that he can’t simply just move on from it. You can tell Jimmy has moved on from 3rd Life long in the beginning of Last Life. Yes, there are times that Jimmy accepts these gifts and comments about the first season but it’s not never as much as Scott. But Scott is always the one who engages the subject.

Now moving onto Martyn who I have watched, he's the same, but only shown differently as shown. In 3rd Life, He was fighting in the Red War along with Ren, who started the war by asking Martyn to do the honors and to chop off his head to spill blood. As they fight side by side, Ren is to be killed by Scar, which leaves Martyn devastated and immediately having his emotions carry him into battle and die in tragedy.

Ever since 3rd Life, Martyn may have moved onto a different group in Last life, being the Southerners, but he never has recovered from the first series by how often he visits and talks to Ren when he can come across him. He had started an alliance with Ren and the Fairy Fort, which became some sort of cult with him? Honestly I don’t remember much from that forth than pure chaos to the point Martyn couldn’t get a grasp on what lore he wanted to push in, but it's fine.

Onto Double Life, Martyn lost his soulmate by traveling without curiosity of who is Soulmate, as if he gave no care who it was. Pearl was along the ride which in the end was what caused him and her to be accused of cheating by Zombie Cleo and Scott. With episodes of off and on rangements between him and Cleo, Martyn had come across Ren and eventually when the two lost their soulmates to someone else, they started another alliance and a rebellion with him along with inviting Pearl in the alliance. It was until either Pearl broke it off or Ren died in the process of Grian’s huge stunt of drip stone that the alliance between the three broke. (It’s only if Pearl didn’t break it off and Ren just died, I can’t remember, so you may correct me.)

So far in Limited Life, Martyn has had a couple flashbacks and hints of 3rd Life, such as one memorable moment, Bdubs gets killed and respawns, immediately asking anyone to kill him so he can become red. In Martyn’s episode, he specifically has a flashback to when he chopped Ren’s off or technically slay Ren and turn him red. That’s all we have been shown of flashbacks or conversations that Martyn has or at least to my knowledge.

So to sum up Martyn’s relations to 3rd Life, is the fact he always ends up teaming up with Ren against anything they vow to fight against. Although Double Life was a bit different, they still fought together against the others because they were unloved by their own soulmates, which pretty much goes with martyn teaming up regardless of the situation.

With all of this in mind, Scott and Martyn are both still stuck in 3rd Life, despite always moving on in different fractions through the seasons, they never seem to give up the memories of the past. The two are always around the ones they used to be with during 3rd Life.

Martyn and Scott now being a pair, this could be a potential plot for angst, hurt-comfort, fluff? or however you see it; The two could be relying on each other to forget about the past, to comfort one or the other in need to remind them that they are there for each other. This could open a lot of cans of worms as they build trust over the time they spend together. This pairing/duo can be an amazing dynamic that’s added to the Life Series.

Another point to add to the discussion of how this duo could be great for the lore! If you were to watch Martyn or Scott or both, we know that Martyn is serving under the Watchers by listening; Scott on the other hand, never actually follows with the rules of the watchers, as you can watch Last Life where he doesn’t spill bloodshed after being cursed with the boogeyman at the finale of the episode, winning the game, or when Scott chose his own soulmate rather than actually working with his tied life soulmate. (even if the reason was because of a misunderstanding.)

It’s the fact that Scott is known to the Watchers as the one who rebels and Martyn as the one who obeys. The two are quite literally the opposite in the eyes of the Watchers. Of course, this is all speculation but I choose to believe that these two could really have something.

In my opinion, Martyn and Scott are the perfect duo in the name of lore and for their dynamic that’s given by their content creators. With everything I can imagine with these two and the endless possibilities of angst or hurt-comfort is just limitless! So now that I explained my entire brain rot of these two- Thank You For Reading!

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spacedykez · 2 years

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get your aromantic double life content!

do you want aromantic double life smp? do you wish there were more aromantic fics in the world? do you love misunderstandings, angst, and/or hurt/comfort? do you love pearl, scott, cleo, and/or martyn and simply want more content about them? look no further! we’ve got it all, folks!

presenting: love loses, a now fully completed four-chapter fic with each chapter centered around one member of the divorce quartet for maximum angst!

(ao3 link, individual tumblr posts:scott/cleo/martyn/pearl) REBLOGS > LIKES!

SCOTT - ON FATE, SPITE, AND CHOICE

Scott was done with games.

He’d never wanted to be part of this. From the start of Third Life Scott had tried to find a bit of happiness despite the blood and war. He’d spited whatever god had created these twisted games and even managed to find a tiny bit of joy: a friend and a bright valley of flowers hidden away from the world.

A friend too good for him. A friend who, when Scott told him he couldn’t love him like he thought Jimmy wanted, had assured him it was okay. That he knew what Scott was trying to say, because he didn’t love like that either.

But they could still be each other's dearest friends; Jimmy could be Scott’s sunflower and Scott his poppy, and they could still love, just not in the same way, and that was enough for them. They didn’t need to fit into the mold of what love was; they loved in their own different way and they were content.

But it hadn’t lasted, and Scott’s happy life had been torn away from him. Jimmy had died, torn away unfairly, and Scott had failed to protect him. A beacon of joy as bright as his sunflower had no place in a world like this, devoid of the happiness and light he deserved.

When Scott had died for his third time, that day in the forest, he’d thought it was over. He’d accepted his fate as the axe swung downwards; closed his eyes in defeat and didn’t bother fighting back. What was there here for him, now that his light had been torn away?

Scott didn’t even feel it hit, already gone from the world. He’d thought that would be the end of his story; just a sad ending to a tragic tale. Dead and gone, forever.

But then, by the powers of some twisted god, he’d reawoken, and taken it as a second chance. Maybe his first life had been a tragedy, but his second would not be the same.

He found a new friend. Not one as special as his Sunflower, but a companion nonetheless, and he was loyal to her. They built a home, and Scott grew almost attached. He began to wonder if maybe, in time, if all went well, he would get a happy ending.

But fate didn’t agree with his ideas for a second chance. He had tried once again to find a happy ending; a bit of joy even in this dark place. But once again, it was ripped away from him.

It was almost worse to win; to watch everyone around die, to somehow survive only to see everyone he cared about be ripped away. He never regretted trying to be kind, but he instead grew to hate the world that constantly destroyed his every attempt at hope.

Scott didn’t remember his final death on Last Life. All he knew was that everything was gone, again, and now he awoke standing in a circle of players: his friends and companions and killers and victims and enemies, and he knew he would spite whatever twist the universe threw at him, as he always did.

But nothing prepared him for soulmates.

This was what he always wanted, right? A friend, someone- he’d been fighting for this since the beginning! And yet, why did it feel so wrong?

Because Scott didn’t want a soulmate. He’d never wanted a lover. He’d just wanted a friend, and instead he was forced into this by the cruel universe.

He was tired of being controlled by these games. Forget lives, forget soulmates, forget everything; Scott didn’t care. He wanted a choice, for once.

And when Scott found Cleo, who was also alone, abandoned by her chosen soulmate, who didn’t want a lover either, he knew exactly how to spite the universe that had brought them here.

Run away together, Scott told her. Let’s be our own soulmates.

And Cleo agreed. No more bowing to the whims of a world that didn’t care for them; they would choose their own paths, their own friends, their own lives.

When Martyn and Pearl walked into their lives, Scott almost regretted his decision. But he knew he couldn’t agree to go along with a written fate, and not when it was abundantly clear his soulmate didn’t care for him.

She’d already left him to go adventuring in the Nether with her new friend Martyn. Great for her! But Scott didn’t need her trying to crawl back to him, and he told her so.

Maybe they’d been friends in the past, but that was behind them. Scott was refusing to play by the rules, and maybe that would end in a few lost friends, but there was a part of him that hardly cared anymore.

He almost hesitated at the hurt look in her eyes, but it was for the best. He couldn’t let himself give in and go along with what the universe wanted.

He didn’t need soulmates, he didn’t need love, he didn’t need Pearl, and he didn’t need a predetermined destiny.

Scott was done playing their game.

CLEO - ON LOVE, FEELINGS, AND BETRAYAL

Cleo didn’t want to abandon her friends.

She’d panicked when she found out what this game’s concept was: soulmates. One simple word, but it set Cleo’s nerves racing with dread. Not because she hated anyone on Double Life; no, of course not! She adored her friends, they got along great, and it wasn’t that she didn’t want to spend time with them.

No, Cleo hated soulmates because Cleo hated soulmates.

Cleo couldn’t love one of her friends, and she didn’t want to. She was happy to share a base with one of them, to spend weeks on end with any one of them, but she couldn’t love them.

She couldn’t do this.

Cleo hated being forced into things, and now the universe itself was forcing her to do something she didn’t want to do, couldn’t do. She couldn’t love her soulmate, and she didn’t want to ruin any of her friendships with anything like love.

Cleo went caving alone, dread and guilt gnawing away at her. She just wanted to go back to when the worst thing she had to deal with was friends betraying her and red lives turning former allies bloodthirsty. And then, as if every part of this wasn’t bad enough, she felt a pain that wasn’t her own shoot through her body.

Fuck.

Cleo froze in horror, back pressed against the stone behind her. Not only did she have a soulmate, their lives were linked. Her soulmate’s pain was her pain, and her pain was probably theirs.

Cleo didn’t want to do this. She didn’t want to be bound by a soulmate, trapped by a game she never wanted to play. At least before, she wasn’t truly bound to anyone; she’d made friends, but she was never really forced to look out for them. But now her closest ally was being chosen for her, and to be her lover, no less. Love: something else Cleo didn’t want.

Cleo sat and leaned against the cold stone wall of the cave. She was alone now; there was no one to see her breaking down. No one to see her on the verge of tears over something as stupid as not wanting a soulmate.

Cleo wanted to sob. She’d never let herself cry over anything; not the death, the betrayal, the pain. But the realization that she was being forced into a life she didn’t want and she couldn’t change a thing about it was breaking her.

She let herself break, alone in the dark cave, where no one could find her. Where just for a little bit, there was no one forcing anything onto her.

Cleo shuddered again as she felt a pain in her leg. She wasn’t moving, so it had to be her soulmate’s injury, and she hated it. Hated that she had to be bound like this to someone else. Hated everything about this.

She rubbed the tears off her face and scolded herself for crying. She was supposed to be strong, fierce; she wasn’t supposed to get emotional over losing control. After all, she’d never had control. None of this was her choice; not the death games, not the bloodshed, and not her friends turning on her. So why was this different?

Maybe because for once, she couldn’t fight it off. She couldn’t change that her very life was dependent on someone else, and she got no say in who.

Cleo shoved those emotions away, back where they belonged and stood up, continuing on through the cave. Small droplets of water hung from the ceiling, splashing onto the ground with an echoing drip, drip, drip, which grew louder and more frequent as she walked. The cave must be going under a river, Cleo decided.

She eventually emerged in a decent-sized cavern with a large opening letting sunlight spill in. Small stalagmites poked up from the ground in the deeper sections of the cave. Ren was already there, wandering around and lighting up the place.

Ren was excited to find his soulmate, which was great for him! But that only left Cleo more worried. In flooded her fears of whoever her own soulmate was and her deep want to not be bound by the rules of this world.

Scott wandered in and they talked some more, gossiping about who was soulmates with who like a group of high schoolers spilling tea about crushes. Cleo played along reluctantly, not wanting to lose them to her fears. After all, Scott and Ren didn’t mind having soulmates, and they were trying to find their own!

And so Cleo went along with them. She couldn't change it anyways, so she couldn't let it get in the way of her other friendships.

When Ren and BigB discovered they were soulmates, Cleo cheered them on. Great for them! And two less people Cleo could potentially ruin her friendships with (well, she still could, just not over this).

Every new pair of soulmates looked so happy together. Grian was groaning that it was Scar, but he didn’t seem to mind the soulmates part. Nobody else complained about being forced into this, so how could Cleo?

And then Pearl and Martyn came back, and oh, Martyn. Of course it had to be him that was her soulmate: reckless, distant, stubborn, stupid Martyn.

She hated him (she didn’t. She hated what the universe was forcing her into). She couldn’t spend her life with Martyn. It was a cruel joke, just another way that the world proved it didn’t care about Cleo.

Martyn was nice enough, really, but he was insufferable. She didn’t want to spend ten minutes with him, let alone forever.

And so they bickered. While Scott and Pearl had a civil conversation, like every other pair of soulmates before them, Martyn and Cleo were at each other’s throats. She hated him, and he hated her, and oh it was so awfully fitting. Each equally as stubborn and unrelenting.

But Cleo refused to fall perfectly into place like the universe’s little puzzle piece. She and Scott would defy their fates, leave their despised soulmates, and forget Martyn and Pearl. Cleo felt the tiniest bit bad for Pearl, but Scott looked at Pearl with contempt, just like Martyn was looking at Cleo, and Cleo couldn’t give in. She wouldn’t give fate what it wanted. She wouldn’t be a perfect little love story like everyone else (couldn’t, anyways).

And so Cleo abandoned her former friends, knowing they wouldn’t want her after she couldn’t be a lover.

MARTYN - ON REALIZATION, REUNION, AND TRUST

If you asked Martyn his opinion on soulmates, he would tell you they were lame.

After all, his soulmate had rejected him before he’d even met her. Not like he’d wanted a soulmate, but still! It hurt!

If that was how it was going to be, fine! Screw Cleo! Martyn didn’t need her or anyone, thank you very much (even if Cleo was actually a great partner, with her natural survival instincts and fighting skill. But never mind that)!

Cleo had always been stubborn, and so was Martyn (It was almost funny, how no matter how much neither of them wanted one another they matched each other so well). And so of course neither would give in and admit to caring about the other.

He didn’t care about Cleo, Martyn decided. If she didn’t care about him, then he didn’t care about her!

Never mind the giant heart he was currently standing atop. He didn’t want Cleo as a soulmate. He didn’t care that she’d left him!

“Hey Martyn!” Jimmy yelled, brandishing his goat horn. His little yellow canary wings fluttered excitedly behind him.

“Aw, come on!” Martyn groaned lightheartedly. “You got one now?”

Jimmy frowned, but continued on in a hopeful voice, sounding quite proud of himself. “Yeah!”

Martyn pulled out his communicator and typed out a message, then watched as Jimmy looked down at it, face falling. “Hey-”

<InTheLittleWood> what does Jimmy’s horn sound like?

Jimmy blew his horn defiantly right as Grian replied, a high-pitched “do-do-dooo!”

Nobody responded to the call. Jimmy frowned, looking incredibly sad, until a lone horn, a faint, matching “do-do-dooo!” called out in reply.

Tango skipped up behind Jimmy, his own bright flame-colored wings perfectly matching Jimmy’s. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Aw, Tango!” Jimmy grinned wide.

“Having fun with your husband?” Martyn called teasingly, and Jimmy flushed.

“Yes, thank you!” Tango answered coldly as he grabbed Jimmy’s hand and said something to him Martyn couldn’t hear, turning and leading Jimmy back towards their house.

Martyn sighed and turned back to gazing at Cleo’s base unhappily. He wasn’t jealous of Tango and Jimmy. He didn’t need a partner to care about him like that (he didn’t even want a partner as in a lover! He just wanted a buddy! A friend)!

He hated Cleo. They could have been a great team, but no. Cleo didn’t want him. Cleo left him for Scott, to ‘defy fate,’ and she didn’t care that Martyn was more than willing to help her. Instead she denied him without giving him a -chance.

A figure walked out of the door of Cleo’s house and Martyn watched intently. He didn’t want to see her! …but he didn’t have anyone else to go to. So here he was.

Martyn jumped down onto the bridge he’d made and walked closer, waving at Cleo. She scowled, but built her own bridge out to talk to him.

“What do you want?” Cleo demanded impatiently, standing with her hands on her hips.

“I just wanna talk,” Martyn told her. Cleo turned away, ready to leave, but Martyn called out to stop her. “No, wait-”

“What is there to talk about?” Cleo whirled and crossed her arms angrily. “I don’t wanna be soulmates.”

“I was trying to get resources for us!” Martyn yelled. He had been trying to help, but she despised him for some reason! And Martyn didn’t know why!

“You left me!” Cleo yelled back. And now there she went, offering her excuses for not wanting him!

“I didn’t know everyone else would be looking for their soulmates!” Martyn replied, throwing his fist to the side in frustration.

“You didn’t think maybe your soulmate wouldn’t want you risking our life in the nether!?” Cleo asked, clearly not listening to what he was trying to say.

“I was careful!” Martyn protested. Couldn’t she see that he was completely competent!? “I didn’t get us killed- I barely got us hurt!”

“But you could have! And you went to the Deep Dark!” It was Cleo’s turn to punch the air angrily.

“But I didn’t!” Martyn exclaimed. And that was the issue- she was dwelling on what-ifs to justify leaving him. She didn’t even care that he’d brought back valuable supplies. “What is your problem with me!?”

Cleo froze, like she thought he hadn’t noticed. Whatever her reason for hating him was, it went beyond a reckless trip to the Nether.

“I don’t want a soulmate,” Cleo spat finally. “Are you happy? Is that what you want to hear? That I hate this stupid game and I don’t want my life bound to you?”

Martyn paused a moment, considering. He didn’t want his life bound to her either, but it didn’t do them any good to work against one another. “What’s so different about this? Everybody else has accepted their soulmates, why can’t we?”

“Everybody else can love their soulmate!” Cleo screamed, immediately backing away in horror and stumbling backwards to get away from Martyn.

“Wait, Cleo!” Martyn called, but she was running away. Martyn pillared up to her bridge and ran after her, chasing her to the door of her house.

“Leave me alone!” Cleo turned suddenly and pushed Martyn away.

Martyn stopped, yelling after her. “Cleo, wait!”

Cleo stopped, turned, and asked desperately, “What is there to say, Martyn!?”

Martyn tried his best not to let her harsh tone hurt him. Cleo was upset, and he couldn’t take it personally. “I don’t want to love you!”

“You- what?” Cleo blinked. “That’s what soulmates are!”

“But do they have to be?” Martyn pleaded, talking quickly before Cleo ran again. “I just want to be a friend! And it’s not helping anyone for us to keep avoiding each other.”

“Can we be just friends?” Cleo asked hopelessly.

“If we can spite the universe? Yeah, of course,” Martyn grinned. “You wanna spite the universe together?”

“I like the sound of that.” Cleo smiled faintly. “Martyn, I- I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Martyn told her. “Lord knows I hate things being decided for me too.”

“We’re a bit fucked up, aren’t we?” Cleo chuckled. Martyn nodded and they both laughed.

“Hey, be fucked up together?” Martyn asked cheesily.

Cleo sighed with a grin on her face and shook her head amusedly. “Yeah, sure.”

Martyn couldn’t believe they’d ever let themselves get mad at one another for something so easy to change, but neither of them were great with actually telling people things. Yet another thing they had in common.

For how much they’d hated each other, they were quite similar. And Martyn loved that. Cleo was great, and he couldn’t ask for a better friend.

Soulmates were lame, but Cleo wasn’t. And Martyn would never forget that again.

PEARL - ON APOLOGIES, FRIENDSHIP, AND ACCEPTANCE

Pearl didn’t want to be alone.

But as she stood in slight shock, staring numbly at Tilly lying sprawled out limply in front of her, Pearl wondered if she was destined to be alone.

Her soulmate and her best friend had both abandoned her. It hadn’t even been a day when Pearl’s soulmate had somehow rejected her before they’d even spoken. She’d been trying to help, and yet somehow that had only made Scott hate her more. She didn’t want a soulmate, really, but it still hurt that no one wanted her.

At least she still had Tilly: the only creature in the world that didn’t care what Pearl did, who would follow her blindly into anything. Pearl wished her friends trusted her that much- even a little bit would be better than being hated!

“Pearl?” A voice called questioningly. She snapped her head up angrily to meet worried green eyes, internally grimacing. Of all the people to show up now, it had to be him.

“What is it?” she said brokenly. She was one wrong word away from snapping. It wasn’t like she had anything left to lose.

Scott stood in front of her with an unsympathetic expression. Good, she didn’t have any sympathy for him, either. “What are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing?” Pearl snapped back. What did she have to be doing? It wasn’t like she had any sort of goal.

Scott didn’t seem to have an answer. Pearl turned her back to him, debating whether to stay or go. She wanted friends, but did she want him? She didn’t want… that. She wanted no part in the strange act called romance, the thing she didn’t understand, that had no place in her life, especially in a death game like this.

“Pearl-” Scott began unsurely. “Are you okay?”

Was she okay? Was she okay? Were any of them okay!? They were in a death game, with no way out, their friends turning against, murdering and/or marrying each other. Her companions had all chosen to leave her and no one seemed to care about her at all anymore. But yes, she was just great, thank you!

“Oh, I’m fine, Scott,” Pearl said sarcastically, not missing the way Scott’s eyebrows raised in concern as she laughed brokenly.

Scott took a deep, steadying breath before replying. “Do you need-”

“Oh, now you’re gonna ask what I need?” Pearl interrupted scathingly. “Now, that you’re seeing what you caused?”

“I didn’t cause this! You were the one that decided to abandon me to go the Nether on Day One!” Scott protested. Of course he wanted to blame her for all of this, when she hadn’t even gotten a choice in any of it!

“I was just trying to be helpful! I didn’t know what everyone else was doing!” Pearl told him (which was true, no matter how much he denied it). “And you abandoned me, too!”

Scott looked down in slight embarrassment, and then, like the words were paining him, he asked, “Do you want to try… being soulmates again?”

“I don’t want to be soulmates,” Pearl scowled. She didn’t need him, or any chosen soulmate. She could make her own life without anyone else.

But then Scott cried out her name, panicked, and she turned to him annoyedly. Before she could even speak to defend herself from whatever he was going to say, he yelled again. “PEARL, LOOK OUT!”

Scott jumped for her, drawing his sword, but not looking to attack her. Pearl whirled to see a tall, green-ish figure behind her, which she could hear making a hissing sound as she watched it.

The creeper flashed a blinding white and Pearl stood not reacting as several things happened all at once.

Scott shoved her behind him and threw his shield up to protect them. Pearl stumbled backwards, tripping and landing on hard dirt. And a booming noise sounded as the creeper exploded, knocking Scott back to land beside Pearl, thankfully uninjured.

The two sat gasping for several seconds before Pearl spoke. “That was close.”

“Yeah,” Scott agreed shakenly. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes, neither wanting to break the uncomfortable silence.

Footsteps came from in front of Pearl and she looked up to see Martyn standing above them, watching them curiously. “What happened to you two?”

“Creeper,” Scott said bluntly, shutting down his questioning, and Martyn didn’t press further. But from out of nowhere, Cleo brushed past him, running up to the two of them, meaning they were not in fact spared from an interrogation.

“Scott, are you okay?” Cleo asked worriedly. Pearl glanced down at the ground. Of course Scott was all Cleo cared about; never mind that Pearl was sitting right next to him, no less shaken.

“I’m alright, it was just a creeper, I’m not hurt,” Scott assured her. Yeah, sure, just don’t bother asking Pearl. She was just fine, thanks.

“Hey Pearl,” Cleo greeted (like an afterthought, like Cleo just had to deal with her being there). That was okay, though. Pearl was used to being left out, and anyways she was fine on her own. “Do you want to come back with us?”

“Come… back?” Pearl repeated disbelievingly. To.. they were… what?

“To where Scott and I live,” Cleo explained. Pearl didn’t reply for a long minute. Hadn’t they told her not to come near them? They certainly hadn’t wanted her company before. What had changed?

“You guys left me,” Pearl answered. Which wasn’t an answer to the question, but Pearl was still scrambling for words. “Now you want me back?”

Martyn frowned and turned to Cleo, exchanging an unsure glance before looking back at Pearl. But before he could speak, Scott. Scott sighed and stepped forward. “I left you because I didn’t want a soulmate. Not because I didn’t want you.”

“But…” Pearl trailed off unsurely. She wanted a friend so badly. But she had Tilly… And did she want a soulmate? Wasn’t that what Scott had just said? “You didn’t want a soulmate? Why not?”

“We thought soulmates had to be, you know, lovers,” Cleo explained sheepishly. “Scott and I, at least.”

Pearl’s heart nearly leapt out of her chest. Was Cleo… was Cleo saying what Pearl thought she was? “You just didn’t want arranged love?”

“Exactly,” Scott agreed, staring at the ground. “I’m sorry for abandoning you, Pearl-”

“Scott!” Pearl interrupted him giddily. “I don’t want that either! Love, I mean.” She grinned and laughed happily, jumping up from where she was sitting to rush over to Cleo. If that was all that had been keeping them from wanting her, then maybe, just maybe, she could have friends! Friends who didn’t want love either!

“Pearl!” Cleo exclaimed excitedly, then steadied herself. “Does that mean you’ll join-”

“Yes!” Pearl practically yelled, barely able to contain her joy. They wanted her! “Yes!”

“Fuck love, right?!” Cleo said determinedly, raising her voice as if to scream to the very heavens that she wanted nothing to do with their games.

“Hell yeah!” Martyn cheered, punching the air in agreement with his soulbound. Pearl nodded eagerly, and Scott quickly joined them, standing up and walking over.

Pearl beamed, a warm feeling spreading in her chest. She had friends now, people like her, and Pearl was happy to say she would never be alone again. if you’ve read this far, thank you and consider reblogging if you enjoyed! also, here have some bonus content!

#aro dlsmp #zombiecleo #inthelittlewood #scott smajor #pearlescentmoon #double life smp #dlsmp #writing #fanfiction #aro #aromantic #this has been sitting in drafts for DAYSSSS #i couldn't get on my computer to format ONE LINK #anyways here you go maybe people will be interested in the full thing #for the record i'm only posting this so i have a single post for the masterlist lol #the otter scribbles

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memryse · 3 years

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many thoughts about Scar in Last Life

We all know Scar is one of the standouts of Last Life; he’s always been one of the key players ever since 3rd Life, driving conflicts and shaping the course of the server. His chaotic nature lends itself perfectly to 3rd/Last Life, and he seems to have only refined it in the hiatus between seasons.

In 3rd Life, Scar was more of a subjective villain. From his own perspective and Grian’s perspective, he wasn’t scary at all! The two of them were just having fun and causing problems – sure, they threatened people, but their dumb antics together made them just feel like two friends messing around; their POV was lighthearted until the final session, really. From other perspectives, however (particularly Dogwarts’ POVs), that was not how the two of them came across. They felt malicious, scary in how casually they approached such a bloodthirsty game. They’d laugh as they took lives, showing no care for anybody but themselves – they’d betray their allies in a heartbeat without an ounce of remorse, and the rest of the players knew it. Scar wasn’t someone to fear from his own POV.

Since Last Life began, however, Scar has become very openly malicious. Even watching his own POV, it’s hard to see him as anything but a villain – his own comment section is full of people commenting on how scary he suddenly seems. I want to expand on some of these villainous moments, because holy fuck, Scar.

In session 1, Scar is certainly a prominent figure, but we mostly get to see his classic silly Scar antics. Sure, he plans on “selling souls”, but it feels like the equivalent of his reputation points in S1. We still don’t get the sense of him going full villain arc yet. He allies with Joel and commits a crime, and we all expect another lighthearted Scar scam which definitely does not go to plan.

And that is what happened… sort of. He’s immediately caught by Scott and Pearl, etc etc etc. The two of them cheerfully agree a scheme to try and kill Jimmy, but that casual discussion of murder is as bad as they get.

Session 2, Scar is chosen as one of the two boogeymen, alongside Joel.

Things go decidedly not to plan immediately. The two of them had agreed last session to try and kill Jimmy, and were supposed to be trusting enough to tell each other if they’re the boogeyman – and yet what does Scar do? Immediately try and push Joel into lava. He’d betray Joel without a second thought – already a contrast to 3rdLife, where upon turning red Scar threw flowers at Grian and asked if they could still be friends. He doesn’t succeed, of course, and Scar and Joel realise they’re both boogeymen, before parting ways.

Scar heads to the nether, where he immediately decides to deceive Etho and Bdubs into thinking he’s weak and has no food, so that he can get close to them nonthreateningly or something. I’ll talk about this more later, but here we get to see what a good liar Scar actually is. People want to assume that he’s all bark and no bite, that he’s a schemer who poses no real threat – when Scar plays into this, he can be reallyconvincing.

The next big moment I want to talk about is, of course, Joel’s trap. The first thing to comment on here is that Scar cries “Joel, are you trying to kill your best buddy?!”, and I can’t work out whether this is Scar acting to diffuse suspicion, or genuine surprise that he’d pull the trap when Scar was right there, but either way it definitely has the former effect. None of the Southlanders suspect Scar in the slightest. Until Scar murders Mumbo in a matter of seconds.

What’s really horrifying about this is that Scar had been begging Mumbo to ally with him just last session. And yet here… not only does he go for Mumbo without hesitation, his reaction afterwards is downright chilling. He just laughs, and tells the others “Welcome to Magical Mountain!” – it’s really quite like a movie villain in how little he seems to care. He doesn’t actually say a word about killing Mumbo; again, despite having desperately wanted to ally with him. To Scar, this was nothing more than an opportunity. Or maybe it’s all a show to him. Maybe it’s both. Scar doesn’t actually care about winning this game – to him, it’s more fun to put on as good a show as possible, and drag as many people down with him as possible (which is definitely a “cc!Scar being a good entertainer” thing, but it translates very well into being a LL!Scar character trait too).

He then hands Joel some supplies, and with the exact same level of nonchalance, tells him to go burn Scott and Pearl’s house down. I’m… getting the sense he enjoyed burning down Etho’s castle in 3rdLife.

Not much of note happens during his subsequent conversation with the Southlanders beyond him failing an initiation spectacularly – after this, he heads back to Joel. They chat from opposite ends of a broken bridge, which is quite a poetic scene honestly, representing the gap between their lives, the destruction of their alliance, etc. I’m just here to talk about Scar’s villainous moments, though, so let me point out one specific line from this conversation.

“I did avenge you, to be fair - Mumbo, I burned him to death, which was enjoyable. I heard him cry, so it was- yeah, that was a thing.”

Just… what the fuck, Scar? What? I know he tried to push the “red lives are psychopathic and feel nothing except a small sense of happiness when people die” in 3rd Life, but this was definitely a lie or at least an exaggeration, because 3l!Scar definitely had a much wider range of emotions than that. Either way, here he doesn’t even have the excuse of being a red life; this is just active malice, pure and simple. Bdubs had a similar level of pride in his boogeyman kill, but I never got the sense that he enjoyed it like Scar did.

Scar goes off to visit Scott and Pearl, and figure out whether they have the enchanting table or not. Note the emphasis on simply figuring it out, not actually getting the enchanting table. Here’s where I want to talk about Scar being a great liar: he fully convinces them into thinking that he was willing to trade lives for the enchanting table, and then he convinces them that he’s so desperate to get the table that he’ll lie about Joel burning their house down. The thing is, Scar had no intention of ever getting the table at that moment – he wasn’t going to trade lives for it to begin with. He’d try his luck at threatening them, but nothing more. He got exactly what he wanted out of that situation: proof. Meanwhile, Scott and Pearl were left believing they’d outwitted him, that they’d called his bluff and bullied him into leaving. They never saw his true intentions, never saw him as an actual threat. Scar is much smarter than people believe, which only makes him all the more threatening.

And finally, he goes on to prove this intelligence even further. He figures out that Scott and Pearl planned to trade for the enchanting table simply by seeing Scott ask Lizzie if she’s home in chat. He then goes to visit Lizzie, and she tells him she declined their offer. What’s notable about this scene is how much less belligerent Scar is than usual: he readily accepts what Lizzie says for once in his life and leaves without being too annoying about it. He later talks about lulling the others into a false sense of security, letting them think he’s not after the enchanting table anymore; that makes me think his visit to Lizzie was purely to confirm that the offer was even made, and he’s now certain that she accepted it. It’s not hard to work out, especially if he noticed her life count.

So, all in all, if you’re not scared of Scar in Last Life, you most definitely should be.

Did I forget to mention he’s currently tied for the highest life count on the server?

#last life smp #goodtimeswithscar #smallishbeans #mumbo jumbo #ldshadowlady #scott smajor #pearlescentmoon #bdoubleo100 #ethoslab #(all tagged are discussed in the post)#mae analyses

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redrobin-detective · 3 years

Text

all is well

Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped into the next room I am I and you are you Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. ~ Henry Scott Hollard

AO3 link

______________

He hadn’t meant to say it, that much was clear. As much as she wanted to hate him for it, claim it was some sort of cruel manipulation; she knew he was just as distressed as she was. The ghost boy had covered his mouth, bright green eyes wide with panic as his misspoken words brought their battle to a screeching halt. Even the ghost the three hunters had been fighting stopped and stared before flying off. No one moved to stop them. Phantom looked at her fearfully, then over at her companion before vanishing without a trace.

It was a slip of the tongue, an accident, so why did the ghost boy calling her Mom make her blood run so cold?

“I’ve knew a kid who called the teacher Mom one time but I’ve never heard it from a ghost,” the Red Huntress said with a sarcastic chuckle. But her shoulders were tense and it was clear the situation made her uncomfortable too. “You okay, Mrs. Fenton?”

“My son isn’t dead,” Maddie said quietly. She would admit there were times where she’d look at Phantom and see Danny overlaid on top of him but those moments were becoming more and more rare. Maddie liked to think it’s because she could find more differences than similarities between the two but honestly, she couldn’t say who her son was anymore. She saw this damned ghost more than she saw the child living in her own house.

“I know, I’ve seen him around,” Huntress said with steady conviction. It made Maddie pause, as it always did, to wonder just how old Amity’s other human ghost hunter really was. Or how young rather. “It was a mistake, he’ll probably avoid you for a bit out of embarrassment but then things will go back to normal.”

“Yeah, a mistake,” Maddie muttered to herself, finally lowering the gun even though the fighting had ended several minutes ago. Why was this whole thing so unsettling to her? Phantom had said much worse things to her, called her a fake scientist and more obsessive than a ghost. He’d even called her a bad mother once when he’d been particularly riled up. She remembered how offended and angry his unnatural eyes had been as they’d glared accusingly into her.

“You know his parents are still alive,” Huntress said suddenly. “I found out by accident a little while ago.” She was still standing on her hoverboard about 3 feet off the ground, her gaze was trained away from Maddie. “They don’t know that he’s a ghost, that he’s Phantom,” the girl’s head was still turned away from Maddie but she had a feeling she was being watched none the less. “Maybe you remind him of his mother.”

Maddie felt liked she’d been slapped.

“And why does that matter to you?” she questioned defensively to cover how much the conversation was shaking her - they didn’t know how could they not know, how could they not miss - “I thought you hated him as much as we did.”

“I don’t like him,” the Huntress said vehemently. “He’s annoying and acts like he’s the only hunter in this town who can actually do the job. But I,” she paused, “I think I understand him, just a little bit. Enough that I’ve been combing through Amity’s missing children files in my spare time. Of course, it’s no good if no one reported him missing in the first place. Phantom doesn’t want me prying but it’s not right for a kid to die and no one to care.”

“He’s just a ghost,” Maddie said, her words weak even to her ears. Was that why Phantom was stuck here? Because he died forgotten and unmourned? The thought of one of her children, her babies, dying without her knowing... she was going to be sick.

“Yeah, he is,” Huntress nodded, “but he wasn’t always. And humans deserve to be remembered, even if they don’t want to be.” That said, the girl sped off into the setting sun, the varying shades of orange glinting off of her suit. Maddie stood in the middle of the street for a little while longer, gun pointed limply at the ground as her whole world spun.

She drove home slowly, taking the long way around to try and put her conflicting feelings into words before she talked to her husband. When she and Jack first began their research into ghosts, they told themselves that they had to divorce themselves from the people the ghosts had been before. If you focused on the lingering traces of humanity in every monster then they would never be put in their place. But she was human and she had kids around the ghost boy’s age, despite her attempts to stick to logic her heart ached with sympathy.

“And you call yourself a mother,” the Phantom in her memory spat at her, filled with hatred but underneath it all was grief. “Where are your kids now? All you care about is the dead but when are you going to care for the living?” Maddie tightened her grip on the steering wheel to keep her hands from shaking.

“Mads! You’re home!” Jack grinned enthusiastically as she quietly entered the house. “Jazzy has her nose in her books and you know Danny, in and up to his room without a word so I made us grilled cheese!” He held her a plate with a flourish, “they’re ghost shaped!” The world tilted itself a little more onto it’s proper axis, no matter how crazy things got, Jack would always be her true north.

“Gracias,” she said accepting the plate. “Can we talk, privately?” She gestured her head down to the basement. Conversations from the kitchen could easily be heard upstairs and she really didn’t want her children to overhear her asking if she was a bad mom. She didn’t want their confirmation that she was right.

Jack’s goofy grinned smoothed out into something softer and he put one hand gently on her back as they walked down to basement. He kicked her usual stool her way and they sat in silence while they ate their dinners, staring at the swirling vortex of the portal.

“You remember that time Phantom called me a neglectful mother?” Maddie asked quietly after a few minutes.

“Mads, you can’t let that sneaky spook get to you. Everyone knows you’re a great-”

“Jack,” she interrupted harsher than she needed to but she didn’t need comfort from a husband but the unbiased opinion of a fellow scientist. “He accidentally called me Mom while we were fighting today, I don’t - I don’t think he meant it, he looked more scared then I’ve ever seen him before he ran off. Huntress was there too, she said.” Maddie gripped her plate tightly in her hands. “She said that Phantom’s family is still alive, that they don’t know about him.”

“Not know? You mean about him being-”

“Apparently,” Maddie squeezed her eyes shut to fight off the unwanted sympathy she felt. “He’s always been the Ghost Boy, the Ghost Kid. I never - I never fully absorbed what that meant. He looks,” Maddie set the plate aside and dropped her head into her hands. “He’s about Danny’s age.”

“Maddie,” Jack said softly, setting aside his own plate and wheeling himself closer. “Whoever that boy was, he’s gone now and all that’s left is an echo, an obnoxious and powerful echo but he’s not... he’s not a child. Not anymore.”

“But he remembers,” Maddie gasped, angry she was letting herself get all worked up over a stupid ghost. “He called me Mom, Jack. Huntress, she said maybe I reminded him of her and,” her eyes filled with tears now. “He’s comparing me to someone who didn’t even notice that he’d died. What does that say about me? About my relationship with our children? I feel like all I do is argue with Jazz these days and god knows where Danny goes to half the time-”

“Maddie, don’t do that to yourself,” Jack said softly, tilting her face up towards him with a gloved hand. “Once you go down that rabbit hole, there’s no digging yourself out. I think it’s just part of being a parent, always worrying that you’re not doing things right. Sometimes,” Jack gaze dropped, troubled. “Sometimes I enter the room and Danny looks at me and freezes like he expects me to do something terrible... He’s just easily startled but it still hurts.”

“Phantom is an echo, not a child,” Maddie nodded quietly to herself, trying to fall back on her usual logic but it tasted wrong in her mouth. He was a ghost... but also a child. “I wonder what he was like when he was alive? His personality seems remarkably preserved, he must have been a vibrant young man.”

“Or his death was particularly traumatic,” Jack mumbled. “Painful deaths usually leave powerful ghosts. And most healthy teens don’t just drop dead for nothing.” A chill fell over the lab.

“How could they not notice?” Maddie whispered with horror. “What sort of parent wouldn’t see that their child was dead, what? Now two years in?”

“Not everyone is as good a mom as you are, Mads,” Jack said, pulling her into his chest. “Neglectful parents are a dime a dozen sadly. He could’ve been a runaway too, ran off and died leaving his folks still holding out hope that he’d come home. Or maybe...” he frowned, “maybe he’s pretending he’s still alive.”

“No, he couldn’t keep the charade for this long,” Maddie gasped but the horrible idea had been planted none the less. Phantom always seemed in such a hurry, like he had somewhere else to be. Was another woman tapping her feet as she waited for her boy to return like Maddie often did, not knowing her child was long gone?

“He’s a wily one, incredibly solid for a spirit. Sometimes I look at him and swear I see his chest moving like he’s breathing. Dampen his glow, dye the hair, change his clothes, he could probably pass as human so long as you didn’t look too close.”

“Jack,” she pulled back and looked at her husband in a panic. “Jack, if he’s pretending to be human when he’s not fighting then there’s a good chance he goes to Casper.” Her and Jack’s eyes widened with realization at the same time.

Their children’s high school has had an unprecedented amount of ghost attacks since the portal opened. They could never figure out why the ghosts targeted that school and ignored the other elementary, middle or even the other public high, Wendy. “What are we going to do, should we pull out Danny and Jazz? Even just until we figure this out.”

“That might tip the ghost off,” Jack said evenly but his teeth were biting into his cheek with worry. “We don’t want to set him off, who knows what he’d do if his cover was blown.” He might look like a harmless teen but Maddie had seen first hand how devastating Phantom could be when threatened. “I think we should tell the kids.”

“What? Why? You know they’re supportive of him!” Well Jazz certainly was, differing opinion on Phantom seemed to be the cause of half their arguments. Danny, truthfully, she didn’t really know his opinions on the ghost boy. He always looked so uncomfortable talking about ghosts with them so they just didn’t.

“Supportive maybe but they’re smart and observant,” Jack countered. “They could be our eyes and ears inside the school. They know better than to provoke a dangerous ghost,” Jack let his eyes drift over to the portal. “Besides, if the worst comes to pass, I want them to be prepared.”

“I don’t like it but you’re probably right,” Maddie grumbled. “If it keeps them safe then I’d do just about anything.” Jack smiled and leaned forward to kiss her gently, his lips a perfect match for her own.

“And this is why you could never be a bad mother,” he said. “Come on, let’s talk to them before they go to sleep.”

“Or Danny sneaks out again,” Maddie said to herself as she followed her husband up the stairs and heard him call for a Fenton family meeting.

It went about as well as Maddie had expected. Jazz alternated between being angry and anxious, telling them emphatically that Phantom wasn’t hiding among them at school and wasn’t a bad ghost to begin with. Maddie didn’t know what had come over her but she hardly recognized this irrational and emotional young lady as her daughter. She hoped it was just Senior year stress and hormones and not some ghostly influenced. Danny, as usual, sat there like he was a piece of the furniture and didn’t say much at all.

“Danno,” Jack said gently as he interrupted Jazz’s rant to engage their youngest. “You would tell us if you noticed anything unusual with one of your classmates, right? You know we’re telling you kids this because we trust you, love you and want to keep you safe.”

“Have you considered that keeping guns around the house, threatening to hunt and torture ghosts doesn’t make me feel very safe?” Danny said quietly, looking down at the table. “So what if he sometimes goes to school, maybe he wants to have something normal in his life. All I know is that if I was Phantom, maybe I would want to hide too. So people like you didn’t find me.” For the second time that night, the words of a teenage boy stopped her cold.

“Danny, what do you-” Danny didn’t elaborate and instead pushed his chair back and headed towards the door.

“Young Man, where are you going? It’s almost curfew and we’re not done here,” Maddie scolded even though she knew that neither her or Jack were in the control of the situation. Danny opened the door and didn’t look back.

“I won’t be long, just a lap around the block. I just, I just need some air, okay?” The house became quiet, no one quite knowing what to say. Jazz excused herself a moment later and walked back up to her room. She slammed her door shut. The ticking of the clock was the only sound to be heard in the suddenly silent kitchen.

“Is that how he sees us?” Jack asked quietly, looking down at his large hands. “Danny used to think what we did was so cool, when did that change?” When did he change? was the silent, unasked question. Or maybe they'd all changed, grown apart so slowly that no one had really noticed. Maddie stood up abruptly and stalked towards the door, strapping an ectogun to her hip as she went.

“Mads, maybe you should give him-”

“You know as well as I do that this is the peak time for ghosts. Danny, he might not trust us but I won’t let a disagreement get him killed.” It was full dark outside and she was halfway down the block before she realized she didn’t know which direction Danny had gone in. The night air was chill for mid-April as it shook off the last dregs of winter. She was feeling cold in her protective hazmat; Danny had left in short sleeves. Maybe she should run back and get his jacket for when she found him.

“Nice night for a walk,” Maddie jumped at the voice to find Phantom lazily floating in the air above her. His posture was casual but his eyes were sharp, searching as he always was. Green eyes glanced at her gun before meeting her eyes. “Looking for someone? Perhaps chasing someone who doesn’t want to found?” No way was she going to let him know her son was out here, alone and vulnerable.

“You actually,” she lied. He raised a disbelieving eyebrow but didn’t call her out. How could he be so expressive and so hard to read all at once? Against her better judgement, she thought again about the ghost as a human. “You called me Mom earlier, I want to know why.”

“What, you’ve never called someone something dumb by mistake?” Phantom flinched, crossing his arms defensively. “It was an accident, I’m just as upset as you are, believe me. Now if you don’t mind, I was trying to have a nice flight to clear my mind. Good luck finding whoever you were really looking for.”

“My husband thinks you’re pretending to be alive, that you’re lying to the town, going to school.” She searched his face for some sign that she was wrong but his expression was still as stone. “You’re putting people in jeopardy, I thought you wanted to play the hero!”

“I’m not doing anything,” He growled, his eyes flashing ominously in the dark. “I’m just doing the best I can, okay? If I go to the Nasty Burger or sit in on English Poetry when there’s no ghosts to fight then who’s hurt? Only me for trying to hang onto something real, something normal!”

“But the ghosts-”

“News flash! The ghosts would be here with or without me because of your stupid portal! I can’t even legally drive and yet you blame me for everything.” He scoffed and looked away, “you really are just like my mother.”

“So I do remind you of her,” she stated. “Your mother.”

“That’s a great thing to say to some kid you shoot at regularly,” Phantom said, icily, his green gaze boring into her over his shoulder. “What do you want me to say? Yeah, you do. It’s not just your voice or your face but the way you look at me like I’m nothing but a disappointment. How you make me feel like I’m some damaged child you need to hammer into shape.”

“You can’t - I’m not disappointed,” she said before she could think otherwise because how else could she react to such a charged statement? What kind of abusive, miserable home had he come from? Her heart clenched again to be compared to this woman.

“Yeah, I can tell,” Phantom snapped at her sarcastically but, like the time when he’d called her a bad mother, underneath the anger was sadness. “None of this matters, we’re both going to keep doing our own thing without each other’s approval. We’re enemies so let’s just forget this all happened and go back to you shooting at me while I beg for you just stop and listen for one second-”

“Alright, I’m listening!” Maddie shouted back, frustrated and sympathetic against her better judgement. “What is it you want to tell me so bad?” Phantom froze, like he hadn’t expected her to just stop like that. His shoulders hunched and his eyes were wide and he looked so much like a lost teenager that it pulled painfully at her heart. God, why did this one ghost bring out so many contradictory feelings in her?

“I want,” he stopped, swallowed and floated to the ground so they were near eye level. Sometime in the last year, he’d gotten taller than her. She hadn’t realized ghosts could grow, could age. Phantom was always the exception to every rule they had. “I want the same thing you want. I don’t like seeing ghosts coming through and hurting people. Before I was Phantom, I was nobody, I couldn’t help anyone. I can now and keeping people safe, it gives me a purpose I didn’t even have when I was human. Ghosts might just be the untethered remnants of dead people but we still love and feel and value things, just differently than you do. I want to keep ghosts from attacking people but without damaging them, we’re not all evil just... trying to find our own way to the finish line. If you’d just, not attack on sight, I could show you.”

It was perhaps the most she’d heard Phantom say all at once. He was rubbing his gloved fingers anxiously against his thigh and there was a desperate bit of want in his tragically young face. He wanted her to believe him, like a child looking to their mother for approval. As more time stretched on without her speaking, his hopeful look fell into a kind of sad acceptance. He looked like Danny had at the kitchen table not 15 minutes before.

“Okay,” she said finally. “We can give it a try for a bit. It’s not a truce exactly but so long as you’re not causing harm, Jack and I won’t shoot at you.” It wasn’t much but the boy looked like he’d handed her the moon and then some. He floated up a little, his boots jittered with excitement. She gaped when he reached forward and grasped her hand only to shake it enthusiastically. His hand was chilled but solid in her own.

“Yeah, you got a deal! Don’t worry, Mo- Ma’am you won’t have to worry about me, I’ll be a good little ghost, scouts honor! not that I was, uh, ever in the scouts. If things go well, I’d be happy to tell you more about ghosts and the Zone. I’ll even give you a tour if you’d like.” His smile was infectious and she bit her lip to resist the natural urge to smile back.

Maybe Phantom was a ghost, a sad child who’d died far too young but he was also someone’s son. That woman, however, hadn’t been able to protect him, to support him. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to give the ghost boy a chance and maybe Maddie could fill in something his other mother couldn’t. Perhaps she could even learn how to give her own children what they needed too.

“We’ll see,” Maddie hummed. “Now, you were going to go flying and I need to find my son before he catches his death, that is, if he’ll even talk to me.”

“He will,” Phantom said softly. “My mom messed up, hurt me sometimes but I knew she loved me and I love her. I don’t know your son but I do know what it’s like to be a son and your mom is... whether you’re living, dead or in-between, she’s always your mom. Maybe he’s worried you won’t love him, the things he’s done or believes in.” He looked away and rubbed the back of his neck, “Of course, I don’t really know you and your family. Usually try and avoid you guys, being ghost hunters and all. Even your daughter is pretty scary.”

“That would be pretty weird, a ghost surrounded by hunters,” her lips twitched upwards despite herself as she imagined Phantom chatting with Jack and Jazz in the living room. The image wasn’t quite as strange as she’d initially thought. Who knows where this shaky truce would lead them? Phantom took that as his excuse to leave and flew off into the night. Maddie watched him go, she started up the block when she got a series of texts a few minutes later.

Danny: I’m home, sorry for running off like that Danny: I don’t like the way you talk about ghosts the way some people talk about race or gender. I want to make opinions based on facts and understanding, not half baked theories Danny: I’d be willing to talk more, if you’d stop being so stubbornly certain you’re right and just listened for a change Danny: I love you, Mom I don’t think I say that enough. Sometimes I feel scared to, like you won’t understand Danny: Jazz came down and Dad brought out the special fudge Danny: Come home, its cold out

Maddie brought her phone to her lips, looking up in the sky as if she might see Phantom still flying around. That boy still loved his mother, the mother who’d hurt him. She didn’t want to be like Phantom’s mom: distant, cruel, unwilling to listen. If she could hold out an olive branch for her enemy, then she certainly could for her son.

Mom: I love you too, baby, never doubt that. I think I'm ready to listen now. Mom: I’m on my way home, save some fudge for me.

I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, Just around the corner. All is well.

#danny phantom #my writing #this seriously came out of nowhere #it took several twists as it just kind of unfurled underneath me #was halfheartedly searching poems about death when I foung this one #it just jumped out like lightning to me #that even though death and circumstance have seperate Maddie and Danny #they're still connected #still mother and son for good or ill #there's love there and a chance for renewal #idk Im just tired #this has been written for like 3 hours its just taken me this damn long to edit

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thetomorrowshow · 3 years

Text

scarlet fever

In honor of last last life, I’ve written this fic inspired by this post of mine! No spoilers for the final session ahead.

Summary

There’s something wrong with him. Maybe it’s a backwards line of code somewhere that’s screwing him up, but something about the way the game is processing him being Red is wrong.

“Kill, kill, kill,” the voices in Lizzie’s head cry.

“Die, die, die,” the voices in Jimmy’s head hiss.

CW: death, blood, suicidal thoughts (more acceptance inevitable death, but it presents as very suicidal).

Fic below cut!

“I understand, now,” Lizzie says.

Jimmy tilts his head. Lizzie catches his eye, grins. Her teeth come to pointed ends. “What Joel meant,” she says. “He told me, once, that being Red was loud. I didn’t get it until I heard them.”

Neither of them have been Red for long. Both of them had fallen to the other’s trap, and in that strange exchange of accidental betrayal, they’ve found camaraderie. Not trust, never trust. Not now that they’re both Red.

“You can hear them, can’t you?” Lizzie whispers, and Jimmy leans closer to hear her over the cacophony of voices in his head. “The way they chant. Over and over. They want blood, Jimmy. They want me to kill.”

Oh.

Right.

Jimmy shuffles away slightly, freezing when Lizzie laughs. The sound is shrill, harsh, more manic than he’s ever heard it. “Don’t worry, Jimmy,” she giggles. “I won’t kill you. It really wants Green blood. I do need to ask Joel how he deals with it, though,” she says, sobering suddenly. “Hearing it constantly--’kill, kill, kill’--it’s a little hard to ignore, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy mutters. “Yeah, it is. I don’t think I’ll be able to ignore it much longer.” He absentmindedly scratches his arm, wincing as he reopens a sore. Was Lizzie going to stay with him, right until the end? Will she be by his side, a new ally, one who will actually care for him?

“I’d better be off, then,” Lizzie says, and his heart falls a little. She picks up her backpack--a spare of Jimmy’s, all her stuff burned--and hefts it onto her shoulders. She pauses for a moment, stood there in the front lawn of Jimmy’s exile hut. “I’m going to go see what Joel is up to. You’re welcome to join me--I’m sure everyone would love to have you.”

Because it is everyone, isn't it? Everyone he could possibly ally himself with. Joel, Mumbo, and Scar--and presumably Skizz--have all formed a team, are running in a pack together.

None of them want him, though. Sure, maybe Mumbo would want one of his old allies on their team. Maybe Joel would want someone who knew Scott as well as he did (though he would never betray Scott, especially not to Joel, especially not to a Red). That wasn’t wanting him, though. Not like Joel wanted Lizzie. Not like Mumbo wanted Grian. Not like Scar wanted everyone. That was just, “Oh, Jimmy’s also Red. Might as well let him join.”

And he would just slow them down, anyways. The voices grow louder, only returning to their normal level once he opens his mouth to speak.

“No thanks,” he says, pulling a strained grin onto his face. “I’ll be fine on my own. I like it, sort of.”

“Alone, yeah,” Lizzie says ruefully. “Alone with Scar as a neighbor and Joel just over the hill?”

“Exactly.”

Lizzie adjusts the straps of the backpack, then takes it off and opens it up, checking her few possessions. If Jimmy didn’t know any better, he’d think she was stalling.

“Well,” she says at last, pushing back her knotted hair (it had once been magically tangle-free, but on Red, it has rat nests that are impossible to pull loose). “I guess I’ll be seeing you.”

“Right. See you soon,” Jimmy says. He tries to put as much conviction as he could into his voice, but it comes out flat. Lizzie turns what is certainly meant to be a sad smile on him. It appears more hungry.

Then she’s gone, off into the dimming afternoon, the buckle on the backpack glinting in the sun. Jimmy watches her go until she’s out of sight, standing motionless in his front yard, the world silent but for the voices in his ears.

He’s heard it from Grian, from Joel, from Scar, and now from Lizzie. Reds have voices in their heads intent on blood, urging them to murder with no distinction of friend from foe. Yellow Life Jimmy hadn’t understood. Red Life Jimmy understands all too well.

“Kill, kill, kill,” the voices in Lizzie’s head cry.

“Die, die, die,” the voices in Jimmy’s head hiss.

Jimmy had been Red for a whole day before Lizzie died to his trap. Like most Reds, he was gleeful, sated for a moment. Unlike most Reds, though, the need to kill vanished, as did the itch in his spine, his hands, his eyes--the sense of relief from causing Lizzie’s death had been the Boogeyman curse dissipating, not the voices calming. The bloodthirst never returned. The voices called for his death, but without the frenzy of being the Boogeyman, they were clearer, louder, more insistent.

There’s something wrong with him. Maybe it’s a backwards line of code somewhere that’s screwing him up, but something about the way the game is processing him being Red is wrong. He would bring it up to Grian, but he hasn’t seen him. Besides, it’s not too much of an issue. The were all going to die eventually, right? What does it matter if his fate is expedited?

He doesn’t eat. He’d tried to, but food tastes like shards of glass, bitter and scraping down his throat. He can’t tolerate it. Water is nearly as bad, his hand jerking as he tries to take a sip, the voices clamoring for him to choke.

He doesn’t allow himself near weapons--the voices grow so loud every time he does, he fears he might ‘slip’ onto his own sword. He doesn’t go out at night either, afraid that he’ll trip over his heavy feet, not move out of the way when a creeper approaches.

Today he glances out the window to his one scraggly sheep in the goat pen. He really ought to go shear it. He doesn’t have the energy.

It’s been nearly a week since Lizzie left. At first he’d been okay--certainly not good, but alive. He’d been able to go on a mining trip, pen a sheep, do some household chores. Now he barely moves from the windowsill or the porch, watching the trees across the way wave in the wind or the weeds in his small flowerbed grow.

He’s dying, and he knows it. He woke up today with a low fever, one that has been inching higher the longer the day goes on. The sores on his body from exploding in Lizzie’s trap haven’t healed, have only gotten worse. His skin is grey and peeling, balance unsteady, head pounding. He isn’t going to get better.

He’s terrified--or, he would be, if he had the energy. Instead, he’s mostly calm. A little sad--he’s so frequently alone when he dies, and he knows that he and the Southlanders haven’t been on good terms for a while now, and he’s barely spoken with Scott, but at this point he just wants someone here. He would even welcome Joel, as long as it means he doesn’t die alone.

He wishes someone was here to hold his hand when he finally goes.

He ought to have been gone a long time ago, but even though his body is actively decaying, Jimmy keeps waking up. He expected to die the night Lizzie left. He’s somehow held on, despite being practically deafened by the voices screaming incessantly for his death. And so, with the little time he has left, Jimmy lives peacefully.

He ignores the Greens that sprint through his fields as if he isn’t there. He doesn’t raise a finger against the Phantoms that swoop around his house each night (despite sleeping--he sleeps all the time, and yet they surround him). Today, on what feels like the last day, he wraps himself in blankets, sits in the shoddy rocking chair (that wasn’t originally meant to rock), and watches the clouds drift by, remembering a better time in a five-towered fort, or in a valley of flowers, or anywhere when he wasn’t Red.

He rocks back and forth, the creak, the wind, the bleating of his sheep inaudible. He’s deaf except for the voices. He’s alone except for the voices. He’s forgotten by all but the voices.

When night falls, Jimmy gathers what strength he has left and pushes to his feet. The world is shockingly sharp, edges more intense than they’ve ever been, and he blames it on his climbing fever. Heat pulses from his dry skin, in time with the pounding of his head. He shivers as his blankets fall from him, pooling at his feet, but continues inside. There’s another blanket on his bed, and a fire in the furnace. If he really needs them, he’ll come back out and get them.

Jimmy wants to collapse into bed, but he doesn’t. He makes the bed, slow, painstaking, until it’s neater than it’s ever been. Then he tidies up the hut as much as he can, putting away uneaten food, sweeping up the muddy tracks, putting his long-discarded boots in the chest beside his bed. He wishes he had the ability to mop up the dried blood that stains his splintering floor.

He doesn’t want whoever finds his body to also find a mess.

He’s about to get into bed, but a glance out his window shows the sheep, standing at the gate to the pen. He can’t leave him to starve. The sun has almost set. He’ll have to move fast.

Jimmy limps out of his hut--his left leg has begun to drag--and unlatches the gate of the pen, shooing the sheep out. The sheep doesn’t move, stares at him forlornly. He hadn’t had the time to name it.

He croaks something--it might be a name, it might not be. He can’t hear himself. The sheep doesn’t move. Jimmy sighs. It’s dark. He’s tired. He’s not going to die here, in his yard, where anyone could see him. He’s going to die in his own bed, warm and alone.

He ties the gate open with fumbling fingers, in case the sheep wants to leave at any point. Then he pats the sheep on the head and staggers back into his house. He leaves the door unlocked. Once his death message appears, someone might come looking.

His Southlands sweater (Martyn and Impulse had made them for everyone, to undermine Grian’s superiority--he bragged frequently about being the warmest in the Southlands) has tears in places, singed here and there. He pulls it on anyway. It still feels warm.

Jimmy lays himself down in bed, a sense of finality filling his chest. He pulls the blanket up, his hands folded over it. The fire crackles in the furnace, a candle flickers from the table.

Jimmy’s eyes close. He wishes that whatever god is granting him clarity would stop. He’s dying, and he’s dying right now, on his own terms instead of letting someone kill him or his own stupidity get the better of him. It would hurt less if he wasn’t aware of his every action.

“I don’t wanna be alone,” he thinks he says. The voices are deafening--shouting, screaming, shrieking for his death. He’s ready. He’s ready to give in.

Peaceful, alone, Jimmy slips away.

And then he wakes up.

He’s disoriented, confused, and a little annoyed. He didn’t want to wake up. He intended to die. But there’s noise--he can hear something over the voices--a knock.

Then his front door opens.

The candle has gone out, as has the fire, but light floods the room when Mumbo steps in, eyes gleaming red and only one maroon sleeve of his sweater remaining, the rest shredded. He tosses something purple up into the air, then catches it. An End Crystal.

“Hello, Jimmy!” he says cheerfully. He doesn’t notice that Jimmy is practically dead, should be dead, grey skin hanging off in bunches and littered with sores. In the hours that he’s been asleep, Jimmy’s fever has climbed even higher, blurring his vision and burning his brain. He can’t focus on Mumbo, can barely hear his words. Even so, he strains to listen.

“I’m thinking of setting a trap for Grian. Want to come?”

Jimmy doesn’t. He shouldn’t. He’s dying, in his own bed, in his sleep. He doesn’t want anyone to see how pitifully weak he is, that he can’t survive being Red.

He also doesn’t want to be alone.

And Mumbo asked him. Mumbo wants his help. Jimmy’s never been able to say no, not to his friends.

His death will have to be postponed.

“In the Southlands?” he hopes he says. He still can’t hear his own voice. He sits up achingly, swinging his numb legs over the side of the bed and retrieving his boots from the chest. Mumbo nods, his mouth moving. Jimmy has no clue what he’s saying. The voices are swelling in his ears.

They leave, the hut empty, the sheep gone from the yard. Jimmy stumbles along behind Mumbo, so utterly exhausted and ill that he can barely move. He’s not alone anymore, and that’s what matters.

He tries not to hope that Grian will fall into the trap. He tries not to hope that maybe, with Grian as an ally, he can ask him to figure out what’s wrong, fix the coding that broke him as a Red Life. Grian’s too smart to fall into the trap. Grian would sooner kill him. At least he wouldn’t be alone. At least he would be at home.

The Southlands. Home.

Jimmy would like to die at home.

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blessednereid · 3 years

Text

Just Stay~ Isaac Lahey

Randomizing my Prompts to write an Isaac Lahey oneshot, which is probably only gonna make me cry more.

Mentions of: Major character death, spoilers, Cursing, Heartbreak, Marriage and Children, pregnancy, violence in rage cages, confrontation. She/her pronouns. Please notify me for any other mentions I may need to add.

Pairings: Pack x Reader (Platonic Friendship), Stiles x Reader [(brotherly) (If you don’t look like Stiles, you can imagine the reader as adopted, I just like the idea of Stiles as a protective brother.), Isaac x Reader (romantic).

Prompts: A10 "You came into my world and you made it worse" and A14 "Just stay"

Word count: 3,381 words

~-~-~

Allison is dead.

She is gone.

And there is nothing we can do to bring her back.

It hurts like hell.

But what made it worse.

My boyfriend told me the next week he was leaving for France.

And breaking up with me,

Because he can't do long-distance.

~-~-~-~-~

"What do you mean you're leaving?" I said to him, tears running down my face, and he could hear every trickle. He wouldn't even look at me.

"I'm leaving (Y/N), I can't stay here. Mr. Argent is going to France, and I'm going with him."

"Why can't you stay? You don't have to leave. It's not like the McCall's won't let you stay at their place."

"It's not that," he sighed, exasperated at my attempts to make him stay.

"Then why can't you stay? Just stay with me." He turned to face me at that.

"(Y/N) I can't do it. This town is full of death and pain. My dad, Erica, Boyd, Allison, Aiden. DON'T YOU SEE?" his voice was full of hurt. "I can't sit around and wait for someone else to die, for me to get closer, and for them to die. I can't do it (Y/N)."

"Isaac… your pack is here. We're here. I'm HERE!"

"But for how much longer? How much longer until you die too (Y/N)?" He turned back around and continued packing. "I don't think this is going to work."

"What? What do you—?" The tiny beaver dam holding my tears had already burst, but the floodgates holding back my sobs had just cracked at his words.

"Isaac, what do you mean?" Complete silence.

"(Y/N) I can't wait for you to die. And I sure as hell can't protect you from five and half thousand miles away." His voice was just above a whisper, but it was enough for me to hear.

I sobered up, my tears stopped coming, my heart dropped, but it wasn't as erratic as before.

"So that's it then. You're just giving us up?"

He said, "Just leave (Y/N)... you can't change my mind on this."

"No. Say it, and say it to my face. Say it, and I'll leave, but I need you to say it." I choked up in between words but managed to get the sentence out nonetheless.

He turned around. "I'm breaking up with you. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"No, It's just what we both needed to."

I turned on my heels and left. I immediately went to Lydia's house.

The music playing on the radio sounded all the same to my ears, no matter how different the melody.

I didn't look back. If he wanted to leave, I would let him go. I knew I didn't deserve that. But that realization didn't prevent the way I felt for the next month to come.

~-~-~

Lydia and Kira tried putting me back out there, setting me up with other guys. Many people tried to break down the walls I put up, but Stiles, being the overprotective brother he is, never let them get close. Every time Isaac came up in a conversation, Malia would swear to the air. Giving empty threats to no one in particular, seeing as how he was never coming back.

I don't think I ever fully healed. He always came back to my thoughts, it was senior year's end, and I still thought of Isaac from time to time. Fondly or otherwise, it really depended on my mood.

I still thought of him coming back, apologizing, us getting married after college, settling down in the suburbs of California, and having a family. Our kids, a boy and a girl loving their fun and witty Uncle Stiles so much they ask for him to come over all the time.

"Uncle Stiles!" Grace and Tyler shouted and jumped away from their toys when he walked into the room.

Isaac stood behind me, his hand on my stomach where our next child rested. He chuckled, his face buried in my neck, lightly nipping at the skin in between my neck and shoulder.

"How are my favorite niece and nephew?"

"Silly Uncle Stiles! We're your only niece and nephew." Gracie, who was seven, stated as-a-matter-of-factly.

"That doesn't mean you're not my favorites," he sassed before extending both of his hands and tickling them, where they fell to the floor.

"Come on, let's leave them be." I turned to Isaac before backing out of the room.

As I said, I was about to graduate, and I still thought about him.

But on days near the full moon, where my "bloodlust is heightened" as Stiles would say, I would go to rage cages to take out my anger. Often imagining the objects to be Isaac's head. His gorgeous head, but soon blasted to smithereens.

I walked into the building, people wore goggles and other protective equipment. I paid my fees, accepted the safety suit and the wooden baseball bat, and walked towards the room. The room with the breakable shit that would soon be shattered for my sick enjoyment. Because that's what heartbreak can do to you.

SMASH

There goes a plate, but to me, it was his head.

The sound of glass breaking resonated through the room.

That was a TV, but to me, it was his gut.

A dull thud

But that time, it was the wall.

Sometimes when I saw my friends who were happy in their relationships. Sweet moments they shared would make me think of my relationship with Isaac and wonder if that's how they felt when they were heartbroken. When Isaac and I would be doing lovey-dovey things in front of them.

"ISAAC STOP! PUT ME DOWN NOW!"

He was spinning me round and round. My torso was leaning over his shoulder onto his backside, and my legs were dangling by his chest.

"No can do, princess!"

"Isaac, this isn't fair. Stop it!"

"What's the magic word?"

"Hmm…. How about… I'll literally kill you?"

"Fine."

He set me down on my feet on solid ground, and very dizzy at that, he still pulled me in for a passionate kiss. And the world stood still.

He always knew what I needed and how I was feeling.

But that didn't stop him from walking out of my life without a second thought or notice.

I remember when Mr. Argent came back, and I was frantically asking where Isaac was.

"Mr. Argent! Hello!"

"Hello (Y/N)."

"How have you been holding up recently."

"Life has been as good as life can be."

Beat.

"Um… Forgive my inquiry…" I hesitated. "Did Isaac come back with you, by any chance?"

"No, he preferred to stay in France. I'm sorry." My heart dropped

"Oh. Well, has he asked about us? About me?"

The deafening silence made my heart stop completely.

"Oh. Ok then. Nice having you back." I ran before he could say anything

~-~-~

It was graduation.

After the ceremony, we had a party in the backyard of Lydia's house. I guess it was to celebrate, not graduating, but making it through high school alive.

And guess who decided to show up.

Isaac Lahey.

In a fucking black suit, with a white collared shirt, with white tulips in his fucking hands.

I didn't notice him at first. Not until Stiles' fist connected with his jaw.

"Ok, I deserved that." Blood from his lip started running down his chin.

We made eye contact, and I wished we hadn't. His face softened and reminded me of every single time he told me he loved me.

My legs started walking to him mindlessly. I didn't even know what they were doing. It was as if I was a doll being controlled by someone else.

When I got to him, he reached out to me. I responded by slapping his hand away and bringing my fist to the other side of his face.

"There. It's even."

~-~-~

He'd been here two weeks.

I hadn't uttered a single syllable to him since 'It's even' I had run back inside to Lydia's bathroom and locked myself in there. Lydia, Malia, and Kira came to my rescue a little bit later with all my comfort foods. We watched stand-up comedy movies until we passed out.

I didn't know who kicked out Isaac, and I didn't want to know. Stiles just came to the room a little bit after I left to tell me he was gone. He didn't say anything else.

I thought I could get away with not talking to Isaac for the rest of eternity, but I was hit with reality sooner than I thought.

My phone lit up with a message from an "Unknown ID." All it said was, 'I'm outside.'

I put on my sandals and walked outside to my front door, where the sapphire-eyed love of my life stood, eyeing me as though his life depended on it.

"You do know I have a gun inside that Mr. Argent gave me, right?" I bluffed.

"Your heartbeat jumped, so either you're lying, or you're excited to see me and wouldn't use it anyway."

"Fuck you."

"There's the (Y/N) I knew all those years ago."

"Yeah, before you left and never said anything after that."

"You're an asshole, you know that?" I deadpanned, squinting my eyes when a breeze blew past me.

He was attractive, and I couldn't deny it.

He was wearing a cardinal red and gold hoodie. The jumper read the words "Stanford University." Just my luck that we would end up going to the same school.

"You know that I never meant to hurt you."

"No, you just wanted to save your own ass from a natural human emotion of grief and instead had me experience so fucking much of it in your absence."

"Do you know I still remember the entirety of our last conversation?" I continued. "The one that ended with you telling me you were breaking up with me?

He looked at me solemnly.

"You gave me no heads up, no warning. I just walk into your room at Scott's house and find you packing. If I hadn't gone there, I wouldn't have known."

He looked at the ground. I began stomping towards him.

"You can't just show up here and expect everything to be normal again, Isaac," I shouted. "You can't show up here and expect everything to be ok without addressing the fucking issue."

Nothing, his eyes, and the air around him reflected shame, but he said absolutely nothing.

"LOOK AT ME!"

"Look at what you did. You changed my world, but you made it worse."

"I'm sorry. I was a coward. And an imbecile." He paused.

"I took the easier way out because I was scared." "I didn't want to have to see you die, so I let you go. And then Chris told me what happened and how you almost did, and I fucking regretted leaving you so much."

I stared at him lifelessly.

"I was an idiot, and I'm still an idiot, but I'd never have forgiven myself if something were to happen to you and I couldn't tell you that I—"

I interrupted. "Just stop. Don't. You don't get to come back here and tell me that you love me. If you loved me, you would have stayed. You wouldn't have left me to mourn you as if you died. Because that's what you did. You left, and you didn't say a word," I ranted. "If you loved me, you wouldn't have done to me exactly what you were scared of. I loved you endlessly. I was there with you for everything, with your dad, when you shifted for the first time. I even got into a fight with my brother for you. When everyone died, I WAS THERE WITH YOU. You aren't the victim here. You certainly don't get to act like you are."

A quietness passed between us, and all that could be heard was the breeze. I walked back into my house without another word, disgusted at myself, n0t for what I said, but how I felt.

No matter how much I could deny it, I was still in love with the bastard. I still wanted to jump into his arms and cuddle with him and kiss him all over his face. I had always wanted that with him, but he broke me, and I was still hurt.

~-~-~

Another few weeks had passed before I saw Isaac again. It was July. In two months, we would all be going to college. It just so happened that both of us got into one of the most difficult universities to get into across the country. So, at the moment, I was currently hating the universe. At least Lydia would also be there.

There was a pack meeting we all had to attend, so we had to meet at Derek's loft.

I got dressed in a navy blue jean jacket, a white thrashers t-shirt, light wash jeans, and combat boots.

I got into Roscoe, and Stiles drove us to the loft. He tried to make small talk, but my mind was somewhere else, somewhere it shouldn't have been.

"Hey (Y/N), When do you think is a good time to name the baby now that we know he's a boy?"

"Hm… how about when you pay your dues for the bet?"

"I thought we weren't doing the bet anymore, love?"

"No, we were. You only tried to drop out when you found out you lost, and then you tried to bow out because you didn't wanna pay. "

He chuckled and tightened his grip around me, bringing me closer to him.

"Fine, you won fair and square. You'll have your fifteen dollars on your nightstand by tomorrow morning. Now can we please cuddle?" he whined.

"Mhm… yes! Yes, we can."

Stop it. Stop thinking about things you shouldn't want (Y/N).

When Stiles pulled up to the complex, he pulled out his phone and started typing what I assumed was a text message.

We started walking up to the front door, and when we entered, there was no one to be found. Absolutely no one in sight except Stiles and me standing in the door frame.

We went upstairs to find everybody else and almost gave up until the last door.

Everybody else was in there, but so was Isaac. Standing there in a grey shirt and black jeans. Pictures of us taken by either ourselves or by our friends throughout our relationship. Everyone was backed against the walls, but he stood there in the center looking at me, and I knew this entire thing was a set-up.

"Stiles?"

He sighed. "Just listen to what he has to say, ok? I already tried kicking the shit out of him."

I gulped, but I stood there, feeling very out of place and very betrayed.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing to the black leather book he held in his hands.

"I have something to say before I tell you what it is," Isaac whispered.

"Isaac, I don't have time for this."

"Please?" He was desperate, and I'm pretty sure everyone in the room could tell, but nobody was looking at him. Everyone was looking at me.

I nodded towards him reluctantly.

"I wanted to write to you. To call you every day. I wanted to come back with Mr. Argent, but I knew you would hate me, and I couldn't bear to see that look on your face, even though I knew it was my fault." He tried looking into my eyes, but I wouldn't let him, looking at everyone in the room beside him.

"I left, and I broke your heart. I know that, and I thought that because I broke your heart, you'd never want to see me again. No matter how much my heart begged to be with you, I wouldn't let it. Because that wasn't what you deserved."

He lifted up the book, and I stared at it curiously.

"So I kept this, and I filled it with everything I wanted to say to you. Stories about my day, times I remembered things we did, things that reminded me of you, places I wanted to see with you, poems, songs, drawings. Anything and everything I could think of to keep my distance so that I didn't hurt you again."

My eyes started to water, but I wouldn't let the tears fall, unlike last time.

"And I'm so fucking selfish for saying this, but I keep hurting myself trying to stay away from you. And I don't want to do it anymore. Because if I'm with you, at least I can try to take away the pain I'll end up causing you. But if you're not with me, there's no one to take away mine."

He opened the book to a bookmarked page and started reading.

"Eyes as big as Venus

"As enchanting and magnetic

"as the moon to the tides

"With her heart so divine

"I'm caught like a spider,

"In charlotte's web."

I bit my lip. As cheesy as it may be, he wrote a poem for me.

"Good morning, love. I just thought of what a future with you would be like." He paused. "Probably full of adventure. You would probably want to go exploring the world after college. All I would want is to have you around. I was thinking maybe when we're older we could have a baby. Start our own little family."

Fuck.

"I was thinking if we have a boy we could name him Noah, for your dad, and a girl we could name her Claudia, after your mom and that pen pal you told me about who you were very close with. In all honesty, I just want to wake up with you in my arms and go to sleep just the same. I love you."

A tear slipped. I think I'm about to pass out.

“"I've been planning to come back for a while, love. I was just a coward who didn't want you to hate him any more than he knew you already did. So I stayed. But I'm here now. And I'm not leaving this time. I don't care what you say, I'll always be there for you when you need a shoulder to cry on, or someone to laugh with, or talk about your book that no one else has read with. I'm always gonna be that person for you because I'm so in love with you, it hurts. And it hurts, even more, to be away from you, and I just can't do it anymore. So I'll be in your life in every capacity that you will let me."

Apparently, I had started walking towards him. Who keeps controlling my feet like this?

Tears were coming out of my eyes, and I wanted to scream.

"Fuck you. Fuck you for leaving me and then coming back and pulling this bullshit."

I turned to my friends. "And fuck you guys for tricking me into this crap." I turned back to Isaac. "But most of all? Fuck you for being so goddamn addicting that after nearly 2 fucking years, I'm still so in love with you even after all you've done to me, I would let you back into my heart.

“Because that is what you have done, Isaac Lahey. You have worked your way back into your home in my heart, so if you hurt me again, I swear to all that is good, I'll kill you."

Before I knew it, his right hand was on the small of my back, his left hand on the back of my neck. He pulled me to him and kissed me. The kind of kiss that makes the world pause. The kind where you forget who and what is around you. Even the cheers of your friends as they celebrate their one true pairing reunited and the scoffs of your brother ready to kill someone for his baby sister.

#teenwolf #teen wolf #isaaclahey #isaac lahey imagine #isaac lahey #isaac x reader #major character death #teen wolf spoilers #isaac lahey x reader #nereid writes

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theres-an-impulstor-among-us · 3 years

Note

3rd life, Tango and Impulse are the last two standing?

this was the first 3rd Life request i received and oh boy have i wanted to work on it for so long. apologies for the older ones i havent touched yet; i’m getting to them! i’m just in more of a 3rd Life mood atm :)

...

Etho drowned

Impulse stares at the death message on his communicator with wide eyes. “Oh my gosh,” he whispers hoarsely. “He did it… Tango got him…”

He checks the tab list. Etho is gone. Only two red names stare back at him: his own and Tango’s. The endgame he’s been avoiding for weeks is finally here.

Impulse continues trading with his villagers, though there doesn’t seem to be much point anymore. Tango is undoubtedly on his way here right now, and he’ll probably want to end things right here and now. There’s only two people left, both on red. One more death will end the game, no matter who dies.

He finds himself hoping that Tango will fall into a ravine or get exploded by a creeper before he even makes it here. But he knows it won’t happen. There’s only two ways this could end, and neither of them are very appealing to him.

All too soon, he hears the familiar voice of his best friend call his name. Wincing briefly, he turns and finds Tango standing in the entrance to his villager trading hall. “Hi, Tango.”

“You saw in chat, right?” Tango’s red eyes are glowing bright, as is the red heart on his neck. “I got him. My trap worked!”

Impulse nods. “I saw. Heck of a way to kill your close friend.”

“Yeah, well, he would’ve killed me with no hesitation, so I did what I had to do to survive.”

“You’ve done a lot of things like that,” Impulse remarks carefully. “Remind me again who you’ve killed?”

“Grian, Bdubs, Scott, Jimmy, Ren, and now Etho,” says Tango gleefully. “Etho’s my first red lifer, though. Gotta say, there’s a hell of a rush in taking someone’s last life and knowing they won’t be able to come back and confront you.”

Impulse slowly shakes his head. “That’s a really… cold thing to say. Remember, we don’t know exactly what happens when we lose our last life. It’s likely we just appear back on our normal servers, but Grian said he didn’t even know that for certain.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Tango rolls his eyes. “Whatcha up to?”

“Getting some books to enchant my stuff so you’ll have a harder time killing me,” Impulse wants to say. Instead, he opts for the safe answer and says, “Just some trading. You… want some emeralds?”

“Nah, I don’t need to trade right now.”

The two fall silent for a moment.

“So I guess we should address the elephant in the room,” says Impulse slowly. “We’re the only ones left. The last two standing.”

“Uh huh.” Tango’s eyes are still worryingly sparkling red. “We are. And don’t think I’m stupid, Impy. I know about the traps you put around your base. Plus the ones in Renchanting and the desert.”

“I didn’t put those there.”

“Whatever. Point is: I know where all the traps are. So don’t think you’re gonna get the drop on me. And when it comes to PvP, I’m stronger.”

“Are you trying to tell me to just lay down and accept my death?” Impulse demands.

“Hell no. Don’t do that! That’d be the worst way to end this whole thing.” Tango pauses a moment. “Who’ve you killed, again?”

“I… I killed Joel and Cleo.”

“And?” prompts Tango pointedly.

Impulse winces. “And… you. I took your second life.”

“Yes, yes you did. And I’m not gonna let you take another.”

“I don’t want to do that, Tango. I may be a red lifer but I don’t want to hurt you again.”

“Too bad,” Tango says coldly. “This is the moment I’ve been waiting months and months for. Two people left. I’ve done too much and fought too hard to delay my victory any longer. Come to the village with your best armour and your best sword, and if you’re not there in five minutes, I’ll hunt you down and kill you without mercy. Got it?”

Impulse can hardly hold back a shiver at the viciousness in his best friend’s voice. “G-Got it.”

“Good.”

Impulse watches Tango leave, before letting out a deep breath. He can’t deny he’s terrified; this is the final confrontation. Either he or Tango won’t make it out alive. And he has a suspicion as to which one will lose their last life first. As blunt as Tango had been, he’s right. Tango knows where all the traps are, he’s better at PvP than Impulse, and he has the fortune to have known Impulse long enough to be able to reliably anticipate any tricks he could come up with.

Impulse hardly stands a chance.

After assembling his best armour under the circumstances, Impulse takes his enchanted diamond sword and heads out into the village. He can already see Tango sitting atop one of the houses, legs dangling over the side. Tango’s armour is iron but enchanted, whereas Impulse’s is diamond and unenchanted. He doesn’t know which will be better in this scenario but he’s leaning towards the enchanted armour.

Tango spots him approaching and jumps down from the house, swinging his own enchanted diamond sword. “Sorry it has to be this way, Impulse. I hope you know that however this finishes, you’ll always be my best friend.”

Somehow, I don’t think you’ll be very happy with me if I’m the one who somehow wins after all this, Impulse thinks.

Aloud, he says, “I’m sorry too.”

A brief pause follows his words.

Then Tango charges forward and the fight begins.

Impulse blocks Tango’s first two blows, but the third glances off his armour. This completely throws him off and Tango lands a few more hits on his armour.

Losing his nerve, Impulse scrambles backwards and takes off running, hoping to give himself time to think of something.

“Hey!” Tango yells. “What are you doing?! Get back here!”

Impulse sprints as fast as he can towards Bdubs and Cleo’s abandoned castle. Without slowing, he jumps on the ruined planks of the drawbridge and makes it across to the other side. When he dares to look back, he notices Tango skidding to a halt on the other side of the moat.

Impulse involuntarily nods to himself. Tango hates parkour, even simple ones.

After taking a moment to compose himself, Impulse turns and spots Tango halfway across the bridge, jumping steadily from one plank to another. Panicking, Impulse jumps on the pressure plate in the centre of the room, before bolting for the stairs.

Tango has just reached the entrance when he hears the telltale hissing noise and he curses. He doesn’t have enough time to follow Impulse to the stairs and he knows it, so all he can do is dive back across the drawbridge.

The TNT goes off a second later, sending Tango flying onto the bank. It’s been placed in such a strategic way that it only destroys the lower floor; the second floor, which Impulse has managed to reach, is entirely untouched.

He grabs a spare bow and some arrows, and fires a few out the slit window at Tango, who is struck in the leg by one and has to retreat to avoid getting hit by the others.

Impulse takes a deep breath. This is a good position; he has the high ground, as it were. He has the advantage right now.

Unfortunately, that advantage becomes a lot less palpable when he realises his meagre arrow stock has run out.

Through the split window, he spots Tango running back across over the drawbridge, clearly realising that Impulse is out of ammunition. His leg is bleeding from where he’s pulled the arrow out but he doesn’t seem to care right now.

Impulse rushes for the second set of stairs and bursts out onto the top of the castle. Over the ramparts, he can see the long abandoned village he used to call home and he’s briefly gripped with a deep sense of sadness and nostalgia.

A few seconds later, he hears footsteps behind him and whirls round to find Tango charging towards him. With only a split second warning, Impulse ducks under his outstretched arm and rushes for the stairs again, but Tango sweeps his legs out from under him. Impulse lets out a cry of pain as he lands heavily on his wrist.

“NO!” Tango yells, standing over him with his sword, forcing him to roll over and look him in the eye. “You’re not running away again! I’ve waited TOO long for this; now fight me!”

Impulse responds by kicking Tango hard in his already injured leg, before rolling to his feet and taking advantage of Tango’s distracted state to shove him away.

Tango stumbles back, his mind fuzzy from the pain. His diamond sword dangles in his grasp. His chest heaves as he gasps for breath.

“Tango…” Impulse straightens up, a sympathetic look on his face. “Please. We don’t have to resolve it this way. Let’s just live together in this world until one of us dies naturally. There’s no reason for us to murder each other just to win this stupid game.”

“No,” growls Tango softly. “You’ve no idea what I’ve sacrificed to get here. If somehow we do go back to Hermitcraft after we die in this goddamn world, do you think anyone’s still gonna wanna be friends with me?”

“Then why burn all your bridges like that?” Impulse demands. “3rd Life is temporary but we’ll be on Hermitcraft for decades to come. Why throw it all away?”

“Y-You don’t understand. I have to win this. Th-There’s no other way to end this.”

Impulse carefully steps towards his best friend. “Tango. Plea-.”

“I SAID NO!”

Tango charges at Impulse, who intercepts him and throws him away from him.

What he hasn’t noticed is how close he is to the edge of the parapet.

Tango manages to catch Impulse’s wrist, pulling him to the ground, but the shock of the landing releases Tango’s grip on him.

Impulse gasps as he realises that his friend has disappeared over the side of the parapet. He hardly dares look, but his communicator going off only confirms what he already knows to be true.

Tango fell from a high place.

Tango is gone.

Impulse has won.

He struggles to a sitting position, wincing at the pain in his arm. It’s over. It’s really over.

After all this time, all these deaths, he’s the last one standing. The “winner”, if you could even call him that. He’s done so much to survive: things he’s ashamed of, things that will stay with him for the rest of his life. The things he’s witnessed will also haunt him; the deaths of everyone around him, including his best friends, as he’s unable to do anything about it.

After what feels like hours, he discards his armour and steps up onto the parapet, the breeze ruffling his t-shirt and shorts. At the bottom, he can almost picture Tango’s body, broken on the hard ground below him. He doesn’t know if his death will take him back to Hermitcraft, back to Tango, but anything is better than staying here alone in this world, void of happiness and life.

“I’m coming home, Tango,” he murmurs.

With that, he lets himself fall.

#3rdlifesmp #3rd life smp #impulsesv #tangotek #vaunna’s requests

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lunarsands · 2 years

Text

ALSMP Fanfic: In Light and In Darkness Ch4

Characters: Shadowcrawler!Shubble, Half-Wither!Sausage, Birb!Shubble, Gravital!Sausage

Chapter warnings: Character Death (the inevitable, again)

Chapter Summary: Sausage and Shubble learn that second, and even third or more, chances are possible.

[Chapter 1] [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3]

(Also available on Ao3! )

Chapter Four

Sunrise found Shubble safely ensconced in the dark upstairs room behind shuttered and boarded up windows, a feature turned useful instead of discouraging. Sausage thought it best to let her stay through the day instead of attempting to travel back to her own home. He himself had a nap on a sleeping bag in a spare room downstairs.

He considered going to confront Scott about his wings then thought better of it. It might not serve any purpose – he doubted the vampire would have misgivings about it, and certainly wasn’t likely to apologize. He also doubted the wings would even work anymore.

During the afternoon he took some time to sit by a window and just look up at the sky, remembering what it was like to fly among the clouds and allowing himself time to accept that those days were over. He was still sitting there, now just absently gazing out at the courtyard with his head propped on one hand, when Shubble came down the stairs. She yawned to announce her presence. “I feel like that was the best sleep I’ve gotten in a while! Your house is really nice, I should have thought about building something like this instead of a greenhouse.” She laughed humorlessly. “It’s kind of silly, when all the plants keep dying anyway. I guess I’ve just blocked out too much of the sun for them, when really I was trying to give myself a way to see during the daytime.”

“I could try to help you fix it,” Sausage offered. “I mean, the plants will just die again if I get near them, but maybe after we change some things you could get new ones and they’ll be okay.”

“I suppose we could try. Okay, yeah, let’s go.”

“Oh, but wait a minute.” Sausage went to find the few surviving plants he had left and came back to present her with a small, tangled bramble vine. “It doesn’t look like much, but it used to have some pretty purple flowers. Maybe you can get them to come back.” He carefully placed it in a backpack and then they headed out.

With her vision being keener at night, Shubble watched their path for hostile mobs and Sausage dealt with any trouble by throwing a skull. Soon they fell into a rhythm and casually chatted in between explosions. When they reached her home, she kept a lookout while Sausage did the planning and building of a second, smaller greenhouse that had regular glass instead of the tinted glass of her original build, in the hopes that less heavily filtered sunlight would help. Then, together they set up new tables and prepared plant pots, and although as much as he wanted to, he had to leave it to her to collect new flowers later. She placed the bramble vine he had given her at the front.

With that finished, he helped her redecorate the inside of her house. In turn, it helped him feel a little like his old self. He talked about some things he had thought about building around his new manor even if a garden was off the plate. She said she would be happy to visit again to see it all when he was done.

Before he left for the night, he gave her a list of different plants he had found during his explorations and the best way to get to them for someone who couldn’t fly. She promised she would let him know when she got them and invited him to come back to look at them – if not from a distance – if she was able to get them to thrive in the new greenhouse, which she would tend during nighttime.

He gave her a smile and went on his way.

~*~

A few days passed. Sausage worked on his building projects, looking forward to having Shubble see them. One thought continued to plague him, however, and he would still end up looking toward Heaven’s Reach, aching to go to the church to talk to Pearlescent. Finally, out of frustration, he gathered an assortment of stones, a bucket of water, and an iron sword, then picked a patch of dirt behind the stables. There he laid out an approximation of a miniature crop field, with the stones as the walls and using the sword tip to draw lines where the crops would be planted. He made a small trench and poured the water into it, then pressed some cracked, unusable wheat seeds into the lines. Lastly, he stuck the sword into the ground in the very middle.

He sat back to look at his work and thought it to be rather pathetic. Maybe he should at least have gotten some sunflower seeds, but he couldn’t bear the thought of destroying one of them with his touch. He clasped his hands, sighed, and bowed his head. He knew better than to expect an answer but he felt a small measure of peace from the gesture. It was better than staring with longing at the church he couldn’t enter.

Yet that peace was broken by a sudden feeling that something was terribly wrong. A vision of shadows and swaying trees came to him. He rushed to his feet and looked around. It felt like something had been there and now was gone. He couldn’t name it, but…he needed to check. Shadow and trees…

He needed to see Shubble.

Quick as he could he mounted one of the horses and rode off, crossing the plains and heading into the forest. An ever-growing sense of dread rose within him. The soul lanterns dotting the trees near Shubble’s home came into view. He urged the horse on faster until the roof of the greenhouse appeared. He leapt down and began searching—

He didn’t need to go far. Only a short way from the front door Shubble lay half-phased into the ground, a small, incongruous crater nearby. He knelt and tried to fool himself into holding out hope that she was merely unconscious, but a closer look told him it wasn’t so. He was able to push his hands into the dirt and get a hold on her, pulling her out despite her semi-solid state.

He obviously couldn’t see what her injuries were, but one thought made him feel along her neck for bite marks in case Scott had fancied himself a taste of shadow blood. He was relieved to not find any, and that left the question of the crater. He could only assume a Creeper had snuck up on her in the woefully underlit surroundings. He cradled her body in his arms, her head tucked under his chin. “I’m sorry, my friend,” he whispered softly.

He gently set her down, keeping an eye out in case she started sinking through again as he removed his cloak, planning to wrap her up so he could bring her to Heaven’s Reach and put her to rest in the cemetery where she could stay protected in the light. Yet before he laid the cloak on the ground, he realized something.

Maybe, like he and Scott, she would come back, too. There was no guarantee what she would come back as, so he quickly decided he would build a small crypt where she could safely rest until then. He worried, though. How long did the process take? She had to have been there long enough already, right? But then again, he himself could have been laying out there for an entire day without knowing, before he changed.

Sausage checked inside the new greenhouse and was disheartened to see that all of the new plants had already died, save for the one bramble vine. He made short work of converting the greenhouse into a covered crypt, replacing the glass with stone and dirt, partially camouflaging it against intruders but leaving the door accessible should Shubble awaken. He draped his cloak over the table he had cleared, then carried her inside, placing her upon it.

Reluctant to leave, he sat beside the table for a little while, wondering. If a moth became a vampire, and an angel became part wither, what would a shadowcrawler become? Was there a chance her misfortune would be reversed? Was there any way to influence it? There was no way to know for sure, but an idea made him go outside and start searching around the woods. Somewhere nearby there had to be…

He spotted a cluster of tiny white flowers with long, curved stems and picked one, then ran as fast as he could back to the improvised crypt. The flowers had already begun to wilt by the time he tucked the stem into Shubble’s hair, but at least he had made it before it completely died. He then withdrew to the door, giving her one last parting look. “Rest well. I hope to see you soon.”

He had no way of predicting the circumstances under which they would meet again.

~*~

Sausage scrunched up his face as bright light made itself known. Was it morning? Had he been sleeping? The ground at his back felt like stone. A bird chirped nearby. He was outside—

The last thing he remembered was falling.

Well, falling again. The back of his head hurt a little and one of his legs ached, but otherwise he seemed okay. The sun felt rather warm.

The bird chirped again, and then it sounded like a voice. “Sausage!”

The sun felt warm.

“Hey, Sausage! Are you okay? Did you trip or something?”

He sat up then glanced at his hands. The haunting shadows under his skin did not appear. In fact, his skin looked less pale than it had been before. He turned his hands over and checks his arms. Aside from a bruise on his left elbow, he looked much healthier.

Another chirp came from the bird, sounding like it was right next to him. He looked down and saw a small humanoid with winged arms, blue feathers, and an oddly familiar face. He had never seen her features in color before but he found he recognized her amber eyes. “Shubble? Is that you?” A hopeful grin broke out on his face.

“Yep! I woke up like this! Isn’t it cool? I’m a cute little birb now.” She chirped again and then tilted her head. “You look a little different, too. Did you die again?”

“I think I…did,” he marveled, looking around at himself and holding out his arms. “I was building way up there and then – Yeah. Yeah, I fell.” He gazed up at the platform high overhead, squinting against the bright sunlight to pick out the shape of accidentally blasted glass and broken scaffolding. He looked back down at her then held out a hand. She hopped up to perch on his finger. “I think this is what happens to people in this world – we become something new any time we die.”

“It looks like it!” She sounded elated. “I never thought that when I got out of the shadow realms that I hadn’t returned to my old world, and it had just changed while I was gone. But it looks like I came out somewhere completely different, and-and I have a second chance!”

Sausage smiled. “You are kind of small now, but… you look happy.”

“And people can see my face now! I don’t mind being smol at all! I can fly around and the light doesn’t hurt to look at! What about you? What are you now?”

He flexed the fingers of his other hand, already knowing he wouldn’t be able to summon a wither skull. There was some other type of energy there, however, slightly buzzing as it waited to be used. He would work on figuring it out later. “I’m not sure yet. I feel a little like my old self – livelier, I guess, but still not an angel anymore.”

“I guess we can’t really go back to who we were before.”

“But like you said, second chances.” He smiled warmly and raised his hand, giving her a higher vantage point to take off from as she spread her wings in agreement.

~*~

The next time he saw Shubble, she was a cat, which was kind of a funny thing to follow a bird. By then he had gotten a handle on his new ability to affect gravity, and they talked about becoming superheroes to protect others in the world.

Then it so happened that he had another accident and woke up as an ant of all things. He had a good laugh about it and had fun crawling around in spaces he could never imagine getting into before, although reaching storage chests became quite the challenge. He built himself an anthill, because, well, why not? It didn’t last long but it added to his experience. From time to time he wondered if Pearlescent was looking in on him. With the trial of being part wither behind him, he knew he could get through whatever else fate threw at him. He hoped she was enjoying the adventure along with him.

~End~

#alsmp #alsmp fanfic #half-wither!sausage #wither!sausage #shadowcrawler!shubble #birb!shubble #gravital!sausage #mythicalsausage #shubble #afterlife smp fanfic #lunar yarns

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crystal-witchiness · 3 years

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***Okay so I found this in my notes from May 2021 as a reaction to the scenes in the beginning of Endgame when Captain Marvel first brings Tony and Nebula back to Earth, when they first get off the ship, and when Tony yells at Steve a few scenes later when he looks like ‘Death Warmed Over’ in his robe and i thought I’d share -

Every time someone argues with me about my ABSOLUTE 100% belief that Steve and Tony had romantic feelings for each other, I’ll just show them this scene. “And I needed YOU.” He didn’t say “You guys” or “Your help.” Tony looked at Steve with so much pain in his eyes and said, “I needed y o u.” And Steve is just as broken watching Tony. This isn’t the first time this has happened between them. They had MANY scenes like this in Civil War (but I like to pretend that movie didn’t happen cause ‘ow blow a hole in my ship why dontcha?’) I mean technically I could submit that whole movie as evidence of their feelings but there are too many negative emotions wrapped up in it and it hurts. This movie is the first time they’ve seen each other since Civil War and when Tony first gets off the ship he basically falls into Steve’s arms. First of all, Steve fricking S P R I N T S when he sees Tony getting off the ship, then Tony sighs in relief and lets Steve take his weight. AND IMMEDIATELY begins unloading his grief about losing Peter cause he knew Steve would understand and comfort him. You can SEE s e e when Pepper runs up that (Ofc Tony does another sigh of relief that the snap didn’t take her (which I wish it did sorry Pepper your character stopped being interesting in the 2nd Iron Man)) Tony has to pull himself off of Steve and pretend to have it more together than he does because Pepper immediately begins crying and Tony has to comfort her. But Steve doesn’t leave his side. Tony cradling Pepper but he’s turning his body so that Steve can cradle him and ugh. Honestly I would have accepted a polyamorous relationship. Tony NEEDED someone to be the leader. THATS LITERALLY WHAT PEPPER WAS TALKING ABOUT. Tony NEVER rests because he always thinks he has to be the one to do everything, EXCEPT for when Steve’s around. Steve is the Captain and even though they bump heads (a lot, awww couples’ squabbles) Tony ALWAYS defers to Steve when it’s important. And Steve? Steve HAS to be a leader, to be helpful, in a healthy way because he couldn’t be that for most of his life in the past. He was a scrawny defenseless guy who always had to depend on Bucky. So to be able to take care of this group of wonderful people who are so powerful and yet STILL NEED STEVE? It’s who he his. It’s who Tony is too but he doesn’t WANT to be that way, he does it because he has to. He does it when no one else can or he doesn’t want to lose anyone else. This scene right now is Tony feeling helpless and so he lashes out at the easiest person, Steve. Steve is their leader and has saved them many times. Tony saw that picture of Peter and couldn’t handle his own feelings of helplessness so he lashed out to bring down the next ‘leader figure’ of the group. Steve and Tony have always been the parents of the Avengers. Steve is the most dad-est dad ever to dad. Meanwhile, Tony invites everyone to live with him while feeding them, clothing them (armor and civilian clothes) and making sure they have top of the line protection. HE LITERALLY EVEN SAYS THIS IN AGE OF ULTRON. SUCH a mom. So he wanted to make Steve feel his pain because Steve made a promise that they would lose together and Steve wasn’t there on that moon. And OF COURSE Tony knows that Steve was on earth fighting his own battle against Thanos but he wasn’t WITH Tony. And they are always stronger together than apart. (Civil War kinda proved this too) Tony sees Steve’s absence as the reason they lost, because ‘if only they’d been together’ ‘maybe we could have won if we’d only been together.’

ALSO DONT EVEN GET ME STARTED ON TONY LITERALLY GIVING STEVE A REPRESENTATION OF HIS HEART. I know he did it out of anger and to make a point but he took away this piece of him, that he made SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE HE FELT VULNERABLE WITHOUT THE ARC, and gave it to Steve. Once again shedding that responsibility and giving it to Steve. Because even with the residual anger over Civil War, Tony trusts Steve. He says otherwise in this moment out of anger but that “vision” he talks about here? He literally watches Steve die (YEAH THATS RIGHT I SAID STEVE. Not PEPPER, NOT RHODEY, NOT ANY OF THE OTHER AVENGERS.) Wanda showed him his worst fear in Age of Ultron and it was the death of the Avengers, but he didn’t see THEM die. Everyone else, Thor, Bruce, Natasha, and Clint were already dead. Tony watched STEVE die and it was STEVE saying that Tony could’ve saved them that spurred him into creating Ultron. He was so scared of losing them and letting Steve down (and letting him die) that he wanted to wrap the whole world in armor to protect him. And he tries to do it again in this scene. He means it to be spiteful but he gives Steve his armor and tells him to hide from Thanos. WHICH IS ANOTHER THING UGH. Tony doesn’t know that out of all of the people who fought Thanos in Wakanda that day, Steve was the one who engaged in hand-to-hand combat with him. Everyone else had armor and suits, weapons, etc. Steve has his serum strength and he u s e d it. It didn’t help for very long but he used his BARE HANDS to fight an alien-monster wielding 5/6 of ALL POWERFUL infinity stones, and ofc he was never going to win, but even Thanos looked at Steve in incredulity at his bravery and resolve. A human (a super charged one at that but still a human) fought him with his bare hands and wasn’t going to stop. (Steve proved this again at the end of Endgame when he’s the last one standing against Thanos and his entire army and just tightens the strap on his broken shield, (and most likely broken arm, based on the flinch/hiss) and readies himself to fight alone. Steve also gave Wanda time to destroy the mind stone (unfortunately, that didn’t mean anything in the end)

AND YET Tony doesn’t know any of this. He doesn’t know how hard Steve fought, just like Tony did on Titan, to stop Thanos. And I REALLY wish we had seen Tony’s reaction to Steve standing up to Thanos at the end of Endgame OR EVEN WIELDING MJOLNIR, but anyways.

Back to the basics. Boss level stuff most people don’t remember or think about- Tony’s dad very unhealthily IDOLIZED Steve. He canonically compared everything Tony did to Steve. So Tony grew up idolizing this man that he also despised because it fueled his father’s abuse of him. Tony shows this anger in the first Avengers. When they have their argument on the quinjet. “Everything special about you came out of a bottle.” He even says something about how Steve didn’t live up to his father’s hype (I don’t remember Tony’s exact words but that’s the gist) And ofc Steve says Tony’s nothing without his armor. But then they go on the prove each other wrong multiple times, but mainly in their last moments in the MCU. Steve proves it by standing alone against an ENTIRE alien army and later by picking up mjolnir. And Tony? Tony is that ONE factor in a million that Stephen sees. Tony, a beautifully pure human-being, with no powers or serums to help, takes on the powers of the stones. KNOWING it would kill him. He had proof. It nearly killed Thanos and Bruce and they were hulking (pun intended) beings with super strength and all that.

Tony and Steve were always set up to be spoils to one another and that makes them perfect together. They balance each other out. Pepper was a boss b****, no doubt, and I loved their relationship in the first two Iron Man movies, but as their characters grew and Tony’s personality was intrinsically changed through trauma- Pepper was no longer right for him. She was good for him, no doubt, but Tony couldn’t relax with her as he did with Steve. Tony could trust Steve to take over and everything could be fine. Pepper was like that for Stark Industries but not in other ways. Tony always saw himself as Pepper’s protector. I will 100% give her props for telling Tony that he’d never rest until he tried Scott’s time travel theory, but other than that she wasn’t particularly supportive of Iron. Man. What Pepper never seemed to understand, and what Steve didn’t understand when he FIRST met Tony, is that Tony and Iron Man are synonymous. Their is no ‘man outside the suit.’ Tony Stark is Iron Man and Iron Man is Tony Stark. Steve was placed into an already created persona of Captain America. Steve didn’t create Captain America even though that’s who he was. He was literally MADE for the role. Tony on the other hand, MADE Iron Man. He was the one who built the first suit - dying in a cave in Afghanistan. He was the one who took responsibility for Obadiah and his father’s actions and became a superhero to save the countries that were affected by Stark tech. Steve may have volunteered to be a superhero because he felt like he had no one other choice but Tony DIDN’T HAVE TO. He had fame, money, power, ALL OF IT. He could’ve EASILY hidden his company’s dark underside once he found out. But instead, Tony was like “Hey um so my company has done some bad things and instead of delegating aid through my money and power, I’m going to personally handle this with a titanium alloy suit and technology that I helped create in a cave while being held captive by a terrorist cell.”

Where was I going with this? OH YEAH.

I will believe in TonyxSteve (Stony) for the rest of my life and I will use fanfiction to fill the void of their deaths. Basically, if I lost anyone in the word vomit above, what I’m trying to say is that- Steve and Tony completed each other. They provided something the other needed. Tony needed stability and protection. He needed to feel like he could let go. Steve needed an anchor in the present. Someone lively and opinionated, SOMEONE ADVENTUROUS AND FUNNY, who Steve could smile with and protect. But also. Steve trusted Tony to be a leader as much as Tony trusted him. They had their ups and downs. Trauma and the Accords didn’t help their relationship at all, but should’ve been it for each other. And I honestly believe they would have t h r i v e d.

Honestly I applaud anyone who made it this far. I don’t know where this all came from but I will not apologize✌🏻

I rest my case your honor.

#avengers endgame #steve rogers #tony stark #captain america #iron man #stony #marvel endgame #steve x tony #i will die with this ship #i ship them #rip stan lee

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starbright18 · 2 years

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MOTEL CALIFORNIA

[content warning: suicidal thoughts and suicide attempt]

[READ AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION]

☾*✲⋆.☾*✲⋆.☾*✲⋆.☾*✲⋆.

"I've seen worse," Scott drew out, eyeing the run-down motel in front of us. The place looked horrible and gave me bad vibes, but it was already dark out and we had no other options.

"Where have you seen worse?" Stiles sassed. Scott shuffled under his gaze, balancing his bag on one shoulder and mine on the other, per his insistence.

"Listen up," Coach Finstock blew his whistle loudly. "The meet's been pushed 'till tomorrow. This is the closest motel with the most vacancies and least amount of good judgment when it comes to accepting a bunch of degenerates like yourselves. You'll be pairing up, choose wisely." He held out a stack of keys, watching closely as different kids took one and wandered off with their partners. "And I'll have no sexual perversions perpetrated by you little deviants. Got that? Keep your dirty little hands to your dirty little selves!"

"You coming with us?" Stiles asked, waving around the key he had for him and Scott. I shook my head, motioning toward Lydia and Allison. "Suit yourself."

"I'll come by and see you guys soon," I promised, joining the two girls beside the bus. "You ready?"

"Yeah, let's go," Allison smiled, starting toward the motel. We paused when we realized Lydia wasn't following. "Lydia?"

"I don't like this place," She whispered. As she finished speaking, my eyes flickered. Admittedly, even I knew this place gave off sketchy vibes. But we were running low on options so it would have to do.

"I don't think the people who own this place like this place," I joked softly. "It's just for a night.

"A lot can happen in one night," Lydia muttered. One night couldn't hurt, right?

"I'm gonna go get my bag from Scott, then I'll be back to the room, okay?" I smiled, nodding my head toward the motel. Both girls said their goodbyes and I turned, heading toward where I could smell the two boys. Just before I knocked on their door, I paused, listening to their conversation.

"Who's the last one?" Scott asked softly. It was silent for a beat before I heard Stiles shuffle nervously.

"Margo," He paused.

"No way, dude."

"No, I know. I don't want to believe it either, but...she comes back from France and immediately all of these weird things start happening. I mean, come on, Scott. You—you saw her before she left. She went all...dark. What if she's still dark but hiding it well?"

"You think your twin sister, Margo, is the one sacrificing people? That she's the darach?"

"I don't know," Stiles hesitated. "She just feels...off."

"Yeah, I feel it too."

I turned on my heel immediately, fighting tears as I retreated toward the room I shared with the girls. Stiles, my twin brother, thinks I'm the darach? And Scott, my boyfriend and best friend of six years...my heart felt broken from the realization that neither boy trusted me. And if they didn't trust me, did any of my friends?

Allison and Lydia looked at me like they were afraid I was going to snap at any given moment. In France, Allison stopped looking at me like she expected me to go dark. But now that we were back in Beacon Hills, she had the same worried look. And Scott and Stiles, they did it too. They even admitted it tonight — they know I'm a bad omen, an omen for death. Derek, Jackson, Kate, my mom, the sacrifices...it was like everywhere I went, death followed closely behind. Everyone I touched, everyone I was supposed to protect, dying because I wasn't strong enough to protect them. To protect anyone.

Instead of returning to our room, I went to the parking lot, hiding around a corner far out of sight in case someone came looking for me. My mind was fuzzy, filled with all of my failures. It was hard to be a pack protector when I never truly protected any of them from what I needed to. What they really needed was protection from me. If I couldn't protect them, if I was only going to hurt them, maybe it was me who needed to die next.

"They were right, you know," From the corner of my eye, I saw Derek leaning against the wall. "They see it, we all do. You're different, dark, dangerous."

"I'm not dangerous," My voice cracked when I spoke. "I'm not dark."

"But you're different?"

"I'm not, I'm still Margo," I argued softly.

"No, you're not. You're something different."

"I'm not."

"You are," The next voice was my mother's. "You're supposed to protect them."

"I'm trying to! I try every day!" I shouted.

"It's not enough," Derek growled, taking a large step forward. "You're not enough to protect them."

"You'll never be enough," My mother agreed. "Poor, powerless Margo. The seraph, protector of the pack, provider of guidance. You're supposed to be their guardian angel."

"You are an angel," Derek nodded. "An angel of death. A bad omen, a dark force. I mean, look at what you did to me."

"I was trying to help. I—I was just trying to help you," I cried.

"Help me? You killed me, Margo!" He roared.

"You killed me, too," My mother took a large step forward, stopping in front of me next to Derek. "And you're going to kill them next."

"I won't—I'll do better."

"The best thing you can do for them is to leave them alone," Derek snarled. "The only way you'll be able to keep them safe is to take yourself out of the equation."

"A life for a life," Mom nodded. "Or, for many lives. You can end the pain and suffering you bring to people, Margo. All you have to do is take that step."

"What step?"

"Step off the ledge, honey," She cooed, reaching for my face. "Do your pack the ultimate favor. End your life to spare theirs." At once, she and Derek disappeared, leaving me alone to face my thoughts.

Maybe they were right. Everyone around me gets hurt or dies. It all started when I got my abilities — my abilities that were supposed to help them only ever ended up making their lives worse. The only way I would truly be able to protect them was if I wasn't around anymore. If I died, no one else would have to.

I crept around the corner after smelling Stiles in the parking lot, watching him from a distance while he opened the door of the bus and dug something out before sprinting back inside. Out of curiosity, I followed his steps, waiting until he was gone before I boarded the bus as well. Right inside the door sat a small box that housed one emergency road flare. With newfound purpose, I searched the bus to find a small canister of gasoline. Taking the flare and the gas, I made my way back out to the parking lot.

My mind was controlling my body as I took the lid off the gas can and drenched myself with it, pouring it all over my hair and clothes. Once I finished, I tossed it away and ripped the cap off the flare, using it to light it. It burned bright and the flames hissed loudly but it didn't scare me. I needed to do this. Just before I could drop it onto the gas, four pairs of footsteps approached from behind me.

"Margo," Allison breathed softly. "Margo?" I looked up at her through teary eyes, noticing Lydia, Scott, and Stiles alongside her. They all had the same terrified look on their face, but it was something I couldn't process. I knew that look all too well. It was me they were terrified of. It was always me.

"Margo, what are you doing?" Stiles' voice cracked, breaking off toward the end of his sentence.

"There's no hope," I cried softly.

"What do you mean, Margo?" Allison whispered. "There's always hope."

"Not for Derek," I shook my head slightly. "Or mom, or for me. Not for any of you guys if I stick around."

"Derek wasn't your fault," Scott whimpered. "You know he wasn't your fault."

"And mom..." Stiles trailed off, fighting back tears. "Mom was sick. She wasn't your fault."

"Every time I try to keep you guys safe, to protect you...every time I try, someone gets hurt or killed. I'm supposed to keep you guys safe. I'll never be able to keep you safe. I can't protect anyone," I sobbed softly.

"Margo, listen to me. This isn't you, alright?" Stiles took a cautious step forward. "This is someone inside your head telling you to do this."

"But what if it is me?" I snapped. "I—I heard you and Scott in your room. You think I'm the one killing people, that I'm still dark. You two even said it yourselves, you can feel it."

"No, we didn't—" Scott tried.

"What if doing this is actually the best thing that I could do for everyone else?" I asked softly, twisting the flare in my hand. "This all started with me. Every time someone gets hurt or dies, it's because I've failed to protect them. Kate, Jackson, Derek...every single one of you last night. It's like all I do is bring death and pain and suffering. Ever since that night when Scott got bitten. People weren't dying, nobody was hurt. My head wasn't so fucking screwed up. Before that...before that I was nobody. Maybe I should just be nobody again. No one at all," I whispered, holding the flare out to my side. Before I could drop it, Stiles took another step forward.

"Margo, just listen to me, okay? You're not no one. Okay? You're someone. You're—you're my twin sister, my baby sister. You're my best friend. I need you, okay? I don't—I don't think I could live without you. I don't want to live without you. Alright, so if you're gonna do this," he stepped into the puddle of gasoline at my feet. "If you're gonna do this then...I think you're just gonna have to take me with you. Alright?" Slowly, he grabbed the flare, forcing it out of my hand. He threw it out to the side.

"Stiles," I whimpered, sobbing softly. "I—"

"No!" Lydia cried. Stiles's body collided harshly with mine, forcing me out of the puddle of gasoline and onto the concrete. Lydia's body landed on top of ours and from around us, I could feel the heat from flames that flickered high from the flare hitting the gasoline. The heat made my mind clear immediately, leaving me confused as to how I got where I was.

"What—what happened? What did I do?" I choked out, sitting straight up. Two hands slipped under my armpits and forced me to my feet, pulling me into a bone-crushing hug. I was overwhelmed by the smell of Allison, who was sobbing softly in my arms. "Allison..."

"Don't you ever scare me like that again, Margaret," She cried, squeezing me tighter. I frowned, wrapping my arms around her waist. "I love you. I love you so much. Don't ever do that again."

"I'm sorry," I whispered, tightening my grip on her as well. "Allison, I'm covered in gasoline—"

"I don't care," She shook her head. Slowly, she let go only to be replaced by Stiles, who held me even tighter. From behind me, I smelled Scott long before he joined our hug, forcing me between him and Stiles.

"We didn't mean it like that," He breathed softly into my ear. "We know you're not dark."

"And we know you're not the darach," Stiles nodded. "You're not a bad omen, and you don't make our lives worse. I meant what I said, I don't want to live in a world without you."

"Neither do I," Scott agreed.

"We don't either," Lydia spoke from beside me. Slowly, she and Allison joined the large group hug.

"You guys don't have to worry about that," I promised weakly. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Good, because if you ever scare me like that again, I'll personally kick your little werewolf ass all the way back to Beacon Hills," Stiles laughed softly.

"I love you guys," I whispered, crying softly. Perhaps I was wrong — if my friends don't see me as a bad omen, why should I see myself that way? I may not have been able to save Derek, but it gave me further encouragement to save everyone else.

☾*✲⋆.☾*✲⋆.☾*✲⋆.☾*✲⋆.

"I don't wanna know," Coach frowned, waking me from my sleep. I groaned in confusion, shifting in the tight grip that held my waist. Scott was behind me with his back to the window, leaning against it while he held me tightly with my back against his chest. Behind us was Stiles, who sat across from Lydia and Allison. A few rows back were Isaac and Boyd, who had also chosen to join us in sleeping on the bus. We wanted as far away from the motel as possible. "I really don't wanna know. But in case you missed the announcement, the meet's been canceled, so we're heading home."

"Of course we are," I rolled my eyes, shuffling closer to Scott. "Five-hour bus ride, I'm gonna take my ass back to sleep."

"I'm right behind you," he sighed, kissing my shoulder softly. "Literally."

"Punny," I grinned, watching the kids board the bus. Ethan sat across from Scott and me and we looked at him in confusion, watching him closely.

"I don't know what happened last night, but I'm pretty sure you saved my life," Ethan sighed softly, glancing at Scott and me.

"Actually, I saved your life," Stiles corrected, leaning into the aisle. "But not that it matters that much. It's just—it's a minor detail."

"So, I'm gonna give you something," Ethan continued. "We're pretty sure Derek's still alive." Scott and I shared an incredulous look before we glanced back at Stiles in shock. We hadn't killed Derek? "But he killed one of ours. That means one of two things can happen. Either he joins our pack..."

"And he kills his own."

"Or Kali goes after him, and we kill him. That's the way it works.

"Great recruiting process you've got there, E," I frowned.

"You're little code of ethics there is sort of barbaric, just F.Y.I.," Stiles sassed from behind me. Ethan ignored him, making his way behind us to sit with Danny while Stiles took his previous seat.

"Coach, can I see your whistle for a second?" Lydia stood, reaching for the whistle that usually sat around Coach's neck. She put her hand over it and blew into it, pulling it back to reveal a purple powdery substance.

"Wolfsbane?" I whispered.

"So, every time Coach blew the whistle on the bus, Scott, Isaac, Boyd, Margo—"

"And Ethan," Lydia filled in.

"We all inhaled it," Scott realized. I shuffled nervously, realizing that whistle was the reason I tried to end my life alongside the other members of my pack. Even Scott had tried, unsuccessfully attempting to hang himself from a balcony upstairs.

"You were all poisoned by it," Allison leaned forward.

"So that's how the darach got in their heads. That's how he did it," Stiles stood, taking the whistle from Lydia before pulling down the window above Scott and me and tossing it into the parking lot.

"Hey, hey, hey, hey. Stilinski!" Coach shouted. "You owe me a whistle!"

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spikeface · 3 years

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(consider this more of a writing prompt than a request) I tried to read Theo Raeken's fandom wiki but couldn't get a sense of him. Can you sell him qua OC? Who is he? What does he want? What does he fear? What are the worst things he's done and what internal logic did that run on? In what ways has he been heroic, even if it may have been unrecognizable to others as such? (Concretely I'm hoping to read any answer and launch into reading fic about him)

This is still a sketch. Canon leaves a lot of lacunae around Theo, so I play with them, but this is one version:

Theo’s childhood leaves him a twisted shell of a person. He’s pushed by the evil scientists who kidnap him and make him their servant (for convoluted plot reasons) to commit horrible acts, beginning with the death of his sister when he’s ten years old. His exact involvement in her death is not clear from the canon. He stands over her, very still, and watches her die, but it’s not clear if he coldly killed her or was simply a drugged victim of the scientists, who mess with people’s perception of reality. My headcanon, based on other canon references, is that the scientists, who are obsessed with creating “the perfect evil,” also push him to kill his parents and eat human flesh, and do lots of other awful things that he pretends don’t haunt him so he doesn’t go mad. Theo is very good at pretending, and learns to stifle his feelings to the point that he can really only be honest about them when he’s actively lying about something else. When he lies to the sheriff about witnessing a murder, for instance, he indirectly acts out his grief over the death of his sister as he chokes out, “I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything.”

After eight years with the evil scientists, he’s a wicked little gremlin. He’s a practiced liar and manipulator, whose speciality is to push people to embrace their darkest urges. When we meet him, he’s trying to turn Scott’s pack as dark as he is, to retroactively justify his own acts to himself, and to make it more certain that the pack will accept him for who he truly is. Theo wants very, very badly to be accepted. Part of it is personal, after a lonely life of being the scientists’ Igor, filled with self-loathing for the things he’s done. Part of it is also pragmatic; as the scientists grow closer to success (resurrecting an evil monster, don’t ask) they have less and less use for him. The scientists kill things they have no use for--failures. Theo isn’t a failure, but he’s not quite a success either, in the scientists’ eyes. Theo is petrified of failure, and the scientists. He wants the safety a powerful pack will provide. The stark difference in power between him and the scientists has led him to equate power and safety.

He works on corrupting all of Scott’s pack members, but focuses his efforts on Malia, Stiles, and Liam. He pushes Malia to try to kill her mother. If she does, no one could judge him for killing his own parents. He pushes Stiles to destroy his friendship with Scott. Stiles looks out for Scott the same way Theo’s sister looked out for him—if he’s actually terrible, deep down, then maybe his sister was too. Then no one could judge him for watching her die. With Liam, his goal is more cathartic. He wants Liam to lash out furiously at Scott for refusing to bite someone, especially when refusing means someone’s death.

Though Theo can pass for a werewolf, he’s actually a weak mockery of one, the result of the scientists’ surgeries rather than being bitten. It’s why his sister needed to die, her heart a necessary organ transplant before the scientists could begin their surgeries (show logic, don’t ask). Theo hates them for it, though he’s suppressed that emotion as a survival tactic while living under their cruel thumb. He tells himself he’s embraced their philosophy of experiments with the supernatural, but deep down is the plaintive question he had as a small, confused child: why didn’t they just make him a real werewolf? He would have been stronger, faster, better in every way than this half-thing they made him. He could have just been bitten, instead of all that surgery.

They wouldn’t have had to kill his sister, if they’d just made him a real werewolf.

Scott is the only one whom Theo can’t corrupt. He’s everything Theo isn’t: powerful, honest, accepted, not only a real werewolf but a special one. Unlike every other Alpha in existence—and Theo—he got his werewolf powers without anyone needing to die for it. Theo is obsessed with him. He needs to destroy him. He does.

Scott uses his dying breath to tell Theo that his pack will never accept him. Infuriatingly, he’s right.

He also comes back from the dead, which complicates Theo’s plans even further.

Theo makes his own pack of people he brings back from the dead. They’re all experiments the scientists no longer had any use for, which Theo hates as a potential reflection of himself, but they seem easy to control. He tries to make them embrace their darkest urges. He’s not quite successful. It doesn’t help that, in a bid for more power, Theo captures an Alpha named Deucalion, who is working to sabotage Theo as a favor to Scott. Deucalion drives some of Theo’s pack away, and shows Theo how to consume others for power. Faced with the choice between a pack and power, Theo chooses power. In the end, he consumes even Tracy, the one person who does actually accept Theo, for who he truly is, lovingly and unconditionally.

Theo is now very powerful. He’s also completely alone, having broken even with the scientists. He’s wretched. He hates Scott more than ever. He tries to kill him and his pack again—and finds himself promptly sent to a hellscape by one of Scott’s pack, where he wakes up to find his sister waiting for him, ready to rip his heart out, again and again and again.

Things get interesting when Liam brings him back from hell, hoping some of the powers he consumed will help them with their current crisis. Over the course of months in hell, however, Theo’s extra powers have been stripped away, along with his smug artifice and his will to live. When Malia starts to beat him to death in a fit of rage, he simply lets her, the same way he eventually simply let his sister take his heart over and over. He recovers from his hell-induced despair enough to try to manipulate and negotiate and generally gremlin his way to safety, but it’s clear he has no idea what to do beyond that. As the one who brought him back from hell, Liam feels responsible for him, which to him means making sure Theo isn’t a threat, bullying him into being helpful, hitting him when he’s being annoying, and offering genuine friendship to Theo if he does actually help. Theo alternates between coldly telling Liam that he’ll leave him for dead the first chance he gets, and almost compulsively saving Liam’s life. He also hits Liam, when he thinks he can get away with it. He’s never had a friend before.

After that crisis is over, Theo languishes. For the first time in his life, no one is telling him what to do. There’s nothing to prompt him to try to find power or a pack, or anything else he once failed at completely. He’s also homeless. And alone. When something creepy and supernatural happens to him in the middle of the night, the only person he can think to call is Scott—but he doesn’t, held back by shame. He remains, in my humble opinion, quite obsessed with Scott. I’m tipping my shipper hand here, but I think what was once the desire to destroy Scott has become the desire to have… something else from him. Not just forgiveness. Theo’s not sure what. It’s been a long time since he was honest with himself about what he feels. He’s working on it.

He chooses to stay in Beacon Hills. Mostly, he continues to lie and push, but he does it to help the pack--particularly Liam, who needs a lot of help with the same anger Theo once exploited. His most redemptive moment is when he chooses to ease a dying enemy’s pain, one of his first completely unselfish acts of kindness. The show ends with him as an “ally.”

#long post #theo raeken #teen wolf headcanon #teen wolf

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spacedykez · 2 years

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love loses

aka: a four-part tale of defiance and companionship aka: the aromantic divorce quartet fic

ao3 link